A Novel by Kyle Tran Myhre with Art by Casper Pham
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“I will write. For the whisper of a possibility that it might matter. For the fun of it if it doesn’t.”
—Kyle Tran Myhre
I must confess that I was given this book by friends for my birthday last year, but only just finished it this January. I thought I would tear through it quickly, but after reading only a few pages, I quickly realized that this was no afternoon page skimmer. This was a story that would shatter my mind and make my heart ache as the ink pushed me to question what it means to be human . . . and a writer.
Was I ready for it then? Nope. I set the whispering pages aside and forgot about the book until the start of this new year. I’m so glad I finally sat down with it and breathed in the soul-deep syllables. Now I’m ready to review Not a Lot of Reasons to Sing, But Enough by Kyle Tran Myhre, featuring art by Casper Pham.
The tale is set in a dystopian future on the moon. The human populace—descended from exiled prisoners dumped on lunar soil with their prior memories of Earth stripped away—are now dying of a deadly plague even as their society fractures under tyrannical forces. The format is broken into a series of poems, conversations and correspondence between different characters, each record a prism that shines a different slant on a civilization on the verge of annihilation. Amid this clamor, the journey of two poets (the human Nary and the robot Gyre) spans the pages with both grief and hope.
The poets contend that writing is not just an abstract hobby, but rather a vital way for people to connect on a historical and ancestral level of existence (Tran Myhre 25). As Nary notes of the act of writing poetry, “It’s about how we take all the random stuff swirling around inside of our bodies—the frustration, the fear, the courage, the darkness, the desire—and we translate it into images, into stories, into something we can hold in our hands and give to someone else” (24).
(Spoiler ahead)
Yet despite Nary and Gyre’s best efforts to engage the minds of their lunar listeners, their final fates are left in question for the reader . . . .
In some ways, this story reminds me of another one of my favorite sci-fi tales, the verse novel Aniara by Harry Martinson. The people stuck on the errant spaceship Aniara are doomed, too. It’s also a study of humanity as all options for salvation are winnowed away one by one and we must face ourselves completely alone, at the end.
Who are you then?
Who am I?
When overwhelmed by what needs fixing, or worse, can’t be fixed, what’s the point of creating art in life?
Art, anyway.
Perhaps the point is to simply take another step. As the robot Gyre reminds us, “You do not have to have a map of the entire galaxy to know in which direction to start walking” (156).
Ultimately, Tran Myhre contends, it is through our art that we can truly learn from one another. But we need to keep doing the hard work of showing up, revising, listening, sharing and growing together (157).
At the start of the story, lunar school children are asked to write “I am from” poems. I was struck by the innocent mirror of a young mind reflecting on our planet, Earth:
“I am from a place I’ve never been, although I’d like to go there someday. A whole world floating above us. Maybe there is someone who looks like me looking down at this moon, wondering” (16).
I give this book *ALL THE STARS.* I know I will be re-reading it again, for the rest of my life, as my wrinkles settle deeper and the frayed song of being human only grows keener.
Work Cited:
Tran Myhre, Kyle. Art by Casper Pham. Not A Lot of Reasons to Sing, But Enough. Button Publishing Inc., Minneapolis. 2022.
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