BOOK REVIEWS

[REVIEW] Songs of the Sun Amor by Wade Stevenson

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(BlazeVOX Books, 2019)

REVIEW BY NETTIE FARRIS 

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As indicated by its title, Songs of the Sun Amor, by Wade Stevenson, is a full-length collection of poetry about love. Stevenson is the author of the memoir One Time in Paris, and two collections of poetry subtitled “A Memoir with Poems.” Understandably, this collection appears to be autobiographical, yet not, necessarily, confessional.

Mother and father appear frequently in this collection, which opens with the poem “About My Mother.” This poem is followed by “The Map of Elsewhere,” which begins: “My mother sat on a wheelchair.” Later in this poem, we hear: “No mother to me, a mother in name, never caught in the act.” We hear also: “Then my father got mad, venting his fury.” The poem ends: “I discovered love in strange places / Real Amor was on the map of elsewhere.”

The love sought in this collection seems to be a supreme love. Something beyond the realm of inadequate parents.

My favorite poem is, perhaps,  “My Teddy Bear.” This poem is about forgetting the past. Living in the present:

A long time ago I lost my teddy bear

Today my white dog barks

To tell me that he’s hungry

Why is the past so difficult to bear?

Why can’t I just exist

Feed the dog, breathe with my breath,

Disinvite the starving guests of ghosts

Exhale, say with simple thanks

Life is good and that’s enough?

Similarly, “Sun, No Son” imagines a new beginning:

If by chance or luck I could be born again,

Emerge another, to learn to love again

I’d seek to become one with God’s eye, the Sun

However, we see glimpses of the beyond, which is the amalgam of opposites:

God, when you find Him,

You’re stunned

To find out

He’s smaller

Than you ever imagined

Bigger

Than you ever thought possible.

When we add opposites, the sum is infinity, as exhibited by “When You Die”:

When you die

You’ll never be lonely

Because you’ll die with the best

Friends and lovers you had

And all those you did not

Meantime, “There is no ordinary, every Amor is extraordinary.”

These are poems about forgetting our past injustices, living in the present, and looking forward to the infinite love beyond this life; for, as we learn from the conclusion to “Promise of the After”: “God’s blow will finish my body hard as a hammer.”

In Songs of the Sun Amor, Stevenson demonstrates an affinity with verbs and occasional rhyme. But most important, he demonstrates an affinity for coherence. This collection is truly a series of lyrical poems that tell a significant story.

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Nettie Farris is the author of three chapbooks of poetry: Communion, Fat Crayons, and The Wendy Bird Poems. She is the former reviewer for Blue Lyra Review‘s Spotlight on a Press feature, and has published numerous reference articles for Salem Press, including micro biographies of 100 world poets. Her essay on Lydia Davis appeared in the Journal of Kentucky Studies and her peer-reviewed article on William Faulkner’s Sanctuary appeared in the Kentucky Philological Review.

 

[REVIEW] If the Ice Had Held by Wendy J. Fox

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(Santa Fe Writers Project, 2019)

 

REVIEW BY MARK H. STEVENS

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We are deep into the If the Ice Had Held, a brisk novel told from seven points of view across more than three decades, when 14-year-old Irene thinks about her mother, a woman she never really knew.

“Irene was not sure she had any true memories of the woman,” writes Wendy J. Fox, “only scraps and fragments she had pieced together from a handful of ragged photographs.”

As a whole, If the Ice Had Held comes to us in those same brisk, jagged scraps and memories. We are given pieces. Shards. And we have the pleasure of seeing the pieces come together as we understand how they connect, as we see the players react, interact, and impact each other’s lives.

Irene, however, is not alone. This is primary Melanie’s story. Of the 37 chapters and seven points of view, Melanie’s story gets 16.

When we meet Melanie, she is working in a non-glamorous corner of the dot-com world. She works in Colorado Springs in “the ground-floor wing of a crumbling office park where the air-conditioning was troubling and unreliable.”  Melanie is restless. She has a constant “feeling of spinning.”  On a road trip, she breaks one of her rules, to never sleep with a co-worker or a customer. She dubs him San Antonio Man. He’s a co-worker. Melanie thinks hard about the quality of her life, her work environment, her home, her relationships. She is a professional adult in a professional world and she is also adrift and searching.

We learn that Melanie is Irene’s daughter and that Melanie’s father was Sammy, Kathleen’s brother. Sammy is the subject of the title—if the ice had held, if Sammy had not fallen in the cold river to his death, Melanie might have been raised by very young teenage parents and then, well, who knows?

Think I’m giving away too much? I doubt it. There is much more to Melanie’s story—what we learn about Kathleen and why she stepped in to supplant Irene’s role as mother, what we learn about the relationship between Kathleen and Irene, what we learn about the stories that were concocted because it was the 1970s and stories were required. What we learn about the first responders to Sammy’s accident, too.

In fact, It was when Fox switched to the one chapter told from the point of view of Simon, the father of a character named Brian, that the novel really clicked into place and I marveled at the kaleidoscopic effect that Fox gives readers of the connections across time, across families, across life.

This is Melanie’s story—maybe? If the Ice Had Held starts and ends with Kathleen. It’s her gesture (much too small a term) that gives the story its spark and its heart. Well, at least, one of them. In a novel riddled with accidents and tragedies, there more than a few lump-in-your-throat moments when fox reveals connections and encounters you won’t see coming.

