Katie Schmid

[REVIEW] A Taxonomy of the Space Between Us, by Caleb Curtiss

Posted on by

 taxonomy

 

Black Lawrence Press

37 pages, $8.95

 

Review by Katie Schmid

 

Caleb Curtiss’ first chapbook is a chronicle of a sister’s death in a car accident; it is the story of the moment of the death and the moments after. These poems are also poems of memory, as the speaker here watches the past become inflected with (and infected by) the knowledge of the loss that is to come, as in “Self-Portrait With My Dead Sister” where the speaker reflects on a day at the beach with his sister when they were young,

…one will grow up and keep on being real,

while the other will grow up and be dead.

In this memory, the speaker’s sister is already dead though she still lives on the beach. The bald truth of a sister whose memory is both alive and dead seems an obvious enough observation about the nature of loss, but in Curtiss’ poems, it becomes a paradox, something that is troubled and fraught, an obsession—Curtiss questions what it means that his sister can be both real and not real, what it means that he dredges up her memory, over and over, to live in these poems, and finally what the space of grief is for. Continue reading →

The Lightning Room with Katie Schmid

Posted on by

Welcome  to the Lightning Room, where DeWitt Brinson & Simon Jacobs take turns asking PANK authors extremely difficult questions about their work.  Below, Simon and Katie Schmid talk about roots and brutal youth and hunger and “The Boys of the Midwest 1 through 5,” which appeared in the April issue.

 

1. When you write about the Boys of the Midwest, it’s always as a collective. Is this a generational thing?

In my mind, children go through a pack-like stage. At least, that was true for me. Especially around the ages of 8-11, I was a part of a neighborhood gang of girls in my mostly rental/apartment living neighborhood in Evanston, IL. There was a kind of rangey lazy quality to our movements – I don’t ever recall us making decisions about what to do, we just found ourselves in the midst of activities: playing in someone’s tree house, informing each other of the edible plants we could find in the grass (I remember eating crabgrass and onion grass, though we were not underfed). It’s a weird time. We didn’t live in an especially great neighborhood, but there was the sense that there was strength in numbers, and we were allowed to be on our own sometimes. Left to yourself, you construct a whole kid world that adults have no bearing on. Or at least, the wisdom of adults gets filtered down to the group through kid logic and becomes beautifully warped.

When my family tells me stories about their childhoods, it seems to confirm that lots of kids, given the opportunity, form their own little feral packs at that age, with their own rules and rituals and heartbreaks. It can be brutal and intense and emotional. They force each other to eat bugs, they tell each other wild insane lies and deliver these as gospel truth. Carson McCullers’ novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, has that fierce little protagonist, Mick Kelly, and she’s simultaneously a leader-parent in her gang of neighborhood children and a child herself, given to all the whims and large, unbearable emotions of childhood. I am fascinated by that time, in my own life and in others’. Looming over all of that feral, emotional child closeness is the specter of the “right” world in the form of your parents, the true gods of your life, whose emotions are even more inscrutable and terrifying than your own. Continue reading →