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 The Stunt Double in WinterRobyn Art ISBN 9780615182629 Dusie Press Books, 2008$13 Reviewed by Drew Dillhunt Robyn Art’s first full-length book of poetry, The Stunt Double in Winter, strives to disentangle the complex, and often veiled, relationship that exists between culture and the feminine. In order to unpack the vocabulary of this collusion, Art develops a chorus of voices entrenched in a series of overlapping narratives, each of which insists on the existence of alternate vantages. This perceptional realignment extends beyond the individual – beyond the narrative arc – infusing the very syntax of Art’s poetic line. The Stunt Double in Winter engages in an active struggle to rework the logic of the sentence, to establish a new grammatical hierarchy where adjectives are no longer confined to the subservient role of modifier. Objects – both real and imagined – densely populate the litany-laden universe of this text, whose varied milieux include artifacts ranging from the contemporary kitsch of Corn-Nuts, fanzines, oven mitts, and saline implants, to the Orwellian futurism of Bliss-Simulation Chambers, Ubiqui-Cams, Hydro-Vac Suits, and Fro-Zo-Sperm tanks. These worlds are filled with a captivating (and often unnerving) collection of baubles that ask us to confront the subtext of a physical world we’ve conditioned ourselves not to see. The specificity of these inventories, and the fundamental role they play in defining these landscapes, make it all the more remarkable then, that ultimately, it’s adjectives – not nouns – that provide the driving force behind the poetics of this collection. Robyn Art employs loaded descriptors to roll out idiosyncratic dialects, reveal the subtext of each narrative line, and render expansive metaphors that offer glimpses into the singular worlds each of her characters occupies. Her adjectives are rarely content to quietly define the perceptual details of the objects and ideas to which they’re attached. Instead, they overtly extend the act of description by suggesting something about the very ontology of objects they describe. As a result, the conventional role of the adjective is exploded so completely that descriptors begin to obscure the nouns to which they are attached. Pastoral and otherwise conventionally “poetic” subjects frequently serve as the context modifiers through which ultra-specific adjectives – without significant assistance from nouns or verbs – go about building the subtext of these poems: corrugated night (51), hyperborean regret (79), mnemonic ash (21), mammiform hillside (31), labile birds (31), lacustrine hair (54), palpitant wheat (83), corpuscular tide (85), tenuous woodlands (41), enumerated dark (49), itinerant weeds (11), epistolary stars (18), indigenous petals (30), undulant sky (30), redemptive shadow (32), perforated sky (32) While none of the objects listed here refer directly to pregnancy or childbirth, adjectives like lacustrine, palpitant, and perforated, swirl around the emotional, physical, and social implications of this narrative, and indirectly inform us about the distinct (and overlapping) realities of each character. Unfettered by verbs or prepositions, these pairings make metaphorical connections that move beyond “like,” “as,” and even “is.” We learn far more about Art’s characters from the words they choose to describe the material world they occupy, than by anything they say or do. As the collection proceeds, this adjectival dominance is further established with ever more specific descriptors drawn from an array of technical lexicons. Art pays special attention to the linguistic arenas of medicine ( fulminant glow [28], diastolic wherewithal [22]); biology ( benthic desire [45], nulliparous thighs [54]); and anatomy ( lactiferous yearnings [54], labial cellar doors [49]) – all three of which allow for meticulous dissections of the relationship between gender and society. The precision of these terms, and the nested meanings they contain, result in juxtapositions far more overt in their efforts to frame the particular context of each speaker. Throughout, there is a pervasive sense that the nouns in these poems are involved in an organic process of becoming adjectives. Art favors adjectives that read like nouns, especially those that have a closely related nounal variant. She freely devises adjectival forms for nouns that don’t already possess one ( metaphastic lives [59], dictaphonic birds [31]), and then uses these inventions to fine-tune her character’s evolving dialects. Nouns are also applied as adjectives directly from their native state ( Nag champa speed-dial [38], roach clip skyline [70]), as if to emphasize the fact that description and comparison are the first steps in the development of metaphor. This process of syntactical transmutation is made explicit in the book’s third poem, “Jedi Mind Tricks.” Here, Art generates a list of individual nouns and then proceeds to “define” them with phrases that reflect that speaker’s relationship to the words, rather than any strict sense of meaning. This technique, which recurs throughout the collection, effectively points out how the adjectives housed within a given object or idea are particular to the context of individual voice interacting with them. By focusing on descriptors – and the transmutation of nouns into descriptors – Art masterfully maintains her focus on the particular contexts of each poem’s speaker, through which the narratives of the book unfold. Art’s concerted efforts to rework our conception of the female body neatly parallels this unfolding grammatical coup. Even as her language pushes us to acknowledge the tangled relationship between grammatical modifiers and the words they modify, Art’s poetry demands we confront the assumed, and frequently invisible, relationship that exists between culture and the feminine. The Stunt Double in Winter is a startling next step towards what Lisa Robertson, in the notes of her poetic treatise XEclogue, describes as “the possibility of a collaborative feminist history and writing practice.” By extending the socio-syntactical approach begun in that volume, Art realizes a cacophony of collaborative conversations that overlap and interleave; even the two voices that do recur – one futuristic, and one contemporary – are more a series of closely related permutations than discreet singularities. At every turn, Robyn Art reminds us that our world is “...a nest / of startled notes that sound like eat, and fuck, and maim...” (91), that language, at its most basic, is a descriptive act. *** Drew Dillhunt lives in the Beacon Hill neighborhood of Seattle and is co-author, with his father, CX, of the chapbook Double Six (Endeavor, 1994). His poetry has appeared in The Pitkin Review and Hummingbird: Magazine of the Short Poem. He has recorded and released two albums’ worth of songs, including one with the band Fighting Shy.
