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A Review of “Round Trip” by Kevin McLellan

Sunday, January 2nd, 2011

Spencer Dew

The strangest thing about this limited-edition chapbook is the name on the cover, singular, Kevin McLellan. Never mind that the cover design is such that “and…” is wedged between his two names, what’s missing is any other name, like, for instance, the names of any of the fifteen women with whom he collaborated in the writing of these poems. Round Trip—its title tickling epistolary associations—is a collection of co-written pieces, presumably sent back and forth, two poets’ efforts polished, ultimately, into one poem. At the end of the text, McLellan says, in a note,

What I find most exciting about the art of collaboration is the heightened level of individual and shared accountability (while creating the collaboration and afterward) for a creation born out of more than one imagination, and that this knowledge of accountability, a memory, exists somewhere in the mind when one also creates alone.

It’s a strange note, in lieu of any explanation of process, but we must assume it holds some importance for the writer whose name is on the cover. The other poets are identified in connection with the poems they co-wrote in the table of contents, and there are biographical notes for each, but the poems themselves are present, in the text, with only their own titles, the organizing principle here being that all of these are equal parts of a single, unified whole, and that what unites them is the process and one party to said process, Mr. McLellan.

The first poems each feature a “you” and an “I,” male and female notions—the recruit whose beard gets shaved the “”jam-/maker he-wife,”  but soon these conceits fall away and, moreover, the poems exhibit a wide stylistic and tonal range. What, precisely, holds them together, as a unit, a collection? Only the collaboration, and that with a motley crew of poets, who, judging solely from the work on these pages, have their own distinct voices and strengths, somehow aped or harnessed by McLellan, who must be a chameleon to collaborate at this pace.

The Jessica Bozek co-written “[for a postmaster],” for instance, with its “erase of curlicues/ & girdles. this bit-o-honey,/ this battered syringe” contrasts with the pulsing narrative weave of Sue Nacey’s co-written title poem. There are poems rooted in place—from the shore of “After Phosphorescence” to the back yards of “Nocturne,” and poems rooted in personality and personal narrative, like “From an Adirondack Chair” with its chronicle of “This mid-July dusk, our anniversary,” which ‘thickens with mosquitoes” as the “sun tea with floating mold/ mimics scum/ on the lake.” Connie Donivan co-wrote that one, and the intimacy and force of the phrases insist that it matters.

What’s happening here is not appropriation or cut-up (though there is some of that, from one of Eisenhower’s papers, in one piece), but collaboration, two skilled poets combining to create each piece, here assembled under one, main, over-arching, male name. So the reader is left with an uneasy feeling. There’s something fishy here, in this arrangement, the male poet coupling with and claiming the offspring of this clutch of other writers. Maybe McLellan would argue that such collaborative process calls into existence a new identity, but, if so, this new, communal authorial presence deserves its own name—signifier of group effort as well as guarantor of anonymity. McLellan, for whatever reason, insists on hanging his own name over this assortment of collaborative work. If nothing else Round Trip should lead any reader to thoughts on the nature of collaboration, possession, relation and ownership—an always useful journey.

Official Seven Kitchens Press Web Site

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A Review of “Crossing the Trestle” by Jim Meirose

Monday, December 27th, 2010

Spencer Dew

“Starting down the loose dirt slope from the head of the railroad trestle steadying yourself on the rusted steel trusses,” Jim Meirose’s pocket-size collection of three short stories begins, the second person narrator dwelling on the details of the place where the ashes are scattered, the place where the memories are set: “There’s a spot down there you need to get to and you slide or half-fall down the slope to a gravel platform under the trestle by the water,” he writes, not so much, perhaps, painting a picture of a location as making clear, in the telling, how well-worn this location, and the travel down there, are to the narrator. This smoothed style—like a wood tool that, with enough years, has come to naturally fit its users hand—distinguishes this little book. In the introduction, Meirose makes clear the ways these stories are metaphors for the act of writing, but he does so, again, in such a personal tone, intimate, that it is not excessive information but, rather, a tiny and perfectly flavored amuse bouche to awaken the reader’s palate for the meal to follow. Its taste is at once pastoral and post-industrial, a celebration of life and a meditation on death: “At the head of the trestle the steel’s bolded into the concrete, the bolts each enter a star of rust; under the trestle you stand by the black water, the strong-smelling mud, the rubble and briars.”

