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An Interview with Alex DiFrancesco on their forthcoming book, All City

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(Seven Stories Press, 2019)

INTERVIEW BY JESSICA MANNION

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Alex DiFrancesco has had a busy year. Their essay collection Psychopomps was released  by Civil Coping Mechanisms in February, and their novel All City is being released by Seven Stories Press on June 18. While both books are excellent, this interview focuses on All City. It is an important book, and very possibly a prophetic one. All City speaks for the people whose stories do not often get told, much less told with nuance and compassion.

All City takes place in a New York City of the near future. The chasm between the haves and have-nots is wider than ever, and climate change has sent superstorms of increasing violence to the shores of the city, tearing it down with wind and water. Those with the means always leave before the storms hit, but those without resources and means, those who have nowhere else to go, must remain and hold on to what they can by sheer force of will.

The book primarily follows three people, their struggles to survive, to regroup and find security after Superstorm Bernice, and to build new lives in a world that’s a mere muddy remnant of what they knew before. Even after the waters recede, life doesn’t get any easier; there is no new food being shipped in, medical care is practically nonexistent, roads and bridges are destroyed, and the wreckage of the storm is everywhere, bringing with it vermin and sickness. As resources diminish, violence increases, and there are few places where one can feel safe.

Alex lived in New York for about 15 years, but has since moved to Cleveland, Ohio, where they are an MFA candidate at Cleveland State University.

Jessica Mannion: Having just read All City for the second time, I loved it even more. There’s a lot to unpack. In part, I see it as a kind of hybrid love letter to and eulogy for New York City. Can you talk about the changes you saw during your time living in NYC and how living here influenced your writing, and your life as an artist?

Alex DiFrancesco: So now, when I think back to when I moved to New York in 2000, I realize I was a shock-wave gentrifier in Bushwick. I was a white, queer, artist who was specifically moved into a very affordable space at the time by people looking to develop it. I didn’t understand that at the time! I was just out of a small town in Pennsylvania, and thrilled that I could work part time as a lunch server in a little Middle Eastern place, write most of the day, and still pay my rent and have money to party a little. It was the dream, for me, to move to NYC and become an artist. I lived in a dirty loft and had a desk made out of a couple boxes and an old door, and I wrote every day. I was highly suspect about going back to school, and NYC provided so many ways other than that route to become a writer.

I remember in around 2005, I was working at some film-release party on a boat moored in the Hudson (those were the days when Craigslist still had the best odd jobs), and someone way slicker and cooler than me asked me where I lived, and then proclaimed Bushwick as “up-and-coming.” I had this sudden, distinct understanding that I would no longer be able live there, and that I had been the beginning of that process for people who had been there much longer.

I lived in NYC for around 10 more years after that. First I had to move all the way to the end of Brooklyn. Then I moved to Queens. Then, finally, just before I left, a friend was letting me pay way less than she could have charged for a room in the apartment she owned because there was no way I could live there and afford it anymore. What I made had stayed the same, and my rent had tripled.

But ultimately, living and scraping by in New York made me the artist I am today. I went to school at the New School, and learned from some amazing professors. I joined a writers’ group with some of the most talented writers I’ve ever worked with in it. I went to lectures, worked in bookstores, interned in publishing. It’s helped me build my life around the written word in so many ways. I’m sad every day that there’s just no place for me there anymore.

JM: What does All City mean and where did the idea for the book come from?

AD: The term “all city” is old graffiti slang for an artist who has painted in all 5 boroughs of New York. When I wrote the anonymous artist character into the book, I thought about how nearly impossible this would be to accomplish if you were working in the post-collapse conditions of the book. I decided to make him do it anyway.

The book was a mash-up of what ifs, really. I started writing a list of them after Superstorm Sandy destroyed parts of New York City, and also shortly after Bansky did his month-long NYC residency where he guerilla-installed a new project in an undisclosed location every day for an entire month. I’d also been reading a lot about Hurricane Katrina. The ideas just sort of melded together.

JM: The novel is primarily told through 3 characters: Makayla, Jesse and Evann. There’s so much going on with the characters: they are all affected by this Superstorm Bernice, and they all experience displacement and a certain degree of trauma, but because of their social status and circumstances, each experiences / survives / processes that trauma differently. Why did you choose these characters to tell this story?

