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A BINTEL BRIEF: LOVE AND LONGING IN OLD NEW YORK by Liana Finck reviewed by Ana Schwartz

Cleaver Magazine Posted on June 9, 2014 by thwackFebruary 1, 2016

A-Bintel-BriefA 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.

Liana Finck

Liana Finck

Finck foregrounds this theme early as her narrator inherits a book of newspaper clippings from her grandmother, old cut-outs of the “Bintel Brief,” an advice column authored at the turn of the 20th century by Abraham Cahan, the editor of the Yiddish newspaper The Forward. The clippings scrapbook turns out to be a magic artifact of sorts when it brings to life a phantom Cahan himself. He becomes the narrator and guide, explaining and fleshing out the lives preserved in each letter. The book proceeds as a sequence of vignettes, mostly black-and-white panels, Finck listening inquisitively to Cahan’s stories.

The time-traveler Cahan is out of place in contemporary New York. His arrival here brings forward the historical experiences of immigrant Jews—the readers of his newspaper—who came to America to find their family and friends, and found them changed from when they knew them in Europe. Subtending these threads is the delicate matter of absorption into “American” culture, a theme Finck treats with judicious subtlety. In some sense, the theme of belonging comes with the territory: New York is a city of plurivocality, an ideal that Finck enthusiastically invokes through the English literary tradition when she paints Cahan quoting Shakespeare on the diverse beauty of man as they walk through Times Square. Even voiced by a time-traveler, it resounds from the heart of her text with remarkable sincerity.

Each story recounts the predicament of a single letter, which is a great formal device since each missive bears with it an urgently felt and discrete plot. The form allows Finck, through Cahan, to gently resist narrating solutions. The advice Cahan offers only ever appears as text, and never comes to visible results. The invisibility of resolutions comprises the great empathy of Finck’s book—there may not be any thoroughly satisfying solution to these problems.

barber

The thematic contrast between advised action and represented life gets at the most powerful formal element of the graphic novel, its fusion of image and text. Finck’s images vividly and gratifyingly give flesh to a world intently concerned with reconciling two tense imperatives: on one hand, there’s the necessary struggle to make ends meet in a new land; on the other, there’s a struggle to keep faith in what can’t be materially guaranteed—the affection of a lover, for instance, or the closeness of distant family, or a felt religious belief. Finck’s graphic style emphasizes their more intense, though varied experience in earlier times. In the black and white episodes, she frequently uses a heavy line to give a sense of shadow and darkness. Yet often, her objects, particularly the human bodies, appear pliant and fluid. For example, in the first chapter, “The Watch,” she begins the story of a frustrated mother by using strong lines and sharp objects: a pencil, a sword, the eponymous timepiece. By contrast, the eleventh chapter, “A Faithful Reader,” represents a story of unassimilated melancholy and trauma with phantom-like shapes and strangely-placed items in Sarah, the letter-writer’s room. The shlemazl, the oppressive spirit, an encephalitic stick-like figure, is rendered with only slightly less solidity than Sarah. These vividly represented problems might long for resolution—the narrator/artist pleads with Cahan to tell her how they ended—but to offer such closure in the text would compromise their emotional integrity.

I'm a girl

The strongest stylistic connection between these sections—the stories of the past and the story of how we come to know the past—is water, as both motif and medium: the line-drawing waves on the title page represent the same waves that bear immigrants to New York; water reappears as the tears that fall down faces throughout the book, indicating strong feelings that persist through history; it’s transformed into the soup that Cahan longs for and that Finck learns to make. Most importantly it is the medium of choice—the watercolors—of the sections of the present. It is the substance of the conversations between Cahan and the protagonist. It is the medium in which Cahan becomes modern—shaving, putting on modern clothing, walking through the city—and it is the medium in which the artist grows more historically aware, eventually initiating her own proper research into her family and her city’s history. The liquid blue of these sections quietly carries through each of the black and white episodes, highlighting an emblematic object of struggle or anxiety.

mad barber

It’s easy to want to over-interpret these blue objects—a hat, a tangle of yarn, a singing bird—as they progress through each chapter. Finck recurrently illustrates dreams in these episodes, and that dense nexus of narrative and symbol isn’t neutralized by the fact that Cahan, until he decides to get a modernizing shave, looks suspiciously like Sigmund Freud. The chapter in which Finck illustrates Cahan discarding that self-presentation is itself one of the most politically unsettling dreams of the book. In that chapter, “The Mad(?) Barber,” the letter writer, a barber, describes dozing off at work, and dreaming about cutting off the head of a disrespectful customer—but that customer is George Washington! He is so disturbed by the dream that he’s tempted to murder his real-life customers. The political implications of such a dream echo in the scene when Cahan, walking through Times Square, chooses to quote Shakespeare (“O wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is!”) to express desire for expansive community rather than, say, Whitman, the more locally famous bard of social sentiment (“I loved well the stately and rapid river;” he writes, for example, in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” “The men and women I saw were all near to me”). These passages indicate justifiable skepticism toward the promise of the American dream through history. The format here is especially powerful in framing that skepticism historically: it is a dream that haunts a man, who narrates it in a letter that is then published in a paper, and here drawn in a graphic novel. There is no singular voice expressing a grievance at America, but a collective, through dream-work. Here, Finck is at her best, most dynamically participating in a historical community.

adoption

Cahan’s advice columns show off his commitment to close listening and observation, but he does not aim to interpret dreams, despite the implicit desire of those letters. Instead, he’s more concerned with the urgent pragmatism of lived life: “The writer of this letter,” he responds to the mad barber, “must simply laugh off the dream and drive the whole matter out of his head…he himself must be strong and overcome his impulse.” And to some extent, the protagonist of the novel takes up a contemporary version of that advice when her spirit friend leaves her, lonely, to get to the work of the present. And this is the singular weakness of the book: the delicacy of the present never rises to the challenging boldness of the past. The last pages thematize her personal development, and represent it as a problem comparable to those that came before: (“Editor, my spirit has left me and I don’t know who I am anymore”). But the novel is reluctant to clearly describe the struggles of the contemporary artist, how she got there and what symptoms she sees. She appears therefore distinctly immune from the urgently felt struggles of her community’s history. It has the effect, at least, in the text, of holding her apart from affective belonging to the historical community she so sympathetically represents. In the final panel, she claims that “some things can’t be put into words.”
Cleveland
There is much to honor about the ineffable, and much to value in the unique potential of images, certainly. But if the blues of the present permeate the strong monochrome of the past, certainly the present too, can benefit from the past’s bold line. This is less a failing than an opportunity for a certainly flexible author like Finck. Her scrupulous and sensitive readings of the past, of the historical experience of lostness and estrangement can only strengthen her intuitive, if, here, vague representation of the contemporary youthful search for love and belonging in New York. Indeed, her work, in its anachronism, points to what might be missing in this crop of recent works: attention to the affinities with the experiences of the past. We can trust that she’ll continue to develop this cross-historical connection with no lack of subtlety or style.


ana-schwartz

Ana Schwartz is a doctoral candidate in English literature at the University of Pennsylvania and teaches high school English in the suburbs of Philadelphia. She is working on a translation of Herralde Prize-winning author Alvaro Enrigue’s first novel. 

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Published on June 9, 2014 in graphic narrative reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

ZOONOSIS by Kelly Boyker reviewed by Carlo Matos

Cleaver Magazine Posted on May 22, 2014 by thwackMay 22, 2014
zoonosis

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ZOONOSIS
by Kelly Boyker
Hyacinth Girl Press, 39 pages
reviewed by Carlo Matos

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 Ripley’s characters are of particular interest because they are often postmodern updates of the original chthonic creatures of Greek myth. There is a child Cyclops, for example, a tribe of crab people, and Orthus—the less-famous, two-headed brother of Cerberus. The modern-day Orthus is the result of a macabre experiment by Russian scientist, Vladimir Demikhov, who “successfully grafted the head of a puppy onto the body of a full grown Mastiff” (“Orthus”). Time and again, as this example makes clear, the true monsters of Boyker’s world turn out not to be the wolves or the so-called freaks, whom she often treats with compassion and understanding, but the “ordinary” people. Even when the wolf bites, she seems to be saying, it is only acting according to its nature. The humans, on the other hand, sit

dreaming of cotton panties blowing on a clothesline . . . teeth jutted forward, all the better to eat them, all the children. (“American Dictionary”)

The first poem in the collection invokes the image of the wolf: “Of course the story begins with a wolf,” says Little Red, but this wolf—unlike his cousin of the German folk tale who meets his end at the hands of a hunter or a lumberjack depending on which version you are reading—suffers a far more ignominious fate than being cut open with an axe:

I ask only that he reconsider the cone I have placed around his neck, the way he walks into walls, confused. (“Little Red”)

Like a house pet, this wolf has been partially domesticated, but, tellingly, it is the speaker of this poem—not the wolf—who seems defeated. The poem ends with Little Red—even though her fingers have all been bitten off—asking the diminished wolf to reconsider “the elegance of his need,” the need being his desire to “pull your entire body through my teeth.”

Kelly Boyker

Kelly Boyker

One thing that I noticed throughout the collection was the proximity of the word “pretty” to acts of physical violence, often to biting and tearing of flesh. There are teeth all over the place, each set more menacing because of the word “pretty” and all its sexual connotations. “Pretty” is really loaded because unlike the word, “beautiful,” say, it carries with it connotations of innocence. In “Curtsy to the Drain Pipe,” for example, the speaker says, “There, you chain smoked Pall Malls and promised me I was pretty. / There, you bit my hand and ran into the woods.” Similarly, in “Vanishing Points,” the speaker bites her own wrist “[b]ecause the absence of prettiness can lead to invisibility / she . . . used her teeth for the degloving.” And in “Meat Products,” the speaker describes a couple meeting for sex at a motel. The man says,

I don’t kill things . . . Not even fish. I catch them; tell them they’re pretty and throw them back in the river

while the woman thinks of the many car crashes she has witnessed out the motel window: “Gleaming packages of flesh / and muscle cut to fit your plate.” This man, who is so comically compassionate toward fish, is predictably cruel towards the person who is sharing his bed:

I don’t make promises, and can you please leave? I have to get up early in the morning.

We are menaced by the word “pretty” throughout the text. This comes to its apogee in two powerful poems: “How Pink Becomes a Duty” and “American Dictionary.” In “How Pink Becomes a Duty,” the female protagonist finds herself the object of lust at a convention of podiatrists. She acknowledges she was there “(just) to be pretty,” but the man who ultimately takes her to his room

did not touch her, instead he made

a cut between his genitals and rib cage and extracted his own liver and spleen and told her, You are not pretty.

You are the end of things. Tentacles, blisters, fever sores. Finally, he made her take his money.

He does not want sex. He wants to be torn asunder. He wants to be infected, but to do so he must first kill her prettiness and the innocence associated with it, hence the sudden venereal language and the forcible casting of the female character into the role of prostitute. The other poem is the terrifying, “American Dictionary”—what Boyker called “a mug shot poem.” The poem is made up of a series of six vignettes, each based, I assume, on a different old mug shot. In one stanza, the character says,

the one half of me wanting to pet pretty girls, the other half wanting to strangle them until their tongues swelled.

Once again, we have the proximity of the word “pretty” to physical violence of a sexually pathological nature. Zoonosis is not simply about the one-way transmission of disease between species—as the title would suggest. The transmission is reflexive; that is, the transmitted material becomes an indistinguishable part of the targeted organism, which has the consequence of blurring the distinction between vector and host, between human and animal, between sex and violence. These persona poems are full of a very satisfying ambiguity, but the one thing that seems to remain constant no matter what the context is Boyker’s compassion towards those on the margins. In an interview with Lauren Henley at Aperçus Quarterly, she says, “I am drawn to the marginalized and I want to tell their stories in a respectful but compelling language. I think we both write about beings and spaces on the edge of existence. This is the nibble that bites us back.”


Carlo Matos Carlo Matos is poet, fiction writer and essayist. He has published three books of poetry and one book of scholarship. His work has appeared in such journals as Paper Darts, Diagram, Atticus Review, Prick of the Spindle, and Arsenic Lobster, among others. He is an English professor at the City Colleges of Chicago by day and an MMA fighter by night. After hours he can be found entertaining clients at the Chicago Poetry Bordello.

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Published on May 22, 2014 in poetry reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

OUTSIDE THE BOX: INTERVIEWS WITH CONTEMPORARY CARTOONISTS by Hillary L. Chute reviewed by Seamus O’Malley

Cleaver Magazine Posted on May 21, 2014 by thwackJune 18, 2020
Outside-the-Box book jacket

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OUTSIDE THE BOX: INTERVIEWS WITH CONTEMPORARY CARTOONISTS
By Hillary L. Chute
University of Chicago Press, 272 Pages

reviewed by Seamus O’Malley

Outside the Box: Interviews with Contemporary Cartoonists by Hillary Chute contains interviews with Scott McCloud, Charles Burns, Lynda Barry, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, Daniel Clowes, Phoebe Gloeckner, Joe Sacco, Alison Bechdel, Françoise Mouly, Adrian Tomine, Art Spiegelman and Chris Ware. If you know comics you’ll recognize this as the auteur scene, and if you don’t you’ve just been given your starter syllabus. Many of these interviews appeared before, especially in Believer magazine, but those have been expanded, and several others are appearing for the first time in print. It is a valuable record of some of the industry’s greatest talents contemplating their work, their influences, and comics culture at large.

There is some precedent for such a collection, such as Todd Hignite’s In the Studio: Visits with Contemporary Cartoonists (2007), which interviewed many of the same artists. That work, as its title suggests, was more about the creative process, and Hignite was mostly interested in the physical details of draftsmanship. Chute, a professor of English at the University of Chicago, is possibly the world’s only full-time graphic novel scholar, so approaches her interviewees with a wider range of subjects. The result is a less focused volume than Hignite’s but allows for, say, Tomine’s interesting accounts of dealing with race in his work, or the inclusion of Mouly, who, while not a creator of comics, has been central to the growth of comics culture over the past generation.

No one is better poised for such a project than Chute. She edited Spiegelman’s MetaMaus, and co-taught a course on comics and autobiography with Bechdel. But more importantly, Chute is one of the best writers we have on comics. Her first book, Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics (2010), as well as articles in academic journals like PMLA and Modern Fiction Studies, are models of comics reading and criticism.

Chute is unobstrusive with her questions, and often the simplest ones lead to the richest (and longest) meditations. Lynda Barry delivers a wonderful, Gertrude Stein-esque ramble on what numbers look like, all prompted by Chute’s short remark, “Yes, the book has a questioning mode.”  It helps that most of these artists are veterans who have had ample time to contemplate their medium.

Headshot of Hillary Chute

Hillary Chute

One theme that many artists return to is that of physicality and print culture. (Kinko’s gets its own line in the index.) Several interviewees speculate that the increase in serious attention given to comics is the result of the virtualization of so much of today’s media, so that a heavy, thick-papered book cuts against the grain of contemporary culture and compensates for a lost connection to physical objects. While McCloud is bullish on web comics and dismisses the paper attachment as a “fetish,” most of the other artists relate their unwillingness to imagine their work independent of paper. This inevitably leads to a culture of nostalgia, visible in the work of Barry and Ware (and if we draw farther afield, artists like Ben Katchor or Seth). And while Tomine laments that “there’s almost a cultural stereotype of the nostalgic cartoonist guy, and you don’t want to play into it too much,” he must know he is doing a poor job of it during his interview, where he defends his decision, unique amongst the interviewees, to put out his work as separate issues initially available only at comic book stores. Clowes, by contrast, regrets publishing his great work The Death Ray as a comic and now only does work straight to book form.

A related issue is the long and painstaking process of creating a comic that is so out of step with the instantaneousness of social media. Sacco, a comics journalist, is the most salient example here: he went to Bosnia in 1995, and the result was the impressive Safe Area Gorazde…published in 2000. For a culture habituated to a continuous feed of information, his creative process reads like a geeky form of sadomasochism. But Sacco’s work—he signs and dates every page—never lets us forget how his source material has been manipulated and formed, and reminds us that we misuse the term “immediate” to refer to the fast speed of new kinds of mediation.

With the exception of Mouly, all of these interviewees are artists who write, or writers who draw. This is auteur tradition, as opposed to the collaborative work that is standard at Marvel or D.C. It’s this attention to literary, often autobiographical work that has drawn some negative attention to Chute, since it taps into some unease over what the comics canon is going to look like. Chute’s success has made her a target for critics—mostly male—who accuse her of snubbing genre comics, especially superhero comics. Some of the comments you can find on academic chat boards are so strident in their misogyny you wonder if it’s parody—one poster lists his favorite critics and writes, “No Chute here!” Does he know he’s supposed to be writing academic discourse and not a sign for his boys club that meets in a treehouse? The fact that a woman has earned alpha dog status is not sitting well with an audience who turned to comics in the first place because of their issues with girls. (I speak from personal authority.)

Sexism aside, Chute takes seriously the issue of canon creation, and even includes, in her introduction, some passages verbatim from an exchange she had in PMLA, in which she defended her work against charges of elitism. While it may seem like a paradox to be an elitist comics scholar, Chute has displayed little interest in superheroes throughout her career, and Outside the Box has no Alan Moore, Frank Miller or Grant Morrison. Chute makes clear her preferred genealogy: “The underground comics community of artists and publishers was, in large part, the genesis of contemporary comics,” and “I am more interested…in the single vision of the auteur of fiction or nonfiction comics.” However, this is not to preclude or circumscribe what scholars should be writing about: she states her desire “for more, not fewer, conversations about comics…with many kinds of perspectives and objects of analysis.” Most scholars do not have to defend themselves like this—if you write on James Joyce, no one asks what you have against crime fiction—but such debates are inevitable as comics scholarship grows up (even as some individual scholars refuse to do so). Quality works like this will ultimately be to everyone’s benefit—readers, scholars and artists alike.


Author Photo of Seamus-OMalley

Seamus O’Malley is an English Lecturer at Stern College for Women, Yeshiva University. He received his Ph.D. from the CUNY Graduate Center. He has published on W.B. Yeats, Ford Madox Ford, Rebecca West, Robert Louis Stevenson, Frank McGuinness, Edmund Wilson, and Alan Moore. His book Making History New: Modernism and Historical Narrative will be published by Oxford University Press in the fall of 2014.

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Published on May 21, 2014 in graphic narrative reviews, nonfiction reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

THE GALAXY CLUB by Brendan Connell reviewed by Ashlee Paxton-Turner

Cleaver Magazine Posted on May 20, 2014 by thwackJuly 7, 2020
The Galaxy Club cover art. A black-and-white photograph of a man and child

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THE GALAXY CLUB
by Brendan Connell
Chômu Press, 189 pages

reviewed by Ashlee Paxton-Turner 

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 the comfortable and familiar all of a sudden feel slightly foreign. Connell has published both short fiction and several novels, notably Metrophilias (Better Non Sequitur, 2010) and Lives of Notorious Cooks (Chomu Press, 2012), and in The Galaxy Club, he experiments with making the conventional unconventional. From the first page of The Galaxy Club, Connell plunges his reader into a world that feels like it should be familiar but is riddled with the mythical and supernatural. I kept thinking that I should know this small, dusty town Connell describes—after all, I currently live in a small, dusty town. But Connell’s small town isn’t conventional. In a sense, it can’t be: it’s the late 1960s or early 1970s and the place bristles with sex (or anticipation of it, anyway), drugs, and rock and roll. It’s also soaked in the supernatural, which seems to stem from Connell’s interpretation of the spiritual aura of New Mexico, where he still lives. In the first chapter, which is only a page, Connell tells the reader that the dead “can still smell the colors.” I knew then reading Connell would be an act of true literary disorientation.

Connell’s town is earthly and unearthly at the same time; the story itself is a meandering quest for the world’s end that becomes a search for buried gold along the way. The narrative rambles. Connell forces the reader to backtrack in order to piece things together—which I rather enjoyed doing, once I got used to the rhythm of the book. Early on, the reader meets Blue Boy and his Demon Taming Stick, a dynamic combination that slays dragons in a creek.  The massacre spurs the rest of the dragons to seek revenge. Blue Boy, the son of Ibbie and Theodore Montoya, is made of part of the sky, and he becomes an integral thread to the loose narrative. Blue Boy appears throughout the book all the way to the end. He becomes familiar to the reader, though he does not necessarily help the reader find his or her bearings.

Brendan Connell author photo

Brendan Connell

Blue Boy does whatever he pleases. He does not succumb to anything but his own desires, and he greets the reader with this attitude of self-assurance, something many of the other characters either lack or doubt. The first time the reader meets Blue Boy, he is killing the little dragons in the creek, and the dragons are asking him to stop. Blue Boy completely disregards the pleas from both Smooth Stone Dragon and Little River Dragon. “You’re an ugly fish and I’m going to bring you to Mom and Dad. Mom’s going to cook you for dinner tonight. She’s going to fry you up,” he says. And later: “I don’t care what you are. We’re going to eat you for dinner tonight.”

Near the end of the book, Blue Boy acknowledges that “they say [he] cause[s] trouble,” and that he seems content and confident; he has no fear of the Galaxy Club, the supernatural mafia that wants him killed. In fact, Blue Boy refers to them as “the Galaxy Clowns.” He knows who he is, and his confidence in his identity, even if an impulsive and sometimes troublesome identity, certainly is comforting to the reader amidst the haze of this small town and its numerous residents.

Connell’s story unfolds in alternating first person accounts told by the various characters. The same events, and their back-stories, appear in the various accounts so that the reader’s picture builds from multiple perspectives all at once. We’re faced with different pieces of information that eventually we realize are somehow all related. Some of the characters are real people, others residents of the spiritual world, others typically inanimate, such as Blue Boy’s Demon Taming Stick. The reader becomes fairly well acquainted with Blue Boy, Elmer, Ramona, Alfonso, and Ibbie and Theodore Montoya. The reader recognizes these recurring characters but only in the same way a visitor might recognize a few faces if he or she stays long enough but still does not really know the full story.

Of course, Connell does much more than provide a few familiar faces amidst this disorientation. He grounds his reader in his wandering would-be hero, Cleopatra, a first person narrator who also appears in other characters’ chapters. The Cleopatra chapters are scattered throughout the book in the same haphazard way that Cleopatra wanders around the town, ultimately finding a woman and hidden treasure and only maybe finding what he sets out to find—the world’s end.

Perhaps, what I appreciate most about Connell’s work is how he uses Cleopatra to create a narrative where the form reflects the content. While Cleopatra starts his journey as a hitch-hiker, accepting the ride offered to him, the reader, too, jumps into The Galaxy Club and can only read the perspectives that are offered up as they appear. Moreover, as Cleopatra winds through the community and sifts through the many personalities either directly or indirectly, the winding chapters leave the reader with the exact same task. The reader’s only real touchstones are Cleopatra and reaching the end of the book, and maybe truly reaching the end of the book is like Cleopatra actually finding the world’s end. After all, in the very last sentence of the book, Ramona Roybal, the woman Cleopatra has run off with, says “I just sat there and looked out the window until I heard him coming,” and that “him” is presumably Cleopatra. She’s waiting for Cleopatra. We’re waiting for Cleopatra, and if we wait long enough, then we might as well start the book all over again. The end of the book is just a brief pause in the search, and it is not even told by Cleopatra, who is as close to an anchor as we can get. If he hasn’t really told us that he is through searching, then how can we be sure we have really reached the conclusion of our own search (reaching the book’s end)?

But I’m not sure if I should like Cleopatra or if I can trust him. Not to mention that Cleopatra drinks a lot. He loves cough syrup, and so it makes it that much more complicated to trust him. His thoughts are not always as coherent as I want them to be, but I am nevertheless excited to reach one of his chapters. It should help me find my bearings except when it doesn’t. Cleopatra is the Queen of Egypt, but our Cleopatra is a man wandering around in the 1970s, who nonetheless thinks he is Queen of the Nile; for all the reader knows, his name really isn’t even Cleopatra.

However, as soon as he says, “…it made my lips go dry and I wanted to speak but there wasn’t anything to say. Or maybe there was everything to say and I had all the time in the world, but I didn’t think so. No, eternity would go by like a flash,” I knew ultimately I wouldn’t be able to avoid liking him, and I knew that, despite all of the mythical and fantastic elements, Connell’s work is much more than something meant to disorient me. I think that it should say: I think for all of the supernatural elements that Connell weaves into his narrative, the honesty of Cleopatra, in fact his base humanity, in his more lucid moments is what works for me most. There is Blue Boy, who is made of part of the sky, killing little dragons in the creek, but there is also Cleopatra trying to think of what to say and how to say it; that’s real regardless of the plane of reality.

Cleopatra, thinking about the next part of his journey, thinking about the rumor of the buried treasure, contemplates going back for Ramona: “Sure, I would be a fool to go back, but I had been a fool most of my life and didn’t see any reason to stop now. You have to dream a little if you want to live. Not just remember, but also dream.”

And he goes on to consider the way he has been living his life. He is about to steal a car, to go back for Ramona, to do everything that seems risky. In his raw honesty, albeit an honesty tainted with cough syrup, he muses, “If I had lived safe I’d have probably been some kind of high priest grown fat, some clean shaven man at a desk quietly watching time go by.”

Connell succeeds because, by the end of the book, he makes it clear that there is some inherent value to the journey and to the wait and the accompanying risks. It is the anticipation of the quest, what is next, and the risks that make individuals wade through the blurred personalities and realities and discover a raw honesty that stretches across time and across reality.


Ashlee Paxton-Turner author photo

Ashlee Paxton-Turner is a native of Williamsburg, Virginia and a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, where she was an English major with a concentration in creative writing. A former Teach For America corps member, who taught high school mathematics teacher in rural North Carolina, Ashlee is now a law student at Duke University.

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Published on May 20, 2014 in fiction reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

MANTIC by Maureen Alsop reviewed by Matthew Girolami

Cleaver Magazine Posted on May 19, 2014 by thwackJuly 2, 2015
mantic-by-maureen-alsop

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MANTIC
by Maureen Alsop
Augury Books, 68 pages

reviewed by Matthew Girolami

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 the collection, are defined by the art of divining and the many ways to do so—“Gyromancy,” “Ouranomancy,” and “Ornithomancy” to name a few—but this is not an instruction manual: Alsop lays these terms bare and explicates them through human moments in verse.

As the “-mancy” titles suggest, Mantic is as a much a lexical read (or listen—read aloud) as it is an exploration of reaction; Mantic is beautiful for its teaching verse and for its honesty: with poem after poem inspired by divining, Alsop points to the many ways humanity has attempted to shape the world in its favor, whether that favor comes from desire or fear. As a result, the poems shift from their theses and speak less of divining and prediction than what innately drives these practices and, ultimately, humanity.

Maureen Alsop

Maureen Alsop

Alsop’s poetry speaks to the sensory, material limitations of these human wishes and concerns. I urge one to read aloud because Mantic feverishly uses sound to mime the physical and spiritual states discussed: pushing the limits of speech as divining pushes the limits of the material world. With each -mancy poem, Alsop uses diction and its clanging or cooing to mimic the material manifestations of the particular divining practice; that is, as divining attempts to use the material world to transcend the material, so does Alsop’s poetry, which often uses images and tangibles to illustrate humanity’s spiritual limitations—both how high and how low our ceiling is. Mantic begins with “Gyromancy,” which is noted as “divination by walking around a circle of letters until dizzy you fall down on the letters or in the direction to take”; following is the blueprint for the rest of the collection, with patterns such as,

So you go wither. So muscled in foxglove….So a camera’s song leans
over the guardrail. So the graffiti of circles. So lexicon is devoured by chalk
in the grasslands.

