Reviews

[REVIEW] Saturn, by Simon Jacobs

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Saturn
Spork Press
36 pages, $12

Review by Emily-Jo Hopson

Saturn, by Simon Jacobs (of Safety Pin Review) is a brave oddity: a collection of 16 shorts about David Bowie, both semi-biographical and hyper-fictionalized. If the thought of reading a book of fan-fiction puts you off from picking it up, reconsider: It is a powerful, intelligent work, polished to the gleam in both theme and execution, at sentence and story level. Though Jacobs is clearly a Bowie fan, and Saturn is, by definition, fan-fiction, it is not a work of fan worship – the portrayal is affectionate, but not uncritical. It’s a fascinating, weird speculation on what life might perhaps be like in David Bowie Land, in David Bowie’s “sizable Manhattan apartment,” as the artist comes to the end of his multi-decade career. There are some accompanying illustrations, and these are equally honest; Bowie’s big teeth, jowls, stubble and age lines are all there.

Plot basics are open to interpretation. My reading: Having become “the ‘elder statesman’ of rock, an old man left to passively herald in the new as his voice goes reedy,” Jacobs’ Bowie is descending Mt. Olympus, and becoming mortal. He attempts to stave off the future and his mortality by revisiting and, increasingly, dwelling within his own iconography; purchased works of art begin to take on his features, flashes of Ziggy Stardust and The Thin White Duke appear in stormy windowpanes, movie and video game cameos are re-watched, obscure bit-parts re-inhabited. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] The Glad Hand of God Points Backwards, by Rachel Mennies

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The Glad Hand cover image
Texas Tech University Press
79 pages, $17.56

Review by Ryan Rydzewski
 

“What good is storytelling,” someone asks the speaker in Rachel Mennies’s first poetry collection, The Glad Hand of God Points Backwards, “if I can’t tell you stories the way I want to?”

The question implies an elusive truth in the stories we tell each other—stories altered, perhaps, by embellishment, by the unreliability of memory, or by lies of omission; stories modified to spare their receivers pain. But what happens when we stake our identities on such stories? What if those stories define not only ourselves, but also our culture and where we come from? Does the avoidance of pain really outweigh the importance of truth? What good are stories about our past, after all, if we can’t lean on them with confidence in our present?

The winner of Texas Tech University Press’ Walt McDonald First Book Prize, The Glad Hand of God Points Backwards tackles these questions by peeling back thick layers of memory and family history. The speaker, a Jewish woman in modern America, attempts to reconcile her grandmother’s stories with the historical facts available to her, and ends up relearning her own identity in the process. Mennies’s poems—steeped in religion, Jewish history, and carefully chosen imagery—are both straightforward enough for clarity and sparse enough to leave room for implication. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] My Family and Other Hazards, by June Melby

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Family
Henry Holt and Co.
320 pages, $25.00


Review by Denton Loving

When June Melby’s family decided to buy the Tom Thumb Miniature Golf course in Waupaca, Wisconsin, nobody understood the myriad ways such a game would affect and influence their family. Melby’s memoir, My Family and Other Hazards, details their relationship with the game of mini-golf, both as a business and as one of the constants in their lives. But Melby’s narrative isn’t merely childhood reminiscence, and although Melby reports about the interesting history of mini-golf, it’s so much more than an historical account.

Melby’s cleverness should be noted in many ways, most obviously with the book’s framework—eighteen chapters, one for every hole in the course. But the beginning of the course isn’t exactly the beginning of the story. The force behind this recounting of Tom Thumb’s history begins with a moment of crisis when Melby’s parents plan to sell the course. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Americana, by Rich Murphy

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americana
The Poetry Press
83 pages, $15

Review by Stanton Hancock

The literary canon is full of examples of writers who head out in search of America. In his third full-length poetry collection Americana, the aptly titled winner of Prize Americana, Rich Murphy embarks on his own journey across the American landscape. However, this is an America greatly changed from the land romanticized and idealized by writers like Kerouac. Rather, this is an America that has failed to live up to its potential. Murphy examines the shining city on the hill fallen to squalor and explores the superficiality of contemporary consumerism. This is not to suggest that Murphy’s collection is simply a cynical mockery of modern America but more so an exploration of American culture. In Americana, Murphy asks the tough questions, “Where did we go wrong?” and “What have we become?”

Whereas other explorations of what it means to be an American have often pulled back and viewed this country with a wide-angle lens, focusing on the open road and expansive metropolitan sprawl, Americana instead zooms in and examines American life from what is at times an uncomfortably close perspective. Consider the opening poem “Western State Penitentiary” which examines a life trapped in a prison. “Entering the prison yard / by way of the womb / and leaving only as the fertilizer / for another civilization . . . ” Continue reading →

Books We Can’t Quit: The Member of the Wedding, by Carson McCullers

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member
Houghton Mifflin Company
176 pages, $7.95

Review by Sara Watson

It is Frankie who compels me, with her particularly gloomy and yet somehow charming brand of adolescent anguish, to pull this book from my shelf again and again. And it is every exquisite sentence that keeps me reading through to the end. Check out this opening, easily one of the most beautiful in all American literature:

It happened that green and crazy summer when Frankie was twelve years old. This was the summer when for a long time she had not been a member. She belonged to no club and was a member of nothing in the world. Frankie had become an unjoined person who hung around in doorways, and she was afraid. Continue reading →

[Review] Bone Map, by Sara Eliza Johnson

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bone

Milkweed Editions
80 pages, $16

 

Review by Nicole Capó

 

There is magic to be found in the mundane.

