Book Review – Women Who Submit

August 7, 2023August 9, 2023

Intersect: Exploring the Longing

Book Review By Lisbeth Coiman

As a writer, I grapple with the immigrant dilemma of allowing contradicting parts of me to find their way in my work or isolate them and write from a specific perspective. In nature felt but never apprehended, Angela Peñaredondo navigates the intersecting paths of immigration and gender politics: A Filipino immigrant struggling to find a home while holding a permanent longing, breaks down their family’s history in search of DNA clues for gender identity.

Earth scientists, botanists, and nature aficionados all learn to read the environment for clues. A rock can tell how old a mountain is and animal behavior can warn the explorer of environmental dangers ahead. Peñaredondo’s collection nature felt but never apprehended is a field trip in search of ancestral cues in the Philipine’s mountainous landscape. Peñaredondo approaches their themes from a naturalist perspective, naming and interpreting their environment to create the paradigm defining diasporic Filipino queer identity.

This four-part collection begins by offering a life raft “I set your weight on a raft” in a ritual for the ancestors the poet is about to dissect, “steel pointed like hawk bone at your bare collar.” First, the poet confronts the lineage of colonized bodies “excavating the bedrock” of the mountain range during the Battle for Manila in 1945 and placing two male lovers at its center under the heavy weight of Catholic dogma.

The imagery in these first poems does not exoticize the tropics nor the male participants of the story. Rather it presents the Philippines in all its complex glory: magnificent nature, Catholic culture, battleground during World War II, “feminization of wage labor,” all occurring “before [the poet’s] birth, who, like a geographer, must go beyond the “excavated map” to understand their legacy. This is the “survivor’s topography.”

However, it’s in the geological analysis that the poet focuses on the women in their ancestry and where her craft shines. Here the poet sees past the exoticization of the tropical female “adorn[ed] in teknite,” “at the Tsubaki nighclub,” “bar girl in a fish tank,” to state “you are much more than others realize.” The last four poems of this first part dissect the patriarchy “lithification/”fossilization and what it means to look beyond the fetish, “love us in our deviancy.”

The poet names body parts, symptoms, and diseases to stress how internalized oppression is in the female body. As it is shown in “exigencies of layers i & ii” where the poet questions the women have assisted pathologies in the perpetuation of these patterns.

Cuticle

Upper epidermis

Epidermal hair

Substomatal chamber

Palisade mesophyll

Xylem

Air channel

Guard cell

Stoma

Phloem

Chloroplasts

Lower epidermis

Thus, Peñaredondo creates a true paradigm of what it means to see past the oppression and go beyond a painful transformation. But the poet refuses to stay in survival and ends the first part presenting the rest of the collection as a resistance story.

In the second part, the transformation takes place with blunt imagery. It’s all about the coming out Queer. The poems become longer, the spaces widen, and the overall structure shifts, patterns emerge. From scattered lines across the page, to brief prose passages, the verses compel us to read in silence, masticate every blunt image, pause, reflect. These poems turn the previously described violence against women into love.

“My fist

…

i can make love with it”

Columns and double columns appear as if grabbing the reader by the shoulders and facing them with a harsh reality.

Hunger : rain :: fever : black stone

Lexicon without apparent connection rains on the page as if words and dates fall off the poem as gender affirmations surface and become the focal point. Then, brief poetic prose passages erupt like the volcanic imagery across the entire collection to reveal the magma within:

“she’ll gulp oysters and mussels down with no desire for the palm wine, she’ll read books, floating on their side, spectral algae trickling their brain and wanted curvy fat. in that unreachable sky some human might describe as precious or turquoise, she knows paradise lives elsewhere.”

In the third part, the poet exposes the immigrant conundrum as the desire for a home while holding a permanent longing. Then exquisite poetry arises, one where imagery and reflection intertwine to create delicate passages holding powerful truths.

“how must one proceed toward potential when splintered enough, boiled down to transparent bits rendered invisible, seen as conformity.”

“exile is a river at the end … ”

“suspension & assimilation with a distant border in view

or lack– . . .”

“to classify as anything but singular is an intervention, a bridge between migration and when

trauma exposes the hybridity of the self, it exposes the multiple, often

incompatible . . .”

