Group Pen B.A. Book Reviews and The Type and Byte Review

The Timbre of Sand

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Page) — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 08:01:00 +0000

by Stephen Page

A Gorrión Press Book

The Timbre of Sand

“In these poems Stephen Page finds rich metaphors to celebrate the varieties and topographies of love. The poet chooses to make the sonnet form contemporary and succeeds in creating a powerful and distinctive music. One leaves the work remembering subtle images of lovers voyaging, crossing Patagonia, visiting Maine, dreaming in Samburu, ‘rejoicing under Kilimanjaro,’ or calm in an ‘envelope of stars.’ Keats-like in the sensuous attention to language and its cadences, The Timbre of Sand adds to our consciousness of the world and nourishes us in the process. With his first book, Page makes an impressive debut that deserves an enthusiastic audience.”

----Colette Inez

Author of Clemency

Reviewed by Sandra Valez

A messiah of poety has arrived.

Reviewed by Monica Sells

The most extraordinary book of contemporary sonnets I have ever read.

Reviewed by Andrea Gabai

Undoubtedly the best book of poems I have ever read. Multi-layered like a sweet onion, every time I partake of a poem, it reveals new meaning. Stephen Page is obviously brilliant as he is sensitive.

Reviewed by John Stauss

Awesome! Unbelievable skills, this new bard. An outsanding first book. Stephen's poems echo in the mind hours after reading. A must buy for weekend readers as well as literary connoisseurs. A nightstand staple.
Edition reviewed: [Paperback | Gorion Press]

Buy the book The Timbre of Sand on Amazon

Matterhorn

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Page) — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 19:08:00 +0000

by Karl Malantes

This book is an outstanding read. Find it. Read it.

Intense, powerful, and compelling, Matterhorn is an epic war novel in the tradition of Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and James Jones’s The Thin Red Line. It is the timeless story of a young Marine lieutenant, Waino Mellas, and his comrades in Bravo Company, who are dropped into the mountain jungle of Vietnam as boys and forced to fight their way into manhood. Standing in their way are not merely the North Vietnamese but also monsoon rain and mud, leeches and tigers, disease and malnutrition. Almost as daunting, it turns out, are the obstacles they discover between each other: racial tension, competing ambitions, and duplicitous superior officers. But when the company finds itself surrounded and outnumbered by a massive enemy regiment, the Marines are thrust into the raw and all-consuming terror of combat. The experience will change them forever.

Written by a highly decorated Marine veteran over the course of thirty years,Matterhorn is a spellbinding and unforgettable novel that brings to life an entire world—both its horrors and its thrills—and seems destined to become a classic of combat literature.

this review from Amazon

The Oscars

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Page) — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 08:53:00 +0000

My choices for some of the awards are: best film (Moneyball), best director (Bennett Miller), best actor in a leading role (Brad Pitt), best actor in a supporting role (Jonah Hill or Philip Seymour Hoffman), best actress in a supporting role (Kerris Dorsey), and best adapted screenplay (Steven Zaillian, Aaron Sorkin, and Stan Chervin from the book by Michael Lewis).

Writing About the Morning Muse

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Page) — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 11:01:00 +0000

Morning Poems
by Robert Bly
Harper Perennial
reviewed by Stephen Page

I haven’t read Robert Bly in over a decade, but now I remember what I felt the first time I read him. I felt awe. I still do. Bly’s talent is something every writer could aspire to, and every reader worship. His "Morning Poems" is aptly titled, as it is just that, poems written in the morning—every morning. It is hard enough for a writer to keep the discipline of writing daily, let alone writing a poem daily, but that is exactly what Bly did. In honor of his friend William Stafford he wrote a new poem every day upon wakening. His morning musings cover many topics: childhood, parenthood, existence, religion, love, aging, death, and interestingly, writing.

In “What the Animals Paid” we are on a familiar scene for Bly, a farm:

The Hampshire ewes standing in their wooden pens,
Their shiny black hooves close to each other,

Had to pay with their wool, with their wombs,
With their eating, with their fear of the dogs.

Every animal had to pay. Horses paid all day;
They pulled stone boats and the ground pulled back.

And the pigs? They paid with their squealing
When the knife entered the throat and the blood

Followed it out. The blood, streaming and personal,
Paid it. Any debt left over the intestines paid.

“I am what I am.” The pig could not say that.
The women paid with their bowed heads, and the
men,

My father among them, paid with their drinking.
Demons shouted: pay to the last drop!” I paid

The debt another way. Because I did not pay
In the farm way, I am writing this poem today.

Life (on a farm) is hard. Everyone and everything pays something for the privilege of existence. They pay with blood, muscle strain, despair, or self destructiveness. Writers have the benefit of catharsis, as well as using their art as a toll fee. When you read this poem you probably think that the ground can’t actually pull back, but this is a typical Bly technique, surrealism in deep imagism, and it works. The visual is there and imagination allows possibility.

Then we come to the poem, “For Ruth,”

There’s a graceful way of doing things. Birch branches
Curve slightly upward; on the wind brings a few
Snow flakes down, and then joins the night;
Or you leave me a sprig of chervil and no more.

Each morning we have this new chance. We can walk
A few steps behind the others down the mountain;
We can enter a conversation as if we were blessed,
Not insisting on our old way of gaining pity.

There’s a way you have of knowing what another
May need ahead of time, before the party
Begins, as smoke sometimes disappears
Downward among branches. And I’ve learned

From you this new way of letting a poem be.

This is a love poem, or more aptly put, a respect poem. Bly gives the gift of the poem to Ruth for all the things that she is, and for the things she has given him—learning a new way to make a poem, to end a poem, to let the poem (and himself) exist.

In “Two Ways to Write Poems,” we are drawn to two things that plague most poets’ lives:

“I am who I am.” I wonder what one has to pay
To say that. I couldn’t do it. For years
I thought, “You are who you are.” But maybe
You weren’t. Maybe you were someone else.

Sam’s friend, who loved poetry, played football
In school even though he didn’t want to.
He got hit. Later he said to me, “I write poems.
I am who I am . . . but my neck hurts.”

How many times I have begun a poem
Before I knew what the main sounds
Would be. We find out. Toward the end
The poem is just beginning to be who it is.

That’s all right, but there is another way as well.
One picks the rhyme words, and so the main
Sounds, before one begins. I wonder what
Yeats had to pay in order to do that.

The second stanza refers to the “other thing” that almost all poets have to do, their day job, here represented as the other things young poets (or aspiring poets) have to do, go to school and join clubs and teams that parents make them join. The last two stanzas refer to poetics. Bly believes the best way is just to let the poem create the assonance and alliteration and rhyme as it is being created, or ‘being’ itself. For Bly, overly structured old-fashioned poetry is too difficult to create, unnatural, and too trying on the soul.

Lastly, we have the poem, “Bad People”:

A man told me once that all the bad people
Were needed. Maybe not all, but your fingernails
You need; they are really claws, and we know
Claws. The sharks--what about them?
They make other fish swim faster. The hard-faced men
In black coats who chase you for hours
In dreams--that's the only way to get you
To the shore. Sometimes those hard women
Who abandon you get you to say, "You."
A lazy part of us is like a tumbleweed.
It doesn't move on its own. It takes sometimes
A lot of Depression to get tumbleweeds moving.
Then they blow across three or four States.
This man told me that things work together.
Bad handwriting sometimes leads to new ideas;
And a careless God--who refuses to let you
Eat from the Tree of Knowledge--can lead
To books, and eventually to us. We write
Poems with lies in them, but they help a little.

Entities perceived as negative or dangerous are the reason positive entities exist. Without the sour we would not appreciate the sweet. We as people have violent animalistic tendencies, but sometimes that is what we need for self-defense and thus survival. Predatory animals weed out the weak and force the mediocre to become strong. Our nemeses allow us to overcome our fears and succeed in life. By not having everything given or explained to us we become doers and thinkers. White lies, especially in literature, give people hope.

Other poems that call attention to the author as writer are, “A Week of Poems at Bennington,” and “Waiting for more Applause at a Conference.” And then there are poems that I did not include in this essay because they do not fit the thesis, but because of their merit, I shall mention them anyway: “Conversations With the Soul,” “The Man Who Didn’t Know What Was His,” “The Russian,” “My Doubts on Gong to Visit a New Friend,” and “A Conversation With a Mouse,” are just a few that deserve to be labeled “great.”

One cannot ignore the theme of existence-contemplation that threads through Morning Poems, and Bly justifies his existence as writer. Most writers would steer clear of calling attention to the fact that they are writing the piece. Many would consider it taboo. Self-indulgent. Ego-stroking. Not Bly. During his career he has broken almost every rule there is to writing and he has gotten away with it because of his writerly talent. He is the polemic god of contemporary poetry, and is certainly destined to become the United States Poet Laureate. I write this essay in honor of him.

This review first published in the Buenos Aires Herald.

Good Day, Mr. MLK

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Page) — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 09:00:00 +0000

a hawk glides by--

his spirit lives here

this mortal dwelling

by Stephen Page from the chapbook "Still Dandelions."

The Chopstick Murders

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Page) — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 10:24:00 +0000

a short story by Sanaë Lemoine

My mother called me the other day while I was washing dishes. She asked me about the chopstick murders. There haven’t been any this month, I said, but we’ll see in December. These things come and go. She seemed rather satisfied with my answer and quickly ended the conversation. I’m late for my swimming lesson, she said.

