Ricochet Editions

[REVIEW] Diorama of a People, Burning by Bradley Harrison

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Burning

Ricochet Editions

33 pages, $15.00

 

Review by Hannah Rodabaugh

 

Several years ago, when I first read Ronald Johnson’s radi os, an erasure text with Milton’s Paradise Lost as source material, I was fascinated by the construct of erasure in the meaning of language. Though the intended product was inconsistent in its desire towards an aesthetic reading experience, it asked questions about interpretation and intention which were interesting in their own right. Put in a different way, a need for structure to display a level of content seemed the point of the erasure. These types of texts often contain intentions in making meaning as one of its forms of making meaning.

In this vein, Bradley Harrison’s short collection Diorama of a People, Burning is neatly exposing these intentions. The chapbook is a wave-like series of text erasures. (This wave-like structure might be intentional, as many references to the catastrophic flooding in Iowa a few years ago occur intentionally and often.) The erasures center around six prose poems. Each prose poem has a series of three corresponding increasingly erased versions that follows it.  In all but the last series, they are in order of least to most erased, which gives us a sense of everything falling away as we read. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Unchecked Savagery by Glenn Shaheen

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savagery

Ricochet Editions

76 pages, $10.00

 

Review by Matt Pincus

 

Glenn Shaheen’s collection of flash fiction is a bitter, sardonic reminder of America’s abstract fears and paranoia of “other.” The stories are distinctly American through cultural tropes (in the first story, “Harry Loves Every Movie,” Crash, Hostel 2 and Failure to Launch are mentioned): Movies, songs, brand name stores, corporate gimmicks and overly dramatized clichés become patterned, dry jokes on tragic ironies in American personas.

The story “Personal Order” takes on the corporate marketing of deodorant, and distorts what is usually a pleasant aroma into the smell of McDonald’s grease. But the narrator says, “People just started coming closer, being more and more curious about my smell. I felt like I was always mobbed.” Although he is getting a desired social response, the smell of his deodorant carries a repulsive cultural history and also an individual, psychosomatic response. The tragic waste of consumer culture is nauseated, but still driven back to consumerism. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Pact-Blood, Fever Grass, by Miriam Bird Greenberg

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pact blood

Ricochet Editions

31 pages, $10

Review by Chris Caruso

 

Miriam Bird Greenberg has hitchhiked over ten thousand miles, worked as a deckhand on a catamaran, and is a daughter of a goat raising anthropologist. These life experiences freed her from a topography that defines location and self as fixed and static entities. Her second poetry chapbook, Pact-Blood, Fever Grass, reflects on these themes of location that teeters between the familiar and a visionary quest. I had to sacrifice my belief that I understood the methods of self and place. This collection led me to follow Greenberg and enter her covenant, believing in her powers of divination.

Greenberg plays the role of a backwoods witch, her poems acting as premonitions of what is possible when the constraints of defining are removed. Her poems disrupt the cultural constraints brought about by labeling, and there is a haunting between what is known and what could be known, the plausible and the impossible. “A Problem of Taxonomy” lets a wunderkammer create a “problem/with taxonomy, I tell the kids.” The act of naming and placing what is real against what is fictional allows the logic of sleeping “inside /a cougar to stay warm, or sometimes just a goat/though a cougar is warmer” to exist alongside a grandmother who loved to set off fireworks. The wunderkammer is a box of all possibilities occurring, an unshuffled deck of tarot cards, a potion not yet concocted; it is a device that removes the hierarchy of roles and locations. Within it everything is re-envisioned free of the constraints of defining. Continue reading →