The fourth part “holds the contradictions” with a letter to self that gives the poet permission to be all the parts of themselves in harmony. An interesting poem written in couplets in a rhythmic composition marked with abundant spaces naming the identity “queer” “gay immigrant child raised in the 90’s” “kweens”, the origin “Bisayan princess” and their art “haranistas.” It also presents those who refuse “to awaken on the part of the subject,” the lineage that killed “femme supremacy.” Poetry forms shift again, to include lists, “Induction to Self-loyalty,” and an interesting poem written in columns, “studies in becoming prayer” which works as a contrapunto between three different voices. The collection ends with an intriguing bilingual poem titled “albularya”–the name for a witch doctor in Philippines. “albularya” suggests the poet had been subject to this ritualistic cure/cleanse to cure the child of a serious ailment. The reader can only wonder if their family tried to pray the gay away or if the child’s life had been in danger.

“for my famished body lipstick to remind me that death

although marked in shade is never monochrome.”

We are in the presence of a poet who is not afraid to explore their past in an intelligent and thorough analysis. nature felt but never apprehended stays with me for it focuses on nature to interpret the colonization of the Filipino diaspora uncovers fossilized patriarchy encrusted at different levels of the poet’s ancestry, “those before us.”

By naming body parts, diseases, and symptoms, the poet stresses how internalized patriarchy and oppression are in the bodies. New patterns indicate the bravery of breaking off tradition to allow for gender identification.

At times a geographer “excavating maps,” at times, a botanist naming plants, mostly a geologist analyzing fossils, the poet uses the lexicon of sciences to name a reality amalgamated in colonized ancestry to reveal the DNA clues that pointed at queerness for generations in a family of Filipino immigrants.

In their nature felt but never apprehended, Angela Peñaredondo embraces their gender identification while holding a longing for the homeland and all the contradictions within. This collection is a gift for those who understand longing and struggle to decipher their own past.

Lisbeth Coiman is a bilingual author who has wandered the immigration path from her native Venezuela to Canada and last to the US where she now resides. Her debut book, I Asked the Blue Heron: A Memoir (2017) explores the intersection between immigration and mental health. Her bilingual poetry collection, Uprising / Alzamiento (Finishing Line Press, 2021) portrays the faces of Venezuela’s complex economic and political unrest.

January 12, 2023January 12, 2023

On Bearing Witness

a book review of Melissa Chadburn’s A Tiny Upward Shove

By Hazel Kight Witham

The title of Melissa Chadburn’s debut novel comes from a flashback in which young Marina, the main character, attempts to rescue a bird stuck in the drain valve of a water heater. Her mother, Mutya, comes along, in a hurry to get to the beach with her boyfriend. She needs Marina to abandon the girl’s vital mission, but Marina is too worried about the bird to leave it. Mutya, not to be slowed by some doomed bird’s plight, first tries to pull it out, but cannot get a good grip, and instead shoves upward, breaking its wing, and not so much freeing it as mortally wounding it. The bird flaps in pained circles before falling still. Marina is crushed, but Mutya brushes it off as “helping a hurt thing” along with a “tiny upward shove.”

A copy of the colorful hardback cover of A Tiny Upward Shove by Melissa Chadburn next to a candle and a plant.

Through its many twists and turns, this novel jolts the reader in a manner similar to Mutya’s no-bullshit approach to bird-rescue. The novel’s vivid, disorienting, furious opening paragraph introduces us to the singular voice of an Aswang—a protective, vengeful spirit from Filipino folklore— who takes us from the world of the living into another realm to bring justice for Marina’s murder. This omniscient Aswang fills in Marina’s battered backstory, introduces several supporting characters, and then hopscotches through the six previous generations of the Salles family the spirit inhabited. The Aswang also delves into the neglected childhood of the murderer: the real-life Willie Pickton, a man who killed 49 vulnerable women—or more—on his pig farm in Vancouver, British Colombia. These characters’ fates are intertwined and offer wrenching views at the damage we do to each other, particularly to children, when we do not pay attention, when we are too consumed with our own busy lives to stop for the fragile birds.

Chadburn starts the novel with Marina dead but renders her vividly alive through the whole of the book: as a child with her lola and mother, as a smart girl in a new school and a new city, trying to care for and contain her restless, reckless college student mother, and later, as a girl navigating the wilds of the foster care system, with all its lonely rituals and rhythms. Chadburn peppers in Tagalog terms for some of the most explicit words, deftly offering context, but then moving forward, trusting the reader to remember them. The Aswang brings us into the most pivotal moments—scenes of hideous cruelty and carelessness that follow Marina into places she never should have gone, places where her mother and others do not protect her. Eventually we meet Alex at a foster care campus, who brings warmth into Marina’s life, but who also carries some of the worst trauma children endure.

