Interview with Contest Judge Maya Sonenberg

Posted on May 14, 2019 by admin

Editorial Assistant Erinn Batykefer sat down with [PANK] Author Maya Sonenberg to talk about her book AFTER THE DEATH OF SHOSTAKOVICH PÈRE and her role as the [PANK] BOOKS NONFICTION CONTEST JUDGE!

Not all ghosts exact revenge or induce terror. Some emerge from a miasma of grief; sad themselves, they spread sorrow. Or perhaps those left behind—daughters and sons—create the ghost of a father, trying to find what’s surely been lost. Following the four-movement structure of Shostakovich’s Suite for Two Pianos and using a mosaic of story, memoir, photographs, literary analysis, and her own father’s journals, Maya Sonenberg’s After the Death of Shostakovich Père is an extended lyric meditation on the death of fathers, both biological and artistic, and the ways in which haunting can produce art. BUY MAYA’S BOOK HERE

Erinn Batykefer: The fiction and non-fiction you’ve published often have multi-media or hybrid elements: prose and drawings, flash mini-essays. Your nonfiction chapbook, After the Death of Shostakovich Père, came out from PANK Books last year and has a similar shape shifting quality, oscillating between literary analysis, storytelling, and a scrapbook of personal photos and journal entries. Do you draw lines between genres?

Maya Sonenberg: I just had a very interesting discussion with my graduate students about whether we thought of the hybrid literary object in botanical terms or mythological terms. For the former, think of the pluot, a cross between a plum and an apricot that has become entirely its own fruit. For the latter, think of the chimera, a fire-breathing female monster with a lion’s head, a goat’s body, and a serpent’s tail. The former is like a mosaic seen from the distance, while the latter is like a mosaic seen up close so that the separate tesserae are distinct. For the former, you might think of the prose poem. In the works of mine you mention, I see myself working in the latter form—the different genres are placed next to each other but remain distinct.

This is all a round-about way to answer your question: I do see distinctions between genres, and even when I combine them in a single section (the literary analysis in After the Death of Shostakovich Père also includes material about my personal experiences of reading the Borges stories), I’m keen to be clear about what refers to me, what is speculation, what is factual. Many thanks to my students Sarah Bitter, Boston Chandler, and Devon Houtz for the discussion, and to Rose Metal Press for their anthology Family Resemblance, which introduced us to thinking about the hybrid as a mythological creature.

EB: What excites you about judging the Big Book Nonfiction contest for [PANK]?

MS: These days both fiction and nonfiction are capacious, and I love that. Nonfiction in particular is a great big tent, including speculative essays and rather straight-forward memoir, essays about something big and important—or tiny and important—out in the world conveyed through a personal lens, essays that borrow forms from other sorts of writing and essays that proceed through collage or logic. I’m just excited to see the different sorts of nonfiction I’ll get to read.

EB: After the Death is listed as memoir / personal essay, but in a lot of ways it does its own thing to create an elegy for your father that mirrors the musical elegy Shostakovich wrote in the wake of his own father’s death. Was (mostly) nonfiction the obvious choice for this project?

MS: When I started this particular project, I actually planned to simply write a short story based on Shostakovich’s experience of losing his father during the Russian Revolution and going on to write the duet for two pianos. Pretty quickly, I realized his many biographers had already covered this, and I began to allow all sorts of material about dead fathers to accrete to the project. The ghost story that makes up the third section came from a novel I had never completed. I decided to write about the Borges stories because I was (and still am) in the midst of several other projects in which I pair a real ancestor with someone I think of as an artistic forbearer. I knew this project would be about my father, but I didn’t turn to including the material from his notebook until after I had figured out the structure of the piece. Each section corresponds to a movement in the piano duet, and within each section, the different literary and photo threads correspond to changes in melody and/or tempo. I suddenly had many different threads I needed to create and the material from his notebook fell pretty neatly into a separate categories

EB: What are you hoping to see in the submissions for this contest? What, in your opinion, should a book of nonfiction do? What are you hoping to feel while reading a winning work?

MS: I honestly cannot make an over-arching claim about what a book of nonfiction should do, but when reading a winning work, I’m hoping to feel hit between the eyes—that I’m reading something really unexpected, forced to see or experience or think about things in a new way. I know—what does that mean? I want to read prose that is aware of its own power and has developed its own style, rather than attempting to be transparent. I want to read memoir in which the writing persona questions and re-questions itself or makes bold claims about itself. I want to read essays about the big bad world that are still somehow personal. I want to read lyric essays that get their components to sing to each other, hitting that sweet spot where the subtle and the obvious cancel each other out. I want to read content or form or style that I can’t even imagine as I answer this question. This is not to say winning works need (or could!) do all of the above. Some might do only one.

