NEW! Review of Timothy Donnelly

Twenty-Seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit by Timothy Donnelly. Grove Press, $14.

Reviewed by Geoffrey Cruickshank-Hagenbuckle

Occam, in translation, was reduced to weak-kneed jabber. "The simplest will be true." What he instead said is that excess must be necessary. Ankle-biters, please here note a world-turning change of plan. I've heard this book attacked starting even at the title, for its ungainly lengths, "pomposity," artifice, its failure as catch-word, pull-quote, or sound-bite. I say, it’s high time authors showed such size, nerve, and style.

Twenty-Seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit declares itself instantly as theater, as gesture, with unquestionable elan. Call it a challenge. Why not try the heights? Put everything anyone else is doing in whatever direction in American poetry today over on one side, I’d have to come out strong for Donnelly on the other.

Painted in the boldest strokes of carnival marquees, view "Fanny Fowler’s Poetry and Dioramas Workshops." (Could what charms most in his art be its slightly fading colors?)

Among her sharper innovations, Fowler’s infamous
   "Poetry and Dioramas" workshops perhaps
   pierce deepest, rivaling in radiance the sloe-
   opening eye of Cleopatra’s asp.

 
Included, on display: "This is the Belle of Amherst’s hearse."

Much lip service gets paid these days to jouissance, but do we still read with pleasure? Who remembers the imagination, with its root-word image? I luxuriate in Donnelly’s apt magic, although he’s not all show. There’s just more good hard work in this one book than in 10 other arguably credible authors’ efforts that I leave dawdling on my desk. I’d really rather read his over. In a new American poetics re-heatedly unearthing the "fragments" of the European past, I love a man who can complete a sentence.  

Consider the above. We don’t ordinarily speak of a "sharper" innovation. Is the poet having more fun than his reader? Irked, and so attentive--suspicious--we next arrive at "pierce." Some kind of back-up, anyway. Could he merely seek by this to reinforce a faltering conceit? I am still in suspension. Magisterially he then brings it off, getting the last word. "Asp" rewards us for our tension.

Thank the gods of sky and sod he did not dig into secrets veiled since ancient Egypt! We don’t need some opaque reference to their Book of the Dead, which of course I’ve heard of but never read. Here’s nothing heavy-handed or elite. Donnelly is deft. Cleopatra impacts unassisted as an immediate image, is accessible to all, and is well suited as a figure to Fanny’s amateur tableaux.

In closing, shall I now admire his "sloe-opening eye"? Enjoyment, plus enjambment! Of course we know Cleo as sloe-eyed; and neatly, too, it was in fact
her asp’s mouth that opened . . .

NEW! Review of Ruth Stone

In the Dark by Ruth Stone. Copper Canyon Press, $22.

Reviewed by Jenn Blair

Edwin Muir once wrote, “This is a difficult country, and our home.” Ruth Stone's poetry has absorbed this contradiction, to its great strength. Her work is by turns wry, spare, raw, and generous. In the Dark presents a collection of poems fully inhabited by a voice that takes delight in many subjects, but two in particular: the slightly ajar and the just so.

Stone's work echoes Wordsworth's famous pronouncement that “we murder to dissect,” but one important distinction between Stone and the Romantic poet quickly emerges: she's funny. Consider her poem “Heaven,” a piece that speaks of “ignorance hung / like a bat of viscous glue; / upside down-- / beautiful blind insectivore.” Traces of humor appear in other poems, but Stone's lightheartedness often contains an edge. “What They Don't Tell Us About” speaks of an “asteroid fat boy,” noting, “This kid is a little punk, three miles in diameter / and solid rock. He's brushed-off / leftover pie dough.” In “Interim,” “the radiator that sits / in the kitchen passing gas” turns plaintive at the conclusion: “When you have nothing to say, / the sadness of things / speaks for you.” Stone's use of everyday objects puts her in the same realm as Nancy Willard and Jane Hirshfield, but her personification possesses more iron, perhaps. In “Drought Again,” she speaks of rocks “secret as potatoes” who “squint in their gum-dirt sockets / and Geiger-count a tremble coming / inch by inch.”

Other poems, such as “Body Language,” hand back readers lost fragments of days. We usually don't remember the sidewalk we walked down this afternoon, but Stone's poetry brushes off matter only to re-present it, giving us another chance. We nod in recognition, for the first time--again--strangely pleased at the reappearance of “A pyramid of vitamins, endorsed by Olympic teams, / in the flyspecked window.” If Stone's poetry is like the world, that's because it contains a little of everything--“mystery” and “longing” as well as “shit” and “Wal-Mart.”

Stone's poetry also speaks of the past as a force to be reckoned with. The poem “Ice” ends with a surprising juxtaposition: “the tracery of blue-white / forget-me-nots carved of the purest ice may lash / us with the sting of memory.” In “This is How It Is,” she remarks of her late husband, “On this planet, for me, there was only one impetuous specimen.” “Am I” is a shattering, unsentimental account of insensitive medical advice handed her shortly after his death. The force of the poem lies in Stone's refusal to point fingers: she indicts simply by recounting. These poems imply that if meaning becomes condensed enough, it constantly reoccurs: perhaps our lives are composed of just a few moments, terror and joy not much different in that they happen over and over. “Accepting” and “Tell Me” also dwell in the personal, touching on Stone's failing eyesight, questioningly but gracefully. Without lapsing into hagiography, the sense still remains that Stone has mastered--or been gifted--the rare ability to hold her disappointment at arm's length, at least just long enough to wrest it onto paper and pound out some of the frustration to sustenance and some of the pain to bread.

In Of Poetic Diction (1973), Owen Barfield argued that metaphors are not created, only apprehended, and that this truth had been forgotten over time. He wrote, “The language of primitive men reports them as direct perceptual experience. The speaker has observed a unity, and is not therefore himself conscious of relation. But we, in the development of consciousness, have lost the power to see this one as one.” Barfield concluded that imagination was the key to drawing disparate parts back to a whole: “The world, like Dionysus, is torn to pieces by pure intellect; but the poet is Zeus; he has swallowed the heart of the world; and he can reproduce it as a living body.” In Stone's collection, poems such as “Blizzard” and “Pulsing” skillfully bring these various “pieces” or fragments together into a unified whole. Her poems hint that Barfield was onto something: with enough imagination, a poet truly can “discover” (or uncover) those places where “here” and “there” brush shins.

Stone's poems bristle with a disarming simplicity. Pieces such as “Walter, Upon Looking Around” and “Between Men” touch on gender, but are not heavy handed, leaving us with the feeling Stone has simultaneously held her tongue and spoken her piece. “In the Free World” presents a truculent murderer's remarks, a few observations on gun control, then concludes with the Mexican government's “betraying” and bombing of “Native American farmers”: the guns that have slipped from the dead farmers' hands are revealed to be “just pieces of carved wood.” Since Stone's censure appears in the guise of comment, the welt does not rise immediately, but gradually, giving the distinct impression that withholding judgement might be the most elegant judgment of all.

If we trust Stone, perhaps it is mostly because she herself seems to inhabit the “stern rapture” mentioned in “Writer's Block.” “Cosmos” asks, “What is this speech, this blind fingering of the dark?” then answers, “Nothing, old mother, / but your wasted breath.” Stern, indeed. But “And So Forth,” the poem presented just one page before “Cosmos,” preaches a cautious optimism. How else could one grow brave enough to ask, “Can I hope the great ear of the universe / is pressed to the wall of space and hears me, / its own chick peeping?”

NEW! Review of Patrick Herron

American Godwar Complex by Patrick Herron. BlazeVOX, $10.

Reviewed by Heidi Lynn Staples

And the just man rages in the wilds / Where lions roam. --William Blake

Some readers simply won't be satisfied with the particular execution of the political agenda in American Godwar Complex. Patrick Herron, surely, is aware of this, and his “Fuck You O Elvis” might be read, in part, as a response to anticipated critiques that demand a front-man of more lyricism and less didacticism:

... Fuck you O Elvis your cloudy pool is airless; the fish float on the surface with marble grin rotated sideways.

Fuck you O Elvis your rotted Picasso-sloughed corpse you had no taste for voluminous fervor you absented toiling clam and skinny tie flim-flam spam man.

Fuck you O Elvis you are the icon of my gilded excoriation.

Fuck you O Elvis fuck you I'll take John Lennon any day.

The epigraphs by Bertolt Brecht and Allen Ginsberg, two writers who worked from a belief in the poem as relevant site for public discourse, suggest we read the book not as the overheard musing of a solitary speaker but as the openly proclaimed indignation of an angry citizen. American Godwar Complex commences with a bit of revolutionary disturbance: “The Star Spangled Banner” becomes the collection's first poem, “The Blood-Spatter'd Banner”:

Oh, say can't you see, by the bare dangled light,
What so loudly we nailed with our nighttime's armed reaming?

Whose blood stripes and barbed stars, through the one-sided fight,
O'er the ghettoes we watched, were so violently screaming?

Does the vanquished's dead stare, uranium bursting in air,
Give proof to our night that our flag is still there?

O say, can that blood-spattered banner yet wave
O'er the land ruled by blind decree, in a world we enslave?

This presents more than bare pastiche; across the collection, Herron employs (not always with sufficient force) the Situationist strategy of d'etournement--the subversion, devaluation and re-use of present and past cultural production to demolish its message while pirating its impact. What Adbusters does to the corporate, Herron sets out to do to the government: “The Star Spangled Banner” becomes “The Blood-Spattered Banner”; “My Country Tis of Thee” becomes “My Country Steals from Me”;“Hail to the Chief” becomes “Hail to the Thief”; “Take Me Out to The Ball Game” becomes “Take Me Out In the Maul Game.”

Herron's saucy speaker mouths off in poems of a wide assortment, including skeletals, epistles, definitions, transcripts, and this one-liner:

“Parade”

I used to love a parade.

