Sefi Atta was born in Lagos, Nigeria, and is a novelist, playwright, and short story writer. She is the winner of PEN International’s 2004/2005 David TK Wong Prize, and in 2006 her debut novel Everything Good Will Come was awarded the inaugural Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa. Her short story collection, Lawless, received the 2009 Noma Award For Publishing in Africa. Lawless is published in the US and UK as News From Home. She lives in Mississippi with her husband Gboyega Ransome-Kuti, a medical doctor, and their daughter, Temi. Below is a review of the new collection, and you can click here for 5 Questions with the author.

The eleven short stories of News from Home cross oceans from Nigeria to America to the UK. This triad of ...MORE]]> By Chidelia Edochie, NONFICTION EDITOR

Sefi Atta was born in Lagos, Nigeria, and is a novelist, playwright, and short story writer. She is the winner of PEN International’s 2004/2005 David TK Wong Prize, and in 2006 her debut novel Everything Good Will Come was awarded the inaugural Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa. Her short story collection, Lawless, received the 2009 Noma Award For Publishing in Africa. Lawless is published in the US and UK as News From Home. She lives in Mississippi with her husband Gboyega Ransome-Kuti, a medical doctor, and their daughter, Temi. Below is a review of the new collection, and you can click here for 5 Questions with the author.

The eleven short stories of News from Home cross oceans from Nigeria to America to the UK. This triad of strongly rendered locales illuminates the dominant theme of dislocation that permeates the entire collection. In the opening story “The Miracle Worker”, Makinde’s is a mechanic in Lagos whose car lot is overrun by the overzealous when an image of the Virgin Mary appears on the windshield of an old car. He at first attempts to rid his lot of the worshippers who flock there as if on a pilgrimage, but then decides to try and turn a profit, with disastrous results that eventually send him to the place he ridiculed—church. In “Spoils”, a young Muslim girl in northern Nigeria laments the other village girls being whisked away to America by a “wrinkled old white woman with two big balloons in her breasts.” In “Last Trip” we meet a heroin trafficker, a woman using her retarded son as a decoy while she smuggles balloons of the white, lethal powder from Lagos onto a British Airways flight.

And in the title story, “News from home,” a nanny for a rich Nigerian family in America worries about an oil protest taking place in her hometown, and plans her escape back to Nigeria. We also meet a pretty light-skinned African boy hoping to pass as he illegally swims the border into Spain; an overeducated, overly privileged Nigerian girl slogging away at a desk job in London; and a deeply sensitive Nigerian woman dealing with her husband’s infidelity, and the prospect of committing her daughter to an asylum. In short, in the stories in News from Home no one is where they should be. All of the characters are trapped in locals that they would rather rid themselves of, or are on their way to fate worse than they could have imagined.

Atta has a knack for beginnings; take the first line of “Hailstones on Zamfara”: “On the day I die I will rise up, arms outstretched, magnificent as the mother of the Holy Prophet, then my executioners will be forced to admit, ‘We were wrong. We should have revered you more.’” While her stories often begin with a lyrical bang, they tend to peter out into endings that do not exactly surprise, nor do they satisfy a reader looking for the conventional epiphany. If you read Sefi Atta’s new collection, News from Home, be prepared for an intense look into contemporary Nigeria and its citizens, as well as a steady thrum of wrenching emotion that sneaks up on you the deeper into the collection you read. To get to know the author, check out these 5 Questions with Sefi Atta.

News from Home by Sefi Atta
Interlink Books (April 1, 2010)
320 pages, $15.00 Paperback

Chidelia’s fiction has won numerous awards, including the Joan Jakobson Award “given to writers of unusual promise,” and an AWP award. Recently, both her writing and reading efforts have shifted toward creative nonfiction. As the new Nonfiction Editor for Sycamore Review, she’ll be looking for memoir, personal essays, experiential journalism/personal reportage, and lyric essays. Check out the ...MORE]]> Chidelia lived and wrote in the southern Chinese city of Guǎngzhōu for almost 2 years before making the move to West Lafayette, Indiana, where Sycamore Review is headquartered. Originally hailing from Stone Mountain, Georgia, then living in New York City during her undergraduate years, and ultimately (sort of) settling in China makes Chidelia a rather rootless woman. Maybe that’s why it is the fiction and nonfiction in which humans have been uprooted, whether voluntarily or involuntarily, that speaks to her so.

