NEW! Review of Nancy Kuhl

The Wife of the Left Hand by Nancy Kuhl. Shearsman Books, $15.

Reviewed by Erin McFarland

Nancy Kuhl’s first poetry collection, The Wife of the Left Hand, details the emergence of the contemporary housewife, as brides-to-be and domestic veterans exist in the midst of literary and historical feminine archetypes. Multiple versions of the feminine suffer in suburbia, vacillating under a taut doctrine of womanhood and the plight of sexual freedom. Pages of chopped verse, clean prose, and found phrases generate a web of naïve concealment, voyeuristic desire, and defiant feminine opposition, stemming from the legacies of Salome, Amelia Earhart, and Saint Catherine. Manifest in themes of love, marriage roles, and betrayal, Kuhl’s poetry warns the modern bride of domestic despair, a living remnant of the feminine martyrs’ curse.

The Wife of the Left Hand asserts its intent from the start, positing the woman as a wavering creature attempting to master the art of housewifery. The first poem, “Almanac,” illustrates the feminine figure: “Everywhere women press the heels of hands to eyes. Swaying and unsteady.” The book’s second poem, “On Summer Street,” positions this unsteady female in the confines of domestication, “the narrative of a house / with its unswerving spine exposed,” revealing a common locale for the poetry yet to come. But even as the first section of Kuhl’s collection progresses, steeped in the context of weddings and dinner parties, The Wife of the Left Hand never fails to breach the stale maxims of desperate housewife mentality. Kuhl introduces Salome midway through the collection’s first section, disrupting the notion of the bride as “utility,” a “synonym for sex” and a being who “aspires to want nothing.”

Salome, a power player in Left Hand’s triumvirate of femininity, conjures the agency necessary to bring Kuhl’s passive narrative of domesticity to an exhibition of feminine prowess. Perhaps a mere historical allusion, but more likely drawing from the motifs and thematic content of Oscar Wilde’s Salome, Kuhl’s three-part introductory biography arrives at an immutable yet evolving character. Bathing after a bee sting, “water will not make her / different but her / skin won’t ever / feel like this again.” As a woman, Kuhl’s Salome masks strength in her sexuality, employing an active indifference to the bee’s penetration, as her “arms are strong / as a man’s, powerful as / a swan’s striking neck.” Assuming command in her feminine role, Salome claims to recite her intended lover’s name, presumably John the Baptist, and reveals “midnight,” a recurring time throughout Left Hand, as the moment of wanton desire. Yet images of the window and the moon serve dual roles, asserting Salome’s ability to “lean from the window” in an active fashion, while forcing her to observe, from the limitations of a window, “which moon will rise,” indicating the narrow frame of feminine expression and an ultimate lack of choice. Nevertheless, Kuhl’s biographic, prose-style stanzas roll off the page in confident ease, evoking an element of obtainable, even if tainted, feminine control.

Salome’s thread resumes in the second section, where “Should Salome Apologize” notes her power over the life of John the Baptist. According to Wilde’s play, Salome wills the death of her mystic lover, who, devout in faith, refuses her advances. By her own volition, Salome kisses the severed head. As the poem’s title suggests, Salome wavers between authority and remorse, which “grows round and fat as a plum.” Still, embedded in the poem’s final prose paragraph, Salome retracts her hesitant apology: “I am sorry not sorry. I wanted the man’s mouth on my skin--lips parted, a kiss, an answer.” Yet in section four Kuhl offers a final encounter with Salome that revives the hesitation of her apology, portraying the demise of the strong-willed woman and paralleling Salome’s death in Wilde’s play. “Salome Means Peace Be With You” provides praise for the martyr of feminine rebellion, recalling Salome’s influential existence as “The One Who Burns the Black Ironwood,” while ultimately reminding the reader that her efforts, though admirable, are fleeting:

The tree will burn
and burn, will go slowly, will vanish
to cinder glow. Smoke tree, cloud tree, tree
of forgetfulness, I am not afraid of tongue
hours licking by, of being kissed
in this house where blossoms sick
with fragrance bend almost in half.
When I lay down the crackling
ironwood calls me, calls Swift River Sweet
Voice Hush-Hush, a feverish solution, my old name.

Salome acknowledges that the price of feminine derring-do, premature in a world of male supremacy, results in her own fatality. Images of smoke clouds muddle her presence, erasing her power; this final time, she burns with the ironwoods she once burned herself. Kuhl allows her image to “crackle” with the fire, summoning traces of Salome’s former self with “Voice Hush-Hush,” a solution stripped of agency that translates with ease into the minds of modern brides and housewives alike.

Salome’s apology lives in Left Hand’s discourse of the modern woman, with traces evident in the third section’s “Apology for New Wives.” Ironically, the poem’s brief images provide a disclaimer for any rash behavior, or schemes “luminous as a pearl,” playing with the concept of concealment: “Hidden: flimsy telegrams / and torn-envelope letters, / clear-eyed jewels; all of it / bundled, pushed deep / into a hole in the wall.” As with Salome, this false apology, rooted in the desire for control vis-à-vis a veiled betrayal, remains inconsistent with many of Kuhl’s domestic pieces. Amidst poems dedicated to archetypal feminine heroines, Kuhl summons the rigid code of housewifery, looming over women like a “mandorla.” In a four-part treatise, “Panels: The Dinner Party,” Kuhl provides three clean, brief synopses of the hostess, idle-minded in a world of “open-mouthed irises, blinking / sugar bowl, finger-thin flutes.” Part four, “Study for Searchlight,” conjures imagery from the first three dinner party scenes, toying with the housewife’s suspicions of her husband’s infidelity. Breaking in form, the disjointed pairs of lines, conforming to no pattern of alignment, cast the hostess as a composed, aloof creature of the domestic. Yet she remains “cool as a dime” as Kuhl illustrates her plight: a keen awareness of the “helicopter,” the “starfish pinwheeling,” and the “crossed lines” on her husband’s back from his “raspberry-skinned lover,” all with due silence.

Even “Open House,” a selection from Left Hand’s fourth section, details the “charm” which “leaves the housewives / translucent,” while they “twist in their tea cups / screw slender black heels into plush / carpet. A camera lens turns open / wide and wide to eat more light.” The window, much like the constraints of the camera lens, plays a central role in the life of the housewife. As with Salome, windows offer the woman a restricted perspective, a distorted lens through which she views life outside the domestic microcosm. In the prose poem “Windows,” Kuhl describes windows that “wear whatever light they can grab hold of,” framing “the street from here, the room from there; the panes throw pale streaks toward every corner,” with the power to obscure the woman’s view and harness her independence.

Perhaps, then, Kuhl introduces Amelia Earhart as a primary feminine presence in Left Hand to defy the limitations of the window, transcending the constraints of perception in full flight above the world of man and woman. In “Cursing the Equator,” Amelia discovers the fabrication in the map of housewifery. Outside the window, she travels “numbered crosslines on the map lines / announcing here and not but / she does not consent there are so many / false maps so many liars.” Yet even in her active support for women in male-dominated fields, even in her liberal marriage to George Putnam where she refused to take his last name, Earhart’s attempt at circumnavigation classifies her as a martyr in a world where males triumph: “she saw clouds gathered like skirts baring blood- / less knees, she saw the vast unraveling / night, she saw reflected in the windscreen / her own face, gray and metallic as a gun.” Kuhl illustrates Earhart’s disappearance, obscured with clouds in a Salome-like fashion, evoking the image of a window where she sees her own tragic reflection, a look of death.

Strains of martyrdom continue to haunt Left Hand with Saint Catherine, completing Kuhl’s dynamic force of feminism. The fourth section’s “The Catherine Wheel,” a found poem, splices and integrates pieces of text from the Oxford Dictionary of Saints. In a non-linear fashion, Kuhl crafts the feminine that “triumphed over the philosophers,” dying as she refuses to marry a man she does not love. Uninhibited, Catherine remains steadfast in thought and action, telling the emperor “No, said love despised marriage to the Emperor, is not found in your crooked limbs.”

Kuhl’s passages both encourage domestic sovereignty and acknowledge the burdens placed on the housewife as a result of feminine martyrs. Recurring images of red and the moon occur in instances of betrayed passion, concealed in midnight, annotating moments of sexual desire and a longing for freedom from the husband. Instances of male infidelity spark moments of feminine jealousy, yet this jealousy is not directed at the husband’s lover; rather, the female covets her partner’s sexual freedom and his ability to live outside the world of secrecy. Left Hand’s second section offers “The Ordinary Husband,” detailing the obscured account of a husband’s matter-of-fact affair: “Saffron clouds sag into the yard; it wasn’t accidental and it’s hardly a secret. I know what I heard and the damn voice clings to her hair.” For the housewife, sworn to concealment amidst male exhibition, life provides “Comfort of ritual and no surprises.” Even Kuhl’s “Keys,” a unique selection from the third section, involves a hybrid of recipe, color descriptors, animal imagery, and cityscape that bind the woman into subjected wifehood. A Wives’ Tale returns to the image of red, recounting that “Vinegar will dry / up all your blood (not true).” In a prose section, a woman runs, attempting to dodge divorce papers, “her red blazer flapped behind her like a cape. By block two I was gaining. She wasn’t one of those pumps-in-handbag-gym-shoes-to-work types.” Kuhl reminds the reader that even the resistant feminine, running from the reigns of man, remains ill-suited for survival in the world outside the window.

In the poem that shares its name with the collection’s title, Kuhl demonstrates the curse of the housewife one final time. “The Wife of the Left Hand” reiterates feminine strife in remaining concealed, a voyeur rather than an actor, as fear of death, in the vein of Salome, Earhart, and Saint Catherine, harness all agency. Indeed, the housewife knows desire, even in feigned ignorance: “The body, no / good house, wants what it / wants; does not listen. / Careless breath, all wave / and sky, sneaks / under her eyelid. She / pretends not to hear / the persistent knock / on the screen door.” Indecision plagues the housewife, yet in a final attempt at resistance, the feminine ignores the knock on the door, adhering to her own perceptions. Even in high praise of feminine prowess, the acquisition of that “flawless plum” and “sweet red bite,” Kuhl’s The Wife of the Left Hand serves as a severe warning to women, one-sittings-worth of advice for the modern bride: the feminine must “Keep / even the smallest betrayal / distant as a wild past” in a reality where domesticity thrives.

