Features

[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.

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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

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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.”

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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.

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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.

[REVIEW] Operating Manuals in the Dark by O.B. Bassler

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(Gauss PDF, 2019)

REVIEW BY CLARA B. JONES

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Speaker 1 : Taylor, hi! I haven’t seen you in ages! What are you up to?

Speaker 2: Dylan! What a surprise! I’m off to a new bookstore on 57th Street. I’ve heard they have a great selection of Postmodern poetry. How about you?

Speaker 1: I’m going to a poetry reading by the philosopher, O.B. Bassler—a new discovery. His debut collection is a hybrid book—poems in a variety of forms on recto pages only. I am writing a paper about the relationship between poetry and philosophy for my Innovative Literature class. Do you have a minute to talk?

Speaker 2: Ummm, sure, I’m curious! I’d like to know more about Bassler. Maybe I could borrow his book when you’re done with it? I am reading the Romantics, now, but am almost ready for something different.

Speaker 1: Bassler’s favorite poet is a German Romantic, Friedrich Hoelderlin; but, he progresses from beautiful lyric poetry to experimental writing—all displayed on recto pages. I think you would find his work interesting. Here’s another passage:

 

“one life is enough

and sometimes it is more than enough

sometimes it is more than enough

to make it through the day or hour or minute

and that is why what is painful

demanding excruciating even torturous

is so close to what is beautiful

that I can easily mistake the intensity of flight

for the intensity of any pleasure real or unreal

and hang onto it for dear life

unto the cleaving from life itself

if such is necessary”

 

Speaker 2: Definitely, lyrical, but with Modernist overtones, too—especially, repetition, like Stein.

Speaker 1: Yes, and Bassler uses other Modernist techniques—no titles, no punctuation, no capital letters. But, experimental methods, also—lots of white spaces define those particular poems. But, more than that. Some of his devices remind me of the ones often used by James Joyce—flow of thought and feeling, metaphor, symbolism, ambiguity, subtle overtones evoking history, myth, and the complexities of life. These conventions, appearing throughout the collection, bind the book together, as they do in Ulysses.

Speaker 2: I am curious to take a look at the book! My boyfriend is studying concrete poetry and visual experimentation this semester. He read an essay by Joe Bray who said that white space can be sites of humor, gravity, play, and reflection. I think of white spaces as erasures or ways to disrupt reading. Does Bassler use white space in those ways?

Speaker 1: Well, yes, in some ways, but there is not much humor or play—much reflection, though. The poems have lots of “interpretive power,” as Helen Vendler would say. Bassler is writing about the human condition over time—Time in the sense of Physics…

Speaker 2: …what does he mean by that?

Speaker 1: I can’t say, exactly, what Bassler intends to say, but I conducted a bit of research when I was reading, Operating Manuals in the Dark, and I learned that, just as Time is an indefinite process of events as a whole, Reality can be viewed in a holistic way. Listen to this:

 

“…the ultimate coincidence of the metaphysical and the physical is the greatest madness of all

now that the metaphysical clock keeps perfect time I should go back and read a number of books

starting with the ones that move forward and returning to the ones that move back

I’ll make a list of one hundred metaphysical books and one hundred physical books

and the two lists will be the same list”

 

Speaker 2: I never studied Physics. Do you think I’ll understand Bassler’s work?

Speaker 1: Oh, definitely! Music, image, rhythm, form, and language outweigh any particular message; and, you will see that Bassler’s poems include many iambs and that they become increasingly minimalist. In fact, if I have an opportunity to ask him a question tonight, I want to know whether his black cover and blank verso pages are references to Kazimir Malevich’s paintings and to his theory, Suprematism—Bassler may be trying to move as far as possible from objects—maybe, even, from objective reality and reductionism! Analyzing metaphysics seems to be his ultimate concern. Let me read one more quote: “the metaphysical clock/the metaphysical clock is not dead it is dying one second at a time/the metaphysical clock runs fast it must be corrected to match real time/not the same backwards and forwards and not the same as metaphysical time.”

