Fiction

• The Last Warner Woman by Kei Miller
• Windeye by Brian Evenson
• Boarded Windows by Dylan Hicks

Nonfiction

• Half in Shade by Judith Kitchen

Poetry

• Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah by Patricia Smith
• In the Futurity Lounge by Marjorie Welish
• On the Planet Without Visa by Sotere Torregian
• Bright Brave Phenomena by Amanda Nadelberg

The Bookish Blend subscription features four prose titles (fiction & nonfiction) published between April 2012 and June 2012. Free shipping. Taxes included.

Fiction

• The Last Warner Woman by Kei Miller
• Windeye by Brian Evenson
• Boarded Windows by Dylan Hicks

Nonfiction

• Half in Shade by Judith Kitchen

The Poetic Brew subscription features four fiction titles published between April 2012 and August 2012. Free shipping. Taxes included.

Poetry

• Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah by Patricia Smith
• In the Futurity Lounge by Marjorie Welish
• On the Planet Without Visa by Sotere Torregian
• Bright Brave Phenomena by Amanda Nadelberg

Adamine Bustamante is born in one of Jamaica’s last leper colonies. When Adamine grows up, she discovers she has the gift of “warning”: the power to protect, inspire, and terrify. But when she is sent to live in England, her prophecies of impending disaster are met with a different kind of fear—people think she is insane and lock her away in a mental hospital.

Now an older woman, the spirited Adamine wants to tell her story. But she must wrestle for the truth with the mysterious “Mr. Writer Man,” who has a tale of his own to share, one that will cast Adamine’s life in an entirely new light. In a story about magic and migration, stories and storytelling, and the New and Old Worlds, we discover it is never one person who owns a story or has the right to tell it.

Reviews

“[E]motionally absorbing . . . ”—O, The Oprah Magazine, Top Ten Titles To Pick Up Now

“Mysticism, magic, tragedy and second changes figure largely in Kei Miller’s The Last Warner Woman; heroine Adamine Bustamante is born with a magical skill in a Jamaican leper colony and moves to London, where her gift is not always welcomed.”—EBONY, Quick and Good Books Section

“This is a deceptive spellbinder, a metafiction so disguised as old-time storytelling that you can almost hear the crackle of home fire as it starts. But then it gets you with twists and turns, seduces and shocks you even as it wrestles with the very nature of storytelling itself. Like the best Jean Rhys novel it’s the story of women haunted by women, and of the dangers of both keeping secrets and saying too much.” —Marlon James

“Beautifully imaginative and structurally inventive. . . . Miller’s narrative alternates between Adamine’s first-person account, told in a colorful and soul-baring patois, and sections recounted, mostly in the third person, by Mr. Writer Man. The two viewpoints at times conflict in illuminating ways, but Mr. Writer Man’s reflections on truth, history and literature pale next to the plot’s more immediate concerns: spirituality, violence against women, and migration, to name a few.” —Publishers Weekly

“Wonderfully weaving together realism and fantasy . . .  [Miller] shows us that magic is inherent in humanity. . . . Perhaps Miller’s greatest feat is the incorporation of the decorous yet often unused second person; sparingly used, it draws in the audience and demonstrates the special relationship between Adamine and Mr. Writer Man as well as the relationship between Miller and his readers. This poetic and enchanting work will appeal to readers of Caribbean literature and literary fiction.”—Library Journal

“[T]his is about the inconsistencies between what we say, what we hear, and what we do with what we say and hear. In a tale that in other hands might have been confusing, Miller portrays intriguing characters with perfect pitch in both narrative nuance and Adamine’s colorful patter.”—Booklist

“Miller’s well-crafted prose and the originality of his subject make this an entirely gratifying novel. I didn’t want to stop reading: from the very first sentence I was fascinated and knew that I was in the hands of a gifted writer. In the finely portrayed characters of Pearline and Adamine and the vivid details of the rural setting Kei Miller illuminates and gives a voice to a neglected piece of Jamaican and, indeed, human history. This novel is a rare pearl, one that I will cherish and delight in for a long time.” —Margaret Cezair-Thompson

“Miller is a name to watch.” —The Independent (UK)

“This is magical, lyrical, spellbinding writing.” —Granta

“The Last Warner Woman is a ‘splendocious’ story, told ‘crossways.’ . . . Miller, who is also a poet, circles around his truths, teases out just-right words to hint at elusive meanings, and ends the novel by acknowledging that in every book ‘the story within breathes its own breath.’ [W]onderfully evocative images and Jamaican words dot Miller’s mesmerizing novel, which enthralls, even as it confronts its readers.” —The Star Tribune

“To enter the dream of this story is to get caught up in a wonderful web.”—NewPages

