Book Reviews: July 2012
All The Roads That Lead From Home Short Stories by Anne Leigh Parrish
After Alluvium, Poetry by Thom Dawkins
The Grievers, Fiction by Marc Schuster
Deformation Zone, Essays by Johannes Göransson and Joyelle McSweeney
Boleto, Fiction by Alison Hagy
Sex with Buildings, Prose Poems by Stephanie Barbé Hammer
Outerborough Blues, Fiction by Andrew Cotto
The Radio Tree, Poetry by Corey Marks
Subduction, Fiction by Todd Shimoda, with art by L.J.C. Shimoda
Self-Published Book
The Girl Who Swam to Atlantis, Fiction by Elle Thornton
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All The Roads That Lead From Home
Short Stories by Anne Leigh Parrish
ISBN-13: 978-1935708414
Press 53, 2012
$14.95, 170pp.
Reviewed by Renée K. Nicholson
To come to terms, meaning the ability to begin to accept or deal with something difficult or unpleasant, is also a phrase that can be applied to the stories in Anne Leigh Parrish’s collection All The Roads That Lead From Home. The characters in this collection come to terms with all sorts of tough and often sordid situations, from the nagging ghost of a recently deceased mother, to miscarriage, to potential suicide at an academically competitive college, to the inevitable fallout of divorce, and so on. Women leave bad men, children learn to make their own way, and friendship sometimes remains the most important thing.
Parrish has a knack for bringing a reader into a specific female consciousness, one of unrequited dreams, unsatisfactory men, domestic situations, and often heartbreaking realities. The stories seek to define who, or what, haunts these characters, confronting their feelings of longing and loss. The plights are relatable, such as when the protagonist of “An Undiscovered Country” tells us “I have a job I hate and can’t afford to quit.”
Parrish’s characters combat everyday problems by extraordinary means. In “Pinny and the Fat Girl,” an unhappy teen fakes stupidity until called out by her best friend, Eunice, the “fat girl” whom Pinny befriends because she feels her peers discount her. To complicate matters, Pinny crushes on the fat girl’s infatuation, a boy named Carl Pratt, who, it turns out, isn’t worth either of their time. What could be a story best left to an overwrought teen drama is poignantly rendered, and leaves the reader, unsuspectingly, with the girls’ laughter.
Descriptions, throughout the collection, are often simple yet arresting, much like the “words like ice” of Sheryl’s mother, the ghost of “An Undiscovered Country.” An example comes from the end of the title story, “All the Roads That Lead from Home”:
Then the rain broke loose. It splashed through the open window, soaking us in no time. I leaned my head out the window and let it pelt my face. Mary turned onto a narrow country road, bordered by fields of grass. In the distance was an old barn, leaning badly, its roof in a sag. I imagined a snug, country house where you could live and not be bothered. When the rain stopped, the air shimmered, and the drops that held on the blades of grass were so lovely I didn’t worry any more.
Many stories are set or refer to Dunston, a fictional town in the Finger Lakes region of New York, which also supports an Ivy League college. The geography presented is often as bumpy a terrain as the interior of these characters. Despite the rain and snowstorms, the sun does appear, both literally and figuratively, and hope, though tenuous, is never abandoned.
After Alluvium
Poetry by Thom Dawkins
Three Sheets Press, 2012
$12.00, 30pp.
Reviewed by Anne Shaw
“Nothing rises that is not swept away,” declares Thom Dawkins’s delicately-crafted chapbook, After Alluvium. As its title suggests, these poems are deeply engaged with landscape as well as the legacy of post-modernity. However, Dawkins rejects hipster irony in favor of a nuanced consideration of our histories: literary, ecological, spiritual and human. Operating in the mode of updated pastoral elegy, fracture and its implications lie at the core of this work.
Perhaps the best example is “Landscape with Instability,” a prose poem whose three blocks of text occupy, almost exactly, the center of the volume. Quietly referencing Hopkins’ windhover, the poem offers three views of a shifting, watery landscape. The experiencing subject is a barely-embodied “narrator” whose perceptions are relayed in third person. In the first view, “No Hawk Appears,” and the narrator is left in a polluted landscape “thinking, All is Dark…thinking, Amor Fati.” In the second view, “Terms are Left Undefined.” Here the hawk appears, but the poem’s language, as well as its subjects, struggles to articulate a way forward: “Hawk awkward, hawkward, toward the hawk. The wind moves in his direction,” the poem offers, without clarifying whether the pronoun refers to hawk or human. In the third iteration of the scene, “Panorama, Symbol’s-Eye View,” the narrator ascends, but “elliptically and based on circumstance.” “His air makes the wings it rises on,” writes Dawkins, as if in our fallen landscape, we must pull ourselves up by our own spiritual bootstraps.
