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CONVERSATIONS by César Aira reviewed by Ana Schwartz

CONVERSATIONS
by César Aira
translated by Katherine Silver
New Directions, 88 pages

reviewed by Ana Schwartz

The Little Estancias

Domestic Tourism
What’s the name for the genre of writing about a house? House tourism exists, but what about house-writing? It would be a good word to have on hand when reading Argentina: The Great Estancias, because whatever that genre is, this book is the exemplar. An estancia is a large estate originating in colonial settlement of Latin America and supported by agricultural industry, usually livestock. Despite regional variation across Latin America (and the use of different names, like hacienda), they generally consist of a large central house and several smaller edifices across acres upon thousands of acres of land. True to the title, the nation of Argentina is the primary subject of this book. Its history and culture are beautifully recorded in the photographs by Tomás de Elia and Cristina Cassinelli de Corral, alongside the descriptive text by César Aira.

CHANGE MACHINE by Bruce Covey reviewed by J.G. McClure

CHANGE MACHINE
by Bruce Covey
Noemi Press, 122 pages

reviewed by J.G. McClure

Think about the change machine outside your car wash: you put in a dollar, the machine spits out coins. Not a neat bundle, but a jangling tray-full. Now think of William Carlos Williams: “A poem is a machine made of words.”Now give William Carlos Williams superpowers and have him beat the hell out of the car wash while musing on Pokémon, Barthes, and metapoetics, and you’ve got a sense of Bruce Covey’s Change Machine.

Covey knows the canon well, and treats it with a mix of comic distance and yearning. Take a poem like “29 Epiphanies.” The speaker has read the classics and gleaned a lot of meaning from them – just not quite the meanings the authors had in mind. From Coleridge, we get “Just leave the albatross the fuck alone.” From Blake, “A lamb is different than a tiger,” from Dante, “Beatrice is out of your league,” and from the Greek myths, “Styx is another name for shit’s creek.”

ON SNAPSHOTS by Jay Pastelak

Roy With Cigar

Jay PastelakON SNAPSHOTS “All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.” —Susan…

FALL ON ME by Melissa Sarno

Melissa Sarno

Melissa SarnoFALL ON ME I’m on a crowded subway, clutching a heavy book that requires two hands not one, but where to place my fingers? On the warm metal pole, or balance, maybe lean, against a door or a railing where…

IS THIS IT by Sidney Thompson

Sidney Thompson

Sidney ThompsonIS THIS IT Jewell Jewell Young didn’t know what made her son happy anymore. There was a time she did, and for most of his life she did. It was why she was making this pecan pie for him,…

BALLAD by Patrick Dacey

Patrick DaceyBALLAD OK she’s gone let’s get setup amp cord guitar now this is romantic this is a gift D C G yep way out of tune needs a good tuning can’t remember how to tune just listen listen it…

ONE OF THOSE WORLDS by Steve Klepetar

Steve KlepetarONE OF THOSE WORLDS Returning from the kitchen one night, you stumble into one of those worlds where dogs breathe fog and foxes roam through orchards near where your mother grew up, a circular tower house where you looked…

CRITTER CONTROL by Rebecca Entel

Rebecca EntelCRITTER CONTROL I hadn’t given much thought to the snake that connected my toilet to the bathroom wall until one July when it split its plastic cap and flooded most of my house. Among other damages, the water buckled…

THE ELEPHANT by Erika Price

Erika PriceTHE ELEPHANT He got the news in the usual way: via Twitter. At 5:00 am when he’d already given up the prospect of sleeping (the thrum of his across-the-hall neighbor’s Skrillex ebbing into the rattle of the broken refrigerator),…

THE INSIDES by Brooke Schifano

Brooke SchifanoTHE INSIDES In the train, you listen to a story about a shaman, feet braced against the wall in the part where you stand on the circle cut into the floor. If this were a human arm you’d be…

KENTUCKY SNAKES by Shaun Turner

Shaun Turner

Shaun TurnerKENTUCKY SNAKES Me and Dorsey worked with Gross Lumber down in the woods behind Viola Creek and we’d cut our share of trees. In the woods, not even Lloyd Gross cared how many beers we drank. All the loggers—usually…