EB: The Finale section of After the Death includes a meditation on Borges’ “The Library of Babel” which was a literary touchstone you found ridiculous later on. Is revealing a state of balance like this (or perhaps coming to terms with the necessity of cognitive dissonance) the project of writing?

MS: As perhaps you’ve seen by now, I don’t think there’s only one project for writing to complete or accomplish, so I’m not really sure how to answer this. I like states of balance, cognitive dissonance, and friction in writing, but I also love a good novel that sucks me right in to its world. I love the calm world of a book like Sarah Orne Jewett’s Country of the Pointed Firs! In my current writing projects, I’m trying to explore both-and, rather than either-or, thinking.

PS—I hope my continuing love, tempered now by many re-readings, of “The Library of Babel” still comes through. [It does!]

EB: If you could encourage the writers who will be submitting their work to [PANK] for this contest to read one book before they hit send, what would you choose?

MS: Ah, not before they sit down to write, but before they hit send! Before they sit down to write, they should read whatever book they love most and take inspiration from it. Before they hit send…. I’m not sure. Again, I can’t think of any one book that would give writers a quick window into my predilections.

EB: Anything else you’d like to share with [PANK]? [PANK] would party with you any day.

MS: I would party with [PANK] any day to

[REVIEW] The In-Betweens by Davon Loeb

Posted on April 23, 2019 by admin

(Everytime Press, 2018)

REVIEW BY CHRIS CAMPANIONI

—

Davon Loeb wants to tell us that all writing—even and especially memoir—means writing what never existed; that all writing demands a mix of imagination and memory, the blending of literal and emotional truths; that even his story, the story of his life—the lyrical narrative of The In-Betweens (Everytime Press, 2018)—subverts our own generic expectations and considerations of what it means to write about ourselves, if only because to write about ourselves would mean to write about all of the people who have formed us, each in their own way, and in ways we may never know, not all the way.

And so Loeb harnesses the speculative and the real, nurturing both, beginning with the hypothetical subjective, entering his story by telling his parents’ story, imagining the life before he had a life, resisting sentimentalism and nostalgia to talk about a past with real stakes: “He was married to a woman his age, and a father of two. She was married to a man her age, and a mother of two. And my father was White and my mother was Black, in America, and everything was stacked against them” (4).

This is a blueprint Loeb continues to return to in his bodily, materially sensitive memoir, in which a memory of tying up a cousin to a tree, leaving her in the rain, ushers in a description of summer thunderstorms; elsewhere, a memory of sitting up in bed interminably waiting for his father to arrive prefaces a larger exploration of his father’s visitations, his frequent absences. The book moves seamlessly through frank explorations of masculinity and gender norms, the superstitious and contractual rites of childhood, racism and the racial imaginary, the failings of education, and the particular experience of being in-between; the everyday experience of interraciality—“the accident ink blot” in a predominantly white, racially-segregated town. Loeb offers lengthy investigations into his own childhood, moving even further back as he imagines his grandparents while re-tracing his lineage; at other moments, he employs lyrical density toward vignettes that encompass all of a single paragraph—a snapshot of a moment that becomes re-contextualized in the voice of an older, wiser, narrator. Yet it’s also Loeb’s ability to imbue his narrative with a disarming and demonstrative self-critique that makes The In-Betweens stand out from countless other memoirs.

Whether it’s in his retrospective unpacking of the family game of “White Boy in the Middle” (“Alabama Fire Ants”), in which he ruminates on his realization of how “somehow if given the chance, the oppressed will always become the oppressor” (44), or his own conflicted relationship to hair and stereotypes (“Thoughts on Hair”), a confession that ends with the self-description of “an actor on stage—guilty of this appropriation—guilty of gainfully being racially ambiguous” (96), Loeb displays both a vulnerability and a self-accountability that is rare, separately and especially together, in a genre that is prone, too often, to a writing of the self which forgets to look inward. In showing his readers his own complicity in the cultural issues he is calling into question, Loeb also forges an emotional bond with his audience; I came away from The In-Betweens feeling as if I had known its author my entire life, a rare feat for any writer, no matter which mode or genre they are writing in or responding to.

But I want to stay here for a moment, to let this linger, to relish it, if only to continue showing how Loeb subverts the genre he is indeed working in, if not also working against. “But I didn’t know what to believe about Richard Downey,” Loeb begins, in a final essay aptly titled “Retirement.” “I had heard so many stories. It becomes a problem when we narrate other peoples’ lives; there’s a misconception of what we think we know and the actual very real story of someone’s life” (184). By relating another second-hand account, while troubling the very nature of relation, of passing along stories that destroy us, yet also sustain us, Loeb complicates storytelling itself; the failure of stories to add up to a life. Much earlier, when he imagines “My Mother’s Mother,” Loeb is quick to intervene in his own narrative, if only to remind himself, and then us: “Then again, that’s just one chapter in this story, one narrative that belongs to a part of her, but not all of her. And it’s important for me to tell you that her life is not to be defined by all that struggle. That there was a beauty in her body and skin before it was bent and broken and blackened—that her skin was just skin before” (12).

