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A Review of “Zen, Mississippi” by M. David Hornbuckle

Sunday, August 22nd, 2010

Spencer Dew

“Can sitting make a Buddha? In the search for enlightenment, the knight of Christ wanders, but he is too weary to wander. The Buddha sits, but he is too restless to sit. The French philosophers read the German philosophers who read the Greeks who read the world directly, and is anyone enlightened?”

Zen, Mississippi concerns itself with such questions to the extent that it follows two generations of men wrestling with reality, fantasy, alcohol abuse, and existential malaise on a sliding scale from dissatisfied coping to outright terror. Patrick, the protagonist, has come to recognize that “Maybe he just can’t deal with normal life, normal ‘reality,’ whatever that turns out to be.” He suspects that “reality” is itself a kind of Zen riddle, but such logic is perhaps too heavily influenced by the fact that Patrick is taking advice from figures such as Monkeyman, a creature manifest, invisibly, from out of his own childhood imagining. Sitting on the handlebars of Patrick’s bike, Monkeyman lectures on the relation between “enlightenment” and everyday life, love and the Buddha, absurdity and the lack of distinction between internal and external worlds.

This is the tone of Zen, Mississippi, a novel that follows a father and son’s dual immersion in a fantasy world, “the parallel universe created by a childgod…where the absurd becomes rational and the rational becomes moot.” There is a more than sufficient amount of philosophical name-dropping and recurring meditations on the word “Zen,” all in the service of trying to describe and delineate the paranoia and hallucinations that befall these two men, generally after a few drinks:

The jukebox whirs and spits, zenzenzenzen, a motorcycle throttle; the bend of a whammy bar on an overdriven electric guitar breaks into a frenzied drumbeat. The deep vibrations stir him to move. He drains the last drops of bourbon from his glass and approaches the bar. Where once there was a redheaded Irish bartender, there is now a man-sized lizard with blood red skin wiping the counter surface with a stained white rag. Dobby is accustomed to this. For the last couple of years, all bartenders become this beast after a few rounds. And the old men at the bar become large apes, grizzle chimpanzees and brash orangutans grunting and screeching at each other in their various primate languages.

Just as one should beware the advice of Monkeymen, generally, when the denizens of a bar spontaneously morph into beasties, one should interpret this as a sign that it’s time to hail a cab for home.

This book, expressing “a debt of appreciation to therapy and 12-step programs”  in a note at the start, certainly has a therapeutic feel, focused, as it is, on the working out of very personal (reptilian) demons. But, in the end, there’s little sense of enlightenment here save that what starts drunk ends sober, still pondering the relations between “realities” so idiosyncratically personal many readers may find it hard to empathize, or follow.

Official M. David Hornbuckle Web Site

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A Review of “We Are Never as Beautiful as We Are Now” by Adam Gallari

Sunday, August 15th, 2010

Spencer Dew

“This used to be fun,” thinks one of Adam Gallari’s characters, pushing against pain to continue a run, on the verge of some new assessment of his present condition, some new relation to his past. Along with wary and would-be artists, this book is populated by baseball players and former baseball players, their position in the world a metaphor for the struggles faced throughout. The characters in We Are Never as Beautiful as We Are Now grapple with the fact that they are not now what they were before, and the reality that pleasure, love–even the framework of identity–exist, inaccessibly, in the past.

In these stories, memories get deliberately hazed through fiction or strong drink and nostalgia exerts a tug “for things lost that he’s never had the chance to experience,” because that which was once tasted and lost is too painful to contemplate. The men in these pages grow old, or come to the slow but sudden realization that they’ve already grown old some time ago, as they pant through the park trying to keep up with their image of themselves, or retch their guts against an alley wall in a vain attempt to keep pretending.

The banal tragedy of the passage of time is one of Gallari’s main subjects, with attention to the varied ramifications thereof, the small domestic betrayals, the perversions created by the slippage of the past. Two men lean against the same bar, contemplating different women, discussing different sports. A novelist of some dated fame waits for an aspiring writer to relay the details of his last night’s bedroom conquest. Gallari has a touch for describing the distance between people, for narrating the constant masquerade of denial and the collapse that happens after, when the masks slip, when the man can’t pick his head up off the bar or the father awkwardly advices his son about the future.