By evoking a fallen enthusiasm for processions--those actions in which things (words, cognitive patterns, policies, people) move forward in regular formation--Herron expresses disenchantment with, among other phenomena, high-stepping lyricism. Instead of a well-wrought yearn, the reader will find, for example, acerbic political haikus:

Politiku 1

Word from our sponsors:
please place your television
on the ocean floor.

Politiku 2

american re
olution: pollution, de
plete uranium.

solution: dig a
hold to permanently keep
armed forces covert.

Sustained anger, a distinct feature of the collection, alienates the reader--perhaps purposefully. As anyone who has been in a good row knows, anger creates distance. Most obviously, anger introduces questions of judgment into the reading experience: What's he so angry about? Should he be this angry? What does he want me to do about it? Such questions interrupt the reader from her dreamy identification with the poem's speaker and ask her to wake up, participate in the making of meaning, and decide the issues for herself, goddammit; however, the best culture jamming--using an enemy's resources against it--is shocking and unexpected. The book's accomplishment in these terms can be unclear, particularly when words rhyme predictably, the syntax goes unsubverted, and the subject and sentiment can be anticipated, as in “Amurika Eins:”

Follow the bouncing ball
to wherever Osama will fall.

Our might will take it all.

To fill the lives of young soldiers with thrills,
to inspire our leaders to gobble their pills!

There's oil in them thar Caspian hills.

Very likely these lines play better as spoken word, an indication of the collection's inherent theatricality.

To everything there is a season. A time to laugh. A time to cry. And a time to tell off the motherfuckers. American Godwar Complex identifies our current epoch as this latter sort.

NEW! L.S. Klatt poems

L.S. Klatt

Three poems

CRETE

Cast-iron block & tackle
look for light in an orange boat
hooks, delphinium
nets drying in a golden pile

The marina is open
it takes Braille to read the cargo

A supermodel sculls in the harbor
her high heels dry-docked
as is the schooner

The fisherman takes apart his propeller in the shade
both hot & cold the way light treats him
I said look at the way she treats him


CORTONA

My halo attracts lightning
& so I am dead

or possibly there's a dead man
in my mouth

though I'm blowing blowing
a pigeon to life

& if not pigeons
an Etruscan named Dardano

my city is lit with the snow
of his groin


FRANCESCO*


Little bronze door where lead you?
I smell an ape or a gory fanatic

anvil head in his hairshirt lap
a bust of pleurisy

Out of the quarried travertine stones
a church of comic superheroes

*yet he walked with the underclass
& capitalized our failures

NEW! Review of Charles O. Hartman

Island by Charles O. Hartman. Ahsahta Press.

Review by Kate Umans

Charles O. Hartman's work has in the past opened its doors to everything from jazz to computer-generated phrases. Yet, for such a democratic poet, he is someone who delights in innovations made possible by restriction. His previous collection, for instance, contained a series of prose poems whose only requirement was that they never use the verb “to be.” Where does a poet who has already gone to these kinds of limits go next? One answer is anywhere. The other answer is somewhere--specifically, the Greek island of Aigina, which provides title and inspiration for Island, Hartman's sixth collection.

The book's ending essay, “Where Am I,” monitors “an especially restless islander” investigating his surroundings. But what restlessness translates to in the book's three sections of poetry is not agitation or haste in scanning its subjects, but rather an active dissatisfaction with the usual ways of processing them. The first of Island's sections consists of a single, hypnotic long poem, “Tambourine”--the book's most consuming and intrepid project. This is no ordinary epic, for it's driven by math before (but not in place of) the usual engines--discovery, quest, and trial. The premise is that the poem functions as a “pi mnemonic”-- the lengths of words follow corresponding decimal digits of pi (the first word 3 letters, the second 1, then 4, and so on).

Hartman peppers “Tambourine” with facts and images of Aigina, telling us, for example, that “to evacuate coasts / a ratsnest of murderous pirates / they built these steep streets.” Yet much of the scene is interior and philosophical, or is compelled by language's near-physical participation. The resulting language can at times be distilled into a proverb-like gravity (“Seeing invents / otherwise anywhere / is a same nonplace”) or even something approximating the stillness and concentration of the haiku (“water / toothless / gnaws senseless a shoreline / rawly new”) and then all at once let lose into a Whitmanesque rowdiness (“A bellow a roaring laugh and posthaste an ecstatic wave speaks lethally / a ten syllable of itself”). Whatever the speed at which the language moves, the effect of the poem is such that every word seems to hang, suspended and independent, in the air, despite the lack of punctuation's regulation. Motion is created by way of a series of poses, the way animation moves frame by frame.

Although Hartman self-deprecatingly references a dependence on a “halfassed lexic hoard,” the poem feels anything but inhibited. It brims with invented colloquialisms and fused-together words (“wayonback,” “mymisself”) that surely reflect, in part, a necessary ingenuity in dealing with the demands of the form. But in a poem which states an interest in processes such as orogeny (mountain making) and the forming and re-forming of shorelines, it is as if the words themselves participate in the protracted coastline drama. They become pieces of an emergent, mid-erosion language, not yet worn down to distinct forms.

The mathematical guidelines technically do their puppeteering from offstage, but “Tambourine” also openly relishes math's connectedness to human experience, geography, and time. And if most poems touch casually on such connections, this poem lives it out. Here, not only does water reveal that “counting enchants it,” but the speaker himself gets plugged into an elaborate logic problem where “the variable I / rehearses values / that like to approach constant X,” with X holding steady to the self's fluctuations, sometimes as higher power, sometimes as the sort of collective vibration of humanity's bustle. Always “out of courtesy / X eludes,” and the pursuit of it invents--in the way any theological search does--both meaning and the debris of “doctrinal middens.”

After this complex meal, the two-per-page short poems of the next section (“Morning, Noon, & Night”) are a palate cleanser--plainspoken, loose-reined observations of island routines, characters, and features. Each one might well be preceded by “Oh, look!” Where the opening long poem brings with it all that comes with the current, these poems better conform to the model of the tide-pool. One peers into each and sees a view, teeming or quiet, but always self-contained: “The lamb in the window has arrived at the height of self-absorption. / Like an invalid whom everything bothers, everything bores except illness, / it has perfected concentration on an ideal” (“The Apotheosis”). Here things and creatures take on their own inner lives; dishes, keys, cats, and dogs dream, plot, and contemplate. But these flights of fancy are all conveyed in the amused tone of the one who invested them with that life, the poet delighting in his bag of tricks.

When the poems withhold details, they do so with the same harmlessness of townspeople going privately about their business--gently, often endearingly--as in the tender but inscrutable lyric “Not One”:

The two--he says--are distinct and inseparable
like the color and the motion of an olive grove
or the pitch and timbre of a voice lingering over a name,
not like sky and sea on a hazy day when islands
and boats seem to float in a false position. Sometimes--he says--
they overlap like the two hands in the lap of an old woman in church
or the thought and word and deed of an honorable man,
not like fig leaves over the first offenders' suddenly private parts.
Never, though, are they one, any more than your two feet,
or your flesh and blood.

Section three (“Eight Greek Lyrics”) contains the logical next immersion. The poems were composed in Greek, and English translations are provided on facing pages. These poems are slower and more deliberate than those of the previous section. “Where Am I” notes, in a discussion of mapping, that “the Chinese reputedly used different miles for uphill and downhill.” If the poems of “Morning, Noon, & Night” are downhill poems, the Greek lyrics are uphill poems, and the mileage does register differently, though rewardingly in both cases.

The Greek lyrics employ the resources of the beginner's phrase-book--cataloguing, interrogation--but run through poetry's fanciful mill. Each new clause is added on with the care of a bricklayer, as in “The Phone Call”:

I wanted to speak to my father
among the dead, but the operator
said it would cost me
all I had. I had

lots: some mountains, a chisel,
two disparate eyes, the light,
the past year, the end of an ugly
cough, a tortoise shell, my pockets,

the tongue of the sea that said No, Yes,
nineteen promises. And a telephone. I asked,
All? The answer: All except
the debt. That you will need.

All the poems of Island seem joined in the act of questioning what happens en route to destination or solution--whether within math, pilgrimage, translation, or a life--following “whichever direction suggests the vectors / of veritably pilgrim progress.” The vector, in fact, could be the book's emblem, as it stands in for the limited, representative knowledge we have of everything--ourselves, time, geography, and the cosmos, to name a few--and “our ability to sample” them, which makes us both fortunate and disastrously constrained. Throughout, the island itself is not only Hartman's solid ground, but also his talisman against an otherwise chaotic vastness, as he declares triumphantly:

Now this universe at large has lost an I
           I
                      locates

NEW! Review of James Doyle

Einstein Considers a Sand Dune by James Doyle. Steel Toe Books.

Reviewed by Matthew Smith

It's the kind of uncertainty that would drive Einstein to distraction. The first poem in James Doyle's Einstein Considers a Sand Dune takes the perspective of an American boy growing up on a farm during World War II. The family living down the road from the POW camp takes a small-picture approach to the war, and, granted, Doyle pitches in an escaped prisoner who more or less embodies Schrodinger's cat. But there's a consistent topic, a voice, a sense of movement and meaning. “When the German Prisoners Passed” even closes poignantly: “The war ended in time so I wasn't drafted. / My parents said they guessed we should be glad // grandpa's was the only death in the family / in the war years. Now they were free to get old.”

Here's the hitch. Poem two, “Babe Ruth Considers a Sand Dune,” picks up the motif of baseball from the first poem and, by way of playful imagery, cleverness, and humor, becomes perhaps the best of all possible outcomes ... if you asked a roomful of poets to write a poem about an athlete in the desert. Doyle does a crackerjack impersonation of the Babe: “'I never liked salt // or egg in my beer,' he snorts, popping another can.” It's just that something seems a little off when this poem carries the title's formula, and all it amounts to is a pretty good bar joke. And so on.

