David Dodd Lee’s ‘The Coldest Winter on Earth’

The Coldest Winter on Earth by David Dodd Lee
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Lee’s work is unerringly visceral, singularly invested on a deep personal level, and always offering a stark, unflinching display for both the speaker-self as well as the reader-observer. Place and memory are often of the most delineated actors in Lee’s books but perhaps never as much so as in this newest collection. Lee seems unafraid of embracing not only the yearning and regret cultivated by the past but the rich, nostalgic confusion that occurs when it’s mirrored and overlapped by the present. Life whirls around Lee’s standing-still speaker as places and people empty out and refill — this is really all that time is as it cruelly steps on. While textually many of these poems appear spare this is another of the brilliant gestures Lee knows so well, and just as a smell can trigger an entire season full of memories Lee’s poems explode and engulf, shrink down to pinpoints with the weight of dark matter. His lines are full of characteristic leaps of association that can comfort or drunkenly go dizzy. There’s always a deft, natural touch to the mechanical bits, the syntax and vocabulary, but Lee’s unique flavor is in a matured, raw patina of breathlessness, anger, lust; artistry without guise, a performance that’s never just putting you on. These poems are as comfortable throwing you against the wall as letting you quietly sink to the bottom of a pond.

There’s good reason why David Dodd Lee remains a staple in the small group of poets I find I can reliably return to when hitting depressingly long dry spells between books that feel like knockouts. One of my flaws as a reader is my susceptibility to taking such spells in dramatic stride, despairing for no good reason that either there just aren’t any books coming out that will genuinely unsettle me or that for some reason poetry has lost some of its destructive and surprising powers to me. Fortunately enough, these things are never true and Lee is a poet that invariably clarifies to me through absurd bouts of self-obfuscation what I personally value in a collection, or put another way, what gets inside of my head and refuses to leave. This kind of reliability is increasingly remarkable to me when over long careers many poets only oscillate in and out of this startlingly complex kind of efficacy.

For lack of a better term, Lee’s ‘staying power’ when included on any shelf has been almost unparalleled in my experience as a reader of poetry over the years. ‘Coldest Winter on Earth’ not only manages not to be an exception to this rule but an admirably achieved high note.

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Haruki Murakami’s ’1Q84′

 

 

Say, its only a paper moon
Sailing over a cardboard sea
But it wouldn’t be make-believe
If you believed in me

 

Desperate as I always feel after finishing a Murakami novel to write up something profound and properly expressive of what his work seems to always so easily do to me, I never have until now. It always feels futile, foolish–I feel like a three-year-old who has seen a supernova; it’s nearly impossible to really articulate what I’ve encountered, yet perhaps a rich, ambivalent sensory befuddlement is all one can hope for in art. I feel this way more than ever after finishing his most recent and hand-achingly thick masterpiece, but here I am nonetheless.

1Q84 feels like quintessential Murakami, full of surreal moments both dazzling and (to this reader, enjoyably) mundane, cats, sadness, loneliness, death, hope, the ethereal and the grubbily all-too-real. Everyone has lost something, and everyone is looking looking looking. I can’t ever get over the strange and deliriously paced tone of this and his other books, a tone that in my experience is some mixture of both the translation process and Murakami’s indelible presence. It feels comfortable but a bit askew, which of course fits into the Murakami Mode almost too perfectly. If I say that the phrases and paragraphs always seem slightly wary and confused, it isn’t a critique of either of those to aspects; rather, I genuinely enjoy the tentative feeling of almost literally every line in the book. There’s a sad but quiet intensity, anxiety  hanging over everything, it’s beautiful but off-putting (not unlike the double moons hanging in the sky of this somehow-but-not-exact-alternate 1984 Tokyo, one normal and one smaller, dented, green).

