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Book Review

Book Review

The Language of Fractions

by on October 18, 2023

Poetry Collection by Nicelle Davis
Review by John Venegas

“Deconstruction” is a word that gets thrown around a lot, both inside and outside academic settings. At the risk of being reductive, it is the practice of taking something apart conceptually. This can be done with anything and its purpose is to understand how that anything functions. Breaking something down into its constituent parts, seeing how those parts fit together and/or function on their own, can be an enlightening and rewarding experience. There is argument to be made that such a process is how we learn in the first place. Unfortunately, the term and the process are all too often co-opted by disingenuous pseudo-intellectuals who try to reframe the concept as an intentionally constructed threat to “traditional values”, or use it to legitimize conspiratorial bigotry. But even setting aside that kind of cruel misuse, I think those of us with “good intentions” have a very consistent habit of missing the forest for the trees. Deconstruction is not done in a vacuum, and those who do it are neither dispassionate nor objective. We cannot observe or describe without affecting, and being affected. I think Nicelle Davis understands this on a fundamental, intimate level. In fact, I think The Language of Fractions is one of the purest examples and examinations of deconstruction that I have read. It is a collection of poetry that speaks to the necessity of the practice while also exposing the cost of such an endeavor, if you pursue it to any depth of significance.

He realized most makeup is designed to look like blood and bruises.

To get it out of the way, allow me to state my general thoughts on this collection in a single sentence: Davis uses an intoxicating combination of sublime intimacy and Cronenberg-ian body horror to rebuild the Tower of Babel as a beacon of community and a direct, open challenge to any power that would deny our inherent divinity.

What became of the heel? / What becomes of the toes? / What do you see in the red / Rorschach test of severed women’s parts?

It is no great observation to state that intimacy requires vulnerability, or that vulnerability can be frightening. But there is more beneath that surface, and Davis is not content to see us wet only our toes. Her poetry here forces us to acknowledge that to be deconstructed is to be taken apart, to have your pieces examined by eyes that you can only hope do not mean you harm. Many, many people have the lived experience of being taken apart (conceptually or physically) by the cruel and the unjust, who often have “altruistic” justifications. Those experiences, of being valued only for your cuts of meat or your bone structure or your fatty tissue or your capacity to breed more livestock, can sear themselves into the mind, onto the soul, assuming they don’t kill you outright. Their lingering legacy is forced disassociation, an effort to torture dissonant mental voices into screaming over your natural one and leave you confused and in a state of self-loathing.

You too can be a house, just make a list of who lives inside you – you haunted house – you open door – you a slowly closing uterus, you casket.

This is why I think Davis speaks to the clavicle and the humerus and the navel and all sorts of other body parts. She is trying to work backward, piece together a shared history and ancestral language. She can see the outline of the identity that was and, while she knows it can never be reconstructed as it had been, the potential for something new and greater awaits. This is a beautiful purpose, to be sure, but it is also the source of the horrifying constructs along the way. Understanding and repurposing require experimentation, require putting things together in ways that were not originally intended, no matter how much it might upset a tradition-laden mind. Moreover, there is no small amount of frustration, as pieces who have long since had individualism forced on them must come together, communicate, and co-exist.

Where do thousands of people go when real / estate agents put on a pub crawl?

Maybe the most telling aspect of the poetry is the consistent underlying tone. There is no shortage of grief, of fear, of regret, but through and beneath it all there is an essence of fascination. There is a relentless need to understand, a joy in the power of unorthodox creation, and a determination to connect with others through shared experience. Each section of the text is framed by a “Belly Poem”, literal navel gazing as if the speaker is repeatedly reaching into some kind of genetic memory to experience umbilical attachment. Is there anything more intimate than the sharing of blood? Than the blurring of the lines between what distinguishes two organisms from one another? Davis is a mad scientist, a mother, and trying to become her own beautiful emergent monster. She writes and rewrites rules and maps, creates games and writes to children to harness naiveté’s objectivity, and build collages out of images, advertisements, and pictures. There is an impulse, as a reader, to beg her to stop, to slow down, to dismiss her words and actions as feverish. But those are the efforts of a complacent mind trying to shield itself from realizing that it can begin to see what she sees.

If this was tarot, we would call it / divination, / but since it’s just a game, we call it the News. Think about how / the dinosaurs died – now make a wish upon a shooting –

And what she sees, among many things, is the inversion; the scar-pattern from how our perspectives were abused into something that someone else approved of. Seeing the rest of the world in horror is the first step, necessary to lance the infectious deception, but never the end goal. The goal is to have the capacity to see beauty for ourselves, in ourselves, and in each other. To this end, the poetry is serenely beautiful, elegantly crafted, and effortlessly witty. It is as if the dissonant and natural voices have stumbled upon a mutual train of thought and are beginning to realize how wondrous it can be when they sing together. To be clear, that beauty is thoroughly painted with loss, in memory of and gratitude for those who came before, and in regret for those who will not see. But without those colors, would the beauty even be real? The power of this collection lies in its visceral biological colors, in its appreciation of what was and what could be, and in a brilliant gaze that has forgotten how to flinch.

The Language of Fractions is available through Moon Tide Press.

Book Review

Some Girls Walk Into The Country They Are From

by on April 14, 2022

Collection by Sawako Nakayasu
Review by John Venegas

There are times where it feels strange that we consider “raising more questions than it answers” as a mark against something. Granted, that phrase is often meant to convey a lack of closure or satisfaction or evidence, but it is the phrasing that bothers me. Are we not supposed to ask questions? Are we not supposed to seek questions? Can’t a lack of questions come dangerously close to willful ignorance? I am aware that I am probably overcomplicating the idea (perish the thought), but I have been reading Some Girls Walk Into The Country They Are From, by Sawako Nakayasu, and I find myself awash in questions, immersed in questions, and I could not be happier as a result. This is the kind of poetry collection that engages on every level and radically reorganizes one’s thought processes. It is a book that I can only recommend to those who are interested in having their presumptions and perspectives interrogated, not by anything as unsubtle as direct question from the text, but by the readers themselves as they immerse in the text.

As good and conscientious visitors they dutifully abide by the laws of the new land. It would only be polite.

I admit with no shame that I still don’t entirely “get” this book. I am a straight, cis male who has lived in the same country his entire life, and this collection primarily engages with displacement and motion within themes of gender, sexuality, political and generational borders, and much more. On a very basic level, this collection contains lines and entire poems written in several different languages, some of which I cannot read and some which I am only partially familiar. But I suspect that is largely the point. First and foremost, as I have said before, literature in translation is an unmatched vehicle for bridging perspectives. Furthermore, the way the poems weave in and out of different languages and styles and identities beautifully reinforces the overarching themes. Even if you could read every character, the text does not permit you complacency. It will not allow you to pin it down beneath a few convenient categories. And it will cause you to look at everything else you have neatly collated and now take for granted and see your handiwork for what it is – insufficient.

She can hold her own in a hot dog eating contest. She has guts of steel, buns of steel, pink enamel nails of steel.

