Editor: Joseph Gordon Levitt

2011, hitRECord

Filed Under: Short Stories, Poetry, Graphic Novels

As the name implies, this is a short little book filled with “stories” that are mostly less than a sentence. Each bite-sized story is paired with a drawing: in a way they’re almost like one panel comic strips, but also not at all like that. While some are funny, some manage to plumb some nice depth, especially for their size. It’s not an impossible thing to do. (The not-exactly-true tale of Hemingway’s shortest story–”For sale, baby shoes, never worn.”–comes to mind.)  Most importantly this is a collaborative book, curated like a lit mag. The art is varied and interesting, and the range of the stories is pleasantly surprising. And yes, that’s the actor Joseph Gordon Levitt* who runs the show.

Here’s an example:

Tiny Stories is an attractive, if not substantive, little book; a nice thing to have on your shelf, or to leave out on a coffee table. To call it more than a diversion would probably be overdoing things, but it’s a good one. I wrapped up my copy to give as a Christmas present, but then decided to order another for myself. I can see myself quickly flipping through this many times before I’m done with it.

Similar Reads: Our own Eric Markowsky’s collaborative story, “Other Doors, Other Rooms,” over at Camera Obscura was in the same spirit as this.

[This book is currently being advertised on the site--that's how I found it.]

*more or less completely unrelated side-note, he’s the lead in a very smartly written movie titled Brick, a noir-style film set in a high school, which is one of my favorite movies of the last few years.

Author: Mather Schneider

2011, NYQ Books

Filed Under: Poetry.

Get the book.

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.”

The title itself is a giveaway to the lives we’re going to glimpse, for “He took a cab” is jazz slang for dying.  And more than some of these characters are members of the walking dead, the barely hanging on, though sometimes joyously, like Dirk of “I Miss You Dirk,” who “…was only 5 feet tall/and didn’t leave much/of a dent…” but he’d been “happy as a cat” in the chair he sat in of an evening, in front of the “state-paid apartment” he’d “finally bumbled” into after living rough for twenty years.  He was a man who didn’t need much to be happy and couldn’t understand those who did require a lot, and when he passes, he leaves a hole not just in the narrator, but in us readers as well.

It isn’t just the fares who are down on their luck, if they ever had any luck at all, but the cabbies, too, like “Don and Kathy are both on parole/and there’s not much else they can do/except hack,” in “Cruddy Buddies.”  They share a cab, night and day shift, and he’s trying to kick a meth habit and she stole “10 grand from the safe” of a McDonalds where she used to work: he drives her to her community service job and she drives him to his urinanalyses.  Schneider tells us it’s not love, but maybe it is.

As well as his fares, Schneider, or his persona, is a constant presence in these poems.  He’s a man who has seen it all and has few regrets.  Hacking pays the bills, allows him to share a life with his Mexican lover, to unwind with a beer or two at the end of his shifts, and to observe humanity, which is what he does best, as when he drops off an Englishwoman at an “expensive detox clinic up in the foothills,” who claims she’s just visiting a friend there (but may be checking herself in), and who tells Schneider she cried when she saw the Grand Canyon, which he, a resident of Tucson, he is ashamed to admit, he’s never seen.  But “When I drop her off the sun is going down./The cottonwood trees are shedding/like crematory ash,” and he thinks “I really should go/and see/the Grand Canyon.”  That crematory ash image is a heart breaker, since we think of autumn trees as lovely, not images of death.

As you can tell from just the few passages I’ve quoted, Schneider writes in cabbie colloquial, for the most part.  While some poems go after a more lyric diction, for the main he’s happy to stay in character as a world weary cabbie, who has to take too much crap on the job.  In that respect, he reminds me of the cabbie persona who used to appear in The National Lampoon, in the “Tales from the Back of the Cab” segment.  But what was played strictly for cheap laughs in that magazine, Schneider portrays with pathos and empathy for the fares who sit in his back seat and for a distinct lack of self-pity for himself.

This capturing of the rough of tumble of life is one of the collections great strengths, though we don’t often associate the language of poetry with that of the street, though Wordsworth was quick to point out that the language of poetry should be the language of the average man.  And it’s a breath of fresh air that Schneider’s first-person-singular cabbie narrator, his fellow hacks, and those who take his cab speak the language of those who’ve been bitten hard by life.  Here’s Schneider, in “Shitty Drivers Everywhere,” in a distinctly dyspeptic mood:  “Each day murder bolts through my heart a hundred times,/I toss ‘bitch’ and ‘asshole’/around like confetti.”  Note how Schneider mixes his rough vernacular with the particularly apt image of confetti, which we tend to associate with celebrations, but here is just making a mess.

