Month: January 2015

A Car With No Tires On It: A Conversation with Daniel McCloskey

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–Interview by Rachel Mennies

 

Rachel Mennies: We’ve talked a lot about you seeing yourself as both a visual artist and a writer—I was curious if you could talk a little bit about a “hybrid novel,” the term you use to describe A Film About Billy?

Daniel McCloskey: I call my book a hybrid novel because it’s a novel that has comics in it. The book has 250 pages and about 80 of those are comics pages, but that term could apply to a broad range of longish narratives that integrate non-traditional elements.

RM: Okay—so that’s one way to distinguish it from, say, a more traditional graphic novel?

DM: Yes. A Film About Billy is more of a true prose book that has chunks of comics in it. It’s a novel about a kid filming a documentary about his dead friend during an international suicide epidemic—so it was important for me to have this character show part of his documentary. [My original] screenplay format wasn’t working, so I decided the text needed comics to give that glimpse. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] A Film About Billy, by Daniel McCloskey

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Billy

Six Gallery Press (distributed by Birdcage Bottom Books; reprint distributed by Small Press Distribution)

248 pages, $12

 

Review by Rachel Mennies

 

Collin, the teenage protagonist in Daniel McCloskey’s comics-prose hybrid novel A Film About Billy, has a movie to make about his dead friend William, and a seven thousand dollar grant from the enigmatic Mint Foundation to complete it. Billy jumped in front of the train tracks near a military base in Canyon City, Pennsylvania, not far from Pittsburgh; his body takes the blow so hard that his friends find pieces of him for miles up and down the tracks—a piece of his long black hair, a discernable shard of his skull. McCloskey’s first book follows Collin, the narrator of the book’s prose sections and the creator of the documentary film represented in the book’s comics frames, through what first appears to be the ordinary process of mourning a sudden loss, and later manifests as a wildly dystopian tale of an international suicide epidemic and a government plot far more bizarre than anything Collin—or the world—could have imagined.

At the center of this book live teenagers: artists and filmmakers and gamers, agents of action, prey to depression and drugs and ennui and suicide, and—most emphatically—the book’s emotional and intellectual centers of integrity. Many of the enduring adults in A Film About Billy—warped scientists, corrupt military personnel, and absent (or present, sometimes for the worse) parents—perpetrate most of the book’s evil. Collin and his friends first unite in the wake of Billy’s death, only to splinter apart as suicide and unrest overtakes Pittsburgh. McCloskey renders these protagonists most thoroughly and tenderly as the book opens and the story of Billy’s suicide unfolds—as we “watch” the first few frames of Collin’s documentary, where Billy lives, as teenager, forever. Continue reading →

The Lightning Room with Josette Akresh-Gonzales

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–Interview by Diana Clarke

 

January author Josette Akresh-Gonzales makes a case for for caring about commas after the apocalypse and remembering even when it would hurt less to forget.

 

1. I was so struck by one line in “The Trumpet Player”: “Mercy for caring deeply about commas/instead of migrant slaves.” I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what, if anything, poetry can or should do when the world is more visibly messed up than usual. By which I mean, do commas have a use? Why bother caring about punctuation?

Without commas, there would be no small intake of breath between phrases, no pause; it would be all hard stops, choppy and unforgiving, like a drill sergeant yelling at you. Of course, I’m a copyeditor, so I have to care about commas. But, do I have to be a copyeditor? That’s the question I ask myself. If the world were to end (I just read the MaddAddam trilogy, by Margaret Atwood, so this hypothetical situation is fresh in my mind), would survivors who know where to put commas be able to make a living? Or would it be more useful, would it be more valuable in a postapocalyptic society, to be able to grow wheat, to weave fabric, to hunt squirrel. Atwood argues in these novels that storytelling matters tremendously to human beings and to survival. Should poetry address the problems we humans face? I really don’t know how it can’t and still survive as an art form. Those whose work takes big risks with big, troubling narratives—like Jamaal May, Martín Espada, Allen Ginsberg—are so rewarding to read, because they are not selfish: they give a huge gift to us in attempting to take on these topics that matter.

