Welcome to Blurbed, a round-up of literary recommendations from the editors and contributors at the Columbia Journal! Each month, Blurbed features a curated list of things to read, events to attend and news from the Journal.

Bizarre, long-term disorders
can be harvested in people
I had three, four, or five

We’ve changed. In May, it hadn’t yet happened; in May, we hadn’t come so far. But now we know how we can use the summer: to create good window seats that look out into the garden, which we seldom enter, and then only in rubber boots. And only if we have to reposition the dolls after a night of wind or rain. The largest doll that we could find rests in the hammock. If you look at it through the wrong end of the binoculars, you can deceive yourself well enough. It seems as if a child really is dangling in the net stretched between the red maple (whose leaves are enormous this year of all years!) and the eastern white pine.

koi fish
throbs in the neck
of your lover.

Pamela Sneed remembers her childhood: “Even my era did not allow me to be little innocent / A threat if I spoke up / A competitor for middle class white girls / who had the world handed to them / And resented me/you for surviving / thriving despite all the odds” (Twizzlers), living against the world who put so much on her back. In the memoir/poetry collection, Funeral Diva, Sneed offers us a glimpse into the 1980s to the world we live in now, traveling through time to a place where Black and Brown LGBTQ+ youth were growing up dealing with the AIDS crisis, police brutality, and struggling to keep communities together in spite of it all. Sneed uses her voice to bring space for the Black community, her eyes paint the image of growing up with terror at your front door and learning to absorb it and move forward.

To take responsibility for your life is a middle class concept, I said to Kristina, who was grimly eating a box of Cheez-Its with her arm in a sling and trying to convince me not to go over to KJ’s apartment again.

We are learning metaphors in middle school,
metaphors as a literary device rather than a lesson about life.

Sue William Silverman opens How to Survive Death and Other Inconveniences with a road trip in her gold-finned Plymouth, “cruising through life” down Route 17 as a teen, “planning to never stop.” Throughout this memoir/thematically linked essay collection, Silverman shows us that, metaphorically, she is still that restless young woman behind the wheel. Poring over an old atlas, Silverman can trace the places and episodes of her difficult past to map the urgency and central drive of the book: what explains the narrator’s life-long fear and obsession with death, and what does it mean to survive?

Say it was a night, any night in the early ‘60s, and I was falling asleep in our brick rambler on Layton Drive in the sleepy DC suburbs. Corner lot, the two-trunked tree. A basement that, like every basement here, flooded after a hard rain. The collective moan meant everyone on Layton Drive was in the same boat, headed downstairs with our pails. Still, we, the Parks, were different from our neighbors; the only family that ate kimchi, for one thing. Kimchi with tuna boats, kimchi with spaghetti ‘n’ meatballs. I even liked it old and soggy but soon enough my mom would be fitting herself with those yellow Playtex gloves over an impressive mound of chopped cabbage and sliced red radishes topped with cayenne pepper. Translation: new kimchi! Fresh and crunchy, just the way I loved it.

but my husband looks more like our savior:
more like Jesus than the man
they have stained into glass–

In his new collection, The Malevolent Volume, 2018 National Book Award, and Lamba Literary Award Winner, Justin Phillip Reed, delves into the underbelly of identity, poetry, religion, myths through the lens of a queer, Black American. A constant theme of The Malevolent Volume is man transforming into a monster, either classically mythic like a Gorgon, or a newly invented creature. In this collection, Reed accepts and moves deftly through anger, cultural truths, contemporary references, and never turns away.

Brooke Davis, online arts editor at Columbia Journal, spoke with director and filmmaker Tayo Amos about her short films On The Clock and A Blossom in the Night and creation during the pandemic.

Rachel Rueckert, nonfiction MFA candidate, spoke to travel writer Pam Mandel about her career path and recently released book, The Same River Twice: A Memoir of Dirtbag Backpackers, Bomb Shelters, and Bad Travel, a coming-of-age story about an unconventional, emotionally fraught gap year at home and abroad. With no guidance or concrete plan, Mandel embarks on a tangled journey across three continents, from a cold water London flat to rural Pakistan, from the Nile River Delta to the snowy peaks of Ladakh and finally, back home to California, determined to shape a life that is truly hers.

You shouldn’t be here, but inside your head you’ve already escaped, that’s what you tell the other inmates, but they just snicker like they’ve heard that before, so you tell the concrete wall that the cops arrested the wrong girl and you just happened to be at the same party, a little fucked up but basically in control, dancing to Common in the living room while your two best friends made out with the Brezinsky twins from Saginaw who love no one, not even themselves, but you’re no gangbanger, you don’t even know how to shoot a gun, you don’t trust them because guns make efficient divorces, they kidnapped your papa and made a Christian lunatic out of your mama, in fact, if the police did their fucking research, they’d know you abhor guns and the idiots who use them to feel in control against the criminal world inside their own heads

Richard died New Year’s Eve 1997 at age 63. From this widow’s point of view, one confounding thing about death is its persistence through time. Day in, day out, year after year, the dead remain dead, even if they return momentarily in dreams or conversation or correspondence. You’re still dead? I find myself asking Richard, even though I’ve been happily remarried for 15 of the 22 years since he died. (Once, I dreamt that Richard returned. I am happy to see you, I said. But I am married. To someone else. That’s all right, he said, slipping into bed next to me and my husband).

That’s what happens if you dive in murky water;

everything disappears from sight, you start looking

at that lot of nothingness closing in around you.

Everything looks as you wish it did not.

When you lift your head, your eyes shut quickly.

“Friction,” by Marieken Cochius, is a selection for the Columbia Journal’s Special Issue on Uprising in the art category.

Editor’s Note: “Civics Unit: Naturalization Test” by Mariya Zilberman, was chosen by Ruth Madievsky as the poetry winner of Columbia Journal‘s 2019 Winter Contest. It was published in Columbia Journal #58 and appears here with permission from the author.

“I was happy to be included in something, even if it was a mostly one-sided conversation with a man twice my age.”

Editor’s Note: “Chimera,” by Kathleen McNamara, was chosen by Ada Calhoun as the nonfiction winner of Columbia Journal‘s 2019 Winter Contest. It was published in Columbia Journal #58 and appears here with permission from the author.