J. A. Tyler

The Body, The Rooms by Andy Frazee (A Review by J. A. Tyler)

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What follows is the ninth 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 reviews have covered every title from Calamari Press (at Big Other) and from Publishing Genius Press (at Mud Luscious Press).

Comprised of five long and fairly complex poems of varying styles, Andy Frazee’s The Body, The Rooms is a book of poetry built to uncover how language is a body, and the way in which readers mirror those instinctual thoughts we can never contain.

from ‘Cartography’:

We or the poet and reader are alone in their poem. Bodies or pages separate. Language is both the separator and that which bridges the lapse of separation.

The Body, The Rooms is as philosophical as it is poetic- Frazee simultaneously exploring the way in which our body is a vessel for the humanity that lies within and establishing the insignificance of language as only one attempt to capture one piece of a larger moment that is always changing: a reader in the moment of reading.

Continue reading →

Bartleby, the Sportscaster by Ted Pelton (A Review by J. A. Tyler)

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What follows is the eighth 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 reviews have covered every title from Calamari Press (at Big Other) and from Publishing Genius Press (at Mud Luscious Press).

It is a dangerous game to mimic or mirror or reinvent a classic piece, so it is perhaps the most dangerous game for Ted Pelton to reimagine the classic of classics, Herman Melville’s much honored and beloved story “Bartleby, the Scrivener”, though in the end, it is an investment well worth Pelton’s time and energy.

Bartleby, the Sportscaster is the original book published by Subito Press outside of their annual fiction and poetry competition, a novella in which the character Bartleby is recast as a minor league baseball analyst who would “prefer not” to exercise his talents on-air, and whose journey succinctly parallels that of its classic, including all of the original angst and narrator rumination:

Here then is the story of a very sad case, like I started to say before. One of the saddest, Bartleby. I guess you might say he was just the last new prospect who didn’t stick, like a thousand others before him. He certainly wasn’t like any of the others. But he was more than just strange. Continue reading →

Moon Is Cotton & She Laugh All Night by Tracy DeBrincat (A Review by J. A. Tyler)

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What follows is the seventh 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 reviews have covered every title from Calamari Press (at Big Other) and from Publishing Genius Press (at Mud Luscious Press).

In comparison to earlier winners in the fiction category of Subito’s annual competition, DeBrincat’s Moon Is Cotton & She Laugh All Night is a much more exposition-based collection, leaning far more heavily on traditional beginning / middle / end structures for each of its stories. This, in and of itself, makes Moon Is Cotton & She Laugh All Night a new sort of playing ground for Subito, and a place to pick up new readers who might otherwise be daunted by more aggressively unique voices like Adam Peterson’s My Untimely Death or Andrew Farkas’s Self-Titled Debut. However, this also means that because DeBrincat supports her stories by traditional constructions, her writing is a bit more prone to predictability. Continue reading →

Song & Glass by Stan Mir (A Review by J. A. Tyler)

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What follows is the sixth 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).

Stan Mir’s Song & Glass, Subito’s 2009 poetry winner, is a solid, enjoyable collection and takes at least two tactical routes that I appreciate and respect, making the book notable to be sure, and certainly worthy of the win in Subito’s annual competition.

Mir creates most of Song & Glass’s noise via a constant marrying and divorcing of elements, questioning what does and what doesn’t exist, which quickly becomes the thematic focus for the collection as a whole. Mir begins this concept with the title, forcing ‘song’, an emotional and even spiritual word, with ‘glass’, a layer of concrete yet see-through and easily shattered existence. This carries into the opening section, ‘Opposite of Autumn’, where these juxtapositions are modeled in a variety of ways:

It is not yet winter it is

already cold

enough to create

snow drifts in the mind

Walking us through a winter that isn’t, yet somehow still accumulates in drifts, Mir sets up to knock down element after element, steadying his poems on readily identifiable metaphors but then crushing those comparisons by negation, questioning, or other means of take-down. And this is how Song & Glass functions in nearly every movement, superimposing the tangible and material with the spiritual or emotional, posing a battle between truth and knowing, wonderfully (and often cleverly) milking the border between paradigms:

across the park the breeze

across the park the asshole

And while this focus on comparisons is not enough to entirely carry Song & Glass as a collection, Mir also makes careful use of another tactic: enjambment and a lack of punctuation, giving us poetry that desperately wants, through its own force of grammar, to be heard:

The faces in the windows

are not petals of a flower

nor those of a bicycle

they are faces paddling

through an afternoon

offset by geometry

The spacing and line breaks remind us how carefully hewn Mir’s poetry is, and that, coupled with the thematic focus on contrasted elements, make Song & Glass an inviting and inventive read that may not blow your mind, but is a noble collection of poetry, and a book clearly deserving of Subito’s recognition.

Song & Glass is available from Subito Press.

