Reading Eric Beeny’s  Snowing Fireflies is like entering a dream about childhood. Even the look of the chapbook is playful””meandering font, drawings of little fireflies here and there, a picnic basket on the cover. The stories are whimsical, imaginative, but with something dark lurking in the background, threatening to turn to nightmare at any moment.

The title story, ‘Snowing Fireflies,’ reminded me of a twist on the raining-frogs urban legend, setting the reader up for entry into the magical in the everyday:

It was beautiful, their small bodies falling across the hills, glowing embers like dead stars, shooting off constellations, broken like pearl necklaces made of Christmas lights–

The story seems to veer into the sentimental at the end:

I opened the curtains and you looked out the window, smiling big. We ran outside in our pajamas and lay down in the glowing field, more of them falling, covering us.

Then Beeny lets the sinister creep in:

We made snow angels, like in wet cement, laughing, sinking slowly, our whole bodies waving goodbye.

‘Snowing Fireflies’ sets a theme for the book—like Grimm’s fairytales, the stories are warm, domestic, and feature children, but a mysterious and frightening edge creeps into each of them. In  ‘The Umbrella Garden,’ an unnamed man spies on a woman watering her umbrellas:

…he watched her sitting on her porch, watched her watching shadows–water from his hose dripped off their webbed petals into the darkness he cultivated, nourishing the source from which is darkness opened, from which it bloomed for her.

The violence is perhaps most apparent in ‘Cloud.’ Told from a child’s perspective, the narrative is a mix of the child-like with hostility and pain—the kid goes down the slide on his “tummy” then is “punched in the face” by a bully and scratched by a girl. The poem ends with the child

down in the sand like a cigarette butt watching them float by, the shapes they made like things I could recognize: gauze, an x-ray chart of a lung with holes in it, a spotted wing.

There are times, when reading this chapbook, that the stories appear to be something someone would write for therapy–‘Cloud’ is one of the most marked moments.

There are 15 stories in the chapbook, some no longer than a few sentences, and it ends  with the longest and most character and dialogue filled story, “Staycation,” about a family camping out in their backyard. Like the rest of the narratives the event is domestic, everyday, and harmless. Even though the dad is the main character, child-like words like “wildernessy” pop up. The story ties back to the beginning of the book with the subtle mention of a dead pet, ‘Firefly,’ and it ends on a mysterious note, with the father stating that it “feels like we’re not even here.”

I was tempted to stop reading this chapbook when words like “pajamas,” “Christmas lights” and “snow-angels” were showing up close together in the first and title story; it was getting a little too cute for me. But I’m glad I didn’t stop, because that troubling, eerie edge of dark cars parked on the wrong side of the street and children being punched in the face anchored the daydreams with the nightmare.

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Renee Emerson writes poetry and lives at a seminary in Kentucky with her husband.

Reading Eric Beeny’s  Snowing Fireflies is like entering a dream about childhood. Even the look of the chapbook is playful””meandering font, drawings of little fireflies here and there, a picnic basket on the cover. The stories are whimsical, imaginative, but with something dark lurking in the background, threatening to turn to nightmare at any moment.

The title story, ‘Snowing Fireflies,’ reminded me of a twist on the raining-frogs urban legend, setting the reader up for entry into the magical in the everyday:

It was beautiful, their small bodies falling across the hills, glowing embers like dead stars, shooting off constellations, broken like pearl necklaces made of Christmas lights–

The story seems to veer into the sentimental at the end:

I opened the curtains and you looked out the window, smiling big. We ran outside in our pajamas and lay down in the glowing field, more of them falling, covering us.

Then Beeny lets the sinister creep in:

We made snow angels, like in wet cement, laughing, sinking slowly, our whole bodies waving goodbye.

‘Snowing Fireflies’ sets a theme for the book—like Grimm’s fairytales, the stories are warm, domestic, and feature children, but a mysterious and frightening edge creeps into each of them. In  ‘The Umbrella Garden,’ an unnamed man spies on a woman watering her umbrellas:

…he watched her sitting on her porch, watched her watching shadows–water from his hose dripped off their webbed petals into the darkness he cultivated, nourishing the source from which is darkness opened, from which it bloomed for her.

