[REVIEW] Nobber by Oisín Fagan

Posted on October 28, 2019 by admin

(John Murray Originals, 2019)

REVIEW BY SHASTRI AKELLA

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Nobber has an exceptional opening act, one that removes the conditional out of John Gardner’s oft-quoted idea that all great novels begin either with a stranger arriving in town or a character taking a journey. Oisín Fagan’s novel begins with four characters taking a journey, and then the novel shifts point-of-view: these strangers arrive in the town of Nobber, and their arrival is shown through the eyes of the locals. The novel, at first, shifts perspectives from one chapter to the next, bringing Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying to mind, but as the story progresses, the point-of-view starts to shift within chapters, and at an increasingly dizzying pace, leaving readers with the distinct impression that Nobber is the schizophrenic monster-protagonist and we are stuck inside its head, an experience that anyone familiar with a small town and its incestuous intimacies and flawed loyalties will recognize. It is a setting that in Stephen King’s works is often the source of horror and that, in Fagan’s hands, also has a distinctly Dickensian feel, the claustrophobia of the setting accentuated by the epic scale of the narrative that plays out in such a tight space.

The novel is set during Ireland’s black plague, but its temporal distance does not make its characters feel any less familiar. de Flunkl and his men are on the move in pursuit of real estate in a time of economic slump; their goal, to buy property on the cheap so they can sell it for a higher value once the plague has ended, holds a strong presence in literature set during the Depression. The men have two encounters as they are about to enter Nobber: the first one is with a band of Gaels, a people who have been displaced from their lands and into the wilderness, and who are now perceived to be ‘savages’. The tension of the prolonged dialogue between the men and Gaels, made possible with the assistance of a translator, William (who is a part of de Flunkl’s retinue), hints at social tensions that, in the present political moment, feel close to home (no matter where, geographically speaking, home is). The second encounter, which I will focus on, brings up a striking instance of the animal dysmorphia that runs like a thematic thread throughout the novel. On the outskirts of Nobber, the men see “a cruciform of wood…on it, thickly laid like a skeleton’s musculature, are reams of dead crows, and they give the form a certain plumpness and lifelikeness from a distance.” The crows, which at first de Flunkl assumes are dead, are “nailed into the wood”. As Harold, another member of the itinerant group, persuades de Flunkl to retreat, warning him that such a ghastly sight can bring no good tidings their way, one of the birds starts to flap its wings, and several others follow suite, and a horrified de Flunkl realizes that they are, in fact, alive. The cross, they notice, is topped with a peasant’s cap, a detail which becomes a lens to read the broader narrative implications of the sight.

Throughout the novel, Fagan uses animal dysmorphia alongside a disintegrating human psyche to place the human and the non-human on a level plane. The conjunction becomes a powerful device to show how the victimized responds to a loss of control by distorting the reality of someone less powerful then themselves. A character who enters Nobber with two lambs, two calves, and a badger (all of which are stolen or captured), reflects: “if animals are jumbled up too greatly in species, and confined too closely, disastrous things happen…Beasts, who should emerge into the synechdocal perfection of predator and prey, too closely combined begin to act in an erratic and unpredictable manner. Both of the lambs think one of the calves is its mother. One of the calves thinks [he] is its mother, and the badger, who should prey on the lambs, instead wishes to prey on him.” Earlier in the novel, a local of Nobber is approached by four men who are naked and who have “sheep skulls tied to their heads.” Mary, a Gael who is kidnapped by Colca (another local of Nobber, and one of the more notorious characters in the novel), kills a horse, but this act of cruelty too is inseparable from human depravity. Colca, as readers find out, practices bestiality, and the novel hints at him having sexual contact with the horse. Rather than the plague taking a toll on both man and animal, it messes with the minds of the humans who then act against the animals.

The action of the novel, once de Flunkl and his men arrive in Nobber, takes places almost exclusively inside the houses of locals. Behind each locked door are an unlikely pair or group of people who parry for power. At times the dead and the dying are trapped in the same space, and the corporeal effects of the plague create for tremendous moments of body horror like the following one:

“Dervorgilla’s arms, held above her head, are shivering with such force that they are almost a blur. Amidst the matted hair of her armpits are swollen protuberances with smooth surfaces. The swellings are hairless, yellow and thick, one under each armpit, like hidden apples growing out of her. One of them is covered in stale pus that has erupted at some former point. Around each buboe is a purple circular bruise, perfect as the concentric ripple of water…[And] Tedbalt[‘s] putrid carcass is decomposing, sunken beneath his work clothes. Steam rises off him, blending the little light above him into a wavy mirage, and his face is covered in a blanket of sleeping flies.”

In the final act the action shifts to the town center, bringing all of its residents together. Colca becomes the focal point of everyone’s anger. Throughout the novel, he enforces a curfew on the people of Nobber to keep the plague from spreading. He kidnaps a Gael and hold her hostage as his ‘wife’, and he has an abnormal relationship with animals. Yet, the conversation he has with his mother and her grief as she watches the plight her son is subjected to makes us wonder if the vigilante form of justice is deserved. And in the process dehumanizing Colca, the people of Nobber dehumanize each other.

Christopher Higgs (2017) poses the rhetorical question of ‘what does it mean to be human?’ and then responds to it to the following effect: “one is not born a human, one becomes human,” for to be human is “not a natural fact. Instead, it is the result of a certain history, a certain civilization, which has resulted in [his or] her current status” (8). Being human, Higgs notes, is a social construct. He adds that “we must not be fooled into believing a human is a human and a monster is a monster outside of or isolated from social and historical contexts” (9). If the notion of what it means to be human has historically been a patriarchal construction—the patriarchy placing a boundary around what it means to be a human civilization and deciding on the laws of governance that decide who qualifies and who disqualifies—then dehumanization, as Peter Grosvenor (2014) states, is the “psychological capacity to relegate people to the status of non-human animals, and to deprive them of the protection normally accorded to fellow humans by moral codes” (154). Thus, “to become a human,” Higgs states, “one must participate in a system of belonging…one becomes human by sacrificing autonomy in favor of participation…those who are human make this agreement. To break this agreement is to become Other” (31). As a socio-cultural construct humanity is, Higgs notes, an act of membership. The shifting points-of-view in Nobber show how each character is, in turn, dehumanizes/is dehumanized. In the face of the plague, the system of belonging that the locals of Nobber participated in, and that the Gaels were kept out of, has fallen apart, leaving the former with no familiar system to work within, thus reducing them all, in status and behavior, to non-human animals. Their treatment of animals is reflective of their own psychological and social condition.

The novel is highly relevant to our current sociopolitical and environmental reality: where on the one hand, the surge of right-wing regimes has narrowed and tightened the boundaries of the systems of belonging that keep some people in and everyone else out, environmental collapse, on the other hand, is on the brink of erasing all such known systems, creating new ways of life—a hitherto unknown chaos—where those who dehumanize the Other also dehumanize each other because the system that once held them together has fallen apart. Indeed, the locals in Nobber dehumanized the Gales until the plague hit them and then they started to dehumanize each other. One need look no further than the fact that Syrian refugee crisis that began because of an environmental disaster created mass migration into Europe, and the attitudes towards these migrations in turn caused a split between the U.K. and the rest of Europe, precipitating the coming about of Brexit.

I began with a famous literary tenet, and I would like to end with one. Ursula K. Le Guin once remarked that all fantastic narratives ultimately address the ills that ail our present social reality, ills that have become background white noise to us and that, therefore, when exaggerated and placed in strange new spaces, far removed from our reality, startle us into paying attention. That, I think, is where the genius of Fagan’s novel lies. In making us pay attention to the black Plague in the 1300s and showing us how some complex, well-wrought characters react to it, it makes us pay closer attention to our own disintegrating reality, to those around us, and ultimately to ourselves. It interrogates the systems of belonging we participate in and it creates a powerful experience of empathy for our future selves who might no longer have access to those systems and who will, as a result, be Othered. And seeing our future Othered selves might exactly be what we need to empathize with the Other in the here and the now. Nobber is an ode to precarity, one that I think will live beyond its generation, serving as both an instructive allegory and a highly readable work of fiction.

