All My Books

Posted on November 19, 2025 by John Biscello
All My Books podcast with John Biscello posted

Interview on All my Books, a podcast aired on MET RAdio (Toronto Metropolitan University).

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Her Body, Her Name

Posted on November 18, 2025 by John Biscello

   It was a time in her life when she was not there, not inside herself or her life. And she was pregnant. Pregnant by the wrong man, so many wrong turns and wrong men, and this one, a mislaid night gathering force and momentum in the base of her spine, her small history measled with shivers and white spiders.

   Placing her hands in the soil and planting things helped, because then the earth became her body, the earth which never suffered an identity crisis. Hands moving through soil was balm and shelter. Another was reading. Entering the lives of others was like playing safely in the country of shadows.

   The novel she had read, written by a South Korean woman, mirrored her psychic landscape to a tee. In the novel, a woman was breaking apart: quietly, quietly. No one heard a sound. Until the woman began demonstrating unusual and erratic behavior, a deviation from the norm, and then the woman, as aberration, was somewhat heard and somewhat noticed. The woman’s ghost took center stage in her life, and she, practicing séance and exorcism all at once, became the body and template to a chronic haunting. A haunting whose night spilled forth into broad daylight. It was, according to many, disturbingly unnatural to see night insinuate itself into day. The woman’s husband was revolted by this grotesquerie. And, by proxy, revolted by his wife, who had become something sub-human.

   The author lights the novel dimly, a muted sepia with charcoal hints of ash, and perfumes its air with dying roses. It is a novel that is both quiet and quietly devastating, soft footfalls echoing in a long hallway. It was as if the woman in the novel was continually awakening from a dream, and with each inebriated awakening, with each round of stupor and revelation, a new fold emerged, a new edge spanning the chrysalis. The novel broke off where the woman was beginning and ending.

   By reading this novel three times, the woman outside the novel took a census on melancholy and came up empty. Yet she kept on reaching, beyond herself. Where was I became where am I, which eventually morphed into I must return … and everything was set in motion.  

   She would give birth to a daughter who would be raised fatherless, she would move back into herself, bloodying her hands along the way in smashing mirrors (but how beautiful the pools of blood darkening the slick lunar glaze)—she had been reflected back to herself as a woman trapped in a novel that no one was reading, and no one had written, but she was not that woman, that woman was trapped in a changeless fate, ossified in fable and dirge. She was not that woman, she was herself outside a novel, herself inside life building itself to house her name, her slow and holy name committing ceremony to mother-tongues.

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Best Indie Gems Hidden in Plain Sight

Posted on November 17, 2025 by John Biscello

A mini-review list compiled for and published on Shepherd:

https://shepherd.com/best-books/indie-gems-hidden-in-plain-sight

 

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Domain

Posted on November 17, 2025 by John Biscello

   Samuel Beckett tried to corral silence by making silence the domain of language. To not say anything, to ultimately embrace silence, would have meant an impossible task—setting down the pen, laying to rest the voice—and placing a moratorium on words.

   The only way Beckett imagined that could happen would have been through death. Death, flexing dominion, would have to pry the pen from Beckett’s cold stiff hand. Death would have to impose the silence and gag order that Beckett could not attain by choice.

   From out of smoldering and sepulchral silences words arise, only to immediately plunge back into the abyss. Gravity’s mouth, magnetic and godlike, is essentially a devourer of seasons. And words, trained through voice and causal urges, are always resisting gravity’s vortex just long enough to spell out hints, needs, cries for help, and homesickness disguised as small dark birds.

  We come out of silence only to return there. Lots of words and stories and jig-dancing at night’s edge in between.  

