Best-Selling Jewish Porn Films by Wayne Koestenbaum

Turtle Point Press, 2006
Reviewed by Lisa Bower






Wayne Koestenbaum’s poetry collection, Best-selling Jewish Porn Films, is as irreverent and in-your-face as the title suggests. Each poem in this collection is trim and snappy; each joke or pun seems selected with care, and articles are as rare as autobiographical shtick. Pop culture and sex are common subject matters, and in the midst of Koestenbaum’s ironic pairings, there is beautiful music.

Koestenbaum’s poems include subject matter as diverse as Plato, Judaism, and “John Wayne’s Perfumes.” These are not poems told in traditional narratives. Instead, Koestenbaum allows his poems to explore many avenues; he pairs what may seem unpairable or unrelated. For instance, in the poem “In This Vale Of Tears We Call Existence,,” he writes, “in this Shorty I call Julia Child / in this cute seminarian I call blow job / in this lamplit hair salon I call brutality in South Boston / in this Catwoman I call interpretation / in this Washington D.C. I call laugh and clap your hands.” Pop culture, place, sex, and politics all make an appearance in this stanza of the poem. This poet’s world is a diverse place; the reader has to be ready and able to leap around subject matter. Ultimately, the pairings in these poems are one of the main points of the collection: life’s collisions are often strange, if only we’d open our eyes and ask if “Crisco is kosher.”

Koestenbaum is conscious of the reader’s desire to understand, and the way many readers assume poetry is autobiographical. In the sixth section of the poem, “Pierrot Lunaire,” Koestenbaum hints at the readers need or want to know or understand a piece of writing in regards to the writer’s personality. He writes:

      I ask if her novel is veiled autobiography
      afraid this interpretation won’t please her
      so far I see on her face no signs irreversibly saturnine
      in the dream I tell her I’m writing poems tangentially touched by
            Pierrot
      sitting beside Susan Sontag at a dinner party, an elliptical table

Here, perhaps like the reader who looks to link Koestenbaum’s life to his poems, the speaker beseeches the famous critic and writer about the “veiled autobiography” in her pieces. What makes is snarky or even ironic is that fact that Sontag is a critic, a genre ruled by expectations other than personal truth. Here, Koestenbaum alludes to the fact that poetry doesn’t have to automatically equate with “autobiography” or traditional ideas of truth.

The collection uses repetition to not only link what one might think unthinkable, but to create new meanings for its subjects. Koestenbaum’s is aware of how people create meaning, whether it’s through cultural icons or through politics and metaphor. In the title poem, he writes:

      Fallen Jewish Angel
      The Isle of Jewish Men
      Jewish Oral Exam
      The Jewish Pizza Boy: He Delivers

      Three Jewish Brothers
      Jewish Room Service
      Jewish Sexual Healing
      Jews Beg for Mercy

Ultimately, this poem operates on a number of levels. Of course, we have Koestenbaum’s tongue-in-cheek humor. However, behind the raunchy language and context of the poem, there is also the levity of such lines as “Jews Beg for Mercy.” In this poem, religion, ethnicity, sex, and “the fallen,” collide. Koestenbaum is not afraid to offend, and he is not afraid to tackle the world and its culture. The repetition in his poems results in a meditative state. In other pieces that use repetition, figures like Judy Garland and John Wayne become the icons of Koestenbaum’s prayers.

Though trim and sly, these poems feature some beautiful and complex lyricism. Koestenbaum’s poem, “Crevice,” is tuned to collision’s music. He writes how, “I can’t tell apart / human beings and lawn ornaments. / More, later, about my vast holdings.” Here, we have the same strange pairings, but we also have a heightened layering of sound: consonants echo and vowels flirt within and between lines.

Ironically, though the poems are flippant and snarky, their tone and openness of subject matter make it seem as if Koestenbaum is shooting the breeze with the reader. The world is often full of strange pairings, strange occurrences, trauma, and humor. Koestenbaum’s singing and laughing as he experiences the world; his collection is truly, as one poem states, an “elegy for everyone.”

**

Wayne Koestenbaum is the author of five collection of poems; a novel, Moira Orfei in Aigues-Mortes, and five books of nonfiction: Double Talk: The Erotics of Male Literary Collaboration; The Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire; Jackie Under My Skin: Interpreting an Icon; Cleavage: Essays on Sex, Stars, and Aesthetics; and Andy Warhol. Recipient of a Whiting Writer's Award and nominee for a National Book Critics Circle Award, Koestenbaum is currently a professor at the CUNY graduate school.

**

Lisa Bower's poetry and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming from such places as Mid-American Review, The Southern Review, Jacket, Rattle, The Hollins Critic, and The Mississippi Review. Though she has an MFA (golf clap), she's not poor or working for "the man." She thinks the starving artist stereotype is so 1992.

Loveliest Grotesque by Sandra Lim

Kore Press, 2007
Reviewed by Karen Rigby





One of Sandra Lim’s great strengths is the ability to intrigue the reader with energetic word play. The poems in this debut demonstrate a willingness to experiment with forms ranging from pantoums to prose poems, to use nouns as verbs, as in the line “I carrot them with caramels” (p. 55), to borrow French phrases, to rhyme, and to surprise us with assertions: “I’m a bandit gripping / hard on the steal” (p.19).

Domestic images including a pineapple-shaped cutting board, pins, a hot iron, and a garlic press are equally at home with references to Wittgenstein, Ahkmatova, Bovary, Pépé Le Pew and classic Hollywood stars. These are the poems of a mind traversing a rich landscape in search of that boundary between the self and the world.

The three chapters in the book are loosely linked by recurring mentions of the sea. In the opening poem, we find “the little ruin” “sang me songs of seafaring”, as though the speaker were beguiled. In the second chapter, the poem titled “The Sea, The Sea” reveals the speaker’s attraction to and fear of the sea’s power. Later, in “Sailor, Your Sonnet”, Lim writes “In a dry season, they’ve dipped me gently into the sea.” The line reads as both burial and baptism. By the time we reach the final line in the book’s last poem—“each time I find I murmur, so this is the sea.”—the sea as a metaphor becomes an exhalation. We sense an acceptance of the journey on the speaker’s end, even if we’re not always completely certain what the touchstones we’ve encountered along the way meant.

The poet seems aware of this occasional tendency to keep the reader at a distance, however, and expresses it best in the closing lines to the poem “Wish You Were Here” (p. 48): “The language never flies straight to the meaning, but in the / meantime the sunsets here are quite resplendent.” One is reminded of poets like Larissa Szporluk—Lim also writes intelligent, wholly original poems with a lexicon of their own. The work invites multiple readings for readers willing to be challenged, but there are times when thoughtful ambiguity forays into more abstract territory:

      X points to a bruise. Look
      at me.

      And now, something
      is hiving within.

      You turn to X
      like a big thought,

      like an offer of all immoderacy.
      So this is the new world.

      X says seeing is believing. You think
      on counter-illuminations. Seeing being innocence.

      You stick your fingers where your eyes
      used to be.


      “Of the Inconsistency of Our Actions” (p. 17)


The poem hinges on the wit of the final lines—sticking one’s fingers where the eyes used to be is the end of innocence, a direct refusal of X’s comment that “seeing is believing”. The phrase may refer back to the bruise. Perhaps X is willing the speaker to acknowledge the particular pain the bruise represents. The ending is also a nod towards the title—one’s actions can be inconsistent with one’s beliefs. But X could be nearly anyone. Though it may not be crucial to the overall poem to know much about X, the poem stands out as a departure from the poet’s usual specificity, using generalized concepts: something, big thought, immoderacy, and new world. Indeed, these minor lapses are only evident when contrasted with the precise choices made elsewhere, as in these lines from “Something, Something, Something Grand” (p. 19):

      your body is a mouth, is a night of travel, your body
      is tripling the sideways insouciance. The muscle in you
      knows gorgeous, in you knows tornadoes.
      In an instant’s compass, your blood flees you like a cry.


Lim is at her best in the prose poems included here, particularly in “A Village Journal” (p.13), where lovers, suicides, memory, and “ a procession of cold data fed like a wick through sleep” create a history . The larger canvas provided by the prose poem allows for greater flexibility, reflection, discursiveness, and questioning—tools used to create an engaging voice that remains consistent without veering into nostalgia.