The story starts with Sammy plunging into an icy river and water seems to ooze its way, in one form another into every scene. The cascading effects from this one accident ripple across time, the proverbial pebble in the pond but the pebble is a human being and the pond is life. its Fox’s writing is cool, serene and stripped clean of sentimentality. She is a dry-eyed documentarian with a keen eye and a terrific ear. The construction of this novel carries an almost David Hockney quality—the farther you step back, the more you see. But it was a singer I heard as the novel layered in connections and details. David Byrne.

If The Ice had Held asks us to wonder, well, how did I get here? “Once in a lifetime, water flowing underground…”

—

The son of two librarians, Mark Stevens worked as a reporter for The Christian Science Monitor in Boston and Los Angeles, as a City Hall reporter for The Rocky Mountain News in Denver, as a national field producer for The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour (PBS), and as an education reporter for The Denver Post. He is currently president of Rocky Mountain Mystery Writers of America and hosts a regular podcast, The Rocky Mountain Writer, for Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers.

 

[REVIEW] Sixteen by Auguste Corteau

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(Etruscan Press, 2019)

REVIEW BY ANN ANDERSON EVANS  

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Sixteen is a work that touches the fringes of magical realism while portraying a story that feels a hundred percent true. Perhaps that is because it takes place in Russia, a land of extremes and miracles. The quintessential Russian element of the story is that the fate of a piece of classical music can touch the national soul. That would never happen in America.

The characters in this story are full blown. They are foul-mouthed, self-destructive, sometimes fawning—but they carry the story on their strong, loveable shoulders. Corteau’s characters would be comfortable keeping company with the Dostoyevski brothers.

Brutal, earthy humor flashes throughout. “I never let the cleaning ogre into the study, so you’ll really be sitting on a plush layer of what I’m told is mostly defunct skin cells. Your disrespectful buttocks will be effectively lying on top of my dead body,” says Rabinovich. English speakers don’t say such things. Corteau has caught the Russian idiom in an enveloping embrace.

Without searching the archives, I wouldn’t know whether such men as Alexei and Rabinovich existed or whether the story told by Alexei bears any relationship to actual events, but it happens in the very real framework of the demise of the Soviet Union, and feels authentic.

The author writes that Alexei suffers from “taciturn dysphoria,” a Russian disease. It is the terror that followed every Russian in whatever station of life who lived under either the czars or the Communists. Every step Alexei takes is an anxious one: people are watching, threatening, undermining, maybe ultimately killing him. Death or the threat of it is such a constant companion that it loses its sting. One gets tired of fearing it when it is always just around the corner. Just Mother Russia folks, the “uncouth motherland.” Putin’s Russia doesn’t seem so different. Today’s America resembles it more than we like to acknowledge.

There are wild temporal and geographical plot swings, harking back to the shenanigans of Grand Duchesses and Czars of earlier days, traveling to the hoary and sumptuous environs of Switzerland, Florence, and elsewhere.

Alexei presents himself as a simple chronicler of his mentor’s life, but the author, an authority slightly higher than Alexei, slips in sly observations on human nature. “Kruschchev wasn’t as tall as photographs made him seem, but that had been true of Stalin as well. Power worked as slyly as elevator shoes.” Again, contemporary Americans take note.

Sixteen is the tale of a great love between mentor and protegé. Alexei is saved from death by being deprived of his mentor’s most closely held secrets and intentions, thus deceiving, misleading, and cheating him. A broken heart is exchanged for salvation. It is left to the reader to determine whether it was worth it.

I paired this book with Julian Barnes’s take on the life of Shostakovich, The Noise of Time. Shostakovich was also a survivor threading his way along the perilous peaks of cultural life under a vicious, greedy government that prized “social realism.”

None of these characters would be my preferred choice of company, but Corteau inhabits them, clothes them, listens to them with such close attention and compassion that, to sum up, I’d follow Alexei anywhere.

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Ann Anderson Evans is the author of the award-winning memoir, Daring to Date Again (SheWrites Press 2014). Other work has been published widely in the literary and academic press.  She enjoyed her eight years teaching freshman writing at Montclair State University , and continues to give writing workshops.  Ann comes from Montclair, New Jersey, spent a decade in Europe, and now lives in Hoboken, New Jersey with her third and final husband.

 

[REVIEW] The Story I Tell Myself About Myself by Sarah Layden

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(Sonder Press, 2018)

REVIEW BY DHEEPA R. MATURI

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A woman without skin. A man with a womb. A person who is also a house. Sarah Layden’s flash fiction collection, The Story I Tell Myself About Myself, evokes ghosts of Sherwood Anderson’s well-known “grotesques” in Winesburg, Ohio. Layden’s characters, too, are flawed and broken, grappling with isolation and desperation, attempting to endure their pain. And like Anderson’s, Layden’s characters are deeply worth the time and effort to understand them.

During a time in which public discourse consists of simplistic labeling, which in turn generates quick classification and easy hatred, Layden insists we resist the impulse to evaluate and judge others quickly. Layden’s cleverly crafted and complex morsels of flash fiction soundly reject the notion of monolithic identity. Rather, she illustrates how identity is an accumulation and amalgam of the perceptions of others, our perceptions of ourselves, and of course, the (many) stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. I found myself reading each story and examining each character multiple times, watching Layden expose all of those layers with subtle and precise scalpel cuts.

But Layden does more than expose these layers. Through her cuts, the heartbreak and loss of each character’s experience, emerge and emanate. In bringing these to light, she guides the reader from witnessing the unpalatable messiness, unappealing imperfections, and sheer strangeness of people — toward empathy. Like Anderson, Layden makes us relate to the characters, feel for them, look under their layers for what they are: fellow human beings experiencing the human struggle to live well.

