Review

[REVIEW] Navigational Clouds, by Alina Gregorian

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th

Monk Books

30 pages, $10

 

Review by Anaïs Duplan

 

 

“apricot trees exist, apricot trees exist”

– Inger Christensen, Alphabet (1981)

It’s difficult to know how to begin to speak about Alina Gregorian’s Navigational Clouds. Each of the thirty poems is, in itself, both a diagram of waking life and a personified map of America. “Unlike the snowstorm in Arkansas, nothing seems wrong with my teeth. But the world is strange” (“Atlas”). Over the course of the collection, Gregorian acts as our cartographer, acutely illustrating what it means to search, perhaps desperately, for some direction, for some sense of purpose in largely uncharted territory. Fragmented, enigmatic and yet logical, Navigational Clouds demands that anyone who dares traverse its landscape learn the lay of the land. In other words, it would seem that the only way to talk about Gregorian’s chapbook would be to mimic the diagrammatic quality of the writing itself.

I. The Cartographer

Gregorian’s speakers are often distanced and aloof, but not for ignorance. Instead, her speakers embody some unnamable coordinate at the epicenter of wisdom, ennui, and skepticism. In “Everything is Happening,” the speaker states, “If everything is the way it could be, then nothing would get done around here.” This particular poem is important. If Navigational Clouds is an ongoing experience of ‘shared attention’ – the readers’ gaze is directed in whichever direction the cartographer chooses – then “Everything is Happening” is pivotal because it widens our focus from a singular incident or place to the global, the universal. A poem like “Untitled,” for example, feels much more microscopic: “You are a daisy pinned to my lapel,” and we spend much of Navigational Clouds reflecting on the minute, just as we do here. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Prague Summer, by Jeffrey Condran

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Prague

Counterpoint Press

288 pages, $26

 

 

Review by Michelle Elvy

 

Long after I finished reading Jeffrey Condran’s novel Prague Summer, the opening quote by WB Yeats lingers in my mind: “What do we know but that we face one another in this place?” It is the most suitable of quotes to set the scene, and this idea that there’s nothing more important than the space between us creates a haunting mood.

The novel begins twice, really. First with a body falling quite beautifully from the sky:

The body seemed almost to float as it left the protection of the window casement. Against the dark sky, buoyed on a humid night’s air, its pale green skirt billowed like gossamer around thin hips and legs. The passive face of the woman looked toward the heavens, mouth open, a few strands of dark hair caught in the corner of her colored lips. For a moment, the whole—skirt, legs, hips, hair—paused cinematically before remembering its obligation to fall swiftly to the unforgiving cement below.

A strong opening moment, a defenestration to set the mood. A woman falling effortlessly, almost gracefully, toward her eventual and inevitable demise. Continue reading →

Books We Can’t Quit: Read-Aloud Poems Every Young Child Should Know, edited by Marjorie Barrows

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Review by Susan Marque

 

I have been thinking a lot about home recently. The lack of having one, and my fourteen moves in the last four years, to various short-term rentals, which means I have few possessions. A thin, light green hardcover remains a symbol of home for me. It is one of the items that has always been with my parents, alongside a vase from my grandmother, and a numbered Lichtenstein lithograph. My parents have lived in six houses, in four states, taking a smaller amount of things with them each time they move. I have yet to own a home, have nothing in storage, and travel light.

Read Aloud Poems Every Child Should Know is out of print, but a couple of originals can be found. My mom sent me our brittle copy in the mail so that I could take a look at the poems again. (She made sure that I promised to send it back before my next move, wrapped it in tissue paper, and told me to do the same on its return.) Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Loose Strife, by Quan Barry

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University of Pittsburgh Press

65 pages, $15.95

 

Review by Colleen Abel

 

Quan Barry is having a good year. Her debut novel She Weeps Each Time You’re Born came out to strong reviews in February, and her third book of poetry, Loose Strife, came out in January. Anyone who has read Loose Strife may not be surprised to hear that Barry is now also a successful novelist: she has a fascination with unearthing stories, and over the course of her three books, Barry has proven that the darker the tale, the more important it is to tell.

In the end notes to Loose Strife, Barry writes that many of the poems were inspired by a collaborative exhibition between her and the visual artist Michael Velliquette, and the book reads like a multimedia lecture or an artist’s talk, delivered with the pictures missing, the poems serving as the only evidence that they were there. Musician and performance artist Laurie Anderson has said of her early career teaching art history in New York that she would forget the details of what she was teaching during slide lectures and just stand in the dark making up stories about the images. Were it not for the poems’ impeccable craft, we might get the same sense from Loose Strife; it’s an unsettling and memorable effect. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Einstein’s Beach House, by Jacob M. Appel

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Einstein

Pressgang

188 pages, $15.95

 

Review by Lynne Weiss

 

The theme of the highly readable and surprising stories that comprise Jacob M. Appel’s Einstein’s Beach House is aptly expressed in the first sentence of the first story, “Hue and Cry”—these stories describe things that are “funny” when they happen “to other people.” Things, the narrator goes on to explain, like “tarring and feathering, Peeping Toms, mad cow disease.” In a sense, all three of these things happen to characters in this first story, which describes the plans of a man dying of a brain-wasting disease to teach his daughters forgiveness by taking them to meet a paroled Level 1 sex offender who has recently moved into their neighborhood. The protagonist is 13-year-old Lizzie, one of the aforementioned daughters of the dying man. While everyone else in the neighborhood is protesting the presence of the parolee (metaphorically tarring and feathering him), Lizzie’s father is making plans to befriend him, and Lizzie and her friend Julia are the Peeping Toms who put a watch on the sex offender’s house and break into it to look for something unspecified. “We’ll know it when we find it,” Julia assures Lizzie, and Lizzie does find something in the course of the story, but it has nothing to do with the sex offender and much to do with her coming to terms with her father’s death and declining powers.

