Posts Tagged ‘Alice James Books’

Janine Oshiro at NYU

Wednesday, November 16th, 2011

On Friday, November 11th, 2011 Alice James Books’s author, Janine Oshiro, read from Pier. The book was the winner of the 2010 Kundiman Poetry Prize and is Oshiro’s first book.  Traveling from Hawaii, Oshiro read at Fordham University and NYU’s Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House before departing for one more reading at Portland State University.  Here’s her set-list from the NYU reading:

“Habitat”

“First Vision”

“Three Capes”

“Next, Dusk”

“Relic”

“Anniversary”

“Pavilion Vision”

“Ecstatic Vision”

“Mountain Vision”

“Setting”

 

 

-steven karl

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Panic

Sunday, July 10th, 2011

by Laura McCullough
Alice James Books 2011
Reviewed by Rachel Bara

“…less than half a cigarette’s time”

Shore towns of New Jersey with community pools, splintered boardwalks, and trashy dance clubs provide the setting for Laura McCullough’s searing fourth collection of poems, Panic. McCullough navigates the lives of the shore’s denizens, tracking their responses to a world of shabby artifice and ineluctable danger. For example, “Sun Dog, Moon Ring, Glory” begins:

 

What is the opposite of decapitation,
a clean-through, laser-like amputation
of a girl’s feet in midair
on a ride at the Sea Bright Pier?

As the sun goes down in the town of Sea Bright, the speaker looks for “mock suns” and “halos,” optical distortions of sun and moon, while also observing the frantic energy of the pier. Within many of McCullough’s poems, single events can shift past like waves between swimmers. In “Bartering and the Myth of Shells,” a toddler “bit[es] into a water toy” and the poem examines the moments that follow. For the child, the experience happens slowly; she dreams as she tongues and tastes the “tiny beads” that fill her mouth “like dessicated blood / or the cracked open egg case of an endangered beetle.” Simultaneously, the mother moves to “scoop the child into the basket of her hips” and splashes “chlorinated water / into her daughter’s gaping mouth.” Finally, the lifeguard’s late “Is she okay?” startles the mother. Mind and body betray her:

The mother thinks the earbuds against his throat
look like shells
she wants to reach out and touch
with the tips of her fingers
suddenly as foreign
as anemones at the ends of her lithe and freckled arms
instead of hands.

By pairing the mother’s impulse to “touch” the lifeguard with the image of a sea anemone’s tentacles, McCullough limns the mother’s curiosity and imagination reminiscent of the child’s. The long sentence broken across seven lines slows perception and strains the moment, skillfully situating the reader within the mother’s body.

Like August Kleinzahler’s Storm Over Hackensack, McCullough’s homage to New Jersey calls attention to the detritus of cigarette butts and pizza boxes as often as seashells and egg cases. McCullough’s exploration of death lends poignancy to both. A grieving mother in “Scattered” asks: “[H]ow could it happen in less than half a cigarette’s time?” As if stretching the instant before realization, McCullough situates loss in ordinary details:

The white tube between her stained fingers leaving her hand,
arcing toward the weeds by the fence—
the landscaping hadn’t been maintained well this year,
a scattering of garbage here and there;
hopefully nothing combustible.

Could she really have thought about that?

The poem dramatizes guilt and shows how it can set in one thought at a time. For the mother, meditation abruptly turns to rage as she contemplates her son’s willful body: “She’d been angry for years / at this jumping, squirming, flailing, rowing away, // and here he’d gone under and away, / and she smoking and jumping in too late.”

While many of her poems enter the minds of mothers, McCullough also engenders the consciousnesses of men, specifically senior citizens, construction workers, and lifeguards. In “Collection Pockets,” she captures a teenager’s fluctuating voice and sense of responsibility, as well as the relationship between two guards, the one who stops by “to get the phone he’d left behind” and the one on-duty who asked him to “Hang there a minute, / so he could go take a piss . . . .” The experience of the off-duty lifeguard, suddenly called upon to give CPR, recalls the earbuds of the earlier poem: “The music inside him ratcheted up as he pressed the white chest / with his crossed palms closing down / against the mother’s cries . . . .” His erratic perception contrasts with the mother’s numbed memory. Poems that follow reveal the way the guard’s failure to save the boy links him to the mother.