Speaker 2: Ummm, I’ll have to think about that when I have the text in front of me. It’s 4 o’clock, and the bookstore closes at 6. I need to catch a bus. I’m so glad that I ran into you! When can we get together for lunch?

Speaker 1: I’ll e-mail you. You can borrow Bassler’s book, and we can discuss his reading. I hope he publishes another collection!

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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] Too High and Too Blue in New Mexico by Becca Yenser

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(dancing girl press & studio, 2018)

REVIEW BY GABINO IGLESIAS

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Nothing compares to hearing about a book and quickly finding a mind-blowing excerpt. That’s exactly what happened to me with Becca Yenser’s Too High and Too Blue in New Mexico. I read a single poem and knew I had to devour the rest and write about them so others could discover the power in Yenser’s words. Here’s the gem that opens the book, the tiny marvel that got me hooked, “How To Forgive In the Desert”:

 

First, attach yourself to the sky.

Go to the furthest edge of city: violet,

Starstruck, closer to god. Not everyone

Has the heart for it. Some hearts are less red.

 

Find yourself a cloud kingdom. Don’t

Come down easily, stay up in that thin air.

Don’t think about how you can’t breathe.

People have not breathed here for 11,000 years.

Second, try to remember why you’re here.

 

Slick rock playground. These are hippos

On their sides. There is never any water. Arroyo.

Say arroyo over and over until your throat is a canyon.

Third, pray to the creatures, especially the Whiptail

 

Lizards whose backs are lined like cucumbers.

Birds will come and go. Fine-dusted worries will land on your toes;

Coarser planets, in your hair. Running will result in headache.

Please, do not run.

 

Remember: You will never be able to see the plateau and the canyon.

At the same time. When you are walking one way, you

Will only remember what is behind you. When you look

Behind, you will only guess what lies ahead.

 

You do not know who you are anymore.

Now drive home. Shudder in the kitchen.

Watch him eat cold cereal as you try to explain

Your tiny heart; the handfuls of stones in your pockets.

That should be enough to get you to read it. However, this is a review, and that means I have to keep going. Too High and Too Blue in New Mexico is extremely short, so don’t expect a long review, but the magic in its pages is worth writing about. Coming in at just 15 pages, this is more a snack than a meal, but its length doesn’t detract from its strength. This collection is full of feelings, packed with illuminating words that show us the poet’s inner dialogue, desires, and struggles, and pulsating truths and questions that range from the personal to the universal. It also chronicles a journey and celebrates different places. Lastly, it speaks of a communion between the poet and the world around her, between the writer and nature, that is stunning:

Kingcup, Desert Cholla, Prickly Pear,

Pincushion or Spiny Star Cactus:

I wanted to pull up all the desert plants

From their roots, hairy and mad;

To keep a book of their deaths.

Yenser understands that there are no dividing lines between beauty and melancholy, love and pain, perpetual motion and the desire to return to the past. This wonderful collection reflects that knowledge. The poems in this book celebrate the poet’s life, but they do so in a way that communicates to the rest of us that there is plenty to celebrate out there; it’s just a matter of going our and finding it. I found some of that beauty in these pages.

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Gabino Iglesias is a writer, journalist and book reviewer living in Austin, Texas. He is the author of Zero Saints and Coyote Songs. He is the book review editor for Pank Magazine, and a columnist at LitReactor. You can find him on Twitter at @Gabino_Iglesias.

[REVIEW] The Way We Came In by Kelby Losack

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(Broken River Books, 2018)

REVIEW BY GABINO IGLESIAS

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There are two kinds of crime fiction. One kind is written by authors who think people do bad things because they are bad. The second kind, the kind that matters, is written by writers who understand that there is a plethora of reasons why someone would commit a crime. In the latter group, the authors producing the best, most authentic narratives are those who have been in direct contact with people like that and have experienced those situations. These authors possess a deep, nuanced understanding of the psychogeography of crime. Their work is generally devoid of judgement and representations that border on caricatures. Author Kelby Losack belongs to this group, and his work is a raw, visceral representation of desperation, hustling, and lives where there is no space to even fathom upward social mobility.