The murders started at the end of the summer during the high season. The inn was full with guests and my husband was up at five in the morning to clean the bathrooms. The last stragglers of the night crawled to bed at that hour, and I would step over their weak limbs on my way to the kitchen. There were just three murders on the first day, the twenty-seventh of August, and then as the weeks went on, the deaths accumulated. By October we had hired a second gardener to dig graves. I established a good relationship with the town at the bottom of the mountain and the mayor helped me with small matters such as making sure the bodies were correctly incinerated. In the evening I strolled through the makeshift cemetery, dipping in and out of the small houses we had built. I counted the leftover urns, still resting unpacked in boxes.

My husband feeds the bears in the morning. We keep them in a bamboo cage by the baths. They look like big black dogs but mostly they stay quiet, drowsing in the afternoon sun.

The guests still come en masse despite the murders. They don’t seem to mind, and they ignore the few journalists that fall upon our hot springs. The curious ones prowl around the baths at sunset, but I shoo them away before dinnertime. I designed a new bathrobe for the guests this year. It has blue lotus flowers on the sleeves and reaches my ankles.

The first body I found was that of a woman. She must have been in her thirties, and there she was, unclothed, arched over a rock by the hot spring. Her feet were in the water and when I felt them they were warm. Two chopsticks jutted out of her chest and blood ran down her body drawing red lines on her white skin. From the wound I picked stray splinters. I washed her first before calling my husband.

My mother came to visit soon after and stood by the hot spring, threw open her bathrobe and yelled out: You spirits come take me away, as well! But nothing happened. I watched her rounded belly and the thinness of her thighs before she closed her bathrobe and snapped at me, So, how do we stop this? I shook my head.

There are days when I worry that my husband will be found, fallen by the baths, stripped naked and stabbed with chopsticks. Ever since the murders began we have banned chopsticks and now I only cook with forks and sharp knives. I ache for the feeling of chopsticks in my fingers. In the mornings I prepare elk stew and rice to be served with deep metal spoons.

We decided to open the inn with the hot springs after we sold our ramen restaurant. My husband wanted to leave Tokyo and I thought, why not, it would be pleasant to run an inn. There are fourteen rooms, a bar and sofas in the entrance. We built two baths with covered paths leading to the outdoor hot springs.

The murders have stopped since last month and I look out of my window through the morning mist. From here I can see the bears rattling in their cages. The knife is heavy in my hands but I continue to chop green onions. My husband goes out to feed the bears and he doesn’t return. Two hours later I pull on my rubber boots and step outside. It is cold and silent; the bathers drift in the hot springs like pale fish. I wave at them and continue down the path, calling my husband’s name. I search for the rest of the day, and by nightfall I return to the inn empty handed.

a note from Sanaë Lemoine: When I was younger, my mother and I would leave Tokyo for a few days and stay at an inn with a rotenburo (hot spring). There was one inn that kept small bears in a cage. I would pass by them every time we went to the baths, they were often sound asleep in their bamboo cages. It seemed that the little bears were once allowed to swim in the hot springs with the guests. They liked the hot water. But then a newly implemented hygiene law prevented the bears from swimming with humans. In the ryokan (Japanese inn) lunch was never served, the two important meals were breakfast and dinner. My mother says that we ate bear stew for dinner. I don’t remember the meal, but she told me it was not so good.
I wrote this story while thinking about the small bears at this Japanese inn.

Sanaë was born in France but lived in Australia for seven years. She then returned to Paris where she completed her schooling. Her mother is Japanese, and her father from Brittany, in the west of France. Sanaë graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2011 with a BA in English and a concentration in Creative Writing. She is a student at Columbia University, in her first year of the MFA program in fiction. In addition to her love for writing, Sanaë enjoys all food-related things: preparing food, eating, reading cookbooks and contributing at www.thewalkinkitchen.com.

follow Ms. Lemoine on twitter.

Living Off the Country

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Page) — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 09:33:00 +0000

By John Haines

The Universtiy of Michigan Press

Reviewed by Stephen Page

While I was reading the introduction of Living Off the Country, I thought, Oh no!, this is just another treatise by an egotistical writer filled with ego-driven philosophy; but I soon changed my mind. By page seven I knew I was reading a good book. Haines’s perception of the evolution of language is keen: “one of the consequences of having a language and a culture is that these begin to exist for themselves in place of the original things we once lived by.” Our minds manipulate language, but mostly, language is manipulated by the powers-that-be to take on meanings other than the idea or thing. “Go West young man,” or “conquer the last frontier,” are a couple of examples. The statement is also an introduction into the main theme of the book, that is, place. For Haines, place is Alaska; moreover the land, the natural world, the things in the natural world. We must get back to nature and be a part of it. This is sound advice, for the natural world is important and the human race has lost sync with it. We build cities that wall out animals, and make noise that scares away more. We give names to things so they fit our conception of the world (reminds me in a parallel sense of Bruce Chatwin's Songlines). Haines believes we must get into the “spirit of place.” Try not to let the names of things block our perception of the world nor our sense of being one with the world. And most of all, we shouldn’t allow our culture or leaders to manipulate our thoughts and feelings about things and ideas. The natural world is where the spirit of the universe can be felt best, and since people are natural beings, they should try to “be” with nature in order to “be” with themselves. All places have different characteristics, different versions of the spirit. Ss Haines goes on to say in other essays: not everyone is in love with nature, nor can he or she be in tune with it all the time, the world has progressed and changed too much for that. So a writer must be in tune with his surroundings wherever he may live. A writer’s job is to write literature that takes on place. Place must be in the writing. I also liked how he emphasized in the latter half of the essays, especially in “From the Beginning,” that writers should be concerned about concepts larger than themselves. He says that poets today lack grand ideas because they are only inwardly tuned, catharsizing and thinking that is all they need to do. Writers certainly need to be inwardly tuned, to get in touch with themselves, but they should also be concerned about larger principles. Worldviews that concern humanity and the environment are some examples that poets might tackle today. I still dislike introductions of books written by the authors, and I felt Haines’s autobiographical sketches at the end only turned the book around to him again, which is defeating the purpose of many of his essays. In all though, the meat of the book is informative and world encompassing, and I am going to return to it many times, and recommend it to other writers.

John Haines

Buy Living Off the Country on Amazon.

Eternal Youth

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Page) — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 16:27:00 +0000

By Ricardo Coler

In Vilcabamba Ecuador, people live from one hundred thirty to one hundred and forty years.

The people do not have yearly medical examinations. No one is sick. They smoke, drink and regularly use substances most people think are reserved solely for rock stars.

They live very humble lives, the workers and the aristocrats--and they all party heavily.

Watch a video about the book on Youtube.

Ricardo Coler was born in Buenos Aires in 1956. He is a doctor, a photographer, and journalist. His photographs and essays about matriarchal societies—polygamous and polyandrous—have been published in several Argentine and foreign media. He is the founder and director of the cultural magazine lamujerdemivida.

He is the author of The Kingdom of Women (2005) and To Be a Goddess (2006). His books have been translated into several languages.

Read Ricardo Coler's bio is Spanish here

Jamie Quatro

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Page) — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 09:11:00 +0000

: Jamie Quatro

Last June I'm at Bennington College and I meet this nice person who has the same name of a famous rock star. Turns out she's a pretty darn good writer too. Jamie has s short story published in the summer issue of American Short Fiction.

Jamie Quatro’s debut story collection, Ladies and Gentlemen of the Pavement, is forthcoming from Grove/Atlantic. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Tin House, Ploughshares, The Antioch Review, AGNI, Bomb, McSweeney’s, Oxford American, and elsewhere. Winner of the 2011 American Short Fiction Story Contest (judged by Wells Tower), she is the recipient of fellowships from Yaddoand the MacDowell Colony, and was the Georges and Anne Borchardt Scholar at the 2011 Sewanee Writers’ Conference. She holds graduate degrees from the College of William and Mary and Bennington College, and lives with her husband and children in Lookout Mountain, Georgia.

Read more about Jamie in her contributor notes for the Oxford American music issue and in her Q&A for Bomb’s Word Choice poetry series.

Blossom

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Page) — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 09:00:00 +0000

by Donigan Merritt

reviewed by Stephen Page

So, I'm in Brazzaville, right? And I'm in this canoe, and this local is paddling me up the river between Congo and Zaire, when all of a sudden this hippo surfaces right next to the canoe, and, well I'm thinking I'm gonna die, right, and the hippo opens his mouth, and I stand up and I open my cell phone to call home to tell Mom I love her, and I look down at the screen I notice the phone’s connected to the net and it's opened to this webpage, and I start reading and I forget about the hippo, and everything is fine, and I'm floating up the river past the hippo and I'm feeling great and the reading is interesting, and on Don Merritt's website I find a link to read a preview of his novel, Blossom, and I'm reading the book and I'm still floating up the river and I'm still standing up in the canoe and I Discover Blossom is a book that makes me feel that literature is still alive, that the novel is not dead, so I order a copy of the book on-line and as soon as I press the "buy" button, the local paddling the canoe turns the canoe toward the shore and rams the canoe into the muddy bank and I leap off into the mud and trudge my way up this trail and find my friend, who works with orphaned gorillas, waiting for me at the edge of the jungle and we go off to save some orphans. Oh, here is Mr. Merritt’s webpage: Random Literary Blogging.