As a more concrete example of what I am talking about, the collection has a running motif (or perhaps reoccurring subject) of a group of girls, their identifications starting at Girl A and ending at Girl J. These girls seem to be in a state of constant flux. Everything from their ages to their clothing to their physical existence to their moods changes regularly. I’m not even sure they are separate entities during some of their appearances. Girl A seems to fantasize about a train sliding along her back. Girl J has sweet and innocent eyes and also manages to give “a swift kick under the table to her asshole editor”. Girl B is “on the brink of overcooking that idea out of the realm of tenability”. Girl F identifies her real name as “Fuck You For Asking”. The fluidity of meaning here is, I think, as its most direct. The motion of who they are, on individual and collective levels, is perpetual. It is a reflection of how many societies and cultures simultaneously attempt to isolate women from each other and other genders and attempt to herd them into vast pens of categorical subservience. It is a reflection of reactions to that external pressure, both in the fight for solidarity and the demand for recognition of the self. It is a reflection of the struggle between our need for understanding and our tendency to oversimplify. Are the Girls ten individuals, ten shifting perspectives within the same individual, or both? Is there a solid answer to that question, even at an entirely hypothetical moment in time?

Girls A through J cut their tongues on the distant approaching sunlight.

These questions are by no means limited to women, whether inside or outside the text. Cultural and ethnic minorities, immigrants, and people from across the spectrum of gender can attest to these experiences. They are questions that should be asked of themselves by everyone, especially instead of external questions like “Yeah, no, but where are you really from?” or “Are you sure you’re in the right bathroom?” or “You get that it’s just a joke, right?”. Where many texts invite you to engage with such ideas, Some Girls Walk Into The Country They Are From firmly points out that this process is already happening, with or without your participation or permission. It reminds you that you have a choice to make: do you have the humility for regular and meaningful introspection, or will you be eroded like the rest of the stagnant detritus as the perpetual movement flows around and over you?

Like this. Luminous continuity of seeing.

And for all this earnestly high-minded contemplation, the collection never fails to be entertaining. Whether decoding linguistic constraints or mulling over a sequence like “Out of a failure to materialize clothing mid-jump on my way to the tuba player,”, the text is just plain fun to read. It runs the gamut of emotions, almost as a byproduct of its refusal/inability to cease in its journey. If anything, it demands more of itself than it does of its reader, perhaps understanding that in order to do justice to the concepts it addresses, it must wield language with both utter precision and kaleidoscopic creativity. I wholeheartedly recommend Some Girls Walk Into The Country They Are From in the same way that I might recommend getting a friend who is willing to stimulate and challenge you.

Some Girls Walk Into The Country They Are From is available now through Wave Books.

Book Review

City on the Second Floor

by on March 29, 2022

Poetry by Matt Sedillo
Review by Frank Mundo

I was watching Disney’s “Encanto” with the kids when the mail arrived with Matt Sedillo’s new book of poetry, “City on the Second Floor” from FlowerSong Press, and I thought, how perfect is that? Here’s Matt Sedillo, extremely popular Chicano political poet, essayist, activist (the hardest working poet I know) – and yet somehow he’s become like the Bruno of certain parts of the Los Angeles poetry scene. His poetry superpower is so electric and engaging that most are absolutely dazzled and inspired by his voice, while the rest are left frightened (even triggered) and dismissive of his ostensibly dark and angry premonitions. Plus, he’s a troll, they say. He’s a communist with Das Kapital C. He’s (God forbid) a renegade. Self-taught? He didn’t even go to college.

Maybe that’s why, despite all he’s done for the poetry community in Los Angeles for a dozen years or so, we haven’t seen even a mention of Sedillo (or his three books) in the LA Times since he won the L.A. Grand Slam championship in 2011. Perhaps that’s why, no matter how hard he works and finds success, he’s never been the poet in conversation at Rattle. And, maybe it’s why, like his second book, “Mowing Leaves of Grass,” his newest book will likely never be reviewed or discussed by the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Maybe it’s just me, but, in certain parts of Los Angeles, it seems we don’t talk about Matt Sedillo – at least, not nearly as much as we should. And I just don’t understand why. Many compare him to Amiri Baraka, Jose Montoya, and so many other fiery or political poets. To me, his work is a cross between Allen Ginsberg and Wanda Coleman. So why isn’t everyone in LA talking about his new book, “City on the Second Floor,” which is flying off the shelves, by the way.

One criticism you’ll hear way too often is that Sedillo’s poetry is too angry. This is a lazy and shallow reading (or listening) of his work. Yes, there is anger in his poetry, and a lot of it, but it’s almost always tempered with humor, which can never be done effectively without empathy and compassion. Sedillo’s speaker addresses this idea in “Post,” the very first poem of the 32 poems and one play collected in “City on the Second Floor.” And I can almost guarantee that Sedillo or his publisher placed this piece first in the collection intentionally. There’s no way this was a coincidence.

“Post” begins looking back (even reminiscing, you might say) to a time of the service economy (when what? America was great?) – “…just like yesterday/ Municipalities raised cities/ Built nuclear families/ Associations of sturdy pockets/ A two-car garage, chicken in every pot.” What follows is their broken promise of tomorrow, “…which doesn’t show up all at once,” the speaker tells us, “But when it does…” it’s with liquidated pensions and automated factories – and the resulting gig economy left in a shambles to a generation who “…cannot afford to live in…” the very cities where they must hustle only to get part-time, freelance, contract, and “adjunct” employment. “Promise me the world, then show me the door,” Sedillo’s speaker concludes. “I was not/ Born/ Angry/ I was abandoned.”

Yet, even with that last line, as justifiable as the “anger” might be for this speaker (and Sedillo’s generation), I think a lot of critics who only want to see anger will miss the fabulous punchline at the end of the poem – “Tell me the one/ Where I killed the economy.”

I love this line, not only because it’s hilarious, but because it’s so accurate. Often accused of being whiners and lazy, Millennials are also blamed somehow for ruining the very broken economy they inherited. But I would argue that there’s nothing overly angry in this line. This is not an “OK, Boomer” sarcastic snowflake moment. This is more of a mic-drop moment – a humorous wink and a nod to the “us” in the us-versus-them structure that makes up so much of Sedillo’s poetry.

Even the title “Post” is a funny play on words of old versus new. Is this the postindustrial standard? Is this a letter? A social media post? Is this a signpost? Or is it a warning, like so many other poems in the collection about how consumerism, credit, and debt will ruin us all? Maybe it’s all these things and a hint of what to expect in the following pages of an angry and funny and compassionate collection.
Sedillo reworks this poem later in the book (sort of in reverse) in a poem called, “Hammurabi,” which is laugh-out-loud funny. This one ends with a deadly serious punchline, “Since they from on high/ Convinced us down below/ That we/ Ever/ Needed/ Their/ Code/ Of law/ To tell us/ We were free.” What’s funny is that the lies about the future in this remix of “Post” come from the TV characters we so loved and trusted: Lucy Ricardo, Mr. Belvedere, Homer Simpson, Peter Griffin, and especially Al Bundy (all comedies, mind you) who convinced us that we “…could raise a family/ In a two story/ On the single income/ Of a shoe salesman.” LOL.

I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t the only one who believed Matt Sedillo’s poetry is as funny as it is angry. Maybe I just have a dark sense of humor. So, I called up Mike “the Poet” Sonksen, a poet, scholar, journalist, critic, mentor, and author with an encyclopedic knowledge of the history of poetry in Los Angeles. I respect Mike’s opinion so much because he focuses on poetry of merit, not simply the styles and genres he prefers. If anyone anywhere in LA is writing or “spitting” quality verse, he knows about it, writes about it, talks about – because he’s all about it and has been for 25 years.

“Matt Sedillo is relentless,” Mike told me. “He’s a student of history and skilled at spinning his astute understanding into engaging poetry,” and I couldn’t agree more. He also said, “Sedillo can also be quite funny, satirizing the powers that be with poetic one-liners. His social commentary balances truth and wit to produce a poetic velocity faster than Starsky & Hutch.”