A boy claims to listen, through a machine, to the voice of his dead mother, in one story, and in another, a woman works the counter of a fuel station on a highway slipped from most folks’ maps by the imposition of an interstate. The woman tries to sell “snack-sized pies in small foil pans on a tray in the hazy glass case at the register” to those few passersby who cross paths with her, but the piece isn’t just a study of contrasts between speed and ease, the new world and the lost, there’s something angrier, even if it is a simple and innocent anger, in the woman’s action—suffice to say, the pies aren’t precisely edible; they’re certainly not made out of fruit. There’s rebellion and humor in these pies and in these pieces of fiction, but there is a gaping sense of loss just under the trestle, just down the highway. As the boy with the machine says, dazed by revelry at the very idea of what it might be like, to talk to the dead, to have the past to experience again: “Thrill, goosebumps, the hot water in the tub, close eyes, Mother what do you have to say, Mother what would you have to say if you could really be here—” But it is just one voice, less young than before, speaking in the dark, one man skittering and sliding down the gravel banks to stand where there’s a better vantage for looking back at the past.

Official Burning River Web Site

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A Review of “Meet Me at the Met” by Eric G. Müller

Monday, December 13th, 2010

Spencer Dew

“I walked up St. Marks to Cooper Square through the slush and snow, catching the almost empty subway up to 57th. A man in pin stripes with an attaché case on his lap was reading a newspaper. The heading, Gonzo Journalist Thompson Kills Self, caught my eye. Fear and loathing leads to a bad end, in Las Vegas or anywhere else.” This is the narrative voice of Meet Me at the Met, a character named Clarence, a creative writing instructor with a novel coming out, left by his wife, estranged from his daughter, wishing he “were as skilled in navigating through the zodiacal adventures of my own destiny as Odysseus could through his,” or, at another point, wishing he “could rap like Tupac, or his deceased nemesis, the Notorious B.I.G. I take out my pen and notebook, hoping to slam a few power words onto the page, or at least to glean what’s irking me today.” Clarence is trite, self-important, and, as his constant attempts to drop names navigate the “zodiacal” straits of what he elsewhere calls “refined culture,” more than a little bit dumb. His stupidity finds expression in puffed-up bromides and, more unfortunately, in a vacuity of perception. He goes to the Metropolitan Museum because, he insists, “art rejuvenates. True art is embodied spirit; and the spirit never sleeps, but always burns on and on,” and, while there, he writes, and, in so doing, he manages to convey nothing like rejuvenation or spirit. Rather, what readers must endure is a great deal of writing about writing, on the level of:

I want to find a place to write.

I click my ballpoint pen, ready to reexamine my forgotten resolution.

I just want to write, and see where it leads me. It’s what I always tell my students in the creative writing classes: ‘Write, every chance you get. It’s a means of self discovery. The act of writing will lead you as much as you lead it.’

I will continue to write, because it’s what I must do, even if it is only in short, sporadic spurts, and even if I don’t fully know why.

I’m ready and alert, with not a clue of what to write. Everything about this project is vague; except for the existential notion that I want to uncover the reason behind my present condition and explore a segment of my life.

I cast my pen’s red line into the page-pool, letting my thoughts slowly reel out into the center of possibilities. I’m a fisher waiting for a bite.

No thoughts come. That’s ok. I’m used to it… I’m waiting to find out what’s on my mind.

I take my pen and go over the letters and numbers until the date stares boldly back at me.

Now I know what drove me to the Met with such inexorable force; why I had to write. It was more than an exercise in self-development. It was more than mere journaling (though it could serve as the groundwork for a memoir).

Indeed, things happen, and, at the Met, after coffee, he writes about them. Müller, who is identified in his bio as the author of a collection of “old and new poetry written mostly while traveling or drinking coffee,” makes his narrator a bit of a caffeine addict, not that there is any trace of tweak or rush in these pages, just lots of mentions of buying and drinking coffee. Among the things that concern him are traumatic memories (“I’m nailed to the spot by the pounding knowledge of a resurfaced episode—a wound, left to fester for years without the necessary attention. Memories tend to return in altered states, popping up at arcane, though seemingly random moments.”), a school scandal that nearly cost him his career, an acid attack against his girlfriend, his daughter’s eating disorder (about which his heartfelt response is “I felt stupid, ignorant, and helpless, though it was obvious that the popular images of women—as expressed in the media—had something to do with it. Moreover, my observation that girls who suffer from anorexia or bulimia often fail to live up to their potential had me worried.”), and, of course, his wife and why and how she left him. We do learn that she is a pretty perfect match for poor Clarence, however, as she, in a characteristic example of this book’s use of dialogue, explains how, exactly, she first consummated the lesbian affair that would lead to the ruin of her marriage:   “It was terribly hot and we often lay half naked in her loft,” she says. “In our sleepy, steamy state we sometimes satisfied ourselves, a bit like in Otto Dix’s painting in the Neue Gallerie—you know the one—Dix’s Two Girls on the bed, masturbating. Then, one day we did it to one another, and, yeah….” Really? Is this how an ex-wife talks to her ex-husband, about this? And would she really use the artist’s last name twice in such a quick span of time?