Dawkins, who holds a degree in Divinity, instead locates the potential for redemption in human interaction and relationship. In “Atchafalya,” there is tentative connection between tourists and the Louisiana backwoodsmen who “teach us the names of things / that will soon be heavy with loss: cypress and cormorant, silver fin / and spoonbill.” In an Edenic swampland of impending ecological disaster, the men achieve a fragile communion as “the fire of grief ascends in us.”
However, it is the book’s moments of romantic and sexual intimacy that offer the most sustained hope. In “Lauds,” an aubade that comprises the book’s closing poem, Dawkins subtly invokes Donne’s “The Sun Rising.” Here the narrator declares to his lover, “I pray to be blessed in you / toes thrown over knees …. / skin stretching over the hope / in our muscles.” In this final poem, the sun “[burns] out the dusk” that has come before, offering, if not transcendence, then the capacity for something close.
Dawkins’s poems are smartly and intimately engaged with their literary forbearers, but never fall into mimicry. With a lyrically unfailing ear, Dawkins eulogizes and even, at times, finds moments to celebrate in our current historical condition.
The Grievers
Fiction by Marc Schuster
ISBN-13: 978-1579622633
The Permanent Press, May 2012
Hardcover $26.00, 176pp.
Reviewed by Joe Ponepinto
Every surface is a façade, obscuring unpleasant truths from the rest of the world. Charley Schwartz, who was graduated from one of Philadelphia’s most prestigious prep schools, earns a meager income dressed as a happy dollar sign for a bank. The school hides its financial troubles behind an ancient, august structure. Charley and his friends from the school present their best public faces, but when a fellow alum commits suicide, they are forced to reveal the personalities behind the masks.
Charley is the classic underachiever, not only failing to reach his potential, but resenting the world he believes has kept him from doing so. When he learns of Billy Chin’s death, he decides to remember his friend by suggesting the school conduct a memorial service. But the school’s Director of Giving recognizes the request as an opportunity to tap the alumni for contributions. Charley is put in charge, and wrestles with the establishment, his friends, his wife, and his own realizations about his relationship with Billy to ensure the event has more meaning than a simple fundraiser.
Schuster’s novel dwells in the dark places of the mind, the realm of doubts and misperceptions born of a life that has turned out to be far short of expectations. Charley carries on, balancing his inner conflicts with rationalizations and clever banter that get him through each day, such as the Marx Brothers’ movie trivia exchanges with best friend Neil. His wife, Karen, meanwhile, remains his biggest supporter, even while she strips the walls of their home in preparation for a renovation, a neat metaphor for what’s happening to Charley.
This is Schuster’s third book, and its understated writing establishes the author as someone who truly understands the painful realities and compromises that are as much a part of being human as the joys. So much in this text, as in its characters, lies beneath the surface. It is worth a read, and possibly two, to understand the subtleties that lie within.
Deformation Zone
Essays by Johannes Göransson and Joyelle McSweeney
Ugly Duckling Presse, 2012
$12.00, Hand bound, 32pp.
Reviewed by Michael Martin Shea
Deformation Zone, a pair of essays from Johannes Göransson and Joyelle McSweeney on the subversive nature of translation, is exactly what we should expect from two of the most exciting writers today: radical, witty, and above all, insightful. Those familiar with Göransson and McSweeney’s blog, Montevidayo, will find themselves at home in the ideological make-up of these short pieces, which betray a predilection for postmodern (especially Baudrillardian) theory. However, though the essays do require a modicum of patience, specifically when they use the same terms to different effects—“medium” becomes particularly difficult—they lack the sort of obscurity and convoluted syntax that turns many away from contemporary criticism. Nor do the authors shy away from calling out what they see as a complacent, conservative view of translation that locates its ultimate good in its transparency—as McSweeney remarks, the idea that “the best taste is that which cannot be noticed,” an idea she and Göransson attempt to dismantle.