This pattern continues throughout the poem with each following fragment as startling as the one before. This passage offers a glimpse into the rest of the collection: that these poems lead the reader not always through narration but rather emotional and sensory resonance alone. At times, Mantic assaults the reader with imagery and angular syntax; however, these are necessary attacks, and not a slight to the writing. Such poetic attacks (and strokes—this is also a healing text) force the reader to explore either unfamiliar or unwelcome experiences, such as loss of love and life, and spiritual and existential crises.

And these are necessary depths to explore. In a culture that refuses sadness and encourages pleasure to an unsustainable and distracting excess, Mantic insists we dive into panic, which, in a sense, divining reacts to. Alsop’s language is as much about seeking direction as divination is. Much like divining’s spiritual use of objects, Alsop often lets psychogeography lead her work, and familiar places, like the physical home-space, take on an emotional and at times surreal form; take “Alphitomancy”:

Home
broke its hold. I sat at the table

in the room you last stood. Night tilted the kitchen, thus the future

of my tiny self fell between the horizon’s two-story brightness.

For anyone who has lost someone, this passage’s use of the kitchen, the house, resonates. This surreal “tilted” house image speaks to the trauma of grief, as a mourner’s physical reality and presence is altered after losing someone. Alsop uses surreal imagery throughout Mantic to remark on loss in this way many times, though these poems are less elegy and more grieving. I say they are grieving because Alsop’s language and imagery command an authority that either distort reality or demand that reality is distorted, much like a grieving mind; her work transcends metaphor and insists on the psychic world’s effect on the material world.

While not always explicitly of death, such imagery speaks to the greater loss—or distance—humans feel from something spiritually indefinable and untouchable. Mantic’s surreal nature articulates this distance through imagery that is near and yet far from familiar experience. With the use of divining as a recurring motif, one learns the physical dimensions and limitations of divining, thus humanity’s distance (or closeness) to the divine as defined by what we are certain of: our material state. In Mantic’s final poem, “Frost Altar,” Alsop culminates a collection of exploration and wonder with:

Eventually, angels
at equinox, covenants arrived knowing the old question. But for the whole

of that one century a single crane’s speculation yellowed me.

Following these large and mystical images is one of Alsop with a loved one in a hospice room. Here, both the divine and the worldly share the same page and there is still cause for divining, as proven by an entire collection of divining poems that have come before this.


Cleaver Poetry Reviews Editor Matthew Girolami is a poet from New Jersey. His work appears in the Susquehanna Review. He is a graduate of Franklin & Marshall College, where he was Arts & Entertainment Editor of The College Reporter.

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Published on May 19, 2014 in poetry reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

INSEL by Mina Loy reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

Cleaver Magazine Posted on May 12, 2014 by thwackJuly 7, 2020

Insel cover art. A blurry black-and white photograph of a woman's face

INSEL
by Mina Loy
Melville House, 176 pages

reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

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, are slipping through your fingers. It isn’t your fault. There’s too much to read. Every other minute, they say, a new genre is born. You can’t, certainly, keep up. The idea of it is absurd. Worse yet, there are other things to do besides reading. After all, it’s nice out, cherry blossoms are swirling in the wind, a vortex of pink feathers alighting the street corner.

Maybe the best thing to do is simplify, streamline the library. Return to the classics after all these years. Read all of Dickens. Run through the American pantheon. Default to Shakespeare, or Edgar Allan Poe.

No? No, of course not. Don’t be silly. There’s no reason to limit oneself. You have to keep trying. Sisyphus lives. His stack of books is growing. His tablet is pregnant with titles. But where will you start, Sisyphus, how will you choose?

The first sentence, of course. The first sentence is telling. It’s the hook, the draw, the hand that shoots the arrow…

Listen: The first I heard of Insel was the story of a madman, a more or less surrealist painter, who although he had nothing to eat, was hoping to sell a picture to buy a set of false teeth.

Mina Loy author photo

Mina Loy

That’s enough, isn’t it? A more or less beguiling opening, if you ask me, an ace in the quiver. But the writer—who? Mina Loy. No, not Myrna Loy, the starlet. Mina. The first I’d heard of her was when the review copy arrived from the publisher, Melville House, whose editors seem insistent on badgering poor Sisyphus. Mina Loy, compatriot of Dalí, Ernst, Man Ray, and Dada, was a poet, painter, designer, and with this book, Insel, a novelist. Loy was a supremely avant-garde thinker who perhaps never quite fit in: she was probably too smart, her mind to fantastic, her legs too peripatetic for the rest of the world. Lunar Baedeker, Loy’s best known work of poetry, lauded by Ezra Pound and others, never quite landed in the canon. A fragment of her moonscape:

Cyclones
of ecstatic dust
and ashes whirl
crusaders
from hallucinatory citadels
of shattered glass
into evacuate craters

Insel, which was only published in 1991, posthumously (Loy died in 1966), is Loy’s reckoning with intellectual and emotional loneliness brought on, in part, by a restless, cosmic genius. She never found comfort, not even among the Surrealists.

Critics may not have always interpreted the novel quite this way. The original version, which was published by Black Sparrow Press, is the story of the baffling, contentious friendship between the 50-ish narrator, Mrs. Jones, the Paris representative for Aaron, a New York art dealer, and Insel, a morphine-addicted 30 year-old German artist. Mrs. Jones is transparently Loy, who lived in Paris from 1933 to 1936 as the exclusive agent for Dalí, Giacometti, Gorky, de Chirico, and Magritte on behalf of her son-in-law Julien Levy, who had in 1931 opened a Manhattan gallery. The German artist Richard Oelze is the basis for Insel, who we imagine—by the title, by the force of the narrator’s obsession—is the subject of the book. But last year, the literary scholar Sarah Hayden discovered manuscript pages for an addendum to the text, the “Visitation of Insel,” a new ending, written in poetic scraps of language that puts the main part of the book in a slightly different light. The “Visitation,” which is published here for the first time, offers the reader a sense of Loy’s despair, the isolation of a creative person few could understand. Those people included her daughters Joella and Fabienne, who she portrays as Alda and Sophia in the novel. Having left Paris, and Insel, at the end of the original part of the novel, in the “Visitation,” Mrs. Jones has returned to New York, a bother to Alda and Sophia, who accuse her of mooching off the family business in service of her novel. One senses that they had given her the job of agent in order to get rid of her.

“Aaron,” [Alda] announced, “doesn’t see why he should give you that hundred dollars”—and with that heinous crow I seemed to call up from the depths of so many of my intimates—“Your book!” she sneered. “It’s an excuse [missing word] to get money out of us!”

“You’re no good—never have been any good—” This blank truth struck me with the finality of unconsciousness. It was from very far away in time & space I heard her aggravation hollow out a course for my second childhood.

You wanted the business—we gave you the business—You wanted an apartment—we gave you the apartment and you sell it for nothing & come over here!”

                “But Aaron told me to see it at that price—”

In her despair, Mrs. Jones collapses on the couch and conjures Insel. “Here was my drug addict; divested of those shreds of flesh, easily as an aria relayed across the Atlantic, a recognizable ‘invisibility’ come to visit me.”

At this point, looking back at the main text, the reader has to wonder if Mrs. Jones has been conjuring Insel all along, for she often describes him as “transparent,” “luminous from starvation,” “evaporated,” with an “especial clarity of light,” her own private angel armed with his cosmic rays—this is the milieu of futurist-surrealists, remember—for saving her.

All the while, the book’s plot—indeed, it exists with requisite tensions as a Parisian love story that cannot be—turns on Mrs. Jones trying to save Insel—from drugs, starvation, dissolution, and disinterest in his art. Loy, in her potent skill as a writer, has deflected her own pain onto him. Critically, when she has “healed”—cleaned his filthy suit and gotten him away from the prostitutes he pimps—and fed him—she loses interest. And he with her. When Mrs. Jones speaks like a “normal person”—an art dealer, who commodifies exactly what can’t be given value—he vanishes.

Loy, it seems, could not face the exigencies of regular life. She was above and beyond it—in fact a very lonely place. Do you think she’d mind if we welcomed her back into the terrestrial library?


Nathaniel PopkinCleaver reviews editor Nathaniel Popkin is the author of five books, including the 2018 novel Everything is Borrowed, and co-editor (with Stephanie Feldman) of the anthology Who Will Speak for America? His essays and works of criticism have appeared in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Kenyon Review, LitHub, Tablet Magazine, and Public Books. If you are an author or publicist seeking reviews or a writer hoping to write reviews for Cleaver, query Nathaniel.

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Published on May 12, 2014 in fiction reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

ELSA by Tsipi Keller reviewed by Lynn Levin

Cleaver Magazine Posted on May 8, 2014 by thwackJuly 7, 2020
Elsa cover art. A photograph of trees and a cloudy sky

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ELSA
by Tsipi Keller
Spuyten Duyvil,  187 pages

reviewed by Lynn Levin

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 demanding, nothing to worrisome. Elsa, at the start, is as much about the jealousies of girl friendships as it is about the protagonist’s desire for some overdue sex and true romance. About a third of the way into the book, however, the narrative becomes increasingly disturbing as Keller skillfully pitches the fascinating but dislikable protagonist, thirty-nine-year-old Elsa, into a gradually darkening labyrinth of seduction and danger. I so wanted to reach into the story and shake Elsa. “Get out of there while you can!” In the meantime Gary, Elsa’s wealthy middle-aged date, whispers in her ear in a velvet voice, “You’re a fool…So trusting.”

Elsa is the third in Tsipi Keller’s trilogy of psychological novels. The first two were Jackpot and Retelling, which trace the fortunes of women. Elsa calls to mind some of Richard Burgin’s noir fiction. Both writers explore the world of nefarious, but initially engaging, operators who insinuate themselves into the lives of lonely strangers aiming to control or ruin them. Burgin’s characters usually escape their captors. Elsa does not escape Gary.

Tsipi Keller author photo

Tsipi Keller

Elsa Berg is an attractive, sophisticated, and very lonely New York tax attorney, who, while catty and sometimes sour, also regrets her personality defects. “Why can’t she be sweet and generous like some women she occasionally meets, women who are soft-spoken, patient, and tolerant? Why is she so easy to anger, to find fault, with jealousy and resentment always bubbling right below the surface?” One evening she and a girlfriend go to a bar where they happen upon the mysterious and handsome Gary, whom Elsa at first dismisses as too old. After a few weeks of calculated delay, Gary calls and takes her on their initial and only date, picking her up in his Ferrari and swooping her off to his luxurious brownstone. Keller takes her delicious time ramping up the sexual and psychological tension as she allows antagonist Gary to ply the eager but socially klutzy Elsa with booze, a love feast of lamb chops and mashed potatoes, and more liquor. Meanwhile, Elsa makes off-putting comments about a colleague’s crotch, then annoys and even insults Gary.

Elsa’s gaffes and unpredictability startle the reader—such behavior!—and leave Gary more than miffed. Then, again, the reader begins to get the notion that there is something very suspicious about Gary. And it is not just that he is condescending toward her. At one point he clamps his hands tightly around Elsa’s neck, claiming that his hands are cold and he must warm them. Yet once he releases Elsa and calls a truce, she’s all too ready to proceed with their evening. “And yes, she is willing. To make up and forget. Maybe like he said, she is too sensitive…” Keller deploys a close third-person point-of-view that exposes her protagonist’s bitchiness, weirdness, loneliness, neediness, and her tendency to rebuff when she should trust and trust when she should run. Elsa’s reactions made me wonder how often needy people dismiss warning signs in dates and partners.

Shockers abound as Gary leads Elsa into the kitchen, captures her in a spinning net, and leaves her trapped for hours. Eventually he cleans her up and cossets her in a white canopy bed. Thus Elsa allows herself to be pampered and humiliated until events run their fatal course.

Much more than a tale about a smart woman who makes foolish choices, Elsa is a fast-paced, tightly crafted, suspenseful, psychological crime novel that sidles up to the reader, then pounces.


Lynn Levin author photoLynn Levin’s newest books are the poetry collection Miss Plastique (Ragged Sky, 2013), a Next Generation Indie Book Awards finalist in poetry, and Birds on the Kiswar Tree (2Leaf Press, 2014), a translation from the Spanish of a collection of poems by the Peruvian Andean poet Odi Gonzales. She is co-author of Poems for the Writing: Prompts for Poets (Texture Press, 2013), a Next Generation Indie Book Awards finalist in education/academic books. Her poems, essays, short fiction, and translations have appeared in Painted Bride Quarterly, Michigan Quarterly Review, Cleaver, The Hopkins Review, The Smart Set, Young Adult Review Network, and other places. She teaches at Drexel University and the University of Pennsylvania.

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Published on May 8, 2014 in fiction reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

FOXES ON THE TRAMPOLINE by Charlotte Boulay reviewed by Matthew Girolami

Cleaver Magazine Posted on May 7, 2014 by thwackJuly 2, 2015
Foxes-on-the-Trampoline

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FOXES ON THE TRAMPOLINE
by Charlotte Boulay
Ecco Press, 64 pages

reviewed by Matthew Girolami

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 last summer I had never been to the prairie, but it is strange how I miss it now—I miss its monolithic emptiness, and how it made me feel like a tiny monolith myself.

We miss something or someone because we feel we belong there or with them. The speakers of Charlotte Boulay’s debut poetry collection, Foxes on the Trampoline, feel their selves or their emotions belong in or to other, natural beings. Boulay articulates this longing through natural imagery—though not as descriptions, as per the nature poem’s tradition, but as part and parcel of the human experience, juxtaposed to want, love, and loss. Take “Senza,” (Italian for “without”) from Part One of the collection:

Jane says her grandfather
cage-raised foxes. She remembers

Charlotte Boulay

Charlotte Boulay

While these lines depict a man possessing animals as objects, the second line of “Senza” embodies Boulay’s unique employment of nature imagery: no longer as object but subject; joined with Jane on the same line, the “cage-raised foxes” come to stand for Jane’s trapped self. Further down the poem, the speaker remarks on a boy’s encounter with a balloon:

A boy tests the pull of the string,
lets it tug his arm to the sky, realizes

everything that can run wants to

Here, the human experience mingles with animal experience—Jane, the boy, and the foxes experience the same want, the same trappings, which are manmade trappings. Consider the collection’s eponymous penultimate poem, “Foxes on the Trampoline.” The speaker begins the poem as a voyeur watching foxes from the window, first in reverie and then in reflection:

They look too skinny, they need

to steal a chicken, or perhaps I could
put out some milk and bread—no. What is this,
some kind of story?

Challenging humanity’s impulse to transform nature, Boulay in turn indicates art’s traditionally enslaving relationship with depicting nature; that no matter art’s legacy with nature, the natural world has not chosen to become the backdrop to mankind’s “story,” that humans are interlopers:

I would never tell them I am watching them
pretend to fly; trespassers, all of us,
of this easy, weightless secret.

This forces the reader to consider poetry formally, and its space within nature. By using poetry, an art of constraints, Boulay illustrates our every day constraints, and our human impulse to constrain. Boulay’s constraint of choice is the lyrical I. Like Louise Glück’s The Wild Iris before her, Boulay’s natural world speaks for the I (and vice versa); however, unlike Glück, Boulay does not erase the I but turns it into a relay of consciousness between selves, the reader, the sea, and animals alike.

And it is lyrical. The final lines of “Foxes on the Trampoline” join the human and the animal, as Boulay laments:

I have everything
else, everything everything. O fox,
is this joy?

After nearly an entire collection of poems illustrating the human experience through nature, the speaker inquires of the fox joy. This moment directs the reader’s attention inward, away from the invaded natural landscape and instead to human constructions—the question itself concerning the fault in our direction.

Foxes on the Trampoline’s largest constraint is a three-part arc. As Westerners, the three-part arc is part of our consciousness. From fiction to theater, it is the most intuitive storytelling construction; however, this is not always to be expected of poetry collections. Thus, when opening Foxes, one immediately notices this three-part distinction. The parts seem to grow into each other, that is, from wanting to having to losing.

Appropriately, a common theme of Part One is the self’s adolescence; in “Senza” a child learns want, and “Boys of My Youth” recalls the early pangs of sexuality through the lens of caring for horses.

Part Two begins and ends with a sailor. Now an experienced lover, the speaker “invented another” to forget a lost lover, and by the end of Two the speaker has left love behind (as much as possible).

Part Three remarks loss. Two of the collection’s most urgent poems, “CPR #1” and “CPR #2” deviate from the natural imagery of the rest of the collection and instead detail loss through the material imagery of a dead human body. Aligned on the right side of the page and with imagery astray of the rest of the collection, Boulay marks grief as something distinctly human, and she does so stylistically and formally.

Despite these themes, each part wades in and out of various moods and temperaments, much like the poems’ darting verse paragraphs and caesuras. Poems like “CPR #1” and “CPR #2” of Part Three, and the sailor of Part Two, serve as recurring motifs to give the reader a complete perspective on the poems coming before and after them.

And herein lies the beautiful irony of Foxes on the Trampoline: that there is beauty in restraint. Internal rhyme abounds in this collection; the lines and indentations are purposeful and necessary to the rhythm and music of its lyrics—Boulay uses trappings to illuminate the beauties and travesties of the trappings of life, as built by humanity.


Matthew Girolami is a poet from New Jersey. His work appears in the Susquehanna Review. He is a graduate of Franklin & Marshall College, where he was Arts & Entertainment Editor of The College Reporter.

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Published on May 7, 2014 in poetry reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

TwERK by LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs reviewed by Shinelle L. Espaillat

Cleaver Magazine Posted on April 30, 2014 by thwackOctober 9, 2014
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TwERK
by LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs
Belladonna, 110 pages

reviewed by Shinelle L. Espaillat

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 for the poet, then, is to craft work of equal aural, intellectual and emotional stimulation. In her first full-length collection, TwERK, LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs creates seemingly infinite layers of meaning that meld to produce critical social statements on both a global and region-specific scale. Certainly, experiencing her interactive performance adds nuanced shades of perspective, but the poems themselves are wealth worth reading.

Diggs’s lingual acrobatics often focus on syncretized cultural elements that speak to a new societal fabric. Opening the collection with a verse from “Genesis” that refers to a monolingual world, Diggs then plunges us into Babylonian chaos. She entitles the first section “anime”—those of Generation X and beyond will know that anime combines elements of American pop-culture and Japanese characterization—and the first poem of the section discusses a Japanese subculture that glorifies a modern version of blackface: extreme tanning. Many poems in this section explore the simultaneous sampling of Black American culture and rejection of Black American physiology. Who knew, for example, that there is a Hindu term for “nappy?”

latasha-nevada-diggs

Latasha N. Nevada Diggs

Another motif throughout the collection is code switching. Code switching refers to the necessary practice of alternating between languages within a single conversation—necessary either because one language lacks the vocabulary needed for full expression, or because the audience will understand some concepts better in another language. James Joyce pre-dates the term but not the practice; Finnegan’s Wake is 672 paperback pages of constant code switching within each sentence. Diggs furthers the modernist sensibility that all language is worth reading, and that each individual’s story is better told in the language that the individual speaks, by investing each poem with multi-lingual weight. Frequently, she switches languages two or more times within a single line, forcing the reader to move slowly through her metaphors, the better to absorb them. This serves the dual purpose of teaching the reader how it feels to lack understanding because of language barriers. Indeed, the second section is entitled “no te entiendo,” which translates to “I don’t understand you.”

The constant and vibrant mixture of ethnicities and languages that Diggs demonstrates is also the trademark of New York City. Nowhere is this more evident than on the subway. In “metromultilinguopollonegrocucarachasblahblahblah,” Diggs effectively creates an interactive sigh/sound installation. Every train does have someone singing “hoarse covers of lean on me.” There is no hierarchy on the train, really; the low-rise jeans craze has yielded scenarios in which “peek-a-boo buttocks frazzle orthodox ringlets.” We hear the blend of tongues, “Yiddish over Korean” and jewelry pronounced “jury.” We see the spectrum of wealth: “Old Navy dressing room style” vs. “Senegalese feet in gold slippers” vs. “Nihongo in Prada,” all of which unify in remembrance as the train nears the World Trade Center: “the metropolis subverted/of all subverting time.” The poem lays bare the paradox: NY is many; NY is one.

Diggs delves deeper into the socio-political fabric in “mug shot pedigree,” in which she exposes prison system’s objectification and animalization of its subjects. It begins as a list poem, moving from basic adjectives: “brown,” “bald,” “average,” to the stereotypical and purposefully offensive: “40 ounce,” “kunta kinte, “baby Daddy.” It ends by referring to the subject’s parents as “Sire” and “Dam”—livestock breeding terms—in place of “mother” and “father,” and stretches the offense further by listing several possible “sires.” The poem echoes society’s dehumanization of Black American men.

TwERK combines Joyce-ian aesthetics with the uncompromising realism of Morrison. The collection celebrates the beauty of language, and lauds language’s interdisciplinary use, while highlighting the cultural significance behind the words and their appropriation.


Shinelle Espaillat Shinelle L. Espaillat writes, lives and teaches in Westchester County, NY. She earned her M.A. in Creative Writing at Temple University. Her work has appeared in Midway Journal.

 

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Published on April 30, 2014 in poetry reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

FLYOVER LIVES: A MEMOIR by Diane Johnson reviewed by Colleen Davis

Cleaver Magazine Posted on April 21, 2014 by thwackJune 18, 2020
Flyover Lives; Red plane going over North America

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FLYOVER LIVES: A MEMOIR
by Diane Johnson
Viking, 265 pages

reviewed by Colleen Davis

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 path. Some people pursue newspaper or magazine jobs, and these positions can offer training and guidance to novice writers. But for those like me, who feel no calling for hard journalism, becoming a writer has meant making a series of strange, often irrational, choices. The careers of beloved authors provided me with my only roadmap. Unfortunately, most of the writers I admired were men who never faced the same social dilemmas (marry/don’t marry; kids/no kids, etc.) that stymied me, a resolute female from birth.

Despite the gender issues, Fitzgerald and Hemingway inspired me to pursue the expatriate tradition. I traveled in France, Brazil, and Japan. I moved to Mexico, lived on a vineyard in Italy. I searched for unusual opportunities to write and when they were not forthcoming, I invented new ones. My efforts brought me years of random joy and satisfaction. Somewhere along the way, I stumbled on the novels of Diane Johnson. It was incredibly reassuring to discover that out there in the big world there was an accomplished novelist who had gone everywhere and done all the things the guys did – while raising four kids and enjoying stable relationships.

Johnson’s work always struck me as elegant, unique, and truly intriguing. Not just because she shares my female perspective, but also because she’s lived a compelling life that brings depth and nuance to her stories. When I heard that she’d published a memoir, I was thrilled by the prospect of reading (and reviewing!) the book. I was expecting a tale filled with literary gossip and acute observations since most of her books hinge on those aspects of social discourse. I was also hoping she’d explain how she developed her inner compass and found the courage to make the choices that led to her literary success.

Headshot of Diane-Johnson

Diane Johnson

Although the first chapters were exactly what I wanted, the book leapt from a provocative lunch in Paris to a dense historical narrative about her ancestors. At various times of my life, I’ve been a serious student of history, but my patience for reading diary entries isn’t what it used to be. I was hungry for juice, drama, and personal revelations. The historical chapters felt so dull to me that I almost stopped reading the book. Thank goodness I didn’t give in to that temptation. I later realized that the ancestral chapters provided an unusual foundation for understanding Johnson’s life, and maybe the lives of all women. There’s nothing like a dose of 18th century facts to make you grateful for today’s liberties. Women no longer feel obligated to endure ten pregnancies. Nor must they watch many of their children die from horrid, incurable diseases. These tales also remind us how much bravery was required to survive the trials of ordinary life. Modern problems like uncertain employment and publishing shifts seem far kinder by comparison.

Nevertheless, I was thrilled when Johnson’s focus shifted to the challenges of her career. Her stalwart ancestors seem to have provided her with the inspiration she needed to leave an unhappy marriage with four kids in tow. She departed from California on the magic carpet of a research grant, faking a sense of economic stability as she raised her kids and pursued her writing dreams in England. It brought me great relief to learn that I wasn’t the only person who lied to their family about having enough money to fund a writing adventure abroad. But I only lied about having enough income for myself—Johnson was pretending she could afford to feed, clothe, and educate four kids on foreign soil.

It’s reassuring to know that her now-grown kids still love her and never made Johnson regret her unusual choices. In fact, their lives were enriched by years of living in France and other spots abroad. While her novels did well, not all of Johnson’s writing projects flourished. In chapters on screenwriting, she describes working on scripts with renowned directors (Francis Ford Coppola, Mike Nichols, etc.) whose movie concepts never made it to the finish line. On the other hand, one of her own books was made into a Merchant Ivory film, set in Paris—Le Divorce—and she also wrote the screenplay for a cinema classic—The Shining—in collaboration with Stanley Kubrick. She got to meet Elizabeth Taylor and Dr. Jonas Salk. Not too shabby for a mid-Western native, mother of four.

My only true regret about this book is that it wasn’t there for me to read twenty years ago. It would have been nice to study her sober, confident approach to literary life when I was making my early choices. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, et al., gave the impression that you had to be sloshed or mad with ambition to attain creative success. Johnson created a wonderful body of work and achievement that inspires in a totally different way. Her life was no less courageous or original for reaching these heights gracefully, in the company of a happy family. Johnson’s biography is nutritious reading for anyone trying to craft a literary life today. Becoming a writer may still seem like a confusing and risky process, but the valiant will find that it’s an adventure worth pursuing.


Author Photo of Colleen-Davis

Colleen Davis is a Pennsylvania writer and author of the website Between the Pond and the Woods, which provides information and a Facebook forum for dementia caregivers. She writes for the Penn Memory Center and is a script writer for the documentary series “Philadelphia: The Great Experiment“, which airs on 6abc.

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Published on April 21, 2014 in nonfiction reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

APOLLO by Geoffrey Gatza reviewed by Carlo Matos

Cleaver Magazine Posted on April 18, 2014 by thwackFebruary 1, 2016

Apollo

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.

Geoffrey Gatza

Geoffrey Gatza

Gatza, in an interview with Loren Kleinman in the Huffington Post, argues that the avant-garde in poetry “means to read and incorporate into your poet self everything you can get your hands on.” To Gatza, conceptual poetry—with a lower-case “c”—is characterized by cross-disciplinarity and intertextuality—what I like to think of in my own work as working-class baroque. Gatza and I are cut from the same cloth as regards class. For those of us raised in an environment where poetry and art is considered a waste of time under the very best of circumstances, our desire to be a part of an aesthetic world we don’t quite belong to is often attended by a general lack of direction. There is no map; there is no one to ask for directions, to shape our artistic educations, so we do what we must; we throw ourselves into everything at once, hoping to discover the path in the dense woods. This approach is often not very systematic, but it can give rise to a very broad awareness of artistic production; that is, art is a series of equivalencies not specialties. In Apollo, for example, poetry is seen through the lens of dance, dance is understood as painting, painting becomes music, music is myth, myth is chess, chess = ballet, and ballet, war—and on and on. It’s not necessarily baroque in the way we often think of in poetry, which usually has something to do with style, a certain self-awareness of poetry as poetry. If Gatza’s poetry is self-reflexive, it is so only in a matrix of other aesthetic and cultural signifiers, not necessarily because it has an overabundance of rhetorical and figurative devices—although there is no prohibition against this kind of thing either.