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Plot

Posted on November 17, 2025 by John Biscello

   Yesterday I buried my mother. Two mothers. Maybe three, or four. I have had many mothers in the small hours of this modest and shrinking life. All my mothers are tassels of foam threading mighty surf. All my mothers are exiled and liberated to a single body-host and fugitive core. The passions of men are septic, and in need of drainage. And not just any drainage: mother-drainage. Mothers swallow cesspools and geyser them upward and outward with religious fury. Mother-tongues perform rites on multiple levels. The stars wink, gratefully. Mirages rage fruitfully, and I say this because here I am, burying my mother again, for the first and always time, there is no end to these burials, no cessation to the amount of mothers becoming funeral batter (the heat of the earth causing them to rise, to rise) … In truth, or in reality—choose your semantical poison—I have buried none of my mothers, not a single one, but I have rehearsed these burials in the cradle of story, I have made myself minister and undertaker, reciting the canticle (while imagining dirt engraving its signature under my nails): I buried my mother yesterday. If I were to start again, and here I start again, I might say—Yesterday I buried my mother. And she buried me. It was a mutual agreement, a tacit bond.

   There’s something about burying the mother who buries you that engenders hallucinogenic closeness. My mother and I become vivid and clear, near and dear to each other in our correspondent deaths, in our shared burial plots.

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Winter

Posted on November 17, 2025 by John Biscello

   I say my mother’s grief was white on white … I say this, but this is not true all the time. The colors change. My mother’s grief has been pink, blue, red. Yet, more and more, when I am feeling my way into and through my mother’s grief (my psychic wanderlust almost always takes me through these regions), yellow has been the primary color. In my travels, I have painted my entire body yellow, and stood in a grove of autumn trees, yellow leaves flashing gentlest elegies, and I sync into solidarity (we are not only autumn trees, cortege and metamorphic, we are also the liminal ambassadors of grieving mothers), and when there is nothing left of me, when I have been stripped bare by winter’s prologue, I cut off the dead pieces of myself and fashion them into a cradle, a bare bones cradle into which I slot myself, where I hibernate all the way through winter, the faces and limbs and mouths of winter eclipsed by a long sleep. This I do to honor my mother, who has always despised winter, who was always sad and depressed the entire winter season—Mother, let us sleep until winter is over, let us sleep as shrunken cradle-mates through the dark glacial void of winter, and I will be the first to rise, I the son always the scout and advance guard, I will rise and tell you when winter has gone away, and you can open your eyes, your blinking baby-bird eyes, but please, do not look at me, turn your head, I cannot bear direct gazes, you know this, turn around, let me see the back of your head, my first temple, and I will become your daughter, your new season’s daughter, brushing your thick hair quietly and diligently.

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Vigil

Posted on November 17, 2025 by John Biscello

When I watched my mother brush her hair, it made a scraping electric sound: vibrating plastic teeth sinking repeatedly into a fuzzy animal. I loved watching my mother brush her hair. I’d make sure to always stand behind her, so I couldn’t see her face. I always felt safer when I couldn’t see faces. Faced held eyes and eyes were too much. Mix the eyes in with mouths, noses, and everything else that formed a living portrait, and it was too much for my nerves to process. But the backs of heads: I was safe. That is, until the day my mother told me she had eyes in the back of her head. My staring became a different pastime, fraught with anxiety. Why couldn’t I see the eyes that were seeing me? How deep were they hidden in my mother’s forest of hair? Years later, when my mother got sick and had to shave her head, I no longer believed in the eyes, but still I had to check … my mother’s head was my first temple.

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Mayday

Posted on November 17, 2025 by John Biscello

My mother’s grief attends nightly to her bones. It is a funeral in reverse, or a funeral in slow-motion, longing for a mourning long delayed. We stall ourselves in grief—idling, passive—and the freest parts become small dark birds tearing away from us, ghost-birds in a winged cortege. We arc and circle ourselves in grief … render childlike outlines in faded chalk.

   I have mimicked many voices to track and capture my mother’s theriomorphic grief, therefore my own: history pared and blood-let outside of time. Inside time, once upon a time, my mother was, as she tells it, a terrified-out-of-her-mind seventeen-year-old, not knowing what was going on, loud brassy voices and foot traffic, screaming her head off, nurses trying to calm her down, bound to a gurney, soprano squeaking of rubber wheels, drugs administered … and there, in the Grand Guignol of the delivery room, it came from her, into this world, a defiant trauma and membered shock, an exile and introduction swaddled in its own immediate reality … the baby banged furiously on air, tiny flailing fists producing music from large pools of nothing. I drank these large pools of nothing into my lungs, and I was initiated: I was passed around, I was wiped, I glided through air, I felt the burning of light, I was a pair of eyes just turned on. Everything, not so much new, as it was returning to me again, with a different cast, different narrative, different set of circumstances, and I, memoryless, cased in a spastic wingless body consumed with hunger.