It is impossible to have any sympathy for either of them, though the ex-wife is blessedly absent most of the time. Instead, we have to deal with Clarence—are trapped, frankly, in Clarence’s head. Faced with a long queue snaking outside the renovated MoMA, our narrator expresses his frustration, that he needs to see the new arrangement inside, has “a need to know, to give my two-penny bit on the Mecca of modern. Artspeak on the subject is flourishing in all the intellectual circles; and both my higher and nether nature is vying for the MoMAment to add my thoughts to the rest of them.” Or ducking into a room of Degas pieces, here’s our narrator smugly sighing that he needs to “find my medicinal dose of art for the day.” Oh, and there’s that moment when he vows “to do my share in the protection of refined culture throughout the world as expressed through the arts, sciences and religion—the trinity which, in its unity, will guarantee the survival of a civilized world based on loving human interrelationships.” This is what I mean, in part, by dumb: here is a book devoid of contemplation or thought but that bills itself, on every page, as some kind of contribution to, well, the literature of contemplation. And here straw-man narrator Clarence can’t shoulder all the blame. In a preface—seemingly written to warn readers off from the book to which it is attached—the author writes, “Through Clarence’s engaging and interacting with the museum’s treasures, the novel has almost become a companion book of sorts for those seeking to find an intimate and personal relationship to the visual arts.” Again: really? And why the “almost” and “of sorts”?

“I love words,” Clarence insists, “especially when I am distressed. They come flying, or well up like fishes from the depths. I’m obsessed by them. When I’m feeling down, I go for the dictionary instead of the bottle,” which is as close as we get to any example of this. Words, we’re told “need to be fed, taken out, talked to, put to work, enjoyed… Wards in the word infirmary are filled with ailing, wounded words,” but we don’t much sense, from this manuscript, of this supposed investment in the language. Instead, we get more of the narrator’s self-important prattle. Likewise, while the book is stitched around visits to an art museum, we get non-descript descriptions or mere passing mention of works of art. Tiny monochromatic pictures of artworks at the Met are included, but these only highlight the problem of how invisible these works of art are within the text. “Kiki Smiths’ intriguing Lilith,” is mentioned, for instance, at just that speed, on page 63; six pages later Clarence scribbles some notes about how a teacher leading a group of schoolchildren “missed a pedagogical moment” by now telling her class “an imaginative story of what she sees in the painting…. I’m reminded of the precocious little girl who was puzzled by naked Lilith, hanging upside down from the wall. Maybe we can only have a semblance of faith if we turn ourselves upside down and inside out,” he writes, “Modern life does that to us.” A photograph of Lilith, in situ, follows, but—really?—what kind of sense can the reader be expected to make from those lines. Other, of course, than that the narrator has never looked at this piece of art.

This disturbing lack of consideration—lack of, to use the author’s own terms, “engaging and interacting”—of individual pieces of art carries over into a lack of distinction between various artworks and various responses to them. As we’ve seen, there is an inchoate hope that religion, art, and science “will guarantee the survival of a civilized world based on loving human interrelationships,” which seems, especially in a novel chock-a-block with references to 9/11 a bit naïve. There are also juxtapositions that simply do not strike our earnest fool of a narrator, as when he realizes, “with a chuckle,” that a group of costumed children have “all succumbed to the charms of J. K. Rowling’s latest: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Dressed in the weird and bizarre outfits of their favorite characters, they sit transfixed and at one remove from reality. I’d quite forgotten about the midnight release parties held at thousands of bookstores throughout America and the world in honor of her fifth book, a tome of over eight hundred pages.” There is a small photo of a statue of Gertrude Stein below that, but, rest assured, our narrator has “quite forgotten” whether there is any difference between these two authors and their work. Both, after all, are part of that “trinity” which will save “human interrelationships,” which, surely, are things that involve lots of writing in notebooks in museums.

