Review from 32.1

Maceo Montoya. The Scoundrel and the Optimist. Tempe, Arizona: Bilingual Review Press, 2009. $28 cloth (ISBN 978-1-931010-65-8), $18 paper (ISBN 978-1-931010-67-2), 266 pages.

Reviewed by Bradley Bazzle

Maceo Montoya’s debut novel, The Scoundrel and the Optimist, is about a runty teenager named Edmund (the optimist) and his drunken lout of a father, Filastro (the scoundrel). The novel’s first sentence establishes their relationship: “Of Filastro Augustín’s seven children, the only one he couldn’t bear to beat was his youngest son, Edmund.” Filastro spares Edmund because he hopes one of his children will take care of him in his old age. As a result, Edmund knows a Filastro quite different than the tyrant who abuses his mother and siblings. Most of the novel weaves deftly between the story of those siblings, who escape one by one to the United States, and the story of Edmund pursuing beautiful young Ingrid Genera by learning to play guitar. All this takes place in a small Mexican town peopled with eccentrics.

Don’t be fooled by the insipid jacket summary (“a hapless but irrepressible redheaded teen whose magnificent strength of spirit makes him a giant among men”); this is a vigorous book, full of humor and gnarled beauty, whose simple, furious language captures the world of a precocious adolescent. Jags of humorous dialogue ring true because Edmund simply has no filter. When Ingrid resists his advances, he blurts
that she looks like a horse. Why? Because she has “skinny bow legs.” The exchange is funny, but it also reveals the unthinking cruelty Edmund shows to those around him. In this way, Montoya draws a disturbing but essential parallel between knavish Edmund and boorish Filastro. Along the same lines, though Filastro is the adult and Edmund the child, there is something desperately childish about Filastro’s drunkenness: he uses peer pressure to drag his compadres on benders complete with jokey rules, benders that, in an adult world, prove deadly. One way to read the novel is as Edmund and Filastro’s journey from self-centered children to empathetic adults.

Montoya seems to delight in goofiness. Because of this, the novel’s minor characters, who aren’t burdened by interiority or narrative importance, stand out. The infamous loan shark, Tres Pasos, agrees to give Edmund his dead son’s guitar if the boy will listen to his best three hundred stories—funny, morally ambiguous anecdotes (a Mexican gangster version of the Arabian Nights) that pepper the novel. Ricardo the Notary makes his living typing letters from aging mothers to their children in the United States, adding morbid literary touches whenever possible. When he types “goodbye” letters from Filastro’s estranged children to Filastro, Ricardo interpolates his unsettled issues with his own father to hilarious effect. But the best of them all is Edmund’s cousin Jorge el Gato, called “the cat” because he may or may not have attempted, on a dare, intercourse with a cat. His is the unlikely voice of wisdom throughout the novel, dispensed over popsicles from the cart he pushes around town.

This novel comes to us from the Bilingual Review Press at Arizona State University, which publishes books “by or about U.S. Hispanics” (from their website: www.asu.edu/brp). Though The Scoundrel and the Optimist is successful because it’s a good story about engaging characters, it draws additional power from its cultural relevance. It’s no imaginative lark that Edmund is named Edmund, a name so Anglo that it barelyexists in the U.S., let alone Mexico. The name conjures the supremely English Edmund Bertram of Mansfield Park and Edmund Pevensie of The Chronicles of Narnia. The curious name, along with the humor and somewhat picaresque structure of The Scoundrel and the Optimist, places it in conversation with the coming-of-age novels of an earlier era, novels like Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield and Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Montoya seems to be asking the reader whether Edmund, but for his location in Mexico, is any different from the heroes of Dickens and Twain. The answer is no. And Montoya adds a twist to the coming-of-age form: Edmund never reads as a proxy for the brilliant young artist, stifled by the people around him and biding his time before writing a deeply moving novel about himself; instead, Montoya lampoons that tradition (and himself) in the wretched figure of Ricardo the Notary.

In the interest of honesty, I should set aside my praise and tell you that this is not a perfect novel. The abrupt prose style used in passages written from the point of view of Edmund bleeds into shorter passages from the points of view of adult characters, and as a result, the adults lack appropriate complexity. The mother, for instance, simply cries or is silent in reaction to Filastro’s cruelty, because the novel hasn’t given her language to express what are surely conflicted emotions. There is also a hooker with a heart of gold. Lastly, the ending may not be quite right, in that it’s convincing from the perspective of Edmund but not from the perspective of Filastro. But isn’t it the sign of a good book when you care if the ending is wrong?

Review from 32.1

Charles Simic. The Monster Loves His Labyrinth. Keene, New York: Ausable Press, 2008. $14.00 paper (ISBN 978-1-931337-40-3), 120 pages.

Reviewed by Ryan Teitman

In his newest book, The Monster Loves His Labyrinth, Charles Simic manages to squeeze between the cracks of traditional genre. The blocks of prose in this collection look like prose poems (most are only a paragraph long, or even a single line), but read like nonfiction. These pieces are Simic’s notebooks, and they give the reader an intimate and funny insight into the brainwork of one of the most formidable poets at work today.
The first of the book’s five sections is the most explicitly organized: very brief scenes of Simic’s time in Belgrade and Chicago. The dense language gives these short, essayistic recollections the feel of prose poetry:

Beneath the swarm of high-flying planes we were eating watermelon. While we ate the bombs fell on Belgrade. We watched the smoke rise in the distance. We were hot in the garden and asked to take our shirts off. The watermelon made a ripe, cracking noise as my mother cut it with a big knife. We also heard what we thought was thunder, but when we looked up, the sky was cloudless and blue.

While these sketches may lack length, they provide a vivid portrait of a childhood and a family, whether Simic recalls finding the lice-infested helmet of a dead German soldier, or his father buying him an expensive suit (which he can’t afford) after they’ve been long settled in America.

The second section shifts gears abruptly—the swiftly-told stories of the opening give way to a barrage of aphorisms and pithy notes. Simic often presents the reader with a single, beautiful image: “Utopia: A rich chocolate cake protected from flies by a glass bell.” But other times his work riffs on and challenges conventional wisdom: “‘You can not shoe a flea,’ Russians say. Whoever coined the proverb forgot about poets.”

Simic devotes the middle section of the book to a kind of ars poetica: his poetic views are laid out in witty dictums that convey a strong faith in poetry, including the belief that some of what makes poetry great is mystery. “God died and we were left with Emerson,” Simic writes. “Some are still milking Emerson’s cow, but there are problems with that milk.” There’s no elaboration on the specific defects of that transcendental brand of milk, but Simic slyly notes a few pages later (with a single line that reads like gospel truth): “Most poets do not understand their own metaphors.”

The final two sections of the book are the least defined, which, in part, makes them the most compelling. The viewpoints and history Simic builds in the opening sections become intertwined. He jumps from vignettes about his father to bold philosophical statements about poetry. And those leaps are some of the most intriguing moments—when we can see the notebook as Simic’s mind at work. A paragraph can work as a poetic manifesto and character sketch all at once:

It is possible to make astonishingly tasty dishes from the simplest ingredients. That’s my aesthetics. I’m the poet of the frying pan and my love’s little toes.

And while Simic may run roughshod over the notion of making a definable point, that isn’t his project. The lyricism of the brief—the moment—is the maze he wants to get lost in.
Simic thrives in this particular genre, which reads like a hybrid of poetry, essay, rulebook, and fable. His notebooks deftly sketch scenes from his childhood, then ably make declarations about the nature of poetry. At the beginning of the book, Simic recalls his teacher giving him chocolates after a violin lesson in Belgrade during World War II:

“Poor child,” she’d say, and I thought it had to do with my not practicing enough, my being dim-witted when she tried to explain something to me, but today I’m not sure that’s what she meant. In fact, I suspect she had something else entirely in mind. That’s why I am writing this, to find out what it was.

Simic never discovers what mysterious insight his violin teacher made after that lesson. But he applies that sense of urgency to the entirety of The Monster Loves His Labyrinth. Simic astutely—yet playfully—interrogates poetry, politics, and his own past. We may not ever find out why Simic wrote these notebooks, but we get to see the strange and wonderful workings of one of the great contemporary poets.

Cultural Studies by Kevin A. Gonzalez reviewed by Marcus Wicker

Kevin A. Gonzalez. Cultural Studies. Pittsburg, Pennsylvania: Carnegie Mellon Press, 2009. $14.00 paper (ISBN 978-0-88748-493-3), 90 pages.

