Sight Progress by Zhang Er, translated by Rachel Levitsky, with the author

Pleasure Boat Studio, 2006
Reviewed by Elizabeth Robinson


The Emily Cheung's art on the cover of Sight Progress gives a useful indication of what poet Zhang Er means by "sight" and "progress." The image billows and circles, as though it is both rising above and surrounding three brightly colored "targets," each a nexus in itself. One of the billows is smoky, threatening to dissipate into the atmosphere, while another is a black outline, both better defined and more empty, ephemeral, than its counterpart. Thus it manifests that for Zhang Er, vision–-in both its literal and imaginative terms–-does not function in the mode of linear narrative, but like a rhythmic or melodic pattern, "a thin and tender female voice trailing, almost child-like as it drifts from the other shore as a white wave or mist, coming close, then closer, before slipping away." In keeping with that vision, Zhang Er's poems in this collection couple sharp (especially visual) perceptions with a tidal sense of forward movement and retraction.

The collection, a series of prose poems, makes maximal use of linearity implied in narrative and prose constructions. The language is direct and mostly quite plainspoken. Rachel Levitsky's translation seems right on the mark in this sense, as it abets the poems in doing their work without fuss or unnecessary adornment (though at times it might have been helpful to more strongly assert an idiomatic English syntax). Form and translation coalesce to underline the forward movement of prose even as the poems continually voice doubt at the possibility of such 'progress.' The tone of this writing is consistently controlled and never showy, yet the tension between forward movement and the aporia that places a drag on such motion slowly wraps around the reader to create a compelling tension. The poem "Today," for instance "Goes straight into history, to a day in the future when I'll look back on it. I'll remember how the sea rises, how the heavens condescend, and the moment they meet, a little cloudy . . ." The projective movement into the future is immediately turned on its head as the speaker, in a feat of the paradoxical, anticipates looking back on it. The seam of future and past meets only cloudily, or perhaps as a palimpsest, the writing of which recommences over and over, as in "Begin Again" when one must "Turn over the page, full with writing, begin again on the back with a new line." Here, the meeting of past and present acquires a literally and figuratively painful aspect, as the page flips and "an accidental slice, the hand bleeding again at paper's edge." Thus the tug between future and past, between affirmation and pessimism leads to the necessity of the present, a seam that is variously cloudy and cutting but is, in the end, all that we have. Zhang Er then refashions necessity as resourcefulness, "Only necessity, imagination's necessity, to stretch beyond the restriction of a lifetime."

The reader enters this poetry as a swirling current that moves with acuity, and even frequent pleasure, amid the material details of the world while the poems question what, if anything, moves at the center of experience: "It all happened here. Yet, nothing happens here." Coupled with that doubt is a muted yet insistent critique of the woman's role in society. Often this thematic thread is connected with Zhang Er's Chinese heritage, but opens outward as well to a pointed examination at the feminine in other realms– western religion or familial arrangements in which wives and daughters are expected to sacrifice themselves for the benefit of men. The aptly titled "Sacrifice," makes this especially evident. Zhang Er writes that the woman's "endurance, the drudgery, bearing the weight while abstaining . . . grows his career, social advance, wealth, not her fortitude." At a time when many younger women step back from allying themselves with feminism, even claiming (wrongly, in my view) that gender discrimination is no longer an issue, Zhang Er's certitude is bracing and admonitory: for a woman, "success is survival, not self-sacrifice."

A relevant peculiarity of these poems is that the sentence construction frequently effaces the subject (e.g. "One Just Divorced and the Other Just Married" begins: "Driving together up the rambling, circuitous mountain road . . ."). This may be an artifact of the poem's origins in the syntax of another language; I can't comment knowledgeably on this. However, the results mark the poems in interesting ways. Firstly, by omitting a subject, the reader is implicated in the process of the poem, becoming that subject; at the same time, identity or subjectivity emerges slowly, so that in the aforementioned poem, it only slowly develops that the protagonists are females traveling in Italy. There's a small shock at the end, when one of the emergent protagonists of the poem "notices everyone looking. At the two of them, the only women there." The absent subject is suddenly quite present, multiple, and female. It's a striking way to get across the continuing otherness of feminine experience.

