thwack

thwack

  • Joined: December 27, 2012
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UNDOING THE DEMOS: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution by Wendy Brown reviewed by Irami Osei-Frimpong

UNDOING THE DEMOS: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution
by Wendy Brown
Zone Books/MIT Press, 296 Pages

reviewed by Irami Osei-Frimpong

“SEN. KIRK: RE-ELECT RAHM OR CHICAGO COULD END UP LIKE DETROIT,” reads the Chicago Sun-Times headline.

In the ensuing article, Illinois Sen. Mark Kirk argues that the bond market supporting Chicago's debt would be a better fit with current mayor Rahm Emanuel leading the city, rather than challenger Jesus “Chuy” Garcia. Those of us who care about democracy wonder if democratic self-determination—whether defined minimally as self-rule, or, more robustly, as participating in popular sovereignty—is extinguished when one's vote is determined by the bond market and its assessments. This is the question U.C. Berkeley Professor Wendy Brown explores up in her latest book, Undoing the Demos.

Moody's does not have a citizen's concern for public schools, parks, museums, local ecology, or Chicago's other common institutions. Yet these are the political conditions through which citizens find meaning in their lives. For those of us who care about democracy, the worry is whether the authority of finance capital on our political imagination relegates democratic citizenship to being simply the medium through which the investment market controls public life.

THE GUILD OF SAINT COOPER by Shya Scanlon reviewed by Justin Goodman

THE GUILD OF SAINT COOPER
by Shya Scanlon
Dzanc Books, 413 pages

reviewed by Justin Goodman

“Spasms of the diaphragm,” the twentieth century theorist Walter Benjamin remarks, “generally offer better chances for thought than spasms of the soul.” And who hasn’t been convinced, softened to a position, by comedy? This is the principal of Shya Scanlon’s newest novel, The Guild of Saint Cooper, which returns to the self-conscious comedy, and literary meditation, of his first novel, Forecast.

That Scanlon’s circled back after writing Border Run—geographically too, from Seattle to Arizona to Seattle—is unsurprising, since it was clear his ideas preferred spasms of the diaphragm. But a novel of so much laughter can betray itself; watching mildly funny Youtube videos with friends in an uproar is a similar feeling. It’s a dare not to laugh, a dare not to take the laughter sincerely, and thus create the irreparable distance.

The Guild of Saint Cooper begins in waiting, and being “tired of waiting.” Blake Williams, narrator and, in Scanlon’s meta-structure, author of Forecast, has returned to his mother’s house to wait for their emergency radio to “roar to life and announce the collapse of the Ross Ice Shelf…trigger a tsunami…and Seattle would cease to exist.” His mother waits for her cancer to claim her, and he waits for his writer’s block to claim him. It is a liminal period. Yet it progresses smoothly, and much like Forecast it stands between the oracle and the satirist.

THE GREAT FLOODGATES OF THE WONDERWORLD by Justin Hocking reviewed by Ana Schwartz

THE GREAT FLOODGATES OF THE WONDERWORLD
by Justin Hocking
Graywolf Press, 266 pages

reviewed by Ana Schwartz

“Grand Programmes of Providence”

Boys can be so mysterious, so closed off with their feelings. Surely they must feel things. But what are they feeling? And what are they thinking about those feelings? Why don’t they talk about those feelings? What do they expect women to do, simply divine those feelings like a barometer at sea—blind to the gathering clouds, deaf to the sound of the gulls and the waves, unable to smell the saltiness of the air? What is the deep wonderworld of a boy’s mind? What do boys want?

Let’s get this out of the way: According to Justin Hocking, it’s not not sex. In his recent memoir, The Great Floodgates of the Wonderworld, Hocking shows that boys also want emotional gratification that often, coincidentally, happens with sexual encounters. And he wants it pretty badly. He might even want it as badly as Ahab wants revenge on the white whale. Hocking’s desire—his addiction—certainly leads him to some strange and dicey situations, and, like Ahab’s quest, often has harmful effects on the people surrounding him. Hocking makes many analogies to characters and situations in Melville’s epic novel. Comparing his life quest for emotional fulfillment with Ahab’s vengeful leadership of the Pequod is only one, and a relatively undeveloped parallel at that.

OUR ENDLESS NUMBERED DAYS by Claire Fuller reviewed by Elizabeth Mosier

OUR ENDLESS NUMBERED DAYS
by Claire Fuller
Tin House Books, 388 pages

reviewed by Elizabeth Mosier

Claire Fuller’s mesmerizing novel begins with a black-and-white photograph from 1976: the once-upon-a-time that her narrator, 17-year-old Peggy Hillcoat, is trying nine years later to recall.

The picture opens a window into a living room in Highgate, London, where a group of so-called “Retreaters,” among them Peggy’s father James, meet to discuss their defense against environmental and economic catastrophe. In the photo, eight-year-old Peggy’s image is blurred; she’s being led from the room by her disapproving mother Ute, while James clenches his fists and Oliver Hannington, his sinister-seeming friend, smiles “as though he wanted posterity to know he wasn’t really interested in the group’s plans for self-sufficiency and stockpiling.”

But memory is partly projection; for Peggy, the photo is like a magic mirror, reflecting what she knows unconsciously but can’t yet claim. Her sudden, strange behavior after looking at it—using scissors to cut around her father’s face, then slicing off her bra and tucking his image beneath her breast—is the reader’s first clue that the “bloody Armageddon” she’s trying to recover is an entirely different disaster from the kind these survivalists predict.

THE SUGAR BOOK by Johannes Goransson reviewed by Johnny Payne

THE SUGAR BOOK
by Johannes Goransson
Tarpaulin Sky Press, 184 pages

reviewed by Johnny Payne

Antonin Artaud gave us the Theater of Cruelty. He “for whom delirium was/the only solution/to the strangulation/that life had prepared for him.”

