Book Review

[REVIEW] The Way We Came In by Kelby Losack

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(Broken River Books, 2018)

REVIEW BY GABINO IGLESIAS

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There are two kinds of crime fiction. One kind is written by authors who think people do bad things because they are bad. The second kind, the kind that matters, is written by writers who understand that there is a plethora of reasons why someone would commit a crime. In the latter group, the authors producing the best, most authentic narratives are those who have been in direct contact with people like that and have experienced those situations. These authors possess a deep, nuanced understanding of the psychogeography of crime. Their work is generally devoid of judgement and representations that border on caricatures. Author Kelby Losack belongs to this group, and his work is a raw, visceral representation of desperation, hustling, and lives where there is no space to even fathom upward social mobility.

In The Way We Came In, Losack’s latest novel, a couple of brothers get together after one of them is released from prison. They have to make money to pay their rent, but regular work won’t give them enough, and they’re running out of time. What they need to do is clear, and it involves drugs and guns. It’s a path followed by many before them, and it’s supposed to happen smoothly, but things go south. They come up with a plan to stay afloat, but that also goes bad. Without the money they needed or the drugs to sell and after a failed attempt at fixing everything at once, the brothers end up in the hands of a man who plans to take their life for what they tried to do to him.

The Way We Came In is a tense, too-real story about coming up with a hustle when every other course of action is impossible. It is a narrative about need and desperation, but also about trying to do the right thing first and brotherly love. Losack explores the special relationship between brothers who love each other and trust each other in a way you can’t trust most people. These men share a gloomy past and the loss of their mother, and that pain brings them together above and beyond their blood. As with his previous novel, Heathenish, there is an unexpected emotional dimension to The Way We Came In that pushes it into an interstitial space between hardcore crime fiction and literary fiction.

There are many elements that work together to make this a required read for crime fiction fans (or fans of the unique type of narratives Losack writes, which I’ve always called hoodrat noir), and tension is at the top of that list. This novel moves forward at breakneck speed, and the action and tension ramp up at the same pace. Short chapters, explosive action sequences, and superb economy of language add to that:

“I jumped at the sound of knuckles rattling the screen door. You grabbed the burner off the table and for a few seconds, we sat motionless, staring at the front door. The rapper said, “Me desperté sintiéndome como si estuviera en la luna.” The second knock came heavier, more tenacious. I jumped again. You whispered, “Hide it,” waving a hand over all the yayo. While you crept to the window to cop a glance behind the bed sheet curtain, I held the unzipped lip of a backpack to the table’s edge and swept up all the contraband with my arm, then I shouldered the bag and spun around, ready to follow if you bolted, but you had tucked the gun in the back of your jeans and were reaching for the door knob, scratching your temple and shaking your head the way you do when you’re trying to suppress a laugh.”

While there is nothing quite like what Losack is doing in contemporary literature, the mix of real life struggles and keen observations are somewhat reminiscent of underground literary legend Peter Plate. Just like Plate did with San Francisco, Losack is a chronicler of the everyday struggles of folks on the verge between the right and the wrong side of the tracks. In The Way We Came In there are guns and drugs and people doing bad things, but they are not cutouts of criminals; they are people forced into illegal hustles. This lack of judgmental writing makes Losack’s work shine. He knows poverty, humanity, and doing whatever it takes while ignoring potential consequences are the holy trinity of crime in real life, and he brings that to the page beautifully. Furthermore, he does so while showing that the streets have many levels, and not everyone is on the same one despite sharing the same spaces:

“A vagrant who’d been begging at the intersection shuffled in on concrete-spattered tennis shoes. The toes of his shoes were split open so it looked like they were yawning when he walked. The old lady humming gospels smiled at him as he passed. The vagrant spent a good long minute in

the restroom and came out with beads of water dripping down his dreadlocked beard. He sat on a stool beneath a small analog television that hung from the ceiling. He watched a sitcom, laughing every time the studio audience laughed, and even when they didn’t. His laugh was a raspy cackle that was often followed by a red-faced coughing spell.”

Three quarters of the way into this books I was thinking: “Watch out, crime writers! Heathenish announced the arrival of an exciting new voice, but The Way We Came In proves Losack isn’t here to play.” Then I kept reading and reached the last two pages of the book. Losack had been holding out, keeping a piece of surreal magic in his pocket, like a desperate man trying to tell a story while holding an ounce in his fist. When I read the ending, my mind changed and my warning morphed into a decree: “Go home folks, the king of hoodrat noir is here and the game is over.”

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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.

 

[REVIEW] But It’s a Long Way by Frédérique Guétat-Liviani (translated by Nathanaël)

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(Nightboat Books, 2018)

REVIEW BY GABINO IGLESIAS

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Most poetry about interstitial spaces and borders explores the permeability of imagined borders, the effects of different cultures and languages on psychological and emotional states, and the (im)possibility of (un)traveling back and forth, of finding home again. Some, however, go further than that and tackle all of it at once while simultaneously inhabiting, literally, the dividing line between languages and a multiplicity of places. In the case of Frédérique Guétat-Liviani’s But It’s a Long Way, the writing is at once an exploration of borders, a scream against a past filled with the nonsense that usually leads to migration, and a strange biography of a life spent on liminal spaces.