Chidelia’s fiction has won numerous awards, including the Joan Jakobson Award “given to writers of unusual promise,” and an AWP award. Recently, both her writing and reading efforts have shifted toward creative nonfiction. As the new Nonfiction Editor for Sycamore Review, she’ll be looking for memoir, personal essays, experiential journalism/personal reportage, and lyric essays. Check out the Submissions page for her full aesthetic statement for Nonfiction submissions. She will also oversee Sycamore’s book reviews of newly released fiction, nonfiction, and books of poetry.

Contact her with submission questions or book review requests at: Chidelia [dot] Edochie [at] gmail [dot] com

by Ruth Joynton

Two things interested me about Allison Titus.

The title of her book, Sum of Every Lost Ship, drew my attention first. Since diving in Lake Huron last summer with its remarkable collection of shipwrecks, anything to do with the sunken objects of this world fascinates me. Any mention of water will at least make me pause and look back. There’s a woman on the white cover, dressed in what seems to be Nineteenth Century fashion, and she’s speaking. But the speech balloon to the right of her body doesn’t contain words, rather whales, whale bones, and above the water, a vessel. Which makes sense once you read the poems in Sum of Every Lost Ship. Someone is speaking in the work, or—more accurately—someones. In this debut collection, Titus gathers a ...MORE]]>

by Ruth Joynton

Two things interested me about Allison Titus.

The title of her book, Sum of Every Lost Ship, drew my attention first. Since diving in Lake Huron last summer with its remarkable collection of shipwrecks, anything to do with the sunken objects of this world fascinates me. Any mention of water will at least make me pause and look back. There’s a woman on the white cover, dressed in what seems to be Nineteenth Century fashion, and she’s speaking. But the speech balloon to the right of her body doesn’t contain words, rather whales, whale bones, and above the water, a vessel. Which makes sense once you read the poems in Sum of Every Lost Ship. Someone is speaking in the work, or—more accurately—someones. In this debut collection, Titus gathers a congregation.

Titus is one of the voices present—but which? Which poems are written from her own experiences, and when is someone else’s story being told? Sometimes it’s hard to tell, and maybe that’s the point.

Often the speakers do not tell their story as a series of events, but as a collection of image fragments, like the woman on the cover: an event sewn, not told straight out. From “The Lost Diary of Anna Anderson” we get: “….Door opens door/ closes. White coats stammer the threshold./ They draw the sheets again and again/ I give them nothing. My mouth/ is a splinter not telling./ They ask if I fell from the bridge/ or did I jump.”

The palpable eeriness of these poem/stories, written from wards and motels and in ice storms, what is told first and next or not told at all—white space between the words of many lines—is a thread that ties the work together. It’s not surprising then to learn that the author, along with earning her M.F.A. in Poetry from Vermont, holds one in Fiction from Virginia Commonwealth. Not surprising, but is the other thing that interested me about Titus.

Most writers agree that there’s something to be gained by studying other genres, but generally keep it to that: the studying, rather than the doing. By “doing” I mean strong pursuit: reading and writing extensively beyond one’s own genre. Titus joins a more uncommon than common crowd of writers by creating with an eye for both fiction and poetry, for more than one genre. But she’s in good company: I think now of Nick Flynn (who writes both poetry and nonfiction), Benjamin Percy (fiction, nonfiction) and Bich Minh Nguyen (fiction, nonfiction, poetry).

When once asked why Nguyen earned her M.F.A. in Poetry only to go on and publish a nonfiction book and now a novel, she replied, “Because I wanted to learn how the line worked.” She did, and based on the success of Stealing Buddha’s Dinner, I think it’s safe to say there’s a lot a writer can learn by working in another genre. Not just “something”.

Likewise, it is the blending of poem and story that makes Titus’s first collection, Sum of Every Lost Ship, so strong.

I’ll keep watch for her fiction in the future, with the hope that it reads like a good poem.

BY ANTHONY COOK, Editor-in-Chief

I must make a disclosure right up front: I’m a huge fan of Bonnie Jo Campbell’s. I’ve been hooked ever since reading her fantastic short story, “The Smallest Man in the World,” which later appeared in her first book, Women and Other Animals. So, I read her newest book, American Salvage, with high expectations. I wasn’t let down.

American Salvage is a collection of 14 stories set in small town and rural Michigan. Though not formally linked, they share a strong sense of place and a cast of down-and-out characters, all wrapped up in Campbell’s energetic, lively prose.

