NEW! Review of Charles Bernstein

Girly Man by Charles Bernstein. University of Chicago Press, $24.

Reviewed by Thomas Fink

Lamenting poetry’s lack of centrality in American culture, not a few writers blame this “shame” on intellectual difficulty, lack of direct emotional communication, and presumed elitism in the work of most practitioners. They dream of a populist poetry as antidote. These folks should have a look at an early poem in Charles Bernstein’s Girly Man, “Thank You for Saying Thank You,” which begins “This is a totally / accessible poem” and ends by calling itself “real.” This self-styled populist poem provides the reader with myriad reassurances:

There are no new
concepts, no
theories, no
ideas to confuse
you. This poem
has no intellectual
pretensions. It is
purely emotional.
It fully expresses
the feelings of the
author: my feelings,
the person speaking
to you now.
It is all about
communication.
Heart to heart.

As Bernstein’s satire reveals, with the marvelous baldness of its “hyper-plain style,” such abstract assertions disingenuously mask the “theories” and “pretensions” that underwrite them: emotional “communication” is possible through the language of feelings tied to personal pronouns and through elimination of tropes, intellectual allusions, etc.; “feelings” can be fully grasped by the speaking subject without the interference of something like the unconscious; writing is a transparent adjunct to speech, which embodies feeling. Fascination with uncertainty, as in “Sign Under Test,” would threaten this confidence in representation and must be squelched: “Then again, there are certain things I never understood, yet lately I find myself mesmerized by these blank spots. They have become the sign posts of my consciousness.” For those who wish to posit the emotional coherence of a self in direct contact with other emotionally coherent selves, getting lost is the wrong set of directional signals.

Further, Bernstein’s poet of “simplicity” in “Thank You . . .” presumes that the attempt at transparent referentiality shows respect and even affection for the reader: “This poem appreciates / & values you as / a reader”; “This poem / represents the hope / for a poetry / that doesn’t turn / its back on / the audience, that / doesn’t think it’s / better than the reader.” As the poem’s title suggests, the writer’s “courtesy” will result in the reader’s gratitude. Both parties can be self-congratulatory while flattering the other. I would argue, though, that Bernstein shows respect for the audience through the sizeable demands he often makes on it in a poem; he implies that it needs no pandering and can handle how he stretches possibilities of “communication.” Take “Choo Choo Ch’Boogie,” a typical wisecracking Bernstein poem, in which he rewrites a line from a revered Shakespeare sonnet and one from an old nursery tune and tweaks a commonly used phrase to produce a double pun:

                 When in a race
with cartoons and French fries, spackle before
autoeject.

                Hold tight!

              The rink around the
posing is closed for retrofitting.

                                          Refurbishment
is just around the hospital coroner.

Respect for the reader comes with Groucho Marxist fun. While it is easy to see Bernstein’s point that speed of consumption characterizes people’s interaction with popular culture (including fast food), the connection between “spackling” and removing a “cartoon” cassette or DVD from the machine with a remote (temporarily ending the “race”) is tougher. “Spackle” might be a trope for critical analysis that fills in cultural gaps prior to adding a new layer to culture and its reception. The perceiver interrogates how the “posing” (presentation and/or duplicity) of a frame (“rink”) produces or conceals meaning; one frame is “closed” so that a more useful frame can replace it. Further, as a section of “In Parts” (one of several poems responding to Richard Tuttle’s conceptual/ minimalist sculpture) tells us, all frames are eventually vulnerable to dismantling: “first, space becomes the frame // like every solution, it looks good at first // the next step: make the frame the first layer of the visual experience // the third is getting rid of it.” Around the “corner” of “the hospital,” beyond strictures of a precise way of bed-making, and after the “coroner” has performed a post-mortem on an old “frame,” readers’ acts of perception can be “refurbished,” not disrespected.

Even as “Thank You’s” persona brags about how he appreciates readers, one egregious slip makes disrespect for some of the potential audience evident: “While / at times expressing / bitterness, anger, / resentment, xenophobia, / & hints of racism, its / ultimate mood is affirmative.” Affirmation of a limited community and negation of others comprise a sinister yes and a contradiction of the idea that the poem “has no / dogma.” In fact, Bernstein does not make right wingers feel “comfortable” with his work; in various poems, he expresses relatively direct, if linguistically playful opposition to the conservative Republican agenda, especially the pursuit of war in Iraq. Here are five quatrains from “The Ballad of the Girly Man”:

A democracy once proposed
Is slimed and grimed again
By men with brute design
Who prefer hate to rime

Complexity’s a four-letter word
For those who count by nots and haves
Who revile the facts of Darwin
To worship the truth according to Halliburton. . . .

So be a girly man
& sing this gurly song
Sissies and proud
That we would never lie our way to war

The girly men killed christ
So the platinum DVD says
The Jews & blacks & gays
Are still standing in the way

We’re sorry we killed your god
A long, long time ago
But each dead soldier in Iraq
Kills the god inside, the god that’s still not dead.

Like a handful of poems or sections of poems in this volume and earlier books by Bernstein, this irregularly rhymed and metered “ballad” borders on doggerel--and propagandistic doggerel at that. The internal rhymes “slimed and grimed” join surprisingly with an end word in a slant rhyme, “rime,” and the end-words “Darwin” and “Halliburton” make for a potent juxtaposition. However, the childishly worded apology of those (for the most part) erroneously tagged as “christ-killers” and the awkward, pleonastic wording in the last line above are the most egregious examples of “bad” verse. Because these aesthetic flaws are situated among the numerous stylistic approaches of poems in Girly Man with political content, as well as the prose section “Some of These Daze,” it is obvious that the poet is having fun composing what he knows very well is “bad” poetry from both a traditional and an experimental perspective, but he is also taking an unusual, useful opportunity for the development of a direct, almost linear argument. (Imagine Bernstein being pressed into service as a lyricist for a political rock band.)

The social resonances of “The Ballad” most obviously engage in dialogue with the diary-like prose reflections of “Some of These Daze,” which offer a detailed, “realistic” report of how people in New York City and elsewhere responded to the tragedy of 9/11, and with “War Stories,” one of the most politically acute catalogue poems (that I know of) done by a U.S. experimentalist. The seven-page poem begins:

War is the extension of prose by other means.

War is never having to say you’re sorry.

War is the logical outcome of moral certainty.

War is conflict resolution for the aesthetically challenged.

War is a slow boat to heaven and an express train to hell.

War is the first resort of scoundrels.

War is the legitimate right of the powerless to resist the violence of the powerful.

War is delusion just as peace is imaginary.

Revising Clausewitz’s famous sentence and following a binary opposition that appears in Dickinson’s poetry, Bernstein damns prose--surely not the prose-(poetry) of the “New Sentence” by west coast Language poets!--but more generally, the notion that war as a choice reflects the limited imagination of “the aesthetically challenged.” Thus, he links “moral certainty” and indifference to or incompetence in assessing aesthetic value. (Note the allusion in the second sentence to the biggest cliché in Erich Segal’s smarmy seventies pop novel, Love Story.) By “aesthetics,” the poet means something very different from, say, aspects of German Romanticism culled for the architecture of Nazism. Later, we learn that “war is poetry without song” and “an excuse for lots of bad antiwar poetry,” which may allude to some “New American” Vietnam era protest verse. The kind of poetry that Bernstein implicitly valorizes as the opposite of bellicose prose entails exploratory, non-dogmatic negotiation, which offers a better chance for “conflict resolution” than the stultification or proscription of dialogue.

However, unlike Edwin Starr in his celebrated Motown song, “War,” Bernstein resists a thoroughly negative view of war, which can be legitimated as the sole available instrument for “the powerless” to resist “the powerful.” Of course, when he ventures even a slightly pro-war statement, it is productively unclear whether he is being serious or mouthing dubious rationalizations: “War is the reluctant foundation of justice and the unconscious guarantor of liberty”; “War is justified only when it stops war”; “War is an inevitable product of class struggle”; “War is the right of a people who are oppressed”; “War pays for those who have nothing left to lose.” The concepts in these sentences have been supported by a great deal of left-liberal and Marxist thought, especially by notions of oppressive forces’ implacability. Yet other sentences might be used to critique these ideas or to demand that they be severely qualified: “War is the principal weapon of a revolution that can never be achieved”; “War is two wrongs obliterating right. // War is the abandonment of reason in the name of principle”; “War is unjust even when it is just.” Such sentences expose the idea that war can deliver a just, enduring peace as illusory, but Bernstein is aware of how nations (and smaller groups), absurdly, can be backed into war: “War is like a gorilla at a teletype machine: not always the best choice but sometimes the only one you’ve got.”

Many other sentences in “War Stories” make excellent use of allusion. Two more examples should suffice: “War is pragmatism with an inhuman face”; “War is the opiate of the politicians.” The second one needs no gloss; the first may: before the Soviet Union bulldozed its way into Czechoslovakia in 1968 to assert its absolute control of the country, Czech leaders instituted the refreshingly liberal “Prague Spring” with the slogan, “Socialism with a human face.” Bernstein suggests that war is a pragmatic way to impose a particular ideology on those who do not want it and to allow a select group to reap the benefits of that imposition. In dialogue with others in the poem, this aphorism can facilitate analysis of the U.S.’s current perilous adventure in Iraq.

Turning back to “Thank You for Saying Thank You,” we learn that “all / good poems” tell “a story.” “War Stories” and numerous other poems in Girly Man do not; they encapsulate multiple stories--ones without a determinate beginning or end--and perspectives on stories in challenging juxtapositions. Against the boast for the populist poem that “A hundred / readers would each / read the poem / in an identical / manner & derive / the same message / from it,” Bernstein’s poems could bring a hundred readers into a chat room to discover some common ground, engage in many fascinating disagreements, and fill in each other’s gaps.

NEW! Poem by Eugenio Montejo

Eugenio Montejo


MY COUNTRY IN AN ANCIENT MAP

The cartographer’s lines never lied, tracing
his dream for us. Certainly many
river channels were fabled, and our mountains
don’t stretch such to the south, nor does
the sea brush against them, though it tries
with its hopeful outlines. The size of the islands
is something else in the swell of his colors.
And yet the innocent glow of astonished eyes
was always precise under the brilliance of palms.
So what if the Orinoco extends like desire
farther north, or if this cape is misplaced,
with its face of a woman seeming almost to speak?
They never lied: here stood Manoa
at the end of the rainbow that rose from Dorado,
and farther off, from a paradise whose infinite
innocence made all its vessels’ journeys worthwhile.
What other truth might we extract?
The maps were graceful love letters,
sailors’ tattoos, unstained pages that tell us
life is eternal only on this lip of the Atlantic.


Translated from the Spanish by Kirk Nesset

NEW! Poem by Craig Morgan Teicher

Craig Morgan Teicher


A CURE FOR DEAD DOGS

           . . . as if weather were a cure
for childhood.
          --Bin Ramke

As if time were a cure. As if all things
pass, this too shall pass were a cure
for time, the time it takes, time enough,

a little more time. As if waking
with a taste in your mouth
were a cure for childhood, a sweaty

sweaty dream, a monster, an
angel in the closet, under the bed
were a cure for a ghost. As if

a thing lost or forgotten, discarded,
fled, written down and revised, revisited
were a cure for dead dogs, dogs

put to sleep, put down, put out of mind,
put that way were a cure for the facts.

