In February of this year, I took a trip with some friends to Colorado. There, I had the good fortune to meet a woman named Holly who snowboards, deals wine, and makes a pungent but delectable fish soup. One evening, Holly prepared dinner the seven of us, and I hung around asking heady questions while everyone else tried to relax. We talked about hot sauce, healthcare, spirituality—and then Holly told me about a meditation group she’d joined. “You know,” she said, turning to me while stirring fish sauce into the curry, “everyone around you was your mother in another lifetime.”

While I like ideas, I also like it when one plus one equals two. I like organized bookshelfs. I count calories. I don’t eat things with four legs. The idea of ubiquitous mothers does not fit well into my rule-based system. Plus, I’ve lived most of my life with an absent mother. So in response to Holly’s statement, I shut my mouth and chopped vegetables, making sure all the chives were the same length.

But like most unsettling things, Holly’s idea took an empty parking spot in my brain, until earlier this year when I picked up Jennifer Richter’s debut poetry collection, Threshold. In poems about birth, death, illness, recovery, and loss, Richter explores themes of a life I have never lived. I have never had children. I’ve never breast-fed a child or nursed a child through an illness. I have never suffered a major illness myself. And yet despite this experience gap, I connected with Richter’s poems more strongly than I’ve connected with any poems I’ve read in the last two years.

From the title poem, “Threshold:”

“You brace yourself. He draws you like this, arms straight out, too stick-thin but the hands are perfect, splayed like suns, long fingers, the hands he draws for you are huge.”

Richter invites us, through the language of the speaker’s world, to understand that each and every one of us is a threshold—something pain passes through. We are resiliant from the moment we are born, mothering ourselves and others always by the very act of allowing life to pass through us. As I read the opening poems of the book, I began to understand, perhaps, what my friend Holly had meant.

Jennifer Richter

Threshold: a point through which things pass.

Perhaps this is also the definition of a poem: something through which time passes. Something which holds a moment, a truth, a reality that time denies as it speeds past, as pages burn and ink smears, as books are digitized and shipped around the world. Perhaps the poem transcends the page, the way Holly’s words transcended my efforts to excise them from my brain. The poem is within us—the poem is us, is what we pass through and is what passes through us. For rather than simply documenting moments in a narrative, Richter captures patterns of grief and their familiar journeys through the body, through society, through time.

From “Recover 5: Now What Do You Do?”:

“The pain is like a child. You marked it first in days, then months. Now years. Your son is five. Today he drops your hand a block before his school. He sprints up the stairs and disappears. Certain doors, you crave to be behind again.”

Richter draws a remarkable connection between pain and children, illness and pregnancy. As the speaker draws lines connecting the grief of loss—loss of a child, loss of the ability to hide, loss of identity—the reader discovers that the only way to operate amid such pain is to view the self as the embodiment of something larger, something out of our petty control, something which flows through us.

Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat Pray Love, pinpoints this very idea in a speech about “creative genius.” What is left for the artist, after the birth, growth, and release of one’s masterpiece? To view the self as a vessel, the genius as a visitor, masterpiece as a gift.

Threshold: a point through which things pass.

What does it mean to “go through” something? To endure? To birth, endure, abandon? Are we all mothers to our pain, our thoughts, our ideas, our children, our belongings? The common denominator Richter pinpoints in Threshold is our inability to control those things which we first capture, but then grow to need. All things contain their own perceptions, their own patterns, their own lives; our grief is in the fact that we live, that we, too, are worlds through which things pass. Things—people, children, mothers—have choices, sometimes grow indifferent, sometimes no longer need us. Acknowledging ourselves as thresholds, we mother. At the first loss, we mother.

As Richter puts it: “Thresh, hold: separate the seeds, gather them back.”

How do we endure illness, pain, emotion, one another? Though Richter explores concentrated themes, her poems speak widely. We can all find ourselves—as mother and child, illness and host, clock and time—in this extroardinary collection of poems and moments, this orchestra of throughness, of threshhold. This mother.

