Laura Sackton

FictionPoetry

Your Dazzling Death

Review by Laura Sackton

In their third collection, Your Dazzling Death, Cass Donish (The Year of the Femme) grieves their partner, the poet Kelly Caldwell, and celebrates their love and life together—the good and the bad. These poems are raw and reaching, often addressed directly to Caldwell. They pulse with ongoing loss, as memory by memory, day by day, Donish is confronted with the fact of their beloved’s death, and their continuing love for her. 

Several poems begin with the line, “In my next life,” acknowledging how grief reforges the world of those left behind. Donish seems to reach for that remade world not only by looking back into the painful, tender memories of a shared queer life, but also by insisting on Caldwell’s continued relevance and presence. “I don’t know // if it’s then or now / anymore. If you’re here / or already gone” they write in “Agate Beach, Lopez Island.”

The centerpiece of the collection, “Kelly in Violet” is a palimpsest of The History of Violets by Uruguayan poet Marosa di Giorgio; some traces of the source text remain in gray. This piece is rich in imagery, overflowing with the daily challenge of living, particularly with grief and mental illness. The urgency and directness of loss haunts even the most beautiful lines: “The butterflies want you back, the hawks want you back, the moon is pining.”

Donish rejects simple notions of time and loss, and instead writes into queer time and grief time, heavy with ghosts and rich with possibility. “Yet isn’t it a mistake / to say I know our story now? Isn’t that the thing? // I don’t believe in dying / fixing—stilling—anything.” This is an openhearted and devastating collection—proof that love stories do not end, but rather go on changing, even through death.

Cass Donish’s Your Dazzling Death is an openhearted and devastating collection—proof that love stories do not end, but rather go on changing, even through death.
FictionPoetry

Scattered Snows, to the North

Review by Laura Sackton

In his 17th book of poetry, Scattered Snows, to the North, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Carl Phillips gazes both inward and outward. His work carries a signature heft, a musicality and syntax that seems to rewrite itself with each read. Phillips tangles his sentences like few other poets working today, and often, rather than untangling them, he lets the tangles linger, clause-heavy and potent, wordy but exacting. The knots he makes with lines, stanzas, images and always-startling juxtaposition are graceful but not easy. One of the distinct pleasures of reading his work is getting lost in the questions it poses, and Scattered Snows, to the North is full of questions.

The speaker of “Searchlights” embodies the contradictions at the heart of this work: “I can see the words, though I can’t / hear them, finding shape first, then meaning, the way smoke does, / Don’t, which is not a question; then just the smell of the rain, which is.” How does the memory of a relationship, or a place, or a particular moment reshape it? Can the present change the past? Why do we fixate on memory, rework the contours of a life over and over again in the mind? What changes as we age, and how do we reckon with what doesn’t? These questions hum through the poems, surfacing and retreating. Always, Phillips engages with them at a slant: “Why not call it love— // each gesture—if it does love’s work? I pulled him / closer. I kissed his mouth, its anger, its blue confusion.”

Phillips beautifully articulates the thorny conflict between reflecting on and being present in: reflecting on time passing while being present in your body; reflecting on the cyclical sameness of human history while being present in the specific ecstasy of a season, a love, a quarrel, the beach at night. The settings of these poems often feel mythological—fields and forests—but they also feel distinctly current. Nature is everywhere, and always changing; there are animals in various stages of life, the turbulent sea, weather, light.

The titular poem, “Scattered Snows, to the North,” is a poignant meditation on loss both intimate and universal. In considering the people who lived during the failing years of the Roman Empire, the speaker muses: “If it was night, they lit / fires, presumably. Tears / were tears.” In “Stop Shaking,” Phillips asks, “What if memory’s just the dead, flourishing differently from how they flourished alive?” Over and over the poems echo one another, alighting on some philosophical truth and then returning, humbled, to the material world.

The poems of Carl Phillips’ Scattered Snows, to the North echo one another, alighting on some philosophical truth and then returning, humbled, to the material world.
FictionPoetry

Letters to Forget

Review by Laura Sackton

Published after poet Kelly Caldwell’s death in 2020, Letters to Forget is assured, electric and devastating. The collection comprises three sections: the first and third contain short poems written in one of two forms, either prose poems titled “[ dear c. ]” and addressed to the poet Cass Donish, Caldwell’s partner, or poems composed entirely of end-stopped lines, with titles like “[ house of rope ]” and “[ house of bare life ].” The middle section contains three long poems that engage with the story of Job through a lens of queerness, transness and mental illness. 

