Archive for May, 2008

The Most of It

Tuesday, May 27th, 2008

by Mary Ruefle
Wave Books 2008
Reviewed by Melinda Wilson

Responsorial

A Theater of Conflict

The insect, perhaps an ant, within the outline of the barren moat, is his entire life, subject to the insistence of his instinct to escape. What then keeps him from it? What is it that looms outside the tunnel of our eyes? Frantic and obsessed, the ant attacks the border, and once on the other side, he is met with another. We are monuments for each other.

Naming

I call them goats, turkeys, cows, babies. Naming is building. A relationship grows with names if we name with great care. They are names of affection, and I love them all.

The Poet’s Great Envy

That we cannot fly. I disagree. Just as birds can fly they can fall. Like legged creatures fall, birds can fall, only the fall from flight is far. Much farther than we can ever fall. There is much to be envied then in our closeness to the ground, our permanent tether to the weight of our bodies. Thus, my fear of planes. Birds too are tethered to the ground.

Imitations

Repeating the name of one’s favorite bird several times over gives the impression of imitation, creates beautiful whispers, chirps of praise. Try sparrow, for instance. “SPARE O,” Ruefle suggests. Tell me that isn’t beautiful. You can’t do that with a woodpecker.

Journeys

That one’s skull contains the whole earth, no, the universe. That going bald means coming closer to the center. We must get to the bottom of our content. I start by sending the air to the bottom of my lungs. When it returns it is warm and wet, fuller than before.

Respectfully

Because it is difficult to respect death, its tearing persistence, we respect instead the sadness it leaves us with. Melancholy may seem bland, but it is strong. I bow my head to melancholy and its ability to shape our grieving into a quiet celebration.

Cures

A beer in the morning can sometimes do the trick despite its having been the poison, and maybe Ruefle was thinking of softer things.

You are My Religion

What I love best. And prayer is most certainly poetry, writing it and reading it. Ruefle composes beautiful psalms.

No Substitute for a Human Lifetime

But the poetry comes close to the most of it.

Tags: 8 stars, Mary Ruefle, Melinda Wilson, Wave Books
Posted in reviews

The Floating Bridge

Sunday, May 25th, 2008

by David Shumate
University of Pittsburgh Press 2008
Reviewed by David Sewell

Floater

the floating bridge One of the more flaccid criticisms of poetry these days is that it involves a sort of cool kids’ club wherein poets write poems for other poets who write poems for other poets who write poems for other poets, and so on and so on, and none of it sells. The idea evoked is that of looking into a mirror into another mirror ad infinitum, while all the while keeping one eye on the witty, handsome, urbane, not-as-judgmental-and-conceited-as-everyone-says person doing all this looking. Anyway. The other side of the proverbial pineapple upside-down cake is that there is another kind of poetry—one that appeals to a wider audience and one that, therefore, sells. Absent from this wider audience, of course, are those cool, cool poets writing for other cool, cool poets.

That I happen to be cooler than a polar bear’s entrails (shout out to Francis the Savannah Chitlin’ Pimp) casts me less as the denizen of an igloo than of an overpriced Brooklyn apartment with inefficient steam radiators. But this review isn’t meant to be entirely about me. Hullo, hullo, then, to David Shumate (no relation) and his new book of prose poems called The Floating Bridge. As I’m (obviously) still in the process of reviewing the book, and my bathtub is a sort of exaggerated Petri dish at the moment, I can’t say for sure whether the book floats, though I’m willing to wager that it does.

Of course, you’re likely ratiocinating right now, it’s all a matter of relative densities, and seeing as the density of a perfect-bound acid-free-paper book, even one published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, is less than that of… Let me stop you right there, Poindexter. What I mean is that there’s nothing too heavy here, nothing too deep or dense or…like I already said, heavy. To wit: The title poem operates as a sort of metaphor for poetry (“Sometimes the bridge is small and inconspicuous. Like a poem.”), though, unfortunately, it’s not one your penny-loafers will be able to scamper across without becoming at least a little bit wet. The poem itself floats, being that it’s neither hammered down to any sort of reality nor able to rise high enough to be of much interest to anyone in the trees. Its failure to either launch or burrow is illustrative of the book as a whole’s major weakness.

The unbearable lightness of many of these poems is just that—unbearable. For instance, the idea behind “Trapped Inside a Haiku Poem” (mind you, a haiku poem, not a haiku refrigerator or a haiku elevator) is exactly as the title reads. And the payoff? Robes, beards, a cabin, an open door, Basho—just what we’d expect, and nothing that we wouldn’t. (Is a duel between Basho and Buson using mackerel as weapons too much to ask for?) “The Amateur Zen Master” forgoes beards but throws in a bald head and sandals and name-drops the tree-falling and one-hand-clapping koans, then has the spamminess to end, “Somewhere far away a whole forest comes crashing down.”

Whether employing wobbly metaphors or just shopworn ones, the poems’ tendency to assume some semi-dopey supposition and then imagineer twelve or fifteen prose lines exploring it in the most obvious detail is almost always unrewarding. A few examples: taking a bus to Gomorrah, being Gertrude Stein’s gardener, happening across a “dying park,” meeting one’s past selves, getting a call from Sancho Panza, paying a visit to Dalí, paying a visit to Picasso. These poems are too polite, too limp, and too stale to have much bite. Their musing nature smacks less of the high art of poetry than of the low kitsch of sentiment and well-wishes.

Calling someone’s poems musings is, to me anyway, a call to arms, and if such an attack were leveled at me or mine, I fear I’d have no choice but to bid adieu to détente and stand to defend their honor in a most chivalrous manner, as those who truly know me know is my wont. So, though I do dare to call a musing a musing here, I do so with the full understanding that calamity may hence befall me. Though, to be perfectly honest, judging from the poems on display, I’m fairly certain that, were I to meet their maker, he would instead attempt to hug me, and…no, no no, that won’t do either. This is sticky business, this.

Why exactly Shumate is such a dedicated suitor of the prose poem I can only speculate, but, unfortunately, the prose form employed here only encourages an intellectually and poetically lazy sort of poem. Too often the poems lean on extended metaphors, such as the floating bridge, that go either nowhere or exactly where the non-trepanned reader always expected them to. In “Metaphors” he says, “It is pleasing to know there are so many metaphors in this world.” I have to respectfully disagree. For instance, I could do without the one in “The Island of Nirvana.” It begins, “Today I’m giving my students a multiple-choice test about the / island of Nirvana.” Then: “Its principal exports are flower and honey.” Sounds good to me. And I have a new bikini I’ve been dying to wear. Let’s go. Ahh, but wait. “This island is really a state of mind. And each day we / burn the boats that would ferry us ashore.” A bit of a downer, really, but at least now I know why I’m always wearing a bikini in my mind.