As if this were a cure for that.

As if what happened, events as told, as tell
about the teller were a cure for
what ails, what finally ends, what time

has taken its toll on. As if what can be
hoped for, what works, what heals
were a cure. As if a cure were needed.

NEW! Review of William Logan

The Undiscovered Country: Poetry in the Age of Tin by William Logan. Columbia University Press, $29.50.

Reviewed by Brian Henry

William Logan is a tragic figure. Born at the wrong time--in the so-called tin age of poetry--and doomed to write about it, he earns his living by teaching in an MFA program, thus contributing to the very machine whose products he loathes. His talents and tastes would seem better-suited to a PhD program, but cultural studies and literary theory have taken over, shunning the likes of Logan (or so he would argue). Stuck with the poetry of this time, Logan rages against it. And the saddest aspect of this situation is that Logan’s criticism garners more attention than his poetry. The ignored poet, then, must content himself with being the notorious critic.

Logan’s primary attributes as a poetry critic--invective and predictability--serve him well as a regular knee-capper for The New Criterion but seem less fitting for The Undiscovered Country, a collection of his “odds and ends of criticism.” Predictability can be a critic’s greatest flaw. Worse than faulty judgment, predictability often accompanies a closed mind, or at least a mind already made up. Logan has his pets--Gjertrud Schnackenberg, Donald Justice, Amy Clampitt--as well as his bêtes noires--Jorie Graham, Rita Dove, Adrienne Rich, and, more recently (and infamously, due to the poet’s public threat to thrash the critic), Franz Wright. For the most part, his reviews of such poets follow a pre-ordained path of praise or damnation. His writing on poets who receive mixed and varying reactions--Paul Muldoon, Anne Carson, Charles Wright--is more worthwhile, because Logan actually demonstrates how he has come to terms with their work. Too often, though, Logan remains content with the elevation of personal taste to a general standard, and Logan’s failures as a critic frequently stem from his scuttling of his hero Randall Jarrell’s admonition, “At your best you make people see what they might never have seen without you; but they must always forget you in what they see.”

Despite his claim to read too many new books of poetry, Logan seems oddly unaware of the state of contemporary American poetry. He admits that trade presses have largely given up on poetry, but one would be hard-pressed to glean this from this selection of reviews. Of the 66 books by contemporary poets under consideration, nearly half (32) have been published by Alfred A. Knopf (a division of Random House) and Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Another 22 are published by W.W. Norton, Ecco/HarperCollins, and Houghton Mifflin. Ohio University Press, the University of Arkansas Press, Wake Forest University Press, and Louisiana State University Press are the only university presses represented; BOA Editions, Overlook, Graywolf, Counterpoint, and Seven Stories are the only smaller independent presses. Considering that major publishers release a small fraction of the notable poetry books published every year, Logan’s near-exclusive focus on books issued by these publishers skews his critical perspective from the outset. It’s difficult to imagine a compilation of 66 books of contemporary poetry that can be as safe as Logan’s and that omits almost every important university press that publishes poetry (California, Wesleyan, Chicago, Georgia, Iowa, Pittsburgh, Illinois) as well as nearly every small independent press (Copper Canyon, New Directions, Talisman House, Burning Deck, Story Line, etc.). For many poets and critics, contemporary poetry would be unimaginable without the work published by these presses, and Logan’s inability, or unwillingness, to acknowledge them does not instill much confidence in his grasp of the present age, be it golden or tin. Logan’s inability to find worthwhile poetry seems due, in part, to his looking for it in the wrong places.

Logan’s introduction to The Undiscovered Country illuminates his weak grasp on the current situation of poetry. This jeremiad rails against the usual enemies--cultural studies, identity politics, the confessional impulse--without engaging any of these issues. The introduction seems outdated (Logan’s diatribe against talk show poetry, for example, would have been accurate and necessary a decade ago but seems largely pointless now, not least because Charles Bernstein made similar charges--in 1980 [in “Thought’s Measure”]--and many other critics have attacked the confessional, and post-confessional, modes), as well as petty; he uses the piece to get in the last word against theory-headed colleagues and others who have disagreed with him. (He also demonstrates, throughout the book, a general disdain for his students, whose ignorance of everything from ancient Greece to scansion to Walt Whitman’s era seems to feed his apoplectic outlook.) This is unfortunate because the book’s introduction is the only thing, other than Logan’s sensibility, that might hold this miscellany together; as such, the introduction’s half-hearted attempt to make an overarching argument works against the book, especially since the crux of that argument--contemporary poetry is mostly terrible--is undermined by Logan’s blinkered view.

For a poet-critic, Logan’s breadth--or generosity--of taste is dispiriting in its narrowness. He makes virtually no discoveries, champions only the already belaureled. The most experimental poets he writes about--John Ashbery, Jorie Graham, and Anne Carson--are now safely mainstream. Only Carson maintains anything resembling a cutting-edge position, but even Harold Bloom is wild about her work. Logan seems to read every contemporary American poet through the lens of Robert Lowell, Geoffrey Hill, or W.H. Auden. Though Logan likes to present himself as a contrarian, his major poets are hardly unsung. Logan also seems unaware of emerging or younger poets. One of the three younger poets reviewed in this book, Joe Bolton, committed suicide in his twenties and is a former student of Logan’s. (Bolton also happens to be one of the most interesting poets Logan discusses.) Nearly all of the youngest poets discussed in The Undiscovered Country--Carl Phillips (b. 1959), Li-Young Lee (b. 1957), Henri Cole (b. 1956), Mary Jo Salter (b. 1954), Franz Wright (b. 1953), Mark Doty (b. 1953), Elizabeth Spires (b. 1952)--were born in the same decade as Logan. Deborah Garrison (b. 1965) and Kevin Young (b. 1970), along with Bolton, are the only exceptions. Few critics of Logan’s standing have discovered so little.

It should come as no surprise, then, that Logan’s strongest essays and reviews concern non-contemporary poets: Shakespeare, Milton, Whitman, Housman, Marianne Moore, Auden. In these pieces, Logan generally allows his erudition to trump outrage, even as one suspects his re-readings of these poets somehow fuel his splenetic treatments of contemporary poetry. They are more historically based, but also more informative and less judgmental. Logan seems better equipped to unpack poems than to assess them; he is a good reader but a bad judge. Still, he does not hesitate to criticize these canonical figures, as when he writes that Moore’s “animals, those refugees from medieval bestiaries and emblem books, once offered her access to an ethical world; later they seemed merely the point, or beside the point.” Of the three pieces on Shakespeare (reviews of Auden’s Lectures on Shakespeare, Berryman’s Shakespeare, and the third Arden edition of the sonnets and Vendler’s The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets), the Arden/Vendler review is the most substantial. Yet one must wonder about Logan’s compulsion toward creating (and maintaining) hierarchies when he specifies how many Shakespeare sonnets “have changed English literature” and how many he would “sell [his] soul for.” The dual focus of that compulsion--on a verifiable canon and on the critic’s own soul--seems rather charming, as does Logan’s willingness to make broad claims about Shakespeare’s fitness for sonnet writing: “Shakespeare’s rhetoric was not well adapted to the sonnet. His signature violence of language . . . rarely survives the sonnets’ casuistic wrangle of heartbreak and passion.” Logan does a fine job of excoriating the trendy idiocies of the Arden editor, Katherine Duncan-Jones, while offering measured praise for Helen Vendler’s study (partly because she is “at odds with current criticism, that tar pit of vengeance and half-baked philosophy,” partly because her criticism, at its best, “sustains itself with self-renewing insight”).

Logan’s clear-headed essay on Sylvia Plath cuts through the haze of myth that has surrounded her work. Though “Plath is as close as we have come to a serious poet formed in the supermarket, with supermarket values,” she “wrote like someone who did not have to worry about consequences.” His review of Lowell’s Collected Poems seems less successful; it skims the surface of each of Lowell’s books, offering mini-reviews with little or no new insights into the work. (His take on the Notebook/History/For Lizzie and Harriet/The Dolphin saga is an exception: “What was intimate [in Notebook] has been rendered remote, supervised, parched.”) Considering how frequently Logan cites Lowell when bemoaning the lack of talent and ambition in contemporary poets, he seems eager to replace Vendler as Lowell’s “primary idolator” (Jed Rasula’s phrase). His statement that Lowell “wrote no major poems after For the Union Dead,” then, seems refreshing in its reluctance to lionize, even if one questions the “major poems” designation.

As a prose writer, Logan has his own tics, most notably the double adjective, which sometimes exhibits an alliterative flourish--“dry, delicate talent” (Marie Ponsot), “dry, devious authority” (Mark Strand), “headlong, hell-bent hubris” (Sharon Olds)--but usually stems from an excess of his own hubris, from a need to outdo the poets being reviewed. Why else would a critic refer to Mark Doty’s “easy, gaudy style,” Anne Carson’s “jaunty, intemperate lines,” Eavan Boland’s “steamy, observant lines,” Cynthia Zarin’s “delicate, whimsical poems,” and Les Murray’s “sloppy, booming ways”? Why would he allow himself such lame redundancies as “sketchy, hither-thither manner” (Charles Wright), “clean, well-mannered lines” (Li-Young Lee), “self-medaled, self-beribboned witness” (Adrienne Rich), “cryptic, sphinxlike poet” (Geoffrey Hill), “modest, untemperamental character” (Elizabeth Spires), “static, lifeless observation” (Frieda Hughes), “tidy, delicate images” (Gjertrud Schnackenberg), “glittery, jewel-like style” (James Merrill)?

Agha Shahid Ali, being a Kashmiri-American, gets twice as many adjectives--“fabulous, delicate (even finicky), alien”--and later, Logan refers to him as “a charming, capable, even whimsical poet.” Perhaps because of her three-pronged name, Mary Jo Salter receives a trinity of adjectives from Logan for her “mousy, tense, off-kilter poems.” The double adjective appears two more times in the same paragraph: “honest, dutiful poems” and “fastidious, well-made poems.” In the space of three sentences, Logan has laid seven adjectives on Salter’s poems while saying very little about the work itself. He also compares her poems to those “a housewife would write, if there were such a thing as a housewife any more.” As if that nugget weren’t offensive enough, Logan later mentions her “hostlesslike sincerity” and “prom-dress exterior,” and toward the end of the review, her “well-mannered, well-manicured poems.” (Determined to win the award for The Most Tasteless Comment in a Review, he ends the review with “under the prim clothes there’s something wild and unmentionable and I wish she’d let it out.”) Logan’s comment on Henri Cole--“We reveal ourselves in our repetitions”--applies equally to himself as a critic, as does his comment on Jarrell: “Adjectives were not Jarrell’s strong point.”

