What follows is the fourth in J. A. Tyler’s full-press of Subito Press, a series of reviews appearing at [PANK] over the course of 2012, covering every title available from Subito Press. J. A. Tyler’s previous full-press series have appeared at Big Other (a full-press of Calamari Press) and with Mud Luscious Press’s online quarterly (a full-press of Publishing Genius Press).

2008 winner for poetry in Subito Press’s annual competition, L. J. Moore’s F-Stein is a complex book, one perhaps best explained by quoting a portion of Paul Hoover’s blurb: “Anagrams of that famous name [Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein] appear as subtitles and offer clues to events so powerful they refuse to be spoken directly. Numerous clues leading to this secret have been dropped along the forest path of reading: homophones, double meanings, and a delightful, allusive style.” F-Stein is exactly this, a poetry collection focused on hiding and reappearing, on losing oneself in another as Dr. Frankenstein lost himself in the monster he created. But Moore doesn’t merely use these ideas as recurring themes – the poems of F-Stein actually become themselves words in hiding, anagrams, mirrors of meaning:

would that I were unconscious of my conscious / but I’m a camera / trained on a tv screen / I’m the medicine cabinet mirror opened / to reflect the bathroom mirror / the back of my head infinitely / I’m a door at the end of a hallway / beyond a door at the end of a hallway

The trouble with anagrams though is the trouble with F-Stein: when anagrams work they are surprisingly beautiful and often unexpectedly poignant, for instance:

The Short Aeneid (anagram of There is No Death)

Or:

Disconnect Tour, Conductor Stein (anagrams of Deconstruction) Continue reading →