reviewed by Isaac Fox
Cover art: “The Economy Class” by Abhishek Tuiwala. Prolit, January 31, 2022.
In her prose poem “basal rosette,” Genta Nishku shatters an American lifestyle into ten scenes. In one, graduate students debate politics in a bar; in another, a project director comments on a drafted grant proposal; another is about picking flowers. At face value, these moments seem mundane, but each thrums with the absorbing, invisible micropolitics that make our lives so vibrantly stressful.
Nishku has her sights on one demographic—wealthy and upper-middle-class academia—and with each word, she dissects that group’s hypocrisies and mental gymnastics. As the aforementioned grad students debate among themselves, “every response is measured carefully against an unspoken moral code.” In later sections, popular attitudes toward dandelions reveal suburbia’s unabashed obsession with homogeneity, and an interaction “abroad” is far too problematic to summarize in one word or phrase. An unnamed “scholar,” who “has a hard time concealing his expertise,” goes to another country and harasses a young boy for fifty-cents change. He seems to view this as a game of sorts. Standing by, “his companions discuss marx.”
Nishku’s prose is sleek, quick-witted, and biting. She also doesn’t use a single capital letter in the poem. As she pokes and prods at widely accepted social hierarchies, she resists the hierarchies of the English language.
This focused critique of relatively wealthy, educated Americans and their language is especially bold when you consider who reads American literary magazines. I suspect that a very large portion of their readership—if not a majority—is comprised of educated, relatively wealthy Americans obsessed with language. Nishku’s piece directly challenges its audience’s worldview.
Prolit (https://www.prolitmag.com/about) publishes prose, poetry, and visual art focusing on economic struggles, and it’s sixth issue came out on January 31. For more of Genta Nishku’s writing, see https://www.gentanishku.com.
Isaac Fox is a student at Lebanon Valley College, where he majors in English and creative writing. He spends his free time reading and writing things that aren’t assigned, shooting pictures, and playing the clarinet. His fiction and photography have appeared in Rune Bear and Heart of Flesh magazines, as well as Green Blotter’s 2021 issue. You can find him on Twitter at @IsaacFo80415188.