Songs for the End of the World
By Saleema Nawaz (McClelland & Stewart)
Reviewed by Emily Stewart
The timing of the publication of Saleema Nawaz’s Songs for the End of the World is either spectacular or terrible, given the COVID-19 crisis. In either case, a novel about a pandemic released during a pandemic is undeniably noteworthy.
Nawaz’s second novel opens in August 2020 as a “bad flu” finds a foothold in New York City. From there, the story follows an array of characters as they react to rising infection rates, jumping back in time to explore how these different characters’ paths have crossed and what events brought them to their present situations.
The virus in this novel, dubbed ARAMIS, has many similarities to COVID-19. It’s a novel coronavirus, highly contagious, and it attacks the respiratory system. Elliot, a police officer, witnesses many of the efforts meant to curb the spread of the virus—quarantining, adoption of masks, lockdowns—as he attempts to maintain order. So much of this mirrors what has happened during the COVID-19 pandemic that reading Songs for the End of the World can feel a bit eerie. It’s no wonder the publishers opted to include a note at the beginning of the book explaining that it was written between 2013 and 2019 and informed by past outbreaks and historical pandemics. Yet the fact that Nawaz is so accurate in her depiction of the virus and the medical and social responses to it highlights her impressive research and talent for synthesis.
This talent is further demonstrated by the novel’s exploration of philosophy—ethics, legality, morality. Several of the characters are linked through the town of Lansdowne, where they attended or worked at a university. This academic background informs their actions during the pandemic and makes for some interesting passages of dialogue in which concepts like elite panic are explored.
The book demonstrates the limits of academic knowledge, or at least the difference between knowledge and action, too. Three characters are thrust into the media spotlight for their supposed expertise: Keisha, a doctor; Keelan, a philosophy professor; and Owen, a novelist. Each is featured in the media snippets that appear between chapters, where they share their knowledge via interviews or articles. But their roles in the greater narrative show their shortcomings. Keisha is on the front lines of pandemic response but unwittingly exacerbates racism by releasing a photo of the ARAMIS girl, an Asian woman who is blamed for spreading the virus due to being present at the restaurant where the first outbreak occurred. Keelan’s books about humanity during times of crisis decry acting out of fear, yet he ends up stockpiling supplies. Owen’s plague novel makes him a sort of survivalist messiah, yet his horde of online followers don’t fill the gap left by the relationship he destroyed through his own selfishness and philandering.
Which brings me to my final point: Songs for the End of the World may be a pandemic novel, but at its heart it is about human connection. Individual characters demonstrate a longing to connect, especially amid crisis, while the story’s structure itself weaves their narratives and acts as an illustration of six degrees of separation—a concept all the more relevant with virus transmission on the mind. It is fascinating to uncover the relationship between seemingly disparate individuals—a police officer and a waitress, a famous musician and a cult-member-turned-mom, a novelist and a philosophy professor—and it is impressive that Nawaz is able to capture so many different views and voices, so much complexity, without losing the reader.
Songs for the End of the World is worth attention for far more than the similarity between its premise and the global crisis during which it was published. Its shifting point of view and overlapping narratives demonstrate a masterful understanding of character.
Render
By Sachiko Murakami (Arsenal Pulp Press)
Reviewed by vange schramek
With roots in the French word rendre, to return, the verb render inhabits an interstitial space in the English language. Sachiko Murakami provides the full complement of possible definitions as the epigraph to her fourth collection of poetry, Render, which range from submission, as in “services rendered,” for example, through to transformation, as in her line “touring musicians have been rendered incapacitated by the economic effects of COVID-19,” while also maintaining its original meaning: to return or to repeat. Murakami’s Render harnesses the bound powers of this verb, moving beyond these cursory definitions to denote moments of conversion in chemistry as well as linguistic translation. Indeed, her collection renders her readers anew—unable to see or marshal this word without registering the entirety of its proliferations. Sometimes the weight of these myriad meanings shimmers softly, a drop shadow; at other times they are a halo of clunky luggage laden with etymological and psychic baggage. Such divisive metaphors clash aptly in the case of Murakami’s Render, where the speaker must navigate the day-to-day realities of complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD) as they creep up and through their new iterations: ones buoyed by hope and governed by recovery, and yet in debt—ever being forced to Give. Something. Back.
As a member of the Kootenay School of Writing (KSW), MMurakami, in her earlier collections, The Invisibility Exhibit (2008), Rebuild (2011), and Get Me Out of Here (2015), mobilized a wry, direct speaker in lyric and sonnet forms that engage and accuse readers, enacting a core KSW tenet of social praxis. The three preceding collections were also constructed in relation to community, both analog and digital. Drafts of poems from The Invisibility Exhibit, for example, were previously shared with family and community members of disappeared and murdered women from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (women taken as a result of serial killer Robert Pickton’s rampage of the late 1990s–early 2000s). Rebuild appeared with an accompanying online component, Project Rebuild, where readers can inhabit Murakami’s poems and rewrite them, challenging the notion that the poems we write belong to us and mirroring the conceptual premise of the Vancouver Special, an architectural style emblematic of immigrant neighbourhoods in Vancouver that are constantly being moved in and out of. Get Me Out of Here is composed of crowdsourced sonnets based off one-liners from people stuck in international airports struggling with being present in such transient and austere spaces.
