We hope you’re enjoying Greg Sarris’s novel in stories, Grand Avenue. If you haven’t started it yet, here’s an excerpt from one of the stories to whet your appetite for more.
It might seem hard to believe, but spring is just around the corner. The books that we’ve chosen for April, May, and June include a beautiful poetry collection by one of the great Bay Area poets, a mesmeric bildungsroman set in a city reminiscent of Los Angeles during riots, and an extraordinary social novel set in the Inland Empire in the recent past.
PRAISE, BY ROBERT HASS
The natural world is strikingly evoked in Robert Hass’s second collection of poetry, Praise. Through word choice, juxtaposition, and enjambment, the two-time United States poet laureate tries to capture the unsayable in original language. In the revelatory poem “Meditation at Lagunitas,” he writes, “There are moments when the body is as numinous / as words, days that are the good flesh continuing. / Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings, / saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.” Here, the reference to the body’s “numinous” or spiritual quality leads to the word “blackberry” as a kind of mantra or prayer. The image repeats across the collection and continues to accrue meaning. Meanwhile, the abstraction of “days” makes an opposite conversion into “the good flesh.”
“A word is elegy to what it signifies,” Hass writes in the same poem. And throughout the collection, tangible and original and sonically pleasing imagery—of kelp drench, a bee hum, eelgrass, and cedar spits—is given the same weight as uncertainties, intangible things that can’t be pinned down with names. In these pages, something lies beyond the physical realm, just out of reach. Nearly a half century after its publication, this stunning collection retains a remarkable power.
THE FLOWERS, DAGOBERTO GILB
Written in a frank, magnetic, energetic voice, Dagoberto Gilb’s The Flowers is a coming-of-age novel set in the weeks before and during riots in a large city that, though unnamed, feels like Los Angeles. You’ll find it difficult to turn away from the consciousness of the novel’s protagonist, Sonny Bravo, a smart, observant 15-year-old, and his lively mother, Silvia. When Silvia marries Cloyd Longpre, the sleazy landlord of an apartment complex named Los Flores, they move into the building, and Sonny becomes involved with others in the complex. Over time, in a fractured and messy world, he contends with racism, violence, and his own sexual impulses and longings—Gilb makes all of this suspenseful.
Sonny is repeatedly drawn to some of the building’s inhabitants, and he grows through these surprising encounters. The residents include Cindy, a sexually provocative married woman; his innocent love interest, Nica, a fellow teenager who looks after her little brother while her parents are at work; and Cloyd’s friends Bud and Mary, a couple who carry a pronounced tension between them that proves to mirror, at a slant, the tension between Silvia and Cloyd.
MECCA, SUSAN STRAIGHT
In Mecca, her sensuously told eighth novel, Susan Straight entwines the lives of memorable characters in and around the eponymous Inland Empire town. A memorable crew of protagonists includes Johnny Frías, a California Highway Patrol officer who is haunted by a secret—a violent encounter that happened in Bee Canyon; the experience comes into sharp focus during wildfire season. Another main character, Matelasse Rodrigue, is raising her two young sons on her own; their father left them for Venice, California shortly before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. And a Mixtec woman, Ximena, undocumented, from Oaxaca, tries to avoid deportation. These principals intersect with a host of other vividly drawn working-class characters.
While their lives are full of racism, work trouble, natural disaster, and encounters with law enforcement, these characters survive because of their deep community bonds. Straight wrote about many of these figures and related ones in her novel in stories Aquaboogie and her most recent novel, Sacrament. Mecca is a beautifully crafted novel with plenty of drama and insight; it doubles as an unforgettable ballad to a vibrant, racially diverse place.
Join us on February 19 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Sarris will sit down with special guest Lisa See and host John Freeman to discuss Grand Avenue: A Novel in Stories. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
OUTLAWS
Read Anne Pedersen’s interview with Kirk Ellis about They Kill People: Bonnie and Clyde, a Hollywood Revolution, and America’s Obsession with Guns and Outlaws. —Alta
LEW GRIFFIN NOVELS
Alta Journal contributing editor David L. Ulin revisits the work of the late crime novelist James Sallis. —Alta
CALIFORNIA WEED
Zack Ruskin interviews Scott Eden about his book A Killing in Cannabis, about the 2019 murder of Santa Cruz tech entrepreneur and cannabis operator Tushar Atre.
—San Francisco Chronicle
THE HARD PROBLEM
Michael Pollan talks to David Marchese about A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness. —New York Times
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