Poetry by Susan Yount, reviewed by Carlo Matos HOUSE ON FIRE (Blood Pudding Press) Susan Yount’s House on Fire begins with a storm, more specifically with a lightening strike that splits the “sovereign catalpa”—an intriguing symbol for the fracturing of…
Fiction by Amy Schutzer, reviewed by Elizabeth Mosier SPHERES OF DISTURBANCE (Arktoi Books, Red Hen Press) When my mother-in-law was dying of ovarian cancer, I had no patience for fiction. That summer, I sat by her bedside, reading while she…
Jay PastelakON SNAPSHOTS “All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.” —Susan…
Grant ClauserTHE MAGICIAN CONSIDERS HIS AUDIENCE The first is always family, living room arranged around the coffee table and a Mickey Mouse Magic kit hidden behind the La-Z-Boy. Handkerchiefs produce silk flowers. Three balanced balls become two, become one, then…
Melissa SarnoFALL ON ME I’m on a crowded subway, clutching a heavy book that requires two hands not one, but where to place my fingers? On the warm metal pole, or balance, maybe lean, against a door or a railing where…
Sidney ThompsonIS THIS IT Jewell Jewell Young didn’t know what made her son happy anymore. There was a time she did, and for most of his life she did. It was why she was making this pecan pie for him,…
Kelle GroomTWO POEMS Story of the Moon He held out both arms like someone innocent being arrested, showed me the long vein for the black panther he’d wanted, something Vietnam vets got, tracing his finger along where the panther would…
Patrick DaceyBALLAD OK she’s gone let’s get setup amp cord guitar now this is romantic this is a gift D C G yep way out of tune needs a good tuning can’t remember how to tune just listen listen it…
Steve KlepetarONE OF THOSE WORLDS Returning from the kitchen one night, you stumble into one of those worlds where dogs breathe fog and foxes roam through orchards near where your mother grew up, a circular tower house where you looked…
Rebecca EntelCRITTER CONTROL I hadn’t given much thought to the snake that connected my toilet to the bathroom wall until one July when it split its plastic cap and flooded most of my house. Among other damages, the water buckled…
Megan DentonTWO POEMS Early Girl for Allie If they ask you how it felt, say it was like rolling barrels of yourself to the brim, poised on the edge of Spring— a delicately fizzy drink. If they ask you how…
Leonard GontarekVEHICLES 1 It is a large, pink cloud, spreading and growing larger, soft, and saturating everything this morning. The town, the smoke ejected curled from houses, some of the lights still on, the sycamore limbs, the bowl-shaped park once…
Erika PriceTHE ELEPHANT He got the news in the usual way: via Twitter. At 5:00 am when he’d already given up the prospect of sleeping (the thrum of his across-the-hall neighbor’s Skrillex ebbing into the rattle of the broken refrigerator),…
Teresa LeoPoetry Editor’s Preface, Cleaver Magazine, Issue No. 6 Cinematic. That’s the word that comes to mind reading the poetry selections from this issue of Cleaver Magazine—poems with many sweeping and carefully chosen images woven into the terrain of the…
Brooke SchifanoTHE INSIDES In the train, you listen to a story about a shaman, feet braced against the wall in the part where you stand on the circle cut into the floor. If this were a human arm you’d be…
Connor Towne O’NeillSTEADY MOVE ITS OWN STILLNESS Of the seven septuplets that live in their grandfather’s grandfather clock, only the seventh—the blind one—spends time on the pendulum. While the others spin the balance wheel, study iambs to the slip-and-catch of…
Ilana EllisPORTRAITS OF FRIENDSHIP: Oil on Canvas These past few years, my work has been fueled by two passions that tugged me between them. The first is that I want to be a painter of great skill. And the greatest skill…
Erin PerazaTHE THING ABOUT A BOAT-IN-A-BOTTLE IS NOBODY STEERS Two figures sit on the bamboo gangplank jutting off a model pirate ship. A man and a woman. They aren’t quite to-scale, and slightly over-sized as they are, they can’t explore…
Joshua IsardPLATITUDES The only platitude anyone should ever offer is I love you. It is the only phrase that they know is true, that you know is true. You’ll be fine, you’ll be great, everything will work out—those phrases aren’t…
Shaun TurnerKENTUCKY SNAKES Me and Dorsey worked with Gross Lumber down in the woods behind Viola Creek and we’d cut our share of trees. In the woods, not even Lloyd Gross cared how many beers we drank. All the loggers—usually…