In short, by revealing the complexity of identity, Layden brings the the reader closer to the truth of human life. Just as she destabilizes the notion of a monolithic identity — and for the same reason — Layden disrupts her story settings, carving out spaces and imbuing them with power to reveal truth. An elevator consultation with a gypsy, (“The Rest of Your Life”), a church service a character does not normally attended (“What Mary Did”), even the silences within a telephone conversation (“Hang Up”) — all tear the characters out of their regular lives. At the same time, they provide the characters a glimpse of truth and readers a more accurate view of those characters’ foibles and self-deceptions.

To the same end, Layden even disrupts the structures within which her stories are constructed. A fill-in-the-blank tale (“Fulfilled”) shows us the potential for variability within her story based upon the respondent. Another story (“Collision Physics for the Math-Averse”) parses a crash into its physical components while simultaneously presenting mirror image realities. A story told in a numbered sequence (“Marv’s 11 Steps”) shows the human need to superimpose order upon the wild disorder of life.

Layden’s skillful destabilization of identity, of setting, of structure make the reader searingly conscious of the fragility of each, and thus able to perceive the truth underneath more clearly. Often, Layden’s skillful storytelling made me lose my bearings, left me a bit raw. Like the woman who removes her protective suit (“The Woman With No Skin”) in order to absorb fully the realities around her and despite the painful bombarding that results, I felt the need to understand life and truth through Layden’s eyes.

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Dheepa R. Maturi, an essayist and poet, is a graduate of the University of Michigan and the University of Chicago. Her work has appeared in The Fourth River, Tiferet, Entropy, the Brevity nonfiction blog, The Offbeat, Tweetspeak, Wanderlust, Defenestration, Here Comes Everyone, Wild Musette, The Indianapolis Review, Dear America: Reflections on Race, and elsewhere. She lives with her family in Indianapolis. www.DheepaRMaturi.com

[REVIEW] musk (musca\muscus\mus) by s. maynard

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(Gauss PDF, 2019)

REVIEW BY CLARA B. JONES

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“[Elon] Musk holds a substantial monopoly on the contemporary gaze.” s. maynard, musk (musca\muscus\mus)

Stella Maynard is a writer in their early 20s living in Australia, “interested in attending to things that sit at the intersection of gender, queerness, technology, the law and desire.” Their pamphlet, musk (musca\muscus\mus), a  semi- “found,” appropriated, collaged, and annotated document (difficult to classify within literary categories or genres), was longlisted for The Lifted Brow‘s 2018 Prize for Experimental Non-Fiction. As the title indicates, the text addresses various philological roots of the word, “musk,” as if they were derived from the person [and, persona], Elon Musk [the subject], the billionaire “techno-capitalist.”

Though unpaginated, the verso-recto format of musk is integral to the pamphlet’s symbolism, significance, and validity as an example of “experimental” and Flarf-like composition since left-hand pages present copies of internet-based material related to Elon Musk—tweets, Google and Facebook entries, photographs—that, in most cases, echo topics addressed on the opposite page. Right-hand (recto) pages present Maynard’s running essay or, perhaps, their long-form prose poem that, because of copious footnotes on virtually every page, reinforces the importance of “found” and appropriated images and text, bringing to mind a comment by the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poet, Susan Howe, “I love the play of footnotes.” By relying upon “found” and appropriated material, Maynard places their work in the company of female writers, such as, Katie Degentesh, Sharon Mesmer, C.D. Wright, and Juliana Spahr.

For purposes of discussion, musk can be divided into five parts—an introductory section, a section on each of the three sub-topics [musca, muscus, mus] and their metaphorical relationship to Elon Musk, as well as, a final, brief conclusion. In the first section, the subject is introduced as “a Man of textual superabundance” due to his constant exposure via social media, the press, advertising, and the like. Maynard goes on to say, “Fundamentally, Musk is infrastructural: a man of tunnels, cars, batteries, energy grids, high-speed trains, giga-factories, wires, and inter-planetary transport.” These associations highlight, not only, the protagonist’s masculinity and phallic display, but they, also, imply his access to power as a symbol of patriarchy. Just as significant, Musk is a powerful figure with whom many men identify and through whom many live vicariously, leading me to consider the manner in which Musk’s attraction may be viewed as a kind of homoeroticism.

The next section expands Maynard’s discussion of Musk “as a trace or index of masculinity” by highlighting the relationship between the subject’s defining characteristics and “musk” (musca), technically defined as testicle, scrotum, as well as, a male sexual hormone. Iterations of the subject on the internet are, in Maynard’s words, “instructive in illustrating the ways in which Musk and his vernaculars of techno-masculinity are habitually taken up, reproduced, and updated, eventually becoming naturalised forms of embodied subjectivity.” This techno-male, then, is a mytho-poetic construct—part real, part fake, part object, part copy, part fantasy—“ready-made” (Marcel Duchamp) for an ubiquitous “neoliberalism.” Throughout their text, Maynard extends their analysis to the roles played by Musk and other techno-masculine figures in perpetuating the destructive, mediating, and dehumanizing effects of Capitalism.

