F-Stein by L. J. Moore (A Review by J. A. Tyler)

What follows is the fourth in J. A. Tyler’s full-press of Subito Press, a series of reviews appearing at [PANK] over the course of 2012, covering every title available from Subito Press. J. A. Tyler’s previous full-press series have appeared at Big Other (a full-press of Calamari Press) and with Mud Luscious Press’s online quarterly (a full-press of Publishing Genius Press).

2008 winner for poetry in Subito Press’s annual competition, L. J. Moore’s F-Stein is a complex book, one perhaps best explained by quoting a portion of Paul Hoover’s blurb: “Anagrams of that famous name [Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein] appear as subtitles and offer clues to events so powerful they refuse to be spoken directly. Numerous clues leading to this secret have been dropped along the forest path of reading: homophones, double meanings, and a delightful, allusive style.” F-Stein is exactly this, a poetry collection focused on hiding and reappearing, on losing oneself in another as Dr. Frankenstein lost himself in the monster he created. But Moore doesn’t merely use these ideas as recurring themes – the poems of F-Stein actually become themselves words in hiding, anagrams, mirrors of meaning:

would that I were unconscious of my conscious / but I’m a camera / trained on a tv screen / I’m the medicine cabinet mirror opened / to reflect the bathroom mirror / the back of my head infinitely / I’m a door at the end of a hallway / beyond a door at the end of a hallway

The trouble with anagrams though is the trouble with F-Stein: when anagrams work they are surprisingly beautiful and often unexpectedly poignant, for instance:

The Short Aeneid (anagram of There is No Death)

Or:

Disconnect Tour, Conductor Stein (anagrams of Deconstruction)

But when anagrams don’t work, they end up reading like a struggle between words and authors, a running out of letters, language forced into nearly incomprehensible phrasing because in an anagram, there are only so many options. For example, this anagram heavy passage:

dad / I’ll drink with you / tell me stories / of our lush inheritance / after blaze joy / diva friar zed / lance rhyme-on / contuse lit (aka scout inlet) / your brother khan / cousin woo / uncle ham live / the syllables tied her in

In this, F-Stein feels likewise a calculated risk, and it takes that risk into its structure as well with footnotes on every opposing page of the collection, bringing the reader in and out of each poem based on those superscript identifiers. And again, sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn’t. Some notes are interesting and clever, particularly when they identify a specific anagram in use, but others are cold and dry, mock histories of words or phrases, names or places, and as such, often feel unnecessary to the poems at hand.

The complexity of L. J. Moore’s F-Stein is admirable, but the combination of anagrams, footnotes, and other divergent structural work makes this book a gamble. When Moore’s literary hijinks don’t pan out for a reader, the collections falls wayward, but when these tactics succeed, the resulting poems are alluring and alive, full of Frankenstein’s best electricity.

F-Stein is available from Subito Press.

Subito Press is a nonprofit literary publisher based in the Creative Writing Program of the Department of English at the University of Colorado at Boulder. We look for innovative fiction and poetry that at once reflects and informs the contemporary human condition, and we promote new literary voices as well as work from previously published writers. Subito Press encourages and supports work that challenges already-accepted literary modes and devices.

J. A. Tyler is the author of eight books, including In Love with a Ghost (Lit Pub Books) and Variations of a Brother War (Small Doggies Press). His recent work has appeared with Cream City Review, Black Warrior Review, Diagram, and Redivider, and he reviews for The Nervous Breakdown and The Rumpus among other venues. For more, visit: chokeonthesewords.com.