BOOK REVIEWS

[REVIEW] Scattered Clouds by Reuben Jackson

Posted on by

(Alan Squire Publishing, 2019)

REVIEW BY RISA DENENBERG

—

In a poem titled “on the road,” Reuben Jackson introduces a motif that recurs throughout his new collection, Scattered Clouds: New and Selected Poems (Alan Squire Publishing, 2019). This poem—the first one in the book—tells the story of black family taking a car trip in 1959, in which the son convinces his dad to stop for the night in Columbia, South Carolina, at “the frontier motel,” but then, it takes this turn,

It worked,

         So why did he return without
room keys?

In his sixties now, Jackson possesses a formidable curriculum vitae, with overlapping careers as music scholar, jazz archivist, teacher, mentor, radio host, and poet. Scattered Clouds mingles poems from his first collection, fingering the keys (Gut Punch Press, 1990) with newer poems, creating a tome that is both retrospective and contemporary.

The title, Scattered Clouds, seems to suggest free movement, which is in synch with the many poems that feature jazz musicians—Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, Gato Barbieri, Johnny Hodges, Big Mama Thornton, Ben Webster, among others. These poems are a history lesson in 20th century jazz and funk. Reading them, I felt well-schooled. In the poem, “thelonius,” about jazz pianist and composer Thelonious Monk, Jackson offers this reflection,

bizarre?
mysterious?

i say no.

for he swung like branches in a march wind.

reached down
into the warm pocket of tenderness.

Scattered Clouds also suggests a sheltering sky that is overcast with shrouds of racism, suicide, and brutality. This more menacing aspect is evoked in many of these poems, for example, the poem, “Key West,” where Jackson again portrays a youth traveling in the South with family, in which the young speaker notices a white woman, and is admonished by his mother,

. . . to turn my eyes
Toward Heaven

         Where it seemed
Even the sky and clouds
Sat

         Apart

The book’s first section is comprised of the poems from fingering the keys. These poems are intimate, revolving around childhood, family, neighborhood, school, and a mounting awareness of black musicians, black music, and black political struggle. The interesting, rather than affected, use of no caps throughout fingering the keys confers an ethos of authenticity to these poems (democracy with a small ‘d’), as if Jackson is saying: These are for me and you, I will sing if you care to listen. His language, always accessible, is graceful and emotionally powerful.

In the book’s second section, “2: city songs,” Jackson returns to the many of the same motifs, often captured through a wide-angle lens. In “white flight, washington dc, 1959,” he recounts,

no more playmates
staring
quizzically
at the negroes
on my father’s
album covers

sarah goldfarb
reminded me
of a girl i saw
in an old mgm movie

even though her father said that
like my crush on her
was impossible

Jackson was raised in Washington DC. His year of birth—1954—was the same year the Supreme Court ordered desegregation of public schools throughout the U.S. Of course desegregation has never achieved integration or parity in education for black children. Still, it is notable that DC schools were among the first to implement the Brown v. Board of Education decision, and so, for a while during the late fifties (prior to ‘white flight’) public schools in DC were integrated. I am a Jewish woman born in DC, who also attended DC public schools in the fifties. Jackson’s poems about his childhood make me feel we might have been classmates. You could substitute risa denenberg for sarah goldfarb. We have all suffered the effects of segregation, a point I think Jackson makes most eloquently here, just as he describes its most insidious effects on African Americans.

Consider these devastating lines from “thinking of emmett till,” where the speaker’s experience brings the lynching of Emmett Till to his mind,

stars winked
above the diner
where I asked
a blonde waitress
for sugar,

and got
threatened by
a local

with
bloodthirsty
smile.

The last section of the book, “3: sky blues,” contains a sweet surprise, a delicious and light dessert after a nourishing, but somewhat heavy, meal.  To appreciate the origin of these poems, you need to know that for several years, Jackson relayed stories about his friend from Detroit, Amir, via Facebook posts. In an introduction to this section, titled “Amir & Khadijah: A Suite,” Jackson describes how he “first met the late poet-barber-romantic curmudgeon, Amir Yasin, at a party,” and “in the spring of 2017” Amir “met Khadijah Rollins.” They fall in love, Amir writes some poems, and the couple was “not so secretly married.” We are also told that “Sadly, Brother Yasin died in his sleep in early 2018.” Jackson concedes that he shares a birthday with Yasin, and claims that it was Khadijah who “thought it would be nice” to include “a few of Yasin’s love-struck musings.” Whether Amir was a poetic persona or an alter ego, whether the romance was actual or imaginary, hardly matters. I can’t help but wish that I had followed Jackson’s social media musings.

There is a tonal shift in Amir’s poems that we don’t find in Jackson’s. They are short and lyrical— and downright romantic. From several poems titled, “Dearest Khadijah,” we find these lines,

To touch your face is to
Feel my fingers pray.

And,

         She is a buoy
in the harbor
at dusk.

In this section we also find this Jackson-penned poem, titled “For Trayvon Martin,” in which the speaker-as-angel walks 17-year old Trayvon home from the store with soulful tenderness—an act which is also a prayer. It ends with these two stanzas:

We shake hands and hug –
Ancient, stoic tenderness.
I nod to the moon.

I’m so old school –
I hang until the latch clicks like
An unloaded gun.

Abashedly, I admit that I had not read Jackson prior to reading Scattered Clouds. But that is exactly why this compilation of poems from his first book with the two sections of newer poems is such a gem. If some of the poems are familiar, you will nod as you read them. And if not, you will feel like you’ve been missing something. Scattered Clouds further establishes Jackson’s role as a steward of Americana.

—

Risa Denenberg lives on the Olympic peninsula in Washington state where she works as a nurse practitioner. She is a co-founder and editor at Headmistress Press; curator at The Poetry Café Online; and has published three full length collections of poetry, most recently, “slight faith” (MoonPath Press, 2018).  