Campbell presents Michigan as a place of beautiful lakes and glistening snow, but also of propane tanks, rusted El Caminos, old foundries, and salvage yards. This is done with a deft touch; it’s never heavy-handed and rarely draws attention ...MORE]]>

BY ANTHONY COOK, Editor-in-Chief

I must make a disclosure right up front: I’m a huge fan of Bonnie Jo Campbell’s. I’ve been hooked ever since reading her fantastic short story, “The Smallest Man in the World,” which later appeared in her first book, Women and Other Animals. So, I read her newest book, American Salvage, with high expectations. I wasn’t let down.

American Salvage is a collection of 14 stories set in small town and rural Michigan. Though not formally linked, they share a strong sense of place and a cast of down-and-out characters, all wrapped up in Campbell’s energetic, lively prose.

Campbell presents Michigan as a place of beautiful lakes and glistening snow, but also of propane tanks, rusted El Caminos, old foundries, and salvage yards. This is done with a deft touch; it’s never heavy-handed and rarely draws attention to itself.

The characters are as ruined as the landscape. The book is populated with meth addicts, burn victims, single mothers, and abused children. There is an assault victim with brain damage and a man who loses the use of his legs in a boat crash.

This sense of ruin, both in setting and character, contributes to what are possibly the book’s most prominent themes – victimhood and the loss of innocence. Take, for example, the opening story, “The Trespasser.” A mother, father, and teenage daughter arrive at their summer cottage to find it’s been broken into and used as a meth lab. The intruders include three men, who have left, and a teenage girl, who slips out the back door unseen when the family arrives. The four-page story ends with the daughter looking at her mattress, which sits on the back porch, bare and covered in blood and semen. The mother covers the daughter’s eyes, but it’s too late. “The dream that scares [the daughter] awake over and over is the dream of entering a stranger’s bedroom – only it is her room – and encountering there her own body, waiting.”

Crimes and accidents dominate the other stories, too. Take the first line from what is perhaps the strongest story in the collection, “The Inventor, 1972”: “A rusted El Camino clips the leg of the thirteen-year-old girl, sends her flying through the predawn fog.” The driver is a homeless hunter whose face is scarred from an accident at the foundry where he once worked. That scar, however, has come to symbolize something more significant – the guilt he feels for his role in a teenage friend’s drowning death. The car accident suddenly forces him out of the role of victim, dredging up his regrets, which, unbeknownst to him, are connected to the hope of the girl who he has hit.

Despite its thematic heft, American Salvage is a short book – only 184 pages. But it accomplishes more in that space than much longer books, in part because of Campbell’s economic, keenly-observed prose. Her paragraphs are tightly constructed, but they don’t feel constricted because the sentences that make them up are punchy and alive. On top of this, Campbell often relies the omniscient point of view, which allows her to delve efficiently into the minds of more than one character in relatively little space. This can be risky, but it works in this collection because the narrative voice is authoritative, discerning and distant enough so as not to feel intrusive. This is what makes American Salvage such an impressive work: It’s a quick read, but packs in enough emotional gravity to satisfy even the most serious readers.

American Salvage by Bonnie Jo Campbell
Wayne State University Press: Detroit, MI 2009
184 Pages. $18.95 paperback.

The narrator of Rawi Hage’s second novel is a nameless immigrant from a nameless war-torn country, struggling to survive in Montreal, “this city with its case of chronic snow.” The story opens shortly after his botched attempt to hang himself in a city park. This failed suicide results in court mandated therapy sessions with a naïve young counselor named Genevieve. What follows is a bleak, existentialist survival tale—the 21st century spawn of Dostoevsky and Kafka, replete with crime, drugs, and sex.

Born in Beirut, Hage lived through nine years of Lebanese civil war before immigrating to Canada in 1992. His debut novel De Niro’s Game, winner of the 2008 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, told the story of two young men on the ravaged streets of Beirut. In Cockroach, Hage fixes his gaze on the exile experience, delivering ...MORE]]> BY CHRISTOPHER FELICIANO ARNOLD

The narrator of Rawi Hage’s second novel is a nameless immigrant from a nameless war-torn country, struggling to survive in Montreal, “this city with its case of chronic snow.” The story opens shortly after his botched attempt to hang himself in a city park. This failed suicide results in court mandated therapy sessions with a naïve young counselor named Genevieve. What follows is a bleak, existentialist survival tale—the 21st century spawn of Dostoevsky and Kafka, replete with crime, drugs, and sex.

