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By Charles Rammelkamp, on April 30th, 2012 Author: Willie James King
2012, Tebot Bach
Filed Under: Poetry
Find it on Goodreads.
| C4 Ratings...out of |
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8 |
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Willie James King, a widely-published African-American poet from Montgomery, Alabama, clearly writes in the long poetic tradition of western civilization, both thematically and metrically. The poems in his second collection published by Tebot Bach, Autumn’s Only Blood, are elegiac and lyrical in tone. Almost a dozen of the nearly fifty in this new collection are sonnets.
Dedicated to Troy Davis, an African-American man who was executed by the state of Georgia in September, 2011, for killing a police officer in Savannah in 1991, the collection begins and ends in autumn, in elegy. Davis was convicted on sketchy evidence and maintained his innocence for over twenty years. The book’s title comes from the dedication:
the spider lilies are
springing up all over
now, blooming, as if
they ought to be
this autumn’s only blood.
The spider lily, which blooms abundantly in the American South in autumn is a transplant from Southeast Asia, a flower full of the potent symbolism of tragedy.
…
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By Charles Rammelkamp, on March 22nd, 2012 Author: Mark Carp
2011, Xlibris
Filed Under: Literary, Short-Run
| C4 Ratings...out of |
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Written in the serviceable prose-style of a newspaper reporter that keeps the reader turning the pages, Mark Carp’s new novella, Cain, Abel and the Family Cohen, tells the story of the rapid rise and breathtakingly precipitous fall of Jonas Cohen, the youngest child of Rabbi Abraham Cohen. Related largely in the first person by Jonas himself (with a couple of minor but confusing switches in point of view in several places), Carp takes us through the beginning of the recent financial crisis when the housing bubble burst, financial institutions tanked and the economy went to hell. Jonas, a recent college graduate and hotshot financial analyst, has just joined the Frick Group, a New York hedge fund where he had interned for several summers.
A precocious investment analyst, Jonas foresees the downturn in the housing market when he arrives in New York to begin his job (his family is from Baltimore where his father leads a congregation) and notices the vastly overpriced properties. He quickly does his research and advises his boss, A.J. Buckner, about the imminent decline in prices and advises him that the Frick Group should begin “shorting housing indexes,” a maneuver to maximize shareholder profits by betting on the decline in housing prices. A real estate broker by day, Carp writes with authority about this in a concise and enlightening manner while furthering his plot.
Jonas’ predictions and advice pan out and he becomes something of a Wall Street celebrity, interviewed on business talkshow programs and consulted for his insights into the economy. A wunderkind, by his own description. …
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By Charles Rammelkamp, on February 27th, 2012 Author: L.D. Brodsky
2009, Time Being Books
Filed Under: Poetry
Find it on Goodreads
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
9 |
| Entertainment..... |
9 |
| Depth..... |
7 |
I originally discovered Louis Daniel Brodsky’s poetry about twenty years ago when I was snared by a title called Capital Cafe: Poems of Redneck U.S.A. I’ve been hooked ever since. An astoundingly prolific and wide-ranging writer, Brodsky’s sixty to seventy volumes of poetry include a number of collections on the Holocaust (Gestapo Crows, The Eleventh Lost Tribe and Rabbi Auschwitz among others); a series of books of political poetry written during the disastrous Bush administration years (the four-volume Shadow War series and the three-volume Regime Change series as well as Showdown with a Cactus); volumes of more contemplative verse on nature and rural life (Once Upon a Small-Town Time and the three-volume Lake Nebagamon series among them), love poems, family poems, regional poems and more. In most of these, and especially in his wonderful series of short fictions, such as This Here’s a Merica and Catchin’ the Drift o’ the Draft, Brodsky displays a wicked sense of humor, at once satiric and Rabelaisian.
Indeed, it was this side of Brodsky’s writing that originally charmed me, in The Capital Cafe, and it is in full force in Dine-Rite, which is likewise centered around a restaurant, its staff and clientele. Yet it should be noted that even at his most sarcastic, Brodsky is a poet with a conscience – Jeremiah with a sense of humor. …
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By Charles Rammelkamp, on January 4th, 2012 Author: Jessica Anya Blau
2011, Harper Perennial
Filed Under: Literary
| C4 Ratings...out of |
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8 |
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Jessica Anya Blau’s Drinking Closer to Home is a sort of amped-up Anne Tyler novel, the story of a funny, chaotic family that fumbles its way to loving and supporting one another despite personal failings and the usual resentments that occur in families. Think of Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant on steroids – or without any clothes on!