In The Way We Came In, Losack’s latest novel, a couple of brothers get together after one of them is released from prison. They have to make money to pay their rent, but regular work won’t give them enough, and they’re running out of time. What they need to do is clear, and it involves drugs and guns. It’s a path followed by many before them, and it’s supposed to happen smoothly, but things go south. They come up with a plan to stay afloat, but that also goes bad. Without the money they needed or the drugs to sell and after a failed attempt at fixing everything at once, the brothers end up in the hands of a man who plans to take their life for what they tried to do to him.

The Way We Came In is a tense, too-real story about coming up with a hustle when every other course of action is impossible. It is a narrative about need and desperation, but also about trying to do the right thing first and brotherly love. Losack explores the special relationship between brothers who love each other and trust each other in a way you can’t trust most people. These men share a gloomy past and the loss of their mother, and that pain brings them together above and beyond their blood. As with his previous novel, Heathenish, there is an unexpected emotional dimension to The Way We Came In that pushes it into an interstitial space between hardcore crime fiction and literary fiction.

There are many elements that work together to make this a required read for crime fiction fans (or fans of the unique type of narratives Losack writes, which I’ve always called hoodrat noir), and tension is at the top of that list. This novel moves forward at breakneck speed, and the action and tension ramp up at the same pace. Short chapters, explosive action sequences, and superb economy of language add to that:

“I jumped at the sound of knuckles rattling the screen door. You grabbed the burner off the table and for a few seconds, we sat motionless, staring at the front door. The rapper said, “Me desperté sintiéndome como si estuviera en la luna.” The second knock came heavier, more tenacious. I jumped again. You whispered, “Hide it,” waving a hand over all the yayo. While you crept to the window to cop a glance behind the bed sheet curtain, I held the unzipped lip of a backpack to the table’s edge and swept up all the contraband with my arm, then I shouldered the bag and spun around, ready to follow if you bolted, but you had tucked the gun in the back of your jeans and were reaching for the door knob, scratching your temple and shaking your head the way you do when you’re trying to suppress a laugh.”

While there is nothing quite like what Losack is doing in contemporary literature, the mix of real life struggles and keen observations are somewhat reminiscent of underground literary legend Peter Plate. Just like Plate did with San Francisco, Losack is a chronicler of the everyday struggles of folks on the verge between the right and the wrong side of the tracks. In The Way We Came In there are guns and drugs and people doing bad things, but they are not cutouts of criminals; they are people forced into illegal hustles. This lack of judgmental writing makes Losack’s work shine. He knows poverty, humanity, and doing whatever it takes while ignoring potential consequences are the holy trinity of crime in real life, and he brings that to the page beautifully. Furthermore, he does so while showing that the streets have many levels, and not everyone is on the same one despite sharing the same spaces:

“A vagrant who’d been begging at the intersection shuffled in on concrete-spattered tennis shoes. The toes of his shoes were split open so it looked like they were yawning when he walked. The old lady humming gospels smiled at him as he passed. The vagrant spent a good long minute in

the restroom and came out with beads of water dripping down his dreadlocked beard. He sat on a stool beneath a small analog television that hung from the ceiling. He watched a sitcom, laughing every time the studio audience laughed, and even when they didn’t. His laugh was a raspy cackle that was often followed by a red-faced coughing spell.”

Three quarters of the way into this books I was thinking: “Watch out, crime writers! Heathenish announced the arrival of an exciting new voice, but The Way We Came In proves Losack isn’t here to play.” Then I kept reading and reached the last two pages of the book. Losack had been holding out, keeping a piece of surreal magic in his pocket, like a desperate man trying to tell a story while holding an ounce in his fist. When I read the ending, my mind changed and my warning morphed into a decree: “Go home folks, the king of hoodrat noir is here and the game is over.”

