8 Books Perfect for Summertime Fever Dreaming

BY LISA MARIE BASILE

Summer is a time of rebirth—everyone says so. Even if you dread the heat and all those bodies locked up next to one another, and even if you can’t stand the sweat and the toil, the summer is kicking up all that stuff inside of you that needs to be released or confronted. Sometimes, for some of us, it takes a summer  to realize beauty and goodness again, while for others, it takes a summer of thinking-thinking-feeling-feeling to finally allow yourself to rest and blossom during the cooler months.

Whatever you feel, the summer is a character in our lives, and it has an impact—whether direct or not.

There’s also something about the summer that makes prose even more seductive. Sure, the winter has had its moments, but it’s the summer—and all its summery things: cool wine, perspiration, dark, hot nights, loud light, white fabrics, the sand and the sea, fever dreams, inescapable lust, suffering—that pools us in. Here are a few of my favorite read-again-over-the-summer books, not just for their content, but for the perfect way they pair with the heat and light. Some books you just must read at the kitchen window in that hot yellow light. 

These are a few of my favorite summer reads over the past couple of years. 

The Sailor from Gibraltar by Marguerite Duras

Holy shit, this is beautiful and heavy, like wet clothes, or like a wine-fueled dream. I started this one years ago and never quite finished, and then I started it again and finished it. Why? I don’t know why. Duras is exceptional—her language is like falling asleep and waking up in the most elaborate palace. This book follows a French man who feels his life is all sort of pointless—and so he finds himself in Italy, and then on a yacht sailing with an American woman who is searching always for her sailor. The language is a dreamy, hot, violent, thrashing animal. Read more about my love for this book here. 

The History of Violets (translation) by Marosa di Giorgio

Marosa di Giorgio makes me weep. Every time, without fail. She is a Uruguayan poet whose voice has transcended style or genre. She pulls me into a place in myself that makes sense. By reading her work, I can experience two worlds: the one we see, and the one we feel. It’s like she makes the ghosts come out. It’s like she haunts me from the inside, always there, sprinkling a little magic into my life and work.

This book is all summer—it’s about the farm di Giorgio grew up on, and where the supernatural and the real converge in a playground of greenery and life and death. It is also a book about memories, which in its own way, is deeply rooted in the tenants' summertime. That we’re hot and moving through this intense heat, and that our childhoods were filled with long days and weeks often without direction, that we remember these things, those long hours, and that we fill them with our feelings and fears. In Marosa’s farm, the ghosts and vines mingle, and it’s a splendid look at how prose can encounter remembering and truth and family.

Ps: I have a tattoo on my arm from one of her poems. It reads, Recuerdo la eternidad (I remember eternity).

RELATED: 4 Poetry Collections That Will Give You All the Feelings Ever

Delta of Venus by Anaïs Nin

Because summer is sex embodied by nature. Because Anaïs Nin's work is sweat and blood and feverish heat. If you haven’t read Delta of Venus, you are in for it, because this book is resplendent and erotic and musical. Nin is basically my other mother, so I’m biased. Full disclosure.

This book was written in the 1940s (sigh), and it’s filled with stories of want and hunger and fetish and desire. It’s also very daring, which, if you were a woman in the 1940s, was not an easy thing to be. It’s also refreshing to read about sexuality from a woman’s goddamn perspective.

There were days when certain fragments of his past, the most erotic, would rise to the surface, permeate his every movement, give to his eyes the disquieting stare Elena had first seen in him, to his mouth a laxness and abandon, to his whole face an expression of one whom no experience had eluded. 🌙 "the illustrated Delta of Venus" #deltaofvenus

96 Likes, 2 Comments - Lisa Marie Basile (@lisamariebasile) on Instagram: "There were days when certain fragments of his past, the most erotic, would rise to the surface,..."

The Stranger by Albert Camus

I’ve read The Stranger about 10 times, and it’s changed for me every time. The first time I read it, I was in 11h grade, and our teacher had us focusing on existentialism. It was then, in that classroom, that my understanding of literature changed. Yes, I had read from the canon, and I’d read beautiful books—but none that mocked me like The Stranger did. It was slow and strange and I could not understand Mersault. I loved and hated him. I felt this oppressive, hot, swampy suffocation take over as I read it. I could feel the summer of the book on me; I could feel the sun and the sand and the sea and the violence and madness. I didn’t know what to think. I often felt fatigued while reading it. And still do.

The Mystical Rose by Adélia Prado

I adore this book for so, so many reasons. Prado, firstly, was an inspiration to me when I first started writing. Having visited Brazil (with family from her town, Minas Gerais), I feel an even stronger connection. Prado was a devout Catholic, which you can feel in her work, blended into her ideas of the body, the imagination, the mystical and the sexual. Breasts, fruit, light, and dark—it’s all here, and to me, it smells of summer. Of all the bad and beautiful smells of the human body.

