[REVIEW] Glass Bikini by Kristin Bock

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(Tupelo Press, 2021)

REVIEW BY CATHERINE IMBRIGLIO

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In 1949, at a Berkeley symposium on poetry, the young Jack Spicer complained about the smallness of the audience for poetry.  Poetry should be as entertaining as popular culture, he argued.  “The truth is that pure poetry bores everybody,” he said.  “It is even a bore to the poet.” Instead, according to Spicer, poets “must become singers, become entertainers.”   If poetry managed to be more generally entertaining, Spicer thought, it would be less insular, it would have many more readers. 

The situation for poetry hasn’t changed that much since 1949. Though in the US today there are more outlets for poetry than in Spicer’s time and many vibrant nationwide poetry communities and festivals, it’s probably a safe bet that most of the audience for poetry consists of people who write or have written poems themselves.  In terms of the general US populace, poetry has sunk into a mighty insignificance.  (I’d be very happy to be wrong about this.) One only needs to look at the NY Times’ list of 100 notable books of 2021 for evidence. (Two books of poetry made the list.)   Or look for the poetry section in one’s favorite bookstore or local library.  What’s there? (The Boston Globe, which lists 20 best poetry books for 2021, appears to be one of the few media outlets that take contemporary poetry seriously.)

If Spicer is right and entertainment is an essential factor for increasing poetry’s readership and significance, Kristin Bock’s Glass Bikini is more than up to the task.  Her book is disturbingly entertaining, in a rubbernecking at the accident sort of way.   The book delights in picking apart illusions of humanity’s goodness, dignity, and value, instead presenting us with a nightmarish, absurdist poetry that is as bizarre as it is horrifying. In Bock’s inside-out, upside-down, Lewis Carroll-ish scenarios, humans are the deadly accident, the catastrophe.  Art is the first thing to go: the opening poem “Overcome,” with its biblical overtones, starts the book off with a whacky sense of belatedness and loss.  With art gone there is little left that provides us with the inspiration for changing what got us to here. Museum galleries have empty walls. People are entertained by the degrading antics of other human beings.  They piss in DuChamps missing fountain, weep “for what might have been”:

And it came to pass, art became extinct.  Still, we flocked to museums and stared into barren rooms.  Look!  Someone would exclaim.  There’s a man rolling around on the floor, acting like an unbalanced washing machine, knocking into things and coughing up wet rags.  Isn’t it horrifying? Oh, yes, excruciating, someone would yell out.  People whizzed in Duchamp’s missing fountain.  They blew each other like whistles where L’Origine du Monde used to hang.  They wept under restroom signs for what might have been.  People shredded their clothes, oozed from chandeliers.  … And thus began the gnashing of hair and the pulling of teeth that lasted for the rest of the unknown world. 

(My ellipsis, Bock’s italics)

The poems that follow, some with ghoulish titles such as “Snuff Poem,” “Everything Coming Up Rifles,” “The Killing Show,” “Postcard from the Coffin” pull us along with their inventive, unsettling strangeness.  Monsters, mannequins, dolls, robots – the almost human – populate many of the book’s poems, in competition with actual humans.  (The humans are losing.) The book’s overall atmosphere is menacing and creepy, often involving the human body’s dismemberment:

No, those are not starfish scattered on the sand.

Those are hands curling in on themselves, making

little nests on the beach.  Sometimes, they scuttle

away to cut off other hands.

(“The Island of Zerrissenheit”)

Along the same lines, in another poem Bock cuts up body parts to chart humanity’s eventual evolutionary demise:

Some time after the extinction of whales, babies were born in pieces.  Lungs, feet, spleen all separate and in heaps.  We dumped the remains of our babies in the woods, in the fields and into the seas.  To our dismay, the single parts rose and animated.  Heads without necks rolled around trying to connect with other parts.  Hearts, arms, and tongues crept over the Earth in grotesque parades.  Organs and limbs clumped together and survived for a time. …

(“How Rabbits Finally Took Over the World”)

At the same time, Glass Bikini is darkly humorous, provocatively so.  (Think Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal.)  The humor here is double-edged.  While Bock makes it clear that humor may be one of the few psychic defenses left in times of existential crisis, she also dilutes its power by reminding us of some laughter’s underlying cruelty. In one of the poems that I see as central to her project, she stages an evolutionary reversal, with humans trying to escape back to their watery origins.  The poem starts at a party, where the speaker’s mother “curls into a set of ovaries and vein-blue tubes.”  The speaker picks up her mother and carries her upstairs.   What follows is a laughter that is deeply disturbing:

…. I drop my mother, and everybody laughs.   It’s just so funny.  She slumps over and throbs in the corner.  My brother slouches toward her.  I try to grab him by the stumps, but they are slick from the forewaters.  I keep dropping him in the rising muck.  Everyone is convulsively laughing.  We can’t stop.  We slip, go under.  It’s hilarious.  All of us grabbing onto each other.  All of us ill-made, laughing, and trying to get back inside.

(“Get Back”)

“Get Back”’s suggestion that humans are “ill-made” comes up in other poems.   In “Belief Is a Default Setting,” newly-made human replicas “sense something ugly and festering in the heart of a friend.  Where there is none.” In “Prometheus Report,” human characteristics are explained by mutations in the genes: “Do you have the M-T-H-F-R mutation?  You know, the “Motherfucker” gene? You can’t detox with that one.”  Such deterministic notions of genetic composition, begging the question of whether human life is worth preserving, place Bock’s work within a distinguished line of dystopian writing. Kurt Vonnegut’s Galapagos immediately comes to mind. (In his book, humans end up as seal-like animals, with no hands.)

A reader might understandably wonder if the book provides any relief from the near-apocalyptic visions which dominate most of Glass Bikini’s poems or if the book is a complete downer. I would say there is a modicum of relief, if one looks carefully. I’ll point out two possibilities.  The first is the poem “Invitation,” where Satan is unexpectedly the hero.  On Monday through Saturday, Satan takes out the garbage of the world.  On Sunday, he writes a short note to the “Dayside Creatures,” a note with lovely lyric simplicity that stands out against the horrors in the surrounding poems:

I am a boy who lives in the woods.

I’ll leave the moon on

all night among the leaves.

The other poem I want to mention, “The Inside-Out,” is also lovely, though sadder and much more complicated.  It could be read as a commentary on the book as a whole, in that it validates the imagination via a “dark specter” that “grows so heavy inside, it’s hard to carry around, hard to bear through the dream of the inside-out, where the wind whistles through the bones of birds choking on their own feathers….”   It’s imagination, even a delusional or despairing one, that compels one to carry on with one’s life, “as if no one can see it beating you down.”  The fact that such imaginative poems, however outrageous, actually exist in Glass Bikini – the book’s pages are obviously not blank, in contrast to the barren museum rooms of the book’s opening poem – gives us at least some short term hope that readers might be moved by Bock’s scathing critiques of our cultural moment. (See the poem “Pluto” for a catalogue of human miscreants.) Like the Emily Dickinson quote that Bock uses as an epigraph to one of her sections (“Tis so appalling – it exhilarates -“), this collection is unsettling, but by no means boring. It demonstrates that the comedic mixed with horror can be more scary and enthralling, more memorable, than pure solemnity.

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Catherine Imbriglio is the author of two books of poetry, Parts of the Mass (Burning Deck), which received the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America, and Intimacy (Center for Literary Publishing), which received the Colorado Prize in Poetry. Her poetry and criticism have appeared in After Spicer (John Vincent, ed.), American Letters & Commentary, Aufgabe, A Broken Thing: Poets on the Line, Conjunctions, Contemporary Literature, Denver Quarterly, Epoch, Green Mountains Review, New American Writing, Pleiades, West Branch, and elsewhere. A selection of her poetry was anthologized in the Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries, ed. Reginald Shepherd (University of Iowa Press). She is a senior editor in poetry for Tupelo Quarterly.