The book works its own expansion and contraction through varying subjectivities, eras, geographies, and cultures. Zhang Er peers steadfastly into the details that comprise incident and meaning without forcing final conclusions upon what she's absorbed. "Like wind," she writes, "you can hear it, feel its very temperature, but you can't grab its form." At times, this elusiveness elicits feelings of oppression, terror, perhaps awe. To be a an untethered explorer of the world has its perils; "Out past the sight of shore you lose your direction, your focus/aim" and find yourself displaced, "lacking all anchor of support." The risk required here comes of that necessity inherent to survival. And it has its payoff, for in pushing at the boundaries, beyond the progress of what one can daily cull by sight, the explorer makes for a more elastic, if sometimes overwhelming, world. Zhang Er writes, "There is a saying,' Imagination needs room to make art that lives.'" Sight Progress offers a brave and honest engagement at the border crossing of imagination and survival.

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Zhang Er was born in Beijing, China and moved to New York City in 1986. Her poetry, non-fiction writing, and essays have appeared in publications in Taiwan, China, the American émigré community and in a number of American journals. She is the author of multiple books in Chinese and in English translation. She has read from her work at international festivals, conferences, reading series and universities in China, France, Portugal, Russia, Peru, Singapore, Hong Kong as well as in the U.S. She currently teaches at Evergreen-Tacoma.

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Elizabeth Robinson is the author of numerous books of poetry, including Pure Descent, winner of the National Poetry Series, Apprehend, winner of the Fence Modern Poets Series, Under that Silky Roof, House Made of Silver, and Bed of Lists. She has been awarded the Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative Poetry and a grant from the Fund for Poetry. She is co-editor of 26, a magazine of poetry and poetics, EtherDome, a press dedicated to publishing the work of emerging women poets, and Instance Press.

Chanteuse/Cantatrice by Catherine Daly

Factory School, 2007
Reviewed by Laura Goldstein


Catherine Daly’s 2007 publication Chanteuse/Cantatrice asks readers to grapple with the concept of the binary as soon as they encounter the book itself: the book has two names, two covers and, as listed in the table of contents, each poem has two titles. This very basic setup soon proliferates into a multitude of possibilities for reading and interpreting the text. Daly offers a comment about the book on Powells.com in an attempt to clarify:

It is called Chanteuse / Cantatrice. It is a two sided book; it can be read either front to back, top of the page to bottom (as one generally reads English) but for a completely different but also "written" book, it can be read from back to front, bottom to top. Hence the odd-seeming title; it is two titles, for two books in one! It is a book of political poetry about collaboration!

Although her statement helps to begin to consider the doubling in the framework as a basis for interpretation, it doesn’t seem to actually be possible to follow these directions. Attempting to read the book from “back to front, bottom to top”, all of the words are upside-down. However, this openness suggests a crucial consideration about our modern political role as citizens given directives: each individual (individual person, individual reader) must ultimately find their own way to cope with the material that composes their lives. The book is ostensibly an extended meditation on war-- its impact, its language, and the difficulty of using language to describe it. Making this an apparent task that can be explored through reading as well, Daly raises the political stakes of the book as she claims that

      The book is a privileged method of exchange
                                          medium

This said (or written) early on, she constructs a space in which she can remain aware of her own involvement in historical process as a poet. Also, through such innovative spacing, she insists on the importance of structure as meaning in the political nature of text as well, and demands that the reader become an active participant.

With both titles, she has announced that she has stepped into the role of singer along with that of poet. The role of the singer is also split in the titles: the word “chanteuse” and the word “cantatrice” have almost the same meaning of “female singer”. However, “chanteuse” tends to imply that the singing takes place in a bar or club, while “cantatrice” refers to an opera singer. So which venue is this, high verse or common language? Daly’s language constantly oscillates, blends and finds new spaces within both, searching for a juncture that may somehow adequately describe our real experiences that exist between ideals and the mundane.

