Bryan R. Monte – Susan E. Lloy’s Deep Breaths of the Inanimate

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Bryan R. Monte
Review of Susan E. Lloy’s Deep Breaths of the Inanimate

Regular readers of Amsterdam Quarterly’s reviews know that I am just as interested in a new book’s cover as its text. I believe this is what first draws in most readers (if they haven’t been fortunate to read a review beforehand). Susan E. Lloy’s latest book, Deep Breaths of the Inanimate, cover by Warthog Designs, features a woman, photographed from behind, with braided blonde hair, wearing a dark pinkish parka, sitting on an old, wooden bus or railway station bench. She is a woman at the beginning or end of a journey, a good visual and apt literary metaphor for the point of departure in Lloy’s new set of 16 stunning short stories.
       And do her characters travel: either physically or mentally to a Zurich bar and casino or the tinder-dry Canadian countryside, or meditating on touchstones of past lovers, we are privy to what most are thinking. Deep Breaths is Lloy’s best short story collection yet due to its variety of characters, conflicts, settings, and narrative styles such as science-fiction, Gothic tale within a tale, and multiple perspective stories.
       To give an idea of the variety of Lloy’s characters, their conflicts or emotional journeys, I will mention only some of Deep Breaths cast of quirky characters in this book’s first half. In the title story, two or three women muse over three objects that are related to their relationships with three men: a painting, a lighter, a clock. Years later, each object and the memories it evokes still moves the women so much, that they can’t bear to discard them. In ‘Rabbit Fever’, Sadie Rayburn, a Canadian Parliament legislative assistant, loses her job when a video of her as a stripper in her college years appears online. Sally leaves Ottawa and buys a convenience store in an Ontario tourist town. This storyline also morphs even further from conventional to science fiction mode due an outbreak of genetically altered rabbits who bite the locals and make them fall in love. In ‘Girls Only’, an older woman decides to move into a three-storey house of younger women in Halifax, Nova Scotia. While living there, she discovers and becomes obsessed by a Gothic style journal purported to have been written by a young woman held captive by her paranoid aunt who was also held hostage by her aunt. ‘Fixed for Life’ is about Rafael, an abused 18-year-old son, who dreams of a good life someday somewhere else instead of the cold, impoverished one he shares with his alcoholic, gambler mother. However, when his mother finally does hit the jackpot and she offers to share her winnings with him, Raphael leaves and taking all put $5,000 with him. ‘That Was Then’ is a tale of a semi-closeted, gay Quebecer, Bobi Jones, who discovers his recently deceased, pudgy, homemaker, single mother financed her life, before he was born, as a sex worker. Bobi also finds a clue to his unknown father. ‘All In’ is the story of two people—one a female, compulsive gambler, who is dangerously deep in debt, and the other, an older widower, whose only son committed suicide, who meet one evening in Zurich bar and start to have second thoughts about their euthanasia appointment the next day.
       One outstanding aspect of Lloy’s characters is their courage (or lack of) to strike out (literally and figuratively) in new directions. ‘She’ is story told from a multi-perspective point of view. It includes the voices of immigrant women in their new countries, some haunted by memories of former lands while living in new ones, others by the loss of a children who disappeared during their migration, and still others who feel they are living neither in a new country, nor an old one, but somewhere in between.
       Another of Lloy’s narrative strengths is creating vivid settings. Whether she is describing a character in the grim and noisy bustle of New York City’s Greenwich Village, a quiet, neat, townhouse district in Montreal, the tinder-dry Canada countryside, or a Neapolitan neighbourhood’s narrow streets, she places her characters firmly there and takes the reader with her. Whatever the setting, Lloy’s stories are fresh and peopled by fully-rounded characters, in original conflicts, who sometimes make surprising choices.
       In addition, Lloy’s narrative frequently employs intriguing, open-ended stories that make the reader (at least this reader) continue to wonder and care about her characters long after these stories have ended. For example, does Jones in ‘That Was Then’ find out that his mother’s, former-life, ‘manager’ is his father? Does Raphael, who tells his Neapolitan girlfriend’s relatives that he was raise in an orphanage, ever come clean? Does the woman, who turned her phone off after she received messages from the hospital in ‘Turn Left on California’, find out she has cancer? And finally, is the nameless city-girl protagonist who moved to the countryside to stretch her meagre retirement savings in ‘Time Out’, able to thumb a ride out an approaching forest fire in time before she and the tinder-dry, climate change scenery are engulfed in flames? The endings of these stories kept me wondering about the fate of all four characters long after the words on the page had ended.
       Each of Deep Breaths stories feels authentic, peopled by characters’ with believable interests, addictions, and sexual preferences, and activities involved in unusual conflicts. (And I’ve only mentioned half of them). These stories are suspenseful: each character’s conflicts are clear, but how they will or won’t not solve their personal dilemmas (or dig their graves even deeper) is not apparent until the very end. In addition, as mentioned above, Lloy’s stories sometimes don’t include standard denouements or resolutions.
       Whether they are starting out, starting over, midway, or have reached the end of the line, Lloy’s masterful cast of characters and their conflicts are unique, engaging, quirky, and sometimes surprising. Deep Breaths of the Inanimate will interest everyone and it is unquestionably Lloy’s best work yet. I couldn’t put the book down.    AQ

