A Review of “Carvings” by G. Emil Reutter

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

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Reviews | 1 Comment »

A Review of “The hairpin tax” by David Appelbaum

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

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Reviews | No Comments »

A Review of “You” by Nuala Ní Chonchúir

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

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Reviews | No Comments »

A Review of “Snowing Fireflies” by Eric Beeny

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

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Reviews | No Comments »

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

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

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Reviews | No Comments »

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

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

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Reviews | No Comments »

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

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

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Reviews | 1 Comment »

A Review of “dislocate No. 6: The Contaminated Issue” by Colleen Coyne, Editor-in-Chief

October 15th, 2010

Jessica Maybury

Reading the new issue of dislocate is not unlike diving into the sea. You stand at the edge, momentarily put off, unwilling to dive…and then you jump in, and it’s wonderful.

What was making me unwilling to read was that when I was flipping through the issue, much of the writing seemed to be of that technical/academic/nonsense style that always seems to just go right over my head. I find it off-putting, pretentious and, frankly, boring. The book lay on my coffee table for a few days, emanating malevolent vibes.

When I sat down for a proper reading, it was with a depressed distaste. This was quickly overturned by reading the editor’s note, wherein there is a description of what ‘contaminated’ means to them: “it is a blending that produces something new.” In this multicultural, increasingly connected world, this is something that is both important and needed.

Technical etc., entries aside, there are astonishing stories, poetry and artwork collected in this issue. The photographic work, taken by Justine Beth Gartner, is displayed in glossy coloured plates and reveals a tight, claustrophobic world of edges and corners, of abandoned places.

The collection speaks up for the contemporary story, breaking boundaries in Modernist fashion, redefining the benchmark for what is ‘acceptable’ or ‘good’ fiction–if any aesthetic viewpoint can be held as relevant nowadays–in ways that made me panic. I doubt that anything I could have written would have been included in this. It is a wake-up call for writers everywhere.

dislocate No. 6 features writers such as Jenny Boully, Greg Bachar, and Curtis Dawkins. The surreal and often complicatedly pictorial metaphors are double-edged and unforgiving; the reader finds that they stay with them long after the volume has been set away.

I have to say that I liked Lindsey Drager’s “Photographs I Did Not Take” the most. Her style is minimalist, pared back and rife with striking images: “If zero is empty, a gaping defined by frame, then so is your mouth,” and “You syndrome of affection, breaking my smiles clean open, smiles cracking over my face,” are but two examples.

More quotes abound, from Jenny Boully: “I have seen the imprint of your little teeth all about the dawn,” from Greg Bachar: “…wasp is a difficult dish to enjoy,” and from Lucas Church:

The weight of something gives a sort of authority, a rifle feels heavy and that’s part of the power, a wrench, a crowbar, a shovel, they’re like badges.

dislocate No. 6 is not easy reading. I was left feeling a little overwhelmed by it, and slightly humbled. Don’t be put off by the pretention of some of the pieces–here there is much that is good.

Official dislocate Web Site

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Reviews | No Comments »

Our Pushcart Prize Nominations

October 15th, 2010

Congratulations to our Pushcart Prize nominees!

Tres Crow – “The Devil’s Courtyard”
Stacia M. Fleegal – “Post-Apocalyptic”
Kathleen Heideman – “Overlooked Heroine, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus”
Carrie Lorig – “Bone Woman”
Timothy Raymond – “Renegades”
Amber Sparks – “When Other People’s Lives Fall into Your Lap”

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Awards | 2 Comments »

A Review of “Diary of a Gentleman Diabolist” by Robin Spriggs

October 8th, 2010

Spencer Dew

Some schools of occultists are inordinately fond of merit badges, hierarchic ranking, fancy dress, special handshakes, Excel spreadsheets brimming with esoteric codswallop, and the like. In certain lodges, club houses, and initiatory chambers, these folks are hailed, by their peers and underlings, as magus maximus, etc., etc., but in the wider world they are usually identified as bores, gas giants with pretensions to some new, much speedier, mathematics. Beware the man who soliloquizes on “infinite delight.” He has a set of manikins in the basement, which is fine for his own private hours, but shouldn’t be confused with what he’s preaching about nor passed around, in sticky pieces, to houseguests.

This little collection of what are inexplicably self-identified as “prose poems” suffers from something of this larger problem of blabbing on about the occult and thus stripping away from it its very useful occultation–useful in the sense of actually inspiring a sense of power, mystery, creepiness, or allure. What we have instead, here, are bits like: “Mighty Moloch, book ablaze, to you do I sacrifice the word-born babes of my fevered brain, hoping to glean from their silent wails the golden secrets of the Infinite Self.” Good luck with that. There’s some saying somewhere about wisdom and its relation to keeping ones mouth shut from time to time, but you won’t hear that alluded to in Diary of a Gentleman Diabolist. You will, however, hear plenty else, with accompanying sigils, or squiggles, an alphabet of energies, as best I can figure it, that drains a little more ink in the printing process but otherwise adds nothing to the book. “All of his bad Latin was entirely intentional,” it is said, of a certain character, a certain type. “Sometimes he even confused it (both purposely and purposefully) with Italian, Spanish, and French, having learned long ago the potent effect of such pseudoscholarly inscriptions on minds of a particular stripe.” This “particular stripe” of mind might find Diary of a Gentleman Diabolist worthy of a half hour or so. Others most likely will not.

There are some genuine spooky bits (any stuffed toy monkey is a terrifying stuffed toy monkey) and some watery reproduction Lovecraft and some fan fiction for the new religious revival of the old religions–“The hatchling Prince, his ways Loki-wild, his words Odin-wise,” etc.–grimoires get eaten, things happen to trees involving semen, and there is an eye, deliciously, in a candy jar, “pressed hard against the glass by a crush of gobstopping spheres made all the more horrific by the fact that they were sweet.” But the book is in desperate need of an editorial hand. Must we really endure such weary declarations as that hell is a woman “every warlock worth his wand” wants to stick his stave into or that “She stood like a phantom before me, like a dream of a ghost in the mist, but her smile was the smile of a sunrise, and it reached to the core of my soul, the core of my Stygian soul”? Again, a “particular stripe” of mind will surely dig this, and feel some excitement, too, over the fact that “The wrath of the nigromancer is like a hairtrigger rifle of unlimited range in the hands of a fickle sniper,” but it is a rather limited “particular stripe” to feel anything from lines like “I am…the thing under your bed, the hate in your heart….” No spell is cast by such deflated clichés. That scent isn’t brimstone, it’s just something stale.

Official Anomalous Books Web Site

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Reviews | 1 Comment »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »