Bittersweet Soup: A Review of Marsha Mehran's Pomegranate Soup by Nicole Bartley

cover credit: Random House, LLC.

Pomegranate Soup by Marsha Mehran is an intriguing narrative with a dash of wonder and one-too-many sprigs of enchantment. She gradually unfolds the co-dependent Aminpour sisters’ tale of evading mysterious pasts and a desperate attempt to establish a safe home in the small Irish town of Ballinacroagh. While there, Marjan, Bahar, and Layla rent a small cafe from an Italian landlady, Estelle, and introduce their secluded town to cultural cuisine. This results in both trusting friendships and despicable prejudices.

The Iranian, Irish, and Italian cultures are depicted only through language and food. Mehran created strong, distinct voices through realistic vernacular from Estelle and the Irish citizens. However the Aminpour sisters don’t present dialogue cadences. Instead, they use the same language structures as the narration: American. This could be an attempt to make the sisters as “normal” as possible for American readers and set them apart from other characters.

Mehran explores the sisters’ “otherness” further through their experiences with prejudice from the town gossip, close-minded society women, and the town bully. Although the sisters are never questioned about running a business without a man, the town (and author) focuses on their ethnicity. Among earlier instances of indirect prejudice, Bahar encounters hatred when she is angrily shunned by the butcher’s wife and men in a bar while trying to find Layla one evening.

“Something was very wrong here…. Something that went beyond the sad little curiosities of the old women in the butcher’s. Whatever she thought of that kind of small-mindedness, it was nothing compared to the bald hatred before her. It was an exclusion as foul as she had experienced in those scary early years in London, when the whole city was under alert of terrorist threats, and anyone who looked slightly foreign was watched with suspicion. Turning on her heels… Bahar pushed through the pub door, anxious to escape the dread that was rising in her chest. Just as the door slammed behind her, a sinister voice called out: ‘Go back to yer stinking camels!’ Raspy smokers’ laughs enveloped the rest of the smarting insult” (140).

The commonness of that insult connects with the characters, which mostly represent tropes. Bahar is fully developed and the overall story arc seems to center on her. Her abusive past resulted in mistrust of men, in addition to severe migraines triggered by fear and any conflict. She is constantly on edge, and her post-traumatic stress is enough to make readers want to hug her and hand her a bowl of abgusht and a cup of tea.

Because of this, readers will find common ground with Marjan. The narration follows her reliance on general kindness, food, and drinks as attempts to provide comfort. They also counteract her ineptitude of protecting and guiding her sisters. And, to ensure that they’re accepted in town, she uses her peculiar gift of making inspirational meals.

“Through her recipes, Marjan was able to encourage people toward accomplishments that they had previously thought impossible; one taste of her food and most would not only start dreaming but actually contemplate doing (78). … Evie and Fiona sat at one of the window-side tables now, each drinking her own bowl of red lentil soup as vague ruminations—prompted by Marjan’s magic—swam in their heads: Evie could see neon pink letters spelling out her name over the salon’s door, while Fiona imagined hers lighting up a theater marquee once again” (89).

But this relates to Mehran’s inability to remove excessive ingredients after her dish has been plated and served. Although Marjan’s cuisine provides a touch of magical realism, other poorly integrated fantastic elements cause hiccups. For example, Layla’s supernatural musk of cinnamon and rose is just enough for readers to suspend disbelief and enjoy the story. But Mehran unnecessarily explains the scent by killing the sisters’ mother in childbirth.

“Layla never knew her mother either, for she died shortly after pushing her out into the harsh world… The weary doctors in Tehran General Hospital had no explanation for the merciless bleeding and just shrugged with defeat when they told her father the news. They failed to mention that, as the last drops of blood seeped into the hospital’s sea green bedsheets, a tiny bud had popped out of his wife’s womb. When the flower seed fell into the pool of blood, it blossomed into the face of a full-grown rose. The fearful doctors kept this to themselves, partly to avoid a malpractice suit, and partly because the rosewater and cinnamon scent that accompanied the flower’s miraculous unfolding reminded them of a time when military guards did not hover behind every surgery room door” (29).

