Month: November 2014

[REVIEW] Thieves in the Afterlife, by Kendra DeColo

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Thieves

Saturnalia Books

82 pages, $15

 

Review by Corey Pentoney

 

I was drawn in to Kendra DeColo’s collection of poetry, Thieves in the Afterlife, as soon as I heard the title. Who could turn down a title like that? If I had to choose one word to describe this collection, it would have to be raw. Raw in every sense of the word. Raw emotion. Raw bodies. And, perhaps most importantly, raw language. In her own words, she makes “each breath/poignant, a rawness/cutting.” Thieves is racked full of lines that stop you in your tracks, and make reading a single poem difficult as you have to deny the urge—or not—to stop and relish the feeling of the line on your tongue and in your head. There are images that will leave you to your imagination:

In the dark he turns
to his wife one last time
and asks her to pull
his heart inside-out
like a sleeve. Continue reading →

The Lightning Room with Yanyi Luo

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–Interview by Diana Clarke

 

Do you long to believe in Whitman’s transcendent vision but criticize his earnestness? November poet Yanyi Luo suggests laughter; it’s “the sound of power unhinging.”

 

 1. “Song of My Selfie” just slayed me with wonder and paradox. How you honor and also skewer Walt Whitman, make poetry out of shoutycaps while satirizing the hyperbolic (performed) enthusiasm that passes for joy on the internet. The search for a “NEW TRANSCENDENTALISM” feels just as urgent as when Walt was writing, and “a BETTER VERSION OF MYSELF” is still such a seductive fantasy. The American dream is so damn persistent. Do you think the internet changed it?

I think that internet technology has given us with the capability for rapid networked communities. This is most significant for those who have been buried, excluded, or misrepresented systemically and historically. We know that the American dream comes with exceptions, but now it is easier—not easy—to begin dialogues with these communities. Those conversations are making their way visibly into mainstream culture. The outlook isn’t wholly optimistic: the internet is a technology, not a leveling field, and the startup and blogger world reflect familiar demographics of overwhelming maleness and whiteness. Whatever change may come from dialogue is still to be seen. Yet, the internet provides the linguistic and satirical context that allows “Song of My Selfie” to exist. I criticize Whitman’s earnestness, but I also want to believe in it, and I sincerely long for a transcendental being that is self-loving but radical, not indiscriminately containing multitudes but constantly looking to enable them and change with them. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Bound by Blue, by Meg Tuite

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Bound by Blue

 

Sententia Books

186 pages, $15

 

Review by Sara Lippmann

 

The title delivers.  Bound by Blue is everything it promises to be – a haunting, heady collection about those shackled, bound by their individual brand of blue – pain, aching sorrow, screaming memories of childhood trauma.  Meg Tuite takes on the awful, the tormented, and the twisted like no other writer. Her characters are not ones to seek out for a moonlight stroll or to cozy up beside on the couch for a breezy rom-com. They can be terrible, but we understand them as survivors; they have suffered from and remain inextricably tied to the brutal, never-ending cycle of abuse. Even when they are unforgivable they are human. The thirteen stories feel almost feral, boldly defying conventional norms with lyrical complexity and startling imagery.  Tuite’s prose is fearless and fanged, exquisite in detail – mirroring the barbed edges of her characters whose nightmares stalk them long into dawn.

Hurt is everywhere. Almost all of Tuite’s characters are victims of unspeakable acts inflicted upon them by mothers, fathers, random boys, local men, and other family members. A go-getter medical student is ruled by her eating disorder, the outgrowth of a savage backwoods assault. A grown man gouges out his eye, irrevocably ruined by his own mother’s sexual coercions.  A child tears out her own tooth as a cry for help against her older brother’s friend, a predatory neighbor.  A caretaker to an elderly man is haunted by the cries of a demented, downstairs tenant.  A delusional housewife can’t escape the damage of a destructive marriage and a childhood rape. Continue reading →

Grit Gospel

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The ministry of making art in Appalachia

–by Final Girl

 

In the Mountains that used to be Magic

 

 

A buck lives in my neighborhood.
It’s not a neighborhood really, just a scattering of houses by the highway.  At night you can hear the freight trains.  I don’t know my neighbors, only by their trash.  It’s not really in town, but not rural enough either for a deer of this size, not this size—large enough to be legendary.  To be the subject of stories, the object of at least one hunter’s obsession.  I’ve seen the buck twice: a startled head, rack flashing like a white mast in the trees.