The most memorable poems in this collection make you wish you’d written them yourself, and glad that someone else has. “Loveliest Grotesque”, written in one breathless and breathtaking sentence, is tinged with insouciant charm, a sharp sense for the poetic line, and an underlying darkness. It exemplifies why we should look forward to more work from this author:

      Loveliest Grotesque

      I kept the little ruin near me, I stowed it in the kitchen,
      it sat in the pantry, like a jar of reddest jam,
      it sang me songs of seafaring, it said the "weather being fine,"
      I listened to it breathe, shiver brokenly in time,
      I believed a multitude stood between us, four seasons,
      the meaningless physical world, and a grammar primer,
      you could see how I found it necessary,
      with its immodest appeals, its constant state of déshabillé,
      it is small for its age, it is too wide-awake,
      so my sewing came undone with the years,
      I stalked myself to the open door, the unlatched gate,
      ma petite is a world sold of charms, it loves a new act,
      has a leer for a mouth, has indecorous energy,
      I ran from the spring glee of it, I radioed ahead,
      oh I unplanned a lifetime, turned my gaze to the west,
      but then it said it would make something of us both,
      the sound of it touched me, fat in its cracked sadness,
      it was homemade all along, it was oddly necessary,
      I looked back like Lot's wife, like the exhausted mirage
      that I was, and the loveliest salt taste was whelming us,
      both awash in a light of knives, and the wind it was shifting like this—

**

Sandra Lim was born in Seoul, Korea and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. She attended Stanford University, and holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of California at Berkeley and an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her poems have appeared in several literary journals including Gulf Coast, Colorado Review, American Letters & Commentary, Denver Quarterly, and ZYZZYVA. She lives in San Francisco.

**

Karen Rigby received a 2007 literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her second chapbook, Savage Machinery, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. Her site is www.karenrigby.com

Rift by Forrest Hamer

Four Way Books, 2007

Reviewed by Helen Losse





In his third volume of poems, Forrest Hamer has written a book about a world of uncertainty. He begins with I don’t know what kind of man I am (“Reconciliation”) and I don’t know what to believe, sometimes (“My Personal Epistemology”) and searches in the “Someone I know” poems—eight of them are in the book (in three of four sections)—for meaning in story: the proof of an idea about the world lies/ in the world of the personal (“My Personal Epistemology”). If the “Someone I know” poems are about image (in tidbits of narrative), the poems between them clarify: Let’s say the self is a story (“Ninety-five, a Hundred”). Sometimes a story that turns on itself and becomes another image, another matter to ponder.

Hamer’s subject matter varies: childhood memories, violence, confusion—How could we be right and they be right? (“Between”)—and doubt—a black hole (“What Happened”), longing and loss of innocence, aching and reaching. Fires whirr in dervishes below us (“Diaspora”). An elderly aunt has become impossible (“Some Sugar”). People alienate themselves in the search for unity; sometimes they need more than lessons because they are lost.

Like the idea there
is no idea
no before and no later
no death
and not now

Like the drive back down
and the heavy heat
insisting
You were not just there (“Lost”)

Then Hamer says, I was falling and falling into a voice, and . . . I spoke back. (“Letter From Cuba”). There are thoughts of suicide. Thoughts, not actions. And the exploration of sex by a woman late in her eighties and the others at “Assisted Living (Goldsboro Narrative #44).” “Someone I know . . . thinks I failed at writing him down.” Like any poet doesn’t.

The poet knows every reader wants a story. But in the final section, “The Point of the Story,” Hamer reminds us of “someone” who has no real interest in imagination, is confused by everyday niceness (“Someone I know" / [Some of us have to live with being mean]”) and others who are humble. By all there was we had not seen/By all there was we had (“The Conquest”).

Rift is a book of stories that does not end with hopefulness, but with There’s some other story to tell (“Conference”). Hamer is a keen observer, not a teller of all things true. After all, stories are certain; their meaning is not. Rift is a book that begs to be read again and again, for in seeking reconciliation, we must notice the rift. And the more the stories differ, the more they appear the same.

**

Forrest Hamer is the author of Call & Response (Alice James, 1995), which received the Beatrice Hawley Award, and Middle Ear (Roundhouse, 2000), which received the Northern California Book Award. He is an Oakland, California, psychologist and affiliate member of the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute and Society. His poetry has appeared in many journals, and has been anthologized in Poet’s Choice: Poems for Everyday Life, The Geography of Home: California’s Poetry of Place, Making Callaloo: 25 Years of Black Literature, Blues Poems, and the 1994 and 2000 editions of The Best American Poetry. He has received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the California Arts Council, and he has taught on the poetry faculty of the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshops.

**

Helen Losse is a poet, free lance writer, and Poetry Editor of The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature. Her recent poetry publications include Southern Hum, Adagio Verse Quarterly, The Centrifugal Eye, Ann Arbor Review, Lily, and Blue Fifth Review. She has two chapbooks, Gathering the Broken Pieces, available from FootHills Publishing and Paper Snowflakes, available from Southern Hum Press.

NOW AVAILABLE: CutBank 68, Winter 2008

fiction by Dennis McFadden, Jenna Williams, Max Everhart, Baird Harper, Adam Peterson, Jeff Chapman, Syd Harriet

poetry by Tomaz Salamun, Matt Hart, Keetje Kuipers, Avery Slater, Ed Skoog, CJ Evans, Katie Peterson

art by Andy Smetanka

featuring critical reviews: Trina Burke on Tony Tost, Karyna McGlynn on Chelsey Minnis, Laurie White on Paul Hoover


Copies are available here.

CutBank Announces New Contests

CutBank is pleased to announce the Montana Prize in Fiction, the Montana Prize in Creative Nonfiction, and the Patricia Goedicke Prize in Poetry.

We are honored to have three talented judges participating in the inaugural year of these contests. The Patricia Goedicke Prize in Poetry will be judged by Michele Glazer. Aimee Bender will select the winner of the Montana Prize in Fiction. The winner of the Montana Prize in Creative Nonfiction will be selected by Suzanne Paola. Click here to read their bios.

Deadline for submissions is February 29. Winners receive $500 and publication in CutBank 69. All submissions will be considered for publication in CutBank.

The contests' $13 entry fee includes a one-year, two-issue subscription to CutBank, beginning with the prize issue, CutBank 69.

Please send only your best work. With all three of these awards, we are seeking to highlight work that showcases an authentic voice, a boldness of form, and a rejection of functional fixedness.

FULL GUIDELINES:

Submissions postmarked earlier than December 1, 2007 or later than February 29, 2008 will be returned unread (along with payment).

Submissions are accepted via postal mail only. Please include SASE for reply and prepare your manuscript according to CutBank's conventional submission guidelines. The contest entry must be noted on the envelope and cover letter, i.e.:

The Patricia Goedicke Prize in Poetry

CutBank

English Dept, LA 133
University of Montana

Missoula, MT 59812

A $13 contest entry fee includes a one-year subscription to CutBank. The entry fee covers the reading of a single submission in a single genre. Prose writers, please send only a single work of no greater than 40 printed pages. Poets may submit up to five poems. Submissions that exceed these guidelines will be returned unread, along with payment. Please submit only once within in a genre, although writers are permitted to submit in multiple genres.

Please include a short cover letter that mentions your address, phone number, and email address, as well as the title of your work. Please include the author's name on the manuscript—names will be removed from the pool of submissions that goes before our contest judges.

Current subscribers may submit for the same $13 fee—subscriptions will be extended by one year.

Please submit entry fee by personal or cashier's check. Checks can be made out to CutBank Literary Magazine.

Entrants will be notified of their submission status no later than May 15, 2008. One winner in each genre, as chosen by our guest judges, will receive a $500 award and publication in CutBank 69, our summer 2008 issue. Winners will be required to complete a W-9 form to receive payment. All manuscripts are considered for publication in CutBank. All rights to selected manuscripts revert to the author upon publication. The author grants their permission to have their work electronically archived as part of CutBank 69 in EBSCO International's subscription-based research database.

Current University of Montana students and faculty and former CutBank staff are not eligible for the awards.

