Blakwork by Alison Whittaker

Mircea Dinescu The Barbarians’ Return Trans. Adam J. Sorkin & Lidia Vianu Bloodaxe Books This collection of poems written by contemporary Romanian poet Mircea Dinescu explores the existential ramifications for individuals living in a politically troubled and consumerdriven society. The Barbarians’ Return is imbued with Dinescu’s characteristic musicality and wit, which packs a punch emphasized by his sly critiques and musings on human introspection. Evan Fallenberg The Parting Gift Other Press Wrapped in a beautifully embossed envelope-imitation cover, author and PEN Translation Prize winner Evan Fallenberg delivers a story of lust, longing, and the extremes found by those who experience such extreme emotions. A suspenseful page-turner of personal entanglement, it takes the form of the final letter of a man who became obsessed with a famous spice merchant after fleeing his grad program to a small town north of Tel Aviv. Books. The book takes its reader on a journey in search of eight “lost” volumes that, as the subtitle states, have assumed mythical status. As van Straten explains: “For me, lost books are those an author did in fact write, even if they might not have been brought to completion: books that someone has seen, or even happened to read, but which were subsequently destroyed, or vanished leaving scarcely a trace.” He informs us repeatedly that this is just as much a personal journey as it is a journey for his readers. The lost books van Straten is searching for are divided into eight chapters: Romano Bilenchi’s The Avenue, Lord Byron’s Memoirs , Ernest Hemingway’s Juvenilia (the contents of the infamous lost suitcase), Bruno Schulz’s The Messiah, Nikolai Gogol’s second part of Dead Souls, Malcolm Lowry’s In Ballast to the White Sea, the contents of a black suitcase Walter Benjamin was carrying at the time of his death, and, finally, Sylvia Plath’s Double Exposure. Most of these will be known to the well read, but others, like the Bilenchi text, may be new to the reader. The chapter on Bilenchi is also heartbreaking, as are most of the stories that appear here. Preceding the chapters is an introduction that lays the groundwork and the intention for such a search. Along the way, van Straten gives us the names of those who helped him, providing a network of fellow searchers. In Search of Lost Books is a nearly perfect, albeit slim, text in which to lose oneself. It is the ideal companion for a short flight or train journey. It can be read on a bus or a subway, in a café or on a park bench. It reminds us that life, and all that we leave behind, is essentially ephemeral. In Search of Lost Books is also a kind of ghost story or cautionary tale about how we think of writers and their work, and the fragility of being human, thus making the work of art all the more significant and essential. The book is also a tale of global significance , taking the author and his reader across space and time and, of course, across languages. Andrew Martino Salisbury University Alison Whittaker Blakwork Broome, Australia. Magabala Books. 2018. 179 pages. This discursively monumental debut collection asserts unwavering pressure on the idea of “Australia”; from within colonially bounded domains, where “One Nation voters eat[ ] lamb on Australia Day,” activist and poet Alison Whittaker asks that her readers look beyond mundanely whitewashed scenes, the 179 pages of Blakwork fed up with mindless gluttonies, racist hegemonies , and infrastructural violences. This book calls out the facile politics and narrow charades that pass for cultural life in that country; here is a voice seething with impatience, grief-stricken at the fate of this occupied place. Divided into fifteen short sections, each title—“bloodwork,” “storywork,” “heartwork ,” “groundwork,” and so forth—indicates just how much re-narrativizing is to Nota Bene WORLDLIT.ORG 87 be done within a country declared by its colonizers a little over two centuries ago to be Terra nullius. The first section, “whitework,” opens with the poem “blakwork ,” and establishes the dialectical labor Whittaker’s texts seek to perform: Fresh blakwork; industrial complexes hands with smooth and flat palm callouses. Soothing re— —conciliation. That dawdling

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