book reviews

LAUreN HALDeMAN

Team Photograph

SARABANDE BOOKS

Little Village comic contributor Lauren Haldeman’s fourth book, Team Photograph (out Nov. 8 from Sarabande Books) is a poignant exploration of how we’re shaped by the places where we grow up. This graphic novel combines Haldeman’s iconic wolf-headed style with erasure poetry to rehash her youth on soccer fields 800 feet away from the battlefields of Bull Run in Virginia.

Throughout her childhood, Haldeman saw ghosts of Civil War soldiers in her house and on the soccer fields. As she got older, she began questioning why she saw the specters. Is it because they wanted to be seen? Why is she the only one who saw them? In Team Photograph, she dives into those memories alongside the American history that accompanies them to ultimately confront the death of her brother.

On first glance, Haldeman’s wolf figures are cute and disarming. Flipping through the book casually, one might assume that Team Photograph is about a fuzzy soccer team on their way to win a championship. It’s only when you start reading that the darker themes of the book—racial inequities, trauma hallucinations, the loss of loved ones—come through.

And while some say graphic novels soften the blow of heavy topics by translating them out of real life, I’d argue that Team Photograph packs an even heavier punch because Haldeman’s illustration style entices you to look longer. In the faces of her wolves, we see Haldeman, historical characters and possibly ourselves, as we grapple with the weighty contents of the book.

This is especially evident when Haldeman discusses the Robinson House, which was home to an often forgotten Civil War-era Black family. The house remarkably survived the war relatively unscathed. Over a century later, despite the house’s status as a historical symbol, it was burned down by arsonists, who some speculate may have been motivated by racist hatred.

Despite living near the Robinson House her entire life, Haldeman only learns about it when visiting Virginia after her brother’s death. She further meditates on the erasure of the Robinson family’s history by bringing them to life in their own family photographs, complete with wolf faces.

It’s here, and at several other moments throughout the book, that we are hit with the horror in our history and our natural instinct to turn away from gruesome things. But, as Haldeman discovers, ignoring our history only keeps its ghosts around longer. Sometimes

we must confront the uncomfortable in order to move forward.

Melancholy yet powerful, Team Photograph is an intertwining of histories that ebbs and flows with ease. Combining graphic novel elements with poetry brings a cohesion that nods to the complexities of history without getting too muddy. It’s a quick read that you can pick up again and again, each time catching something new. —Lily DeTaeye

SKYLAr ALeXANDer

Searching for Petco

FORKLIFT BOOKS

Searching for Petco (Forklift Books, 2022) opens like someone suddenly turned on a speaker. I felt accosted by author Skylar Alexander’s opening poems: clearly meant to be spoken, clearly friends with slam poetry. Extra-sensory and openly branded “millennial.”

Alexander brazenly powers into an image, hands her reader an archetype and disarms them on entry. “Oh,” you think, “I am reading millennial pop-culture poetry.” Pop culture is the first language or second nature of this collection of poems, and it’s also a misdirection. The reader will understand the references that freckle every poem (such as poems titled “Mick Foley Death Wish,” “Bayonetta,” “Rozengurtle Baumgartner, Untouched by Man”), but someone expecting more traditional poems might be put off. This is no matter: Alexander is telling her reader she knows what they expect and she’ll wear her generation proudly—but don’t you dare underestimate her.

Bitterly feminist and bitingly universal, Alexander has permission to speak for our generation. In “Confession,” the first poem that caught me off guard and really slowed down my reading, she says, “I want to unhinge / the cellar door / of my ribcage & reveal / my cobwebbed truths, / strategically buried

/ to act as the foundation / of my withheld convictions” and then “& suddenly it’s Easter dinner– /same spiral ham, same corn casserole, but / everybody’s got a Keystone and / something nice to say, & even / teetotaler grandma will put down / the Bible for a minute, unclip / her clipon earrings, unclutch / her pearls & breathe.” It is not easy to be caught off guard by a poet whose work I am already familiar with. These poems touch on moments from my own childhood and adolescence that I’d forgotten. They left me feeling both lonely and understood. In “Making Chloramine Gas in Grandma’s Basement,” Alexander’s narrator fades out with, “Watch: I will evaporate; / become toilet bowl / bleached clean / / Watch: I will vaporize; / become ammonia / lighter than air.” This collection deals with sexual assault, coming of age, Neopets and Tamagotchis, beauty standards, skate parties, chloramine gas, falling in love and WWE. There is barely a moment from the last 30 years missing from this text and, in case we get lost along the way, Alexander included “Liner Notes,” for her pop culture references. It IS NOt EASY tO bE cAUGHt OFF Repeatedly, Alexander’s work GUArD bY A POEt WHOSE WOrK changes tone, reminding the readI AM ALrEADY FAMILIAr WItH. er this is a collection of searching. This is a collection built for tHESE POEMS tOUcH ON MOMENtS searching. For readers in Eastern FrOM MY OWN cHILDHOOD AND Iowa, Alexander leaves traces of her time here, such as in the ADOLEScENcE tHAt I’D FOrGOttEN. poem “Driving River Drive Every Night for the Rest of My Life” and “Searching for Petco,” which take place in Davenport, or in the poem “From The Solar Plexus,” in which she says, “fine and intricate / like the boy who sells beer at John’s Grocery / who teaches me to pretend / Schlitz is champagne / Skyrim is caviar / that I wanted this.” Alexander’s first book is somewhere between a warning shot and flare depending on the reader. Do you need a partner to get you through the dark or do you need to back down? —Sarah Elgatian