Donigan Merritt was born in southwest Arkansas in 1945. He has worked as a journalist, scuba diver, fishing boat captain, and university professor. He has a BA and MA degree in philosophy and an MFA in Creative Writing from the Iowa Writers Workshop. He is currently living in Buenos Aires; with his diplomat wife who has lived in Central Europe, South Africa, and Germany.

picture of author, Donigan Merritt

A Foal Poem by Rose Hunter

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Page) — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 09:44:00 +0000

A Foal Poem is a new full-length poetry book from Rose Hunter. Written in Mexico during the course of 2010, the poems form an outer journey that starts in Puerto Vallarta, moves to Acapulco and San Miguel de Allende, Sayulita, and back to Puerto Vallarta. Overall, the book takes the reader on an inner journey through the themes of addiction and recovery, relationships, and changing/emerging identities.

For a taste of A Foal Poem, try Aposematic / Grey at BluePrintReview, and The Lion / rebar at Connotation Press.

For the full mileage, in advance of the release of the eBook, Rose is offering free PDFs to anyone who wants to review the book, or simply read it. Just mail her at roseh400@yahoo.com.

"A Foal Poem drew me in and didn't let go.... I wanted to stay within this world - the cube lady explaining with her hands; the Mexican palms and the cranes; bubbles in the rock and black sand beaches. Life during the wave’s lifetime... Revealing and concealing, A Foal Poem curls inward, outward, and within." -Sherry O'Keefe

Rose Hunter is the author of to the river (Artistically Declined Press), and the editor of the poetry journal, YB. Poems from this book have appeared in A cappella Zoo, decomP, elimae, Escape Into Life, kill author, The Nervous Breakdown, PANK, Referential, The Toronto Quarterly, Willow Wept Review, the BluePrintReview, and others. There also is an author talk with Rose Hunter in this blog.

Rose Hunter: A Foal Poem

poetry collection

108 pages

$6.50

A Foal Poem is my second book of poems (September 2011).

You can buy it on Amazon.

And add it on Goodreads.

Here is some pimp-age:

A Foal Poem drew me in and didn’t let go…. I wanted to stay within this world – the cube lady explaining with her hands; the Mexican palms and the cranes; bubbles in the rock and black sand beaches. Life during the wave’s lifetime. The book blends fault lines in a block of ice, rebar and banana leaves, bear parks and lion roars and sugar-stealing tejones…. And how is it we have parrot dresses and Minisuper Jazmines and people who know what it is to skin the wind? Revealing and concealing, A Foal Poem curls inward, outward, and within.

- Sherry O’Keefe.

A Foal Poem is almost an impressionistic novel in verse. After a while I surrendered to its rhythms and let it take me along and then the whole became larger than the sum of its parts. Foal’s linking lines are like a returning melody motif – no that’s not right. More like a returning drum motif. A beat. - Michael K. White.

The poems in A Foal Poem open into landscapes, like those Mexican houses that open into lush courtyards vibrant with color and life. They all offer something of value, of insight, unflinching glimpses, sometimes painful and often funny and amazing. - Steve Wing.

Turn to any page in A Foal Poem and you’ll get to witness a poem being born before your eyes. You’ll watch the images and sounds and smells and grief rage and kick as the poet uses her uncanny skill to weld the fragments into a poem filled with insight and experience and, most of all, tough beauty.

- John Riley.

This is the type of poetry I live to read. I’ve been so engrossed the time has slipped away and now I have to go to work without taking a shower! - Melanie Huber.

Poems from the book have previously appeared in such publications as A cappella Zoo, Atticus Online, the BluePrintReview, decomP, elimae, Escape Into Life, kill author, The Nervous Breakdown, PANK, Referential, The Toronto Quarterly, Two Weeks (Linebreak anthology), and Willows Wept Review.

For a more complete list, as well as links to those poems, see my “Other Poetry Publications” (Journals) page.

A Foal Poem is a BW book.

Expat Author Interview with Rose Hunter

The poet Rose Hunter has lived in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico for about two and a half years now, which to Rose seems both long, and not that long. Originally from Australia, Rose spent ten years in Toronto before moving south of the borders. She speaks German – her mother is German – and Spanish – which she describes as a work-in-progress – but she publishes only in English . . . for now.

IMBO: Buenos dias, Rose! I love the old town of Puerto Vallarta, as I think I’ve told you several times. Someday we’re going to share some guacamole and a few margaritas – but until then, how about telling us a bit about your writing.

Rose: I don’t know how to describe my writing except that at the moment I’m writing mostly poetry, and it mostly comes out of my life experiences because I don’t know how to do it any other way. I mean everything is a life experience. I don’t understand what I think are called “writing prompts” and the like, is what I’m trying to say.

I’ve written short stories and whatnot in the past (and articles, etc.) and will probably go back to doing that as well, eventually. But I’ll always write poetry I hope, if I can. That’s the writing I enjoy the most, and that makes the most sense to me.

IMBO: How has being an expat affected what, and the way, you write?

Rose: Where I live has an enormous influence on what I write, and the way I write. It’s about writing, but it’s also about more than that. It’s about being happy, generally, with where I exist, and feeling simpatico with the culture around me. I don’t feel that in Australia for example. There are a lot of reasons for that, and cultural differences I could get into and probably bore everyone, and maybe offend a few people. I wrote somewhere that it’s like Australia is written in a code I don’t understand. I get very depressed there. There’s nothing for me to write about there. That sounds dramatic, but, well, there you have it. Whereas here there’s plenty of living, and therefore plenty of writing.

IMBO: Let’s say you’ve just boarded a transatlantic flight. As you make your way to your seat, adrenaline shoots through your chest. You’ve dreamt about this moment with this person for years. He/she is sitting in the seat next to yours. Who is it and, assuming you get the nerve up, what will you talk about—for nine hours?

Rose: I never know how to answer this type of question. There are lots of people of course, authors or maybe spiritual teachers, etc. But I’ve probably read their books and most likely they say more in those books than they would to a stranger on a plane. I think I’d prefer a chance to be thrown together with someone I used to know. Maybe someone I can’t get up the nerve to contact again, or wouldn’t know how to find. I’d like to know what happened to certain people, and what they’re doing now. Yes. I can think of one or two people like that. I won’t say who, here. PS I realize I am turning down an opportunity to talk to Jesus or something. Oh well.

IMBO: No one ever says they’d like to sit next to me, but OK. Onward. Care to share some of your work with us?

Rose: Well, I’ll give you the link to the book of poems I’ve just published, which is like a long story too, in a way. Here is the info, at my blog. There are links to the book at Amazon on that page, as well as some blurbs, and links to poems from the book that have been published in various journals. The book is called A Foal Poem.

It came about I suppose, like my stuff usually comes about, as some kind of compulsive urge to make sense of my experience and (in my mind) record it so it’s not lost forever. I’m sure that’s what most of my writing is about: not wanting to lose things. The attempt is futile of course, but at the beginning of a book I seem to think this time it’s going to work. I haven’t written so many books. But I completed another manuscript recently and I realized the same impetus must have been behind it, because I noticed the same disappointment, afterwards. This period of lived time, this experience, this person, whatever it is – no, it/they, are still lost, after you’ve finished spilling the words. This is something most reasonable people understand I think. But I don’t think writers are reasonable people. I think a lot of us are, as I remember Martin Amis putting it one time, people who are “flummoxed by first principles.” At least I know I am. The word “recovery” (in the epigraph of A Foal Poem) works on a few levels, I think/hope.

A Foal Poem is coming out as an eBook shortly, but prior to that if anyone wants a free PDF copy, I’ll send it to them. Just email me: roseh400@yahoo.ca. No strings, or commentary required/expected. Just a free book.

IMBO: Wow, Rose, that’s a sweet offer. How about a link to a story written by another expat?

Rose: A poem again, for me? I like Arlene Ang’s stuff. Here’s one, in Juked (which is also one of my favourite journals). It's called

Manic car driving is not a door stop

—Gale Nelson

This poem has so many things in it I like. A red light and a fish market, for a start. Place! Salt! And a tooth at the end…. People who know me a bit know I can get obsessed with teeth. I also like salt, and, although I don’t drive, gas pedals and steering wheels:

…. She knew

the steering wheel by its salt

margins, its strange salt

sweat on her hands. When did the foot

become a note, a tic that knew

….

and what images, right?

This was how 5 AM felt in her grip, like salt

in a footbath, a painful tooth abstraction.

IMBO: Has your concept of home changed since you’ve been an expat?

Rose: Mexico is the first place that’s felt like home, really. So I guess my idea about home is that sometimes you have to look for it; you’re not necessarily born in it.

Rose, it's been very interesting catching up with you. Congratulations on A Foal Poem! I hope it's a grand success.

I must be off,

Christopher

___________________________________

Links to Rose Hunter's writing can be found at "Whoever Brought Me Here Will Have To Take Me Home." Her book of poetry, to the river, was published in 2010 Artistically Declined Press. Poems of hers have been published in such places as PANK, kill author, decomP, elimae, The Nervous Breakdown, anderbo, Juked, Metazen, The Toronto Quarterly, Bluestem, Escape Into Life, and others. She just published a new full-length poetry book, A Foal Poem. She is the editor of the poetry journal YB, and lives in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. She also keeps a photo blog at Fotos del Día.