Despite being about many things, But It’s a Long Way is mainly about the multiplicity of borders. Language and cultures are borders. People are borders. Poverty is a border. Everything is a border. Everything is a thing that separates humans in some way. They are created, suffered, celebrated, and forgotten. They change people and force them into actions that may or may not want. Of all the things they are, however, the most important one is constructed. Recognizing that they are constructed is one of the biggest steps a person can give toward a better understanding of how borders work, but it can also lead to frustration for a variety of reasons. Guétat-Liviani’demonstrates a deep understanding of this bizarre frailty/impenetrability that changes depending on a plethora of sociopolitical elements:

borders/they are forgotten/when/it’s

to judge a president/and then later/they are put back/to prevent

people from crossing

But borders are more than just dividing lines that impede free movement. They are more than places where one nation ends and another one begins. They are more than geographical spots where cultures may be different and a different language may be spoken. Borders, in this book, are looked at in all of their significance, and that means they are also seen as problematic sociopolitical spaces and places where bad things happen merely because of what separation entails:

sometimes/there are even wars/because of/the separations

there are also/the borders you can’t see/between arabs and

the racist French/it comes/from generalization/the terrorists

they say you have to kill/in the name of islam/so people believe

all muslims/are like that/but there’s also racism

on the part of/maghrebians/toward/others

Guétat-Liviani’ writes about Otherness with knowledge and authenticity. This book is at once a travelogue, a diary, and a mosaic biography. The reader is pulled by words through an epic journey that covers France, Spain, Albania, Morocco, Kosovo, Serbia, Chlef, Algiers, Belgium, England, and more. With the geographical changes come emotional ones, but also languages, and this book is packed with people who speak French, Arabic, Spanish, English, and Turkish. These traveling, languages, and experiences frame an underlying narrative about perpetual otherness, a unique story about exile that is at once personal and universal.

The second part of this book is in French. As someone who writes bilingual fiction, I loved that. Real discussions about being outsiders/exiles/migrants can’t be had solely in one language, especially when the artist initiating the discussion or sharing his or her experiences isn’t a native English speaker. In that regard, the second half of the book is a celebration of difference that also makes a statement: language matters when discussing other cultures.

While there is much to like about this book, perhaps the most surprising element is the amount of hope packed into its pages. Yes, there is pain, loss, and coping, but the heart of the narrative, just like that of the poet, are full of beauty:

being kind/being mean/it’s a choice/it has nothing to do/with origins

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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.

[REVIEW] Vigilance is no Orchard by Hazel White

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(Nightboat Books, 2018)

REVIEW BY ERIKA HOWSARE

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If landscape is one of the primary wellsprings of poetic urgency, landscape design—the human intention that arranges ground, plants, walks and walls for the human eye—is a less common subject for poets. But there are numerous ekphrastic possibilities for a poet wanting to engage with nature, where nature is not untouched wilderness, but rather the raw material for a designer’s work.

Just as many nonfictionists have worked to untangle the relationship between the way we look at landscape paintings and our seeing of actual landscapes—Rebecca Solnit comes to mind here—a poet might find fertile ground, so to speak, in contemplating the way a garden design produces an experience for the visitor.

Cole Swensen has explored this question in more than one book, thinking about how we learn to see beauty and also how we physically, deliberately build our notions of beauty in actual places. “If you stare long enough the image / gilds itself over the eye,” she writes in Park, and again in Greensward: “…a garden is, in short, an open link bent on forming more, ever outward, a line between humans and other species…a following thinned to an horizon with all its attendant aesthetic principles of balance, rhythm, motion, etc., and the ethical principles inherent in them, and in both directions, i.e., it comes back to us.”

Poet Hazel White, in her new book Vigilance is no Orchard, takes the project a step further, to include the investigation of her own writing process as she grapples with the overwhelming aesthetic impact of a private Southern California garden designed by landscape architect Isabelle Greene. The book is much more than a simple account of walking through the garden; it includes quotes from conversations between White and Greene, and it repeatedly circles through a thicket of inspiration, influence, writerly ambition and writerly despair.

It’s worth knowing that White, along with one previous book of poetry, has published many instructional gardening books, and one can sometimes detect in Vigilance the tension between the experimental and commercial modes of writing—or, perhaps, a torque happily applied to the latter mode, as the poet begins to set herself free within the field of language, composing lines that would not rest easily in an average how-to book: “Terraces that step down gently were a clue that Greene intended a seamless departure. My feet anchored in groundcover, my head could ride the lines there, on / air’s back.”

But although White’s break with conventional language provides her with a lodestone and a methodology, the book’s true subject is her struggle with the admiration and envy she feels toward Greene’s accomplishment in the Valentine garden in Montecito. The garden is considered a landmark in modernist landscape design, but for White the source of unease is more personal and, indeed, bodily:

“I bowed low to Greene’s motion. Accepted the blow of it—I must know the how of its thinnest leaf on its strongest breeze, be sure, as my back was bending in astonishment.”

Being deeply affected by another person’s aesthetic accomplishment is a joy that immediately turns to exigency. “Beauty is not shelter, it necessitates a forward momentum,” White writes, in a perfect encapsulation of the discomfort that an artist can feel toward another artist’s work—the desire to produce a response that possesses, that wraps the original work in one’s own, even larger, vision. “…though the phrasing small and never named as envy: I would/I wished/I would/write about her.” Those final three words take on spatial shades—“write about” as in “encompass.”

The quest thus identified, White sets off (“urgently”) into cycles of poetic advance and retreat. Vigilance is a self-referential account of its own making that makes frequent use of Greene’s words to generate slippage between the landscape design process and the writing process. “To make a garden or a text show up—one needs the connections to be manifold,” writes White, and then quotes Greene: “‘But I hate geometry.’”

The writerly struggle, in White’s account, has many facets, and her commitment to an honest narrative about the difficulty of conceiving, and completing, a project is refreshing. Many of her readers, after all, will be poets who can intimately relate to the various conundrums she describes.

It takes White a while, for example, to settle into the scope of the project, to name all its imperatives. She must “have an environment whole…not parceling or steering into writing.” She must stay connected to her own physical experience in the garden: “Awareness of its forms alerts the body, so if I am quick / I can prod spatial pleasure for the texture of attention.” She must track inspiration as it “crosses into space never looking back,” like an exuberant toddler one must follow and contain without controlling too tightly. Above all, she must stay “at the edge inventing.”

