A.K. Afferez

Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama Alison Bechdel Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, May 2012 304 pages $22.00 This post was contributed by Kim Liao. As a nonfiction writer, I envy visual artists. They get a palette of colors and canvases and, as a result, a vocabulary at their disposal beyond my 26 letters. And there were moments during Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir Are You My Mother?

In Louise Erdrich’s latest novel Future Home of the Living God, the laws of physics have gone haywire and evolution has started moving backward. Animals have stopped “breeding true,” and pretty soon, so have humans apparently: pregnancies become complicated; fewer boys are born. No one really knows why, and since everybody wants answers, the U.S. government begins rounding up and monitoring pregnant women, as it slips into theocratic totalitarianism.

There are no bees in the gardens of Louise Glück’s 1992 Pulitzer-winning collection The Wild Iris. Nothing to pollinate and propagate the species—and yet there are hints of cycles and transformation: time sprawling from “earliest spring” to “end of August,” tableaux of the gardener and her companion planting rows of peas. Is it all an illusion though? In one of the “Matins” poems, the gardener asks, “You want to know how I spend my time?