[REVIEW] Unchecked Savagery by Glenn Shaheen

savagery

Ricochet Editions

76 pages, $10.00

 

Review by Matt Pincus

 

Glenn Shaheen’s collection of flash fiction is a bitter, sardonic reminder of America’s abstract fears and paranoia of “other.” The stories are distinctly American through cultural tropes (in the first story, “Harry Loves Every Movie,” Crash, Hostel 2 and Failure to Launch are mentioned): Movies, songs, brand name stores, corporate gimmicks and overly dramatized clichés become patterned, dry jokes on tragic ironies in American personas.

The story “Personal Order” takes on the corporate marketing of deodorant, and distorts what is usually a pleasant aroma into the smell of McDonald’s grease. But the narrator says, “People just started coming closer, being more and more curious about my smell. I felt like I was always mobbed.” Although he is getting a desired social response, the smell of his deodorant carries a repulsive cultural history and also an individual, psychosomatic response. The tragic waste of consumer culture is nauseated, but still driven back to consumerism. Continue reading

[REVIEW] If Not For This, by Pete Fromm

If not

Red Hen Press

240 pages, $15.95

 

Review by Heidi Willis

If you go by the photos of his cowboy-handlebar-mustache and his memoir revelations of fighting mountain lions, the four-time Pacific Northwest Bookseller Award winner Pete Fromm is nothing like the narrators of his novels. He is not a fifteen-year old boy desperately trying to live up to the dreams of his manic sister (How All This Started), and he is decidedly not a coming-of-age girl wrestling with sex and an absent father (As Cool As I Am). Yet by the first page in, you’d forget he is neither of those.

Fromm’s newest novel, If Not for This, takes on an even greater hurdle–writing from the point of view of a woman dying of multiple sclerosis. It is a bold tactic that, under a lesser writer, might tend towards melodrama or cliché. Fromm, however, creates a narrator that crackles with sarcasm, wit, and an authenticity that makes the risk pay off. Continue reading

[REVIEW] Amulet by Jason Bayani

amulet

Write Bloody Publishing

90 pages, $15

 

Review by Stanton Hancock

 

In Amulet, Jason Bayani issues a loud and defiant declaration that he has come to claim his place amongst the ranks of the best modern poets.  While his credentials alone are impressive – he has an MFA in creative writing from St. Mary’s College, he’s a Kundiman Fellow, and he’s a co-founder of the Asian American spoken word collective Proletariat Bronze – it’s the startling power contained within the pages of Amulet that serve to stake his claim.

Bayani covers so much poetic ground in his first collection that it is startling to reach the last page and realize that it clocks in at less than 100 pages.  After my first read-through, I was sure I had read a much longer book based purely upon the multitude of stylistic choices Bayani makes throughout the book.  While the use of many disparate styles can sometimes cause a collection to lack cohesion, Amulet does not suffer from this problem.  In fact, the strength of Bayani’s voice envelops these pages and gives the reader a sense that the many various styles do not reflect a lack of direction but rather a poet sharing the many facets of his personality.   Continue reading

Between the Bones

 

Fragments of language and story extracted from the body

 

–by Temim Fruchter

 

 

What Weighs

 

“Please give me that heavy book. I need to put something heavy like that on top of my head. I have to place my feet under the pillows always, so as to be able to stay on earth. Otherwise I feel myself going away, going away at a tremendous speed, on account of my lightness. “ – Anais Nin

 

*

We were not counting on the weight of the chicken.

It was heavier than a chicken should be, everyone agreed – even for a large chicken, the kind you would be proud to find toward the back of the freezer, behind the smaller, rounder chickens, a muscly misfit back there, too bulky to be on display but perfect to feed the lot of us.

Because we would be eating in a different city, we put the chicken between the clothes in my cloth suitcase, frozen solid, and zipped it up so it bulged around the midriff, heaving it upright and pulling out the handle for easier carriage. It was when I tried to walk that I realized that the suitcase wouldn’t move. When I moved the suitcase anyway, it protested stiff and the handle snapped off, and then there was nothing to do but push the suitcase to where I was going with everything I had from my pelvis up to my chest. Continue reading

[REVIEW]The Pulpit vs. The Hole, by Jay Shearer

Pulpit

Gold Lion Press

53 pages, $10.00

 

Review by Denton Loving

 

 

Jay Shearer is the author of the novel Five Hundred Sirens (Cairn Press, May 2014) and the short story collection How Exquisite the Dead Girl (finalist for the 2013 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction). His novella, The Pulpit vs. The Hole, was understandably selected by Percival Everett as winner of the Gold Line Press chapbook competition.

