Max BartlettBIRDS / NERVES There’s this bird. It’s nighttime, and there’s this bird. And he’s flying, and who knows how long he’s been flying, because that’s not what’s important. The thing is there’s this house. Everything outside the house is…
Deirdre O’ConnorTWO POEMS A Man and A Name A man fucks a woman, then is smitten by another with her name. He is like the sky’s coincidence, never the same cumulonimbi, but always the sky. He is in the look…
Charlotte BoulaySCIENTISTS HAVE DISCOVERED that there are whirlpools in the wakes of stars. Birds run on at the mouth in different languages and the horses are lonely: we must keep mothering the empty plains. Detroit’s salt mines are becoming saltier…
Grace JordanFLYING I was wearing my turquoise suede moccasins. I was afraid they would get wet because I knew it would start raining at any given moment. There was an ominous raincloud making its way down the block. I decided…
Amy BurnsHUNGER I was sitting at my friend Bebe’s kitchen table. She was standing at the counter using a black and yellow handled screwdriver as an ice pick. I was telling her about it while she chopped. You should have…
Mercedes LawryTHE ACOLYTES, LIAR, AND BOX The Acolytes Somebody drowned the acolytes. They were not wee fellows so it must have been someone with plenty of muscle. Now an emptiness hovers like a bad smog burning throats and lungs. The…
Jenny Wales SteeleCOUCH [?] It was an okay day. I don’t understand zoos, the appeal. The kids thrill to it, sure, but kids are dumb. My nephew flounced around, did his giddy slash sissy thing. He was wearing his jester’s…
Geoff PeckTOUGH You picture it: fourteenth floor of Walker dormitory. A former wrestler dangles from a window. The one they call Bisonhead has him by one ankle and another ex-teammate, a freshman, by the other. It’s late April in Oklahoma,…
A BINTEL BRIEF: LOVE AND LONGING IN OLD NEW YORK
by Liana Finck
Ecco Press, 128 pages
reviewed by Ana Schwartz
There’s a new sort of fiction circulating, stories of young people, by young people, for young people. This isn’t YA lit. These stories range across genres, even mediums, but they all describe the ambivalence of maturing in post-post-modernity. These narratives share a sense of lostness and reflective self-estrangement. The authors are smart and the narratives are smartly-dressed. They usually take place in New York. Think Frances Ha or Tai Pei or Girls. And if, as one well-respected author of such fictions has recently described them, they at times seem “cold, lazy, [and] artificial,” they also exhibit “extreme honesty and thoroughness of […] self scrutiny.”
Liana Finck’s new graphic novel, A Bintel Brief features one such young me-person; but, although the story mines her development as an artist, it does so by digging into the past. With the distance afforded by history, and supported by the graphic novel’s relatively diffuse gaze, Finck offers a warmer, and more engaged account of a remarkably persistent theme: how one comes to feel that they belong to a community.
Poetry by Kelly Boyker, reviewed by Carlo Matos ZOONOSIS (Hyacinth Girl Press) Kelly Boyker’s chapbook, Zoonosis, is loaded from cover-to-cover with fantastical creatures, folktale monsters, and twentieth-century “freaks” drawn from the pages of Robert Ripley’s “Believe It or Not.” The…
A Graphic Narrative by Hillary L. Chute, reviewed by Seamus O’Malley OUTSIDE THE BOX: INTERVIEWS WITH CONTEMPORARY CARTOONISTS (University of Chicago Press) Outside the Box: Interviews with Contemporary Cartoonists by Hillary Chute contains interviews with Scott McCloud, Charles Burns, Lynda…
Fiction by Brendan Connell, reviewed by Ashlee Paxton-Turner THE GALAXY CLUB (Chômu Press) In his novel, The Galaxy Club, Brendan Connell, who was born and raised in New Mexico, reinterprets the landscape of a small New Mexico town, insisting that…
Poetry by Maureen Alsop, reviewed by Matthew Girolami MANTIC (Augury Books) This is a book of annotations, a bibliography of divination. Like any bibliography, Maureen Alsop’s Mantic is carefully researched and curated. The collection’s title, Mantic, and periodic poems within…
Fiction by Mina Loy, reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin INSEL (Melville House) You, dear reader, consummate seeker of literature in all forms, of voices in all languages, of song and fragment, of tome and flash, of ancient and modern: writers, books,…
Fiction by Tsipi Keller, reviewed by Lynn Levin ELSA (Spuyten Duyvil) As I began reading this short novel by Tsipi Keller, I found myself enjoying what I thought was going to be a leisurely experience with chick lit. Nothing too…
Poetry by Charlotte Boulay, reviewed by Matthew Girolami FOXES ON THE TRAMPOLINE (Ecco Press) You are in a field, a forest, or on a shore; you may have never been here before, but it brings forth some immense longing. Until…
Poetry by LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, reviewed by Shinelle L. Espaillat TwERK (Belladonna) The challenge in reading sound poetry is to try to grasp the full depth of the work’s significance without having the performance as a guide. The challenge…
Nonfiction by Diane Johnson, reviewed by Colleen Davis FLYOVER LIVES: A MEMOIR (Viking) It takes guts to become a writer. Not because it’s a dangerous profession, but a person drawn to serious writing often discovers that there’s no clear employment…
