Of the very few bookstores in Red Hook, Pioneer Books stands out for its smart curation and clear visibility along Van Brunt. Here are a few titles currently stocked at the humble storefront that we couldn’t help reviewing.
Pioneer Books hosts regular events and book clubs. Check out their website, swing by 289 Van Brunt St, or call (718) 596-3001 for more information. The bookstore is open Wednesday through Sunday, 12-6pm.
Silent Spring: Rachel Carson
2018 marked the 50th anniversary of Rachel Carson’s ecological masterpiece, Silent Spring. The new edition feels no less powerful today.
You might’ve read excerpts but Silent Spring is well deserving of a read or a reread as we welcome the new year. Part biology, chemistry, field guide and history, Silent Spring is the type of book best read with post-it notes and a pen; each page contains a high volume of dense scientific information.
You might find yourself asking why you didn’t pay better attention in science class. Despite the density, Carson’s voice remains a delight with her seemingly effortless oscillation between matter-of-factness that is tempered by poetic levity with lines like, “In autumn, oak and maple and birch set up a blaze of color that flamed and flickered across a backdrop of pines.”
This type of beauty offsets the desperate and dire message running throughout Silent Spring: We’re ruining everything. Carson, who battled a vicious and fast moving cancer as she finished Silent Spring persisted in relaying her horrific discoveries even as she rapidly lost physical strength.
Chapter titles range from the benign “Earth’s Green Mantle” to the blunt “Rivers of Death” and feature beautiful sketches of birds nests, raccoons and wildflowers. The entire book is held together by the accuracy of Carson’s findings and this back and forth, between light and dark is what makes Silent Spring terrifying and compelling.
For more information on Carson’s life, look no further than Jill Lepore’s luminous profile (March 2018) from The New Yorker, “The Right Way To Remember Rachel Carson,” which provides fascinating biographical information about Carson’s nonconventional life and love of the sea. As the Trump administration continues to turn a blind eye to the preservation of the natural world Carson’s warnings remain a sobering and clear-eyed analysis of the ongoing damage humans inflict on the environment and ourselves.
Silent Spring is a reminder to the American people to remain vigilant about matters of public safety. Carson writes, “For mankind as a whole, a possession infinitely more valuable than individual life is our genetic heritage, our link with past and future.” We owe it to Carson to bear witness.
Neither A Salt Spring Nor A Horse: Nick Waplington
In Nick Waplington’s book “Neither A Salt Spring Nor A Horse,” Waplington turns his eye towards trees and women paired with a series of oil paintings he calls “Poseidon.” The title references a line from Greek mythology referencing a competition between Athena and Poseidon at the Acropolis.
Waplington opens the book with a brief description of the showdown between salt and olive tree; gleefully informing readers Athena and her olive tree prevailed. Published by Pacific in 2018, the striking blue cover leads way to an interesting juxtaposition of landscape and portrait mixed with the bright and insistent colors of abstract paintings in a kaleidoscope of pinks yellows and blues.
The monochromatic series, “Olive Trees” (2013) was shot between the Jewish settlement Har Homa south of Jerusalem and the Palestinian city of Bethlehem. The trees seem to represent the tenacity and history of the desert despite continued unrest in the Middle East, the bright blue of the sky in some of the shots both fresh and pristine.
Waplington refers to the area as “no man’s land” but the knotted trees and white hued villages in the backdrop hint at life. In most of the photographs the tree dominates the shot, and the eye is drawn to the green of the leaves against the subdued browns, the dustiness of the landscape fairly tangible in the still photographs.
The portraits are of women at a midrasha, or Jewish religious boarding school, in the settlement of Shvut Rachel. Each woman stares at the camera, framed by a doorway. But the intensity of their gaze is challenged by their modest dress, knees elbows and necks covered. Their facial expressions are simultaneously open and enigmatic. Somehow the shapes of the trees become similar to the statuesque women and one is left desiring of such focused concentration on living objects.
If They Come For Us: Fatimah Asghar
The opening line from Fatimah Asghar’s 2018 collection (One World/Random House) If They Come For Us from the poem, For Peshawar reads, “From the moment our babies are born/Are we meant to lower them into the ground?” This plaintive questioning and awareness of violence both past and pending pervades Asghar’s highly personal poems held together by the overarching theme of the India/Pakistan Partition along with Asghar’s continued quest for a sense of identity and belonging.
The title itself speaks of the bitter and tactile fear of persecution. One poem opens with a line taken directly from Trump’s recent ban on Muslims in 2015. Many of the poems demonstrate a preoccupation with bodies, both Asghar’s and others with lines like “my sister’s pussy/hairs” or “my nipples lighthouses/in a swollen ocean.”
Some of the poems threaten to read as overly dramatized or sentimental with lines that feel obvious: “she’s holding my unborn baby/in her arms, helping me pick a name.” Others like the somewhat self-explanatory Oh Pussy, The Things I’ve Pulled From You feel predictable with somewhat inexplicably graphic lines: “cotton cheese discharge.”
A few of the poems experiment with form like Microaggression Bingo set in a grid and filled with lines like “All the actors in a movie about Egypt are white” or “Get called a FOB & told you smell like curry.”
One version of several poems entitled Partition is designed like a blank mad lib, underneath each line is either “country” or “proper noun” and Map Home is a clever crossword with the clue to 3 down reading: “despite it all, there’s a path to love.” If They Come For Us is a hip, young and self-aware voice with lines like “gold acrylic nails” “granny panties” or “Call it eyeliner/so crisp it could kill a bitch.”