In the third section, Maynard employs the idea of a moss plant (muscus) as an interface between “the plant, animal, and human worlds.” They transfer this fundamental, and powerful, function to the subject, stating that, “Attending to our ‘mossy’ networks necessitates an engagement with the ways in which Elon Musk’s infrastructural developments are changing the present and future organization of life.” Maynard introduces Naomi Klein’s term, “philanthrocapitalism,” referring to “a billionaire class who posit themselves as the problem-solver of crises that have been historically (un)settled through collective action, dismantling or the public sector”…representing “a form of corporate environmental paternalism whereby the ultra-rich ‘generously’ tackle some of our greatest crises using their loose change.” Though it is easy to sympathize with Maynard’s concerns and to validate their analysis, the statements may be problematic for some readers since, from a purely artistic and formalist perspective, their didactic, literal nature potentially detracts from the otherwise seamless flow of the text (which should be read at one sitting for maximum effect) and since the overwhelming scale of current global crises, such as climate change, ecosystem collapse, and poverty, all but require solutions produced by concentrated wealth. Nonetheless, in musk, Maynard presents themselves as a political poet concerned, as Adrienne Rich was, with using the “oppressor’s language” [Rich] in revolutionary ways.

The fourth section addresses “the index of ‘musk’: mouse” [mus]. Again, the philanthrocapitalist is presented as a mytho-poetic symbol of power. Maynard writes, “In August, 2017, SpaceX delivered 20 mice to the International Space Station. In fact, Musk’s desire to make human life multi-planetary began with the dream to send mice to Mars; his intention was that the mice would procreate in space, and return to Earth with interplanetary offspring.” Maynard advances Nathan Eisenberg’s notion of a gendered subjectivity, “discursively infused with a system of values that would reinvigorate the men of the nation to deliver salvation.” Invoking the Futurists as representatives of “the Modern fascist man” (e.g., Ezra Pound), Maynard does not mention the paradox that the Futurist movement, though short-lived (~1909-1920), was noteworthy as an artistic project and was the source of some of the creative techniques Maynard, herself, employs (e.g., verbal collage, “found” material: see Marjorie Perloff, 2003, University of Chicago Press). Nonetheless, philanthrocapitalists are empowered by unregulated markets and [masculine] competition, and, as Maynard puts it, “The quest to make humans multi-planetary represents a kind of pseudo-colonial environmental-fatalism whereby men of the capitalist elite give up hope on their environmental survival, and quite literally abandon the planet they have all but destroyed.” Related to this, the author suggests that these men are having unfettered fun at the world’s expense by way of “a pervasive youthful playfulness.” Power play, then, is a gendered game.

Maynard ends their text (each page paired with one or more found images referencing the subject) implicating “white masculinist possession,” calling, instead, for Jordy Rosenberg’s plea to “summon the counterforce of our own desire.” Presumably, this is a statement concerning the power of feminist principles to forge solutions via a “collective state of lived resistance…founded in scenes of ambivalent desire and intimate attachment…beyond (and against) the pheromonal energies of Elon Musk, directed towards new discursive formulations.” In the final analysis, then, Musk is not a fantasy, or an abstract case, but a real threat, and Maynard focuses their creative abilities upon using art in the service of feminism and politics—nationally and internationally. This debut pamphlet marks this young author as a writer to watch as their artistic talents and political sensibilities expand and mature. I recommend this volume to anyone interested in a creative activist, feminist, and civic voice deserving a wide audience. musk (musca\muscus\mus) provides its readers with a unique visual, symbolic, and literary experience, a worthy example of avant garde collage, conceptual, and appropriated composition, and I look forward to reading Maynard’s future work.

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Clara B. Jones is a Knowledge Worker practicing in Silver Spring, MD, USA. Among other works, she is author of Poems for Rachel Dolezal, published by Gauss PDF in 2019

[REVIEW] Fake News Poems by Martin Ott

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(BlazeVox Books, 2018)

REVIEW BY LEONARD A. TEMME

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Simply put, Martin Ott’s new collection, Fake News Poems, is terrific and here’s why; the book is structured around a single idea so simple it’s genius. The idea allows immense flexibility and has roots that go back centuries, yet Fake News Poems is entirely contemporary and as fresh as tomorrow. I suspect the idea for the book came in a flash, a moment of inspiration in response to the Greatest, Most Magnificent (GMM) President of the United States (POTUS) Of All Time (OAT). So what is the book? What will you find when you read it, which I recommend you do?

It’s a kind of almanac, a collection of 52 poems, one a week for the year 2017. The title of each poem is a news headline complete with date and source. For example, the first poem in the collection is Automated Book-Culling Software Drives Librarians to Create Fake Patrons to ‘Check Out’ Endangered Titles. This headline appeared 2 January in the online zine Boing Boing. All 52 poems follow the same pattern: date, publication source, headline, and then the poem.

The poem does not present the news; the title tells us all the background we need for that. Books are in trouble again, and librarians are coming to their rescue. Beginning with a report that Fahrenheit 451 is in danger, the poem presents a dystopian vision of AI deciding which books to keep and which to cull. As the poem progresses, references grow increasingly personal until we realize that we are in love with books, each one intimate, like a friend, teacher, and lover, and we are on the verge of losing them.

Fake News Poems continues this way. For the most part, each poem fits on its own page and each has that poem-ish appearance that contrasts with the facticity of the date, source, headline / title.  The contrast is certainly intentional as telegraphed by the book’s inscription from William Carlos Williams’ Asphodel, That Greeny Flower: “It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die every day / for lack / of what is found there.” This reference is what Fake News Poems is really about.

