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Poetry, food, illness, and gender
Jul. 1st, 2019 09:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
opusculasedferaDates by Nawal Nasrallah
This is a short book about the date palm, covering both the biological side of what exactly it is and the cultural side of why it's so very, very important in the Middle East. Slight, but not without interest: one of the things that really made me understand how foundational to many cultures the date palm is was the poetry that's quoted throughout. It's not just that many cultures wrote poetry that refers to the date palm, it's that it becomes clear that there's so much date palm vocabulary that is normal and poetic in Arabic and in English has to be translated with scientific terminology that looks wildly out of place in this type of e.g. love poetry. A good resource on date palms, but you have to really want to read about dates.
Joon: Persian Cooking Made Simple by Najmieh Batmanglij
A perfectly good Persian cookbook featuring a good variety of types of dishes, all selected with the intent of being cookable by the average non-Persian cook in North America without sacrificing taste. I will probably make some of these dishes, though as a readable cookbook, I preferred her Food of Life (reviewed here) which not only lists recipes, but then elaborates on several different possible variants for each one and gives a much bigger picture of the scope of the cuisine.
Passage by Gwen Benaway
I should have read this before I read Benaway's second book of poetry (reviewed here) because she has definitely grown since this book, but the poems are still excellent and heart-rending.
Sick: A Memoir by Porochista Khakpour
Khakpour has Lyme disease, which is both hugely debilitating and sufficiently vague that she has a hard time getting doctors to believe her. She's not sure when she contracted the disease, only that she seems to have always been sick, and the memoir is about both her life as someone coping with a debilitating and mysterious condition and the process of finding adequate medical care for something that some doctors don't even believe in. Khakpour is very honest about the ways in which she is and is not coping well with her disease; even a diagnosis is not necessarily the consolation you might expect it would be, and her resentment at having to have her life restricted is very refreshing.
Vexy Thing: On Gender and Liberation by Imani Perry
I'm not even sure how to review this except to say that if you're interested in race or history or gender, you should read this book. Perry describes how the liberal project (in the European sense of liberal, not just meaning vaguely leftist) keeps changing, but always maintains categories of non-persons that do not count in the new liberal order, but actually hold it up. She takes the reader through various historical examples to illuminate her argument, alway allowing for the complexity of the many different ways her subjects were oppressed, though I think she does an excellent job of tying them all back to the same strands of Western thought. Again, I am describing this complicated book very badly, but it doesn't feel complicated to read, only very deeply considered, and I recommend it highly.
even this page is white by Vivek Shraya
I have a terrible bias against the sort of poetry chapbook where poetry is confined to one tiny corner of the page, even when this means that a short poem must be split up over three pages for no particular reason and there are acres of blank white space. I suppose it might be a deliberate point in a collection about race and whiteness, but it wasn't to my taste. The poems themselves are somewhat uneven, though I may just be the wrong audience. When they were good, they were quite good; when they were otherwise, they were banal or plodding. On the other hand, I may be missing something: I'm not much of a poetry reader, and I don't have the POC or immigrant experiences that Shraya is exploring here. It did win some awards in Canada. I'd love to hear someone else's thoughts if anyone else here has read it, and I am looking forward to reading Shraya's recent book of essays.
This is a short book about the date palm, covering both the biological side of what exactly it is and the cultural side of why it's so very, very important in the Middle East. Slight, but not without interest: one of the things that really made me understand how foundational to many cultures the date palm is was the poetry that's quoted throughout. It's not just that many cultures wrote poetry that refers to the date palm, it's that it becomes clear that there's so much date palm vocabulary that is normal and poetic in Arabic and in English has to be translated with scientific terminology that looks wildly out of place in this type of e.g. love poetry. A good resource on date palms, but you have to really want to read about dates.
Joon: Persian Cooking Made Simple by Najmieh Batmanglij
A perfectly good Persian cookbook featuring a good variety of types of dishes, all selected with the intent of being cookable by the average non-Persian cook in North America without sacrificing taste. I will probably make some of these dishes, though as a readable cookbook, I preferred her Food of Life (reviewed here) which not only lists recipes, but then elaborates on several different possible variants for each one and gives a much bigger picture of the scope of the cuisine.
Passage by Gwen Benaway
I should have read this before I read Benaway's second book of poetry (reviewed here) because she has definitely grown since this book, but the poems are still excellent and heart-rending.
Sick: A Memoir by Porochista Khakpour
Khakpour has Lyme disease, which is both hugely debilitating and sufficiently vague that she has a hard time getting doctors to believe her. She's not sure when she contracted the disease, only that she seems to have always been sick, and the memoir is about both her life as someone coping with a debilitating and mysterious condition and the process of finding adequate medical care for something that some doctors don't even believe in. Khakpour is very honest about the ways in which she is and is not coping well with her disease; even a diagnosis is not necessarily the consolation you might expect it would be, and her resentment at having to have her life restricted is very refreshing.
Vexy Thing: On Gender and Liberation by Imani Perry
I'm not even sure how to review this except to say that if you're interested in race or history or gender, you should read this book. Perry describes how the liberal project (in the European sense of liberal, not just meaning vaguely leftist) keeps changing, but always maintains categories of non-persons that do not count in the new liberal order, but actually hold it up. She takes the reader through various historical examples to illuminate her argument, alway allowing for the complexity of the many different ways her subjects were oppressed, though I think she does an excellent job of tying them all back to the same strands of Western thought. Again, I am describing this complicated book very badly, but it doesn't feel complicated to read, only very deeply considered, and I recommend it highly.
even this page is white by Vivek Shraya
I have a terrible bias against the sort of poetry chapbook where poetry is confined to one tiny corner of the page, even when this means that a short poem must be split up over three pages for no particular reason and there are acres of blank white space. I suppose it might be a deliberate point in a collection about race and whiteness, but it wasn't to my taste. The poems themselves are somewhat uneven, though I may just be the wrong audience. When they were good, they were quite good; when they were otherwise, they were banal or plodding. On the other hand, I may be missing something: I'm not much of a poetry reader, and I don't have the POC or immigrant experiences that Shraya is exploring here. It did win some awards in Canada. I'd love to hear someone else's thoughts if anyone else here has read it, and I am looking forward to reading Shraya's recent book of essays.
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