The first draft of this novel was a super sloppy 40,000 words written during NaNoWriMo. I didn’t really participate in the community aspects of it, but I did challenge myself to write the proposed amount in the month of November. Once I had the list of what-ifs, I started to look at them from different angles. Makayla came first, because I wanted someone who would likely be without many resources besides her sense of community and her relationships. I added Jesse in because it’s very important to me to portray trans lives in the larger context of the world — in such a way that they’re not isolated, but also not in trans-only spaces all the time. Evann felt necessary, too, because you can’t show the have-nots without showing what it looks like to have it all.

JM: Another character – a mysterious mural artist – remains unseen, but his Art starts showing up everywhere in the devastated city like crocuses in the spring. What role does Art play in All City? How have the visual arts influenced or inspired you as a writer and artist?

AD: There are a series of works of visual art in this novel that are all carefully chosen and all mean different things.

Evann, the art collector, is given a Basquiat when she graduates from design school. This kind of started as a joke, because I made her collect Basquiats and first editions of Ayn Rand books. What kind of awful person wouldn’t get the irony there? Then, like a lot of the things I do to amuse myself in my writing, I started taking it seriously. Really, what kind of person wouldn’t get that? Certainly not one like me, or anyone I’d care about. But someone. So Evann was born out of love for Basquiat and Ayn Rand.

There’s a scene where two trans street punks go into The Met to look at Van Gogh paintings, and one of them starts crying because they’ve never seen Van Gogh’s sunflowers and never realized how dead they were. The other one says, no, they’re dead but they’re still moving and full of life, that’s how much life Van Gogh saw even though he was so sad. It’s one of the few times in the book that art is just enjoyed and not commodified.

Then, Evann owns two more paintings that play symbolic roles in the story. She owns Richard Bosman’s woodcut “Full Moon” and John Lurie’s absurdist watercolor “Bear Surprise.” The role of “Full Moon” (which shows one man beating another to death in a boat) is to show Evann looking into a world she has no idea about, but the other characters are all to familiar with. The role of “Bear Surprise” (which shows two people having sex in the woods and a bear yelling “Surprise!”) is because it’s Lurie’s most famous but probably least-skilled painting, which Evann totally doesn’t understand. It’s a little poking fun at her, to have it in there. I also learned while doing research for the novel that Lurie was one of Basquiat’s early mentors, so I felt compelled to write him in because of that connection.

Art is really commodified almost every time it appears in  the book. It’s made for the right reasons, but it’s consumed, often, in ways that are more about the owning it than the divineness of it. I have very silly and almost spiritual beliefs about art and where it comes from, but the art world and the world of the novel are both kind of ugly and gross and highly capitalist rather than about communicating the thing that makes art worth making.

JM: How does All City explore ideas of ownership?

AD: I’m thinking of the ownership of space as the main way it works. There’s a luxury condo, and when it’s not something that the rich want, it’s good enough for the poor. It’s a place they can make a utopia. But then it becomes something that the rich want again, and it’s too good for the people who have made it their own. This is a microcosm of the gentrification of New York, in the book. So really the way ownership is dictated is on the desires of those who have the money to protect their “rights” to a space, not those who work to make it their own.

There’s also something there about the use of graffiti as a way to take and remake public spaces as something belonging to everyone, for everyone’s use and enjoyment. It’s ecstatic and community-based, much like the true community-building that happens in the luxury condo. I don’t think I could’ve told this story without the addition of graffiti.

JM: How does All City explore the concept of hope – about the future, about a better life, about belonging – and who ultimately will see their hopes realized?

AD: Hope is fraught in All City. There are people like Evann who have implicit access to it, when they choose it. There are people like Makayla who make it out of what they have. But I want to say that the last scene is my probably depressive final take. Who gets to see that which is supposed to bring us hope? Who doesn’t? And who are the few people who believe that hope is a starting point, something they saw once, and carry that fire as far as they can?

JM: In part, All City is a story of survival. How do you explore survival and the things some people must endure in order to do so?

AD: Without giving too much away, I think the biggest traumas in the book are one character’s rape, one’s loss of a parent, and one experiencing a hate crime committed against the person they love. These characters all rally, at least for a while, or eventually, to use the trauma they’ve experienced to make the world around them better. It creates empathy in them rather than destroying them — but sometimes it destroys them too. I think the idea that some people choose to make sure that no one goes through the horrible things they’ve been through is the driving idea behind a lot of these characters. They’re not saints, and they’re not perfect — but they’re driven by the fact that traumatic things have happened and they’ve turned them into compassion, which then turns into community and survival.

