By David Blomenberg, Sycamore Review Contributor
J. A. Tyler has quite an astonishing number of works out recently, including INCONCEIVABLE WILSON, which was recently excerpted in PANK magazine, In Love with a Ghost, and, among other works, two chapbooks, and has no fewer than three books due out this year. What I’ve read of Wilson’s work focuses on the fragility of self, its parts, its dismantling. His most recent book A Man of Glass & The Ways We Have Failed shares this theme. “I remain, remainders,” the speaker in INCONCEIVABLE WILSON says, “the parts, pieces. I am dismantled. Tools and instruments and me taken apart.”
Even the genre Tyler writes in—he terms his longer works novel(la)s—dovetails with that sense of fractured identity. A Man of Glass… centers on one character’s point of view like a novella. It has stanzas instead of paragraphs, and is it lineated like poetry or not? A Man of Glass… can be seen as a novel planted in the unsteady ground between novella and poetry. It’s an interesting form that we’ve been seeing more of lately: in addition to Tyler’s works, other works in this form include We Take Me Apart by Molly Gaudry and Culture of One, from the ever-prolific Alice Notley. In all of these, identity never strays from the center of the frame.
In A Man of Glass…, something is wrong; the love’s gone sour between the unnamed man and woman. The man still loves but now, it seems, she does not. She washes her hair with cherry shampoo up above him in her apartment while he stands there, dejected, in the street. The stage, surprisingly, is then set for scenarios that remind me of the sonnet cycles of the 1600s. In fact, this book follows the same fever-chart course some of those poem sequences do, with rising and falling levels of desperation. There is denial: “You see now what you have done to me…how you have made me so different that I can’t even exist anymore.” But has she done this? The same accusation is leveled in Michael Drayton’s Idea, a sonnet cycle from 1593: “My heart was slain…who should I think the murder should commit? …It slew itself…”
The tension ratchets higher. The man alters himself to bring her back. She doesn’t speak. He changes, again and again and again, to get her attention, to perhaps rekindle her attraction to him. He becomes a string of beads, a spotted egg, a wineglass, a rainbow. Through a bewildering series of changes, the main character tries to metamorphose to win her, and each metamorphosis is inadequate: “Mourning is a river that never changes, but always changes and never cries itself out.” In many ways, the situation is more heartbreaking than that of the sonneteers who tried but never won. The speaker in Drayton’s sonnet cycle realizes his folly early: “Upon your lips the scarlet drops are found/ And in your eye the boy who did the murder.” In J. A. Tyler’s latest book, the main character teeters closer to the edge. In off-kilter and lacerating language, Tyler’s A Man of Glass… follows the track of a man who had won but now has lost.
A Man of Glass & All the Ways We Have Failed
Fugue State Press
ISBN 978-1-879193-24-6
112 pp.
$12 paperback
