[REVIEW] The healing properties of 16 PILLS by Carley Moore

Posted on May 7, 2018 by admin

Tinderbox Editions, 2018

REVIEWED BY JESSICA MANNION

Carley Moore’s debut collection of essays, 16 Pills, is a therapeutic read, and while no book can boast being a panacea for the ills of modern life, this one comes close. Moore writes like her life depends on it. She dissects the stories of her life with intelligence and precision, and invites the reader to share in her examination. Feminist, political, funny, and irreverent, Moore’s essays are masterful, and show a true love of the form; the stories are deeply personal, while still tapping into shared human experience.

Moore is a Professor of Writing and Culture at NYU, and an Associate for Bard College’s Institute for Writing and Thinking. She is a poet, a novelist, and an essayist, and her love for writing in all forms is clearly evident in this collection. The essays range from short, sharply focused vignettes revolving around a single memory or issue, to more broadly universal themes, drawing copiously from her life and her reading for inspiration. She selects passages from a wide scope of material, using quotes from Zadie Smith as well as more surprising sources, like an article about lice from Scientific American.

The title 16 Pills refers to the number of essays in the collection, and themes of illness, physical and mental health recur throughout. These are not the only themes Moore explores, but the early years of her life had a huge impact on her, and the far reach of this time is evident.

The collection’s first essay, “The Sick Book,” introduces the basis of these themes of body and wellness. As a child, Moore was hospitalized for an unknown medical condition that caused her muscles to contract and twist to the extent that she sometimes couldn’t even walk. While doctors struggled to diagnose her mysterious illness, she was helpless to control her own body, not just the muscle cramps, but her daily schedule, and the tests she had to endure. What she could control were her observations, her thoughts, and her memories. “The Sick Book” is doled out in a series of brief vignettes, memories from this frightening time. Her eventual diagnosis is revealed – although not in this essay – and she refers frequently back to this time as she explores its repercussions on herself and her family.

Moore has a neurological condition called Dopa Responsive Dystonia. She shares this hereditary disease with her father, although hers is a much more severe case; her father’s lived experience with the disease was mild enough that he didn’t even know he had it until his daughter’s diagnosis. The essay “On Spectacle and Silence” begins with a brief anecdote from this time – a memory of she and her father sitting together on a green recliner. From here she launches into an exploration of personal responsibility, political activism, and what it takes to become an adept witness and advocate, as well as the amount of work it takes to learn to play ones role in all three. She judges the failings of herself and her father in particular here, and explores the role of media and storytelling in guiding self-reflection and as a vector for personal and political change.

Moore seems to delight in combining the sacred and the profane: “Nitpicking and Co-Parenting” starts as a humorous essay about she and her ex husband dealing with their 5 year old daughter’s bout with lice. The essay discusses the challenges of co-parenting and raising a well-adjusted child, then veers into a feminist examination of the practical work of nitpicking (i.e. it’s a very women-dominated profession), the trope of a nitpicking wife, and then ties that to the film “Alien,” wherein Sigourney Weaver’s character Ripley, is the hero – but a female hero who is ultimately performing another kind of nitpicking. Ripley does the tough job that no one else wants. She cries and she is in pain, but she knows what she must do and simply does it. Moore explains how “[Ripley] embodies a feminist ethos I’ve come closer to realizing as a single, co-parenting mom” (19).

In the essay “My Pills,” Moore explores the essay as an agent of healing, albeit a difficult one. “Isn’t the essay form itself an anti-palliative, a recipe for pain, and an invitation to cause trouble?” she asks, “Because the writing of an essay is the untangling of the worst kind of mental knot” (86). Moore warns that the essay isn’t a cure-all, and the process not simple. Such examinations can be very messy, but they are also necessary. “In my essays, I plan to wallow and wander, to get stuck and linger over painful moments and difficult texts. I am trying to figure something out here and to name it for myself and for you my dear friend” (86). A better metaphor for an essay in Moore’s hands might be something more akin to the irrigation of a wound. Moore is not afraid to bare it all, to show her vulnerability, as messy as it can be. Instead she probes the things that most people shy away from, and the result is healing.

16 Pills doesn’t offer easy answers, instead it invites the reader to become comfortable with uncertainty. As she says in “Resistance Dance,” “… I feel ‘mixed’ about a lot of shit. If you give me a problem, I will feel two to ten ways about it. I speak from multiple positions. [… ] The essay is my most comfortable genre because it allows me to honestly change my mind. I like landscapes that feel like mixed tapes and I’ll take a queer dance floor over a straight one” (146).

Although she delves into some dark places, Moore’s 16 Pills is ultimately a journey toward optimism and hope, a journey toward self-discovery and acceptance. If only we all could cast light into the dark corners of ourselves with such alacrity.

Jessica Mannion is a writer living in Brooklyn, New York. She writes essays, articles, poetry and short stories. Her writing can be seen in publications including Crixeo, and Alliterati, among others. She has a BA in English Literature from the University of Alaska, Anchorage.

[REVIEW] Fortress by Kristina Marie Darling

Posted on June 16, 2015 by Sheila Squillante

Sundress Publications

78 pages, $14.00

Review by Carley Moore

Marriage, it turns out, is a kind of fortress. Or maybe marriage just calls us to homes—some of us will wind up in cabins, others apartments, and still others McMansions. Regardless of whether or not we can afford the down payment, the mortgage, or the rent, the ideology around marriage and housing runs deep in America. How else to explain why so many of us went belly up in 2008 so that we could have a chance at owning our little piece of the American dream? And why do we continue to get married when the divorce rate is well over thirty percent?

