I Go To Some Hollow
Amina Cain
Les Figues Press
ISBN Number: 1934254096

Reviewer: Alice Osborn


          Today we’re told to “find our purpose,” “wake up with a goal each day,” and “measure all activities.” After all, we’re in a recession, and we need to dig deep to improve our current financial and emotional situations. Although I believe in striving and goal-setting, it is refreshing to read Amina Cain’s first short-story collection, I Go To Some Hollow, in which her characters don’t have to-do lists on their radars.

          Inside of these fifteen unconnected stories, all around 1,500 words, Cain’s female protagonists could almost be aliens from another planet. That’s how lost they seem in their bodies and in their general human interactions. These characters want to connect with other people in the same way that they might connect with the landscape and the weather. They want to feel passion and easily navigate human relationships, but instead they only experience boredom and awkwardness.

          Cain’s simple prose is heavily influenced by Marguerite Duras, and as is the case in Duras’ work, Cain’s characters enter into awkward sexual and sensual situations in an attempt to escape their overwhelming loneliness. Sometimes this loneliness occurs even within a relationship. Cain forces her readers to encounter and empathize with this emotional distancing through the use of stark details (“I can feel the temperature of both kinds of water, the rain water even colder than the lake water.”) and a hypnotic sentence structure. In the introduction to this book, Byanu Kapil says, “In the erotic centrifuge of this text, an erotic that can’t always be processed by the figures who populate it, touch becomes a way to alleviate the proliferating panic of being ‘unable to locate himself or herself where he or she should be captivated and replaced, not by another subject but by space itself.’” Centrifuge is a perfect word to describe this sensual searching that the characters initiate with their hands and fingers.

          Besides exploring the senses in all of their capacities, Cain is drawn to images involving water, birds, woods, and urban landscape. Her characters would rather drink tea with organic honey than coffee, would rather walk than run, would rather eat mushroom barley soup than a cheeseburger, and would rather read Lolita than watch Letterman. When her characters work at making connections, they reveal their vulnerabilities, their innocence, and the fact that they generally don’t know what they’re doing. Sometimes they fall flat on their faces, but in all of these stories there’s also a sense of hope that some connection has indeed been forged and that the main character will persist with the awkward relationship at hand in order to make it work.

          In “Black Wings,” Cain takes a common story of boy meeting girl and renders it compellingly bizarre. Already in the first sentence the reader feels the protagonist’s confusion: “I want to know what it is like to be asexual.” She soon meets a man, and they become boyfriend and girlfriend but do not have sex. The black wings of the title are a pair of costume wings left behind by a woman, and their arrival is a catalyst for the main character’s sensual exploration. She does a lot of thinking about past relationships, China, and the ocean. In the final lines of the story, she does visit the ocean and tells her boyfriend, “I don’t know what I am,” when he asks if she is asexual.

          “Black Wings” is just one of several stories that explore sexuality, infidelity, and jealously. Since these stories are quite short, readers don’t get a prolonged interior view of the characters’ angst, but the distance and pain they experience is palatably conjured. In “Something I Never Finished,” the main character has a boyfriend, Barry, but is seeing another man, named Mick, and all three are friends. The protagonist yearns to let go of the emptiness and boredom inside of her and can’t see beyond the present moment. She pays attention to what’s going on around her and feels separate from the men in her life:

    While Barry and Mick eat together I brush my teeth at the sink and climb into bed. My eyes closed, I feel like I am nine again, listening to my mother and father having a dinner party. Here, Barry and Mick’s forks clink against the plates. My shirts and dresses flap on the clothesline outside.

    “She’s asleep,” I hear Barry say. But I am still awake, listening to their hushed talking and imagining things in quick succession. I imagine Mick shooting a bobcat. I imagine Barry drowning during a storm. I imagine myself pulling band aids down from a shelf.

          “I Go To Some Hollow” is the last story in the volume and makes some of the most imaginative leaps in the collection. The story begins,

    I’ve been pressing my hand into sharp places. I’ve never held something and used it to cut myself, but if I’m outside I’ll press my hand into a thorn to make sure I feel it. It’s embarrassing. If I have a fight with someone this is what I’ll do. Yesterday I got into a fight with Celeste, with whom I’ve been building a house. I was holding a nail and I pressed my palm hard against it.

          The prose is thick with sensual tension as the unnamed protagonist wonders if Celeste sweats under her layers of clothes, if she has ever held a bird, and if she were to look inside Celeste’s muscular arm “would she see herself?” In the final lines, the image of hands is recycled as the women plunge their hands into a freezing stream, two people experiencing real sensation side-by-side but not with each other.

          As an author, Amina Cain is drawn to boredom and the intricacies of human relationships. In her engaging and honest writing, she reveals thoughts that most people entertain but seldom express (“Once when I drank a beer with a friend of mine on her deck we talked about what we did when we were turned on. We did the same things.”). I might have preferred longer stories with deeper and more sustained structures, but length and plot is not where Cain finds her writing strength. She is much like a fast expressionist painter who employs color and texture, letting the viewer decide what the painting reveals. Ultimately these stories highlight the distance that occurs in any relationship and how, within quiet moments, people can transcend this coldness, finding the sublime within an awkward state.