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thwack

  • Joined: December 27, 2012
  • Articles: 2319
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OVER AND UNDER by Caroline Swicegood

OVER AND UNDER
by Caroline Swicegood

“Where are you from?”

The question, which comes from a smiling white-shirted waiter with a red towel over his arm, is friendly and typical, nothing but small talk with a tourist, the way it generally starts. Sabine begins flipping through her mental rolodex of possible answers: with slightly olive skin, warm brown hair, and green eyes, with three languages perfected (and two of them Western, no less), with a French name, she can pass for almost anything.

She used to tell the truth more than she does now. In Istanbul, she either got slant-eyed suspicion or solidarity, depending on who she was talking to; she found herself over-tipping to prove that she isn’t like the other Syrians wandering the streets, covered and curve-palmed. In Athens, she was kicked out of a cab after speaking Arabic on the phone with her mother. In Dubai, no one gave a shit, because everyone knows they are being paid half as much to work twice as hard—the master’s degree hanging in her brother’s office there feels almost mocking. In Alexandria, in a country that has known its share of problems, it inspired a spirited coffee shop discussion about the nuances between refugee and immigrant and expatriate. In the Venice airport, her first time this far west since the war started and her home country gained notoriety, the customs agent flipped through her passport, looked repeatedly at her Schengen visa, escorted her to a room to wait three hours, be questioned for two, and wait four more.

MY PERSONA by Cynthia Atkins

MY PERSONA
by Cynthia Atkins

I carried my persona
in a brown paper bag. It held
shreds of lint and one hair
that the comb forgot—My persona
has a pecking order. Its first name
rhymes with self—Always the last in line.
My persona is filled with
yearning. It shipped off on a garbage
of barge, and landed with a din in
the Witness Protection Program.
My persona hid under a shamrock
in DUMBO---My mural penned
by a black gloved hand. It lay chalk flat
on a red brick building,
mixed with saliva, turpentine,
and cheap wine. My persona is not

REV. DR. KING by henry 7. reneau, jr.

REV. DR. KING
henry 7. reneau, jr.

bury me standing,
with the music of my name
ringing out
into air as hope,

as gut-bucket blues,
saw blade that shears a nail
to scatter of phoenix sparks,
legend,
blooming as one strong pulse
within the windstorm
of indifference & history.

remember me as conviction,
a moral parallel,
to live each day
as if i were someone else’s mile
in broken shoes.

VOLTAGE by Kylie Lee Baker

VOLTAGE
by Kylie Lee Baker

Ivy turned the living room lamp off and back on again for the eleventh time when Hal finally looked up from his book.

"Should I read somewhere else, darling?" he said.

The worst part was that he meant it. Ivy knew Hal would gladly get up and read in the bathtub again so that she could toy with the lights until the bulbs burned out. What was left of Ivy's fingernails gnawed into the doorframe, her other hand limp across the lamp chain. She turned it off again because she couldn't look at Hal's face in moments when she loved him.

Ivy hurried to the bathroom and turned on the hot water, scrubbing lavender soap into the creases in her palms and under her chewed fingernails. The familiar restlessness sent electric currents prickling through her bones and charged her fingertips with static energy. She felt an absence, a missing brick in the wall, a cavernous negative deeper and darker than simple nothingness.

She threw open the medicine cabinet lined with nail polish that she never used and pushed back one bottle sitting half a millimeter out of formation.

SOMETHING SPECIAL ABOUT THIS STREET by Zoe Stoller

SOMETHING SPECIAL ABOUT THIS STREET
by Zoe Stoller

Adam, and how he thought I was 24 and how
Erika didn’t know I wouldn’t forget. I drew red on

my fingernails and it stained my shirt and I dream
of falafel and my back turns to sweat. Backstage,
and I remember dancing, and Molly kissed Peter

too but I slept in his bed. My electricity’s off and
the pencils are permanent. My tea tastes thick and

it hurts to swallow. He grabbed me in the city
and my virginity on the phone. Next I am who I
wouldn’t ever really be, and maybe I would sing

NATURE POEM by Eliza Callard

NATURE POEM
by Eliza Callard

Worrisomely fat dog--a silken nut brown ale color--
belly swaying near the bouldered trail, with his wolfish

mates. A family under the budding trees, the girl twisting
a butterfly net in her hands. “What are you trying to catch?”

“Anything.” Pitbulls Hazel--with the wet grin--and Pele--licking
and nibbling so vigorously he awakens the years-old bone bruise

where a stranger punched my jaw on a crowded street. Instant
friends with t-shirt-wearing Phillies fans, commiseration alone our

FLU, 1917 by Elizabeth Frankie Rollins

FLU, 1917
by Elizabeth Rollins

The germ slips into the spaces, the interstices, trembles in the fingerprints, in the suspended spittle of a cough. It gathers and collects itself. It becomes something, again. There in the lungs and hollows of the human body, it grows and blooms. Greedy and bountiful, it burgeons and spreads and insinuates. Hungry, vigorous, it climbs into the lungs, it fills the life with itself, makes life forget what came before. Agnes walks down the street, the germ humming in those around her. A woman passes, turns her head toward Agnes, opens her mouth and coughs, her gloved hand rising to cover her mouth a moment later.

The sound of coughing. The delicate cough. The throaty cough. Phlegmy cough. Muffled cough, wet cough, graveled cough, also the sound of moaning and whispers and the frequent cries of pain. The sighing of the living and the sighing of the almost dead. Footsteps. Weeping. Hacking. Foam.

The patients stare at the ceiling. They lay on their sides, elbows holding up their heads. They sit up. Sometimes they sit together. But often, unless they are in the throes of serious dying, they are motionless, hands under covers, half in another land, preparing to leave entirely.

BOYS WITH FACES LIKE MIRRORS by Joe Baumann

BOYS WITH FACES LIKE MIRRORS
by Joe Baumann

The bus crash devastated everyone.

That morning, Jane Philban looked out the kitchen window and tsked at the thunder heads perched above the trees. Her son bounced on the balls of his feet behind her, telling her it didn’t matter because the field trip was to the bowling alley, and the bowling alley had a roof.

Mrs. Pederson’s son pleaded from his bed to be allowed to go even though he had a temperature of one-oh-one. He didn’t feel sick, he said, slapping at his high forehead and kicking his feet like he was pedaling a bike. I feel fine, and you know I really like the smell of bowling shoes.

Anthony Skiles dressed himself, picking out a t-shirt and the new jeans he’d gotten for his birthday because the field trip meant no one had to put on the blazers or the purple-and-green striped ties they wore every other day. He was glad for the field trip because his dress shirt was wrinkled and the teachers would frown at him. Anthony waited for the bus while his mother cried in her bedroom because her husband had told her the night before that he wanted a divorce. No one had told Anthony this, but he’d heard a lot of yelling, the slamming of a door, and his mother’s sobs. He’d reheated his own dinner.

