[{"id":52009,"date":"2026-08-20T09:38:00","date_gmt":"2026-08-20T13:38:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/?p=52009"},"modified":"2026-09-07T13:44:05","modified_gmt":"2026-09-07T17:44:05","slug":"before-the-fuckers-catch-us-transmad-poetics-and-epistemic-flight","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/2026\/08\/20\/features\/scavar\/before-the-fuckers-catch-us-transmad-poetics-and-epistemic-flight\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cBefore the Fuckers Catch Us\u201d: transMad Poetics and Epistemic Flight"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This feature was originally published in the Full Stop Quarterly \u201cTender Tongues,” edited by Nat\u00e1lia Affonso. Subscribe at our Patreon page<\/a> to get access to this and future issues, also available for purchase here<\/a>.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Cisheteropatriarchy names with violence; does violence with its names. The project of diagnosis, embedded in medico-psychiatric clinical research as practice, seeks to consolidate power over the epistemological and material conditions of life itself. Given these violent efforts, it is critical to examine the myriad breakages, trapdoors, and lines of flight forever in cisheteropatriarchy\u2019s shadow, embedded in the omissions, ambiguities and evasions in what I have called elsewhere transMad<\/em> practices\u2014those that combat hegemonic frameworks of knowledge and practice by centering those that deliberately do not make sense in the entangled shadows of cisness and sanity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Following Andrea Abi-Karam and Kay Gabriel in We Want it All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics<\/em>, I understand poetics as a \u201cway to inhabit revolutionary practice\u201d (2022:2) particularly for those whose bodyminds refuse to comply with hegemonic demands for legibility. transMad poetics are creative tactics of reorientation away from the institutional mandates of \u201ccure\u201d and \u201crecovery\u201d of one\u2019s capacity for labor, but shared orientations against cis\/sane ways of life and linear storytelling (Cavar, 2022). These linear modes mark a highly institutional[ized] form of storytelling, whose long shadow\u2014what Liat BenMoshe calls the institution yet to come<\/em>\u2014pervades even trans | Mad lives relatively untouched by the physical space of the clinic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The story of trans | Mad non\/compliance begins with a hegemonic Story, whose capitalization reflects its ability to accrue social and monetary capital. For decades, trans scholarship has acknowledged the curatorial labor of trans embodiment when seeking vital healthcare, legal legibility, and, however minimal, protection from the most immediate and devastating forms of social violence (Coyote and Spoon, 2014; Gill-Peterson 2022; Malatino 2019; Spade 2003; Stryker 1998). To enter into the clinic and declare dysphoria is to embark on a justificatory project, one that is at once epistemically incriminating (\u201cI suffer from a disease called dysphoria\u201d) and desperately self-justifying (\u201cmy relationship to my bodymind is real, and I have narratable memories to prove it\u201d). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the poetic interventions I will be reading, authors disrupt attempts to \u201cmake sense\u201d of disparate, profoundly ununified bodyminds in a way that undermines (under-mines, under<\/s>mines) emergent practices in the cracks of the real. It is in these cracks, in the margins and the alleyways and \u201ccripistemic\u201d backwoods, and in moments stolen<\/em> (Moten and Harney, 101) from and apposite<\/em> to the Institution, that transMad projects event themselves. With the term \u201capposite,\u201d I follow Moten\u2019s (2004:274) account of appositional enlightenment within the Black radical tradition:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

Appositional enlightenment is remixed, expanded, distilled, and radically faithful to the forces its encounters carry, break, and constitute. It\u2019s (the effect of) critique or rationalization unopposed to the deep revelation instantiated by a rupturing event of dis\/appropriation, or the rapturous advent of an implicit but unprecedented freedom.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Amid what Moten identifies as demands for \u201cuniversality in language\u201d (as opposed to the \u201cmerely phonetic\u201d (273)\u2014which might also be called word salad<\/em> (a term ascribed to the \u201cnonsensical\u201d forms of speech attributed to people diagnosed with schizophrenia) or mumbo jumbo<\/em> (whose anti-Black origins were immortally satirized in Ishmael Reed\u2019s 1972 novel by the same name)\u2014exists a legibility killswitch. Moten writes of an \u201cordinary\u201d (white, sane) reality necessarily undercut by the simultaneous Otherwises: \u201cthe extraordinary is the always surprising path through the ordinary<\/em> that is made by way of the montagic, transversal sequencing of events\u201d (273). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

To do transMad means, having passed (again and again and again) through the spiny gates of the ordinary, to find recourse to the very corners of the imagination, to take pleasure in the nonsensical. transMad involves a disidentificatory recognition that the very violent regimes of diagnosis that both invent and destroy us are also sites of fugitive pleasure, to make poetry in community in the face of carceral grammars. This is a refusal of a kind of so-called care <\/em>that is, in truth, curative, seeking to erase ambiguities in favor of the easy, the legible, and even the \u201caccessible\u201d (false claims of ableism sometimes emerge in attempts to quash transMad modes of communication). Inasmuch as it gestures toward truths, realities, and experiences not-yet<\/em> (or, perhaps more accurately, not-here<\/em>), the speculative and even secretive elements of transMad creativity\u2014including the interventions I read below\u2014refuse calls to speak legibly, simplistically, and universally on non-normative embodymindment. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

transMad poetic interventions address\/undo violent projects of hyperindividualized, medico-psychiatric storytelling, and manifest lines of flight toward realities otherwise, which cannot be collapsed into linear narrative frameworks. In spite of extractive structures, fugitive, opaque, and poetic practices circulate, leaving evidence of transMad poetic methodologies without revealing their secrets. Departing from the carceral politics of the Story and toward lyrical resistance, I explore transMad poetics as radical speculation, as challenging windows into words worlds wounds rooms of our own.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Recognizability and its Discontents<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n


Love my aggression. Spy on me, I beg you. […]
What you understand is not what I am. What you fail to understand.
(Besemer, 2018: 19).<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

If permitted to exist at all, the story of trans subjectivity under the medical gaze must remain oriented toward approximations of cisheterosexuality, conditional abled\/saneness, thinness, and class-privileged whiteness, which together constitute and are constituted by acceptable gender performance (Snorton, 2017). Of course, the mandate to story ourselves as sensibly is critical not only to trans oppression, but Mad oppression, and illustrates the inextricable entanglement of these two systems. The testimony of the \u201crecovered\u201d once-ill is a powerful narrative technology, and has served to advance mainstream mental health policy agendas, and individuals with the requisite \u201clived experience\u201d may even be coached into narrating their respective stories intelligibly for institutional gain, whether for themselves or for an institution (Woods, Hart, and Spandler, 2022). In response to this, and to the parallel and intertwined issues of epistemic subjugation in trans clinical encounters, trans (Radi, 2019) | Mad (LeFran\u00e7ois and Voronka, 2022) epistemologies find recourse to the experiential knowledge of trans | Mad persons ourselves, particularly those who have survived institutional oppression, whether within a discrete, walled space or under epistemological frameworks that render us what I, following Mel Baggs, call \u201cperpetuallyabusable unpersons<\/em>\u201d (Cavar 2023:16). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the long shadow of the institution and its narrative mandates, relief rests in the minor literatures of transMad life. Following Deleuze and Guattari, Berlant (2006: 34) describes minor literatures as \u201cspace[s] of internal displacement [which shatter] the normal hierarchies, clarities, tyrannies, and conclusions of compliance with autonomous individualities,\u201d comparable to \u201cdigging a hole\u201d in the face of an unlivable reality. These holes are ambivalent spaces of processing, grieving, and (re)imagining, which must hold complex traumas, yet refuse to confine themselves to recognizable trauma frameworks. This paradox undergirds much transMad poetic writing: we fight to recognize each other carve illucid and illicit intimacies, even while stealing (ourselves) from institutions and steeling ourselves against medico-psychiatric violence. [Our bodies] are floating in space, ready to be explored<\/em> (Leungsuraswat, TTL 82). But the map is not the territory, and transMad poetic strategies offer obfuscation as a way of engaging with trauma, while blocking the pathological pathways of institutional possession.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With small, stark font, wide-spaced and replete with gappy blackouts, autistic, Chinese-Canadian poet Jane Shi\u2019s Leaving Chang\u2019e On Read <\/em>unveils a DSM of a different variety. The poem, \u201cHistory Flipping,\u201d indeed flips the DSM-V criteria for autism spectrum disorder into a text nearly unrecognizable, studded with white space and black bars. Tellingly, Shi leaves available to the reader words readily applied to autistic children by clinicians: \u201caffect,\u201d \u201cnonverbal,\u201d \u201cabsence of,\u201d \u201cexcessive,\u201d and, of course, \u201cdisorder,\u201d fumble across the page, attempting and failing attachment (16-17). These words, decontextualized, become stark in their dehumanizing ethos\u2014the autistic subject (object) is defined as necessarily in excess or in absence, but excess and absence of what? Stripped to its bare bones, the autism diagnosis is no longer a label for a preexisting condition, but a means of measuring distance from agreed-upon behavioral norms. The result of noncompliance with these norms, as Shi indicates, is a detachment to the point of illegibility. Autistic personhood falls through the fractures created by clinical diagnoses of unwholeness. The disordering is deliberate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The epigraph to this particular poem is also telling. In it, Shi quotes Theresa Hak Kyung Cha\u2019s opus, Dictee<\/em>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

She mimics the speaking. That might resemble speech. (Anything at all). Bared noise, frown, bits torn down from words. Since she hesitates to measure the accuracy, she resorts to mimicking gestures with the mouth. The entire lower lip would lift upwards then sink back to its original place. (quoted in Shi, 16). <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Cha\u2019s meditation on illegible, unrecognizable speech and is rooted in her experience as a Korean woman and immigrant under U.S. empire\u2014and empire\u2019s demands for a fluent (in English), sanitized (sane-tized) story of assimilation and forgetting on the part of dislocated people. Redeploying the quotation for her queer, Chinese-Canadian, autistic purposes, Shi highlights and rejects white supremacist, cisheterosexist, and ableist epistemic violence. She marks up psychiatric texts, both to come to terms with the terms set for her existence, and to implant the total institution with an exit row: below the repeated word \u201cdisorder\u201d sit several lines of blacked-out text\u2014speculative space which refuses to serve readers not already in-the-know. Shi\u2019s refusals double as invitations to speculate on experiences whose horrors (and possibilities) defy language. (Leslie Feinberg (2014:5): Do I have to tell you every detail? Of course not<\/em>. | Franz Kafka: I am constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplicable, to tell about something I only feel in my bones and which can only be experienced in those bones<\/em>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In fat feminist and public scholar Caleb Luna\u2019s (2022) hybrid poetry collection, REVENGE BODY<\/em>, which intervenes in anti-trans, anti-fat, and ableist\/saneist medical projects, these redactions are preempted elsewhere in the text: it refuses to specify individual persons in its poetic dedication (italics in original):<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

for the sick & disabled<\/em>
crazy femmes who are surviving,<\/em>
those who chose not to, &<\/em>
those who died trying<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

This dedication tells a micro-story in stark contrast to those of recovery-through-transparency, instead allowing \u201cfailure\u201d up to and including suicide to be in conversation with trans | Mad survival. Luna\u2019s line breaks add ambiguity to an anonymous litany, identifying the \u201csick and disabled\u201d and \u201ccrazy femmes\u201d as distinct, yet overlapping and soon-to-be-expanded categories. The third line, \u201cthose who choose not to, &\u201d once again gestures ambiguously to its predecessor an ampersand opening space for the weighty conclusion: \u201cthose who died trying.\u201d Strikingly, Luna calls in a wide array of interlocutors in this dedication, while choosing not to reprise the medical interpellation that placed them into contact.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(Bo Leungsuraswat:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI guess this is how recognition works<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Every sight leaves<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

a scar<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A cut<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

That alters the shape of your body\u201d<\/em> [76])<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Luna also gestures at something darker. Throughout REVENGE BODY<\/em>, they recognize the ongoing horrors that have consigned them to the abjected categories of trans, fat, disabled, and Mad. However, this very shared status of abjection creates the conditions for comradeship, and lays the groundwork for anticarceral coalition. The community Luna invokes is both concrete and ambiguous: the \u201csick & disabled \/ crazy femme(s)\u201d are someone(s)<\/em>, known and loved, yet also unknown, perhaps even to themself. Luna subtlety recognizes that the violence that renders sickness, Madness, fatness, and queerness inimical to full personhood leaves in its wake a powerful solidarity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Luna\u2019s dedication offers counter-recognition, a way of seeing and inviting transMadness while necessarily obscuring \u201cincriminating\u201d details. The poet gestures to, and, at the same time, chooses not to capture events of carceral violence: both out of a decision not to rehearse an ongoing project of medical humiliation enacted against fat trans | Mad people in particular (Baggs 2018; Mercedes 2020; Mollow 2015) but also because they cannot linearly, chronologically, matter-of-factly describe those events: traumatic events are indiscrete and ongoing, an unending sentence evading linguistic capture. Not only because ruptured memory defies chronology, but also because the language of \u201ctrauma\u201d so often rests in the hands of its perpetrators. The well-worn dictum \u201cdo no harm\u201d becomes, for abusive medical institutions, a promise: we are ontologically incapable of harm, and you, unperson, cannot be hurt.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The genre of remembering required here is unavailable precisely because of its dehumanizing implications: \u201cYou can\u2019t be present while another person stops being a person. If even for a moment that other person is just shivering meat,\u201d writes McKenzie Wark (2020: 12-13). Unpersoning becomes both event and non-event, eminently recordable (via sterile medical documentation) and yet unwritable (in terms of addressing trans | Mad lived experience). Redaction from the record of personhood, while necessitating counter-poetics, also necessitates their own redaction. To reflect the inescapability of medico-psychiatric violence is to reflect the very absences through which we, together, escape.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the opening pages of Reverse Cowgirl<\/em>, McKenzie Wark (2020: 11) writes: There are moments when I don\u2019t exist. I both want and fear those moments.<\/em> Both Shi and Luna express ambivalent orientations toward nonexistence, contending with the ways in which their voices are foreclosed from medico-psychiatric record, yet at the same time facilitate a \u201cvoicelessness\u201d that can wield its own obfuscatory power. If to be transMad is both to reject (as a point of creative pride) and be rejected (as perpetually-abusable) from legibility, what dreams might we express with words that cannot be read?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Poetics After Knowledge<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