McCullough’s reliance on trauma as a central theme can be overwhelming and sometimes theatrical. But by featuring more poems about lifeguards than bereft mothers, Panic moves beyond the motions of grief and loss to contemplate new life. In “Severance,” we learn of a former lifeguard’s pregnant wife. Reaching towards the simplicity of joy, the speaker remarks: “She is growing happier. / Soon they will know the gender, / and his mouth goes dry / at the thought of a son . . . .” McCullough’s poems hinge on a hopeful future. People return to those shimmering pools, observe fireworks from the sea wall in Sea Bright, and the air and water—like the best of these poems—offer a momentary release.

*

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Parable of Hide and Seek

Sunday, December 26th, 2010

by Chad Sweeney
Alice James Books 2010
Reviewed by Kate Angus

8

“…watch the sky / braiding and unbraiding its light.”

Although there are many smaller pleasures in Parable of Hide and Seek, Chad Sweeney’s latest collection, the book’s greatest strength is Sweeney’s embrace of mutability and potential. The poems in this book move effortlessly between the concrete logical world and a place where the laws of nature are suspended or irrelevant. Through his use of associative imagery and elegant line breaks, Sweeney creates a liminal space where the real work of poetry begins, which is to say that his readers–with a tip of the hat to an older master– wander through a series of shifting images that allow them to “find (themselves) more truly and more strange” (Wallace Stevens, “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon”).

This world of infinite possibilities is perhaps best illustrated by “Wednesday,” a poem comprised of five elegant tercets. He begins with the mundane; “A hubcap was ringing,” moves rapidly into the rest of the stanza’s unexpected action (“I lay flat on the street / to answer it.”) and then leaps into a series of assured and surprising associations as the poem unfolds. Sweeney continues,

A fern was ringing.
A tombstone. A ladle.
It was Wednesday

at the center of the year
and everything was calling
to everything else.

This assertion that everything interacts is one of the essential and most interesting tenets underlying Sweeney’s poetry. The contradictory images of metal and plant (hubcap and fern) merge as they perform the same action, and the speaker’s action creates another implied image (hubcap and fern as telephone). These associated images propel the action of the poem forward into the second great strength of his poetry: a clear-eyed and calm acceptance of the world’s inescapable danger. Sweeney concludes:

Hello! Hello!
The clouds were doused
in gasoline.

Hello! I answered,
into a blue sheet
fluttering on the line.

The implication of danger remains after the poem has ended, and yet the reader is left with a curious and lovely sense of tranquility as well. Amidst the anxiety inherent in clouds doused in gasoline, the blue sheet on the line holds the connotation of the blue sky, an inherently peaceful image, and the speaker is speaking to all of it as he greets and answers the world.

This twined sense of calm and danger is consistent in Parable of Hide and Seek, most notably also in “The Methodist and His Method,” where the speaker’s dead grandfather “preaches to the other corpses” and concludes with the ominous and lovely

Each man has been given his row boat,
he says,

to lie back in and watch the sky
braiding and unbraiding its light.
No one is safer than we are.

There are less interesting poems in this collection–moments where Sweeney draws a bit too much attention to his magician’s tricks (for instance, by telling us “a noun is verbing” in “Captain’s Log”). But overall, this is a book of manifold pleasures written by a poet with a deft, assured hand.

*

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Shelter

Monday, August 3rd, 2009

by Carey Salerno
Alice James Books 2008
Reviewed by Ken L. Walker

5

Conceptville

shelter_cover Michael Vick has served his time and the moments will soon come when the National Football League has to decide whether or not it wants to reinstate a canine mafioso guru. Vick’s vicious dog fighting helix got him poster-man status for what to hate when it comes to the DeLillo-esque underworld croonings in and outside the United States. Sad that always happens to black man. Interesting that animal-fighting occurs all over the world and throughout history, so why would it not be happening in and around Georgia, USA? Turn on Discovery channel right now and you might see a lion mauling a helpless zebra. Freedom is only upright when there is an honest, unmitigated sanctuary for a creature to exist in.

