My strange reading coincidences continue.  Wayne Miller’s wonderful poetry collection The City, Our City (a review of which appears in our most recent print issue) was part of an uncanny string of books I was reading that had to do with the formation and destruction of cities.  The very next two books I picked up after writing that review continued the trend.  It was a bit spooky, to be honest.

With a title like Songs and Stories of the Ghouls, it might at first blush appear as if the release date (at the beginning of November) of Alice Notley’s latest book might be part of a Halloween-themed publicity campaign.  But considering that few poetry books get a publicity campaign of any sort, and in spite of ghouls and blood-sacs (more on that anon) and scattered ...MORE]]> by David Blomenberg, Sycamore Review Contributor

My strange reading coincidences continue.  Wayne Miller’s wonderful poetry collection The City, Our City (a review of which appears in our most recent print issue) was part of an uncanny string of books I was reading that had to do with the formation and destruction of cities.  The very next two books I picked up after writing that review continued the trend.  It was a bit spooky, to be honest.

With a title like Songs and Stories of the Ghouls, it might at first blush appear as if the release date (at the beginning of November) of Alice Notley’s latest book might be part of a Halloween-themed publicity campaign.  But considering that few poetry books get a publicity campaign of any sort, and in spite of ghouls and blood-sacs (more on that anon) and scattered bones and such, we are dealing with something as epic—literally—as Notley’s other monumental works.

Derek Walcott, among others, noticed that Helen of Troy, the cause of the war in Iliad and Aeneid, is only a shadow in the famous story.  She doesn’t even have any direct dialogue—all of the words she supposedly said are spoken for her by men. Back in the late 80s, when she was working on her now-classic book-length poem The Descent of Alette, Notley saw the epic up to the present as a form exclusively in the purview of the Masculine.  She wanted to write a feminine epic.  The result was dazzling. What we have in Songs and Stories of the Ghouls is essentially a continuation of that work.  Here, she moves to women as they are portrayed in existing Classical texts—no less than Medea and Helen of Troy, one a murderess, the other portrayed as the cause of Troy’s fall. What’s at stake here is taking these stories back.   Regarding the accepted story of Medea, Notley makes it clear: “the purpose of the story: to establish as reality, that a woman of power can only be evil.”   “Nothing is unchangeable,” Notley says in the opening pages of the book’s second section, “except for a myth—let’s change that.”  In a combination of prose and poetry, the women of these long-established tales are brought forth and are given a voice.  They speak from their own mouths.

Notley said in a brief conversation with me after her recent reading at Notre Dame that she was tired of politics, that Alette was her overtly-political poem, that what she writes these days isn’t concerned so much with the political.  But much of this new work is political in various ways.  In the well-known story Medea has power, but always used it to help Jason. And why is the established story told in such a way—a woman of power who kills her brother and children and poisons another woman?  To “establish as reality that a woman of power can only be evil.”   “No one really believes in her power,” Notley writes, “She is only allowed it as an adjunct to her passion.  She can’t just have it.  No woman is as yet allowed that.” We move from gender politics to political demonstration:  “When you protest, you’re no/ longer a civilian: they can kill you.”  The ghouls here, reduced to sucking on blood sacs for sustenance, are the women suppressed in such a scheme.

Even more intriguing is the kinship this volume has with, not only Classical epics, but also with H.D., whose Helen in Egypt I just by chance happened to pick up next.  In both books we have a sense of a feminist retelling of the stories that concern women, but which have been only voiced by males. The two books could be considered sister texts; they resonate with each other in complex and astonishing ways; their aim is to reclaim the Feminine in these epics. There is quite a bit more here to explore than can be included in a book review, but suffice it to say that Notley’s oeuvre is a rich field for exploration, and—along with Descent of Alette—The Songs and Stories of the Ghouls is a wonderful place to start.

Songs and Stories of the Ghouls

Wesleyan University Press

205 pp.

ISBN 978-0-8195-6956-1

$24.95 Hardcover

Ron Padgett, poet, author of some twenty volumes, memoirist, collaborator, badass, septuagenarian, translator, Okie, grandfather, has earned himself the right to start a poem thusly:

There’s not a lot of time to think when one is assailed by activities and obligations and even less time to do it when one is free of them because then one spends one’s time thinking about how little time there is.

Sometimes, when talking about poems, poets, or recent collections with poet friends, I’ll try and distinguish between poets I like “as a writer of poems” (read: poets whose techniques I find “fresh,” whose “voice” I respect, whose “language” is “interesting”) and poets whose work I like “as a Jacob” (read: poets I want to drink for breakfast).  This is sometimes an unpopular (read: schizophrenic) perspective, but—for me—is the ...MORE]]> by Jacob Sunderlin, Co-Editor of Poetry

Ron Padgett, poet, author of some twenty volumes, memoirist, collaborator, badass, septuagenarian, translator, Okie, grandfather, has earned himself the right to start a poem thusly:

There’s not a lot of time to think
when one is assailed by activities and obligations
and even less time to do it
when one is free of them
because then one spends one’s time thinking
about how little time there is.