GET BEHIND ME SATAN by Mica Evans

GET BEHIND ME SATAN
by Mica Evans

She remembers his daft voice ringing like a death knell: Beer,
it’s beer you blubbering broad - you’re supposed to drink it fast.
She’s feeling fat but not hungry. She’s full of beer but not ugly,
and she knows. She’s looking killer in that cotton blend catsuit
he bought her the last time she couldn’t stop crying. Whenever
she cries, he causes then cures it, and she forgives him
like bare feet in a crowd. When his caustic tongue takes it
a lick too far, he flowers, fixes, flatters her like fluorescent
lights in a sunny park. She remembers his pink lips spitting:
She’s got a nice ass and an afro, she doesn’t know about Foucault,
so don’t ask her, just bring a round of shots. She rarely talks.
She thinks, Can someone get this broad a crock of soup and a lager?
All hail the pale ale gods who got her here another night.
Despite the seven white men drooling at her from their stools,
she taps her toes, takes a glub, and anxious-glances at the door.
She’s down down dumb drunk drunk and won’t eat until
he waltzes in with that keyring jingle, three bloodhounds at his feet.

TOUCHED FROM THE SKY by Shannon Viola

TOUCHED FROM THE SKY
by Shannon Viola

Whenever I read Tacitus in the Latin, I want to crawl underneath my bed with twelve cupcakes and curse myself to Dis and back. He’s a sassy Roman author. One time, Tacitus used an ablative absolute to lead into a result clause. You might not know what either an ablative absolute or a result clause is, and I wouldn’t expect you to, but trust me. Connecting those two grammatical constructions in Latin is mental. But Tacitus did it anyway.

If you haven’t already guessed, I am a Classics major.

If you don’t know what a Classics major is, that’s okay too. My roommate, Erica, has known my major since we moved in. One day in October, however, I was lounging on my bed, translating some Tacitus, when I peered up to Erica and said:

“You know, I just really love Latin. Translating just makes me happy.”

So Erica, with a face as sincere as a mother’s and in a tone as dulcet as vernal dew, said, “Well, Shannon, if you love Latin so much, you should major in it. Really. Just do what you love.”

I squinted my eyes and stifled a guffaw. “Erica—that’s what a Classics major is.”

“Oh,” she laughed, “I never knew what a Classics major was, so I just pretended to know whenever you mentioned it.”

LESSONS IN PROBABILITY THEORY by Tony Gorry

LESSONS IN PROBABILITY THEORY
by Tony Gorry

It's a late summer afternoon in 1945. On the side of Tongue Mountain in the Adirondacks, a male deer is leading two females along a switchback. They're on their way to a special meadow to enjoy its late summer bounty in peace, undisturbed by occasional hikers passing along the trail.

They're halfway across the last switchback when the sharp crack of a rifle splits the air. The buck stops abruptly and stands rigidly in the soft light. The does freeze as well. For some moments, only his ears and nostrils move. Then he shakes himself, sending a ripple under his coat from his neck to his haunches. He snorts, and turns from the trail onto a narrow rocky track that is largely hidden by bushes. The inner side of the path clings to the mountain, but the outer edge drops off sharply to a valley below. With no hesitation, the buck and his companions clatter out along the ridge. As they round a bend, the buck again stops. Standing still, he surveys the shimmering vista the lake laid out below him. The females behind him fidget slightly, awaiting his direction. Some twenty seconds later, he snorts once more, gives another rippling shiver, and starts up again. The three deer round the bend and soon will be gone.

As the second doe makes the turn, one of her back hooves dislodges a small rock, spinning it over the edge of the trail and sending it caroming down the hill. The falling rock flickers when it exposes a polished side to the fading summer light. Silently, it drops until it glances off the side of a large boulder embedded in the hillside. With a click, the encounter sends the rock spinning sharply off course. It bounces twice, once left, once right, into a patch of mossy stones. Then, continuing its journey, it strikes the edge of a large tree root, seems to poise for a moment, and finally nestles into a depression among some mottled leaves.

Below the deer, between the mountain and the lake, lies the Knob, a loose cluster of cottages and a few permanent homes on an abutment into Lake George. During harsh winters, only a few hardy souls live in the Knob. In summer, however, the cottages are filled with families drawn by the swimming, boating, hiking, and the sheer beauty of the lake. During the war years, it's mostly mothers who bring their children. They want a few days break from work and escape from some of their loneliness and fear for their husbands overseas.

AN APOLOGY by Simon Mermelstein

AN APOLOGY
by Simon Mermelstein

The mouth is where toxicity leaves the brain. Spit
out the ugly until pure thoughts remain. Split
my sharp tongue from soft palate, my kind heart from all that blood.

Where do bad thoughts come from? Cruel instincts,
those regretful daggers that slice inside and out.
Bottle them and they shatter glass. Chew them over
and they swallow my stomach

but to exhale this teargas is a prayer for dissipation.
Maybe it will sink into the soil, poison the carrots but leave my friends be.
I’m so sorry I’m Sarin.
People wear masks and I think I know why.

THE ANGELS OF PONT-SAINT-ESPRIT by Patricia Flaherty Pagan

ANGELS OF PONT-SAINT-ESPRIT
by Patricia Flaherty Pagan

In her mercy, mother ties me to a chair in the attic with rough, wheat-colored rope. Fishermen tell mother that Monsieur Armunier writhes in his straightjacket yelling about serpents upon him. Nurses and nuns rush to his aid. But mother does not trust me, “ma belle jeune fille,” to the doctors at the asylum, so we guard my secret at home.

The attic roof leaks. Raindrops kiss my cheeks.

Silvery lights flash and my stomach convulses. Delicate bells of lily of the valley wrap me in their sweet aroma. I am grateful. As flames crackle in the river, seraphim rise on blue-tipped wings. Their celestial voices join in a libretto of glory. I also sing. Then I ride the crescendo of sound to them. They enfold me in their wings of sky and we soar and dip above the spreading fire.

Quiet, child, my mother says.

MY PROMOTION by Gerri Brightwell

MY PROMOTION
by Gerri Brightwell

The night we celebrated my shell wouldn’t open. I worked the blade between its lips but it rattled across my plate while the others were already swallowing in ecstasy. Soon they were offering suggestions. I gripped the shell in my napkin, pinning it against the table and viciously twisting the blade. Finally it gave with a wet suck and a cheer broke out as I lifted it to my lips. Inside lay a naked creature smaller than my thumb, limbs folded tight, eyes shut in fear. One heartbeat, then I tipped it into my mouth and applause shattered the air.

NATURAL SELECTION by Alec Hershman

NATURAL SELECTION
by Alec Hershman

The trees wave desperately to the storm-procession
like a pope-cloud has inspired them to send wind.
The size of the fury dwarfs us. And we not-
so-desperately have feet for scampering
and industry. This is how we've been lost
—as creatures—unwound on scented tracks.
The horses among us turn circles
around the spot where lightning starts.
Is this the replica? Puppets are ingesting
other puppets and the whole cast, it seems,
is strung on one string that runs gut to throat.
We are thimbles, once nested and now harassed
by a breeze. We are humans
and so are mutants for how we hear
a word in thunder, see the flash, and think
the string has raised us from our meal.

RUSSIA IS NOT LIKE US by Barbara Haas

RUSSIA IS NOT LIKE US
by Barbara Haas

An inch or two of new snow has fallen since morning, flocking the graves at Novodevichy in feathery white. Black marble obelisks and basalt monoliths create a vertical as well as horizontal tombscape, a way to organize death into the narrow alleys and lanes of a space-cramped necropolis.