[REVIEW] water by Reuben Woolley and Jan Stead

Posted on by

(Self-published and hand-bound [limited edition, /10, 17cm x 21cm])

REVIEW BY CLARA B. JONES

—

“The chap book with Reuben is finally finished…[t]he stitching was the hardest part—getting the holes lined up and not tangling the linen thread. I have had angst over this bit since the project started but I am relieved to find it all worked….” Jan Stead blog, smallwindowstudio

“There was earth inside them, and they dug.” Paul Celan

I regularly peruse Entropy Magazine‘s feature, Where To Submit, and have noticed that a few journals are dedicated exclusively to collaborative writing; and, in the domain of experimental literature, hybrid work—often between writers and visual artists—is not uncommon. Collaboration is difficult, even between the best of friends. There are always issues of coordination and control, not to mention the inevitable conflicts of egos. I collaborated with a colleague once—on a major writing project, and it was the worst experience of my 40-year professional life. Notwithstanding others’ experiences, Reuben Woolley and Jan Stead have produced a joint effort that has yielded outstanding results. water, the pamphlet under review, is a visually stunning creative work showcasing the noteworthy talents of two artists—one a poet, one a printmaker and painter.

Jan Stead answered questions from me via Facebook. I, especially, wanted to know more about her life and work, her inspirations, and her role, as well as her process creating water. What follows is extracted from her responses. She is located in the UK, residing in North Yorkshire and North Lincolnshire where she has a “small window studio.” Often working outside, Nature and, in general, the world around her, are her primary influences. She “admires” David Hockney and, also, draws inspiration from words. “Reuben’s work has recently been very important to me….” A former teacher, Stead now works full-time as an artist.

Regarding the chapbook with Reuben, Stead received five poems from him with a water theme or thread, afterward, preparing the illustrations. In her words: “I made five drypoint plates on metal and decided on a colour palette so there was a coherence [see photo accompanying this review]. I used ultramarine, permanent yellow, permanent red, raw sienna hue and sepia on a textured paper. I followed a ‘traditional order’, the front cover is a Bastard Title i.e. no author name just the title, followed by an introduction as to the composition of the book. This page was signed by us both so I signed first, then it went to Spain for Reuben to sign and then back here. The poem and its illustration were stitched together first in a way that makes them lay flat when the book opens so you can see text and image together.” Further: “ The ‘illustrations’ for the poems are drypoint etchings each are an edition of 10 that is shown as /10. They are made by incising the lines into a metal plate with a variety of sharp hand tools. I retyped Reuben’s poems in an old typewriter font following his layout.” Additional details, including, technical ones, can be found on Stead’s blog and on her Facebook feed.

Reuben Woolley is an internationally recognized poet from the UK who resides in Spain. He has been featured in jacket2 and other venues, he has been interviewed by editors, publishers, academics, and other poets, and his books, chapbooks, and poems have been received enthusiastically by his readers, peers, and publishers, particularly, those who appreciate “exploratory” or political poetry. In addition to writing, Woolley publishes and edits two poetry journals, The Curly Mind, an online venue for innovative work, and, I am not a silent poet, an online journal reserved for poetry with political relevance, especially, topics concerning abuse. Reuben’s “referential” [Marjorie Perloff] poems have an instantly-recognizable style—elements of collage; juxtapositions of words, phrases, and other grammatical units—[apparently] meaningful or not; repetition [from water, the word, “tick”]; soft and hard rhyming [from water, “speak” – “speak,” “light” – “night,”, “ways” –  “waves”]; copious white spaces; innovation and play with grammar and punctuation [especially, use of periods, double-spaces, and back-slashes as partial or full stops—sometimes, along with white spaces, slowing the pace of reading]; lack of capitalization;, as well as, relative consistency of form.

All of these features not only demonstrate that Woolley has “found his niche,” but, also, that his poems have a recognizable and intentional “voice” and persona. In addition, the consistent and repetitive features of his poems unify his work within each poem, within books, and across collections, highlighting a perspective expressed in a 2018 interview: “Miles Davis, John Coltrane, who led me into Free Jazz. [sic] I’m trying to get a Free Poetry of a similar Nature. This does not mean anarchy; no good verse is free. The good poet…controls every element at his or her disposal….” Woolley’s work is in no manner “derivative;” however, he has credited numerous musicians and writers as inspirations—among these are, Paul Celan, Jerome Rothenberg, Sylvia Plath, T.S. Eliot, Samuel Beckett, Denise Levertov, Bob Dylan, Charles Bernstein, Alice Notley, Helen Ivory, and Fran Lock.

water is heavily influenced by literary conventions, apparently, characteristic of all of his poems, since echoes of his last book resonate throughout the brief, new, 5-poem, 5-print, collection. In January 2019, I reviewed that expertly-written and handsomely-produced volume, some time we are heroes, in the online journal, The Bitchin’ Kitsch, observing that: “The repetition of wet things—liquid things—is ubiquitous throughout the text  [ e.g., ‘water,’ ‘blood,’ ‘rain,’ ‘beer,’ ‘breast milk,’ ‘ocean,’ ‘liquor,’ ‘tears’],”, and one notices that the last word of water‘s final poem [“north  water  &  waves”] is “heroes” [“my whispering heroes”], lending water a type of closure or regularity over time. In addition, many words in the new book refer, directly or indirectly, to water, among them, “rain,” “ocean,” “fish,” “sea,” “waves,” and “boats.”

In literature, “water” symbolizes life, cleansing, and rebirth. Reuben’s poems, read, in water, from first to last, can be interpreted as a person’s quest for wholeness over the course of his/her life—over time [from water, “you hear tick tock the old / like fish / remember six seconds repeat / staring a cold night /   tick      / tock              ;”  “a same you say / a doppler / shift  ticktocticktock / we band the waves  a truly / sea”]. Though, throughout water, there seems to be no necessary correspondence between poem [left-hand page] and color print [right-hand page], each of Stead’s fluid, misty images contains a circle, and three [of five] prints contain either, what appear to be, branches or a trunk of trees. The circle symbolizes Mother Earth or sacred space and is reminiscent of the Hindu/Buddhist/Jainist, Mandala, in which a circle appears within a square with a center point—the “boundaries” inherent to circle-symbolism. Related to these associations between poems and prints, trees symbolize, like water, union or physical and spiritual nourishment. Of course, water can be soothing and nourishing, as well as, dangerous, highlighting the present pamphlet’s complex and rich themes of life, death, and time [and memory?] that are replete with what the poetry critic, Helen Vendler, has called, “interpretive power” [see, especially, the poems, “private battlefields / personal interpretations” and “not  crossing  i  say”].

