Tarpaulin Sky Reviews & Interviews

Richard Froude’s Fabric reviewed by Megan Burns

noreply@blogger.com (Tarpaulin Sky Reviews) — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 11:31:00 +0000

Richard Froude
Fabric

ISBN 9780982989609
Horse Less Press, 2011
107 pages, paperback
$15.00

Reviewed by Megan Burns

Fragmenting the Book of Memory

Richard Froude’s Fabric is a journey into the making of songs and the weaving of subtle textures that amuse and disorient the reader. Subtitled “A Prelude to the Last American Book,” Froude tests the edges where lyric meets narrative and where structure has the freedom to dance into disarray. The word “prelude” is a loaded starting point as the reader sets off to define this text in relation to an unknown: does prelude in this sense mean as in music, a short piece free in style, or is it a nod to Wordworth’s Preludes, or is the phantom text of the Last American Book truly haunting this book. The answers are probably all of the above as Froude’s technique is quite similar to Susan Howe’s The Birth-Mark, where disparate impressions, images, and histories are brought together to tell a story, and part of the story is how the story makes itself on the page.

What is riveting about Froude’s book is that the reader vicariously enacts the shaping of the story as Froude pulls certain threads until the whole cloth emerges into a tapestry that was previously hidden from view. If the reader was able to anticipate Froude’s map, then the whole gig would be up, but Froude moves the pieces as deftly as a chess player caging the king. Fabric is a book concerned with sequences and patterns, and so the chess metaphor is apt. Froude uses recurring moves to introduce, turn the text, and then turn it again, all the while keeping the reader engaged in this exploration of where language and memory can take us. Froude writes: “Maybe one day everything will be collected in sequence and bound with leather (10).” and later, “Any arrangement can be perceived as a sequence (18).” These lines are clues to the reader to set stake in the words as they are laid out and then repositioned on the page.

Another book that comes to mind reading Froudeis Bernadette Mayer’s Memory; Froude, like Mayer, has an ability to clearly animate the past while remaining cognizant of the layers and gaps. It is in these layers and gaps that Fabric moves beyond storytelling to create a journey into history and memory where we find links and crossovers that truly are mysterious. Many books handle subjects like suicide, death, or loss; Fabric does it by taking the reader into unfamiliar territory and then creating a landscape like a code that the reader can break: “All I want is for the echoes to find their origin…This is my affair with language (35).” The story sets out a sequence, but how we break the code depends on what we hide in our internal translations. Froude links his text to the body: “It is almost impossible to completely remove redundancies from a sequence. They are present even in coded strands of DNA (32).” Froude again here is turning sequences and codes back into the body and into the text and then allowing the reader to interpret and assemble.

If the first two sections, Type and Contexture, can be viewed as a template to reading patterns; then the last two sections, The Dashes and Oceanography, embody this thought. Earlier motifs will be stripped bare while new patterns and codes are under constant construction; it’s a straight drop from the initial dissent into Froude’s dizzying array of connections and correlations. The Dashes is described as a silent movie or a dream, and it vacillates between times describing characters that seem to shed and pick up masks: “In this instance, speaker becomes reader. Her name is Marjorie. God is a little bird (57).” Oceanography is subtitled anti-type, an antithesis to the beginning of the book, but it’s a place where familiar ideas and objects resurface only to morph into other characters or images. “Now I dream of myself as water (105),” Froude states, and like water, nothing is firm or solid. In this last section, Froude allows his text to sit on the page with gaping underlined holes. If Froude is testing the reader, then how will they pick up the pattern, and will it matter what gaps are filled and which are left empty?

Maybe Robert Duncan dreamed of Froude’s text when he said: The exclusive truth that defines any individual order, in what it excludes, may be seen as false to the larger fabric of the universe.1 Froude certainly rises to the challenge of executing this truism on the page manifesting exclusions and inclusions that keep the reader in a constant state of expectant returns. Fabric is a text that is subtle enough to consume in one sitting, but complex enough to engage the reader in a line by line dissection.

* * *

Megan Burns has a MFA from Naropa University and edits the poetry magazine, Solid Quarter. She has been most recently published in Jacket Magazine, Callaloo, New Laurel Review, YAWP Journal, and the Big Bridge New Orleans Anthology. Her poetry and prose reviews have been published in Tarpaulin Sky, Gently Read Lit, Big Bridge, and Rain Taxi. Her book Memorial + Sight Lines was published in 2008 by Lavender Ink. She has two chapbooks, Frida Kahlo: I am the poem (2004) and Framing a Song (2010) from Trembling Pillow Press. She lives in New Orleans where she and her husband, poet Dave Brinks, run the weekly 17 Poets! reading series.

Matthew Henriksen's Ordinary Sun reviewed by Erin Lyndal Martin

noreply@blogger.com (Tarpaulin Sky Reviews) — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 12:02:00 +0000

Matthew Henriksen
Ordinary Sun

ISBN: 978-0-9844752-2-3
Poetry / 120 pp. / pbk.
Black Ocean, 2011
$14.95

Reviewed by Erin Lyndal Martin

One of the most infamous images in Luis Buñuel's iconic film Un Chien Andalou is the scene in which a woman's eye is slit. Immediately, the omniscience of the narrator is shattered, opening the movie up to many interpretations and therefore many authors.

Similarly, Matthew Henriksen's Ordinary Sun opens with the line "An eye is not enough," splintering the reader's point of view before the text is even begun. "What I cannot find in the morning is most myself," concludes the third poem, further asserting the transparency of the narrator; the second line of the following poem reads "where I was beyond repair." Even the book's structure mimics that fragmentation, being comprised of many subtitled sections, including two from Henriksen's previous chapbook, Is Holy (horse less press).

In an interview with HTML Giant, Henriksen reveals that many of the poems were originally in prose and then lineated later, furthering the fractured nature of the book, the poems as once-whole paragraphs obliterated into linebreaks. In the same interview, Henriksen, describing his process, says "Just revise back and forth until no form but a formless certainty makes sense?"

And it does make sense in a book like Ordinary Sun. The anonymity of the narrator isn't a problem here—in fact, it's often an asset, for the images seep easily through the narrator's porous membrane of observation. In "Groves," the quiet self allows for the other images to rise above the din of ego:

The peach trees meant to melt under the sky,
which was the pale phantom of every sky I knew.
I questioned my arrival with the authority of amnesia.
Surely, one before me had scratched questions in the bark.

Here, the amnesiac "I" forgets itself among the melting peach trees and the pale phantoms of skies past. Many reviews have focused on the natural imagery present in Ordinary Sun, but most of the book was written in Brooklyn, according to Henriksen's wife, Katy, who wrote this essay about the Brooklyn pastoral. The Brooklyn pastoral is a concept well-deployed by Matthew Henriksen throughout these poems, wherein the so-called natural and the urban ring out with equal resonance. "Ghost" opens thus:

Heaven must subject itself to the city for
the city to lose function. A throng of sparrows
and one gutter pipe must be all that sing.
The multitudes wilt from their professions and,
thus, professing. Hollyhocks taking in light are merciless.

Here, the gutter pipe and the sparrows alike sing. Hollyhocks surround the city, the multitudes wilting (equating the urban masses with nature). In "Corolla in the Midden," Henriksen writes:

[…]where the world works out
what the world will between
fuel and flesh, as shape
precedes color, the Greek said,
but not on this lawn
without chemicals and rich down
in that city dirt. Each leaf denies
another nightmare in its scent.

Later in the same poem, Henriksen remarks that a snakeskin begins to resemble worm skin beneath a "yellow-amber spent bulb." "I see this kind of shit / often but not more often than I like," he goes on to say, implying that the symbiosis of the artificial and natural are everyday occurrences in the speaker's existence. In this poem, the world works itself out "between / fuel and flesh" and therefore between the technological and the corporeal. "When I don't sleep I can sleep / with crickets or trucks," "Corolla in the Midden" continues. In "Copse," there is a reference to "the helicopter's sigh." Here, Henriksen evokes Auden's sympathetic fallacy of city life in "In Memoriam, William Butler Yeats:"

The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted[…]
But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom,
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.

To center some of Henriksen's antecedents with more precise geography, one also thinks of Whitman's "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry:"

Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt;
Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd;
Just as you are refresh’d by the gladness of the river and the bright flow, I was refresh’d;
Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift current, I stood, yet was hurried;
Just as you look on the numberless masts of ships, and the thick-stem’d pipes of steamboats, I look’d.

The "multitudes" of Henriksen, the "brokers" of Auden, and the "crowd" of Whitman ultimately amount to the same observation of the convergence of the urban and the natural. But Henriksen is more aligned with Whitman, for both poets question the concept of the self among the urban pastoral. Perhaps this is the true query of Henriksen's narrator posited as permeable—when in the urban landscape, one must take in both "natural" and "artificial" images with the same awe among throngs of others who absorb the same images, the same "kind of shit."

* * *

Erin Lyndal Martin is a poet, fiction writer, and music journalist, and is associate fiction editor at H_ngm_n. Her work has recently appeared in Typo, Diagram, and Bust.

Nathalie Stephens's We Press Ourselves Plainly reviewed by J. Mae Barizo

noreply@blogger.com (Tarpaulin Sky Reviews) — Fri, 20 May 2011 10:37:00 +0000

Nathalie Stephens
We Press Ourselves Plainly

ISBN 978-0-9844598-0-3
5" x 7" | 120 pp. | pbk.
Nightboat Books 2010
$14.95

Reviewed by J. Mae Barizo

“I should like,” the narrator declares in We Press Ourselves Plainly “for my own name made illegible…” Indeed, we never learn the identity of the devastating speaker whose body and mind is the landscape on which violence unfolds. It is not a pleasant voice nor is it necessarily appealing, yet it enthralls in its immediacy, a distinctive intonation which begs the reader to devour it in its singular attempt to articulate the tragedy of history.

A 97-page book-length poem in the form of continuous blocks of text separated only by ellipses, Stephens endeavors neither to elucidate the source of violence nor to expose a chronological representation, therefore the fragments—some of which are complete sentences and others only partial slivers thereof—have the aesthetic of immutability and timelessness, a voice existing in the present moment yet also in the dredges of the past. “There is a room and there is a war” the speaker declares, yet the poem exists also outside of a room and concurrently in various locations: Berry Head (a coastal headland in the English Riviera), Paris, Hyde Park, Fallujah and Donostia (the Basque region of Spain). Perhaps there has been a war or there will be one. “The wars become one war” and “The wars are indistinguishable” Stephens writes, adding to the atemporality of the poem and the omnipresence of violence. The book opens with a quote by Franz Kafka: “Everyone carries a room about inside him.” which further puts forward that the location is the body itself which bears the carnage. The post-script furthers this idea of the body as an object of compression and cruelty, stating that one of “the active functions of this work is compression...of all the possible spaces pressed into that body, upon which the pressures of historical violence and its attendant catastrophes come to bear.”

This notion of compression, most prominently set forth in the book’s title, stems from the root of the word press, which harks from the early thirteenth century Old French noun presse which means “crowd, multitude.” The verb form also dates from the same century: preser, “push against”. Though Stephen’s book is titled “We Press Ourselves Plainly” (italics mine) the speaker in the book is a very convincing “I”; seldom does the “we” come into view, yet the overall sensation one derives from reading is a collective sense of calamity, as if the voice is representative for a multitude or nation, even if the experiences cited sound at once both ubiquitous and painfully intimate. “There was one country in particular…It became the particularity of every country...” Stephens writes. In other sections the voice seems to shuttle back and forth between a collective and the sentiments of a lover: “The bodies that fall unheld into the next day…I would like to kiss you…The field of vision narrows with the century…We stand on one side or another of the century”.

Notably, when the “we” comes to the forefront it is often in this context of being on one side or another. “We stand on one side or other of the glass”, “We stand each on one side or other of the crossing line”, “We stand each on one side or other of the monument and it is the same monument.” This motive repeats itself with the “we” being on one side or the other of violence (p.47), a door (p. 55), skin (p. 75), name (p. 81). The last time this motif appears is on p. 87, but the object is modified in the latter half of the sentence: “We stand each on one side or other of a pleasure and it is the same pressure” (italics mine). Here the word pressure takes on an agreeable, if not sexual connotation. This “being on one side or the other” subtly presents a type of political counterbalance which seems to be at threat throughout the entire text. The “We” seems to refer to a group of people on different but not necessarily opposing sides. Other times the “we” becomes the pronoun signaling a sexual relationship or perhaps the bond of two individuals forced into close confinement. “We slept in a single bed” (p. 11) or “We are naked for the moment…I grant you this one torment” (p. 15) and “We bear..Bury…Heart spilling blood into the weakened parts…Vomit it into me..” (p. 39).

This dichotomy between singularity and plurality, while rampant in Stephens’ book, neither weakens or undermines the integrity of the speaker, though rectitude seems to be the least of his/her concerns. Rather this contrariety points to the existential dilemma of identity and the self. “A book is less the appearance of a self than the disappearance, a grievance against self,” Stephens wrote in her 2007 book “The Sorrow and the Fast of It.” The brokenness of the language in “We Press Ourselves Plainly” insinuates a further fragmentation of the self:

…All the buried things arise…The rivers with the bodies of everyone…Each save the first one…It crawls over me…There was one language and this was the son…I refuse the offerings…There are flowers in a vase…I throw them down…We wake and are watchful…The bodies accrue and we name them…Small rashes that spread over the skins…Our languages become enlarged with the grief…

The body, in Stephen’s book, is continuously beaten, cut out or scourged by mysterious malaise like the “small rashes” in the above excerpt. Not only that, but the speaker is perpetually vomiting, as if in an attempt to purge itself of the trauma it has been subjected to. What happens to a speaker which is surrounded and inflicted with excruciating emotional and physical torture? The result for the reader is an erasure of the speaker and the self, so that the excess of remembrance that the speaker endures becomes a longing for blank space, an insistent forgetting or “a compression layered of other moments just like it.” (p. 23)

…Shorn and emaciated…I forget all of it…The disordered remembrances…There is knocking…It comes from inside…A strangulation…The tripes pulled up into the ribcage…A thick elastic band…Not breathing…

Stephens has been compared, and understandable so, with Jean Genet and Hélène Cixous, yet for me Stephens manipulation of language and form is heir to a long tradition of French (though Stephens is French-Canadian) poetic innovation that goes back to Francois Villon and makes itself manifest in contemporary writers such as Edmond Jabès and Claude Royet-Journoud. The form of “We Press Ourselves Plainly”, simultaneously litany and lament, brings to mind Alice Notley’s “The Descent of Alette” in its aesthetic and also its use of punctuation (Notley used quotation marks to separate fragments in much the same way as Stephens utilizes the ellipses). For me, however, the most obvious predecessor of the form that Stephens has chosen is the short dramatic monologue “Not I” by Samuel Beckett which features the same block text separated by ellipsis. “Not I” explores the emotional upheaval experienced by a woman after an unspecified traumatic event. In the performance of “Not I” a black space is illuminated only by a bright light focused on a human mouth, which utters in a frenetic tempo a logorrhea of angst-ridden sentences and sentence fragments, quite in the vein of an audible inner scream. This inner scream is what Stephens has articulated so skillfully.

* * *

J. Mae Barizo has reviewed for Sink Review, Matrix Magazine, Coldfront, and H_NGM_N.

Shira Dentz’s black seeds on a white dish reviewed by Jenny Gropp Hess

noreply@blogger.com (Tarpaulin Sky Reviews) — Fri, 20 May 2011 10:23:00 +0000

Shira Dentz
black seeds on a white dish

Shearsman Books, 2010
ISBN: 1848611285
6"x9" | 90 pp | pbk. | $15

Reviewed by by Jenny Gropp Hess

Like most of us who reach a certain age, I’ve been close to people who have died. I’ve woken up in the night feeling as though an aneurism of grief has burst in my body and not known how to feel or write further into the sensation, though I understood it was comprised of many things: absence as the result of loss, the feeling of my own mortality, the sense that I could never, ever see that person again, and etcetera. But what to do with that ‘etcetera,’ I always wonder as my blood stills. Is that aneurism a body of its own, something I might slow and freeze-frame with the goal of finding a more understandable fact or, to quote Emerson in “Language,” “the terminus or circumference of the invisible world”?