JM: The characters Makayla and Jesse in other circumstances would often be seen as outsiders of society, but you put them front and center in the book. Why did you choose to tell this story from their perspective?

AD: This is always my goal, to put the outsiders at the inside. I think I have always felt like a bit of an outsider myself, so I’m not really sure how I could sustain an emotional and moral core to a novel without it being heavily focused on characters who see and feel and experience things outside the norm or the default.

Also, it’s a highly political act to write the stories that people say shouldn’t be told. I knew Jesse had to be in there because I’m a trans person, and queer representation means something to me. I was really a bit hesitant to write Makayla because she’s a minority I’m not a part of, she’s a woman of color. Certainly, a woman of color could have written Makayla in another way, and it would be entirely more appropriate for her to tell a woman of color’s story. But I also had been reading so much about the aftermath of Katrina, and the poor people left behind, and it struck me as absurd to try to tell a story of gentrification and climate change and survival from multiple perspectives without characters of color. I took as much feedback as I could get from folks more aligned with her perspective.

But it was incredibly important to me, outside of specific demographic, to tell the story of those who had been left behind, and, more terrifyingly are being left behind. All City is, in some ways, a warning. But it’s also the story of those who’ve been pushed so far out that they’ve had to make their own way, and know what they’re doing when things really go down.

(photo by Emily Raw)

JM: In many ways, Evann is a controversial character; she is probably the least sympathetic and the one who causes the most harm. Yet she would certainly not view herself that way, nor would much of society. How is her perspective important?

AD: I wrote Evann about 16 times. You might recall from when we workshopped this book in our writers’ group, people were referring to her in Snidely Whiplash terms, because she was just that bad. The somewhat less dastardly Evann who ended up in the final pages was born largely out of my wonderful editor, Sanina Clark, pushing me to make her less villainous. Sanina had asked me early on if Evann was a cipher, a stand-in for gentrification, and I said that no, she was a villain, for sure, but I also wanted her emptiness and need for consumption in place of being able to feel anything to be real and human. Sanina pushed me through rewrites to make Evann less of a complete monster, and more of a asshole human, if that makes sense.

In some ways, Evann is the most important character I’ve written thus far (at least to me), because she’s the life most outside of my own, which is what writers are supposed to be creating, I think. With every other character I was able to find something inside myself to return to like a compass when I started to go astray with them. I really had to work to find this place with Evann. I used to take walks in Green-Wood Cemetery to Basquiat’s grave all the time, talking to his ghost and think about Evann doing the same.

But she also plays an important role in the story in that we have to see the other side of this huge divide in the future world. If we see Jesse nodding out in a dirty IRT station from scrounged opiates, we also have to see Evann fucking a guy with pearl studs in his dick, you know?

JM: Your essay collection Psychopomps came out in February of this year. How do these books inform each other?

AD: I think people who read both will see bits and pieces that reflect each other. Sometimes I kind of feel like writing creative nonfiction can be like pulling back the curtain and seeing the little dorky man in a suit working the controllers. That’s me, the little dorky guy in Psychopomps, and All City is like the illusionary Oz.

I’m only half-way kidding. Anyway, read both; keep my cat in her favorite wet food.

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Jessica Mannion is a Brooklyn-based freelance writer. Her writing can be seen in The Literary Review, Alliteratti, and other publications. She also does copy-writing on a variety of subjects.

[REVIEW] Soft Science by Franny Choi

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(Alice James Books, 2019)

REVIEW BY DANA ALSAMSAM

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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…

 

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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

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(The Accomplices, 2019)

REVIEW BY GABINO IGLESIAS

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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.

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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

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(Copper Canyon Press, 2019)

REVIEW BY ESTEBAN RODRIGUEZ

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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.

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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

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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.

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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

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(Catapult, 2018)

REVIEW BY GABINO IGLESIAS

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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.

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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

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(MA Press, 2019)

REVIEW BY CLARA B. JONES

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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.

Interview with Contest Judge Maya Sonenberg

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Editorial Assistant Erinn Batykefer sat down with [PANK] Author Maya Sonenberg to talk about her book AFTER THE DEATH OF SHOSTAKOVICH PÈRE and her role as the [PANK] BOOKS NONFICTION CONTEST JUDGE!