Reviewed by Marcus Wicker

In his debut collection, Cultural Studies, Kevin Gonzalez fleshes out and amps up many of the already strong poems from his 2007 chapbook, The Night Tito Trinidad KO’ed Ricardo Mayorga. Employing the second person “you” as a stand in for the “I,” Gonzalez writes as a Puerto Rico-born MFA poet, educated in the U.S. Cultural Studies articulates a recurring speaker’s love and distrust of identity and America as a rosy melting pot.
Cultural Studies is a book about voice, and it sounds like a poet’s heart occupying space between Puerto Rico and the States, pondering the self. Ars poetica “Flat American Waltz” introduces this idea:

Beneath the cracked roof of the bus shelter,
where a school of cigarette butts gathers

to worship the thin lines of the sidewalk,
a man is muttering a cliché as deep

as the best metaphor you could conjure
for America. It’s all been done before.

Gonzalez insidiously calls attention to the self (the speaker, talking in clichés) by juxtaposing clichéd cigarette butts with the man muttering a cliché concerning America. This redundancy mirrors the act of writing a poem—the notion that, from subject matter to craft, no idea is original. What’s original about Gonzalez’s work follows two couplets later:

Let’s talk about accents, tongues

curling up as they hit the base of the pot.
The black smoke of the bus assimilates

into black air. Let’s all believe in the place
These hard plastic seats are taking us.

A kind of “accent,” or voice here, is celebrated in the poet’s fresh imagistic rendering of an old adage—the cigarette butts become a school, gathered to worship the sidewalk crack. Black smoke serves as a metaphor for the writer’s own identity—a convergence of languages and cultural points of reference. Throughout the book, as in the final couplet, Gonzalez seems to be talking himself into believing that a bicultural identity is natural. However, Gonzalez is also a truth teller; his poems are willing to admit the complexity of identity and nationality.
The speaker’s life in Cultural Studies can be traced from childhood to college to graduate school and back to Puerto Rico. In “Poet Laureate Guest Stars on The Simpson’s” the speaker, at ten years old in San Juan, makes frequent early exits from the baseball diamond to watch dubbed American television in an overcrowded apartment building. Daily, he ran past an old man “who walked so close to death / he must have already missed himself” to watch Homer struggle with a clip-on tie and Marge gamble away Lisa’s college fund on The Simpsons. Near the middle of the narrative, Gonzalez begins to critically assess the show’s impact:

. . . Youth was
however long it took to learn
nobody loans without borrowing something
in return. For you, Homer was Homero
& Santa’s Little Helper was Huesos,
& somewhere, kids deterred
by the bent acoustics of your tongue
referred to Samuel Sosa as Sammy,

In making the English-speaking cartoon character his own (Homero), the poet also relinquishes a bit of his own identity. By westernizing Latin American baseball star Samuel Sosa’s name for his friends, the speaker takes part in the process of assimilation. By the poem’s end, Gonzalez wishes to return to the baseball diamond—“it’s foul poles / two bent palm trees.” But he cannot; the “beachfront lot is now a Walgreens.” Through suggestion, Walgreens becomes a metaphor for the seemingly acquiescent speaker.
In “Cultural Strumpet,” the speaker recounts college, explaining “you were still / a Poli-Sci major. You wore T-shirts / with portraits of patriots on the front / & told girls how Che Guevara, baby, / was buried beneath the Fountain of Youth.” Juxtaposed with lines like “The Puerto Rican girl said, You’re so militant / the black girl said, You’re so white / the white girl said, You’re so white / and there was no arguing in Pittsburgh [where Gonzalez attended college],” the reader sees a man outwardly struggling with identity, momentarily conceding to the girls’ collective judgments. Paired with a poem like “Cultural Sellout” where the speaker longingly proclaims “Pablo [Neruda] was not the kind of poet / who googles his own name,” we view the American notion of fame interfering with the poet accessing his identity as a writer of Spanish descent.
Through a narrative, “Cultural Stud” portrays the speaker returning to his native Puerto Rico after college. At Frenchie’s nightclub, a Columbian waitress sparks a realization:

She wants to be an American citizen
& you are tired of being
a graffittied wall
forgiving the humid caresses
of your vandals. You tell her
it's true: you have a token to feed
to the rusted turnstile of heaven
but you have no lube to make it turn.

To the waitress, the speaker’s birthright becomes more important than his poetic flattery. Nothing will cure the author’s sense of cultural dislocation; neither drinking cases of Medalla, Puerto Rico’s national beer, nor his knowledge of American cartoons. However, in Cultural Studies, the poet’s tongue—his diglossic, melancholy, narrative exploration of a conflicted bicultural identity—allows a reader space to try on the author’s blues. Winding yet taut, candid and crafted, intelligent but never obnoxious, Gonzalez celebrates and laments cultural dislocation in a wildly honest voice.

Book Review from 31.1

Dan Beachy-Quick. A Whaler’s Dictionary. Minneapolis, Minnesota: Milkweed Editions, 2008. $20.00 paper (ISBN: 978-1571313096), 330 pages.


Reviewed by Nina Mamikunian


Perhaps I should start by admitting that I have never read Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. The weighty tome somehow slipped through the cracks of my four years as an English major in my undergraduate education, and I have gotten through half of graduate school knowing only the basics: “call me Ishmael” and Captain Ahab’s relentless pursuit of a white whale. So what drew me into Dan Beachy-Quick’s A Whaler’s Dictionary, a work of philosophy, essay, and criticism inspired by and directly commenting on Moby-Dick, was not an interest in the nineteenth century novel but rather this book’s own claim to exist in the “margins” and attempt to “record what glimmers remain of thinking impossibly realized before the thought is vaguely lost.” True to its title, it is written in a dictionary format with cross-referenced entries and is not meant to be read linearly. The entries are more like prose poems. For example, in the entry “Chaos,” Beachy-Quick writes:

We tend to think of the chaotic as the noisome, but in doing so betray the deeper chaos the world brings: a yawning gape or abyss, a child’s mouth before a tooth has broken through the gums. That original chaos…has not a single harsh sound…but merely, as in a child’s mouth, vowels carried upon the breath that voices them.

One of the many impressive aspects of A Whaler’s Dictionary is that it does not presuppose or necessitate anything more than a basic knowledge of Moby-Dick. Beachy-Quick handles Melville’s character relationships, plot points, and symbolism (for example, Queequeg’s tattooed body or the role that Pip plays on the ship) with such deftness and clarity that having read Moby-Dick (or any of the other authors and critics that Beach-Quick expounds upon) is by no means a prerequisite. More importantly, it becomes very clear early on in the book that A Whaler’s Dictionary is not actually about Moby-Dick at all; it only uses Moby-Dick as a way to talk about something much larger and harder to put into words.

Beachy-Quick’s main task is to “[offer] a series of interlaced meditations to bring a reader near to the white squall of meaning that is Moby-Dick.” However, he makes no thesis statement or grand argument that he sets out to prove or disprove. Beachy-Quick positions himself as the “you” addressed in the famous first line “Call me Ishmael” and intimately so. Beyond that, he grants all readers access into both the “you” that Ishmael addresses and the “I” that does the addressing. He goes so far as to include himself as one of those readers plumbing for meaning, not only of Moby-Dick but also of reading and words themselves. Many of his entries relate directly to language (such as “Aleph” and “Bet” and “Hieroglyph” and “Inscribe,”) and he finds ways to talk about reading even through entries like “Flames” and “Eyes” and “Duplicates.” The connections he draws between whaling and reading/writing are most clear in the entry for “Line,” where he uses the word “line” to refer to both a whale line (a length of rope tied to a harpoon) and also:

…the most basic unit of verse. A poem is a line winding from margin to margin until the poem is done. A book is composed of dark lines. A book pursues in lines the meaning it desires to understand or convey. A metaphoric stretch can claim for the poetic line the same dangers as the whale line. The reader and the whale are in the same boat.

In entry after entry, Beachy-Quick shows us that books, language, thought, and even the very act of creating through voicing or writing bear more similarity to whales and whaling than one would first think. The whale becomes thought itself, the ocean obscures meaning, Captain Ahab’s own forehead has as many lines as a book might, and Queequeg cannot decipher the marks on his own body. Beachy-Quick makes it clear:

Ahab pursues a whale; we catch a book…The Whale escapes and the book escapes, and they both flee along the same line by which we drew near their forms—almost comprehensible, almost tangible, almost legible. The book in our hand contains a depth and holds its breath. Reading and writing are impossible work.

It is fitting then that Beachy-Quick begins not with an author’s note but with an apology. He begins by recognizing Ishmael’s “failed cetological endeavor” and acknowledges that he “simply repeats the failure in a different guise.” In this way, Beachy-Quick acknowledges the failure of all words. All dictionaries, whether it be Ishmael’s or A Whaler’s Dictionary, fail because the gaps between text and meaning, signifier and signified, are nearly impossible to bridge. The only thing that words can do is circle back on themselves and endlessly refer to one another and chase the list presented at the end of an entry, the “see also,” which is never ending. The connections between entries create lines themselves, but those lines are as shaky and deceiving as the spider webs from Jonathan Edwards’s sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” that Beachy-Quick cites in entries like “Faith” and “Void,” cross-referenced with “Expression” and “Silence.” The pursuit of uncovering true meaning is as much a mad pursuit as chasing a white whale. Beachy-Quick, however, in the artistry of his prose and poetics, shows us that the pursuit—and the books that are the material evidence of those pursuits—is worthwhile.