The first section of the book, called “Chanteuse” is a prelude that lays out the terms of the project by flipping between description and demonstration. Like Muriel Rukeyser, Daly uses both form and content to convey these political messages. In her use of voice, she finds it imperative to include self-examination in this mode. She immediately locates the question driving her method, asking “is singing saying?”(1) Soon, the answers start to roll in on continually varying metaphors connecting the evolution of song to subjects in the world that are in motion, that make sound themselves:

      Croon amphibious landing craft,
      Subatomic particle, we navigate by sound and range

The poems are themselves suggestions for how one may respond, by finding the sound within language and using it to answer back to forces that act upon one in the world.

In this way, a singer uses the element of projected voice to express personal and social concerns, making the personally traumatic a cause for public examination. In the book, her primary voice consistently breaks into other voices, showing that a contemporary subjectivity has absorbed and must include many. Daly constructs a complex melody that follows traditions, but also strays and surprises. She develops a unique form for these poems throughout the book by creating patterns of text and space, where single words become emphasized in the course of her song, and spaces provide a rhythm.

This kind of play between voice and silence is at the whirling core of her use and examination of the binary, exacerbated into a deep divide between those we identify as other in times of war. In poem after poem, Daly finds ways to use doubling as a poetic that might provide an antidote. For instance, she repeats elements of language in the retelling of an event in order to reveal the double nature of identity when hiding oneself during war:

            accidentally dropped her handbag
      packed with a handgun
      an officer reached to pick it up            for her—
      she managed to beat him to it,
            not beat him with it (4)

So how can the other that is created in war be resolved or what is “collaboration linked with peace”? (20) We are challenged to become her collaborators by bridging the traditional binary created between writer and reader, contributing our decisions about reading in various ways and joining her in this project. Although her directions can’t be followed to the letter to read the book in two ways, the gestures towards such conditions open up even subtler poetics. A new title at the end of each poem provides a profoundly “other” tone for the space after reading a poem, suggesting that rereading it “backwards” means remembering it in the context of the new title. In this new definition, Daly reconsiders the stigma that has been placed on the word “collaboration” as it emerges from contexts of war by showing that war isolates us as far as it can—first into groups and finally into a state of fierce survival as individuals. She writes, “we worked/ together to make/ collaboration a dirty word” (17). However, we are asked to participate in a resurrection of the term and social activity of collaboration, by preventing the song that has emerged from trauma from remaining an individual voice that is simple and directive, and that merely perpetuates the dynamic of trauma. Daly asks us to help transform the poetry into a message that we must not only listen to from many perspectives but must add to with our own actions.

Her procedure is itself a method that ”upsets inherited modes of life, loosens control of traditional authorities” (4) and ultimately provides many layers for various types of readers to gain access to the piece using language play, self-reference, page space, the structure of the book itself and direct political content. Above all, Daly demonstrates the height of human creative freedom through critical thinking that she finds the lack of the most criminal aspect of war, as well as possibly the cause of it. Here, her form creates an awareness of the value and importance of other viewpoints, actually providing gestures towards answers that can only be completed through collaboration.

**

Catherine Daly is the author of a number of poetry collections, including DaDaDa (Salt Publishing, 2003), Locket (Tupelo Press, 2005), Secret Kitty (Ahadada Press, 2006), Paper Craft (Moria Press, 2006), To Delite and Instruct (blue lion books, 2006), Chanteuse/Cantatrice (factory school, 2007), and the forthcoming Vauxhall (Shearsman Press, 2008). She is a teacher and software developer of online business applications for various clients, shttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifuch as Fox, Goldman Sachs, NASA, and Universal. She has been teaching on and off since an undergraduate teacher’s assistantship in the History of Mathematics. Daly taught the first online poetry workshops in the UCLA Extension’s Writers’ Program in addition to critical theory, women’s studies, and literature courses at UCLA Extension, Antioch LA, West LA College, LA Southwest College, and elsewhere. She has written a longtime blog titled “A List, A Misc.”

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Laura Goldstein is an experimental writer and multi-media artist whose poems have been published in print journals as well as online. Recent work can be found at The Little Magazine and PFS Post. She teaches writing at Loyola University and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and lives and performs in Chicago. Her first chapbook, Ice In Intervals, is due out from Hex Press this summer.