This is the attempt (among other upstarts) that Carey Salerno’s new book, Shelter makes, poem after poem interjecting and impelling the thrusts and denials of animal cruelty. The cover would entice any embittered dog owner and, whew!, if your dog just died yesterday, skip the cover altogether—two coon hound puppies pawing and staring through a fence, up-close. From the first poem, “Fledgling,” Salerno exercises a first-rate couplet form which takes on a breath-pattern of panting, of steam, as here:

We turn from the purple carrier,
backs to the mother, guttural moan. (3)

Or, similarly in “Entre Chien Et Loup” (“Between The Dog and The Wolf”) when the poet’s “I” starts to see the concept of a day for errand-use or killing:

I will spend it drifting, watch others pretend on TV.
Pretend, too, my head isn’t wrapped in this heavy

coat, shelter, churning wind in its backyard.
I press my face against cold fence and scream. (17)

But, by as early as page 14, the brain is crammed to the brim with vividly-fierce halogen and steel gurneys, surgical tables and domesticated lungs still pulsating on the floor. If a reader can make it the distance, his or her sensibility and heartfelt responsiveness will need a vacation, a gulf coast far from any poem because Salerno’s poems are not subtle (the poem on page 3 is called “Instead of a Shotgun”) as they work their way into your gums like a bad nicotine overdose. Ironically, I found myself at my desk, smashing a gnat with her book. Bizarrely peculiar.

When I interviewed Salerno, she seemed kind, generous, and unabashed about answering any question I had. She, in fact, did work at animal shelters, so the “work” shakes its own first-hand:

“I worked at a kill shelter in my late teenage years, and I’m not sure exactly how many animals I’ve seen to the ‘other side’ . . . and I think the war and my feelings about war prompted me to revisit the experiences I had within the shelter. Writing was cathartic for me in a lot of ways, but I also wanted to shed light on aspects of society/humanity that are rarely recognized, confronted, or discussed.”

It becomes echoingly apparent that contemporary, young poets are heading north toward Conceptville, the city with a huge populace that refuses to pay their taxes, as well as, shuns the idea of a book of poetry, a book that does not build itself around a specific theme, place or character. The concept has taken over. I’m one of them so I’m not exercising my PlayerhatingDegree here; but I do, personally, wonder when books of poetry will come back around to being just that—a collection of individual poems that are separate, free and existentially-ambitious individuals yet come together to attempt public, in the end.

Salerno’s poems, unfortunately, cannot do that. Without the concept of animal cruelty swirling like an Alaskan mosquito swarm, these are too oblong, parables and allegories that don’t hold hands but are attached at the hip. It’s an onslaught, too much, overdone. Salerno should definitely sell the book to PETA and make more money than she’d ever dreamed possible in this magnified microcosm called Poetry. Something done exactly to a T here, though, is the magnanimous effort to remain gritty and realistically-captivating. Poets have to show the looking-glass its own guts, even if it is a Hanoi amount of euthanized Weimeranners choking on their own blood.

Readers of symbolism will be pleased at what alternate chemicals the concept has in its breath—layers of CIA extradition, Kevorkian psychological tactics, abortion, even Texas death row chambers. Who knows? Maybe even Rwanda, the US government’s eradication of indigenous peoples, the Japanese, and of course, Africans. Not a single poem is directly about that, though—you know, human beings!

