Uncategorized

[REVIEW] Einstein’s Beach House, by Jacob M. Appel

Posted on by

Einstein

Pressgang

188 pages, $15.95

 

Review by Lynne Weiss

 

The theme of the highly readable and surprising stories that comprise Jacob M. Appel’s Einstein’s Beach House is aptly expressed in the first sentence of the first story, “Hue and Cry”—these stories describe things that are “funny” when they happen “to other people.” Things, the narrator goes on to explain, like “tarring and feathering, Peeping Toms, mad cow disease.” In a sense, all three of these things happen to characters in this first story, which describes the plans of a man dying of a brain-wasting disease to teach his daughters forgiveness by taking them to meet a paroled Level 1 sex offender who has recently moved into their neighborhood. The protagonist is 13-year-old Lizzie, one of the aforementioned daughters of the dying man. While everyone else in the neighborhood is protesting the presence of the parolee (metaphorically tarring and feathering him), Lizzie’s father is making plans to befriend him, and Lizzie and her friend Julia are the Peeping Toms who put a watch on the sex offender’s house and break into it to look for something unspecified. “We’ll know it when we find it,” Julia assures Lizzie, and Lizzie does find something in the course of the story, but it has nothing to do with the sex offender and much to do with her coming to terms with her father’s death and declining powers.

Appel is an award-winning writer whose work has appeared in more than 200 literary journals. According to his website, Appel is has an M.D. from Columbia and has been admitted to the bar in New York State and Rhode Island. Einstein’s Beach House, which is published by Pressgang, a small press affiliated with the Butler University MFA program, is Appel’s second collection of short stories. He has also published novels and collections of essays. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson

Posted on by

argonauts

Graywolf Press

160 pp, $23.00

 

Review by Jacob Spears

 

The unsettled prose in Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts reflects the intractability of her concerns in writing about identity, personhood, and how we make relationships with others. The white space that surrounds each paragraph is a return to the fragmentary form she developed in Bluets, which also found Nelson using the intimacy of her life to write about larger cultural ideas. The Argonauts, however, is a more difficult work, interested in expressing concerns about gender and normativity without attempting to situate those concepts through a fixed discourse. Every bit as erudite as her previous book, The Art of Cruelty, though not as magisterial and academic, The Argonauts embarks on a voyage of exploration in which the ship, like the Argo, “designates molten or shifting parts, a means of asserting while also giving the slip,” intent on retaining “a sense of the fugitive.”

Though it swells in and out of its address, Argonauts unfolds mostly as a confessional written to the second-person ‘you’ that is her partner, the artist Harry Dodge, who very publicly underwent a transition from female to male through the course of their relationship. “Something about identity,” Nelson quips, “was loose and hot in our house.” As a memoir, Nelson’s account of intimacy is at turns light and disturbing, charming and uncomfortable. What if where I am is what I need? she asks, citing Deborah Hay. “Before you, I always thought of this mantra as a means of making peace with a bummer or even catastrophic situations. I never imagined it might apply to joy, too.” Argonauts is an attempt to chart this course in which her position and experience—like language—is anchored in the moment of exchange. A place, context, or sentence inevitably shifts understanding, performance, and intention. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Breakable Things by Loren Kleinman

Posted on by

breakable

Winter Goose Publishing

71 pages, $12

 

Review by Brian Fanelli

 

Loren Kleinman’s third collection of poems, Breakable Things, has more than one reference to Charles Bukowski, and similar to Bukowski’s work, Kleinman’s latest effort contains more than one poem about drunken revelry and sexual adventures. However, the poet pushes deeper, beyond poetry about wine and sex. Breakable Things draws a stark connection between love and violence, either mental or physical, while highlighting themes of loneliness, trauma, passion, and moving on from past relationships.

Immediately, the opening poem establishes the theme of loneliness and longing, which haunts much of the collection. In the book’s title poem, the author establishes surreal imagery and juxtaposes it with a speaker whose fragility is exposed by the closing stanza. In the opening stanza, the speaker states, “My kitchen/is the only thing that exists/one room/floating up/above New Jersey’s faults lines,” before confessing in the second to last stanza that she is alone, eating, smoking and drinking in the kitchen, “the only girl in the world/hiding in cabinets/next to breakable things.” Images about lights circling around the speaker and the ceiling acting as its own solar system make the reader feel as buzzed as the speaker. What grounds the poem, however, is the confession in the closing lines, the fact that even the alcohol isn’t enough to comfort the speaker. Continue reading →

The Lightning Room: Blog People

Posted on by

[PANK] Interviews Editor Diana Clarke is a facilitator of the unexpected. She is a brilliant asker. Her approach both to writing and to conversations with other writers is vivid and curious, articulate and pointed. The fiery result of this approach comes across not only in her interviews, but also in her other work – including her film reviews, her writing about urban space and culture and her work translating Yiddish women poets. The stories she tells – and the ones she draws out of her subjects so deftly – are deeply dimensional.

Below, Clarke talks Lolita, lightning, pleats, vulnerability and Yiddish.

 

–Interview by Temim Fruchter

 

1. Many of us are scattered across the country and only know one another, and our writers, from the internet. Where do you blog from?

Mostly I blog from coffee shops. I find I can do the work much better–much truer, with more presence and intention–away from my home. My favorite cafe in Northampton, Massachusetts, where I’m living these days, has huge windows and great people-watching. I love sitting in the ambient communal energy, able to be still because of all the motion around me.