Born in Beirut, Hage lived through nine years of Lebanese civil war before immigrating to Canada in 1992. His debut novel De Niro’s Game, winner of the 2008 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, told the story of two young men on the ravaged streets of Beirut. In Cockroach, Hage fixes his gaze on the exile experience, delivering a cast of characters from Iran, France, Macedonia, Algeria, and elsewhere, all united by their alienation, and by the adversities they overcame to arrive in frosty Quebec.

Be warned: you will rarely encounter such a misanthropic narrator. Between therapy sessions and welfare checks, our anti-hero passes his hours lurking around the apartments of friends and strangers, scrounging for crumbs, money, and dope. In raw, bleak passages, Hage sheds light on those corners where the unwanted scavenge. “The underground, my friend, is a world of its own,” the narrator tells us. “Other humans gaze at the sky, but I say unto you, the only way through the world is to pass through the underground.”

In the novel’s boldest aesthetic turn, whenever greed or lust overtake the narrator, he succumbs to a “mysterious, mutant urge.” Antennae and sharp teeth protrude from his head. He becomes one of the cockroaches that “salivate like little dogs” in his apartment. Hage uses spare, unassuming language to turn his narrator into a cockroach not once, not twice, but a dozen or more times throughout the novel. The transmogrification is temporary, yet more menacing than Gregor Samsa’s, such as when the narrator sneaks into Genevieve’s house through the basement plumbing. “I sprang from her kitchen drain, fixed my hair, my clothes, my self, and walked straight to her bedroom…she had a large bed, unmade. I crawled up onto it and sniffed her pillow and bathed in the scent of her sheets…I wanted to see what she saw before taking off her glasses, before she closed her eyes for the day.”

Cockroach is an unsettling trip through the underground, a painful meditation on exile and isolation. In a noir style punctuated with lyric passages, Hage delivers a character who is slimy and unpredictable, yet admirable merely for his ability to survive. As the secrets of his past uncoil, we can’t help but agree with his attitude toward his therapist: “If only she knew what I am capable of.”

Cockroach by Rawi Hage
W.W. Norton & Company: New York, 2009
305 pages. $23.95 hardcover.

At the end of Rafik Schami’s sprawling The Dark Side of Love, recently released in English, the author worries about how Western colonialist narratives may have shaped and colored his work.

“Again and again,” Schami writes in the book’s final, memoir-like pages, “I had been led astray by colonialist ideas of us, which whether well-intentioned or not ultimately offered misinformation.”

The novel, which cost Schami 40 years and a library of more than 200 books, numerous magazines, and boxes of archival materials, was the work of a heart, he says, fixed in his native Damascus. However, the novel—which was written in his adopted German—resembles Western literature far more than contemporary Arab work. The Dark Side of Love spans a blood-feud-thwarted love affair and a murder-mystery, and is told in largely realist style. ...MORE]]> BY M. LYNX QUALEY

At the end of Rafik Schami’s sprawling The Dark Side of Love, recently released in English, the author worries about how Western colonialist narratives may have shaped and colored his work.

“Again and again,” Schami writes in the book’s final, memoir-like pages, “I had been led astray by colonialist ideas of us, which whether well-intentioned or not ultimately offered misinformation.”

The novel, which cost Schami 40 years and a library of more than 200 books, numerous magazines, and boxes of archival materials, was the work of a heart, he says, fixed in his native Damascus. However, the novel—which was written in his adopted German—resembles Western literature far more than contemporary Arab work. The Dark Side of Love spans a blood-feud-thwarted love affair and a murder-mystery, and is told in largely realist style. It lands its main character, Farid Mushtak, in Syria’s worst political prison. His beloved, Rana Shahin, is imprisoned in an asylum.

Some wonderful things result from Schami’s mostly realist narration. Arabic literary narratives about political imprisonment tend to be first-person and absurdist or dreamlike—such as those of Sonallah Ibrahim (Egypt), Fadhil al-Azzawi (Iraq) and Sinaan Antoon (Iraq)—but Schami’s political prisons are precise, rich in visual detail, and apparently well-researched, as the author himself never spent time inside one. Al-Azzawi’s Cell Block 5, for instance, brings the reader deep into the emotional life of an Iraqi prison. But there are things we don’t see in Cell Block 5 that we do in Schami’s precise, sometimes watchmaker-like prose.

