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By Robert Cooperman, on April 23rd, 2013 Author: Charles Harper Webb
2013, University of Pittsburgh Press
Filed Under: Poetry
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
9 |
| Entertainment..... |
9 |
| Depth..... |
10 |
In What Things Are Made Of, Charles Harper Webb displays such a wonderfully quirky, idiosyncratic voice, whether writing about oil-slicked, doomed penguins or puppy love. His poems careen between wild hyperboles, the irony of looking back at youthful indiscretions and unrequited or disappointed love, to the joy he feels with his beloved small son and wife, and his love of old rock bands like the Stones or Led Zeppelin. But there’s always something interesting, fascinating in this collection, something that makes us read and keep turning the pages, to see what new and deliriously strange take he’ll have on the things of this world.
One of Webb’s favorite poetic ploys is to pile up instances and examples until they seem to be almost spinning out of control, taking on lives of their own. It’s an effective strategy to get at the confusion, chaos, miserableness, but also the sheer fecundity of life. …
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By Robert Cooperman, on July 5th, 2012 Author: Charles Rammelkamp
2012, Time Being Books
Filed Under: Poetry
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| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
10 |
| Entertainment..... |
9 |
| Depth..... |
10 |
By way of full disclosure, I saw an early manuscript version of Fusen Bakudan (a reference to the balloon bombs Japan sent over to the U.S. during World War II). I thought the sequence had the makings of a terrific poetry collection then. I was wrong; it’s a great poetry collection. This is not to say it’s the happiest book you’ll ever read, because it’s, as its subtitle notes, a tragedy (Poems of Altruism and Tragedy in Wartime).
The tragedies that the poems in Fusen Bakudan encompass are the carnage wrought by two wars: World War II and Vietnam. The stories told are of real people: In May of 1945, the newly minted Reverend Archie Mitchell and his pregnant wife Elsie take a group of children on a picnic up Gearhart Mountain, outside the logging town of Bly, Oregon. Elsie and five of the children are killed when they stumble across a balloon bomb on the forest floor (they were made in the thousands by Japanese schoolchildren and landed as far east as Nebraska and as far north as British Columbia and Alaska) and it explodes. Or as the grieving Reverend Mitchell laments in “A Saturday-Afternoon Picnic,”
The history books say
they were the only six Americans to die
on United State soil,
but I number seven—
Elsie five months pregnant.
His faith sustains him, and after two years, when his ministry at Bly is coming to an end, he marries Betty Patzke, whose younger siblings, Dick and Joan, were also killed that horrible day. And because Archie and Betty are people who live their faith, they go to then-Indochina, Vietnam, to work at a leprosarium, just as the Vietnam War is starting to churn up more bodies. Archie, Dr. Vietti (who runs the leprosarium), and Dan Gerber, another aid worker, are all kidnapped by the Viet Cong and never seen again, though Betty holds out hope over the years that they will be returned, alive. They’re not. Tragedies upon tragedies! …
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By Robert Cooperman, on February 28th, 2012 [This collection of exemplary short fiction is a C4 Great Read.]
Author: Patrick Michael Finn
2011, Black Lawrence Press
Filed Under: Literary, Short Stories
Find it on Goodreads.
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
10 |
| Entertainment..... |
8 |
| Depth..... |
10 |
Patrick Michael Finn’s award-winning second story collection, From the Darkness Right Under Our Feet, depicts the grim industrial nightmare and post-industrial hell of Joliet, Illinois. Think of Dante’s Inferno and Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony” shuffled together and you begin to get a picture of just how grim this world is, and how pitilessly Finn depicts it, while still making us care about these characters stuck in their blighted urban Ninth Circle of Hell. But when the damned are stuck in hell together, they do hellish things to each other, and nothing namby-pamby like the infernal and eternal talkers of Sartre’s No Exit. No, these are all-American sinners, who take no prisoners, and have no pity for themselves, so why should they have any for their victims?
So in the course of the opening story, “Smokestack Polka,” a kid whose father has died of a heart attack on his walk home from his job at the Joliet railyards tries to kill the loathsome wife- beating thug who tries to put the moves on his mother, six months after his father’s death, at his cousin Reenie’s wedding. The brick the unnamed narrator on the roof hurls down at Tomczak barely misses its target, and Tomczak takes the incident for an accident and concludes the story with, “But let’s get the hell out of here. This fucking place is falling apart,” which, whether Tomczak realizes it or not, pretty much describes all the lives depicted in this powerful collection. …
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By Robert Cooperman, on November 14th, 2011  Author: Mather Schneider
2011, NYQ Books
Filed Under: Poetry.
Get the book.
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
9 |
| Entertainment..... |
10 |
| Depth..... |
9 |
What Alan Catlin, the Schenectady bartender/poet has done for the seamier side of the drinking trade, Mather Schneider, in He Took a Cab, has now done for the taxi business in Tucson–but it could be anywhere where cabs are hailed and hacks are stiffed for a tip. Where Catlin showed us, with great sympathy and understanding, the habitués of bars, Schneider gives us an inkling into the lives of not just his autobiographical cab driver-persona, but also the fares he drives to and from the airport, to bars, to doctor appointments, to fast food restaurants, to john appointments, and elsewhere. And as often happens in cabs, people reveal themselves in a word, phrase, or gesture; and Schneider reveals himself as well.
These poems give us a slice of the harder side of life, the other side of the tracks, the places we’ve either never seen, except to drive through to someplace more picturesque, or the places we’ve been all too glad to escape from. I confess I feel a particularly affectionate affinity for Schneider’s cabbie persona and his fares, since I drove a cab more years ago than I care to think about. But that disclaimer aside, this is a strong collection, maybe not for the weak of stomach, but a much needed look at what Fred Neil called in his great song of the same title, “The Other Side of This Life.” …
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