The other problem with a world full of metaphors, to be perfectly obvious about it, is that metaphors, by definition, stand in place of something else. In these poems, the metaphors are like stand-ins for roles that were never in the script—like, say, if a group of gin devotees biffed off from the local gin-palace and decided to launch an attack on the forestage of the nearby theater, variously vomiting on and groping each other throughout rehearsals. An ill-fated metaphor, no doubt, but were I to take up the rubric laid out in The Floating Bridge, before you can say, “Pass the gin, guvnor!” one of these valiant souls would be donning a red hat, one would be down on bended knee ruminating about the price of tube socks, and one would be twirling and twirling and twirling round the scenery until he realized that sometimes ’tis not the world going round that makes the difference, or some such simpering rubbish.

What I mean is that, too often, there simply is nothing behind the metaphors, no strong reason why they’re employed at all, except, perhaps, just grist for the mill. When the emperor’s thong is showing, well, it seems the jig is up. And the metaphors deployed here are too obvious and of common trade to be of any real use. The book as a whole rarely escapes the burden its commonality of thought and language imposes. One way to look at the poems would be to laud their straightforward, unself-conscious language and themes, but that would be wrong. That would be to turn poetry into a mentally disabled child whose every flatulence is worthy of a hearty round of applause. Which is not to cast aspersions at our hypothetical child. I would much rather sit in audience of his sonic performance than have to read books of poems that trade in tying bows around packages of comforting drivel and try to hug me through the pages in a confused Zen Buddhist I’m Okay, You’re Okay kind of way.

Because I don’t think this kind of thing is okay. In fact, I think that such poems—completely safe to leave in a newborn’s cage overnight, with no risk that the babe will try to choke on them or that they’ll come alive in the dark and sit on the little squeaker—perhaps, paradoxically, can only do harm to poetry, by painting the whole thing in the sort of soft light favored by art world maverick Thomas Kinkade. I don’t imagine they will have any effect whatsoever on the form, but I do think it’s worth noting that, perhaps in the world of poetry, if ever you find yourself standing on a floating bridge, it may just be that you missed the boat.

To focus the periscope a bit more on the poems, too often the prose sentences clunk on like an old Plymouth in need of a tune-up. “The Bedouins of Paris” begins with, “The city of Paris appeared to a band of Bedouins somewhere out in the Sahara.” Why not just say, “Paris appeared…” Unless, of course, he believes that, if “The city” were elided, the reader might think of…what? That Ilian rapscallion? That horse-faced heiress? That Aqua Netted hair band that would eventually spawn into Poison? The next poem in the section, “Spring in Paris,” begins, “They say that Paris is a magical city, especially in the spring.” Who does? Oh right, everyone. Forever. Though, again, why are “they” doing all the saying in the poem. Why not just say, “Paris is a magical city, especially in the spring”? A page or so later, “The Kissing Institute” (French kissing, get it?) starts with another whisper from the bushes: “I’m told there are institutes in Paris where you can learn the ancient art of kissing.” Really? By whom?

I keep wondering, why can’t he just say something, instead of telling us what someone else said? I want him to stand up and stand behind something, to have an actual idea, to take some chances, instead of loosing this endless parade of what-ifs on us. But, my hopes be dashed, for every page brings more and more toast in milk: “Perhaps only women should be allowed to live in Paris” (“The Gates of Paris”), or “They say the way to tell if a fish is fresh is to look it in the eye (“Fresh Fish”).

On top of that, there is entirely too much conjecture in these poems. Too many “maybes,” “ifs,” “likes,” and the sort. A poetry of the imagination can be great, but if one is employing the imagination for nothing greater than to personify the north wind, or if all one finds in imagining what it would be like to visit Dalí is that “he greets us as the door on seven-foot stilts” and there’s a swimming pool filled with vinegar, well, not much has been gained.

The ending of the Dalí poem reiterates a point I made above. It reads: “But we remind him we have far to / travel. And it’s late. We point to the clock on the wall as proof. It / is almost fully melted.” Another groaner, it’s consistent with many endings in this book, which are routinely clumsy and try entirely too hard to resonate and/or promote the P in poetry. Whether these bad endings ruin the poems depends on how you feel about the logic of double-jeopardy.

Ultimately, debating whether these poems are any good is to miss the point completely, if I can condescend so flabbily (I can—if I may, I mean). To piggy-back on the book’s central metaphor, they’re safely in the mainstream of poetry, flowing along somewhere in the middle, content not to rock the boat. No doubt, many people, relatively speaking, will read these poems and will find doing so a pleasurable experience. And many people, of a different sort, will bung their noses up in the air, scanning the firmament for the ghost of T.S. Eliot or Wallace Stevens flitting by, to carry them off to some more rarefied altitude. Who’s right? Who’s wrong? Who cares? What’s clear is that these aren’t important poems. Depending on who you are, that means either everything or nothing.

Tags: 5 stars, David Sewell, David Shumate, University of Pittsburgh Press
Posted in reviews

A Darker, Sweeter String

Friday, May 23rd, 2008

by Lee Sharkey
Off the Grid Press 2008
Reviewed by John Deming

Let’s Stay. Already Leaving.

a darker, sweeter string In his essay “Words of a Native Son,” James Baldwin explains that he once developed a fictional character by looking for and finding her in real people. This led to a greater revelation:

“I began to see that there would be very small
things that she would do and very peculiar
things that she would say to reveal her torment.
I began to see that this is what we all do, all
of the time, all of us, including you and me. That
whatever is really driving us is what can never, never,
never be hidden and is there to see if one wants
to see it.”

If the potential for this kind of understanding, even sympathy, is everywhere, it’s tempting to lapse into misunderstanding as to how/why so many earthly people possess such violent, imperious, even murderous impulses. “The trouble is, of course,” Baldwin continues, “that most of us are afraid of that level of reality.” And naturally, when fearful individuals seek the comfort of like-company, benevolence can easily go belly-up.

Much of Lee Sharkey’s new book reminds us of the extent to which the notion of “one vs. many” marks the natural flux of things. For example, the inevitable death of a beloved individual vs. the inevitable annihilation of the human race en masse. But Sharkey’s focused obsession on inevitability is never completely absent of hope. Hope emerges from an unfathomable blend of urgency and patience, which is embodied by the careful fragmentation of her poems:

This sack of skin
his eyes ever a window

in sleep transparent lids

his eyes
there is no time

“Time” is an important word in Sharkey. In these lines from “Unscripted,” our narrator watches a sleeping loved one. Literally, she watches him age. Sooner or later, this person will die. An overwhelming urgency clamors in, interrupted by the lateral stillness of the room (“the present is true to itself,” she writes later). It’s the potential of one passing instant against the whole abstract mass of time, and finally, the implication that moments must be seized in a way that suggests life, however transient, carries some form of value.