Not that what might be called politics, or history, doesn’t enter into the picture; it’s just that, as with all other pictures, Clarence can’t focus on the details. At the start of the invasion of Iraq, our narrator improvises what he takes to be an Islamic prayer ritual, prostrating himself before a mihrab in the Asian Art Wing. When confronted by a security guard who points out that removing ones shoes isn’t generally accepted in the museum, Clarence makes the case that “It’s not much different than artists setting up their easels and copying masterpieces.” Really? Really? This, it seems to me, could be the germ of a major claim about the function of art, about the act of museum-going, etc. But Clarence just blabbers it out there. I, for one, was amazed his shoes didn’t get “quite forgotten” as he wandered off to his next cup of coffee and therapeutic scribble session.

This is a very bad book, but it will surely prove most painful to anyone who cares, even in passing, about art, museums, or writing, and will certainly prove crushing to anyone who values subtlety, the sound of language, or takes seriously the idea that art might change us in some deeper sense than merely serving as a prop for solipsistic daydreams. Clarence and his ex become reacquainted, predictably enough, at an art museum:

While examining how the art was arranged in the context of the walls, roofs, slanted ceilings, staircases, and so forth, it felt like I was being reacquainted with the Arietta I once knew, before we’d grown apart. By making each other aware of this or that detail we were simultaneously exploring who we once were and who we’d become. At the same time I was also aware of all the things that we’d never spoken about, and it felt like a widening abyss beneath us, filled with the pain we’d caused each other. Did she feel it too? Had she analyzed our relationship like I had—gone over each and every detail?

Good God, I hope she hasn’t, but then again, this is the woman who explained her lesbianism in terms of Dix, so of course she’s the sort who, if you’re standing beside her staring at Henri Rousseau’s The Sleeping Gypsy, will soliloquize:

Take a look, there are six stars in the sky, but the eye of the lion is like a seventh star—the brightest one. For me the lion has always stood for courage; and the number seven, which is recognized as a spiritual number in almost every culture, I see as representative of wholeness or unity of soul. However, the lion can also kill, or be killed, which would prevent the harmonic possibilities of the seven…

I wanted to like this book. I kept reading until the bitter end. I would like to write the most generous review possible, and I am afraid that is what I am doing. You will only be able to avoid hating this book if you find some trace of charm in the dull pomposity of its narrative voice. You will only be able to endure this wretched book if you can endure bludgeoning, bloodless passages like this, in reference to the installation The Gates, in Central Park:

Passing through the inaugural gate was almost a ceremonial act; I was conscious of their symbolic significance—gate and archways have always held an important place in mythologies, legends, folk tales, fables, as well as in social customs and traditions, expressing change from one state into another—inner and outer (expressions of initiation and transformation). They convey a beginning or an end, an entering and an exiting. As it is, we are continuously going through something, yet we’re mostly unconscious of all these little gateways. In between there are the more obvious occasions like the first day of school, the wedding day, respective graduations, transfers, promotions, or the first home run (not to mention unforgettable disasters, accidents, firings, break-ups, and so forth). But even within each day we traverse through wide and narrow, tall and tiny gates, mostly unconsciously. Gateways demarcate one state from another, and the grandest, most mysterious ones we call birth and death.

Official Eric G. Müller Web Site
Official Plain View Press Web Site

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A Review of “Carvings” by G. Emil Reutter

Saturday, November 20th, 2010

G. Emil Reutter

“I am here/ in the terrible now,” G. Emil Reutter writes, penning lines like those carvings for which his book is named. “We are very much like the old oak trees found in a public park. People stop and leave their marks on the trees, carving with a knife, initials, hearts with initials, a piece of someone left behind,” reads an introductory note. “These poems represent some carvings in my life, some minor others lasting.” This is a fair enough assessment. There are plenty of pages here that read like so much garbled graffiti, but, on occasion, there is a voice of urgency. “I am alive,” says a poem, and there are sirens outside, puddles on the pavement, cold water in the taps.