Inbox by Noah Eli Gordon

BlazeVOX Books, 2006

Reviewed by Andy Frazee





“I thought it would be interesting to see what would happen,” Noah Eli Gordon writes in his introduction to Inbox, “if I were to take the body-text of every email that was addressed specifically to me (nothing forwarded or from any listserv) currently in my inbox (over 200) and let all of the voices collide into one continuous text.” The result is “55 pages of uninterrupted prose that constitutes a kind of temporal autobiography”; from page to page the text appears as one long column:

I’ll try to catch up with you Sunday… I’m not really leaving till Tuesday. Otherwise, I’ll see you in Iowa. Once settled in KC I’ll get you that bookletized PDF for Eric’s chap. Sorry for the delay. I’ve been thinking about it but too busy & would want to take some time articulating my thoughts on the matter. How’s it going out there? Things in Ithaca are pretty cool, except for the lack of a job & the usual stresses of moving and settling in. But Josh Corey and Emily are really cool, and there seems to be a lot of energy (if not time) for getting stuff happening. And it’s frigging beautiful out here.

(Unfortunately no one excerpt can truly replicate the experience of reading Inbox. Any single passage taken out of context assumes a new meaning—as in the quotation above, which, ending with the exuberance of “it’s frigging beautiful out here” could almost be a prose poem. But to truly understand the Inbox reading experience, one needs to see how this sentence is immediately subsumed by the next topic: “Got a question. I know you’re probably insanely backed up with projects, but I wonder if Braincase might be interested in the mss. of those Rilke poems of mine.” And so on and so on.)

Seemingly inspired by several lines of artistic and poetic tradition—including the procedural poetics of OULIPO, John Cage, and Jackson Mac Low, as well as the appropriative poetics of work such as Ronald Johnson’s Radi os—-Gordon, in an interview for RainTaxi, cites the conceptual artist Sol Lewitt in explaining how Inbox, his “reverse memoir,” came to be. “The book is really just the execution of an idea, and a privileging of the idea over any other aesthetic criteria,” Gordon notes, “which is the truncated version of the definition Sol LeWitt gave to conceptual art: ‘The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.’”

To be clear, the only words of Inbox actually written by Gordon—-prolific author of several collections of poetry including The Area of Sound Called the Subtone (Ahsahta Press, 2004) and the National Poetry Series selection Novel Pictorial Noise (HarperCollins, 2007)—-appear in exactly two places: in the two page introductory letter/email; and on page 37, where one of his correspondents quotes an earlier message: “Your last email to me includes the great line, ‘it was around the time I quit playing music…and turned into a poetry geek.’” Most of the concerns in the text reflect the business of poetry—-readings, chapbooks, publications, critiques and revisions—concerns that the reflect the everyday struggle to get one’s poetry out into the world, but that over the course of fifty pages often approach the banal:

Thanks for the attachment. I look forward to reading it when the second issue is done. I don’t have you down for a subscription—it’s $12/22/30 for 1/2/3 issues, respectively.

…

1.5 spacing is the hot thing it seems these days! i [sic] never knew how to do it before in HTML until recently and now it seems like everyone’s doing it…

…

It’s not a forum for my usual review process, it’s a rah-rah forum, which is also cool to do and a kind of community service, I think. So- care to send me your thoughts on this? My deadline is 3/11.

How do we as readers approach this text? Perhaps we should take our cue from the conceptual writer and UbuWeb founder Kenneth Goldsmith’s “Sentences on Conceptual Writing” (2005, drawing on LeWitt’s “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art” [1967]). “It doesn’t really matter if the reader understands the concepts of the author by reading the text,” writes Goldsmith. “Once it is out of her hand the writer has no control over the way a reader will perceive the work. Different people will understand the same thing in different ways.”

With this in mind, Inbox is as much a product of Walt Whitman as of conceptual art. That is, Gordon’s “collision of voices” is not perhaps all that far from Whitman’s “I contain multitudes.” In Inbox Whitman’s multitudes are scattered among the nodes of an electronic network, allowed—-finally, perhaps—to speak in their own voices, fractured from the grip of the all--encompassing Whitmanic I—-while that I is replaced by an absence: the figure of Gordon himself. For the reader of Inbox, this figure is not of course Gordon the author (i.e., “Noah Eli Gordon,” the name on the cover and the copyright), but a construction born out of the accumulated inferences of the email texts. This duality, of Gordon the actual, physical person and Gordon the inferred doppelganger, is one of the sometimes eerie relations between concept and content reflected within the Inbox text itself, as in this passage where one of Gordon’s correspondents discusses another “Noah Gordon” existing somewhere out there in the extratextual poetry world:

Yeah, I saw that there is that “Noah Gordon” guy too. You should form a coalition to annihilate him. Or raise money to have a broadcast on network television of Simon Says or something: Simon Says Noah Eli Gordon, Simon Says Noah Gordon…

…

And as I’m writing this, I’m only hoping that you are in fact the author of “The Frequencies.” If not, my deepest apologies. But if you are in fact the Noah Gordon that I’m hoping to find, I just want to say that I came across your book the other day and it has completely floored me.

Here we may remember another quote from Whitman: “I acknowledge the duplicates of myself.”

Although in his essay Goldsmith goes on to write that “it is only the expectation of an emotional kick, to which one conditioned to Romantic literature is accustomed, that would deter the reader from perceiving this writing,” Inbox does, eventually, deliver something of “an emotional kick.” The “heart” of this work, if that term applies, comes at the end of the text (as the earliest of Gordon’s saved emails), and throws a certain emotional resonance back on the preceding fifty-four pages. The message appears to be from Gordon’s mother or father:

Given the headline regarding 3 criteria for likely “spectacular attacks from terrorists I began thinking too much […] If anything awful should happen please attempt to contact one another and each of you to [sic] look out for your grandparents. […] …oh yes and if I ever become a body to bury do it in Lakeview Cemetary [sic] in Cleveland…near a tree. Have a great weekend and I love you all.

It is this “if I ever become a body to bury” which reinforces that it is the “out there,” the world beyond the page, to which the text constantly refers. Reading Inbox we are constantly asked to imagine the physical bodies these voices connect to—the “address,” so to speak, from which these voices “address” Gordon, and whose words we are allowed to overhear. The result is not only Gordon’s “reverse memoir,” and not only a snapshot of a certain neighborhood of the global poetic village circa 2004. In the end, Inbox, with its collision of voices, is a study in the ways communication shapes the very way we perceive others—and how we are perceived in turn.

**

Noah Eli Gordon’s books include: Novel Pictorial Noise (selected by John Ashbery for the 2006 National Poetry Series); A Fiddle Pulled From the Throat of a Sparrow (New Issues, 2007, winner of the Green Rose Prize); Inbox (BlazeVOX, 2006); The Area of Sound Called the Subtone (Ahsahta Press, 2004, selected by Claudia Rankine for the Sawtooth Prize); and The Frequencies (Tougher Disguises, 2003). He is the co-author with Sarah Veglahn of That We Come To A Consensus (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2005) and with Joshua Marie Wilkinson of Figures for a Darkroom Voice (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2007). His reviews and essays have appeared in dozens of journals, including Boston Review, The Poker, 26, Jacket, and The St. Marks Poetry Project Newsletter. He writes a chapbook review column for RainTaxi: Review of Books, teaches creative writing at the University of Colorado at Denver, and publishes the Braincase chapbook series.

**

Andy Frazee is a PhD student in English and Creative Writing at the University of Georgia and holds an MFA from the University of Illinois. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in 1913, Rhino, Faultline and The Sycamore Review. His review of Barbara Jane Reyes’s Poeta en San Francisco is forthcoming in Verse.

The Stripping Point by Brian Henry

Counterpath Press, 2007

Reviewed by John Findura



It used to be that books of contemporary poetry could often be looked at as either a collection of individual poems or the occasional group of poems loosely connected by some narrative or stylistic thread. More recently however, the “project” book has very much come into vogue. The “project” book can be seen as a kind of novella in verse, or, at the very least, a heavily connected collection of individual poems that work better as a whole than individually. Starting with his last book, the excellent and daring Quarantine, Brian Henry seems to have grasped firmly onto this idea that the whole may be greater than the sum of its parts.