Excerpt

Once upon a time there was a leper colony in Jamaica. If you wanted to get there today, you would have to find a man named Ernie McIntyre but who you would simply call Mr. Mac, by his own insistence and also the insistence of others, including his mother who knew him by no other name. Mr Mac was famous for his great big belly, so surprisingly big that the buttons on the one side of his shirt were permanently estranged from the holes they were supposed to be married to on the other; he also had a great big head, and a sprawling set of buttocks, all of which he could somehow manage to squeeze into the front seat of a Lada taxi, you in the passenger seat, and then make the wild jerky ascent up the red dirt road lined on each side with the broad green leaves of banana trees. When the car reaches the crest of the hill, Mr. Mac would stop, a welcome break, because if no one had warned you before about Mr. Mac’s driving, how he would press on the gas from the bottom of the hill and never ease off, not for any corner, not for any dip, not for any rock in the middle of the road, just gas gas gas all the way, the whole time giving you his own tour guide speech in a strange language which even if you could understand you would not hear because of the diesel engine; and if no one had warned you about all this and you had made the great mistake of having a full breakfast, then all that food would have churned up and you would be close to sick.

On the crest of the hill you would tumble out of the jeep, holding your stomach, while Mr. Mac excitedly points to something below.

“Look, mate.”

He would say this word, mate, because maybe you are from England and he is trying to impress you.

“Dung deh suh it deh. Yu nuh see it? Dung deh suh! Look nuh! Den wha mek yu a hole on pon yu belly like seh birt pain a hit yu? Look. See de zinc roof dem pint up through de mist. Deh suh we a guh.”

You would not understand Mr. Mac completely but you would look to where he was pointing and some of the words would then come together and make a kind of sense, for indeed, down there in the valley there were zinc roofs pointing up through the mist. And that’s where you were going. Just as the Original Pearline Portious had back in 1941 while her mother was frozen under a guava tree. Pearline had stood on this same crest of a hilltop, except she had arrived by her own two feet. She had also looked down on the tin roofs and made the decision to walk down. This, despite her seventeen years of living in these mountains and never before having stepped foot on the trail. If she had continued to listen to the wise counsel of her family and friends and all those who lived in the mountains, she would not have made this journey, for they had said over and over that down there in the valley was a place of terrible sickness.

But it wasn’t curiosity that led Pearline Portious down the trail, unwittingly changing her life. That day she needed to sell a purple doily. The color purple was a strange choice for a doily. It was accepted on the island that anything designed to cover wooden surfaces—table cloths, crocheted mats or doilies—was supposed to be white. Pearline’s determination to crochet and knit in colors—pink, blue, red, green, purple—meant that not a single one of her creations were ever sold. The absolute failure of what was supposed to be an entrepreneurial endeavor did not upset Pearline. She considered herself an artist, and of the kind whose chief aim was to please herself. Every unsold item would then truly belong to her and she took great pleasure in finding a place for them in her room. It was a room which everyone in the village had toured and reluctantly admitted, despite still being convinced that each individual item was ugly, that the combination of them was something wonderful. They said it was as if the child lived inside a rainbow.

Pearline’s mother, of course, tried hard to dissuade her daughter from her useless and colorful habits. That very morning she had observed her daughter knitting the purple doily under a guava tree.

“Pearline girl, look on what you is doing nuh! It is just ugly. Nobody is going to buy something like that. You cannot afford to always be making things for yo own self.”

“Mama. I will get this one sold. I promise.”

“Eh! You can’t even look me in the eyes and say that. Girl, you is just wasting time. Who really is going to buy that from you? We even looking on the same thing? It is purple, girl. Purple. Who you ever see with a purple doily in them good, good house?”

“I say I will get it sold, Mama.”

“Saying you going to get it sold not going to get it sold, Pearline. You is only full of talk. Look at me, girl. Is high time you grow up. And don’t puff up yu face at me neither. I saying these things for yu own good. Me and yu father giving you money dat we never just pick up outa road easy suh. And we giving it to you only for you to make these—these purple pieces of stupidness that not going a damn place except inside yu room.”

Pearline’s ten fingers began trembling. They became useless, unable to continue the knitting which had happily occupied them before her mother’s arrival. She kept her eyes fixed to the ground, unable to look up. Her mother was also trembling in anger. She had not intended for this confrontation to become a thing so big, and yet she knew it had to become bigger still. Having embarked on this road, she knew she had to walk its full length. So she stepped out of her slippers and onto the earth so her daughter would understand that the next words out of her mouth were serious.

“Alright, girl. Alright. You say you is going to sell this one. Well fine. Go and sell it. And I swear to you I will stay here on this piece of ground until that happen. Come thunderstorm or sunhot I not moving. You hearing me, child? Jesus Son of Mary would have to come down off him cross to move me. Cause is like you take me for some kind of poppyshow.”

Pearline finally looked up, astonished. She knew that this threat was true, for mothers were always doing things like that. Her mama would stay right there. She would not go inside  to sit or to cook or to sleep. She would not go to the farm ground to work. She would make the neighbors pass and see her as rooted as the tree she was standing under, and she would explain to them that it was her daughter that had made her into a poppyshow. She would stay there even for days until Pearline either sold the doily or came back and apologized saying Mama, you are right. It is time I grow up. So the Original Pearline Portious went off to the market, desperate to do what she had never been able to do before.

