Review of North Dixie Highway by Joseph Haske

Newly returned from the Bosnian war, Buck Metzger can’t sleep. His waking life seems to be a mix of old and new nightmares, old and new dreams—some involving revenge, some involving pretty girls who live and breathe the ether of literature, and some just memories that float in the landscape of his mind like boats on the fresh water of lakes Huron and Michigan. North Dixie Highway is Joseph Haske’s debut novel, and it does not fail to beguile. The author starts his writing career with a bang, as the narrative is crisp and flowing, full of disquietude and searching, but also replete with fast-moving scenes of family life, war, old feuds, childhood haunts, infatuations leading nowhere, and the present-day meandering roads that the young narrator tries to sort through in his attempt to put his life back together.

Review of Jimmy’s Blues and Other Poems by James Baldwin

For James Baldwin’s many devotees, Jimmy’s Blues and Other Poems is representative of the American novelist and essayist we all know: the narrative voice in Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) and the unabashed writer-activist of The Fire Next Time (1963). As we look back to what we know of Baldwin’s work and style, Jimmy’s Blues (2013) shows us the parts of his writing that have been overlooked: a poetic speaker, for instance, who brings blues and jazz into the sounds and stories of this collection. When Beacon Press published the first edition of Jimmy’s Blues in 1983, four years before Baldwin’s death, the majority of Baldwin’s readership did not perceive him as a poet. He was instead considered a strong, clear narrative voice and a witness to how Americans hated and loved one another. This collection is emblematic of the narrative flow Baldwin brings from his fiction and non-fiction into poetry; it is also evidence that as a novelist and poet Baldwin’s voice is always consistent.

Review of Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine

Claudia Rankine. Citizen: An American Lyric. Graywolf Press, 2014. 169 pp. $20.00, paper.

Six chapters into her latest book, Claudia Rankine writes, “It is the White Man who creates the black man. But it is the black man who creates…This endless struggle to achieve and reveal and confirm a human identity, human authority, contains, for all its horror, something very beautiful.” Beautiful, she writes, and I repeat it to myself. Again. Reading this moment in Rankine’s work, I feel as if I’ve earned something, as if she is finally offering me, the reader, the consolation I’ve hungrily and anxiously been waiting for since the book’s terse epigraph from Sans Soleil: “If they don’t see happiness in the picture, at least they’ll see the black.” But full consolation doesn’t ever seem possible or even desirable for the speaker, such as when the “new therapist [who] specializes in trauma counseling” answers her front door and yells at the speaker, “Get away from my house,” and, “What are you doing in my yard?” only to be chastened by the realization that this nonwhite trespasser is actually her new client. In consolatory reply, the therapist utters the ineffectual apology: “I am so sorry, so so sorry” to the silent speaker. Thus ends the first section of Rankine’s book. We realize that consolation never counts in moments when people fail to see you.

Review of Under the Water Was Stone by William Stratton

Every so often, a photograph becomes more than the moment it captured. It’s yellowed from hanging on the wall of a chain-smoking aunt, or its edges are wavy from that time the basement flooded. These types of heirlooms are faded, worn, sometimes recolored or restored—like our memories of them. They take on a history, a weight of their own. And in saving them, and more importantly, in sharing them—in passing them hand-to-hand around the table amid reactions of reminiscence, laughter, and loss—we carry that weight together. We find strength. William Stratton’s debut book of poetry, Under the Water Was Stone, evokes this feeling, seating the reader at a table among friends sharing stories of struggles and triumphs. In a striking synthesis of voices, Stratton delivers poems that show immense tenderness, sorrow, joy, and above all else, strength.

These poems, and Stratton’s book as a whole, are fortified through the effective contrast of tones, perspectives, formats, and subjects both within individual poems and among the poems themselves. Arranged in five sections, “Family,” “Friends Beloved,” “Self,” “The World,” and “Home,” the structure of Under the Water Was Stone provides a frame without limiting flexibility. Poems about loss and family benefit from the contrast of love poems and lyric observations of the world—yet because everything fits into the sectional structure, even poems with very different tones or subjects support the work as a whole rather than seeming out of place.

Review of Abide by Jake Adam York

You don’t need to look far to find Jake Adam York’s posthumous collection Abide described as an elegy for the poet himself. For some, this may be a familiar tune, bringing to mind Larry Levis’s Elegy, also published posthumously and described similarly. But a careful reading of Abide rejects the urge to position York as the focus of the book’s attentions.

His project—an ambitious, career-spanning one, of which this book is merely the latest installment—is a series of elegies for the martyrs of the American Civil Rights movement. York’s attention to the individual martyr is what empowers the project beyond simple gesture and into heartfelt mourning: those who are elegized are named specifically—John Earl Reese, Medgar Evers, William Moore, among others—and their stories are given intimate, sacred attention.

Review of August Kleinzahler’s The Hotel Oneira

August Kleinzahler. The Hotel Oneira. Farrar Straus Giroux, 2013. 112 pp. $24.00, hardcover; $15.00, paperback; e-Book, $9.99.

August Kleinzahler’s most recent collection of poetry, The Hotel Oneira, is saturated with images of weather. More particularly, it is saturated with the often discordant prosody of storms and the audial images created through reverberations in the lulling patterns of rain. Kleinzahler’s poems present freakish, operatic movement as well as the gradual revelations of images/objects that wind and rain manifest. In “Rain,” we see and hear this effect, which reveals “M. Francis Ponge, exemplar of phenomenology / and the breathing of things” as if Ponge were a secret object himself, who waits to appear

until sufficiently dark, as if at the beginning of a show,
and with the sound of it the only sound.

might one begin to detect his outline in the rain,
like an image hidden in a picture puzzle,
slipping about, darting like a pike,
over the hoods and under the chassis of parked cars

Review of The Small Blades Hurt by Erica Dawson

Erica Dawson. The Small Blades Hurt. Evansville, Indiana: Measure Press, 2013. 66 pp. $20.00, Hardback.

Erica Dawson’s latest book whirls us like a drunken line dancer whose skillful footwork veers in and out of formal composure and into wild, playful lines and dark truths. In many ways, the book follows the narrative of her first collection, but Dawson isn’t embodying that Big-Eyed Afraid speaker anymore. Her lines possess a palpable confidence, a “tendency to lead” that comes from years of experience as a formalist writer. Dawson can swerve between lines and still keep the beat. She is as comfortable quoting Shakespeare and Whitman as she is singing every word to “Wagon Wheel” at the top of her lungs, no matter if the song’s “spokes [have] spun the road enough.” In the crown of sonnets in “New NASA Missions Rendezvous with Moon” she creates lines such as “Where there is space, there is, no doubt, a death / In the afternoon.” The bodies in The Small Blades Hurt search for those little deaths because “each mission is a tryst.”

Review of Daylight Savings by Robert Gray

Robert Gray. Daylight Savings. George Braziller, Inc, 2013. 113 pp. $15.95, paper.

Robert Gray is one of Australia’s most celebrated poets, but Daylight Savings, which consists of forty poems spanning his nearly forty-year career, is his first book to be published in America. At first I wondered how these poems would translate to my own experience, which has taken place so far from where the poems were written. References to his home country do abound; Gray touches on Australian culture and history, especially focusing on its landscape and unique plant and animal life (there are, indeed, kangaroos). But these poems are not limited by their geography. They boil down to the essentials—nature, death, art, love—in a way that reaches far beyond their context.

Working for The Man All Over Again: A Review of Ray McManus’s Punch

Ray McManus. Punch. Spartanburg: Hub City Press, 2014. 72 pp. $15.00, paper.

From the cover photo to the opening epigraph, we know that this is a book devoted to the life of a working man. Punch is a distinctly American book in that way: it contains the poetry of a man destined to change water in a field, to wrestle with barbed wire, to know the hours put into the job because there’s a piece of cardstock with his name on it as well as the days of the week, which he punches every morning and then again every night.

Review of Adrian Matejka’s The Big Smoke

Adrian Matejka. The Big Smoke. New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2013. 128pp. $18.00, paper.

Adrian Matejka’s third poetry collection, The Big Smoke, dramatizes the physically grueling, racially charged, and ethically complex boxing career of the first African American world champion, Jack Johnson. With the exception of the closing poem, the voices of Johnson and his supporting players tell their own stories. For Johnson, that act of gaining sovereignty over the literary representation of his life substantiates his masculinity and his contested humanity. Early on, the reader will notice the subtle accumulation of the phrase “they said” in various forms. Johnson recognizes that his image, constructed by hands other than his own, fuels a corrupt campaign. That fabricated image corroborates a racist ideology that refuses to identify people of color as intellectually sound and morally upright individuals. If Johnson is indeed an inherently deviant beast, then the world can devalue his greatness as a boxer and negate his human status; it does not have to undertake the mentally strenuous mission of examining its belief systems.

Desert Teeming with Life: Review of Without Compass by Benjamin Miller

Benjamin Miller. Without Compass. New York: Four Way Books, 2014. 72 pp. $15.95, paper.