The Stripping Point is composed of two poetic series, the first titled “More Dangerous Than Dying” and the second, “The Stripping Point.” Eschewing individual titles, we are forced to contemplate the book as a whole as it cannot readily be broken down into bite-size pieces, much like the way the individual songs of a concept album lose their magic once separated into radio-friendly singles. The only guideposts along the way are quotations that precede each part and are thankfully referenced in a “Source” section.

The idea of a dual series worked well for Henry in Quarantine, but in comparing that work to The Stripping Point, the newer work appears to succeed, albeit to a lesser degree. The first sequence is composed of 31 poems set in a 1990s paper mill chronicling “the vicissitudes of a relationship that is simultaneously new and at its depleted end,” according to the jacket copy. While that may sound like a very simplified breakdown of a million things, from Malcolm Lowry’s Under The Volcano to Casablanca, in actuality it reads more like a disturbingly unfunny episode of The Office:

      A thing is delivered
      to your In-basket

      carbon-copy to me

      (…)

      We hold hands
      by the water cooler

It is this everyday language and action that ultimately grabs the reader’s attention. “The office party was a carnal affair” comes later, to the surprise of no one. The reality of the words manage to both shock in their utter frankness and to cause wonder that a poem can be constructed of the everyday, much like the disbelief that accompanies the realization that a particular sculpture was once a cast-off piece of stone.

      The significance of the difference
      between the tip as calculated
      and the tip as left on the table
      becomes a wedge between us

Somehow, the mundane has infiltrated the hallowed halls of contemporary verse. But it is not just the words; it is also the distance of Henry himself from the poems. Using a style that he began with Quarantine, Henry has left almost all traces of the poet absent from the poems. Unlike his earlier collections Astronaut and Graft, The Stripping Point feels as though it were created in a vacuum, much like the modern workplace feels.

      Blond hair on your overcoat

      The situation revolves on itself

      Stasis    action    guilt

      It’s the first that hurts
      the last that reminds us
      we’re here

At times Henry sounds like he is reciting his own version of Nostradamus:

      Across the table
      fallacious conclusions and unencumbered assumptions
      mark their method of attack

      It all ends up at the landfill

      (…)

      The plant reshifts priorities
      returns to shredding trees

In hindsight, the only possibly thing was indeed for the plant to return to shredding the trees. The plant will continue its pulping of trees far longer than the relationship between co-workers can ever last.

The second, much more experimental, series of poems, titled “The Stripping Point,” runs to fifty-five sections. As it runs its course, it literally is “stripped away,” from 6 lines to only two. Beginning “Decide on deciduous or remain ever green / My love      for envy is not your color”, “The Stripping Point” runs down like the ticking of the doomsday clock. The repetition of certain lines keeps the momentum running forward to the inevitable ending of “Surrender to dim and be done with darkness”.

The key to this entire section of the book is that inevitability, along with lines such as “Some days the tongue needs a prophylactic” and “Delicious and made with desire from desire”. Perhaps the only negative is the overuse of words such as “nival” and “riparian.” Fine words though they may be, the echoing of the words causes them to lose some of their meaning and their uniqueness as the poem clicks to its end.

What impresses the most is the fact that Henry is still experimenting and growing and there is a genuine excitement preceding each new book. As he has proven so far, there is little in language or subject matter that cannot find its way into the poetic idiom. The monotonous existence that many of us find ourselves is a theme for many poets, yet few take it to its place in the real world. A part of all of us, unfortunately, understands

      We strive for the effluvium
      but lack all requisite lightness
      find ourselves squarely placed
      in the fluorescence of the feebly salaried

**

Brian Henry is the author of four previous books of poetry: Astronaut (2000), American Incident (2002), Graft (2003), and Quarantine (2006). His poems have appeared in many magazines around the world, including Jacket, New American Writing, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, and Volt. He has co-edited Verse since 1995, and he co-edited The Verse Book of Interviews (2005). He currently teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Richmond in Virginia.

**

John Findura holds an MFA from The New School. His poetry and criticism appear in journals such as Mid-American Review, Verse, Fugue, Fourteen Hills, Rain Taxi, GlitterPony and H_NGM_N, among others. Born in Paterson, he lives and teaches in Northern New Jersey.

Threads by Jill Magi

Futurepoem Books

Reviewed by Heather Sweeney

The book remains dangerously fragile--even more so after all my mark-making, gluing, soaking. The binding has been pushed almost beyond its limits. So I was pushing against the limits of "the book" and the limits of what is held in the body as language…

—JILL MAGI

…dwelling and travel are not distinct
—MEI-MEI BERSSENBRUGGE

Magi boldly tests the limits of the book’s form in Threads which simultaneously binds and frays at every turn. In 1997, Magi ventured into Estonia alone and unarmed with the language. It is here, within this “book-art project,” that she aspires to desilence and uncensor the history of a country. The poet attempts to recover and resuscitate father, an Estonian refugee of WWII in a forest of multi-layered sounds and landscapes. Woven with with maps, letters, biographies, photographs, dress patterns and song, Threads both tears and sews. Unraveling a series of experiential blueprints, the book ultimately investigates self in relation to lineage, and its fluctuating degrees of disintegration and salvagement.

Similar to Eleni Sikelianos’s endeavor in The Book of Jon, Magi navigates through the various tales of her father’s life to inhabit his physical, emotional and intellectual spaces. Upon her arrival in Estonia, Magi pursues an imagined connection:

Needing more time to arrive, I sit on a bench between ferry terminal and city gate, imagining that my father’s history is visible on my face. An uncertain expression. Perhaps sadness or certain Estonian features such as hair color or the eyes, though in any other context, I do not believe in this (9).

Touching an illegible distance, a memory of a face becomes a map. Gaps in translations and history are illuminated.

Without a table of contents, the reader is immediately thrown into the deep end of an evolving Estonia, a place of supposed regentrification: “The attachment of cell phones to the belt and new umbrellas over empty café tables is read as progress” as “museum labels peel away…” (1). The poet appears confused among a rubble of weeds, burning garbage, bullet holes, electrical wires and cement apartment buildings. And it is this confusion, a self-reported “vertigo,” that mirrors the disjointed nature of the book. Preservation is pieced. Reconstruction is messy. Magi craftily exposes these processes through a vividly collaged portrait.

Documenting the fleeting essence of her search, Magi reconstructs an undeniable impermanence. She is “sketching a breath a fingerprint dissolves” (108) but there is also an acute awareness of something “to find out. A view called history. Or to enter” (44). The poet is grasping and gazing through the gaps of her father’s sparsely recorded life: “(Dear Dad, if you can even vaguely translate--)” (112). She seeks to hold onto any remnants of her journey: “I collect stains and bits /of leaves” (119). What is left: ephemeral souvenirs. Although ephemerality and loss hover over the book like a “cloud of blackbirds,” the essence is what remains as the “grain of the original is ascertained” (8).

The reader is moved from a familiar, autonomous place where “map of comfort was--/pillow of no tradition” (48) to an atmosphere “of generative tensions” (50). Revealing doubt and mispronunciations, Magi’s threads mesh to form a unique texture of sounds and language; as “each day falls off into unspeech” (38) we lean in to listen to the “stuttering infrastructure” and “flexible word order” (45). Lines are infused with uncertain translation. Her efforts are textured with a certain struggle. Threads of speech are revealed as “flashcard fossils” (4). Magi reports to her father: “Inside my body your language is growing” (124).

We tend to think of ourselves as autonomous creatures, and this is reified by our culture of duality and compartmentalization. Yet, the acknowledgement of and quest for connections may shift and transform perceptions of self, moving us from “the position of the single body versus a whole family “(52). Our pasts are fragile structures and one must often take a journey far outside, beyond our self-imposed limits, in order to begin to understand them. Magi inspires us to do so with strength and without hesitation so that we also may come to know our own “inherited map.”

**

Jill Magi is a writer and artist living in Brooklyn, New York. She is the author of the chapbook Cadastral Map, published in 2005 by Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, as well as several self-published and personally distributed small, handmade books. Her poetry, prose, and visual work has been published in HOW2, The Brooklyn Rail, Jacket, The New Review of Literature, Aufgabe, Chain, and Pierogi Press, and exhibited at the Brooklyn Arts Council Gallery and the Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition. A 2006-07 writer-in-residence with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, she also teaches at The City College Center for Worker Education and runs Sona Books, a small press dedicated to publishing risky, quiet, project-driven works in chapbook form.