The collection, which won last year's Steel Toe Books Poetry Prize, contains some stunning, beautiful poems (“The People Who Have Vanished,” “Corset,” “Christina of Denmark,” “Tipi,” “The Diver,” and “Perhaps There's a Headstone” for starters). “No Other Elegy,” a meditation on a favorite swimming hole gone sour, reminds one of Larkin with his knack for marrying the profound to the profane. (“Nice debris, I think. The rest / of the life-sized doll is probably // staring up at me from the bottom.”) The end of this poem brings up a concern that gathers mass and energy as the book goes on: that of a dangerously inert past, and future. Doyle reminds himself and us that, difficult as it might be, he's going to have to stand up if he wants to move around:

I dove in just now
to make memory three-dimensional.

But total memory has no fluidity.
You are encased in it and preserved whole

like a peat bog corpse. I drag myself
out of the water while I still can.

A peculiar component of Einstein is the handful or so of ekphrastic poems. The best of these is “Christina's World,” named for the famous painting by Andrew Wyeth of a blind girl reclining on a hill. By slyly projecting his own mythology onto the familiar scene, Doyle peels back our expectations and reveals something far more shocking and familiar: “Suddenly we know what she is looking / at. The field between her and the house / has filled up with the rest of her life ... It has / become so crowded now neither Christina / nor we can ever again move on.”

So many of the poems, however, smack of novelty; too often Doyle seems to be pacing off his creative range. “Louis XVI” is slathered with opulent descriptions and nudge-nudge observations, and a potentially interesting piece about the worship of the transient is ultimately spoiled by linguistic display. An indulgence in post-imperialist finger wagging certainly doesn't help: “He powdered / his cheeks nine times a day / in the one mirror he knew / was shatter-proof--the vagrant eyes / over the countryside and cities / of France.” Aside from being a little awkward, this snipe is banal. (Noting that Louis XVI was inconsiderate of his subjects is a little like pointing out that Gandhi was a nice guy.) Even so, some of Doyle's flights of fancy do soar. The unlikely “Diapers” follows the hilarious nosedive-into-madness of a conservation-minded mother who makes the choice to use cloth diapers. Tailing the development of new life and new waste, the poem brings the reader again into the struggle against stasis, against the filling-up of the world--this time with “millions of small white symmetrical squares.”

When Doyle is not digging into this recurring concern, however, his poems can baffle, with tropes and images that seem to have no more continuity than a pack of chain-smoked cigarettes. In “I Think I Met the One Last Night,” he makes the following transition: “She lined them up / behind the Zamboni // and we skated / on smooth ice like a real family. / When the curtain // dropped, we realized / we could still be friends.” “Discards,” an otherwise intriguing piece about shedding dead skin, stumbles over its own sagacity: “Anonymity is the one drug // whose only withdrawal symptom is time.” The ambitious double portrait “Salome”--depicting the young dancer visiting John the Baptist in prison--touches on both figures' inner monologues but leaves us with a disappointingly shallow conclusion. We are led into the darkness of the saint's cell with a richly attired beauty as our guide, and somehow all we leave with is a tolerance for differing perspectives. Even the title poem, toying with the proximity of brilliance to silliness (“his mustache like Groucho Marx.”), concludes its game at a noncommittal distance, with “things that could be old / spaghetti or new worlds / trickling down his chin.”

So why the schizophrenia? Two poems from late in the book may provide the answer. The first, “John the Baptist in the Desert” (combining earlier devices), concludes:

He no longer needs to give shape to the words
his cousin will wish upon the world.

His hands have the strength his voice had.
He clenches and unclenches them. Now that he knows

he will live, John no longer cares if he dies.
He is ready to leave the desert.

Maybe this has been Doyle's plan all along--neither to cooperate nor to impede, but to step aside and let truth go about its own business. In “In the Bronx,” the genius reappears as hyperbole: “they rehashed his moves / in that day's Yankees game from more angles / than Einstein ever figured on his blackboard.” Is it that simple? Is the angle-tally this book's central concern? The poem's last lines elaborate: “like turning / your back on yourself for a while, / so you wouldn't feel used up by yourself.” Clunky as the phrasing is, it aptly describes all the moments in Einstein Considers a Sand Dune when Doyle opts to wink at the reader, at the poem, and at himself as poet.

We know the winking is a conscious choice, however, because, halfway through Einstein, Doyle faces the abyss hinted at in so many other poems. “The Cancerous Cell” is a robust treatment of disease as an allegorical figure: “It can't put the book down. It reads / faster and faster. It will read / through the night until the story / is finished.” Doyle's vigorous imagination stretches to full effect, fingering dozens of images which he sets in place with a precision and care magnified by urgency. Here he brings us to the intersection of mortality and eternity:

We can invent the intimacy of a biopsy
and pinpoint the precise moment
when the microscopic world of cells
opened like a gorge and we swayed
on its edge, growing dizzy, staring down
and down. In this case, 2:16 P.M.,
Tuesday, February 23rd, 1999.

NEW! Karyna McGlynn poem

Karyna McGlynn

THE STRAWBERRY COATS

Here come the girls in their strawberry coats,
up our building’s walk
with their thin boys and black bangs.
It’s 2:30 am on a Friday and they return
precisely now, and now
they see me watching from my fish-tank room.
They are swimming toward me through their freckles,
through their knitting.

Tonight the season starts to chill.
From my desk, I blow and their hair turns gold,
turns red, falls in piles on the drive.
They are artists without paints or pens or instruments.
They all own birds.

Here come the strawberry-coated girls!
They are smoking on the stoop because they have to:
it’s in their contracts. They’re Catholic,
or something like it.
Their words are purple rosary beads,
they visit each station in turn,
tap each holy head with a thumb and begin again.
They never say too much.

Smoke eddies at the windows of my fish-tank.
I remember I am Southern, other--
and despise my messy mouth: bragging and gushing,
smearing and smashing all my meaning together.
I light my fish-tank from within,
write on the front glass, where the girls go by.
I am no mystery.

There, my juvenalia sits in the corner like a naked doll,
with my old name and made-up lovers, there
where anyone might see and know the worst of me.

There! They are coming--
the girls with red coats and black bangs and birds,
who live deep down in our building
in rooms without windows or doors,
with their clocks and thin boys who worry and count.

Off come their red coats.
They are snuffing their smokes on the stairs,
pouring their silent bodies back
into our building’s gut.
They hide what’s wrong and wear what’s right.

I hear them lock-up, light-tight
and sweep their crumbs.
I smell their papers burning in the kitchen sink.

NEW! Michael Robins poems

Michael Robins

Three Poems


APPEARANCES

For the hours in which a silhouette is cast,
the evening’s kept awake by another form.

Now it’s now again, the snow bears a pattern
for the shapes who nearly meet in the snow.

Once a covered slope was manner for taking,
a profile for each rise in the conversation.

The streets under light are empty time again
for linen, tables & chairs of a festive spread.

Once, I built a frame, hoarded convention
to counter the sound a hungry circle makes.

The evening becomes a figure, lovers sleep
in a fold of white sheets & the appetite grows.


GREEN SHOULD A FOOT PASS THROUGH

Because we live in comparison, right or left,
sunny side up, I’m torn belief by the whole,
the moon & star together in a red full tone.
The yellow cranes divide the sky, one world
from the next while an iron frame takes shape,
fashions a skyline, the breeze along its path.
It’s nice outside, nicer yet a steam that climbs
ruptured, a funnel scattered above the street.
What could be more enchanting: the chimney,
wisp that skims a valley in the break of day?
A man, a woman, twisting links under cover
or is the house on fire, a lantern by the draft
& now a window sand, ash divorced in ash?
Embers or glaciers, the desert or via city map,
one may gather or unravel the forms around.
If, later, you find the time to unearth a source,
reap the slow uncoupling. You may dissolve
a frost along the line that stays its silver tone,
the childhood that arrives much later in life.


WE ARE SMALL UNDER A RUMOR OF THE TONGUE

We were awoken by the flood, drops of night
inside the larvae when something’s overturned
our log. Blind is collective memory, inch to inch
where those have gone for sugar in a kitchen.
We have so many legs. They begin at the knee,
extend the air as if for an empty glass of water
in the darkness of a room. The workers gnaw
within the circles between our jaws, their world
a narrow stair cut tall & back without a railing.
Larvae or pupae what’s the difference? They’re
ours, white at birth, they’ll fight until they die.
A wind thwarts the grass, footpaths that tumble
like the branch end to end toward other yards,
other towns. Underground, we pile mounds
to protect our queen, our mother sealed inside
her chamber. We carry twenty times our weight.

20th anniversary issue

Verse 1995-2004: The Second Decade

600+ pages of poetry by writers from more than 20 countries

Pre-order the 20th anniversary issue of Verse and save 25%

Cover price: $20
Verse blog price: $15 (+ $3 postage)

Buy two copies and save 40% on the second copy: $30 for two copies (+$5 postage).

Special rates available for classroom orders (10 or more copies). Please contact Brian Henry at bhenr [at] yahoo [dot] com if you are interested in assigning the 20th anniversary issue of Verse in your classes.