Kristina Marie Darling’s newest collection of poetry, Fortress, is a spare examination on the ruins of a marriage and the pain of that loss. The book’s shape calls to mind a box, square rather than the traditional rectangle, and aside from the preface and the epilogue which are erasures of Elaine Scarry’s classic work The Body in Pain—the poems inhabit the bottom of each page in the form of either footnotes or spare lines of prose. The remainder of the page is blank white space, a field onto which we can project our responses. The layout of these pages reminded me of the story templates my daughter’s first grade teacher gives her students; lines at the bottom and a vast white space for drawing. Part of this book’s beauty lies in Darling’s commitment to the white space, to the meadow, garden, and flowerboxes in which the speaker and her husband grow poppies, lilies, and geraniums. This landscape is contested, the meadow is burned, the poppies die, and the husband tears out primroses so that he can begin “tending the garden himself, with all of the grace of a landscape painter.” The book makes references to Persephone, romantic poets like Keats, and opium traffics in a dreamy-drug induced haze, and I couldn’t help but think of those early mythological marriages (Leda and Europa) in which the proposal is nothing more than a rape. The speaker seems just as baffled by her marriage, and she wanders the fortress of her house and its grounds picking up the objects from her trousseau as if on a hunt for clues as to who she was before she became a wife. In my favorite poem of the book, the speaker asks, “What is there left to say? When we married, I became his wife. I can no longer remember what I looked like before that veil descended, or the vow exchanged between us.” This poem, like many others in Darling’s book, suggests that the pain of a ruined marriage is a surprise and in some ways, like Scarry’s premise, beyond language. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Any Anxious Body by Chrissy Kolaya

Posted on February 10, 2015 by Sheila Squillante

Broadstone Books

96 pages, $18.00

Review by Carley Moore

The cover of Chrissy Kolaya’s first collection of poetry, Any Anxious Body, is a drawing by Jess Larson of a yellow short-sleeved shirtwaist dress with a full skirt and white piping along the lapels and pockets. The dress floats in the blue and white watermarked background, as if on a dress form, inhabited by no particular body. Still, the dress is iconic and reminds one of the working-class American women in the 1950s who wore these dresses—mothers, aunts, grandmothers, wives, and girlfriends, all of them workers who tried to make a place for themselves as first- and second-generation Americans in small industrial towns. The dress is a ghost of sorts and the book haunts us, reminding us of the stories of love and loss, death and sacrifice, abuse and secrets at the center of family lore and history. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Wonderland, by Stacey D’Erasmo

Posted on December 4, 2014 by Sheila Squillante

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

242 pages, $22.00

Review by Carley Moore

I didn’t know it, but I’d been waiting for Stacey D’Erasmo’s fourth novel, Wonderland. I’ve been working on a novel for the last year about a young woman who tries to change her life by running away with a female-led indie music band in 1990, and so I’ve steeped myself in rock n’ roll memoirs and journalistic accounts of bands on tour. Many of the books were male affairs, with the exception of two of my favorites—Pamela DeBarres’s groundbreaking and sexually frank groupie memoir I’m With the Band and Sheila Weller’s well-researched and historically-minded Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carley Simon and the Journey of a Generation. These books gave me a unique glimpse into what it was like to be a woman in a male-dominated field, and the complex interplay of power, artistry, and sexuality that is the heart of playing in a band and performing for large audiences of adoring fans.

Still, D’Erasmo’s protagonist, Anna Brundage is a revelation. She’s a female artist who is sexual, in and out of love, and determined to stage a comeback though she has no clear idea how to make that happen. Anna’s fortunes and her fame are not particularly tied to those of the men around her, and yet she works with men, fucks and loves them, and calls a couple of them mentors and muses (such as her father, who is a famous conceptual artist, and Ezra and Billy Q., older, more successful musicians who have helped her career). I love Anna because she’s smart, sexy, and really and truly on her own. She’s not looking for any saviors. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] We Lack in Equipment and Control, by Jennifer H. Fortin

Posted on June 10, 2014 by Sheila Squillante

H_ANGM_N Books
104 pages, $14.95

Review by Carley Moore

In the introduction to Sing a Battle Song: The Revolutionary Poetry, Statements, and Communiqués of the Weather Underground, 1970-1974, Bill Ayers re-examines the complex global social, political, and economic climate that led to the formation of one of the most infamous revolutionary groups in American history. Known for their brash communiqués and the bombing of several government buildings in response to the war in Vietnam, the Weather Underground created their own vocabulary, a series of riffs on the Bob Dylan lyric from the song “Bad Moon”—“You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” Ayers remembers:

We talked of Weathermen and Weatherwomen, Weatherkids and Weatherstories, Weather documents and Weathersymps. The leadership was, of course, the Weather Bureau, a leaflet was a Weather Balloon, and the anti-imperialist struggle was the Weather Tide. Recruits went through what amounted to an informal Weatherman Berlitz in order to become functionally bilingual.

Weather, then, became not only a patois, but also a means to communicate on two levels—the politics in the air and the air itself. Continue reading →