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Butterfly (2011)-Julie O’Yang By Gabriel Ricard The title of Julie O’Yang’s beautiful, passionate and fascinating new novel is initially quite deceptive. It will eventually make sense to those who take the time to read through a narrative so rich in image and experience that it’s almost poetic first and foremost, but just looking at the cover reveals nothing. Some titles reveal too much. Others are intriguing in their ambiguity. Anything from either of those camps can get your attention for different reasons. Something as simple as Butterfly can have a thousand possibilities surrounding it. O’Yang clearly has reasons for choosing it, and those reasons are important, but the title is really just a formality. You aren’t going to know what’s waiting for you until you dive in to her original, lovingly detailed story and characters. As you read further along, and with Butterfly this is quite easy to do, a title like Butterfly becomes more than its most simple definition. It cuts away those thousand possibilities, but leaves behind several intriguing ideas. Butterfly is a book that reminds you of the joy of discovering a treasure, and wondering why there aren’t a few hundred-thousand more who have already found it before you. The book was only released last year, but it continues to slowly build an audience who still understand the thrill and gratitude behind discovering writers through simple happenstance. Julie O’Yang words wear a collective heart on their sleeve, and it doesn’t take very long at all to be pulled head-first into this novel. To call Butterfly a love story is a fine means of introducing its basic plot, but it goes much deeper than that. To call O’Yang’s considerable writing achievement a love story set against a historical backdrop, as difficult to capture in fiction as that of the World War II/Sino-Japanese war is a little closer, but it’s still not the sum of what this book accomplishes. Indeed, this is a good place for the reader to start, a place to bring us into the affairs of its two main characters, an older Chinese woman brought to the point of collapse by insurmountable heartbreak, and a much-younger Japanese soldier who harbors his own tragedies and secrets. These are characters strong enough to carry their own separate stories. Woven together by O’Yang’s spirited, multi-layered narrative they create an account of complex, dangerous love that fleshes them out as fully as a character could ever hope to be. A great story springs from their romance, and it could have held together a novel even longer than the one O’Yang released. It’s not much of a knock against a story when the worst thing you can say is that it left you wanting more. What we do have is a story whose soul simply has riches to spare. It gives us a tightly-written-yet-profound beginning, middle and end. Nothing is wasted in terms of plot, characters, dialog and even metaphor. Nothing is taken for granted. What we do take from Butterfly, particularly the ending, is what we take from any work of art whose impact on us is this substantial. We see an entire world opened up for us through a singular work of fiction, and we can’t believe that it’s actually been there the whole time. It just takes writers like O’Yang to flip the light switch on.

Wolf Down (2011)-Anthony Liccione By Gabriel Ricard Gratitude is a recurring theme in Wolf Down. There are other emotions captured in the stories and experiences related throughout Anthony Liccione’s new poetry collection, but gratitude is the most recurrent. Make no mistake, Liccione is not writing the kind of gratitude that can also be found alongside words like elation or euphoria. This is not a cry of joy from the mountaintop. The gratitude in poems like “One” (with its fantastically dark, comic punch line at the end), “sense of freedom” or “Deep for Words” is of a much different tone. It almost doesn’t seem like gratitude at times, but these pieces can be seen as a stubborn determination to celebrate life. That even feeling the brunt of terrible times at least indicates that we are still capable of feeling at all. Whether or not this is good relies on the individual’s outlook on life and just how much they can take. Liccione can take a lot, observe a lot and write it all down with an eye for imagery and talent with form that suggests he’s been in his own personal one-horse two for far too long. These stories are not limited or naive. They possess the scope and credence of a writer who perhaps sees more than they really want to. Writers are known for working even when they’re not actually writing. The acutely introspective tone of Liccione’s poetry (“plate” is one of the best examples of this voice) is a constant. It’s a kind of intensity that can burn out a writer who doesn’t know how to process it. Liccione is still standing, getting out of bed in the morning, going to work, dreaming, writing, thinking, hoping and rallying against the tide of a universe that at times seems to have a gambling problem. There is weariness in still being able to do these things, put stories like “Muteness” into a carefully constructed, smooth poetic form. Yet Liccione is also aware of the dignity in being able to accomplish this. Knowing what’s out there in the world doesn’t mean you also have to let it destroy you. The good is taken with the bad in Wolf Down, and the transition from one to the other is seamless, and the mark of a writer as tired yet willing and eager to continue on. It is the gratitude of still being alive, coming through the minor and severe hells of an ordinary day more or less intact. It is not something easily gained in life, but it’s always worth trying for. The writer capable of telling us of their journey through this as well as Liccione will never lack for material. When the material is as good as that which is found in Wolf Down we gain almost as much as he does. Just by reading what’s on his mind.