I would be remiss not to mention water as an example of the monetization of poetry—a short work of art sold for 100 pounds sterling. While this initiative is not a novel one, it is not practiced on a wide scale, and it may be time for poets to discuss methods for making their work financially sustainable. By way of e-mail, I asked Woolley about plans for a marketing strategy for the expensive, new collection. He responded that, probably, the pamphlet will be sold at Stead’s art exhibitions and in galleries. The poet noted, with surprise, that one of his Facebook followers has expressed an interest in purchasing a copy of water and that, at a later date, the artists “might bring out copies at a lower price…after the ten are sold.” Another idea floated by the poet, based on Bob Dylan’s lithograph prints, “The Drawn Blank Series,” would be to produce a “series of the artwork and poem combined.” In 2018, I wrote a proposal* suggesting that poets market their work, in association with a visual artist, according to the same criteria employed by visual and other artists [e.g., “performance artists”] who contract with galleries. The intent would be, in part, to enhance poets’ income from their art, to broaden the influence and impact of poetry, as well as, to increase the range of artforms represented by a given gallery.

Clearly, no poet would be obligated to participate in such a marketing strategy. However, if the tactics were even marginally successful, advantages (e.g., stream of income, incentive for poetry journals to pay poets, increased status of Poetry among the Arts and in public) should obtain to poets and galleries alike. The Woolley-Stead model and related concepts might be discussed at literary retreats, conferences, M.F.A. departments, etc. Whatever devolves from initiatives like water, the pamphlet represents a psychological and spiritual whole that many of us hope to achieve across our lifetimes. Though not a religious text in any manner, Woolley and Stead have created a chapbook for the spirit, in addition to, a work of intellect, sensation, and emotion—Art, in the most fundamental sense, worthy of being part of a rare book collection. water will be well-received by all readers of hybrid texts and avant-garde projects.

 

*available via e-mail request: foucault03@gmail.com

—

Clara B. Jones is a Knowledge Worker practicing in Silver Spring, MD, USA. Among other works, she is author of the collection, Poems for Rachel Dolezal (GaussPDF, 2019).

[REVIEW] Soft Science by Franny Choi

Posted on by

(Alice James Books, 2019)

REVIEW BY DANA ALSAMSAM

—

Franny Choi’s Soft Science begins with a quote from Donna Haraway: “We are excruciatingly conscious of what it means to have a historically constituted body.” This sounds at first like a Butlerian critique of societally constructed gender roles. But upon looking into Haraway and discovering her expertise in cyborg’s as a feminist post-humanist argument, it becomes clear how Haraway’s quote relates directly to Choi’s collection. In critique of traditional feminist theory, Haraway uses the cyborg to deconstruct boundaries, not just of gender, but also of the boundary between the human and the other (the animal or the machine). Soft Science takes on these boundaries full force. As the collection goes on, we sometimes forget if the speaker is a cyborg or a human, and this confusion is intentional. This more politically charged quote is immediately juxtaposed with a much softer, humanizing quote from writer Bhanu Kapil. This juxtaposition becomes characteristic of the collection which places heartbreaking and humanizing poetry about the intrinsically gendered, political experiences of the poems’ speaker next to cyborg poetry that feels (and sometimes is) computer generated.

A series of poems called “Turing Test” begins each section, mimicking the experiment which tests how well computers can simulate human speech. These poems shimmer at meaning but don’t arrive at it. They instead use constellations of language society associates with queer, Asian, femme people, and we leave these poems with the feeling of perceptions that are constructed: from phrases like “duck duck roll” to “sodium bicarbonate” to “undress me anywhere,” we see this piece as reflective of a cultural machine that takes the other in, labels them, and spits them back out with a prescribed vocabulary for identity.

This feeling of artificial construction continues in one of the first poems of the collection, “Making Of,” which I feel is exemplary of the collection’s themes in both the cyborg poetry and the poetry embodied by a human speaker. It begins with the lines: “When a cyborg puts on a dress, / it’s called drag. // When a cyborg gets down / on her knees, it’s called // behavior.” This immediately recalls the initial quote from Haraway and the idea of gender performativity. Because the cyborg is man-made but appears natural and human, it becomes an avatar in this collection for the cultural construction (the man-made construction) of the collection’s speaker. The speaker goes on to eat both of her hands: “Each digit, // a salty word whose meaning / furred my teeth.” Here the speaker tries to make sense of her own body, to put it into language but only given the vocabulary that society allows, meaning comes out illegible, furry.

The woman speakers in this collection are constantly attempting to uphold the pressures and expectations placed on women but are simultaneously burning with a desire to be seen—not read for meaning but understood. In “Acknowledgements,” the speaker says, “I’m / still smiling, smiling until my gums crack, until / I’m a photograph.” And then in “Shokushu Goukan for the Cyborg Soul,” a play on the Chicken Soup for the Soul collection, the speaker says, “so I am both the woman holding the camera and the woman / being opened by it—nothing special about that.” The cultural expectation of women is so deeply ingrained that they uphold and regurgitate these norms, become the image they are told to be. This collection shows women picking up behavior or appearance because, in some way, they are told to, or don’t know how else to be.

All of the subtle gender theory scaffolding the collection does wonders when we land on intimate, personal poems from a human speaker who longs for love and understanding, so much so that she finds freedom in promiscuity, and later experiences shame. This cycle of emotions is familiar and relatable for many young women. Fulfilling their desires is impossible when they are sexualized but then shamed for the actual act of sex. Even the shame is constructed. Next to the cyborg poems which evoke ideas of culturally constructed and performative ideas of gender, these poems about the inherently gendered experiences of a femme body entering the cultural machine are deeply impactful.

I’ll end with a piece that resonated like no other. Unlike the tables, slashes and prose blocks that create the marked experimental queerness of the collection, “On the Night of the Election” remains simple in short 3-5 word lines utilizing standard punctuation. Here, the speaker recalls the night He was elected, a night which, as a queer femme and child of an immigrant myself, still brings tears to my eyes. The speaker masturbates in a hotel room while watching the news and contemplating numbness—of the body, of our country—and what it means to feel hopeless under an administration that not only labels the other but despises the other. This piece requires no explanation:

 

“is there anything that works

that isn’t a machine for killing

or doomed to collapse or stolen

from the sweat of the hungry?

