KISS
by Paul Kavanagh
She called me into the front room and told me to sit down in the comfy chair and then she leaned over and kissed me and then she kissed me again and then she kissed me again and then she kissed me again and then she kissed me again and then she kissed me again and then she kissed me again and then she kissed me again and then she kissed me again and then she kissed me again and then she kissed me again and then she kissed me again and then she kissed me again and then she kissed me again and then she kissed me again and then she kissed me again and then she kissed me again and then she straightened up, took a step back, rubbed her sore lips and then she said: “Now your story has more kisses than all the kisses in the books by Jane Austen.”
AT THE BEACH
by Debra S. Levy
When they pull in, the lot is crowded. In the distance, the sun begins descending behind a curtain of wispy clouds.
Water roils onto the sand and seagulls and plovers retreat to dry land. But the water recedes they jay-walk back onto the glistening surface, picking off lake flies and dead minnows.
The sun is a pink iris closing on a dappled blue-black sky.
Rest assured the world will come to an apocryphal end. You should never count your chickens before they fly the coop.
“I want a good tan,” the girl with the parrot tattoo on her shoulder says, spreading her blanket just so.
ZUMBA FEVER
by Nadia Laher
Saturday at Zumba there was a new song, one with a thumping electronic beat. Marie hated when there were new songs. She still had difficulty learning the routines they did every week, mastering such simple moves as simultaneously throwing her right arm in the air and kicking her left foot up. The instructor, Sierra, bopped around at the front of the room, clapping her hands together.
“It’s a new song, ladies! Time to jive!”
Marie could feel sweat sticking to her back underneath the big white t-shirt and loose black capris she wore. She’d found them on sale at Marshall’s, next to the racks of bright athletic clothing and spandex. Lenny had bought her a gym membership, insisting she stay active. She’d protested, but he used his trump card, said, “I want my kids to know their grandma for a long time, Ma” and she gave in. Now she watched the young girls dancing in their sleek running shorts and wished it were possible for her to feel less unappealing. She imagined them whispering about her, the fossil in the back row wearing all the clothing. Three rows of girls in front of her, and no one wore capris. But they were tan and toned, and she’d surrendered her legs to cellulite years ago. She eyed Sierra’s pink spandex tank top with envy.
“Get into it, ladies!” called Sierra, pushing her butt from side to side. “Let’s see those booties pump!”
JEEP, RED
by Donald Collins
She was the Mail Lady, an aging bleach-blond in jeans and bright fleece. All around campus there are poorly cropped images of her smiling face like “missing” flyers. I pass by one fast, and realize I am running.
My run finds me on the precise, mile-long road that surrounds our high school campus. The sun is rising, and everything is so beautiful and shines so brightly that I have to keep blinking. I don’t remember starting the run, but it’s easy to forget things you’ve done many times. There is something else I’m forgetting…
I’m late!
I cut my loop short, sprinting through our common up to the front of my dorm. I tug on the resistant handle, locked out, and recall the picture of my ID sitting on my desk.
There’s no one around so I break in, scaling the familiar lattice up to the second floor balcony. I pop the summer screen, and shiver through a thirty-second shower.
At 8:30 A.M. there is a memorial assembly for Jackie, our Mail Lady, who is dead.
◊
JUST READ
by Rebecca Lambright
When the power goes out, empty the refrigerator and put the perishables in a cooler full of ice. Assume that the bills weren’t paid and don’t ask questions. Light candles and do not speak. Time your showers, keep them short, ignore that they’re cold. When there isn’t enough food for everyone some nights, drink water to silence the hunger. Do your homework, go to bed. Take the foreclosure letters from the mail, put them in Dad’s briefcase, pretend you didn’t see them. When Mom is sad, hide the books. When Mom looks tired, hide the books. When Mom gets angry, hide the books, every time. You hide them because you know that she’ll look for them. Because you know that there is no money, Dad got them anyways. For you, he says. And once everything is calm again, read.
I grew up with these as my principal rules. I followed every one except for the rule about words. I wasn’t supposed to have them, read them, want them, or write them. Mom said words took you away from school, took you away from work, too you away from what you were supposed to be doing. But words were the one thing that there were always more of. Even if I had to pay for them, they could feed me over and over again. Words made me forget I was hungry and words made me forget that no one was smiling. Reading was my first rebellion.
Taylor RickettALLIGATOR TEETH Bite marks cut across your forearm, marking a half-circle below the elbow. The wound peeks at each end—a yellowed crescent, swollen arc of flesh— it has taken the shape of the alligator’s smile. Down to the water,…
BANGLE
by Gabriel Thibodeau
When she wears the bangle she feels so fucking good. Just look how it hoops her wrist like one of Saturn’s rings, how it knocks back and forth as she waves her hand, points at things. She’s hot shit when she wears the bangle.
She was wearing the bangle when she met the boy and hooked the boy and used him and used him and dropped him. He looked so small when she dropped him, like she’d shrunk him in half, like she was Saturn and he was some little moon. She’d been the moon a million times before, but now she has the bangle. She likes the way it slides to her elbow when she raises her hand and likes the way it hurts when it knocks back down. There are little marks around her wrist, little tiny bruises, little puckers of color. She pushes them with her thumb when she’s bored or anxious or when Dad gets loud downstairs.
OBSIDIAN BLUES # 36
by Herman Beavers
on the slaveship used to be,
a polemic blast of wind,
the mere hint of an
ache & somewhere a child
sadder than me, long gone
brother suffers through
yet another mention of this light
around me, a bright tumbling;
character, the falsest of alarms—
electricity shirring, doubt
scoffing this pyrophoric embrace
THE HURRICANE
by Gemini Wahhaj THE HURRICANE
by Gemini Wahhaj
At the time of the hurricane, they were both still working. A few days before the hurricane hit, Lila was getting on a plane to New York for an oil and gas conference.
At the time of the hurricane, they were both still working. A few days before the hurricane hit, Lila was getting on a plane to New York for an oil and gas conference. They called it Hurricane Ike on the radio, and people laughed when they heard the warning, since it followed warnings about so many other hurricanes that season that had failed to materialize. But this time it was real.