Logan’s other major fault as a critic--his tendency toward the ad hominem attack--is what makes him an entertaining read (and a despised figure in a world full of back-scratching and false praise). These violations of critical decorum contribute more to his status as “the most hated man in American poetry” than his actual critical assessments do. Yet this matter is more than a lapse of decorum; it is a breach that undermines the reader’s trust not only in Logan as a critic but in criticism itself. A reader new to poetry, seeing Logan chastising a gay poet for his gaudy shallowness or an African-American poet for becoming a public figure, cannot be blamed for being turned off. Consider the following irrelevant comment: “Stephen Dunn is a rational man, probably a good husband and father, a generous and genial neighbor.” Predictably, this becomes a way for Logan to dismiss Dunn’s poems as “the stuff of scrapbooks.” While one might agree with Logan’s overall assessment of Dunn’s poetry, one should question his need to discuss Dunn as a person. If Dunn were an irrational man, a terrible husband and father, and selfish neighbor, would that make his poems more interesting? Of course not.

Elsewhere, he uses Kevin Young’s race as an excuse to take a shot at African-American writers in the academy, and accuses Charles Wright--one of the most prolific poets now writing--of “paralyzing laziness,” which apparently means not being as assiduous as Homer or Dante. Logan follows his half-vicious, half-perspicacious comment on Mark Doty--“Too often, he renders a world not transformed, just lacquered and varnished with a FOR SALE sign attached”--with a wholly vicious one: “If you hired him to design your house, it would end up looking like Versailles on a quarter acre, with gushing baroque fountains (concrete, not marble) and interiors by Liberace.” He might have had fun inventing this scenario, but it says nothing meaningful about Doty’s work.

The worst instance, however, concerns Rita Dove. Logan’s overarching argument--that Dove has become too famous to write good poems--turns on itself, since Logan’s entire review of Dove focuses on her fame. He spites his point to prove his point. Logan’s attack on Dove centers on her success--being named Glamour’s Woman of the Year, receiving numerous honorary doctorates, being Poet Laureate, etc.--which, he argues, has nothing to do with her poems. In other words, fame never guarantees good poetry. He’s right, of course, which makes his decision to review Dove’s career--rather than her poetry--questionable. Even when one agrees with Logan--say, when he writes, “[Eavan] Boland may want to bleed poetry, but often she just leaks self-importance,” “C.K. Williams is the guilt-ridden Peeping Tom of American poetry”--one has to question how being so personal can possibly benefit the criticism.

As entertaining as they can be, Logan’s barbs often serve as distractions from the matter supposedly at hand: the poetry. Because Logan is one of the few critics today who can write readable prose about Geoffrey Hill’s work, it’s unfortunate when he resorts to comments like “[Hill] would like to invent a poetry monks could enjoy (if poems came as hair shirts, he would have his own designer label).” There’s something schizophrenic about Logan’s critical persona: half scholar, half cocktail wag, he cannot let himself play it straight for more than a paragraph or two.

To Logan’s credit, he is willing to give a hard time to poets he usually admires--Hill, Schnackenberg, Anthony Hecht--while professing grudging admiration for poets who often annoy him--Carson, Charles Wright, Ashbery. He has come to admire Muldoon despite himself, gushing that Muldoon “sets himself impossible labors and exceeds them.” Sometimes, Logan’s put-downs can seem like wry compliments, as when he refers to Franz Wright as “a demonic version of William Carlos Williams.” And he can be brutally (and impersonally) right: “A poet’s talents exist in productive tension for only a decade or so. Before, the language is all main force, the subjects mistaken, the voice immature; after, the poet often hardens into manner.”

Logan’s model in wit, ambition, and ferocity, is, of course, Randall Jarrell. Like Jarrell, he can come up with zingers in his sleep, but Logan seldom puts them to legitimate use. His prolificness could be a source of this problem. Given limited time with which to engage a work, he too easily gives a book short shrift. If Logan were to live with a book for a year before assessing it, the resulting response would be fuller and more thoughtful, if not more positive. Logan possesses a strong mind and even stronger opinions, and despite its many faults, The Undiscovered Country is worth reading. Logan’s willingness to take a stand--even if for all the wrong reasons--distinguishes him from critics who seem intent on--and content with--passing off extended ad copy as criticism.

NEW! Review of Tessa Rumsey

The Return Message by Tessa Rumsey. W. W. Norton, $14.95.

Reviewed by L. S. Klatt

In The Return Message, Tessa Rumsey composes herself in the aftermath of “a love affair that ended badly.” Behind every lyric is a debris field of emotional wreckage--betrayal, miscarriage, broken engagement. Even the “cherry blossoms” are “caught. / Inside the static loop of loss.” If “all forms of landscape are autobiographical,” as Charles Wright once suggested, then what we have here in the “mountain streams of No-Where” is the poet at an impasse.

But bleak as that seems, The Return Message is not mired in the morbidly confessional; whatever her personal losses, Rumsey investigates the idea of love from a philosophical perspective. Rather than croon about heartache, she seeks ontological answers: if romance is only a biological impulse, then why, after intercourse, do I still long for my partner? “Does the soul--exist?”

The book identifies this craving for love with other human passions--namely, fame and transcendence. Are these evidences of personality or egomania? In one hilarious barb at the Rolling Stones, Rumsey writes, “memo to Mick: a spotlight shone on a body don’t infuse the body with soul.” But, on the other hand, his stage persona, to some extent, derives from audience acclaim. In The Return Message, identity is formed from without and within, at once concocted by others and self-expressed.

How different is Jagger from a Juliet lost in her Romeo’s adulation? “Consider The Individual, a tightly corseted continuum of light and ashes contained. /. . . in a burst of self. / Revelation: an exodus we call ‘falling in love’ or ‘abandoning one’s proper station.’” Untying the corset may not be “proper” but it is necessary; to be fully affirmed, the self must merge. Here and throughout, Rumsey posits a personhood that is blurred.

In Rumsey’s universe, all boundaries are artificial and therefore permeable. “If each world stops at walls of its interior-- / (Where one body begins, where the next body ends--) / Isn’t a wall a way of rubbing up against, of joining, of letting in?”

Even her grammar is not hard and fast. More often than not (note: “. . . in a burst of self. / Revelation”), the reader must ignore the period and roll through the stop in order to follow the thought: a hyper-enjambment.

Nor do the poems comprise a discrete series. Rather, they are paired, sharing a title and, wherever the book is opened, occupying left and right pages. But in these two versions of the same poem, the opposing lyrics are not mirror images but asymmetrical. The poem on the left side is consistently three lines long while the one on the right is more expansive. The first is elliptic, the second, digressive, and the two do not often coalesce.

Yet other poems among the hedgerows Rumsey has cultivated bear striking resemblances, and the reader encounters replications. For example, the “lipsynching” of “Headset” has already been anticipated in an earlier poem: “Because I could not be the songbird I found. / Another to croon my favorite tune.” Or in the opposite direction, “the cherry blossoms” of “April Fools” become “the Paradox of Cherry Blossoms, standing for winter and spring simultaneously” in “Fantasy Coat.” True to the design of a labyrinth--where one never knows which way is in and which is out--these passageways occupy the foreground and are complicated.

Rumsey’s “endless loop of landscape” sounds oddly similar to another line from Charles Wright--“all landscape is abstract and tends to repeat itself”--as if the organic material of Wright’s work has cross-pollinated. Certainly the two poets share an affinity for music, metaphysics, and Zen-like queries, but Rumsey more frequently strikes an exuberant, almost Thoreauvian note: “Don’t disappear! Shine brighter.” Such a plea resonates with “Copperopolis,” where she exclaims, “Every breathing body has a city buried. /. . . And lo! You are lit up from the inside!”

These moments resist the desperation we might expect from a poet obsessed with mortality. Though Rumsey stares down death and its concomitants, she remains inspired by the dazzle of the day-to-day, no matter how brief or troubled. The landscape, as it has for artists ad infinitum, keeps her musings grounded. This, after all, is a peregrinator who is wont “to ramble over. / Earth alone while still transmitting thoughts and feelings to whoever may be listening.”

NEW! Review of Nathalie Stephens

Touch to Affliction by Nathalie Stephens. Coach House Books, $16.95.

Reviewed by Meg Hurtado

With Touch to Affliction, Nathalie Stephens explores the poet-as-trespasser. Her speaker wanders through a world to which she clearly feels entitled (she intimately references the train stations and street corners of this poetically consecrated world). However, her cutting lyricism soon reveals that this city exudes not only loss but rapidly approaching danger, and her role within it is more than simply elegiac. Touch to Affliction strives to save what must endure, and Stephens’s speaker is responsible for this task. The poet plays both the elegant bard and the invincible journalist, leading the reader through a “city” that has fallen into the hands of its fate. Her double identity extends to a sense of double vision, which she manipulates gracefully through her awareness of language as song and system. Stephens conjures vibrant images and clarion scenes, but their beauty never compromises their full dimensionality. She has been assigned to search for both the inner and outer story of this “city.”

Her writing itself possesses the texture of light, revealing both what can and what cannot be seen. In one simple example, she says of “a dog lying heavily against a wall” that “It is or is not cold.” In many of the poems, Stephens dramatically expands this sense of double-sight. The fruits of this fearless expansion are several moments in which we know that the speaker is both living and dead. Such moments do not produce horror, nor any sense of a tortured, “ghostly” speaker. Rather, they comprise an achievement in clairvoyance just as serene as it is extraordinary.

The speaker of Touch to Affliction belongs to a world of transparency, a devastated city in which usual boundaries of culture, language, and survival have been removed. Even so, her awareness of such boundaries penetrates the text--constant references to the nature of language at first appear academic, but prove to be anything else. All of her linguistic theatrics eventually assert themselves as essential. Even the tiniest inversions of diction or unconventional, abstract syntax earn their place in this city.

The city could be Paris, to which she makes multiple references, but it could just as easily be 1945-Berlin, or 1917-Moscow, or any other city in time of strife. Fortunately, Stephens possesses such a miraculous intuition for and control of language that this breadth of subject does not damage her visceral nearness to the world of her creation. Though Stephens definitely conjures a visually and intellectually surreal landscape for this “city,” it is a surreality with which she is familiar. Such intimacy with the universal cannot help but impress and fascinate the reader, especially since she graphically describes the emergence of “the city” from her own thigh.

This image resurfaces many times in Touch to Affliction, as do several others, but the thoughts behind them remain ever-original and breathtaking. She identifies her city not only with all cities, but with all individuals. Furthermore, every individual is also a war, a tragedy. She asks, “What part of you is city? What part of you is famine?”

Stephens gives her speaker no immunity against this human-as-war identity. The speaker describes herself in blatantly geographical terms: “You identify me as a contested surface. A stripped margin of land.” Obviously, this gives rise to all kinds of existential questions, the answer to each of which is “yes.” Stephens’s ability to create double-realities seems unlimited--she has created a narrator both omniscient and completely subjective. This assessment also applies to the text itself. The reader may easily traverse half of Touch to Affliction before he or she notices its basic form. Stephens does not compromise between prose and poetry, but exploits language so well that her poems embody and transcend both mediums, just as “the city” must embody and transcend disaster and individuality.