Much of Carvings is given over to reflections on nature, which is perhaps a mistake. “I cannot write of the great Greek goddesses/ or the numerous flowering plants and trees/ for I do not know their names,” Reutter writes. It wouldn’t hurt to learn such things, honestly. By which I mean, poetry gathers visceral strength from the infusion of particularities, the texture of language. Instead, we are given “yellow leaves tumble away/ naked maples stand guard/ a lone blue jay/ perches upon the branch/ hungry cats prowl/ about tree trunk,” which is both vague and staccato, bluntly dull. Too much of this book features lines like “feelings flow from me as of roots of a tree/ spidering through the hard earth in search of/ water, only my roots set firmly and always/ lead to you.”

Reutter is more at home away from all the trees, like, say, at the pharmacy, where “Pork roll,/ spam, hot dogs are in demand.” Or at the bar, amidst the “stench of stale beer/ cigarettes/ of bourbon and scotch/ sickening sweet aroma of/ syrup and burnt burgers” where the narrator realizes he’s “wasted my beer and can’t/ order another…another beer, another shot/ empty glass/ another wasted night.” The bars here all seem a bit better-noticed than the trees; Reutter has a sense for the exterior and interior details of such places, “Smoke-filled room/ blues plays on the box/ smell of beer and bourbon/ mixes with stale smoke/ cheap perfume and Old Spice./ A place of whatcould-/have-beens/ avoiding what is,/ as each glass of liquid gold/ changes reality and time.” Not that there isn’t real beauty to be glimpsed, whether passing quickly in an airport concourse or sitting outside a café smoking menthols, or writhing to the rhythm of summer in the city:

Asphalt bakes in the street
as roof tar bubbles.
Sweat beads drip along her arching spine,
chest heaving forward—
moaning and alone.

Such evocative moments stand out, and deserve, frankly, their own, much narrower and better edited book, free of such half-formed musings as “if Rockwell/were alive today/ what magazine would/ his painting grace/ what would he paint?” The real poetic moments tend to get buried in the bad writing, the clichés, but, if one persists, there are those moments, like the knife-gouged marks in the tree declaring “I am here,” “I am alive.” Consider this small piece, in full—nothing about Rockwell here, nothing about not knowing the names of trees. No, here is something raw, vulnerable, and real:

Mom
In the middle of the night, I wake thinking I hear you
call my name. Stumbling down the hallway I see the
living room; I am not there, you are not here. You always
thought you were a burden; I told you not so and on these
nights when I wake, I look for you still and I miss you. It is
two in the morning and I am thankful for those last few years
we spent together in the solitude of night; sharing your
life with me as the light in your eyes slowly dimmed. Helpless,
I listened, hoping I had not burdened you.

Official G. Emil Reutter Web Site
Official StoneGarden.net Publishing Web Site

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A Review of “The hairpin tax” by David Appelbaum

Saturday, November 13th, 2010

Spencer Dew

milkweed steam
blows across the fuchsia
fly caught in courtship

container later
an amber wand
electrics hair

fear another
white Turk brain
bring an amulet

This is “Coming revolution,”  in full, from David Appelbaum’s The hairpin tax. Beginning with a piece entitled “Origin of the work in art”—where we go from caves to “old masters” to “this lidded tomb”—Appelbaum’s little chapbook piles the language on thick, “black syrup/ Winnebago” (14) and “razor-back sleuth/ ever-dying twin” (9) and “fake brown vinyl makeup/ leans along against a stud/ scored with cigarette burns.”

These “haunted trash words” can be, sometimes, rich, with seemingly intentional puns—“as on the goad ahead”—and crafted couplings of words—“edifying skirr of a fan,” “jagged edge along/ thistle spines a comb.” “Swagger craft at/ the new dame,” Appelbaum says, nicely, “Tucson rust-pocked/ arch roost/ but neither local nor/ germane.” As poems, however, such fragments don’t always click into place, leaving some pages of The hairpin tax reading too much like they’ve been produced by the tumble of the bingo hopper. Fair enough, especially as the text ends on a note at once self-reflexive and inconclusive, a longing left gaping into white space on the page. But then Appelbaum has to go and ruin it all, affixing a self-aggrandizing “Afterword,” which affects the reader like a chugged half bottle of cough syrup immediately after a meal, bludgeoning away all the earlier subtleties of flavor.

“The fragmentary poems are of flight, written in the full fury of movement from a known habitat to one full of strangeness,” Appelbaum insists. “The uncanny is their constant envoy. They enter into things at an obtuse angle and forget their origin, beyond good sense, beyond good taste and use of time.” It is such observations that go beyond good sense, that test the patience of readers, who should not have to listen to an author, whose poems we still hold in our hands and are capable of judging on their own visceral merits, go on about his own “excessively complex meanings.” More attention to the poems, and less to praising his own accomplishments, would have been a wiser path for Appelbaum to pursue.