If the mind is a terrain, cut in complexity like any other indescribable landscape
then let us be cartographers because we need better maps.
If pathology is a map
If language is a map
If the language of pathology is our map, then we need better maps.
(kitty lu bear, 2022:6).<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

transMad poetics cannot and should not be consigned to the realm of \u201ctrauma processing\u201d\u2014even when, as Luna\u2019s work indicates, these poetics can serve as a vital, life-saving technology. For my interest in transMad survival, I am perhaps even more interested in flight: thinking transMadness as its own kind of off(er)ing, perhaps providing a response to the query of why poets off themselves<\/em> (Ching-In Chen, TTL 97). What if to off oneself is not inherently a practice of self-killing, but self-obfuscation\u2014which, arguably, includes self-killing and ego-killing. Under this framework, the poet, and certainly the transMad poet, practices offering<\/em> in striking out against language\u2014pilfering the resources offered by institutions and smuggling them into an Otherwise reality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Offing: a killer\u2019s gerund. A likely possibility. A horizon in the far distance. Where can poetry take us?<\/em> In her practices of transreality, game studies scholar and performance artist micha c\u00e1rdenas \u201cuse[s] a poetic lens to subvert the power of the cisgender gaze\u201d (2017:8) whose devotion to a biologized, overdetermined Real World forecloses trans lives. Instead, she calls for an approach that embraces a multiplicity of contradictory realities, all simultaneously \u201ctrue\u201d and \u201cuntrue\u201d: what Ching-In Chen identifies as \u201cmessy, chaotic, overrun, contradictory, blowing every which way\u201d (97). The chaotic possibility of transreality is kin to the concept of tranifestation<\/em>, coined by Kai M. Green and Treva Ellison to describe the process of \u201crenaming and refiguring\u201d the world such that \u201cruptures [in \u2018reality\u2019] are mobilized as generative sites for solidarity and transformation\u201d (2014). To these chaos-notes, I add speculation<\/em>, alongside an illustrative quote from author Karen Russell, whose orientation to the craft of speculative fiction has been critical to the analysis in this essay:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

I\u2019ve always loved speculative fiction because it shows us that there are alternative ways of doing things and alternative ways of living. You have to imagine a way forward before you can get there. It\u2019s so easy for my imagination to list in dystopian directions, but it feels very active to pivot and ask, \u201cWhat could happen? What is unwritten? Where do I have agency?\u201d<\/em> [in Westenfeld 2023; emphasis added]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

While remaining ambivalent about the language of \u201cagency,\u201d especially for trans | Mad subjects unpersoned by institutional violence, I linger on Russell\u2019s call to ask what could happen<\/em> and, even more, what is unwritten?<\/em> The ambiguity of these questions echoes the \u201cflexible epistemology\u201d offered by tranifestation, as well as the call to contend with \u201cdifficult knowledge\u201d (Costa and Ross, 2023) coming from Critical Mad Studies scholarship and praxis. To identify with trans | Madness is to practice speculation on a daily basis: to commit trans desire, to open oneself to trans becoming, is to speculate on a bodymind relationship not-yet-here; to walk through the consensus reality which deems you Other while at the same time moving through a psychological landscape to which sane people lack access. What happens when we collude on the ward, exchange tips and contacts? When we pirate knowledge from the medical industry to care for our comrades in the shadows? transMad speculation contends with the possible (and the immanent impossible) without fixing (in any sense of the word) these possibilities to the rational, sane, and\/as the real. We follow Russell\u2019s ambiguous calls of what<\/em> and where<\/em> in order to expose the inherent weakness of \u201ca totality that cannot stand, in its orderedness, in the face of the rough non-sense or extra-sense\u201d (Moten, 2004:272).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Speculation, while often ambiguous, can also provide us practical steps toward that which we seek to tranifest. NM ESC\u2019s poetics point to the importance of embracing danger, including crime, within a framework that criminalizes transMad existence. In their experimental essay \u201cSunset Vans,\u201d ESC opens with a scene as familiar as it is unimaginable: a government shutdown that they and their comrades hope is \u201cfor good\u201d (305). Moving by backslash from thought to thought, \u201cSunset Vans\u201d rapidly contextualizes this hope in its naming of what Sara Ahmed calls affective alienation <\/em>from the cisheteronormative, white supremacist project of \u201crecovery.\u201d ESC\u2019s \u201cstrange dreams\u201d (205) of hope are not divorced from the violent realities under which they and their comrades live. Strange hope and normative violence are inextricably linked: a summer evening of front porch sex gives way to the memories of winter: tight-wound friendships that medical hegemons \u201ctore at the seams \/ & called it suicide watch\u201d (306). Medical interventions hostile to transMad life keeps ESC and comrades running, running down deadly stretches of I-95 and toward a summer always receding\u2014a summer free\/d of the \u201cmaterial consequences for living how we do\u201d<\/em> (206) [italics in original].<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For ESC, the experience and promise of summer (re)presents a fugitive hope for (non)realities behind, beneath, and obscured-by medico-legal \u201ctruth.\u201d Taking up Moten\u2019s call for the nonsensical, ESC remixes the slogan \u201cproperty is theft\u201d: \u201cif property is theft and theft is proper then I\u2019m going to put my fist through the sun and pull the light out\u201d (306), thus imagining a transMad craftworld capable only under the cover of darkness. Pulling the light out<\/em> is only partially a \u201csentimental \/ lingering\u201d (306) project; it is also a form of un- and re-writing: \u201cwe didn\u2019t choose or want these bodies \/ but we are losing the right to repair them,\u201d ESC continues, linking together multiple forms of technosocial injustice,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201c& we need that warmth to hold each other up\u201d (306-307)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hold up through what, for how long? We will not receive these answers, instead receiving implicit despites: despite incarceration, grief, expulsion, subjugation, survival is as unrelenting as it is opaque: the strange dreams of warmth that keep us loving and fucking and fighting are as impermanent as the highway and thin as \/.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In \u201cSunset Vans,\u201d we hold up in order to address spatiotemporally mingling traumas whose paths routinely overlap. Nominally \u201cindividual\u201d experiences coexist with the ongoing, ambient traumas of climate violence, eugenics, and enforced poverty. While \u201coptimistic\u201d recovery approaches presuppose limits to the length of ugly feelings, marking them as temporary roadblocks on a longer path to a healthy-balanced-normative future, \u201cSunset Vans\u201d uses ugly feelings as a cudgel, a brick through the glass front of happiness which condemns transMad people to oblivion. ESC illustrates the ways in which transMad poetics cannot be contained in the language of \u201ccoping\u201d\u2014to live on, transMadly, is to bump directly against the demand to (appropriately, legibly, in a timely manner) \u201cprocess trauma\u201d as such. It may very well instead require a poetics of paranoia, rumination, perseveration, obsession, and friction, in and through behaviors decidedly \u201canti-social\u201d whose implications text on a page can only begin to address.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In another contribution to a transMad poetics of the \u201canti-social,\u201d McKenzie Wark\u2019s Reverse Cowgirl<\/em>, freely fucks and fucks with the \u201csensible\u201d in terms of transition, ultimately demonstrating a language-averse language of joy. Wark eludes the fealty to \u201crealness\u201d often demanded of trans memoir. Instead she freely blends fantasy (sexual and otherwise), fairytale, and \u201creal life\u201d happenings, particularly in her recounting of life prior to realizing that she was trans. Yet the textual moments oriented around her own trans-realization, too, prove different from conventional autobiographical notions of \u201cwriting-into-being\u201d (Moten, 277) which appear to invent \/ event a legible and immutable subject (Moten, 277-278). Such a form, Moten notes, constructs, predicts, and ultimately restricts, leaving no space for generative defiance (278). It is precisely this generative defiance that Wark deploys in her transreal description of trans-realization:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

Its decided. I\u2019m giddy with resolve, adventure, logistics, epidermal charms, demigod blessings. I will transition. I am going to make my exit from masculinity. I don\u2019t know how far I can get away from it. I don\u2019t know who this I is or who she will have been or become. And I know I have left this too late. But it doesn\u2019t matter. I\u2019m out. Out as trans. Out as trans to the trees and the hawk up in the tree and the lake and the fish down in the lake and the beaver downstream in the river. Out to the sun, out to the sky. Hello world, I\u2019m trans! Am I binary or non-binary? Am I trans-femme or a trans woman? No idea. Well, some ideas, some steep inclinations. But the decision that\u2019s made is to jump off the edge of masculinity and hope to float.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The immediate emotional texture of Wark\u2019s realization, as she writes it, is one that simultaneously embraces intellectual deliberation and flights of fancy: she has been taken in like a lover by the charms of trans life, pushed to the brink of that \u201cexit from masculinity\u201d by an enabling and unnameable force. The process of her realization is fuzzy, marked by momentary pleasures and cyclical intellectual explorations: she is concerned with the continuous process of what Deleuze and Guattari might call becoming-trans \/ trans-becoming, one disoriented from existing notions of \u201cideal\u201d gendered embodymindment and instead concerned with fleeting, intuitive, ecological relationships.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wark compares her \u201coutness\u201d not to persons who have legibilized their trans identities to a human public, but to trees, lakes, hawks, fish, beavers, and rivers. Yes, she is out, in the way of something ejected from a burning capsule: out of a narrative \u201cbenevolently given\u2014which is to say violently imposed\u2014by the one who took [her] and [her] ability to tell, [her] ability to tell and [her] ability to know, [her] ability to tell and to know in the interest of that which [she] would know or would have kin\u201d (Moten, 278). This time, Wark hails herself instead: a \u201cyou there!\u201d replaced with \u201chello world!\u201d and followed by \u201cI\u2019m trans!\u201d and a purposeful avoidance of further description. Unlike what we might call \u201csane transition\u201d narratives, wherein the moment of trans realization is one of closure (\u201cthis is who I am, that past person is \u2018dead\u2019 or never truly alive at all\u201d) Wark\u2019s is of what could be described as a beginning but could even better be identified as a rupture in the very project of trans self-description\u2014of the idea of the medically-authored\/authorized \u201ctrans individual\u201d at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

ESC and Wark exemplify transMad poetic impulses to disrupt the legible, as a means of survival and\/as becoming. This combination means that the practice of speculation is happening as we happen: ESC\u2019s anti-\/ante-hospital care work is speculative and happening precisely because it cannot happen, and yet it is, and yet, by medical mandate, it is not. Wark\u2019s trans, having been hailed by herself with and through nonhuman beings, is both unarrived and having always been: what is new is not her gender, but the rupture this new orientation produces in the narrative fabric of her life. Here, transMad speculative practices disturb language from \u201cinside the house\u201d or disturb the master\u2019s house with its own tools, irreversibly damaged in the process.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Conclusion<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Names stick. Notes gather in the traces we leave. Yet, we render lives, texts, and socialites Otherwise: We may speak in gossip, paranoid patterns, deny medical authorities the benefit of the doubt precisely because there is no benefit to doubting the extent of their cruelty. We keep secrets with our lives because they make the difference between incarceration and relative freedom. Our poetic approaches reflect this ever-shifting relationship with safety and danger, with what can and cannot be put into words, resulting in feats of imagination that portend new worlds even as they (the approaches, the feats, the worlds themselves) are already-arriving.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What is the purpose of poetry that refuses to be read? What is poetic about the refuse, the detritus that defies interpellation? While poetics is not inoculation against the cruel optimism of recovery toward the legible, it can serve as a trapdoor, an opening of alternative possibilities. Rather than coming to specific conclusions on the purpose of transMad writing (or even a concrete definition as to what transMad writing is<\/em>), I have outlined two key elements of transMad speculative poetics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

The first: a poetics of, against, after, and beneath the institution, both in its material forms and in its long discursive shadow. The interpellation of trans | Mad subjects into intolerably violent lifeworlds necessitates a poetry of obfuscation, redaction, risk, and rage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The second, highly related element is one of speculation, of what Marquis Bey calls \u201cfugitive hope,\u201d described as \u201cthe living outside of time and civilization because it yearns for something not legible in current frameworks\u201d (216). These are not worlds free of the lingering memory of violence, but moments, trap doors, and hiding places Otherwise to everyday realities of violence and death.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

So long as trans | Mad existence exists, it exists toward that which cannot (yet) be understood, pushing ever-further from the shores of fixed, stable, and legible knowledge of selves and others. As we steel ourselves for increasing assaults on our ways of being, un\/knowing, and becoming together, I look forward to further engagement with transMad poetic practices, taking comfort amid terror in mapless moments and cunning feats and disheveled language. In the long shadow of the hospital, the prison, and the terrors of their demands for transparency, transMad writing refuses, offers alternatives just out-of-sight. Now: what wor(l)ds might we take into what lies beyond?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

NM ESC:

If property is theft and theft is holy then i am proud
of every single year we\u2019ve stolen back
of how much joy
is possible
to haul away from here
before the fuckers catch us.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

For a full list of references, consult the Full Stop Quarterly issue “Tender Tongues.”<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

[sarah] Cavar is the author of <\/em>Failure to Comply (featherproof books, 2024) and <\/em>Differential Diagnosis (Northwestern University Press, 2026), with genre-nonconforming writing in <\/em>Kairos, The Rumpus, Transgender Studies Quarterly, Electric Lit, and elsewhere. They hold a PhD in Cultural Studies with a concentration in Science & Technology Studies from the University of California: Davis, and are interested in the politics of queercrip & transMad knowledge production. More at www.cavar.club, @cavar on bluesky, and at librarycard.beehiiv.com.<\/a> <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It is in these cracks, in the margins and the alleyways and \u201ccripistemic\u201d backwoods, and in moments stolen from and apposite to the Institution, that transMad projects event themselves…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1325,"featured_media":52022,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,1511,101],"tags":[9961,2737,9963,5494,9960,8555,9962,9959],"class_list":["post-52009","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features","category-quarterly","category-latest","tag-cripistemology","tag-fred-moten","tag-fugitivity","tag-naming","tag-revolutionary-poetics","tag-tender-tongues","tag-transmad-poetics","tag-sarah-cavar"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52009","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1325"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=52009"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52009\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":52053,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52009\/revisions\/52053"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/52022"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52009"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52009"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52009"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":51991,"date":"2026-08-19T10:24:28","date_gmt":"2026-08-19T14:24:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/?p=51991"},"modified":"2026-08-19T12:11:37","modified_gmt":"2026-08-19T16:11:37","slug":"emily-mcbride","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/2026\/08\/19\/interviews\/rosebailer\/emily-mcbride\/","title":{"rendered":"Emily McBride"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Emily McBride\u2019s brainy debut novel, Queen Mab<\/a><\/em> follows Madeleine, a second-year PhD student studying Victorian and Modernist literature, who unexpectedly becomes pregnant. Soon after the birth of her daughter, Madeleine becomes unnerved by her baby and convinced that she was switched at birth by fairies (a nod to the changeling myth in literature).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

