Tag Archives: poetic

The Beauty and Bitterness of Unrequited Love: The Italy Letters by Vi Khi Nao

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The Italy Letters cover

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The Italy Letters by Vi Khi Nao (August 13, 2024) reads like bitter chocolate with rich undertones that will pique the acquired tastes of readers looking for poetic experimental fiction and stories about the mid-life crises of disillusioned literary fiction writers who are not cishet white Ivy Leaguing/New Yorker men. The bitterness comes from the raw, at times desperately pained but always poetic philosophizing of Nao’s narrator, who is struggling with simultaneous financial and emotional precarities that gives rise to frequent flights of morbidity and fantasy—both of which are channeled into the letters that make up this story. The object* of these letters? A straight married woman oceans away who our narrator seems to have developed unrequited intimacy as much out of need for some stability in her life as actual lust.

These heavy sentiments are punctuated by honey-decadent sentences that treat the English language like childhood Ello sets: bending, contorting and even breaking the set pieces in order to achieve a singular vision. Nao is deliberate and thoughtful in the way she writes her narrator’s frustration with a reality that is tired, faded, exhausted by lack of money, lack of mobility, the unfulfilled promises of an American Dream that is inextricable from the American army’s violent upheaval of the ground her mother was born on and later left, fueled by the same sense of absentia that even decades later drives serial addictions and suffuses her daughter’s longing letters.

I also appreciated how Nao de-romanticized the itinerant drifter artist archetype. If white boys who criss-crossed the country in the fifties while penning pieces that earned enough (give or take a couple of trust funds or working wives) to sustain their intoxicated shenanigans were the aspirational archetype that raised generations of equally entitled, misogynistic creators, Nao’s narrator, who is itinerant less out of a sense of thrill-seeking pastoralism and more because of the failures of late-stage capitalism, is more emblematic of the current cultural moment and the creators demanding their voices be heard within it. It is, therefore, also a book about what we owe to ourselves, about women who all too often live by what we feel we owe to others—to our lovers, our family, our bosses, the people whose money puts a roof over our head and food on the table. And it’s about how these patterns can repeat even in the lives of the queerest among us—how perhaps it is precisely those furthest on the margins that are most vulnerable to this sort of harm.

Readers will like this if they are looking for:

  • fiction that is feminist and frustrated with the state of things while still being dense enough to ruminate on a re-read.
  • prose that reads like poetry that reads like parts of Naomi Klein, Barbara Ehrenreich and Jasbir Puar’s nonfiction combined into a feeling body.
  • authors that use pop culture moments as springboards to discuss the deeper emotions and anxieties swirling in the zeitgeist.
  • stories about feeling isolated and lonely even when you’re around other people, and with a realistic denouement about starting to move in a more hopeful direction.
  • stories about toxic relationships where the protagonist eventually leaves them.
  • writing about the physical experience of living in a marginalized body. Nao’s writing is a particular standout for this.

Overall, this book won’t be for everyone. It’s one of those reads that’s got a lot of (as Sianne Ngai might put it) ugly feelings that make it hard to take in a single reading (unless, like me, you got to it at the tail end of a breakup that left you with the idea that the prefab middle-class HEA and all its attendant promises of security are moving further and further out of reach with each passing day). It’s also one of those books that ends on a hopeful note, but pulls you through a maelstrom of difficult feelings before doing so, and sometimes we’re a little too up close and personal with the feeling of precarity to want to read such a clear-eyed description of inhabiting it. But The Italy Letters (which you can preorder now) is definitely a book that, perhaps in another twenty or thirty or even ten years, will become part of the broader canon of queer fiction that so quintessentially captures what it was like to live through this.

*We only ever see her as filtered through these letters, this nebulous woman who we only know by nicknames and factoids, dialogue that is never quoted and therefore can be assumed to be cut and paraphrased through the narrator’s own lens.

Content warnings: suicidal Ideation, intimate partner violence, chronic illness, abusive relationships

An Obsessive, Erotic, Vampire Gothic: An Education in Malice by S.T. Gibson 

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the cover of An Education in Malice by S.T. Gibson 

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I feel as though all my adult life I have been wishing for a Carmilla retelling that really illuminates the heart of the original novella—the obsession, intensity, eroticism, and power struggle between Carmilla and Laura that makes the text one of the most lasting examples of nineteenth-century lesbian fiction. I’ve finally—finally!—found it in S.T. Gibson’s An Education in Malice (Redhook 2024). 

I loved Gibson’s queer treatment of Dracula’s brides in A Dowry of Blood (2021) and her new novel, marketed as a sapphic adaptation of Carmilla that finds Le Fanu’s characters at a women’s college in the mid-twentieth century, is one of my most anticipated reads of 2024. Indeed, An Education in Malice doesn’t disappoint. Deliciously Gothic and addictive, every corner of this novel was a pleasure to read. 