Poets included:

Agha Shahid Ali
K.E. Allen
John Allison
Jorge Carrera Andrade
Rae Armantrout
Simon Armitage
John Ashbery
Jan Baeke
Coleman Barks
Benno Barnard
Jeanne Marie Beaumont
Joshua Beckman
John Beer
Josh Bell
Charles Bernstein
Javant Biarujia
Mark Bibbins
Linda Bierds
Judith Bishop
Bruce Bond
Charles Borkhuis
Marianne Boruch
Janet Bowdan
Peter Boyle
Andrea Brady
Lucie Brock-Broido
Lee Ann Brown
Pam Brown
Oni Buchanan
joanne burns
John Burnside
Siobhán Campbell
C.S. Carrier
Hayden Carruth
Paul Celan
Maxine Chernoff
Kate Clanchy
Pura Lopez Colome
Shanna Compton
Gillian Conoley
Clark Coolidge
Matthew Cooperman
Joshua Corey
Cynie Cory
Robert Crawford
Keki N. Daruwalla
Jordan Davis
Olena Kalytiak Davis
Cort Day
Sarah Day
Ales Debeljak
Gerardo Deniz
Ray DiPalma
Milan Djordjevic
Joseph Donahue
Timothy Donnelly
Michael Dumanis
Marcella Durand
Russell Edson
Gunter Eich
Elke Erb
Luciano Erba
Clayton Eshleman
Jenny Factor
Paul Farley
Michael Farrell
Gary Fincke
Mark Ford
Graham Foust
David Gascoyne
Amy Gerstler
Melanie Giles
Ray Gonzalez
Noah E. Gordon
Arielle Greenberg
Lavinia Greenlaw
Vona Groarke
Allen Grossman
David H.W. Grubb
Barbara Guest
Judith Hall
Barbara Hamby
Joshua Harmon
J.S. Harry
Kevin Hart
Matthea Harvey
Steve Healey
Michael Heller
Kris Hemensley
W.N. Herbert
Tracey Herd
Bob Hicok
Jessica Hornik
Christine Hume
David Ignatow
Alojz Ihan
Phillipe Jaccottet
Ervin Jahic
Kathleen Jamie
Christopher Janke
Lisa Jarnot
Eugen Jebeleanu
Kimberly Johnson
Peter Johnson
Barbara Jordan
Hedi Kaddour
Joy Katz
S.K. Kelen
Karla Kelsey
Richard Kenney
Venus Khoury-Ghata
Marzanna Bogumila Kielar
John Kinsella
August Kleinzahler
Caroline Knox
Kenneth Koch
John Koethe
Yusef Komunyakaa
Nancy Kuhl
Kevin Larimer
John Latta
Radmila Lazic
Katy Lederer
David Dodd Lee
David Lehman
Alissa Leigh
Ben Lerner
Phillis Levin
Emma Lew
Petter Lindgren
Timothy Liu
Lisa Lubasch
Roddy Lumsden
aonghas macneacail
Paul Maliszewski
Claire Malroux
Malinda Markham
Dionisio D Martinez
Pierre Martory
Ted Mathys
Glyn Maxwell
Susan Maxwell
Medbh McGuckian
Jerry McGuire
Heather McHugh
Paula Meehan
Richard Meier
Jennifer Militello
Matthew Miller
Peter Minter
Edwin Morgan
Paul Muldoon
Judy Nacca
Daniel Nester
Eilean Ni Chuilleanain
Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill
Geoffrey Nutter
Conor O’Callaghan
Julie O’Callaghan
Dennis O’Driscoll
Caitriona O’Reilly
Jena Osman
Ruth Padel
Eric Pankey
Ethan Paquin
Seth Parker
Don Paterson
Ricardo Pau-Llosa
Vera Pavlova
Alexandria Peary
Peg Peoples
Simon Perchik
Teresa Pfeifer
Peter Porter
Kevin Prufer
Carol Quinn
Justin Quinn
Amudha Rajendran
Peter Ramos
Heather Ramsdell
Claudia Rankine
Srikanth Reddy
Peter Redgrove
Donald Revell
Rebecca Reynolds
Peter Richards
Aleksander Ristovic
Ana Ristovic
Yannis Ritsos
Robin Robertson
Matthew Rohrer
Rachel Rose
Peter Rose
Catie Rosemurgy
Carol Rumens
Tessa Rumsey
Gig Ryan
Tracy Ryan
Tomaz Salamun
Mary Jo Salter
Mukta Sambrani
Fiona Sampson
Standard Schaefer
Robyn Schiff
Susan M. Schultz
Leonard Schwartz
Jo Shapcott
Laurie Sheck
Reginald Shepherd
Craig Sherborne
Spencer Short
Eleni Sikelianos
Martha Silano
Charles Simic
Bruce Smith
Iain Crichton Smith
Gustaf Sobin
Laura Solomon
Gary Soto
Peter Steele
Ales Steger
Jesper Svenbro
Cole Swenson
James Tate
Emily Taylor
Jeet Thayil
Tony Tost
John Tranter
Lisa Turner
Lee Upton
Nanos Valaoritis
Karen Volkman
Diane Wald
Steven Waling
Mark Wallace
Chris Wallace-Crabbe
William D. Waltz
Joe Wenderoth
Jason Whitmarsh
Dara Wier
Lucy Wilks
Diane Williams
Terence Winch
CD Wright
Charles Wright
John Yau
David Yezzi
Dean Young
Kevin Young
Ivana Zuzul

NEW! Review of Pam Brown

Dear Deliria by Pam Brown. Salt Publishing.

Reviewed by Naomi White

Pam Brown’s Dear Deliria, dating from 1970 to 2002, isn’t chronologically organized or grouped by original publication, thus offering a survey of Brown’s work without boxing in the pieces. Brown purposely leaves out an introduction, allowing her work to exist without commentary. This seems appropriate because of the work’s fascinatingly autobiographical feel. In “Eyes on Potatoes” she pulls the reader into a glimpse of her own life:

downloading Laurie’s poems
pages flutter off the printer tray
and get mixed up with bits of Bolton’s.
I walk out to look up at the vast sky
lit by a huge full moon     the night
is tranquil      everyone’s indoors watching
crap tv      the muffled sounds of soaps

However, unlike many so-called confessional poets, Brown doesn’t waste words. Rather, she appears anxious in her presentation of her life and thoughts. The last stanza of “The ing thing” is refreshing: “taking so long / to write the book-- / only to be / remaindered.” Because Brown writes about a poet struggling to finish her own thoughts, her poems are appealing and accessible. By outwardly looking at herself from a reader’s perspective, Brown avoids pretension and didactism. The normalcy and non-academic scene of “Montreal,” in which Brown writes, “I force myself to write this, / to stay awake        while doing so / in the public library on Saturday afternoon,” offers a fresh alternative to the stateliness of highbrow academia.

Despite Brown’s resistance to being pegged as an academic, her poems make a clear statement about her self-perception--as a poet first, as a woman and Australian second. Her audience seems to be at the forefront of her attention in many of her poems, as in “Eyes on Potatoes”: “but should I continue      my poem will be constructed / as ‘funny’ like my inclusion of some notes on a reading.” This self-conscious appeal to the reader to withhold judgment on her work is engaging because it plays into the confessional feel of Brown’s poetry. Her work also has a feminist slant, but the women she mentions in her work are almost always poets. For example, Alice Notley, like Brown, found a voice for "the new woman" in her own time, but her first aim was to make a poem rather than present a platform of social reform. Unlike Notley, however, Brown’s struggles do not come from gender inequality, but from an internal struggle to find the language she feels is necessary. In “Fifty-Fifty” she writes, “I am dimly / jealous of / Alice Notley ‘who now permanently lives / in Paris’; / something / I wish / my notes / might say.”

The subject matter of Brown’s poems is often entrenched in the routines of everyday life. She varies the setting, switching between the suburban/urban and the pastoral, and she refers to city life in “Sheer veneer:”

the biggest buildings
full of
chinless wonders

who drown
in their own
useless evenings

they move
like cows
in big tuxedos

Here, Brown develops a cynical tone through her unflattering images. The word “wonders” drips with sarcasm and disdain, especially following the unattractive modifier “chinless.” In the midst of the urban subject matter, she incorporates rural descriptors, such as describing the businessmen as cows. According to John Kinsella, in an interview with Brown in Jacket, “The mundane and the illuminated morph together textually in [Brown’s] work and the bricklayer is not superior to the musician, or vice versa.” Because the rural image of cows and the urban image of tuxedos are equally unpleasant, Brown does not setting one above the other.

The mundane holds power for Brown, and she devotes a considerable amount of time to it: mocking it, beautifying it, and showing it in her own daily life. “In Ultimo” takes vivid snapshots of daily urban life, playing with the notion of the value of everyday routine:

up to the third floor
for a lean
& a musing--
what colour’s my posture
what colour’s my posture

here’s the view
from the balcony --
grey and darker grey
brick wall          office
windows          computer
screens & tv screens
nearly always on

Brown finds energy in her use of dualites. She seems to struggle with opposing ideals of urban and rural, academic and domestic, foreign and familiar. Not only does she present opposing images, but her style creates another layer of duality. In “A life transcendent” Brown uses alliteration to enhance the duality: “between sips / of / porphyry pearl,” “facsimiles / float around / the firmament,” “place the poem.” Through the repetition in sounds, she furthers the idea of doubleness in the poem. To stand out against the echo of the alliteration, she also uses contrasting abstractions, such as “ you are / glad and sorry / all at once,” to emphasize the tension between two opposites. Through this, Brown avoids placing judgment and is able to find beauty in the contrasting ideas.

The intimacy and forward nature of Brown’s poetry is immediately inclusive. Even recreational readers of poetry will find pleasure in Dear Deliria, but it is by no means dumbed down or without deeper literary merit. Rather, Brown finds a distinct place that includes all readers, inviting them into her poems and, through her writing, her life.

NEW! Review of Quarterly West

Quarterly West #58 (Summer 2004). $8.50.

Reviewed by Becky Rodia

Prior to receiving the Summer 2004 issue of Quarterly West for the purpose of this review, I hadn’t read an issue in about four years. I used to admire Quarterly West for taking risks while remaining accessible and enjoyable. The Summer 2004 issue, however, wanders far out into risky territory, often leaving meaning and accessibility behind, particularly in the nonfiction selected for this issue (the sloppy proofreading didn’t help matters either; the issue is peppered with typos and errors). Despite the uneven quality of the individual pieces, however, the issue is commendably cohesive in respect to the editors’ specific tastes. A reader more in tune with the editorial sensibility currently in place at Quarterly West might find more that speaks to him or her in the Summer 2004 issue than I did.