2. Okay, maybe this is a cheating question, but here goes: What is your dream question, the question you’d want any interviewer worth their salt to ask YOU? Continue reading →

MÉNAGE À TRIOLETS, by Heidi Czerwiec

Posted on by

A [PANK] Blog guest series for National Poetry Month

 

DILDON’T

 

http://metro.co.uk/2015/04/26/remember-your-loved-one-by-putting-their-ashes-in-a-dildo-5168393/

 

Your lover can fuck you beyond the grave.
I’m just going to put this here:
a widow has needs. If you crave
your lover’s dick, from beyond the grave
his ash is yours, forever your slave
encapsulated in plastic gear.
I can fuck myself beyond his grave –
I’m just going to put this here.

 

***

hauthorpicHeidi Czerwiec is a poet, essayist, translator, and critic who teaches at the University of North Dakota and is poetry editor at North Dakota Quarterly. She is the author of three chapbooks, including Self-Portrait as Bettie Page, and the forthcoming A Is For A-ké, The Chinese Monster. Recent work appears or is forthcoming in Barrow Street, Waxwing, and Able Muse, and you can visit her at heidiczerwiec.com

#AWP15 or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bookfair

Posted on by

 

 

–by Dan Reiter

 

bits and pieces

A Lawrence Weiner canvas at the Walker Art Center

 

I am in a dive bar in Minneapolis, waiting out the interlude between poets, watching William Tyler navigate a tractate of reverb. The thought of tomorrow’s panel discussion––”The Writing of Atrocity”––has me locked in a cycle of dread and procrastination. They expect me to speak ten full minutes, yet I have nothing prepared, no idea where to begin.

Behold the young literati: bold-rimmed, russet-bearded, baroque, well-inked. Come here for truth. Tyler’s pick sends out blistering messages; he manipulates his pedal until his guitar is playing three-part harmony. Why hadn’t I worked on my presentation last night? Who wastes a perfectly free evening unscrolling the #AWP15 twitter feed? But God, that tweet of Melville House’s––Saeed Jones (@theferocity) flaunting a gorgeous paperback of Baldwin’s last interview––was a classic: “James Baldwin and @theferocity give better side eye than you.” Continue reading →

MÉNAGE À TRIOLETS, by Heidi Czerwiec

Posted on by

A [PANK] Blog guest series for National Poetry Month

 

PATRIOT ACT

 

Acts of congress are necessary
to preserve the perfect union intact.
So why do some folks, so contrary,
think Acts of Congress are necessary
to mandate who may pair off, marry?
Listen: we the people fuck;
these acts of congress are necessary
to preserve the perfect union intact.

 

***

hauthorpicHeidi Czerwiec is a poet, essayist, translator, and critic who teaches at the University of North Dakota and is poetry editor at North Dakota Quarterly. She is the author of three chapbooks, including Self-Portrait as Bettie Page, and the forthcoming A Is For A-ké, The Chinese Monster. Recent work appears or is forthcoming in Barrow Street, Waxwing, and Able Muse, and you can visit her at heidiczerwiec.com

Pictures of You: Shabnam Nadiya

Posted on by

 “None for the Birds,” by Shabnam Nadiya

 

Fullscreen capture 3302015 22539 PMMothering didn’t come easy to us—not to my mother, not to me. Surely there are women who slip into that role with the ease of sword into sheath. Surely there are women for whom discarding their earlier selves was a battle early won. Not us though. Perhaps it is wrong of me to say that. Perhaps it is more accurate to say we discovered, in our own ways, that lullabies were just one kind of song.

To become a mother was expected; less so for me than for her. The leniency afforded by a later time was not much, but it did grant me a few more moments to breathe. Her vision of what her life should be was halted again and again by marriage, war, childbirth, migration. Obstruction (?b?str?kSH(?)n,äb?str?kSH(?)n/, noun) : a thing that impedes or prevents passage or progress. Sometimes you have to choose to let an obstruction merely ‘impede’ and not ‘prevent.’ Tenacity became my mother’s religion; she fed it to me straight and raw through the umbilical cord.

I broke my world apart, once, and put it back together. It’s not your world anymore, friends and family told me, You’re a mother now; it’s your daughter’s. I disagreed. If I didn’t learn how to hold on to my own world, how could I tell my daughter that the real question isn’t whether gravity can push you down or pull you up, it’s whether gravity can pull you apart? Continue reading →

Pictures of You: Michelle Bailat-Jones

Posted on by

 “we counted the birds off instead,” by Michelle Bailat-Jones

Fullscreen capture 3162015 84731 PMDeviled eggs, our mothers told us, that is what the men would want on a day like today. We woke at dawn, for there were cousins coming and neighbors and children. Our dresses grew limp from all the boiling. Some of us took the time to change before the cars started rolling up the back field—tires crunching, horns squawking—some of us ran outside anyway, grateful for the cool air on our faces.

Over at the creek, tree branches tssked their fingers at us in the eleven o’clock wind. You said there would be ants, swatting already at your skirt, smoothing and pulling at the darts, and I wished I’d chosen a floral print, too.

The men carried their bottles and blankets and footballs and jackets. Their hair was combed, their shirts open at the collar. They were forgetting the children already, shouting only half-hearted rules and reminders. Watching them dash and tumble in the grass and the weeds, then vanish at the wood in a line of bright heads. Continue reading →