RE-MEMBERING THE DARK AND THE LIGHT

a review by Jennifer Peedin

Kimberly Becker’s new volume of poems, Bringing Back the Fire, is a collection of darkness and light, of grief and relief, and is in part a personal journey. On a much wider scale, it is a journey that reflects the exploration that is ongoing in North Carolina and in the South at large as we remember and learn about our Indigenous history. While Becker “re-members,” so do we; as Becker calls home over and over again, so do we, wherever that may be. In the title poem, told from the perspective of the water spider that brought the fire to the world in the Cherokee legend, she writes, “I dream dreams of fire and water / And when it thunders I think of the hollow in the sycamore tree on that / island that once seemed impossible to reach.” This story, like Becker, seems to be calling for a re-memberance and a redefinition of what it means to be from the South, what we hope the South will one day become, though at times it seems impossible to reach.

doing so, Becker divides the collection into two sections, Dark and Light, the former beginning the volume. The Dark section opens with “Affixing the Halo,” her own story of the process of getting a Halo brace before stereotactic brain surgery, but readers find bits of themselves as she describes the painful process: “The halo is heavy as hell / It becomes hard to hold your head up / with the weight / of this unwieldy glory.” We remember the burdens of smiling when angry, holding our heads up when we want to collapse in exhaustion, and Becker embraces those thoughts, too, writing, “Buck up; hold your head high? / But the halo is heavy; you can barely walk / No way you could fly.” She offers permission to let the halo fall and drop our head into the absolute chaos of modern life.

JENNIFER PEEDIN grew up in Eastern North Carolina and is currently a PhD candidate at West Virginia University where she researches southeastern Indigenous and Black narratives that rely on swamps and hurricanes.

KIMBERLY L. BECKER is author of several poetry collections, including Words Facing East (WordTech Editions, 2016), Flight (MadHat Press, 2018) The Bed Book (Spuyten Duyvil, 2020). Her poems have appeared in journals and anthologies, including Women Write Resistance: Poets Resist Gender Violence (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2013); Indigenous Message on Water (Indigenous World Forum on Water and Peace, 2014); and Tending the Fire: Native Voices and Portraits (University of New Mexico Press, 2017).

Becker is assiduous in communicating with the past, memory, and grief, both her own grief and others. Her new poems are frank in their raw emotion and unromantic in the best way possible. Those of us who tire of a romanticized version of the dark places in life and the journey to circumvent them find relief in Becker’s poems. They easily allow us to see ourselves in these situations, in that arduous journey of trying to bring back the fire. In

Other poems reflect Becker’s preoccupation with memory and home. She often writes “re-member,” stressing the reconnection and recollection of the past rather than a simple remembering of what is forgotten. This may be evidence of Becker’s continued explorative journey into her Cherokee heritage with her consistent use of the Cherokee language, seeing and connecting with her ancestors in everyday life and retelling Cherokee stories and legends such as the title poem, “Bringing Back the Fire.” This process of exploration and identifying as a poet of Cherokee descent is present in her other volumes, but in this collection, Becker allows readers to engage with the Cherokee past and how it bleeds into a present-day North Carolina, reminding us of a long ago home. It is natural to think of the past, of home, in the midst of grief or struggle, and in her poem “Heimweh” (German for homesickness), Becker writes, “I am far from / mound and mountain / . . . / but I will face East to sing / my morning song in Cherokee.” Many of us, in the waning days of a pandemic, often look homewards or to a past with more comfort in the known, and though Becker acknowledges this anxious nostalgia, she is also very quick to share that she is not alone in her journey through the present.

Spirits are scattered throughout the collection, spirits that watch and council and those that have chosen Becker to share their story. They are “Knocking from within barn walls / Spirits saying / we, too, lived with unmet needs / we, too, need attention,” and they come to the surface in a trip to New Echota, the beginning of the Cherokee Trail of Tears, as Becker is overcome with emotion narrating, “from this place of strength and grief, / offering thanks / My tears are for self, but also from deeper source.” In the journey to bring back the fire, Becker reminds us of a time of deep darkness, employing these spirits to narrate in “Missio Mei,” a poem about Native boarding schools. She writes “of a religion that forced baptism / onto heathens / forced innocence / from children.” Though reflecting a dark time in American history, many in the Indigenous community are now active in ensuring the future is different. Becker writes, “This is what happens / when you give away your power / Now my mission is to call it back.”

Offering these words of power and action, Becker calls us into the Light section of her collection. As promised, she brings us through the grief to the other side, a lighter side, made wiser from trauma.

