Book Review

[REVIEW] Ghosts of America by Caroline Hagood

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(Hanging Loose Press, 2021)

REVIEW BY DAKOTAH JENNIFER

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Why can’t women write great American novels? What does it mean to be a woman, rewritten by the male gaze, actively striving to tell your own story, imbue your own importance, all while the American canon makes you a fragile, breakable, sexual thing? Caroline Hagood’s Ghosts of America: A Great American Novel demands much of all celebrated, American male writers. Norman Roth III, also known as “Herzog,” is a professor, Vietnam veteran, and well-known American author, visited by the ghosts of women who were the subjects of the novels he’s written.

Herzog, a white male professor and author, the spitting image of lackadaisical literary success, is introduced as a painfully honest man, who takes almost nothing seriously, especially not women. His novels on Jaqueline Kennedy and Valerie Solanas have not only received critical acclaim, but “gotten [him] laid since the 1980s. Because what is literary academia if not the overweight, ugly, balding white guy’s tenured ticket to young tail?” Herzog is a sort of caricature of a lazily patriotic, white, aging, authorially academic, lewd male American man. He speaks profoundly then immediately undermines it with a vulgar, superficial quip or lack of care.

Hagood’s feminist look at the idea of the canon, at the male American writer and erasure of female traumas and histories, is artfully done through the simultaneous retelling and condemnation of the author in one. In the format of A Christmas Carol, Herzog is visited by these women he’s subjectified to the male authorial gaze, and made silent as they retell their stories. Much of the piece feels like a class, a history lesson, but one that is so vital. frequently ignored, unseen, deprioritized. Hagood’s women retell their stories, restore their tongues into their own mouths, relieve themselves of the trauma and the triumph of living through it. We begin to hope that this sort of reckoning Herzog gets becomes an epidemic– that historical women everywhere who were made into objects just for the story will get a change to haunt the authors who imposed their gaze.

Herzog spies on a nude neighbor, defiles women in every other sentence, burdens us with his… personal habits, and seems oblivious to the women he’s used to garner his awards and “get laid.” In all, he’s a self-interested, oblivious academic who still has some profundity to him, and in that way, he is a perfect archetype. He is not only his cruelty but also pensive thought and understanding. In one moment he is recounting when he, “Cut [his] hand on broken glass while sloshed, then rubbed it around on my typewriter paper like something good would ever come of it,” and in another, he writes, “a whole history of building empires on others’ backs. The language of equality in our Constitution was never a promise, but just a super clever and sneaky way of controlling the greatest number of people.” Herzog is not unintelligent, and that perhaps, is what is most truthful about the paradox of it all– he is bright and sexist, he is not uninformed, he is uninterested in knowing. Hagood crafts Herzog’s character, however coarsely, into the perfect mirror image of every man known and unknown who gained praise writing about women who were nothing but tools.

Jackie Kennedy is the perfect pious woman–survivor of tragedy and still standing. A warrior written as a fragile woman made into a First Lady by her husband and broken by the same hand. Jackie’s story is given the most time and is the most informative, and for good reason– Jackie speaks out as a hero, the main character, the protagonist victor, instead of the supporting actress society, and Herzog had seemingly made her. Jackie does not start when John F. Kennedy enters her life, and though she is changed by his death, she does not stop when he leaves. She is “already dead,” but she continues to live, and that is her heroic story, not her downfall.

Valerie Solanas is the woman made crazy by her story. She is the newer sort of woman, who understands, “and yes men are also abused and have to survive it, but I’m not qualified to write that book.” Her more modern take, her futuristic way of being, makes her seem eccentric, but through Hagood’s intricate prose we see that Solanas is not crazy but a visionary–a woman who speaks what she sees, a woman who has been harmed by the male world she attempts to live in. She says, “Nobody knows this, but to be defiled is to attend your own funeral, but you’re on the ceiling and nobody can see you,” and its lines like these that strike us within– Hagood speaks through the characters into women. You feel it deep inside, and suddenly, you are Valerie or Jackie or Medusa or Philomela– Hagood has a sneaky way of making all women one, with just a line or two. Hagood, in contrasting Solanas and Kennedy, allows for both extremes of women– the crazy woman and the perfect woman– and shows us how, through the very same author, they are both inadequate, weak, fragile, sexualized in all the wrong ways. It is not only a compelling story but a strange sort of belonging.

The piece is subversive, entertaining, and informative, in that order. Once Jackie appears, the narrative captures the reader and keeps them. Herzog, though he seems to intentionally be this way, is quite an uncomfortable and hateable character, and grinding through his introduction proves to be a challenge. The male gaze is critiqued, revised, and therefore closely examined through a sort of isolated reckoning– this book is not only a literary work, but an act of revision and restoration.

Ghosts of America: A Great American Novel reframes the ghosts of America as women, true heroes alongside valorized men, and rewrites the consistent wrongs of the canon. In short, through almost fragmented chapters, Hagood’s quirky story takes a gander at redemption– for the canon, for women, for America.

