[REVIEW] Seven Stages of Anger and Other Stories by Wendy J. Fox

Posted on July 2, 2015 by Sheila Squillante

Press 53
124 pages, $14.95
Review by Jody Hobbs Hesler

It would be unfair to say I hungered for more emotion in Wendy J. Fox’s Seven Stages of Anger and Other Stories, because my very hunger is what the writer meant to evoke. These are, after all, stories of the modern West – a sere place peopled by characters who are just emerging from generations of isolated farm and desert life or who are working desk jobs and living in the now tamed-to-sterility post-Wild-West suburbs. The emotional hollowness and dislocation of Fox’s characters matches their positions in and relationships with this New West.

This collection is Fox’s debut, as well as the inaugural winner of the Press 53 Award for Short Fiction. All the stories take place somewhere in the West – some in rural, others in urban settings, mostly in Washington state. Sometimes the characters are young and house-hunting, about to start their families. Sometimes they have fled a life they knew in the rural wasteland and are seeking a new way in an unknown place. Sometimes the characters are in love. Almost all the time, the love is mistaken and breaks. Some of the characters recur, and Fox varies points-of-view, usually between first-person and close-third, though the title story experiments with second person. All the stories hearken to something missing. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Goddess Wears Cowboy Boots by Katherine Hoerth

Posted on June 30, 2015 by Sheila Squillante

Lamar University Press

116 Pages $15.00 USD

Review by Amanda Daria Stoltz

Every poem in Katherine Hoerth’s Goddess Wears Cowboy Boots is a fresh gust of wind. In this stunning collection, Hoerth deconstructs the complexity of femininity, and the steep binary that makes feminine beauty both dangerous and powerful, sinful and godly. These poems are effortlessly steeped in nature and mythology, and each is as satisfying as Eve’s first taste of forbidden fruit.

Hoerth teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Texas Pan American, and it’s no mystery why she’s got a chili pepper rating on Ratemyprofessors.com; her poems are spicy hot. Goddess Wears Cowboy Boots is Hoerth’s second collection of poetry, and it keeps its promise to be as sexy (and powerful) as a Goddess wearing cowboy boots. Never have I read poems so encompassing of womanhood. They range from naivety to caution, from shamefulness to exhibition. They are as if Faulkner’s Caddy wrote poetry. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son, by Kent Russell

Posted on June 25, 2015 by Sheila Squillante

Alfred A. Knopf

304 pages, $24.95

Review by Joseph Demes

“I am homesick most,” Kent Russell writes, in I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son, “for the place I’ve never known.” Framed by a road trip with his father, from San Francisco to Martins Ferry, Ohio, and a biopic of Daniel Boone, Russell’s essays (which have been featured in n+1, GQ, Harper’s, and The Believer) are imbued with longing for a mythology he has never embodied – and possibly cannot embody. His subjects are pearls excavated from an oceanic high- and low-brow milieu. They include: the “partially deflated . . . most physically unhealthful” fans of Insane Clown Posse (ICP); an entrepreneur peddling a Crusoean retreat for the rich; a man self-immunizing to snake venom, attempting to break records; and Amish teens furiously competing in youth baseball leagues in the throes of Rumspringa (time when they’re allowed to tour the secular world and either reject or commit to their religion).

Russell’s most comfortable and poetic when speaking of sports, especially hockey. While he writes about baseball with awe – of its immaculacy and a necessary ascetic view about stats – hockey is tragic, an entropic system. Gone is the purist view that players must display both technical finesse and vicious pugnacity. Stratified team dynamics are the norm: virtuosic scorers, middling defenders, and golem-like enforcers. Russell resurrects John Brophy: an aged, terminally concussed minor-league enforcer, a casualty of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE): brain damage usually spotlighted in football. Russell won’t allow us to forget Brophy, though; Russell can’t let us shake the past, despite his attempts at divorce. There is pent-up violence and frustration in his prose, a disjunct between his masculinity and a mythology of American maleness. Russell worries that he may be the son his father begrudges, and yet still his patriarch’s rightful inheritor: “I am become Dad, destroyer of beers.” Continue reading →

The Thingbody, by Clare Louise Harmon

Posted on June 24, 2015 by Sheila Squillante

Instar Books

51 pages in PDF form, $10

Review by Maya Lowy

Pushcart-nominee Clare Louise Harmon’s debut collection, The Thingbody, is a kind of claustrophobic flipbook, a philosophic, psychotropic memoir. It sears your eyeballs, claws at your fingers, begs to be listened to. Ultimately, the book is more than the sum of its parts. It mosaics into a compelling peek into a burgeoning academic mind.

