Jellyfish Dreaming

By D.K. McCutchen

Leapfrog Press

 

One reviewer calls its “a head trip like nothing you’ve read,” a story that weaves together many issues percolating today — climate change, genetics, gender, biology — “in such a way it’s impossible to miss how they were always all one thing to begin with.”

“Jellyfish Dreaming,” by D.K. McCutchen, is a post-apocalyptic, speculative novel that on one hand envisions a future world of seemingly unmitigated horror. For one thing, the oceans now “cough up jellyfish and plastic rubbish” and little else, and the human race — what’s left of it — subsists largely on a diet of jellyfish and kelp.

In fact, humans are starting to turn into jellyfish themselves — and they’ve become sterile.

Then’s there’s Jack, the central character of the novel, is a “200-year-old intersex street kid” who has a strange form of immortality, in which he changes back into a kid every time he reaches the cusp of adulthood.

Jack still has memories of things, like birds and frogs, that existed before environmental disasters destroyed the old world. That and the fact that he’s not sterile attracts the interest of some nearby university researchers, who believe Jack and some other orphaned survivors might be humanity’s last hope.

Love is still a part of life. But when Jack falls for Joon, one of the tough street kids who can choose their own gender, old bigotries erupt into violence, and Jack must scramble to protect those he loves from a madman and save a dying world. But at what cost?

D.K. McCutchen teaches writing for students in the University of Massachusetts Amherst College of Natural Sciences, and she’s also an associate director of the Junior Year Writing Program. She’s a UMass graduate as well.

McCutchen will come to Broadside Bookshop in Northampton on Oct. 17 at 7 p.m. to talk about the U.S. edition of her nonfiction book, “The Whale,” a narrative first published in New Zealand that recounts the author’s experience on a scientific expedition from Tahiti to New Zealand.

Open Fire

By Deborah Gorlin

Bauhan Publishing

Memphis Shoals

By Brad Crenshaw

Greenhouse Review Press

Amherst poets Deborah Gorlin and Brad Crenshaw, who are married, take different approaches to their poetry in their respective new volumes: Gorlin writes mostly in free verse, while Crenshaw’s work is an epic, four-part blank verse poem about an imaginary family.

In “Open Fire,” Gorlin considers the different properties of fire, from the warmth it can give to the destruction it can cause, and she also looks at mortality, the passage of time, and moments in history.

“In Hitler’s Bathtub,” for instance, she imagines the iconic picture taken of Lee Miller, the American WWII photographer, washing off physical and psychological filth in the bathtub in Hitler’s Munich apartment at the war’s end.

“She places her boots, / recently dirtied from Auschwitz , squarely / on the mat, bathing here, her act of ironic / desecration, gesture to the showerhead, / the man who made a holocaust of hygiene.”

In the prose poem “Fall Higher,” the poet confronts the inevitability of aging: “The stairs loom these days. I take them / as a matter of pride whenever I’m able. But / I won’t deny they daunt like a wager in poker …”

And “Landslide” could be read as fear of the threat of climate change, in which the narrator imagines a place deep underground “beyond / the subterranean mantle,” where someone “supine on his mattress of bedrock” waits to “force upon me / his intimacies, taking everything I’ve got in this world away.”

With “Memphis Shoals,” Brad Crenshaw continues the epic poem he began in a previous volume, “Genealogies,” about a unique North American family whose story ranges between the 15th and 20th centuries.

Both volumes are narrated by a man named Bartlett Smith, an adopted son of the family in question, born in 1950, who in “Memphis Shoals” returns to Memphis, Tennessee in 1982 to pick up the story where it previously ended, with the death and dismemberment of another character, Alfred Ison.

According to publicity notes, Smith “confronts his personal demons and those of his long-lived extended family” in Crenshaw’s new volume, navigating a journey that has echoes of the wanderings of Odysseus and which also deals with immortality.

“Crenshaw has another way of narrating the American experience — with humor, science, melancholy, and the longing for home that troubles American hearts,” says one reviewer. “Get ready to be amazed.”

Deborah Gorlin is a former co-director of the Hampshire College Writing Program and a past poetry editor of The Massachusetts Review, and Brad Crenshaw is a neuropsychologist who previously taught at UMass Amherst. Both will read from their work at Amherst Books on Oct. 18 at 6 p.m.

The Last Language

By Jennifer duBois

Milkweed Editions

Williamsburg native Jennifer duBois, today living and teaching writing in Austin, Texas, has earned considerable acclaim for the incisive writing of her three previous novels, winning a Whiting Award and a number of other honors in the process.

In her newest book, “The Last Language,” duBois presents a tale told by Angela, a 27-year-old Ph.D. student at Harvard whose world has collapsed: Her husband has suddenly died, she’s asked to leave her program in linguistics at Harvard, and then she suffers a miscarriage.

With a 4-year-old daughter in tow, and over $75,000 in student loan debt, Angela is forced to move back in with her mother in the Boston suburbs.

From this bleak starting point, DuBois weaves a tale that also offers its share of dark humor, as Angela finds a job in a language center that’s using experimental therapy, via a typewriter-like device, to try and help nonspeaking clients learn to communicate.

Angela is paired with Sam, a 28-year-old man who’s been confined to his bedroom most of his life. But the technology seems to work, and Sam is soon demonstrating what seems like considerable intelligence and communication skills. The two draw closer — and then the relationship turns intimate.

And that’s the rub: Angela narrates her story from jail, after Sam’s parents find out about the affair and bring charges against her.

So what’s really happened? As Publisher’s Weekly writes, “DuBois walks the high wire with Angela’s audacious and unreliable narration, leaving room for readers to wonder how much … is true and to what degree she’s manipulated Sam.”

“This clever novel,” the review says, “lingers long after the final page.”

Jennifer duBois will discuss her new novel at Broadside Bookshop on Oct. 24 at 7 p.m.