Review: ‘Assumption’, by Percival Everett

Assumption by Percival Everett
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

What to say, really? Everett is a complex and strange master for our complex and strange, so-called ‘modern’ landscape. He always manages subtle and sometimes misleading stories and conversations about human proclivities, about race, about society, without ever letting them obnoxiously and lazily take over the stage. He always seems to have a more meaningful game at play, masterminded behind a never-ending series of stage curtains.

If nothing else Everett should always be read to experience something I can only think to call his confidence, an ephemeral talent for touch and tone, a hand at the small of your back, guiding you, with intentions always unclear–you might be set down for a warm meal, or shot and left gasping in a shallow river. Every footstep feels muddy, uncertain, superbly ambiguous, always unsettling. Everett always finds ways of reminding me as a reader to work against my own complacency. The author is not always your friend. By the end of this one, you’re going to adore the title and spend the hours after finishing it haloed by afterimages, aftershocks, ghost presences burned into your peripheral vision.

Graywolf Press has the Midas Touch as of late. They can do no wrong.

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Review: ‘Richard Yates’, by Tao Lin

Richard Yates by Tao Lin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I loved this book. I can say without sarcasm or irony or shame it assuaged me existentially. I feel like I admire a certain kind of commitment / effort required to write and read a book like this, and this has nothing to do with ‘tedium’ unless you’re not paying attention, but that’s okay, most people don’t, and it has nothing to do with being a good or bad person or a smart or dumb person (okay, sometimes), it’s just how people are. Art is hard, interacting with art is hard, finding art that is ready to interact with you as an individual is perhaps the hardest part.

I really enjoyed the relationship dynamic at the center of the book. I think it’s confusing and perhaps funny how many people seem to dislike this book because the HJO character doesn’t seem to often be a great person to be in a relationship with, as if the book isn’t fictional, and even to whatever degree it might not be, how does that reflect on the book? That itself is an interesting thing to think about, so I guess now I’m glad some people think that way, even if I think those people are stupid (though I don’t, but still do, which is why I’m confused).

What I enjoyed most about the relationship in the book is the confusion the HJO character feels when the DF character expresses cognitive dissonance daily in how she proceeds with her life, such as wanting to lose weight and be healthy while she is bulimic. The HJO character frequently gets upset and seems genuinely confused by this, as to why someone would say they want something or to act a certain way while never acting that way or doing what they need to be doing to enact certain outcomes in their life. This is something I personally connect with and find myself often doing. My personal feeling is along the lines of ‘It often gets more complicated than that’ but that just might be an excuse. I’m really intrigued that the HJO character seems to never ‘suffer’ from this; I’m curious if he really doesn’t or the book is written in such a way that it only seems that he doesn’t. My being intrigued by this is sort of stupid, though, as I’m interested in how he engages in the world this way if he really does, but if he really does it’s not the result of any disciplined worldview (like I wish it were, so I could adopt it) but simply how he ‘is’. This makes me wonder if this is still a worldview and daily practice that can be achieved by discipline and repetition, or if you have to be wired that way. This is the struggle that drives the relationship via conflict and resolution, and with it the novel. I’m interested in the disproportionate ratio of intense scrutiny on the behavior of the DF character, it shows some kind of abstract bias in the narrating entity. Again I’m glad for the extreme show/tell ratio–the fact that so little in the writer/reader relationship is dictated in this way creates a true sense of accessibility.

I’m curious about people who have problems with the style of the book, because it seems authentically stream-of-consciousness to me in a way (or rather stream-of-existence?), it feels like a good approximation of how life proceeds, so if people don’t enjoy the style of the book how do they go about their lives? It also seems that this book abides by the cliche rule of fiction to show and not to tell (just because it is cliche does not mean I think it’s wrong), this book shows everything and tells essentially nothing. Like anything else, especially in art, there’s as much meaning and enjoyment as is generated by your interaction with the book.

I mean, is it true that a novel I’ve never read has literally zero meaning to me because I’ve never read it? If you read this book it has meaning to you, I think ‘meaning’ or ‘making sense’ etc. are lazy, ambiguous, useless terms. I think talking in detail about the degree and type of meaning you do or do not find in a book or piece of art is way more interesting.

I don’t know why I’ve become so interested by the people who say things about this book when they didn’t like it. I just looked at the Goodreads profile of one of them and one of her interests is ‘cheese’, so I thought ‘Cheese beast. That is apropos, but only to me in this instance for maybe 15 seconds.’ This doesn’t make her a bad person, though.

