{"id":74665,"date":"2026-02-28T01:35:55","date_gmt":"2026-02-28T06:35:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/?p=74665"},"modified":"2026-02-28T01:39:07","modified_gmt":"2026-02-28T06:39:07","slug":"i-arrogantly-recommend-71-by-tom-bowden","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/2026\/02\/28\/i-arrogantly-recommend-71-by-tom-bowden\/","title":{"rendered":"i arrogantly recommend… #71 by Tom Bowden"},"content":{"rendered":"

 <\/p>\n

\"\"i arrogantly recommend…#71 is a mostly monthly review column of unusual, overlooked, ephemeral, small press, comics, and books in translation by our friend, bibliophile, and retired ceiling tile inspector Tom Bowden, who tells us, “This platform allows me to exponentially decrease the number of views on screens by people who have no use for such things.”<\/p>\n

Links are provided to our Bookshop.org affiliate page<\/a>, our Backroom gallery page<\/a>, or the book’s publisher.<\/p>\n

Read more arrogantly recommended reviews at: i arrogantly recommend…<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

\"\"Girl with a Bullett<\/strong>
\nAnna Malihon \/ Olena Jennings
\nWorld Poetry Books<\/a><\/p>\n

Ukrainian poet Anna Malihon\u2019s works have transformed, since Putin\u2019s invasion of her country, from \u201ctightly rhymed poetry\u201d to looser free verse, according to Olena Jennings, Malihon\u2019s translator. Perhaps the war has shaken her sense of cohesion that form imbues artistic expression with; certainly, it has affected the routines of and memories associated with everyday life the poems of Girl with a Bullet describe. Homes destroyed, children killed, friends and family exiled, existence an imprisonment.<\/p>\n

In one of her untitled poems, Malihon writes,<\/p>\n

They return when darkness descends:
\neveryone that you could save . . . And couldn\u2019t.
\nTheir voices are clear: \u201cRun little one,
\nthere isn\u2019t time to think.\u201d
\nAnd the marksman who covered you like snow covers a plowed field
\ndidn\u2019t have a chance to say \u201cI love you,\u201d
\nfell quietly without surprise or regret
\non that historic day.<\/p>\n

Heartache, emotional turmoil, confusion, and anger bring Malihon to apostrophize,<\/p>\n

Tell me, November, stop time for an hour,
\nhow many of us will you take in this unequal match,
\nhow many of our best will fall from a hill into dark water.
\nWhy are you silent, November? What are you waiting for?
\nWhy are we filled with so much anger, over wisdom,
\nwith so much white despair in our hair?<\/p>\n

Olena Jennings\u2019s translation conveys the energy, outrage, and pleading of Malihon\u2019s poetry into forceful lines rendered into idiomatic English warning and reminding of terror brought home.<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"Even Time Bleeds: Selected Poems<\/strong>
\nJeanette L. Clariond \/ Forrest Gander
\nPrinceton University Press<\/p>\n

Mexican by way of Lebanese descent, born 1949, Jeanette L. Clariond has won numerous awards for her poetry and has been a dedicated translator of works from Anne Carson, Elizabeth Bishop, Primo Levi, and others. Translated by fellow award-winning poet and translator Forrest Gander, the poems in Even Time Bleeds, gathered from several of Clariond\u2019s books, cover such topics as Mexico\u2019s ongoing femicide pandemic, scientific versus spiritual knowledge and the capacity for empathy allowed by the spiritual but ignored by technology. Here\u2019s an example, from \u201cLooking at What\u2019s Looked At\u201d:<\/p>\n

On the wall, only reflections.<\/p>\n

Nothing is really there,<\/p>\n

nor is the real any guide to salvation.<\/p>\n

But the glow of golden leaves<\/p>\n

\u2014all foliage\u2014<\/p>\n

is a beginning, for when the sun sets and darkness
\nwrites itself over the plants, something ignites at their core.<\/p>\n