Within these constraints, Caldwell’s imagery and imagination soar. The epistolary “[ dear c. ]” poems were written during time Caldwell spent in a residential hospital receiving treatment for suicidal depression. There is deep sorrow in these poems, and a sense of restlessness—as if the lines are trying to break out of the page. Caldwell leaps from image to image, her mind and body constantly in motion. “Here are some awkward questions, and you can say what you’re thinking. How many bruises can I put on the scale before it tilts? How much does a marriage bed weigh? How to place this body on an actual body?” she writes in one. In another: “I wish starlings carpeted the floor of this rainy April morning instead of a beige spread.” 

There is a delicate playfulness in Letters to Forget, despite the severity of the subject matter. Caldwell writes with intellectual curiosity and emotional vulnerability, pondering the heaviness of memory, the power of claiming her own self and body, the balm of loving and being loved, and the often dark reality of living with bipolar disorder. Her inventive use of end-stops is nothing short of stunning; she divides sentences into new worlds with periods, creating a thudding, propulsive intensity that is hard to look away from.

“What comfort does, we mimic, and we hope for marvelous clouds, and burned fog, and lovers’ spit,” Caldwell writes. It is heartbreaking that this debut will not be followed by other books, but the words that Caldwell has left us are not mimicry. As much as any poetry can be, they are the living stuff of the world.

The poems in Kelly Caldwell’s debut collection, Letters to Forget, have a thudding, propulsive intensity that is hard to look away from. As much as any poetry can be, they are the living stuff of the world.
FictionDebut FictionComing of Age

Blue Light Hours

Review by Laura Sackton

In her debut novella, Blue Light Hours, award-winning translator Bruna Dantas Lobato explores how distance—between languages, cultures and places—can affect a relationship.

At the center of the story are a mother and daughter and the rituals they create to remain close to each other despite the thousands of miles between them. The unnamed daughter is in her first year at a small liberal arts college in Vermont; her mother remains at home in Brazil. The daughter goes about her mundane days and then recounts them to her mother over Skype. Her mother, in return, offers details about her own increasingly lonely life.

These exchanges between mother and daughter are both melancholic and mesmerizing. Neither of their lives are particularly interesting in the conventional sense. There are no devastating breakups or major meltdowns, no financial catastrophes or familial betrayals. The daughter does her schoolwork, makes friends with her fellow international students, eats in the dining hall, observes the unfamiliar New England seasons. The mother watches soap operas, goes to work, asks again and again about her daughter’s strange new world. 

The book, instead, probes beneath the surface: How much of a life can truly be shared over Skype? How does being apart change a relationship as foundational and important as the one between a mother and a daughter? What happens when what is shared, over time, becomes rote, empty? 

Dantas Lobato explores these questions with thoughtful nuance. Her writing sometimes feels emotionally restrained, but perhaps this is a reflection of the characters’ longing: the daughter’s longing for the particular ways her mother knows her and also for the excitement of a new, separate life; the mother’s longing for her daughter to remain close. The prose itself embodies loneliness: crisp, declarative sentences that have the flow and rhythm of poetry. Blue Light Hours is an intimate meditation on home and homesickness, belonging and wanting to belong, on what it means to leave and be left, and the many tiny ways of attempting to bridge an impossible distance.

Bruna Dantas Lobato’s debut, Blue Light Hours, is an intimate meditation on home, homesickness and the many tiny ways of attempting to bridge an impossible distance.
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical FictionDebut Fiction

What I Know About You

Review by Laura Sackton

In his beguiling debut novel, What I Know About You, Éric Chacour delicately explores the complicated circumstances that create distance between people, and the limits of what anyone can know about those they love.

In 1980s Cairo, Tarek, a doctor from a Levantine Christian family, begins a relationship with a young man. Up until this moment, Tarek’s life has been a series of expected events. He grew up to become a doctor like his father, and took over the family practice after his father died. He has played the roles his wealthy family expected him to: dutiful son, successful professional. 

The young man, Ali, comes from a poor neighborhood, and enlists Tarek’s help when his mother becomes ill. As their relationship evolves, Tarek is not prepared for all the ways his love for Ali changes him. He doesn’t know how to navigate a relationship that he must hide from his community. Ali upends Tarek’s neat, ordered life, and the turmoil affects Tarek’s entire family.