Bathing, A Story by Sanaë Lemoine

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Page) — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 09:19:00 +0000

Hugo’s father explains he named him after Victor Hugo. He does not think that because in French the family name is at the end, in Japanese it would read Hugo Victor. He names his son Hugo and later tells him it is not because of Les Misérables.
Ruy Blas is the masterpiece, the best play ever written! His father says. He quotes, Verre de terre amoureux d’une étoile! A worm in love with a star. He was a Shakespearean actor in his early twenties and tells his son that the Japanese acting school was not so good.
When Hugo is eleven his father moves to Osaka while Hugo stays with his mother in Tokyo. They have a small apartment in Meguro. Hugo is accepted at the Kuhara University and remains living at home with his mother. She is thirty-eight and beautiful so people think she is his girlfriend when they go to the movies.
Hugo waits for Shiro outside of the public baths, the onsen, of the university. He pretends he’s waiting for his friends and drinks Pocari Sweat while Shiro eats dried apricots. Her hair is wet and her face red from the heat of the bath.
Shiro knows Hugo’s friends have already gone back to their rooms when he is sitting on the bench. Because this is her first year at university she is not fully accustomed to the onsen. The women and men are separated, yet she has never seen so many naked girls and women in the same space. One girl is so beautiful, she’s not tall, but her face is oval and her nose well-shaped, and all Shiro can see are her light brown nipples, dark hair, and the color of her skin on her limbs. She envies her soft skin. Shiro is not used to seeing other girls naked and cannot help but look at her own body and then at their breasts and pubic hair.
She is skilled at washing, as a dancer in high school she would carefully bathe every evening. At university Shiro washes after dance, and when she stops dance, she continues to go to the public baths.
I’ve seen you go home in the evening, you don’t live on the campus, but you bathe here? Shiro asks Hugo.
We only have one bath, for me and my mother, it’s very small. I don’t want to be a nuisance. This one here is large, plus the soap and shampoo are free.
Hugo doesn’t tell her his mother is so young and the boxes of tampons in the bathroom make him uncomfortable, as does the shaving cream.
After a month of university Shiro still can’t forget the early mornings of high school. Awake at five am she would take the train from Nishi-Hachioji to Yokohama and walk the ten minutes to school passing by the combini stores. The last year she takes a class on manners and sits with eight other girls on the tatami floor peeling mandarins. By the end of the hour her legs and feet are numb from sitting and her fingernails orange. The teacher shows them how to peel the mandarins so as to leave a flower shaped peel.
She remembers the girls at her high school. One day she wore a ring her mother gave her and they asked if she was engaged. There was no time for boyfriends if she was practicing dance every day after school and stretching for two hours before going to bed. Her mother would make sure she waited five hours between her meals; she said it was better for the stomach. Also, she would give her a glass of milk with a spoonful of plum vinegar; it is good for the digestion. If she were to be a dancer she would have to be thin. Luckily you have my bones, her mother said.
Shiro asks Hugo what he wants to do after he graduates.
Watch trains, he says.
You want to be a train watcher?
Yes, but I’d rather watch the trains that don’t stop at the station. Well, that would be my full time job. My part time job would be Chemist. What about you?
I don’t know. I’m thinking of teaching.
Shiro has a cat and when the cat dies she tells Hugo about it. She sleeps with the cat for a month when she finds out it is sick. He says he is sorry and then asks her if she will go to the public baths with him.
What do you mean? Together?!
Yes. If we go early enough there won’t be anyone. At four am it’s empty. I’ve never seen anyone. Well, there’s this old man who goes to wash around three, but he doesn’t stay longer than half an hour.
They go to the onsen at four am. But since they’ve washed the night before they decide to go for a run, an excuse to clean themselves later. It’s dark and the streets are empty apart from the bakery where light filters through curtains. Shiro doesn’t sweat very much, but Hugo is soaked by the time they get back to Kuhara. The onsen changing room is empty and Shiro notices how the men’s is the same as the women’s room. She’s never undressed before someone other than her mother or the girls she bathes with. She takes her clothes off when his back is turned and wraps a towel around her body.
Can I wash your hair? He asks her. He hasn’t touched her yet and although her hair was washed last night, she agrees.
Shiro rinses herself quickly so they can go into the bath, she can sense his discomfort. The bath is big in the men’s onsen, it is large enough to fit maybe twenty people, and with the two of them alone, steam rising around their arms and face, she feels as if she is dressed.
Hugo is always listening to music and he makes her CDs although he never writes down the song titles. He explains that the order of the songs is crucial and she shouldn’t skip any song, listen to it from track one to track nineteen, he says.
He tells her they took a class last year together but she can’t remember him, it was a two-hundred person lecture and she sat near the front most days. He would sit a few rows behind her and draw the back of her neck, her hair tied up, her ears. There are dozens of small drawings of her ears in his history notebook. She comes upon them one day and asks if he wants to become an otoligist. He says he likes anatomy. Those are your ears, he tells her. You can’t recognize them?
She notices the pearl earrings she used to wear before she lost one down the sink drain.
Her parents think she should live at the University. The rooms at Kuhara University are very small; they have a narrow bed, a light wooden desk and closet, and a small sink in the corner. In the evening she takes thick brown tape and picks up loose hairs from the floor with the sticky side until she thinks it must be clean.
She watches TV on Friday night with her father. It is some Japanese show on who is the strongest man. The men have to go through a variety of obstacles and show their physical endurance, endless monkey bars, walking on their hands in water, and she sees how the men keep falling. They watch another show where a couple has to taste different dishes and say which ingredient or dish is the most expensive: two different steaks, two wines, two sea urchins. On Sunday morning Shiro goes to Hachioji and spends an hour at the Muji store. There are shirts on sale and she buys three beige ones for 5, 000 Yen.
Hugo spends the weekends drawing. He draws a comic strip where a boy is writing at his desk and begins to knock his head on the desk. With each panel blood begins to spread on the table as he slams his head and then the blood decreases and by the last panel he is sitting at his desk with his head intact, writing.
Shiro is at the Kuhara dining hall at eleven am and because it is so busy she gets a bowl of curry rice to avoid the other queues. As she tastes the curry to see if it is mild, she sees Hugo standing next to a table speaking to a few girls. There is one he is looking at while he moves his hands and arms in rhythm with his talking. She is pretty and looks half-Japanese, maybe she’s half-British, Shiro thinks. That’s why she has the lighter hair and smiles easily. He is handing her a CD. Shiro leans in while focusing all her eyesight and she doesn’t notice when her hair falls in the curry because Hugo is now touching the girl on her shoulder. Shiro sucks on her hair and bends her head down to eat. She realizes she’s forgotten to get a spoon for the curry but doesn’t want to stand up in case Hugo might see her. Instead she unwraps her chopsticks and tries to coat them in sauce. She is so concentrated on picking the grains of rice, separated by the curry, that she does not hear or see Hugo when he sits down besides her. He takes the chopsticks from her hand, without speaking yet, and pulls a spoon out of his pocket. Shiro looks down even lower, ashamed.
Thank you, she says quietly.
Are you alright? He asks her. She smiles but doesn’t look at his face when he places the spoon on the table.
The chopsticks were fine, really, she says.
No one eats curry like that, I’ve been watching you for the past five minutes and you’ve barely gotten a spoonful into your body.
You eat it. Shiro says.
You’re not hungry? He looks surprised and rubs the spoon with his palm. He takes the bowl and the chopsticks and starts eating.
Hugo’s friend asks him how he undresses Shiro because she wears so many layers of clothes. Hugo doesn’t know what to answer because he hasn’t had to think about this yet, at least not the taking off the clothes, although he constantly remembers her naked body the morning of the onsen. He also can’t explain why he didn’t do anything that day.
Well, he begins, it’s easy, I just take it off in one go. You know, the tights, the socks, the skirt or the shorts, the underwear, I pull it off all together. Then with the top part I do the same.
He imagines her layers of clothes as the folds of a kimono, maybe because he has been reading Mishima for class, he thinks it is just a maze and that he would untie each item of clothing separately.
When Hugo knocks on the door Shiro is cutting her fingernails. She lets him in and sits back on the bed with her nail-clipper.
Sorry to stop by so late, Hugo says. I’ve just been having trouble with this chemistry homework for tomorrow.
Yes, it took me a while, I finished it about an hour ago though. I can help you if you like.
Why do you even bother with Chemistry if you like literature?
Expand my horizons. She smiles.
Hugo sits next to her and when she is finished cutting her nails, he asks if he can cut his.
I keep forgetting, and I hate it when they’re long.
I can cut them for you if you like, Shiro offers. He looks at her surprised, because she takes his foot and starts untying the laces of his shoes.
What are you doing? He asks.
Your nails? Shiro is now taking his socks off.
No, those are fine, I meant these, he says, waving his hands at her.
You sure you’ve cut your toe nails? I always forget about those. I mean, who looks at their feet really.
She starts clipping and he feels her fingers curl around his toes.
Hugo notices that she’s only wearing cotton pajamas and is disappointed he won’t be able to slowly take the layers off clothes from her body. That is if he can. He doesn’t know why he’s so paralyzed around her and how he has allowed her to touch his feet, they are wide feet and he dislikes their shape. He remembers bathing earlier on so they must be clean. Shiro asks him if he would like to stay the night because it is so late, she says if he would like to, that he doesn’t have to of course. He shouldn’t feel obligated. He stays awake a little longer finishing chemistry but when he slips into bed at around six am, Shiro pulls him to her warm body.
Later when Hugo unbuttons her shirt very slowly, suddenly the prospect of all these buttons, one by one, gives him the same thrilling thoughts that the layers of clothes had excited in him earlier on. Shiro is soon naked and so is Hugo, and though they kiss she tells him she’d prefer they don’t have sex, she says, I hope you don’t mind, but I haven’t before and I’d like to just sleep beside you. He runs his fingers down her spine and then holds her hips close to his body. He thinks, I should have known when she cut my toe nails like that.
When Hugo’s mother comes home she takes her shoes off and as she leans over to hang her coat, lighters and a matchbox fall from her pockets. Hugo looks at the TV as he hears her quickly pick up the matches and lighters, he doesn’t dare look because he knows her cheeks are red by now and her eyes bent down.
Your father wasn’t even there at your birth, Hugo’s mother tells him. He’s heard the story a hundred times but he still sits at the table listening.
Instead of coming to the hospital he had to stop by the house and check on your brother, for goodness sake he was eleven years old, not like he couldn’t take care of himself while I was in labor at the hospital. He was ten minutes late and it took you ten minutes to be born.
Hugo knows what she’ll say next. He treated me as if I were his concubine, his mother tells him.
Because he knows her story and he doesn’t want to show he is ignoring her, Hugo helps her in the kitchen as she makes the dinner. Tonight she cooks vegetable and shrimp tempura. After dinner Hugo can smell the oil and batter on his clothes and hair, he showers and washes himself twice, Shiro will not like this stink, he thinks, throwing his clothes in the washing machine, this will not do.