Sharkey’s anti-war bent is a logical component of this obsession. The urgency of action against time is central to anti-war movements; passion emerges from the sensation that an unjust war must be stopped now, not five minutes from now. If it ends now, a life might be spared. However inconsequential or sacrificial one life may be amid a massive military struggle, each casualty holds a profoundly singular identity, history, system of opinions and ideas, system of veins, organs and impulses. This individually is addressed when, our narrator, while demonstrating against the War in Iraq, is accosted by a brokenhearted Mom:

I have two children in the war and let me tell you: They are the heroes, you don’t deserve to walk this earth

A mouth pursed over in pain

I’ll take the opportunity to tell you about my family. My son’s no
“stupid soldier”—got a master’s degree. He went to Iraq to bring
democracy

This mother then backs away from the nobility of the cause, and we see the real struggle: “Do any of you know what it’s like to be up all night, every minute thinking…” Sharkey artfully, and from great distance, presents the contradiction that mother and protester want the same thing: for these children to be home. For mothers to be able to sleep at night. For the impossibly singular socio-political war monster to find itself more intuitively aligned with the tremendous sadness of every living person, particularly those with an incidental stake in the abstract business of humans killing other humans. Sometimes war is necessary or justified; many times it isn’t. Sharkey isn’t shy about taking sides: “I see what it would cost to see your country has betrayed you”.

Even though life can be cognized as valuable, Baldwin suggests, people are willing to destroy each other. Does this develop from a sense of anger at an irrespressible sense emptiness and meaninglessness? Is killing, as Don DeLillo’s unflappable hero in White Noise suggests, a way of storing up credits against one’s own death? Who can tell. There are grown children everywhere. They are confused. They emote. They deceive. They want. They claim territory. They build walls. They play war. They can’t conquer the abstract, but can perhaps conquer the concrete:

They build a wall around it. They call it their familiar. It tells them, you have to choose between your mother and your father

The kids throw stones. Now. Organize your anger and set out over the disfigured landscape

The stakes are high, because the very value of life comes into question. These boys, anger organized efficiently, are set to destroy the very obscurity of life. This is of course opposite the idea that the human ability to organize—to cognize at all—might be used to recognize suffering and develop a system of ethics. But brutality is fact in this asteroid-smash of a universe, and human beings can’t be expected to be an exception; Sharkey understands this. Without horror, we can’t frame virtue anyway; without death, we can’t frame life: “How beautiful is the gift of mourning.” All over the natural world, there is a thin line dividing pleasure and pain: “Desire so intense that she eats him / mandibles cracking his skull.” These things rely on each other.

The poet, of course, makes nothing explicit; with her space, her fragmentation and her open endings, she is already leaving us. So are the people she loves. She is sad. And thankfully, her fragmentation, her open-ended semi-prose stanzas and her effortless sense of distance offer a focused and alluring read. The poems are individually titled, but the book reads more like a series, a self-contained long poem, a sustained inspiration. “Unscripted,” an incredibly strong long poem in its own right, concludes with a carefully imagined flower in bloom:

cups
                  open
red lines the throat

                   at the base of the skull
a tangled flow
                                    a flower

There is brutality in these lines; when “red lines the throat,” we’re helpless to avoid considering a slashed throat, even a beheading. But at the base of an intact skull, blood flows in and out of the brain, allowing for conscious reason; flower is almost “flow”-er, or something that flows. The flow of blood and cells in one cognizant person is fused with the flow of time. Human cognition is tangled, but perpetually in bloom.

When Sharkey’s on, she disappears like vapor; in a few select cases, she disappears into recognizable poetics. For example, the first passage I quoted (in which the poet views a slumbering loved one) is followed by this line: “breathe in breathe out.” The use of breathing as a way to apportion time is wonderful, but the execution-by-caesura is predictable. Likewise for the Poetic diction in lines like: “Not a sound was coming from my mouth.” Nevertheless A Darker, Sweeter String is a book that is best read in repetition, cover to cover, and should be considered a focused, dramatic length of lyric; certain abstractions might fall short depending on your inclinations, but the occasions are rare.

Life, Whitman still teaches us, insists on itself. In “Song of Myself,” we see this in what the bard terms a “jetblack sunrise”—an incident where “four hundred and twelve” young prisoners of war are “brought out in squads and massacred.” They don’t all go quietly: “A youth not seventeen years old seized his assassin till two more came to release him, / The three were all torn, and covered with the boy’s blood.” Life insists on itself, and this becomes evident not only in the shaggy grasses that punch through each spring, but in the will of a near-butchered seventeen-year-old. The fact of brutality lends itself to fact of—the urgency of—survival. Whether skulls are cracked on the battlefield or in the mandibles of an insect-lover, Sharkey sees the war, the urgency, in nature:

lilies have risen

from mud for the surface

where the new leaves lie

So whether or not we learn to stop destroying ourselves is almost beside the point (Sharkey, in appropriate contradiction: “There is no hope to offer, and we offer none”). If we have the capacity, as Baldwin suggests, to look at people and see “what drives them,” we’d certainly witness blind hatred at some point or other. Yet to use cognition in order to insist on life is an end in and of itself–to perpetuate life, to survive because it is our business to survive. If ethics are an abstraction, they are our abstraction.

War happens on a massive scale, and pieces of writing about war tend to be equally massive. What you have in this book is, in the end, deeply personal–a soft reminder you’re only seconds away from decades of nostalgia, from telling yourself it’s a shame, I just got here and I’m already on the way out. Such sensations perhaps make the greatest case that life should never be considered expendable (and on a more immediate level, that lives should only be sacrificed for noble causes). Sharkey reminds us that the desire of the many who want to stay–and want others to stay–in spite of everything is perhaps our greatest contradiction, and that which makes us most valuable.

Tags: 7.5 stars, John Deming, Lee Sharkey, Off the Grid Press
Posted in reviews

God Particles

Wednesday, May 21st, 2008

by Thomas Lux
Houghton Mifflin 2008
Reviewed by David Sewell

Just in Time!

lux cover Within mere minutes of being handed this book by Coldfront’s own hyacinth boy and squirreling it in my man-style tote bag for safekeeping, things in my life started to fall apart. Common sense may argue that it is I and, more particularly, my puff adder of a mouth that’s responsible for all of my problems, but I’m not ready to let Thomas Lux off the hook yet.