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The Next CountryIdra Novey ISBN 9781882295715 Alice James Books, 2008 $14.95 Reviewed by Joshua Neely The map of places passes.
The reality of paper tears.
Holes in maps look through to nowhere
– Laura Riding
You wouldnt think that a man would run plumb out of country out here, would ye?
– Cormac McCarthyIn Idra Novey’s The Next Country, we find poems that occupy borderlands, poems that invoke a kind of wanderlust and ask us to examine where we have placed our demarcations, both personal and cultural, and why. As the title of the collection suggests, these poems are about a country that is not the one we currently occupy – that we are about to enter dislocated territories, the white spaces on our maps. The terrain varies widely, appearing otherworldly in “Aubade for Viña Del Mar” and “East of Here” and more conventional and literal in poems like “The Bartering” and “Maddox Road.” Novey also delves into questions of poetics in the self-referential regions of “The Experiment” and “At Some Point After We Sealed the Windows.” In this way, Novey’s poems jump ahead and circle back on themselves. Each poem is a country and as we read we move from country to country, between regions of human experience, through the territory of the imagination. The collection begins with the otherworldly. “Aubade for Viña Del Mar” prefaces the collection with a song of parting and an invocation of creation or the creative process. As the speaker bids farewell to her lover, the Vineyard of the Sea, she engenders a new line of thought. This line of thought becomes a “stray dog” that the speaker follows so that it will “stop following” her. But before the speaker can exert complete control, “a violin begins forming/in the pocket of [her] coat” and she “will soon be the owner/of a complete instrument.” In this short space (the poem is 13 lines), we are given a glimpse of how the rest of the collection will grow, if you will, from this notion of poem/poet as a sort of harbinger of whatever else may come. What comes next is the poem “East of Here”: In the next country over, the lotus
is chocolate-brown and grows tall
as maize. The sole religion seems
to be bread, any kind, including
one similar to rye, but made of lotus.
and if someone you’ve doted on
dies there defending
the nation, seven emissaries
for the president come by
all wearing stethoscopes,
and listen to your heart. Afterward,
they offer artichoke sandwiches
in official blue Saran Wrap and hand you
a list of either answers
or questions, but never both.
There’s a road if you want to go. We find ourselves “In the next country over” and it appears to be a land more exotic than ours, or one with rites and traditions that are unfamiliar and strange. A hallucinated land fueled by cakes of lotus that makes us begin to wonder if we, like Tennyson’s Lotos-Eaters, are “deep-asleep […] yet all awake.” To choose to follow the road offered in the final line is hardly a choice at all. Novey’s appeal to our natural (irresistible) curiosity about where we are, where we are going, and what’s over the next hill, will win every time. And so we read on. Novey’s choice to lead-off with magical realism is interesting, considering the very real – both tragic and poignant – events she depicts later in the collection in poems like “The Bartering” and “Maddox Road”. In the former, Novey circles back to a country of the past. In post-Pinochet Chile a father buys another copy of a book his daughter burned to save his life. The poem skillfully asks us to consider the cost of things we normally take for granted. In this poem, the book, for which the father pays “the cost of an/ice cream, a small box of mints” could have cost him his life while others did pay with theirs in Chile during this time. In “Maddox Road” Novey’s speaker and her sister (a half-sister who appears in other poems in the book) experience a very real, very touching moment in a country of “weathered tobacco shacks” and “plantation land.” The word “plantation” echoes in the reader’s mind and again ideas about the true costs of things haunt the poem’s subtext. Elsewhere in the book, Novey delves into poetics and the nature of poetry and writing, and even language as an icon of civilization in poems like “The Experiment” and “At Some Point After We Sealed the Windows.” In “The Experiment” Novey seems to reference a kind of inevitable end of civilization we find in Shelley’s “Ozymandias” or Yeats’ “The Second Coming,” wherein our works and our words form a figurative country that we hope will somehow outlast us, a basis for our “wild faith that someone will want to see/what we have made.” Novey questions whether our “dictionaries with our best words” are enough. In the post-apocalyptic piece “At Some Point After We Sealed the Windows,” Novey continues to question the role of language and what happens if the semiotics we thought we knew lose their validity. A border is also a threshold and Novey never lets us forget this as we visit each poem. In each poem we feel we are on the verge of so much human experience – what it is to create, what it means to live through injustice, what it means to be on the brink of something. Underneath the shifting territories of Novey’s collection, we find a searching subtext that ultimately recalls an image from the first poem “East of Here.” We begin to see that in The Next Country, Novey has given us a “list of either answers/or questions, but never both.” *** Joshua Neely lives and works in Sacramento, and recently completed his MA in English at CSU Sacramento. He is an editorial assistant for Flatmancrooked Publishing and an assistant poetry editor for Narrative. Some of his poems have appeared in The Suisun Valley Review and Eclipse Literary Journal.
