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Local Books
Carol Tyx
Remaking Achilles: Slicing Into Angola’s History
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HIDDEN RIVER
Ordinarily I read one poem in a collection at a time and digest—give each piece special attention. Remaking Achilles is different. I read it in one sitting. And then I read it again, sure that with a second read I would find some solution to the questions it raises.
Written by Carol Tyx, a professor emeritus of Mt. Mercy University who runs a book club at Anamosa State Penitentiary, Remaking Achilles could not have come at a better time. As the U.S. (with support from protesters around the world) erupts with demands for racial equity and an end to police brutality, I found myself inside a painful, prescient narrative of the early days of the prison-industrial complex.
With an obvious understanding of poetic form and narrative, Tyx lays out a history in chronological order, using direct quotes and found poetry from her subjects to make this story tangible. Her poetry speaks for key players in Angola State Prison (in Angola, Louisiana; the inspiration for private, for-profit prisons) from 1844-1951, centering on a series of events in 1951 in which inmates cut into their own Achilles tendons in order to avoid the labor they were assigned, which led consistently to torture and often to death.
The inmates whose exact words Tyx interweaves in italics frequently quote prison staff threatening them with death. In the poem “William Richardson Reading Hamlet In Charity Hospital, New Orleans,” Richardson gives three separate instances of such threats before the closing stanza: “I am twenty-two, ten months left on my 18-month sentence / for trying to buy an ounce of marijuana— which by the way / is easier to get in prison than out / I didn’t know if I was going to wind up stick-simple / from getting beat on, or scalped, like some I saw / or dead. What good would a parole do then?”
While Tyx explores the spectrum of humanity when faced with cruel reality, she’s also forcing a mirror to her audience. The injustices the inmates faced in 1951 are still happening. One of the first poems, titled “How To Make A Plantation Prison,” reads like a leaked instruction manual for police departments in 2020 that could end up on a protest sign, “When more than a hundred prisoners die in a year, / increase arrests.” (These men wanted proper toilets and not to be murdered. How much has the prison system really changed since then?)
Part of this book’s effectiveness is in the building of the full narrative (making it tricky to tease out many representative quotes). The reader gets hooked on a spectacle of cruelty, only to find that there are no good intentions among those in power. But there are heroes here among both inmates and the “free.” Journalists battle with politicians while clergy and medics beg wardens for mercy.
The volume ends on a high note—“they named me / Achilles. Best name I ever been called”— but the book is enduringly haunted.
Seventy years from the rebellion, I can’t feel certain that any of the reforms eventually granted to Angola were enough. Tyx’s painstaking research is obvious, immersive, unavoidable and functions as a call to action. May hindsight grant change. —Sarah Eglatian
R.E. Lane
Hunker in my Bunker
SELF-PUBLISHED
In the midst of the first full month of pandemic-induced sheltering, Iowans across the state were looking for ways to make sense of their situation. I’m talking deep April, when we all started realizing that there was no quick and easy way out of this. When the itch to socialize was becoming unbearable. When we began to wonder if we’d get to experience spring.
One thing that marked that time most distinctly was the realization on the part of parents that we were going to need to find a way to help our children through something that we hadn’t fully gotten a grasp on ourselves.
It was in that confusion that Iowa City artist and writer R.E. Lane found her creative space.
Released May 5, Hunker in my Bunker: When it’s time to stay inside is a charming children’s book that gives voice to the experiences of a young child weathering an extended isolation. The reasoning is ambiguous—there is sickness in the book, but all in all, it’s aiming for a child’s imperfect perception of what is going on in the world of the pandemic. It’s not a way of explaining to a child, per se, but an attempt to help a child process.
The book is filled with coping skills couched in clever rhyme. “Today I’ll wear pajamas / But tomorrow I’ll dress up,” Lane writes. “When you’re hunkered in your bunker, / You’ve just got to switch it up.” (Perhaps this serves as a good lesson for the ostensible adults among us as well, types your reviewer, at noon, in pajamas and not, sadly, a dragon costume.)
Lane’s interesting conceit in the publishing of this book is that there are seven different versions available. She iterated her story with different looks for the central character, so that children of a variety of races and backgrounds could see themselves in the tale. Without having purchased them all, it looks from the covers as though at least two are male characters, the rest female (the story is all in first-person, with no gendered pronouns referring to the narrator), with a wide cross-section of hair colors and skin tones.
There’s no denying that it’s important for children to see characters they can identify with in the works that they read. But the presence of so many options serves also to highlight the families that aren’t represented— there is a Mama and a Daddy in the book, for example, and both are the same coloring as the child. There are also a grandpa and a younger sibling, locking the story into a specificity that limits the child’s self-insertion.
But the effort, though imperfect, is intriguing. And the book itself, publishing conceit aside, is sweet enough that any child should be able to relate. The honeyed hopefulness is the right dash of optimism for this point in history. And the tender moments—the look of concern on the dog’s face when the child is sick, for example—land beautifully. —Genevieve Trainor
THE FALAFEL JOINT