[REVIEW] Lost, Hurt, or in Transit Beautiful by Rohan Chhetri

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(Tupelo Press, 2021)

REVIEW BY HANNAH RIFFELL

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Rohan Chhetri does not write poems for the faint of heart. Lost, Hurt, or in Transit Beautiful is a book divided into four parts, the first of which is titled Katabasis, a word that translates to mean a downhill retreat or a descent into the underworld. True to the word, Chethri opens with a monolithic poem that first evokes a bloody folk story before leading into sharp lament for the poet’s own deceased relatives, a transition that weaves subtle inferences of love into a framework of mortality. If the meaning of Katabasis escaped the reader, this introductory poem ought to be a clear forewarning. This physically slim volume of poetry is an emotionally demanding work of art, as Chhetri turns an unblinking eye towards the violent, death-filled nature of reality and questions how it is possible to live in harmony with and to produce poetry alongside the darkness.

“The King’s Feedery,” as the first poem, contains likewise the first lines of the collection, lines that are jarringly stark. “After the rape and the bloodbath,” writes Chhetri, setting the stage for a panoply of poems about sincere pain, but also signalling that the heart of the book extends beyond the actual rape and bloodbath. While Chhetri rarely shies away from graphic details, Lost, Hurt, or in Transit Beautiful seems more attuned to the complexities of the “after.” This is a book concerned with the process of remembering desolation and telling stories about agony.

In the first part of the book, the Katabasis section, Chhetri exposes the brutal nature of reality, dwelling on stories of war and genocide and massacres. In “Lamentation for a Failed Revolution,” Chhetri parallels the corporal and psychological effects of violence with a poetic style of disjointed lines, vivid diction, and spliced paragraphs. The images in this poem are horrific: he writes about a man with “blood sluicing down an eye” as he walks to a pharmacy, about a nurse patching together on a fifteen-year-old boy “a medieval coin-sized chunk of skin fallen off the areola,” about “paint-thick blood on the rained streets.” The poem is exhaustive, spanning five pages and nine stanzas; the story does not come quickly or easily to an end. How could it? There is a haunting character to suffering that does not end when the event itself has culminated, something that Chhetri understands keenly. “They dragged our children’s fathers down to the river/ Held them by the hair, pulled their tongues out of their mouths taut like catgut.” This is a historical trauma, one that will affect not only the tortured fathers but the children who observed and will inherit that trauma.

The poems take on a personal note in the second part, called Locus Amoenus in reference to a literary utopia, and seem to describe an intimate effort at reconciliation, as the poet shoulders the lasting legacy of generational trauma. In “Dissociative Love Poem,” he writes that “We are nothing but/ A sum of our history of shame. Grandfather rising/ from a ditch, blood-washed face bloated purple,/ Single pulse beating behind ear, left to bleed out/ By the man who married his only sister- / That’s as far as we talk about in the family.” This is the voice of a man struggling to live in a world where violence is so prevalent, even though it may not have happened to himself in particular. Even so, while Chhetri frequently writes about the violence-marred past of his grandparents and the unspoken griefs of his parents, he also alludes to a lover, who has presumably died, adding a deeply personal layer of sadness to the poems. Indeed, the third section of the book is named Erato, after the Greek muse of love poetry. In Lost, Hurt, or in Transit Beautiful, the pain is universal and unique and at all times overwhelming. And yet the words are invariably ornate and powerful, while gruesome at times, sheltered in verses that are appropriately unstructured and free-form. This is one response to tragedy: to frame the tragedy in exquisite language, thereby creating a kind of locus amoenus out of the agony. Chhetri’s poetry, however, challenges this response. Is there truly any way to shape the language of ruin into something permanently beautiful, or is the beauty only found “in transit,” the rest blemished by the reality of death?

There are brief and brilliant moments when the poems reveal a glimpse of beauty. “Bordersong” begins quaintly, deceptively so. “We lived downwind of a bakery,/ butter sesame roasted black cumin.” But it becomes clear that the loveliness of the bakery image is short-lived, as the poem spirals into despair, ending with the line “Downwind blew kerosene & ragsmoke/ in some young martyr’s evening.” It is as if the trauma is inescapable, despite the best efforts of the poet to invoke gorgeousness. Nowhere else in the book is the struggle to move beyond grief more evident, until the third-to-last poem, a pentych entitled “Recrimination Fuge” that a forward-motion is suggested, as the poet manages to refine hope through the simple process of remembering grief.

“Recrimination Fugue” arrives in the fourth and final part of the book, Grief Deer, the name of which derives from the title of one poem and is echoed in the imagery of the closing piece: The ravens calling for the wolves to split/ Open the light from the dead deer’s belly/ Jeweled in the dark purse of its pelt. It is not until this moment in “Mezza Voce” that Chhetri finally admits to the discovery of beauty in spite of horror. “We are each given heaven for brief so heavy./ We put down dance small around it.”

In the confusion of these final lines, there is of course a sense of still being lost and murmurs of woundedness, of still being hurt. But there is also, at the end of the arduous journey that is Lost, Hurt, or in Transit Beautiful, something that truly can be called beautiful, something beautiful that can perhaps be made permanent through poetry.

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A native of northern Michigan, Hannah Riffell is an upcoming graduate of Calvin University, where she is a Writing major and a member of the Arts Collective. Her poetry has been published in the on-campus creative journal Dialogue, as well as The National Writers Series Journal and the 2018 book Beyond Stewardships: New Approaches to Creation Care. In 2021, she received the Academy of American Poets University and College Prize at Calvin University. She intends to keep writing and reading poetry long after graduation.  

[REVIEW] A Net to Catch My Body in its Weaving by Katie Farris

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(BPJ, 2021)

REVIEW BY LISA LOW

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Katie Farris’s A Net to Catch My Body in its Weaving (A Net) is a short, powerful book chronicling the emotional voyage and struggle to survive of a woman diagnosed with Stage 3 breast cancer at age thirty-seven.  In twenty-six poems told over thirty-seven pages (the entire chapbook can be read in a half an hour), A Net narrates a sequence of events following the announcement of breast cancer: a revelatory phone call; an MRI; getting dressed on the morning of surgery; sitting in the waiting room after surgery; looking in the mirror and seeing a monster without hair or breasts; a desire for sex during chemo; spousal tenderness; a walk in the woods; a conversation with Robert Frost; and the finding, beyond the bodily strength and support of a loving husband, of spiritual strength in Emily Dickinson. Each of the poems illustrates one facet in the complex drama of Farris’ trauma: shock, pain, grief, loneliness, terror, alienation, self-loathing, and joy. Winner of The Beloit Poetry Journal’s 2021 Chad Walsh Chapbook Prize, A Net is as easy to read as a Dick and Jane book. Partly because breast cancer is a common scourge (one in eight women are diagnosed with the disease; eight in eight women fear it); partly because the book is so well written; partly because the book’s purpose is to write “love poems in a burning world,” I doubt many English-speaking humans would put the book down without first finishing it.  Everything, every poem and every moment in every poem, tells the story of Farris’s cancer, making the chapbook a unified and suspenseful, hard to turn-away-from story of a person dancing as fast as she can on the head of a pin called death.

Twin American poet mentors preside over this book, Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman.  In a “Row of Rows” Farris and her husband argue about whether Whitman or Dickinson is the greater epic poet. Farris chooses Whitman in the argument, but Dickinson is clearly the mothering rib from which Farris more naturally springs (“you, the voice, I the faithful echo,” she writes in “Emiloma.”) In the book’s last explosive elated poem—“What Would Root”—Farris finds a home in Whitman. For the most part otherwise, Farris is all Dickinson.  Like Dickinson, Farris is a tiny female (“have you seen me?” Farris writes, “so skinny you could shiv me with me”) whose poetry is also “tiny.” Indeed, Farris’s poems are even shorter and slighter than Dickinson’s. “A Week Before Surgery”—which describes Farris’s mental preparation for surgery (“like Giotto’s angels,” the poem begins, “sketched from his studies / of sheep, I open the jaws of my back to the sky”)—is six lines long.  “Ice for Me” is seven lines long. “The Man You Are the Boy You Are” is nine lines long.

Dickinson’s importance to Farris is apparent not only in stylistic and cultural/biological similarities (brief, hyphenated poems written by a slight, white American female on either side of the twentieth century), but in Farris’s frequent references to Dickinson. Dickinson is the subject of five of the chapbook’s twenty-six poems and she carries three of the book’s titles. Dickinson is Farris’s poetic mentor; she is her spiritual mentor as well. In “Emiloma” the breast-afflicted Farris writes, “Today I placed / your collected poems / over my breast, my heart / knocking fast / on your front cover.” In “Finishing Emily Dickinson” Farris grieves the “loss”—the coming to the end—of Dickinson, for she has finished the Collected Poems (some maybe, like Plath’s, written hastily before her death): “Oh, Emily, goodbye! / We met in April and parted in July.”  But Emily is not gone, for Dickinson’s body is the steeple on Farris’s “Church of Mystery—” and the bonging tongue of her steeple-bell rings “on, beyond.”

The most common character in the book besides Farris herself (whose traumatized subjectivity is explored throughout) and Emily Dickinson, is Farris’s husband (the real life poet Ilya Kaminsky) who figures in the following poems as caretaker and lover: “Why Write Love Poetry in a Burning World?,” “In the Event of My Death,” “The Man You Are the Boy You Are,” “Marriage, An Exercise,” “A Row of Rows,” “An Unexpected Turn of Events,” “If Marriage,” “I Wake to Find You,” and “Against Loss.” These love poems—mid-trauma marriage analyses—comprise a third of the book, or nine of the book’s twenty-seven poems. No sisters, brothers, mothers, or fathers wander these pages. Dickinson, Kaminsky, and Farris herself are the book’s primary characters. They alone are Farris’s guideposts; her rock-solid turn tos in a frightening world.

The poems are full of pain, but they are also funny, reveling in black humor. In “Standing in the Forest of Being Alive” Farris writes: “some of us are still putzes / in death, catching bird shit on our tombstones.”  In “An Unexpected Turn of Events Midway through Chemotherapy,” Farris announces “I’d like some sex please.” In “After the Mastectomy” Farris writes, since it’s hard for a “watchtower” (a mastectomy survivor) to hide, “I go to the world with my tongue out / and my shirt unbuttoned, my keys / in the lock” wearing “a six inch scar instead of a nipple.” Funniest of all, Farris writes in “If Marriage”: “If Marriage is a series / of increasing / intimacies, a slow / sweet collapse into / oneness, I / would still beg / your forgiveness / for asking / your assistance / unwinding that pale hair / from my hemorrhoid.”

Besides being brief (a couple of poems are one sentence stretched into a skinny vertical line), the poems are characterized by occasional rhymes stacked on top of each other (attuned / soon; on / beyond; Lupron shot / in the gut; stone / palindrome) and by the knitting together of image patterns. The image of a braid as a ladder recurs. Farris’ braid, lost in chemo, is the rope she tells her husband to keep, for she will need that braid to let herself down into earth if she dies. The word “puppet” comes and goes. Pain enters Kaminsky’s face “like a hand hunting inside a puppet.” Similarly, the sky “always / has its hand in you / as if you were a puppet.” Another recurring image is of a door. In the book’s prefatory poem, “Why Write Poems in a Burning World,” Farris describes herself as stuck in a wedged-open door that is at once a barrier and a shield. The door signifies the moment of annunciation. In that moment when she learns she has breast cancer, Farris becomes trapped like a fly in amber between innocence and experience, looking by necessity into a terrifying future the end of which she cannot fully see.

A Net ends with a truly spectacular breakthrough love poem, “What Would Root.” In it Farris comes to terms with her death. “What Would Root” differs from the twenty-five poems which precede it, first, because of its length (it is five stanzas of eight unhampered lines; eight Whitmanian ego-bursts, each), and second, because of its unrestrained exuberance. The lines are longer; the emotions less bridled; and there is an acceptance of death-in-earth reminiscent of Walt Whitman who described grass as the “uncut hair of the dead” and who said “look for me under your boot soles.” As if it were an exhilarating dream, the poem describes Farris going into the woods, being among the animals, and becoming eventually a part of the woods. Twigs grow from her eyes, she lies down and feels the hairs on the back of her neck rise, and realizes for the first time they are not hairs but roots and that “everything [is] everything.”  As she lies down, the roots in her skull shift “beneath her own branches” and the top of her head blows off, allowing the tentacles that come from her to root in earth and drink. In this poem Farris relaxes at last and the self affixes itself in a kind of permanence to planet Earth.

The poems hold occasional missed notes and ineffective lines, but mostly Farris captures the essence both of tenderness and terror with a few amazing deft strokes. She steps easily, poem-by-poem, from initial diagnosis; to CT scan; to pre-op prep; to surgery; to post-op doctor visit, to being stared at for breast-less-ness; to moments of comfort with the beloved; to staring at herself transformed in the mirror—hairless and without breasts; to relaxing finally in the book’s spectacular ending. Pinioned by diagnosis in a spot of time, she trains herself to live with this terrifying new reality that cannot be avoided; that must be borne and somehow survived.

To the initiating question—“Why Write Love Poems in a Burning World?”—Farris offers several answers. First, the poems express love, both for her husband and the burning world itself. (In “Against Loss,” Farris says she writes the poems to give Kaminsky memories of her and to memorialize their relationship to one another in the event of her death.) Second, the poems form an emotional “net” or hammock to hold her body as it falls. Third, they teach her how to survive, offering her a vision of “what is not hell in hell”; reminding her that the world is beautiful, whatever her condition, and that she is beautiful, despite what chemotherapy has done to her body. Finally, they leave a legacy. They mark Farris’ presence in this world and provide a boat to ferry her from it. Not unlike Emily Dickinson’s stacks of poems tied in neat ribbons left for those who came after her, these poems are Farris’s legacy, written and organized not at age fifty-five, but at age thirty-seven because that’s when the threat of death came to Farris’s body. 

While modern poetry is often derided as unreadable, readability is one of A Net’s most wonderful features. The poems are metaphorically subtle and emotionally ambitious but they speak plainly. Ted Kooser writes that poetry’s highest calling is to move the reader, to change the readers’s experience of the world. A Net meets that high bar well. (My first reaction on reading the book was to tell my friends who have had breast cancer to read it, immediately!) I defy a reader to not instantly understand and be moved by the book. Ted Kooser also writes that the purpose of poems is to be read, to form bridges; soul-altering connections between poet and reader. Again, Farris’s book fits this bill well. Farris’s very purpose is to connect, probably first and foremost with her husband, knowing that her life and legacy depend upon connection, but also with the common reader. In a world where Farris is doomed to walk alone, even without the hand of her husband, she walks less alone in the presumed understanding of the reader to whom she can tell her deepest secrets and speak her most unspeakable pain.

The inscrutability of modern poetry is notorious, blocking even the most enterprising reader from entry, like a dog at the gates of hell. But Katie Farris’s A Net to Catch My Body In Its Weaving is not inscrutable. Step-by-incisive step, A Net chronicles the stages in a plot of terror until we feel first-hand what it is like to face the loss of everything one lives for: life, love, marriage, and happiness. In A Net we learn what it is like to live beneath the waving scimitar of death and to be forced into hand-to-hand combat with it. Farris comes away from her cancer diagnosis awash in a brutality, different and knowing. We come away different and knowing, too; rewarded by her strength; sunk in that terrifying claw as if it were our own.

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Lisa Elaine Low’s poetry has appeared in Valparaiso Poetry Review, Green Hills Literary Lantern, American Journal of Poetry, Evening Street Review, Free State Review, Good Works Review, Phoebe, The Potomac Review, Delmarva Review, Broken Plate, and Tusculum among other literary journals. She is co-editor with Anthony Harding of Milton, the Metaphysicals, and Romanticism (Cambridge University Press in 1994). She received her doctorate in English from the University of Massachusetts and spent twenty years as an English professor, teaching at Cornell College; Colby College; and Pace University. Visit her at lisalowwrites.com.

[REVIEW] Phone and Pencil by J. Gordon Faylor

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(Lavendula Books, 2021)

REVIEW BY CLARA B. JONES

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… I worry about you, puckerdash. You were my favorite

while you lived, and now that I wait until sunset

to congratulate our fathers killed, smokes another

so pearly you lost a car accident image “node” to claw

waiting to light the candles with a triggering glare

you’re crossing the road to post and might find

a common mind eating eggs alone to survive. Empty

pockets. Back readies weekend not that personally,

a master form so long as you keep us real from

dome kin post-address play toms on lock wrestle

when I wait for bad faith morphology graphs a play …

J. Gordon Faylor, Phone and Pencil, p. 67

The cover of this new collection allows the reader to enter the text seamlessly. Brett Goodroad’s Expressionist monotype is reminiscent of an Ernst Ludwig Kirchner painting or, better, of Edvard Munch’s famous artwork, “The Scream.” Angst is the prevalent mood, possibly, symbolizing the human condition, itself—reflecting subjective emotion rather than “the thing itself.” This subjective perspective is woven throughout the text that follows the haunting cover image—including, occasional insertions of referential elements [Gompers; Nina], radically distorting what may be the author’s intended meaning or creating a carefully crafted, indeterminate long poem for the reader’s emotional effect and evoked responses.