Göransson’s piece, entitled “Translation Wounds,” centers on the idea of translation as an incision into the body of the text, through which a plurality of readings enter and destabilize the text—above all, on the level of linguistics. Citing both Christian Hawkey’s non-fluent translation of Georg Trakl and Swedish poet Aase Berg, Göransson makes the case that certain texts or modes of translation give rise to a sort of ghost realm, in which we find “the real danger of translation […]: the inner and outer are confused” such that the road between the translated and the translation becomes impossibly complex. McSweeney’s piece, on the other hand, focuses on filmmaker Matthew Barney as a way to discuss how physical translation reveals the apparatus of the translation effort, and the effects this has on the translated body. Written in a sort of hyper-cultural, tonally diverse language, McSweeney’s essay is as fun to read as it is enlightening. On Barney, she remarks, “Some commentators suggest he is the model of this mould. Yet something there is that doesn’t love a mould, or that loves it too well, that smooshes it, splooges it.” Her conclusion—that translation consists of one body “saturating” another—stands in stark contrasts to the accepted notion of a docile, invisible translator.
Taken together, these two essays radically expand the possibility of translation, which is not to say that they solve a distinct problem. The essays give rise to more questions than answers—most notably, it’s unclear whether these views of translation are descriptive or normative—do even the most conservative translations invoke translation’s ghost realm?—and it might be difficult for some readers to understand how McSweeney’s focus on film relates to written texts. Given the length, though, it would be absurd to expect more than a primer; hopefully, we can expect a more lengthy discussion on translation from these two in the future, of which this will only be the springboard.
Boleto
Fiction by Alyson Hagy
Graywolf Press, May 2012
ISBN-13: 978-1555976125
Hardcover $24.00, 288pp.
Reviewed by Raul Alvarez
Alyson Hagy writes of life in Wyoming with gentle sincerity. By foregrounding the coming-of-age story of a man and his mare, Hagy produces a novel that reflects its setting, with sometimes sparse, yet always elegant prose. Boleto is, ostensibly, a western. From the initial pages, readers are asked to accept Will Testerman’s expertise as a young horse whisperer. However, Hagy carefully introduces us into the complicated world of raising horses. She allows us personal investment in the story, and the investment is well rewarded.
This is a novel that builds upon Hagy’s reputation as a master storyteller. From the success of her short-story collection, Ghosts of Wyoming, Hagy has been a stalwart voice of the American West. Here, she explores complicated questions: the pursuit of money, the ethics of ownership, and the broken social constructs that separate us, all through the relationship between Will and his beautiful, usually unnamed, quarter horse. Hagy’s ability to bring the vast skyline of rural Wyoming to life is unparalleled in modern fiction. Her novel teems with the same energy as the isolated, rolling terrain that inspired it. The dialogue maintains the same qualities as the reverently described landscape. This book is an important immersion into a world and its inhabitants that are frequently ignored by city centric readers.
Sex with Buildings
Prose poems by Stephanie Barbé Hammer
dancing girl press, May 2012
$7.00, 32pp.
Reviewed by Joe Ponepinto
Posted July 2012
Stephanie Hammer’s short stories and flash fictions have often displayed an imagination laced with biting social comment—a dead mayor leads to an all-dead government; furry blue monsters live in the sewers of Beverly Hills; professors burn down their schools while trying to save them. The prose poems in this slim volume continue to fire Hammer’s literary arrows, although they occasionally replace her humorous jabs at society’s constructs with a more serious and less subtle aim.
The opening piece, “Ars Judaica,” deals with old and new views of being Jewish, a subject close to Hammer who converted to the faith when she married, and a change made more dramatic since she is related to the Romanov family, Russian aristocrats who persecuted Jews. “I see the word holocaust and I have to read whatever it is,” she writes. And later:
You look Jewish she says. You don’t look Jewish another one says. My friend’s parents whisper anti-Semitic jokes, when I am at their house. Is she…? They say to each other. NO, I say loudly, but I am filled with the fury of the Cohen (the priestly class) over this slight. I am 17. My boyfriend’s name is Sy Metzger. He is regrettably very tight with money. But a thing of beauty to look at. A brilliant filmmaker, a passable lover.