The writhing of consciousness find voice here, too: “You’ve tried not to think about her. You’ve tried to think of everything and anything else, but even filling your head with thoughts of possible distractions leads your mind to realize that it’s doing so just to distract itself, so you wonder if, now, it would just be easier to think about her.”

In the strongest story, “Chasing Adonis,” told entirely inside a second-person point of view, a man obsessed with winning back his ex-girlfriend seeks transformation through the gym, through abandonment of food, pushing harder and harder until his thighs bang against the treadmill safety bar. Denial here becomes fixation, a consuming task, doomed from the start to fail at its ostensible goal. The girl will never come back, and eventually the man’s knees will go. In the meantime, “You move onto tuna fish and skinless chicken breast, always plain,” as other Gallari characters move on to Johnny Walker or axing down maple trees. Such resistance may be futile, but the exertion of energy is, itself, a way of avoiding the issue. We Are Never as Beautiful as We Are Now, its title another cleverly angled take on time’s inevitable and inevitably destructive passage, highlights both the futility and the humanity of such protest.

Official Ampersand Books Web Site

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Reviews of “Assault on the Senses” and “Training the Problem” by Michael P. Ferrari

Saturday, August 7th, 2010

Spencer Dew

Assault on the Senses, a reprinting of a 2007 novel chronicling the travails of one Kalvin Gray, a college frat boy who starts the countdown for happy hour before he begins his first class and ends up–in no small part because he’s shuffling through life drunk, judged by most people as an asshole–framed for a sexual assault he did not commit. The conversational tone of the narration is its strength, though, at times, having a narrator who thinks idiotic thoughts and readily relays them to the reader can be a bit like following an assinine Twitter feed–“I hooked up with the Hot, Liberal Arts Chick. I’m fucking awesome.” Or, “It’s really hard to blow smoke rings. A lot of people say the trick is to use your tongue. Others say you can only do it by curling your upper lip downwards. I try both. Nothing.” Or the frequent assessment of assorted women as “friggin’ hot. Just plain hot.”

Yet Ferrari is able to turn Kalvin into an endearing character precisely because of this constant, stream-of-thought intimacy. The doofus who, early in the novel, is relishing his own classroom farts while simultaneously rhapsodizing about how much he loves “freshman girls in all their slutty, undressed goodness,” becomes a richly conceived character on the brink of, maybe, growing up. “At the risk of sounding like a teenage girl writing poetry for her English 101 class,” he says, before saying something he actually feels. “I mean, I’m starting to think that the reason I–not just me, but all of us–the reason all of us drink so much and sleep all day is because we’re just too friggin’ scared. We’re too friggin’ scared and stupid to look into the future, because we know we’re all totally unprepared, and we’re going to get eaten alive, not by the ‘real world’ but by life in general, and it sucks. It just sucks, plain and simple.”

Kalvin’s story continues in the novella “What Ever Happened to Kalvin L. Gray?” included in Training the Problem along with stories about blackmailing priests, a female narrator relaying the step-by-step details of her shooting death, a dog inspired to racial consciousness by watching John Singleton movies, some pure murderous viciousness, a stoner’s story of a crusty hotel hook-up, and a series of “Letters from the Emotionally Retarded.” Unfortunately, the tone here is more like early Kalvin, the guy who, in Assault on the Senses assessed “how serious” the charges against him were this way: “I realize there’s a good chance I’ll never get laid in Berkshire University again. I have almost a year and a half left before I graduate. Granted, my sex life is about as active as a one-legged runner, but the idea of being strictly banned from any possibility of sex is, well, scary.”

In Training the Problem the poignancy of emotional disconnection is too often dulled by the character of the narrators. While “haunted” by past relationships, racism, misogyny, emotional numbness or straightforward cruelty make these folks hard to take. As one, characteristic, narrator says of his situation: “No matter how charming you may be, there’s no way you can turn a story about your dick causing a super-tight vagina to split open and belch blood into a decent pick-up line.” This narrator, it should be noted, was trying to use the story to help win a “rebound” relationship. Not that Problem doesn’t also feature a strong tone of melancholy under all the belching and drinking, along with some reflections on growing older, but it misses the innocent notes sounded in Assault, like Kalvin’s pondering, in that novel, that if “Guys can ejaculate from their dreams; is it so hard to believe they can get worked up and let down by them as well?”