I’m glad to have read this book and glad Melville House is putting this out. I thought that it could have easily been that this book might never have existed and genuinely felt intensely worried/sad/something, but that’s a strange way to think about anything.

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Review: ‘Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned’, by Wells Tower

Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The range of style evinced here is stunning. I love that some of the stories are disruptive in their incompleteness, as if the endings were forgotten. The last two stories in particular (including the title piece) are pristine, absolutely deft with a tonal bravado that seems effortlessly, paradoxically subtle.

The stories that have a great deal going on cohere flawlessly and the stories where almost nothing happen let their steady, hummed silence do all the proper work; compelling feels like an understatement. One wonders what Tower might manage in a novel, though he stretches his limbs so naturally in the short story form I wonder if more collections like this one are what’s to be expected, and gladly.

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Review: ‘selected unpublished blog posts of a mexican panda express employee’, by Megan Boyle

Selected Unpublished Blog Posts of a Mexican Panda Express Employee by Megan Boyle
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

‘Selected…’ by Megan Boyle is a rich addition to the catalog of Muumuu House, a sort of literary, cultural bastion for young writers that resonate thematically with the work of founder and internet-famous ‘symbol’, Tao Lin.

This enjoyably ambiguous ‘collective’ centers often around anxious-yet-stoic, stream-of-consciousness, I’m-okay-really-but-what-am-I-doing-with-my-life work of a complex flavor that many describe as the signature zeitgeist/milieu/something of my generation, a claim I have knee-jerk reaction toward deflecting as reductive and broad-brushed until I read the work and nod constantly, writing ‘Yes/pretty much/word/this/yup/lol’ in the margins. Megan Boyle’s debut collection of poetry is absolutely no different, and this is a good thing.

Yes, actually this is what my head sounds like. It may often feel like stereotypical ‘teenage angst’ that has ‘grown up’/gone to graduate school/spent years reading Lorrie Moore et al/’decided’ to exist as much on the Internet as off of it/etc. but that’s okay because it’s ostensibly the truth, to my mind.

Boyle’s speaker even nods toward the role of production of such an effect in the creative process itself:

“i relate to 90% of what lydia davis says, but i’m not sure if it’s because we’ve actually had similar thoughts, or because her style of writing makes me think we’ve had similar thoughts. i think a little of both.”

We see a bit more of this concern RE: life/art interplay later in the poem ‘every thought i had while walking to school’:

“am i consciously trying to think interesting thoughts because i think i’m going to write this down later?”

Another accusation/’hallmark’ of this kind of writing is a kind of self-indulgence one might expect with stream-of-consciousness writing almost constantly zeroed-in on how one feels at any given moment; a notable flourish in this book is a tendency to now and then shift this focus entirely to concerns of a larger scale, tied into mortality/the passing of time/the speaker’s effect on the world:

“do i only feel depressed because i constantly ask myself ‘how are

you feeling right now’ and sometimes don’t have an answer

i just looked at this and thought ‘professional blogging asshole’

i will be 24 in october”

and again, from one of the book’s most overarching and refractive moments:

“i am still unsure of what ‘life to the fullest’ for me would be, mostly i just

try to be well-liked in social situations and not die

i silently ask myself questions in the first person limited a lot, i.e. ‘am

i okay right now.’ if i mess up conversationally i will switch to second

person, i.e. ‘you fucking asshole’

sometimes i narrate my life in the third person in my head and won-

der of it’s good enough”

and in an early poem, put simply:

“everything i touch is going to be a fossil someday”

Two compelling paradoxes (and their resulting, understandable confusion) continue to be the matter of such work: feelings of anxiety clashing with feelings of stoic, existential boredom/directionlessness alongside intense loneliness clashing against the desire to be alone. The persistent shakiness between these emotional flares often feels anchored in the physical (sex/drugs, but without the ‘exciting’, cliché celebratory addition of ‘rock n’ roll’) as well as the intellectual/emotional. There are many comments both in and about the ‘Muumuu House aesthetic’ about the internet/social media/chatting that feel markedly appropriate; fewer things are as defining to my generation and technology seems enveloped in the same paradox: bringing people together while separating them. It’s an incredibly deep and nuanced conversation to consider, and I’ve not seen it articulated as appropriately or with as much emotional/artistic intelligence as I have here. One superb moment, from the poem ’7.20.09′:

“i’m consciously avoiding social situations. it feels okay, not really

different than before. maybe i’m a little more calm or something, and

it sort of looks like other people are having more fun than me all the

time

maybe i should stop doing that before people start forgetting about

me in their weekend event planning

i keep thinking about updating my blog, twitter, and facebook with

‘AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH,’ then leaving the internet indefinitely”

and here’s a moment that speaks a bit to this feeling outside of the context of the internet:

“i feel

like getting drunk/stoned with people is just a way to ‘pay dues’ to a

voice inside my head which says ‘you should be social,’ i don’t expect it

to result in feeling genuinely connected to anyone.”

This mention of ‘connecting’ resounds throughout the book on many levels, and what I perhaps enjoyed most about the entire book was the occasional moment of empathic consideration, often along the same plane of other thoughts/emotions, i.e. the classic existential questions aka who we are / where we’re going, mortality/the future, etc.:

“the guy next to me is typing expressively

seems like he’s looking for attention

he has a huge jug of water, like something a family would bring

to a sporting event

in ten hours we’ll both be in other places and the computer lab will be

dark and quiet

in 50 years our children will have families”

So maybe there is a connection somewhere in the nature of loneliness and separation, another strange but familiar-seeming paradox, and while the internet is an incredible, daily metaphor and reminder, this is a far older and human-nature thought/emotion, one the entire book sits upon and adds to, one worth exploring.

As is this book, I should by end be saying. Many detractors of this unique style have and will continue to point to the simplistic, accessible language and stilted-seeming tone/’craftwork’, and they do so at the cost of failing to interface with where the real work is–the nuanced introspections, emotional depths and genuine empathy that many are legitimately struggling to find a place of/place for. This book has a great deal to say, says it well, and knows you don’t always have to dress up/put on a costume to say it. It made me feel less lonely, or at least less lonely in my loneliness; it also made me want to spend more time writing. These are honestly perhaps my only real criteria for liking a book. I like this book.

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Review: ‘The Faster I Walk, the Smaller I Am’, by Kjersti A. Skomsvold

The Faster I Walk, The Smaller I Am by Kjersti Annesdatter Skomsvold
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Dalkey Archive has another stunner in this debut novel by Kjersti A. Skomsvold.

Our lonely, elderly narrator has measured her life, if she has truly marked off the passage of time at all, in knit earwarmers and an insistent though compelling lifelong conjuration from her husband of one statistic after another. As she sits overlooking the edge of her own mortality she gazes back into the spare vacuum of her life to see what filled all those spaces kept barren of friends, family, pursuits, and so on.

There’s an implicit sadness over the wasted life here, woven through the artfully pseudo-simplistic and good-natured inner thoughts of Mathea as she reflects on the husband she loved nearly as much as he seemed confounded by and sad for her, the dog that drowned after she threw its treat into a lake, and the child that never came.

The entire book is stoically infused with the tremendous weight of a lifetime of empty but hopeful days, and all of the loneliness that has come as Mathea approaches death, flailing out in her final days for some bit of meaning or legacy in a world that seems content to wholly forget her as she meanders about in her wedding dress, wielding a sandwich bag of teeth.

The reader is left to decide if she has succeeded or not in this sort-of adventure that is as bizarre as it is banal with a most disarming, persistent undercurrent of an unromantic loneliness and desperation; this is a rich, literary death rattle worth listening to.

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Review: ‘Primitive Mentor’, by Dean Young

Primitive Mentor by Dean Young
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Sometimes it feels like enough to say that a book was insanely good.

What I previously thought of as hyper-personalized shades of emotion surrounding bouts of reflection on mortality, selfhood, ‘place’ in all the macro, cosmological meanings as well as the micro, what-am-I-in-my-various-occurrences-of-family ones turned out to really be a bit more complicated. This is a book that shifts with breakage and tremor along the fault lines that form Young’s aesthetic gesture, singular enough to converse on and on as many do about surrealist jumps, the reality of post-modern ‘collage’ that Terry Eagleton say is the only art form we’ve got left, yet of course intrinsically this just leads to more breakage and nuance (even if every last nuance is accidental, which is really what this book is ‘all about’), the camera zooming in and out on exponential scales that defy notions of sense-making in a way that reinforces every last bit of meaning we’ve felt since listening to water drip down the first cave walls.