**

Heather Sweeney lives in San Diego where she works as a design consultant and teaches yoga.

equilibrium's form by Susanne Dyckman

Shearsman Books, 2007

Reviewed by Anne Heide




Susanne Dyckman’s first full-length book, equilibrium’s form, understands where “the space of possibility/is an appetite,” where the unknown is both a generative and consumptive force. The poems in this book insistently document “what is known,” though only in partial image, as if trying to set fragmentary particulars into the realm of the immediate known, leaving all else to question. Shushing the insistent noise of finitude for the sake of a patient querying, Dyckman has created an open-ended elegy, a proposal of patience that takes the form of an active questioning, one that swerves from the passive finite. This is a book where shadows take root as the “space of possibility,” the grey unknown into which Dyckman roots the small insistent.

Although the poems in equilibrium’s form steer away from the definite known, the book is nonetheless preoccupied with the ways in which we know. Dyckman questions the way in which knowing takes shape through the act of documenting minutia, how the act of knowing is parceled into specificity. Minutia is known, and knowledge comes in portion:

                sky bone arm

                eye

                what is known is

                dusk silence hand scar

                not a sound but

                word

                air

This is not the duality of a shadow world and a finite world, but a proposal for a world of greater precision. “Sky” becomes “dusk,” “arm” becomes “hand,” and we are translated into a locale of increased specificity, where minutia is quite seriously known without pretense or irony, and the beginnings of knowledge are made into deliberate detail. The greater picture is that there is no greater picture; the limbs of a scene are the center of it. The language itself is potentially fragmentary in that the semantic possibilities at work extend beyond the singular. No one sense can be made of the text; it is a work of detail that is fragmentary not because something is missing, but because any attempt at completion would fail the text.

Dyckman’s field of accrual asks for knowledge to come individually, in shadowy spaces, in illegibility. Although there echoes of Plato’s cave, this text calls a different sense of reality into being: “dipping fingers/in shadow play/is all I know.” Shadow isn’t illusion, but the hopeful unknown: “I will the shadow/swallowing whole.” Shadow is willed into existence in order to conceal and complicate untrustworthy clarity.

The book never loses its concern for this deliberately partial and self-specific knowledge. If the fragment stands in for the whole, if it is more representative in its partial presence, then Dyckman has written an epic in facets, calling for specificity to stand in stead for the whole, revealing a more complete picture in the gaps. This awareness of the fragmentary in language extends to the fragmentary body. The remnant of the scar appears as a trace of physical memory, “who or where known by the finger’s trace/across the scar turned pink.” It is the trace left from action, the proof that an event occurred, that something can be known:

                                     the honed

                flint           retracting           heals

                syllables hidden                behind

                more syllables                there’s the scar

Here, it is the unending strata of healed-over language that points to the difficulty in representation. But these are syllables, not words. Here, parts of speech are not incoherent when parceled, but contribute to a density of meaning, of proof. Something here happened.

But something violent to the body. In the prose poems of the book, the elegiac tone is most narratively present. Illness arrives in the prose sections of the book, where information is more fluid, filled with story. Although these are the most narratively sure moments of the text, they seem deliberately uneasy in their certainty, full of unease about looming illness, inevitable loss, and the difficulty of using story to fill that space: “We are almost the same height and weight, like twins, except her walk is slow and I need to hold back to match her pace. Her skin is brown, not a healthy brown but a shade of sickness.” These prose poems ask for stillness; like the particular images that are known, the tone is one of stasis: keep patience, let this moment linger: “stay          be still          you are stone.” In these brief moments of elegy, another shadow is cast across the manuscript, a proof of loss.

Dyckman’s book is both tenuously wrought and utterly concrete. It is the tension between these two extremes of knowing that sets the pace for this deliberate and elegantly crafted consideration of the frailty of individual knowledge.

**

Susanne Dyckman was born in Chicago, and has lived in cities on both coasts of the U.S., finally settling in Albany, California, where she curates the Evelyn Ave. reading series. She is the author of two chapbooks, Transiting Indigo (Etherdome Press) and Counterweight (Woodland Editions). Her writing has appeared in various publications, including Pomona Valley Review, Switchback, 26, Marginalia and First Intensity. After being named a recipient of the Five Fingers Review poetry award, she was invited to join the journal's editorial staff. She is currently a thesis adviser for the University of San Francisco's MFA in Writing program. She is also Chief Financial Officer for a wholesale import company.

**

Anne Heide poetry has appeared in Shampoo, Coconut, Octopus and No Tell Motel, among others. Her reviews have appeared in Jacket, HOW2, First Intensity, Xantippe and Rain Taxi. She edits the journal CAB/NET out of Denver, where she is working towards a doctorate in English and Creative Writing at the University of Denver.

Going Postal: Rebecca Loudon's Radish King and Navigate, Amelia Earhart's Letters Home

Ravenna Press, 2006
No Tell Books, 2006

Reviewed by Caroline Ashby



Rebecca Loudon’s Radish King and Navigate, Amelia Earhart’s Letters Home – her second book and first chapbook, respectively – both present themselves as collections of correspondence. In the case of Navigate, sender and recipient are clear: Earhart, our speaker, stranded after her Lockheed Elektra went down on or near Howland Island in 1937, has prepared letters and diary entries to friends and family whom she addresses in the poem titles, i.e. “To my Muriel, my doppelganger, my darling, my negative eye” and “To Miss Visser my one and only piano teacher.” (A glance at Earhart’s Wikipedia entry will unlock the mystery to most of the names.)

The poems of Radish King, however, sit inside the front and back of a postcard, but appear to be to and from the unknown. The characters that populate these poems are anonymous hes, shes, and yous that, in my reading – and the book lends itself to many – inhabit the speaker’s fiery and feverish dreams. They send the speaker poems chronicling the dream-memories to which they have been banished, simultaneously allowing and forcing her to piece together her journey through life. And what a brazen journey it’s been.

At first she remembers everything,
then starts slinging it off. The concierge
knows her name, all her lovers
in the same room, pare, paring, parings,


a pool on her pillow when she wakes,
pink or red or blue,
her sick sheets pulled down.

from Radish King’s “Bandaging Starla”

The poems of RK are sodden with hot-blooded sexual encounters, yet “pairings” is strikingly absent from the sequence in this passage, and this is telling. In RK, our speaker fails to connect on anything but a superficial, or bodily, level. Instead of holding fast to the memory of her beloveds, she has shucked them off, one by one. But they keep coming back to haunt her.

Earhart, on the other hand, summons those to whom she is emotionally tied, but is unable to connect physically since she is invisible to the world. She, therefore, is the ghost of Navigate. Consider one entry “From the missing diary:”

Virginia last night I dreamed you at twelve brushing my hair with the little yellow brush brushing brushing gathered my hair at my neck brushed underneath so carefully fifty strokes the handle warm in your hand my head in your lap I could smell you bristle I was bristle and clean fifty strokes to the side my pink ear exposed Ginny with strong hands you smelled of the forest my head full of electricity smelling you now my arms and legs and between my legs bristle with fur I am votre ours à fourrure my head in your lap your hands in my hair.

Earhart is begging and frenzied for contact. But the speaker of RK eschews the kind of nostalgia Earhart embraces, taking pains to writhe herself awake before those dream-memories are received.

In their solitude and delirium, the speakers of Loudon’s two works seem in conversation with one another. To her mother Earhart writes, “Dreamland and my own breath is gossip,” an isolation echoed in RK: “I’m alone in a body that doesn’t remember” (from “The dead-dog scent of lilacs on the last day in April”).

Loudon also allows the vocabulary of both speakers to overlap. In “flicker like a bluegirl under water,” from RK, the speaker says, “…she twisted each button/ on her sweater until it popped,” and Earhart writes, “All my buttons have twisted off.” While “chewing the leaves/ of a pepper tree my lips bleed,” Earhart writes to her sister, Pidge, and RK’s speaker “sing[s] the peppery tulips” in “Safeword.”