Shira Dentz’s first full-length collection, black seeds on a white dish, allows me to witness, via a powerful, emotional command of word play and imagery, the slowing of the grief-aneurism. In writing about the death of her brother, Asher, and allowing the language-veins of that event to extend into the larger body of her life, Dentz leads us from loss to the beyond of loss, which is also, she reveals, the beyond of the imagination. Take, for example, “The Wind of Madness Has Broken a Skin”:

Something at the edge of danger
Turns into its opposite, and circles:

Frigid wind, now blue flame,
Curls a rind out of the night’s air.
Black space a springy trampoline.

The void is unusually still, like a lake
With nothing pulling on it.

Mania’s headdress
Is a thin, lilac gauze.
The back of her toes (as well as the cracks between)
Are wiggling ligatures disassembling.

Whirlwind upon whirwind upon whilwind,
A petal falls off the black-mum sky.

“Something” with unfixable qualities is rapidly approaching, but it isn’t abstract in its changing; it rolls threateningly from wind to flame, finally shirking a semblance of wholeness by becoming a rind. Here Dentz is slowing her emotional sensation, seeing it, aware and in control on the trampoline of black space. Then the sensation moves forward out of its unusual void, to recode the ‘something’—once the threat of her own grief—as her own creative and emotive ‘mania.’ Pushing through the void, she finds herself wielding only language to walk us vividly to the limit of the image she can’t fully form. Inspired by doubt and vagueness, Dentz’s manic body is one that dissembles and counters the soundness of its physical unity; it is a body that both produces verse and recoils from it: “Whirlwind upon whirwind upon whilwind”—two nonexistent winds spin out of a real one. And as language comes apart, the funereal mum begins to come apart as well, leading to a mutation of Mania’s body:

Mania’s many heads wheel around.
A spider sticks to her mind. Not something she knows.
She’s only hanging the receiver from the pay phone on the windiest hill.

As Dentz’s identity simultaneously collapses and reassembles into an uncomfortable and undeniable many-headed oneness, we witness her torrid relationship with language yet again, her mania driving her further and further away from the human form. In That This, Susan Howe writes: “Somewhere I read that relations between sounds and objects, feelings and thoughts, develop by association; language attaches to and develops its referent without destroying or changing it—the way a cobweb catches a fly.”(13) But Dentz’s associations, in this otherworldly poem-place where there is no clear visual referent, are different. If the poet’s mind is a cobweb (which it is indeed in the poem “Numbness and shade”), it’s not catching a fly for sustenance; instead it’s got a spider—which ostensibly has the ability to spin the web—stuck to it. Thus we have the poet trapped in her own web (language) in the process of developing its “referent.” In this world, the poet threatens to feast on herself. Yet this risk is an image-giving one: Mania had a body for a moment, and the whole sky was the flower of death. We’re shown not only the grieving, craving mind’s body but also, via language, its universe; we’re able to inhabit the poem’s landscape. Then the speaker awakens and we realize the whole poem was a dream:

The day after is colorless as Antarctica. Trees static at forty-five degrees.
Just before sunset, the landscape straightens.

The pink that rubbed off my bedspread onto my pants
Has rubbed off on a cloud.
Chinese sounds are snow shovels.
French vowels, water sullied the color of cheap topaz.

Toward the end of the book, in the poem “Here,” Dentz reaffirms that this imagistic universe, one of dream and reality, resides all in herself: “My own thoughts, thumping in me like a heart.” But Dentz plays a humble god, giving language its dues in “The Importance of Being Earnest.” The pink that “rubbed off on a cloud” reappears:

When verbs first rose to leave, it was for periods. I had no idea the
          matter was a part of speech when
arms could be tables; the crest of a wave, gooey.
To begin with, they didn’t just fly off;          no,

they were a flutter of birds.
Gradually there was no distance between shade of periods, and the
          stolid period itself.
Their lapses spread to clauses, picking entire sentences clean like
          leaves from trees; dry looks hairy
against a background of pink winter sky
Every vista brought on a question.
Imagine being a kid in a playground and the sky between everything.

Dentz owes her sky to language, “the sky between everything,” yet later in the poem she recognizes the conundrum and risk of language play, writing: “A letter like the sky seems to stop being a thing once it’s no longer / blue.” Again the “black-mum sky” dissembles before us; Dentz’s explorations lead us into worlds hopelessly estranged from our own world, the world in which her brother died. Her poems ask us to question the act of eulogizing: If we can’t recreate the world with language, how can we properly eulogize a body that’s passed into it? Dentz recognizes this difficulty, and thus she pays homage to language, to the fragile yet potent world of the image.

Indeed, the book contains five sections, each seeming to work more and more towards Dentz’s creation, for the reader, of her world of language, of her use of that world as therapeutic and, perhaps, less and less futile. In the fifth and final section, in “Cornucopia,” the sky takes on a more composite feel in terms of authorship:

This morning on the subway
I was trying to twist my life
to fit me, a delicate activity.
I saw the Tree

in the Garden of Chaos.
Then, my small brother’s old ghost and I,
swinging high in its branches, the sky a book,
and my feet turning its pages to the blanks after the end.

So the end result is a craft, separate from Dentz. Yet she’s not talking about twisting a poem—she’s talking about twisting life. Representation twists life, and this can be either a beautiful or marred thing; at the moment, Dentz is unsure whether or not she will honestly succeed. “Autobiography,” from the book’s fourth section, also speaks to this notion:

I want to say my life has
been a pipecleaner, beautifully twisted,
in tandem with others like it.

Or, not beautiful, a known-by-name shape;
nothing to do but let the form of things take over.

Of desire, Maurice Blanchot says: “Desire: let everything be more than everything, and still be all.” Dentz, in “Like the signature of a bald tree stump,” follows suite in her own way: “…white text sinks into water / .sduolc eht htiw derhs I // Desire like the wind out back that rustles the leaves. / I’d rather play with a ghost than all alone.” Dentz writes the ghost into the landscape and the landscape becomes her reflection; the ghost becomes old, aging solely with her and finding a stillness only in the poem. This is not an easy process, this 90+ page mixing of the specter with the real, this attempted expansion of the perceivable. One can feel Dentz struggling with the potential of her imagery as she writes lines like the following: “Fear I’m of a species that opens over and over, withering before it blossoms.” Her project is to persevere in poetic form, and even the titles of her poems give this struggle away: “Chantilly Lace,” “Origami,” “Celerity,” “Babble.” The result: still lives of energy, “black seeds on a white dish.”

* * *

Jenny Gropp Hess lives in Tuscaloosa, in case you ever want to find her. Her writing resides in or is forthcoming in Colorado Review, Seneca Review, Unsaid, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, American Letters & Commentary, Parcel, PANK, The Hat, and others. She attends the University of Alabama, where she recently finished a stint as editor of Black Warrior Review.

Jennifer L. Knox's The Mystery of the Hidden Driveway reviewed by Kat Good-Schiff

noreply@blogger.com (Tarpaulin Sky Reviews) — Tue, 17 May 2011 14:12:00 +0000

[Best poetry book cover in 2010? --Eds.]

Jennifer L. Knox
The Mystery of the Hidden Driveway

Bloof Books, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-9826587-1-0
84 pp. | $15.00

Reviewed by Kat Good-Schiff

As should be expected, much is strange and unnatural in The Mystery of the Hidden Driveway, the third book of poems by Jennifer L. Knox. Murderers, opera singers, and coyotes rub shoulders across the varied, yet equally wild, psychic terrains of desert, suburbia, and silent movies. In the poem “Cars,” we coast downhill with the speaker and her father at night in a quietly hurtling truck, unseen animals lurking just beyond the headlights. Many of these poems have a similarly ominous and thrilling momentum. Like a freeway accident, it’s impossible not to stare at the narrator of “The Clean Underwear/Ambulance Thing,” who declares, “When I was 12, I had sex with my / stepmother. It was fantastic, / and not a bit weird.”

Many of the poems contain elements of good fiction: suspense, catharsis, and memorable characters that are at once unlikely and unquestionable. The emotional range of the book is dizzying. One of the more reflective, less narrative poems, “The Cliffs above Oswald,” explores a psychological landscape of “waist-high bramble / … the thorn sea that has / swallowed us” and “seems to seal up / behind us as we struggle by.” In contrast, the preceding poem, “You’re F*cking Crazy,” is the extreme opposite of such gentle witness and features these rock-star opening lines:

I found him in the backyard at midnight
wearing a foam rubber sun costume—no tights
or underwear on—one ball hanging out the leghole
like a jawbreaker in a baby sock.

These poems burn like road rash and are tenacious as gravel under the skin. The book combines the transgressive dramatic monologues and fantastical narrative poems for which Knox is best known with some unabashed memoir, and the interplay of fiction and nonfiction works well. The honesty of the memoir lends the fiction a deeper quality, and the outrageousness of the fiction increases the surreal quality of the nonfiction since both have been crafted by the same brave imagination.

In a 2008 interview in Bookslut, Knox said, “I’m interested in people who do and say stupid, insane or compulsive things, and finding respect for them despite that. I’m not interested in pointing out how wrong people are … it’s way too easy—like watching Cops.” In several of Driveway’s more difficult poems, she musters an impressive amount of empathy for unsavory characters, often writing in the voice of a male persona who has committed a violent crime. In “Saving Her Wasted Breath,” the narrator drives the getaway car while wearing “a new white suit (pulled the tags / off with my teeth),” and his accomplice rides in the trunk:

Mongoloid Todd’s a tougher fit—the gate was locked
at Len’s Big and Tall, so I threw his blood-soaked duds off
the pier and he climbed in the trunk bare-ass—been there
two hours. When I gas up, I’ll cop us both T-shirts and shorts.

Visceral and vivid, the third-person narrative poems are even more compelling given the incredible names and situations Knox has come up with. In “Sling and Moley,” the title characters find endless riches at the beach after Sling inhales the sea, leaving “[p]earls, / plastic, and cans … on the sand space / where ocean used to be.” Mike and Lou (“Nice ‘N Easy Medium Natural Ash Brunette”) attend “a Grow Your Own Cocaine class at the Y” before they “make love like animals, for hours, as some / wildly expensive thing in the oven burned.” Like all good fantasy, these poem-stories are ridiculous yet emotionally true and therefore entirely plausible.

The prose poem sequence “Cars” is a coming of age story set in a suburb on the edge of a desert as one car after another, along with too much alcohol and drugs, bring about a string of near-death experience for the teenaged narrator. The cars become stand-ins for the miraculously resilient self:

I blew a tire coming home from a Dead show in L.A., but because I was tripping I kept on driving … The car drove off the cliff, turned in the air, and landed 30 feet below… I ended up in a ball behind the passenger seat with nothing but a tiny scratch on my hip. Oh, how I mourned those shoplifted pants the EMTs cut off me.

The girl’s father is equally unpredictable:

I could never predict when he would get angry. But since his happiness was rarer, maybe I should say I could never predict when he would be happy.

Ultimately she believes the circumstances were skewed against her: “Every car he gave me to drive … ‘malfunctioned’ in a major way.” As father becomes car and daughter becomes driver, they hurtle down the road and she fights for both control and understanding: “ ‘Don’t tell your mother,’ he’d say. ‘Why?’ ‘Because this is fairly dangerous.’ ”

So much struggle, danger, and mess transpire in these poems that it is fitting for the most tender of them, placed near the end of the collection, to put forth the act of shoveling dirt as a demonstration of affection. “Love Poem: One Ton of Dirt” is a story of horticultural triumph over a barren city lot. It portrays incautious joy (“we are badass with shoulders sore, lower backs no / doubt rainbows of pain on the morrow”) and hard-earned hope that “this’ll be the Mother / of all happy endings.” Such love is gritty and delicious.

With so much driving in these poems, one can imagine the “hidden driveway” of the book’s title as an image of home that, in the askew world of this book, might seem the stuff of legend. Many of the poems’ characters seem doomed never to find it, yet the book’s arc is hopeful. Lest we get too comfortable, it is equal parts cozy dream and accident waiting to happen.

* * *

Kat Good-Schiff is the author of two chapbooks, Curl (a finalist for the Robin Becker Chapbook Prize) and East of North, and her work has been published in various journals including Eclipse, PANK, and Twelve Stories. She lives in western Massachusetts.

D.J. Dolack’s 12 Poems reviewed by Raina Lauren Fields

noreply@blogger.com (Tarpaulin Sky Reviews) — Tue, 17 May 2011 13:18:00 +0000

D.J. Dolack, 12 Poems

D.J. Dolack
12 Poems
Eye For An Iris Press, 2010
6.5×5.5, 28pp., handbound

Reviewed by Raina Lauren Fields

I think I picked the perfect day to read D.J. Dolack’s chapbook, 12 Poems, a collection of handmade: hand-stamped, hand-stapled, hand-folded, and hand-pressed poems, the first collection from Dolack since 2005’s The Sad Meal. I read the book during a rainy afternoon in early March—the rain tapping lightly against the windows, water funneling down the drain pipes and out in the puddles in the alleyway, a slow, continued flow of weather. Perhaps a better time to read Dolack’s poetry would have been in the evening or at dawn, when I imagine most of his poems are set, under the “low shelf haze” (I THOUGHT WE DISCUSSED THIS ALREADY).

If calling Dolack’s poems romantic is an insult in current American poetry, then I apologize in advance. They are romantic and quiet, but full of energy like bursts of “sick confetti” (RIGHT NOW: / FEELS LIKE:) They are sexy. That is, if you’re into unanswered voicemails (I THOUGHT WE DISCUSSED THIS ALREADY), silken letters (NYC POSTCARDS (FROM UNION HALL)), and “years of dog-eared pages on the shelves” (WHAT THEY WANT ME TO TELL YOU). There are poems when the general caresses of love becomes specific—where things enter a sort of slow-pan, zoom, and pause:

“The way you use only one ear for the phone.

A canned scene amidst the laughter.”
(ELEGY FOR POETRY’S EFFIGY; ENTROPY)

There is an overwhelming sense of intimacy in the poetry. Light plays an important role in almost every poem. These poems are filled with low light and whispers, stolen speech in bedrooms and bar rooms:

…a low

yellow moon outside
sipping back the sky.
(ELEGY FOR POETRY’S EFFIGY; ENTROPY),

…the bar room light dims
and walls come over us…
(SELF-PORTRAIT WITH INTERIOR MONOLOGUE),

“Like the curtain letting in
a thick little light,

close though not yet a halo.
(HOW A YEAR IS BORN).

In the first section of the book, light is never fully present, often clouded by something—the sky, the walls. Perhaps it is because “The light is one obscene gesture” (NYC POSTCARDS (FROM UNION HALL)), and its presence must be thwarted.

And in the same way that light is important, so is naming, or the role of names. But what is the point of naming, especially to an unnamed speaker? Is it to make what is unknown, known? To make what is unreal or imagined, real? To make what is foreign and distant, yours? Is it to foster a kind of ownership? For Dolack, discussing naming seems to create a closeness, but simultaneously helps him to understand an absence, an acute emptiness, to identify:

The light is one
obscene gesture:

people who don’t
look like their names.
(NYC POSTCARDS (FROM UNION HALL)),

The sky above all things reaches

and comes in
on a pattern of light

no less trusting than dusk
dusting our legs, saying a name

in spite of names.
(RIGHT NOW: / FEELS LIKE:),

and “There’s a nickname up against the pillowcase…” (HOW A YEAR IS BORN).