The play with mortality is arched up by a sort of warm kindness breathed in like humid air that seems to only be visited on the patients in all the vast terminal wings; sure it’s impossible to ignore what I’ve passingly read about Young’s health issues but it beautifully doesn’t matter, the hints of this strewn with a careless ease about the book as if Young is saying ‘Sure, it’s about that, it’s about me, but let’s get a little more ambitious…’ and the camera zooms, even as it sits stationary and solitary.

It’s all surrounding the beautiful existential cognitive dissonance of knowing that we’re dust motes in the beam of sunlight, sure, but to each mote, no matter how loving and altruistic, we’re always our own universe, it all revolves around us at some manner of scale & of course before we had better math and lenses we thought that’s how it all really went about. Whether you think poetry is about yourself or not Young feels the same, knows it’s both as much as it is neither; the collage sits as a pristine metaphor because every breathing bit in every scene of every micro-poem is Young, isn’t him, is you, me, whatever. It’s the kind of thinking that dares truly sentimental waxing and Young casts coquettish glances that way yet his hand guides with far too much irony and experience to let the poems drown.

Like I said: insanely good.

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Review: ‘The Difficult Here’ by Christine Garren

The Difficult Here by Christine Garren

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

More so than with any poet I’ve yet to read, Christine Garren’s poems always leave me with an impression of what I imagine to be her ‘process’, which is the only word at hand for what feels like the machinations of a writer with the abstract, nuanced, first-mover kind of creative patience that forgotten deities would due well to gather around to take notes on.

These poems are absolutely precise, pristine, free of any recognizable scaffolding, having been spun into motion and carefully watched over, waiting for each of these scenes to suss themselves out with a Darwinian cruelty towards the unnecessary. The ‘scenes’ come in and out of view not so much with quickness as with a quiet consciousness of whatever it is a particular poem might do on its page, refusing to mill around at either beginning or end, waiting to be noticed.

In several of these pieces an attitude almost resistant to the reader-viewer flares, opening with a biting bitterness toward “the young, // with their fake cleavages and fake fingernails and fake-colored hair–that cheap / looking flock”. Like all of lines here, this scathing sweep never really swings home; there’s a periphery of empathy constellating around, a subtle but emotional tell that pulls this compelling chapbook together. This feeling of continuity was my central, overarching feeling while finishing this book, as its titular lines show in the poem ‘Late January’:

“In the air that was violently cold, in the grey unforgiving light of morning
I drove past miles and miles of houses. Forever the road went
and though it was the end of January, in every other yard it seemed
a fake wretched-looking reindeer stood abandoned–or a life-sized creche
wasted in the freezing weather. In the end it was impossible to ignore
the repeated frostbitten glare of the virgin staring out into the street
or the elegant, flesh-eaten camel who stood beside her infant
swaddled in ice–as they stayed on this year, living with us
a little longer now–suddenly stranded in the difficult here.”

While this poem seems lonely in its absence of any human presence save the speaker, it stands with an even greater degree of starkness in the context of the rest of the book, where life and motion teem over. This poem seems to me one way to frame the rest of the book, in that the compartmentalized feeling of each poem and their swift arrivals and departures remind me of the houses the speaker likewise passes; the ‘here’ becomes both some faintly concrete place as well as a more heady location carried through all of the poems, stringing them together like the various trees mentioned in nearly every poem both figuratively and, faintly again, literally as they can be found manning the gaps of the textual landscape from one piece to the next.

The ‘here’ is so difficult because of the experience of reality itself, passing as one does through the grey murk between both joy and bitterness with either too much speed or not enough, lulling around at times in the wet late of a January, the decorations either forgotten or somewhere near it, looking as weathered as we all usually do. The warmth of the holiday has passed–everything is passing–but will, of course, be coming around (and leaving) again. The ‘here’ is the small moment, the tedious and unforgiving one that sits between the various, kindly-regarded ‘real’ moments that constitute the whole of life. But even these moments and micro-moment snapshots prove rich, exponentially layered with even the fewest lines. There’s a grace to this, and a grace to such moments that Garren allows to permeate this chap; the effect is light but stalwart, never letting both feet on the ground while making a kind of ineffable sort of stand. Just don’t expect superficial, easy meaning to answer you in return; ‘here’, we’re absolutely on our own, whatever we make that out to mean:

The Living Star

“we forget we are dying
and spin
on and on drifting nearer
then apart–living just as you do–all the time
we see you in the fields near your Autumn fires–your faces tilted upwards
toward us
as if we held an answer–when we live just as you do–nothing
about us is free”

‘The Difficult Here’ is the first book from Indiana University South Bend’s 42 Miles Press.

