Yes, two progressive publishing houses are a small thing indeed on this increasingly unnerving planet of ours. Still, think of this as the modern capitalist version of burning books, though as with those fossil fuel companies, it is, in reality, more like burning the future. Think of us as increasingly damaged goods on an increasingly damaged planet.
In another world, these might be considered truly terrible acts. In ours, they simply happen, it seems, without much comment or commentary even though silence is ultimately the opposite of what any decent book or book publisher stands for.
Our Missing Hearts is saddled by grief. But it is also propelled by hope, less a grim prognosis of the future than an impassioned call for a full reckoning with the past.
In this sense, Ng's narrative does borrow one important element from dystopian fiction — the idea of memory erasure, imposed by a repressive regime and borne by individuals cut off from their cultural legacy.
If you’ve ever taken a psych class, you may have seen an instructor hold a blank piece of paper up in front of the room, then wad it into a ball, the whole flat 8.5-by-11 sheet made compact inside a fist. The point of this demonstration is to show why human brain tissue is crumpled rather than smooth. It allows greater surface area to fit in a small space: more brain in the skull. You might also note how the opposite corners of the page can now touch. More folds mean more connections, more speed, more power — a good metaphor for poems. Verse (from the Latin for “turn,” as in turn of the plow) creates more folds. Lines call attention to the surface area of language, the words that brush against one another as they file into their pews, not just the words next to them but above and below them too. Lines accordion more meaning into narrow margins. “This spiral staircase/made of words,” Jorie Graham writes self-referentially in the poem “Root End” — a helical shape being the most efficient use of space when you need to climb a story.
Elizabeth McCracken’s novel The Hero of This Book marks a moment in time, summer 2019, “the summer before the world stopped.” The book is occasioned by a solo trip its narrator takes to London from her home in the United States, ten months after the death of her mother, Natalie Jacobson McCracken. We learn the mother’s name—which resembles the author’s—in a footnote near the end of the book, which jettisons conventions of genre and humorously combines the cadences of memoir with claims of fictionality. Though purportedly a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in fiction and the author of numerous publications in that genre, McCracken’s narrator resists being called a “novelist” now writing a “memoir.” The stories we tell while grieving tend to be too complicated and contradictory to classify anyway. It is enough, McCracken’s book argues, just to be a person with memories.