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Gabino Iglesias is a writer, journalist and book reviewer living in Austin, Texas. He is the author of Zero Saints and Coyote Songs. He is the book review editor for Pank Magazine, and a columnist at LitReactor. You can find him on Twitter at @Gabino_Iglesias.

 

[REVIEW] But It’s a Long Way by Frédérique Guétat-Liviani (translated by Nathanaël)

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(Nightboat Books, 2018)

REVIEW BY GABINO IGLESIAS

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Most poetry about interstitial spaces and borders explores the permeability of imagined borders, the effects of different cultures and languages on psychological and emotional states, and the (im)possibility of (un)traveling back and forth, of finding home again. Some, however, go further than that and tackle all of it at once while simultaneously inhabiting, literally, the dividing line between languages and a multiplicity of places. In the case of Frédérique Guétat-Liviani’s But It’s a Long Way, the writing is at once an exploration of borders, a scream against a past filled with the nonsense that usually leads to migration, and a strange biography of a life spent on liminal spaces.

Despite being about many things, But It’s a Long Way is mainly about the multiplicity of borders. Language and cultures are borders. People are borders. Poverty is a border. Everything is a border. Everything is a thing that separates humans in some way. They are created, suffered, celebrated, and forgotten. They change people and force them into actions that may or may not want. Of all the things they are, however, the most important one is constructed. Recognizing that they are constructed is one of the biggest steps a person can give toward a better understanding of how borders work, but it can also lead to frustration for a variety of reasons. Guétat-Liviani’demonstrates a deep understanding of this bizarre frailty/impenetrability that changes depending on a plethora of sociopolitical elements:

borders/they are forgotten/when/it’s

to judge a president/and then later/they are put back/to prevent

people from crossing

But borders are more than just dividing lines that impede free movement. They are more than places where one nation ends and another one begins. They are more than geographical spots where cultures may be different and a different language may be spoken. Borders, in this book, are looked at in all of their significance, and that means they are also seen as problematic sociopolitical spaces and places where bad things happen merely because of what separation entails:

sometimes/there are even wars/because of/the separations

there are also/the borders you can’t see/between arabs and

the racist French/it comes/from generalization/the terrorists

they say you have to kill/in the name of islam/so people believe

all muslims/are like that/but there’s also racism

on the part of/maghrebians/toward/others

Guétat-Liviani’ writes about Otherness with knowledge and authenticity. This book is at once a travelogue, a diary, and a mosaic biography. The reader is pulled by words through an epic journey that covers France, Spain, Albania, Morocco, Kosovo, Serbia, Chlef, Algiers, Belgium, England, and more. With the geographical changes come emotional ones, but also languages, and this book is packed with people who speak French, Arabic, Spanish, English, and Turkish. These traveling, languages, and experiences frame an underlying narrative about perpetual otherness, a unique story about exile that is at once personal and universal.

The second part of this book is in French. As someone who writes bilingual fiction, I loved that. Real discussions about being outsiders/exiles/migrants can’t be had solely in one language, especially when the artist initiating the discussion or sharing his or her experiences isn’t a native English speaker. In that regard, the second half of the book is a celebration of difference that also makes a statement: language matters when discussing other cultures.

While there is much to like about this book, perhaps the most surprising element is the amount of hope packed into its pages. Yes, there is pain, loss, and coping, but the heart of the narrative, just like that of the poet, are full of beauty:

being kind/being mean/it’s a choice/it has nothing to do/with origins

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Gabino Iglesias is a writer, journalist and book reviewer living in Austin, Texas. He is the author of Zero Saints and Coyote Songs. He is the book review editor for Pank Magazine, and a columnist at LitReactor. You can find him on Twitter at @Gabino_Iglesias.

