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Book Review

Popular Music and The Crown Ain’t Worth Much

by on March 3, 2017

Popular Music by Kelly Schirmann

The Crown Ain’t Worth Much by Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib

Review by Katharine Coldiron

 

 

 

In the middle of writing an ekphrastic novella based on an album I loved, I discovered to my surprise that music and literature don’t cross paths much. Bob Dylan is often viewed as a poet, and Yeats has been set to music by more than one artist, but still, it’s not often that the two media reflect on one another.

However, two small-press books of poetry from 2016 prove exceptions. Popular Musi
c, by Kelly Schirmann (Black Ocean), and The Crown Ain’t Worth Much, by Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib (Button Poetry/Exploding Pinecone) both explicitly call on musical influences to work at their subjects. In Schirmann’s case, the subject is life as a Millennial woman; for Willis-Abdurraqib, it’s life (and death) as a young black man. Both books explore multiple modes of poetry (often veering into prose), and both books boast artistic confidence and maturity well beyond debut-book status.

Schirmann’s poetry sticks largely to narrative and vignettes, but she causes small details to loom large. Most of her poems are no longer than a page, and some are even shorter. The narrative flow gives the reader the sense of sliding in and out of different parts of Schirmann’s mind.

All my friends
are moving to Los Angeles
She’s a fascist, says the Goodwill clerk
& hands me a new book
Wanting to learn a thing or two
is a dangerous position to be in
Girls just wanna have fun
says the loudspeaker
& the people swing
their brightly colored arms

As interesting as her poetry is, the prose is possibly even more effective. Popular Music is divided into six sections, alternating between prose and poetry.  The prose segments each tell a single story almost as a fable, beginning with a memory and ending with a life lesson. That sounds tedious, but in practice it’s stunning. The prose also hits as hard as the poetry, if not harder, because Schirmann brings a poet’s sensibility to both rendering detail and making thematic connections.

Schirmann varies between real-life details and this kind of spare, unadorned analysis. She really shines, though, as her prose lifts into the lyric register toward the end of each prose section. “Music makes space for us, entire continents of space,” she proposes. “It provides us with new languages and images with which to describe it to one another, new emotional esthetics with which to interpret the experience of Living. It even provides us with a person to which we can outsource the interpretation of this experience. Out of this mouth, our feelings flow.”

This is definitely a point of view to which Willis-Abdurraqib would subscribe. His book is not explicitly about music, but musical artists of all kinds are name-dropped throughout it: Jay-Z, Taking Back Sunday, Nick Drake, Kanye, many more. One poem is named “At the House Party Where We Found Out Whitney Houston was Dead”:

We, the war generation.
The only way we know how to bury our dead
is with blood, or sweat, or sex
or anything pouring from wet skin
to signify we were here, and the wooden floor
of a basement belonging to an old house on Neil Avenue
makes as good a burial ground as any
says the small boom box now playing DJ
in the center of this room,
and the Whitney CD inside,
pouring out of the speakers just loudly enough
to let everyone in this room
get a small taste of Whitney alive and young,

Music is not the only thread that ties these poems together. The poetry takes multiple forms: narrative, visual, prose, couplets, and even sideways, the words running vertically from the bottom of the page to the top. However, the book is all of a piece. Partially this unity derives from a series of refrains: dispatches from a barbershop, memories of a shooting, a dead mother’s voice. The book also holds together via its recurring themes: violence, funerals, the urban environment, poetry itself, and, most importantly, blackness.

…And child, when you take skin swollen and damp from the river and the blood, and you throw it in the heat, everything pops. You gotta cover your eyes, baby. Hold them children close. My mama’s mama said that’s how God made the south. Said there was nothing but grass and then, one day, all this wet black skin. Said it popped so loud when they set them down in the blazing stomach of the new world, them plantation fields split clean open and then there was cotton. And then idle hands for the picking, and then war, and after that, we all woke up with our skin covered in hot grease, birds following us everywhere and so at least we was eating good.

Need I say more? Willis-Abdurraqib’s words speak for themselves more powerfully than anything I could say to recommend them. Read this book; live inside this poet’s skin. His is a poetic voice as strong and impactful as Ta-Nehisi Coates’s, a mourning, shouting, singing vox populi.

 

Popular Music is available through Black Ocean Press.

The Crown Ain’t Worth Much is available through Button Poetry.

