Author: Sheila Squillante

[REVIEW] The Story of How All Animals Are Equal & Other Tales, by Matt Runkle

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animals

Brooklyn Arts Press

158 pages, $15.95

 

Review by Anna Mebel

 

Matt Runkle is both a writer and a visual artist currently studying at University of Iowa’s Center for the Book. He writes short stories and prose poems, makes collages, comics, and art books. Though The Story of How All Animals Are Different & Other Tales is his first book of short stories, Matt Runkle has also published a zine called RUNX TALES. As an artist, he is interested in assemblages, juxtapositions, things that most people would discard. These artistic practices filter into his writing. In The Story of How All Animals Are Different & Other Tales, Runkle mixes fairy tales, love stories, satire, dystopia, prose poems, and careful observations of the ordinary.

The stories are often very short but always efficient, showing us flashes of worlds similar to our own, yet slightly off—an apocalyptic scenario in which people live out of their cars, a supermarket located on the border between two countries, a town in which the punishment is election to public office. He finds “places where comings and goings occur from every side,” where borders dissolve and relationships become unstable, letting worrisome aspects of human nature emerge. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Fifteen Dogs by André Alexis

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FifteenDogs_cover

Coach House Books

171 pages, $17.95

 

Review by Lynne Weiss

 

Fifteen Dogs, the latest novel by Canadian writer Andre Alexis, compellingly explores the human condition—the need for purpose, spiritual sustenance, food, sex, sensual gratification, and most of all, for love and language—through the perspective of fifteen dogs who have been given human consciousness in the course of a bet between Hermes and Apollo.

All fifteen dogs happen to be in a veterinary clinic next to the Toronto tavern where Hermes and Apollo formulate their wager. “I’ll wager a year’s servitude,” says Apollo, “that animals—any animals you choose—would be even more unhappy than humans are if they had human intelligence.”

Apollo’s brother Hermes (they are both sons of Zeus), accepts the bet on the condition that if even one of the creatures to whom they grant human consciousness dies happy, he wins the bet. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Navigational Clouds, by Alina Gregorian

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th

Monk Books

30 pages, $10

 

Review by Anaïs Duplan

 

 

“apricot trees exist, apricot trees exist”

– Inger Christensen, Alphabet (1981)

It’s difficult to know how to begin to speak about Alina Gregorian’s Navigational Clouds. Each of the thirty poems is, in itself, both a diagram of waking life and a personified map of America. “Unlike the snowstorm in Arkansas, nothing seems wrong with my teeth. But the world is strange” (“Atlas”). Over the course of the collection, Gregorian acts as our cartographer, acutely illustrating what it means to search, perhaps desperately, for some direction, for some sense of purpose in largely uncharted territory. Fragmented, enigmatic and yet logical, Navigational Clouds demands that anyone who dares traverse its landscape learn the lay of the land. In other words, it would seem that the only way to talk about Gregorian’s chapbook would be to mimic the diagrammatic quality of the writing itself.

I. The Cartographer

Gregorian’s speakers are often distanced and aloof, but not for ignorance. Instead, her speakers embody some unnamable coordinate at the epicenter of wisdom, ennui, and skepticism. In “Everything is Happening,” the speaker states, “If everything is the way it could be, then nothing would get done around here.” This particular poem is important. If Navigational Clouds is an ongoing experience of ‘shared attention’ – the readers’ gaze is directed in whichever direction the cartographer chooses – then “Everything is Happening” is pivotal because it widens our focus from a singular incident or place to the global, the universal. A poem like “Untitled,” for example, feels much more microscopic: “You are a daisy pinned to my lapel,” and we spend much of Navigational Clouds reflecting on the minute, just as we do here. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Kern, by derek beaulieu

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blue

Les Figues Press

89 pages, $17.00

 

Review by Klara du Plessis

 

Especially as a child, I was obsessed with the spelling of my name, the interchangeability of K and C in English; I often introduced myself as “Klara with a K,” attempting to pin down my orthographic identity. Flipping through derek beaulieu’s new book Kern a first time, I land upon a visual poem featuring the letter K, some commas, arrows and a question mark.

question

 

Continue reading →

Reading Colorfully: Traveling through the World’s Literature

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–by Nichole Reber

Ask for names like Basharat Peer or Tashi Dawa at your local or chain bookstore and the clerks look at you like you’ve got seven heads. I was the one confused, though, by the lack of easy access to international authors upon repatriating back to the States. Sure, I no longer had daily access to ramshackle book vendors beside Mumbai train stations, Peruvian favorites in Lima’s bookstores, or expat bar bookshelves in China, but need that put an end to my colorful reading? So join me in this journey between crisp white pages of new literary titles and soft yellowed pages of older books.