Shostakovich, Chekhov, Yeltsin, Kruschev—they lie here. Mayakovsky, Bulgakov, Gogol, Tretyakov—tons of granite guard their rest.

Moscow is never more silent than under a mantle of soft mounded snow and winter never more Russian than on a somber day whose gray sky is wooly with constantly sifting flakes.

An occasional bouquet of faded flowers brings a splash of color to this cemetery. Even the grave of a mathematician from the 19th Century is graced with a spray of scarlet gladioli, proof of memory’s persistence. Roses lie crushed at the feet of alabaster statues, their petals made pale by the lacework of snow, forgotten bouquets in a forgotten season left to commemorate the lives of legends.

The statues themselves are arresting. Human figures seem to stride out of polished rock slabs but stop just short of stepping free, something in the granite leashing them to eternity. The opera singers, ballerinas and artists stare across the black and white austerity, honored guests at a quite exclusive cocktail party, VIP’s on the A-list forever. Sculpted larger than life, the carvings illustrate the way death has forced upon those who rest here super-human proportions. Their stone faces reveal the dignity of luminaries who know strangers will gaze upon them for centuries.

THE DROP SHOT by Shola Olowu-Asante

THE DROP SHOT
by Shola Olowu-Asante

The thing to remember was that nothing had really changed. That was what her father was telling her. Yes, he and mum were no longer together but that was only a small detail in the grand scheme of things. More important was that he loved her, mum loved her and Imee loved her too.

Stella nodded but her gaze drifted out the window, to where the sunlight draped over the Angsana trees. It was hard to concentrate on what he was saying with the many cries flying up from the condo swimming pool now that it was after-school peak hour. Hard because she was looking forward to seeing her friends, maybe even going out to Ion Mall like they used to on Friday afternoons when she still lived here, in Singapore. Hard because her father had been staring at her ever since she got off the plane, making her feel that despite what he said, nothing would ever be the same again.

‘Stella are you listening?’

Stella wrapped her arms around the new Babolat racquet he’d just given her. A tennis prodigy, that’s what her parents and coaches had called her from the minute she first picked up racquet. She had played every day since but after the divorce and the move back to London with her mother, she had lost her touch. Everything that had once been easy became a struggle. She couldn’t hit her favored drop shot, because it needed finesse, soft hands, while hers felt about as sensitive as meat cleavers. And when, during a match against a girl she should have beaten with her eyes closed, Stella watched as ball after ball dived to the bottom of the net or else sailed over the baseline, the emotions that had been simmering away boiled over. She smashed her racket on the court, screaming over and over, ‘I’m done with this stupid game. I’m done.’ She’d had enough of all the rules, the hours of practice, the fitness training. It was the scaffold around which the rest of her life had been built and she wanted to tear it down. Her mother had been patient at first, but when after a month, and then another Stella refused to play, she panicked. ‘I don’t know what else to do,’ Stella overheard her saying on the phone. ‘She’s your bloody daughter too.’

ART AND HEALING by Donna Levinstone

ART AND HEALING
Pastel Landscapes
by Donna Levinstone

Art enhances the healing process. My work is meditative and has been used in hospital settings and other situations where healing is called for. My mother and a few of my friends, in the last stage of their lives, have used my work as a source of calm and focus during their bed-ridden illnesses. As a cancer survivor, I, too have found that artwork provides calm in my life. My pastel landscapes have often been referred to as “landscapes of the soul”.

The use of wide skies in my work promotes a sense of well-being. I have memories, as a young child, of riding in our convertible and gazing up at the sky for hours. According to Jack Borden, founder of For Spacious Skies, people who have sky awareness in their lives often have an added sense of optimism. They look at their lives, like the skies, with an endless sense of possibilities.

ALPHA ∞ OMEGA by Laurin DeChae

ALPHA ∞ OMEGA
by Laurin DeChae

Unveil, prophet. Write me the end first where you find comfort
And tell me when the time is near to suck sweet from the vine.

Feel that atmospheric friction, surge of pressure, curl of toes to shriek
Just above our heads the rise and fall of history, of man deepening ravines.

How the body changes form when it pleases, how it
Shifts shape for both right and wrong reasons. Water to wine.

Whiff of honeysuckle memory gently rests its head on your shoulder,
Think of bread, of mouth dry, of want as tendrils touch cheek to vine.

Let knowing lull you to sleep with fantastic imaginings of the end,
All gold and glitter, razzle dazzle and stars, glitz at the end of the divine.

BIRDSHOT by Michal Leibowitz

BIRDSHOT
by Michal Leibowitz

After we’ve shot the swallows from the sky
I tell you of the coast you’ve forgotten,
memories turned legend, migrating inwards.
I am the gluttony learned by leeching
the ocean, all swallow bones and
winter. Wait with me as I sift through
this island, the almost-glass, the spirits
they promised. Let me pick these splinters –
murmur gentle things – let me make you
stay. Here are the swallows and here
are their feathers and here are the phantoms
waiting, wasting:
Let us take you to the grotto
where the walls glint inwards,
and the birds drop downwards,
lose their faces in the swell.

MY BOYFRIEND’S ESTRANGED GRANDFATHER by Rachael Tague

MY BOYFRIEND’S ESTRANGED GRANDFATHER
by Rachael Tague
He was an alcoholic, a wealthy engineer, and a butterfly collector. He traveled all over the world, especially in South America, specializing in Southern California and Neotropical specimens, amassing a collection allegedly worth hundreds of thousands of dollars by the time of his death in late 2007.

His house in California must have been nothing but walls and racks of display cases – wings ranging from the size of a buttercup blossom to an oak leaf. Splotched, banded, eyed, lined, swiped, swirled. Splayed and mounted, framed, flocking Emperors, Brushfoots, Daggerwings, longwings, snouts, and Swallowtails, sleek, fuzzy, feathered—frozen.

It happened on a bridge—or rather, off a bridge—in the Kosnipata Valley of Atalaya, Peru. He ventured away from the Association for Tropical Lepidoptera early on the morning of November 4. As there were no witnesses, they can only assume that he spotted a rare butterfly – perhaps the one he traveled to Peru to find – misjudged its distance from the bridge railing, and flung his net too hard.

Accounts of the height of the fall range from thirty to five thousand feet, frozen in flight for an instant, barely long enough to snatch a breath of the air rushing around him before he met the dry river bed. His association initiated a search when he didn’t show up for dinner and discovered his body in the ravine, net in hand, and the butterfly trapped, flapping in the fibers.

WANING by Caitlin McGill

WANING
by Caitlin McGill

Saria rocked in her chair on the porch, wondering how the trees kept still on such fierce nights. The house had grown so quiet since her mother’s boyfriend left—since she told her mother what he’d done—that it seemed like all she ever heard was her mother’s wine glass clinking against the sink.

Her mother had kicked him out right away, but Saria sensed her mother hadn’t believed her. “I don’t understand,” her mother had said. And later, once he was gone, when she was drunk: “Who started it anyway?”

Saria stared out at the trees and wondered what it would be like to never speak again, to wave only when the breeze brushed her limbs, to keep the sparrows and robins and blue jays warm as they scampered through her, to open her mouth only when the wind grew so strong that her whole body trembled and his voice was there beside her again: Don’t tell.