This more distant narration—and the heft of an 850-page book—also allows Schami the space and time to lovingly develop his core characters, particularly Rana Shahin and Farid Mushtak, and Farid’s parents, Elias and Claire.

***

The book’s organizing principle, Schami tells us, is a grand, Arab-style mosaic, depicting several generations of Syrian history. But in the book’s opening pages, the reader comes too close to the pieces, and finds a caricature of mid-20th century Syria. Jasmin Shahin is one of the first ill-starred romantics to appear, and, she declares, as if to underline the book’s twin themes: “Time out of mind, life in Arabia has moved between two sworn enemies, love and death, and I’ve decided in favour of love.”

While Aunt Jasmin may believe this, it’s something different for the book to found itself on this Orientalist-sounding rock. And the book’s opening fragments do come uncomfortably close to equating Arabia with eternal love and death. When Jasmin’s nephew shoots her to cleanse the Shahin family honor, a jet of her blood makes a sideways figure eight, the sign of infinity, on a wall. Fortunately, once the book moves into other stories—of Farid’s childhood and the ordinary, day-to-day lives of Damascenes—the mosaic loses its outline-ish quality.

Schami’s book is, then, not a completely realist work. Throughout the novel, his core characters maintain a slightly larger-than-life status. They are flawed and believable and real, but they can also accomplish the impossible—as when Claire rescues her son from their country’s worse political prison. And they all, or the good guys at any rate, manage to live happily ever after.

***

The Dark Side of Love is full-to-bursting with different varieties of passion: between the young and the old, those in first and second and third youths, married people and prostitutes. But the reader is always clear on the book’s two ultimate possibilities: Either our favorite lovers, Rana and Farid, will flee their homeland and make a life together, or they will fail. Farid makes a few hand-motions toward staking his life in Syria—he works as a teacher and edits a Communist magazine—and even tells Rana’s friend that he wants to create a world for lovers in Damascus. But the book never presents remaining in Syria, within Syrian logics, as a real possibility. The Syria of the book remains remote and unchangeable. The lovers’ job is to escape it.

Some things do shift with the passing decades. Children get new toys, new technologies and ideologies appear from abroad, dictators come and go. But the new gadgets and ideologies don’t alter the characters’ lives, and bumbling, power-mad dictators repeat each other with little variation.

So, for the most part, things stay the same—the atmosphere just gets heavier. Options are closed off for Rana and Farid, and there seems to be no way of dealing with the situation except to flee, as the author himself once did. Schami writes in the memoir fragment that ends the book—which follows the fictional narrative without a break—that he had no choice but to leave Damascus as a young man. He says, almost apologetically, “I would not have survived my three years of military service.”

It would be cruel to wish that Schami had stayed, and survived his years of military service. It would also take a hard heart not to cheer for the book’s underdog, fairy-tale lovers. Surely the book’s popularity with German readers is due in part to its wonderfully happy ending. But a strange aftertaste of the colonial experience remains. Perhaps this is one of the darker sides of love: It’s difficult to be completely happy about a “happily ever after” that lands our protagonists in post-imperial Europe, thus impoverishing Damascus and separating Rana and Farid from their histories and memories, changing them into people who speak a language their families don’t know.

The Dark Side of Love by Rafik Schami, translated by Anthea Bell.
Interlink Publishing: New York, 2009.
853 pages. $24 paperback.

The Dark Side of Love by Rafik Schami, translated by Anthea Bell.
American University in Cairo Press: Cairo, 2009.
853 pages.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________

M. LYNX QUALEY earned her M.F.A. in creative writing at the University of Minnesota. Her work has appeared Black Warrior Review, Crab Orhard Review, Third Coast, The Quarterly Conversation, the New Orleans Review, and elsewhere. She lives and writes in Cairo, Egypt.

Peter Campion’s new book of poems, The Lions, articulates both the private intimacies of life and a robust involvement with the natural and political world. He intensifies the individuality of his first book, Other People, also published by The University of Chicago (2005), to show how the personal is inescapably public. To traverse from the personal to the public, Campion establishes both intimacy and grandeur. The collection begins by intoning the dual involvement:

It happens in our ignorance. Fringing the steep calderas and sinkholes                   the blacktail deer descend. Trembling. All systems on alert.