In the second section of the chapbook, which includes the poem, “WHAT THEY WANT ME TO TELL YOU,” those things that were hinted at—light, love, epiphany, understanding, are acted upon. These actions move from the previous whispers, are announced in litany, “I love you”—even once declaring:

You might say I love you, for Christ sake –

I love you out through the back window
down the fire escape

to the neighbor’s yard,

I love you
how the elderly love bakeries –

in the way they say cake.

For Dolack this is the equivalent of fireworks or skywriting, “I love you this much” in the afternoon sky. Now, the rooms are no longer shadowed, but filled “with so much light.” While this is true, the reader is still left in the clutches of generality. That is, left without a specific idea of the relationship or role of those within the poems. It seems as if Dolack is purposely subverting the reader’s expectations of getting to know these people or the situations that are presented within, which is why the final verses of the poem would somewhere that seems unexpected:

Something is not right when the clouds are like this
and everything is clear.

Night is coming in,

Or you are moving towards it.

Sugar granules
under your bare feet, roman candles

in the distance become.

I applaud Dolack for not ending in the easy space of optimism. There is something ominous, something real. And there’s something funny about much of this poetry, isn’t there?

I love you
how the elderly love bakeries –

in the way they say cake.
(WHAT THEY WANT ME TO TELL YOU)

Or perhaps, it’s the way “people mark … their lives by epiphanies.” Or perhaps it’s the fact that life is “one of those things that could go on and on.” Perhaps it, too, is a thing we writers are all “condemned to describe” (NYC POSTCARDS). The way things really are.

* * *

Raina Lauren Fields is currently enrolled in the MFA program in Creative Writing at Virginia Tech. She has published poetry in Callaloo, Gargoyle, PANK, Diverse Voices Quarterly, 5x5, San Pedro River Review, Breadcrumb Scabs, and other literary journals. She has also published a poetry review in Rattle and is a current editor of Toad and previous General Editor of Creative Writing for The Minnesota Review.

Lucy Ives's Anamnesis reviewed by Broc Rossell

noreply@blogger.com (Tarpaulin Sky Reviews) — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 19:00:00 +0000

Lucy Ives
Anamnesis
Slope Editions, 2009
ISBN 9780977769841
Pbk., 83 pp.

Reviewed by Broc Rossell

Anamnesis and The Harmonograph

In an essay written to accompany his recent exhibit at the Reykjavik Art Museum, regarding the relationship between a viewer and a procedural object (such as the waterfalls he built beneath New York City's bridges last year), Olafur Eliasson remarks that one alternative to the ageing Euclidian conception of space is waves. Waves, argues Eliasson, are a more helpful concept for understanding how an individual in all her complexity responds to and interacts with a work of art which itself is responding to and interacting with nature. "These can be waves of information, but also the communication of information through physical waves such as microwaves, long waves and frequency. Electricity is a kind of wave, as are my words, when they leave my mouth as condensed air, spreading radiantly, entering your ears. Also light."¹

Lucy Ives' debut collection of poetry, Anamnesis, is a procedural object, a work of art that seeks to render visible the waves of thought, perception, and revision that, together, comprise the written poem. These waves are amplified by the book's constraint; in her introduction to the Slope Prize winning collection, judge Maxine Chernoff notes that the poems "are in a constant state of revision, engendered by two refrains, the imperative 'Write' and its counter-gesture, 'Cross this out.'" These gestures contrast the third imperative, that of the speaker, the voice that is neither written nor crossed out. The effect is that multiple intentions or voices appear on the same page:

Write, "What you fear is near you"
Cross this out
Write, "What you fear is faraway"
Beautifully so
Yes, also, it is hidden
Write, "And never came near, this long decade"
Cross this out

These multiple imperatives insist that the reader participate in the process of "writing" "the poem," so that the final version of the poem is not on the page of a book, but something implied or imagined: not only the dialogue you and the speaker have imagined for each other, but what you, the reader, have read, written, and erased. The act of "reading" Ives' book leads the reader to perform an oscillation both through the text and above it, creating a relationship analogous to the three-dimensional images traced by the pendulums of a harmonograph.

While Oulipo was founded fifty years ago (I can't help but think of Marcel Benabou's Why I Have Not Written Any Of My Books when reading Anamnesis), and conceptual art has been an institution of the visual arts for more than forty years, it has only recently entered into the bloodstream of American poetry. Noah Eli Gordon's Inbox comes to mind as a rare example of a collection wholly dedicated to its concept, and of course there are the fine adventurers at Coach House Press and beyond to the north. More typically, American experimental poets have used "concept" as a generative constraint: Gillian Conoley's Plot Genie, for instance, employs a found "plot generating device" to both propel poems away from and return into each other into a kind of carnivalesque; and poetic variations, themed long poems, or poem sequences on a variation of one, are becoming ubiquitous. Perhaps the most likely comparison is of Anamnesis to Dan Beachy-Quick's This Nest, Swift Passerine. Both collections attempt a kind of extreme presence, a urgent drive to expose the very impulse to write, and do so though similar tropes (though Beachy-Quick, not striving to engage the reader to the truly radical degree Ives is, strikes out lines for us). Anamnesis, however, resists comparison. Its fusion of the modes of the utterance and address is unique.

The simple concept Ives has chosen for her collection of poems is ingenious. Anamnesis belongs not among stacks of experimental poetry, but with the ambitions of conceptual visual artists who sought to replace the object with the assumptions and intentions behind it: Rauchenberg's erasures of de Kooning or Ceci n'est pas une pipe are closer to the kind of infinite aesthetics of Anamnesis than those of contemporary poetry. Ives has replaced the book with the act of reading and response. The book does not become the book, does not become itself, until we engage with it. For the elegance of its iteration alone, it merits our attention.

And yet there are also beautiful and evocative lyrical turns, which we are not instructed to write or cross out, moments that exist independent of the reader, apart from our experience, and thus rendered powerfully vulnerable and delicate:

I had forgotten I was in love
It took a longer time to be remembered
Elsewhere
In the world
All this is just writing about what has been lost
By a person who wanted no things
About whom nothing is known save
What remains published

It is as if while walking through one of Eliasson's glowing, mirrored hallways, we were to find someone's pocketbook: a trace of a person left behind, a license and some snapshots, an small inventory of abandoned memories.

"Anamnesis" is one of those richly evocative words whose multiple meanings make it greater than the sum of its parts. The term in ancient Greek, ἀνάμνησις, translates literally as the "loss of forgetfulness." Socrates used it to describe his theory wherein all the knowledge of the universe is contained within our souls and lost in the shock of childbirth; accordingly, we spend our lives attempting to regain the perfect knowledge we have lost. And, somehow, in modern medicine the term is used to describe a strong immune response. Together these definitions suggest a hope of the author that reading this book, and engaging with it in the way it offers, one might find a new vitality, an awakening of the spirit in the rediscovery of the memories that make us who we are. That the speaker writes phrases and memories that cannot be revised, that do not invite revision, only heightens the contrast of the vast majority of memories that are constantly undermined by recollection itself.

It makes sense that formal innovation and experimentation became American poetry's preoccupation in the twentieth century, after thousands of years of rhapsodizing on love, death, God, nature, and consciousness. From Pound's fiery Cantos to Steven's orbital meditations to Objectivist breaths into Ashbury's constant digressions, our poetic tradition of the past hundred years has largely been concerned with language's ability to represent what the mind cannot render without it – with how far language can take us into the outer reaches of understanding.

But in being more concerned with form and formal innovation than content (that fraught and perilous word) today's golden age of "experimental" poetry also finds itself troubled by a pervasive lack of tone, and of voice. Ives has found one answer to this problem in conceptualism, which escapes many longstanding issues of form and formalism by acting within constraints. Remarkably, in writing within a constraint that speaks directly to the act of writing and (more essentially) of revision, she has also found a mode of enormous lyrical amplitude, a mode both highly mannered and profoundly intimate. In its ability to invest the intellectual beauty of conceptual art with the ethos of a shared, communal intimacy, Anamnesis is an act of alchemy.

_______________________
1 Eliasson, Olafur. “Your Engagement has Consequences.”In Experiment Marathon: Serpentine Gallery. Edited by Emma Ridgway. Reykjavik: Reykjavik Art Museum, 2009: 18-21.

* * *

Broc Rossell is a writer from California. He earned his MFA from the University of Iowa and is a doctoral candidate at the University of Denver. His poems have appeared in Boston Review, Harvard Review, Volt, and elsewhere

K. Lorraine Graham's Terminal Humming reviewed by Joe Atkins

noreply@blogger.com (Tarpaulin Sky Reviews) — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 17:27:00 +0000

K. Lorraine Graham
Terminal Humming
Edge Books, 2009
ISBN: 9781890311315
Paperback
$16

Reviewed by Joe Atkins

There’s many ways to describe the poems of K. Lorraine Graham’s Terminal Humming—Gurlesque, flarf, procedural, postmodern—and likely most of them would fit in some fashion, accommodating a singular aspect of the wide range of voices, sources, and techniques within this particular appropriation of language, this particular poetics. Yet, within the pages of this compelling volume, the visions of circulation, connective tissues gone awry, there’s a sense that semantics have shifted into a collage of relativism, and what a wondrous multitude, that. Which is not to say there isn’t an underlying truth here, however elusive this truth may be, but that as the language slides from one amazing line to another, one moment to the next, the real substance is actually contained in this entertaining, leaping action.

In the fist section of the three larger poems, “If This Isn’t An Interview I Don’t Know What to Say,” the poems are quick bursts of broken thoughts. These small stanzaic moments, either titled by single lines or summarily-accented, render a fleeting autonomy before juxtaposing the next stanzaic body below. The overt presence of the tilde in between stanzas facilitates this circuit movement—the tilde indicating equivalency or similarity between two values in mathematics.

The Way We Boil

Living motion any place is some
where else to be written in, a fundraising
fax blow-job, a particular strand of un
interrupted programmatic policy making room
for messing around on the copy machine
in lieu of driving to the park in snow to
hold someone else’s mittens in the
middle of the day on a Tuesday.

~

Culture collection Staff Meeting

Academic lab possession obstacle transfer
q.p.q. dangerous radical NAM germ
commerce. Compliance control attempts
to harmonize sensitive confidence and
flesh. Devil in the undercut. Report uniform
dual use denial, radical party agents subject
to aligned malevolent non-elements. (36)

And the next, and final poem of the section:

Nuclear Socialism Staff Meeting

Fortunately there is, embedded in a forest,
not a bomb but a peaceful nuclear device. Driving recognition
in a cycle background of soft mining
paths to obviate risk. Embarking partition.

~

Ops Mounting Dialogue Staff Meeting

Ideas suited to the life
of themselves. The announcement
of position or potential position.
Where would the literal be if
I didn’t love? And might the
physical being in-place as desk
or bed or laundry room (monitor
glow in cheek) change if building
alternative families was not possible
without always an excuse for forgiving? (37)

There’s a conscious critique here of material—call it the real, call it things. This critique moves from the business world of a sexualized office setting, displaced through telecommuting, faxes of genitalia that exist prior to the plethora of online pornography, both of which co-opt the physical intimacy of actually touching another human being, subverting all of the snow-storm obstacles that real people actually face, with intimacy-tech. This thought is brought round to poetic concerns in the second poem, “Ideas suited to the life / of themselves.” In the distance we hear “No ideas but in things,” now come full circle; those things contain our ideas, now ever more difficult to access, shipped across the world for consumption: no ideas but in endless exchange. “And might the physical being in-place as desk / or bed or laundry room…” The breaking apart of the physical is also the Eros of technology—or specifically the rapid advancement of capitalism:

~

Automatic shredder joy.

~

At least headhunters understand pain. If it doesn’t blow up, I’m not
going to write about it. (17)

The tilde, persistent throughout this collection, is a metonymic device, relational proximity serves as our means of movement, of exchange. All values are equivalent, flat, superficial, slipping into one another. Fits of convulsions, then stillness; an erratic and rhythmic field. Technological innovations which rip apart whole documents, coincide with xenophobic online dialogues and neoliberal bureaucratic middle men connecting labor with employers, shaving a bit off the top of each neatly placed hourly wage—class tension slowly coming to a boil, “The subject of an essay on scrounging”(24). Ultimately we’re left with an intense hub of things colliding, a murmur which is unceasing despite the announcements of destinations and arrivals, allusions and sources, information flowing in and out. This is the terminal humming as noise, and what it signifies is a long path where the humming becomes a terminal symptom of the forces which bring so much confusion, fear, abstract hope, and monotony. Graham treats us to the sweet subjective torment of Io in the digital age (goodbye Argus Panoptes, viral times call for viral measures), “I’m a lily-white fuck toy of the patriarchy:”(69). And she poses a direct, darkly entertaining image of a contemporary kettle primed to scream, “Language / as angry form”(79).

* * *

Samuel Amadon's Like A Sea reviewed by Joe Atkins

noreply@blogger.com (Tarpaulin Sky Reviews) — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 17:00:00 +0000

Samuel Amadon
Like A Sea
Iowa Poetry Prize Series
University of Iowa Press, 2010
6"x8.5", 100 pp., pbk

Reviewed by Joe Atkins

To get an idea of what a non-flarf, non-conceptual version of appropriation looks like, one need go no further than Samuel Amadon’s Like A Sea. The collection has a wide range of samplings sprinkled across the lines, and, since we’re such big fans of the list, here they are in all their illumination: J.D. Salinger, Pound, Walter Benjamin, Jane Kenyon, Robert Lowell, Eugenio Montale, Joris-Karl Huysmans, EA Robinson, Primo Levi, Beckett, Jackson Mac Low’s diastic reading process, Eugene O’Neil, Berryman, an appropriation of Olson appropriating Norbert Wiener, and last but not least Wikipedia. More than just a recounting of the notes, the above list provides the what of the book, it’s primary apparatus.

Effectively remixing provides the answer to how one poet might engage and simultaneously acknowledge the ghosts of those writers, thinkers, poets before her/him. As such, this recycling of language is a viable option that presents a curious set of constraints and possibilities. While the disparity between some of these figures, Mac Low vs. Lowell, Huysmans vs. Benjamin, among others we do not have the time to untangle seems antagonistic at best, there are a few similarites. Though most, but not all, of these figures converge in a single poem, “Nine At Nine,” we would point out three connections: the conflict of religion and modernism, the idyllic form of nature vs. that of the city, and the authors’ use of procedural writing. In the two former connections we find a correlation between these writers and the recursive subject of Hartford, Connecticut which Amadon narrows in upon; in the latter the larger process of Like A Sea finds a historical precedent.

The appearance of Hartford and its multiplicities is represented through the cyclical forms of the poems titled “Each H,” each numbered in its appearance. These poems are taken from Amadon’s chapbook Each H, and between them sit similarly styled works that depend on shifters and syntactical structures to up-end normative grammatical order so that new potential meanings might emerge from the abandoned forms, like so many rebuilt cities. In this fashion Amadon remixes even himself:

EACH H (VII)

I could not sound like anyone to anyone,
but often meant to almost (as
rocking is from weaving) sound

local, as there should be more
local, I started saying here, how-
ever I sounded saying

I can be here again, saying it over
in a way so it piled, in a way
piling, as we cannot see it

ending, where it is from, the reason for
it is in fact frightening
to hear so much anywhere in anyone. (39)

The importance of sounding like anyone, one of the authors noted above, himself, the multiple selves that we carry within our thoughts, and how all of this accrues, piles, is important to this work, just as the multiple appearances of Hartford are. This need for autonomy emerges immediately and consistently throughout the text: “I could not sound like anyone but me”(3); “That it could sound like him”(48); “That it could sound like us?”(49). The self blurs into the collective, into the other, and as such we find a subjectivity brimming with fragments, small pieces that fit together to form a whole, the way a city elusively takes shape in the collective consciousness of its residents. Or, how a writer might find ones ephemeral self emerging from the texts of others, “You mean, after us. He’s after us?/ No, he’s us. Well, then he’s in the wind”(35).