Another poem I loved from the book, “Pope of Broadway,” literally starts as a classic joke: “An Arab, an Italian, a Jew, a Puerto Rican, an Inuit, an American Indian, a Mongolian/ And a Mexican/ Walk into a bar…” and “Anthony Quinn orders a drink.” This is a wonderful and complex poem about the “ethnically ambiguous” actors (the “every” Brown-man) in Hollywood, from Quinn (who was the best) to today’s other “two first-name” actors who continue this unusual tradition today, including Cliff Curtis and Oscar Isaac.

I like this poem also because I spoke about this concept (and the larger and darker meaning behind it) with Matt Sedillo a couple years ago, before he had written the piece. And reading the final product in his new book was a real treat for me.

That day, I also asked Matt what his goal was when writing a poem. “First,” he said, “it’s to satisfy the demands of structure.” Matt often uses a three-act structure that he has developed and refined over the years and made his own. It’s one of the major topics he discusses and often teaches as a highly in-demand speaker/performer at the top colleges and universities in America and at several other major venues in Canada, England, and Cuba. “Second,” Matt continued, “no matter what the theme is, I want to write poems (not every time, but I try) that are calls to action.” It’s not surprising to me that his answer is all about craft. Matt sees craft everywhere. He studies it and looks for patterns and anomalies in everything. He’ll read texts or study videos of fiery speakers, like Hugo Chavez and Michael Parenti, and spend hours breaking down their prose, examining what they say and how they say it. He’ll study the timing of stand-up comics, books, films, commercials, anything that tells stories in an engaging way that gets people to act.

In “Mowing Leaves of Grass,” Sedillo’s first book with FlowerSong Press from 2019, his craft, especially his three-act structure is in full effect. It’s the work that put him on the map as a unique and powerful voice in Los Angeles and beyond. The poems in his latest book, “City on the Second Floor,” however, offer a glimpse, I believe, of where his poetry is headed: even more powerful, political, angry, funny, timely, smart, carefully crafted, and compassionate calls to action.

I also asked Matt Sedillo who influences him and his writing, and I was a little surprised by his answer. An avid student of history, Matt listed artists who are still alive and very active in the community. He said Luis J. Rodriguez, the 2014 Los Angeles Poet Laureate. He also mentioned other poets whose work inspired him: spoken word artist David A. Romero, author of “My Name is Romero,” and Viva Padilla, Publisher/ Editor-in-Chief of Dryland, a literary journal.

Finally, I wanted to know about Matt Sedillo’s publisher, so I contacted Edward Vidaurre, Publisher/Editor-in-Chief of FlowerSong Press, and I asked him straight out why he chose to publish such an outspoken and, perhaps, controversial poet as Matt Sedillo. Without hesitation, Vidaurre answered, “Because, like me, he is fearless about his work. He’s a necessary voice in a world where being an activist is sometimes looked on as trouble.” Finally, he added – and it all made perfect sense to me – “I wanted his collection to make noise and open eyes.”

I suppose the gatekeepers and kingmakers of the Los Angeles literary scene will do what they want to do – and they still might not talk about Matt Sedillo after my little plea here. But, with Sedillo’s incredible work ethic, his determination and dedication to craft, and his fearless and supportive publisher’s commitment to sharing “necessary” voices and books, I know we will definitely be hearing much more “noise” from him.



City on the Second Floor is available now from FlowerSong Press.

Frank Mundo is a poet from Los Angeles. His latest chapbooks are Touched by an Anglo (Kattywompus Press) and Eleven Sundry Flowers (Antrim House).

Book Review

Pixel Flesh

by on November 19, 2020

Review by Vicent Moreno

When Nocilla Dream, the first novel by Agustín Fernández Mallo, was published in Spain in 2006, it caused a seismic movement in the slow-moving and mostly predictable Spanish literary field. Published by a small press, the novel achieved a popularity only reserved to established literary figures and big publishers. While Fernández Mallo had already authored a couple of books of poetry, the instant success of his novel propelled his career; since then, he has published several novels, has penned a couple of essays on poetics and cultural theory, has won national and international awards and recognitions, and his works have been translated into various languages. Pixel Flesh, which appeared in Spain in 2009, was his first book of poetry after the publication of Nocilla Dream and it is his first book of poems translated into English. The volume is published by Cardboard House Press, a small independent publisher, which continues to lead in its drive to find and make available some of the best Spanish-language poetry to an American audience. This bilingual edition is translated by Zachary Rockwell Ludington and made possible, in part, by a grant from the PEN/Heim Translation fund. The best translations are always born out of a personal interest or passion in the work to be translated and this is clearly the case in Ludington’s precise and nuanced English rendering of Pixel Flesh (Carne de Píxel).

As a whole, Pixel Flesh can be read as a meditation on love, loss, and memory. Its format is a compilation of prose poems which, strung together, read like a long and fragmented poetic love letter with some caveats. For one, it is written from the perspective of loss, it does not project love into the future, but rather it looks at its past; it is the punctilious examination of a love affair. Like the pixel to which the title refers, the poetic voice zooms in obsessively to events, situations, moments, that make up the poetic voice’s love story. Interestingly, the only poetry written in verse in the book is actually not the author’s, but excerpts from a scientific article taken from the Spanish newspaper, El País. This bold move has two implications: on the one hand, it highlights Fernández Mallo’s understanding of science as a form of poetry, and on the other hand, it displays a very Duchampian gesture, ultimately signifying that anything is susceptible of becoming art in the right context or seen through the right eyes.

Scientific language appears frequently in the book, often as a metaphor of a stable and pure referent that lovers, as lovers do, try to circumvent in order to construct or understand their own reality: “you didn’t know the Principle of Least Action by which light [everything in general] seeks the quickest path to travel between two points (23) or “Your door, the Street, the hill. There is in this kind of goodbye a strange aquatic anti-law [you were crying, it was raining] that submerges Archimedes’ Principle and invalidates it” (21). Each of these images (the walk around the city, the goodbye in the rain) are motifs repeated throughout the book, to which the poetic voice will come back again and again, adding and subtracting information. Pixel Flesh is a highly intertextual work that opens up all sorts of hallways and windows into other forms of art, into other texts and disciplines. The references are sometimes direct: Blade Runner, Wittgenstein, Warhol, and pop music, among others, appear in the book as a very eclectic and, in appearance, incongruous amalgam of quotes and allusions that are a trademark of Fernández Mallo’s style. Ultimately, however, it is the reader who holds the key to venture into new doors and corridors. This makes each new reading of the book a new experience, rendering it practically inexhaustible in connotations and suggestiveness. For the sake of this review, I will just focus on three major references that stood out during my reading and which correspond to three of the discourses with which the author plays and pays homage to (philosophical, literary, and cinematic).

While Wittgenstein is a main influence in Fernández Mallo (after all, he has a collection of poetry titled Yo siempre regreso a los pezones y al punto 7 del Tractatus [I always return to the nipples and to the remark 7 of the Tractatus) and it appears as a direct reference in Pixel Flesh, it is Roland Barthes and its A Lover’s Discourse that resonate in this book. For one, both works are hybrids or mutants, they are hard to pin down as belonging to a specific genre and they are plagued with references and dialogs with other works. In a way, both start from the personal experience of love to try to conceptualize it and universalize it. Fernández Mallo collects moments, sensations that sometimes he calls “pixelados” [pixelations] and that conform a sui generis experience of the love story. Similarly, Barthes would call this the “Image-repertoire”, that is, the individual collection of subjective realities that the lover has about their particular relationship with the loved one, a unique idiolect that is however shared among those who love or have loved. The language of love is at once unique and universal: “What I saw in your eyes no one ever saw before, that we were the secret life of water, and an interplay of bodies to revalidate that cipherless escape by which a human being is something more than a bit of saliva” (19).