Then, in short declarative statements he describes the natural world descending into the technological to gaze “however long / Then tense. Then pulse out through the air / smelling of buckwheat and water.” Reminiscent of Lowell, The Lions contrasts two usually separate spheres utilizing the terminology of the technological to ...MORE]]> BY STEELE CAMPBELL

Peter Campion’s new book of poems, The Lions, articulates both the private intimacies of life and a robust involvement with the natural and political world. He intensifies the individuality of his first book, Other People, also published by The University of Chicago (2005), to show how the personal is inescapably public. To traverse from the personal to the public, Campion establishes both intimacy and grandeur. The collection begins by intoning the dual involvement:

It happens in our ignorance.
Fringing the steep calderas and
sinkholes
                  the blacktail deer descend.
Trembling. All systems on alert.

Then, in short declarative statements he describes the natural world descending into the technological to gaze “however long / Then tense. Then pulse out through the air / smelling of buckwheat and water.” Reminiscent of Lowell, The Lions contrasts two usually separate spheres utilizing the terminology of the technological to describe the natural and the natural to define the action of the technological. This rapid contrast seems as effortless as it is profound, creating comparisons which are unexpected but once heard, undeniable.

Though the book is divided into three parts, the comparison of the individual and the political jumps forward in the third poem. In a description of war violence on the televised news, an event termed “average,” Campion chooses one image to define the others, culminating in a sense of being inextricably involved compounded with the conscious futility of resistance. The singular image of bullet casings across the screen encapsulate the actual events in the distant and perceived surreal world and the individual’s fascination. This establishes the world of news, riots, and current events as factors of development. Though rarely as eloquent as Campion’s sonorous verses, the impact of worldwide events upon the personal sphere is not usually addressed without an implied moral understanding, especially within the national identity of a post 9/11 America. But The Lions doesn’t become preachy or overbearing, rather it uses the political events to send the private reactions into sharp relief, creating a necessary bond without delineating cause and effect.

Once the stage has been set with the differing spheres as major actors, the individual poems are presented as graceful dialogues among the various resulting interstices. The poem “Magnolias” is a meditation on solitude and its possible causes followed by the bare power of “Capitalism,” a poem of terse sparse lines, modeled after a Korean poet. As an individual speaking to others who ineluctably feel similar, the poems build up to “That feeling of substance/ emptied” to carve out a sanctuary of a “blind / plunge where again and again we find each other.” These lines, close to the end of the first chapter, elucidate a loneliness and a desire for companionship, no matter how brief; they also cultivate a hope that though the emptiness may reside within all of us, there will be unavoidable moments wherein twinned souls can and will mesh creating memory and enough strength to survive the “sweep of what we will not stop.”

The second part opens in a response/continuation of the first. The first poem compounds the images of the entire first part and continues the arc of the initial poem. In poems like “In Late August” and “Lilacs,” the presence of nature becomes more distant and autonomous as the spectator contemplates the useless vanity of human actions where

. . . all we own
is the invisible
web of our words and touches

which is then directly described as “silence and fabulation.” The chapter continues to show the increasing large public world and the shrinking private sphere constantly shaped by outside pressures. To keep the individual away from any reductive generalizations, strains of ancient history and comparisons to mythology illustrate both the majesty and common minutia of everyday life. In one moment, which is a loose translation of book VI of the Aeneid, a father explains to his son the significance of Lethe, the “river of oblivion,” in the next a young swimmer is immersed in a New Hampshire lake thinking of dreams and memory in an impressionistic splashing of sharply soft images.

Though the first two chapters are exquisite by themselves, The Lions would not be complete without the third part. The opening poem, “Sparrow,” is a single sentence broken up into two and three word groups which slow appropriately and mimic the dive of the title’s bird. This “diving past” is the observation of the natural world, which is then turned into the human experience:

the same way
we survive
our happiness
and also: sorrow.

Visually and aurally pleasing, the poem moves from sparrow to sorrow in twenty-one lines, a plunge which finally unites and initiates the human into the natural. This newfound unification of the elements compounds their inner relationships. Immediately after the calm dive of “Sparrow” we are thrown into “Protest” where the protestors watch themselves on the news assessing their political impact, completing the elements’ unification, which consequently unsettles the concepts of unity and completion.