Now Johannes Garson, in the ironically named The Sugar Book, gives us a poetry of cruelty. It is the necessary car wreck that brings the Jaws of Life. The book is a whisky genre-bender in a haunted Los Angeles, where the “I” walks out on his son, fucks the homeless, reflects on scrotums, obsesses about tits, his hard-on, hot bitches, taxes, capitalism, the value of poetry (it’s worthless), noctuid larvae, and “the sepulchral chambers of the law.” Like many outrageous, seemingly misanthropic writers, he is at heart a moralist. The first section in fact contains a poem about immigration (as always, among many other topics). “The Law Against Foreigners Involves Mostly the Body” offers this withering insight:

It’s also interested in my body when dogs bark at my
genitals but it pretends that’s just evidence of a social
conscience. It wants to find the human in me, even if it
takes ripping this lamb mask into a thousand shreds and
hanging it up on the wall.
And feign outrage when I grow numb.

The speaker’s scathing appraisals scald himself, because conscientious objector or not, he is part of the law. Political poetry often gets a deserved bad name, but Garson hits themes hard yet moves along, often in the very next phrase, to trenchant comic appraisals of his own filthy habits, lit up by indeterminacy.

PREPARATION FOR THE NEXT LIFE by Atticus Lish reviewed by Jamie Fisher

PREPARATION FOR THE NEXT LIFE
by Atticus Lish
Tyrant, 417 pages

reviewed by Jamie Fisher

If civilization ended tomorrow and had to be reconstructed based on Preparation for the Next Life, our descendants could get reasonably far with Atticus Lish's instruction manual. They could learn, for instance, how correctional officers respond to an incident in the yard. Or how to eat a hot dog:

The guy whose house it was’s woman brought out a tray of hotdogs and set it on the coffee table, which was behind them. The plumber turned around and said thank you, hon. There's relish, she said. She sat down on the couch, which was behind the coffee table, and spooned relish on a hotdog and bit into it with her hand cupped under it and chewed.
In Preparation for the Next Life, Lish fixates on certain details. Notice how insistent he is on the geography of the living room, seemingly at the expense of almost everything else besides the hot dog. No one says much in this well-appointed room and not much happens—here or anywhere. The nearest metaphor for the novel may be a heavily upholstered room in which no one talks, really, about anything. The plot, such that it is, feels light. The structure is non-existent. Still, Lish wants to make the room look busy. So we have lazy boys, kitchenettes, sofa-beds; bodegas, E-Verify, the military-penal complex. At the end, gripped by the anxiety of moving, he decides the best way to leave the room would be to set it on fire.

THE BOATMAKER by John Benditt reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster

THE BOATMAKER
by John Benditt
Tin House Books, 451 pages

reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster

The intersection of poetry and prose is a rough sea, with deep, sometimes misleading currents. Some writers adapt poetry easily to fiction. Lyrical language works by adding texture to the plot; in some cases, it is the plot, as in flash fiction or more experimental forms. However, it doesn't compensate for shallow storytelling. John Benditt's novel The Boatmaker suffers from just this imbalance of plot and language, and the book founders from scene to scene, never quite finding its depth.

This isn't a reflection of the author's abilities; Benditt has credentials out the wazoo, including a stint as editor-in-chief at Technology Review: MIT's Magazine of Innovation. He also was awarded the John Russell Hayes Poetry Prize. The shift to fiction seems natural for such a talented writer, but the adaptation doesn't come easily and makes The Boatmaker a long, dull slog through all-too-predictable terrain. Alcoholic geniuses, bad guys, run-of-the-mill anti-Semites, women tormented by their emotions: it's all too familiar, and Benditt adds little new or surprising to these threadbare tropes.

At its core The Boatmaker is an epic tale. The nameless main character awakens from a fever dream possessed by a desire to build a boat and sail to the mainland from his tiny island. An intemperate drinker, the boatmaker wanders in and out of sobriety, crossing paths with beggars, thieves, a priest, and workers of all stripes. These encounters unfortunately feel increasingly contrived; imagine Nathaniel Hawthorne stranded in Finland and you'll have a good idea of how this unfolds.

FOURTEEN STORIES, NONE OF THEM ARE YOURS by Luke B. Goebel reviewed by Jacob White

FOURTEEN STORIES, NONE OF THEM ARE YOURS
by Luke B. Goebel
FC2, 167 pages

reviewed by Jacob White

The pleasure of reading Luke Goebel’s little big first novel, Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours, comes less, it seems, from the pages themselves than from the palpable life-lust ripping past them, sloughing them off. The release of this energy is of course exactly a function of the novel form, yet the feat feels entirely new here, or newly realized. This monologue is running for its life, splitting the novel’s formal seams with intrusions to qualify retrospective distance or the shifting narrative present, the parentheses and brackets gaping wider and wider to reveal the fevered flesh beneath. In the narrator’s racing panic, we feel the pages tattering loose from his arms before finally snapping behind him with the wind into the crazy nothing. “Books are over,” the book concludes, and rarely indeed has a book been so humbled by the thing it contains. Life moves through these pages, and our joy—our elation—is seeing the pages struggle, and fail, to keep up.

I suppose each of Fourteen Stories’ chapters revolves around a particular story or anecdote, but in each the particulars get stirred loose in the turbulence and we’re left largely with the wind-shunt of its passing. But the situation more or less is this: Our narrator is undone by the death of an older brother, the loss of a girlfriend, humiliation by a mentor, and a peyote ceremony that, he says, “took me off the planet but I’m still on the planet.” The world is no longer a recognizable thing, nor is the self, so he acquires an RV, into whose aft all of this furniture goes sloshing...

LEAVETAKING by Peter Weiss reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster

LEAVETAKING
by Peter Weiss
translated by Christopher Levenson
with an introduction by Sven Birkerts
Melville House Publishing, 125 pages

reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster

The late years of adolescence are the torch on the sugar of the artist's will to create. Forgive the metaphor; I won't extend it. But as I was reading Peter Weiss' novella-slash-memoir Leavetaking, I couldn't help but think of my father, cracking into a crème brûlée with the backside of a spoon. I do not recall the restaurant, the rest of the meal, or the occasion, but I can remember clearly the strong, decided crack of the spoon against the caramelized crust and my father's white shirt cuffs and the satisfied look on his face as the dessert shattered, fragments piercing like shrapnel the smooth, sweet cream. My father has always done things with precision; I know him as someone who deliberates, and is a model of patience although he does not enjoy waiting. When he left home, it was time. We knew our exits just as we acknowledged the brief silence between courses, the arrival of a new dish on its small, white plate.