As I said above, this manuscript is really a love letter to a certain brand of modernism—especially that of Marcel Duchamp—but it’s not Duchamp the artist who reigns here but Duchamp the chess player, the titanic figure who turned his back on painting:

One does not
Simply choose
To stop painting.
Analogous to
Breaking one’s leg.
It just happens. (“Astronautica”)

As a patzer myself, who has spent countless hours studying a game for which I’ll never be more than a wood pusher, it was easy to fall under chess’s spell once again. Chess is the backbone and the blood of this text. In the introduction, Rrose says, “The chessboard will be our medium to meet the divine/halfway”—the chessboard as Ouija board. In fact, the Prologue, entitled “The Birth of Apollo,” is not about the birth of the sun god at all but about the birth of chess, about how Apollo went to Euphron to design a game that would make the dryad, Caïssa, fall in love with him. Sadly, he only partially succeeds:

He left Caïssa with her game,
Becoming the muse of chess.
And Apollo became the very
First chess widow in history.

The ballet ends with Duchamp and Rrose engaged in a chess match—the third time the Marshall/Duchamp game has appeared in the text—and the revelation of Duchamp’s Étant donnés, the final masterpiece he worked on in semi-secrecy during the twenty years he supposedly “quit” painting.  It is actually quite a successful ending to the ballet, especially when it is compared to the absurdity of Gatza’s expulsion from an art gallery, which follows in the coda.

The book is from start to finish an act of subversion, which is not something I say lightly, so much so it demands I must revise what I said earlier about Apollo taking the “shape” of a ballet program. It doesn’t take the form of a ballet program; it isn’t a poetry book walking around in the garb of a souvenir. It is a program for a closet ballet I now feel I sat through. If you’re looking for a “book of poems,” Apollo might not be for you, but if you’re looking to have an experience of poetry, of how play can be deadly serious, then take your seat because the lights are dimming and the orchestra is tuning up.


Carlo Matos

Carlo Matos is poet, fiction writer and essayist. He has published three books of poetry and one book of scholarship. His work has appeared in such journals as Paper Darts, Diagram, Atticus Review, Prick of the Spindle, and Arsenic Lobster, among others. He is an English professor at the City Colleges of Chicago by day and an MMA fighter by night. After hours he can be found entertaining clients at the Chicago Poetry Bordello.

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Published on April 18, 2014 in poetry reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

THE NO VARIATIONS: THE DIARY OF AN UNFINISHED NOVEL by Luis Chitarroni reviewed by Ana Schwartz

Cleaver Magazine Posted on April 17, 2014 by thwackJuly 7, 2020
The No Variations: Diary of an Unfinished Journal cover art. Large black text against a white background

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THE NO VARIATIONS: THE DIARY OF AN UNFINISHED NOVEL
by Luis Chitarroni
translated by Darren Koolman 
Dalkey Archive Press, 256 pages

reviewed by Ana Schwartz

Because we were late in arriving, because we were late in departing, because we didn’t care that we’d be late, and, above all, because those from whom we waited turned out to be ourselves, which is to say, the others, the ones we called, ‘the slow ones.’ – The No Variations

Readers can only hope to be included in that community, that “we,” for the community described so affectionately here makes this one of the most memorable passages from The No Variations, Luis Chitarroni’s dense and often disorienting new non-novel. The passage appears early in the text, while expectations of narrative continuity still hold purchase. Lateness, in fact, extends hope for a plot, and with its charisma buys patience against the frustrations of plots subsequent absence. Instead of plot, the novel offers personality. The expansiveness and potential inclusivity of this passage pleasurably inscribes the writer himself; yet the same sort of expansiveness can slide easily into solipsism, an overindulgent memoirish quality.

Luis Chitarroni author photo

Luis Chitarroni

The No Variations balances between anecdote and comprehensive narrative. The tension between the two appears as early as the subtitle, which includes two distinctive genres, the diary and the novel. Presumably about the process of finishing, or trying to finish a novel, the text lingers in the vicinity of narrative, very literally “about” a novel, but there is no plot proper to this text. The specter of a plot as the ideal end of these notes makes its absence in the text a frustrating element. Instead, Chitarroni offers vignettes of the protagonist, Nicasio Urlihrt, trying to revive a literary anthology with poems and prose by friends and colleagues. The compilation of these notes makes little sense, however, although it does collate little plots, some more realistic than others, and often narrating the obstacles of everyday life that make literary work so difficult: “There were whole days and nights,” Chitarroni continues, “During which we lost our way…during which we lost our purpose. We bummed around exchanging tales of days gone by, anecdotes, gossip.”

At times these fragments are satisfying and pleasurable. Furthermore, the text’s refusal to neatly organize the diffuse experience of living isn’t a particularly shocking or innovative technique. Instead, what makes the book so compelling is its identification with the protagonist’s sense of frustration of balancing writing and living. Occasionally he glamorizes the writer’s preoccupation with life, with a glow of pyrrhic consolation. He insists, in occasional bursts, that living is more important: “The writer doesn’t really want to write, he wants to be; and in order to truly be, he must face up to the difficult challenge of not writing at all—not even a single line—of not theorizing, of not lifting a finger.” The seduction of the first part of that assertion (that to be is better than to write about being) tends to overshadow the diarist’s assertion that not writing is also difficult. The protagonist goes on to claim that in order to strive to live rather than to write, he “became deaf” to the world around him, obliged himself to ignorance, rather than, presumably, be tempted by the desire to create or represent.

If, for Chitarroni, the distinction between writing life and living it is central, his text from the start sides with writing: it is, after all a diary, and life-writing is thus the ideally professed genre. One technique deployed by the diarist in evading responsibility for writing or failure to write, is to continually point to his use of a pseudonym. Nicasio Urlihrt’s adoption of a publishing name, “Hilaríon Curtis” allows him to claim, with measured if frustrating hilarity, that “although I’m not really a writer, I’ve had many things published in my name…The whys and wherefores of all this escape me, as they would anyone. But I’m not writing this to resolve them.” Perhaps to reconcile his disavowal with his profession, or to suggest a possible reconciliation, the narrator admits on the first page that Nicasio Urlihrt is an anagram for Hilaríon Curtis; it’s hardly difficult to notice then, that these are both anagrams for Luis Chitarroni. The alphabetical acrobatics suggest that the text perhaps really is an experience of real-life-writing, rather than just very close mimicry.

So if the adoption of not-quite-true, reassembled personalities is one way to write life while still living life, and to not let living become an obstacle toward the practice of writing, the prose also takes on the work of remixing and reassembling. Sometimes this happens locally: for example, two paragraphs after reminiscing about his clique’s self-designation as “the slow ones,” the narrator returns to the theme, but with a subtle and important shift in tense: “Because we’ll be late in arriving, because we are loath to depart, because we don’t care that we’ll be late.” The transformation from paste tense to anticipated future describes the present lovingly, the experience of a community loath to move forward. Together, these passages support the claim that yes, to live in the present is more valuable to write about it retrospectively from the future. In a less local register, Chitarroni returns to certain scenes across the course of the novel, and although they’re a little more difficult to identify, relying more heavily on the readers’ memory, the rewards and pleasures of noticing these passages are commensurately great. That pleasure balances the frustrations of searching for narrative, searching for cause and effect: instead, it’s differently pleasurable to identify a theme—several themes—and their variations.

The emotional effectiveness of these moments is in both this kind of recognition within the text and the hope of recognizing yourself in the characters. That double identification is essential in the genre of the “variation,” at least, as practiced by Chitarroni. It is a mode of life-writing that distills personal experience into the blocks of language that comprise it. As time passes, these elements—of a sentence, of a literary clique, or even of the name of an individual—rearrange themselves into new forms while preserving some trace of the original content. The moment of recognition involves the reader insofar as she is compelled to reach back into the elements of her own past, and begin to recognize these characters or these lines as shaping her lived experience beyond the pages of the book. In this way the claims of the text take on a life of their own, and the anticipated characters “will turn out to be ourselves.”


Ana Schwartz author photo

Ana Schwartz is a doctoral candidate in English literature at the University of Pennsylvania and teaches high school English in the suburbs of Philadelphia. She is working on a translation of Herralde Prize-winning author Alvaro Enrigue’s first novel. 

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Published on April 17, 2014 in fiction reviews, reviews, translation. (Click for permalink.)

AMERICAN SONGBOOK by Michael Ruby reviewed by Ana Schwartz

Cleaver Magazine Posted on April 8, 2014 by thwackOctober 24, 2014

american-songbook-michael-ruby-paperback-cover-art

AMERICAN SONGBOOK
by Michael Ruby
Ugly Duckling Presse, 144 pages

reviewed by Ana Schwartz

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 of the journey, probably radio hits. Headed East, perhaps, the lyrics of each song traverse both geography and time: a path paved in words. The lyrics to these songs linger in memory, but they’re also so ephemeral—though the words remain, their thrill often fades along with the little experiential details that make any such trip unique. Between the transient intensity of experience and the permanence of a material archive, exists poetry, transcription of verbal and nonverbal song on a page, lending it a more lasting presence.

Michael-Ruby

Michael Ruby

Each poem in Ruby’s latest collection, American Songbook, riffs on or responds to a canonical piece of American pop music, and appears chronologically, spanning the American radio-waves from the 1930s (Bessie Smith’s “Pinchbacks” to the cusp of the twenty first century (Rob Thomas and Carlos Santana’s “Smooth”). This sequence of poems presents a narrative of personal experience, but the individual experience of pleasure in pop music is at the same time an experience of the twentieth century.  And, commensurately, there’s great diversity in this collection, it “contains multitudes,” invoking musicians in the southern blues tradition, to the rebellious grunge of the northeast, from Woody Guthrie to Biggie Smalls. The verse itself, although more subtly than the subtitles of the poems, includes flashing and vivid experiences of American history, too, from strikes in Delaware in “The Desert Blues” to the frogmen of “Folsom Prison Blues.” More expansively, however, and more affectively, the semantic static that fills these poems, the language that Ruby brings to the remembered lyrics, evokes the collective experience of listening to music on the radio over the decades. It’s not just one person’s experience of these songs, but a national history formed through the community that has loved this music over time.

Ruby’s language prioritizes aesthetic pleasure over semantic sense, but it’s not devoid of form. Through the collection, Ruby returns time and again to certain formal characteristics. In contrast with his semantic playfulness, these formal characteristics are all the more powerful. The most vivid of these techniques is Ruby’s use of the acrostic, mimicking the mind that wanders away from the line of song as it listens to lyrics. In many poems, the first word or words of each line are the lyrics of the song that gives each poem a title. So, for example, his meditation on Elvis Presley’s “Can’t Help Falling In Love” looks like this:

Wise salamanders
Men enter the air
Say nothing to oracles
Only fools for holidays
Rush the barbells
In a good-luck paste

The song is still there, in the background, but the noise of words, like radio static, draw the mind away from the song’s meaning and into its own associative wanderings, to be brought back with each word drawled by Presley’s voice, and emphasized by the compelling force of the line-break. The acrostic playfulness is probably the most reliable formal element in the collection, running like a backbone through Ruby’s twentieth century. And if this observation spoils the joke, or preempts the pleasure of pattern recognition, it’s of a piece with the difficult, interrupted pleasure of recognizing the song: It’s impossible to sing along with these because Ruby insists that the memory of music will be the memory of experience, sometimes individual, sometimes cultural.

The most memorable example of this technique, and its consequences, is Ruby’s two-part reworking of Jimi Hendrix’ “Star Spangled Banner,” already a reworking of the national anthem. Ruby includes two versions, and while they both generally follow the acrostic formula, the first more effectively replicates the expansive, rambling experience of Hendrix’ improvisations at Woodstock in the summer of 1969. As with much of the collection, this poem too is an acrostic. Here, however, to mimic the drawn-out tension of Hendrix’ riffs, Ruby does not rely on words, but on the blankness of the page, the lines between the double-spaced riffs. Thus, in the occasional moment when he uses normal spacing, for example, when he begins three lines in a row with “the twilight’s” or “the rocket’s” or “the bombs”, the poem invokes the sense of friction so memorable the guitarist’s on-stage riffing.

This song does most effectively what the other songs aspire to do—that is, use language to mimic and expand on the experience of sound. What makes it’s success possible is, perhaps, the fact that Hendrix’ solo empties the anthem of its words in order to critique that patriotism of the late sixties. Of course, listening to Hendrix, the words are already ringing in the listener’s memory and Hendrix’ virtuosic digressions display a rebellion latent in the American character. In a like manner, Ruby’s poems, and this one in particular, very nearly empty words of their meaning. The risks of doing so in the context of the American twentieth century, a high-stakes historical context, give the experience of this song an appropriate thrill.

But instead of offering a sort of empty pleasure, Ruby’s collection insists on contemplating the conditions for such a thrill: The thrill offers the possibility of connecting the listener to a singular moment in history rather than the endless repetition of popular culture. Ruby represents this in his collection by giving his homage to Hendrix two iterations, a doubleness that makes it unique among the collection. And where the firs version went in to replicate the thrill, the second version more straightforwardly critiques what a thrill is: “The thrill pines for a solvent…The thrill operates in an icy smoke…The thrill performs for a small audience.” Ruby still stuffs each line with words that make more pleasure than sense, but his inclusion of observations like these, with their provocative insights, derive great power from their contrast. Although the second version of the anthem is a pale shadow of the thrills of the first, the pairing makes an important claim on the relationship between aesthetic pleasure and a historic moment. Although the singular historic moment can’t quite be reproduced, its imaginary existence in collective memory gives the experience of music its thrilling quality, particularly music from the past. Furthermore, that thrill tends toward dissolution, ephemerality, and is best savored with intimate company. Contrasted with pop music, poetry offers itself as a more stable entry to those pleasures.

Near the end of the collection, Ruby turns to a few rap lyricists, which would present a special challenge for not only the premise of the collection, but also the experience of poetry in the twenty-first century. What experience of music can poetry riff on and expand when the music is itself, increasingly based in language? It’s a perplexing moment in cultural history, and less thrilling than it is melancholic—that is, it is sad, but not exactly nostalgic, since the moment isn’t even quite past. Imagining, for example, the memory of the nurse taking care of Tupac Shakur, Ruby writes that “her replacement is gone, her replacement’s replacement hasn’t heard of me, it hurts to reminisce about a replacement.” The palliative is no longer effective, no longer fits the present moment, and the pain persists. If, through the course of American history music had soothed the nation’s aches and pains, calmed its less-pleasant memories, and poetry had offered a more lasting memorial of that pleasure, can it still do so today? And what form will it take?


ana-schwartz

Ana Schwartz is a doctoral candidate in English literature at the University of Pennsylvania and teaches high school English in the suburbs of Philadelphia. She is working on a translation of Herralde Prize-winning author Alvaro Enrigue’s first novel. 

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Published on April 8, 2014 in poetry reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

MAURICE SENDAK: A CELEBRATION OF THE ARTIST AND HIS WORK reviewed by Tahneer Oksman

Cleaver Magazine Posted on April 7, 2014 by thwackOctober 9, 2014
MAURICE SENDAK: A CELEBRATION OF THE ARTIST AND HIS WORK

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MAURICE SENDAK: A CELEBRATION OF THE ARTIST AND HIS WORK
Curated by Justin G. Schiller and Dennis M.V. David
Edited by Leonard S. Marcus
Harry N. Abrams Press, 224 pages

reviewed by Tahneer Oksman

In a collaborative comic strip published in The New Yorker in 1993, cartoon versions of Art Spiegelman and Maurice Sendak amble through a forest littered with their own creations peeking out at them from the background. Sendak’s character wisely pontificates, “Childhood is deep and rich. It’s vital, mysterious, and profound. I remember my own childhood vividly…” In the final panel, he adds, “I knew terrible things. But I knew I musn’t let adults know I knew.”

sendak2Those of us who grew up reading Sendak’s beloved children’s book, Where the Wild Things Are—which is to say, very many of us—undoubtedly recognize in those words the strange and titillating worldview that belonged to the wolf-suit wearing Max. In a gorgeous 200-plus page coffee table book recently published by Abrams and in conjunction with a 2013 Sendak retrospective, Maurice Sendak: A Celebration of the Artist and His Work, readers can immerse themselves in this vivid worldview. The book is broken up into eleven chapters, each focused on a different theme relating to Sendak’s life and work. There’s a chapter dedicated to the posters Sendak designed (“Sendak used the extra space to stretch out with his favored characters,” explains Steven Heller in the accompanying essay); another chapter tracks Sendak’s work on stage, including his opera design (“Oy gevalt!!” the children’s book author exclaimed when first contacted by the opera director Frank Corsaro, who asked if he’d be interested in collaborating on The Magic Flute); and still another is devoted to his work as an educator (“If you’re going to steal, steal good,” he once told a member of his 1971 Children’s Books course at Yale).

Sendak3These amusing tidbits help us get to know the man who stumbled into the world of children’s literature just before the market for such works exploded in the postwar 1950’s. Born in 1928 to Polish immigrant parents, Maurice, or Moishe, got his start as the assistant window director of FAO Schwartz. Soon he was noticed by Ursula Nordstrom, a woman whom Leonard S. Marcus describes as “America’s most daring publisher of books for young people” at the time. Sendak had already fixed on the object of his artistic explorations. As his cherished works repeatedly reflect, he was fixated on the question of “how children survive in a world largely indifferent to their fate.” In Chapter X, titled Where the Wild Things Are (though wild things manage to show up in almost every Sendak-related project after their 1963 debut), curator Patrick Rodgers has an essay on three preliminary drawings from the children’s book. Comparing early watercolor drawings to the final product, Rodgers shows how Sendak carefully toiled to condense details in order to convey the force of Max’s emotions. Through Sendak5changes in posture, expression, and movement, for instance, he transformed the wild things into the objects of Max’s active imagination to emphasize the young boy “as the author of his own cathartic fantasy.” As a teacher, Sendak explained this process of condensation as an attendance to rhythm – how a book could, as Sendak’s student Paul O. Zelinsky recalls, “become music.”

And the rhythms that can be traced in Sendak’s stories are, certainly, a central aspect of what makes them so memorable and appealing. Children’s books are meant to be read again and again, like lyrical poetry. But they are also meant to be looked at, fondled, and, dare I say, torn. In Sendak we find an author keyed into “the young child’s natural impulse to improvisation and self-reinvention,” as Leonard S. Marcus so beautifully explains. That impulse—to favor words alongside pictures, sense as well as nonsense, the fantastical and the real—may be latent in the adult reader, but it is always there in the background, lurking and even beckoning, like one of Sendak’s wild things.

Sendak4


oksman imageTahneer Oksman recently completed her Ph.D. in English Literature at the Graduate Center at CUNY. Her articles on women’s visual culture have been published or are forthcoming in a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, Studies in American Jewish Literature, Studies in Comics, and several upcoming anthologies. She has taught at NYU-Gallatin, Brooklyn College, and Rutgers University in New Brunswick. Currently, she is at work on a manuscript on Jewish women’s identity in contemporary graphic memoirs. She is on faculty at Marymount Manhattan College as Assistant Professor of Writing and Director of the Writing Seminar Program.

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Published on April 7, 2014 in graphic narrative reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

THE UNDERSTORY by Pamela Erens reviewed by Ashlee Paxton-Turner

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 31, 2014 by thwackJuly 7, 2020
The Understory cover art. A photograph looking up at a blue tree against a pink sky

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THE UNDERSTORY
by Pamela Erens
Tin House Books 169 pages
(originally published by Ironweed Press in 2007)

reviewed by Ashlee Paxton-Turner

I began Pamela Erens’ The Understory to find the main character, Jack Ronan Gorse, peering inside his coffee cup to reassure himself that he is indeed drinking black coffee. As someone who also only drinks black coffee, I identified with Gorse’s need to ensure the absence of cream and sugar. Of course, Gorse’s habit has an interesting origination; it developed after once finding sour milk in his coffee. This first introduction to Gorse is a telling  characterization of him; he is a man in love with his habits and his routines, yet at the same time, restricted by them, using them to repress his desires for love and companionship. Gorse even goes so far as to insist that he cannot tolerate the company of other people, yet he is drawn to Patrick, a stranger, who he allows to distract his thoughts and upset his routine.

Pamela Erens author photo

Pamela Erens

The quiet of a familiar apartment lined with familiar books. The quiet of the flora and fauna of Central Park and the quiet of a favorite booth in a favorite diner. The quiet of a bonsai room in a Buddhist monastery in Vermont. For Gorse, an ex-attorney, it is this quiet and solitary life among his books, his thoughts, and his routine that sustains him until he faces eviction, homelessness, and his own repressed desires. Gorse finds himself struggling to blend his routine and quiet existence with an imagined intimacy with Patrick, a man Gorse consistently forgets he hardly knows. It is in this tenuous relationship with Patrick, and a flashback to a childhood friendship with a boy named Henry, that Erens demonstrates her aptitude for capturing the essence of relationships that do not materialize or meet an individual’s expectations. Whatever Gorse so desperately wants from Patrick, he cannot get, so he obsesses over small details, even a shard of glass of Patrick’s shoe, or conversations that have yet to occur. Gorse retreats to the Ramble of Central Park and addresses his obsession indirectly, sometimes spying on others and other times simply considering the foliage.

Gorse insists that what resonates the most with him in Central Park are shrubs that grow close to the ground, “the understory, as botanists call it.” It is Gorse’s understory that Erens so compellingly gives her reader, not a backstory or glossy picture of the man everyone around him sees, although that is the picture that Patrick takes of Gorse and later gives to Gorse. The Understory is the story of the meditations and thoughts that might ordinarily be left unnoticed much like the ground-dwelling shrubs of Central Park.

Erens makes beautiful what is so painful: a man’s obsession with routine and his struggle to find a place for himself. In addition to fluid and moving writing, Erens’ form reflects her content so that the reader feels as Gorse does, comparing and contrasting his existence in New York City  to his time at a monastery in Vermont. The novel is organized by alternating chapters, Gorse’s life before entering the monastery and his life at the monastery, until a final chapter that brings the two experiences together. Appropriately, the chapters that describe Gorse’s life before entering the monastery are longer, winding pieces that describe Gorse’s own winding routines, while the chapters that occur at the monastery are shorter, more minimalistic, and more incisive in their reflections, perhaps to reflect the minimalistic feelings of a Buddhist monastery. The novel pushes between the lines of one man’s meditations on his existence and the mystery of his current situation.

Without much pretension, Erens also skillfully incorporates numerous literary and philosophical references. The detailed descriptions of Gorse’s routine combined with these references allow the reader to understand Jack Gorse and all his thoughts. In imagining what he will say to the judge to defend himself from eviction, Gorse muses:

Your Honor, Locke wrote that what gives a man a right to property is that he has mixed his labor with that property. Hegel added that when a man exercises his will upon a thing, he makes that thing a part of himself.”  And he continues, “Should only geniuses, only people who offer a verifiable brilliance to the world, be allowed a life among books? Thoreau said that it would please him to imagine a government that could tolerate the existence of a few men who wished to live aloof from it, ‘not meddling with it, nor embraced by it’.”

For Gorse, it is natural to imagine his solitary existence in the context of heavyweight philosophers.

However, Erens does not simply write a man’s meditation on his life. Erens demonstrates that routines, even meditations are temporal. At some point, the actions that reflect the true self must bubble up to the surface, shocking everyone involved. The ending is just that—a shock. A character I felt I knew so well does something neither he nor I can imagine, and it is at the novel’s conclusion that Erens makes clear the full extent of the damage of self-repression.


Ashlee Paxton-Turner author photo

Ashlee Paxton-Turner is a native of Williamsburg, Virginia and a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, where she was an English major with a concentration in creative writing. A former Teach For America corps member, who taught high school mathematics teacher in rural North Carolina, Ashlee is now a law student at Duke University.

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Published on March 31, 2014 in fiction reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

ON LOVING WOMEN by Diane Obomsawin reviewed by Amy Victoria Blakemore

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 26, 2014 by thwackApril 7, 2016
on-loving-women

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ON LOVING WOMEN
by Diane Obomsawin
Drawn & Quarterly, 94 pages

reviewed by Amy Victoria Blakemore

“On Loving Women”: it sounds like a treatise. But Diane Obomsawin does not deliver the usual tome with this intimately illustrated collection of coming out stories, nor does she intend to. In contrast to similarly named philosophical texts such as Aristotle’s On the Soul or Arthur Schopenhaur’s infamous On Women, On Loving Women presents ten vignettes of first love without explanation or elaboration: they are whole ideas, answers unto themselves. And they are utterly delightful to read.

DianeObomsawin2014_creditRehabNazal

Diane Obomsawin

Obomsawin begins each short narrative in On Loving Women with the speaker’s name and a single- or double-panel snapshot of her in her natural habitat: in a chair with a drink or dressed as Zorro, sword and all. For one speaker, Catherine, Obomsawin forgoes props to highlight her big, awkward eyes. These introductions could have easily verged into the expected, but Obomsawin ensures that her readers have an added layer of complexity to work through: all of her speakers, from start to end, are animals. Mice, birds, bulls, pigs – at times, discerning one breed from another proves difficult. Obomsawin’s minimal lines accommodate similarities between the speakers as opposed to singularities. Even readers can project themselves into their knee-less legs, rectangular torsos, and elbow-less arms.

fishnetsobomsawin

This invitation to identify, powerful in many mediums, strikes an especially tender note in the context of what many might consider a realm of sexual difference. Never does Obomsawin exclude a reader who might not participate in loving women; ultimately, the text is as much about loving as it is about women. Just as readers are welcomed to occupy each speaker’s body, they are welcomed to experience the pain, the thrill, and the vulnerability of first love with them. “Candid” does not properly characterize the language of On Loving Women; each narration has the texture of a night at the bar with friends: deliciously unapologetic, a little bit gritty, and, at times, peaked with unspoken sadness. We swing from learning about Marie, who had to move away and sell her horse after her parents discovered her sexuality, to the endearingly sentimental Diane, who is always in love because “it gave [her] a reason to go to school.” And, like a rowdy night with friends, we are privy to details of sexual encounters – some in the key of “making love,” others beginning: “We got seriously wasted.”

wonderwomanobomsawinimage

Most striking, Obomsawin decidedly invokes a risky medium to enrich the honesty of her narrators’ voices: the cliché. And even more, she does so un-ironically. Phrases such as “It was love at first sight” and “It hit me like a thunderbolt” stand alone without the usual protective coating of self-deprecation. Obomsawin resists the urge to portray romantic euphoria as an object to be broken down and studied. Her treatment is anti-philosophical: she gives young love the space to breathe its long, dramatic sighs. Each individual story is numbered with its own set of pages, raising its contents to the status of a novella. Obomsawin’s On Loving Women, in all of its empathy and vulnerability, is a solvent against sarcasm. To every reader who has been in love, if even for a moment, her work confirms this: if it meant the world at the time, it should mean the world in your memory.

horsesceneobomsawin


Amy-Victoria-BlakemoreAmy Victoria Blakemore is a graduate of Franklin and Marshall College, where she served for three years as a writing tutor. She earned honors for her senior thesis on contemporary iterations of Superman in comics and graphic literature, and she also was awarded an Academy of American Poetry Prize. Her work appears in the The Kenyon Review, [PANK], and The Susquehanna Review.