Despite several dramatic plot elements, this is a quiet, internal novel. Its brilliance is in the way Chacour plays with point of view. The opening section is written in the second person, and while at first it reads like it is addressing the reader, it soon becomes clear that something more complex is going on. Who is the narrator? Who are they speaking to? How do they know such intimate details about Tarek’s life, his doubts, fears, desires and joys?

In sparse but beautiful prose, Chacour invites readers into the secret world that exists between the mysterious narrator and Tarek. On the surface, What I Know About You is an emotional family story, a queer awakening, a tumultuous romance. It’s a richly textured portrait of Cairo from the 1960s through the 2000s, and a nuanced exploration of queer relationships in Egypt during a time of intense governmental and societal homophobia. But even more compelling than all that is the story underneath: the why and the how of the narrative itself. As the narrator muses at one point, “there’s no way to stay outside your own story.” 

Éric Chacour’s debut is an emotional family story, a tumultuous queer romance and a richly textured portrait of ’80s and ’90s Cairo—with an intriguing narrative twist.
FictionLiterary FictionComing of Age

Still Life

Review by Laura Sackton

In her sharp, funny and wonderfully observed debut, Katherine Packert Burke captures the ordinary texture of queer and trans life. Still Life is a surprising and layered portrayal of the quotidian, full of biting musings on queer and trans culture, literature, art and, quite poignantly, Sondheim musicals. 

Edith is a trans woman in her late 20s, muddling through life without direction. She’s living in Austin, supposedly working on her second book. In reality, she spends her days cruising dating apps, going to parties and attending protests against increasingly violent anti-trans legislation. Grieving the death of her best friend and sometimes-lover, Val, she’s trapped in a melancholic longing for her past in Boston.

When a college friend invites her to speak to his creative writing students, she reluctantly returns to Boston for a week, where she visits her ex-girlfriend, Tessa, whom she dated before she transitioned. The narrative moves between the turbulent present and the turbulent past. In both timelines, Edith’s life revolves around her tangled relationships with both Tessa and Val. The three women’s friendships shift as they age, move and fall in and out of love. Edith transitions and comes out; Val dies. It is these two world-remaking changes that give the novel its emotional heft. 

There’s not much plot in these 272 pages, but the novel is all the richer for it. Without external events driving the action forward, Burke is able to focus on the strange and singular details of her protagonist’s interior life. Burke writes about grief, transition, gender identity, desire, and queer and trans love with astonishing expansiveness. Edith’s journey is not straightforward or linear. It’s circuitous, sometimes stagnant. She tries to think her way forward, but finds, again and again, that she cannot escape the material world—her physical body.

Still Life is an ode to both the sweet and thorny parts of queer friendship. Its urgency lies not in what happens to the characters, but in how they feel about what happens to them. Most of all, it’s a novel about navigating that most human of conundrums: change.

Katherine Packert Burke’s debut, Still Life, is an ode to both the sweet and thorny parts of friendship, full of biting musings on queer and trans culture, literature, art and, quite poignantly, Sondheim musicals.
FictionLiterary FictionComing of Age

Hombrecito

Review by Laura Sackton

In their haunting debut novel, Hombrecito, Santiago Jose Sanchez illuminates the hidden. The story begins in Ibagué, Colombia, a city that the protagonist, Santiago, returns to again and again, in dreams, memory and reality. Santiago is a young boy trying to make sense of a world he doesn’t understand: his absent father, his mother who sometimes “forgets she is a mother,” his feelings of alienation and otherness. When he moves with his mother and brother to Miami, those feelings continue to grow, even as he begins to embrace his queerness.

Sanchez traces Santiago’s search for belonging as he grows up and eventually leaves home for college in New York. The story follows the expected beats of a queer coming-of-age novel, but does so at a slant. Time moves unexpectedly. Scenes that take place over a few hours go on for pages; several years pass in the blank space between chapters. The prose is intensely visceral and deliberately opaque. It feels as if the narrator holds both himself and the reader at a distance before, distraught and needy, suddenly pulling them close. It’s a heartbreaking pleasure to get lost inside these pages.