Forty-one pages of poems (available, for now, only in PDF: in many ways, Thingbody is a book-of-the-future) alternate between neon-bright blocks of color and postmodern blocks of text. If Gertrude Stein and James Joyce had ever had some sick, stuttering baby, it might look a little like Thingbody. Hand-drawn illustrations throughout remind us of the gruesome, homuncular, and yet somehow not indelicate body of this titular thing. “Call me Skinsack for I am the deindividuated,” Thingbody opens. “I am that which seeks violence seeks and lacks ethical privilege of person.” Continue reading →

[REVIEW] The Devils That Have Come to Stay by Pamela DiFrancesco

Posted on June 18, 2015 by Sheila Squillante

Medallion Press

304 pages, $14.95

Review by David S. Atkinson

I’m not particularly drawn to westerns, though I will read anything that appears well written, but I was curious when I heard Pamela DiFrancesco’s debut novel (her fiction has appeared in such places as Cezanne’s Carrot, Monkeybicycle, The Carolina Quarterly, and The New Ohio Review so she’s definitely a seasoned writer despite this being a debut) The Devils That Have Come to Stay described as an acid western. What was an acid western? I admit: I was intrigued.

A nameless man tends his saloon and misses his wife, who is off caring for her ailing mother, in the midst of the increasingly sick Gold Rush landscape. A mysterious diseased Indian comes in, and then an equally mysterious gold-toothed stranger looking for the diseased Indian and the gold that the diseased Indian has taken from him. The nameless man decides it is time to rejoin his wife. His wandering through the brutal and often metaphorical western land is The Devils That Have Come to Stay. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Fortress by Kristina Marie Darling

Posted on June 16, 2015 by Sheila Squillante

Sundress Publications

78 pages, $14.00

Review by Carley Moore

Marriage, it turns out, is a kind of fortress. Or maybe marriage just calls us to homes—some of us will wind up in cabins, others apartments, and still others McMansions. Regardless of whether or not we can afford the down payment, the mortgage, or the rent, the ideology around marriage and housing runs deep in America. How else to explain why so many of us went belly up in 2008 so that we could have a chance at owning our little piece of the American dream? And why do we continue to get married when the divorce rate is well over thirty percent?

Kristina Marie Darling’s newest collection of poetry, Fortress, is a spare examination on the ruins of a marriage and the pain of that loss. The book’s shape calls to mind a box, square rather than the traditional rectangle, and aside from the preface and the epilogue which are erasures of Elaine Scarry’s classic work The Body in Pain—the poems inhabit the bottom of each page in the form of either footnotes or spare lines of prose. The remainder of the page is blank white space, a field onto which we can project our responses. The layout of these pages reminded me of the story templates my daughter’s first grade teacher gives her students; lines at the bottom and a vast white space for drawing. Part of this book’s beauty lies in Darling’s commitment to the white space, to the meadow, garden, and flowerboxes in which the speaker and her husband grow poppies, lilies, and geraniums. This landscape is contested, the meadow is burned, the poppies die, and the husband tears out primroses so that he can begin “tending the garden himself, with all of the grace of a landscape painter.” The book makes references to Persephone, romantic poets like Keats, and opium traffics in a dreamy-drug induced haze, and I couldn’t help but think of those early mythological marriages (Leda and Europa) in which the proposal is nothing more than a rape. The speaker seems just as baffled by her marriage, and she wanders the fortress of her house and its grounds picking up the objects from her trousseau as if on a hunt for clues as to who she was before she became a wife. In my favorite poem of the book, the speaker asks, “What is there left to say? When we married, I became his wife. I can no longer remember what I looked like before that veil descended, or the vow exchanged between us.” This poem, like many others in Darling’s book, suggests that the pain of a ruined marriage is a surprise and in some ways, like Scarry’s premise, beyond language. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] My Very End of the Universe: Five Novellas-in-Flash and a Study of the Form