The background of the mother dying will gain readers’ sympathies, and it’s easy to believe that Layla’s natural musk is due to Marjan’s constant cooking with exotic spices. But a rosebud causing fatal hemorrhaging represents an elaborate need to appeal to readers, which tarnishes the story.

But Pomegranate Soup isn’t just a novel about family and finding a safe home; it is also, surprisingly, a cookbook. Each chapter is prefaced by recipes, and the rich descriptions of ingredients will make readers salivate. Overall, the novel provides enough intrigue and simplicity to keep readers turning pages without much thought. It will succeed when readers wonder if they, too, live in a provincial town that needs a bit of spice.

Review by Nicole Bartley

Pomegranate Soup by Marsha Mehran
Random House, 2005

Issue 09 Contributor List

*Artwork*

Bruce Barton

Marina K. Caprara

Susana H. Case

Sally Deskins

Andrew Ek

Bonnie Gloris

Christian Hendricks

Jason Johns

Mette Norrie

*Fiction*

Michelle E. Crouch

Julie Day

Amy Fant

Tawnysha Greene

Geeta Kothari

Brandi Wells

Nici West

Chris Yamashita

*Nonfiction*

Alicia Barnes 

Rachael Levitt 

Ioanna Opidee

*Poetry*

Bryan Borland

Anthony Isaac Bradley

Jo Ann Clark

Jarrett Eakins

Dakota R. Garilli

RJ Gibson

Lizi Gilad

Michael Hurley

Rochelle Hurt

W. Todd Kaneko

Sarah Leavens

Christopher Leibow

Naomi Lore

Rachael Lyon

Lisa McCool-Grime

Colin Meldrum

John A. Nieves

Emily O'Neill

Matt Pasca

Jan Priddy

Ann Robinson

Jonathan H. Scott

David Shumate

Danez Smith

Virginia Smith

Emma Sovich

Christine H. Stroud

Christine Tierney

Quinn White

Wendy Wisner

My Four Walls and Our Two Faces: A Review of Karen Lillis’ Watch the Doors as They Close

We've all had to face the inevitability of change. People move away. Relationships end. We get older, and we start to inspect our pasts under a new light, hopefully leading to some sort of acceptance or understanding. In Watch the Doors as They Close, Karen Lillis lets readers dive full force into the mind of a woman who recognizes that “everything flows,” and whose heart has been broken just days before the book’s opening. The narrator, by recounting and exploring some of the couple’s shared moments, seems to be trying to explain how two people could burn so brightly for each other in summer only to fizzle out by winter.

The entire piece reads like a discarded diary, with entries dating from December 12, 2003, to the end of that same month. The narrator is a writer who works in a bookstore and was seeing Anselm, a deeply troubled composer, from roughly August to December. In the first sentence, she admits that “this is the story of Anselm.” In fact, the narrator remains nameless throughout the novella. We learn so much about Anselm so quickly, including his sexual past in Paris involving three different women and his depression:

He calls it “the bad space.” When he starts going there he starts getting shaky and scared. Anxious. The shaky feels like after you've been crying for a long, long time. When he’s in the bad space he is almost absent to himself (though he seems to sit with it and try to cope with the accompanying anxiety – other times he just wants to be distracted, like watching movies – still other times he can’t bear it and he drinks to take the edge off) but he can seem strangely present to the person he’s with.

The quote above illustrates Lillis’ narrative tactics. Here, the sense of distance, of separation between Anselm and the narrator and the reader, is strongly established. Anselm is absent to himself while strangely present, just as he is absent and present to the reader through the narrator’s interpretation of him. Appearing within the first few pages of the book, Anselm’s depression casts a shadow over the entire relationship. It dictates the way the couple interacts and, often, how the narrator feels about herself. The sex stopped being sober relatively early on, and they live a sort of “desert island existence” not because the narrator is anxious about getting Anselm to meet her friends, but because Anselm is “so skittish among the living.” At one point, things are so awkward that the narrator has “a full-blown meltdown,” and “internaliz[es] his daylong inattentiveness into an inescapable feeling of ugliness and impotence, and just general ineffable anguish.”