Lila saw Ike approach Houston on TV in her hotel room in New York. She tried to call Kamal but phone lines were down. Ike finally made landfall at night. Lila watched, minute by minute, as the giant, swirling cloud simulation of a category 4 tropical cyclone hit the speck that was supposed to be Houston. News of a train accident interrupted the hurricane coverage periodically, but mostly, during the days of the conference, all TV cameras stayed focused on Ike and Houston.
Heading home, on a flight to Atlanta (there were no flights available to Houston yet), Lila listened as the pilot made an announcement about the hurricane. Houston had been destroyed, he said. Windows had been knocked out from the high rises downtown. Trees had flattened houses to the ground. Entire neighborhoods had been flooded. This was terrible news to deliver to anyone cut off from family in Houston, trying to get home.
Lila buckled herself in her seat. She flagged down a tall, clean-shaven steward to ask him if he knew anything, but there was no way to glean any specific facts. For the first time in her life, Lila made a phone call from a plane. Although they made good money between them, their frugal, middle class South Asian habits had always precluded any temptation to make a luxury call from an airplane, until this disaster, which warranted a change.
OUR LADY OF THE MARVELOUS WRISTS
by Jennifer Moore
Conchita Cintrón, 1949
I killed my first kill in the slaughterhouse.
Stabbing oxen with a dagger was my drill.
One’s eyes must be open to one’s own horrors.
One’s eyes must be open to one’s own persona:
with training I became the Blue-Eyed Torera,
diosa rubia, the Blonde Goddess of the Arena.
THE CROWS
by Kathryn Hellerstein
We hear them before dawn in our dreams
And step through droppings
On the sidewalk in the morning.
Seeing no birds besides the usual sparrows,
We wonder, at first, if geese were
Driven up from the river by the night's rain.
At dusk, I walk with my daughter.
Through the deepening light, black arrowheads
By the hundreds swarm over the treetops,
Glide, and settle indifferently, caw, grow silent,
Caw, in a circle of branches.
I spin around with my face to the sky.
ATLANTICA
by Ernest Hilbert
At a touch, the pane of ice jigsaws, cracks
To diamond scatter, hard cold clouds
Clustered against a mountain chain.
One large shard holds its shape, tracks
Its slow starfish way down the windshield, crowds
Out ever smaller nicks of ice. The rain
Will soon steal its contours, but for a while
It is my continent, rhododendron,
Moth wing, milk spill, embryo, no Atlantis
Or Antarctica, but a sunken isle
I’ve named Atlantica, frozen cauldron
Filled with cold storms, a far home, locked atlas,
Fighting to recall a word and reclaim
Myself from a place that has taken my name.
TALLBOY
by Rachel Hochhauser
Aaron and Irene married in a public park with a large green lawn, though the ceremony was in the shaded woody part, where small acorns covered the ground and caught in guests’ shoes. It was a late marriage for Aaron, and a second for Irene. Her first husband, an architect, wasn’t invited. In the crowd there were familiar faces. Aaron’s college friends, bearded, stood together.
They’d all known each other at Penn and trickled out west, following one by one like senior citizens to early retirement. They met for bagels on Saturdays. At the reception, they sat at one table, alternating with their wives.
The celebration wasn’t ostentatious — simple. The groom sold magazine ad space and the bride was a painter. Irene used oils to recreate local landscapes and sold canvasses to tourists. She’d done the planning herself. Tables and cloths rented from a party supplier, champagne and a middlebrow merlot. There was no bridal party or best man, but Stuart, who had been Aaron’s college roommate, gave the toast.
He faced the crowd as he spoke, and though he had not planned the speech, the words found themselves. They reflected the convivial warmth their group felt toward one another, and the history and integrity of their happiness. Stuart enjoyed knowing that he could evoke those feelings and that he was viewed as good. As he finished, the lowering sun warmed the audience’s faces and foreheads so that they reflected his goodness back toward him. After the party, his wife, Diane, took one of the homemade centerpieces.
AFTER VALLEJO
(Theme and variations)
by Conor Kelly
I
I shall die, César Vallejo wrote,
in Paris on a day of heavy showers,
on a day I already remember,
a Thursday, perhaps, and in the autumn.
He died in Paris, true; but in the spring –
Good Friday, April 15 1938.
As to whether or not it rained on those roads
he ceased to feel, alone, I cannot recall.
César Vallejo is dead (of a strange disease).
Everyone kept on hitting him for no good cause.
They hit him hard with a cane and hard,
as well, with a rope; his testament:
the body blows of life, the shoulder pain,
the solitude, incessant rain, the roads…
FIVE FLASH PIECES
by Emily Grelle
1.
Shell of an Aphrodisiac
Lathered in shampoo, her hair became like sea foam embracing knotted driftwood, limbs exfoliating on the shore. Her flesh was turning pink from such long exposure to the shower head’s hot prick, and the moon’s white hot eye lit up with the glee of a voyeur, peeping through darkness at a celestial body in motion. Razor in hand, she mutilated every hair that dared leave its follicle inside her. She had no room in her life for hairy situations, and she inwardly thanked the shower for demanding that she curtain herself off from the world at least once a day. Sometimes she would pretend she was a pearl, safely clasped in the tub’s hard enamel shell. If she wanted free, she could slither out, never clammy but like an oyster—a moist, labial aphrodisiac to be swallowed up by tongues of towels. And yet she was afraid of water—the taste of it repulsed her. To drink it felt like subjecting her insides to a bath in which there was no soap, no sponge, no scented crystals, only a cesspool of phlegm and bile. She was glad when the gurgle of the drain proclaimed the downfall of moistness. Her feet were the only part of her whose allegiance to water made itself known in shapeless prints upon the floor, but even these did not stay fastened to her nails for long. She would sic her slippers on this part of her that someone had so aptly labeled ‘heel,’ and the sound of their synthetic soles when they slapped the floor for its insubordinate behavior would carry her forward, deliver her to drier ground. The mirror was the final frontier. At the face-off she knew to enlist an army of Q-tips to help her come clean completely—she’d plant their shafts so deep inside her ears, that drums of war would seem to sing and plead. Its head erect and seeing stars, the moon would watch and wax and shoot off comets at the height of heaven.