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Dakotah Jennifer is a twenty-year-old black writer currently attending Washington University in St. Louis. Jennifer has been published in Across the Margin, HerStry, Popsugar, The Pinch Journal, Voyage YA, Protean Mag, Apartment Poetry, Paintbucket.page, the Grief Diaries, The Confessionalist Zine, Oral Rinse Zine, and Ripple Zine. She was accepted into the Juniper Writing Workshop at Amherst, The Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and the Writing Workshops Paris with Carve Magazine for the 2021 year. She won Washington University’s Harriet Schwenk Kluver award for the 2018-2019 year and The Dramatics of St. Louis Prize for the 2020- 2021 year. She has also published two chapbooks, Fog (Bloof Books) and Safe Passage (Radical Paper Press).

[REVIEW] Luster by Raven Leilani

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FSG, 2020

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REVIEW BY CARISSA CHESANEK

Raven Leilani’s Luster is a smart and bold exploration of self-worth and self-appreciation wriggled from a love triangle gone strange and a sense of urgency to understand the world around us. This short book is both sexy and sad, angry but funny, with impressive literary prose that is blunt and mischievous, luring you with little intention to let go. In Luster, there are vital essences buried deep within the core, more visible as you peel back the droves of sticky layers. And once the characters and their world are slowly revealed, we find there is very little that’s different from our own. These themes and revelations allows us to understand the impact of those around us and the startling influences that make us who we become.  

Edith, who goes by Edie, is a black woman in her twenties working as a managing editorial coordinator in publishing and living in a run down Brooklyn apartment with a roommate she shares very little connection. Much of Edie’s lackluster in life can be credited to the art she no longer creates, not after her last chilling portrait of her dead mother sprawled on the floor wearing only one shoe. Her desire to create is still there, but so is the distraction of sex, which she falls victim to, often tittering oversexed, and later categorized as “sexually inappropriate” in the office. Her escapades or escapes can be hard to endure with constant displays of demeaning ridicule and unsettling exploitation. With Eric, an older white man she met online, it’s no different, comparably worse with his blatant confessions of violent fantasies that lead to aggressive behavior. It’s clear that Eric and his chauvinistic demeanor dominates Edie, guiding her through this destructive manipulation of class and sex. But this story is not tired or trite, because there is also Eric’s wife, Rebecca, the master with all the rules, who takes us on an unexpected path.

Leilani shifts from past to present with assertiveness, giving us valid insight to Edie’s childhood and her relationships with men at an early age. What’s interesting about Edie is her self-awareness, her revelation of bad relationships that stem from the nonexistent one with her father: “This was the contradiction that would define me for years, my attempt to secure undiluted solitude and my swift betrayal of this effort once in the spotlight of an interested man.” We then learn of Clay, the mixed race older man who played off Edie’s innocence and grief with carefully fine-tuned tactics of a chronic abuser.

Rebecca, a medical examiner for the VA, is as interesting and complex as they come. She’s agreed to an open marriage but seems less than keen on the idea, and yet, she invites Edie to stay in the home without Eric’s knowing. There is something sinister here, the appeal of shock value toward her husband perhaps, but there’s also Akila, the adopted twelve year-old black daughter, who paves more questions into Edie’s appearance: Why is she really invited here? The prolonged uncertainty and swaying companionship between Rebecca and Evie is complicated but not all obstructive. It is because of Rebecca’s unusual hospitality that Edie has a new and inspiring space to start creating once again.

Leilani has given us a novel of our times with prevalent topics circling social movements of Me Too and Black Lives Matter. Discrimination based on gender and race are transparent with pay gaps and sexual abuse, socioeconomic status, and racial profiling. The lives of Eric and Edie are parallel in their social and economical differences which are as alarming as they are informative. We can learn when we are aware. This book paints an accurate portrait of society’s many weaknesses while also spotlights potential hope. In a world where we’re actively searching for that one great muse, often times we can find it staring back at us in the mirror.

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Carissa Chesanek is a New York City-based writer. She holds an MFA from The New School. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, Cagibi, BookTrib, CrimeReads, Booklist, among others. She is a non-fiction reader for Guernica magazine, a member of PEN America’s Prison Writing Committee, and volunteer at Center for Fiction.

[REVIEW] Later, My Life at the Edge of the World: A memoir of outliving AIDS and its shadows by Paul Lisicky

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Graywolf Press, 2020

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REVIEW BY DWAINE RIEVES

There are places we go to by choice and others where we simply wind up.  The far tip of Cape Cod is, in Paul Lisicky’s new memoir Later, one of those places where your presence may only seem a choice.  This captivating tale opens in the early 1990s, a time when the artists and writers in Provincetown, or “Town” as we come to know it, are constantly shadowed by AIDS.  It is AIDS and the risk of the disease that, once you’re in Town, seems the ultimate decider.  In the opening scene, we find a young writer arriving at the local arts center, his initial thoughts preoccupied with his family’s fears, especially his mother’s worry.  “She is afraid of my living among my kind, especially now that so many young men are dying of AIDS.  She is expecting me to die of AIDS.”  It seems one’s fate in Town is one with AIDS, and the choice to live here—even if only for a year or two as a developing writer—is no cause for celebration.

A major theme in the early literature of AIDS was urgency.  The poet Bill Becker titled his 1983 collection of poems An Immediate Desire to Survive.  Immediacy was a warning, lateness no poetic conclusion. The journalist Randy Shilts constructed And the Band Played On along a timeline that leaves one breathless, the need to do something about this situation far too critical for anyone to sit and ponder.  In Paul Monette’s memoir, Borrowed Time, the story races over only a few months.  From the 80s until the mid-90s, the years for gay men were summarized in body counts, time always too short, science always lagging.  Reflection, the ability to dwell in a place and contemplate this untimely world, was no unrushed option for a young gay man, that time-out simply inconceivable given the chase of the virus.