In Tyler’s 1982 novel, Pearl Tull, the 85-year old matriarch ruminates, “Something was wrong with all of her children. They were so frustrating – attractive, likable people, the three of them, but closed off from her in some perverse way that she couldn’t quite put her finger on. … She wondered if her children blamed her for something.” This could be Louise Stein’s reflection after she suffers her “massive” heart attack in Santa Barbara, California, in 1993, and her three children return home from their east coast locations to be with their mother and father, Buzzy, over the course of the next two weeks as Louise receives treatment. Only, Louise couldn’t care less what her children think of her, in the last analysis, as much as she loves them. …
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By Charles Rammelkamp, on November 28th, 2011 [As each year comes to a close, we ask our contributors to give us their picks of the best books that came out in the previous 12 months--and we let a few older ones slip in as honorable mentions. You can follow the entries through the rest of the year here, and check out the picks from 2009 and 2010 while you're at it.]
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Field Grey, by Philip Kerr.
The seventh volume in the noir series about Bernie Gunther, former Berlin police detective during the rise of Nazism, this novel finds Gunther returning to Germanyafter several post-war years in exile in South America and Cuba covered in the last two novels). In Field Grey Gunther is caught up in the morally ambiguous Cold War retribution between the Communists and the Fascists.
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 The Buddha in the Attic, by Julie Otsuka.
This short, lyrical novel paints a picture of the Japanese “Picture Brides” of the early 20th century, girls who emigrated from Japan to the United States to marry other Japanese. The story goes up through the start of World War II and the internment camps to which the U.S. government sent Japanese-Americans.
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 At Dock’s End: Poems of Lake Nebagamon, Volume Two, by L.D. Brodsky.
The second of three volumes of poems in which Brodsky, the modern day Thoreau, returns to his beloved lake inWisconsin to observe nature throughout its spring and summer changes.
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 The Cookbook Collector, by Allegra Goodman.
An intriguing novel about two sisters at theend of the twentieth century during the high tech boom and culminating in the September 11,2001 attack. The story takes place in California and Boston. Along the way, Goodman involves themes of Jewish mysticism, antiquarian book collecting, food and love.
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 The Marriage Plot, by Jeffrey Eugenides.
Set in the early 1980’s, this novel focuses on three characters just graduating from Brown University: Madeleine, an English major; Mitchell, aReligion major; and Leonard, a Biologist. Manic depression and spiritual searching are other key themes, along with love and relationships.
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 Bullfighting, by Roddy Doyle.
Thirteen poignant short stories about middle age set mainly in Ireland. Doyle’s ear for dialogue and his witty observations make these tales about men reacting to dying, to diminished vigor and the prospect of the “empty nest” both wise and entertaining.
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By Charles Rammelkamp, on October 27th, 2011 [This dense novel is a C4 Great Read. Find it and other C4 favorites on our Great Reads shelf at Powell's.]
Author: Tom Frick
2011, Burning Books
Filed Under: Literary, Historical.
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Set in the early 1800’s in Robin Hood’s territory, Thomas Frick’s The Iron Boys is a real tour de force that takes the mayhem of the Luddites who resisted the Industrial Revolution as its subject. The term “Luddite” has long been used to describe a person who resists technological change, but it’s a sure bet that not many are really aware of its historical roots as an unorganized, almost spontaneous insurrection against the dehumanizing tendencies of the emerging capitalist economy.
The Luddites flourished in the second decade of the nineteenth century in the Northern English counties of Yorkshire, Lancashire, Cheshire, Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire. Ned Ludd, the mythical figure after whom the movement was named, was reputed to live in Sherwood Forest. The Luddites were crafts workers who largely had control over their lives and livelihoods until the advent of the textile factories, which dehumanized workers in the name of profits. Indeed, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was written to an extent as a reaction to Luddism, an eloquent treatise against the machine. Byron championed the movement in the House of Lords, a lone voice against the machine. The Luddites attacked the mills and smashed the machines that were ruining their autonomous way of life. …
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By Charles Rammelkamp, on October 14th, 2011 Author: Mark Wisniewski
2011, Gival Press
Filed Under: Literary.
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At first when I started reading Show Up, Look Good, I wanted to compare it to Bright Lights, Big City, the Jay McInerney tour de force from the 1980’s, partly because of the similarity of the cadence of the titles but also because of the hip sensibility and the dark sense of humor common to both; both stories take place in New York City, as well – glamorous Manhattan, specifically. But once I got further into the story I started to think of the protagonist, Michelle, a girl in her mid-thirties from Kankakee, Illinois, come to “make it” in New York, in terms of Holden Caulfield, the runaway of The Catcher in the Rye. Both characters have a personal sense of honor and both see through phonies.