Book Review from 31.1

Peter Selgin. Drowning Lessons. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 2008. $24.95 hardcover (ISBN 978-0-8203-3210-9), 233 pages.

Reviewed by Chad Anderson

Peter Selgin’s Drowning Lessons is a collection that, more than anything, focuses on the nature of solitude—self-imposed or otherwise. These thirteen stories travel from the peaks of Andean mountains to the watercolor coasts of Crete to a lake in New Jersey, and Selgin’s deft hand reveals the beauty of the world while never idealizing it. In fact, despite the often serious plights of his characters, Selgin’s tone is often playful, albeit cynical. The humor does not detract from the near tragedies within the collection, but instead serves as a flame to illuminate them.

Selgin’s balance of humor and heartbreak is demonstrated in the story “Sawdust.” The young narrator aches from the disappearance of his beloved teacher with whom he is suspected of having an inappropriate relationship. Juxtaposed against the narrator’s melancholy and confusion about his sexuality is the humorous character of Mr. Bulfamante, a.k.a. Sugar, a French boxer-turned-floor sander who, as a favor to the narrator’s mother, takes the boy as an apprentice and serves as his father figure:

Before he’d let me into his van, Sugar would make sure that I’d brought my thermos full of bouillon. Sugar insisted on hot bouillon as the only suitable beverage for floor sanders and boxers, summer and winter. Not lemonade or iced tea or coffee or hot chocolate. Bouillon. And not chicken bouillon, either. Beef. Chicken was for fruitcakes. Also the bouillon couldn’t be made from those little cubes, none of that Herb-Ox or Knorr Swiss crap. It had to be real. Homemade.

Sugar, however, isn’t merely comic relief. His distinct brand of masculinity conflicts with the masculinity the narrator learns from his romantic, worldly teacher, and in the end, the two ideals collide, forcing the narrator to truthfully consider the kind of man he wants to be.

As in “Sawdust,” the protagonists of Selgin’s stories are most often paired with other characters that could bring out the best and worst in them. A failed shoe store owner who happens to be the son of a failed cartoonist is hired by the whimsical Pablo Picasso to drive him from Los Angeles to the country of Colombia. A Manhattan doorman has a fling with a crippled woman and later refuses to accept that she has played him when she doesn’t show up for a date. A poor, elderly Black woman cares for the last living survivor of the Titantic, escorting him to the events of wealthy history buffs. Part of the pleasure in reading Selgin’s stories is to see how these pairs uplift or undo one another, whether they become foils or friends or both, and whether the protagonists choose solitude or fight against it.

While the protagonists are usually in the presence of a prominent secondary character, they (and by extension, Selgin) seem concerned with the nature of loneliness. In “Color of the Sea,” Andrew—a discontented, middle-aged artist—and Karina—a young, impulsive Brazilian—strangers to one another, decide to embark on driving tour of Crete together. Moving though the beautifully-rendered Cretan landscape and acknowledging their palpable sexual tension, the two travelers simultaneously irritate and fascinate one another, discussing love, sex, age, and, most especially, loneliness:

“…That’s what loneliness is. No longer being able to enjoy being alone with yourself. When you’re lonely, the person you really want to be with is yourself.”
“That is an interesting theory. And how does one learn to do that?”
Andrew shrugged. “Go for a walk, eat a nice meal by candlelight; romance yourself. Ask yourself, ‘What do I feel like doing today?’ It sounds strange, but why should it? Why should it be so strange to do with ourselves what we think nothing of doing with others? Why—for example—should I be more courteous to you, whom I barely know, than to myself, whom I’ll know for the rest of my life? It doesn’t make sense.”

In this story and others, loneliness itself is a character, creating distances between siblings and lovers, forging bonds between strangers and enemies. The characters in Drowning Lessons must ultimately choose between risking their hearts for another person and embracing solitude, and no matter what happens, learn to be content with their decision. Selgin’s surprising and generous collection suggests that only we can teach ourselves the lessons we need to endure the world or even to escape it.

Review from 30.2

Lynn Aarti Chandhok. The View from Zero Bridge. Tallahassee, Florida: Anhinga Press, 2007. $14.00 paper (ISBN 978-0-938078-98-2), 77 pages.

Reviewed by Jenny Burdge

Lynn Aarti Chandhok’s debut collection of poetry, The View from Zero Bridge, is gorgeous. The poems work their truths, half-truths, and debatable facts through both the magic of sensual detail and words and phrases crafted into rhythms and rhymes usually so subtle, you often only awaken to their power by the end of the poem, when Chandhok wants you to know that yes, you’ve been under a spell, and perhaps you should question the veracity of everything the poem has told you, everything you’ve ever been told.

Chandhok was born in Pittsburgh, and raised there as well, but she spent many summers as a child in Kashmir with her father’s family. This upbringing in more than one place, more than one culture, echoes through the book’s situations and motifs, but dealing with multicultural existence is not, per se, the book’s theme.
From the cover image and title and through the poems themselves, the book announces itself as one concerned with place (Zero Bridge) but also perspective (the view). After reading Chandhok’s note regarding the cover, it also becomes clear that the book is concerned with just what we consider fact in the first place. Chandhok says, “Like many of the ‘facts’ in this book, the title itself is wrong.” That is because, although Chandhok somehow came to understand that the cover image, a photograph taken by her father, was taken from Zero Bridge, she finally learned in 2007 that this couldn’t have been the case, for there is no boat landing under that bridge.
The idea of truth, then, amongst all the book’s other concerns, is primary. In this way, an epigraph by Derek Mahon serves as the bottle of champagne for this book’s maiden voyage—both thematically and formally. It reads:

Ah, but words on the page aren’t the whole story
for all my hopes and fears are fictions, too
and I live in a virtual fever of creation—
the whole course of my life has been imagination,
my days a dream; when we wake from history
may we find peace in the substance of the true.

So, often being incapable of knowing truth—that “whole story”—the hope is that we can be satisfied with its substance—the essence of truth, which we still find ourselves unsure of, given the delusion of history; that is, the stories we’ve been told and the stories that we’ve read are untrustworthy, and only when we recognize this can we find something essentially true. This essence of truth is difficult and troubling, as the first poem, “Marketplace” (set in Kashmir, 1999), expresses:

My loss is trivial: a childhood home
to which return would be a senseless risk
just to confirm that paradise was real.
…
On either side, the only truth is loss,
and blame is strewn like wreckage or debris,
the storylines, disputed maps, redrawn.

Through all five of the book’s sections, this difficulty and trouble of knowing truth is returned to, rehashed, reestablished. In a sonnet of two septets titled “Brooklyn Botanic Garden, 10/01,” the speaker encounters a woman painting the staged nature “as if it’s not / already art, or dream, or plan, or real.” In another sonnet, “Trust,” the speaker says, “We’ve pulled it off again,” and then remembers dreaming frightening fires as a child, which she’d been told could happen, then concludes: “I’m undone by what children believe: / the ones who dream of martyrdom, or mine— / who trust that what I tell them is the truth.” In “Revision: the Bandh,” the speaker revisits a poem that appears early in the book, realizing the memory that occasioned the earlier poem was imagination: “Was it a dream or vision that such lengths / could spread themselves, so beautifully, on the banks?” In a number of elegies, that “only truth,” loss, is even more direct. It becomes clear that this “only truth” is what unites us, in spite of ourselves, in spite of whatever “blame is strewn like wreckage or debris.”

The poems in this collection do not, however, dismiss the delusion or illusions of history as being without value. The longest poem of the book, and perhaps my favorite, spreads out over the book’s middle. “The Story of the Palace,” set in Fatehpur Sikri, April 2001, is formally more intricate than the other poems. It is written in iambic pentameter, just as almost all the others in this book are; however, with its lines being broken, either mid-line or with the more usual enjambment, the meter is more difficult to detect. Similarly, rhymes, both true and slant, weave subtly through the poem, sometimes with the chiming word at a distance from its partner. These weavings are a reminder of the book’s epigraph (both formally and thematically), and they imitate the intricate and broken threads of which history and stories are also woven. The poem tries to find the true story of the title palace, but the speaker’s guidebook, stories she heard on an earlier visit, and the stories her guide tells her during the current visit often diverge. There is no way to know the truth, no way to know what pieces of it to trust. A line from the guidebook describing the palace applies just as well to the stories of it: “Its parts are better than the whole.” What this poem suggests, then, contradicts the book’s epigraph.

Perhaps we can’t find peace in the substance of the truth, because we may never see what that is. Perhaps peace comes in viewing all the diverging parts of history’s dream, hoping one of those parts is true, while delighting in all the others.