As I read this startling debut, which does work “somewhere between telling history and taking on history” (182), as its own author writes elsewhere, to describe another teacher’s instruction, I am reminded of the importance of oral history in recognizing and thereby preserving personal histories so that they might be shared, and in being shared, so that they might validate multiple histories, which is to say, multiple lived experiences, multiple versions of the world as we know it, in an effort to breakdown the singular or authorized dominant account—the as we know it that so often goes unquestioned. “I had to keep my façade that none of this ever bothered me. That I was a participant to learning like everyone else, and not the thing that was being learnt” (86), Loeb writes, in “But I Am Not Toby,” a powerful response to the tokenism of learning Black history once a year, but also the internal struggle with becoming the sole representative of all black experience; the trap of representation in a cultural branding of “diversity” absent a true engagement with difference.

This form of sharing and re-sharing, of passing down, of inheriting and re-distributing has obvious social and political implications, but it also speaks to what might otherwise go unspoken, the trauma that so often results in self-silencing. So much of this book reads like a series of parables, and this is exactly why: Loeb recognizes our own failure—as a people, as a culture—to see beyond our own limited scope of imagination. Who cares if it’s true, as in the delightful and heartbreaking rendition of “On Some Things, I Wish We Did,” so long as these stories become true, and thereby become instructive, to us. When Loeb relates an anecdote about an eighth-grade wax museum project (“O.J. and the Wax Museum”)—“My brother could have been Bill Gates. He always liked computers; we had an IBM. […] Would he have to paint his skin, part his hair, change the inflection of his voice? […] It was all make-believe anyway. And when we tell kids to make-believe, we want them to imagine—to explore the possibilities—or do we really mean to be exactly who you are, what you are” (71-72)—we are meant to take him at his word.

—

Chris Campanioni’s new book, the Internet is for real (C&R Press, 2019), re-enacts the language of the Internet as literary installations. His selected poetry was awarded an Academy of American Poets College Prize in 2013, his novel Going Down was named Best First Book at the 2014 International Latino Book Awards, and his hybrid piece This body’s long (& I’m still loading) was adapted as an official selection of the Canadian International Film Festival in 2017. He runs PANK and PANK Books, edits At Large Magazine and Tupelo Quarterly, and teaches Latinx literature and creative writing at Pace University and Baruch College.

www.chriscampanioni.com

[REVIEW] Bukowski in a Sundress: Confessions from a Writing Life by Kim Addonizio

Posted on May 10, 2017 by admin

addonizio

Penguin, 2016

REVIEWED BY JUSTIN HOLLIDAY

–

Kim Addonizio, known for her poetry, fiction, and writing guides, has published her first personal essay collection after two decades after writing. As she often does in her other work, she covers topics such as family, writing, drinking, and sex, but what makes this book so different is that it is truly “confessional” writing in the strongest sense of the word. While all of her writing is unvarnished, Bukowski in a Sundress is the barest truth of the persona Addonizio wants everyone to see.

Some of the essays are written in second person. Rather than feeling ersatz by ostensibly addressing the reader, these particular essays allow Addonizio to express insecurities and frustrations in a way that discusses personal experiences and shows the ways they may relate to others. In her essay “How to Succeed in Po Biz,” she provides a step-by-step guide of sorts for poets:

Feel anxious about the upcoming trip because you hate to travel. Feel anxious because you are basically a private person and can’t live up to the persona that is floating out there in the world acting tougher and braver than you. You are a writer, after all.

This rhetorical strategy is a way to explore the anxieties that many other writers feel. Other essays in the collection similarly meditate on the difficulty of writing itself, from procrastination to writing that appears “DOA” on the page. These essays reveal the possibilities, or perhaps the pitfalls, that even successful writers contend with.

Addonizio’s caustic sense of humor shines in the memoir as well as it does in her other work. From failed relationships to odd encounters in the Midwest, she considers nearly everything worthy of witty, often critical response. Even titles like “Necrophilia” and “Children of the Corn” are used to redefine readers’ connotations of such terms. For example, “Necrophilia” refers to loving the emotionally dead, those who appear alive but cannot reciprocate love. Further, she plays with clichés with other titles such as “Pants on Fire, ” an essay that acts as the ultimate confessional for any poet. Here, Addonizio reveals the “lies” in her poems, which are considered lies only because of the contentious space of poetry within the often-false literary binary between fiction and nonfiction. Amidst her “confessions,” she intersperses other truths she has learned as a writer: “I swear on a stack of Bibles that some men really will want ‘to fuck your poems.”’ Such claims not only express the humor and chagrin of Addonizio’s experiences, but also reflect the mentalities of readers.