With her view of every individual, including the speaker, as a war zone, Stephens appears “confessional” on many levels. Such a comfortable category feels long-lost and perhaps welcome to the reader, but Stephens boldly and bluntly refuses it, just as it seems to be most supported: “Not confessional. Evidence, rather, of the unspeakable. That thing toward which we move and we are an affront to the language we use to name it.”

She allows us no easy roads, but if one had to “bend [Stephens] into language,” one could call her a tragic poet, in the word’s truest sense--not only does she possess power over tragedy, but inimitable kinship with it. This is the “terrible beauty” of Yeats and the purity of contemporary European writers like Tomaz Salamun, sung by an earth-mother of humility and strength. Though Touch to Affliction waltzes with the tides of violence, Nathalie Stephens writes without fear or compromise, “brazen and stumbling.” Touch to Affliction is a clean, stone Madonna, buckled and rife with violence and the possibility of exultation.

NEW! Review of Camille Guthrie

In Captivity by Camille Guthrie. Subpress, $14.

Reviewed by Kate Seferian

Camille Guthrie jumpstarts her second book, In Captivity, with intrigue and exhilaration: her opening poem, “The Start of the Hunt,” spreads over nine pages and sets a suspenseful tone and level of intensity that enable the book to forge ahead and captivate the reader. Guthrie alternates between the contemplative and narrative voice and offers the reader a multitude of speakers--the lover, the prey, the predator, the quiet observer. The motif of the hunt pervades the book, whether appearing blatantly and literally, as in the opening poem when Guthrie writes a list of “What To Bring on a Hunt,” or emerging as the slight shadow behind the poet’s words as she secretly “first saw you / pearled primed bearded beading” in “At the Fountain.” Guthrie manipulates this motif, a theme normally expressed through visual art, to fit language rather than imagery. Most noted for its role as muse for painters and Greek mythology, hunting embodies a strong blend of impassioned emotions rooted in both the senses and the intellect. Historically, hunting hints at aristocracy as well as a social event that calls for rituals in certain cultures, and Guthrie includes all of these facets of the “traditional” hunt in her poems.

Guthrie includes only eleven poems in this collection, but she splits several of the poems over a series of pages, thus allowing the reader an unobstructed path to comprehension and absorption; the creation of sections offers a smooth transition from one page to the next and evades the weight and confusion often engendered in more compact, concentrated poetry. Despite the segmented structure of poems, Guthrie still manages to string the theme of the hunt from beginning to end and enthrall the reader with details of life’s literal and figurative pursuits. She describes herself in the collection’s first lines:

Nevertheless, like a blank piece of paper
I drifted along past buildings . . .

Withdrawing into cloudy heights
I walked up aimless blocks each day
Discord knocking about in my head

Sick with fear that had no form
Captured by my debt to pay
Wanting to make something of myself
Wanting knowledge & intimacy . . .

In the following sections, Guthrie erupts with the suspense, violence, and passion born from the chase--“this is the starting point because I look for danger / everywhere putting out feelers”--and later violence bursts to the forefront: “Scent hounds slip from the shore / Rashness, Desire, Anxiety, Fear & Grief / could ambush us you know / their snouts disappear into wild grasses . . . Cacophony rings like unstoppable capital / its edges echo into the trees / Such riches there / to rot have run.”

Guthrie experiments with structural segmentation in “My Boyfriend.” In a note at the back of the book explaining the source of inspiration for some of the poems, she explains that this poem was modeled after a list in Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel. Guthrie breaks down the boyfriend into three parts--his exterior, his interior, and his actions--and the poem is formed from these three sections. Guthrie mixes the earthly, natural, historical, and abstract to build the boyfriend’s character: “a back like chalked sidewalk,” “fingers like sparklers,” “elbows like antidotes,” “a skull like a geode,” “throat like a bold headline,” “bowels like surrealism,” “veins like Japanese characters.”

Guthrie concludes the book with the same segmented format of the beginning, and the final poem, “In Captivity,” while laced with the grief and anxiety of personal, psychological confinement along with more macrocosmic burdens, closes with optimism and anticipation for something greater: “Captured by your debt to pay / You are the genius of this shore / And will be truthful to your words / To all who listen from here on.” Guthrie spends much of the collection reflecting upon her own personal hunts or those that exist around her, but in the final poem she addresses “you,” potentially the reader, and finishes with insight directed toward the audience. In meshing the more intangible, philosophical illusions and aspects of the hunt with the physical and personal, Guthrie achieves flexibility with a topic that could be dangerously limited.

new issue of Verse

The new issue of Verse is out. Click on the link above for details. The discounted offer is good through January.

Up next: a big issue devoted to French poetry & poetics.

NEW! Review of Catherine Bowman

Notarikon by Catherine Bowman. Four Way Books, $14.95.

Reviewed by Meg Hurtado

Catherine Bowman’s Notarikon fills its reader with a profound sense of the obscure, of the million tiny, sticky acts of irreverence that constitute an individual’s window to the world. She quilts together all the minutiae that make a neighbor, a marriage, or a vacation, to name a few. Her own ability to systematize images and information fascinates her, and the book’s title reflects this fascination appropriately: “Notarikon” is a Kabbalist term for making new words out of the first and last letters of other words in holy texts.

Bowman’s gift for synthesis does not always work to her advantage. Several of the poems in Part I veer toward moments in which her abundance of eclectic imagery becomes pure sensory overload. In the poem “Persephone and the Man of Letters,” each stanza focuses on a letter of the alphabet, followed by layers upon layers of imagery. For example, the “E” stanza concerned with the letter contains the line: “Of humidity. Of day-old coffee. And fries extra-crispy.” If this association bears poetic fruit of a Kabbalist persuasion, it excludes the vast majority of readers and appears excessive to the point of self-consciousness. That the poem takes the highly artificial form of a list only reinforces this gap between Bowman’s arrangement of words and what depths it might reveal.

But in the poem “Fish with Coco: Five Havana Milagros,” she manages to array such images as “an animal eye / marinated for days,” “a raft / named Jesus,” “a colossal frosted cake,” and “a pinch / of black camino” into a cohesive lyrical unit. “Fish with Coco” also takes the form of a numbered list, but in its case structure frees lyricism, rather than constricting it. At her very best, Bowman turns those techniques which evoke self-consciousness into absolute vision. Part I of Notarikon contains fourteen poems, and all of them reflect her love of lists, letters, and numbers. Bowman divides “Fish with Coco” into five numbered sections, titled “Eyes,” “Tongues,” “Ass,” “Ears,” and “Heart.” She speckles her poem “The O Store” with words containing the letter “O,” and the twenty-six lines function as an abecedarian.

Bowman also makes use of cross-references between poems, causing the reader to wonder just what kind of intricate world of imagery and meaning they have entered via her work. For example, the first poem is titled “Heart,” as is the last section of “Fish with Coco.” Her poem “1000 Kisses” contains multiple words containing the letter “O” in every line, like “The O Store.” “1000 Kisses” also features the phrase “convulsed, crucified,” which the reader may link to Bowman’s “Jesus’ Feet,” an earlier poem concerned with the moment when Christ has risen from his death by crucifixion and displays his wounds to the apostles.

Religious and spiritual concerns in Notarikon cannot be attributed to detached intellectual exploration. All of her poetry features some degree of “religious” diction, though the poem titled “Jesus’ Feet” displays its religious intention most blatantly--not only because of the subject matter and tone, but because only in this poem does Bowman muffle her impulse to load the poem with radiant eclecticism. What imagery she does employ can be found in the actual story of Christ: “shepherd crossing the valleys,” “vinegar,” “yeasty loaves of bread,” “broiled fish, and a honeycomb.”

In spite of her ability to successfully curb her verse with traditional imagery, Bowman possesses her own conception and spirituality, as well as her own mode of description. For instance, the Eden symbolism in “Heart,” the first poem of the book, is difficult to miss. But Bowman portrays the serpent as an object of wonder rather than revulsion, betraying a penchant for the inversion of values which pervades not only her use of language but the book’s paradigm as a whole. “Heart” ends with the thought that a snake “Tastes like / hope, memory, forgiveness.”

Part II of Notarikon contains a single poem called “1000 Lines.” A strictly composed account of a ten-year marriage, “1000 Lines” boasts one hundred stanzas, divided into ten cantos. Each stanza has ten lines, with ten syllables in each line. If her free-wheeling voice in Part I caused the reader to question Bowman’s ability to function within a strict form, “1000 Lines” leaves behind all such doubts.

Almost every stanza begins, technically, with the word “ten” (Bowman cleverly begins some lines with words like “tenderness” and “tensions,” etc). Her more obscure choices, like “tenement” and “tenebrionid,” would sound out of place if employed by any less skillful author, but Bowman wields them beautifully. She gives each canto a “title” in italics--a list, punctuated by dashes, of the most searing pieces of the stanzas, or the most pivotal moments in the “marriage.” They appear random, but prove rich.

The strict form of “1000 Lines” serves not only an aesthetic, but a reflexive purpose. It binds the reader to the speaker’s paradigm, insofar as the reader must view the poem in very much the same way as the speaker views her marriage: the poem’s beginning contains its end. The uneven manner in which Bowman divides her stanzas into cantos may produce a certain amount of disorientation regarding the reader’s pace, but the fact remains that the speaker’s world of “ten kinds of limbo,” “sulfur springs,” “summer and winter and what’s / found between” will vanish with the thousandth line. Yet, like the speaker, the reader must focus on the beauty and breadth of Bowman’s language because of the honesty and simplicity of the poem’s structure. Even beginning every stanza with the word “ten” never grows tiresome. Rather, the reader becomes devoted to the inevitable pleasure and comfort that the reader will receive from her linguistic cleverness. The speaker of the poem immerses herself in the pleasure of memory free from obvious analysis--“Ten reasons why we ended. I’m drawing / a blank” and “Ten years, and I remember more about / the trees we’ve seen.” The reader, free from the anxiety of over-analysis, engages fully in the act of rapturous hindsight.

“1000 Lines” brings Bowman’s insatiable penchant for eclecticism to intellectual and emotional fruition. Her bizarre, ecstatic imagery finally yields boundless originality and beauty. One parenthetical stanza in Canto 2 epitomizes her gift for synthesis as images of “the red dragon man,” “jailer boy,” “phone sex,” etc, build to a nightmarish pitch. Bowman then ends the stanza with a mystical sense of purpose, by bombarding the reader with the crystalline nature of love: “I screamed, What are / you? He bent down and whispered, I am you!”

With “1000 Lines,” Bowman has unveiled the soul of Notarikon. She finishes the book with only one poem, “Nostrum,” which composes the whole of Part III and functions as a successful sugar-pill to soothe the violence and memory of “1000 Lines.” With such an ending, Bowman exhibits the awareness of her personal strengths and honesty about universal human weakness that make Notarikon both extravagant and essentialist.

NEW! Review of Chad Sweeney

A Mirror to Shatter the Hammer by Chad Sweeney. Tarpaulin Sky Press, $10.