Despite the close association of the GMM POTUS OAT with the phrase ‘fake news,’ to its great credit the collection explicitly references the GMM POTUS OAT in only a few poems. For example, the second poem, in response to a January 13 Mondoweiss News headline Origins of a Golden Shower, considers the rise of the GMM POTUS OAT through a series of six tercets (note the poem-ish form) to conclude with ‘musing on how the waterfall of humanity / gushed in his presence, history in the taking.’

The third poem, from 15 January, The Inquisitr (sic), riffs on the closing of the Ringling Bros Circus, quickly shifting from news to family drama. This is the poet as reader responding to the headline in nine couplets. The structure could not be more clear; the flat facts of the headline at the top of the page inspires, or provokes, the poet’s response, captured in the poem that declares itself to be a poem by its shape. This pattern delivers fifty-two doses of the good Dr. Williams’ prescribed antidote to the poison in the fifty-two headlines, which are a sampling of what we experience daily. Note, I spot checked about a dozen of the headlines via Google and they are all the real news.

The table of contents alone, the list of poems titles, is provocative reading as the news of our society, reflecting who we are and what we read; but where is the GMM POTUS OAT in this? He appears in about a dozen or so poems but almost never by name, yet his shadow lurks in much of the book. While most of the poems do not explicitly tackle politics or social issues head-on, his shadow is easy to see as consistent with the tenor of society and consequently, the tenor of the poems. The GMM POTUS OAT doesn’t have to suck all the oxygen out of the news cycle, he is part of it, fitting in perfectly, fouling the atmosphere.

There are many great poems in the collection as there are many great headlines. The cover picture is of a man in a red tee-shirt and blue shorts pushing a lawn mower through his backyard, enclosed by a tall, wooden privacy fence, the very picture of self-contained stability. But we see over the fence to the tornado filling the sky, coming his way. Meet Everycitizen. The picture refers to the 5 June, Huffington Post headline and poem title: Determined Dad Won’t Let a Tornado Stop Him from Mowing the Lawn. The poem, with as many end and inner rhymes as any rap lyric, appears on the page in eight, nice-and-tidy couplets that remind me of the steward dutifully aligning the deckchairs on the sinking Titanic. Ott doesn’t ridicule the situation, he understands it, and relates it to his father and to us. Given the current chaos, we do what we can to establish and maintain what order is possible.

The two midyear poems are worth noting because they are consistent with most of the book, not polemical or political, they capture the surprise of real life, struggling humanity trying to normalize the absurd. The L. A News of 26 June is the source for a seven couplet poem reacting to the headline: Suspect Hands Monopoly ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ Card to Deputy. The final couplet: “Love is a game with rules inked each day / The joke was that he still held out hope.” So do we. The second midyear poem, from July 5, CMBC, is a single sentence spread over a dozen lines organized into four neatly arranged tercets reacting to the headline, Sex Robots Could Make Us Lonely and Unable / to Form Relationships with Other Humans. The poem begins “When the dollhouses become our houses” and concludes with ‘when love may tear you limb from limb / there is no hope without beginning or end.” With these poems we are visiting true but tragicomic reflections of ourselves. The headlines are absurdist reality; the poems strive after order.

Like bookends, the last two poems of the book balance the first two. Recall the second poem turns the golden showers on the GMM POTUS OAT while the penultimate poem, dated 19 December from CNN, has the headline / title “Disney Adds Trump Robot to Its Hall of Presidents, which congers an image sufficient to give every reader pause: the GMM POTUS OAT surrounded by all his inferiors, from Washington through Obama. Extraordinary. Reading through the Fake News Poems we realize we finally elected the president we deserve.

The last poem, completing the year’s cycle, dated 26 December, reacts to the headline, “Man Beats up an ATM for Giving Him too Much Cash,” which appeared in USA Today. The poem feels like a coda, rounding out the year with an absurdist Chaplainesque image updated from Modern Times, futile but heroic in the way librarians protecting books heroically resist the inevitable. I can almost hear Ott reading this last poem with its many internal rhymes as rap. And so it goes.

—

Leonard Temme is a research neuropsychologist in a government research laboratory. He studied writing most extensively with Marie Ponsot, Sue Walker, Josh Davis, and Kristina Darling. In addition to his professional publications, his writing has appeared in numerous literary and small presses. He serve as Poet Laureate of Northwest Florida between 1989 and 1992.

 

[REVIEW] Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky

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(Graywolf Press, 2019)

REVIEW BY LEONARD TEMME

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The long-anticipated publication of Illya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic is an important literary event. The title page identifies the book as “poems,” which is as misleading as it is true. True, because the book contains 59 poems, each capable of standing alone with its own structure, sound, meaning, and music. Misleading, because the book is a single work of art, to be encountered as a totality from beginning to end. Taken together, the poems form a two-act play describing the military occupation of Vasenka, a fictional Eastern European town. The 36 poems of the first act tell the story of Sonya and Alfonso Barabinsky, while the 21 poems of the second act tell the story of Mamma Galya Armolinskaya.

The play opens with the poem, Gunshot, which begins:

Our country is the stage.

When soldiers march into town, public assemblies are officially prohibited. But today, neighbors flock to the piano music from Sonya and Alfonso’s puppet show in Central Square….

 

An army jeep swerves into the square, disgorging is own Sergeant.

‘Disperse immediately!’

 

The poem continues with a description of the puppet show, the Sergeant, and the townspeople who watch the deaf boy, Petya,

 

… lean back, gather all the spit in his throat, and launch it at the Sergeant.

