The Fifth Woman by Nona Caspers

The Fifth Woman by Nona Caspers
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I get to the middle of Nona Caspers’ book, The Fifth Woman, and suddenly I want to write. D. H. Lawrence’s requisite to great writing, “An interesting mind at work” leaps out at us from the page. That’s why I do this for free, I’m thinking, so I can read free books like these and feel like this… Wow. It’s like a really long prose poem, cut into sections; a sort of mystery play of grief and recovery, loss and redemption; but through a contemporary, Bay Area writer’s life; a transplant from the Middle West, as many of us are.

The clarity of her sentences pulls me into a story I’ve “made up” about the huge, empty house at the corner of Avalon and Claremont that I’ve wanted to write about for weeks, “Its children’s bedroom windows gazing open but empty, southward to the wide, waiting world…” I leap from mere words on the page to a Creator’s viewpoint, The Large. I haven’t read anything this perfect since Laurie Anne Doyle’s World Gone Missing, so right.

It’s a different voice than Doyle’s, of course; plot, thought and emotional pattern; but clear and right in the same way, as if we’re brought into the moment of each story purely, succinctly, cracking open a flat, gray rock and discovering a bright chunk of gold.What used to be surrealism, now called “magical realism” since Allende and Ionesco brought them into fiction and stories; makes immense, mythic and multidimensional the ordinary world.

After a series of interlocked grim but gripping portraits, scenarios and incidents; guided by her beckoning Mother’s image as she steps out her back door into the yard outside; she boards a bus, is transported to a primal deer hunt out of Gen X techie San Francisco, and she stalks and kills, dismembers and transports her venison; recollects her Father, memories of her lover, Michelle; converses with a worm, a bear, her own heart, as she moves through a time where impossible things happen. Like recovering from an intimate death.

Getty Images, Free, Park & Fog

Where are her images from? Her dreams, feelings, hallucinations? Her world is ours, metropolitan, everyone’s. But so full of love, longing and precision. Everyone who’s ever loved and lost, lost hope, kept going, watched time drag and days dwindle and sag, then finally caught sight of a shoelace that’s just a shoelace, a day that’s just a day.

My heart grows wide, my mind triples with these writers. A voice of song, a breath of time, a breeze of hope…

The Berkeley Times, 9 January, 2020, © 2020 Wyndy J Knox Carr

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The Beadworkers, Stories by Beth Piatote

The Beadworkers by Beth Piatote
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Author Beth Piatote's book shows us clear truth of Indigenous survivals in a hostile world which has mistaken their way of life and individual lives as "hostile" and inferior. Piatote, a Nez Perce and an Associate Professor of Native American Studies at Cal Berkeley, gathered a packed house at the Tuesday night Ohlone Café University Press Bookstore on Bancroft Way for her reading of parts of The Beadworkers, recently released by Counterpoint Press, another Berkeley endeavor. We munched “the first foods of that place” and drank dark herbal teas as Beth read and Café host Vincent Medina gave a quick historical background of the place, people, language and its foodstuffs.

It was the day after an Alameda County Superior Court judge turned away a quick approval process for the planned development on the historical West Berkeley Shellmound, halting the bulldozers for perhaps another five years, in recognition of the site’s “cultural heritage.” Cultural heritage is the foundational material of Piatote’s book, expressed in beautiful, funny and poignant characters and their tales and lives in poetry, story and a short play.

Antíkoni crafts a rewriting of the Antigone story around the seizure and possession of “thousands of ancestors’” remains “held across the street” in the anthropological “collections” of the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum, confronting Kreon as an “apple” (red on the outside and white on the inside) who has bargained away her “outmoded” respect for the bodies of their ancestors. He has taken what he sees as “the only path to power” “Through diligence and obsequious posture,” ignoring both justice and their community, as represented by a chorus of the legend-telling Aunties. Antíkoni, her brother and the Aunties defy him with immediate action and timeless legends of the interconnectedness of all life on Mother Earth.

Language, family, land, cyclical returns, collective care and labor illuminate these tales of loss and revitalization, resilience, humor and attention. Prayer, ways of expressing the aesthetics of “We are those people from that place,” and the “adaptability” and “continued practice” for the forms their culture and communities hold flow through her work, inspired by Indigenous “tactile working together” from beading a sash to protecting the waters of North America and the world for the salmon and at Standing Rock as well.

All Our Relations! Aho!

Kreon’s son says to him, “you remain an Indian. And an Indian is no one without his Tribe.” Truth told. A very good collection. More to come, please!

Water Protectors Camp 1 Dec 2016 reutersmedia.net

The Berkeley Times, 9 January, 2020, ©2020 Wyndy J Knox Carr



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