Time changes a landscape, seasonally, it was built up, it is abandoned. This dichotomy of past and present haunts both Amadon as poet figure and Hartford as place. Specifically the was/is binary is troubled over in “Notes From the Hartford Poems.” Later this past tense action confronts objects merging into a bodily metaphor:

__________When I broke the window

latch, when I jammed the door, when I
took to cusp, when I opened in my lip. (40)

Mundane objects continually obfuscate an idyllic natural setting in this verse, and/or greater cognitive thought. Or, possibly more importantly, how this happens within a normative grammar until confronted:

NORTH OF PROVIDENCE

Listen to the heaters & think
if they’d rise to the ceiling, we’d wish
all our objects to lift themselves

as noisily. How we live in a world
that moves without attention. Put
bells to walls. Then don’t listen. Go out

into isn’t that just a brighter not
thinking things through? (42)

There are many ambiguities and nuances to this remarkable book and it is completely worthy of the Iowa Poetry Prize. What Amadon is able to accomplish as a whirlwind of parts that float in and out of each other to form a whole is a precise display of rhythmic and technical ability. His verse never comes to rest on any one thing, leaving all parts of the fluid experience tangentially related to a variegated set of times and places. Not a poetry of the mind, not verse auspiciously concerned with circling in upon itself, but parts small and large, little fragments of language that emerge from the currents of subjectivity, the seas of history to be dusted off and reconsidered anew.

* * *

Travis Cebula's Under the Sky They Lit Cities reviewed by Nancy Stohlman

noreply@blogger.com (Tarpaulin Sky Reviews) — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 15:50:00 +0000

Travis Cebula
Under the Sky They Lit Cities
BlazeVOX Books, 2010
Poetry
ISBN: 9781609640255
Paperback, 93 pages
$16

Reviewed by Nancy Stohlman

In his debut full-length collection of poetry, Under the Sky They Lit Cities, Travis Cebula advises: “Everyone in the city should ride the bus at least once/viscosity of a community is best measured by that stick”. From the first poem in this collection to the last, you understand that the narrator’s relationship with “city” is not one of aloof pontifications, or distant idealisms/condemnations. No, traveling through the pages of this slim volume is akin to traversing a city on foot, an anthem both to decay and the resilient life that rises among debris.

In Cebula’s hands, ossified benches look like “driftwood” or the “staved bones of an orphan” and “tattered kids pranced like royalty/their flannel shirts dangled tuxedo tails.” In the poem “Agnostic” (and not all of the poems are named) he says: “Not intending to condemn, I have/demolished the beauty of boulevards.” He later laments, “Rampant cynicism seems to/overrun my faith in alleys as playgrounds.” But he avoids the allure of judgment or polemics. Like any intimate relationship, Cebula’s relationship with City is complex, exhilarating, tragic, hypocritical, and ever changing—he frames her smog, he frames her chess tables, he frames her snowbanks, he frames her railyards. Because Cebula resists the urge to pit urban against rural, to condemn or glorify the object of his obsessions, his complicated relationship with City gains more credibility, his poetry winding us through a landscape of tragic beauty. Even Cebula says, “Don’t even try to figure out which side I’m on. From a/practical standpoint/I promise judging this is a waste of time.”

I was halfway through his “Etude for Cities (as seen by the sky)” before I realized that he had omitted the letter ‘A’ from the entire sequence. But this is not just a poetic sleight of hand, a trick to show off Cebula’s virtuosity. No, the subtle ingenuity created with the absence of “A” in this sequence of 13 etudes leaves the poetry’s “E’s” and “I’s” gritty and hard, words become visceral, like the clinking of a steel mill or the screeching of rails, the tinkling of store bells and streets of commerce, brick factories, the pounding of iron—implicating the reader into the hardness of the city.

This nod to erasure make one wonder, too, what else Cebula might feels has gone missing? Certain themes emerge in the work: “Zoos are just parks now, with taller fences,” he says, and instantly an elephant at the zoo becomes a woman longing for escape: “Dull rage at beatings/that faded years ago--/her pacing tamps ellipses into dirt.” Cebula shyly admits that “I wouldn’t have the courage to stray from/lights that haunt my days as well as nights.” Is Cebula—and by proxy, the reader, too—a tormented, willing, addicted prisoner of City? Or urban scenes of Christmas: “Mistletoe with plastic berries and a red ribbon/in a cellophane pouch/nativity scenes set out on cardboard with green felt,” complete with Santa heads that nod fa-la-la-la-la. He would seem to be condemning the dichotomy of Christmas spirit among the pollution of the city, and yet he caresses a lamppost, “loving the feel of alloy under my fingertips.”

Toward the end of the book Cebula’s narrator mumbles a mantra: “I believe in the tiptoeing heron/thin legs of willow sticks/knobbly knees and all/I believe in the creosote that drips/liquid, sticky in the sun Oh/ let me believe, too in the/stumbling, the shuffling people/on the sidewalks.” Perhaps Cebula’s narrator, myopic and enmeshed, doesn’t realize that his poetry has indeed become a hymn to those shuffling people, those abandoned steel rails and brick factories, those old prospectors rolling dice, that concrete river, foaming like a shaken can of Coors. For to write about such a landscape with such intimacy and complexity reveals Cebula’s true love even as he seems to deny it. Only the reader, with a reader’s generous distance, can see the real Cebula, framed against those streets, a tormented lover, longing both for escape and also for those dirty arms to wrap him forever in her dilapidated beauty, her gritty, poignant love.

* * *

Nancy Stohlman’s novel, Searching for Suzi: a flash novel (Monkey Puzzle Press, 2009), was recently nominated for a Colorado Book Award. Her other books include Live From Palestine (South End Press, 2003) and Fast Forward: The Mix Tape (FF>>Press, 2010), the latest in an annual series of flash fiction released by Fast Forward Press, which Stohlman also co-founded. She’s currently on the writing faculty at Arapahoe Community College and the Community College of Denver. She’s hoping all this writing business will eventually make her enough money to pursue her real dream of becoming a pirate.

Renee Gladman's Event Factory reviewed by Paula Koneazny

noreply@blogger.com (Tarpaulin Sky Reviews) — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 14:08:00 +0000

Renee Gladman
Event Factory
Dorothy, a publishing project, 2010
ISBN 978-0-9844693-0-7
Paperback, 136pp., $16

Reviewed by Paula Koneazny

An unnamed protagonist arrives in a fictional city-state called Ravicka where she meets people, has adventures, and then departs without, seemingly, really having been anywhere or accomplished anything. The opening epigraph from Samuel Beckett serves well as a compass : "something has to happen, to my body . . . which never . . . wished for anything, in its tarnished universe, except for the mirrors to shatter . . . the magnifying, the minifying, and to vanish in the havoc of its images." Magnifying and minifying aptly describe the challenges encountered by both narrator and reader. A visit to Ravicka becomes a tour of a land of smoke and mirrors, a Through the Looking Glass experience in which the story is as much a shape-shifter as is the sexual self. Its hard-to-pin-down quality doesn't, however, make Renee Gladman's short novel Event Factory a flawed narrative.

In Ravicka, the color yellow is pervasive; sometimes tender or empty, at others, more a green or brown. When Ravickians are healthy, they breathe yellow in and out. It's the color of the sun, but perhaps not our sun, although as the narrator reminds us, this isn't a different world than ours, since she arrived here on an airplane and that's also how she will leave. How Ravickians themselves leave remains a mystery, even though they appear to be abandoning Ravicka faster than the narrator can "stamp it" with her "tourism." (101)

The narrator is a linguist. She speaks seven languages, including several dialects of Ravic, but discovers that speaking the language isn't sufficient: "If only traveling were about showing off your language skills, if only it did not also demand a certain commitment of body communication, of outright singing and dancing--I think I would be absolutely global by now." (42) She may arrive accidentally (or not), but once in Ravicka, she embarks on numerous quests. What she's looking for changes as she changes location (place is primordial here; time more incidental, except when it's time to eat or "time to fuck." 23). She is more tourist than scholar. In search of both the Old City and Downtown, where she expects to find skyscrapers (after all she's seen them on postcards and from windows), she's led astray by false directions, as well as by erroneous and discarded maps. She seeks architecture and, above all else, what she calls "convivium." (36) She finds and then loses her guide and lover Dar. She also searches for the Ravickian literary masterpiece, Matlatli Doc, hoping it will lead her to its author, and through her, a better understanding of Ravicka.

Matlatli Doc, with its title that's almost an alliteration of Melville's Moby Dick, "is famous for its pace: nothing happens, nothing happens, then everything is 'said' to happen though nothing happens around that saying, then the book ends, and throughout it all there is this shouting." (86) Substitute "gesturing" for "shouting" and this synopsis pretty nicely describes Event Factory itself. Ravic, the language spoken in Ravicka looks vaguely Slavic. The fact that its Old City has been in existence for seven hundred years, brings to mind Krakow, Poland which not long ago celebrated its 750th anniversary. Ravicka also carries traces of Ursula Le Guin's Gethen and Winter from The Left Hand of Darkness. Words like pareis (29) and concepts such as "inswept by time" (47) are particularly reminiscent of Le Guin. Other books and other imagined locations resonate here as well, such as Haruki Murakami's Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World and the Tokyo of David Mitchell's number9dream.

Many of the features of Gladman's prose have been borrowed from her prose-poetry and the author often seems to be thinking about poetry as much as anything else. For example, the narrator muses: "I meant 'silence,' but silence is not something that moves visibly from one place to another. You simply cannot use the word this way, even in Ravic. I was saying smoke and he knew I did not mean it, but whether he knew what I actually did mean was hard to say." (70) Renee Gladman, the poet, might just as well be describing her poetics.

Event Factory's plot is summed up in its opening lines: " From the sky there was no sign of Ravicka. Yet, I arrived; I met many people." (11) Very little that happens between the narrator's arrival and her departure is causally related. Almost everything that occurs, except for language and ritual gestures, could have happened in any order. Nothing changes, other than that Ravicka continues to empty out. There is no real plot nor character development. Characters don't stick around long, with the exception of the narrator and Simon, the singing hotel/ motel receptionist without whom "there was no center. There was no hotel . . . . without him, it was a different place." (38) Ravicka may be, in the final analysis, simply a metaphor for life, where we, tourist-linguists, find ourselves for a short while, because "the plane . . . had landed and not yet taken off." (18)

* * *

Paula Koneazny lives and writes in Sebastopol, California where she earns her living as a tax consultant. Her poetry has appeared most recently or is forthcoming in OR, Interim and Bateau. Her reviews have been published in American Book Review, Verse, Rain Taxi and Tarpaulin Sky. She is currently an assistant editor of Volt. She can be contacted at paulagraphpress AT gmail DOT com.

noreply@blogger.com (Tarpaulin Sky Reviews) — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 11:52:00 +0000

Cara Benson's (made) reviewed by Julie Joosten

noreply@blogger.com (Tarpaulin Sky Reviews) — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 17:36:00 +0000

Cara Benson
(made)
ISBN 9781897388563
72 pp., 5.5" x 8.5", pbk.
BookThug, 2010

Reviewed by Julie Joosten

Cara Benson’s first full-length book, (made), is an active work of nouns. This collection of prose poems explores a mind at work and the way that mind opens out (into) the world. Benson’s poems deliberately inhabit a made world—a world of days, bayonets, apples, banks, cities, alphabets, roads, holidays, cars, and deserts, of glinting, surviving, shedding, holding, talking, approaching, and rushing. And they travel through that world as local inhabitants and as curious tourists engaged in its constructed contours. Exploring the possibilities of a book of definition, desire, and horizon, the poems’ titles appear below the poems in large, bold font. It is as if, moving through a poem, the reader experiences the process of arriving at a name: the title is both the poem’s destination and its production. But the titles also raise the question of perspective. Encountered horizontally, as well as vertically, the title appears in the foreground of the field of the page, and the poem unfolds in the cultivated distance behind it. Creating an archive of space, (made) insists on a multi-dimensionality that extends into the field of the reader’s body; Benson writes, “If this is in your hands, it is only here because you hold it” (55). The deictic “this” resonates as book, poem, word, and the reader’s body bears out the conditional, holding these made artifacts in her hands and mind, collaborating in a production that requires her participation for making’s resonance.

As a verb, the book’s title is in the past tense; it gestures to a completed, past making; as an adjective, it suggests something shaped in a particular way. Benson embeds “(made)” in a bold litany: “affect effect multiple handicap barn buster flipped tv dinner micro . . . cosm ready (made) meandering firefly abdomen plug caulk” (47). Parenthetically noting the process that brings this list together and that defines the items on it, Benson suggests the implicit, textured relation between made things and the act of making. The created landscapes, relations, and ideas (made) explores are constantly under construction. The book offers itself up as material of and for new makings. Thus, in (made), the present presses against the past, and a consciousness of the future anterior emerges: the poems create a future in which what will have been made is here in utero, in a present shared with a collaborating reader. A certain terror inheres in that future. In an interview with Bookthug, the book’s publisher, Benson describes (made) as “a pre-elegiac poem for the earth.”* I’m drawn to this account because it insists on the present of these poems as a necessary space of enunciation. And while pre-elegy presages elegy for a lost earth, the poems’ engagement with that present turns upon an earth that is not yet lost, that might not be lost. As Benson notes in “me-tooism,” “What the word will become cannot be known” (61); what the world will become cannot be known either. That is part of (made)’s power: it invites the reader to explore her world as the strange, beautiful, and often destructive combinations and re-workings of vibrant materials.

These materials move through time to a space of articulation. Charting an uncanny traveling, Benson writes: “Burned earth, the fire can travel through dry underground routes and spring up hundreds of feet from its source. Garden beseeched” (33). The address to “Burned earth” becomes movement through time and space: it spreads fire, shares grief. In “far, far away” Benson writes, “Premature night exposes her white teeth marks in the dark . . . A hug off the horizon while her face-mask covers desire too cold to be discovered. What she can’t hold she’ll havoc” (41). Benson draws on both the sound and meaning of “havoc” to create a sense that runs counter to the sentence’s semantic claim--“havoc” resonates as “have” and “disturbance.” The line thus suggests that disturbance is a mode of possession. Benson’s poems explore the possibility that making is both a creative and destructive act that possesses us. Her poems are plastique in the French sense of the term: they take form and destroy form. (made) explores how we and our making and made objects emerge from this paradoxical relation. In the book’s opening poem, “and the book begins,” Benson writes, “Bobbed sunflower head heavy from yearning fulfilled” (7). In a later poem, “café society,” a remaking occurs: “The kettle was boiling above and the baskets were underfilled. Yarn” (39). “Yearning fulfilled” becomes “underfilled. Yarn.” Linguistic making echoes in the poems’ deft soundwork that reworks a line or phrase, allowing sound to recreate sense.

Sound is a form of production in (made), and so is thought. Thinking is making in Benson’s work; it is a desire for understanding that is hospitable to startling perceptions and unconventional forms of knowing: “To steal a hole one must first have desire . . . Take whatever was forgotten now found in all the coat pockets of the world into your cupped hands which act as conduits into the hole” (15). (made) takes “the forgotten now found” and invites the reader into it; the book carries her along, stutters her progress, speeds her up, gives her away, recombines, and remakes her—and the world she inhabits. Benson’s poems create, from an encounter with the given world, a new world that is both dangerous and rapturous. And also, sometimes, peaceful. The poems in (made) create possibility “To enter, beside.” They offer the reader the objects of her everyday life as the materials that build a collective thought and care from the makings of a mind. Collective because of their hospitality to artifacts, objects, natural materials, animals, and weather, to readers, thinkers, empathizers, workers, armies, the outraged, the hopeful, the careful, the rigorous, the overlooked. Each and all are called in to the poems. And so to read (made) is to inhabit a radical openness that “Grant[s] light.” In Benson’s own words, “What travel will come. What standstill. Such ruckus amok. Such rendering” (26).