TIME PRESENT AND TIME PAST by Deirdre Madden reviewed by Annika Neklason

TIME PRESENT AND TIME PAST
by Deirdre Madden
Europa Editions, 161 pages

reviewed by Annika Neklason

I wonder, sometimes, what it would be like to meet my family for the first time. What it would be like to look at them as strangers, to know nothing more about them than what I could see in their faces and their clothing and the way they moved to introduce themselves.

It seems like an impossible task, separating the people from the years I’ve spent growing up with them and the years I’ll spend growing old with them. Maybe more than anything else, family is a matter of shared time. Of photo albums full of baby pictures and accumulated Christmas and birthday presents and long, fidgety car trips to half-remembered vacation spots. Family is this weight of shared history, both experienced and inherited, and of shared futures that are always looming over every exchange of goodnights, or goodbyes.

WE’LL GO TO CONEY ISLAND by Barbara Scheiber reviewed by Ashlee Paxton-Turner

WE’LL GO TO CONEY ISLAND
by Barbara Scheiber
Sowilo Press, 246 pages

reviewed by Ashlee Paxton-Turner

With all the recent speculation about octogenarians releasing novels, it’s exhilarating, and reassuring, to read Barbara Scheiber’s sweeping first novel, published last year when the author was 92.

We’ll Go to Coney Island, which was 30 years in the writing, tells a semi-autobiographical story about one family across generations, with a mother’s secret as the thread that connects everyone. The story is a set of relationships, conflicts, and memories as time passes. Scheiber was formerly a radio producer for NBC, and in 1975, she was involved in drafting the Education for All Handicapped Children Act.

The book’s cover is a Walker Evans photograph of the backs of a man and woman at Coney Island. Evans took the photograph, which captures the scene Scheiber describes on the page one, in 1928. The Metropolitan Museum of Art featured it as a signature poster for a retrospective of the photographer’s work in 2000.

There is double-meaning to the photograph’s use as the cover illustration for We’ll Go to Coney Island: the man in the image is Scheiber’s father, Harry A. Gair, and the woman is Harriet, his lover and later Barbara’s stepmother.

THE UNSPEAKABLE: AND OTHER SUBJECTS OF DISCUSSION by Meghan Daum reviewed by Jamie Fisher

The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion
by Meghan Daum
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 244 pages

reviewed by Jamie Fisher

Authenticity is Her Bag

So here's the problem with coma stories: not everyone gets a coma story. Life-threatening medical emergencies chased closely by miraculous recoveries are, for most of us, in short supply. People who do find themselves with a coma story shouldn't be surprised when friends, relatives, and neighbors want a piece of it. They want your Ninety Minutes in Heaven, absent the ignominious retraction. They want to know how your near-death experience has changed you, brought you closer to God. They want your spiritual lesson, and they will be insistent.

Meghan Daum’s coma story caps off what you might call a tough year. First her grandmother died, then her mother. Then she began to feel woozy with grief or flu, except that it turned out to be flea-transmitted typhus that knocked her prone on a hospital bed, hovering for days in a medically induced coma. Her total recovery is so unanticipated that her neurologist is prompted to call it miraculous. (Not the word you want to hear from the man with his tools inside your skull, Daum observes.) Because she is a writer, her friends request a “coma story”. But it seems unfair to expect anything beyond a convalescence. Daum is satisfied with coming out of the crisis with her personality, and basic motor skills, intact. “And in this story, I am not a better person. I am the same person. This is a story with a happy ending. Or at least something close enough.”

THE CAPTAIN’S DAUGHTER by Alexander Pushkin reviewed by Derek M. Brown

THE CAPTAIN’S DAUGHTER
by Alexander Pushkin
translated by Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler
NYRB, 170 pages

reviewed by Derek M. Brown

Originally published in 1836, The Captain’s Daughter is a fictionalized account of a historical rebellion against the administration of Catherine II. The novel first appeared in English as Marie: A Story of Russian Love. In this edition, Robert and Elizabeth Chandler defy the sentiments of Robert Frost, who once declared that “poetry is what gets lost in translation.” In this edition, all the richness, humor, and poetry for which Pushkin is celebrated, is lovingly preserved. The Chandlers’ translation will undoubtedly carry mass appeal for a modern readership.

Alexander Pushkin
Alexander Pushkin
In The Captain’s Daughter, Pushkin’s protagonist, Pyotr Andreyich Grinyov, the son of a lieutenant colonel, is “enrolled as a sergeant in the Semyonov regiment while still in [his] mother’s womb,” that he may be placed in a regiment befitting someone of his class and rank upon the completion of his studies, which he undertakes while “on leave.” Expecting to serve in the Guards, which he equates with “freedom and the joys of life in Petersburg,” his temperamental father is determined to have him “serve in the real army,” where he will “toil and sweat and smell gunpowder.”

Under the care of his father’s huntsman, Savelich, he is taken to a remote village, where he falls in love with his captain’s daughter. Soon, chaste pursuits in an idyllic setting, replete with snow-covered steppes, are interrupted by the intervention of a brigand, Pugachov, who has assumed the name and identity of the late emperor, Peter III. Intent upon overthrowing the imperial family and demolishing the nobility, Pugachov appeals to the disenfranchised and radicalizes them much as criminal organizations and terrorist groups do today. Although Pyotr’s fortress is eventually sacked, he is spared by this imposter, whom he unwittingly saved from freezing after giving him a hare-skin coat during a violent snowstorm preceding the emergence of his rebellion.

BOMBYONDER by Reb Livingston reviewed by Brent Terry

BOMBYONDER
by Reb Livingston
Bitter Cherry Books, 346 pages

reviewed by Brent Terry

Welcome to the crater. Keep your head down, your eyes open, and try not to lose your lunch…or your mind. Your guide on this journey is one of literature’s most unreliable narrators: a murderous, narcissistic, yet oddly appealing young woman on a quest through the bombed-out wreckage of her own psyche, in search of a past she can hang her hat on, a future that tells the truth, the real nature of her bomb-maker father’s legacy, and a little birdy that might make everything turn out okay.

