American Odysseys: Writings by New Americans. Vilcek Foundation, [2012].

American Odysseys is a nearly six-hundred-page anthology of writings by twenty-two people who have come to the United States of America from other countries in the last generation. Many came with their families when they were young. Some were clearly escaping war or persecution in their home countries. Others were looking for a new beginning. A few may have relocated simply because their jobs sent them here.

This is a collection of poems, short stories, and excerpts from novels. Many are based on their experiences in coming to America or fleeing their old country. Sometimes they are just poems or stories that could have been written by anyone.

For example, Ellen Litman writes about experiences in my hometown of Pittsburgh that could have happened to any number of people, whether recent immigrants or not. Her characters are from the former Soviet Union as she is, but similar things could have happened to others whose ancestors came on the Mayflower. I would note there are a few distinctives that show us Pittsburgh, but even those could be altered slightly and placed in another location.

Ismet Prcic’s selection “Porcus Omnivorus,” on the other hand, is very distinctive. It has echoes of “The Swimmer” as our slightly inebriated Bosnian-American protagonist tries to find his way home from a Los Angeles neighborhood. He passes by a house where he hears some people speaking Bosnian. They are having a party, and they welcome him in. It also turns out that the people at the party were not on the same side in in the 1990s civil war there. In that sense, it is more like some of the short stories of Ambrose Bierce.

Some of the stories from the Near East, especially Iran, are moving because they involved significant personal danger. While fiction, they are based on things that really happened or could have. Stories and poems by immigrants from Latin America and the Caribbean speak a lot to the region where I live. I have had numerous students whose families are from one place or the other, and they are finding their own distinctive identity.

The stories and poems from immigrants from Vietnam are worth reading. Having lived through the Vietnam era, it is both refreshing and enlightening to read about the perspective of someone who was “in country” back then. There is a somewhat unfair stereotype of American Vietnam veterans as being all troubled and suffering from PTSD. Yes, some are troubled and have suffered, but many came back and adjusted all right. It was no different for the Vietnamese soldiers, regardless of which side they were on. Some of them, too, became very troubled, others managed to make a new life, even if they had to emigrate.

I make two general observations about the works in here. Some of the works do have sexual content. There is nothing unusual about that in modern literature. What was striking, though, was how unpleasant nearly all the references to sex are, even when about married couples or people who seem mutually attracted to each other. The so-called sexual revolution (which did go side by side with the Vietnam era in America) was supposed to “liberate” people and even make sex fun. It seems to have become dreary and banal. Maybe the old ways were better.

The second observation is simply that much of the poetry is dense. Back in the sixties and seventies I worked hard to understand modern poetry. At the time to a degree I succeeded because I kept on trying and because I had some good teachers and developed a background. I honestly did not get a lot of the poems in this collection. Often they had effective images or interesting language, but they lacked or seemed to lack cohesion. Some fell into the trap of profanity and pornography, as mentioned in another recent review of poetry. The political side tended to be vaguer or more general.

Having said that, there were some interesting poems, too. Matthea Harvey, for example, has two series of poems in here that have a variation of the Hebrew acrostic poems of the Old Testament. Each poem has alliterative sentences arranged in alphabetical order. Each starts alliterating G and then proceeds alphabetically through S or T, depending on the poem. Sometimes Q or J is skipped. Here an excerpt form “The Future of Terror/5” showing part of H and I:

            We danced the hokey pokey on holy days—
            put your left arm in heaven, your right leg in hell
            and in the hubbub of shake-it-all-about,
            we didn’t hear the hoofbeats. The illuminati
            spoke to us over intercoms via interpreters. (122)

Perhaps this form has a name.

Lest it sounds like I am complaining about the poems here, there are some that I think anyone can appreciate. Those by Vuong Quoc Vu are especially moving. A few are reflections on the the Vietnam War, but most are just observations about universals from a distinct perspective. The use of language works extremely well in these poems, as some even explain Vietnamese words and grammar to us. But it is precisely through words and grammar that we communicate in whatever tongue we use. Many of the works in American Odysseys do have something to say.

My thanks to the school family who shared this book with me.