Official Codhill Press Web Site

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A Review of “You” by Nuala Ní Chonchúir

Saturday, November 13th, 2010

Jessica Maybury

I find that I cannot lose myself in many novels. The world never seems to be entirely credible; the characters are never completely solid; the plot is predictable. I make myself sound like a book version of a snooty wine taster but it’s true. I come to books with expectations, and sadly I can never throw them away entirely. As an Irish novel, I thought You would be all misery-guts and poor-mouthing. It’s not. Suffice to say, I finished this novel in almost one sitting, finding myself immersed in it as one is in luxurious, foamy bathwater.

The novel is told in the (seemingly forbidden) second person, and while I was waiting for there to be a point to this device, it never emerged. I didn’t find myself disappointed, however, as the novel had much more to offer than narrative ploys. You centres on a house by the Liffey river in Dublin, and a mouthy but sensitive ten-year-old girl who has a lot on her plate. Tragedy ensues. It is handled with gentle care and compassion, with humour and grace. This is what makes You such a welcome surprise to read.

The novel has many facets; elements of a children’s tale, of memoir, of a coming-of-age story. It is sharply drawn with the eye of a woman with a keen taste of timing and scene-setting, and with the secret inner ear of a poet, each sentence constructed with care and fitting in with the others in perfect balance.

An established Irish poet—see Portrait of the Artist with a Red Car, Tattoo/Tatu and Molly’s Daughter—this is not Ní Chonchúir’s first foray into fiction. She has story collections, Nude, To the World of Men, Welcome and The Wind Across the Grass. It is, however, her debut novel and a well-realised, believable one.

As an Irish novel, it is never entirely free from the shadow of the Irish literary tradition. In short, the tradition involves rural life, sombre themes and a lot of rain. How does You both conform and refute to this tradition? It ticks some of the right boxes in the pro camp: the themes and events are solemn, with a casual violence and matter-of-fact presentation that is both shocking and true to life, reminding the reader, to some extent, of the plays of Martin McDonagh…and that about sums it up. You breaks through the traditionalist stained-glass ceiling with a refreshingly modern and urban splintering and scattering of shards. It emerges in the 21st century, intact and with a new way of writing, of seeing, which at once heralds the novel as a focal piece of contemporary literature.

Official Nuala Ní Chonchúir Web Site
Official New Island Books Web Site

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A Review of “Snowing Fireflies” by Eric Beeny

Friday, November 5th, 2010

Jessica Maybury

First, hands down I would have to say that this is the most attractive collection that I have seen for review so far. The writing on the cover is hand-done, the paper is thick and good to touch, and the double lining makes the collection strangely resilient (having carried it in and out to work for about two weeks now, I should know).

Second, on the first read through, the writing is innocuous, beaming up at the reader in perceived innocence. The sentences are short and snappy, often simplistic in their construction, child-like. It’s the images that hit hard out of this undemanding groundwork. They punctuate the text like stark trees in snow:

Each morning, he went outside and carefully raised the umbrellas in her garden. They bloomed like flowers, big dark gray flowers, their hooked handles like roots dug in the soil.

On the second read through, I began to snatch at deeper meanings and plays on rhythm and connotations. The third reading confirmed that the collection is eminently quotable: “Her absence had grown fond of him”, “We ran outside in our pajamas and lay down in the glowing field, more of them falling, covering us”, “By sundown his needs were poisonous flowers the troop couldn’t identify without a survival manual”.

I liked this collection because of how easily it was assimilated into my own life experience. There are some things, however. Housekeeping notes. Well. Basically only one comment: the word ‘big’ is way overused. ‘Smiling big’, ‘giggled big’, ‘hugged him big.” It’s the only grating note in the piece.

I read somewhere about how reflections catch the world in microcosm. Beeny’s worlds are small and carefully formed, easy to ride along in your mind as you continue your way through life, dipping back into the stories again and again whenever the need should arise. A surprising, precious collection.

