Hannah Rodabaugh

[REVIEW] The End of the City by David Bendernagel

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end
Pink Fish Press
252 pages, $13.49

 

Review by Hannah Rodabaugh

 

David Bendernagel’s experimental novel The End of the City is a Joyce-like rabbit hole of loss, introspection, and grief. It follows key points in the life of the main character – a guy named Ben Moor – from awkward high school athlete to trained assassin. It vacillates between the character’s past and present so often that you are not always sure of what is happening when. But that is Bendernagel’s intention.

The novel opens in Reston, a city that is noted for both its ruralness and its seedy New Jersey-like charm. To main character Ben, Reston is like a version of Robert Sullivan’s The Meadowlands – only without the poisonous waste and Jimmy Hoffa:

This place is a chink in the armor, a soft spot in a bad tooth. Here on the outskirts, the city’s street grid is bent out of shape, like a fence mangled by escapees wielding wire cutters—snapped, peeled apart, pushed through. The gully looks like it was created by a car bomb; the real cause was the collapse of an underground cave. The roads glitter with broken glass and come to an end at the edge of the gully, the pavement crumbling and falling into this depression. … On the other side of the gully—scrawny branch tangles, a junkyard overtaken by vines. Civilization crept across this boundary and failed or hasn’t yet taken hold.

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[REVIEW] Mother, Loose by Brandel France de Bravo

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mother

Accents Publishing

34 pages, $10.00

 

Review by Hannah Rodabaugh

 

Brandel France de Bravo’s poetry chapbook Mother, Loose combines childhood nursery rhymes and a sense of overwhelming grief into a fascinating, hybrid document. At times, it resembles the humor of the book Politically Correct Bedtime Stories—except this collection is more like its grown-up cousin than its twin. Other times, the collection is intense in its portrayal of the narrator’s dying mother—sometimes similar to Plath’s aesthetic-like immolation of her father. This chapbook’s lush language, its poignant grief, and its imaginative retelling of classic nursery rhymes are a delight to read.

The title appears to be a sort of intersection: a play on the words “Mother Goose” and “Mother Lose.” This double meaning is intentional as so many of the poems, even the retold nursery rhymes, are about the death of the narrator’s mother (or at least a mother figure) from some form of cancer. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Paper, Cotton, Leather, by Jenny Sadre-Orafai

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paper

Press 53

80 pages, $14.95

 

Review by Hannah Rodabaugh

 

Within this debut poetry collection, Paper, Cotton, Leather, Jenny Sadre-Orafai’s poems illustrate love and its byproducts within a ringing framework of grief. Grim or sentimental at times, this collection looks at how some people haunt our lives even after they are gone: a presence of absence that is ghostlike, yet strangely real. Following her disintegrating marriage and divorce, the poems in this collection run the gamut of images and/or conventions associated with a failing domestic partnership: wedding paraphernalia, ring fingers, in-laws, adultery, rebound relationships.

One of the things that interests me in this collection is the way that Sadre-Orafai fixates on ideas or moments or objects she finds herself thinking about over and over after her marriage ended. An example of this is how the name of the collection stems from the first three traditional wedding anniversary gifts. In “Record,” Sadre-Orafai writes:

It’s polite to record what we get each year.
Paper, cotton, leather.

The years measure, interpret
these gifts that do nothing but soak space.

The cake agreed to keep until we’re ready
to brave again. The gardenias that didn’t

faint, smashed into a book, the pages curled
tight, a grab at the stalks at last.

I look after its spine, expect it to tantrum,
heave to the floor, the year we’re waiting for.

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[REVIEW] Memory Chose A Woman’s Body by Angela M. Carter

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memory
Unbound Content
102 pages, $16.00

Review by Hannah Rodabaugh

Angela M. Carter’s Memory Chose A Woman’s Body is a collection of poetry that deals with the subjects of the author’s abusive childhood, her subsequent problems with mental illness, her southern roots, being a mother, and others. Her poetry, which tends towards the confessional, is viscerally intense, a poetry of extreme images and emotions. Her work is glaringly and uncomfortably honest. However, this honesty is also what reels you in. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] The Only Sounds We Make, by Lee Zacharias

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Hub City Press

224 pages, $16.95

 

Review by Hannah Rodabaugh

 

Lee Zacharias’s most recent book, The Only Sounds We Make, is a collection of essays that discuss everything from where writers write, to the history of vultures, to the pleasures of photography, to destructive, document eating dogs. However common these threads may (or may not) be in our own lives, these essays interrupt our expectations instead of blandly repeating them. And they are wonderfully interruptive. Blending personal nostalgia, social or historical discussion, and intellectual statements, the twelve essays in this collection interweave all of these threads interestingly and adeptly.

The essays I enjoyed most were: “Geography For Writers,” a nuanced look at how surface plays in inspiration, and “Morning Light,” a paean to the creative delights of photography. Both fascinated me with their questions of place and location in relation to artistic endeavors. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Diorama of a People, Burning by Bradley Harrison

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Burning

Ricochet Editions

33 pages, $15.00

 

Review by Hannah Rodabaugh

 

Several years ago, when I first read Ronald Johnson’s radi os, an erasure text with Milton’s Paradise Lost as source material, I was fascinated by the construct of erasure in the meaning of language. Though the intended product was inconsistent in its desire towards an aesthetic reading experience, it asked questions about interpretation and intention which were interesting in their own right. Put in a different way, a need for structure to display a level of content seemed the point of the erasure. These types of texts often contain intentions in making meaning as one of its forms of making meaning.