* “Interview with Cara Benson,” BookThug News, 3 Dec. 2010.

Michael Gizzi's New Depths of Deadpan reviewed by Patrick Dunagan

noreply@blogger.com (Tarpaulin Sky Reviews) — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 14:00:00 +0000

Michael Gizzi
New Depths of Deadpan

ISBN13: 978-1-886224-96-4
Poetry, 72 pp., offset, smyth-sewn pbk.
Burning Deck, 2009

Reviewed by Patrick Dunagan

Michael Gizzi’s poems play it deadpan exceptionally well. Cast throughout the poems as though each page were a stage, words are his characters, shrugging off assumptions casually laid upon them and bubbling with an ever present humor that at times may be just slightly muffled.

CLOISTERED IN AN OYSTER

Another sleepless night with the top down.

He has a headache that could write its own biography. How long
can one inhabit a dumb-waiter? His mother Pearl plumps his
pillow.

Eyes lie through their teeth. Is it important to be unfortunate?

Is shucks not enough? Perhaps he could import a diver to yank
him out of bed?

Another clammy night.

Gizzi takes Leibniz’s monad viewing room out for a stroll and runs with it. “Witness the window grappling with the body.” (NIGHT-BLOOMING GRAMOPHONE) New intentions get written out via substitutions of the unfamiliar alongside the familiar, “Aliens write in puns we know are curly fries. Drive-up windows make this clear.” (THE DEEP) Every day reality gets a re-set as common experiences get blown to alternate extremes entertaining with surprising delight that refreshes without taxing one’s patience.

Rather than expressing any persona of Gizzi The Poet, full of immediate concerns of personal or other nature, these poems scamp across the page in lively play of language and imagination achieving that rare comfortably of hitting stride in new spaces. Continuity comes, when it comes, from cultural and literary references spun wildly beyond confines of previous assumptions.

ARBOR DAY

and in the sky there were glistening rails of milk
—Frank O’Hara

An armory with no army
which every summer leaves obscure.
Call it respite. Say a train wreck dreamed it,
a purchase in the blur.
Was there a split in the arborist?
A shame we ignore the same words.
Sap becomes shellac.
A hand goes up, flanked by magicians.
A tale told to pigeons.

This is play at nobody’s expense, the grubby world gets opened up and explored anew as Gizzi tests the unexpected appearance and unravels those distancing tendencies which so often hold readers back from just going there with trust in the poem. This is poetry as show-n-tell for adults and the classroom is the day-to-day world as it gets reshaped and re-defined.

STEEL MESH

Having swapped poles, I guess it’s safe to say we’re sound asleep.

Who has time for space? Euphemism’s as good as it gets (oxidized juncos).

A difference engine spooking even the shade of Houdini (particle
theory), no visible means of escape. A cage within a cage custom-made
for a wraith,

with divots left by the great head-banging auk.

Not a laugh-in but a standup coffin or comfort station for autism.
Can one say bee-keeping is useful

and Egyptology is not? How is it that buttons offer solace

softer than personalities?

That “great head-banging auk” is our self, testing the limits of our capability for wonder, finding that there really is no end to our ability to be stunned while still digging the merits of the encounter. Gizzi situates the speaker of the poem somewhere between resting on standard perceptional perspectives while also endeavoring maintain some semblance of self without resistance to being held off balance for a while. He then twists and tweaks the situation just the slightest bit to get to where words go to when they leave the comfort of home, dragging his readers with them.

Yosemite Sam upbraids a dust devil.

What does she have to say about the weather on Lesbos—or on
drugs, for that matter? Leave it to Beaver Lamarck to formulate
a batalog of cloud types. These here blew in from the French
Revolution to stack up over this canary yellow hum cover.

(“CLOUDS NINE”)

Gizzi plays his lines, fine tuning as he goes, bouncing a raucous bash of sound off sense, making such meaning as surprises himself as much as his reader. What does it MEAN is not a priority ahead of does it rise to being some fresh thing now known? Flip the assertions, change your orientation, and see where that leaves you. Gizzi’s fired up the starting vehicle, charge on out with him for the ride.

There were in him the makings of a bird, a giddy soldier, a sailor,
too. As he liked to put it, a mind can really get inside your head.

(“GILLETTE CASTLE”)

* * *

Macgregor Card's Duties of an English Foreign Secretary reviewed by Robert Mueller

noreply@blogger.com (Tarpaulin Sky Reviews) — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 13:00:00 +0000

Macgregor Card
Duties of an English Foreign Secretary

ISBN 978-1-934200-29-2
6" x 8", 112 pp.
Fence Books, 2009

Reviewed by Robert Mueller

What’s a body to do today with all this tiresome ironic chic? Look for a poet, like Macgregor Card, of wit and daring, true aplomb. Look, for example, at “Office of the Interior” from Duties of an English Foreign Secretary, winner of the 2009 Fence Modern Poets Series. Here the poet slams in enough mystery to give the dominant theme all the old leverage it needs to send us somewhere:

I hope the streetlamp will
show up tonight
in some disinterested way
once the tilted park has made it
out of view by law
Do you anticipate that it will rain?
Next volunteer
Just nod if you’re
anticipating rain

As you can see, the forbidden landscape really moves.

It is difficult for a poet of any stripe to clear away the tired pleading. My favorite among the successes is “Le soleil et le police dog.” Notice how this poem, quoted in its entirety, cuts through the menace to an exact ueber-menace:

Le soleil and le police dog
accept the offer of the road above
through the curtain of the burning geese
I hope they will not catch fire
like the nudists do in Canada
or turn my eye to fat
hot coin for dark machine
to browse on the cave-money of suicide
wet rats dicking in the rain
heaven smiles on threat elimination
and the police-dog,
and the police-dog
smiles on me
I hope I will not catch fire
Le tellement croyable police dog
Le soleil et le police dog

The full effect, and not just some of the words, is very French, now in sophistication, now in limpidity, now in sophisticated cool linearity, now in taking clear breaths, in remaining sure for what that is all worth. Plus, here is satire worthy of its pedigree, and not less sharply involving than some of Mr. Card’s longer efforts, where the fulminations are well-sustained and do not flag or strain.

Let us say that the libertine, at one time a heinous figure, is now, the poet realizes, an all-satisfying and all-neglecting father figure, suitable stand-out for the unearthly moment. Indeed the dwelling on neglect thrills, as in “I Am the Teacher of Athletes,” where a strange catalogue of heroic song-types yields to strange visions of hegemony. A kind of epinikion, the poem celebrates the Unreal World-City, makes practice of disturbed landings however beautifully evoked:

A vast ocean weed
through a private garden
Bright corona
of the zero-responsibility corral

Poems like “That Old Woolly Bloodletting” and “Gone to Earth” equally stand citizenship over on its bed, and experience a world, ours or not ours, and play the alert and sleepy tricks that keep that experience, and keep the expression and the impression (both fully honored), in the shifting movement by which to encompass a memory up to the challenge. These are good, long, engrossing poems. Suppose good writing is all you can find. Here it follows from an honest a-moral, almost a-tonal apposition to a diminished world. Another approach, a heartfelt sympathy, would not be amenable, would lend losing color. Richness should not be allowed out at ease.

How Macgregor Card does what he does, with or without regrets, is refreshing. He does not do it by any straight-line technique, however, but rather as if for each providential element you had to find a different basket. The rhythms and style of sixteenth-century lyric inform the title poem (to my ear), resulting in an awareness and polish that nevertheless deliver only one aspect of what the fuss and the trust are all about. In fact, although each new turn of the page is not always surprising, there is always some surprise when reading Duties of an English Foreign Secretary. Thus in “Rule of Hospitality,” where the shimmering logic and virtuosically plain language track a conceit of making love and not either war or international incident, these complex angles arrive unexpectedly on a lightly-textured surface. Part of the surprise is the special use of metaphor (“rule” the vehicle, “attraction” the action and “fear” the distraction), and if that were not the case, then metaphor itself might run the way of a common thread. In “Shipfilm” you can tell that the poem relies on water as metaphor, but you can also tell that the metaphor is watery, that it flows and spreads, and that its composition, as metaphor as well, is unique. In similar — and uncanny — fashion the good “Libertines’ Announcement” veers toward bottomless appeal. Upending robustly, it unwinds from a not obvious wrapping, to the end that its guiding metaphor might just be a shelf in a library stacked with all the poems of its kind, the kind it seeks to lean on.

The poems and the library of the poems: maybe such are the key and the potent modifier for a language so fierce at pushing in solider clips. So often the poetry is terse, quick; and so often the poetry becomes, what poetry can be at its best today with our revived intelligences, a mode of prescient footnoting to some book that has been written and has yet to be written. These are the actuals: a pleasant heirloom, a permutating conviction. That is to say, these sources present themselves both in real and in quandary fashion, and can be inhaled, and can be recaptured, with or without sourcing. So often here the source-hunting would be a pastime; and so often the source-feeling, a fulfillment and a paradigm. It is not as if the phrases beg for quotation marks, not that at all. Rather they have a peculiar and lovely ring, and then I want to nominate a source. And you can have your candidates, too.

One further notes that repetition of whole lines adheres to willful formalism, and then one knows of the widely differing charges that give rise to formalism based thereon, and then how skillfully Macgregor Card re-uses, or ignores and refuses, the formal charges, troubles their aspectual recurrences so as to dissolve out all the skill, and then the “Pantoum” itself that drags down and dead. So there is indeed a line from poem to poem, a certain unpleasant, even, respect for the line, even, but even this formal aspect remains in, or achieves, isolation. It is remarkable how the writing stirs to this brilliance of discrete positions and types such that you do not dismiss it — all the while that the brilliance gets washed out, even though not washed up, not that either. It may not seem exhilarating, but with the right attentiveness you will feel it move and your pulse quicken and quicken, as when the cries of “Nary a Soul” extend and extend.

Yet what is hard to make of the writing, just as it persists at the verge of disturbances, is what cannot be denied: That at times it suffers. It breaks down and suffers, with or without meaning to. Thus in a few instances the search for resonance may be difficult, stalled in a trope for affirming without sounding, detained in whiling away refreshments at late neutral zone.

What, though, of the pleasing variation of word choice, the semblance of order and mission that can so take you in? This from the opening out of “Gone to Earth” is wondrous strange metaphor and delight:

I should have slept in a balloon
gone to Earth
hissing to own the sea
it is so difficult you dear
to be an underestimated resource
with the handshake of a coward
owned in thin air
I should have made an entry—

More than clever taunt, “Gone to Earth” achieves as full poem. A haunting mystery distinguishes itself ex and pro nihilo and may represent Macgregor Card’s best claim and best true moment, though again not as defining moment strictu sensu. Definition is, by way of deflation of brilliance, strictly averted; the moves are confident, but evasive, take themselves down studiously.

To undertake the challenges of Duties of an English Foreign Secretary is to follow a fine and tricksome fashioning and not to fall beleaguered by control for control’s sake. In the meantime, would that it were true, richness will not have its way. Lord keep us from the cold!

* * *

Brenda Iijima's If Not Metamorphic reviewed by Patrick Dunagan

noreply@blogger.com (Tarpaulin Sky Reviews) — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 13:47:00 +0000

Brenda Iijima
If Not Metamorphic
ISBN-13 978-1-934103-10-4
6" x 8", 128 pages, pbk.
Ahsahta Press, 2010

Reviewed by Patrick Dunagan

What’s both difficult and improbable to achieve with poetry these days is any hint of expression towards self-knowledge that doesn’t come across perceived as more or less a sham. Contemporary poetry shelves are densely populated by too much easily-packaged-for-reader-consumption-introspective-gleaning trite. Brenda Iijima’s writing on the other hand is a direct confrontation which playfully and directly engages questions of knowledge of self: what are the connections between perceptions and how they pass through consciousness via the body. This is exploratory writing that offers its rewards as they are come upon, self-discoveries which hold us, revealing us to our selves, active in every sense of the word. Neither self-serving nor bemoaning of uncertainty, Iijima stakes out her position as poet-explorer/inciter facing off against the challenges of a world in constant dynamic shift and does so with courage that refuses back away. Her interest in delving into just what is possible displays a vulnerability that engages by way of its immediacy.

Iijima no more knows where the poem is going than the reader does. But don’t be fooled however, for she most importantly first and foremost is excitingly aware of where she’s at in the moment of writing. Tapping into personal ecological underpinning of human perception via all the senses, the questions asked throughout the multiple sections of the long title poem are insistent, probing the condition of consciousness come aware in its moment.

Iijima is constantly moving within her writing, from out her own consciousness into that of others, thing to thing, jarring expectation of how and what words do, questing her way towards ever further revealing of perception’s foundational perspective.

In the second poem, TIME UNIONS, Iijima resists a narrative drive instead drawing upon the sympathy of sounds between words to spread out a scene of the sensuous pull vowels command upon one another.

There’s a strong sense of landscape explored, possibly lost, and the urge to resurrect and embody it forth.

This looks ahead to the closing poem of the book, PANTHERING, wherein Iijima viscerally imbues the animal swelling of place she felt during a visit to “the last remaining Native American intaglio effigy” as she “rested inside its grassy contours” and “an intense heat radiated outwardly and engulfed” her body. Iijima returns repeatedly to a near Phenomenological rendering of her body’s perception via language, physical as well as mental that is spiritual without any wishy-washy mysticism overlay. She seeks knowledge in the act of writing what happens in writing.

Iijima is all animal: conscious, reflective, thought-probing, provocative animal. She prowls through language of thought and being, every observation leading to another divergence, caught up with itself alive in the moment. Yet such branching explorations don’t lend any sense of sporadic diluting of her initial questing. Her project remains focused and driven, realizing its own work as it explores what is readily known to enter the questionable realm of what might otherwise go by missed.

There’s a return to the physical body as prime substance, and not in any sentimental sense, rather take Charles Olson’s declaration “your body / is to drop / its load” as the project/concern in which Iijima is sharing “I follow you, downward dog.”

* * *

Elena Fanailova's The Russian Version reviewed by Katie Eberhart

noreply@blogger.com (Tarpaulin Sky Reviews) — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 16:02:00 +0000

The Russian Version
Elena Fanailova

Translated by Genya Turovskaya and Stephanie Sandler
Introduction by Aleksandr Skidan
Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010
ISBN 978-0939010-98-1

Reviewed by Katie Eberhart

The fine thing about Elena Fanailova’s book The Russian Version is getting a poet's view of Russia in recent years. In this bilingual collection of poems time passes and some things change, and some only shift. Themes which demand attention are the presence of doubles and how both structure of the poems and the poet's interests change. Fanailova has a keen eye for details of story and scene, but also the even more complex terrain of motivations and dreams in a place where even the dead are denied peace (even from those who were closest to them). The second part of the poem The Land of the Dead (a poem in four parts from the work With Particular Cynicism, 1998-1999) begins:

...A willow sprouted from her grave.
A year later it cracked the tomb apart to the rose-colored stars.
Its roots grew through her ribs and entwined her heart.
But father took an axe and a saw
Pried out the root and chopped down the stalk.

And so it is oppositional forces of life and death that play a role and form knots of complexity and wads of questions, and everything is complicated by family and history and what each person can and can’t control.

