C&R Press

[REVIEW] While You Were Gone by Sybil Baker

Posted on by

(C&R Press, 2018)

REVIEW BY BARTON SMOCK

—

What if not so strange bedfellows were soap opera and short story? What if promise is a shape that steals the form of its maker? What if keyhole was the eye of an empty clock? What if one could look long enough at the ceiling and so change the color of heaven? If each, then I would say we may one day have a book like Sybil Baker’s While You Were Gone. In the meantime, we have Sybil Baker’s While You Were Gone.

In different stages of gone-ness are three sisters from Tennessee. Are Claire, Shannon, and Paige. In that order, or not. Each goes from sadness to updated sadness, knowing place as puzzle but seeing differently how a piece can be both missing and extra. As Baker draws them, they are lived-in and in orbit; spirits in a movie about feet touching the earth. Claire, sheltered so early by her belief in free fall; Shannon, silenced by her idealization of reportage; Paige, seeker of a recordable transit. Insomniac acolytes, all. Survivors of synopsis anchored to haunting their individual uprootings. The South is here:  the new, the old, the same, the simultaneous. As is the short attention span of history. As is the subtle and futureless yen a body has for ruin. As is Death, a fourth sister, whose blood has no birthday.

Fathers read of sickness and outside some are singing and this is the church of the unmothered internal. Mind is the dream of memory. Sex claws at the present. Some here are egg-shaped and hiding and asking, sister, can the devoured hear the sound that my stomach is making? I have no answers. There are Fisher Price figures in a crochet dollhouse. I said oh, above this work, and oh again. For I had not guessed doom to be impulsive. For I had not known endings to revive arrival, or grief to put brush before fossil.

As a storyteller, Baker knows revelation is the consoler of plot and that time exists to mourn chronology. As an artist, Baker casts a bite-mark on that vividly tragic fruit as one awed into suddenness and then as three in the twilight of playing dress-up. As a voice, Baker quotes shadows beyond the reach of comment.

I pray you will love this book for its commemorative absences and for its overlapping obscurities. I believe you will for how it navigates so visibly that it trades being spotted for being seen.

—

Barton Smock lives in Columbus, Ohio, with his wife and four children. He is the author of the chapbook infant*cinema (Dink Press, 2016) and editor of isacoustic* (isacoustic.com)

[REVIEW] Lessons in Camouflage by Martin Ott

Posted on by

(C&R Press, 2018)

REVIEW BY TOM GRIFFEN

—

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.

 

—

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] Ivy vs. Dogg by Brian Leung

Posted on by

(C&R Press, 2017)

REVIEW BY PRATIMA BALABHADRAPATHRUNI

__

Ivy vs. Dogg is Brian Leung’s fourth book. In 2005, he published World Famous Love Acts (Sarabande Books),  a collection of short stories, which takes a totally different approach to the art of weaving a story. What his novels and short stories have in common, though, is their careful attention to detail and thoughtful rendering. The pace is measured and even, but never monotonous. If I might draw a comparison, Leung’s work is like the spokes of a bicycle, releasing a colorful streak with each turn.

The cover of the book, replete with a giant technicolor squid, evokes this colorful and vibrant approach to storytelling. The ubiquitous “We” that surfaces and resurfaces throughout the book seems almost to come across as the arms of that giant squid.

Which leads to the reader’s first question:  Why does the title of the book have the phrase “With a cast of thousands” featured prominently within it?

Admittedly, as the title announces, the story is about  two childhood companions, both contesting for the position of Junior Mayor.  Still, how many characters can fit into a book of 275 pages?

I realized that it is not just the campaign, and the contesting of Ivy vs. Dogg, that drives the narrative, but it is the town of Mudlick, and the people who can swing the vote either way, that make the narrative arc as inherently unstable as it is. I whistle and startle the neighbor’s cat who has taken to snoozing under the shade of our frangipani. I am sure the cat has a story to tell.  But, it takes a Brian Leung to make that an interesting enough a story to sustain  the reader’s interest.

While the book concludes with the election results and their aftermath, it is not so much the suspense that keeps one’s interest. Rather, it is the dry humor bordering on sociological satire that sails the story through. For, this is not just the story of the popular rich boy, with good looks and blue eyes, and the good-natured plain Jane. It is about the town and the people, their friendships and fraternities.

Yet it is the voice of the Committee that rules the roost, and hands us reason to chuckle or even take a tiny pause, and finally reflect. Printed in large, bold font, and enclosed in parentheses, these pieces of language act as would rumblers on the autobahn, as they slow down the reading, and at times, offer comic relief. It is not as if these dialogue sections always support the text, for many times they seem to be in contradiction to or ridiculously synchronized with that which is being implied in the story. For somehow, the story seems to grow stronger by their presence, as if they were a scaffolding of sorts, although they seem oddly askew, sometimes.