APOLLO
by Geoffrey Gatza
BlazeVOX
, 168 pages
reviewed by Carlo Matos
Geoffrey Gatza’s Apollo is an all-out assault on the reader, like facing an opponent who senses you’re about to wilt and so presses the action. Every time we think we know what he’s doing, another surprise comes our way. And this is how good conceptual poetry should be—not just the simple execution of a clever conceit but a text that threatens at every turn to burst from the inside out and take the reader with it but never does. Taking the shape of a souvenir program for a one-night performance of Stravinsky’s ballet of the same name, the book contains a myriad of Dada-like exercises: poems generated by a John Cage-like method of assigning words to each square on a chess board and to each piece and then playing out the game between Marcel Duchamp and then US chess champion, Frank Marshall, at the Chess Olympiad in Hamburg in 1930 (accompanied by pictures of each position and a cat), an Arthurian legend based on the Lady of Shallot, a three-act play where Duchamp somehow manages to play himself as Rrose Sélavey (his female alter-ego), and a business letter to the director of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, who kicked the author out one day for the mysterious offence of carrying an umbrella—a moment so Duchampian it is the perfect coda to this ready-made text. In “Fifteen Hundred Hours,” Rrose Sélavey says, “The consciousness that bound these obscurities. . . together/ was overgrowth.” It is a perfect metaphor for the entire collection, for this paean to Gatza’s modernist heroes who perform his ballet: Duchamp, Sélavey, Max Ernst, Gertrude Abercrombie, Leonora Carrington, Dorothea Tanning, and Dizzy Gillespie.
Fiction by Luis Chitarroni, translated by Darren Koolman, reviewed by Ana Schwartz THE NO VARIATIONS: THE DIARY OF AN UNFINISHED NOVEL (Dalkey Archive Press) Because we were late in arriving, because we were late in departing, because we didn’t care…
Poetry by Michael Ruby, reviewed by Ana Schwartz AMERICAN SONGBOOK (Ugly Duckling Presse) Imagine a road trip across America, probably in the summer, “in the good old plastic gasoline / Pell-mell summertime.” Of course, music will be an essential part…
A Graphic Narrative curated by Justin G. Schiller and Dennis M.V. David, edited by Leonard S. Marcus, reviewed by Tahneer Oksman MAURICE SENDAK: A CELEBRATION OF THE ARTIST AND HIS WORK (Harry N. Abrams Press) In a collaborative comic strip…
Fiction by Pamela Erens, reviewed by Ashlee Paxton-Turner THE UNDERSTORY (Tin House Books, originally published by Ironweed Press in 2007) I began Pamela Erens’ The Understory to find the main character, Jack Ronan Gorse, peering inside his coffee cup to…
A Graphic Narrative by Diane Obomsawin, reviewed by Amy Victoria Blakemore ON LOVING WOMEN (Drawn & Quarterly) “On Loving Women”: it sounds like a treatise. But Diane Obomsawin does not deliver the usual tome with this intimately illustrated collection of…
Fiction by Dennis Must, reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin THE WORLD’S SMALLEST BIBLE (Red Hen Press) and Fiction by Joan Chase, reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin DURING THE REIGN OF THE QUEEN OF PERSIA (NYRB Classics, new edition) GROWING UP, MID-CENTURY Childhood…
Poetry by Gregory Djanikian, reviewed by Anna Strong DEAR GRAVITY (Carnegie Mellon University Press) At the beginning of the fourth section of Gregory Djanikian’s Dear Gravity, in a poem titled “Beginnings,” the speaker, one of two “giddy / amnesiacs of…
Fiction by Melissa Malouf, reviewed by Elizabeth Mosier MORE THAN YOU KNOW (Dalkey Archive Press) Melissa Malouf’s More Than You Know intrigued and perplexed me right from its disorienting start. I’d barely landed on the first page when I fell…
Anastasiya ShekhtmanTHE OLD MAN AND THE POOL Regardless of which creative field you look at, there is always talk about process. This postmodern world has rendered form and content inextricable in many ways, so when I look at work, it…
Patricia Colleen MurphyTHE BIRTH OF NO I remember everything but in an order I cannot control. It was suicide season. I was 14 and I couldn’t believe my mother’s thrift, like she had missed a few zeros. It was in…
Mary van OgtropTHE LAST ONE IN A bridge cuts a straight line across the sky, connecting one wooded area of Richmond, Virginia, to another. Imagine a bridge and you’ll see a parabola, the structure’s midsection arching high in the air…
HUNGRY
by Rachel Estrada Ryan
It has been seven days since we’ve run out of meat and vegetables in the freezer and most of the cans and boxes and jars in the pantry. My husband reminds me that we have not run out of money. He says this as he leans against our stainless steel refrigerator that matches the stainless steel stove and the stainless steel dishwasher and the stainless steel built-in microwave. Of course I know he’s right; I also know we probably never will. No, we will always have too much, and the people on the charity websites will never have enough, and frankly if I have to spend another afternoon hauling reluctant children and unforgiving paper-or-plastic bags I might just lose it once and for all. I’m not sure I can ever go to the supermarket again.