Reviewed by Chris Vola

The 20 shrewd, sparse poems in A Mirror to Shatter the Hammer resonate with potential and presence, vibrate with the maddened shouts of a dozen remarkably dissimilar narrators, and entice the reader with the sagacity of an elderly carpenter and the bright-eyed callowness of a newborn. The fourth chapbook from San Franciscan Chad Sweeney grabs the proverbial hand and flings it on an exploration through cities and deserts, across the boundaries of space, and far from the realm of hackneyed conventionality.

Many of the poems in the book sting from jarring collisions between the ancient and the postmodern, the bucolic and the metropolitan. Medieval vicars and slashing guillotines are interspersed with visions of the first colony on the moon, ancient grandmothers anchor themselves onto the antennas of satellite dishes, a cigar store echoes with the sounds of growing rice and prosthetic limbs. These juxtapositions endow the poems with a sense of timelessness, of a memory that travels far beyond the reaches of any single lifetime and the clear perception of a future that is at once hopeful and foreboding. In “Diurine,” Sweeney describes a homeward trip on the freeway that quickly becomes a journey through space, time, and language itself:

My house arrives
through the internet,
its corners landing everywhere.

To be a red night
watched carefully by Bedouins.
To be a comma

between two really important
clauses.

The timeless element in Sweeney’s poetry allows for a rare cohabitation of narrators (some valiant, some disturbed, some naïve, others just plain pissed-off) from a wide array of geographical locations, moral and spiritual inclinations, and even spatial dimensions.

Beneath the liberation that this timelessness creates, there exists a more important and urgent notion that each passing moment, no matter how seemingly insignificant, must be appreciated and respected. Even though the poet has been bestowed with widely spanning visions of remarkable clarity, he understands that “Today a book is being hung. / Tomorrow it could be you,” that nothing is guaranteed, that time stops for no one, not even the most clairvoyant among us. Sadly, this respect goes hand-in-hand with more than a hint of bitterness and nostalgia, a longing for a time when “we were happy,” an evaporating connection to a family history, and a quickly approaching end-time. The cigar-smoking father, the sister who burns happy faces into her arms, and scores of mustached uncles and great-uncles fade with the flick of a switch. The narrator of “Harvest Time and Whale Watching” acknowledges and quietly surrenders to this inevitability when he admits, “Most of my life is in the past. / There goes some more of it.”

Oftentimes, Sweeney employs short, musical lines that contribute to many of the poems’ highly rhythmical qualities. The vast majority of these lines contain only three or four words and many end with some sort of punctuation, usually a period. The brevity of the phrases gives each line more weight and instills a sense of sharpness and exactness to the text and the space between it, a staccato march with accents on the notes of each striking image and idea: “No closer to understanding. / I’ve seen my wife sleeping. / A blue face on a pillow.” In “The Factory,” anaphora creates a persistent rhythm:

One key is a street.
One key is a glacier.
One key is a cardinal.
One key is a bruise.

From these lines the reader can easily deduce the accurate hums and the metallic chug-chugging of cogs, the relentlessness of a strange, yet pleasant-sounding assembly line.

In a collection that glides so gracefully and succinctly through centuries, across continents, from the bizarre to the rational, the element of surprise is a constant and unifying motif. Men teach sheep to fight lions, briar patches shiver with delight, cities spontaneously rise from the sea. It is never evident to the reader from the outset where each poem will end, but one can be fairly certain that the people and cities the poet describes in the beginning stanzas of his poems will almost certainly take on bizarre characteristics or be placed in seemingly impossible situations. However, nothing is ever impossible or improbable in the world Sweeney crafts, a place where “I’m a cancelled stamp. / You’re the carpenter / of an orphanage. / She’s an out-of-order sign,” a place where the idiosyncrasies of a startling reality in some way embellish and mirror our own. Therein lies A Mirror to Shatter the Hammer’s ultimate appeal. Within the pages of the book, the reader is drawn not only to Sweeney’s characters, but to his or her own grandparents, uncles, and neighbors, to the threads of a common past, and towards a future we view with equal parts hope and apprehension.

NEW! Review of Chris Pusateri

VI Fictions by Chris Pusateri. Gong Press chapbook.

Reviewed by Lauren Grewe

In his chapbook VI Fictions, Chris Pusateri explores the possibilities for language in a postmodern, commercialist word, playing the literary equivalent of a game of Russian roulette as he flirts with the idea that language is empty, that the signs lead to endless signs. For Pusateri, this carnival hall of mirrors view of language, rather than limiting the language of poetry, opens up a whole new range of self-consciously futile exploration, as Pusateri tries to make language, and poetry, relevant for a world of supermarkets, internet porn, and composite selves.

For many readers, Pusateri’s chapbook will lack immediate approachability since he writes in disjointed, somewhat terse phrases, often connected thematically rather than through logical narratives. Indeed, some poems in this short chapbook appear to work purposefully for disorientation, as Pusateri links images as disparate as business cards, swimsuits, shirts, and rice cookers in a single poem. Yet beyond the apparent disorder, these short prose poems, mostly paragraphs composed of loosely associated sentences, frame certain themes as Pusateri searches for the deeper meaning behind that impulse buy in the supermarket line. As a poet, Pusateri delves into a stereotypically superficial world and resurrects not reverence or awe or anything religiously associated, but a sense that the “Clothes suits walk[ing] by with people in them” hide the deeper psychological tensions he articulates in his poems.

Pusateri’s poems display a marked inability to seriously consider the world around him, or perhaps he has rather too seriously considered his world. His characters (the main ones always male) view life through the beer goggles of fast-paced modern media and consumerism, coping in various ways with the modern death of certainty. In one poem Pusateri muses, “Every day the sun comes up a little later,” while in another he comments, “He decided that this year, June would have thirty-one days. Beneath his feet, he felt the year leap.” If there remains no reference point, no preformed settings in this world, then the possibilities become limitless, and, in their sheer infinity, terrifying. This view of the world complicates language, enabling it to work without purpose, for the sheer play of words, which has always been a main draw of poetry anyway. Yet Pusateri takes what many have accepted in theory and puts such ideas about language into practice in his poetry, collapsing the real with the fictional, until we can no longer tell one from the other and must admit that we impose such boundaries to begin with. Such a liberating view of truth allows Pusateri to playfully propose in his own book:

The book was unhooked, unzipped--the book was a ledger of old accounts. Beneath the flaking paint was its old haircut. The book readed a needer. The book was published by Exxon as part of the settlement. True or false: the book just wants you to listen.

Beyond sheer language experimentation, Pusateri exhibits a consciousness of the politics involved in saying anything at all, and in several instances he mocks big businesses and Hallmark materialist America. His incorporation of American capitalism through his use of advertising slogans points toward the political--or at least the aware--as he subverts overused slogans, trying to make us think about the way they operate on our lives with an incandescent beating as steady as the thrum of florescent lighting. He remarks, “Use only as directed implies unnamed consequences” and intones, “Once you cut the tag, all sales are final.” One drawback of this hyperconsciousness of postmodern, consumerist existence becomes apparent in the book’s overly constructed feeling. Emotion often feels suppressed in VI Fictions, as if real emotions could not survive an overly active self-awareness which includes so many superficial brand-name bearing voices. Indeed, Pusateri’s characters appear trapped in the superficial snow globe of their own exceedingly complex and yet exceedingly shallow lives, unable to make any decisions, important or unimportant--stuck in the volitional stasis that perhaps comes from desiring too much too often. Pusateri humorously addresses this volitional failure when he remarks, “She said he had problems committing. He couldn’t decide between chicken and pork.” With so many objects in reach, nothing really “seem[s] reachable” anymore, not an address “Euthanized with a piece of box tape,” not a book, not other people--“When socializing, he thought of the weather as his hole card”--not even ourselves. Yet this pathetic development, far from leading us to pursue other means of satisfaction, leads to more pleasure-dredging:

The savings of one dollar the coupon promised was just enough to make him buy the new product. While the product is new the idea is old. He was thirty (nearly) and through careful attrition, was beginning to consider that, while not old, neither was it young. The savings of hair (or: wrinkles, time, worry, etc) was just enough to make him purchase the new product.

But Pusateri delves into a realm beyond mere capitalist hand-slapping in his brief sojourns into an uncertainty provoked this time by the possibility of meaningful human connection. In his only vertically-oriented poem, he contemplates the connections, perhaps self-invented, perhaps not, between himself and the outside world:

. . . I wonder
if the woman in the window opposite mine is
every night performing for me. This has never
been proven by empirical methods. All my doubts
are reasonable and what lies beyond is any-
one’s guess. The hyphen is bridgework,
a simile between two otherwise intolerable
terminologies. I’m so tired of “I.”

In spite of Pusateri’s constant musings, or perhaps because of them, nothing in this book proves anything. Instead VI Fictions contains a world of postulations, sometimes delightful, sometimes acidic, always qualified within a particular consciousness. Pusateri remains cynical and highly critical of his world, giving the reader the impression that maybe she or he should hide for fear of further manipulation by the ad-inspired realm of modern social desires. Pusateri takes thoughts and desires you wouldn’t admit to having but secretly do and drags them kicking and screaming into the open, unmasking them as life’s superficial decision-makers. For Pusateri there resides little or no logic behind the wants of the average American John Doe: “Nobody orders it for the parsley, but no one would stand to be deprived.” If Pusateri’s poems offer any hope for the modern human condition, that hope remains in the ability of his characters to make fun of their situations, to recognize in their desires an emptiness and to mock that quality without perhaps ever escaping from it.

More than heroes, Pusateri’s characters are survivors, armed with “Syntactic tomfoolery, void where prohibited” with which to shape their media-driven existences if they can. Through these conflicted, self-doubting, self-loathing men, Pusateri depicts the challenges and rewards of a postmodern, consumerist life, where man as agent has become a fallacy and language as truth an outmoded shirt on an aged supermodel. Although stylistically and thematically Pusateri does not make his latest ride a comfortable one for his readers, his tricky leaps sometimes lead to insightful connections well worth the jump. Pusateri’s questioning of language in VI Fictions should challenge readers to further contemplate the medium of words, the words drawing attention to themselves as well as to the world they reenact in a way that prohibits the clear sight of windows but renders the view all the more captivating and self-reflective for the grime.

NEW! Review of Arielle Greenberg

My Kafka Century by Arielle Greenberg. Action Books, $12.

Reviewed by Alex O. Bleecker

Arielle Greenberg’s latest collection of poetry, My Kafka Century, is a constant reminder of the impact psychology has had on the twentieth century, “the century invented / by Austrian Jews, analysts who peeled back the brain.” With the advent of the science of the mind has come an unprecedented emphasis on the individual, who grows increasingly complex. The book itself acts as a disclaimer--an apology, almost--for the saturation of the self in society. Nearly all of the poems are written in the first person, yet it is impossible to pin down a single, consistent “I.” In fact, each poem is written from a unique narration, the net effect being an assertion of the individual as an intricate, elusive, amorphous whole. Greenberg weaves a dizzying tapestry, insisting on the self as a unique permutation of memories, relationships, spiritual influences, and pop cultural icons. She maintains that, amidst the “fear-sets flickering” of our media-driven age, no experience--moment, chapter, period--begins or ends discretely, but rather bleeds into the next. We are “crackers die-cut into the shapes of fish,” “craft-paper pages,” and “sprinkles of glued-on glitter”--human collages, both literally and figuratively. Greenberg deftly fashions such varied themes as Jewish mysticism, 1950’s movie stars, linguistic criticism, pedophilia, baseball, and extra-terrestrials into continuous threads that resonate eerily.

