Book Review | Page 10 | Angel City Review

The Women, by Ashley Farmer

Ashley Farmer’s The Women (Civil Coping Mechanisms 2016) is many things: the result of unpacking and repacking research, a careful methodical exposure of the subjugation of women, a call to action, and a book of poetry. Farmer takes fragments of information from the results she encountered as she searched women-related phrases and presents the reader with entries that do not regurgitate the research but collates and engages with the results.

In many ways, The Women is not just another collection pointing out the existence of a problem. Its poems warn us about the danger of treating women as subservient, but they are also calls to action, encouraging us to reexamine our perspectives on women and encouraging women to be proactive in defining their images for themselves. Though this collection is about women, it is not merely written for women. Farmer’s poems offer a how-to guide that moves away from “just another woman complaining” and suggests solutions through active “chopping up, stitching together, and writing through the texts.”

One of the major strengths of Farmer’s poems is the variation in style and structure since she presents fragments that we can then take and add our own personal experiences or observations. The book is divided into three sections where she plays with the notion of time by dealing with the past, the present, and the future. Each section elaborates on how women were seen, how they are seen now, and ends with an argument for how women should be seen. The idea of time is also emphasized with the different poem styles: prose poems, list poems, and narrative poems. The diverging styles offer us different ways of viewing and addressing the way in which women have been undermined and rendered powerless.

What I found to be more compelling about her entries are the ones that almost read like a list. The repetition of key phrases like “women are” or “women fall” reminded me, as a woman, of many instances where I have heard those same phrases being directed at myself or at others. Though the book is not extremely long or difficult to comprehend, there were times where I had to step away from it because of the reminded that, even in the twenty-first century, women are still subjected to oppression by both men and women. I see rejection of women online and in person and it saddens me how we often fail to see it. Farmer’s poems shed a light to the areas of subjugation women face —areas that might go unnoticed and as a result get perpetrated over and over again. One of the two epigraphs in the collection illustrates how we sometimes fail to recognize these small instances:

Q: “Why has society always been hard on women?”

A: “Society hasn’t always been hard on women. Hope I helped!”

—Exchange between strangers, Yahoo! Answers

No, it didn’t help. The individual who answered the question chose to ignore a question that could have had many answers. Though answering a Yahoo! question will not solve the ongoing problem of women being perceived as unassertive, unable to think for themselves, and dependent, providing a proper answer is one step in the right direction. At least, I think, Farmer would agree.

The Women is available now through Civil Coping Mechanisms

The Sky Isn’t Blue, by Janice Lee

Bear with me for a moment.

Have you ever been in group therapy? Group therapy has a stigma, partially deserved and largely undeserved, for being this boring, sad assemblage of people half-whispering self-help mantras or trying to find their collective “happy places”. But do you know what the real purpose of group therapy is? Empathy. In moments of depression and confusion, it is almost impossible not to feel an intense abandonment and persecution, as if the insanity of the world has turned its whimsical focus on you and you alone. Group therapy is meant to reveal to the individual seeking help that they are much more than just an individual; to lift the veil blocking out light and sound and connection with other people, many of whom are experiencing eerily similar pain and perceived isolation.

Why do I bring this up? Because Janice Lee’s The Sky Isn’t Blue is a beautiful exercise in empathy born of shared experience. Typically authors are discouraged from being brave with their work, especially now when most of us are expected to churn out models from and for the assembly line. But this book tries to be so many things at once that it is a miracle it isn’t crushed under the weight of its ambition or the sheer number of concepts it brings to the table. Here are just a few:

This book is confessional. The language alternates between hesitant and reserved and vomitous and unfiltered. It speaks with the voice of one who has a great deal of difficulty divulging the personal information at hand, and with the voice of one who holds her hand over flame anyway, expelling the admissions out some deep seeded need. “Tide Pools & Rain”, for example, is, to me, a beautiful treatise of guilt and the acceptance of emotional vulnerability.

This book is metaphysical. Is the book made of essays? Poems? Short stories? Yes to all, and no to all. The speaker(s) sits in a perpetual stillness between violently contrasting dichotomies: pain and pleasure; hope and memory; elation and grief; suffocation and isolation; empirical observation and sublime hallucination. And yet neither the stillness nor the boundaries between the dichotomies are impermeable, to the speaker’s wonder and terror. “Mornings in Bed” encapsulates this succinctly, taking one of the simplest throwaway moments of your day and using it to highlight the madness of opposing forces.

This book is explanatory. The text is inevitably drawn back to a state of defending poetry, defending poets, and defending expression. The work needs you to understand what it means to write, to write poetry, what poetry is, and what an author is. Or, perhaps, the work is going to do everything it can with the English language to try and explain it to you. And the way the work goes about this is not using textbook definitions or even elaborate rules; the book does its absolute damndest to induce sensory experiences. You can be told fire is hot, but it does not prepare you for touching flame. “The Salton Sea” is as much argumentative as it is a compilation of memory, switching back and forth between poignant citations and symbolic recollection.

I would hope that any potential reader could see the empathetic value in such a work. Lee is expressing a great deal of what it is to live as a writer, and not the cliché stereotypes of the mopey half-bum or the misunderstood genius. She explores what it can be like for someone whose mind has intimately experienced the existential crises that can arise from confronting the nature of the world around you. She explores the frustration and maniacal joy of trying to express transcendence with mortal language. But critically, she seems to never ask for sympathy. This is not a social media post begging for attention or meaningless platitudes. It is an intimate look into a mind “touched” by some Hegelian sense of spirit and possessed by a need to make a proper record of what it sees.