Many people seem to experience (whether they enjoy it or not) the distinct feeling that Murakami bleeds over into their real world somehow, taints them — this is absolutely the case for myself, it’s always been the hallmark to me of fiction that has a special staying power, has an elusive brilliance. I honestly don’t feel like I’ll ever look at the moon again with remembering this book; even moments of transit seem to draw it quickly back to my memory, as the characters here are always traveling in one form or another. I was struck even by stunning little coincidences while reading that seemed to signify that I, too, had somehow been pulled a little into a strange alternate reality, had become a shade of green. While sitting down to write this my cat suddenly became incessantly noisy and playful as if trying absurdly hard to keep my attention elsewhere. While reading what was to me the most intense moment of the most intense chapter near the end of the book, ‘It’s Only A Paper Moon’ sung by a very young Ella Fitzgerald came onto my Pandora station (I hadn’t even ‘Like’ed the song until then), which very honestly unsettled me for a moment. The ‘moon’ connection aside, the song appears throughout the nove as jazz and classical music one more haunt Murakami’s fiction. I had never liked a single jazz song I had ever heard until some of the music in the book sent me searching out of curiosity, and now I cannot get enough. Haunting and infectious perfectly describe this book.

I’ve seen some criticism of the book’s close, that it offers either not enough or too much closure. I suppose I’m too easy to please, to connected to what I feel is the Murakami experience I so much seek out and enjoy. I felt at peace with the ending; it’s heavily bent and untidy, but that’s one thing I love about this book and the rest of his fiction — it’s never tidy, it’s never polished or feels like, once you’re done, that the book will even fit conveniently back onto the bookshelf. I remember when reading Murakami for the first time, Kafka on the Shore, how struck I was by the duality in these surreal iconic characters and their presences–we first see Johnny Walker, a dashing and menacing presence–but then we get…KFC’s Colonel Sanders!? This absurdity, this refusal towards perhaps easier (to write, and to read) gestures and choices. This isn’t what he ‘does’, and it’s why I’ll always come back to his work. It’s unsettling, imperfect, confused, awkward, brilliant and it will sometimes tarry, sometimes disappear without waiting for you.

Christopher Hitchens’s ‘Mortality’

No one who might have glanced over back in December at a post on my now defunct political blog, Orwell’s Hanky, about the death of Christopher Hitchens, will labor through this review with any misapprehensions regarding objectivity. I’ve grown to become very comfortable in the position that no review (or even, honestly, rather much journalism of any sort) can or should reach for objectivity. I’m ready to concede there are certain benefits to even pretending about it, but I think the cost is too high. More deserving of emphasis here however is the probability that there hasn’t been anything said about the Hitch in his entire writing and intellectual life (other than the fact of his departure) that has been objective.

While the elegance and emotional intensity apparent in the admiring interviews and essays that came in the wake of his death were often a joy to read, and very expected, equally expected were the vitriolic grandstanding of his more ludicrous detractors who rarely seemed aware of the irony that in attempting to so articulately dismantle the man they only proved to miming him, offering unabashed swings like the kind he was so famous for (if ‘Hitchslap’ doesn’t find a place in the vernacular of debate, we’ll have truly proven ourselves unworthy of the namesake) but never with near as much wit or flourish–they consistently, though loudly, missed the mark repeatedly–drunken duelists putting their rapiers right into their own feet before tripping. You honestly felt you could sense that they had been spending the nearly two years of Hitchens’s affliction saving up what they thought were outlandishly lovely barbs, really working and polishing them up, setting them aside as they awaited the grim release from the gate.

The short pieces collected here, many of which appeared originally in Vanity Fair, felt so sadly strange to me. Having spent most of the last several years reading more or less every printed word from the man, I like many had become so used to the aura of him when he was really on stride–and he nearly always was, another one of his feats as an intellectual and rhetorical superhero–while he too occasionally could fall victim to bad puns, Christopher was admirably sickened by cliche, yet the frequent description that he was ‘larger than life’ seems inescapable. The strange and beautiful sadness of this little book–it’s smallness also feels both appropriate and tortuous, a party ending that no one is ready to leave–is that it shows that while Christopher was larger than life, he was never too large so as to become unreal, truly a superman; he was ‘just’ a man, and shares the same ending we all do. While his memoir Hitch-22 to my mind lacked a bit strangely in that it felt slightly too distant (Hitchens declared several times he refused to make it only about himself, and only wrote it in a way where it was always a way to write about other people, events, historic moments), Mortality is intensely personal, acutely present in its body-ness. Christopher writes with a directness and vulnerability that can only be described as ‘brave’, another cliche, and one of the collected, disjointed notes in the book’s final chapter reveal an unsurprising opinion about this brand of ‘courage’: “Brave? Hah! Save it for a fight you can’t run away from.”