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 Degrees of LatitudeLaurel Blossom ISBN 9781884800801 Four Way Books, 2007$15.95 Part of the BargainScott Hightower ISBN 9781556592324 Copper Canyon Press, 2005Price: $15.00 Reviewed by Carl Rosenstock Coming to Terms : Part of the Bargain, Scott Hightower, and Degrees of Latitude, Laurel BlossomSamuel Beckett wrote The Unnamable in 1953, when he was approximately 47 years old. I suspect he could not have written it at a younger age, much less have written the oft-quoted diminuendo on which the novel ends — “… in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.” As I edge ever farther from formative experiences, I find myself less drawn to their simple recounting, and more interested in the process by which those experiences integrate into who I am, as over the years smaller, and even somewhat larger, compromises accrete and we become never quite who, or what, we started out to be. The question remaining — how is it we “go on.” Such a question is not proffered by someone taking the measure of the moment one is about to embark on a life; it is proffered by someone taking the measure of that life. How easy, in the first flushes of adulthood, to feel that certain power that arises with first grappling with experience. Perhaps that’s why poetry sometimes strikes some as a young person’s game. Mind, I still love such work. Just as someone younger might read the later works of another to find the landmarks that lay ahead, so too I read another’s early works to be reminded again how one must look at each moment fresh. That said, there are those who understand what Beckett meant. … “Losses and brutalities / Have left me dull.” (“Door to the Terrace,” Scott Hightower.) This is hard-earned knowledge. Learned not when wounded. Learned after healing, when one strokes the scars and remembers. That always unanswerable question of how we go on, how we come to terms with the distance between who we were, who we set out to be, and who we’ve become is at the heart of two strikingly different but beautifully composed volumes of poetry — Scott Hightower’s Part of the Bargain and Laurel Blossom’s Degrees of Latitude. Though both may chronicle journeys, these are, to be sure, two very different books. On first reading, Hightower’s book appears the more conventional — a collection of seemingly unrelated lyrics — he circles back to certain critical themes, each poem a tessera in a mosaic portrait of the poet in the present. Blossom’s volume seems more akin to the work of an archaeologist — shards of her life laid out in such a way as to suggest the figure of the whole. Nonetheless, both books chronicle a distance traversed. Theirs is not a poetry of reaction, but of reflection, from the vantage that age and distance provide. As with any such journey, we write from the perspective of the present — piecing together that which brought us to now. Hightower’s book begins, fittingly enough, with an invocation to the muse, the twist being we are not about to begin an epic, where such invocations are customarily made. “I have a preference for peaceful night / When I am alone; however, you are / Just as likely to show up mid-morning / or late afternoon …” In that invocation, he defines who (in this moment) he has become. To put those earlier lines of his in a context (into his context) — “Losses and brutalities / Have left me dull. (I am equally / Likely to be visited by the dead / As by the trials of the wandering living.”) From that initial figure, contemplative, accepting, circumspect even, Hightower turns, in the next poem, to his boyhood in rural Texas — “Polio and Counting.” If that first poem marks the distance he’s traveled, this one marks the distance he would need to travel. The poem opens with the poet and his brother and sister sitting in the shade, watching as their father worked the fields, stopping only to “take a swig of water // from the burlap-wrapped / Can he’d stashed with us. …” He goes on, “By four, I could reliably / Count sheep in multiples. / A skill honed sitting // On my mother’s legs …” And there the poem turns away from the seeming idyllic setting, nodding toward the figure in the opening poem, “Her reclining on a raked / Sit-up board her father // Had gerry-rigged. Every / Morning she cried brushing / Her hair. The pain was simple. // Her perfume bottles glimmered : / “There will be pains that will not / Leave you with a kiss.” Hightower then proceeds to plot the points (from his past, both distant and immediate, from his present … even from his imagination) between those first two poems, allowing the reader insight into how he evolved into the moment of the invocation, how the past bleeds into present, how once freighted moments are now recollected in calm. Such is the breadth of the collection, that no individual poem exemplifies the whole. He offers further recollections of his boyhood and of his sexual awakening, of the deaths of family members and friends, speculations on Charles Laughton and Ethel Waters, time spent in Spain, even dinner at Tavern on the Green (with its subtle allusion to Ziryab, who was credited with being the first to lay out the sequence of courses in a meal, and like any sensual encounter, “we finish with a cigarette”). Still, individually and collectively, the poems subtly circle back to that opening figure on the balcony — as he says, in the title poem, “For some of us, our origins / will seed our ends.” On the surface — and the surface, so inexhaustible, is where we always begin — Laurel Blossom’s Degrees of Latitude seems the more virtuoso performance. Formally more daring and more ambitious, her journey seems the more straightforward. The vehicle is a journey from the North Pole, moving through three zones toward the equator, and then through three zones away from the equator, culminating at the South Pole. The individual poems, as such, are the nine points along that axis. The driving engine is a compelling narrative — a childhood divorce, a troubled and difficult mother, an abusive marriage, struggles with alcoholism and recovery, and a sort of redemption. This may strike some as fodder for Oprah. But in truth, there are few new “plots” — one need only read what Flaubert or Tolstoy accomplished with seeming soap opera plots. Like a joke (and what