I'm The Man Who Loves You by Amy King

BlazeVOX [books], 2007
Reviewed by Brandi Homan





The title poem from Amy King’s I’m The Man Who Loves You serves as an example of one of King’s true strengths: her confidence. She says:

I began this day by celebrating the hour of my conception
and a simultaneous abandonment of complete non-existence; (34)

Such self-confidence is evident throughout the rest of the work as well, but let’s be clear that it is not arrogance, either unearned or earned—it’s exuberance. King has an unabashed willingness to abandon “non-existence,” to claim her space in the world. “She won’t adhere / to personal space. / She won’t appear / as a potted plant” (71).

As we continue to wade through the aftermath resulting from Chicago Review’s recent articles questioning the nature of the relationship between gender and (especially “experimental” or “avant-garde”) poetry, King’s desire to dive in and both embrace and upend traditional gender roles is refreshing. She continues:

I put on my long black dream and stepped into the world of women
to live among my female brothers who know how to grow
up on ink that occasionally vanishes & candles that eat at the wick;
(34)

The choice of the phrase “female brothers” presents readers with a quandary—Is King intentionally playing with the notion that feminism has been accused of trying to give women “masculine” traits in order to ascertain status? Why not “sisters”? Or is she self-consciously attempting to feminize male writers by assigning their fraternity the “female” title? Instead, the compounding of the two words draws attention to the ever-confusing, and ultimately failing, terminology surrounding gender roles, here specifically among artists.

As much as King, throughout, urges us (and in the previous quote, women writers in particular) to step forward and accept our lives and ourselves, she does so in a way that is disarmingly inclusive, reminding us to “Be small, o person” (74). She looks at our species with a beneficent eye, saying “…it’s amazing how children never quite come to resemble / their grown-up-middle-aged bodies” (64). While these lines could be interpreted as simply name-calling (adults behaving like children), the phrasing suggests that we are, at our most basic, children who should be looked upon with kindness stemming from that very fact—much like how we view our own children. Not that this tendency toward compassion is surprising from King, consider the community-building work that she does with the well-recognized online journal, MiPOesias.

Yet King is not naïve about the relentless potential for expanse (resulting from both human nature and the advent of the digital age) and cruelty that lies between humans in contemporary society:

… The smallest story of two people coming
Together imitates a circus tent in winter holding
Everyone beneath it. (15)

Here, King is acknowledging the “infinite distances” between even the closest people that Rilke has referred to, continuing on elsewhere to complicate the shakiness of relationships further by bringing in that which has the utmost potential for disembodiment: technology.

In his book Some Ether, Nick Flynn refers to the term “Angelization” (coined by Marshall McLuhan), which Flynn describes as “the process / by which any technology disembodies us.” King addresses this erosion several times throughout I’m The Man Who Loves You, compiling examples of answering machines, cables, hybrid vehicles, and digital photos, as in the following:

…I’m attaching a computer-shot photograph
so you know what I mean or can at least see
a pixilated version of my face as it thinks
your name… (77)

King brings the two ideas together—the instability of our relations with one another resulting from nature as well as technology—in phrases like:

…Someone should study
The extracting power one has with another: only everything’s
A signal when you turn your radar on. (15)

I’m The Man Who Loves You is just such a study, with just such a predicament. With so much happening so fast, so often, in today’s society, how are we to determine which signals ultimately have meaning?

King’s underlying compassion does not, however, keep her from being sharp-nosed about the state of the world and our country. In a book filled with highly charged, subversive political commentary, she knows what we’re up against:

…Ultimately, what
is this for—what is it: days of finger clipping,
an elbow of personal risk to maintain state-wide
funding, and a gun using things
you love against you. (56)

But King’s promotion of self and species—plus her slant toward the political—are big-picture issues, and I’m The Man Who Loves You provides many more concrete lyrical pleasures. The book is varied, from often startling word choices to the different lengths/styles/subjects King employs. I’m The Man Who Loves You is organized alphabetically, which is potentially a risk; however, because the work itself takes so many risks, leaps, this choice seems congruent with the scope of her project.