In Later, by contrast, we have a gift of time: a place for contemplation even as the shadow of AIDS still chases us.  Such is the magic of living among the artists trying to create an art of life itself “at the edge of the world.”  Lisicky writes, “Town moves on two tracks at once.”  There’s the typical forward time and also “lyric time, which has nothing to do with the clock.”  The residents of Town thrive on lyric time, this patchwork of images and actions they share with us in this luminous read.  “It’s time as enacted in a painting or a poem or a song.”  Lyric time is set up as the opponent of AIDS time.  Lyric time allows us to sit with ourselves and think, for “lyric time moves off to the side and stalls: lateral instead of linear.”  Lyric time in Later allows us to sit with the lives we’ve witnessed and will witness, including the lives within us.  We flit with the narrator from lover to lover because flitting is all that this brief world allows us.  We dwell with the one who seems to care.  He moves on, and another steps up from the shadows.  Or should, his arrival only a matter of time.  Time is the beautiful lover luxuriating in the heart of Later.

Later also carries us from the years when AIDS seems inevitable for many gay men to 2018, a time when the risk for AIDS can be profoundly lowered and the disease itself treated.  The narrative sweep in Later is linear, the inhabitants of Town faithful in trying to help the new arrivals find their own direction.  These new residents have, after all, chosen this place where time and risks constantly mirror the body’s urges.  Who we are, including our sexual nature, is a given, but where this nature might take us can be a choice.  In Town, life itself feels a choice, the shadows close but also understanding.

The forward push of Later allows for detours.  We are presented with the narrative in parcels, short sections that could be taken as patchy prose poems within each chapter with rich, challenging language.  The structure of such finely stitched sections may easily remind you of a quilt, a collection of carefully stitched life stories, people and legacies to contemplate, the risks and rewards in where we choose to live, love, and in our all-too truncated time, develop.  Not an AIDS quilt now in prose, not really.  More a comforter as people in Town might stitch it, more purpose than opinion.  In Later, we’re given the opportunity to feel deeply the places where we’ve been, the lives in which we now find ourselves, and the places where we must yet go.  Later gives us time to suffer and also create, a place to comfort ourselves in our choices.

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DWAINE RIEVES was born and raised in Monroe County, Mississippi. Following a career as a research pharmaceutical scientist and critical care physician, he completed an MA in writing from Johns Hopkins University. His poetry has won the Tupelo Press Prize for Poetry and the River Styx International Poetry Prize. His writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The Baltimore Sun, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Georgia Review and other publications. 

[REVIEW] The Geese Who Might Be Gods by Benjamin Cutler

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(Main Street Rag, 2019)

REVIEW BY ESTEBAN RODRIGUEZ

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For many poetry collections, the theme of place is central to the images, ideas, and emotions they seek to instill in their readers. In the book Romey’s Order, Atsuro Riley couples a unique regional dialect with the memories of growing up in the backwoods of South Carolina to create a rich and highly percussive collection. In the work of B.H. Fairchild, the Midwest – both its people and the landscape – shapes the speaker’s understanding of not only the region, but the world at large. For Benjamin Cutler, southern Appalachia courses through the veins of his debut collection, The Geese Who Might Be Gods, and with a voice that is clear, lyrical, and maturely measured, we are gifted with poems that are both beautiful and hauntingly memorable.

The beauty of Cutler’s collection lies in its ability to weave the historical with the personal, and to create a narrative where the understanding for a greater truth is found in the relationship between the two. In the opening poem “Peeling Bark for Bread,” the speaker ponders a documentary that details the Sami people (from Scandinavia) and the manner in which they’d peel bark and grind it into flour. This rather random fact inspires the speaker to do the same to their mother’s dogwood, albeit unsuccessfully. The mother, “in grief and rage,” laments the speaker’s actions, but when the splintered edges grow back within the year, the “leavened loaves under the sun” remind both speaker and mother (and reader as well) how wounds can heal and eventually flourish.Many poems center on familial relationships, either through the frame of the speaker’s childhood or through the eyes of the speaker as a father. In one poem, the speaker remembers turning to his brother and his brother’s friend to help fix a lawnmower, and when these two “shamans garbed in grease / and denim” have resurrected this “child” (the lawnmower), the idea that family serves as a foundation and backbone to one’s own needs is illuminated in a subtle yet thoughtful tone. In “Butterfly Funeral,” the speaker, now a father, shows his son how certain moments require our attention and care rather than the more common act of capturing a scene through a photograph:

See their color:

a spill of ink on yellow paper.

See their movement:

wings like hands opening

and closing in uncertain prayer.

 

Remember so you can tell her:

they’ll be gone when we pass again.

 

Looks like a butterfly funeral,

 

he said and—

with such reverence—

 

brushed one finger

over on attendant’s wings.

 

It shuddered but did not fly.

 

These poems are heartfelt, but without falling into the trap of being overly sentimental. Page after page, Cutler seeks to create images filled with emotional and intellectual nuance, delving into subjects such as A.L.S. (“How to Speak With the Dying When the Dying Cannot Speak”), grief in the wake of a school shooting (“A Refusal”), and the anxiety surrounding survival should the world enter its last stages (“A Tomato Sandwich for the End-Times”).