Book Review

Sing the Song

by on February 8, 2017

Sing the Song, by Meredith Alling

Review by Linda Michel-Cassidy

 

Meredith Alling’s Sing the Song collects twenty-seven strange and muscular flash fictions. My second take on these stories was how well they are crafted, and how well they work, given their brevity. At the sentence level, there is not a single superfluous word. My first take on these stories, the read-for-pleasure, no note taking first impression, landed on the first sentence of each story. Most, if not all, are so very confident, brazen, even, that they are almost stories in and of themselves.  A few to consider:

“Some babies drink soda the second they are born.” (“Other Babies”)
“I was the only blonde at a redhead party.” (“Redhead Party”)
“Once a year the Ancient Ham crawls out of the sewer to sit on a curb and answer questions.” (“Ancient Ham”)
“The exam room is a mess and I feel right at home.” (“Treatment”)
“Catherine on a wormless morning, praying to God.” (“Hellsure”)

How could one not read on?

The pieces are unified not by any of the usual methods: overlapping characters, or place or even topic, but by approach. The language used in the telling is one tick away from the expected. Instead of going weird, the author veers askew, and manages all this with brevity and understatement. Each piece exhibits control and a preference for lean sentences. When there’s dialog, it’s truncated. This sort of tamped-down language is the perfect base for the oddities that follow. The stories teeter gently in different directions: the absurd, the fantastical, the sad. Then, there comes the sucker-punch.

“Small Man” opens, “A small man walked out from behind my uncle’s television once. He just walked out my uncle says, and then walked down the hall. No big deal.” Alling writes of curious and unlikely things situated in a world we think we know. The narrators talk the way we talk, and find their lives as confounding as we do ours.

“Small Man,” continues, “Sometimes when I tell the story about my uncle, people think it’s funny, but it’s not. It’s serious. Hello. My uncle was sitting right there in his brown corderoy recliner with a plate of potatoes.” The man has a regular house, regular wife, regular dinner. No hysterics. It’s just a thing that happened. Many of the stories are like this one—not a huge identifiable arc, but rather an offering. Here’s a thing that could happen to some random dude who only wants to chomp on his dinner already. Then when the wife comes home, of course she’s not so sure, but she goes along. What we’re left with is the sense of their relationship that you do what you do for love, and that feeling is so simple and honest, that it backs up the whole story.

There are no tricky verbal gymnastics here; it’s all very low-key, often colloquial, but I’m convinced that this is all part of Alling’s strategy. Instead of using overwrought or poetic language, she writes in brisk unfettered sentences, clipped and to the point. It’s just a little to the side, which allows the action of the stories to bloom.

In “Ancient Ham,” the most absurdist tale of the lot, a wise ham answers the questions of the populace. This is only after they gift him with sewing needles and a little poke.

Most questions are about health, wealth, or love. They must be yes or no questions. The Ancient Ham answers by bobbing left or right. Left is no, right is yes. When the ham answers, people scream. … The air around the Ancient Ham swells with sweet breath. This makes the Ancient ham teeter with delight. Get it real delighted, it will vibrate. The women clutch their hips, men flex their thighs.

Like “Small Man,” its point isn’t the fantastical things that happen, so much as the endpoint, here a revealing moment between a mother and daughter. “The girl looks up, lips glistening. ‘Aren’t you beautiful,’ the mother says. The Ancient Ham bobs right, right, right.” Both stories start with the absurd, spin outward, then land squarely on a moment of connection. This trajectory, from whimsy to the final emotional note, managed in only a few pages, is is evidence of the control with which Alling writes.

In “Sample Sale,” the passive, crabby, sleepless narrator is first in line to buy a designer bag. Alling takes what feels like a real-world, albeit hideous, situation, a queue at a warehouse sale, then drops in an out-of–place character and allows things to escalate. Aggression and jealousy reign, and soon enough, there’s a brawl. The narrator ends up on the ground, confessing to these rabid strangers that she cannot sleep, that she is afraid of burglars. But then the warehouse opens, and they’re off. “’You’d better move,’ said the woman fanning herself. She was gently kicking my waist with her loafer. ‘You don’t look like you’re going to make it.’” The misguided energy, the distracted half-compassion of the other ladies feels very realistic. As with a number of the other stories, people are in the same physical space bumping along with their own agendas.

Alling writes convincingly of characters who have no idea of themselves. Many want to connect, but don’t have the tools, as in “Whistle Baby,” where the narrator cannot, will not agree with the parents of a baby that their child is a living, breathing miracle simply because the baby sort-of whistle-spits. The beauty of this story is that everyone is right and everyone is wrong. Alling nails the cool smugness of the parents, as seen in the letter the wife sends to the unimpressed narrator:

Sam,

We’ve tried to be good neighbors. Clover is a good baby, and a special baby we see now (and as suspected). A lot of people are interested and some TV shows too, but not you? Maybe we misunderstand, If you want to visit, please do.