Lillis’ choice of a diary format provides a level of honesty—in private writings, there’s no reason to leave anything unsaid. If the narrator were telling this story to a friend or family member directly, for example, there'd be more cause for skepticism. Lillis instead keeps the world of the novella very small, aptly mirroring the couple’s “desert island existence.” Minor characters are mentioned by name but aren't involved in the scenes.

The novella’s success comes in Lillis’ portrayal of a destructive relationship. The break up is so filled with subtleties that it really is heartrending. But, while readers empathize with the narrator’s sadness, the problem of Anselm’s tacit abuse is very real—his mood swings, his insularity, his drinking, his urge to leave without warning or explanation, not to mention the moments when the narrator simply feels threatened even though nothing is happening. Displaying typical signs of an abused person, she shares enough about Anselm’s shaky past to contextualize and almost justify his behavior. She has brief moments of clarity about the situation, but there is so much talk of confession, of her admitting to a wrong and returning to a “state of Grace,” that it seems she thinks she committed some sin. In the story we’re told, the narrator comes across as the victim but blames herself as the victimizer. She is so wrapped up in the World of Anselm that perhaps the truth is hard to acknowledge.

By the end of Watch the Doors as They Close, readers are left somewhat conflicted. While wanting to understand Anselm, there’s also a feeling that the narrator should stand up for herself and throw a few punches. But it’s not that kind of book. It is a personal and delicate attempt at tolerating change and moving beyond sadness and abuse. Just as the narrator says that “one has to sit very still and pay close attention to see where [Anselm’s] going,” so the readers must look closely to see some hope that the narrator will find solace and adapt. “I bought him some food for the bus and paid for a cab to Port Authority as if he still belonged to me,” she admits in closing, “but when the bus finally backed away, I hurried home to Brooklyn and dragged our futon to the curb.”

Review by Robyn Campbell

Watch the Doors as They Close by Karen Lillis
Spuyten Duyvil Novella Series, 2012

Sarah Leavens Reviews BK Loren’s Animal, Mineral, Radical: Essays on Wildlife, Family, and Food

Animal: as in wild, domestic, essential
Mineral: as in solid, crystalline, interlocked, creating a sometimes jagged bond
Radical: as in rootsy, of the earth, digging to the origin, resulting in change

As the title indicates, BK Loren’s new book of essays, Animal, Mineral, Radical: Essays on Wildlife, Family, and Food, invites the fundamental elements of living into concert with one another, to impressive effect.

Loren utilizes the lyric prose for which we know her well (from her recent novel Theft) to examine both small moments and large ideas on the page. Though the collection of thirteen essays is divided into three sections, ideas of animal—such as the human experience of aging or the awesome yet fragile nature of coyotes—mineral, and radical interact with one another within each essay and throughout the entire book. Such integration is one of Loren’s great strengths as a writer. She provides a space for intersection of what we might think of as discrete inquiries or topics by crafting a container wherein the subjects become fluid and together yield a much larger inquiry. Not only are the stories and subjects incendiary, but her command of language is acute.

“Plate Tectonics and Other Underground Theories of Loss,” the collection’s penultimate essay, provides a thought-provoking example of Loren’s exploration of relationships between the physical, natural, and spiritual world. This personal/lyric essay, segmented by the chronology of an earthquake, delves into Loren’s adjacent experiences with depression, the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, and the loss of her home and possessions in an aftershock. By writing into each of these, Loren builds a platform for scrutiny of the ramifications of an everyday life disconnected from the natural world. Loren tells us that after the earthquake, she was “opened like sky;” the ensuing portrayals of a regained awe are reminiscent of Annie Dillard, except that Loren goes one step further and, again, holds such awe in concert with the actuality (and sometimes, the banality) of contemporary responsibility and everyday life.