Another clear influence in Fernández Mallo is the language of film and cinematography. Some of the poems in Pixel Flesh in fact almost read as script directions, a choreographed scene that the lovers act out: “You were so beautiful, so whole with your pointy boots on that trip, the most thorough and western woman I had ever seen, light dominated by your hands, sentences: a drafting pen between your lips, astounded balance as you seasoned the fish” (47). The film Journey to Italy is mentioned a few times and one can see how that story of a disintegrating marriage is an apt background for the book. However, it is Michelangelo Antonioni’s vision and aesthetics, his elliptical and elusive plots that echo throughout these poems. The peripatetic characters of Pixel Flesh are reminiscing of Antonioni’s characters as they navigate urban landscapes and personal ennui in an intimate travelogue. We are never told the whole story, but are left to piece it together. Much like Antonioni’s trademark use of “dead time” in his movies, Fernández Mallo obsessively focuses on elements in appearance outside the story to elicit an emotional reaction in the reader who draws its own conclusions on how to connect them: “We circled the city. The sky ionized and dark, you offered me a Lucky [star between your fingers]. Within a radius of 2000 km around Earth there are more than 2 million kilos of scrap, the newspaper said: satellites, rockets, devices disintegrated in their circling” (89).

Finally, in this free play of associations that Pixel Flesh provokes, I can’t help but think of Julio Cortázar. Like the Argentinean author, Fernández Mallo possesses an understated romanticism that is allowed to shine in this book of poems. Pixel Flesh echoes the famous chapter 93 from Rayuela (Hotspot), a moment where Horacio lets go, so to speak, penning a love letter that is also a reflection on what it means to love, its language (“El amor, esa palabra…” [“Love, that word”]). Compare these two excerpts on the realization that what lovers feel is not that special, that it can and will be replicated in other arms, in other spaces: Pixel Flesh: “that everyone is one and, what’s more, not numerable, that other women will come, that other men will come, that it’s scary to think about the extent to which we’re all interchangeable” (13) and Rayuela/Hopscotch: “Of course you’ll be cured, because you’re living in health, after me it’ll be someone else, you can change things the way you change a blouse”.

The reader who enters Pixel Flesh, and in general the author’s universe, with an open mind and ready to be led down the rabbit hole of free associations will be doubly satisfied. While the text connects with the reader on a purely aesthetic and even affective level, thanks to a translation that stays true to the feeling of the original, it finds a more profound meaning in its invitation to the reader (that Baudelaire’s-like “invitation au voyage”) to explore, imagine, and see how this pixel of a work inserts itself in the larger picture of culture’s understandings of love across poetry and art, philosophy and sciences.

Pixel Flesh is available now through Cardboard House Press.

Book Review

The Book of Anna

by on November 12, 2020

If there is any significance in taking a novel of eight parts and proceeding it with a five part metatheatrical sequel, it is to show that length and history do not make a novel. Instead, imagine the waves of reaction and retelling passing between generations and finally into the hands of writers who take the liberty to create and recreate without shame or fear of traditionalists’ view of text. Leo Tolstoy’s Anna is often negotiated by the temporal and spatial definitions of woman at the time of reproduction. In Carmen Boullosa’s The Book of Anna, one may call into the question the boundaries of a sequel. Boullosa text, and the incredible translation by Samantha Schnee, stretch beyond the imagination by infusing historical references, magic realism, literary criticism, and metatheatricality to spin the yarn of its archetype to gives readers and women a version which we might be able to look at with more than contempt and see a possible outcome more closely aligned with our reality of feminism. 

Although I have never been a fan of disclosures, Boullosa’s novel begins with an explanation of the book. Tolstoy’s Anna writes a manuscript which is referenced once then thrown by the sidelines. Here, through her descendants, the work is finally able to come to light – but more than the work, the legacy she leaves behind for her children is something which Boullosa finds might have greater significance than her adultery and suicide. The explanation is also a wonderfully shameless way of giving readers a pass at first needing to read or reread the 864 page predecessor. 

Unlike the novels from the 18th century, Boullosa highlights the lives of every social class and pits their lives side by side. The novel opens with a vagabond attempting to bomb a train, a nod to Tolstoy’s novel which tickles the idea of breaking away from canon and promoting a new interpretation of femininity. Rather than focusing on Annas suicide by train, here we get Clementine’s desire to destroy a train – and whatever it may represent for each reader. 

Over and over, the characters are juxtaposed against each other through life and death or dreams and reality, “In Claudia’s dream, she exchanges glances with Sergei. In Sergei’s dream, they don’t. But in both dreams Sergei reflects: ‘But I am not completely human. And you know that better than anyone: I am a fictional creation, part of an imaginary drama”. These words are said to a dream version of Tolstoy who is haunting the characters subconsciously as they attempt to decide throughout the novel whether or not to give a painting of Anna to the New Hermitage. I am in awe of the psychological and traumatic retelling of characters like Sergei – to show how much they are aware of their own existence only in terms of their story is something I’m sure many fear before walking into the cold arms of existentialism. 

Some of the more meta sections of the novel revolve around Sergei, the son of Anna Karenina. Boullosa maps out for readers each moment and distinction one should make in order to understand the characters as fiction and nonfiction. Sergei exists but he also exists as a fictional character, “Sergei occupies the very same seat that his mother did…It’s like a menacing cloud that burns and asphyxiates him.” I see in these lines something reflective. A technique of writing which can oftentimes be taken to one extreme while craving the other. Poor Sergei is haunted by his past but by participating in society he is also haunted by his existence and is constantly swimming through anxiety made more evident with the block texts that are dedicated to explanation why Sergei is the way he is. 

I find that by highlighting the women in the novel as a sort of force to be reckoned with, while leaving Sergei as a sort of manchild, is just beautifully hilarious. So many female protagonists are silenced, especially in classic literature, and here too the men of the novel try to silence them again. Boullosa won’t let them. She gives the women a voice in the way they dress, the way they refuse to feel sorry for themselves, the way they manipulate their husbands carefully to act in a way they find favorable. 

If there was anything to dislike about The Book of Anna it may well be the length because when I finished it I actually said, That’s it? I wanted more, and I feel most readers will as well. There is not much closure in the novel and that in itself is a sort of rejection of the stereotypical novel and also a rejection of many of the interpretations of Anna Karenina. 

The Book of Anna is available now through Coffee House Press.

Book Review

Room in Rome

by on September 17, 2020
Written by Jorge Eduardo Eielson
Translated by David Shook

I think it is fair to say that wholeness, or, more specifically, a lack thereof, is part of the fabled “human condition.” I do not and will never claim to be the most experienced person in the world, but I also do not believe that I have ever known someone who feels complete. Truly complete, that is. To be clear, I do not mean content or happy – you can be either or both of those things and still possess unfulfilled desires, relegated aspirations, or even loneliness. Some of this, I think, does come from a very healthy and important drive in the mind to seek out challenge and stimulation. But it is long overdue that we acknowledge how much of our incompleteness, on a personal level, is imposed upon us. It is in this context that cannot help but consider Room in Rome, a collection of poetry by Jorge Eduardo Eielson. Again, in the interest of clarity, Eielson’s text is not preaching from the soapbox. There is nothing inherently wrong with preaching, but Room in Rome is using an alternative approach; an exercise in unstoppable serenity, an embracing of empathy with infinite momentum.