One of the most intriguing aspects of These Geese Who Might Be Gods is how Cutler can take a seemingly grotesque image and find meaning that isn’t apparent on the surface. In “Bear Paw,” the speaker finds a “fraction of a crucifixion – / a single [bear] paw nailed to a telephone pole.” After bathing in a shallow pool, he returns to the paw and ponders the last moments before its death:

How heavy he must have fallen,

how silent and still

 

as blade cut through radius,

tendon, and ulna—as spike

pierced the palm’s pad, paw

 

lifted high for a sign:

flesh as dark and bloodless as guilt,

bone as pale and dry as forgiveness.

 

There’s a certain sense of guilt that the speaker feels for the bear, wondering if it experienced defiance or fear before it was killed. Nevertheless, the speaker ultimately feels cleansed (or forgiven) of having to witness the aftermath of such a strange, brutal act. Even when the images are not based in reality, they remain stark and offer a chance at greater reflection. In “Waking From Tooth-Loss,” the speaker navigates a dream where his teeth fall out and expose “nerve / and purple-blooded absence.” He doesn’t know exactly what it means that he’s losing teeth so rapidly in a dream (some interpretations of this would indicate that it symbolizes anxiety and the way we think we are perceived by others), but he knows that once he has awakened, he cannot regain the feeling – however ominous it is – he had when he was asleep:

But now that I’m awake,

I have forgotten the secret.

Now that I’m awake,

my teeth are here, rooted to bone,

and you are not.

I cannot ask. You cannot answer.

Hurry your return,

if you can, because soon I will swallow

something that tastes

too much like loss.

These teeth are tired of chewing.

The “you” comes in unexpectedly, but it can be in reference to the “I” that the speaker left behind in the dream (a separation, if you will, that he experienced when he woke up), and this loss, this constant “chewing” of everyday life, reveals that there are always moments out of our grasp, those we can only hope to retell.

There are debuts that are good and there are debuts that are great precisely because they remind you of the power of poetry and how important it is in capturing the environment, the people, and the moments that shape our most basic understanding of this world. The Geese Who Might Be Gods is an incredible book that examines our relationship with nature, loss, family, and with ourselves, and with that “endless hungry search” for meaning, we find light in these pages where we least expect it.

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Esteban Rodríguez is the author of Dusk & Dust, forthcoming from Hub City Press (September 2019). His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Arts & Letters, The Gettysburg Review, New England Review, Puerto del Sol, Shenandoah, TriQuarterly, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. He lives with his family and teaches in Austin, Texas.

[REVIEW] Soft Science by Franny Choi

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(Alice James Books, 2019)

REVIEW BY DANA ALSAMSAM

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Franny Choi’s Soft Science begins with a quote from Donna Haraway: “We are excruciatingly conscious of what it means to have a historically constituted body.” This sounds at first like a Butlerian critique of societally constructed gender roles. But upon looking into Haraway and discovering her expertise in cyborg’s as a feminist post-humanist argument, it becomes clear how Haraway’s quote relates directly to Choi’s collection. In critique of traditional feminist theory, Haraway uses the cyborg to deconstruct boundaries, not just of gender, but also of the boundary between the human and the other (the animal or the machine). Soft Science takes on these boundaries full force. As the collection goes on, we sometimes forget if the speaker is a cyborg or a human, and this confusion is intentional. This more politically charged quote is immediately juxtaposed with a much softer, humanizing quote from writer Bhanu Kapil. This juxtaposition becomes characteristic of the collection which places heartbreaking and humanizing poetry about the intrinsically gendered, political experiences of the poems’ speaker next to cyborg poetry that feels (and sometimes is) computer generated.

A series of poems called “Turing Test” begins each section, mimicking the experiment which tests how well computers can simulate human speech. These poems shimmer at meaning but don’t arrive at it. They instead use constellations of language society associates with queer, Asian, femme people, and we leave these poems with the feeling of perceptions that are constructed: from phrases like “duck duck roll” to “sodium bicarbonate” to “undress me anywhere,” we see this piece as reflective of a cultural machine that takes the other in, labels them, and spits them back out with a prescribed vocabulary for identity.

This feeling of artificial construction continues in one of the first poems of the collection, “Making Of,” which I feel is exemplary of the collection’s themes in both the cyborg poetry and the poetry embodied by a human speaker. It begins with the lines: “When a cyborg puts on a dress, / it’s called drag. // When a cyborg gets down / on her knees, it’s called // behavior.” This immediately recalls the initial quote from Haraway and the idea of gender performativity. Because the cyborg is man-made but appears natural and human, it becomes an avatar in this collection for the cultural construction (the man-made construction) of the collection’s speaker. The speaker goes on to eat both of her hands: “Each digit, // a salty word whose meaning / furred my teeth.” Here the speaker tries to make sense of her own body, to put it into language but only given the vocabulary that society allows, meaning comes out illegible, furry.

The woman speakers in this collection are constantly attempting to uphold the pressures and expectations placed on women but are simultaneously burning with a desire to be seen—not read for meaning but understood. In “Acknowledgements,” the speaker says, “I’m / still smiling, smiling until my gums crack, until / I’m a photograph.” And then in “Shokushu Goukan for the Cyborg Soul,” a play on the Chicken Soup for the Soul collection, the speaker says, “so I am both the woman holding the camera and the woman / being opened by it—nothing special about that.” The cultural expectation of women is so deeply ingrained that they uphold and regurgitate these norms, become the image they are told to be. This collection shows women picking up behavior or appearance because, in some way, they are told to, or don’t know how else to be.