The other notes (and the entire collection) also reveal a mind and personality that rejects many of the shallow criticisms one finds against ‘intellectuals’ (i.e., when one encounters it in the wild being used in a pejorative sense)–his scattered, unfinished personal notes referencing Larkin, Symborska, Alan Lightman, Saul Bellow, Proust…aren’t the flippant conversational parries looking to impress party-goers. They’re the fluent, quiet constructions of a brilliant mind looking to do in its literal final chapter what it has done so many times before: using art and literature and beauty and sadness and fear and pain to make some kind of sense of the brutal but pristine reality of a universe found ever uncaring about our human ends, full as they so often are with unfairness, dullness, banality and days each full of a fresh physical agony and humiliation. A strange and painful rash, hands and feet gone numb, cruelly alternating constipation and its opposite–Christopher details these abusive little passport stamps from ‘Tumortown’ as the engine of his mind continues on seemingly unblemished.

Also unsurprising is Christopher’s refusal to give in to the sometimes overwhelming tempations to solipsism or self-pity; he knows and writes  the pointlessness of asking ‘Why me?’ to a universe that’d never even be bothered to reply, ‘Why not?’ Particularly cruel, though, seems to be finding himself ‘in the land of the unwell’ just as he felt he was reaching a pleasant plateau in life. He writes, “…I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal it bores even me. Rage would be beside the point for the same reason. Instead, I am badly oppressed by the gnawing sense of waste. I had real plans for my next decade and felt I had worked hard enough to earn it. Will I really not live to see my children married?”

And, for a man known so well for his booming voice and the mental acrobatics with which he could fuel it, the paragraphs later on detailing his thankfully temporary loss of his voice, as well as the bouts of cloudy, sluggish ‘chemo-brain’ are inescapably afloat on an aching terror of what cancer might steal from him well before it all ended, and are some of the most poignant and starkly personal he ever wrote.

One certainly feels the sadness and quiet rage (however pointless) in these honest moments, and I’m sure to be in vast and good company with those that feel as sad and angry as only his readers can at the robbery of such a mind and personality at such a young age. As famous to his conservative opponents for his mostly liberal, Marxist ideals and (probably most famously) for his iconic anti-theism as he remains to his liberal comrades for his pro-war stances, it remains a wonder and a testament that those that were most ready to disagree with his political and religious views were ready to defend well past his death his charm, his warm and honest friendship, his generosity of time and spirit to the younger generations, and his humanistic principles towards justice and freedom in all its forms. While he’ll most likely always be famous for his atheistic debates and books, it’s very much more important to remember that God was only the biggest of the tyrants on his to-fight list. Christopher was first and foremost a philosophical soldier on the front line against any brand of totalitarianism; well before his illness he was almost famous simply as someone who knew how to live a broad and full life, and he deeply treasured the importance of allowing all people the chance to find their way to do the same. This final, minimal collection is a quiet, nearly stoic meditation of such a personality coming to a close.

The foreward by longtime friend and editor Graydon Carter speaks even more to the warmth and lasting richness of Christopher’s friendship; the afterward by his wife Carol Blue is heartbreaking and hopeful, cherishing and loving without ever being cloying or sentimental. Her words show Christopher the sweet and witty husband, the ‘impossible act to follow’ as much at home as when he took the stage. Blue’s touching voice to end the book is a generous one, and we’re all lucky to find its inclusion here. Her words will make anyone with a pulse weep.

To let myself be victim to another cliche, for many this book will be a look at the man behind the legend; Christopher says that often the mark of a good writer is that their readers always feel directly addressed, almost preternaturally so–here more than ever will this feel true. Christopher was fond of saying he always knew he had been burning the candle at both ends, but ‘had found it gave off a lovely light’–lovely feels like a word both impossibly accurate and lacking. I feel myself becoming far too saccharine for comfort to simply say this book allows what feels like a few last moments with such a singular and bettering light, but it does.

