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In a fragmented world, what remains? Presence, Sheila Heti’s newest novel insists, in all its broken and halfhearted and odd forms. Being present, however halfheartedly, to people and to texts is one balm for this condition.
Jeff Chon’s 2020 novel creates the impression that we cannot help but be immersed in the very toxic culture being satirized and critiqued. We feel the discomfiting sense that we are operating on someone else’s turf—and we aren’t likely to find our way out anytime soon.
If “home lies in ‘re-membering,’” then home is not a place, but an ongoing process. To traverse land is to trace the steps of your forebears, and to travel in search of heritage is to access our past by living fiercely in the present and finding what stories live there.
In Michelle Zauner’s 2021 memoir and Russell Banks’s 1991 novel, unfathomable loss catapults people into unknown realms of pain and lonesomeness—but with time, trauma also leads them back to selves they had always contained but almost forgotten.
You read a poem aloud or, more often, a voice almost like your own recites the words in your mind, almost like being silent. What you hear is your performance of the poem: your internal recitation directed by the poem’s unimpeachable arrangement, how it asks to be read.
Susan Briante’s 2016 collection illustrates that the metaphor of market value is not only hollow but violent, since we have no choice but to be interpellated by it. The market scans us, calculates pecuniary value; in return we must surrender everything else.
Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel shows the painful reality that transformation and remembrance go hand in hand. This isn’t comforting—how can it be?—but to remember, to practice remembrance daily, shapes a person.
Joy Harjo’s signature project as the twenty-third U.S. Poet Laureate is one of mapmaking: gathering poems by forty-seven Native Nations poets in a cartography of voice. This poetic map acknowledges other maps of colonial violence and erasure, and while poetry can offer no full answer to the pain, it can bear witness.
Sarah Manguso, Beth Ann Fennelly, and Heather Christle show that what may at first look like fragments are instead distillations of memories, emotions, and experience—made stronger by their brevity and turned into something whole through their painstaking arrangement.
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