Fanailova uses precise language. She has a handle on everything: the atmosphere and seasons, light and dark, male and female, life and death. I was frequently reminded of Osip Mandelstam's poems, the grim and gritty scenes, the use of atmosphere, ghosts and doubles—but Fanailova's images and language are thoroughly her own. The book begins with an untitled poem from The Russian Album, 1994-1997:

Already yesterday November was arriving.
Already yesterday the light had changed.
You'll wake up: a ghost stands at our window,
A lancet in the pocket of its vest.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
And death has acquired such an easy style.
Her smile is like a model's out of Vogue.
Her gestures are taken from old revues,
The dry wings of ballet legs.

Death is consistently present. It would seem death is available, as in socially acceptable—what you'll see when you wake up, a ghost with a lancet, but there are two sides of a lancet (a sharp knife and a surgical tool) and two faces, or even genders, of death. In these poems Death is comfortable, Death dresses stylishly, and clearly Death is a character.

Fanailova coaxes different effects from a variety of forms, rhythms, and structure. For instance, in Shades in Paradise, the distance of the third person (“They...”), a forward-driving repetition, and short lines create the idea of a mass experience, and again there is the contradiction, the oppositional force even in the title which suggests the unexpected. Shades in Paradise begins:

They come home,
They lie down together.
They don't give a damn about anyone,

So the poem becomes a kind of map with “war” at the heart—war is generally easy to define and hard to understand. Ghosts are more of an idea or notion that is impossible to prove and yet richly imaginative—and in this poem repetition combined with forgetfulness suggests zombies, and in any event metaphor:

They kiss on the eyes,
They don't remember why,
They leave no trace.
Nothing keeps them in place:
Not honor, not valor, not duty. . .

But Fanailova uses a broad poetic brush and following Shades in Paradise is Frida's Album which is a characterization of the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo's work:

Frida sits coiffed (in whiteface), sits next to the canvas,
A lace underskirt, apron, earrings, braids in a wreath,
Death to her left, Diego headless on her right, . . .

Frida's Album is torment merged—Frida Kahlo's and Fanailova's—through eyes and language, a pairing of Kahlo's own injuries and pain and the cultural injuries and the pain of which Fanailova writes. This poem is a transfer of the idea (through art) of the personal to the idea (through poetry) of society or community (or anti-community). The poem is metaphor translated and amplified. Frida's Album has longer lines and more musicality than the abrupt rhythm of Shades in Paradise. The images in Frida's Album come rapid fire and crushed together, conveying a world in agony and collapsing, a very strange place laden with death and nothing is what it seems: “Frida is dressed as a boy, . . . / . . . [with] drowned women in her hair.” So again it is doubles, and shape shifting and somehow it seems as if the Fridas have split in two because one Frida can not hold everything.

Why do we read poetry of war? For the words and language? To feel lucky with our own lives? Although the theme of war underlies The Russian Version, it is not only a book of war poems. Near the end, in New Poems, I see fruit trees as a hopeful sign even as the yearning for role models continues and the world portrayed is still gritty and afflicted:

who will tell us that the world blooms like the branch of the cherry tree,
the bing cherry, the bird cherry, the apple tree, the plum tree
that the dead are rising, are alive,
like angels of glory?

As a collection, The Russian Version transforms brutal and terrifying history into a compelling story where two things matter: remembering and change—and there is change in the country and change in Fanailova's poetic style, and subjects change through place in time, and you see what is remembered and forgotten, where history and the unthinkable lodge, and how culture and memory adjust. The Russian Version* is an important book weighted with history and recent times and the poet's unflinching quest for truth.

________________________

* Fanailova’s “Notes to the Text” (endnotes) helpfully provide historical, biographical, and literary references for certain poems.

* * *

Katie Eberhart's writing and poems exploring the fine margin between people and landscape can be found in the Palmer (Alaska) Arts Council poetry anthology Voices Between Mountains and the online literary journal Plasma Magazine. Katie was selected as an Artsmith Artist Resident in 2009 and has an MFA in Creative Writing from the Rainier Writing Workshop.

Peter Waterhouse's Language Death Night Outside, Poem Novel reviewed by Katie Eberhart

noreply@blogger.com (Tarpaulin Sky Reviews) — Sat, 27 Nov 2010 11:03:00 +0000

Language Death Night Outside, Poem Novel
Peter Waterhouse
Translated by Rosmarie Waldrop (2009)
U.S. publisher: Burning Deck/Anyart, Providence, RI.
Originally published in 1989 as Sprache Tod Nacht Aussen (Rowohlt Verlag GmbH).
125 pp.

Reviewed by Katie Eberhart

Reading Language Death Night Outside is like traveling to a foreign country except the country you travel through is not merely landscape but a web of the narrator's observations, experience, points of reference, and language. The subtitle Poem Novel suggests more freedom and fancy than a single genre but also more responsibility to deliver both story and poetry, or a poetic story. Clearly, there are multiple ways these forms coexist and Waterhouse has found many, including a narrator's view which switches between moment-by-moment observation and reflection, and investigation of what occurred in the past. The story is centered around Vienna, Austria but spreads outward to places like Chernowitz and Zagreb as well as southern Austria and Italy. On the first page the forces are established, including poetry and the death of the narrator's grandfather.

In the fall of 1984 I heard poems by Andrea Zanzotto. The poster had announced a hermetic poet. I was working on a long essay on Paul Celan. My interest jumped over. Zanzotto canceled. A bilingual reading with rough translations took place without the poet. The rough translations convinced me. Two hours. A survey of the work, I could not get the poems out of my mind. . . (7)

The narrator lives within a chain of events that is like a slow motion exploration of feelings and experience as if walking along a street and noticing everything within a rhythm of short sentences and repetition of the subject or a pronoun that imparts an urgency to encounters and observations. The narrator is both investigating history and considering where his grandfather's life intersected historical events. For example, after leaving a lecture on the “intellectual development of [Austria] since 1918” where matters of national guilt and national consciousness were hotly debated, the narrator recalls his grandfather:

. . . I sat at home. I thought of grandfather's face. I thought of grandfather's eyes. I thought of grandfather as a soldier in the army. I thought of grandfather's carpentry. . . . I thought of grandfather's flight from the family. I thought of the family of seven in the one-and-one-half room apartment, with the water faucet out in the hall. I thought of grandfather's long illness. . . . (71)

The tension within this work, besides nuances of language, exists between the larger events of history and what a person can now observe or even comprehend. For example, the peripatetic narrator ponders something that sounds simple enough, looking east:

I drove to the eastern edge of the city. I stood in the field. I looked east. In looking east I had the impression of thinking outside my language. I drove on straight highways to the eastern border of the country. The highway ended at the river. The bridge across the river lay there collapsed. I climbed over parts of the bridge. I looked at the thicket on the bank. I retreated. I walked across the wet meadows. . . . (16)

But nothing is simple. The narrator has traveled to Slovenia and the experience includes that of staying at a castle, of winter quarters for a circus in the castle yard, of children playing, of “In the evening, five fires were lit in the yard” until it becomes a matter of looking toward “the land of morning.” The narrator says “I thought of the land of morning as thought outside my language. I closed my eyes. I said a sentence. Between the words was the land of morning.” (16) The narrator is searching for ways to understand the past, and it seems possible that there is a puzzle or paradox with how we come to grips with memory, guilt, and survival that connects to language as if it is “between the words.”

Reading Language Death Night Outside, you have entered a very private space of pondering that ripples outward from the narrator's experience and world view and whatever else comes his way including three long poems (the poets are Andrea Zanzotto, Paul Celan, and Carl Rakosi). These poems act as an outside force on the narrative but also become internalized because of the narrator's efforts to find meaning in each poem. The effect is of larger ideas that remain even after the narrative continues into some other inquiry.

Waterhouse's Poem Novel is unique in style and language. The short sentences and repetition give the feeling of a long poem although the appearance is of prose. In Language Death Night Outside, Waterhouse has created a literary place where the personal and institutional intersect, where philosophy butts against history, where abstraction spreads across experience and landscape, and especially the idea of a place “between the words.” The questions in this book are interesting and crucially important and it is a book that should be read as we drift farther from times that are still difficult to talk about, but times that Peter Waterhouse has made progress in extracting from “between the words.”

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Olga Tokarczuk's Primeval and Other Times reviewed by Katie Eberhart

noreply@blogger.com (Tarpaulin Sky Reviews) — Sat, 27 Nov 2010 10:42:00 +0000

Primeval and Other Times
Olga Tokarczuk
Translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
Twisted Spoon Press, Prague 2010
248 pp

Reviewed by Katie Eberhart

This novel begins with the boldly presented idea that Primeval is both a place and more than a place. The first thing we learn is that “Primeval is the place at the centre of the universe” and I reminded myself of Primeval's exceptional location as I followed the intergenerational tableau anchored within a normal-seeming landscape in Poland of roads and forests, farms, rivers and lakes but along the borders four archangels are said to protect against certain human shortcomings.

In Primeval and Other Times each chapter or section begins “The Time of . . .” and the novel unfolds as separate but interlaced stories where characters appear, and reappear, sometimes in their own story and sometimes in another character's story. Many characters are related to other characters by family, or accidental encounter, dreams or beliefs, and the characters are staunch in what they believe, whether it is a higher power, believing that the midwife switched the babies at birth, or a game that becomes an obsession.

Written in a straightforward prose, the stories span human actions and reactions, showing the inner workings of a community, the interactions between people, causes and effects, and beliefs and desires. For instance, “The Time of Genowefa” begins in 1914 when Genowefa's husband Michał is suddenly taken away to fight in the Russian army. Misia is born while her father, Michał, is away at the war. (Misia is an adult with her own children when Primeval becomes the front during the Second World War.) As a child, Misia watched her father returning: “[her] first memory was the sight of the ragged man on the road to the mill. Her father staggered as he walked, and then often cried at night, . . .” and her father brought the grinder home from the war:

Misia's grinder came into being because of someone's hands combining wood, china and brass into a single object. The wood, china and brass made the idea of grinding materialize. Grinding coffee beans to pour boiling water on them afterwards. There is no one of whom it could be said that he invented the grinder, because creating is merely reminding yourself of what exists beyond time, in other words, since time began. Man is incapable of creating out of nothing – that is a divine skill. (44-45)

The grinder is not quite a talisman but one of its roles is to mark time because it is something which barely changes while people grow and age, wars are fought, and a lot happens. The grinder signifies endurance and continuity, much like the grist mill which, in a larger sense, anchors Primeval to the very basis of survival. But it isn't just things that have a symbolic nature, characters also achieve a larger more representative role, such as Misia:

Like every person, Misia was born broken into pieces, incomplete, in bits. Everything in her was separate – looking, hearing, understanding, feeling, sensing, and experiencing. Misia's entire future life would depend on putting it all together into a single whole, and then letting it fall apart. (42)

I was intrigued by the transformation of characters and indeed what might change a character's life, and thus story, such as Florentynka who is an old woman living alone with her dogs and the explanation of her circumstances becomes part of the myth-making effect:

People think madness is caused by a great, dramatic event, some sort of suffering that is unbearable. They imagine you go mad for some reason. . . People also think madness strikes suddenly, all at once, in unusual circumstances, and that insanity falls on a person like a net, fettering the mind and muddling the emotions.

But Florentynka had gone mad in the normal course of things, you could say for no reason at all. . . . (52-53)

Tokarczuk has tackled a difficult task, to create a place, characters, and stories that exist in their own right but also within the stream of history, where the characters are both believable and beyond belief, where the extremes are pushed farther than what most of us have experienced and yet (the terrifying part) are anchored in twentieth century history. One result is questions like How can this be? How could this happen? which are the troubling questions about the times during which events in Primeval occurred.

Offsetting all of the changes though is a constancy—of space and time—so that the mill on the river continues to exist, whether there is grain or not, and also

There are lime trees lining the Highway leading from Jeszkotle to the Kielce road. They looked the same at the beginning, and they will look the same at the end. They have thick trunks and roots that reach deep into the earth, where they meet the foundations of everything that lives. . . . (188)

Primeval and Other Times is a carefully wrought fictional exploration of the light and dark elements of being. Tokarczuk's strong voice and meticulous writing have brought these stories into existence making Primeval its own place with a compelling intergenerational drama that is set within the context of a history we know. Olga Tokarczuk's novel tells important stories that will be of interest to anyone who is a student of human nature and history and who has ever wondered how mythologies develop; and Primeval and Other Times should be read by everyone because literature is one way we remember and learn from the past.

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Julie Carr's Sarah—Of Fragments and Lines, reviewed by Megan Burns

noreply@blogger.com (Tarpaulin Sky Reviews) — Sat, 27 Nov 2010 10:14:00 +0000

Julie Carr
Sarah—Of Fragments and Lines
Coffeehouse Press, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-56689-251-3
6x9, 74pps
$16

Reviewed by Megan Burns

A Doubled Woman: Julie Carr's Sarah—Of Fragments and Lines

This slim volume is a meditation on birth, death, grief, and nature in a series of poems designated by Carr as fragments, lines, and abstracts. The poems echo one another in images of birds, shores, rain, leaves, salt, and honey. The subject matter of the mother, the daughter, conception, and death are also woven into the tapestry, but it is the language, the sounds themselves, that interconnect and create a whole in a book that speaks about what is in pieces. The loss of the mother, a double loss due to the mother’s Alzheimer’s, is complicated by the speaker’s pregnancy. Images of birth and death as well as daughters and mothers become blurred and confused in the poems as the voice attempts to tease out with language an order built upon internal sounds. Sounds become a mainstay, propelling an investigation into complicated gestures.

The book begins with a poem titled “Landlocked Lines,” an important departure as the poems that follow seem to flow further from the shore and into the abyss. “It would be absurd to imagine the absent person in the margins of the book” this poem tells us, and here we begin to confront the idea of elegy and how this form shapes the person who is lost. This first poem introduces ideas or images that resurface, much like memories of a lost loved one; a physical object like the “red wall,” birds, and stories about giving birth to save a life all return in later poems. Alliteration and internal rhymes ground most of these poems; they escalate to a frenzy especially when grief seems to overpower the speaker:

now rectangles of fluorescent, of bold blonde daylight on walls of old dreck now shine like gestalt or defense, like splayed hair. Now old odes or seeds of thought turned snug in gummy mugs: I’m alone here in a day like an arrow or a lance in a gash. Day, don’t say things, don’t order (12).

With a few exceptions, almost all of the poems have the words “lines,” “fragments,” or “abstract” in the title. The obvious connection is that these speak to the mother’s fragmented thoughts before her death, but they also mirror the speaker’s nonlinear thought process. The process of waiting for someone to die is ironically similar to the process of becoming a new mother. Time takes on a new meaning as it lengthens and slows; absent of logic, the mind struggles with exhaustion and an ever changing range of emotions from joy to relief to depression. Again, these poems point out the blurring of these roles, so that it is hard to pinpoint if it is grief or being a new mother that causes the emotions. The loss of the parent complicates the speaker’s new role as a parent, the loss of a mother complicates the daughter’s new role as a mother, and both death and newborns cause worry, fear, stress, disjointed thinking and exhaustion. The emotions are either confused or--as the speaker points out, “doubled”--much like the mother’s body is doubled during pregnancy. The poem “Conception Fragment” introduces the speaker’s double bind

daylight and tree buds
petro-
detritus and dust
what’s winged
in the open of your pregnancy? (17)

The poem begins to mix the metaphor of the bird imagery that is attached to the mother with that of this new addition. Birds historically have been connected to both birth and death from religious ideas of sparrows bringing in new souls, to the stork, and to references of the soul departing the body and taking flight. It’s no surprise that bird references and birds by name, quails, doves, hawks, herons, owls, gulls, pigeons, magpies and ducks, are all present in these poems. The fact that birds appear in both poems about the mother and about the child further emphasizes this doubling, this blurring of the threesome. The mother, daughter, and unborn child create a trinity, but one that is put off balance, in an earthbound sense, as the mother departs and the child enters its life.

