Contributors: Featured Writer Lourdes Figueroa, Howie Good, Courtney Bush, Sal, Lauren Bender, Isobel Hodges, Sam Rose, Hibah Shabkhez, Marissa Skeels, William R. Soldan, Jennifer Lothrigel, Samuel Gilpin, Jasmine Harris, Anete Kruusmägi, Alan Parry, Nancy Iannucci
Earthquakes in Candyland by Jennifer Robin. Fungasm Press (2019). $14.99, paperback.
Jennifer Robin’s feminist gonzo nonfiction collection, Earthquakes in Candyland, is a series of disruptions; from essay to micro-flash, Robin takes the position of an intimate journalist, combining observation and interviews with poetic vignettes and philosophical inquiry that push us to question ourselves and our role as humans.
Many of the longer pieces in the book follow in the style of Robin’s statement in the story “Oxy’s Midnight Runners”: “I’m here to hear stories,” she says to her interview subjects on a trip to New Orleans, “I’m sick of telling mine.”
Anaïs Nin, an influence of Robin’s once said, “We write to taste life twice.” It could be said that Robin’s book is a result of tasting life twice to illuminate meaning and experience in her work, and the result is deeply personal, blunt and empathetic.
What Robin calls “fissures in the illusion,” these essays, flashes, and tweet-riffs are what seep up through the cracks of the candy-coated veneer, critiquing everything from our self-obsessed technology addictions, to the criminal justice system; they are meant to provoke and also to connect.
Told from bus stops, train stations, MAX rides and sidewalk encounters, the book weaves a narrative of lives lived in transition, as if Robin took a literal road trip through a Candyland apocalypse and recorded the whole thing in her notebooks.
The 125 stories (in 315 pages) tackle both deep critique and celebration of American experience from multiple perspectives. The story “Breathe Deeply,” narrates unflinching descriptions of violence in a series of vignettes revealing a history of racism at the hands of white slave owners. “The Tarot Reader of Troy, New York” details Robin’s hitchhiking journey across the country to visit her biological daughter in an open adoption. “Oxy’s Midnight Runners” follows a pair of New Orleans teens selling pills to make ends meet, while discussing everything from ghosts to ancestry and what it means to “have no truck.”
Later, the interviewer turns the camera on herself.
“I am trying to remember everything…as if I can retreat at a later date and like an ancient scribe add up this information on sheets of pressed goatskin and it will spell out the meaning of life. And why shouldn’t it? How much do I need to know? How much does anyone need to know?”
This is how Robin gets personal on the page, with larger questions which unexpected, intimate connections naturally stir within us, if we’re paying attention.
Her fascination with the lives of others is contagious; the army-brat turned model on the overnight Greyhound. The cam girl exchanging emojis with her clients on the night bus. Lonnie, a tattoo of a star on her cheek, touting her God-love to a man at a Portland bus stop. They are the people who challenge the norm by being unabashedly themselves.
Like literal Queen Frostines or Princess Lollys, it’s the experiences of those Robin meets on her journeys who ground the stories— symbols of hope guiding us through our own sense of American aimlessness, our search for a lost King, something to believe in.
The story “The Best Flavor” is one sentence: “If we must have mind control— what is the best flavor of mind control?”
The micro stories that break up these essays prod and expose, and feel like distilled versions of what Robin cannot let us not hear; we’re fucked, but people are beautifully complex, and our stories matter.
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Lily Blackburn is a Portland based writer, an editor for Typehouse Literary Magazine and a full-time bean pharmacist (barista.) She graduated from Portland State in 2017 with her BA in English. You can find her work at Little Fictions | Big Truths, Coffee People, and Angel City Review.
THE BLACK CONDITION FT. NARCISSUS by jayy dodd. Nightboat Books (2019, 96 pages). $15.95, paperback.
I read jayy dodd’s newest creation over and over, until I became only an ear, severed. Until I became only nerve, raw to each breath, feeling reverence, heartbreak, tenderness, gratitude. Feeling humility in the face of the divine, a witness of every word-cell’s tenuous tenaciousness. I kept/wanna keep this collection on replay, letting SIDE A pour in, then SIDE B, then the BONUS TRACK, crashing again and again against that inner drum, swirling all the way back, all the way down.
jayy dodd tells me so many things I need to hear, one of which is LISTEN. Listen so hard you miss meals and phone calls. Listen so hard those voices demanding your and others’ extinction break apart and dissolve back to nothing. Listen so hard that when you turn the volume down, you don’t recognize the world anymore. Trish Salah calls dodd a genius—so much YES. With this new collection, dodd shows being—”blxk trans femme” being—in all its complexity, beauty, and vulnerability. Here the self can shiver out of one’s grasp as easily as ripples can disperse one’s reflection. There’s something god-like, something permanent, in that ephemerality, that resistance to category and definition, that impossibility of being—and urgent need to be—held.
dodd shows that being—in line, in poem, in self, in world—is so much more than any one presentation, any one glimpse in the mirror, any one capture on film. dodd’s book is full of hands, always in flux, so expressive yet so mysterious, being only one part of a whole that often exists in shadow. Powerful in holding but also in letting go. Vulnerable for the same reasons. Able to show so much about a person, but also so little. Able to build up, tear down, lead and mislead. In “Manual,” the lines: “What if God was something / that could be held in the hand.” Not a question.
dodd’s book is next to, awash in, testament to the divine, writing the “blxk trans femme” body into existence, creation the first tool of divinity. In “I Know I Been Changed,” dodd writes, “you will call me out my-self, blasphemous / but i have heard on high my body is harmonic gospel / it was written in sacred memory before coming into being / now, i am here ready for rapture…”. As the speaker becomes, agency/power is reclaimed: “…As a child, / I spoke as a boy, I understood as broken, / I thought as a ghost; but when I renamed this body, / I put away childish things” (from “narcissus reads 1 Corinthians 13, Without Love”). Coming of age, coming into being, stating, “I am.” Complicating and decolonizing the statement that “we are made in god’s image.” Trans body as god-like, a reflection and manifestation of the divine.
But not immortal. After all, “Amerikkka” has declared war on such bodies, especially when they are black and femme: “in the wood / the trees say hey baby, / so i’ve accepted my body / can’t be both safe & beautiful” (“narcissus goes to the market”). Existing, out in the open where a pool may reflect beauty, where a stone thrown may disperse it. By existing, dodd gives me courage to do so. But dodd also holds me accountable, reminds me that I too have hands. That an old myth can be undone and a new one made. That I should hold “whatever / binds me to this earth” close and undo whatever doesn’t.
“…what will we make of our new cradles of tomorrow?” dodd asks in “Babylon.” I am so here for this remix, this rapture, this future-making.
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Get your copy of THE BLACK CONDITION FT. NARCISSUS here, and visit jayy dodd here.
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