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Published on March 26, 2014 in graphic narrative reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

THE WORLD’S SMALLEST BIBLE by Dennis Must and DURING THE REIGN OF THE QUEEN OF PERSIA by Joan Chase, reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 20, 2014 by thwackJuly 7, 2020

The World's Smallest Bible cover art. Artwork of a black human figure standing on a red landscape under a black sky. Below, cover art for During the Reign of the Queen of Persia. A photograph of a brown space empty but for a yellow chair

THE WORLD’S SMALLEST BIBLE
by Dennis Must
Red Hen Press, 232 pages

DURING THE REIGN OF THE QUEEN OF PERSIA
by Joan Chase
NYRB Classics (new edition), 215 pages

reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

 

GROWING UP, MID-CENTURY

Childhood is a kind of endlessly swelling pregnancy; the womb stretches and through the amniotic fluid of rooms and voices, odors and faces, the adult world becomes slowly traceable yet still distant, incomprehensible. Once in a while it ruptures and the child is forced to “grow up fast.” Otherwise, it’s the child who must give birth to her adult self. 

But perhaps I’m oversimplifying: for every child, eventually, will have to negotiate the various thresholds to the adult world and will do so not in a linear progression, but rather in some sort of prolonged iterative process of seeking and receiving, receiving and seeking, a rain shower that comes and goes, once in a while revealing sun. And society has erected its own regiment of boundaries, some known, some unexpected; almost all of these require some kind of an appointment with sex or death.

Such are the haunting conditions in which we emerge as full grown members of our species that we come to realize, though often not until it’s too late, that the adults that shepherd us can also do us harm. At best, one escapes with only ache—the nagging heartfall of mortality—at worst, what? Suicide, despair?

This inquiry underlies two rather mesmerizing novels, Dennis Must’s The World’s Smallest Bible, just out from Red Hen Press, and Joan Chase’s 1983 During the Reign of the Queen of Persia, in a new edition from New York Review Classics. Both books portray children—Must’s Ethan and Jeremiah and Chase’s Celia, Jenny, Katie and Anne—in mid-20th century rural America, places only a couple hundred miles apart on the cusp of suburbanization and demographic change. And both are searching books about people trying figure out the puzzle of existence while being watched upon by the overbearing monsters of death and sex. With little plot in either novel, there is rather a heightened sensory experience—a debt the authors owe to Faulkner—a lush world to breathe in instead of merely to read about.

There is no innocent 1950s Middle America here, neither on the northeastern Ohio farm where Chase’s book is set nor in Hebron, Pennsylvania, where Jeremiah and Ethan grow up. Their father—Papa—is an alcoholic skirt chaser, who drives Mama to attempt suicide, their aunt a stripper at the Elks Club. The annual Hebron carnival is an invitation to visit the Bearded Lady and her associates. You might lose your virginity there, as Jeremiah does, but beware the clap!

The boys are about ten and eight when their mother orders the younger Jeremiah back into the children’s bedroom. She’s had it sharing her bed with her son, just another reminder of the man who’s supposed to be there and isn’t. Ethan, she says, is in charge of the boy now. But Jeremiah is the more spirited child, aggressive and sexually charged. He declares his independence early, leaving Ethan to observe his mother’s descent into madness. Rose Mueller—Mama—has lost the attention of her husband; she’s confused by middle age, boredom, and her own uncertain sexuality. To get her husband’s attention, she starts acting and dressing like one of his floozies, a woman named Lee Ann Daugherty, splitting her personality, and all of a sudden destroying the world the boys thought they inhabited. Must delivers this shift with alacrity—it comes upon the reader as is does the children with a powerful, blindsiding force. “Papa made love to one and ridiculed the other,” says Ethan, who narrates Must’s story. “It’s as if I had opened my closet door and Mama stood there, figuratively naked, handing me a note she’d written.”

New book, Ethan. Throw the old one away.
Nothing is what you think it is or was.
I’m incapable of playing the role of yours and Jeremiah’s mama any longer. That woman died long ago. I don’t know who I am. I’m somebody who sleeps with your father and prepares your and his dinners. I wash and iron your clothes. I clean this house. But please don’t ask me anything else about who I am. I simply don’t know.
(italics in the original)

For all the she is caught between the traditional and the modern, Rose Mueller could easily be just another of Chase’s “Aunts,” the five daughters, all in their 30s and 40s, still in the orbit of their mother, the fierce and sometimes forgiving matriarch, Gram. The women—Aunts May, Libby, Rachel, Grace, and Elinor—were raised on the farm Gram had bought after receiving a surprise inheritance; Libby, the mother of Celia and Jenny, lives there with her husband, a butcher named Dan. The women had grown up, in the world of Ohio farm country, rich, with property and horses. Gram hadn’t—she was sent to work at eleven—a fact she, the “Queen of Persia,” lords over her soft daughters.

Celia and Jenny and their cousins Katie and Anne, the daughters of Grace, roam as a collective across the house and fields, chunks of which the indifferent Gram keeps selling off. The four of them—the collective “we” narrating the story—bounce among the territory their mothers, Gram, the silent prick Grandad, who knows only to keep tending the cows, and their own internal, searching world, laced with emergent desire, and awareness of themselves as women. “Our mothers wouldn’t allow us to talk to like Gram though they themselves did when they were mad enough,” they say. “When we were alone we did it for fun.”

It made us feel bold and powerful. In the same way we played strip poker; it was just something that came over us, the wanting to play, the knowing we were going to, only putting it off for a little, so we could feel the excitement working in us. We were breathing hard, trembling even, when Katie threw the crumpled deck among us. Jenny might say, “Maybe we shouldn’t.” But there was no stopping us.

Will they turn out more like the hard but utterly capable Gram or like one of their confused mothers—or, still possibly, their lustrous Aunt Elinor, a New York advertising executive and recent acolyte of Christian Science? As Anne then Celia become sexually active, the girls have to negotiate conflicting feelings of passion and the need for control. Should they run wild and risk pregnancy or settle down and risk boredom? Either way, they’re soon to find out that adulthood demands bewildering compromise that can so easily lead to despair.

As the girls collectively and individually try to figure all this out, Ethan, the narrator of The World’s Smallest Bible, keeps watching, measuring the distance between Papa and the next door neighbor, a dreamer named Stanley Cuzack, trying to figure out who will be. While Papa numbs the pain in town, Cuzack builds, first a found object sculpture garden then a massive luge course to “shoot the moon” then a perpetual motion machine he thinks will make him immortal. “Stanley sang too,” says Ethan,

But he crooned for immortality in the A&P encyclopedia. Papa warbled for dames. A male bird never sated, willing to die, nay drown, in the Big Run of Lust.

Stanley’s quest captivates Ethan and their friendship becomes the heart of this story. “Cuzack is dogging something more intoxicating than poontang is to you and Papa,” he tells Jeremiah. Once Cuzack gets the perpetual motion machine going, it “won’t ever stop. Ever. After Papa, Mama, even you and me are long gone.”

Jeremiah thought awhile, then like he was thinking out loud, said, “That’s what I want to be.”
“What?”
“What the Polack’s buildin’.”
He rolled over and pulled the comforters nearly over his head. “Somethin’ that’s ain’t ever gonna die.”

It’s mortality, all these children discover, that eats at the adults in their midst. On the farm, the girls must confront it: Aunt Grace, the mother of Katie and Anne, is dying of cancer. When glamorous Aunt Elinor, with her sharp clothes and colorful jewelry and determined good humor, comes for an extended stay, she’s there to cure her sister. After all, “Christian Science was a science of health, it was the power of God revealed and demonstrated. It would help all of us, as it had helped her; and it was going to cure Aunt Grace completely.”  Grace will become Elinor’s perpetual motion machine.

Of course, we, like our wisened narrators, know how all this will end. But the turmoil generated in the brew of sex and death that bubbles so ferociously inside each of us makes these two books such revealing mirrors, not only on middle America, circa 1955, but on our own lives today. More so, in the surprise tragic endings of both books, the writers seem to want to say the earlier and hotter our sexuality burns the harder it is later to face the inevitable compromise and despair.


Nathaniel Popkin author photoCleaver reviews editor Nathaniel Popkin is the author of five books, including the 2018 novel Everything is Borrowed, and co-editor (with Stephanie Feldman) of the anthology Who Will Speak for America? His essays and works of criticism have appeared in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Kenyon Review, LitHub, Tablet Magazine, and Public Books. If you are an author or publicist seeking reviews or a writer hoping to write reviews for Cleaver, query Nathaniel.

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Published on March 20, 2014 in fiction reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

DEAR GRAVITY by Gregory Djanikian reviewed by Anna Strong

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 14, 2014 by thwackOctober 9, 2014
Dear Gravity

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DEAR GRAVITY
by Gregory Djanikian
Carnegie Mellon University Press, 104 pages

 reviewed by Anna Strong

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 the present” under the ‘disapproving glance of history’ gestures outwards:

Here’s a new window to turn to,
here’s a cloth to clean the mists (“Beginnings”)

Though the poem comes at the beginning of the penultimate section, it is in many ways a suggestion for how to read the entire collection: as one enormous room of infinite windows to turn to, an insistence on presence in each individual poem, and an acknowledgement that history, however disapproving, is unavoidable, in both poetry and in memory.

So many of those windows look out on landscapes and cityscapes, from Alexandria to Arizona to Philadelphia. Language preserves the memory and the feeling of those landscapes against one another and allows them to exist in the same poetic space. In “First Winter in America,” Djanikian’s speaker, experiencing the first snow and ice of winter, is suddenly afraid to forget the desert, and the language of the desert:

White eyelashes, white mittens,
I thought I could become
whatever I touched.

A year before, in another language,
I held the desert in my hand,
I tasted the iridescent sea. (“First Winter in America”)

The speaker has not only a new country and a new climate, but also a new language for the new set of experiences. The speaker is also anxious that the language is inadequate, incomplete, does not have the right words in either the old language or the new:

And I stayed where I was,
someplace I had no name for,
not for the snow or my standing still
and watching it fall. (“First Winter in America”)

Gregory-DjanikianLanguage here is not just a communicative device, it is a forger of connections—connection as preservation and remembrance, connection as assimilation, and connection as the only cord between a boy sailing from Alexandria to Lebanon, a man reciting poetry to himself in the shower, and a man and his wife on a ranch in Arizona. The poetic impulse induces both anxiety when the words won’t come, and profound joy when they will. In “Why I Have the Radio On,” the speaker has forgone a family outing to stay in and work, only the expected “significant work” won’t come:

And the house has suddenly become
immense with too much light
not a word I say will contain it (“Why I Have the Radio On”)

Djanikian lovingly writes of the “first efforts,” the early fumbling poems that want so much to say something but fail under the weight of language that takes itself too seriously:

And what about that immense
celebratory “Ode to Coffee,” the spoon
in its cup rising like a mast of insight
from the dark unconscious

Isn’t comforting to know
that the malarial cloud
of bad writing can linger anywhere? (“First Efforts”)

The ghosts of poems that didn’t work linger over “First Efforts” and “Lost Poems,” which ring with a pain just as acute as the pain of losing Alexandria. The anxiety of the “wrong words” isn’t a failure of poetic talent or work, it’s a failure of language to render memory “just right.” The wrong words, the failure of recollection, operate a little like the pivotal “My Uncle’s Eye,” in which a young speaker covers one eye in an attempt to see as his one-eyed uncle sees, but in fact can be read as an analogy for a preemptive linguistic recovery of the ‘hazy edges’ of memory, once those edges inevitably begin to blur:

And I was practicing how to move
the way he moved, skimming along
hazy edges, judging distances
by inkling, relying on some part
of the tangible world

without knowing exactly
what to hold on to,
what to let go. (“My Uncle’s Eye”)

But eventually, the speaker settles down, settles into language with an ease that comes only from letting go of the anxiety of the exact word:

Now the sky is roiling
into a storm which, I’m sure,
has a name, but “storm” is just
what I want to call it,

as large a noun as I have
to account for every unexpected turn
maybe veering my way. (“On a Nature Walk in the Southwest Desert”)

The poems of Dear Gravity are surprising, hopeful, heartbreaking, and clean. Djanikian’s poems reminds us that language is the gravitational pull between the furthest reaches of imagination and real experience and memory, and these poems exist in and push at the limits of that intermediate space. Ultimately, memory and experience can be rendered only in language, and all that matters is who does the telling—or really, the writing, as he writes in the most stunning, fluid, open poem of the collection, “The Book of Love”:

go ahead read it out loud even if several paragraphs
were missing even if all the pages were blank
and the story would have to be told
by heart as if I had written it. (“The Book of Love”)


Anna StrongCleaver Magazine reviewer and assistant poetry editor Anna Strong is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, and is originally from Haverford, PA. Her work has previously appeared in the Penn Review, the Pennsylvania Gazette, Peregrine, and Poems for the Writing. Anna also helps teach Penn’s Modern and Contemporary American Poetry course through Coursera. She is pursuing a master’s degree at Boston College.

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Published on March 14, 2014 in poetry reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

MORE THAN YOU KNOW by Melissa Malouf reviewed by Elizabeth Mosier

Cleaver Magazine Posted on March 10, 2014 by thwackJuly 7, 2020

More Than You Know cover art. The title text in different colors against a white background

MORE THAN YOU KNOW
by Melissa Malouf
Dalkey Archive Press, 240 pages

Reviewed by Elizabeth Mosier

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 down a rabbit role with narrator Alice Clark, chasing characters I hadn’t yet met: Hannah Jensen and her husband Bradley, always called Mr. Jensen; Barbara Delaney from Las Vegas; the “three dead young men,” Eric Langland, Richard Stone and Darrell Farnsworth, grad students in English and American Literature at UC Riverside. Unmoored (by early retirement) from teaching at a California community college, Alice doesn’t decide so much as she is compelled to travel cross country to Vermont to confront the Jensens and her role in her friends’ deaths. Through Las Vegas, Cheyenne, Omaha, and Peoria to the Jensens’ home in Chittenden, Vermont, Alice pursues a psychological mystery for which the only way forward is back. Her “mad undertaking” is a puzzle she puts together in real time with the reader, a year after her road trip—and decades after her loss. “Untimely deaths is a phrase one could use to make a tidy story of it,” she says. “If one had never met the Jensens.”

Melissa Malouf author photo

Author Melissa Malouf

But this story is anything but tidy. The novel’s odd, taunting title aptly describes not only the mystery at its heart, but also the instability of any story’s meaning through time. Like the old black and white photograph of the grad school friends that “tells [Alice] something different each time [she] looks at it,” interpreting Malouf’s story is a matter of choosing from a set of literary tropes that point in different directions. Is Alice, who sometimes slips into distancing 2nd-person voice, the fragmented protagonist of a trauma narrative, seeking integration? Is she like the hearth-centered females of 19th– and 20th-century domestic fiction, settling for home ownership while secretly pining for “priestly” Eric? The solitary scholar stand-in for the madwoman in the attic? A contemporary version of the Victorian innocent lured into the clutches of charming villains? An unwitting resident in a haunted house, its walls embodying regret and grief? A guest in an Agatha Christie country manor, presumed a suspect if not a victim? Shifting these signposts seems to be part of Malouf’s point. More Than You Know reinterprets the linguistic puzzle-making of Lewis Carroll’s classic Alice in Wonderland, and reproduces the frustrating and rewarding experience of learning to read: deciphering words in changing contexts, embracing and abandoning patterns as clues.

Alice is a literary code reader—so she’s alarmed by the lurid victim tales Hannah invents as the two women play the board game, “Clue.” And when Hannah shows up at her house one night claiming she’s been raped, Alice studies Mr. Jensen’s diary for evidence. But like Hannah’s husband, the diary is indecipherable: “There is no discursive writing inside, no revelations or reflections, no detailed memories, no stories per se,” she says. “There are only our names—Alice, Eric, Darrell, Richard, Hannah—in various couplings and combinations.” Later, when Eric’s body is found in the Chittenden Reservoir, his coat pockets stuffed with heavy volumes, Alice looks to the sunken books’ titles for explanation. For Alice, literary “weight” has figurative and literal significance.

Reading a literary novel set at a college is like any inner-circle game: the more familiar the references, the greater the pleasure. And though the mystery involving the charismatic, creepy Jensens keeps the reader turning pages, the novel’s somewhat hasty ending reminded me of “Clue,” in that the solution is never as satisfying as the search.

But there’s another, larger, question of identity that Malouf pursues here. Is Alice “always just Alice,” as Hannah (whose palindrome name is the same word read forward or backward) insists, and her potential pre-determined by her past? Or can she change her trajectory to revisit “the life [she is] not leading [that] sits on [her] shelves and in [her] cupboards, an unwound clock”?

“Here is a storybook tale,” Alice reflects in the first pages—and near the last moments—of her story, from a future that includes a friend (Barbara) and a child (Constance, her ward) she’s brought forward from the past. “One about a world where these things could have helped me to mend the gaps that kept me close to Eric but not close enough. It’s a busy little world, abuzz with patchings-up and re-assemblings and timely rescues. With tinkerings that don’t manage to stop either the clock or the sickle but do their noisy best to stave them off….I want to end up in such a place, to live out my days there, mending, not dreaming.”

“It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backward,” the White Queen says to Lewis Carroll’s Alice. Indeed. For Melissa Malouf’s Alice Clark, remembering is also the act of rewriting her future.


Elizabeth Mosier author photoElizabeth Mosier is the author of The Playgroup (Gemma Open Door) and My Life As a Girl (Random House). She has recently completed a new novel, Ghost Signs.

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Published on March 10, 2014 in fiction reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

DEPT. OF SPECULATION by Jenny Offill reviewed by Michelle Fost

Cleaver Magazine Posted on February 18, 2014 by thwackJuly 7, 2020
Dept of Speculation cover art. The title text on a red stamp

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DEPT. OF SPECULATION
by Jenny Offill
Alfred A. Knopf, 177 pages

Reviewed by Michelle Fost

Here’s an idea for a book party. Hold it in the Guggenheim. Set up an exhibit of all the pages of the book. Frame each page and display them in sequence, ending at the bottom of the ramp. Enlarge the pages 10X the size of the Borzoi Book edition pages, because the first line of the book is “Antelopes have 10X vision, you said” but also so that it’s possible for many viewers to be reading a single page. Hope for crowds. Leave the walls behind the framed pages white, to call attention to the writer’s use of white space as well as the visual appeal of the blocks of text in this accomplished second novel. See if anyone at the bottom of the ramp wonders if the experience of the novel is like what could happen if, say, Rothko had created a series of paintings to be viewed sequentially and that expressed an artist’s emotionally fraught love story. Or maybe if Terrence Malick created an exhibit of still photographs that told a similar story.

The passages that make up Jenny Offill’s 46 brief chapters in her new novel are visually and tonally striking. Still, the astonishing emotional pitch and compositional elegance of Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation snuck up on me. Sure, block paragraph after block paragraph is beautifully crafted. The writing is always sharp, crisp, careful. But her chosen subject matter is risky in its seeming self-absorption. Struggling writers beware: you may not appreciate following the woes of a Brooklyn writer who seems to have a nice enough position teaching writing, a kind husband, a healthy daughter, good friends, a sister who looks out for her, an agent in the wings awaiting her new manuscript, and lots of time to do yoga. What’s she whinging about?

Jenny Offill author photo

Jenny Offill

That’s not to say that our protagonist doesn’t have her challenges. Her story is one of wanting first of all to become an “art monster,” then falling in love. The story line is then fairly simple. She gets married. She has a child. Her husband cheats on her with a much younger woman. Rage. Rage. Rage. Then, finally: a repairing of the marriage, while still being able to be an art monster. What makes this novel so satisfying?

For me, Jenny Offill has created something that feels only possible in language—it truly is a work of written art. She writes a consciousness into being. Here she builds character a little the way David Markson did in his wonderful novel, Wittgenstein’s Mistress. Our narrator calls out to Berryman and Rilke, and we begin to know what it’s like to see the world as she does. Sometimes I felt I was too close up to this consciousness—remember the Antelopes with their 10X vision of the novel’s first sentence. We seem to be looking through a microscope at the narrator’s thoughts. “Memories are microscopic,” the narrator tells us. She can be tender as well. Of her baby: “That swirl of hair on the back of her head. We must have taken a thousand pictures of it.” On falling in love: “I learned you were fearless about the weather. You wanted to walk around the city, come rain come snow come sleet, recording things. I bought a warmer coat with many ingenious pockets. You put your hands in all of them.” Joan Didion said in a Paris Review interview that writing is a hostile act because the writer is pulling the reader into the writer’s dreams. As Didion puts it, “Well, nobody wants to hear about someone else’s dream, good or bad; nobody wants to walk around with it. The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream.” Offill tricks us; we’re there.

I’m glad I stayed. The narrator instructs us in point of view: “It’s important to note the POV switch here.” Offill uses point of view to a beautiful end. It’s not just technique; it’s story. Point of view perfectly communicates the narrator’s dissociation when her marriage is in crisis. Style and point of view, like a camera, reproduce the narrator’s shifts in mindset, perhaps the way the French doctor Hippolyte Baraduc in 1887 in the narrator’s telling “found that the same emotion would make the same kind of impression upon the photographic plate, but that different emotions produced different images. Anger looked like fireworks. Love was an indistinct blur.”

Didion has written of seeing pictures that for her have a shimmer. “You can’t think too much about these pictures that shimmer,” she says. “You just lie low and let them develop. You stay quiet.” She writes of the pictures having a grammar. She says that with her novel Play It As It Lays, she wanted “to write a novel so elliptical and fast that it would be over before you noticed it, a novel so fast that it would scarcely exist on the page at all.” It’s my feeling that Didion, writing about her craft, cuts close to what Offill achieves. Even if the surface details—the biography in miniatures—make us restless and impatient with the privileged narrator who doesn’t grasp how good she has it and seems to have little interest about much that’s going on in the larger world around her, the story transcends its smallness with its truths. Not only is the book filled with white space, it also has an emotional core. I think Offill does more than create an enclosed world that is beautiful in the way of a snow globe. Through its artistry, the novel got me thinking about how and why a self closes off and opens up to the world.


Michelle Fost author photo

Michelle Fost is a writer living in Toronto. Her fiction has appeared in Geist Magazine and The Painted Bride Quarterly. Her book reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and The Boston Phoenix Literary Section.

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Published on February 18, 2014 in fiction reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

THE HYPOTHETICAL GIRL by Elizabeth Cohen reviewed by Michelle Fost

Cleaver Magazine Posted on February 7, 2014 by thwackJuly 7, 2020
The Hypothetical Girl cover art. Three different-colors female figures made up of typing symbols

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­THE HYPOTHETICAL GIRL
by Elizabeth Cohen
Other Press, 256 pages

Reviewed by Michelle Fost

Like so many of the characters in Elizabeth Cohen’s fifteen incisive stories in The Hypothetical Girl, Emily in the title story is truly suffering. Her affliction is contemporary. Girl meets guy online, falls hard for him, and is rejected by him before their relationship ever has a chance to develop out in the real world. What happens when people connect online, on sites like Letsgethooked.com, Flirtypants.com, and Yummybaby.com? Many of the stories have a sad, humorous and twisted logic. Emily—who meets Nick on Matchmaker.com—walks right into the new anxiety. “I think I miss you,” she says to Nick. “Can one miss someone one has never met?” Nick’s answer (“You can, but it is ridiculous”) is devastating. In a way, it is a simple case of unrequited chat love. Nick does not see Emily as a real person, only as an online chat partner. Cohen captures his problematic point of view: “‘You are not an actual girl,’ he wrote. ‘You are hypothetical.’” Emily’s feelings for Nick, a guy locked away in the online universe, lead her to experience herself—not Nick!—as less and less real. She is overwhelmed by her feelings for a person who is real but not real; out in the world, she is fading away.

In another story, “Dog People,” the oddness of the web arrives in its absence. Clarissa and Harry meet while walking their dogs in the park. Clarissa chats on Facebook with a friend about this budding relationship. “Oh wow,” the friend writes. “A real-world man. You don’t hear much about that anymore.” In this story, though, the ending that takes place in the real world has the feel of online. The man disappears in a way that is surprisingly swift and complete, like the closing of a tab.

Elizabeth Cohen author photo

Elizabeth Cohen

Again and again, in this collection, Cohen maps out the strange terrain of her characters’ travels online. Her characters set out full of hope—intrepid and romantic explorers. Often, it doesn’t go well. “Blame it on the Internet,” says a therapist in “Limerence.” In this tale, a guy named Larry is suffering from something that feels huge but unnameable: “It was like a drug but it was not a drug.” He had connected with Louise online, but she stopped writing. Cohen writes, “There was no minute that went by when he did not want to check his cell phone or his e-mail inbox, or rake over the text messages in the Louise file.” Larry is finally helped when his therapist finds a name for what is wrong with him. The therapist says he has a disorder called Limerence, “an obsessive, unrequited love.” Larry’s problem sounds like something that could happen to anyone, online or offline. In this case, having a name to hang onto makes all the difference for Larry, and for a little while he runs around saying the word over and over again, taking pleasure in the sound of it, relieved by the validation of his suffering as real. Cohen writes with panache about the very particular afflictions of the web that arise when the division between real and not real becomes so murky.

The fifteen tales are humane, if dark. Cohen maintains an edgy humor while looking clear eyed at what often goes wrong when her characters take risks. I found myself thinking that Cohen’s accomplishment is related to an adventure remembered by the protagonist of one of the stories, Alana in “Life Underground.” Alana recalls a childhood family trip into a cave. The tour guide showed them glittering, beautiful stalactites and stalagmites. He also brought them into an unlit chamber in the cave, letting them experience “real darkness, actual darkness, rare in our world.” Cohen’s stories, written with sharp humor and intelligence, are attuned to both light and dark.


Michelle Fost author photo

Michelle Fost is a writer living in Toronto. Her fiction has appeared in Geist Magazine and The Painted Bride Quarterly. Her book reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and The Boston Phoenix Literary Section.

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Published on February 7, 2014 in fiction reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

THE DISMAL SCIENCE by Peter Mountford reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

Cleaver Magazine Posted on February 4, 2014 by thwackJuly 9, 2020

The Dismal Science cover art. A tiered brown cake made out of earthy substance with a tree at the top

THE DISMAL SCIENCE
by Peter Mountford
Tin House Press, 275 Pages

reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

It seems fitting that Peter Mountford’s novel, The Dismal Science, is being published just as certain global emergent markets—Brazil, Turkey, India, South Africa, and Indonesia, nicknamed by investors the “Fragile Five”—are failing. As the book opens, in 2005, at a World Bank conference in Washington, DC, Vincenzo D’Orsi, a Milan-born, 24 year veteran Bank economist, is leading a panel discussion on the state of global markets. The subtext of his introductory talk, in the woozy gestalt of Bank and IMF bureaucrats:

Politics had matured, capitalism was working. Stability had taken hold and the emerging markets were now actually emerging.

“It’s almost on autopilot,” says Vincenzo.

Vincenzo is speaking of himself, too. Professionally, he’s peaked, after a long climb through the bank’s politicized bureaucracy; fundamentally allergic to simplistic, ideologically fraught rhetoric, he’s grown bored of spouting the corporate line. He knows he could give the same speech next year and the year after that, endlessly collecting a bloated paycheck and playing speed chess with his best friend Walter, a Washington Post reporter, on the weekends.

But like those emerging markets today, Vincenzo is about to send himself over the edge. At 54, he is placeless, neither Italian nor American, and only vaguely accustomed to Washington (despite having run World Bank programs in Latin America for years, he struggles with Spanish). His wife Cristina is dead, the victim of a terrible accident, and his relationship with their 23 year old daughter Leonora is strained. Vincenzo loves Leonora more than anyone in the world, but their lives are diverging, leaving him essentially alone.