“Drought / Worry of direction,” the title of the middle section in Vigilance, is of course a major part of the writing process: that parched, sinking feeling that the text one has been laboring over is ill-conceived and will add up to nothing. Drought for a garden is like doubt for the poet. “The work arcs and fails,” White assesses her own progress halfway through the book, and a page later, quotes Greene, who’s enjoying the fruits of a long and successful career: “My shows at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and the UCSB Museum were an immensely enlarging experience. There was ME!”

There’s another important difference, in White’s account, between her own struggle to create work that satisfies her and Greene’s seeming confidence, lightness, with the materials of her craft. Greene works with trees, rocks, water, “‘cow parsnips riffling among quaking aspens.’” She carries “‘a feeling for the crease in an arroyo, down in it and way back up the other side.’” This delicious physicality contrasts with the writer’s tools, which can only ever be abstract: “a fragmented narrative,” a plot that “dissolves to tableau…a gaze through glass toward no particular direction.”

Even the setting comes into play—White, who grew up in rural England, is permanently out of place in California, which is Greene’s native state. The oneness of Greene with her environment and its indigenous flora offset the sense of being a foreigner in another person’s vision.

White manages to report on these disparities between her own uncertainty and Greene’s artistic fulfillment in a way that is gracious and responsible, and makes clear that Greene is a warm, generous friend as well as an articulate commentator on her own work. Yet she also recounts at least one episode of questioning Greene’s aesthetic: “Wait– // Working low to the earth—is Greene timid and showing no tail?” White goes on to describe another, very different garden, one whose soaring verticals create an effect that’s more aggressive, almost violent (“Time Before whistles in from the outside. It…threatened to take down my pants”) compared with Greene’s horizontal, “explorative” or “solicitous” style.

This is not only the arcane shop talk of landscape designers; it echoes White’s own search for the right approach to poems. Elsewhere in the book she finds a parallel between the empty page (“White page a slick of construction talk”) and land that’s been violently cleared: “Scrape the hillside. / Loud bulldozer erases topsoil, turns, / piles it. / White real estate.” Even if the author isn’t punning on her own surname here, she does seem to be criticizing a certain mode of relation to a field of possibility.

A few pages later, a resolution suggests itself—a listening attitude, a way of allowing rather than forcing significance. “Move into mouth’s house: but don’t write myself into / a miniaturized shelter on paper.”

Physical reality, the garden itself and the body moving through it, are the keys both to White’s finding a way through her subject and to making this book an account of something more than a poet’s inner process—a real communication. The lines about the Valentine garden thrum with sensuality: “A field day, as wasps know, crawling split fruit.” And: “Brilliance of neon pink crabapple bloom / shatters around itself.”

Even as White suggests a parallel between conventional, strictured language and landscape design that imposes an external vision on a site assumed to be passive, she also echoes and reenacts Greene’s innovativeness, building a quiet rebellion against centuries of tradition surrounding nature poetry. The inclusiveness of her language makes clear that this voice belongs to someone who, though passionate about plants and gardens, is not writing from an idyllic vacuum.

That voice invites many kinds of language to become part of a search for “a manner in which language might push out and touch us.” Greene’s words, both quotes from conversations and bits of what must be written communications, form a collage with White’s deliciously unpredictable lines. The dominant mode recalls Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s prose-influenced, abstracted style, but White is a collagist and a word-sculptor, who can deftly skid among registers, and

“pivot/

into

thinning

bruising

switch-

eroos.”

 

She has a keen ear for idiomatic speech and a designer’s eye for white space, and can slip between addressing the reader and seeming to address herself (“Try talkback…Make a rustle”).

The invitation to language-awareness parallels the call to place-awareness. One must be present to the presences (as Greene, quoted here, exclaims: “‘The persimmon tree is intensely red just this minute!’”) and mindful of imminent loss and decay (“Gardens flicker in and out of existence”). Being outside, being in a space, being attuned to one’s own body and conscious of the mind riding that body through a special, ordered environment: These are a salve for the condition of habitual thought and worn metaphor, a “coherent deformation” that acknowledges imperfection: “scars in the blue bloom of agave leaves.” These are the anchors that allow a new kind of language about nature to come into being.

It’s as though White strives to deserve, through writing, the experience she’s already had in the garden. The final chapter of this effort is ultimately not described, but rather manifested in the existence of the book itself, with all the moments of doubt, resolve, and labor elegantly woven into the work’s polished form.

—

Erika Howsare is a Virginia-based poet and her second full-length book, How Is Travel a Folded Form? was published this year by Saddle Road Press. She previously published a book-length meditation on waste, co-authored with Kate Schapira, called FILL: A Collection. She has also published several chapbooks and served as a coeditor at Horse Less Press for eleven years. Her reviews, interviews and essays have appeared at The Millions, The Rumpus, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Taproot.

 

[REVIEW] Pardon My Heart by Marcus Jackson

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(TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern 2018)

REVIEW BY NATHAN ELIAS

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In his sophomore collection of poems, Pardon My Heart, Marcus Jackson exposes his own heart while also putting an ear to the heartbeat of the contemporary African American ethos. The collection is broken into four parts and investigates not only how an individual’s heart can be amplified by “mistakes—long ago and recent” but how the American heart can take no shame in ruining a party after too much to drink, “doing its little two-step, aglow / in the middle of the room, never / happier to have nowhere else to go.” Judging by the scope of longing, regret, and adoration in this collection, it is evident that Jackson’s heart is a big one and full of ardor. The speaker in these poems provides testimony of a life lived, of a heart broken and self-mended while simultaneously demonstrating a hardness and unwillingness to be shaken by “love’s complex breaths” “full of beauty and absurdity.”