Maybe my body was all three,

there, in the hotel room,

liquor-shot and reaching

in every direction

for an answer,

a complete sentence, or,

if nothing else, an exit,

a view, at least, of what

waits on the other side

of despair…

 

—

Dana Alsamsam is the author of a chapbook, (in)habit (tenderness lit, 2018), and her poems are published or forthcoming in The Massachusetts Review, North American Review, The Shallow Ends, Salamander, BOOTH, The Common as well as critical work in The Rumpus. Her work has been supported by a fellowship from Lambda Literary’s Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices.

[REVIEW] Losing Miami by Gabriel Ojeda-Sague

Posted on by

 

(The Accomplices, 2019)

REVIEW BY GABINO IGLESIAS

—

Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué’s Losing Miami is an outstanding exploration of exile, Otherness, and the possibility of returning to a place you’ve never been to. Unapologetically bilingual and packed with explosions of language in which coherence is ignored and the reader is invited to make connections between words, this poetry collection is at once brave, nostalgic, and passionate.

Ojeda-Sagué is fully aware of his status as a displaced person. His Otherness, like that of many others, make him a permanent nomad, someone who belongs only to movement and transitional/interstitial spaces. The same applies to his family, which came from Cuba. His work reflects that. Much like Gloria Anzaldua’s mestiza, the poet and his family live surrounded by the idea of a return to a place that never was or that could never be again:

I am asked if I would go to Cuba now that policies

have changed. When I ask my abuela the same

question, exchanging “irías” for “volverías,” she says

que “no tengo nada que hacer en Cuba.” Somehow,

I feel the same, even if I could never say “volvería”

because I have never been to Cuba. Returning would

not be the form, in my case. But to grow up in Miami,

as the child of exiles, is to always be “returning” to

Cuba. Everything has a fragrant—not aftertaste,

but third taste—of Cuba. Angel Dominguez writes

“What is the function of writing? To return (home)”

but his gambit is that the flight (home) is the writing,

the verb “to return” is the writing, not the home itself

or returning to it. What is the function of writing:

“to return.” The answer is no, I would not go to Cuba,

because the Cuba I come from only can be returned

to in the murmurs of the exile.

Ojeda-Sagué is a very talented poet, but the most beautiful element of Losing Miami is the code switching. Anyone who follows my work knows I love bilingual writing, and Losing Miami is full of it. The poet cambia de idioma de momento, sin perdir permiso a nadie y sin preocuparse por hacer que los lectores que no entienden el idioma lo puedan entender. This gives the collection an undeniable sense of authenticity and a cultural depth that few of its contemporaries share. Whole poems are written in Spanish without translation. They aren’t italicized or explained. They are what they are in a language that isn’t foreign; it is the poet’s language. Here’s “Esponja”:

el internet me hace sentir horrible, como si

todo pasara a la misma vez, y como si hubiera 30

horas en el día / casco del demonio / ciruela /

avenidas y malas noticias / dominó / dibujo el

mundo sobre un papel / duermo adentro del congelador /

encuentro parte de un radio en el patio / lo siembro /

allí crece un manicomio / azul y marrón /

en seis semanas / azul y marrón /

ciruela / una uva entre los labios de Patroclo /

en seis semanas todas estas ideas

serán ahogadas / serán fluidas /

al dibujo le añado agua de una esponja

While the poems in Spanish can be hard to decoded for those who don’t know the language, they are relatively simple and will not offer much of a challenge for those who opt to translate them. However, there are other poems in which Spanish and English share space that are not that easy to decipher. Ojeda-Sagué writes rhythmic clusters of words that act like a celebration of language, a bridge between cultures, and an invitation to fill in the blanks. These don’t appear early on. Instead, they show up once the reader has an idea of how the poet’s brain works. They are fun to read. They are intriguing. They tell tiny single-word stories and sometimes add up to bigger, multilayered narratives. Readers should slow down when they encounter them. These poems demand to be read twice, to be explored, to morph into new realities in the brains of those who read them. Here’s my favorite one:

sincrética allowance pájaro steak dar

criminal coraje water tendida field debajo

salted mar virus sigue giant carabela city

palma awful infección girls abierta bluer

grama palms sudan rafter mariquita heat

boca agape el great mosquito summons

coraje and viento acid pueblo gridlines

pobreza dreaming Haití they mandan

back queman back pobreza back abierta

back rezo that no take mi sweet vida back

If Losing Miami is any indication of what The Accomplices are going to be publishing, then do yourself a favor and put them on your radar immediately. The strength of this book sent me looking for more of Ojeda-Sagué’s work. It will do the same for you.

—

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 and CLASH Media. You can find him on Twitter at @Gabino_Iglesias.

[REVIEW] Lima : : Limón by Natalie Scenters-Zapico

Posted on by

 

(Copper Canyon Press, 2019)

REVIEW BY ESTEBAN RODRIGUEZ

—

One only needs to look at the current debate regarding reproductive rights in various state chambers across this country to see that there are still political parties and groups that want to limit the legal and social rights and privileges of women, convinced the gap that exists between them and their male counterparts need not be closed. It’s a tiresome fact, and how we as a society view the female body leaves politicians, pundits, and those closest to us with no shortage of opinions. If, however, we believe that literature has the power to spark change, then we must also believe that it acts as a tool to help curate a history we want to leave for future generations, especially if certain narratives don’t align with the realities of marginalized and underrepresented voices. Natalie Scenters-Zapico’s Lima::Limón is not just a collection of poetry, but a conversation that seeks to explore gender roles, machismo, and the figurative and literal borders that simultaneously constrain and liberate the body and its desires.

The collection begins as a snapshot of innocence, with the speaker of the poem “Lima:: Limón: Infancia” explaining that she “wants to be the lemons in the bowl/on the cover of the magazine.” This picturesque image doesn’t last long, however, and three poems later, the speaker is in a completely differently situation, devoid of any still-life serenity.

I lie on my back in the grass & let the weight

of a man on top of me. Out of breath, he searches

for a place on my body that hasn’t flooded.

The only dry patch left is my hair, which he uses

to wipe the sweat from his face. He is disgusted

because I have turned the earth beneath us

damp. He says I am an experience, like standing

in an irrigated grove of lemon trees.

The “man” here, both a specific man and a composite of other men, is dissatisfied with the body in front of him, searching for what hasn’t already be explored and occupied. It sounds harsh using such terms, but that discomfort is what Scenters-Zapico is pushing us toward, and it doesn’t relent when the man says that the speaker’s “moisture/brings mold & [her] body is nauseating.” The image of the lemon enters near the end of the poem, but we are no longer seeing it in the same light as earlier. What was once a symbol of opportunity and tranquility is now an object that is processed for someone else’s pleasure and consumption.