Reb Livingston’s literary forbears are legion. In this compellingly daft, lyrical, and mind-expanding novel we find traces of Sophocles, Lewis Carrol, Vonnegut, the Nabokov of Pale Fire, Hunter S. Thompson, Gertrude Stein, and Shelley—both of them—all run through the cerebral cortex of Tim Burton, put in a pill and swallowed whole by Livingston, the effect of which is an acid-trip of a novel that requires every bit of guile and courage a reader can muster. Livingston is best known as a poet, (with two critically acclaimed books and a Best American Poetry appearance to her credit) and her poetic sensibilities guide this book: not magical realism, but hyper-realism smashed to bits and reassembled, reanimated, and turned loose among the unsuspecting villagers.

THINK TANK by Julie Carr reviewed by Johnny Payne

THINK TANK
by Julie Carr
Solid Objects, 82 pages

reviewed by Johnny Payne

The first order of a book of poetry, irrespective of its particular style, is to give pleasure. It’s that simple. Whatever releases the dopamine from the nucleus accumbens qualifies. This was my experience with Julie Carr’s Think Tank. I suspended immediate comprehension, simply following the text’s pulses and impulses. Pick a through line: trail the images from start to finish, or the sounds, until understanding accumulates like dewdrops on a Maine slicker.

This is a volume of extraordinary discipline, cerebral yet appealing, loose and playful:

Yeast minutes leap to
swamp the city’s borders

or,

Honk geese: soprano, duck duck
hobbles, belly first a girl-falcon spins

or,

a headlock is to a hat as a tourniquet is to a condom
a headlock is to a hat as a paring knife is to tongue

I could go on giving examples.

LEARNING CYRILLIC by David Albahari reviewed by Jon Busch

LEARNING CYRILLIC
by David Albahari
translated by Ellen Elias-Bursać
Dalkey Archive, 189 pages

reviewed by Jon Busch

Printed on the cover of renowned Serbian author David Albahari’s most recent short fiction collection, Learning Cyrillic (his seventh book to be translated into English), is an excerpt from a review, “A Kafka for our times…” As I read the twenty plus stories in the collection, this short passage stuck with me. I was taken aback and distracted by how little resemblance to Kafka I found. Unlike Kafka, who never breaks role and keeps the fourth wall strong, Albahari entertains a great allowance of postmodern play—with frequent narrative breaks and ruminations on meaning and text. With the exception of, “The Basilica in Lyon,” about two-thirds into the collection, there is slight trace of Kafka. And even in this piece, the resemblance is superficial and lies solely in the use of a labyrinth setting.

THE SCAPEGOAT by Sophia Nikolaidou reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

THE SCAPEGOAT
by Sophia Nikolaidou
translated from the Greek by Karen Emmerich
Melville House Publishing, 237 pages

reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

In Greece, the perennial crisis of confidence in political institutions has worsened since the economic crash of 2008, leaving young people particularly disenfranchised and disillusioned (“New Party Capitalizes on Greeks’ Loss of Faith in Their Leaders,” says the Times on January 21st). The writer Sophia Nikolaidou confronts the disillusionment in The Scapegoat, a neatly kaleidoscopic stirring of a novel, her first to be translated into English. Nikolaidou, in Karen Emmerich’s swift translation, connects the present anxiety to the1948 murder of the American journalist George Polk (the namesake of the prestigious Polk Awards), who had been investigating Greece’s corrupt right-wing government during the nation’s Civil War. Fearing the loss of U.S. aid, the Greek government pinned the murder on Grigoris Staktopoulos, a journalist and one-time communist. Evidence was thin to non-existent and, as in the Nisman case in Argentina, hardly anyone felt they would ever learn the truth.

THE DOOR by Magda Szabó reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster

THE DOOR
by Magda Szabó
translated by Len Rix
introduction by Ali Smith
New York Review Books, 262 pages

reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster

Some types of love cannot be corralled, as narrator Magda finds in the legendary Hungarian novelist Magda Szabó's novel The Door, originally published in 1987 and now out in a new English translation by Len Rix. These other kinds of love are elemental—the way the Greek heroes were, in their mythological stature—and too terrible to share the flimsy mantel “love” with puppy-dog eyes and Valentine cards.

The person in whom Magda discovers this other kind of love is Emerence Szeredas. Magda and her husband, both writers in a time when it was politically difficult to be an artist in Hungary, hire Emerence to keep house for them. Emerence is known as a hard worker, despite being in her 70s. She cares for many families in the neighborhood, not out of necessity, it seems, but from a sense of pride. “I don't wash just anyone's dirty linen,” she says. After checking Magda's references, she begins working for the couple, and her relationship with Magda begins to take shape.

LEAVING APPALACHIA: Overlap in Poetic Landscapes by Julia Paganelli

LEAVING APPALACHIA: Overlap in Poetic Landscapes
by Julia Paganelli

In August, I stuffed my summer dresses and cooking implements into a Toyota and trekked eighteen hours from Appalachia to the Ozarks. I’ve been tallying the difference between the mountain ranges.

Appalachia is older than the Ozarks—cliffs softer. More oil painting than chiseled sculpture.
I’ve been reading up on architecture. In the book Why We Build: Power and Desire in Architecture, Rowan Moore writes, “Where things get interesting is when desire and built space change each other, when animate and inanimate interplay” (19). Of course, Moore is referring to the architect her structures, but I’ve approached these theories otherwise. I’ve approached as poet to landscape.

Moore states, “Architecture is experienced as background or not at all” (91). An architect fails when she creates a place that cannot be added to by he who lives there. Landscape is meant to be lived into, as are poems.

HOW YOU WERE BORN by Kate Cayley reviewed by Michelle Fost

HOW YOU WERE BORN
by Kate Cayley
Pedlar Press, 152 pages

reviewed by Michelle Fost

How You Were Born is an archive of anxiety. In the story “Young Hennerly,” Robert Browne gets out of being drafted to Vietnam by being a student of American folklore. His work involves interviewing older people from around the country and collecting their stories. He’s heard many times variations of the story Annie Reardon tells him. As a girl she was warned to stay away from the men in the trees, and especially the dangerous man who lives under a great rock. That man is so hungry, the story goes, that if he sees you he might eat you! Something about Annie Reardon’s telling spooks Robert Browne. When he drives past a huge rock and a man materializes out of nowhere at the side of his car and looking for a lift, it’s clear that our inner worlds hold fears that can’t be escaped as easily as the draft.

