Book Reviews: August 2012
Falcons on the Floor Fiction by Justin Sirois
The Always Broken Plates of Mountains, Poetry by Rose McLarney
The Names of Things, Fiction by John Colman Wood
The Chalk Circle: Intercultural Prizewinning Essays, Nonfiction edited by Tara L. Masih
Apostle Islands, Fiction by Tommy Zurhellen
Fall Higher, Poetry by Dean Young
Stories For Boys, Memoir by Gregory Martin
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Falcons on the Floor
Fiction by Justin Sirois
Publishing Genius, 2012
ISBN-13: 978-0983170648
$14.95, 300pp.
Reviewed by Nicolle Elizabeth
Extra: Nicolle Elizabeth interviews Justin Sirois
From war-torn Fallujah, Justin Sirois has birthed Falcons on the Floor. The novel dwells in the real time lives of two young men, Salim and Khalil, who try to escape the violence by traveling up the Euphrates River. Salim is intent on contacting Rana, a girl he met online who lives in Ramadi, a town forty miles away.
Although Sirois did not have any in-person experience of Fallujah, he enlisted the help of a refugee from the area, Haneen Alshujary, to craft this work. Despite the difficulties of long-distance reportage, Sirois presents a believable image of an Iraq ravaged by more than a decade of conflict. The accuracy of the story and characters comes through Sirois’s immersion in the issues and people of Iraq. He and Haneen run the Understanding Campaign, an organization that provides monetary and other support to non-profits and NGOs doing aid work in and for the Middle East.
Sirois’s goal for the book (see the accompanying interview) was to bring readers a humanistic view of what war is like for two everyday characters, made remarkable by events: “Their fatigues were assemblages of surplus Russian and stolen Iraqi police uniforms. One of them puffed a pipe through a slit in his red and white headwrap. Prayer beads dangled from their belt loops like little strung cherries. Red diamonds, sewn to their shoulders, confirmed their alliance.”
In counterpoint to the Iraqi protagonists are two young American men. Sirois provides the perspectives of all of them in parallel as the story progresses, using a writing style that lays bare his roots as a poet. Sirois is saying, “If not for geography and the currents of history, this could be any one of us,” a kind of literary generosity often found in books produced by the Publishing Genius camp.
The Always Broken Plates of Mountains
Poetry by Rose McLarney
Four Way Books, 2012
ISBN-13: 978-1935536192
$15.95, 80pp.
Reviewed by Anne Shaw
“You know how it has always / been here,” Rose McLarney writes in The Always Broken Plates of Mountains, “Love always shot / with the feeling this is the last of it.” McLarney, a native of western North Carolina, consistently roots her work in that state’s landscape: a place where beauty always carries with it a threat of violence, a legacy of both tenderness and loss. A sense of the always-already fractured helps to characterize this quietly powerful first collection.
“So people could try to grow / on the good land,” a neighbor declares in “Where I Will Live,” “they built in the hardest places.” Apart from the book’s self-proclaimed “Ars Poetica,” this statement seems to serve as the guiding principle for McLarney’s poetics. Meticulously crafted and delicately poised, her poetic “house” sits squarely in the rural. Her concern is with the people, processes, and histories of a North Carolina farming community. Each of her delicately-crafted lines is as musical and finely tuned as the next; as a whole, the poems are characterized by the restraint that was “all I had to distinguish myself” (“Covenant”). Surely, in today’s cacophonous and insistently urban poetic landscape, thriving in such terrain is a difficult undertaking.
McLarney’s strength is also, of course, her weakness: this reader wishes at times for poems that deliver more formal innovation and more overt engagement with their poetic forbearers. Yet, just as she rejects a hipster aesthetic, McLarney rejects showiness for its own sake. These deeply-engaged lyric narratives nonetheless deliver consistent surprise. In two of the book’s closing poems, “Desire,” and “I Learn to Be Still Like the One I Love,” McLarney uses short, pliant lines to reference both Emily Dickinson and Greek mythology. “My love is a hunter,” she writes. “I learn / a new aim: leaving no / fingerprints, making no mark.” This is “an emphatic Thumb” whose emphasis is on its deep concentration, a hunter whose survival depends on her ability to observe the environment. McLarney’s eye and ear are dead-on. The result is a stubbornly-rooted first collection of impressive insight and craft.
The Names of Things
Fiction by John Colman Wood
Ashland Creek Press, 2012
ISBN-13: 978-1618220059
$17.50, 261pp.
Reviewed by Dani Burlison
The vast rocky plains of the Chalbi Desert in Northern Kenya offer little in the way of hiding places or shelter from brutal winds and difficult questions. Yet he, the anthropologist, returns to the familiar barren landscape—the site of years of field research—in hopes of finding answers, of finding peace.
John Colman Wood’s chilling and gorgeous first novel, The Names of Things, follows a nameless anthropologist and his reluctant wife, an artist, through field research with the Dasse people of Kenya. Through marital tension, through long periods apart, through an illness that reveals long-buried secrets, the story unfolds around them as they attempt to work through emotional and physical distance in very unexpected ways.