The imposition at play in Eielson’s poetry is the child and tool of society and culture. As far as I could tell, every single poem in this collection dealt with identity on some level, and specifically with the forces that either try to insidiously manipulate the self-image or try to crush it under their bloated gaits. Eielson, himself Peruvian and Swedish, two ethnic and cultural heritages that are themselves the results of centuries of war, colonization, immigration, and exchange, writes from a largely first person perspective as he has quite literally been transplanted to Rome. Poem after poem deals with expectations placed upon him, upon his neighbors and friends and strangers, and trying to find the sources of those expectations. Governments, patriarchy, the Catholic church, capitalism, and more appear as forces wielding boundaries and arbitrary labels as weapons to be bolted onto people, as if being branded in ownership is somehow going to lead to fulfillment. For all of its beautiful harmony as a text, Room in Rome is a scathing indictment of in-group favoritism and gatekeeping, and likely all the more beautiful for it.

el corazón / de esta ciudad que es tu cuerpo / y es el mío / nuestro cuerpo / y nuestro río / nuestra iglesia / y nuestro abismo?
the heart / of this city which is your body / and is mine / our body / and our river / our church / and our abyss?

In my last review, of Don Mee Choi’s essay on translation, “Translation is a Mode = Translation is an Anti-neocolonial Mode”, I remarked on how much joy I found in Choi’s essay writing style as it broke many of the dry as sepulchral dust rules that they warn you about in school. Now, I find myself wonderfully blindsided by this novelty again in Eielson’s poetry. We are no strangers to experimental poetry, and I would say that, by modern standards, Eielson isn’t doing anything groundbreaking. It is, instead, in simplicity that he expresses himself. There are spots where he puts his line breaks in the middle of words or phrases. I can already hear my professors (and even some of my understandably wary peers) cringing at the thought, but it is handled beautifully here. It contributes to the theme of incompleteness central to the work. The poems, while not consistent in their length or structure, somehow all have this snowball effect, building a downhill momentum as the language encourages its own flow. All the while, the speaker seems to float next to you, not so much detached as particularly of aware that they are both connected and an individual.

This type of delivery, that serenity in the face of chaos, is something that particularly appeals to me, largely because I find it seems to incredibly difficult to achieve. It is one thing to try and block out emotion (or appear to block out emotion) and appear dispassionate. It is altogether another to not judge yourself for having emotions, to achieve a kind of harmony by embracing yourself and the chaos and understanding your relationship to it. Too often we fetishize detachment as some idealized state of being, driven by those who would benefit from us denying our own humanity. You can feel the pain in the speaker’s voice when he speaks of things turning to ash before him. You can taste the intensity and ache of his love when remembers lost loves in ancient city. He recognizes these things as part of himself.

¿cuánto tiempo ha pasado desde entonces / cuántas horas / cuántos siglos he dormido sin contemplarte?
how much time has passed since then / how many hours / how many centuries have I slept without contemplating you?

For those of you familiar with work translated from Spanish to English, it should come as no surprise that David Shook is in top form here. The English versions of each poem are not only effectively accurate but they are almost as much of a joy to read as the original Spanish. None of Eielson’s message or emotion seem to be lost and Shook handles Eielson’s style wonderfully. And, corny though it may be, I cannot help but see this reinforce the search for identity throughout the text.

When I write these reviews, my goal is to express the kind of intellectual and emotional engagement that I experience, not to suggest how you should feel about a text, but to encourage you to find your own experience with it. They are suggestions, however emphatic, that the texts I am discussing will bring you the challenge and stimulation that I think the overwhelming majority of us seek. This goal, I think, is partially why Room in Rome had such an effect on me and I why I write about it now. Eielson is gently and firmly reminding you to find yourself, to be aware when other forces are trying to dominate your perspective or infiltrate theirs under the guise of your own. You can be a child of contradictions, of many names, of myriad complexity, and still be an identifiable you.

Room in Rome is available now through Cardboard House Press.

Book Review

You & Me Forever

by on August 18, 2020

Chaos, lies, and raw emotion battle one another, composing and decomposing organically to create the heavy words strung together in Valerie Hsiung’s You & Me Forever. A work which transcends the barriers of a title of contents page and throws tradition under the bus of nostalgia. Memories alter page by page, making readers question their own experiences in youth as if self deception is a character in the story of our lives. Tradition, raunch culture, religion, origin story and sexual harassment mold into the textbook of an elementary school child and we are transported back to the world only our repression can find.

Written in sections of “Book One” , or “Postscript”, the poems wreak havoc on the mind and transport readers into the strange world of being literally lost in thought. This form of revisionism lends the text to become an art form in multiple layers and works as a performance. There have been certain moments when one can feel certain of relative trauma in text. You feel, I feel, they feel. We can all empathize or sympathize and wonder and relate. But there are times when a person comes across words on a page, and while remaining a hundred percent sure that they just read about rape, abandonment, or the unavoidable lies which come with ancestry, one may not notice the significance of the trauma. Valerie Hsiung’s work functions as a coping mechanism in both structure and content. From the words on the page to how they settle on the paper, meaning is woven into memory. Playing around with sentences and repetition like no one before her, Hsuing’s poems twist popular culture by recycling phrases and lyrics to make different meanings from them, as if putting together a ransom note from newspaper clippings.

Without giving away too much of herself, Hsuing uses ancestry to connect readers to the work in a way that’s relatable like parents lying about the origins of the child’s name, or a small exaggeration of a childhood event. Something so innocent that later becomes the foundation for a life of trauma.  While the first section, “Book One” delves into the youth of the narrator, the rest of the work jumps around memories of pain and confusion through events which have been altered by time. Hsuing’s use of italics showcases the mastery of intonation and how the way you say something affects the meaning,“They said the mind-the soul-die too/but only after the body.” 

There is a back and forth play between nature and technology at times, “I lick and lap at the magnetic water, become a part of the magnet.” As the narrator discovers a mutiny of self, a battle between memory and reality proceeds and the carnal animal or beast of the narrator becomes the driving force of the work. Violation is a lubricant for timeless emotion and poetry. And here also, the pain and violence in the poems are written with a sense of fragility and lightness that readers may at some points wonder, did we just skip something deep or was it meant to be so fleeting? 

More than once did a hand raise and a yelp come from my mouth as I joined in unity with the text, ME TOO! I wanted to shout, but had to keep reading each lasting word like I was starving. Hsuing introduces old ideas and creates their counter-positives, “In ancient times, rape was as common as wild was common. So, abduction, and the two – rape and abduction – often went hand in hand. These are common themes.” And immediately after this we read a section on the double standards portrayed onto Hera and Zues. But there is an almost existential nonchalant way in which the allegories are written. To see rape, then follow with “List of youngest birth mothers.” and no context behind it stands out as poetry that asks the reader to do work – which is brilliant. 