In Part One, Jackson reminisces on the sweet naiveté of youth—Friday nights at Paradise Skate (“We shimmied on small, oiled wheels, / until sweat glazed our faces, until motion / swept the debris from our beings”), old Regal or Fleetwood “amplifiers / with enough wattage / to shock polar bears” losing a fistfight and dissolving to Mary J. Blige on the radio. Meanwhile, Jackson laments over what to do with all his longing while wishing he could sing “as southern as Muddy, as electrically / as Jimi.” However, Jackson does sing throughout these poems. He sings to the love gods in thanks of “permission to mend, for prescribing time and somber songs / as balms”; he sings of the dominion of men, in which a tenth grader mournfully becomes a local legend for knocking out someone twice his age and weight, “an addict / who’d racked up enough petty wrongs / to earn a defeat from a skinny teen”; he sings of jail phones and bullet-shattered windshields.

In Part Two, Jackson travels back to the night of his birth in the Rust Belt, a fact he admits lying about and “saying I was born in a garden so near / the sea that my mother—multilingual / rinsed me at the fringe / of the tide.” While entering the realm of the unreliable narrator, Jackson is no less hesitant to deny such a baptism at the end of his poem “Evasive Me”; he calls out that he’s disinclined to allow “my ears and my mouth any songs not made / from the water, dirt, wind, salt, and fire / of American manipulation.” Jackson’s admiration for his mother continues throughout second part in poems like “Off Camera” in which a black-and-white photo of her reveals a young woman, before the poet’s birth who “sees / the brutal plentitudes waiting to break her.” This poem is effectively arranged after “Lullaby,” a retrospect on a baby after a bout of domestic violence. Here, Jackson asks, “Is there / a sure way to love a man the world won’t quit dealing trouble to?” The woes of a chain-smoking mother lineate in the poem “Ashtray”, the centerpiece of which being the object filled with the mother’s smolderings during her “lapses in labor or happiness.” Part Two moves on to trouble-making in the Rust Belt where characters steal triple beams from a school’s chemistry to make soda-cooked cocaine. As any reader of Jackson’s first collection, Neighborhood Register (CavanKerry Press 2011), will know, the Rust Belt’s streets and grit hold a special place in the poet’s heart. In poems from the first collection, such as “What the Baddest Kid in Our Neighborhood Said to Jasmin Jenkin” Jackson speaks as an authority on those who “keep a gun on [them] like ID” though they surely “don’t need it.”

In Part Three, Jackson turns toward the flesh, “so much…you’d like to touch / but don’t.” He admits to a love that made him “fine with dying” that his soul is so outlandish his body can barely hold it. Jackson reminds readers, though, of times “I’ve been getting along better / with my bartender than with my lover.” The early onset of love evolves through Part Three, away from the flesh and into separation, “an intricate, tireless silence.” Jackson paints an image of a newly adult couple fighting while the sky divides, and a time when his “bigmouthed heart” longed for the loneliness he lost.

Part Four finds the poet “in a kingdom of marvelous heartbreakers” including himself, his father, uncles, cousins, and wife, for whom he writes of buying a ring, despite “the wound [his] wallet had just become.” In an homage to his wife’s hips, Jackson draws parallels to hips that “share genes with the hips of American slaves” and also make “White women lower their heads / like children who’ve broken a dish.” The unflinching need to draw in those he loves is unyielding as Jackson writes on about his wife’s hair that sings “some kind of refrain / that does to the mind what / the mid-sky moon does to the night.” The collection finishes with Jackson confessing to listening to his wife’s breathing while she sleeps, her advanced asthma like “sand being scattered / by a wind the sea only brings / during darkness.”

Pardon My Heart cements a life of love within its pages, and though the cement ends up cracked, Jackson knows how to build a statue from the rubble.

—

Nathan Elias is the author of the novelette A Myriad of Roads That Lead to Here (August 2017) and the chapbook Glass City Blues: Poems (September 2018). He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles and has served as Fiction, Art, and Flash Fiction editor on the literary journal Lunch Ticket. He has taught a variety of creative writing classes, including fiction, poetry, and screenwriting. He is currently working on a novel.

[REVIEW] I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood by Tiana Clark

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(University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018)

REVIEW BY CORI BRATBY-RUDD

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Tiana Clark’s second poetry collection, I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood, delves into Clark’s racialized experiences as a Black woman living in the South. The entire collection functions as a complex personal re-telling of the way such histories of violence can live on in the bodies of those who occupy land and live near spaces–like the trees of the book’s title–that were once the site of mass pain and violence.

With cover art by esteemed poet and artist, Terrance Hayes the work is visually compelling and complex even before opening to the first page. The impressionistic painting of a Black woman holding a bouquet, with two of the pink flowers covering the woman’s eyes, readers are immediately introduced to a world of the unseen, complex, and deep beauty.

Perhaps one of the strengths of the collection, besides the compelling, haunting and unique prose, is the careful organization with which Clark organized the entire text. For instance, the book itself is split into three sections. After being introduced to the first section title called, “I Can’t Talk”—and by quickly skimming through the next sections, it becomes clear the entire book title, I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood is actually broken down small section titles within the book itself. As such, each of the three collection sections are titled: I Can’t Talk / About the Trees / Without the Blood.

Another of Clark’s assets’ is her profound mastery of poetic form. From the first poem in the section “I Can’t Talk,” titled “Cross/Bite” which appears in the poetic form of a Curse, to concrete poems, to her frequent use of couplets, Clark simultaneously deconstructs issues of race, class and gender in the South while expertly writing in forms that feel natural and unforced.

Following the theme of talented title creations: “Cottonmouth” appears after the curse poem “Cross/Bite.” Reflecting on the history of cotton, specifically the history of cotton picking, and the use of slaves to pick the cotton, the title uses wordplay to not only imply the same silence, but to racialize that silence. By the end of this poem, a small section even appears shaped as an empty open mouth. Themes of mouths and silences appear through the entire section, as readers become both uncomfortable in the brute reality of racism, and also awed with Clark’s ability to break down seemingly mundane micro aggressions—like a family member asking to take a family photo at a former plantation- i.e. a mass grave for slaves.