[REVIEW] Diary by Liliana Ponce (translated by Michael Martin Shea)

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(Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018)

REVIEW BY MAXIME BERCLAZ

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In the second entry of Diary, on the first page, we are met with the desire to return to the beginning: “I want to start over. It’s an exercise of abstention—to/develop the sensibility of the air.” This desire repeats, is actualized, moves from a wanting to a declaration, then an explication. From “I want to start over,” to “I begin again,” to “What is it that begins again? Writing,” or “What is it that I begin again? Writing,” whichever variation you prefer, the poems circle around a perpetual renewal of their own making, their own writing.

The writing that Ponce begins again and again is that of the construction of “another nature,” an impossible forest in summer, that through her language she makes immobile in its re-creation. The nature described is crystallized by abstraction, an idea that springs not from its own center but rather originates in the trace made of it by the sun and wind. Questions, concepts, and epigrams become halfway concrete while naturalistic descriptions undergo an equally partial sublimation. Rhetoric and image swap clothes, faces.

The oscillation between the two, this modulation of nodularity and hollowness, leaves the writing precarious. It is a writing suspended over the abyss of its birth because of its refusal to turn away from it, always on the point of collapsing back into silence. Yet this instability gives the language a density, a brightness of resonance, made possibly only by this proximity to its source, the site of its un-and-remaking. In the monotonous body of summer, Ponce sculpts a closed circuit where air can chase the beginning like a hound. Against the line of progress she makes a circle where “trees grow on top of silence,” where she can start over, again and again, free from history.

Or she would if not for the titular form. Yoked to the diary, the poems are pressed into the net of calendar time. It may be time at its most bare, twenty numbered entries, nothing to indicate a chronology other than the series itself, but the slip of forward motion is there. In Diary, “The future is like a hole,” one that leads to “the sinking into that diffuse space, that diffuse time, in which we will not be,” and yet the very organization of the book produces that hole in the act of reading. Despite the congealment of language it flows at zero viscosity, into the depths of the future.

Against the line, against the circle, we move into the spiral. Writing becomes coterminous with history. There are repetitions, moments of alignment between coils; crises of production, riots, revolutions, failures, but we can never go back to the beginning. We embrace the collapse that threatens language, we turn to the abyss not as a place of rebirth but a pure uncertainty. Through silence we find utopia, the space and time where we will not be. Only there can we find the pleasure of writing Ponce describes, “its anarchic joy.” Anything less would be suicide.

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Maxime Berclaz is a first year candidate for an M.F.A. in Poetry at the University of Notre Dame and an Editorial Intern at Action Books. He has been published in Poems for Freedom, an anthology of poems put together in support of the anarchist bookstore Freedom after its firebombing, and The Grape, Oberlin’s alternative newspaper.

[REVIEW] Sleeping Things by Holly Iglesias

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(Press 53, 2018)

REVIEW BY CLARA B. JONES

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Holly Iglesias is a prose poet, a critic, a translator (Spanish), an educator specializing in documentary and archival poetry, a feminist, a lesbian, a traveler, a recipient of fellowships and awards, as well as, a member of the Cuban diaspora in the United States. As her poems attest, she has a strong sense of memory and place, in addition to an abiding concern for the status and welfare of children and women. Sleeping Things (2018), her third full-length collection, includes poems highlighting her thesis, advanced in her critical essay, Boxing Inside The Box (Quale Press, 2004), that the prose poem, a form of ancient origin,  symbolizes the constraints borne by women [all oppressed groups?] boxed into bedrooms, kitchens, churches, bodies—literally, figuratively, and psychologically: “Oh, victim soul, don’t bite back. Instead, sink deeper/and deeper into the bed, into sheets thin as pity, pillows/flattened by the weight of piety.” (p 18, Sleeping Things); “Mother is the superior of our kitchen, her habit an/ apron.” (p 20). I first met Iglesias after a reading in a bar, Crow & Quill, in Asheville, NC (p 69), filled with a group of her dedicated admirers, with whom I soon identified.