Subito Press is a nonprofit literary publisher based in the Creative Writing Program of the Department of English at the University of Colorado at Boulder. We look for innovative fiction and poetry that at once reflects and informs the contemporary human condition, and we promote new literary voices as well as work from previously published writers. Subito Press encourages and supports work that challenges already-accepted literary modes and devices.

J. A. Tyler is the author of the forthcoming poetry collection When We Hold Our Hands (Dark Sky Books). His recent work appears with Black Warrior Review, Cream City Review, Redivider, and Diagram, and he reviews for The Nervous Breakdown and The Rumpus among other venues. For more, visit: chokeonthesewords.com.

Self-Titled Debut by Andrew Farkas (A Review by J. A. Tyler)

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What follows is the fifth 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).

Fiction winner in the 2008 edition of Subito’s annual competition, Andrew Farkas’s story collection Self-Titled Debut is, on one hand, a book filled with intelligent and able-bodied stories, but on the other, a collection that unfortunately stops just shy of being a magnificent book, just short of delivering brilliance.

From the start, Farkas’s book reads as an exercise in obfuscation. The cover itself is a blurred image of a headless man, walking in an undeterminable landscape, bracketed in scars of unidentifiable light; and its title – ­Self-Titled Debut – is clearly mocking yet also latching onto this notion of indeterminacy. And while I’d love to say that there is value in this vagueness, that Farkas is using these motifs to talk about them, over the course of this eleven story collection I am not convinced.

Self-Titled Debut opens with ‘An Immaterial Message’, a flash piece where a message that we don’t know isn’t delivered to a person who is left constantly waiting – Farkas’s foray into Beckettian structures. And like a microcosm of the collection as a whole, this story is interesting and well-written, but I was instantly left wondering what it all meant, what it was for, where it was heading or where it wanted me to go. I was, like the recipient in the story, left waiting. In this way, Self-Titled Debut offers story after story that, each in their own way, offer up undeliverable messages, lost causes, conversations with one’s self, and other various modes of never-connections.

Farkas perhaps unintentionally describes this muddying best himself in ‘Oubliette’:

It had all begun so simply, so clearly. But from the outset of the evening the situation had become more and more inchoate, until now it was utterly entropic. It started innocently. There was the beautiful, symbolic night; the prospect of an adventure away from the norm; the vigor, the motility to pursue the adventure because of the night one hopes to wrap his mind around; the mystery of the alley (a mystery in a mystery); the deeper mystery of the hole (a mystery in a mystery in a mystery). But now the vigor was replaced with confusion. The confusion was represented by an intense yearning to burst forth in abstract rage, cursing the world for its ill-defined secrets.

In the end, this focus on the vague, on the indecipherable, makes Self-Titled Debut sound like a Poe fan’s wet dream, but the problem in Farkas’s collection is that the book never holds tightly enough to this theme, actually obscuring itself from it. So while this book could have been beautifully playful, Self-Titled Debut seems instead relinquished, at least in my mind, to be a book that is readable and smart, but that falls short of making the impact it had perhaps intended.

Self-Titled Debut is available from Subito Press.

Subito Press is a nonprofit literary publisher based in the Creative Writing Program of the Department of English at the University of Colorado at Boulder. We look for innovative fiction and poetry that at once reflects and informs the contemporary human condition, and we promote new literary voices as well as work from previously published writers. Subito Press encourages and supports work that challenges already-accepted literary modes and devices.

J. A. Tyler is the author of the forthcoming novel Water (Civil Coping Mechanisms). His recent work appears with Caketrain, New York Tyrant, Redivider, and Fourteen Hills, and he reviews for The Nervous Breakdown and The Rumpus among other venues. For more, visit: chokeonthesewords.com.

F-Stein by L. J. Moore (A Review by J. A. Tyler)

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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 →

With One’s Own Eyes by Sherwood Anderson (A Review by J. A. Tyler)

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What follows is the third 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).

To round out their 2008 catalog, Subito Press published With One’s Own Eyes: Sherwood Anderson’s Realities, a collection consisting of an introduction by Welford D. Taylor, a lecture that Sherwood Anderson gave on Realism in 1939, and the stories “Adventure” (originally published in Winesburg, Ohio, 1919) and “Death in the Woods” (originally published in The American Mercury, 1926); and while as such With One’s Own Eyes is a nice nod to the roots of Realism in American literature, it feels more like a project than a book, and its true value seems packed solely into the reprinted Sherwood Anderson lecture.

With One’s Own Eyes opens with Welford D. Taylor’s essay, a scholar of repute and a well-known researcher of Sherwood Anderson, but Taylor’s contribution is dry, steeped in tiresome academic references, and serves only as a reminder of what most students hate about the university years: those lectures that go on and on without them. In contrast, the stories reprinted in With One’s Own Eyes are interesting reads, and certainly solid representations of Sherwood Anderson’s style, but they do seem odd collected like this, since both are really more apt in their original contexts, “Adventure” within Winesburg, Ohio and “Death in the Woods” in Death in the Woods and Other Stories. Continue reading →

My Untimely Death by Adam Peterson (A Review by J. A. Tyler)

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What follows is the second 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).