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Shastri Akella earned his MFA in fiction at the University of Massachusetts (Amherst) where he is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature. His story won the Bridging the Gap fiction contest at the Slice Writers’ Conference in 2018. His works appears in Guernica, Electric Literature, The Common, Rumpus, World Literature Today, LA Review of Books, Danse Macabre, and European Stages, among other places. He is currently seeking agents for his novel, The Elephant Songs, queer novel set in 1980s India with an an interracial love story at its core.

[TINY REVIEWS] Esteban Rodríguez on Cruz/Randall/Glasglow

Posted on October 21, 2019 by admin

WORDS BY ESTEBAN RODRÍGUEZ

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Dregs by Cynthia Cruz (Four Way Books)

In her fifth collection, Cynthia Cruz’s Dregs explores the remnants of human destruction and how one must navigate the maze of social ambiguity associated with the collapse of everyday structures. Cities are besieged, winters reign and weep inside the world’s inhabitants, and the speaker, absorbed in this half-lucid dream of longing and death, enters, page after page, an array of abandoned settings, searching for meaning where there appears to be none. With a concise, lyrical, and surreal poetic style, Dregs reads as a kind of post-apocalyptic catalog of how we’ve been “Forever changed // By the sickening poverty / Of sorrow.” Just over fifty pages, Dregs is a relatively quick read, but the images are haunting, and with death lingering at the end of every poem, Cruz is sure to leave you pondering your own existence long after you’ve put the book down.

Refuse by Julian Randall (University of Pittsburgh Press)

Winner of the 2017 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, Julian Randall’s Refuse explores identity, binaries, masculinity, sexuality, family, and the politics and social constructs that govern our relationship with ourselves and others. These poems don’t attempt to sugarcoat its themes and subjects, but they don’t sacrifice lyricism, emotion, and a much needed urgency at the expense of chipping away at a greater truth. Additionally, Randall captures moments that become meditative explorations of what it means be black (and biracial) within the frame of societal expectations. For example, the poem “Fright Night Lights #20” details a football teammate’s pectoral tear while bench pressing. The speaker helps his teammate to the office, but while at the office, as the staff studies them, he begins to fear the “slow guillotine the brief blade / of a white woman’s smile” and how quickly that gaze can become something both distressing and dangerous. The collection is bold and unapologetic, a debut that shows Randall’s promising career as a poet and a curator of the issues that deserve to be confronted and revealed to a wider audience.

deciduous qween by Matty Layne Glasglow (Red Hen Press)

Selected by Richard Blanco as the winner of the 2018 Benjamin Saltman Award, Matty Lane Glasglow’s deciduous qween is a vibrant collection that examines the queer world around us and how environments influence and shape our understanding of identity, sexuality, and of the perceptions we have of our bodies and character. In many of the poems, Glasglow takes small moments from the past and meditates on their importance in the present. In “deciduous qween, II,” for example, the speaker reflects on his first performance “prancing around [the] living room / in a Mickey Mouse onesie,” and through lyrical musings on that event, is able to accept who they always knew they were:

That afternoon, I felt sparkling silver gleam

sprout from my skull like all my bones were

precious metal, & I just wanted to let them

shine, to let anyone hold my body in the light

so I could look like I was worth something.

deciduous qween delves deep into this question of worth, the value of knowing who we are and who we want to be. To quote Eduardo C. Corral, “Vulnerability, brashness, grief, and astonishment leap off the page,” and there is no doubt that you too will find yourself within the pages of this book, and with the same glamor, glory, and glitter and make these poems important and memorable, you’ll have no choice but to “Let your crown shine.”

Esteban Rodríguez is the author of Dusk & Dust, forthcoming from Hub City Press (September 2019). His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Arts & Letters, The Gettysburg Review, New England Review, Puerto del Sol, Shenandoah, TriQuarterly, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. He lives with his family and teaches in Austin, Texas.

[REVIEW] People Skulk by Gordon Faylor

Posted on October 17, 2019 by admin

(GaussPDF, 2019)

REVIEW BY CLARA B. JONES

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“No theoretical generalization is foolproof.” Marjorie Perloff

The broader San Francisco poetry scene has a long artistic history and has been called the “countercultural center of modern poetry,” associated with poets such as Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder, and Allen Ginsberg. J. Gordon Faylor: an editor at San Francisco MOMA & Editor of GaussPDF, publisher of digital and innovative books, is author, among other works, of the highly-regarded, Registration Caspar [2016], a stunningly original novel/”long-form” poem, as well as, The Puppet Wedding, a 2017 pamphlet—both volumes composed experimentally using innovative grammar, semantics, form, and content, as well as, indeterminate semantics and non-sequiturs. A few words from The Puppet Wedding are employed in People Skulk [e.g., “puppet,” “half-pint”], a between-text repetition facilitating the perception of unity across the author’s oeuvre. Other devices employed to enhance wholeness in the new collection are the lack of a Table of Contents and serial pagination. Similarly, the phrase, “people skulk” is repeated in the title poem, and idiosyncratic punctuation is employed throughout the book to highlight structure, as well as, “referential” and “non-referential” elements.

Titles of volumes and poems may conceal rather than expose or stress meanings of compositions, particularly, if there appears to be no connection between them. The title of Faylor’s new collection is connected to its title poem’s first lines, “People skulk, / they really do; / match affinities, rain descent / arrogance volitive, dated / worthy blisters on Leonora’s / shells otherwise abandoned.” [36]. Experimental poems lend themselves to critical, including, textual, analysis [“close reading”], and the reader might ask, for example, is “Leonora,” Leonora Carrington, the British-Mexican Surrealist painter—possibly, referring to the author’s aesthetics or the lens through which he intends his collection to be viewed? Alternatively, “Leonora” may be an intimate reference or a symbolic name indicating, perhaps, that the text is to be read as a heteronormative one. This quote exhibits a common device of experimental poetry—the deployment of non-sequiturs and erasure to “splice,” conceal, obscure, or delete material that may or may not enhance meaning or facilitate interpretation.

For example, “skulk,” and other words, may have more than one, or archaic, meanings or may function as different parts of speech, and the reader must decide how the poet is using language that may be deployed in many different ways—e.g., intentional-unintentional, conscious-unconscious. “Skulk,” as a verb, may mean to hide or to malinger [Br.]—often with a sinister or cowardly motive; alternatively, used as a noun, “skulk” means, a group of foxes. Following Ludwig Wittgenstein’s concept, “language games,” word usage is meaningful only insofar as the reader can determine what “rules” the writer has employed. The “game” for the reader is not to reconstruct what the author intended, but to use “close reading” to uncover “rules” or “associations” [n.b. “associative poetry”] derivable from the text. The title poem continues:

“I’m going to skulk myself

fudge fish chats with the NSA

these last days wagering

wipe-washing with my carrot

not behaving toward vocalizing

the glowed leftover, my standing here

unfollowed so to speak,

hoveling for present people

standing around here, dead guilty.”

—and, later in the title poem,

“You get to dress tape

understand animal

smarts not worthy

fuck and walk

undone go ahead hate me and my

pickled people love for putting up

with, at most, our kites’ reports.”

Cowardly or sinister motives are not addressed explicitly; however, the poem’s speaker refers to himself as skulking “with the NSA,” “not behaving,” “unfollowed,” “dead guilty,” and the like. Similarly, though foxes are not mentioned in the poem, the speaker mentions “fish” and “animal”— referentiality contrasted to and contradicting the non-referentiality of the composition when it is read as a whole and in parts. Furthermore, the components, “you…fuck and walk” and, “go ahead hate me,” direct the reader’s attention to an apparent relationship between the speaker-subject and recipient-object, while other words and phrases may function parenthetically or as “fillers,” or they, also, may stand alone—referentially, or not. The subject’s “gaze” is, clearly, directed at the female, “you;” however, it seems throughout that the object’s gaze is not directed towards the subject or “voice,” who, we shall see, is Gordon, himself. Elements that stand alone, with or without apparent relationship to other parts of a poem, may be considered Functionally Independent components of a poem or, even, “fillers” or “stops,” devices common in experimental poetry [see “Collage” and “Erasure” below].