NEW! Review of David Kirby

Ultra-Talk: Johnny Cash, the Mafia, Shakespeare, Drum Music, St. Teresa of Avila, and 17 Other Colossal Topics of Conversation, by David Kirby. University of Georgia Press, $19.95.

Reviewed by Meg Hurtado

If David Kirby’s book of essays on various cultural topics proved nothing else, it would prove that a book can be judged by its index. In the case of Ultra-Talk: Johnny Cash, the Mafia, Shakespeare, Drum Music, St. Teresa of Avila, and 17 Other Colossal Topics of Conversation, the index borders on fabulous, ranging from Verlaine to John Travolta, from Kafka to West Side Story to Wittgenstein to Yosemite Sam. An index of half its length would make any culture-lover swoon, but Kirby possesses an extraordinary talent for collecting ideas, personalities, and physical details. And the essays themselves live up to the eclecticism promised by the index, but never ostentatiously. Kirby achieves this by overloading the reader with cultural name-dropping in the First Words section of the book, which for some reason he refuses to call an introduction. His explanation for a book on various “colossal topics” includes Florence, African refugees, an Auschwitz survivor, television, Goethe, Gutenberg, Whitman, football, Emerson, several Italian Renaissance masters, and so much more. After an opening like that, most of his uncanny or ecstatic cultural references seem perfectly organic.

But even in this multitudinous diorama of our artistic and historical world, Kirby has arranged a particular cast of characters to act as guides and gauges for his philosophical ventures. Shakespeare, Whitman, Odysseus, and Ishmael/Melville are the favorites, but Ginsberg, Rothko, and Dante also surface and resurface in several of the essays. At times, one has to wonder if he’s trying a little too hard to make everything blend together. For instance, in the book’s very first essay, he compares an inmate of Folsom prison to a “shape-shifter” from the Odyssey. It’s an imaginative analogy, but probably a bit of a stretch for most readers. Perhaps Kirby has just introduced his dramatic technique of comparing everything to everything a little too soon in the collection.

Eventually we begin to see that even such dramatic comparisons play a small role in his overall aims for the book. In spite of the crazed eclecticism of subjects and metaphors, Kirby has several specific agendas which he defines clearly in the book’s “introduction.” He makes clear that he wishes to address “the only question worth asking--what’s good?” Second, he wishes to pursue this question from an original, American perspective, which in turn asserts a respect for multiculturalism and for the institution of language: Kirby says that “part of seeing the world from an American standpoint is recognizing that our culture is as many-sourced as the English language itself.” Kirby certainly fulfills that requirement in his essay “The Meaning of Everything,” in which he pays homage to the Oxford English Dictionary and the tireless etymology-philes who created it in all its twenty-volume glory.

Though these are the official aims for the book, Kirby’s greatest accomplishment is his insistence on a non-linear, overabundant progression of culture. In this task, his cast of characters proves its mettle, allying nationalities, time periods, and various spiritual, historical, and cultural realities with each other. For instance, Kirby compares Walt Whitman rather convincingly to the ancient Hebrew writers of the Psalms, and to the psychedelic rockers of the ’60s. Kirby proves the cultural point closest to his heart--the universality and democracy of genius. He freely announces that “My subjects are things which are valuable because everybody values them.” Appropriately, he attributes this sentiment to two cultural giants, Goethe and Leopardi, and adds his own “post-theoretical” twist: “for a cultural phenomenon to be truly colossal, it has to be valued by everyone not just briefly but repeatedly and over time.”

All of Kirby’s essays retain this egalitarian sentiment, but never hypocritically so. He talks frankly about life as an intellectual, about living and writing in Paris and Florence, and about signing a contract with CBS. His awareness of the fact that he’s better educated than most of the people he writes about is neither arrogant nor guilt-ridden. He proves his claims in this book’s First Words that it takes “large mind” to truly appreciate and articulate the world around us, but he also talks with convincing sincerity about his experiences tutoring Travis, an underprivileged nine-year-old struggling to pass the first grade. Kirby admits that he wasn’t motivated by charity alone, that “[he’d] like to know how people learn to read. Memory is of no use, since I can’t remember ever not reading. And since I spend my days in a rarefied atmosphere of reading and writing at the highest levels, I feel as though I should know how I and the professionals around me got started.”

In the end, Kirby’s status as a poet powers him through this ambitious collection of tirades, elegies, and investigations. Not all of his subjects are automatically fascinating in a scandalous, pop-culture way, but in every case his genuine research and enthusiasm thoroughly wins us over. The dithyrambic ecstasy of Whitman doesn’t qualify as dinner-party conversation to the average American, and Kirby admits this in his discussion of poetry’s historical place in American culture to an unsuspecting businessman, who would eventually “drift away to the bar or the newsstand, sorry they ever brought the topic up”. But even in his most colloquial subjects, and even in his best successes at rendering the non-colloquial ones palatable to any reader, we wait for his moments of extraordinary poetic outburst, which strip away, in a burst of self-consciousness worthy of Whitman, the analytical mask. As he says in his essay on the sexual lives of St. Teresa of Avila and Emily Dickinson, “For in the midst of that bright fury, the universe is still.”

NEW! Poem by Jasmine Dreame Wagner

Jasmine Dreame Wagner

METRONOME

The moon was a peach
and the sky, persimmons.
Clouds washed up
on the beach--
or were they styrofoam
peanuts? I warbled
like Gershwin,
into a can. My professor
of geography asked me,
how can you have
a river and an ocean
in a city? Where
were you standing?
Someone said, ecumenical.
Someone said, plaster.
A girl with acetaminophen
stashed in her pockets
purchased a black and
white cookie. After class,
I climbed Mt. Rainier
and Mt. Rainier disappeared.
I skateboarded
home. Outside my window,
the laundromat whispered,
Sparkle Temptations.
I tied my curtains in knots
but kept them hanging
to occlude the moon.
The sky was persimmons,
but not really.
All I could say was
more red than blue.

NEW! Review of Ada Limón

This Big Fake World by Ada Limón. Pearl Editions, $14.95.

Reviewed by M. Roberts

In a world increasingly cynical about love and where form seems to dominate function, Ada Limón argues for sincerity. She conceives a man in a gray suit and makes him her hero, navigating his battle against artificiality in life and love (and even hardware). In her storybook in poetry This Big Fake World, Limón weaves a hopeful narrative about finding purpose in a dysfunctional world, begging the question: why not write a story?

Broken into three sections and sandwiched between a prologue and epilogue, This Big Fake World bears a clear narrative arc, requiring an investment (even on re-reading) similar to that of a short story. Limón’s prologue prepares readers to meet her characters, and reveals her hand from the beginning:

and let these small people rise up
and recover, let the man in the gray suit
be our hero for once, the woman
at the hardware store, the drunk,
and make each one of them remind us
that we have all come out of basic need,
some gnawing thing, some hunger.

Keep in mind, though, that the woman at the hardware store is not a drunk. Rather the drunk is a separate character (Lewis, who in an injection of absurdity into Limón’s work, mainly appears through letters to Ronald Reagan). Limón prepares us for a story of love and angst, where the domestic-heroic man in the gray suit’s failing marriage keeps him at arm’s length from his attraction to the equally damaged hardware store lady.

The three parts of the story follow typical narrative pattern: our characters are introduced, their crisis revealed, their solutions found. To do this, Limón invokes a familiar tone, inviting readers into her community of observers. The man in the gray suit is “our hero,” and thus the story becomes universal. The drama is familiar, Limón’s insights not singular. This works both for and against Limón. Her story is ultimately accessible, her call for meaning answerable, but at the same time the poetry itself in This Big Fake World risks being overshadowed by its own sense of allegory.

Limón does an excellent job weaving the theme of appearance and reality, questioning notions of form and function. For the man in the gray suit, it seems a matter of control. Nails become a recurring image in Limón’s book, as our hero uses his purchase of nails as an opportunity to get close to the hardware store lady. In “Between Her and Her Friends He Was Known as Mr. Hammer,” the man in the gray suit pretends to do work on his roof while watching her:

He wondered why he needed
to pretend to hammer,
and not just hammer.
One made him feel dirtier than the other,
the hammer noiselessly
avoiding the nail.

At the beginning of the third part, where the hero’s marriage unravels to his benefit, Limón reveals his growing inner-tension:

Our leading man is worried about the number of nails he keeps
buying from the lady at the hardware store. His garage is full of
every kind of nail you can imagine, and he with nothing to fix, but
maybe himself. He starts a note to his wife that he later crumples.
It starts, “Being I have so many nails, I wish to be useful to
someone.”

Here Limón tries to show us what it means to find function in a world composed of facades.

The strength of Limón’s voice is its familiarity. She is casual in her diction, which at its best enables her reader access to powerfully simple images. Her most beautiful moments come from brief observations that keep the mind’s eye moving and allow the story to progress without becoming predictable. For instance, as the hero and Lewis sit at the bar discussing his wife’s leaving, Limón takes us to the streetscape with deceptively simple but captivating beauty:

Our hero watches a small yellow dog
outside, its leash wrapped too tightly
around the No Something sign.

It begins to snow as a banjo plays
from the radio and the dog looks up
awfully surprised at his luck.

Simple moments like these capture the best of Limón’s conversational style, creating an artful image with rhythmic texture distinctive from her more expository moments.

This Big Fake World wraps up nicely, giving it a storybook feel that jaded adults might find soothing. There is a light at the end of the tunnel, Limón tells us in an epilogue that seems a little heavy-handed:

The object is to not simply exist in this world
of radio clocks and moon pies, where holidays
and lunch breaks bring the only relief from
the machine that is our mind humming inside . . .

She begins, then calling for all of us to “make a fire out of / everyday things . . .” Limón wants us to revel in this world, in its seeming junk and clutter. In the end, she says, “Somewhere along the banks of this liquid world / let all of us hold close to the lost and the unclear, / and, in our own odd little way, find some refuge here.” This is good enough, but what of the reader? With the hero finally approaching the hardware store lady and his friend finally safe at rehab, things seem nicely wrapped up, leaving us to wonder where the lost and the unclear might actually be found in This Big Fake World. For its moments of beauty and universal insights, Limón’s book still seems driven by its overarching narrative message rather than the poetry itself.

NEW! Review of Sina Queryas

Lemon Hound by Sina Queyras. Coach House Books, $16.95.