Richenda Van Leeuwen and Bob Ward – Turning Green

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Richenda Van Leeuwen and Bob Ward
Turning Green

A cliché would have it that people can turn green with envy. Currently with climate change hard upon us, turning green is the wisdom of the age. What is called for is a state of consciousness where one seeks to live without overtaxing the resources of planet Earth. Moreover, it needs to become a community approach, fully accepted and well supported.
       How does one grow into this cast of mind? For me it’s been a case of a mild interest gradually becoming a matter of focussed attention. In the 1970’s my family were privileged to have the occasional use of a simple cottage in mid-Wales, Nant-yr-nele, that was so remote even the foresters no longer wished to live there. But we could roam the hillsides, dabble in streams, gather fallen branches to supply the wood-burning stove, indulge fantasies of simple living. About eight miles away the town of Machynlleth was within reach of our modest car bumping along rough tracks while avoiding sheep. At the edge of the town was an abandoned slate quarry.
       We discovered that in 1973 it had been taken over by a community of engineers and architects among others who recalled that they’d set out to act ‘as a testbed for experimenting with alternative types of technology in response to the 1970’s oil crisis and a growing concern about the environmental impact of fossil fuels.’ In 1975 the site was made open to visitors, and we went a couple of times, it proved so intriguing. Some people did find aspects rather way out. I overheard a man complaining to his wife in a section dealing with options for making human waste productive: ‘I’m not going to pee over our garden just to grow better cabbages.’ However, our younger daughter, aged ten, latched onto the overall message strongly, as she explains below. The Centre for Alternative Technology continues to flourish, with an emphasis these days on post-graduate environmental education.
       Not far from where we were living, the new town of Milton Keynes initiated a visionary scheme in the 1980s whereby developers brought in novel designs for thermally efficient houses. For a while the completed estate was opened to the public. We were impressed both by their practicality and style. This was a way ahead.
       Subsequently we moved from central England to a new home close to the East Anglian coast. Once there, we fitted economy light bulbs, lined the cavity walls, upgraded the double glazing and improved the roof insulation of the conservatory. Then in 2011 we installed solar panels upon our south facing roof, among the first in our neighbourhood to do so. These fed electricity directly into the National Grid, for which we got paid. Not only did this provide us with income, enough now to have covered the initial outlay, but we genuinely felt that we were aligning ourselves with the green cause. Currently a new estate is being built beyond our garden fence. Each house is being provided with an array of solar panels, that’s progress.

Bob Ward, Solar panels, e-car charger, and e-car, photograph, 2025.

       Our most recent change has been to switch from driving an elderly diesel to an electric car. We are pleased with it. A great advantage is that we can recharge it cheaply at home, using some of our self-generated electricity. The picture shows the car on our forecourt connected to the charging unit and the solar panels on our roof.

Bob Ward, Wind Turnbines, photograph, 2025.

       Turning to the bigger picture, on a clear day when we gaze from the nearby ridge that overlooks the North Sea, stretching along the horizon a dozen miles away are turbines like a troupe of graceful dancers whirling to the music of the wind. The underground cables that bring the electricity ashore cross local farmlands. Here is England trying to live up to William Blake’s description of it as a “green and pleasant Land”. (Introduction to his poem Milton)

Bob Ward, Norfolk Offshore Windfarm, photograph, 2025.