But sometimes, Schneider is all too happy with using slack language, all but indistinguishable from prose, and not great prose, as in “Trust Me,” where a fare “…wanted me to stop/a block from his house/so his wife wouldn’t/see the taxi.”  This is serviceable connective tissue, at best, but thankfully Schneider doesn’t often resort to it.  But there’s another problem here: often he’ll break a line on such slack words as “the” or “a” or “and,” when the last word of a line should be the most important, as in this example: “Stacy isn’t an/aberration,” when, to my mind, that information should all be one line.  And this collection could be culled by about 15-20 pages, especially the poems that have nothing to do with the hack life.  Plus too many poems begin by giving a fare’s or cabbie’s age and physical condition in the first two lines, when I’d have liked a little more variety in Schneider’s opening gambits.

But these are quibbles.  Far more important, when I read poem after poem I saw people I knew, situations that rang true as gold from my own memories of driving a cab.  Schneider presents more than the facts of driving a cab; he gives us the truth of one aspect of the human condition, one that we should never ignore merely because it’s painful to look.

Similar Reads: Alan Catlin, Near Death in the Afternoon on Becker Street and Deep Water Horizon; Philip Levine, What Work Is; Kevin Young, Jelly Roll.

Author: Sarah Gorham

2011, Four Way Books

Filed Under: Poetry.

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You can already tell by the title of her new collection that Sarah Gorham has a sly, subversive sense of humor.  From modified “prayers” saturated with irony to a five-part reflection on bureaucratic and other absurdities associated with a frankly horrific accident, Gorham regards the world with a disengaged, puzzled fascination, and at its best it is as if you see things through her eyes for the first time.  Her poem, “Detach,” captures this attitude, evident throughout her poetry:

Detach

Thank the stars for distances between

stars, for broad mountain meadows

that shrink your troubles to ants

carrying leaves five times their size.

The sun is 91 million miles away;

not too far, not too close.  Be like that.

Perch in a look-out tower, overseer of campfires

and dangerous breezes.  You’ll spot the heat,

pick  up the phone.  Let others

put their faces in the fire.

The world is a wondrous place if you twist your head and look at it from a different angle.  “Odd place for a sculpture,” she begins the poem, “Bust of a Young Girl in the Snow.”  Indeed, Gorham’s logical leaps from line to line are breathtaking.  “I long for babies,/but never more than mountains./My view of the Jungfrau: peaks like starched/petticoats I could bury my face in./She is a cold confection, a meringue/I feel in my teeth.  When I am/in the presence of mountains,/there will always be enough sex./But never enough mountains,” she concludes the poem, “Three Sides to the Mountain That Are Really One.”

Gorham is truly one of those poets you don’t want to have to “explain” so much as simply “show,” bring to the reader’s attention.   Look at this!  And this!  It’s the overall tone, a sort of Dickensonian playfulness, that’s really enchanting about her verse.  Her poetry can pop and sparkle with the wisecracking wit of a Dorothy Parker.  Take this sonnet, for instance:

Compost

“No woman should call another fastidious.”

- James Thurber

She had in mind dahlias, a stretch

of dianthus, Jack-in-the-Pulpit or two.

For this rot. In candid view!

Enough to make her retch –

the certainty of being touched, mussed,

dog-snouted till the prettiest sheen

turns brown, black-brown, black-green.

Once they called this mush fastidious.

Now it’s the woman’s touch, tight

as she flips a grub-infested

compost heap.  Breath held, over-dressed

in fleece, gloves, clogs, apron, hat.

It’s garden variety metamorphosis –

plain disgust to petal-perfect daintiness.

Gorham’s prayer poems–“We Are Bold to Say,” “Prayer During a Fast,” “Parting Prayer”–likewise display this charming irreverence.   “I confess that I have/sinned against you/by what I have eaten/and by what I have/not left uneaten,” she writes, in a cadence reminiscent of the Al-Chet prayer Jews recite on Yom Kippur (Gorham is Jewish on her father’s side, she notes in “Accommodation”).   It’s as if she has taken the Almighty aside and nudged Him in the ribs.  “Eternal God, charitable one/you have reluctantly included us/your back-up guest list,/for the birthday of your Jesus Son/who will be two thousand ten/this December if the faithful have it right…” she writes in “Parting Prayer.”