“God knows, / there’s no reason for God to feel guilt,” the title poem sashays. Well, duh. I was saying that Lux may be to blame, not God. Anyway. “I think He was downhearted, weary, too weary / to be angry anymore, or vengeful, / or forgiving, and He wanted each of us, / and all the things we touch / and are touched by, / to have a tiny piece of Him, / though we are unqualified / for even a crumb of a crumb.”

So, yes, it would seem then that God is not the one to hang the seagull necklace on—I mean, he tried, creating me from some old dust, giving me a good go at it on my own. Even after he threw in the towel, with the blowing himself up and the precipitating the particles and everything. He tried. His conscience is clear. But it was just too late. I was busy touching those around me with Sewell particles, instead of God particles (which, as I’ve noted, were in my in-no-way-feminine tote, yet unread), and that has made all the difference. The “tender rain of Him” falling “on every cow, ladle, leaf, human, ax handle, swing set” had not come soon enough for some of us swing sets. As Lux says, we are unqualified for His particles. And Sewell particles are simply not good enough for girls with page-boy haircuts. It is not how He wanted it to be; it is how it is.

Speaking of which, I sometimes think it’s a good idea that they don’t let cars drive on the sidewalk. At any rate, in the interests of aversion therapy, I will now attempt something like a review of this book, even though it may very well curse to damnation anyone who grasps it, which you may want to keep in mind when considering a purchase. I’m not saying that, without a doubt, it will ruin your life to be within cat-swinging distance of this slim volume, but I do think caution is key in situations such as this. One must be so careful these days.

Unfortunately, the darkly bright and sprite Lux of books past, the Lux who seems to live in another world entirely, has been too much in our soiled cities of petty jealousies and violent skirmishes to be as much fun as we may want. There are still flashes of the old brilliance here and there. The first section doesn’t disappoint in this regard. “Peacocks in Twilight,” for example, lives in that Tate/Knott/Edson nexus that amazes in ways delightful and disturbing. After telling us of his plans to shoot said peacocks in twilight with his father’s gun, he adds, “Daddy didn’t like peacocks / in twilight either, they offended / an iron aesthetic of his, something to do / with loathing cheap beauty, the meretricious, which I must have inherited, / or else I love to hear and see / the peahens weep.”

“Behind the Horseman Sits Black Care” is strange and fun and from a place that only Lux and a few others seem able to plumb with consistent results. Various dead or dying (one presumes) people—Black Care, Slit Throat, Nipple Cancer, et al.—are all riding, stacked on each other’s shoulders and such, on the chevalier’s horse, to death, or hell, or somewhere dark. But the Horseman “prefers none of this.” He “desires a doorway, / a cave’s mouth, a clothesline—or best: a low, hard, / garrotey branch.”

File that poem and “Her Hat, That Party on Her Head,” with its fine balance of silliness and resonance (the woman with the “birthday party on her head” is pacing aimlessly, in apparent pain over a loss), and most of the other poems in the first section next to the Lux poems everyone knows and loves. These are poems of a beguiling and belying clarity and a practiced ease of language, sometimes annoyingly novel (“Hitler’s Slippers”) and sometimes asking one too many dances of an extended metaphor (“The Lead Hour,” “The Pier Aspiring”), but altogether delightful in their revealing of a highly personal and individual world and a wonderfully adept and talented tour guide.

In Act 2 of three, Lux seems to have been loosed on the moor, where he wanders aimlessly, excoriating wildly and shaking a cold fist hither and thither. Our God from the title poem may be too tired and old to be angry anymore, but age seems to be having an opposite effect on Lux. And, unfortunately, anger, as of most men, is unbecoming of him. One sees this ire mostly aimed at those who would use God’s name to blow something/someone up. Fair enough. But Lux here is less the poet than the cable news hector. “Their Feet Shall Slide in Due Time” soberly finds solace in Deuteronomy’s promise that “the wicked, the venal, / shall face a steep, greasy hill whose fortress / they cannot take,” where inevitably they’ll lose their footing and fall. “Invective,” on the other hand, wishes some special someone “boils, pocks, and blisters.” Lux prays that “your son wish to be a poet” and “your wife fucks you / in the ass,” and, finally, that “your next breath, / and each one thereafter, fills your lungs / with the stink of your corpse.”

Lux rails against the consumerization of Christ (or relics, at least; “Jesus’ Baby Teeth”) and informs us that, though he did behead his neighbor’s ceramic duck, “a book / did not tell me I had the right to do so, / nor did I hear a voice, / a promise, from a pearly place.” As the poem “5,495″ chides us, Jesus was, apparently, whipped 5,495 times. For comparison’s sake, “A Jew on the way to the gas chamber didn’t (collectively / is another story), nor did he carry / the gas chamber on his back / to the chamber site.” The poem ends, “every day in your name, and/or your father’s, or / some other god’s, God forgive me.” God, yes; Apollo, maybe not.

This my-god-can-do-more-pushups-than-your-god stuff is tiresome (“Certainly my god / can rip the heart from your god’s chest” is maybe meant sarcastically, is maybe in someone else’s mouth, but still…) and not particularly well served by a poetic setting, nor does poetry benefit much from having it as a subject matter. This section of religion/God-tinged poems pulls a few other monkeys out of its hat, but they mostly beat the same diminutive tin cymbals over and over again. There is a bit of freshness here, too, but if you really want to know more about the poem that imagines some Amish marauders murdering a drunken Quaker, you will have to risk curse and damnation and pick up the book for yourself.

The third section is underwhelming, too, but for different, less-jingo-jangly reasons. At times it feels like the good poems went in the first section, the God poems in the second, and the less-good everything else in the third. “Mole Emerging from Trench Wall, Verdun, 1916″ is perhaps the best of the section, and it shows that temporal distance serves Lux better than trying to deal with contemporary issues, such as the very current problem of religiously motivated terrorism. “Toad on a Golf Tee” explores just what the title portends and proves that, though a poem can be written about most anything, maybe not always a worthwhile one.

There are several cases where Lux seems to be pointing at poets and poetry he doesn’t like, often in a sarcastic kind of way. From “Vaticide”: “The murder (metaphorical) of poets, / is not such a bad idea in some cases.” It’s probably best not to think too much of this, but that three or so poems deal with Lux’s feelings for other poets paints the poor man’s Fabio in a somewhat cranky light. Ditto the couple or so poems that praise the act of reading and libraries—preaching to the choir, perhaps, and, as with the poems against certain poets/poetry, time spent somewhat profligately.