Joan Retallack made the following observation, “What I’ve found in my decades of teaching…is that the conviction that there is an entity called ‘poem’ with a discrete essence one should be able to discern and evaluate according to universal aesthetic principles continues to be widespread.” This point of view suggests, I think, that non-traditional, non-mainstream poetry—innovative, avant garde, experimental poetry—is not rule-governed. Retallack, and many others, however, would probably agree that different sub-genres of poetry may encompass different procedures and aesthetics. The brief discussion of Faylor’s title poem, for example, demonstrates writing that is formally non-linear, without surfical clarity or 1 : 1 mapping of parts of speech and meaning. Such characteristics violate and disrupt the rules of classical art—what the 19^th century German art historian, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, called, “true style”—incorporating, “noble simplicity,” patriotism, order, lack of emotion, symmetry, balance, emotional restraint, harmony, no distortion, and/or scientific precision, among other traits. Faylor’s compositions, instead, are fractured with respect to form and content, grammar and semantics. Like Winckelmann’s Greek Revival aesthetics, then, experimental poetry exhibits its own recognizable style that can be described no less clearly than “true style.” Consistent with this idea, Marjorie Perloff, speaking of collage, stated, “It does not follow that collage is essentially a “degraded” or “alienated” version of earlier (and presumably superior) genres.”

What additional information can we extract from People Skulk? Faylor makes clear that the “voice” of the collection is the author, himself—“Inside demand—inside demand, Gordon.” [14]; “stop apologizing, Gordon / people do it because they’re depressed / or unintentionally dreary,” [48]. As Rosalind Krauss has noted, speaking of Claude Cahun’s photography, the artist is “subject and object of representation,” a type of “mirroring” and “doubling” reinforced by the device that Faylor is, at once, speaking to himself and to an “Other”: “You’re a radiant individual and make me glad, / but if we’re done we’re done, I promise. / I’ll still send your / aerations a kiss and always tear up after.” [8]

In addition to identifiably “experimental” devices, Faylor’s new collection includes some traditional features—occasional soft rhyming, even, a few 14-line, sonnet forms [32], or near-sonnets, suggestive of the classical “love poem,” and the couplet on p 61 is Shakespeare-like: “Answer me with both lolling now that I’m bare / let me bleed my share.”—a couplet expressing loss and, possibly, regret. Apparently, as suggested above, People Skulk is, inherently, about lost love [“…secure until you finally see me off? / I’ll love you until I die, regardless.”, 5; “I’ll still send your / aerations a kiss and always tear up after.”, 8; “If and when you coddle her goneness”, [15]; “…in retrospect, bitterly.”, 27], and there are numerous references to sadness, regret, reflection, and loneliness. Also, conventional, if not, traditional, the volume includes quite a few words uncommon in US speech but more common in the British vernacular [“archegonia,” “aletheia,” “propaedeutic,” “psionic,” Latin phrases, etc.], a device that might be interpreted as pretentious or elitist, though archaic or uncommon words combined with inclusion of splicing, erasure, or non-sequiturs in a poem can be employed as a formulaic way of creating an innovative or experimental composition. Although, “death,” “necrophilia,” “dead,” “lifeless,” “malignancy,” “polyps,” and angry tones are elements of many of the poems in People Skulk, this is not a “dark” collection, in great part due to Faylor’s frequent word play, as well as, the indeterminacy [“undecidability,” “non-referentiality”] and fractured arrangement of the compositions. On the other hand, see 4-5, “They wanted the same minced baby / lowered into its cradle, sobbing.” The subject has his low moments—like all of us.

The device, “collage” [splicing], and its relation to experimental literature, whereby poets layer ideas or images, assembling various forms of speech to create a new whole, has been famously studied by the poetry critic, Marjorie Perloff*. Collage subordinates and disrupts the voice and identity of the subject, though each composition is likely to have dominant elements serving as moments of clarity or emphasis or, sometimes, normalcy. In the two-sonnet poem, “I Forget,” for example, “Gordon” states, “’You could’ve responded with so much more’ I tell myself….” [44]. Motifs such as the foregoing denote what dominates situations [see the poem, “Proof of Staff” (may become, “Proof of Stuff”?) on p 3], and strong units of speech may dominate through emphasis, making a point, or grabbing attention —similar to repetition. On the other hand, speaking of Dadaism and “anti-art,” Dietmar Elger has pointed out that the reader may not make “coherent sense” out of the works. Admittedly, fragmentary language [“text fragments”] often suppresses logic, and People Skulk includes several fragmentary, even, one-line, pieces [e.g., 40, 49, 58]. I am arguing, however, that collage poetry is not necessarily random, “stream of consciousness,” or “free association” though some content may be concealed in subconscious [dreams] or unconscious processes. Commenting on Kenneth Goldsmith’s idea that Conceptual Poetry is “unreadable,” Marjorie Perloff contended that each word constitutes a “choice” by the poet and is, thus, intentional. Thinking of a Bob Seger song, the poet must decide, “what to leave in, what to leave out.”

Collage poetry requires erasure and non-disclosure—of words, phrases, parts of speech. The Italian Futurist writer, F.T. Marinetti, for example, exclaimed that adverbs, adjectives, punctuation, conjugated verbs, and syntax, in general, should be abolished. Erasure might be employed to conceal or repress painful, embarrassing, socially unacceptable, prohibited, triggering, private, or otherwise unpleasant or proscribed material. Erasure, then, might hide [sic—“skulk”] meaning, though it would be a mistake to attempt to recover whatever thoughts or motivations Faylor [“Gordon”] may have had when composing his collection. Erasure might, also, function as a type of Wittgensteinian “language play” [“I take on the malignancy of the room / swept on by sterile water, / polyps of my itinerary.” [55], a complex line that might have been written by the German poet, Gottfried Benn. Examples of “word play” may be found in the rich poem, “Archegonia” on pp 26-27. Language and word play may entail the reader switching or adding words, such as in the lines, “I want to make you comfortable / I defied that one cracked night / and spun out apologizing.” [56]. What if we change the phrase, “one cracked night” to “one crazy night?” “Crazy” appears in several poems and, if inserted here, may facilitate associations and decipherability, substituting for “cracked.” Similarly, The reader might, also, elect to insert “of control” between “out” and “apologizing,” creating a more harmonious and normal phrase, “and spun out of control apologizing.” Both of these modifications may enhance the reader’s experience of, interpretation of, and/or accessibility to parts of the poem or of the whole composition. On the other hand, collage may, also, be effected for purely artistic purposes by the poet, and, according to Perloff, “…is, by definition, a visual or spatial concept.”, implying that collage poems are types of spliced visual art, in addition to spliced verbal compositions.

Because of the juxtaposition, intertextuality, and unconventional usages [e.g. using verbs as nouns or adjectives] of a variety of linguistic elements, collage and erasure may contribute to the experience of contradiction, ambiguity, ambivalence, tensions, oppositions, and conflicts, such as, those between male-female, imagination-reality, archaic-modern, native-foreign. Experimental poetry, then, is, in part, recognizable because of indeterminate meaning, yielding a “transrational” experience, according to the critic, Gerald Janecek. He goes on to suggest that, like many Russian Futurist compositions, poets strove to write independent of Nature—like Abstract Expressionists after them; elements were, often, interchangeable, as they seem to be in many of the poems in People Skulk, and there seems to be no necessary logical or functional basis for the poems’ ordering in the text. Nonetheless, as pointed out by Perloff, some logical elements and relations may still be present, such as, negation, contradiction, similarity, equivalence, identity, and their negatives; as well, arrangement, association; assortment, repetition [e.g., 28, 36] are often used as “rhetorical devices” for clarity, memory, emphasis, or other functions, as in the following excerpt from the poem, “Safer’s Pet Rescue” [28],

“Gory repetition childish

your small dog isn’t. No you don’t bit by bite sled dog

the world war’s garage

my students’ crystals depicting ruby red

I want kids to band together

in uncooperative moments

cads ripping back-up plastic article “Stressed”

for the small dogs’ fiber, their backup system finally tested

yet no longer my own, which

I gave up depressed-guy style.”

