Wolfgang HilbigThe Females

Books in Review The most fascinating element of Kareva’s poetry to me is that it seems haunted by a sense of religion and spirituality with the dark and intense tone of Europe’s Middle Ages. The angels in her poetry come always bearing swords, and an intense power can be felt even in the ether between pages. As Kareva grapples with dark and light, heaven and earth, life and death, speaking and silence, the reader cannot help but feel engrossed by her pert yet poignant word choice, and the attention to sonic detail by translator Miriam McIlfatrick-Ksenofontov is not to be understated. When Kareva writes about writing, as she does in “If you speak only once . . .” and “When I write . . . ,” it is clear that she is a master of her craft, self-aware and in full possession of her artistic faculties. Many of these poems will stay with me long after I put this book down, and are more than worthy of being returned to, yet one stanza in particular haunts me: “The art lies in deciding / where on earth art begins. / The counter of waves may lose / sight of the ocean.” Kareva loses neither waves nor ocean in her poetry, instead somehow encapsulating unfathomable moments, like a sunbeam kept in a terrarium, for the understanding and joy of her reader. Linda Stack-Nelson Minneapolis, Minnesota Wolfgang Hilbig The Females Trans. Isabel Fargo Cole. San Francisco. Two Lines Press. 2018. 136 pages. One of the many reasons Wolfgang Hilbig left the German Democratic Republic might have been that, as his narrator suddenly realizes, all at once there were no longer any “females” in that totalitarian state. It seemed that the state had banished the bottom halves of female persons to the West, where they were being stuffed with money, while it had kept the top halves in the East, where these developed muscular arms that could support the Aufbau, the “building up” of the new state. In building this new society, after all, there was no room for “wallowing in bourgeois distractions” or indulging in “hobbies of the intellectuals” such as sex. “Sex” was what they had in the reactionary West. Worse, “sex” was, in fact, an American word and hence totally taboo in a country of “true love.” The past was equally taboo. The GDR had no compunction repurposing factories that produced munitions for the Nazis using inmates from the adjacent concentration camp. Now they produced radios. Just as it had exiled sex, the GDR palmed off its own historical responsibility on the “reactionary West.” That Nazi past haunts the narrator in nightmare visitations from Ilse Koch, the “Beast of Buchenwald,” though in his waking hours he merely has to face the weighty woman official at the Workplace Steering Committee, who eyes him with something “between mockery and outrage” when he explains that he had used his free time between jobs to try his hand at writing. Who does he think he is? Giving himself “intellectual airs!” He needs to work in the real world. Room for art or imagination seems to have been banished as well. Resigning himself to that real world, he works as a stoker in the boiler house of a large laundry staffed by the inmates of the huge prison next door. One day he hears voices that compel him to climb to the roof of the boiler house. And there, in the prison yard, he sees the missing females. When he shouts in joy, he believes they send him a signal: Just wait! We know that Hilbig had given up waiting , having left in 1985, but we also know the “females” would prove right: those walls did come down. How toxic life had been within them Hilbig has depicted almost too palpably, and Isabel Fargo Cole has once again faithfully rendered his work into perfect English. Ulf Zimmermann Kennesaw State University Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd From a Shepherd Boy to an Intellectual: My Memories Thousand Oaks, California. Sage. 2019. 380 pages. Those who are aware of anticasteism and lower-caste empowerment movements in India will certainly be familiar with Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd. His books attack the hegemonical caste structure headed by the priestly

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