Posted on June 11, 2015 by Sheila Squillante

by Tiff Holland, Aaron Teel, Meg Pokrass, Chris Bower and Margaret Patton Chapman; Abigail Beckel and Kathleen Rooney, editors

Rose Metal Press

306 pages, $15.95

Review by Jay Besemer

Chances are you’ve already heard of Rose Metal Press. You’ve probably also heard of the five authors contributing to Rose Metal’s latest anthology, My Very End of the Universe: Five Novellas-in-Flash and a Study of the Form. Like the press’s previous anthologies (and like the flash novella itself), it collects discrete prose packets into a unified, diverse, quirky whole. It’s like a good potluck; we get reacquainted with two Rose Metal Short Short Chapbook winners (Aaron Teel and Tiff Holland), and see fresh work by three other writers. Each author also provides an essay about his or her writing process. Highlights include Chris Bower’s wacky account of how a mechanical failure determined his working method, and Margaret Patton Chapman’s exploration of writing as cartography. All the authors’ comments are fascinating—far from the textbook-dry blah-blah one often gets in the context of studies of literary form. A great introduction by the editors also fills us in about the working nuances of the flash novella animal.

My Very End of the Universe refuses to reduce the genre to a generalized set of rules and characteristics. Each novella is a rule-breaker, each author something of an outlaw. Form and content are as idiosyncratic across the book as are plotlines. You’ll notice some common ground, though. Some of it’s formal; the flash novella highlights the tension between positive and negative space (transplanted from a visual to a fictional context) almost as keenly as poetry, and you can see this throughout each novella in various ways. Negative space in these texts tends to manifest either as absence or contrast—think of a black and white photograph, and how differently the negative is “read.” Curiously, these are all family dramas, playing on memory and pain as well as absurdity and love. The evoked situations are intense, as are the emotions brought up in the reading process. This is where the positive/negative space comes in handy. As Meg Pokrass suggests, we need those absences as much as we need the text. The conceptual space taken up by what isn’t shown provides relief from the more emotionally demanding things that are shown. Moving between contrasts, or from presence to absence, allows us to move through the story, taking it with us—and thereby assisting in its telling. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing by Eimear McBride

Posted on June 9, 2015 by Sheila Squillante

Coffee House Press

227 pages, $24

Review by Brynne Rebele-Henry

Eimear McBride’s debut novel A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing is a runic chant for every woman, girl, and infant who has ever been born. McBride’s language is sexual, primitive, almost Stonehenge-like in its spacing and punctuation. The words pound against the page in a style that brings to mind the innermost working of organs in the human body, the language a jumbled elemental call for blood, desolate in its beauty, the prose reminiscent of a desert at four in the morning:

For you. You’ll soon. You’ll give her name. In the stitches of her skin she’ll wear your say. Mammy me? Yes you. Bounce the bed, I’d say. I’d say that’s what you did. Then lay you down. They cut you round. Wait and hour and day.

Continue reading →

[REVIEW] The End of the City by David Bendernagel

Posted on June 4, 2015 by Sheila Squillante

Pink Fish Press
252 pages, $13.49

Review by Hannah Rodabaugh

David Bendernagel’s experimental novel The End of the City is a Joyce-like rabbit hole of loss, introspection, and grief. It follows key points in the life of the main character – a guy named Ben Moor – from awkward high school athlete to trained assassin. It vacillates between the character’s past and present so often that you are not always sure of what is happening when. But that is Bendernagel’s intention.

The novel opens in Reston, a city that is noted for both its ruralness and its seedy New Jersey-like charm. To main character Ben, Reston is like a version of Robert Sullivan’s The Meadowlands – only without the poisonous waste and Jimmy Hoffa:

This place is a chink in the armor, a soft spot in a bad tooth. Here on the outskirts, the city’s street grid is bent out of shape, like a fence mangled by escapees wielding wire cutters—snapped, peeled apart, pushed through. The gully looks like it was created by a car bomb; the real cause was the collapse of an underground cave. The roads glitter with broken glass and come to an end at the edge of the gully, the pavement crumbling and falling into this depression. … On the other side of the gully—scrawny branch tangles, a junkyard overtaken by vines. Civilization crept across this boundary and failed or hasn’t yet taken hold.