Juxtaposed with outlandish detail, her declarative, assertive moments work well, keeping the poems from being too tongue-in-cheek or abstract. Similarly, moments of mini-narrative help keep readers grounded. Her blunt, apt titles are thoroughly enjoyable (a few favorites being “I’ve Only Got One of Me in Here” and “Yes, You”). She also frequently plays with sound, as evidenced by these lines from “On the Way to Dinner, An Objective Remark Written Down,” combining sibilance, alliteration, and assonance into a veritable aural bouquet:

…A cunning clay
can, a little pan, red devil hot pulp kiss and then the gin’s
sheen lipped across your streaming teeth slips back lick. (53)

Even though King does something that there should be more of in contemporary poetry—addresses the sociopolitical aspects of life in the 21st century head on—I’m The Man Who Loves You accomplishes much more. It is disjointed, beautifully grotesque, and unsparing, yet it is ultimately hopeful, kind, and entertaining. In “I Used to Be Amy King,” King says, “…we are bred to be the best neglected fun, forthcoming” (32). Believe you me, King is this type of fun. I’m The Man Who Loves You is not to be neglected. This book is for anyone who has ever stepped into, or wanted to step into, their own “long black dream.”

**

Amy King is the author of I’m The Man Who Loves You and Antidotes for an Alibi, both from Blazevox Books, The People Instruments (Pavement Saw Press), and most recently, Kiss Me With the Mouth of Your Country (Dusie Press). She is the editor of the Poetics List, sponsored by The Electronic Poetry Center (SUNY-Buffalo/University of Pennsylvania) and teaches English and Creative Writing at SUNY Nassau Community College. Her poems have been nominated for several Pushcart Prizes, and she has been the recipient of a MacArthur Scholarship for Poetry. Amy King was also the 2007 Poet Laureate of the Blogosphere. She is currently editing an anthology, The Urban Poetic, forthcoming from Factory School.

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Brandi Homan is the author of Hard Reds, forthcoming from Shearsman Books in September, and Two Kinds of Arson, a chapbook from dancing girl press. She is editor-in-chief of Switchback Books.

The Wintering Barn: A Story by Leslie Jamison

Burnside Review Press, 2007
Reviewed by Kristina Marie Darling




In Leslie Jamison’s The Wintering Barn, Napoleon’s army collides head-on with savants, scholars, and the Pasha of Egypt, setting the stage for a quirky, unpredictable chapbook of fiction. Depicting the journey of Etienne, a researcher who specializes in animals, as he accompanies the French army on a military campaign, Jamison’s work delves into provocative subjects – of which prostitution, infidelity, and the excesses of European royalty are merely a few examples – while remaining lyrical and lighthearted throughout. Combining the metaphors of a finely crafted poem with intriguing characters and an unmistakable narrative voice, The Wintering Barn presents an engaging portrait of Etienne, dazzling readers with exotic locales and evocative images all the while.

In depicting the protagonist’s journey, Leslie Jamison’s use of recurring images to structure the chapbook is impressive. Divided into several episodes, each taking place in a different time and place, these sections are gracefully woven together through repeated descriptions of giraffes, albeit in different contexts. Stating early in the chapbook that Etienne’s love interest, Claude, had recently purchased a giraffe in Egypt, Jamison writes: “He turned over the receipt to show an animal whose edges were furry where the ink had smeared. It looked like a horse whose neck had been pulled like taffy. It was stretched next to a tree. They were the same size. I tried to imagine the corpse I had seen in the desert – what would it have looked like alive, standing on four crooked legs?”(5). Reappearing in Marseilles, again in Egypt, and at the end of the chapbook, such descriptions often serve as links between scenes, settings, and characters. Structured more poetically than a typical short story, The Wintering Barn is subtle and innovative in its use of imagery to forge connections between plot elements.