Official Eric Beeny Web Site
Official Folded Word Web Site

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A Review of “Lambs of Men” by Charles Dodd White

Friday, November 5th, 2010

Spencer Dew

“The night was cool, the wrack of the marsh heavy. A chevron of geese cut noisily overhead as they passed across a gibbous moon.” Such is the prose of Charles Dodd White’s tale of a man returned to Appalachia from the war, haunted by visions that “came back in grotesque shapes that were but masks of the waking world” and manning a military recruitment office next to a coffin shop. As with that symbolism, sometimes White lays on the language a little too thick in trying to conjure a lost time, a lost place:

By midday, he had come onto a wind-scoured road trafficked with every sort of commotion bound in or out of the Carolina Lowcountry. Even the occasional Model T truck gave a cheeky honk as it flew by, raising smell whirlwinds of dust. The daily mania of commerce in the vicinity of Beauford was a stark contrast to the regimented order of a training day on the island. Here, men and woman in sundry raced along the road, their colorful clothing whipped by the breeze. The variety was something of a poke in the eyeballs for Hiram, having been for so long accustomed to a shallowly deviating hue of green.

Such a paragraph, from the novel’s first chapter, exemplifies the problem that exists throughout; there is never a sense of an ease of phrasing—nothing here seems to have naturally formed itself into words, nor are any of these words particularly perfect. The poke in the eyeballs is the overwrought quality, the too-crafted description, the too-packed paragraph. And such language—rather than immersing readers in a the world of violence and death that White lays out for his protagonists, a father and son—distances the reader, discourages deeper wanderings into these mountains. “Hiram breathed out and let the preacher wince in the dusty sulk of the office made claustrophobic by the cigarette smoke,” for instance; such lines, rather than conveying an unshakable image, sound like tongue-twisters, a catalog of words, each too lovingly clung to for the wrong reasons. And the language occluded, leaving the hooch runner describes as having a “smile as wide as greed itself” invisible behind the cliché. White has his moments, sometimes, and some readers will surely be drawn into this tale, echoing as it does, albeit a bit too intentionally, certain tropes from Cormac McCarthy or Charles Frazer. There is a murder, a posse, a corpse that needs to be dug up. And there is an attempt at deep reflection on the mortality itself, though many readers will find the writing, along the way, to be like so many rusty bear traps scattered across their path.

Old ghosts kept to these mountains. In running from them, Hiram had thought he put them away, dispelled them somehow. But he now saw himself for the fool he was. Coming back into the hill country, he realized he was the one who haunted the land. Those ghosts, they belonged here more than he ever would.

Quite a lot of haunting, of several sorts, is happening here, but that most needful haunting of the reader by the word, of the story as something that lingers on, visceral, for the person who has read it—that is something White doesn’t manage to pack inside this book.

Official Charles Dodd White Web Site
Official Casperian Books Web Site

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A Review of “We know what we are” by Mary Hamilton

Saturday, October 23rd, 2010

Spencer Dew

This beautifully produced chapbook–the winner of Rose Metal Press’s fourth annual short story chapbook contest, judged and with an introduction by Dinty W. Moore–features an unsettling letterpress printed ribcage on the cover and deals out short pieces driven by free-wheeling first person voices and a surrealist logic anchored solidly in the concrete, such that, for instance, we have

I am a long coat, a black duster, the kind that hangs off your shoulders and brushes your palm. The kind that nicks the backs of your knees and parts open front and back to allow for movement. The kind of coat that makes you taller, kinder, ghost-like. I don’t know,

and

It’s one of those things like how a riddle works its way into the notches in your sinus cavity and lingers and infects and wakes you at night and you try every possible path to resolution, and still you can’t figure the answer. And still you are awake at four a.m.

What’s hypnotic about such passages owes much to the coupling of real-world particularity–in object, in description, in language, and in experience–to something vast and mysterious, some message relayed, as in another story in this collection, via coded dots and lines. We have a coat, a way of talking about the cut and hang of said coat, we have “sinus cavity”  and infection, we have this insomniacal pondering, and yet all of these pieces are like glass shards glued down onto a mosaic, and the pleasure of We know what we are is that this mosaic is never visible as a whole. We see an arch, patches of color, a pickup truck loaded into a pickup truck, but something–like the visions of a fever dream–remains always just out of reach.