Santiago’s complicated relationships with his brother and his mother shift with time, but never get easier. This is true of every relationship in Santiago’s life. There’s his first boyfriend, whom he meets in an internet chat room; his father back in Colombia, who drifts in and out of Santiago’s life; his roommate in New York; the men he sleeps with but doesn’t show himself to. His relationships to places are equally fraught: He longs for Colombia even as he distances himself from it. He leaves Miami but feels constantly pulled back by his mother.

Hombrecito is a novel about the events, sometimes unseen, often beyond our control, that shape our understanding of the world. It’s about growing up amid silences that reverberate into adulthood. It’s about self-destruction and self-denial; about fierce and unconditional love; about the cost of hiding and the turmoil of leaving a country. It’s about queerness and transience and one man’s long, slow journey to find a home inside both.

Santiago Jose Sanchez’s debut, Hombrecito, is a queer coming-of-age following a boy’s life from Colombia to Miami to New York. It’s a heartbreaking pleasure to get lost inside these pages.
FictionLiterary FictionComing of Age

Blessings

Review by Laura Sackton

Chukwuebuka Ibeh’s debut novel is a quiet but profoundly moving coming-of-age story about a young gay man in mid-2000s Nigeria. It’s an at first straightforward novel that deepens as it progresses, building toward an ending befitting its protagonist—a young man continually moving through different versions of himself.

Blessings opens in 2006 in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. When Obiefuna’s father catches him in a moment of tenderness with another boy, he immediately sends him away to boarding school. Life at school is strictly regulated and often violent. Older boys abuse and terrorize the younger boys without consequence. Obiefuna, fearing that his sexuality may be discovered at any moment, does what he thinks he has to in order to survive.

Though the novel continues to follow Obiefuna through his early years at university, his time at the boarding school takes up the most space and carries a hefty emotional weight. At times it may feel as if the story drags, but the beautiful and complicated third act reveals that Ibeh knew exactly where he was going all along. He captures the uneven importance of memory and experience, the way certain events can haunt a life without our knowledge. Obiefuna’s relationships to himself, his family, his lovers and his country change dramatically over time, a shift that Ibeh weaves almost invisibly into the prose.

Interspersed between chapters from Obiefuna’s point of view are ones told from his mother Uzoamaka’s perspective. These feel less immediate and vivid, but do add a poignant narrative layer, giving readers a glimpse into what goes unspoken between mother and son.

Blessings is an excellent work of queer fiction, full of characters who are neither good nor bad, but simply human beings in constant flux. Ibeh writes cruelty onto the page alongside tenderness, crafting scenes of domestic gay love with the same attention and detail he gives to scenes of emotional and physical violence. He offers us a precious glimpse of the world as it truly is for so many queer people: not tragic, not perfect, not all suffering or all joy—but worth living in and telling stories about.

Blessings offers a precious glimpse of the world as it truly is for so many queer people: not tragic, not perfect, not all suffering or all joy, but worth living in.
FictionLiterary FictionComing of Age

Bad Habit

Review by Laura Sackton

In her first work to be translated into English, Spanish poet, playwright and author Alana S. Portero captures the complexities of trans girlhood and adolescence. Set in the working-class San Blas neighborhood of Madrid in the 1980s and 1990s, Bad Habit, is full of chaotic, messy, vibrant life. The unnamed protagonist, a trans girl who possesses an unshakable knowledge of herself but lacks a way to express it safely, has a singular first-person narrative voice. Her campy humor, biting observations and poetic musings will leave a lasting impression on readers.

Portero balances long, meaty passages of self-reflection with vivid scenes grounded in sensory detail. The resulting mix reads like a fictional memoir, a woman baring her soul with a wink. It even follows the expected beats of a coming-of-age memoir: the protagonist’s childhood and early realization that her gender is at odds with how the world sees her; her first bittersweet experience of love; her teenage exploits in Madrid’s downtown party scene; her painful attempts to blockade herself in the closet; her tentative forays into trans life.

Portero writes about the intersections of gender, sex, desire and longing—intersections that collide in the body—with incredible thoughtfulness and nuance. She also beautifully portrays trans sisterhood and found family. Many trans women play important roles in the protagonist’s life, often in surprising and unpredictable ways. These women are lonely, crass, loving, tough and each distinct. The care they give one another radiates off the page, even, and especially, when the narrative gets grim.