Although the occurrence above might seem mutual (even though there are hints that it is anything but), the speaker, at other times, must ward off men who believe that anything can be bought.

My landscape of curves & edges

that breaks light spectral

 

is not for sale, but men still knock

on rib after rib, stalking the perfect house –

There is a violence here, and that desire to invade and claim the female body, as if it were real estate, is prevalent throughout. Often times, it’s implicit–a husband criticizing his wife for attempting to surprise him for his birthday by jumping out of a cake; a woman laughing at jokes at her own expense in order to maintain a “porcelain doll” image in her household–but there are poems when this violence is visible, and none other is more direct than “More Than One Man Has Reached Up My Skirt.” The speaker recognizes that she has given up protesting not only the act from which the poem takes its title, but other things: catcalling, being seen exclusively as a servant, and even the guilt that comes with having to resort to an abortion. Despite this, the speaker finds herself “lucky” due to the fact that “other girls/work in maquilas” or “work in brothels” or “are found/wearing clothes/that don’t belong to them, or no/clothes at all” or “are found/with puta/written in blood across/their broken bellies.” The speaker, remembering a conversation with her mother and how she used to cover her eyes when they encountered girls working the corner, states that yes, she is “very lucky,” but whether she believes it is a different question entirely. How can a woman truly claim prosperity when the social, economic, and legal forces that govern what women can and cannot do are consistently acting upon her? The answer obviously is that she can’t, since institutions, although favorable to certain races and classes of women, are still a part of the patriarchy, one that actively seeks to control how much “luck” women have in their everyday lives.

It’s ironic that after various violent encounters, the man in certain poems returns to the speaker, unwilling to leave her for fear – we can assume – of being lonely, being emasculated, and of completely breaking who they feel is their right to control. In the poem “Notes on My Present: A Contrapuntal,” the speaker so aptly questions, “How do you write about the violence/ of every man you’ve ever loved?” This is not easy to answer, but Scenters-Zapico has found a way, and it’s fitting that one of the last poems of the collection ends with a mother detailing her advice to her daughters, hoping, perhaps, that she can prepared them enough to not ever have to ask such a question. She warns about police, about taking an exam without a social security number, about men who want to hurt them just for the sake of seeing them suffer, and emphasizes that despite all that life throws their way, they have “good bones/ for hard work” and shouldn’t be ashamed, just as we as readers shouldn’t be either, to try to “make this place beautiful.” Scenters-Zapico has offered us something to help with that; we in turn must do our part to continue unveiling the cruel reality marginalized women face, and bring it to the forefront of conversations we have on how to leave the world better than we found it.

—

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.

[TINY REVIEWS] Esteban Rodriguez on feast gently by G.C. Waldrep, American Radiance by Luisa Muradyan, and Holy Moly Carry Me by Erika Meitner

Posted on by

When Gabino Iglesias approached me with the idea to write a poetry column for PANK, there was absolutely no doubt that I was on board. Immediately, I sorted through the pile of books I was reading, picked three and began writing. My aim here, and of the column as a whole, is not to provide traditional reviews, but rather short overviews that will hopefully engage future readers to poetry collections they might enjoy. I won’t guarantee that the collections chosen will always be recent (published within the past year or so), since poetry and certain books are, after all (and excuse the cliché here) timeless. Nevertheless, for this first installment, I chose three fairly recent collections that embody today’s social, political, and spiritual landscape. They have cemented their place in the literary world not only by being awarded the William Carlos Williams Award, or the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, or the National Jewish Book Award in Poetry, but by being books that one can return to, as I often found myself doing when writing about them. Let’s hope you find as much enjoyment in these works as I know I did. Cheers!

feast gently by G.C. Waldrep (Tupelo Press)

In his sixth collection, G.C. Waldrep explores the tensions and harmonies between the body and spirit, presenting poems that are both beautiful and devastatingly urgent. Like his previous collections, Waldrep interweaves the universal with the personal, writing in a manner that is philosophical, spiritual, and conversational all at once. The seventh anniversary of the invasion of Afghanistan provides a meditation on language and its shortcomings. A real-life funeral expands on the role chance plays in one’s death, and how God reveals secrets we are only briefly privy to. Other poems read like fables (“To the Embalmers” immediately comes to mind), and we are left witnessing the tragedies and daily miracles of the world feast gently so skillfully depicts. Waldrep’s poetry is at times demanding, but if given the right amount of care and attention, you’ll find that you are all the better, and wiser, for it.

 

American Radiance by Luisa Muradyan (University of Nebraska Press)

Winner of the 2017 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, Luisa Muradyan’s American Radiance reflects the complexities of the immigrant experience, and, through humor, pop culture allusions, and lyrical playfulness, highlights the exodus from one’s homeland and what it means to assimilate in America. Muradyan’s poems are not only concise, but funny, drawing on a plethora of figures (Prince, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis, Macho Man Randy Savage) that guide us through moments that are nostalgic, bittersweet, and at times utterly heartbreaking. Muradyan’s juxtapositions are clever and surprising, and with poems like “We Were Cosmonauts” (which narrates the speaker’s journey from Moscow to the U.S., while drawing comparisons to a game of Tetris), we see her poetic range, and see how moving a collection can be when it combines humor, history, folklore, and experiences so many can relate to.

Holy Moly Carry Me by Erika Meitner (BOA Editions, Ltd.)

In her fifth collection, Erika Meitner wrestles with the anxieties of modern-day suburbia. Holy Moly Carry Me is an outstanding and relevant collection that never shies away from exposing the tensions one faces in America, detailing, for example, what it means to be a mother raising a white son and black son in today’s political climate, or what it means to live in a region of the U.S. (Appalachia) not fully understood by others. Meitner has the ability to use seemingly unremarkable moments, such as a trip to the Dollar General, to examine relationships, identity, gun violence, teacher salaries, the middle class, poverty, and the responsibility to ponder these questions from a place of relative privilege. This collection is a testament that the mundane isn’t ever truly mundane, and that when it comes to our societal structures and the way in which they influence our behavior, there is always room to explore the truths that lie beneath the surface.