What comes next [“indeterminacy”]? Logical conventions are not followed throughout [“transrational”]. “World war’s garage” does not occur in Nature—at least, not on surface. Words, phrases might be interchanged without loss of effect [e.g., “crystals” and “article”]. However, some logical and relational associations remain present, particularly, at the level of phraseology, if not complete sentences [e.g., “small dog,” “ruby red,” “backup system”], and repetition [“small dog”] is employed for emphasis, to enhance memory, to attract attention, or other effects.

Several critics have pointed out that Indeterminacy in literature is a device in which components of a text require the reader to make their own decisions about the text’s meaning. Often, the final lines of a poem leave the reader “hanging,” as in examples above. The text’s meaning, then, remains open to interpretation [“indeterminate”]. Some readers have decided that these features render the poems of John Cage, Gertrude Stein, John Ashbery, for example, “incomprehensible;” however, I have attempted to show that close reading and critical analyses may result in intra- and inter-textual comprehension of some components of experimental poetry such as that found in Faylor’s new collection. In People Skulk, “Gordon” is never whole or self-actualized. Throughout the book, he is embedded in a “system” of contradictions, ambiguities, and oppositions: subjective-objective, plant-animal, personal-impersonal, part-whole, attachment-detachment, self-conscious-other-directed, instinctual-cerebral. Like the formalities of the text, “Gordon,” himself, remains indeterminate, fractured—“self” determined, primarily, by what the Other [“you”, the subject’s object] reflects back [Jacques Lacan’s, “mirroring”]. Non-specificity can be distracting and can seem like no more than distortion or obscurity or illusion or tricks or games that the poet is imposing upon the reader; however, if we understand that “entering” and embracing an experimental collection, such as Faylor’s, People Skulk, relies upon methodology no less than traditional poetry, as outlined in this review, the reader’s efforts will be rewarded many times over.

*Chapter 2 in Perloff M (1986) The Futurist Moment. The University of Chicago Press.

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Clara B. Jones is a knowledge worker practicing in Silver Spring, MD, USA. In addition to other writings, she is author of, /feminine nature/ [GaussPDF, 2017].

[REVIEW] Kansastan by Farooq Ahmed

Posted on September 26, 2019 by admin

(7.13 Books, 2019)

REVIEW BY J.D. HO

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One of the important projects of contemporary writers of color or writers belonging to marginalized religious groups is to reclaim and rewrite histories that have largely been recorded and imagined by the majority. Farooq Ahmed’s Kansastan is one such reclamation. Ahmed weaves an alternative narrative of Kansas during the Civil War. His unnamed narrator lives in Imam Bahira’s mosque, slaughtering goats and doing other chores, while around him Kansans defend the state against Missourians. Like a less wholesome Forrest Gump, complete with leg braces, our narrator meets historic figures like the abolitionist John Brown. While the setting is America during the Civil War, on the border between a free state and a slave state, Ahmed incorporates narrative elements from the Qur’an and Islamic history, drawing in particular on the story of Hajar and her son Ismail, ancestor of the Prophet Muhammad. Muslims populate Ahmed’s novelistic universe, and the mosque stands without comment in Kansas. In the Civil War period, Muslims were, in fact, present in the U.S. because a significant number of slaves came from Islamic regions, but that aspect of history is not directly addressed in this narrative.

The narrator of Kansastan at one point proclaims: “If I inherited the mosque, I could retell our stories!” Thus, the main character ostensibly shares a goal with the novel itself. But what is the purpose of retelling and reclaiming history? The tone of Kansastan leans more toward satire than historical illumination or giving voice to unheard witnesses. The retellings seem to be important primarily to gratify the narrator’s ego. In the text, the narrator often feels overlooked, unjustly treated, incorrectly perceived. His sense of injustice increases with the arrival of a woman named Maryam, whom the narrator claims is his aunt. The members of the community regard Maryam’s son, Faisal, as a healer and prophet, while the narrator is the butt of jokes. When Faisal strikes a geyser in the parched landscape, the populace shower him with gratitude, but the narrator complains that no one acknowledges the fact that he was the one to make Faisal play the game that led him to discover the well. That link, he says, “was lost between the storytellers and the told.” The narrator exists only as “the cripple” in songs about Faisal. To combat that injustice, the narrator schemes to take over the mosque by defeating his oppressors one by one.

We know little of our narrator’s past, though we know he is an orphan, that he has a malady that prevents him from walking easily, and that he possesses some knowledge of the Qur’an, though that knowledge is perhaps as unreliable as he is. He doesn’t know Arabic, and calls “ignorance—my shield and my sword.” Despite the character’s ostensible religion and time period, he smokes cigarettes and marijuana (which he calls his “analgesic seasonings”), commits murder and rape, and is generally unsympathetic. In this he resembles some of Vladimir Nabokov’s narrators, whom we are not necessarily supposed to like or trust, and who often have an exaggerated sense of self-importance and a shifty moral compass. Ahmed’s narrator is similar. He seems to bend facts to cast his ethically dubious actions in a positive light. He is our storyteller and our archivist, the compiler of all the information we know about the novel’s world.

As I began this novel, I had trouble getting my bearings because there is little exposition of the factions and historical background of this particular universe. I found myself wishing for more world-building and exposition. I turned to the Qur’an for direction because Kansastan so constantly references the Qur’an and the people in it. Though my reading of it is incomplete and certainly not deep, the Qur’an helped in two ways. First, as I looked up many of the novel’s quotations from the Qur’an, I began to question the narrator’s knowledge of scriptural context. Second, thinking about how to read the Qur’an was helpful for thinking about how to read Kansastan. In his introduction to my version of the Qur’an (Oxford), M.A.S. Abdel Haleem states: “An important feature of the Qur’anic style is that it alludes to events without giving historical background.” Haleem goes on to say that the Qur’an relied upon its readers’ knowledge of events that were, at the time, current. Ahmed employs a similar style, perhaps purposely leaving the particulars of the Kansas–Missouri conflict vague in order that readers will treat the novel as contemporary fable—or satire. Though Ahmed draws upon the Qur’an and the story of Hajar and Ismail, he does not create straightforward parallels.

From an editorial perspective, I think Kansastan tries to take on too many narrative tasks at once. Its satirical elements often clutter the narrative in a way that decreases their effectiveness. (References to Kansas-specific insider jokes, for instance, are worldbuilding, but not in a meaningful way.) But Ahmed possesses the skills to wield a satirical blade, as when the Imam says, “Whom ye war against, I war against,” and much later Faisal says, “If the Lord be for us, who can be against,” echoing both Romans 8:31 and George W. Bush after 9/11.

Another purpose of retelling in the form of satire is to attempt to make sense of—or find relief from—the present, and I think that is where Ahmed’s aim lies. In mocking disability, religion, and the fight against slavery, Kansastan treats nothing as sacred, revealing a deeply pessimistic worldview. The point may be that the particulars of factions and history will do nothing to make sense of the events of our times or the narrator’s. If our murderous and narcissistic narrator is on the side of abolitionists, what does that say about the other side? Perhaps both sides are Fanatics (the narrator’s term), and both sides believe they are right, but, as readers standing outside the narrative, one side’s fanaticism is indistinguishable from the other’s.

—

J.D. Ho has an MFA from the Michener Center at the University of Texas in Austin. J.D.’s poems and essays have appeared in Georgia Review, Ninth Letter, and other journals.

