Cow Heavy Books

55 pages, $10

Like a jigsaw puzzle, Kristina Marie Darling’s Compendium asks to be pieced together. It is a collection of lyric poems, vignettes, erasures, glossaries, footnotes, and histories that present only bits and pieces of a story of two lovers. The reader has the pleasure of filling in the gaps, coloring in the blank pages, and imagining what is beneath the white space, the unspoken, and unsaid. It is part ghost story and part collage that weaves together different literary movements.

What’s especially fascinating about Compendium is the array of styles Darling features in a mere few dozen pages. The book opens with a few poetic vignettes that introduce the story of Madeleine and the connoisseur. Very little is known about either character, leaving the reader to fill in the gaps. After the brief section of vignettes, Darling provides even less to the reader and offers only erasures of the previous vignettes, before shifting to glossaries, footnotes, and histories that create even greater mystery.

Though the forms in the book constantly shift and transition, there are some reoccurring themes and ideas. In the opening vignettes, there exists a tension between silence and music. And the two are often presented together on the same page, no matter how contradictory that may seem. In the poem “The Box,” the connoisseur gives Madeleine a jewelry box, and all is silent and still around her besides “the old piano’s most delicate song drifting from beneath the lid.” The images presented in the poem’s last few lines only enhance the tension between stillness and music:

“Around the box, a disconcerting stillness
Snow falling outside the great white
house as she danced and danced.”

This idea appears in other poems, including “The Blue Sonnets,” in which the connoisseur writes to Madeleine to tell her that the sonnets he’s writing require “both solitude and music,” and a few pages later, in the vignette “The Homage,” a “disconcerting stillness” exists between the connoisseur and Madeleine. The feeling of stillness and silence is also increased in the book because several of the pages are loaded with white space, and at times, there are whole blank pages between the writing.

As perhaps a contradiction to all of the white space and mysterious narrative and characters, Darling did create a heavy emphasis on color, especially in the section of vignettes. This makes her images stand out even more and sharpens the writing. The reader pays attention to the “dark green taffeta” of Madeleine’s dress and its “stiff white sleeves,” as well as “the blue wrapping” and “cluster of green ribbons” of the jewelry box. The connoisseur also has an obsessive eye for detail. He notices the creases in the sleeves of Madeleine’s dress and the silk ribbons “hanging above every doorway” in a music hall.

Besides presenting a fragmented, mysterious story of two lovers, Darling also presents a collage of literature, mostly through the footnotes, glossaries, and histories found toward the end of the book. Here, the author references various movements and styles of literature, including the Victorian novel, English Romanticism, sonnets, the lyric ode, and other forms and movements. Though Darling does not use any of these specific forms in the collection, she does acknowledge how the past influences the present and how these classical modes had an influence on the current literary landscape and all of its varied forms.

Overall, Compendium is a captivating collection of mixed forms that challenges the reader to fill in the blanks, to imagine what text could fill the pages of white space and complete the story of the connoisseur and Madeleine.  It is also a book that pays tribute to the past and opens a discussion about how the past has a direct influence on the present and how previous literary movements and modes impact what is written today. Above all, amidst all of the white spaces that fill the book are stark, well-crafted images that make the mysterious story of the lovers that much more fascinating and beg the reader to go back and fill in the missing details.

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~Brian Fanelli is the author of the chapbook Front Man. His poetry has also been published by a number of journals and websites, including Young American Poets, Chiron Review, Word Riot, Boston Literary Magazine, Breadcrumb Scabs, Indigo Rising Magazine, and Blood Lotus. His work is also forthcoming in thePennsylvania Literary Journal. Visit him at www.brianfanelli.com.~

Finishing Line Press

$12

I often lament that I have never lived anywhere else.  Sure, I’ve moved like a roulette wheel ticking around to different suburbs, but that center, the crumbling metropolis of Scranton, has always been within reach.   And I won’t lie, my husband and I have had many fantasies about picking up our children and moving wherever we want, settling where we think they will have a better life.   After reading Dawn Leas’ I know When to Keep Quiet, I must admit, this seems like a horrible idea.