The first few pieces are deceptively solid QW fare. Stephanie Harrison’s short-shorts, “Lists” and “Bereft,” skillfully telegraph loss and emptiness. The couple in Peter LaSalle’s story “Marche aux Shadows” moves through the dreamlike, haunting scenes, struggling with the specifics of what can and cannot be known, wondering if they’re truly on the road to the “shadow” market of the title.

Shortly after these respectably risky opening pieces, I encountered Lance Larsen’s essay, “Looking for Spiral Jetty,” winner of the 2003 Writers @ Work award for nonfiction. Though the piece achieves its overarching goal of placing Robert Smithson’s earthwork into a context, getting there is a struggle. The writing is cluttered with inept neologisms (“zenned myself into tranquility”), cliches (perhaps the most egregious of which is Larsen’s use of a dictionary definition of “jetty” to serve as an entire, brief section of the essay), and tortured metaphors (Larsen describes one of Smithson’s essays as “so torqued with technical and hallucinogenic language that I felt I was inside one of those fast food salad containers that has been violently shaken until every sentence drips with too much dressing”). What Larsen’s essay lacks in style, it ultimately makes up for in meaning. Unfortunately, the same could not be said for other nonfiction pieces in the issue, most notably the inscrutable “Conjuring” by Mary Cappello, which reads like a stream-of-consciousness journal entry (Cappello’s biographical note states that she works in “experimental prose forms,” and though I was able to understand the experimental nature of the piece, I grasped little else) and Kyle Thompson’s “Biographies Toward An Unknown Author,” which indulges in cliche after cliche about the writing life (“the novelist’s wife knocks softly . . . on his office door, and then finally breaks in to find him there . . . all bones, and his books perched fat on their shelves”) and the joys of reading (“This morning, for instance, I resurrected Chekhov and Bulgakov . . . They wandered around the room bumping into each other . . . sharing news from home”).

The fiction is stronger. While I felt Harrison and LaSalle were the standouts, Janice Levy’s “Between the Rhymes” does a good job of depicting the detached shock of a woman whose husband has recently died, and Ann Pancake handles image-laden stream-of-consciousness adeptly in “Coop,” a story about rebellion at a camp for disadvantaged girls:

The girls throbbed in the doorway, four or five deep.The girls throbbing, the howl a blood-orange come-here spiral, the girls piled, arms thrown across backs, heads over shoulders, and everyone quivering against the rule. Throbbing. They never broke it.

Come morning, they found out the other coop had tried to burn their bunkhouse down.

The poetry selected for this issue is solid. Stephen Cramer’s “The Whetstone” takes the unearthly sound of a musical saw as the jumping-off point for an acutely felt, beautiful meditation on loss:“one edge can slice you / while the other keeps singing.” The wry poems of Mike Dockins and Kurt S. Olsson are as entertaining as they are thought-provoking, particularly Dockins’s “Notes Toward the Last Poem on Earth,” a list of events--or lack thereof--that would render poetry unnecessary (“No thin layer of ash covers the town,” “Glacial ice recedes at a sensible rate,” “Even the hangovers are tolerable,” etc.) and Olsson’s “Chicken Man,” an homage to characters who frequent cheap restaurants, “retail familiars” who are tolerated, even needed, “so long as there’s no cause to rummage beyond the twitch, the lisp / the change purse a blackjack of tarnished pennies, / the lost child.”

Donald Platt’s “Spring Theophanies” is a wonderfully dizzying rush of reversals. No sooner is something given than it’s taken away, as in the first five lines:

     The pear trees
put on their white see-through chemise of blossoms
          that the season will strip

from them until they stand shy, shivering with rain,
          and green . . .

The poem’s alternating litany of progress and destruction, life and death, bestowing and denying, is tempered with brief pauses: “Consider the all-night laundromats . . .” “Consider also the day lilies . . .” Everything that bursts forth in this poem inevitably subsides or is negated, leaving one with the feeling that April surely is the cruelest month.

NEW! Review of Marianne Boruch

Poems: New and Selected by Marianne Boruch. Oberlin College Press, $19.95.

Reviewed by Jenn Blair

Marianne Boruch’s Poems: New and Selected opens with “The History of The,” a twelve-part poem that spans nine pages. One part opens “something flashes      in this hollow between buildings.” The poem presents many such small smudges of permanence--kernels the heart swims back upstream to meet and memories the mind continually coalesces around despite the forward pull of chronology and the endless driftings of clouds: “The room is cool / as the past is cool in its / immaculate way. Dark hallways. Even in summer, / the rooms there . . . Meanwhile, my grandfather / read by the window. And I gathered myself / though there was no self yet / to gather. How to say this? I watched / light fall on him and all his years: / beautiful, courtly.” How and when are we born? Boruch’s poetry suggests a few answers: Here and there. Long ago. Eventually.

After “The History of The,” Section One officially begins, presenting readers 25 new poems that poems brim with autumn leaves, tulip trees, stick-on glow in the dark stars, cats, and ROTC boys--familiar landscapes, but ones presented with an uncommon depth of observation. One new poem, “Double Double,” seems an unassuming ars poetica. The poet describes the space where she goes to write (her son’s old room), then shares, “I wait all this. And wait, / to clicks of sparrow, the tuneless / finch--my window’s up. Write write! because-- / I don’t know. Birds close down / for a fine few seconds.” A lovely last line, but slight recompense--and as for the self-induced command? Flown off into exasperation. This rupture, however, arguably creates the same effect as George Herbert’s vocational agonies do in “The Collar,” or Milton’s Sonnet Twenty-Six (on blindness). Poems such as these do not falter so much as break into candor, and once they mend themselves, the recovered calm carries an even greater authority. The speaker has considered the price, but still presses ahead. In “Double Double,” the poet grows placid again, and more, concluding, “Take a room. Then quiet the world in there. First, it’s small.”

Other new poems in the collection contain subtle, but powerful, voices. In “The Way the Dying Hear Things,” the speaker witnesses a “nurse busy / with another patient, now lift / your other leg, voice too high, / vapid sweet.” Here, a moment most turn away from must now be looked at, and considered. “Elegy” makes effective use of repetition, creating an almost incantory cadence: “Before the basil blackened. Before plates / slept in their cupboard. Before the streets / were snow. Before the song started in the throat / or crept sideways into the hands that hold the cello / or the moon spilled to nonsense all / over the floor.” The poem is so simple, so seamless and perfect, readers easily glide right past the line “Before our son grew so eye to eye” before stopping, turning around, and asking, “Before our son grew so eye to eye? Could there be a more bittersweet way marking time?” One line carries all the world’s dynamite, then explodes it, but subterraneously, leaving everything intact and ringing.

If Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience were mixed in a blender, Boruch’s “Song in Spring” would come pouring out. The poem glides and gilds, but refuses to present youth as a golden age free of care. There is already a shadow over the sun--a sadness in the swagger: “The fuck you is the easy part, yolk of an egg / that loves the sizzling grease, mouse / the trap dreams of, the way cars / veer off at dark, / all headlights until / the curve in the road swallows them. Such / relish. But the what now, and the should I / that’s the loneliness straight. And how many / days and nights, years of that before the body / tells none of its secrets gracefully / but gets used to things broken . . .” After acknowledging the stress of childhood and considering the physical body’s slow demise, the poem ends with a wry, fond paean to one’s early years: “Oh, that / Fuck you in the bright afternoon. Child / with the foul mouth, darkly radiant on the steps. / New leaves maneuver each bud, the blinding / bicycles speed by.”

Poems are like lives, in that ending them well often poses the greatest of agonies. Boruch’s poems, however, seem exempt from this common difficulty. Consider her new poem, “I Imagine the Mortician,” in which the speaker meditates on a fictional undertaker who is unhappy with his vocation, but possibly takes some joy in carefully examining the hands of the dead: “It might be / a hobby of his that perks up the whole / awful business . . .” Although the main focus of the poem is an imagined undertaker, the end of the poem subtly refocuses attention back to the speaker; at this juncture, the geo-physical location of the poem seems to shift, but only in theory. At first, one might have difficulty believing that no particle or atom presented ever stood outside the brilliant lie of the imagination. Still, at the poem’s close, a door slowly opens--a door belonging to a house the poem never left: “. . . My mind-- / only birdsong entered, sound / like pebbles tied together with string / and trailing off. So I let / the mortician in / with his bent curiosity, the reverse / of the new mother who counts / all the toes and fingers / and is so relieved.”

“Pleasure” is much different than “I Imagine the Mortician,” but this poem also comes to a skillful close that mixes observer and subject, until all seems bound up and indistinguishable as Yeats’s Dancer and Dance. After speaking of two young people kissing at the Art Institute, the speaker places herself on a museum bench (then on a haystack in a Monet painting). At the end, her gaze returns to these two lovers, and the voice expands to include any fixture of the building (the speaker, the bench, or a piece of artwork--she might as well be any of them--but the interesting part is that perhaps she really is): “Of course, these two / are young, which is to say, I’m / not anyone, a piece of wood, / a wall. And they’re / invisible.”

After the first section of new poems, the book divides into four more sections, one section for each of Boruch’s previous four collections of poetry. Sections Two, Three, and Four present poems from The Gazebo (1985), Descendant (1989), and Moss Burning (1993), respectively. The more recent a work is, the greater share of representation it receives: Section Five is the largest, presenting 36 poems from Boruch’s most recent work, A Stick that Breaks and Breaks (1997).