Phone and Pencil is the most compelling full-length collection that I have read in recent years, and J. Gordon Faylor proves himself, once again, to be a seasoned writer whose practice has not settled into a predictable style—linguistically, in terms of structure, or with regard to content. His brilliant 2016 novel, Registration Caspar [Ugly Duckling Presse], is a haunting, futuristic tale of a humanoid whose end is near. Faylor, now living on the East Coast, has been called a “Bay Area Beckett.” In addition to writing, he is a museum curator, and, as a publisher and editor [GaussPDF], has highlighted the experimental, often, hybrid, work of seasoned, as well as, early-career artists. Faylor mines the potential of the personal landscape with particular regard for understated, respectful communication with his reader in a way that is, at once, intimate and detached. The rare nod to the lyrical “I” or to overt statements never detracts from the author’s resistance to the literal or the didactic, even though political motivation is a constant undertone throughout his oeuvre.

Indeed, the expressionistic sub-text of Faylor’s new long-poem is, itself, political, the modernist artistic movement, Expressionism, having been a rebuke to Impressionism active on the artistic scene in Europe, more or less, from before WW I to the start of WW II. Phone and Pencil disrupts our understanding of what the mainstream regards as conventional verse, employing “language games” and other innovative compositional features in the service of what is often termed, “associative poetry,” possibly derived from Surrealism’s “automatic writing,” but, crafted with the skills in Faylor’s “toolkit,” an automaticity that has been refined and tempered by an apparent intentionality that, nevertheless, preserves the experiential “flow.”

A good example of the author’s facility with quiet referentiality is Faylor’s use of “Nina” as a repetitive element throughout the text. Nina, the name of cartoonist, Al Hirschfeld’s, daughter, was embedded in many of his drawings as a hidden element or concealed message, not unlike the veiled verbal techniques employed by Faylor that, at once, hide truth and cloud perception. These methods land Phone and Pencil squarely in the domain of postmodern poetry that rejects grand narratives to adopt a tentative and fractured world view. In addition to “Nina,” the collection includes several references to [Samuel] “Gompers,” the famous British-American labor leader active during the late 19th Century to mid-20th Century period.

Like John Ashbery, Faylor’s occasional references to material that the reader may be uninformed about does not interrupt focus—an effect that is very difficult to master. Indeed, once I began reading this book, it sustained my attention in a manner that stimulated my emotions and my intellect. Faylor’s methods of concealment do not deceive or foreclose the receiver [interpreter?]  of the literary composition whose effect is balanced and understated—even though I would speculate that the author’s act of creation must have involved a fair amount of “free-association.” Each word seems to have been carefully selected as a stand-alone, as well as, a companion to other words and phrases. Faylor’s expert use of monosyllabic, “hard” words exposes the hand of a mature poet, enhanced by the characteristic that the composition is not self-conscious or studied.

Other features of Phone and Pencil make this a singular literary experience that all readers of innovative poetry will value. Furthermore, anyone curious about experimental writing will find this volume a stellar vehicle for entering the sub-genre. This brief review is an inadequate introduction to the many techniques employed successfully to create a work that is, at once, accessible and challenging. Among these techniques are repetition; neologisms; infrequent, though, effective use of [apparently] “found” phrases bounded by quotation marks; humor; image; music; rhythm—yielding a text that is cohesive, though, non-formulaic. I am, particularly, struck by a playful conceit that enhances the depth, complexity, anticipation, & enjoyment of the experience—that many phrases and sentences appear, upon first encounter, to be sensible, yet, provide a pleasurable, “Ah, hah!” phenomenon upon realizing that veridical meaning is only apparent. Even if you are not a regular consumer of poetry, I recommend Phone and Pencil enthusiastically. This book deserves a large audience, and any new collection by Faylor is to be celebrated.

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Clara B. Jones is a Knowledge Worker practicing in Silver Spring, MD, USA.

[REVIEW] Ghosts of America by Caroline Hagood

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(Hanging Loose Press, 2021)

REVIEW BY DAKOTAH JENNIFER

—

Why can’t women write great American novels? What does it mean to be a woman, rewritten by the male gaze, actively striving to tell your own story, imbue your own importance, all while the American canon makes you a fragile, breakable, sexual thing? Caroline Hagood’s Ghosts of America: A Great American Novel demands much of all celebrated, American male writers. Norman Roth III, also known as “Herzog,” is a professor, Vietnam veteran, and well-known American author, visited by the ghosts of women who were the subjects of the novels he’s written.

Herzog, a white male professor and author, the spitting image of lackadaisical literary success, is introduced as a painfully honest man, who takes almost nothing seriously, especially not women. His novels on Jaqueline Kennedy and Valerie Solanas have not only received critical acclaim, but “gotten [him] laid since the 1980s. Because what is literary academia if not the overweight, ugly, balding white guy’s tenured ticket to young tail?” Herzog is a sort of caricature of a lazily patriotic, white, aging, authorially academic, lewd male American man. He speaks profoundly then immediately undermines it with a vulgar, superficial quip or lack of care.

Hagood’s feminist look at the idea of the canon, at the male American writer and erasure of female traumas and histories, is artfully done through the simultaneous retelling and condemnation of the author in one. In the format of A Christmas Carol, Herzog is visited by these women he’s subjectified to the male authorial gaze, and made silent as they retell their stories. Much of the piece feels like a class, a history lesson, but one that is so vital. frequently ignored, unseen, deprioritized. Hagood’s women retell their stories, restore their tongues into their own mouths, relieve themselves of the trauma and the triumph of living through it. We begin to hope that this sort of reckoning Herzog gets becomes an epidemic– that historical women everywhere who were made into objects just for the story will get a change to haunt the authors who imposed their gaze.

Herzog spies on a nude neighbor, defiles women in every other sentence, burdens us with his… personal habits, and seems oblivious to the women he’s used to garner his awards and “get laid.” In all, he’s a self-interested, oblivious academic who still has some profundity to him, and in that way, he is a perfect archetype. He is not only his cruelty but also pensive thought and understanding. In one moment he is recounting when he, “Cut [his] hand on broken glass while sloshed, then rubbed it around on my typewriter paper like something good would ever come of it,” and in another, he writes, “a whole history of building empires on others’ backs. The language of equality in our Constitution was never a promise, but just a super clever and sneaky way of controlling the greatest number of people.” Herzog is not unintelligent, and that perhaps, is what is most truthful about the paradox of it all– he is bright and sexist, he is not uninformed, he is uninterested in knowing. Hagood crafts Herzog’s character, however coarsely, into the perfect mirror image of every man known and unknown who gained praise writing about women who were nothing but tools.

Jackie Kennedy is the perfect pious woman–survivor of tragedy and still standing. A warrior written as a fragile woman made into a First Lady by her husband and broken by the same hand. Jackie’s story is given the most time and is the most informative, and for good reason– Jackie speaks out as a hero, the main character, the protagonist victor, instead of the supporting actress society, and Herzog had seemingly made her. Jackie does not start when John F. Kennedy enters her life, and though she is changed by his death, she does not stop when he leaves. She is “already dead,” but she continues to live, and that is her heroic story, not her downfall.

Valerie Solanas is the woman made crazy by her story. She is the newer sort of woman, who understands, “and yes men are also abused and have to survive it, but I’m not qualified to write that book.” Her more modern take, her futuristic way of being, makes her seem eccentric, but through Hagood’s intricate prose we see that Solanas is not crazy but a visionary–a woman who speaks what she sees, a woman who has been harmed by the male world she attempts to live in. She says, “Nobody knows this, but to be defiled is to attend your own funeral, but you’re on the ceiling and nobody can see you,” and its lines like these that strike us within– Hagood speaks through the characters into women. You feel it deep inside, and suddenly, you are Valerie or Jackie or Medusa or Philomela– Hagood has a sneaky way of making all women one, with just a line or two. Hagood, in contrasting Solanas and Kennedy, allows for both extremes of women– the crazy woman and the perfect woman– and shows us how, through the very same author, they are both inadequate, weak, fragile, sexualized in all the wrong ways. It is not only a compelling story but a strange sort of belonging.