Sam tries, really tries, but is only left to wonder, “I feel hot and tired and confused and alone and wonder if this is better, right now.” This last line is such a heartbreak, because we try so hard at times, but really have no way to judge if we’re humaning properly.

Flash fiction, when done right, as it is here, carries a wallop like no other. None of these stories felt like another, and yet the group feels cohesive. I suspect this is because while they start out with a shot, they all twist about, and each find their own emotional note, leaving the reader spent.

 

Sing the Song is available now through Future Tense Books.

 

Linda Michel-Cassidy is a writer and installation artist living on a houseboat in northern California. Prior to that, she spent a decade in voluntary exile in the high desert of New Mexico. Her writing can be found in Jabberwock, Harpur Palate, The Rumpus, Electric Literature, and others. She works for the literary reading series Why There Are Words and teaches experimental prose.

Book Review

The Braid

by on January 18, 2017

9781928650393The Braid, by Lauren Levin

Review by Raul Ruiz

 

You don’t know me, so what’s my opinion worth to you? What could I possibly do to qualify my belief that this new book, The Braid by Lauren Levin, is a spectacular, awe-inspiring project that will become an important book in the genre of the long poem? I am now going to stand on my head for an hour just to prove it to you. Faith, after all, is half the work of living.

It has been some time since I’ve encountered a book of poetry with such scope. Levin’s ability to form room enough for her poems to expand and meander while sustaining an incredibly singular tenor makes me want to touch the green sky. And though the book is enormous in content and in its aim to complicate structure (in other words, to claim it completely), I want to focus on the two aspects that I think are Levin’s greatest art: her attention to the liminal, and the necessities of motherhood writ large.

First, can I show you a tiny handful of this book’s light? From the first poem, “The Braid,”

Between myself and where everyone is
Under Mirabeau Bridge the river slips away between where my body stops and the world begins
It doesn’t have to be chronological, though she was born

If that’s the space, the braid weaves around a space impossible to fill
In that emptiness I watch time drift in her, accumulate, while elsewhere it doesn’t build up, it drifts and is sold

The first aspect I want to focus on is The Braid‘s function as a book about accumulation and refraction as a means to generate liminal regions. Levin is a master at creating spaces where opposite energies meet to form crowded empty forms, a perfect formal technique to denote the contemporary solitude among the frequencies of endless information abutting our lives. Here, Apollinaire’s poem “Mirabeau Bridge” (which begins, “Under Mirabeau Bridge the river slips away…”) crowds the space and time that a birth establishes to create an emptiness where time grows, where “a space impossible to fill” is born. This attention to liminality as foundational to loneliness sprouts blossoms of meaning throughout, so much so that I have often kissed the pages of this book, often in public, with eyes all starry.

The second aspect deals with what parenting actually necessitates. I am not a father, but I am not completely ill-equipped to discuss this, I don’t think, having been a first-row witness to the work of my own parents (is this going to get mushy? you must be asking yourself). Here, can I just go ahead and show you another bit from the book? This one from the poem titled, “I Want Our Minds to Be the Same,”

I keep reading Pasolini’s poem “Rage”
It’s about exiting a rose-shaped sphere of safety
and becoming public property
And because safety is intolerable but so is being property
because whether you are known or unknown is intolerable
the poem speaks truly to say that this condition is the author of rage

I dreamed that I asked my mom if she was annoyed with me
She said yes and that bugged me

Holy oxytocin! I want to focus our attention on Levin’s use of the word “property.” It is no accident, I think, that she uses the word in relation to Pasolini’s work. For what Levin is talking about when she talks about property isn’t a chip in the large schema of commerce and ownership (though these concepts are indeed enormous tectonic plates that push against the form), but more the age-old concept of each of us belonging to each. In exploring the work of motherhood, Levin inhabits a mode of writing that asks the reader to think about their own relationship to selflessness and selfishness, to how we make ourselves the “property” of others, of how we serve all others stuck in the puke of this our current world. Because just as the daughter in the poems, Alejandra, at some point says, “I want to grow a tree and chop it down,” so are all of us the agents of tremendous violence. And yet, we are loved nonetheless. There are endless fields that require tending to. The enormity of these poems makes room enough for us all to find our form of courage.

