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Book Review: All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews (2014)

by Abbigale Kernya, ​for The 44 North

Managing Editor


The book cover of All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews
The book cover of All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews

Genre: Literary Fiction, Psychological Fiction, Canadian Lit


Recommended Age: 16+ readers

​​​

Rating Scale:


Educational value: ​​ 4/5

Positive message: 2/5

Positive role models: 2/5

Violence: 5/5

Sex: 3/5

Language: 2/5

Drinking, drugs, smoking: 4/5

Consumerism:​ 1/5

“It was the first time that we had sort of articulated our major problem. She wanted to die and I wanted her to live and we were enemies who loved each other.” —Miriam Toews, All My Puny Sorrows

It’s been a really long time since I have had such a visceral reaction to a book. Around a month or so ago, a good friend of mine recommended Miriam Toews’ All My Puny Sorrows after realizing we shared the same love of books that hold the capacity to destroy their reader. 

 

Lately, I’ve been going through a lot of changes in my life—some good, some bad, all equally as frightening. Reading All My Puny Sorrows found me when everything felt so uncertain, and self-doubt continuously plagued my psyche in a never-ending spiral of change. The book follows two sisters, Elfreida and Yolandi, as Yolandi narrates their sheltered religious upbringing in relation to her elder sister’s rebellious grit and desire to find life outside of their community. 

 

I should stop my review now to warn readers that this book is not for the faint of heart and not for those looking for a happy time. 

 

Elfreida—in all her lust for life and worldwide success as a pianist—wants to die. In the simplest of ways, Yolandi’s sister doesn’t want to stay alive. Through the book’s narration of Yoli’s perspective, to watch the person she idolizes more than life itself rot in a hospital bed after a failed attempt and balance her role as a sister and friend to the shell of a human once resembling her sister all while dealing with two children and a divorce, All My Puny Sorrows tests the limitations of love; asking just how far will one go to honour those they love even if it kills them, even if it doesn’t.

 

Through motherhood, sisterhood, and childhood, how does one escape genetic sadness? What do you do when the one person on this planet you love more than anything wants to leave it? In a delicate analysis of human suffering, Toews bends the limits of humanity, exploring grief as a crash course in unaltering love and how far family can go to save each other. 

 

There was a moment that caught my breath when I first read it. When Elfreida lies in a hospital bed, she tells her sister there is a glass piano inside her, and she’s terrified it will break. I won’t get into my interpretation of this imagery, for that I invite you to pick up a copy and decide for yourself what it means.


I remember approaching the climax of this novel and leaving my house in search of a calmer place to finish. With tear-stained cheeks and a hollow hole in my chest, I closed this novel and sat in silence on the couch in my office. All My Puny Sorrows has left a stain on my soul—one that I cannot thank my friend enough for, and one I cannot recommend enough. 

Writers Room | ICE Murders: Lives in Slow Motion

by Mikaela Brewer ​for The 44 North

Senior Editor


White chalk letters on orange tile. They read: “#LeaveNoOneBehind”
White chalk letters on orange tile. They read: “#LeaveNoOneBehind”

Please note: this short story discusses targeted violence and death. It may activate folks with similar lived experiences, beyond what feels safe to spend time with. Please engage with this story how/whenever it feels safe for you.


For a preface to what’s been transpiring in the U.S., please read this article by Gillian Smith-Clark, our Editor-in-Chief. 


***


“I’ll say it again and again: trauma is not what happens to us, it is the space between us.”


They say that in the last seven minutes of brain activity, approaching death, a person re-experiences their whole life. Others say it’s just surges of memory and awareness. Me? I’m a writer. At least half of my life happens in my head with characters I’ve never met. But they’re the residue of not only people I’ve known, but people I’ve passed in life—on streets, at schools, in restaurants. Mothers, poets, fathers, cooks. So I say, why not?


In some way, I know Renée Nicole Good, Keith Porter, and Silverio Villegas Gonzalez, because so many others did. Because ‘I’ is such a falsity, sometimes. It’s lonely before it grows branches into the ‘T’ of ‘Tree’ or ‘Together’ or ‘Truth.’


We breathe in what trees breathe out. And we walk and run. We’ve breathed in one another.


With that breath, I imagine Silverio’s seven minutes. Even in his focused severity, he relives the moment he dropped his two children off at day care and school. At each place, he does the same thing: moves their dark hair from their foreheads with a warm palm, and places a kiss. I picture him first learning to cook, maybe from a family member. Perhaps he remembers the scented smoke in a kitchen with windows overlooking beautiful Michoacán on the Pacific Ocean. I see his fingerprints across kitchen utensils in a restaurant near Franklin Park. His careful, responsible hands make art for eleven hours, and then, in the sixth minute, reach back to his children. 


And after seven minutes, the world is without another father.



“I know how to build a survival shelter / from fallen tree branches, packed mud, / and pulled moss. I could survive forever / on death alone. Wasn’t it death that taught me / to stop measuring my lifespan by length, / but by width?”


Width. I imagine the width of Keith’s heart beat, soul, and smile. He relives meeting his best friend, Adrian, in 1996 as a teenager. He hears his nickname echoing, “Pooter!” He sees the laughter and life his jokes brought to parties, the students he supported, and the teens he helped Adrian foster parent when he was only in his twenties. Two beautiful girls’ faces sparkle for him here, as they always have. There are Dodgers games and rich conversations with God and family. In the sixth minute, his spirit never broke—love kept repairing any cracks.


And after seven minutes, the world is without another father.