Indeed, the Kalvin Gray of the novella, “What Ever Happened to Kalvin L. Gray?” isn’t nearly as compelling as he was in Assault. The trappings are familiar, as the novella opens with Kalvin waiting for “death by dehydration,” surrounded by the same “crumpled cigarette packets, mangled and crushed beer cans and the standard half-empty waters I’ve come to use as ashtrays over the years.” His senior year at Berkshire University, still drunk, still widely considered an asshole, Kalvin again finds himself the target of persecution, though in this case the problem is the campus Women’s Center, campaigning–without regard to evidence–that he should be registered as a sex offender. Our protagonist discovers this fact when he prepares to dump a load of Women’s Center literature in the trash. “I felt almost righteous trashing pamphlets that indirectly trashed my penis,” he says, taking time to survey the pages enough to know that under the “garbage” about “the several different flavors of rape a girl can encounter” were “weepy statistics” and “numbers and facts that could easily be used to pad a feminist manifesto against the penis. Standard stuff you’d expect from the types of girls who probably insist on changing the spelling of women to ‘womyn,’ just so there’s no trace of men in their gender: stuff about men making more than woman in the world place, stuff about glass ceilings, shit like that.” Whatever you think of Kalvin’s tirade, it’s hard to imagine a man who, months before, ran into heavy legal trouble and the sort of crisis that might well wise a person up, to here be so dismissive and hostile. “Acquaintance rape?” thinks Kalvin. “I don’t even know what that is.” It’s either too much vitriol, or too little sense–in any case, there’s nothing here to care about, to empathize with. Along with that distance comes a falsity, as we, as readers, are expected to believe that this is the same narrator we came to know in some detail before, who can here say of himself, “Imagine a portrait of the stereotypical poor college student, pour a couple of unnecessary pints of alcohol into his bloodstream and put a comic-book thought bubble over his head with the word ‘Duh’ in it, and there I am.” Only, jarringly, there’s no irony in such self-assessment, and, sadly, instead of a comic “Duh” here Kalvin is saying “Acquaintance rape? I don’t even know what that is.”

Assault on the Senses is in every way a stronger book, but likely fans of it will check out the other as well, and perhaps, with enough such fans, Ferrari will return to Kalvin Gray in the future. Here’s hoping that characterization advances the poor guy a little, letting him learn a few things from those experiences that, as he says in Assault, “blew my brain open.” In Assault he uses this phrase to describe his last visit home, a revelation of sorts, or at least a nudge toward one. At the breakfast table, Kalvin, a twenty-one-year-old man, dug his hand into a cereal box, fishing for a prize:

I pulled my hand out with the toy in tow, little pieces of Apple Jacks falling and bouncing off the tabletop like hunks of flavored moon rocks falling to Earth. I tore into the plastic, fingers crossed for a T-Rex.

“Aw, dammit!”  I yelled in a fit. My mom, who was sitting across from me the whole time, who saw me probe an innocent box for a cheap plastic dinosaur, just looked up at me. “I already have the brontosaurus,” I explained to her.

Without notice, my mom stood up from the table, shook her head and said one thing: “When I was your age, I was already married and had a kid.”

Official Michael P. Ferrari Web Site
Official Blue Room Publishing Web Site

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A Review of “Adopted Behaviors” by James R. Tomlinson