 

The Braid is available now through Krupskaya.

 

Raul Ruiz earned an MFA from San Francisco State University and has worked with writers at San Quentin State Prison. He is currently at work on his first book of poems.

Book Review

Storm Toward Morning

by on December 6, 2016

41bgmqbdr1lStorm Toward Morning, by Malachi Black

Review by Alana Folsom

 

There are some poetry books that ask to be read for their emotional impact—for the pure punch to the gut that their lines deliver—and then there are books that more subtly creep into your bloodstream. These books aren’t loud, but they remain beautiful and heavy in the part of your stomach that always feels a little hollow. Malachi Black’s debut book Storm Toward Morning is the latter: a subtle and delicate sneak. Most of this comes, for me, in my awe over Black’s use of form, syntax, and sound. As I read, I trust that the poet behind each word, who lay every comma like a brick, is doing so intentionally. The fact that Black has an explanatory companion to Storm Toward Morning online only affirms what his poems simmer with: control.

And I know that there’s a criticism of poetry often bandied about: that poets are writing for other poets. But Storm Toward Morning is the who gives a fuck? reply to that question. Black’s awareness of craft sparkles in its precision and, sometimes, humor (like “Ode to the Sun,” which opens with “You repeat yourself like no one/ I know…”).

I don’t want to lie, though: I struggle at times in this collection to grasp onto something beyond craft, and spent the week after I’d first read the book wondering if craft was enough. After re-reading this collection, though, I think that it is: that the skill embroidered into every poem is what makes each poem beautiful. Can I call a poem a Faberge egg and not be a douche?

In a text exchange with a friend, I called STM “intellectual” and when she asked if I meant “show offy,” I knew the word intellectual was wrong: these poems hum with confidence, seem to emit an I-know-what-I’m-doing bing at the end of each line. They’re not showing off, their just skillful. The moments that Black seems to be saying directly to other poets do you see what we can do? are the strongest. “Insomnia & So On,” for example, begins with the lines “Fat bed, lick the black cat in my mouth/ each morning. Unfasten all the bones//that make a head, and let me rest: unknown/ among the oboe-throated geese gone south” (7)—I could keep quoting, but the prosody’s muscularity is evident in these opening lines. The smoothness of the end-rhyme is the least impressive part of these couplets; more expert is the movement of meter, which begins with stress after stress to communicate the quite literal stress of the unsleeping speaker and then transitions into a lulling iambic pentameter. Within the meter, though, each word holds a sonic resonance that complements the beat, but also operates singularly: the long “o” sounds pull you forward through the entire poem and that construct a network of images (animals, weather, domestic life).

Storm Toward Morning tackles insomnia, depression, subjectivity, and faith. Underneath all this headiness and potential grand philosophy, though, is a simple and pressing question that the book circles: what is living? Interestingly, STM erases all notions of an individual speaker through repetition and divergent self- and poetic-definition, so the question is never rooted in the personal, a move that seems invigorating and new because of its anti-confessional bent. In “Traveling by Train,” for example, the poem ends with “…you’re lost/ between the meter and the desperate rhyme/ of clacking tracks. Home is nothing here./ You’re gone and in the going; can’t come back” (6). This “you” here seems to be the reader, lost to what the speaker knows (and there’s humor here, too: a glimpse into self-deprecation and diminishment) is a “desperate” rhyme, yet the reader remains “in the going”. The syntax in the poem’s final line seems to capitulate rather than declare: “can’t come back” is its own clause and doesn’t speak directly to “you’re gone”—in other words, the syntax is playing with our expectations, is calling for our attention  over the loud train sounds. The poem is aware of itself and yet it able to remain within the poem, like an actor believably addressing and then ignoring the fourth wall.

Interesting, too, the book is filled with poems that actively define both “I”s and “you”s—“I am the black strokes on the baby grant” (5), “I am an element” (25), “I am the harvest” (47) as well as “…you were the bottom of a birthday hat” (8), “you are the gulf/ between the hoped-for/ and the happening” (36), just to cite a few. These definitions, which often come in odes or in addresses to God, serve the effect of multiplying the speaker and the reader, who is sometimes the “you” as in “Travelling by Train,” but is often not. This isn’t a book about ego, about the self as individual, and perhaps that is why it doesn’t ever read as “show-offy”—because there’s no one thing/ person that these poems point to. Instead, these poems point to poetry itself: they are sonnets, they are odes, they are, most of all, asking to be read and read again so you can sink into the layers of craft that blanket each line.