The selected poems gives new readers another chance to encounter the birds who “dive/ into invisible walls, / their small heads dashed against pure thought” in “Diamond Breakfast,” and the horse “the color of thick velvet drapes, / years and years of them behind the opera, / backdrop to ruin and treachery, all / innocence and its slow / doomed unwinding of rapture” in the sadly elegant “My Son and I Go See Horses.”
Those already familiar with Boruch are bound to find selections from past works more than apt. They will nod again at the Biology teacher in “The Berlin Wall, 1996” who “cheered and harped / over any bright bit--a fingernail or a piece of scab / down to its cellular tweed.” The inclusion of “Reasons” will reintroduce them to the lover who eloquently confesses, “Third place: a continual slow surprise / at your beauty / which is a kind of country. / I take my citizenship seriously . . .” “Moss Burning,” the elegiac title-work of Boruch’s 1993 collection, is another older poem that can more than withstand resurrection; the poem is so well-wrought, so understated, yet fierce, that even past readers might be startled again.

Selections from A Stick that Breaks and Breaks are especially well-chosen. “Camouflage” touches on “mimicry” and “deception,” speaking of “Secrets in the bones which aren’t / whispers, in the fine / and serious brain / whose best parts / cannot think.” “The Vietnam Birthday Lottery, 1970” is another fine poem. In the poem, the speaker remembers a cluster of girls anxiously listening to the radio: “And each had a birthday / hidden in that quiet like a flame / you’d cup a hand around, / in wind.” Although the speaker was single at the time, she had a friend “whose boy was suddenly born all wrong.”

One of the greatest strengths of Boruch’s poems is their locale: they often situate themselves at the edge (or precipice) of the unexplainable. In a new poem, “Bones Not of This Puny World,” the speaker meditates on saints: “I think / about them, not constantly, just / occasionally, how seen from below, / they were wiry / bent shapes, which meant they were / praying, repeating some / fabulous, modest sentence--forgive me, / mother of all things that walk / or swim or fly, that think / or refuse to think--or they were / simply glazed over, going / lockjawed into that / holy blank.” The sense seems to be that one can begin to peer into such mysteries, but then he or she must quickly back away. In “Piano Tuning,” the speaker cannot watch the man tuning her piano (the act is too private and wonderful and terrible), but she listens (and is altered) all the same: “Because the whole time / it was the slow weight of the tuning hammer, / the metal strings that don’t know / what music is, sweet / dumb narrowest expanse / of the deepest ore, singing out / its genius anyway.”

In the end, there might not be much difference between the saints and the piano presented in the aforementioned poems. Both inhabit the space where sense breaks down and the only thing that matters is uttering the utterance, regardless of what ground the notes fall on. Boruch’s imaginative witness of these “throw away” notes or gestures is not primarily salvaging, or even art. First of all, it’s an act of courage. Before that, a great gift.

NEW! Review of Maram al-Massri

A Red Cherry on a White-tiled Floor: Selected Poems by Maram al-Massri, translated by Khaled Mattawa. (Bilingual Arabic-English edition.) Bloodaxe Books / Dufour Editions, $23.95 / 8.95 pounds.

Reviewed by Lars Palm

Let’s begin by quoting a poem:

I run         jog          I tarry        rise
                    and descend
I come          close          move away
                    I scream
I moan          pant          fall quiet
                    disappear
                and become
I storm          I rain
I weep          I laugh

A woman in the feast of her ecstasy
thronged by a man’s host of angels.

This is poem # 9 from the book I Look to You by Maram al-Massri, the second of the books from which poems were selected for this volume. The second stanza is a perfect example of the art of murdering a poem; it of no use whatsoever. In fact, when I read it, it took the pleasure out of the first stanza as well.

I recall John Ashbery being interviewed for Swedish radio in the mid-1990s. He was asked how he knew a poem was finished and he replied that he knows a poem is finished when he’s reached the point where whatever else he writes turns out bad and needs to be removed. He also could have said that keeping the bad parts of a poem could easily ruin the good parts of it as well. This is exactly what, to me, is the matter with the poem above. And, let me be blunt about it and get it over with now, I don’t think this volume should have been published. Or let me put it this way: had I been an editor and received this manuscript I would have rejected it rather promptly. Or maybe I’m just not the reader this book needs, whoever that might be.

Maram al-Massri is a poet in her fifties, born in Syria, now living in France. A Red Cherry on a White-tiled Floor is her first book in English, translated by Khaled Mattawa. It is also the title of the first (of two) books from which the selections were made.

What we have here are 142 small poems concerning, love, desire, abandon, the masculine and the feminine written in short, spare lines, originally sequenced as a kind of narrative, although the narrative lines get ruptured when poems are selected for translation. Al-Massri relies heavily on a few key words, which she tries to charge with as much meaning as possible; she also relies on paradox, a longtime poetry classic from Turkey and eastward, and on the technique of taking two fairly straightforward images and adding to them a conclusion that shall give the preceding images some extra depth, as in # 42 of A Red Cherry:

This evening
a man will go out
to look for
prey
to satisfy the secrets of his desires.

This evening
a woman will go out
to look for
a man who will make her
mistress of his bed.

This evening
predator and prey will meet
and mix
and perhaps
perhaps
they will exchange roles.

This poem may in the original have virtues that the translation doesn’t have. I’m thinking here of things like alliteration, that would turn it into something more than the plain or, rather, flat statements that we’ve see in English. Which brings us to the problems of translating from the Arabic. First, it is usually done, at least into western languages, for readers who can’t even read the alphabet the original text is written in. This puts extra emphasis on the demand that the translation be a self-reliant poem, because most of the readers can’t really go back to check with the original. Second, translators from the Arabic are often heard telling that many of the word-roots in Arabic have multiple and quite often contradictory meanings in western languages. This would mean that there is more room for turning one original poem into a variety of (probably quite different) translated poems, than when translating, say, an English poem into Swedish.

Enough complaining. Let us ignore 140 of the poems and focus on the two that I consider functional poems in English. The first one is # 60 from the first sequence:

With my delicious fruit
I light
the way leading to me.

Your stupid birds
prefer
old bread.

This is simple poetry at its best: brief, to the point and, in this case, a bit sarcastic, but also one of the very few poems in this book that feel genuinely felt. The second poem, with which I will end, is a three-liner which is plain beautiful:

What does a horse do
with a beautiful broken
neck?

NEW! Jennifer Burch poem

Jennifer Burch

HEFT

Work in this room is the heat or subtraction of it
where I am like a giant, the volume never changes
the room is a miniature day or spaceship
floating I descend, an alien-doll
I imagine the determination of others
in order of preference, puppeting me
the work cannot drop out of it, just the origin
something will fall to fracture sleep
it's not easy to be dishonest about the system
persistent heat or its subtraction, unrecognized instincts
peering around the work beneath its order

NEW! Review of Peter Gizzi

Some Values of Landscape and Weather by Peter Gizzi. Wesleyan University Press, $13.95.

Reviewed by Graham Foust

On my first trip to southern California, I visited the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and saw two retrospective exhibits, one featuring the work of Robert Smithson, the other drawings by Ed Ruscha. What struck me most about these shows was how well they fit together; the qualities of one artist bled into the other and felt at home there. Smithson’s work, which for me has always had an air of high seriousness about it, somehow became cartoonish and hilarious--the Hotel Planeque slideshow, for instance, would hardly be out of place in Richard Linklater’s Slacker. On the other side of the museum, Ruscha’s gunpowders, chocolates, and pastels felt like mirror-coated rocks pouring out of a dumptruck and into the adjacent bins of my left and right brain. Humor hadn’t seemed so profoundly playful to me--so seriously funny--in years.

If the sensibilities of these two contemporaries were somehow fused together and instructed to write poems, that compound mind might look and feel something like the mind of Peter Gizzi, a writer who strikes me as an at-once tense and casual excavator of the causal and sensual. Watch how Gizzi’s small poem “In Defense of Nothing” fuses Smithson’s high-flying earthwork and Ruscha’s ground-bound skywriting:

I guess these trailers lined up in the lot off the highway will do.
I guess that crooked eucalyptus tree also.
I guess this highway will have to do and the cars
      and the people in them on their way.
The present is always coming up to us, surrounding us.
It’s hard to imagine atoms, hard to imagine
      hydrogen & oxygen binding, it’ll have to do.
This sky with its macular clouds also
      and that electric tower to the left, one line broken free.

This poem’s first line wouldn’t be out of place in one of Ruscha’s mid-seventies works on paper (one that might hang between “I Was Gasping for Contact” and “Honey, I Twisted through More Damn Traffic Today”), while the last almost seems like it’s been culled from the text of Smithson’s 1967 essay “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic.”

We might expect poetry in and of the age of Windows to be a little buggy, and it’s perhaps fitting that it takes three tries or titles--three turns of Gizzi’s key--to get this volume started. The book’s first section, “Forensics,” consists of one long poem entitled “A History of the Lyric,” which is itself composed of six individually titled sections, the first of which, “Objects in mirror are closer than they appear”--and we’re off! (is this on?)--initiates the book’s automobile-as-planetarium theme by cruising the reader through days and nights, past mountains and owls, and under electricities and skies of various stars and stripes. In the poem’s title section, Gizzi writes: “Don’t trade on this high tone // for silence, rather lumen chatter / recalling the better part of majesty.” The better part of “majesty” is “jest,” and while it’s fair to say (and no doubt obvious) that the poem’s tone might originate from Jack Spicer’s down-to-Mars “lowghost,” majesty’s remainder-letters remind us that there’s a bit of Allen Ginsberg’s King of May here, too. To wit, the poem’s coda’s last lines:

When the end was near
I picked up for a moment, joy
came into my voice

Hurry up it sang
in skiffs and shafts
Selah in silver tones

When the day broke open
I became myself
standing next to a door

In my dream, you were alive
and crying

Like much of Ginsberg’s work, “A History of the Lyric” is at ease with the personal--that which Spicer deemed “the big lie”--and yet its final lines turn away from the reality to which any history aspires. The speaker fucks with us by way of a new spin on the old Doors’ title “Alive, She Cried” in the uncontrollable and overdetermined space of a dream, a space where our minds are simultaneously at their best and worst, their truest and most fictional.