As a result of these conjunctions, the speakers (and books) begin to materialize for the reader as siblings under Loudon’s parentage. The speaker in RK is alone in her body, separate and distant from, yet terrorized by the phantoms of memory and imagination. To those back home, Earhart is the phantom, though her folks remain close in Earhart’s mind’s eye. The speakers are each a wing of the same plane, shooting off in opposite directions, but sharing Loudon’s backbone.


From Navigate’s “Where are you Fred?”


I want to tell you how bad it felt
falling and knowing
what a bad idea it was
to have decided against the parachutes

ha ha

I was a seed pod tumbling
thought I could flap my arms
shout your name and Snook’s
join hands
like synchronized swimmers

••••••••••••••••

From Radish King’s “Drinking Perchlorate on the Avenue of the Gods”

I’m sorry your plane went down.
I’m sorry you flailed and spilled your gin.

There is clotted cream on the table,
you are round and soft. You fell
you fell out of the sky.


Radish King and Navigate do indeed “join hands,” each book informing and intensifying a reading of the other. The books are best read in the evening before bed, when one’s own ghosts begin to be roused.


**

Rebecca Loudon is the author of three collections of poetry, including Tarantella (Ravenna Press). She is a violinist with Philharmonia Northwest Chamber Orchestra. She teaches violin to children. She has written the libretti for two choral pieces and a five part song cycle for orchestra and soprano.

**

Caroline Ashby is a graduate student in Library Science and former
private investigator, with a BA in Creative Writing from CUNY Hunter College. She's also an Assistant Editor for Tarpaulin Sky.

Blame Everything on Love: on The Beekeeper's Departure by Jennifer Chapis

Backwards City Publications, 2007

Reviewed by Scott Whitaker






Jennifer Chapis’ work in The Beekeeper’s Departure is more than honey light and tickle, though sensuous texture is layered in the lines and syllables of these poems like a beehive. She has a great ear, and often her ear is at odds with her subject, a tension that is muscle and bone to what I hope will be a continuing body of work. These poems are sensuous yet dangerous places; they are tough lyrics about love, the little deaths that come with love: addiction of a loved one, how two people’s history can hurt a relationship, desires, and the absence of children.

It would be too easy to entertain comparisons to Sylvia Plath and the world of “The Beekeeper’s Daughter,” and like Plath Chapis’s work is elliptical and pretty. But do not take this description of her work: pretty and reduce it to a negative connotation. She wields light and combs beauty out of difficult subjects, in many ways like Plath. But let’s be fair to Chapis and leave Plath here. In this paragraph.

The main subject of Chapis’ poems are love, “I blame everything on love/Old scar stretching neat again” (from Counting Venice Beach). Here the scar is not only love’s history, but also the surgical scar from After Ovarian Surgery where the speaker is “a mother underwater” in a steam bath that threatens to erase the speaker “Her body all steam…Her insides nothing, an itch….” But of course it isn’t that the steam bath is dangerous, it is the weight of the surgery. The steam bath and blueberries of the poem “penetrates and undoes” the speaker and are mute witnesses to an emptiness that threatens to consume. In the later poem Chapis includes directions to care for the incisions, much like Frank Bidart’s patient in “The Arc” directions which grounds the reader in reality “Keep the incisions dry. Bathe them in Bacitracin, vitamin E, let the air nurse them.”

The who in the poems are not as important as the poems themselves. Chapis might be writing about her own experience or the experience of a sister, but it doesn’t really matter; much like the identity of the alcoholic that peaks out from many of these poems. The identities of the subjects are effaced by the emotional landscape, which is the true subject. The alcoholic of these poems could be the lover that astounds her in “Counting Venice Beach” when she says “You are wicked and stunning and remind me/of calculus. Whisky. Those too-smart and dazzling/birds whose genus name/often escapes me” or of that collapsed form of in “Cirrhosis in Verse” that through the poet’s imagination becomes an island, a den where she hangs “heavy drapes,” or again a lover in “The Revisionist Remembers” that “didn’t believe in love until it touched you./Even after six years/your drinking surprised me/every time.”

The poems in The Beekeeper's Departure are populated with bees, berries, steam, the ocean, horses, sex, drinking, and missing children. There is a ruralness to these poems. Not to say the poet is a poet of the country, but the wilderness is as part of the landscape as civility, even when “raining bones over the mountain.”

The speaker seeks to escape history, “the final century,” the boxed wedding gown that’s seen “three closets” and does so finally in the title poem when “history is not behind us” where bees are silent, then “brew,” perhaps a promise of newness to “two aged trees on a beach,” which are the lovers, of course. And the lovers in these poems are “bent on practicing the impossible” and though the tone of the poems are often elegiac, the overall warmth of the images leaves one with a sense of hope, if not for the lovers who populate the poems, then for the language that breathes them.

**

Jennifer Chapis is the author of the chapbook, The Beekeeper's Departur (Backwards City Press 2007) and a limited-edition broadside, "Poem as Tossed Salad" (Center for Book Arts 2002). She has published poems with The Iowa Review, DIAGRAM, Hotel America, McSweeney's, Barrow Street, Quarterly West, the Best New Poets anthology series, and others. Her work was recently recognized with the Florida Review Editor's Prize, GSU Review Poetry Prize, and a Pushcart nomination, and finalist for prizes including the Benjamin Saltman Award, the Brittingham and Pollak Prizes, the Iowa Award, and the Lynda Hull Memorial Poetry Prize. Jennifer is a co-founding editor of Nightbook Books.

**

Scott Whitaker

A Fiddle Pulled from the Throat of a Sparrow by Noah Eli Gordon

New Issues Press, 2007

Reviewed by Michael Flatt









With his sixth book, A Fiddle Pulled from the Throat of a Sparrow, Noah Eli Gordon shows himself to be a prolific writer not only in his fast and steady production, but in his deftness within a number of poetic styles. In this book, he works with the sonnet, narrative poetry, the short poem and the long poem, all brought together in eight sections. His mellifluous form runs from Creeley-like sparseness to a poem that text-wraps the page. He has a great appreciation for the home-run line and image, but remains serious. At all times, he has one eye on the book's overarching subject, which is language.

At first glance, maybe one's first read through the book, it appears that what Gordon studies most closely is man's relationship with the world. Landscapes and objects affect his subjects in unexpected ways, as in the poem "The book of journeys," in which the speaker looks at the sky and feels it is out of place, "each star seemed off kilter." He reexamines and questions the ways that people can and do relate to their environments, thereby creating new spaces for interpretation and experience. His poems form pockets in the universe we know where unknown dimensions exist, where smoke has an indentifiable sound and the night sky isn't necessarily fixed.

Gordon manages to alter perception in the intangible world as well. He deconstructs the frame that man has built for consciousness, that series of imagined understandings that makes being alive comfortable and bearable. Take, for instance, the second half of "A tuning fork turns all this noise to glass."

            miming the music
of one digging a ditch,


            the rough sketch
                        of an abbreviated calm,


                                                a further conjugation of focus
                                    or just something to fill the afternoon--


                                                                        all this work on balance,
                                                            an anodyne for falling in

                                                                                                (p. 10)

When Gordon mentions a "conjugation of focus," he means at once the conjugation of the verb and the conjugation of the act itself. The reader is left to examine how the verb applies differently to different people or groups. Similarly, Gordon points out that the lingual function of abbreviation can have a broader application as well, to moments or feelings.

"A tuning fork turns all this noise to glass" comes from the first section of A Fiddle Pulled from the Throat of a Sparrow, "A Dictionary of Music," which focuses on music as a metaphor for language. Gordon's point seems to be to make the reader fall--and in the poem's conclusion--into his world, or at least fall into his pattern of questioning. In reading his poetry what we are balancing on is the tenuous ground of perceived reality, grasping onto what we know in order to follow him into unfamiliar places.

The other notable subject of "A Dictionary of Music" is death. Gordon seems almost nihilistic when provoking images of emptiness after life in the poem "Phrasing and form." "the terrible skull under such a pretty face / that diner used to be a train car ... everything pretty transitive, aleatoric." Ultimately, the speaker sputteringly concludes, "finality uncomfortably funny." Death is frightening, humorous and, it seems, incidental. Gordon works backwards from the inevitable to find things we can control.