The structure of the chapbook works well with the repeated themes and motifs in the text, which often deal with romances that could have blossomed had circumstances been different. Ranging from Etienne’s love for Claude to Claude’s failed marriage, these unfulfilled relationships are depicted across several different times and places, linked by common imagery that shifts with the plot of the chapbook. Jamison writes, for example: “I think of Claude: asking questions about the color of the sky, dipping slick plums in sugar, clutching that receipt in the midst of awful dreams. He never met the animal he bought. Maybe it never existed. Paint me next to it, he might have said. To show the height”(17). Depicting the unexplored possibility of Etienne’s relationship with Claude alongside the dream of a spectacular pet giraffe that never materialized, Jamison’s imagery unites plot elements while further illuminating them. Suggesting that, like the exotic animal that Claude never met, his relationship with Etienne remains both majestic and impossible, Jamison’s shifting images and fragmented text render familiar themes both relatable and suddenly strange.

The Wintering Barn is an enigmatic, intelligent read. Anyone who enjoys fiction that is quirky and lyrical throughout will be missing out if they don’t add Leslie Jamison’s chapbook to their collection. Five stars.

**

Leslie Jamison has recently published work in A Public Space, Tin House, Black Warrior Review and Best New American Voices 2008. She lives in New Haven, Connecticut.

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Kristina Marie Darling is a graduate of Washington University in St. Louis. She is the author of four chapbooks, including Fevers and Clocks (March Street Press, 2006) and The Traffic in Women (Dancing Girl Press, 2006). A Pushcart Prize nominee in 2006, her poems, reviews, and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Janus Head, Rattle, The Mid-America Poetry Review, Rain Taxi, The Adirondack Review, The Main Street Rag, The Mid-American Review, Jacket, Redactions: Poetry and Poetics, and other journals. Recent awards include residencies from the Centrum Foundation and the Mary Anderson Center for the Arts.

this big fake world: a story in verse by Ada Limón

Pearl Editions, 2007
Reviewed by Sea S. Perez





This big fake world, Ada Limón’s second book and winner of the Pearl Poetry Prize, begins with a hypothesis:

      If this place that we live in includes
      the kid with the chemicals and the lot
      of old boats and carpet squares covered
      with a sea of rocks from any given river,
      wouldn’t two people deserve to meet here,
      somewhere down the street before the light
      turns green, or before their hearts explode
      from one dumb tragedy or another. (1)

Limón’s “story in verse” proves that a woman at the hardware store, a man in the grey suit (our hero), and our hero’s friend, Lewis (the drunk), can remind us “that we have all come out of basic need, / some gnawing thing, some hunger” (1).

The narrative revolves around our hero, a traveling businessman in an unsatisfying marriage. What separates this big fake world from most stories of middle class dystopia is Limón’s unique way of crafting the inner life of her characters:

      His wife said, “If you were a movie star,
      you’d be Mark Harmon.”

      He got up then, left the door open
      and walked down toward the river.

      Mark Harmon wasn’t really
      a movie star—and she knew it.

      He felt safe among the warehouses
      with all their “wares” so useful.

      One warehouse said IDEAL FIRE
      in the color of wheelbarrow rust.

      He thought it was strange
      that what they made were fire

      extinguishers. The “ideal fire”
      being the fire one could easily put out. (14)

Our hero, to escape his passionless marriage, becomes infatuated by the hardware store woman and expresses this passion by buying nails from her. His garage fills will every kind of nail, yet he has “nothing to fix, but maybe himself.” He even begins a note to his wife (which he later crumbles) that began: “[b]eing I have so many nails, I wish to be useful to someone” (51).

That someone, ironically, is the hardware store lady, who shares our hero’s sense of loneliness and alienation. In “A Particular Fast Food and Its Particular Brand of Melancholy,” Limón sketches our heroine’s life:

      It only happens when she passes
      Kentucky Fried Chicken, especially
      Kentucky Fried Chicken in other countries
      with long lines and bright posters
      that make things look familiar,
      but not necessarily appetizing.

      Then she wonders, What part of the human
      body is kindness stored in,
      where is it situated in the bone?
      When will she be able to wish her ex-husband
      good luck and mean it,
      be a well-wisher, a do-gooder, get wings?

      Is it something she could see, some sharp
      bony mass sticking out of the ribs?
      If it was fried, could she eat it?
      The neon signs in Kentucky Fried Chicken
      make it simple, but more hurtful in a way,
      saying, it’s just been too long since she’s
      had a family bucket, a biscuit,
      been called a good girl. (21)

While this big fake world follows a typical narrative arc, there’s no other poet that so naturally weaves story and verse, humor and sadness. The “familiar” story becomes unexpectedly appetizing through Limón’s singular ability to “make a fire out of everyday things” (66).