is a joke, after all, but a very short story), it’s all in the telling.The volume, like the journey, begins on an Arctic icebreaker at the North Pole (“Ice so blue it’s frozen sky lit from within, above, below.”) Mixing the simply odd (“On the ship’s P.A., Belafonte singing Day-O”) with the oddly out-of-place (“… pictures of my son and me in Nairobi …”), the reader is seduced by both the clarity of the description and the voice describing. And then, at the last moment of this introduction, “… the Captain says he came up out of the swimming hole wanting to /shout for joy, but couldn’t. // The cold has taken his breath away.” The speaker takes the same swim, and comes up “ … wanting to shout : Get me out of here ! / … below freezing. / Cold as childhood. // Ladies and gents, I did shout it ! ” The layout of those last lines does not convey how the poems appear on the page. Through careful orchestration of line breaks, alternating line lengths, and white space between stanzas and sections of the individual poems, the reader is deliberately slowed — contrary to the propulsive forward momentum of the narrative. The space between those last two lines, for example, heightens what is a deft juxtaposition of the pre-history of her immediate surroundings and the seeds of her personal history, of detached scientific observation against personal confession. Such prosody also allows the reader to linger over individual details, images, even savor certain musical moments (“We always knew where we were. In the middle, in the (humid) muddle in / the more or less // … Hallway (halfway) where morning and evening met.”) Like Hightower’s volume, this is not nostalgia — a wistful exercise verbally recreating certain moments. It is an attempt to excavate the past, in order to understand the present. Where Hightower returns, in many of his poems, to the opening figure, Blossom drives forward to the South Pole, and to an acceptance of her present, which is a sort of redemption. (“So we have reached, at last, the starting point. / Here the auroral fire, the breath-taking, breath making diamond dust. / The ice moves outward, bearing the dead. /// Air so clear you can hear them speaking. / World so white you can see them writing. / Home is everywhere. Home is nowhere. YOU ARE HERE.”) Part of the Bargain and Degrees of Latitude are, to be sure, two very different books. While Laurel Blossom’s book may seem the more virtuoso performance (and it is breathtaking in its beauty and its profound depth), Scott Hightower’s book, in its quiet, diffident, almost off-hand manner, is every bit the equal. What is overwhelming, what is powerful in both books is what the poets do with their personal histories. These are the histories, worn and weighed, of someone older, experienced. What I found, after reading and re-reading each of these volumes, was not only how (albeit obliquely) they offered ways to examine one’s own life, but also how much they seemed to comment on each other. Midway through Degrees of Latitude, I thought of how Scott’s observations offered almost choral comments on certain moments in Laurel’s book. And as I pondered the poems in Part of the Bargain, I thought again of how apt, how true, were those last lines in Laurel’s volume. And isn’t that what we look for when we read — conversations between the books we’ve read, and conversations between those books and our lives. Truth be told, I would not advise one to read these books back-to-back. It is an almost impossible task to twist your attention away from one, to then read the other with the same empathy. My advice is to read one, give yourself time, then (and only then) read the other. But do read them both. Only after, and after contemplating what you’ve read, will you be able to grasp what both poets, in their way, have accomplished in common. *** Carl Rosenstock was born in Albany, New York, and grew up on a farm near there. He received a B.A. in Asian History from Union College, and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Vermont College. His work (poetry, fiction and non-fiction) has appeared in various magazines, and anthologies. He lives and works on the westernmost end of Long Island, in Brooklyn, New York, where he curated the Night-&-Day Reading Series.
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 The Illustrated Version of ThingsAffinity Konar FC2, 2009$17.95 Reviewed by A D Jameson Affinity Konar’s debut novel opens with a mentally-unbalanced young woman being released from an institution because she has just turned eighteen. She moves back in with her aged grandparents and, desperate for a normal life, quickly sets about reassembling her scattered family, starting with her half-brother and her father. She then undertakes a lengthy search for her runaway mother, although her attention soon enough wavers, causing the tenuous quest narrative to drift in and out. (The middlemost chapters more or less drop the plot and read instead like a string of short stories, although this is hardly a complaint: they’re good short stories.) The overall missing-family arc, however, is of secondary importance. What really drives Konar’s novel is unrelenting wordplay: her restless narrator just can’t leave language alone. Her descriptions and expositions collage diverse types of illogic and jokey rhetoric: surrealistic word salad, parataxis, nonsense poetry, absurdist reductions, malapropisms, metonymy, twee riddles, cartoonish depictions of appalling behavior—and, occasionally, pitch-perfect imitations of Groucho Marx: “The magazine leads me to a neighborhood where people glare over their rosebushes for recreation.” Compounding the narrator’s own verbal evasiveness is the fact the characters around her speak only in obstructions, constantly arguing and stonewalling by means of one-ups and puns. When the narrator tries (for reasons that never become all too clear) to forcibly enter the suburban home of a pedophile, her pants leg starts smoldering, having caught some sparks from an unidentified something that is “burning on the doorstep”: “Can I come in?”
“Maybe when you’re not so much on fire,” he says.
“Not even to use the sink?”
“Look,” he says, and his thumb indicates the clutter of a lair behind him. “I’ve got a lot of valuables in there. I don’t need them getting scorched. Or looked at.”