 

Storm Toward Morning is available now through Copper Canyon Press.

 

Alana Folsom recently graduated with an MFA in poetry from Oregon State University, where she was Editor-in-Chief of their literary magazine, 45th Parallel. Her poetry has been published in The Journal, Hobart, and Apogee, and is forthcoming in Columbia Poetry Review; her critical writing has been published in The Iowa Review and the Rumpus. Follow her at @axfolsom.

Book Review

The Walled Wife

by on October 11, 2016

s-l1000The Walled Wife, by Nicelle Davis

Review by CLS Ferguson

Magic by division

of threes.

emp / ti / ness—

worth / less / ness—

rooms must be

filled with

sac / ri / fice—

Nicelle Davis’s brilliant collection is equal parts poetry collection and performed historicity, centered around the myth of the walled wife. Academics and lay readers can relate to Davis’ portrayal of the wife through her writing—she is no woman and therefore every woman.  The poetry works upon and against the historical accounts of the myth included as epigraphs included in the section entitled “case studies.” Davis answers Performance Studies scholar Della Polluck’s charge in her book, Exceptional Spaces, to make history go, rather than go away.

“We are shaped by story,” writes Lauren K. Alleyne in her introduction to The Walled Wife. She explains the plot from which Davis pulls her collection: “The master builder, Rada is building a citadel, Skadar [and] it’s believed that a woman must be buried within the walls of edifices in order for the buildings to stand.” The woman must be sacrificed, and writes Alleyne, “by inhabiting the perspective of the wife, Davis is able to also explore/explode the action.”

Nicelle’s word play and use of footnoting lays a foundation for the reader’s journey from the beginning. Her first poem, starting the first section: Wall One—Case Studies, which I included as an epigraph, is entitled As a Story Goes: Structurally. The base of the narrative begins and is always coming back to the body, the building, the body in the building. The paradox of the body that will no longer breathe as a means for the building to survive is also encapsulated in the play between a religion that may shun exactly what it is practicing and building upon: superstition. The wife is relied upon to make the building strong.

Further entrenching the patriarchy in the practice of walling the wife is the theme of man seeing himself as savior. In her piece, In Some Versions, the Husband Sends a Bird to Save His Wife, the husband becomes a bird, wanting to save his wife, but the river and winds keep him away. She wants him to save her, but he doesn’t, saying merely to have faith.

Have faith, he tells her. But

it is difficult, she cries. He assures her it wouldn’t be faith3

if it were easy.

Even the husband king does not have the strength to save his wife, but requires that she endure.

It is not only the husband that the walled wife has a relationship with. She also communicates with Rada, the builder. When reading the first section, it is helpful to the reader to reference the footnotes contained in the second section, Wall Two—Foot Notes. The walled wife buries the deepest and most appealing, truthful, insightful emotion in her footnotes or subtext. For example, door.6 I give that. The little 6 wedged between is the vaginal cavity, the opening to the womb. The builder giving her “that” is actually his permission for all who enter and exit the church to pass through her most inner and sacred entrance.

In the first section, Flesh Price demonstrates the loss of connection between the walled wife and her son, ending with a shore is all I know how to cling to. 9 The footnotes allows the reader to see the poems as skeletons so that s/he can interpret and allow the wife to fade a bit into the wall. The footnotes allow no such escape, as demonstrated by #9: In me is a little girl I’ve locked away. When she tries to escape I slap her until palms bleed, that is to say I sing myself to sleep when her tears surface on my face.

Dripping with Liquid Flesh: Parts of an Egg furthers the analogy of the female reproductive system. The analogy of the egg is quite literally analogous to the female reproductive system, but beyond that, there is a depth of betrayal that gives further insight into the anguish of the wife. She mourns the loss of a child she did in fact birth and mother as well as a daughter who never was—who may be the child she yet wishes to conceive or perhaps the child is the wife herself.

The third section, Girl Inside, is an exploration of the author finding herself through the walled wife, this is especially apparent in My Little Box Head Responds/Objects to Found Poetry and the Rewriting of “The Ballad of the Walled-Up Wife”: What I found in “The Wife” is this: I thought I would dig her up, but I only discovered my desire to be brought down, to be bound. In Experiments in Being Buried, the author tries on different walls, until she ends up masterbating in someone else’s bed, as if to demonstrate the equal feelings of pleasure and awkwardness that come with being buried alive.