[REVIEW] Bloomland by John Englehardt

Posted on September 19, 2019 by admin

(Dzanc, 2019)

REVIEW BY DAVID TROMBLAY

—

Bloomland, the winner of the 2018 Dzanc Prize for Fiction, explores the cyclic American cultural phenomenon of an all too real mass shooting set at a fictionalized southern university nestled in an evangelical stronghold where God and guns are routinely spoken of in the same breath and with the same reverence. Though the setting is masterfully crafted and given intimate nuance by Englehardt, Bloomland could also have the thinnest veil dragged across its pages and become Anytown, USA, all too easily unnervingly. Therein lies the first of countless gripping details waiting between the novel’s pages. Englehardt strikes at the unfortunately understood universality of this story by whispering to the psyche of the reader, saying, “this is what real endings look like, after anxiety erodes into routine.

This conversation—which has spent too much time in the mouths of talking heads following the week’s latest and greatest presumably unavoidable tragedy—is examined through the unfolding lives of a trio of characters including a student struggling to find a life of which they are willing to subscribe to, a widowed professor, and young man who is made listless by an emptiness and unknown yearning which he sets out to eradicate at any cost. The cost is interrogated by a trinity of narrators who attempt to talk the three characters through the descriptive, prescriptive, and speculative, events that led up to, unraveled during, and followed that fateful day.

“Later I understand you’re opening up to me, telling the story of your life like it happened to someone else, like the things you’ve experienced are not singular, but part of a cycle that is always repeating and reinventing itself.”

Englehardt employs these second-person narrators expertly while reminding the reader there is an “I” behind the tragedy to help usher the survivors who are left alive to move on afterward. Not doing so would be a grave mistake and no different than what America has been inundated with by the media following the endless string of mass shootings of recent history. By leading the reader through these knotted lives while using the “you” and “I,” Englehardt presents the question of who are “we” to sit back so apathetically and serve as an audience to what is quickly becoming history’s most grotesque spectator sport, leaving you to “…wonder if the scariest thing about all this is not that life can’t return to normal, but that it already has.”

It should not surprise readers that this book does not end with a cheery conclusion, but envelopes a meticulously scaffolded reflection of the current American society, one so willing to send thoughts and prayers when the time arises, yet simultaneously waiting for it to be their own turn, as if it is merely inevitable.

—

DAVID TROMBLAY is a native of Duluth, Minnesota. He served for 10 years in the U.S. Navy, deploying to Iraq, Eastern Europe, and Africa. He is currently studying English Literature and Writing at the University of Wisconsin-Superior. His essays and short stories have appeared in Minerva Zine, The Nemadji Review, and Yellow Medicine Review. His first novel, The Ramblings of a Revenant, was published in 2015.

[REVIEW] Arsenal/Sin Documentos by Francesco Levato

Posted on September 11, 2019 by admin

(CLASH Books, 2019)

REVIEW GABINO IGLESIAS

—

NOTE: The following is a tweaked version of my introduction to Levato’s book.

Writing poetry entails pulling feelings, dreams, and memories from nothingness and bringing them to the page with words. That’s why it’s so easy. That’s why it’s almost impossible. On the other hand, blackout poetry is the art of pushing unnecessary/extra/dishonest words into oblivion so that the true message, the meaning behind the jumble of words, can be revealed. Since the words are there, given, one could argue that it’s an easier task. However, that is not the case. Every discourse is constructed with an intention, and this type of poetry demands a ruthless, fearless deconstruction of that discourse in order to reveal the truth. If poetry can speak truth to power, then what I’m choosing to call here revelation poetry speaks truth to power using power’s original discourse.

Francesco Levato’s Arsenal/Sin Documentos is a courageous book. More importantly, it is a necessary book. We are witnessing abuse and bigotry daily. We are living a ridiculously anti-immigrant rhetoric created to cause fear of the Other. This book slashes into the center of that issue and exposes its inherently racist core. Remember watching science fiction movies as a kid and being scared of aliens? Well, alien is, once again, a word used to instill fear, and to deliver a clear message:

“The removal of these aliens, must be prioritized.”

But these are not aliens Levato is talking about. These aren’t grey monsters with huge black eyes or evil green humanoid beings with disintegrating ray guns; he is discussing immigrants. People. Brothers and sisters in the struggle that is staying alive and caring for those we love. He is talking about children. Yes, the same children that got tear-gassed at la frontera.

Now imagine your life is so shitty you decided to leave everything you know behind to move to a different country. You have no money and fear abandoning your home, your language, your friends, your job, everything. Then you get here and the folks holding the American Dream receive you with “Choke holds/neck restraints/baton to the head/electronic pulses to cause/Incapacitation/or pain.” Welcome to the United States, cabrones.

Now stop imagining things. What you are about to read is not about imaginary things, it’s about everyday things that happen at the border. It’s about rules and regulations that were created to control and dehumanize. It’s about exposing the reality of a system that seems to be designed for a war and not for receiving individuals seeking asylum.

Like I said, stop imagining things. There are real words will real world implications ahead. Words like lethal and enforce. Words like authority and body and discretion. Words like taser and trauma and control. These words matter because they point to a flawed system. These words matter because Levato pulled them from a plethora of official documents he felt have “the capacity to affect an embodied subject both discursively and physically.” They matter because they tell stories about the way other humans are seen, treated, processed. They matter because they are the law of the land, sanctioned by those in power and applauded by many.

There is a point in the career of every writer where he or she will have to decided if politics are going to be part of their oeuvre. Even deciding that they won’t is a political move. I respect that. However, fully engaging is something I respect much more, and that exactly what Levato has done here. There is no pandering. There is no sugarcoating. And there is Spanish. This level of engagement is the literary equivalent of standing in the middle of the road a few seconds after the cops drove by, one hand squeezing your crotch and the other held up high, middle finger flying. That deserves respect.

Perhaps the beauty of Arsenal/Sin Documentos is that it exposes truth while also leaving the door open for the reader to discover more. For example, it includes the instructions for immigrants who want to become citizens. Among those requirements is knowledge of English. Yeah, and then you remember there is no federal law establishing English as the official language of the United States…

Frontera narratives matter now more than ever, and you’re this book is a crucial addition to the list of books tackling the issue.

—

Gabino Iglesias is a writer, book critic, and professor living in Austin, TX. He is the author of ZERO SAINTS and COYOTE SONGS. His work has been translated into four languages, optioned for film, and nominated to the Wonderland Book Award, the Bram Stoker Award, and the Locus Award. His literary criticism appears regularly in venues like NPR, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Criminal Element, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. His nonfiction has been published in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and other print and online venues. He was a juror for the 2018 Shirley Jackson Awards and the 2019 Splatterpunk Awards. He is the book reviews editor for PANK Magazine and a literary columnist for LitReactor. You can find him on Twitter at @Gabino_Iglesias.

[REVIEW] The Geese Who Might Be Gods by Benjamin Cutler

Posted on September 6, 2019 by admin

(Main Street Rag, 2019)

REVIEW BY ESTEBAN RODRIGUEZ

—

For many poetry collections, the theme of place is central to the images, ideas, and emotions they seek to instill in their readers. In the book Romey’s Order, Atsuro Riley couples a unique regional dialect with the memories of growing up in the backwoods of South Carolina to create a rich and highly percussive collection. In the work of B.H. Fairchild, the Midwest – both its people and the landscape – shapes the speaker’s understanding of not only the region, but the world at large. For Benjamin Cutler, southern Appalachia courses through the veins of his debut collection, The Geese Who Might Be Gods, and with a voice that is clear, lyrical, and maturely measured, we are gifted with poems that are both beautiful and hauntingly memorable.

The beauty of Cutler’s collection lies in its ability to weave the historical with the personal, and to create a narrative where the understanding for a greater truth is found in the relationship between the two. In the opening poem “Peeling Bark for Bread,” the speaker ponders a documentary that details the Sami people (from Scandinavia) and the manner in which they’d peel bark and grind it into flour. This rather random fact inspires the speaker to do the same to their mother’s dogwood, albeit unsuccessfully. The mother, “in grief and rage,” laments the speaker’s actions, but when the splintered edges grow back within the year, the “leavened loaves under the sun” remind both speaker and mother (and reader as well) how wounds can heal and eventually flourish.Many poems center on familial relationships, either through the frame of the speaker’s childhood or through the eyes of the speaker as a father. In one poem, the speaker remembers turning to his brother and his brother’s friend to help fix a lawnmower, and when these two “shamans garbed in grease / and denim” have resurrected this “child” (the lawnmower), the idea that family serves as a foundation and backbone to one’s own needs is illuminated in a subtle yet thoughtful tone. In “Butterfly Funeral,” the speaker, now a father, shows his son how certain moments require our attention and care rather than the more common act of capturing a scene through a photograph:

See their color:

a spill of ink on yellow paper.