This story reveals twists and sorrow, yet the most haunting aspects of the novel are the excerpted, factual field notes on the grief rituals of the Dasse, which are dispersed and planted between each chapter of the book. The presence of these notes hint at the conflicting emotions that grip the anthropologist while he faces his loneliness and deeply painful regret. With no quick and readily available term to label or name the things stirring inside him, he is forced to step away from the scientific lens of observation and into an unsettling place of uncertainty, where he must struggle to come to terms with the absence of knowing.
The mood of the Chalbi landscape echoes the feeling of being lost, of seeking answers, of reaching for something to ease the mind. But the anthropologist finds no comfort there, just more questions as he discovers that the only members of the Dasse community who may hold answers for him offer little more than clouded, vanishing memories. Through it all, The Names of Things guides the reader slowly, illustrating the reluctant, graying pace at which grief often moves.
With vivid detail and thoughtful prose, Wood delivers a unique and heartbreaking story of love, loss, and the universal human experience of seeking acceptance.
The Chalk Circle: Intercultural Prizewinning Essays
Nonfiction edited by Tara L. Masih
Wyatt-MacKenzie Publishing, 2012
ISBN-13: 978-1936214716
$14.95, 196pp.
Reviewed by Vincent F. A. Golphin
Chalk lines often outline reality, whether it’s a spot where a corpse laid or a tacitly understood barrier that one dare not cross. In The Chalk Circle, a collection of essays edited by Tara L. Masih, authors examine the chalk lines of the old social mainstreams that defined America in terms of “whiteness,” and other cultures by their prejudices. They force readers to widen their conceptions of just what mainstream means, illustrating how changed we have become.
There is a refreshing candor to many of the essays, some of which are literary gems. In an essay excerpted from her book, Reflecting on Dragons and Angels, Hamburg-born Shante Elke Baanwart illustrates this as she reflects on her perceptions of World War II when she was a child. Many writers have shared recollections about that period in history, mostly from the angle of American soldiers or Holocaust survivors. The now septuagenarian writer offers a rare view of the conflict: “War’s presence hid in the corners of our home and wafted like a foul stench behind the curtains and underneath my bed.”
The greatest surprise in DePauw University professor Samuel Autman’s “A Dash of Pepper in the Snow,” is his generous explication of the anxiety that being an American other can cause. The St. Louis-born African American shares an ironic tale about how his negative reaction to an outdated expression of approval—that’s mighty white of you—from a white waitress during the time he lived and worked in Utah might have cost the woman, who was once married to a black man, a job.
In “Giiwe: go home,” award-winning writer and artist Christine Stark fights to forsake whiteness in the embrace of the Chippewa (Anishinabe) and Cherokee in her family tree. The rarely seen perspective, as she puts it, confronts, “people who think that returning to Indian ways is a joke,” with the details of a lifelong personal quest and a century’s old Native American effort to find a “safe and secure place.” She writes, “If you were light-skinned [in her grandmother’s time], and someone found out you were Indian, you could lose everything, your house, your job, your children.”
The Chalk Circle at turns can amuse, bemuse, and challenge readers to redefine the spaces they occupy in society. These essays quietly celebrate multiculturalism, and offer insights not often heard from a wide range of writers. They offer evidence that differences do not exclude a common link among Americans—who hope and hurt in so many similar ways. The Chalk Circle is a work that pierces the heart.
Apostle Islands
Fiction by Tommy Zurhellen
Atticus Books, 2012
ISBN-13: 978-0983208099
$14.95, 240pp.
Reviewed by Ed Bennett
Tommy Zurhellen’s novel, Apostle Islands, is an irreverent look at a modern day messiah who preaches and performs miracles on the shores of Lake Superior. Sam Davidson is an unlikely religious figure in the rural fishing villages of the upper Midwest, preaching sermons like:
Listen: God will still love you if you eat bacon. He’ll still want you if you smoke reefer or sleep with a complete stranger or download Motorhead on your MP3. No, you ain’t going to burn in hell if you use a condom. And My Father knows as well as anyone that in the right circumstances, sometimes vodka really is the only solution.
This is Davidson’s Sermon on the Mount, a somewhat different take on Matthew’s gospel. It’s no wonder local and federal authorities are investigating him.
There are Biblical parallels: apostles, a Lazarus character, pickup trucks in place of camels, and motorized fishing nets to bring in miraculous catches. Sam’s mother, Roxy, is a suffering Madonna with a taste for white lightning. Zurhellen has created living, passionate characters to recount this story rather than the pious representations we are accustomed to from religious literature. The story line moves from the Sermon on the Mount to Sam’s death and resurrection, and includes recreations of the Acts of the Apostles and a couple of Paul’s epistles.
Apostle Islands is a sequel to Zurhellen’s Nazareth, North Dakota, which covers the birth and early life of this latter day messiah. It’s no Sunday school version of the gospels, and often reads as satire, which may test the faith of some readers, but develops into a story about a community of caring, loving people who try their best to get by in a difficult world.