In Benjamin Miller’s engrossing debut, his speaker lives in what one title calls the “Wake of Avoidable Tragedy.” I hear only one speaker, because the voice is so consistent from poem to poem. Stuck in a psychological desert, he occasionally doubts that a way out exists and feels as if he’s without a compass. More often, though, he’s aware that his compass may be broken, pointing in the wrong direction. Or that he can only properly use the working device—know where to go and why—after honing his ability to exist in uncertainty, what Keats called negative capability. “One-eyed crabs clung to my fingers,” he says, “And I named them. This is wait. This, delay.” He puts the thing away to be intentionally without compass but then glances at it from time to time. Eventually, he trusts it.

Review of domina Un/blued by Ruth Ellen Kocher

Ruth Ellen Kocher. domina Un/blued. North Adams, VT: Tupelo Press, 2013. 81 pp. $16.95, paper.

Ruth Ellen Kocher’s fourth book, domina Un/blued is an austere, surreal, imaginative exploration of historical servitude, dominant/submissive relationships, and found/lost personhood that poet Lynn Emanuel justly selected to win Tupelo Press’s coveted Dorset Prize. Often, modern readers of poetry seem to approach a book as if the text must prove itself to the reader, as if it must offer itself up and unspool meaning in accordance with the reader’s preconceived conventions. Such an approach will be unsuccessful with domina Un/blued. One must, rather, offer oneself up to this work.

domina Un/blued is, for Kocher, “an experiment in palimpsestic writing” built upon/through fragments of two earlier manuscripts, Hybrids & Monsters and The Slave’s Notebook. In reading domina Un/blued, the notion of palimpsest comes through in several poems interrogating the act of translation, where the poem itself is a footnote to an exercise that is white space. In “D/domina: Issues Involving Translation,” the poem appears as white space interrupted only by footnotes at the bottom of each page, such as: “Exercise 3. / Possessive case for the word ‘slave’ does not exist in Italian. // The slave owned not own nor owns / Nor evolves. Nor provision any make consonant belonging.” Thus, even within the footnote to the white space, Kocher uses extended spacing between words to highlight the erasure inherent in the (dominant) enacting of translation. In “Translation Exercise Esercizio di traduzione,” Kocher creates a poem from two parallel columns of text, one English and one in Italian, both offering translations of the same line. For example:

it is hot è caldo
warm caldo
blazing sfolgorante
the handcuffs begin with me le manette iniziano con me
i am the lock and the key io sono la chiave e lo schiavo

 

By structuring her poem in this way, she permits—even encourages—readers to subvert the dominant linear reading of texts in favor of a more fluid, multiperspectival approach, where one could read the English column then the Italian column, or the English line then its accompanying Italian line before moving on, or, depending on one’s fluency and desire for language as sensual sound play versus meaning-making, one could move across these columns at will, without linear order.

While multiple poems involve Italian words, sometimes with translation (as above) and sometimes without, readers need not be fluent (or even familiar) with Italian to experience the impact of Kocher’s writing—one need only be open to loosening the quest for meaning (which is, perhaps, a quest for dominating) into a sensual receptivity to the pleasures of music. In “Translation Exercise II,” the lines “Some people I sweet delicate who would aggressively / animaleschi who would elegant refined who would sport,” and “I assure you that I like the game and fun the transgression me / irresistibilmente,” are amplified by the inclusion of Italian—which subverts the dominance of English even while offering readers word roots (“animal” and “irresistib[le]”) that make them participants in this elision of language.

Furthermore, Kocher’s use of white space is provocative throughout. In most of these poems, each present stanza is separated by enough white space to hold traditional stanza-break space plus an absent stanza, forcing readers to read absence as a presence and to submit to a magnified version of the delayed fulfillment we experience in stanza enjambment—a fine illustration of dominant/submissive relationships through both form and content.

Kocher’s background in classical literature and linguistics is apparent in this text, for she frequently returns to the Corinthian column (iconic structure of empire and civilization) and the theory that its design was inspired by a basket of acanthus leaves placed on the grave of a slave girl. “Un/blued” features three identical columns of text that begin: “the columns are / capped with / acanthus,” then repeat down the page “empire Empire / E/empire / empire Empire / E/empire,” before terminating in “baby, baby, o / baby / girl.”

Linguistic play abounds in works such as “D/domina’s Feet,” where Kocher writes, “These woods [period] All Woods [period] No / matter / How hard ‘All / Woods’ desires to be only wood all woods is all / woods.” In “D/domina,” Kocher uses transgressive capitalization to explore dominant/submissive relationships:

sorry to request
sorry to Y/you to be unworthy

(this morning on the train Y/you show M/me that Y/you are)
(this morning on the train Y/you yolk as uniform as the egg’s      shell)
i thank Y/you again
(the egg knows an order)

In the poem “Translation Exercise,” Kocher writes, “i am the slave and the key / the keys / i belong to / my self not my sex.” Speaking from a personhood where “Possessive case for the word ‘slave’ does not exist in Italian,” one must conclude that, since “black is only a thing the slave owns that is nothing,” the slave cannot even own the capital I. As an African American poet, Kocher’s astute exploration of historical servitude has significance for European and American readers.

Beyond Kocher’s complex theoretical and philosophical underpinnings, the musical, lyrical language glimpsed in her earlier books is vibrant and electric here. In “D/domina: Daughter,” she writes, “and within that conversion / your loss as a first nothingness.” In “D/domina: G/gnosis,” she weaves together image and lyric: “Her body / hid from its parents Forgot its sisters Bathed / each morning as though performing ritual // leaving Her body knew before she knew / Soon like hesitation It would forget return.” Repetition of sound and image works to evoke almost pre-lingual reverberations within the reader, again using language to destabilize itself, as in “D/domina: Look,” where readers find “grass nearby cut and clumped. grass clippings. grass smell. grass / green and gasoline. engine. night / streetlights come on // say night come on.” And, in “M/meditation I Dominance,” the poem subverts our expectations of agency by exploring the voices of temporal entities—those we may more often see as spaces for action, not as actors themselves: “The once has never said / Nor the next day stammered.”

In a world dominated, at times, by three-section manuscripts, Kocher’s choice to offer her collection without section breaks is effective. By doing so, she reaffirms the slipperiness of language, domination/submission, and identity—for can a poet ever say where one section’s themes/motifs end, with certainty? Can a poet’s work, which often arises from a swirl of influences lived, imagined, and co-constructed, be that easily partitioned? Such an act may be reductive, forcing the text to submit to reader expectations, and domina Un/blued, fierce in its beauty, will bow to no one.

And, as in her earlier books, Kocher proves that she knows how to close a collection, powerfully, in her last lines:

There is no field. There is no clover no green. You listen
anyway. Hear a voice follow you into the afternoon Language
crosses a clearing the stark way a thing revealed
when thinned clouds expose better light.
You the tree tip toward words as they bring outward
inner form.

In domina Un/blued, Ruth Ellen Kocher establishes herself as a sophisticated writer who holds a command of image, syntax, and line, even as she invites the text to de/stabilize this authority. What, then, can readers do, but submit to this destabilization as well?

Review of Lungs Full of Noise by Tessa Mellas

Tessa Mellas. Lungs Full of Noise. Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 2013. 133 pp. $17.00, paper.

The twelve stories that make up Tessa Mellas’ debut collection, Lungs Full of Noise, are absorbing, haunting, and unforgettable. The collection, which won The Iowa Short Fiction Award, is darkly fantastical and delightfully strange, calling to mind the works of Angela Carter, Kelly Link, Karen Russell, and Kevin Wilson. The stories feature a leaf-covered baby with vines sprouting from his body, figure skaters who affix ice skate blades directly to their feet, a green-tinted college roommate from one of Jupiter’s moons, three young girls stranded in an attic by rising sea levels, and teenage girls who eat nothing but grapes so they can dye their skin lavender to attract prom dates. Mellas’ prose is lovely, precise, and surprising; she takes no shortcuts and doesn’t rely on familiar tropes or clichés. Each sentence, and each story, is original and unexpected.

Although there is a lightness in the lyrical language and playful humor that runs throughout this collection, these stories have heft. They are concerned with issues of self-doubt and insecurity, ambition, jealousy, fear, loss, powerlessness, control, grief, and unfulfilled longing. Themes of troubled motherhood and the confinements of femininity appear again and again. Several stories address the deteriorating environment and the impending apocalypse. The stories also show a preoccupation with the body, examining the ways in which people try to manipulate their bodies, the ways in which our bodies betray us, and the body’s mysterious hungers.

The characters that inhabit this collection are often overwhelmed and outmatched by their desires, and the stories explore the ways in which their misguided attempts at fulfilling these desires go awry. In “So Many Wings,” a woman named Bea discovers that her ex-husband died in a car accident and steals his severed arm from the morgue as she is identifying his body. When she unwraps the arm back in her apartment, “it makes her body feel buoyant,” and she falls asleep with the arm tucked into the sheets of her bed. In “The White Wings of Moths,” a mother longing to make things right with her estranged daughter fills her home with thousands of caterpillars until the house becomes overrun with moths. The moths “coat the walls… Around the chimney, they huddle en masse. They smooth the chimney’s edges out. They bulge, a tumorous growth, a snowy beast… [Bea] unearths a cocoon. A cocoon the size of a daughter.” In “So Much Rain,” three sisters living in the top floor of an abandoned house during an apocalyptic flood struggle against their inevitable end, eating Polaroid squares and wallpaper and crayons, calling each other names and playing nonsensical games. Unable to understand, accept, or change their circumstances, Mellas’ characters follow their own flawed and desperate logic.