Friday afternoon Shiro’s parents aren’t home, her father is in Hokkaido for the week-end giving a talk and her mother at work until late. She invites Hugo to visit her home and shows him the temple attached to her house.
This is where my father holds the ceremonies, she tells him, opening a door at the end of the hallway. The temple is about twice the size of their house, and when Hugo looks through the doorway he sees yellow and red, the thick tatami floor and mikan oranges in ceramic bowls. He goes into the bathroom and smokes into the mirror making sure the ventilator is on.
It’s raining and Shiro forgets her umbrella but she stands in Shibuya next to the statue of the Hachiko dog and ties her hair up so it won’t look so wet. She looks up at the statue, an Akita dog, grey and over-sized, she thinks. There are hundreds of people in the square holding umbrellas waiting to meet people. It is already seven minutes past twelve and she wonders why her father is late. She sees him walking quickly towards Hachiko, holding a dark blue umbrella, and he waves when he sees her.
You’re soaking, Shiro, did you forget your umbrella again.
It broke, she says, I didn’t forget it.
He holds the umbrella over her as they choose where to have lunch. They settle on a ramen place and as soon as they sit down he orders two teas. So cold out there today, he says, rubbing his fingers.
Hugo finds an envelope on the kitchen table. Inside is a note from his mother saying she has gone for a few days to the mountains and will be back soon. She’s left him 10, 000 Yen folded in a slip of paper. Hugo thinks of his mother, she’s still young, thirty-eight and that’s not so bad for the mother of a university student. He re-reads the note but there is no mention of which mountains she’s going to, he wonders if she’s all the way up north or just an hour from Tokyo. Outside the weather is dry and the sky white, it’ll be snowing soon, and as Hugo closes the blinds he knows she will be gone for a few weeks. He watches TV until it is dark outside and then looks in the fridge for dinner. There’s nothing to eat so he goes to the 7-11 down the street. It’s almost empty but the lights are still incredibly bright and he feels his eyes squint as he walks through the aisles. There are some freshly packed meals, he tries to find something without MSG and finally he picks up three onigiri. Outside the weather isn’t too cold even though it’s almost the middle of December, maybe it won’t snow after all. Hugo gets a beer from the vending machine and decides to eat at the park. It’s not really a park, more a small playground where children come during the day after school. The swings are empty and he sits at the bottom of a slide, leaning back on the plastic frame. The ground is a hard, beaten earth, there are no trees and he laughs out loud at the dismal surroundings. No crows even, he thinks. Looking up the sky is now a blackish grey and he can hear the highway nearby. He cranes his neck to an opening between two tall houses and sees the thick columns of lighted buildings. The onigiri are individually wrapped, the rice is soft and he eats them between gulps of beer. He thinks of Shiro and how he doesn’t know how to speak to her. Maybe she would like his mother, he can see them traveling together to the mountains. He’ll take her on a train ride tomorrow he decides. It was a stupid idea, the bathing. He doesn’t know what went through his mind, of course the thought of seeing her naked. Though he’d been so embarrassed of his own nakedness that he’d kept the towel wrapped around his waist as he washed her hair. She had held her towel against her chest, covering the front of her body. He thought anyone would have found it ridiculous, the whole situation, them with their towels in an onsen. When Shiro was rinsing her hands, her back turned to him, Hugo had slipped into the water where the steam was so heavy you could barely see. He’d looked down when he saw her legs close to the edge.
He falls asleep on the slide and is woken up around five in the morning because of the cold and the sky is already a light grey. When he sits up a homeless man is crouching on the far side of the playground looking at Hugo. The man is small and sits quietly on the ground with a few plastic bags and a backpack. Hugo gets up and instinctively bows his head to the man, throwing his beer can in a bin on his way out. Back at the apartment he washes his teeth and wonders if it’s too early to call Shiro.
Do you want to get breakfast? He asks her, at six am. Her voice is very small but she has picked up after four rings.
Now?
He doesn’t respond and she quickly picks up the conversation.
Yes ok, where do you want to go?
My mother’s not home, do you want to come over, I could make you something?
He gives her the address and she says she’ll be there in a half hour.
Hugo buys eggs, milk although he rarely drinks it, spring onions, salmon and daikon radish pickles. He’s preparing a rolled omelet and grilled salmon when Shiro rings the bell downstairs.
How come you’re awake so early yet you always sleep in class? Shiro asks.
You noticed?
Your head is flat on the desk! Well, most of the class is asleep in French.
Because the professor hardly speaks in French. I swear if the class actually was in French I’d be wide awake.
Hugo, is your mother nice?
She’s so-so. It depends, most of the time she’s not at home.
Oh. What does she do?
She’s a hostess, though you know, she won’t tell me. She smells of cigarettes but I know she doesn’t smoke and she also practices Karaoke singing when she thinks I’m sleeping. Well, she’s not so good of a singer but she’s improving her skills.
Mine doesn’t sing but she doesn’t go out either. She had me so late, who gets pregnant at the age of forty-five?
She doesn’t look so old though, from the photos you showed me.
Well, she does have very little white hair and she’s small.
Hugo and Shiro don’t speak for a while, Hugo doesn’t know what to say next, now that he’s sitting beside her and they’re alone, it is not like outside of the common baths, where there was the light and sound of shifting bodies.
Hugo is talking to a Mexican exchange student, her name is Perla, Pearl, Shiro mutters, and looks at Perla’s dark skin and brown hair. Sometimes Shiro thinks her own skin is yellow but then she realizes it is just the lighting, and she doesn’t want to bleach her skin white like the other Japanese girls with their whitening toners. Perla is short, but at least her legs are long and she smiles at Hugo while he waves goodbye as he walks away from the table.
Shiro! Hugo says, stopping next to her. She stands up and feels her legs are short, she hopes the black pants will lengthen them and passes her hands over the orange cotton shirt to feel her stomach.
I have to go to class in a few minutes, Shiro says as she pulls a bag onto her shoulder. She has to hold it there because her shoulders are too small and the strap slips along her arm.
Hugo asks what class and when she tells him it is the Genji and Heike one, he laughs and says what a waste of time, yet he decides to walk with her. Shiro is a little embarrassed to walk with Hugo, he bounces and with each step his body seems to reach upward, to then fall in rhythm. They walk in silence because Hugo’s eyes are facing the sky and Shiro looks around making sure there are no obstacles in his way.
Where’s your backpack? Shiro asks.
I don’t have one. It’s at home but I never use it.
You don’t take notes?
Nope! Here, I have a pen and small notepad. But I prefer not taking notes, helps me remember if I just listen, and he taps at his head looking over at her before going back to the sky.
You don’t want to spend time with your mother anymore, do you? You’ve met a girl, Hugo, haven’t you?
Hugo doesn’t respond and sits at the table looking at his mother.
You’re like your father. Well can I at least meet her?
No. Hugo stands up. I’ll be back later, I won’t eat dinner here.
What are you going to eat? I made soba! I thought it was your favorite.
I prefer ramen.
Going to see the girl? Do you know what your father did to me, how he humiliated me in front of his friends and coworkers, the way he spoke about me and how he made our private life a public affair?
Yes, and see, I don’t speak to him.
An hour later he returns and apologizes, blushing as his mother accepts.
Hello Shiro, I’m Keiko. Hugo’s mother bends forward and Shiro bows with her hands folded below her abdomen.
Thank you for having me to dinner, Keiko.
It’s about time! Hugo hardly ever talks about his friends. I don’t know about them until he brings them home.
Hugo gets orange juice and he sits at the table with Shiro while his mother starts dishing out food onto ceramic plates.
These have been in the family for years, she tells Shiro, holding a plate. Some of them have broken but they’re irreplaceable. We had to fix them with gold and she points at the dark yellow specks in the cracks.
There is beef, rice, cucumber pickles and broccoli. I have also azuki beans for dessert, you like sweets yes?
Shiro nods.
What are you studying, Shiro?
Japanese Literature.
I see. Oh you must have heard of Yoshimoto Banana.
Yes, I’ve read a few of her books.
Funny name isn’t it. And your father is a Comparative Religion professor, right?
Yes, Shiro says surprised.
I looked up your family name in the University website, Keiko smiles.
Shiro feels Hugo’s hand under the table touch hers.
Did you have to go to such an extreme? He asks his mother.
I’m sorry, I was curious, the name sounded familiar. Okuma. Such a nice ring to it. Three syllables. I wonder, I don’t mean to be indiscreet, is Okuma the same Okuma Shigenobu?
Shiro bows her head and her hair falls in a fringe hiding her eyes.
Oh my goodness! Why he was a prime minister! Oh, Hugo, you could have told me! You always leave out the details. It must be incredible having parents like yours, how lucky of you, having such brilliance in the family.
In her last year of high school Shiro goes to Happoen Garden early in the morning. It used to be her grandfather’s home before the war, now it is a museum and park. She takes food for the fish and feeds the koi. She crouches down on a stone by the edge of the pond and pokes her finger in the water, but because there is moss on the stones she loses her balance. Just as she feels her feet slip she tries to hold on but her fingers close on water. Only her legs and arms are wet, the pond is shallow, yet the wind is so cold that her bare legs are numb. She has to go home and change but then feels tired and decides to skip school. Her parents aren’t home so she takes omochi and toasts it in the oven until the rice dumpling is soft. She chews on it and sits in the temple looking at the shrine her father cleans every morning. The room is dark but the gold and red are brilliant and she leans back spreading her body on the tatami floor. When she wakes up she feels rubbed in incense.
Hugo looks at the people on the train and sees that most of the passengers are asleep. He can feel the hot air blow on his legs, nobody smells, he thinks. An old lady walks in holding two shopping bags, they look heavy and she is breathing hard so he stands up offering his seat. She scowls at Hugo and asks him if she really looks that old. He sits back when she doesn’t move and instead clutches a metal bar next to the doors.
He gets off and switches to the Yamanote line to Meguro station. He hasn’t seen Shiro in two months, first she was sick and then his mother asked him to spend the month of his holidays in Kobe, and he hasn’t spoken to her since his return.
It is five in the morning when he goes to the communal baths, a little too late he thinks, some of the early risers will be arriving in a half hour or so. If he is lucky no one will be there until six am. The sun is rising and Tokyo is grey, but the air is dry and he likes that for once he’s not wiping his face from the humidity. Shiro is not in the men’s changing room, why should she be, he remembers she is a girl after all and is ashamed of their bath. It seems childish now, but he senses a slight intoxication at the thought of it, and then quickly undresses.
She calls him around midday and apologizes for not speaking to him earlier. He apologizes, I should have called you when I got home. He knows she is quiet and will not respond to this.
When Shiro goes to the public baths there are four Australian exchange students who have arrived in the morning. Three are girls and they stand in the changing room dressed, unsure of how to proceed. Two strip down to bathing suits and walk into the onsen holding towels to their chest, the third girl goes back to her room saying she’s clean and doesn’t feel the need to wash just yet.

