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East Side Solitude is a mixed poetry and prose journal about love, longing, and liminality in the Pacific Northwest. Asyia Gover reveals the mysterious leading characters through a series of vignettes that trace their tragic romance from the Middle East, to the Far East, to the East and West Coasts of the US. These two second-generation Americans navigate the temptations and traps of young adulthood while struggling to stay tender and connected throughout this narrative poetry chapbook. With an introspective and somber tone fitting of Covid-19-era literature, Gover's work walks the reader through vivid motifs of natural elements to explore themes of self-destruction, regret, loyalty, and reverence. These experimental poems and illustrations dazzle the reader's appetite as if they were "simmering curry, flame-licked beef, ... hot shawarma." Gover's vulnerability stands out as a unifying strength of this work, even as she tells the story with tongue in cheek, such as "In those moments, when my lips pressed into your chest, when our left hands connected, or when we linked our breaths, I was casting no spell." Lest her wounded lovers reminisce in a contextual vacuum, Gover's slices of life draw attention to addiction, anti-Blackness, colonialism, and housing insecurity as examples of forces that carve out the characters' destinies. Follow along with this heartfelt collection to find out if the semi-fictional personae in East Side Solitude ever reach reconciliation and justice in the midst of "the obscured otherworld, the / opposite of the train horn, / the ears closed to alarm, / the city subdued with stillness."