Mortality will be available in early September from Twelve Books.

Review: ‘Bright Brave Phenomena’, by Amanda Nadelberg

Bright Brave Phenomena by Amanda Nadelberg

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

From the poem ‘Like a Tiny, Tiny Bird That Used to Make Us Happy’:

“The
bride and groom were shivering, it
actually started to snow. The shadow
of the mind stood up, changed tables,
like a plane I was coming and going.
Furniture happening places it shouldn’t,
blank bodies on the wrong half of the
world, we don’t know what to do.”

Amanda Nadelberg has accomplished so much polish alongside a kind of paradoxical cohesive chaos in this book that it makes me struggle to remember the last full-length collection I’ve read that seemed to hold together so well, particularly when playing (this is an understatement; toying? Nadelberg is running a linguistic fun house / carousel / quiet star-gazing party, here) along with its own physics and weather patterns.

Weather and nature seem so important throughout the book, and the often intense movement from line to line and poem to poem kept reminding me of a tornado, made of debris and always collecting more while always throwing off a house or tractor-trailer for the sake of the explosion–and always the twirling momentum intact, growing stronger, even when lazily meandering with approachable language. Nadelberg likes to let things float astray with brilliant collaging of imagery and tone while keeping things anchored with an almost jarring, lucid lyric-I mode that surfaces with an enjoyably unpredictable frequency and mood. Always a bit sly, whimsical, vulnerable and affirmed/affirming.

In an interview with Geoffrey Hilsabeck, Nadelberg mentions the use of weather as a kind of universal referent, and indeed it becomes another anchoring force throughout. This is yet another truly satisfying aspect of the book, as she bounces around accessible language and imagery yet always in a way that remains mysterious, as disjointed in presence and meaning as the classic ‘speaker’ that is far from an everyperson. This had the effect on me, like the linguistic shapeshifting and semantic riddling, of feeling like I was always in on the play and the joke, but only part-way, the perfect climate for a book that revolves around broken patterns (weather, words, histories, memories). The sadness isn’t always joyous but it nearly always felt affirming, a word that seems to come to my mind often (and, it seems, often in the minds of other reviewers / blurbs). Even the ‘I’ of these poems is fluid and ungraspable, often inhabiting other beings and spaces without a stumbling register of that change.

From the poem ‘Recommendation or Decision’:

“One of the nights
the sky fell over, came home, put his
keys in the jar. I am the Ostrich in the
foyer, I think about death a lot in general.”

What I perhaps loved and appreciated the most is Nadelberg’s talent for counterbalancing, for playing the thin line of whimsy and play against against genuine impressions of sadness, vulnerability, sadness flooded through with nostalgia and memory, quieter, more unsettled darker poems that to me re-emphasize the feelings of affirmation and hope; these aren’t distractions or defense mechanisms or put-ons, they’re machinations of brightness and progress, of surviving and doing so without ignoring all that might hold one back or in more toxic places.

From the poem ‘Poem from Claire’s Knee’:

“Come at me
with flowers and I will
run away. I manage a
factory of self-preservation.
It’s like I’ve found you
again in the factory.”

This slippery ‘you’ could easily be the poet herself, could be the frequent other ‘you’ that pops up often in the book, could be anything really, amid so much unhinged morphing–but I feel like I know, though I can’t put my finger on it, or it doesn’t quite matter, always the real trick when the reader is given a space to play a bit ourselves, sometimes even a seemingly straight-forward word can be a bit of a Rorschach.

To me this is the larger effect the book had on me, at least–everything that seems mundane and ‘accessible’ (always such a problematic term) becomes gorgeously strange, unsettling and affirming usually at the same time. More simply described, Nadelberg works amazingly well on the level of the line, word-to-word, letting fault lines form and the underlying plates slip and break almost constantly but without ever letting the entire thing crumble. Her poems here are coyly wrought, intensely emotional with thoroughly intellectual veins, witty and often enormously funny. A hallmark of what talent has meant to me for a while now is a kind of consistency–a book may have three or four truly mind-blowing poems, but do I read the other 70 or whatever to find them, the filler and scaffolding for the supernovas? Nadelberg offers one after another, every poem has earned its page and place in this collection, it’s a constellation of stars exploding, no bit of line here has gone slack.