McBride\u2019s novel is an urban folktale and an original exploration of postpartum depression and psychosis. It joins the burgeoning genre of women\u2019s writing about motherhood, though it is the first novel in this genre that I have read that also addresses topics like precarity in academia, gentrification, and adoptive families.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"
Photo Credit: S\u00edlvia Poch<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

I have been eagerly awaiting McBride\u2019s debut, and Queen Mab<\/em> delivered in both the propulsive reading experience and the ways in which addressed political questions around motherhood and raising a child in a city.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At a moment in which conversations around post-partum mental health are extremely pressing, I had the opportunity to speak with McBride over video call about her novel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rose Bialer: Queen Mab<\/em> opens with a wonderful scene where Madeleine realizes she\u2019s pregnant. She feels the first flicker of life inside her as a moth. If writing a novel in any way can be compared to having a child \u2014 how did you experience the first flicker of this story?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Emily McBride: Well, I definitely think this novel can be compared to having a child. Partly because of the subject matter, and partly because it started with me having a baby and my response to that, which was nowhere near as extreme as the character\u2019s. But nonetheless, it obviously brought up a lot of reflection, which informed the final story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The moth that opens the novel was central to everything in the finished product, but it wasn\u2019t the first flicker of the novel. I started with the changeling idea, and the idea of a reversal of what we expect of the changeling story, which I won’t go into super detail, so as not to spoil things. I\u2019ve found for myself that when I have a story that works well, it usually starts out with a very simple idea, which is usually just some kind of reversal of expectation for the reader. That was the case here. Everything else was just adding, adding, adding.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At one point, the moth was sort of buried in chapter three. Later, when I was trying to write a first chapter that would be an effective opening, I remember thinking like, oh, maybe that. Maybe we can move that forward. Then once it was in that place, it became very central to the whole story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Also Queen Mab<\/em> is definitely like a baby for me because all my kids were born in the summer, and it has also appeared in the summer. It was published ten years after my first child was born, so it feels like a way of rounding out the decade.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You spend much longer conceiving a novel than you do a child.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

For sure. But then once it’s out, it’s set. You don’t have to have teenage arguments with it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Very true. I wanted to ask you to come back to this idea. You describe the novel as an urban folktale about motherhood and madness. Does your writing always take on a bent of the magical or was it a style that felt particularly suited to this story?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I don’t always write things with magical or fantastical elements. But I did read a lot of fantasy novels as a child. Not so much adult fantasy novels \u2014 I sort of maxed out around twelve or thirteen. But that was an enormous part of my reading education. Even now, I love  novels or stories that are primarily realist, but have some uncanny or magical or slightly mythological element to them. So once I had the idea for this, I knew that it was something I wanted to pursue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think that what’s very effective in the novel is you aren\u2019t always  sure what\u2019s real and what isn’t, which mirrors Madeleine\u2019s post-partum experience. Speaking of motherhood and madness, you wrote a wonderful review of two Irish novels that deal with those topics in the <\/strong>Stinging Fly<\/strong><\/a>: <\/strong>Soldier Sailor<\/em><\/strong> and <\/strong>Milk<\/em><\/strong>. You write, \u201cFor these writers, to become a mother is to become wild \u2014 to be thrown from a place of citizenship and apparent intellectual equality into the wilderness.\u201d Did you feel this to be true in your novel as well?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was able to write that review in that way because I had spent three or four years thinking about all of these things; I had recently finished this book and so was primed to recognize the patterns. I was trying to read many of the new motherhood books as they started appearing. Not always right in the moment because I wanted to keep my own mental space. But when I did read them, I would notice these recurring patterns. So I was thinking, isn’t it strange how there’s this wilderness aspect in Night Bitch when the woman becomes a dog<\/em> or in Chouette where a woman gives birth to an owl?<\/em> In my own book, which I had started before reading either of those, and also in Soldier Sailor<\/em> and Milk<\/em>, there is a strong discussion of motherhood in terms of the animal. The kind of chaotic, broken animal, like mechanized farming cows in Milk<\/em>, and a dying baby bird in Soldier Sailor<\/em>. I think it was mainly just that I noticed these things more than somebody else might have in that moment because I had been thinking about them for so long.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The most impactful scene for me in <\/strong>Queen Mab<\/em><\/strong> was the birth scene because it was just such an intense momentum. You do make references to the animalistic. And I was reading that\u2013I have not given birth, but I was like, oh my god! If this is what birth is, I don’t know if I want to experience this. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was an amalgamation. I took everybody’s worst experiences. I’ve been interviewed by people who have given birth and been like, oh, my birth wasn’t like that, and I was like, well, no, like mine wasn’t really like that either.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

No, but it can be extremely traumatic and horrible for many people.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I mean, there’s nothing in there that doesn’t happen to people, right? Also about what we were speaking of earlier, I think it is natural that we compare motherhood to animals because it kind of turns you into an animal, which is something I think we’re not used to being in the present day. We know intellectually that we’re animals and that we’re mammals and that we function the same as other animals, but we don’t feel like it. And most of the time, we don’t have to really deal with the physicality of living on that intensive level.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That comes up as a point of tension in the novel with Madeleine having complicated feelings about having a baby while also pursuing the life of the mind, especially as she faces judgment from some of her colleagues in academia. As a mother and a writer, how did you approach this topic?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

So as a person who was living in the mind, obviously it was a big shock to have a baby. To suddenly be thrown into a world that was extremely physical, and not just in terms of the birth, but in terms of looking after the baby, and being attached to something 24 hours a day. I think for some people, this isn’t a problem at all. Some people are more physically oriented, or even if they aren’t, they really like the chance to be. But if you’re used to having time alone to think your thoughts, suddenly having no time alone to think your thoughts, and actually not much ability to think your thoughts \u2014 if you do get any time alone you’re completely frazzled and sleep deprived and your body is doing weird things \u2014 is a big surprise. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I don’t know if it’s something that maybe affects us even more nowadays than in the past because we tend to have babies later, and so we’ve probably had more time to establish the kind of life that we want. So it is a shock when it is dismantled in front of you, even if it turns out to be a somewhat temporary dismantlement. It doesn’t mean that you’re never going to enjoy life again. This book is not meant to convince people not to have children, although some people have taken it that way. But let’s say it’s a moment of strong pressure. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am curious too about the other novels and memoirs that also touch on these topics. <\/strong>Queen Mab<\/em><\/strong> is being published amongst a thriving new cadre of contemporary women writers exploring motherhood in fiction and non-fiction. Ay\u015feg\u00fcl Sava\u015f\u2019s aptly named <\/strong>The Wilderness<\/strong><\/a>, Olga Ravn\u2019s <\/strong>My Work<\/em><\/strong><\/a> are just a few examples. Could you speculate as to why there has been such a burgeoning genre of women\u2019s fiction about motherhood?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is very curious for me, because it’s true that a bunch of them have come out in the last seven or eight years. I went through a period of wondering if there was just something in the water, but I think it probably has more to do with the Read Women movement that started just before 2014. People started talking about how we don’t read women enough, and men never read women, and we have to support women’s writing. Then, a lot of people started having a year of only reading women. It may have given a boost  to these more \u201cdomestic topics.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think back to my own state of mind in 2016 when I started thinking of the story. The novel was mostly written in 2019 and 2020. But at the beginning, I had a sense of inferiority about the topic itself, despite thinking it was a topic that should be covered. I wondered if anyone would be interested in a story of a woman home all day with a baby. I think that’s maybe why it ended up being a horror novel in some ways. I wanted to make sure there was drama. And even though I know that you can find drama in quotidian things, it didn’t always feel that way writing it in the late-2010s. The irony is that by the time it was finished, there were so many of these books about motherhood that I was starting to wonder if anybody would want to read another one. Still, mine has fairies!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I’m someone who’s always going to read a motherhood novel.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yeah, there are people who are having new babies all the time. But, it\u2019s just curious how dramatically the scene had shifted in just those few years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I mean I do feel very lucky as someone who believes they want to have children. I think now there’s going to be so many books for me to read and help me feel less alone and less crazy when I do.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

For real. When I was looking for them in 2016, I found Rachel Cusk’s A Life\u2019s Work<\/em> \u2014 which is amazing and which everybody should read \u2014 but there wasn’t very much else there wasn’t really very much in the way of fiction. And even Rachel Cusk’s book was from 2001.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She was ahead of her time in that sense.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

But it’s crazy to think of the reaction she got to it now. How she was pilloried in the press, and everybody was discussing her personal life. I do think things have changed in the discussion of this topic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Madeleine isn\u2019t the only thing changing throughout the novel. You write so convincingly about the rapidly gentrifying neighborhood she and Tom live in, Splinters. I felt like I knew or had been to Splinters before \u2013 its shops with overpriced birthday cards and the revitalizing murals that had almost something ominous about them. How did you come to create Splinters, and what made it the right setting for the story you wanted to tell in the novel?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I’m so happy you asked about Splinters because Splinters is a very precious part of the book to me. I always had this particular neighborhood in mind. In part, because it was a bit grim, but also appealing in a sort of grungy glamour way. The animals you find in this kind of British neighborhood also felt very relevant to the fairytale atmosphere and changeling mythology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the same time, I had been reading a lot about people starting families in Spain, where I live. There was a lot of discussion in the press at the time about the fact that people were having their first baby at thirty-five or thirty-six. The birth rate is now 1.1 children per woman. Nobody’s having kids. Why not?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of course, all of those conversations were happening alongside everything else going on in society: the fact that many people don’t have well-paying jobs, that they’re often living with their parents into their mid-thirties because they can’t afford to move out, the long tail of the financial crisis, gentrification, the arrival of Airbnb<\/em>, and the transformation of neighborhoods. I felt that all of this was an essential part of the conversation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even though this isn’t a book about whether or not to have children, the reality is that we can afford the housing we can afford nowadays. Often, we’re able to afford it only because someone else has been pushed out by cost and can no longer live there. And even then, that housing might not be really fit for the purpose of raising a family. The broader drama of having children includes money, housing, the difficulty of reconciling the fact that everybody needs to work with the sky-high cost of childcare in so many countries. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

So I had all of these political questions floating around in my mind, and I wanted to address them in some way. I didn\u2019t want a suburban, middle-class story of motherhood, even though Madeleine is, arguably, middle class.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You mention the changeling mythology \u2013 I am really curious about your research <\/strong>research process on this topic while writing the novel. Madeleine is doing a PhD in Victorian and Modernist literature and a lot of her research interests surface in the novel and are braided into the writing. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I’m not an academic, but I decided to make Madeleine one because it gave her a reason to fixate on the idea of changelings. I thought, Why would someone think that?<\/em> I knew changeling stories myself, but it’s not something that would have leapt into my mind. So that was my starting point, and from there it became a kind of self-reinforcing process.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I’m not as knowledgeable about the Modernists. I’ve always been a big fan of the Victorians, but the Modernists ended up making more sense for the novel. I always insist that I’m not actually an expert on the Victorians, the Modernists, or any of these subjects. It was more a case of making Madeleine an expert and then following her interests as I wrote.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The more I developed her character, the more I immersed myself in the material, especially modernist poetry. Then I’d go off on all these side tangents. I’d look for poems about babies, poems about animals, poems about cities, short stories and novels. I got a lot of books. Old books on Project Gutenberg, which is where some of the really bizarre Victorian novels come in. I downloaded PDFs of peculiar medieval stories, and it snowballed. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think, looking at the finished novel, it can seem as though everything was carefully planned. But in reality, a lot of it was extremely random.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One story that really chilled with me in the book was that of Bridget Cleary, the Irish woman who was murdered by her husband in 1895 after he claimed she had been abducted by fairies and replaced by a changeling. Did stories like hers shape your thinking as you wrote the novel? What do they reveal about how women\u2014especially mothers and those experiencing mental illness\u2014have been understood and treated throughout history?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

One reason I was interested in changelings was that I came to see them as an early folk response to, if not depression, then at least a failure to bond. It\u2019s finding your infant to be not your infant in some way. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

If that’s true, these experiences have existed throughout history. They’re not just a modern ill. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bridget Cleary wasn’t the one experiencing a mental health crisis. She had pneumonia or something similar, and her husband read a fairy explanation into it and  and murdered her. Nonetheless, Bridget shows how vulnerable women have been historically to storytelling. Sometimes that led to them being locked up or hospitalized, or living unhappily, or in the most extreme cases, killed.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s a lot in <\/strong>Queen Mab<\/em><\/strong> around family lineage and our society\u2019s obsession with blood connections or lack thereof. Why were you interested in exploring this theme in your writing?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I’m interested in migration a lot, or people with split identities. I myself am both British and Canadian. Madeleine is as well, although she has the opposite parent arrangement to me. I had a friend growing up who was adopted by two British parents, but was not eligible for a British passport because of being adopted, which was always a story that I found just so shocking. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The more I thought about it, the more I became interested in adoption, both as yet another way of being a changeling, and another sort of potential source of alienation for Madeleine. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s a beautiful moment in the novel too, where she does look at her connections with not her biological family, but her adoptive family, and sort of recognizes similar themes.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yeah, I was very happy that the adoption thread allowed that to happen, because it did imply a more universal experience than just bad genes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rose Bialer<\/a> is an emerging translator and writer who lives in Barcelona. She has held positions at 826 Valencia, The Kenyon Review, Asymptote Journal, and Artist at Risk Connection. She holds a B.A. in Spanish and Sociology from Kenyon College and an MPhil in Comparative Literature from Trinity College Dublin.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We know intellectually that we’re animals and that we’re mammals and that we function the same as other animals, but we don’t feel like it. And most of the time, we don’t have to really deal with the physicality of living on that intensive level.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":976,"featured_media":52001,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,5,101],"tags":[330,2530,1074,984,1071,9957],"class_list":["post-51991","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featinterview","category-interviews","category-latest","tag-academia","tag-fairy-tales","tag-gentrification","tag-motherhood","tag-parenting","tag-urban-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51991","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/976"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51991"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51991\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":52007,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51991\/revisions\/52007"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/52001"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51991"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51991"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51991"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":51967,"date":"2026-08-19T08:30:00","date_gmt":"2026-08-19T12:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/?p=51967"},"modified":"2026-08-10T16:45:12","modified_gmt":"2026-08-10T20:45:12","slug":"brother-epistles-shanda-mcmanus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/2026\/08\/19\/reviews\/mckenziewatsonfore\/brother-epistles-shanda-mcmanus\/","title":{"rendered":"Brother Epistles – Shanda McManus"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\"Cover<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