The next day, the narrator returns to try to help the sex-offender (whom she designates “Mr. Smudge”) to bury an opossum that’s passed away on the same eventful doorstep: “It’s my house,” Mr. Smudge says. “And I don’t like you touching my things. That possum grew up here, just like me. We have something in common that you don’t. He’s mine.” And so, faced with such taxing adult obstinacy, it makes perfect sense when the narrator returns midway through her story to the institution she’s been kicked out of—wanting, we can see, for familiar surroundings, and fellow inmates whom she can at least pretend are her friends. But even there she’s refused admission and honest human contact (and thereby an identity): I see parties of families going in. They seem happy to be there. The head nurse writes their names out on nametags so they can become visitors, there, on the other side of the door, but to begin with they’re family. They cross themselves, surrender sharp objects, bear fruit.
“Is it because I didn’t bring anything?” I ask. “Is that why you won’t let me in?”
“That could be a reason if I was looking for a reason,” the nurse says. “But I don’t need another reason. Now, am I right or am I right?” After repeatedly being denied admittance by the Kafkaesque head nurse, the narrator settles for recalling a time on the inside when she sold her urine, which was clean and therefore “coveted.” Then, coming to her senses, she resolves to cut her hair—to become someone else, and to start anew. But the next chapter sees her adrift at a string of locales—a roller rink, a beach, a fortune teller’s, a therapist’s, a church...—all of which promise the possibility of a normal self, but then fail to deliver. None of them, in fact, seems any more coherent or rational than the forbidden mental institution (which is, at least, an institution). While some of the novel’s chapters read, perhaps, as being more necessary than others, the overall text quickly becomes addictive. Konar’s high-concept style never disappoints, and multiple sections coalesce into heartbreaking sequences, such as a particularly gorgeous subplot in which the narrator’s father repeatedly sends his daughter away, ordering her first not to look like her estranged mother, then not to sound like her, then not to smell like her, etc. Finally, the father insists that his daughter tell him only lies, triggering this response: I explain that I don’t want to lie to him. Not on purpose at least. I come from a line of honest mistakes, things said without thinking, words that popped out of people who were just getting by. They really thought they’d have the rent by Sunday. They really believed they couldn’t get people pregnant.
Konar’s greatest achievement throughout is that her unyielding verbal gymnastics never come across as calculated, but rather demonstrate a genuinely believable bewilderment over language. The layered puns and the fractured meanings, the fitful half-starts and stops and redundant U-turns, the nonsense and the shamefully revealing over-significations—they all steadily build up into a touchingly confused voice, the sweetly hopeful confession of a very troubled character. The unnamed narrator at the center of The Illustrated Version of Things speaks the way she does not to be clever, not to parade her wit before family and friends and ultimately the reader, but because she knows no other way to speak. Language routinely fails her; she flails, desperate not to lie again, but with each word she’s betrayed once more, once again caught lying. Her heroic attempt to make it all make sense, to provide a definitively transparent illustration, goes repeatedly awry, time and again obscured and deflected and confounded—but remains illuminating, and moving. Her choked-up version of the things that comprise her twisted life is ever artful. *** A D Jameson lives in Chicago. His fiction has appeared in the Denver Quarterly, Fiction International, the Mississippi Review Online, elimae, Lamination Colony, and elsewhere. He teaches English and sometimes directs music videos.
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 The Mirror in the WellMicheline Aharonian Marcom Dalkey Archive, 2009ISBN 9781564785114 $12.95 Reviewed by John Madera Lust and Found: “Outside of Language and Into Being”Language is nothing but meanings, and meanings are nothing but a flow of contexts. Such contexts rarely coalesce into images, rarely come to terms. They are transitions, transmutations, the endless radiating of denotation into relation.
—Lyn Hejinian, Introduction to The Language of Inquiry
Language gives structure to awareness. And in doing so it blurs, and perhaps even effaces, the distinction between subject and object, since language is neither, being intermediate between the two.
—Lyn Hejinian, Preface to Writing Is an Aid to Memory. Micheline Aharonian Marcom’s novella The Mirror in the Well is a wellspring of words, a work as much about sensuality and intimacy as it is about distancing and fragmentation. Her book reveals how profanity and vulgarity, and a throwing of all caution to the wind total surrender to the flesh, may be a portal for redemption and self-awareness, while simultaneously suggesting that this may also lead to uncertainty and loss. According to Henry Miller, no stranger to erotica, “Obscenity is a cleansing process, whereas pornography only adds to the murk.” If The Mirror in the Well is a cleansing, than it is an exorcism. To paraphrase Miller, a true understanding of humanity results in a realization that there are no limits to one’s sublimity and baseness. Miller once asked, “Why are we so full of restraint? Why do we not give in all directions? Is it fear of losing ourselves? Until we do lose ourselves there is no hope of finding ourselves.” In The Mirror, America is a place where “people live in their self-made tunnels, their eyes covered by cultural mores membranes, like technological steel moles.” The woman’s eyes-wide-open trespassing of and transgression against these cultural membranes toward the place, space, state of mind, state of being