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Review: ‘For Sale By Owner’, by Kelcey Parker

For Sale By Owner by Kelcey Parker
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Kelcey Parker’s debut collection of stories will leave you feeling, among other things, very surprised. The surprise at work is not because of the material she works with—the seemingly quotidian bricks of the domestic Midwestern suburbs—but in the way she infuses those materials with a truly unique velocity and darkly playful touch. The suburbs and soccer moms and unfaithful husbands aren’t the ones you read about in books or watch on sitcoms, but the ones you yourself drive past every day and speculate about as your mind wanders.

To me these stories have done what few have managed, and that is to bypass what we think we mean with terms like ‘realist’ that are supposed to reference a familiar framework—our own ‘real’ lives. So we’ll find ourselves or people we know in them, their stories are ours, and so goes their supposed (and often effective) premise. But Parker has done the real trick, has reached a territory of the real that shows just how far fiction of this type might push when it bothers to stop and trouble itself first. You might not find your story in this collection but they all seem close at hand, in the yelling from the neighbor’s house or the lone woman you spot checking into a dingy motel.

I was also at all times enjoyably perplexed by the emotions and humor Parker has woven, complicating every thought and piece of dialogue such that it seems one might labor under the very real sensation of experiencing several, even conflicting emotions at once. Are these stories hopeful? Nihilistic? Heartbreaking? Heart-affirming? Every sentence seems to turn where you think they’re going, which is the real key to this kind of reality, the one we genuinely recognize as our own: the stories don’t know, the characters don’t, just as we often don’t. Sometimes we do feel affirmed or utterly broken, but such concrete places are few—these stories aren’t selling anything or playing dress-up.

This notion leads to my final appreciation which is that this collection feels like it comes from a veteran source; there’s no lack of confidence or deftness to Parker’s gesturing, a steadied hand at the wheel as she careens us around the burning suburbs of her sophisticated, sharply imagined inner world.

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Review: ‘the Homelessness of Self’ by Susan Terris

the Homelessness of Self by Susan Terris
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Cole Swensen offers the following in her blurb of Susan Terris’s the Homelessness of Self, out recently from Arctos Press:

“…Terris also does something entirely new with the confessional poem, opening it to previously unexplored territory with her vivid, idiosyncratic language and hauntingly honest imagery. The whole is eye-opening and refreshingly frank.”

I don’t normally open a review with a blurb, or even really cite them at all, but after finishing the book I couldn’t help feeling a bit like I had been scammed by such high praise. If one has, say, bought this book essentially at random from SPD Books, such words might assuage any fears that one is stepping into a book of an all too familiar affect, in which case such a person as your humble reviewer becomes caught off guard by the very stale and plodding book that appears page by page. Which is all to say that Swensen’s blurb to my mind seems almost humorous in the way it seems to catalog all the flatnesses of Terris’s poems as I was affected by them.

The territory feels very well-trodden indeed, with language that might be vivid if it could compose itself with an ambition that might see itself as something more than a parade of cliché romantic naturalism and bored domesticity. By language that is ‘idiosyncratic’, Swensen I assume means the painfully frequent nudges toward word play that simply seem to me to show either a lack of imagination or a lack of effort—they are small, half-willed efforts in nearly every instance I found them, as the following stanza from the poem ‘The Path to Innisfree’ examples:

“Disease and dis-ease. What we have

taken, must all be returned.”

This lazy gesturing crops up again and again, showing up in a section where Terris works with lists of aphoristic lines in some attempt toward turning them towards her own end of the thematic cores of the text, and here more than ever it feels to me the lack of imagination costs her heavily. The terse nature of aphorisms makes employing and tweaking them infinitely harder than perhaps writing them to begin with; the margin of error for dabbling in them in this way feels razor-thin to me, and Terris seems to clumsily teeter off this edge with an unsettling consistency. For instance:

“He who follows the path of least resistance will have least

And any man who tries to walk on water will surely drown”

What would often seem most striking to me were the numerous moments where Terris seems to lack all confidence that even these very easily leapt-to linguistic tinkerings will be clear or compelling to the reader, which seems to prompt her to explicate their meanings time and time again, undercutting whatever small momentum such lines may have had to begin with. From ‘Currants, Currents, Undercurrents’ (another example in its own right, as it goes):

“As she treads to stay above the glazed surface, she

watches mallards, webs sculling, circle her, creatures who

mate for life. Any female – mate lost – must forever solo.”