Review of Boy with Flowers from 30.2

Ely Shipley. Boy with Flowers. New York, New York: Barrow Street Press, 2008. $15.95 paper (ISBN 0-9728302-5-1), 84 pages.

Reviewed by Esther Lee

A scrim—a gauzy curtain often used in theater—can simultaneously reflect and filter light, resulting in a delicate, porous visibility from either side. In his debut poetry collection, Boy with Flowers—winner of the 2007 Barrow Street Press Book Award, selected by Carl Phillips—Ely Shipley achieves a similar intimacy in his treatment of the performative “gauze” of our notions of identity in order to explore the complex perceptions of transgender experience. In Boy with Flowers, the speaker’s self-recognition shifts, as if it were a light reflecting against the cubist body, which is alluded to in the speaker’s remark about the moon that “...glitters dully, but only / if I tilt / my head just so.” The recognition of the self becomes a bewildering, subterranean dreamscape, like a “milky shadow shaped like a door,” whereas the looking and perceiving committed by others is often stifling and interrogatory.

Occasionally veering toward surrealism but always returning to the sensual, these poems jolt us back to the fierceness of the lived experience, of the sublime and of terror, and the hinterlands of memory. If “light is / only a gauze, hanging inside so many / strange faces...,” then Shipley’s arresting and lyrical poems combine the emotive motifs of lighting and the social masks we wear, along with the film technique of montage; thus illuminating the mirrored layers of our own complicated psychology.

In the opening poem, “After the Carnival,” a scene of disorientation ignites dizzying tension, palpable as the memory of a traumatic accident, which provokes a feeling of impending disaster as it unfolds in slow motion:

It’s night. Each of us wears

a mask. I am
the pig, and you
the hawk. Children hide,

folding into their mothers’
skirts, as we kiss

one another and sometimes
them. Beak and snout smear

spread open lines of red
lipstick...

And later in the poem, the manipulation of breath takes on a panicked, eerie tone when the “you” in the poem, during an attempt to avoid drowning, instead becomes smothered, ironically, by a forced kiss:

at thirteen, a high school boy
held your head
under water at Lytle Creek. Inside

you couldn’t swim
so clutched his neck, his arm
until he lifted

your face, smashing his face
into your mouth, sucking

your breath...

Like “birds siphoning secrets from the lungs of men,” the breath is portrayed as a kind of flitting presence in the throat, one that may carry secrets of the speaker. Whether it be during a moment of visceral panic while staring at the “eye of God” of a disco ball (“tiny / in squares until I can’t breathe”) or while sipping from a wine glass that is “the shape of someone’s / breath, held,” the breath—as a means of coping or source of physical comfort—hovers inside the throat, and serves as a liminal conduit through which the breath channels between the speaker’s body and the outside world, where, ultimately, the voice might “choke / out its notes, its high-pitched / scream, its pop.”

Whether implied or overt, the violence that the poems address pervades the speaker’s reality and diverts away from the innocence of when the speaker, at ten, “played barefoot / in the backyard desert...took naps in the patch of grass / we kept trying to grow” to a stark eeriness, as illustrated in the dream of “Boy with Flowers”:

...Today I wake from another dream
in which I have a beard, no breasts
and am about to go skinny-dipping
on a foreign beach with four other men.

I’m afraid to undress, won’t take off my shorts,
so they grab me, one at each ankle, the other two
by each wrist. I am a starfish hardening.
The sun hovers above, a hot
mirror where I search for my reflection.

I close my eyes. It’s too intense. The light
where my lover is tracing fingertips
around two long incisions in my chest. Each sewn tight
with stitches, each a naked stem, flaring with thorns.

In this collection, such remembered moments of crushing violence often trigger temporal shifts, transporting the reader from Echo Park and the dyke clubs of LA to “a window somewhere in Montana,” or driving in a ’76 Chevy Monte Carlo—places where fists are bitten and a roll of dimes can be transformed into a weapon with which to punch “while my own fingers got crushed / over and over again, between / all I held and wanted / to push away.”

Boy with Flowers attempts to remember what is unbearable by casting it against the intimate scrim of language, of intimate moments held up to the light. Objects that we may take for granted are de-familiarized, and, ultimately, we are left with the speaker’s acute wonderment of the “body of the bird against the glass,” a cigarette’s “long finger of broken ash,” of magnolia petals that “would no longer be / white, but darkening everywhere / they’d been touched.”

Refresh, Refresh by Benjamin Percy

Benjamin Percy. Refresh, Refresh. Saint Paul, Minnesota: Graywolf Press, 2007. $15.00 paper (ISBN 978-1-55597-485-5), 249 pages.

Reviewed by Nina Mamikunian

The characters in Benjamin Percy’s newest collection of stories, Refresh, Refresh, are looking for ways to start over and ways to keep going. Set in small, Oregon towns, these ten stories explore relationships that revolve around loss, abandonment, violence and death. Boys have lost fathers to war, fathers have lost daughters to abusive relationships, husbands and wives have lost children before they were born. Car crashes, nuclear meltdowns, and bear attacks are not uncommon in the worlds that Percy creates. His characters are inextricably tied not only to one another but also to this menacing world around them. Yet, they refuse to surrender, and so fight—almost savagely—against themselves and against nature for the small bits of happiness and peace in their lives. The narrator of “When the Bear Came” seems to describe the lives of all the books’ characters when he realizes “It was as if a rhythm had been beating all along, the rhythm of the land, and finally I had found it, here in the peace of the dark woods, with only one slug and twenty feet of rope between me and absolution.”

The tensions that run beneath the surface of these stories are palpable and often take on corporeal forms, such as the amputated foot in “The Killing,” or the bruises young boys inflict on one another in the title story “Refresh, Refresh.” Often, they take on more overwhelming proportions, such as the ominous, dark spaces that run beneath the houses in “The Caves in Oregon” or the torrential floods of water spouting from the fire hydrants in “Somebody Is Going to Have to Pay for This.” Percy manages to create physical senses of absence so well that those absences almost feel like characters themselves. It is these absences that form the backbones of the stories and of their characters’ lives. Explicit or not, each of these stories carries with it a sense of unease and a sense of a world where, in an instant, either everything or nothing will turn out all right. The boys in “Refresh, Refresh” know that “It [doesn’t] take much imagination to realize how something can drop out of the sky and change everything.” But rather than let this fear overwhelm them, the characters accept it and integrate it into their everyday lives, constantly struggling to accept the unknown and the unchangeable.

Violence and death are also key features, with blood pumping through these pages as it pumps through the human body. Many of the stories center on hunting, and in doing so treat life, death, and survival in a very matter of fact way. Despite the perceived divide between man and beast, the hunter and the hunted, there is an undeniable connection between the men and animals here, and the men in these stories are connecting to their most primal emotional instincts as they venture into dark forests, often connecting themselves to their prey in the most literal ways: smearing blood on their faces or keeping their amputated body parts in their taxidermy sheds. Men are constantly reminded of their own mortality in these settings and of the near impossibility of true safety. But it is precisely this heightened sense of alarm combined with Percy’s expert control that makes these stories such a thrill to read. These forests—both the literal tracts of land and the psychological spaces the stories occupy—are, indeed, dark and deep, but Percy is a knowing guide.

Review of Sentences: The Life of M.F. Grimm from 30.2

Percy Carey and Ronald Wimberly. Sentences: The Life of M.F. Grimm. New York, New York: Vertigo, 2008. $19.99 hardcover (ISBN 978-1401210472), 128 pages.

Reviewed by Marcus Wicker

In the graphic novel Sentences: The Life of M.F. Grimm, underground rap artist Percy Carey recreates the gripping story of his life. Carey’s “blow by blow” storytelling joined with Ronald Wimberly’s artwork results in a high speed joy ride, even if the joy is not always obvious. This joint-production is filled to the brim with urban superheroes, struggle, pain, and triumph over deadly circumstances.

The book opens with a bit of dark humor as young Percy, a reoccurring extra on Sesame Street, informs his childhood buddies that Big Bird and Oscar are actually adult actors dressed in costumes, yelling, “It’s all bullshit. Big Bird’s just some man in there, an’ I saw him, an’ he wears pants that look like Big Bird’s legs, an’ Oscar ain’t real, an’ Snufulupagus, he ain’t real neither.” From the very first scenes, Carey establishes himself as a conflicted character: an individual who treats his friends like family, but refuses to sugarcoat his feelings towards even the most trivial subject matter. As the story progresses, this sense of conflict evolves into hyphenation in high school, where Carey finds himself terrorizing the underbelly of New York and reading books like To Kill a Mocking Bird for a little pleasure on the side.

The characterization of Percy as a conflicted person often yields serendipitous encounters. For instance, both his moral backbone and grandiose ego trigger a house party altercation where the young man takes on a pack of thugs to defend the women attendees’ collective honor. The hellish beating Percy endures motivates him to lay low and focus on his aspirations to be an emcee. This turning point spawns likeminded friendships and razor-sharp rap rhymes: “Yo, my rhymes filled with protein / addicting like ice cream or morphine or caffeine / but choke you like chlorine.”