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Knives

Posted on November 17, 2025 by John Biscello

   My sister says she doesn’t have many memories from childhood. When she looks back, there’s nothing there: a blank screen. I never asked her if she saw black or white in her absence of memories.

   One of her earliest memories, one that became archival celluloid: my father, drunk and drugged out of his mind, chasing her and my mother down the block with a knife. My sister and mother ducked into a doorway next to the toy store around the block and hid there until the threat had passed.

   I don’t know where I was when this happened. My sister shared this memory so many times that I began living through it, as if I too had been there, and in moving through this memory with the propriety born from intimacy, I may have modified it. The knife, for example: Did my father have a knife when chasing my mother and sister? Or did I plant the knife in my father’s hand, based on another memory, one which belonged to an ex-girlfriend who told me that one of her first memories was of her father holding a knife to her mother’s throat. Did I combine the two fathers into one? Did I duplicate the knife and place it into my father’s hand, making me an accessory in this revised episode of violence?

   I had experienced my father during lunatic flights of rage, and knew very well that not only might he wield a knife during such moments, but he was also capable of slashing or carving into one of us with a blind fury. It was possible. The knife was possible. Mutilation or death … possible.

   When I asked my mother about the memory, she said she had no recollection of that happening. So, in her story: no chase, no knife, no husband. It was a blank screen. Whether she saw black or white in that absence, I don’t know, because I never asked.

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Dinner, No Voices

Posted on November 17, 2025 by John Biscello

   I waited. We waited. A storm was coming. It had to be. He had returned from rehab several days earlier, after having been gone for two months. My father had always born pouchy bags under his eyes, but there, in rehab, the pouchy bags had unnerved me. I think because they brought attention to his eyes, and these were different eyes from before. These new eyes seemed to shine with fear, or projected a nakedness that I couldn’t bear. These eyes belonged to a bewildered and overmatched little boy, and I didn’t want to see a boy where my father was supposed to be.

   Now, at the dinner table, it was my father but also it wasn’t—this man was quiet, subdued, and the thing that most disturbed me: the way in which he handled his fork and knife. Before, his knife would tear into meat with murderous ferocity, and his fork would produce all kinds of noises—pinging, clacking, rattling—when meeting his plate and teeth. My father had always eaten with brute vigor. Not this version of my father. This one ate, almost gently, and I never knew my father, or my mother, for that matter, to do anything gently. The common vocabulary of their actions and gestures registered as frenetic, frantic, hasty, insistent … everything in the key of volatile drama. Which was why my nerves couldn’t handle what was happening. When you are expecting death metal and instead receive a soft classical ballad … the echoes of metal keep reverberating within your nerves. The ghosts of the music you are not hearing can be more powerful than the music you are hearing.

   Because my father was silent, my mother was too. As was I. No one had anything to say. We ate in caged silence. We ate as if someone had just died in this apartment and out of respect for their memory we were eating quietly. I snuck glances at my father’s pockmarked face. A boxer’s face, mashed-up in different places. At any moment, I expected the rage to return, the sudden shift to fury … he’d snap at me, or my mother, for some perceived offense we had committed, something he found displeasing about us. It never came. This man was a punchless choirboy, and his knife and fork were used less like murder weapons and more like ordinary utensils.

   I wanted to scream into his face, wake him up to who he was, who he had always been, who I knew him to be. Who we knew him to be. My mother was an accomplice in this caricature of silence. I wanted to scream at her, too—Don’t you know this is false, this peace is a façade and charade? I know it. Why don’t you know it? You will revert back to being savages, the two of you hurling homicidal and suicidal impulses at each other, and I, I will feel right at home again, dying to escape.

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