Sometimes, when talking about poems, poets, or recent collections with poet friends, I’ll try and distinguish between poets I like “as a writer of poems” (read: poets whose techniques I find “fresh,” whose “voice” I respect, whose “language” is “interesting”) and poets whose work I like “as a Jacob” (read: poets I want to drink for breakfast).  This is sometimes an unpopular (read: schizophrenic) perspective, but—for me—is the difference between Karen Volkman and Susan Wheeler, between C.D. Wright and Elaine Equi, between Alex Lemon and Zach Schomburg, between Ashbery and Koch, between—shit—between the Beatles and the Stones, Ghostface and Raekwon, Joni Mitchell and Townes Van Zandt.

Point being, Ron Padgett is in both categories, comfortably.  He takes a nap in one, wakes up, makes Earl Grey in the other, splatters brains on the wall, and goes back to sleep.  The poem above, titled “Thinking About a Cloud,” from his 2011 collection, How Long, continues: “That’s what it’s like to be in America / early in the twenty-first century” and I really believe it, because Padgett writes with the kind of innocent brilliance, the childlike wonder, at—brace yourself—“The Everyday” that we’ve become too cynical, too esoteric, and too distracted to appreciate in contemporary poems.  That poem is an existential conversation between the speaker and—yes—a cloud.

Like Johnny Cash, Padgett defeats irony.  The prevailing theme here is death, which strikes Padgett as funny, without cynicism—“The Death Deal,” a catalogue of possible options for the poet’s end, ends:

I’m oddly almost cheered
by the thought
that I might find out
in the not too distant future.
Now for lunch.

Are we allowed to have this much fun in a book of poems?  Who cares.  Read Ron Padgett, and age with such grace.

How Long (2011)
by Ron Padgett
Coffee House Press, 91 p.
$12.50

Thursday, December 1st, Shannon Cain will be taking part in the Purdue Visiting Writers Series on the Purdue campus in West Lafayette, Indiana. Please join us at the Krannert Auditorium, Room 140 at 7:30. Shannon Cain will be reading from her debut collection The Necessity of Certain Behaviors. The event is free and open to the public.

Jane, the protagonist of “This is How it Starts,” the first story in Shannon Cain’s debut collection The Necessity of Certain Behaviors and winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize from University of Pittsburgh Press, is a girlfriend to both a married lawyer, who happens to be man, and a doctor, who happens to be a woman. She is also an artist living in her family’s rent-stabilized apartment in Manhattan who paints on panes of ...MORE]]> by Conor Broughan, Fiction Editor

Thursday, December 1st, Shannon Cain will be taking part in the Purdue Visiting Writers Series on the Purdue campus in West Lafayette, Indiana. Please join us at the Krannert Auditorium, Room 140 at 7:30. Shannon Cain will be reading from her debut collection The Necessity of Certain Behaviors. The event is free and open to the public.

Jane, the protagonist of “This is How it Starts,” the first story in Shannon Cain’s debut collection The Necessity of Certain Behaviors and winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize from University of Pittsburgh Press, is a girlfriend to both a married lawyer, who happens to be man, and a doctor, who happens to be a woman. She is also an artist living in her family’s rent-stabilized apartment in Manhattan who paints on panes of translucent glass. In order to create a textured still-life or landscape or a portrait, Jane must paint backwards:  “she must paint her foregrounds first, top layers before bottom.” Like Jane, Shannon Cain has put considerable effort into “planning her layers” and in each of the nine stories in her debut he has created textured moments of beauty, stark landscapes and a stunning collection of uniquely American lives.

The textures in Cain’s stories are built upon familiar themes that are juxtaposed to one another in idiosyncratic ways. Sexual identities are challenged, hearts are broken, parents struggle to care for their children without letting go of themselves, and children are left to confront a world changed after the death of their parents. These textures can take a tragic or humorous turn depending on the story, but Cain’s tone is always sincere, honest and generous to her characters that seem to make and get into more trouble in this collection than most writers could manage in a full career of books.

A young woman moves to L.A. to connect with her father, who happens to be Bob Barker from The Price is Right, and finds unexpected love and the truth about her childhood. The wife of a mid-size city’s mayor is caught masturbating in the steam room of a local gym and she must confront not only her vulnerabilities, but those of her husband and their daughter, who has been damaged in ways the mother had never taken the time to notice. “The Queer Zoo” is the story of a heterosexual man working at The Queer Zoo, “home to the world’s largest collection of homosexual, bisexual, and transgender animals.” The Queer Zoo is not only the second busiest attraction in Arizona, behind only the Grand Canyon, but it is also forces the protagonist, Sam, to ask if he has ever really been free.

In the O. Henry Prize final story, “The Necessity of Certain Behaviors,” Lisa escapes from the city on an eco-tourism trip and finds herself in a mountaintop village where she no longer has to “identify” as straight, gay or bisexual as she did in the city and is “thrilled by the jolt of it and by her own desire.” Lisa stays in the village indefinitely and “she no longer knows the difference between lost and found.” She finds contentment, not confusion, in the village that has “made itself available to her.”