The violence is perhaps most apparent in ‘Cloud.’ Told from a child’s perspective, the narrative is a mix of the child-like with hostility and pain—the kid goes down the slide on his “tummy” then is “punched in the face” by a bully and scratched by a girl. The poem ends with the child

down in the sand like a cigarette butt watching them float by, the shapes they made like things I could recognize: gauze, an x-ray chart of a lung with holes in it, a spotted wing.

There are times, when reading this chapbook, that the stories appear to be something someone would write for therapy–‘Cloud’ is one of the most marked moments.

There are 15 stories in the chapbook, some no longer than a few sentences, and it ends  with the longest and most character and dialogue filled story, “Staycation,” about a family camping out in their backyard. Like the rest of the narratives the event is domestic, everyday, and harmless. Even though the dad is the main character, child-like words like “wildernessy” pop up. The story ties back to the beginning of the book with the subtle mention of a dead pet, ‘Firefly,’ and it ends on a mysterious note, with the father stating that it “feels like we’re not even here.”

I was tempted to stop reading this chapbook when words like “pajamas,” “Christmas lights” and “snow-angels” were showing up close together in the first and title story; it was getting a little too cute for me. But I’m glad I didn’t stop, because that troubling, eerie edge of dark cars parked on the wrong side of the street and children being punched in the face anchored the daydreams with the nightmare.

—

Renee Emerson writes poetry and lives at a seminary in Kentucky with her husband.

Are Ben Mirov’s poems haunted? Perhaps not so much as they are preoccupied—inhabited by something that was there before anyone arrived, including, perhaps, the poet himself. Ghost Machine guides us through the narrator’s material occupations: food, friends, money, sex. The conspicuous absence of what corresponds to these occupations—nourishment, comfort, love—hums and glows under the poems’ surface. Here we meet a narrator who reveals this absence while keeping its mystery intact.

Mirov has a great knack for writing sentences that recreate the cadence and rhythm of everyday life. Owing much to the newly-minted poetic economy of email and text messages, each largely-unpunctuated sentence is only long enough to fulfill its purpose. Modified versions of the same sentence are repeated in a manner that calls out to Lyn Hejinian’s poetic autobiography My Life. While Hejinian’s repetitions are systematic, Mirov’s crop up unexpectedly, appearing on either side of the divide between conscious and subconscious thought. “My bed is an ear that cannot record,” for instance, is transformed fifty pages later into “her face is an ear that cannot record.” Thrilling moments occur when the narrator alters his language before our very eyes: “I change love poem to move pole.” These repetitions and transformations progress as effortlessly, and disturbingly, as recurring dreams (or nightmares).

In reading this collection, I couldn’t help but think of the fact that spirits refers to both ghosts and alcoholic beverages. It’s not a coincidence. The altered logic of inebriation is examined here with an objective clarity that is at once horrifying and hilarious. Sentences like “I’d like to kill a forty” and “I’m smashed after three drinks” point to the way our language treats alcohol as a living, willful entity. In Mirov’s world, everything is fair game for this kind of treatment: one may just as easily “go down on the breeze” or “eat a man made of dreams.” Booze is one of many spirits that underlie the superficial simplicity of these poems, influencing the poems’ inhabitants in ways beyond their control.

The deadpan extremity of Mirov’s tone allows for some very funny moments. Anyone who appreciates Twin Peaks will enjoy the seamless transitions from serious to ridiculous, as in “Ghost (1:42 a.m.):

The spirit world shifts behind me. There’s coffee on my shirt, not blood. I can’t absorb information on a bench in Dolores. I had a dream we were in a hotel. Your blonde friend was faceless. She offered me salsa.

As in Mirov’s other collection, I is to Vorticism, mundane subject matter is treated with a correspondingly plain voice; between the two, the unexpected emerges in the form of some unarticulated hilarity or doom just under the surface of everything. “I erase what I compress, “ Mirov says. Here, the boundary between the ordinary and the extraordinary is compressed so much that it disappears. Mirov finds ghosts haunting our shared language, just as he finds them haunting his private life. I arrived at the end of this book as if having just woken up on the BART train, with no memory of where I was before, and upon entering the somnambulant fog of San Francisco in search of a burrito, found instead the phantom afterglow of Ghost Machine.

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Iris Cushing lives in Brooklyn and is an editor for Argos Books.