Laura Mecklenburger“VULNERARY” AND AN ART WITCH When I try to describe my artwork to others, I often say that I make ritual objects and installation art. But I didn’t set out to make installation art from the beginning, and I…
Nick KolakowskiTHE GREAT WAVE CARRIES YOU FORWARD Marie’s husband Zachary passed away in early March, followed two weeks later by the dog. Marie would never confess this to anyone, but she missed the dog a little more than Zack. At…
Zachary LundgrenBRANDED He was drunk and I’m sure it helped when I took the iron from the stove: a loud red, a cruel star. I held the iron like a relic of some religion we’ve all long forgot but is…
Royee Zvi AtadgyAN EVEN, PERFECT BURN Come here, he said. No, you can just watch me and then afterwards we’ll go to sleep and that’ll be the end of it, she said. You mean that we’ll go to sleep like…
Jason KapcalaBUNGALESE CONSTRICTOR No one told me that Carlos’s gallery exhibition was that night until after I’d wrangled the Burmese python from under the porch and I was drenched through with rain and covered with dead leaves and muck. Storm…
Olive MulletIN SEARCH OF DEATH Because I could not stop for Death He kindly stopped for me. —Emily Dickinson —So why are you working at Hospice? Death is my thing. I’ve read all the books on it, most of them…
Rick BaileyALL EARS A few weeks ago my father woke up almost totally deaf. He already had a significant deficit. For years he has worn hearing aids. One for each ear, they are a microphone, amplifier, and loudspeaker all in…
Anthony WallaceBLACK RAINCOAT, BLUE STOCKINGS Nobody took Rhiannon there, and nobody took her home. She managed the whole thing by herself. When she woke up, it was dark outside. A light was on in the living room, and she could…
Shannon ViolaIN MY TIME I have a love-hate relationship with Hemingway. Sometimes when I’m writing, he’s over my shoulder. He seizes my hand and slashes the Latinate adjectives on my page while I wince and moan. He tugs at one…
Jane CarrollWINGS TO GO There’s a chicken place on Ridge Avenue called “Wings to Go.” I occasionally wait for a bus across the street, and that sign always seemed to me a little too poetic for a wing place. It…
Nicole CallihanIN THE MEWS Two feuding gardens are thought to be responsible for the most recent blooming. According to the rain, in late summer, a band of tiger lilies recruited a pack of peonies, and those peonies, comely as they…
Gabriel Ojeda SaguePLACES TO WALK OUT TO I read the note scribbled wildly on torn paper: “Language is not the signifier nor the signified. It is the significance.” The only constant is the height of buildings. I hate the way…
Robert WexelblattMARCH 5, 1953 The funeral was flowerless. Every early spring bloom had been expropriated by the KGB for their boss. Scarcely forty people dared show up. Charged with counter-revolutionary bourgeois tendencies, tormented and shunned by the Composers Union, his…
Melissa DuclosCONFESSIONS OF A FACEBOOK MOM I’m with Teddy and Elliot, sitting on the floor amidst a pile of Legos and a stack of books, and I find my eyes wandering up to the shelf. My fingers get a little…
Brennan CusackHOW TO MASTER SOCIAL MEDIA Take a good hard look at yourself in the mirror because it’s got a frame like a photograph and you need the practice. Move around and play with angles until you find the most…
J.C. ToddON THE ROMANCE OF PARKLAND for Erica Upstream, a shadow crosses the oxbow of a river whose flood plains are silted by paternal names of grant-holders. Their slaves tilled the alluvial bottom land, turning up flints and the bones…
Kathy Lou SchultzJACKSON LISTENS TO THE BIRDS for Jackson born 2/5/07 Memphis is a huff of spring grandiose pink blossoms about to pop a rainstorm lurking in the palpable air It’s you and me rounding the corners of Midtown lush…
Justin NicholesA SAD, LOGICAL CAPITULATION (after D. H. Lawrence) The day a welding rod shimmied down Zou’s collar and combusted his shirt into singed tendrils, the same day my stomach caught traction in the scoop of his lower back and…
B.A. VargheseALL GOOD THINGS The milk was white and it squirted out from under his hands. He pulled and pulled the cow’s udders one at a time to a rhythmic beat and I watched it fall down in spurts after…