In this vein, Bradley Harrison’s short collection Diorama of a People, Burning is neatly exposing these intentions. The chapbook is a wave-like series of text erasures. (This wave-like structure might be intentional, as many references to the catastrophic flooding in Iowa a few years ago occur intentionally and often.) The erasures center around six prose poems. Each prose poem has a series of three corresponding increasingly erased versions that follows it.  In all but the last series, they are in order of least to most erased, which gives us a sense of everything falling away as we read. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] A Different Sun, by Elaine Neil Orr

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Penguin

388 pages, $16.00

 

Review by Hannah Rodabaugh

 

Elaine Neil Orr’s first novel, A Different Sun, is a fascinating portrayal of 19th century missionaries struggling to create a Baptist church in the Yoruba region of Nigeria.  Orr got her inspiration for the book from the diary of Lurana Davis Bowen, who, along with her husband Thomas Jefferson Bowen, became the first Southern Baptists who worked as missionaries in Africa during the 19th century.  Orr writes:

“My mother gave me a copy of Lurana’s diary when I was working on my memoir, Gods of Noonday. I was tantalized by its suggested brevity . . . I first imagined a work of creative nonfiction in which I would seek to expand Lurana’s story, using all the historical evidence I could find, as well as my own experience. I found instead that fiction was the best medium for conveying not Lurana’s story per se but my own vision of what might have happened when a young, well-to-do woman from Georgia fell in love with a former Texas cavalryman and traveled to Yorubaland. What motivated her? What did she long for? What were her limitations?” Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Magenta Rave, by Janna Zonder

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Magenta

Samille Press

302 pages, Paperback $11.66/Kindle $4.99

 

Review by Hannah Rodabaugh

 

A Crime Is Its Cutting End: Janna Zonder’s Magenta Rave

            Magenta Rave, Janna Zonder’s first novel, is a crime story in its heart. Inspired by the Lorena Bobbitt trial, it follows a wave of serial assaults in the Atlanta area on recent prison parolees who were incarnated for sexual assault.  The perpetrator, who calls herself Magenta Rave, surgically removes the members of the men after drugging them at sleazy bars (roofies, or Rohypnol, makes a lot of appearances) and luring them to motel rooms.

The book opens with the first victim waking after what he imagines was a wild night with a strange woman only to find his penis missing and a carefully applied surgical bandage in its place. The victim is rushed to the hospital, and there we meet the main protagonists of the story: Atlanta detectives Simone Rosenburg and her partner Marty Sloan. Both detectives are in their 40s. Rosenburg, originally from Jamaica, is divorced with a teenage daughter; Sloan is country man who, when not doing police work, tills the family farm.  Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Bye Sea, by Tony Mancus

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Bye Sea

Tree Light Books
41 pages, $12

Review by Hannah Rodabaugh

Tony Mancus’ wonderful chapbook collection Bye Sea is a fascinating excursion into cultural sea tropes and the ways we reclaim them for the personal or private. In this whimsical collection, pirates, madras, the sea shanty, weather predictions (very sailor), cartography, model ships in bottles, and yes, even treasure chests are recreated, or more accurately, regrown into a set of individual gestures that seek to expand outside of their cultural associations while they are still at some level unable to escape them.

However, the first thing that strikes you when reading this collection is not the poems, though they deserve our best attention, but the inspired typography and design. Everything about this collection speaks to the quality of the design process. The cover bears a beautiful, original screen-print of an octopus. (I have a great deal of affection for the octopus, so perhaps I am biased!) The typography and page layouts throughout also are absolutely gorgeous. In all honesty, this is one of the most aesthetically pleasing reading experiences I have had in quite some time. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] How We Light, by Nick Sturm

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            Sturm3

H_NGM_N BKS

105 pages, $14.95

Review by Hannah Rodabaugh

 

Nick Sturm’s full-length poetry collection How We Light is an interesting foray into the mechanics of grief. At its heart, the majority of the poems concern a failed love affair. They ask questions of how and why we communicate even when that communication fails.  While there are other minor themes replete throughout the volume, none of them surmount the near constant repetition of mouths, lips, faces, throats, and voices united in their inability to do what they were designed for. Referenced in almost every poem, they point to what becomes fetishism over loss, a sort of leitmotif for giving grief language.

For example, in “A WHORL THAT ASCENDS,” Sturm writes, “At the exhibit I touch / everything with my mouth   My mouth / does not attract much attention.” While not directly about loss, we get the sense that this mouth has still failed to communicate what it needs to. It speaks through tactile sensation, and no one pays attention to what it is speaking. Similarly, in one of the many poems that share the title “WHAT A TREMENDOUS TIME WE’RE HAVING!”  Sturm writes, “[T]ell me you love me / is what I want to say but my tongue is not so evolved / My tongue rides a hobbyhorse in a big wet parlor / It acts like a baby.” Other iterations under that same title continually push the theme: “I am a mammal lucky to have a mouth,” one states. “I wake up and muzzle my soul . . . / My mouth automatically dismantles,” states another. This use of mouths united in their inability to do what they are designed for creates a level of hopelessness around the potential for genuine communication. This repetition also seems to say that those who can communicate the least effectively may obsess about it the most. (Though there is no loss of effective communication to the reader even when communicating about how one is unable to.) Continue reading →