Bruce AlfordSTUDY TO BE QUIET I live, I say, and language lays itself open through the movement of the earth: green-gold grass upright, virginal flowers, husky insects secretly courting life; shadows, cirrus touching, trailing off ice crystals in cloud, falling…
TONY
by Elizabeth Alexander
We were running through the Shepherd’s Woods down by Yalloway Creek and across from the schoolyard. We were running because Tony had said he wanted to and I had said that that sounded fine, and so we ran. When we reached the Gap, that’s the wide space between one side of the Woods and the other where the ground falls away and you can see the Creek squeeze through rocks at the bottom, I jumped over. Tony stopped and wouldn’t do it, so I said “C’mon Ton—! Don’t be a chicken!” And he hated when I called him that, and I suppose that’s what did it. And I suppose that’s why his mum won’t meet my eye when I look at her across the pew.
THE 8TH HOUSE
by Feng Sun Chen
Black Ocean Press, 93 pages
reviewed by Johnny Payne
Aphorism is the thought slot of our time. Philosophy has turned cuneiform. The ambitious poem-cycles that might once have been written through urgent, incessant movement, seeking enjambment as a fugitive does a street corner, with muscular metaphors in hot pursuit, now favor the end-stop.
Feng Sun Chen, in The 8th House, practices this art of the succinct.
No organism is ashamed under the knife.
A woman’s body is an angel factory.
When I pick up a book and open it, it is dead.
Even in Chen’s first person stanzas, we get a colder intellect, rendering emotional candor into sedate masochism.
I like it when you look at me with disdain.
I say things that make you want to hurt me.
This is the real thing, severe as winter
part icicle that cannot be smashed
part that parts leaves nothing to fill, only futility fills.
But although nothing free-floats, it’s hard to point to a firm scheme. The principle of recursive imagery, twining time and again around the broken spine, holds this book together more than any set of explicit ideas. Most of all, there is the image of water. “The dead lover seeks wetness;” “Very moist and quiet and dripping;” Manatees mistaken for mermaids, steaming shame, magma, jelly, tar, spinal lubricant, mucus, foam, dark lymph, viscosity of wood, and of course the sea. Feng Su Chen signifies in effluent images, in a long concatenation that expresses itself as an extended thought wave. To this extent, she revives the spirit of the poem-cycle, and it is chiefly in this way that she resembles those expansive bards seeking to create the über poem.
UNDOING THE DEMOS: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution
by Wendy Brown
Zone Books/MIT Press, 296 Pages
reviewed by Irami Osei-Frimpong
“SEN. KIRK: RE-ELECT RAHM OR CHICAGO COULD END UP LIKE DETROIT,” reads the Chicago Sun-Times headline.
In the ensuing article, Illinois Sen. Mark Kirk argues that the bond market supporting Chicago's debt would be a better fit with current mayor Rahm Emanuel leading the city, rather than challenger Jesus “Chuy” Garcia. Those of us who care about democracy wonder if democratic self-determination—whether defined minimally as self-rule, or, more robustly, as participating in popular sovereignty—is extinguished when one's vote is determined by the bond market and its assessments. This is the question U.C. Berkeley Professor Wendy Brown explores up in her latest book, Undoing the Demos.
Moody's does not have a citizen's concern for public schools, parks, museums, local ecology, or Chicago's other common institutions. Yet these are the political conditions through which citizens find meaning in their lives. For those of us who care about democracy, the worry is whether the authority of finance capital on our political imagination relegates democratic citizenship to being simply the medium through which the investment market controls public life.
THE GUILD OF SAINT COOPER
by Shya Scanlon
Dzanc Books, 413 pages
reviewed by Justin Goodman
“Spasms of the diaphragm,” the twentieth century theorist Walter Benjamin remarks, “generally offer better chances for thought than spasms of the soul.” And who hasn’t been convinced, softened to a position, by comedy? This is the principal of Shya Scanlon’s newest novel, The Guild of Saint Cooper, which returns to the self-conscious comedy, and literary meditation, of his first novel, Forecast.
That Scanlon’s circled back after writing Border Run—geographically too, from Seattle to Arizona to Seattle—is unsurprising, since it was clear his ideas preferred spasms of the diaphragm. But a novel of so much laughter can betray itself; watching mildly funny Youtube videos with friends in an uproar is a similar feeling. It’s a dare not to laugh, a dare not to take the laughter sincerely, and thus create the irreparable distance.
The Guild of Saint Cooper begins in waiting, and being “tired of waiting.” Blake Williams, narrator and, in Scanlon’s meta-structure, author of Forecast, has returned to his mother’s house to wait for their emergency radio to “roar to life and announce the collapse of the Ross Ice Shelf…trigger a tsunami…and Seattle would cease to exist.” His mother waits for her cancer to claim her, and he waits for his writer’s block to claim him. It is a liminal period. Yet it progresses smoothly, and much like Forecast it stands between the oracle and the satirist.
THE GREAT FLOODGATES OF THE WONDERWORLD
by Justin Hocking
Graywolf Press, 266 pages
reviewed by Ana Schwartz
“Grand Programmes of Providence”
Boys can be so mysterious, so closed off with their feelings. Surely they must feel things. But what are they feeling? And what are they thinking about those feelings? Why don’t they talk about those feelings? What do they expect women to do, simply divine those feelings like a barometer at sea—blind to the gathering clouds, deaf to the sound of the gulls and the waves, unable to smell the saltiness of the air? What is the deep wonderworld of a boy’s mind? What do boys want?
Let’s get this out of the way: According to Justin Hocking, it’s not not sex. In his recent memoir, The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld, Hocking shows that boys also want emotional gratification that often, coincidentally, happens with sexual encounters. And he wants it pretty badly. He might even want it as badly as Ahab wants revenge on the white whale. Hocking’s desire—his addiction—certainly leads him to some strange and dicey situations, and, like Ahab’s quest, often has harmful effects on the people surrounding him. Hocking makes many analogies to characters and situations in Melville’s epic novel. Comparing his life quest for emotional fulfillment with Ahab’s vengeful leadership of the Pequod is only one, and a relatively undeveloped parallel at that.
OUR ENDLESS NUMBERED DAYS
by Claire Fuller
Tin House Books, 388 pages
reviewed by Elizabeth Mosier
Claire Fuller’s mesmerizing novel begins with a black-and-white photograph from 1976: the once-upon-a-time that her narrator, 17-year-old Peggy Hillcoat, is trying nine years later to recall.