By bringing a voice to a history and a pain that is largely under-discussed, Clark’s work of documenting her story in a quasi-memoir collection uses sharp language that is both haunting and rhythmically enchanting. Clark has confirmed that many of the pieces reflect stories from her personal life, and told reporters that “Whenever I look at a tree in the South, I’m always going to see the blood on that tree. I’m always going to see the strange-fruit history that exists within that tree.”

Themes of mouths, silence and blood echo through the entire collection, painting vivid pictures of a country still seeped in racism and sexism. Each poem demands attention, and each poem stands on its own—but when placed together, they build off one another. Like the silence and mouth imagery echoed in the first section, “Without the Blood” also uses images of blood and wounds throughout. That being said, despite the violence implied by the title and the images, the work itself is not, as Clark puts it herself, “slavery porn.” Rather, each moment of blood or bones are seemingly from day-to-day stumbles with violence that subtly echoes throughout. Through the hanging clothes lines, over the drying sheet we see a place where Uncle Vernon hid from the KKK. The section is thus literally “Without the Blood” as readers see the extensions and lives experiences of violence, but not the acts themselves. The actual depictions of violence, sexual assault, and lynching are mostly in the “I Can’t Talk” section.

After the section ends, readers are greeted by a poem that proceeds the epilogue, titled “How to Find the Center of a Circle,” in which Clark ends her book with a haunting image of little white boys circling around her. The boys, on skates, taunt Clark, forming a circle of hatred that she can neither physically nor emotionally escape from. The top of the poem actually hold the formula for creating a circle—thus planting the reader with Clark at the center of her circle of pain that is made of iron. The circle encompasses Clark’s intention with splitting her section titles, readers thus circle and fall back from any progress Clark’s prose may have led us through. We are surrounded by trauma and cannot escape it. As soon as one part of the circle is complete, we dive back into it. Thus, we arrive at the end only to know that we are meant to endlessly circle around these topics, encased in the extremely tangible and the subtle racist and sexist micro-aggressions that have carved Clark’s life.

—

Cori Bratby-Rudd is a queer LA-based writer. She graduated Cum Laude from UCLA’s Gender Studies department, and is a current MFA Candidate in Creative Writing at California Institute of the Arts. Cori enjoys incorporating themes of emotional healing and social justice into her works. She has been published in Ms. Magazine, The Gordian Review, Califragile, among others. She recently won the Editorial Choice Award for her research paper in Audeamus Academic Journal and was nominated as one of Lambda Literary’s 2018 Emerging Writers.

[REVIEW] Lessons in Camouflage by Martin Ott

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(C&R Press, 2018)

REVIEW BY TOM GRIFFEN

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The title of Martin Ott’s third poetry collection, Lessons in Camouflage, conjures up the image of a military uniform. As if announcing, “Here’s what was learned while wearing one.” Such an allusion makes perfect sense, given Ott’s background as an Army interrogator—an asker of questions, gatherer of information, a seeker of truth, of admittance. The collection wastes no time setting a tone, expressing an intention. Line one of the opening poem, “The King of Camouflage” reads, “Yesterday’s sky is my molting skin.” The key word is “molting.” This shedding, this casting off of body parts serves as the spinal metaphor for the poet’s post-military personal journey.

Lessons in Camouflage is a melodic and, at times, manic dance of compacted and complex imagery. “The Gravel Diaries” sprays the landscape with visions.

I hid away in my room, lost in yellow,

                        the light stabbing villains and time-

                        washed pages. A child’s toy dagger

hisses in the scabbard. The LA River

gurgles in a tectonic bouillabaisse.

My heroes for a time hid in spines.

Damp shirts on the balcony ululate

on a swinging noose.

The reader’s imagination is scattered again with “Coming of Age Poem Using Fifty Words That Might Cause The NSA To Flag You As A Terrorist.”

His mother would sweep her mace into an indigo

purse and badger him, “Slow-poke the artichoke,”

for preferring Reno to the college snuffle, beef market

of lacrosse tossers, Jell-O shots, and credit card fraud.

The opening poem’s iambic meter is also a comfortable swaddling. It sets a slow pace and calls to mind traditional forms. “Look into ash. I’m there where you begin. / I am the shadow that forms in front and stays.” Repetition offers further amenity and clues of influence. Each of the 24 lines of “Mile Post” is repeated once. The piece opens with, “I made sure that no one ever passed me,” and ends, “I made sure that no one ever passed me. / Night will never catch day on the cratered runway. / Why am I still running from camouflage?” This echoing continues in “Why My Father Carries Three Guns,” wherein every other line concludes with a refrain, “…of guns.” A kind of declarative epimone attempting to answer the first line’s question, “Who will be my brother in the family of guns?” The poet looks for beauty, or at least acceptance, in an object of violence imbedded into his being. Hails it, “a symphony of guns.” “A neurobiology of guns.” “The shamanism of guns.” “The flooding of guns.” “The tragic trigonometry of guns.” But none offer solace. Thus continues the unlearning. A brittle flake falls from a peeling chrysalis.

Ott, often humorously, examines life’s plain sight artifacts, attempting to access convoluted, and disquieting issues. In “Marks” he hints at an ideal, a magic fix for particular faults. “Remember the guy on the infomercial / waving the wand over impossible stains, / erasing kids’ mistakes.”  “I Lost The Robot In The Divorce” is a painful tease. Begins in kitsch, “With one eye, tin torso, dryer duct limbs, / my thrift store doppelgänger leans over / the scratched up dining room table,” then ends, unexpectedly, with a chilling memory that could either reference a failed marriage or a battle scene. “ Looking back, there was no way I could stop / things splitting, division of flesh, curse / of an immobile man in two places.”

