Reviews

[REVIEW] Everywhere Stories: Short Fiction from a Small Planet, edited by Clifford Garstang

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Everywhere

Press 53

234 pages, $19.95

 

 

Review by Denton Loving

 

 

“You just don’t know who your enemies are. And your enemies are so often your friends, Molly. It will always be like this, I fear,” says Lana, the narrator of Alden Jones’ “Heathens,” one of twenty stories collected from twenty different authors from around the world and edited by Clifford Garstang in Everywhere Stories: Short Fiction from a Small Planet.

Lana is an American teaching in a village in Costa Rica. She is well loved by her students and the community, but in the story, she is caught up in teaching a lesson of a darker kind to Molly, a teenaged innocent visiting Costa Rica as part of a group of fly-by Evangelical missionaries.

Lana discovers that the world is dangerous, which is also Garstang’s first thought in his introduction to the collection. These diverse stories range from every continent, from toothless bikers in New Zealand to young women approaching adulthood in the Congo, from a boar attack in a German park to a suicide bomb in Israel. If these stories share a single theme, it is of this danger that permeates our human existence, regardless of our geographic location. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Witchita Stories, by Troy James Weaver

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Witchita

Future Tense Books

200 pages, $12

 

Review by Ryan Werner

 

Previous general portrayal of the Midwest has been decidedly not-my-Midwest: Garrison Keillor’s rosy-cheeked shitheads and the good-guys-win-bad-guys-lose world of John Hughes. My Midwest is boredom and its trappings—drugs and sex and Tori Amos tapes—and as those ideas run through Troy James Weaver’s Witchita Stories, it does to Wichita, Kansas what Gummo did to sub-rural Ohio or what Alice Munro did to small town Canada. It shows how those not on the map survive without the map.

Opening jam “Summer” is the best of them all. It doesn’t go far, because nothing in town goes far. “My sister is sixteen and she’s already at that stage in life where she’s bringing over guys that look like Fonzie or Vanilla Ice.” That’s the first sentence, and I wish I had written it. I wish I had written the next part, too, about these guys and their bad music, their misappropriated styles. How the sister is distracted to a point of neglect and how hot it is outside and how you just won’t die one way or the other, won’t melt away in the heat and won’t freeze to death in counteracting it.

And that’s it. 329 words and maybe ten steps off the front porch, a walk into the kitchen to eat what your sister didn’t make you. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Debridement by Corrina Bain

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debridement

greatweatherforMEDIA

98 pages, $16.00

 

Review by Jay Besemer

 

One risk with the personal review is that one’s own experience insists on taking up space in a conversation about someone else’s work. But a book like Corrina Bain’s first full-length poetry collection Debridement demands a greater degree of transparency and subjectivity in a reviewer. So here’s my little bit of space in this conversation: I am a transgender man, moving through a “transition” that will actually continue through the rest of my life, as my middle-aged, chronically ill body continues to work with the testosterone that has saved me. I experience and write about Debridement from that highly embodied, complexly irreducible subject position. It is not the same position as Bain’s gender non-conforming one, and that also needs saying, because these nuances of position are at once subtle, mobile, difficult to navigate and vitally important.

This means I am not the same reading (or writing) person I used to be. My previous version would have been uncomfortable weighing in on a book whose violence is both unapologetic and necessary. For that’s what Bain’s book is—violent and necessary, and violent by necessity. I’m not talking about the violence of content, though there is that kind of violence in these poems. I’m talking about a surgical violence. A radical, invasive disruption of one’s person and body for healing purposes. Only here, the poet is not telling readers about a healing trauma (or about healing from trauma). In Debridement, Bain is both holding the knife and under it. He is cutting away his own dead parts as well as ours. And make no mistake: we need this. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Life is Short – Art is Shorter: In Praise of Brevity, edited by David Shields and Elizabeth Cooperman

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Life
Hawthorne Books
320 pages, $18.95

 
Review by Dinty W. Moore

Life Is Short Reviews Itself

[An assemblage of sentences lifted, Shields-style, from Life is Short – Art is Shorter: In Praise of Brevity.]