In the end, it’s only about one-half of the book that hits the sweet spot. I admire that Lux has the courage to take things to places he doesn’t always go, it’s just that some of these poems might have been better kept in his private reserve. Then again, it’s been recently proven that I should just stop talking, and maybe that I should have never started. So, as with many good poets, bad or less-good Lux is not bad poetry, it’s just a reminder of what we miss in a person we’ve come to know and like. As for bad Sewells, well, as Lux once wrote, love is “all sore and dumb / and dangerous.” Sewells sometimes too.

Tags: 6 stars, David Sewell, Houghton Mifflin 2008, Thomas Lux
Posted in reviews

Slantwise

Monday, May 12th, 2008

by Betty Adcock
LSU Press 2008
Reviewed by Diane Schenker

An Elizabeth

adcock cover I randomly opened Slantwise, Betty Adcock’s sixth book, to a poem titled “Names,” her contemplation of ending up as Betty instead of the much more poet-like Elizabeth (her given name). I felt as though I had come all alone to a party and was taken in hand by a delightful person who put me at my ease, made me laugh, made me think, made me want to go on with the conversation all night–and who, it turns out, was the hostess:

. . . At fifteen,

I knew I was an Elizabeth,

but nobody listened.

How awful

to be Betty, all aprons and frosting mix

. . .

And yet . . . and yet,

doesn’t poetry have to be every bit as tough

as the woman pouring diner coffee:

as practical as the mother of several

who tends bar, does laundry, and cooks?

It has to sing a little, toe the line

like a dancer, and good looks won’t hurt it.

It has to rise and shine and be able

to clear a table and make change

in a New York minute.

I liked this person. I wanted to read more.

Folksy charm by itself wears thin pretty quickly, but this congenial nod towards Elizabeth Bishop (you are an Elizabeth, / you are one of them) was just an appetizer. Adcock’s range runs deep. The warm, welcoming hostess becomes by turns intimate, political, gruesome, funny and fearless. And always, always generous. Whatever territory she ventures into feels like having a good friend hold your hand and walk you through things you’ve looked at but never seen, parse you memories so vivid you forget they’re not your own.

Adcock grounds herself in geography and the natural world–commonplaces in poetry, but her freshness drew me in time after time. Each sunset, each woods, each jay, each lake–it was as though nothing like this had ever existed in quite that way before (remember Bishop: “nothing stranger /had ever happened”). Not a bad definition of poetry. “Barrier Islands” is an example:

Skirts of the continent, ruffled in heavy pavane

of sand and tide or frenzied in capriccios

of gales, can sometimes tear like lace in the turns

as of dancers wearing the wind, wearing the moon.

Salt-drenched beloved of the hurricane,

their drift is longer than the sea’s step in,

step out; partners the storm but answers

no augur.

In human affairs, she steps back and is able to ask an innocent question and provide an innocent answer about a crux like, for instance, death. In “Diagnosis”:

Perhaps we die of an overdose of stories. . .

I am adding this to my list of favorite first lines of poetry. It’s a long poem and yes, it lives up to its opening. But I’m not going to quote any more of it because you should read it.

So how does Betty Adcock take the old tropes and knock them fresh? She inhabits a world so tactile, so saturated with color and smell, so delicious, it makes you want to eat it with a spoon. And the next layer after her slant, full touch observations of natural surroundings is not exploration of us now, but of ghosts, the unseen, things past. Then us. Current time comes last in this lush world. Adcock’s shades have much to teach us, not least that we feel our place in the world among them.

But we do get our lessons, too. We learn of love, of long marriage. We learn of loss, of aging parents drifting away. And poetry itself, crazy endeavor, even there, her lessons are fresh reminders. “Letter to a Gifted Student” sets out the essence of the life of a poet, in all its futility and necessity:

Know this first: the gift is worthless

you’ve been unwrapping all these years,

unlayering a Christmas paper gorgeous-patterned.

Or shroud-plain as clouds. Or soft dark

as velvet marked with wine or blood.

Each time, you’ll keep the faith, something

will turn up—something material and sharp

as money: a knife, a pair of marble eyes,

a tree, a roofed pagoda, a bone, a flute.

Nothing ever does.

Nothing does its dance

with you again: no paycheck, no crown

of laurel, no dragon slain, no downed

champagne. Just this unshading over and over,

the heart opened like a pomegranate . . .

Slantwise includes what has become an almost obligatory inclusion in contemporary poetry collections: the 9/11 poem. Despite my ambivalence, Adcock here, too, wins my heart. She is able to embrace and honor in one poem the personal devastations and the historical context. She evokes the particular vision of horror, a woman in a Brooklyn kitchen, Hiroshima, global economics and “the slant light of every September . . .” She concludes:

Our marvelous

looking-glass holds, in its network of steel

and invisible signal, history and myth

and money laid across the world.

That great snare shines in its cables

like the orb-weaver’s art, trembles fragile

as any web on night grass

in a field of starlight.

Go get a copy of Slantwise. It will give you a big dollop of the best poetry has to offer: those things you thought you know will jump at you as though you’ve never seen them before. Let Betty Adcock take you by the hand. She throws a great party.

Tags: 7 stars, Betty Adcock, Diane Schenker
Posted in reviews

The Third Body

Friday, May 9th, 2008

by Jeff Knorr
Cherry Grove Collections 2007
Reviewed by Lanie Wilt

Travel by Bird-beak

knorr_cover Jeff Knorr’s The Third Body is a book about openings, spaces made and lost, and the knowing that in our living and leaving, in our awareness and inevitable absence, crouches a fear that love too will turn to dust:

Something hard and thin is coming

out of the blue afternoon, something
opening like a yawn and deep
as the dog’s brown eyes.
A breeze moves between us

clearing out the space
for all that is spread before us,
the seeds blowing, the skating sun,
all that is certain to come.

These openings come from light that weaves through branches and breathing, and into the beauty Knorr knows will turn to ash: “I fear touching my love; she is made of cinders / As light comes, the moon breaks to ashes in the west.” With a skilled and steady hand Knorr extends his invitation, a poet’s call to follow his steps through “the shift of light and leaves” to the edge of violet night, return to love under apple orchards and the comfort of old friends lost. These are pages of need and hesitation, knowing lines that tremble beneath the weight of time and the anticipation of death. Landscapes themselves open, unfolding in the language and energy of dreams— access into rhythms of sleep and seclusion somehow as firmly rooted and real as the trees that shiver in winter’s wind.