For me, the standout story was “Bibi from Jupiter,” in which the narrator moves into her college dorm to find that her roommate hails from one of Jupiter’s moons. “When I marked on my roommate survey sheet that I’d be interested in living with an international student,” the story opens, “I was thinking she’d take me to Switzerland for Christmas break or to Puerto Rico for a month in the summer. I wasn’t thinking about a romp around the red eye of Jupiter, which is exactly what I’d have gotten had I followed my roommate home.” The narrator’s sarcasm and sharp wit are flimsy covers for her insecurities and hurt, and the reader learns about Bibi through jealous and guarded descriptions. “She’s not an all-out green,” the narrator explains. “Tinted rather, like she got a sunless tanner that didn’t work out. Her ears are inset like a whale’s, and she doesn’t have eyelids.” But Bibi is smart and popular, especially with the boys living on their hall, and the two girls’ relationship becomes complicated and fraught. The narrative deftly delves into the unexpected, but the outcome still seems inevitable and fitting.

Another favorite, “Quiet Camp,” about a camp for girls who talk incessantly, is breathtakingly lyrical and immensely moving. It begins, “We arrive on a westerly wind, our lungs inflated with speech. Our mothers said this would happen if we didn’t learn to quiet our tongues. Our tongues couldn’t be stopped, so up we went. Up and up. Until we knocked the chandeliers with our heads.” The story, told from the collective perspective of these chatterbox girls, follows the girls’ attempts to quell their natural proclivity for constant speech, and the harsh punishments they receive when they fail to do so. The descriptions of their time at the camp are evocative and lovely: “A rowdy tribe, we walk through the woods…The sound of our speech swarms like the hiss of cicadas thrashing out of their husks. Syllables tap off our teeth. Our dimples crease and uncrease in a Morse Code frenzy.” Told with the peculiar mix of grotesque hyperbole and dark beauty characteristic of fairy tales, this story left me unnerved but enchanted.

These stories are unsettling. They work themselves into your mind and climb under your skin, and they linger. Mellas’ characters are eccentric but wholly convincing, and it’s difficult not to feel the full and devastating weight of their vulnerabilities, wounds, and desires. These stories relentlessly examine the weakness of the body and the desolation of a future where the world’s resources have dried up. They lead the reader far into the realm of the impossible and the strange to expose the familiar in a new and harsh light. But buoyed by the beauty of the language and the wonder of these unexpected narratives, this collection is captivating. This is an important, intelligent, and mesmerizing book, one that establishes Mellas as an original and unflinching writer.

Review of Hum by Jamaal May

Jamaal May. Hum. Farmington, ME: Alice James Books, 2013. 74pp. $15.95, paper.

Jamaal May’s self-reflexive debut, Hum, is musically understated, performative yet private, a spiritual voice in dialogue with a post-industrial landscape. “Dedicated to the interior lives of Detroiters and the memory of David Blair,” the book takes its formal structure from the combination of that landscape with the speaker’s anxieties, which range from the mundane to the mortal. But ultimately, the book invests the word “hum” with a particular sense of the human, a spiritual music that finds its way up from between May’s words and defies straightforward analysis.

The book opens with a poem entitled “Still Life,” an anaphoric series of images of a boy costuming himself and playing imaginatively with urban detritus ranging from barbed wire and bent nails to a bath-towel cape. The end of the poem takes an inward turn with the lines, “Boy with a boy / in his head kept quiet / by humming a lullaby / of static and burble.” The first of many references to “humming” throughout the text, one might read these lines as a self-portrait or analogue of the author as a young man and a description of Hum’s nascent project. But only a few lines after this framing of the poetic text as personal solace, that project is placed in jeopardy. May writes of rust as a metaphorical thief the boy “doesn’t see / but knows / is coming tomorrow / to swallow his song.” This tension between the transformative potential of creativity and the consumptive action of time seems central to Hum, underlying the anxieties that structure the text.

May’s marriage of interior life to external form is unusually intricate, particularly for a poet’s first book. Many poets have used the sestina, a traditional Italian form in which lines end with particular words that repeat according to a mathematical pattern, to explore themes of obsession or anxiety. The second and second-to-last poems in Hum are sestinas that share a single set of end-words: “machine,” “ignore,” “sea,” “snow,” “needle,” and “waiting.” Six other poems in the body of the manuscript take their titles from phobias associated with those end-words. Such ambitious projects often come at the expense of attention to individual poems, but the eight poems of Hum’s spine each feel as carefully conceived as the overarching structure itself. “The Hum of Zug Island,” the book’s second sestina and penultimate poem, even earned May a Pushcart Prize. However, the function of these formal devices is not simply to impress; they build the themes of obsession and anxiety into the structure of the text itself.

Though subjects such as “snow” and “waiting” may seem rather mundane foci for phobias, in May’s poems these subjects become pathways through anxiety into trauma, raising questions that resound long after the poems end. “Chionophobia: Fear of Snow” is a second-person elegy in which we know the deceased protagonist only as “you.” In the poem, the windblown ash and sand of a combat zone recall the snow in which “you” and “your brother” played as children:

   Can two snowflakes be the same

   on a ghost-white street where enough gather
   to construct faceless snowmen? In this desert,

   sand blinds the way snow did back home.
   Your brother patches holes

   in men with names he can’t or won’t learn,
   and wonders if, somehow, you are still here,

   using an earthmover to pour sand
   into foxholes.

These lines highlight the particularity of the minute and familiar—snowflakes, grains of sand—while also pointing out the anonymity of bodies in war. How can snowflakes be unique when survival seems to depend on blinding ourselves to the individuality of the suffering and dead? Images of “your brother” and “you” patching and filling holes may gesture toward healing and peace, but the comfort they provide restores neither the identities of the soldiers nor the landscape.

The poem continues, weaving meditatively between images of past and present, sand and snow, before arriving at the apparent source of the protagonist’s fear. When a fruit stand appears to shiver in the desert heat, “your brother” recalls how his family heard the news of “your” death:

   Your brother shivers

   remembering your mother’s shiver,
   the way she sank to the ground, heavy

   with news, and your body comes home again.
   Your bone-colored casket repeats

   its descent, sinks under the flag, and a thud
   resounds. Fades. He still hears it.

In these lines the poem’s dichotomous elements blur together, resolving momentarily into a scene where sand and snow, innocence and mortality, the living and the dead all coexist paradoxically. The leaping progression of images through which we arrive at this transcendent moment not only makes rhythmic and resonant connections between disparate settings, it also reflects the fact that post-traumatic stress is often triggered by seemingly innocuous experiences.

Such associative leaps are common in May’s work, but they seem particularly suited to describing the dissociation experienced by this poem’s speaker. In the final lines of “Chionophobia: Fear of Snow,” May capitalizes on this dissociation as well as the second-person mode of address to enact the protagonist’s identity crisis on the reader: “Deafening like footfalls / against the icy driveway, resonant / like your mother’s voice, calling / the wrong name—your name—again.” The ambiguity of identity in these lines shifts attention from the protagonist’s grief over the trauma of his brother’s death to the realization of his own mortality. And this artful closing completes the poem’s journey from a phobia’s innocuous trigger through personal trauma to the temporal source of so many obsessive anxieties.

While this review has focused on how the poems that act as Hum’s most explicit structural elements explore the speakers’ anxieties about time and mortality, the other eighty percent of the text also deserves critical attention. The images and themes introduced in the sestinas and phobia poems recur throughout the book, adding to the impression of anxiety while re-contextualizing key words and images in surprising ways. As mentioned above, Hum is intimately concerned with Detroit’s post-industrial landscape and legacy, and several of the poems explore relationships between humans and machines in terms that are both spiritual and bleakly realistic. In “Hum for the Machine God,” a title which plays on the word “hymn” as well as other meanings of “hum,” a boy prays for his abusive father to be injured but feels remorse when his prayer is granted more brutally than anticipated. In “On Metal” a handful of lay mechanics huddle around a broken down car as the speaker realizes that the human body and the tradition of mechanical repair—both of which he reveres with a nearly religious sense of mystery—are rapidly being rendered obsolete by computerization. And in “Hum of the Machinist’s Lover,” a machinist serenades an automaton he’s created, but whom his breathing corrodes. In these poems, the speakers’ anxieties about mortality intertwine with spiritual tradition and technological innovation to render a portrait of the human condition during a distinctly postmodern moment.