All of the subtle gender theory scaffolding the collection does wonders when we land on intimate, personal poems from a human speaker who longs for love and understanding, so much so that she finds freedom in promiscuity, and later experiences shame. This cycle of emotions is familiar and relatable for many young women. Fulfilling their desires is impossible when they are sexualized but then shamed for the actual act of sex. Even the shame is constructed. Next to the cyborg poems which evoke ideas of culturally constructed and performative ideas of gender, these poems about the inherently gendered experiences of a femme body entering the cultural machine are deeply impactful.

I’ll end with a piece that resonated like no other. Unlike the tables, slashes and prose blocks that create the marked experimental queerness of the collection, “On the Night of the Election” remains simple in short 3-5 word lines utilizing standard punctuation. Here, the speaker recalls the night He was elected, a night which, as a queer femme and child of an immigrant myself, still brings tears to my eyes. The speaker masturbates in a hotel room while watching the news and contemplating numbness—of the body, of our country—and what it means to feel hopeless under an administration that not only labels the other but despises the other. This piece requires no explanation:

 

“is there anything that works

that isn’t a machine for killing

or doomed to collapse or stolen

from the sweat of the hungry?

Maybe my body was all three,

there, in the hotel room,

liquor-shot and reaching

in every direction

for an answer,

a complete sentence, or,

if nothing else, an exit,

a view, at least, of what

waits on the other side

of despair…

 

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Dana Alsamsam is the author of a chapbook, (in)habit (tenderness lit, 2018), and her poems are published or forthcoming in The Massachusetts Review, North American Review, The Shallow Ends, Salamander, BOOTH, The Common as well as critical work in The Rumpus. Her work has been supported by a fellowship from Lambda Literary’s Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices.

[REVIEW] road, road, road, road, road by M; Margo

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(MA Press, 2019)

REVIEW BY CLARA B. JONES

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M; Margo (Margo Emm), Editor of the online poetry journal, Zoomoozophone Review, identifies as “transgender” and “non-binary.” I have called them a poet of angst, because of their penchant for dark ruminations about “gender dysphoria” and life, in general. road, road, road, road, road (hereafter, “road”) is their fourth collection of innovative poetry in a conceptual mode whereby precise rules were determined in advance, fixing structure and form. According to Margo, “road is a book of chance-based texts, comprising random wikipedia clusters.” Each “text” includes 50 words, and the collection includes 50 poems.

I have followed their career as a poet and musician since first encountering their writing which is characterized by skillful use of repetition, “psychological transformations,” metaphor, innovations of form and hybridity, as well as, creative manipulation of embedded meanings. For example, road‘s reliance upon the numbers 5 [pertaining to one’s love life or to human anatomy] and 50 [seeking personal and spiritual freedom] invoke a concern for the subjective, as well as, for mathematics and formal operations [e.g., a random numbers device], and the number 5 is fundamental to our base-10 numerical system. Thus, in one “text,”

 

“five menfolk murdered in /

addition     five     suffering /

half-finished facsimile of /

the    groove     a     powerful /

slapdash botanist altogether /

his     lifecycle,     also     a /

longtime     fellow     of     the /

Normal  Times  gone  by…”

 

Furthermore, in addition to repeating the word, “road,” five times in the collection’s title, Margo is most likely calling the reader’s attention to one of the word’s dictionary meanings—“a series of events or a course of action leading to a particular outcome,” a perspective that they no doubt intend to challenge by using statistical probability to compose his 50 “texts.” This bold point of view is reminiscent of Geert Buelens’ comment concerning the “constructed nature” of contemporary poetry that employs “smart, rich, and didactic language.” In addition to possessing these features, however, Margo’s “texts” in road extend traditional definitions of what we mean by “poetry,” and Kenneth Goldsmith, as well as, others, have asked, without agreed-upon answers: “What does it take to be a poet in the Internet Age?”

The first page of road includes an “Author’s Note” entailing 5 statements. The author’s notes delimit and bound the collection, preventing the randomized “texts” from sinking to the levels of nihilism, mimicry,  or gratuity. Indeed, as Marjorie Perloff has stated about “conceptual” poetry, what may appear random or undirected is, in the hands of a skilled craftsperson, work borne of intentionality, choice, and forethought. The first note states: “The road is a literary form that is similar to a poem but not quite the same as a poem.” Paraphrasing Marcel Duchamp, “It is not a poem; it is an idea of a poem.” One would like to know more about Margo’s views concerning what constitutes poetry, particularly, in a literary climate with increasingly blurred boundaries between poetry and prose, indeed, poetry and anything else [e.g., see Flarf, “epic” poetry, L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poetry, internet poetry, vispo, and other experimental forms].