The piece is subversive, entertaining, and informative, in that order. Once Jackie appears, the narrative captures the reader and keeps them. Herzog, though he seems to intentionally be this way, is quite an uncomfortable and hateable character, and grinding through his introduction proves to be a challenge. The male gaze is critiqued, revised, and therefore closely examined through a sort of isolated reckoning– this book is not only a literary work, but an act of revision and restoration.

Ghosts of America: A Great American Novel reframes the ghosts of America as women, true heroes alongside valorized men, and rewrites the consistent wrongs of the canon. In short, through almost fragmented chapters, Hagood’s quirky story takes a gander at redemption– for the canon, for women, for America.

—

Dakotah Jennifer is a twenty-year-old black writer currently attending Washington University in St. Louis. Jennifer has been published in Across the Margin, HerStry, Popsugar, The Pinch Journal, Voyage YA, Protean Mag, Apartment Poetry, Paintbucket.page, the Grief Diaries, The Confessionalist Zine, Oral Rinse Zine, and Ripple Zine. She was accepted into the Juniper Writing Workshop at Amherst, The Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and the Writing Workshops Paris with Carve Magazine for the 2021 year. She won Washington University’s Harriet Schwenk Kluver award for the 2018-2019 year and The Dramatics of St. Louis Prize for the 2020- 2021 year. She has also published two chapbooks, Fog (Bloof Books) and Safe Passage (Radical Paper Press).

Author Interview with Kim Young

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Shelby Handler, an incredible part of our PANK Family, sat down with author Kim Young to discuss her book of poetry, Tigers.

ORDER TIGERS HERE!

INTRO: Tigers is an exploration of a series of mutigenerational landscapes of the feminine–female adolescence, womanhood, motherhood, and personal revelation.  Where the traditional coming of age story moves from “innocence to experience,” Tigers moves, through the excavation of trauma, addiction, recovery, adolescence, parenthood, and punk rock, from the ignorance and misunderstanding of a youth’s misbegotten “toughness,” into a turning inward toward tenderness and resilience—toward, in essence, what it really takes to be mature, “tough,” and–tigerly. With a principle focus on the dangers threatening girlhood, this book examines not merely the threat of degradation and assault, but, more deeply, the squandering of love through ignorance and inattention. Tigers here surely serve as symbols for such outward and inward threat, but also as a sign of the mature and tender maternal toughness of youth-grown-wise through trial and reclamation. 

SH: There are many lush and haunting layers to this book: the tigers, the mother ghosts, the marriage fragments, the “directional headings” that orient each section. For me, they created a chorus of different voices and conversations, across time and space. They orchestrated tensions between the mundane and the sacred, the living and the dead, creatureness and humanness, predator and prey. How did you come to some of these different threads? When and how did you know they all needed to ring together in Tigers? 

KY: I started the poems that make up Tigers after the birth of my firstborn and those early drafts initially wrestled with the more apparent theme of danger—especially given the formative trauma of my sister’s kidnapping and rape that I explored in my first book, Night Radio. The motif of the tiger had been a recurring dream of mine since I was in my twenties. It was about threat—yes—but more about power (in the dreams I learn to pass tiger without it pouncing and eventually I harness the animal and walk it on a leash). 

At some point in the writing of the manuscript, I noticed, too, all the other wild animals populating the poems—coyote, deer, raccoon. The urban wild. Fellow feral hearts. As a parent, I was growing increasingly uncomfortable with the role I played in a child’s domestication process: The ways we teach children to become social humans who don’t stick their toes in the oatmeal. My role as a parent raised questions for me about all that’s sacrificed in the process of maturation and how we spend so much of our adult lives trying to recover the wonder and wildness that we train out of children. 

I could see this, too, in the poems that were related to my adolescent self—that loaded girl living in her car with her shaved head and hairy armpits. She had something to tell the mother I had become. And so the idea of tiger kept opening up for me, kept yielding meaning, but at its core is what you are pointing to: a sort of tension between the past and present, the wild and tamed, predatory and prey. The threads you mention are ways for the poems to investigate moral complexity, states like shame, grief, ferocity, and tenderness. And they’re also a way to speak to what’s hidden, or what stands behind. I was interested in exploring that feeling, the unseen, the more unruly and concealed parts of the self.

SH: On the topic of the directional headings, I love that they basically make the book a compass, something that must be navigated by circularly: East, South, West, North, Center. In that way, I felt like Tigers resisted and played with chronology in fascinating ways. Though the collection thrums forward and has momentum, it simultaneously pushes against linearity. Inside each section, we move across generations, across eras of the speaker’s childhood, coming-of-age, recovery and adulthood. Quite literally, present and past tense are packed tightly together in the poems. For me, it brought up the ways that healing, particularly through violence, addiction and patriarchy, is non-linear, intergenerational, messy. How were you thinking about chronology in writing and ordering the book? Did you produce in a similarly non-linear fashion or was there any pattern in their original creation? 

KY: A central project of the book is a retrieval of the non-rational, the unbound—a part of the self that is often neglected in a world the overly values productivity. Inhabiting that space meant that many of the poems resisted notions of linearity, progress—stories that are told as a straight line moving through time. 

Also, I think of that line in Richard Rodriguez’s essay “Late Victorians” where he writes: “I do not believe an old man’s pessimism is necessarily truer than a young man’s optimism simply because it comes after. There are things a young man knows that are true and are not yet in the old man’s power to recollect.” And while I’m not necessarily exploring Rodriguez’s notions of optimism and pessimism in Tigers, I’m definitely interested in what my younger self knows that my older self might be trying to reclaim. The book is very much a project of going back to find the wisdom that might’ve been concealed or overlooked. And I think of reunification and retrieval as circular processes—maybe a spiral? 

I’ll say, too, that the prose poem has been a generative and spacious form, one that works against chronology, where I’ve enjoyed the ability to move more quickly between past and present, between interior and exterior, a form flexible enough to carve out the interior thoughts of the speaker along with dialogue, newspaper headlines, song lyrics, and other layers of text. 

SH: Ok, not to just keep talking about the directional headings, but hey, you give a queer witch a book that is structured with feminist witchcraft and this is what you get.  Clearly, I’m fascinated by the way they structure the book into five sections, each representing a cardinal direction but also an energy, a power, specifically, the powers to “know, will, dare, keep, change,” in that order. For any muggles out there, these directions are used to “cast the circle” for a ritual, to open the space. How did you come to these as the skeleton for the book? Are the poems themselves rituals, invocations or spells?

KY: Exactly—calling in the directions transports you between the worlds, between all the mundane details of daily life (the freeways, sunburns, and monthly payments) and the shadow world—the great vault, the unknown, the mystery. Most things are not as they seem. And the directional headings hopefully amplify the idea that the poems are spaces where the reader can enter and get a peek behind the veil (as I suppose all poems are on some level). 

The directional headings came later in the process of structuring the book (though they were how I was taught to cast a circle back in 1999). As an organizing structure, the directions—with all the connotations associated with each element (water as emotion and intuition, for instance, and air as inspiration, thought patterns, the cerebral) really helped me order and organize the poems and conceptualize how I wanted the book to function as a whole, again resisting a linear narrative that arrives at a destination or revelation. Instead, each section, each direction, is a place for a particular kind of knowledge. Given that this book is dedicated to my daughter, I wanted it to be a, sort of, book of shadows that I could hand down to her. I wanted it to be, not necessarily instructions, but instructive, the way a spiritual text can act as a map for what’s most mysterious.  

SH: Part of my fascination with how feminist witchcraft influences your work is because a central interest of Tigers is the delving into the speaker’s ancestry. We see this, in the Mother Ghosts series and beyond. Specifically, you seem to be exploring with what it means to have European ancestry, in Estonia, Hungary, and Ireland, and your investigations are matrilineal, focusing on the mothers and grandmothers who have come before. I’m so curious about this ancestor work, and how it is related to the other threads of the book, the childhood and coming-of-age stories, the tigers, the witchcraft, the marriage fragments. How did those poems come to you? Research, ritual, communication with ancestors, dreams? 