You can find some translated poems here: http://bombmagazine.org/article/3056/four-poems.

Lucy by Jamaica Kincaid

I reread this magnificent this book on the beach recently, and it struck me that most books about young women are sadly quite trite and full of melodrama. Not this one. Kincaid’s writing is so alluring and unique and bold, and this story—about an au pair from the West Indies, Lucy—is a transcendent coming of age story. It’s set in the backdrop of a wealthy white family’s home, where Lucy is alone, without her family, dealing with issues of race, identity, cultural loneliness, and the developing self. It’s like summer itself; there is a change occurring, as Lucy experiences, and reading her story comes at you in full force with all the heat of its weight and terribleness and power and reflection.

RELATED: 4 Existential Poetry Collections You Should Read

My Summer of Love by Helen Cross

You may have seen the movie, but have you read the book? It looks at the love-lust-obsession between two young girls who, very different, fill their achingly hot summers with one another. The two girls delve into the darkness of death and loneliness and sensuality and power, and their relationship becomes a sort of power play. It’s heady and I’m obsessed by it. I can smell the rivers and the sheets and the skies the book inhabits.

The Present Tense of the World by Amina Said

This book is drenched in summer in that the Tunisian shore, and other lands, lap you up as you read. Said writes that she "was born on the shore, of the sea of the setting sun." But it’s more than that; there’s a sense of fleeting transience, and discovery of the self through place, and the sea outlining the lands and cultures she travels to. Said writes in French (you can read more about that, and the implications of colonization in language here) and there’s a definite sense of the political in all of her work. It’s a beautiful, heavy read, and one that I believe is required, especially for any poet who wants to understand place and the self within it. I found, reading it in the summer on the shore in dead-heat, that I was drunk on its dripping, begging language. I can’t imagine reading it in the winter; it’s too urgent for coolness.

Bonjour Tristesse (Hello Sadness) by Françoise Sagan.

I literally read this book while sunbathing nude. It’s about a girl who spends her summer in the French Riviera, surrounded by her father and his lovers and their sensual antics. She then develops a relationship with a boy from a villa over, and the book becomes one of sex and jealousy and dreams of death. The book is a drug, and reading it, you feel high and full and languid, like you’re hiding behind a hot, vulgar, strange veil. More than that, it is a feminist book, one that isn’t afraid to explore a young woman’s sexuality from her perspective.

---

Lisa Marie Basile is an editor, writer and poet living in NYC. She is the founding editor-in-chief of Luna Luna Magazine and the author of APOCRYPHAL (Noctuary Press, 2014), as well as a few chapbooks: Andalucia (Poetry Society of New York), War/Lock(Hyacinth Girl Press), and Triste (Dancing Girl Press). Her bookNYMPHOLEPSY (co-authored with poet Alyssa Morhardt-Goldstein), was a finalist in the 2017 Tarpaulin Sky Book Awards.

MAAT SUITE BY GARETT STRICKLAND

DOT

I.

[ The madness I make does it like ]

                          [ THIS ]

is where enters
the night’s worst phase                                                              walking on one’s mother

Remembering the encounter of the book the gestation of it as a blind object the potencies hidden
within herein lies mysteries     the impatience in that desire to know that deep loving want of to be
able to be known by it     and even in the un-understanding in the understanding of knowing it as
it was written     thru pores  →  an unstoppable train     this language as seepage a seepage of
language as the age sees its page in the page of disks sick reference bro you are my brother as
this word     the same the same this homonym this home breathing in in unity and then again
again to be untied and once then more united on and on and     [ a mother does her twin sons in
the steamroom and they are not shy of each other ]     read into a tape already looped it builds a
nest     ( wow mom wow mom wow )  and into another such womb are we all the more
enveloped     a deferment of form     cabin’d in ain soph     thirsty for the outside     the madness
of the day     the nonsense of the moment     [ a diagram of the essential mystification ]     reveals
nothing in the manner that one cannot measure momentum-slash-position     a concentric
cube,     this calendar

II.