If it isn’t clear by now, I highly recommend this book. It is easy to read and yet wonderfully complex, giving you ample reason to pick it up again and again.

The Sky Isn’t Blue is available now through Civil Coping Mechanisms.

The Strangest by Michael J. Seidlinger

The Strangest is a clever 21st century reimagining of the existentialist classic, The Stranger by Albert Camus. Michael J. Seidlinger (most recently the author of The Face of Any Other) has taken the difficult task of entering into a dialogue with a text that is regarded as a masterpiece of the 20th century, and surprisingly, has breathed new life into it. The novel follows the same narrative arc that the classic follows and the themes of existentialism and “outsiderness” roam aplenty here as well. Where The Strangest differs from The Stranger, however, is where it actually shines. Neither homage, pastiche, or simple parody, the novel paints a remarkable depiction of the way we communicate and function within society today and our culture’s over reliance on social media to fit in.

The novel follows the anti-social and despairingly ineffectual Zachary Weinham who works at a retail store and carries on a vague, mostly ambiguous, relationship with a girl named Veronica. Instead of playing an active role in society, Zachary spends most of his time obsessing over a social media presence he has created for himself by the name of “Meurks” (an obvious nod to Meursault from The Stranger). Through Meurks he records nearly every social situation he encounters in his day via a social media post. Zachary is more interested in the comments and likes he receives as Meurks than the actual interactions he has with characters like Veronica, his work colleagues, or the shady Rios. The notion of people connecting more with their digital selves than their actual selves is where Seidlinger really captures the current social media milieu brilliantly. By creating a digital “alter ego” it also adds a feeling of dynamism to a character that for all intents and purposes is lethargic and apathetic. As the novel carries along (albeit slowly and in a daze the first 50 pages or so) a series of events and odd friendships lead Zachary to commit murder and must suffer the consequences. Sound familiar? Sure.

Given that the novel follows the same emotional beats and a similar narrative arc as the work it is in conversation with, it is told with enough stylistic flair and filled with a contemporary idiosyncratic anxiety that keeps it feeling fresh. Seidlinger employs the same short, staccato like sentences that are prevalent in The Stranger but formally Seidlinger gives us brief little vignettes, which are set into the chapters of the novel. Sometimes the vignettes are 100 words long. Sometimes they are 500. The vignettes are emblematic of a kind of piecing together of “truth” that Zachary goes through in the novel. Sometimes painfully insightful – sometimes rambling and inconsequential – the vignettes are a nice stylistic touch that let us into the fractured and socially disconnected mind of our modern day Meursault.

Much like Seidlinger’s millennial contemporary Tao Lin, he shows us that despite all the opportunities social media gives us to connect, sometimes we are left feeling alienated, hollow and utterly disconnected from society. The Strangest successfully taps into the disorienting “otherness” that was so compelling in The Stranger and creates a harrowing vision of 21st century life. If Seidlinger is onto anything at all here, we’re all fucked.

The Strangest is available now from OR Books.

www.michaeljseidlinger.com

www.orbooks.com

“Digby’s Hollywood Story”, by Thomas Fuchs

In an age of literature written for television and movies, an age of sequels and reboots, and an age of selfies, one wonders at the cultural relevance of storytelling through the written word. No, I don’t think visual mediums will replace literature in the way that video cassettes, DVDs, and the Internet were supposed to ruin the cinematic experience. But after reading Thomas Fuchs’ “Digby’s Hollywood Story”, I can’t help but consider the significance of story itself.

This novella is a tease, the kind of tease that excites and frustrates, but which leaves you with a generous taste of profundity. The elements are all present for rich, melodramatic noir: a down to earth fella with a badge and a nose for trouble; mysterious dames that radiate seductive power and vulnerability; big money and big cover-ups; a sudden, suspicious event with dire potential consequences for our hero. But embedded in it all is a commentary so meta that it leaves your expectations in a chalk outline.

Fuchs has made a grandiose point about the stories we tell ourselves in a wonderfully subtle and ironic way. He handles his noir with care, knowing you’ve read The Maltese Falcon or The Killer Inside Me, luring you back into the genre with the light and shadowy hand of slow-burn tension. Then his twist emerges, and it is one that should have been painfully obvious, but its cleverness lies in the fact that the reader blinds himself or herself to the truth of the matter. The story knows you want to be deceived, that you want to be Digby, at the center of some grand illusion where only you can save the day and get the girl and mete out justice.

This novella is very much worth the read, whether you are a casual reader or someone with a personal library. The writing is, like Digby himself, straight-forward and direct. It delivers its atmosphere and tone with a minimum of fuss and it avoids the excesses that can plague so much of crime noir. Despite the short length, the story manages to take its time and develop its protagonist in a very compelling way, and it achieves this through not wasting time in anything that is not needed to move forward. Moreover, the commentary provides a layer of depth that is valuable to anyone with the creative impulse, especially where storytelling is concerned.

But, and consider this your fair warning, be prepared to consider this story’s implications for the culture we live in today. By the end of the read, you may very well be left wondering if you have been wasting time trying to get your life to fit a cliché narrative.

Digby’s Hollywood Story is now available through Roundfire Books