The title poem is split into five sections which begin with the “neural drizzle” of memory which bounces between the present personal/political/natural and the past. This poem addresses the existence of the two dedicatees and establishes the poet as speaker. As speaker, we are now privy to private details of the poet’s life, his parents’ lives and their involvement with Robert McNamara. The reference of McNamara as memory conflates the images of television in the prior poems to complicate cultural and private forms of memory. More obviously autobiographical than the other poems “The Lions” references many of the previous images and imbues them all with a renewed intimacy. The poem climaxes with images of the now naturalized humans in staggered lines of sensual sounds. Campion’s highly polished prose is always surprising and yet never jarring, leaving the reader ultimately forced to mete one’s own balance among the many forces playing into the quotidian, but allowed the brave, private ruminations of a poetic predecessor. The Lions shows that balance is possible without sacrificing any poise or elegance. A fine addition to contemporary poetry, I look forward to this young poet’s next compilation.

The Lions by Peter Campion
The University of Chicago Press, 2009.
63 pages. $18.00 paperback.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________

STEELE CAMPBELL is a graduate student in English at Auburn University.  He has previously been published in Rope and Wire, Touchstones, and the Boston Literary Review. He  has been awarded the Robert Hughes Mount Jr. Prize in Poetry from The Academy of American Poets and serves as a Student Editor for the Southern Humanities Review.

There are at least three voices at work in Brent Goodman’s the brother swimming beneath me.  There is the voice of the lens: poems rich in sight-detail that move as a cycle of photographs before the reader, often with the same subject shot from several angles. “The Sunarban Swampland Tiger swims up to 2 miles a day. A diver captures how outstretched paws shape efficient paddles. The narrator explains how big cats swim the same way they walk, walk the way they swim, chins skimming water.”

There is Goodman’s sonnet voice: rambunctious, funny, full of old jazz: “Cans cranked, I love to listen past the studio tricks/ and catch a hint of any discarded ghost line/ mistakenly laid down when a mic bleeds through./ First thought, best thought? Cue take two.” Though ...MORE]]> BY RUTH JOYNTON, Nonfiction Editor

There are at least three voices at work in Brent Goodman’s the brother swimming beneath me.  There is the voice of the lens: poems rich in sight-detail that move as a cycle of photographs before the reader, often with the same subject shot from several angles. “The Sunarban Swampland Tiger swims up to 2 miles a day. A diver captures how outstretched paws shape efficient paddles. The narrator explains how big cats swim the same way they walk, walk the way they swim, chins skimming water.”

There is Goodman’s sonnet voice: rambunctious, funny, full of old jazz: “Cans cranked, I love to listen past the studio tricks/ and catch a hint of any discarded ghost line/ mistakenly laid down when a mic bleeds through./ First thought, best thought? Cue take two.” Though infrequent (“First Queer Poem” and “Improvisation” are it) the sonnets do a considerable amount of work for the collection. Far more active than the detailed-driven poems, they also buoy up the final and most important voice in the brother swimming beneath me: Goodman’s clear grief.

“Grief begins with how,/ not why,” the poet writes in “Evaporation.” Years after the death of his brother, the speaker of these poems still wrangles with the astonishing sorrow of fraternal absence: “Dear dropout sick/ of school, your blood swallows wind. Grief/ begins with every story I try to tell. I wasn’t there,/ your hair thinning to nothing. My mouth burns cold.” The repetition of phrases in these poems represents that haunting—it’s hard proof that one never gets past the tragedy but only learns how to turn it off.  Goodman knows well the place where one is free to turn it back on. He goes there: the light is different every day. The poems in the brother swimming beneath me have incredible range and because of this Brent Goodman is a writer to watch.

BY RUTH JOYNTON, Nonfiction Editor

As a lover of Rilke, I remember reading Duino Elegies for the first time, nineteen years old, how one thick poem could sustain me for days.  It was proof that exhaustion is not always the reader’s enemy: when done right, it even satisfies.  It seemed impossible to read a book of Rilke’s in a very short amount of time (have I read all of his work yet?) and really understand it.  Still the work sustained me, and kept me coming back.  Jessica Garratt’s poems in her first book, Fire Pond, are crafted differently but stem from the same root of a good-willed doubting look at the world.  They also satisfy.

