Book Review: Ribald

Gwendal Cottin

Ribald by Alina Stefanescu, Bull City Press Inch #44, 2020

Reviewed by Lannie Stabile

“Your mom can die, but that birder will keep walking down the street, whistling as you piss your pants.”

For such a tiny book, Alina Stefanacu’s Ribald, a micro-collection of essays, demands a lot of unpacking. Let us snap open Grandma’s antique trunk, and what will we find? A handful of gravel, a pocketknife, a stressed horse, a gauntlet and sword, a scream, a cold beer with an old friend. Perhaps.

We begin with a seemingly innocuous story of a balding elderly neighbor, sweat glistening on his smooth head, and we learn it is not a first-time occurrence, this loss (of hair). We’re then led to “Six Gravel Roads,” a series of smoky, gritty paths taken, retaken, and regretted. Paths like a first haircut in the graveyard, sex with a quarterback who wields backhanded compliments, and living too fast, too loud, trying to feel something.

Stefanescu then moves us through a story about claustrophobia and suffocation. Onward to betrayal and shitty best friends. A brief, mournful stop at the difference between good and bad family memories. A swift jab of racism and misogyny. Finally, our conductor lands us safely at an understanding and acceptance, of sorts.

“For a long time, I did not understand what people meant by detailing. When they had something ‘detailed,’ it was often a car, and so I assumed that to detail involved the addition of details.”

Something that is especially delicious about Stefanescu’s collection is how playful she is with language, how incredibly detailed she is. The way “gravel road” exists in the beginning line of each of the half-dozen sections of “Six Gravel Roads.” How she goes from sad streak to color streak to urine streak and back again. Noticing that “Detailed” is the longest, most detailed essay of them all. It’s an understatement to say this collection is clever and cheeky, without coming across as arrogant or heavy-handed. Everything is perfectly threaded together, like a green silk bow tie around a dog’s neck, a bracelet made from the base of an antler, or Grandma’s special cake recipe.