 

The sound we do not hear lifts the gulls off the water.

 

With the Sergeant’s unheard gunshot the book earns its title, Deaf Republic, for the people of Vasenka can hear nothing.

These poems have multiple backstories, some clearly biographical. Kaminsky was born in Odessa when the Ukraine was still part of the former Soviet Union and is himself deaf. Moreover, Kaminsky published a related sequence of 16 poems in the May 2009 issue of Poetry Magazine and that sequence is still available online. Several of these earlier poems are not included in the book while some have been radically rewritten and a few remained unchanged. In a note accompanying the 16 poems, Kaminsky writes that they are from an unfinished manuscript, Deaf Republic, found under the floorboards of a house in an Eastern European town, and that they tell the story of a pregnant woman and her husband during the occupation. He adds that several versions of the manuscript exist.  The fiction of the floorboards as well as the many differences between the 16 poems of the sequence and those in the book point to several more backstories. And let’s not overlook the backstories that make these poems immediately relevant to our lives in America today.

The book includes a dramatis personae listing the characters who populate the play, but not every character speaks. Act One has two voices; one voice is the Townspeople, a narrator who provides action, context, and continuity, not unlike a Greek Chorus. The other voice is Alfonso, the husband of pregnant Sonya. They are puppeteers in Madam Galya Armolinskaya’s puppet theater.  Act One describes the newlywed couple and the Townspeople under the military occupation. Sonya gives birth to her baby girl, Anushka, and is then summarily shot. The soldiers take Anushka from Alfonso and hang him. Act One closes with:

There will be evidence, there will be evidence.

While helicopters bomb the streets, whatever they will open, will open.

What is silence? Something of the sky in us.

 

Act Two also has two voices, the Townspeople and that of Madam Mamma Galya Armolinskaya, the charismatic, dynamic, active resistance fighter, who at 53 is having more sex than any of us, and who whipped a Lieutenant with the leash of his own patrol dog / and there were thirty-two persons watching / (for the baker / insisted / on bringing his sons). The Townspeople admire and hate Mamma Galya, the luckiest woman in our nation, as they remain deaf to the horrors and cower. They would give anything

… to ride away from our funerals

beside you, in a yellow taxi,

 two windows open,

leaving loaves of bread

in the mailboxes

of the arrested.

 

Larger than life, she rescues the baby Anushka hidden in a bundle of laundry, raises her, leads the resistance, is betrayed by the men of Vasenka, executed, and buried.  Read these poems aloud and weep.

Describing the aftermath of Mamma Galya’s funeral, the anonymous voice of the Townspeople declaims:

Today

I have to screw on the expression of a person

 

though I am at most an animal

and the animal I am spirals

 

from the funeral to his kitchen, shouts: I have come, God, I have come running to                                                  you –

in snow-drifted streets, I stand like a flagpole

 

without a flag.

 

The play takes place in the historical past, and in a county with alien Eastern European names we associate with oppressive authoritarian governments. We recognize that the play describes the kinds of violence that have happened many times in many places. Far worse things are reported daily today, just not yet here for most of us. So we in America, safe within our boarders, read the play at a safe distance, shake our heads at the horror and suffering, confident, right down to our toes, how wrong it all is, how horrible, and are outraged at the atrocities, with the subtext not us, not us running sotto voce through our heads as we read.

The book sandwiches the play between an opening and a closing poem that cut deeply because they dissolve the distance between America and Vasenka to place us in the middle of the Deaf Republic. The opening poem is titled the indictment, We Lived Happily During the War, and begins:

And when they bombed other people’s houses, we

 

protested

but not enough, we opposed them but not

 

enough. I was

in my bed, around my bed America

 

was falling: invisible house by invisible house by invisible house –

and continues with the closing indictment:

In the street of money in the city of money in the country of money,

our great country of money, we (forgive us)

 

lived happily during the war.

The closing poem titled, In a Time of Peace, is the reply and begins:

Inhabitant of the earth for fortysomething years

I once found myself in a peaceful country. I watch neighbors open

 

their phones to watch

a cop demanding a man’s driver’s license. When the man reaches for his wallet,

 the cop

shoots. Into the car window. Shoots.

to conclude with:

This is a time of peace.

 

I do not hear gunshots,

but watch birds splash over the backyards of the suburbs. How bright is the sky

as the avenue spins on its axis.

How bright is the sky (forgive me) how bright.

We, the American deaf, who protest too little to be effective but enough to assuage our conscience, who catch the daily atrocities on the evening news, are called to examine ourselves. Regardless of how self-congratulatory we are for ‘America as the shining city on the hill,’ we are part of the history of humanity, no better, and, we hope, no worse than most.

Deaf Republic may be described as a hybrid, with text on a continuum between prose and poetry with each piece a dramatic monologue that moves the story forward. The intention, shape, and scope of the piece, a play, mostly poetry, intended to be read rather than staged, puts the text in the tradition of Closet Drama, a form that had some popularity during the Elizabethan and Jacobian periods and among the nineteenth century romantics. This form has been subsumed by the modern radio play or today’s podcast, and it is hard not to imagine Deaf Republic being performed as a reading, possibly with music. Reading the Deaf Republic sent this reviewer to revisit Schoenberg’s A Survivor From Warsaw; the two are close cousins.

This is political writing at its best–not ideological or hectoring poster board invective but the sound of human anguish–read the poems, weep, and be shaken.