As the title of the collection suggests, there is a potent theme of mothers and daughters going on throughout this collection.  “What is a mother but a tooth’s way of producing another tooth?” she writes in “Homesickness,” and in the metaphor we see the almost claustrophobic bond she elaborates on all over these poems.  “To my child I became my mother, and her mother, and hers.” ( “Accommodation” )

Part Two of this three-part collection opens with a Jewish proverb as its epigram:  “What the daughter does, the mother did.”  And then the first poem in this section, “Sixteen,” focuses on a mother and her rebellious daughter, who “conjured the toughest boy of all/to push my love aside.”  “On the Birth of a Daughter,” which concludes the collection, ends with the admonition, “When your daughter matures, the tree must be sacrificed./A phoenix will alight there/only when the queen steps down.//You must step down.”  And yet how difficult stepping down must be!  As the epigraph to the third part advises, “Researchers have found that certain cells escape from a fetus, persisting in the mother’s bloodstream decades after she is pregnant.  These cells migrate to wounds in the mother’s body.” Wow.

You could call this “fatalism,” but that sounds too harsh. Still, there is very much the attitude that “the child is father to the man,” or at least that daughters become their mothers.  “Immortality,” another baby poem, concludes: “Touch that fantastic little foot.  The baby is an implant, a fresh cutting./She will take.  She will take you away.”

“Prick and Twinge”–daughter injures herself, requires medical attention and a mother feels guilt through negligence–“Barbeque”–a girl learns to eat with utensils (“Is it progress if a cannibal uses a fork?”)–“Lost”–she loses her mittens (“The brain is a wicker basket”):  so many poems about the quotidian events that bond parents and children.  And then there is “Passeggiata,” a poem in which the relationship between a college-age girl and her mother has become attenuated, part of the letting-go that never really lets go.

But all of these poems are rooted and related in the endearing detachment with which Gorham regards the world, the fresh metaphors with which she envisions and presents to us the world around her.  And so, concluding on another sonnet, this reviewer shows Gorham and doesn’t try any longer to explain:

Pond in Winter

A garden pond rimmed with stone

has frozen over, but under the ice

(like a soap-streaked shower curtain,

or distant light pollution),

a dozen goldfish churn the water

flourishing their Isadora fairy fins.

Above, a cat follows the orangey action,

pretend-yawns, skids, saunters

with sprawled claws.  Winter insulates –

with just an inch of oxygen

the fish respire, feed, swim,

while our cat is a frenzy of gesture,

paws drumming:  You are going

to die.  If not now, in Spring, in Spring.

Similar reads: What Men Want by Laura McCullough, Taste of Cherry by Kara Candito, Ka-Ching! by Denise Duhamel.

2011, Honest Publishing

Filed Under: Poetry.

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Jazz, the latest release from 8-time Pushcart Prize nominee Jéanpaul Ferro, is a jolting collection of poetry full of exuberance and vulnerability.  Recently nominated for both the 2012 Griffin Award in Poetry and the 2012 Kingsley Tufts Award in Poetry, Jazz is one of those rare collections that captures the true essence of 21^st Century life.

There is an underlining disquiet within the lines of Jazz that seems to mirror the horrific headlines of each day.  The characters of Ferro’s world inhabit a cold and heart-breaking reality that often breaks apart into tragedy.  One of the truly remarkable accomplishments of this book is Ferro’s ability to remain neutral while still capturing the vitality that truly great poetry is readily able to capture.

In “Letter From A Soldier,” a young soldier stationed overseas imagines home as though he is writing a dark mystic letter—half dream and nightmare:

I look for you in the dark,

beyond the Massachusetts woods

where the wolves hide at the edge

of the field,

all night long as the rockets

rain down just a little bit harder;

I go through all the alleys as the

buildings come down and everything

turns to ash,

But I am just a little bit broken,

broke in all the right places—

a million little jewels that split apart

all across the ground.

A large number of poems in Jazz are deftly nuanced so that space and time seemingly ceases to exist.  You begin to read within one realm; and while you believe you have been transported a million miles away you are suddenly thrust back into a place you never expected.  Nowhere is this better examined than in the haunting “Life on Mars.”

And at night in my new home I lie there awake, staring up

into their bright green sky,

not thinking about God who was right there, but dreaming

about you instead, your naked body clutched tightly up against

my soul that was trembling,

the scent of wood smoke on us like when we were wet and out

camping,

dreams of our dog and the ice storm when the electricity went out,

how everything was frozen like platinum;

and you quoted Anaïs Nin right before the power came back on:

We don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are, you

whispered;

and right then the phone rang as the lights came on up; and it was

your father calling, frantic, to tell you that your mother had just died.

Throughout Jazz there is an emotive theme underlining every word and syllable.  You get the sense of who the character is in the poem, their likes and their dislikes, their occupation and their obsessions.  It is almost as though you can taste what they had for breakfast and you can sense the scent of the room they actually might be sitting in.  In the poem, “Cuba,” a man has grown old and tired waiting for his beloved country to change:

We hid amid the swaying fields of sugar cane

when Castro overthrew that fool, Fulgencio,

you in your libidinous red dress that kept

all the men of Plaza Vieja very happy, every day

a procession after the bullfights and the executions;

I think I was dead every morning I was without you,

the statues of the city cold, but I understood them,

And now I am old and you have already gone,

nothing to quench my thirst like things used to do,

Jesus! I’m tired of waiting for Cuba to change!