Reviewed by Erin McFarland

From Sina Queyras’ third collection, Lemon Hound, spring forth six sections of contemporary prose poetry that activate the interplay between earth and cityscape, where tailored intellect meets the matter-of-fact. Laced with Virginia Woolf-inspired content, Queyras cultivates a rhythm that rocks the reader through a frontier map of the twenty-first century woman. Anything but still, the passages navigate the realities of urbanity, expectations of nature, and limits of feminine perspective in a world that has long since undermined the merits of modernism.

Playing with form, Queyras presents the dueling perspectives of old school and new school femininism, generating a conversation of rhythmic, repetitive phrases between various voices, each postulating the role of woman. Most evident in the first two sections, “A river by the moment” and “On the scent,” Queyras summons stock symbols of nature and industrialization, carving female identity from trees and concrete. Spanning the pages of the second section, she negotiates the unmitigated space between women who “toast veggie dogs” and “wear Birkenstocks” and “buy soy” with their counterparts, who “buy magazines and try new diets” and say “oh for Manolo Blahniks” and “consider law school” and “buy eye cream even if they love wrinkles.” The laundry list of juxtapositions continues throughout the work, engaging the reader in a steady, dichotomic conversation between high and low.

Charting the territories between generations of women, Queyras concludes the section “On the scent” with an exposé of the contemporary female, conceived as the lovechild of nature, the city, and her mother: “They are so done with political messages. They are so past any need to protest. They are so What’s your problem? They are so We’re fine with the way things are. They are so Get over it. They are so Accept it. They are so Anger is uncool. They are so Move out of our way rigid one, and let the beautiful ones sing.” For Queyras, the trouble of defining womanhood in a changing world manifests itself throughout Lemon Hound. She continuously reimagines the idea of the feminine yet reaches the same roadblock with each attempt: “If only what was feminine were firm.”

Inserting slices of Virginia Woolf into a matrix of feminism for 2006, Lemon Hound remains chock-full of allusions and even borrowed language, infusing the old school v. new school dispute with a modernist ethos. Perhaps this poses a problem for readers unfamiliar with Woolf, especially as Queyras admits in her acknowledgements that the text is a “direct response to and engagement with the work of Virginia Woolf.” However, when consulting the passages, readers need not apply a “What Would Woolf Do” logic to extract bits of significance. Rather, the references to Woolf, even while enriching, do not hinder Lemon Hound’s accessibility. In fact, when diving into the text, unaware of the collection’s trajectory, the reader will not even encounter Woolf’s name until the third section, titled “Virginia, Vanessa, the Strands.” Until Woolf, proper nouns like Microsoft, Bjork, Hilary, Prozac, Cosmo, Bloomingdale’s, Johnny Depp, Chekhov, Penn Station, Cate Blanchett, Good Housekeeping, Middle East, Chrysler, Twizzlers, and Clint Eastwood sprinkle the text, keeping the contemporary reader, as well as the Woolf scholar, within Queyras’ reins.

Lemon Hound’s dedication to Woolf unfolds as “Virginia, Vanessa, and the Strands” portray scenes of Woolf and her biological sister, Vanessa, after whom many of Woolf’s characters are assumed to be modeled. While an understanding of Woolf’s real-life relationship with Vanessa enhances the text, Queyras’ language provides sufficient insight into the sisterhood. As displayed in “The buzz, the croon, the smell, all seemed to press voluptuously against some membrane,” the sisters forge their own dichotomy: “Vanessa is impatient. Vanessa wants the poppies to unfold, she thumbs the slit and Virginia is appalled. Virginia understands something about holding back. Her presence does nothing to encourage.” In the piece, Vanessa desires to paint over the poppies, creating an immortal version of nature. Virginia, shocked by the immediacy for artifice, craves patient observation and reflection, perhaps revealed only later in her own writing. Regardless of familiarity with Woolf, the discrepancies between visual art and written art engage the reader. The unfeasible reconciliation between two minds, Virginia and Vanessa, similarly echoes the competing threads of femininity stranded throughout the text.

The final piece in the section “Meanwhile, Elsewhere, Otherwise,” titled “Or: another way of telling,” reinvents Woolf’s stock characters, from the Ramsays to Lily Briscoe. Reminiscent of “Time Passes,” the second section of To the Lighthouse, “Or: another way of telling” introduces the struggles of Lily as a painter while meditating on the association of nature and death. Evoking strong imagery and employing avant-garde sentence structures, Queyras writes: “Alone, Perished words wrote themselves all over the grey-green (as the waves) the immense pressure of his concentrated woe: she couldn’t paint couldn’t create words--no longer aware who originally spoke them.” Queyras describes the difficulty of the creative process, resistant until the artist internally and externally locates the perfect medium for form and content.

Beyond her affiliation with Woolf, Queyras’ alliance to Gertrude Stein proves more evident, as Stein’s presence pervades the pages of Lemon Hound. After all, she “tries Advil and Stein,” applying Stein’s repetitive form to her own style. Queyras crafts phrases with similar opening clauses while playing with voice, conjuring a rhythmic painting of her own. In true modernist fashion, Queyras adheres to a fragmented structure, jumping seamlessly from the Canadian frontier to the macadam of New York, Boston, Los Angeles, and Brooklyn. Queyras’ primary vehicle is the river, a gray area between nature and city, portrayed with strong imagery from the start: “The river is not confined to the town. The river is townless, yet the river is town, for without the river there is no town . . . Without the river there are no bridges . . . Without the river foundations crack.” For her, the river provides a constant exchange of form and content and old school and new school feminism. Similar to a river, Queyras’ prose poetry seeks constant mobility in short phrases that both lull and shake, while adopting a unique voice for each individual poem, ranging from “she” to “it” to “he” to “they.”

Playing further with the tensions of nature and cityscape, the poem “Our Lady of Bark” describes the manner in which nature and city would one day speak to one another: “Given time she would weave trees into skin. Given time trees would sprout feet and enter Manhattan. All the granite from Vermont would call out for a reunion. There are stranger things. We pass by daily. There is a place for bark, she says, and it is tender.” Queyras’ prose poetry evokes the return to the city, a contemporary hub of art and culture, yet in the scheme of natural language plagued with modernity. Recurring images include women as salmon, swimming upstream, while plugged into a contrived lifestyle, their hearts running out of batteries, feeding off artifice. The frequent image of the female on a bridge indicates a desire for reconciliation, and plays out in Vanessa and Virginia, yet remains problematic when Queyras points out the irony of women who “carry their laptops into gardens.”

Even as Lemon Hound may struggle to define the feminine amidst generation gaps and the ambiguities of locale and artistry, Queyras dares to inform readers what they will not find in her collection, including a woman who “might feel naturally quite content with herself, see the city as a pleasant backdrop” as noted in her poem “Some other poet in the city.” And, true to her claims, the text neither praises the city nor is self-aggrandizing. She does not “couplet,” and her poems are neither “tidy” nor “sestina.” In fact, veering from convention is what makes her collection. Queyras’ content, the ambiguities that accompany the philosophical-banal intersection, could not assemble so well in another form. Lemon Hound’s unique rhythms provide immediate gratification while its layered substance affords greater fulfillment with each reading.

NEW! Poem by Allison Campbell

Allison Campbell

BATHTUB FISHING AND CHANCES FOR REMAKE

When mistakes repeat we’ll cheese grate the sheet music. We’ll choke déjà vu to death--hold old faults underwater till their legs stop flailing, fingers quit trying to scratch up the length of our arms, pinch at our wrists.

If problems grow gills and learn to swim the tub, feed off shower scum, then we’ll go fish--hooks in the upper lips and out left eyes. On our bathroom floor they’ll die, beaten.

Once gone the troubles might haunt, but so what for half-lives. If translucent fish come to your side, if they whisper you’re bored of me, agree, and in the morning know it was only the ghosts of scaly forgottens.

NEW! Two poems by Jared White

Jared White

Two poems

HERMITAGE

The trick everyday is not to be boring. Sometimes
This means no I at all. Sometimes it means clear out

For a whole new town. Sometimes schoolchildren.
Some days I think, try semiotics for a change, or

Scan the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. See dunes
That I only know are there because of movies and

Hearsay. Eventually I too can claim what means
Up and what is a landscape and where are the stars.

I’m an expert by dint of never stopping. On top of
The mountain and all along the old river unless

It’s a foxtail or a railway or just a flourish. Who
Knows better. Wanting only matters if I’m snowed

Thoroughly and then moving on briskly. I’m such
A pilgrim that I don’t care what will come next.

Looking up and wondering can give me a sunburn.


THE POST-ENLIGHTENMENT

Should we say forgetfulness
About everything from before
We struggle against? I must

Be even farther from not okay
Than I thought. I wish repression
Were easier. More subjunctive

And spoken about less daily.
See my hand not shaking?
I swear it was during previous

Periods of clarification. Splay
The strings of sympathy’s
Guitar. Still the transparency

But know it’s there. You look
Through objects all the time.
Therefore a we we think on.

Beard smells of last night and
Deodorant. A velvet frippery
Dress me up. Cheese. Forget

About me while looking at me,
Prettified representative of an
English. I don’t have to worry,

Do I? Safety in numbers. And
Where did I put those thingums.
Tucked safe behind the ears.

NEW! Review of Eileen Myles

Sorry, Tree by Eileen Myles. Wave Books, $14.

Reviewed by Meg Hurtado

Eileen Myles’s Sorry, Tree achieves a wispy, brilliant blend of the political and personal. She does not shy away from historical subject matter, but she defines it by way of the ordinary day. But make no mistake, the days of a poet of Myles’s incisive talent contain nothing ordinary at all. Love, lawn-chairs, death, bad dreams, and September 11th all wind their way through verse at once confessional and driven purely by form.

In the book’s second poem, “No Rewriting,” Myles attempts a palimpsestic view of personal and socio-political history, and succeeds masterfully. She begins with what could be the dialogue of vagabonds. As with all the dialogue in the book, Myles does not clearly identify a speaker, but the poem starts with the line, “nobody’s going to come in and take my cup of money,” and continues with “sometimes the only no I have is to reverse things.” The second remark might appear slightly esoteric, but in the context of street-dwellers it could easily refer to turning clothing inside out, or sanity. The third piece of dialogue--“I agree. It’s a good place to shit”--seems a clear indication of her fearlessness in approaching the homeless lifestyle. Myles advertises herself as a feminist condottierre of the East Village--a romantic self-image, but appropriately paired with her childlike ability to “pretend” rather than simply conceive or craft.

