Fable-Forward

Page 6 American Book Review to perceive. Color mixes and mutates. As an agent of transformation, color in Kapil’s book becomes a body, an animal, that the reader passes into, flooded with sensual textures. As you read Humanimal, the alchemy of Kapil’s complicities will change the color of your eyes, and you will see through it; her prose changes the very shape of your face. Christine Hume is the author of Musca Domestica (2000),Alaskaphrenia (2004), Lullaby: Speculations on the First Active Sense (2008), and Shot (2009). She teaches in and directs the interdisciplinary Creative Writing Program at Eastern Michigan University, where she hosts a radio show/podcast Poetry Radio, available through iTunesU. Hume continued from previous page cally rendered images are devices of disorientation, yet the book refuses the moral ambiguity typical of the noir genre in favor of humanimal expressivity. In Kapil’s wandering course along fault lines of species, gender, class, and cultural identity, nothing reduces to black and white. Color, like the subjects themselves with all their essential mutability, patterns the book in an enchantment of mimetic faculty: “Her milk is white and then the sun goes in the ground. Because my mother does, she does so every night. We watch her disappear, and then we disappear. Blue as blue then brown then green then black.” Or try this on: “Citron-yellow dots collect and scatter. A silver sky collapses in folds upon the canopy. The grid divides then divides again. When the girl crawls out of the broken jungle, she’s soaked in a dark pink fluid that covers her parts.” Kapil’s prolific use of color emphasizes the visual, mystical, and mythological as she imparts sumptuous density to her subjects. Humanimal immerses us in corporeal atmospheres of memory and cinema. Color awakens us into an Other world, drawing felicitous links between disparate situations through color’s rhetorical potencies: blue paper lighting the jungle for film, the blue glare of the girl’s eyes at night, blue hymnal, leaves, hair, chalk, water, light, rain conjure the saturated mood of blues as well as the act of writing in the blue light of a computer screen. This “Blue Sky Fiction” reminds us that our experiences have shaped our capacity Fable-Forward Joanna Howard In her latest book, The One Marvelous Thing, Rikki Ducornet delivers those things for which her work has so often been praised: sensuous language, magical and evocative imagery, irreverent wit, and settings ranging the globe and beyond. Perhaps known best for an exuberant, maximalist style, her fictional cabinets of curiosity draw on the wonders of myth and folktales, as well as on the mysteries of natural history. She is also an accomplished visual artist and illustrator, essayist, and poet, and brings the sensibilities of all these artistic avatars to her latest collection. Ducornet merges the literary fantastic with a scathing vision of cultural realism which is at once timely and unyielding. With The One Marvelous Thing, Ducornet returns to the form of the literary fantastic short fable established in her earlier collection The Complete Butcher’s Tales (1994). In conversation with the work of Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, Italo Calvino, and Angela Carter, her tales show an easy affinity with her predecessors as she continues to contemporize the fable form. The One Marvelous Thing is fable-forward (to rework a term from the fashion industry). Ducornet merges the literary fantastic with a scathing vision of cultural realism which is at once timely and unyielding in its exposure of issues of social conformity, repression, superficiality, insecurity, and denial. The terrains of The One Marvelous Thing are often quite fanciful. “The Dickmare” takes up the uncanny romantic lives of two oceanic bivalves seeking erotic mediation from a pernicious mollusk that seems part psycho-pharmacologist, part grand inquisitor. With “Green Air,” Ducornet reworks the story of Bluebeard, offering a tyrannical philanderer who locks his sorrowful wife in a chest when she no longer fulfils his sexual ideal. She moves into new narrative territory with several futuristic dystopias: “Lettuce,” in which a corporate dictatorship prohibits the growing of fresh vegetables, or “The Scouring,” which envisions a time when the flattened earth is without...