This complexity bears a tension that is everywhere in My Kafka Century. The first poem, “Ewe, or The One Who Brings Water,” scrolls the reader through traces of a broken love, where “to you: I send this missive of false / starts, half asleep, half in jest, / wholly imperfect I took the child from you.” She leaves sentences dangling--“I am as needy as. / I cannot take another demon, fatigue, or.”--asking readers to fill in the blanks with their own images, like a Mad Lib about disturbed domesticity. The last stanza becomes self-reflexive: “So here I go . . . Attach me: thread of light I have: I do not have it,” with the speaker describing him/herself as completely incomplete and introducing a tone linear enough to be sensible as wel as schizophrenically fascinating.

As no experience exists in a vacuum, the title poem begins in medias res. Stylistically, the two- or three-line stanzas all begin like first lines of a speech: “By which I mean I have come to this dark county a carpetbagger / and left it in the body of a woman”--a mixed metaphorical acknowledgement of the ill-gotten gains of Reconstruction and the process of reincarnation itself. In a Plath-like moment, Greenberg writes, “that my father’s thumping love for me churns me . . . that I wear a grudge like a brass star locket on a chain.” She is both sheriff and persecuted Jew--hunter and hunted. Like Kafka, the complexity of neurosis in Greenberg’s poetry stems from the contradictory feelings of Jewish guilt and pride--“That my life is a kind of flag for Life in General; / that I am hateful and boastful and chosen enough to make such a claim.” Greenberg slips in and out of singular and plural first-person narration, from her own lowercase “life” to “this Life we speak about can be shared,” attempting to deconstruct, discover, and define the individual’s role in society.

A genre-bender of sorts, “Folding the Bed” is a blues nursery rhyme in couplets. True to the tradition of these two otherwise disparate forms, most of the couplets contain either some slant rhyme or a refrain. A jilted, jaded lover sings the story of how her man left her after perhaps gambling their money away. As in a drunken rant, the addressee changes throughout the piece; the speaker talks to herself, her neighbor, anyone who will hear the story of her woes. She begins by addressing her man: “Bedmaker. Spoonmaker. Carpenter. Crook. / You’ve left me with nothing. My braids tied in silk.” Lovelorn, she falls to addiction and entertains suicide. To her neighbor: “I need just a knife and a pinch of your sugar. // I need just a slug of the gin in your bathwater. / I need just a tub. Just a song. Just a lick. // Make whiskey from kettle. Eat it like smoke.” Entirely dependent and unskilled, she resorts to prostitution: “I’ve taken a rib to neaten my corners. / John Murphy. John Henry. // John Riley. John Doe.” Greenberg paints the picture of a desperate, derelict woman folding back her Murphy bed, “the bed resting inside the wall” each time a customer leaves, both begging and cursing her abandoning lover to “Remember this house cause you’ll come back tonight. / Bedmaker, Spoonmaker, Carpenter, Crook.”

The title of the poem “One Hundred and Eighty” alludes to reversals. The first stanza has shades of Sharon Olds in its use of eerily organic language and repetition to parallel the experiences of being someone’s child and having a child of one’s own--an about-face of sorts:

When I become a mother,
the hole in my heart will gasp a song of old world violins.
This, like all other stories, keeps me awake: a pack of lies,
a pack of wolves, animals who make
the machine of the future, the future
into which, like a transparent silvery tube,
I will make a child. The child will be made of glass.
I will be the glassmaker’s daughter, blowing a wish
into the burning, spinning hive.

Honest with herself, she acknowledges that becoming a mother is as unlikely as a lie, however being the “glassmaker’s daughter” (that is, glass and fragile) the speaker can only have an equally fragile child of her own. In the second stanza, we encounter a forest with one hundred and eighty hypothetical paths--the right, the left, and everything in between--wherein there is “only one path paved in true blood, / the blood of what is real. / If one is real, then this is the only path one can find. / No others present themselves. / The right have no choice but to be right.” This last line works on two levels: it acknowledges the non-dualist, Buddhist theory wherein polar opposites always coexist in a thing, therefore what seems like a decision between two choices actually is not a decision at all; and it also works as a critique of the conservative, religious “right” that calls for a singular, homogenous society and attempts to deny diversity.

Toward the end of the book, “Babel” echoes the overarching theme of collage identity in the twentieth century. The poem is a scathing commentary on an issue of recurring significance in My Kafka Century: Jews attempting to mask their Jewishness. The subject of Greenberg’s critique is Dr. Ludovic Zamenhoff, the late nineteenth-century Polish intellectual/spiritualist who created the ‘universal’ language Esperanto. The poem begins “The Jew who invented Esperanto: he’s a Jew, / don’t deny it.” In the second stanza “A Jew tried to bleach his tongue, / make the whole world his pidgin so no one / could tell what he was.” Since a tongue cannot be bleached, this fails, just as “Not a bone of language / is neutral.” Language is inherently political. Any attempt to construe it as apolitical is as fraudulent as someone denying his or her own ethnicity. “The twentieth century is an Esperanto: / it was invented by a Polish Jew / and never worked . . . now we speak mongrelese.” Instead of being the great equalizer, cross-cultural diffusion has simply led to a loss of ethnic identity where the speaker has no ownership over language, “and not even half of our words are our own.”

Amidst a whirlwind of pop cultural icons from the century that was--Peter Lorre, Shirley Temple, Kate Smith, Patti Duke, President Howard Taft, Helen of Troy, Burt Bacharach, Patsy Cline, Tom Verlaine, etc.--Arielle Greenberg’s My Kafka Century is a tour de force that simultaneously seeks to assert the self’s solitude while embracing the world. It is as fragmented as it is seamless. Upon completion, the reader comes to understand that these poems are not only Arielle Greenberg’s ‘Kafka Century,’ they are everyone’s.

next issue of VERSE

The next issue of Verse is currently, finally at the printer. We'd planned for the issue to be out by October, but various circumstances got in our way.

The issue is 300 pages long and includes work by 78 writers, plus reviews of 17 books.

If you pre-order the issue, you can get it for $7 (instead of the $12 cover price), postage paid. Just send a check to VERSE (address above) by January 15.

TEXTS BY

Seth Abramson
Samuel Amadon
Annemette Kure Andersen
Beth Anderson
Jeffery Bahr
Hadara Bar-Nadav
Dawn-Michelle Baude
Priscilla Becker
Simeon Berry
Judith Bishop
Emma Bolden
Jenny Boully
Victoria Boynton
Pam Brown
Julie Carr
Maxine Chernoff
Heather Christle
Bruce Covey
Michael Earl Craig
Mary Crow
Jen Currin
Crystal Curry
Ed Davis
Xue Di
Ray Di Palma
Landis Everson
John Gallaher
James Galvin
Sarah Goldstein
Chris Green
James Grinwis
Barbara Hamby
Michael Hansen
Jerry Harp
Sara Henning
Bob Hicok
Cathy Park Hong
Erika Howsare
Nicholas Hundley
Lesley Jenike
David Krump
Jesse Lichtenstein
Amy Lingafelter
Timothy Liu
Jennifer MacKenzie
Sarah Mangold
Peter Markus
Paul McCormick
Kevin McFadden
Gordon Meade
Sandra Miller
Stan Mir
Andrew Mister
Natasha K. Moni
Schirin Nowrousian
Jessica Olin
Ethan Paquin
Peter Ramos
Sarah Riggs
Peter Rose
Catie Rosemurgy
Christopher Salerno
Steven D. Schroeder
Morgan Lucas Schuldt
Roy Seeger
James Shea
Craig Sherborne
Anis Shivani
Lytton Smith
Chad Sweeney
Brian Teare
Jonathan Thirkield
Chris Tonelli
Sidney Wade
G.C. Waldrep
Chris Wallace-Crabbe
Mike White
Emily Wilson

REVIEWS OF

Joshua Beckman
Ted Berrigan
Shanna Compton
Alice Fulton
Thomas Heise
John Kinsella
Jennifer L. Knox
Corinne Lee
Timothy Liu
Ted Mathys
Thomas Merton
Sawako Nakayasu
Ethan Paquin
Muriel Rukeyser
Gustaf Sobin
George Witte
John Yau

NEW! Poem by Kate Hall

Kate Hall

OVERNIGHT A HORSE APPEARED

I crawled out of a war machine.
You didn’t recognize it as such, but
I did. I held it and fostered it
and fed it strange wooden apples from my purse.

To spend a lifetime waiting inside
a stick horse is to live with confusion
between hollow and hallow. I’ve lived
in this one room my whole life.

It looks a lot like outside. A tiny farrier
by the red barn in the distance. Four horses waiting
to gather us up. We cannot see beyond them.
We colored their coats

to explain the end to ourselves.
The red horse and the pale horse
and the other and there is hunger. A tiny farrier
on the horizon line. Meaning, it’s time

to crawl back inside myself. As the wind,
I’m drawing these patterns in the sand.
Accept the horse as a dangerous gift
you find meaningful. The offering

before the first burning arrow is fired
into the city. It could have been
fireworks or lightning. For my horse and me,
it hardly matters. Though it will matter for you:

how you decide to read me or
whether you do. Overnight, one horse
will gather us. The equine sternum
a drawbridge to a corporeal castle

we are plotting inside. Four horses
released on the unsuspecting city. I am the only one left
inside the warhorse I am holding in my hands.
I will have to live with him, maybe

for him. I am ready
to practice non-participation.
I want this to be the last thing I’ll ever do,
to stop here and say I’ll go no further.

NEW! Review of Marc J. Straus

Not God by Marc J. Straus. Northwestern University Press, $14.95.

Reviewed by Karen Robichaud

As a practicing oncologist, Marc J. Straus uses his own experiences to fuel his writing in his first play, Not God. Straus’ third book explores the hope, tragedy, and difficulty of communication felt when dealing with the effects of cancer. Though Straus’ first two books of poetry, One Word and Symmetry, also deal with human reaction to cancer, Straus enters new territory by creating a play in verse in Not God. The verse is simple and direct, sharing the stories of two people: the patient and the doctor. The subject matter of the poems ranges from the everyday gossip of the hospital to childhood memories to the nervousness of a patient following an MRI. To that end, Straus also explores the progression of a patient’s mental and emotional state nearing death, bringing his new and old work together under a different genre and connecting the poems quite differently. By alternating between doctor and patient, Straus depicts the concerns, fears, frustrations, and inabilities of both parties as they struggle with cancer.