In one of seven poems with the name “Sarah” in the title, the speaker points out, “First you had to give up the meaning of words. And then water” (24). Here, again, a doubling is suggested, as the mother loses her memory and her language, the poet/daughter is faced with the challenge of creating a language that will express this loss. For the poet, giving up language is as life-taking as giving up water; without either there is the sense of being bereft of all that nurtures and helps us to survive. By contrast the fetus survives in water and is a constant companion to the mother’s words even though they lack meaning at this point. Sound is important to the unborn baby in the same way that sound seems to carry these poems beyond meaning to a place where rhythm and rhyme provide the emotion:

Every boy with a stick, every ache of the pen, every fool’s me. The split or slit of me’s unseared, unsutured. This being’s strut rests not. Veil of rain in the leaves again. Tangle of future untried, untied. To gain my ruse, my reason, my route. Gnast’s a spark, a bit of coming, a flit or flash in the foot of it.

This is less about what the poem is saying and more about the tone: the feel of saying these hard sounds, their ability to pile up, to hold the speaker’s anger, her exhaustion, and her inability to make sense of the senseless. This is a hard book to read not only because the emotions are painful and raw, but because of the sonic density of the poems. Lines like: “Since I lost her I stored her like ore in my form as if later I’d find her, restore her” (36) or “If the soul is in the body a silence/ The silence of flames that don’t sputter don’t burn out” (38); these are lines that pierce the heart. You have to put the book down to allow the sounds to swirl in your mind. You have to put the book down because you have your own losses and your own loves that you fear to lose. It takes incredible courage to share this with the world; these poems have songs to give us as human beings.

* * *

Megan Burns has a MFA from Naropa University and edits the poetry magazine, Solid Quarter (solidquarter.blogspot.com). She has been most recently published in Jacket Magazine, Callaloo, New Laurel Review, YAWP Journal, and the Big Bridge New Orleans Anthology. Her poetry and prose reviews have been published in Tarpaulin Sky, Gently Read Lit, Big Bridge, and Rain Taxi. Her book Memorial + Sight Lines was published in 2008 by Lavender Ink. She has two chapbooks, Frida Kahlo: I am the poem (2004) and Framing a Song (2010) from Trembling Pillow Press. She lives in New Orleans where she and her husband, poet Dave Brinks, run the weekly 17 Poets! reading series (www.17poets.com).

Aaron Belz's Lovely, Raspberry reviewed by Joseph Harrington

noreply@blogger.com (Tarpaulin Sky Reviews) — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 14:31:00 +0000

Aaron Belz
Lovely, Raspberry: Poems

ISBN 978-0-89255-359-4
Persea Books, 2010
80 pages, pbk.
$15

Reviewed by Joseph Harrington

“You expect me to tell you about the interior of the room/ in which I’m typing this, and connect that to my feelings,” begins Aaron Belz’ second full-length poetry collection, Lovely, Raspberry. Readers of his first book (The Bird Hoverer) needn’t be told that he won’t make that facile connection. Like some of the poems in that volume, this one proceeds to elaborately eviscerate contemporary “mainstream” poetry, with its predictable rhetorical moves and taken-for-granted subjectivity. At the same time, it dives into one of Belz’ major concerns: the ultimate impossibility of easy connections – whether between lovers, reader and writer, word and referent, subject and self. “Lets put our heads together/ and try to think up a third room unknown to either of us” – this book is that room. But by the same token, You can’t connect with I: “I cannot even begin to do it, for I am a ranch boy/ and not even a very good one; I live in El Bandito, Texas.” Like the other poems in Lovely, Raspberry, “Direction” takes a detour down the rabbit hole, to a place weird, hilarious, and utterly unexpected – even by the writer, one infers.

In “Skee Ball,” he admits that “[i]t’s true that I am experienced in the ways of freeform thought . . . I practice stream of consciousness in a professional way . . . and often enjoy observing the way other people’s minds move about unhindered by reason.” Skee balls or screw balls: Belz can toss them in rapid succession. His signature wacky humor owes as much to the Ernie Kovaks as to the New York School: there is parody of the high-fallutin elegiac poetic voice, but there is also wit, as in “Thirty Illegal Moves in the Cloud-Shape Game”: “Potatoes/ Waves/ Ghosts/ A Rorschach blot/ Fuzz/ Clouds/ A dragon head/ Chèvre,” and so on. This is a smart gag – one based on a logical gap and linguistic slippage. I could go on to talk about legibility and representation – about the fake and the real, the funny and the serious, or (as one poem title has it) “Signal versus Noise” – but I won’t, because doing so would be out of keeping with the spirit of the thing, which is fundamentally that of dark comedy and “perspective by incongruity.” “When every word sounds cliché,/ each turn of phrase derivative,/ that’s when I turn to slapstick” – and it is a strategy that works both to enliven and to defamiliarize the writing. Many of the poems are elaborate and bizarre jokes with punch lines that are even more bizarre (have you heard “The One About the Ectoplasm and the Osetoblast”?); the joke is on the joke. This book will make you laugh a lot more than most poetry books, largely due to the poems' dark, deadpan tone and debunking bent:

My Best Wand

Of all the magic wands
I’ve bought over the years,
only the steel one
with the sharp tip
really works – you point it
into someone and say
ABRACADABRA
and the person magically
becomes wounded.

The pieces in Lovely, Raspberry sound like dream narratives, chance operations, homophonic translations, jabberwockery, Beckett dialogue, logical syllogisms gone awry, or horrifying kids’ poetry. But then this is the speaking subject who, when “[t]illing Charles Reznikoff’s back yard/ brought up a dozen lions and several patches/ of wildebeest hearts.” Only Belz could find such playful imaginative richness in the backyard of the great Objectivist, and he doesn’t even need to cut-and-paste Google search results to do it. Sometimes that richness takes the form of verbal riffs for their own sake:

The heat-soaked hexes from Mexico
rowed north in boats. The white
Texan vixens came sailing in too, on brooms.
The place was full of hicks in tuxes.

Brad, that’s enough. Play it somewhere else.

OK – but Aaron, please don’t. This fanciful, rick-a-tick-tunk hullabaloo is just the antidote for capital P Poetry. There is indeed some subtle rhyme and meter in here, but just enough to make you do a double-take. Indeed, stanzas in the same poem sometimes don’t seem to have much connection to one another, beyond variations-on-a-theme – which is enjoyable, if you can take your reasonable hands off the verbal steering wheel for a bit. “Do not express yourself mildly: do it wildly.” Lovely, Raspberry does it.

* * *

Joseph Harrington is the author of Things Come On: an amneoir (Wesleyan University Press 2011), Poetry and the Public (Wesleyan 2002), and the chapbook earth day suite (Beard of Bees, forthcoming). His creative work also has appeared in Hotel Amerika, The Collagist, Otoliths, Fact-Simile, and P-Queue, amongst others. He teaches at the University of Kansas in Lawrence.

John Dermot Woods's The Complete Collection of people, places and things reviewed by Lindsey Drager

noreply@blogger.com (Tarpaulin Sky Reviews) — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 14:56:00 +0000

John Dermot Woods
The Complete Collection of people, places and things
BlazeVOX, 2009. 178 pp, pbk.
$16

Reviewed by Lindsey Drager

John Dermot Woods’s epigraph to The Complete Collection of people, places and things comes from Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. It reads:

By remembering it I have been able to understand many people and things that I was never able to understand before.

While the obvious allusions to Anderson’s book don’t reach far beyond the opening chapter, it is difficult to ignore the gaping ambiguity in this sentence; that is, there is no referent for “it”. It can be argued that opening a book as such is a risky move, but here it seems more an experiment in the cannon as archive. In other words, you have to look it up.

Anderson’s quote surfaces in the first chapter of Winesburg, in a section entitled “The Book of the Grotesques”. In it, an elderly writer composes the book in response to “a dream that was not a dream” in which “all of the men and women the writer had ever known had become grotesques”(Anderson, 24). The “it” of Woods’s epigraph refers to the narrator’s summary of this writer’s book which he recalls as such:

In the beginning when the world was young there were a great many thoughts but no such thing as a truth. Man made the truths himself and each truth was a composite of a great many vague thoughts. All about in the world were the truths and they were all beautiful. (Anderson, 25)

There is no better introduction to Woods’s The Complete Collection of people, places and things, which can be read as a modern day reimagining of “The Book of Grotesques”. Woods’s novel is a practice in the art of defamiliarization, outlining a world that is only vaguely recognizable, in which the existence of water has not yet been proven and sleep is induced through force; “a place where people ended up remembering, when all they wanted to do was regret” (pg.100). The book functions as both ethnography of our-world-estranged as well as instructions for navigating it, centered on characters named Glo-worm, Voltron, Punky Brewster, Danger Mouse, Rainbow Brite, and Optimus Prime who are embarrassed to admit in public they haven’t used game cartridges and protect their party favors and switchboards with as much fervor as their pride. The attempt here is catalogue, as it is the concision of each tale that defines the person’s role not as an individual, but in accordance with or opposition to, others. It is in this way that the story revolves rather than progresses linearly, arguing along with Anderson that history is both fractured and circuitous.

Though the “people” and “places” are effectively rendered here, it is the “things” that are particularly alien and therefore steal the spotlight of this book; manuals, chopsticks and Velcro all adopt a value that is both deeply personal and—or maybe therefore—profoundly political when the behavior associated with such tools is deemed improper.

In fact, this is a world that functions because of law, though perhaps corrupt and certainly alien and Woods’s tone and register support this. For example, consider this case study in Velcro:

It was something that touched people where it meant the most. People cherished their Velcro when they were alone—or sometimes with their immediate families. Velcro was solemn; it was usually found in kitchens. For years, people had been doubting if real innovation was possible; Velcro seemed so fully realized. It was admitted that change might come—but acknowledged only in whispers—between thundering knocks on wood and the grating dirge of the head side of a one-bit coin scraping against the tailside of another. People like their Velcro exactly the way it was; they just didn’t trust that is would stay that way. (pg.79)

Reflective of the comic melancholy that permeates the book, this description of what in our world might be a merely pragmatic tool heightens Woods’ project to a performance of high burlesque. Such is also the case with kiosks and stilts, both of which are rendered through the simple language and distant tenor characteristic of a guidebook or instruction manual and are presented as items to be lauded.

The degree to which Woods’ Collection is “complete” is a point worth discussing as the commitment to succinctness and brevity suggests we learn about these characters, spaces and objects through what could be deemed profile. This argument is supported by the truly stunning illustrations that accompany each of these thirty-two 500-700 word “stories”, as each profile becomes both literally and figuratively a character sketch.

In an age in which the meaning of “profile” has been intimately linked with the ethically complex task of self-representation, it is easy to forget the word’s literal definition; an outline, or: a drawing within the frame of one dimension. In other words, the profile stands antithetical to completeness, as it is the very lack of total knowledge that defines it.

Yet the narrator claims that the collection is not “just a recounting, or some sort of a Manual; it was complete” (pg. 4). The question raised is what to do with past: how to keep it; how to keep it safe; who should care and/or care for it.

The Complete Collection reminds us that it is fiction that transcends the dichotomy of profile and complete tale, as it is discrimination in presenting the events of a characters’ life on the page that constitutes story; this is, in fact what designates the map from the territory. In the realm of story, the world is only what it is on the page. Woods’ book simultaneously critiques and embraces the very storiness of history, an edifice we tend to confuse with The Truth. It is this thin volume, an artifact that is itself referenced in the beginning of the tale, that is the complete life of this world, and in the end, to echo Anderson, all the truths are beautiful.

In the introduction entitled “A Village Beyond Approach” (the play on words here stands as joke initially, but bears thematic meaning as the section concludes, as does most of Woods’ humor throughout the book), the question of a full and accurate depiction of history through the medium of text is addressed eloquently in a discussion the narrator overhears between a young man and the town’s scribe:

The collector admitted that there were times his pen lost the shape of the world he intended to craft. He was once part of a league (he thinks it was organized by the local Policemen’s Benevolent Association). It was a whole collection of collectors who pooled their efforts. They compared, contrasted, refined and traded their doubles. But, over the years, trends kept changing, and, as such, the process of transcribing history became more taxing. Most of his compatriots found more ephemeral subjects to collect and quickly discard. When he was left alone, his words faltered and he fell silent. (pg. 3)

In an effort to fulfill his former commitment in recording the world, the scribe produces The Complete Collection by means of (not insignificantly) erasable pen. But, and importantly, it is the narrator’s recalling of the collector’s text that we as readers are provided. This triple removal further underscores Woods’ commentary on the meaning of making; that the collector’s belief in reaching a singular history and accurately recording such is a myth that escapes him implies our sympathy should lie with the collector.

But it is with the people, places and things that I share sympathy, as their history is a history particularly—and perhaps cruelly—not their own. In a moving metaphor in the penultimate chapter Woods gathers his cast under a tent. “It might have been an awe-inspiring sight,” the nameless narrator tells us, and we know what is coming next because we are these people, places and things, yet the line devastates; “but there was no one outside to witness it” (pg. 174).

_________________
Anderson, Sherwood. Winesburg, Ohio. Viking Press, 1960.

* * *

Lindsey Drager is an MFA candidate at the University of Illinois where she teaches creative writing and holds a graduate assistantship with Dalkey Archive Press. She has work published or forthcoming in Artifice Magazine, PANK, Dislocate, Redivider and elsewhere on the web.

Joseph Massey’s Areas of Fog reviewed by Elizabeth Moore

noreply@blogger.com (Tarpaulin Sky Reviews) — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 12:34:00 +0000

Joseph Massey
Areas of Fog
Shearsman Books, 2009
ISBN: 9781848610521
Paperback, 116 pages
$16.00

Reviewed by Elizabeth Moore

At first glance, Joseph Massey’s Areas of Fog appears tediously Minimalistic, and indeed, with his affinity for brevity, Massey risks accusations of pretentious purism. But linger on Massey’s poetry and the suspicion proves vastly misconceived. Far from supercilious, Massey seems almost humbled, struck by the unassuming beauty of ordinariness. Whereas other Minimalists exert control through perfected precision, Massey uses concision to allow space for thought. Massey, who quotes Clark Coolidge’s idea that “[t]he line is an assemblage of broken smaller pieces,” follows in form. Divided into five parts, the book threads together impressionistic observations and subtle commentary – a fluid merging of shadowy existence and vibrant life. Massey drifts with focused intensity, and readers hover on the edge as witnesses to a quiet confrontation with the world.

The poems are perhaps best described as linguistic place constructions. Sparsely but meticulously crafted, they evoke the essence of Humboldt County, California, where Massey lives and works. Massey captures the county not only through subject matter but also through careful attention to structural form. “Empty” space becomes active space in that it plays a primary role in creating atmosphere. Not only does it allow for a wandering, unpressured reading of the poems, but it also reflects the openness of the county. It also complements the poems’ fragmentation, a characteristic founded on Massey’s skeletal diction and reinforced by his meditated enjambments. Massey’s pauses force readers to slow their pace. At first the spaces make for labored reading, but eventually they create an entrancingly hypnotic rhythm. Readers feel that they are there beside Massey, or perhaps floating in a soothing sensation of dejà vu.

And this is the effect of the book – that although the poems recall Humboldt County, they also remind readers of their hometowns, wherever they may be. Thematically, the poems are simple and approachable. The clipped lawns, stained coffee cups, and pockets of light could be anywhere. The poems easily slip into readers’ memories just as if they reflected readers’ own experiences – because they could be, or maybe they are. “[H]ere, the one speaking/& the one/ listening, is you,” Massey writes in “Bramble.” Readers and writer share a common voice.

