Nine Books About Your Life:

Interview by Nicholas Alexander Hayes

In the Nine Books About Your Life series, authors are invited to talk about nine types of books that have had an impact on their life. Their responses give us a glimpse into their relationships with their books and other people’s books. In the inaugural installment, we speak with Olivia Cronk, author of the forthcoming Womonster (Tarpaulin Sky).

First Book – I’m not totally sure what all “first book” could/might mean (something read to me, something handled/examined by baby-me, a chapter book read on my own, one of those floppy little “readers” in school, etc.) . . . but I do have some memories: a very tacky (a word I do not use slanderously!) Cinderella book with these little white roses drawn around people’s shoes . . . Roald Dahl books . . . somewhat embarrassingly, my family had a subscription to TV Guide and I “read” from that quite a bit . . . I also liked to read the back matter on my dad’s mass market fantasy/sci-fi books—these texts, and certainly others I just can’t recall now, influenced and influence me still. I like the gaudy, the surreal, the domestic, the sensation-of-being-alone-in-play-feeling, the occulted/veiled text. Those things I like best and best when jumbled together, especially in palimpsest/visual effect.

Most Cherished Book – Ha! I’m obsessed with objects, so, I can’t even say. All of them!?!

Whatever book(s) I’m reading at the moment become a kind of decorative item (to me), laying around the apartment or in my purse or near my pillow. I fetishize them. Even if the covers are not aesthetically pleasing. They’re caught up like prey in my private and ephemeral still-life collection, i.e. my gaze. Fonts. Covers. Titles. Interior concerns, too. All mingled with tablecloths and wooden floors and my wallet/keys . . . So, currently, a fetishized item is Caren Beilin’s Blackfishing the IUD, a gift from Amanda Goldblatt (another collector of books!). It is a good book, too!

Blackfishing the IUD
Caren Beilin
Wolfman Books
ISBN: 978-1733276115

And then of course I/we have just loads of books we don’t really read or have never or maybe only once but we still keep them around because “what if” and also “what a great object to have” and maybe somehow our daughter will want it/be able to use it/glance at it once and get an idea or a sensation.

My stepfather is a great collector and curator of books, always finding amazing things and giving them as gifts. As an example, in December I received a text called Fifty Early Medieval Things, and right now I look at this before bed, sometimes.

Fifty Early Medieval Things: Materials of Culture in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages
Deborah Deliyannis, Hendrik Dey, and Paolo Squatriti
Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9781501725906

I had given to him and to my husband this book [Videoland: A Visual Catalog of American Video Store Logos, 1980-1995] (which I saw a copy of at Amanda Goldblatt’s apartment and which is obviously just a magical thing to have around):

Videoland: A Visual Catalog of American Video Store Logos, 1980-1995
Andy Sturdevant
Birchwood Palace Industries
ISBN: 978-1732407619

Most Perplexing Book – I’m not a particularly aggressive or ambitious reader. I’m a hedonist about it all; I generally only read things I am going to somehow “enjoy,” very open of course to what form that enjoyment might take. If a book isn’t holding my attention by providing some kind of pleasure, I just stop reading it. And that’s not the fault of the book; it’s me. My husband reads a lot of theory, and I love to talk with him about it, but it’s not usually a place I go. Another place I don’t usually go is popular literary fiction, though I’m sure there are some exceptions I’m not thinking of right now (like: do the Ferrante books count? cuz I do love those). I suppose this is a bit of an easy target, but: we just spent the last nine months or so devoting the nightly reading aloud time (our daughter is 8 and in a magical time of reading on her own and wanting to listen) to the Harry Potter books, per her request. (Now thank goodness we’re into some dragon fantasy stuff, which coincides with my childhood encounters!) I was too old to read Harry Potter in the initial capitalist machinery, so this was my/our very first encounter. They do not baffle me, but I think they are terrible: many unexamined and phobic attitudes, poor consideration of how to play with narrative tropes, awkward phrasing for a reading-aloud situation, no sense of how to make of the “formula” a game . . .

Life-changing Book –Again, how to even consider this question: my whole intellectual being is excess and idiosyncracy! Generally—for me, anyhow—the strands of growing as a person and growing as a writer are bound together. When I was 20 or so and assigned Lucie Brock-Broido’s The Master Letters, my whole understanding of writing and persona changed. And those things are part of my personhood, of course. That book—and its recursivity with Dickinson—made my imagination thicker. Earlier, in high school, that had happened when I read Kafka and Donne and Keats. Like, in an extreme way. Super thick. An adolescent realization about reading and psychedelic experiences and how to pretend. In grad school, Arielle Greenberg’s first book, Given, was released at the Chicago AWP and I bought it on a whim and had a dramatically instructive experience about words and pretending. A few years later, I read Lara Glenum’s The Hounds of No and it, sorry to use a cliché here, absolutely galvanized me. Forever and backwards. I’m still not over it.

And then I’m regularly altered by writers’ single lines/sentences: Aase Berg via Johannes Göransson, Nikki Wallschlaeger, Bhanu Kapil, Amina Cain, Hiromi Ito via Jeffrey Angles, Jay Besemer, Marie Ndiaye and Marie Redonnet via Jordan Stump, Suzanne Scanlon, Alice Notley, Joyelle McSweeney, Barthes, Dolores Dorantes via Jen Hofer, T Fleischmann, Claudia Rankine, Sandra Doller/Miller—oh god, I could just go on and on scanning my shelves and saying names and titles that instructed me and moved me into other dimensions.

I’m not even mentioning SO MANY things. Oh, wait, let me just say: Jenif(f)er Tamayo’s You Da One and Fanny Howe’s The lives of a spirit . . .