There is plenty of danger and darkness in How You Were Born. The narrator of “Blind Poet” might be providing a blueprint for many of the stories when she says, “A stranger arrives, pounds on the door, or shows up at the foot of your bed; you ask them in, even if they are soaked with rain, battered by wind, and dangerous, even if they are worse than dangerous.”

THE POET’S “I”: DISTANCE THROUGH FIRST-PERSON by Katie Rensch

THE POET’S “I”: DISTANCE THROUGH FIRST-PERSON
by Katie Rensch

In a recent conversation with a group of mixed-genre writers, it came to my attention that we were all writing in the first-person, well, more or less. In fiction, we call the first-person the “main character”, in poetry we say the “speaker” of the poem, and in nonfiction it’s the writer’s name because the “I” must, by definition, be the person writing. We might just call these labels for the first-person simply labels. Character, speaker, writer –is there really any difference? I would like to think the “I,” that one small, vertical line, one letter, was so simple.

Because voice is a basic element of craft we are encouraged to think no true distinction exists between genres. As writers we enjoy the simple rules of voice because it gives us boundaries. We have three choices: first-, second-, or third-person. In my own reading and writing of poetry, though, I have noticed a great capacity for the use of the first-person voice, and I’ve come to understand it as a gesture, one that is possible in all three modes of voice.

Lately I’m drawn to Elizabeth Bishop’s Geography III (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1971) and the way the first-person voice draws distance between the speaker’s voice and the body, the natural world, and place. In her often matter-of-fact voice, Bishop navigates the geography of our human landscape. In these poems, I find a skilled craftsman who uses the first-person in nearly all her poems –even ones that on the surface seem to be in second- or third-person. These poems expose the ability of the “I” to create both intimacy and distance.

YOU’LL ENJOY IT WHEN YOU GET THERE The Stories of Elizabeth Taylor reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster

YOU'LL ENJOY IT WHEN YOU GET THERE
The Stories of Elizabeth Taylor
by Elizabeth Taylor
selected by Margaret Drabble
New York Review Books, 428 pages

reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster

No, the other Elizabeth Taylor. The English one, who you've never heard of. The one who was a librarian and a governess, because that was still a thing in England in the 1930s, before marrying a businessman, which was also a thing and a perfectly acceptable in terms of occupations for men, prior to the invention of career terminology like “Lead Regional Response Liason” and “Customer Solutions Engineer.” It was a different world, in which you could be a writer and a housewife at the same time, and wear white gloves and talcum powder, and have a lover, and have two sets of riveted china, whatever that is. It is a world Taylor describes perfectly in her story “The Benefactress,” in which people “kept to themselves, drank their own tea in their own kitchens, used surnames, passed a few remarks, perhaps, when they met by chance in the graveyard or weeding their garden plots or, dressed in their best, waiting for the bus to go to the village and draw their pensions.” Every peg has its right hole. In unfamiliar circumstances, the characters' familiarity with rightness changes.

AND THE GIRLS WORRIED TERRIBLY by Dot Devota reviewed by Julia Paganelli

AND THE GIRLS WORRIED TERRIBLY
by Dot Devota
Noemi Press, 80 pages

Dot Devota, in her book, And the Girls Worried Terribly, puts aside marriage to man, woman, or God and marries self to self. Through bizarre and delightful celebration imagery, Devota leads us to conception through physical and mental violence.

Devota’s title has been carefully selected from a caption in Oliver Statler’s The Black Ship Scroll. In this historical work, Statler writes of an instance when Japanese singing girls were to have their photographs taken by foreigners, “and the girls worried terribly,” that “the soul might leave to take up residence in the ‘new self.’” It is from the concept of these two selves that Devota’s book is threaded and spun.

Even from the start, in frantic, dream-like sequences, the reader encounters creatures spawning from a vibrant and rapidly shifting earth—both of which are dependent upon the speaker. Bees, compared to champagne bubbles, become excited by mascara-laden eyelashes instead of blooming flowers. In this universe, bees are drawn to women instead of natural blooms— connecting nature to the self in alluring and magnifying ways. The speaker, in fact, finds her voice “amplified” by nature in her poem “iii...

HOW AMERICANS MAKE RACE by Clarissa Rile Hayward reviewed by Irami Osei-Frimpong

HOW AMERICANS MAKE RACE:
Stories, Institutions, Spaces
by Clarissa Rile Hayward
Cambridge University Press, 234 Pages

In How Americans Make Race, Clarissa Rile Hayward argues that the persistence of racialized spaces is not merely a matter of the remarkable, particular stories individuals tell themselves about themselves; rather, racism persists because of the way racialized commitments are embedded in the unremarkable narrative context, the physical objects and the mundane habits of thought and action, that serve as the unacknowledged backdrop of White community space. If Jill's identity emerges from stories told against a backdrop of political investment: strong public schools, smooth roads, well-paid teachers, etc., then Jill will have a hard time making sense of herself in a space characterized by political disinvestment. This second space will be felt as hostile in an existential way, even though the space may not be any more physically dangerous.

Hayward argues against the “narrative identity thesis,” the notion that racial identities are matter of the narratives we tell ourselves about ourselves. She argues that, while this thesis can explain how Americans produce race through narrating racial hierarchies and racialized aspirations, the thesis cannot account for how racism is persistently reproduced, once the initial racist narrative identities evolve into seemingly race-neutral stories. Recall our White church. A feature of the church's Whiteness is how it participates in an institutionalized context that is normalized to omit reference to King, even as a large share of American church life embraces the opportunity to remember the pastor and civil rights icon. It is important to remember how this church is White even if every congregant individually embraces a gospel of inclusion and rejects their forebears’ explicitly racist beliefs; however, it is these racist forebears who put the church on an ethnically White path by institutionalizing a context that disproportionately depreciates King's relevance for the life of their church.

EVERLASTING LANE by Andrew Lovett reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster

EVERLASTING LANE
by Andrew Lovett
Melville House, 353 pages

reviewed by Claire Rudy Foster

Why do we think that childhood is a golden, untouchable idyll? Childhood is horrible; even the happy, non-traumatic ones, stuffed with loving family, good food, summer vacations, and abundant laughter, weigh on us.