The poet makes an unexpected gesture toward narrative in the following section entitled, "How Human Noun." One might actually see it coming in the epigraph by Gertrude Stein, which reads, "All this has so much to do with grammar and with poetry and with prose." Gordon manages to infuse a feeling of prose into his poetry without taking any radical measures. The poetry in "How Human Noun" works as a compliment to that of the rest of the book.

"How Human Noun" is the story of a marriage, as told in poems that sequentially detail the ceremony scene by scene. The best part is that Gordon completely avoids being sweet. While there are moments of terrific beauty, and the poems are addressed to a counterpart "you," these aren't love poems. They're simply poems about a marriage ceremony. (In fact, his most romantic gesture is formal. Each of the poems is seven lines long and double-spaced, one half of a sonnet.) This is the first poem in the section, entitled, "They said the smallest wooden horse was dead in your costume."

      gone unnoticed the inevitable protagonists accrue

      fragile centipede working rot into unreliable endnotes

      a storm, cicadas, ribbons of smoke above the river

      somewhere else a war

      light falls as usual

      & the hour fails to episodic

      in the most expensive suit I've ever worn

      (p. 28)

Gordon provides a context for his protagonist's thoughts in the line "somewhere else a war," making the ceremony a recognition of beauty ("ribbons of smoke above the river") in the real and troubled world. The day is at once usual and an exception, as the sun still sets, but the anticipation has made for high expectations, some of which are not met. The poet's take on marriage is encompassing and honest.

Turning the page from "How Human Noun" to "Untragic Hero of Epic Theater" is like shifting from fifth gear to second on the freeway. "How Human Noun" lulls the reader into the ease of interpreting complete phrasings and ideas with clear tethers attaching them. "Untragic Hero of Epic Theater" is a much denser read, both formally and conceptually. His imagery becomes more surreal and less steady. Gordon offers far less guidance in this section, giving none of the individual poems its own title. The last line of the first untitled poem connotes the danger that these formal changes imply. "The imperative's wax center & a magnifying glass held to the sun." It is definitely Gordon's hand on the glass's handle, and he's directing the beam at the pliable sense of certainty the preceding section provided the reader.

"Four Allusive Fields" is a short section of four sonnets working from a quote by Roland Barthes concerning his character Cy Twombly. "Who is Cy Twombly? What is it he does? / And what are we to call what he does?" Each of the sonnets begins with the line, "Cy listens absently to absent Homer." That recurring line, as well as recurring images and the nonstandard treatment of the form recalls Ted Berrigan's sonnets. Despite these similarities, it's the differences between Gordon's sonnets and Berrigan's that offer the most information. For one thing, Gordon's sonnets are humorless, while Berrigan's could make an Amish man laugh on the Sabbath. Gordon inherits Berrigan's love for sound, but has a much deeper love for the complex concept. Berrigan was a close follower of Frank O'Hara, while Gordon seems more like an Ashbery kind of guy.

"Book of Names" also calls to mind the second generation New York School. The speaker of these poems addresses characters on a first-name basis the way that Ted and Kenneth (Koch) and Bernadette (Mayer) liked to do in their work. But one gets the feeling that Gordon is naming names less literally, and more for the purpose of studying the process and implications of naming as a practice.

      Why Bernadette? & why David?
      Why Rebecca? Why Mark?
      Why the book of names? Why say yes and no?
      Why a syllable & its buoyancy?

      (p. 60)

"Why the book of names?" is a good question. As music is made a metaphor for language in "A Dictionary of Music," "Book of Names" attempts an understanding of language's origins. The section emphasizes the delicate nature of language in passages that simultaneously connote birth and death in the naming process. "Yesterday / I named // a dead bird / Rebecca." He recognizes in beautiful metaphors that what makes language stable is the collective human decision to make it so.

Given this intricate and enduring consideration of language, it should come as little surprise that Gordon ends the book with a poem featuring an epigraph by Myung Mi Kim, which reads, "Cohere who can say." Kim is a contemporary poet whose multicultural relationship with language allows her a unique authority on the subject. The title of Gordon's poem, "Urge to Call" seems to intentionally mirror the first poem in Kim's first collection, "And Sing We" from Under Flag. Gordon's poem stresses language's inability to predate any of its subjects. "begin with the phrase: it's light outside / with a window, the reshaping of water / to map the shoreline between finger and figure." Gordon's project is to acknowledge the subject and then acknowledge language as his acknowledging tool. The goal provides its own self-perpetuating paradox in that poetry is reliant upon language to acknowledge language.

The structure of A Fiddle Pulled from the Throat of a Sparrow reflects Gordon's Z-A process. He begins with the end in mind in the morbid imagery of "A Dictionary of Music" and ends with a beginning in the final line, which reads, "a child who says: the window shows it's time to get up." This allows Gordon to end the book without ending the discussion of language, our habits with it and uses for it.

A Fiddle Pulled from the Throat of a Sparrow is an enriching book in the sense that each read provides more information as to its creation and construction. A single reading shows a collection of sections that it is difficult to recognize as a book. But reading further, one notices strands of sinew binding the work as a single body: a line borrowed from a poem in one section to provide the title for another section, the staid attention to language itself. One would hasty to decide that the widely variegated sections struggle to inform each other. Like any great artist, Gordon asks the reader to struggle to inform himself.

**

Noah Eli Gordon’s books include Novel Pictorial Noise (selected by John Ashbery for the 2006 National Poetry Series), Inbox (BlazeVOX, 2006), The Area of Sound Called the Subtone (Ahsahta Press, 2004; selected by Claudia Rankine for the Sawtooth Prize), and The Frequencies (Tougher Disguises, 2003). Ugly Duckling Presse recently published That We Come To A Consensus, a chapbook written in collaboration with Sara Veglahn. His reviews and essays have appeared in dozens of journals, including Boston Review, The Poker, 26, Jacket, and The Poetry Project Newsletter. He writes a chapbook review column for Rain Taxi, and teaches at the University of Colorado at Denver.

**

Michael Flatt was born in Syracuse, raised in Tully and also calls Buffalo his home. He currently studies and teaches at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

The Line by Jennifer Moxley

The Post-Apollo Press, 2007

Reviewed by Matthew M. Gagnon





“In the liminal all times converge,” writes Jennifer Moxley in her fourth book of poems The Line. By skillfully evoking the past, present, and future, Moxley limns the in-between state of experience, the hours kept at bay by an associative mind. In this dream-state, the speaker of the poems, or the “you” that weaves through them, is occupied by trial and is henceforth affected by conditions that hinder or challenge the mark of history and a subject’s relationship with the orders of time and memory. In this sense, we are housed within the constructions of physical and mental spaces, as well as by the larger idea of the polis on the hill that are central to Moxley’s interconnected prose poems.

In the poem, “Awake,” the speakers says: “The flesh envies the word’s longevity but not its delayed effects.” The speaker’s bind conjures how words enter the blood stream of history and enjoy a circulation that’s more stable than memory, or what we desire to retain as knowledge. However “delayed” the word might be, it promotes its own action outside of belief, in terms of it being lodged in-between speaker and its intended target.

The speaker in the title poem, “The Line,” instructs that “You will walk out of the visible and learn to accept the darkness. You will find the line.” What is the line that Moxley has in mind? It is partially a register of the ideal of utterance, which moves freely through time, as opposed to a diachronic understanding of the movement of time through history. “The Line” ends with a provocation to write: “Find time in words. Replace yourself cell by letter, let being be the alphabetic equation, immortality stay the name.” The complexity of the statement is suggestive of a larger vision that runs through The Line. I read the “cell” as the necessary structural unit of our physical body. It also implicitly mirrors the enclosure of a cell whose nature is to impede mobility: a devised place where deviation from social standards is ostensibly dealt with. By this transfer of “cell by letter,” Moxley seems to suggest that while words certainly bear the fruit of history, there is a naming that transcends physical borders, whether private or public.

Moxley’s prose poems, or machines constructed of precise words, invite the reader to share the burden of engagement with self and other, to partake in a state of being where personal myth is manufactured even as “material evidence contradicts memory.” This is more than a mapping of our social location. From “The Cover-Up”:

      That was an under-motivate lie that has no eye on the future. You’ve met others, artful people who repress their feelings in order to distort time. Because they cringe at the force of the past they cultivate cultural amnesia. How do they do this? If they have money or power anyone who dares contradict them is seen as envious and petty. If they are as yet unknown, they threaten their friends with the divulgence of their unattractive secrets. If they are notorious they remain quiet.