It is not as if the book is a rider to one’s moral conscience. It is not even a social commentary.

(Still, there are specific and concrete expression, which are very precise, and reflect the usual mindset of any small town, and all the people that could make it.

The book is dedicated to among others, also to  “ every home town whose children hear the whispering fists.”

What whispering fists? Later, much later, I realized that the whispering fists are the Committee or really the social pressure on kids who grow up to not be kids and sometimes get to be part of these Committees, or could these fists be fists of determination to be who they want to be, as they fight a social system and social stigma, social oppression?

Some things in the book are purely farcical, or so it seems. When a topiary shaped like a little girl is treated like one and the actual kids are not given enough thought, when  a little girl is hit by a car and soon forgotten or pushed out of the minds, when a little girl who grows to be sensible and social conscious teenager, when  the blue-eyed boy born with a silver spoon in his mouth is always a winner because he is so much more to look at when compared to the plain jane or the wallpaper, …ah, yes, that is the town of the whispering fists, with its omnipresent Committee, surely there must be an instruction or two on rearing children.

(Cultivate the skills of attractive children.) -The Committee.

Or even

(Make your child smoke a full cigarette as a toddler to discourage the habit later.) – The Committee

Of course, the Committee know everything, is always right, and omnipotent…well maybe…

Here is an extract from Page 23 that goes with the Committee’s opinion on Page 24:

“Whatever the case, it’s always been a rough bit of housing and if you live there, it says a lot about your position in life, whether you want it to or not.

(Home ownership is a foundation of moral stability.) – The Committee”

That is not as simple as it sounds. Because, in the book, a boy disses a girl, states she hails from the Pink Ghetto, is poor enough to only live in an apartment instead of a house, even though, he kind of likes her.

Ouch.

When I said, the story reels off like the spokes of something that turns circles, this is what I meant.

Each bit of the wheel that the reader traverses, enlightens us a little more.

(This is not a book for those seeking Enlightenment ) – The Reader

I really wonder how Brian wrote them, these Committee monologues.

My guess is, he wrote the story,  and then spent an awful lot of enjoyable  time coming up with the Committee says, or he watched people playing Simon says… who knows …maybe he read old newspapers as he went about with the editing of the book. New news is no news. Really.

Yikes, I sound like the Committee.

Even though, this book is an absolute unified collage of several stories, given the unique lives of the town folk,  there is a lot of intelligence that went into the pieces of Committee quips, they are hilarious and acerbic, simultaneously. Of course, some are almost innocent and funny…

(Mustaches make a lip reader’s job difficult.) – The Committee

Oh, wait. Here is the text that follows:

“Jacob Alter crossed his legs and put his arms behind his head. He was growing a mustache and it was coming out redder than his hair had ever been. ‘I’ve heard from a pretty reliable source that Ivy Simmons didn’t tell us something very important about her candidacy.’ All of us, as if on cue, leaned in to hear what Jacob was about to say.”

And there, the Committee quip morphs into being the chameleon that it almost always is, it changes its color when hurled into its given its context.

What they do is transport the reader into a social commentary. They offer scope for argument, they involve the reader outside  and beyond the story, enable and afford her to interact in the scenario, without having to interfere with the plot of the story.

The story meanders on, unhampered, as languidly as a horse swishing its tail as it grazes in the meadow with other horses who swish their tails too. And the reader, watches it all, takes it all while thinking about the moral and social implications of sociological structures.

The author becomes the magician; out come all these stories: rainmaker, a plant girl, a woman who talks to the topiary, the man who insists on a fence, and his neighbor who relents, old time  girlfriends, boyfriends, and many more, many many more, a cast of thousands, who fit right into the brackets that hold them all together, allowing them fit right into the plot of the main story: an election campaign where the contenders have to constantly upgrade their acts, for “each event  is only as good as the last event” of the campaign.

But, also, the writer, is engaged in something else: a sleight of hand … and we are drawn into it all, it happens, on its own, without the reader trying to make it happen. There is a story and then, there is a social commentary. The reader is both accepting the story and also arguing the structures and pressures of living in closed societies, especially small towns where everyone knows everyone else.

__

Pratima Balabhadrapathruni is a home maker, writer, and poet. A winner of the in the Poetry Sans Frontieres contest twice in a row, she also has been chosen for the 2014 IWP workshop in non-fiction conducted by the Univ. of Iowa. Her work has appeared in OTATA, and Haiku Presence, Haibun Today, and other publications.