The Wilhelm Scream, by Jeremy Behreandt (A Review by Sean Ulman)

Posted on January 8, 2013 by Roxane Gay

Jeremy Behreandt’s prose chapbook “The Wilhelm Scream,” an elegant set of ten tarot-sized cards, clasped in a tattooed tissue and tucked in a textured envelope that could very well contain an urgent ancient telegram, is aware of itself.

The story concerns three brothers who “circle the abyss like wolves,” prior to each’s maundering or marauding claims for the city throne. The first brother seems the forerunner for he “makes love like a viper” and the description of his power, “best rendered as a slithering shadow unhinging its jaw on a fabrege egg,” provides a metaphor for usurpation as well as strengthening his symbolic comparison to a snake. Continue reading →

Heeldragger, by Chelsea Tadeyeske (A Review by Sean Ulman)

Posted on November 29, 2012 by Roxane Gay

Plumberries Press

32 pgs./$5.00

In Chelsea Tadeyeske’s”Heeldragger,” a pocketful of space-conscious (cautious) punch-packing poetry spliced among collage-carved graphics (stocking’d legs, heels, domestic furnishings, women’s bodies with blank faces that mimic mannequins), the opening canto blots the page like a staircase to a detached basement; a step or two might be sundered or skipped, the descent’s danger dealt sensibly discrete.

“who leaves

laurel-wreathed,

sweat and sparkle

heels in parade

will stump and shove to see

the rising of balloons

the holy animal stroked to transparency”

The second poem is two words footnoting the page’s bottom left corner. The first word is “i,” the other is “possum,” so the reader can delight at the outset in the absurdist shmaltz and schist to follow. Continue reading →