BEAUTY by Gregory Djanikian

Gregory-Djanikian

BEAUTY
by Gregory Djanikian

In the eye of the beholder, we say, disregarding
what the beautiful might spring from,
an oil slick’s satiny iridescence, the ravishing
splash of orange in the smog-ridden sky.

Yesterday, someone pointed to the loosestrife
overtaking our garden, praised the lovely
delicate petals, the long magisterial stalks.

Sometimes the beautiful is a fire
that takes the whole of a tree in its arms,
sometimes a wild and engorged river
cutting deeply into the land.

The beautiful floats beyond us
immune to our beholding.

THE AIRPORT AND THE MUSEUM by Laura Tanenbaum

THE AIRPORT AND THE MUSEUM
by Laura Tanenbaum

I decided to ask for the manual scan, so I was listening to this woman telling me to spread my legs, where she was going to put her hands and I laughed because it seemed like porn. Not really like porn, of course, just like the way I imagined porn would be when I was a prim pre-internet teenager who’d never seen porn, right down to the crap lighting I somehow knew was something you were supposed to know about porn. The word banal came to mind. Though in the airport the lighting really was crap. Thankfully, there weren’t any mirrors, not to guard against vanity like in the house of mourning but to preserve some shred of self-respect, some hope we weren’t the faces we were.

Behind me men came out of the luxury lounge. More porn; more banality. They twitched under their rings and slick hair making their way to the first class line. Last year a company spent ten million dollars on an innovation that found an extra centimeter of room for first-class legs. They had a team of engineers and they all cheered, threw a big office party in honor of the centimeter. I read this in an airport in the special travel issue of the New Yorker. It was right before an article about migrants dying at sea and the European coast guards turning them away. A sentence came into my mind: “I tremble for my world when I remember God is just.” I thought someone righteous had said this but I looked it up later and it turned out to be Jefferson. First I thought, how strange a slaveholder said it. Then I thought, of course a slaveholder said this, they would know.

MEDIEVAL PHOTOGRAPHER by Sarah J. Sloat

MEDIEVAL PHOTOGRAPHER
by Sarah J. Sloat

In a past life I imagine
I was a medieval photographer
toiling to capture

the wrist of a prince
perspiring in miniver sleeves.

With anachronous baggage I recorded the horse
collar and caravan,
wheels crossing a field of bodies

to cast gradations of shade,
stippled and matte,
on the dust and beclouded countenance.

THE YELLOW FACEMASK by Tasha Coryell

THE YELLOW FACEMASK
by Tasha Coryell

She hadn’t been planning to rob the bank. Her face was cold.

Or maybe she had been planning to rob the bank and her face was cold. Sometimes bank robbers feel a chill in their cheeks just like any ordinary person.

The facemask was yellow. She couldn’t remember buying it or recall why she had chosen that color. There were a lot of yellow things in her closet: cardigans and dresses, a nightgown that bordered on an ugly green. She supposed at one time she must’ve enjoyed the color. Said things like, “Yellow is cheerful.”

On that day however, yellow did not make her feel cheerful and instead made her feel like the top part of a banana, the knob that is peeled down to reveal the gushy insides.

It was one of those winter days that was so cold that the car door was frozen shut and Elise, with her small body and yellow knob head was unable to open the door and had to return inside to get her husband who was still wearing his pajamas pants to come outside and open it for her.

“You’re starting to turn into the chair, all brown and leather,” she said to him.

“The chair leads a good life,” he replied and looked up at her. “You look like a bank robber in that thing.”

He had to put on his Goretex jacket and boots just to go outside.

“Sure is cold out there,” he said. “Are you sure you want to go out now?”

THE LITTLE TOWN WHERE TIME STOOD STILL by Bohumil Hrabal reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

THE LITTLE TOWN WHERE TIME STOOD STILL, novelas
by Bohumil Hrabal
translated by James Naughton
NYRB Classics, 299 pages

reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

Late summer might be the best season to read Bohumil Hrabal, for time reveals itself in the ripe air and everything bleeds with life. Hrabal, the Czech novelist of delirious syncopation, who died in 1997 falling from a fifth floor hospital window while trying to feed the birds, returns to childhood in these two novelas about the manager of a small-town brewery, his older brother, savage wife, and young son. Hrabal’s stepfather was the manager of a brewery; Maryška, the wife of Francin, the fictional brewery manager, narrates the first novela, Cutting It Short. Their son is the narrator of The Little Town Where Time Stood Still.

When Cutting It Short, which Hrabal published in 1976, opens, Maryška, is lighting the lamps, waiting for Francin to come in from the brewery. “I dread the day,” she says, “the mains will be brought to the brewery and all the brewery lamps, all the airy lamps in the stables, the lamps with the round mirrors, all those portly lamps with round wicks one day will cease to be lit, no one will prize their light, for all this ceremonial will be replaced by the light-switch resembling the water tap which replaced the wonderful pumps.” Maryška’s no sap to nostalgia (indeed, quite the opposite, a woman of voluminous hunger for free-flowing life, she loves to climb the brewery’s chimney and speed around town on her bike); she’s merely setting us up for a string of electric events that will forever disrupt life in the town where time stood still. Hrabal’s full-throated prose, brought to delirious and delicious English life by the late translator James McNaughton, has the capacity to go low and high all at once, to convey meaning glossed with viscera.

LONG WALK TO VALHALLA by Adam Smith and Matthew Fox reviewed by Brazos Price

LONG WALK TO VALHALLA
by Adam Smith and Matthew Fox
Archaia, 96 pages

reviewed by Brazos Price

In Long Walk to Valhalla, a graphic novel by Adam Smith and Matthew Fox, we follow a young man named Rory as he winds his way back through memories of his childhood in rural Arkansas. Rory and Joe are brothers, but so much more. Rory is Joe’s protector. Joe has difficulty speaking and is prone to strange trances in which he sees visions of "Pretty Things," surreal-looking creatures that are not exactly monsters but certainly not part of the normal landscape of Arkansas. Because of Joe's peculiar malady, he is vulnerable to worlds both real and (perhaps) imagined. This is a story of growing up and the sadness that accumulates along the way.

The story begins when Rory’s car breaks down in the middle of nowhere. He has only three contacts, all three of whom we meet during the course of the narrative, and no money to make a call. Then Sylvia appears from within a corn field near where Joe is stranded. She claims to be a Valkyrie out of Norse mythology, sent to take Rory off to Valhalla, the land where heroes go after they die in battle.

This is a framed story that works on several levels as it moves back and forth between Rory's present and his childhood. There is the story Rory tells himself and the story he tells Sylvia about his life. Rory and Joe’s abusive and alcoholic dad, Dwayne, looms large in the frame, the one constant that must be overcome. We get a sense of Dwayne's character in one of the early flashback scenes, when he sends Rory and Joe out to a convenience store to buy some ephedrine so he can cook meth. When the boys return, he spends hours haranguing Joe over some perceived slight. This short scene also defines the setting of the small rural town where Rory and Joe grow up; the store clerk is not at all surprised that Dwayne is sending his sons to do his "errands," and when she comments that Joe "don't talk much," Rory simply says "Yes, ma'am," and takes Joe's hand as they leave, showing the protectiveness he feels for his brother. We then see the parking lot from Joe's point of view: alive with hordes of bizarre creatures, from a dog-faced airplane to a giant sushi monster. Rory doesn't share these visions, but he accepts that Joe sees them and doesn't label him as crazy because of it.