All of the stories in the collection call into question the necessity of certain behaviors that the characters act upon in order to find freedom, love, or redemption. More often than not, the behaviors the characters believe are necessary are misleading, if not self-destructive. In the end, Cain forgives the bad behavior of her characters, but she never lets them off the hook. Charlie, the protagonist of the standout story “Juniper Beach,” abandons her longtime girlfriend after her parents die in a tragically silly car accident. With her inheritance, Charlie buys an old RV and searches for a sense of purpose and herself on American highways, documenting sites of other horrific automobile accidents. In the middle of a strip mall parking lot at sunrise, Charlie admits to herself that “she expected to feel different. She expected to know more about where she was going.” In that way, she is not different from the rest of the characters in the book or from those of us lucky enough to read this collection who are trying to “feel at home in America, rootless yet ensconced, held in place by her movement across strips of landscape.”

The Necessity of Certain Behaviors
Shannon Cain
University of Pittsburgh Press – September 2011
144 pages / $24.95

When your kitchen is a mess—a plates-piled-high-in-the-sink, socks-getting-stuck-on-sticky-spots mess—how do you react? If you’re anything like me, a messy kitchen means that you clean up the coffee table in the living room or pick up clothes that have collected at the foot the bed. Rather than tackling dirty dishes, the grime on the sink, or whatever it is that has been growing behind the stove, I project the mess onto other portions of the apartment, allowing me to clean a minimal amount while still feeling accomplished for tackling a chore.

When we first meet David Lamb, the fifty-four year-old protagonist of Bonnie Nadzam’s beautiful, unsettling, and stunning debut novel Lamb, he has just buried his father, has recently divorced his wife, and has been forced to take a leave of absence from his job because of ...MORE]]> by Conor Broughan

When your kitchen is a mess—a plates-piled-high-in-the-sink, socks-getting-stuck-on-sticky-spots mess—how do you react? If you’re anything like me, a messy kitchen means that you clean up the coffee table in the living room or pick up clothes that have collected at the foot the bed. Rather than tackling dirty dishes, the grime on the sink, or whatever it is that has been growing behind the stove, I project the mess onto other portions of the apartment, allowing me to clean a minimal amount while still feeling accomplished for tackling a chore.

When we first meet David Lamb, the fifty-four year-old protagonist of Bonnie Nadzam’s beautiful, unsettling, and stunning debut novel Lamb, he has just buried his father, has recently divorced his wife, and has been forced to take a leave of absence from his job because of an affair he can’t seem to end with a younger colleague. In a word, David Lamb is a mess—a plates-piled-so-precariously-high-you’d-be-better-off-buying-a-new-set-of-dishes-at-K-Mart mess.

Early in the novel, when David Lamb’s work partner, Wilson, tells Lamb that he’s “kind of made a mess of things here,” Lamb acknowledges as much by saying “it’s been one thing after another.” To say that’s an understatement is an understatement. With a seemingly endless stream of manipulations and self-delusions, David Lamb has created an epic and unfathomable mess of his life. Rather than try to clean it up, he projects that mess onto someone else, so he can clean up her mess and accomplish a chore, a good deed. Enter Tommie.

Tommie is also a mess, but she hasn’t made one of herself. She is an unattractive and unpopular eleven-year-old. Her mother works all day and she doesn’t get along with her stepfather in their small suburban Chicago apartment. When her friends dare her to ask a stranger for a cigarette in a liquor store parking lot, and that stranger happens to be David Lamb, a strange, manipulative, unnerving and oddly genuine relationship is born: “Scrawny white arms and legs stuck out of her clothes. The shorts hung around her pelvic bones and her stomach stuck out like a dirty spotted white sheet. It was grotesque. It was lovely.” Nadzam not only has an eye for perfect though unflattering descriptions of her characters, she also possesses a keen eye for beautiful, lush descriptions of the natural world, especially after Lamb convinces the impressionable Tommie to join him on a week-long trip to his dilapidated cabin in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Just as Lamb convinces Tommie that the trip will let her into “this country’s secret heart,” Nadzam invites the reader to look into the country’s secret heart with lines that describe an America that is disappearing: “Outside the truck, before and beside and behind her, an endless span of blond grass and silver bitterbrush and greasewood and sage.”

Lamb abducts the willing Tommie and they strike out west. Outside of her dysfunctional home, Lamb believes he’ll show the self-conscious Tommie her own worth: “It was like he found a loose bolt out there in the world and had carefully turned it back into place.” The tension inherent in a story about a fifty-four year-old manipulating an impressionable eleven-year-old on a road trip builds as they drive further and further west of the Chicago suburbs: Will Lamb take the relationship too far? Will they be caught? Will Tommie realize the trouble she is in and find help? But Nadzam doesn’t rely on external tensions or melodrama to drive the momentum of the novel; rather, she lets the conflict between Lamb and Tommie, and Lamb and himself create tense scenes where by and large nothing really happens.