      They encourage others to reveal themselves and then store these confessions as ammunition. They leak poisoned hints about brewing conspiracies in order to distract from their own schemes. They play on fear and guilt. They invent instances of injustice to rally the people to arms. As the crowd seethes with righteous anger, they sneak out the back.

What Moxley employs through this passage is not only an urgency local to our own socio-political status, but an urgency of self concerned with reputation and power. In effect, we are marked by an interior life that operates despite of, or in spite of, the clamor of the past on the consciousness. Moxley’s use of the pronoun “they” invites a reading that’s engaged with an insidious oligarchic mainframe holding the public, its individual and collective consciousness, with as much distain as the earth we stand on. However, the “you” of the poem is not designed as innocent individuation when juxtaposed with the State and its public servants. As much as we would like to entertain the notion of our innocence, we are afflicted by our own relation to these power structures; our subjectivity is implicated and countered by the line of time, and Moxley as a guide shows us through perfect syntax, that “I am exactly like them. I neither forgive nor forget.”

All of this is not to suppress the intensive scope of interior distinctions, such as the various states of living domestically and within a kind of twilight zone, which occupies a space between sleep and initial waking. The narratives of how we inhabit these spaces are a complex web of disclosures and loss: consciousness and Ego are alive and well, but are tampered with by self, other, and the ideal of writing. Consider “Elsewhere Here”:

For 40 pages your eyelids have stood guard against the bright early morning sunlight. On the surface of your sleep-life renegade sentences have puzzled each other into impotent shapes. En route to delirium the depleted conductor of your weaving consciousness oversees the work. Knowing that this display of mental agility—no passive amniotic reception—is never present in waking life, the agitated pleasure you feel in the exercise has become heartbreakingly seductive. Should you get up? Could the threshold be traversed by other means? Is there a brilliant mode of comprehension your consciousness denies you? Yes. The knowledge that accrues without your knowledge refines the pleasure of alienation, processes undesired stimuli, and the whispered exchange of mysterious data. By closing your eyes you have become a permeable environment: the taunting paradox of all that you know, just out of reach inside your own head.

What Moxley considers and displays are the rich underpinnings of our brain’s multiple actions. Here, these actions are linguistically charged to carry over into a substratum of doubt, delirium, and contradiction. This poem as others do in The Line, call upon difference and the tenuous negotiation between a so-called field of polar opposites, as in reading the unread—a passivity that self inhabits in sleep or the “permeable environment”—and finding those value systems whose power and logic entwine our lives, or in other words, make us punctilious citizens of the world. These kinds of inhabitancy are erected with sound and sense in Moxley’s 43 prose poems that encompass The Line. The sensations therein are real and perhaps, dear reader, “What you know seems useless next to what you don’t.”

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Jennifer Moxley is the author of Imagination Verses (Salt, 2003), The Sense Record (Salt, 2003), and Often Capital (Flood Editions, 2005). She has translated two works by Jacqueline Risset, The Translations Begins and Sleep's Powers. She currently teaches at the University of Maine in Orono.

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Matthew M. Gagnon grew up in northeastern Massachusetts and has since lived in Vermont, Colorado, and western Massachusetts. He is currently a student at the University of Massachusetts MFA Program for Poets & Writers in Amherst. His review of Graham Foust's Necessary Stranger is appearing in the most recent issue of Octopus Magazine.

Necessary Stranger by Graham Foust

Flood Editions, 2006

Reviewed by Kaethe Schwehn



      “Don’t
      just say there—signify something”

Thus commands the speaker in Graham Foust’s book, Necessary Stranger. In many ways, this intellectual imperative is the guiding tension of the work itself. Foust’s book is a reminder of the three-dimensional quality of our world, not simply in terms of dimensions of space, but in terms of qualities of knowing. Foust’s objects go beyond “saying” and “signifying” in a one-dimensional way: they metamorphosize and suggest and remind and synthesize as well. The book, however, is not simply a “Note on Ontology,” as the title of one poem suggests; rather, it is the experience of a world in which the static forms of things have been broken and dismembered in which, as Emily Dickinson notes in the epigraph, “Things are not what they are—”

Poetry should only meddle/canoodle/schmooze with philosophy insofar as it provides an experience or enactment of the philosophical concepts themselves—otherwise “philosophical” poems simply begin to sound like Kantian greeting cards. (This book, I might add, is definitely not one that shouts “read me with Hegel”). Necessary Stranger succeeds because of the craft that accompanies the ideas; after all, many of the ideas are not really new (we’ve been trying to describe our broken and fractured world a la “The Wasteland” for quite some time).

The poems are short. Only a handful of them run over a page in length and many are composed of lines consisting of five words or less. Foust relies mainly on syntax, line breaks, rhyme and repetition to keep us reading carefully. The repetition is perhaps what fascinated me the most. Some of the repetition is simple: repeated phrases such as

      you care for me
      You care for me

Simple enough. These two lines exist in a stanza by themselves. But look at the lines that frame them:

      You be careful if

      you care for me.
      You care for me

      you carry me to you.

The simple declaration repeated in the central stanza becomes both warning and moment of intimacy, a pushing away and a pulling toward. Sometimes the repeated phrase varies slightly so that we are forced to ponder the shift in meaning caused by the addition of a single word or syllable or letter:

      Pretended you don’t bleed. Pretended
      to not bleed. Pretended
      not to bleed. Ran cold water on it.

      Meanwhile, winter
      busied, winter
      buried, winter
      bruised.

      ****************

      The poem is
      the poem’s is

      a snag.

The repetition serves a variety of purposes in both of these examples (taken from the poems “Formal” and “Day Job,” respectively). We could debate for quite awhile the difference between “Pretended/ to not bleed” and “Pretended/ not to bleed” or discuss the conflation of busied/buried/bruised. For me the specifics are not as interesting as the experience itself. Dickinson claims “things are not what they are—.” This may be true, but I think for Foust the greater problem is that things ARE what they are…and myriad other things as well. A tree IS a tree and “a gust/ of blood;” the sky IS sky, but also the “sky is tar is grass is trees.” But this is not simply a case of metaphoric overdose, it is the poetic dilemma of trying to describe an object, an event, or a person in a way that gives it humanity and multi-dimensionality.

This struggle is perhaps most aptly presented in the poem “Two Versions of the Same Watery, Domestic Poem” in which Foust offers us two versions of a loved one leaving. The first version happens in past tense: “A lake unfroze and/ broke—its water looked for us.// Dim spring storms clicked/ our windows until June.” The speaker remembers a specific forgotten object: “You left and you left/ an earring in/ the bed.// I took it/ for a little rearview mirror.” The second version is told in present tense and the earring is again described, this time as “Glint, be it tin/ or diamond/ or idea.” What is perceived by the speaker is not the thing itself but the qualities of the thing, its possibilities of being. Ultimately within the poem, the earring is many things: physical object, nostalgic reminder, metaphor, suggestion, and idea.

Well, great. A multidimensional earring. Who cares? Why does this matter?

It matters because, as Foust reminds us, we live in a world where “Our words keep ramming/ into nothing into masks.” To settle for a single dimension, a single representation results in only bad things: bad first dates, limited reading lists, and pesky wars in places such as...umm...Iraq. Foust’s book is a reminder that even daily objects should be strange to us, that in order for us to be honest observers of who and what surrounds us, it is necessary—at times—for us to act as strangers among them.

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Born in Knoxville, Tennessee and raised in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, Graham Foust currently lives in Oakland, California with his wife and son. He is the author of As in Every Deafness, Leave the Room to Itself, and Necessary Stranger, and he teaches in the graduate and undergraduate programs at Saint Mary's College of California.

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Kaethe Schwehn's poems have been published in or are forthcoming from jubilat, Flim Forum, Crazyhorse, Forklift, Ohio, Faultline, and The Literary Review. Kaethe studied creative writing at the University of Montana and is a recent graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She currently teaches at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota. Her dog, Luxy, is named after the city in Egypt, not the casino is Las Vegas.