Review by Chris Vola

In a recent opinion piece in the New York Times, Jonathan Franzen, decrying technology’s suctioning of deep human emotions (i.e. “liking” a video of a kitten playing the piano versus deeply caring about someone), writes that “the ultimate goal of technology…is to replace a natural world that’s indifferent to our wishes — a world of hurricanes and hardships and breakable hearts, a world of resistance — with a world so responsive to our wishes as to be, effectively, a mere extension of the self.” That our current obsession with techno-consumerism is incompatible with traditional love as it applies to long-lasting human relationships. In his latest novel, Us, Michael Kimball delivers a gripping, forceful ode to that almost-forgotten lifelong theater of affection and agony between a man and a woman, an impeccably rendered meditation on what the Japanese call mono no ware, the beautiful sadness of impermanence.

The novel is told primarily from the perspective of an elderly man whose often-ill wife suffers a major stroke while the two are in bed. In the hospital, and later at home, the husband exerts his own fragile energy by devising (and dreaming) methods of easing his spouse’s degeneration, while failing to cope with a horrific possibility that has never been considered: “She didn’t look like my wife like that, but I had never seen my wife dying before that night and I didn’t know what it was going to look like.” The remainder of the narrative is interspersed with chapters narrated by a much younger man, ostensibly the husband’s grandson many years later, who probes and analyzes his family’s history to better understand the love between his grandparents, in order to make sense of his own existential fear and questions about death.

The prose’s genius lies in its simple and straightforward, yet excruciatingly detailed delivery. Even though there are few, if any genuine emotional meltdowns on the part of the husband, the reader is instantly enveloped by his quiet grief, his unyielding devotion to his wife as he fills her hospital room with familiar items from their home to comfort her even in her comatose state, as he later moves her arms and legs so that she can re-learn to move them on her own, as he places pills on her lips and gently prods her to swallow. The hopeless superstitions that he hopes will prolong their lives: “I thought that she might open her eyes up if I kept looking at her.” “Poignant” and “heartbreaking”, both cute, hackneyed adjectives, do nothing to describe the emotional disturbia evoked by the novel. It is impossible for anyone who has witnessed the bond between failing grandparents or parents, or has even come close to experiencing a love that transcends the triviality of this gratification-hungry era to not be moved by the painstakingly rehearsed ways in which the characters meld their deteriorating bodies and minds in an obviously futile attempt at prolonging the inevitable – “We both took her sleeping pills so that we both could sleep. We were doing everything together that we could.”

Initially I found the transition in narration from the husband to the grandson to be a bit (unpleasantly) jarring, especially given how engrossing and strongly written the initial chapters were. But ultimately, the grandson sections do a wonderful job of breaking up the always understated yet supercharged intensity of the husband chapters, a psychological heaviness that might verge on the unbearable when taken all at once. The tone here, even given Us’s subject matter, manages to feel a tad lighter, less of the depressing and more the reverent (yet still ultimately sad) memories of long-gone ancestors who belong to a time and a social construction that these days seems utterly foreign. The juxtaposition of the distant and internal perspectives of the same events provides a different, more powerful fullness at it pertains to a greater human tragedy. One of the book’s most touching scenes comes from a memory of the grandson’s in which he is watching his grandfather carefully aiming his instant camera over a casket at a funeral, and later blowing on a fresh picture, waiting for an ended life to re-materialize in his hands.

Franzen concludes his piece by suggesting that the inevitability of death “is the real root cause of all our anger and pain and despair,” but that we can alleviate much of the discomfort inherent in being alive by truthfully embracing love in whatever form we choose. The bare thoroughness of this realization as it pertains to human relationships is Us’s greatest success. Light beach reading this book is not. But for those willing to shed some of the pain-defying mechanism (and more than a few tears), Kimball has delivered a frighteningly universal gut-wrenching, a necessary blast with the power to upset (and maybe help) even the most hardened, solipsistic of readers. By delving so deeply into the most ordinary and unsettling of truths – one that makers of smartphone apps and the ADD technophiles who need them would like to ignore – he has taken contemporary fiction and turned on the light of a sparsely decorated dark and beautiful room to which it has perhaps never been.

About the author:

Chris Vola’s reviews appear in The Brooklyn Rail, The Rumpus, Used Furniture Review, and elsewhere. He is the founder and editor of Apocalypse Piñata, a forthcoming literary and cultural e-magazine.

Review by Tom O’Connor

While reading Tom Rechtin’s Traces, I was reminded of Edward B. Germain’s stirring description of surrealist poetry:

among the worlds we know, the surrealist poet is drawn to three: the world of objects (rats and brooms and garbage), the world of abstract ideas (insurance policies and laws), and the world of desire, unconscious desire that recognizes events in the other two. What we desire surfaces through the unknowable maze of the subconscious to reappear with hallucinatory fascination as money or lovers, forgetting or remembering, fears, objects and ideas that seem to present a complete reality, but which are merely shadows cast far. (Surrealist Poetry in English 48)

By experiencing this unconscious desire as poetry, the fresh or new is rendered immanently possible, and this is Rechtin’s primary objective in Traces: to cast ordinary objects, ideas, and desires into the maze of the imagination in order to see what “surfaces” out of that interaction.

The trope of tracing in Rechtin’s chapbook echoes surrealism’s shadow-casting rather well in that objects from everyday life (a moth, crane, painting, or dream) become preludes to a wild collision of disparate elements, which is always rewarding for the reader. In fact, many will surely be astonished by Rechtin’s chapbook’s great diversity of poetic styles, which range from outright surrealistic flights of revelry (“Dali Meets Rodin: Off-Broadway” and “After Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie”) to confessional (“now that the fleas are gone” and “300,000 Kilometers per Second”) to imagistic (“The Crane” and “The Painter”) to the discursive and meditative (“Bigfoot” and “Two New Tires”). Regardless of their particular mode, his poems always embody the three worlds of meaning that surrealism animates with untamable desire: “We should / open our eyes and stare / at the sun till its spots float free” (23). In this way, his poems aim to keep our experience of life itself at a fever pitch—to “frequent the flower” as William Carlos Williams phrases it.

One of the chapbook’s standout poems is the title one, and it’s a representative example of Rechtin’s talents. The poem’s speaker meditates on the metaphor of tracing as a way of dealing with everyday stress:

When I was a child I couldn’t draw,
but that didn’t stop me from finding
the thinnest paper, and placing it over
the pictures in books I loved. (15)

This metaphor becomes even more profound later on when he must navigate the tricky family dynamics between his nuclear family and the new one he’s beginning as he leaves his parents’ home. In the poem, the speaker scrutinizes the way that many of us praise children’s desire to create art (like his own tracings of eagles, fish, and spaceships) all the while not understanding keenly enough that creativity is, at its root, a real-life power. A surrealist would say that this is one of the greatest travesties that our hyper-rational, over-socialized culture inflicts upon artists daily.

The speaker’s mother perceived his tracings in a similarly dismissive manner—i.e., as a means of covering up the “holes” in his closet door for his grandparents’ visit. At the end of the poem, the speaker utilizes his adeptness at tracing as a way out of many problematic social cycles, which are typically passed down unchecked from generation to generation:

Every time someone looks in the mirror
they are wide open, like gars to feed.
Don’t you see, Maria? The holes were covered
by a paper-thin mirror, so I could trace. (16)

A mirror is perhaps the most dangerous terrain in all of existence for human identities—i.e., it’s the domain of Narcissus, self-flattering illusion, judgment, and potentially fatal self-deceptions. Hence, the ability to trace out new powers of perception is paramount in a world where uncreative resemblances dominate. The speaker’s desire to trace common objects and ideas anew transcends even his own need to avoid the black hole of outworn habits because he hopes that an unspecified feminine companion in the poem, Maria, will also be capable of such redemptive insights. The poem’s speaker is creating a new pattern that is free of past pitfalls and, in this way, he invites the reader to desire more singular approaches to the world that can affirm our true talents and abilities. Whenever he traced an image as a child, that “product of the author’s / imagination [seemed to him] more than really real” (15). A surrealist would definitely agree with this sentiment because reality is never reducible to our more conscious habits. For this reason, a simple artistic event like tracing an object can be imbued with a “hallucinatory fascination” that transcends the very simplicity of the act itself. We readers should heed the call of Rechtin’s poetry and keep exploring our everyday reality’s possibilities until, as the speaker of “The Roses Themselves” explains, we too can discover that “opening / In sight” (10).

Tom O'Connor

Tom O’Connor’s poems have been published in magazines like MARGIE, Poetry Southeast, South Carolina Review, Pebble Lake Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Notre Dame Review, and Soundings East, among others. His scholarly articles have appeared in The Journal of Film & Video, Pedagogy, The Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, Disability Studies Quarterly, Horror Studies, and Social Semiotics, among others His first scholarly book, Poetic Acts & New Media, was just released from The University Press of America.

Review by Tobias Carroll

On the desktop before me as I set out to write this review are two volumes: specifically, the two parts of Adam Novy’s The Avian Gospels. The designs are complementary: on one appears the title, Novy’s name, and about twenty birds; on the other, the birds have increased in number and, grouped together, resemble a particularly sinister cloud. That’ll be the last time I refer to the two books separately: for all intents and purposes, this is one long novel divided into two volumes, and while there’s some closure at the end of the first, it’s not going to slow any reader with some amount of emotional investment in the story being told.
    The nature of that story, and how Novy tells it, is interesting — and occasionally frustrating. On the one hand, The Avian Gospels meets many of the criteria of dystopian science fiction: an ambiguous and shattered city, ruled by a dictator; the involvement of the paranormal — here, the ability of a father and son to psychically control the flocks of birds that have gathered around said city. (At times, The Avian Gospels would make an interesting double bill with Patrick Ness’s Chaos Walking books.) At the same time, Novy sprinkles references throughout the novel that suggest a more self-aware level beyond the revolutions, denunciations, and abuses on display. There are specific references to the unlikely trifecta of James Ellroy, William Faulkner, and Oulipo; more generally, some of Novy’s use of specific words seems intentionally disjointed, recalling the rewritten syntax of Ben Marcus’s The Age of Wire and String.
    Most significantly, there’s the novel’s setting. One one level, it’s a war-torn city abounding with refugees and street musicians. Given certain qualities — a seeming proximity to northern Europe, for one — I found myself picturing somewhere vaguely Balkan. Novy is admittedly cagier as to the specifics, and this city recalls any number of battered urban spaces; I suspect that every reader will picture a slightly different former warzone. Based on references scattered throughout the novel, however, this isn’t a city that posesses a rational location: it borders both Oklahoma and Hungary, with Angola not far off. Alternately: it borders a civil-war-torn African nation and a similarly stricken European one, and its closest American neighbor was home to a catastrophic act of domestic terrorism. It’s an interesting metaphor, but it’s also one that can distract: all of the theory at work here clashes with the very visceral story Novy is telling. A metaphoric geography can stimulate, but that same geography upends the relatively logical story being told.
    The tension between Novy’s more experimental inclinations and the inherently compelling narrative at the center of The Avian Gospels does occasionally cause more friction than is necessary. The moments of dislocation that punctuate the novel — the location of its setting, the cultural status of ska in this world, the instances where certain words seem to have shuffled their meanings — are interesting on their own terms, but can become distracting as the novel’s sweep takes over. That story is fairly concise: a father and his teenage son, both with control over the minds of birds, fall into the middle of a conflict between the dictatorial judge ruling a city and the revolutionaries who oppose him. There’s madness and corruption and abundant betrayals, some shocking violence and some violence that, ultimately, feels inevitable.
    Another interesting point of comparison for Novy’s novel is Adam Levin’s The Instructions. Novy, in fact, dedicated this novel to Levin, and the two books, while initially dissimilar, ultimately seem like very different ways of wrestling with similar themes: authority, faith, a revolution. What Novy is looking at here is the legacy of trauma, its propagation, and the yoking of the miraculous to the morally dubious. It’s a familiar story, rendered in terms that can freshly horrify. The father and son at the heart of this novel use their abilities to delight the city’s residents, putting on shows of spiraling birds reshaping themselves from clouds to forms literal and allegorical. Both sides of the city’s conflict seek to co-opt that power: some to stifle revolution, others to stoke it. There’s a strange parallel to the experience of the crowds watching the spirals of birds in the reading of this book: just as they are delighted by the uncanny, the reader may initially be drawn in by this book’s bold title and by the fact that the books themselves resemble tiny Bibles. What emerges here is less a blueprint for life than a cautionary tale where little is sacred; an ominous narrative where wonder, in the end, gives way to tragedy and a primal cry evoking horror.

