Named after the Innu word for “wind of the north,” Tshiuetin is the first railway in North America owned and operated by First Nations people. Its southern terminus, I would soon learn, is about 15 hours east of Toronto by car.
Canada was built by rail. The country’s early railway system was a vital tool for economic growth, but it also abetted Canada’s colonial mission. In addition to carrying goods and services, trains in Canada disseminated disease among the Indigenous communities on whose land this country was built. And while the country’s railroads offered the possibility of expansion to some, for others they were harbingers of forced relocation.
I didn’t know how to cope when we finally broke up. I was terrified that I was fundamentally unlovable. The breakup left me with no understanding or acceptance of myself, no clue what went wrong, and a nagging feeling that I wasn’t good, capable or smart enough. I was afraid that, without him, no one could guide me to become the person I was expected to be. I was a shell of a person and, at the time, it didn’t seem like anything could change that.
Alone in my childhood bedroom, surrounded by Queen paraphernalia and other band trinkets, I found myself Googling Freddie Mercury, trying to comfort myself with details about a person who made no apologies for being who he was and overcame staggering adversity in the celebrity world. His legendary voice was wafting through the room when I found a website advertising the party. There was no better way, I figured, to find myself than honoring the musician I admired most. I found a $500 round trip, booked a plane ticket, found myself a place to sleep after the party and, a few months later, set out to chase Freddie’s spirit.
After I got married, I started taking walks in the Aoyama Botanical Garden every Sunday afternoon. It was a way of taking a break from work and domestic chores – if I stayed home on the weekend, Midori, my wife, would always end up asking me to fix something. After breakfast, I’d take a book and walk from our neighborhood to Shinjuku Avenue, where I’d enter the garden through the east gate. That way, I could walk by fountains, cross the lines of trees in the courtyard, and, if the sun was shining, sit down to read on a bench. On rainy days, I’d go to the café – almost always empty at that time – and settle down by a window to read. Going home, I’d leave the garden through the back gate, where the guard would nod politely in recognition.
Though I went to the park every Sunday, it was years before I entered the greenhouse. As a little boy, I’d learned to enjoy gardens and forests, but I’d never been interested in individual plants. To me, a garden was an architectural and green space where you could go alone, but only if you had something to read or amuse yourself with, and where you could even take clients to close a good deal. When I was young, I’d gone to that same garden with a girl from school and, later on, a college girlfriend, but neither of them had thought to visit the greenhouse, either. I admit that the building wasn’t exactly enticing: it looked more like a chicken coop or storehouse than an enclosed garden. I imagined it to be an oppressive place, maddening like Tsukiji Market, though smaller and filled with unknown plants that had unpronounceable names.
Making your way through this novel feels like riding a high-end convertible down Hollywood Boulevard on the prettiest day of the year while luminaries wave to you from the sidewalks and nothing truly bad ever happens. Of course, eventually all the flower children will become boomers, the designated bad guys of our time, but that’s no concern of Utopia Avenue. As with enjoying any great party, the art lies in knowing when to leave.
One could call Natural History a “philosophical book,” a novel that remains in dialogue, throughout its pages, with the tradition of twentieth century French philosophy, from Badiou to Derrida. The book overflows, as has become Fonseca’s trademark, with multiple stories that direct the reader in different directions, but which slowly begin to trace the contours of a recognizable conceptual phantasmagoria. From Badiou, it seems to adopt his “theory of the event” and the idea of trying to find a truth, even when the final piece of the puzzle permanently eludes us. And from Derrida, it seems to borrow the idea that every event bears the traces of a previous event, traces that work as displaced repetitions, distorted copies of an original that never gets fully actualized. As such, two main conceptual threads seem to guide the text: the first one a reflection on the notion of identity, which has always fascinated Latin American writers; and the second one about the role of art. Far from abstracting into realm of pure autonomy, art is seen here as an intrinsic part of reality itself, incapable of escaping its ethical responsibilities.
Over the past months, members of the Worker Writers School have been writing “coronavirus haiku.” Posted on the Worker Writers School Instagram and Twitter accounts, these poems convey the exhaustion, fear, and stress of NYC life and work during the COVID-19 pandemic, and provide a creative virtual space for reflection and community. Some speak to the strange quiet of city streets and feelings of isolation; others describe the intensity of frontline work and the anxieties of food insecurity. This ongoing project provides a further testament to the vital work of the WWS and to the expansive resonance of Social Poetics. On the page and beyond, Nowak’s commitment to the “first-person plural” offers an urgent, much-needed social vision for poetry today.
Ysenda Maxtone Graham’s dartingly curious book spans half a century, 1930-80, ending with the era of computers and economy travel. It is based on enthralling interviews. There are prewar memories of rising at 4am to dig potatoes from the Scottish soil, shaving the hair off pigs’ carcasses or picking snails from dry-stone walls for London restaurants, all for a hint of pocket money.
The one-day holiday goes to the seaside and back in the works coach, dads decanting straight into the pub. The nowhere holiday means games in derelict buildings, the freedom of the streets, three chairs plus a sheet for a tent, Victorian novels, teenage romance. If you can stay put for all this then why bother with a boarding house, where they sometimes had the gall to charge extra for the condiments?
For a girl to scam the world
to slip out the lies from her body
she must open up and risk the penetration of fakes
and know herself as a name she didn’t choose.
I’d print out a crocodile & feed it
my left hand, then print out another,
prosthetic hand & feed it that one,
etc., ad infinitum. The beast would be
hungry, & I have less use for myself