Add in stanzas like the following (I think it speaks for itself):

“O, song of the flagpole, sonata of wave and wind.

Out by the sandbar, in the shallows, wild

rice grows. Move toward it, wait, listen.”

And the seemingly relentless awkwardness of ‘witticisms’ such as the one in these lines:

“And marriage proves it’s easy to be a math atheist. Here,

one and one should equal one but still equals two.”

And the promise of Swensen’s praise began to feel more and more to me like a pitfall that I had all too quickly leapt into. Which feels very unfortunate, because the one complement the blurb paid that I felt was worth being given was that of honesty, even if no part the text pushed it forward into a velocity that would threaten to haunt after the book was finished. That honesty simply never felt it could muster itself through the strangely uncomfortable lines that promised its presence.

In the poem ‘Phoning Home / Salt’, the speaker offers the question “Is this one more B movie script?” This is a very resonant question, one of the few the book manages despite itself, dressed as it is in a tired cloth that itself isn’t without irony. This question cries for a more vulnerable speaker to feel its presence, once unconcerned with lazy linguistic tics and sadly crutch-like clichés.

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Review: ‘otherwise elsewhere’ – David Rivard

Otherwise Elsewhere: Poems by David Rivard
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

If I am tempted very much to say that I admire the complexity and depth of Rivard’s poetry, I can only do so while giving even greater recognition to the deftness with which he constructs these pieces, the way the layers are laid out line after line with a subtlety that is its own kind of wit. What is enviable is that this wit is a finely-honed wit but Rivard leaves no trace of his labor, gives no impression of laborious ‘craftwork’ endured to reach this particular landscape.

That is all to say the kind of rich, detailed kind of attention fueling the imaginative effort throughout these poems seems quite effortless despite the often brilliant turns his lines take, his metaphors often surprising not with an element of juxtapositions that seem to form the strangest of neighbors and only that, but that the strangeness is never all that strange. We wonder if they haven’t been neighbors all along and most importantly, why didn’t we see them before Rivard revealed them to us, as if he had been given a special tour of this landscape?

This kind of curation is often best exemplified in Rivard’s use of listing in his poems; here’s one my favorite examples:

“and having come home once more
for a little while longer
we will be able to go on helping ourselves then
to the Frenched rack of lamb
or an uninhibited pit bull
encrypted lap top’
or pen knife–
an accidental & systemic form of self-inventing life–
and the container ships will go on mutating across sea lanes
carrying cartons
of bath towels hardwoods & pixels”

and here is another:

“and at the muffler shop
the crawl line reminded viewers repeatedly

that the dead researches had taken as their clan tag
the name True China Gamers,

and then there were jests
and serious sad agreements to kill for love

inside the dimly-lit school hall then
the 6th graders dashed in & out of ‘Twelfth Night’”

Rivard’s wit also exerts itself in the more direct notion of the word, often producing a conversational quality that is both humorous and genuinely sad, stemming many times out of a reflecting nostalgia still trying to suss out some kind of wisdom of the world for both the speaker and perhaps for others, for an unsentimental kind of wisdom that one might be able to pass on somehow to someone else, a striving for that mode of kindness even if it feels mostly impossible, something intangible that for all our wants is perhaps best to remain out of reach for anyone’s articulation:

“And soon enough there was rain
over all the Elizabeths. And a skiff embarked across the bay.
But no student at exam time in any school anywhere
would claim this has a storyline or plot. Only now & again
did it make sense.”

So the struggle over the ephemeral must continue, as it always has, whether the answers sought are of realms political, religious, of the intellect or of the heart. Rivard seems to imply to me that of course it’s not the destination but really the journey is often without rewards as well, but still the work goes on, and he does so in this book that finds itself doing its work among the ranges and expanses, not only physically but in manners of class, race, and any other kind, really. There are gestures here towards a kind of acknowledged, failed universality, which is absolutely not to say that Rivard doesn’t manage to get beyond himself; these poems never stay close to home, are inherently of a broader and more wild breed, are somehow always, as the book’s title offers, other places, other times, elsewhere from whatever this place might be.

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