Note 2 states: “The road is a fifty-word text-collage produced by means of chance operation.” Importantly, though, as Goldsmith has pointed out, most literary formulations require a human “hand” at some point in any process, even if random-order machines or tables determine final results [Is there ever a “final result?”]. Perloff has said of “collage” poetry, “Each element in the collage has a kind of double function: it refers to an external reality even as its compositional thrust is to undercut the very referentiality it seems to assert.” Thus, parts of a collage are juxtaposed in relation to others—and the juxtaposition may be “chance-based” or not. Each of Margo’s “texts” may be viewed as a whole, as well as, as a pastiche of discrete units, both with [or, as Margo will point out below, with and/or without] significance to the reader. Thus, “Physical     model     of     a / bacterial     flagellum     is / expressed (hence the season, / first at Pocono Raceway and / tenth at the track for teams / not being allowed to run….” The author’s incorporation of white spaces not only slows the reader’s motion across words, but, also, inserts a visual component, and Ulla Dydo has discussed “visuality” in relation to the poetry of Gertrude Stein.

Margo’s Note 3 asserts that, “The road is a semantic pathway leading to no particular semantic destination.” The author’s “texts,” then, are not goal-directed, contrary to the dictionary definition quoted above, bringing to mind the roles of luck and chance in anyone’s life. There are limits to intentionality and choice, echoing the ongoing scientific debate about the validity of “free-will.” Goldsmith has written that a feature of some experimental works is to be, at the same time, “unboring” and “boring” and that writers need to “re-imagine our normative relationship to language,” a process certainly performed when Margo’s methodology produces lines such as, “(arrowheads and hammering / devices) km team event New / York at the age of 79,….” Goldsmith has, also, said, “We need to employ a strategy of opposites: defamiliarization and disorientation.”—a good description of the effects produced by Margo’s “texts,” in which the author defamiliarizes our common notions about what a poem is and disorients the reader-viewer so that they are unable to make those assumptions.

“The road is not necessarily asemic nor exactly pansemic, but perhaps post-semic.” is Margo’s fourth note. Again, they emphasize that the texts are random but not, actually, random at all. There is, then, “method” to “madness,” and a domain exists beyond physical and material formulations of reality [i.e., according to mathematics, events-in-the-world cannot be random and non-random at the same time], referring back to the numerical symbolism of #50 presented above.

Note 5, “The road is something that can be read or not.” reflects a topic commonly discussed by Goldsmith relative to “conceptual” writing. He has pointed out, “Conceptual writing is a type of writing that doesn’t require a readership.” He goes on to say that unread writing is characterized by “illegibility” that disrupts the normal reading process. I understand these pronouncements to mean, in part, that language, as conventionally understood, can be re-arranged in ways that make a text [sic] un-knowable, thus, in some sense, un-readable. Such manifestations of phonemes, graphemes, and morphemes render some experimental texts, essentially, unreal and inaccessible.

What, ultimately, is “post-semic” or, even, post-conceptual writing? Are we necessarily blurring distinctions between the written word and visual art? Are we inventing “texts” comparable to Kazimir Malevich’s revolutionary black paintings, creating literature’s own version of Suprematism—moving as far away as possible from the representational and the objective—the expected, the learned, the social, the “normal—toward the numerical 50?”  Wherever these inventions take us, I suspect that Margo will be at the forefront of innovation. Every reader-viewer who appreciates, or is curious about, experimental literature, however defined, will want to read road, road, road, road, road, as well as, Margo’s past and future work.

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Clara B. Jones is a Knowledge Worker practicing in Silver Spring, MD (USA). In 2019, GaussPDF published her collection, Poems for Rachel Dolezal.

[REVIEW] Great American Desert by Terese Svoboda

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(Mad Creek/Ohio State University Press, 2019)

REVIEW BY JODY KENNEDY

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Terese Svoboda’s Great American Desert is a collection of twenty-one short stories linked by a common geographic location in the Middle West. The stories examine our relationships to one another, the land, and the natural environment beginning with the prehistoric era “Clovis Camp” and ending with the post-apocalyptic “Pink Pyramid.” Svoboda is the author of five collections of poetry, five novels, a memoir, a book of translation, a novella and stories, most recently the biography Anything That Burns You: A Portrait of Lola Ridge, Radical Poet.

I had never read any of Terese Svoboda’s work and was immediately captivated by the light-hearted, humorous and often stark poetic prose found in “Clovis Camp” and in the stories that followed. One of the book’s most prevalent themes, echoing the Biblical Adam’s dilemma, is touched on in “Clovis Camp,” and the following “Major Long Talks to His Horse,” but its the third story, “Dutch Joe,” that seems to sum it up perfectly:

“Lands sakes is what we’re always exclaiming because land is all we’re good for, all the sakes there is or ever will be. Each of us, fifty or so strong, have fled a country crowded with kin or else lorded over, every inch of the land spoken for down to the last hop of hare, or squawk of fowl. We settlers have pushed all the way into the pockets of Lady America, hoping to take her wealth for ours, her endless waving grain and her cattle in abundant herds. Through our boot soles, thin as they are, we perceive the urgency of the land’s fecundity to be ours, it is so empty and waiting. Even the clouds suspended above us are our clouds, borne in the reflection of our great desire. We slake our thirst for our own land by possessing Lady America with the plow. We are homesteaders.”

The love story, “Bomb Jockey,” contains a series of fantastic events offered up in Svoboda’s lyrical and often startling poetic imagery:

“The waitress at the cafe? remembers her well enough to have a conversation but she’s short, more interested in the mercury spill she saw on her way to work. How beautiful and strange the great gobs of liquid metal were, slithering all over the ground in amongst the snowed-in crocuses.”