Fall Higher
Poetry by Dean Young
Copper Canyon Press, 2011
ISBN-13: 978-556593116
$22.00, 105pp.
Reviewed by Brittney Scott
Dean Young’s poems are not unlike an M. C. Escher lithograph, some drawn hand reaching out from the picture to sketch itself, or tumbling stairs and doorways that turn you upright, upside down, and downside up. In his newest collection, Fall Higher, there is, as promised, a lot of falling: falling down stairs, out windows, through a vast and mysterious Dean Youngian kind of space:
Some weird shit
goes down here, baby, but soon your motor skills
will save you from rolling into the river
or throwing yourself from the bridge
although that will primarily be the power
of self-preservation that is with you
even now, working in your willingness
to suckle. (Happy Zero-th Birthday, Gideon)
His message, though, is not a hopeless one. It is, rather, recognition that we exist and that existence is a miracle. All this falling then, is not written as warning, but as a poetic near-death experience that leaves one more awake.
There is something for everyone in this collection. Young plays the poles perfectly—eternal, yet topical. In his poem, “Articles of Faith,” he writes, “I used to like Nicole Kidman / now I like Kirsten Dunst. / Jennifer Aniston is a schmuck / but Brad’s sure a rotter…Demons walk the earth. / Says so on a T-shirt.” In just over 100 pages he touches on politics, weather, love, death, fame, birth, dancing, fate, diseases, swans, rocks, and flaming scarecrows. His range, more so than ever, is dazzling and impressive.
Young’s typical form and structure is also at work. In “Madrigal” for example, he writes in strange, un-heroic couplets, like a deranged Pope, “Maybe we put too much faith in the heart / when any blockhead knows everything falls apart, / turn to mush the storied administrations of the brain, / there’s no statue that won’t eventually dissolve in the rain.” He writes short and long; sometimes in tight quatrains, sometimes allowing the poem to roll over several pages in one long blocked stanza. In previous collections, Young has always allowed his poems to do with him what they will, and this collection is no exception.
Along with his characteristic weirdness, there is an innate ability to understand when the reader needs foundation. He grounds the reader, and having accomplished that, takes it as his cue, nay, his duty, to blast off into strange and bizarre territory:
I could have been doing anything but I wasn’t
I was hugging wet clothes into the dryers
that moment in the Laundromat when you’re most exposed
the leopards have been waiting for in the long grasses
and the coyotes trotting through the dry grasses
and the raptors lying in the long sky. (Bay Arena)
Fall Higher offers the best of Young. There is internal slant rhyme, perfect end rhyme, jokes, gibberish, and rubbish—a whole whirlwind of chicanery. But his work wouldn’t be what it is without its powerful and grave emotional undertow. It’s as though the reader wades out into an unmarred river only to be torn underwater. You come up breathless, nostrils burning, scared, but alert and newly clean.
Stories For Boys
Memoir by Gregory Martin
Hawthorne Books, October 2012
ISBN-13: 978-0983477587
$16.95, 274pp.
Reviewed by Caroline Horwitz
In Stories for Boys, Gregory Martin creates an intense familial memoir about his reaction to his father’s emergence as a gay man with an addiction to anonymous sexual encounters.
The book is aptly named, referring to several different boyhoods: Martin’s own, which he revisits, wondering if his past is now tainted by the residue of his father’s double life; his young sons’, featuring their embodiment of innocence and his struggle to protect them while honestly communicating with them about their grandfather; and his father’s nightmarish childhood, punctuated by the physical and sexual abuse he endured from his own alcoholic father.
Martin’s adeptness at characterizing the story’s key players throws the reader into a cascade of emotional turmoil. One is immersed in sympathy for Martin, in the midst of his confusion and anger; for his strong-willed mother, deceived for the entirety of her marriage; and for his contemplative, penitent father, who navigates the awkward waters of coming out in his senior years, recovers from a suicide attempt and battles memories of paternal molestation.
Martin’s figurative language shines in lines such as, “… my father feels the horrible pull of his father’s gravity like the moon’s on tidewater.” The power behind his words illustrates how his father’s new identity is far less astonishing compared to the revelation of the long-lived lies and sexual addiction:
Yes, his homosexuality was a shock. But the real, lasting shock is that unquenchable desire that I never, not once, had any intimation or sense of—that he was so profoundly different from the man I thought I knew. 1,000 men. The self-loathing and shame and dark, inner loneliness; the cathartic, self-flagellation that must accompany the confession of such a number.
Besides his ability to write sentences of utter devastation, Martin also weaves evocative comparisons between his father and the life and writings of Walt Whitman. He makes the book all the more distinctive and accessible by including emails from his father, family photos, children’s drawings, tree house diagrams and pop culture images.
Stories for Boys is, in essence, stories for everyone. It is an artful journey from betrayal to forgiveness, of a father attempting to safeguard his children from the heartache that comes with honesty while raising them to possess open minds about those of all sexual orientations, and of a son reconciling the father he thought he knew with the man he comes to know.