Month: March 2015

[REVIEW] Paper, Cotton, Leather, by Jenny Sadre-Orafai

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paper

Press 53

80 pages, $14.95

 

Review by Hannah Rodabaugh

 

Within this debut poetry collection, Paper, Cotton, Leather, Jenny Sadre-Orafai’s poems illustrate love and its byproducts within a ringing framework of grief. Grim or sentimental at times, this collection looks at how some people haunt our lives even after they are gone: a presence of absence that is ghostlike, yet strangely real. Following her disintegrating marriage and divorce, the poems in this collection run the gamut of images and/or conventions associated with a failing domestic partnership: wedding paraphernalia, ring fingers, in-laws, adultery, rebound relationships.

One of the things that interests me in this collection is the way that Sadre-Orafai fixates on ideas or moments or objects she finds herself thinking about over and over after her marriage ended. An example of this is how the name of the collection stems from the first three traditional wedding anniversary gifts. In “Record,” Sadre-Orafai writes:

It’s polite to record what we get each year.
Paper, cotton, leather.

The years measure, interpret
these gifts that do nothing but soak space.

The cake agreed to keep until we’re ready
to brave again. The gardenias that didn’t

faint, smashed into a book, the pages curled
tight, a grab at the stalks at last.

I look after its spine, expect it to tantrum,
heave to the floor, the year we’re waiting for.

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Pictures of You: Alia Yunis

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“Two” by Alia Yunis

 

Fullscreen capture 3132015 21822 PMBaghdad, Circa 1958

This is a photo of my mom and her fellow teachers on the train in Baghdad, which my mom used to say was their weekend escape to the big city.  My mom and her friends were Palestinians and Egyptians who at 18 years old were sent by their families to help out with finances by teaching newly oil-rich Kuwaiti girls Arabic, English and math.  It reminds me that  Baghdad once meant hope, sophistication and fun, not tragedy and terror. Continue reading →

Pictures of You: Holly Robinson

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“Why Are the Men in Your Novels So Nice?” by Holly Robinson

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Recently, I was talking to a book club about my latest novel when a woman demanded, “Why are the men in your novels so nice?”

The woman said the word “nice” like it was a deadly contagious disease, or maybe a tricky tax question. I stumbled through an answer about writing emotional family mysteries with dark secrets, and how I try to give readers a beacon of hope by the end of each novel.

However, the real answer is simpler, I realized later: the men in my novels are nice because I have a great brother. Continue reading →

Pictures of You: Jordan E. Rosenfeld

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“The Children Aren’t Smiling,” by Jordan E. Rosenfeld

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My 8th birthday. No one means to tell the truth in this photograph but it can’t be stopped, its slow seepage rises up like flood waters. First glance offers happiness: all smiles, such good times.

You’ll find me bottom left, crouched in a pout. The full effect of my costume can’t be seen: not the Flamenco skirt and my mother’s brown boots, the lacy shirt and the veil atop my birthday hat. I marched out back, stuck hands on hips, but nobody even turned a head. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Everybody Suffers: The Selected Poems of Juan Garcia Madero, Translated by Matt Longabucco

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suffers

O’Clock Press

52 pages, $12

 

Review by Matt Pincus

 

Juan Garcia Madero, the supposed writer of the poems in Everybody Suffers is the protagonist of Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives. He is an observer and student of the leaders of the visceral realist poetry movement, Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano. One knows Madero writes poems, which are never seen in Bolano’s text, thus giving Longabucco the impetus to posit himself as a fictional scholar and translator.

Everybody Suffers carries elements of imagist poetry from H.D. and Pound that mince with transgression, political rebellion, and hint at an echo, or reverie from French Symbolists haunting the text. Also, Longabucco’s speakers use Bolano’s fictional elements and themes in poems such as “Age of Enlightenment,” which draws directly from the corrupt policemen in 2666 who are complicit in the murders of young women around the town of Santa Teresa. Longabucco, as a fictional translator of a fictional character’s poetry, shows the government’s complicity in corrupt drug cartels, something more present now than ever after 43 students went missing in Iguala, Mexico two months ago:

and then destroyed the hands with acid
and then tore up the autopsy report
and then cremated the body and the prints
and threw all the ashes in the ashcan
and then buried the ashcan in a desert
not on earth.