Unlike the grit that often comes with trauma poetry, the work here even goes as far as to reclaim “discharge” as something natural and feminine rather than grotesque or medical, “It was easy to carry the box that held her remaining life to the rented room in the abyss where the tree leaked its discharge…In this place, there were trees, mucosal intonations, and unprotected intonations, a vast, endless gamut, with trees, with trees, upon which she was only one of countless sentences.” The heartbreak I still echo while rereading the words in You & Me Forever is something I will cherish each time I have to call my parents grudgingly, or explain myself to an authority figure, or even explain myself to myself. Even in its final section, Hsuing manages to throw tradition in the air and writes the typical “acknowledgements” section of a book but instead of thanking names, she lists moments which have affected her in putting together this work. It’s almost like saying, yes thank you to all my friends and family for shaping me into this creature, or thank you for giving me the trauma and pain to put together this raw perspective of my life. 

You & Me Forever is available now through Action Books.

Book Review

Translation is a Mode=Translation is an Anti-neocolonial Mode

by on August 5, 2020

In several reviews on this website, I have expressed my view on the value of literature; namely, it is a necessary vehicle used to share human perspective and an intensely potent tool for empathy. If this is true, then there may be no purer manifestation of that value than that of literature in translation. It represents the crossing of borders and boundaries beyond the physical. It is often a deeply collaborative effort, as even authors who translate their own work must adopt hybridized linguistic and cultural perspectives. It, by its very existence, forces the reader to confront the existence of those they might otherwise be encouraged to label “alien”, “foreign”, or even just “different”. So maybe I am not in what one might consider a sufficiently objective mindset to examine Don Mee Choi’s essay “Translation is a Mode = Translation is an Anti-neocolonial Mode”, but I do not care, because it is a fascinating and provocative distillation of the power of translation, and a vital framing device for how we must proceed.

I seek mirrors through which I can also traverse, in order to map out the neocolonial history of my home, to translate myself.

The heart of this essay is giving translation its proper context. Beauty can often be found in the wake of tragedy, and while said beauty never justifies said tragedy, you can never understand one without the other. Most translation is no different. Much of it is born of and necessitated by the inconceivably cruel legacy of colonialism. But when we look at that legacy, especially those of us who are the descendants of colonization, we have a nasty tendency to treat it as a barbaric ancestral practice that we have left behind. The truth is that colonialism, like so many other forms of oppression, has merely adapted to new circumstances. Neocolonialism, which is the invasion and enslavement of cultures by or on behalf of capitalist corporations in the name of profiteering, is its latest incarnation and the one Choi specifically confronts in the essay.

I am not content to just go from Korean to English. I am not content to uphold the notion of national literature – the notion that literature outside of the Western canon is always bound to national borders.

She takes the time to explore the intense relationship between translation and identity, of how work in translation can resonate with someone who is of two or more worlds, with someone who can still feel the amputated connections to multiple cultural pasts. She shows how translation can take the very impetus behind neocolonialism and repurpose it as a tool of resistance; where neocolonialism ignores boundaries and consent in its insatiable need to destroy, work in translation travels back along its rubble-strewn wake to undermine it at the source. She helps us experience the tragic beauty of translation in our modern context, namely the regretful necessity of its existence as an imperfect tool of preservation and communication. For Choi, translation is not merely a political act, but a defiant one, resisting not only human greed but the advance of time itself, and questioning the assumed inexorability of both.

But my tongue deforms, it disobeys. I translate this longing, entangled with neocolonial dependency, as homesickness, which is a form of illness, a form of intensity.

On a slightly more personal level, I can say that Choi’s manner of essay writing is one that makes me deeply regret the argumentative techniques being taught in most schools. I would not be against showing this essay to any number of professors and department chairs as an example of how it is more than possible to make a persuasive written argument that is profoundly informative, deeply emotional, and a joy to read. Especially in the latter half of the essay I found myself pausing after several sentences and bemoaning the notion that so many students are taught to approach non-fiction and academic writing divorced from their own personal perspectives, as if such a thing was even possible. Choi’s writing is clear and powerful, poignant and elegant. She takes hold of an utterly daunting beast, that being the infinitely stacking layers of identity and legacy at the heart of her essay, and renders it intelligible without sacrificing scale or impact.

My tongue and your tongue are already an aggregate, a site of multiple and collective enunciation.

It is no coincidence that violence and militarism are so intimately tied with Choi’s subject matter. Neocolonialism is tautologically violent, and as it faces growing resistance around the world, it shows that violence through continued attempts at cultural erasure, police and military brutality, and economic exploitation. It can only ever respond to challenges with cruelty and dehumanization. And what is literature in translation other than an attempt to acknowledge someone else’s humanity? I do not think Choi is arguing that translation is some silver bullet (even our metaphors are violent) that will save us from greed and hubris and hate. But she makes the best case I have ever seen for the necessity of translation in fighting that terrible hydra. Her essay reminds me that translation doesn’t merely grow in the wake of tragedy. It is a manifestation of the existential human need for connection and acknowledgment.

“Translation is a Mode=Translation is an Anti-neocolonial Mode” is part of Ugly Duckling Presse‘s 2020 Pamphlet Series.

Book Review

The Book of Scab

by on May 14, 2020

Written by Danielle Pafunda
Review by Anahita Safarzadeh

Dear Ugly Little Scab – we see you, we feel you, you are not alone. As the chronically ill Scab manifests within her passages, so do shared realities with a psychedelic twist. Danielle Pafunsa’s The Book of Scab makes what could be classified as nightmarish acid trips. Written as letters addressed to “Mom and Dad”, Pafunda opens the floor for ownership and for vulnerability as she traces through her adolescence and forces readers to experience the uncomfortability of sex and drugs which have so heavily influence the upbringing of little Scab. 

Fully equipped with the weaponry of a run-on sentence, Pafunda tells a tale much like the myths and legends of our ancestors. “I give his father the keys to your cars I give his father a bottle of your black label Jack Daniels I give his father some of the pornos I found in the ravine just in case he likes that kind of thing.” Something old and somehting new, Pafunda combines the nostalgia of the past generations who exhalted sex drugs and rock and roll while also being reminicient of what it was to like to be a child looking in on their parents confused or unaware. 

Something full of true grit, while still maintaining what is unique about our generation – music, sexual freedom, and a little bit of LSD. Although mysterious and out of place with time, the small essays between each parental letter has true depth. Using techniques such as alliteration to create a melody even if the chorus is made up of “bitch” and “fuck”. Spilling out of inanimate objects, little scab explores the landscape of her memories, the good, the bad, and the ugly.

“Between my ribs there are failings, and in my lungs there is a swollen crown of pollen spurs. It’s the only thing natural about me. I cough, and my bad taste wheezes out.”

To say one is reminded of Candy Man would be an understatement. The creature living within the passages of this novel has experienced pain, yes, but beyond that she is in pain and she see’s even her bodily fluids as evidence of her life as consequence. Consequence to what, to living, to existing, or consequence to being born into a body which others see as an object 

One is reminded of the magical realism of Latinx writing, an exotic tale of twisted stories. People turning into animals, love turning into puking in a bush. Is this all an acid trip, are our lives one nightmarish ride which has stops meant to wake us up. Using rose petals to dab blood from cuts made into the skin to write words. An expression of art and storytelling as a way of giving life from trauma. The Book of Scab dares to execute what many have only fantasized about. 

In certain moments readers are able to get a glimpse of what is real and what is not, then the proverbial rug is pulled from us, our trip guide wanders off, and again we are left alone to address the motives behind the hurtful actions of our friends and families. Each scenario, although unique to the Scab, relates to minority and female upbringing. Moments which have always existed and never been challenged are now written against a bourgeoise backdrop. 