Adam Peterson’s My Untimely Death, the winner in fiction of Subito Press’s inaugural contest, is a bright and clever collection of flash vignettes intent on showing the absurdity of death, no matter where or how it is manifest, and no matter how much we are expecting, or, in the case of some of Peterson’s narrators, eagerly anticipating it.

Within the opening pieces, Peterson perfectly illustrates what we can expect from the structure of the book: a nameless narrator struck down or otherwise overcome by a death of various modes and methods, often predicted, and always poetically charged and under-written with a brutal touch of humor. Continue reading →

Little Red Riding Hood Missed the Bus by Kristin Abraham (A Review by J. A. Tyler)

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What follows is the first 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. J. A. Tyler’s previous full-press series have appeared at Big Other (full-press of Calamari Press) and at Mud Luscious Press’s online quarterly (full-press of Publishing Genius Press).

As Subito Press’s first competition winner in poetry, Kristin Abraham’s Little Red Riding Hood Missed the Bus sets the bar extremely high for future volumes, tangling the standard versions of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ around contemporary culture and through surreal landscapes to form a poetry collection of ghosts and blood and snow, a re-envisioned and re-invigorated fairy tale.

Little Red Riding Hood Missed the Bus is a pocket-sized, matte volume, slim and beautifully designed by David Stadler. And the physical sensibilities of the book – minimal, simplistic, straight-forward – are in wonderful contrast with Abraham’s poetry, which is sprawling and dense, thick-blooded and expansive. This ripe juxtaposition in the production of Little Red Riding Hood Missed the Bus is an excellent way into a book that thrives on contrast. Continue reading →

In the Time of the Blue Ball by Manuela Draeger, translated by Brian Evenson (A Review by J. A. Tyler)

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In the Time of the Blue Ball is the tip of an iceberg. Translated by Brian Evenson, this book is a collection of three stories from Manuela Draeger’s ten story catalog featuring Bobby Potemkine, a hapless quasi police officer assigned to supremely confused and exhausted cases. But Manuela Draeger is only the pen-name of author Antoine Volodine, and Volodine only the pseudonym for a French author who secrets his name away. Draeger is also a character in Volodine’s other books, “a librarian in a post-apocalyptic prison camp who invents stories to tell to the children in the camp.” Iceberg indeed.

As with Roald Dahl and Dr. Seuss before her, Manuela Draeger materializes new phrases and places from nothing and inside of fresh and vastly imaginative stories. The reader is brought through these invented worlds via Potemkine’s investigator lens as he tracks the disappearance of the inventor of fire, the constantly reoccurring murder of a noodle named Auguste Diodon, and the case of the baby pelicans who, without mothers, quietly plague the cityscape:

A baby pelican is not cumbersome. With a bit of string, you can hang one around your neck. It will sway in rhythm with your feet, very well-behaved, very cute, without ever burping or whining or leaving any droppings. Therefore, there is no reason to complain about them. But in the end it’s rather unusual to find yourself taking care of this little pelican while its mother is elsewhere, off in who knows what mysterious elsewhere.

Draeger skips and hops language across the pages, drifting us underneath mounds of glorious new domains where woolly crabs house sapphire blue commas of hair on their bellies, all women are first-named Lili, all men Djinn, dogs talk, battes lead the way, flies play imagined orchestra instruments, and every creature, even Potemkin himself, has some “sadness to cultivate”:

I had finished my investigation, and I should have felt proud for having done my best, but at that moment, I had above all the impression of finding myself alone. Everyone was there, still within earshot or nearly, but I felt very alone.

Even in the plots of these stories Manuela Draeger can’t help but deliciously tinker words into newness: the inventor of fire was simply living elsewhere and convinces Potemkine to help destroy the last remnants of flame; Auguste Diodon is finally saved from the noodle bowl but is brash and ungrateful; and the baby pelicans, though they are happy with their new mother, leave Potemkine feeling empty and lost:

I started to move again.

For a moment, I walked in a circle on Soraya Gong, from east to west, under the moon, listening to the distant murmur of the waves. Djinn’s yelps, the laughter of the battes from incalculable heights. Then I went home.

We read because we are seeking extraordinary words, and Draeger’s words are exactly that, extraordinary. We are extremely lucky that this volume has reached us non-French speakers in the skin of the Dorothy Publishing Project and I am, as you will be when you read this book, absolutely hungry for more of all that is In the Time of the Blue Ball.

In the Time of the Blue Ball is available from Dorothy Publishing Project.

J. A. Tyler is the author three books including A Man of Glass & All the Ways We Have Failed from Fugue State Press. His reviews have appeared with The Nervous Breakdown, The Colorado Review, & Rumpus. For more, visit: chokeonthesewords.com.