Having dramatically quit the Bank, Vincenzo is free; anything is possible. But he stares out at the world with overpowering ambivalence toward everything but his daughter and his daughter’s rat-faced boyfriend. Soon after leaving the Bank, he finds himself in a New York hotel room during an early winter storm, forced to consider his future.

What he’d never done was stop advancing himself, steadily, gradually, upward within the architecture of the Bank. Now he was supposed to put that energy toward some other thing. The great second act. Or was he onto his third act, now? Alas, it was probably the third act. The finale.

He needed a new fire, a fresh purpose to his days. Instead, he had a hissing heater by the window of his well-appointed hotel room. And he had those massive snowflakes, too, a hundred million delicate and crystalline lattices suspended peacefully between gusts, like a sea of glowing spirits floating aimlessly between waves—but then they’d all spin wildly away from the window as if gathering for a tsunami.

Vincenzo follows in a long line of melancholic and disillusioned middle aged male characters in existential crisis. In certain ways, there’s not much new here: “What he wanted was sad and predictable: a younger woman, not too much younger, but enough to be truly beautiful, with whom he could he could settle at his farm in Piedmont and pass his remaining years in peace, tending to the olive trees.”

But Mountford’s portrayal of Vincenzo is utterly vivid, overcoming, as good writers do, trope with particularity. Vincenzo breathes so completely, most fully when he’s grappling with his beloved Leonora (the father-daughter dynamic here is exquisite), that the reader is liable to imagine the testy, forlorn man is sitting on his lap. Pat him on his bald head, he needs comforting.

One can’t help but be reminded of the Italian actor Toni Servillo in this past fall’s La Grande Belleza. Servillo plays a onetime novelist and longtime playboy, who at 60 can no longer quite connect. Like Vincenzo, Sevillo’s Jep Gambardella lives in relative opulence, but to no effect. Even his oldest friends leave him cold. But Jep has something Vincenzo doesn’t: a city—his city, the eternal city—Rome. Jep turns to Rome as perhaps we all seek out a measure of the eternal to soften the inevitable decline. Vincenzo, on the other hand, seems to have nothing. He pretends to fall in love with a different city of high elevation, La Paz, but that’s really in an effort to get laid.

As he struggles with his own desire and indeed his daughter’s future, Vincenzo comes to resemble perhaps the most remarkable of literature’s melancholic men, Lampedusa’s Don Fabrizio, the Leopard. (It may be that Italian men have a lock on this role.) Both men struggle, it seems, with a world that goes on without them. Their reaction is rarely graceful, and often self-destructive; even the Leopard, the wisest of men, is the often the cause of his own suffering.

Yes, Don Fabrizio had certainly had his worries those last two months; they had come from all directions, like ants making for a dead lizard. Some had crawled from crevices of the political situation; some had been flung on him by other people’s passions; and some (these had the sharpest bite) had sprung up within himself, from his irrational reactions…

One might easily substitute Vincenzo here for Don Fabrizio. Vincenzo, who reacts viscerally to fundamentalism, breathes in disorder. His antidote, perhaps counterintuitively, has long been the hyperrationalism of economics. Now, after throwing away his job, his every move feels irrational. In the spiraling out, he confounds all those in his path, including himself. But is he, finally, living? If auto-pilot’s been turned off, and the driver has taken his hand off the steering wheel, where exactly is he going?

Vincenzo, deep in confusion, has no idea. Mountford is too honest to say otherwise. We each of us are only wherever it is that we are; one can’t be ambitious and utterly sanguine all at once—and anyway, only time can sort it out, if in fact that is what time does. “There would not be angels spreading their majestic wings at the conclusion,” he writes. “There had been only this—the space left between where he’d been and where he would emerge again.”


Nathaniel Popkin author photoCleaver reviews editor Nathaniel Popkin is the author of five books, including the 2018 novel Everything is Borrowed, and co-editor (with Stephanie Feldman) of the anthology Who Will Speak for America? His essays and works of criticism have appeared in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Kenyon Review, LitHub, Tablet Magazine, and Public Books. If you are an author or publicist seeking reviews or a writer hoping to write reviews for Cleaver, query Nathaniel.

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Published on February 4, 2014 in fiction reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF EARLY EARTH by Isabel Greenberg reviewed by Stephanie Trott

Cleaver Magazine Posted on February 3, 2014 by thwackOctober 9, 2014
Encyclopedia of Early Earth

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THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF EARLY EARTH
by Isabel Greenberg
Little, Brown and Company, 176 Pages

Reviewed by Stephanie Trott

There is no sole way to tell the story of our planet. Whether one chooses to uphold a belief rooted in science, religion, or some amalgamation of the two, our interpretation of man’s early days will never be a precise match to that of our neighbor. Many origin stories regarding that ancient spark of life cross cultures that span the globe, each holding vaguely similar elements and lessons with the introduction of new heroes, heroines, beasts, and locations.

Isabel Greenberg has taken this philosophy into account in her graphic novel The Encyclopedia of Early Earth. Though not a non-fictional encyclopedia, Greenberg has reinterpreted familiar childhood stories of valiant journeys, jealous siblings, and—of course—the gravitational pull we call love. Her tales, which are framed as the life story of a nameless Nord man, are set in a much earlier and much colder time. Following the Nord man as he journeys beyond the horizon, we learn that a soul can indeed be split into three separate human bodies and returned again into one, that elderly women will go to murderous lengths just to ensure their right to an afternoon nap, and that our world may have once rested in the twisted tendrils of an avian demigod.

I Call Them Humans

Early Earth is divided into four segments, each based in a new land and progressively traveling from the Land of the Nord to the South Pole. The stories follow the epic transecting journey of the Nord man as he searches for the missing piece of his soul; traveling with the company of a canine companion, he paddles from his northern-lying home to the arboreal settings of Britanitarka and Migdal Bavel. The Nord man encounters a cast of characters that is both familiar and strange: lurching giants, fickle rulers, and a mischievous band of moneys (alas, sans wings) each impact the Nord man’s soul search and are woven into his story’s tapestry.

Overseeing the earthly actions are three gods: the Eagle god Birdman and his children, The Ravens Kidd and Kiddo. The home dwelling, the Cloud Castle, is described by Greenberg as lying “beyond the Aurora in the forth (or maybe fifth) dimension” and contains the littered debris of innumerable intricate bathtubs, toilets, and chamber pots. While Birdman is less than thrilled by the epic journey of our mortal protagonist, Kiddo harbors a somewhat maternal protection for him and ensures that her cynical father causes the Nord man no harm.

The text’s narration takes a formal tone, while the internal and external character dialogue is conversational and often satirical, with many tongue-in-cheek interactions.

I Like Your Mittens

Transcending the written text is language communicated through the presence of color; the majority of this text is completed in matte black and white, though each page features complementary colors based upon the setting of its events. The panels are colored as though the reader is looking at a photograph that appears to be monochromatic, though it   is actually pigmented: shady greys are heavily present in the zones where mercury hibernates well beneath the 32° F mark. As the tales accumulate, warmer shades of apricot, buttercup, and crimson are brushed throughout the scenery of more temperate climates.

Stylistically, human bodies are depicted as they exist in reality: flawed and slightly disproportionate, each holds small morsels of beauty and defies the highly feminized and masculinized characters within traditional fairy tales. The South Pole woman, for example, is adored by the Nord man immediately upon Early Earth’s opening panels not because of her overall beauty but because of one small feature: her ears. Other characters—with missing teeth, bald heads, and wrinkles as deep as mountain gorges—remind the reader of the frailty that lies within our own mortal existence.

You Will Like This Story

 

Greenberg pays respect to oral storytelling through Early Earth, which reads as though it were a verbalized collection of tales rather than one communicated through paper and ink. While each installment builds upon the last, individually they stand thoroughly sound and have morals presented upon their conclusion.

As with many folk stories and fairy tales, Early Earth faces an unfortunately quick ending with little wiggle room for questions from the reader. While somewhat abrupt, answers to any earlier questions realized by readers will most likely be found in the book’s Appendices. Here, Greenberg pays respect to the technical step of omniscient explanation in the dance of storytelling and takes care to explain more about the mystical lands we have traveled to, the people who inhabit them, and even additional stories.

Whether read in installments over the course of dark winter nights or in its entirety during a late winter snow squall, Greenberg’s The Encyclopedia of Early Earth contains a multitude of cultural references that will undoubtedly strike as familiar with any reader. This comedic and captivating collection offers a creative account of what life on our Blue Planet may have been like for the earliest of humans, introducing us to a bevy of original stories while respectfully reaffirming the well-worn tales of old.

Land of the Nord


Stephanie-Trott-Stephanie Trott received a B.A. in English and Creative Writing from Bryn Mawr College in 2012. Her work has appeared in Polaris: An Undergraduate Journal of Literature and Arts, Bryn Mawr’s Nimbus magazine, and the premiere issue of Buffalo Almanack. An aspiring writer and photographer, she presently lives and works in Mystic, CT.

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Published on February 3, 2014 in graphic narrative reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

THE OLD PRIEST by Anthony Wallace reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

Cleaver Magazine Posted on January 27, 2014 by thwackJuly 9, 2020
The Old Priest cover art. A shadowed priest holding a wine glass against a blue background.

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THE OLD PRIEST
by Anthony Wallace
University of Pittsburgh Press
2013 Drue Heinz Literature Prize, 170 pages

reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

“Let’s leave Limit,” says Anna to her husband Phil, the narrator of Anthony Wallace’s story “Snow behind the door.” Limit is a fictional New Jersey town near Atlantic City and a metaphor for the physical and emotional borders that confine Phil and the other protagonists in this searing, surprising collection. Phil and Anna want to escape—their neighborhood is in decline, the neighbor’s dog won’t stop barking—but at what cost? To what end? What’s keeping them?

What’s begging them past the border?

Phil and Anna could leave. She suggests they open a restaurant in an old industrial town in upstate New York that’s “just begging for this kind of thing.” But Phil’s grandmother Rose is dying; they can’t leave her, not yet, anyway. He needs her too—as he listens to her own stories that wend the line between escape and acceptance. Ruth’s stories—and the stories, places, and myths that hover over other characters in this collection—exert a kind of invisible, perhaps even imagined, influence over their lives. We imprison ourselves, Wallace seems to say, in memory and habit.

In “The City of Gold,” fiftysomething Charlie has dragged his nineteen year old girlfriend Amber, the narrator of the story, from Atlantic City to New Mexico, where he imagines he’ll get work in an Indian casino. (The casinos in this book, windowless places of escape, inevitably imprison the characters in dead end lives. Phil works at a casino called the Bastille, “the irony of that name long since lost.”) Since she was sixteen, Charlie has kept Amber under his total control; he has given her a “good life” in exchange for her freedom. While they’re waiting to see Charlie’s contact at the casino, Amber sees an opportunity to flee; as with two other stories in the collection, “Have you seen this girl?” and “The unexamined life,” escape comes in the form of a surprising sexual encounter.

Here is the narrator Christine stepping across a threshold in “Have you seen this girl?”:

Then a door opens and I’m out on the fire escape with Darcy, the sky in flames behind the blackened rooftops. The dog on its length of rope blinks, looks up at me, blinks again.

“Hey,” Darcy says, and brushes the velvet-covered back of her hand against my arm, the side of my face, the ends of my hair.

“Hey,” I say back. “Want to go someplace? A look, something, the architecture of her face.

“Sure,” Darcy says. “Where to?”

She takes her gloves off, one arm then the other.

“Let’s get lost,” I say. “Let’s just get so lost—”

Sex and drugs, indeed, infiltrate Wallace’s various borderlands; they serve as the means and form of escape, and, of course, entrapment. In the title story of the collection, “The Old Priest,” a 2013 Pushcart Prize winner suffused with existential Catholicism, an encounter traps the narrator in an endless paralyzing purgatory of sexual confusion and uncertainty. In some other imagined Catholic reality, the priest, behind the confession box, might relieve him the burden. But this priest, who knows the border territory all too well, and the narrator are locked in an unspoken battle of will and shame.

Wallace’s protagonists seem to alternate between paralysis and determination; his skill lies in meting out both kinds of characters—and in convincing the reader how closely they’re aligned, perhaps he might say two sides of the same coin.


Nathaniel Popkin author photo Cleaver reviews editor Nathaniel Popkin is the author of five books, including the 2018 novel Everything is Borrowed, and co-editor (with Stephanie Feldman) of the anthology Who Will Speak for America? His essays and works of criticism have appeared in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Kenyon Review, LitHub, Tablet Magazine, and Public Books. If you are an author or publicist seeking reviews or a writer hoping to write reviews for Cleaver, query Nathaniel.

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Published on January 27, 2014 in fiction reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

BLOOM IN REVERSE by Teresa Leo reviewed by Anna Strong

Cleaver Magazine Posted on January 24, 2014 by thwackFebruary 1, 2016
Bloom-in-reverse

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BLOOM IN REVERSE
by Teresa Leo
University of Pittsburgh Press (Pitt Poetry Series), 104 pages

reviewed by Anna Strong

From the dedication page, Teresa Leo’s  Bloom in Reverse props itself against the fence between the living and the dead. Dedicated to the living but in memory of Leo’s friend Sarah, the poems carry the dual burden of trauma and memory. How do we process, how do we articulate trauma? If we’re at all like Teresa Leo, we recognize that in art, in poetry, we remember the the Sarah Hannahs of the world and bring them into a collective consciousness. She is not forgotten.

Donald Hall wrote an astounding collection of poems chronicling his wife’s cancer and death, Without. Bloom in Reverse reads much like that collection—in each poem, we feel the keenness of the “without,” the strain of recollection, the reconstruction of the smallest moments of friendship and intimacy in the clearest language accessible to the speaker. Many of the poems are two-line stanzas, heavily enjambed and riddled with fragments, clauses that build and build on each other only to be let go in a kind of sigh—we feel the struggle to hold onto whatever memories come to mind, only to realize that that’s all they are. The ending of “She Said: It’s Not that Things Bring Us to Tears, but Rather, There Are Tears in Things” struck me as the most poignant of these conclusions:

a crude eradication that paints me still,
that which I must not think about fully

or for too long — heat, stress, vapor, bone —
I understand, insistently,

this concept of tears;
I’m surrounded by things.

The collection also carries the guilt of moving on. In “Constant,” the speaker finds “the man she loves / in front of a computer // with his hand in his pants” and in “I Have Drinks with my Dead Friend’s Ex-Boyfriend,” the speaker suddenly finds herself falling for her dead friend’s ex boyfriend, who “drove an hour in the rain // on a cold winter night to a bar / in New England to help me remember you.” There is also the anger that comes with that feeling of being left behind — in “Your Rose Bush,” the speaker has “killed” her rose bush “not by accident:”

and so your rose bush is not —
not here to invoke or provoke

not her to dismember the mind,
no false hope, a bloom in reverse
just another way to say
I disremember you.

That poem is a knife in the gut to anyone who has ever felt that anger and guilt, the persistent why and how, the ache of not understanding “the signs.”

This collection is hard to read. It brings old hurts to the surface, no matter how long you’ve buried the memories of your own grief, but it reminds us that memory, in the end, is all we have. You can’t bring them back, but you can choose to remember. You can water the plants. You can look at photos. You can sit outside and listen for a name on the wind, look for any sign you want that they’re somewhere, if not here. You can go on living, which is the affirmation of the final poem of the collection, “Advice for a Dying Fern:”

there still may be fiddleheads,
rolled up shoots

sturdy as shepherd’s crooks,
primed as stringed instruments

unplayed, not yet unfurled
but ready,

the living ready to burst
through the dead.


Anna StrongCleaver Magazine reviewer and assistant poetry editor Anna Strong is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, and is originally from Haverford, PA. Her work has previously appeared in the Penn Review, the Pennsylvania Gazette, Peregrine, and Poems for the Writing. Anna also helps teach Penn’s Modern and Contemporary American Poetry course through Coursera. She is pursuing a master’s degree at Boston College.

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Published on January 24, 2014 in poetry reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

The New York Nobody Knows: Walking 6,000 Miles in the City by William Helmreich and Baghdad: The City in Verse edited by Reuven Snir reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

Cleaver Magazine Posted on January 22, 2014 by thwackJune 18, 2020
The-New-York-Nobody-Knows; New York skyline

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THE NEW YORK NOBODY KNOWS: Walking 6,000 Miles in the City
by William Helmreich
Princeton University Press, 449 pages

BAGHDAD: THE CITY IN VERSE
edited by Reuven Snir
Harvard University Press, 339 pages

reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin 

Writers, this one included, have long struggled to capture in words the dynamic and multi-layered ways that cities change. Cities themselves are powerful change agents in the wider world, but they are defined and redefined constantly by the evolving tastes and desires of their residents (who themselves are always changing), technology, culture and religion, structural political and economic shifts, and the feedback loop of history and history-telling, characterized through myth, poetry, and mass media. Here’s how I try to make sense of it in Song of the City (Four Walls Eight Windows/Basic Books):

BAGHDAD--THE-CITY-IN-VERSE book jacket

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Think of the city as a collection of swarming cells that change, adapt, grow, shrink, and grow simultaneously. Imagine hundreds or thousands or millions of cells, each living and dying not in parallel or even in sequence, but overlapping from one generation to the next. The whole place moves in several directions at once. Unless calamity hits, no city dies in a single instant. Despite what you read in the papers, no city, no neighborhood even, is ever miraculously reborn.

I want to say cities change because people, in all their contradictions, make them. But urban change can also be terribly unnerving, even terrifying, and sometimes violent. We might reject it outright, and fight it to the death. We might campaign to preserve a building that harkens to another time, or demand that a neighborhood remains “Italian” or “Puerto Rican” or “black.” And we might mourn for a city “that once was.”

Perhaps, in part, it’s the very conflict between change and constancy that makes cities such interesting and powerful places. Now, two very different but surprisingly related books published at the end of last year, The New York Nobody Knows: Walking 6,000 Miles in the City by William Helmreich (Princeton University Press) and Baghdad: The City in Verse, edited by Reuven Snir (Harvard University Press), help us frame and reframe the discussion. Both Helmreich, a sociologist who has studied New York for four decades and Snir, a professor of Arabic literature at the University of Haifa, seem to agree about the organic nature of urban change. “A city is not a static unit,” writes Helmreich in the introduction to his book. “It’s a dynamic and constantly environment, adapting to the needs of its residents.” Citing the prominent sociologist Janet Abu-Lughod, who passed away a month ago, Snir writes in his excellent introductory essay, “Cities are ‘living processes’ rather than ‘products’ or ‘formalistic shells for living’,” an idea I mirrored in Song of the City, which is organized into parts: pulse, body, soul, and seed.

Both of these admirable new books are indeed necessarily open-ended explorations: Helmreich’s across space, Snir’s through time. Over four years beginning in 2008, New York native Hemreich walked 6,000 miles across nearly every block of New York’s five boroughs;  Snir, whose parents were exiled from Baghdad to Israel in 1951, parceled through more than a century of poetry about Baghdad, translating and ultimately presenting 199 poems by some 123 poets.

The cities, too, are distinctly comparable. Baghdad was founded in an instant, in 762, by the Caliph al-Mansur, who called his city Madinat al-Salam, the City of Peace. It was to be the first city in the Arab world that would eschew placelessness. Until then, according to Snir, the Bedouin notion of genealogy framed one’s Islamic self-conception far more than the idea of homeland. Within a century, having made “place and self mutually interdependent,” Baghdad became one of the largest cities in the world, and beyond that, writes Snir, in a manner that makes us think of New York as a symbol for America, “Baghdad has been the city of Islam and Arabism par excellence—the center of the Islamic empire and the Arab world, in reality and certainly metaphorically. Baghdad was at times a metaphor even for the entire East.”

It became an open and pluralistic and hedonistic city through the end of the first millennium, into the second. It was, as the poet Ibn al-Rumi writes in the 9th century, “A city where I accompanied childhood and youthfulness;/ there I wore a new cloak of glory./When she appears in the imagination, I see her budding branches aflutter.” And then, in 1258, the city was destroyed by the Mongol Hulagu, a founder of the Persian dynasty Il-Khanid. This was all but the death of the place; Baghdad didn’t quite recover until the late 19th century into the 20th century, when it flourished as a tolerant, modern metropolis. The Baghdad of a century ago, in 1914, Snir points out, was majority Jewish, and filled otherwise with Arabs, Bedouins, Christians, Kurds, Persians, and Turks. At that very moment, melting pot New York was enjoying the heights of 20th century immigration and the first great migration of African Americans to the more tolerant north.

Of course, Sadaam Hussein and the modern Hulagu, the United States, eventually put that to an end; and in a sense, the cities’ fates became intertwined, as the poet Adonis, whose work on Baghdad Snir has collected in this volume, notes in the poem Salute to Baghdad (2003),

Put your coffee aside and drink something else.
Listening to what the invaders are declaring:
“With the help of God,
We are conducting a preventative war,
Transporting the water of life
From the banks of the Hudson and Thames
To flow in the Tigris and Euphrates

Snir presents a great deal of poetry on Baghdad from the second half of the 20th century and into the 21st, a time marked at first by modernity and cultural blossoming and at last by utter destruction and despair. Writes the poet Bushra al-Bustani in A Sorrowful Melody, “The tanks of malice wander./My wound/Is turned away like an abandoned horse/Scorched by an Arabian sun,/Chewed by worms./Picasso paints another Guernica,/Painting Baghdad under the feet of boors./Freedom is a lute/Strummed by a nameless dwarf./Paintings in Baghdad’s museums/Are at the mercy of the wind.”

In the book’s afterword, the Iraqi writer Abdul Kader el-Janabi notes that with its history of destruction, “Baghdad is an easy metaphor for revival and eclipse.” Indeed, despite attempts to conjure more complex and dynamic narratives for their cities, both Helmreich’s and Snir’s books are infused with that traditional broad stroke urban metaphor, of life and vitality followed by decline and death and (hopefully) life again. The difference is the point of view. New York, in the dusk of the Michael Bloomberg era, is triumphant: safe, utterly vital, nearly entirely tolerant. New York today is New York par excellence. As the protagonist of his story, Helmreich, who grew up in upper Manhattan in the 1950s, carries this prejudice into his exploration, which tends to downplay the challenges to New York’s massive homelessness problem, for example, or ethnic tension. He has a right to, for certain. New York, which lost more than 800,000 people during Helmreich’s formative years, has soared in the last two decades. He is, I think, both proud and amazed. And though Baghdad is now and again one of the largest cities in the Middle East (its population is 7+ million; New York’s is 8.3 million), Snir’s narrative is prejudiced by his own family’s story of loss of a beloved homeland and the war on Iraq, which left vast sections of the city in ruins.

The best way I know to counter the power of this broad, and deeply ingrained, urban narrative is with writing—and in the case of poetry, imagery—that’s specific, and particular to time, place, and circumstance. In this regard, I was somewhat (but only somewhat) disappointed by Snir’s collection. There is much metaphorical writing across the eras—“In the sky/The poles bow,/searching for what deserves illumination,/But the streets are overcrowded/With void.” (Sinan Antoon, 1989)—and not nearly enough visceral reality. I wanted to be taken onto an overcrowded street of the ancient city, of the modern city, of the city post-war to smell and hear and taste it. For that reason, one of my favorites in the collection is An Elegy for al-Sindibad Cinema, by the late Sargon Boulus, published in 2008. The movie house, a fixture of the cosmopolitan city of the mid-20th century, was bombed during the Iraq war. “Those evenings were destroyed…/Our white shirts, Baghdad summers…/How will we dream about traveling to any island?” he asks,

Al-Sindibad Cinema had been destroyed!
Heavy is the watered hair of the drowned person
Who returned to the party
After the lamps were turned off,
The chairs were piled up on the deserted beach,
And the Tigris’s waves were tied by chains.

Helmreich seems aware of this pitfall; his epic walk was meant to—and did—put him face-to-face with hundreds of New Yorkers on their own turf, to see them as individuals whose daily reality helps define the city of today, and who in turn are shaped by the city. And those New Yorkers are complex beings, as he writes, “a person’s identity can include, say, religion, community, race, language, and economic considerations all at once. Human beings are naturally free to pick and choose from these.”

In essence, he’s reporting out on the state of things. In Jamaica, Queens, he meets an immigrant from the small South American country of Guyana who has planted a garden. “It’s a small area,” writes Helmreich, “about four feet long and three feet wide, surrounded by a miniature white picket fence.”

“These flowers are beautiful,” I say by way of starting a conversation.

Small and wiry, with bright teeth framed in part by a neat mustache, he responds with a soft smile, “They are flowers from my country, Guyana, which I love. I planted them to remind me of home. This way, when I look outside I always remember the beautiful place I lived in before I came here.”

Foreign-born people now account for 40 percent of New Yorkers; with their American-born children, Helmreich points out, they are the city’s majority. He thus spends a great deal of time on ethnicity, devoting chapters on new immigrants, “the Future of Ethnic New York,” and on New York’s neighborhood-based communities, home to so much of the immigrant experience.

In the chapter, “Enjoying the City,” Helmreich finds himself in the northwest Bronx, at a concert of the Jamaican reggae singer Beres Hammond. Helmreich describes the scene, “people on their feet, dancing the entire time,” the make-up of the audience—99.9 percent West Indian, 65 percent women—“dressed about two steps above what you’d call casual.” This must have been a fascinating event as cultural tableau. The author might have described in detail food, dress, conversations, art, and even the neighborhood around the venue at CUNY Herbert Lehman College. But instead, Helmreich gives the reader a kind of quick analysis in language that feels too broad and too conjectural (and full of assumptions), hoping to categorize the scene rather than record it for its essence. “Each immigrant who comes to the United States,” he writes,

leaves behind ways of life that need to be adapted to fit in with their new circumstances. Yet they also wish to preserve their identity. Yes, they’re now in America and hearing American music, but also important is the music of the homeland, accompanied by lyrics that express yearning, memories, shared values, and forms of cultural expression—how the houses looked, how the foods tasted, and how the people lived and related to one another. And of course the lyrics speak of the challenges of making it in their new homes.

Helmreich goes on to reveal some of Hammond’s stage banter, but of course what the reader really wants is to read the lyrics that are about the struggle to live in two worlds, hear the conversations, and taste the food. The author has it all, we presume, in his notes, but this visceral, sensatory New York isn’t revealed here. Nor are buildings or streets described in any consistent way. This isn’t Joseph Mitchell; we can’t quite conjure Helmreich’s hidden New York.

Part of the issue here is that the author is too ambitious: he wants to give us the whole city, the city he’d lovingly discovered and rediscovered in his four year walk, but 468 square miles is too vast a territory for ethnography. And his sociologist’s instincts work against him: amidst the panorama, it’s extremely hard to categorize and label in ways that expand the reader’s interest and imagination. To try to make sense of complex things, he’s all too often forced to sweeping judgment and summary statements that feel inadequate. Calling some place a “bad neighborhood” or diverse people “gentrifiers” doesn’t help. Labels have a way of distancing us from the complicated reality.

Interestingly, the book improves vastly as it moves along. In the long chapter on gentrification, Helmreich is able to convincingly put analytic skills to work, and perhaps because the people he encountered in gentrifying neighborhoods are English speaking, the quotes from them are longer and more resonant. It also appears that the systems and values at work in these places feel more accessible to him, and therefore to the reader. But he is right focus so substantially on immigration and immigrant life. Nothing so much defines the process of urban change than the ways newcomers adapt, reject, assimilate, become inspired by the city they’re adopting, which is after all the collective product of the many millions of people who had come before.