[Split\/Lip Press; 2026]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Shanda McManus was a girl, she and her little brother were so close that even their names ran together: \u201cShandaandMonir, ShandaandMonir, ShandaandMonir like a chant.\u201d The two of them were bound together, united in survivorship after their mother\u2019s death from ovarian cancer and their grandmother\u2019s death three years later. Then, just after Shanda finished her first semester of medical school, Monir, not yet twenty-one, was killed in a fatal drive-by shooting. Over thirty years later, McManus began writing intimate, revelatory letters that bridge the past and present and make up the majority of Brother Epistles: A Sister\u2019s Memoir<\/a><\/em>. The book contains an addendum with copies of four handwritten letters and one Army incident report from Monir, so Brother Epistles<\/em> reads like a conversation that traverses the boundaries of death. \u201cI am finally writing you outside of time,\u201d McManus writes, \u201cto reach that part of myself that is you.\u201d The intimacy between Shanda and Monir is the prevenient fact of the book: it precedes and colors everything else, saturating her writing with tenderness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The memoir unfolds in spiral: starting with Monir\u2019s death; moving out to show Shanda and Monir as children, their points of connection and divergence; then circling around to show who Shanda has become in the years since Monir\u2019s death and the evolution of the world in which she has continued to develop and change. The book reads like a lyric experiment in time travel. \u201cGrief for me is not a series of five steps,\u201d McManus writes, \u201cbut a spiral and a repeating loop. I walk alone outside of time. The past is the present is the future\u2014it is infinite and eternal, like you and me.\u201d Brother Epistles <\/em>weaves together intergenerational memory and personal anecdote, refusing to relinquish a single minute.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

McManus writes to her brother about his family: their father, Monir\u2019s widow, the sons who grew older than he did. She fills him in on what the people he loved have made of their lives in his absence. When Monir died, he and Niecy, his wife, were separated. \u201cEven if you\u2019re still mad with her and act like you don\u2019t care,\u201d McManus writes, \u201cI\u2019m going to tell you that Niecy made something of herself.\u201d McManus is dedicated to chronicling the ways people continued to develop after Monir\u2019s murder. To her, this is the primary tragedy of premature death: that one is robbed of the chance to grow. Over and over again, she laments that his story was cut short, that he didn\u2019t have the opportunity to mature beyond his youthful mistakes. \u201cYou got paused before you could<\/em> change,\u201d she writes. \u201cI wonder what other voices time and status would have given you.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Because Shanda and Monir grew up together, they partook of a common language filled with shared reference points. McManus skillfully invites the reader into that shared perspective and then expands it to include all that\u2019s happened since Monir\u2019s death in 1992. Monir experienced racism firsthand, both growing up in North Philly and serving in the Army. McManus doesn\u2019t need to tell him about it. But Monir wasn\u2019t around to witness the intensification of anti-Blackness since the 1990s, the backlash against the gains of the Civil Rights movement. \u201cGrowing up in the seventies, we hardly knew anybody who went to jail,\u201d McManus writes. \u201cNow . . . it seems like everybody goes.\u201d Through her letters, McManus informs her brother about mass incarceration, mandatory sentencing, and three-strike laws: \u201cThe so-called War on Drugs seemed like it was a war on us.\u201d She captures what it\u2019s like to have your own government regard you as an enemy. She tells him about Colin Kaepernick kneeling during the national anthem, the murder of Philando Castile, and the Black Lives Matter movement. \u201cNot so long ago, the police murdered a black man, George Floyd,\u201d writes McManus. She contextualizes Derek Chauvin\u2019s murder of Floyd as the latest chapter in an old, familiar tale about police violence against men of color: \u201cI know, ain\u2019t nothing new.\u201d As McManus catches her brother up on the sociopolitical state of America since his passing, she simultaneously provides a nuanced education for readers who have had the privilege of remaining ignorant of institutional and interpersonal racism. Monir was murdered while he was selling crack\u2014an act of youthful hubris and desperation he was robbed of the chance to learn from. \u201cYou believed that selling crack was the best you could do,\u201d McManus reflects. \u201cAnd maybe it was. What were <\/em>your job opportunities? Your choices?\u201d By detailing what\u2019s happened to their mutual family members in the intervening thirty years, McManus shows the systemic nature of the forces that conspire against Black boys. Both of Monir\u2019s sons served time. McManus relays the circumstances to her brother as if giving an accounting for the boys, and her story captures the arbitrariness of police intervention, underwritten by white assumptions of the boys\u2019 criminality. \u201cJail time was like a slow wave moving towards your sons and it seemed unstoppable.\u201d She writes with total empathy, understanding the reasons Monir made his choices and raging at a country that limits Black boys\u2019 lives to the consequences of their worst decisions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you think that a book of letters to a deceased loved one would be dreary or doleful, think again. McManus\u2019s prose, while saturated with grief, is also buoyant and bright. The nature of the correspondence allows McManus to write in present tense, to summon Monir\u2019s presence alongside her own. Her tone is often teasing. \u201cGuess what,\u201d she writes. \u201cThere is an oldies station for hip-hop. I know, crazy, they didn\u2019t even play rap music on the radio when it first came out . . . We\u2019re old heads now, look at us with gray hair\u2014well, I\u2019m imagining yours, ok.\u201d McManus grapples with depression, but the way that she names her pain pins it in place, keeps it from expanding and swallowing her whole. She confesses her resistance to treatment and keeps writing. \u201cDepression comes for me now, but it has less power,\u201d she says. \u201cSomehow I recognize it. That doesn\u2019t stop the darkness, but just knowing what\u2019s happening keeps me holding on.\u201d Her commitment to holding on extends from the moment she identified her brother\u2019s body at the hospital. \u201cI touched your chest and I thought I felt your heart. My heart. I backed away from the table and out of the room. I had the sense of facing two doors, one marked DIE and the other LIVE. I had to choose. I stepped, unfeeling, through the second, leaving you behind.\u201d She revels in the life that has occurred since her brother\u2019s death: the lives that have extended past his, and the surprises she\u2019s encountered in her own .<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A strong book review makes an argument about the book, but I can\u2019t do that here. Brother Epistles <\/em>is so intimate\u2014not even because of McManus\u2019s personal revelations, though there are plenty: the abortion she got in high school, her elopement and marriage to a white man she met in medical school, her complicated guilt about living in the suburbs. Rather, the context of the book, written as letters to her dead brother, imbues her prose with so much love that I can respond only with gratitude. I feel that I\u2019ve been invited into a heart-to-heart or granted permission to overhear this conversation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The book blooms with her reverence for life. \u201cI did live after you died,\u201d McManus writes. \u201cI have had joy and happiness along with desperation and despair.\u201d She catalogues how she got through medical school, met Steve, had a baby, got married, became a doctor. The letters are associative and thematic rather than organized by chronology. McManus\u2019s casual way of referencing relatives by nickname and using shorthand for shared memories keeps the prose informal and organic, drawing the reader into the texture of her life. Her accomplishments are a way that McManus has justified her existence to the world\u2014a world that\u2019s constantly trying to quantify the value of human life\u2014but to her brother, McManus never needed to justify anything. \u201cI stayed alive and became somebody, just like you said I would,\u201d McManus writes. \u201cYou meant becoming a doctor. But I was already somebody before\u2014your big sister.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In publishing her correspondence with her late brother, McManus gives her readers a profound gift. While I read, I felt welcomed into the enduring love between siblings: their solidarity, the secrets they shared with one another, and the way they interpreted the world. \u201cAll I know is we are miracles just because we existed,\u201d McManus writes. \u201cAnd you\u2019re no less of a miracle than me even though you\u2019re gone.\u201d Brother Epistles<\/em> is a vessel for love that cannot be extinguished by death.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

McKenzie Watson-Fore<\/a>\u00a0serves as the executive editor for sneaker wave magazine and the inaugural critic-in-residence for <\/em>MAYDAY. She holds an MFA in Writing from Pacific University, and her work has been published or is forthcoming in\u00a0<\/em>the Offing, Bridge Eight, Christian Century, and elsewhere. She can be found at\u00a0MWatsonFore.com<\/a>\u00a0or drinking tea on her back porch.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[Brother Epistles] reads like a lyric experiment in time travel<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1103,"featured_media":51968,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[101,11,4,35],"tags":[8499,7668,1265,6983,965,459,739,9955,7815,9743],"class_list":["post-51967","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-latest","category-featreview","category-reviews","category-small-press","tag-anti-black-racism","tag-anti-blackness","tag-epistolary","tag-family-memoir","tag-grief","tag-gun-violence","tag-memoir","tag-shanda-mcmanus","tag-siblings","tag-split-lip-press"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51967","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1103"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51967"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51967\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51975,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51967\/revisions\/51975"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/51968"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51967"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51967"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51967"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":51942,"date":"2026-08-17T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-08-17T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/?p=51942"},"modified":"2026-08-02T12:54:31","modified_gmt":"2026-08-02T16:54:31","slug":"chateau-rouge-amit-chaudhuri","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/2026\/08\/17\/reviews\/eamonmcgrath\/chateau-rouge-amit-chaudhuri\/","title":{"rendered":"Ch\u00e2teau Rouge \u2013 Amit Chaudhuri"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