In Bringing Back the Fire, Kimberly Becker’s poems bring life back to a comatose world, to awaken what was forgotten, but she must take us through the fire to get there. Becker takes us back to the lows of the past few years as she describes hospital rooms, COVID chaos in the ER, and the undignified state of death. Her words serve as a reminder that there must be darkness, sometimes significant darkness, before there can be light. When she does return us to the light, brings us back to the fire, we know we’ve conquered the darkness. n

Increasing Echoes

by Margaret D. Bauer, Editor

After three decades of feature sections and writers, it is no surprise that our Flashbacks section gets longer and longer. Welcome back to several writers, whether for yet another poem or essay that was a finalist, for having a new book reviewed, or for receiving a new award covered here (looking at you, 2022 Raleigh Award winner, Valerie Nieman). Given our 2006 issue’s focus on children’s and YA literature, we always publish the news of the latest recipient of the NC AAUW Young People’s Literature Award in this section. Congratulations to Micki Bare. Too often, this section includes notice of the passing of one of NCLR’s writers. This time it is my mentor and friend Philip Gerard, who has been a source of support and kindness since I met him in my early years as Editor. During Alex Albright’s editorship in NCLR’s first years, Philip shared a chapter from his provocative novel Cape Fear Rising, a novel that would bring much needed attention to one of the darkest chapters of North Carolina history, the 1898 coup d’etat in Wilmington. I learned about the only successful coup d’etat in American history via this issue of NCLR, sent to me prior to my interview for the job as NCLR Editor. And I remember that I could not wait to read the full novel. Since doing so, I have taught Cape Fear Rising several times, including in an honors seminar on the coup in literature and history, during which my colleague History Professor Karin Zipf and I brought our class to Wilmington. Observing his engagement with our students, as well as at readings and other literary events, I got to see Philip in action, and I know his students are mourning the loss of such a generous, enthusiastic professor. I share their grief, and repeat my condolences to his wife, Jill, and his colleagues at UNC Wilmington. Read more about Philip in our remembrance here.

In 2001, our science fiction feature included an interview with John Kessel, and we published a short story by him in 2006. More recently, Dale Bailey got a little carried away – in a good way – in his effort to review Kessel’s new collection of short fiction. “Keep going,” I said, when he warned me that the review was exceeding our usual thousandword range. I know you’ll enjoy Dale’s essay as much as I did. Now I’m looking forward to reading more of Kessel’s fiction, though I’m still deciding about whether to read the one that “took the top of [Dale’s] head off (not gently) and gave the contents inside a thorough stirring.” But how can I resist after Dale’s description of the effect of that story every time he reads it?.

If you are a writer we have not previously published and are therefore wondering how your essay or poem ended up in this section, it’s something about your work’s focus, which echoes a past issue’s feature section. Our 2011 issue featured environmental writing, and the environment plays an important role in Mark Powell’s novel reviewed in this section. In 2014, we featured war in North Carolina Literature, and here you’ll read a review of a new World War II–era novel by Leah Weiss, who is new to our pages. Our 2017 topic, North Carolina Literature and the Other Arts, brings Morrow Dowdle’s poem “Brow,” inspired by artist Frida Kahlo, and Blaise Kielar’s music-inspired essay into this section.

Enjoy, too, reading about the newest members of the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame in the pages to follow. And as North Carolina Writers’ Director Ed Southern directed the audience at the induction ceremony, “keep reading.” n

28 Celebrating, Finally, the 2020 North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame Inductees

34 A Triumph from Doodle Hill a review by Rebecca Godwin n Malaika King Albrecht and Marsha White Warren, eds. Collected Poems of Marty Silverthorne

36 “We’ve all lost a champion”: Philip Gerard (1955–2022)

38 A Very Dark Ride: Three Ways of Looking at the Short Fiction of John Kessel a review essay by Dale Bailey

46 Cosmic Background Radiation a poem by Eric Weil art by Robert Langford

48 The Coming of Wisdom in WWII Eastern North Carolina a review by Donna A. Gessell n Leah Weiss, All the Little Hopes

50 NC AAUW Young People’s Literature Award

51 Making Sense of the Sixties a review by Sheryl Cornett n Lee Zacharias, What a Wonderful World This Could Be

53 Valerie Nieman Receives Sir Walter Raleigh Award

54 Captain von Trapp in the Surgical Suite a poem by Maureen Sherbondy art by Tim Lytvinenko

55 Jubilee a poem by Janet Ford art by Carrie Tomberlin

56 Complicated Connections: Young Love in the 1970s South a review by David Deutsch n Jim Grimsley, A Dove in the Belly