As we pass through the gates of maturity, moving towards our adult selves, we forget the burden of being a child. Proust, with his Sisyphean sentences, knew. Roddy Doyle knew it, wrote it into his perfect novel Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha. And Andrew Lovett knows it. His first novel, Everlasting Lane, captures the dreaminess of childhood, and the small details that make it nightmarish as well.

I had a particularly fine childhood, in case you wondered. My parents were kind and affectionate. There were picnics. Ice cream. I liked school, and was allowed to read whatever I wanted. In the summers, my sister and I went to stay with our grandparents. On the weekends, we listened to bluegrass music in the park, hiked in the woods, and rode our bikes around the nearby lake. I do not say that childhood is horrible because mine was. I say it, because childhood is a time of incredible tension between the awakening mind, and the restrictions of being a young person. Children are not allowed to make their own decisions, usually. They do not choose what they will do, how they will behave, when or what they will eat, or what they will study. All these things are decided for them, by the grownups who care about them. For better or worse, children are slowly tamed by their parents and teachers.

THE OPPOSITE OF LONELINESS by Marina Keegan reviewed by Colleen Davis

THE OPPOSITE OF LONELINESS
by Marina Keegan
Scribner, 240 pages

reviewed by Colleen Davis

There’s a stretch of Philly’s Walnut Street Bridge that makes me tap my brakes. I’m not a slow driver by nature, but that corner with the new streetlight always makes me reduce speed. About a year ago, a young man lost his life right there, when two cars collided. As one of the vehicles spun onto the sidewalk, Zachary Woods climbed the streetlight to avoid the car. Unfortunately the vehicle knocked both man and lamppost over the bridge. If the story isn’t sad enough, consider how talented Zachary was: he’d received dual admission to the MBA program at the Wharton School and a selective International Business program with the Lauder Institute. The guy was fluent in Chinese, skilled in international investment, and a record-breaking NCAA swimmer. No calculator is sophisticated enough to tally what the world lost during that crash.

The memory of this incident haunted me as I read The Opposite of Loneliness, a collection of pieces written by Marina Keegan. Her title essay scored more than a million Internet hits shortly after its online publication. Marina, whose lovely smile adorns the book jacket, earned a Bachelor’s Degree, Magna Cum Laude from Yale, and had a job offer at The New Yorker. But her promising life ended in a car crash just five days after her graduation ceremony. You can read the book to commemorate her life and talent—or read it just to be impressed by the skills a young person can acquire when fully immersed in the craft of writing.

RED JUICE: POEMS 1998–2008 by Hoa Nguyen reviewed by Kenna O’Rourke

RED JUICE: POEMS 1998–2008
by Hoa Nguyen
Wave Books, 245 pages

reviewed by Kenna O’Rourke

Hoa Nguyen is a poetic tease: her retrospective Red Juice is a decade’s-worth of poetry that tantalizes with glimpses of self-awareness and familiarity just as soon as the lines lose you in non sequitur and obscurity. The poet flutters between intense clarity and seeming nonsense (albeit eloquent nonsense), forcing the reader to dwell over her deceptively short poems, grappling with gut-reactions to the way the work appears on the page.

Reading the book becomes an accomplishment, a brain teaser; steeping the simple language in one’s thoughts to draw out the meaning seems as much a part of Nguyen’s poetry as the words themselves. For all of its length, Red Juice is rewarding—its complexities reveal themselves in intricate patterns of meta-referentiality, historical weight, even humor.

One has to wonder if Nguyen presaged the collection, time-stamped in its very title, as she wrote these poems seven-to-seventeen years ago: they drip with a sense of history, whether the recent past or the Neolithic. With titles like “Dream 5.22.97,” the reader can’t help but picture the Nguyen of the ’90s knowing that cataloging her poetic chronology would be useful in the future.

A QUESTION OF TRADITION: WOMEN POETS IN YIDDISH by Kathryn Hellerstein reviewed by Alyssa Quint

A QUESTION OF TRADITION: WOMEN POETS IN YIDDISH, 1586-1987
by Kathryn Hellerstein
Stanford University Press, 496 pages

reviewed by Alyssa Quint

Poetry by female Yiddish writers has become the tree that falls in the empty forest of Jewish literature. As a discrete body of work it resonated only faintly with the same Yiddish critics and scholars who gushed over male Yiddish authors. English translations have become an important repository of the dying vernacular of East European Jews but, again, not so much for its female poets. Women's Yiddish poetry finally gets its scholarly due from Kathryn Hellerstein, long-time champion of the female Yiddish poetic voice, in her comprehensive and accessible account, A Question of Tradition: Women Poets in Yiddish, 1586-1987.

Hellerstein organizes her book around the concept of a literary tradition as invoked by the likes of T.S. Eliot in his monumental essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent." To Eliot's eloquent if male-dominated and Eurocentic discussion of what "compels a man to write," (my italics), Hellerstein counters with a chain of women who work off the energy of the East European Jewish female experience with its idiosyncrasies of language, religion, gender, and culture.

APPROACHING BORDERS by Nathaniel Popkin

APPROACHING BORDERS
by Nathaniel Popkin

Two men, one aged 61, the other 65, each born in late January, each a father in grief. The first is the Israeli writer David Grossman, whose son Uri was killed in the brief 2006 Israeli war in Lebanon. The other is the American poet Edward Hirsch, whose son Gabriel died of a drug overdose in 2011. On a bookshelf these men and their books may stand together, G then H, Grossman then Hirsch, David then Edward. They are joined too by the instinct to drill into unfathomable sorrow. In 2008, Grossman produced a startling work of preemptive mourning, a novel published in Jessica Cohen’s English translation in 2010 as To The End of the Land and last summer the ecstatic lamentation Falling Out of Time (also translated by Cohen), both brought out in U.S. by Knopf. Hirsch reviewed Falling Out of Time in the New York Times Book Review shortly before Knopf published his piercing seventy-eight page elegy, Gabriel.

TRAPPED IN THE ALPHABET by Niels Hav

TRAPPED IN THE ALPHABET
by Niels Hav

When Barack Obama was inaugurated as president in USA, the poet Elizabeth Alexander was reading at the ceremony. The poet may take on a similar role in different cultures. But in everyday life, and most of the time, the poet is an outsider. A lonely bandit in the desert. That’s how it is in Europe, and so it is in the rest of the world.