She continues in this section from awkwardness to pain with Vila: Sacrifice, in which the author names pieces of the body given as a sacrifice in the wall. Ravens Fly in Threes serves as a reminder of being alive and free. The emotion of letting love go manifests as a physical splitting as the author attempts to set herself free, though maybe never successfully.

The fourth section, Wall Three—Retelling: A Countdown serves as the acceptance the author attempts to find of becoming The Walled Wife. In Third Hour of Being Buried Alive, the Wife Thinks of her Last Day in Church: Or Sharp Edges Hidden in the Seamstress, Davis plays with the concept of distancing the elocutionary sacred from the elocutionary profane, as set forth by Paul Edwards in his 1999 Theatre Annual article, Unstoried, by placing them within the same woman as she resists the wall around her. At the End: Day One furthers this by removing all possible romanticizing of the wall (I piss myself . . . I shit myself). The author indicts her readers in First Night in the Wall, the Wife Begins to Haunt Herself, making us all question whether we are always already haunting ourselves:

I claw at the bricks—can hardly keep a fainting swell from drowning me. Mama, she says, mama. And the song stops with mama. Now that she isn’t swallowing all air—I scream the church is falling, and her feet echo like a mischief of rats in my cellar.

The wife hears a daughter she doesn’t have, in the church she has become, screaming out as the only way to save it—though it has consumed and perhaps killed her. In Rada Hears the Wife Crying, the wife, perhaps the author weeps, mourns the loss of her life and her freedom, though when her perpetrator asks what is wrong, she denies her own grief. The reality of her husband betraying her and the stages of grief she experiences from being buried alive become a part of the wife in this section. After the irreparable harm that her perpetrators have cause her, they attempt to smooth things over with the wife in this section of the collection, as if to make amends, but there is never an offer of reparations. In the last poem of this section, Rada Goes to the First Day of Congregation, the man who caused her this pain and loss and the wife herself experience an acceptance of all that has happened after struggling with God. This is a home for a love greater than our individual bodies can hold.

The fifth section contains only one poem, The only words worth reading are written in the margins, suggesting perhaps all of our worthiness is at least slightly off center.

Overall, The Walled Wife commands the reader to acknowledge this woman who has been essentially erased by men, by patriarchy, buried in the walls of a church. The writing is impeccably crafted, each word selected and masterfully placed to take us on the journey of the wife’s betrayal, suffering, rebellion, grief, and acceptance. While most of us do not literally end of physically trapped in a wall, the process Nicelle Davis leads us through in her writing, through the metaphor of the walled wife, leaves us all with a bit better understanding and acceptance of our own demons and walls.

 

The Walled Wife is available now through Red Hen Press.

CLS Ferguson, PhD speaks, signs, acts, publishes, sings, performs, writes, paints, teaches and rarely relaxes.  She and her husband, Rich are raising their daughter and their Bernese Mountain Border Collie Mutt in Alhambra, CA. http://clsferguson.wix.com/clsferguson

Book Review

Blind Spot

by on October 4, 2016

blind-spot-cover2-cr-e1477633102497Blind Spot, by Harold Abramowitz

Review by Gretchelle Quiambao

 

There are novels that challenge your notions of conventional writing and there are novels that make you reflect on your own memories of past regrets and disappointments. Harold Abramowitz’s Blind Spot does both, all the while deliberately using language to create dynamic storytelling that leaves the reader eager to find out more about each character. Divided into three parts, the novel tells the stories of trauma and does so in a way that leaves readers anticipating more.

Abramowitz’s novel inspired me to look outside of what is to be expected and saw that syntax can be played with to creatively tell a narrative. Through repetition more is revealed about our characters’ thoughts and insights. The repetition also helps to develop a visual of the scenes in Abramowitz’s narrative, “The hotel was set in the mountains, set high in the mountains. The hotel was well known as a place to go for cures for one’s ills. The hotel was set atop a great mountain range, and he turned his head.” The Part I- Hotel was my favorite of the three narratives in the book because, to me, it was the most interesting and mysterious. Through a series of intersecting dreams and memories I was able to piece together the story of a character but still had room to interpret the narrative in my own way and be guided to create an ending for the character that still remains unknown.

Throughout the novel, I was constantly trying to decipher whether or not the narrator was reliving dreams or memories in the story. Figuring out what was truth was part of the mystery of the novel.  As the narrator continued, more and more was revealed about the character’s true self, “He felt despair, real despair, and that, in and of itself, was something new, was enough to make him cry.” This novel was a display of life’s traumas and a reminder that dreams are often formed from our own desire to relive memories no matter how painful they may be. The stories made me self-reflect and forced me to confront the feeling of loss but at the same time feel consoled.