Sleeping Things, a volume in three parts, is titled and introduced by Federico García Lorca’s words, a poet referenced elsewhere in Iglesias’ writings. Clearly, she has been influenced by Lorca’s Surrealism (“automatism,” unconscious processes: “ A Child’s Book of Knowledge…”, pp 14-15, 21; “Remote Control”, p. 26) and his “deep song” form (“The body sojourns but briefly in the material world…”, p 4; “The grandeur of possibilities soothed/my shame. Should I stand shoeless for days in Alpine/snow…?”, p 24).  Part I of Iglesias’ new, handsomely crafted and illustrated book, presents poems with multiple layers of significance, demonstrating the ways in which her childhood experiences, musings,  and recollections relate to historical and current events documenting the author’s routes to an awakening of socio-political consciousness: “We were a system, a sociology, a discipline of black/and white, its strictures softened by Gregorian chant/and myrrh, by the nuns pacing left and right [sic] as they/tapped the maps with a flourish—Holy Roman Empire,/Barbarian Invasions, Counter-Reformation.” (p 7). The poet’s vivid historical, psychological, spiritual, and metaphorical tapestries reveal her ongoing interest in causal, situational, interconnected, as well as, multi-level memory, time, place, relationships, and identity inherent to personal, local, regional, national, and international domains (see, for example, “Hit Parade”, p 27).

Part II of Sleeping Things reprints poems from her chapbook, Fruta Bomba [tr. Papaya or female genitalia; Making Her Mark Press, 2015]. Although Iglesias may be viewed as a “political” writer, these poems, like others throughout the book, demonstrate her lyrical, intimate style transcending sociology, literalness, and didacticism: “No words precede the reef, none follow. Only sea fans,/brain coral, clouds above the surface. Glint of sun, of/barracuda and baitfish in flight, the Gulf Stream/sweeping by, squeezing between Florida and Cuba….” (p 31).  Iglesias often refers to events in Cuba, Miami, and St. Louis, especially, the physical and emotional distances between these places, as well as, other locations. Her poems about tropical areas authentically reflect their sensuousness—color- passion-soul (components of Lorca’s duende), exoticism, mystery, and, sometimes, the potential for violence (“The boy, crying, clutches the neck of his rescuer as a/federal agent in riot gear yanks him away.” (p 44). Though Iglesias has clearly renounced the [optimistic] Modernism characteristic of José Martí and Lorca, the poems in Sleeping Things are not depressing or nihilistic. They reflect, rather, an awareness of the complexities and contradictions of the post-World War II political landscape, refusing to advance unifying solutions, as the Modernists did (e.g., Science, Psychoanalysis, Communism). Nonetheless, each section of this book demonstrates that Iglesias’ compositions are part of the experimental tradition, particularly, in their forms (e.g., pp 14-15, 17, 21, 42, 45, 56).

Part III is the strongest section of the book, in part because it highlights Iglesias’ strengths with words—double-meanings, word-parings, complete sentences, as well as, whole poems. Many titles, for example, are playful conceits (e.g., “Lobal Warfare,” “Uncivil War…,” “The Game of Crones”). Also, my favorite line in the volume occurs in Part III (p 60): “It was still life [sic] after she’d gone—hair in the brush,/scented talc, the impress [sic] of her younger self in the/cushions of the couch.” Further, the most lyrical, metaphorical, and imagistic poems can be found in this part: “The first time I saw the Mississippi from the air,/I knew my place, and I knew that home was a sinuous/ribbon lacing east to west, past to future, bondage to/possibility, appearing and disappearing like a snake in/new-mown hay as the sun flashed on its surface.” (p 51). In my experience, music and meter, Formalist criteria, do not often characterize contemporary prose poems; yet, Iglesias achieves these heights over and over again. Sleeping Things contains some of the most beautiful prose poems I have ever read.