The picture opens a window into a living room in Highgate, London, where a group of so-called “Retreaters,” among them Peggy’s father James, meet to discuss their defense against environmental and economic catastrophe. In the photo, eight-year-old Peggy’s image is blurred; she’s being led from the room by her disapproving mother Ute, while James clenches his fists and Oliver Hannington, his sinister-seeming friend, smiles “as though he wanted posterity to know he wasn’t really interested in the group’s plans for self-sufficiency and stockpiling.”
But memory is partly projection; for Peggy, the photo is like a magic mirror, reflecting what she knows unconsciously but can’t yet claim. Her sudden, strange behavior after looking at it—using scissors to cut around her father’s face, then slicing off her bra and tucking his image beneath her breast—is the reader’s first clue that the “bloody Armageddon” she’s trying to recover is an entirely different disaster from the kind these survivalists predict.
THE SUGAR BOOK
by Johannes Goransson
Tarpaulin Sky Press, 184 pages
reviewed by Johnny Payne
Antonin Artaud gave us the Theater of Cruelty. He “for whom delirium was/the only solution/to the strangulation/that life had prepared for him.”
Now Johannes Garson, in the ironically named The Sugar Book, gives us a poetry of cruelty. It is the necessary car wreck that brings the Jaws of Life. The book is a whisky genre-bender in a haunted Los Angeles, where the “I” walks out on his son, fucks the homeless, reflects on scrotums, obsesses about tits, his hard-on, hot bitches, taxes, capitalism, the value of poetry (it’s worthless), noctuid larvae, and “the sepulchral chambers of the law.” Like many outrageous, seemingly misanthropic writers, he is at heart a moralist. The first section in fact contains a poem about immigration (as always, among many other topics). “The Law Against Foreigners Involves Mostly the Body” offers this withering insight:
It’s also interested in my body when dogs bark at my
genitals but it pretends that’s just evidence of a social
conscience. It wants to find the human in me, even if it
takes ripping this lamb mask into a thousand shreds and
hanging it up on the wall.
And feign outrage when I grow numb.
The speaker’s scathing appraisals scald himself, because conscientious objector or not, he is part of the law. Political poetry often gets a deserved bad name, but Garson hits themes hard yet moves along, often in the very next phrase, to trenchant comic appraisals of his own filthy habits, lit up by indeterminacy.
PREPARATION FOR THE NEXT LIFE
by Atticus Lish
Tyrant, 417 pages
reviewed by Jamie Fisher
If civilization ended tomorrow and had to be reconstructed based on Preparation for the Next Life, our descendants could get reasonably far with Atticus Lish's instruction manual. They could learn, for instance, how correctional officers respond to an incident in the yard. Or how to eat a hot dog:
The guy whose house it was’s woman brought out a tray of hotdogs and set it on the coffee table, which was behind them. The plumber turned around and said thank you, hon. There's relish, she said. She sat down on the couch, which was behind the coffee table, and spooned relish on a hotdog and bit into it with her hand cupped under it and chewed.
In Preparation for the Next Life, Lish fixates on certain details. Notice how insistent he is on the geography of the living room, seemingly at the expense of almost everything else besides the hot dog. No one says much in this well-appointed room and not much happens—here or anywhere. The nearest metaphor for the novel may be a heavily upholstered room in which no one talks, really, about anything. The plot, such that it is, feels light. The structure is non-existent. Still, Lish wants to make the room look busy. So we have lazy boys, kitchenettes, sofa-beds; bodegas, E-Verify, the military-penal complex. At the end, gripped by the anxiety of moving, he decides the best way to leave the room would be to set it on fire.
THE BOATMAKER
by John Benditt
Tin House Books, 451 pages
reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster
The intersection of poetry and prose is a rough sea, with deep, sometimes misleading currents. Some writers adapt poetry easily to fiction. Lyrical language works by adding texture to the plot; in some cases, it is the plot, as in flash fiction or more experimental forms. However, it doesn't compensate for shallow storytelling. John Benditt's novel The Boatmaker suffers from just this imbalance of plot and language, and the book founders from scene to scene, never quite finding its depth.
This isn't a reflection of the author's abilities; Benditt has credentials out the wazoo, including a stint as editor-in-chief at Technology Review: MIT's Magazine of Innovation. He also was awarded the John Russell Hayes Poetry Prize. The shift to fiction seems natural for such a talented writer, but the adaptation doesn't come easily and makes The Boatmaker a long, dull slog through all-too-predictable terrain. Alcoholic geniuses, bad guys, run-of-the-mill anti-Semites, women tormented by their emotions: it's all too familiar, and Benditt adds little new or surprising to these threadbare tropes.
At its core The Boatmaker is an epic tale. The nameless main character awakens from a fever dream possessed by a desire to build a boat and sail to the mainland from his tiny island. An intemperate drinker, the boatmaker wanders in and out of sobriety, crossing paths with beggars, thieves, a priest, and workers of all stripes. These encounters unfortunately feel increasingly contrived; imagine Nathaniel Hawthorne stranded in Finland and you'll have a good idea of how this unfolds.
FOURTEEN STORIES, NONE OF THEM ARE YOURS
by Luke B. Goebel
FC2, 167 pages
reviewed by Jacob White
The pleasure of reading Luke Goebel’s little big first novel, Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours, comes less, it seems, from the pages themselves than from the palpable life-lust ripping past them, sloughing them off. The release of this energy is of course exactly a function of the novel form, yet the feat feels entirely new here, or newly realized. This monologue is running for its life, splitting the novel’s formal seams with intrusions to qualify retrospective distance or the shifting narrative present, the parentheses and brackets gaping wider and wider to reveal the fevered flesh beneath. In the narrator’s racing panic, we feel the pages tattering loose from his arms before finally snapping behind him with the wind into the crazy nothing. “Books are over,” the book concludes, and rarely indeed has a book been so humbled by the thing it contains. Life moves through these pages, and our joy—our elation—is seeing the pages struggle, and fail, to keep up.
I suppose each of Fourteen Stories’ chapters revolves around a particular story or anecdote, but in each the particulars get stirred loose in the turbulence and we’re left largely with the wind-shunt of its passing. But the situation more or less is this: Our narrator is undone by the death of an older brother, the loss of a girlfriend, humiliation by a mentor, and a peyote ceremony that, he says, “took me off the planet but I’m still on the planet.” The world is no longer a recognizable thing, nor is the self, so he acquires an RV, into whose aft all of this furniture goes sloshing...