In moments of sought-out solitude, silence is both frightening and magnetic:

And they gather themselves in one graceful movement
turning against the air, a solid plane of birds
deep in a breeze, holding the shape
the law of wind spoke to them like a ghost,
as if we all might suddenly hear the one terrible secret
listening to the flowers scream,
watching the clouds bend over tipping wings.

While Knorr’s rhythm falters, if only slightly, in the more direct political poetics of poems like “River Dragging,” the return to his familiar more than makes up for it. Knorr is truly at home among the landscapes of light and shadow that stretch across his pages, managing without sentimentality a scope and sensibility often missing from such scenery. Knorr builds his landscapes from the ground up, the eventuality of death and annihilation in tow as he effectively captures– then amplifies– lives as impermanent as sound.

Throughout his poems wife, son, and faithful old dogs are all possessed and lovingly pursued through a wilderness kinder and closer than the “murmuring/ crowd of the sand-hot beach”. Amidst Knorr’s lines you’ll find yourself somehow willing to follow him into a place of retreat, enter conversation with winds and hunting dogs, the cool river’s flow and “the single maple leaf/ flaming red in his hands.”

Along the way are the labor pains of adoption, the lingering ache and pull of withholding what is essential, and the recognition that these are the first of many separations, approaching as surely as seasonal storms. Here’s Knorr in, “The First Time We Lost Our Son”:

…we were in our other country
alive as water on that December morning
the orphanage director took our son,
the light waving away through the mimosa branches,
the dog snapping, our boy’s small arms pushing at her.
And while she tried to calm him you just leaned on me
broken as deadfall firs, cloudburst crying.
…
The going away doesn’t fade beyond the closing clouds;
the leaving keeps coming like weather
that has settled in for a long season.

In the midst of Knorr’s greatest passion and connection, he confesses: “It seems/ impossible that…[he]… might lose this feeling,”—intimacy of silence and worship in overlap. This is what Knorr is after, the “essential” flickering through moments that wave away through branches, retreating through still air. Knorr is on some level a poet of terror—unable to escape death in the very moments he feels most alive.

Overall, Jeff Knorr’s The Third Body is an insightful, serious read you’ll want to return to. His lines of quiet connection and clarity rise like “a ripple…from deep, slow water,” welcome moments for those seeking refuge from the endless (often mindless) sights, sounds, and sayings pressing in on all sides.

Tags: 7 stars, Jeff Knorr, Lanie Wilt
Posted in reviews

Sex at Noon Taxes

Wednesday, May 7th, 2008

by Sally Van Doren
Louisiana State University Press 2008
Reviewed by Melinda Wilson

Borrow or Rob?

borrow or rob Despite the charming palindrome title reminiscent of Sexton’s “Rats Live on No Evil Star,” Sally Van Doren’s Sex at Noon Taxes lacks a sense of necessity that is requisite to producing successful and demanding poems. The poems in this collection are rather easy, and I’ll explain what I mean in a moment. First, let me say a few things about the title.

The title is, perhaps, the most complex and interesting part of this book. It is clever in that it provides two topics that are somehow in opposition. Sex, an act often completed out of love, desire or lust—all exciting and pleasurable—and taxes, ugh. Very few people look forward to doing their taxes. It is a hateful time of year associated with stress, anger, and bitterness for our wonderful country. These contrasting themes offer much to think about. The title begins the book with a sense of complexity and a need to order things, to understand this theme of antagonism or conflict our lives are filled with. However, it seems the palindrome never belongs to the poet. The first poem in the collection is of same name and includes a note indicating that the poem and the book are titled after an Ed Ruscha painting titled Sex at Noon Taxes. Unfortunate… Anne Sexton’s famous palindrome, Rats Live on No Evil Star, was also not hers. She saw this title on the side of a barn in Ireland. Borrowing or taking is never inherently undesirable. It is how the poet uses that which is not her own to drive at their own truths that is essential.

For Van Doren, few things seem to be vital. There is rarely a sense of urgency or conflict in the poems. Not general conflict, but rather a conflict that demands a resolution, that demands that the reader be involved in searching for that resolution, that truth. In a conversation with Harry Moore, Anne Sexton said, “I’m still talking to myself, which is what you do when you write a poem, I’m afraid.” I don’t disagree with Sexton often; however, this statement is incomplete. Yes, a poet is speaking to him or herself when the poem begins, at its start, but by the end, by the completion of the poem as an entity, which requires it being read by someone else, then the poem meets its inevitable transformation. Once the poem is read, it is amplified; it expands to include the interpretation of the reader and the reader’s engagement in the poem, the truths the reader brings to it. Van Doren’s poems are not open to this transformation.

The poems I am referring to specifically are those like “Conjunction,” “Pronoun/Punctuation,” “Primur” and “Marriage.” The first two of these four feel pompous and splashy. They don’t offer much substance and virtually no conflict as they speak of the obvious bits of punctuation and grammar indicated in their titles. “Primur” also comes off as self-important, and certainly does not invite the reader in. It nods to Harryette Mullen in Sleeping with the Dictionary. “Primur” is written somewhat phonetically: “Bedder not tew admit that / the auther of the pome”…“hs mor to say than the vegetable / berger sizzling ovur charcoles…” Other than slowing the reader down a bit, these misspellings add little to the poem. The poem is what it is; it comes across as simple and unimportant. Once the words are understood, the same message is conveyed. I get annoyed. But annoyed is not nearly as bad as grossed-out. See “Marriage” which contains the following nastiness: “…fart-splattered walls…” and “To Become World” which ends:

…With a pair of tweezers, she
plucked out every pubic hair

and affixed them to her chin.
She stroked her beard
when she spoke and listened.

All this lousy criticism is not to say that the poet doesn’t fight for and achieve some wonderful truths. One such triumph can be found in “Equinox.” Here the poet works to understand time’s structure and character, the ways in which it influences our lives and the fact that in our struggle to piece together its movement, we fail. Time affects everything, and despite our efforts to comprehend it and retard it, it presses on:

How to measure the space between
the bed three nights ago and a car pulling
in the driveway? And what did Time sound like?
It was iambic, a rising beat hidden in the trope,
turning at the sight of him. Someone had given
permission to isolate them from the closure of a day.

It is in these normal occurrences such as a “car pulling in the driveway” that we encounter the need to understand time and to attach a formal measurement to it. Here the poet makes a connection with the experience and the reader and though no clearly defined resolution can be found, we do find common experience.

There are also poems in which Van Doren calls her readers together. They are persuasive and contain sudden bursts of excitement and motivation, for example, in “Oasis”:

…and any encounter
with a cactus is just that; pluck out
the offending needle and
continue.