The main tension in this collection is between our hero and our heroine, but the most interesting character by far is Lewis, the drunk and our hero’s friend. Limón depicts Lewis through letters he writes to Ronald Reagan:

Dear Ronald,

I was watching the Discovery Channel a couple of weeks ago and learned about the whale shark […] Ronald, its mouth is six feet across. That’s just an inch taller than I am. That mouth could swallow me lengthwise. Ever since I’ve learned about that mouth, I haven’t stopped thinking about it. […] I have been wanting to be swallowed whole, Ronald. I have not told my best friend or the people at the beer distributors. I feel phenomenally selfish about it. I want that swallowing-mouth all to myself. I want it to take me in, in its big mouth, and keep me there until I grow old in its warm, warm belly, floating in this big fake world. (58)

Limon creatively shows us the emotional contours of her characters as they make their way through “this big fake world.” Granted, Limón’s epistolary shift is rather strange, the letters are convincingly humorous and sad, which is to say they are convincingly human.

This big fake world builds into a parable about redemption and refuge. In a world that doesn’t fit into a manageable snow globe, the characters learn to deal with their own uselessness, emptiness, sadness, and “other big dumb words in the dictionary” (37). I don’t want to spoil the story, but rest assured that the characters find small ways to satisfy their basic need for love—that gnawing thing, that hunger. Limón’s story in verse teaches us to “hold close to the lost and the unclear, / and, in our own odd little way, find some refuge here” (66).

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Ada Limón is originally from Sonoma, California. A graduate of the Creative Writing Program at New York University, she won the Chicago Literary Award for Poetry and has received fellowships from the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She works as the Copy Director for GQ Magazine and is teaching a Master's class for Columbia’s MFA program in Spring 2008. Her first book, lucky wreck, was the winner of the 2005 Autumn House Poetry Prize. Her second book, this big fake world, was the winner of the 2005 Pearl Poetry Prize.

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Sea S. Perez is a co-founder of Achiote Press and author of several
chapbooks, including constellations gathered along the ecliptic (Shadowbox Press, 2007), all with ocean views (Overhere Press, 2007), and preterrain (Corollary Press, 2008). His first book, from unincorporated territory, is forthcoming this year from Tinfish Press. He blogs at blindelepant.blogspot.com.

Organs of Articulation: Skirt Full of Black by Sun Yung Shin

Coffee House Press, 2006
Reviewed by Molly Sutton Kiefer




Reading the poems in Sun Yung Shin’s Skirt Full of Black is like standing in an echo chamber full of variation—a cacophony of voices clanging against each other, some fusing, some trailing behind, some simply lingering. The poet’s main concerns are the Korean diaspora, adoption, women’s labor, and the complexities of language. Her poetry resembles a collage—borrowing technical phrases and syntax from texts on adoption (calling for a Works Cited page), utilizing intruding voices, and painting brief images—all reflected in the use of italics, punctuation, and occasionally, the alternate font.

Much of Sun Yung Shin’s poetry focuses on the call and answer, the give and take of dialogue. “Myopia” takes us into an optometrist’s office, gives us a poem in the form of conversation between eye doctor and patient, neither one listening to the other—the doctor giving the characteristic instructions, the patient in an act of confession revealing her personal history and future hopes. Many poems aren’t as clear in the use of voices—often the technical jargon of an texts on adoption will adjoin a memory which will then lead into a listing of terms. The result is the kind of perplexity that would come from a layered background, the reader sifting through the voices, instructions, and observations. Perhaps the poet herself puts it best in the poem “The State Will Be Served Even by My Hand on These Letters” when she writes, “the letters jockey for position but tangle in broken limbs / stray musical notations are crushed for their outrageous deviance” (pg 55).

