The Forked Juniper: Critical Perspectives on Rudolfo Anaya by Roberto Cantú (review)

nonfiction, How I Became a Tree. One of these patterns is her unique ability to find kindred arborphiliac souls in figures from the past. Roy meticulously follows the paper trails left by tree lovers like the artist Nandalal Bose, the Bengali literary icon Rabindranath Tagore, and the physicist Jagadish Chandra Bose. Interspersed with descriptions of their writings are brief, stunning flashes of recognition : “The Sanskrit word for this kind of kinship is ‘sahrydaya,’ the cosoul, the soulmate, the sharer of the soul. Discovering a sahrydaya in Nandalal brought such relief and joy: I was not the only one who had regarded the tree as a human or the human as a tree. I turn a page, and there is Nandalal again, showing students how to draw tree joints. I smile at the kinship, the reference to ‘human’ in the instruction . . . . The tree-becoming human is also on the next page where the illustration of tree bark made me want to scratch a rough patch of skin on my knee, where so many scars of childhood games live.” Such moments of sahrydaya illuminate “a liberating sense of life, where one can be plant and human at the same time,” but her loving attention to soulmates is also tethered to a larger structural purpose. How I Became a Tree begins by positing the world of trees as an alluring other to that of the human—the author ardently desires to live in “tree time.” However, as the narrative grows and proliferates through discussions of the thoughts of soulmates, the recall of personal memories, and the explications of the representation of trees in literary and philosophical works, the active anthropocentric desire to transform into the other gradually fades. Instead we are presented with a subtle, more ordinary process of becoming: “I tried to live to tree time, rejecting speed and excess. And yet I did not feel completely like a tree. Not until a bird came and sat on my shoulder around sunset one day. I did not move. I do not know about the bird but I was certain that in the thinning margins of that forest . . . I was, at last, ready to be a tree.” In small, subtle turns of unexpected kinship like the above, the kaleidoscopic dimensions of Roy’s distinctly ordinary quest to become a tree emerge clearly into view. Amit R. Baishya University of Oklahoma The Forked Juniper: Critical Perspectives on Rudolfo Anaya. Ed. Roberto Cantú. Norman. University of Oklahoma Press. 2016. 317 pages. Finally, a gathering of essays on Rudolfo Anaya’s now vast archive of writing that considerably widens the circuitry of engagement with global literary histories. Roberto Cantú brings together a group of critically imaginative, international scholars whose readings no longer tolerate the facile regionalist, nationalist models that have for so long circumscribed our reception of not only Anaya’s work but that of most Chicana/o writers. Finally, a group of scholars committed to exploring the deep aesthetic, philosophical, transcultural histories scribed into Anaya’s oeuvre. The essays are spectacular, smart, and inventive, offering, as most of them do, detailed analysis of Anaya’s genealogical location within the long history of cultural production and intellectual exchanges across the Americas. This, especially in essays by John Pohl, Spencer R. Herrera, and Enrique Lamadrid. But not only the Americas . María Herrera-Sobek charts the correspondences between Anaya’s mythotheological tropes and those of ancient Greece and Hindu Vedic philosophy and theology. Monika Kaup offers a brilliant reading of Anaya’s writing as part of a long line in the “hemispheric continuities of the New World baroque” and a “mestizo deformation” present in Carpentier, García Márquez, Glissant, and other Latin American writers, artists, and critics of the late twentieth century Rabindra K. Swain This House Is Not for Knowing Authors Press Swain’s poems in this collection often seem to leap into being from some simple observation—of nature, of human nature—before swelling into a universal register that brings the reader alongside author in the poem. With lines composed of simple yet inviting words, Swain’s poems can surprise with a surrealist flair or raise a lump in the throat from an unexpectedly...