Continue reading →

Books We Can’t Quit: The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

Posted on June 2, 2015 by Sheila Squillante

Little, Brown and Company

224 pages, $24.95 hardcover; $8.99 paperback

Review by Lisa Rabasca Roepe

I first read The Catcher in the Rye when I was in high school and I was best friends with one of our class outcasts—a boy, much like Holden Caulfield, who was misunderstood, who was smart but yet managed to be failing most of his classes, and, like Holden, was kicked out of school. Although, unlike Holden, my friend’s departure from school was only a temporary suspension brought on by him setting a fire in the guidance counselor’s office in an ill-fated attempt to destroy a test he had failed miserably.

At the time, this book showed me it is OK to be an outcast, and Holden Caulfield, with his dislike of phonies and movies, and his concern for the ducks in the lagoon in Central Park South and his friend Jane Gallagher, became my hero.

The novel follows three days in the life of Holden Caulfield. Many have speculated that Holden is telling the story to a psychologist while inside a mental institution. “I’ll just tell you about this madman stuff that happened to me around last Christmas just before I got pretty run-down and had to come here and take it easy,” Holden says.

His tale begins on a Friday night, the weekend before Christmas break, and just after Holden has returned from New York City with the fencing club. The team had to forfeit their meet because Holden, their manager, left all the equipment on the subway. We also learn that Holden has been kicked out of Pencey Prep for failing every class except English, and it’s the third school he’s been asked to leave. His history teacher, Mr. Spencer, asks Holden if he has any concerns for his future. “Oh, I feel some concern for my future, all right.” Holden says. “Sure. Sure, I do. But not too much, I guess.”

Holden goes back to his dorm room and goes to the movies with friends, even though he hates movies. It seems like a normal Friday night on campus until his “handsome roommate,” who is on a date with Holden’s friend, Jane Gallagher, comes back to their room. They get into a fight and Holden decides he’ll just leave school early, go to New York City, check into a hotel for the next three days and then go home.

Over the next three days, we see Holden struggle with loneliness and depression (“I was feeling sort of lousy. Depressed and all. I almost wished I was dead.”) Eventually he sneaks home to see his sister, Phoebe, and leaves a note for her saying that he is moving out West and asking her to meet him at the Natural History Museum so they can say goodbye. Phoebe shows up with a suitcase and says she is going with Holden. Holden’s story ends with Phoebe on the carrousel and Holden standing in the pouring rain watching her and crying because he was “so damn happy.”

Since high school, I have probably read this book a half a dozen times. I have devoured everything else by J.D. Salinger—Franny and Zooey, Nine Stories, and Raise the Roof Beam, Carpenters—at least twice. I feel the same way about books as Holden does, “What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.”

When I was younger, I wished I could have called J.D. Salinger and discussed Holden with him and told him about my friend who reminded me of Holden. I wasn’t aware of J.D. Salinger’s history with young girls and, in fact, I didn’t know about it until I attended the University of Iowa Summer Writing Festival and our teacher had us study For Esmé—with Love and Squalor. A few of the students were offended and refused to read or discuss the piece. I remember being annoyed with them because I just wanted to learn how to write like J.D. Salinger. Who wouldn’t?

It wasn’t until last year when I read My Salinger Year by Joanna Rakoff and Salinger, the 720-page biography by David Shields and Shane Salemo, that I started to feel creeped out. The story of how a 53-year-old Salinger wrote a letter to Joyce Maynard after reading her article, “An Eighteen Year Old Looks Back on Life” in The New York Times makes me uncomfortable, especially since she dropped out of Yale to move in with him. Maybe she wanted to learn how to write like him, too.

But I can’t turn my back on my one of my favorite literary heroes, Holden Caulfield. The Catcher in the Rye is a book that, regardless of its author’s life, I just can’t quit.

***

Lisa Rabasca Roepe is a freelance writer living in Arlington, VA. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Mid, Mommyish and Good Housekeeping.