Throughout the book, M.F. Grimm (A.KA. Percy Carey, the narrator) strings together unlikely comparisons, like the ones above, in cadences reminiscent of his 2006 triple disc release, American Hunger. His multisyllabic word play requires jumbo-sized speech bubbles so that, spatially, Grimm’s rhymes are often at the forefront of each panel. Wimberly’s life-like graphic treatment of studio recording sessions, packed concerts, and emcee battles add layers to Carey’s narration. The effect is a world where lyricism and life-experience work in concert with one another—a combination which illuminates the reality of Carey’s mind-boggling story.

Percy’s lyrical prowess then takes him on a journey to the West Coast to work with companies like Geffen and Epic records as a ghostwriter. It is in Los Angeles that the reader realizes Grimm was an unseen presence behind the music of Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, and M.F. Doom, producing/co-producing beats and writing lyrics. It is also in LA that the reader recognizes Percy’s Oscar Wilde-esque syndrome: he can resist everything but temptation (temptation, in Percy’s case, being shoot outs, drug deals, and general violence). This affection for hip hop and street life ultimately leads Grimm back to a growing fan-base in New York to sign a record deal, but this never happens due to a shooting that leaves him paralyzed from the waist down. Carey’s book slightly falters here, as the author begins to tell more than show. Whereas the first half of the book is drenched in non-stop action, the second half is invested in Grimm’s change of lifestyle. Although his voice maintains a gutter register, this sluggish recollection of events renders Carey’s bullet point style of narration slightly monotonous. The graphic format of this book seeks to redeem this oversight though.

Gritty shading, dark shadows, and exaggerated facial expressions consume the quickly portrayed but dramatic “back alley” moments of this book in a way that speaks volumes when Carey does not. Ronald Wimberly’s panels are as compelling as the work of a world class jazz drummer: they remain ever present without overpowering but create distinctive, enriching layers when necessary.

At its best, Sentences is a story of hope, a story of promise. Carey’s compelling tale chronicles the emcee’s pinnacles and plateaus without falling victim to the stereotypical tropes that plague mainstream hip hop, that is, rented rides, video vixens, and pricey jewelry. His precious jewel is a unique brand of diction—a sort of asphalt talk that feels as swaggering and street as the world he inhabits, embodies, and critiques.

Review from 30.1

Catherine Imbriglio. Parts of the Mass. Providence, Rhode Island: Burning Deck / Anyart, 2007. $14.00 paper (ISBN 978-1-886224-81-0), 64 pages.

Reviewed by Ryan Teitman

Catherine Imbriglio’s Parts of the Mass—a collection that trembles with the passion of the Catholic liturgy—resonates like a well-struck tuning fork. Imbriglio has so heavily infused these poems with the sounds and rhythms of the Mass that the book becomes a testament to divinely-used language comingling with secular, everyday forms.

Each poem takes a different section of the Mass and resurrects it as something new. A series of letters turns the epistles into corporate memos complete with headers and time stamps. The poem “Antiphon,” a play on call-and-response prayer, careens from subjects as disparate and as Mussolini’s hands, brain mass, and sweaty farmhands. And while the religious—or at least overtly religious—content of the Mass falls away in each of her poems, Imbriglio leaves something much more powerful in its place: the echoing rhythm of the liturgy.

In the collection’s opener, “In Nomine,” Imbriglio lays out her poetic catechism in the prose poem’s first few lines: “Say forth, say forthwith, in the name of colors, of real colors, in the name of real colors named, in the initial real color named, say Brunelleschi, say curvature, say Sir Francis Crick.” Throughout the collection, repetition is working in the same as the work as prayer: the communion is in the act of saying, not necessarily in the meaning of the words that are said. In “Gospel According to the Middle,” the book’s linguistic play hits its most biblical key: “In the beginning was the who, and the world was with who, and the world was who.”

The poems in Parts of the Mass contain no traditional narratives, and even concrete images are scarce. But in pieces like “Psalm,” Imbriglio shows how a poem can be carried on the sheer luxury of words alone:

Lay your hands upon me, you in the black bent grass, the body in motion that
stays in motion, so too in your drifting to or from me, in the pictures of the
body that provoke the body, judica me, you in the blackpoll warbler, judica me,
you in the black-tailed godwit.

The recurrence of “body” and “motion,” along with the repeated invocation of “judica me” (translating to “do me justice,” or “judge me”) tows the reader through the poem’s thick, lush sounds. Imbriglio further emphasizes these types of repetitions by combining them with a fragmentary structure that sometimes forgoes complete sentences in the name of distinct rhythmic tones. “Psalm,” which appropriates the form of a telegram, further pushes the disjointed voice that Imbriglio experiments with in many of the poems:

If without if without finding stop. What impudicity what who me stop. This is
stop no speech no language where the voice from the wilderness stop.

Throughout the book, sentences in poems sometimes end on articles, such as “the,” or other unnatural points, which are jarring when first encountered, but the poems build on that unease by continuing to push the boundaries of syntax. “Introibo” shows how the articles can serve to replace the nouns they were tethered to: “It seems to me, but also the. To be freed of the.” The lines then become not about the articles themselves, but what comes after—the missing words. They become a repetition of the unsaid.

While the book leans toward non-traditional forms and linguistic patterns, its real artistry is in creating a textured, fully-realized space for itself within the framework of the Mass. Fundamentally, prayer is a type of poetry, and Imbriglio’s poems turn both the everyday and the obscure into a new kind of benediction. Her haunting linguistic prowess transcends any boundaries of form.

Review of Riding Westward from 30.1.

Carl Phillips. Riding Westward. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007. $12.00 paper (ISBN 978-0-374-53082-2), 53 pages.

Reviewed by Luke Hankins

Carl Phillips has long written poems that ignore contemporary American aesthetic doctrines, and that fact alone is heartening. He is entirely comfortable with abstraction, often building his poems on lofty language, and he is unafraid to “tell” as much as he “shows.” His poems speak in the tone of one speaking to an intimate about shared experience, without the kind of sarcasm we often call irony. Consequently, the poems tend to allude to experiences in a fragmentary way, as if the reader has prior knowledge of them and needs only small reminders. What is more, the reader is seldom sure where or when the situation described by one of Phillips’s poems is occurring. Because of these qualities, the poems in Phillips’s latest collection, Riding Westward, may at first confound readers who are used to so-called accessible poetry. In fact, “accessibility” is one of those contemporary doctrines I mentioned above—one which Phillips thankfully ignores. The following lines from “Erasure,” the first poem in the collection, are a good example of these qualities:

Above us, the usual branches lift unprophetically or not, depending:
now spears; now arrows. There’s a kind of tenderness that makes
more tender

all it touches. There’s a need that ruins. Dark. The horse
comes closer.

Here, we have “the usual branches,” as if they are usual not only to the speaker of the poem, but to the reader as well. We have fragments of a scene—branches lifting, darkness, a horse referred to with a definite article as if we already knew it was there—but the scene remains fragmentary throughout the poem, and we never quite know where or when we are situated. The above lines also illustrate Phillips’s propensity to “tell” as well as “show,” his refusal to shrink from making authoritative pronouncements: “There’s a need that ruins,” and “There’s a kind of tenderness that makes more tender // all it touches.” However, the tone of this poem is quite complicated, because not only are we assumed to understand this fragmentary scene, but we are presented with a speaker who makes both authoritative statements and equivocations: “the usual branches lift unprophetically or not.” In this case, the equivocation is intensified by the double-negative construction. Double negatives recur throughout the collection, working as semantic counterbalances to the authoritative tone of the poems’ speakers, as their logical clumsiness has the effect of undermining what might otherwise be effortless pronouncements.



Another potentially disorienting aspect of these poems is the fact that the titles often have nothing overtly to do with the poems or their dramatic situations. There is “Bright World,” which does not describe brightness at all, or even the world very much; there is “The Way Back,” which is about “the urge to make meaning”; there is “The Smell of Hay,” which is about memory, but mentions no situation involving either hay or the sense of smell; there is “The Cure,” which describes a dying tree, which ends up as a metaphor for history, and light falling through it, a metaphor for human lives—but no sign of a cure anywhere for the dying tree or the human lives tumbling through its branches. These are only a few examples of titles that are not linked to their poems the way we typically expect them to be, since they are not descriptive of the poems’ content. Instead, the titles function evocatively: their effect is to create mood by association. In the same way, his poems are anything but descriptive of the world or of life—they do not set out to paint a clear picture of the world or of experiences, as we have largely come to expect poems to do. Phillips’s poems are far too abstract and fragmentary to do that. But they do something equally important by letting the reader’s imagination participate more fully with the speakers of the poems. While reading this collection, one often finds oneself unconsciously repositioning oneself imaginatively in order to create, along with the poem, the story to which the poem alludes. The fact that this is effective is a testimony to the power of this collection—it is not something a lesser poet could achieve.