[New York Review Books; 2026]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Has there ever been a city more primed for disillusionment than Paris? Even for those who\u2019ve never visited, the city feels familiar for all its infinite representations across paintings and postcards, movies and social media, each endowing the city with the particular viewpoint of someone who\u2019s come before. But because of this ubiquity, Paris risks becoming ever less knowable to its millions of annual visitors. Is it even worth trying?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In his new novel Ch\u00e2teau Rouge<\/a><\/em>, Amit Chaudhuri takes his turn at answering this question, exploring ideas of what it means to simply be<\/em>, authentically, in a city so bogged down by other people\u2019s depictions. The narrator must face down his own expectations over the course of an extended stay in Paris, situating himself after all the writers, artists, and philosophers who have preceded him and whose own versions of the city endure\u2014a legacy that risks tilting from intellectual heft into just baggage.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Similar to Chaudhuri, the unnamed narrator is a writer, musician, and singer from India. Arriving in Paris a few hours earlier than his wife, a professor, and their teenage daughter for a months-long fellowship at the fictional American Center for Thought in Paris (perhaps inspired by Chaudhuri\u2019s fellowship at the Columbia Institute of Ideas and Imagination), the narrator\u2019s first impressions portend grave disappointment. He has sublet an apartment in Ch\u00e2teau Rouge, a neighborhood in Paris\u2019 18th arrondissement with a vibrant African community.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Exiting the Gare du Nord, the narrator finds himself \u201cthrown into chaos.\u201d His initial observations of the neighborhood are \u201chow unimpressive everything was\u201d and that \u201c[t]he pavements were dirty.\u201d A supermarket reminds him of \u201ca relief camp\u2026 The migrants in the queues were impatient and obstreperous: they had an animating appetite for life.\u201d His abiding pique suggests the condescension of an old-world gentleman jostled by a crowd. As he gets his bearings before his family arrives, doubts surface over the entire endeavor: \u201c\u2018Why am I here?\u2019 It wasn\u2019t a question I wished to dwell on. I felt disappointed \u2013 in the surroundings, in myself. Are these people okay? Am I in any danger?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Alas, the apartment is no better. Chaudhuri packs the narrator\u2019s dour commentary with mischievous humor. In the main room of the apartment, \u201c[t]hings seemed wrecked, flattened, or missing. The spaciousness was real: it was like standing in an emptied-out abattoir. The futon on the floor was a casualty. I walked around it.\u201d The bathroom, for its part, \u201cwas suspect\u2026 In the bowl was a history of staining. It was archaeological \u2013 presenting no immediate threat.\u201d Even before his family arrives, he decides then and there that he can\u2019t stay in this apartment.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But it seems that the true letdown for both the neighborhood and apartment is that they don\u2019t offer the particular type of \u201cParisian grime\u201d that the narrator had hoped for and in which the other fellows will live: \u201cI, on the other hand, would not know what it meant to live in Paris. I would be making an inventory of things in the flat that needed urgent attention.\u201d For all its problems, the apartment is perfectly habitable, but the narrator suffers from the way in which it hasn\u2019t met his expectations. His wife brings more optimism but is met with his deflating asides: \u201cThat\u2019s a nice garden! (not true; more a space for prisoner access).\u201d At times, the narrator\u2019s bellyaching can be grating, his petulance verging on the out-of-touch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The origins of the narrator\u2019s preconceptions are never far from sight. He reads essays by Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin about the sky over Paris. He thinks about Jean-Paul Sartre, and he reflects on Woody Allen\u2019s Midnight in Paris<\/em>. The narrator and his wife even receive an invitation to visit Jacques Ranci\u00e8re, and he marvels at the idea that he shares the city with the philosopher. Chaudhuri, just like the narrator, is a writer\u2019s writer, and Ch\u00e2teau Rouge <\/em>evokes the autofictional conceits and travel writing of novels such as Maria Stepanova\u2019s The Disappearing Act<\/em>, Katie Kitamura\u2019s A Separation,<\/em> Ben Lerner\u2019s Leaving the Atocha Station<\/em>, and Rachel Cusk\u2019s Outline<\/em> trilogy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Decades earlier, the narrator\u2019s wife gifted him a copy of A Moveable Feast<\/em> that he has yet to read. On their first morning in their apartment, she quips: \u201cYou know, if Hemingway were living in Paris now, this is where he\u2019d be.\u201d But the narrator doesn\u2019t respond well to this, asking her not to tell anyone what she told him. The reality is that, tormented by the shadow of his predecessors, he envies Hemingway, for whom he falsely supposes that \u201c\u2018the experience of Paris\u2019 didn\u2019t have a prior definition. It was the here and now.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And so, equipped with so many versions of what Paris should be, the narrator sets out to seek out the authentic in the city, and is thus quick to write off Ch\u00e2teau Rouge: \u201cNot that the neighborhood was \u2018French.\u2019 It had adopted a version of Frenchness.\u201d In the narrator\u2019s estimation, Ch\u00e2teau Rouge is only an imitation of Paris, not the genuine thing. His first meal at a Parisian caf\u00e9 by Clignancourt is a disappointing assemblage of tinned tuna and tasteless lettuce, but at least, he feels, this is the real deal: \u201cI paid up speechlessly. I disliked it; but it met my expectations.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The narrator can never quite separate his expectations of what Paris should be, full of art museums and fine dining and Hausmannian apartment blocks, from what it is, a lived-in city where people buy ready-made dinners at supermarket chains. He lingers over the perennial question of how to be in a place that has been so documented, so mythologized, and so fictionalized that authenticity is always mediated. At one point he concludes: \u201cThis<\/em> was Paris. To live in Paris means to know<\/em> you\u2019re living there. I still feel a terrible urge to conform. To live in Paris and be separated from it would be dreadful.\u201d But just what this means, and from what exactly he means by separation, is never explained.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Indeed, it is the narrator\u2019s gaze that seems to primarily demarcate whether something qualifies as Parisian or not. In Barb\u00e8s, a predominantly Arab neighborhood, he complains: \u201cThey wouldn\u2019t know what to say if you asked for directions. And they don\u2019t recognise Montmartre\u2026 Barb\u00e8s is a law unto itself.\u201d He is constantly confounded by his own prejudices: \u201cThe man was kind; he had little English. He put paid to my belief that Africans might know more English words than the French.\u201d But there is a sense that the narrator is only playacting his othering in order to fit his version of a Parisian bohemian: \u201cI desired to be a philistine about Europe, in return for Europeans being philistines. Ignorance wasn\u2019t easy to achieve: non-Europeans know a lot.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ch\u00e2teau Rouge<\/em>, Chaudhuri\u2019s ninth novel, is composed of many such philosophical musings and street observations, some sections made up of a mere sentence or two. As in earlier novels like Sojourn<\/em>, in which an unnamed professor chronicles an extended stay in Berlin, or Afternoon Raag<\/em>, a series of richly-drawn reminiscences about a former student\u2019s time at Oxford, Ch\u00e2teau Rouge<\/em> recalls the travel diary of a nameless narrator, full of passing thoughts jotted down at busy caf\u00e9s and crowded museums: \u201cThe Palais-Royal is a gilded cafe. Its trees are like bars, orderly and placatory. They\u2019re as substantial as spumes of smoke. Enchanted, we\u2019re content to wander from spot to spot all day.\u201d Some of his theoretical asides reflect on more everyday life. Shopping trolleys are a symptom of \u201cingrained migrancy,\u201d while he labels pasta \u201cthe esperanto of food \u2013 the language everyone knows a bit of.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Owing in part to this journalistic style, the narrator and his family seem somewhat alien as they explore the grand sights of the city. At the Mus\u00e9e d\u2019Orsay, the narrator observes that \u201cpeople in the room were like rushes \u2013 still and thick. Their bodies had the tension of those who were listening. Almost everyone had headsets on. We navigated them, keeping mostly silent.\u201d Throughout the book, the narrator remains largely detached on his fl\u00e2neur-like wanderings, hardly seeming to interact with anyone outside his family. He cultivates a couple one-sided acquaintances with local street vendors from Bangladesh and Pakistan, but they seem mostly bemused by him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As time goes by, the narrator uses all his walking to chart out the city through meanings specific to himself, creating a personalized map. He divides Ch\u00e2teau Rouge into three regions: \u201cthe West African,\u201d \u201cthe Arab strip,\u201d and \u201cthe working-class French.\u201d In effect, he has begun to create his own mythology of the city, accepting his version as intrinsically valid: \u201cIt was a good location from which to savour \u2018Paris.\u2019 I was beginning to feel it would be best not to settle down in areas recognisably Parisian, because places recognisably themselves tend to be fictitious.\u201d He begins to feel an attachment to Ch\u00e2teau Rouge and, miraculously, even \u201cwhat I\u2019d come to think of as my<\/em> apartment.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So begins the narrator\u2019s own pivot to romanticizing his version of the city\u2014only the latest in a long and robust tradition. As it turns out, the narrator\u2019s initial visit for the fellowship is just the most recent of several trips he\u2019s taken in the past. He compares monuments like the Arc de Triomphe and the Eiffel Tower to his \u201cstaid landmarks\u2026I had checked them out as a child and then a young man, etched my presence like graffiti on the scrawl of other presences, past and present, in those neighborhoods.\u201d His presence in the city is simply set atop what\u2019s come before\u2014and will itself be buried someday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the later sections, after his fellowship has ended, the narrator revisits Paris periodically, drawn back to Ch\u00e2teau Rouge to see how the neighborhood has changed in the intervening years. He notices the proliferation of posters for the Front populaire<\/em> left-wing coalition in the lead-up to the 2024 legislative elections, the ongoing construction for the Paris Olympic games, and the inescapable presence of the populist gilets jaunes <\/em>protesters. He revisits the street vendors he used to talk to. Even though some don\u2019t remember him, he insists on taking selfies with them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A final visit to Ch\u00e2teau Rouge reveals that an art gallery has opened up in a former warehouse: \u201cI\u2019m pleased; but next moment I\u2019m wary. Maybe bohemians \u2013 artists, playwrights \u2013 will move in, taking advantage \u2013 as is customary \u2013 of low rents. The migrants will move out. The bohemians will be drawn to the \u2018music in the air\u2019 and replace it with the energy of their creative projects \u2013 \u2018biff,\u2019 \u2018bam,\u2019 \u2018boom.\u2019\u201d Chaudhuri entrusts the irony to the reader, seeing as, unwittingly or not, the narrator himself was the first sign of this gentrification. Either way, it\u2019s his version of the city, already ephemeral, that he clings to\u2014as if Paris, or any place, ever remains the same.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What is perhaps new is the ways in which Paris is changing as a result of globalization, making things begin to feel the same. For example, when the narrator and his wife go to meet Ranci\u00e8re, they find his apartment located above \u201ca Brooklyn-style caf\u00e9.\u201d The narrator and his family seek comfort by streaming anonymous shows on Netflix, follow the blue dots on Google Maps to get places, and evaluate a fried chicken shop as only marginally better than KFC.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The narrator recalls how, in the heady years of the 1990s, such American fast-food chains were exotic commodities, where people flocked for a taste of the future. Now, however, these places have since become so familiar that the reverse has occurred: \u201cit\u2019s the artifice of Paris that\u2019s become the other, elusive commodity.\u201d He enjoys the human-interest of watching produce vendors sell yams, cabbage, and peanuts, but he knows he\u2019ll never actually shop there: \u201cIt\u2019ll always be display. I\u2019ll get my essentials from Carrefour and Franprix and meals from Marks and Spencer\u2019s.\u201d Perhaps, the narrator seems to suggest, a modern-day Hemingway would be an M&S shopper, too. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A family crisis spurs the narrator\u2019s most decisive action. The illness and death of his father-in-law forces him to return twice to India, which provides a foil to his nonstop observations in Paris. In India, he is simply among family, without any need to reflect on his surroundings. For the funeral, he plans to sing two different songs, but the Acharya objects to one of them on philosophical grounds. This, in turn, prompts the narrator to push back: \u201cI become intransigent. I say to my wife that I don\u2019t see any reason why I shouldn\u2019t sing bahe nirantara ananta <\/em>that I would<\/em> like to sing it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The narrator and the Acharya debate the meaning of the song in question, until his mother-in-law intervenes, brokering an uneasy compromise that ultimately allows the narrator to sing and, in doing so, to finally just be himself. This decisive action, though it comes late in Ch\u00e2teau Rouge<\/em>, is almost disorienting, providing a sharp contrast to all the detached musings that have come before. It\u2019s almost as if the narrator\u2019s unending compulsion to observe and interrogate the authenticity of his experience in Paris\u2014weighed down by all those books and movies\u2014has gotten in the way of having any kind of experience at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Eamon McGrath<\/a> is a writer based in Brooklyn. His work has appeared in the <\/em>Los Angeles Review of Books, <\/em>Asymptote, the <\/em>Chicago Review of Books, and other places.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A modern-day Hemingway would be an M&S shopper, too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1122,"featured_media":51943,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[101,11,4],"tags":[9951,9952,4937,325,1198,78],"class_list":["post-51942","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-latest","category-featreview","category-reviews","tag-chaudhuri","tag-n","tag-new-york-review-books","tag-nyrb","tag-paris","tag-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51942","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1122"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51942"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51942\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51944,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51942\/revisions\/51944"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/51943"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51942"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51942"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51942"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":51690,"date":"2026-08-13T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-08-13T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/?p=51690"},"modified":"2026-07-15T20:54:27","modified_gmt":"2026-07-16T00:54:27","slug":"contents-discontents-heterotopic-literature-in-the-age-of-distraction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/2026\/08\/13\/features\/elizabeth-brogden\/contents-discontents-heterotopic-literature-in-the-age-of-distraction\/","title":{"rendered":"Content\u2019s Discontents: Heterotopic Literature in the Age of Distraction"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This essay was first published last month in our subscriber-only newsletter. To receive the monthly newsletter and to support Full Stop\u2019s original literary criticism, please consider joining us on Patreon<\/a>.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Young Girl on a Red Carpet, Felice Casoraticirca (1912)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