Richenda Van Leeuwen adds her story:

       All four of us children were force-fed nature as soon as we could toddle, as our parents are both lifelong keen birdwatchers. So those long ago trips in Wales invariably involved winding down car windows – often in the pouring rain – to try and spot a then elusive Red Kite.
       But those early nutrients fed us well. As a 10-year old, I was struck by the small wind turbine turning on the roof of the Centre for Alternative Technology, and impressed that solar panels could provide electricity, even in such a rainy place. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, it became deeply imprinted in me and shaped things to come.
       Fast forward 30 years and I was offered the opportunity to join a global renewable energy investment firm to lead their work in emerging markets, across Asia, Africa and Latin America. I jumped at the chance, remembering my interest from long ago. While solar panels were still pricey, a new technology was beginning to illuminate the path forward – LED lights – which enabled a much smaller solar panel to be used to light up a home and provide basic lighting at a far lower cost than in earlier years.
       I was fortunate to be able to invest in and support philanthropically several emerging companies that were taking these innovations into parts of the world where communities lacked electricity. Also, I played an early role in developing a United Nations initiative focused on energy access that has brought solar power to hundreds of millions of people over the last fifteen years.

Richenda Van Leeuwen, Solar Panels, Central Bank of Kenya, Institute of Monetary Studies, photograph, 2023.

       To me the most fulfilling part of this work has been to use solar power in remote health clinics and hospitals where the grid is unreliable in places like the neonatal health unit in Bo General Hospital in Sierra Leone. There, solar panels and batteries provide reliable power for the oxygen concentrators and baby warmers that help save the lives of premature and critical newborns.
       I am proud of my parents for many things, including showing us that even at 90+ years old you can make a difference. And also, not least, for (probably being at their wits end) planting valuable seeds in taking four rambunctious kids out for the afternoon to an offbeat small alternative technology centre on a very rainy day.    AQ

Philip Gross – Melt Line

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Philip Gross
Melt Line

On one hand: Let us sit upon the ground
and tell sad stories
                                  of the death of… (things
in general, the seasons.) On the other
let’s stomp,
                      let’s puddle-slosh
like toddlers, drop to our knees in it,

icky-fingered in the particular
wonder of new mud
                                    the melting snow
discloses. From sandpapery chill
to slush, to slump
                                in dark-dribbling scars,
earth wakes, feeling its body again,

cramped from long numbness: Spring
which is also
                        a slow un-forgetting
of impacted pains, a spillage
undigested, chunks
                                of tyre-tread ruts
incriminating as a fingerprint, rust,

wire, shrapnel; deeper, mammoth’s
death-throe,
                        last meal in its craw,
the plague bacillus, morning-after breath
of peat bog,
                        and the ancient sleepers
dragged out of their dreamtimes – what,

again? – and all the wounded histories,
stuck clockwork
                             of parade-ground strutting,
flags, flags, uniforms… And mudslides,
oh, and hunger
                            and the children of hunger
gazing at the roadside – they will not

forgive us – from the churned fields,
barefoot, mud-
                            coloured and mud-crusted
as if new-created like Adam all over again
just waiting
                     for the word this Spring breathes
into them, and what will they say then?

Leen Raats – When the levee breaks

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Leen Raats
When the levee breaks

We couldn’t grasp it. How the walls which
we so carefully constructed,
are not the safe fortresses we have longed for
since the day we were born.

So we recited our prayers
cradled children in trembling arms, trusted.

Only a few of us headed for higher ground.

When the levee broke
no one knew where to go.

Nathaniel Calhoun – negative buoyancy

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Nathaniel Calhoun
negative buoyancy

overlaid by a swarm in which we have poor representation
we feed solitude to narrative engines      honed on a narrow
range of grievances      passed-over junior officers rancorous
slouching or this moment in plank pose     tax their umbilicus
to a throttle point   |    we no longer move in murmurations
we are herded   |   termite towers emerge too close      to our
shelters      a lopsided world of dubious roofs     barely stable
on one wavelength    |   isolation vinegars unguilded minds
goiters in our math yield to an omni-potentiality      a star
furnace      yoked      to our laziness   |   hoarding     ravaged
inhalations    ridden past salvaging      compulsory huffs
before the baleen heave      our lungs fill with frothy blood
and the pressure gauge      doesn’t mean every being will be
crushed     hadal zones      piezolytes       water swims     un-
bothered through unbothered water     indigestible signatures
tempt vanta fish      toasted by lava tubes      in the crushing
trench     technicolour microns      lodge in sea turtles blurred
by a jellyfish sea       something’s always comfortable where
ever you stray     habituated      indicating   |    is there a name
for the point beyond which       we become negatively buoyant
and how far out must we go      to have zero chance of orbiting
earth   |   droplets in a deluge     breach     from the noise of
statistical insignificance      and burst      like a beached whale
from the great      unraveling assumptions      of every earlier
era   |   maybe in a smaller tribe      we might have lasted