Wednesday, July 21st, 2010

Spencer Dew

“That crap he’s readin’ got two dollar words and don’t reflect reality,” says a character in this chapbook, and the author is trying to get at this reality, as, for instance, at the story’s end, there’s a rape scene of sorts, described elliptically–“Interlocking fingers cup the back of her neck, thumbs press inward, hands squeeze. Veins display, blue lines map out and vanish”–and in institutional jargon with a dose of cynical swagger–“CSC (Criminal Sexual Conduct) is added to his file. Congratulations, you are now a registered sex offender.” The tone here is consistent throughout Adopted Behaviors, giving the sense that Tomlinson, who teaches prisoners, is keeping his own shoulders high and any emotional response (especially empathy with these very prisoners) tightly under wraps. The back cover promises that all the pieces inside are “related in some way to the human condition and/or prison experience,” which, when you consider it, already says a great deal about Tomlinson’s point of view. The “or” there points to a divide between the human and that which is other than, less than, human–a roiling, unredeemable mass of violent beings. And to maintain this dichotomy one needs a guard up, a front of aggression and bravado even at the level of language, which becomes a blunt and expressionless tool for bludgeoning a story into the pavement.

Included here are experiments in “flash memoir” revolving around perspective on possibly seminal events–some childhood hunting, an incident of running down a construction worker with a Ford Pinto–told from far away from any feeling on the things. There are also flash fiction pieces with kids setting up a sidewalk stand to sell Merlot in crystal glasses and a man whose Detroit tool and die job is lost to the Indian corporate giant Tata. These are stories about inertia, about lives bowled into the gutter and still rolling. There are outbursts of violence, too, none quite as brutal as the seemingly non-violent crashing of a wedding by a group of wounded women. A disposable camera and a toilet full of shit somehow seems crueler and more shocking than anything with bullets or shanks, but perhaps the credit for this is with the build-up. In one of the longer stories, where a marriage is still holding together despite a serious spat over the non-use of nasal strips, the husband develops a new habit, driving slow past a bus stop for a glimpse of a certain too-young girl. The lust itself, being a matter of passion, more or less, is left largely undescribed, but we are given a sampling of Tomlinson’s prose pugilism on the drive over:

He’s not running late; however, he does want to get to the corner of Samsa and Conner as quickly as possible. He folds down, accordion-style, the faded vinyl top on his mustard-yellow Volkswagen and crouches in just the same. His Picasso-ugly head thumps the rearview mirror. His face turns blue. Bubble wide eyes stretch to the side. Plastic frames torque. Nose and lip lap. The reddish-brown derby down. The mushroom dome blown. He slows down, way down, get calm down, and puts the derby back on. It’s still too large; it bends his ears east and west like radars, or antennas, transmitting his momentary thoughts….

This man, too, works in a prison, swallows his daily poison, and sticks to the set trajectory with no mind toward anything resembling either satisfaction or defeat. The story is called “Jail Bait,” but there’s no baiting, really, no pursuit, no capture, just worms that will ultimately eat us and the hooks that, in the meantime, go through us all. The sense one gets is that in Tomlinson’s world anything more than that is a two dollar word–a fancy fantasy, a make-believe abstraction–with no place in reality and, thus, no role in this hunched over, slightly depressing chapbook.

Official James R. Tomlinson Web Site
Official Motor City Burning Press Web Site

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A Review of “Forked Tongue” by Craig Sernotti

Monday, June 21st, 2010

Spencer Dew

Having, in an earlier poem, denied belief in the moon, this book soon after paints an image of a “bank executive / drunk on absinthe / thrashing his / F2M transsexual paramour…for acknowledging his / receding hairline.” So surely no moonlight shines down on this brutal, lonely, ultimately pathetic scene.

Sernotti’s is a world of senseless violence and violent lusts, of incest and porn, of drinking piss on a dare or passing out after one too many attempts to insulate the vulnerable self from reality writ large. “We run on empty stomachs in cardboard shoes,” one poetic voice declares.

Mixed in with nightmare images of peeling faces and toilets overflowing with fresh shit, Glenn Danzig and John Updike exist as ciphers in a world spun off axis, broken. Videos of decapitation play out their grisly one-act joke, while worldly men, no longer young, talk about what they’ve done, recently, with high school girls.

At times, these pieces seem like so much braggadocio, drunken mumblings about strippers and shaved scrotums, perverse retellings of fairy tale with the whiff of French onion soup. But, as with that bank executive beating the lover he cannot name, there’s something strikingly tragic just under the surface here.