About the author:

Tobias Carroll lives in Brooklyn. He writes about music and books (and sometimes the places where they overlap). His fiction has appeared in THE2NDHAND, 3:AM, Word Riot, Vol.1, and as part of Featherproof Books’ “Light Reading” series. He is presently working on REEL, a short novel.

Review by Ian Singleton

One word to characterize Charles Baxter’s fiction is “haunting.” The potential for surreality of his stories drives a contemporary reader of late realist fiction mad with wonder—in a word, haunted. Continuing his rich and varied body of work comes Gryphon, the just published collection of new and selected stories. I believe Frank O’Connor said he felt horrible for any writer whose work was subjected to such a collection. Perhaps he was right, but the opportunity to give a general interpretation of Baxter’s work is too good to pass up.
     Of course, all the best short story writers haunt the reader. However, the degree to which Baxter’s stories give this effect makes him exceptional. Baxter’s stories truly use the form as it differs from the more plot dependent novel. One reason they’re so intriguing is the immensity of meaning they transmit through their brevity. It’s no wonder Baxter is a former poet, since metaphors in his stories embed less commonplace meaning while leading to more mysterious outcomes, leaving us openly dazzled.
     Almost always, an uncommon, defamiliarizing event takes place. In “Royal Blue,” the moment is when the author “sees” spoken words in the color of the story’s title: “Maybe he was tired, or feverish, but he heard her utter the sentence in blue, royal blue, the color of the northern lights and Granny W.’s inscriptions, and he felt himself spiral into light-headedness” (321). Such depictions are risky, even for a seasoned writer such as Baxter, since they run the risk of alienating the reader. But Baxter’s unique subject matter, as he depicts it, only attracts us more to the narrative. The writing is so artistic and coherent, it assures us to wait until the end and even then to wait until the story has gestated after reading. Writing which dares to explore people, places, and ideas opposite from the commonplace, such as this, is the richest, because it resists solution, only giving body to an enigma one can’t readily consume. It haunts us because it tantalizes us with exactly what we as readers don’t immediately recognize.
     Baxter comes across as a writer’s writer, especially after taking into account his essays on fiction, some of which appear in the book Burning Down The House. The literary criticism in the book puts Baxter in the ranks of the best scholars. Writing, art, and creation in general often appear as subject matter in his work. Be it storytelling, lying, playing, writing, or remembering, creativity is a significant activity in all these stories. In the new stories, it’s there: in “Poor Devil” with an ex-married couple’s stories to one another, in “Mr. Scary” with the ponderances of a grandchild, folk art in “Royal Blue,” in “The Winner” when a fake hard luck monologue overpowers its audience, in “Ghosts” with the constant lying and imagining (storytelling) of its characters, and in “The Old Murderer” with mind games an ex-con plays on himself in order to survive. With so many variations on the creative act, metafictional intrigues are only the beginning of what the stories offer. Most of all, however, the creative process heals or relieves the characters. It reveals what’s good about people, what is undeniably we ourselves.
     Another recurring theme is the occurrence or potential for violence. This potential is usually a reflection of very real violence in American society. His characters are often good, at the very least fairly intelligent, compassionate enough citizens. Actually, this only encourages a more damning judgment of the casual destructive thoughts of the protagonist in “The Next Building I Plan to Bomb”:

On the ceiling the projected sun of Harry’s mind rose wonderfully, brilliantly gold, one or two mind-wisp cumulus clouds passing from right to left across it, but not so obscured that its light could not penetrate the great public building into which men, women, and children—children in strollers, children hand in hand with their parents—now filed, shadows on the ceiling, lighted shadows, and for a moment Harry saw an explosive flash. (243)

The violence in Harry’s imagination is only another force sweeping over him and taking away the control he desires to have over his circumstances. In “Westland,” the protagonist commits an act of victimless terrorism with a gun given to him by his new friend of the working class, literally fulfilling the idea of how guns beseech their users to fire:

here’s a kind of architecture that makes you ashamed of human beings, and in my generic rage, I took the gun and held my arm out of the window. It felt good to do that. I was John Wayne. I fired four times at that building, once for me, once for Ann, and once for each of my boys. (151)

These two stories in particular demonstrate everyday Americans becoming caught up in violence. In “Royal Blue,” September 11th looms at the beginning and leads to the story’s title. At this point, however, the 9/11 attack is simply a jolting act of violence without the imperative of retribution. The event has literally and metaphorically cleared the skies, “thanks to the ban on airline travel that had been in effect for the past two weeks. The upper atmospheres had cleared themselves. Deep colors had returned overhead, at least for now.” In this story, violence leads toward an understanding of people, regardless of its perpetrator or motive.
     Baxter’s daring methods and striking subject matter exemplify what the author reveals in an interview with Robert Birnbaum in The Morning News, how he breaks all rules in the first draft. His practice shows here and results in a collection that, in reality, does not provide a jumbled pinning down of the writer, as O’Connor would have deplored. Instead, like any one of these stories, it draws the reader closer to the writing and begs him to read the stories not selected for this volume, to wait with bated breath for what this author will write in the future, to remain opened up and awed by the artistic imagination.

Ian Singleton

Ian Singleton has lived all over the United States. He studied at the University of Michigan and Emerson College. Once, he won a Hopwood Award. Several journals have published his works including The Houston Literary Review, qarrtsiluni, Fringe, and Ploughshares. He taught writing at a Massachusetts prison.

The California-based press Flatmancrooked is fond of alternate editions, experimental funding models, and neatly planned deviations from what might be expected from a publisher, small or large. Recent and forthcoming work that they’ve released has included novellas from Alyssa Knickerbocker and Emma Straub, along with Shya Scanlon’s Forecast, a novel originally serialized online. And while the stories told in James Kaelan’s We’re Getting On are compelling, the book has attracted as much attention for its carbon-neutral construction and Kaelan’s tour of the West Coast by bicycle.
     What you make of We’re Getting On may well depend on what edition you hold in your hands. The slimmer of the two — the one with spruce seeds buried within the cover — contains the novella of the same title. The longer of the two shares its name, but adds three other stories, which place “We’re Getting On” in a slightly broader context, and lend it new shades and depths. (So that this doesn’t become incomprehensible, a quick note going forward: the italicized We’re Getting On will henceforth refer to the 206-page editon; “We’re Getting On” within quotation marks will refer to the novella and the standalone edition of the same.)
     The story told in “We’re Getting On” is both simple and stark. A small group retreats to the outskirts of society and, under the leadership of the novella’s narrator, attempts to regress to a pre-industrial state. From early in the story, it’s fairly clear that our narrator is the sort of monomaniacal idealist featured in certain Werner Herzog films; as the situation described here begins to deteriorate, he becomes fond of long passages that read like something between soliloquies and manifestoes:

“Let me review my plan. The garden has to die, or I have to kill it, then kill an animal with my spear, try to kill something else, such as a hawk with a rock, fail at that, find a dead animal somewhere, eat part of it, search for another carcass, fail to find it, and I’ll be getting on.”

     Soon, that regression isn’t simply a societal one but also an intellectual one, as the narrator vows to abandon language altogether. In its own way, the novella is horrific: our narrator, if not a sociopath, is not far from that, and as his plan begins to go awry, the sense that we are about to witness something awful grows. The narrator’s detachment from the reality of his situation and his use of philosophy to justify his treatment of those around him mark him as a familiar type: the sort of guy whose barstool rantings you’d want to move away from as quickly as possible, who you’d later see asked to leave, who wouldn’t go without throwing a punch or two.
     In the context of We’re Getting On, “We’re Getting On” takes on an even more sinister cast. The longer edition opens with “A Deliberate Life,” a grim story of punks sitting in a bar watching the trial of Saddam Hussein on television. In that story, we’re introduced to a character named Dan — who, Kaelan later implies, is the narrator of “We’re Getting On.” That introduction adds another layer of tension to his status as group leader; he’s moved up in the world, and this isn’t exactly a good thing.
     The other two stories in We’re Getting On strike nearly opposite tones. “The Surrogate” is a grotesque piece in which a disintegrating relationship begins manifesting itself in the horrific treatment of a rat. “You Must’ve Heard Something” takes a quieter approach to its unsettling. Here, the setting is austere: two apartments in adjacent buildings, their owners waiting there, taking refuge after some sort of societal disruption. The story moves deliberately, Kaelan underlying the precariousness of their situation, and the introducing a series of revelations that mirror the unrest hinted at in the distance.
     The two editions of Kaelan’s book are equally distinctive, and the way in which the shorter version dovetails with some of the concepts discussed in “We’re Getting On” is ingenious. But it’s the lengthier version that creates a more interesting context for “We’re Getting On,” and — crucially — that expands on its themes of societal decay, flawed idealism, and the gulf between good intentions and righteous action.

About the author:

Tobias Carroll lives in Brooklyn. He writes about music and books (and sometimes the places where they overlap). His fiction has appeared in THE2NDHAND, 3:AM, Word Riot, Vol.1, and as part of Featherproof Books’ “Light Reading” series. He is presently working on REEL, a short novel.

Monkeybicycle 7

Monkeybicycle has been pumping out the jams for years now, but even so, MB seems to be hitting a new stride. This is next level shit. The MB mothership has landed. You need to open up a copy, have a look, and let MB do it to you in your eyeball.

Chopsticks by Ryan Boudinot

Ryan Boudinot is back with a brand new invention. His story “Chopsticks” is a sharp turn, if not a total one-eighty, from his last MB offering, “The Mine”. But fear not, this is not unfamiliar water. “Chopsticks” is funny and biting and reminded me of another wonderful and funny and biting story called “Free Burgers for Life” …also by Boudinot, also published by MB (back in the halcyon days of issue three). I like how each issue of MB shows growth, sometimes small, and other times by leaps and bounds; but always staying true to their roots, gut instincts.

A Certain Mental Toughness by Tyler Stoddard Smith

Another MB favorite, TSS, has a story that opens like this:

“My running style at age 8 bore a striking resemblance to C3PO’s, although I added a “windmill” technique that involved whirling my right arm in a counterclockwise direction, an addition that
Unfortunately served to further slow my forward progress.”

You read that right? So, you’re sold. Pick-up the issue, scumbag.

On Anzio Beach by Elizabeth Alexander

Just a wonderful story, really. There is this mixture of dream imaginary and reality that reads like a literary interpretation of a Looney Toons episode. We see Alet (a family friend of the main character, who has been reincarnated as a dog) smoking a Winston cigarette and making shapes with the exhaled smoke: “…a ghostly nine iron…a salad fork with wobbling tines…” The absurdity of the story is entertaining as hell, but the real attraction is the earnest moments that deal with the impending and past death of loved ones. “On Anzio Beach” also boasts an excellent ending, one of those endings that explains the whole story and redefines it at the same time. It makes the reader appreciate what they just read all the more. Hurray!