We find Carmilla and Laura at the isolated Saint Perpetua’s College in Massachusetts. Surrounded by the history of the campus and the complex motives of both staff and students, Laura Sheridan is thrown into the thick of college life. Almost immediately she is unwittingly pitted against the captivating and imperious Carmilla, professor De Lafontaine’s star pupil in their poetry class. As Laura is drawn further and further into Carmilla’s orbit, she soon discovers De Lafontaine’s own obsession with Carmilla, and the darkness that cuts through the women’s lives. However, as Laura and Carmilla’s feelings for one another turn into something more, Laura’s own darker desires rise to the surface, and it might just be her own curiosity that leads to her doom—or her destiny. 

Not only does this novel do Carmilla (1872) and all of its lush, confusing, glorious Gothic excess justice, but Gibson has also written an entirely new novel of Gothic suspense. This is vampire fiction at its finest, with all the beauty and gore one comes to expect from Gibson’s writing. I couldn’t begin to guess how the story would unfold, and it kept me on the edge of my seat until the very end. One doesn’t have to have read Carmilla to enjoy this novel—not at all. It is entirely its own text. At the same time, Gibson clearly weaves familiar easter eggs into her text for fans of the original. 

Everything—from the setting to the rivalry to the world of the vampires—is perfectly crafted to create an atmosphere of temptation and dread. The writing is so poetic I was highlighting on every page. An Education in Malice is exactly the kind of novel I wanted it to be. It’s a perfect winter read for those who are looking for something extra Gothic this February! 

Please add An Education in Malice to your TBR on Goodreads and follow S.T. Gibson on Instagram.

Rachel Friars is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of English at Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada. Her current research centers on neo-Victorianism and lesbian literature and history. Her work has been published with journals such as Studies in the Novel, The Journal of Neo-Victorian Studies, Queer Studies in Media and Popular Culture, and The Palgrave Handbook of neo-Victorianism.

You can find Rachel on X @RachelMFriars or on Goodreads @Rachel Friars.

A Meditation On Grief Through a Speculative Lens: Our Wives Under The Sea by Julia Armfield

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the cover of Our Wives Under the Sea

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I’ve seen this book mainly categorised as horror but after reading it, it feels more like a speculative fiction with elements of horror and sci-fi in it. This book transcends genres: that’s the mark of a phenomenal read! 

I went into this story expecting an action-packed, horror-strewn plotline and found something much better and resounding. Leah, a marine biologist, is married to Miri and embarks on a deep-sea mission from which she doesn’t return for six months. It’s a mission that goes horribly wrong and alters her life inextricably. The story is told from alternating points of view of Leah and her wife, Miri. 

The first portion of the book portrays the slow and gradual deterioration of their relationship and the silences that hover around them. The writing style is mundanely descriptive and intimate but charged with unspoken emotions. The author spotlights and emphasises their dynamic inner worlds and feelings and their reaction to this traumatic event. 

The chapters are interspersed with haunting and heartfelt past memories of the couple that throw into stark relief their dire situation in the present. Miri feels that the only way to move forward is to look back and hold the past as a beacon of light to guide their enigmatic future. This new unprecedented future seems endless, strange and indescribable, and in contrast, the past feels tangible and comforting. So she collects pieces of her past, holds them close to her heart, and soldiers on. 

There is a constant tone of nostalgia and a sense of something that is lost and irretrievable. Miri tries her best to be there for her wife through her transformations and it takes a toll on her. For Leah, she carries the horrors that she faced under the sea to her life on the land as well. The sea haunts her days and nights alike. Leah’s experience under the sea isolates her and brings her face-to-face with a truth that lodges itself into her body and continues to take charge of her. It is interesting to witness the struggles of the wives parallelly. 

Some of the chapters in the book make brilliant comments on grief and its enduring hold. It shows us how grief can transform us, either for the better or for the worse. Apart from the sea experience, I think the book also comments on how some traumatic events can really shake the foundations of our lives and relationships and permanently set us adrift. Also, I found the naming of the parts in this book very interesting and accurate. It documents how Leah gradually becomes one with the ocean and loses her grip on the land. 

The last portion of this book is filled with suspense and it takes on a frenzy sort of urgency. Even though I predicted the ending, it completely crushed me. It reminded me of the movie Shape of the Water. As long as you don’t dwell on the technicalities of the plot, the story is heartbreaking and profound. The book gets sadder as it progresses and then suddenly it plunges you into an abyss of absurdity and terror. I was not ready for it. However, I thoroughly enjoyed reading it! The entire reading experience feels like a poetic submersion!