One of the most memorable aspects of Lamb is the sometimes obtrusive, always observant, and downright beguiling narration. In an interview, Nadzam herself has described the one-of-a-kind third-person narrator as more of a distant first-person point of view. The narrator introduces Tommie as “our girl,” David as “our man” and invites the reader to “pause” in order to contemplate how Tommie’s parents and friends are reacting to her disappearance. This manipulative narration—not so unlike the hyper-observant narrators in Terrence Malick’s films—may open up too many distracting questions for some readers who will wonder just who the narrator is: is it Tommie years later? Lamb himself? But for me, the narrator does not to distract; it adds a new layer of tension that implicates the reader in the action of the novel, becoming less a voyeur than an accomplice in the backseat of David Lamb’s truck.

With more questions than answers, Lamb demands a second or third reading to take in the lush descriptions, striking dialogue, and multiple layers of tension. As unsettling, terrifying and uncomfortable it is to be a willing participant in the backseat of Lamb’s truck while reading the novel, the view is undoubtedly amazing and worth revisiting, “all of it vast and unchanging, as though Lamb and the girl were at rest and not rushing west, a diffuse and unmappable destination.”

Lamb
Bonnie Nadzam
Other Press – September 2011
275 pages / $15.95 Trade Paperback

Every good story collection has its governing metaphors, those common notes that blend the individual crooners into a concert of voices singing harmony. Restlessness defines the spirited characters in Patricia Henley’s fine new collection of short fiction, Other Heartbreaks. In these stories, people’s lives break down and are reassembled; there are changes of allegiance and sexual orientation; there are moments of great sweetness and moments of insufferable loss. As one narrator puts it, these are tales of “broken hearts, mended hearts, eternal stories of love lost and gained.”

Henley moves across the territories of her stories with deceptive ease, ranging back and forth in time, layering with moves both small and large, gradually filling in the context for a dramatic present that is always tied in interesting and complicated ways to the past. Henley’s stories require ...MORE]]> by Rob Davidson

Every good story collection has its governing metaphors, those common notes that blend the individual crooners into a concert of voices singing harmony. Restlessness defines the spirited characters in Patricia Henley’s fine new collection of short fiction, Other Heartbreaks. In these stories, people’s lives break down and are reassembled; there are changes of allegiance and sexual orientation; there are moments of great sweetness and moments of insufferable loss. As one narrator puts it, these are tales of “broken hearts, mended hearts, eternal stories of love lost and gained.”

Henley moves across the territories of her stories with deceptive ease, ranging back and forth in time, layering with moves both small and large, gradually filling in the context for a dramatic present that is always tied in interesting and complicated ways to the past. Henley’s stories require (and reward) a reader’s patience. “Sun Damage” is a fine case in point. Meg is adept at travel and reinventing herself. She’s changed her name a few times. She likes to keep moving, to keep things new. After her father’s death, she returns home to see her mother and younger brother with a “reluctant heart.” We gradually learn why: returning home means confronting some difficult memories concerning the mother’s brutality. These are “Secrets she knew how to keep…. Memory serves us in ways that allow us to go on with a little dignity. She could stand to recall everything. But there was no sense telling everything. At some point what you told became only gossip on yourself, stirring up old trouble. And no good can come from that.”

As “Sun Damage” concludes, Meg is hard at work coming to grips with her difficult past. Her mother, who has also changed, reaches out: “Don’t be afraid of me, Meg.” Meg tries, but it isn’t easy. With every new step she takes, she feels the tug of memory. This is as it should be. In “The Art of Fiction,” Henry James famously declared that “Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads… catching every air-borne particle in its tissue.” This is the atmosphere of Other Heartbreaks: a finely-wrought web of memories, fears, and hopes connected to a tender, tenuous present.

Relationships between women are paramount in Other Heartbreaks. In “No Refunds in Case of Inclement Weather,” Ellen and Claire, an autumn-spring lesbian couple, slowly grow apart. Claire’s old flame Tommy, a widower, needs a companion and a stepmother to his young child. Claire is ready to play those roles. In a wrenching conclusion, the much younger Ellen spies this nascent family at play in a park, watching as her partner embraces a man with tenderness and love—precisely what’s been lost in her own relationship with Claire. Ellen cannot deny the obvious: “What they have is so pure that they didn’t even feel guilty when I walked up,” she remarks. Ellen learns that “love is stronger than guilt. Not that it’s pure, only stronger.” It’s a hard lesson, and one Ellen will both accept and act upon.

Place and character have always been tightly joined in Henley’s fiction. In the section of this collection entitled “Other Heartbreaks” we find a series of three interwoven stories about a family in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago. Joe, descended from the eastern Europeans who settled the neighborhood many decades ago, is loath to leave; the name of his baseball memorabilia shop, Home Plate, says it all. Joe clings to his past—embodied in his uncle’s decrepit country farmhouse—even as it rots around him.

Joe’s wife, Emma, longs for new adventure and travel. In the second story in the sequence, “Emma Compartmentalizes in Ireland,” she distances herself both literally and figuratively from her family. What she finds overseas is oddly liberating. Danny, Emma’s former student, has dumped his wife and run off with another woman; Danny’s mother enjoys an active life as an older, single woman; and Danny’s friend, the joyous, flirty Liam, is divorced but on surprisingly good terms with his ex-wife even as he dates other women. Emma finds it all rather inspiring, and in one of the most powerful endings in a book filled with powerful endings, she prepares to do something that will almost certainly lead to the end of her marriage. “It comes to her,” Henley writes, “not all at once like a pearl of wisdom, but in distasteful increments…. And walking down to find Liam, she blinks back tears, thinking—but not for long—of how she has deceived herself. And will.”

Such is the ethos of this powerful collection. Henley’s characters don’t have Joycean epiphanies. They roll and tumble through life, take bold risks, allow themselves to do the things they finally feel they must. Other Heartbreaks is a good and honest book, true in every way that matters. The stories are polished, exquisitely-cut gems, written in the sharply-observed prose we’ve come to expect and treasure from this master of the form.

Other Heartbreaks: Stories
Patricia Henley
Indianapolis: Engine Books, 2011.
178 pages / $26.95 hardcover, $14.95 paper, $6.99 E-book

In a country and age without epics, we have only lyrics, each a minor hero that braves a domesticated and commodified world. Lily Brown’s first book, Rust or Go Missing, affirms the dangers of such a world, navigating the real hazards that hide in our postmodern (mis)understanding of the spaces we live in and live by. Each poem reminds us that, in such spaces, our speech is all that can condemn or save us.

Finding recourse in comic books and antiquated armor on display, these poems hint at the traces of the heroic and the extra-ordinary in our everyday. What works in these poems is a tension that arises from the Romanticism caught in the traps of quotidian rooms and quotidian love. In the book’s closing poem, “Museum Armor,” we find ourselves in an ...MORE]]> by A.E. Watkins

In a country and age without epics, we have only lyrics, each a minor hero that braves a domesticated and commodified world. Lily Brown’s first book, Rust or Go Missing, affirms the dangers of such a world, navigating the real hazards that hide in our postmodern (mis)understanding of the spaces we live in and live by. Each poem reminds us that, in such spaces, our speech is all that can condemn or save us.

Finding recourse in comic books and antiquated armor on display, these poems hint at the traces of the heroic and the extra-ordinary in our everyday. What works in these poems is a tension that arises from the Romanticism caught in the traps of quotidian rooms and quotidian love. In the book’s closing poem, “Museum Armor,” we find ourselves in an unsettling locus of fishtailed women, nuns, and Dalian clocks, the reality of which proves more disconcerting because it is unquestionable:

A fishtailed woman
mounted my wall, gave

me a feeling. I thought
of nuns. The clock flashed

on the ceiling; time was
inside. I found you

under the owl-white
sky. I scratched the glass

with my eye. Tipped birds
over the red bridge.

The sun in my wall.
We slant. Speech

centers our backs.

In such spaces, the tilted image of time in a watch face’s reflection on a drywall sky becomes an uncanny stand-in for the position of the sun in a blue zenith. This place is also an odd double, its construction (“my wall”) an unnatural substitute for a Romanticist self constructed from seasons. Our only way to survive in such places, Brown suggests, is to find a mode of “[s]peech” that “centers our backs.”

The pleasure of this poetry is the tumble-down logic one follows from line to line, across breaks and across poems. And this logic thrives because the poems realize themselves not as words on pages but as lyrics that explore and explode our relationship with everyday places, as in the following lines from “In the Shins”:

Comic books, electronics, shitty
substitutions for love. Shifty things
break off of me like a field

of turning hands, all waving goodbye.
Goodbye, cave. Goodbye, simulacrum.
Hello, ether. Hello, sorry,

I lost my footing. Even language pivots.

Here, comic books and Platonic caves are equally at stake, even if equally reduced to “shitty” and “shifty,” so that what’s left for the speaker is a poetic space of unsure footing. But this also proves a place where the loose ground allows for the language to move, to “pivot.”

Brown’s poems, we find, are duplicitous. The places and lines we discover are always of two minds. And what fascinates is the interaction between these two minds, the gaps we spy between different layers, between the poems’ multiple frames. In “Transference,” we watch as the speaker watches a “serial drama” unfold on morning television, and we witness through the poem the ways in which the television frame also instructs and constructs us. By poem’s end, the speaker finally acknowledges to the television: “I’ve let you box my insides.”

These lines question how we look at the world and how that looking shapes who we are. We discover underlying harms, the subtle but pervasive forces that preside over the world without and within, ultimately turning both into something unfamiliar, or even something totally wrong:

 [...] She wants to know the climate
of the room where I last wrote.
Was it the living room? Was it the staircase,
The memory of a staircase? I make a lie
of the absolute, space like a reflection
that never changes. And it’s space
she’s after. Space where she has me build
statements out of ignorance. Here are
the words. Here is a length, a pause,
a glance out the window
for effect. Here is the way I heard
toads in the woods, walked without
paths in the woods, saw a golden
golf course through the woods
and sneaking to the greens found everything
was wrong. Fake fountains in the watery parts…

(from “Backpedaling for Statements”)

These poems are not epics. As true lyrics, they hope to save us by warning us to look out and by reminding us how to look.  They explore the material realities of everyday places and the reality of love in this age. As true lyrics, they try to teach us what’s worth saving and saying:

I don’t miss out on what
I miss. You were right
about the future, a feeling
attached to now. Here,
my trick: accompaniment.
Trade the images for new stock.
You, lagging between too-close
and too far. First I was alone,
waiting, Then I was alone,
alone.

   (from “Knower”)

Rust or Go Missing
Lily Brown
Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2010
72 pages / $15.95

Many years ago when I had completed my first year of teaching fiction-writing, I had a drink with Leonard Robinson, former editor at Esquire, on his lovely front porch in Missoula, Montana. We got to talking about teaching. Leonard told me a very simple way to present the idea of tension to students. He said, “Imagine there’s a guy in an elevator at the top of a very tall building. The elevator breaks down and suddenly he’s plunged downward. There are at least two possible outcomes. And you might be rooting for one or the other.” This notion is at the heart of the story in Robert Olen Butler’s new novel, A Small Hotel. It is a textbook example of such tension — a real page-turner.

But it’s so much more than that.

Michael and Kelly ...MORE]]> by Patricia Henley

Many years ago when I had completed my first year of teaching fiction-writing, I had a drink with Leonard Robinson, former editor at Esquire, on his lovely front porch in Missoula, Montana. We got to talking about teaching. Leonard told me a very simple way to present the idea of tension to students. He said, “Imagine there’s a guy in an elevator at the top of a very tall building. The elevator breaks down and suddenly he’s plunged downward. There are at least two possible outcomes. And you might be rooting for one or the other.” This notion is at the heart of the story in Robert Olen Butler’s new novel, A Small Hotel. It is a textbook example of such tension — a real page-turner.

But it’s so much more than that.

Michael and Kelly Hays, the central characters, have been married for twenty-four years. They are divorcing. Present time in the novel is short, but Butler lovingly carries us into the past, and we are privy to the intensity of their first attraction and decision to marry. He is an excellent chronicler of the small domestic moments that create and destroy love. His dissection of the conversations and omissions of their breakup is painful to read.

The novel is set primarily in New Orleans, a verdant, decadent, lively city. Butler knows it well and writes about it in a way that steers clear of caricature. I wanted to be there.

Blogsters who will remain unnamed have taken Butler to task for writing about divorce when he has recently been through a public divorce.  One admitted she had not even read the book. Those conversations are better suited to the cafe than the internet. I imagine Butler is old-school and it’s in his bones to morph the psychology of his own life into fiction.

My take-away (a lesson never alluded to in the book): After 24 years, it’s not easy to start a new history with a new lover. You may always be haunted by the glorious and perplexing moments of longtime marriage.

____________________________________________________________________________________________

Patricia Henley’s new collection of stories Other Heartbreaks will be published by Engine Books in October 2011. She is the author of two chapbooks of poetry, three short story collections, two novels, a stage play, and numerous essays. Her first book of stories, Friday Night at Silver Star (Graywolf, 1986), was the winner of the Montana First Book Award. Her first novel, Hummingbird House (MacMurray & Beck, 1999), was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her most recent publications include an essay in Smithsonian Magazine and short stories in Glimmer Train, Seattle Review, and The Normal School. She has taught for 24 years in the MFA Program at Purdue University.  She lives in a congenial neighborhood not far from campus, with her two dogs, Jack and Alice, and a cat named Cricket. www.patriciahenley.org

It’s difficult to find an arrangement of prose poems that seems to work well as a collection, or that extends beyond attempts to define this new and unique genre. Christopher Kennedy’s third collection of prose poetry, Ennui Prophet, is a rare exception to this dilemma.

In Christopher Kennedy’s hands, the prose poem is not a linear list of things but a skittish thread running through the narrative line. The second paragraph of “Museum of Wrong Turns” introduces a “roommate who thought Mr. Rushmore was a natural phenomenon.” The third and final paragraph begins with an “expensive vehicle” and ends with the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. These prose poems have more in common with the contemporary American poems being written today than they do with the prose poems written a generation ago by poets as diverse as Charles Simic, ...MORE]]> BY KENNY TANEMURA

It’s difficult to find an arrangement of prose poems that seems to work well as a collection, or that extends beyond attempts to define this new and unique genre. Christopher Kennedy’s third collection of prose poetry, Ennui Prophet, is a rare exception to this dilemma.

In Christopher Kennedy’s hands, the prose poem is not a linear list of things but a skittish thread running through the narrative line. The second paragraph of “Museum of Wrong Turns” introduces a “roommate who thought Mr. Rushmore was a natural phenomenon.” The third and final paragraph begins with an “expensive vehicle” and ends with the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. These prose poems have more in common with the contemporary American poems being written today than they do with the prose poems written a generation ago by poets as diverse as Charles Simic, John Ashbery, Russell Edson and Anne Carson. Kennedy’s poetry is too jumpy to belong in a category that is more than a decade old.

Mark Doty discusses newer and younger poets in his introduction to Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century: “Their overwhelming preference is, instead, for performative speech: they are concerned with the creation of a voice, a presence on the page meant to be an experience in itself, not necessarily to refer to one that’s already taken place.” Christopher Kennedy’s work is an example of this emphasis on the experience of the written word, rather than a more traditional focus on the events that inspired the writing. But it’s unclear if the shift is good or bad for prose poems. Kennedy’s prose poems seem more fluid and graceful when they are brief. His longer pieces, on the other hand, tend to be marked by nervousness.

Here is the dexterous “The Day Before My Violin Broke” in its entirety: “The wings of crows were quills dipped in India ink. I looked up from my lesson and watched them rise and bank in the wind, as they painted the pale sky black.” The connection between the crow’s wing and the “painted” sky in this shorter work is obvious. In the longer prose poems it is not clear, however, that more insight is being achieved despite their greater latitude.

Another prose poem, “Where Does the Carpathian Highway Roam?” begins: “Heidegger wore a bathing suit, or so I assume. All the great thinkers sunbathed when no one was looking.” This prose poem lands far from Heidegger in the end. Left-handed guitarists, a swarm of bees, a Buddhist monk, Rasputin, Cantonese, and the F.B.I. all make cameo appearances in this collection, both in and out of context. This approach is not unlike a television actor who slips in and out of character during an interview on NPR to keep audience members guessing as they try to thresh out reality from performance. Ennui Prophet will have the reader glued to the program as well.

Ennui Prophet
By Christopher Kennedy
BOA Editions, June 2011
92 pages, $16.00

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Kenny Tanemura is an American poet living in California.

An old school teacher I didn’t know well retired and died in a small town south of here.  He was loved by his gradeschool students and many children.  He had a loving wife who died later on.  In sorting through the house a box of documents was discovered that his wife perhaps didn’t know about.  Perhaps she did.

The box was filled with letters and poems the teacher wrote.  The box revealed he had an earlier wife, married at the height of young love.  She died suddenly while she was still beautiful.  The poems he wrote were to her, each one a variation on loss, like messages on voicemail:  Why do you not answer?  When can I see you again? Outwardly, he was happily married to his second wife, who grew old with him ...MORE]]> BY DAVID BLOMENBERG

An old school teacher I didn’t know well retired and died in a small town south of here.  He was loved by his gradeschool students and many children.  He had a loving wife who died later on.  In sorting through the house a box of documents was discovered that his wife perhaps didn’t know about.  Perhaps she did.

The box was filled with letters and poems the teacher wrote.  The box revealed he had an earlier wife, married at the height of young love.  She died suddenly while she was still beautiful.  The poems he wrote were to her, each one a variation on loss, like messages on voicemail:  Why do you not answer?  When can I see you again? Outwardly, he was happily married to his second wife, who grew old with him and they raised a large, loving family, but privately, intimately, his first wife’s death was something he never got over.

Many of the gemlike character poems of Noelle Kocot’s beautiful fifth book, The Bigger World, are snapshots of people experiencing an event that marks them forever. They show deftly, sometimes mercilessly, how they stagger on, such as Tristan in “Favors from the Dead”:  “When his partner/ Died, Tristan found himself being/ The lone survivor of an alien race/ Of two.”  Or the speaker in “Fugue,” whose loneliness weighs increasingly on her:

Nothing seemed to matter
Anymore, not the past with
Its ax of granite nor the future
With its watery punctuation,
But the moment, yes the moment,
She was forced into it like
So much dough between
The fingers.  “God bless us all,”
She said aloud to everyone and no one.
There is no other life.

Kocot’s own loss of her husband in 2004 may well inform the works in this collection, as they did in her previous book, Sunny Wednesday, published by Wave Books in April of 2009:  “I forget and walk off the dying world without you/ And the memory of your laughter that keeps cawing at the void.”

Often in the poems of The Bigger World, this watershed event is simply a realization, as with “God Bless the Child,” the opening poem of the collection:  “She and her son walked/ Silently on, not out of the flames/ Or anything, but just walked on.”  There is a great sad sense of hope in these pieces that is tremendously moving, and the language is concise, simple, and direct, to the extent that one has to resist the temptation to include an entire poem rather than excerpts.

There is a fairytale-like quality to all of these poems, both in the sense that they follow a strange dream-logic, but also in their great compression of time.  Entire lifespans unfold in the space of half a page (“Twilight fell/ Across the ages.  A refrigerator/ Hummed.”).  Life may extend beyond the grave to a Purgatory filled with IRS auditors, or to a void where one floats completely alone in a spacesuit. But in The Bigger World, these characters continue onward, not out of flames, perhaps not into them, but, because they have life, and the living must keep moving.

The Bigger World
by Noelle Kocot
Wave Books, 2011
88 pages, $16.00

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David Blomenberg is a former Poetry Editor of Sycamore Review. He lives, works and writes in Indianapolis.

To borrow (shamelessly) a simile from Forrest Gump beginning a Jess Row story is like sampling from a box of chocolates – you never know what you’re going to bite into. In his most recent collection, Nobody Ever Gets Lost, the title story centers around a young woman struggling to come to terms with the death of her fiancé in 9/11. Another story, “Amritsar,” is written from the perspective of a middle-aged Sikh immigrant learning to fish from his son, who is planning to marry a white American girl. Row’s O. Henry and Pushcart-Prize-winning story “Sheep May Safely Graze” centers around a federal bureaucrat during the Reagan administration, grieving over the death of his young daughter in a freak boating accident at summer camp. The stories in Nobody Ever Gets Lost take ...MORE]]> BY DALLAS WOODBURN

To borrow (shamelessly) a simile from Forrest Gump beginning a Jess Row story is like sampling from a box of chocolates – you never know what you’re going to bite into. In his most recent collection, Nobody Ever Gets Lost, the title story centers around a young woman struggling to come to terms with the death of her fiancé in 9/11. Another story, “Amritsar,” is written from the perspective of a middle-aged Sikh immigrant learning to fish from his son, who is planning to marry a white American girl. Row’s O. Henry and Pushcart-Prize-winning story “Sheep May Safely Graze” centers around a federal bureaucrat during the Reagan administration, grieving over the death of his young daughter in a freak boating accident at summer camp. The stories in Nobody Ever Gets Lost take place in Thailand and Washington, D.C.; New York City and the Bronx; the quiet Virginia suburbs. Row is able to tap into a wide range of perspectives and personal histories, creating characters that feel both fresh and intrinsically familiar.

Row does not shy away from exploring a variety of ethnicities, cultures, and religious backgrounds in his characters. However, when reading Nobody Ever Gets Lost I was most struck not by the differences between the characters, but rather by their similarities – feelings of rage, of loss, of loneliness, of confusion. In Row’s stories, small moments of misunderstanding lead to devastation and regret. His characters grapple with morality and faith; they betray each other and, sometimes, find moments of redemption. As novelist Julie Orringer observes, Row “is concerned with human stories, with tragedy on the scale of individual lives; while these stories resonate far beyond the characters themselves, the stories’ aim seems to be to illuminate the complicated nature of particular human experience. These are psychologically astute portraits of men and women whose outward circumstances often reflect inward states of loss or grief.”

Indeed, a theme that Row delves into again and again, and a thread that ties many of his stories together, is the moments of connection and disconnection among people. In Nobody Ever Gets Lost, these moments often brush right up against each other, a conversation suddenly shifting in tone, paths veering off into new directions from a single phrase. Because of a flicker of eye contact in a train station, a young British girl finds herself in a van in Bangkok, facing certain death. A moment of connection between two college students – the human touch of skin to skin – is colored by the later knowledge that one of them dies in a failed suicide bombing. In “The Call of Blood,” narrator Kevin muses, “That’s what you do around these people – you spatter words around like paint and call that a conversation, you say horrible things and take them back and say, that’s a relationship, that’s what I always wanted.” And in Row’s work it is the disconnections you are often left with – miscommunication and anger that lead to irrevocable violence.

Yet, in the same story “The Call of Blood,” another character says, “Language is the sickness and the cure.” Perhaps, in the violence, there is redemption – if not for the characters, then for us as readers. For Row has a remarkable ability to evoke empathy in the reader for his characters, to spark vivid connection between ourselves and these raw, whole, complicated lives on the page. To put it simply, his work caused me to think about the world and the people around me in a new way. It may be true that when beginning a Jess Row story you don’t know what to expect – you can’t typecast where it will take place or the characters it will center around – but you can expect that a Jess Row story will challenge you, move you, and stay with you long after you have turned the final page.

Nobody ever gets lost
by Jess Row
Five Chapters Books, 2011

Jess Row was born in 1974 in Washington, DC. After graduating from Yale in 1997, he taught English for two years as a Yale-China fellow at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He completed an MFA at the University of Michigan in 2001. His first book, The Train to Lo Wu, a collection of short stories set in Hong Kong, was published in 2005; in 2006 it was shortlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Award and was a finalist for the Kiriyama Prize. In 2007 he was named a “Best Young American Novelist” by Granta. He has also received an NEA fellowship in fiction and a Whiting Writers Award. His nonfiction and criticism appear often in The New Republic, The New York Times Book Review, and Threepenny Review. His current projects include a novel, a third collection of stories, Storyknife, and an anthology of critical writings on the short story, On Being Short. In 2009, Jess and his wife, Sonya Posmentier, started Suture Press, which publishes limited edition chapbooks of short fiction and poetry. You can find Jess’s chapbook The True Catastrophe here. Jess is an associate professor of English and Buddhist chaplain at The College of New Jersey, and lives in Princeton, New Jersey, with Sonya and their two children, Mina and Asa. A member of the core faculty in the low-residency MFA program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts, he also teaches in the MFA program at the City University of Hong Kong.

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Dallas Woodburn, Assistant Fiction Editor, is currently pursuing her M.F.A. in Fiction at Purdue. Her short fiction has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and the Dzanc Books “Best of the Web” anthology and has recently appeared in The Ramshackle Review, Fiction 365, and Concisely: A Journal of Flash Fiction. She is also editor of Dancing With The Pen, a collection of today’s best youth writing, available at www.writeonbooks.org.