THE WAKE by Paul Kingsnorth reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster

THE WAKE
by Paul Kingsnorth
Graywolf Press, 365 pages

reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster

As I write this, the white half of the world is up in arms about a lion, killed on the other side of the globe. Black protestors in Ferguson stand in lines, chanting the names of the dead. Videos are released of police officers assaulting, maiming, and shooting unarmed black citizens. The temperature soars to 165 degrees in Iran. This summer has been too hot, a climate sweating for change. It is the oldest story: the new idea comes, and grinds the good old world into dust. And another idea on top of that, invaders with new languages and new philosophies.

Not all new ideas are good; genocide is one of them. We're still seeing the systemic elimination of natives from their own land, in the United States and elsewhere. Sacred tribal lands are sold to copper mining companies. Lakes where gods once rose to give prophecy, poisoned by industrial waste. The crushing disappointment of our modern losses is brought to life in The Wake, which takes place in England in 1066 A.D. Awakened to the impending disaster of the Norman Invasion, Buccmaster of Holland begins to have visions of the Old Gods, which call him to fight back against the invaders and restore England to her former glory. Wake means “watcher,” and like the Buccmaster, the reader is compelled to watch the persecution of native English people by the army of Guillaume le Batard.

THE TREE WITH NO NAME by Drago Jançar reviewed by Justin Goodman

THE TREE WITH NO NAME
by Drago Jançar
translated by Michael Biggins
Dalkey Archive, 274 pages

reviewed by Justin Goodman

Contention over millennials’ degree of entitlement hasn’t been limited to the United States. As we learn from Slovenian writer Drago Jançar, in fact, the generation gap has an equally special significance in the former Soviet Bloc, where, according to translator Erica Johnson Debeljak, writing on the Dalkey Archive Press website, the “new generation…takes independence and freedom, the Slovenian language, and shopping malls to be their birthright.” Communism is outdated. That’s why The Tree With No Name is so timely. The issue is not simply post-birth pangs (Slovenia was established in 1991 with the USSR’s collapse). Rather Jançar asks, what is there for the old generation in a new world?

To Janez Lipnik, the archvist protagonist who’s preternaturally incapable of letting go of the past and which he belongs to, it’s all that’s left. “Wherever there is no past,” he thinks, “the world is fundamentally unreal.” The overarching dread of becoming a living artifact overcomes Lipnik after his wife, Marijana, points out a women’s bicycle that is pulled from “the poor river whose bad luck it was to run through the center of the city.” This has happened after Lipnik has started work on the diary of “The Great Lover,” as he dubs him, who “slept his way” through World War II; after he remembers his grade school teacher, Zala, had a bike just like it; after he discovers a secret about his wife’s past, which destroys their marriage. “After,” in the sense of Klee’s Angelus Novus: In the words of Walter Benjamin, “He is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating.” The novel opens with chapters Eighty-six to Ninety-nine, going down to One (when the bike is found) and back up to Eighty-five, reduplicating the unhinged obsessions of the archivist to retrieve a lost world, the past, as it moves rapidly away.

Four Novels from Unnamed Press reviewed by Johnny Payne

THE PAPER MAN
by Gallagher Lawson
Unnamed Press, 267 pages

REMEMBER THE SCORPION
by Isaac Goldemberg
translated from the Spanish by Jonathan Tittler
Unnamed Press, 133 pages

THE FINE ART OF FUCKING UP
by Cate Dicharry
Unnamed Press, 230 pages

ESCAPE FROM BAGHDAD
by Saad Z. Hossain
Unnamed Press, 304 pages

reviewed by Johnny Payne

The wryly-named Unnamed Press out of Los Angeles is living the self-appointed paradox of making a name for itself. Any independent press walks the line between sufficient eclecticism to draw in a swath of curious readers, and a strong enough identity to stand out from the pack. Unnamed Press has achieved this goal with a set of spanking new novel releases: Escape from Baghdad, Remember the Scorpion, The Paper Man, and The Fine Art of Fucking Up (possible best title of the year).

A decided taste rules the selections:

There is snappy dialogue. “He’s a sullen little shit, but his work’s pretty good;” “All of Lima smells like a woman in heat.” “I dream only in American.”

There is narrative pith. The first, brief paragraph of The Fine Art of Fucking Up reads:

I am sitting behind my desk watching the downpour when I catch the scent of bacon. Dunbar is in the building again, despite the restraining order.

CREATIVE WRITING PEDAGOGIES FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY edited by Alexandria Peary and Tom C. Hunley reviewed by Lynn Levin

CREATIVE WRITING PEDAGOGIES FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY edited by Alexandria Peary and Tom C. Hunley reviewed by Lynn Levin

CREATIVE WRITING PEDAGOGIES FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
edited by Alexandria Peary and Tom C. Hunley
Southern Illinois University Press, 310 pages

reviewed by Lynn Levin

We live in an era of border crossings. In marriage, family, race, gender, and geographical boundaries, our world is more than ever about blending, bridging, transforming, and migrating. Frontiers are shifting in literature, too: the move is on toward hybrid and blurred genres—prose poems, flash fiction, videos, and other experiments in expression. Into this climate of mixing and crossing, comes Creative Writing Pedagogies for the Twenty-First Century, edited by Alexandria Peary and Tom C. Hunley (SIU Press, 2015). The book details the many ways in which creative writing instructors are crossing boundaries: for example, using compositional strategies in the creative writing classroom. The twelve essays in this book are rich in theory, research, practical ideas, and in-the-trenches know-how. The contributors are academics who are also poets and writers. They all specialize in teaching creative writing, composition, and/or literary studies. Many of the essays captivate with inspired ideas. A few, aiming for the scholarly, rely a little too much on academic jargon and buzzwords. All in all, I found a raft of useful crossover and new-generation ideas for teaching creative writing and, as a by-product, some new ideas for teaching composition as well.

ARE YOU SEEING ME? by Darren Groth reviewed by Allison Renner

ARE YOU SEEING ME?
by Darren Groth
Orca Book Publishers, 278 pages

reviewed by Allison Renner

Books are often seen as a respite from everyday life and road trip books can be an even greater escape. They let you travel without having to go through airport security or get stuck in a strange city's traffic. Darren Groth’s Are You Seeing Me? takes readers from an Australian airport to several stops in Canada and the United States, journeying alongside nineteen-year-old Justine and her twin brother, Perry.

The trip is a big undertaking, but it’s meant to be a send-off, a farewell to the lives the twins have always known. Justine and Perry’s father died a year ago and, since then, Justine has been Perry’s caregiver. Before his death, their father secured Perry, who has autism, a spot at an independent living facility. Justine is conflicted: Perry says he wants to move away; her boyfriend wants to move in; and she can finally live a life without caring for a brother with disabilities. But she doesn’t really mind taking care of Perry, and worries that he’ll forget about her as he establishes his own independent life. She knows how to prevent his behaviors (sometimes!), how to calm him down, and how to explain his condition to others with a rehearsed speech. She promised their father that she’d take care of Perry, but is she doing that by letting him go off on his own?