The titular essay actually comes from criticism by a member of the National Book Critics Circle Award committee. When Addonizio was under consideration for the award, one critic dismissed her as “Charles Bukowski in a Sundress,” suggesting her writing was derivative, uncouth, and anti-literary. Regardless of Bukowski’s success, his work is often viewed as flouting “literary” standards, whatever the vaguely and sometimes arbitrarily defined standards may be. While the insult does anger Addonizio, she responds with analogies of her own: “Frankly, I’d have preferred a different, though equally nuanced, characterization of my work—say, ‘Gerard Manley Hopkins in a bomber jacket,’ ‘Walt Whitman in a sparkly tutu,’ or possibly ‘Emily Dickinson with a strap-on.”’ As a poet and a woman, she strives to fight for self-definition, wanting her self-generated comparisons to reflect the creative and occasionally strange but always evocative elements she blends in her work.

Other essays tackle difficult topics that are harder to laugh at; however, Addonizio adeptly reports the seriousness while also trying to acknowledge the humor we can find in our own pain. Essays about her dying mother show tenderness toward her family, reflecting the balance of the woman who has also written about necrophilia, homemade pornography, and the importance of alcohol consumption elsewhere in the memoir. “Flu Shot” provides a look at what it is like for her to be the outsider daughter who rarely sees her mother because they live so far apart. When she writes about the ordeal of trying to get her mother to the pharmacy so that she can be inoculated, Addonizio reveals a struggle that so many families must deal with as parents age. And in this meditation on aging, Addonizio also confronts the emotionally distant relationship she and her mother, renowned tennis player Pauline Betz, have had in the past, finally making some sort of peace with it.

Whether writing about failed romantic relationships or familial conflicts, Addonizio evokes a clear idea of what her life has been like as a writer, a mother, a lover, and a daughter. Although she has reclaimed “Bukowski in a Sundress” as a wry moniker, she is more than that. Kim Addonizio is her own woman, and her writing has revealed that she stands nonpareil, though I would not blame her if she became “Emily Dickinson with a strap-on.”

[REVIEW] VHS and Why it’s Hard to Live by Tatiana Ryckman

Posted on February 7, 2017 by admin

11TR

Zoo Cake Press, 2016

REVIEWED BY MATHEW SERBACK

—

Tatiana Ryckman is the voice inside of my head.

Maybe I feel this way because we are both from Cleveland, Ohio. Or maybe it’s because we both migrated to big cities in Texas. Or maybe the answer is something more obvious – something simple; Tatiana Ryckman is just better at being honest.

In her new collection of flash nonfiction VHS and Why it’s Hard to Live, Ryckman expresses the sadness we all feel about never becoming the person we thought we wanted to be. She has an unmatched talent for finding the embarrassing truths we don’t want to tell ourselves and exposing them through tangential connections.

Each story in this collection is built with precision. The sentences bubble, and the self-reflections bubble, but they always burst by the end. It’s the small moments of self-revelation that absorb me into the prose. It is in these moments that Ryckman is the voice in my head.

In “Coming of Age,” a flash piece about love and hatred, she writes, “In high school, a boy who would sneak into my room at night but who would not date me said ignorance was the path to happiness, and that happiness was death to the self. It’s a little dramatic, but it explains a lot about the times.” I’m suddenly compelled to find my high school girlfriends on their social media of choice and tell them how sorry I am for the past – to tell them how wrong I was about the future.

That’s what Tatiana Ryckman’s writing does to the boy who was sneaking in and out of windows and telling half-truths they knew were lies. Just imagine what it’ll do to you.

In “My Death,” Tatiana considers the way she will die, “I can’t walk to the grocery store, which is not to say I don’t walk to the grocery store but every time I have walked to the grocery store, alone, at night, I know I am being followed. Or if not followed, then watched, to be followed on a future night.” That’s the same voice in my head that tells me I’m afraid of sharp objects – the pronounced corner of a table, the useful end of the screwdriver – and most importantly, knives. Ryckman reminds me that we all are sharing in a ubiquitous death. She has to walk to the grocery store, I have to use a knife, and you have to board that airplane. Her death is waiting in the bushes. My death is in my right hand.

Each story is a different thought that keeps you up at night.

And even now, as I try to tell you how beautiful and tangled Ryckman’s language is, she’s the voice in my head that is reminding me that VHS and Why it’s Hard to Live isn’t about her – it’s about me, and always will be, “Maybe you know what I mean; maybe all of our shit is just pet enough to keep us up at night, alive and in the world reaching our full potential, wondering what the world would be without us.”