Clariond writes poems on absence and the qualities that make for presence\u2014which reveal there never was an absence, but that conditions determine what one can see. She often alludes to Christianity, the crucifixion, and the rood, contrasted against the light of science, which is no aid to sensuous knowledge. In \u201cSky of Shadows\u201d she writes,<\/p>\n

Loosed from the Lord\u2019s hand, birds darken the sky.
\nHabituated to light, we forget how to read shadows.
\nWe\u2019ll come to polish
\nthe word
\nas we\u2019ve polished a silver bowl.<\/p>\n

We brush aside
\nthe science, laded with darkness,
\nwhich brings feeling to our touch, while we try to understand
\nthe loneliness of the elm on the riverbank.<\/p>\n

I haven\u2019t quoted from some of Clariond\u2019s strongest work here, that on Mexico\u2019s ongoing femicide. I\u2019ll just say that readers familiar with Carolyn Forch\u00e9\u2019s \u201cThe Colonel\u201d will know what to expect, only the target has changed.<\/p>\n

Beautiful, thoughtful, well-translated, and relevant.<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"A Child of the Jago<\/a><\/strong>
\nArthur Morrison
\nOxford World\u2019s Classics<\/p>\n

Taking place in an East London slum during the 1890s, A Child of the Jago is a British rejoinder to Stephen Crane\u2019s \u201cMaggie: A Girl of the Streets.\u201d A realistic depiction of multi-generational impoverishment, crime, and disease, Jago studies the life of Dicky Perrott over 10 years\u2014from ages 8 to 18\u2014and his parents and siblings. The Jago was fictionalized in name only\u2014the place was real but had been torn down by the time the novel was published. Because the social conditions in which its denizens floundered, the destruction of the old apartments only forced residents to move to other impoverished quarters nearby.<\/p>\n

Crime and booze rule the Jago\u2019s streets. One priest, Father Sturt, tries to find employment opportunities for his parishioners and steady sources of food, but with limited success: The food offered comes at the expense of having to endure church services, which the parishioners are reluctant to attend, and employment is usually rejected.<\/p>\n

Except for certain robberies and neighborhood battles, few people plan their actions ahead of their occurrence. What is in hand is treasured above mere future possibilities. The men, women, and children rob each other and those who stumble into their neighborhood, taking stolen goods to a local fence, and pennies for which they exchange for alcohol and stale bread.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s the age before guns became plentiful, so the violence is limited to the effects engendered by fist, brick, and wood. Because the Jago\u2019s inhabitants are malnourished (Dicky Perrott only stands five-two by the time he\u2019s 18), the fights might be spectacular but the stamina to sustain them limits their duration to an hour or two when members of rival neighborhoods provoke each other\u2019s vengeance, the neighborhoods united only by their mutual hatred of the police. No policeman dare enter the Jago alone.<\/p>\n

Morrison shows Dicky\u2019s difficulty in obtaining and keeping honest work\u2014his peers are against it as is his first fence, a Mr. Weech, who wants Dicky to keep supplying him with stolen goods. His father is a drunk ne\u2019er-do-well, his mother an inept sewer of canvas bags (16 hours a day of sewing brings in enough income to pay the weekly rent).<\/p>\n

Suffice it to say that A Child of the Jago <\/strong>is not a feel-good tale, and the conditions and opportunities it describes remain largely the same today because society still prefers over systemic change shrugging its shoulders while sneering at the unworthy, shiftless poor.<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"On the Calculation of Volume, Book III<\/strong><\/a>
\nSolvej Balle \/ Sophia Hersi Smith + Jennifer Russell
\nNew Directions<\/p>\n

For readers unfamiliar with the first two books in this seven-book series, here\u2019s a summary of its premise: While on a business trip to Paris, a woman named Tara Selter discovers that she has become stuck in time, the day of her arrival, one November 18. No one she speaks with that day remembers conversations they had with her when she returns the next day, another November 18. Except for her own actions, every day repeats in every detail. Her aim is to figure out how to return to the normal cycle of time.<\/p>\n