WHY I WRITE Or, It’s The End of the World as We Know It and I Feel (Sorta) Fine by J.G. McClure

J.G. McClure Author Photo

WHY I WRITE
Or, It’s The End of the World as We Know It and I Feel (Sorta) Fine
by J.G. McClure

I remember as a kid going to a science museum somewhere in Missouri. They had an exhibit—basically a rickety computer with MS Paint hooked up to a radio transmitter. The idea was this: you’d draw a picture, the transmitter would transmit it upward, and voila, your masterpiece would travel out among the stars, waiting for distant life-forms to receive it. Whether this actually happened or whether it’s merely a cocktail of youthful misunderstanding and nostalgia is beside the point. I remember it, and I remember the conviction that aliens would discover my rudimentary stick figure family and feel a pang of pathos for life on our little rock.

This was a great deal of pressure. If the drawing was bad, what would that say about our society? The aliens who found my little sketch—the lines rough, the colors off—might decide not to visit us after all. Or worse, they might rain fiery death down on us all for my grave sins against representational art. (My sketches were not good. If that turns out to be what dooms our world, I apologize.)

A recent piece in Esquire, entitled “When the End of Civilization Is Your Day Job, or, Ballad of the Sad Climatologists,” explores the “pre-traumatic stress” experienced by climate researchers: the prevailing sense of apocalypse among the folks who know apocalypse best. The story describes “the gradual shift from hope of prevention to plans for adaptation” to an Earth so unrecognizable that we shouldn’t even call it Earth anymore. (One writer proposes “Eaarth”). Even the “optimists” of the story speak of glacial melt, rising sea levels, and the obliteration of coastal cities worldwide as a foregone conclusion. As one researcher puts it, “We’re fucked.” Some of the less-hopeful scientists have moved into the woods (as far inland as possible) and set up off-grid cabins to wait out the end of days.

A HOUSE MADE OF STARS by Tawnysha Greene reviewed by Kathryn Kulpa

A HOUSE MADE OF STARS
by Tawnysha Greene
Burlesque Press, 189 pages, 2015.

reviewed by Kathryn Kulpa

In the very first scene of A House Made of Stars, Tawnysha Greene’s debut novel, the ten-year-old narrator and her sister are awakened by their mother, who spirits them to a darkened bathroom where all three sit in the bathtub, towels piled over them, while the house shakes with thuds so loud even the narrator’s deaf sister can feel their vibrations. Their mother tells them it’s a game. She tells them they’re practicing for earthquakes. But even at ten, the narrator knows it’s not nature’s rage they need to fear. It’s their father’s.

Greene’s voice in this novel is pitch perfect, an eerie and convincing combination of innocence and prescience. The hard-of-hearing narrator is homeschooled and isolated; her mother believes public schools will not teach “Godly things.” Yet her understanding of their family dynamic and her father’s mental illness are intuitive and profound. Without adult labels or filters, we see his depression, his paranoia, his moments of happy, expansive mania that can change in an instant to brutal outbursts, and the scars he carries from his own violent childhood. We see her mother’s hapless attempts to keep the family safe and fed continually thwarted by her father’s whims. After the family loses their home and moves in with relatives, the children go hungry while Daddy spends his money on lottery tickets. Mama already knows not to question his choices. The girls learn it, too, in a particularly brutal fashion.

While the scenes of violence against children are harrowing and at times hard to read, A House Made of Stars also has moments of beauty and hope. There is a timeless, quiet feeling to the story, especially when the two girls are alone with their mother, that makes it feel almost as if it is taking place in a long-ago world. Despite her inability or unwillingness to protect the children, we sense Mama’s love for them. It is her mother’s stories of the stars and the myths behind them that help sustain the narrator, as well as the letters she writes to her cousin, describing what is happening with her family. Later, when the family are on the road, the narrator leaves these notes hidden along the way, both memoir and cries for help.

HAW by Sean Jackson reviewed by Michelle Fost

HAW
by Sean Jackson
Harvard Square Editions, 181 pages

reviewed by Michelle Fost

Sean Jackson’s first novel, Haw, recently out from Harvard Square Editions, is an ecological nightmare narrative, the story of a world starved for clean water. When I first came across Jackson’s writing in his short story “How a Ghost Is Made” (in Issue 7 of Cleaver) I was impressed by Jackson’s snappy, lean prose style. In “How a Ghost Is Made,” Jackson portrays a woman who is in the process of pulling away from the husband who is cheating on her. We first encounter Shelly while she is out for a run. As Jackson describes: “She leans into the next turn, bursting up Spindale Street like they taught her at Oberlin: run till you can’t think straight, then back off one gear.” The anger in the story moves similarly—high throttle, then backing off just enough. Shelly runs in a lush setting and her anger as she moves towards her emotional leave taking gives the story a satisfying, raw, unbridled energy. Shelly’s external world—her surroundings on her run—appears full, but her internal world feels stripped down, impoverished, giving some power to her reaching out in memory (however feebly) toward her mother.

The world of Jackson’s Haw is starkly different from that of “How a Ghost Is Made.” In Haw we won’t encounter any sprinklers nourishing lawns or anything even close to what Shelly experiences when “she pops in her earbuds and descends along the bridge into a canopy-covered swath of nature so green it makes her sick.” Instead, in Haw Jackson gives us a remarkably desolate world of the future.

HOW TO BE ANOTHER by Susan Lewis reviewed by Carlo Matos

HOW TO BE ANOTHER
by Susan Lewis
Červená Barva Press, 81 pages

reviewed by Carlo Matos

In How to be Another, Susan Lewis explores the full range of the prose poem form. These poems read like short speculative essays in the tradition of Montaigne, which is to say they have a metaphysical or epistemological bent to them. “Most knowing goes unlicensed,” says the speaker archly in “Introduction to Appreciation.” We are not dealing in this book with the esoteric details of autobiography or memoir but with the broader experiences of humanity as a species. How to be Another isn’t concerned with the kind of surface empathy or watered-down existential day-seizing of self-help books (as the title might suggest) but is instead a work of anthropology—though, clearly, these perspectives must intersect to some extent. For example, the speaker of “Introduction to Narcissism (III)” says, the “point is, self-awareness confers little evolutionary advantage. We are not wired for objectivity.” However, later in the same poem, the speaker acknowledges that the “pain” caused by self-awareness “is relentless, staying with you longer than any friend or flattering memory.” The shift to the second-person pronoun is telling for although the “you” is largely rhetorical in nature, it is still much more personal than the third-person perspective of the rest of the poem. Evolution itself is not the problem; it’s the fact that our species has evolved, or so the poem seems to suggest, to a point of diminishing returns.

TOUCHÉ by Rod Smith reviewed by Brandon Lafving

TOUCHÉ
by Rod Smith
Wave Books, 112 pages

reviewed by Brandon Lafving

Poetry these days is unglamorous, but at least it’s fun. At most, it’s fun. Rod Smith’s Touché plays, but you would have to call it mischievous because it hits you with über grit, and not one punch is held back.

“Everything I have written is trash. I have not / even the strength to love. Let it go.” The blunt emotion of these lines is the impulse of “Buoyancy”—the cathartic moment of a tormented artist who is filled with self-hatred and guilt over his inability to love a woman more than his work, and his work at all.