“We were drunk, / we were high, / we were walking the dog,” and anything that happens after is unable to make anything more of those conditions. There is no transcendence is orgasm, just another little ending, a measure of lost time. Blow jobs become exercises in futility, even metaphors for mortality, no matter what sort of swagger the individual poetic narrator may take in the retelling.

“I die in my dreams,” one poem says, yet dreams lie dead here, too, crushed under the weight of all the accumulated grit. “We are ashes trying to be flowers,” runs another line, but the sense one gets from Forked Tongue is that this metamorphosis is not to be–rather, the poetry here contemplates these ashes, sifting through them for bits of broken teeth and globs of silver fillings. “We cry into our empty glasses. / We tell jokes about graveyards, / ovens, money, dead babies.”

Whatever wonder moonlight may have once provided for the romantic imagination, it’s been excised here. Forked Tongue narrates the hangover that comes after.

Official Blue Room Publishing Web Site

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A Review of “Editorial” by Arthur Graham

Sunday, June 13th, 2010

Spencer Dew

This self-published book of prose is all over the place, veering through time and space out into flights of sci-fi and fantasy, with shape-shifting characters, a recurring self-reflexivity about narrative and editing and fiction and lies, and a bulging bag of so-called postmodernist tricks, some of which seem designed like knock-off versions of the name brands Kurt Vonnegut and William S. Burroughs. There’s a little Dr. Strangelove in here as well a bit of chemically-filtered Michael Crichton fragments–the U.S. government loads up into a post-nuclear ark, in the far-flung future a virus eats all materials on which writing might be preserved. There’s no small amount of attention to alcoholism, which may or may not hold larger, metaphorical meanings, and there are statements, amidst the cartoons and comic anecdotes about masturbation, such as “The lies of the author are thus supplanted by the lies of the editor, which somehow results in the conveyance of truth, or a kind of it anyway….” The ellipses are original, as are quite a lot of chains of Xs marking the text as censored in some way.

Consider this example of biographical, historical writing:  “XXXX XXXXXXXX was born to XXXXXX and XXX XXXXXXXX on XXX XXth, 19XX CE in…,” etc. Graham is interested in how all language use is paraphrase, how all acts of memory are instances of editing.

‘Historian’ (or in this case, ‘biographer’) is the name given to the individual charged with plumbing the depths of time, taking each notable occurrence and describing it with the appropriate level of detail, context, and (perhaps most importantly) speculation…. The true fullness of history is invariably reduced to a flat, empty point on a timeline (or a chapter in a book) where it remains–dead, static–until the next brave soul dares to descend into its turbulent depths.”

Editorial brings no real new perspective to such considerations, however. Stories rather predictably turn out to be “not what you expected,” even if the predictable, in most cases, is boilerplate absurdity. Scenes are written and edited as they unfold (or explode), with various authorial or editorial presences playing first person protagonist, etc., which is, precisely, what you would expect.

Oscillating between “more pedestrian–more printable” bits of rehashed class notes on various waves of navel-gazing and attempts at associative pyrotechnics that do little more than fizzle (“your catfucking mother with reptammary glands suckling frogs and pigs alike in a bucket of nuclear war winter time in Reno Nevada has never been so hot girls in school on paper…”), the 136 tedious pages of Editorial will likely strike its readers as–to quote one of its autobiographically plumbing voices–“self indulgent in retrospect.”

Buy Editorial from Amazon

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A Review of “When You Feel & Don’t Know How to Say” by Estefania Crespo

Sunday, June 6th, 2010

Spencer Dew

“Pit me of my resources, / Poach me of my life,” writes “actress, singer and songwriter” Estefania Crespo in a self-published bit of self-promotion, When You Feel & Don’t Know How to Say. This collection of poems comes complete with several photographs of the young actress, a filmography (she played “Make out Kissing Student” in Bart Got a Room), and a full-page advertisement for her and her twin sister’s band, EnV, and their EP, Beautiful Thing. You can look up her Web site on your own; my task here is to take the text seriously. So, what sort of poetry does Crespo write?

The poem “Sensations,”  for instance, ends:

Continue on your way,
Continue with speechless sulk.
When you think of a person with my name,
And feel a bit of heavenly warmth.
May it continue synergistically,
Sarcastically within abundant bulk.

