Dot

There’s this white twine smell. Wine settled
into pools on each step. The reflected ceiling
keeps on dipping from the moisture.
They won’t replace the soot-stained toilet.
When I was ten we ran out in the rain,
covering the sewer grates with rocks,
trying to make this little town float away.
The comet settled in the sky above the hospital
(plucking the string noislessly with my finger)
for three buoyant nights.
We turned ‘perihelion’ into a verb,
did the little Icarus trick,
found everyone to be made of the stuff.

Review: ‘Lying’ (e-book) by Sam Harris

Lying by Sam Harris
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Extraordinarily thorough and readable discourse, especially considering the concise nature of this long essay ‘form’, on the effects of lying both on the micro (personal) and broader societal(macro) levels. Harris makes quick and wise work of clearing up some of the silly, often semantic hangups of this conversation, i.e. the hairsplitting of technical lying and deceit at large.

I think Harris gives appropriate concessions to the very uncomfortable and concrete ramifications of even ‘white’ lies, while nicely intellectualizing the real, that is to say short-term nature of these consequences. The many arguments for nearly categorical truth-telling in all situations continue to nicely promote what is almost a logistical argument as much as a moral one — the often absurd lengths one must go to in order to sustain any lie nearly always outweigh the freedom of truth, its complete independence. As Harris says, a truth needs no maintenance, ‘it can only be reiterated’.

As someone with a more than healthy conviction against e-readers and e-books by and large, I do have to note I found myself enjoying this little (literally, small) new literary form of the short-short book or long essay, available appropriately enough only as an e-book. This astute and enjoyable bit of philosophy is more than worth the $2.

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Review: ‘Above All Else, the Trembling Resembles a Forest’, by Louise Mathias

Above All Else, the Trembling Resembles a Forest by Louise Mathias

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

What a graceful wrecking ball of a book; or, to steal from it, from the poem ‘The 10:15 to Cambridge’:

“That the on-coming train
was a pack of the shyest white horses.”

This new chapbook from the always luminous and serrated-blade Louise Mathias (and one must nod deeply to David Dodd Lee’s cover for it, to call it arresting is to criminally understate its power) is full of such moments. I can’t somehow get past some cliche or another about a cracking whip when I think about Mathias’s lines, the way they flow out so elegantly only to suddenly incur a wrath of image and noise once fully extended. I often had the feeling of being suddenly jolted out of a dream, or rather from one dream into another.

Again a line from the book itself seems all too appropriate in describing it; from the poem ‘Orion’:

“At first

the motion startles,
then the mass.”

Something always enjoyable to me is a complex air of confidence to Mathias’s speaker, something coquettish toward a sly, trickster arrogance but never quite getting there, moving around a sort of nearly invisible presence of unfiltered emotion known, like a black hole, but it’s dark inescapable shape. I always feel Mathias is not only fully aware of these tonal lattices but in turn makes them part of the trick and game. From the poem ‘Twentynine Palms’:

“Is that what you wanted? Subtle? The luke warm
politics of someone else’s marriage?”

Tremors and oscillations flutter throughout, one’s feet shake though never quite go out from under. Memory and closeness in body and emotion to a specific other seem so important here, and as Mathias points out in the poem ‘Blue Cogs of a Secret’.

“How a memory–(fur, being charred)
must be stubborn, or quit.”

I feel so many memories in these pages, both the stubborn ones kicking up dust and the ones that quiet, the ones whose faint fingerprints and voices still echo about somewhere. I’ll end with some lines from the poem ‘Snuff’, the poem that barely left me standing. Buy this chapbook. Mathias is a blasting wonder. Cheers to Burnside Review Press for lending the fuse and powder. The scent of flowers and cordite hover all around this book.

“You can exit the city of ghosts. You can’t exit
a tremor.

…

Fog on the film. I said, my bones are gone.”

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JMWW poems are up

The new JMWW is up, featuring two poems by me, ‘line static’ and ‘lift’.

http://jmww.150m.com/

Christopher Hitchens and Conviction

I don’t plan on double-posting normally, but I’ve begun a separate blog for things politically-related and have kicked things off with a post about Christopher Hitchens; it can be found over here: http://orwellshanky.wordpress.com/2011/12/19/christopher-hitchens-and-conviction/

Ozone Park Journal

Their Fall 2011 issue, including my poem ‘after cyborg’ is up, it’s gorgeous, and it can’t be found here: http://ozoneparkjournal.org/Fall_2011.html

 

Review: ‘by deer light’, by Garth Graeper

by deer light by Garth Graeper

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Yeah I’m reviewing another Greying Ghost Chap–wanna fight about it? I happened into a handful of them and they’re all great, so there you have it. As I sit here some strange older man is eyeing from the cover of by deer light with either menace or love, perhaps as if I owe him money, he’s on crutches though–crutches that appear to be broadcasting ancient mysteries and, because it’s December, synthpop Christmas music.

I opened the cover and found what looked and felt like another, smaller cover. Throughout my reading I felt very enclosed by this, cushioned in by this double-wall, a feeling that quickly seemed more and more like a womb as so much of this chap seems interested in not just the physical or thematic presence of a womb but in the emotional, metaphorical properties one might associate. Always an almost overbearing symbol and thematic shortcut for birth, life, renewal, etc., one often forgets how much distress, violence, death, and physical excess exists at the site, something I felt was being toyed with often and seriously here. I felt very cold and vulnerable reading this, and a certain kind of familial yearning / turmoil / loneliness too. I look outside at one of the first real bits of snow of the year and it feels right to be reading this chap / feeling this way, today.