—

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] Cove by Cynan Jones

Posted on by

(Catapult, 2018)

REVIEW BY GABINO IGLESIAS

—

Cynan Jones is one of those authors who constantly reinvent themselves. His body of work proves he is fearless when it comes to exploring new territory and always willing to explore the way language can be used to maximize the impact of a narrative. In Cove, which was published in a beautiful hardcover edition by Catapult, Jones offers what is perhaps his most minimalist narrative while trying out new rhythms and showing what extreme economy of language can accomplish.

A man is out at sea. He is in a kayak and gets caught in a sudden storm. Then he is struck by lightning. When he wakes up, adrift on his kayak and with a shattered hand, he finds his memory gone. He can’t remember who he is, where he came from or how and why he ended up floating in a kayak in the middle of the ocean. Despite his lack of memory, he knows he has to move, to push forward toward the shore, to survive. In the absence of recollections, his instincts take over and survival becomes his main goal. In his struggle, the ghost of a sensation, not quite a memory, comes to him: a woman and a child are waiting for him, and he has to make it back to them. What follows is a short, visceral read about a wounded, memoryless man fighting for something he barely remembers.

Cove is a self-contained master class on economy of language. It is also a outstanding example of what happens when writers allow brevity and poetry to mix outside of poetry:

Still, his memory is out of reach, things approaching, dipping, disappearing. A butterfly, nearly knowledge. He thinks of the state of his skin, does not know if he had started out clean shaven, knows, though, that his stubble grows at uneven rates.

Jones is a superb writer, and he flexes new muscles in this book. Besides his usual storytelling, there are things happening with the writing here that go beyond good writing. The most memorable of them is the rhythm of the prose. Insistent is not a word usually used to describe writing, but it applies here. The words keep coming, hitting the reader the same way the water laps against the kayak. Sentence construction follows an arrhythmic sort of melody that constantly changes, shifts in lengths, and then returns to previous cadences:

He looks at the stars, sees those on the horizon. That some of them might be the lights of ships, of land, he can’t allow himself to think. Cannot allow himself to image the warmth, the food, the safety they would mean. It is better they are stars. That they are out there somewhere in the same infinity as him. That they are not real beacons.

The plot of Cove is deceptively simple: a man trying to make it back to something he barely remembers after having a horrible accident. That said, there is an honesty to the writing, to the simple actions of the man, that makes this a captivating read. Furthermore, once the man is invaded by the idea of a memory that may or may not be real, his demeanor changes, his priorities morph and give him renewed strength, and readers go from being witnesses to actively rooting for him:

With the knowledge of her had come the need to ease her worry. It was impossible for him to believe he would die, but it was possible for him to believe he could leave her alone. Her and the child.

This is more a novella than a novel, but regardless of what you call it, this book cements Jones as a master of the short book and a leading voice in terms of maximum impact packed into extreme economy of language. If you’re a fan of great writing, don’t skip this one.

—

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 and CLASH Media. You can find him on Twitter at @Gabino_Iglesias.

[REVIEW] road, road, road, road, road by M; Margo

Posted on by

(MA Press, 2019)

REVIEW BY CLARA B. JONES

—

M; Margo (Margo Emm), Editor of the online poetry journal, Zoomoozophone Review, identifies as “transgender” and “non-binary.” I have called them a poet of angst, because of their penchant for dark ruminations about “gender dysphoria” and life, in general. road, road, road, road, road (hereafter, “road”) is their fourth collection of innovative poetry in a conceptual mode whereby precise rules were determined in advance, fixing structure and form. According to Margo, “road is a book of chance-based texts, comprising random wikipedia clusters.” Each “text” includes 50 words, and the collection includes 50 poems.

I have followed their career as a poet and musician since first encountering their writing which is characterized by skillful use of repetition, “psychological transformations,” metaphor, innovations of form and hybridity, as well as, creative manipulation of embedded meanings. For example, road‘s reliance upon the numbers 5 [pertaining to one’s love life or to human anatomy] and 50 [seeking personal and spiritual freedom] invoke a concern for the subjective, as well as, for mathematics and formal operations [e.g., a random numbers device], and the number 5 is fundamental to our base-10 numerical system. Thus, in one “text,”

 

“five menfolk murdered in /

addition     five     suffering /

half-finished facsimile of /

the    groove     a     powerful /

slapdash botanist altogether /

his     lifecycle,     also     a /

longtime     fellow     of     the /

Normal  Times  gone  by…”

 

Furthermore, in addition to repeating the word, “road,” five times in the collection’s title, Margo is most likely calling the reader’s attention to one of the word’s dictionary meanings—“a series of events or a course of action leading to a particular outcome,” a perspective that they no doubt intend to challenge by using statistical probability to compose his 50 “texts.” This bold point of view is reminiscent of Geert Buelens’ comment concerning the “constructed nature” of contemporary poetry that employs “smart, rich, and didactic language.” In addition to possessing these features, however, Margo’s “texts” in road extend traditional definitions of what we mean by “poetry,” and Kenneth Goldsmith, as well as, others, have asked, without agreed-upon answers: “What does it take to be a poet in the Internet Age?”

The first page of road includes an “Author’s Note” entailing 5 statements. The author’s notes delimit and bound the collection, preventing the randomized “texts” from sinking to the levels of nihilism, mimicry,  or gratuity. Indeed, as Marjorie Perloff has stated about “conceptual” poetry, what may appear random or undirected is, in the hands of a skilled craftsperson, work borne of intentionality, choice, and forethought. The first note states: “The road is a literary form that is similar to a poem but not quite the same as a poem.” Paraphrasing Marcel Duchamp, “It is not a poem; it is an idea of a poem.” One would like to know more about Margo’s views concerning what constitutes poetry, particularly, in a literary climate with increasingly blurred boundaries between poetry and prose, indeed, poetry and anything else [e.g., see Flarf, “epic” poetry, L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poetry, internet poetry, vispo, and other experimental forms].

Note 2 states: “The road is a fifty-word text-collage produced by means of chance operation.” Importantly, though, as Goldsmith has pointed out, most literary formulations require a human “hand” at some point in any process, even if random-order machines or tables determine final results [Is there ever a “final result?”]. Perloff has said of “collage” poetry, “Each element in the collage has a kind of double function: it refers to an external reality even as its compositional thrust is to undercut the very referentiality it seems to assert.” Thus, parts of a collage are juxtaposed in relation to others—and the juxtaposition may be “chance-based” or not. Each of Margo’s “texts” may be viewed as a whole, as well as, as a pastiche of discrete units, both with [or, as Margo will point out below, with and/or without] significance to the reader. Thus, “Physical     model     of     a / bacterial     flagellum     is / expressed (hence the season, / first at Pocono Raceway and / tenth at the track for teams / not being allowed to run….” The author’s incorporation of white spaces not only slows the reader’s motion across words, but, also, inserts a visual component, and Ulla Dydo has discussed “visuality” in relation to the poetry of Gertrude Stein.