Loren lays out her argument for mindfulness with the book’s introduction, where she references a recent essay by the editors of n+1, who posited, “all contemporary publications tend toward the condition of blogs , and soon, if not yet already, it will seem pretentious, elitist, and old-fashioned to write anything, anywhere, with patience and care.” It is no surprise—indeed, it is a great relief—that Loren, who opens Animal, Mineral, Radical with the sentence “Writing is listening,” draws a parallel between the “patience and care” it takes to write well and the patience and care of “the way we view and interact with nature.” What follows are thirteen essays that champion “the power of language,” nature and the compassion yielded when we apply patience and care to the process of both.

Though every essay included in Animal, Mineral, Radical stands its ground, highlights include “The Evolution of Hunger” and “Word Hoard.” “Hunger” alternates research and meditation on early humans’ eating habits with the writer’s experience of sharing meals with a homeless man and with her father before his death. She draws a line between our “hunger for communication” and our “hunger for food,” introducing her father’s telling of a painful memory and her own struggle with a displaced brother. “Hunger” is repeatedly heartbreaking and exemplary of Loren’s consideration for relationships within the world and the body itself, as well as her thirst to explore: “I wake hungry, achingly starved to become more human: the beautiful animal in the core of me craving the evolution of it all.”

“Word Hoard,” a brief essay and the collection’s last, explicates language itself, a phenomenon made elusive to Loren after an experience of aphasia. She says, “Words carry on their backs entire histories. This is what I learned the day they packed up and made me languageless.” The aphasia lasted for years, which seems an incomprehensible agony. The beauty of the essay—indeed, of the entirety of Animal, Mineral, Radical—is that Loren recovered language, and with it, the ability to illuminate: “Words are my nourishment. They are the molecules that seethe in my veins. they are the lights that filters through the rods and cones of my eyes to create color and dimension. […] Writing, to me, means food, means sustenance.”

The care and passion with which Loren writes are palpable in this collection. While reading, I found myself needing to put down the book repeatedly in order to soak in the full weight of the words; I found myself purposefully slowing down my reading in order to enjoy the book longer; I found myself scribbling quotes and thoughts in my notebook. I found myself throughout Animal, Mineral, Radical, both piqued and deeply satiated.

Review by Sarah Leavens

Animal, Mineral, Radical: Essays on Wildlife, Family, and Food by BK Loren
Counterpoint Press, 2013

Weave Magazine Counts

Following the release of VIDA's 2010 Count, we shared Weave's gender breakdown for each of our first five issues. The numbers were as we expected with female-identified writers making up more than half of each issue's contributors. We gathered this information based on the gender pronouns authors use in their bios. If a contributor used "their", gender-neutral pronouns, or no pronouns at all, we count them in an "unspecified" category. Given the dismal numbers shown in VIDA's 2012 Count, we hope our latest count will lift your spirits. The following is the gender breakdown for issues 06, 07, and 08, as well as our total count of all previous contributors.

Issue 06: 67% female / 33% male
Issue 07: 69% female / 29% male / 2% unspecified
Issue 08: 64% female / 32% male / 5% unspecified

ALL ISSUES: 66% female / 33% male / 1% unspecified

Our staff continues to discuss the overall diversity of our the work we publish in terms of aesthetic, genre, subject matter, and themes. We have also conducted internal surveys in order to gain a better understanding of whose stories are being told, as well as whose aren't. Non-heterosexual writers are strongly represented with more than a third of our contributors in our first seven issues identifying as asexual, bisexual, gay, homosexual, lesbian, and/or queer. We also seek to improve our overall diversity in other areas. In particular, we'd like to encourage submissions from writers of color, writers with disabilities, writers without higher education, emerging writers, imprisoned writers, as well as English translations of international writers. Let this serve as a call for submissions to those whose work is marginalized; perhaps your writing can find a welcome home within Weave's pages.

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by Laura E. Davis