A Tiny Upward Shove reveals the vital work fiction can do to expose corrupted systems and spotlight abuse in a way that is a call to action for the reader. To do so in this case required a depth of knowledge on the part of the author, and the courage to mosaic lived experience and careful research into a propulsive story, rendering something new and transformative. In Chadburn’s case with A Tiny Upward Shove, it required delving into the brokenness of our foster care systems and researching the horror of Willie Pickton, his victims, and, even in the midst of so much wreckage, finding a way to have curiosity and compassion enough to explore what led Willie to such violence.

Chadburn’s use of the Aswang narrator, Tagalog words and phrases, and her extensive research renders a world of wrenching stories so real that they become a part of us and force us to look at the awful when we so often choose comfort by averting our gaze.

For readers who seek escape, a splash in the shallows of a beach read, a bird easily freed from entanglement, this may not be the book for you right now. But for those able to trust an author as skilled, caring, and badass as Chadburn to take us into the deepest woods, to bear witness to callous sexual violence, remorseless slaughter, and crushing systems, but then lead us back out again, is a way of honoring the women at the heart of this story, as well as their real-life counterparts. Chadburn, righteous Aswang writer, memorializes women unable to share their stories and urges us to take more care in this world of beauty and devastation.

As a Women Who Submit board member, Chadburn continues to support this network in submitting writing to agents, journals, contests, and presses. In 2020, Chadburn offered the WWS community a workshop on literary citizenship—modeling ways writers can support authors with reviews, and nudging us to find ways to uplift and nurture each other’s literary pursuits in the midst of deeply challenging times.

Chadburn’s debut novel asks readers and artists: where do we put our money, our time, our creative efforts to make change, to spotlight injustice, to bear witness? In what ways can we—especially those of us with the privilege to have avoided systems like the ones Chadburn explores—channel our energies for good? The courage it takes to stay with Chadburn’s narrator is just one small step toward greater courage in honoring and protecting women’s lives and caring for those on the margins and in the shadows. Melissa Chadburn’s A Tiny Upward Shove is a powerful catalyst for holding accountable the systems designed to support our most vulnerable.

Hazel Kight Witham is a mother, teacher, slam poetry coach, and writer who was made in Los Angeles and still calls it home. She has published work in The Sun, Bellevue Literary Review, Integrated Schools, Mutha Magazine, Cultural Weekly, Rising Phoenix Review and other journals. She is a proud public school teacher in LAUSD and was a 2020 finalist for California Teacher of the Year. She is a member of Women Who Submit, and gathering with them throughout the high seas of pandemic kept her afloat as a writer. Find her work here: www.hazelkightwitham.com.

March 30, 2022

Toward Reckoning

A review of Toni Ann Johnson’s novella, Homegoing
by Hazel Kight Witham

I first heard Toni Ann Johnson bring voice to a character onstage at a reading in the MFA program we shared. I barely knew Toni Ann, but I was swept into the world of her fiction by the characters she illuminated with her humor, vivid dialogue, intriguing conflict, and acting chops. 

I didn’t know she had a significant history as an actress, both on stage and in film, and experience giving characters voice through her work as an award-winning screenwriter: she won the Humanitas Prize for her screenplay “Ruby Bridges,” another one for “Crown Heights,” a true story about two teens who connect in the wake of the Crown Heights unrest of 1991. 

Toni Ann Johnson’s novella, Homegoing, winner of Accent Publishing’s Novella contest in 2021, explores vital questions we all need to reckon with. The book opens in New York City, the winter of 2006. At the outset, Maddie, a singer, has just suffered her second miscarriage and her husband, who reminds her he “wasn’t ready” for a baby anyway, is bailing back to Los Angeles.

She is twisted with grief and the shock of betrayal, “curled up like a fist on the floor.” A phone call with her mother, Velma, reveals that she is more interested in who from their mostly white neighborhood in the New York suburbs has ended up on the obituary pages. Her mother’s inability to listen or empathize with Maddie, or even allow space for her to share the news of her miscarriage, is breathtaking.