this story first published by the Creative Writing Program at the University of Pennsylvania

: Sanaë Lemoine

Women Up On Blocks by Mary Akers

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Page) — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 12:16:00 +0000

Women Up On Blocks by Mary Akers
Reviewed by Stephen Page

The female protagonists in Mary Akers's collection of short stories, Women Up On Blocks, live male-dominated lives. They feel trapped, yet are in the situations they are in because of decisions that they made during certain periods of their lives.
The first story, Medusa Song, begins as a story of child neglect:

She scrambles the eggs while the baby howls at her knees. To drown out the racket, she hums and jabs the fork into the yolks... then does a quick sidestep when the baby lunges for her knees.
His little fat hands grasp the air, throwing him off balance. He totters on his heels for a moment then sits hard and rolls back sideways, bumping his head on the floor. He stops crying abruptly and flails his arms in the air like a bug stuck on its back.

The neglect continues: "She's barely gotten the toast buttered when John Junior starts up again. He's poopy, she can see it rimming the edges of his diaper... she carries him out to the pickup and puts him squish onto the seat." The mother-narrator of this story, whose name is Cynthia, justifies her behavior by blaming it on her husband's possible infidelity: "Cynthia can't remember when things changed. Maybe it was when she suspected John of sleeping with his secretary." By telling the story in the third-person, Cynthia can distance herself from her own monstrosity. She lets the reader know she was wrong for neglecting the child. Cynthia notes that she was submissive to her husband before the baby was born: "John and she never fought before. Well, sometimes, but it was always more of a disagreement and once Cynthia apologized, it would be over." Cynthia, in another attempt to defend her actions and plead forgiveness from the reader, confesses that she was not always a child neglector: "She used to love her life . . . She used to love the feeling of everyone needing her so badly . . . And when the baby fell asleep, she would sit and hold him just as long as he would sleep."

Another story, "Mooncalf," begins with the frightening first line, "How you recognize a monster is dependent upon how you view normality." "Mooncalf" is the tale of Siren, an intelligent woman with cerebral palsy. While she is at college, she believes she is blessed when she meets and marries Chris, a man whom she perceives as good-natured. Soon after they are married, Chris begins to reveal his true character-even when Siren, who speaks in the first person, denies the existence of his temperament, saying, "In our early marriage, I spent my days struggling to fix Chris's meals . . . Chris almost never fussed." Then they have a colicky baby whom they name Jonah (apt because of the wailing). Chris's reaction to Jonah's constant crying is this (speaking to Siren): "Please don't misunderstand . . . I know he is a precious gift . . . But some days I wish it were just you and me, like it used to be." O.K. Reasonably, what parent has not thought this very same thought at least once in his or her early marriage? But not every parent voices this thought, and if one does, the thought usually passes as soon as the words are uttered. Chris's words are a narrative tactic to reveal more of his character, and a foreshadowing technique. Near the end of the story, we find out just what Chris is made of, when in the middle of the night, as Jonah is crying in the other room and Chris is pacing the floors of the house because he cannot sleep, Siren tells the reader:

I awakened, suddenly to the sound of Chris speaking again. His cadence and tone were strange. His voice was breathy and frantic, and held an edge of panic, "Stopstop- stop-stop-stop-stop-stop!" he said. Jonah's cries stilled and I heard the side of the crib go back up . . . I lay there listening hard in the stillness and staring at the blackness of the ceiling. An uneasy feeling curled itself around my insides and tightened.

In the story "Wholesale," a late-adolescent girl with addictive behaviors runs away from home and an alcoholic father. She becomes a drug-addicted young woman and allows men to sexually abuse her in return for her fix. The main character uses drugs and men use her. Akers probably added this story as an allegory-that for some women, attraction to abusive men is an addiction in itself.

The women protagonists in Mary Akers's stories live in worlds dominated by imperfect men, but they are not perfect characters themselves since they chose to be who they are. They are controlled by "monsters," but they have become monsters. Yes, they are victims of circumstance, but they are not quick to choose behavioral change or a way out when they are in cognitive dissonance. Akers sums up the collection in this quote from "Wholesale": " . . . life can be hell. But also that our choices keep us there, or free us from it, according to our actions."

Readers will empathize with this book because the "monster" lives inside all of us. Good people keep that monster in check. Readers will also relate to this book because everyone has had at least one bad relationship in his or her life, or gone through a rough period in his or her long-term relationship. Akers writes well-her dialogue and situations are realistic, she wastes no words, her metaphors are aptly used; she applies good hooks, good foreshowing, good character development; her stories are devastating, stark, not obvious; she has a large, non-pretentious vocabulary; she captures the voice of each character according to his or her socialization and education; she knows just what information is needed and which is not for the reader to comprehend the intent of the story; and she knows how to start and end a story. Group all of these strengths together, and the result is a writer who knows how to write a short story. Akers's can be ranked with Proulx, Hemingway, Carver, and Cheever.

This book is available online at Press 53 at www.press53.com, and at Amazon.com. Akers maintains a Web site, www.maryakers.com, where her biography can be found, as well as a blog at www.maryakers.blogspot.com.

this post first published on: HOW Journal

3 comments:

Jayne said...: Stephen- great review. I haven't read Mary Akers and this sounds like a good one. Although I'm not sure I'd want to relive my early days w/the kids! ;); May 9, 2011 3:19 PM
Karen @ Scobberlotch said...: This sounds very compelling and relatable. I like how you suggested we all keep the monster inside us. There's some truth in that. Great review.; May 10, 2011 7:35 AM
Stephen Page said...: Akers is a great writer.; November 30, 2011 1:57 AM

She Had Some Horses

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Page) — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 10:00:00 +0000

by Jay Harjo

Thunder’s Mouth Press

Reviewed by Stephen Page

Friday afternoon. I take a taxi to the Airpark. On my flight to Punta del Este I read She Had Some Horses by Jay Harjo (a gift from a member of my old writing group). The poems remind me of those I have read in workshops—they evoke imagery but little emotion—nothing wrong with them but nothing outstanding about them either. That evening, after pizza with my family in the backyard of a friend’s vacation home, I read the book again. I begin to notice a subtleness to the poems I did not before, an evasive beckoning. The next day, I read the book a third time. The poems don’t reach out from the page and grab me, but they gradually pour off the page and seep into me, like a woman’s beauty I did not note on a first meeting, but upon a second and third encounter enters me and will not leave me. One of the better poems is ‘The Woman Hanging From the Thirteenth Floor Window’:

She is the woman hanging from the 13th floor

window. Her hands are pressed white against the

concrete molding of the tenement building. She

hangs from the 13th floor window in east Chicago.

with a swirl of birds over her head. They could

be a halo, or a storm of glass waiting to crush her . . .

The woman hanging from the 13th floor window

on the east side of Chicago is not alone.

She is a woman of children, of the baby, Carlos,

and of Margaret, and of Jimmy who is the oldest.

She is her mother's daughter and her father's son.

She is several pieces between the two husbands

she has had. She is all the women of the apartment

building who stand watching her, watching themselves. . .

She is the woman hanging from the 13th floor window

on the Indian side of town. Her belly is soft from

her children's births, her worn Levi's swing down below

her waist, and then her feet, and then her heart.

