Lotera Jarocha

Sohrab Sepehri The Oasis of Now Kazim Ali & Mohammad Jafar Mahallati, tr. BOA Editions The Oasis of Now, the first publication of Sohrab Sepehri’s work in the United States, gathers works from three of Sepehri’s most acclaimed books. Sepehri combines his rich knowledge of Buddhism, Sufi mysticism, and Western traditions in this rapturous collection. Pulsing with life, Sepehri’s poetry mourns and rejoices, celebrating the complex nature of the world and humanity’s place within it. Tilman Rammstedt The King of China Katy Derbyshire, tr. Seagull Books The King of China begins when Keith Stapperpfenning and his grandfather are forced into a family vacation to China. When his grandfather dies suddenly, Keith must rely on a guidebook to write a series of letters home. Oddly entertaining, this novel won Tilman Rammstedt the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize in 2008. Nota Bene plains culture and romance, but ultimately he is nothing more than a mirage. In Ward, Bair sees a way back home, a fulfilling life in the place she lit out from as soon as she could. In Julene, Ward sees a connection to a more sophisticated world, and when he contemplates moving to Laramie, Wyoming, where she works, there is the promise of legitimacy as a cowboy and those mythic Wyoming license plates. When it comes down to it, neither can make the requisite compromises for the fantasies the other has created. Myths, especially myths of manhood , working landscapes, and the West haunt each generation of this western Kansas family, and Bair’s memoir is both most fresh and most powerful when she fully engages these myths. Her father’s edict— “Hang on to your land!”—haunts the surviving generations. Under the spell of the patriarchal myths expressed through hard work, thrift, and commodity agricultural production , each generation struggles with legacies. For Bair’s brother, his father’s drudge as a teen, manager after his father’s death, the farm kept him from pursuits he loved. For Bair’s son and nephew, farming means fulfilling the family legacy, “what Grandpa would have wanted.” Bair’s niece sees the family allegiance to the farm in a broader context. For farmers like Harold Bair, the patriarch still calling the shots long after his death, it’s a “power trip,” something out of King Lear. Within this larger context, Bair agrees to sell the farm. This necessary and painful step does not release the family from the environmental responsibilities of their land tenure. It complicates them. One of the signal achievements of Bair’s eco-memoir is thatshecanbothstridentlydefendher anti-irrigation and pro-environment stance and recognize her complicity in the economic and cultural systems that keep industrial agriculture ascendant in the United States. In The Ogallala Road, Bair wonderfully shows how even the most forceful defenders of the natural world can be ensnared by patriarchy’s most intimate expression —in lovers, in fathers, sons, and in ownership of land. Nancy Cook University of Montana, Missoula Alec Dempster. Lotería Jarocha: Linoleum Prints. Erin, Ontario. Porcupine’s Quill. 2013. isbn 9780889843622 Alec Dempster’s Lotería Jarocha brings together two Mexican folk traditions, the son jarocho and the lotería. From Veracruz, Mexico, the son jarocho is a type of music that is sung and danced to while performed on a combination of indigenous and European instruments, while the lotería is a Bingo-like game played by members of the community. May–August 2014 • 119 120 worldliteraturetoday.org reviews Lotería Jarocha is a collection of sixty block prints corresponding to a son jarocho, each with an accompanying prose description. The descriptions and the illustrations are whimsical. For example, “Cascabel,” which means “rattlesnake” in English , describes a son that includes elements of flamenco while incorporating a musical instrument sounding like a snake’s rattle. Dempster’s linoleum block print illustrates the musical instrument, but instead of appearing as a rattlesnake’s tail and rattle, it has the shape of a human heart. The son itself incorporates elements of seventeenth-century Andalucian Spain and a passionate dance performed by women. Lotería Jarocha reminds one of the deeply liberating and subversive nature of folklore and folkloric production . Subversion occurs on several levels. An

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