One way to describe Phillips’s poems is to acknowledge that they function more evocatively than descriptively. What I mean is that they are not by any means about life, which would be no accomplishment at all; rather, they are of life, out of it, and convincingly so, which is a great accomplishment indeed. His poems are informed by and allude to experience without having to entirely create or recreate experience, and this is the source of their undeniable authority. In “Turning West,” Phillips himself makes a similar distinction when he mentions “a distance like that between writing from a life / and writing for one…” (Phillips’s italics). Writing for a life might mean writing in order to have a life, to create one out of a paucity of living or being present in the world. This is decidedly not the kind of writing Phillips does. It is clear that his poems are from life. The evidence of this is the powerful effect they have on the reader who is willing to lay aside expectations for simply “accessible” poetry and who is willing to imaginatively engage, as with an intimate, in these evocative, allusive conversations.

Review of Embryos & Idiots from 30.1

Larissa Szporluk. Embryos & Idiots. Dorset, Vermont: Tupelo Press, 2007. $16.95 paper (ISBN: 978-1932195521), 71 pages.

Reviewed by Cate Whetzel

In borrowing her title from Milton, Larissa Szporluk’s fourth collection, Embryos & Idiots, invokes and salutes Paradise Lost and the epic tradition by offering an alternative to overly familiar and reheated Western cosmogonic myths. What a relief! Very few collections offer an escape, however brief, to a landscape as mysterious as the kingdom of Od. Embryos & Idiots is composed of three sections or acts that balance the sacred with a healthy dose of the profane. Each act is prefaced with a neatly diagrammed program—reminiscent of a playbill—outlining the section’s dramatic scene, the characters in relation to each other, and voices we may expect to hear in the chorus.

In the beginning is Anoton, Szporluk’s principle character. We learn that in the mineral kingdom of Od, Anoton informs on his mother because he “suspects [her] of breaking the law against harboring plants and animals. He reports her; she is demolished.” In retribution, Anoton’s father cuts off his son’s head. It lands on Earth and becomes an island. In time, Anoton, sentient despite decapitation, will indirectly demolish another woman.

The opening poem “Boulders” shows Anoton’s suspicion that his mother has a live bee “trapped in the amber / nook that led to her mineral uterus.” The lines that follow are saturated with Od-forbidden images and the buzzing of a lone bee:

He had been born with that sound,
the rain of maracas, maraud of a rose, and so lived
in his mind with a wax city, silver hives

of see-through honey, chambers crammed
with princess-waste and ice, and would be
almost crazy, brushing her outer stone,

of which he had grown enamored
like a pilot of a bomb site, fingering the lever—

This is a reminder of how the forbidden becomes erotic and may refresh and exert its power through imagination; and how language may give us our desires with one hand, but will punish us with the other.

It’s an old story but the voice is new; the metaphors are glossy. Here are jealous and impatient mothers, fathers and children. Children are alternately victims and tyrants. Parents are tragic failures who need to be overthrown. In section two, in which “everything starts talking,” we hear an anonymous speaker, whose situation is analogous to Anoton’s, address his mother in “Stars and Marrow":

…I turned

my back on you and died lEike a duck
in the open, a pile of yesterday’s
nobody’s child. Strapped to my high
yellow chair, the waves that lunged
at me were carnal, but no, I didn’t
mind. There is so much good
in the worst of us, so much bad
in the best. I found succor in the devil
when the angels cooked my head.

Anoton’s fall is reminiscent of similar scenarios in Classical Greek, Hindu and Christian mythologies: the Greek Hephaestus is cast down from Olympus by parents Zeus and Hera during a family argument, resulting in a permanent limp; another Classical turn in Embryos & Idiots refers to Anoton as “Venus’s son,” the faintly incestuous, temporally crippled Eros. In Hindu mythology, Ganesh loses his head when his father Shiva fails to recognize the boy guarding Parvati’s bedroom door. In an effort to console Ganesh’s mother, Shiva replaces the boy’s head with the head of an elephant. Last in this group is the Biblical and Miltonic Satan, expelled for a definite crime: attempting a militaristic coup to rule heaven in God’s place.

But whatever similarities abound, Szporluk’s Anoton has more in common with Milton’s Satan than with any “bad son” archetypal role. Both are punished for their ambitions, but the fruit of their punishments is not a lesson learned but a new path, diametrically opposed from the world both characters have known. Satan is given Earth and the space beneath it; Anoton becomes a mountain island and consumes a girl castaway, repeating in basic gesture his original sin. In section one’s final poem “Dark Eros,” the subsumed girl, or possibly the broken mother, or even the goddess Venus, speaks to Anoton-the-mountain: “How does / it feel, she asks the old mountain, / to have no choice but to feel?” From underwater, Anoton answers her:

The past is a quasi-fetish.
I was only a child but my
obsession with you was divine.

The richness of language in this collection cannot be overstated—Szporluk loves to rake words, to break rocks, to turn the earth in each poem by breaking up the musty and the comfortable. In doing this she brings us new worlds, neat and prettily shaped on the page, but also smart, allusive and self-referential. Her poems demand a careful eye. Although I admire Szporluk’s previous collections, I admit that in the past I’ve found myself feeling along a poem’s outer wall for a latch or window, having a great time but thoroughly mystified. That’s not the case here. Here many layers and motifs set up an infinite figure eight for the dedicated reader to tread and retread. The poems in Embryos & Idiots reward the intellect without sacrificing the senses.

Review of The Water Cure from IR 30.1

Percival Everett. The Water Cure. St. Paul, Minnesota: Graywolf Press, 2007. $22.00 hardcover (ISBN 978-1-55597-476-3), 216 pages.

Reviewed by Jackson Brown

It’s a novice reader’s faux pas, but even the most seasoned critic could lose sight of the distinction between narrator and author in Percival Everett’s novels. Everett has a knack for straddling that line just enough to make his Black male narrators read like variations of himself. Erasure, one of Everett’s previous novels, is widely acknowledged as having autobiographical elements, its plot involving a Black writer’s struggle to successfully define himself outside of a stereotypical literary persona. Moreover, Everett’s bio on Erasure’s dust jacket could double as a description of the book’s narrator: a California-based professor who enjoys fly-fishing and woodworking. In Everett’s latest book, The Water Cure, his Black male novelist/narrator, Ishmael Kidder, represents authorial self-definition gone awry. The story serves as Kidder’s personal account of how he has captured, tied up, and is torturing the man he suspects of raping and murdering of his eleven-year-old daughter. In this case, the narratorial/authorial distinction is clear, at least until one turns again to the dust jacket, featuring a photo of the author, Everett, hovering protectively over his own infant son.

A similarly multifaceted plot undergirds the novel’s multifaceted narrator. When not physically or psychologically tormenting his victim in the basement, Kidder entertains his literary agent, Sally, upstairs. Kidder’s double life is compounded with his recent tragedy and his lingering sense of loss from walking out on a stale marriage. By the end of the novel, Kidder’s left wondering whether any of it—his career, his anger, his solitary existence—is worthwhile. Everett manages to keep all these balls aloft in the narrative air, but the effort is so conspicuous that the juggling act itself becomes more prominent than the plot. The torture narrative is vaguely resolved. Frequent gaps in the book’s fragmentary structure make the narrator seem shadowy—more “there” than “here.” And throughout the novel, Kidder can’t decide what he wants to talk about: ancient philosophy, the Bush administration, semiotics, or the weather. What’s even more displacing is that Cure directs all its high-academic and far-ranging banter unequivocally at the reader, at “you.” Be assured: if Everett’s novels have a reputation for being cerebral, The Water Cure indeed follows suit, and aggressively so. While Everett intentionally conflates his voice with his torturer/narrator’s, the muddy second-person narrative conspires to displace us, the readers, into the position of the torture victim.

That’s not to say that Cure’s author/reader, torturer/victim dynamic creates an unpleasant experience—no more unpleasant, at least, than it’s meant to create. Though guided along by a violent, grief-stricken narrator, at no point does the novel feel outside the control of a capable storyteller. Everett’s humor and ear for dialogue keep the narrative afloat, so to speak, in places where it might, in less able hands, drag. Take for instance Kidder’s exchange with a JCPenny’s sales associate when he sallies out from home to purchase new instruments of torture for his victim—full-length mirrors:

“Why do you need two?” she asked.

“An experiment,” I said. […] “I’m interested in various angles of incidence and refraction,” I lied to her, leaning an elbow onto the counter. I then went on, “Do you know what the Venus effect is?”

“No.”

[Kidder goes on to explain.]

“Okay.” She didn’t want to talk anymore. [Her voice’s] truckish quality was replaced by one of, not annoyance, or boredom, but of a hushed, tight-lipped, subdued alarm.

