Women and Children First by Alina Grabowski, Zando Books, New York, 320 pages. $16.99

 

Women and Children First by Alina Grabowski, Zando Books, New York, 320 pages. $16.99.

Review by Ed Meek

A creative literary take on the mystery novel

In Egypt when someone dies, relatives hire professional mourners to help the family and friends grieve. Jews sit shiva for seven days after the death of a close one. For many of us though, there is a funeral mass and service. Then, we are expected to get on with our lives. Alina Grabowski delves into the way women in a small town process the tragic death of a high school girl.

In an interview with a local journalist, Ali Goad, in Austin, Texas, Grabowski describes her novel as exploring “how a community processes a tragedy … focusing on “the complexities of memory.” The novel is written from the points of view of ten women, each of whom gets her own chapter. The first five chapters lead up to and include the death of Lucy, a high school student, and the last five chapters deal with the aftermath. Each of the women has a connection to the main character. The chapters function like long short stories that are cleverly linked. Each chapter is a mini-mystery: who is this person and how is she linked to Lucy? The novel is a kind of giant puzzle with the pieces fitted together as you read along.

The advantage of novels with multiple points of view is that we are introduced to a number of characters rather than stuck with one voice. Although Holden Caufield of The Catcher in the Rye starts out as a very entertaining narrator, after a hundred pages, the reader begins to get sick of him calling everyone a phony. On the other hand, what happens with multiple points of view is that we find ourselves drawn to some characters more than others. Grabowski is a talented writer who creates the voices of a range of women, from teenagers to forty-something moms. However, she is more convincing with teens and young women than she is with the older ones.

Grabowski says that although the novel focuses on a mystery it is “primarily literary fiction.” As a result, the emphasis is on character, not plot. “Great character makes great fiction,” the writer Bill Kittredge once said and Grabowski is skilled at creating character. In her attempt to make the novel realistic, she often undercuts what would be climaxes in other novels. Grabowski often backs away from conflict giving us characters that are compelling but what happens is sometimes a letdown.

My favorite character is Mona, a caustic thirty-year-old who is living in the house her mother left her and working in a bar. She has great lines like: “If only I could look at everything in life and know its interior contents. I would have dated significantly fewer musicians.” Another strong character Marina describing a high school girl, says, “She smiles with the innocent menace teenage girls have been perfecting for centuries. What an age! To be so convinced of your allure and so ignorant of its consequences.” These are the kinds of insights that make fiction so enjoyable. Maureen, the principal of the high school says,” But a girl and a child are not the same. A child is a pet. A girl is prey.”

The characters all react differently to the death of Lucy. Many are trying to get away from the problems engendered by the tragedy. Two high school mates of hers literally run while her mother doesn’t want to face or even find out what really happened.

Grabowski has her thumb on the current zeitgeist with compelling women who each have power in their own world and who are often reacting to men who disappear or let them down.

There’s an embarrassing viral video that may have caused Lucy to take risks she might not otherwise have engaged in. The title, of course, is a reference to the Titanic. At the beginning of the book, an epigraph tells us that the only reason that they say “Women and children first” is to test the strength of the lifeboats. Alina Grabowski’s promising and well-written debut novel is well worth diving into.

Poet Ellen Steinbaum finds beauty in simplicity

Recently, I caught up with poet Ellen Steinbaum to interview her about her new collection, LEAVINGS.


Steinbaum wrote me:



"Leavings is my fifth collection and I’ve also written a one-person play. My work has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize and is included in anthologies including Garrison Keillor’s Good Poems, American Places; The Widows’ Handbook; A Mighty Room: A Collection of Poems Written in Emily Dickinson’s Bedroom; and CavanKerry’sWaiting Room Reader II. An award-winning journalist and former Boston Globe columnist, I write a blog, “Reading and Writing and the Occasional Recipe” which can be found at my web site, ellensteinbaum.com."




This is the final poem in Leavings:


“The Intervening Day” we call it:

the day between his birthday and our
anniversary, between the beginning of
his days and the formal beginning of our
days together, between these two occasions
for cards and cakes, good wishes, celebrations,
this one day that has no ritual, just
an everyday day, a day we notice perhaps only
because it sits sandwiched between the two
momentous ones, a day when nothing further
is required than our simple gratitude for
one more ordinary day.

Poet Charles Coe wrote of your poetry collection that your poetry evokes "profound truths in the smallest, quite corners" Could one say you find the profound in the mundane—the minutiae?

I love that Charles said that. I hadn’t thought about that but, yes, it feels right. Though I admire poets who can wrestle with huge subjects and bring them into a scale for human observation, I think I am more comfortable with the very small thing that might almost escape notice.