Not all ghosts exact revenge or induce terror. Some emerge from a miasma of grief; sad themselves, they spread sorrow. Or perhaps those left behind—daughters and sons—create the ghost of a father, trying to find what’s surely been lost. Following the four-movement structure of Shostakovich’s Suite for Two Pianos and using a mosaic of story, memoir, photographs, literary analysis, and her own father’s journals, Maya Sonenberg’s After the Death of Shostakovich Père is an extended lyric meditation on the death of fathers, both biological and artistic, and the ways in which haunting can produce art. BUY MAYA’S BOOK HERE

 

Erinn Batykefer: The fiction and non-fiction you’ve published often have multi-media or hybrid elements: prose and drawings, flash mini-essays. Your nonfiction chapbook, After the Death of Shostakovich Père, came out from PANK Books last year and has a similar shape shifting quality, oscillating between literary analysis, storytelling, and a scrapbook of personal photos and journal entries. Do you draw lines between genres?

Maya Sonenberg: I just had a very interesting discussion with my graduate students about whether we thought of the hybrid literary object in botanical terms or mythological terms. For the former, think of the pluot, a cross between a plum and an apricot that has become entirely its own fruit. For the latter, think of the chimera, a fire-breathing female monster with a lion’s head, a goat’s body, and a serpent’s tail. The former is like a mosaic seen from the distance, while the latter is like a mosaic seen up close so that the separate tesserae are distinct. For the former, you might think of the prose poem. In the works of mine you mention, I see myself working in the latter form—the different genres are placed next to each other but remain distinct.

This is all a round-about way to answer your question: I do see distinctions between genres, and even when I combine them in a single section (the literary analysis in After the Death of Shostakovich Père also includes material about my personal experiences of reading the Borges stories), I’m keen to be clear about what refers to me, what is speculation, what is factual. Many thanks to my students Sarah Bitter, Boston Chandler, and Devon Houtz for the discussion, and to Rose Metal Press for their anthology Family Resemblance, which introduced us to thinking about the hybrid as a mythological creature.

 

EB: What excites you about judging the Big Book Nonfiction contest for [PANK]?

MS: These days both fiction and nonfiction are capacious, and I love that. Nonfiction in particular is a great big tent, including speculative essays and rather straight-forward memoir, essays about something big and important—or tiny and important—out in the world conveyed through a personal lens, essays that borrow forms from other sorts of writing and essays that proceed through collage or logic. I’m just excited to see the different sorts of nonfiction I’ll get to read.

 

EB: After the Death is listed as memoir / personal essay, but in a lot of ways it does its own thing to create an elegy for your father that mirrors the musical elegy Shostakovich wrote in the wake of his own father’s death. Was (mostly) nonfiction the obvious choice for this project?

MS: When I started this particular project, I actually planned to simply write a short story based on Shostakovich’s experience of losing his father during the Russian Revolution and going on to write the duet for two pianos. Pretty quickly, I realized his many biographers had already covered this, and I began to allow all sorts of material about dead fathers to accrete to the project. The ghost story that makes up the third section came from a novel I had never completed. I decided to write about the Borges stories because I was (and still am) in the midst of several other projects in which I pair a real ancestor with someone I think of as an artistic forbearer. I knew this project would be about my father, but I didn’t turn to including the material from his notebook until after I had figured out the structure of the piece. Each section corresponds to a movement in the piano duet, and within each section, the different literary and photo threads correspond to changes in melody and/or tempo. I suddenly had many different threads I needed to create and the material from his notebook fell pretty neatly into a separate categories

 

EB: What are you hoping to see in the submissions for this contest? What, in your opinion, should a book of nonfiction do? What are you hoping to feel while reading a winning work?

MS: I honestly cannot make an over-arching claim about what a book of nonfiction should do, but when reading a winning work, I’m hoping to feel hit between the eyes—that I’m reading something really unexpected, forced to see or experience or think about things in a new way. I know—what does that mean? I want to read prose that is aware of its own power and has developed its own style, rather than attempting to be transparent. I want to read memoir in which the writing persona questions and re-questions itself or makes bold claims about itself. I want to read essays about the big bad world that are still somehow personal. I want to read lyric essays that get their components to sing to each other, hitting that sweet spot where the subtle and the obvious cancel each other out. I want to read content or form or style that I can’t even imagine as I answer this question. This is not to say winning works need (or could!) do all of the above. Some might do only one.