May intricately weaves together these themes and others to create a wide-ranging and surprisingly coherent debut. But what makes Hum remarkable, perhaps more than its structural sophistication or thematic content, is the intimacy and authenticity May’s voice conveys as he thinks and feels his way through each line and stanza. In “Thalassophobia: Fear of the Sea,” a poem addressed to the Detroit poet David Blair who drowned tragically at a young age, May writes:

      . . . You know
      I get like this sometimes—I listen

   for footsteps that will never come,
      remember waves I’ve never seen,

   watch them fold and break and slowly
      whet stones that jut up from coastlines,

   and today I learn something old
      about the sea . . .

In these lines May makes himself vulnerable by sharing his creative process—a process of discovery in which imagination blends with memory and sensual perception—with someone he loves. And while not all of the poems in the book exhibit that process as explicitly as “Thalassophobia,” an impression of May’s vulnerability suffuses his poetry. Formal sophistication and conceptual implication may make Hum a significant work of literature, but it is May’s human touch that fills these poems with the irreducible combination of feeling and music.

Review of Capital by John Lanchester

John Lanchester. Capital: A Novel. New York, NY: Norton, 2013. 528 pp. $15.95, paper.

John Lanchester’s novel of and about the present moment, Capital, presents its readers with a seminal regional difference to digest, that of England vs. the U.S. This fissure conjures up the first sentence of Elizabeth Young’s critical milestone Shopping in Space: “American literature has never received a rapturous reception in Britain.” In that volume, Young also epigraphically quotes David Byrne (“Shopping is a feeling”) and Debord & Wolman (“Life can never be too disorienting”), influential worldviews which are applicable to the Lanchester book and to the contemporary cosmopolitan novel at large. Young was Brit-crit at its best, we’re all worse off without her, and one of her areas of utmost interest was how Americans perceive British fiction. David Mitchell, Alan Hollinghurst, Monica Ali, Tom McCarthy, Ian McEwan and others have helped foment some change, but for a while there it was rather polarized. Things were either stodgy and butlered or sneering and trainspotted, with the occasional mainstream leap into quidditch matches or lovelorn record store clerks or the diaries of thirtysomething women.

Deftly navigating the new intercontinental order, Lanchester’s novel has a texture of handsome gravitas, but its presentational mien is one of fragmentation. 107 chapters, most of four or five pages, suggest sprawl and compendia. This has led to innumerable Dickens comparisons, but the structure and voice, along with the multi-character “breadth of palette” approach, derive more from a text like Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. Consider the following Wikipedia quirk: the book’s entry is listed as “Winesburg, Ohio (a novel)” but the first line of description calls it “a 1919 short story cycle by the American author Sherwood Anderson.” It then goes on to identify George Willard as protagonist and moves forward from there.

Capital doesn’t really possess a protagonist, not even a nominal one, and if that sounds irksome, this isn’t the book for you. The most traditional story (the one Franzen or Ishiguro would’ve spotlighted) is that of Roger Yount and his tendentious marriage to wife Arabella. Like Anderson’s Elizabeth Willard, Roger is restless, desiring change. Like Tom Willard, he is concerned with the concept of success and how he is perceived. Like the mature George Willard, he is a bit old and a bit tired and a half-tragic figure in his own mind. It is from this segment of Lanchester’s narrative that we received a January 2012 excerpt in The New Yorker entitled “Expectations.” Roger and his family, his office job, his house, his nannies, they comprise the “this is the way we live now” portion of the novel. The now in question being the global economy in the midst of instability, recession, depression, collapse. Capital begins in December 2007 and concludes in November 2008. An angry young subordinate angles for Roger’s job. There’s a Margin Call moment. Lehman Brothers is ominously mentioned.

On the artistic front, in case you were thinking this is primarily a men-in-suits book, foregrounded amidst the multiplicity is a Banksy-esque guerrilla artist, Smitty (real name Graham), the grandson of another major character, Petunia Howe, an elderly remnant from a disappearing era. In his sections, Smitty is subversive in his approach and obsessive about denying access to his identity. In Petunia’s sections, Graham is the dutiful grandson who earnestly loves his nan. His mom/Petunia’s daughter? That’d be long-suffering “poor Mary,” who’s right out of a Mike Leigh film. This triad, with the artist at the center, offers a DeLillo-an portrait of the successful avant-garde within his more sedate surroundings. But unlike DeLillo and Leigh, Lanchester’s novel is more warm than cold, more immersive and humanistic than analytic and sociological. He is an author in command of his characters, and he is also very “close” to them, though it is difficult for the reader to achieve that same level of intimacy, if only because there are so many of them and because the narrative shifts its settings and emphases so often.

There is certainly a keen etiological eye for class and ethnicity which, along with Anderson’s micro-opus, may also call to mind Michael Apted’s landmark -Up documentaries, which trace the lives of a varied group of English citizens by recording their exploits at seven year intervals. In Capital, we have northward migration via Quentina, a Zimbabwean meter maid, a Lovely Rita for the immigrant era, and Freddy Kano, an émigré soccer star from Senegal along with his cautious ex-policeman father Patrick. The Eastern European front is personified in Zbigniew, a Polish carpenter whose sections are workmanlike, almost as if they were stand-alone stories, well-crafted miniatures about love, sex, and the loneliness of being perpetually away from the place you think of as home. He eventually finds something he’s not supposed to hidden behind a plaster wall (direct echoes of Elizabeth Willard at the end of Anderson’s “Death”) and later falls for one of the Younts’ babysitters, a Hungarian named Matya. This is a conglomerate of characters who, in the words of Winesburg’s Seth Richmond, “just want to work and keep quiet.” Lanchester’s omniscience also patterns Anderson’s, though his characters are grounded not in the grotesque of fin de siècle America but in the gulosity of the international present.

Lanchester’s portrayals of the Islamic sector of London’s populace compose the most scrutinizable sections of Capital. Though they’re entertaining and engaging and never shallow, it is here that the author perhaps brushes against the walls of his own limitations (or maybe his research just hasn’t been naturalized enough for my tastes). It’s also where the POV/literary ventriloquism occasionally sounds a bit forced. There are three Pakistani brothers: Usman, the youngest, bearded and angry, the militant Muslim; his oldest brother Ahmed, an assimilated shopkeeper in a happy arranged marriage; and middle brother Shahid, whose affiliations lie somewhere between the two extremes but who bumps into an old comrade from his more radical days and offers the fundy a couch to crash on. One of them is, somewhat predictably, roughly treated and rights-besmirched by the terrorism-phobic powers that be, and like Wing Biddlebaum at the end of Anderson’s “Hands,” at a moment of dire need he finds solace in a religious article; in Wing’s case it was an allusion, a rosary, while in a situation finely wrought by Lanchester it is a Qur’an.

I compare Lanchester’s approach to Sherwood Anderson’s because though Capital is populated by an interwoven multitude of characters and a singular setting, it isn’t Thackeray or Trollope. This is not a satire nor is it a melodrama. It distributes its laughs and drollery but for the most part it’s pretty staid, very much categorizable as realism. And within its panoramic sprawl there is that lack of a singular protagonist. None of the quintessentially British mainstays, no Becky Sharp or Dorothea Brooke or Pip the orphan here to ground it. Also no ostentatious axes to grind; this is not agit-prop or economic determinism nor is it elitist apologetics. If there is an Anglophilic comparison to be made, perhaps it is to Lanchester’s countrywoman Ali Smith, lauded for her skill at entering a multiplicity of her characters’ heads. In terms of how the various stories weave together to form an almost musical brocade, perhaps the greatest compliment one could afford Capital is that it recalls something of Joyce’s Dubliners. Lanchester’s tome could easily be titled Londoners and it would be a fitting moniker.

Other kindred spirits for Capital can be found in the contemporary film canon, where Kenneth Lonergan’s fascinating Margaret, barely released in 2011 but destined for classic status according to some serious voices in the film community (Karina Longworth has been a particularly vocal advocate), mixes up a similar potpourri for New York City. This may feel like a digression, yet another external comparison, but Lanchester seemingly would approve. He has taken the care to populate his novel with unexpected divergences, at least on the character level. Some of the plot machinations come together rather too tidily, but overall the genre mash-up approach keeps the more predictable moments from bourgeoning into full-scale blemishes. There is a refreshing dearth of soapboxery. There are no precocious teens or one-dimensionally greedy bankers, no strident leftist academics or thinly veiled references to Zadie Smith. There aren’t any ugly Americans traipsing carelessly across the touristy bits of London nor do real-life personages make an appearance. There are no Cate Blanchett or Brad Pitt sightings. That said, the films of Alejandro González Iñárritu are another major touchstone from the world of postmodern cinema. It is as if Lanchester has condensed the global point of view of Babel’s swirling gyres into a singular magnetic city-setting, a cubist interlacing of characters and locales which recalls the megalopolist urbanity of Amores Perros and the surface-coincidental but deeply socio-economic tidal coalescences of 21 Grams.