“To The Guy Who Drew A Penis On The Elevator” begins with a sarcastic note of gratitude. “Thanks for giving us something to look / at when my kids visit, for the devotion / it took to bring a chair to etch it.” Deems the artistic cockandball effort, “Herculean.” Then, catches readers off guard with an ensuing question, free from mockery and rich in earnest curiosity: “Are you teaching us no container is / permanent, from womb to coffin, that the journey homeward is a messy / business?” Ott’s humor is a crutch, but not one carved from cowardice. Rather, it is a tool to bolster healing and personal revelation.

“Core” assures readers the original intention is attainable, even if such an achievement first requires acceptance. An honoring of brokenness, a shaky-handed readiness for life’s frailty.

The heart is a feathery fossil. It used

to beat. It used to soar. Today is swollen

with need. Do you hear it? When tanks

quake, when hands shake, when hills

tumble at the desk. Courage is holding

the pieces and knowing there’s more.

Lessons in Camouflage pares away a hardened shell. It is an attempt at rebirth. As Ott’s poems decorticate a protective and necessary guise, they give rise to a personal infrastructure ready to take on the challenges of civilian life. Relationships, fatherhood, the idea of masculinity—all is refurbished, then etched onto a disguise-free bedrock. The final poem, “33 Lessons In Camouflage,” solidifies this foundation while highlighting a transformative irony where the interrogator thus becomes the interrogated. And truths come spilling out.

Interrogation was a nesting doll

of camouflage, uniform as skin,

questions as fists to pummel any

chance to unhinge the man within.

 

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Tom Griffen is a North Carolina writer and adventurer. He holds an MFA in from Pacific University. His work has appeared in The Rumpus, The Los Angeles Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, The Literary Review, O-Dark-Thirty, and others. In 2018, Tom walked across the USA. 3400 miles in 205 days. Follow his journeys on Instagram @tomswalkacrossamerica.

 

[REVIEW] Barnburner by Erin Hoover

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(Elixir Press, 2018)

REVIEW BY PETER H. MICHAELS

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Erin Hoover’s debut poetry collection Barnburner is replete with powerful and timely character-studies. Each character, whether a bad boss, a junkie, a peer on a different path, a boyfriend, or a mugger is examined with the same mordant empathy Hoover is incredibly adept at employing. The epigraph reminds us that “a ‘barn burner’ [is] one who destroyed all to get rid of a nuisance.” This book takes a piercing look at addiction, corporate life, variations on female identity, privilege, and sexual violence against women. Hoover’s assault on the most problematic corners of a capitalistic and patriarchal society lives up to the title Barnburner.

This collection’s honest, even scathing tone is established immediately in the poem “The Lovely Voice of Samantha West.” Hoover juxtaposes the hollowness of working at a call center with the honeyed voice the speaker learned to employ successfully: “The call center made me an / expert in my voice’s currency, what I could / do with its pitches and pauses, my larynx / flexing around the rarely varied words. It / was work.” (3–4). Hoover understands the ugly parts of life and her own awkward relationship with this flawed world.

This dissection of lived moments slices throughout the collection, and even is addressed directly in “Why Don’t You Have Kids?” A poem where the speaker acknowledges that her own self-reflection on a loaded and complicated question from a friend both memorializes and distorts her thoughts. “I’m certain, when doctors open / my corpse, / they’ll find this story in all its versions. / With forceps, they’ll pull apart / the question women are asked, press / the strands of my answers onto slides” (24). Hoover understands that truth is both found and lost under this close inspection: “But this is / the wrong way to look” (id.).

That looking glass stare is pervasive throughout Barnburner, and is found in poems like “Livestock,” a poem which begins with Neil Diamond calling the speaker’s mother a “fat girl” (32) and ends with pigs inspected at something like a 4-H contest. While this is not a subtle comparison, the skillful progression of lines leads to an eviscerating ending “But no matter / how perfect the form, we ask— / as if it can’t be helped— / what the animal tastes like” (33).

Hoover wants to slice and taste into bitter and brutal truths and accomplishes this time and again with lines like “I hear my mother tell my nephew / what she once told me, in what / I know now is denial: No one wants  /  to hurt you” (34) from “Tiniest of Shields” a poem confronting the inescapable aftershock of violence, even in small towns.

Arguably “Takedown” captures Hoover’s ability to examine and obliterate the worst parts of our patriarchal society with lines like: “the best methodology / for devaluing a woman is to strap her body / to the cum-stained mattress of your mind” (54); “I didn’t know rejection,  for some men, is a mother, and when she opens her legs, / she births monsters” (55); and “I want / more for her than pussy shots and the vengeant // glow of an LED screen, a choice beyond / predator or prey” (57). “Takedown” is not without its own self-awareness: “every cool girl styled an allegiance to corporate punk / by threading the same studded white belt through / her skinny jeans” (54) and “We girls were the first professionals / of the profile pic, guilded in Photoshop” (id.). This is typical of the poems in Barnburner, which look both inward and outward with equal severity.

The strength of the poems in Barnburner is their unflinching retelling of dark moments. In “The Valkyrie” the speaker confronts an ATM mugger: “me / banking on him as the kind to shove a girl / down a flight of stairs” (74) and her own demons: “I put my hands on his neck and squeezed, / said, No one will even notice you’re gone / in the stony voice I usually reserve for myself” (73). The speaker in “If You Are Confused About Whether a Girl Can Consent” walks to work the day after an evening with large time gap: “the night and its events / were projected on a screen behind me, / outside my field” (47). Hoover is unafraid of this type of societal inspection and self-reflection. Hoover proves time and again that she is that “Somebody,” able to “turn up the lights” (15).

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Peter H. Michaels lives with his family in Southern Maryland. You can reach him at http://peterhmichaels.com

[REVIEW] Any Man by Amber Tamblyn

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(HarperCollins, 2018)

REVIEW BY S.N. KIRBY

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Amber Tamblyn’s debut novel speaks to a climate where we face more and more revelations about the monsters that haunt our communities with their self-serving path of destruction and abuse. While the monster in this story is infamous for one peculiarity—this time the sexual predator is a woman, who goes by the name Maude—the unfolding of the narrative plays out like so many others our society has seen. Moreover, it is the public’s schadenfreude and salivation at witnessing this private pain that Tamblyn suggests that we, the public, are perhaps just as monstrous as the predators that lurk in dark corners.