Sometimes Mara Faye Lethem’s translation feels a bit clunky; occasional oddly constructed sentences may take a moment to untangle. But this hardly matters, because the prose overall is so fresh. The protagonist’s ability to see herself and the people in her life both up close and from a distance is irresistible. Bad Habit is queer fiction at its painful, honest, celebratory best, rejoicing in the beauty of trans lives while simultaneously acknowledging the violence that the world too often thrusts upon them.

The campy humor, biting observations and poetic musings of Bad Habit’s heroine will leave a lasting impression on readers. This is queer fiction at its painful, honest, celebratory best.
FictionLiterary FictionDystopian FictionComing of Age

Memory Piece

Review by Laura Sackton

In her first novel since her National Book Award-longlisted debut, The Leavers, Lisa Ko explores memory, art, technology and consumption through the eyes of three childhood best friends. Jackie, Ellen and Giselle meet at Chinese school in suburban New Jersey in the 1980s. Though they come from different backgrounds and have divergent interests, they’re drawn together by a shared desire to make something more—or different—of their lives. Moving from the dot-com era and early tech culture of the 1990s to a highly militarized vision of New York City in the 2040s, Memory Piece traces the ways the three women’s lives converge and diverge.

Giselle turns to art, launching her career with an experimental performance piece in which she lives for a year in a hidden room in a mall. As she becomes more immersed in the art world, she begins to question her motives and desires, floundering through a life that is sometimes more display than substance. Jackie gets caught up in the early days of the internet, working for a tech startup by day and developing her own radical projects by night. Ellen becomes an activist in college, and devotes her life to community organizing and fighting against the gentrification threatening her home. 

The novel’s three distinct sections drive home just how differently Giselle, Jackie and Ellen engage with and react to the world—and each other—as everything changes around them. Jackie’s section is full of frenetic energy, while Giselle’s is dreamy and quiet: Her voice comes through at a remove, as if she’s narrating from a distance. Ellen’s section is poignant with loss and nostalgia. Throughout, Ko’s prose is beautiful and sharp, and her ability to shapeshift through a range of tones makes the novel a pleasure to read.

A bittersweet wistfulness permeates the whole of Memory Piece. Though Giselle, Jackie and Ellen remain important to one another throughout their lives, there is a separateness to each of the novel’s sections that gives it a meandering and melancholy feel. This is a compelling, often chilling and beautifully observant novel about what connects us to, and disconnects us from, each other.

Moving from the dot com era and early tech culture of the 1990s to a highly militarized vision of New York City in the 2040s, Memory Piece traces the ways three women’s lives converge and diverge.
FictionLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction

The Great Divide

Review by Laura Sackton

In The Great Divide, her first novel since 2014’s The Book of Unknown Americans, Cristina Henriquez paints an intricate, layered portrait of a monumental moment in the history of the Americas: the construction of the Panama Canal. Set in 1907, this polyvocal novel is a powerful act of witness and remembrance.

Instead of focusing on only one character, Henriquez threads together the stories of over a dozen people whose lives are profoundly affected by the canal project. This inspired choice suits the scope of the event and hints at even more stories beyond these pages: It’s easy to imagine, in the snippets of lives that Henriquez zooms in on, just how many more love stories, deaths, moments of radicalization, migrations, injustices, protests and other life-altering moments occurred during the construction of the canal between 1903 and 1914.

The characters come from many countries and a wide range of backgrounds. There’s Francisco, a Panamanian fisherman who’s disgusted at what the canal project is doing to his country, and his son Omar, whose decision to work in the excavation zone causes a deep rift between them. There’s Ada, a girl from Barbados who arrives in Panama hoping to earn enough money to help her ill sister back home. She finds work in the house of John and Marian Oswald, a white American couple who have come to the isthmus in the hopes that John can eradicate malaria. Joaquin, a fishmonger who’s mostly content to live an ordinary life in the city, gets swept up in his wife’s burgeoning protest movement when she finds out her hometown is being forcibly moved to make space for the canal.

Additional points of view include those of canal workers from across the Caribbean, a foreman, a mail carrier, a young woman with dreams of becoming a photojournalist and an egotistical French doctor. The canal disrupts their lives in different ways: It kills some of them and makes others rich.

The Great Divide is a collection of small narratives that together create a moving and powerful epic about the human cost of building the Panama Canal. The novel’s greatest strength is this unrelenting smallness. It insists on the importance of every human life, and illuminates the endless, ordinary, forgotten stories that underlie every pivotal moment in human history.