Multimedia

Reading Group Guide

1. Who do you feel is the book’s more reliable narrator, and why?

2. Is Adamine morally culpable for abandoning the leprosy patients?

3. Is Ada sane? If so, how do we explain her bouts of amnesia in the mental hospital? If not, at what point does her insanity begin, and does something specific cause its manifestation?

4. What is the role of religion in the novel? How would you describe Ada’s relationship with spirituality?

5. What is the role of women in the novel, and to what extent does Ada conform to or defy this mold?

6. Is madness universally or culturally defined? Was Ada sane in Jamaica but crazy in England? Or did one of the two get it wrong?

7. There is an undercurrent of male domination, rape, and abuse in the novel, beginning in its very first chapter and persisting to the end with Adamine’s own rape. To what extent are men portrayed as villains, and to what extent is this behavior considered a cultural norm in Jamaica?

8. Most of Ada’s friendships are short-lived. How would you define Ada’s relationship with other women?

9. Why does Adamine, a respected and powerful individual, feel there is “nothing for her” in Jamaica?

10. The power of the mind is a recurring theme in the novel, beginning with Mother Lazarus’s story. What is Adamine’s relationship with her own “power of mind?”

A memoir by Judith Kitchen

When Judith Kitchen inherited boxes of family photographs and scrapbooks, they sparked curiosity and speculation. Piecing together her memories with the physical evidence in the photos, along with a sense of history and a willingness to speculate, Kitchen explores the gray areas between the present and the past, family and self, certainty and uncertainty. The result is a lyrical, ennobling anatomy of a heritage, family, mother-daughter relationships, and the recovery from an illness that captures with precision the forces of the heart and mind when “none of us knows what lies beyond the moment, outside the frame.”

Reviews

“Judith Kitchen has written a book that is at once clear and accessible and at the same time insistently complex. Her effortlessly constructed hybrids make Half in Shade part memoir, part speculation, part essay, a demonstration of the interactive art of seeing, and finally for me, a beautifully sustained meditation. It is at that meditative level that the book’s potent, unsentimental emotive power gathers.” —Stuart Dybek

“[Half in Shade] rewards a leisurely reading, with not only, as Kitchen promises, “patterns of American immigration and opportunities,” but an experience that may open the eyes to the treasure chest of American experience found among those stepchildren of the arts—the snapshots. Kitchen’s book lets you know what a keen eye coupled with an alert and sensitive intelligence can see.” —Publishers Weekly

“Half in Shade is one of those rare, hypnotically enjoyable books that can be stretched out over many long, lazy afternoons or read in one sitting. Kitchen writes of photographs that ‘there is a mystery in a still moment. The very black-and-white of it. It serves as entry into another time, another place.’ The same could be said of her words.” —ForeWard

“Half in Shade is the work—diligent and curious—of an innocent of sorts, a daughter, mother, and grandmother mapping family stories and myths using grainy images as her guide.”—No Such Thing As Was

“Behind the beautiful language Kitchen employs and the poignant moments she unearths, it’s the theme of life’s instability that resonates most. . . . Using her imagination—and ours—Kitchen creates a testament to the veracity of art: sometimes the fiction is more real than the facts. More importantly, sometimes all the spectator needs to connect the dots is that uncanny sense of familiarity.”—The Brooklyn Rail

Excerpt

I seem to be stuck in their wake, halting behind each of them as they stop, pose, smile, then move apart, while I wait patiently, for them to finish. In twenty-seven languages they speak the universal tongue—the telltale click that says you’re trapped in someone else’s frame. The place does not matter, though this time it is the Butchart Gardens just outside Victoria, British Columbia. It’s crowded, and I can barely see the flowers for the people who stream past them. In the distance, wild geese lift from the field where they have been feeding, circle once, then settle in the further distance on a pond. The tractor that disturbed them drones on, turning the earth for what looks to be yet another bed.

These are no ordinary flowers—or rather, they are ordinary flowers set in extraordinary circumstance. Each individual garden tucks itself into the hillside, or wanders down to the water—all but the regimental Italian garden that now occupies what was once the tennis courts. The gardens swell with color: one all white, from the tiniest rock creepers to the tallest hollyhocks; another yellow and muted orange; and, of course, the subdued greenery of the Japanese garden with its stylized miniature trees and drab stone Buddhas, punctuated by one bright red bridge over a studiously placid stream. By now the flowering trees have gone to green, and the rhododendrons are clearly past their prime. Today there’s a riot of roses—those most boring of blooms, stiff on their thorny stems.

Stop. Position your subject. Raise the camera. Stop. Motion your subject to move a little to the left. There. Now you can see the roses too. Click. Flash. A document of your day. And there I am, pausing while you chatter away, oblivious, it seems, to anyone or anything else. Oblivious to the fine rain that falls, even as the sun insists itself, the day softened into the spectrum, all indigo and mauve. Or iris. Lilac. Lavender.