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Disruption is often the element that keeps us from finishing a chapter, a story, or a line. It can pull us from a book, from the laptop, from the page, and send us quickly and fully into another state or task. We live in a culture of disruption, short attention spans, and the ever-present opportunity cost of each fleeting moment. So when a writer takes on these constraints by fusing disruption and narrative as a way to extend a story’s ever-widening themes, a new type of book is created that defies the word “collection” and achieves something less definable.

Meet Lynn K. Kilpatrick, author of In the House.

In the House is a book full of windows, of grammatical shapes and designs. Plot, conflict, resolutions, prepositions, stairwells, walls, cabinets. The kick-off story leads us to enter the book as though it is a house—one in which each room is an ever-expanding world. To name a few, “My Neighbors” is a kitchen full of characters, a rotating buffet of Stella the wino, Maggie the hoarder, John the meat enthusiast, Penelope the dangerous knitter, Sam the disappearing waif. “On Understanding” takes on a curious prose form that feels like scenes flying past the window of a moving train. This rhythmic movement is sustained throughout the book and furthers the exploration of relationships—people with people, people with structures, structures with ideas—in a domestic landscape that is always moving, changing, as though seen through a camera mounted on wheels. This form dissects and reassembles the idea of the “new domestic,” of domesticity in the new age of all-things-wired. What does it mean to be “in the house,” to be held in place in an age of motion, of fleeting relationships, realities, and contexts?

Lynn K. Kilpatrick

Kilpatrick’s wit pervades this house of stories, a dry voice weaving complex interiors with quirky exteriors, dressing characters with just the right hint of the bizarre, with their knives and wine and tiny dogs, their pageant crowns and brown bags. Recurring images are stitched like thread throughout the book: knives, holes, and openings. The house, it seems, is porous and penetrable at all times. “There is a particular equanimity inherent in knives,” Kilpatrick writes in “Knives in the Kitchen.” “No job outweighs the next or the previous.” This concept of fluidity, movement, constant change seen through multiple windows, vibrates through the relationships the author explores.

A seven-part sequence, “Dioramas of a Domestic Landscape,” explores a stagnant state of domesticity, a dollhouse of glued fruit, empty dishwashers, and the plastic happiness of miniatures, foldable skies and the simplicity of toothpick boys with paper-clip bicycles. This “neat” world, one in which structures themselves stand in for lives, is juxtaposed against the quirky, beating-heart mess, the movable feast of characters, restless women with watchful eyes, caged by the ideas of their enclosures. This series, woven like a crown of half-baths through the novel, continuously contrasts the real physical and psychological messes of “house-existence” with the sterile nature of artifice built by bricks, vinyl, grammar, prepositional phrases, and plastic red adjectives.

Kilpatrick carves a new spot in the long tradition of writers, from Gertrude Stein to Harryette Mullen, who have explored, in various styles and forms, ideas of domesticity and the trappings of interiors and exteriors—from skin to brick to fences. The collection is vibrant, eccentric, and all the while clear. Read it forwards, backwards, or in sharply cut cubes. Read up close and far away, pull and weave between stories, between walls, between rooms and the dollhouses within—all the while asking yourself what it means to be In the House.

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As a reader, it can be difficult to follow a character who knows not who they are nor what they want. Often, this is the trouble with stories in which a protagonist is breaking free, leaving a past life behind. The character has loaded the car, the music is loud, and for a moment, everything flies by weightlessly. Then, character and reader must ask the inevitable question: Now what?

In Jami Attenberg’s The Melting Season, Catherine “Moonie” Madison hits the road out of Nebraska with a suitcase of her husband’s money and no clear idea of her next step. The first sections of the novel let us know Moonie is lost, vulnerable, and naive. We wince as she has a tense encounter with two men outside her hotel room, a slow dance of dialogue not unlike the excruciating exchange between Connie and Arthur Friend in Joyce Carol Oates’s classic story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”

Attenberg does an expert job of characterizing Moonie’s sheltered, timid, distrustful view of the world of “otherness” she finds outside of Nebraska. Her fears and rejections are relatable and spotlight the idea that one can imprison oneself inside naïveté, reducing all new things to the psychological context of home, with its familiar understanding of the world. In this way, Moonie is an interesting study, and the reader is left to hope, after the first few chapters, that she will somehow burst into consciousness.