See their movement:

wings like hands opening

and closing in uncertain prayer.

Remember so you can tell her:

they’ll be gone when we pass again.

Looks like a butterfly funeral,

he said and—

with such reverence—

brushed one finger

over on attendant’s wings.

It shuddered but did not fly.

These poems are heartfelt, but without falling into the trap of being overly sentimental. Page after page, Cutler seeks to create images filled with emotional and intellectual nuance, delving into subjects such as A.L.S. (“How to Speak With the Dying When the Dying Cannot Speak”), grief in the wake of a school shooting (“A Refusal”), and the anxiety surrounding survival should the world enter its last stages (“A Tomato Sandwich for the End-Times”).

One of the most intriguing aspects of These Geese Who Might Be Gods is how Cutler can take a seemingly grotesque image and find meaning that isn’t apparent on the surface. In “Bear Paw,” the speaker finds a “fraction of a crucifixion – / a single [bear] paw nailed to a telephone pole.” After bathing in a shallow pool, he returns to the paw and ponders the last moments before its death:

How heavy he must have fallen,

how silent and still

as blade cut through radius,

tendon, and ulna—as spike

pierced the palm’s pad, paw

lifted high for a sign:

flesh as dark and bloodless as guilt,

bone as pale and dry as forgiveness.

There’s a certain sense of guilt that the speaker feels for the bear, wondering if it experienced defiance or fear before it was killed. Nevertheless, the speaker ultimately feels cleansed (or forgiven) of having to witness the aftermath of such a strange, brutal act. Even when the images are not based in reality, they remain stark and offer a chance at greater reflection. In “Waking From Tooth-Loss,” the speaker navigates a dream where his teeth fall out and expose “nerve / and purple-blooded absence.” He doesn’t know exactly what it means that he’s losing teeth so rapidly in a dream (some interpretations of this would indicate that it symbolizes anxiety and the way we think we are perceived by others), but he knows that once he has awakened, he cannot regain the feeling – however ominous it is – he had when he was asleep:

But now that I’m awake,

I have forgotten the secret.

Now that I’m awake,

my teeth are here, rooted to bone,

and you are not.

I cannot ask. You cannot answer.

Hurry your return,

if you can, because soon I will swallow

something that tastes

too much like loss.

These teeth are tired of chewing.

The “you” comes in unexpectedly, but it can be in reference to the “I” that the speaker left behind in the dream (a separation, if you will, that he experienced when he woke up), and this loss, this constant “chewing” of everyday life, reveals that there are always moments out of our grasp, those we can only hope to retell.

There are debuts that are good and there are debuts that are great precisely because they remind you of the power of poetry and how important it is in capturing the environment, the people, and the moments that shape our most basic understanding of this world. The Geese Who Might Be Gods is an incredible book that examines our relationship with nature, loss, family, and with ourselves, and with that “endless hungry search” for meaning, we find light in these pages where we least expect it.

—

Kervinen’s Cyber Poetics

Posted on August 9, 2019 by admin

(ma press, 2018)

REVIEW AND INTERVIEW BY CLARA B. JONES

—

“What does poetry look like in the technological age.” Kenneth Goldsmith

Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, an internationally recognized artist, is a Finnish composer, producer, writer, visual artist, publisher [ma press], and editor of the new journal, coelacanth—a venue for experimental poetry. His work focuses, mainly, on algorithmic processes, computer-assisted compositions, and various other methods based on cybernetics, chaotic dynamics, and stochastic systems, among others. For purposes of the present review, I am advancing Kervinen as a “cyber poet,” and his book, as little as a single point, can be read as a collection of randomly-generated prose poems or as a long-form poem. The following piece is representative of the works in the volume:

Limpness inverted psychoses black-and-

blue affidavit Not only within the breakdown

point of an L-estimator is bounds undertone

decontaminate merrymaker bloodsucker defend and

apocalypse fight bottom tacky manifestly infuse

refusal scenario aardvark sponge as a single

point dairy the image that tress thick resilient

nuclear energy difficult computationally. In

many circumstances L-estimators are adjacent

cymbal congestion temp unequivocally broadcaster

as in the median (of an

I asked two of my friends to read and comment on this piece. Walter, a senior citizen and serious student of classical, English-language poetry, responded that he did not understand the poem and that it might as well have been written in Finnish. Meghan, a young mother and a published poet who writes beautiful lyrics, including iambic pentameter and soft rhyming, said that the poem was not her style but that she would like to learn more about experimental literature. In a sense, these readers are correct to imply that, from a Formalist perspective, a lot is missing from these compositions, though many of the texts include elements of strong image and emotion [“repeater,” “orgasm,” “breakdown”]. For the most part, however, the compositions, in whole and in part, are “defamiliarized” and “strange,” as Viktor Shklovsky noted when speaking of poetry using common language in such a manner as to alter the reader’s sensation or perception—features relating as little as a single point to Futurism and Dadism.

Surely, the poems in as little as a single point are examples of avant garde writing, often characterized by repetition and redundancy [“L-estimator,” “breakdown” or “break-down,” “minimum or maximum”], intermittent punctuation and capitalization, as well as, non-sequiturs throughout such that words or phrases may not follow logically from one another [“collage” poetry]. Some of the phrases begin as if they might become complete sentences—then veer off into something completely unrelated [“The breakdown point of an L-estimator is given by antonym are basis of why upper and sarsaparilla accommodations transformation…”] Additionally, some cryptic meanings might have been built into the randomly-generated texts. The book’s title, for example, may refer to a “single-point rubric” [Education] or a “single point of failure” [Systems Engineering].

Further, like many innovative works [e.g., Joyce’s Ulysses], these compositions may be viewed as “language-games” [Wittgenstein], and this algorithmic prose poetry is a type of “performance art”—playful, probing multi-sensory experience, creating, for some readers, a type of [signal] noise. Also, consistent with many experimental poems, these pieces are “indeterminate,” challenging the status of the author’s and reader’s egos and lacking a “thetic” component of narrative or closure. Indeed, each word or phrase can stand alone, permitting the reader to combine and recombine them into novel [meta-novel] texts. I would urge Walter and Meghan to consider John Cage’s comment: “If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually, one discovers that it is not boring at all.”

(Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, courtesy of the author)

In an attempt to gain a better understanding of Kervinen’s methods and purposes, I solicited answers to four of my questions via e-mail, as follows:

Clara Jones: How would you classify this book of poems? i.e., What kind of poetry is it?

Jukka-Pekka Kervinen: For me this is a series of prose poems, all written algorithmically by my own program[s]. More usually, I call my ‘poetry’ as ‘writings’, it somehow describes [what I do] better, especially computer-generated texts, but lately I have started more and more to manually change things I am not satisfied [with], which [in] some cases means I rewrite [the] whole thing. That means the direction is from computer-generated to computer-assisted. [A] few years ago I had strict rules to NOT alter/change anything generated by my programs. [I]t was just one binary choice: [generated] either by computer or manually. Getting older seems to mean getting a bit softer, too.

CJ: Can you envision ever working with an “intelligent machine” [robot] with haptic [human interface] capabilities to create poetry?

JK: I have done computer-generated music, texts and images [since the] early 1980’s, and so far, I haven’t seen anything even remotely intelligent [in] any machines. [W]e are still far away [from] “thinking” computers. [T]here’s always [a] human behind [the machine], programming, collecting data, organizing information etc, and of course, someone need[s] to switch the computer on. For me, [the] computer is an extended pen, another point of view, [a] different approach, where I “convert” my ideas to the format the computer is able to handle and then write the program to generate stuff, according [to] the idea I have already formed in my mind. So, basically, I write programs to emulate myself.