The pathos is so real to me—the hapless raising-onto-pedestal of a woman—the inevitable transition to thoughts of writing: “I have to write past this obsession / with you, Nora, with an invalid / admiration in the learning. You’ve / got the idea. I’m a calf. & the victory / of the light. // Does it go on? The poem I mean.” I am pretty sure I felt this way last week. Touché, indeed.

DOCTORS by Dash Shaw reviewed by Brian Burmeister

DOCTORS
by Dash Shaw
Fantagraphics Books, 96 pages

reviewed by Brian Burmeister

What is it that awaits us after death? In his graphic novel, Doctors, artist/writer Dash Shaw creates a world in which each afterlife is unique, generated from one’s own memories with assistance from a newly-invented medical device, the Charon.

Throughout Doctors, Shaw showcases skillful storytelling. The world he creates is inventive and fascinating. From the beginning, he successfully pulls in the reader with the story’s sense of mystery. One quickly wonders what is real as the initial central character of Miss Bell struggles to make sense of a series of confusing events in her life.

As the story surrounding Miss Bell unfolds, we learn that doctors have created (through the Charon) a way to prolong life after death, allowing one’s consciousness to live on temporarily in a joyous modern-day Elysium. Within the afterlife, doctors are able to communicate with the deceased and, when successful, are able to compel the person to return to the land of the living, at least for a limited time.

A HISTORY OF MONEY by Alan Pauls reviewed by Rory McCluckie

A HISTORY OF MONEY
by Alan Pauls
translated by Ellie Robins
Melville House, 197 pages

reviewed by Rory McCluckie

There has never been a time when the subject of money wasn't fertile ground for a work of literature; whatever view you take on its role in our lives, it's central to them. From the economic policies of governments to the spare change tossed into a busker's guitar case, it's difficult to imagine what life without it might look like. Not a bad subject, then, for a work that is set to catapult its author onto the international stage. Alan Pauls is an Argentinian novelist, essayist, and critic who has been writing fiction for years while holding various academic and editorial posts in Argentina and the United States. Indeed, he seems to be so active and prolific in his various roles that it's perhaps surprising that Pauls' 2007 novel, The Past, has, until now, been his only work to have received an English language translation. With A History of Money, he should have assured that such negligence comes to an end. This is a skillfully realized work, as accomplished in its execution as it is acute in its criticism.

YOU DON’T SAY by Nate Powell reviewed by Stephanie Trott

YOU DON’T SAY
by Nate Powell
Top Shelf Productions, 176 pages

reviewed by Stephanie Trott

Given ten years, an artist can undergo a series of personal evolutions that may come to mark them as a master. Among these seasoned individuals sits Nate Powell, a graphic novelist who has been writing and self-publishing since the age of fourteen. His most recent collection, You Don’t Say, presents seventeen short stories written over the course of a decade that celebrate the range of realizations that contribute to our inevitable maturation.

Targeting a young adult audience, these narratives are relatable to all who are in or beyond those infamous teenage years. From nights spent idling in barren parking lots to the realization that we will not forever willingly stay up past 3 A.M., Powell captures the a-ha! moments that come to define us as adults in the face of calendar rotations. Each installment features a brief text-based introduction that both describes the inspiration for the following piece and explains the comic in relation to the artist. Powell also includes suggestions as to how certain pieces should be read, asking the reader to consume several in one go or to allow features to work as singular entities. He shows the reader respect, and we in turn follow him down a psychological rabbit hole into a shaded world of self-doubt, superiority complexes, and good but misplaced intentions. Among these well-laid plans is the narrative “Cakewalk,” a non-fiction account in which a young white girl dresses in blackface as Aunt Jemima for Halloween. Forced by a teacher to remove the meticulously applied charcoal, we learn that the girl deeply wishes to embody the person she imagines the iconic matriarch to be: “I imagined that everybody liked Aunt Jemima. And that they stared at her face like I did when I ate pancakes in the morning.”

SUPERIOR PACKETS by Susie Timmons reviewed by Clare Paniccia

SUPERIOR PACKETS
by Susie Timmons
Wave Books, 181 pages

reviewed by Clare Paniccia

So often we find a characterization and romanticization of New York City within literature and film—the city forming a metaphor for struggle and loss and surrounding a scene with an obvious reminder that time (or taxis) waits for no one. If we close our eyes and imagine “New York,” we might see towering skyscrapers, new-age coffee shops serving only one type of organic bean, streets marred with the remnants of garbage and posters… This is the city that we know—the one that pulses continuously in our veins and invites a feeling of hunger or thirst, in that we cannot be satiated unless we are wholly involved in the movement, in “it.”

I find it important to imagine my own relationship to the city before interpreting Susie Timmons’ three-volume collection of poetry, Superior Packets, which takes on its own characterization of a late twentieth-century New York. Any place, the city or otherwise, can mold to the individual experience—within spaces and locales we encounter our own subjective realities that form the basis for our relationship to that particular environment. Out of these subjective events, these memories, we create our own understanding, our own identities that take on pieces of these locales as fragments of our individuality.

THE ARGONAUTS by Maggie Nelson reviewed by Gabriel Chazan

THE ARGONAUTS
by Maggie Nelson
Graywolf Press, 160 pages

reviewed by Gabriel Chazan

Sometimes an idea reverberates and echoes for a long time, like a song. This was my experience reading Maggie Nelson’s revelatory new memoir, The Argonauts, which starts with an idea Nelson found reading Wittgenstein: “the inexpressible is contained—inexpressibly!—in the expressed…”, and “its paradox is, quite literally, why I write, or how I feel able to keep writing.” Nelson wrote the book while she was with her partner, the non-binary trans artist Harry Dodge, and pregnant with their first child. At one level,The Argonauts recounts her experiences with Dodge, whose gender identity consciously resists the traps of language, and with parenthood. In attempting a reconciliation of the two perspectives, Nelson finds a freedom through language.

More than simply telling a ‘story’, Nelson considers here the act of trying to bring experience into language and ideas, particularly those which seem to oppose this very act. She incorporates an array of ideas from theorists ranging from Judith Butler to Wittgenstein in order to consider the inexpressibles of gender, sexuality, joy, and the seeming contradiction of queer parenthood and marriage—an experience increasingly brought into the mainstream of social structures and away from radicalism.

In the brief interval between my first reading of The Argonauts and the writing of this review, the Supreme Court has legalized same-sex marriage in the United States. This is, in many ways, an important and very positive development for queer rights, yet it is also far from an ending. In the book, Nelson pointedly notes, “if we want to do more than claw our way into repressive structures, we have our work cut out for us.”

TOMBO by W.S. Di Piero reviewed by Johnny Payne

TOMBO
by W.S. Di Piero
McSweeney’s, 63 pages

reviewed by Johnny Payne

Giacomo Leopardi speaks of two essential kinds of imagination: strong and promiscuous. The first is “weighty, impassioned, melancholic, with deep emotion and passion, all fraught with life hugely suffered.” The second is “playful, light, fleet, inconstant in love, high spirited.”

The W.S. Di Piero of The Dog Star, the one I first encountered as a reader, is of the strong variety, as in his depiction of a somber Whitman attending injured soldiers and offering introspection on a Civil War battlefield in “Walt, the Wounded.”

A small fire still burns in the nursery.
Rice and molasses simmer on the stove.
Children will have to learn to ask for less,

less from the elephant dawn that chilled
across the heights where Lee held his ground.

