Recently Reviewed: From Climate Poetry to AI Experiments

In the poetry collection Smother, Berkeley native Rachel Richardson takes on the losses engendered by wildfires and climate change. But as Alta Journal editorial director Blaise Zerega notes, “the poet’s defiance is directed not just at flame and smoke but also at those who reveal their misogyny by picking apart maternity—a woman’s decision to have a baby, how she raises the child, how her self-identity changes as her young one grows up.” He adds that to read Smother is “to be welcomed into a community of writers.” The poem “Despite,” for instance, is written “after Hikmet/O’Hara/Reeves/Vuong/Rader/Wright.” Richardson’s collection shines most brightly when it provides singular images like, in the first poem, “fire bearing crow feathers—no, ash” on a cold morning, with “everyone blinking, looking around, / phones lifted to the horizon.”

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Blackfeet author Stephen Graham Jones has published more than 30 books. In a rave review, critic Chris Daley describes Jones’s latest, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, as “a deep dive into historical fiction inspired by the 1870 brutal massacre of a Pikuni Blackfeet camp by U.S. soldiers in Montana.” In this new book, Daley says, there are more layers than ever, “about monsters and history, ghosts and justice.” In the vampire-Western novel’s frame narrative, a professor who is up for tenure is given a journal from 1912, kept by her great-great-grandfather, a pastor, who records “confessions of a strange and slightly menacing ‘Indian gentleman’ who starts turning up for his Sunday sermons.”

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Historian William Deverell writes, “Journalist Alexis Madrigal is captivated by the Oakland of the past 100 years or so in his terrific book The Pacific Circuit: A Globalized Account of the Battle for the Soul of an American City, and his is a story that emanates outward from [the] West Oakland shoreline on San Francisco Bay.” Madrigal’s social history looks at the trade routes that crisscrossed the Pacific, bringing goods manufactured in Asia to Oakland, among other ports. While Oakland is a starting point for what Madrigal calls the Pacific Circuit, he argues that the city also bore the brunt of “toxic pollutants spewed by ships and trucks.” The book also explores how an environmental justice warrior, Margaret Gordon, took on the polluters and, as Deverell puts it, “notches some wins.”

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In her stunning fifth novel, Laila Lalami builds a near-future world in which even our dreams can be surveilled. The Dream Hotel ’s protagonist, Sara, is an archivist who is detained at the airport because she’s dreamed of killing her husband. At the retention center where she’s sent, she and others are repeatedly written up for minor infractions, their stays almost arbitrarily lengthened. Critic Heather Scott Partington notes that what might be cast as speculative dystopia is perilously close to present-day reality. As she observes, “The Dream Hotel is not about Sara finding her independence or discovering her identity, as might be expected, but rather about her declaring that she will not operate within the system of the retention center, or ultimately the government and corporations that control her life.”

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Stacy Nathaniel Jackson’s Afrofuturist debut novel, The Ephemera Collector, is an homage to Octavia E. Butler. It’s the story of Xandria Anastasia Brown, a curator at the Huntington, which has been taken over by a predatory conglomerate. Xandria struggles with memory loss due to long COVID, and when the Huntington’s CEO is taken hostage, she is implicated. Alta Journal contributing editor David L. Ulin explains that the novel is arranged as “an archive in its own right” that builds “a narrative out of fragments: transcripts, timelines, correspondence, images, documents.” The book, Ulin writes, “is about memory as work, as essential effort, in which only by maintaining the artifacts of the past can we hope to understand the present and move through it.”

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Vauhini Vara’s Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age is an original, thought-provoking memoir-in-essays about technology and what makes us human. Law professor G.S. Hans writes that “refractions of Vara’s experiences through Silicon Valley’s mind-bending inventions serve as the primary throughline of Searches.” The previously published essay out of which the book grew was an experiment in which Vara worked with the then-nascent technology ChatGPT to write about her grief over her sister’s death from Ewing’s sarcoma. While the piece remains moving and slightly surreal, it appears here with revised concluding lines. Later, in another experiment, Vara asks ChatGPT to review her history of artificial intelligence; while initially some of the AI’s observations emphasize balanced critique, gradually its commentary turns into tech-founder boosterism. Hans criticizes the writing in the book produced by AI, concluding, “Searches’ least mediated observations remain its most haunting.”•

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