All the poems are instigated by a talented writer, no doubt. The prevalent problem is that all the poems could be whittled down into two or three exclusive pieces, instead of a whopping forty six. To side with the humanism and satyagraha involved, I’ll end with an excerpt from the best piece in the book, “Certification,” which possesses a weird variety of Marxist Humanism, the kind that Erich Fromm tried to make centrifugal. Salerno writes, “She’s saying over and over I feel foolish [. . .] careful with the needle,//not too deep. The drugged cat’s ears/press the skull. She cannot miss its vein, focusing//on the twenty five cent raise. Wasn’t that enough”.

*

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Begin Anywhere

Wednesday, April 29th, 2009

by Frank Giampetro
Alice James Books 2008
Reviewed by PJ Gallo

5_5

Frankly

giampetro coverFrank Giampietro’s Begin Anywhere is, above all, an exercise in self-consciousness, self-interest, self-indulgence and a number of other self-nouns sprung from the same sort of goofy egotism allowed in children. That said, his poems can be compelling insofar as they remain wide-eyed explorations of their invariable and stylized subject, Frank Giampietro. When Giampietro resists indulging in his persona, his speakers’ self-interest can be an effective representation of the way the self splinters among the various parts of our daily lives. More often, though, he just seems like he can’t help himself.

On one hand, an uncharacteristically rhymed sonnet like “Frankstory” (sidenote: other titles that include the poet’s first name are “Frank Giampietro, Poet,” “Frankie the Haggler,” and “Anti-Ekfrankcis”) takes on an interesting conceptual structure wherein one man’s sense of his own history is placed in the context of global history which is then placed inside another man’s sense of his own history. The result is three historical moments presented like a set of Matryoshka dolls, and it is unclear whether the speaker’s personal history is to be thought the most important or the least. The method borders selflessness but implies that history cannot exist if not for its iteration in the minds of living people. On the other hand, a poem like “Me Spy with My Little Eye” might more accurately represent the collection’s single-faceted obsession with the self—all while chanting a childlike me, me, me:

Me and no more fifty-gallon fish tank.
Me in my new hundred-dollar shoes
and my, if me don’t cut my hair just so
my head looks huge.
Me, my head is huge.

Everything exists in the poem because of the speaker, which makes some obvious philosophical sense. Giampietro wisely avoids philosophy, but still, his hybrid baby-talk and the afterthought “you” introduced in the final three lines of the poem amount to a silly sort of manipulation—the kind used to uphold rules in a children’s game. Giampietro concludes, “You’re so smart / and so cool, but I freakin’ spy you.”

Most of the poems in the collection are not so syntactically inventive or formally organized—most are colloquial and observational. The connection is strong, and one of Giampietro’s more derivative modes is to present a series of invariably self-referential statements tied together with an ambiguous title such as “Another Poem Scoring 4.7 on the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level Test” or “Confessional Poem #783.” The first few lines of the latter poem test the limits of the style with representative humor:

I have dried my hands on my dog.
I have stolen the first line of this poem
from a TV commercial
for beer. I have used a cock ring.
I fear the art teacher at the school where I work
will use this knowledge against me someday.

The poem ends strongly, with the speaker’s opinion of himself projected imaginatively through his son. The final lines, “if my heart doesn’t give out too soon / my boy will pity me,” deflate the supposed importance of what comes before and subtly recognize a sad quietness in the gaps between the speaker’s yells. Nevertheless, these poems rely on their becoming fresher and fresher with each incoming line—a technique that, even when done successfully, can feel like a tedious, meandering search for the next great self-oriented shock.

Evident in those same early lines of “Confessional Poem #783” is another of Giampietro’s methods, namely a persistent self-consciousness. “Dear J, I Patched This up Instead of That One I Promised About Simone Weil” is the most obvious of such poems, and Giampietro doesn’t stop with the title. In it, he writes, “‘After Eating an Apple Core and All, While Riding in my Car’ / is what this poem was going to be called.” Of course, the poem does end up largely about Simone Weil, highlighting the one-dimensional strangeness of being told what not to expect but expecting it anyway. To say a poem would have been about Simone Weil or could have been a villanelle or hasn’t fulfilled any number of alternate possibilities is to be bland and obvious, but also means a recognition that circumstances necessarily external to the poem have interfered with its purpose—and that the self or the speaker or Frank Giampietro, despite the precedence any of them takes, does not exist without something gleaned from the rest of the world.