I’m not entirely sure what that means, though, within the context of the poem, the narrator “cannot help feeling insufficient,” even though “Our favorite is in our favor,” and “Our wanting is in our want.” I’m not entirely sure what that means, either, though, again, the narrator claims to be “glad you have hesitation” before sending that “you” on with the aforementioned silent sulk. As the title of this book indicates, speech–saying–isn’t always easy. “My feeling keep on spilling,” she writes elsewhere, and, in another poem, “Try giving yourself up to words, / It is hard when you are successful.”

Crespo isn’t particularly successful in this regard. “I cannot help but to think of you, / When you accompany every time I breathe,” for instance. Crespo is at her best not when she’s trying to convey what she does not know how to convey–“The way we will never know you,” as she writes in one poem–but when she gives in to the “climbing intensity” of language itself, not speaking from her heart but just playing with words:

Single, secular sorrows,
Bravo to plastic pleathered thoughts.
Thinking is no longer instinctual,
As enhanced green bamboo rots.
Humans limitedly control,
And devices perpetually robot.

I’m not entirely sure what that means, either, but such knowing seems beside the point. There’s something trippy and fun, at least, in such associative acrobatics, which avoid the overcooked sentiments of, say, “You are a tantalizing love fantasy, / Not to dwell upon fantasies that will never die. / Because of you love can only be, / A fantasy so tempting.” I’m pretty sure I do know what that means, but I certainly don’t care. For the most part this book consists of similar pre-masticated tidbits–“Sickening, suffering, trite,” to quote a poem. But there are a few moments when instead of “sensitively burning” her overly self-serious, melodramatic emotions on the page she embraces poetry as “A chomping, charging playful game” and thus succeeds, in part.

“To know and now yourself,” for instance. I’m not entirely sure what that means, but I’m willing to be seduced, a bit, by its newness, to find it sort of neat.

Official Estefania Crespo Web Site

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A Review of “Fitting Parts” by Kenneth Pobo

Sunday, May 23rd, 2010

Spencer Dew

The black-suited ministers that populate this free PDF chapbook have their “crossword-puzzle God / figured out and written with ink.” Theirs is a religion of certainty and bigotry, a religion of “Hate, / a mosquito spray fog,” that leaves us “all coughing / asthmatics,” in a world where “the ambulance always late.”

The “Fitting Parts” of the title are explained by yet another of these sinister ministers in terms of divine design: “God didn’t intend / homosexuals because / our parts don’t fit.” The hatred, not the stupidity, is what’s focused on here. Pobo rages against the dehumanization of homosexuals. As he writes, one certain people “define me / as a lifestyle choice– / the rest comes easily.” Indeed, the real threat, as Pobo sees it, is in parents who “strap down / their kid’s brain…so the kid grows up / to be like them, / flat, / hateful– / anxious.”

These poems are “speaking out” and expressing something of the human reality of those who feel their existence disregarded by the world of black-suited ministers. Yet there are moments of awe and humor–appreciations of Sappho and Whitman, musings on cocks stalking men in dreams–amidst the anger. And Pobo tries here to voice an alternative to, for instance, the path taken by one character, whose situations expresses the stakes in play for this slim book:

Steve turned himself into a lie
to satisfy them, hoped to die,
hoping his death could stop the threat
of violence. He hid so well,
but felt that everyone could tell.

Official Philistine Press Web Site

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A Review of “Isotropes: A Collection of Speculative Haibun” by T. J. McIntyre

Sunday, May 23rd, 2010

Spencer Dew

McIntyre shuttles us off to other planets, leads us through retellings of fairy tales, plops us into petri dishes, and conceals us at the edges of sacrificial ceremonies. This free PDF chapbook, while scattered in its subject matter, relays scenes of horror that, for all their variety, have a certain similarity. Tentacles uncoiling through the salty fog, the hiss of static on a dead station, apocalypse in general, with all the trimmings–McIntyre offers all this and more, and as some readers will appreciate the faint trace of diluted Lovecraft, others will admire the book’s engagement with traditional form:

unhinged deities
the worlds we try not to see
the veil is so thin

Many readers, alas, will find the writing shoddy and the collection incoherently arranged, a patchwork of not-so-fresh corpse-bits that fails to convince. Here, for instance, is a representative sample, a stream of narration from the perspective of a lost and hungry child beholding a sight of wonder in the woods:

The house on the horizon looked unreal. Candy glazes sparkled in the growing sunlight. A puff of smoke emanated from a licorice chimney, and we knew that inside there would be warmth. We knew it might be a trap. Anything too good to be true usually is, after all. But, by that point, we did not care. We just wanted to be warm.