To prepare for L.A., I’d been listening to great records about cars, among them DJ Shadow’s 2002 album The Private Press, which opens and closes with a sample of one Novella Johnson, who is cutting/writing a record/letter to a man Shadow’s listeners can know only as Lester. In the first sample, her voice rises from scratchy vinyl and noodling music to say the following (reproduced here to the best of my abilities) about her recent vacation by car:

451 Commercial Avenue
Apartment K
Richmond, California

September 9th, 1951

Dear Lester

I’m sorry I didn’t write before and because this record wasn’t sent which I intended doing before this. Everything went wrong. Tonight, we got together and kept the kids up and decided to have a little fun making this record. But of course, coming up, we didn’t have any trouble, we had a lot of fun. Momma slept all the way, and I didn’t get tired driving, was overanxious. We got in about 12:45, got to Richmond, woke the family up. There are so many things I could say but I just can’t get them together . . . I’ll let you hear from somebody else.

The relative scarcity of both personal letters and vinyl records in our new century (not to mention the sheer odd-ness of a letter sent by record) combines with Novella’s teary, trailing, and yet somehow matter-of-fact voice to evoke a daft--one might even say spastic--melancholy. Indeed, Shadow’s entire record, with its constant mention of automobiles (“Mashin’ on the Motorway,” “Blood on the Motorway”), dissed connections (“Walkie Talkie,” “Giving Up the Ghost”), and discontent (“Fixed Income,” “You Can’t Go Home Again”), seems to insist that we don’t know whether we’re coming or going. While its effects are certainly beautiful and pleasurable, the record never allows its listeners to escape the dark and masterful strangeness; as is the case with some of the Beach Boys records, the shadows that Shadow’s ghostly America casts prove to be more powerful than the sun that makes them possible.

Lyric poetry is a private press of sorts--a single human voice speaking to no one in particular, and yet somehow making public his or her persona. One year after the release of Shadow’s record, we find one of lyric poetry’s most deft practitioners down in the dumps and sampling (from Wallace Stevens’ dump no less!), as he stitches together one of the funkiest and most fortifying collections of our new and often dumbstruck century:

                     Isn’t it great here
just now dying along with azaleas, trilliums,
myrtle, viburnums, daffodils, blue phlox?
It’s good to be a ghost in America,
light flooding in at this moment
of never coming back to the same person
who knew certain things, certain people,
shafts of light entering a kitchen
at the end of an age of never coming back now.

Here, in what I take to be the centerpiece of his third full-length collection of poems, Peter Gizzi offers up a recitation of resuscitation (a “Revival”) even as that poem’s first line discourages such an activity by way of its speaker’s declaration that “It’s good to be dead in America.” I, for one, have come to expect such contradictions and conundrums from Gizzi, and I always find them delightful, baffling, more than a little scary, and completely relevant to our continuously changing and challenging present. In a time when our various values are being debated, reinvented, upheld, fought for, and/or totally misunderstood, Some Values of Landscape and Weather breathes the rather old craft of poetry into our new formations of life with uncanny candor and skill. Despite--or perhaps because of--his status as one of the most prominent “indie” poets of the last decade, Gizzi is an entirely “major” figure; that today’s academies (or at least Wesleyan University Press) have opened their doors to him bodes well for poetry’s future.

NEW! L.S. Klatt poem

L.S. Klatt

PSALM OF THE AMPUTEES

Pittsburgh, city of
multi-corporations
we homeless sleep in your parks
   praise us
our golden years--hands
cut down from the trees
released for a season
amber waves of gloria
    in excelsis deo
swept into drifts
the sweet gum leaves

Unreachable as the ocher starfish
anchorites we once held fast
to west           and east coast
but one by one   we picked our way
face down   eating up the miles
traveled on tube feet
(suckers thrown ahead)
attachment
the rest to follow
and whenever a useless arm
had to be severed
Heart would make up for the lost
   limb

Now you are curious--what’s
in the garbage bags? human parts?
                See for yourself
the arm sometimes grows back
slowly   (starry)

NEW! Review of Jeanne Marie Beaumont

Curious Conduct by Jeanne Marie Beaumont. BOA Editions, $14.95.

Reviewed by Dorine Preston

The poems in Curious Conduct are varied in both content and form, but still read like the individual components of one unified larger project, so that the pieces proceed as concurrent explorations of adjoining territories. Several categories of poem are interspersed throughout the book, as though three or four decks of poems have been shuffled together; in this way, the arrangement of the collection provides the reader with a pleasant combination of constant change and constant familiarity, since the more pages one turns, the more one can say, “Oh, one of these again,” followed by, hopefully, “I like these.” Naturally, each reader will be better pleased by some categories of poems than others. I am disappointed by the poems in which Beaumont seems to have employed cleverness as an end in itself, and prefer pieces in which she has employed her verbal dexterity as a means to travel somewhere more interesting.

Too many of these poems rely on gimmicky sound effects and start-overs in an unsuccessful attempt to create a sense of writerly inquiry into the role of language in human psychology, how the words we use not only describe our world, but create it, or are a world in themselves. Beaumont explores this idea in real depth in poems like “Skill (A.M.),” where she reminds us, “I could fathom more if I knew more words.” In general, however, texts which interrogate themselves ought to ask themselves harder questions than these poems do; too many of these pieces merely perform the surface gestures of investigation, without any real drive to discovery. The opening poem of the collection, “Chapter One,” is unfortunately one such poem, as is “Ionesco Street,” with its “Good day. Good dog. / Good god! Good night.” and “An entrance required an exit. / Fix it! I said. O-- / pen wide, wide and say blah. / Blah, blah--ah.” These lines seem to be going through the motions, and most of these moves feel too familiar to offer the reader any real surprises.

Saddest of all are the poems which sail along successfully until the very end, a place where Beaumont has an unfortunate tendency to insert the word “soul” where it’s not wanted or to end the poem with a cheap stunt unworthy of the rest of the text. The first instance of this is “Her Parasol,” a wonderfully coy exploration of the repressed erotic which makes shrewd use of both visual arrangement and self-interruption--until the end, where “her soul / spinning and / spinning and” fails to close the reading experience with the satisfaction the reader has been led to expect.

“Circa 1812” makes a similarly unfortunate blunder. The poem takes us on a high-speed tour through both the mundanities and the historical highlights of the period, such as “Not far away, a nursemaid repeats her tale till the older Grimm brother gets it right” and “The young poet, meanwhile, in his attic room above the surgery / dreams of extracting a beautiful tooth . . .” and “Three fleas dance on the bed of a prince.” At its close, though, the poem falls down by giving in to the urge to explain itself to us: we are told, “I’m in my early life as a fly . . .” This lean on the easy laugh of the old saw seems unnecessary; the preceding text has unfolded with a sense of authority that we will be happy to follow wherever it leads, so this fly-on-a-wall explanation feels like an alarming misstep.

Fortunately, Curious Conduct is leavened by lovely oddities such as “Regime” and “The Plenty,” which employ fresh images and music like “The crumbs from his breakfast / bauble the front of his red velvet vest” (“Regime”) and “We two were streams conspiring the river” (“The Plenty”) to draw the reader into small alternate universes where she is happy to linger. In addition, many of Beaumont’s intriguing opening premises for these poems really do pay off, as in “Keep This Letter on Hand at all Times,” which posits a country where the traveler may bring back “a sheet / of the newest imperial postage stamps, the set / with four designs: deck of cards, top hat, two doves, / and a levitating woman,” and where the traveler is instructed, “. . . whenever you leave a room, / promise to name the cheese when you return. / You’ll never fail!” Such quirky gems are only the flashiest of the rewards this text has to offer. Some of Beaumont’s sparest, simplest pieces are also her most successful, as in “Afraid So” and “Rock Said,” both of which proceed with a quiet gravity and keep their jokes on the wry side.

Curious Conduct asks the reader to make some difficult decisions when it comes to the priorities of a poem. Is a little word-play enough? Are we satisfied with a few faint verbal fireworks, or do we demand a show with a purpose? Beaumont’s is a deft hand at both humor and pathos, and the best of these poems combine wit with substance. Good show.

NEW! Review of Ted Greenwald

The Up and Up by Ted Greenwald. Atelos, $12.95.

Reviewed by Lawrence Giffin

Ted Greenwald, a poet associated with Language writing, has produced nearly thirty books in the past forty years. His newest work, The Up and Up, is number nineteen of a proposed fifty volumes of cross-genre poetry commissioned by the Atelos project and edited by poet Lyn Hejinian and poet/designer Travis Ortiz.

At first glance, The Up and Up seems to walk the line dividing the long poem from the novel. The book is divided into 32 prose poems or chapters of roughly three pages, each poem/chapter divided into short paragraph-like stanzas. Each stanza/paragraph is composed of phrasal fragments of various lengths, consisting of bastardized clichws, decontextualized mottos, puns, paragrams and permutations. The spontaneous, interrupting/interrupted clauses of The Up and Up closely resemble the form of ad copy, randomly bombarding the average person from walls, buildings and billboards, in restrooms and in magazines.

Formally, The Up and Up is a struggle to personalize the public and to publicize the personal. The fragmented non sequitur that makes up the content of the poems reveals itself as an intensely human strategy to consciously create a personal history from impersonal fragments that, on their own, have little meaning. Consider a few stanzas from “Self Phone”:

The perfect place    Keep changing into    Cunt and
prick       Dollar after dollar      Love      Nor money      And meld
Tuesdays    The boat sinks
Well you might ask    That’s what I’ve been      Asking,
asking myself      There’s never enough      Who has       The time
of your life
      It’s that time, again      Moving right along       More left
Where that      Where’d that      Come from?
      I’m coming to      Bear with me      The wolf’s at the door
Crying shh perdition       Hold your horses      Twinge hasp for
sari      Have you heard this one?