The topography of I Know When to Keep Quiet is as vast as the Texas landscape where the speaker and her family eventually end up.  The poems begin in New Jersey, where the speaker is surrounded by family.  Most notably a grandmother whose backyard is “A stone-walled map of green and red peppers”.  There is a strong sense of unity in this family from New Jersey.  They go to mass together, they eat dinner at one another’s houses, and most importantly, they seem to simply surround one another.

But all is not as it seems.  In Ashes, Leas paints a terrifying portrait of an abusive, alcoholic father.  The poem is fraught with tension as she describes her father’s violent behavior:

My father was a volcano

spewing lava that night,

tables became timber–

curtains fell, walls crumbled.

While I have read my share of childhood abuse poems, there is something distinct in Ashes.  Leas doesn’t stop at the visual, she captures the visceral:

In the morning, we tiptoed over rocky

landscape, washed our hands in ashes.

We waited.

It’s that last line.  The waiting.  That really illuminates the rest of this collection with a sense of foreboding.  This family is going somewhere.  And you can believe it will indeed be a rocky landscape.

I Know When to Keep Quiet then becomes a story about the chase.  The chase for her father’s sobriety, his chase for a sense of normalcy.  The family picks up everything and moves through several different states, all of which Leas manages to capture the essence of with subtle and distinct images, all while letting us in on her reluctance to call these foreign places home.  In Assimilation, a poem from the family’s stop in New Orleans, she learns to eat crab from an aunt and uncle:

On the tabletop, covered

with soggy newspapers,

a collage of broken carcasses,

cracked claws, half-empty pony bottles

takes shape.  I study it, a transplanted

niece left behind, a culture not my own.

The family then flees New Orleans and heads for “the next exit, the new hometown, the cacti-sprinkled flatlands and prairies [of Texas].”  It is here that Leas learns to drive, comes of age, so to speak, and meets Miss Jean, whose drawl teaches “me how to be a Texan, a lady.”

Finally, just when we feel a sense of settling in on the part of the speaker, the family is uprooted once more and heads for their final destination: Pennsylvania.    Leas spends a lot of time in this section of the book showing us the struggles of belonging.  In Another School, 1982:

The teacher introduces us, asks

polite questions about Texas.

We answer with hybrid accents.

The boys stare, the girls smirk,

heads turning to whisper.

Suddenly, the reader is pulled from the comfortable chair in our living room to the uncomfortable task of standing in front of a classroom full of high school students.  Our heart aches for these sisters, our speaker and her twin.   We have followed her journey, we have watched her grow and overcome so much change and turmoil, and we want to know she will be okay.

And she is.  In the last, and in my opinion the strongest, poem in the collection, Slipping, Leas captures the raw tenderness of adolescence:

Back on the dock, words pause

in the air above us.  Hands glide

over skin smooth as the lake’s

first ice.

And then, in the poem’s final verse, the poets grasp of the figurative becomes apparent:

This is the way I fall back,

yes, dark water rolling the dock, yes

the weight of drowning on my chest.

We are left knowing that while Pennsylvania has become home for the speaker, she will never forget where she has been, a deep tide always rolling her back to the rocky landscape over which she has traversed.   And the reader is left thankful for such a beautiful collection, and for the fact that Dawn Leas doesn’t know when to keep quiet.  As for me, I will be staying put.  Allowing the roots under my small Pennsylvania house to grow deep and envelop my girls with a sense of permanence.

Safety Third Enterprises

15 pgs, $3.00

In her chapbook “I Don’t Respect Female Expression,” Frank Hinton manages to include an astonishing amount of content within just fifteen pages.  Fittingly, considering the traditionally masculine name of “Frank” is being employed by a female writer, Hinton’s collection playfully leaps back and forth between male and female viewpoints as she examines the universal concepts of home, family, and relationships.