Rose.

My quick count tells me that two of every three people here are carrying a camera. Some carry two—one for the hand, another slung around the neck, zoom lens glaring like a ferret’s eye. And there are camcorders as well, through roses do not dip and sway the way a field of tulips might, do not turn their heads or whisper or bow. So it must be all these milling, smiling people these cameras intend to seize—here on a Monday morning in mid-June, sometime in my past.

Among married couples, ninety-two percent of the time the man is in charge of the camera, but fairly often the wife wields a smaller version as well. Two women together either carry one each, or else none. In the amorphous groups of young people, everyone sports a leather case. Only children are free of the duty to record: they coil around lampposts, lean over the sides of fountains, poke or prod, race ahead or drag their heels—anything to disrupt the static posture of these planted beds, their planned finery.

What will the children remember of this day? The boredom. The see-through umbrella. The migrant feather found at the edge of the walk. The way Grandma kept stopping to sit on every bench. The way Uncle Martin made them stop so he could enforce his idea of family: Say cheese, fromage, formaggio, queso, queijo, käse, kaas, chi-zu, jibini, tupi, serowy, ost. In twenty-seven languages, smile.

I prefer their young memories—the inexplicable ennui—to the albums that will eventually shape this day in recollection, the fabricated family lined up against a background of fuchsias and pinks, backdrops to the drama of forced smiles and obligatory arms around shoulders.

In the photograph, we look at; the self becomes someone we watch with mild curiosity as the day spools out in three-by-five increments. The shutter clicked, and caught me thus, therefore I am.

In memory, we walk through. We reenact. We call up the slight shiver as the sun disappeared behind a cloud. We hear again the chatter, the mishmash of sounds as people call to each other, point and click. We conjure the moment when the wings all beat the air as if they were one large wing and the tractor made a syntax of sound. We stop to let the man ahead of us focus his third eye, as though he, too, would remember himself poised at the frozen edge of the moment before the moment before.

So, I hesitate just beyond the range of their future, a woman they did not notice or, when they did, they thanked politely as she halted her own passage through the day to make room for their documentation. What will they do with the stacks of prints tucked into their envelopes as though to preserve the limits of perception? The bottom drawers of twenty-seven countries grow steadily heavier, weighted with these self-defined memento vivere.

Photographers Anonymous. There must be a club for those who have sworn off this addiction, who resist the urge to snap and snag, whose memories provide the pigment, the sensation of the hand on the lizard-skin rail of the bridge, the goldfish wavering like coins in the water below. They meet in secret, in the pages of books, their ears attuned to what will make the eye respond, the inner eye, the one without the necessary attachments, where zooming in means going deep. They meet in secret, and they share their fear that we have lost the art of seeing to the technologies of looking. Look, they say, at what we’ve become. So many identical photographs—just lift out John and brush in Jacques. Same time, same place, same faces filled with stilted smiles. Same thoughts, same—oh, shame—desires.

“Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear! From out of the past come the thundering hoof-beats of the great horse Silver,” and I’m a child, sitting in front of the old Philco waiting for The Lone Ranger, 7:30 p.m., every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, the voice on the radio conjuring the masked rider and his quiet companion, Tonto. I’m seeing it all unfold—the plains unrolling under Silver’s hooves, giddy with sagebrush and tumbleweed, the mountains an austere blue in the distance. Where did I get that image—I, a child who had yet to see a movie? Yet it was so clear, so perfectly mine.

And now I’m alive again in that time—maples shading the street like a dusk before dusk; the street itself cooling in that after-dinner hour when children can circle and circle on bikes, or prick their ears to the clanking refrain of kick-the-can; time held at bay until my mother’s clear voice orbits the yards, calling us in to thrill to history.

Never mind that the speed-of-light hoofbeats were bathroom plungers pumped up and down in sand or gravel. Never mind that the gunshots were a cane slapping a leather cushion. Never mind that the rushing river was really crumpled paper. In my mind it was real, made all the more real because it happened only in my mind.

Imagination, then, must be the flip side of memory, not so much a calling up as a calling forth. Yet imagination also relies on knowledge: on knowing what is—and is not—possible in this world of fact. Imagination plants the seed or buries the bulb knowing the seasons will shift, seeing, in the mind’s eye, April give way to August, the azalea to the rose, knowing that the red leaves of the maple will burnish in autumn, knowing that from this exact window, one can look down to the inlet where the moon’s reflection will be just another shimmering white blossom.

And the photo? It catches the moon’s reflection—here—held forever in this one impressionistic night, while the moon moves on, dropping below the horizon, giving way to the pastel dawn. While we move on to other gardens, other moments to record. The snapshot holds us still in our twenties, our thirties, our sixties. Past tense. Imagination fills the aperture, finds the griefs that caused the lines at the corners of the eyes. And memory reconstructs those griefs, faded now to bearable, but alive and squirming beneath the glossy surface, demanding their day in the brash, unflinching glare of the sun—the hidden ultraviolet damage of it—until grief cannot be glossed over, but finds us out again, and again.