Henry MargenauIT’S THE NOISE YOU MISS MOST IN THIS GIANT NEW WORLD As soon as Ray’s wife had walked out, all the appliances stopped working, like she took all the electricity along with her. The refrigerator stopped humming and a…
“Believers” was named a Notable Essay in The Best American Essays 2015 Elizabeth MosierBELIEVERS The sauceboat showed up in a bag of filthy artifacts dug up at the National Constitution Center site. To my untrained eye, it was just another…
Myra LottoFUJIKO NAKAYA, FOG ARTIST On the last Saturday morning of April, my husband and I put our two young children in the car for the hour-long drive to New Canaan, Connecticut. We were on our way to attend the…
Susan CharkesTWO POEMS To Catch The Ocean In Your Bucket You Have To Point Your Bucket Toward The Shore remember the time you forgot that bird’s name? the one that sings all night if you’re not listening. you wake to…
Devin KellyGROWING UP She is naked save for pink socks, and her pale young behind squeaks as she slides, or inches, down the balustrade. The sound echoes off the wooden floorboards and she imagines a tiny creature screaming in short…
Tricia ParkON THE Q Someone is singing “Rocket Man” on the opposite side of the NQR stop at Prince Street. “I miss the earth so much, I miss my wife; It’s lonely out in space; On such a timeless flight.”…
Max BartlettBIRDS / NERVES There’s this bird. It’s nighttime, and there’s this bird. And he’s flying, and who knows how long he’s been flying, because that’s not what’s important. The thing is there’s this house. Everything outside the house is…
Deirdre O’ConnorTWO POEMS A Man and A Name A man fucks a woman, then is smitten by another with her name. He is like the sky’s coincidence, never the same cumulonimbi, but always the sky. He is in the look…
Charlotte BoulaySCIENTISTS HAVE DISCOVERED that there are whirlpools in the wakes of stars. Birds run on at the mouth in different languages and the horses are lonely: we must keep mothering the empty plains. Detroit’s salt mines are becoming saltier…
Grace JordanFLYING I was wearing my turquoise suede moccasins. I was afraid they would get wet because I knew it would start raining at any given moment. There was an ominous raincloud making its way down the block. I decided…
Amy BurnsHUNGER I was sitting at my friend Bebe’s kitchen table. She was standing at the counter using a black and yellow handled screwdriver as an ice pick. I was telling her about it while she chopped. You should have…
Mercedes LawryTHE ACOLYTES, LIAR, AND BOX The Acolytes Somebody drowned the acolytes. They were not wee fellows so it must have been someone with plenty of muscle. Now an emptiness hovers like a bad smog burning throats and lungs. The…
Jenny Wales SteeleCOUCH [?] It was an okay day. I don’t understand zoos, the appeal. The kids thrill to it, sure, but kids are dumb. My nephew flounced around, did his giddy slash sissy thing. He was wearing his jester’s…
Geoff PeckTOUGH You picture it: fourteenth floor of Walker dormitory. A former wrestler dangles from a window. The one they call Bisonhead has him by one ankle and another ex-teammate, a freshman, by the other. It’s late April in Oklahoma,…
A BINTEL BRIEF: LOVE AND LONGING IN OLD NEW YORK
by Liana Finck
Ecco Press, 128 pages
reviewed by Ana Schwartz
There’s a new sort of fiction circulating, stories of young people, by young people, for young people. This isn’t YA lit. These stories range across genres, even mediums, but they all describe the ambivalence of maturing in post-post-modernity. These narratives share a sense of lostness and reflective self-estrangement. The authors are smart and the narratives are smartly-dressed. They usually take place in New York. Think Frances Ha or Tai Pei or Girls. And if, as one well-respected author of such fictions has recently described them, they at times seem “cold, lazy, [and] artificial,” they also exhibit “extreme honesty and thoroughness of […] self scrutiny.”
Liana Finck’s new graphic novel, A Bintel Brief features one such young me-person; but, although the story mines her development as an artist, it does so by digging into the past. With the distance afforded by history, and supported by the graphic novel’s relatively diffuse gaze, Finck offers a warmer, and more engaged account of a remarkably persistent theme: how one comes to feel that they belong to a community.