BEST 21 BOOKS OF 2016

Posted on January 26, 2017 by admin

BY GABINO IGLESIAS

—

Last year was such an outstanding year for literature that a top ten list just wouldn’t cut it. Horror, literary fiction, poetry, nonfiction, noir; every conceivable genre produced at least a couple of gems that deserve to be on this list. I started the year aiming to read 200 books, which is something I try to do every year. Work, looking for work, too many long books, and writing a dissertation were all elements that got in the way. That being said, I managed to read about 110 books, and here are the best 21 in no particular order:

21. Floodgate by Johnny Shaw. This was fast, fun to read, packed with more action than a superhero movie, and showed a level of worldbuilding that makes it a novel that should be used to teach it. Shaw can do crime, violence, intrigue, and comedy, and all of those can be found in spades here.

20. Death Confetti: Pickers, Punks, and Transit Ghosts in Portland, Oregon by Jennifer Robin. Robin is a performer, writer, and traveler whose life definitely belongs to the small group of those that should be written about. This collection of nonfiction takes place mostly in the streets, on public transportation, and in bars across Portland. The people and situations the author encounters are enough to make it a recommended read, but the outstanding and commanding way in which Robin writes about them make it an absolute must and earn the book a spot on this list.

19. Slipping: Stories, Essays, & Other Writing by Lauren Beukes. One of the first authors to come to mind when thinking about writers who can move in and out of a plethora of genres while simultaneously sounding fresh and unique, Beukes has become a household name thanks to novels that are a bizarre, scary, wildly entertaining mix of science fiction, crime, and horror, and this collection offers more of that.

18. Bruja by Wendy C. Ortiz. What Ortiz does for the memoir here is comparable to what Flaubert’s Madam Bovary did for modern realist narration or what Capote’s In Cold Blood did for the nonfiction novel. Simply put, Ortiz’s “dreamoir” is a new thing and this book will be the starting point for a movement as well as the go-text for all upcoming memoirs that inhabit the interstitial space between reality, memory, very personal surrealism, and dreams.

17. Magic City Gospel by Ashley M. Jones. Going into a poetry collection without being familiar with the author’s work is always an adventure. With this book, the adventure yielded a treasure trove of southern imagery, a screaming celebration of roots and culture, and an unapologetically raw view of the female African American experience. This is brave, beautiful, necessary poetry that should be taught in schools and that undoubtedly becomes more important with each dumb step the country takes backwards.

16. A Collapse of Horses by Brian Evenson. Evenson is one of the most talented living writers in the world, and this collection is full of stories in which he proves it time and time again. Sad, strange, creepy, touching, surreal, scary; if you can think it or feel it, Evenson does it here. The best short story collection of 2016 and yet another superb entry into the oeuvre of a man who seems to only get impossibly better with each new offering.

15. Black Wings Has My Angel by Elliott Haze. The folks at the New York Review of Books know how to pick their classics, and this one is my favorite so far. A narrative that still resonates in modern noir’s DNA, this is a dark, twisted tale of love, violence, secret agendas, and the way plans have a tendency to crumble.

14. Witch Hunt by Juliet Escoria. This book is full of the kind of poetry that reaches deep inside you, pulls out the ugliest things you have to offer, and then slaps you in the face with them, and Escoria does it all just by sharing her own life. Full of heartbreak, broken relationships, and crippling realizations, this book is what happens when a talented author decides nothing in her past is sacred and exorcises the demons by writing them out.

13. The Incantations of Daniel Johnston by Scott McClanahan and Ricardo Cavolo. This is the only graphic book on the list, and it’s more of a surreal biography than a novel. Touching and magical, Cavolo’s art and MacClanahan’s words combine perfectly to offer readers a look inside the brain and soul of an outstanding artist tortured by mental illness and haunted by demons most of us can’t even begin to fathom.

12. The Book of Endless Sleepovers by Henry Hoke. Sometimes a poet is capable of stuffing his entire life into a book, and that’s exactly what Hoke did here. The pain, awkwardness, drama, and discoveries of a child transform into the suffering, joy, and blossoming sexuality of a young man, and all of it is filtered through the author’s sharp mind and tender heart. By the time I was done with this, I wanted to ask a million questions, congratulate Hoke a million times on his accomplishment, and give him a million hugs.

11. Chicano Blood Transfusion by Edward Vidaurre. El barrio has a heart that spans the globe, and Vidaurre taps into it to write poesía with a lot of truth and feeling. Readers will find the usual themes here, but also a range of new ones and different, unique experiences and memories. La poesía del barrio has a new voice in Vidaurre, and I can’t wait to see what he does next.

10. Albina and the Dog-Men by Alejandro Jodorowsky. Just like no film director can compare their work to the bizarre visions created by Jodorowsky, no author can claim to bring together poetry, love narratives, and surrealism to the page the way he does. This is a long, sexualized, mythological fever dream that fits in perfectly with everything Jodoroswky has given us in his long, illustrious career.