At first glance, the books around which this essay is framed make an odd quartet: In the first, a single mother tries to immerse herself in an eighteenth-century novel over the course of a single day spent tending to her newborn. The second follows a tenured professor as she hunts a long-dead author through dense urban markets, cemeteries, and archives. The third recounts its author\u2019s solo overnight visit to one of the world\u2019s most famous museums. The fourth is a dual narrative in which two young women, a century apart, inventory hundreds of species of minor flora growing in and among ancient Roman ruins. They bear few similarities to one another in terms of plot\u2014aside perhaps from a shared minimalism\u2014or genre\u2014running a wide gamut from fiction to historical biography to personal memoir (and various combinations thereof). What links them, I would argue, is their fascination with settings that qualify as \u201cheterotopias\u201d: a subcategory of \u201cother spaces\u201d (\u00e9spaces autres<\/em>) that Michel Foucault defined\u2014in opposition to the \u201cfundamentally unreal spaces\u201d of utopia\u2014as \u201cplaces that do exist<\/em> and are formed in the very founding of society\u2014which are sometimes like counter-sites . . . , in which . . . all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted.\u201d In Kate Briggs\u2019s The Long Form<\/em>, Iman Mersal\u2019s Traces of Enayat<\/em>, Jakuta Alikavazanovic\u2019s Like a Sky Inside<\/em>, and Katy Simpson Smith\u2019s The Weeds<\/em>, such discrete environments serve as scenes of reckoning with a phenomenon as amorphous as it is ambient: the dystopic fortunes of companionate reading in today\u2019s vicious attention economy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The concept of heterotopia belongs to a larger hermeneutics of space that Foucault developed in response to what he saw as the twentieth century\u2019s chief preoccupation (in contrast to the nineteenth century\u2019s obsession with history): \u201cThe present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space<\/em>. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed.\u201d In a lecture delivered to architects in Paris in the early spring of 1967, Foucault introduced this category and enumerated a set of criteria by which it can be identified, including plasticity, polyvalence, and exclusivity. Notwithstanding massive variability in terms of function, affordance, and vibe, all instantiate sites \u201coutside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality.\u201d Among the explicit examples he provides are gardens, ships, prisons, psychiatric asylums, boarding schools, cemeteries, archives, libraries, and museums.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Digital space, albeit imminent, would have been all but unimaginable to Foucault when he died in the early 1980s. If, toward the middle of the twentieth century, we found ourselves in \u201ca moment . . . when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network,\u201d the dawn of the twenty-first would turn us all into vertices along the vastest and most pervasive network that had ever existed: the worldwide web. The modern internet has opened up fresh horizons of anxiety: So far, for citizens of the second millennium, the ever-scarcer resource over whose distribution, monetization, and susceptibility to atomization we are constantly fretting has been our ability to focus. For the majority of human beings at this stage of the Information Age, daily life is defined by access to infinite \u201ccontent,\u201d which places never-ending demands on our psychological, intellectual, and emotional energies. We are constantly bombarded by reminders that the world\u2019s injustices, cruelties, and catastrophes far exceed any individual\u2019s capacity to process (much less combat) them. At the same time, social media and influencer culture traffic in the illusion of individual agency and accountability, cultivating an insidious rhetoric of empowerment and self-actualization that further depletes individuals, making us feel as if we are always already failing to know enough or to act effectively in light of constantly-refreshing feeds. As Nicholas Dames put it in a recent essay, fatigue and beleaguerment have become the principal trademarks of today\u2019s reader:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Every cultural moment has its favorite, iconic reader types, its fantasies that become part of the self-awareness of the actual reader\u200a\u2014\u200aof you, reading . . . [O]ver the past year, a new category has seemed to open up: the Exhausted. The almost-burned-out, frayed, fried, edge-of-collapse reader, just barely keeping it together.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Immersive reading, in particular\u2014to say nothing of writing that invites and sustains it\u2014is existentially imperiled by the weaponization of chronic distraction and overwhelm. It is not only that fluency in a digital idiom of emojis, tweets, memes, hypertext, etc. come at the expense of more traditional forms of literacy and habits of critical thinking; it is also that they erode our collective willingness to engage with longer, more complex forms of narrative argument and worldmaking\u2014a reluctance that is further exacerbated by the mass use of generative AI, trained on large language models, that can produce or synthesize any volume and density of text in seconds (with results that are increasingly difficult to dismiss as mere \u201cslop\u201d). It seems increasingly quaint to grieve the obsolescence of attention when computers can think so much better than us. Our minds may be unraveling, but what use are they, anyway?  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Content\u2019s many discontents haunt this set of recent literary texts, all published or translated into English since 2020 (and to which could be added countless others, including Suzanne Scanlon\u2019s Committed<\/em>, Lisa Robertson\u2019s The Baudelaire Fractal<\/em>,and Doireann N\u00ed Ghriofa\u2019s forthcoming Said the Dead<\/em>, to name a few). Each confronts the current crisis of attention by enlisting what we might call the heterotopic imaginary: cemeteries, archives, libraries, museums, and various iterations of the garden all serve as primary sites of narrative action for Briggs, Mersal, Alikavazanovic, and Smith, who use them to reflect on the limitations and possibilities of concentration and intimacy in a world that not only enables, but actively incentivizes, the denigration of both. Any attempt to summarize these books must first acknowledge the extent to which they resist the logic of synopsis or overview. All of them celebrate exquisite affective nuance and keen perception, as well as an enthusiasm for associative (but decidedly un-clickbaity) digressions, that rebuke the notion of linear plot: What \u201chappens,\u201d if anything, is irreducible to key points or main actions. They are meander maps rather than dramatic arcs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Long Form<\/em> is a neo-Joycean account of one diurnal cycle in the life of a young single mother in London as she feeds, plays with, strolls, and cuddles her infant daughter while simultaneously dipping in and out of Tom Jones<\/em> (which is ordered on and delivered by Amazon but almost certainly not recommended via its own collaborative filtering models, which could scarcely infer that a consumer of diapers and bottles \u201cmay also like\u201d Henry Fielding). The Long Form<\/em> is a quiet drama\u2014often quite literally, in deference to nap schedules\u2014of shape-giving : \u201cthe story of two people composing a day together,\u201d as the back copy puts it. In the opening pages, Briggs seems to allude\u2014more or less explicitly, given that Roland Barthes and his cohort are her principal interlocutors\u2014to Foucault\u2019s notion that \u201ccarpets . . . were originally reproductions of gardens . . . and the rug is a sort of garden that can move across space.\u201d At the beginning of the first section, the protagonist, Helen, says of her daughter\u2019s playmat: \u201cIt was a garden. Say it was a garden.\u201d This \u201cbig square\u201d is where mother and daughter idle away the morning, Helen oscillating between communion with her pre-verbal child and (aspirational) immersion in a work of literary imagination: \u201ca thick square divided into four distinct sections. Its colors were a bit faded. From the sun, from the heavy rounds it must have done in someone else\u2019s washing machine. Its spaces looked touched, well-mouthed: its closer textures more or less exhaustively pre-explored.\u201d How fitting that the name of its current, tiny proprietor is Rose.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Traces of Enayat<\/em> is the story of the author\u2019s search for a female Egyptian writer whose only novel was published posthumously, following her suicide in the mid-1960s. Mersal\u2019s path first crosses with Enayat Al-Zayyat\u2019s through pure serendipity, when she stumbles across an out-of-print edition of her book at a used book market (the Soor El-Azbakeya<\/em>) and feels an instant, enigmatic pull toward its unknown author. She proceeds to embark on a journey of spiritual exhumation that takes her to the places that Al-Zayyat frequented, notably the German girls\u2019 school where she matriculated as a child and adolescent; the archives of the German Archaeological Institute, where she had indexed the bequest of nineteenth-century Egyptologist Ludwig Keimer (about whom she was writing a second book when she overdosed on barbiturates in 1963); and the un-GoogleMaps-able City of the Dead, where Mersal finally, ebulliently, locates her eternal resting place among the tombs and mausoleums. Traces <\/em>explores the ways in which an obsession with a subject from the past can reacquaint the author with her own former selves, opening up fresh vantage points on unrealized potentialities. In following Enayat Al-Zayyat\u2019s trail back to Egypt, where the young mother and aspiring writer killed herself in the early 1960s, Mersal\u2014a professor of Arabic language and literature at the University of Alberta\u2014trysts with abandoned modi vivendi that had once defined her own daily life as a twenty-something doctoral student and member of Cairene bohemia in the 1990s. Aspects of Mersal that have atrophied or lain dormant in the transition from footloose youth to established middle age are rekindled as part of the research process. As she gradually integrates herself into a new network of scholars, librarians, and archivists that aid her efforts to reconstruct Enayat\u2019s forgotten legacy, Mersal recuperates some of the optative aura of her own early adulthood. At the same time, she remains scrupulously reluctant to over-identify with or live vicariously through the object of her obsession: \u201cFollowing the traces left by a person is not at all the same as telling the story of that person\u2019s life. To trace someone does not mean filling all the gaps or searching out every fact in the quest to document it. It is to take a journey toward someone who cannot speak for themselves.\u201d Some readers have been disappointed or puzzled by her resistance to the expository plenitude typical of more conventional historical biography. But Mersal\u2019s project deviates from what historian Saidiya Hartman calls \u201ccritical fabulation\u201d\u2014the \u201ccombining of historical and archival research with critical theory and fictional narrative to fill in the blanks left in the historical record\u201d\u2014in its emphasis on her own complicity in the failure to appreciate her subject. She is more curious about the ways in which Al-Zayyat eludes her (\u201cher life was too much for me to ever know\u201d) than she is confident in her capacity to narratively envision and interiorize her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like a Sky Inside<\/em> recounts the author\u2019s solo visit to the Louvre, where she goes to commune with a beloved piece of statuary and the memory of her immigrant father: It begins as nocturne\u2014\u201cFrom March 7 to 8, 2020, I spent the night [there], alone . . . in the antiquities section\u201d\u2014and ends in aubade: \u201cI leave at dawn . . . I stop at the Caf\u00e9 de la Com\u00e9die to drink a double espresso.\u201d Permission to inhabit such iconic premises under these conditions\u2014\u201cAlone. At night.\u201d\u2014is not easy to obtain:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Explicit etiquette and the implicit aren\u2019t the same, but both exist. There are interviews, more or less official; character witnesses, more or less unofficial; a certificate of criminal record is required. It\u2019s a lengthy process, and surely a necessary one: you don\u2019t let just anybody into such a place.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The first-person narrator is the daughter of a Montenegrin immigrant who adored his adoptive country but spoke imperfect French and often asked her (not entirely facetiously) how she would go about stealing the Mona Lisa. The book is a reflection on her complicated relationship to the cultural patrimony contained within galleries she had often visited as a child, in the company of her father, as well as to his ambiguous legacy to her\u2014and the imbrication of the two: \u201cWhat do you pass down . . . when you\u2019ve turned your back on your past? When you\u2019ve managed . . . to recreate yourself in another country, another language? My father took me to the Louvre.\u201d The bag she brings with her is filled with analogue provisions: a notebook, a toiletry kit, a duvet, a square of nougat, and a secret gift (never revealed) for the Hellenistic goddess whom she has come, especially, to ponder: \u201cAnd the statues around me: . . . Do they wish they could return somewhere? . . . The Venus de Milo, whose artificial shadow stretches to my feet: . . . Is it possible that she sighs for the earth, its darkness, its odor\u2014the earth from which she was unearthed, in the spring of 1820, by a Greek farmer?\u201d In the quietude of the after-hours gallery, without a screen to doomscroll, she is able to channel metamorphic rock.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In The Weeds<\/em>, a mid-nineteenth-century New Englander accused of theft is indentured to British physician and amateur botanist Richard Deakin, to assist his compilation of Flora of the Colosseum of Rome<\/em> (1855), whose publication will ensure his posterity; her twenty-first-century successor updates this meticulous herbarium in the age of global warming, as part of her doctoral training with an older male advisor whose casual sexism permeates every interaction. The latter catches glimpses of the former between the lines of Richard Deakins\u2019s Flora of the Colosseum of Rome<\/em> (1855), gradually perceiving the voice of his young female assistant as she pores over the exquisitely sensual descriptions of the plants they are both tasked with cataloguing: \u201c\u2018Do you ever wonder about Deakin?\u2019\u201d the first-person narrator asks her mentor at one point: \u201c\u2018what kind of help he had, or whether he did all the writing himself?\u2019\u201d When he dismisses such curiosity as frivolous (\u201c\u2018I don\u2019t question authorship\u2019\u201d), she doubles down: \u201c\u2018Some of his phrases strike me as feminine.\u2019\u201d Later, she hails this intuited subjectivity directly: \u201cI see you, D, for the tender way you see.\u201d Only in a defunct gladiatorial stadium-cum-hortus conclusus<\/em> could such an astonishing act of recognition occur.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The encounters that these heterotopic settings enable, or to which they seem especially hospitable, are ones whose value is all but illegible within the larger hegemonic framework of techno-capitalist logic. They are offline, unprofitable, and almost aggressively niche\u2014risky investments in terms of material payout, social prestige, or viral potential. They are, to varying degrees, unilateral bonds: Due to the discrepant ontological or developmental status between the protagonist or first-person narrator and the Other with whom she is interacting, they cannot be reciprocated in kind. Mastering Linnaean taxonomy; mothering a newborn; curiosity about and sympathy toward literary characters; an ongoing dialogue with a work of artistic genius; the (dis)articulation of an archival silence: All require a painstaking commitment to detail, a tolerance for tedium, mental and physical stamina, and a refusal to be beholden to conventional notions of productivity, achievement, and progress. All of these books concern women who, for reasons that fall along a broad spectrum of volition and intentionality\u2014from the \u201cfourth trimester\u201d to pure whimsy\u2014find themselves in states of solitude or semi-isolation that render them particularly available to trans-temporal affinities. These attachments to sculpted marble, fictional consciousness, erased forebears and spiritual ancestresses, to their own unrealized potential, deferred dreams, or past lives make it possible for them to persist into the future. As Alikavazanovic writes of her night in the Salle des Cariatides: \u201cAlone and at the same time anything but.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And yet. However encompassing these books\u2019 commitments to heterotopic circumstances and the encounters that take place in them, there is a shared acknowledgement of their inevitable impermanence. These situations are always temporary and fleeting, rather than terminal: Each text ends with the promise, immediate or eventual, of abandoning them favor of the \u201creal\u201d world. Part of this has to do with the transient or precarious nature of the protagonist or narrator\u2019s exemption from it in the first place: sabbatical, postpartum, PhD training, penal detention, a rare exception for which many accommodations have been made. But it is also that each book is interested in how\u2014by lavishing attention on something of little relevance, commercial interest, or practical use to the extra-heterotopic sphere (a dissertation, an eighteenth-century novel, undesirable vegetation, unconsummated love, a baby, a sculpture)\u2014the narrators and protagonists are able to re-enter it with more resources to accept and navigate it. In our age of calamity, heterotopia mirrors and amplifies the ephemerality and fragility of the world we inhabit. In the article I mentioned earlier, Dames posits that the \u201cavatar\u201d of today\u2019s jaded reader is \u201cthe mother,\u201d and can it be a coincidence that all of the narrators are, or will soon be, conduits for the next generation? Reproductive futurity is not, of course, a sufficient or necessary prerequisite for having a stake in the health of the Earth and its population, or hope that our planet (perhaps even our species) will survive. At the same time, it is not hard to accept the mother as representative of those for whom the temptation to steal away from the evidence of its disastrous condition and all the mechanisms by which we are numbed to it is particularly acute.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Twenty years ago, literary scholar Susan Keen coined the term \u201cnarrative annexes\u201d to describe spaces in nineteenth-century novels that momentarily disrupt, intrude on, or subvert the text\u2019s main sites of action: The flickering alleyways, prickly hedgerows, and barren moorlands that permit the intrusion of characters and events the genre otherwise tended to preclude. Victorian literature, dominated by the aesthetics of verisimilitude, took for granted the reader\u2019s capacity to be absorbed by a representation of the world as it (more or less) was, perhaps because the empirical version did not compete as fiercely for the reader\u2019s time with its counterpart on the page. The heterotopic imaginary arises from an acknowledgement that this is no longer the case. At the same time, it is motivated by a longing for reading\u2019s traditional rewards: private love affairs with inanimate objects and non-sentient beings that nevertheless feel alive. In the age of distraction, when the global prospects of pleasure reading seem far from auspicious, literature in which \u201cother\u201d spaces constitute (rather than being alternatives to, impositions on, or escapes from) the primary milieu of the text discreetly nurture these vulnerable kinships. Like secret gardens in which heirloom varietals continue to thrive in spite of larger-scale climatic threats, the heterotopic novel provides a fertile terroir in which the cultivar of literary sensibility can flourish, even as early-twenty-first-century life constantly threatens to frack into oblivion our neurological capacity for it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Elizabeth Brogden<\/a> <\/strong><\/strong>is a writer and editor based in Cambridge, MA. Her essays, reviews, interviews, and short fictions have\u00a0appeared in\u00a0Bellevue Literary Review<\/em>,\u00a0The Common<\/em>,\u00a0Times Literary Supplement<\/em>, and\u00a0AGNI<\/em>, among others. She can be found online at\u00a0www.golightlyeditorial.com<\/a>.<\/strong><\/strong><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The encounters that these heterotopic settings enable . . . are ones whose value is all but illegible within the larger hegemonic framework of techno-capitalist logic . . . offline, unprofitable, and almost aggressively niche.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":827,"featured_media":51691,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,8,4835,101],"tags":[104,9197,7542,9913,9196,9911,8666,9910,1150,5370,9914,9909],"class_list":["post-51690","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-feature","category-features","category-from-the-newsletter","category-latest","tag-distraction","tag-egyptian-literature","tag-elizabeth-brogden","tag-heterotopia","tag-iman-mersal","tag-jakuta-alikavazanovic","tag-kate-briggs","tag-katy-simpson-smith","tag-michel-foucault","tag-newsletter","tag-susan-keen","tag-traces-of-enayat"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51690","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/827"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51690"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51690\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51886,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51690\/revisions\/51886"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/51691"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51690"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51690"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51690"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":51927,"date":"2026-08-12T08:30:00","date_gmt":"2026-08-12T12:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/?p=51927"},"modified":"2026-08-10T16:45:34","modified_gmt":"2026-08-10T20:45:34","slug":"the-rage-letters-valerie-bah","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/2026\/08\/12\/reviews\/annayabaynes\/the-rage-letters-valerie-bah\/","title":{"rendered":"The Rage Letters – Val\u00e9rie Bah"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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[Metonymy Press; 2023]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tr. from the French by Kama La Mackerel<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This review was originally published in the Full Stop Quarterly \u201cTender Tongues,\u201d edited by Nat\u00e1lia Affonso. Subscribe at our Patreon page<\/a> to get access to this and future issues, also available for purchase here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cInvisible ink is what lies under, between, outside the lines, hidden until the right reader discovers it . . . The reader who is \u2018made for\u2019 the book is one attuned to the invisible ink.\u201d Toni Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