CJ: As a poet, what is the worst or best advice you have ever received?

JK: I have no formal education in writing or literature, I studied musicology, composing and computing in university. So, this is [an] interesting question. [P]erhaps because of [the] nature of my writings, I have never gotten any advices. Not a single one.

CJ: What poetry projects are you currently working on?

JK: I am mostly working with music currently, but I write 1-3 books per year, run two presses, Gradient Books and ma press, and I am editing [the] first issue of [a] new e-zine, coelacanth; these are ongoing projects. I work very impulsively, I have no idea what I am going to do tomorrow, or next three hours. I am [currently] working with some art-related, mostly music, processes [most of] the time. [My] children have all moved to [their] own houses; I am living with my wife and our four cats, and I work constantly, except when sleeping, time [that] is dedicated to [my] extremely stupid dreams, which can’t be related to anything in real life. And not only stupid, they are usually also unbelievable boring. I also eat, but that I have always considered as a waste of time.

Clearly, Kervinen has given much thought to his multi-faceted career as an experimental artist. Whether or not he considers himself an overtly “political poet,” his methods are oppositional—refusing to conform to mainstream standards established by Formalists such as Cleanth Brooks or Helen Vendler. At the same time, although we might classify him with the Post-modernists [fracture/fractured language and motivation], he shares with Modernists, such as Eliot, James, and Stevens, the acts of expanding our understanding of poetry’s forms and content. One is reminded of Kenneth Goldsmith’s observation: “An original writer is not one who imitates nobody, but one whom nobody can imitate.” Surely this perspective suggests that experimental compositions, such as those in as little as a single point, share features in common with what most critics and readers think of as traditional poetry (e.g., originality, “interpretive power”). Indeed, it might be suggested that Kervinen’s poems are not anti-authoritarian as ends in themselves but, rather, innovative and exploratory commentaries on contemporary psycho-social ways of being and “events in the world”—both existential and veridical. This is an important book that is highly recommended to consumers of the avant garde, as well as, to any reader curious about the current and future direction of cyber literature.

—

Clara B. Jones is a Knowledge Worker practicing in Silver Spring, MD, USA. Among other works, she is author of the poetry collection, /feminine nature/ (GaussPDF, 2017). Clara, also, conducts research on experimental literature, radical publishing, as well as, art and technology.

[REVIEW] The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams by Mary Mackey

Posted on August 5, 2019 by admin

(Marsh Hawk Press, 2018)

REVIEW BY JOAN GELFAND

—

Having just won the Eric Hoffer Award for the Best Book Published by a Small Press in 2019 and a Women’s Spirituality Book Award, The Jaguars that Prowl our Dreams: Collected Poems 1974-2018 is a stellar work. In the span of forty years, Mary Mackey has published 14 novels, most with big five publishers (two under the pseudonym “Kate Clemens”) and eight collections of poetry, one of which, Sugar Zone, published by Marsh Hawk Press, won her the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Literary Excellence.

Added to these accolades, two of Mackey’s quirky and sensual poems from the series “Kama Sutra of Kindness” (Travelers With no Ticket Home) were featured on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac. All this was accomplished while teaching Film and Creative Writing at California State University Sacramento for over thirty years.

Mackey is a magnificent thinker with broad passions: pagan cultures, literature, anthropology, ecology and history are subject explored in “Jaguars.” After graduating with her PhD from The University of Michigan in 1970, she arrived in Berkeley, California, and began publishing in earnest. Her first novel, Immersion, was recently re-released. An ecofeminist novel, which takes place in the jungles of Costa Rica, it is a portent of climate change.

Serious topics such as ecofeminism, history, and ecology might sound dry, but like many magnificent thinkers before her, Mackey is in full possession of a wild and wacky sense of humor that always puts her readers at ease. I’ll also say here that while her mind is magnificent and her interests broad, her work, while stunningly layered, is always accessible.

I first fell in love with Mary Mackey’s poetry when she arrived at the open mic at the Gallery Café (San Francisco), a series that had a reputation for attracting exceptional poets. Mackey’s vibrant jungle imagery mixed with her confident and mellifluent Portuguese enchanted and enticed me to learn more about her work.

From Sugar Zone:

“Eles estão comendo they’re eating

purple snails powdered viper venom

lagartas esmagadas flowers that dye their lips

the color of blood singing of cities of blue glass

and the jaguars that prowl our dreams”

We are not in Kansas anymore, I whispered to myself. Or even San Francisco. It was thrilling.

As I became increasingly familiar with Mackey’s new collection, I was beguiled, awestruck and amazed at her ability to embrace the beauty of the world while being able to hold the frighteningly challenging, particularly in Brazil where real and present dangers were omnipresent. Rather than recoil, Mackey remained alert to the terrors and danger, external and internal threats:

“Sempre me amendrontou I have always

been afraid tankers strung out along the horizon

like a necklace of black

seeds a idéia de ter um filho of the idea

of having a child let’s get drunk

on cachaça forget her outstretched

hands her face the delicate angle of her nose

Mackey allows anxiety its full due, asking questions with no answers, setting down posits that lead nowhere except to more difficult questions.

tell me why they are burning

palm trees on the road to the airport

why the water tastes like ashes

why the windows of the cars are blind?

(Sugar Zone)

As a poet and reviewer, I had spent time researching Elizabeth Bishop’s source documents at Vassar College. In my essay, “Elizabeth bishop’s Alternate Worlds,” I explore Bishop’s development as a poet and novelist and the work she did before and after her experience in the Brazilian jungle.

I had delved into the boxes of archives guarded by the college where the young Bishop had studied and been taken under the wing of the well-connected Marianne Moore. As I worked, I began to make connections between the two poets.

Connections yes. But I want to make something clear before we go too far down the road: Bishop’s visions that resulted in a series of mystical and magical poems were inspired by experiences in the Brazilian jungle with ayahuasca – a half century before the hallucinogenic substance became a household word. Mackey is, and has always been, stone cold sober.

From the poem: “I Went to the Jungle Seeking Hallucinations”:

“I drank nothing I ate nothing

yet the fevers made me prophetic”

The daughter of a medical doctor, her experience with “an alternate world’ and visions began at a young age with an unfortunate predilection for running dangerously high fevers; an experience which terrified her parents but gave her the first opening to another reality.

From “Breaking the Fever”:

When I was young

fevers were attacked

the grown-ups would rub you

with alcohol

wrap you in wet sheets

refuse you blankets

fan you, feed you

plunge your wrists in cold water

In this poem, we have the entry into the world of a child disabled by illness in the form of a ravaging fever. Mackey uses a fine, but almost sickly rhythm here that telegraphs that this forced bed rest is just the beginning of the saga. Using recombinative rhyme (echoing/ wrap you, refuse you blankets, fan you feed you), we are in unflinchingly dire territory that is about to get worse:

“…At 105 I would start to hear voices

soft and lulling

at 106 faces would appear

swimming around me

stretching out their hands

they would gesture to me

to join them

I was always very happy then

floating out on the warm brink

of the world.”

No ayuhuasca required.

The second and third pages of the poem are absolutely magical, but it’s a spoiler if I tell you where this poem goes.

Whatever the outcome of that 106-fevered experience, one thing is certain: it opened Mackey to a world she could live with, so that years later, when she is struck in the Amazon jungle, she maintains the strength and presence of mind to pen another brilliant poem. For example, in her recent poem “105 Degrees and Rising,” Mackey writes that fever:

‘lifts [me] from my bed/in an ascending spiral /whispering my name over and over”

If what comes before prepares us for what comes next, Mackey has been prepared as a child by those fevered visions, once striking in the safely of her parents’ home, now striking in the far away, primitive jungle. In both cases, she hangs tight.