KY: I can hear the stories of my mothers and grandmothers, but I have little context to comprehend what they mean. Until I cross the threshold and stand at that age, or, in this case, with a child of my own, those ancestral stories had little significance. The very first poems I wrote came after I entered motherhood. Little by little, I began to understand the strength, compromises, and failures of my own mother and grandmothers in ways that were uncomfortable and profound. Questions of what we inherit and what pass down are central to this book, and I suppose the powerlessness I felt in handing down a certain legacy of suffering to my daughter meant an exploration of ancestry. In many ways the poems came from my ability to recognize the ancestral stories I had be carrying all along in new ways. 

SH: To extend the last question even more, I really appreciated the poems where you are grappling directly with whiteness and complicity with white supremacy in your family and yourself. As a fellow white poet, I believe it’s vital for us to do this work of unearthing complicity, reconnecting to ancestry lost in assimilation in our creative work, and of course, moving power and heeding the calls of BIPOC movement leaders. I’m curious how you’re thinking about contending with whiteness in the book? And is it related to how the book’s speakers are resisting other violences and oppressions?

KY: In a book so concerned with power, it makes sense that I had to at least begin the work of looking at white supremacy and, yes, my complicity in that system. In my case, the intersection between sexual violence and the fact that my father and other men in my family worked in law enforcement, the very people who brutally police and uphold the laws that protect white supremacy, seemed unavoidable. And because my father was an LA cop and because he is a man I love, I have a vantage point into that world that not everyone has. It’s a complex and fraught relationship to power, and I can only think that I would do more harm by ignoring it. 

SH: The way you move between different forms on the page is refreshing and dynamic. In Tigers, there are so many different textures alongside one another: prose-block poems, poems filled with gaps and spaces that sprawl across the page, short-lined poems that pull us along slowly, and so much more. How do see these poems singing with each other? Is your generative process different for different forms? 

One of my explicit experiments in Tigers was to explore forms that were different from the elliptical, image-laden poems that made up much of Night Radio. I was interested in syntax and repetition, in how to create music with the sentence. I felt drawn to the ways the prose poem contains all the stuff that makes up poetry—image, metaphor, compression, repetition—but is also interested in story-ness. I mean, these prose poems (and the prose poems I most love) still do what poetry does: they create a space for the reader to have an experience, to recover a more complex perceptive kind of knowledge. But there’s also less investment in silence, in the unsaid. And much more investment in velocity. There’s a meat & potatoes feeling to a prose poem—something substantial and filling. 

SH: Okay, last question. Do you have any “ghost books” of this collection, as Maggie Nelson calls them? What texts did you “lean against”, or what minds think along with, in the creation of Tigers? 

KY: Yes—I love Maggie Nelson’s notion of the “ghost books” and while I don’t think I have necessarily leaned against texts in this book in the same way Nelson describes, I love to think about the contexts out of which we write. I definitely turned to Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, another text that I returned to as an older human and saw with completely different eyes. And there are many quoted lines from Tich Naht Hanh’s writing, the 90s music I grew up with–The Cramps, Bikini Kill, and PJ Harvey. There’s the oral wisdom I was raised on in twelve-step recovery meetings. And then specific texts like Michelle Tea’s essay “On Valerie Solanas” in Against Memoir and poems like Robert Hass’ “My Mother’s Nipples.” 

SH: Ok, putting all those books and pieces on my to-read list. Thank you so much Kim for this stunning book!!

Shelby Handler is a queer ashkenazi writer, organizer, performer and educator living in Seattle on Dx?d?w?abš (Duwamish) and unceded Coast Salish land. Recent poems have appeared in Poetry Northwest, PANK Magazine, Sugar House Review, The Journal, Gigantic Sequins and the Write Bloody anthology “We Will Be Shelter: Poems for Survival”, among others. Currently, they are an MFA candidate at the University of Washington.

PANK is Hiring!

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Starting this fall, our team at PANK will begin reviewing applications for three new editorial roles:

PANK Assistant Books Editor

PANK Daily Editor

PANK Magazine Assistant Editor

We are excited to take the first steps toward continuing to grow our community of readers and editors, without whom this literary/arts publishing collective would not be possible! Please send us a CV and a brief (one or two paragraphs is fine!) description of your areas of interest, and the kind of writing and art you are interested in bringing out into the world. Tell us about your favorite writers and your favorite literary journals and small presses. Email us at pankmagazine@gmail.com with your name and the role you are applying for in the subject field. We can’t wait to learn more about you!

Assistant Books Editor – Aid in the publication process, including assisting with the selection process of submitted manuscripts, managing the flow of book publication, title marketing and distribution.

PANK Daily Editor – Helping to manage our ever growing online platform of book reviews, author interviews, craft essays and more. 

Magazine Assistant Editor – Assisting with the publication of our annual print issue, online issues and folio collections.

Unpossessed Places

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BY CHRISTOPHER IMPIGLIA

—

The pandemic forced us all to pause, often in solitude. An unfamiliar, uncomfortable place, even for the writer, social engagement now expected, indeed required, and distractions commonplace, writing a navigation between these, between cameos and posts and clicks of elsewhere, nowhere. Between subsisting and pursuing—or being pressured to pursue—more lucrative things, and the guilt we’re made to feel for engaging in what doesn’t readily generate—at least not initially—the only thing we’re told is of value: money.

Netflix, like most media, did its best to invigorate the stillness, force-feeding content, the play button obsolete, the right to choose under scrutiny, algorithms stifling agency, self-doubt fueling algorithms; we trust in them, a safer bet than ourselves. Suggested viewing: not a suggestion, but a necessity, an inevitability.

Season after season after original movie blare on. Every Avenger and their personal trainer will soon have their own must watch show. Streaming platforms have grown into all-powerful megaliths, cementing themselves in the stillness, feeding off our fragility. New ones have absorbed whatever was left lingering in their accessibility, fresh subscriptions and devices required. Add-ons have added to the equation, the extra dollar per-month necessary to elevate us beyond the base subscription and its subscribers. Or simply to rejoin the masses, to not be left behind. Even as in parts of the country, including my own, vaccination has led to re-openings, and maskless faces, scowls—we’ve forgotten how to smile—have returned a sense of normalcy, with variants raging in the background and fresh closures perhaps looming—we turn up the volume, scroll through our phones, try not to think about it—we find ourselves unsure. We hesitate with our greetings—a hug? Cheek kiss? Elbow? Our fragility persists. We crave the ease of our couches. Of content. Our addiction pulsates.

Like many, I retreat. And yet, it’s the stillness I seek. The now familiar discomfort I believe all of us should embrace lest we lose ourselves completely, drown in overstimulation, the ignorance it breeds; the one positive I can draw from the pandemic, its solitude, is that, to some extent, I was able to reclaim myself, forced to. Consuming has its limits. It offers temporary respite. Herein lies the illusion that allows capitalism to endure. I was able to reclaim my world shrunk to a more manageable size: a living room, bedroom, kitchen. A running track. To do what we’ve kept—increasingly—from doing: step back, sit down, and think. Think in the purest sense: about life and by extension death, which has come to sound, unfortunately, like something reserved only for the bygone romantic or emo.

No longer cast into the surging current of a dreaded, endless commute, rapt by overlong meetings and task after endless task, the need or impulse to be productive or social or sociable every second dulled, the gaps in-between widening, no longer filled as they once were, in a paradoxical attempt to rest the mind in its rapture, my innermost self resurfaced. I allowed it to, switching off screen after screen or simply growing bored of them. Books becoming better, more real, company. Welcoming stillness’ strands: boredom, absence, silence. It came in waves, the self, an oft tortuous crashing, ebbing, and flowing.

I was forced to confront it all: the smothered, bottled up, half-forgotten, and ignored, and I have strived, as a writer probably should, to document, summarily, in our age of distraction, what I have gleaned in those difficult moments. What I can only hope will help the reader and fellow thinker find their own stillness. Their own selves. Persist in this necessary state even when eruptions of thought cloud and spill. Singe, engulf, overwhelm.

Life, Calvino notes, is a contemplation of memory. Memory: an unreliable, ever-changing thing that reinvents itself in order to fit your current state physically and emotionally. Where you are in your travels. In your life’s journey.