Murakami’s landmark socially conscious lyric and her impetus for communal creation take distinctive turns in Render. While a first-person speaker exists in the prior collections, the speaker in Render is focused inwards, in contrast to the externally accosting poems prescribed by the influence of the KSW. Render’s speaker is one facing the reality of maturing pains as they affect the personal, singular body and self: addiction, grief, and both intergenerational and generational traumas. Unlike the collaborative poetics of previous collections, Render folds in upon its singular speaker as they transit their own pasts and presents. For example, in the poem “Still, Here,” the speaker traverses the complexity of C-PTSD: “You enter every room / except the one with your name on it.” This “I,” this “you,” is one grappling with accepting the slippery time-space continuum of survival: the endless frustration of trying to just “get over it” and rejoin a sense of normalcy. Murakami’s speaker—and the plethora of us readers out there battling addictions and/or attempting to overcome the long-standing effects of abuse—see that normalcy gleaming mirage-like around others. It angers us, it evades us, it exasperates us. Murakami’s speaker forges on, trudging through sobriety and striving for emotional clarity toward a potential, unknown something on the other side. In the poem “Breather,” the speaker considers what’s on the other side of one’s “Bottom as in the end of doing harm. Bottom as in no further passage”—a potential answer arises only from a commitment to continuation: “You keep digging because you hope / there might be a glint of violence / that will tear you open the way / God tears some open.” These lines are simultaneously truth, hope, and incantation, akin to the AA Serenity Prayer the speaker riffs upon in this collection: “grant me the serenity to accept / the difference / between now and then.”
Unlike the wide, deliberate net cast for crowdsourcing in Rebuild’s companion Project Rebuild and Get Me Out of Here, Render presents slow, private thought—thought accumulated on the long, oftentimes tedious personal journey of recovery. For a poet hitherto compelled by a social praxis, this inward departure may seem—from the outset—as a pivot toward inacessibility. And yet, such poems arrive at exactly the right time, as Murakami’s readership oscillates between the poles of community conviction and compounding private angst brought to the fore by the events of a global pandemic, a BIPOC revolution sparked by unthinkable carnage, plummeting economic projections, and a world-on-fire climate apocalypse. Though Murakami admits her process is to write “from after,” and not during, events, poems such as Render’s “The Internment” offer lines to live by as we dodge “Filial hunger, filial debt, filial panic disorder” and, though it is acutely painful, “Scrape until something bleeds.” Bloodshed here is laden and plodding but an eventual catharsis. In “The Exact Nature of My Wrongs,” the speaker “gather[s] the weight of her grief / and take[s] her to your bed, then / friend[s] her on Facebook and leave[s] her / to her walk of shame.” Such a stanza belies a crucial truth of this fourth collection and of an author-speaker reaching the breaking point of attempts to “fix” the outside world when the being’s own inner worlds no longer hold. This tension is epitomized by the necessary dose of self-care one requires or is able to afford oneself in a moment of profound collective breakdown. On airplanes the safety announcement’s automated message commands you to put on your own oxygen mask first; only once you are breathing can you attend to your community. Render is this poetic mask.
You are Eating an Orange. You are Naked.
By Sheung-King (Book*hug Press)
Reviewed by Shazia Hafiz Ramji
In an interview with 49th Shelf, debut novelist Sheung-King tells Kerry Clare that he grew up with dyslexia and had trouble reading as a child and that audiobooks helped him access stories.
The narrative structure of speaking and listening is evident in Sheung-King’s You Are Eating an Orange. You Are Naked. Throughout the novel, the male protagonist tells stories, creating the scaffolding of frame tales to weave an intertextual time-leaping tapestry that draws from Chinese folktales, the cinematic dreamscapes of Wong Kar-Wai’s films, and Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
At first glance, Sheung-King’s book may seem to be a collection of stories because each chapter can stand alone, but the relationship between the unnamed couple develops and recurs throughout as they drift from Hong Kong to Macau, embarking on a contemporary, transnational odyssey of love.
In the second chapter, titled “Kitchen God,” the narrator’s lover (unnamed and referred to as “you” throughout the book) listens to him tell a story about rice over Thai food. The narrator remembers his mother telling him about the Kitchen God, who made sure people didn’t waste food and that “food left in children’s bowls would appear as warts on the faces of their future spouses.”
In response to this memory, the narrator acts: “I did not want my future spouse to grow warts. I only put a small amount of rice in my bowl.” Later, he contends with Japanese propaganda that posited: “Those who cook Japanese rice are the happiest.” And he confronts himself: “I am Chinese. I wondered what it meant for a Chinese person to eat Japanese rice.”
Meaning and politics arrive through memory, relation, and food. Rice as a signifier is reclaimed and cast aside: “… I was never proud of living in a post-colonial city. I needed to prove that my life was separate from the nation, and from rice.”