While certain encounters can be offensive and disturbing, all are something to be learned from. We can gain from all life experiences if we choose to “continue.” Sex at Noon Taxes suffers from too few of these telling and conjoint poems. We need more of the unexpected, more of the poems that communicate because they must. They excavate the poet’s experiences and bits of consciousness that must be uncovered because even though the poet may be talking to herself, the things of which she speaks are things in which we can all find realities.

Tags: 5 stars, Louisiana State University Press, Melinda Wilson, Sally Van Doren
Posted in reviews

Winter Journey

Monday, May 5th, 2008

by Tony Towle
Hanging Loose Press 2008
Reviewed by Mike McDonough

For Whom the Bell Towles

I’m giving Winter Journey an extra half-star because I want you to look past its cover. The drab, pointillist abstraction slapped on a dull lavender background, bracketed by titles apparently printed with defective disappearing ink, does not reflect the lively, erudite intricacy and humor of the work inside. Even if you recognize the looming bulk of the WTC towers, be assured this book contains no elegies for 9/11. Towle shares some blame for the nondescript title, which doesn’t reflect the mood of the book. Take a look at tonytowle.com to see some good cover designs, including one by Jasper Johns and my favorite by Larry Rivers: there’s the energy that should be on the cover.

It’s sometimes hard to be fair to any collection so soon after a career-spanning greatest hits like A History of the Invitation. You have to look past the intimidating difference in scale and leave enough time to judge the new work on its own merit. Happily, in Towle’s case, Winter Journey contains work that ranks with his best, and avoids any tendency to coast. In fact, I was certain that “Hudson and Worth” was in Invitation, since it contained such a classic Towle premise as turning a parking lot by a construction site into a map of the 1943 tank battle of Kursk:

…the asphalt below,
where a diagram of the 1943 battle of Kursk has been laid out
in myriad notations of red and orange.
Notice the red arrows near the parking lot. They
are Rossokovsky’s T-34’s which will pierce the German salient.
At sunrise, faculty from a military college
will utilize jackhammers to simulate the clamor of battle
while we huddle in our bunkers until the lesson is complete.

Towle is a master of satirical conceits, and this is no small thing. He follows their implications until they ascend to Parnassus and/or blow up in his (and our) faces. While I admit that language often acts as a deconstructor in chief, many poets seem to regard extended metaphors and fulfilled premises with a moral distaste which to me seems akin to cooking an omelet by cracking the eggs and dropping them on the kitchen floor. It’s like a joke without a set up, or a set up without a yolk. Towle, being a seriocomic gourmand, reliably cracks his eggs in the pan, cooks the omelet to a turn, flips it deftly, topping it with iffy mushrooms and cheese, which speak to him with historical relish and trepidation of blond invaders with puffy tents and egg-shaped Viking helmets, causing him (and us) to turn green and to volubly puke into the faux marble birdbath out back while Frank O’Hara adds a funny, touching zinger for dessert. Figuratively, of course.

You, reader, have a friend in Tony Towle: he is willing to go to these absurd lengths for you. His poems are in a hyperdrive that has nothing to do with character-driven realism, but stabs at the heart of the oversignified, ad-ridden, thoroughly engineered world that we live in—Donald Barthelme with a streak of John Donne? Watch what he does in “Truth in Advertising,” especially the section on Michelin’s iconic inflatable demigod’s especially “resilient… compassion.” Read his take on the beer commercial where the man pretends to be a doctor in order to take advantage of the limo with the bar (wait, you’re endangering the lives of real patients to get this full bar and you take the light beer?). Don’t miss the one where the SUV bounces its way across terrain consisting of the letters of its own name like the animated bits on Sesame Street, until, faced with “plummeting into the bottomless canyon” between the P and the A, “the vehicle awakens, its cold engine shuddering/ in the silent showroom, beads of moisture covering the hood.” Another classic Towle motif is the co-opting of the calendar for commercial purposes:

Every little breeze
takes on import
during Hurricane Awareness Week
which has kicked off
another Real Estate Avarice Month
here in fashionable Tribeca.

Towle is fond of reminding us that he is a Gemini, and therefore really gullible. Laugh, but don’t believe that for a minute, though his recent work has been reliably and fortuitously bipolar, not to mention a bit schizophrenic—which may be shitty for his consciousness but gravy for us. Our current war anxiety speaks to him in the guise of Mognol hordes disposing prisoners by rolling them up in rugs and kicking to them to death in order that no blood be shed. “YES, IRONY IS WHAT MADE OUR EMPIRE GREAT/ intones Genghis Khan from his bottomless tomb./ SURE IT WAS, confirms his son Ogodei, /rolling his eyes…/in an early use of italicized sarcasm.”

Winter Journey also contains muted elegies for the losses inevitably sustained over 40 years. One might not even catch the elegiac tone in “Bagatelle” because the surface is so breezy. The computer spell checks a reference to Teshub, storm god of the Hittites, as “Toshiba.” The poet continues to breeze of endless rain and cosmic investors cutting a loss as if they were clicking a mouse. 2/3 of the way through, we find a reference to sitting on the beach and considering “The Great North Atlantic,” which is a geographical fact as well as a reference to a book by Towle’s late friend, Kenneth Koch. Then we can reread the passage, astonished by the intricate thought that has been camouflaged by Towle’s comic, absurdist tone:

By now I’m on a trip, if not exactly a vacation
though I anticipate brambles, mosquitoes,
poisonous berries and lunatics with shotguns
as I usually encountered on vacation,
except when I would sit on the beach
and consider the Great North Atlantic
investing the feeling
that vacations would last longer
than I knew they were going to.

Lines like these give us a new sense of emotional directness in poetry. His fantastic and funny scenarios read less as escapism than challenge. Towle’s tonal mix of absurdity and pathos is so seamless that, as Ron Padgett put it, we are not permitted to distinguish between the real and the imagined. This would seem to be a recipe for schizophrenia, so let me elaborate: when we think of The Wizard of Oz primarily as an allegory, we have distinguished between fantasy and reality: we think we know what the book is really about. This gives readers a sense of security that Towle’s work does not. If we know the virtual world is located in silicon chips and fiber optic lines, then we think we know where Reality (capital R) is. In Towle’s poems, his speakers are in game world even as they walk down Broadway dodging traffic. Towle doesn’t have to set up a bleak Sci Fi future to scare us. The future is already here. The wonder is Towle’s resilient humor: we are all walking underwater and making the best of it. The wonder is that the undertow of loss is so well-balanced with the immediate pleasure of being alive. Here’s the fine miniature that kicks off the first poem, “In The Coffee House,” a contemporary mirror of the exciting, artistic life the once youthful Towle was looking for:

the Mona Lisa, in the Village
at Bleecker and Seventh, a blip
from the middle ages
on the radar screen of that young woman over there,
while she thinks of someone else.