To return to Sherwood Anderson and regionalism, it may be best to unpack rather literally. The UK edition cover of Capital features a pictographically cartoonish London that more closely resembles Rio de Janeiro (the overcrowded constriction of affluence and poverty, of Victorians and favelas, skyscrapers and shacks, all smashed together in an über-dense agglomeration of third-world and first-world), while the first edition American hardcover comes outfitted with a book jacket depicting an aesthetically pretty mixture of urban nightscape contrasted with a blurry figure in the foreground. It coheres artistically, but it doesn’t give a real sense of the cornucopia of content that awaits, the truly diverse surfeit of characters, interactions and commentaries. For example, there is a masterstroke of a mini-chapter (Chapter 94) that belies what can at times seem like a topically “male” book. The chapter is an almost entirely self-contained story about a long-term couple, in which the female half of the pair brilliantly chronicles the various phases of her boyfriend’s recently diminished attentions and considers the now defective state of their attempted union, the devolution of his character as a man, and the various manifestations this takes as the relationship deteriorates—she makes a list to enumerate his pros and cons and the single pro he maintains is “He used to be lovely.” An Andersonian stroke indeed, most reminiscent of “Loneliness,” which concerns Enoch Robinson, who, like the boyfriend in Capital, is riveted by the art world and later his own solipsism at the expense of his everyday reality and those who people it.

Also, all three blurbs which constitute the back cover matter of the American hardcover are from writers with famous books distinctly associated with New York City (Claire Messud, Joseph O’Neill and Colm Toibin; so a multi-national blend as well). It’s almost as if W.W. Norton & Co was consciously trying to say to a U.S. audience: “Well, some writers who are heavily connected to your big international city like it, so how’s about you take a chance with one of the chaps from across the pond?” And for my buck or euro or pound, Capital is a high-degree-of-difficulty maneuver which, though it has its flaws and a mostly merely utilitarian prose style, gets points for structural complexity and creativity, and for sheer declensive evocation as well. This level of striving is preferable to a more perfectly executed but formally less intricate literary venture. Lanchester’s level of regional realism writ large could easily come off as contrived and the fragmentary style could fail to achieve integration or wholeness, but the novel never succumbs to these pitfalls and contains a plethora of trenchant passages and vivid scenes alongside a laudable and literary consideration of class. Concision, however, is not its primary goal.

Sherwood Anderson’s most canonical work is a triumph of the succinct, one which glorifies what most would call humdrum lives. It is efficiency incarnate. Lanchester’s book, on the other hand, is about a time when global capitalism experiences a failing because of its excesses and overindulgences, its inefficiencies, best exemplified in a situation near the end of the book where a character observes that there are two types of people—those who lose a certain amount of money and take the necessary steps to alter their lives, drastically if necessary, and those who suffer an economic setback and do not change one iota, who are so opposed to living the humdrum life that they vow to spend their way into a more glamorous one whether they can afford it or not. Capital essentially takes the Andersonian form and explodes it, expands it, extrapolates on it. It is Mailer to Anderson’s Capote.

Malcolm Cowley’s introduction to the Penguin edition of Winesburg, Ohio calls it “a work of love, an attempt to break down the walls that divide one person from another, and also, in its own fashion, a celebration of small-town life in the lost days of good will and innocence.” This may be too bucolic an approximation of small-town life, as the aforementioned “Hands” is, after all, about a schoolteacher who is nearly lynched by the townsfolk because of a false accusation of molestation, but Lanchester has aspired, in his contemporary milieu, to similarly break down walls of division, in perhaps the most dense and turbid of modern Western metropolises. If it is a celebration, it is of humanity itself, which at its best transcends barriers of economics and race and culture, which survives despite our era being one of bad will and exploitation, consumed by what Anderson’s Joe Welling refers to in “A Man of Ideas” as the invisible and ever-burning fire of decay. Lanchester’s is a class-conscious novel that is rarely preachy, reminiscent of David Simon’s The Wire in this way (an American work many Brits have lustily embraced). In Capital, when things go wrong for the lower classes, people are incarcerated, deported, manhandled by the state. When they go awry for the upper classes, wifey is given a stern warning to curtail her shopping sprees, a less expensive nanny is hired, a family has to settle for fewer summer vacations to Southern Europe.

When it comes to class, one of the most conspicuous aspects that must be confronted moving forward is the quality and availability of health care. Winesburg features multiple doctors (dear Dr. Reefy in the much-anthologized “Paper Pills” and in “Death,” the unstable Dr. Parcival in “The Philosopher”) and though they are imperfect, they are present, they are fulfilling their function. The doctors in Capital’s London are difficult to access and absorb some of the harshest implied criticism. Petunia receives bad news from a pedant who can’t help but remind her that her brain tumor is, strictly speaking, not a form of cancer. Her daughter Mary speaks with a bevy of health care workers of various stratifications who assist her mother. From these sections, consider this example of Lanchester’s brand of realism as Mary is asked if her mother is being properly tended to: “There’s the GP. I mean the GPs. It’s difficult for them, they don’t know me, I’m just some woman ringing up, the district nurses are nice, they say they’ll come, they mean it when they say it, I don’t know, it’s just sometimes that you feel you’ve fallen down a crack, you’re sort of invisible.” We all could face such a moment, and this is largely why we read, for those moments when the author renders the world genuinely and convincingly, yet anew. Health services are an ultimate reality, as is child care. Both have never seemed more expensive or more complicated, whether the details are sharply observed but innocuous or a symptom of something more insidious. Corresponding examples are found in the nurse who Mary deems too old to be the furious texter that she is, and in Matya pointedly observing that many of the children she is paid to watch “were both spoilt and neglected…and while they were used to being ignored, and to going to almost any lengths to get attention as a result, they were not at all used to hearing the word ‘no’, especially not when it meant what it said.”

A final question then. Is vérité enough? One of the qualities that makes Winesburg, Ohio such a superior work of literature is its enduring value even as many of the things and people it describes have become all but extinct, historical footnotes. Regarding an ultra-contemporary literary portraiture such as Capital, one concerned with accuracy, with detailing a specific time and place, I cannot say whether or not it has the power to sustain and nourish intellectually in a way worthy of comparison to an established canonical work, but I will contend that it’s an impressive and ambitious novel.

It also bears a reaffirmation of that allusion to the Joycean metaphor of the musical brocade. Like Sherwood Anderson’s book, John Lanchester’s is concerned with the unironic truth and with what are often called the common people. Anderson’s is a meticulous micro-opus, what is sometimes now referred to via the shorthand “sepia-toned,” an understated work played with a softly strummed guitar and timeworn banjo, the background whisking of a handmade wooden drum, a choir of townspeople in single-voiced dirge, a folky and foreboding Americana. Lanchester’s is a cacophony perhaps more in the tradition of popular music, where his country’s combinatory legacy concerning the common people moves from The Beatles to Paul Young to Pulp, from The Clash to Arctic Monkeys to Dizzee Rascal and M.I.A. Capital is then the opposite of a parlor trick. It is a populist projection for those caught up in the flow of the many meanings of its title. It is a paean to citizenry. The Greek derivation of protagonist is “first struggler,” but here the strugglers are diffuse and diverse, a multifarious mélange. This is a novel of the many, the distillation of a public that is not necessarily a community (as it is in Anderson’s construction). Given our contemporaneous world, Capital is then best described as deft but never a deception.

Review of Vow by Rebecca Hazelton

Rebecca Hazelton. Vow. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2013. 73 pp. $15.95, paper.

Rebecca Hazelton’s second poetry collection, Vow, is a testament to the cyclical nature of everything. Though the title implies an ending of one life and the beginning of another, when Hazelton says, “Morning and all is forgotten,” she is lying to us. These poems are very much preoccupied with a revolving history, with modern-day mythology reborn from the ancients, with looking back on relationships and seeing patterns everywhere.

Rather than dividing the book into sections, Hazelton utilizes recurring titles and subjects. She has several Books: “Book of Memory,” “Book of Janus,” “Book of the Wild,” “Book of Denial,” among others. There are also several personas: Elise, who behaves much more like an omnipresent Muse than a typical poetic persona, and Fox and Rabbit, whose intimate predator-prey relationship is closely dissected, the organs then pinned for us to examine. “When I cut off your head / I feel better, / when my hands are inside you, / it’s warm,” Hazelton says in “Fox Dresses Rabbit.” Through these interwoven titles and subjects, we begin to discern a narrative arc. Much like undressing a lover, we slowly uncover the pulsing story that fueled these poetic outbursts. The most revealing poems in this set are “On First Sleeping With Elise in the Presence of My Ex-Husband,” “Fox Assesses Rabbit’s Damage,” and the titular “Vow”: a love triangle, a withered marriage that leads inevitably to divorce, a demented suburbia. No one gets out alive in this world.