This is not art. This is life, where grief accompanies our every loss, and every photo is a loss recorded. We sift through the album, grieving, even as we smile in recollection. In every language, it’s a mixed blessing I stop for, waiting for strangers to complete the process so we can all walk on, in present tense.

A woman falling out of sync with the world; a king’s servant hypnotized by his murderous horse; a transplanted ear with a mind of its own—the characters in these stories live as interlopers in a world shaped by mysterious disappearances and unfathomable discrepancies between the real and imagined. Evenson, master of literary horror, presents his most far-ranging collection to date, exploring how humans struggle to persist in an increasingly unreal world. Haunting, gripping, and psychologically fierce, these tales illuminate a dark and unsettling side of humanity.

Reviews

“Brian Evenson is one of the treasures of American story writing, a true successor both to the generation of Coover, Barthelme, Hawkes and Co., but also to Edgar Allan Poe.” —Jonathan Lethem

“Laughter can be an effective tool of the horror writer, and Evenson is its finest practitioner.” —Time Out Chicago

“All the stories in this collection are hard-edged, tinged with emotional or physical violence and capped by shock or outright horror. Characterized by building suspense and dread, these tales often have a folkloric feel far removed from the commonplace.” —Booklist

“For those whose imaginations constantly hunger for genuine nourishment, Brian Evenson’s Windeye is a feast . . . Windeye delivers a complex and varied collection filled with contrasting flavors. Ranging from feudal to post-apocalyptic, it contains some of the best uncanny and horror writing to come out of New England since Stephen King published The Stand in 1978.” —ForeWard

Excerpt

Windeye

1.

They lived, when he was growing up, in a simple house, an old bungalow with a converted attic and sides covered in cedar shake. In the back, where an oak thrust its branches over the roof, the shake was light brown, almost honey. In the front, where the sun struck it full, it had weathered to a pale gray, like a dirty bone. There, the shingles were brittle, thinned by sun and rain, and if you were careful you could slip your fingers up behind some of them. Or at least his sister could. He was older and his fingers thicker, so he could not.

Looking back on it, many years later, he often thought it had started with that, with her carefully working her fingers up under a shingle as he waited and watched to see if it would crack. That was one of his earliest memories of his sister, if not the earliest.

His sister would turn around and smile, her hand gone to knuckles, and say, “I feel something. What am I feeling?” And then he would ask questions. Is it smooth? he might ask. Does it feel rough? Scaly? Is it cold-blooded or warm-blooded? Does it feel red? Does it feel like its claws are in or out? Can you feel its eye move? He would keep on, watching the expression on her face change as she tried to make his words into a living, breathing thing, until it started to feel too real for her and, half giggling, half screaming, she whipped her hand free.

There were other things they did, other ways they tortured each other, things they both loved and feared. Their mother didn’t know anything about it, or if she did she didn’t care. One of them would shut the other inside the toy chest and pretend to leave the room, waiting there silently until the one in the chest couldn’t stand it any longer and started to yell. That was a hard game for him because he was afraid of the dark, but he tried not to show that to his sister. Or one of them would wrap the other tight in blankets, and then the trapped on would have to break free. Why they had liked it, why they had done it, he had a hard time remembering later, once he was grown. But they had liked it, or at least he had liked it—there was no denying that—and he had done it. No denying that either.

So at first those games, if they were games, and then, later, something else, something worse, something decisive. What was it again? Why was it hard, now that he was grown, to remember? What was it called? Oh, yes, Windeye.

2.

How had it begun? And when? A few years later, when the house started to change for him, when he went from thinking about each bit and piece of it as a separate thing and started thinking of it as a house. His sister was still coming up close, entranced by the gap between shingle and wall, intrigued by the twist and curve of a crack in the concrete steps. It was not that she didn’t know there was a house, only that the smaller bits were more important than the whole. For him, though, it had begun to be the reverse.

So he began to step back, to move back in the yard far enough away to take the whole house in at once. His sister would give him a quizzical look and try to coax him in closer, to get him involved in something small. For a while, he’d play to her level, narrate to her what the surface she was touching or the shadow she was glimpsing might mean, so she could pretend. But over time, he drifted out again. There was something about the house, the house as a whole, that troubled him. But why? Wasn’t it just like any house?

His sister, he saw, was standing beside him, staring at him. He tried to explain it to her, tried to put a finger on what fascinated him. This house, he told her. It’s a little different. There’s something about it … But he saw, from the way she looked at him, that she thought it was a game, that he was making it up.

“What are you seeing?” she asked again, with a grin.

Why not? he thought. Why not make it a game?

“What are you seeing?” he asked her.

Her grin faltered a little but she stopped staring at him and stared at the house.

“I see a house,” she said.

“Is there something wrong with it?” he prompted.

She nodded, then looked to him for approval.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

Her brow tightened like a fist. “I don’t know,” she finally said. “The window?”

“What about the window?”

“I want you to do it,” she said. “It’s more fun.”