LEAVETAKING
by Peter Weiss
translated by Christopher Levenson
with an introduction by Sven Birkerts
Melville House Publishing, 125 pages
reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster
The late years of adolescence are the torch on the sugar of the artist's will to create. Forgive the metaphor; I won't extend it. But as I was reading Peter Weiss' novella-slash-memoir Leavetaking, I couldn't help but think of my father, cracking into a crème brûlée with the backside of a spoon. I do not recall the restaurant, the rest of the meal, or the occasion, but I can remember clearly the strong, decided crack of the spoon against the caramelized crust and my father's white shirt cuffs and the satisfied look on his face as the dessert shattered, fragments piercing like shrapnel the smooth, sweet cream. My father has always done things with precision; I know him as someone who deliberates, and is a model of patience although he does not enjoy waiting. When he left home, it was time. We knew our exits just as we acknowledged the brief silence between courses, the arrival of a new dish on its small, white plate.
TIME PRESENT AND TIME PAST
by Deirdre Madden
Europa Editions, 161 pages
reviewed by Annika Neklason
I wonder, sometimes, what it would be like to meet my family for the first time. What it would be like to look at them as strangers, to know nothing more about them than what I could see in their faces and their clothing and the way they moved to introduce themselves.
It seems like an impossible task, separating the people from the years I’ve spent growing up with them and the years I’ll spend growing old with them. Maybe more than anything else, family is a matter of shared time. Of photo albums full of baby pictures and accumulated Christmas and birthday presents and long, fidgety car trips to half-remembered vacation spots. Family is this weight of shared history, both experienced and inherited, and of shared futures that are always looming over every exchange of goodnights, or goodbyes.
WE’LL GO TO CONEY ISLAND
by Barbara Scheiber
Sowilo Press, 246 pages
reviewed by Ashlee Paxton-Turner
With all the recent speculation about octogenarians releasing novels, it’s exhilarating, and reassuring, to read Barbara Scheiber’s sweeping first novel, published last year when the author was 92.
We’ll Go to Coney Island, which was 30 years in the writing, tells a semi-autobiographical story about one family across generations, with a mother’s secret as the thread that connects everyone. The story is a set of relationships, conflicts, and memories as time passes. Scheiber was formerly a radio producer for NBC, and in 1975, she was involved in drafting the Education for All Handicapped Children Act.
The book’s cover is a Walker Evans photograph of the backs of a man and woman at Coney Island. Evans took the photograph, which captures the scene Scheiber describes on the page one, in 1928. The Metropolitan Museum of Art featured it as a signature poster for a retrospective of the photographer’s work in 2000.
There is double-meaning to the photograph’s use as the cover illustration for We’ll Go to Coney Island: the man in the image is Scheiber’s father, Harry A. Gair, and the woman is Harriet, his lover and later Barbara’s stepmother.
The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion
by Meghan Daum
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 244 pages
reviewed by Jamie Fisher
Authenticity is Her Bag
So here's the problem with coma stories: not everyone gets a coma story. Life-threatening medical emergencies chased closely by miraculous recoveries are, for most of us, in short supply. People who do find themselves with a coma story shouldn't be surprised when friends, relatives, and neighbors want a piece of it. They want your Ninety Minutes in Heaven, absent the ignominious retraction. They want to know how your near-death experience has changed you, brought you closer to God. They want your spiritual lesson, and they will be insistent.
Meghan Daum’s coma story caps off what you might call a tough year. First her grandmother died, then her mother. Then she began to feel woozy with grief or flu, except that it turned out to be flea-transmitted typhus that knocked her prone on a hospital bed, hovering for days in a medically induced coma. Her total recovery is so unanticipated that her neurologist is prompted to call it miraculous. (Not the word you want to hear from the man with his tools inside your skull, Daum observes.) Because she is a writer, her friends request a “coma story”. But it seems unfair to expect anything beyond a convalescence. Daum is satisfied with coming out of the crisis with her personality, and basic motor skills, intact. “And in this story, I am not a better person. I am the same person. This is a story with a happy ending. Or at least something close enough.”
THE CAPTAIN’S DAUGHTER
by Alexander Pushkin
translated by Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler
NYRB, 170 pages
reviewed by Derek M. Brown
Originally published in 1836, The Captain’s Daughter is a fictionalized account of a historical rebellion against the administration of Catherine II. The novel first appeared in English as Marie: A Story of Russian Love. In this edition, Robert and Elizabeth Chandler defy the sentiments of Robert Frost, who once declared that “poetry is what gets lost in translation.” In this edition, all the richness, humor, and poetry for which Pushkin is celebrated, is lovingly preserved. The Chandlers’ translation will undoubtedly carry mass appeal for a modern readership.
Alexander Pushkin
Alexander Pushkin
In The Captain’s Daughter, Pushkin’s protagonist, Pyotr Andreyich Grinyov, the son of a lieutenant colonel, is “enrolled as a sergeant in the Semyonov regiment while still in [his] mother’s womb,” that he may be placed in a regiment befitting someone of his class and rank upon the completion of his studies, which he undertakes while “on leave.” Expecting to serve in the Guards, which he equates with “freedom and the joys of life in Petersburg,” his temperamental father is determined to have him “serve in the real army,” where he will “toil and sweat and smell gunpowder.”
Under the care of his father’s huntsman, Savelich, he is taken to a remote village, where he falls in love with his captain’s daughter. Soon, chaste pursuits in an idyllic setting, replete with snow-covered steppes, are interrupted by the intervention of a brigand, Pugachov, who has assumed the name and identity of the late emperor, Peter III. Intent upon overthrowing the imperial family and demolishing the nobility, Pugachov appeals to the disenfranchised and radicalizes them much as criminal organizations and terrorist groups do today. Although Pyotr’s fortress is eventually sacked, he is spared by this imposter, whom he unwittingly saved from freezing after giving him a hare-skin coat during a violent snowstorm preceding the emergence of his rebellion.
BOMBYONDER
by Reb Livingston
Bitter Cherry Books, 346 pages
reviewed by Brent Terry
Welcome to the crater. Keep your head down, your eyes open, and try not to lose your lunch…or your mind. Your guide on this journey is one of literature’s most unreliable narrators: a murderous, narcissistic, yet oddly appealing young woman on a quest through the bombed-out wreckage of her own psyche, in search of a past she can hang her hat on, a future that tells the truth, the real nature of her bomb-maker father’s legacy, and a little birdy that might make everything turn out okay.