Despite the absence of medical terminology in his writing, Straus depicts an emotionally charged medical world. The patient dying of cancer grows more overcome and frightened, while still trying to find dignity and comfort in the sterile hospital environment. The first poem, delivered by the patient, comments on the white lies told in hospitals to ease the shock of one’s own mortality: “She said he was old and frail / and his kidneys failed. / It is more than / she should say, but she is kind / to differentiate his circumstance from mine.” Straus shares what he has observed from years in oncology and never rationalizes the human behavior. His honesty creates very sympathetic characters, both of which grapple with the pain of cancer. The doctor, knowing that no easy answer exists, encourages himself to “say yes--a sliver of grace in an / excoriated world.” Straus strikes a balance between the direct ways doctors must find to deliver bad news and how one, as a human, must come to terms with mortality. By personalizing the doctor through descriptions of his own memories, Straus delivers a portrait of humans desperately trying to save each other and themselves.

Using natural language, Straus focuses on the lack of control one has over cancer, which emphasizes the value of the play. Neither the patient nor the doctor ever spins out of control, but both continually grapple how to exist in a losing battle. For example, in “Reward,” the patient reflects on the benefits of knowing one’s fate, as it consoles many, but decides, “I prefer not knowing. It sufficed / to know everyone died sooner or later.” Lack of control irritates the patient and the doctor as neither has the answers. Both learn each day how to understand a world in which cancer exists. However, in the final pages, Straus becomes rather heavy-handed with his metaphor in “Brine,” which sets up a nightmarish dream, a symbol of the doctor’s struggles to cure his patients, not always successful. Because the poem reflects the struggle, the reader understands exactly what Straus intends, but in the final stanza he shifts gears and alienates the audience by treating them like simpletons:

It is like this being an oncologist, and each time
I enter the brine I try to be buoyant. I try
to concentrate on the other side but the light
glares blindingly off that little girl in yellow.

This ending causes the poem to lose the momentum Straus maintains in the previous three stanzas. Without the final stanza, Straus’ message remains clear. In other poems, Straus does not create this problem. His final words often provoke new thought or add a twist to the overall idea rather than belaboring the point. Furthermore, Straus’ poems often reflect each other, though set pages apart, and his ideas about humans and cancer resonate throughout the whole book. In both “Luck” and “Say Yes,” both patient and doctor reference the quick fix people look for in bad situations. The doctors wishes he could “answer unequivocally, / to give patients a sense of purpose,” while the patient notices the tricks people play to fool away their bad fortune, “I have this itch under my arm. I’ll scratch it twice / in slow circles and my cancer is gone.” Both “Luck” and “Say Yes” represent Straus’ ability to look at human reaction slightly differently.

Straus continues to investigate human reaction as the two speakers, doctor and patient, explore human futility in very different ways, often missing connections, frustrating both speakers. Additionally, both characters explore the idea of God in different ways. The title poem, “Not God” explores the power a doctor holds as patients preface questions with “I know you’re not God . . .” but then ask the unaskable. The doctor’s pain becomes clear, “Do you say this to your lawyer, accountant / or mother-in-law? And if I’m not God, then / ask me a question that only God can answer?” In contrast to the doctor’s annoyance and his own inability to console, the patient references God in a completely different way. In “Humming” the patient hums to his/herself and all those around him/her try to guess what song the patient hums, yet, “I am confounded by these inexplicable noises / from my mouth that each recognizes as familiar. I think / God hears them as my prayers.” The final lines of Not God demonstrate Straus’ range of thought and emotion. The simple language does not stand in the way of delivering a powerful message about human beings in a chaotic world. Just as each individual tries to create order in the world, often through a personalized relationship to God, like in humming, Straus looks for order in a world where anyone could have cancer.

The book closes with a poem from the doctor, “What I Am,” explaining how he knows how long someone has to live, slightly apologetic for his proficiency in delivering death sentences. Straus openly confronts the gravity of his profession and reveals the heart behind it. Without sentimentality, Straus addresses the fear, loss, and purposelessness his patients feel and also expresses the doctor’s feelings of helplessness. A play like Not God is able to put its actors alone in space and allow the words to speak for themselves. Straus’ Not God is filled with potential and power, making it a compelling read, but under appropriate direction, breathtaking to watch.

NEW! Review of Paula Cisewski

Upon Arrival by Paula Cisewski. Black Ocean, $11.95.

Reviewed by Kate Seferian

One could regard Paula Cisewski’s first book of poems, Upon Arrival, as the beginning of a significant journey, but she too often seems to hover around the surface rather than dive to inspect the massive potential below. Although the mediocrity of many of the poems elicits lukewarm response, Cisewski unearths a few gems in the pile of rhinestones. Her ingenuity manages to shine through some of the chinks in Upon Arrival.

The book opens with “All the Way Home,” a brilliant, pioneering piece suited for the beginning of the book because it suggests the collection’s underlying purpose as a poetical expedition and gives a colorful glimpse of the poet. Cisewski introduces herself as a feisty and bright writer who embraces her flaws as elements of a jaded perfection: “The greenfinch in me flying straight into the cracked mirror in me / The you-already-said-that in me / The firewalk: the glow, the blistered faith.” Cisewski combines nostalgia, introspection, and inner strength to create a backbone, or essential reason, for her work. “All the Way Home” spurs the poet’s, and ultimately the reader’s, journey: Cisewski performs a meet-and-greet with her audience and establishes a foundation for the subsequent exploration of her art.

Cisewski presents a collection rife with erratic and eclectic forms, an observation which lends itself to her obvious proclivity to experiment, as well as her struggle to find a characteristic niche. Each poem exhibits its own personality, and while this aspect hints at a sense of lyrical schizophrenia, it also motivates one to think that if the current poem does not evoke a strong reaction in the reader, the next page may satisfy any lingering appetite. In his review of Upon Arrival, John Deming notes that “the mania [Cisewski] is really indulging in . . . is an obsession with the notion of multifarious selves. Every person is burdened with an infinite number of conflicting impulses and emotions--indeed, of ways to finally envision oneself” (http://reviews.coldfrontmag.com/2006/10/upon_arrival_by).

In “My Dearest Memory” and “Origami,” Cisewski showcases an extraordinary ability to weave language with the heartache of memory and wasted chances. “My Dearest Memory,” at first glance, almost appears as two poems and quite possibly could be read as such--the two staggered columns maintain a hint of dependence on each other but still act as their own entities. Cisewski exhibits skilled control in playing the poem line by line, each one holding its own weight but also contributing to a whole. Cisewski reaches a climax in Upon Arrival with “Origami,” in which she beautifully depicts the intricacies of the what-might-have-been situations we all run into: “Something folds out in the shape of a bloom / for the pocket of quiet they guard with their lives.” These poems are what propel the reader forward as Cisewski flirts with a taste of her abilities, with what pulsates beneath the rough surface.

The book contains three sections, as the poet’s penchant for dabbling in a variety of structures can seem daunting to the reader if she unleashed everything in an unorganized fashion. One could associate the final section, which shares the book’s title, with the theme of the opening poem “All the Way Home”--the theme of the poet’s journey. Cisewski opens her final section with a quote from T.S. Eliot: “In order to arrive at what you are not, you must go through the way in which you are not. And what you do not know is the only thing you know . . .” Cisewski suggests her collection may actually act as a personal journey, but one may find it difficult to discern any destination or closure in the end; her constant changes in structure contribute to the collection’s choppiness. It is natural, with any journey, to want to achieve a sense of resolution or declaration in the end, and the poet does not deliver the conclusive note that some of her readers may desire.

Cisewski finishes her book on somewhat shaky ground, leaving the reader with “who else is not to be trusted / with language”--a stimulating and loaded question, and possibly one that readers could use against her. This question humbles Cisewski and serves as an interesting finale to Upon Arrival, but the lines hint at the instability of some of the preceding poems. Cisewski bounces between mediocrity and brilliance, sometimes floundering but also exhibiting fearlessness in dabbling in colorful, chaotic personality.

NEW! Review of Jon Woodward

Rain by Jon Woodward. Wave Books, $14.

Reviewed by Lauren Grewe

In his second book, Rain, Jon Woodward wallows in the beauty of modern decay and the poignant absurdity of unabashed grief. A personal testament to mourning and recovery, to the stages of bereavement and the urban ghosts that follow, Rain explores the trials of modern life, quietly propelling the reader through the mental process of redemption after trauma, of a world fallen but not completely lost, mired in chaos but still striking.

Rain is in many respects an elegy for Patrick (the speaker’s deceased friend) and for the world that Patrick inhabited and that the speaker still inhabits. Woodward processes and reprocesses Patrick’s death, finding various forms within which to fit and contextualize his grief. “[I]t’s not that he died,” the speaker says, “it’s that he won’t stop / dying and reemerging fully ordinarily / through ordinary doors.” These “ordinary doors” emerge as the poems themselves, which recount the grieving process as one in which Patrick resurfaces more living than dead, at least in the speaker’s mind. “Patrick stood in a bucket / and died only one foot could fit in the bucket,” Woodward writes, “would not the body of Patrick this / bucket fit inside as the / bottle of my mouth fills / one of my head’s pockets.” Would not the ghost of Patrick fit within some shape, take some form within the speaker’s mind, so that, given substance, the speaker could face the vicissitudes of the world and “the stain” that those trivial but unforgettable acts of violence leave on the human soul.

Woodward’s short poems (never longer than a page) seem to write themselves, flowing from phenomenal reality without the mediator of reason or logic. For the most part he grounds his poems in everyday occurrences--he starts some of his poems with observations about a church down the street tolling a D flat over and over again, going to see Spider Man, strawberries and scrambled eggs. But Woodward manages to imbue these mundane events with personal and emotive (if not always cosmological) significance, perceiving the here and now not as an end in itself but as an illogical gateway to emotional recesses.

Structurally, Woodward’s terse yet mellifluous phrases flood the boundaries of conventional syntax, their laxity opening up new possibilities of meaning for each reader each time she or he interprets a poem. By leaving his poems untitled, Woodward creates fluidity reminiscent of the book’s title. Playing off ideas and meaning established in his earlier poem, which discusses fear and uncertainty over a bowl of chowder soup with Patrick, Woodward picks up in the same vein two pages later with the ending of his last poem of the section “Rain, Ocean”:

some
guy at a gas station

walked up to the car
began cleaning the windshield saying
as he did so Sic
Transit Gloria Patrick goes Sic
Transit my Chowder Shitting Ass

The poems’ lack of punctuation and unnecessary capitalization force the reader to engage with the poems and self-consciously make syntactical decisions that affect meaning, resulting in a heightened level of participation that causes the reader to feel like the poet’s accomplice rather than merely his audience. The poem that begins “a grown man the singer” rejoices in this ambiguity which leaves the reader with multiple possibilities of meaning:

he explains how this man
deliberately attempted to wall off
all of his anxieties by
singing about the sunshine it
couldn’t possibly work I tried

dancing at their show a
first for me but can’t
help overhearing the death stumbling
fear look at all these
idiots dancing I’m fucking surrounded

The words “I tried” could fit within the context of either stanza, leaving the reader to decide whether the desperate speaker tries to mask his own anxieties by “singing about the sunshine” or by “dancing at their show.” Either act would be a frenzied attempt by the speaker to affirm a nonexistent, nauseating optimism, through burning his retina with the bright side of life or trying to lose himself in the crowd. While Woodward enables both interpretations, dualistic logic and the need to pause for breath, may convince the reader that she or he needs to pick one possibility. But Woodward may be employing this inclusive, non-delineating syntax in order to avoid just that eventuality of decision that would splice the poem and deny the multiple ways it can work. An oral reading would necessitate a decision, just as an oral reading would necessitate punctuation, even if temporary and hazarded. However, a reading of the words on the page requires no such divisions of meaning, no such decisions. Instead, the indistinct syntax contributes to the overall fluidity of the poetry in Rain.