Objects are real. Details matter – to the devil and to everyone else, including and especially writers. It was assumed that I would have a fedora hat of my own by the time I was twelve years old. In honor of the hybrid spirit of the form, stage your prose poem in such a way that you get at what is to you one of life’s crucial paradoxes. You’re white an dewy an tickin like a time bomb an now’s the time to learn. This assignment is similar to the one for “Object,” except the image or object you choose is now in dynamic movement. In the middle of the ride something grazed my head. There was a metal bar hanging loose along one of the corners, and each time we whipped around it, the bar touched me. Write two stories or essays, each 500 words long, in which you first see through the male Continue reading →

[REVIEW] strange theater, by John Amen

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strange

 

NYQ Books

112 pages, $14.95

 

Review by Brian Fanelli

 

In his essay “Litany, Game, and Representation,” poet Tony Hoagland says that American poetry is informed by “new tensions, new understanding, and new possibility.” He adds that American poetry currently has no preference for “narration, description, or confessions of the autobiographical self,” and poems of the “new poetry” shoot off in dozens of aesthetic directions. In many ways, John Amen’s latest book, strange theater, is very much of the “new poetry” that Hoagland defines. The collection contains different aesthetic directions, prefers the surreal over straightforward narrative, and though many of the poems are dedicated to people, the poems generally resist the confessional and autobiographical.

There were shades of the confessional in Amen’s previous collections, but strange theater relies more on strange and unusual images and poetic leaps of imagination. In the beginning of one poem, “yr opportunity,” there is an image in the opening stanza about scorpions crawling across someone’s palms on a Saturday and waltzing, dragging along violins. In another poem, “the son we never had,” there are hints of confessional narrative in the opening line, but the poem, like many in the book, turns to the uncanny and the surreal, perhaps as a way to address more complex issues or even memory.

the son we never had
crawls through our kitchen
linoleum cracking beneath his impatience

he studies us as we sleep
sifting through our trophies & urns
clutching his banister of space

he wanders the dim corridors
glimpsing a bedroom that might’ve been his
streaking invisible prints on panes & ledges

Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Lucky Alan and Other Stories, by Jonathan Lethem

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lucky

 

Doubleday

 

$24.95, 157 pgs

 

Reviewed by Jonathan Russell Clark

 

 

The short story form serves Jonathan Lethem well. An imagination and intellect as keen as fertile as Lethem’s can take any idea and run with it for as long as he likes, which can result in, for instance, his disastrous 2009 novel Chronic City. Or it can produce something wondrous like The Fortress of Solitude. But Lethem’s stories, like his essays, allow him to explore a conceit with the same brilliant mind while simultaneously preventing him from wearing out his literary welcome.

His third story collection Lucky Alan and Other Stories shows Lethem in total control of his prodigious skills and cultural insight. These nine stories cover many of the themes Lethem finds himself returning to again and again, but their economy ups the punch considerably. But perhaps most important to the success of these tales is Lethem’s acute understanding of the worlds over which he hovers.

Take, for instance, the story “Their Back Pages,” which features a group of long-forgotten comic book characters crash-landing on a tropical island. I couldn’t help but be reminded of George Saunders’s “In Persuasion Nation,” a similarly satirical romp featuring characters not from comics but from commercials. Saunders’s aim is very different, yes, but there’s also something else: Saunders necessarily remains at a distance in “In Persuasion Nation,” because the object of his story (commercials) is not a world of which he’s a part. Lethem, who has himself written comic books, clearly knows the realm of paneled storytelling intimately, so “Their Back Pages” wins as both a funny satire and a knowledgeable artifact of Lethem’s vast cultural reach. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] A Taxonomy of the Space Between Us, by Caleb Curtiss

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 taxonomy

 

Black Lawrence Press

37 pages, $8.95

 

Review by Katie Schmid

 

Caleb Curtiss’ first chapbook is a chronicle of a sister’s death in a car accident; it is the story of the moment of the death and the moments after. These poems are also poems of memory, as the speaker here watches the past become inflected with (and infected by) the knowledge of the loss that is to come, as in “Self-Portrait With My Dead Sister” where the speaker reflects on a day at the beach with his sister when they were young,

…one will grow up and keep on being real,

while the other will grow up and be dead.