Reb Livingston’s literary forbears are legion. In this compellingly daft, lyrical, and mind-expanding novel we find traces of Sophocles, Lewis Carrol, Vonnegut, the Nabokov of Pale Fire, Hunter S. Thompson, Gertrude Stein, and Shelley—both of them—all run through the cerebral cortex of Tim Burton, put in a pill and swallowed whole by Livingston, the effect of which is an acid-trip of a novel that requires every bit of guile and courage a reader can muster. Livingston is best known as a poet, (with two critically acclaimed books and a Best American Poetry appearance to her credit) and her poetic sensibilities guide this book: not magical realism, but hyper-realism smashed to bits and reassembled, reanimated, and turned loose among the unsuspecting villagers.
THINK TANK
by Julie Carr
Solid Objects, 82 pages
reviewed by Johnny Payne
The first order of a book of poetry, irrespective of its particular style, is to give pleasure. It’s that simple. Whatever releases the dopamine from the nucleus accumbens qualifies. This was my experience with Julie Carr’s Think Tank. I suspended immediate comprehension, simply following the text’s pulses and impulses. Pick a through line: trail the images from start to finish, or the sounds, until understanding accumulates like dewdrops on a Maine slicker.
This is a volume of extraordinary discipline, cerebral yet appealing, loose and playful:
Yeast minutes leap to
swamp the city’s borders
or,
Honk geese: soprano, duck duck
hobbles, belly first a girl-falcon spins
or,
a headlock is to a hat as a tourniquet is to a condom
a headlock is to a hat as a paring knife is to tongue
I could go on giving examples.
LEARNING CYRILLIC
by David Albahari
translated by Ellen Elias-Bursać
Dalkey Archive, 189 pages
reviewed by Jon Busch
Printed on the cover of renowned Serbian author David Albahari’s most recent short fiction collection, Learning Cyrillic (his seventh book to be translated into English), is an excerpt from a review, “A Kafka for our times…” As I read the twenty plus stories in the collection, this short passage stuck with me. I was taken aback and distracted by how little resemblance to Kafka I found. Unlike Kafka, who never breaks role and keeps the fourth wall strong, Albahari entertains a great allowance of postmodern play—with frequent narrative breaks and ruminations on meaning and text. With the exception of, “The Basilica in Lyon,” about two-thirds into the collection, there is slight trace of Kafka. And even in this piece, the resemblance is superficial and lies solely in the use of a labyrinth setting.
THE SCAPEGOAT
by Sophia Nikolaidou
translated from the Greek by Karen Emmerich
Melville House Publishing, 237 pages
reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin
In Greece, the perennial crisis of confidence in political institutions has worsened since the economic crash of 2008, leaving young people particularly disenfranchised and disillusioned (“New Party Capitalizes on Greeks’ Loss of Faith in Their Leaders,” says the Times on January 21st). The writer Sophia Nikolaidou confronts the disillusionment in The Scapegoat, a neatly kaleidoscopic stirring of a novel, her first to be translated into English. Nikolaidou, in Karen Emmerich’s swift translation, connects the present anxiety to the1948 murder of the American journalist George Polk (the namesake of the prestigious Polk Awards), who had been investigating Greece’s corrupt right-wing government during the nation’s Civil War. Fearing the loss of U.S. aid, the Greek government pinned the murder on Grigoris Staktopoulos, a journalist and one-time communist. Evidence was thin to non-existent and, as in the Nisman case in Argentina, hardly anyone felt they would ever learn the truth.
THE DOOR
by Magda Szabó
translated by Len Rix
introduction by Ali Smith
New York Review Books, 262 pages
reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster
Some types of love cannot be corralled, as narrator Magda finds in the legendary Hungarian novelist Magda Szabó's novel The Door, originally published in 1987 and now out in a new English translation by Len Rix. These other kinds of love are elemental—the way the Greek heroes were, in their mythological stature—and too terrible to share the flimsy mantel “love” with puppy-dog eyes and Valentine cards.
The person in whom Magda discovers this other kind of love is Emerence Szeredas. Magda and her husband, both writers in a time when it was politically difficult to be an artist in Hungary, hire Emerence to keep house for them. Emerence is known as a hard worker, despite being in her 70s. She cares for many families in the neighborhood, not out of necessity, it seems, but from a sense of pride. “I don't wash just anyone's dirty linen,” she says. After checking Magda's references, she begins working for the couple, and her relationship with Magda begins to take shape.
LEAVING APPALACHIA: Overlap in Poetic Landscapes
by Julia Paganelli
In August, I stuffed my summer dresses and cooking implements into a Toyota and trekked eighteen hours from Appalachia to the Ozarks. I’ve been tallying the difference between the mountain ranges.
Appalachia is older than the Ozarks—cliffs softer. More oil painting than chiseled sculpture.
I’ve been reading up on architecture. In the book Why We Build: Power and Desire in Architecture, Rowan Moore writes, “Where things get interesting is when desire and built space change each other, when animate and inanimate interplay” (19). Of course, Moore is referring to the architect her structures, but I’ve approached these theories otherwise. I’ve approached as poet to landscape.
Moore states, “Architecture is experienced as background or not at all” (91). An architect fails when she creates a place that cannot be added to by he who lives there. Landscape is meant to be lived into, as are poems.
HOW YOU WERE BORN
by Kate Cayley
Pedlar Press, 152 pages
reviewed by Michelle Fost
How You Were Born is an archive of anxiety. In the story “Young Hennerly,” Robert Browne gets out of being drafted to Vietnam by being a student of American folklore. His work involves interviewing older people from around the country and collecting their stories. He’s heard many times variations of the story Annie Reardon tells him. As a girl she was warned to stay away from the men in the trees, and especially the dangerous man who lives under a great rock. That man is so hungry, the story goes, that if he sees you he might eat you! Something about Annie Reardon’s telling spooks Robert Browne. When he drives past a huge rock and a man materializes out of nowhere at the side of his car and looking for a lift, it’s clear that our inner worlds hold fears that can’t be escaped as easily as the draft.