“we know this fox
sitting under the tree
her heartbeat
running through us

she’ll saw apart our name
pile together the black branches
and disappear
behind them”

I can’t quite articulate the kind of expected comfort that feels, enjoyably, to be missing here, the lack of an expected warmth, perhaps maternal. It’s not so much as absent as hazy, perhaps disfigured, broken–so much here is indeed broken, stretched, skinned, flush constantly with bright warm blood and gigantic hearts; we think of ‘big hearts’ in many cliche ways (Valentine’s Day, an adjective for someone warm and generous…) but really, cardiomegaly, a great big word I’ve recently learned–enlarged hearts are a, yes, BIG problem. This chap is full of these bits of the mangled, the too large and small, I feel like there are awkward, newborn limbs flailing all over, falling, cracking skulls…nothing seeming to quite fit (fit in, fit out, fit-fit).

“I had too many spines
running through me, a glimmer
of light on my tongue
you did not even fit inside your own body”

This chap ‘ends’ with something toward distant and healing, but I don’t think I believe the healing–it seems like the distancing, the loneliness all come rather immediately, as if the healing was never going to be possible. What was going to heal, anyway? Certainly not the bodies, and what hope for something more abstract? I felt the final gesture of moving apart felt actually like stillness, everything having been and stayed so far apart; when the bodies here were together, there was no real closeness, to my mind. Everything here was continually shedding apart.

“she tore up
our heart and grew it into
a small right hand
and broke it

we concentrate
on the shattered bones
while the winter
passes”

What an insane chapbook. I feel like the white, rough covers were slowly melting, or shedding hair as I read. I feel like I could read it again and be reading an entirely different book. Like the other Greying Ghost chaps I’ve enjoyed so much recently what really stays with me is that nothing sort of does–there’s always an oscillation going on, I’m never quite able to get settled, to keep my fingers on anything.

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Review: ‘Michigander’, by B.J. Love

Michigander by B.J. Love
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Greying Ghost is now 2-0. I really think this might be it, I might go on hiatus from full-length poetry collections for a while; I’m just finding way too much insanely good stuff in chapbook-land–I’m seriously batting perfectly right now.

This book is physically tiny (even by chap standards) but feels immense, to call it expansive is to laughably understate the many millions of lifetimes you’d need to breathe through all the air there is here. The real trick is that Love manages to edge in just enough constraint to keep one’s focus on the production at hand, and it is a production. I want to use my line about this reminding me of some of the Smashing Pumpkins music videos but I just did that in my last review. It’s more apt, anyway, to say that this feels like a Jan Svankmajer piece with a Michael Bay kind of budget, filmed on location, somewhere like Muskegon.

I really enjoyed the shaky sense of scope and ‘lens’ throughout this chapbook, the shifting authority of the narrating voice as well as the place of the viewer and/or reader as the production on display quickly evinces many facets beyond the normal spectacle / receptacle relationship.

I get a lot of paradoxical feelings when reading this RE: disposability, mortality, and meaning that hopes to or can echo out longer than 25 frames-per-second might allow. HD film and TV stun with better and better quality, but really all the more to forget–change the channel, find whatever’s next in the Netflix queue. But Lake Michigan keeps lapping with its forgiving waves, right? I don’t feel that there is a statement being made about the lasting ease of nature vs. media, though–the lake is media, an elevator wanders along its shores next to us, the headlines aren’t the only thing that are tomorrow’s microfiche, etc. Our wedding announcements, our obituaries, our births, the newspaper in the gutter / being recycled / being read online, everything is transmittable, our bodies just a really slow bandwidth rate.

I have no idea what any of that means. I loved this chapbook, it’s yellow covers a little bulb sitting at the edge of my peripheral vision as I type this, giving off no light but not dimming.

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Poem up at Nashville Review

See the newest issue of Nashville Review, featuring my poem ‘Stray Dog Prayers’.

Lots of really cool stuff in this issue. Love NR’s commitment to putting out all kinds of content, including comics and music.

Review: ‘Polaroid Parade’, by Paige Taggart

Polaroid Parade by Paige Taggart
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I just spent some time this morning with this stunning chap from Greying Ghost. There’s a great deal to admire packed into this spare little gray book, most notable to me was the sweeping, bright colors coloring nearly every inch of the canvas here–if there’s any whitespace left over in the landscape Taggart paints, it blinds and chills you (think the first sunny-skied blizzard of the year). In this way the poems remind me of the work of my dear friend Naoko Fujimoto, who always seems to spread color simply and with a glossy sheen while always allowing in texture and depth.

Everything is in motion here, too; I also find myself reminded of some of the Smashing Pumpkins music videos, and Cornell boxes, little stop-action animations going berserk (quietly), absurd non-narratives telling you their stories. What really works about what Taggart is doing for me is the deft way she resists the temptation to really let a narrative form, or to let this dreamscape develop and employ its own language. Imagery and syntax pop and cohere and dance and pass out left and right, and there are even some recurring almost-characters and themes and objects, but everything is so unsettled and unsettling…things, yes, cohere, but dissipate and shatter almost as quickly, the minute you’ve got your finger on a ley line you’re plummeting again. Another note on the syntax, this chap really shines linguistically in flowing, airy flourishes that hold themselves tight even as they float away–Taggart’s speaker / constructor / maestro play-by-plays confidently but with a wide-eyed surprise and wonder. This production feels like a very imaginative and matured vocabulary of images and language filtered through the sort of unbridled scope of a playscape of playthings we might think of as childlike in the freedom seen at work.

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