Kate Schapira

[REVIEW] Southern Sin: True Stories of the Sultry South and Women Behaving Badly, Edited by Lee Gutkind and Beth Ann Fennelly

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Southern Sin

 

In Fact Books
350 pages, $15.95

 

Review by Kate Schapira

 

As a reviewer, I may have come in the wrong door. I’m not from the South, and I’ve never lived there or even been there for very long. What’s more, the word “sin” puts my back up — it reminds me of ads that refer to chocolate as a “guilty pleasure.” Oh, for heaven’s sake. Just relish the damn thing.

But what if you can’t? Or what if the guilt really does make the pleasure sweeter? What if, as Dorothy Allison suggests in her introduction, it fills you with defiant pride — the lie you get everyone to believe, the truth you fling in everyone’s face?

Sin as a show, as I’ll show them, appears more than once in this collection: Chelsea Rathburn, in “The Renters”, offers aid and comfort to a couple having an extramarital affair partly to thumb her nose at her ex-husband, “so squeamish about all things sexual.” The essays’ displays of intimacy, physical glut and emotional mess, feel less like confessions than like exposures. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Kala Pani, by Monica Mody

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kala
1913 Press
92 pp, $16.00

Review by Kate Schapira

In the Canterbury Tales, some travelers meet by chance at an inn. They tell each other stories to pass the time, and the stories reveal their world—its hypocrisies, its ideals and bad deals, its deflations and delectations. The people in them undergo suffering, humiliation, glory and pleasure, but the major relish is in the recounting itself. In Kala Pani, Monica Mody’s strange new text, six world travelers—travelers from the First through Sixth Worlds—are becalmed in their travels by the new government, who’s withholding their visas and planning to chop down the tree they lean against. They, too, tell stories that reveal their feverish, gaudy and hamstrung worlds, painting the insides of their cages with every available secretion.

Kala Pani draws some of its black water from the same mutated gene pool as the work of Joyelle McSweeney, Lara Glenum and Feng Sun Chen: monstrous porous bodies, profit and lust, e-surveillance, and the sores kept open by attempts at control. It draws on the recent past’s most marketable stories and categories, and shares with McSweeney in particular its filmic stutter; the audience is also a character, and not a harmless one, within the queasy frame. “Contradictory structures had left the audience breathing hard. Were they expected to play? If so, what was their role, and how much sugar?” Continue reading →

[REVIEW] The Disinformation Phase, by Chris Toll

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disinformation

Publishing Genius Press
68 pp/$12.00

Review by Kate Schapira

The first time Emily Dickinson appears in Chris Toll’s collection of poems, she’s writing an angry letter to Arthur Rimbaud about the FitzGerald translation of the Rubaiyat. The second time, she pays a fangirl visit to Edgar Allan Poe, hitches a ride to 2002 in his time machine, and leaves a poem in a Baltimore bookstore. Its first stanza reads

I’ve lost Everything – I’ve lost Everything Twice.
I bought a Sniper Rifle from a man named Don.
I’ve got a Holy Bible gnawed by mice –
I want to dance like they did in Babylon –

I was just talking with someone about how dashes aren’t what makes an Emily Dickinson poem; they dress a poem up as an Emily Dickinson poem. That made me wonder what I’d put on a poem to make it look like it came from Disinformation Phase. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] The Fluency of Light: Coming of Age in a Theatre of Black and White, by Aisha Sabatini Sloan

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~by Kate Schapira

Fluency of Light

Sightline Books: The Iowa Series in Literary Nonfiction

128 pgs/$17.95

 

Discussions of whiteness and blackness in America all too often devolve into a series of platitudes. In fear, fury, insistence or exhaustion, statements grow more and more categorical; poetry, complexity, and improvisation leak out. Aisha Sabatini Sloan’s collection of essays—facets of memoir gathered around, crystalized and refracted by works of art and bodies of music—works to put them back.

Sabatini Sloan orders one of her most intense and far-ranging essays, “Silencing Cassandra,” around riots in London when a police officer killed a young man named Mark Duggan. She quotes a BBC interview with a black Londoner named Darcus Howe, who says of his grandson, “’I asked him the other day, apropos of the sense that something was seriously wrong in this country. I said, “How many times have the police touched you?” He said, “Papa, I can’t count, there have been so many times.”’Inaudible remarks continue.” What sound can include both the inability to speak and the refusal to listen?

Sabatini Sloan turns to P.J. Harvey’s howl of an album Let England Shake, Anne Carson’s essay “The Gender of Sound” and playwright Joseph Chaikin to show these riots not just in the context of their history but by the light of works that “[let], like a needle in the vein, the blood out of a sick body, extracting a kind of poison”; that make, according to an unnamed Jamaican musician she quotes, “a sufferer’s sound.” “Silencing Cassandra” also draws glints from Revenge of the Nerds II, the Skatalites, Scared Straight, Secrets and Lies, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Malcom Gladwell, Graceland, Parenthood, and dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson; photographers Lorna Simpson, Charlie Philips and Arnet Francis; writers on music David Katz and Les Black. Writing, in a book about race, of a riot with origins in racism is not unusual or unfraught; what has power is that Sabatini Sloan shows how this is not news, how these works throw off reflections, half-tones, shudders, resemblances we could see if we were watching, hear if we were listening. Continue reading →

My Tranquil War by Anis Shivani (A Review by Kate Schapira)

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NYQ Books

136 pgs/$16.95

            When a writer chooses their ground, there’s no point in fussing that a different arena might have served their efforts better. Writers ask us to meet them at a particular set of coordinates; we can show up or not. Anis Shivani has chosen the terrain of human cultural artifacts—paintings, poems, novels, films, and narrations of history—on which to restage the colonial era’s shocks, gashes and reverberations. These poems reminded me of Teju Cole’s much retweeted and reposted Twitter series “Seven Short Stories About Drones”: famous opening sentences of novels (largely, but not only, from the Western canon) ruptured irreparably by drone attack. The implications were clear and inescapable: all these things are ruined by how they were made. The war of their making must be apparent in them; all other readings are dishonest.

Where Cole maintained his efforts just long enough to bring us past the point where the point is made and to the moment where it sickens us, Shivani’s poems dig in. There’s a degree of almost puritanical relish for the tackiness and shoddiness of the hangover you get from mixing imperialism with liberalism:

“Unburdening Tennessee mountain-skies faint, then repaint
our polyester faces (denied since the seventies, Wal-Mart homes
vacant for boomeranging jibes), our nylon faces stripped
of gesture.

                                                                              …Graduates,

sit and take refuge in the emperor-president’s speech, disrobe
yourself of benign platitudes (those you learned in Shakespeare
and Plato), we’re about to launch into the journey of (corporate)
life where you find your umbilical cord stretched to infinity.
It’s a poetic world …” Continue reading →