Consider Bull Shannon, for instance, or Theodore Huxtable. Both are invoked repeatedly in this collection, and in some sense surely hover above it as guiding spirits. The text is prefaced with the acknowledgement that without “Malcolm-Jamal Warner and the creators and writers of The Cosby Show…I would be lost.” Yet a story like “Me and Theodore climbed to the top of the water tower because we were scared of the tremors beneath the dirt,” beginning “There is nothing wrong with lanterns under your skin” has little to do with The Cosby Show per se. Rather, the story titles featuring these names function more as joke intros or oblique glosses on the brief narratives that follow, reflecting, as well, the speed with which one image, in Hamilton’s work, move on to the next. A songbird is replaced by a fruit bat, Malcolm-Jamal Warner in Eskimo kit is transmogrified into a plastic bag full of silver buttons.

This alchemy is not unconnected to the oral, performative nature of Hamilton’s work.  She, with Lindsay Hunter (whose Daddy’s was reviewed in this month’s decomP) co-founded the Chicago reading series Quickies!, focused, as it is, on polished and entrancing live presentation of literature. These quick pieces have the ring, frequently, of texts intended to be read aloud, where, unmoored from the permanence of the page, their shifts, non sequiturs, and free associations play out to different effect, part of the small talk preamble and intermittent gaze of the stage magician pulling off something casually spectacular with a deck of cards. Or an audience volunteer and a handsaw.

“Many rips make one hole insignificant,” says the narrative of one wisp of a story, at once speaking to and exemplifying Hamilton’s sleight of hand. Precision in the display of randomness, this is skill behind We know what we are. From the plainly stated–“There is a certain faith in the body’s ability to heal. In the way a broken bone set correctly will find its way back together.”–to the fantastical–“I said take up your weapons and make your way into the belly of night. Slash apart her mud veil.” Imagine a stage magician who, amidst assorted nonchalant pyrotechnics and the seemingly spontaneous hat-based production of numerous rabbits and fruit bats, also makes appear on stage, in glimmering mist, the motley billing of a night court session while shimmying around in imitation of the freestyle dance of The Cosby Show’s opening credits–this is the sort of book that begs you to flip back to the front page of a short story just finished and riddle your way through it again. “Tremors?” you’ll say, “Like, Tremors?”

Official Mary Hamilton Web Site
Official Rose Metal Press Web Site

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A Review of “The 2010 Jersey Devil Press Anthology” by Eirik Gumeny, Editor

Friday, October 15th, 2010

Spencer Dew

“My teacher told the class that if we feel strongly about our stories that we should submit them to a publication. I’m submitting this one to Jersey Devil Press. I read that one of its main criteria for accepted submission is quality,” reads one of the pieces in this collection of stories, many of which first ran on the Jersey Devil Web site. The quality here is less anything like artistic quality and more like quality of place, the quality of a Taco Bell franchise, for instance, at once forgettable and rich with details that seem to demand an ironic gaze. This is a quality shared by narrators for disparate stories, a longing for the coolness of Bruce Lee movies and untoasted Pop-Tarts, or the hope “that the McRib sandwich would taste as good as it looked on the commercials…that the 11 herbs and spices represented a genuine mystery; that the individual locations were part of something larger than themselves, and that chains had discernable personalities.”

It is a hope unfulfilled, and most of the stories here are “haunted by nothing,” to quote another line. They feel, amidst the bluster of brand names and detritus of strip mall culture, like “When the Apocalyptic Armageddon of Y2K finally arrived, and not a damn thing happened.” One predominant sense is that we’re being presented, here, with exercise pieces, skits penned out at the spur of the moment, unplanned, winking a little too loudly at the porn industry or junk food. There’s a unpleasantly unfunny jokey-ness. And, maybe worse, an unsettling feeling of reading something unready, unfinished.

A notable and necessary exception is Kate Delany’s brief and tonic “Jersey Fresh,” a story which stabs at some of the problems plaguing all the other pages. “You just love how authentic and unpretentious everything is:  the hyper-laminated menus, the dump wait-staff, the enormous windows with a view of the highway on one side, of a brick wall on the other.” A story about a native returning to Jersey from California–obsessing, over scrapple and eggs, with veganism, raw diets–who can’t get enough of how everything is just “so Jersey” back in the Garden State. “For several minutes, you marvel over the chocolate chip muffin on the menu which no one, you insist, would ever eat on the West Coast and that’s what’s so great about being back here! No one gives a shit!” There’s a wisdom to Delany’s story, craftsmanship in her construction, a rage and a sympathy, real characters and real images. “Jersey Fresh” is a page and a half of real quality; it’s a pity the rest of the volume can’t measure up.

Official Jersey Devil Press Web Site

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