Although the young narrator demands separateness in the context of identity, the novel insists on the opposite. In “Memory Piece: Macau,” the narrator and his lover visit his father’s homeland of Macau, where he riffs on the impossibility of the cliché It’s not you, it’s me: “That saying is so centred on humans. Maybe external things play a part in a relationship as well, you know? […] A person can’t be that far apart from his or her surroundings; we’re all part of this universe.”
Sheung-King’s graceful wit and humorous ruminations on everyday life remind us of what fiction can do. Whether we turn to novels to escape from life or ease our loneliness, the best ones always let us know that even those closest to us are unknowable. Sheung-King’s lovers know this. And they still go along for the ride, because what is life otherwise?
You Are Eating an Orange. You Are Naked. is like Sally Rooney’s Normal People but for transnational millennials always on the move, at home nowhere and everywhere at once. A refreshing, innovative debut that isn’t afraid to challenge every trope we know—about life and fiction itself.
Phases
By Belinda Betker (Coteau Books)
Reviewed by Clea Roberts
Belinda Betker’s debut poetry collection, Phases, is a significant contribution to LGBTQ2S+ literature. The collection explores the trials of a lifelong journey toward knowing—toward identity—and the wayfinding power of embracing the body’s sensual nature.
The linear narrative of the poems in this collection spans a lifetime. The book is split into three distinct sections. The first section, Saros Cycle, features poems from childhood to young adulthood, where the speaker experiences her first funeral, the onset of menses, miscarriage, domestic violence, and the dissolution of an abusive relationship. An awkward, sometimes shame-filled adolescence and early adulthood unfolds in this section of the book. The speaker emerges from the innocence of childhood to fall under the heavy gaze of others who notice her “buck teeth, and glasses, her blotchy skin” and how she walks “funny / once a month” due to bulky menstrual pads. The absence of love and intimacy haunts these poems. In time, the speaker finds herself in an abusive relationship and full of self-loathing:
How foolish to speak
out loud, forgetting to duck
his fist, my ears ringing, eyes
swelling, him shouting
who’s the idiot now (“Bread”)
And while many of the poems in the first section dwell on shame, a reader finds pockets of reprieve where a sense of self is trying to fledge. Within these pockets, the speaker seems to tentatively palpate the future for what it might hold.
I could tie a double Windsor
better than any of them—
with or without a mirror
on myself, or someone else—
my talent for knots
and entanglements. (“Tied Right”)
In the second section, Grazing Occultation, the speaker recounts the beginning and end of a second marriage (also abusive), the grief and depression that follows a hysterectomy, and reconnecting with the body after physical and emotional trauma. The poems in this section begin to push away from the form of the stand-alone lyric poem. “Marriage Counseling (He Said, I Said)” recreates a pivotal moment between the speaker and her husband during therapy, which is intensified by the use of a script-like format. “Understanding Hysterectomy” creates a multi-layered understanding of a complex procedure by using a series of linked poems. The long-poem format suits the subject matter, as each poem provides a different window on the speaker’s experience. In these poems, and others, I admire Betker’s flexibility and experiments with form in order to find the right vessel for her poetry.
Moon imagery is pervasive throughout Phases. The section titles are astronomical terms associated with the moon. The moon is ever-present witness to the speaker’s darkest and most luminous moments. After filling her pockets with “cold smooth stones” and walking out on thin ice, the speaker sees the “faraway moon shiver / beyond fish gleam / and airplane glint.” When she emerges from the fog of depression and reclaims her imperfect yet sensual body in “Perigee Syzygy” (the poem title taken from the astronomical term for a supermoon), the speaker becomes the earthly manifestation of the moon:
Full moon
so large, so close
outside my back door.
I lift my arms, stretch
my hands to its radiance—
ten moons
rise from my nail beds.
…
I slide my hands
over bare breasts
to scarred belly
and lower—
the quickening inside.
“Orbital Eccentricity” is the third and final section of Phases. The speaker, having acknowledged that “[u]nravelling has its purpose.” now sets out to weave herself a new life, a new way of living in the world. These poems rejoice in moving “beyond childhood / closer to my truth.” In the poem “Coming Out” the speaker tells a friend she has “met someone—a woman.” This poem is dynamic in how it compresses moments of silence (“September trees spill fire over water— / reflections waver”) with moments of robust laughter:
Finally you say
but we can still be friends right?
I stop in my tracks.
Yes, absolutely—I don’t like you
like THAT
and after laughter you ask
which one of you plays the man?
I recall that classic routine—
who’s on first
what’s on second
I don’t know’s on third—
but now I’m playing
the outfield.
Ultimately, it’s this rejection of heteronormativity, of deciding she is “playing / the outfield” and embracing drag that brings the speaker fully into self-
actualization. The poems in the third section of Phases complete the collection’s satisfying arc in which the speaker moves from a place of shame and fear to a place of self-acceptance and strength. The poems in Belinda Betker’s debut collection lean intimately into moments of great vulnerability and great strength. As a reader, I am grateful for the discrete and sustained attention she has brought to each poem, breathing through the pain toward a “place of knowing.”
