Graywolf Press

[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] Homie by Danez Smith

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Graywolf Press, 2020

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REVIEW BY GABINO IGLESIAS

No one does it quite like Danez Smith. That’s it. That’s the review. Okay, that’s not it. You obviously need a little more. Here we go.

Danez Smith doesn’t just dance to the beat of their own drum; they slaughter magical animals of oppression with their hands, dry and stretch their skins, build the drums, call everyone together for a party, and then play the drums while dancing in a house built of words that can withstand a hurricane, the weight of history and racism, and a collection of memories best forgotten.

Homie, which is the title of this book only for the uninitiated, is a celebratory dance, a slap in the face of complacency, and an invitation to a revolution. It’s also a superb collection of poetry from one of the most interesting and unique voices in contemporary literature. In Homie, Smith opens their heart and their past and invites us all in to take a look. In fact, Smith does more than that: they make us their friend, especially those of us who, as people of color, have faced a different set of struggles.

There isn’t a single throwaway poem in Homie. That said, I won’t discuss all of them. Instead, I’ll give you glimpses of those that have stuck with me for weeks and are still with me now, a month after turning the last page.

The first one is “dogs!,” a strange crowning jewel that contains the taste of many of the cohesive elements that make this collection read like a whole: anger, humor, rhythm, and a message that’s stretched on top of the words like a cat, waiting for you to acknowledge it, to recognize its existence. It’s made up of little poems, all dealing with dogs in one way or another. Here is one I had to share on Twitter:

“scooby doo was trying to tell us

something when every time that

monster mask got snatched off it

was a greedy white dude.”

Here’s one that comes later and slices through our times all the way to the marrow to expose one of those problems that live at the core of this country like an intractable cancer:

“a dead dog is a hero, a dead lion

is a hero, a cloned sheep is a

miracle a dead child is a tragedy

depending on the color, the

nation, the occupation of non-

occupation of the parents.”

Danez’s is the kind of in-your-face poetry that revels in celebrating Otherness, that screams about the realities of the poet’s positionality. They are here to say things that matter, to scream about injustice:

“i didn’t come here to preach peace

for that is hot the hunted’s duty.

i came here to say what i can’t say

without my name being added to a list

what my mother fears i will say

what she wishes to say herself”

And this is Danez’s book, so they say whatever they want to say. In that regard, I guess some readers could find the language shocking. However, the way they use it demands attention. The title inside the book, the real title of the collection, contains a world of meaning. The words here are words that live in the interstitial space between being horrible insults and operating as reclaimed/repurposed terms that carry power with them. Yes, there are words here most people wouldn’t say/shouldn’t say, but “this ain’t about language/but who language holds.” Danez is in your face about these things because ignoring them is not how we make them better, how we bring people together, how we shine a light on racism, homophobia, and injustice.

Homie is timely, powerful, and honest. It’s one of those rare poetry collections that demand to be read because it contains the usual elements (i.e. love, memories, regret), but also brings other elements to the table, elements that are timely and important: bigotry, poverty, culture, and family. This is an elegant collection rocking short shorts; a fun read that’s extremely serious. Go read it. 

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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] Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky

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(Graywolf Press, 2019)

REVIEW BY LEONARD TEMME

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The long-anticipated publication of Illya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic is an important literary event. The title page identifies the book as “poems,” which is as misleading as it is true. True, because the book contains 59 poems, each capable of standing alone with its own structure, sound, meaning, and music. Misleading, because the book is a single work of art, to be encountered as a totality from beginning to end. Taken together, the poems form a two-act play describing the military occupation of Vasenka, a fictional Eastern European town. The 36 poems of the first act tell the story of Sonya and Alfonso Barabinsky, while the 21 poems of the second act tell the story of Mamma Galya Armolinskaya.

The play opens with the poem, Gunshot, which begins:

Our country is the stage.

When soldiers march into town, public assemblies are officially prohibited. But today, neighbors flock to the piano music from Sonya and Alfonso’s puppet show in Central Square….

 

An army jeep swerves into the square, disgorging is own Sergeant.

‘Disperse immediately!’

 

The poem continues with a description of the puppet show, the Sergeant, and the townspeople who watch the deaf boy, Petya,

 

… lean back, gather all the spit in his throat, and launch it at the Sergeant.

 

The sound we do not hear lifts the gulls off the water.

 

With the Sergeant’s unheard gunshot the book earns its title, Deaf Republic, for the people of Vasenka can hear nothing.

These poems have multiple backstories, some clearly biographical. Kaminsky was born in Odessa when the Ukraine was still part of the former Soviet Union and is himself deaf. Moreover, Kaminsky published a related sequence of 16 poems in the May 2009 issue of Poetry Magazine and that sequence is still available online. Several of these earlier poems are not included in the book while some have been radically rewritten and a few remained unchanged. In a note accompanying the 16 poems, Kaminsky writes that they are from an unfinished manuscript, Deaf Republic, found under the floorboards of a house in an Eastern European town, and that they tell the story of a pregnant woman and her husband during the occupation. He adds that several versions of the manuscript exist.  The fiction of the floorboards as well as the many differences between the 16 poems of the sequence and those in the book point to several more backstories. And let’s not overlook the backstories that make these poems immediately relevant to our lives in America today.