In “Ogallala Aquifer” a man-made mountain of toxic dirt begins to grow out of a government-sanctioned garbage dump reminding us of our own present-day Great Pacific Garbage Patch (an estimated 1.6 million square kilometers of trash and plastics floating somewhere between California and Hawaii) or the ugly chemical pesticide wars going on in the Arkansas Delta farming community or any of the other numerous transgressions we continue to commit for personal or collective gain or convenience and against our better environmental interests.

The final story, “Pink Pyramid,” one of my favorites, is a post-apocalyptic vision of America made more bearable through Svoboda’s deft poet’s heart:

“She sneezes. They’ve raised a cloud of pink dust. There’s a couple of other clouds in the distance but theirs is the thickest, the most recent. The dust coats her throat, the little hairs on her arms.”

Despite the difficult subject matter, “Pink Pyramid” like many of the other stories in the book, shares a mélange of personal struggle, longing, and tenderness which left me strangely hopeful for the human race.

While Great American Desert delivers a sometimes harsh critique of America’s relational and historical trajectories, its lively mix of humanity, absurdity, and insanity might leave some of us to wonder if we aren’t actually enjoying every current episode or rerun of our great American experiment, passion play and not soon to be forgotten dream.

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Jody Kennedy is a writer and photographer living in Provence, France. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Fairy Tale Review, DIAGRAM, Tin House Online, Electric Literature, and The Georgia Review, among others.

[REVIEW] I Don’t Write About Race by June Gehringer

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(Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2018)

REVIEW BY MIKE CORRAO

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I Don’t Write About Race is a beautiful and honest collection of poems, exploring the complex and nuanced nature of identity. “I don’t write about race / I write about erasure,” the poet says.

Gehringer’s work feels so natural and cohesive, as if it is forming on the pages as you read. Each new poem, a continuation of the last. The poet documents what’s inside her head, as well as a cacophony of microaggressions, which occur so often as to become another of life’s mundanities. The reader is confronted by their own actions. We are made to witness the constant judgement and dehumanization of the trans community. Moments where they are misgendered, belittled, harassed, and ignored.

For a brief time, the poet wishes for some physical manifestation of these pains (a burn or a cut or a bruise), somewhere she can point to and say, ‘this is where it hurts’ but the pain in these poems is often abstract. It is emotional and psychological. How do you alleviate the pain of being considered less of person than you are? The pain of ‘white hands’ and violent rhetoric? “How many millions wish you dead?”

In the latter half of her collection, Gehringer shifts focus, labeling many pieces as Leviathan. In doing so, the poet emboldens her work. She summons this image of the ‘eidolon from a long-lost age’ and imbues it with new meaning. The subject becomes large and powerful. Yet in the process, she does not change who she is. She does not make herself in the likeness of this new image, rather the Leviathan becomes her.

Gehringer has created a powerful collection of poems. I Don’t Write About Race is essential reading, an important text exploring identity and the trans experience.

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Mike Corrao is a young writer working out of Minneapolis. His work has been featured in publications such as Entropy, decomP, Cleaver, and Fanzine. His first novel will be released in fall of 2018 by Orson’s Publishing. Further information at www.mikecorrao.com.

[REVIEW] Operating Manuals in the Dark by O.B. Bassler

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(Gauss PDF, 2019)

REVIEW BY CLARA B. JONES

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Speaker 1 : Taylor, hi! I haven’t seen you in ages! What are you up to?

Speaker 2: Dylan! What a surprise! I’m off to a new bookstore on 57th Street. I’ve heard they have a great selection of Postmodern poetry. How about you?

Speaker 1: I’m going to a poetry reading by the philosopher, O.B. Bassler—a new discovery. His debut collection is a hybrid book—poems in a variety of forms on recto pages only. I am writing a paper about the relationship between poetry and philosophy for my Innovative Literature class. Do you have a minute to talk?

Speaker 2: Ummm, sure, I’m curious! I’d like to know more about Bassler. Maybe I could borrow his book when you’re done with it? I am reading the Romantics, now, but am almost ready for something different.

Speaker 1: Bassler’s favorite poet is a German Romantic, Friedrich Hoelderlin; but, he progresses from beautiful lyric poetry to experimental writing—all displayed on recto pages. I think you would find his work interesting. Here’s another passage:

 

“one life is enough

and sometimes it is more than enough

sometimes it is more than enough

to make it through the day or hour or minute

and that is why what is painful

demanding excruciating even torturous

is so close to what is beautiful

that I can easily mistake the intensity of flight

for the intensity of any pleasure real or unreal

and hang onto it for dear life

unto the cleaving from life itself

if such is necessary”

 

Speaker 2: Definitely, lyrical, but with Modernist overtones, too—especially, repetition, like Stein.

Speaker 1: Yes, and Bassler uses other Modernist techniques—no titles, no punctuation, no capital letters. But, experimental methods, also—lots of white spaces define those particular poems. But, more than that. Some of his devices remind me of the ones often used by James Joyce—flow of thought and feeling, metaphor, symbolism, ambiguity, subtle overtones evoking history, myth, and the complexities of life. These conventions, appearing throughout the collection, bind the book together, as they do in Ulysses.

Speaker 2: I am curious to take a look at the book! My boyfriend is studying concrete poetry and visual experimentation this semester. He read an essay by Joe Bray who said that white space can be sites of humor, gravity, play, and reflection. I think of white spaces as erasures or ways to disrupt reading. Does Bassler use white space in those ways?