Born in the era of #MeToo and the subsequent disclosures of long standing institutional abuses, Tamblyn’s work gives voice to a cast of men healing after a monster (or is she a woman) destroys their bodies and leaves them naked in the humiliation of her abuse. Some are left for dead. Others are left in their shame. The only evidence she leaves is a six-foot long, white hair.

In the narrative, Maude transforms from human assailant to a mythical creature created out of an amalgam of visceral nastiness. She bounces from human to nonhuman not by her actions, but by the descriptions of her as detailed by the men she assaulted. The first victim, Donald Ellis, sees Maude in a moment of second sight as she moves onto her next victim: “Between the parted woods, a small pair of black eyes peer out and a misshapen scribbled hand claws at the bark, it other arm long, dragging in the mud./The creature is headless./It moves.” Adding to this narrative of Maude, the second victim Pear O’Sullivan goes on to call her, “Maude with cankles and demon egg sacks growing in her gums. Hooved Maude . . . Like a fucking burn victim with babies’ decapitated fingers for eyelashes. With breath like rotting fish and a trail of fur running up the back of her legs and two giant claws for tits.” Here there be monsters.

Something about the physicality of her monstrosity and the way it shifts and changes seems to suggest that there is a shifting component to her selfhood. So often the standard narrative focuses on the transformation of the victims—from victim to survivor—but here Tamblyn seems to suggest that in the very act of becoming an assailant, Maude transforms into a monster. Giving pain is just as transformative as receiving it. But the source of that transformation remains unclear. Is it her soul that is corrupted by these acts? Maybe. For now, the mythical quality of Maude’s physical monstrosity gives her an aura of an omnipresent demon, lurking just outside of our reach.

Maude isn’t the only monster in this narrative. In the echoing and reverberations of voice and power in a media obsessed world, the men left in the wake of Maude are confronted with a cacophony of “support” online and on screen. Through tweets and television transcripts, Tamblyn cleverly reveals the level of entertainment, if not pure enjoyment, society derives from these horrific tragedies. While the author isn’t at a Trump level criticism of the media (no fake news here, folks), there is a kind of blame she places on the media outlets for the way they relish in the private horror of these men.

A caller to Donald Ellis’ radio show, yes he gets his own radio hour, speaks to this quite eloquently, “I realize, more than ever, we need to keep fighting and protecting our kids, not just from predators but also from a society and culture that feels kind of predatory ya know? I mean, that lady did the crimes, but we publicized it. We capitalized on it.” Hey, tragedy makes for great ratings, right? Donald Ellis testifies, “I live in a country built on celebritizing its citizens’ grief and amplifying stories of violence and assault for political gain, click counts, or television ratings. Let me be emphatically clear: They. Don’t. Care. About. Us. People who live through sexual assault are a crash on the side of the road, and the American media is nothing more than cars slowing down just long enough to take a peek.” The condemnation is harsh and swift, make no mistake.

While the public focuses on the monster without, the survivors battle the monster within themselves. Because at the core of it all is a story of healing. This is where readers find a there’s a touch of the mystical in the nightmare. Some kind of unseen magic seems to wind its way around the prose and poetry that is untouchable from tragedy. This magic is delicate but resilient. Tamblyn’s novel reminds us that we can live in a world worthy of redemption. While we can’t destroy the monsters, we can heal the ones within ourselves. Even still, in the concrete jungle of New York, Maude lurks and mutters, “Any man will do.”

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S.N. Kirby is a graduate of the MFA Fiction program at The New School. Her fiction work explores the relationship between man, magic, and nature. She has interviewed musicians across musical genres such as Ray Toro of My Chemical Romance and Beats Antique. Her National Book Critic Circle interviews with Ruth Franklin and Pulitzer Prize winner T.J. Stiles were featured on The New School writing blog. When she’s not writing, you can find her teaching yoga in New York City. If you smell sage burning, it’s probably her.

 

[REVIEW] Blackbirds by Greg Santos

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(Eyewear Publishing, 2018)

REVIEW BY GABINO IGLESIAS

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Greg Santos’ Blackbirds is one of those rare poetry collections that seems to hit the right length: long enough to be a book that leaves its mark and short enough to be read twice in a row and leave you wanting more. Also, it delves deep into the world of the poet, allowing not only the world around but also his family and the world inside him to share a space on the page.

Santos is hyperaware of his surroundings. He feels everything. The result of this is hyperaware poetry that bridges the gap between commonplace people and events and the kind of circumstance that earns a spot on our memory forever. The series of events and reflections shared here inhabit that strange interstitial space between the personal and the universal; holding your child, looking out a window, remembering a place, looking at a loved one. This personal/universal binomial starts early on with “I Have a Problem,” a poem that offers a condensed version of the type of thing Santos does time and again in the rest of the collection:

All I care about is everything.

I like to lie down and look up at the stars,

even when there are none.

I am almost nothing but thoughts and water.

I find mirrors unbearably off-putting.

My children find them droll.

Do you feel that too?

My left hand feels like a cataclysmic storm.

I will never tire of looking at my wife.

Her smile is like a constant sonar beep

in the depths of my chest.

I hear rain even when it’s sunny out.

Have you ever squinted at the ocean

so the sky and the water blend until

you don’t know where one ends and the other begins?

I’m doing that right now with you.

While navigating the inside/outside/interstitial space is enough to make this a recommended read, what truly makes this short collection shine is the way the poet deals with his unique and collective identity. Family, migration, discrimination, and hope are all present here, all dancing with each other in the present as they vocalize their ties to the past. For Santos, where you come from is as important as where you’re going because it defines who you are and informs what you do even when it’s not a clear element that can be easily explained or even remembered: “My family is from forgetfulness,/our geography forever shifting.”