The book includes a dramatis personae listing the characters who populate the play, but not every character speaks. Act One has two voices; one voice is the Townspeople, a narrator who provides action, context, and continuity, not unlike a Greek Chorus. The other voice is Alfonso, the husband of pregnant Sonya. They are puppeteers in Madam Galya Armolinskaya’s puppet theater.  Act One describes the newlywed couple and the Townspeople under the military occupation. Sonya gives birth to her baby girl, Anushka, and is then summarily shot. The soldiers take Anushka from Alfonso and hang him. Act One closes with:

There will be evidence, there will be evidence.

While helicopters bomb the streets, whatever they will open, will open.

What is silence? Something of the sky in us.

 

Act Two also has two voices, the Townspeople and that of Madam Mamma Galya Armolinskaya, the charismatic, dynamic, active resistance fighter, who at 53 is having more sex than any of us, and who whipped a Lieutenant with the leash of his own patrol dog / and there were thirty-two persons watching / (for the baker / insisted / on bringing his sons). The Townspeople admire and hate Mamma Galya, the luckiest woman in our nation, as they remain deaf to the horrors and cower. They would give anything

… to ride away from our funerals

beside you, in a yellow taxi,

 two windows open,

leaving loaves of bread

in the mailboxes

of the arrested.

 

Larger than life, she rescues the baby Anushka hidden in a bundle of laundry, raises her, leads the resistance, is betrayed by the men of Vasenka, executed, and buried.  Read these poems aloud and weep.

Describing the aftermath of Mamma Galya’s funeral, the anonymous voice of the Townspeople declaims:

Today

I have to screw on the expression of a person

 

though I am at most an animal

and the animal I am spirals

 

from the funeral to his kitchen, shouts: I have come, God, I have come running to                                                  you –

in snow-drifted streets, I stand like a flagpole

 

without a flag.

 

The play takes place in the historical past, and in a county with alien Eastern European names we associate with oppressive authoritarian governments. We recognize that the play describes the kinds of violence that have happened many times in many places. Far worse things are reported daily today, just not yet here for most of us. So we in America, safe within our boarders, read the play at a safe distance, shake our heads at the horror and suffering, confident, right down to our toes, how wrong it all is, how horrible, and are outraged at the atrocities, with the subtext not us, not us running sotto voce through our heads as we read.

The book sandwiches the play between an opening and a closing poem that cut deeply because they dissolve the distance between America and Vasenka to place us in the middle of the Deaf Republic. The opening poem is titled the indictment, We Lived Happily During the War, and begins:

And when they bombed other people’s houses, we

 

protested

but not enough, we opposed them but not

 

enough. I was

in my bed, around my bed America

 

was falling: invisible house by invisible house by invisible house –

and continues with the closing indictment:

In the street of money in the city of money in the country of money,

our great country of money, we (forgive us)

 

lived happily during the war.

The closing poem titled, In a Time of Peace, is the reply and begins:

Inhabitant of the earth for fortysomething years

I once found myself in a peaceful country. I watch neighbors open

 

their phones to watch

a cop demanding a man’s driver’s license. When the man reaches for his wallet,

 the cop

shoots. Into the car window. Shoots.

to conclude with:

This is a time of peace.

 

I do not hear gunshots,

but watch birds splash over the backyards of the suburbs. How bright is the sky

as the avenue spins on its axis.

How bright is the sky (forgive me) how bright.

We, the American deaf, who protest too little to be effective but enough to assuage our conscience, who catch the daily atrocities on the evening news, are called to examine ourselves. Regardless of how self-congratulatory we are for ‘America as the shining city on the hill,’ we are part of the history of humanity, no better, and, we hope, no worse than most.

Deaf Republic may be described as a hybrid, with text on a continuum between prose and poetry with each piece a dramatic monologue that moves the story forward. The intention, shape, and scope of the piece, a play, mostly poetry, intended to be read rather than staged, puts the text in the tradition of Closet Drama, a form that had some popularity during the Elizabethan and Jacobian periods and among the nineteenth century romantics. This form has been subsumed by the modern radio play or today’s podcast, and it is hard not to imagine Deaf Republic being performed as a reading, possibly with music. Reading the Deaf Republic sent this reviewer to revisit Schoenberg’s A Survivor From Warsaw; the two are close cousins.

This is political writing at its best–not ideological or hectoring poster board invective but the sound of human anguish–read the poems, weep, and be shaken.

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Leonard Temme has a doctorate in neurophysiology and is a research scientist in a government laboratory. He studied writing most extensively with Marie Ponsot, Sue Walker, Josh Davis and Kristina Darling. In addition to his professional publications, his writing has appeared numerous literary and small presses. He served as Poet Laureate of North West Florida between 1989 and 1992.