While I really like the concept of each piece of this book as drops that collectively represent all the challenges of her life as a Palestinian American, it felt like Hammad spent a little too much time talking about writing her story through all the different references to wetness and where it found her compared to actually threading the pieces together. It’s a rather short memoir, largely because she was so young when writing it, so the repetition becomes tiring rather than powerful. But there’s still a lot of strength in the individual parts, even if they don’t all come together so well.

I took out a bunch of poetry books and maybe I just wasn’t in the mood for this one, or maybe I’m not into Le Guin’s poetic “wryness.” I suppose she is better known for her fantasy and sci-fi fiction.

The mix of personal and political poems felt a little awkward at times, but I like her down-to-earth style.

POEM AFTER RECEIVING VOICEMAIL FROM YOU AFTER (I DON’T EVEN KNOW ANYMORE) HOW LONG!

Your voice and the weighted
stammering between us
evident
and the train of my routine
adjustment to nothing anywhere
as unforgettable
as your bare feet on the flagstone
pathway
next to bunched up honeysuckle
blooming aromatic in the a.m.
of a daily life
we shared but never dared
to lock and key
into
our problematic/
intersection—
That train derailed/my
regular defenses failed
to lower the volume
of the million and one
or zero
meanings
of your call

Though I started this book with the news that many people find it just a little too long, knowing that must have helped, as I was not overwhelmed by the length at all. Though everything is drawn-out in this book — like this sentence at the beginning of chapter five, as the students are walking to chapel for vespers:

Above the decorous walking around me, sounds of footsteps leaving the verandas of far-flung buildings and moving toward the walks and over the walks to the asphalt drives lined with whitewashed stones, those cryptic messages for men and women, boys and girls heading quietly toward where the visitors waited, and we moving not in the mood of worship but of judgment; as though even here in the filtering dusk, here beneath the deep indigo sky, here, alive with looping swifts and darting moths, here in the hereness of the night not yet lighted by the moon that looms blood-red behind the chapel like a fallen sun, its radiance shedding not upon the here-dusk of twittering bats, nor on the there-night of cricket and whippoorwill, but focused short-rayed upon our place of convergence; and we drifting forward with rigid motions, limbs stiff and voices now silent, as though on exhibit even in the dark, and the moon a white man’s bloodshot eye.

I was surprised by how experimental this narrative feels overall, with some incredibly surreal sections and others entirely decked out in layers of metaphors. Though it is an entirely critical look at race in the mid-nineteenth century, spanning over many different arenas to portray just how pervasive problems are in the culture of the United States, the language and atmosphere of the story is often quite beautiful. This is the sort of book that makes me wish I was studying literature, to spend some time reading lit theory and exploring the depths of the story. While an ever-recurring feeling of hopes dashed threads throughout, I found something uplifting about the brutal truth of it all or perhaps the fact that these truths were told against the odds.

Invisible Man was the only novel published by Ellison in his lifetime. Thanks to John F. Callahan, his literary executor, a bit of his second (2,000-page) manuscript was published as Juneteenth in 1999. A fuller version of that manuscript (also edited by Callahan) will be published by Random House this summer as Three Days Before the Shooting.

A little novella about endings and regrets for what maybe never could have been, dressed in the ill-fitting hopes that anything is possible. You can feel that tightness and slack in all the wrong places.

Poetry can be pretty good reading for subway reading as is anything that has a shorter format. But I’m kind of out of practice in reading verse these days. The beginning of this book felt so prose-like and conversational, but by the end things flowed more. I can’t really tell if that was the book or just me getting used to it. I didn’t really feel any thematic connections in the first two sections (“Slice” and “Juice”), but the last section “Flesh” came together for me more. Again, it might have just been me.

I think this is one of my favorites:

Small Murders

When Cleopatra received Antony on her cedarwood ship,
she made sure he would smell her in advance across the sea:
perfumed sails, nets sagging with rosehips and crocus
draped over her bed, her feet and hands rubbed in almond oil,
cinnamon, and henna. I knew I had you when you told me

you could not live without my scent, bought pink bottles of it,
creamy lotions, a tiny vial of parfume—one drop lasted all day.
They say Napoleon told Josephine not to bathe for two weeks
so he could savor her raw scent, but hardly any mention is ever
made of their love of violets. Her signature fragrance: a special blend

of these crushed purple blooms for wrist, cleavage, earlobe.
Some expected to discover a valuable painting inside
the locket around Napoleon’s neck when he died, but found
a powder of violet petals from his wife’s grave instead. And just
yesterday, a new boy leaned in close to whisper that he loved

the smell of my perfume, the one you handpicked years ago.
I could tell he wanted to kiss me, his breath heavy and slow
against my neck. My face lit blue from the movie screen—
I said nothing, only sat up and stared straight ahead. But
by evening’s end, I let him have it: twenty-seven kisses

on my neck, twenty-seven small murders of you. And the count
is correct, I know—each sweet press one less number to weigh
heavy in the next boy’s cupped hands. Your mark on me washed
away with each kiss. The last one so cold, so filled with mist
and tiny daggers, I already smelled blood on my hands.

You can listen to Nezhukumatathil read this one on From the Fishouse (though I’m not so into her reading of this).