 

EB: The Finale section of After the Death includes a meditation on Borges’ “The Library of Babel” which was a literary touchstone you found ridiculous later on. Is revealing a state of balance like this (or perhaps coming to terms with the necessity of cognitive dissonance) the project of writing?

MS: As perhaps you’ve seen by now, I don’t think there’s only one project for writing to complete or accomplish, so I’m not really sure how to answer this. I like states of balance, cognitive dissonance, and friction in writing, but I also love a good novel that sucks me right in to its world. I love the calm world of a book like Sarah Orne Jewett’s Country of the Pointed Firs! In my current writing projects, I’m trying to explore both-and, rather than either-or, thinking.

PS—I hope my continuing love, tempered now by many re-readings, of “The Library of Babel” still comes through.  [It does!]

 

EB: If you could encourage the writers who will be submitting their work to [PANK] for this contest to read one book before they hit send, what would you choose?

MS: Ah, not before they sit down to write, but before they hit send! Before they sit down to write, they should read whatever book they love most and take inspiration from it. Before they hit send…. I’m not sure. Again, I can’t think of any one book that would give writers a quick window into my predilections.

 

EB: Anything else you’d like to share with [PANK]? [PANK] would party with you any day.

MS: I would party with [PANK] any day to

[REVIEW] Great American Desert by Terese Svoboda

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(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.

Digital Sunrise: God, Virtual Reality, and Death

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(Installation shot, Jamie Martinez and Erin Ko, “Neo Kingdom” in Speculative Cultures. A Virtual Reality Exhibition (2019), curated by Tina Sauerländer, Peggy Schoenegge, and Erandy Vergara. Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Gallery, Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, Parsons/The New School. Photo: Marc Tatti)

BY KATIE PEYTON HOFSTADTER

—

It’s an hour to digital sunrise, and I’m looking up the different ways to die. At least in simulation.

You can die with the human race or you can die alone. There’s nuclear annihilation: the bomb, a 360-degree immersive experience. Or the unexpected terror of gun violence: The Grass Smells So Sweet, a mixed reality installation by Dani Ploeger (just this week, my university responded to yet another on-campus active shooter threat). If you expect to go it alone—and you probably should—you might choose a more contemplative simulation. The Neo Kingdom is a virtual reality installation by Erin Ko and Jamie Martinez based on the Egyptian Book of the Dead.

It’s part of “Speculative Cultures: A Virtual Reality Exhibition,” organized by Tina Sauerländer, Peggy Schoenegge, and Erandy Vergara at the New School’s Kellen Gallery two blocks from Union Square. If you’ve ever seen a virtual reality exhibition, you have an idea what to expect. When you walk in, you generally find four or five people stumbling around in circles, their eyes encased in VR headsets attached to the ceiling by an electrified bungee cable. They are reaching for things you can’t see. They are pointing at things you can’t see. Sometimes they are pointing at you.

There are screens set up to project the experiences happening to people in the headsets as they bump around in front of you. What you’re seeing is the visual field of one of the two convex “eyes.”

The Neo Kingdom is tucked into the back corner of the gallery, enclosed in a barely-there red curtain. Clearly it will be a more private experience. You step into an enclosed space, where the VR headset hangs waiting for you (it comes off a bit menacing: in fact, an early version of this dangling apparatus was called the Sword of Damocles). There is no outward-facing screen, for others to follow your journey into the underworld. You will die alone.

The first thing you miss is your feet. When you put on the headset your body disappears, and you find your disembodied ghost hovering over a kind of deep-space surfboard. The pinpoints of light around you are stars: you have left the earth.

In this darkness, the universe sounds like the ocean, slow-crashing on all sides.

A bubble floats towards you; it appears to contain another universe. A red universe of red stars. (Transportation is a big question with VR: you need to move between worlds, but how?) You let the bubble suck you in. You can no longer see outside the bubble, back to that first world of stars. You have crossed from an impossible but familiar world—deep space—into a world that is both impossible and unfamiliar—the red universe of the dead.