Author Photo of Nathaniel PopkinsCleaver reviews editor Nathaniel Popkin is the author of five books, including the 2018 novel Everything is Borrowed, and co-editor (with Stephanie Feldman) of the anthology Who Will Speak for America? His essays and works of criticism have appeared in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Kenyon Review, LitHub, Tablet Magazine, and Public Books. If you are an author or publicist seeking reviews or a writer hoping to write reviews for Cleaver, query Nathaniel.

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Published on January 22, 2014 in nonfiction reviews, poetry reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

HERE COME THE WARM JETS by Alli Warren reviewed by Vanessa Martini

Cleaver Magazine Posted on January 21, 2014 by thwackOctober 9, 2014
Here-Come-the-Warm-Jets

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HERE COME THE WARM JETS
by Alli Warren
City Lights, 104 pages

reviewed by Vanessa Martini

Diving into Alli Warren’s Here Come the Warm Jets is at once exhilarating and slightly overwhelming. Warren pulls no punches with this collection. The reader is at once plunged into Warren’s intricate linguistic code, and she does not wait for or expect us to get used to her from the start. The only comparable experience I can call to mind is seeing a Shakespeare play: the language is difficult to follow at first, being at a slight remove from our everyday speech, but by the end of the first act—or the first several poems, in Warren’s case—this wall has dissolved, and we are left free to absorb as much wonderful language as possible.

The collection shares a title with Brian Eno’s 1974 album, and this gives an immediate clue to how much cultural cross-pollination Warren plays with. I am sure I have missed more than a few references, but Warren gleefully includes rappers, fashion labels, social networks, and frequently sexual slang, sometimes turning on a dime from more high-minded language: “You look out on the estuary/and it is gross/full of sentiment/did she suck it or did/you just bang her…” This rapid hop-skip between stylistic codes makes reading the poems collected in Jets a frequently exhilarating experience, sometimes almost addictive, as each poem only confirms Warren’s cracking skill with words, and it’s impossible not to want to see what she does next.

Alli Warren

Alli Warren

Warren also references social media with the most ease I have seen yet in poetry, mostly due to her decision to absorb its language to make her comments, instead of retreating to an ivory tower to proclaim doom from above. The lines in “Whose Rules Relate Regardless of their Names” begin with verbs that will be familiar to any Facebook user: “Join the group Work, Awareness of Death, & Sexual Conference…Become a fan of boat-like gliding…Poke the quadriceps/Poke the wild nettle;” in “Some Greater Social Sharing” we read about “two eyes fixed/on one profile / doing the pre-/emptive poke.” Such language is at once immediately familiar to a certain subset of readers, but seeing it in this context—printed on the page, not glowing on a screen—adds a layer of dissonance to that familiarity and asks us to think again about Internet-born language that has filtered offscreen and into our daily vernacular.

Gender and sexuality also wind like a thread through Warren’s tapestry of poems. In “Can I Prevent My Wages from Being Garnished?” we read about “a charming young thing/with big breathy icons”; elsewhere, “I stick my tongue in/and then I stick/my finger, forearm & mouth in/I venture all around,” “all private parts/precede and mislead/their patrons,” and “Terence and Will their concern/for purity of pussy.” The tone of these instances tends towards the slightly clinical, or maybe the skeptical; there is no sentiment about sex here, no romanticizing, and Warren frequently pairs these occurrences with meditations on class and monetary transaction (another overarching concern throughout the collection) which, to a certain frame of mind, is a perfectly natural pairing.

Although these observations bubble up in the reading of Jets it takes completing the collection to really get a fuller sense of cohesion, and this is because Warren closes the text with “Personal Poem,” a seven-page, glorious conclusion that immediately recasts all the poems before it and practically demands the reader return to the beginning and start again, for doing so lends a completely different feel to all the poem that came before it. It is difficult for me to articulate exactly why this is so, but “Personal Poem” takes the sort of poem children are often assigned in elementary school—Write a personal poem, about yourself, name things you like and believe—and turns it into a sometimes blistering, sometimes heartrending manifesto that exposes what forms the slightly messier underpinnings beneath Warren’s precision-cut earlier poems. There is no pretense of a “speaker” here, we see Warren herself, far more vulnerable than at any other point before: “Cultivate crushes and houseplants but not too many,” “If you lack confidence in your poetry don’t compensate with clothes,” “Astrology is real….Mercury retrograde will end.”

Such statements, delivered with the purity of belief that comes from learning after struggle, effectively deliver what might be called the abstract of the collection, the simultaneous summation and teaser, that clarifies while also enticing. It is at once a fantastic poem in its own right and also a superb decision about placement: at the beginning of a collection this poem would feel too obvious, in the middle, from out of nowhere. But at the end it allows all the poems before it to shed a little of their skin, to expose the softer parts beneath that are suddenly made vulnerable in any re-read, and this is a collection that begs to be read again and again, because Warren’s skill is one that only grows more apparent the more time a reader spends submerged in her poems.


Vanesssa MartiniVanessa Martini graduated from Bard College in 2012 with a degree in creative writing. She now works as a bookseller in San Francisco, where she eats a lot of avocados and walks everywhere. In the past she has interned for McSweeney’s Lucky Peach, where she milked a cow for an assignment, and for two sex writers, for whom she had to read 50 Shades of Grey.

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Published on January 21, 2014 in poetry reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

MERMAID: A Memoir of Resilience by Eileen Cronin reviewed by Colleen Davis

Cleaver Magazine Posted on January 17, 2014 by thwackJune 18, 2020
Mermaid Memoir; Woman wearing sunglasses on beach

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MERMAID: A Memoir of Resilience
by Eileen Cronin
W.W. Norton, 336 pages 

reviewed by Colleen Davis

When I read a memoir, I feel like I’m climbing into the kitchen of someone I’ve never met to see if their recipes for life trump mine. It’s amusing—and sometimes shocking—to discover the great variety of messes humans can create with similar ingredients. Lives get twisted and re-shaped by crazy family members, creative impulses, and random events. But some people get a truly strange variable thrown into their stew. Eileen Cronin, for example, was born without legs.

You might think that if you’ve spent your earthly time in prime physical condition, her story will not connect with yours. But that’s not how Cronin’s memoir, Mermaid, comes across. Sure the young Eileen is at a great disadvantage in her early years. She must “squiddle” from one place to another instead of walk. But once she’s old enough to get prosthetic legs, her challenges start to resemble those of typical teenagers.

In fact, it seems that the most complex feature of Cronin’s life is not her lack of legs. She has a much tougher time navigating the shifting emotional currents set off by members of her rambunctious family. Eileen has ten siblings to contend with as she evolves from child to adult. While the narrative makes it clear that these kids have deep bonds with each other, their behavior often bewilders Eileen who obviously has a different perspective on many of life’s great questions. A prominent scene in the book depicts a moment when Eileen’s leg flies off as a handsome dance partner twirls her in the air. The potential for this kind of ordeal is something she’s always got to look out for, so her path in life is truly unique.

Yet these moments just deal with the external Eileen. While the first half of the book hints at her inner confusion, they don’t fully expose it. The story’s middle chapters paint a picture of a fairly stable young woman who seems to be accepted by most people—including handsome, intelligent men. There is something about her easy transition into the arms of a college dean’s son that makes you wonder if life is really all that hard for Eileen. I mean there are plenty of two-legged teenage girls out there who never have such an easy time finding romance or social acceptance. Though she gets nervous about certain decisions, for some unexplained reason Eileen never seems overwrought until much later in the story when tragedy strikes a sibling.

This buoyancy of her tale made me wonder if Cronin was holding something back. Writing about family is always tricky business. Considering the sheer number of people who could object to her take on things (i.e., ten siblings, a mother who may have taken thalidomide, a squadron of Catholic school teachers who taught the Cronins, etc.), holding back is something she may have felt compelled to do. But her smooth evolution into a pretty girl with lots of opportunities makes you wonder what she did with her pain.

During my own adolescence, I had to deal with a physical disability that transformed my life in a purely negative way. Although I had all my limbs, I developed an extreme scoliosis that required plaster casts, a back brace, physical therapy, and endless doctoring. The person who became my high school best friend had an even more serious curvature requiring extensive surgery and long recuperation. These experiences left us steeped in self-loathing that took decades to shake off. We suffered in relationships, we lacked self-confidence, and too often we self-medicated to quell depression it took years to outgrow. As I read Cronin’s story I kept asking myself: How come Eileen never gets depressed? How come she doesn’t seem to hate herself for being so different? Did she have more resilience or character than we had? Or did the size and economic position of her family create some kind of firewall between herself and cruel social forces?

As a reader I was disappointed that the author didn’t provide answers to these questions—or at least give enough evidence on which to hazard a guess. The sheer number of Cronin’s siblings creates another narrative problem. It’s hard to keep each Cronin distinct as you read. Most memoirs don’t have this volume of characters and it’s tough to keep them vivid over a forty-year period of growth. The good news is that readers who hang in until the end will find some richer passages that make the problems of adult Eileen seem far more compelling than those of her post-college self.

The final chapters offer a more honest assessment of Cronin’s problems with alcohol, self-doubt, and trust. Chapters describing her foreign travels are also illuminating. They illustrate her personal courage as she moves unhindered across sketchy terrain. Ultimately, Cronin’s book shows how far you can go if you refuse to eat the crumbs the world offers and make life into a meal of your own.


Author Photo of Colleen-Davis

Colleen Davis is a Pennsylvania writer and author of the website Between the Pond and the Woods, which provides information and a Facebook forum for dementia caregivers. She writes for the Penn Memory Center and is a script writer for the documentary series “Philadelphia: The Great Experiment“, which airs on 6abc.

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Published on January 17, 2014 in nonfiction reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

SCATTERED VERTEBRAE by Jerrold Yam reviewed by Kenna O’Rourke

Cleaver Magazine Posted on January 16, 2014 by thwackOctober 9, 2014
Scattered_Vertebrae

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SCATTERED VERTEBRAE
by Jerrold Yam
Math Paper Press, 2013

reviewed by Kenna O’Rourke

Jerrold Yam’s second poetry collection was titled with care: like the image of scattered vertebrae, these poems are at once beautiful, dark, and disturbing. Yam weaves family life, social expectation, religion, and tragedy together so ornately that at times one does not realize what they’re reading. This technique generally makes for compelling and delicate poetic image, but at times the disorientation feels less deliberate—Yam’s is a poetics that requires rereading, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. It is a poetics of “pleated identity” (31), turning away from singular intent or simple subject matter, and its difficulty reflects the personal sense of unease that Yam confronts throughout: unlike some collections, here one can safely equate the speaker with Yam himself.

Yam’s verse is elaborate, complex by nature, for the poet dives into his own conflicted psyche in a ritual of Freudian digging. He dredges up childhood memory as well as painful scenes of the present day, from his disappointed mother’s mixed acknowledgement of him, to his stricken grandmother with curled body and “feet knotted / in wreaths and bouquets” (89). The book is writhing with sexuality, pulsing with imagery of “the unripe / egg of the female before sperm tongue their way through / its gelatinous down” (50): indeed, the poet seems to have a minor obsession with the womb, seeking, perhaps, his own origin story.

Jerrold Yam

Jerrold Yam

The anatomical fascination that cohabitates with Yam’s social/familial relations begins to fail, however, when the author resorts to explicit sexual description—or worse, dramatized sexual description. His memories of locker-room explorations, a hand job rendered in the seat of an airplane, and so on appear out of nowhere, the sensitive hedging of previous poems yielding suddenly to such excessively wordy lines as “my / beating organ about to froth over its glistening cloak” (66). Perhaps Yam’s eagerness to write about ejaculation can be rationalized as part of the Freudian catharsis discussed above, but bodily attention seems far more effective in this collection when limited to scientific curiosity, rather than what might be misread as fond reminiscence of past orgasms; consider, for instance,  the more poetic “I / survey this cinema of red, / feverishly waiting for a gene to / raise its flimsy translucent palms” (65) or “things stranded in the script of capillaries” (86). Lines like these may not smack of sexual courage (the “unbridled fire” [85] of which Yam seems to revere as a refusal to conform to societal expectations), but they do not compromise the lovely hauntedness of this poetry with distracting imagery as others do.

In Yam’s defense, his sexual orientation appears to be linked heavily to the family discord, and likely the hesitation about religion expressed by “twin criminals of [his] lungs / loaded like doubt in a church” (62), that he transcribes. Scattered Vertebrae is, at its core, a book of loaded poetry, driven by psychological, emotional, and physical desire, placing current events (the Sierre Coach Crash and other tragedies), a mother’s coldness, turbulent romance, and the church on the same sad but enchanting level. Though the imagery is at times heavy-handed or overwrought (“her limbs propped along the bedstead / like bags of dormant muscle” [100]), its intensity is quite often appropriate for Yam’s dark subject matter; if, as the poet asserts, “All that is beauty is also ruin” (95), he has certainly mastered the art of sorting through the rubble. He writes, “I don’t know / of sorry and thank you and I / love you — their foul simplicities” (48), and seems to prefer it that way, the book a genuine celebration of life’s perplexing lots.


Kenna O’RourkeKenna O’Rourke is an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania majoring in English with a concentration in Creative Writing. Her work has appeared in The Pocket Guide, the Philos Adelphos Irrealis chapbook, and Penn’s Filament and 34th Street magazines. She is an editorial assistant for Jacket2, an enthusiastic employee of the Kelly Writers House, and an occasional blogger and jewelry-and-sewn-object-maker.

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Published on January 16, 2014 in poetry reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

CARDBOARD PIANO by Rina Terry reviewed by Shinelle L. Espaillat

Cleaver Magazine Posted on January 13, 2014 by thwackFebruary 1, 2016
cardboardpiano

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CARDBOARD PIANO
by Rina Terry
Texture Press, 102 pages

reviewed by Shinelle L. Espaillat

We tend to equate the word “prison” with concrete, metal and despair, ostensibly as means of change or as a tool of rehabilitation. In her new collection, Cardboard Piano, Rina Terry reveals multi-layered evidence of the transformative power of art versus stone. Anyone who is familiar with Stephen King’s prison stories, The Green Mile and Rita Hayworth and The Shawshank Redemption (or at least with the movie adaptations thereof) expects to question the prison system and to explore the humanity of both the inmates and the guards. Terry’s words push the reader to consider the realities of an in-person search for and confrontation of that humanity, in all its potential glory and obloquy.

The opening salvo, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Inmates” offers a kaleidoscope through which we can feel the entire collection. Terry challenges our accepted notion of rehabilitative space as cyclical: “There is only one/direction. Single file/through metal detector.” Parole notwithstanding, the suggestion is that for most who enter, there is no hope, and what’s more, the system-keepers believe that as well. After all, “an inmate/is and inmate/is an inmate.” The guards do not see what Terry sees, the one man who holds on to his sense of self enough to iron his uniform, or the baptism trough as cleansing agent.

In “I’m Just Glad to Be Here” Terry explores gender politics within the system. She tells us that “Power . . . scratches its balls and zips up/as you step aside for him to pass.” If power is a man, how can women have any authority, and how can Terry, as chaplain, help the inmates to see her as an instrument of change? Indeed, the systemic power works against rehabilitative efforts. When we hear the inmates’ voices, the anger, though it exists, is sparse and muted, and is directed at the forces that landed them in prison, or the futility of existence within prison walls. “Power,” when it speaks, lashes out at the chaplain, and at the missionaries who volunteer. The problem, as highlighted in “Ebenezer Holiness Pentecostal Church Prison Chapel Volunteers” is that people who want to help, to reach the inmates’ hearts and transform them from within, threaten the existence of Power. The volunteers “spread(s) unwelcome/stunning light in a cesspit,” counteracting the “hopeless empty impossible” trinity that equals job security to the officers. Poems that speak in the officer’s voices, and in the voices of the administrators, use harder, plainer language, speak through expletives and ring with indifference..

Terry contrasts the vulgar, explicit vitriol of the guards with subtler, introspective language from the prisoners themselves. “Horse Trough Baptism” exposes the delicacy of hope, and the dangers involved in reaching for it. To agree to baptism, which in prison is a public affair, means agreeing to be exposed in wet, clinging prison garb, to an audience that includes potential rapists. In exchange, they receive “no perks, no parole points,” no tangible rewards. To do so offers the possibility of finding meaning beyond “steel bars and jangling keys/ you can’t touch.” They do it because they “want to believe something. . . because you just can’t bear not to.” The only incentive is hope.

Terry’s poems are filled with music, figuratively and literally. Over and over, we see music do what metal bars do not. “Wherever Two or More Are Gathered” fuses prayer, art and transformation. Set on Christmas Eve, the poem focuses on the chaplain and the only two inmates who show up for the service. They sing “Silent Night” by candlelight, and in the dark cold one inmate breaks into tears. “Such A Moment” explodes a rare and perfect convergence of art and spiritual upliftment, in which “there rose up such great joy/the air was moist with the tears/they could not dare to shed.” The titular poem, in which both the chaplain and an inmate lose themselves in the soundless music the inmate plays on his fake instrument, illuminates the healing nature of art.

The American prison system operates on the premise that rehabilitation is possible. The stone walls, while protecting “us” from “them,” are meant to eliminate or control negative characteristics and transform inmates into ex-criminals. Terry shows us that art can do what the system does not, and through her controlled use of language and imagery, proves the power of art to effect change.


Shinelle Espaillat Shinelle L. Espaillat writes, lives and teaches in Westchester County, NY. She earned her M.A. in Creative Writing at Temple University. Her work has appeared in Midway Journal.

 

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Published on January 13, 2014 in poetry reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

SUPERLOOP by Nicole Callihan reviewed by Anna Strong

Cleaver Magazine Posted on January 12, 2014 by thwackOctober 9, 2014
superloop

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SUPERLOOP 
by Nicole Callihan
Sock Monkey Press, 72 pages

Reviewed by Anna Strong

The startling beauty of Nicole Callihan’s SuperLoop lies in the balance the poems strike between the specificity and universality of childhood memory. The strongest poems take us deep into a place of colorful, youthful imagination, full of the unexpected juxtapositions that only retrospection can bring. The poems retrieve those crystal-clear moments in childhood when we make our first brushes with what it means to be a grown-up—a death in the family, divorce, a new word, and ultimately, the realization that our parents are no more perfect than we are. Callihan constantly crushes and compresses those moments of innocence and experience together, as in the the title poem, where she writes “This is the way / the Tilt-a-Whirl ends / not with a smile / but with a nice ass whisper.”

Every poem in the collection is richly textured and intensely visual. The colors of our childhood homes, playgrounds, and titular (“SuperLoop” is the name of a favorite carnival ride) theme parks seem brighter than ever when seen through the lens of Callihan’s poems, an effect that comes from her ability to access childhood, whether in content or in voice. Callihan is able to combine a child’s imagination and focus on the minutiae with an adult’s sense of the scope of the universe, which makes for juxtaposition and associations only possible with this compression of time:

But now I am in yellow, an October flower girl

for my father’s new life. Now in red December,
our mother divorces another man,
but it is still August for us. We are out of seeds,

so we lay on the sidewalk, my brother
and I, and we play dead ‘til almost
dusk… (“Playing Dead”)

The balance of focus in the poems tips towards the simple, the tangible, the sensory, which makes the intensity of the moments of memory stand out all the clearer. The reader is never settled in the poem, our focus constantly shifts between the specific and minute and the “big” moments in a young person’s life. Those shifts are colored by a touch of surreality—just enough to be exciting and not so much as to take over the entire poem—which both smooths over and enhances the jumps in time and adds a certain instability to the memories the speaker relates. We remember events as we remember them, whether we remember them “correctly” or not is irrelevant. The surreality functions not so much as a poetic construct, but as an element of memory itself, equally powerful as the things that at least superficially seem “real”:

I walked back
to the house
which I remember
as paper
though I’m sure
it was brick or stone
or wood, and my mother

was crying because
the orthopedist
was screwing a nurse,
she said,
then explained
that screwing is when
grown-ups kiss. (“The Other Dead”)

The best poems in the collection follow this (admittedly, very-nearly formulaic) approach to childhood memory: looking back on the big, defining moments through the tiniest of lenses.
The poems manage not to blend into one another, however, because Callihan tempers the narrative poems with non-narrative, simple, sensory poems. The strength of these poems lies in the tremendous gaps Callihan leaves for the reader to fill in—we may insert ourselves into the more narrative poems because of a personal experience we share with the speaker, but the non-narrative poems leave wide-open space for us to join Callihan in the poem. The voice in the non-narrative poems is more adult in its sensibilities, and feels heavier and sadder, but loses none of the child’s wonder of the world, which we feel in the richness and sensory complexity in the language, coupled with the rhythm suggested by the short lines and enjambments:

plump and red
you beat perfect
tonight, heart
you have never been wrong
never wronged
sweet apple
go go (“October, night”)

Callihan’s collection leaves us wanting to go back to our childhood with an empty scrapbook and a snow-cone, to ride the Tilt-a-Whirl for the first time since our first kiss, to fill in the gaps in our memory not with the truth but with the imagination. There is grace and hope and extra whipped cream in the darkest places these poems are willing to go, and a fierceness in the memories lit only by neon carnival lights.


Anna StrongAnna Strong is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, and is originally from Haverford, PA. Her work has previously appeared in the Penn Review, the Pennsylvania Gazette, Peregrine, and Poems for the Writing. Anna also helps teach Penn’s Modern and Contemporary American Poetry course through Coursera. She is pursuing a master’s degree at Boston.

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Published on January 12, 2014 in poetry reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

LITTLE FISH: A MEMOIR OF A DIFFERENT KIND OF YEAR by Ramsey Beyer reviewed by Stephanie Trott

Cleaver Magazine Posted on December 5, 2013 by thwackOctober 9, 2014
Little-Fish-Cover

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LITTLE FISH: A MEMOIR OF A DIFFERENT KIND OF YEAR
by Ramsey Beyer
Zest Books, 272 pages

Reviewed by Stephanie Trott

It’s a familiar notion, the sense of being a little fish in a big pond. This awareness may arrive at an early age for some, while running inexplicably late for others. But for eighteen-year-old Ramsey Beyer, a lover of lists, lakes, and bonfires, this epiphany arrives with a traditional right-of-passage: the start of college.

Ramsey Beyer –  Photo by Michael Cantor

Beyer, now ten years beyond this awakening, chronicles her transition from Midwest high school senior to city-savvy first year art student in her debut memoir, Little Fish: A Memoir of a Different Kind of Year. Like many pre-undergrads, she precariously balances on the teeter-totter of change and consistency that comes with college acceptances, graduation, and the unstoppable arrival of the first autumn away from home. Beyer demonstrates maturity and insight when constructing a list of what her home environment lacks and what the prospect of life in a more populated setting might bring, highlighting both the positive and negative possibilities. After one final evening together with her “oldest and best friends,” the author even wonders while on the edge of slumber whether a part of her might actually like being Midwestern. But the thought is fleeting as she and her mother embark the next morning on a 600-mile journey from Paw Paw, Michigan to Baltimore, Maryland. The learning curve is steep, as any former collegiate will recall, and Beyer doesn’t shy away from noting even the smallest of challenges. 

Conquer-the-Bus

While the first few weeks present obstacles that range from completing two weekly six-hour classes to learning and debating the differences between direct and passive political action, Beyer successfully settles into the new pace of her life as “a little fish in a big pond for the first time ever.” We share in alternating monumental and miniscule moments, which she artistically weaves throughout her black and white narrative while painting a complete account of this yearlong rite of passage. Surrounded by a buffet of like-minded, artistic individuals, Beyer firmly grasps the identity of her twin golden braids, which she has worn daily since middle school, and flirts sporadically with the idea of loping them off in exchange for a shorter ’do. Her growth appears largely internal, as she celebrates small events like the challenge of peer critiques and the expansion of her new friend group. She is not immune to homesickness, however, and often ponders the wellness and whereabouts of her Michigan friends as she anticipates their correspondences.

Week1-Week-3

Beyer is quietly rebellious and leads an enviably creative life sprinkled with solitary wanderings around Baltimore’s inner harbor, a growing presence in the city’s punk scene, and her first relationship. She is ever optimistic but immensely grounded, remaining rooted in her identity while still receptive to change. 

Little Fish is sprinkled with lists, many of them copied from Beyer’s first zine—“a cut-and-paste independent magazine that is filled with whatever you want,” explains the author. Oftentimes Beyer’s lists are presented in tandem with graphics and highlight the contrasting norms of the past with changes occurring within the present. These creative catalogs read like poetry and cover a range of both serious and silly topics, from “recent best feelings ever” to a deeply honest look at personal downfalls.

List- 

Also included as textual components are Beyer’s journal entries, which detail her demanding schedule, desire to return to her friends back in Paw Paw, and humble appreciation for the luck that she has experienced in life thus far. It is clear that she appreciates her parents and brothers, whom we are introduced to at the commencement of her memoir through a pen-and-ink annotated photo album. “I’m so lucky to have such a good home life and such a good school life,” Beyer writes while flying back to school after a one-week autumnal recess. “I wish everyone did. It’s weird how the instant I step off the plane, I’ll be in a totally different universe/mind-set/routine.”

Perhaps one of the most poignant themes of Little Fish is the initial recognition of being a stranger in a once-familiar locale: for Beyer, this knowledge comes during the aforementioned trip home during a break from classes. During this time, Beyer checks off the majority of items from a to-do list and pens her thoughts on both the good and bizarre aspects of returning to Paw Paw.  Being that this is her first experience living away from her life-long home, she experiences epiphanies of magnetic proportion, such as recognizing the presence of sexist and racist language utilized by those in her hometown and the varying levels of freedom that come from living in a city versus a rural setting.

Beyer checks in with the reader and lets us into her psyche through the constant presence of thought bubbles, which appear in a variety of social situations. She thinks for the everyman, whether by recalling her desire to eat one of the donuts in a somewhat outlandishly peculiar student art project or by asking her solitary questions regarding changes in her friend group as the academic year concludes.

 Thought-Bubbles

We are left upon the conclusion of Little Fish with illustrations of the items left in Beyer’s shared apartment, an insightful list of what she hopes to learn in the next year, and well-placed anticipation for the next chapter. While the story closes with the completion of the young artist’s first year of college (and the potential modification of hair length), readers may continue devouring her present adventures online through comics, zines, and photographs at EverydayPants.com.

Jumping-Fish


Stephanie-Trott-Stephanie Trott received a B.A. in English and Creative Writing from Bryn Mawr College in 2012. Her work has appeared in Polaris: An Undergraduate Journal of Literature and Arts, Bryn Mawr’s Nimbus magazine, and the premiere issue of Buffalo Almanack. An aspiring writer and photographer, she presently lives and works in Mystic, CT.

 

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Published on December 5, 2013 in graphic narrative reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

CONTROLLED HALLUCINATIONS by John Sibley Williams reviewed by Anna Strong

Cleaver Magazine Posted on December 4, 2013 by thwackFebruary 1, 2016
Controlled-Hallucinations

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CONTROLLED HALLUCINATIONS
by John Sibley Williams
FutureCycle Press

reviewed by Anna Strong

Controlled Hallucinations is a collection of questions, interiors, and barriers—stepping into the world of these poems means being alone with your thoughts and the images and associations your brain creates only in its quietest moments. The title of the collection already suggests that these poems will occupy a space far removed from the outside world, but John Sibley Williams invites readers into this space with an introduction to the collection in the form of an untitled poem (following the dedication, which is to “the coming extinctions”). The introductory poem is a series of infinitive clauses (“To be the effect. / To be a thoughtful pause / and restrained response. / To the the passion of raking nails.”) which collectively define what can be expected from the ensuing poems.

