The poems in Naming the Rose draw from vulnerable, autobiographical elements mixed with the obliviousness of those around the speaker. The two-sectioned poem “The Light of Day” contrasts loving memories of pumpkin carving by the speaker’s daughter with the fear of the speaker-mother as her partner and the father of her daughter, “drunk,” “too drunk,” “rid[es] down the highway at 90 miles an hour” with “a huge stolen pumpkin on [her] lap.”
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This collection of poems explores the fracture of a marriage after a secret is revealed—a husband’s closeted homosexuality, at odds with his religious upbringing and the life he has built. Set against the pastoral backdrop of stables and gardens, canning jars and roving horses, tether & lung traverses the landscape of loss and longing with striking vulnerability.
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If God appears on these pages, it is in the sacred clarity of the concrete detail. The speaker as a young girl, drawing ankhs and peace signs in the back of her bible, listening to a hymn as it slides beneath the pews.
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It’s in these moments that Hobbs Hesler subtly presents space for the reader to ponder the lessons we learn at any age, picking apart notions that we should get second chances.
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The request to be granted refuge in Britain or the US from victimization based on sexual orientation, religion, tribe, and/or familial ties, as soon as it is uttered before certain authorities, initiates a formal evaluation of the refugee’s narrative, which is held up to impossibly arcane, contradictory, even Kafka-esque standards by asylum officers over endless retellings.
Hurston consistently drew attention to herself in her ethnographies and included the dialogue of her interlocutors, thus eschewing the objective and distant narrator perspective.
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Reviewer Matt Meade writes, “These sixty or so mean little tales come across as dispatches from some strange world, as if Grimms’ fairy tales all took place in a moldy locker room.”
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Reviewer Carol Haggas writes, “Meno has written a definitive and unnerving account of the myriad risks and meager rewards of seeking asylum.”
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“The process of reading the book took longer than usual for a variety of reasons, least of all a natural disaster and a pandemic,” writes reviewer Loie Rawding. “But I found myself returning each night to read a few pages and sink into a warm, if unsettling, darkness.”
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“There is immense value in Ripatrazone’s book regardless of your faith,” writes reviewer S.T. Brant.
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