Margo’s Note 3 asserts that, “The road is a semantic pathway leading to no particular semantic destination.” The author’s “texts,” then, are not goal-directed, contrary to the dictionary definition quoted above, bringing to mind the roles of luck and chance in anyone’s life. There are limits to intentionality and choice, echoing the ongoing scientific debate about the validity of “free-will.” Goldsmith has written that a feature of some experimental works is to be, at the same time, “unboring” and “boring” and that writers need to “re-imagine our normative relationship to language,” a process certainly performed when Margo’s methodology produces lines such as, “(arrowheads and hammering / devices) km team event New / York at the age of 79,….” Goldsmith has, also, said, “We need to employ a strategy of opposites: defamiliarization and disorientation.”—a good description of the effects produced by Margo’s “texts,” in which the author defamiliarizes our common notions about what a poem is and disorients the reader-viewer so that they are unable to make those assumptions.

“The road is not necessarily asemic nor exactly pansemic, but perhaps post-semic.” is Margo’s fourth note. Again, they emphasize that the texts are random but not, actually, random at all. There is, then, “method” to “madness,” and a domain exists beyond physical and material formulations of reality [i.e., according to mathematics, events-in-the-world cannot be random and non-random at the same time], referring back to the numerical symbolism of #50 presented above.

Note 5, “The road is something that can be read or not.” reflects a topic commonly discussed by Goldsmith relative to “conceptual” writing. He has pointed out, “Conceptual writing is a type of writing that doesn’t require a readership.” He goes on to say that unread writing is characterized by “illegibility” that disrupts the normal reading process. I understand these pronouncements to mean, in part, that language, as conventionally understood, can be re-arranged in ways that make a text [sic] un-knowable, thus, in some sense, un-readable. Such manifestations of phonemes, graphemes, and morphemes render some experimental texts, essentially, unreal and inaccessible.

What, ultimately, is “post-semic” or, even, post-conceptual writing? Are we necessarily blurring distinctions between the written word and visual art? Are we inventing “texts” comparable to Kazimir Malevich’s revolutionary black paintings, creating literature’s own version of Suprematism—moving as far away as possible from the representational and the objective—the expected, the learned, the social, the “normal—toward the numerical 50?”  Wherever these inventions take us, I suspect that Margo will be at the forefront of innovation. Every reader-viewer who appreciates, or is curious about, experimental literature, however defined, will want to read road, road, road, road, road, as well as, Margo’s past and future work.

—

Clara B. Jones is a Knowledge Worker practicing in Silver Spring, MD (USA). In 2019, GaussPDF published her collection, Poems for Rachel Dolezal.

[REVIEW] Great American Desert by Terese Svoboda

Posted on by

(Mad Creek/Ohio State University Press, 2019)

REVIEW BY JODY KENNEDY

—

Terese Svoboda’s Great American Desert is a collection of twenty-one short stories linked by a common geographic location in the Middle West. The stories examine our relationships to one another, the land, and the natural environment beginning with the prehistoric era “Clovis Camp” and ending with the post-apocalyptic “Pink Pyramid.” Svoboda is the author of five collections of poetry, five novels, a memoir, a book of translation, a novella and stories, most recently the biography Anything That Burns You: A Portrait of Lola Ridge, Radical Poet.

I had never read any of Terese Svoboda’s work and was immediately captivated by the light-hearted, humorous and often stark poetic prose found in “Clovis Camp” and in the stories that followed. One of the book’s most prevalent themes, echoing the Biblical Adam’s dilemma, is touched on in “Clovis Camp,” and the following “Major Long Talks to His Horse,” but its the third story, “Dutch Joe,” that seems to sum it up perfectly:

“Lands sakes is what we’re always exclaiming because land is all we’re good for, all the sakes there is or ever will be. Each of us, fifty or so strong, have fled a country crowded with kin or else lorded over, every inch of the land spoken for down to the last hop of hare, or squawk of fowl. We settlers have pushed all the way into the pockets of Lady America, hoping to take her wealth for ours, her endless waving grain and her cattle in abundant herds. Through our boot soles, thin as they are, we perceive the urgency of the land’s fecundity to be ours, it is so empty and waiting. Even the clouds suspended above us are our clouds, borne in the reflection of our great desire. We slake our thirst for our own land by possessing Lady America with the plow. We are homesteaders.”

The love story, “Bomb Jockey,” contains a series of fantastic events offered up in Svoboda’s lyrical and often startling poetic imagery:

“The waitress at the cafe? remembers her well enough to have a conversation but she’s short, more interested in the mercury spill she saw on her way to work. How beautiful and strange the great gobs of liquid metal were, slithering all over the ground in amongst the snowed-in crocuses.”

In “Ogallala Aquifer” a man-made mountain of toxic dirt begins to grow out of a government-sanctioned garbage dump reminding us of our own present-day Great Pacific Garbage Patch (an estimated 1.6 million square kilometers of trash and plastics floating somewhere between California and Hawaii) or the ugly chemical pesticide wars going on in the Arkansas Delta farming community or any of the other numerous transgressions we continue to commit for personal or collective gain or convenience and against our better environmental interests.

The final story, “Pink Pyramid,” one of my favorites, is a post-apocalyptic vision of America made more bearable through Svoboda’s deft poet’s heart:

“She sneezes. They’ve raised a cloud of pink dust. There’s a couple of other clouds in the distance but theirs is the thickest, the most recent. The dust coats her throat, the little hairs on her arms.”

Despite the difficult subject matter, “Pink Pyramid” like many of the other stories in the book, shares a mélange of personal struggle, longing, and tenderness which left me strangely hopeful for the human race.

While Great American Desert delivers a sometimes harsh critique of America’s relational and historical trajectories, its lively mix of humanity, absurdity, and insanity might leave some of us to wonder if we aren’t actually enjoying every current episode or rerun of our great American experiment, passion play and not soon to be forgotten dream.