In the third volume of this seven-book series, Tara has discovered another person stuck in time and as long as she. Henry Dale is his name, originally from Norway but now spending time in Germany, like her, attending the odd lecture at the local university. After spending a few November 18s together exchanging notes on how they have grappled with their situation, Henry moves in with Tara (they sleep separately).<\/p>\n

Before this calamity in her life, Tara sold used books and was happily married. While she has spent many November 18s with him by this time in the series, he never remembers their encounter. She is eager to resume her life with him. Henry, however, was a divorced academic who used the repetitious day to pad his vita with articles he\u2019d written. He was fatalistic about the day and assumed nothing he could do would get him unstuck. He does have a kindergarten-aged boy he likes to visit and makes periodic trips to the U.S. to see him.<\/p>\n

It is while he is on one of those trips that Tara meets Olga, a 17-year-old student, also stuck in time and herself looking for Ralf, a fourth person stuck in November 18 but gone missing.<\/p>\n

Book III places the series in a holding-pattern that spends part of its time recapping Books I and II, allowing Tara another group of days to try different ways of approaching her husband about the problem (and again failing), and adding new points of view by way of additional characters, who each have their own vantage point and set of metaphors with which they attempt to understand and work out their predicament. They come no closer than Tara was by the end of Book I.<\/p>\n

Ralf is eventually found; the four move into a vacant mansion; problem-solving resumes\u2014but with two twists: they start examining the inconsistencies in the time loop they\u2019re in (certain items bought on the 18th vanish overnight, others remain), and\u2014just as Book III closes\u2014they are visited by five newcomers.<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"Computer People<\/strong>
\nR. G. Vasicek<\/a><\/p>\n

One of the trends in under-the-radar publishing is lo-fi, which eschews the time-consuming vetting of a mainstream publishing house for the immediacy of a medium that aims to reflect contemporary life\u2014self-publishing and along with it the limitations it allows for design and fonts: the modern equivalent of mimeographs and xeroxes satisfying the urge to get it out now. If the layout and font (resembling that of a typewriter) of Computer People look as raw as the text reads, remember that the ad-libbed looseness of Bukowski is an artifice harder to achieve than it looks. The design elements signify \u201cauthenticity.\u201d<\/p>\n

Despite the book\u2019s title, its aesthetics eschew computer culture, let alone worship it. In something between essay and auto-fiction, the book opens with photographs of notebook pages, which become typewritten transcriptions, the book we\u2019re reading. The computer people of the book\u2019s title are of two types: Those who think (compute) versus those who live as machines, serving as inputs for faceless corporations. Despite the casual look of the layout, the semantic content quotes Hegel, Virgil, Levinas, and figures in terms of applying their philosophies to a life lived.
\nTo the digital life, Vasicek gives the finger: \u201cI\u2019m going to say fuck it\u2026 fuck this fake reality\u2026 I\u2019m saying it now\u2026 fuck it\u2026 fuck this fake reality.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"The Singing Fish<\/a><\/strong>
\nPeter Markus
\nCalamari Press<\/p>\n

The Singing Fish<\/strong> is a novella set in a realm with elements of gothic fantastika (such as one of the protagonists deliberately nailing his hand to a post), where the occurrences quickly and unexpectedly turn weird, and the cruelty is cartoonish\u2014after all, for instance, the characters\u2019 heads return in one chapter after being sliced off in a previous chapter. The characters are generically named: Brother, Girl, and Boy. There are two Brothers, one of whom narrates the chapters, most of which could stand on their own as a weird tale of a world like our own but ruled by cartoon physics.<\/p>\n

The voice is an odd cadence made of noun-verb-noun phrases grammatically simple and repetitive, paratactic in the manner of oral storytelling, something along the manner of The House That Jack Built. Here is a sample:<\/p>\n