2. The speaker in that poem says, “I have two kids so I’ve forgotten everything.” But whoever she is, she’s writing poetry—which is a kind of memory, not to mention that she’s lying, and that the purpose of the yizkor service is to give people permission to remember, and to mourn family members they’ve lost. What’s the relationship between loving and forgetting? Continue reading →

[REVIEW] An Impenetrable Screen of Purest Sky, by Dan Beachy-Quick

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Screen

 

Coffee House Press

256 pages, $15.95

Reviewed by Michael Peck

 

Fairy tales are the Legos of art. From Mother Goose in 1695 to Pan’s Labyrinth, they uncork latent desires and dreams left otherwise bottled. Very much in that vein, An Impenetrable Screen of Purest Sky sits at the crossroads of Gen X frustration and childlike wonder. “There is a line across which the fact wanders and becomes imaginary,” Dan Beachy-Quick’s narrator says, “but like the equator, it is an imaginary line — one crosses it and knows something is awry only when the stars rise at night in ludicrous combinations.” With Purest Sky Beachy-Quick crosses and re-crosses that demarcation, then implodes it.

The protagonist of Purest Sky, Daniel, is in the process of uncovering a fairy tale volume, Wonders and Tales, a tome his eccentric father forbade him from perusing as a child. That volume, Daniel believes, holds the key to his father’s journey to the Galapagos Islands in search of an occulted scroll of songs and the hardships meted on Daniel ever since. Weaving in his doomed relationship with Lydia, a woman who chooses physics over love, and remembrances of his entire family’s demise, Beachy-Quick rifts the world neatly in two.  Continue reading →

Because of your fatal addiction to art: A Conversation with Chelsea Hodson

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–by Julie Hart

 

I met Chelsea Hodson last July when she read at The Book Report, a reading series at the HiFi on New York’s Lower East Side. She “reported” on Jo Ann Beard’s The Boys of My Youth by reading an essay about the boys of her own youth. I bought her chapbook, an essay called Pity the Animal (Future Tense Books, 2014), and read it on the subway home. This line severed me: “I was writing everything down as if I knew what I was seeing.” I almost immediately began my own piece beginning with, “I was writing down my opinions and calling them poetry.” This is the highest form of flattery I know.

Chelsea agreed to come over to my Brooklyn studio and let me interview her. We talked about her recently completed project, Inventory, a Tumblr blog pairing short prose poems with photos of every single thing she owns—all 657 of them. We also discussed her writing practice, Marina Abramovic, her favorite poets, the Tin House summer workshop, and our minimalist aesthetic.

 

Julie: First, I wanted to ask you about Inventory. How did you keep going for 657 days?

C: Well, when I started it, I didn’t think anyone would read it. But I liked the idea of it being on the internet, a public document. Putting it out into the world helped me feel accountable, so the longer it went, the more I realized it had to be completed. When I started it, I thought, “I’ll do it for a while, but I probably won’t do everything.” The longer it went on, the more I realized, “No, I actually do need to finish it.” But I didn’t realize it was going to take nearly two years to do. I thought it would take maybe a year. I don’t know why. I just started making an inventory, and I started in the kitchen. When I decided to do the blog, I began a narrative and just did whichever object I felt would logically come next. Something in the kitchen would remind me of something in a book, so I would get that book and quote that part, so in that way it became somewhat random. I wasn’t doing it by room; I was doing it by instinct, intuition, what I thought would come naturally in the inventory. Conceptually, it would not be good if I didn’t actually do everything. I just felt, what’s the point if I don’t do the whole thing? Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Scouting for the Reaper by Jacob M. Appel

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reaper

Black Lawrence Press

194 pages, $15.15
Review by Max Vande Vaarst

 

 

Jacob M. Appel’s Scouting for the Reaper is a masterpiece of human hysterics. In nearly each of these eight collected stories, which shift in perspective across age and gender lines, yet hold firm throughout to their essential self-seriousness, the Dundee-winning biochemist polymath Appel makes a habit of substituting obsession for conflict and the paranoiac for the poignant.