Appel is an award-winning writer whose work has appeared in more than 200 literary journals. According to his website, Appel is has an M.D. from Columbia and has been admitted to the bar in New York State and Rhode Island. Einstein’s Beach House, which is published by Pressgang, a small press affiliated with the Butler University MFA program, is Appel’s second collection of short stories. He has also published novels and collections of essays. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Island of a Thousand Mirrors, by Nayomi Munaweera

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St. Martin’s Press

256 pages, $24.99

 

Review by Michelle Newby

 

“Behind the retreating Englishman, on the new nation’s flag is poised a stylized lion, all curving flank and ornate muscle, a long, cruel sword gripped in its front paw. It is the ancient symbol of the Sinhala…A green stripe represents that small and much-tossed Muslim population. An orange stripe represents the larger Tamil minority…But in the decades that are coming, race riots and discrimination will render the orange stripe inadequate. It will be replaced by a new flag. On its face, a snarling tiger, all bared fang and bristling whisker…A rifle toting tiger. A sword gripping lion. This is a war that will be waged between related beasts.”

The politics of the Sri Lankan civil war are rendered not just personal but intimate as the Buddhist Sinhala (the ancestral dominant caste) and Hindu Tamil battle for the island nation in Nayomi Munaweera’s stunning debut novel, Island of a Thousand Mirrors. Reduced economic circumstances force the Sinhala Ranasinghe family to rent the upper floor of their home to the Tamil Shivalingam family. As conditions in the country deteriorate precipitously and the war invades both families, they are forced to flee the island. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson

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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 →

[REVIEW] You’re Fine by Gina Tron

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Papercut Press

276 pages, $15

 

Review by Spencer Goyette

 

Gina Tron, regular VICE columnist and no stranger to the darker sides of human behavior, has a voice that deserves listening to. In You’re Fine, her autobiography and first book, Tron leads readers on a twisted path through her own personal history detailing events both humorous and dark with a consistent candidness that is excruciatingly honest and magnetic. Tron’s insight into the world around her is often cut with sarcasm and humor, but it carries a depth as she tries to give meaning to the chaos:

“Sometimes people don’t want to understand how a person has become the way they are, they just demonize their current behavior.”

Tron seeks help from a psychiatric facility after being rejected by friends and family following heavy cocaine use and a brutal rape, yet she quickly finds out that the ward she’s entered into has an atmosphere of extreme apathy and neglect. Patients roll around in various states of drugged-up stupor, some shitting themselves so frequently that they are caked in their own excrement. The staff is brutal and negligent, the doctors are cold and mostly absent. Her personal narrative provides insight into how poor the approach to mental health, addiction, and sexual abuse treatment are in this country. Most of us are not aware of these people or fail to acknowledge their existence altogether, as if ignoring fixes the problem. Continue reading →

Books We Can’t Quit: What begins with bird, by Noy Holland

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FC2

167 pages, $16.95

 

Review by Brynne Rebele-Henry

 

Noy Holland’s 2005 story collection What begins with bird is a catalogue of conception. The female characters are a host of surrogates charged with the rearing of their own wombs, babies both imaginary and not, and the men are damaged bruisers, temperamental, mentally unstable fathers unaware of their growing broods, lumberjack drop-outs, quick to lose control. Tinged with love and the catatonia and soreness of afterbirth, Holland’s prose forms an ode to the lilt, bulge, hobble, and gilded calamity that is pregnancy, the fallopian galaxy of it, and to the burlesque that is parenthood. Holland frequently uses the garden of fertility as a metaphor— the stunted growth of roots that result in insanity, the barren ovaries of plains and mountains and the hardships of existing in a body—and equates the tangles of birth, abortion and menstruation to winter, when trees strip their own leaves in a form of reincarnation. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Seven Stages of Anger and Other Stories by Wendy J. Fox

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Anger
Press 53
124 pages, $14.95
Review by Jody Hobbs Hesler

 

It would be unfair to say I hungered for more emotion in Wendy J. Fox’s Seven Stages of Anger and Other Stories, because my very hunger is what the writer meant to evoke. These are, after all, stories of the modern West – a sere place peopled by characters who are just emerging from generations of isolated farm and desert life or who are working desk jobs and living in the now tamed-to-sterility post-Wild-West suburbs. The emotional hollowness and dislocation of Fox’s characters matches their positions in and relationships with this New West.

This collection is Fox’s debut, as well as the inaugural winner of the Press 53 Award for Short Fiction. All the stories take place somewhere in the West – some in rural, others in urban settings, mostly in Washington state. Sometimes the characters are young and house-hunting, about to start their families. Sometimes they have fled a life they knew in the rural wasteland and are seeking a new way in an unknown place. Sometimes the characters are in love. Almost all the time, the love is mistaken and breaks. Some of the characters recur, and Fox varies points-of-view, usually between first-person and close-third, though the title story experiments with second person. All the stories hearken to something missing. Continue reading →