—

Jody Kennedy is a writer and photographer living in Provence, France. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Fairy Tale Review, DIAGRAM, Tin House Online, Electric Literature, and The Georgia Review, among others.

[REVIEW] The In-Betweens by Davon Loeb

Posted on by

(Everytime Press, 2018)

REVIEW BY CHRIS CAMPANIONI

—

Davon Loeb wants to tell us that all writing—even and especially memoir—means writing what never existed; that all writing demands a mix of imagination and memory, the blending of literal and emotional truths; that even his story, the story of his life—the lyrical narrative of The In-Betweens (Everytime Press, 2018)—subverts our own generic expectations and considerations of what it means to write about ourselves, if only because to write about ourselves would mean to write about all of the people who have formed us, each in their own way, and in ways we may never know, not all the way.

And so Loeb harnesses the speculative and the real, nurturing both, beginning with the hypothetical subjective, entering his story by telling his parents’ story, imagining the life before he had a life, resisting sentimentalism and nostalgia to talk about a past with real stakes: “He was married to a woman his age, and a father of two. She was married to a man her age, and a mother of two. And my father was White and my mother was Black, in America, and everything was stacked against them” (4).

This is a blueprint Loeb continues to return to in his bodily, materially sensitive memoir, in which a memory of tying up a cousin to a tree, leaving her in the rain, ushers in a description of summer thunderstorms; elsewhere, a memory of sitting up in bed interminably waiting for his father to arrive prefaces a larger exploration of his father’s visitations, his frequent absences. The book moves seamlessly through frank explorations of masculinity and gender norms, the superstitious and contractual rites of childhood, racism and the racial imaginary, the failings of education, and the particular experience of being in-between; the everyday experience of interraciality—“the accident ink blot” in a predominantly white, racially-segregated town. Loeb offers lengthy investigations into his own childhood, moving even further back as he imagines his grandparents while re-tracing his lineage; at other moments, he employs lyrical density toward vignettes that encompass all of a single paragraph—a snapshot of a moment that becomes re-contextualized in the voice of an older, wiser, narrator. Yet it’s also Loeb’s ability to imbue his narrative with a disarming and demonstrative self-critique that makes The In-Betweens stand out from countless other memoirs.

Whether it’s in his retrospective unpacking of the family game of “White Boy in the Middle” (“Alabama Fire Ants”), in which he ruminates on his realization of how “somehow if given the chance, the oppressed will always become the oppressor” (44), or his own conflicted relationship to hair and stereotypes (“Thoughts on Hair”), a confession that ends with the self-description of “an actor on stage—guilty of this appropriation—guilty of gainfully being racially ambiguous” (96), Loeb displays both a vulnerability and a self-accountability that is rare, separately and especially together, in a genre that is prone, too often, to a writing of the self which forgets to look inward. In showing his readers his own complicity in the cultural issues he is calling into question, Loeb also forges an emotional bond with his audience; I came away from The In-Betweens feeling as if I had known its author my entire life, a rare feat for any writer, no matter which mode or genre they are writing in or responding to.

But I want to stay here for a moment, to let this linger, to relish it, if only to continue showing how Loeb subverts the genre he is indeed working in, if not also working against. “But I didn’t know what to believe about Richard Downey,” Loeb begins, in a final essay aptly titled “Retirement.” “I had heard so many stories. It becomes a problem when we narrate other peoples’ lives; there’s a misconception of what we think we know and the actual very real story of someone’s life” (184). By relating another second-hand account, while troubling the very nature of relation, of passing along stories that destroy us, yet also sustain us, Loeb complicates storytelling itself; the failure of stories to add up to a life. Much earlier, when he imagines “My Mother’s Mother,” Loeb is quick to intervene in his own narrative, if only to remind himself, and then us: “Then again, that’s just one chapter in this story, one narrative that belongs to a part of her, but not all of her. And it’s important for me to tell you that her life is not to be defined by all that struggle. That there was a beauty in her body and skin before it was bent and broken and blackened—that her skin was just skin before” (12).

As I read this startling debut, which does work “somewhere between telling history and taking on history” (182), as its own author writes elsewhere, to describe another teacher’s instruction, I am reminded of the importance of oral history in recognizing and thereby preserving personal histories so that they might be shared, and in being shared, so that they might validate multiple histories, which is to say, multiple lived experiences, multiple versions of the world as we know it, in an effort to breakdown the singular or authorized dominant account—the as we know it that so often goes unquestioned. “I had to keep my façade that none of this ever bothered me. That I was a participant to learning like everyone else, and not the thing that was being learnt” (86), Loeb writes, in “But I Am Not Toby,” a powerful response to the tokenism of learning Black history once a year, but also the internal struggle with becoming the sole representative of all black experience; the trap of representation in a cultural branding of “diversity” absent a true engagement with difference.

This form of sharing and re-sharing, of passing down, of inheriting and re-distributing has obvious social and political implications, but it also speaks to what might otherwise go unspoken, the trauma that so often results in self-silencing. So much of this book reads like a series of parables, and this is exactly why: Loeb recognizes our own failure—as a people, as a culture—to see beyond our own limited scope of imagination. Who cares if it’s true, as in the delightful and heartbreaking rendition of “On Some Things, I Wish We Did,” so long as these stories become true, and thereby become instructive, to us. When Loeb relates an anecdote about an eighth-grade wax museum project (“O.J. and the Wax Museum”)—“My brother could have been Bill Gates. He always liked computers; we had an IBM. […] Would he have to paint his skin, part his hair, change the inflection of his voice? […] It was all make-believe anyway. And when we tell kids to make-believe, we want them to imagine—to explore the possibilities—or do we really mean to be exactly who you are, what you are” (71-72)—we are meant to take him at his word.

—

Chris Campanioni’s new book, the Internet is for real (C&R Press, 2019), re-enacts the language of the Internet as literary installations. His selected poetry was awarded an Academy of American Poets College Prize in 2013, his novel Going Down was named Best First Book at the 2014 International Latino Book Awards, and his hybrid piece This body’s long (& I’m still loading) was adapted as an official selection of the Canadian International Film Festival in 2017. He runs PANK and PANK Books, edits At Large Magazine and Tupelo Quarterly, and teaches Latinx literature and creative writing at Pace University and Baruch College.

www.chriscampanioni.com