Our first encounter with Reaper’s “Dear Diary” brand of melodrama comes in equal doses through the three adolescent-narrated openers, “Choose Your Own Genetics,” “Creve Coeur” and the title story “Scouting for the Reaper.” The love interests here manifest themselves early, entering their respective scenes accompanied by hammy giveaway lines such as “He was a broad-shouldered, square-jawed teenage dreamboat…his cheeks blossomed like peonies” and “At that moment, the girl – the most alluring creature I’ve ever seen, stepped angelically into our artificial winter.” Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Egg Heaven, by Robin Parks

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Egg

Shade Mountain Press

150 pgs, $16.95

 

Reviewed by Jonathan Russell Clark

 

Diners provide the interconnection for the characters in Robin Parks’s fine debut collection Egg Heaven. All set in Southern California, the servers at these establishments move in and out of each other’s lives like their customers move in and out of the restaurants themselves. In “La Playa,” young Bell, after losing her mother and her home, finds employment in the titular diner. Later, in “Delgado’s Family Mexican Restaurant,” we hear of “Jacinto’s Aunt Bell’s restaurant, La Playa,” giving us a sense of what happened after Bell’s story ended. Young Bell, again in “La Playa,” tries to eat at a place called, simply, Breakfast, but “the waitress sat in the back, smoking in the dark, ignoring Bell, so she finally left.” In another story, “Breakfast,” we seem to meet that neglectful waitress.

But these connections are not meant to further the plot. This isn’t a novel-in-stories; it is a collection of interconnected stories. The distinction is important here because Parks isn’t interested in telling one big story but a number of small ones. The autonomy of each piece is necessary for the larger, more important connections to take hold. These characters––these servers and owners, customers and regulars––are linked less by the coincidence of geography and more by the state of their lives––full of loss, fragile hope and fleeting tenderness. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Memory Chose A Woman’s Body by Angela M. Carter

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memory
Unbound Content
102 pages, $16.00

Review by Hannah Rodabaugh

Angela M. Carter’s Memory Chose A Woman’s Body is a collection of poetry that deals with the subjects of the author’s abusive childhood, her subsequent problems with mental illness, her southern roots, being a mother, and others. Her poetry, which tends towards the confessional, is viscerally intense, a poetry of extreme images and emotions. Her work is glaringly and uncomfortably honest. However, this honesty is also what reels you in. Continue reading →

Men Writing Women: Why I’m Good at It. Am I Good at It? How to Be Better at It.

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–By Michael Gerhard Martin

 

 

When I was an undergraduate writer-boy, I thought myself a Hemingway scholar. I carried a valise, and tried to take up pipe smoking and hunting and tweed. I drank hard and thought existentially, and wished piously for wormwood visions.

The well-thumbed copy of Papa’s Complete Stories in my valise was the Finca Viggia edition, after all, and while I still don’t know what Finca Vigia is, I knew at the time that it meant authenticity. The book’s broken spine and worn pages affirmed my own authenticity. I was going to be a writer. I was a writer. Look, world, at my valise, my fountain pen, my Finca Viggia edition, and comprehend!

Those among us not embarrassed by our twenty-year-old selves are likely slaves to ridiculous nostalgia. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] The Fun We’ve Had, by Michael Seidlinger

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FunLazy Fascist Press

168 pages, $11.95

 

Review by Joseph Michael Owens

 

It’s nearly impossible to imagine Michael Seidlinger’s pen ever stopping. He’s already published more books than the majority of writers are likely to in their whole careers. The key feature of nearly everything Seidlinger writes is that it’s almost certainly guaranteed to be different than the last book he wrote. The only constant in Seidlinger’s writing—besides the shining quality of the prose—is change. Indeed, the only given is that he doesn’t show any signs of stopping.

There’s often a feeling of uncanny detachment between the reader and Seidlinger’s work. It has a tendency to draw you in and allows you to only get precisely as close as Seidlinger wants you to, to see the work at a specific distance that he’s determined. Like an expert filmmaker, Michael Seidlinger is the writer, director, cameraman, and producer of these written scenes.  Continue reading →