It is in the “Infinite Worlds” section of Jaguars that Mackey begins to let loose with imagery that is memorable, remarkable and absolutely frightening, but always adhering to poetry’s rules and codes and aesthetically pleasing in the darkest ways:
From “Ghost Jaguars”

by day you told us the dead crouch in the jungle

arms wrapped around their knees

heads down blind

living in a great blueness

that expands to the horizon

like an infinite ocean

at night, they rise

and hunt ghost jaguars

drink the black drink

fuck the trees

If you allow yourself to see this collection as a metaphor, I would suggest it depicts a poet drawn to fire, to destruction, and to experiences so intense they force you to question your life, your priorities and your raison d’etre.

It is true that, for many writers, the edge is where they feel most vital and at one with themselves. Take the journalist Marta Gellhorn, who craved war coverage as much as Hemingway needed to fish or Neruda needed his political disruptions and protests. But unlike an Ezra Pound, or a even a Carolyn Forche, there is never a sense of judgement or partisan politics in Mackey’s work. The poems stand on their own.

And then there is the figure of Solange, a figure Mackey first introduced her readers to in her award-winning collection Sugar Zone. Solange appears repeatedly through out Mackey’s later poems. Is she real? A lost friend? I don’t know, but I do believe that if Mackey had not been opened to an alternative reality early in life, Solange, the mythical and magical creature, could never have manifested.

Here is a recent poem in which Mackey introduces us yet again to this alter ego/goddess/mythic figure:

“Solange in her Youth”

sometimes you froze among the briars

deaf to our pleas to come back to the boat

froze as if you were listening

to a great slow rush of water

that would someday bear you away

I identified Solange as a spirit sister, and I love her, and I think in many ways, Mackey must love her too. Take for example, this excerpt:

“for a whole week, I missed Solange

Por uma semana eu tive saudade….

for twenty minutes I

stood in the deserted street . . . looking

for something

no longer there”

This progression of an image from book to book is exactly the beauty of a collected work: It engenders analysis; it gives readers the chance to discover how a poet arrived at point c from point a. It is, in its best form, a roadmap of a poet’s oeuvre.

Not all authors progress as Mackey has from her initial deeply personal to increasingly spiritual work. We don’t all go from the concerns of the immediate (career, partners) to thoughts of the world or to cultivating the ability to look at the wider world with compassion, patience and empathy. Not to mention, we do not all possess the mettle to position ourselves in the middle of a remote jungle where, given our proclivity toward fever, we would likely face another bout of illness.

Reporting that Mackey has progressed from personal to global is not meant as a blanket laudatory statement. Mackey is very much a product of her times, having started publishing in the 70’s when women writers were seeking to analyze their personal lives – the correctness of their politics, their sexual relationships and their career choices. One must remember that Mackey began writing her poetry just as an entire movement of women was breaking the chains of invisibility, just as entire classes of people today ache to break the chains of poverty, drug warlords and .

And for all of this poet’s serious looking, connection making, and reportage, Mackey is in full possession of humor; she takes life, but not herself, seriously. This humor puts us at ease. For example, I find it impossible not to laugh when reading “L Tells All,” Mackey’s rewrite of the myth of Leda and the Swan, reincarnated as a confession in a supermarket tabloid. Apparently, Leda’s relationship with Zeus did not go well:

“we had nothing in common

his feathers made me sneeze

I was afraid to fly

he was married

(of course

they all are)

we even had religious differences

This critique of a collection of Mackey’s best poems from a total of eight of her ten collections, leaves four collections I have not given their full due. To summarize: the early collections function as the foundation of Mackey’s magnificent mansion: we have a stand-alone section entitled “A Threatening Letter to Shakespeare,” and four previous book length collections: Split Ends (a deeply personal collection – 4 poems included) One Night Stand (3 poems on the topic of sexual politics,) Skin Deep and The Dear Dance of Eros 13 poems total on the topic of a young woman choosing to move through the world, the walls she hits, and the doors she pushes open.

Like the painters Gaugin, Picasso, Manet, this poet would never have found her rhythm had the early poems not been written. They are part of the journey and the training of the muscles of listening and opening, crafting and communicating.

And, finally, in 2018, along with writing new poems about the tropics, Mackey began to explore her Kentucky roots. These Kentucky poems form the section “The Culling” open the collection. Personally, these poems, as much as I support delving into one’s heritage and being transparent, are like an astronaut taking up gardening. It’s a fine pursuit, but we know that she must have the dream of space on her mind. These poems read like an addition to the family archives, an exposure of a painful roots, but they do not possess the same fully inhabited, magical, exotic and inspired worlds of the other collections. Perhaps because the information came down in family lore rather than immediate experience, they lack the same emotional investment, and even curiosity.

Still it takes a confident poet to lay down the tracks of a family whose matriarch was mangled by a hog, where guns prevailed, horrible catastrophes were common, and men were summarily valued over women. The hazard here, is that by opening with this series of poems, Mackey runs the risk that her readers may not not recognize the depth of her talent and the pyrotechnics she displays in her recent mystical poems and the award-winning books that have catapulted her to fame.

—

Author of “You Can Be a Winning Writer: The 4 C’s of Successful Authors” (Mango Press), three volumes of poetry and an award-winning chapbook of short fiction, Joan Gelfand‘s novel set in a Silicon Valley startup will be published in 2020 by Mastodon Press. Recipient of numerous awards, nominations and honors, Joan’s work appears in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Huffington Post, Rattle, Prairie Schooner, Kalliope, The Meridian Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, Levure Litteraire, Chicken Soup for the Soul and many lit mags and journals. Joan coaches writers on their publication journey. http://joangelfand.com

[REVIEW] Headlong by Ron MacLean

Posted on July 23, 2019 by admin

(Mastodon Publishing, 2019)

REVIEW BY WENDY J. FOX

—

Well into Ron MacLean’s Headlong—originally published in 2013, and reissued this year by Mastodon Publishing—Nick Young, needing something to help him channel his anger and worry, does what he says he used to do in the old days to get through it: he writes.

Nick is a washed-up journalist who has returned to his hometown to help his father after a stroke, and it is with a journalist’s nose for uncovering a story that MacLean develops this novel over a hot Boston summer. Middle-aged and divorced, it’s clear Nick would probably not have left his life in LA (despite there not being much to leave) if he thought he had any choice in the matter. He’s unemployed bordering on unemployable, and not a single women enters his orbit without her appearance being commented on. He’s grossly fond of the word “sexy.”

Yet, MacLean’s steady hand manages to balance the floundering, can’t get out of his own way, occasionally lecherous Nick with an important story about activism, friendship, and family.

The novel follows the thread of a labor dispute that ignites into violent protest, pitting radicalized youth against corporate scions, and ups the already high stakes of what it truly can mean for families when workers are striking by weaving in the unsolved murder of two union janitors, a complicated friendship with a close friend’s son, and a police department who protects their own.

Against this backdrop, Nick is coming to terms with what it means to him to be a journalist again, and while he fights it, his muckracker instincts will not allow him to let go of any lead, and he begins to cover the story in earnest, landing a feature and a column. At the same time, he’s sleeping on a futon in his father’s neglected home, the medical bills from the nursing facility are piling up, and his dad, who is not improving, regularly mistakes Nick for Nick’s dead uncle.

Headlong is a kind of modern—and decidedly literary—take on hardboiled crime and detective stories. MacLean’s careful pacing and thoughtful character development lends a novel that could easily veer into the didactic or cliché a layer of empathy, while still keeping the elements of the genre that keep the plot exciting and the pages turning.

Ultimately, though, Headlong is a book about what it means to have idealism, to lose it, and to start to find the thread of it again. It is a novel about having been young and not being young any more, and it challenges readers to consider mortality and their own choices. What do we think justice, whether it is social, environmental, meted out by a judge or a family member, really means? MacLean doesn’t have all the answers, but he pushes us to understand what we’d give, or give up, to get it, and he writes through all of these questions with an assured, steady grace.

—

Wendy J. Fox is the author of The Seven Stages of Anger and Other Stories (winner, Press 53 short fiction contest & finalist for the Colorado Book Award), The Pull of It (named a top 2016 book by Displaced Nation) and the forthcoming novel If the Ice Had Held, selected as the Santa Fe Writers Project grand prize winner by Benjamin Percy. Writing from Denver, CO and tweeting from @wendyjeanfox.