Poet John Sibley Williams

Williams titles his poems only with Roman numerals and visually speaking, the poems do not set themselves apart from one another any more than their numerical differentiation—though they vary in length, the poems have short lines and stanza breaks obey only the internal rhetoric of the poem’s meaning, not an external metrical scheme. The absence of titles or great variation in the tenor of the poems makes the reader feel as though they are reading an extended interior meditation from a single speaker on what it means to think, to feel, and to know.

Many of the poems pose questions to this effect—especially the first three poems, which pointedly introduce this rhetoric of questioning—all of which ask both what it means to know and how it is that we language “knowing,” as in the short third poem, which contains the most beautifully compressed articulation of this idea:

without a single voice to complain
while strumming my fingers along the many
closed worlds of language
What is the sound of a shared idea?
What is the sound of your agreement? (III)

Williams primarily uses a first person speaker in these deeply interior poems, but even when he evacuates the speaker altogether there is still a sense of a sparse vacuum of thought. There is no sense of a world beyond the space of the poem, few competing voices beyond the speaker’s, few observations that seem to come from anywhere besides the consciousness of the speaker’s own thoughts. Silence and solitude blanket these poems as much as the white space around them on the page, and it is not long before the reader finds themself drawn deep into this world where thinking and feeling are the only language. Williams articulates this internalization with sound—in the (welcome) absence of rhyme and meter, alliterative and assonant sounds, and even simple repetition provide the links between lines:

The paper cut on my palm
runs parallel to my love line.
They taper off at the same spot,
under my thumb. (IX)

The sounds of the poems slow the reader down—instead of racing through the short lines, the reader wants to read closely for these subtle, savory moments of sonic connection.
Each poem opens and closes like a window and is gone the moment the reader moves onto the next poem—the fact that every poem resolves itself with closed punctuation (periods and question marks exclusively) sometimes leaves the reader wishing some would open out to the world beyond the poems, a kind of coming to the surface for air after a long, deep meditation, but the reader is also left with the feeling that they needed this time of retreat from the world of certainty.


Anna StrongAnna Strong is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, and is originally from Haverford, PA. Her work has previously appeared in the Penn Review, the Pennsylvania Gazette, Peregrine, and Poems for the Writing. Anna also helps teach Penn’s Modern and Contemporary American Poetry course through Coursera. She is pursuing a master’s degree at Boston.

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Published on December 4, 2013 in poetry reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

THE GRAVEYARD by Marek Hłasko reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

Cleaver Magazine Posted on December 3, 2013 by thwackJuly 9, 2020
The Graveyard cover art. A white profile of a man's face against an orange background

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THE GRAVEYARD
by Marek Hłasko (1956)
in the first English translation by Norbert Guterman (1959)
release December 3, 2013
Melville House, 140 pages

reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin 

The moment of truth in this book of deceit is treated in a most unusual way: it isn’t treated at all. Or more precisely: it isn’t even needed. The consequences for Franciszek Kowalski, the protagonist of Marek Hłasko’s unforgettable 1956 novel The Graveyard, indeed for all of humanity, are damning enough.

Marek Hłasko author portrait

Portrait of Marek Hłasko (1934-1969) by Zbigniew Kresowaty

Slender Citizen Kowalski had fought bravely in the underground in 1945; after receiving a nearly fatal chest wound, his faith in international socialism had willed him to live. Now, at 48, the sober Kowalski is a proud Communist Party member and a factory manager in a Polish city. One night, he runs into a comrade he hasn’t seen in years. The old fighters set off to a bar to reminisce, and despite himself Kowalski gets drunk. On his way home early the next morning, Kowlalski inadvertently insults two young police officers, and without explanation they have him locked up for the night.

The earnest Kowalski can’t understand what’s happening. “Under arrest?” he asks. “What for?”

“Don’t you know?”

“No,” Franciszek said resolutely. He came close to the railing and put his hands on it. “I do not know. I remember that I somehow flew off the handle, but it seems to me that’s no good reason for keeping me locked up all night.”

“No good reason?” the sergeant drawled. “And what about the things you shouted? Don’t you remember what you shouted?”

The three of them stared at him, and Franciszek suddenly shriveled…“No,” Franciszek said after a while. He passed his hand over his forehead. “I don’t remember.”

Franciszek shrivels and you, reader, shiver. “It’s those words we’re interested in,” says the sergeant. Kowalski has entered level one of totalitarian hell. Outrage is followed by remorse, self-approbation, despair, and bewilderment. “Each one of us imagines he didn’t do anything,” a stranger tells Kowalski, in the drunk tank. “Each one of us somehow thinks he is innocent.”

Hłasko, who was forced to publish The Graveyard and other works while in exile (his books were banned by the Polish government), was masterful in revealing the levers of psychological manipulation at work in a totalitarian society. By the next day, Kowalski is convinced of his guilt. No longer worthy of his membership in the Party, he decides he must prostrate himself before his factory’s Party tribunal. This will be his moment of truth, a chance to cleanse himself and rebuild his standing. But what is this tribunal? An inane and arbitrary body, a farce.

Now stripped of his Party membership, Kowalski finds himself on the relentlessly gray, rain beaten streets of the city. “He raised his head and breathed in the air with all his strength,” says Hłasko;

there was a lump of steel in his lungs. He walked on, occasionally stumbling; he stared at the sky—it was better, easier this way. An insipid moon was drifting over the roofs; the darkness grew thicker and thicker, a clammy, impenetrable darkness which choked the sickly stars and he crowded city. A military patrol tramped by, the heels clattering. The moon suddenly dropped out of sight behind a dirty cloud; the soldiers walked ahead, staring apprehensively into the damp darkness.

Kowalski walks on—into the graveyard that was his faith in communism, his faith in humanity. He seeks out his comrades from the underground. They’ll vouch for him, he thinks, but one after the other has been destroyed by the “fear you’ve got to live with, constantly, without interruption, from morning until night.” Each one is more paranoid, more wary of the police, more afraid. Each one after the other has grown more distant from the idealistic days of the war.

Poor Franciszek buckles under the acute disillusionment; Hłasko makes his despair a metaphor for the emptiness of the regimes of the Soviet bloc. But his power as a writer lies in the precision and the particularity of a single man’s story as it unfolds in a single devastating moment. As a reader, this is the great reward, as it is with so much of the literature from Eastern Europe now being published—often for the first time in English—by Melville House, Archipelago, and New York Review Books: a beguiling glimpse at human beings drawn to the edge of existential possibility and then, so it seems, pushed some more.


Nathaniel Popkin author photo Cleaver reviews editor Nathaniel Popkin is the author of five books, including the 2018 novel Everything is Borrowed, and co-editor (with Stephanie Feldman) of the anthology Who Will Speak for America? His essays and works of criticism have appeared in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Kenyon Review, LitHub, Tablet Magazine, and Public Books. If you are an author or publicist seeking reviews or a writer hoping to write reviews for Cleaver, query Nathaniel.

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Published on December 3, 2013 in fiction reviews, reviews, translation. (Click for permalink.)

MY DIRTY DUMB EYES by Lisa Hanawalt reviewed by Margaret Galvan

Cleaver Magazine Posted on December 2, 2013 by thwackMay 18, 2015
My Dirty Dumb Eyes

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MY DIRTY DUMB EYES
by Lisa Hanawalt
Drawn and Quarterly, 120 pages

Reviewed by Margaret Galvan

My Dirty Dumb Eyes, released last May, may be comic artist Lisa Hanawalt’s debut text with a major publisher, but it highlights her preexisting popularity. Indeed, Hanawalt’s text shows its chops through its diverse array of humorous comic vignettes often originally commissioned for well-known print and internet periodicals—from New York Magazine to The Hairpin. A few months prior to its release, one of these comics, “The Secret Lives of Chefs,” first printed in the pages of Lucky Peach—a magazine co-created by Momofuku-founder, David Chang—was nominated for a James Beard, the preeminent award in the culinary world.

In addition to “The Secret Lives of Chefs,” where Hanawalt creatively imagines bizarre skeletons in the closet out of the public personas of renown restauranteurs, she weighs in on the world of fashion and film in other comics. Her eyes certainly are not dumb—she can speak knowledgeably about a vast swath of culture in order to poke fun at it.  But, dirty is an apt descriptor for much of her work where genitalia and evocations of sex predominate.

Even in a multi-page comics review of the New York Toy Fair, she admits her libidinal impulses by the seventh page, making the “uncomfortable observation [that her] attraction to certain toys feels kind of… sexual?” Following this observation, she contends that one toy is dildo-like and another cries semen-like tears. After voicing these thoughts, she moves into a more serious discussion of the role of toys in childhood nostalgia, yet, at the comic’s end, she illustrates herself in a wedding dress smooching the dildo-like toy. She refuses to leave the sexual behind or silent on the page.

Hanawalt-Moosefingers1

Hanawalt-Moosefingers2

Across her oeuvre, Hanawalt often depicts her sentient beings as animals, but her embrace of the animalistic does not build on the visceral, sexual energy, but departs from it. These very-human animals, rendered in Technicolor, sometimes discuss more poignant topics, regularly reaching existential impasses and unearthly conclusions. Following from an unresolved argument about driving style, the cat in “Control” unrealistically and successfully propels the car into the air by driving over a car, leaving the horse passenger in tears over the multi-car heap of twisted metal behind them. In “Moosefingers,” a horse questions her artistic decision to make idiomatic finger sculptures, wondering at the worth of the “pile of weird fingers” and tossing and turning in bed without resolution.  On the next page following this conclusion, we see a photograph of some of these sculptures, suggesting that the horse’s artistic angst is Hanawalt’s own. In the comic as a whole, these tonally serious comics are interspersed among the lighter fare.

Hanawalt-Fashion-Week-Hat-Animals1

Hanawalt-Fashion-Week-Hat-Animals2

Hanawalt’s embrace of the vulgar alongside a more serious register aligns with the blithe irreverence that she calls upon for so much of her humor. Take an off-kilter observation and run with it for comedic effect, and that’s how you end up with the six pages of photorealistic animal faces donning surreal headgear that is “Fashion Week Animals in Hats” and “North American Wildlife and Hats.” These visual indices, which are so emblematic of her work, resonate with the feel of today’s Internet, where so many of these works first appeared. Her catalogues seem very reminiscent of our BuzzFeed culture of endless lists of humorous sound bytes. My Dirty Dumb Eyes may not be a cohesive narrative, but her comics are no less engrossing than an afternoon spent surfing through cat videos on YouTube.


Margaret-GalvanMargaret Galvan is a PhD candidate in English and a film studies certificate candidate at the City University of New York Graduate Center. She is writing a dissertation entitled “Archiving the ’80s: Feminism, Queer Theory, & Visual Culture” that traces a genealogy of queer theory in 1980s feminism through representations of sexuality in visual culture. Her academic writings, which explore the intersection of critical theory and visual representation of female bodies, can be found in publications like the Graphic Novels (Salem Press, 2012) reference work and in the forthcoming book, The Ages of The X-Men (McFarland, 2013). She teaches in the Gallatin Writing Program at New York University and works as an Instructional Technology Fellow at Brooklyn College. See margaretgalvan.org for further information.

 

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Published on December 2, 2013 in graphic narrative reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

A CONVERSATION WITH NATHANIEL POPKIN by Roberta Fallon

Cleaver Magazine Posted on November 18, 2013 by thwackJuly 9, 2020

Lion Leopard cover art. Family crest-like artwork of two lions holding flags against a golden background

A CONVERSATION WITH AUTHOR NATHANIEL POPKIN
by Roberta Fallon

Nathaniel Popkin’s new novel LION AND LEOPARD is set in early nineteenth Century Philadelphia, and features historical figures such as Charles Willson Peale, Raphaelle Peale, and the German painter John Lewis Krimmel. A historical incident sets the plot in motion—a mysterious death at a mill pond— and the novel’s descriptions are so earthy you can almost smell the cowpaths. Yet Popkin says Lion and Leopard is not historical fiction but rather a contemporary piece that deals with universal themes of originality, duplicity, family, friendship, power struggles and unexpected twists of fate. Indeed, the dialogue-rich writing uses slang that you might overhear on the streets today. And the issues are familiar. I sat down with Nathaniel earlier this month to ask him about the book.

[Editor’s note: You can preview a sample chapter of Lion and Leopard, “The Dig“, in Cleaver Issue No. 1.]


How did you get the idea for Lion and Leopard? It’s such a Philadelphia book, and such a Philadelphia art world story.

I was reading Gary Nash’s First City, which deals with characters in early Philadelphia, including Krimmel and George Lippard. I became interested in both. Both die tragically at the height of their careers. I also read Anneliese Harding’s biography, John Lewis Krimmel. Krimmel was thirty-two when he died. In his paintings he captured the street as it is, all types of people. No American had ever done that before, and I felt a connection to him. In 1821, he’s elected president of the Society of American Artists and then he gets a commission to paint a major historical painting on William Penn; his career is taking off, and on July 15, 1821 he dies, drowns. I knew I wanted to turn it this into fiction.

What are your other influences?

Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red, a novel that opens with a drowned painter. It’s a first person narrative about a lost art world. My influences tend to be literary, not historic. A wide range of other books, including Bolaño’s Savage Detectives, influenced this one.

Portrait of Raphaelle Peale and Titian Ramsay Peale walking up stairs

Staircase Group (Portrait of Raphaelle Peale and Titian Ramsay Peale I), Charles Willson Peale,, 1795
Philadelphia Museum of Art

How did you put the story together? 

I didn’t quite understand the connection between Peale and Krimmel’s death until I went to Adam Levine, the keeper of the city’s water history, and he helped me figure out where Krimmel drowned. It was literarily just up the lane from Peale’s farmhouse Belfield, which still exists. So I saw the proximity. Then, in reading Peale’s journal, where he details all kinds of things from farm inventories to conflicts with his children, I discovered the pages of Peale’s journal for the dates around Krimmel’s death were missing. No mention of the death of a rising star, who he certainly knew. I found that interesting, mysterious, intriguing.

Tell us about your process. 

I started working in 2007. I bought anthologies on all the people who would become my characters and literally surrounded myself with prints of the paintings. Then I asked an artist friend to look at the work of these painters and help me discern their personalities.

The Peale family is particularly interesting, and they’re all a little nuts, especially the father, Charles, but the son Raphaelle, the still life painter, he’s a basket case.

Raphaelle Peale was a very unusual man for the time. His work, although in still life, is really about himself. Those bruised apples: that’s him. They are full of his damaged soul. Charles Willson Peale was a mad man who throughout his life struggled to keep his passions in check. Rembrandt Peale was, on the other hand, very serious and almost purely dogmatic.

Still Life with Steak painting by Peale

Raphaelle Peale, Still Life with Steak, c.1917
Munson Williams Proctor Museum of Art

Your novel has a lot of dialogue, and the use of slang seems more akin to our time than to the 1800s.

In my novel, dialogue is action. Zadie Smith is dialogue-y; Roberto Bolano, too. I like contemporary fiction. Lion and Leopard was never intended to be an historical novel. It was meant to be contemporary. Its ideas about fiction are contemporary.

You are an accomplished non-fiction writer. Why a novel?

I’ve written two other novels, but they are still unpublished for one reason and another. My love is literature and I thought I ought to be able to write fiction. (I have also published some flash fiction.) I could have written this book as history or even as a quest to solve a mystery, but the tragedy of the story resonated to me as fiction. 

How did you become a writer? Were you an English major? 

I was a philosophy major. I’ve never taken a writing class—no creative writing, no journalism. I’m self-taught. As a writer, I’ve always been an outsider. The first thing I published was Song of the City, a book of literary non-fiction. That book pulled me into becoming a writer as a full time career.

Were your other novels set in the past like Lion and Leopard?

No, they were contemporary, partly set in Philadelphia. One was about a Wharton professor who meets a woman through notes left on a SEPTA regional rail train.

Lion and Leopard is full of artists and writers. Any writers or artists in your family?

I grew up in Bucks County along the Delaware. My family is from Trenton. My dad is a dentist—probably one of the great artisans of teeth. My mother has worked the front of his office for years. My father’s family was filled with lefty intellectuals. My mom’s father was a self-taught capitalist and entrepreneur. His bookshelves were filled with biographies of Ford, Carnegie, etc. My sister has been a journalist, in TV news. She was once a practicing artist, but has dropped it. My family has always been creative.

Do you make art, in addition to writing?

In 1988 I went to Speos, in Paris, to study photography. The school was founded by one of Cartier Bresson’s printers Pierre-Yves Mahé in 1984. There, I learned it all—how to use the dark room, everything. This was just as they were bringing in the first computers to the school to teach digital. My time at Speos gave me an opportunity to roam around the city and practice street photography, something I’ve been doing ever since—it’s what formed that connection in my mind to John Lewis Krimmel. There is a photography section on my website with three photo essays and a fourth coming soon.

Have you exhibited your photos?

I’ve shown in a gallery across from Christ Church on 2nd Street in Philadelphia, and I showed in Paris while I was in school.

Do you consider yourself a local writer?

So many writers are the product of place. They respond to and write from a perspective of place. I suppose I’m no different. So call me a Philadelphia writer, but not a “local writer”—that seems to me a term that’s used to label anyone not cool enough to live in New York.

What are you working on now?

Mr. Mosaic, a novel. I’m taking notes now, and hope to start writing in January—a book that ought not take five or six years to write. It’s about an architect who becomes obsessed with a vacant lot, which becomes his undoing.


Nathaniel Popkin in front of the sea

Nathaniel Popkin author photo Cleaver reviews editor Nathaniel Popkin is the author of five books, including the 2018 novel Everything is Borrowed, and co-editor (with Stephanie Feldman) of the anthology Who Will Speak for America? His essays and works of criticism have appeared in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Kenyon Review, LitHub, Tablet Magazine, and Public Books. If you are an author or publicist seeking reviews or a writer hoping to write reviews for Cleaver, query Nathaniel.

Roberta Fallon author photoRoberta Fallon is the co-founder of theartblog.org. She has written about art for Philadelphia Weekly, Artnet, Art Review, Art on Paper, The Philadelphia Inquirer and Art and Auction, and has taught and been a visiting critic at Tyler School of Art, St. Joseph’s University and Cranbrook Academy of Art.

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Published on November 18, 2013 in fiction reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

PACHYDERME by Frederik Peeters reviewed by Brazos Price

Cleaver Magazine Posted on November 11, 2013 by thwackAugust 30, 2018

Pachyderme

 

 

PACHYDERME
by Frederik Peeters
translated from the French by Edward Gauvin
Harry N. Abrams Press
SelfMadeHero imprint, 88 pages

Reviewed by Brazos Price 

A cinematic opening: a woman’s heeled boot, a 1950’s traffic jam in bucolic Romandie, a downed elephant.  

Pachyderme-1

Carice Sorrel, a woman who “simply must get to the hospital,” to see her husband who has been in an accident, heads into the woods rather than wait for the elephant to be removed.  In Pachyderme, by Frederik Peeters, this transition from the road – through the woods – and into the hospital, quickly feels like a trip into the subconscious.  When Carice first sees the hospital, the reader sees her have something of an out of body experience.

Pachyderme-2

Ultimately, the image seems to suggest that she is replaying, reinterpreting, and reworking recent events while asleep or unconscious or insane or dead.

She wanders through the hospital and her memories. Moments of unreality are interspersed in the story and generally taken with aplomb by Carice, which further suggests that she is in a dreamlike state. This, coupled with frequent jump cuts in the narrative to places without context, adds to the overall unsteadiness of any direct interpretation of what is happening. The feel of the story is what seems to matter.

Take the decidedly Freudian stretch that finds Carice trailing her hands across a hospital wall , one that suddenly extrudes a nipple.  Carice is surprised to find her hand there, and yet once she does, she begins to caress and stimulate the nipple. Flowers come out of the wall in great numbers, and form a vagina-like opening.

 Pachyderme-3

Carice walks inside and finds herself in a verdant grove, fecund with infant-like creatures that have appeared periodically up to this point. It comes across like a waking dream:  unsettling, influenced from life, but lacking clear meaning or resolution.

Pachyderme-4

Carice cannot have children.  This fact is implied earlier when she first meets the infants in the woods, but it is revealed to the reader definitively while Carice is having a conversation with a corpse in the morgue.

Pachyderme-5

This corpse may or may not be her future-self post-mortem. She is discussing her life, and her marriage, with her corpse. That certainly lends credence to a reading that Carice is going through some internal processing of her life up to the present.

It would be a shame, though, to read Peeters work just through that specific lens.  There is much here that is ripe for exploration.  Take the lowercase i in the lettering. Peeters uses lowercase i exclusively, as compared to all caps for nearly everything else (except the letter t).  Does the lowercase i imply that the characters lack agency?  Real egos? It is heavily implied that Carice had, for years in her marriage, suppressed her own desires. She confides as much to one of her young piano students, the same one who gives her an elephant necklace and appears occasionally just out of reach in the hospital.

Other aspects of the story feel less true.  There is an ever-present feeling of Post WWII paranoia, primarily manifested and expressed by an ominous and strange stuttering secret policeman.  The policeman is wearing a trench coat and can appear from nearly anywhere.

Pachyderme-6He is after some documents, and enlists Carice’s help to retrieve them, or at a minimum to convince doctor Barrymore in the hospital to return them. This other character, the doctor, has his own depthand it almost rivals Carice’s, though he appears in fewer pages. He is an enigma, a dancing alcoholic seducer of women who seemingly likens his craft to performance.  His is another path with which to read and analyze the comic.

So, Pachyderme is clearly about one woman coming to grips with her life.  Or it is a Freudian look at the sublimation of desire. Or it is a treatise on post WWII paranoia. Or it is the exorcism of guilt. Really, though, what this comic is about is not important. Pachyderme is dense. It is cinematic. It sticks with you, it makes you think about it long after you’ve read/watched it. You may want to re-read it, to re-interpret it. Perhaps you will even dream on it.


Brazos-PriceBrazos Price is from Austin, Texas where he served as an inaugural member of the Texas Library Association’s Maverick Graphic Novel Reading List. He has also reviewed comics for the librarian focused website No Flying, No Tights. He now works as a Librarian in Atlanta, Georgia.

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Published on November 11, 2013 in graphic narrative reviews, reviews, translation. (Click for permalink.)

GILGI, ONE OF US By Irmgard Keun reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

Cleaver Magazine Posted on November 4, 2013 by thwackJuly 9, 2020

Gigli cover art. A white profile of a woman's face against a plum background

GILGI, ONE OF US
By Irmgard Keun (1931) in the first English translation by Geoff Wilkes

Melville House, 210 pages 

Reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

You push through the small, enclosed, almost claustrophobic rooms at the head of “Léger: Modern Art and the Metropolis,” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, like an exile from a provincial village, and there you are face to face with Léger’s masterwork The City. Now free of the repressive ties of the parochial, you’re not there yet. The City—the city—looms, an inscrutable machine. “At once spacious in its lateral spread and aggressively frontal, it offers the eye no reasonable focus and the body no comfortable place to stand,” says the show’s curator, Anna Vallye, in the deeply informed essay, “The Painter on the Boulevard,” in the exhibition catalog. “To approach is to hazard.”

The City by Fernand Leggier

But Léger’s painting is no warning. Rather it’s a syncopation of the moment when Modernity wrote itself across physical and temporal space in the form of the bristling, color-flashing, mesmerizing, hard-edged, dangerously inhumane and astoundingly infinite city. Past The City, the show opens up into a vast gallery, where, almost a century on from 1919, when Léger finished the eight foot tall painting, you are carried away by the arms of levers, the spin of wheels—faster, faster—the spectacle of man inventing his world (and made to feel both God-like and mouse-like by it). In the gallery, you may feel, despite what you know about the intervening century, the power and joy and energy of the city as it breaks apart the hard heavy stone of the traditional world and carries you willingly forward, with no need, so it seems, to look back.

Léger’s point, says Vallye—so admirably achieved by the exhibition—was not just to represent the city on canvas but to make something that itself would be equal to the tenacious force of the unfurling metropolis. Undeniably the city infects the work, which in turn—like so much other modern art and literature, music and film—pressed back onto the streets and boulevards of the city.

Irmgard Keun author photo

Irmgard Keun

One of those works, a slender 1931 German novel called Gilgi, One of Us, Irmgard Keun’s first, has just been translated into English for the first time, by Geoff Wilkes of the University of Queensland in Australia, and will be published November 12 by Melville House Publishing. Indeed, for this reader, Gilgi arrives as an equal kind of modernist wonder: the assertive voice of a young woman singularly determined to grab on. “My times! The only ones I can live in,” says Gilgi, a 21 year old typist at a hosiery concern in Cologne, who is teaching herself to translate Spanish, French, and English so that she can travel and work where she wants. “The times before, the times after—don’t interest me at all. The times now are important to me, they belong to me–.” The city—the world—would be hers.

The knife blade of modernity would slash history—would expose its injustice. The theorist Walter Benjamin, writing about the same time as Keun, put it thus: “The dreaming collective knows no history.”

Not insignificantly, Vallye, the Léger curator, chose a passage from Benjamin’s The Arcades Project to set the urban scene.  “Streets are the dwelling place of the collective,” notes Benjamin, “…an eternally unquiet, eternally agitated being that—in the space between the building fronts—lives, experiences, understands, and invents as much as individuals do within the privacy of their own four walls. For this collective, glossy enameled shop signs are a wall decoration as good as, if not better than, an oil painting in the drawing room of a bourgeois; walls with their “Post No Bills” are its writing desk, newspaper stands its libraries, mailboxes its bronze busts, benches its bedroom furniture, and the café terrace is the balcony from which it looks down on its household.”

This broad shouldered, crass, class inflected, pedestrian cityscape is Gilgi’s home, even as, in Cologne, it sometimes feels like a second city version. As the book opens, Gilgi, at 20 and still living with her mostly silent parents, endures—for the good of her will—a cold shower. She exercises, dresses smartly (of course), and running a little late, hops a streetcar to work. “Dingadingding—they get off, they get on. They ride the streetcar. Ride and ride. Eight-hour day, typewriter, steno pad, salary cut, end of the month—always the same thing, always the same thing.”

But adorable Gilgi sees herself apart from the collective. “They’re gray and tired and lifeless. And if they’re not lifeless, they’re waiting for a miracle. Gilgi isn’t lifeless, and she doesn’t believe in miracles. She only believes in what she creates and what she earns. She isn’t satisfied, but she’s pleased. She’s earning money.”

Gilgi - eine von uns (1931)

Gilgi – eine von uns (1931)

Punctual, hardworking, and organized, she’s moving forward. But significantly, this isn’t 1919. In 1931, the year the book comes out, the German economy is in recession and in so many ways the promise of modernity is in doubt. And on the street: “Nazi guys beating up Communists—Communists beating up Nazis.” Keun felt what was coming. There is despair, nationalism, doubt and even more, hints at the way, starting the very next year, German society would be exploited by Hitler. Gilgi would be banned and Keun would go into exile in Holland.