where she “knows to what for what she was born,” as well as the hope of meaningful discovery, of finding oneself “without the boundaries of polite American society, without its self-consciousness,” are the driving forces of this character’s quest. But her quest is not without challenges and conflicts. The unnamed protagonist, whose morality is unhinged from puritanical conventions, who surrenders herself to a hedonistic self-gratification, seems to be free of absolutes, but again and again she doubts herself and yearns for another kind of love. Through oneiric temporal displacements we learn how the main character, a businesswoman unhappy and bored with her lackluster marriage and sex life, begins her new life of infidelity, extreme exploration of her body, and an incantatory arousal of her vast sexual appetites. Beneath all the intensity and vulgarity, however, we find that she simply “listened to a quiet need inside of her that loudly raged for years inside of her,” and also that her journey is not without guilt, grief, doubt, fear, and desperation. In the midst of her escapades she chastises herself for her betrayals, she doubts her own ability to give and receive love. She describes herself at one point as “a sow in her mud (of loneliness) and covers herself in it…” She talks about the “black mottled filth which could be her guilt now, her fear and hoary nightsweats.” At various points in the story she is dissatisfied with, even revolted by, her lover, and describes her life with him as a “dark labyrinth.” Marcom’s use of the second-person narration in the novella is particularly effective in communicating the main character’s attempts to bring clarity, reason, and perspective on an often euphoric, desultory, decadent, and yes, even sometimes transcendent illicit sexual life. The familiar elements of Marcom’s style, namely streams of thoughts, asides, reveries, and lyricism are present, but in this work her prose reaches such a feverish intensity that the page can barely bear its weight and tension. Marcom’s sentences are not tethered by conventional grammar and syntax; words run on and over, and flow in rushing streams, daring the reader to breathe them in. They’re jammed together through inspired punctuation and explode in breathless heaves. Sometimes elegiac, sometimes mournful, usually melancholic, they veer wildly, careen with lyricism, and cavort with expressionism. Yes, she’s certainly drunk from the rivers of Faulkner, Joyce, and Woolf, but there’s a relentless edginess here that is Marcom’s own. We also find Marcom’s signature use of “mashups” like “out-joy,” “refeels,” “notasked,” “unteaching,” “unsad,” “before-rains water,” etc. Marcom wisely breaks the narrative up into small blocks that allow the reader to rest. I read every break as a kind of reflective caesura from the inundation of the main character’s thoughts and feelings. There are also intermittent metafictional elements which serve to remind the reader of the artifice of the story, a story that is about sex as an act creation, recreation, and re-creation. During the course of the story, we discover that the woman may in fact be writing this story and we find her struggling to find a language that encapsulates the glories, the vicissitudes, the waves of doubt and despair, the longing, the yearning, the absolute abandon, the contradictions of and in her life. And who is the narrator of the third-person limited chapters? The lover? The husband? Another lover? The one she calls “the writer who writes, the hand which sings, the maker of phrases who makes me?” As past, present, and dreams spill into each other (she dreams of orbiting planets, of thinning pubic hair, her Maman, satyrs, etc.), intersect in innumerable ways, she recognizes that “the language of it is lost to it.” Caught in a whirlpool of conflicting thoughts, emotions, and desires she begins to read the old books, the possessions by the gods, The Thousand Nights and One Night is by her bedside, to understand, or the devils, how it is that you remade her in your workroom that afternoon in August, carved and cut an ancient woman, your mother, sister and the nymphs on the lintels of old European buildings—the language can hardly say it any longer: but with your cock inside her cunt and you are pushing it in and her orgasm opened a river inside of her and she would like it beyond language you are grunting in her ear, filling her mouth with your tongue, cunt with cock, spittle and urine and a piston inside of its fleshy destiny and she would like to die with you in this moment and to kill you, squeeze the breath from you you ask her to put her hands around your neck as she rides your cock and you ask without asking, place her hands around your neck and press her white blue-veined fingers into your trachea, cut off your breath then your orgasm and your breathing again and you have not died and she rides you longer until she slaps your face comes on your cock, pisses and cries into your shoulder. And when she is feeling sad and melancholic as she often does at her job and on the week-ends with her family, she remembers that eternal moment, returns to you the endlessly in her dreams and then also in her car as she makes the drive south to your workplace and the floor upon which you will fuck her week after week month after month during your affair. Here we find allusions to the Japanese erotic film “In the Realm of the Senses,” a film depicting a former prostitute and her boss’ bizarre relationship hinged on sexual experimentation, sadomasochistic play, and drinking. The film ends with the woman choking her lover (at his request) to death while making love. She then cuts off his genitals and writes, “Sada and Kichi, now one,” in blood on his chest. A direct reference is made to the film toward the end of the novella. Struggling to find a language for her experience the woman thinks, “Outside of the words between them breath arrives on the edges of the alphabet…what mysteries lie there? what ecstasy? which god?” Her lover provides one answer as he initiates her into sex as an act