Cuba is both a truth and a fiction, a great story of lust

and of craving,

A country that longs for tomorrow to be like yesterday,

and for yesterday to be like tomorrow.  Amen.

There are pieces within Jazz that are absolutely stunning.  And there are images and metaphors that I will never be able to get out of my head.  In the poem “This Much,” we find the passage: “drunk in night sweats in the time machine on our way to equilibrium.”  In the evocative “Grand Canyon” we find the lines: “the rock and sediment wearing us down / all the rest of us spilling out from the inside / until the core shows, beautiful in the platinum moonlight / our bodies wet and wedged in between the glittering strata.”

And in “Living A Life At Night” the sexy and evocative opening: “Our nights never crumble / we like to lick the poetry off each other’s bodies / the fires burning down near the rivers of Providence / dancing in the streets like it is a red New Orleans / jazz piano during the war with Norman Brown on guitar.”

Jéanpaul Ferro’s Jazz is a seminal work reflecting the new digital, technological, and sound-bite era of this early 21^st Century.  All the traditional problems are here as before, but they are faster, more jarring, contradictory, surreal, and mythic.  Ferro captures this nicely, and in his own unique way.

There is no one way to label him as a writer or someone who is part of one school or another.  But there is a cohesiveness and a beauty in his work that is always immediately identifiable; and then nourishing as you let it take you in.  For me, Jazz is the type of book that feeds both the soul and the mind.  And there is no greater achievement than for a writer to weave these two counterpoints into one.

Similar Reads: Virgin of the Apocalypse, by Corrine De Winter; Blizzard of One, by Mark Strand.

2010, Black Lawrence Press

Filed Under: Poetry.

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Steeped in the bleak history of mid-twentieth century Europe, Shelley Puhak’s award-winning Stalin in Aruba nevertheless brims with a dark humor.  The poetry, lyrical, full of fresh, vivid imagery, is saturated with grim irony.  Even the title suggests this, juxtaposing one of history’s most monstrous dictators with an idyllic vacation island.  In the eponymous poem, indeed, Stalin’s infamous liquidation of his enemies and undesirables blends into the techniques of photographic manipulation, cropping, chopping, clarifying pictures, as if genocide were merely an option in a Photoshop program.   “Purging the Aunties,” a poem based on Stalin’s arrest and execution of many of his female relatives, is likewise set during two birthday celebrations for touchy Uncle Soso, again juxtaposing the horrific with the mundane, bringing to mind the macabre image of skeletons dancing during the Black Plague.

Puhak paints a similar picture of Hitler.  “The Fuhrer’s Girls” is a five-part poem from the points-of-view of five of Hitler’s lovers, most of them suicides.  Geli Raubal, the daughter of Hitler’s half-sister whom he virtually imprisoned in his Munich apartment, speaks of “Uncle Alf,” evoking an image of a comical monster.  Only, not so funny:  whether murdered or killed by her own hand, it was with “Uncle Alf’s” gun that she was killed.

Uncle Alf’s Walther eight-caliber

against my chest,

Emil, Emil, I whisper,

until my nipples clot up, hard.

Even the titles of many of these poems burst with sardonic wit:  “What They Left Out of My Obituary,” “Yevgenia’s Pick-Up Line,” “Why Lenin’s Embalmer Will Miss Dinner,” “The Lady Laudanum-Drunker, 1889”: they almost sound like punchlines, and then you read the poems and realize, again, they aren’t so funny after all.  Yevgenia is the adulterous wife of Konstantinov, the chief of the secret police, too exhausted from his duties of torture to satisfy his wife so she seeks her pleasures elsewhere – under his own nose.  Lenin’s embalmer is missing dinner to put the final touches on Lenin’s corpse, and even though he promised to come to Vlasta’s dinner, he is scared witless; this is a delicate matter, what with:

nights, boots up the back staircase

mornings, doors jawing open

and new neighbors next week.

If he doesn’t want to disappear himself, he will stay late to do the job.

“Lida and the Swan,” alluding to Yeats’ famous poem, “Leda and the Swan,” is a darkly humorous dramatic monologue in the voice of the film star, Lida Baarova, describing her seduction by her lover, Joseph Gorbbels (rumored to have webbed feet) in darkly comic bird imagery (“his narrow lips peck my neck”; “Tonight he will come,  moulting khaki”).