So that painful longing you feel for someone who inflicted so much pain, who you were certain you were meant to lose; those fragments of your past that haunt you in lulls, tempting you to flood yourself with image, sound, and drink, with oblivion, to dive into motion, shake yourself free, taught, explicitly and subliminally, that a moment of contemplation is a moment lost, to consume, consume; in your dreams and nightmares, buried in your subconscious, in your primal inability to let go, to forget, once an advantage in a primal world, now a hindrance; those words you still hear spoken long ago in voices once music to your ears, now shrieks, growls, wails, poison; words and voices that suffocate, strangle, make your best attempts at soaring a slog through the mud, to which you never replied, but perhaps should have, or did, weakly, wrongly, a better response only later on your tongue, when it was too late: trust none of it. It’s all but what you—we—have been designed to fear: innumerable negatives, some of which we can name: uncertainty, disappointment. Unfulfilled goals, guilt, shame, doubt, regret … harnessing memory, corrupting it, undoing the reality it never intended to record.

This: a realization that might sooth your torment. Allow you to reinvent memory again, sculpt it into idols worth worshipping, into inspiring recollection—feed off it. Let it inform your art, made no longer for catharsis, wet with tears, aflame with anger, but with pleasure. For pleasure. For understanding, exploration, and beauty. All art should aspire to beauty: what all can behold. Into nostalgia—you gaze off, out, back.

A smile comes to your lips. You reach out to an old friend—a real friend, which means a shared past, a perhaps difficult conversation, a confrontation you avoided—nervous, throat dry.     

“Of course I remember you,” they say.

They remind you of who you were. Who you are: flawed, like anyone else. Perfect in your imperfection, to tempt cliché, which hold a certain universality, timelessness. Appropriate. Loved regardless. Like anyone else: capable of being forgiven. Of forgiveness.

“Redemption.” The word rings in your ears.  

Mistakes and successes alike, you now see: glittering gems.

Another realization: you will possess only very little in your lifetime. Considering the vastness of the world, the universe, which only continues to expand, and the fleetingness of your existence, there is so much more you will never have.

Here I again draw from Calvino, who I keep by my side.

Invisible cities the only ones we can now safely occupy.

Everything you possess, therefore, everything you can possess, is precious. As precious as the unpossessed and unpossessable; the grail isn’t meant to be grasped, sipped from. The Fisher King: leave him be. Let him heal his own wounds. Like El Dorado, like fame and perhaps fortune, like the edges of the universe, of consciousness: it’s meant only to be pursued.
  

So take hope, traveler. Continue to retreat. To seek. Lose yourself in unfamiliar, uncomfortable places. Physically: when doors open once more. Emotionally: incessantly. Continue to possess—let moments pass, become memory. Let them acquire that same sacred sheen as miracles. To choose—let memory dictate your choices. Let them be your guide, your lantern, bright with ambition. Continue to entangle yourself in your surroundings, your limbs, like your roots, those of the trees. Your limbs the skyscrapers, the satellites, the reaching, striving of all others. The present: a tangle of all the decisions everyone has ever made.

Trust yourself. Be content with yours.

—

Christopher Impiglia is a writer from Bridgehampton, NY. He also adjuncts and edits art books. He received an MFA in Fiction from The New School and an MA in Medieval History and Archaeology from the University of St Andrews. A Finalist in Nowhere Magazine’s 2020 Spring Travel Writing Prize and the 2019 Hemingway Shorts Contest his words have otherwise appeared in Columbia Journal and Entropy Magazine, among others. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram @Impigliato.

Desire and Phoebe Bridgers’ Garden Song

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BY ANANYA KUMAR-BANERJEE

—

(February 26, 2020)

I’ve been fixating on gardens recently. Maybe this is because I live in an apartment, and I’ve been spending all my time inside. Maybe I’m thinking about gardens because they remind me of my childhood, when my family lived in a house with a backyard framed in the ferocious green of mid-Atlantic weeds. Maybe I’m thinking about gardens simply because, at the time of my writing, it’s spring. It’s the time of year when life reminds us that things are still moving forward, even if we think they aren’t.

Phoebe Bridgers’ Garden Song was released in late February of 2020 as a single. Shortly after, it became Bridgers’ most popular song, soaring ahead of Motion Sickness. After the release of the album Punisher, Garden Song was buried among a series of electric and sentimental songs. But Garden Song remains important for me. It is irrevocably linked in my memory to where I was at the beginning of the pandemic.

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Garden Song is a moody ballad. The introductory thrumming feels like it is made to be heard from inside a house, the sole sounds emptying into a room where one sits alone. It’s a song about the future. I started listening to the song in the beginning of March 2020, well before we knew things would be as they are now.

In the song, Bridgers’ narrator tells us she’s looking to the future, to a “someday”. She’s dreaming, reflecting on the possibilities of a particular imagined day. Bridgers pelts us with details: a house upon a hill, a skinhead neighbor, false flowers in bed, a fire in her youth. But the chorus is where it hits us. The chorus is where she reveals the emotions grounding the whole piece.

There, she reveals that she is looking at someone. This is the person she wants to share her “someday” with. She tells us this she wants a shared future. A future with a garden. Who knows if it will happen? Who knows how much will have been lost along the way?

There’s a certainty in that desire that is grounding, especially when life becomes loose at its hinges. Time becomes a detail. Instead, we are asked to look inward. Bridgers points us to an internal clock which is significantly less meticulous. It is type of time-keeping that has very little to do with regular rhythms. Garden Song begs the question: Do you know what you want? It doesn’t ask how long it will take to get there.

Wanting these days is a complicated feat for me. It’s naïve, it’s romantic, often, it’s pathetic. I can’t help but feel as if I’m experiencing a crisis of desire. This crisis feels reflected back at me in the media I consume. In the books I read, disaffected narrators state the facts of their life with no gesture towards their desires or the future. In the news I watch, we move away from the hopefuls towards the expected. Desire loses its currency in a world that is closing in on itself. The center, once firm, does not hold. But desire propels us forward. Strong desires are often indecipherable from needs.

Garden Song gives wanting a kind of value that is, for me, hard to overstate. To want something is to believe, however impossibly, that it might given to you. TWhen we desire something or someone, we implicitly say that we are willing to do something to get to the object of our desire. We admit that we have not given up. Desire is the antithesis of the resignation I find myself wearing as an everyday garment.

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Times between when I first started listening to Garden Song and now seems to have passed in one fluid stroke. Like Bridgers’ narrator, I don’t know how, but I got here. I’m here in my apartment in Connecticut, and it is spring. Every morning at 8, the birds hum their tune at a pace paralleled in Garden Song. Somehow, I lost winter along the way. The days are often sunny and brisk. The trees look courtly in their coral and blush plumes. 

Today, I saw the loose petals of a cherry blossom tree scatter in the wind. I was listening to Garden Song and thinking about how I wanted to share this memory with someone. Like Bridgers’, I don’t know what’s going to happen in the future. I don’t know if my parents and grandparent will make it to the end of this virus. I try to keep my eyes trained on the horizon, Bridgers’ invoking “someday”. I am trying to make space for wanting in my life because I can’t let myself give up. I look for the beauty provided by the earth’s movements.

I stay inside. I call my parents daily, sometimes multiple times a day. This is the closest I’ll be to them for months. I dig my hands into more books, into a fresh set of pencils and charcoals. I want to read. I want to draw. I want to see beauty in life’s edges. I want to, like Bridger, look up into the world and see a life worth living.

So, yes, I’ve been thinking about gardens, the kinds which are starting to flourish in New England every spring. Sometimes, I smell the fresh soil and grassy dew of gardens in my dreams. I see their colors outside my window, where the birds have been singing into the late morning hours. Gardens are the product of years of desire and hard work. They demand patience and investment. 

I’ve been thinking about the kind of person I want to be. What kind of world I want to grow into, what I want my garden to look like. Who I want to grow alongside. If you listen closely to the song, you can hear a second voice paired softly with Bridger’s at the chorus. A voice which amplifies her own. This voice is also thinking about the future, wondering how we got where we are. This voice is just trying to figure it out, too.