Perhaps the best thing about the book is that offers a much-needed dose of hope despite carrying a good dose of doom. Every time Santos writes about love or his family or holding his daughter, he shows there is plenty left to life for, much left worth struggling for even when the darkness seems to cover everything. In fact, there is even a hint of humor when discussing the current sociopolitical state, which is very present in “MURICA”:

Rumor has it we are going to raise a barn.

Stay tuned. Have a beverage with me.

Pepsi says LIVE FOR NOW.

Living for corn syrup is vexing.

Our little American town is exhausted.

Please help.

Ultimately, Blackbirds is a short, beautiful collection that finds its roots in movement, love, change, and migration. Santos is a keen observer and a great chronicler of modern life who understands that looking at the mess outside his window is as important as feeling the warmth of his loved ones, and that makes his poetry as relatable as it makes it necessary.

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

 

[REVIEW] The Incendiaries by R.O. Kwon

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(Riverhead Books, 2018)

REVIEW BY GABINO IGLESIAS

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R.O. Kwon’s The Incendiaries is a dangerous novel. It pulls readers in with what appears to be a simple but effective plot, lulls them with a prose that constantly explodes in short bursts of poetry, and then drags them down, wild-eyed and incredulous, into a dark, scary, deadly place where shattered love, religious fanaticism, emotional trauma, and terrorism clash. With a strong religious undercurrent and a triumvirate of characters that allow the story to flow forward at breakneck speed, The Incendiaries is the kind of novel that announces the arrival of a unique, talented voice that is not afraid of the dark.

Phoebe Lin meets Will Kendall during her first month at the prestigious Edwards University. She is popular and likes to partake of the local nightlife as well as most of the social events the campus has to offer. However, despite being outgoing and sociable, there’s something at Phoebe’s core that she never shares: she feels guilty for her mother’s recent death. Just like her, Will has something to hide. He’s a bizarre young man on a scholarship who transferred to Edwards from Bible college after having a faith crisis and works as a waiter at a local Italian restaurant to make ends meet. Despite their differences, the two of them fall in love, but that love is threatened when Phoebe starts spending a lot of time with a secretive cult founded by a man called John Leal, a former student with an enigmatic past. However, the situation goes beyond mere jealousy, and when the group perpetrates a violent act in the name of their convictions, Will is forced to confront the fact that the woman he loves is capable of such a thing while also having to deal with once again being in the midst of the religious fanaticism he worked so hard to escape.

There are three elements in The Incendiaries that deserve a moment in the spotlight. The first is the use of language. This relatively short novel possesses great economy of language, but Kwon made sure that every word earned its place on the page. Short chapters and snappy dialogue help the narrative sustain its quick pace, but the author also manages to inject almost every page with a dose of poetry, and that’s what ultimately makes it shine not only in the moment it’s being read but also for weeks after as it is recalled:

“Once, while hiking with my parents, I’d watched a starling flock in motion, the confusion of birds mobbing about like nets full of fish until they’d lifted, all at once, shape-shifting into a braided coil that flung, agile, whip-tight, into the horizon. Pests, my father said—practical, as usual. But I’d thought it an astonishing sight, God’s design made visible, and that was what Phoebe’s playing felt like: the flight of notes rising into shape, a large purpose made plain.”

The second element is the three characters at the center of the novel, which are very different from each other and used in different ways. Will is the main narrator, Phoebe is the changing mystery/floating question mark, and John is the drop of chaotic poison that triggers bad things. Besides the obvious trinity/religious theme, the interaction between these characters, as well as the way Kwon alternates their voices, makes for some engaging, haunting reading. Also, the way Phoebe changes is almost palpable, but there are signs throughout the narrative. Her thoughts are part of what makes this novel the type that demands to be devoured in a single sitting or at least as fast as possible:

“If I were less selfish, I’d have released the hold I had on him, this love-dazed Will, more child than man. But I wasn’t. I couldn’t. He took the stairs to my suite at a full run. Bruises formed at the tops of my thighs. If I went to bed after he did, Will turned toward me, still asleep. I might put my head next to his, but he’d clamp his hot legs around mine. He hauled me in. I tried not to pull loose; still, I did. He protested. Insistent, not quite conscious, he reached for me again. I listened to his pulse. His soft, thin hairs, dandelions strands, shifted between my lips. I breathed them in. Here’s a wish, I thought. Don’t let me go. Until Will, I drifted; he attached me to this patch of earth. He clung all night.”

Lastly, there is enough darkness here to satisfy fans of creepy thrillers and even lovers of horror fiction. That Kwon keeps her writing comfortably rooted in literary fiction does nothing to diminish the impact of the themes discussed and the awful act in the last third of the book. This courage to take the story into very gloomy, dangerous, bloody places pushes The Incendiaries into must-read terrain. The fact that all this happens on a thick layer of religion is just a bonus and a sharp comment on our current sociopolitical landscape:

“The Lord had peeled the flesh of His corpse. He had spread it as a bloodied veil upon this earth, a flailed red carpet to ease His people’s fall. Others might ask how long, but he could wait. Faith is a long patience. Minutes tremble, he told his group, with the hope of revelation. Each particle of dust breathes forth its rejoicing. The stripped Nozhurst trees spelled out the Lord’s writing, if they’d learn to see it. God is, not was. He, John Leal, had called them as heroes. The Lord had laid His hands upon their heads.”

The Incendiaries is one of those deceptively simple novels that eventually turn out to be a multilayered marvel of interconnected narratives. The tale constantly shifts and, like a scared animal, seems to run away from the light that bathes it at the beginning and ends up curled in the dimmest place available. At once a love story, an examination of guilt and loss, and a sharp look at religious fanaticism once it abandons the realm of discourse and enters that of irreversible action, this novel is a superb debut by an author with an authoritative voice, poetic voice.

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