In The Pulpit vs. The Hole, Shearer gives a coming-of-age story like few others.  This is a contemporary tale that takes place at an aptly-named summer camp, Camp Abednego, in Eastern Pennsylvania.  Here Shearer presents the age-old questions that always arise when good and evil must confront each other.  What makes Shearer’s story so powerful are the unique setting and circumstances in which the questions are asked. Continue reading

Dead or Alive: Robert Frost in Ripton, VT

 

Exploring writerly lives through literary pilgrimage  

 

–By Robin McCarthy  

 

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Robert Frost owned two homes in Ripton, Vermont, and both locations are now owned by Middlebury College. The more elaborate of the two summer homes, Homer Noble Farm, is nestled on the outskirts of the college’s Bread Loaf campus and privy to the action of the summer conference that has drawn writers to Ripton, Vermont every summer for nearly ninety years. The second Frost home is a remote cabin tucked away into the woods a mile and a half down the road. While guests often stayed at the farm, Frost himself preferred to spend his visits to Ripton in the rustic cabin removed from the campus.

When I visited Bread Loaf a number of years ago, I was struck by how impossible it is to separate Frost’s relationship with Bread Loaf from the identity of the summer writers’ conference. The poet was influential in establishing the Bread Loaf school and remained a frequent visitor and lecturer for most of his life. There are many writers celebrated at Bread Loaf, both past a present, but none so storied or active in their own mythology as Frost. Continue reading

Virtual Book Tour: From Here, by Jen Michalski

From Here Banner - v1

 

Today is the third stop of Jen Michalski’s virtual book tour celebrating her new collection, From Here. The twelve stories in From Here explore the dislocations and intersections of people searching, running away, staying put. Their physical and emotional landscapes run the gamut, but in the end, they’re all searching for a place to call home.

 

Thematically, how does this collection differ from your other books?

I think there are some similar themes of isolation and dislocation that I explored in The Tide King and also Could You Be With Her Now, but the stories in From Here are through the prism of many different narrators, who differ in age, sex, ethnicity, physical locale. I’d written these stories over a period of seven years, maybe, but I think there’s a lot more of me in them than the aforementioned work, my inner struggle of wanting to belong, to find a place to feel at home. But, at the same time, I think, like any story collection, is a good cross section of my work. Some of it I wrote when I was single, some when I met my partner, and I was deep into my thirties and some of my life priorities were changing, and maybe my perspective, too. Continue reading

[REVIEW] The Plague Doctor in His Hull-Shaped Hat, by Stephen Massimilla

Plague doctor

Stephen F. Austin State University Press

118 pages, $16

 

Review by Eliza Rotterman

 

Stephen Massimilla’s new poetry collection The Plague Doctor in His Hull-Shaped Hat begins seaside with the desire “not quite to live forever” but “to take / my fill of you, a long, lascivious look.” It’s an apt start for a book inspired by myth, history and journey. “Teach me to keep going / nowhere,” pleads Massimilla, “nowhere” describing both place—rock and sky—and an enlightened state of mind. From terrain nearly vacant of human presence to Italian cities densely populated and teetering atop towers of myth, the cyclical, Buddhist kind of travel Massimilla speaks of is always on a spiritual plane even while his language reflects a hyper-real, playful sensibility: “Urethra of porcelain teapot hisses,” and teens in “their went-thither hips in zucchini-green denim” traipse by.

Our expectations of travel are often unrealistic. We demand transformation without accepting the terms of pilgrimage. Adrift in his “hull-shaped hat,” the speaker of Massimilla’s poems searches for authentic, unfoldable experience. And at times he seems to find it—in his continued effort to see himself as part of a collective searching for homecoming.  “I mean more than consuming,” he tells us in “Etymology”;  “I stand wanting.” Remarkably, Massimilla brings loss and disappointment into haptic resolve:

The warmth replaced
with loss becomes part of every other reality,

its appreciation, alive to the touch,
touched every which way, every way.    Continue reading

The Tangible and Strange: an Interview with Gina Keicher

 

 keicher

 

Interview by Emily Coon

 

Consider the strangeness and dysphoria of modern existence in America. Poet Gina Keicher does in Wilderness Champion, which roams highways, explores curiosity cabinets, guards lawn volcanoes, and dances in a gun store after the apocalypse.

Emily Coon: Many – most – of the poems in this book are organized into paragraphs rather than lines. Some paragraphs include lines of dialogue. Can you tell me more about that choice?

Gina Keicher: At some point in revision, each of the prose poems saw line breaks. At some point, I also tried to offset the dialogue and give it more space on the page, but the momentum felt disrupted to me. If I write in lines, I tend not to give dialogue its own space, so when I transition to prose poems, I let that convention slide. The dreamy, fluid roll from prose to dialogue appeals to me.

Also, embedding the dialogue became a way to make turns on a technical level. In Wilderness Champion, things change, appear, and disappear. Things get weird. So, letting someone talk seemed like a strange crafty move instead of a strange subject maneuver. Continue reading