Tove Jansson. The Summer Book. NYRB Classics, 2008, 184 pages.

Reviewed by Alyson Mosquera Dutemple

It’s not in late May or early June that I reach for Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book, but in September when the cicadas are loudest, when hurricanes start to gather in far off seas, when back-to-school mania takes over the shelves and the daily conversation, and summer’s bubble feels on the verge of bursting. Nevermind that, nowadays, it’s not unusual for the first day of school to bring temperatures in the nineties (or higher), and that global warming has made us all rethink our concept of seasons. What Jansson’s strange and slim little book offers isn’t so much a description of a season, though it is filled with passages about the pleasures and perils of swimming, hiking, and other exploits of the hottest months, but the feeling the season brings. Time just passes differently in the summer. Living things shoot up, change, burst into bloom. And then they get ready to die. And somehow we are always thinking of the end of the summer, even when we have only just begun it.

Jansson captures summer’s liminal feels through a series of vignettes about a grandmother and her six-year-old granddaughter who pass the season together on a remote island off the coast of Finland. The point of view switches seamlessly between the two prickly-sweet characters, one just beginning life, and one nearing its end, as they traverse the landscape, grouse, grieve, and weather days with each other. A chronicle of a season passing and life just doing its thing, this volume is a treasure trove of unsentimental astonishing prose like this: “It was August, and the weather was sometimes stormy and sometimes nice, but for Grandmother, no matter what happened, it was only time on top of time, since everything was vanity and a chasing after the wind.”

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Alyson Mosquera Dutemple’s work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Colorado Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Salamander, Passages North, Redivider, Arts & Letters, Cincinnati Review’s miCRo series, and The Writer’s Chronicle, among others. She was a 2022 runner-up for the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, and one of her stories received a Special Mention in the 2024 Pushcart Prize anthology. Alyson teaches and edits in New Jersey.

Eduardo C. Corral. Guillotine. Graywolf Press, 2020. 72 pages.

Reviewed by Livia Meneghin

In Guillotine (Graywolf Press 2020), Eduardo C. Corral traverses the perilous terrain of the Mexican border, bearing witness to the systematic racism and cutting language used against migrants, while also inhabiting a personal space of queer desire and unrequited love with hunger for human connection and thirst for freedom.

Corral masterfully employs visual elements of poetry to bridge a gap that words alone cannot cross. Overlapping words and phrases create the form of “Testaments Scratched into a Water Barrel Station.” Spanning nearly thirty pages, this poetic sequence emulates the water stations throughout the desert that provide refuge and necessities for people trekking north. Corral recreates the scratches, handwriting, and graffiti through words written in different fonts and sizes. Different voices scatter the pages–some of migrants saying, “rio de aguas vivas” (15), and others spewing hateful, xenophobic speech. All the same, they all use the water barrel, a source of life, to make their testimonies known.

Another testament within the sequence ends with the lines:

…………………….Dusk here, is stunning. Yesterday, I woke to ants crawling
…………………………………………………………………………………..over my body,
………………………………………………………………………..to ants crawling
…………………………………………………………………………………..over
……………………the body on the cross around my neck.” (Corral 22)

Corral expertly turns his lines, making great use of the horizontal dimension of the published page. By incorporating white space into the language, he transports readers from a stunning sky all the way down to ants crawling over a necklace pendant. This cinematography successfully guides readers through disturbing, haunting, and/or otherwise dangerous images.

Corral is witness, traveler, and guide–through a mental map, corporeal discovery, and a physical terrain. In Guillotine, he begs readers to urgently command their own lives–past, present, and future.

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Livia Meneghin (she/her) is the author of the chapbook Honey in My Hair, and she is the Sundress Publications Reads Editor. Her writing has found homes in Breakwater Review, The Room Magazine, Gasher, Thrush, and elsewhere. She teaches writing and literature at Emerson College.