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Pictures of You: Victoria Barrett

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“First Apartment, Spring 1996,” by Victoria Barrett

 

Fullscreen capture 352015 85722 AMIn the fall of 1995 I was twenty-one years old, living with my mother in an apartment in my hometown. I had flunked out of college that spring and slunk home with my head hanging, vacillating between deep, deep shame and panic. I was a Smart Kid. My smartness had, growing up, been the only thing about me that mattered. What I wanted once I was on my own at school was to be loved, smart or no: loved by family, loved by a boy, loved by friends. Failing that, I would have liked to be admired. Failing that, well, I didn’t know what I wanted. That summer and fall I worked a day job dispatching truck drivers and waited tables at night, convinced I was the kind of loser who had already done at age twenty-one every worthwhile thing she’d ever do. I wanted to go back to school—I was determined that I would—but more immediately, I needed to live somewhere else. The fights were getting nastier and more severe. My mother had been hitting me, throwing at me whatever came to hand, telling me she wished I hadn’t been born since I was twelve. By this time there was nothing left but the fighting. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Late Lights, by Kara Weiss

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Late

Colony Collapse Press

123 pages, $14

 

Reviewed by Jonathan Russell Clark

 

Kara Weiss’s Late Lights is an unusual specimen. A book of stories so connected, they basically make up a novel. But at 123 pages, Late Lights is more like a novella in stories, a combination of two types of fiction that don’t ordinarily sell well. Or even get published, for that matter. Story collections, the popular publishing wisdom goes, only interest MFA students, while novellas, apparently, interest no one. That Weiss not only published the book but also won two Next Generation Indie Book Awards makes the rarity of her achievement all the more atypical.

Weiss’s work follows three childhood friends through five stories: Monty, a troubled delinquent trying to turn his life around after yet another spell in juvie; B.J., a girl who identifies as a boy; and Erin, the straight-laced one, who, inevitably, makes some bad choices of her own. They all grew up in Brookline, a mostly affluent neighborhood of Boston (street-parking, for instance, is forbidden on many streets, so as to keep the area beautiful and unclogged by cars). Weiss’s characters, though, are not rich. In “Kinds of Violence,” we learn of B.J.’s brothers – violent, angry boys who have all spent time in court or juvenile detention or jail. In the title story, while visiting him in juvie, Monty’s father tells him that he’s moved to Roxbury, a poor neighborhood. Only Erin appears to come from a family of means, a fact made even clearer by her choice of college: Dartmouth. Continue reading →

Pictures of You: Asha Rajan

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Fullscreen capture 352015 84900 AM“Ammamma,” by Asha Rajan

I met my maternal grandmother when I was six months old. It was my first trip to our ancestral home, the youngest of her grandchildren, the last of the matrilineal line. Every Summer holiday after that was spent there.

I wish I could have known her as an adult. I wish I had had the foresight to ask all the questions that come to me now, to niggle out the details of her life, her ambitions, her desires, her disappointments. But that’s not to be. Thirty years ago, on the 9th of February, when I was 15 and she was 85, my Ammamma, my Mothermother, died. Hers was not an easy death, not a slow waning with time for goodbyes, not a death she had been prepared for in any way. I know this because I was with her in those last gasping moments. I was the only one of her family with her, and at 15, I was inadequately equipped to deal with all I experienced. Continue reading →

Pictures of You: Jim Tomlinson

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” Seven Things I Know to be True,” by Jim Tomlinson

1. Red is the color my brother doesn’t see. If he were to look at this old photo, he’d think your blouse was a faded grey-green. When we were young, he’d insist on swapping golf tees with me, his reds for my whites or yellows. For years he didn’t say why.

2. Hammersmith Farm was the family cottage to which young Jackie Bouvier often came in summer. In a nearby Newport church, in fact, she married Jack Kennedy. His presidential helicopter sometimes landed on Hammersmith’s long west lawn, and the couple’s young daughter, arms outstretched, would race down that long grassy slope to greet her arriving father, the image captured by ready photographers.

3. It was fifteen years before the day you cartwheeled across Hammersmith’s sunlit lawn that I first met your mother, this at a Newport dance. We’d stay married thirteen years more.

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