“Heartbreaker on a Quest”

Writer Pham Thi Hoai knows how to tick off the Vietnamese powers that be. Her homeland’s government accuses her of disregarding social taboos, disrespecting traditions, having a pessimistic view of their country, and worse— abusing the “sacred mission of a writer.”

DCF 1.0

Pham Thi Hoai

In the book that introduced me to her work, Night, Again: Contemporary Fiction from Vietnam, edited by Linh Dinh and published by Seven Stories in 1996, Dinh describes that “sacred mission.” Writers throughout East Asian history were considered public servants, he explains. Their task “was to steer the masses toward righteousness. Writing that is irreverent, playful or morally ambivalent,” he writes, “was seen by the ruling class as either frivolous or subversive.” By 1978, Dinh writes, more than 160 South Vietnamese writers were detained in re-education camps (which my experience living in China taught me to interpret as brainwashing camps, a newfangled Cultural Revolution practice). About a decade later Vietnam’s political climate appeared to have changed. Secretary General Nguyen Van Linh encouraged writers to “’Speak the truth… No matter what happens, Comrades, don’t curb your pen.’” That was, however, not entirely true.

Hoai is just one author whose work, such as her first novel The Crystal Messenger, was banned. She now lives in Berlin where she founded and writes in an apparently incendiary online journal in Vietnamese, which has also been banned in Vietnam. Her work, fortunately for us on this side of the planet, has been translated into English, French, Spanish, Italian, German, and Finnish. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Prague Summer, by Jeffrey Condran

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Prague

Counterpoint Press

288 pages, $26

 

 

Review by Michelle Elvy

 

Long after I finished reading Jeffrey Condran’s novel Prague Summer, the opening quote by WB Yeats lingers in my mind: “What do we know but that we face one another in this place?” It is the most suitable of quotes to set the scene, and this idea that there’s nothing more important than the space between us creates a haunting mood.

The novel begins twice, really. First with a body falling quite beautifully from the sky:

The body seemed almost to float as it left the protection of the window casement. Against the dark sky, buoyed on a humid night’s air, its pale green skirt billowed like gossamer around thin hips and legs. The passive face of the woman looked toward the heavens, mouth open, a few strands of dark hair caught in the corner of her colored lips. For a moment, the whole—skirt, legs, hips, hair—paused cinematically before remembering its obligation to fall swiftly to the unforgiving cement below.

A strong opening moment, a defenestration to set the mood. A woman falling effortlessly, almost gracefully, toward her eventual and inevitable demise. Continue reading →

Books We Can’t Quit: Read-Aloud Poems Every Young Child Should Know, edited by Marjorie Barrows

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aloud

 

 

Review by Susan Marque

 

I have been thinking a lot about home recently. The lack of having one, and my fourteen moves in the last four years, to various short-term rentals, which means I have few possessions. A thin, light green hardcover remains a symbol of home for me. It is one of the items that has always been with my parents, alongside a vase from my grandmother, and a numbered Lichtenstein lithograph. My parents have lived in six houses, in four states, taking a smaller amount of things with them each time they move. I have yet to own a home, have nothing in storage, and travel light.

Read Aloud Poems Every Child Should Know is out of print, but a couple of originals can be found. My mom sent me our brittle copy in the mail so that I could take a look at the poems again. (She made sure that I promised to send it back before my next move, wrapped it in tissue paper, and told me to do the same on its return.) Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Loose Strife, by Quan Barry

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loose

University of Pittsburgh Press

65 pages, $15.95

 

Review by Colleen Abel

 

Quan Barry is having a good year. Her debut novel She Weeps Each Time You’re Born came out to strong reviews in February, and her third book of poetry, Loose Strife, came out in January. Anyone who has read Loose Strife may not be surprised to hear that Barry is now also a successful novelist: she has a fascination with unearthing stories, and over the course of her three books, Barry has proven that the darker the tale, the more important it is to tell.