Pafunda constantly uses shared realities to expose moments of sexual assault which have gone to make scabs of us all. Candy and fruit as a way to numb the pain and outrage of sexual assault, or lack there of. A showcase of extreme cruelty and unforgiving abandonment leading to a lifelong need to fill a void. The novella freudian tactics sewn into childlike dreams and adult-like realities. Midway through Scab begins to recognize why she did certain horrible things to others, but only after she is left awkwardly craving attention from men who have inappropriately attacked other women, “I ruin everything, don’t I, when I go looking for attention.”

There is a sexual narrative carefully told throughout the novel. Something which allows readers to connect the otherwise seemingly different essays, letters, and passages. A scab is a wound healing, but this scab keeps breaking open, like zooming into the Mandelbrot set. But there is also a narrative of an outsider which could be glossed over if not read with more open mindedness. “My rights are alienable. That I hold onto them for the time being is material….All my privileges are plenty suckled up around me at night in the bed when I dream of getting out of here.” Pafunda begs the question of identity and passing. Are we all unhinged corpses walking around in our skin suits absorbing the world around us, letting the world around us absorb us in turn? 

The Book of Scab is available now through Ricochet Editions.

Book Review

Jakarta

by on May 8, 2020

Written by Rodrigo Marquez Tizano
Translated by Thomas Bunstead
Review by John Venegas

What is the measure of a good piece of fiction? You’d think after all these reviews, I’d have a definition. But the truth is that no definition can ever be broad enough to encompass all the possibilities and specific enough to have any useful meaning. So it may be better to ask what makes this piece of fiction a good one. In this case, the fiction in question is Jakarta, by Rodrgio Marquez Tizano, and to be quite honest, I am writing this review to figure out the answer to that question. I’ve read it three times now and, after each reading, I’ve come away with two undeniable conclusions: 1) this a fucking fantastic piece of literature and 2) I can’t make sense of why. So here’s to hoping that putting words on digital paper might lend some clarity.

Though the city stagnates, and any possible works are safely buried under endless red tape, it’s still a place you never fully get a handle on.

On the most direct terms, this is a truly dystopian narrative. A first-person, non-linear dystopian narrative that teeters on the edge of magical (or perhaps sci-fi?) realism, all delivered by an unnamed protagonist. Right off the bat, the sense of dislocation and a lack of identity is intense. You are let loose in a world that goes largely unexplained and yet which is also disturbingly familiar, and your only guide is a person who won’t tell you their name and may not have the best grip on the flow of time, or their own sanity. It is, I have to say, a hell of a risky play. But damn does it pay off in the end. For one thing, I am always happy to see when an author trusts their audience to be smart enough to keep up. For another, the text is so well written that you find yourself following along almost through instinct alone, at least until you are so far in that you can’t really see the way back and you give in to the flow.

From Morgan’s notebook:

A story: the king asks the artist to paint him a labyrinth.

But it takes more than evocative sentence structure and clever wordplay to make a piece of fiction good, doesn’t it? What about the story? Dystopian fiction in particular always seems to be a misstep or two away from being a nihilistic masturbatory session for unprocessed immaturity. And yet here, Jakarta manages to be unrelentingly, mercilessly bleak, and yet somehow also funny and sweet and charming. The story allows you to empathize with people that, had someone just told you about their personalities, you’d probably never approach. It hands you existential questions with a sympathetic and regretful pat on the shoulder, not because it feels guilty, but because it knows you’ve been avoiding these questions for too long. I know this sounds pretty damn vague, but for however corny this might sound, Jakarta is a text to be experienced, not explained.

Maybe it is just me. Maybe this text comes along at the perfect (worst?) time for me. In the interest of disclosure, I am Latino, I am on medication to treat depression, I am a socialist, I am a former athlete and gambler, and I am living and writing this review while under stay at home orders to try and avoid the attentions of a global pandemic. When you read Jakarta, you will understand why all of that is relevant on the surface, but the reason I bring it up is that if we are going to consider that “good” may just be entirely subjective, then maybe this text is just letting me indulge that particular combination of young man’s angst and aging man’s bitterness, the parts of which I am just old enough to have a foot in.

Farther along the coast, beyond the ravines, the sky glows with a dirty light, like halogen lamps about to give up the ghost.

It takes a text like Jakarta, I think, to remind us of the purpose of literature, or perhaps the multi-faceted nature of that purpose. The purpose I speak of is empathy, the willingness and desire to recognize and experience (however second-handedly) perspectives that are not our own. Literature, like pretty much any art, is an act of understanding that we are not alone, that we want to be recognized and want to recognize in turn. And that recognition is not reserved for wholesome, or even bittersweet, experiences. If anything, we need solidarity and acknowledgment more than ever when we are isolated, when we are being oppressed and abused, when we are being fed narratives that are meant to distract us, deceive us, or render us powerless.

Addendum to idea: when I ask for my boulevard to have its very own median and for this median to be fitted in turn with a row of banana trees, Dos Bocas banana trees, the Secretary for Hydraulic Resources and Social Wellbeing gives me a tender look and exclaims: Don’t push your luck.

So have I stumbled upon an answer then? Is that what makes Jakarta a good piece of fiction? It’s probably as good an answer as I am capable of at the moment. The fact is that it is a wonderfully cathartic text, in the truest Aristotelian sense, one that tackles extremely difficult and unfortunately poignant subject matter and handles it with supremely gratifying deftness. To be clear, it is not a book that is going to appeal to everyone. But it’s also the kind of book that makes you realize what a damn shame that is.

Jakarta is available now through Coffee House Press.

Book Review

Unearth [The Flowers]

by on April 30, 2020

Written by Thea Matthews
Review by Sarah Bethe Nelson

The natural world of botany creates a scientific boundary around these deeply confessional poems. Thea Matthews’s debut collection, Unearth [The Flowers], uses the Latin names for plant life to root the reader in lifespans that persist. The Latin names provide a musicality that establishes an earthbound rhythm of growth, destruction, and regeneration. In the first lines of “Prelude | Praeludium” Matthews says:

UNEARTH          the abuse : repetition of bruising the spirit
the silence two o’clock in the morning
the mother in silence
the memories of a child
the child  / mother                 stolen
the generations like weeds ossified
the apathy of those already dead with a pulse
the time said once more     ssshhh… don’t tell no body     

They alert us to the battle that will be fought. Here the rhythm is no nonsense, staccato, a call to arms. We hear the pulse. Unearth, is to dis-cover. Excavation, with its suggestion of the morbid, tells us to dig up the buried truths, to set the record straight. The “no body” teaches us to feel the invisibility of the abused, and places us inside her voiceless-ness. The no bodies also represent our dead, our ghosts, and our memories. Demons are dragged into the light of day, and even though they are terrible to look at, they are eventually rendered powerless. The fight is over and Matthews has won.

Growth and regeneration weigh heavy throughout the collection. The interplay between our physical bodies, the “boundaries” of our flesh, the shore, and the ethereal development of heart and mind crawl like vines among the battle to regain power after what feels like irreparable damage. Memories are as vicious as cacti thorns and as deadly as poisonous flowers. But in this world there are remedies to be found, a salve for wounds, leaves that comfort, and healing nutrients in the damp soil and warm sunlight.

In “Iris”, Matthews performs an autopsy of memory and emotion while delivering a scathing comment on the hypocrisy of religion in a country that values wealth and fame over all else. A place where children are the innocent victims and “will/ starve over-/ weight” while “others/ will die in/ denial/ more will die/ next to stran-/ gers respons-/ ible for/ excavat-/ ing little/ organs”. You can hear the drums crack in these fragmented lines.