He sighed, and then pretended to think. “Something wrong with the window,” he said. “Or not the window exactly but the number of windows.” She was smiling, waiting. “The problem is the number of windows. There’s one more window on the outside than on the inside.”

He covered his mouth with his hand. She was smiling and nodding, but he couldn’t go on with the game. Because, yes, that was exactly the problem, there was one more window on the outside than on the inside. That he knew was what he’d been trying to see.

3.

But he had to make sure. He had his sister move from room to room in the house, waving to him from each window. The ground floor was all right, he saw her each time. But in the converted attic, just shy of the corner, there was a window at which she never appeared.

It was a small and round, probably only a foot and a half in diameter. The glass was dark and wavery. It was held in place by a strip of metal about as thick as his finger, giving the whole circumference a dull, leaden rim.

He went inside and climbed the stairs, looking for the window himself, but it simply wasn’t there. But when he went back outside, there it was.

For a time, it felt like he had brought the problem to life himself by stating it, that if he hadn’t said anything the half-window wouldn’t be there. Was that possible? He didn’t think so, that wasn’t the way the world worked. But even later, once he was grown, he still found himself wondering sometimes if it was his fault, if it was something he had done. Or rather, said.

Staring up at the half-window, he remembered a story his grandmother had told him, back when he was very young, just three or four, just after his father had left and just before his sister was born. Well, he didn’t remember it exactly, but he remembered it had to do with windows. Where she came form, his grandmother said, they used to be called not windows but something else. He couldn’t remember the word, but remembered that it started with a v. She had said the word and then had asked, Do you know what this means? He shook his head. She repeated the word, slower this time.

“This first part,” she had said, “it means ‘wind.’ This second part, it means ‘eye.’” She looked at him with her own pale, steady eye. “It is important to know that a window can be instead a windeye.”

So he and his sister called it that, windeye. It was, he told her, how the wind looked into the house and so was not a window at all. So of course they couldn’t look out of it; it was not a window at all, but a windeye.

He was worried she was going to ask questions, but she didn’t. And then they went into the house to look again, to make sure it wasn’t a window after all. But it wasn’t there on the inside.

Then they decided to get a closer look. They had figured out which window was nearest to it and opened that and leaned out of it. There it was. If they leaned far enough, they could see it and almost touch it.

“I could reach it,” his sister said. “If I stand on the sill and you hold my legs, I could lean out and touch it.”

“No,” he started to say, but, fearless, she had already clambered onto the sill and was leaning out. He wrapped his arms around her legs to keep her from falling. He was just about to pull her back inside when she leaned farther and he saw her finger touch the windeye. And then it was as if she had dissolved into smoke and been sucked into the windeye. She was gone.

4.

It took him a long time to find his mother. She was not inside the house, nor was she outside in the yard. He tried the house next door, the Jorgensens, and then the Allreds, then the Dunfords. She wasn’t anywhere. So he ran back home, breathless, and somehow his mother was there now, lying on the couch, reading.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

He tried to explain it best he could. Who? she asked at first and then said Slow down and tell it again, and then, But who do you mean? And then, once he’d explained again, with an odd smile:

“But you don’t have a sister.”

But of course he had a sister. How could his mother have forgotten? What was wrong? He tried to describe her, to explain what she looked like, but his mother just kept shaking her head.

“No,” she said firmly. “You don’t have a sister. You never had one. Stop pretending. What’s this really about?”

Which made him feel that he should hold himself very still, that he should be very careful about what he said, that if he breathed wrong more parts of the world would disappear.

After talking and talking, he tried to get his mother to come out and look at the windeye.

“Window, you mean,” she said, her voice rising.

“No,” he said, beginning to grow hysterical as well. “Not window. Windeye.” And then he had her by the hand and was tugging her to the door. But no, that was wrong too, because no matter which window he pointed at she could tell him where it was in the house. The windeye, just like his sister, was no longer there.

But he kept insisting it had been there, kept insisting too that he had a sister.

And that was when the trouble really started.

5.

Over the years there were moments when he was almost convinced, moments when he almost began to think—and perhaps even did think for weeks or months at a time—that he never had a sister. It would have been easier to think this than to think she had been alive and then, perhaps partly because of him, not alive. Being not alive wasn’t like being dead, he felt: it was much, much worse. There were years too when he simply didn’t choose, when he saw her as both real and make believe and sometimes neither of those things. But in the end what made him keep believing in her—despite the line of doctors that visited him as a child, despite the rift it made between him and his mother, despite years of forced treatment and various drugs that made him feel like his head had been filled with wet sand, despite years of having to pretend to be cured—was simply this: he was the only one who believed his sister was real. If he stopped believing, what hope would there be for her?

Thus he found himself, even when his mother was dead and gone and he himself was old and alone, brooding on his sister, wondering what had become of her. He wondered too if one day she would simply reappear, young as ever, ready to continue with the games they had played. Maybe she would simply suddenly be there again, her tiny fingers worked up behind a cedar shingle, staring expectantly at him, waiting for him to tell her what she was feeling, to make up words for what was pressed there between the house and its skin, lying in wait.