I’d like to think that someday, I’ll have a house with an herb patch that produces perfect pleats of hot peppers. I’m trying to focus on the small details without paying attention to the kinds of things that could hurt. I’m putting effort into imaging a future of gardening, where desire rules my life in an orderly fashion. I want to believe that there will be good things waiting for me and the people I love in a decade or two. I have to.

The life I live after this virus – if it might be said, however daringly, that there will be an after — will be one haunted by all that preceded it. It will be filled with the ghosts. So, I don’t flood my future with my mother’s face, my grandfather’s smile. I fill it with a sense of calm possibility, the very mood brilliantly echoing throughout Garden Song. I want big bay windows and sunlight that soaks in all the warm colors of my house. I want a family. I want to love many people. I want a life full with all its living. I tell myself that I know that I will get there.

Like Bridger’s declining, soft voice tells us at the end of the folksy tune: “No, I’m not afraid of hard work/And I did everything I want/I have everything I wanted.” Like Phoebe Bridgers, I concede to my desire, because I know it does something profound: it keeps me alive.

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Ananya Kumar-Banerjee is an MPhil Candidate for World Literatures in English and a recent graduate of Yale, where they studied Ethnicity, Race & Migration. Ananya is interested in the dynamic between speculative work and contemporary narratives around reality. They are a proponent of literary romance and local public radio. When they’re not reading, you can find them listening to love songs and playing with their tuxedo cats, Patchouli and Arlo.

[REVIEW] Midwest Gothic by Laura Donnelly

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(Ashland Poetry Press, 2020)

REVIEW BY SALLY SMITS MASTEN

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The intertwining of poetry and gardens has a long history, of course, from the pastorals of Hesiod and Virgil to Wordsworth’s daffodils to Anne Spencer’s famous garden and Mary Oliver’s incantatory natural imagery.  And it isn’t new to say that a poetry collection is like a garden, and yet. 

And yet. Laura Donnelly’s Midwest Gothic is the garden of Eden and of exile, the garden of inheritance and of renewal. Each poem in the collection shows her to be a master gardener, deftly pruning the lines, digging into the hard ground, nurturing delicate images, unearthing what’s buried, replanting seeds of hope after sorrow.  Midwest Gothic is inventive, smart, poignant, delicate, sometimes bitingly funny, celebratory, sorrowful. With skill and sincerity, Donnelly deploys the garden, the world of the garden, in all directions—as metaphor and motif, image and symbol. In the gardens are the threads between generations, the living representation of her mother’s courageous act(s), the illustration of the difficulty of starting over and eventual triumphs, the image of the roots of family and also the burial of ancestors and the burial of secrets.  As Donnelly writes in “Summer,” the book’s final poem, “It was all garden / and it was all not.”

For the first section of the book, Donnelly’s first poem provides a framework and an aim: “I will gather you back.” This first section, then, becomes an unearthing, a recovery, a way of preserving stories and memories and establishing the ground from which the speaker comes.  These poems meditate on inheritance—they revisit graveyards and basements, old homesteads, tangible hand-me-downs, and her great-grandmother’s written account of her childhood.

In the most striking poems, Donnelly draws together the stories of her ancestors with meditative, prayerful language and juxtapositions from the garden: death and glory, rot and beauty, the quotidian and transcendent.  In “Alice at Five Years Old,” for example, Donnelly moves from a single photograph of her great-grandmother’s family on their homestead to a handed-down memory: “Someday, when the girl meets / her mother-in-law / they’ll share a bowl of oatmeal / as if it’s the body of Christ.” The poem concludes with the contrast of death and renewal in language with resonant, sorrowful long O sounds, an incantation and prayer: “Hear us, oh Lord, in our longest day’s / shadow of bones— // the delphinium grows / from her body / in a choir of indigo.” Similarly, in “Primula vulgaris (Primrose)”—even the title drawing together contrasting language—the speaker digs into the difficult work of gardening first, with “compost, manure, / the pulverized feathers of chickens,” and abruptly shifts to the difficult work of living:

Grandmother does not want to leave

her house for the nursing home.

Mother does not want to leave

her house for the divorce.

In the next two stanzas, the speaker continues working through this cycle of death and rebirth, a frost and roots exposed, a struggle to stay alive, the fuchsia’s centers “bright as slits of flame.”  This poem is rooted in earth, in “blood and bone,” dwelling on this symbolic burial of the birds’ “remains.” But just as in the paradox of that word, the poem is insistent on remaining, on staying alive, on growing from these roots.

While individual poems certainly stand out, the particular brilliance of this section—and indeed the whole book—is in its careful arrangement, Just as a gardener understands how to pair plants so that each thrives, these poems resonate with one another, echoing refrains and images to build a story, a full and blooming world, creating layers and depth of meaning.

The second section digs closer to the surface with more intimate meditations on childhood, what was observed, what images remain, what meaning to make now of what happened then.  A particularly striking pair of poems appear almost at the midpoint of the book, “Transplanting the Flowers” and “Garden Vernacular,” and between them, Donnelly creates a shift in momentum.  There is something like an electric current moving between these two poems. “Transplanting the Flowers” is a visceral reflection on the speaker’s mother, returning to her house four months after leaving the house and the speaker’s father; in the imagery and line breaks here, again, is an insistence on thriving in spite of it all, on preserving the inheritance that is a source of life:

What she won’t leave behind:

a poor woman’s dowry, the perennials

separated, transplanted,

passed down.

But the poem’s end is uncertain; the act of transplanting—the perennials, her own family—is filled with suffering: the spade “slices root,” rips and tears, with an unraveling of roots like thread. 

The poem that immediately follows, however, points toward the garden, in its new unlikely place—“strange on a city block”—thriving.  There are “gloriosa daisies between cracks” and “ferns lapping up the dusky shade.” In this poem is the transcendent moment of hope, after all the quotidian and tedious work of living, after the difficulty of separating, of loss. The garden, like the speaker and the reader, find restoration and even magic in the final lines: “It was not unusual to see bear cubs / in that garden. It was not unusual // to see that garden breathe.”

In the third section of the book, Donnelly’s masterpiece is in choosing exactly the right source and exactly the right method; these are “The Secret Garden Erasures.”  Donnelly works with this classic of childhood, makes this inheritance her own, releases, like her mother’s garden, its secrets, and unearths new meaning from it.  In this section, too, are echoes of the previous sections; it becomes a kind of mirror for the speaker, a new way to understand her history.  Here, too, is a breathing garden; here, too, are flowers named and blooming.  It ends, perfectly: “I thought / I could dig somewhere.”

The final section of the book moves beyond the boundaries of the garden, family history, and the speaker’s inheritance; true to the title of one poem, “Theme and Variations,” it keeps contact with its roots, in poems like “Perennial” and “Calendula officinalis (Marigold),” but its tendrils spread outward, in content and form.  Here, there is a pantoum, sparse and musical couplets, layered meditations on summer, the “flesh and saturation” of tomatoes, knives in kitchens and surgeries. And there are more directly confessional poems, contrasting forgiveness with a “bitter twang in [her] throat.”  In an echo of “Garden Vernacular,” the poems now, rather than the garden, tend the speaker’s family secrets, transforming sorrow and anger into sharply drawn images and language.    

Donnelly’s book is an inheritance—of family mythology and secrets, the knowledge and language of gardens, and musical and literary traditions.  In 1972, Adrienne Rich published a review of Eleanor Ross Taylor’s work, noting that her poems “speak of the underground life of women…the woman-writer, the woman in the family, coping, hoarding, preserving, observing, keeping up appearances, seeing through the myths and hypocrisies, nursing the sick, conspiring with sister-women, possessed of a will to survive and to see others survive.”  Donnelly has continued in this tradition, sustaining and nurturing it, and adding her own sheer intelligence, deep reflection, delicate phrasing, sharp imagery, and deft and resonant deployment of metaphor and motif.  The poems dig deep for their thriving roots; they do not shy away from “blood and bone” in the soil and the difficult work of unearthing.  And then, they are carefully placed in the book’s garden plot, and both individually and together, these poems create a flourishing, brilliant collection.

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Sally Smits Masten’s poems have been published in Crab Orchard Review, The Georgia Review, Smartish Pace, Northwords, The Laurel Review, and other journals.  She earned her MFA in poetry from the University of North Carolina Wilmington and her PhD in American literature from The University of North Carolina at Greensboro.  She currently teaches at Western Governors University.