Hazelton rips out the raw insides of domestic life and holds them out for us to find omens in, like animal entrails or tea leaves. “Vow” in particular takes a scathing stance on marriage; by the time the couple in her poem are standing at the altar, “They sw[ear] to uphold the bonds / and the principles / and the yelling. / They sw[ear] to oral sex.” She works in their deterioration so quietly that by the time we reach the end, we find ourselves rejecting “the standard narration” just as much as she does. She is at her funniest in her moments of rebellion against the middle-class suburbs. “I am a wolf, I run / to the manicured edge / of the cul de sac,” she writes in “Book of the Wild.” The suburbanites “just like to watch wolves / and see them do wolf things.” The lens she uses to focus on the ways in which a relationship naturally decays extends outward and looks slant at the world of too-small lawns and streets named after trees:

     Today the radishes are colored like a girl’s mouth
     and their tops wag from my bag as I walk home,
     announcing, Here is a woman who loves
     a good produce stand,
even though I will pull them
     from my refrigerator’s hydrator in three weeks, faded
     […] That night, I overhear
     a woman say there should be a law against hunting
     predators, how she hates the hunters who snare and shoot
     wolves, for example, and I know she’s really thinking
     of her two black labs

This excerpt from “Not Here to Buy the Leopard” is representative of various poignant moments in which Hazelton skillfully maneuvers between the tame and the wild, the manufactured and the natural. Her lines are shot through with animal imagery, and more than once, there is an animal skin draped on someone’s body. In “Elise Enters the House of Triumph,” Hazelton writes:

     When I try to talk
                            about the past, it becomes a jaguar throw
                                                                             wrapped around
                                                      your bare shoulders,
     illegal plush, musky repulse

The pages of her book are canvassed with words, often (but not always) rejecting traditional line breaks and lengths in favor of manipulating white space. While this technique could read as inanely experimental or abstract, Hazelton deftly uses it to her advantage, her words taking us seamlessly through the margins of the page and surprising us at every line break. These poems read fluidly and fast-paced, a nice contrast to her slower, more conventional ones.

Though most of this book asks us to examine dichotomies, Hazelton does not sharply juxtapose any thing against another. She is gradual in her writing, and the book is most powerful when taken as a whole, not unlike a book of prose. In this way she saves us from jarring contrasts, and we instead get a sense of a balanced fluidity in this world of women and men and animals Hazelton has created. The animals, especially, embody the old and the new, the feral and the tame:

     There were ponies in the fields
     searching for grass in the acres of snow,
     their winter coats
     shaggy and Miocene
                           and I wondered if somewhere
                                                   there was a sugar cube for me.
                                                   Yes, I said it.

“I Love His Profile” is unafraid of tackling the wild landscape, and though one poem is titled, “The Pastoral Is Difficult,” Hazelton is once again toying with us—she moves seamlessly between the civilized, paved world and the world of free-ranging wild animals. Perhaps her most haunting union of these two is titled “Those Horses,” in which a field trip to the foggy coast leaves children and teachers beholding the swollen corpse of a horse, its mate “nuzzling its slack flank.” This moment perhaps reflects the regret in “Elise Enters The House of Triumph,” that of a friend/lover leaving just before “meth g[ives] [her] cheekbones to die for.” Retreating “into smug sobriety, the snug safety / of a circadian life,” the speaker is displaying a type of cowardice the horse mate would never even consider.

Her final poem, “Love Poem for What Wasn’t,” has a sister in the book’s beginning, “Love Poem for What Is.” Here she torques our expectations derived from these titles. “Love Poem for What Is” takes the concreteness of the words “what is” and shatters it at our feet. It is a poem about love as utter domination, as sickening excess, as emptiness all around you:

     as if your tongue burst into a rash of red sequins,
     as if everyone can see your stutter in the air,
     a staccato love you, love you, and nothing
     in the world standing in that space to receive it.

We are left shaken and warped, prepared for the way Hazelton goes on to compare love with constriction and relationships to pelted wildcats in the rest of the collection. But by the time we finish “Love Poem for What Wasn’t,” close the book, and let her last few lines smolder for a while, we reach a different conclusion. Rather than experiencing an unsatisfying drop-off from what has certainly been both an arousing and significantly depressing collection, we get an eerie sense of closure. She gives us a bald admission of real emotion that doesn’t end on a wrong note. “This is my anger at my own fear / of mercy,” she says. “This will have to do.” We suddenly see poetic anxiety rush out and feel empathy, rather than damnation, at those last lines. Vow gives us the energy to read through sensual pain and to nod our heads in acknowledgement, but to also remember it is only seasonal.

Review of Mira Corpora by Jeff Jackson

Jeff Jackson. Mira Corpora. Columbus, OH: Two Dollar Radio, 2013. 186 pp. $16.00, paper.

Acclaimed playwright Jeff Jackson has written a novel, Mira Corpora, starring his adolescent self, who escapes an abusive home to roam through a surreal and lawless wasteland filled with teenage hobo camps, haunted amusement parks, and pill-popping oracles. By leading his fictional surrogate through this wild, fictional world, Jackson hopes to blur the lines between his memory and his imagination. Obscuring them is essential to his novelistic enterprise, as an introductory author’s note explains:
     This novel is based on journals I kept growing up. When I rediscovered these      documents, they helped me confront the fragments of my childhood and      understand that the gaps are also part of the whole. Sometimes, it’s been      difficult to tell my memories from my fantasies, but that was true even then.      Throughout I’ve tried to honor the source material and my early attempts to      wrest these experiences into language.
In an interview with Tin House, he further explains that, while writing he “was less concerned about the character sharing [his] literal experiences than making sure there was an emotional honesty underlying everything.”

Jackson’s ambitions for his novel call to mind Alasdair’s Gray’s novel, Lanark, which juxtaposes its hero’s emotionally fraught real life with his counterparts’ journey through a surreal dystopia where real-life pain is eventually healed. Is this what Jackson means when he says that emotional honesty underlies his novel’s fantasy? Mira Corpora entertains this possibility in its early stages. Before memory is abandoned for fantasy, stark depictions of the domestic sphere evince the trauma that informs the narrator’s journey:
     Somewhere between my shoulder blades there’s a burn the shape of a      clothing iron. My mother enters the room with a jar of salve…. Once the      bandage is secure, she turns on the bedside lamp to better examine her      handiwork. My mother starts to sob…. [A]fter a few minutes, I reach out and      rest my hand on her shoulder. She slaps at me. “You little shit!” she shrieks.
This and other memories of child abuse make the narrator’s subsequent flight feel both emotionally honest and vital for survival. They also feed the reader’s expectation that, by escaping into a green world, the narrator will transform; that his trauma and repression will be inverted in the surreal world; and that expression and healing will blossom from his wounds.

Ironically, the ravaged, dystopian world the narrator flees to is no greener than the one he escapes. He returns from his journey with only more wounds, so that mourning his late mother proves an Olympian feat. Unable to summon compassion for his mother, he feignedly celebrates her death between eruptions of involuntary grief: “I stamp down the grave until it blends seamlessly with its surroundings…. I crack open a fresh celebratory jug of something or other. It’s probably morning when I find myself weeping in the middle of the woods…. I plunge my hands into the hole and…pull out the silver [cremation] urn.”

Clearly, Mira Corpora does not share Lanark’s sense of emotional triumph. This is not to say that defeat cannot also be honest. If confusion and defeat are the mental states that Jackson wishes to honestly represent in his novel, the domestic scenes bookending the narrator’s journey depict them with honesty. The journey is another story, however.

Throughout his travels, the narrator infuses his present-tense reportage with affect and bravado. A prime example is his experience with a bootleg cassette mysteriously mailed to the address-less cardboard box he sleeps in. Listening to the tape is an epiphany, “like being turned inside-out and finding the story of your life written on your inner organs…like having your blood leeched to remind you that you have blood.” His devotion to this tape is adolescent in its zeal. It becomes a source of solidarity between him and a band of fellow teen vagabonds; later, it inspires a manhunt for the tape’s reclusive author. Yet, the narrator never elaborates on the tape’s redemptive power. Has being eviscerated cleansed him of inner turmoil? Or has it increased his turmoil, engendering rage and wanderlust? For that matter, what is the story of his life written on his inner organs? As the narrator emerges from each consecutive pitfall appearing more detached than before, the reader increasingly suspects that he is hiding from these questions—hiding the fact the he does not know the answers. This is not emotional honesty.

Still, a wiser, more honest narrator or author looking back on his adolescence could expose these concealed emotional truths. This is a bildungsroman after all, albeit one occasionally obscured by flourishes of fantasy. The narrator’s fraught homecoming contains the potential for an emotionally honest reflection. As he struggles to mourn, he could, in the author’s words, confront the fragments of the past. Instead, he conceals them further. Like his mother’s cremation urn, his emotions are buried, in this case, by art: “Slowly I screw up my courage. I want to write some version of what’s happened to me, but I have no idea what sort of story might spill out.”

À la A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Mira Corpora concludes with a fragment of the narrator’s early writings. This surreal sketch bears no relation to the narrator’s experience aside from the conspicuous image of an orange tree he saw on his journey. Rather than providing psychological insight or motioning towards emotional closure, this frivolous creative act is meant to seem heroic. If there is triumph to be found here, it is fantasy’s triumph over memory. But if Jackson’s imagination has silenced his broken heart, where does that leave his alleged emotional honesty?

Review of The Vicious Red Relic, Love by Anna Joy Springer

Anna Joy Springer. The Vicious Red Relic, Love: A Fabulist Memoir. Seattle, WA: Jaded Ibis Press, 2011. 202 pp. $18.00, paper.