“All moments will shine/if you cut them open,/glisten like entrails in the sun,” says Sara Eliza Johnson in her poem “As the Sickle Moon Guts a Cloud.” And cut she does, stripping away at the layers of those moments to find what lives underneath in her first collection of poetry, Bone Map. Though her work consistently touches on themes of death and disease, war and pain, it’s also full of color and light — It’s easy to imagine Johnson sitting in a sun-drenched room ruminating on the brilliance of blood.

Despite the ripeness of her poetry, Johnson’s vivid imagery stands in stark contrast to her careful use of language. Her phrases are slow and thoughtful, evoking images that are as striking as they are subtle. In “Frühlingstraum,” for instance, the narrator is reflecting on her hands while gardening, when suddenly:

I scrape my palm on a rock
        and it bleeds into the soil
(which will bring tomatoes, strawberries). It is good
to be alive.

Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Trip Through Your Wires by Sarah Layden

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trip

Engine Books

264 pages, $14.95

 

Review by James Figy

 

Memory—how much we dwell on it, how much we can trust it—pervades Sarah Layden’s debut novel Trip Through Your Wires. The story follows Carey Halpern, an Indianapolis native who has never come to terms with her boyfriend Ben Williamson’s murder seven years ago in Mexico—and the role she likely played in it. Then authorities find Ben’s stolen passport. The discovery sends Carey into a maelstrom of memories about that year abroad.   It forces her to face the past and try to move forward.

The book is set half in Indianapolis in 2003, half in Mexico in 1995-96. In the present, Carey is unexpectedly let go from a temp office job, which was the bright spot in her life. It’s a worst-case scenario. Besides her parents, whom she lives with and owes money, Carey is alone. She cut herself off from everyone following a series of poor life choices after her return from Mexico. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Fog Island Mountains by Michelle Bailat-Jones

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Fog

Tantor Media

225 pages, $17.95

 

Review by Julienne Isaacs

 

The gloomy cover design of Fog Island Mountains, Michelle Bailat-Jones’ first novel, immediately appealed to me, ripe for a spate of late-winter melancholia: streaking rain over a black-and-green mountainous settlement, the whole layered with heavy titular fog.

But true melancholia denotes passivity or depression, and on that level Fog Island Mountains’ cover design is deceptive. The novel, which won the 2013 Christopher Doheny Award from the Center for Fiction, is self-contained and energetic, as whimsical as it is sad, as playful as it is serious. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Pattern Exhaustion, by Nate Pritts

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pattern
Smoking Glue Gun
46 pages, $8

 

Review by Jen Lambert

 

What’s the word for when you’ve been doing something your whole life, like, let’s say walking, and suddenly you become so very aware of how you do it, maybe you put more weight on your left foot or you land on the balls of your feet just so, and now that you know this, you can never, ever walk the same way again? Now, the way you move is altered, and you can feel it with every step you take. What is the word for what this walking has become? This book is full of this word.

Pattern Exhaustion, by Nate Pritts, is everything I fear, the collapse of what I know and expect and the period after, the fumbling, the tripping through, until the new becomes the known. Maybe it’s everything we all fear: a brokenness, an unraveling of the familiar. Pattern Exhaustion is a manifesto on how to learn to be human when you are already human, or maybe it’s a lesson on the recovery of being too human, a nervous breakdown of the mind and the heart, the softening of everything we know until we don’t even recognize our own bodies, until we are empty, until we ask “how do I love when there is no one there?” Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Remnants of Passion by Sarah Einstein

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remnants

Shebooks

40 pages, $2.99

 

Review by Lynne Weiss

 

I thought I was going to love Sarah Einstein’s collection of four essays, Remnants of Passion, as soon as I read the first sentence: “Mommy Buddha is grousing again, hitching up his skirts and planting his big, black Chuck Taylors into the rutted mud of the road.”

I knew I was going to love it a few pages later when I laughed out loud, because I really love good writing that startles me enough to make me laugh. Having read the collection a few times now, it’s hard to remember exactly which sentence was the first one that made me laugh out loud, but it might have been the one in which our narrator/protagonist describes overhearing an ex-boyfriend (specifically, the one she describes as Terry-who-was-my-boyfriend-before-that-awful-business-with-the-cops-and-the-weed) describing a Thanksgiving at his parents house, and “his father grousing at the words we’re using on the Scrabble board, words he doesn’t know, words like textual and orality, which he says don’t sound like good Christian words to him …” The sentence goes on, though I’m not going to include it all here, because I’m supposed to be the one writing this review, and Einstein has a gift for writing long sentences woven of many strands of meaning and experience that carry a reader into the very sensations and sensuality of the world she is describing in these essays. Continue reading →