Not all of Sun Yung Shin’s language focuses on the narrative, the direct address, the prose-like movement. Her greatest use of figurative language comes in the time-honored simile: “Finger bones like wingspan / of flightless bird” (11), “Slow like glass as a verb” (26), “previous children repeat themselves like rain” (42). Often there are visceral images to accompany those similes, such as “the metal that will unskin the world” (39) and “Take out the dog’s boiled skeleton but leave in the whinnying shudder” (43).

There is also a kind of playfulness to her language—much like balling words up and rolling them on the plane of a desk to see where they end up, as in “Fruit of Arrival”:

My mate cut the purple cord, I drop a kiss onto my son’s birth, now closed and clean.

The navel a door closed like an ear, something smothered.

I never sang sweet lullaby, my voice has poor affect. The bones of my race, the back of my head, all flat as a cradle.

Aluminum, life. A mirror. An image. “One that closely or exactly resembles another; a double: He is the image of his father.” (pg 17)

This concern with belonging and family comes from Shin’s family history: she is a Korean-American adoptee, and this may explain her focus on dualities, belonging, and contrasts. In “Economic Miracles,” she writes:

      Light reflects off my computer
      monitor not the glittering
      rice paddy, not the sewing
      machine’s glittering
      needle dipping like a cormorant into tomorrow’s
      Nike and this is
      the Culture at work. (pg. 26)

Her poetry relies on juxtapositions of culture, of text and intertext, and experience, as well as the idea of without, a certain kind of loss and pretending, as in “The House”: “Take my hand and look, look at the costumes / pretending to be real clothes” (40). The poem “Missing Masks: Names” includes the mathematical symbol “does not equal”(≠) when listing family names and terms.

One of the most striking lines from Skirt Full of Black comes in “Half the Business” when we get the raw sentiment:

      We should all have two languages, one of our childhood, and one of our
            deathbed.
      God, let those two be the same.
      No more songs about bureaucrats, armies, a confetti of human hair.
            (pg. 47)

This plea seems to spin throughout the narrative of Skirt Full of Black, where rarely is there one language, one understanding of a given situation. The poem ends on these lines:

      Every woman a scholar dissecting her own body, eating her own words
            until the end of words.
      Dear God, give no more speech or speeches.
      This is the business of language, its livelihood. Even now. Even to
            begin.

The centerpiece of Sun Yung Shin’s collection is “Vestibulary,” a kind of dictionary, an associative collection of images in relation to Korean vocabulary. Here she is free from intruding voices—this is the poet and the shape of her ancestor’s language, the way it feels in her mouth and on the page. An example of one collection of images is in “kiyek”:

      stained raw your lover’s knee,

      precipice;

      scythe, raw grain;

      late, wet harvest;

      half-chair in silhouette. (pg. 67)

All these images resemble the shape of the character “kiyek,” which looks something like this: ┐. Some become more imaginative, as in the case of “liul”:

Dictionary of myth. A child in her library. Sounds eaten whole. A bull and a virgin.

The lonely Minotaur haunted in broad-backed, forbidden heat. His human clothes remained in two suffocating wardrobes, pinna to pinna. On all fours he tried a wrecked ladder, a hoof slipped while he had a vision of a snake meandering the legs of a four-poster bed. (pg. 70)

And “piup”:

Bring a list of symptoms to your doctor.
A broken rope. Story.

A man stares out the window in drunken gravity, holding a glass half full of sheer whiskey. His wife lays [sic] down among the fur coats, unknowing of her womb half full of inheritance. She palms a book, open, margin mislaid. (pg. 72)

Skirt Full of Black is not for the casual reader, one who simply wants an afternoon read, but what collection of poetry should be? Sun Yung Shin demands this of her readers: to explore language and origins, to explore heritage and dualities, to pay attention to what value we place on the personal experiences and assumptions we bring to the page.

**

Born in Seoul, South Korea, Sun Yung Shin grew up in Chicago and now teaches at the Perpich Center for Arts Education in Minnesota. She is the author of the children's book Cooper's Lesson and an editor of Outsider's Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption.

**

Molly Sutton Kiefer's poetry has been published by Yes Press, Dislocate, and La Fovea. She currently teaches English in Minnesota and and plans to begin an MFA program this upcoming school year. Read more at mollysuttonkiefer.com.

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.

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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

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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