“The role of us poets is to witness the world,” writes Danez Smith in “An Elegy for My Neighbor, Renee Nicole Good.” But it’s the role of everyone.


I see Renée crafting her award-winning poem, “On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs,” which won the Academy of American Poets Prize in 2020. She relives the sparks of that better life in Minneapolis—maybe a drive from Kansas City with her wife, Becca, and her youngest son. The wind is warm and made of dreams. I see her feeling the joy, vibrancy, and safety of new friends and community—felt because she helped make it real. I imagine she ventures through moments with Timmy before his death, her second husband’s love. And her three children’s lives, like the once disparate strands now a fierce braid, tether together the expanse of her life. She revisits the moment, perhaps on a soft couch after school, where she and Becca taught their kids to “believe that no matter where you come from or what you look like, all of us deserve compassion and kindness.” In the sixth minute, she’s smiling. The sunshine she radiated is returned to her, and she feels its glow: every moment she stood up for others. 


And after seven minutes, the world is without another mother.


Minneapolis, LA, and Chicago keep fighting amid the plummeting temperatures—the coldest we’ve seen in a long time. They will not be frozen. Together, they’re warmest. And we must keep the fire burning against what freezes; against the threat of ice build-up on bodies, hearts, and minds. 


Laura Gilpin’s “The Two-headed Calf” reads:
















And then, years later, Matthew Dawkins writes, “Even two-headed, the calf is mourned.” 


Who is called two-headed? And targeted as such?


Maybe the two-headed are the people most balanced by two heads. That is to say, those who hold much more than themselves.


And what a beautiful thing this is. ICE may have killed one head. But beneath twice as many stars to navigate with, there’s another. And it’s always been us—each other, right now. 


***


Resources

Poet’s Corner: “Rosa Parks” by Nikki Giovanni

by Mikaela Brewer ​for The 44 North

Senior Editor


“Rosa Parks” by Nikki Giovanni from Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea. Copyright © 2002 by Nikki Giovanni. Reprinted in Poetry by permission of Harper Collins Publishers Inc.


A white sign with black capital letters, held up at a protest.
A white sign with black capital letters, held up at a protest.

Note: This poem is not in the public domain! Please use the link above to read it.


In 1971, Nikki Giovanni spoke with James Baldwin at length in A Dialogue (also released as a book). When I first read it, not long after she passed away in December 2024, the texture and resonance of her voice felt like double-sided sticky tape. It hasn’t left me, and sticks to what I read now. Her conviction is unparalleled not only in its power but in its grace; grace as in its dexterity of love. And for that reason alone, I struggled to choose just one poem for this essay. Nikki still calls us with wit, fervour, and care. 


“Rosa Parks” stands out in its dense, uniform block of text. It conforms, you might say, to the shape of a column in a newspaper, complete with narrative flow. But it certainly doesn’t conform in its content, which isn’t beneath complex diction or syntax, but under the literal act of reading the poem. So few of us read poems by Black women. It’s a great month to start. They’ve been writing the truth—of love and violence—for centuries, under persecution and censorship, sowing wisdom the way enslaved Black women, aboard ships crossing the Atlantic, hid seeds in their hair.


Nikki’s poem is also the shape of an elegy, ode, or brick—to be thrown or built with. It’s the shape of heaviness. The ghosts of Thurgood Marshall, Gwendolyn Brooks, Emmett Till, and the Pullman Porters are with us. And they remain alive, in part because women like Rosa Parks (and Claudette Colvin, Viola White, Pauli Murray, and Elizabeth Jennings Graham) sat back down on a bus, and kept what was always theirs. It wasn’t her feet that were tired when Rosa, the field secretary of the NAACP, reclaimed that seat—on the bus and elsewhere. It was hers, and everyone’s before her. Nikki’s poem reminds us of a few things: Rest is a human right, and yes, Black women are strong in innumerable ways, one of which is when they choose rest as resistance.  


“Rosa Parks” further connects modes of transportation through time, non-linearly, resisting the linear flow of news that frequently refuses the past’s life in the present. “And this is / for all the people who said Never Again” remains a call to action. It feels eerily applicable, and even at the time the poem was written (2002), could be a reference to wars on Palestine and Afghanistan, still raging today.


And in our role, as readers and distributors of Nikki Giovanni’s poetry, we can look to the Pullman Porters she writes of. 


“The Pullman Company established its sleeper cars as a unique and luxurious way to travel, complete with the [carefully trained, typically formerly enslaved Black men], hired to be porters. Pullman Porters quickly became a staple of the Pullman Sleeping Car experience, often fighting to maintain a balance between good relations with the Pullman company and protesting for better conditions and wages. Pullman Porters are often attributed to helping create a [B]lack middle class in the United States, with their employees forming the first all-[B]lack union, The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, in 1925.”



The Pullman Porters were the keepers of care and right to protest for their Black passengers. With this in mind, I admire the beckoning of a new manifesto, of sorts, with capitalization of ‘No’ in Nikki’s poem:


“No longer would / there be a reliance on the law; there was a higher law. When Mrs. / Parks brought that light of hers to expose the evil of the system, / the sun came and rested on her shoulders bringing the heat and / the light of truth. Others would follow Mrs. Parks. Four young / men in Greensboro, North Carolina, would also say No.”


“Rosa Parks” is an example of poetry as resistance, and therefore, as a commitment to storytelling in ongoing violence and its ever-unfolding aftermath. It’s a vow to truth-telling. And with that, because no one will ever say it better:


“But it was the / Pullman Porters who safely got Emmett to his granduncle and it / was Mrs. Rosa Parks who could not stand that death. And in not / being able to stand it. She sat back down.”

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