Now, in a flash of light, the Egyptian God Anubis appears in front of you. He has a two-faced jackal in tow, and a codex you can’t read. Are you supposed to engage him? Debate him? Is he scanning your soul? What is the language on the codex? What does it mean? Are those actual hieroglyphs or Ancient-Egyptified emojis? Most importantly, are you dead yet?

The screen goes bright. Then dark. And you wait patiently for something that never happens. You wait, looking at nothing, feeling nothing, alone in the darkness with your thoughts, and the sounds of the slow-crashing space ocean.

With nothing in front of you to reach for or point at, you are staring into a pool of darkness. You let it do what pools do: settle into a reflective surface. (You’ve long ago forgotten that ten feet away your friend is still spinning around and pointing at things no one else can see.) How long will you stay in this dark cocoon? Is this the journey you are meant to be on?

Also: am I doing this right?

*

In 1991 Damien Hirst was given money to make whatever he wanted.

He hired a fisher in Queensland, Australia, with instructions to kill something “big enough to eat you.” The fisher caught a tiger shark, which Hirst then embalmed and suspended in a tank. He called it “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living.”

I always assumed the Impossible Death was the dead shark. Our minds can never fully wrap around the death of anyone. Including the animals we breed to die for our dinner (I am not a vegetarian). Including the many thousand species extinct by our hand. Including everyone we will ever know, and of course, ourselves.

There is a second meaning, which I only understood after reading the instructions: that the fisher was instructed to kill something deadly to himself.

We humans no longer spend our days avoiding death by predators. Or by starvation, or by cold. We can create anything we can imagine, or we will soon (our imaginations keep pace). If you don’t have a virtual home yet, with a virtual pet—you will. The US Department of Defense wants lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS) We construct digital avatars to live for us, and to kill for us. We’ve also created avatars to die for us.

I spoke to Tina Sauerländer, one of three curators for the “Speculative Cultures exhibition,” who has been working with digital art and XR for almost a decade (XR is the umbrella term used to denote virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality (MR, which some people say doesn’t exist—another story)). She focuses on the impact of internet and digital technologies on people. When I asked her to describe the most powerful experience she’d had in XR, she told me about a piece by Dani Ploeger, called The Grass Smells So Sweet. It offers a surreal experience, based on descriptions posted by survivors on online forums.

You take off your shoes, stand on a square of grass (real grass, not astroturf) and put on the headset. You see the grass; you feel it beneath your feet; you even smell fresh-grass smells (dispensed from an olfactory wall unit).

Next to the grass, a monitor shows found texts from Question & Answer forums Quora and Reddit, which respond to the question “How does it feel to be shot in the head?” The texts, written by people who survived a headshot, can be browsed using the scroll wheel of a mouse next to a monitor.

Suddenly your field of vision cracks. An intense buzzing disorients your hearing. You find yourself trying to hold onto the blurring images of grass and sky, but it’s impossible to focus.  Your ears ring. The grass is overcome by the black. The sky dissolves. All goes dark, and silent.

In class last week, I asked students to write for five minutes about something they were afraid of. Dying, one student wrote simply.

I am also afraid to die. I want to peer into the darkness, and see a tunnel of hope. Orpheus followed Eurydice to hell, but he couldn’t bring her out again. I sense what I’m seeking is metaphorical: better mythmaking, perhaps. But stories do change, don’t they?

Is it fair to project this onto an artist’s project? Maybe darkness is just darkness.

(Installation shot, Matias Brunacci, “Virtualshamanism: An Alternative Digital Reality of Consciousness” in Speculative Cultures. A Virtual Reality Exhibition (2019), curated by Tina Sauerländer, Peggy Schoenegge, and Erandy Vergara. Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Gallery, Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, Parsons/The New School. Photo: Marc Tatti)

*

My phone never seems to go dark.

It’s always brightly connecting me to things seen and unseen. Each morning, my inbox populates with notifications from work, friends and advertisers (which lately seem to sometimes be the same). Bureaucratic announcements from two universities, which I am directed to incorporate into my understanding of the world. I am typing this text on my laptop; notification banners unfurl on the “lock” screen of my phone.

I want my smartphone to be one step smarter than the work I use it to accomplish, which would theoretically free up my time, connect me with more people with less effort. Instead, my work and a couple of corporations are using it to outsmart me, stealing my free time before I realize I have it. Late technocapitalism may advertise yoga classes, but in reality I am never far from the orders dictated to me by this device (which I freely elect to carry, or at least believe I do). My day is maddeningly fragmented, yet invisibly catalogued by Google and Facebook, advertised back to me in an increasingly optimized form. The system even advertises products to tame the very mess it itself creates, promising a life of greater presence, calm, and contemplation.