of creation and recreation and re-creation. “When you are making her,” she says to him, “when you are a god and she is also a god, the nymph visiting from the other world is pushing out of her mouth and breast. The nymph’s fluids are her own; the nymph’s red and pink lips kiss your mouth sweetly. The girl with the dark hair and eyes and you with your blue blind irises. A snake at the base of the spine unfolds in the dark afternoon in the wood dust and motes.” The lover makes her but not without demands, pressures, and expectations: But perhaps as you make her you do make her fall in. The girl falls in to love, as if love were, what exactly?, the underground stone palace where the lover has hidden the beloved? the deepest well where the serpent lives? And you expect it, demand it: Stop fucking your husband, you tell her, I can’t bear it (fall in to love with me). She stares at you; she is silent and dark looking in the eyes. I love you, you say, and thrust this inside her like your cock: love me back love me back love me only in this possession.” He teaches her “to love her cunt because the cunt is her center, the cunt is pleasure, the cunt knows and knew him, picked him from a cavalcade of other men. But there are also moments when she recognizes in their lovemaking the reciprocal act of creation, where she suspects that she too is creator. “Perhaps I made you,” she tells her lover, “I called to you and you arrived.” Birds return as a motif in this novella. There are robins, blue jays, crows, hummingbirds, a blue heron, etc. Watching hundreds of small grey birds, she wants to travel like them, that she “would like some kind of flight, would like an outside of her ideas, the labyrinth of codes and conduct which keeps her close, inside of a closed circuit.” And her lover “has leaked her soul out onto the air again, like the small pockets of air beneath the bird-grey wings and lifting them, today, outside of the girl’s window and into the sky.” Later, she yearns for “the unmomented moment when the yellow-billed-not-robins, time and outness which is inness, rush out, as if the world and all of her life were limitless and love a tangible flight outside of words and outside of her life as she knew it before…” These birds return again and again as a metaphor of freedom, of release. She repeatedly makes references to literature as she attempts to make sense of her experiences. Various mythologies and archetypes converge in the novella. In addition to Scheherazade, she likens herself to Leda’s daughter. Tristan and Isolde are exhumed. There are nymphs, satyrs, banshees, dervishes, djinns, cyclops, a minotaur, maenad, gods, and dæmons. And there are various parallels to religions. She describes herself as her lover’s acolyte and imagines him “prostrate at the altar of her sex.” His presence is likened to a sacrificial offering. At times she believes that she is possessed. “She is possessed by a river, or a river god, and she goes down the strong current, follows her emotions like a fish into the waters, she wants to be struck from the water, struck by her husband her lover, by this river dæmon who possesses her and makes her speak in so many tongues.” She describes their connection as a hum as vibrations, where “everything is seeable in its nature, the essences emerge, each man and woman is an icon, an idol…” In bed, where “gods descend,” her lover is “a thousand years old and she is his night and the darkness makes them eternal lovers and everything is right and good and joy moves from her form out into the night skies stars which she doesn’t see in her city and back again as light moves.” This may be a reference to Shiva and the Goddess who made love for thousands of years. In the myth, Agni the fire god was sent to remind them that sex is not only for pleasure, but for procreation as well. Part of the woman’s awakening is the recognition of three or four iconic figures that have shaped her character. The woman sees “her father her school professor her first boyfriend husband and now her lover joins in the company of men in her mind, merges with them into the old one, the god-man.” But as she reflects on them, they seem more like the possessed man who accosted Christ in his travels to the Gergesenes. When Christ asked the man his name, he answered, “We are legion, for we are many.” In her essay “A Thought Is the Bride of What Thinking,” Lyn Hejinian writes: “Certainty is given to the simple-minded. To know what one thinks under all circumstances, to have definite and final opinions, is a matter of doubt to the ethical intellect. It is matter for doubt. (This doesn’t deprive one of the capacity for making decisions, which come in the thick of things, though maybe arbitrarily.) Toward the end of The Mirror, the question, “How can a book such as this one end?” is asked. While there are numerous insights interspersed throughout the story like this one: “Time is illusory, a construction like a wall or canonical texts—this book lasts forever her orgasm is like this book this phrase this moment when words cannot do anything, all of the vibrations are in the blood then, everything is in her fluids and his,” the woman’s quest remains unresolved and filled with uncertainty. But we do learn that, for at least one time, the woman finds fulfillment when, after making love, “she is happiest than she can ever remember and for the first time in her memory her inner cosmos the dream-lover and her outside life, her white skinned blue-eyed fat bellied lover meet have merged at the top of her skin inside of her sex which is inside outside of her body her mind or the spirit and she has taken communion with him, lost her mind and given her flesh for his, for this, today.” ***
John Madera lives in New York City. His work has appeared in elimae, Bookslut, New Pages, Open Letters Monthly, The Quarterly Conversation, The Rumpus, and is forthcoming in The Diagram, Little White Poetry Journal, and Underground Voices. You may find him at hitherandthithering waters and editing The Chapbook Review. He sings and plays guitar for Mother Flux.