‘Bright Brave Phenomena’ is published by Coffee House Press.

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Review: ‘Finding Kansas’, by Aaron Likens

Finding Kansas: Decoding the Enigma of Asperger’s Syndrome by Aaron Likens
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

A very accessibly-written account and it maintains a certain charm for a necessarily personal tale by way of never failing to feel very genuine in the emotions expressed.

The foundation of my disappointment in the book, however, is that it’s largely dull and at least to this reader, lacking in the echelon and depth of insight attributed to it in its introduction and publisher’s praise. Accessible writing need not be amateurish–this isn’t to say the book is badly written per se, but it’s indeed a collection of informal, personal essays and it never lets you forget that. Small yet frequent stylistic tics toward the insecure and repetitive statement become increasingly taxing as the book wears on.

But I’d be ready to forgive the mediocre writing if the book paid off in its chief promise: to ‘unlock’ what it is to experience AS/ASD to those outside of the condition. To me it simply failed in this regard, with a notable exception I’m more than happy to mention.

First, I’m ready to admit my own bias here–from my own life experience and what I’ve passingly read about autism / AS / ASD, it looks to genuinely be one of the most over-diagnosed conditions on offer, rivaling ADD. A very recent report in America shows the diagnosis rate skyrocketing due, in the opinion of several citations in the report, to an ever-broadening scope of diagnostic criteria–to the degree that within roughly the next two years, the diagnostic criteria is being overhauled. Considering over-diagnosis and the boringly, emphatically annoying American tendency to both seek out labels and uniqueness (particularly by parents for their children) and the way in which diagnosis of such conditions can be tempting explanations for various idiosyncrasies–i.e., shortcuts to understanding and empathy without doing the heavy lifting or worrying something more troubling is at work–so much of this grows tiresome. Thinking on the notion that normalcy in most regards is a myth, don’t we all fall somewhere on the autism spectrum, almost all of us well short of the ‘healthy’ extreme? If so, what’s to truly unlock? Is it so mysterious?

Much of the book felt this way to me. With some jarring exceptions (I’m getting there, I promise) the vast majority of this book felt exceedingly normal to me. An intelligent kid that feels more comfortable talking to adults than this peers, is socially awkward, gets bored by mundane teenage jobs, and has trouble getting over his first loves. There’s no rich, unique, compelling, insightful, nuanced experience here at all. If you want to sell a compelling book using such commonplace material, you’d better be leaning heavily on some other aspect of the writing to be very charged, and Likens doesn’t pass either, here.

All of this is coming around to the point that I’m not saying nor have I ever thought autism / et al. to be a myth — over-diagnosed doesn’t mean the condition isn’t legitimately expressed in some patients. I think AS is a very real and very excruciatingly strange experience to behold, and I absolutely believe Likens himself is a very genuine victim to it. The depth of the lack of empathy Likens expresses seems staggering at its most acute, and I wish he had whatever we might say is missing from the writing here to explore that depth in a more profound and vivid manner. He does hit on such elements, but only in passing. His discourse on the way ‘first’ may work in ASDs to frame future impressions and encounters was interesting, and the reaction of professionals and ASD sufferers to this concept might prove illuminating, I’d be glad if it did considering the way this portion of the book stands out in relation to the rest.

We also cannot forget the titular theme of the book, which is Likens’ own exploration of the comfort zone he discovered for himself early on in life in the form of observing and taking part in auto racing. There doesn’t seem to be terribly much here that is revelatory to the ASD experience at large, but it remains an intriguing area to experience by proxy. Likens does some fulfilling work here exploring the very tangible ways that systems of closure and restriction work to liberate himself and many others on the autism spectrum. It indeed seems to speak to the root mechanic of the disorder which is, simply and broadly considered, being overwhelmed by choice in complex situations. No surprise that social situations are almost always emphasized in regards to AS, as the nuanced and complex variables of human interaction have always been one of the fundamental mazes of the human experience. I enjoyed Likens’ discussion of the ways in which game systems work incredibly well in this regard.