Not all virtual experiences are designed with empathy in mind.

I have a friend who died, and his Facebook page is still alive. Most people have experienced this phenomenon. On Facebook, he still lives in New York. We are still friends. I am still prompted to invite him to events, to bring his missing soul back to the advertising platform. The algorithm does not realize that he can deliver no more revenue. Or perhaps it knows he still can.

This, to me, is horror.

Our religions recognize that we need spaces for contemplating death, for contemplating life. I grew up Catholic, and the confessional offered a dark and quiet opportunity to think about your life, your mistakes, and your character. There was a man on the other side of a curtain, a priest, who could be one of several men at different times, but they all were meant to symbolize God, which was always a little confusing. It was a ritual space, to be moved through as quickly as possible. It was uncomfortable, and I went as rarely as possible.

*

As we increasingly abandon traditional religion

(the “spiritual but not religious” category has increased 30% between 2012 and 2017), many people look towards art and technology to help us rationalize irrational thoughts, including death.

“Our old agrarian mythologies and religions are ill-equipped to deal with the pace and scale of these changes and are no longer able to provide a sense of meaning or direction,” says XR artist Timur Si Qin. He believes empathetically designed virtual experiences can be used as a medium to communicate a new secular spiritualism, which elevates matter itself to a sacred status. This, he explains, is necessary to confront “(material) problem of climate change.” In 2018 he showed Campaign for a New Protocol in Hong Kong. This spring he will show it at Frieze in New York.

*

OK, I admit it. I have a god-sized hole to fill, too.

I am seduced by promises of new awarenesses. In the Neo Kingdom, I want something to happen to my spirit.

But there’s another problem. While I’m trying to focus on the virtual journey, I can’t stop thinking about my body.

I’ve talked to friends, and they all report the same anxiety. At no moment are you more aware that you have an actual body as in a VR headset. Where did it go? What is it doing in the real world? Who is watching it? What might happen to it? This is when you start checking behind you, worried you might be missing something, aware you are spinning like an idiot. You are also aware of your friend, also a spinning idiot, and also the many other spinning idiots in the room. You are a spinning idiot nation. You are grateful for the (barely-a-curtain) curtain. You wish it was thicker.

You settle down. Look around. Where, again, are you supposed to look?

There is nothing but yourself in the darkness, considering your place in the universe. It is deeply unsettling. The new spirituality is invisible. You literally can’t see it. The priesthood is locking you out of the temple.

Around you is nothing and everything, the vast potential of other worlds. Other ways of seeing. Other types of learning and intelligence. Networked organisms, altered time, collective consciousness. For a moment you are connected to all of this strangeness.

The most amazing thing? Your human brain reconditions itself to this reality. There is this other way to experience consciousness, and who knows? There may be more.

According to Jaron Lanier, one of the founders of VR, “Virtual reality is the technology that exposes you to yourself.” In the wake of a VR journey, a perceptual/reality-shift happens: when you take off the headset,” you have a chance to experience being born again in microcosm. The most ordinary surface, cheap wood or plain dirt, is bejeweled in infinite detail for a short while. To look into another’s eyes is almost too intense.”

Art isn’t about what is in the gallery press release. It’s about this moment where you are confronting yourself. The silence in the darkness after the god is gone, and the ringing stops.

You come to be challenged or healed, then you go back to your life.

*

When I take off the headset, the barely-curtains are beautiful.

The threads are so fine, they seem to hold light. I think of Arachne, the weaver who was punished by the gods for her art. Challenged to a contest by Athena, she won. Athena’s tapestry was propaganda for the gods, the ruling class, and it depicted them in positions of glory. The weaver Arachne’s tapestry was both beautiful, and true. It depicted the corruption of the powerful: the supreme leader raping women. The strong abusing the weak. Arachne won the contest, because art was greater. Athena punished her by destroying her voice: according to the legend, she turned Arachne into a spider. (Today, we know magic doesn’t work that way. What happened to Arachne?)

The curtains are so light they lift a bit off the ground. I feel lightness, too. I’ve had a consciousness-shifting experience, and contemplated something difficult. Reality itself feels just a bit more lightly held.