Throughout Rain, Woodward juxtaposes instances and employs non-sequiturs to make connections. He grasps at meaning in a world where hell and absurdity collide and eventually emerge as two aspects of the same modern reality. One poem begins with a discussion of fire extinguishers so small the speaker cannot imagine them containing anything more than chicken noodle soup. The phone rings and the poem switches to conversational form as the speaker talks to his mother, “hi / mom yeah I got it / it’s right here thank you / no I like chicken noodle,” when “the phone suddenly bursts into / flames um hold on mom.” These moments of absurdity and logistic failure hint at the depth of the speaker’s grief and his subsequent uncertain state of sanity throughout much of Rain. In another poem the speaker recounts:

. . . this morning when
I woke up I fabricated
the following nightmare you dangled
a microphone from your teeth
you were on a ledge

four stories up the microphone
swayed back and forth I
was jumping trying to grasp
it whaddya mean not scary
I’ll show you not scary

This fearful yet contained voice quietly shrieks out its terror in the middle pages of Rain, wondering all the while “at what point did the / bombs begin to fall exactly.”

While Woodward bemoans modern life, unmasking its raw and imperfect nature, his world reemerges with distinct glimmers of hope amid the failure. Working in a circular motion, the first poem in Rain reexamines these notions:

in spite of which it’s
hard to imagine it all
going to shit the pinkflowering
dogwood for example is my
newest favorite tree the decay

of what world we’ve got’s
not exactly what I’m afraid
of not now . . .

. . . what questions then to
ask for what if anything
about this coffee these fries

The speaker in Rain often despairs of life and events, but he never quits the game. He falters at many horrors--the death of his friend, decay and loss--but his sincerity reveals his unwillingness to revel forever in modern decay, to lose himself completely in his grief.

More than a book of elegies, Rain experiments with ideas of what to do with this “brutally fascinating world” of which we can only “see a / tiny part.” How then to cope with grief in a world of self-conscious absurdity? What questions wait for us to ask them, if indeed there survive questions worthy of asking about “this coffee these fries,” this world, this being? By the end of Rain, Woodward convinces his reader that human experience is more complex than grief, more varied than despair, that, by gaining “momentum” from the “depths” of suffering, humans can transcend tragedy and “hang for / some seconds in the sun,” breaching out of states of sleep as “whales out / of the ocean whales silhouetted / like souls.”

NEW! Review of Christine Garren

The Piercing by Christine Garren. Louisiana State University Press, $16.95.

Reviewed by Christopher C. Vola

In her newest and most engrossing book, The Piercing, Christine Garren showcases her faith in the exhilaration found in the overtly commonplace with 50 short, strikingly beautiful poems. Her imaginative, surprising, and yet somehow accurate reactions to routine events and objects call to mind recent collections such as James Tate’s Return to the City of White Donkeys and Mary Ruefle’s Post-Meridian. However, unlike Tate and Ruefle, Garren’s poems rely for the most part on understatements, on calmly describing the things that all of us see to uncover any number of darkly energizing truths. In “Childhood” from Among The Monarchs (University of Chicago Press, 2000), she uses her surroundings to explore a powerful moment between a mother and her daughter:

From the tree, a swing is hung. A mallet
rests against a fence. And on the lawn, a woman gathers pecans.
I think about her all the time,
partly in disbelief, partly because she is my mother. But now it’s dusk.

The calm and momentary sounds, the familiar objects, the subtle change in the sky--the spaces in between the moment--all seem to endow the brief and apparently insignificant reflections of a child with a mysterious and captivating strength.

The poems in The Piercing begin just as innocently, often painting an objective, tranquil, and pastoral picture--a flock of geese passing overhead, rain falling through trees, two boys swimming. When read alone, these descriptions are quaint and occasionally touching, but Garren’s true prowess surfaces later in the poems when she describes her own interactions with these scenes in order to create personal, sensitive moments that lead to abrupt yet rewarding resolutions. For example, in “The Teaching,” we see a “long rectangular yard behind the house. / At dusk the birds came, eating the berries / while the olive-colored leaves blackened,” and think that we have seen this autumn scene hundreds of times, that this is our own backyard, that this is a place that merits little more than a passing glance. But Garren shows us that this small patch is in fact an invigorating jungle filled with strange trees, strangling vines and explosions, and implores us to look to “the small wildernesses of it, / the blown-everywhere leaves, as it was true / here / its ruin was its beauty.” An unlocked door, a large box, and an old photo album elicit similar responses from the poet.

In his review of Garren’s first book, Afterworld (University of Chicago Press, 1993), W.S. Di Piero writes, “[Garren’s poetry] lives in the commonplaces of life but opens into mysterious invisible orders.” Throughout The Piercing, she continually takes the reader to a world where even the most fleeting images conjure the ever-present longings of a not-too-distant past, a world where “The gulls, blanched in the dark / were coming in behind the boats--from so long ago / this has gained such force inside of me,” a world where the surreal and the rational collide with a seamlessness that is rare and, in most cases, visually satisfying. Summer grass, torn bits of paper and the whirring of a ceiling fan all serve as catalysts for the emotional and sometimes frightening confessions, for the stories that exist behind the mask of the ordinary, for the “little death beneath the clouds / that the bells fragment.” These stories are what make Garren’s latest work a stirring read. In “Break,” she relates to a deep sense of loss when “a few autumn leaves fell past us, with spots on them, drifting / over us, with a distinct departing noise-- / and we looked up / into exactly how they came, those early ones / that frightened us.”

Many of the poems’ lyrical qualities stem from Garren’s expert use of line breaks. In “Safe,” as well as in other poems, this lyricism allows her to instill a subtly driving rhythm, one that provides the reader with a sense of anticipation, of not knowing where the poem is going, but of wanting to get there:

the sound of dark rushing past us
the damp scent of darkness

the cocaine powders, the thoughts

not beautiful

In these lines one can find the music for which Garren is best known--a quiet sonata resonating possibility, desire, and an interior fierceness that drives the reader to an often unlooked-for conclusion.

Within the arrangements of this music, there also exists a sense of finality that hangs over The Piercing, much in the same way a dark rain cloud slowly expands over an otherwise pleasant picnic. Unlike the picnickers who may begin to curse the sky as its downpour ruins their tuna casserole, Garren understands the inevitability of time’s continuously buzzing machine and embraces it, acknowledging that “The exhilarating life is finished. We must accept it / this late afternoon and move / back into the rational world.” While so much of The Piercing relies on uncertainty, one concrete message is that all things must come to an end, an end foretold by such inconspicuous and overt signs as the coming of winter, a dead goldfish floating in a pond, an anchor being lifted from the water, a nervous cow before its slaughter. However, alongside this notion of fatality lies an equally salient notion of regeneration, the sense that “death must be equal to its directionlessness,” that the world is cyclical and can revert from blackness to daylight in an instant, that the failings of a middle-aged woman can be forgotten in the quiet steps of her tiny daughter.

The sparseness of Garren’s prose and her superficially simple musings make The Piercing a complex book--accessible yet densely packed, calm and focused yet completely unnerving. The book ends much in the same way as it begins, unassuming but sharply poignant: “Look, there you go. There I go--There our landscape goes as if / through a fantastical roof’s hole, the shingle pulled off, the nail off-- / our death is / flying over the city.” In a collection so plentiful in ambiguity, in melancholy and hopefulness, in arrivals and departures, one thing is certain: The Piercing is Garren’s finest work, a book for those seeking adventure and for those who have already found it in their own backyards.

NEW! Review of Tony Tost

World Jelly by Tony Tost. Effing Press, $7.

Reviewed by Ezekiel Black

Many book reviews and blurbs enjoy describing a book in its own words. They use a quote from the book, for example, to derive some convenient insight. This method might be considered empty, equivalent to the pandering spiel found on a Historical Romance’s back cover, but it could also be considered profound. Many editions of the Bible, for example, include the section “What the Bible says about itself,” where a collection of scripture outlines the Bible’s divine authority. Although World Jelly’s introspection does not offer the word of God, it does provide a glimpse into the book’s overall project:

Words are magic
because they hang
one mystical experience
away from a crisis

Words can separate the crisis, the fight-or-flight immediacy, from a mystical experience, so one can examine the poetry held within. If words did not remove the crisis, one could not digest the situation’s poetry, like someone unable to think “I can’t wait to tell my friends about this high-speed chase” because he or she is too busy getting out of the way. Essentially, words distill the everyday into poetry, and one can see the everyday in World Jelly, as in this stanza:

Rhetorical answers
to actual headlights
in the unbroken slowing
too cold for the animals
to decompose

The headlights answer the speaker’s rhetorical question about what is in the road, and the speaker must abruptly decelerate to avoid the roadkill. The speaker would not initially think “I could make this into a great stanza” because he or she is taken by the situation’s urgency, but once the speaker and the incident have some distance, the possibility for poetry becomes apparent. Maybe this interpretation--the reformation of the everyday into verse--is coincidental, but World Jelly does paraphrase its mission again and again, like in the stanza “Small bag of the present / at the mercy of the sentence.”

The fun of World Jelly emerges from the surprising range of the everyday. The book is not through-and-through white-knuckle crisis. Although it can be heavy, some of the crisis is lighthearted: “Buoys and gulls / the rhetoric of inevitability / hits its spot every time.” If the “buoys and gulls” reference seems opaque, World Jelly does provide an insert to clarify some of the pop culture allusions, like Bob Dylan, Charlton Heston, and The Band. These notes also reveal how esoteric the book is, how some poems employ anecdotes that only Tost and his company would know. For example, one poem includes the stanza “Rett has duende,” which is a game to compose the best three-word poem that Paul White, Robert Bell, and Tost play. The reader could not, prima facie, appreciate that stanza’s depth because its full significance lies hidden inside the notes. As long as the notes are present, though, World Jelly’s impermeability seems insignificant. Fortunately, checking the notes is not a chore because they contain material that is just as entertaining as the book.

World Jelly is a playful book, similar to Invisible Bride, but much less concrete. The book will suspend the reader in a pool of abstract thought, heightened by the lack of punctuation, and the book is self-conscious of this fact, adding some self-deprecating humor:

My blue rags
have some kind of power
smaller than the period
at the end of this sentence

The lack of punctuation allows each thought to bleed into the next line, each line to bleed into the next stanza, and each poem to bleed into the next poem. To aid this movement, the beginning of each poem, except for a modest initial, is indiscernible, containing no title or epigraph. This ebb and flow will lull the reader into the book’s dreamscape, where one-line stanzas, esoteric humor, pop culture, the everyday, and a menagerie of animals rule. Altogether, this book contains a strange but praiseworthy universe.