[…]

I then went to the drugstore and bought the largest hand mirrors they had.

When the clerk there asked me what I needed all those mirrors for, I told him that I was vain and left it at that.

What emerges from Cure’s unconventional plotline is a nuanced and raw depiction of troubled interiority. In an attempt to logically justify his brutal actions and disassociate himself from the greater American barbarism his victim comes to represent for him, Kidder translates his situation into word problems and algebraic equations, neither of which he can successfully work out on the page. Likewise, language frequently breaks down throughout the novel: Kidder resorting to pen sketches in moments when he finds his anguish ineffable—words devolving into garbled phonetics, as if spoken through water. Despite Kidder’s alternate intellectual posturing and narrative flippancy, he—and perhaps Everett as well—straps himself down in the basement right along with us, helpless as he relentlessly deconstructs his own project, with merely the act of expression offering hope for salvation.

Everett’s latest work is nothing if not ambitious. Unabashed in its critical commentary on America’s own special brand of ruthlessness and unflinching in its gaze at its own authorship, The Water Cure can’t be called a success in its resolution so much as successful at its own dissolution, highlighting the problematic relationship between language and our national and personal pathologies.

Review of I Carry A Hammer In My Pocket For Occasions Such As These from 30.1

Anthony Tognazzini. I Carry A Hammer In My Pocket For Occasions Such As These. Rochester, NY: BOA Editions, Ltd, 2007. $14.95 paper. (ISBN 978-1-929918-90-4), 142 pages.

Reviewed by Christopher Citro

In his 1928 Dada short feature Ghosts Before Breakfast, Hans Richter creates a world where it's impossible to simply wake up, get dressed, and have breakfast. A necktie will come to life and crawl about on one's head. One's hat will lift off and join a flock of other hats flying around, just out of reach. This is a world in which Anthony Tognazzini, author of I Carry A Hammer In My Pocket For Occasions Such As These, would comfortably sip his morning orange juice.

Published by BOA Editions in their American Reader Series, Tognazzini's debut collection is the well-respected poetry press's first foray into fiction. This lush hybrid of short shorts and prose poems mixes fifty-seven stories of differing lengths a la Lydia Davis. These are stories with one foot in the mundane everyday world and the other in the fantastic and grotesque—with objects and characters swooping unexpectedly between like hats through the morning air.

The collection begins, appropriately, with a section entitled "Ever Since This Morning." Here, images of awakening after late nights and shaky dreams blend with the sharp colors of a new day. Again and again the quotidian world is invaded by chaos and absurdity. The theme comes most alive in dialogue, when everyday, terse utterances bump against ones more appropriate to hothouse Victorian versifying, calling to mind such American surrealists as James Tate and Russell Edson. In the story "In Love With Nowhere To Go," a man awakes hung-over to find all his furniture stacked in the kitchen. He remembers he's in love with a woman named Jane, and then inexplicably heads out to visit a drive-thru liquor store called "Stop and Sop."

The microphone at the drive-thru was designed as a plastic beer bottle.
"Hello," I said.
"Murf, murf," said the lady.
I told her she'd better articulate herself or else.
She said, "From this blanket of ashes, our Life, springs not one but a thousand dancing angels, their hearts dappled flags of moonlight, their wings slim and silvery."

After this poetic exchange, the man drinks two bottles of whisky while driving, blacks out, and returns home the next morning. Remembering that he's in love, he crawls into his couch, balanced on the kitchen counter, and falls asleep. Having come full circle—by way of cars, liquor, vomit, and toothpaste—we have about as coherent a portrait of a day in the life of a young man in love as one could wish. In the end, the absurdity seems more than the means to an end, it's the end itself—a psychological point acute in its refusal to deliver anything resembling a tidy analysis of the foibles of love.

In section two, "Second Thoughts," characters react with sudden violence to the various interruptions of their routines, as in the Daniil Kharms-like title story, in which a speaker is asked for a loan and responds by reaching for his hammer. We meet couples attempting to survive "love's ever-ragged disequilibrium," such as in "Accident by Escalator," in which a man gets pulled into an escalator and permanently flattened to a grooved pancake. His girlfriend puts up with this for a while but ultimately leaves. Thankfully, along comes a new girlfriend—"a doormat named Rebecca."

In the third section's "Gainesville, Oregon—1962,” Tognazzini's absurdist axe reveals a rotten core to an otherwise tranquil, suburban family. We start in a safe, "Leave it to Beaver" world and end with underage group sex, a drug-overdosed mother in a coma, a liquored-up neighbor boy dead in the shrubbery, and a dispirited father pulling up the drive after first having run over the family cat. This violence—the rending of reality that characterizes most of the stories in the book—can at times feel forced, and the sexuality sophomoric, but the overall effect is one of revelation. And also joy—these stories are fun as hell to read, full of humor, lyricism, and playfulness.

The stories of the final section, "Gift Exchange," culminate, surprisingly, in resolution and rest (often in the form of a nap)—in rebirth even—though always in a world haunted with mystery and loss. The book ends, as do so many of the stories, with the breakdown of simplistic understandings into a less comforting, but more realistic, recognition of the danger and chaos that underlie everyday life. In the story "Same Game," an adult on his weary way to work in the morning is thrown a ball by a child playing in the street.

"You look sad. Where are you going?"
"To work," I told her. "Everyday I take the bus, same time. See my briefcase. It's an adult thing. When you grow up, you'll see. It's not sad. You ride the bus, work, come home atnight. Like that." I tossed the ball back, "You?" I asked. "Where're you going?"
The built-in reflector on the girl's sneaker gleamed. She said, "I'm going to be brave in ways you won't recognize." Then she pocketed her racquetball and ran away from me.

One can almost hear the hats swooping overhead, chasing the rising sun.

Review of The Jinn and Other Poems from 29.2

Amira El-Zein, The Jinn and Other Poems. Boston, Massachusetts: Arrowsmith, 2006. $10.00 paper, 28 pages.

Reviewed by Roxana Cazan

Amira El-Zein’s 2006 chapbook, The Jinn and Other Poems, follows her other works Bedouin of Hell (1992) and The Book of Palm Trees (1973). Among the attractive features of this book is the fact that El-Zein’s poetic interests find nourishment in her scholarly preoccupation, especially as her book Jinn Among Humans in Classical Islam: The Hidden and the Manifest is forthcoming. Her vision commingles perspectives: from the Qur’anic and Judeo-Christian canons to Greek mythology and Zoroastrianism. Her poems employ exquisite metaphors belonging to the realm of the exotic, bringing into the text local and temporal color, archetypes, and, most importantly, the private self captured at a moment of both spiritual and physical alchemy.



As the title announces, the thematic focus of the collection is anchored in the poet’s attempt to define the jinn. Scholars have debated whether the jinn are vanished souls, invisible creatures endowed with free will, entities with bodies of smokeless fire, good, or evil. Belief in these creatures precedes Islam. In fact, the ancient Semites, probably influenced by Zoroastrianistic doctrines, believed that the spirits of primeval men, the jinn, rummaged the earth at night, bringing disease and madness, and metamorphosing into animals with the first light of dawn. Etymologically, the singular form of the noun comes from the verb root janna, which means “to conceal,” “to hide.” Having the advantage of this connotative richness, one can understand the versatility and elusiveness such creatures afford the poet who places the speaker in a crucial transformative situation. Whether this can be called death or not, the reader may postulate.

The opening poem, “The Jinn,” proposes a symbolical miscellany. References to ceremonies, myths, epics, or totemic representations open the poems to both Eastern and Western audiences. Allusions to a geographical reality with “ecstatic horses,” “tiny boats,” “a Beirut balcony,” the “desert,” etc. establish the setting. Within the setting, the speaker witnesses the arrival of the jinn, a phenomenon that corresponds to some sort of physical transformation. Somber details hint at death: “fish bones / into the water of life,” falling into “a deep pit,” birds drizzling “soft feathers” (which happens when a bird molts or is killed, then plucked). Contrapuntal, the metamorphosis of the body points not to dissolution, but rather to revivification:

my pores break open
and algae bloom on my skin.

Intimations of another type of transmutation suffuse the following poem, where the poet waits to be transformed by the jinn and thus write her verse. This move is not surprising since the early Arabs believed that a poet is inhabited by a spirit at the moment of poetic creation. “I Hear My Ink Spill” does not contain straightforward references to the jinn, but to a totalizing spirit who can be, in a pantheistic or panentheistic mode, an aspect of the divinity. The call of the spirit, made audible in the poem through the usage of refrain and epanalepsis, allows the speaker to travel from a heaven to Hell:

When the spirit called
I descended,
The light flickering,
My oil lamp dying,


When the spirit called
I descended
Toward shapes
Of intact whiteness.