Even Michelle’s language sometimes sounds like Holden’s: “…but what really killed me about this whole ‘Have you read so-and-so’ game,” she tells the reader while describing the so-called literary workshops of a pretentious roommate she has in the Village, “…if everyone there read every book they said they’d read, none of them could have written a word.” Things were always “killing” Holden, too, with their absurdity or hypocrisy. (“Sensitive. That killed me. That guy Morrow was about as sensitive as a goddam toilet seat,” Holden observes about a prep school classmate ). Elsewhere Michelle makes the similar Holden-like observation:
…it killed me how many times in my thirty-four years I’d gotten along with people but kept cruising toward being alone.
But all this searching for somebody to whom to compare Wisniewski’s work amounts to a reviewer’s way of introducing him to readers. Who is he “like,” and will readers be warned or welcomed by the comparison? The blurbs compare his work to Carson McCullers, Truman Capote, Elmore Leonard, Ruth McKenney (My Sister Eileen). One even does compare Michelle’s picaresque adventures in New York to Holden Caulfield’s. In the end, though, we might just as well take Wisniewski on his own terms because the story and characters don’t necessarily fall into these neat comparisons. …
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By Charles Rammelkamp, on June 15th, 2011 Editors: Abigail Beckel and Kathleen Rooney
Rose Metal Press, 2011
Filed Under: Short Stories, Literary.
Get a copy at Powell’s.
| C4 Ratings...out of |
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9 |
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They Could No Longer Contain Themselves is a collection of five chapbooks – seventy-three flash fiction pieces – in about 240 pages; each story packs a swift punch, some more effective than others. Written by five different authors – John Jodzio, Mary Miller, Elizabeth J. Colen, Tim Jones-Yelvington and Sean Lovelace – these are five distinct voices, or styles, contained between two covers. But as editors Abigail Beckel and Kathleen Rooney note in their excellent preface, the stories in these five chapbooks are barely contained, bursting out beyond the confines of their plots and truly exemplifying the possibilities of the genre, which often eschews plot and character in favor of experience itself.
The book’s title comes from a line in the story “Aesthete,” from Mary Miller’s collection, Paper and Tassels. The title refers to a boy the narrator, a young girl, suspects is gay, even as he runs his hand up her skirt. Beads of water from a leaky ceiling swell “until they could no longer contain themselves,” and we wonder who is reaching that point. The boy? The girl? Both? …
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By Charles Rammelkamp, on December 10th, 2010 Author: Nathan Leslie
 2009, Hamilton Stone Editions
Filed Under: Poetry.
| C4 Ratings.....out of |
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Known mostly for his fiction – six collections of short stories last I counted – I nevertheless became acquainted with Nathan Leslie when we both had poems in Red River Review in 2001 (one of these, “Chip,” is included in Night Sweat). While his fiction collections often cohere around a theme – motherhood (Madre), cars (Drivers), faith (Believers) – Night Sweat is a selection of poems that span a decade and sometimes seem so different, one from another. This collection is divided into seven discrete sections, an eclectic mix of theme, form, and focus. Thus, to get a handle on Leslie’s work and the vision it embodies we need to approach this collection in terms of style.
While he writes the occasional form poem – there are two ghazals in the final section and the book opens with a series of exphrasis poems, based on works of art – Leslie primarily writes free verse poems and keeps the language spare and descriptive. Whitman-like, he is fond of lists, but rather than cataloguing a stream of examples or representatives, Leslie uses the technique to paint a picture. “On a boat in the Severn we caught/eels, crabs, bluegills, croakers…” (“A Fishing Poem); “Though I hiked the juniper/trails – spying lizards, coyotes, hares and hawks…[the wrentit] plucking toyon berries,/wasps and caterpillars…” (“Wrentit”); “My sister and I found/washing machines, tires,/rusted box springs, hordes/of brown bottles, beer cans.” (“The Creek”); “in Indian Lake dotted with wildflowers,/moss, lichen, scrub bushes and beetles…” (“The Lake”); “a dragon stem goblet for mother,/topaz wings, a Sarpaneva sculpture/blown in a burned wooden mold/for Anne, a lavender opaline/bell gilt with a bronze mount for me.” (“Glassware”) These aren’t lists so much as details freed from the fog of prepositional language, as if Leslie is carving a statue from a block of wood, only the material is the concrete language of nouns, things. …
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