I’m often made into a different (better?) person by the shimmery sensation of a writer’s “voice” hanging over me as I do my commonplace life, but under the influence of reading/having just read. It’s often the case that a book is a costume-changing portal that allows me access to more selves.

Most Underrated Book –So many books don’t get the public praise that they should, and especially books in translation. On that note, I’m going to plug a book in response to this question: Lemur, by Andra Rotaru, translated by Florin Bican. I actually wrote about this book at The Collagist (now The Rupture), and I don’t think it’s really been discussed other than a fairly dismissive review at PW (per the google search I just now did). This book is wonderfully weird! It’s a dance-based text, it’s a translation, it’s a Frankenstein thing, it’s kind of about the terror-pleasure of The Shining hotel, it’s about kinship and migration, it’s gestures, it’s spook, it’s body. Soooo good.

Lemur
Andra Rotaru (Author), Florin Bican (Translator)
Action Books
ISBN: 978-0900575761

A Surprising Book – For reasons somewhat unknown/secret to me, and, although I am not a regular full-book re-reader (except for teaching and “projects”), I have read this particularly stylish little copy (Bantam, 1964—no online images) of Joan Didion’s Run River (“THE EXPLOSIVE NOVEL OF A STRANGE MARRIAGE AND THE SINS AND SECRETS OF CALIFORNIA’S NEW SOCIETY!!!” per the copy on the cover) more times than I can say. I find it so soothing. It gives me exactly what I want for hedonistic reading, and it is a lovely object. Maybe I should have mentioned it up above?

Your Most Recent Book – In June, my third book, Womonster, will come out (Tarpaulin Sky). It contains two long-form poems and is especially concerned with merging the lyric and the conceptual. In the first poem, “INTERRO-PORN,” which I wrote mostly/probably five summers ago, I was trying to work through the complexities of self-interrogation in the context of being white and cis and hetero and usually middle class . . . but I also wanted to write about the self/selves and reading (and consciously stealing tricks from other writers) and pretending and the notion of the question as pornographic and the notion of the gaze as surveillance and sex and noir-style interrogation and fashion and moms and just all sorts of stuff. I wanted to make scripts and “fashion wallpaper” out of email interviews about memories of mothers’ outfits. I wanted to make something readable and skimmable at once. I wrote this way simply because those were the things I was thinking of and the form best suited childcare during this time when my daughter was littler. The other poem, “CHENILLE,” written maybe three summers ago, was, mostly an attempt to make a Shirley Jackson-ish portrait of domestic life—gothic and psychedelic and closed and miniature/ real and not real. Both poems and therefore the book as a whole are about the horrifying performance of the self/selves.

Before I ever had a book published, my writerly goal was to “make” a book as an object that someone might have in their bag on the train, or in a bathtub, in a waiting room, to read it/sort of read it in some kind of (semi-) private space. That is still what I want: to be, even very ephemerally, inside of someone’s time.

Womonster
Olivia Cronk
Tarpaulin Sky
(Forthcoming June 2020)

Your Next Book – I am perhaps two thirds of the way through a poetry slash criticism manuscript about gossip, the movie 3 Women, the intersection of the ephemeral and the liminal in time and mirrors and miniature . . . maybe? . . . and I think soon the next section will emerge, which, I hope, will be something I’m currently calling “The Bobby Project,” about Bobbies Vinton, Dee, Helms, and Darrin (50s/60s rock n’ roll crooners).

Also, my husband and I are working on a collection of essays related to our theory of The Z-Axial:

The z-axial is a literary mode and a way of reading. It often springs from uncanny, fantastic, speculative texts. For example, time-travel stories suggest the z-axial; they are a kind of liftoff. However, as with Todorov’s fantastic line, the uncanny crashes into “literature,” and all writing becomes potentially z-axial: getting lost, being buried, unveiled, or returning “unchanged” after millennia. The z-axial is a far-out wah-wah-wah: a sine wave, the depth that predicates length and height, a space for potential resistance to white bourgeois presumption embodied by a literary middle-sized naturalness. Daily life. Predictable grids. What we’re describing, though, shows how the everyday teeters on the impossible but truly mortally real, a cosmic and biological forever. This mode is, then, an outflow that opens into the self and is the self as it relates to the “world.” In other words, authorities enclose horizontally and vertically. They naturalize and immiserate, but the z-axial refers us diagonally back to ourselves reborn in the uncontainable world of the present. The z-axial is a trait in literature that reveals the necessity of freedom and revolution. But we’re not describing futurism. Or the speculative, per se. Or, again, the uncanny. We’re describing the now: terrifying space flies away in every direction. We are made of a forever that is everywhere.

Plug a Book –I don’t personally know these first two writers but I think everyone should read these two books, which very generously instruct and consider and enact:

Amanda Goldblatt let me borrow this wonderful book [Austerity], which is kind of like a bath of an essay, in poem-form, like breathing fog onto glass and writing in it a letter:

Austerity
Marion Bell
Radiator Press
ISBN: 978-1732814516

Anais Duplan’s Mount Carmel and the Blood of Parnas (out of print) is smart in every single direction; notably, an essay/piece of criticism precedes some sparer poem-pages, and it feels like you watch the author deal out the playing cards of their own theory-work.

Mount Carmel and the Blood of Parnas
Anais Duplan
Monster House Press
ISBN: 978-0986046186

And I do know Ashley Miranda, and their work is DELICIOUS and affecting (and everything you want out of poems). Miranda makes haute the ephemeral, and personal the radical, and liquid trauma, and it all hurt-pops like a candy necklace you’re chewing on.