While many of the poems in this collection deal with Stalin, Hitler, and their coterie, about half treat other subjects with the same sardonic wit.   And just as often these subjects are other monsters.   “The Ice-Wife” takes the story of Otzi, the well-preserved mummy of a man frozen over 5,000 years ago in the Alps, on display at the Smithsonian, to create a tender image of love and even devotion.  There was evidence, after all, that Otzi had a mate who darned his socks.   We have an image of creatures like Shreck and Fiona, the animated Disney monsters of recent film, and, from some ambiguous female speaker talking to some nebulous lover/monster, the poem tenderly concludes:

I pray I’ll know what to carry

up any slope, so if I fall,

if they find me a thousand

years later, they’ll know what I was

and was not without you.

Other poems are downright gothic, befitting a poet from the city of Edgar Allen Poe.  “Julia J” and “Dearest Ellen” are poems inspired from the inscriptions on gravestones in a cemetery in Kingsville, Maryland.  “Dearest Ellen” is in the voice of the mother of a seven-year old girl buried along with her father in 1814.  She sounds a little skeptical about her husband, a little resentful toward her daughter!  “Torch” involves people who have martyred themselves in protest by burning themselves up – Vietnamese monks,  Quaker war protestors – and employs delicious wordplay to develop its “message,” its image:

The boy is nameless until he twists up into the air,

bends the sky out of focus,

becomes an arching blur of orange,

a hail of ash and pebbled bone,

that blazes in the nasturtiums

trailing their flame

across my yard.

“The Regulars” is a poem told in the second person, addressed to the duped friend of a girl who likes to live dangerously.  They find themselves in a hole-in-the-wall bar in a seedy neighborhood, “across MLK Boulevard, the line/between down-on-luck and luckless,”  The two girls are broke, but Lisa, the risk-taker, scares up some money for drinks from the regulars there:

A blow job costs twenty, anything else is extra.

With the ten-dollar deposit, she orders

two shots,

change for the jukebox

What are you doing? you hiss.

She cocks her head, ringlets diffusing

the dim light.  Shut up and pour.

The upshot is that Lisa disappears, leaving “you” holding the bag.  Funny – but not so funny!

Which brings us back to Stalin and Hitler and anybody with power.  You could say that the poems in Stalin in Aruba are about power, its corruption and abuse, and you wouldn’t be wrong, but this oversimplifies Puhak’s work, and as she notes in “Stalin in Aruba,” “simplicity and clarity always obfuscate:/ actions become ideas we only squint at.”  There’s much more going on here.  Later, in “Where They Are Now,” she again picks up on the theme of “ideas” in a poem about the descendants of the Soviet monsters, and in their refusal to acknowledge certain realities we see this complexity at work, even see the absurd humor of it all:

Grandchildren of liquidators and liquidated

sit at the same lunch table, never asking

whether we are mistaken to love ideas

more than people.

Similar Reads: Robert Cooperman’s Petitions for Immortality: Scenes from the Life of John Keats.

Author: Ish Klein

2011, Canarium Press

Filed under: Literary, Poetry

Get a copy at Powell’s

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.)

Take “Warrior One,” from Moving Day, which opens with an allusion to Yeats’s famous line, “The center cannot hold,” from “Second Coming,” a poem about the fall of civilization.

No center. I hold

every action’s reaction and again:

consequences beyond my neck.

This quiet stanza speaks to the individual’s responsibility to and interference from the outside world. But instead of the Yeatsian distress at the world’s chaos, we continue:

One life: to feel!

In every way!

Enough!

For Klein, holding the world is a joy, not a punishment. Klein’s speaker is no Atlas, weighted down, earth digging into his shoulder. Klein’s speaker exalts in Warrior One yoga pose: legs strong, supportive, arms reaching to the sky.

If exclamations were not enough, Klein also uses all caps. Again, not something the average writer of anything but a text message can get away with. Klein uses all caps sometimes as emphasis, sometimes as stage direction, and sometimes as prop. In “Be Here Hamlet!” the speaker postulates on what Hamlet would think and say in the modern age. Specifically:

…he’d be like:

My father’s gone but replaced,

I don’t have to worry about being king.

If this new guy eyes me hungrily, that’s on him,

I’m not gay for guys my mother likes

and my mother seems happy. DIRTY GERTY,

what did that mean? On the basement wall, knee level.

I hate to think she wrote that in a “moment.”

This use of all caps works as a prop: something literally written on the wall. But it also works as an emphasis. DIRTY GERTY is read so much differently than Dirty Gerty, dirty Gerty, even Dirty Gerty. Of those readings the first two are boring, and the last seems couched in anger. Using all caps creates the sense that each letter is equally important and so the words are read slowly, emphatically. Try it with me, aloud, “DIRTY GERTY.” Coupled with this language, the tone teases. I imagine a best friend hearing about Gerty’s “moments” in the basement might smirk, “Oh my, DIRTY GERTY, you are so naughty!” The caps direct the reader to experience the irreverence. (Note also the slang, “he was like,” which I learned not to use in third grade and which perfectly sets up the monologue’s casual tone.)