Thus, she begins the longest and most comprehensive poem of her book with the voices of the marginalized. All her voices partake of this quality, whether she speaks as a lover, or for her lovers, as a child or a philosopher. She achieves, through the various facets of her authorship, both celebratory and subversive effects--elebratory because she embraces bohemia, and defends it to “the people who always think the public problem is theirs are gay,” etc., and subversive because in her lines she has recreated bohemia as comprehensive, autonomous. By insulating the avant-garde with such single-mindedness with her outward-moving expression, she draws attention to the fact that bohemia too blooms by immanence.

Myles does not shy away from the outer frame of her own lifestyle. She never caves to the urge, so prevalent in Western artistic tradition, to erase her own hand from her work. At no point in her poetry does she pretend, or allow the reader to pretend, that she produces poetry by some kind of predestined, disembodied, mystical process of illumination from above. She mentions not only her status as a poet, but the mechanisms which she must manipulate in order to sustain that status. References to artistic grants, something the amateur reader of poetry seldom considers, pepper the book, as do references to writing classes and poet-in-residence gigs. By incorporating these external “systems” into her artistic worldview, she buttresses it against criticism which might take insularity and attempt to call it blindness or ineptitude in the face of reality.

Her work takes its roots from the visible, the tangible, and the corruptible. This root, furthermore, takes all kinds of forms--everything from commentary on materialism (“I’d like to buy one of those / really expensive / doors like I saw / in the Times”), to descriptions of love which are anything but Sapphic in style or mood (“I love you too / don’t fuck up my hair”). She manages to mix this debt to temporality with an awareness of the abstract greatness of such a debt.

Myles draws on an incisive journalistic knack for assorting images, but these images never truly stand alone. This knack asserts itself most strongly in her poems regarding love and politics--namely, the four titled “Dear Andrea” and “No Rewriting.” The first of the “Dear Andrea” poems exhibits her blend of external and emotional naturalism. The poem consists of several seemingly disjointed thoughts that rise to a feat of pathetic fallacy and characteristic internal clamor: “And the sea / hits the rocks & / the seagulls hop. / Man am I / in love.”

Great events, whether historical or personal, are defined by Myles in terms at once precious and plebian. Most notably, Myles structures the timeline of the morning of September 11th around two events: moving her car, and going downstairs to get a cup of coffee. According to her narrative, she missed the literal witnessing of the event; but for her, witnessing is more than an act: “it was never out my window but I see it out there now.”

With the realization that Myles indulges her role as witness, we reach the heart of her work. She takes her responsibility to bear witness for the marginalized seriously, but never exclusively. One poem, “To Hell,” reads very much like an homage to Ginsberg’s “America,” a work that has worked its way out of the avant-garde and into the mainstream. Myles survives this transition by way of the reverberations of her fearless voice.

NEW! Review of Dan Chelotti

The Eights by Dan Chelotti. The Poetry Society of America, (1 of a set of 4) $30.

Reviewed by Emily Hunt

The puzzle of death his architecture, Dan Chelotti has created a kingdom creased down the center, energized by sparrows, rain, and circling wolves. The Eights, composed of four multipart poems, begs extensive devotion: one, two, even five readings are not enough. Lines such as “there is something orange about every woman” and “you are the kingdom that sweats from my eyes” echo long after the reader stumbles upon them for the first time. These “words spun to ignore the dying” put readers in a trance comparable to the writer’s own hypnotic state: “I must follow the eights for the eights want me to follow.”

Once the reader soaks in the array of resonant images in The Eights, he or she begins to notice Chelotti’s methodical approach to structure. In a significant number of his lines, he uses a word or phrase twice. In these cases, the second half of a sequence mirrors the first: “Be done with it. Be done with it. / Look for clouds and see clouds.” For Chelotti, “folding [is] a given.” He speaks of a “dead father made of father,” a “rat-filled hut / That says from every song emerges another song,” and a desire to “carve a man from another man.” This recycling directly relates to the writers’ interest in the circle: “I’ve spent many years attempting the perfect free-hand circle.” Reader, writer, and poetic figure are subject to such loops. A recurring image of wolves orbiting a fire determines the pace of this collection. One naturally thinks of vultures circling the dead, of seasons blooming and melting, and of a man traveling the curve of a question only to find himself back at the launch of its dissection.

Chelotti “refuse[s] the world its right to be flat.” He finds doors within doors, questions inside answers. Unfolding this mystery he’s named “the eights,” he recognizes that to believe in something is to let it go: “I have an idea / And it dies whenever I say it. / I have you. You live even when I’m quiet.” Chelotti looks for the dead in small mumblings of the living, in “deer sniffing around [an] outdoor toy train setup,” in sheep chewing on grass until the green leaks out of it, and in the shadows that dirty the world. He detects that the losses he cannot see weave their way into the objects that surround him. Someone out there is dying now, and now, and within the completion of each of the speaker’s circles around a “dust-ridden bowl of oranges.” The energy left behind by the dead subtly replenishes pieces of his environment that had gone limp, still, or silent. In the fifth section of “An Anthem for Three Thousand Voices,” the “runners say they grow stronger / when the river claims another tooth,” and at the moment that “another powerline drops . . . a small boy with a stick suddenly rules their world.” Such brighter minutes stretch readers taut, remedying the sagging that ensues with the news of death.

At times, Chelotti speaks bluntly, and through raw confessions the reader grasps his exhaustion with recurring loss:

I’ll tell you: it’s easier this way
Because people die and I hate that.
Because people pretend to love death
And even the sparrows laugh at them.
I hate them more than I hate the dead.

He asks for two graves--one in which he can bury his fear, and the second in which he can lie next to it. These poems do not tire the reader, despite their bleak subject matter. If anything, the reader extracts fuel from Chelotti’s striking language; he or she cannot help but spread the little book wider and return to its opening image of a sliced, “steam[ing]” trunk to take on “the eights” once more.

NEW! Poem by Doug Ramspeck

Doug Ramspeck

LOVE THEORY

The argument, I think, was over medieval bishops
using a mace instead of a sword to circumvent
canonical law admonishing against the spilling
of blood. Or about the term fin-de-siècle
and the origins of “sweetypants.”
And then about what chemical can be used to burn off
a single layer of your skin or the way the words
sex and mockingbird are not interchangeable
but could be if only we’d agree
to start saying, “Look at that beautiful
sex singing from the shagbark tree,”
or, “I mockingbirded her good last night.”
Which is not the same thing as whether
a mace can bludgeon and maim and kill
without shedding a single drop of uncanonical blood,
which is not the same thing as whether
great planetary system makes a promising
metaphor for love, which is not the same thing
as whether there is more beauty or horror
in the enormous chandelier of human bones
hanging from the chapel in Sedlec
in the Czech Republic. All there was was argument.
And then, later, we heard a mockingbird
singing from a shagbark tree.

NEW! Review of Amanda Nadelberg

Isa the Truck Named Isadore by Amanda Nadelberg. Slope Editions, $15.

Reviewed by Benjamin A. Mack

In Isa the Truck Named Isadore, Amanda Nadelberg introduces 63 fictional characters doing things like bombing donkeys, cooking peacocks, and drinking motor oil. Each poem in this alphabetical collection is titled after a character whose eccentricities are described satirically by the narrator. Because the narrator often tells the reader to reread previous poems for greater effect (e.g., “Gwenda,” which reads, “Go back to school / and read ‘Ceridwen’ there.”), a back-and-forth movement transforms Isa the Truck Named Isadore into a sardonic interactive experience. Coupled with Nadelberg’s continuous use of subtle language twists and delicate wit, this strategy parodies American culture, society, and religion to an end both refreshing and warranted.

Despite recently relocating to rural Minnesota, Nadelberg is a Bostonian at heart. Bean Town sports and Massachusetts politics become recurring themes throughout her work and sometimes serve as foundations for national comparisons, as in “Sanna”:

Soon
Massachusetts will be
the president of this
place and we will all
be honest with such
beautiful teeth and
a sense of water. It
makes you honest I
swear.

This poem addresses the 2004 presidential election, and through Senator John Kerry’s presidential campaign, Massachusetts is personified as being “honest.” On the surface, the personification in the poem glorifies Massachusetts. Yet the narrator also possesses a quirky satirical tone that lacks political consequence and focuses on Kerry’s “beautiful teeth” and “a sense of water,” thus critiquing the superficiality and jingoistic nature of American politics.

A unique poetic structure contributes to Nadelberg’s quirky tone. Free verse, skinny lines, and indefinite line breaks mark each poem. The free verse allows for quick changes in subject while the lines and line breaks subvert the reader’s expectations, as in “Bean”:

Inside this small
place I can
love you. Let me
wash your hair in
the bathroom sink and
make you a glass
of water with many
cubes I promise they
will fit.

Each line possesses no more than four words, and the subject changes quickly from washing one’s hair to fixing a glass of water. The indefinite line breaks introduce additional uncertainty into the poem and make the narrator sound aloof and light-hearted.

Nadelberg’s tone and style are the source of her wit, which becomes most evident in portrayals of American pop cultural icons. For instance, in the book’s first poem, “Adelaide,” she writes:

Was walking on
her own street when
a bird flew in
to her forehead
like to Fabio
on that roller coaster
when he came out
all bloody

Unlike Fabio, who is “mad” as a result of the unfortunate occurrence, Adelaide is “sad.” She lacks a mother who can “clean up [her] head.” The narrator expresses adoration for Adelaide’s outlook on life as opposed to Fabio’s in the poem’s final couplet, “this is why I love you. / This and this and this.” This juxtaposition portrays Fabio as unappealing and mocks his popular icon status.

In “Wilberforce,” Nadelberg goes further in mocking American society’s embrace of pop culture--in this case, Miss America:

Miss Ohio
became Miss America
last year, back when
the pageant still had a
talent component. . . .
Miss Ohio sang a song
About Drew [Carey] living in
Iowa as an Amish person
and the audience loved
it and the judges loved it
even more.

From Nadelberg’s description of Miss Ohio’s talent, one immediately recognizes that talent is not needed to win the Miss America pageant. Without the validating aspect of talent, those who embrace the Miss America pageant are mocked and portrayed as being easily amused.

Nadelberg also satirizes Christianity and Judaism by pointing out the misuses and illogical aspects of each faith. In “Emmy” she writes:

Let us pray
for a safe journey of a few
bumps. I can see straight
into the ear next to me a good
inch and a half into this man’s
head. Fabulous. Truly. Just
send it all to Jesus.

In this poem, Nadelberg exaggerates the concept that Christianity will solve even the most insignificant of our problems. She directs a similar tone towards Judaism in “Kaapo”:

Jews bury quick.
Good to the body.
Theo died in the
morning and was
buried the next one.
My uncle sat with
him all night. Jews
keep the dead company.

Together the poems undermine religious tenant and practices, taking them out of context. As a result, certain practices sound harebrained or deranged.

The frailties and foibles of the human condition are revealed throughout Nadelbergs’s Isa the Truck Named Isadore. Using interesting perspectives and an unconventional style, she demeans those aspects of society and culture that many hold dear. Society’s idols and society itself are made to look absurd. According to Lisa Jarnot in her introduction to the book, these societal shortcomings are the “things that make human beings special” and are a result of our “constant effort to make sense of the materials of the world.” In other words, these shortcomings are unavoidable. Nadelberg’s light-hearted satirical tone does not distance the reader from this, and in the process serves the reader a fresh interpretation of Americana.

NEW! Poem by Eric Pankey

Eric Pankey

TOMB FURNISHINGS


Ark of river stone.

Ashen residue of straw.

Attic dust, cellar damp.

Calabash adorned with cowries

A conundrum, a compendium.

Corrosives that free an image.

Dried seed heads, boluses, antlers among the tangled roots.

Dusk pinned down on a stony draw.

Folio volumes of maps and anagoges.

Gaps in the narrative where coincidence enters.

The half of speech that is the listener’s.

Joists, beams, floorboards.

Loams and siennas.

The lure of light.

Models of earthly and heavenly palaces.

The moment’s spur.

Nest the wind picks apart.

A pause, a rest, an impasse.

Sound of waters coming together.

Stupa of rain.

Sufficient repetition to suggest endlessness.

Thrown voices, thrown shadows.

Tool-marks on the overgrown knots, char on the crossgrain.

Tress of hair.

Vectors and quadrants.

Verdict written in sand.

NEW! 5 poems by Anya Cobler

Anya Cobler

Five poems

HOSPITALITY

The breadth of this pile of pollen-drip day-
lilies, spread open to the sharp world, to
any passing genocide that may shut,
the wind pulling its parts out to rot at
the base of Earth. The man who they grow out
of, his arms not containing their full break;
he’s wash in talk about how for years now,
all he’s done is try to keep the outside
in, the outside in. He’s lost in a for-
gotten heat, ‘cause the two lost arts is dent-.
istry and house-building, as I am blown
over in his purple skin, repainted
by a sprint-flower that walks away now,
walking away from the bust, see ya babe.


ACCELERATION

You change, babe (pour chercher) velocity
will rip holes in grids. My behind stairs/fares
sliding down the hips of scree, hill by road
by works in the city. . . and then a green
paper plane in a red back. I hid my
breath in the dark V of its bend. I avenue
a future/tree-lined. Your bowels are deep &
open & sleek. and hunger by night. Who
knows the rove from Chauncey, the street-throbbing
wink-down plan-me: a tv screen tongueing
me knees in the floor. What that she bore is
just the deep parts of something very large.
Don’t whurry. One in droves and droves. Heard thru
the door, the wheel, wind, mills the night, heards, birds.


O LONGFELLOW

It was me and you in the terrible.
Old man black cycles past in his pyja-
mas thru the sleet or we cut him knees down.
But Jove is a river rat who finds the
floating pimps, sprays out not a letter, not
a pardon for the miserable life, a
howling dog in heat during your flood blank
night. You haf so joy, that when you laugh the
chord is quite sad; in Aug when it shines most
leperously, a thousand no-emit stars
show up out of boom town. Darken the gal-
lows, pray together away for their free-
dum. O my you. We did divorce my head.
His rat hole opening squats for a lid.


JULIUS

This red dress decorates me, it bleeds in
encloses, like the Tanzanian flag.
This corresponds to her and the hour of
flight, orchid black of tomorrow, a break
liberation, her flight picture: what you
have counseled me to do I have not done.
The green shrouding most poured I’d ever toughed.
Says mother, an anvil is always pierce-
ing my bladder, I shall not return o
seasons o silence like peace castles flees,
o hands in the man in the streets feeding,
which treats me so badly as I walk by
as if with a sword, as with skull raised I
should see the crust teeth white of tomorrow.


MIND (AFRAID) AWAY--

I made hen in the hoor lay, in my hoor
lay. Why am I output? A trail of my
mark mews about, then shrieks midday while do-
ing nothing. Mye ash do naught while I with
hoor lay, of thor, the horsehair pinks-a-pinks.
A-fore, lady, a-toon. Mind’s led you a-
loon. Was it from the nut. The wisdon of
nuts? From the boar--I lay in the hoor. I
lay as if a hoor. A heart-don tips tips,
cuts the muscles to their sin. Harbor the
sin-made hert in her moor. Moor. Moo. Not I,
not I count heads. Not nopevein. Watch her neck-
vein moo as the story, as the testi-
mony. Leaves her more talented than live.

NEW! Poem by Graeme Bezanson

Graeme Bezanson

AMERICAN FOLKTALE

All my closest compadres were named for Idaho
which was named for nothing. Eleven set out west
to the mountains planted on the horizon
like a row of cattle's teeth. Ten gathered their clothes
above their heads and swam to the east
and the school bus shaped island. I wandered
from village to village with one boy to carry always
alongside me two liters of Coca-Cola, one boy
to follow me everywhere with a short-handled spade
to bury me with, wherever I fell.

NEW! Review of Robert Lopez

Part of the World by Robert Lopez. Calamari Press, $17.

Reviewed by Leigh Murphy

In his first novel, Robert Lopez leads the reader into a peculiar “part of the world” on his own terms. The novel itself deals with the everyday actions of the narrator, from renting an apartment to buying a used car. However, these tasks become yard sticks by which one must measure the narrator himself and his sense of reality. By the end of the novel, the reader is forced to question the validity of everything the narrator has said, as a new, obfuscated yet elucidated reality begins to appear.

The narrator reveals himself in a piece-meal fashion, immediately declaring that, “Sometimes I know the particulars when asked, but I just as often forget.” In this way, Lopez brings the reader into an unnamed, vaguely described place in America. (One can only assume it is America, as the narrator, who is himself unnamed, differentiates himself from a proclaimed female foreigner because of her use of typically British colloquialisms.) The narrator depicts his own part of the world in a series of oppositions throughout the novel. He observes other characters, and remarks on their part of the world in contrast to his own. Certain “parts of the world” are described with simple statements such as, “Where she is from the women admonish the men for being perverts.” Rather than describing his surroundings to the reader, the narrator seems preoccupied with diction, and the story becomes intertwined with, and eventually inseparable from, these anxieties: “Imposing is not the correct word in this instance, the proper usage. This is the second time imposing has been misused. But I like the sound of it, accentuating the soft vowel sounds.”

As a reader, one is at first concerned for the narrator and wonders how he survives, as he is plagued by strange daydreams and an inability to pay attention to anything other than himself. In this way, he resembles Meursault in Camus’ The Stranger. The narrator’s mantra--“Almost nothing has anything to do with me”--becomes superfluous as the novel progresses. The reader sees that the narrator is unable to relate to the outside world in much the same way as Meursault, through his fumbling interactions. His familiar apathy is also illustrated in his statement that, “Whenever someone tries to explain something to me I get lightheaded and fall down.” What distinguishes him from Meursault, though, is that this apathy does not seem to be intentional. While at one point he states that sequence is of no importance, he later expresses his belief that “Certainly someone was responsible for it, for all of us.” Similar contradictions can only mean that this character is not determined in his beliefs, as was Meursault. Instead, it appears that the narrator is simply unable to comprehend others’ feelings and attitudes. Moreover, he acts disgusted by what he cannot understand. Especially troubling is his concern with the so-called Teardrops: middle-class, overweight individuals who seem to make up most of the population. While this indifference bordering on contempt appears symptomatic of some mental defect (e.g., “Choosing something from a take-out menu can induce anxiety, even paralysis. I have gone without more than once, have gone to bed without my supper”), the narrator remains self-aware, assuaging to some extent most of the reader’s concerns. Also comforting are his relatively functional relationships with a neighbor and sister, though they are functional only from his viewpoint.

The structure of the novel is patterned around repetitions. The narrator repeats himself, nearly word for word, on several occasions. Each time he does so, however, the passage takes on a new significance both within the narrative and to the reader. As the work progresses, the reader begins to question the veracity of the narrator’s account. There are holes in his stories, and each time he repeats them the details change. While he admits this occasionally, and states that he does not intend to deceive the reader, this does not provide any sense of confidence. Instead, it increases the reader’s concern for the narrator’s functionality.

At the same time, the narrator begins to refer to his health problems more frequently. What begin as allergy pills eventually morph into some type of medication that results in sluggishness, drowsiness, and confusion. What at first appear to be idiosyncrasies begin to suggest a more dangerous, innate problem with the narrator. He can no longer distinguish his own present from fiction and memory. The narrator’s repetitions begin to take on new meanings. “When the phone does not ring is never a problem,” a seemingly innocuous statement insinuating that the narrator does not like to answer the telephone, ultimately leads the reader to see that the narrator is paranoid and anti-social, or worse. The repetitions of certain passages, word for word, acquire new meaning when the narrator changes the subject of the descriptions. He describes his neighbor, with whom he has a sexual relationship, in the same words as his sister. He describes the neighbor’s car in the same way he previously described his own. The reader begins to question everything he or she has just read, and wonders whether the other characters were ever real at all.

Part of the World is simultaneously accessible and complex. Lopez chooses each word carefully, giving the novel a two-tone sense of superficiality and depth. The repetitive structure gives the reader a distorted perception of reality, parallel to that of the narrator. The banalities of everyday life are reconceptualized as fascinating, important, and complex through the eyes of this equally mesmerizing narrator. The reader must come to a conclusion at the end of this novel and decide for him/herself whether or not to believe the narrator: a refreshing literary technique since the author provides balanced evidence for numerous conceivable endings. Ultimately, Lopez gives the reader the unique opportunity to determine reality in Part of the World.

2007 Verse Festival Introductions

Andrew Zawacki

Introduction: Peter Gizzi / Andrew Joron / Elizabeth Willis

Verse Festival / Thursday, March 29, 2007 / Mercury Art Works, Athens, GA


-itsy / -antsy / -ing / -oid / -ed
-ology / -ocracy / -onomy
-ation / -ality / -archy
-obic / -etic / -ectric / -ency / -istic / -esse / -esque

These are a few of the lyrical, laconic, lapidary sounds that Peter Gizzi makes in the second of two title poems from his latest book, The Outernationale, while “Standing,” as he puts it, “at the corner of nth and twilight.” Partly suffix and partly self-sufficient—that is, part part and part whole—these fag-ends /slash/ ends-unto-themselves seem to me a fitting way to open this poetry festival, the poem being what, among other things, celebrates the life of words, however mutated, mutilated, or mute. Characteristically plainspoken but elegant, Peter Gizzi seeks, despite all ruptures, “to be complete inside the poem / To be oneself becoming a poem,” “that one day / we might find ourselves lit up.” But not so fast: for poetry is likewise mourning, the cry of an existence that, as the hyphens in Gizzi’s litany of terminations indicate, is at best a half-life. For language, especially poetic language, inevitably standing in for reality by erasing it, to replace with a parallel real, finds itself not only present, as matter placed on a material page, to be manipulated or measured, but also transparent, absented from the reader’s immediate awareness. As a visible, tangible medium, poetry is awake as its own message, and elegizes the thing it signifies, singing a song of itself over the object’s open grave; but as a forgotten, always already posthumous word, poetry eulogizes its referent by effacing none other than itself, keeping quiet so things as they are can speak. In the shorthand of one of Gizzi’s titles, the word, like any corpus, is “Bipolaroid,” with “continuities, gaps.” The fractured once-were-words, or words-in-waiting, scattered throughout Gizzi’s poem—gathered into alliterative and associative phrases of two, three, or four elements, like a verb being conjugated, or a noun declined—are at once dead in spirit, we might say, and alive to the letter. They call out to be completed, but they can also make a go of it alone. As “broken tiles,” to quote another poem, as “sine and cosine,” as both “written speech” and “barely legible,” these crippled but nonetheless breathing bodies arrive “almost home.” Allergic to teleology, then, but nonetheless ambitious to function in our actual world, among human being, the poetic word is, on one hand, revolutionary, a mode of revelry, what Gizzi calls a “Protest Song,” poised anarchically at the outer of the nationale, like an American word with no foothold in France, or a French word unwelcome here; while on the other, poetry is a form of respect (or what we might term reverence), a mode of knowledge (or revelation), and a conduit of dreams (or reverie). The Outernationale makes me think of these things, for it stakes out the frontier not of a poem wherein a fugitive ‘we’ might hide, but of an ‘us’ in which the outlaw poem may remain at large. Across his several poetry books, from Periplum and Artificial Heart through Some Values of Landscape and Weather and this year’s volume, Gizzi offers us a poetry that is as compassionate and communal as it is turncoat and torn-from: “Confetti in April / Confetti in May,” he writes, “This was the last party . . . Bird, enough of your trill.” Gizzi is concerned with the “tink tink” and “Clank, I love you” of language; with the “Ça va?” and “everyday sprecenze” of speech; with the “A is for knee socks” and “O stymie dewy” and “H I J K L banner” of our alphabet; with the “Whoa, Saturday. / Whoa, morning” and “Dear Saturday, thank you” of our ordinary time—but never for their own, lonely sakes. “When I asked what happened,” he says, “I meant what happened to us?”


Andrew Joron is not alien to poetry as the perfumed word, both a rose in its own right and a sign that only signals a further flower. As early as his debut poetry book, Science Fiction, he has been revolving the Mallarméan bouquet within his mind and heart. In his most recent volume, he elaborates this meditation on the mirrorlike traffic between “rose” and “eros” to embrace yet another anagrammatic form, “sore,” thereby returning poetry to its primordial status as pain, as a wound that will not heal or even close. Indeed, we cannot help hearing in the book’s title, The Cry at Zero, an exhilarating cacophony of open channels: zero-degree writing, for instance, and its effort to strip the author of any authority; Dickinson’s “zero at the bone,” her figure for an afterlife of interminable dying, that is, of writing itself; Ground Zero, a placeless place where many of Joron’s most poignant, pressing, responsible remarks on American imperialism are situated; Zeno, who plied the paradox of the halving of halves; the Greek letter tau, often an abbreviation for zero, and also the title of Philip Lamantia’s ‘lost’ poem, to which Joron feels an affinity; and “O, the grieving vowel,” as Joron names it. Joron has staked his poetics, not exactly on the Heideggerian privilege accorded to etymology, but on the hunch that any word is likely the harbinger of other words, whether by homophonic vibration or unexpected coincidence, and that often words appearing to collude in fact collide. Dedicating his book to the late Bay Area writers Lamantia and Barbara Guest, for example, he appropriately conjures “lament” and “ghost.” Elsewhere, though, as when he interposes a colon between “rending” and “rendering,” Joron indicates not equivalence, or even valence, but opposition: to render, of course, is to give, whereas to rend is to sever; so while they seem to share the same root, what the former joins together the latter sunders. Consciously deploying what he calls, in reference to Jacob Boehme, “a musical chord of morphemes,” Joron is far from merely playing semantic games. “Where language fails,” he argues in his opening text, “poetry begins.” For Joron, poetry is the emergence of a Cry that, while composed of language, nonetheless constitutes an emergency for language, which cannot contain it. Poetry is the part that overwhelms the whole. “A poetic impulse,” Joron avers, “will cause the system of language to exceed its own boundary conditions, and to undergo a phase transition toward the Unsayable.” Steeped in the pre-Socratics, in German philosophy, and in the Surrealist hasard objectif, Joron espouses a poetics most indebted to the post-structuralist tradition that has attempted to think the impossible relation between a restricted economy and its exception: for Joron, poetry claims a radically disruptive role, akin to that leveled by the “Autrui” of Lévinas, say, and the “jews” of Lyotard; by Bataille’s “free expenditure” and Blanchot’s “scandal”; by Barthes’ photographic “punctum”; and most recently, by Jean-Luc Marion’s “saturated phenomenon.” Like the human body, our most immediate site of self-disruption, poetry is non-dialectical and non-identical. Bearing out the “structured randomness” so frequently his theme, Joron has organized his so-called “Selected Prose” as a cross- or perhaps non-generic work, wherein essays, book reviews, and even a personal letter are situated alongside ‘prose poems’ that had appeared earlier, in Fathom and The Removes. This is further evidence, if we needed it, that poetry, at once urgent and insurgent, is “the Opening to Otherness” by which we, in turn, are opened.


“We are living in an era,” Andrew Joron argues, “. . . of the convergence of science, mathematics, and poetry.” If that’s true, then we have, among other writers, Elizabeth Willis to thank for it. Science has impelled her art from the beginning, in the guise of thermodynamics. Her first book, Second Law, set decimal to decibel, claiming in the sharded minimalism of her title sequence, “No meaning was before there was a night / No mention before there was Divide.” What was scattered throughout Second Law has been newly bound, as if by gravity’s tug, in her most recent volume, Meteoric Flowers. Yet even its dense prose poems, however compact in rhetoric and thought, are perforated and internally fissured: partly literary and partly “unfixed by science,” their words Willis’ own but their titles taken from Erasmus Darwin, they will not decide between the prose and the poetry that constitute their duality. The title says much about Willis’ style and investigative methods. Whereas a meteor hails from afar, hurtling down to earth from outer space, a flower moves up and away, growing from the inside of the earth toward the sun. From a human vantage, the meteor is vatic, and can harm us; the flower, like us, is veined: “We’re only clay,” Willis writes, “blossom machines.” One is hard, comprised of astral bits broken off from something larger, and rushes headlong toward its destruction, unique insofar as it will never be heard from again, while the other is soft, composed of tiny organic elements, and flourishes slowly before fading—only to return the following season. The marriage of meteor and flower, like the strange harmony proclaimed in the title of her earlier book, The Human Abstract, is Willis’ way of saying that poetry is singular—and plural. So she is sometimes given to lyrical glissando, à la Wallace Stevens, whose epigram, “A poem is a meteor,” provides the book’s epigraph. “What gives, or gave, to get us here, what wired fluorescence?” Willis asks in “Rosicrucian Machinery.” Her answer, from elsewhere in the book: “As luck conducts the inner man, a trumped up art will fly beneath the wings.” But Willis is also pragmatic, demotic, terrestrial, socially and politically savvy: “America owns the moon,” she ventures, not entirely hyperbolically, and “We all live under the rule of Pepsi,” in “the garden of western expansion,” walking around as we do, daily, in Rutherford, or Gatorville, or Brownsville with its flying flag, or Sweet William, Virginia. Whether “at the edge of L.A.” or “the edge of Venice,” according to Willis, we are “living in a desert of bolted-down things,” where what is “public,” she warns, “can’t be protected.” Not surprising, then, are her several elisions between “idyll” and “Idly,” as though America’s relative peace and prosperity were also the surest sign of its doing the devil’s work. “Among the lower orders,” she muses, admonishing the administration, “a W is sibilant.” Trying to negotiate “a careful avalanche of we and they,” while “The world is clanking: noun, noun, noun,” Willis crosses over to the side of the verb, capriciously but with total conviction, transiting and transforming all self-centeredness by speaking from Whitman’s Texas-sized mouth, by trying to discover “how dirt thinks,” by “joy[ing],” as she promises, “to dream / a more fortunate planet.”


Introduction: SÉbastien Smirou / Jena Osman / Olena Kalytiak Davis

Verse Festival / Friday, March 30 / Georgia Museum of Art, Athens, GA


When a direct object is suddenly asked to become the subject of a following sentence, but is forbidden from relinquishing its role at the end of the earlier, transitive phrase, something confusing and probably uncomfortable happens to our sense of agency and orientation. The story, such as it is, starts to unravel quickly. When an adjective is unwittingly separated from its noun, an adverb from its verb, a pronoun from its antecedent, and when the candidates for any one of these referents are plural, it is literally unclear who’s who, what’s what. When a quatrain tries to become a painting, by converting its words as if into image, its margins into full-justified frames, and when a series of these aspiring tableaux, hung meticulously side by side, shows a book trying to morph into a museum, the onlooker is obviously at a loss for how to proceed through this would-be Uffizi. And when a wealthy Italian statesman, art patron, soldier, and lover tries to live inside the French language, he finds that his currency, as it were, is no longer current. I don’t know, of course, whether this was Lorenzo de Medici’s experience of the Renaissance world, but it is certainly the experience any reader has when facing Sébastien Smirou’s appropriately titled Mon Laurent. In his book, the whole universe may hang in the balance of the tiniest of words. “ayant appris une future rémission des étoiles,” begins the fourth stanza of the eighth and final section, “les médecins / regardent . . .” Laurent is dying of gout, so the court astrologers consult the stars for advice. On first take, the sentence—if one can speak of sentences where there are no capital letters, no punctuation other than parentheses—seems to say: “having learned of a future remission from the stars, the doctors look around,” as though the medical entourage had divined, from the stars, a lessening of Laurent’s malady. This would be a relief, not least for the sick man himself. But there is a second order to the ‘same’ phrase, and it offers information that bodes as ill as the previous version’s promise: “having learned of the stars’ future remission, the doctors look around,” where what is at stake is a pending remission of the stars—their fading or disappearance. Grammatically treacherous, Smirou’s line locates the fate of Laurent, and hence of Medici Italy as such, within the single, seemingly insipid conjunction, des. Nor is the welfare of only one man, one country, or Europe suspended. Just as children of the Copernican revolution were learning that the universe had never revolved around them, despite their illusions, so too does Smirou’s des encapsulate a celestial dilemma: either human proficiency can continue to interpret the heavens, to discover therein its salvation, or else the stars themselves are growing dim, receding to where we will no longer have any access, leaving us to our own, insufficient devices. This is the classical abruptly declassified—but not declassed. Mon Laurent is an elegant, funny, often sad meditation, as concerned with physical arrangement and fractal symmetry as it is with perplexing semantic eccentricity and ruminations on matters philosophical, political, and sentimental. Constructed according to a 4 x 16 x 8 pattern—of lines per stanza, stanzas per section, sections per book—with the gaps separating individual words rendered as regular as possible, Mon Laurent is a mélange of traditional format with an un-constricted modern idiom. Smirou’s emergence began a decade ago with his appearance in the Revue de Littérature Générale, a massive magazine-anthology that detonated on the contemporary French poetry scene, throwing the collective gaze toward new aesthetics and revised ambitions. As founding editor of the micro-editions rup&rud, Smirou once published Peter Gizzi, and he has since been earning an increasingly serious reputation among several innovative American poets, including Cole Swensen, Stacy Doris, and Susan Howe.


The demanding, multifarious work of Jena Osman is an ongoing exercise in displacement. The first thing to be stretched and snap is any conception of the poem as a self-contained, lineated verbal artifact, complete with beginning, middle, and end, and written by a single consciousness. Indeed, many of Osman’s projects are not ‘written’ at all, but are rather curated, coordinated, given space in which to circulate as an interactive collage, in which text, context, and numerous para-texts all border one another. Among the many elements that work together in Osman’s arenas, be it harmoniously or, just as often, through cacophony, are citations, sometimes attributed but often not; handwritten manuscripts, notably Dickinson’s; Supreme Court rulings and other juridical and political memos, including sound-bytes culled from press conferences; images, whether static and pictorial, stolen from a book of gestures, say, or else projected, such as those we’re about to see on screen; phrases whose typeface bolds, enlarges, until suggesting billboard copy, before slimming down to 9-point font, as footnotes, endnotes, asides placed literally at the side of the page, so that suddenly what appeared to be peripheral comes into view as the central concern, pushing the ostensible subject to the margins. Hermeneutically suspicious, adamantly pitched against anything smacking of uniformity or received wisdom, none of Osman’s operations is identical to its neighbors; instead, each ports a logic and a logistics tailored to her present preoccupation. Her writing provides the perfect example of texts “conditioned,” as Andrew Joron has said about someone else’s poem, parts of which were published in Osman’s journal Chain, “but not controlled, by the application of rules,” in which “formal constraint serves as a propaedeutic for the poetic imagination.” The formal constraint of Osman’s “Memory Error Theater,” to take an example from her recent book An Essay in Asterisks, involves a legend, or key, containing a 3 x 7 grid. With each cubicle corresponding to a planet, a copyeditor’s mark, and an abstract idea such as “relativism” and “the question,” the sequence proceeds to open each of those Pandora’s boxes like a computer file, in order to address the slippages of personal and historical record, particularly the way in which memory is invented, edited, revised, changing over time as the remembering agent changes. Ostensibly similar in its consciously hypertextual layout is her 16-page “The Periodic Table as Assembled by Dr. Zhivago, Oculist,” from her first book, The Character: different elements from the table communicate logarithmically with small poems. But as Osman’s note to the text makes clear—although text is obviously a word not wide enough to accommodate what we’re talking about—the activity of reading “The Periodic Table,” as published between two paper covers, is only to experience one of the who-knows-how-many permutations and combinations made available by her parametric experiment. Osman’s ambition is to refuse deciding for the reader what and how to read, and in printing the poem she brings us up against the limits of ‘the book,’ with all the potentially sinister connotations of that phrase. The result of Osman’s ‘poems’ is not to interpret the aesthetic, social, and political spheres in which we inevitably live, although her work makes overtures that direction, employing ‘multi-media’ strategies precisely to critique the perniciousness of news and how it’s fed us. She is too mistrustful of the readymade version, too skeptical of anything that would claim to be “beyond a reasonable doubt,” to want to impose an orthodoxy on us. Instead, suspending anything remotely resembling a full-proof interpretation, what Osman wants to illuminate is the act of interpreting itself, from its procedures through its consequences. For all the formal virtuosity and singular deformations in Osman’s repertoire, it’s that last that strikes me as imperative to her work and why we need it: consequence.


“Hence sordid bullshit, leave me the fuck alone.” Like everyone who’s read Olena Kalytiak Davis’ latest book, shattered sonnets love cards and other off and back handed importunities, I feel the basic human urge to say that line aloud, preferably in front of a roomful of students. Explicitly ironic and explicitly explicit, the invocation mimics the rhetoric of a seventeenth-century sonnet while making no bones, obviously, about its gen-X expletives. And that, according to Davis, may be the very rub that gets irritating: the methods for negotiating the sentimental life that we inherited from poets and lovers of the past are no longer operational, and instead of fixing them we get pissed off, or hurt, when they break down. Davis seems to wear her emotions, her baggage, her dirty laundry, and even her wariness on her sleeve, if not “hanging // down / my deepest cut / shirt,” but that is likely just subterfuge. Her self-reference is a front for a more deeply ingrained self-irreverence, and it leads her to solicit the protection, or at least the presence, of someone else: the Reader, the Lord, you. For it may be, via litany or profanity, that one of these folks can forgive her. But absolution is hard to come by when the confession itself is a lie. “i have never told anybody / about the time i i i / slept with three guys at once,” she admits in “keep some stuff for yourself,” “cause it never happened.” Brandishing a sexuality more volcanic than veiled, Davis is a teller of tall tales and of tales below the belt. To wit, she is less interested in old wives’ tales than in young—perhaps premature—wives’ tales and also ex-wives’ tales. “i have decided that we do not want other people’s . . . husbands,” she writes to a friend, “as we do not want our own.” The question of fidelity has always been on the loose in her work. Her first book, And Her Soul Out of Nothing, contained a diptych of dueling poems, “In Defense of Marriage” and “Against Devotion,” a dilemma to which her more recent book contributes a lyric called “to love” and another called “poem convincing you to leave your wife.” She even fears—or feigns to fear—that her own reader will leave her, for an Italian mistress. The site of all this anguish, of course, is the heart, and Davis is desperate to understand how and why it gives itself, or is taken by force; how it cracks, withdraws out of shyness or spite, betrays or is betrayed; how heavy it is, and how light; how necessary and unwieldy. No amount of bookish consolation will offer any solace, as when she invokes the famous dictum about the heart’s reasons, only to tell Pascal to “shut up!” The speaker of Davis’ poems is indentured to first-hand experience, often leading to disastrous results, as we might expect when a “freakèd heart” is married to a “prosthetic soul,” both of them housed in a body that loses first its virginity, then its vanity—before deciding to sport them both once again. Davis is the Ukrainian-rooted, raised-in-Detroit lovechild of Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins, a strange offspring when you think of it, he a Jesuit and “time’s eunuch,” she refusing to leave her father’s house. But as parents they imparted a good deal to their daughter: a diction that manages to be both stringent and baroque; a tempo turning ever back on itself; an obsession with salvation and the general oh-shit of the self; a fraught rapport with nuns; a predilection for spring; a valedictory outlook, often self-lacerating, even kinky; and the incredible incapacity to make up her mind. “So far,” Davis writes, “Anti- / Thesis and then, maybe, a little thesis.” But there is also this contrarianism, and a frequently unrepressed anger, and a confusion of love with lust, which makes me think that the father was actually John Donne. “Reader Deaf and Reader // Dear,” beware: something dastardly, something bastardly, is among us, and she introduces herself as “sir olena kalytiak davis.”

NEW! Review of Joseph Lease

Broken World by Joseph Lease. Coffee House Press, $15.

Reviewed by Emily Hunt

In Broken World, Joseph Lease scrambles for self-definition in a deliberately muddled composition of “shiny cars parked in a lot” and bits of broken mirrors, “red buds” and “torn strips of city.” This collection of poems, awash in political overtones, leans on potent imagery to address the corruption of a country once “blank, blank, blank.” Lease tosses text from hand to hand as if it were a solid object; with the repetition and reweaving of single words and phrases throughout the book, he tests the weight of these tools, looking for a way to sculpt an understanding of his identity, inherently colored by America, his home.

Broken World, sufficiently dappled with white spaces and room to reflect, lends itself to a reading in one sitting. Lease’s poems are as vulnerable as they are demanding, as tentative as they are assertive. He asks and tells, gropes and glues. By Part Two, which is composed of twenty-six individual poems that share the title “Free Again,” the reader finds him or herself digging through the contents of a man split open, spilling words.

The structure of “Ghosts,” Broken World’s first poem, signals for readers Lease’s concern with the limitations inherent in words: “the word for dawn / is others / the word for light / is freefall / the word for hand / is others.” The rhythmical piece reads like a man out of breath trying to spit out meaning. Lease has written down these phrases--given them some sort of physical body and enough space to breathe--so that he, like a painter gauging the accuracy of his composition’s proportions, can step back and look at them to decide if they hold true. "Ghost" ends with “nothing,” open and defiantly blank, dangling against a background of airy white.

“Broken World,” the poem to which the collection owes its title, initially gains momentum in its painting of America’s portrait, only to fall back into this naked place, “blank as glass” and “erased by snow.” The repetition of “won’t be” delineates through negation, while phrases like “America equals ghost” lend definitions ultimately void of certitude. By “Soul-Making,” readers discover that this deceptively empty space holds a man, “bodiless and bright,” whose “soul is like a green used car . . . an old drunk king, a patch of ice.” America, then, becomes a nesting doll of ghosts, stacked and stacked with the spirits of men and his objects.

Time and time again, Lease examines the interplay between authority figure and subject, teacher and pupil, superego and ego. Referencing paintings that resemble scratchy lessons on a chalkboard, he speaks through “Cy Twombly” to readers as if he were encouraging a group of curious students: “you are getting it and you are getting it / here or there or somewhere.” The speaker (or teacher) himself searches for a gem of recognition, for “thick ropes of light” inside his words. Later, “Little Lightning Bolt” introduces a recurring “Simon says” theme. As readers we are puppets, hands on our heads, hearts exposed to whatever may fly our way: “Simon says, put your finger on your nose. Simon says, you haven’t done enough . . . Simon says, you only have blood, marsh light, and sparrow.” Through these modified playground commands, Lease cries out from the perspective of a manipulated subject.

Like several of Lease’s pieces, “Lightning” ends with a dash, rushing readers along to the next page. In this case, the dash points to 1944 Litzmannstadt, a scene that stinks of ashes, hunger, and dirty names. Here, Lease continues his exploration of the weight of a word assigned, shaking it out like a dusty rug to see what settles: “They made us garbage--I was garbage-- / they call me / human garbage--I was garbage / so I still am.” Such simple constructions serve as poignant expositions of a culture’s ugly underbelly. Broken World thrives on these moments that address the power of a label, whether it be “garbage,” “Jew,” or “American.”

Lease applies the notion of tabula rasa to America itself throughout “Free Again.” He steps through the mud of a world stuck on money, “drunk on not / having to / respond,” and clouded with the neon emptiness of strip malls and parking lots. Trekking through such an environment, one cannot help but think of how its once-clean slate must have shimmered. Lease begs us to look at our reflections; he highlights bits of shattered self, heavy as glass in the air of this country. In his Broken World, habitat defines inhabitant and vice versa, and both remain swampy. These poems possess an uncanny synchronization of insistence and wonder. A tainted, money-hungry country rapt with the color green (e.g., “When we’re gone our names will mean green body . . . our names will mean green thought”) soaks those born into its homes and tossing in their beds before sleep, cuts their darting thoughts with the bare and haunting honesty of a face in the mirror. Lease cracks open these icy reflections to fish for something worth “free[ing].”

NEW! Poem by Kenneth Williams

Kenneth Williams

THE SUMMER HOUSE IN WINTER

for Lisa Nardi

The summer house in winter
lifts like a saint into a sky
not blue but bone white,
its orange an anticipation
of the coats of the men
who tromp through
incredible snow.

Aren’t you just sick of gorgeous people
making news in gorgeous settings?

Aren’t you ready
to drop and pray
for those whose joy
is mayonnaise?

The cognac explodes
into oak-paneled flame.
The library dwindles
in significance.

Quick!
Show me all the books by anonymous.
Bring me the head of Frank Lloyd Wright.

Straighten the doornail.
Stem the rose.

I am the very flower of discretion.

NEW! Review of Miranda Mellis

The Revisionist by Miranda Mellis. Calamari Press, $12.

Reviewed by Caitlin Brown

In her novella The Revisionist, Miranda Mellis plunges her readers into a looming, apocalyptic existence where the natural world resembles an ominous machine, and the local convenience store has become known as the new natural jungle. Complemented by the mechanical yet strangely beautiful artwork of Derek White, whose images seem to be almost motorized, Mellis’ story of a nuclear age weatherman paints a world without sensation, or truth, or reaction. Yet, despite the empty void felt between her characters, Mellis manages to transcend the predictable feelings of hopelessness, and subtly, tastefully adds an afterglow of promise to her story.

A short 82 pages, The Revisionist vividly observes the world through the eyes of its narrator, a weather surveillance reporter who documents his--or her, Mellis never tells us--findings from an abandoned lighthouse, seven miles outside the city. Ironically, Mellis emphasizes the heightened sensation that can be felt through the use of the narrator’s telescope--to hear another’s heartbeat, or to read another’s mind--and juxtaposes this advanced machinery with both a narrator who has significantly distanced himself from the subjects of his observations and a human population that fails to feel anything at all anymore.

From the blind to the hearing impaired, Mellis’ world is one in which, as the narrator claims, “nothing was felt any longer, or known through the sense portals, despite the fact that every part of the body was designed for contact.” Some fail to even notice that their bodies are dramatically mutated or gone completely. Indeed, Mellis also intends to highlight the fact that even the animals of this world are more engaging and receptive than the people. While “people howled and chirped at one another” in convenience stores, spiders, seeing-eye dogs, and birds give long soliloquies on selfhood and pain. A postmodern tone of human disconnection and a sense of lost wholeness seem to glaze the narrator’s panoramic view of the broken down metropolis.

The theme of sensation is further emphasized throughout the book, both by Mellis’ spatial designing and by Derek White’s vivid illustrations. Mellis replaces the conventional use of chapters with artistic spacing throughout her prose, almost as if she is leaving legroom for the reader to think, question, or simply stare at the lack of words or images and treat the blank page as an aesthetic experience in itself. The randomness of her spacing choices further accentuates the fragmentation of this world of hers, as if Mellis is forcing the reader to acknowledge the vast distances and spaces present among characters and their stories, refusing to let them be ignored.

As for White’s images, dispersed throughout the book, they not only add an additional aesthetic angle to Mellis’ already pulsating descriptions, but seem to evoke something of the sublime in the reader. When viewed in conjunction with the story, these images are both horrifying and beautiful, painful and pleasurable. Below is one of White’s images, construed from Mellis’ following description: “Through my telescope, survivors were running around in circles. Buildings were curdling. The very air had faded, was pixilated.”

Though the reader knows that he gazes upon a scene of nuclear holocaust when viewing White’s image, he sees horror only in the fact that he finds the image pleasing to look at. Perhaps there is also satisfaction found in the fact that the scene takes place from a distance, just as the narrator sees it. Untouched by the disaster, the reader therefore feels no remorse--and that in itself calls for horrified reflection. Not all of White’s illustrations portray such infernal scenarios, but they are all captivating in their intricate detail, drawing the reader in and beckoning him to study each image for its elaborate elements. One might argue that Mellis’ colorful imagery requires no supplement, but the graphic illustrations are difficult to pass up, and one finds oneself excitedly anticipating the picture on the next page.

The sublime emotion found in White’s drawings provides a reiteration of Mellis’ subtle ambivalence present throughout the story. Though hers is predominantly a tale of loss and absence, of a deteriorating human race, leaving the reader feeling hopeless and depressed is clearly not her aim. Instead, Mellis manages to extract the beauty--or what little, simplified part remains left of it--from the rubble, giving her piece a more optimistic outlook overall. Various pairs of characters find camaraderie or “mitotic love” through each other’s company. In defense of the monotony of the world, the narrator argues for repetition as a new art form, saying “you could pathologize the repetition, call it futile, but if you considered the aesthetics of repetition as such, you might actually begin to embrace eternal recapitulation.” Though Mellis’ sarcasm is apparent, the narrator’s ambivalence between false and authentic feelings presents itself as a constant. Often he deems human feelings and relations pointless, while other times he sways and thinks there is something to them; and this ray of doubt in the uselessness of human contact becomes the beauty behind Mellis’ seemingly sad story. Mellis also mentions an intuition that all humans share, one that helps them know when they are being lied to--perhaps the only sense they still commonly possess, and perhaps the most important one of all: the common knowledge of what it means to be human.

Such instances in the story, though often fleeting, provide evidence that Mellis has captured in The Revisionist an aura of both a slow deterioration towards an end and, perhaps, an eccentric new beginning, tailored from the past. Even the narrator feels unsure as to which direction his world is leading, and this seems to be Mellis’ point--that the questioning and doubting are what must remain after most everything else has ceased to exist. The Revisionist is a tangle of surfaces and images that struggles to undo itself before the reader’s eyes; and its attempt--not its failure--to do so is where its beauty unearths itself.

NEW! Poem by Peter Conners

Peter Conners

MEAT ZOO


The monkeys had been burning all morning. In the midst of it all, peanuts were sold at a discount. Polar bears batted seal corpses across their habitat. The cows were made of ground beef with two lamb eyeballs wedged into their heads at odd angles. Penguin skins were doormats; orange duck feet propped open lavatory doors. The crows were laughing in their trees.

NEW! Two poems by Natalie Lyalin

Natalie Lyalin

TWO POEMS

Düsseldorf Is For Sisters

One is Scheherazade but they both wear overcoats.
One traces sun’s rectangle on the floor but they
both wear overcoats. Are you my sister from Mom’s
uterus? Are you using a fork in that way? Why does
one flower in our arrangement look so eaten?
I’m sailing to you. I’m sailing to you on white sails.
On white cells. I’ve recently counted my white cells.
One is a stirrup, but they both ride in saddles.
One has puffy lips, but they both ride in saddles.
I like names like Angela, Angelica, and Stanley.
I like Beuford, Blaine, and Tammy. Düsseldorf really
is for sisters. Please Bring in the rhinestones,
the leather purses. Bring on the hair pins
and lacquered horses. One wears a metal band,
but they both have pink gums. One doesn’t mind
that much, but they both have pink gums.



Pink and Hot Pink Habitat

They shoot up, the stalks with globular color
with stiff tissue layers poking the air.
You arrange them in water, but do they need water.
The answer is yes. They are alive.
When knocking a vase over, backhand it,
send the globs flying. When visiting college,
you learn that glass is liquid and sloping down.
Backhand your college choices. Arrange an arrangement,
fit into a hounds-tooth jacket. Get a small pipe,
a dried mushroom, and an antique locket.
When people come over, show off you closet.
Your ancient corsets and slovenly coats.