She is dangling.

The woman hanging from the 13th floor hears voices.

They come to her in the night when the lights have gone

dim. Sometimes they are little cats mewing and scratching

at the door, sometimes they are her grandmother's voice,

and sometimes they are gigantic men of light whispering

to her to get up, to get up, to get up. That's when she wants

to have another child to hold onto in the night, to be able to fall back into dreams.

And the woman hanging from the 13th floor window

hears other voices. Some of them scream out from below

for her to jump, they would push her over. Others cry softly

from the sidewalks, pull their children up like flowers and gather

them into their arms. They would help her, like themselves.

But she is the woman hanging from the 13th floor window,

and she knows she is hanging by her own fingers, her

own skin, her own thread of indecision . . .

The woman hangs from the thirteenth floor window crying for

the lost beauty of her own life. She sees the

sun falling west over the gray plane of Chicago.

She think she remembers listening to her own life

break loose, as she falls from the 13th floor

window on the east side of Chicago, or as she

climbs back up to claim herself again.

The woman hanging from the window is EveryIndianWoman but she could very easily be Everywoman, even EveryOne. Anyone reading the poem feels empathy, like they are up on the ledge with The Woman. The event in the poem is tragic, but the narrator leaves the reader with an inkling of hope--the way most people feel about life.

Your Weekend Music Break

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Page) — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 09:58:00 +0000

The Kingsmen - Louie Louie

publikworks commented on A Music Break For You - have fun

What a riot! I love the go-go dancers in the background. Thanks for the retro rock, Stephen, great choice.

The Dirty Life

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Page) — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 09:25:00 +0000

The Dirty Life

By Kristin Kimball

276 Pages, Scribner

reviewed by Stephen Page

A successful freelance writer with a degree from Harvard lives on the trendy Upper East Side of New York (OK, so she lives in a walkup across the street form the Hells Angels main headquarters building—but the area is becoming popular for aging preppies, so rent and property prices are rising). She gets a hack job from a magazine editor to drive out to small plot of land just past the Big Apple’s suburbs to interview an educated neo-hippie who is running an organic farm. The man avoids her when he can, gives her errands to do when he can’t, and just generally bosses her around and treats her like trash for three days, until she finally stands her ground and corners him as he is running from one of his thousand daily chores to another of his thousand daily chores, and she demands as she points a finger at him, “Look, are you going to give me the interview or not?” He stops in his tracks, chuckles, looks deeply and respectfully into her eyes, and says “yes.” In the ensuing interview, while they are pulling the entrails out of a freshly slaughtered pig, she falls in love with him and he falls in love with her. For the next several years they build a life together while struggling to keep an organic farm viable.

In the memoir Dirty Life, Kristin Kimball shows the reader that “pastoral” and “bucolic” have different connotations—and that neither word is synonymous with “idyllic.” Yet, for Ms. Kimball and her fiancé, privilege is perspective. “Wealth” and “success” are subjective words that cannot be measured with a pop-culture ruler, but rather with how one lives life.

Once you get past the first page of romance-novel description, The Dirty Life is an outstandingly written book. If you are like me, when I am reading a book that I love, whether it be for its content, plot, voice, characters, or style (and in this case, all of the preceding), you don’t want to finish the book. When you find yourself arriving toward the end, perhaps the last fifth of the book, you procrastinate, continually finding excuses to not read more than a few pages at a time because you don’t want the beauty of the story or the magic of the story telling to end. This is one of those books.

Kristin Kimball

Buy the book on Amazon.

Check out the book and the author bio on the website, The Dirty Life

A Ranch Vet’s Verse

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Page) — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 09:51:00 +0000

While I was in a veterinary store in Lobos, a neighboring town twenty kilometers north of a ranch I was visiting, I noticed a stack of brown and red books on the corner of the display-case divider that divides the tellers from the customers. I picked up one of them and recognized the cover illustration as a Gustavo Solari, a local, and internationally famous, artist. The title of the book was Versos de un Doctor Criollo (A Ranch Veterinarian’s Verses), and it was written by Fernando M. Terrizzano, a veterinarian who lives on a ranch that borders the same river my friend’s ranch borders, El Río Salado (The Salty River). I didn’t even open the book to read a few of the poems. I just decided to support the local artists by purchasing the book. I am glad I did. What I like about the book is the quality of writing, the attitude of the narrator, and the vivid characterizations. Terrizzano reveals the rustic realities that accompany pastoral settings while portraying the ranch workers as human beings. As Bruce Chatwin said once, “If you can’t maintain the dignity of the people you are writing about, then you shouldn’t be telling their stories in the first place.” Many scenes in the book are Wild-Western. More importantly the book has Green Appeal, as the narrator watches pastures and wetlands transform into biosphere-poisoning mass agriculture.

The book is available by going to or contacting anyone in the veterinary office La Ensenada

AddressSan Martín 8 City Lobos Provence – Buenos Aires Telephone 02227 – 42-2009

A Book of Poems About Wheat

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Page) — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 15:16:00 +0000

A Book of Poems About Wheat

by Author Unnamed

An Inaustere Collection

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Page) — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 10:05:00 +0000

Selected Poems
By Paul Auster
faber and faber, 101 p.p.
Reviewed by Stephen Page

Selected Poems reveals Paul Auster’s poetry as sensuously rich and full of flux. The author stretches metaphor and visceral to their limits and packs them into the confines of short poems. A first reading will likely leave the reader stumped, thinking the poetry obscure, but the poems are linear and tell story. The collection commences thus:

Roots writhe with the worm . . .
the word / Belittles its nest . . .
Only the egg gravitates . . .
A flower that defines the air . . .
Speech could not cobble the swamp . . .
I name you desert . . .
The flower is red . . .
That welds step to word
And ties the tongue to its faults . . .
The song is in the step . . .
the bird without a name . . .
light escapes through the interval . . .
to drive
Out the babble that worded its body . . .
the eye . . .
Lifted . . . carries
its own birth.

The vivid imagery in that poem carries with it emotion. This is Auster’s strength. His weakness, in our spell-it-out-for-me didactic world of contemporary literature, is his subtleness. Auster uses observation of nature to put forth his thesis—which is: there is a difference between things and the words labeled upon those things. I am sure he was familiar with Williams’s “No ideas but in things.”

As the collection continues, this semantic notion is conveyed in allegory and symbolism. Eye imagery pops up continually, and many of the poems carry on in conversation, a contention with an intangible “you,” which obviates the speaker from accomplishing a goal:

You will sound
the choral rant
of memory, and go the way
that eyes go
. . . you will forget your name.

. . .
waiting
in your labyrinthine ear . . .

The sky in your name . . .

. . . You
will sleep here, a voice
moored to stone . . .
. . . To carry the burden
of eyes . . .

. . . merging
wit the not yet nameable . . .
. . . the eye
will teach you . . .

. . . Count me along, then,
with your words. Nothing
. . .will change . . .

My voice turns back
to the hunger it gives birth to . . .

This banter intensifies as the poems progress. The reader asks: Who is the “you”? Who is the “you” and the “I”? Who is the “you” and the “eye”? If the reader rushes through the poems, the answers to those questions will not clarify, at least not until the prose-poem section:

On the surface, this motion seems to be random, but such randomness does not, in itself, preclude meaning . . . I remain in a room in which I am writing this. I put one foot in front of the other, and for each step I take I add another word . . . it is a journey through space, even if I get nowhere, even if I end up in the same place I started. It is a journey through space . . .

Auster is combating language. Words are jailors to him, keeping him from the true experience of life. He tries escape, and when he does, the medium he chooses is significant—it is prose. Auster is less confined while using prose. Yet, at the end of the prose section, he finds himself still physically imprisoned. He has only freed himself mentally. At least, briefly it seems, he has undertaken the voyage of attempt.

Auster returns to poetry for the final section of the book and mobility becomes imperative: “Always the smallest act . . . larger than life, a gesture . . .to the very end / I want to be equal to whatever it is / my eye will bring me . . . that carries us along with ourselves.” In the last poem, movement is the resolution:

The sound of a word

I cannot speak.

So much silence
to be brought to life

. . . in this world
within me . . .

I am here.

As if this were the world . . .

Then:

how words fail us, how nothing comes right
in the saying of it, not even these words . .

The tongue
is forever taking us away
from where we are . . .

but the day itself, and how it has grown
inside my eyes, stronger
than the word is made of, as if
there could never be another word

that would hold me
without breaking.”

With his final lines, the author returns to tonguelessness, of being unable to express the experiences of life with words, and it should be noted that it is through verse that he retreats into himself.

Selected Poems without meticulous extraction may be lean in meaning to the careless reader, but that is Auster’s irony. Language does not clarify anything unless it clarifies difficultly. After lamenting throughout the collection that he cannot use words to say what he wants to say, Auster transcends silence and attempts alliance between thought and language in prose—his way of saying that prose, though not perfect, is clearer than verse. This is probably why he became a novelist and did not remain a poet. A smart financial move, for if he had continued to write this kind of elevated poetry, however brilliant that it is, he would never have attained his present status during his lifetime. He might be working at a very good university, even won a literary prize or two, but he wouldn’t be as well known, except in academia. A sad reality in today’s non-poetic world. In any event, at the end of the collection, Auster returns from a prosaic journey and appears content to incarcerate speech while in a constant state of observation. Sight, movement, and thought are all that is important. He is free without language. The paradox is that these sentiments are expressed with language.

This review first published in the Buenos Aires Herald.