Reflecting upon Iglesias’ body of work leads me to recall Louise Bogan’s line: “Women have no wilderness in them; they are provident, instead.” I wonder whether Bogan and Iglesias, are underestimating women and other oppressed or suppressed groups—their capacities for change, transformation, as well as, agency? Having said that, I think the reader will agree that many of the compositions in Sleeping Things are noteworthy, deserving a wide audience. Among feminist poets writing today, Holly Iglesias is one of my favorites, and, if her canon were larger, she would certainly deserve critical attention relative to Adrienne Rich, Alice Walker, and Elizabeth Bishop. Iglesias’ compositions are mature examples of the prose poem sub-genre, and, at their best, the writings stun in their ability to combine “color” with theme (additional Formalist criteria). I have learned a lot about style and metaphor from studying Iglesias’ project, and I am always left hungry for more after reading her books. Absorbing Sleeping Things was a pleasure, and I highly recommend this significant collection to anyone interested in compelling innovative literature.

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Clara B. Jones is a Knowledge Worker practicing in Silver Spring, MD, USA. Among other works, she is author of the poetry collection, /feminine nature/, published by GaussPDF in 2017.

[REVIEW] Give a Girl Chaos by Heidi Seaborn

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(Mastodon Books, 2019)

REVIEW BY CARLA BOTHA

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The end of another year is always a good time for reflection upon the chaos we all had to battle in order to survive. Give a Girl Chaos is Heidi Seaborn’s first full-length collection of poetry and is a tribute to the chaos around us. Her poems explore and celebrate the world with all its infinite chaos — disasters both personal and public, in this striking collection filled with pain and joy.  Not only is her work visually appealing, but every poem is carefully constructed as it navigates the space on the pages with choice syntax and diction, internal rhyme, metaphor use–lines and stanzas are easy to comprehend, and don’t demand a guessing game.

Readers will discover a hidden gem inside every poem, which makes it surprisingly easy to trust the poet on this journey of chaos. With unexpected twists and turns into the unknown, Seaborn delicately reminds her readers that turmoil is part of the world we live in, and shows how beauty, disappointment and invisible, sometimes visible forces of nature can surprise us, if we are willing to take a good look at the world around us.  The poem “Stop Motion” shares some of this beauty and disappointment all at once, but I am not going to give it all away, this is just a little taste of what is awaiting the reader:

 

Once in Santa Cruz

hundreds of monarchs swirled

around me

flirted

with eyelashes          fingers

then flew to Mexico.

 

 

Clutter of paper tigers

 

spread across a canvas of snow.

 

Wings fanned in all directions             frozen

in flight.

 

Sometimes we fail to see the signs— …

 

As a poet who has lived all over the world it’s clear that Seaborn doesn’t like the limitation of borders, this can be observed throughout her work. Her personal recollection of boundless experiences become poignant poems discussing a diverse selection of themes not often seen paired together, as many poets nowadays habitually, maybe unconsciously choose to focus mainly on one specific theme. Give a Girl Chaos challenges this phenomenon as it “breaks the rules” by reaching outside the confines of a ‘one theme collection’ — one of the main reasons why this makes for a fantastic read.  Divorce, sexual assault, earthquakes, bomb explosions, falling in love again, watching her children grow up, experiencing Thailand, Nepal, Mexico, the Arab-Spring in Egypt, drought in Tanzania. The last poem “How It Ends” brings this collection full circle, “Ah, the hopes of hornets, / you and me.  The road ends here.”  Seaborn gives her readers a tool for survival, which will remind them of how to endure chaos long after they have finished this collection.

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Carla Botha lives and work in the United Arab Emirates.  She is currently pursuing an MFA in poetry through NYU’s low residency program in Paris. She also serves on the editorial board of the Painted Bride Quarterly.  When she doesn’t work, she prefers to spend time at home with her four dogs, tail-less cat and a cup of black coffee.