The title poem may be the best of such poems. The poem reveals the physical and emotional history of a woman’s death, but it does so in very distinct, well-paced steps. Halfway through the poem, after the speaker’s father has mysteriously thrown a shotgun into a lake, Giampietro reveals the cause of death, and his speaker begins his appropriate unraveling:

Or I could begin after the splash, with the ducks
flying back to the bread. Or ten minutes earlier
with my father not consoling, but wanting to console
my half-sister as she stands there, a shadow’s length
from the doorway watching him hold
what’s left of his first wife. Of course I could begin
with his wife shooting herself
in my half-sister’s abandoned playhouse.

The poem begins again several times before and after these lines, and it works largely because it reluctantly backgrounds its self-consciousness in the face of a visceral, emotionally-charged incident. It also works because the poem’s self-conscious refrain and the inherent emotionality of the subject meld successfully into a sad stutter, as if the speaker must continue to begin the story because he is afraid the end of his story will really be the end.

Such human moments make it difficult to take a hard line on Begin Anywhere. It would be easy to find fault with the overstated, colloquial comedy of many of Frank Giampietro’s poems, but there is an endearing clumsiness about his speakers, as if they are forever under threat of tripping on their shoelaces or drinking too much wine at their in-laws’. Still, Giampietro gives himself a starring role in the collection, and like most character actors, his better work is done in bit parts.

*

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Forth a Raven

Wednesday, November 29th, 2006

by Christina Davis
Alice James Books 2006
Reviewed by John Deming

4

Life as Inverted Journeywork

davis raven coverIt could be said after reading Christina Davis’s Forth a Raven that the poet has found her medium but not her form.

Now that that sentence has scared away any high-schoolers who wound up here accidentally while Googling sources for a Poe paper, I’ll note there’s a lot to like in this book, but that the raven she has sent forth will inhabit America’s favorite literary medium in a kind of a  bird-smacking-into-glass way rather than a sneak-in-through-the-window-and-prod-your-mania way.

Which isn’t really a criticism, because the window could just as easily have been open, and either way, the arrival of a noteworthy writer has been announced.

Forth a Raven is worth the read for a number of reasons, primarily the fact that the poems offer mystery, intelligence and wit that can’t be faked: “You learn to walk, which is done by walking. / You learn the past tense of have, which is hunger.” Davis’s lean lyrics also comprise a very lean book; at 49 pages (43 pages, once you remove the section dividers), she provides readers with a quick dip into contemplation and oft-earned romance.

So what’s the problem? The forms her poems inhabit are consistently out of sync with the content. Primarily built on trim couplets, tercets, and quatrains, her poems lean towards being clever thoughts rendered lyrically—the kind of things suitable for little conversational prose poems, not for the icy detachment you’ll feel she’s striving towards. The poems become estranged; the line breaks, in many cases, lend needless gravity to small metaphorical anecdotes:

Whereas I know a man
who saves the anonymous faces
sold with the frames

and props them against the wall (and, in his wallet,
folds them with his family) till the day

when each is recognized.    

In “Nostalgia for the Infinite,” Davis poses the question “Does anyone ever ask to return as himself again?” The answer is yes, because Louise Glück answers the question gorgeously in “Landscape,” the centerpiece in Averno. Glück is worth mentioning here because I think Davis takes a lot of her formal cues from Glück—namely Glück’s sledgehammer enjambments, and the ironclad detachment of her precise, barely-there lyrics. Only one other poet has pulled off that kind of detachment, and her name is Plath.

Davis is more conversationally inquisitive, more willing to be your friend. These kinds of enjambments and stanza breaks poeticize this good-natured curiosity. This is not always the case; take this nicely executed quatrain that opens “Last Words”:

My grandmother said precious little but merely breathed in and in
as if the back of her were open and we were no longer in
the presence of the front. Is it over?
someone asked, of the inverted journeywork.