Overall, there are aspects of this book that undeniably shed light on the very intimate struggles of the true ASD experience, but these moments felt disappointingly like diamonds in the rough. A stern editor’s touch, I feel, would’ve slimmed the present material (and associated stylistic crutches, most notably the constant, needless repetition) far enough back to demand a more complicated contemplation on some of the book’s more intriguing moments. It promises to unlock the door but only offers a glimpse through the keyhole.

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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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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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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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Review: ‘Kindertotenwald’, by Franz Wright

Kindertotenwald: Prose Poems by Franz Wright
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

“If he could only overcome the fear, like a deafening dial tone in his right ear where he lies alone dressed in night listening, listening.” from the poem “Mrs. Alone”

Having loved the often spare nature of Wright’s poems over the years, I was intrigued by this new collection of prose poems, many of them considerable in length. I was afraid perhaps of there being too much, of what exactly I’d be hard-pressed to articulate. There is quite a lot here, but not one word of it free of Wright’s veteran and nuanced touch orchestrating toward a compelling whole that continues to feel lean, even surgical, and always biting. The entire book feels to me…not restive exactly, as the trademark anger and anxieties and lashings are all present, but more emphatically reflective and considering. There is a funereal air about this book, with many continuing returns to rich concerns and anti-concerns about mortality, the past–it feels as if Wright has come around some kind of final bend, or crested a last hill and is pausing in his book to look both ahead and behind him.

I say the book is not restive despite this almost pastoral metaphor I’ve drawn up, because the darkness and emotion are as brutally unrelenting here as in anything Wright has done before. While some of the poems have the airy, expansive feel of a long sigh let out between bursts in an argument, most of them well up over and over, billowing upward and outward like mushroom clouds, seeming to encompass every person who has ever lived until dissipating, leaving the poet alone under his own merciless gaze. The images and language pile up more and more without any shelter in enjambment or stanza break, trapping the reader into dealing with them in a manner that feels appropriate in a book that deals so often with both emotional and physical flavors of imprisonment.

Wright’s speaker screams at the sky and himself and at anyone that is close enough to hear, realizing over and over the futility and absurd sadness of life, of looking around at perhaps this final hill and realizing one has gone nowhere, with a furtive and honestly-wrought recurrence of faith suggesting perhaps that only in looking upward is there anything to see. For all his work in anger and addiction and loneliness and desperation, one is always in danger of missing the genuine and unsentimental yearning for and solace in love that undercuts every poem, in whatever small places the speaker struggles to find it.

Art forever remains such a place for Wright, whose poems carry a charged, seemingly inherent sense of defiance to the senseless tedium and loss of life; the poems so often drawing up the landscape for consideration and then standing as their own testament to what Wright has done after considering its gray robbery of nearly everything.

“It is all forever written down on a page in your keeping, the palm of my hand: outworld the world time, outheartlesss the heartless, so much meaningless fear, filling the sky, why, why this insane waste of time, the whole world one faithless Gethesmane”, from the poem “Our Mother”

The continual piling of these stark and almost overly layered poems seems Wright’s way of fulfilling the instruction of the above lines, letting his pieces play the world’s games back at them tenfold while laughing all the way. His talent for an acidic, black wit shine in numerous one-liners and pristine, complex metaphors that manage to dance and swing like a prizefighter simultaneously. Take the blows, be dazed, spit out some blood and teeth–as Wright knows, we’re all losing and losing quickly, and this is another book that will offer him a stretch toward lasting a while longer.

“Like you and I, they did as they were told. To things already here, we were called forth and asked to join them, asked to live. Not forever, not even very long. But we are called forth, we are brought here, and we are not brought here to die…

…This world was here before me, is now here, and will be when I am not. There is no sadness in my face, not my true face. My blanket is green, with here and there patches of brown showing through. So the grave has come into the bedroom. I am sitting up in my grave, I knew it. It comes right up to my waist; but it is not covering my face. It is still very far from covering my face,” from the poem “The Window”

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