*

The common fear, in XR,

is that people could be put into a kind of Skinner’s box, a closed experiment in which a rat comes to believe levers produce food. The rat doesn’t know that, outside the box, food is not produced by pushing levers. Inside a VR headset, I am easily convinced that a touching a trackpad allows me to fly, clicking a trigger causes me to teleport, or that stepping off an imaginary plank can plunge me forty stories to my death. Like the rats, would I ever believe a lever produced food? It’s frighteningly easy to imagine.

Maya Georgieva, the director of the New School’s XReality Center, points out that the physical world, the one we are born able to perceive, is regulated. Why not virtual, augmented, and mixed worlds?

We’ve perfected storytelling, she explains. This is storyscaping. And it is powerful. It can be used to make us better, or worse. It can be used to create paths to save our planet, or to stoke the hatred, racism, misogyny, and xenophobia (and lever-produces-food myths) that will destroy it.

The art world is wary of new technologies, especially those that are harder to monetize as investment vehicles. We have to get over it. We have to talk about it. We have to ask for what we want. We should care that this is happening, and we should care how.

*

And now it’s time:

6:40 (at least in New York, April). The Whitney website allows me to see what isn’t visible from my tiny ground-floor apartment window: the rising of the sun.

I watch my browser shrink on my screen, in facsimile (it’s a shrinking screen-within-a-screen, but the illusion is good). As the image of my laptop minimizes, the landscape behind it is revealed. I watch the sun rising over the river and the Manhattan skyline. My shrunken laptop is now on a raft on the fast-flowing river (on my smartphone, the image is a shrunken phone). The shrunken browser still tracks the movements of my mouse across its tiny screen.

This is the cliched ending of the VR hero’s journey, where the storyteller returns to the real world, more aware of it after their journey into the unknown.

It’s a small, quiet reminder that I don’t exist in a room with a keyboard. I am tied to the planet and the rest of life. It is satisfying.

For sixty seconds.

As the browser fills the screen once more, notifications continue to ding. This is not a solution. It’s just a moment.

Seventh VR Definition: A coarser, simulated reality fosters appreciation of the depth of physical reality in comparison. As VR progresses in the future, human perception will be nurtured by it and will learn to find ever more depth in physical reality. – Jaron Lanier

*

One more thing about Lanier.

He didn’t grow up as a gamer. He was a scientist, a musician, a film student. An artist. As a teenager, he remembers poring over grainy art journals from New York, in the New Mexico State University library. The images he saw felt more exciting, more evocative than if they had been perfect facsimiles.

Our conditioned brains are constantly prodding at our surroundings, testing and learning. “Reality,” Lanier says with beautiful simplicity, “is what pushes back.”

Art is something like that too. I think about my experience with the Neo Kingdom, is searching for the ghost inside. Not the holy one, but the human one. The moment when the art pushes you, and something inside of you pushes back. The true experience of art isn’t the food-lever, or even your food-lever response. It is you, questioning what it was in yourself that just pushed back.

 

XR Exhibitions mentioned in this article:

The Neo Kingdom

Erin Ko and Jamie Martinez

In “Speculative Cultures: A Virtual Reality Exhibition” (free, through April 15)

curated by Tina Sauerländer, Peggy Schoenegge, and Erandy Vergara

Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Gallery at Parsons School of Design

66 Fifth Avenue, entrance at 2 West 13th Street

The Grass Smells So Sweet

Dani Ploeger

Campaign for a New Protocol
Timur Si Qin
Showing at Frieze, New York ($, May 2-5, 2019)
Randall’s Island
0 to 1 / 1 to 0
exonemo
viewable anywhere on the Whitney websites during sunset or sunrise
Feb 6, 2019—

the bomb

Smriti Keshari, Eric Schlosser

Film by Kevin Ford, Smriti Keshari, Eric Schlosser

—

Katie Peyton Hofstadter is a contributor to BOMB Magazine, The Shadow, and The Believer, and is the 2019 art blogger for The Best American Poetry. She has been published in literary journals including Gargoyle and Short Fast & Deadly. Three short plays were presented at this past summer’s Fringe Festival in Washington, DC. She is currently working on a series of interviews and articles about artists and creative professionals working with technology, including digital art and design, program-based art, and virtual and augmented realities. She teaches writing to art and design students at Parsons.