Speaker 1: Well, yes, in some ways, but there is not much humor or play—much reflection, though. The poems have lots of “interpretive power,” as Helen Vendler would say. Bassler is writing about the human condition over time—Time in the sense of Physics…

Speaker 2: …what does he mean by that?

Speaker 1: I can’t say, exactly, what Bassler intends to say, but I conducted a bit of research when I was reading, Operating Manuals in the Dark, and I learned that, just as Time is an indefinite process of events as a whole, Reality can be viewed in a holistic way. Listen to this:

 

“…the ultimate coincidence of the metaphysical and the physical is the greatest madness of all

now that the metaphysical clock keeps perfect time I should go back and read a number of books

starting with the ones that move forward and returning to the ones that move back

I’ll make a list of one hundred metaphysical books and one hundred physical books

and the two lists will be the same list”

 

Speaker 2: I never studied Physics. Do you think I’ll understand Bassler’s work?

Speaker 1: Oh, definitely! Music, image, rhythm, form, and language outweigh any particular message; and, you will see that Bassler’s poems include many iambs and that they become increasingly minimalist. In fact, if I have an opportunity to ask him a question tonight, I want to know whether his black cover and blank verso pages are references to Kazimir Malevich’s paintings and to his theory, Suprematism—Bassler may be trying to move as far as possible from objects—maybe, even, from objective reality and reductionism! Analyzing metaphysics seems to be his ultimate concern. Let me read one more quote: “the metaphysical clock/the metaphysical clock is not dead it is dying one second at a time/the metaphysical clock runs fast it must be corrected to match real time/not the same backwards and forwards and not the same as metaphysical time.”

Speaker 2: Ummm, I’ll have to think about that when I have the text in front of me. It’s 4 o’clock, and the bookstore closes at 6. I need to catch a bus. I’m so glad that I ran into you! When can we get together for lunch?

Speaker 1: I’ll e-mail you. You can borrow Bassler’s book, and we can discuss his reading. I hope he publishes another collection!

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Clara B. Jones is a Knowledge Worker practicing in Silver Spring, MD, USA. Among other works, she is author of Poems for Rachel Dolezal, published by Gauss PDF in 2019

[REVIEW] Too High and Too Blue in New Mexico by Becca Yenser

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(dancing girl press & studio, 2018)

REVIEW BY GABINO IGLESIAS

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Nothing compares to hearing about a book and quickly finding a mind-blowing excerpt. That’s exactly what happened to me with Becca Yenser’s Too High and Too Blue in New Mexico. I read a single poem and knew I had to devour the rest and write about them so others could discover the power in Yenser’s words. Here’s the gem that opens the book, the tiny marvel that got me hooked, “How To Forgive In the Desert”:

 

First, attach yourself to the sky.

Go to the furthest edge of city: violet,

Starstruck, closer to god. Not everyone

Has the heart for it. Some hearts are less red.

 

Find yourself a cloud kingdom. Don’t

Come down easily, stay up in that thin air.

Don’t think about how you can’t breathe.

People have not breathed here for 11,000 years.

Second, try to remember why you’re here.

 

Slick rock playground. These are hippos

On their sides. There is never any water. Arroyo.

Say arroyo over and over until your throat is a canyon.

Third, pray to the creatures, especially the Whiptail

 

Lizards whose backs are lined like cucumbers.

Birds will come and go. Fine-dusted worries will land on your toes;

Coarser planets, in your hair. Running will result in headache.

Please, do not run.

 

Remember: You will never be able to see the plateau and the canyon.

At the same time. When you are walking one way, you

Will only remember what is behind you. When you look

Behind, you will only guess what lies ahead.

 

You do not know who you are anymore.

Now drive home. Shudder in the kitchen.

Watch him eat cold cereal as you try to explain

Your tiny heart; the handfuls of stones in your pockets.

That should be enough to get you to read it. However, this is a review, and that means I have to keep going. Too High and Too Blue in New Mexico is extremely short, so don’t expect a long review, but the magic in its pages is worth writing about. Coming in at just 15 pages, this is more a snack than a meal, but its length doesn’t detract from its strength. This collection is full of feelings, packed with illuminating words that show us the poet’s inner dialogue, desires, and struggles, and pulsating truths and questions that range from the personal to the universal. It also chronicles a journey and celebrates different places. Lastly, it speaks of a communion between the poet and the world around her, between the writer and nature, that is stunning:

Kingcup, Desert Cholla, Prickly Pear,

Pincushion or Spiny Star Cactus:

I wanted to pull up all the desert plants

From their roots, hairy and mad;

To keep a book of their deaths.

Yenser understands that there are no dividing lines between beauty and melancholy, love and pain, perpetual motion and the desire to return to the past. This wonderful collection reflects that knowledge. The poems in this book celebrate the poet’s life, but they do so in a way that communicates to the rest of us that there is plenty to celebrate out there; it’s just a matter of going our and finding it. I found some of that beauty in these pages.

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Gabino Iglesias is a writer, journalist and book reviewer living in Austin, Texas. He is the author of Zero Saints and Coyote Songs. He is the book review editor for Pank Magazine, and a columnist at LitReactor. You can find him on Twitter at @Gabino_Iglesias.