The chapbook begins with the aptly titled “A Starting Place,” where Hinton’s nameless narrator rests against a banister and enjoys an orange.  As the narrator reclines and muses, “This is my favorite place in the house. My back / fits well on the wood. My head feels good on the curl,” it is easy for the reader to imagine his or her own special place in their childhood home.  As the narrator relaxes, memories stir and the narrator leads the reader smoothly into the second poem, “Father/Daughter.”

In this poem, the reader learns that the narrator is a woman who is reminiscing about an awkward encounter with her now-deceased father.  She laments the loss of her father and the bonds they shared.  She likens the loss to “a new hole in the universe that I’m / supposed to create.”

Create she does.  Rather than simply write from a male character’s perspective, Hinton decides, in a refreshing twist on convention, to employ post-modernistic techniques and allow the reader to bear witness to her crafting her protagonist within the pages of the chapbook.

Make A Man

Make a man and name him Frank.

Make him young and frail. Etiolate his skin. Grease his hair. Outfit him with strands of North American Culture. Give him access to the internet. Put him on peripheries of what you admire. Make him read HTMLGIANT.com for ~2 hours a day. Make him search endlessly for the defunct I AM CARLES brand t-shirt that says: “1983-????”. Make him born in 1983. Make him feel a lot but express very little. Make him listen only to music that has been approved by pitchfork.com

Give him something to hold on to. Give him a psychic anchor. Give him yourself. Your name is Lili. Fuck him.

Having crafted her character in front of the reader’s very eyes, Hinton then places him in one of the collection’s longest pieces, “A Medium Sized Mammal Native To North America.”  This borderline-prose piece grants the reader intimate access into a couple’s life together.  Hinton keeps the reader at arm’s length from the two lovers, never delving into their thoughts, instead forcing the reader to draw his or her own assumptions about the relationship based purely upon the actions of the characters.

These actions reveal much about the characters.  While they both are frustrated with the raccoons destroying their yard, they are willing to pay to have them removed rather than choose the quicker and cheaper route of having them exterminated.  Although the poem does not directly address emotions, choosing instead to focus on actions, the couple’s kind natures are plainly apparent.

Soon after this, the reader is gifted the most powerful poem in the collection, “All Of The People In These Pictures Are Dead Now.”  The poem consists of a series of paragraphs where a nameless narrator, presumably Frank, describes various snapshots and his relationships with the pictures’ subjects.  The most telling of these is the six word section, “Here’s a picture of my dad.”  The poem concludes with the description of the narrator’s own picture as he lays in a field:

“Today there’s snow on the ground and the sun is dipping and I don’t have a camera. It doesn’t matter. This moment need not be captured. All the really important stuff happens in absence of cameras, all the little real moments. Let’s see how long I can stay here  in the cold. Let’s see what animals come to pick me apart and carry me away.”

The lines “All the really important stuff / happens in absence of cameras, all the little real moments,” are the most moving in the collection.  They remind the reader that the most precious memories are the ones kept within our hearts, not needing the reminders of photographs or keepsakes.

Hinton’s subjects often speak in the second person, addressing an unseen other.  This technique works marvelously as a tool to pull the reader into the verse and ensnare his or her attention.  In “You Rarely See Your Dirt In The Shower,” the narrator speaks confidently that, “when we meet it will be something like when I put my hand under the shower water and realize that it’s warm enough now.” Such simple similes are far more effective than the overwrought, verbose language far too many writers employ to convey such a simple concept – when true lovers meet, it will just feel right.

“I Don’t Respect Female Expression” is an adventurous and intriguing chapbook that contains more evocative language than many much larger collections.  The relatively short length of the collection makes for a very quick read and it can quickly be reread in its entirety over and over again. While the strict traditionalist may be turned off by the lack of traditional form or structure in her work, Hinton’s chapbook is an exceptional collection of modern poetry that will appeal to anyone who enjoys a poet willing to take chances and dance outside the boundaries of convention.

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Stanton Hancock is a writer and musician whose poetry and fiction have appeared on scraps of paper, in tattered notebooks, and under bridges.  He has an MA in Creative Writing from Wilkes University and is currently pursuing his MFA.  He recently finished his first novel and feels pretty good about that.