Your lead poem " Commitment" deals with all things-- cockroaches. You have a knack for seeing the ugly/beauty—the romantic gloss of this roach couple?​

I think “ick—cockroach”—but I did like learning that these creatures I consider loathsome actually have this behavior I find—write it—charming!



Regarding your poem about the doomed Donner Party, I can't help but think of Donald Trump – a ham-fisted, carnival barker and snake oil salesman, who leads his hapless flock to their death.

Exactly what I hoped you’d think of, including the happy coincidence of the two names.



In your poem " What Happiness Is?," you explore the ''limp gifts"—the little things-- that are indeed consequential in a relationship. This brings us back to the profundity of minutiae.

Yes. What I was thinking of here was how, when we are lucky enough to spend our days with someone we care about, the tiniest observations become little “gifts” of noticing to offer for sharing. Noticing is something I’ve written about specifically, because noticing is what poets need to do—right?--in order to find something worth turning into metaphor, worth thinking about.



Do you feel your years as a journalist informs your poetry?

I’m sure they do. When I turned to poetry it was out of a desire to say something in a way I couldn’t do in prose, but I think it’s all of a piece, different ways of putting into words and sharing what I find interesting.


Why should we read your book?

There’s a wonderful line by Willa Cather: there are only two or three human stories and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.


I really believe that’s true—we each have our own details, but the basic outlines of our stories are easily recognizable to one another. And I think the more our individual stories are told with our specific details, the easier they are for someone else to see their own stories in. And isn’t that what we all crave, especially after a lockdown that isolated us from one another and societal divisions of all kinds—a point of connection, of commonality? My story—or the things I’ve noticed enough to bring into my poems—are mine, but I think others can find themselves in what I’ve noticed and written about, and then maybe feel connected to others through that.

Red Letter Poem #224

  The Red Letters

 

 

In ancient Rome, feast days were indicated on the calendar by red letters.

To my mind, all poetry and art serves as a reminder that every day we wake together beneath the sun is a red-letter day.

 

––Steven Ratiner

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Red Letter Poem #224

 

 

 

 

 

***





the villas, sister, are all empty—on a spring ray, like on a spit
we don’t turn against men’s gazes indiscreet, thirsty
there’ve been so many disasters in the twentieth century

with all of us that

none of us has managed to retain her
childish illusions, girlish dreams, pink slumbers



the villas, sister, are looted, every other one
shame our kind mothers didn’t teach us how to survive a war,
occupation, deportation, Holodomor, GULAG
taught us instead to close our eyes when the path is bloodied
leave someone’s body spread out, stretched out, your-my body
before the face of abuse, o man, Lord, are you here?



the villas, sister, are being rebuilt, everything will be forgotten,

albeit not at once, someday
our sons will grow up, they will trust strength more than us
our daughters, graceful as deer, resilient as Kevlar,
stronger than steel, let them not be applied to wounds,
let them not even be grateful to us, to their wicked mothers





––Halyna Kruk







Considering that Vladimir Putin has declared repeatedly that both the idea of an independent Ukraine and its proud cultural legacy are simply ‘fictions,' he’s certainly expended an astonishing tonnage of munitions––not to mention the lives of countless Russian troops––in trying to obliterate what he claims does not exist. The awful toll of dead and wounded within Ukraine is well-documented; but organizations, from within that nation and beyond, have also been assiduously documenting the cultural genocide being perpetrated. UNESCO has verified the damage or destruction of 438 cultural sites in Ukraine since the invasion began, including: 142 churches or religious centers; 215 buildings of historical and/or artistic interest; 32 museums; 32 monuments;16 libraries; and 1 archive––the majority of these being intentionally targeted, a violation of the Geneva Accords. Looting of art and significant cultural artifacts has been widespread as well. Ihor Poshyvailo, co-founder of the Heritage Emergency Response Initiative, said: “This is a war against our historical memory. . .against our soul, against everything that makes us Ukrainian.” But the aggressors are discovering that this ongoing war crime has only strengthened the resolve of these beleaguered people––and intensified the attention on Ukrainian poets and artists worldwide.



Halyna Kruk is one of the bright lights in the Ukrainian literary firmament––a poet, translator, educator, and literary critic. In addition, she writes award-winning children’s fiction, translated into 15 languages. A professor of literary studies at the National University of Lviv, she served previously as vice-president of the Ukrainian branch of PEN, the international writer’s organization. The conflict in her homeland has only magnified the global interest in her work. Today’s poem is taken from Lost in Living (Lost Horse Press, 2024) a brand-new bilingual edition of her poetry, translated with tremendous sensitivity by Ali Kinsella and Dzvinia Orlowsky. One of numerous untitled pieces in the collection, it is a lament for the hard truth that non-combatants, like women and children, often suffer the most when war becomes the tyrant’s method of pursuing his insidious objectives.