We writers are soloists. We celebrate the same virtues as the Bedouins: perseverance and generosity. Some poets among our best colleagues know about hunger and thirst, heroic poverty and longing. There are other values than the material, and retaining this knowledge is one of poetry's tasks.

RETHINKING THE SHITTY FIRST DRAFT by George Dila

RETHINKING THE SHITTY FIRST DRAFT
by George Dila

I do not write shitty first drafts.

In fact, that phrase, inspired by Ernest Hemingway, popularized by Anne Lamott, offends me slightly—both the idea of thinking of my own work this way, and also that word itself, shitty, to my ear an ugly and repellent adjective.

What does the phrase mean, though?

To quote the wonderful Miss Lamott, from her book-that-everyone-has-read, Bird by Bird, “The first draft is the child's draft, where you let it all pour out and then let it romp all over the place knowing that no one is going to see it and that you can shape it later.”

THE DEEP ZOO by Rikki Ducornet reviewed by Kim Steele

THE DEEP ZOO
by Rikki Ducornet
Coffee House Press, 106 pages

reviewed by Kim Steele

Rikki Ducornet begins her newest book of essays, The Deep Zoo:

To write a text is to propose a reading of the world and to reveal its potencies. Writing is reading and reading a way back to the initial impulse. Both are acts of revelation.

And, just as a text is unknown until it is written, the deep zoo—the essential potencies at the core of humanity—exist unknown until explored. In this book of essays Ducornet boldly ventures into this essential human core.

THE GHOST IN US WAS MULTIPLYING by Brent Armendinger reviewed by Johnny Payne

THE GHOST IN US WAS MULTIPLYING
by Brent Armendinger
Noemi Press, 94 pages

reviewed by Johnny Payne

It has been thirty years since Bernstein, Hejinian, McCaffery, et alii stormed the gates of poesy—twenty since some of them hitch-hiked up to Buffalo. Depending on where you sat, they were either a palliative or a wound—in either case, necessary. They ran over the daisy with a lawnmower, the better to see the fibers of its petals. In a preface some time back to a re-issue of The Sophist, Ron Silliman mourns that “seventeen years later . . .[it] doesn’t look as radical to the eye as perhaps it once did.”

That isn’t necessarily a bad thing. They accomplished what they set out to do and thus of course Bernstein’s work looks more familiar. There is a time to shoot down the rapids with funky alphabet soup spraying in your face, and another to issue out into a broader and slower expanse of river, where you can put your head up and see the sandstone cliffs. The essential debate of whether a word is a word or a picture will go on forever, without closure, as it should. Beyond anyone’s manifesto, how much rhetoric and how much lyric, how much narrative propulsion and how much regress, are good for the brain game once known as verse, goes under negotiation with every keystroke of every poem.

THAT DEXTEROUS MARGIN by Michael McFee

THAT DEXTEROUS MARGIN
by Michael McFee

1.

A poem is a visual as well as a verbal object.

Its language is primary, obviously, the sounds the words make, and the effects those sounds have on the reader, phoneme by phoneme and as a whole aural object. But the shape the poem makes on the page is crucial as well.

2.

I spent my first two years of college in design school at a technological research university. It was not a very verbal place or time for me. I logged many hours in studios, drawing and drafting and working on various design projects. I was learning to observe closely and to present what I saw in clear yet imaginative ways.

That visual urge abides in me. My imagination is most often triggered by something I see and try to convert into lines. And once those lines start to become a poem, I can’t stop thinking about the way it looks: my favorite medium in design school was pen and ink, and I want the poem to be perfect down to the very last crosshatch.

THE MATHEMATICIAN’S SHIVA by Stuart Rojstaczer reviewed by Michelle Fost

THE MATHEMATICIAN’S SHIVA
by Stuart Rojstaczer
Penguin Books, 366 pages

reviewed by Michelle Fost

Stuart Rojstaczer’s debut novel The Mathematician’s Shiva follows a son mourning the death of his remarkably powerful mother. It’s a first person narrative, very chatty, in the voice of Sasha Karnokovitch, a professor of Atmospheric Sciences who studies the physics of hurricanes. Yes, his mother was something of a hurricane. Her death brings with it a kind of celebration of her genius, with a procession of mathematicians descending on the family to participate in the funeral and the seven days of shiva that the family observes afterwards.

THE USE OF MAN by Aleksandar Tišma reviewed by Jamie Fisher

THE USE OF MAN
by Aleksandar Tišma
Trans. by Bernard Johnson
New York Review of Books, 368 pages

reviewed by Jamie Fisher

One of the major themes in The Use of Man is the use of women by men. Most of Tišma’s men are womanizers, none more confirmed than the central character Sredoje. As a boy, he dreams of lording over "sweet-smelling" slave girls as a pirate brigand; as an adult, he uses his policeman status to coerce frightened women into sleeping with him. The other main character, Vera, attempts to save herself as war approaches by separating from her family, escaping with a local official to Budapest. She attracts him by tanning in the sun, relying only on “her own healthy, supple body, in which she had full confidence.” In the long, dismal postwar economy, she will eventually prostitute herself in exchange for gifts and favors. For preoccupations like these, the author has been accused, on occasion, of “eroticizing the Holocaust.”

THE ART OF DESPAIR by Allison Seay

The Art of Despair
by Allison Seay

I. Out of the Depths

Perhaps it is a weakness to rely only on my own poetic experiences or sensibilities as a way to talk about craft or as a way to teach. In writing this, I thought of all kinds of things I could write about, things I have discovered about form and experiment and figuring out what it means to write from a Real Place. To be self-referential is sometimes not interesting or helpful to another’s plight in art or otherwise, even if we intend it. I can only say how it has been for me. I can only say the truth as best as I know it and hope that you find some seed of truth you might use for your own work, or find some luminosity that might illumine your poems in a new way.

10:04 by Ben Lerner reviewed by Ana Schwartz

10:04
by Ben Lerner
Faber and Faber, 245 pages

reviewed by Ana Schwartz

10:04 is Lerner’s impressive follow-up to 2011’s Leaving the Atocha Station. It aspires to make more meaningful connections between art and life; philosophy and experience. Atocha sets a high bar. That novel’s protagonist, Adam Gordon, wandered through Madrid in 2004, lonely as an El Greco cloud, thinking about Lukacs while staring at Bosch; in the meantime, cultivating a precious skepticism toward any “real experience of art.” 10:04 updates Atocha—tries to push conceptually further its concern for the melding of art and life, and the critical possibilities of the novel genre; while bringing them objectively closer, making them more reachable.