These are minor things that add to Klein’s voice. But more than punctuation or grammar, I’m drawn to Klein’s rambling, energetic style. (This is not a book to read before bed. Though maybe you’d have crazy Fear and Loathing-type dreams.) Reading this book feels like eavesdropping on a thinking brain. It’s at once intimate and unexpected, chatty and surreal. Images come out of nowhere and you try to keep up. From “For My Fellow Manchurians”:

I am another Manchurian, broken to be

the great ape in this outfit.

Yes! An ape, an animal captive.

You give me a crayon and a surface and I will depict

the bars to my cage.

I’ve looked inside and begged my father for a favor.

He said what I say, that he is alone and incapable;

thank God for his wife, though.

The woman who wanted to kill me.

These are the keys to my cage; I do not like

to touch them but

someone’s got to push the button.

Here are the nouns in those first 12 lines: Manchurian; ape; outfit; captive; crayon; surface; bars; cage; father; favor; God; wife; woman; keys; someone; button. Looking from one noun to the next offers surprising transitions. OK, captive, bars, cage, and keys are not shocking combinations. However, Manchurian to ape to outfit to captive to crayon (crayon!) is strange. And the nouns aren’t employed in typical ways: father and his wife—traditionally comforting people—are captors, one apathetic and the other murderous. And what the hell is this button?

The reader cannot anticipate how Klein’s speaker will move through images, ideas, and feelings. The reader follows and tries to keep up. Why would the father not help? Why are the speaker and the father of the same mind? Why would his wife want to kill the speaker? Why doesn’t the speaker want to touch the keys, to get out of the cage? If the speaker has access to the keys, is the speaker really a captive? Why is the speaker broken—because she (or he) too is “alone and incapable”? What’s this button—nuclear destruction? Listening to the speaker think is as often sad or scary as it is funny or joyous. It is always rewarding.

I’ve been reading Helen Vendler’s Coming of Age as a Poet. She writes about Milton, Keats, Eliot, and Plath and their first perfect poems. Vendler says perfect poems display “confidence, mastery, and above all ease…. they manifest a coherent and well-managed idiosyncratic style voiced in memorable lines; one would not wish them other than they are.” I won’t say that Moving Day is a book of perfect poems, but it’s pretty damn close. Klein’s voice is natural, effortless. I could never write poems like hers. Her voice is entirely her own: funny without being light, surreal without being incomprehensible, conversational without being boring. And this voice makes Moving Day a terrific read.

Similar reads: Union!, by Ish Klein; Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman, for his exalting tone.

2009, Fiat Libertad

Filed Under: Short Stories, Poetry, Short-Run

The subtitle of this book, Despicable Embarrassing Repulsive, presumably refers to the types of characters that occupy its pages. That’s not altogether inaccurate, depending on whose perspective we’re looking from, but I didn’t find Garcia’s characters to belong to those descriptions. That is how they see themselves. Her ability to convey this is Voting Booth‘s greatest strength.

Through shifting narrative focus the book tells the story of a few California youths (a group of homosexual Latinos) during the 2008 election. Voting Booth is delivered through a blend of prose vignette and poem. Most scenes are 1-3 pages long (the whole book weighs in at a slim 70 pages). The story of the youths juxtaposes the somewhat disconnected world of addiction-fueling indulgence with the inflated patriotism and sense of civic responsibility that arrives with the build-up to an election and fizzles by the time the new president is inaugurated.

The inhabitants of Garcia’s book are depressed, suicidal, addicted, and full of disquiet. We see that they are at least trying to enter themselves into the conversation, to be tuned in to a country that is in many ways only theirs geographically. But ultimately they aren’t really in the conversation, and maybe aren’t even invited.

This realization can be quite heavy:

Now, I sit here, slouching barefoot, and the sun is setting. The ocean is rippling with life and all I want to do is die in it. Maybe I’ll get really wasted, trashed, tanked–as my students say–and go swimming far out until my arms grow tired. I’ll swallow the salty seawater, my lungs will clog, and my mind will drown…

This is a book about lost potential. Call it apathy, call it failure, call it a mire at the bottom of a slippery slope. The recognition and complacency in that is stirring. It has gravity. She writes:

Forgive your crumbling selves / and try / just try / if you can / not to take the world down with you

Garcia’s writing gradually builds until the book reaches a sort of resonance. The reader can feel for her characters. Not one to be overly concerned with the empowerment of an individual in a democratic state, I was stirred when the dishelveled hungover girl managed to cast her vote. She says: “Didn’t sleep-in this morning AND I voted. Fuck the trash. I’ll take it out tomorrow.” It’s a step. Maybe that’s enough, or maybe it’s despicable, embarrassing, and repulsive.