Other poems are paeans to some of the great writers of the short form. To Russell Edson, Hammer offers a dragon in Hollywood dissed by more important types, and a wife and mother who cannot resist her urge to leave her family and explore northern climates. Lydia Davis gets two dead lovers. Yasunari Kawabata and Barry Yourgrau share a suburban bamboo nightmare.
The title poem, dedicated to Lynn Kilpatrick, extends our culture’s preoccupation with sex to include the pleasure possible from contact with buildings—what a wonderful analogy to describe our increasing emotional distance from other people.
Hammer’s is an intelligent, informed imagination, and her aim in this chapbook remains true. Her indictments of ridiculous and unthinking social customs and stereotypes are entertaining, yet critical as always.
Outerborough Blues
Fiction by Andrew Cotto
Ig Publishing, June 2012
ISBN 978-1935439493
$15.95, 207 pages
Reviewed by Ed Bennett
Think of New York City and its stories, and you probably think of Manhattan. But there is a second aspect to the city, made up of the four boroughs that ring the hub, and which have their own tales to offer. Andrew Cotto’s Outerborough Blues takes place in Brooklyn, and focuses on a seamier time in the history of the boroughs.
Manhattan appears in brief cameos, but the real action takes place throughout Brooklyn, from the Verrazano Bridge to the Navy Yard, centering on The Notch, a bar/restaurant on the western end of the area, in the 1990s, when the neighborhood was at its low point in the days before gentrification.
The protagonist, Caesar Stiles, finds a missing person, faces down a threat to his safety and resolves a family conflict in the space of a week. Other characters speak the muscular sounds of the outer boroughs of the time. The Captain, Caesar’s employer, explains the ways of the neighborhood to him:
“So what about Cyrus and all his businesses? You think you know something? Hell, this ain’t middle America, boy, or wherever the hell you from. It ain’t Manhattan either—this is Brooklyn, real motherfucking Brooklyn, and we got our own rules round here, our own way of living, our own way at looking at things. I don’t worry ’bout no one’s business, no one worries ’bout mine.”
I am reminded of the no-nonsense straight talk found in Walter Mosley’s work, yet Cotto’s prose does not mimic. Other reviewers might use the word “gritty” to describe this novel, and no doubt they would be correct. But reading Cotto’s novel brings to mind another word: honest, as in a keen portrayal of that other New York City, an investigation into the sometimes overlooked places where most of the city’s residents are located, and a deserved tribute to their lives.
The Radio Tree
Poetry by Corey Marks
New Issues Poetry & Prose, 2012
ISBN-13: 978-1936970063
$15.00, 63 pp.
Reviewed by Beth Sutton-Ramspeck and Doug Ramspeck
Even if John Ruskin occasionally makes the concept of the pathetic fallacy—our tendency to project human emotions into the natural world or even into artifacts—sound faintly like a character flaw, a perhaps forgivable distortion, poets have long utilized this device as a way of exploring and externalizing our personal and human geographies.
In Corey Marks’s second book of poetry, winner of the 2011 Green Rose Prize, he offers a series of highly interior and often impressionistic poems: works in which the speakers are laid low by their own skewed impressions of the natural and man-made worlds surrounding them. Many of the poems—and often the most breathtaking—begin in a dream or dreamlike world that merges mysteriously, ominously, with waking reality. The works return again and again to certain obsessions—tulips, birds, radios, menacing trees, and faded photographs. Many of the best poems in the collection, including “Three Bridges,” “And Winter,” and “Sleeper Lake Fire,” focus on natural disasters.
In “Sleeper Lake Fire,” for example, “a tree was burning in my dream,” then the flames, smoke, and disturbed birds “drift/ from a dream” into a reality punctuated by a radio that obsessively “mutters” warnings. As the poem concludes,
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxbirds
startled at the sudden blaze,
handfuls of ruckus trashing
into a night torn between the skyand the dark page lapping below
where the fire doubled
and grew wilder like a dream
of itself coming true.
In a second poem, “Little Bird,” Marks writes of a dream bird singing “a song like no song” to a baby who has “thoughts / that can’t find a way / to be said.” Yet “Mornings, the baby clicks and squawks / when I wake her in a language /she chooses not to speak.” Language, another central concern in this accomplished collection, navigates its way through the idiosyncratic voices and perceptions of the speakers, unlocking throughout The Radio Tree the inner life.