“shame our kind mothers didn’t teach us how to survive a war,/ occupation, deportation, Holodomor, GULAG”, Halyna writes, a line that quite simply makes the heart ache. She questions why parents and the broader community encouraged women to demurely “close our eyes when the path is bloodied.” But now Ukrainian civilians of every possible background are being schooled in the lessons of wanton destruction, an aggressor’s unbridled malice. Yet they are demonstrating the sort of courage and national resolve that ought to make every other democratic people examine their own commitment to remain free. Sweeping in with minimal punctuation, Halyna’s poems often combine a sort of relaxed conversational tone with sudden nightmarish turns and startling shifts in perception. When she terms it “your-my body,” lying bloody in the path, we readers will have a hard time maintaining a safe distance from the unfolding events. And when, near the conclusion, she adds: “our sons will grow up, they will trust strength more than us/ our daughters, graceful as deer, resilient as Kevlar”, I imagine that many of us will look up from the page and consider, for a moment, how well we’ve provided for our own children’s well-being. Have we the fortitude to be one of those “wicked” parents, honestly schooling them in the real dimensions of this dangerous world? Of course, as this war has sadly demonstrated, neither poets, mothers nor their children are in fact made of Kevlar––but the poems themselves may yet prove to be resistant to the bullets and bombs of invading armies. If they are embraced by the voices, the imaginations of readers who can appreciate their honesty, this constitutes a kind of inviolable Ukraine––and even tyrants may run out of armaments before these stanzas can be expunged. Crying out in the poem: “o man, Lord, are you here?”––I, for one, am anxious to see who will finally answer that prayer.

 

 

 

Red Letters 3.0

 

* If you would like to receive these poems every Friday in your own in-box – or would like to write in with comments or submissions – send correspondence to:

steven.arlingtonlaureate@gmail.com

 

 

* To learn more about the origins of the Red Letter Project, check out an essay I wrote for Arrowsmith Magazine:

https://www.arrowsmithpress.com/community-of-voices

 

and the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene

http://dougholder.blogspot.com

 

* For updates and announcements about Red Letter projects and poetry readings, please follow me on Twitter           

@StevenRatiner

A KIDS BOOK ABOUT OVERDOSE, by Lee S. Varon

A KIDS BOOK ABOUT OVERDOSE, by Lee S. Varon, LICSW (a kids book about Press, 2024)


Review by Julia Carlson


Many of you may know Lee Varon for her fine poetry, but there is another side to her work, which is a focus on addiction. Varon, a clinical social worker, has explored addiction personally in her poetry, but in the last few years she’s expanded her work to include fiction and workbooks about this complex subject. My Brother Is Not a Monster, a book for young readers from the view of a young girl whose older brother is a drug addict, is a sensitive, realistic rendering of addiction in a family. This story defines addiction, its consequences, and recovery. It is a hopeful story.



Now Varon brings us a workbook, A KIDS BOOK ABOUT OVERDOSE,. published by a kids book about Press (akidsco.com). This press focuses on topics like hope, feelings, relationships, and safety for a young audience. Like many of their releases, they suggest grownups and kids read it together. Overdose is a scary topic, even for adults, but anyone who has had to deal with addiction, whether personal, familial, professional, or social, knows that overdose is part of addiction’s fabric. Failure to quickly identify and treat it can lead to death.



Varon has done an excellent job defining overdose - drugs that can cause it, what addiction is, what overdose looks like, and what to do if you are unfortunate enough to witness one. There's a detailed description of what happens during a 911 call, including how to administer Narcan. This might be too much information for a younger child (this book is recommended for 5-9 years of age). In fact, this is why its suggested the book be read with à parent/caregiver.



The end of this book focuses on feelings that might arise after witnessing an overdose - fear, anger, sadness, confusion, guilt, and anxiety. Varon explains and normalizes how to deal with feeling helpless after such a terrifying event. There's also a “to-do” list of suggestions to help keep your home safe and our kids aware of what to do in an emergency.



It's a sad commentary indeed, when thousands of Americans, of all ages, have died due to drug overdose in the last 5 years, that Narcan, which reverses overdose, is now stocked in many restrooms, schools and public libraries, and in fact, that this book has even been written. However, I believe it’s important for this information to be out in the public domain. Keeping addiction a secret doesn’t help anyone. During my 25 years working in addiction, and especially with families and children, there were too many times when addiction reared its head. Children were often faced with situations like caregivers missing in action, arrested, passed out in the bathroom from an overdose, or worst case, dead. The outcome was not always positive and the children were left to suffer the effects.



It's obvious that the fight against addiction needs to continue - so much needs to be done. Treatment for rehabilitation and recovery, as well as general education about addiction, needs to be accessible on a wide scale. This workbook is a positive addition to the battle and should be in every school and public library.