Anna Joy Springer’s fantastical memoir, The Vicious Red Relic, Love, is a thickly layered exploration of love, lust, loss, and grief—and of the differing selves called into play as imperfect humans navigate desire. The beginning of the book lays out its improbable task: The primary narrator, Nina, is to create a guidebook for a creature she has fashioned to go back in time, to be with her first female lover, [Gil], as the lover commits suicide. The creature, named Winky in imaginary real time and Blinky in imaginary past time, must negotiate a series of enchanted forests, each offering different enticements, pleasures, and dangers. Associated with each forest is a document or set of documents through which Winky and the reader may piece together not only the lovers’ story but also its parallels in (a reimagined) ancient Sumerian literature, most notably the loss of a partner in The Epic of Gilgamesh and the netherworld sequence in Inanna’s Descent to the Underworld. (Though “Nina” may be seen as a derivative of “Inanna” and “[Gil]” as an abridgment of “Gilgamesh,” character correlations are fluid throughout the book.)

For all its lavish use of fable, The Vicious Red Relic also functions as a snapshot of 1990s San Francisco—specifically, of the world of a third-wave-feminist college student who is also a sex worker, punk-rock musician, and fledgling lesbian. Nina’s efforts to juggle these identities become ever more complicated as she enters into a love-and-sex relationship with [Gil], an archetypal Bad Girl—damaged, addicted, brilliant. Dazzled by [Gil’s] past as cult/abuse survivor, street thief, and prostitute, and by revelatory sex (“I felt like a muscular black-winged horse had flown out from between my thighs, then burst open like a star”), she attempts to fulfill her partner’s violent fantasies, learning in the process “that in my heart I could be anyone, even the ‘father,’ and that I owned nothing, nothing of me, not a damn thing.”

The Relic unfolds as a seeming miscellany of narrative shorts (some clearly fictional, others disturbingly realistic) punctuated by journal entries, class notes, poems, doodles, drawings, collages, and other “artifacts” that may or may not be historically authentic as memoir. The work is, in Barthes’s famed terminology, a writable text, one that flaunts its artifice and dares the reader to assemble its meanings, irreducibly plural. As such, it doesn’t lend itself to summary review. A conclusive understanding of [Gil], for example, is thwarted by (among other things) the character’s dissociative identity disorder, an irreducible plurality in itself. How much of her reported lethal past is “real,” and does it matter that we (and Nina and Winky and quite likely Anna Joy Springer) will never know?

And the author’s disregard for the “sanctity” of classic master works—Nina’s first reading of Gilgamesh is titled “How to Read the Ancient or Hackneyed”—reminds us that even what is carved in stone may prove to be writable, that foundational texts can be shown to have feet of clay. The extant official version of this work, dating from between 1300 and 1000 BCE, was selectively constructed from multiple stories, many of which survive on tablets and fragments of various origins. The earlier stories do not form a coherent narrative, and significant lacunae in both these and the sanctioned redaction invite significant editorial intervention. Springer’s radical rewrite is thus a revision of a revision of a revision for which there is no urtext. The official version of Gilgamesh is a forcibly unified myth in the service of ancient Mesopotamian kings—why shouldn’t a twenty-first-century queer feminist writer adapt/expand/transform it for her own aesthetic and political purposes? Why shouldn’t Inanna, who functions in Gilgamesh primarily as a narrative device (the petty, punishing bitch-goddess), be restored as epic hero, as the only deity who braves the realm of death and yet returns to the heavens?

The audacity of The Vicious Red Relic, Love is less a matter of intricate design and daring appropriation than of Anna Joy Springer’s willingness to acknowledge the book as memoir. The work is a study in pain, abjection, fear, betrayal, and devastating tragedy—familiar themes in feminist confessional writing—but the protagonist and her lover are at times cruel, indifferent, hateful, bored, funny, manipulative, and/or self-destructive, both within and without the theater of their BDSM. While Nina and [Gil] are clearly not documentation but representation, fictive enactors of “womanhood” through manifold (and sometimes startling) gender identities, their basis in real-world lovers makes for a kind of intimacy that not all readers will welcome. In this book of shattered boundaries, the line between public and private may be the most challenging to forego.

As must be clear from the above commentary, in many ways The Relic is a classically postmodern text, forsaking the idealizations of literary realism and moving between registers with disconcerting ease. If, as Lyotard has suggested, the postmodern aesthetic calls for presenting the unpresentable, this fable of impossible love and terrible death very nearly achieves that unattainable goal. But if a hallmark of postmodern literature is cool and ironic detachment, the play of surfaces without concern for depth, The Vicious Red Relic, Love defies categorization. Numerous reviewers have attested to its pathos, and Springer herself has described the work as intentionally emotive:
     A writer has to theatricalize, to teach a reader how to read this particular      book, to bring a reader into a psychic state, to work on the reader’s nervous      system, to pace the experience, to guide the reader but not overguide, to give      moments of crescendo, moments of rest.
Her aim is not merely to produce a tragic spectacle but to engage the mournful imagination—as prelude to critical reflection.

Through Springer’s commemorative art, we face the certain and irrevocable loss that shadows all human life. We are reminded that bereavement triggers more than individual sorrow, that the anticipation and experience of loss are intersubjective, socially shared. In this difficult book, sharing functions as an occasion not for sentimentality (Winky and Blinky notwithstanding) but for raising difficult questions. What do we think and feel in relation to death, and why? Do memorials heal us? Have they typically provided an artificial closure, a way of avoiding the presence of absence? In the performance of mourning, how do we speak of (and for) the lost person, the lost body? To what extent is human subjectivity a precipitate of lost attachments, physical and emotional? Despite multiple personae, do we share with the ancients a core experience of connection and sorrow? The Relic prompts us to consider how cultures have taught us to express—and to suppress—our love, our sexuality, our grief.

Review of You Are Not Dead by Wendy Xu

Wendy Xu. You Are Not Dead. Cleveland: Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2013. 67 pp. $15.95, paper.

You, the reader. You, the loved one. You, the speaker’s best friend. You, a football. You, a river. You, the moon. You are and are not the “you” in Wendy Xu’s You Are Not Dead. I know this because when reading this rhetorically complex but unbelievably casual collection of poems, I embodied the position of the subject just as easily as I did that of the speaker. Take, for instance, the final line of “Like Whatever Makes You Not A Statue”: “Everyone is laughing but only / you should know why.” In this poem, the “you” has been addressed in terms of a close relationship (whether romantic or platonic) near the poem’s beginning and suspended towards the poem’s center. The final use of the second person occurs after a discussion of the speaker’s own dreams: “about a ferris wheel rolling away…on a gigantic tour / of North America…My mouth is a peach pit of everything / I’ve ever said.” Due largely to its placement following such internally-dependent details, the final “you” jolts us out of the intimate address and into a register in which the speaker could be considered to be talking to herself. Such a shift muddies the identity of the “you” in, I think, a rather satisfying way.

These highly lyrical poems are organized mostly in blocks—that is, stanzaic breaks are a rarity here. This is due, partially, to the emphasis Xu places on the line break, but it is also reflective of each poem’s meditation as its own individual and individualized experience. Each box of text contains its own little world in which neither you nor the speaker is dead. And each of these text boxes is replete with elements of the natural world: iron, trees, sails, light, birds, the moon, sand, horses, wolves, rivers, teeth. Underlying this obsession with environment is a pervasive anxiety about the apocalypse and its terms. The speaker of “You Are Not Who They Wanted You to Be” asserts, “when the actual untelevised apocalypse / comes I don’t want / to be ready, a capsized tugboat blinking in the harbor / is how you’ll know I stayed.” The speaker’s indefatigability is evident here—despite the very real fear of the world as we know it ending, the speaker is determined to remain in it, to remain in these text boxes, in the natural world, surrounded by its material things.

Reading these poems, I was spellbound by shared moments of suspension—the ordinary events that hold within them the same love, or pain, as a dramatic one. “I drink my coffee and wait / for what is next,” Xu writes in “What It Means to Stay Here,” and we are almost there with the speaker, waiting on the next grace- fully simple line, waiting for our own “you” to walk through the door and tell us plainly about their day. Throughout You Are Not Dead, we anticipate the next thing that is not this thing, while simultaneously reveling in the moment at hand. “Hold on, I promise / it’s happening,” the poet swears in “Requirements for Seeing a Valley,” and we hold out for the poem’s end, for the world to un-pause, for the following poem to affirm, “Here you are. Here / you have always been.”