—

Leonard Temme has a doctorate in neurophysiology and is a research scientist in a government laboratory. He studied writing most extensively with Marie Ponsot, Sue Walker, Josh Davis and Kristina Darling. In addition to his professional publications, his writing has appeared numerous literary and small presses. He served as Poet Laureate of North West Florida between 1989 and 1992.

[REVIEW] Ways of Looking at a Woman by Caroline Hagood

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(Hanging Loose Press, 2019)

REVIEW BY PATRICIA GRISAFI

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In Ways of Looking at a Woman, Caroline Hagood wonders how motherhood has changed her as both a person and a writer: “When I feel overcome by my post-birth transformation, I imagine my body as a written form and try to guess its genre.” But after childbirth, a singular genre doesn’t seem to work anymore. So she turns to hybridization, which feels like a more authentic way to articulate the condition of being woman, object, mother, and writer. As a result, Ways of Looking at a Woman is a smart, honest, funny, and endearing lyric portrait of the artist as a fragmented and reconstituted entity.  

Hagood uses the hybrid text as a way to discover and create identity. And like identity, just when you feel you have a grasp on her narrative, it slips away and transforms into something else. This is part of the immense pleasure of the book—that it contains multitudes. Part film theory, part personal essay, part poetry, Ways of Looking at a Woman toys with our expectations of how each of these genres should operate. The themes that tie the text together—gazing and consuming, mothering and being mothered, creating and destroying, and confessing and withholding—are elucidated by quirky anecdotes. Here is the writer as watcher of junk TV and connoisseur of junk food, the writer as a woman who is exhausted by her children but still finds time to ponder postmodernism on the toilet. “Mostly I didn’t write a memoir because nobody wants to read something called The Subtle Art of Writing While Covertly Watching a Zombie Movie, Playing Make-believe with a Tantrumming Kid, and Eating Taquitos,” Hagood explains.

Like the title alludes, Hagood’s text feels like what might happen if Wallace Stevens and Laura Mulvey had a rambunctious child who delights in finger painting with food all over the study. There’s a loopy energy to Hagood’s prose that feels very much like motherhood manifested. Her book is serious but doesn’t take itself too seriously. You have to love a writer who is comfortable enough to invoke both Reality Bites and Derrida in a way that is not obnoxious — and put both of them on the same theoretical level. This happy marriage of high and low is an engaging feature of Hagood’s book. We all know the academic who can and will name-drop theorists into conversations about cat litter, but Hagood’s invocations don’t feel showy or performative. The meshing–actually, obliterating—of hierarchies is part of the goal here. Once we realize that hierarchies, much like genre and static designations, confine us, we can be liberated and create something explosive and new.  

Organized as a thesis (Hagood wrote the book while working on her doctoral dissertation), Ways of Looking at a Woman adopts an academic form while also poking fun at academia. Riffing on the cliche of women’s inherent mysteriousness, Hagood jokes in the “Methodology” section: “So I needed to study women, but I wasn’t good at statistics…Besides, I like women, and have found that to dissect them with numbers and figures was to forget that.” Sometimes, the analysis kills the joy or distracts us from the inherent pleasure of the text — and sometimes, Hagood writes, prevents us from fully inhabiting the work: “I started wanting to use ‘I’ in the dissertation where it didn’t belong. On every page, Caroline kept popping up—making lewd gestures behind a footnote, mooning me from behind a piece of particularly dry text.” Here, Caroline’s impertinent insistence is on not just making the text her own but actually becoming the text. This is not just a dissertation, a body of work–it’s a literal body. A woman’s body.  

Ways of Looking at a Woman is a feminist text. It’s a story of becoming, transmutation, trauma, and women’s work that often goes unseen or under appreciated: cleaning tiny nails, washing food off the walls, giving birth itself (the way Hagood describes birth is perfect: “this purple creature of tenderness suddenly came exploding out of me and I got to keep it). In one of the most stunning parts of the book, Hagood crashes body horror into feminist theory, commenting on the inherent amalgamation of womanhood: “Women have felt this monstrousness since the beginning of time, but I just went the extra step and literally became a monster. One fateful day I became literature. It was beautiful, astounding even as my skin became fragile and see-through, became diaphanous pages. I transformed into the hybrid I had always been half-woman, half-writing.” In this book, Hagood becomes Frankenstein’s creation or even Dorian Gray—her body as art and experiment, containing difficult truths about humanity.

—

Patricia Grisafi, PhD, is a New York City based freelance writer and editor. Her work has been featured in Salon, The Guardian, Vice, Narratively, The Rumpus, Self, Bustle, Ravishly, and elsewhere. Her short fiction appears in Tragedy Queen: Stories Inspired By Lana Del Rey & Sylvia Plath.

[REVIEW] Ghost Of by Diana Khoi Nguyen

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(Omnidawn, 2018)

REVIEW BY ESTEBAN RODRIGUEZ

__

To quote a phrase from Terrance Hayes’s foreword, Ghost Of by Diana Khoi Nguyen is a collection of “exile and elegy.” The poem’s first line proclaims there “is no ecologically safe way to mourn,” and because there isn’t, at least not within the collection’s context of loss, the search for identity, and the acclimation to a culture of a new country, Nguyen so confidently writes in a style and voice that is as innovative as it is maturely aware of its subjects and themes.