Poetry by Kelly Boyker, reviewed by Carlo Matos ZOONOSIS (Hyacinth Girl Press) Kelly Boyker’s chapbook, Zoonosis, is loaded from cover-to-cover with fantastical creatures, folktale monsters, and twentieth-century “freaks” drawn from the pages of Robert Ripley’s “Believe It or Not.” The…
A Graphic Narrative by Hillary L. Chute, reviewed by Seamus O’Malley OUTSIDE THE BOX: INTERVIEWS WITH CONTEMPORARY CARTOONISTS (University of Chicago Press) Outside the Box: Interviews with Contemporary Cartoonists by Hillary Chute contains interviews with Scott McCloud, Charles Burns, Lynda…
Fiction by Brendan Connell, reviewed by Ashlee Paxton-Turner THE GALAXY CLUB (Chômu Press) In his novel, The Galaxy Club, Brendan Connell, who was born and raised in New Mexico, reinterprets the landscape of a small New Mexico town, insisting that…
Poetry by Maureen Alsop, reviewed by Matthew Girolami MANTIC (Augury Books) This is a book of annotations, a bibliography of divination. Like any bibliography, Maureen Alsop’s Mantic is carefully researched and curated. The collection’s title, Mantic, and periodic poems within…
Fiction by Mina Loy, reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin INSEL (Melville House) You, dear reader, consummate seeker of literature in all forms, of voices in all languages, of song and fragment, of tome and flash, of ancient and modern: writers, books,…
Fiction by Tsipi Keller, reviewed by Lynn Levin ELSA (Spuyten Duyvil) As I began reading this short novel by Tsipi Keller, I found myself enjoying what I thought was going to be a leisurely experience with chick lit. Nothing too…
Poetry by Charlotte Boulay, reviewed by Matthew Girolami FOXES ON THE TRAMPOLINE (Ecco Press) You are in a field, a forest, or on a shore; you may have never been here before, but it brings forth some immense longing. Until…
Poetry by LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, reviewed by Shinelle L. Espaillat TwERK (Belladonna) The challenge in reading sound poetry is to try to grasp the full depth of the work’s significance without having the performance as a guide. The challenge…
Nonfiction by Diane Johnson, reviewed by Colleen Davis FLYOVER LIVES: A MEMOIR (Viking) It takes guts to become a writer. Not because it’s a dangerous profession, but a person drawn to serious writing often discovers that there’s no clear employment…
APOLLO
by Geoffrey Gatza
BlazeVOX
, 168 pages
reviewed by Carlo Matos
Geoffrey Gatza’s Apollo is an all-out assault on the reader, like facing an opponent who senses you’re about to wilt and so presses the action. Every time we think we know what he’s doing, another surprise comes our way. And this is how good conceptual poetry should be—not just the simple execution of a clever conceit but a text that threatens at every turn to burst from the inside out and take the reader with it but never does. Taking the shape of a souvenir program for a one-night performance of Stravinsky’s ballet of the same name, the book contains a myriad of Dada-like exercises: poems generated by a John Cage-like method of assigning words to each square on a chess board and to each piece and then playing out the game between Marcel Duchamp and then US chess champion, Frank Marshall, at the Chess Olympiad in Hamburg in 1930 (accompanied by pictures of each position and a cat), an Arthurian legend based on the Lady of Shallot, a three-act play where Duchamp somehow manages to play himself as Rrose Sélavey (his female alter-ego), and a business letter to the director of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, who kicked the author out one day for the mysterious offence of carrying an umbrella—a moment so Duchampian it is the perfect coda to this ready-made text. In “Fifteen Hundred Hours,” Rrose Sélavey says, “The consciousness that bound these obscurities. . . together/ was overgrowth.” It is a perfect metaphor for the entire collection, for this paean to Gatza’s modernist heroes who perform his ballet: Duchamp, Sélavey, Max Ernst, Gertrude Abercrombie, Leonora Carrington, Dorothea Tanning, and Dizzy Gillespie.
Fiction by Luis Chitarroni, translated by Darren Koolman, reviewed by Ana Schwartz THE NO VARIATIONS: THE DIARY OF AN UNFINISHED NOVEL (Dalkey Archive Press) Because we were late in arriving, because we were late in departing, because we didn’t care…
Poetry by Michael Ruby, reviewed by Ana Schwartz AMERICAN SONGBOOK (Ugly Duckling Presse) Imagine a road trip across America, probably in the summer, “in the good old plastic gasoline / Pell-mell summertime.” Of course, music will be an essential part…
A Graphic Narrative curated by Justin G. Schiller and Dennis M.V. David, edited by Leonard S. Marcus, reviewed by Tahneer Oksman MAURICE SENDAK: A CELEBRATION OF THE ARTIST AND HIS WORK (Harry N. Abrams Press) In a collaborative comic strip…
Fiction by Pamela Erens, reviewed by Ashlee Paxton-Turner THE UNDERSTORY (Tin House Books, originally published by Ironweed Press in 2007) I began Pamela Erens’ The Understory to find the main character, Jack Ronan Gorse, peering inside his coffee cup to…
A Graphic Narrative by Diane Obomsawin, reviewed by Amy Victoria Blakemore ON LOVING WOMEN (Drawn & Quarterly) “On Loving Women”: it sounds like a treatise. But Diane Obomsawin does not deliver the usual tome with this intimately illustrated collection of…