Similar Reads: Dark Innocence (Iniko)

[This review was requested and a review copy was provided.]

2010, Mischievous Muse Press

Filed Under: Poetry, Literary, Short-Run

Injuring Eternity offers readers a variety of voices, techniques, and subjects. There are first person confessions, third person narratives, and linguistically adventurous lyric poems. The work addresses family, love, politics, art, and religion. It tackles current events, popular culture, and spares a few asides for Miles Davis. It’s an ambitious collection that takes a lot of risks.

Unfortunately, that ambition isn’t always realized, and the risks don’t always pay off. Reading Injuring Eternity, I found myself starting and stopping, entranced one moment, puzzled the next. The good poems are good enough to make the weaker ones all the more disappointing. There’s a lot of talent in these verses, and a lot of promise, but overall the whole collection leaves an impression of potential rather than accomplishment.

Consistently, the best poems confronted personal matters, family, growing up, and the mother daughter relationship. These poems were often simple, nimble, and almost effortlessly evocative. “Photograph of My Mother as a Young Mother” suggests a complex relationship through fashion choices and gestures, a mother presenting her daughter for the camera as the speaker now presents her mother for the reader.

My mother is turning slightly
So as to face the camera,
As if to jump in and say, “Stop, don’t
Take me in this outfit, just take the child.”

The speaker guides the reader through this frozen moment from the past, turning at the end to take in the perspective of the little girl in the photo: “Just out of / Camera range, the car, the future, my father / and everything else.”

Poems like this one, “Jules,” and “The Last Letter to My Mother” were enveloping. They never once tripped me up or called undo attention to their own formal elements. A number of the other poems, however, failed just where these succeeded. Heavy-handed sentimentality or halting line breaks left me puzzling over a particular choice at the expense of my experience of the poem as a whole and kept me from fully inhabiting the language.

In “Please,” a response to the BP oil disaster, the speaker asks the natural world to forgive humanity our folly. It opens by demonizing selfish “Americans needing / To drive” and exalting “dear fish and dolphins and sea creatures.” Then the poem stalls. It never moves beyond these shallow characterizations, closing on the same pleading note from the opening lines. “Devotion to the Breath,” makes similar missteps, anthropomorphizing breath as a lover without then expanding or complicating the central conceit.

In “Serving,” a poem about two lovers working the same shift at a diner, the lines tend to break so that a new line begins with one or two words before a comma or a period. This tactic leaves some lines hanging on a qualifier looking for its referent and creates a double-stopping effect, almost like the poem is stuttering:

You and I work the swing
Shift. Food all night
Long, consuming us…

Wiping off ketchup
Lids, filling sugar
Dispensers…

Breaks like this appear in a number of poems, including “How to Get Passionate” and “At the Makeup Counter.” In each case, I was torn between feeling that the poem was being withholding or else that it couldn’t make up its mind.

In the end, not being able to make up its mind turned out to be the main weakness of the collection as a whole. It tries to do so many different things from one poem to the next that it buries its best offerings. The good stuff here is very good, and it makes me wonder what kind of collection Accardi might produce in the future if she focused on the more personal, confessional material in her work and followed it as far as it would lead.

Similar Reads: For good, contemporary poets, check out Valzhyna Mort and Major Jackson.

[This review was requested and a review copy was provided.]

Author: Derek Walcott

2010, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux

Filed Under: Poetry

Aging, tranquility, the death of friends and the cyclical nature of time are a few of the themes touched upon in Derek Walcott’s White Egrets. He finds beauty in the flight of birds, the crumbling of buildings, in broken dialects, and always in the sea.

Water and the sea feature in almost all of the 54 poems, as Walcott’s verses traverse the world–from Saint Lucia in the Caribbean, to Spain’s Mediterranean and Italy’s Adriatic, from the Congo river, to the canals of Amsterdam. Rain and the sea, rivers, marshes, wells, waterfalls–water is the central motif, expressing the flow of time, the seasons, the rain cycle, and the recurrent struggles of man, as generation after generation loves and dies.

Here are elegies for friends, ruminations on lost relationships with women, more of Walcott’s ever present post-colonial musings–including a poem dedicated to Barack Obama–and an all-pervasive sense of peace. This peace rises from the views of birds and sunsets, it is there when Walcott realizes his age and the pains in his body, it is even there in the death of his friends. “Your death is like our friendship beginning over,” he writes in a poem titled only “7″.

Most of the poems are untitled, marked by nothing other than their number in the sequence. A few do have titles, such as the longest poem, “Sicilian Suite”, a break-up poem which spans eight pages in eleven sections, and the title poem, which turns the return of orange-billed egrets into an image of passing time and death. Those bills then become Walcott’s pen, picking through the dirt for sustenance.

Innumerable species of birds soar and stalk through these pages–gulls, hawks, herons, and flock after flock of egrets. The birds become symbols for beauty, art, and poetry itself. Walcott writes, “if it’s true that my gift has withered… then there is nothing left to do but abandon poetry like a woman because you would not see her hurt.” This is the sense of loss and sadness mixed with acceptance and tranquility communicated in these poems.  And in turn, the infinite is exposed and expressed, the infinite repetition of the same tragedies and the same hopes and the same beauties. “What weight, what mass of time is borne… what ignorance of the heaving wreaths, as if this image could expiate centuries: the horse, the shining girl, the weed-fretted sands.”

Similar Reads: Omeros (Walcott), A Yes-or-No-Answer (Shore), Questions of Travel (Bishop)

2009, Hamilton Stone Editions

Filed Under: Poetry.

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.

One poem in particular, “Two Car Garage,” related from the perspective of emergency responders, depicts the stark results of carbon monoxide poisoning, almost as if these were archaeologists uncovering the deaths at Pompeii, the details stark, vivid, unobscured, observed:  “Mom held a glass of water,/the newspaper stretched on the table;/the young girl with a curling iron, the radio blaring, mirror lights blazing;/the father in his sweatpants slumped over/the rowing machine…”  A few lines into the next stanza:  “We walked into the carbon monoxide clouds/and cut the ignition, cut the radio static,/walked back through the living room,/kitchen, mudroom, bathrooms, upstairs, hoping/we wouldn’t find another piece of this wax museum./Not so lucky….”

Many of Leslie’s poems take place by the water – “The Canal,” “Fishing,” “The Creek,” “The Lake,” “Brothers,” “The Shallows,” “A Fishing Poem” to cite a few – and others are similarly steeped in the details of the natural world.  It is as if in focusing on these aspects of existence that Leslie wants to convey the idea that what we see around us is what really is and needs only be shown in its intricate detail to understand this, to grasp its beauty or its majesty.  The details provide their own commentary and conclusions.  Life is not about metaphor or essence  (“No ideas but in things,” as William Carlos Williams wrote in “A Sort of a Song”). This is starkly conveyed in the poem called “In the Shade.”

Twenty cicadas encrust our mailbox poll

and I sit on the patio watching

a turtle lumber through

the grass, thinking of your touch.

.

I wanted to write a poem

about the nature of time,

of grace or the essence

of fury in a lost world,

.

but whirling blades whine

through the trees, and the snowpeas

we planted and the oily feathers

of the grackles pecking the grass

.

tell me this will do.  Behind our house

winter creeper slinks from elms;

the shade casts a haven.

What else is there?

Leslie’s character poems similarly portray individuals in simple circumstances, coping with unremarkable situations that nevertheless are the crux of their existence:  a disabled man (“James”) describing his circumscribed life; a boy (“Jerome”) coping with the consequences of a homemade tattoo; a not particularly attractive girl (“Kristine”) contemplating her loneliness and alienation.  These are all ordinary people saturated in the angst of day-to-day existence, whose predicaments are ultimately irresolvable, their poems more a statement of fact and situation than the paradigm of problem and solution.  These character poems that form the second section of Night Sweat all have one-word titles – “Ada,” “Simon,” “Chip,” “Carney” – as do the majority of Leslie’s poems as well, modified, if at all, by only “The” or some other stark adjective like “Black” or  “Imperial.”   This, too, suggests Leslie’s style of identifying the essence of a thing by its existence, its idea rooted in its name, and the immediacy he seeks to convey.  The title of the eponymous poem captures this so well, and I suspect this is why Leslie singled it out for the title of the collection as a whole.

You don’t get a great deal of “attitude” from Leslie’s poems, but occasionally there’s a sly irony.  Take the poem, “Relics,” which begins:

Don’t take this wrong;

Miracles are miracles.

It’s only the design

.

of queuing for a knuckle

bone that puts me off,

not the end result –

.

if you can believe tales

of dud eyes wiped clean,

and hard ears that perk to jingles.

Yet even here, in the bemused commentary on the waiting lines in museums and at holy sites where patrons and pilgrims gawp at venerable remains, you get the sense that Leslie regards these objects as no more sacred than a blade of grass – but no less sacred, either.

There’s pure satisfaction to be derived from reading Nathan Leslie’s poems, in their sense of immediacy, and that’s what poetry is all about, finally, isn’t it?  There may be wisdom here, too.

Also read: Gregg Mosson’s Season of Flowers and Dust (for the nature images) and Joanne Lowery’s Jack: A Beanstalk Life (for the dream qualities).