FUJIKO NAKAYA, FOG ARTIST by Myra Lotto

Myra LottoFUJIKO NAKAYA, FOG ARTIST On the last Saturday morning of April, my husband and I put our two young children in the car for the hour-long drive to New Canaan, Connecticut. We were on our way to attend the…

GROWING UP by Devin Kelly

Devin KellyGROWING UP She is naked save for pink socks, and her pale young behind squeaks as she slides, or inches, down the balustrade. The sound echoes off the wooden floorboards and she imagines a tiny creature screaming in short…

ON THE Q By Tricia Park

Tricia Park Author Photo

Tricia ParkON THE Q Someone is singing “Rocket Man” on the opposite side of the NQR stop at Prince Street. “I miss the earth so much, I miss my wife; It’s lonely out in space; On such a timeless flight.”…

BIRDS / NERVES by Max Bartlett

Max BartlettBIRDS / NERVES There’s this bird.  It’s nighttime, and there’s this bird.  And he’s flying, and who knows how long he’s been flying, because that’s not what’s important.  The thing is there’s this house.  Everything outside the house is…

FLYING by Grace Jordan

Grace JordanFLYING I was wearing my turquoise suede moccasins. I was afraid they would get wet because I knew it would start raining at any given moment. There was an ominous raincloud making its way down the block. I decided…

HUNGER by Amy Burns

Amy BurnsHUNGER I was sitting at my friend Bebe’s kitchen table. She was standing at the counter using a black and yellow handled screwdriver as an ice pick. I was telling her about it while she chopped. You should have…

THE ACOLYTES, LIAR, and BOX by Mercedes Lawry

Mercedes LawryTHE ACOLYTES, LIAR, AND BOX The Acolytes Somebody drowned the acolytes. They were not wee fellows so it must have been someone with plenty of muscle. Now an emptiness hovers like a bad smog burning throats and lungs. The…

COUCH by Jenny Wales Steele

Jenny Wales Steele

Jenny Wales SteeleCOUCH [?] It was an okay day. I don’t understand zoos, the appeal. The kids thrill to it, sure, but kids are dumb. My nephew flounced around, did his giddy slash sissy thing. He was wearing his jester’s…

TOUGH by Geoff Peck

Geoff Peck

Geoff PeckTOUGH You picture it: fourteenth floor of Walker dormitory. A former wrestler dangles from a window. The one they call Bisonhead has him by one ankle and another ex-teammate, a freshman, by the other. It’s late April in Oklahoma,…

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

A BINTEL BRIEF: LOVE AND LONGING IN OLD NEW YORK
by Liana Finck
Ecco Press, 128 pages

reviewed by Ana Schwartz

There’s a new sort of fiction circulating, stories of young people, by young people, for young people. This isn’t YA lit. These stories range across genres, even mediums, but they all describe the ambivalence of maturing in post-post-modernity. These narratives share a sense of lostness and reflective self-estrangement. The authors are smart and the narratives are smartly-dressed. They usually take place in New York. Think Frances Ha or Tai Pei or Girls. And if, as one well-respected author of such fictions has recently described them, they at times seem “cold, lazy, [and] artificial,” they also exhibit “extreme honesty and thoroughness of […] self scrutiny.”

Liana Finck’s new graphic novel, A Bintel Brief features one such young me-person; but, although the story mines her development as an artist, it does so by digging into the past. With the distance afforded by history, and supported by the graphic novel’s relatively diffuse gaze, Finck offers a warmer, and more engaged account of a remarkably persistent theme: how one comes to feel that they belong to a community.

ZOONOSIS by Kelly Boyker reviewed by Carlo Matos

Poetry by Kelly Boyker, reviewed by Carlo Matos ZOONOSIS (Hyacinth Girl Press) Kelly Boyker’s chapbook, Zoonosis, is loaded from cover-to-cover with fantastical creatures, folktale monsters, and twentieth-century “freaks” drawn from the pages of Robert Ripley’s “Believe It or Not.” The…

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