There is plenty of danger and darkness in How You Were Born. The narrator of “Blind Poet” might be providing a blueprint for many of the stories when she says, “A stranger arrives, pounds on the door, or shows up at the foot of your bed; you ask them in, even if they are soaked with rain, battered by wind, and dangerous, even if they are worse than dangerous.”
THE POET’S “I”: DISTANCE THROUGH FIRST-PERSON
by Katie Rensch
In a recent conversation with a group of mixed-genre writers, it came to my attention that we were all writing in the first-person, well, more or less. In fiction, we call the first-person the “main character”, in poetry we say the “speaker” of the poem, and in nonfiction it’s the writer’s name because the “I” must, by definition, be the person writing. We might just call these labels for the first-person simply labels. Character, speaker, writer –is there really any difference? I would like to think the “I,” that one small, vertical line, one letter, was so simple.
Because voice is a basic element of craft we are encouraged to think no true distinction exists between genres. As writers we enjoy the simple rules of voice because it gives us boundaries. We have three choices: first-, second-, or third-person. In my own reading and writing of poetry, though, I have noticed a great capacity for the use of the first-person voice, and I’ve come to understand it as a gesture, one that is possible in all three modes of voice.
Lately I’m drawn to Elizabeth Bishop’s Geography III (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1971) and the way the first-person voice draws distance between the speaker’s voice and the body, the natural world, and place. In her often matter-of-fact voice, Bishop navigates the geography of our human landscape. In these poems, I find a skilled craftsman who uses the first-person in nearly all her poems –even ones that on the surface seem to be in second- or third-person. These poems expose the ability of the “I” to create both intimacy and distance.
YOU'LL ENJOY IT WHEN YOU GET THERE
The Stories of Elizabeth Taylor
by Elizabeth Taylor
selected by Margaret Drabble
New York Review Books, 428 pages
reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster
No, the other Elizabeth Taylor. The English one, who you've never heard of. The one who was a librarian and a governess, because that was still a thing in England in the 1930s, before marrying a businessman, which was also a thing and a perfectly acceptable in terms of occupations for men, prior to the invention of career terminology like “Lead Regional Response Liason” and “Customer Solutions Engineer.” It was a different world, in which you could be a writer and a housewife at the same time, and wear white gloves and talcum powder, and have a lover, and have two sets of riveted china, whatever that is. It is a world Taylor describes perfectly in her story “The Benefactress,” in which people “kept to themselves, drank their own tea in their own kitchens, used surnames, passed a few remarks, perhaps, when they met by chance in the graveyard or weeding their garden plots or, dressed in their best, waiting for the bus to go to the village and draw their pensions.” Every peg has its right hole. In unfamiliar circumstances, the characters' familiarity with rightness changes.
AND THE GIRLS WORRIED TERRIBLY
by Dot Devota
Noemi Press, 80 pages
Dot Devota, in her book, And the Girls Worried Terribly, puts aside marriage to man, woman, or God and marries self to self. Through bizarre and delightful celebration imagery, Devota leads us to conception through physical and mental violence.
Devota’s title has been carefully selected from a caption in Oliver Statler’s The Black Ship Scroll. In this historical work, Statler writes of an instance when Japanese singing girls were to have their photographs taken by foreigners, “and the girls worried terribly,” that “the soul might leave to take up residence in the ‘new self.’” It is from the concept of these two selves that Devota’s book is threaded and spun.
Even from the start, in frantic, dream-like sequences, the reader encounters creatures spawning from a vibrant and rapidly shifting earth—both of which are dependent upon the speaker. Bees, compared to champagne bubbles, become excited by mascara-laden eyelashes instead of blooming flowers. In this universe, bees are drawn to women instead of natural blooms— connecting nature to the self in alluring and magnifying ways. The speaker, in fact, finds her voice “amplified” by nature in her poem “iii...
HOW AMERICANS MAKE RACE:
Stories, Institutions, Spaces
by Clarissa Rile Hayward
Cambridge University Press, 234 Pages
In How Americans Make Race, Clarissa Rile Hayward argues that the persistence of racialized spaces is not merely a matter of the remarkable, particular stories individuals tell themselves about themselves; rather, racism persists because of the way racialized commitments are embedded in the unremarkable narrative context, the physical objects and the mundane habits of thought and action, that serve as the unacknowledged backdrop of White community space. If Jill's identity emerges from stories told against a backdrop of political investment: strong public schools, smooth roads, well-paid teachers, etc., then Jill will have a hard time making sense of herself in a space characterized by political disinvestment. This second space will be felt as hostile in an existential way, even though the space may not be any more physically dangerous.
Hayward argues against the “narrative identity thesis,” the notion that racial identities are matter of the narratives we tell ourselves about ourselves. She argues that, while this thesis can explain how Americans produce race through narrating racial hierarchies and racialized aspirations, the thesis cannot account for how racism is persistently reproduced, once the initial racist narrative identities evolve into seemingly race-neutral stories. Recall our White church. A feature of the church's Whiteness is how it participates in an institutionalized context that is normalized to omit reference to King, even as a large share of American church life embraces the opportunity to remember the pastor and civil rights icon. It is important to remember how this church is White even if every congregant individually embraces a gospel of inclusion and rejects their forebears’ explicitly racist beliefs; however, it is these racist forebears who put the church on an ethnically White path by institutionalizing a context that disproportionately depreciates King's relevance for the life of their church.
EVERLASTING LANE
by Andrew Lovett
Melville House, 353 pages
reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster
Why do we think that childhood is a golden, untouchable idyll? Childhood is horrible; even the happy, non-traumatic ones, stuffed with loving family, good food, summer vacations, and abundant laughter, weigh on us.
As we pass through the gates of maturity, moving towards our adult selves, we forget the burden of being a child. Proust, with his Sisyphean sentences, knew. Roddy Doyle knew it, wrote it into his perfect novel Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha. And Andrew Lovett knows it. His first novel, Everlasting Lane, captures the dreaminess of childhood, and the small details that make it nightmarish as well.
I had a particularly fine childhood, in case you wondered. My parents were kind and affectionate. There were picnics. Ice cream. I liked school, and was allowed to read whatever I wanted. In the summers, my sister and I went to stay with our grandparents. On the weekends, we listened to bluegrass music in the park, hiked in the woods, and rode our bikes around the nearby lake. I do not say that childhood is horrible because mine was. I say it, because childhood is a time of incredible tension between the awakening mind, and the restrictions of being a young person. Children are not allowed to make their own decisions, usually. They do not choose what they will do, how they will behave, when or what they will eat, or what they will study. All these things are decided for them, by the grownups who care about them. For better or worse, children are slowly tamed by their parents and teachers.