Xu’s navigation of moments of suspension is not the only way our expectations are manipulated in this collection; rhetorical play is at the heart of her work. The rhetoric of You Are Not Dead is often one of disavowal—of what’s important being talked around, not about. Such rhetoric invites the reader to explore what’s not being said through the explicit statement of its lack. These poems almost say, “Here are ten ways to say what isn’t happening,” and this inductive approach results in an unexpected emotional depth. The collection opens, for instance, with “Several Altitudes of Not Talking,” a contradiction in itself, since the poem is colloquial, conversational—even friendly. “Several Altitudes” is, like all of the poems in You Are Not Dead, heavily enjambed; the first two lines read, “You are part of other people but not / like them,” exposing a certain distance from yet fascination and identification with the world around the speaker. These poems, truly, are part of the world but not / like it. Here, the ordinary is filled with the poet’s own awe and charm: “A very important car / with sirens rumbled by and sounded / exactly right.” What a totally obvious yet profound claim—that a car sounds, “exactly right,” exactly like itself. How deft of Xu to draw our attention to the inevitable aptness of the world.

Xu’s poems deftly navigate the space between the often-obscured personal and the dominant external. The concrete world is in the spotlight while the personal and confessional take place off stage—far away enough that we can see hints of it, but not so close that we comprehend the details we’re presented with in a narrative sense. “In June Like We Said But I Fell Out of Love” indicates, for instance, in its title, a past between the speaker and a lover, but the poem, even in its opening, goes about avoiding the subject, diverting us to a seemingly-alternate anecdote: “Once I went to a costume party for the end / of the world where I was a meteor and my friend / a blue jay.” The speaker and this friend drink tequila and talk about happiness on a rooftop while their costumes come apart. By the time we reach the poem’s final line (“So we stayed up there in the dark for a while / thinking about what to think”), we have entered and exited a moment that appears to be narratively separate from that of the title—the character in question in the body of the poem is a friend, presumably not a lover. And are we in June? Has the speaker fallen out of love, or is this scene one of a romance’s conception?

Xu plays further with our expectations in “Dear Future Where Everything is Hypothetical Except for Joy,” in which she toys with causality by utilizing anaphoral “if” statements that, for the most part, resist resolution through a flirtation with the “then.” Occasionally “then” appears, but mostly it is implied, or even skirted away from, as is the case in the lines, “If later the streetlights shatter me / into pure amazement.” Also at work in this poem is a sense of detachment as the speaker looks in on herself at a party scene. Someone has fallen in love. Someone is holding a glass up to the light. And in this poem I, like the speaker, want to preserve some element of the world’s unpredictability—I am with her when she declares, “if it is supposed to be a surprise don’t / ever tell me.”

Ending the collection is an eleven-poem series in which each piece is entitled, “We Are Both Sure to Die,” the second poem of which ends on a particularly telling passage:

     …We are not dead.
     We still adventure in a completely
     original way. Just coconut or
     wearing stripes for dinner.
     Good weather or hello.
     I have been waiting forever
     to meet you with all these books.
     The sky no longer angry.
     How does it feel now
     with your head still stuck
     inside the amazing sun?

Fascinatingly, this passage contains the material things of Xu’s and our world—coconut, stripes for dinner, good weather, books, the sky, “the amazing sun”—while simultaneously addressing the speaker and reader’s own absorption in these concrete elements in the final lines. Suddenly we are not visiting these poems so much as we are “stuck inside the amazing sun” of them—we don’t get to choose whether or not we live here, whether or not we are going to die. In this sense, Xu’s collection is entirely inevitable. And this inevitability made me leave these poems really needing to return to them—needing to go outside and look at trees and the moon, and appreciate the world, and then laugh at it for being so simple, and hug people, and say hello, and drink my coffee in solitude, all at once.

Review of Reading Emily Dickinson in Icelandic by Eva Heisler

Eva Heisler. Reading Emily Dickinson in Icelandic. Tucson, AZ: Kore Press, 2012. 114 pp. $15.95, paper.

Reading Emily Dickinson in Icelandic houses poems written by Heisler during a nine-year stay in Iceland after having received a Fulbright grant in 1997. Within the collection, prose poems slowly expand and condense, as Heisler attempts to apply structure to her experience yet fails innumerable times in a struggle to understand the trills of the Icelandic language, the faces and attitudes of its inhabitants, and her own self so displaced she is nearly disembodied. Compact lines of prose give way to lines more dispersed and scattered across the page, forms flickering over the harsh, mysterious, and sublime landscape of Iceland, embodied in the flat faces of its inhabitants, particularly in the poet’s lover Steinunn. I found myself startled by breaks in prose and increased abstractions, then brought back to level ground when prose returns in the final poem. There is a movement from the physicality of Iceland to hazy mindscapes of ghosts and lost women like Persephone and Eurydice. The poet speaks to “Persephone in the Winter Palace” in couplets whose simple and predictable line breaks reflect the straightforwardness of the story that is also her own:

     You fell in love with your husband
     because he knew a lost language;

     because his incantations and promises
     resembled your dreams of God.

     But you have been in this winter palace
     for eleven winters,

     and you have acquired neither the language
     nor a shape.

     You are inside the palace
     but outside the door.

Such a love is paralleled in the speaker’s love for Steinunn, whose palace—Iceland—is also the place where the speaker resides but does not fully reside. Just as the poet fails to fully understand and keep Steinunn, she fails to ever fully integrate herself into Iceland’s landscape, halted by mistranslations or, at other times, an inability to even begin to translate.

There is a sense that Steinunn is one with the foreign landscape in “Map and Hand,” and the poet’s attempts at understanding or mapping the two result in confusion: the land is “an emptiness that I cannot read—like you. You map the / emptiness because I cannot tell the difference between / my feelings for the view and my feelings for you.”

The foreigner’s inability to separate the person from the place further emphasizes how travel disorients the traveler, allowing even once familiar things to take on new meanings. Heisler examines flea market finds like aromatherapy “Fizz Balls” in “Something to Finish”: “Encountering these in the States, I would have folded / into myself. But in Iceland, the kitsch doesn’t claim me. / I finger the gaudy beads; they don’t take the shape of coffins—I am here and some place else.” This strange sense of being present but absent, here but not-here, becomes a consistent and ironically grounding element in the collection. Heisler’s relationship with this displacement is ambivalent but perhaps ultimately soothing; Heisler, at the end of the four-sectioned collection’s first section, sighs, “At last, elsewhere.”

While Heisler technically has the ability to translate Icelandic to English, this ability cannot transcend cultural differences, just as a word cannot perfectly embody the actual thing or experience. Her lover can only speak and write so much English, and she as the poet fails to evoke foreignness through the necessary use of recognizable words: “I know that you write not what you want but what you can. / I have the words; you, the place.” There’s despair, and loneliness, in the inability to translate, yet once the thing has been translated, there is perhaps a deeper despair at having simplified something ineffable: “Today you look at me and the look is like a bruise / on wallpaper. I am exhausted by the looking. I blame you, / the stranger, for no longer being strange.”

Steinunn marks an ambivalence Heisler has for Iceland: while she wants to find ways to connect and really understand the place and its people, she also yearns to maintain a distance in order to admire it. Once again, this calls to mind our human relationship with poetry: we long to translate our feelings, but sometimes in decoding such feelings, we can ruin them. At the same time, Heisler enjoys a sort of limbo with Steinunn in that Steinunn embodies Iceland but also speaks English. When Steinunn is fully Icelandic in “Accent,” the bridge to Heisler falls: “Speaking Icelandic, Steinunn no longer charms: wooly / syllables exclude me; our private architecture disappears / and in its place stands a stall roofed with shields.”

Heisler’s strained relationship with Steinunn extends to her relationship with all Icelanders, a mix of attractive strangeness but troublesome distance and aloofness. Early on, Iceland’s people are idealized pastoralists in their boot-wearing and harvest feasts but also gruff critics of the materialist North American lifestyle riddled with wasted leftovers and aluminum foil. The color red there is not of Coca-Cola, but of red cabbage. In response to such coldness and difference, Heisler expresses a constant need for sweetness and sugar cubes throughout the collection, amidst the spit balls, rotten shark, and singed sheep heads of Iceland and the crumpled receipts, endless to-do lists, and tangled extension cords of the U.S. This continues to encapsulate a greater trope of yearning for human connection despite issues of translation. There are moments, though, when the poet triumphs simultaneously within and despite such list-heavy poems of objects riddled with strained meanings, as in “Imagining the Last on the First”:

     … This isn’t about letting you
     know me. It is about persuading you that where it is not
     blue, it is gold. I do not speak of crumpled receipts and
     the tangle of extension cords. “You’re awake!” you
     remarked in the autumn, as if this were sleight of hand.
     This isn’t about letting you know me. This is about keeping you
     from sleep.

There is gold, and beauty, to be found in between objects and in moments shared with others. Whereas Steinunn seems to lose her mystery and allure, Iceland remains different from the United States, but also the same in that it is not the physical objects that matter, but the human impressions left on them. In “What I Remember,” Heisler further emphasizes what she finds to be most important:

     What I remember is neither the words nor the light in
     the kitchen but the press of a hand against my forehead.
     What I remember is not the color of eyes but what it felt
     like to be seen. What I remember is not the overstuffed
     luggage but the door, and you leaning against it. What I
     remember is not computing sums in the margins of my
     notebook, but three words and a grove of birch that I
     mistook for a herd of ghost horses. What I remember is
     not the new wardrobe but a fling of red and white.