9. Glue by Constance Ann Fitzgerald. I read this book on my phone while sitting in my car. I didn’t plan on that, but the first few pages hooked me and the rest is history. This is a powerful, autobiographical narrative that deals with loss and coping. Fitzgerald shines at showing us that being broken and not knowing how to handle things is a perfectly normal part of being human.

8. Mongrels by Stephen Graham Jones. Sure, this is a werewolf novel, but it’s also an outstanding noir, a fantastic YA narrative, an emotional family saga, and a great road trip tale. Jones has always managed to work in many genres at once, and this one stands amongst his best work to date, which is saying a lot.

7. Disappearance at Devil’s Rock by Paul Tremblay. Anguish and loss are at the core of this creepy narrative. The disappearance of a young son is the vehicle Tremblay uses to scare readers, but it’s also the event he uses to deconstruct the way humans (re)act under pressure and how an event can make people collapse. This is another author than only gets better with each new book, and I eagerly await whatever he puts out next.

6. The Fisherman by John Langan. I’ll keep this one short: the mythos book that will be talked about and discussed twenty years from now? This one.

5. I Am Providence by Nick Mamatas. A scathing academic deconstruction of the Lovecraftian scene and its problems would collect dust in university libraries across the country, so instead of doing that, Mamatas wrapped it all up in a wildly entertaining and surprisingly funny novel about a murder at a Lovecraftian convention. If you care about the destruction of racism and misogyny but don’t mind doing it with a smile on your face, this book is for you.

4. Novi Sad by Jeff Jackson. Post-apocalyptic fiction done right. Tense, gloomy, strange, and poetic. This is the shortest novella on this list, and it packs as big a punch as anything else on this list.

3. Patricide by D. Foy. The best literary novel of 2016. Smart, fast, violent, philosophical, and possessing a depth that most literary fiction can only dream of. Foy is an author whose work will be talked about a lot in the near future. I suggest to start reading him now.

2. Swarm Theory by Christine Rice. I could write ten pages on the way Rice weaved together a narrative about a whole town and all its denizens, but that would probably bore you. Instead, I’ll say this: Swarm Theory is the most impressive book about a town/plethora of characters that I’ve read since devouring Camilo Jose Cela’s The Hive, and remember that Cela got a Nobel in Literature in 1989.

1. The Heavenly Table by Donald Ray Pollock. Along with Jones and Evenson, Pollock is a national treasure whose work constantly mesmerizes readers. Hilarious, vicious, filthy, and smart, this story of brotherhood, death, and crime was one of the few true literary gems published by one of the Big Five in 2016.

[REVIEW] One With the Tiger: Sublime and Violent Encounters Between Humans and Animals by Steven Church

Posted on November 2, 2016 by admin

Soft Skull Press
November 2016
300 pages

REVIEWED BY Hollynn Huitt

—

Steven Church is betting that you’ve stood outside of a lion enclosure at the zoo and, for at least one long second, thought about jumping in. But not because the lion is cute, or looks like a big, sweet cat lounging in the sun. You want to jump in because you’re afraid, deeply afraid, and that fear draws you to animals like a magnet. One with the Tiger opens with the story of David Villalobos, a young man who jumped into the tiger enclosure at the Bronx Zoo, where he was promptly mauled. Church has a casual and compelling style of writing, and the opening chapter seems to be setting us up for a deep dive into David’s psyche when he jumped into the cage. And the book does do that, in it’s own way, although not by interviewing David, or diving deeper into the story. Instead, David’s dangerous compulsion is the starting point for an in-depth exploration of what it means to be drawn to, and get too close to, dangerous and wild animals.

The book is split into 8 sections, each one loosely themed around an incident involving humans and animals, or humans behaving like animals. Take the “Timothy Treadwell” section, which focuses on grizzly bears–both the author’s personal experience and the documentary and the enigma of Timothy Treadwell, star of the Werner Herzog documentary, Grizzly Man. Church is exceptionally gifted at writing about movies–his spare but warm style gives lends just enough detail to make you feel like you’ve seen the movie, and his enthusiasm about each of the scenes he describes in One with the Tiger is contagious. I watched Grizzly Man after reading and honestly preferred Church’s description and analysis to the actual movie.

Church brushes on the innate savagery within humans as well, in his chapter “Iron Mike” (roughly organized around Mike Tyson’s ear biting of Evander Holyfield) and how we are little more than raving raging animals underneath all of our culture. This part of the book is full of boxing facts, which can get tedious, but is ultimately carried on the strength of Church’s skillful weaving of real life events, movies and literature in a snappy, easy-to-read digest.