In Val\u00e9rie Bah\u2019s debut collection<\/a> of interconnected stories, Black queer and trans friends navigate the absurdities of whiteness, the vagaries of relationships, and the mystical blend of the explicable and inexplicable. Daphn\u00e9, Fred, Marie, and Katia form the main cast of the stories, circling and entangling themselves with each other in a way all too familiar if you run in queer circles. Anti-Blackness, ableism, and capitalism haunt their lives like the sculptures in Marie\u2019s apartment, which seem to hold a spirit. Bah is at turns poetic, critical of Canadian society, and empathetic to the friends and lovers at the center of the collection.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To understand the almost hypnotic draw found within the pages, we can turn to the preface. There, St\u00e9phane Martelly, editor of the original Francophone edition, proclaims, \u201cWe write with this \u2018invisible ink\u2019 that Toni Morrison talked about, which slides between the lines to engender new readings\u201d (viii). Martelly refers to the passage that serves as an epigraph to this review, she speaks of the invisible ink that is like a hidden message quite clear to those who know what to look for. In some ways, I am not the right reader; I\u2019m from the US, and my first language is English. I learned French starting in middle school, and I\u2019ve rarely had people to communicate with in French outside of school. I am sure that there are messages written in the invisible ink that I miss having not been immersed in francophone Canadian culture. However, in many of the ways that matter most, I am the right reader: Black, queer, nonbinary, living in the heart of an empire. As my eyes glided over the page, I experienced a unique kinship to the characters. I felt as if Bah had reached into my chest, touched my heart, and said \u201cYou are not, and never have been, alone.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Daphn\u00e9, a queer nonbinary leftist that appears in multiple stories from \u201cSculptures\u201d to \u201cFl\u00e2nage,\u201d presents in stark relief the different ways that gender nonconformity is expressed in French and English respectively. French, as a gendered language, demands that adjectives, nouns, past participles, etc. reflect the gender of whomever is being referred to. In the original text, Bah makes clear that Daphn\u00e9 eschews the modern gender binary (exemplified with the il\/elle dichotomy) by using the pronoun \u201ciel\u201d and conjoining the masculine and feminine versions of words (for example \u201cseul\u00b7e\u201d). This forces the eye (and mouth if reading aloud) to hesitate and acknowledge both the masculine and the feminine. Tripping up the eye and tongue denaturalizes any strict delineation between genders; it makes the reader unsure, prompts questions about language, gender, and boundary policing. By contrast, English is much less reliant on gender. Daphn\u00e9 is referred to using \u201cthey,\u201d and there is no need to disrupt the text as a reminder of their gender.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the translator\u2019s note, Kama La Mackerel hints at these differences in language. They say, \u201cWriting then [in French] becomes a demanding exercise in drafting, moulding, and sculpting the language. In English, however, my third language, there is a sense of freedom and permission that I seem to have right from the outset\u201d (155). That conspicuous construction is evident in the ways I mentioned above. \u201cIel,\u201d the pronoun analogous to the English singular \u201cthey,\u201d is still not recognized by L\u2019Acad\u00e9mie fran\u00e7aise, the institutional gatekeepers for the French language. La Mackerel goes on to say, \u201cI was also constantly faced with the question of relevance regarding certain literary choices in French that I found revolutionary, but not so much . . . in English. (In English, there are already more rooted lineages of Black, racialized, and LGBTQ+ writers who have written and continue to write against the empire.)\u201d (156) The fight against the rigid conservatism of the French language is more visible in how Bah abandons strict gendering, but that \u201csculpting\u201d is lost in English. In some ways, I appreciated the original French more because I was not allowed to forget Daphn\u00e9\u2019s gender; each adjective and \u201ciel\u201d confronted me with how they refuse categorization. The ease of English that La Mackerel describes obfuscates the difficulty that nonbinary\/gender-nonconforming people experience when they demand their proper pronouns be used. In real life, you often hear things like \u201cshe- I mean, they\u201d or some variation of that. That stumbling is lost in the translation from French to English.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the collection, English and French are not the only languages given space. Bah does not assume the sovereignty of verbal language; they present it as only one piece of the puzzle when engaging in interpretation and meaning-making. Tone, body language, and what is not said are just as important as, if not more important than, what is said. In \u201cTheft,\u201d the first story in the collection, there is very little dialogue. The story follows a child who struggles with dict\u00e9es at school and steals books from the school to create grotesque creations for their \u201csecret stash.\u201d Instead, hair, tone, and body language construct the mother\u2019s defensive and protective message when talking to her child\u2019s principal. We don\u2019t hear what she says, but we see how she prepared for (metaphorical) battle, which is arguably more important than her exact words. Bah writes, \u201cHer whole body says: What right do you have to blame my daughter, and by extension, my person and everything that we are?\u201d (4). Verbal language is often the domain of the oppressor; they regulate and determine what language is acceptable and \u201ccorrect.\u201d Oppressed people become experts in expressing themselves in looks, tone, body, aesthetics, etc.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cLogawou,\u201d the story in which we get a glimpse of Fred\u2019s childhood in foster care, demonstrates the importance of Bah uplifting other modes of expression. Fred \u201ccommunicated by means of groans and postures, a paralanguage that made her teachers suggest that she switch into \u2018special ed\u2019\u201d (81). She also has a deep attachment to a fur coat purchased when her mother was still alive; her mom said \u201cshe looked like a lougawou,\u201d a typically female werewolf that drains blood from sleeping victims in Haitian mythology. The coat seems to have a sentience as Fred remarks that it growls on its own. Verbal language is one of the ways we distinguish humans from animals. In a white supremacist point of view, we must avoid the animal because we are above them, hence why Fred\u2019s unwillingness to communicate \u201clike a person\u201d indicates to the school that she must have diminished intelligence. We must be creatures of the mind instead of the body. Bah rejects that premise by treating with reverence every avenue of expression. In \u201cLougawou,\u201d Fred does not speak at all. She has a rich inner life, but the majority of her external communication is her facial expressions and the growls attributed to her fur coat. This is not a point of shame, but rather, Fred\u2019s connection to the animal, to the (super)natural is her power. It is what allows her to consume a white man whose desire is based upon extraction, especially from women of color, in \u201cWhite.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Throughout the collection, Bah displays lovingly the survival tactics of Black people (e.g. code-switching, a term that is borrowed from English in the French text). Sometimes we cannot say everything we feel aloud, as with the mother in \u201cTheft\u201d or Katia in the \u201cFille du roi\u201d triptych. We must subvert language through \u201ccreolization\u201d and create meaning that is clear to those in tune with us; the invisible ink may be found in the subtle scrunching of a nose or a slicked-back hairstyle instead of on the page. In the US, AAVE is our cultural manifestation of \u201ccreolization.\u201d To acknowledge the innovative methods of communication used by Black people, Bah aptly chooses not to shy away from the ugly truth of antiBlackness. Even as they inject the stories with magical realism, the collection is grounded by an understanding of the systems of oppression that beget antiBlackness, fetishization, white supremacy, racial capitalism, etc. However, Bah is not defeatist. Black queer and trans people create new languages and new ways of being. \u201cThe Letter,\u201d an offering of asexual partnership from Fred to Daphn\u00e9, demonstrates a liberatory imagination that could never come about if your mind is shackled by white supremacy, heteronormativity, and cissexism. Oppression desires to rob one of the ability to imagine any other way of living and loving. Bah escapes that banality to create a world filled with characters and languages that is so bursting with life that I felt as if they were people on the periphery of my life. As their first collection of stories, Bah shows immense promise and attention to craft. Most importantly, they write in that particular invisible ink that Black queer\/trans readers are attuned to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Annaya Baynes<\/a> <\/strong>(she\/they) is a Fellow specializing in curriculum at Girls Write Now. They are a Master’s student in the Martin Scorsese Department of Cinema Studies at NYU Tisch School of the Arts. Annaya has interned at various publishing houses, including Penguin Random House, Macmillan, and The Feminist Press. She believes in the liberation of all oppressed peoples from Palestine to Sudan to the DRC and beyond. You can also find their words on their Substack<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Illustration by Sally Chen: Sally Chen<\/strong> (they\/she\/he) is a queer, non-binary, second-generation Chinese (specifically Taishanese!) American multidisciplinary artist who\u2019s born & raised in Brooklyn, NYC. They graduated from Parsons School of Design with a BFA in Illustration and Psychology minor in 2022. Find their art at https:\/\/salpalc.art\/<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Even as they inject the stories with magical realism, the collection is grounded by an understanding of the systems of oppression that beget antiBlackness, fetishization, white supremacy, racial capitalism, etc. However, Bah is not defeatist. Black queer and trans people create new languages and new ways of being<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1323,"featured_media":51928,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,26,6561,101,11,4,6649,35,1530],"tags":[8499,3558,119,5511,9950,151,4588,8685,4973,173,5924,85],"class_list":["post-51927","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-translation","category-debut","category-fiction","category-latest","category-featreview","category-reviews","category-short-fiction","category-small-press","category-stories","tag-anti-black-racism","tag-blackness","tag-debut-2","tag-french-canadian-literature","tag-metonymy-press","tag-queer","tag-queer-fiction","tag-queer-lit","tag-queer-literature","tag-short-stories","tag-trans-literature","tag-translation-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51927","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1323"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51927"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51927\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51976,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51927\/revisions\/51976"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/51928"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51927"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51927"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51927"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":51904,"date":"2026-08-10T20:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-08-11T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/?p=51904"},"modified":"2026-08-17T19:46:19","modified_gmt":"2026-08-17T23:46:19","slug":"bitter-water-opera-nicolette-polek","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/2026\/08\/10\/reviews\/sophie-golub\/bitter-water-opera-nicolette-polek\/","title":{"rendered":"Bitter Water Opera \u2013 Nicolette Polek"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

[Graywolf Press; 2024]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She is the type of figure who lends herself to mythmaking, both through her own self-mythologizing and the actual facts of her existence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

An entertainer, dancer, and artist, Marta Becket and her husband were driving through Death Valley, California, in 1967 when they stopped to fix a flat tire across from an abandoned hotel. She found a doorway, peered through its holes, and saw an empty theater. This would become her theater. The couple leased the complex (hotel and theater) and Marta devoted the rest of her life to the place. She revived it and covered it in murals, even with her own likeness. Every week for the next four decades, she starred in performances. Unsuccessful and overlooked as a performer in New York, here she was determined to be the artist she knew she could be. She would create her audience of whoever lived in or passed through the town and also through illustrious murals of rapt crowds. She would force her own legacy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With her 2024 novel, Bitter Water Opera<\/a><\/em>, Nicolette Polek jumps into Becket\u2019s legacy-making. While the life of Becket was very much real, Polek offers a work of fiction. Becket might have approved: an artist allowing another artist to take artistic liberty. Becket might have disapproved: an artist fully wanting to control her own image and legacy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The book opens with the narrator, Gia, sending a letter to Marta Becket. It has no address\u2014just an illustration, a childhood photograph, and \u201csomething like a prayer.\u201d Becket soon after appears at her door. By the next page, we learn that Becket died years earlier.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gia is in a state of existential ennui. She has recently ended a romantic relationship, disturbed by her own infidelity and deception. She is still meeting up with her ex, hoping to explain herself. She is on leave from her job in the film department at a university. She is avoiding texts from her mom. Her work friend quit. All of these relationships hover beyond her. Not much grounds Gia in her own life. She conjures Marta and asks her to \u201cattend\u201d to her life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Polek has written a book about Marta Becket and not about her at all. This is Gia\u2019s Marta. Many relationships are this way: we see someone else for who or what we need or want them to be. When I finished the book, I wasn\u2019t sure whether Marta was a real or fabricated figure. She felt as if she could be real. Online, I found news articles, a documentary, and even an autobiography. But Polek\u2019s version is real enough. And Marta herself, no matter how real, is also a fiction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gia\u2019s attraction to Marta (and the Amargosa Opera House and Hotel) derives first from an interest in small-town unusual landmarks and is followed by archival research. She admits that Marta also reminds her of her own mother. Marta becomes an obsession, or \u201cfanaticism\u201d to use Gia\u2019s word. We are watching one woman looking at another. What is she looking at in her? She says, \u201cThis was the kind of woman I thought I would be. Alone and powerful with creation.\u201d Marta\u2019s solitude, even with romantic partners and with audiences, draws in Gia. Self-important Marta would certainly not care to be admired for her aloneness, even if this quality is perceived as powerful. But Gia reflects on her own sense of loneliness, since she was a child, and finds power in Marta\u2019s embrace of it. \u201cI felt singed by panic. I could\u2019ve had Peter\u2014but I couldn\u2019t have, because I desired someone else, and with them I would desire yet another.\u201d She admits a perpetual dissatisfaction, what she terms \u201cmy limerence,” always looking at the past or the future, never the present; always looking at another person instead of the one in front of her; always desiring what is not: \u201cbetween two sides of ruin, as I used to live\u2014forward and backward\u2014between the despairing anti-possibility of my past, and the possible despair in my future.\u201d Looking outside to seek a solution to her inside. Gia herself is living in her own fiction: sending out unaddressed letters, conjuring up deceased artists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Early on, Gia recalls a colleague who wanted to break up with her boyfriend because she thought he was cheating on her. Day by day, she removed one object from their home until, one day, he opened the closet and there was nothing left. She hollowed out their home. Gia no longer has a relationship with that woman, but this anecdote summarizes Gia\u2019s state of being. A hollowness that she seeks to fill.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Polek embodies this hollowness by selectively withholding details and specificity. In Gia\u2019s replaying of her infidelity, she writes:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There was a row of crab apple trees at the top of the trail, sturdy and mangled with age, and I climbed onto one of the lower branches to look out at the vista. He turned toward me to say something and as he did, I caught his hand. I didn\u2019t understand why. A thrilled impulse. He moved closer, as though this was intended all along. In an instant, the levity from our walk extinguished under irreversible fog. We stayed there pressing each other against the crab apple tree, until the bark dug into my back and the sun fell from dark orange to gray.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Like so many of the plot details of Gia\u2019s life, Polek holds back. What another author might spend pages on, Polek moves through in one paragraph. The memory itself is vivid with some very specific details: the crab apple trees, the sun\u2019s shifting color, the sensation of the bark. But what happened? Was there more to this affair than the pressing of two bodies? This is the incident that leads Gia to leave her boyfriend. This is the main event that shatters her sense of self and thwarts her ability to interact with her those around her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bitter Water Opera<\/em> is Polek\u2019s second book and first novel. Her first book, Imaginary Museums<\/a> <\/em>(2020), is a collection of flash fiction. Bitter Water Opera<\/em> may be a novel, but the brevity and concision of that earlier form and style persist. Almost every memory or scene is just a couple pages, if even. Polek knows how not to linger. Her flash fiction is also filled with evocative and sensorial details circling an unspoken darkness at the core. More so than Bitter Water Opera<\/em>, that undercurrent is often sinister or violent\u2014fear of other people, abandonment, drowning, lying.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bitter Water Opera<\/em> is a pilgrimage story, a woman traveling to the locale of the woman she worships. The book is also a roadtrip story, since she has two other stops along the way\u2014a cabin in the wilderness and a daytrip from Amargosa. It is about a journey and a destination. Gia needs this destination to be her salvation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ironically, the locale is Death Valley\u2014a landscape known for its unbearably harsh conditions\u2014and Gia is searching for reasons to live. On a trip from Amargosa, visiting the lowest point in the country, she has an experience of spiritual transcendence. She prays out and is shaken by a presence. Between this and the first reawakening in the woods, Gia might be starting to slowly find herself. This journey becomes less of a pilgrimage, and more of a roadtrip. Will the journey, rather than the destination, be the salvation?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At Amargosa, Gia encounters a group of preservationists who are attending to Marta\u2019s legacy. Marta too, it seems, needs saving. They meet in hushed tones every day to figure out how to save the decrepit building with Tamarisk roots bursting through the carpet. Gia wanders in and around the hotel. She chats with the one other guest. For being so obsessed, her behavior there is surprisingly lackadaisical. Neither Gia nor the reader are totally clear what she is looking for. She seems to want, to need, someone to breathe something into her\u2014some direction, some antidote to the loneliness, a contrast to that \u201climerence.\u201d Upon arrival, she says, \u201cI imagined that Marta had requested that I meet her at the junction in order to consume me. But the beckoning didn\u2019t feel like it was from Marta. All I knew was that I needed to be there, for a showdown with something unknown to me, before something brilliant could happen.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