My Brother’s Keeper by Andrew Ervin

One of the great things about this story is that it takes place in the space between the sensational or bigger story, and that is appealing, isn’t it? As the story opens a death has already occurred. The reader gets the story of what happens before the news is passed to the family and police… but funny. The narrator is an excellent bundle of nerves, but there is a quiet to this story that is very satisfying. Ervin achieves this terrific dynamic by balancing the crazed narrative with some stoic well-chosen images. The piano standing in flood water comes to mind, lovely. And, thus the reader finds he has the sensational or bigger story with these pages. Or, wait, And thus, the reader gets the real story, not just the bigger one. Maybe something mixing the two? And thus, the reader gets the real story, not just the sensational story. And thus, is just too pompous sounding, no matter what. Either way, “My Brother’s Keeper”… is a keeper, see for yourself.

It’s hard to think of another collection in recent memory that covers as much stylistic ground while still maintaining a high level of quality as Matt Bell’s How They Were Found (Keyhole Press). It follows last year’s chapbook How the Broken Lead the Blind — and, typing this out now, there’s a sudden recognition that the titles of the two collections, taken together, begin to imply a story of their own. Two of the longer stories in How They Were Found initially appeared as standalone chapbooks: “Wolf Parts,” a sort of deconstruction of Red Riding Hood, and “The Collectors,” Bell’s postmodern take on the reclusive Collyer brothers and their obsessive tendencies towards collecting and hoarding objects of every variety.
     From these two stories, one might take Bell for a writer on the more accessible side of experimental fiction: a curator and manipulator of certain known quantities, sometimes making himself known as he walks among the scenes he presents. But after reading the thirteen stories collected here, a picture emerges of a writer with a much grander reach. Along with the more structurally complex stories mentioned earlier, How They Were Found also offers a taut account of the coverup and investigation of a murder, a surreal story of amnesiac soldiers in a polar landscape, and a tale of a woman’ encounter with the personification of her ex-lover’s lost idiosyncrasies and bad habits.
     And yet, for all of the intentional surrealism of some of these stories, there’s an emotional specificity that resonates. How They Were Found opens with “The Cartographer’s Girl,” which at first seems to fall into a certain corner of contemporary fiction: an unnamed city, a protagonist known only by his occupation, a crucial character now missing, the incorporation of symbols into the text. Yet the sense of loss here makes sense; even as the setting seems stylized, the characters are recognizably human; the protagonist’s namelessness feels less like some nod towards making him an Everyman and more a logical outgrowth of his particular job, of the assigning of titles to specific points in space.
     One could suggest Angela Carter or Steve Erickson as reference points, but Bell also draws from less expected sources: the repetitive, occasionally brutal structure of “Hold On To Your Vacuum,” for example, has an experiential similarity to video games, a topic Bell has incorporated in his fiction and discussed in essays and on his blog. And it’s moments such as these that make Bell’s fiction feel uniquely modern: he’s folding unexpected elements in to his fiction in neatly organic ways; not simply namechecking technology, but understanding how to make it work within the context of his fiction.
     It doesn’t hurt that Bell’s empathy with his characters is consistent even when his fiction is at its most structurally experimental. “An Index of How Our Family Was Killed” is exactly what its title suggests. Yet Bell finds the emotional resonance in that form, sometimes through repetition, and sometimes through a perfectly arranged phrase. And one of these entries — “Family, as in something broken or lost” — both stands on its own as a particularly wrenching passage and seems to summon up and recontextualize the titles of both of Bell’s collections.
     The expansiveness of this collection may be disorienting at first. The damaged protagonist of “Dredge,” trying desperately to solve a murder he’s incapable of rationally investigating, may seem like an uneasy neighbor of the fragmented variations on familiar characters in “Wolf Parts” or the religious leader haunted by revelations of an mechanical messiah in in “His Last Great Gift.” But taken together, the entirety of this collection represents an attempt to marry several generations of literary techniques, to find common ground between the ultra-modern and the classical, the historic and the post-modern. It’s a venture at which Bell succeeds, yielding something that’s also a pleasure to read.

About the author:

Tobias Carroll lives in Brooklyn. He writes about music and books (and sometimes the places where they overlap). His fiction has appeared in THE2NDHAND, 3:AM, Word Riot, Vol.1, and as part of Featherproof Books’ “Light Reading” series. He is presently working on REEL, a short novel.

The promotional video for Gary Shteyngart’s new novel, Super Sad True Love Story, features the author as a parodied version of himself ranting in faux Russian-ESL while trying to hustle copies of his new book. It is a star-studded event with James Franco (a student of Shteyngart’s at Columbia’s MFA Program) declaring of Shteyngart: “I don’t think reading is really his thing.” While author Edmund White marvels, “They let him teach at Columbia?”

The video, in short, is ridiculous, but it generated a good amount of buzz in anticipation for the book’s release. And for his part, Shteyngart seemed to have fun with it (at his own expense, to boot). It is becoming increasingly common for publishers to use promotional videos to market upcoming books by their most popular authors. But not everyone is pleased about it. Novelist Jonathan Franzen appeared in a video to promote his new novel, Freedom. As the video begins, Franzen expresses his “profound discomfort at having to make videos like this.” Franzen’s stated reluctance about appearing on camera, while somewhat unnecessary, does lead him to a valuable observation that “the point of a novel is to take you to a still place,” and that reading “is a quiet alternative” to the constant multitasking offered by technology and online media.

This tension between our hyper-interactive online lives and the sustained focus of reading is at the center of Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story. In this dystopic novel, Americans no longer read; rather, they “stream” texts and scan for information on their äppärät devices (think iPhone 22.0). Shteyngart imagines a country teetering on the verge of eternal, Roman collapse, addicted to Chinese debt, and governed by the authoritarian Bipartisan Party. In interviews the author refers to the exact setting of the novel as “maybe next Tuesday.” And yet, the book’s title insists that it is a love story.

Lenny Abramov, 39, is thought odd because he still owns actual books, which he douses with Pine-Sol in anticipation for the arrival of his love interest, Eunice Park, 24, whose generation considers books to be “smelly.” Shteyngart explores this generation gap by narrating the story through Lenny’s diary entries and Eunice’s GlobalTeen (i.e. Facebook) Messages.

Lenny’s diary provides the bulk of the story’s linear plot progression. The novel begins with his declaration that he will never die because “yesterday [he] met Eunice Park, and she will sustain [him] forever.” It should be said that Lenny’s renouncement of death is literal. He works at Post-Human Services where he recruits High Net Worth Individuals who want to live forever using the company’s patent advances in medical technology.

In her GlobalTeen Messages Eunice writes in a highly entertaining teenage-speak using such acronyms as TIMATOV (Think I’m About To Openly Vomit). In one message to a friend, Eunice describes a guy she met in Rome (not Lenny) who was streaming Chronicles of Narnia in a café. “Remember we streamed that at Catholic?” Eunice recalls of her post-literate education.
Later, when Lenny tries to entertain Eunice by reading from Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, it ends with Eunice crying and telling Lenny that she never learned to read texts “just to scan them for info.” Lenny apologizes for reading:

People just aren’t meant to read anymore. We’re in a post-literate age. You know, a visual age. How many years after the fall of Rome did it take for a Dante to appear? Many, many years.

Unlike many of his predecessors who imagined a dystopic future where books are banned or burned, Shteyngart imagines a world where books are ignored and forgotten.

The novel’s scope is remarkable, and Shteyngart provides all the necessary inventiveness to compel his reader through its grandiose plot. Some of the story’s most intriguing twists may feel like headlines from late 2008, announcing the Great Recession. However, Shteyngart started writing this novel in 2006, before Lehman Brothers folded, before Big Auto collapsed, and before amendments to the American Dream had to be issued from all cultural corners. The earliest version of what became the novel appeared as a short story in Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists published in Spring 2007. Another draft appeared earlier this year in The New Yorker when Shteyngart was selected to the prestigious list of Best 20 under 40 fiction writers.

Despite his reputation as a humorist and satirist, in Super Sad True Love Story, Shteyngart has proven himself abundantly trustworthy of caring for our culture’s ideas of love, attraction, and pursuit. The emotional heart of this story is big and it beats most convincingly through the unlikely love between Lenny and Eunice. In addition to the adjectives that help title this novel let’s add: hilarious, terrifying, and beautiful. Shteyngart is a visionary, able to peer into the darkest parts of America’s common future and somehow discover a love story buried within. With Super Sad True Love Story Shteyngart emerges every bit as funny as we thought him after Absurdistan (his second novel) and even more promising than we realized after his first novel, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook.

About the author:

Benjamin Dolson is a writer from Michigan. He currently lives in Brooklyn, New York with his lovely wife.

Looking at the cover of Aaron Burch’s How to Take Yourself Apart, How to Make Yourself Anew (Pank 2010), it’s hard to avoid thinking of the relation between bodies and space. Text in three lines — the title, and the author’s name — occupies a section of the cover, along with ample views of the background. The rest is taken up by an illustration, itself anatomical: part of a skeleton, the ribs and hips and spine. Taking yourself apart, making yourself anew: the book hasn’t yet been opened and already the visceral associations have begun.
     Once it has been opened — a different sort of spine cracked — there’s a subtitle: “notes and instructions from/for a father.” And then an index, listing three sections, the one in the middle captioned “Tales;” the other two fitting somewhere between instructions and observations. Aaron Burch has arrangement on his mind. Biology and lineage and anatomy all fill the pages of this collection, some sparsely, some nearly bursting. And yet classifying this book is next to impossible: the ever-popular “prose poems”? Aphorisms? This is a book concerned with taxonomies, yet it defies that sort of classification for itself. Which, one suspects, is the point.
     The first section, “How To Take Yourself Apart: Instructions,” reads like a series of brief ruminations on fatherhood. The moment of overlap in its subtitle — that gulf between “from” and “for” — emerges here, hovering over the eleven short pieces it encompasses. They read like concentrated meditations on facets of life — one begins with a meditation on the phrase “shotgun wedding” before shifting its focus towards hunting, then towards watching sports, before ending with a sentence containing a single word: “Pull.” These are physical pieces where the lines between human and animal, father and son, are easily blurred. Those transitions continue in the third section, “How to Make Yourself Anew: A Bestiary.” Fathers and sons recur here. The fourth word in “Caladrius,” which opens this section, is “Icarus,” and that relationship — fathers and sons and rising and descending — continues throughout, a motif in which Burch finds ample variations.
     In the center of the book is “How To Fold Paper Cranes: Tales,” its most traditional section. But even within these nine stories, Burch’s fluid and often visceral imagery is on display. Here, birds show up on odd places, their appearances and connotations increasingly sinister. “Molting” opens with the line “My hands are turning into birds, Penny said,” and travels from there to a gulf between theory and reality, ending with an image that’s literally wrenching. The stories range from surreal to kitchen-sink in their realism: in the four sentences of “Cheap Seats,” Burch is able to convey a wealth of information about one particular relationship.
     Throughout How to Take Yourself Apart, How to Make Yourself Anew, one encounters pain and love, transitions and transformations, settings contemporary and classical. Its relationships are complex, sometimes loving, sometimes violent, oftentimes both. And, given the subtitle and the implications of the title, it’s ultimately no surprise that it ends, almost inevitably, with the moment of birth.

Lost Poet: Four Plays by Jesse Glass (BlazeVOX 2010) showcases the playwright’s wide range of style and diversity of subject matter, while allowing readers to enjoy the dark humor and sense of bitterly ironic fate that infuses each work despite the 13 years that separate the earliest piece from the most recent. Glass’ plays offer a meaty abundance of themes, images and language that will bewilder, enlighten and exhilarate enthusiasts of experimental literature and avant-garde theatre. The writing is fearless and wide-open. It invites multiple levels of interpretation, while it stares straight back at you and smirks -”it’s rather simple really, fate will have its way with you.”

“Homeless in America” (1988) juxtaposes a group of homeless people struggling to survive a Milwaukee winter with the crew aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger during the disaster of 1986. While Gil Scott Heron treads similar territory with “Whitey on the Moon,” Glass strives to examine what unites these two seemingly disparate realities, rather than accentuate the differences. In a vividness of dialogue that suggests a first-hand gritty urban experience, we find the homeless where fate has left them, dying slowly in the frigid January streets. The dialogue is sparsely interspersed with a voice-over reporting the Challenger’s countdown (stopped once due to a computer function glitch) to a perfect lift-off. The homeless continue to squabble with each other unaware of any news updates. Suddenly we are thrust into the Challenger’s cabin with a hysterical Christa McAuliffe:

“I thought this was an honor. I tried so hard all my life to do the best thing for everybody. I took all the tests. All those hard hurting tests. I really tried my best. And now…now that I’m here…now that I’ve achieved…Now that reporters from all over the world know my name…now our–my–epitaph is Uh Oh? That’s no fair! No fucking fair! This America. This hype.”

Alas, Christa too is now rendered homeless (“I should be home right now enjoying my life.”) and doomed to a horrendous fate, the prestige of being considered a hero means nothing to her in the end.

Another voice-over addresses Christa, “We made you. We marketed you. We are mourning you now. You are the brightest and the best we have to offer. All of you. But you are worth more to us as a name, a concept, a sacrifice, a brand, than as a living, breathing, aging individual.” The voice continues on into a litany of beloved American names, concepts and brands: Coca Cola, Michael Jackson, Disneyland, Hollywood. The first name mentioned is McDonald’s. The second is Burger King, where our homeless, a few coins permitting, occasionally drop in for a cup of coffee. – Man: Let’s have a coffee now. I’ve got enough for a coffee at Burger King. We can split it.

“Dove Hunting” (1977) is an Artuadian, Beckettian, Cassavetian one-act play that takes place in the eternal present. A medium (as in spiritual communicator) whispers in an old woman’s ear and suddenly the woman’s bleeding from her mouth; a pool of blood forms on the floor. Man: What time is it? Medium: The end of the world. The old woman cuts the man’s throat, stabs her own arms and legs, and shoots the medium. The beings crawl around in the blood, they make half-hearted attempts to bandage themselves and each other like mummies. Enter the young lovers, staggering around in passionate embrace, the old woman cracks an egg over their heads, the girl exits and returns with a dove and an ax. To ever see this performed would be unforgettable – a surrealist blood bath, a dadaist torture porn. The young lovers just appearing, dropped from nowhere, and the surrounding gore doing nothing to quell their arousal. Fate drops us anywhere, the egg yolk runs down behind our ears and we ignore the horrors of the everyday in pursuit of our passions. Fate and Jesse Glass are laughing.

In a work of autobiographical fiction, Ryunosuke Akutagawa once wrote of his protagonist, “He did not observe passersby in the street in order to know life, rather, he tried to know life through books in order to observe the passersby in the street.” In “The Lost Poet” (1990), Glass proves that he can thrive under either of these conditions. He writes of the plantation era South with as much familiarity and understanding as he does the 1980′s Milwaukee streets. Edgar Allan Poe’s friend and rival Thomas Holley Chivers is presented as a egomaniacal windbag of a man who believes himself to be divinely inspired. Did Poe really plagiarize Chivers in writing “The Raven”? Did Chivers really perform medical experiments that resulted in the untimely deaths of four of his children? Reveling in our fascination with missing pieces and bizarre historical scuttlebutt, Glass pounces on Chivers and piggybacks him across the stage, slapping the long dead Georgian’s ass and making him say things like: “I’ll wager our conversation will lay bare the foundations of the universe!”

Here Glass himself is fate, gleefully and excessively gluing macaroni and glitter to a construction paper Chivers who can no longer speak for himself. The proud, image conscious man is demonized and made to dance like a buffoon before future generations of theatergoers. Where the man ends and the caricature begins is anyone’s guess. Fate and Jesse Glass are laughing.

Chivers is alone on the stage, leaping and clapping his hands. The stage fills with children. The children all leap and laugh and clap their hands. The children appear joyous. Chivers appears in desperation. Fate and Jesse Glass are laughing.

Chivers’ epitaph, including the words “HIS WORK WILL REMAIN A MONUMENT FOR AGES AFTER THIS TEMPORARY TRIBUTE OF LOVE IS IN DUST FORGOTTEN” glows in red letters on a screen behind the stage. At the front of the stage, in semi-darkness, Poe laughs uproariously and then departs. Poe is laughing. Fate is laughing. Jesse Glass is laughing.

“Worm–A Sexual Opera” (1978) begins with an aging, ailing, former war hero farmer and his wife in danger of losing their house and land to foreclosure. The couple, referred to as “Father” and “Mother”, are seated before a great gleaming desk. Bank Vice President: Cobalt treatments are not cheap, as you know. And I have a memo here from the Cancer Center that notifies us that you must have a substantial amount paid toward your hospital debt, Mother and Father, or the County Hospital will also arrange a little- ah, public demonstration of their monetary concern, as it were. Father: And I almost died for you guys!

Three voices in the darkness recite fragmented details of natural occurrences around the farm, interspersed with observations of the couple’s deteriorating livelihood. The voices describe in vivid detail a horse dying of natural causes. The voices move on to more erotic territory. All Voices: Mother has an animal, the animal is her, the animal’s up her somewhere, stretches bends and begs. The animal is a pencil sharpener, a despairing clam.

We’re in a red room with a golden throne. A worm sits on the throne surrounded by jars of his own bodily fluids. Two dwarves are paying him homage. Bohu & Tohu: King Worm! King Worm! Who giveth children and sorrow & taketh them away. Who stands on a man’s gut & proclaims him a man, & then falls- becomes the Accusing Angel-leads the sexes to crime, to war, to death. Hail precious Worm! The worm is some amalgamation of lust and disease. The worm is fate. The worm is a young stranger who shows up one day volunteering to paint the barn, then balls Mother senseless while Father’s sleeping in his chair.

We grow and decompose. We flourish and then our paint peels off. Fate will allow us our fleeting joys and rattling tin mementos of achievement. Father places an ad – “Young Man To Paint Barn, None Other Need Apply.”

In a review of this length, one can really only scrape the surface of the complexity of material presented by Jesse Glass in this collection. Each play stands on its own and deserves its own deeper analysis. Fate and humor may not be the only threads running through all four works. An immense sympathy seems to applaud the emotional capacity of the have-nots. Glass seems to have a bleeding heart.

And in “Dove Hunting,” and again in “Worm–A Sexual Opera,” a man dreams of being a shoe.

Review by Salvatore Ruggiero

When he was younger, Arvid Jansen hung above his bed a portrait of Chairman Mao hung, right beside Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell. He states that it was a “well-known retouched photograph where [Mao] sits hunched over his desk writing with one of those Chinese brush pens, and I always thought or hoped, that it was not one of his political or philosophical articles he was writing, but one of his poems” (56). This is almost a self-reflexive critique of the recently translated Petterson novels themselves: Can his novels exist without the influence of politics? For both Out Stealing Horses and To Siberia had the somber, heavy backdrop of World War II in Norway. And now in I Curse the River of Time, set also in Norway but in the 1970s and 1980s, we have the spectre of communism and the effects of the Cold War hanging above the narrative.

It’s 1989, the Berlin Wall is about to fall, and Arvid Jansen is thirty-seven. His mother finds out that she has cancer and decides to head home to Denmark. At about the same time, Arvid finds himself proceeding with a divorce, or at least a separation from his wife and daughters—we don’t see any legal actions formally taking part. Arvid and this mother have an estranged relationship—she almost feels more free-spirited and more energetic than her son, who is much more introspective and driven to alcohol. Yet they become companions, an odd couple. His mind is almost the enemy here, as his memories seems to haunt the narrative with embarrassing past events between mother and son: most notably a disastrous toast by him on her fiftieth birthday; and the older and younger girlfriends that Arvid had had who bring him to where he is today. Most of the narrative is in fact a flashback to previous times as Arvid and his mother spend an autumn together piecing their lives together.

If it sounds like the story of Arvid’s arrested development, that’s because it is. Arvid is not really capable of living on his own, of raising a family, of holding a job, of having an original idea. He is a member of the Communist party and attempts to live his life by the book. He enjoys an array of literature, but doesn’t write a word of it. He drinks Calvados, a French brandy, because two characters in Erich Maria Remarque’s Arch of Triumph do. He says he’s getting divorced, but does little to expedite or even help the process. The only thing that he seems to choose to do is join the Communist party, much to the chagrin of his family and especially his mother as they worked hard for him so he could opt not to work by their side in the factories. He doesn’t even understand the reality of why he was hired in the first place:

‘We liked your father here. He gave his all, every single shift . . .’
     ‘I know,’ I said.
     ‘That was the only reason.’
     ‘I see,’ I said.
     ‘Yes, that was all.’
     I turned and headed for the door, and when I got there and had my hand on the door handle, I stopped and said:
     ‘Do you know who the people is?’
     ‘I don’t give a shit.’
     ‘I thought so,’ I said with something that was meant to be a sarcastic smile, but it was clear that he did not give a damn about the people, nor why I asked the question, and anyway he was already looking at his papers again and did not see my smile. (171-2)

Although Arvid may be a working man of the working class, his employers don’t care about his dogma or his fervency for the Communist doctrine. They’re unaware of the concept of people, a term that at this point is an antique, inadequate, derived from Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, another book that his fellow workmen have not read nor would care to read. They’re there to work, not to pontificate on philosophy. They want to talk about football, not social and economic liberation. And it never seems that Arvid is able to make this connection; this disconnect pervades his interior, family life.

He returns to his mother because he can’t form a relationship with his wife. There’s a powerful, sad description of him sitting and resting on the beach, watching his sick mother who is on her knees looking out to the sea:

I lay like this for a few moments to see if she would stand up, but she didn’t. I crawled back and leaned against the mound, squeezed my eyes shut and tried to concentrate. I was searching for something very important, a very special thing, but no matter how hard I tried, I could not find it. I pulled some straws from a cluster of marram grass and put them in my mouth and started chewing. They were hard and sharp and cut my tongue, and I took more, a fistful, and stuffed them in my mouth and chewed them while I sat there, waiting for my mother to stand up and come to me. (233)

Arvid is crawling, reverting back to an infant-like stage, revealing his inability to stand upright. He’s being destructive as the ingestion of the marram grass suggests; it cuts through his mouth and tongue. He is like a baby, moving to the oral stage, when he chooses to explore everything through the mouth instead of by touch. It wouldn’t have been shocking, though it would have been trite, if he had commenced sucking his thumb. He doesn’t care if the grass is cutting his mouth like a razor; he’s more concerned with himself and his desires. He can’t handle the power of reality.

This separation from the world, this idealism he has for himself is linked to that image above his bed, Mao perhaps writing a poem not a political treatise. He’s uncertain because he can’t read the Chinese before the Chairman. But regardless of that fact, it’s almost more interesting that he wants Mao’s writing to be a poem, the poem from which the title to this book derives:

Fragile images of departure, the village back then.
I curse the river of time; thirty-two years have passed. (56)

Poetry here trumps the politics, but can the politics be ultimately removed? Can Mao the poet and Mao the leader be two separate entities? Is the past always there to haunt us? Does a reversion to a more natal state bring some sort of absolution from past transgressions? These are some of the questions that Petterson allows his readers to ruminate on, to linger in the mind, to ponder even if his characters do not.

Review by Kevin Kane

In order to tackle a good literary work, I need to be hungry. And I can usually judge what I’m reading by how it affects that hunger. Sometimes a story collection forces me to set it down after reading a story, too full of images and emotion to continue. Other times, I lightly snack my way through the whole thing. The strength and beauty of the stories in Joanna Ruocco’s Man’s Companions pushed me to devour the entirety of the collection in a few days despite being achingly full from the rich, dense prose.

The title of the collection suggests something encyclopedic in nature—some sort of narrative-based listing of things serving as companions to man. Ruocco titled the stories with names of different animals, a list extending through the narratives of both normal— “Canary,” “Lemmings,” “Frog,” and more fanciful like “Flying Monkeys” and “Unicorns.” These work in subtle ways by using the animals in the stories while examining different facets of society serving as a different sort of companion such as failure, ignorance, or over-confidence in the characters. In “Small Sharks,” an annoyed husband reads imperfect sentences to his wife from a novel about raising humans underwater. She fails to comprehend what makes a sentence imperfect just as the husband fails to picture living underwater. The wife however does not suffer from the same lack of imagination, she thinks, “There would be round windows with a million tons of pitch-black water pressing against them and occasionally small sharks with light-producing organelles in their skin would pass back and forth, leaving milky streamers.” In this brief story, Ruocco captures the divide between a husband and wife through small details as if small sharks fed at their relationship allowing something to open up between them.

The stories, even when they’re quite short—many only a page or two long, attack with an encompassing intensity, raw and piercing, leaving little room for bearings or breath. Ruocco’s lyric prose pulses and resonates. In the dream-like story “Snake,” two friends stop to sleep as they drive through the desert. While out of the car, the narrator observes a flow of bats springing out from crack in a rock “like someone just opened a bat-filled fire hydrant.” Just as these bats flow out—too many to count or control, Ruocco piles on observations and details from her narrator as she thinks about her friend Janie’s snakeskin purse—”It is possible that red snakes exist; they live in the redder rocks of the desert, the red rocks to the south, or else the snakes are from Mars.” The narrator’s thoughts pour from her prose, forcing the reader to react to the onslaught and find a way to adapt.

Though titled with the names of animals, you can’t read the stories looking only for the creature named in the title and the different manifestations that can surface. As in “Snake” where the red snakeskin covered purse, the narrator’s boyfriend’s member, and a translucent dream-snake all show themselves cloaked by the thought of the snake. The title serves as in introduction into the ideas we have about that creature and trigger all the societal, mythic, and unconscious thoughts of that animal. Then Ruocco tells a story apart from but relying on that animal or idea.

In the only story in the collection told by a third person narrator, “White Buffalo,” Ruocco breaks up the narrative with numbered sections. In comparison to the shorter stories, it feels epic, covering a cast of quirky characters that run an elementary school. Many of the sections follow Ms. Mencken as she interacts with co-workers at the school and cares for her ailing father at home, who is still abusive even at an advanced age. Ruocco constructs absurd characters, such as the body-building principal talking of his negative space white buffalo tattoo, that come to resemble reality more closely than traditional fiction. For instance, after Principal Baxter assumes his position, he runs out of a meeting with the teachers and tears a drinking fountain from the wall, saying “There will be no more stooping to the level of children [. . .] I have ordered a water cooler for the Teachers-Lounge.” No principal behaves like that, but he might think of doing it and, in the exaggeration of his and other characters, Ruocco demonstrates not only how strange humanity is but also what happens when people allow their veils of politeness to fall. She pointedly examines what sits underneath those veils, divorcing characters from our ideas of falsity and societal mores.

In “Marzipan Lambs,” a woman interacts with the owner of a bakery, both of them losing or having lost their mothers. The two rely on each other for strength. The baker gives her a marzipan lamb week for her mother and she takes it even though the mother has passed. These lambs fill her fridge at home, drying out over time. The narrator can’t bring herself to tell him as she knows that their mutual struggle helps him to deal with his mother back in Italy, asking to go with the angels.

Powerful and compact, the stories, like marzipan lambs must be broken down slowly even if devoured quickly. Like those dried ears of marzipan lambs, they must to sucked on and wondered at before they dissolve into understanding. The story collection presents short tales that pleasantly sated my hunger. Yet, every time I set the book down or even closed the cover, I had to go back for more, unable to tear myself completely away. These stories by Ruocco necessitate time and re-reading, making this short volume well worth exploration.

George Witte’s Deniability is a well written, well thought out collection of poetry filled with poetic masterpieces. Deniability is broken up into three parts and within them we are taken from Ground Zero to the monotony of daily commutes to war to media bombardment and beyond. Witte voices his opinion of a post 911 world by showing his readers rather than by telling them. His poems are accessible and filling on a light level but offer so much more literary value when examined under a close read. Witte also further confines himself (as we are all confined) with syllabic boundaries, delivering work that is symmetrical and orderly, akin to a clockwork orange, in a disorderly world.

Part one of Deniability primarily deals with Manhattan life. With great skill and precision, Witte interlaces Greek mythology and symbolism into his works. He shows the reader that some people have the ability to open their eyes, they are in fact aware of the automatic society we have created and questions the rat race. Some notable poems of section one deserving a close read are “Sunday Morning Hangover” and “Elsewhere” (in addition to those outlined below).

In “The Revellers” Witte describes a normal commute scene. This commute is more than a commute but moreover a daily descent into hell. A presumed bum oversees the events, acting as a ferryman of the subway (a proverbial river Styx ) whom is there to collect a toll from passengers. The Charon, or bum, is adorned with tattoos, which Witte describes as a “presidential V”, almost a sort of ‘medal of honor’ of the underworld. Our hero of “The Revellers” continues a ritual of sucking tokens from the turnstile slot (“He bends again to mouth the metal nipple” [the only regular sustenance he has]) and commuters carry on with their commute or “descent.”

In “Classical Subjects” Witte breaks the poem into three sections. The first section is presumed an ekphrasis of a painting. The scene described is the mythological story of Apollo flaying Marsyas. The specific painting of subject is possibly Flaying of Marsysas by Tiziano Vecellio, however the “cat” referenced in Witte’s poem would be an ekphrastic non sequitur, because Vecellio’s painting clearly shows a dog lapping up the blood. Irrespective of the specific piece of art described, the mythological story and most paintings of Apollo flaying Marsyas communicate the same parallel Witte makes in the second section of the poem. In the second section Witte describes in detail the images of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay and their mistreatment. Those photographs, while they are a brutal display of inhumane acts, also could be taken out of context, much like the flaying of Marsyas. Acts of terrorism compared to Apollo being issued a musical challenge. In part three, we are taken to the Genesis of “Classical Subjects” and Witte talks about writing the poem on a subway car “collecting evidence against/ humanity’s inheritance” (Which Witte has done throughout Deniability, making his case). He is approached by a bum and describes the bum’s feet as being “flayed”, a reference to part one. Perhaps the bum has been flayed by society…? (What is his crime?)

Section one is ended with the poem “The Ticket”. Here Witte drives home a major theme of his book; “Yet still be dead, the body’s/Reflexive dumb machinery/Chattering like a cash box gone awry/While soul slips quietly out,”. We’re in an automatic society, teetering on the edge of soullessness and need to wake up.

The depth and thickness of Witte’s political statements in section two knows no bounds. In section two Witte makes several Judeo-Christian (mainly Christian) references. One more than one occasion he refers to the wars we are in as “crusades” and those in the war as “crusaders.” In “Occupation” we’re told that “We’re deputized to conquer Babylon .” Over and over again, Witte rehashes the amount of hypocrisy that has taken place with our ‘war on terror’, the constant media bombardment, the ‘lies’ or truth stretching (“Fooled twice we’re not ashamed—sincere/incompetence builds character— /but err again, apologize/for circumstance beyond control,” or “…how’s intelligence/know missile shed from shadow,…”) and brings it to surface under the auspice of Presidential (& Presidential cabinet) deniability. All of this is particularly important especially because the constant ‘reaffirmation’ that our “war on terror” is not a religion based war but one serving the better good of the world at large.

At the end of section two we are given the title poem “Deniability”, which touches on the themes of constant surveillance and ‘bad’ intelligence. These themes and the themes throughout the work poignantly reminds us that the free and great nation we live in has closely approached that of a fascist state. Both the people and the state have entered into a full state of deniability, where we happily eat what we are fed, without question or quam, as long as prime-time news continues to deliver the dramas we most desire and our leadership continues to cut the quality of information.

Section three continues to build on the fore-blazed themes. The poems in the latter third of Deniability points out our addition to the conspiracy of it all. The poems resound with the same paranoia that old wives tales concerning razor blades in apples (false) and “snoopy stamps” that are purposely laced with LSD to get children to trip (also false). Here Witte takes the everyday events and examines them under a microscope making the point that if you look for something you will find it…if we’re looking for terror, we’re going to find it.

In “The Third Pig” Witte plays off of the classic children’s story “The Three Little Pigs.” In Witte’s revival we’re again bombarded with paranoia. Also in this adaptation there is a loss of innocence, our bedtime stories having come to life to plague us and we’re left with a contemporary ending “the mine canary whistling one/ inquiring note into the dark,/ then pausing to inhale, and wait.” The real question arises, “are we doomed in this metaphoric mine we call reality in the 21st century?”

Overall, Deniability is a master-work and Witte is a writer that must not escape below the radar. His poems can be appreciated on a surface level but, in reality full justice to the writer must be delivered by giving him a close read. Deniability is a collection of craft and will hopefully continue to be celebrated for years to come.

Visit George Witte online.

About the reviewer:

John Petrolino is a United States Merchant Marine officer and the author of two collections of poetry: Galleria and Congo Lights. His work has been featured or is forthcoming in The Idiom Magazine, Eviscerator Heaven, The Bradstock Journal, Write On!! Magazette, The Working Tools Magazine, The New Jersey Freemason, The Storm Generation Magazine, WestWard Quarterly, The Istanbul Literary Review, Exit 13, The Sandstorm Gallery, The Bayshore News Online, The Monmouth County Monitor newspaper group, Rock Candy, Hot Tea Cold Water, The Journal of New Jersey Poets, Lips, The Shot Glass Journal and on poetryvlog.com, identitytheory.com, and wordriot.org. Mr. Petrolino was also featured on the newly released World Spirit film Greenwich Village and was a 2009 Poet Laureate nominee for the Asbury Music Awards. He continues to work on his poetry and other works while aboard ship, traveling, or at home. Be sure to visit him on the Web at www.johnpetrolino.com.

Review by David F. Hoenigman

Protest! Is the first release from UK based Beat the Dust Press. The cover art of the square, hardback book is reminiscent of the Stones’ Exile on Main St. album sleeve and features black and whites photos of Rimbaud, Artaud, prostitutes on a corner, street riots, retro SF artwork, paintings of historic battles, a female face marked for plastic surgery…etc. All with the word “Protest!” in red capital letters scrawled across the top. The broad disparity of imagery perhaps suggesting a wider sense of the word than we’re accustomed to. Inside we find the writing of Steve Finbow, Melissa Mann and Joseph Ridgwell, each writer takes about 60 pages to state their piece.

Perhaps Steve Finbow is protesting against writing in typical form. His “Asylum Beach” is a swirl of surreal Malone Dies-like institutions, Genetian cell fantasies (or not), ogling sunbathing Thai girls (or not), Guy Ritchiesque character interviews, beating a Buddhist(?) priest to death on a filthy used condom beach, all the while receiving Philip K. Dick telegrams.

It includes a memorable scene of a fresh seafood lunch:

“On his knees on the beach, he notices something translucent ahead of him. He crawls towards it. Crabs and flies make way, return. A jellyfish. Tendrils eaten away by fish or shrivelled in the sun. Its globular body remains, a pale limpid white with pink and blue undertones, like frozen skin or sun-flared porcelain. The centre of its body looks like the dial on an old rotary phone. Or a moulded vanilla blancmange shot with rhubarb and iodine. He digs his fingers into the mass, tears off a chunk, brings it to his mouth, bites down into it, chews, and swallows. Then on all fours, head down, biting, biting off pieces, spitting out what he cannot swallow, until the jellyfish is nothing more than a dismemberment of matter, a stage towards nothingness, a dislocation of the universe. Satiated, he stands, throws back his head, roars into the sky.”