This review also may be read here: BA Insider
here: Group Pen BA Links
and here: Shadow Knife Pen Poems

Leatherneck Sea Stories

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Page) — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 10:00:00 +0000

Recollections of Marines, Korea, and the Corps during the 1950’s

By Dave Easton

Canopic Publishing, 214 pages. $16.95

Reviewed by Stephen Page

According to legend, around 1664, when King Charles the II of England first heard a tale of flying fish, he turned and asked a British Royal Marine to vouch for the story. When the B.R.M. concurred, King Charles threw back his head and laughed. Thereafter, he answered anyone who told him something he found incredible to “Tell it to the Marines.” More than a hundred years later, King Charles’s phrase carried over as a slogan when referring to U.S. Marines because somehow they gained the reputation of bending the truth a bit when retelling an event. The reputation continues to the present. Some people nowadays might even go so far as saying that whenever you hear a Marine bragging about his exploits, and in between episodes he pauses to say, “I have another sea story for you,” that would be the same as him saying, “if you believe that, I have another one for you.”

Dave Easton grew up in the United States during a period when patriotism was high, during the 1940’s. Though Easton clearly does not advocate war, he understands that he and many other United States citizens went to the Korean War with the same ideals that were carried over from WWII.

The book is a collection of short stories and anecdotes of the author’s experiences during the Korean War. Although Easton is humble, he writes captivating stories. He knows how to tell a tale. The reader laughs when he goes through boot camp, feels fear when he is in combat situations, cringes when he is given extra duties such as burning barrels of human waste, empathizes with his admiration for noble characters, and agrees with his distaste for shady characters. Redundancies are forgiven because, as the author explains in the prologue, the stories were written singly and without the intent of being gathered into a collection. The stories, however, do work well together. They compliment each other, and the redundancies become merely polite reminders of important events and subjects.

As evident in the case of King Charles, although a tale might seem tall, it might be true in that it is slanted by socialization—in certain aquatic areas of the world, there are fish that leap long distances from the water and their fins give them the illusion that they are flying. This book, however, has no illusory qualities. Every account seems plausible and coincides with historical events. Whether you are a history buff, a Marine, or just like to hear a good yarn, the book is worth the buy.

Note: this review first published in the Buenos Aires Herald.

The publisher is Canopic Publishing

The book may also be purchased here: http://www.amazon.com/Leatherneck-Sea-Stories-Recollections-Marines/dp/0972860452

Hatch’s Mission

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Page) — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 12:44:00 +0000

By Don Merritt
Bantam Books, 215 pages. US$7.95
A Review by Stephen Page

This is the third book of Don Merritt’s trilogy concerning Franklin Hatcher, nicknamed Hatch, who due to circumstance becomes a drifter-loner living on a tropical island. Hatch is a former Captain in the U.S. Army infantry.

In this closing of the trilogy, Hatch and his old college-best-friend’s wife, Jan, travel to Laos and Bangkok to seek revenge for the death of Jan’s husband. Involved in the intrigue are the CIA, mercenaries, and shoot-'em-up bad guys.

This book will appeal to a wide range of readers, including plot followers, adventure seekers, military enthusiasts, and romance lovers. It is great summer reader, or a weekend time-passer. The trilogy would make a great action film.

Book one: Hatch’s Island
Book two: Hatch’s Conspiracy
Book Three: Hatch’s Mission is available on-line:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0553268686?tag=openlibr-20

http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?bi=0&bx=off&ds=30&sortby=2&sts=t&x=79&y=15&cm_ven=PFX&cm_cat=affiliates&cm_pla=links&cm_ite=k172077&afn_sr=gan&isbn=0553268686&pfxid=a_163106418

And http://openlibrary.org/b/OL7823618M/Hatch's_Mission_3

Read earlier links in this website, or look under the category "Locations to Find Books Mentioned" on the right side of this website to order the first two book of the trilogy.

Don Merritt is a United States Expat who lives in Argentina and now writes using his full name, Donigan Merritt. His blog is here: http://doniganmerritt.typepad.com/
His recent novels, The Common Bond and Possessed by Shadows, are available at KEL Editions in Buenos Aires: http://www.professionaltravelguide.com/Destinations/Buenos-Aires/See-and-Do/Shopping/Stores/Bookstores/Kel-Ediciones-p1828391

And at Amazon.com:
http://www.amazon.com/Possessed-Shadows-Donigan-Merritt/dp/1590511581/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1260045576&sr=1-1-spell

http://www.amazon.com/Common-Bond-Donigan-Merritt/dp/1590513061/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1260045615&sr=1-1

The Psychologist and the Foreign Language Teacher

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Page) — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 10:20:00 +0000

By Wilga M. Rivers

University of Chicago Press

212 pages

reviewed by Stephen Page

Halfway through the second chapter of The Psychologist and the Foreign Language Teacher, I began having flashbacks. Putting on a coat and tie. Walking to class on a clear bright day, carrying a briefcase. Walking to class on a rainy day, whistling, holding an umbrella. Entering the classroom and being called “Prof” and “Teach.” The scent of chalk-dust, the sound of books opening and pens scribbling. The satisfaction I feel when I am helping somebody learn something and I see the look on their face when they realize they have learned something. The cortical sensation I get from stimulating conversation with my advanced students. Having students come up to me after a class and saying, “thanks.” I haven’t taught in two-and-a-half years, but I realize how much I miss it. The book is intelligently written and the “audio-lingual” method is clearly outlined and explained. She is correct in believing that the translation method does not work well. It makes the student lazy and creates too many steps in the neural pathways. The only comment I would make to the author is that the drilling method is only appropriate for the beginner student. I taught many methods, Berlitz style drilling, grammar methods, and natural-speaking methods. The latter seems to work the best, but only on the post-beginner levels. After the first few months the drilling becomes unnatural and a bore. She does bring up a lot of clever points, most notably:

Language is speech . . .Language is a set of habits . . . Teach the language, not about the language . . . listening, speaking, reading, and writing. These four skills must be learned “in that order” (that is the way children learn). . . mastery of the skills must be accompanied by familiarity with the culture the language represents, as well as a larger view of life resulting from the realization that there are many cultures and value systems, some far different from our own . . . Learning to make responses in situations which simulate “real-life” communication situations . . . When language is in action, there is always a speaker. He is always somewhere, speaking to someone, about something . . . and word-lists pairing foreign-language words with “equivalents” in the native language should not be used for teaching purposes.

The book is a technical but good read, and I would recommend it to anyone teaching a foreign language.

Buy The Psychologist and the Foreign Language Teacher on Amazon

Book Presentation by Maria del Mar Estrella

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Page) — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 10:07:00 +0000

Maria del Mar Estrella presents her new book, El Cíclope, on October the 31st, at the Rocca Museum, at 7 PM. Ms. Estrella is an accomplished poet and an entertaining reader. Don't miss the event.

Watch Ms. Estrella read on YouTube

The Rocca Museum is located at Vicente López 2220, between the Recoleta Cemetery and Pueyrredón.

What Narcissism Means to Me

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Page) — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 09:55:00 +0000

By Tony Hoagland

Graywolf Press

78 pages

reviewed by Stephen Page

After I read What Narcissism Means to Me, I wished I had chosen The Donkey Gospels. Glancing through the other, after reading the first, I sense more immediacy. Nonetheless, I arbitrarily chose to study about narcissism, will accept my choice, and thus I shall report. It’s a great book. A good read. The structure is interesting, with America, Social Life, Blues, and Luck as titles of the four sections, as if that were the hierarchy of importance from top to bottom for self identity or the molding of the self. The poems are sarcastic, ironic, self loathing—more importantly loathing of the self as all-important. The point of the collection is to show that when the self is the center of the universe and the ego presides over community and society, we have problems—racism, dictatorships, presidents taking self-motivated actions without concern for the people. Hoagland portrays himself, and the “I” of the poems, as narcissistic, but it is a tool for pointing out the fallibilities of narcissism rather than revelational confession. Well done. I especially liked the poem the second section is named after, “Social Life”:

After the first party peters out,

Like the gradual slowdown of a merry-go-round

another party begins

and the survivors of the first party

climb onto the second one

and start it up again

Behind me now my fiend Richard

Is getting a fresh drink; Ann, in her black dress,

Is fanning her breasts; Cynthia is prancing

From group to group,

Making kissy-face—

It is not given to me to understand

The social pleasures of my species, but I think
What they get from these affairs
Is what a bee gets from flowers—a nudging of the stamen.

…..

What I like about the tree is how

They do not talk about the failure of their parents

And what I like about the grasses is that

They are not grasses in recovery

…because silence is always good manners

and often a clever thing to say

when you are at a party.

All introverts can relate to this poem, all observers, all insightfuls. Much of social life is childish, ridiculous, pretentious, an act, yet, it is probably natural for human species to behave this way. Those who do not find it natural to socialize sometimes resort to the readily available drug alcohol. Hoagland does offer suggestions. Listen. Don’t act. Don’t expound. Make an appearance but do not lose the egoless self for the self that needs to be socially accepted.

Purchase the book on Amazon.

Book Presentation by Maria del Mar Estrella

noreply@blogger.com (Stephen Page) — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 11:01:00 +0000

Maria del Mar Estrella presents her new book, El Cíclope, on October the 31st, at the Rocca Museum, at 7 PM. Ms. Estrella is an accomplished poet and an entertaining reader. Don't miss the event.

Watch Ms. Estrella read on YouTube

The Rocca Museum is located at Vicente López 2220, between the Recoleta Cemetery and Pueyrredón.