For a cerebral, philosophically-minded poet, Garratt is honest.  This is what invites the reader back—the no bullshit policy of her poems.  The opening piece “Abstract” starts straight: ...MORE]]>

BY RUTH JOYNTON, Nonfiction Editor

As a lover of Rilke, I remember reading Duino Elegies for the first time, nineteen years old, how one thick poem could sustain me for days.  It was proof that exhaustion is not always the reader’s enemy: when done right, it even satisfies.  It seemed impossible to read a book of Rilke’s in a very short amount of time (have I read all of his work yet?) and really understand it.  Still the work sustained me, and kept me coming back.  Jessica Garratt’s poems in her first book, Fire Pond, are crafted differently but stem from the same root of a good-willed doubting look at the world.  They also satisfy.

For a cerebral, philosophically-minded poet, Garratt is honest.  This is what invites the reader back—the no bullshit policy of her poems.  The opening piece “Abstract” starts straight: “Many are alone./ This is the specific and the universal/ truth.”  While not made to go as slow as Rilke’s, Garratt’s poems do work very well when read in pairs.  Two in the book are inspired by Duino’s author: “Elegy” and “Without.”   The excellent order of the poems in this collection lends to the pairing method: longing for safety, the theme of “Foundation,” returns as the theme in the following poem, “The state of things.”  This is true for most of Fire Pond, except its title poem set mid-way through the book.

“Fire Pond” is a series of ten sonnets more musical but equally as meditative as the previous third of the collection.  Set in Peterborough, New Hampshire, the speaker seems in forceful retreat.  She is attempting to talk herself out of contact with a lover who is ultimately not hers: “hours of whir/ bending round conversation with a man/ who’s married, who’s your friend, who, there, again,/ tickles the boundary from straight line to curve/…wheeling newish luggage/ around the weedy periphery…”  Because of the angling curiosity of the book’s beginning, the music of the ten sonnets comes as a deft and welcome swing in tone.  Garratt demonstrates her dexterity in both modes again as the book closes almost as soft—but sure—as it began: “nothing, more like sinking so far in/ to the leaden season of Lent, as to arrive/ in its dark reversal, an overripe underworld/ of moveable feasts…”

CHECK OUT AN INTERVIEW WITH JESSICA GARRATT HERE

Don’t let the unpronouncability of the poet’s name throw you off–this collection is worth looking into. This wonderful book came to us in the mail from those nice folks at Zephyr Press, who no doubt were pleased by the fact that this collection–in parallel translation–was shortlisted for best poetry translation of 2009. It appears to be the third in Zephyr’s New Polish Writing series.  I’m certainly looking forward to their future publications.

The poems in this collection are spare, sinewy, and often disturbing in their sense of detachedness, both in a sense of remove as with a sense of having been, with a shocking blow, been severed from important connections, from loved ones, lovers.  they are a selevtion from Tkaczyszyn-Dycki’s previously-unEnglished nine books of poetry, published beteen 1990 and 2005.  This sense of loss is underscored ...MORE]]> BY DAVID BLOMENBERG, Poetry Editor

Don’t let the unpronouncability of the poet’s name throw you off–this collection is worth looking into. This wonderful book came to us in the mail from those nice folks at Zephyr Press, who no doubt were pleased by the fact that this collection–in parallel translation–was shortlisted for best poetry translation of 2009. It appears to be the third in Zephyr’s New Polish Writing series.  I’m certainly looking forward to their future publications.

The poems in this collection are spare, sinewy, and often disturbing in their sense of detachedness, both in a sense of remove as with a sense of having been, with a shocking blow, been severed from important connections, from loved ones, lovers.  they are a selevtion from Tkaczyszyn-Dycki’s previously-unEnglished nine books of poetry, published beteen 1990 and 2005.  This sense of loss is underscored by the obsessive revisitation, of circling back to the same issues, the same events, that the speaker still has yet to come to terms with.

The speaker’s voice is very often self deprecating–  “I use language with difficulty (I am/ a contemporary poet)”, both in matters of writing, as well as in love. Often these two things are intertwined, as in poem XXVI, in which the speaker’s other poet friends become objects of envy.  Rather it is their tongues, the “ever imperfect serpent in their/ / mouths that I envy when it comes to kissing/ because their tongue utters so much more/ than mine that is always slavering and pleased/ with itself when I thrust it in the mouths of others.”

Bill Johnston, yet another greatly talented Indiana-based translator (see yesterday’s Gunter Grass post)–has done a great service in bringing this Polish poet to an English-speaking audience.

Peregrinary, by Eugeniusz Tkaczyszyn-Dycki

Translated by Bill Johnston

148 pp. ISBN 978-0-939010-97-4

$14.95