Wow! What the fuck is going on? It’s an exhilarating onslaught.

I love the brief plays on words here and there:

“He is there and not there. They are here but not here. Not there during the act. Not they during the act. Not their during the act.”

I love the rhythm throughout. In fact, it just sort of grabbed me and dropped me off at the end. Confronted with such rhythm I tend to madly follow it at the expense of my overall understanding, and I believe this piece could be interpreted in a million different ways but let me take a crack at it: released in Bangkok and/or the Thai beaches, a man feels as though he’s escaped from his cell (the treatment he’s usually administered by society), given the items on display his morality (the priest) is an annoyance that must be dispensed of, maybe he picked up a used copy of Dick’s We Can Remember it For You Wholesale at one of the cheap book stores on Khaosan Rd. The sun, constant drinking, thorough fulfillment of elsewhere stifled desires, reading books in the moments that his head is clear – and reality starts to waver, to spiral, to jellyfish.

Just a thought. Anyway, great writing Mr. Finbow. It’s relentlessly exuberant.

In Melissa Mann “The Beautiful Fight” we find protest in a more traditional sense – the desire to make a strong statement in the hope of rallying people to your cause. The strong-willed Jude (a woman) takes advantage of the weak-willed (and dysmorphic) Karen in order to extend a political agenda. Karen agrees to a tremendous physical sacrifice that Jude hopes to broadcast on YouTube. I would do readers a great disservice to divulge too many details, but things don’t turn out so well and in the aftermath Karen may just hit upon what could be the backbone of…everything:

“You know what I think though, Jude? I reckon…I mean, well, maybe the cause yer fighting for – women’s rights, animal rights, whatever – in’t the one yer think yer fighting for at all.” Jude frowns. “At the end o’the day, like, I reckon all causes are really just about yerself. Mainly, anyway, don’t yer think, Jude? The real fight is with yerself and…and for yerself, in’t it? At the end o’the day.”

That whatever we claim to be championing is really just something we hope to see our authority or influence extended within: causes, art, religion, clout; it’s all about yourself. Welcoming others aboard your lifeboat of grievances in order to justify them.

But then Jude does make many valid points. Like this memorable tirade in a strip club:

“pole-dancing is for the poor, the abused and the hopeless. It demeans women and makes ‘em victims. You lot out there, waving yer dirty money at ‘em, are consumers of live human beings. It’s like fuckin’ cock fightin’, this is, only yer’ve taught ‘em to dance fo’ yer.”

So, even if it is all about yourself it can still be valid and beneficial to society but you must be careful not to release within yourself the same insanity and greed for power that fuels what you started out fighting against. We are all susceptible to this.

I wanted to watch the barbarous YouTube clip they were making. I wanted Karen to be sacrificed up for my short-term curiosity. And reflecting back on the pole-dancing speech – isn’t that what pornography is? Isn’t anyone who’s willing to be filmed in acts of extreme degradation at the very least suffering from drastically low self esteem? It’s wrong for us to take advantage of these people for our own amusement, right? How and when did we acquire this appetite?

There’s much more going on in “The Beautiful Fight”, Melissa Mann’s story raises a lot of issues. It’s brilliantly crafted. It’s chilling.

Joseph Ridgwell’s “The Battle of Barncleuth Square” tells the tale of a homeless UK poet not really eking out an existence in the rundown King’s Cross area of Sydney. It’s presented as an autobiographical story, the narrator referred to as Ridgwell. Here we see lifestyle as protest. A complete refusal to conform to society:

“That was my problem, I was a dreamer, somebody unable or unwilling to adapt to the rigours of modern living. Then there were the others, the other people. I just didn’t understand them, the way they looked, walked, talked, their hatred, love, pain, suffering, jealousy – I didn’t understand any of it. All I wanted to do was drift away.”

Of course, it’s almost an unconscious protest. It could be just his personality or his destiny, a position some simply gravitate towards. Like the oddballs, drunks, and prostitutes he portrays for us: the Radio Man, Bibi the Brazilian Trannie, Instamatic Camera Lady, Growler.

At one point he attempts to get a job at a coffee shop but, due to an inability to do any task properly, is let go halfway through his first day. His way of thinking is his downfall but also his salvation, his vitality often shaking off the hopeless.

Shortly after exiting the coffee shop:

“Despite my earlier optimism, it appeared that I’d hit rock bottom. Then it dawned on me. What did it matter? When it comes right down to it, rock bottom isn’t as bad as you might expect. I still felt the same and looked the same. In fact I was the same. I just didn’t have any money.”

That the story is set around Sydney’s Millennium New Year’s Eve festivities gives it an atmosphere of an impending something and later the wobbling purity of a new beginning. The Suits arrive with their official papers shortly into the new year. The authorities are breaking up the happy makeshift community. Ridgwell’s writing is a celebration of all that is comforting and fleeting a la Henry Miller or Charles Bukowski, though it exposes the toll this lifestyle takes on those who live it (by choice or otherwise) it opts to view these people possessing a unique dignity and to consider them with understanding and affection.

“In all the time I knew him the Growler never uttered an intelligible word. That was why he was called the Growler. He just growled all day long, that’s what he did. And along with Baldie, his partner in crime, he was the main architect and constructor of the seemingly never-ending series of open-air rooms that made both of them famous. And there is something to be said for that.”

As representative of this dignity the community does not go down without a fight. Readers will not soon forget Baldie’s final display of protest the following morning. That Ridgwell and another poet friend named Beermatt watch the battle from a safe distance says something about the varying levels of commitment to this lifestyle and how the truly entrenched are beyond self-preservation.

All in all, it’s quite a debut from Beat the Dust Press; I look forward to future releases.

With all of the almost necrophilic releases of famous writers’ unpublished works (the recent posthumous publication of Nabokov’s The Original of Laura comes to mind), you might think, especially because of its affectless prose, its despairing tone, its absurdities and monotonies, that Kamby Bolongo Mean River is the last treasure trove from the Samuel Beckett estate:

I didn’t forget about the you in how are you but when I think too much about one word and then another I sometimes decide I’ve had enough of the words and will listen only to the voice from then on. The words aren’t as important as the voice and when you only listen to the voice you don’t have to think about the words themselves. You can listen to what comes between the words and behind them.

But no, although certainly navigating within similar troubled waters, Robert Lopez’s prose is his own. And it’s written as much with a mind toward revealing a solitary’s disturbed consciousness as it is toward telling an equally disturbing story. Kamby Bolongo Mean River’s estranged narrator is confined in some kind of holding cell with only a bed and a telephone. Through a mirrored window, doctors watch to see whether he chooses to answer incoming calls. The phone’s intermittent ringing—or at least the intimation that it might happen—in the story sets the narrator off into all kinds of circuitous conversations with himself, into self-absorbed reveries on language, or, rather, the failure of words to communicate meaning:

The trouble is when I listen I don’t listen for the words. I listen for what is between the words and behind them. The way you do this is to listen to how the voice sounds. If you concentrate on the words you lose the voice and the voice is always too important to lose. How the voice pronounces each word is probably the most important thing.

It is this mining of the words between the words, the interstitial remains of what is left unsaid, that provides the forward propulsion of Kamby Bolongo Mean River. The narrator’s conversation with himself has been going on, at least by his estimation, for over thirty-two years. He struggles with answering the phone because it will disrupt this presumably schizophrenic state. Though he’s in some kind of institutionalized environment, not much is definitively stated about where he is exactly and why he’s there. Yes, he’s in “a room with four walls and one window and almost nothing else,” and we also learn, through the narrator’s obsessing over it, that there is no television and air conditioner. Why he’s allowed the single convenience of a phone, and why, in whatever strange, debilitated condition he’s in, he’s allowed to have conversations through it, is never explicitly stated either. This is how the novel begins:

Should the phone ring I will answer it. I will say the hello how are you and wait for a response. I will listen to what the person on the other end says. I will listen to the words. Sometimes I don’t listen. Sometimes I wait until the person finished answering the hello how are you so I can say whatever it is I’d been saying to myself before the phone rang.

All this may sound bleak, but the book’s last lines signal to us that there may be some hope for the narrator:

I will say you are who you are and where you are and I am who I am and where I am so let’s stop now with the hello how are you I have a headache and don’t feel like talking so please leave a message because I am fine.

That’s what I’ll say should the phone ever ring again this next time.

I will say I am fine which means please stop talking.

The absence of commas, colons, semicolons—actually all punctuation save the period, hyphen, and apostrophe—in Lopez’s novel makes for an oddball kind of rhythm where thoughts collide and then are abruptly stopped only to start again, like turning on a faucet and then quickly shutting off the valve, only to let it spurt out again. Ordinarily, Lopez’s constraints would result in suffocating prose, but instead, the dispensing of most punctuation, the stripping away of inflection, of any remotely flowery description, results in sentences that precisely limn the narrator’s consciousness, a narrator who would, given a chance, “rewrite the dictionary” because “[t]here are a lot of words in there [he doesn’t] like the definitions for.”

Kamby Bolongo Mean River’s unreliable narrator may sit comfortably next to Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert and Salinger’s Holden Caulfield, and also “Chief” Bromden from Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Charlie Gordon in Daniel Keyes’s Flowers for Algernon, and Patrick Bateman in Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, although “sitting” may not be the best image, as I picture the narrator fidgeting around his cell, obsessing over trivialities, and almost choking with his crazed, insular, no, airtight, logic, and continuing to draw on the walls, masturbate, and interminably talk to himself.

Robert Lopez’s carefully crafted, insistent prose is matched by his bold exploration of madness, abuse, emotional and psychological trauma, isolation, but also of one man’s self-motivated, if still ill-directed, plan for rehabilitation. Kamby Bolongo Mean River may just tie both your brain and stomach into knots.

About the author:

John Madera sees good in too-small glimpses, doubts that there’s a thing called a soul, and sometimes wishes there was a god so he had someone to blame. With his medicine woman and fierce little girl, he slips into the still, dusky spaces safe from the big city’s bright lights. www.johnmadera.com

Dear Michael Kimball,

Strangely, instead of writing “Reviewed by John Madera” above, I wrote: “Reviewed by Michael Kimball.” I have, as you can see, already fixed the mistake. I’m not sure why I initially wrote “Reviewed by Michael Kimball.” It wasn’t a conscious thing, something I deliberated over. I wasn’t thinking of using some kind of Borgesian conceit or metafictional trick. It just happened that way. I also didn’t know that I was going to write a letter to you, hadn’t planned it, until after I had typed out some of my favorite passages from your book, most of which I’ve since meshed within this letter to you. I’ve had to cut some quotes as editors often want to have only a few demonstrative pieces from any book. Plus, it’s always important to be mindful that repeatedly pulling quotes from a book and then explicating it may prove wearisome to the reader. So I’m afraid that some of them didn’t make it. But that shouldn’t matter since I’m writing to you about your own book, one with which you are intimately familiar, and, perhaps, even tired of at this time. So the challenge for me here is to somehow describe to you my thoughts about your book without telling you what you already know while at the same time underscoring the central themes of Dear Everybody while also detailing your obsessions and concerns for other readers of this letter. Actually, that last sentence is a nice echo of your book’s first sixteen pages where you lay out what the entire book is about. You also did that in your first book The Way the Family Got Away where in the first few pages you reveal, in a synopsized form, the book’s main plot pivots. And here, you get away with it again, getting the story out of the way right at the beginning so the book becomes something larger for the reader than just finding out what happens next.

I wanted to read and review this book after I had heard you read from it at Unnameable Books in Brooklyn for the release of Unsaid Magazine’s fourth issue. There was something in your voice, its reedy plaintiveness and urgency that got to me. It didn’t feel put on, although it had to have been. You were acting, is what I mean to say. These letters you had read were letters that you had made up after all. They weren’t from you really but from a character you had meticulously created, not out of thin air, but out of words, words woven together as intricately as any genetic code. Those letters you read are, of course, very different from this letter that I’m writing to you now. This letter is written from me (not a character that I’ve made up), to you, a real person who invented a person who wrote letters to other imaginary people, not to mention places and things (more on that later). But this isn’t something you were hiding. For those short moments I had dutifully suspended disbelief, accepted your novel’s epistolary conceit, and surrendered to the idea that there was a Jonathon Bender who, having grown up in an often cheerless household with an abusive father who would box his ears to “bring him back into the real world,” out of “Jonathon-land with his Jonathon-thoughts,” had fallen into a downward spiral, a lacuna of despair, that led to that same “black hole with teeth” that David Foster Wallace had often found himself. No, it was easy to be swayed into imagining Bender writing these letters and see him sitting in his kitchen believing that everybody he remembered was sitting there with him. I believed him, or, rather, you writing from his point of view, when he wrote:

I am sitting in my kitchen with everybody who I can remember and it is crowded in here. Everything that I can remember is falling out of my head, going down my arm, and out my fingers. I can feel it happening inside me and sometimes it hurts.

Jonathon shares that he thought that his life had been “continuous” but discovered that all he could remember were “isolated instances” he had hoped were his “defining moments.” All of this was easy to see and believe as you were reading.

However, what I found disturbing since hearing your voice reading that afternoon (your voice that breathed life, of a kind, into your character, Jonathon Bender, who writes in a precise, crystalline manner, not unlike the prose I’m used to reading from you) was that your voice wormed inside my ear. It was your voice I heard when I finally sat down to read, and finished reading in one sitting, Dear Everybody. I’m writing this letter to you with a stream of electronic white noise in the background. It’s supposed to help me find some kind of “comfort zone,” an “auditory Zen.” It’s also supposed to aid sleep, enhance privacy, block distractions, mask tinnitus, and soothe migraines. But what it doesn’t do is block the earworm of your voice, its aneurhythm, as it were, that is now perhaps, forever embedded in my brain.

So Michael, how do I get rid of your voice in my head?

Also, I found out that Luca DiPierro created a short film based on Dear Everybody. I made the mistake of watching it after I read your book and discovered that you play the part of Jonathon Bender in it. I know, we only see you from the back. But it’s you, it’s your voice. So I’m confused now. Is Jonathon Bender you? You, like most writers, are probably sick of people conflating their writing with autobiography, and so am I, but why’d you go and muddle things up by making this film? But I know it can’t be you, first of all, because even if some of these experiences were drawn from your own life, your story hardly resembles Bender’s. I also know that autobiography itself is a construct, as much a piecing together of imagined “defining moments” as any fiction. So even if you had written this book as a memoir I would have to think of it as a narrative of conscious artifice. The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, or rather, our selves, and the people we supposedly know, are just as made up as the stories that are made out of thin air, or, rather, out of words. Plus, at least at the time of this writing, you’re not dead. But then again, Bender never lived. He’s a figment, a fragment, an idea. It’s funny how I need to remind myself about this fact. But with the careful, poignant portrait that you’ve rendered here, this becomes easy to forget.

What struck me about Jonathon Bender’s letters is their consistency. No matter how painful the subject, his letters remain bright, honest, winsome, and often childlike. So many people seek to find their “inner child” but for Bender that child never left, never grew up. But I’m not sure that’s a bad thing, at least not entirely. While his naïveté may keep him from being able to piece himself together, and keep himself together, it does allow him to see things with such stunning clarity and to say what has gone unsaid for so long. For instance, in his first letter, he writes:

Dear Mom and Dad,

Do you ever wish that the sperm and the egg that became me wasn’t me? I’m sure that you must have been expecting someone else from all of that pleasure.

Sometimes the letters have the fantastic purity that can be found in Art Linkletter’s Kids Say the Darnedest Things:

Dear Mom and Dad,

Here’s the reason that I pulled the stitching out of my feather pillow and then pulled all the feathers out of it too: I thought that I was going to find a bird.

But they also often have a dark subtext:

Dear Grandma and Grandpa Winters,

Thank you for giving me the Etch-a-Sketch for my seventh birthday. I liked drawing with it better than drawing on the walls, but I always felt sick when I shook it and everything on its magic screen disappeared. It reminded me of how my dad would grab me by both of my shoulders and shake me until everything went blank inside me too.

Jonathon is a functioning depressive for most of his life but after his girlfriend breaks up with him he plunges into a dark emotional sinkhole:

Letter to his landlord:

If you hadn’t found me, then I might never have left my apartment. I was so afraid of anything outside of me. I felt as if I had cracked somewhere inside of me and even though I wrapped my arms around my legs and tried to hold on to myself, the crack kept getting taller and wider until there was an opening where you could see through me if you looked at me. Even now, I can feel that opening getting bigger inside me and pretty soon I will disappear into it.

Jonathon Bender was a broken man. Unwanted as a newborn, shaken as a toddler, smacked around as a child, Jonathon learned to hate himself, hated the way he felt and looked, and at one point he wanted “to change everything about [himself] until [he was] somebody else.” When he was running he felt as if he “could run right out of [his] own body.” Over and over again, Jonathan yearns to be different than who he thinks he is. From a letter to his mother:

I wanted to get in a car and just drive until I didn’t know where I was anymore. I had always imagined that wherever that was that nobody would know who I was, that I would give myself a new name, and that the rest of my life would somehow be different.

I haven’t mentioned another primary aspect about this book’s construction. Jonathon Bender’s letters are ordered and contextualized by his brother Robert. As his de facto literary executor, his brother, in addition to organizing Jonathon’s letters, includes excerpts from their mother’s diary, interviews with their father, excerpts from Jonathon’s wife’s eulogy, as well as newspaper clippings, encyclopedia entries, and other ephemera that help to flesh out Jonathon’s story. These additional elements counterpoint Jonathon’s perspective with examples of their father’s brusqueness, his powder-keg temper, and their mother’s various denials, complicities, fears, all the complexities of the battered wife and loving mother. It’s ironic that just like Jonathon’s many attempts in his life to understand how his family had fallen apart, his project to capture his life’s “defining moments” was doomed to failure. That his legacy was mediated by his estranged brother, not to mention your mediation Michael, as writer of every element of this book, as well as readers’ various interpretations, underscores how any story may be interpreted in innumerable ways.

Sometimes I think that the membrane between mental illness and well-being is tissue thin. How different is a writer writing from the perspective of a person who imagines that want ads, tornados, a university, a weather satellite, a street are like persons, that you can apologize to them, thank them, from a person who actually does believe that these things are people that can be addressed? Is it that a writer can slip in and out of these states with ease and with no discernible debilitating side-effects, can step away from it like you do from a costume? Dear Everybody raises a lot of questions in my mind. I don’t expect you to answer them. Nor do I think that they can ever really be answered. I think that’s one of your book’s strengths, that it unsettles, that it brings wounds to the surface, that it provokes and challenges ideas of equilibrium and insanity.

One last thing: I was upset when I discovered that my copy of the book had somebody else’s writing in it. I’m not talking about your characters’ words, which are all your words anyway, but someone’s ballpoint pen notes and underlinings. It was the one thing that turned off your voice in my head while I read. So I wondered if that’s the trick to getting rid of the earworm. If I were to scribble my own notes in the margins of Dear Everybody would your voice then be dammed up? Well, I didn’t try since I can’t bear the idea of writing in a book. It’s almost like why I’ve never considered getting a tattoo. It’s too permanent.

Sincerely,
John Madera

About the reviewer:
John Madera edits the forum Big Other and journal The Chapbook Review. He is published widely online and most recently in The Collagist, Flatmancrooked, and The Prairie Journal: A Magazine of Canadian Literature. His fiction is forthcoming in Opium Magazine and Corduroy Mountain. He is editing a collection of essays on the craft of writing ( Publishing Genius Press, 2010).

The first thing I noticed was the paper. I was expecting it, because every review I read said it’s printed on nice paper, and it really is. Thick, rich, rough paper, the kind of paper that could probably absorb a teaspoon full of coffee per page, and still keep its structural integrity.

Sort of like the rest of the book, really. Joey Comeau is a Writer with a capital W. His webcomic A Softer World established him years ago as the sort of person who knows exactly where our nerves are, and who can make us feel euphoric or miserable with one phrase, and he delights in it. Overqualified, the book with the really nice paper, is the same way.

Overqualified is a collection of cover letters to companies Joey wants to work for. Some of them actually got sent, but I don’t know that anyone offered him a job. I’m not certain I would. Reading these cover letters is like looking at a snail without a shell: There’s Joey, completely naked, and it’s fascinating and a little bit stomach churning. He doesn’t bother with the usual things that everyone else says in cover letters- what a good worker he is, or how much his old company loved him, or how much money he’ll bring in, but instead he might tell you about his habit of impersonating teenage girls on Yahoo Chat so he can flirt with other men, or how he is a revisionist who makes up his past as he goes, or that Apple should make a computer that won’t let you drunk-email your ex.

The fun part of this book is that you can read it in any order. Each letter fits another piece into the puzzle that is Joey, but they don’t build on each other- only on Joey and his brother Adrian. Joey’s brother comes up a lot- sometimes he’s dead, sometimes he’s been badly injured and is a vegetable, and once he gets better. In a way, Overqualified is about Joey’s relationship with his brother, which is cut short when Adrian is injured and maybe killed. By the end of book we don’t know what happened to Adrian, or whether he’s still alive, but we know that Joey is not done with him yet. We’re not certain where it will end because he is not certain. All Joey knows is that this is how things are, and that is all he tells us, and it is enough.

Overqualified made me love Joey Comeau. Not because he’s a great guy, or because I’m attracted to him, or because I think he has something important to say, but because he is not ashamed of who he is. His book is uncomfortable sometimes, and weird most of the time, and often very, very honest. I wouldn’t hire Joey, but I love him.

About the author:
Anselm Engle is a chronic academic and acute writer from Sacramento. His nonfiction writing has appeared in a number of electronic and text publications, and he has recently had a fiction piece picked up by Valley Public Radio for a dramatic reading. When he isn’t reading and writing, he’s studying writing at Sacramento State University, or tutoring aspiring writers at the Sac State writing center.

Review by John Madera

With all kinds of worthless chit chatting and twitter jibber jabbering going on, The Delicacy and Strength is less a reminder that epistolary literature is a lost art, but more a revelation that its possibilities are still available, if one avails his- or herself to it at all. Leslie Marmon Silko and James Wright met only two times, the first time at a writers conference in Michigan and the second in a New York City hospital where Wright lay dying of cancer. Between these two bookends was a gap of three summers and then a little over two-and-a-half years of correspondence between them. What began as an exchange of mutual admirers of each other’s work (Silko describes Wright’s work as having “grace and delicacy,” that it “coax[es] out the range of dissonances and harmonies it allows us…”) rather quickly developed into an intimate series of encouragements, exposures, shoptalk, and reveries on language, death, landscape, art, and life.

Wright initiated the letters by expressing his admiration for Silko’s Ceremony which he describes as “one of the four or five best books” he’d ever read about America and that his “very life [meant] more to [him] than it would have meant if [she] hadn’t written” this classic book. The gravity of this statement is obvious, but it’s a sincerity that is carried throughout their letters. Wright’s letter arrived at a time of great personal turmoil for Silko and was received by her as a kind of salve on her wounds. After some formalities are dispensed with the letters grow equally in their surprising candor and in their detail. One such letter from Silko opens with a wonderfully wrought tale about a mean rooster on her property in Arizona:

There are all kinds of other rooster stories that one is apt to hear. I am glad I have this rooster because I never quite believed roosters so consistently were as the stories tell us they are. On these hot Tucson days, he scratches a little nest in the damp dirt under the Mexican lime tree by the front door. It is imperative for him that the kittens and the black cat show him respect, even deference, by detouring or half-circling the rooster as they approach the water dish which is also under the lime tree. If they fail to do this, then he jumps up and stamps his feet, moving sideways until they cringe. This done, he goes back to his mud nest

Surprised at what she wrote, Silko shares: “I never know what will happen when I write a letter. Certain persons bring out certain things in me.” What Wright brought out in Silko was her incredibly fluid narrative style, a style informed equally by Faulkner and Twain (what Wright describes as a “gift for storytelling, the natural gift, the gift of one who is native to life itself, so to speak…”) as it is by the long line of Laguna storytellers in her life. But what was also drawn out were beautiful reflections on what she has learned as a Laguna. For instance, regarding death:

Death never ends feelings or relationships at Laguna. If a dear one passes on, the love continues and it continues in both directions—it is requited by the spirits of these dear ones who send blessings back to us, maybe with rain or maybe with the feeling of continuity and closeness as well as with past memories…. At Laguna, when someone dies, you don’t “get over it” by forgetting; you “get over it” by remembering, and by remembering you are aware that no person is ever truly lost or gone once they have been in our lives and loved us, as we have loved them. Which isn’t to say that you conduct life exactly as if the person were alive. If Grandpa didn’t like red paint, after he is gone you can feel free to paint the walls red because it is understood that those sorts of things are no longer concerns of the dead.

Neither Wright nor Silko had any awareness of Wright’s illness until long after they had established contact and shortly before he died. So these auguries of death are less eerie as they are stunning examples of how extraordinarily attuned these writers were as they were writing these letters to each other.

While Wright is effusive in his praise to Silko of her work and her letters, he was much slower to open himself up to her. It was easy for him to describe places and objects or poetry to her:

When you love a place, really and hopelessly love it, I think you love it even for its signs of disaster, just as you come to realize how you love the particular irregularities and even the scars on some person’s face….

Sometimes I wonder about things like lace, things that human beings make with their own hands, things that aren’t much help as shelter from the elements or against war and other kinds of brutality….

A poem is a very odd duck. It goes through changes—in form and color—when you leave it alone patiently, just as surely as a plant does, or an animal, or any other creature. Have you ever read a book by someone which you know has been written too quickly and impatiently and published too soon? Such books always remind me of tomatoes or oranges that have been picked still green and then squirted full of artificial colors. They look quite nice on the supermarket shelves, and they taste awful. I remember reading such books and feeling the glands under my chin begin to ache. They made me feel as though I were getting the mumps.

But after a letter from Silko wherein she describes her debilitating divorce and how she lost her custody fight, Wright finally opens up to her and shares what he describes as his “worst pain.” Silko’s response is lovely and is another reminder of story’s capacity to renew, to heal even:

I am deeply moved by the letter you sent and want you to know that I will always cherish and guard its story. I believe more than ever that it is in sharing the stories of our grief that we somehow can make sense out—no, not make sense out of these things…. But through stories from each other we can feel that we are not alone, that we are not the first and the last to confront losses such as these…

This release enables Wright to be able to write:

We all seem doomed to a freedom to choose between indifference and sadness. I can’t—or won’t—be indifferent to life, and yet when I turn my face toward it, how sorrowful it seems.

I was surprised how devastated I was after Wright’s letter wherein he tells of his cancer. Though I had known it was coming, it was nevertheless still shocking. Wright died three months later. The Delicacy and Strength of Lace is an incredible document as it affords us an opportunity to reflect on the power of opening up, of sharing stories, of intimacy, and also of how much may be said in a letter, how a letter, unconfined by silly word-counts, carefully written rather than quickly typed in some “dialogue” box, may actually result in some deep connection, awareness, and perhaps even greater understanding about what it means to live, how, as Silko describes, “deeply we can touch each other” with “simple words.” When was the last time something that landed in your inbox did that for you?

About the reviewer:

John Madera edits the forum Big Other and journal The Chapbook Review. He is published widely online and most recently in The Collagist, Flatmancrooked, and The Prairie Journal: A Magazine of Canadian Literature. His fiction is forthcoming in Opium Magazine and Corduroy Mountain. He is editing a collection of essays on the craft of writing ( Publishing Genius Press, 2010).

Most people spend their lives really trying to understand the delicate balance of what makes a relationship work. They meet people, they date, some get married, some don’t and all the while they are learning from each interaction a little more about the opposite sex. Learning a little bit about themselves.  What makes them tick, what they like and dislike, who is the right person and how they can tell.

In Robin Stratton’s chapbook, Dealing with Men (ISBN 0-9753211-3-7), she takes the reader on a journey of various interactions and displays the results of what happens when men and women collide in life.

The short collection of poems and micro fiction dive into a complex world where Robin exposes the fragile line we walk when dealing with the opposite sex. Stratton opens up her heart and lays her emotions on the line for the world to read and relate and learn.

Her poem “Even Though” is a perfect example why headaches and relationships are so common:

driving distracted as I
fumble for my cell phone
we squabbled this morning
over some dumb thing
and even though your call
won’t resolve the issue
and no apology is forthcoming
I still want to hear your voice.

A scenario that all readers who have been in a relationship will relate and written so smoothly that all readers will enjoy. Reading the chapbook you find yourself nodding your head as if Robin was in the room telling you something that had just happened to her and you as a friend are trying to console or be happy for her. The chapbook makes you part of her world and the rollercoaster she experiences.

Robin perfectly paints both the good and bad side in Dealing with Men and the chapbook works as a how to guide when it comes to understanding why women act and react to any situation.  Her fluid writing style allows a reader to consume each piece of writing with ease and the emotion that motivated her to write the piece jumps off of the page for the reader to embrace.

After one poem, “The Game” I found myself with a need to question my wife if she had done what the narrator had done as the poem was too natural, too possible it became probable. Here is a short excerpt from the poem:

It was the first game I have ever watched
and yet I converse with ease, or so he thinks
not realizing that he is doing all the talking
and I am just agreeing.
A successful strategy.

The chapbook was published by Big Table Publishing and is available for $10 on their website www.bigtablepublishing.com. It is well worth the money and pays for itself with the light it sheds in the wonderfully aggravating world of relationships.

About the reviewer:

Casey Quinn writes prose and poetry. He also edits the online magazine Short Story Library. His first poetry collection Snapshots of Life was released in 2009 by Salvatore Publishing.

Tony Gruenewald’s The Secret History of New Jersey is a wonderful collection of satirical, reflexive, quasi-political, lyrical and humorous poems.  Gruenewald’s Secret History is broken up into to chapters or “exits” as he describes them (throughout the collection Gruenewald constantly refers to transportation, the road and to highway systems themselves).  The first, “Exit 1-The Secret History of New Jersey” contains many poems of reflection and of the past.  “Exit 2-New York City, Boca Raton, Bluefield, W.Va., Afghanistan” is loaded with more of Gruenewald’s observations and opinions.  Though, both parts are filled equally with his astute and cynical observation of the world around him.

Many of Gruenewald’s poems are full of lyrical aspects loaded with alliterations.  Better than reading his work is listening to him read it.  I had the pleasure to hear him read “Grand Finale” (the first poem in his book) at a reading and he sets a wonderful pace with his word selection “…Bombs and M-80′s/buzzed back yards” and “chased by barrages of bottle rockets.”  In his piece “Ford Motor Company Edison Assembly Plant, 1948-2004” he loads the page with sweet sounding alliterations “Suburbs sprouted/from surrounding fields/feeding it the sweat and muscle…”

Besides the lyrical aspects with his use of alliteration (consonance and assonance as well), making the poems pleasant to the ear/inner voice Gruenewald’s work is significant and he adds depth and shade with the use of symbolism and literary reference.  In his poem “A Study of the Social Order of Automobiles” Gruenewald juxtaposes several ideas and ideologies serving up a deep and multi faceted poem.  In it he starts “When your Subaru left the inspection station/like Hester Prynne,/its scarlet sticker conspicuous,/the other cars did not shun it,”.  Gruenewald, like Miller uses Puritanical New England as a pulpit to bring to light modern conflict in his referencing Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter.  In the poem he continues “it was their drivers whose eyes/were either averted/or overflown with disdain.”  Gruenewald paints a picture of a society full of ‘all accepting motor vehicles’ versus ‘all judging drivers.’  “A Study of the Social Order of Automobiles” is full of satire and show’s Gruenewald’s disgust towards the current and continuing ‘competing with the Joneses’ mentality of America which we have been living in since post WWII.

In “Route 1 Free Association (To the guy in the black Lincoln riding my bumper…) ” Gruenewald uses, as the title suggests, free association.  In this piece he raps on from Neal Cassady (stating in the first line “You’d think you were Neal Cassady” comparing the guy behind him riding his bumper to Cassady) to James Dean to Jazz music legends to the Blues to idealism (“of my grandfather’s ridiculously/green front lawn.”) and from the Blues to color association of traffic lights to tail lights and then back full circle when he states “you’re about to react/to my brake lights’/alarming red or/we’ll both be singing/some serious/blues.”  Gruenewald’s cunning use of these associative ideas perpetuates the same feelings of being in a car; driving fast, and then slowing down, signs and sights going by, taking it all in slowly or with velocity, constantly being bombarded by images and sounds (Just like jazz music).

Like in “A Study of the Social Order of Automobiles“, Gruenewald makes some serious and living social statements in “First Class (for Jerry Monastersky).“  In “First Class) Gruenewald brings up an account of his mother receiving a letter from his teacher after the first day of school “though expectations were low,/they’d teach enough to know//how to sign away my soul/to the used car and mortgage,//and to please remember that I’d been bred/to be fed to the factories….”  From reading The Secret History of New Jersey one can deduce that not only was Gruenewald not “bred/to be fed to the factories” that he has more than exceeded whatever low expectations his educators had for him.  This classification of students being outlined is an important statement which is more alive now than it was yesterday (the ‘no child left behind’ communism of education).

In several of Gruenewald’s pieces he makes religious references, not only referencing but satirizing commonly known Christian prayers/phrases.  In the title poem “The Secret History of New Jersey” Gruenewald delivers the piece as if it would read form the New Testament, making commandments such as “all turns,/even those to the left/should indeed begin/from the lane of right.”  He also has a poem with the witty title of “The Last Temptation of Cracker Jack Christ” which could be read several different ways.  In “Love, American Style” Gruenewald reminds readers of the phrase “In God We Trust” being scribed on American currency followed by the poignant (but true) statement “since His only Son/was crucified and died/on the dollar sign….”  Lastly, in “Junky” Gruenewald rolls through this poem starting with a Shaksperian satire “To decaf/or not to decaf/that/is the question…” and ending with “Our Father who art in/Columbia…” all dedicated to his (or Bernadette’s, whom the poem is dedicated to) love for coffee.

The Secret History of New Jersey is a witty and entertaining read for all pallets.  The road references and metaphors, in conjunction with his lyrical jazz-like stylings will usher the reader through to the end on a fast pace and a high note.  Gruenewald’s satires and observations (serious or otherwise) have a unique spin on them, which at minimum will result in a slight “heh” or have one rolling on the floor.  Hop on the freeway and learn all you can about The Secret History of New Jersey.

The Secret History of New Jersey (ISBN-13: 978-1-880764-25-1) published in 2009 by Northwind Publishing is available on Amazon.com and more information can be obtained from the publisher at PO Box 823, Red Bank, NJ 07701.  Be sure to visit Tony on the web at www.tonygruenewald.com.

Throughout this review I italicized and put in quotations the titles of poems to differentiate them from quotations of a piece.