Or there is the dark homage “To My Old City”: “diesel fume and bloodspoor streaked / on wet streets, and cars biting evening papers / from the black newsstand.” In it, memory figures as corrosive.

Surely all poets offer changes in mood, even within a single book, but underlying shifts in temperament happen over time, if at all. And with the appearance of Tombo, I may observe, without being accused of vicious gossip, that Di Piero The Strong has turned promiscuous.

BETWEEN GRAMMARS by Danielle Vogel reviewed by Amanda Hickok

BETWEEN GRAMMARS
by Danielle Vogel
Noemi Press, 78 pages

reviewed by Amanda Hickok

It’s so often that a book of poetry can be thought of as a static object, a collection of disembodied words that are supposed to transcend the body and voice of their author on the page. And it’s so often that poets are bodiless, as poetry—no matter how much it is about bodies—must be divorced from its corporeal source and recipient; that a poet writes for an anonymous reader who in turn reads nobody behind their words. However, and perhaps ironically, poetry’s meaning comes at least in part from its resonance within these bodies, in its ability to stir in them a visceral reaction. Danielle Vogel knows this, addresses this with a forceful intimacy between poet, reader, and page that is both beautiful and challenging in a breaking-the-fourth-wall kind of way, in the vulnerability it necessitates that we are so often sheltered from.

Between Grammars, a book-length poem, begins with an equation of text and body—epigraphs that include “we melt into each other with phrases… We make an unsubstantial territory,” from Woolf, and “Language is a skin,” from Barthes, and then a prologue in five volumes: body, letter, page, book, body. It’s significant that we start with VOLUME: BODY and circle back to it, volume itself as the attempt to unfold the hidden dimensions of these relationships, and the cyclical trajectory as the making and renewal of meaning in the body. The next section begins WATERSHED, and I can almost hear the tearing of the thin membrane between body and text as seamless contiguity floods the boundaries.

COUP DE FOUDRE by Ken Kalfus reviewed by Carolyn Daffron

COUP DE FOUDRE
A Novella and Stories
by Ken Kalfus
Bloomsbury Press, 277 pages

reviewed by Carolyn Daffron

Ken Kalfus is an audacious stylist, whose stories and novels often invoke the likes of Borges, Calvino, Golgol, and Saramago. His choice of subject matter can be equally fearless: cosmology, 9-11, and the grand sweep of Russian history, to name only a few. Coup de Foudre, the novella which forms the centerpiece of his most recent collection of short fiction, is a coruscating example of this gutsiness and high literary ambition.

Not that I enjoyed reading it, at least not the first time. Coup de Foudre tells the story of David Léon Landau, a character not-at-all-loosely based on French financier and former presidential hopeful Dominque Strauss-Kahn (known in France and now everywhere as “DSK”) who was accused of sexually assaulting a housekeeper in his New York hotel in 2011. Although criminal charges were dropped, the case led to a civil settlement, various other scandalous accusations and revelations, and the ruin of DSK’s career.

The novella is a first person account of the hotel assault and the events immediately surrounding it, written in the form of a letter to Mariama, the housekeeper-victim—a letter which Landau can never send to her or anyone without violating a civil gag order and subjecting himself to criminal prosecution. Landau’s story, which parallels DSK’s in almost every known particular, is a repellent one, and its narrator is about as monstrous and unappetizing—to say nothing of unreliable—as they come. Even while purportedly seeking “moral benefit” from “fully and exactingly” acknowledging his errors, the chief of which is that he forcefully fellated Mariama, he cannot help reminding her that his name “signified financial brilliance in the service of the public” and that a water treatment plant he financed in her home country may once have given her clean liquid to “sip thirstily and with pleasure…You may even have reflected at the time on the liquid’s animating power and plenitude…Some may have spilled from the sides of your mouth.” It is hard not to shudder at this.

THE TRAVELS OF DANIEL ASCHER by Déborah Lévy-Bertherat reviewed by Melissa M. Firman

THE TRAVELS OF DANIEL ASCHER
by Déborah Lévy-Bertherat
translated by Adriana Hunter
Other Press, 189 pages

reviewed by Melissa M. Firman

How well do we really know the people we love? What happens when the family stories and personal histories we’ve grown up believing turn out to be fiction—or, at best, a version of the truth?

These are the questions explored in The Travels of Daniel Ascher, the debut novel of Déborah Lévy-Bertherat. Translated from the French by Adriana Hunter, this is a quick, fast-paced read where much happens in this story-within-a-story novel.

Hélène, a 20 year old archaeologist living in Paris, is a typical university student; she’s exploring her new city, falling in love with Guillaume, and occasionally babysitting a young neighbor boy. Among the few people she knows in Paris is her great-uncle, Daniel Roche, a famous author. His books, written under the pseudonym H.R. Sanders, are bestselling literary travel adventures with dashes of fantasy and mystery. (Think Harry Potter.)

THE BOOK OF LANEY by Myfanwy Collins reviewed by Kathryn Kulpa

THE BOOK OF LANEY
by Myfanwy Collins
Lacewing Books, 200 pages

reviewed by Kathryn Kulpa

When terrible acts of violence occur—as they do all too often in America—our thoughts naturally turn to the victims and their families. But what about the families of those who commit violent crimes? What if someone you grew up with was a school shooter, a terrorist, a mass murderer?

That’s the reality fifteen-year-old Laney is living. Her brother West and his friend Mark, two high school outcasts, boarded a school bus armed with machetes, knives, guns, and homemade bombs. Six people died; twelve were wounded. Mark blew himself up, but West made his way home to kill his mother, and he would have killed Laney, too, if police hadn’t stopped him. Left with the wreckage her brother left behind, Laney feels completely alone, unwanted, even hated. Her father died when she was young, and her mother’s boyfriend is only interested in leaving the state as soon as possible. Strangers phone the house with death threats. This is her only identity now: the killer’s sister.

THE REFUSAL OF SUITORS by Ryo Yamaguchi reviewed by Johnny Payne

THE REFUSAL OF SUITORS
Ryo Yamaguchi
Noemi Press, 97 pages

reviewed by Johnny Payne

This chaste book could be titled The Story of O. Ryo Yamaguchi rhapsodizes, if more quietly, in the mood of Keats when he exclaims “O for a Life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts!”:

O machine, O accord, I no longer ask the things I need
not ask . . .

the slow atmosphere of story has refused too long

to seat my rhythms, and I
have refused to elaborate myself through its lines.

His drama of sensate consciousness is based on the refusal (ergo the title) to follow the suit of narrative poetry, in favor of the mind’s free play. Yet one may legitimately ask, as we sometimes do of historical novels, whether the writer courts anachronism or rather renews the proposition. In the case of Yamaguchi, the answer is complex.

Many times I found myself wondering whether this one-vowel incantatory tendency was a tic or sprang organically from what I am tempted to call “new lyric.” “O youth, o conflagration, O end of summer parking lots”; “O office of elaborate letters, O remark”; “O here is the work”; “O John the Baptist”; “O hybridized floral shift.” All this is contained in a single poem, and there are many like it. Bemused, I could say at least that the tone is not ironic, as in Laurie Anderson’s suburbia-mocking “O Superman/O Mom and Dad.”

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