DISCOVERIES

The Other Woman

A Novel

Eric Jerome Dickey

New American Library: 328 pp., $12.95 paper

Here’s a black woman who is exhausted, working until 1 a.m. most nights as a Los Angeles TV news producer. But she’s got her baby-blue 1964 Mustang with white interior, her house in the Valley and a sweet, good-looking teacher husband. She’s fast-talking, cares only about breaking news. It’s not her fault -- the rat race has gobbled her up. It’s no surprise when she gets a call from the husband of the woman her own husband has been sleeping with for eight months. (To notice, she’d have had to be at home for more than an hour a day.) She confronts him, he confesses and she poses a list of 21 questions he must answer if he wants her to even consider staying. Of course he refuses so she uses all her journalist skills to answer them herself. (Research requires her to sleep with the husband of the woman who seduced her husband.) It sounds a little glitzy, a little slick, but Dickey is relentless. He is also a master of showing how we enslave ourselves (the unnamed narrator refers to her workplace as “the plantation”) and how power is abused.

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Violet Island and

Other Poems

Reina Maria Rodriguez

Translated from the Spanish by Kristin Dykstra and Nancy Gates Madsen

Green Integer: 204 pp., $12.95

paper

Poet Reina Maria Rodriguez is well known in Cuba for her writing but also for her efforts (including a literary magazine she co-edits and weekly salons she holds on the roof of her home) to include the work of writers and artists in exile in “the nation’s cultural histories and ongoing publishing projects.” Born in 1952, seven years before the revolution, she writes poetry that is a fierce, continuous effort to sort truth from lies. Hers is the voice of a split self, a person easily inhabited by the spirits of historic figures, writers, painters and by those who would steal her vitality. In the poem “debts,” she lists as evidence of her existence various numbers, things and people (children and friends) and the “books they haven’t stolen from me yet.” She writes of searching for “the adolescent lamb,” the true self she has betrayed. She writes about an “inner revolution,” and in the poem “polyhedrons” about the importance of protecting innocence -- “to know what a beginning is.” Many of her poems are bathed in a “watery light,” island poems of beach houses, porches, sand and sea. In these houses, “the eye slithers,” under doorways, into the lives of other writers, like Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf. You think she’s clinging, sometimes by a thread, to her patch of earth, her country, her life as a mother and a writer. But you’d be surprised if she ever lets go.

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Potato City

Nature, History and Community in the Age of Sprawl

Sue Leaf

Borealis Books: 212 pp., $22.95

In 1984, biologist and zoologist Sue Leaf moved with her husband (a family doctor) and child (with another on the way) to the sleepy, not-so-distinctive town of North Branch. Tired of the urban sprawl and lack of community in another Minnesota town, they wanted a place where they could walk to work and school and sink roots. Leaf became interested in how well potatoes grew in the sandy soil of her backyard garden. She learns that the town had once been called Pot-8-0 City, but the flourishing industry begun in the 1880s “vanished without a trace” by the early 1930s. Prowling through old records and cemeteries, Leaf learns about the original settler families (mostly Swedish). She works to restore native plants and trees. She fights gophers, confronts a bull snake, lives through a tornado and thinks long and hard about what it means to live and die in a community. Wandering among headstones one day, it occurs to her that a web of friendships, marriages and business relationships has become “part of the soil, fading away unseen. It was becoming earth and oak trees.” She writes about the pace of sprawl, the loss of farmland and a way of life that seems like a dream or a place buried somewhere in our collective memory.