The language, while stark and at times brutal, retains a lyrical quality, the imagery both horrifying and beautiful, the textures tangible. You feel and see the story vividly. The petals unfold into an unknown world, propelled by the laws of nature, laws that lie outside of the body’s power. The use of space on the page literally makes the reader breathe and prevents crowding the growing thing before their eyes. The spaces slow the tempo and build the tension.

 In this collection the bull is called she, the flesh a boundary to the outside world like the shore stops the sea. It’s beneath the surface that salvation grows. The inner mirrors the outer: “as above so below/ as without so within” we are told in the opening lines of “Nopal Cactus.” It reads like an incantation, you almost hear the chorus singing it throughout the poems, reminding us how to fix our gaze, and how to steel ourselves for what is to be endured. It sets us up to grow anew, stronger and more resilient with every revolution.

We come to see that our trials and fears are the perennials. Are we replanting and cultivating our pain over and over, year after year? Our lives, our stories, what we create, are the annuals. There are seasons for our pain but seasons do end. Our bodies and souls regrow with the passing of time. This truth, Matthews seems to be saying, is an eternal one.

When we reach the annuals the rhythm shifts noticeably. The pace steadies and breathes, no longer fighting. In the midst of the eternally recurring we register the pulse of Matthews’s voice. Somehow “kill” rhymes with “healed” and we have reached momentum. The scars show but the battle and the mourning are over. In all of their quiet power and glory, the leaves unfurl.

There are moments during reading Unearth [The Flowers] when you feel how tightly Matthews holds these poems, her cards still very close to her chest. You wonder if what seems to be strict sequencing in order to control the reader’s emotional response could have been loosened to allow the poems to fully blaze and stun. Could they have grown more wild if not contained so closely? It’s possible, but for now I choose to trust Matthews’s vision, her tremendous strength, her devastating honesty, and the beauty of her words, each one a living thing reaching far into the Earth and stretching ever upward to the clear and healing light.

Unearth [The Flowers] is available for pre-order now through Red Light Lit.

Sarah Bethe Nelson is a poet, songwriter, and musician living in San Francisco. You can read her poetry collection, Illuminate The Ruins, which is available on Amazon. Or listen to her three albums Fast-Moving Clouds, Oh, Evolution, and Weird Glow (released by Burger Records) on Spotify, iTunes, or Bandcamp. Her book and music are also available at sarahbethenelson.com.

Book Review

Materia Prima

by on February 13, 2020

Can it be said that awe is an underappreciated emotion? I’m sure we’ve all got at least one friend that uses “awesome” as if it were going out of style (and let’s face it; it probably is and should). But I am talking about awe – that spine-shaking, finger-twitching, pupil-dilating experience of magnitude beyond one’s self. It is a sensation that ignites fight and flight. It is, maybe, the purest form of excitement, that moment balancing on a knife’s edge between dread and desire. Or, maybe, it is that knife’s edge splitting us in two, letting our halves drown in both extremes. I suspect that our current cultural lack of appreciation may have something to do with pride. Our egos get in the way, convincing us that humility is the same as weakness. Even when we are afraid of the awesome thing before us, our pride often blinds us to its full scale and potential of meaning.

and at the edge of the twenty-first century / anew
Narcissus and his double / clasped together / verging
on asphyxia / in rigid water /
locked / enclosed in green glass:
a Siamese fetus / in a test
tube /

These are the immediate thoughts I am left with after finishing Materia Prima, a collection of the poetry of Amanda Berenguer, one of Uruguay’s most renowned poets. This is the kind of text that you want to encourage egotistical people, especially those saturated in toxic masculinity, to sit down and just read. It is a beautiful, surreal read, almost oxymoronic. It is at once calm and intense enough to boil your marrow; it possesses the kind of fearlessness that can only be earned through facing true fear. If you’ve read any of my work on this website, then you know I have a deep-seeded attachment to the metaphysical, the cosmic, and the existential. Berenguer’s work plays those strings like a true maestra as she guides you through what I can only imagine was her own existential reckoning, and does so not as condescending instruction but as an invaluable lesson to the rest of us.

the gesture suspended adrift / taking measure of the world’s door / in the lapse / of thought’s pause / the exposed piercing amnesia shines / the Milky Way unknown.

“Materia prima” is a phrase from alchemy, referring to the concept of a base form of matter. It is, theoretically, the substance out of which all other matter is formed. It was largely dismissed as a concept when physics and chemistry overtook alchemy as the sensible branches of science. But the concept still exists; “materia prima” is still one of the holy grails of physics, even if the label is no longer used, and the search for it led to the discovery of the atom, the proton, the electron, the neutron, the quark, the neutrino, and still pushes the cutting edge of science to this day. Why am I explaining all of this? Because this is my review, and damnit if I am not going to spend a paragraph nerding out and talking about how amazing the choice of title is. Berenguer uses “Materia Prima” as the title for one of her more famous works, and editors Kristin Dykstra and Kent Johnson use it as the title for the collection, and I could not be happier. The concept connects on so many levels. It represents the connecting element of the largest and smallest scales, and resonates with us, we supposedly insignificant specks in time seeking deeper meaning in an unfathomably huge cosmos. It represents the eternal quest of the writer, trying to use beautifully imperfect language to reverse engineer sapient emotion and experience. It represents the effort of taking control of one’s own ego, breaking down all the constituent nonsense and hypocrisies and appreciating your scale and value as both what they are and what they could be. And the poetry of this collection is full of such explorations.

La Amaranta cree que es Madonna / y que lleva en sus brazos tatuados / un corazon verde como la luz de un semaforo. / San Jorge y Michael Jackson se le confunden.

For all of its impact on the conceptual side, Materia Prima does not disappoint on the technical side. Berenguer, continuing in her wonderfully deceptive contradictions, is both highly experimental and intimately structured. Some poems are akin to word searches or mathematical graphs. Others, like “Trazo” (Outline), use multiple text colors to create poetry within poetry in a way that is almost disturbingly elegant and simple. Still others, like “A Study in Wrinkles”, read almost alike prose poetry. On a very direct level, this means that the pacing of the text is enticingly variable. Each turn of the page has a reliable chance to bring innovation and a change in perspective. And yet, amidst all of that, Berenguer’s poetic voice is surprisingly consistent. The calmness I mentioned earlier is present throughout, even in moments of exhilaration, fear, or sadness. It is not calm in that it lacks emotions, or feels them in a stunted way. Rather, it is the calmness of letting yourself fully experience something, submitting to something powerful, knowing full well that you too are powerful and will emerge on the other side.

The notion of the divine / centers on a reality that is efficient / yet superhuman – whose mystery satisfies / darkness and infinitude. There’s neither blasphemy nor condemnation – there is poetry – word written – in the present / traveling across time.

For all the excitement this book stirs in me, it is something of a meditative experience. It is a strangely refreshing reminder that peace need not be stagnant or lacking in vitality. So often we are sold on the promise of conflict as the vehicle for inspiration and adrenaline. And, to be sure, Materia Prima does more than its fair share of wrestling with conflict. But there is a harmony here that I didn’t know I’d been missing. Or that I’d needed. I love most every book that I review (I wouldn’t be reviewing it here otherwise), but this is one that will likely go into my yearly rotation of things that require a return journey.

Materia Prima is available now through Ugly Duckling Presse.

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