But it’s the third category of incident that Church is most fascinated with, the one that David Villalobos presented to us at the beginning of the book–people who willingly go into cages or environments with dangerous animals with not because they want to die, but because they they feel an almost indefinable pull, perhaps because of adrenaline, or because it’s forbidden. Church is obsessed with this particular demographic, in part because he has felt the call, and he’s betting that you do, too.

The book an easy and fun read, and strangely holds together, despite being fragmented into parts and missing a basic narrative arc. We subconsciously hold out hope for a plot twist at the end: that Church will step into a cage, or that he’ll be able to speak with David Villalobos. Maybe then he could clue us in on something we couldn’t read for ourselves in the news or media. But instead he is relegated to rehashing news clippings and interviews. Church’s subject matter, horrific and compelling in a train accident sort of way, is the strongest quality of the book, and he handles it without machismo or affectation. He’s just a regular guy trying to come to terms with the strange obsession he feels and by the end you’ll be looking at the world–the world of dangerous animals at least–in a whole new way.

[INTERVIEW] Chloe Caldwell on I’ll Tell You In Person

Posted on September 14, 2016 by admin

Publisher: Coffee House Press in collaboration with Emily Books
Publication date: October 4, 2016
Number of pages: 184
Price: $16.95

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REVIEW AND INTERVIEW BY MANDY SHUNNARAH

With stories about growing up and fearing growing old, friendships and friend foibles, the intimacies of obsession and the intricacies of depression, I’ll Tell You In Person is an essay collection as vulnerable as it is blunt. Chloe Caldwell’s sharp wit and keen powers of observation are in full force in her newest book.

Caldwell takes readers on an odyssey through turbulent formative years of heroin, binge eating, Craigslist dating, the loss of a close friend, coming out, living in Europe, best friends, ex-friends, relationship blunders, encounters with celebrities, and all the experiences of youth that make us who we are. I inhaled Caldwell’s essays with unusual quickness—losing track of time, forgetting the presence of people around me, being fully present and absorbed in a way that only the words of a gifted essayist can produce.

I’ll Tell You In Person chronicles young adulthood with aplomb. Though it can feel as if the reader is meant to recall her own adolescent calamities and stack them up for comparison, this collection isn’t some righteous manifesto. There is no moral to the story because, as seasoned writers know, stories don’t need morals.

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I talked to Chloe about her book and the challenges of writing personal essays. (This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.)

Mandy Shunnarah: I have to start off by congratulating you because I read I’ll Tell You In Person faster than any book in recent memory. One of the elements I most adored about the book is that you’re deeply self-deprecating without being overly critical or judgmental of yourself, and without apologizing. I got the sense that writing about your past heroin addiction, binge eating, masturbation, job woes, and nearly over-drafting your bank account to impress a millionaire celebrity was cathartic. Tell me more about your writing process and the emotional pilgrimage of writing this book.

Chloe Caldwell: Thank you! I’m touched you felt that way. The essays all came to be in different ways and times. “Yodels” I wrote back in 2013 for The Rumpus. “Soul Killer” I sent to Salon that same year because I had no money and $150 was a lot for me. Same with “The Laziest Coming Out Story.” So half of the book was already written without being considered a book. I began putting the essays together and then added five new ones over the course of 2014-2016.

I don’t know if it gives me any sort of relief or catharsis at all. The tough thing about this book was I was super broke during the process of putting it together, and submitting it to publishers. It’s stressful to work on a book without money, because to have time, you need money. It was difficult for me to sit and work on essays when I knew I should be working at my dad’s music store for money or catering or finding more teaching jobs.

MS: With I’ll Tell You In Person being your second collection of essays, how did you find yourself evolving as you explored more facets of what it means to grow up?

CC: It’s hard to talk about this stuff, it’s so ephemeral. I’ve always been smart in spite of my stupid choices and have been hyper-aware enough to know I could only make ridiculous decisions before I got older. And now I am older. It’s a creepily acute feeling I have at thirty, both like a child and a grown woman. My life is unconventional in the sense that I documented my wilder years. It’s not that I did anything more interesting than anyone else, it’s just that I have it out there in the form of a book. I feel myself evolving in many ways—I’ve always been into growth and therapy, etc., but I like to keep some of my evolving private.

MS: You share very openly in your work, though it sounds like people are always wanting more. What’s that like? How do you separate yourself from your work and maintain a personal life as a personal essay writer?

CC: I share openly in my work and in my life as well, mostly. But my essays are by no means my life story. There’s a ton I haven’t written about. The essays are just what I thought would be entertaining or enjoyable for a reader, what I had ideas for. People are definitely always wanting more and it’s a slippery slope. Luckily, I have an awesome therapist who used to work in publishing in NYC and knows a lot about the writer lifestyle, reads my books, and is familiar with the “scene” and the authors and books I mention. She’s helped me create clear boundaries around a lot of this stuff.