Subduction
Fiction by Todd Shimoda, with art by L.J.C. Shimoda
Chin Music Press, May 2012
ISBN-13: 978-0984457670
Hardcover $25.00, 304pp.
Reviewed by Joe Ponepinto
Like the tectonic plates that collide and force one to slide under the other, our thoughts and emotions, Todd Shimoda writes, are forced below the surface of our consciousness. The author builds the tension in Subduction in an earthquake-like fashion, mimicking the fault lines of geology among his characters, even going as far as to have one of them create a map of the relationships on Marui-jima, a fictitious island off the coast of Japan, to show the strained affairs among the residents.
A young doctor in a metropolitan hospital, Jun Endo, covers for a superior and accepts the blame for a patient’s death. His punishment has him banished to the shaker-prone speck of volcanic land for four years. There he meets Mari, a documentary maker, and Aki, a seismologist. All three have an interest in the island’s permanent residents, seniors who refuse to leave despite a government edict designed to save them from the cataclysmic temblors that have plagued the island for decades and are predicted to continue.
As with earthquakes, much of the motivation for Subduction’s plot lies beneath the surface, revealed layer by layer through the stories the islanders and Mari tell. Each of the characters, whether a permanent or temporary resident of the island, has a story with enough impact to stand on its own, and Shimoda does a masterful job of weaving them into the plot. The only character without a tale to tell is the narrator, Endo. Compared to the others he has lived, he believes, a dull, uneventful life, and he struggles throughout his stay to find a personal history worth sharing.
Subduction is further enhanced by the illustrations of L.J.C. Shimoda, the author’s wife, whose intriguing art adds to the book’s mystery, and matches the pace of her husband’s careful storytelling. The novel and accompanying art make for a stunning package, but preclude this book from being produced in anything but a hardcover format. The combination is well worth the slightly higher price.
Self-Published Book
The Girl Who Swam to Atlantis
Fiction by Elle Thornton
ISBN: 978-1466431683
$10.00, 155pp.
Reviewed by Renée K. Nicholson
Elle Thornton’s novel locates the reader squarely in the consciousness of Gabriella, a girl beyond innocence and not quite to the point of adult knowledge. It also locates us physically on a North Carolina military base in the 1950s. Our young narrator is precocious and active, and soon finds friendship in Hawkins, an African-American Marine who works for Gabriella’s father, a man she refers to simply as The General. Hawkins becomes an important figure for Gabriella, not only for his ability to forge a delicate friendship as well as for teaching her to swim. Swimming becomes a beloved activity—and one where she can ponder, escape, and prove her abilities to her father.
To complicate matters for Gabriella, her mother is largely absent, and our young narrator longs for her return. Left mostly alone, except for a few other kids on base, including a burgeoning crush named Doyle, Gabriella becomes pre-occupied with the story of Emmett Till, a young black man who was killed in the South for whistling at a white woman. Gabriella delicately parses race relations through the telling and retelling of Emmett Till’s tragedy, her friendship with Hawkins, as well as another unlikely friendship with Eula Mae, the elderly mother of a military officer, who in her own youth had tried, successfully, to befriend an African American boy.
Told in short, episodic chapters, The Girl Who Swam to Atlantis could almost qualify as a novel-in-stories. Each chapter is practically a stand-alone installment, with a gentle arc. The structure keeps Gabriella’s journey well paced between present action and her inner conflicts. It allows for breaths between heated moments—such as when Gabriella and Hawkins are pulled over by local law enforcement off the military base and Gabriella fears she has put Hawkins in peril—and more playful ones—such as swimming with her friends at the officers club, or listening to Doyle play guitar. The language pitches and sways with these changes. In one moment, we hear the rough-hewn voice of the sheriff, “‘Git out of the car, boy.’ The sheriff is all leather and chewing gum, his face pocked as a waffle iron.” And in another scene we shift to a more serene voice:
In near total darkness we walk along a winding road. We both stop to look up at a military cargo plane, its navigation lights flashing as it drones overhead. Doyle’s lips brush mine, and I feel a small shiver, like wind touching flowers in a field. We stand there peering at each other through the blackness. Then we’re chasing one another, shouting, “Wait for me, wait for me!” Our laughter and the chorus of cicadas rise and whirl with the unchained stars.
Thornton manages to balance the age and voice of the narrator with a lyric sensibility, as well as with subject matter that cuts to the strained and difficult issues of race in the segregated South.