Gopu M. Sunil – The Only Language That It Still Speaks

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Gopu M. Sunil
The Only Language That It Still Speaks

We kept the thermostat set to ‘forever’,
as if the planet were a room we could heat
without paying the bill.

We filled the sky with our invisible footprints—
a slow snowfall of carbon
settling into every breath.

The ocean, patient as a monk,
began to rise
not in a dramatic rush,
but in a quiet, relentless inching
that stole the shore
one silent morning at a time.

The forests stopped whispering.
They began to creak,
to cough,
to turn their green into ash
like old paper in a fire.

We called it growth—
a word that sounded like a promise.
But promises don’t come with deadlines.

Now the storms arrive
with the weight of a warning,
and the air tastes like metal
after a summer that never ends.

We have overshot the limit
we didn’t know we had,
and the world is reminding us
in the only language it still speaks:
weather.

Michael H. F. Wilkinson – Skirmishers

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Michael H. F. Wilkinson
Skirmishers

Dandelions dot the windswept grass
on this man-made chain of hills,
this earthwork fortress,
solid bulwark against the tides,
besieged by the North Sea.

Sheep graze here, oblivious,
impervious to the stiff sea breeze.
Waves lap the shoreline rhythmically,
no frontal assault seems imminent,
no storm surge is gathering.

But something comes creeping,
seeping through cracks and pores,
deep under the dike we thought secure,
seawater advances underground,
feeling its way forward.

The sea’s skirmishers, maybe,
infiltrating their old domain
trying to reclaim it,
or at least deny mankind
the fruits of its conquest.

Winter rains hold them back,
but with every summer’s drought
underground outriders advance,
insinuating themselves
into the water table.

And so the skirmishers creep on,
sapping the soil’s fertility,
finding their way towards the roots,
blighting some corner of a field,
one crop at a time.

The sea has all the time in the world.

Michael H. F. Wilkinson – Dust devils

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Michael H. F. Wilkinson
Dust devils

Summer is hellish
in the fields of the Provence
where dust devils twirl.

Autumn sees no seeds
sunflowers are sandblasted
in the scorching air.

Fall has lost fragrance
lavender stripped of blossom
dust devils dance on.

Winter brings silence
broken vines in the vineyard
the devils have fled.

Linden Van Wert – Recapitulation

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Linden Van Wert
Recapitulation

Though we don’t believe it, the story nature tells has never been human-centred.

This early morning, a silhouette seems to be an Archaeopteryx spreading
its long-feathered wings in the glare of today’s climbing sun
motionless on the tall, steel tower carrying power lines
beside the causeway leading to a nearby island.

It is an anhinga drying its wings after breakfast—
today’s link in the unbroken chain of winged fishers
from Late Jurassic waters among extinct reptiles—a reminder
that every day we travel among miracles as if they were merely mundane.

Will the possibility of impermanence ever pierce our saurian sense of entitlement?

Erik Vincenti Zakhia – Wave in Filigree

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Erik Vincenti Zakhia
Wave in Filigree

Erik Vincenti Zakhia writes: ‘I took Wave in Filigree in Amchit, Lebanon, where I live, in the afternoon, on a stormy winter day. I took the photograph with very simple equipment: an iPod touch 6th generation. I use this for two reasons. First, it is light and pocket-sized and second, also out of environmental concern. My philosophy is to keep the same electronic device as long as it is functional. I am fascinated by how the sea connects the entire world. Water forms a unity and offers a landscape that, until now, we have found nowhere else in the universe. We should protect and preserve the Earth, and the only way to do so is to build a global and sustainable peace between nations. In addition, waves are noisy and silent at the same time; they invite dialogue across cultures, reflection, and poetry. If we do not change our current model of development, they may also become a threat.’

Erik Vincenti Zakhia, Wave in Filigree, photograph, 2025.