WORKING STIFFS by George Dila reviewed by Jon Busch

WORKING STIFFS
By George Dila
One Wet Shoe Publishing, 42 pages

reviewed by Jon Busch

George Dila’s recently published short story chapbook Working Stiffs is a satirical romp through perverse worlds where power and profit constitute The Good. In such worlds, morality is thereby consigned a priori, as any action that serves power and profit. The stories contained in Working Stiffs are brutally honest, albeit zany, depictions of a universe existing under this moral teleology.

LITTLE ORESTES by Nick Kolakowski

Nick Kolakowski

LITTLE ORESTES
by Nick Kolakowski

When I was a boy, my father told me the story of Agamemnon, King of Argos, peerless butcher of the Trojan War. Agamemnon was arrogant, which Dad considered a sterling quality for a man to have, so long as he backed that shit up with mighty deeds. Dad might have earned a degree from a good college and spent his life building a library of thick books, but sometimes when he drank his speech tumbled back into that crude pit from which nobody in our family will ever escape, dug by generations of pissed-off roughnecks with vicious tongues...

STARING AT THE SEA by Julianna Foster

Several years ago I came across a story about a nor’easter that hit a small coastal town.

The morning after the storm, residents of the town reported having seen something they had never experienced before or since—fleeting visions, every one. Strange sightings out at sea, like clouds of smoke rising from the horizon, orbs of light and unrecognizable objects floating on the water. Yet, as soon as they appeared, they were gone.

YOUR ROYAL HIGHNESS by Charlie Keys Bohem

YOUR ROYAL HIGHNESS
by Charlie Keys Bohem

His Royal Highness was a tweaker who hung around outside the convenience store where we used to go to buy booze. He always had his hands shoved wrist deep in his pockets, and there was always a twenty four-ounce Miller Hi-Life in a brown paper bag sitting on the newsstand next to him. His face was covered in black, some mixture of sweat and ash that stuck in his stubble, and he wiped it often—long, greasy drags across his cheeks that left them dirtier than they had been before. The management let him stay because he gave them such good business.

FIGURES OF SPEECH by John Shea

FIGURES OF SPEECH
by John Shea

Philadelphia

Dear Joe,

It was great seeing you again last weekend. I don’t think Sharon and I have had so much fun in a month of Sundays. Sorry for the cliché. Which reminds me: I’d be delighted to write the rhetoric booklet you spoke about. It would be fun to trot out all those dusty figures of speech, half of which I can’t even name. Is there still a market for that sort of thing, with all these students who just ramble on or pour out their undiluted, unfiltered feelings onto the page? Rhetoric is a bad word to them, isn’t it? Well, if the offer’s still good, I’ll send up some pages soon. A few extra bucks would help tide us over. Sharon is feeling a bit glum about my tenure situation, and who knows what will happen if I have to start over somewhere else...

PARADISE, ATTAINED BY TOUCH Excerpts by Robert Lunday

PARADISE, ATTAINED BY TOUCH
Excerpts
by Robert Lunday

“When I woke up, I had no hands.”[1]

“One day I awakened on a planet with people whose hands occasionally disappear…”[2]

The future is handless.

My fingers are tied in tight knots, they’re strings; they’re cigarette butts littering the ground, and each one reminds me of some direction I’ve lost, each finger points out a path.

⋅

SILKWORM by Emilia Rodriguez

SILKWORM
by Emilia Rodriguez

They rode the bus at dawn and again before bed. Some of them talked, but Luz never did. It was easier to rest her head against the trembling glass and listen: Someone's husband came home drunk, Someone won at bingo, and Gloria’s daughter finally had the baby. Gloria reminded Luz of her mother: rotund, vivacious, and demanding. It was so unnerving to be around her, Luz wished there were an earlier route, or an alternate route she could take to keep from hearing Gloria’s voice. Luz was unable to conceive, and she dreaded the mornings when Gloria bragged about her daughter’s pregnancy, recounting every ailment from the swollen feet to the constipation. Gloria was so proud of the pregnancy you'd think she was responsible for it herself. And though Luz felt some jealousy at the news, the thought that Gloria might have to quit to help her daughter care for the infant made her smile....

IF YOU DO NOT KNOW by David Hallock Sanders

IF YOU DO NOT KNOW
by David Hallock Sanders
Excerpt from BUSARA ROAD, a novel in progress

“King Solomon was a very wise man. This we all know. How do we know this? Because the Bible tells us so! Right here in ….”

Pastor Hesborne Kabaka made a small production out of opening his Bible and reading from it.

“…right here in ’The Book of the Wisdom of Solomon.’ There you go – clear as can be!”

Someone in the congregation exhaled a soft laugh. The pastor shut his Bible....

THE HERD by Annika Neklason

THE HERD
by Annika Neklason

The cows are clustered together at the crown of the hill. From where Priya stands on the shoulder of the highway they look like shadow puppets, dark, shifting silhouettes backlit by the harvest moon. They seem small enough, insubstantial enough, at this distance to be knocked over by a strong wind, or even swept away entirely.

Beside her, Amo cups his hands around his mouth and moos at them. The low vibrato of the sound makes Priya shiver, but the cows are too far away; they can’t hear him. They don’t lift their heads....

NO-BAKE by Charles Ramsay McCrory

NO-BAKE
by Charles Ramsay McCrory

It would be Bridget’s first Christmas without alcohol, and mentioning this fact to her sponsor she was conscious of using the seasonal language of loss: “My first Christmas since the divorce,” “Our first Christmas since Rachel died.” Gratitude, or the pressure to feel grateful, compelled her to admit she’d been spared such tragedies. Trent had stayed married to her through Blendergate and the ensuing six weeks of rehab, and Selena, their daughter, would be meeting them by train from her college for Christmas dinner at Rob’s. She’d managed to keep the bakery (though one pushy counselor had cautioned her not to reenter the melee of the food industry), along with the upstairs apartment, and her hand had healed nicely, leaving just a few silvery crosshatches and numbness in her index tip. The blender was nonrefundable, but then she was only counting blessings....

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