Through repetition and looping, I was able to get more insight into the state of the characters and build a relationship with the story. Although he is a truly detailed storyteller, Abramowitz also keeps enough information vague to have the reader relate to the narrative. This open ended storytelling allowed me to interpret the narrative for myself.  Whatever might not have been resolved in his narration was for left me to complete.

The most interesting and exciting aspect of Abramowitz’s writing is his ability to use syntax in a creative way that does not distract from the narrative. I found his style poetic, stirring, and challenging. Through a series of syntactic looping and duplication we learn more about our characters’ reflections on the traumas that they have endured. This helped me to become more engrossed into the novel and kept me wanting to learn more. I wanted each repeated line to divulge more about their experiences and thoughts so that I could weave together the narrator’s story. For me, this novel truly highlights the use of language and syntax. Language structures becomes the star of this novel as you continue to read through and find that his syntactic loops become more apparent. The way Abramowitz uses language in his storytelling is one that few can emulate successfully.

I found Blind Spot to be a comforting and interesting novel about trauma that also displays how language can be fluid. The novel’s structure plays just as much of a role in the storytelling as the actual stories themselves. With each reveal of the narrator’s most in-depth thoughts, more connections and questions were resolved within the story. I found the novel to be not just an example of premier storytelling but a great display of how to play with language structures to entice your reader into your story. I felt myself jealous at Abramowitz’s ability to manipulate syntax to his advantage. He was able to create a compelling narrative by using unconventional structures in an effortless way.

This novel shows how poetry and narrative can come together in harmony. Abramowitz’s structure mimics the way in which we relive our own traumas, dreams, and memories. The repetition reminds us that there is comfort in thinking of the past and little resolve in trying to make sense of it all. In the most positive way, he reminds his readers about the traumas of everyday life and encourages them to embrace their own memories of loss and pain.

 

Blind Spot is now available through Civil Coping Mechanisms.

Gretchelle Quiambao is a writer and linguist based in Los Angeles.

 

Book Review

A Bestiary

by on July 13, 2016

9780996316743A Bestiary by Lily Hoang

Review by Katharine Coldiron

“A pack of dogs. A swarm of insects. A mischief of rats. / You desire the human equivalent.” So reads one of many fragments in Lily Hoang’s extraordinary new book, A Bestiary, released in April by Cleveland State University Poetry Center. The book won the press’s 2015 essay collection competition, and the confusion inherent in a poetry press’s holding an essay collection contest seems appropriate when considering A Bestiary, which straddles genre lines defiantly, proudly. The book is brief, only 150 pages, and its contents are also brief; its essays are composed sometimes of single sentences punctuated by section breaks. But every word is a shout. Every phrase echoes against multiple surfaces of meaning.

A Bestiary is nominally a memoir in fragments, but it is also an exploration of the power of fragmentation itself. Some of the essays utilize a braiding technique, switching from personal experience to fact to folktale and then wrapping those elements around each other in a swirl of shared meaning. But the threads are so narrow that the result more closely resembles a coat of many colors than a braid. It’s all of a piece, and enough to cover, usefully, rather than to hang motionless down one’s back.

Hoang clothes her personal tragedies in gorgeous language, and often in a blackly comic tone. “Every time we talk, Megan says something about how great my life is. / / As I flail.” She flails through death, illness, racism (and cultural invisibility), domestic violence, and the addictions of loved ones. Throughout, she maintains a clear, impatient intelligence, both inside her memories and in the precise endeavor of recording those memories. The bestiary, occupied mainly by rats but also inhabited by the animals of the Chinese zodiac and quite a few animals of the human variety, is organized according to a secret choreography of Hoang’s own. “I unstitch the real and out tumbles magic.” I closed the book with the sense that I’d read something much longer, much larger, than this slim, unassuming volume.

Like The Argonauts (as unclassifiable, and as finely wrought), A Bestiary seems to float in space, alone with itself, rather than finding a secure pigeonhole in the reader’s mental catalogue. I don’t mean there’s no reference to other work – indeed, the book is rife with allusions to fairy tales, contemporary culture, and commanding voices from prior centuries (Blake, Montaigne, Cicero). And there’s something of Lydia Davis in Hoang’s deft employment of fragmentation, though she feels more giving, less stark, than Davis. But A Bestiary uses almost nothing from the standard personal essay playbook, nor can Hoang be slotted in next to it’s-a-hard-knock-life memoirists such as Mary Karr. She builds on David Markson, quotes David Foster Wallace, and occasionally recalls David Shields, yet she is not clearly walking the path of any of these men. She is speaking her own language, one that’s prickly and splendid and hard to box into a single genre. Hoang creates her own zoo for words and memories, and all the reader can do is walk around in awe.

A Bestiary is available now through Cleveland State University Poetry Center and through Small Press Distribution.

Katharine Coldiron lives in California and blogs at The Fictator.

Book Review

The Pulse Between Dimensions and the Desert

by on March 31, 2016

book coverThe Pulse Between Dimensions and the Desert by Rios De La Luz

review by Sara Khayat

The Pulse Between Dimensions and the Desert (102 pages) , Rios de la Luz’s debut collection of stories, is a vivid and honest book. Each story is rich with culture in the interspersing of Spanish in the dialogue, the narratives, and even the foods. The cadence of the narratives is quick and unforgettable. The book jumps from incredible surreal stories to hard-hitting goose-bump inducing truths. The narratives don’t limit themselves to one point of view. First, third, and second person narratives are all given the chance to seduce the reader into a world where time machines are built, “you meet your soul mate in a planetarium on mars,” and the “viejita who lives on the corner en la casa azul” tells the future.

Although I enjoyed each of the stories, I gravitated more toward the small (flash fiction) stories. The economy of language in each piece is refreshing, honest, and stimulating with lines like “I want to talk about my brown skin,” and “My curls are geometric half-moons with a hint of coconut.”

The story order and the level of detachment between each narrative are of particular interest. This book is structured in a way where each story can be read on its own, yet even with my A.D.D. mind, I still found myself reading the entire book cover to cover; I put the pieces together to see how the characters were related. There was enough of a balance and disassociation between narratives to make me still doubt their interconnectivity.

The narrators range from young children to grown adults. There isn’t one precise age group being developed. There is innocence in each narrative, as well as a corruption of innocence that lingers behind each story. There are grudges, there is anger, there is love.

Each female protagonist, young or mature, is extremely badass. From narrators that slice open their own hand to preserve a lie to knife-wielding investigations, each turn of the page presents a character that emits protective and curious personalities. The narrators and characters of these stories are ruthless, raw, and intrepid. It’s a bit odd how cold and mature the children are, as if the children know more than even the adults in the stories understand.

The topics covered in these stories that are refreshing to read. From the “pads like diapers [that] stuck to the bridge of my panties because I was petrified of tampons getting stuck inside,” to the “bush” that “overcame the tightness of my skirt and created a puffy cloud over my pubic mound,” taboo female topics that are almost always talked around are being forced into the light.

The most important subjects this book fearlessly tackles are queer discrimination, sexual abuse, physical abuse, as well as microaggressions. These four ideas are laid out in a painful manner for the reader to either identify with or acknowledge as existing.

Microaggressions are well illustrated in this book, from the tiring question “Where are you from?… No, where are you really from?” to comments by other characters about skin color, the sounds of native languages, and sexual abuse related to race.

Identity weaves its way through each narrative. In one story, the narrator states, “under the influence of mescaline you, looked into a mirror and saw accuracy in the depiction of your being.” And in the story “Rosario,” another mirror scene takes place: “at the age of fifteen, I used to look at myself in the mirror in strangely padded bras. I pretended that my skin was lighter. My hair was lighter. My eyes were lighter.” This commentary on identity is heartbreaking, and depicted in such a striking, open fashion.

Rios de la Luz has created enchanting worlds in such a small amount of space. After the end of this book, I wanted more. I was addicted to the language, the bravery, the depth of the characters as well as the worlds I emerged into. If you want to become immersed in culture, strong characters, and poetic language, then by all means, occupy your hands with this book.

 

The Pulse Between Dimensions and the Desert by Rios de la Luz was published by Ladybox Books, an imprint of Broken River Books. Ladybox Books “is […] a small press with an emphasis on featuring the work of badass authors who identify as women.” They have published four print books and frequently publish new works of art, poetry, and fiction on their Ellx blog.

 

 

Sara Khayat was born and raised in Los Angeles, California. She is editor-in-chief of Paper Plane Pilot Publishing (thepaperplanepilots.com). She graduated from California State University, Northridge with a BA in English/Creative Writing and a minor in Psychology. Her mind is full of wildflowers, ladybugs and grey matters. Give her a shout and she’ll give you a whisper.

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