Cristina Henríquez’s polyvocal novel is a moving and powerful epic about the human cost of building the Panama Canal. It’s easy to imagine, in these snippets of lives, just how many more love stories, deaths, migrations, protests and other life-altering moments occurred during the canal’s construction.
FictionLiterary FictionFamily Saga

City of Laughter

Review by Laura Sackton

The protagonist of Temim Fruchter’s remarkable debut novel, a queer grad student studying Jewish folklore, describes her work as collecting scraps. In the wake of her father’s death, 30-year-old Shiva decides to get her master’s, hoping to unravel the family mysteries her mother has kept hidden from her all her life. Shiva eventually travels to Warsaw, where a series of experiences, from a night in a queer bar to a performance of a famous Jewish play, lead her to a deeper understanding of herself, her mother and her ancestral heritage.

This novel, like Shiva’s work, is a collection of beautiful scraps—scraps of folktales and memory, hidden family histories, love letters, accounts of strange happenings in the past and present—all tangled together and rewoven into a whole that’s strange, lush, imaginative and pulsing with life. Fruchter draws on folklore remembered from her own childhood, as well as a whimsical (and sometimes dark) universe of invented tales to create something entirely new.

The narrative refuses to sit still, jumping between points of view, decades and countries as Fruchter traces four generations of Jewish women from a tiny Polish shtetl in the early 20th century to contemporary New York. Fruchter’s rich and unwavering exploration of queer lineages, alongside matrilineal and Jewish ones, is extraordinary. As Shiva becomes more deeply immersed in the lives of her foremothers, those foremothers become more vibrant and detailed, in prose that moves from shimmering and dreamlike to sharply funny to wonderfully contemplative.

Readers looking for easy explanations will not find them in City of Laughter. Readers looking for questions—and the spaces they open—will find them in abundance. This is a book full of belly laughs, intergenerational wonder, queer beauty, Jewish history, and storytelling that reshapes worlds. It’s a story about the work it takes to look into a rupture—in yourself, in your family, in history—and, through looking, begin to transform it.

Temim Fruchter’s remarkable debut novel is a book full of belly laughs, intergenerational wonder, queer beauty, Jewish history and storytelling that reshapes worlds.
FictionLiterary FictionFamily Saga

A Grandmother Begins the Story

Review by Laura Sackton

Métis author Michelle Porter weaves a beguiling and intricate story out of sparse, interlocking poetic fragments in her fiction debut. Her expertise as a poet and writer of nonfiction is on full display in this genre-blending book, which is deeply rooted in Métis storytelling, matrilineal knowledge and spirituality. It feels more like a collection of stories told by elders gathered around a fire or in a kitchen than a traditional novel. This unique structure creates a surprising momentum, effortlessly drawing readers into many meandering plots.

The story follows several generations of Métis women as they face turning points in their lives. Geneviéve (Gee), in her 80s, has checked herself into rehab for drinking. Gee’s 20-something great-granddaughter Carter, adopted by a white family, meets her grandmother Lucie for the first time when she requests Carter’s assistance in her decision to die by suicide. Carter’s estranged birth mother Allie attempts reconciliation, often through texts. Meanwhile, Gee’s sister Velma has recently died and is trying to make peace with her life from the spirit realm.

However, these women and their complex relationships are not the novel’s sole focus. It also charts the life of a young bison, Dee, whose herd’s ancestral territory is now crisscrossed with fences that force bison to adjust to human constraints. Dee’s chapters are some of the most poignant in the book—she longs for freedom and adventure even as she learns that her survival is bound up with that of her herd.

Chapters from the perspectives of bison grandmothers, Gee’s dogs and the grassland itself add to a rich mix of human and nonhuman voices. In contrast to Carter’s wry and resigned narration, Dee’s voice bursts with unconstrained joy and heartache. Gee is constantly cracking jokes, her sister in the spirit world speaks with a melancholy longing, and the texts from Carter’s mother are clipped and full of simmering regret and pain.

A Grandmother Begins the Story is a beautiful meditation on the interconnectedness of spirit, land and family. It’s about what gets passed down from mothers to daughters and what doesn’t. It’s about the stories that persist through generations—sometimes hidden, but always present—and what happens when those stories break open into new shapes.

Chapters from the perspectives of bison grandmothers, dogs and the grassland itself add to the rich mix of human and nonhuman voices in A Grandmother Begins the Story.

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