LO C A L B O O KS
Chuy Renteria We Heard It When We Were Young UNIVERSITY OF IOWA PRESS
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e Heard It When We Were Young is a love letter to all of us who, like author Chuy Renteria, don’t know whether or not they had a happy childhood or whether or not they are good people. It is a love letter to those of us who feel guilty whichever way we answer. This book was written in a language native to those of us who didn’t quite fit. Told like he’s sitting among friends, Renteria, a first generation American, uses Spanish and Spanglish throughout his narrative without othering the languages by using italics or translations. He makes clear that they are as much a part of his narrative as the English. This is one story, one identity, one language. This autobiography is relentlessly honest, vulnerable and surprising. The prologue is among the best writing I’ve ever read. Without mincing words, without whitewashing or censoring, Renteria sets the stage for his difficult journey: “Even in this town. There are evil people.” I have seen Renteria’s work before, both performed live and in writing, and this was levels beyond—a bald-faced vulnerability rarely seen in private spaces, in ink for anyone to read. Thankfully, the intensity turns down a bit in the bulk of the book (although the epilogue has that same penetrating openness). Beginning with Renteria as a young boy, the age of the narrator seems to change with the age he’s telling, on through
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teen years and into adulthood. Anyone who has heard about this book before now knows it’s “tales of growing up Mexican American in small-town Iowa,” knows there’s discussion of lowrider culture, b-boying and otherness. But I hadn’t seen anything out there to warn me that it wouldn’t feel so much like reading a book as reading the words of the prophets written on the bathroom stalls of my middle school. As Renteria writes, “We were the scrappy kids fighting against boredom and racists … But that’s not the whole truth, right? We were also fighting against innocence. We were fighting against ourselves.” Through cultural and familial conflict, the traumas born of teenage boredom and the search for identity, Renteria folds his life into a narrative arc that feels at once fresh and unrelentingly real. Each moment begs to be read, forcing readers to recognize the cycles of violence and power dynamics that framed our own childhoods.
THIS BOOK NEEDS TO BE READ. While themes of violence and shame are prevalent throughout We Heard It When We Were Young, they are not told so intensely as to make me squeamish. It was seeing parallels between Renteria’s regrets and my own that made me uncomfortable. This book needs to be read. It needs to be read by people with no idea what it means to be other, who don’t know small-town life, for whom school or coping came easily. And it needs to be read by those who know what it is to be other. Those who have struggled to make a space for themselves. Something painful but safe is happening here. If you see yourself in these pages, you also see that you’re not alone. (Content warnings: violence, racism, disordered eating, death) ––Sarah Elgatian
Caldwell Murchfield; ill. Bruce Lanning It Can’t Be Easy to Hang a Giraffe in a Cheap Hotel Room … [SELF-PUBLISHED]
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hen I first received this slim volume in the mail, I panicked. How can one get a ~500-word review out of a book of less than 40 pages? I had assigned it to a freelancer, but held back, not wanting someone else to have to grapple with that dilemma. A 40-page poetry book? Sure, golden! But noir comedy micro-fiction? Wait. Noir comedy micro-fiction? Yes, you read that right. Each page is a series of sentence-long stories, pairing an arch, detective fiction tone usually reserved for the underbelly of humanity with the underbelly of the animal kingdom, instead. If that sounds surreal, or nonsensical, or insane, rest assured: It’s all of those things. It’s also laugh-out-loud funny and a glorious testament to the virtues of word economy. Murchfield captures an entire world in each sentence, making clear choices that nod to the tone he’s, well, aping while also creaking open the door of a universe of possibilities. Like the best micro-fiction, these aren’t snippets, but full stories unto themselves, with bold characters in ludicrously fun situations. This writing style is an illustrator’s dream, and Bruce Lanning is clearly enjoying his part in the farce, pulling a story from each page and giving it depth and whimsy in his casual, engaging black-and-white art. He, too, is a master of storytelling in miniature, evoking mood and
meaning with a single expression. Lanning captures fear in a bird’s eye, smarm in a snake’s smile. Irony and multiple meanings form the core of many of these, with wordplay galore guaranteed to make you groan. But some of the best are more simple than that, funny due to the juxtaposition but also sad—noir to the core: “The sound of Shorty’s claws frantically scrabbling for purchase on the slick floor was abruptly silenced by a volley of gunshots.” These stories are at their best when they are fully original, or when the pop culture references are swift and subtle. A fantastic example is Lanning’s illustration of the sentence, “Like most walruses, Duke was a mean drunk.” The story is among my favorites, for its silliness and simplicity (and also its darkness, to be honest). But the addition of a hammer to Duke’s victim in his illustration, a nod to “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” is goofy and fantastic. But things fall flat a bit in the direct homages to familiar, rather than arbitrary, animals. References to Snoopy and Lassie and Curious George feel a bit forced. They’re not as funny as the other stories, and they run contrary to the original characters’ personalities in a way that a sentence-long story just doesn’t have time to earn. Taken as a whole, though, this collection is a joy to peruse. It can be taken all at once or read piecemeal, making it a perfect coffee table or bathroom book. It has the feel of a 20th century joke book updated for the internet age. We’ve all read or written micro-fiction on Twitter; it’s become as ubiquitous as those joke books were 40 years ago. Collecting it this way, with illustrations added, is a lovely nod to both traditions—and it’s a perfect holiday gift for that one person on your list with a goofy sense of humor who you can never find something for. Perhaps I’ll pick one up for that freelancer who I stole the pleasure of this review from! —Genevieve Trainor
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