 Hollowed by these twin losses: her baby, Nina, and her partner of ten years, Rolando, Maddie is further leveled by the inability to voice her grief. Her mother doesn’t know how to listen, and neither does her father. She spends a week invisible, bedridden, underwater. She can’t go to her job as a singer in a piano bar, she is cut off from her voice. A visit from her mother gets her up and moving but she is still heavy with sorrow that no one seems to want to let her express.

On the TV all the channels begin covering Seinfeld star Michael Richards’s racist meltdown on the stage of the Laugh Factory in LA, the place Maddie’s husband is headed without her. Richards’s vitriolic performance of this country’s deep-seated racism, compounded by her mother’s mourning of a white neighbor, brings Maddie’s childhood rushing back. She grew up the only Black child in a white, conservative town in the wealthy New York suburbs, where kids who are her friends in kindergarten “realize she’s Black” by third grade. They perform the racist behaviors they inherit from their elders, and no one seems to think there’s anything wrong with that.

The performance of overt racism becomes a through line. While the comedian is publicly called out, Maddie reckons with the trouble of returning home to that mostly white, conservative town as the holidays descend. A neighbor’s death brings her back to her hometown on New Year’s Eve to both mourn one more loss and contend with the harms of the past. The kids who filled her childhood are all grown up now, and Maddie, raw with grief and the loneliness it brings, asks some of them to account for their childhood transgressions and their cowardly silence.

The responses range, and reveal the complexity of reckoning: her own mother dismisses Maddie’s memories, the bully acknowledges and apologies, her friend Tobias, “breaker of her young heart,” just wants to move on.

But the story is not, of course, only about grief and racial reckoning. Johnson’s humor is a through line too. It comes in memorable scenes, like when Velma’s spiteful Dachshund seems the embodiment of microaggressions—a snapping, snarling, unapologetic creature that Velma defends unconditionally. It comes in the dialogue that renders each character vivid and compelling.

Humor and reckoning collide too when Velma once again offers her daughter up to this community with all its blind spots, racism, and privilege. The novella rises to a crescendo in the scene where Maddie’s mother Velma has volunteered Maddie to sing “Amazing Grace” at the funeral of the deceased. Maddie learns she will be performing just moments before when she sees her name on the program, and has no time to prepare for this sudden call. She is furious with her mother, but takes the stage anyway, standing before the mostly white community, the handful of people of color, performing a beloved anthem in this display of public grief.

Johnson reminds us of the complexity of this song, an ode to awakening, to being lost and then finding redemption, a song written by a slave trader who made his fortune trafficking in African lives. As Maddie sings before the crowd she asks herself, “What am I doing standing in this white church in this white town that crushed my spirit, singing the words of a white supremacist who wrote it for his own forgiveness? Why should I forgive?”

Maddie’s grief—for her lost child, her broken marriage, her challenging parents, and the betrayals of this childhood home, make for a tricky performance. “Singing magnified every feeling,” and when she falters, her childhood friend, daughter of the deceased steps up, calls for the community to step up, and they begin to sing together, offering this complicated, beautiful song back to Maddie. The moment is riveting, but also another kind of performance: what is it to sing of being lost then found, blind, then seeing, when so much has still been unaccounted for? What grace is this community asking without having done the work to earn it?

It is a moving moment, but Johnson quickly reminds us of how far we still must go. When that childhood friend Tobias is bitten by her mother’s vicious Dachshund, he offers a trade: the harm and disregard he perpetrated in the past for present forgiveness of canine transgression, as if the two could be comparable: “Maddie, how ’bout, I let this go, and you let your stuff go?”

She responds: “Let it go where? Where do I send it?”

Shortly after, a neighbor with Alzheimer’s unleashes a racist diatribe against Maddie, lunging at her as he hollers the n-word and rails that she doesn’t belong in the house. It is a scene that brings the Laugh Factory moment directly to Maddie, highlighting all the vicious ignorance of our shared past.

When the beleaguered wife of the man apologizes for his behavior, Maddie thanks her, but doesn’t let her off the hook: “I’m surprised though…Because you called me the same thing when I was a kid. You hated ‘us people’.” Now the woman is friendly with Maddie’s mother, and Maddie wants to know: “What’s changed?”

By the end, Johnson’s character understands the impact of this place of her childhood better. “The voice of this place had been loud and she’d carried it with her all her life. Now she saw that the voice was nothing but a beat-down, demented, old fossil clinging to the need to be better because its own image was so fragile.”