Two pages in, and we are introduced to one of the collection’s most intriguing forms; “Triptych” (the title of five other poems in this collection) is composed of an altered, blurred photograph of a family (Nguyen’s own) with a piece missing (which Nguyen’s brother cut himself before his death), followed by a fragmented poem (taking the shape of that figure), and a prose poem that seeks to illuminate the meaning behind the photo and the previous poem. Although a form like this runs the risk of seeming forced, and can look to an experienced reader like something the poet learned in a workshop and was excited to put on the page (think of all the poorly constructed ghazals that randomly show up in a collection that doesn’t need them and that don’t fit with the poet’s overall style), Nguyen is able to use this form in a manner that is never superficial. The beauty of these poems lies in the seemingly chaotic nature they take as the collection progresses. By the fourth “Triptych,” the photograph is altered to the point of nausea, and the fragmented poem that follows singles out the speaker’s brother, Oliver, as a figure so far removed from anything that resembles that serene family in the photo before:

Re

mem

ber the

handsom

e boy pla

ying ball i

n the decay

ed city? Thin

k about him

how he’s pla

ying and pla

ying not as

king a singl

e question,

think abou

t that how

My replication here doesn’t do the justice to what the reader will experience firsthand with these poems, nor will any replication successfully capture the essence of the “Gyotaku” poems (Gyotaku is a Japanese form of printmaking that uses fish or other sea animals as printing plates). These poems are more vibrant and visually jarring as Nguyen prints her text onto the altered photographs. In one instance, the name “oliver” (shaped into a disembodied figure) is juxtaposed next to the cut portion of a family portrait and then splashed in various trail-like patterns across the next page, all in different shades of black and gray. Such a technique recreates the footprint the speaker’s brother left behind. The speaker, through these pieces, copes with these memories, and the page offers no better canvas to visually express the labyrinth of emotions still fresh after such a loss. Near the end of the collection (in the last “Gyotaku” poem), multiple lines of olivers (printed in light gray) occupy the whole page, while a poem in the shape of dark figure lingers the right hand corner, as though the ghost or spirit has nowhere to go, stuck in a two-dimensional limbo that prompts the speaker to ponder how it’s “not the body/but the self that is/a suffering form.”

In no way should anyone confuse these poems as a cheap substitute for the language Nguyen achieves in the book’s more “traditional” poems. In “I Keep Getting Things Wrong,” the speaker reflects on their parents’ exile from Vietnam to the United States. The speaker’s father is depicted with deity-like qualities, giving “his hand to his mother,/[while] all around them, a thousand hands reach up” for salvation. The father leaves Saigon unscathed, resettling in Southern California. But such happiness doesn’t last long, and the speaker’s brother’s death inserts itself in the present as much as it does the past. The speaker feels inclined to “eat the food/left out for [her] dead brother” and at one point, while sitting at a desk typing, remembers that she dreamed twice that she “fucked” him. The speaker cannot escape what so painfully plagues her, and though for some it might be exhausting to read, the subject is reformulated in ways that allow for greater understanding, empathy, and reflection.

In other poems, the speaker imagines herself as a house occupied with emptiness and guilt, or envisions a world where she pours pieces of herself into a dog (not that the dog has any particular significance other than being an entity in which the speaker’s desires can be projected and potentially take form). Nguyen’s poems also extend to lyric narratives. The poem “Ghost Of” recounts a family’s history, detailing what appears on the surface to be trivial matters (how parents came about naming their son, how a young daughter walks around pigeon-toed, how seat belts enumerate a mother’s failures), but that ultimately shed light on the complexity of this “story of refugees” (a subject that is all too relevant in today’s social and political landscape). Ghost Of carefully moves at a pace that is thoughtful, innovative, and elegiac, and never once shies away from speaking about death in a manner that is both personal and universal. After all, as Nguyen so aptly puts it, in times such as these, “there is no shortage of gain or loss.”

—

Esteban Rodriguez is a poet and teacher. He is the author of DUSK & DUST,  forthcoming from Hub City Press.

[REVIEW] I Don’t Write About Race by June Gehringer

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(Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2018)

REVIEW BY MIKE CORRAO

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I Don’t Write About Race is a beautiful and honest collection of poems, exploring the complex and nuanced nature of identity. “I don’t write about race / I write about erasure,” the poet says.

Gehringer’s work feels so natural and cohesive, as if it is forming on the pages as you read. Each new poem, a continuation of the last. The poet documents what’s inside her head, as well as a cacophony of microaggressions, which occur so often as to become another of life’s mundanities. The reader is confronted by their own actions. We are made to witness the constant judgement and dehumanization of the trans community. Moments where they are misgendered, belittled, harassed, and ignored.

For a brief time, the poet wishes for some physical manifestation of these pains (a burn or a cut or a bruise), somewhere she can point to and say, ‘this is where it hurts’ but the pain in these poems is often abstract. It is emotional and psychological. How do you alleviate the pain of being considered less of person than you are? The pain of ‘white hands’ and violent rhetoric? “How many millions wish you dead?”

In the latter half of her collection, Gehringer shifts focus, labeling many pieces as Leviathan. In doing so, the poet emboldens her work. She summons this image of the ‘eidolon from a long-lost age’ and imbues it with new meaning. The subject becomes large and powerful. Yet in the process, she does not change who she is. She does not make herself in the likeness of this new image, rather the Leviathan becomes her.

Gehringer has created a powerful collection of poems. I Don’t Write About Race is essential reading, an important text exploring identity and the trans experience.

—

Mike Corrao is a young writer working out of Minneapolis. His work has been featured in publications such as Entropy, decomP, Cleaver, and Fanzine. His first novel will be released in fall of 2018 by Orson’s Publishing. Further information at www.mikecorrao.com.