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 Log of the S.S. Mrs. UnguentineStanley G. Crawford Dalkey Archive, 2009ISBN 9781564785121 $12.95 Reviewed by John Madera Message in a Bottle: Stanley G. Crawford’s Log of the S.S. Mrs. UnguentineRegarding Stanley G. Crawford’s Log of the S.S. Mrs. Unguentine, one could begin by saying it’s an incredibly bizarre tale of two mariners adrift for decades on a sea barge documented in log entries begun after one of the mariners sees the other commit suicide. One could marvel at how the characters travel on what amounts to a floating landfill from which they grow a dense forest, home to hundreds of birds, and how Unguentine, in a fit of inspired madness, destroys this Edenic garden and replaces it with an artificial one made with painted planks, pulleys, levers, and other assorted contraptions. One could comment on the mysterious, disturbing, oneiric, and sometimes surreal relationship between Unguentine and his wife, how they live without a word spoken between them for years. With the narrative’s numerous references to fertility, harvest, growth, and rebirth, a tidy parable can probably be teased out from it. You could also talk about how it’s set in a post-apocalyptic world and how it celebrates iconoclasm, individualism, etc. But none of this really gets at how this story comes together. Rick Moody could have been describing Stanley G. Crawford when he wrote “It’s all about the sentences. It’s about the way the sentences move in the paragraphs. It’s about rhythm. It’s about the way emotion, in difficult circumstances, gets captured in language. It’s about instants of consciousness. It’s about besieged consciousness. It’s about love trouble. It’s about death. It’s about suicide. It’s about the body. It’s about skepticism. It’s against sentimentality. It’s against cheap sentiment. It’s about regret. It’s about survival. It’s about sentences used to enact and defend survival.” But whereas Amy Hempel relies on space, concision, brevity, Crawford’s effusive lyricism—his rolling, spiraling cadences, its alternating plaintive and plangent sentences—is really what this whole novel is about. Have you ever “peeled” a baseball, removed its cowhide covering? I did once and found tightly-wound string wrapped around a cork and rubber sphere. Log of the S.S. Mrs. Unguentine is like that. There are strings and strings of words here. The language is so compact and dense that you wonder how it doesn’t unravel itself from the pressure, from its sheer intensity. Take for instance Mrs. Unguentine’s description of their vessel. It was a barge, a barge such as is used to tow garbage out to sea with. It was the only way I would go out to sea again, I said. We got the thing for a song, garbage and all, rot, stink, and a flock of squabbling seagulls. We had the garbage covered with earth and planted trees and flowers, and there was a great canvas with brass fittings to cover it all up from the wind and the waves, and thus we set sail upon a course that kept us to temperate zones, for the sake of my plants. And many times we were halted by hostile navies who had never seen such a sight; once we were claimed by an impoverished government which sought an island cheap by virtue of confiscation. While I watered my plants, Unguentine drank. On some equator or other I added dogs and a cat who ate fish and provided fecal matter for my garden which came to flourish to such a degree that it grew impenetrable in places, while vine-reinforced leafy boughs overhung virtually the whole barge and we could go on for days on end without seeing each other, amused at our respective ends by visitations of uncanny birds. Passages like these are set within even larger unbroken paragraphs and move like massive ice floes that slowly make its way somewhere across the earth’s surface. The log begins tentatively with several terse and almost stoic entries about their life, but they slowly develop into ravishing passages. At various points Mrs. Unguentine makes brief references to their destroyed world, a world of continual foul weather, brown fogs over cities, “land, that shambles, was a sorry surface unfit for the conduct of anything but a harrowing traffic.” But we’re given nothing more than that. Her thoughts are reserved strictly for their life on the barge, her husband’s many eccentricities, her thoughtful insights into the absurd dynamics of their relationship and communication. As the novel developed, I felt thoroughly inundated by the commanding waves of language, language full of desire, empathy, fascination, grief, and rapture. Even the simplest of things, like descriptions of daily routines, are suffused with lyricism. Mrs. Unguentine after marveling at the geodesic dome they had recently built on their barge relates how they “always rose early and ate just before sunrise in the mists like mildew on the surface of the sea, on colourless waters, on waters lightly tinted blue or pink, or sometimes yellow, calm waters flecked here and there with blue leaves and silver lips where a breeze would drive a ripple up. Several hundred yards out, that white line of foam which marked the border between fresh water and salt, for the vegetation of our barge generated so much fresh water that we were perpetually ringed by a sort of inner tube of it, a lake floating in the sea, over seventy feet deep, and where swam hundreds of carp-like descendants of goldfish that once lived in our fish-ponds, also minnows, guppies, angelfish, bluegills.” These are Melvillean cascades by way of Anne Michaels. But there’s also the list upon lists of Whitman, the rolling, rolling, rolling on the river of Twain, and the dark clouds forever on the horizon of Faulkner. Log of the S.S. The Mrs. Unguentine demands total surrender. And there are so many gripping sentences that beg to be read aloud. Like these for instance, from the novel’s concluding paragraph where Mrs. Unguentine lays alone suffering from delusions on their deteriorating ship: I submitted to fantasies of pregnancy, some comfort in my lethargy and waiting, of an elderly childbirth upon one of Unguentine’s old sperm which till now had lain dormant within my body like a grain entombed, to burst into germination long after all the old walls had fallen. And when the pains finally grew sharp I thought that death should come like that, like childbirth, into the birth of silence and no light—and I stood up one last time and pushed the curtains apart to have a glimpse across the gardens, my fence, to the waves upon waves of velvet green beyond. I fell then. Someone screamed, I heard sobs, I heard coughing; suddenly I wanted to sleep. But the light from the window was too bright. When I raised my head from the floor, my mouth agape and some strange noise lowly pouring from it, I looked across my huge stomach heaving with contractions and thought to see Unguentine flow slowly out from between my legs and crowd my knees, or a somewhat dwarfish version of him, yet with the white beard, the flowing white hair. He was crouching now, I saw his eyes blink open, I saw a smile flash across his damp face the instant before his features went rigid and he toppled over backwards with a heavy thud. I could no longer raise my head, see where he was; yet I knew now he had come back to me only to die, was dead, to smile only, no more. A rivulet of my blood was soon flowing across the floor in pursuit of him. Soon myself, my body. Thus I joined him. ***
John Madera lives in New York City. His work has appeared in elimae, Bookslut, New Pages, Open Letters Monthly, The Quarterly Conversation, The Rumpus, and is forthcoming in The Diagram, Little White Poetry Journal, and Underground Voices. You may find him at hitherandthithering waters and editing The Chapbook Review. He sings and plays guitar for Mother Flux.
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The Stunt Double in Winter