Jami Attenberg

As she steers into Las Vegas, The Melting Season finds a new momentum in the electric landscape of casinos, drag queens, and copious liquor. We meet Valka, a stranger to whom Moonie warms quickly, and whose energy propels the story into new possibilities. She, too, is escaping something in Vegas; a cancer survivor who endured a recent breakup, Valka is living large, looking for loose companionship and quick romance. She scoops up Moonie like a mother hen would, pushing her to meet new people, drink champagne in bed, and get out of her head into the present tense. Valka is self-assured, ironic, and, unlike Moonie, ready to free her mind.

The novel’s form curiously adopts this very aesthetic. With Valka on the scene, linearity is disrupted and the story travels back and forth in time, interspersing fragments of Moonie’s memory. Much as she is unable to fully escape her past— her abusive husband, her pregnant sister—the reader remains captive to the story behind the story. Several interesting scenes and vignettes are borne of this backward-glancing, but the picture of Moonie’s past life in Nebraska still remains largely fuzzy.

Attenberg seems aware of this stark difference in energy levels between the backstory and the present-time story unfolding in Las Vegas. She skillfully uses Valka to shovel coal into the engine of the novel, strengthening the narrative at times when the long flashbacks of the second section begin to wind down and deflate. Ultimately, this battle between time frames weakens the novel; the reader is offered answers to the question “Why?” in slow fragments throughout the book, whereas the question “What?”—its central conflict—is never fully understood. Valka, though she tries diligently, can’t quite seem to bring Moonie out of her foggy depression into a new rhythm of possibility. The novel’s climax, involving the inevitable return to Nebraska and search for closure, feels muddy and vague, the necessity of Moonie’s return revealed only in the final pages, a concealment that prevents readers from fully understanding the tension between present and past. As a result, Moonie often feels lost and lackadaisical—real enough emotions in life, but in fiction a recipe for lost momentum.

The Melting Season offers sparkling, vivid glimpses and vignettes of a fractured life, and Jami Attenberg cracks open many truths about memory, perception, and the multiple meanings of “freedom.” What satisfaction is lacking in the story’s end are to be found, in abundance, in the novel’s clarity of vision and the compelling nature of so many of its earlier scenes.

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“I want to go to the concert.” Rainey.

“Jesus God, Rainey. I want to eat your hair.” Richard.

Meet Rainey and Richard, page 7. Rainey: beautiful, seductive, curious, fourteen. Richard: lustful, insatiable, a composer, thirty-nine. This is how you begin Dylan Landis’s debut, Normal People Don’t Live Like This, and unlike many story collections, you finish one story and immediately turn to the next. You leave UPS at the door, punching the bell and screaming in Spanish, you ignore the cat swiping all the pens off your desk, and read on.

You read Normal People on the treadmill. You read it on the sidewalk. You meet Landis’s characters and you like them more than the people you know in real life. You think, while tearing through the pages: This woman knows all my secrets.

In “Jazz,” Richard and Rainey struggle in the grass of Central Park, Richard groping her pale belly, Rainey rolling her eyes. Whatever it may look like, the narrator tells us, Rainey is most assuredly not being raped: “It is true,” the story remarks, “that Rainey radiates power and light.”

Dylan Landis

It is also true that Rainey has asked Richard if he will marry her when she turns sixteen. True that Rainey wears tea-rose oil between her toes, believing it can drive a man wild. You receive Rainey through a cleverly deceptive narrator who, in each story, brings light to the real conflicts, overriding those easily gathered from the surface narrative. Landis punches holes through conventional wisdom, ideas about right and wrong and who is to blame. The narrator of “Jazz” dismisses the reductive idea that Rainey is the victim, Richard the abuser. “Jazz” isn’t about victimization, nor is it about abuse—it’s about the inner dilemmas of an adolescent as she navigates the unwieldy power of seduction.

She thinks how this is one more interesting thing a man can be reduced to. She wonders if sex is like math, like if you make a man want to eat your hair or go too far, does it follow that you balance the equation by letting him.