In this memory, the speaker’s sister is already dead though she still lives on the beach. The bald truth of a sister whose memory is both alive and dead seems an obvious enough observation about the nature of loss, but in Curtiss’ poems, it becomes a paradox, something that is troubled and fraught, an obsession—Curtiss questions what it means that his sister can be both real and not real, what it means that he dredges up her memory, over and over, to live in these poems, and finally what the space of grief is for. Continue reading →

Books We Can’t Quit: To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee

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mockingbird

Harper Collins Publishers

336 pages, $25.99

 

Review by Amanda K. Jaros

 

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, a book that has never gone out of print, is a particularly relevant story right now. This year, the book marks its 55th anniversary and is being celebrated in concurrence with the publication of Lee’s second book, Go Set a Watchman. Despite this much-anticipated release, I find Mockingbird significant today not so much because of Watchman, or the fact that it continues to be a staple of high school English classes, but rather, because every time I turn on the news I see stories of prejudice as our society continues its struggle for racial, sexual orientation and gender equality. Though Mockingbird was first published in 1960, in many ways it could have been written last week.

The story revolves around Scout Finch, an eight-year-old tomboy who spends her summers playing outside with her older brother Jem and their friend, Dill. The three play-act scenes of the townspeople’s quirky habits, they sneak out at night to lurk the neighborhood, and they are obsessed with their reclusive, and unseen, neighbor, Boo Radley. Radley is a phantom of speculation who inspires both fear and fascination in Scout. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Starve the Vulture, by Jason Carney

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vulture

Kaylie Jones Books
300 pages, $15.95

 

Review by Amye Archer

 

When I first heard Jason Carney read in a small, sweaty room on the south side of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, he read a story about pie, the kind his Mamaw made for him, and how one act of kindness by his Mamaw melted him into a million pieces. He cried. I cried. We all cried. This is the Jason Carney I know: the brilliant poet who can hold a crowd in the palms of his gentle hands, even in the most desolate of moments. But this is not the Jason Carney we meet in his new memoir, Starve the Vulture – not at first anyway.

Jason Carney was not born, he was built. Starve the Vulture, is the story of that process. A braided narrative takes us through three separate journeys: a bipolar childhood in which a young Jason bounced between an abusive father, a desperate, young mother, and the soft glow of his grandparent’s home; an adolescence fraught with violence, addiction and despair; and, finally, a single day – the day that would come to mark the end of Jason’s drug addiction. All three threads combine to create the three-dimensional world of an addict who would overcome a lifetime of emotional and physical brutality. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] The Story of How All Animals Are Equal & Other Tales, by Matt Runkle

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animals

Brooklyn Arts Press

158 pages, $15.95

 

Review by Anna Mebel

 

Matt Runkle is both a writer and a visual artist currently studying at University of Iowa’s Center for the Book. He writes short stories and prose poems, makes collages, comics, and art books. Though The Story of How All Animals Are Different & Other Tales is his first book of short stories, Matt Runkle has also published a zine called RUNX TALES. As an artist, he is interested in assemblages, juxtapositions, things that most people would discard. These artistic practices filter into his writing. In The Story of How All Animals Are Different & Other Tales, Runkle mixes fairy tales, love stories, satire, dystopia, prose poems, and careful observations of the ordinary.

The stories are often very short but always efficient, showing us flashes of worlds similar to our own, yet slightly off—an apocalyptic scenario in which people live out of their cars, a supermarket located on the border between two countries, a town in which the punishment is election to public office. He finds “places where comings and goings occur from every side,” where borders dissolve and relationships become unstable, letting worrisome aspects of human nature emerge. Continue reading →