There are so many mysteries: where he goes, how he lives.  How old is he?  How long has he been here?  How long will he last?  He gives me something to root for, the buck.  He helps me dream of something undiscovered still in these settled hills. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] If There’s Any Truth in a Northbound Train, by Ryan Werner

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Any Truth

Passenger Side Books

28 pages, $4

 

Review by Jonathan Russell Clark

 

 

In his essay, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” David Foster Wallace describes what he calls “Image-Fiction” as writing that “uses the transient received myths of popular culture as a world in which to imagine fictions about “real,” albeit pop-mediated, characters.” He cites as a practitioner of the art Mark Leyner, whose 1990 book My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist contains lines like, “I had just been fired from McDonald’s for refusing to wear a kilt during production launch week for their new McHaggis sandwich.”

Leyner’s novel and Wallace’s essay popped into my mind as I read Ryan Werner’s If There’s Any Truth in a Northbound Train, which seems to me both a throwback to that style and a cautious update of it. Like Leyner, Werner’s stories are filled with oddballs, off-kilter occurrences and pop references. And Werner also shares with Leyner an ability to distill a situation in very few words. One of Werner’s stories opens like this: “I didn’t marry a girl named Florence and then she won the lottery. That’s not the way I tell it but it sure is the way she tells it, like they’re related, like there couldn’t be one without the other.”  Not only is this a very funny line, it’s also remarkably economical––an entire relationship dynamic is established in a handful of words. Continue reading →

Dead or Alive: Sarah Orne Jewett in South Berwick, Maine

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Exploring writerly lives through literary pilgrimage    

–By Robin McCarthy 

 

SOJ house, front

I return home to Maine in August for one of the last weeks before the semester begins back in Michigan, before the berries go by and the snow starts to fall and the miles between where I grew up and where I live become more difficult to cross. On the day we leave Maine, there are things to acquire; pint of berries from the field, whoopie pies and Italian sandwiches in the manner only a Maine gas station can make them, glass growlers to fill with favored small-batch IPAs.

With these things packed into the Honda Civic that has now looped it’s way between the nation’s coasts for over 260,000 miles, my boyfriend and I drive west across the interior of the state and then South on the interstate. Leaving Maine is my least favorite activity, although I’m too old for homesickness like this, and I know my absences are largely temporary. And so I am happy to stop for a while in South Berwick, just on the Maine side of the New Hampshire state line, to parallel park in front of Sarah Orne Jewett’s childhood home, to eat the first of the squirreled-away sub sandwiches on the bench outside. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Excavation by Wendy C. Ortiz

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Excavation

Future Tense Books

242 pages, $28

 

Review by Alex M. Frankel

 

Wendy Ortiz’s memoir, Excavation, is an outstanding first book. It chronicles how the author, as a middle school student back in the mid 1980s, was seduced by her English teacher, Mr. Ivers, and how he carried on an affair with her over the next several years. The memoir is remarkable not just for its taboo subject, but also for the matter-of-fact tone Ortiz takes as she tells about her most unusual relationship. It is a relationship on which the author has had plenty of time to reflect: now in her forties, she works as a therapist in her native southern California. She has published both poetry and prose (including an essay in the “Modern Love” series in The New York Times) and is the founder and curator of Los Angeles’s Rhapsodomancy Reading Series. Alongside the main story of her teenage years, Ortiz has added vignettes from her personal and professional life as an adult, including her work with at-risk youth. These passages, beautifully interspersed with her adolescent tale, shed light on the person she has become, and also function as brief pauses following cliffhangers, enhancing the book’s atmosphere of danger and foreboding.  All the while, the reader keeps wondering, “When and how is Ivers going to get caught?” Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Looking for Small Animals, by Caitlin Grace McDonnell

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animals

Nauset Press

$12.00, 68 pages

 

Review by Rachel Mennies 

 

Because it’s the worst place in the world to find the correct answer to anything, and because I never take my own advice, I type one of Looking for Small Animals’ lingering-after-I-finish-the-book subtexts, “Are humans animals?”, into Yahoo Answers. And chris160444, his avatar a growling, wild fox, gives me an answer that I believe McDonnell might echo: “The worst animals on the planet,” my new friend chris says, “are humans.”

The tameless, yet complicated animals inside us come alive early in Looking for Small Animals: “The animal started lashing at fifteen,” the speaker of McDonnell’s poem “The Moth” tells us. We read this collection, McDonnell’s first, to see where the animal leads us: to understand what an at-times-savage, at-times-peaceful human speaker can teach us about a world gone machine, about our distances from and connection to our nonhuman co-citizens. Continue reading →

Wrought & Found

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Original poems & found images.

–by Mia Sara

 

IMG_0004

Weekend at El Cap with Fifth Graders

–After Lowell

 

Here we watch the kids go mock wild;
my wits all run to seed, and scatter,
more itchy weeds for the cracked riverbed.
We all lose track of our child
in the cold, after dark, when it matters,
half-tanked at the fire pit, our heads

tight in the shrink-wrapped void of time.
My wits, in ashes, ashes. At El Cap.
I used to hold her in my lap,
this fierce and final child of mine. Continue reading →