“What is it?” he would say in a hoarse voice, leaning on his cane.

“I feel something,” she would say. “What am I feeling?”

And he would set about describing it. Does it feel red? Does it feel warm-blooded or cold? Is it round? Is it smooth like glass? All the while, he knew, he would be thinking not about what he was saying but about the wind at his back. If he turned around, he would be wondering, would he find the wind’s strange, baleful eye staring at him?

That wasn’t much, but it was the best he could hope for. Chances were he wouldn’t get even that. Chances were there would be no sister, no wind. Chances were that he’d be stuck with the life he was living now, just as it was, until the day when he was either dead or not living himself.

About
Minneapolis writer-musician Dylan Hicks’s fourth album and a companion to his debut novel, Boarded Windows.

Credits
Dylan Hicks, vibraslap, vocals, piano, organ; Terrry Eason, guitar; James Everest, bass; Erik Mathison, drums; Joe Hastings, vocals; Rachel Price, saxophones; Joe Savage, pedal steel; Walter Schleisman, trombone; Brian Tighe, vocals.

Produced by Dylan Hicks and Jason Orris.

Photography and design by Karl Raschke.

About
Minneapolis writer-musician Dylan Hicks’s fourth album and a companion to his debut novel, Boarded Windows.

Credits
Dylan Hicks, vibraslap, vocals, piano, organ; Terrry Eason, guitar; James Everest, bass; Erik Mathison, drums; Joe Hastings, vocals; Rachel Price, saxophones; Joe Savage, pedal steel; Walter Schleisman, trombone; Brian Tighe, vocals.

Produced by Dylan Hicks and Jason Orris.

Photography and design by Karl Raschke.

Wade Salem is a charismatic aesthete, drug dealer, and journeyman country musician. He’s also a complicated father figure to this novel’s narrator, whose cloudy childhood becomes both clearer and more confusing through Wade’s stories, jokes, and lectures. Through the eyes of a keenly observant, underemployed record collector, Wade emerges as a sly, disruptive force, at once seductive and maddening.

Shifting between flashbacks from the seventies and nineties, Boarded Windows is a postmodern orphan story that explores the fallibility of memory and the weight of our social and cultural inheritance. Stylistically layered and searchingly lonesome, Dylan Hicks’s debut novel captures the music and mood of the fading embers of America’s boomer counterculture.

Each book comes with a free download of the companion soundtrack, “Sings Bolling Greene,” written and performed by the author.

Special Offer

The “Music & Lyrics” bundles:
Option #1: Get a signed copy of the book and a signed, limited edition CD of the soundtrack, “Sings Bolling Greene” for $20
Option #2: A  signed copy of the book and a signed, limited edition LP of the soundtrack, “Sings Bolling Greene” for $25

Reviews

Excerpt

The last time I saw Wade Salem was the morning of December 21, 1991, through the window of a green and white taxi. I stood on the sidewalk’s lumpy mattress of snow and watched him toss a backpack to the other side of the seat, and pull off his pomponed Washington Redskins cap with a nod toward urgency. The taxi was overheated, it’s safe to imagine. I had recently turned twenty-one. I had even more recently lent Wade the backpack, in the way one lends out a quarter or a piece of gum. In the trunk was my former guitar, a mid-priced acoustic on which three or four nights earlier Wade had played “Gentle on My Mind” and “The Poor Orphan Child.”

Something—my sticky-zippered backpack, or, more likely, the Redskins cap—must have slid off the backseat’s slippery vinyl, because just as the taxi was about to pull out into the lane, its wheels creaking the snow, Wade leaned over (to pick up the cap, I’m speculating), erasing himself from the rear passenger-side window, like I and millions of others had slide-erased stale sketches from our magnetic drawing toys, such as the one Wade long ago brought home to me, unwrapped, as an ingratiating gift. His head reemerged as the taxi made its first turn toward the airport. For a moment I lingered on the sidewalk, across the busy westward one-way from a pretentiously named Nixon-era apartment building, its mansard roof covering most of its face like the Fat Albert character’s nonpomponed cap. The bare trees and dirty boulevard snow were aptly gloomy, but the sky was blue, seemed too blue for the nostril-stinging cold. I felt tired and brittle, wished my feelings of good riddance weren’t so mixed with longing.

Multimedia

Minnesota Monthly Q&A with Dylan Hicks:

Q: The narrator of Boarded Windows is a young man who works in a Minneapolis record store in the 1990s and gets caught in a Halloween blizzard. Um, is this you?

Dylan Hicks: The store is drawn pretty closely from Musicland, where I worked for a long time. But the substantial stuff is invented: I was never visited by a con-man father figure.

Q: You played in bands as the “governor of fun” back then. Were you especially fun?

DH: No. I meant it as a play on songs like Otis Redding’s “Love Man,” an ironic persona.