THE OPPOSITE OF LONELINESS
by Marina Keegan
Scribner, 240 pages
reviewed by Colleen Davis
There’s a stretch of Philly’s Walnut Street Bridge that makes me tap my brakes. I’m not a slow driver by nature, but that corner with the new streetlight always makes me reduce speed. About a year ago, a young man lost his life right there, when two cars collided. As one of the vehicles spun onto the sidewalk, Zachary Woods climbed the streetlight to avoid the car. Unfortunately the vehicle knocked both man and lamppost over the bridge. If the story isn’t sad enough, consider how talented Zachary was: he’d received dual admission to the MBA program at the Wharton School and a selective International Business program with the Lauder Institute. The guy was fluent in Chinese, skilled in international investment, and a record-breaking NCAA swimmer. No calculator is sophisticated enough to tally what the world lost during that crash.
The memory of this incident haunted me as I read The Opposite of Loneliness, a collection of pieces written by Marina Keegan. Her title essay scored more than a million Internet hits shortly after its online publication. Marina, whose lovely smile adorns the book jacket, earned a Bachelor’s Degree, Magna Cum Laude from Yale, and had a job offer at The New Yorker. But her promising life ended in a car crash just five days after her graduation ceremony. You can read the book to commemorate her life and talent—or read it just to be impressed by the skills a young person can acquire when fully immersed in the craft of writing.
RED JUICE: POEMS 1998–2008
by Hoa Nguyen
Wave Books, 245 pages
reviewed by Kenna O’Rourke
Hoa Nguyen is a poetic tease: her retrospective Red Juice is a decade’s-worth of poetry that tantalizes with glimpses of self-awareness and familiarity just as soon as the lines lose you in non sequitur and obscurity. The poet flutters between intense clarity and seeming nonsense (albeit eloquent nonsense), forcing the reader to dwell over her deceptively short poems, grappling with gut-reactions to the way the work appears on the page.
Reading the book becomes an accomplishment, a brain teaser; steeping the simple language in one’s thoughts to draw out the meaning seems as much a part of Nguyen’s poetry as the words themselves. For all of its length, Red Juice is rewarding—its complexities reveal themselves in intricate patterns of meta-referentiality, historical weight, even humor.
One has to wonder if Nguyen presaged the collection, time-stamped in its very title, as she wrote these poems seven-to-seventeen years ago: they drip with a sense of history, whether the recent past or the Neolithic. With titles like “Dream 5.22.97,” the reader can’t help but picture the Nguyen of the ’90s knowing that cataloging her poetic chronology would be useful in the future.
A QUESTION OF TRADITION: WOMEN POETS IN YIDDISH, 1586-1987
by Kathryn Hellerstein
Stanford University Press, 496 pages
reviewed by Alyssa Quint
Poetry by female Yiddish writers has become the tree that falls in the empty forest of Jewish literature. As a discrete body of work it resonated only faintly with the same Yiddish critics and scholars who gushed over male Yiddish authors. English translations have become an important repository of the dying vernacular of East European Jews but, again, not so much for its female poets. Women's Yiddish poetry finally gets its scholarly due from Kathryn Hellerstein, long-time champion of the female Yiddish poetic voice, in her comprehensive and accessible account, A Question of Tradition: Women Poets in Yiddish, 1586-1987.
Hellerstein organizes her book around the concept of a literary tradition as invoked by the likes of T.S. Eliot in his monumental essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent." To Eliot's eloquent if male-dominated and Eurocentic discussion of what "compels a man to write," (my italics), Hellerstein counters with a chain of women who work off the energy of the East European Jewish female experience with its idiosyncrasies of language, religion, gender, and culture.
APPROACHING BORDERS
by Nathaniel Popkin
Two men, one aged 61, the other 65, each born in late January, each a father in grief. The first is the Israeli writer David Grossman, whose son Uri was killed in the brief 2006 Israeli war in Lebanon. The other is the American poet Edward Hirsch, whose son Gabriel died of a drug overdose in 2011. On a bookshelf these men and their books may stand together, G then H, Grossman then Hirsch, David then Edward. They are joined too by the instinct to drill into unfathomable sorrow. In 2008, Grossman produced a startling work of preemptive mourning, a novel published in Jessica Cohen’s English translation in 2010 as To The End of the Land and last summer the ecstatic lamentation Falling Out of Time (also translated by Cohen), both brought out in U.S. by Knopf. Hirsch reviewed Falling Out of Time in the New York Times Book Review shortly before Knopf published his piercing seventy-eight page elegy, Gabriel.
TRAPPED IN THE ALPHABET
by Niels Hav
When Barack Obama was inaugurated as president in USA, the poet Elizabeth Alexander was reading at the ceremony. The poet may take on a similar role in different cultures. But in everyday life, and most of the time, the poet is an outsider. A lonely bandit in the desert. That’s how it is in Europe, and so it is in the rest of the world.
We writers are soloists. We celebrate the same virtues as the Bedouins: perseverance and generosity. Some poets among our best colleagues know about hunger and thirst, heroic poverty and longing. There are other values than the material, and retaining this knowledge is one of poetry's tasks.
J.G. McClureCROSSING THE EMOTIONAL LANDSCAPE: ARCHER, BOB’S BURGERS, AND CONTEMPORARY POETRY 1. The emotional landscape of the reader determines the work that can reach her. Imagine the interior world as a sea: the boat-poem can move ahead, but the truck-poem…
RETHINKING THE SHITTY FIRST DRAFT
by George Dila
I do not write shitty first drafts.
In fact, that phrase, inspired by Ernest Hemingway, popularized by Anne Lamott, offends me slightly—both the idea of thinking of my own work this way, and also that word itself, shitty, to my ear an ugly and repellent adjective.
What does the phrase mean, though?
To quote the wonderful Miss Lamott, from her book-that-everyone-has-read, Bird by Bird, “The first draft is the child's draft, where you let it all pour out and then let it romp all over the place knowing that no one is going to see it and that you can shape it later.”