As Maggie Nelson says, “I don’t worry about people who ‘think they know me’ because, not to sound flip, they just literally don’t.” I’m paraphrasing, but I feel the same way. I have a private life just like everyone. I just write about certain “slices of life” if you will excuse that horrendous expression. “Prime Meats,” for example, is about something I did ten years ago. So I don’t feel super close to a lot of the essays in the collection.

MS: You seem at peace with your younger self, and I get the feeling that’s something a lot of people wish they could do. How did you get to that point? Was it a difficult place to reach when, as a writer of personal essays, you’re inevitably reaching into the past?

CC: Well, I don’t think I thought of it as a point to get to or a place to reach, which helps. I guess it’s just part of my make up, and comes naturally to me, which is why I ended up being a personal nonfiction writer—a lifestyle most certainly not for everyone. I did some weird shit in my youth, but who doesn’t? Plus, it got me to where I am: healthy, with books published, a job I love. My life is filled with the classes I teach, so I’m constantly reading personal essays of other people’s mistakes, so to me, it’s the new normal.

MS: The title harkens an intimacy that’s present on every page. Considering how I inhaled the book it almost feels strange that you’re not actually my real life best friend telling me these stories in person. Are these essays stories you did tell people in person before writing them down?

CC: No, they weren’t. I was just texting that phrase to my friends/family all the time about small things, like what I felt about a movie I’d just seen or whatever. I felt limited on text message and email and many of my close girl friends live in cities across the country from me, so I liked saving up anecdotes until I saw them in person and we could chat over glasses of wine. I liked the conversational tone of it for a book title, so it stuck. None of the essays aside from “Hungry Ghost” are exactly riveting stories or anecdotes. That’s why I say in the opener that I don’t necessarily have “good stories.” I’m more the kind of writer who tries to make narrative out of nothing.

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Mandy Shunnarah is a writer based in Columbus, Ohio, though she calls Birmingham, Alabama, home. She writes personal essays, book news, and historical fiction. Her writing has been published in The Missing Slate and Deep South Magazine. You can find more of her work at her website, offthebeatenshelf.com.

[REVIEW] This Must Be The Place, by Sean H. Doyle

Posted on October 15, 2015 by Sheila Squillante

Civil Coping Mechanisms

102 pages, $13.95

Review by Nicholas Rys

Sean H. Doyle is a seeker. His gasoline-soaked debut, This Must Be the Place, begins with a quote by legendary American Mystic, Edgar Cayce, “…at any time, in any world, a soul will give off through vibrations the story of itself and the condition in which it now exists.” Throughout the book, both parts at the end of that quote prove to be important, as Doyle summons up not only the vibrations of the story itself, but also the condition in which it now exists.

The book presented itself to me unusually. I was half drunk on a Thursday night and for some reason, eager to start something new. The explosive and deceptively playful cotton-candy-meets-Jackson-Pollock cover art was too loud to ignore, even strewn across my living room floor next to a handful of other 2015 books I had recently ordered. Despite my better efforts to call it quits after the first vignette. This is heavy stuff, I thought. I should wait until tomorrow. I read the first half in one feverish sitting. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson

Posted on July 17, 2015 by Sheila Squillante

Graywolf Press

160 pp, $23.00

Review by Jacob Spears

The unsettled prose in Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts reflects the intractability of her concerns in writing about identity, personhood, and how we make relationships with others. The white space that surrounds each paragraph is a return to the fragmentary form she developed in Bluets, which also found Nelson using the intimacy of her life to write about larger cultural ideas. The Argonauts, however, is a more difficult work, interested in expressing concerns about gender and normativity without attempting to situate those concepts through a fixed discourse. Every bit as erudite as her previous book, The Art of Cruelty, though not as magisterial and academic, The Argonauts embarks on a voyage of exploration in which the ship, like the Argo, “designates molten or shifting parts, a means of asserting while also giving the slip,” intent on retaining “a sense of the fugitive.”

Though it swells in and out of its address, Argonauts unfolds mostly as a confessional written to the second-person ‘you’ that is her partner, the artist Harry Dodge, who very publicly underwent a transition from female to male through the course of their relationship. “Something about identity,” Nelson quips, “was loose and hot in our house.” As a memoir, Nelson’s account of intimacy is at turns light and disturbing, charming and uncomfortable. What if where I am is what I need? she asks, citing Deborah Hay. “Before you, I always thought of this mantra as a means of making peace with a bummer or even catastrophic situations. I never imagined it might apply to joy, too.” Argonauts is an attempt to chart this course in which her position and experience—like language—is anchored in the moment of exchange. A place, context, or sentence inevitably shifts understanding, performance, and intention. Continue reading →