Q: The book is crammed with cultural references—songs, novels—some fake, right?

DH: I wanted to create a dream world where the reader can’t identify what’s real. For his latest novel, Jonathan Franzen made up a band called Walnut Surprise, which seems ridiculous at first. But after a while it’s like, sure, Walnut Surprise, why not?

Q: The character who can only have sex to John Philip Sousa marches—true story?

DH: She is a friend of a friend. But the rumors may not have been true.

Q: You’re releasing your first CD in years, Dylan Hicks Sings Bolling Greene, as a companion to the book. What inspired it?

DH: Bolling Greene is a country musician who skirts the edges of this book, a kind of intellectual Kris Kristofferson type. For the CD, I wasn’t pretending to be him so much as riffing, like I’m covering his songs from memory.

In her newest collection, National Book Award finalist Patricia Smith explores the second wave of the Great Migration. From her parents’ move from the South to Chicago to being raised as an “up North” child under the spell of Motown music, she captures the rampant romanticism of waiting and hoping and the dogged disappointment and damage of living under a delusion. Shifting from spoken word to free verse to traditional forms, she reveals “that soul beneath the vinyl.”

Reviews

“Patricia Smith is writing some of the best poetry in America today. Ms. Smith’s new book is just beautiful—and like the America she embodies and represents—dangerously beautiful. Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah is a stunning and transcendent work of art, despite, and perhaps because of, its pain. This book shines.” —Sapphire

“Patricia Smith’s dazzling new book sings Chicago and Detroit, the midcentury migration of African American families northward (They say it’s better up there . . .), to cities both harsh and alluring, cities that offer and withhold, raise hopes and dash them at once. Above all, Smith turns her attention—her passion, her fierce sonic powers—to Motown, that aural mirage, the shimmering promises inherent in ‘every wall of horn, every slick choreographed / swivel . . .’ Here is one of our essential poets at the top of her form, bristling with energy and fire, praise and outrage. There’s no one like Patricia Smith, and her bold, necessary poems light up the American twentieth century in all its song and sorrow.” —Mark Doty

“From the Mississippi Delta to Chicago, these poems embody America. Patricia Smith is a formidably gifted poet (‘Motown Crown’ is stunning), yet perhaps her greatest gift is her openness—my heart is made larger when I live with any of her words, if only for awhile.”
—Nick Flynn

“At her best Patricia Smith writes poems full of risk and courage, thick with pain and alive with insight and humor. At her best, Patricia Smith confronts memory with delight and alarm, and manages to find music in the abject and callow. At her best, Patricia Smith has discovered the necessary equation to make beautiful, memorable poems: she calls it ‘the crunch / of bone, suck of marrow.’ In Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah, part elegy to things past, part epic poem of migration and the planting of roots, part anthem to Chicago, to family, to the deepest unspeakable secrets of a girl’s coming of age, Patricia Smith is at her best, and the gift she presents to us is truly, truly priceless.” —Kwame Dawes

“Patricia Smith’s newest collection, Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah, evokes a sense of history and self-awareness combined with precise storytelling and the most crafted verse. . . . In her current incarnation, we find one of the most authentic voices of Modern American Poetry.” —Pank Magazine

“Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah is about the Great Migration, when a half million African Americans left the South and moved to Chicago between 1916 and 1970. [S]mith evokes parents and children in the new urban environment.” —The Pioneer Press

“The people here are so vividly drawn that the reader is deep in their world by the fourth poem of the book, and what a rich, many-layered world Smith creates, full of passion, struggle, and a fierce and vivid surviving, behind which, all ‘swerve and pivot,’ all ‘languid, liquid, luscious’ is Motown. . . . Smith’s poems are their own powerful music.” —Mead Magazine

“Welcome to a place of hopes and dreams punctured with rawness and pain. Patricia Smith’s autobiographical epic is cinematic in scale yet music box in intimacy. . . . Smith compresses culture ’til it peals like crystal—like singing light.”—The Brooklyn Rail

Excerpt

From “Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah”

My mother scraped the name Patricia Ann from the ruins
of her discarded Delta, thinking it would offer me shield
and shelter, that leering men would skulk away at the slap
of it. Her hands on the hips of Alabama, she went for flat
and functional, then siphoned each syllable of drama,
repeatedly crushing it with her broad, practical tongue
until it sounded like an instruction to God and not a name.
She wanted a child of pressed head and knocking knees,
a trip-up in the doubledutch swing, a starched pinafore
and peppermint-in-the-sour pickle kinda child, stiff-laced
and unshakably fixed on salvation. Her Patricia Ann
would never idly throat the Lord’s name or wear one
of those thin, sparkled skirts that flirted with her knees.
She’d be a nurse or a third-grade teacher or a postal drone,
jobs requiring alarm clock discipline and sensible shoes.
My four downbeats were music enough for a vapid life
of butcher shop sawdust and fatback as cuisine, for Raid
spritzed into the writhing pockets of a Murphy bed.
No crinkled consonants or muted hiss would summon me.

Multimedia