The poet laments “the missed opportunities strewn about the incorporeal field” with the realization that, lost in his feelings, he, like, missed the 60’s while it was actually going on across the street at the San Remo:

exhilarated
by loneliness, poverty and paralyzing
indecision, resolutely ignoring the fact
that everyone cool in there
knew that I wasn’t.

Buffeted by time and memory as the poet is, the bounceback is around the corner. He is

waiting for an actual girlfriend:
and in fact it’s cool to have a girlfriend at my age
I think amusedly to myself
behind the overpriced coffee—
2.95 to contemplate the traffic
fleeing down the avenue and into the past.

I said that Towle does not allow us to distinguish between the real and the imagined; that his world is mostly engineered, and the wonder is that it isn’t a bleak, apocalyptic dystopia, but mostly pretty damn funny. Yes, he sometimes hides sadness behind the breeziest of tones. Yes, his game worlders are at risk of actually being struck by traffic crossing Broadway, but Towle insists he is an optimist. He feels that even in an engineered world, nature will always be there, if sometimes in disguise; we will be able to tell the difference if we cultivate a sufficiently practiced eye:

But to work out an agreement with these successive vistas
we will need help from a circumference of clarity
and a marvelous pencil to record what is happening. The lake still
needs help; it is far from the actual water. And this is characteristic
of the sort of designer who disappears among the cypresses,
asking the very mildness of the atmosphere for help.

This stanza is one of the few in the book that have a straightforward tone, but the poem is actually a Miltonic sonnet, and the stanza is the sestet balancing a far more absurdist octet. This helps us see, as Charles North pointed out, the musical structure of Towle’s materials, the counterpoint of his ideas, and the tendency of his stanzas to move in different directions and begin the poem anew, like symphonic movements.

Like the monomaniac coyote, we can paint a tunnel on the cliff to fool the roadrunner, and get hit by an oncoming train. Like the roadrunner, we can run right through to the other side. The difference is the clarity needed to make the marvelous pencil work for us, pun intended, so that we can see through the potentially fatal enticements of the ACME jet-powered bat suit—which is as far as this ridiculous comparison can be stretched. And since you’ve read this far, I can safely take that last half star off the curve.

Tags: 9 stars, Hanging Loose Press, Mike McDonough, Tony Towle
Posted in reviews

Murmur

Friday, May 2nd, 2008

by Laura Mullen
Futurepoem Books 2007
Reviewed by Jason Schneiderman

”All the possible / Interpretations already in the works.”

mullen cover

You know how when Belle and Sebastian sing that Bible Study and S/M aren’t everybody’s cup of tea, and you’re all like, “oh come on, S/M and the Bible totally go together.” Well, Laura Mullen might complain that Murder Mysteries and Language Poems aren’t everbody’s cup of tea.

Laura Mullen is really smart. Laura Mullen is a really good wrier. This book is a disorienting exploration of the Murder Mystery genre blended with an exploration of those who love the Murder Mystery genre. How does one explain wanting to read about bodies washing up on the shore? Wanting to read about mutilated bodies and necrophilia and decaying corpses? “It actually happened, of course, But not (ever) exactly like…”

The speaking voice in this book is never stable for long. As soon as you’ve settled into the voice of the mother, the murderer, the corpse, the daughter, the detective, it’s time to move on. Every prose/poem stanza/paragraph ends in fragmentation. “The report should include the actual bottle or broom handle, he muses, not just a list of items forced” for instance. The voices of the book keep dropping off a cliff, disappearing just as you get used to them. It’s not quite a collage or a quilt, but the overall effect is remarkable. A disorientation you get used to, like being inebriated.

For a while my husband has been watching endless cop shows about sexual predators with incredibly convoluted desires. As the cops track down the pervy perps, they keen a chorus of “What kind of a sicko thinks of these creepy scenarios?” “What kind of a sicko wants to see this kind of thing?” Hey guys, it’s the writers and the audience. Laura Mullen knows this better than I do. She wrote a whole book about it.

I want to hear more about the mother and the daughter. The mother hates her life, and the daughter hates her life and her mother for making her live that life. The mother escapes into Murder Mysteries, but then we’re inside the Murder Mystery, and then the mom is gone. Get it? It’s better than identification. It’s being. Our attention shifts to her attention. It’s brilliant. “In early anatomy illustrations the dead often reach down and part their own flesh, exposing secrets they seem no longer impressed by or still can’t face.” (62). The mother wants the daughter to accept the tedium of the domesticity of womanhood, even as she teaches her to escape into the exciting extremity of the Murder Mystery. “He put the bodies in an acid bath. How did the night pass? We must have had homework.” (62). The daughter (young Laura Mullen?) may or may not be writing the book, but she is certainly speaking the book. Or she is holding the book together. All of these quotes were in a footnote.

The book is long for a book of poetry, short for a murder mystery.

Futurepoem makes gorgeous books.

In “Narration: Lecture 2,” Gertrude Stein asks “Is that prose or poetry and why.” Laura Mullen answers, “both.” The first sections of the book feel more like prose poetry—and when she gets to the conventional poetry (left justified, line breaks, etc), it gets really gross. “When she laughs / A bright bib of blood gleams wet / Down the front of her black dress.” (128) The conventional poetry section is entitled, “Killer Confesses to Unspeakable Acts” and the murdered wife is alive/dead/imagined/decayed/abused/loved. The section comes with an epigraph from Gertrude Stein: “There’s no such thing as being good to your wife.” Is Stein including herself as having a wife, or excluding herself from heterosexuality? Mullen raises a similar question. If the killer is generated by her imagination, or for her imagination, then is she killing or being killed for?

My favorite passage is the opening of the book. “The roll of double-strength paper towels is printed with images of trees, she notices, tearing them apart as she uses sheet after sheet in the effort to swab up the mess. With any luck, she’s thinking bitterly, well be getting burgers in Styrofoam packages stamped with palm fronds and the rapidly vanishing species of the rain forest.” (no page number, it’s in the front matter, before the pagination starts—you can’t even count backwards to it, or it would be on page negative ten, and obviously there is no page negative ten)

Emotionally engaged. All risks pay off. Eight stars.

Tags: 8 stars, Futurepoem Books, Jason Schneiderman, Laura Mullen
Posted in reviews