там и тогда

Posted by Terry

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For years I have been writing a paragraph about every book I read as part of my annual Reading Log, which you can find above. Many of the books I read are from smaller, independent presses or were written by writers who aren’t everyday names, and I would like to give them a bit more exposure. Other books have publishing dates that are years or decades earlier and haven’t been written about much lately. So, I’m going to make a weekly post of these little blurbs I write (assuming I finish any books that week) and not keep them hidden away on my website. Feel free to tell me what you think.

Andrew Zawacki’s Endscape (Photoworks, 2026) has 30 b&w photographs and 24 poems (all sestets). They all come from deep within the countryside north of Athens, Georgia, where he lives, with its dark entangled woods, buggy streams, and wide rivers. Elsewhere the markets might be “panicking” and overhead there are contrails “making a sick wash of the sky.” But in the woods, there is still the slightest hint of slavery and a reminder of the old Minstrel tune “Swanee River.” A bulldozer “tears the horizon down.” More ominously, Hurricane Helene is approaching. Highway “106 got bitchslapped clean, the troposphere / overdyed. Broken, and badly reborn. A black / hole that bends light around it. There / are only ways in: ” The poem and the book ends on the void after that colon. Zawacki is a vocabulary maven, using specialist terms and words from the deepest recesses of the dictionary, along with wonderfully bent clichés, all in the service of a thrilling exactitude. This is Photoworks Photo-Poetry Pamphlet Project P5.

One of the prime locations of Andrew Wittkop’s Literary Voyagers (Belt Publishing, 2026) is Lake Huron’s Mackinac Island in the summer of 1837, when three fabled historic characters met amid hundreds of visitors from neighboring Ojibwe and other local tribes: the American geologist Henry Schoolcraft, who was to publish extensively about the Upper Midwest and the Native Americans who lived there; his half-Ojibwe wife Jane, who collected, translated, and wrote down those stories and more; and Anna Brownell Jameson, a British woman who had followed her husband to Canada. Amazingly, she had made the arduous and dangerous trip from New York to Mackinac Island alone over the winter, which took her nearly nine months. Years later, back in England, she would become an important writer on Italian Renaissance art and an advocate for women’s rights, moving among the intellectual nobility of Britain and Europe. The Schoolcrafts are well-known figures to anyone who has dug a little into Midwestern or Ojibwe history. But Mrs. Jameson was a new figure to me, and a completely surprising one. All three are strong, yet deeply flawed characters, which makes this a fascinating group portrait. In Literary Voyagers, which is named after a handwritten magazine the Schoolcrafts once issued, Wittkop seems to be one of the new cohort of historians who is comfortable using every tool he has to tell his story, using the letters, documents, and other archival sources the participants left behind. But he’s not afraid, based on his knowledge and the evidence, to “dramatize” certain scenes to help fill the gaps in the archival record and make us feel that we are eavesdropping on conversations held nearly two centuries ago. Literary Voyagers is also a visual delight, filled with historic sketches, maps, and beautifully reproduced paintings. I read a PDF of the book, which will be published in October.

In Necronauts (Stillhouse Press, 2026), Ryan Habermeyer uses the fiction genre of the “found manuscript” to create a group portrait of a mythical Utah town, taking us back to the 1980s of Ronald Reagan. Habermeyer, it turns out, has fortuitously “discovered” in his attic nearly a thousand obituaries his father had written for the local newspaper. Ninety-five of these sometimes charming, sometimes alarming obituaries are combined with a matching set of portrait photographs from his own extraordinary collection of vernacular photographs, many of which would normally be considered rejects or accidents. They suggest we are observing the very moment in which death envelopes the town’s eccentric characters. Life and death in Calypsee, Utah, managed to foreshadow the absurd and frightening America we live in today. I wrote more about this book here.

https://sebald.wordpress.com/2026/06/29/week-26-2026-zawacki-wittkop-habermeyer/

http://sebald.wordpress.com/?p=23758