When the other guest requests a tour, Gia finally sees the famed theater. She barely sought it out. The murals unfold: \u201cnuns, prostitutes, noblemen, Marta\u2019s cat with a litter of kittens.\u201d The preservationist reveals Marta\u2019s prickly personality, erased faces when people who promised to fund the opera house did not pay up. One of the preservationists delivers a strong speech to the visitor who, to them, is not taking this place seriously. Gia then goes to sit beyond the stage, and wonders, \u201cand with that, things felt as if they had reached their natural end. I had turned over the details of the opera house for so long that to visit it<\/em> became an act of remembering, the act of remembering an act of forgetting, the act of forgetting an active motion.\u201d Finally, Gia\u2019s engine is revving back up. She has faced the object of her obsession.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gia leaves Amargosa and the book winds towards its end. To the reader, the now dissipated unnameable ennui is still impenetrable. For one-hundred-and-twenty-two pages, Polek has gestured at it, circled it. This ennui pervades the book, and yet what exactly is it? Only once we have moved past it can we look our problem in the eye and name it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By the last page, Gia speaks no longer of being in the dulled and distanced state. She goes home. She goes to her mom\u2019s house. She mentions a new job. She has a potential date. She states, \u201cJoy completed and doubly felt.\u201d The hope and joy and clarity that were perpetually beyond her, have found their way to her. The transformation in this final scene is not quite convincing, newfound enthusiasm stated but not conveyed. Maybe here, too, is another journey she must embark upon: how to embody salvation once found. Marta could not save herself. The preservationists are trying their best to save her. Gia at least seems to be on her way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sophie Golub<\/a> is a writer, artist, editor, and museum-worker based in Brooklyn, New York. She publishes an interview series focused on emerging artists in which each artist recommends her to the next. She was most recently the department manager of publications at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

She would force her own legacy<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1321,"featured_media":51905,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[101,11,4],"tags":[9941,7944,603,9943,4010,3453,9942,2231,4669,1465],"class_list":["post-51904","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-latest","category-featreview","category-reviews","tag-amargosa","tag-artists","tag-california","tag-death-valley","tag-desert","tag-graywolf-press","tag-marta-becket","tag-novel","tag-opera","tag-performance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51904","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1321"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51904"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51904\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51989,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51904\/revisions\/51989"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/51905"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51904"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51904"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51904"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":51955,"date":"2026-08-07T08:30:00","date_gmt":"2026-08-07T12:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/?p=51955"},"modified":"2026-08-10T16:46:03","modified_gmt":"2026-08-10T20:46:03","slug":"the-city-lara-moreno","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/2026\/08\/07\/reviews\/danielle-bartholet\/the-city-lara-moreno\/","title":{"rendered":"The City – Lara Moreno"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\"Book<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

[Open Letter Books; 2026]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tr. from the Spanish by Alice Banks and Katie Whittemore<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The eponymous term \u201cthe city\u201d means little without proper context\u2014and on first glance, means even less when used as a book title. Yet in this case, readers soon find, with the author\u2019s guidance, that the versatility of the phrase is exactly what makes it perfect for this novel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From Open Letter Press, The City<\/a><\/em> by Lara Moreno, translated by Alice Banks and Katie Whittemore, follows the lives of three women in urban Madrid up until the very start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Oliva, a native Spaniard, Damaris, an immigrant from Colombia, and Horia, a seasonal worker from Morocco, represent the various echelons of Madrid society.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The book is a stunning portrayal of womanhood, modernity, and the struggle for survival amongst various odds, centered around three women in different stages of life. It is in their dissimilarity that the reader can see how they are all alike at their core. These women are resilient yet vulnerable, desiring more out of their lives. They struggle against city life, learning to find a balance between their own desires and the desires of the people around them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a Colombian myself, I especially resonated with Damaris\u2019s character, seeing how natural disaster and poverty push people to lengths they do not anticipate. There is a kind of \u2018natural disaster\u2019 in each woman\u2019s life, from the actual earthquake that irrevocably changes Damaris\u2019s life, to Oliva\u2019s struggle with domestic abuse, to Horia\u2019s son going missing as he attempts to reach her in Spain. Something shakes up their lives that they cannot ignore, and they must continue the practice of daily life while fighting each battle internally, having to rely mainly on themselves for emotional strength.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For example, Moreno describes a fight between Oliva and her partner Max, framing it almost like a battle. She writes \u201cwar broke out over [Oliva\u2019s] head\u2026faced with an attack, flight is an appropriate and natural reaction. Flee, even when it is from one\u2019s home. Avoid the shrapnel.\u201d Here, Moreno illustrates Oliva\u2019s decaying relationship, which is shown to be as disastrous as a physical battle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Each one has children of varying ages and needs\u2014Oliva has a young daughter, Horia has a teenage son, and Damaris has two adult children. Motherhood is highlighted in each of the women\u2019s stories, but it does not define them or usurp their identities as people. Damaris reflects on this when thinking how close both she and her mother were to dying in the catastrophic earthquake she experienced in Colombia, saying \u201cnobody ever wants their mother to die, because a mother pushes you out of her womb and your husband does not,\u201d showing the intrinsic link between mother and child and how it drives both individuals to do anything for each other. This role both distinguishes the women and brings them into thematic communion with one another.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Oliva and Horia are highly focused and present in their children\u2019s lives, with motherhood being their major if not primary motivation. Damaris, contrarily, feels more mothered by her own children, as they ask her to come back to Colombia and wonder if she needs to stay at her job in Spain. The dynamics each woman has with her child is complex and nuanced, showing the varying ways that motherhood can present itself even in the same geographical and cultural area.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In accordance with a more modern literary style, the tales of these characters are told to us through fluid streams of consciousness reminiscent of Virgina Woolf and Sally Rooney. This is a literary fiction novel with the pace and energy of a thriller. By using omniscient narration with no quotations marks, allowing it to move quickly between characters, The City <\/em>wrests control of the reader\u2019s attention and holds it tight until the final page of the novel. Moreno adjusts to the changing emotional states of her characters, allowing us to feel the distinct voices of the three women while the style remains firmly Moreno\u2019s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The writing reaches its peak in its description of Oliva\u2019s life and her struggle with the verbal and emotional abuse she endures at the hand of her partner, Max. I felt anxious and scared alongside her as she navigated her way through his ever-changing emotions; my heart raced with her and for her. Through Oliva\u2019s narrative voice, we see the manipulation and guilt Max inflicts on her when she attempts to set boundaries: \u201cI want to live the life that being with you lets me live, I need it. No one\u2019s ever gotten me to see what you make me see\u2026I\u2019ll die if you leave me.\u201d Moreno depicts the manipulative and toxic with care, empathy, and detailed attention, illustrating how such a situation could someday end up befalling anyone, even the reader.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This writing style sets The City<\/em> apart from other literary fiction of similar subject matter. Instead of being mainly internal and contemplative, it manages to make the everyday thoughts and struggles of those characters visceral. It is a feat that a novel in translation is able to sustain such a style successfully. It speaks to the talent of the translators and author that the sentences were able to remain coherent even when translated out of the original language.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is highlighted in the narration discussing Oliva, saying that she \u201cdoesn\u2019t differentiate worry from sadness\u2026Nor the battle from sadness\u2026She senses the hole, the hollowed-out gut. But it\u2019s butterflies, not blackness. One must go on. One must make an effort,\u201d displaying repetition and an extended exploration into the despair that Oliva feels. Though the word \u201csadness\u201d appears multiple times, there is a slow build toward its meaning that builds nuance and allows the reader a window into how Oliva views the world and internalizes her situation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The role of the city of Madrid is both central yet understated in the novel. The city is present and alive in the lives of the women, who go to their favorite markets and know their neighborhoods intimately, but it takes a background role to the struggles of the three characters. Each woman has a favorite spot she frequents or a routine road she takes, but outside of those details we get little description of the city. I was left wanting a deeper understanding of how each of these characters see the soul of their city, how the people in it make Madrid what it is. There was some color lacking in establishing the culture of the city and how it feels to live in it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the beginning of the novel, Moreno does write that \u201cMadrid isn\u2019t a city that tries to conceal or cloak its ugliness. This imposing cavern, this labyrinthine warren of bloodied rabbits might be its most sophisticated act of improvement.\u201d This visceral interpretation of the Spanish capital is intriguing, as it does not refer to a certain place but to the energy of the city overall, but such descriptions or telling details are not found in many other places in the book. The novel fails to consistently keep the city in mind, which is ironic for a book titled The City<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Horia, toward the end of the book, describes that \u201cMadrid sounded like an atrocious monster\u2026like the lethargy of idle hours,\u201d associating it with her fear and anxiety over her missing son. This could be an example of the reason why there isn\u2019t as much Madrid-based description, as the author could be pointing our attention toward viewing the city as the main characters see it, imbued with their own emotions at any given time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The final portion of the book features the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis, though the novel ends before lockdowns truly start. Each of the characters has weathered her own challenges and is beginning to come out of the other side of them, but we never see this come full circle. This causes the ending to feel abrupt and sudden, like the television has unexpectedly gone black from lack of electricity. The book is fabulous at building and keeping momentum, so such an ending leaves readers feeling dropped into an abyss rather than feeling satisfied. Though one would likely not expect a perfect fairytale ending, there could have been more of a well-rounded conclusion rather than one that left me wondering if there were missing pages in my copy of the novel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a relatively slim volume, Moreno has crafted three distinct worlds and worldviews that readers can sink their teeth into. The women feel like they could step off the page at any moment, that they could easily be real people one encounters on a street corner. While the term \u201cthe city\u201d is unspecific, it perfectly describes a bustling environment that contains multitudes of people, each with their own story. The book illuminates the private struggle women are constantly facing, and the larger community that contains all of those struggles within it, knowingly or unknowingly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Danielle Bartholet<\/a><\/em> (she\/her) is a senior year Writing, Literature, and Publishing student, minoring in History and Journalism. She serves on her college newspaper, <\/em>The Berkeley Beacon, working as the Deputy Projects Editor and Operations Managing Editor. Her reporting ranges from a variety of arts and culture pieces, to coverage of Emerson\u2019s student government, to interview pieces, sports features, and more. She can also be found working for <\/em>Her Campus Emerson as its Vice President, and as the Marketing\/Communications Director for <\/em>Page Turner Magazine. Outside of her roles, she spends time working on her original fiction projects, and making short form vlogs for her social media. Her writing has appeared in <\/em>Houston Family Magazine and <\/em>PaperCity Magazine, publications in her home state of Texas, as well as <\/em>Black Swan Literary Magazine, <\/em>Full Stop Literary, <\/em>EM Magazine, and <\/em>Front Porch Magazine. She also runs a Substack, \u201cScribblings\u201d in which she posts personal essays and snippets of her creative writing.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Something shakes up their lives that they cannot ignore, and they must continue the practice of daily life while fighting each battle internally, having to rely mainly on themselves for emotional strength<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1263,"featured_media":51956,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,6561,101,11,4,35],"tags":[9954,2231,214,4320,3502,1014,7708,85],"class_list":["post-51955","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-translation","category-fiction","category-latest","category-featreview","category-reviews","category-small-press","tag-lara-moreno","tag-novel","tag-open-letter","tag-open-letter-books","tag-spain","tag-spanish","tag-spanish-translation","tag-translation-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51955","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1263"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51955"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51955\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51977,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51955\/revisions\/51977"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/51956"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51955"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51955"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51955"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}]