There’s little warmth or life here, though the “unreal” is given a fresh glaze in each poem.

Official T. J. McIntyre Web Site
Official Philistine Press Web Site

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A Review of “Dodging Traffic” by J. Bradley

Monday, May 17th, 2010

Spencer Dew

Slam poet J. Bradley’s collection has the in-your-face pace and bullying egotism of the slam circuit. Blunt personifications and schoolyard similes abound. “Disappointment kneels,” for instance, likely to honor lines like “Your face looks like / a swine flu outbreak / in a small town.”

The poems here read like performance pieces, and, thus, one will need to read a little spittle and swagger into them, and discard the repeated reference to thesauruses, and maybe put the book down from time to time to take a breath and rally up enough sympathy to witness another amateur bare knuckle verbal beat-down. Consider a poem like “Upon Seeing Your Profile on MySpace…” which taunts “Your idea of a diet / is holding a digital camera / at a 45º angle.”

But if you take a deep enough breath between bouts, you might realize just how bare the knuckles are in this fight.  As insults go, most folks prefer witty ones, for sure, but when you get to a poem like “On the Day of Our Wedding” and read “You looked like / the kind of princess / who needed poisoning” you just might catch a whiff of the real poison in play.

Bradley is more bruised than a bruiser, and in his poems he needs to own up to this fact and put his deep purples on display. It’s hard to care about the keyboards that “call 911” and “show bruised Delete keys / to the responding officer,” but it would be easy to care about the man pounding out poems on said boards–especially if he deletes a bit from his next collection.

Describing a hangover as a construction site is a nice warm-up exercise, but keep it private. Likewise, as to the question of how to “woo / a pterodactyl to bed,” well, pyrotechnics of words might work, or just a shot of homebrewed honesty. Dodging Traffic gathers together scraps of scuffles–one-two aphorisms (“What Makes a Man,” you ask? Bradley serves it to you raw, on a bumper sticker) and some too-obvious feigns (How is someone sleeping like Dresden during the firebombing? That seems a less relevant question than the one about seducing a gliding dinosaur). In his final piece, “The Poetry of J. Bradley, Abridged,” the narrator declares:

I will make a mask for sadness
out of the liner notes of my
The Cure collection so I can
skull fuck hope into its ocular nerve.

This is the voice from the gym, shadowboxing for the next slam, the same sort of character who “laughed all through Roots” and wants to write poems with the same sardonic reach. The guard up here is what’s throwing the fight the wrong way; Bradley needs to swing less, lean back, rope-a-dope, and bleed!

After a poem like “On the Day of Your Mastectomy,” which feels like a cop-out (“Enough asked / for a moment, silence”), it’s hard to expect more than bile and Bazooka Joe lyrics in something like “June MacGuff to Bristol Palin.” But here we have–maybe through the channeling of a different fictional voice, the film character instead of the man-at-the-microphone–something downright poignant, and laced with the very “hope” whose eyesight gets threatened a few dozen pages later.

Hidden among the hard jabs are some real flashes of sincerity, where the speaker isn’t ranting over an audience but speaking directly at some real “you,” talking about wedding vows or raising a son or even, in the improbable–but funny, sweet, self-deprecating and deep–“Doing It Norse Style,” wooing women. The take-away here (and the promise of Bradley’s poetry and this rough collection) is that hands must be trained to do something other than fight:

Until they wield bouquets
skillfully, you cannot spend
another Monday morning
counting coins of broken glass
cached beneath your skin.

That’s the wisdom of the bruised. No fine lace-work there, but it’s not without its beauty, its truth.

Official J. Bradley Web Site
Official Ampersand Books Web Site

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