“What’s changed?” is a question that Homegoing asks of all of us. What does healing look like? How can we reckon with the past if we do not listen to those hurt by it, and make authentic amends? How do we hold each other accountable for harm? How do we reconcile with each other in this country where so much brutality was baked into the beginning, and the legacy of it lives on in our language, in our actions and inactions? How do we make amends, instead of dismissing old wounds, or hiding behind excuses?

What truth and reconciliation might be possible in this country if we could do that? If we could hold space for the grief and trauma our history has brought, and that our present perpetuates, but work toward better for one another as we move together into something new?

Toni Ann Johnson’s Homegoing invites us through the story of Maddie and the vibrant scenes she inhabits, to consider how we listen, how we honor, and how we make amends—authentically, not performatively—so that we may move toward collective grace together.

February 3, 2022

Book Review: Through the Screen

By VK Lynne

Review: Once Removed by Colette Sartor

I first met Colette Sartor in 2020. She was sitting in her backyard, adjusting her glasses and announcing, in the middle of a women’s writing meeting, that she had a sourdough bread to check. I was smitten.

Of course, whether my admiration translated through the portal of Zoom is anyone’s guess, but she became a friend through those Women Who Submit check-ins, and then later through the pages of her enchanting book, Once Removed.

The pink/peach cover of Colette Sartor's short story collection, Once Removed, with the purple silhouette of a woman standing with her hands in the pockets of her a-line dress.

Colette’s writing is much like the woman herself: No nonsense, yet sensitive; incisive, yet gentle. She was one of the first in the group to listen to my music and tell everyone else to do the same, and when I told her that I planned to read her book in order to write a review, she briskly popped a copy in the mail before I could object.

There is always that one person, when you join a new group, who you gravitate toward to find your footing. I had joined Women Who Submit perhaps a year before the COVID-19 pandemic, but had not really felt like a concrete part of the community, until the meetings became virtual and weekly.

That first morning, as I scanned the boxes, something about the woman with the half-smile, long dark hair and knowing eyeglasses settled my nervousness, and gave me the courage to return, Saturday after Saturday.

So of course, I really wanted her book to be good. There are few things worse than building something or someone up in your head, only for the idol to come crashing down from the pedestal once the statue is exposed as mere stone.

Fortunately, as I turned page after page of the short story collection, it became clear that it was not a gilt facade, but a solid golden cathedral.

Each story is discrete, yet all the tales are connected. In this way, Colette acknowledges that there is dignity and value in our starring roles in our individual life stories, while gently reminding us that we are also a supporting characters in many others’.

As the stories describe various women’s journeys, and losses they suffer along the way, it becomes a book that commiserates and comforts its reader. We are all struggling, we are all succeeding and failing, and while our tragedies are to be honored, they should not isolate us in despair- for we are not alone.

Colette deftly stitches the pieces of each life’s fabric together into a bittersweet tapestry that reveals its glorious pattern gradually, beautifully, until the final page, when the entire work is thrown into the light to take your breath away.

Once Removed is one of the very few books I’ve read that left me greedily turning back to the beginning immediately upon completion to walk the path again. More slowly this time, I began to notice the sweet harbingers, the dangerous forebodings, and the profound lessons strewn along the way.

The Saturday after I finished reading, I logged on to Zoom and saw Colette propped in her bed, a smile curling up one side of her face, and I longed to climb through the screen to hug her in gratitude for the experience that is her book. Ruefully, I knew that even if we’d been face to face at that time, we still could not have embraced, because we were still in the plague of distance.

So instead, I wrote this down. Colette, for me, your book served as a reparative to that isolation. It brings its reader edification and visibility and empathy. It offers perspective, healing, and wisdom…and not a small amount of joy.

Thank you.

Image of author and musician VK Lynne with bright pink hair and wear a black hat and and jacket with a gray fluff color.

VK Lynne is a writer and musician from Los Angeles, and a 2015 recipient of the Jentel Foundation Artist Residency Program Award for writing. She penned the award-winning web series ‘Trading on 15’, and authored the novels ‘Even Solomon’ and ‘A Pook is Born.’ Her two poetry volumes, ‘Crisis’ and ‘Revelation,’ make up the audiobook ‘The Release and Reclamation of Victoria Kerygma.’

Her writing has been published in the LA Poet Society’s Anthology “Los Angeles Poets For Justice: A Document for the People”, Image Curve, The Elephant Journal, GEM Magazine, and Guitar Girls Magazine.