The Iliac Crest by Sarah Booker

size. At 880 pages and with rather imposing proportions, it’s easily one of the biggest books to be published in this fall’s flood of titles. Its title suggests a dossier or a file, but Bouillier’s book might also be considered an autopsy report; it describes the full arc of a romantic relationship, the ending of which is inextricable from the tragedy described at the book’s very beginning. M is a woman sixteen years younger than the writer, one who has seduced him completely: “M wasn’t just my type: she was also my style, standing there in front of me, incarnated.” But the book doesn’t focus solely on their relationship; it owes its length to the many inventive digressions its writer inevitably slips into, even as M becomes increasingly ineffable and unattainable, a Beatrice made flesh. And yet the sheer energy of Bouillier’s passion, and his indefatigable ability to turn a word from a mere conveyance of information into the nucleus of a hilarious pun gives the book such an infectious energy that only the final page recalls to mind the book’s subtitle: Volume 1, After and During Love. There is little doubt that the S designating the beloved almost certainly refers to Sophie Calle, whom Bouillier dated in real life before she made art out of their breakup. Is this brick of a book his comeuppance? One hopes the second volume, After and Well Before Love, will grant all the answers. Jeffrey Zuckerman New York City Cristina Rivera Garza. The Iliac Crest. Trans. Sarah Booker. New York. Feminist Press. 2017. 136 pages. The Iliac Crest is a bizarre and mystifying gothic tale told from the perspective of a cynical and paranoid narrator, a doctor obsessed with the ocean. He is a man of mundane repetition and an apathetic outlook on his work life. The story begins on a dark and stormy night as two women show up at the doctor’s front door. The first woman is a stranger who claims to be Amparo Dávila. The second woman is the doctor’s ex-partner, whom he calls the Betrayed. As the days pass, Amparo continues her stay in the doctor ’s home, she befriends the Betrayed, and they even come up with their own secret language. They claim to know the doctor’s biggest secret—that he is a woman. The doctor begins to question his gender and feels immense unease in his own home. He feels like an outcast, as though the women are hiding something from him, so he starts an investigation into Amparo. As the doctor unravels new information about her, he is led into a surreal realm where ghosts, gender, and existence intertwine and warp. Rivera Garza’s writing is haunting and otherworldly. The time frame in the book is unspecified. It is filled with existential mystery and revolves around the concept of mental illness. Her writing dissolves and questions the rules behind a simplistic gender binary. She delves into what it means to be silenced as a woman author, what it means when women disappear. At times, Nota Bene WORLDLIT.ORG 79 Wajdi Mouawad Anima Trans. Linda Gaboriau Talonbooks Quebecois author Wajdi Mouawad steps behind the eyes of over fifty different animals to tell the story of a man who sets out to find the person responsible for the rape and murder of his wife. Each of these animals and insects is given characterization and a particular voice as narrator, which builds a complex, multifaceted story full of terse language taking readers on a journey from Montreal to New Mexico. Nasty Women Poets: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse Ed. Grace Bauer & Julie Kane Lost Horse Press Bodies, beauty, sisterhood, sex, and sexism are only a few of the subjects pursued from their historical and mythological roots to their many modern iterations in this hard-hitting volume, which is at once profoundly political and inextricably personal. Nasty Women Poets takes its title from the televised words of a prominent political figure (“whose name,” Bauer and Kane say, “we shall not utter here”), an act of reclamation and affirmation that is echoed by the talented voices and moving...

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