The question of rape lingers long after the last paragraph of the brief story, as does the question of how to present truths which might be manipulated by the teller. Perhaps this is what is so elusive, fascinating, and overwhelmingly cool about Dylan Landis: She draws landscapes and narratives around characters who couldn’t be ordinary if they tried, characters who deny moral categorization. Much like the work of Alice Munro, the intrigue of Landis’s stories lies in small gestures and the exploration of characters’ psyches with a thorough, delicate eye.

But you learn to keep your guard up. Landis’s characters walk in and out of stories, Rainey passing the torch, in “Fire,” to Leah, who remains in the spotlight for most of the remaining stories. Normal People has all the ingredients of a tight novel, yet remains a collection of closely tied stories with a few sharp detours. This looseness is occasionally frustrating—Landis’s characters are addictive, and so it can be disappointing when they disappear. You really like Rainey. And Oly. Even Helen. You feel dumped.

In the book’s final two stories, Helen makes a brave move into the world, and the realities of adulthood explode into Leah’s life. But Normal People doesn’t end when you set it on the night table; the collection contains small bursts of narrative from characters so real that they cannot fade into memory. You find yourself wondering, What would Leah do? You’ve made commitments to these characters. You want more.

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Jung Ji-won has lost her long-term boyfriend and cooking school partner, and it takes hardly a chapter of Kyung-Ran Jo’s novel Tongue to understand why. Hopelessly obsessive over food, fantasies, and her failing relationship, Ji-won salivates over every morsel of her own self-pity, eagerly entertaining each disillusioned possibility of Souk-ju’s return.

As if the memory of his deceit were a rare slice of steak, Ji-won chews on the image of Souk-ju and his lover, Se-yeon, for chapter after chapter, unable to reel in her obsession and despair and translate them into something physical. As a result, the preliminary chapters of Tongue often feel as though they are cranking the story’s engine through analyses and musings full of stagnant metaphor.

As time passes, Ji-won regains her appetite and her careful attention to food—a blessing for this novel whose story finds its landscape inside the crust and damp foie gras, honey and homemade bread, crumbling saffron and, eventually, a tough slice of tongue. With her appetite for food comes an appetite for revenge, and the carefully frozen block of aggression toward Souk-ju begins to thaw. Ji-won finds the backbone she lacks for human relationships inside her culinary creations, expressing her lust, hatred, and remorse through courses of caviar, duck, and, finally, tongue with truffles. Similarly, the novel finds its steam in the kitchen, where sensory details paint the landscape of deceit and revenge. Each kitchen scene is embellished with intense particulars, from the rich color of meat and produce to the skin and fabric that comprise the story’s silent, abstract characters.

Kyung-Ran Jo

But Ji-won’s descriptions and musings over Souk-ju’s infidelity, however intense, remain more cerebral than emotional, as meticulously explained as if she were walking the reader through a surgery. It is as if Ji-won’s emotional landscape is only developed through the food itself, as though Jo had created two Ji-wons—Ji-won as chef and Ji-won as woman. Ji-won as chef delights as much as she despairs in ruminations of lost love, family, and food. Ji-won as woman, however, falls flat, mechanically evaluating her own feelings as if looking at herself through thick aquarium glass.

The story itself becomes a long, multi-course meal with a grand finale, a dessert of shock to end the evening. By the time the final meal is served, Ji-Won has been dragging her emotions behind her laboriously—not the building, spinning emotions we expect of a character who is at the end of her emotional rope. As readers, we are relieved to find her back in the kitchen, where Jo creates the real persona and vehicle for this story.

That said, it is perhaps the where and the who that keep Tongue interesting, far more than the actual plot, which suffers from Ji-Won’s relentless overchewing of metaphor and memory. Despite its rich drawing of scene and exhaustive culinary thread, Tongue moves slowly in a non-linear motion that can deflate its urgency. This tension, however, creates a curious movement—one that does not necessarily propel the story forward but creates a swirling motion in which each chapter becomes a loop, one more course in the meal that by itself changes little but adds to the overall experience. Perhaps this is why the novel’s ending comes as such a vivid surprise—Ji-won finally takes action, responding physically, rather than mentally, to her situation. Though Tongue can be frustratingly slow, its devastating final payload reverberates backward, rejuvenating the story’s cycles and leaving the reader in a state of satiation and relief.

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