Yet the more Glückian the italics and sparser the lines, the less compelling and more dramatic the notion of the poem. Here is “Dramatis Personae” in its entirety:

What is it you do, again?

What do you call a character
who is only put here
to foster an impenetrable plot?

A foil?

A human.

I guess the point is we’re all of us foils, but the microphone volume needs to come a down a couple of notches. A number of fun, occasional, “ooh that would make a good poem” poems are chased into similar patterns. She’s best when the “point” of the poem is buried in image, oddity, and playful artifice—the title poem is a good example, as is “Two Varieties of Passion Plays,” which concludes:

So what, if it took a year to make
a bass of that boy in the field,
so what, if the mothers must agree
to raise their girls as voices?

Ultimately, I think Forth a Raven introduces us to a head with a million important ideas. But the work itself would be stronger, and the voice would appear more genuine, if the poems exercised a bit less rigidity.

*

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The Pitch

Friday, October 6th, 2006

by Tom Thompson
Alice James Books 2006
Reviewed by Melinda Wilson

5

City Palpitations

The PitchThe cityscape feels fleshy in Tom Thompson’s The Pitch. The buildings have “pinkish tissue,” they are “swamped with sweat,” and machines are “wracked and frantic.” The city is alive and breathing, and people seem cold and made of steel. At times, the setting is frightening, though strangely fitting.

Thompson is delighted by buildings and their interiors as he exclaims in the title poem, “The Pitch (Invitation au Voyage)”: “What superb rooms these are!” His speaker asks if we can “install ourselves here” as though people are mechanical objects that need to be plugged in—perhaps a nod to the banal American office job and even more so to the political atmosphere, slowly making robotic subjects of us all. His somewhat creepy obsession falsifies the world to make it something new. Think The Matrix minus the somber booming of Morpheus.

Poems like “Gloss, Upwards” work towards imagining a city in which the development of structures is natural process. This poem is perhaps one of the oddest in the book, which for Thompson, means one of the best:

The water towers of New York are shivering like egg sacs.
Shall we tell them to get down from there?

Their hairy legs attract the wind
up where they were so recklessly scattered…

The idea that they were “recklessly scattered” conjures sympathy for these towers, way up there all alone. Despite the underlying sense that these towers are somehow our enemies, Thompson conjures sympathy for beings that are positioned against their will or at least beyond their control. But the poem gets eerier when the speaker addresses us and says “Hear them whinge in the distance like tree tops?” Their silence is something to be feared as their blooming or waking may bring destruction. The poem details an ongoing power struggle. The towers are being overgrown with leaves, the “other” nature is suffocating them and they dream of “imploding directly over our bedrooms, / drenching our night-things with a violent passivity.” The poem’s conclusion is fascinating:

…all their ambulatory innards, become our own.
Burying us quite silently from the inside. The way we like it.

According to Thompson, the skyscraper is a brand new kind of beast, maybe more beastly than any beast we’ve encountered before. They have made homes for themselves up there. And streetlight becomes knowledge; it “flows in the head and out the hide.” But in the same way that man-made constructions like buildings become alive, the natural elements like the sun become metallic objects, such as keys.

This trend becomes obvious after having read the first couple poems of the collection, yet Thompson continually confronts his reader with the idea, and at a certain point it becomes overbearing. In “The Goods,” once again inanimate objects have life. “Strip these walls to the hide,    skin them of art, paper./ Compared to pure animal.” The last line here is unnecessary, overwrought. Nevertheless, the poem’s purpose is met.

My feeling is that it would do Thompson some good to find a second grand similitude; his “building-as-living thing” hang-up grounds The Pitch, which is nice, but it also follows him around just a bit too much. He is nevertheless skilled at presenting the most unlikely likenesses and shocking the reader into belief. His writing is obsessive, addictive, and maddening. The world he creates in The Pitch is, by the end, startlingly familiar.

*

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