In the end notes to Loose Strife, Barry writes that many of the poems were inspired by a collaborative exhibition between her and the visual artist Michael Velliquette, and the book reads like a multimedia lecture or an artist’s talk, delivered with the pictures missing, the poems serving as the only evidence that they were there. Musician and performance artist Laurie Anderson has said of her early career teaching art history in New York that she would forget the details of what she was teaching during slide lectures and just stand in the dark making up stories about the images. Were it not for the poems’ impeccable craft, we might get the same sense from Loose Strife; it’s an unsettling and memorable effect. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Einstein’s Beach House, by Jacob M. Appel

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Einstein

Pressgang

188 pages, $15.95

 

Review by Lynne Weiss

 

The theme of the highly readable and surprising stories that comprise Jacob M. Appel’s Einstein’s Beach House is aptly expressed in the first sentence of the first story, “Hue and Cry”—these stories describe things that are “funny” when they happen “to other people.” Things, the narrator goes on to explain, like “tarring and feathering, Peeping Toms, mad cow disease.” In a sense, all three of these things happen to characters in this first story, which describes the plans of a man dying of a brain-wasting disease to teach his daughters forgiveness by taking them to meet a paroled Level 1 sex offender who has recently moved into their neighborhood. The protagonist is 13-year-old Lizzie, one of the aforementioned daughters of the dying man. While everyone else in the neighborhood is protesting the presence of the parolee (metaphorically tarring and feathering him), Lizzie’s father is making plans to befriend him, and Lizzie and her friend Julia are the Peeping Toms who put a watch on the sex offender’s house and break into it to look for something unspecified. “We’ll know it when we find it,” Julia assures Lizzie, and Lizzie does find something in the course of the story, but it has nothing to do with the sex offender and much to do with her coming to terms with her father’s death and declining powers.

Appel is an award-winning writer whose work has appeared in more than 200 literary journals. According to his website, Appel is has an M.D. from Columbia and has been admitted to the bar in New York State and Rhode Island. Einstein’s Beach House, which is published by Pressgang, a small press affiliated with the Butler University MFA program, is Appel’s second collection of short stories. He has also published novels and collections of essays. Continue reading →

CAREFULLY CURATED CATASTROPHES (a hypothetical pitch), by Matthew Burnside

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Dear Publisher,

This pitch, if you even want to call it that, started out as (& being about) many different things.

In the end, I decided it couldn’t be (about) one thing without being (about) everything.

//

What the hell even is a story if not the simple saga of someone trying?

//

If I wanted to impress you, here are the things I would tell you about myself: I recently graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and currently teach creative writing for new media there. I was recipient of a Truman Capote Fellowship. I am author of five chapbooks, one of them interactive, two of them for charity. My stories, poems, and articles have appeared or are forthcoming in Best American Experimental Writing 2015, The Iowa Review, The Los Angeles Review, DIAGRAM, Ninth Letter, Passages North, PANK, Hobart, kill author, Pear Noir!, Gargoyle, NAP, OmniVerse, and more. I am co-founder of an experimental literary magazine called Cloud Rodeo, managing editor of Mixed Fruit, and have been a reader for PANK, The Iowa Review, and NPR’s 3 Minute Fiction. In addition, I write a monthly column for Ploughshares on storytelling and intersections between new media and literature and serve as interviews editor for BOAAT press.

The manuscript that I’m submitting, Bestiary and Other Tales of Monsters, was recently finalist in a few contests, including The Lit Pub’s Prose Contest, the Santa Fe Writers’ Market Literary Awards, and the Willow Springs Editions Spokane Prize in Short Fiction.

//

If I wanted to be honest with you, here are the things I would tell you about myself: At 32, I’ve applied to 32 academic jobs & received 0 interview requests. (The future’s so bright I’ve gotta wear one of those miner helmets with an industrial flashlight on it.) I only got into the Iowa Writers’ Workshop after 50 other programs cordially disinvited me to attend their programs over a period of 3 years. The manuscript I’m sending you has been rejected over 25 times now. In workshop sometimes at Iowa, my head would hurt because I didn’t understand what the fuck anyone was talking about. I would say something like, “I like the fact that this story has a pony in it. It’s very axiomatic I think,” and hope no one would ask me if I even knew what the word axiomatic meant. Continue reading →