By
Shannon C. Walsh, on April 27th, 2011
[This bombastic poetry collection is a C4 Great Read. Get Moving Day and other Great Reads from our Powell's Bookshelf.]
Author: Ish Klein
2011, Canarium Press
Filed under: Literary, Poetry
Get a copy at Powell’s
| C4 Ratings...out of |
10 |
| Language..... |
8 |
| Entertainment..... |
9 |
| Depth..... |
9 |
| Voice..... |
10 |
I am a narrative poet, and as such, I glom onto a storyline. This can be difficult with poetry books, as they’re often populated by poems that have nothing in common but the author. Ish Klein’s poems also resist simple storytelling, but for a different reason. Most of the poems in this book seem to be told in the voice of a single speaker. This is a safe assumption because of the recurrence of certain themes and details throughout the book: protons/electrons, battlefields/veterans, actors, family, shape-shifting, identity perception, etc. But Klein isn’t really a narrative poet. While her poems tell a story, the story is not forefront and it’s not linear. Instead, like some of the best novels, Klein’s poems are character-driven. Her poems tell the story of what it’s like to be inside her speaker’s head. I’ll talk more about this later.
What I want to discuss first—what delights me—is Klein’s voice, which has remained consistent since her first book, Union! First of all, Klein is able to succeed where a lesser writer could not. Take, for instance, Klein’s use of exclamation points. Since the fall of the Romantics, it is difficult to use an exclamation point in literature without irony. A friend of mine can’t read a book without saying “exclamation point” aloud every time she sees one. And, I’ll admit, when I saw Union! I thought, ‘Really?’ (Union! answered, “Really!”) The “!” is just not doing its job anymore. But Klein has reclaimed it. Her exclamations really are exclamations. The “!” conveys her passion for life. For life! (It’s addictive.) …
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By
Shannon C. Walsh, on July 26th, 2010
[A new entry in our "I Loved This Book When..." series will appear every Monday this summer. To keep up with this series or any other, check out our Special Features page.]
I loved all Christopher Pike novels when I was upping my bra sizes. From the ages of 10 to 14, I read every book he wrote or had written: a total of 29 young adult and 3 adult novels—though I am appalled to discover that I missed a Tatyana Ali / Jonathan Brandis TV movie based on Fall into Darkness, which is inexplicably billed as “A True Story.” (I admit I had JB on my wall during his SeaQuest 2032 days, right next to 21 Jump Street’s Johnny Depp. I liked boys with pretty faces, which, later in life, will make perfect sense.)
I distinctly remember my first Pike experience. I was home sick from school, sitting on the couch as my mom left for work. She’d made sure I had all of the necessities in reach: a can of Pepsi, the remote control, and two books she’d brought home for me (which I greeted with the customary aloofness of a preteen). The cover—by which I judge a book—of Remember Me pictured a girl’s body sprawled on the flagstones below a balcony railing where an ominous hand rests. Whisper of Death’s cover had the black-robed, skeletal figure of Death hitchhiking near a few scared teenagers on a deserted highway.
I chose to start with Remember Me because I thought that Whisper of Death would be scarier (even though now I think the cover is cheesy); I wasn’t sure I wanted to be home alone and petrified. After all, just a couple of years earlier I’d made my mother return a book about a rogue, school-project volcano that she had suggested might be too scary for me.* If I couldn’t sleep with The (unread) Volcano Disaster in my bedroom, how could I read a book that I (wrongly) assumed was about the character Death stalking and killing teenagers? …
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