"Nothing quenches my step."
André du Bouchet

Designer time signatures
for rent

for bread     light or bust

worry required to keep
hungry

and qualified

thoughtforms all lined up
and nailed to a board

to admire or play
another game of darts at

carve
tonight’s password

into the wood
of our booth because we’re sitting in it and sitting down

can be
a way of loving

something, us

let this be enough
desire
blown out

as an eyelash
into flame

so forceful
so majestic

certain
declarative & willing

to be wrong

"And nothing will be yours except a movement
toward a where that is whereless."
Alejandra Pizarnik

LINE

Ticket
processional

shame parsed
you

whittled person
reenacts

a holocaustian
or bad face

afternoon deprived
of pivot’s distance

yogic piss
on charred glass

piloting
scorched orchards

Savaging thru a
bag

it’s showtime
overtaken

with the
emoticon

of infinite intimacy
with abjection

& you other
havable joy

King size
unbarterable

delusion

a kindness
not yet

knock’d
up faerie folk

on cellar shelves
in middle basements

striking
off planet poses
drinking

all the best
potions we’d

forget     yet

Isle
engine

how you heard

longing
close      or on top

fathoms
from

yr hood

secret  ed
inside

tee shirt thin
lyrics

and the hum
of apt pipes

in the wall
we met

this for

Leashed
crickets

piston out blues

antenna turnt
to oblivion sis

caught lulling
forcing

to expression
a street

sign
full

of holes in a rut

we
made

out
in

all summers
from now

on

This slow out of tune
accumulation

of haircuts     of hedonism

and the shape a mouth makes
in sabotage

to our regularly
scheduled      desk&vessel

does a madness
so nice     so good

in the project our light cleans
of weekends

There is no approach
in presence

I am at the extreme
of this thing here    I am

& your dream makes
the pocket round

for echoing day

---

GARETT STRICKLAND is the editor of .PLINTH., ICHNOS, and other publications of the Unwin-Dunraven Literary Ecclesia. He is the author of a long-poem, WHOA DONT CARE (Jerkpoet, 2015), and UNGULA (forthcoming from Solar▲Luxuriance). He’s an ordealist.

Poetry By Leslie Contreras Schwartz

PAPER DOLL CHAIN

Girls folded in upon girl and
another girl, holding hands of paper

a mask of thick mascara, eye-
liner, owling their eyes

paper dolls for play, holding
hands and repeating
thoughts, solo boats set afloat

by boys and men, pushed
farther still by the white world.

How to anchor except by holding hands with other
girls, girls to size and compare,

how their edges crease or fold more than
yours, how you want that too. That rusty anchor

in my best friend, which I hold onto,
its breast shape and weighted steady

as she practices her hand-smother and the gentle crush
of me. How else are we to prepare for the Mexican boys

now roaming the hallways, their arms
a hanging hook around some brown girl's neck?

Girls wanting to know
what it takes be a woman, how much to erase.

The rubber tip leaving no mark
left of a girl in a woman set inside the body of a man

or a boy. For now, it's a game of that blow
she knows is coming. I let her teach

it to me, practice and practice the art of being
inside other bodies, hers and then his
and his, all those brown, white,

red red bodies.
Never mine.

ANIMAL LIFE

Those black-beat wings. A rustle in my chest, those balled fist-of-hearts beating like lit
bulbs that click on and off, secret spark.       Too many people move about, waist deep in
swamp stench, the doors of buildings breaking into dark waters.     No matter to them.
Their bodies glide like liquid, agile, part of this covering up and over.           So, hide, little
warriors of fur, blood-rimmed eyes staining the night, the quiet blinking, the barely
breath. Hide to live amid these bloated houses, straining to contain all its things,
cosmetics and laced-up shoes and plastic toys that constantly sing. Because everything
sings, constantly, a radio tune that no one wants to hear but keeps on playing. Those can't
keep my hands to myselfs, those go love yourselves.   A smothered piano, a cello, a
symphony, in the tight muscle around my lungs, beating into me like my own bright
blood. I cannot live here if I don't save this hush, this furious sound.

HEADLONG

On the photograph "Pleasure and Terrors of Levitation," by Aaron Siskind

Headlong, body-long
spun into air--
a white man containing a woman
containing her crippled
walk, her brown body,
in his limbs, that whip-shaped
hair. He carries
her freedom in his levity,
that will to never fall to earth,
to be held buoyant by nothing
but air and belief in his own brilliance.
O, to be that light,
and to still be weighted
by the body's core of muscles,
bone and tissues, toughing its way
through sinew and blood to move
and be seen, to be allowed to be
a body that moves through the world
at will, that flock of black birds
crashing through the sky
of white starlight. Not
this life of boxes within boxes
within boxes--

Let me be that. Let all women
and girls, men and boys,
be that, stretching their bodies
along the sun-track to God,
not caring how many times
we fall apart and break,
that fall-apart dance so familiar
to us all. All those beautiful broken
spines lined up to make a ladder
to find what is missing.

---

Leslie Contreras Schwartz  is a Mexican-American writer of Maya descent, and a third-generation Houstonian. Her first collection of poetry, Fuego, was published by St. Julian Press in March 2016. She writes poetry, essays, and fiction about the lives of women and girls, particularly as survivors of bodily and psychic trauma. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Collagist, Hermeneutic Chaos, Tinderbox Literary Journal, Houston Chronicle, Catapult, and more. She lives in Houston with her husband and three children.