We were the both of us ripping off hunks from the moon with the muddy-clawed hammers that were our fists. And that fish that walked on water, when this fish heard the sounds of us brothers singing from the river\u2019s muddy shore, this fish turned its fish head towards the sound that us brothers were making, and what this fish did was, this fish walked across the river\u2019s muddy water, over to us brothers, and what it said to us then was, What are you two looking at?\u201d<\/p>\n

If Huck Finn dropped acid with Salvador Dal\u00ed, you\u2019d end up with The Singing Fish<\/strong>: Yarns about living next to a muddy river, fishing and diving in it, and hammering fish heads (and human parts) to a post made for scaling.<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"On Love and Barley: Haiku of Basho<\/a><\/strong>
\nBasho \/ Lucien Stryk
\nPenguin Classics<\/p>\n

Over 250 haiku are collected in this volume of poetry by the 17th-century Japanese master, Basho, wonderfully translated by Lucien Stryk. Stryk\u2019s translations of On Love and Barley <\/strong>aim for capturing each haiku\u2019s mood and images rather than mimic in English the syllable pattern followed in Japanese (5-7-5), while succeeding in compressing the poetic expression into three lines that never total above ten words.<\/p>\n

Despite their brevity, these are not poems to be read as one might social media posts, which constantly aim to undermine contemplation. If the silence embedded in these poems can\u2019t be heard, they\u2019re being read too fast. Basho\u2019s poems embrace still contemplation in which deep and miraculous beauty is revealed to surround us at every moment, and in which ask us to use our senses to see existence anew by wondering, for instance, what a certain sound might look like. (Not as wonky as it might sound. Sound artist Stephen Vitiello, for instance, has recordings in which light (vibrations) reflected from, say, a skyscraper, is transformed into sound (also vibrations but set to a level humans can hear), and these sounds change based cloud coverage and angle of the sun.) Juxtapositions of disparate sights and sounds indicate auspicious moments. Here are some samples:<\/p>\n

#34:
\nIf I\u2019d the knack
\nI\u2019d sing like
\ncherry flakes falling.<\/p>\n

#17:
\nSparrow in eaves,
\nmice in ceiling\u2014
\ncelestial music.<\/p>\n

#149:
\nRainy days\u2014
\nsilkworms droop
\non mulberries.<\/p>\n

Basho succeeds in distilling poetry to its essence, allowing suggestion, nuance, balance, and image to bloom in the reader\u2019s mind.<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"Letters on England<\/a><\/strong>
\nVoltaire \/ Leonard Tancock
\nPenguin Classics<\/p>\n

First published in 1733, Letters on England <\/strong>consists of letters written while Voltaire visited England. Topics include English culture and cultural figures in the fields of politics, science, religion, and literature, beginning with a report on a Quaker church service. Many of the figures discussed were either still alive (with whom Voltaire was probably also personally acquainted) or recently deceased (as with Newton). He discusses the works and ideas of Isaac Newton, John Locke, Francis Bacon, Descartes, Shakespeare, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, John Dryden, and more, including a few off-the-cuff translations into French of the poets.<\/p>\n

The last and longest letter (25 pages) concerns nothing British: Pascal’s Pensees.<\/strong> For Voltaire, Pascal too often derives conclusions based on unspoken assumptions that also tilt toward cynical exaggeration rather than on claims defensible via evidence and logic. (Worth picking up a copy of Pensees<\/strong> for that alone. Voltaire is a reasonable rationalist, and ridgid dogmas he finds absurd and harmful.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  i arrogantly recommend…#71 is a mostly monthly review column of unusual, overlooked, ephemeral, small press, comics, and books in translation by our friend, bibliophile, and retired ceiling tile inspector Tom Bowden, who tells us, “This platform allows me to exponentially decrease the number of views on screens by people who have no use for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":74676,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[466,461],"class_list":["post-74665","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-i-arrogantly-recommend","tag-tom-bowden"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74665","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=74665"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74665\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/74676"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=74665"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=74665"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=74665"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}