Massey’s recognition of elegance in simplicity gives the book its charm. His book highlights the world as a quiet marvel where existing beauty is regrettably overlooked. Even the commonplace and the ugly become poetic: a television’s light shines mysteriously over the grass; weeds sway rhythmically in a cinder block; a spider web sags gracefully under the weight of a receipt. Already assigned significance through the sheer act of having been extracted from the jumble of the world, they also gain impact through form. Massey’s master craftsmanship reveals itself in his use of space, which he employs to force lingering concentration, even, at times, dividing words and stretching them to multiple lines. In “Bramble: A Gathering of Lunes,” for instance, he highlights the rare laziness of a bee, emphasizing the odd sleepiness of the moment with careful enjambment:

                    yellow-striped bumble-
     bee bends slow-
                    ly into sunlight

Massey often uses haiku-like forms, and appropriately, he pays particular attention to sensory perception. He explores the world as actively alive: “A neighbor’s/voice (is)/strained to a/thin thump,” a honeysuckle scent recalls “an open vowel,” a “tree/stammers/through fog.” Sensory stimulation transforms the normally distasteful to something surprisingly beautiful. In ¨Property Line,¨ for example, Massey describes the musicality of street litter, writing that ¨Glass/crushed/by a garbage/truck/cracks the/room’s/silence in/half.¨ Massey reprocesses and reevaluates the world, and readers can delight in his recognition of undiscovered splendor.

Massey’s magnifying of detail hints at latent meaning in a world readers thought they knew. Gradually, it emerges that Massey observes the world not for pure enjoyment but in an attempt to better understand how one experiences life. He seems to feel an incompleteness, and it’s as if his enlargement of detail reflects an aching need to find answers by reexamining what he formerly overlooked. He seems particularly puzzled by what is versus what could be. In “Property Line,” he admits to unfulfilled hope in the aid of words in comprehending the world. Either he loses what small grasp he had, as when he writes, “what words I/wrote with/dissolve,” or he remains trapped within self-construction: “Words occur to gather/a world–/not the world.”

The themes of perception and reality also extend to memory. Memory seems fleeting and fundamental, sometimes “stifled/by the day’s/lapse,” as in “Pulse,” other times caught “skid(ding) across/daylight’s/edges,” as in “Without a Field Guide.” Massey recognizes the temptation of the ideal, referring in “Reading,” for example, to “a world/behind the glass,/within whose/insistence/we drift, forget.” Indeed, many of his poems recall an episodic memory in which he remembers without the burden of analysis. And yet Massey also hints at a darker memory, a memory frustrated by confusion and unpermitted denial. A muddling of identity often results. The bewilderment following mistaken identity that Massey expresses in “Greyhound, North Through Sonoma County,” where “a mirror of –/(his) face/supplants/the landscape,” later returns prominently and drives the section “Out of Light.” There the speaker mistakes branches for fingers and watches as light patterns change shape across skin. Emptiness and nothingness overwhelm the poems. “Is there anything here/to say we’re anywhere/at all?” Massey writes in “Plein Air.” Just as the speaker in “Clyfford Still” “walks (himself) wordless,” so does Massey use his poems to dissolve into the unknown what he had previously clarified in precise detail. Objects disband into abstract shapes and silence absorbs voices, leaving “a stilted vacancy.” In his apparently fruitless struggle for comprehension, Massey seeps into “areas of fog.” Gone is the comforting clarity of the opening poems. “Here at the/margins,” he writes, “it’s all said/illegibly.”

And yet readers feel otherwise. Indeed, the book’s effect stems from Massey’s exposure of the margins, a poetic exploration that pushes beyond literal diction and evokes feeling. At the margins, Massey can meander through a world too complex to be received all at once. While meaning may not always be immediately comprehensible, it’s there. That there’s often no apparent resolution matters little. It’s enough for readers to revel in this re-presentation of the world. Readers sense that they’re on the brink of something quietly momentous. The book’s lasting impact comes from Massey’s indulgence in extant possibility: Brilliance can stem from anything – something ordinary, or extraordinary, or both.

* * *

Elizabeth Moore is currently working on a series of short stories that capture how communication affects the experience of place. She is from San Francisco.

Feminaissance reviewed by Megan Milks

noreply@blogger.com (Tarpaulin Sky Reviews) — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 12:40:00 +0000

Feminaissance
Edited by Christine Wertheim

Poetry | Prose | Essays | $20
ISBN 13: 978-1-934254-17-2
Size: 6“x9”, 132 pages, pbk.
Les Figues Press
Contributors: Dodie Bellamy, Caroline Bergvall, Meiling Cheng, Wanda Coleman, Bhanu Kapil, Chris Kraus, Susan McCabe, Tracie Morris, Eileen Myles, Maggie Nelson, Juliana Spahr, Vanessa Place Christine Wertheim, Stephanie Young, and Lidia Yuknavitch.

Reviewed by Megan Milks

“Another anthology of experimental women’s writing!” Feminaissance opens with both jubilant announcement and weary defense. While editor Christine Wertheim’s choice of exclamation point over question mark or interrobang might slightly privilege the jubilance over the fatigue, her dedication is equal parts celebration and justification of the collection of texts it precedes. Wertheim insists, in dedicating the anthology to “all of the-M-others everywhere,” that despite historical strides in our understanding of gender (and other identity categories) and power, the Others “still don’t have their share of discursive space” (vii). It is on these grounds, Wertheim suggests, that an all-women’s anthology, a collection of what Dodie Bellamy calls “tiny revolts,” is justified.

As Wertheim and publishers Teresa Carmody and Vanesa Place explain further in their foreword, this justification requires enunciation in the context of recent conversations in the literary press purporting the obviation of women’s poetry anthologies. Feminaissance necessarily begins on the defensive, countering those who would spurn such a project and the (always already bad bad) essentialism it presumably relies upon. Wertheim addresses and opposes the malignancies attached to essentialism in her eloquent introductory essay, which makes a case for socio-historical essentialism while placing the anthology in the context of a “more ambiguous, more refined notion of gender” and a dynamic and unstable feminist politics.

From here, the book’s pages are divided into three parallel sections that represent visually the complexity of the anthology’s discussion of gender and writing. A thin banner, two lines deep, runs across the top of the book, reproducing Juliana Spahr’s and Stephanie Young’s essay “Numbers Trouble,” which interrogates claims that representative equality has been reached in contemporary anthologies. The second and third strands of the book present, as the editor and publishers put it, a “plurality of voices” that demonstrate the diversity of approach and content of women’s experimental writing. With Spahr’s and Young’s paper providing a kind of inverse anchor to the other texts, the anthology simultaneously recognizes the importance of the numbers game while departing from it to attend to other issues pertaining to gender, writing, and feminism.

These texts, which originated in papers and readings given at the Feminaissance conference held by Cal Arts in 2007, are occasionally academic, occasionally theoretical, often personal, often performative, often out of or between and across genres, often addressing féminine écriture with or without Hélène Cixous, frequently concerned with sex, sexuality, and the body, sometimes approaching space and time, transposition, utopia, a/the social imaginary, always exciting, often surprising, occasionally familiar but more often strange, wonderfully.

A sampling: Maggie Nelson reads Sylvia Plath and Alice Notley as poets who in their embrace of the antisocial bring out transformative psychological change. Bhanu Kapil addresses monstrosity, mobility, transposition, continuity, hybridity, and the quest to get to an experience of desire: “an ‘unseen but recorded’ experience of desire…desire in its vestigial state” (84). Eileen Myles theorizes gender in language as productive of gender in the world, calling her writing a “utopian gendered imaginary” that anticipates a coming actuality (105). Meiling Cheng returns to Cixous, putting her notions of writing the body into a framework of change and transformation, of beginning and beginning again. Vanessa Place & Carolyn K. Place’s “The First Gurgitation is a Sentence” performs with intratextual enjambment a mad linguistic body lurching to contrasting rhythms. Lidia Yuknavitch’s “psalm,” divided into fragments, punctuates the texts it separates to provide a kind of meditative space.

Interested more in curation than in representation but necessarily engaging with both, Feminaissance is, as Wertheim writes, “less a demonstration that women can do the same avant-garde, experimental, innovative and conceptual works as men….[as] it is a display of the many different avant-garde, experimental, innovative and conceptual modes that women themselves conceive” (vii). If these texts are bodily, if they are ‘feminine,’ as a collection they both insist upon and radically complicate essentialism and gender as categories of analysis and literary production. Moreover, as a community of texts, Feminaissance claims a belonging to a genealogy of women’s experimental writing that it recognizes as being as necessary as it is polymorphous.

* * *

Megan Milks lives in Chicago. Her work has appeared in Western Humanities Review, Everyday Genius, and Pocket Myths, among other journals. She co-edits Mildred Pierce Magazine and co-hosts Uncalled-for Readings Chicago. She blogs at montevidayo.com.

On Kristen Nelson’s and Noah Saterstrom’s "Ghosty" (Drunken Boat, 2010)

noreply@blogger.com (Tarpaulin Sky Reviews) — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 15:54:00 +0000

The Fictions of Memory ( / Loss), "Getting It Right," and I-Forget-What-Else¹

By Christian Peet

We pack the physical outline of the creature with all the ideas we already formed about him, and in the complete picture of him that we compose in our minds those ideas have certainly the principal place. In the end they come to fill out so completely the curve of his cheeks, to follow so exactly the line of his nose, they blend so harmoniously in the sound of his voice that these seem to be no more than a transparent envelope, so that each time we see the face or hear the voice it is our own ideas of him which we recognize and to which we listen.

--Proust, Swann's Way. Translator unknown; quoted in Donald S. Spence's Narrative Truth and Historical Truth: Meaning and Interpretation in Psychoanalysis (W.W. Norton, 1982).

A few weeks ago, the online magazine Drunken Boat published a collaboration between Kristen Nelson and Noah Saterstrom², entitled "Ghosty." Noah's drawings accompany Kristen's spare but moving account of the death of the narrator's father, with whom she had a conflicted, troubled relationship. While the story suggests that her father's remains will likely end up as ashes, what "remains" for the narrator is a host of unanswered (and perhaps unanswerable) questions, and an inability to articulate even the simplest of responses to a question about what sort of life he had lived--though, she says, "an unspoken answer fills up my mouth. It gets bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger."

Accompanying this passage is one of my favorite drawings in the series, depicting a ghost that has ballooned in size so that it not only fills the house it inhabits, but fills it to bursting. The sheathing is gone from the walls of the house, leaving only a gabled roof and the stick frame of two-by-fours.

I can't help but wonder if, regardless of the ghost's overwhelming size--or, perhaps, because of it--the ghost is invisible to the inhabitants of the house. Rather than standing in a doorway or at the foot of a bed, for example, as a "normal" ghost might, the ghost is so large as to contain the whole of the house's livable space. In a sense, the ghost has swallowed the inhabitants. In any case, to live inside the house means necessarily living inside the ghost. Or, to mix metaphors: rather than the proverbial "elephant in the room" (i.e., the thing that everyone is thinking about but no one will discuss), here the elephant is the room.

An old writing-workshop adage also comes to mind: "You have to have some distance from your subject in order to write about it”--a theory that is helpful in examining why, for instance, poems written in the throes of a high-school breakup don't quite translate in "great literature," that sort of thing. But the theory also recalls, for me, Maslow's "hierarchy of needs," inasmuch as it implies that one is not in the position of relative safety necessary to create art, to render a subject "artfully," when the subject is actively traumatizing the artist.

This theory of necessary authorial/artistic distance, however, also implies that, someday, the writer/artist will "look back" with some new clarity and perspective etc., which in turn implies that the event at which we "look back" is a fixed point in time--unlike us, whose lives have continued; we who remain, we who are present, we who are reading this; We, the Living, upon whom poet Robert Pinsky once bestowed the title, "the unfallen lords of life."

And yet, drawing on a bit of insider knowledge--not fair, I know--I can’t help but think: The narrator of “Ghosty” is not so unlike the author, whose own father passed away just months ago. I can’t help but think, Dang, Kristen. Good work. And I can’t help but think: Maybe an author doesn’t necessarily have to wait, doesn’t necessarily need distance.

The operative word being "necessarily," of course; we each have our own routes, processes, requirements for our art. Some write with a kid on their lap, others need a room of their own, etc. Some write at work, others wait until they are home. Some live in vans down by the river. Some, like myself, apparently, require years, while others, like Kristen, are able not only to live through this (to quote Hole), but are also able to create through this.

I think what appeals to me about creating work during acute pain is this thought: Do it now, even while you’re hurting, in case the pain just flat-out fucking kills you in the future.

Besides, the pain may go away but the literal and metaphorical scars will not. One way or another, we will always be reminded of this time, this loss, this pain. “This” is never going anywhere. “This” is our life. We live inside it. We can never have any “distance.” We’ll never “get it right.”

This essay, for example, uses a lot of italics and words in quotations, and doesn't always do it well, but, just for today--as they say in AA--I couldn't care less. Also, look at this picture:

What could be more wrong than that picture? And in the context of "Ghosty," the picture and the stuffed unicorn to which it refers, are simply heartbreaking. So much so, I wanted to laugh. I wanted to laugh and laugh and laugh to stave off all the terrible, terrible tears.

Moreover, even if we did "get it right," today, we’ll never remember it the same way. I’m acutely aware of this, as I’ve been reading a rather brutal amount of books and research on the topic of memory, particularly where memory intersects with “unpleasant” experiences, from the merely unappealing to the horrific and traumatic.³ Though the books focus on a variety of things in relation to memory, all of them, in one way or another, evidence the importance of “narrative” in “making meaning” of what we tend to think of as the “facts” of our lives: our memories. And though we like to think of our memories as static, like the events to which they refer, our memories are constructed anew every time we attempt to recall them. Thus, anything we write today will be different from what we write tomorrow about the same event.

So I ask myself today, after reading and thinking about “Ghosty”: Why not just write all along the way? And I respond: Good idea, Christian. You have nothing to lose and at least one thing to gain: your present construction of this memory. Your own narrative. Your own fiction. After all, we were discussing fiction, right? Or was it nonfiction? I forget. Good thing I wrote it down! Let me check. . . .

Maybe this confusion, this malleability, is why Noah literally drew frames around each of the the images in “Ghosty.” Rather than seeing visual representations of scenes or ideas discussed by the narrator, maybe we are seeing snapshots, portraits, family photos taken of those scenes. Or maybe the narrator is trying, against the odds, to place some sort of frame around these scenes, to create a snapshot-memory.

I don’t know if the narrator has succeeded in this attempt. But I know that Kristen and Noah have succeeded. The ghost may keep shifting, growing, changing over time, but “Ghosty” is now fixed, a series of snapshots in a larger album, snapshots that leave out whole persons, include only the elbow of another, but will be appreciated in the future for having "captured" dress and hairstyles as much as for having "captured" the intended subjects. The work itself, “Ghosty,” by virtue of existing, is now part of the larger narrative of the ghost. The ghost that is our life. Our life that is, somewhere in time, already someone else’s memory. Or so we hope, taking our snapshots along the way. . . .

____________________

¹ Not really a review, since Christian does not write real reviews. TSky's Reviews Editor is on leave, however, and Christian has unfettered access to the reviews blog and can post reviews-that-are-not-really-reviews all he wants.

² Full disclosure: Kristen and Noah are Christian's friends. See footnote #1 + Christian's not trying to sell you anything: "Ghosty" is free to anyone with an internet connection.

³ Elizabeth Loftus and Katherine Ketcham, The Myth of Repressed Memory (St. Martins Press, 1996); Paul McHugh, Try to Remember: Psychiatry's Clash Over Meaning, Memory, and Mind (Dana Press, 2008); Richard Ofshe and Ethan Watters, Making Monsters: False Memories, Psychotherapy, and Sexual Hysteria (University of California Press); Donald Spence, Narrative Truth and Historical Truth: Meaning and Interpretation in Psychoanalysis (W. W. Norton, 1984)