Alchemic phenomena surprise the reader in “The Returning Spirits” as well. The images take a Dali-esque turn: horses vomit stones, tongues gyrate, and the Qur’an’s opening chapter is recited while jazz music plays. The speaker becomes plural and represents a society, and the transformation experienced at death (or birth for that matter) is closely supervised by an unforgiving time, anthropomorphized into a personage whose nature is stern and unbending: “Our sheikh is Time.”

Past and future generations establish contact in these poems even though such contact opposes Judeo-Christian-Muslim teachings. The invocation of these past generations recalls the summoning of the jinn in the preceding poems, which creates a correspondence between men and spirits. In this interaction and interconnection, one can read a continuous and tireless evolution:

note the sunflower’s
blazing mouth, and that foot-basin of rose-petals
…
What sounds like someone kicking a soccer ball
around the backyard must be that sheikh.

The concluding poem, “Square is Jerusalem,” calls on other poetic traditions. With stanzas of only a few lines and the rhetorical mode of imploration and sigh, this poem is first reminiscent of Sufi poetry. When the rhetoric blooms in images of Bedouin women lamenting over an abandoned campsite, or when the speaker invokes the reader/listener, the poem also recalls the qasida, an Arabic form. In this sense, El-Zein employs several aspects of intertextuality which not only propose an interesting decoding of the text, but also point to a transmutation of form and content in Arab poetry. El-Zein’s technique of interlacing references and symbols transforms her poetry into a beautiful weaving, a carpet with vibrant colors and exquisite details which invites any reader to take a seat.

Review of For Love of Common Words from 29.2

Steve Scafidi, For Love of Common Words. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006. $16.95 paper (ISBN-0-8071-3137-7), 72 pages.

Reviewed by Cate Whetzel

The Southern Messenger Poets series has done it again with Steve Scafidi’s exquisitely taut second book of poetry, For Love of Common Words. The collection is an ongoing exercise in defamiliarization, the moment when you wake to an eerie, dark afternoon after a long sleep and cannot decide whether it’s morning or night. Scafidi’s poems exist in a between-place, where any conclusions the sleeper may come to are honest, but essentially wrong. Although several poems in the collection do not practice this sleight-of-hand, preferring the straightforward approach, Scafidi’s skill in this deft switch is like the lion tamer’s and the physician’s: obdurate but coaxing, a bait and a salve. The poems’ narratives balance between two worlds, one of almost magical potential that ignores history and its precedent, and “the given world”—our world with its unbearable shortcomings.



For Love of Common Words pulls us through fantastic landscapes—a well-heeled bear on his way to a wedding; a pitchfork floating tines-up, “iconic as a statue of Mary / in a pilgrim’s mind”; and a murdered boy remembered through another boy trapped inside a pumpkin at the county fair; all are images from what we might call (to steal a title from the book’s remarkable first poem) the “Life Story of the Possible.” Essentially formal, the verse and controlled rhymes guide us across this hilly dream terrain, and the poems themselves tread on uneasy ground, making us ask whether we have inadvertently walked into a requiem or a wake—do we grieve for the sake of grieving, or do we delight in the metaphysical mixed bag of emotions that result from loss?
Through fairytales, the news, natural history, and domesticity, Scafidi wants to show us what it means to have a love of common decency, to recognize and differentiate beauty from illusion, and to hate horror, “that common murderous evil bitch.” Elegiac in tone and often in subject, these poems hope, in spite of themselves, that the universe will deliver better than we suppose. In “For Love of Common Things,” the speaker wishes for the newly departed Czeslaw Milosz a “beautiful / Lithuanian quarter of / heaven where one is allowed to question / and grow doubtful and argue with friends and smoke,” and, in a final turn recalling Yeats’ “The Song of Wandering Aengus,” the poem’s speaker prays:

and if there is a heaven of any kind Oh lord let it be
this city where the poet undresses
tonight and swims
in the river while the mermaid plays
a ukulele and calls to him under the silver trees.

The moments where Scafidi really shines are in his longer poems meditating on awkward moments of beauty, self-conscious lyrics bordering on frustrated narrative. In one of my favorite poems, “To My Infant Child on a Winter Night,” which is certainly doing homage to Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight,” the father instructs his infant:

…Child, do this—watch—make a small tight fist
and shake it at the sky. The night is an idiot and blind, bigger
than your mother and I and we defy it with you

and this is really no way to welcome you to the shimmering
lilac of being here but talking like this is all I know.

Amid these moments of ardent hope and great scenery comes absurdity, exaggerated into poems fueled by fury and an uncommon decency, one in which Scafidi simultaneously expresses gratitude and disappointment in the world and, perhaps, the poet’s role in it. Here, grief becomes both moral luxury and a personal necessity. But these poems double back on themselves, making way for the possibility of a happy ending as in “The Boy Inside the Pumpkin,” where the title character is discovered inside the smashed remains of a blue ribbon pumpkin. Scafidi wants us to know that we live in a wild world where “these things never happen. They happen everyday.”

Review of Gate of the Sun from IR 29.2

Elias Khoury, Gate of the Sun. Trans. Humphrey Davies. Brooklyn, New York: Archipelago Books, 2006. $26.00 cloth (ISBN 0-9763950-2-9), 539 pages.

Reviewed by Nathaniel Perry

Khalil, the narrator of this sprawling epic, is a storyteller. Well, he doesn’t call himself that; he is a doctor. Though he is not really a doctor anymore and has no formal medical training; he is more a nurse. However, he doesn’t do a lot of nursing either at Galilee hospital, which is not in Galilee, but is outside Beirut in the shattered Palestinian refugee camp of Shatila. Khalil nurses just one patient, the comatose body of a legendary Palestinian resistance fighter, Yunes, who Khalil keeps alive through regular feedings of honey and milk, baths twice a day, and, more than anything else, telling the unresponsive Yunes story after story after story. The situation, as another reviewer has noted, is a kind of inverse of Scheherazade. Here, the stories keep the listener alive. Though, as the reader is plunged further into the thicket of narratives, we come to believe, as Khalil (and the author) insists, that it is primarily stories that keep us all alive. And stories, as they are told in this novel, refute themselves, retell themselves, undo themselves, reinvent themselves, and become themselves. They are breathing entities; they are people. And without stories, a people, a person, has no meaning, no life.

The author of Gate of the Sun, Elias Khoury, was born in Beirut, and early in his life, after visiting the refugee camps that surround that city, he became deeply committed to Palestinian human rights. And Khoury’s commitment, one surmises from the novel, has developed into a pledge not only to help the refugees, but also to get their story straight. The book brims with historical detail—anecdotes from the expulsions of 1948 through to the horrors of the Lebanese civil war in the late 1970s and 1980s. Khoury, however, tells the Palestinian story not from an abstract and widened historical vantage point, but through the intimate personal stories of hundreds of individuals. Khalil tells Yunes, and us, of his own travels to China, of the loss of his grandmother (and the pillow stuffed with rotting flowers she left to him); he tells Yunes the stories of Yunes’s own life —his great love affair with his wife Nahilah, the death of his son Ibrahim, the months he spent hiding out in the wilderness, his sleeping inside giant olive trees. Khalil tells stories of people he barely knows—a young mother who sews together a piece of pita bread to please and quiet her wailing child, that same young mother moments later forced to murder the child, a former hero turned madman and caged in an asylum, a troupe of French actors come to Shatila for research, a man whose herd of buffalo is massacred by Israeli gunners at the Lebanese border, the cattle’s “blood splashing the sky” as he stands among them dumbfounded and ruined.

The result of this multiplicity of tales is not just the creation of a world, a frequent concomitant of any lengthy novel, but the creation of the world. The stories, as Khalil sees it, are his only option for making sense of the untrustworthy chaos of history. “We have no alternatives,” he says at one point, “and no masks, and even war no longer provides enough of a mask to conceal the whirlpool in which we’re drowning.” Khoury, I think, agrees. The catalogue of historical events in this novel is not what has happened to the Palestinian people. Rather, what has happened is the sum of smaller things—each uncle murdered, each child born in a field, each glass of sugared rosewater lifted in celebration, each ghost seen among the ruins of a village, each olive stolen from what was once a family’s own orchard. And each story that isn’t told and retold wipes a portion of that people from existence. Thus Khoury, through Khalil’s desperate and unorthodox means of keeping Yunes alive, is making an equally desperate and real attempt to keep a people alive.

Elias Khoury’s Gate of the Sun is now in at least its second printing and has received much attention here in the U.S. and abroad. But it deserves more readers. The book is a masterpiece, yes for its wildly impressive technique and wonderfully complicated narrator Khalil, but even more so for its deft handling of emotion, both pain and love (which might here be the same thing), and for its damning insistence that we, its readers, keep our ears open to its stories, to all stories, to all people. Near the novel’s end, in a final address to Yunes, Khalil says, “I tell you, no, this isn’t how stories end. No.” Khoury, in this Palestinian epic, has done his best to keep the story from ending, and he seems to be asking, maybe quietly begging, his readers to do the same.