Gilgi, as the translator Wilkes points out in an essay at the back of the book, is a so-called New Woman of the Weimar Republic, capable of earning, living independently, and choosing her path. She reads newspapers and listens to jazz; she is honest with herself, careful never to dream excessively. Dutiful enough, she comes and goes as she pleases. This isn’t the only kind of New Woman here, however. Gilgi’s friend the flamboyant Olga works when she needs and otherwise travels. She has flings with men, but is careful to never get to close. Olga guards her independence.

After work, for extra cash, Gilgi takes dictation from a former military officer who is writing his memoir. She keeps a tiny room where she goes at night to practice translation. Aware of her good looks, energy, and attractiveness—a sensibility reinforced through Keun’s use of the interrogative semi-second person, as if Gilgi’s rational subconscious is doing the talking and then turning its head to talk to the reader—Gilgi is sexuality liberated: the great fear of modernity. Though young, she easily sees through men.  She rebuffs the ugly ones and lures along the ones who can help. “The main thing is that you know how to fob them off tactfully,” says Gilgi, “without starting some great drama of outraged honor.”

But in the infinite city, of course, anything can happen. Yes, something is coming to disrupt Gilgi’s tight little world. “Do people ever suspect how completely they can be influenced!!!!” wonders her subconscious a bit later on. One night Olga introduces her to Martin, a bohemian writer who is house-sitting for a well-to-do friend. Gilgi—so cold, so controlled—falls in love. “Since that night,” writes Keun, “something in Gilgi has been broken beyond repair.—Oh, liking someone is good—loving someone—is good too. But being in love, really being in love: an extremely painful condition.”

Martin, who finds German work ethic moralism absurd and inhumane, knocks Gilgi off-kilter, leaving her ultimately “defenseless, completely exposed…at the mercy of everyone and everything.” But Gilgi, happily, is never quite a victim. This makes Gilgi strikingly different from novels like Theodore Dreiser’s 1900 Sister Carrie, about the excess and moral bankruptcy of urban life. Gilgi isn’t at all a moral screed—it’s too wise—about men, politics, aging, and justice. As Gilgi struggles, she begins for the first time to unwind her deeply held belief in personal responsibility. Finally, she begins to see herself as more than a single one-dimensional entity, but rather as a person of sometimes divergent layers, a different person at different times to different people—a thoroughly modern woman, that is. “There are two layers in me,” she begins hesitantly to feel,

And the upper one, it dictates—everyday words, everyday actions—little girl, little machine girl, little clockwork girl—the lower layer underneath it—always wanting, always searching, always longing and darkness and not knowing—not knowing where to—not knowing where from. A thinking without words, a knowing behind the words—a wakefulness in sleep—behind laughing, a weeping — — — the uncut umbilical cord—a tie to the dark world. And the gray world and the bright world, you’re familiar with them and you know about them—and you didn’t want to acknowledge the dark world and you’re still trying to lie it out of existence. But it’s there—for every woman—every man. And one person says sorrow and one person says pain and one person says crime—filth—or God—no word cuts right through to the core.

No, Gilgi, there is hardly any comfort in the modern city. It will throw you. It will demand you to ask, and ask again, “What—am—I—really?”


Nathaniel Popkin author photoCleaver reviews editor Nathaniel Popkin is the author of five books, including the 2018 novel Everything is Borrowed, and co-editor (with Stephanie Feldman) of the anthology Who Will Speak for America? His essays and works of criticism have appeared in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Kenyon Review, LitHub, Tablet Magazine, and Public Books. If you are an author or publicist seeking reviews or a writer hoping to write reviews for Cleaver, query Nathaniel.

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Published on November 4, 2013 in fiction reviews, reviews, translation. (Click for permalink.)

SIDEWALK DANCING by Letitia Moffitt reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

Cleaver Magazine Posted on November 1, 2013 by thwackJuly 9, 2020

Sidewalk Dancing cover art. Two long shadows against a concrete floor

SIDEWALK DANCING
by Letitia Moffitt
Atticus Books, 158 pages
Reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

A sidewalk dance is the step or two that strangers on a sidewalk make together in an effort to get out of each other’s way. Sometimes, says Letitia Moffitt, they

naturallly move in tandem, like dancers, until they collide. Sometimes they stay that way, perpetually in each other’s path, never moving past each other.

This suspended state of existence—one imagines cells tumbling around a petri dish—infects Moffitt’s novel Sidewalk Dancing (Atticus Books), the story of Grace Chao, a Chinese immigrant to San Francisco, and George McGee, a peripatetic and dogmatic city planner, who intercepts Grace at the diner where she waits tables, and pulls her half knowing into a life of mutual abeyance. The couple moves to Hawaii, where George designs an impossible house, fails to convince his colleagues of the importance of the latest planning ideas, and loses in a bid for city council of the town of Windward Oahu. They have a child, Miranda, who narrates some of the chapters of the book.

The three McGees each struggle with identity. George has run from his unassuming Pennsylvania origins; over and over again he seeks the other to awaken his soul and lend meaning to his life. In Grace, apparently inscrutable, he sees another equally out of kilter. Grace is an artist, who can’t abide the impractical, an immigrant who isn’t sure why she desires to be American, if she does. They carry Miranda along in their fraught dance so long that as an adult she is wary of the search for an ethnic identity: it can’t seem to lead anywhere good.

Moffitt has a straight, dry, insightful prose style especially suited to Grace’s silent suffering as an outsider, never able to connect or feel at home, even in Hawaii. “I sometimes felt,” says Miranda of her mother, “that she was in perpetual retreat, withdrawing into something like the tunnel of a snail’s shell, an endless vacuum tube spiraling inwards, and away from the opening to the world, compressing into the claustrophobic space inside her head.”

While Grace, who is brittle but also tough (far more resilient than her husband), detaches, George fumbles and falters. All of a sudden,

He was not a young man who astonished and impressed people when he told them of the places he’d been and the things he knew. He was a middle-aged man whose lifelong experiences had been rendered into idiosyncrasies—mostly harmless, at worst a nuisance.

The portrait of these two figures in the setting of 1970s and 1980s Hawaii is the book’s clear strength. Moffitt understands their insistent, nagging contradictions; she hears their silence, especially as it strangely rains down on their daughter. And indeed, the perspective is welcome. It’s just this—the layers of silent suffering, shame, confusion—that Moffitt knows she has to explore if she’s going to turn this particular version of the immigrant experience into literature that matters. She seems aware of her special view; Grace wonders why Miranda, apparently an aspiring writer, can’t turn their family story into something like Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club. Miranda counters that she isn’t interested in that sort of maudlin fiction. “I know everybody read Tan,” Grace responds in turn. “And see the movie. She writes more like real life, like a true story. Those other writers, they may be trying too much to be writing literary. Too strange, too hard to read. Nobody understand them.”

Sidewalk Dancing isn’t hard to read. Moffitt’s prose is polished, but of course it happily lacks the necessary clarity of commercial fiction. And yet, about two-thirds through, as the story’s focus shifts to Miranda herself, the prose becomes “like real life” and ultimately banal. Somehow the tightness that bound the first two-thirds of the book—prose that had obviously been worked hard and clean—got lost in an effort to bring the story to the present, perhaps because Miranda herself is too close to Moffitt. By the end, the reader finds himself disinterested in Miranda, longing for Grace’s compelling, frustrating passiveness that he feels must somehow be wise.


Nathaniel Popkin author photoCleaver reviews editor Nathaniel Popkin is the author of five books, including the 2018 novel Everything is Borrowed, and co-editor (with Stephanie Feldman) of the anthology Who Will Speak for America? His essays and works of criticism have appeared in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Kenyon Review, LitHub, Tablet Magazine, and Public Books. If you are an author or publicist seeking reviews or a writer hoping to write reviews for Cleaver, query Nathaniel.

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Published on November 1, 2013 in fiction reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

BLINDING: THE LEFT WING by Mircea Cărtărescu reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

Cleaver Magazine Posted on October 17, 2013 by thwackJuly 9, 2020

Blinding cover art. Abstract colorful artwork in the middle of an olive background

BLINDING: THE LEFT WING
by Mircea Cărtărescu, in the English translation by Sean Cotter,
Archipelago Books, 464 pages

Reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

It starts in adolescence. The questions come to you while lying in bed (certainly now with a growing awareness of your sexuality), the walls of your room expanding into endless grainy darkness, as if the room itself could encompass the entire world: why am I here, why is there anything at all?

The questions may haunt you at age 13 or 15 or 17, but by adulthood they tend to feel banal. Unanswerable, impossible, if taken seriously debilitating, they are in a word blinding, and so you tend to avert your gaze. But suppose you can’t, suppose the inviolable white light only draws you closer, to madness possibly, to paint or write or drink or pray (to what God, tell me?) almost certainly. And so perhaps you scribble, the pages of your notebooks filling with furious script, like eons of sediment piling into sad mute mountains no one else will ever excavate or carve or climb.

Unless, perhaps, you are a writer of the caliber of Mircea Cărtărescu, the celebrated Romanian author of the 1996 book Blinding: The West Wing. Cărtărescu is a poet, essayist, and novelist of unsurpassing imaginative vision and startling bravery. He has won several Romanian literary prizes, but beyond Romania and France, where a few of his novels have been translated, and Holland, where he has taught, Cărtărescu, a child of the post-War communist dictatorship of Nicolae Ceaușescu, is rather unknown. His only other novel to be out in an English edition is the 1993 Nostalgia, published here in 2005 by New Directions.

Blinding, which was brilliantly translated into the English by Sean Cotter for Archipelago Books, is a strange, beseeching, glimmering book that’s part meditation, part meta-fiction, part exploration of the relationship between a man and his deeply flawed city. The Bucharest in Blinding, says the book’s narrator Mircea, “filled my window, pouring inside and reaching into my body and my mind so deeply that even as a young man I imagined that I was a mélange of flesh, stone, cephalo-spinal fluid, I-beams and urine, supported by vertebra and concrete posts, animated by statues and obsessions, and digested through intestines and steam pipes, which made me and the city a single being.”

And like the Prague of Michal Ajvaz and the Buenos Aires of Borges, in Cărtărescu’s hand the rooms, gazes, corners, lamps, current events, political officials, ruins, hallways, and basements of Bucharest become portals to hidden, dreamlike, distorted, and yet visceral worlds. Reader, beware: one might veer into them at any second.

The point of these journeys, be they to underground vaults or high into elevator shafts left standing after wartime bombing or even to the time sequence of another city—New Orleans—is to challenge the veracity of our individual senses. We are, in other words, he says, blinded by the incessant propaganda of our own prosaic lives. But there is hope: even “in this opaque world, dense, murderous as pillow that someone holds over your face, kneeling mercilessly on your chest to stop your writhing,” says Cărtărescu, “revelation is possible.”

He goes on: “What every person had intuited at some point in their lives somehow, suddenly became clear: that reality is just a particular case of unreality, that we all are, however concrete we may feel, only the fiction of some other world, a world that creates and encompasses us.”  In that world, we—every being and kind of being, every feces and every sperm, larvae, neuron, and whisper—are all part of single throbbing unit of life.

The heart of the book is this search for enlightenment, with hints of the Norwegian writer Karl O. Knausgaard’s discovery of angels in A Time for Everything and shades of Hinduism and barbarity. Is this a true spiritual journey or, as Mircea wonders, “nothing other than howling, yellow, blinding, apocalyptic howling?” This meta-conversation about the purpose and intent of the work—alive throughout—is like a strap handle on a streetcar, to steady the reader as the story sways.

And what of the story? Having gone through electric shock therapy for facial paralysis at 16 and hospitalization for another, unspecified, illness as a young boy, Mircea is about thirty in the mid-1980s, when the book takes place. Seemingly alone but for a drunk named Herman he’s taken into his small apartment, Mircea seeks the meaning of his existence, most profoundly, in the empathetic narrative of his mother Maria’s coming of age, from peasant village to encounters with Bucharest nightlife to the night of the bombing, by Allied forces, of her neighborhood in the last year of World War II. Maria is adventuresome, self-possessed, and in love with cinema. Post-War Bucharest, the “Romanian miracle” of early communism, feeds the life of her quickly transforming city. But progressivism turns into the despotism, doubletalk, and political strangulation of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s bloody regime: a different kind of blinding.

Through all of it—the quick paced, straightforward, sexually charged narrative of Maria’s passage to womanhood, her marrying Mircea’s father Costel, Mircea’s boyhood from one house to the next with visits to Maria’s father in the country, the detours to other worlds rife as they are with insect imagery and madness, the strap handles of meta-fiction—Cărtărescu’s prose, so magically transformed into English by Cotter, speaks to the reader with a lush and fruitful honesty. Time and again, he produces imagery you, the reader, are sure you’ve held in the quiet of your own subconscious, mirrored in Maria and Mircea’s own search for memories and images of their pasts. Here is a crowded subway station filled with “a subterranean humanity rising like a menacing water,” a blind man walking “as though he was resisting someone who pushed him from behind,” a tram approaching, “red, rocking on its rails, like a tired beetle,” Mircea walking the night city, “the mysterious and beloved city spread under the Persian carpet of the constellations.”

In all, Blinding wants to prove that being is both less and more than we take it to be. It’s less, because of course, none of us is really separate from the massive opera of life, more because reality is also unreality, reality is memory, human existence is cumulative, iterative, self-creating. “The me of today,” writes Cărtărescu, “englobes the me of yesterday who encompasses the one from the day before yesterday and so on and so on, until I am only an immense line of Russian dolls buried one in the next, each one pregnant with its predecessor, but still being born from it, emanating from it like a halo until the middle is darker and the surfaces more diaphanous, and the glassy surface of my body in this exact moment already reflects the tame light of the one that I will be in an hour, since my astral body is nothing else but the clairvoyant light from the future.”

Again and again, Blinding seeks this greater, more profound, more meditative path, which in this imaginative realm is never banal and always lush, even amidst the gray streets of the ugly city. That doesn’t mean the book is easy to read. The other worlds are harsh and strange and sometimes ridiculous. A giant, blue winged butterfly appears and reappears, a harbinger or a monster or a god. You might tire of Mircea’s endless melancholy or, if you’re like me, part flesh and stone of my city, but also weary of its utter, blinding hegemony, Cărtărescu will speak to you, an astonishing voice from another world.


Nathaniel Popkin author photoCleaver reviews editor Nathaniel Popkin is the author of five books, including the 2018 novel Everything is Borrowed, and co-editor (with Stephanie Feldman) of the anthology Who Will Speak for America? His essays and works of criticism have appeared in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Kenyon Review, LitHub, Tablet Magazine, and Public Books. If you are an author or publicist seeking reviews or a writer hoping to write reviews for Cleaver, query Nathaniel.

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Published on October 17, 2013 in fiction reviews, reviews, translation. (Click for permalink.)

WHERE SOMEBODY WAITS by Margaret Kaufman reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

Cleaver Magazine Posted on October 15, 2013 by thwackJuly 9, 2020

Where Somebody Waits cover art. A photograph looking up at a Ferris wheel against a gray sky

WHERE SOMEBODY WAITS
by Margaret Kaufman
PaulDryBooks, 201 pages

Reviewed by Nathaniel Popkin

Critics never thought much of Ettore Scola’s 1987 film La Famiglia. Vincent Camby, writing in the New York Times, said that it has “the manner of a film that was conceived as an idea…The characters and events were thought up later.”

But the idea, to capture time as it drifts through a single family in the space of a single apartment, is so powerfully melancholic that I’ll sit and ache through the film any time. Even despite the soft filter gauze of the mid-1980s.

That same ache ventures forth from Margaret Kaufman’s debut novel Where Somebody Waits, out this month from Paul Dry Books. The tidy paperback, with its glancing, storyteller’s prose, covers about 60 years and four generations of the Davidson family, Jews in a small Arkansas town. While La Famiglia centers on the scholarly, even-handed Carlo—it opens with the infant Carlo in his grandfather’s arms on the day of his Christening and ends at a party for his eightieth birthday—Where Somebody Waits places its focus on Ruby, a fiery beauty from a poor downriver hamlet who seizes the opportunity to marry the gentle shopkeeper Bubba Davidson. “If he was so solicitous now, when they barely knew one another, what would it be like when they were lovers?” Ruby wonders of Bubba, whose real name is Nathan, on their first date. “Was it possible she would sleep with a Jew?”

The Davidsons are an archetype Jewish family of the south, whose story of dual identity and assimilation has been rarely told in film or literature, one major exception being Tony Kuschner’s play Caroline, Or Change. Bubba owns a clothing shop on the town’s main street; his brother is a doctor, who treats black and white alike. The family is vaguely more liberal than most of the town’s whites. Bubba, Ruby notices right away, says “colored” instead of “nigger.” But while the Davidsons don’t hide their identity, they are caught, as Kaufman writes, “in a frenzied limbo between worlds we didn’t quite inhabit.” Bubba, eager for business, donates fans to the church revival going on in town at the book’s opening with his store name on one side and a picture of Jesus Christ on the other.

Early in the book it appears that this duality, and negotiated compromise, will be the territory of Where Somebody Waits. It struck my interest: there have been shoe and furniture and dry goods stores all over the south with the Popkin name on it, distant relatives who disembarked in New Orleans instead of New York, who I imagine eat, as the Davidsons do, fried catfish and collard greens and cornbread.

But Kaufman’s book finds its emotional center in a different negotiation, Ruby’s own, between passion and stability, the urgent fire of the moment and the long simmer of a life well-lived. Ruby and Bubba’s immediately explosive love tempers. A year goes by and Ruby isn’t pregnant. “Lying on their bed, smelling his cigar, listening to the radio, feeling the evening creep into the house, purple and blue over the rose of Sharon outside their bedroom window, Ruby was surprised by sadness.” Ruby, who is so compellingly drawn out by Kaufman, hungers for a child, but she’s also reconnected with an old lover John Clay, who had been off at war.

Must she give up one for another? In La Famiglia, Carlo, too, is faced with a similar choice, between the steady Beatrice and her sister Adriana; the choice of Beatrice haunts him—and yet all the same it doesn’t. Life simply goes on.

“Anybody who tells you you can’t love but one man at a time, they don’t know what they’re talking about,” says Ruby much later in life. It took her decades to come to understand.

In Carlo’s lifetime in La Famiglia, Canby notes, “Italy has survived World War I, the rise of Mussolini, the Spanish Civil War, World War II, the fall of Mussolini, Nazi occupation, Allied liberation, the sinking of the Andrea Doria and the marriage of Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe.” Likewise in Where Somebody Waits, as Ruby fights and gives into passion, and tries to hold the demon whiskey and her uptight sister-in-law at bay, the US experiences World War II, desegregation, Viet Nam, terrorism at the 1972 Olympics, the counter culture, and AIDS.

Kaufman’s skill is threading all this through a humble, almost whisper narrative about a certain southern family writ across a short—or is it long?—period of time. As all time, Ruby’s era aches with our own need and our own enduring search for grace, aware as we are of our limited time to be alive.

–October 15, 2013


Nathaniel Popkin author photo

Nathaniel Popkin

Cleaver fiction review editor Nathaniel Popkin is the author of three books, including the 2013 novel Lion and Leopard. He is co-editor of the Hidden City Daily and senior writer of “Philadelphia: The Great Experiment,” an Emmy award-winning documentary series. His essays and book reviews appear in the Wall Street Journal, Public Books, The Kenyon Review, The Millions, and Fanzine.

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Published on October 15, 2013 in fiction reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

WE WON’T SEE AUSCHWITZ By Jérémie Dres reviewed by Stephanie Trott

Cleaver Magazine Posted on October 11, 2013 by thwackOctober 9, 2014
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WE WON’T SEE AUSCHWITZ
by Jérémie Dres
SelfMadeHero, 199 pages

Reviewed by Stephanie Trott

Everyone has a story, a collection of historical inner workings and familial memories that makes us who we are. But not all desire or are able to physically retrace the steps of those who laid our ancestral foundation. In We Won’t See Auschwitz, author Jérémie Dres does precisely that: embarking on a pilgrimage to Poland in search of the “drop of cool water from a spring” that he likens to his Grandma Thérèse, Dres winds his way through the history of the country and retraces his grandmother’s steps while simultaneously forging his own.

IncredibleThing

The reader is dropped immediately into the action, rendezvousing with Dres in Warsaw’s historic Old Town as he searches for his grandmother’s original home on an unseasonably warm June afternoon. Together we search with him through the clouded eyes of the past for the buildings and neighborhoods his grandmother once recalled perfectly from memory, only to find that they either no longer exist or have been altered beyond recognition. Dres, eager to learn from those currently dwelling within the city walls, next meets two “young, Jewish, Polish, and hip” Varsovians who advise and answer his questions about the current sentiments of Poland toward Jews. He is amazed to find that there are still Jews in Poland, his own family having long since departed for France. Dres continues to meet both older and younger Polish residents, conducting a series of informational interviews and receiving in return detailed contemporary history lessons. The week becomes one where movement is somewhat determined by conversation, the destinations lingering on the horizon like doors begging to be opened. We tumble into this rabbit-hole expedition like Alice through the looking glass, as the present becomes a vehicle for gaining access to the past.

As is the case of any well-planned personal journey, though, Dres’s trip is full of both surprise and disappointment at the deviation of continuity between the past and present. Roadblocks are strewn throughout, ranging from unfamiliar Polish vernacular to the pestering presence of a dybbuk, a demon that “possesses people with any sort of tie to Yiddish culture,” that plagues Dres’s brother and travel companion Martin. We follow the brothers through Warsaw and into the country, silently peering over maps while invisibly crammed in the back of their compact European rental car on a journey to the decrepit Jewish cemetery in Żelechów. Dres is careful not to sugar-coat his fears, explaining in detail the plan he and his brother devise to tell people that they are “guys some Jewish billionaire’s hired to take pictures of his ancestral village” and chronicling his brother’s anxiety in the odd looks thrown to them from local citizens as they wander.

NotOurFamily

Lest the reader be weighed down underneath the somber conversations with government officials and trips through the crooked-toothed graves of deserted burial grounds, Dres is careful to include cultural highlights between the heaviest of chapters. We are with him on his first night at the Oki Doki Youth Hostel, where he opts for an early bedtime instead of chatting with others at the bar, and we share in his amused disappointment in a Polish meal. He is ever conscious of the reader, providing a perfect balance between solemnity, cheer, and historical background.

Dres chooses to illustrate his graphic memoir entirely in black and white drawings, complementing the collection of family photos found in the book’s appendix and allowing the reader to decipher the complete story in the barest possible way. In the absence of color, we are shown the texture and depth of scenery, specific facial details of those met by the brothers, and this allows us the opportunity to absorb the situation in a somber manner. From panel to panel, there are small differences to Dres’s drawings that illustrate well the true humanity he experiences—no two drawings are completely identical, just as no two moments perfectly mirror one another.

Dres looks at the scarred stories of his family as a guide, one that not only looks back into his unchangeable heritage but also pushes himself toward his own malleable future. “Perhaps this story will help put things back in order,” he writes upon the conclusion of his memoir. And while the “right order” of one’s life is indeterminable, Dres successfully reorganizes the abstract memories ingrained deep within himself while subconsciously weaving a tangible chapter into his own story.

InTheEnd


Stephanie-Trott-Stephanie Trott received a B.A. in English and Creative Writing from Bryn Mawr College in 2012. Her work has appeared in Polaris: An Undergraduate Journal of Literature and Arts, Bryn Mawr’s Nimbus magazine, and the premiere issue of Buffalo Almanack. An aspiring writer and photographer, she presently lives and works in Mystic, CT.

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Published on October 11, 2013 in graphic narrative reviews, reviews. (Click for permalink.)

The Property by Rutu Modan reviewed by Amelia Moulis

Cleaver Magazine Posted on October 10, 2013 by thwackAugust 30, 2018
PROPERTY

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THE PROPERTY
by Rutu Modan
Drawn and Quarterly, 222 pages

reviewed by Amelia Moulis

A family secret.  A tragic love affair.  This could well be any book of the last millennia, and yet in Rutu Modan’s latest graphic novel, The Property, fresh life is given to these age-old tropes.  After receiving the 2008 Eisner for her first foray into adult graphic novels with Exit Wounds, Modan’s second novel further cements her talent in exploiting the subtleties of the medium. Where Exit Wounds is a fast-paced and chaotic adventure, The Property follows similar themes in a calmer setting as a grandmother and granddaughter travel from Tel Aviv to Warsaw ostensibly to reclaim a property they lost in World War II.

From the outset, grandmother Regina is established as a quick-tempered, strong-minded and endlessly stubborn character in direct opposition to the temperament of her granddaughter, Mica, who is practical and level-headed.

p8-Regina-fighting-with-airport-security

As their personalities collide and the cracks of their relationship grow deeper, both characters find themselves steeped in a wealth of age-old grief.  Mica finds herself driven by emotion, calling her new yet ‘untrustworthy’ Polish lover (deemed untrustworthy primarily due to his heritage) when her grandmother is unwell, and Regina becomes weakened by memories she cannot silence or defend. It is only once Mica and Regina connect with the climate of grief, and the legacy it entails, that they are truly able to connect with one another and reconcile the past.

P221-Regina-and-Mica-examining-bread-rolls

Gracefully plotted and ripe with suspense, Modan’s gentle pace evokes the tragic eternal echoes of the Holocaust while exploring Warsaw as a real place where real people lived as opposed to the stale and dehumanized pitch presented to tourists: “Personally, I prefer Majdanek to Auschwitz” comments a schoolteacher taking his class to Poland.  Modan alleviates the solemnity of the atmosphere with a subplot of skulduggery and the workings of precise wit and satire, for instance in the change of attitude of a class of school children on a Yad Vashem trip from the flight over to the flight back.

p-10-plane-shots-with-the-children

p220-plane-shots-with-the-children

These moments of humour, and in fact the entire plot, unravel without the aid of a narrator. Modan relies on her ability to convey deep emotion through Tintin-esque linge claire in a matte color scheme, generating pain and suspense through the astute application of panelling and the most minute manipulation of a single line.

P47-Regina-putting-her-lipstick-on

It is difficult to find fault in The Property, yet possibly Modan’s weakest moments arise from statements or reactions that seem melodramatic or over-sensationalized. But the dynamics of these moments often reveal themselves later in the piece and thus in retrospect serve to further underline the author’s careful observation of the idiosyncrasies of everyday life: halting conversations, miscommunications, faltering pauses, awkward poses and bizarre actions.

P197-Regina-putting-the-doughnuts-over-her-eyes

Her strict adherence to a realistic portrayal of human interaction is further enhanced by the trilingual communications – different tongues lettered in different fonts for intelligibility between specific characters – and the precision of body language. This precision is heightened by Modan’s use of actors to play out each scene before she drew the book.

P38-Mica-hiding-behind-the-bush

In The Property, Rutu Modan examines memory and history: how actions reverberate through time and suffuse into later generations, how grief is assuaged or left to canker, and how peace can be sought in the manifold plexus of love.  The Property is rich with subtle satirical nuance in contrast to moments of clarity depicted in beautiful detail.  Rutu Modan’s latest work is a tribute to her breathtaking talent as a cartoonist.

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–October 10, 2013


Amelia Moulis

Amelia Moulis

Amelia Moulis is from Canberra, Australia, but was living in New York for the past year, fulfilling her Creative Writing major at Columbia University. She recently returned to Australia in order to graduate from Monash University in Melbourne, but spends her spare time planning her return to New York.

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Published on October 10, 2013 in graphic narrative reviews, reviews, translation. (Click for permalink.)

THE GEOGRAPHY OF MEMORY: A PILGRIMAGE THROUGH ALZHEIMER’S by Jeanne Murray Walker Reviewed by Elizabeth Mosier