The phrases shift between curious bewilderment and formulaic experience. By refusing to distinguish between the value of a sentence fragment and the value of certain common constructions imbedded in everyday English, Greenwald levels the playing field, allowing lines and phrases to shatter and recombine randomly, while allowing the reader to glean a vague narrative through her own interaction with and experience of the text.

What is most remarkable about the book is the range it achieves through seemingly random fragments. One might imagine that prose poetry consisting entirely of disparate fragments would lend itself to a certain unreadabilty, and, to the book’s credit, it does. Greenwald’s work creates a very pleasing ambiguity by delaying semantic finality. Thus, the reader is empowered to join in the struggle to make meaning, becoming personally involved in the poem. One of the more striking examples of a poem that obliges the reader to make her own connections is “Knows What Stop”:

Personal computer      Emerges from a coma      A differ-
ent person      Those are
        A cross between ebb and flow      If anything, something
A sense of bring there      Try describing a good place      Due
to happines      Happen to pass
        A past someone      Feel good time    Line by line      Long
past admission      Prettily wrap pain      But failing for
Pronoun removal
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
        Membrane salutations salutation pen      Tonight’s
request      Only you      And you alone      Without backup
Twelve-step      Or otherwise
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
        Crosshatch hair      Recedes tidally       Laughing hysterical-
ly      Which someone    Too shall pass      Way to go      See and
say

The beauty and pathos of The Up and Up is a lot like the classical beauty and pathos, only it has been modernized, industrialized and capitalized. The old tropes of time and loss from “Dover Beach” recur in “Knows What Stop” as “A cross between ebb and flow      If anything, something” and “Recedes tidally.” The decontextualized phrases evoke a sense of loss and dejection. The way in which the phrases are presented, separated by large spaces, one is able either to read them as aggregating toward a comprehensive meaning, or to read each phrase alone and attempt to infer its usual context. “Tonight’s request” may be a quote from a deejay or an emcee at a wedding reception. “Only you” could be the song played, perhaps as a long distance request. “And you alone” might be the tail end of a conversation that began, “I love you.” Being “Without backup” is the officer’s greatest fear. Alone, the phrase “Or otherwise” seems opaque, yet in the context of “Knows What Stop” this little non sequitur is the equivalent of a lyric moment for which the reader and writer share responsibility. Finally, what could more succinctly express the book’s project to reclaim language from the uses of ad agencies than the phrase “Pronoun removal” where one is so emotionally bound to someone as to be equally as bound to their semantic presence. “Knows What Stops” is the poem that best illustrates the project of The Up and Up, that of revaluating the purity of our relationship to language and to each other through language.

The Up and Up is a testament to the productive element of reading in conjunction with a text that does not dictate an experience from a sovereign perspective so much as present the reader an object with which she can work and play. The Up and Up is essentially what its title suggests: it is straight with the reader, offering what by right it can--language, and a language that is at face value as unassuming as the speech between friends. The more two people know each other, the less obligated they feel to qualify everything they say; their speech becomes free and fragmented, each trusting in the other’s ability to complete the sentence, sometimes to complete it more perfectly.

NEW! Anthony Robinson poem

Anthony Robinson

SALT FLAT AUGUST

The neighbor in her youth is smiling at my Cuisinart and behind the door from which Brazilian music comes comes also queer noise.

The rain fell seminal down the August-flat day. Cardboard here. By “flat” I mean lacking curves but still shapely.

The neighbor’s youthful pluck does nothing to cure her earnest half-smile. She is like a cold-burning day in a year we can’t remember.

Fahrenheit says sixty-six. I try to instill in my students a sense of warped responsibility: make the world your own bad son. Salt accumulates on a flat surface.

Upstairs, lurks, pantheon, Freon. I don’t know where to get Freon. The Freon black market is closed. I wish they wouldn’t move to Chicago, a flat city.

Windswept is a way to describe a leafy street. Asphalt, fresh paint. Skittering. America is far off and curved if you stand enough away from the globe.

The salt left on the rim of the glass is like the sugar on the lips of the broomstick-shaped neighbor. Both invite and repel.

The mouth of a child in slight weather moves but only produces syllables not language. Across the alley apartment dwellers drink. White dog moves like honey.

It’s an escape fantasy invented by the primary players but two of the three think they only dreamt it.

I am speaking inside a box the things I dare not write for fear of banishment or a stranger’s finger on my cheek.

We’ve moved this far into August my favorite month. America is impossibly away.

NEW! Review of Linh Dinh

Blood and Soap by Linh Dinh. Seven Stories Press, $16.

Reviewed by Julie Misso

After reading Linh Dinh’s latest collection of stories, Blood and Soap, one will note that Dinh wavers between instances of abstraction (at times painterly in descriptiveness) and instances of “easiness” (perhaps unsuccessful experimental writing). Throughout the book, Dinh seems to emphasize characters who are in continuous struggles to find concrete representative-ness, only to be faced with the blurred abstractions of new worlds into which they are thrown. There are also instances where Dinh offers characters so uncomplicated that one is often left wondering if the pages from somebody’s diary or journal were simply inserted. Thus, in Blood and Soap one must evaluate Dinh’s capability to find a clear identity and voice through which he may give depth and substance to these characters, and (a second overarching task, alluded to throughout by Dinh himself) find the presence or absence of a “literature,” which one may find hard to classify, especially when dealing with experimental prose such as Dinh’s.

Dinh’s presentation of diverse worlds for his characters is consistent in each of his stories. These worlds, which range from a prison cell in “Prisoner with a Dictionary” to a ghost town on the Red River Delta in “The Town of the Hidden Coffin,” often seem to challenge pieces of the main characters’ core representations and identities. Instances of abstractions allude to a want of something more in each of the characters. These abstractions, though often engulfed in themes of beautiful colorful/painterly representations, at times leave us with only surface descriptions of the characters and their journeys. In the story “!,” protagonist Ho Muoi, a man accused of being a fake English teacher, contemplates the seemingly underlying abstract journey that is consistent with the book as a whole:

A man may fancy he’s making an abstract painting, but there is no such thing as an abstract painting, only abstracted ones. Every horizontal surface is a landscape because it features a horizon (thus implying a journey, escape from the self, and the unreachable). Every vertical surface is either a door or a portrait (thus implying a house, another being, yourself as another being, and the unreachable).

Dinh’s writing itself is abstracted in the sense that each story offers a character which is lost in thought, deeply engrossed, or preoccupied with an objectively simple, yet subjectively complex, aspect of their world. In search of their lost identities, Dinh’s characters attempt to find tangible representation of themselves in the new countries, cultures, or situations in which they are immersed. For example, in “Prisoner with a Dictionary,” the foreign prisoner seems to lose a piece of his core self in his search for a new identity while attempting to understand an English dictionary left in his cell. Dinh shows this loss of self in the prisoner’s contemplations:

But if the prisoner was convinced he was gaining a new language he was also surely losing one because he had, by this time, forgotten nearly all the words of his native language. By this time he could no longer name any part of the anatomy, even the most basic, hand, nose, face, mouth, etc., and so his own body was becoming vague, impersonal, unreal.

As the prisoner is reading this English dictionary and “... purging himself of his native language,” he is attempting to “get rid of his horrible past ...” He assimilates forgetting his native tongue with forgetting bad experiences or humiliation from his past. The culmination of this story is that, “Perhaps he [can] sense that his native tongue [is] the very author of his horrible life. But these are only conjectures, we do not know for sure.” These “conjectures” seem to be an easy way out for Dinh. With such an inventive idea for the character in general, one hopes for deeper travels into the character’s experience. But perhaps Dinh’s prose style of short bursts cannot allow us this depth. Some may enjoy these short blurbs or quick glances into sometimes simple and absurd characters, but one could assert they border on “easy” rather than experimental.

For instance, in “Losers,” Dinh offers quick character sketches ranging from Jack, who is viewed as “promiscuous” when his leather shoe obsession leads him to curling up on his bed with a dozen pairs of shoes, to Jim, who is turned on by envisioning his plastic dinosaur collection strutting around in high heels. The tendency Dinh has toward being “easy” is in his merely glancing against such outlandish habits, rather than exploring them beneath their surfaces.

There also seems something less-than-rigorous about Dinh’s conceit of the “one-sentence story.” In totality, one such piece reads “Resigned, the single woman begins each conversation with a male stranger: ‘We’re only talking because you want to fuck me’.” And that is it--the “whole story.” These read more like creative writing workshop prompts or exercises in that they are presented as a mere idea, leaving any level of development to the reader’s imagination.

Dinh’s lax approach endures even in his last story, “My Grandfather the Exceptional,” in which the protagonist grandfather comes to a final realization after traveling through many villages:

Finally, at his last village, he looked around and was relieved to find out he was no longer exceptional. Because all old men look alike, disgusted and disgusting, he was finally welcomed into the fraternity of those waiting to die.

The aged man at the end of his journey resembles too much a cookie-cut ending for any book. Left with a somewhat cliched epiphany to ponder, perhaps this conclusion also gives too much “closure” for a book that seems to otherwise defy conventions both formal and thematic.

Dinh offers characters, offers stories, but does he offer a literature? Dinh alludes to this idea of creating a literature in the aforementioned “!,” in which Ho Muoi attempts to learn English through a notebook of phonetic notations he has made from the ramblings of an ill American soldier. Ho Muoi reflects, “If one can break apart a clock and reassemble it, one can scramble up phonetic notations and rearrange them in newer combinations, thus ending up with not just a language, but a literature.” This does seem to be an appropriate means to making a literature, but does Dinh meet the very challenge he proposes? One can only abstractly allude to the want of making a literature so much before a reader expects a concrete product of what has been alluded to.

Overall, the “stories” in Blood and Soap are somewhat satisfying in that the majority of the characters seem to be in search of something more in themselves, in others, or in their worlds. The main dilemma for those who read this book is that they may end up feeling a bit like the characters in Dinh’s stories--in search of something more in their reading of them.