Shira Dentz's _ Leaf Weather _, reviewed by Valerie Wetlaufer

Leaf Weather
Shira Dentz
Tilt Press, 2009
Staple-Bound Chapbook, 27 pages
$8.00

Reviewed by Valerie Wetlaufer

In the third poem in Leaf Weather, “what transforms a white bough, for instance,” Dentz offers us a recipe for her unique brand of poetry: “let’s make some word water two parts salt one part light influenced by the moon.” The concoction seems apt, for these poems are both organic and otherworldly. Here we are in a landscape of picnic tables, mountains, candlestick towers and metal rains. Each individual object is familiar, but the tableau as a whole feels delightfully strange.

One moves through these poems at a frenetic pace; many words run together without spaces in between, such as in “watercolor tongue” where colors are given an almost painterly quality: “bluegreenyellow air” and “glasslikewater glass” offer us a collage of language applied more likely with brushstrokes than a keyboard. Such moments also foreshadow the calligram a few pages later, in “and now for contemplation,” that recalls Apollinaire. A bucket-shaped block of overlapping words nearly indistinguishable from one another reads, “Ice is an interesting subject for contemplation. Why is it that a bucket of water soon becomes putrid, but frozen remains sweet forever? It is commonly said this is the difference between the affections and the intellect.” The words form both the shape of a bucket and individual ice chunks in the bucket, also seeming to melt together so that the physical form of the poem enacts its subject.

This moment could also be an anthem for the book as the struggle between love and intellect figures prominently in many poems. In the same poem, the speaker contemplates the dual nature of mind and body, saying, “why should my body as i eat trying to find a resting point of no more want love when i park the car. … i want love when i park the lines to be torn in a few spots. i discover i still have senses to open. It is me who cares if i can’t be alive in want love when i park the intellect.” The concept of parking the intellect—or keeping your mind from interfering with your heart and body is a familiar struggle—but one which Dentz tackles in a new way. The conundrum is fresh because we literally see it presented differently (with the calligram) and hear it differently because of the sonic repetitions, which build one upon the other, a crescendo of trouble and sense.

These poems, both conversational and arcane, continue with the powerful “Black Flowers,” an elegy for grandmothers which builds from a (relatively) straightforward narrative to stranger language and form, pushing the boundaries of our expectations, twisting words the way grief does, and again containing a visual element, black scribbles illustrating the line, “A stew of scribbles” that describes the speaker’s "bubby." The final section remixes language from the previous three, repeating motifs and phrases, searching for sense in death, a way out from under what the speaker calls “mourning: the heaviest fabric.”

Throughout the book, Dentz embarks on an exploration of gender roles, writing about a speaker being asked if she has any children, teenage girls gossiping, finding “another source of ( ) am woman a Woman” (“banana chips”), and describing landscape with female features, as in “the road breasts in the mountains” (“A Brook Somewhere Goes Against a White Mountain Discipline”).

There seems to be a connection between these musings on femaleness and nature, both of which feature prominently in the book, mostly because nature is so often described in feminine terms, with a “sun sister,” “the red bottom lip,” and breasts, as well as an eroticization with the yonic red pit of a sunny peach. As men have long seen themselves reflected in nature, so does this female speaker see the feminine side of the outdoors, even engaging Thoreau in the poem, “let the possum go.”

whatever i want so what is
it I can look out Thoreau because saying things
flying across time flying across water
a leaf falls bird flies the way it
starts up.

Dentz urges us in the penultimate line of the book to “shed the fixed landscape” (“sunslips”). Good advice for viewing nature or poetry, and this book does both, altering the reader’s expectation of what a “nature poem”—or what any poem—resembles.

* * *

Valerie Wetlaufer has lived in Iowa, Vermont, France and Florida. Currently she resides in Salt Lake City where she is a doctoral fellow in the English Department at the University of Utah. Her poems and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Poets' Quarterly, Melusine, Word Riot, PANK Magazine, Poemmemoirstory, The Gay & Lesbian Review and Bloom.

Eli Brown's _ The Great Days _, reviewed by Julia Bloch

Eli Brown
The Great Days
ISBN 9781893448056
Boaz, 2009
Fiction. Paperback, 288 pp.
$14.95

Reviewed by Julia Bloch

The literature of utopia has always contained within it the situation, even the certainty, of dystopia. The biggest lessons from communities designed according to a version of the ideal often come into view when we understand how utter failure was written into the original blueprints. But what kind of in-between space do we navigate between the ideal and the disastrous, or between the ideal and the banal space of the everyday? In a 1967 lecture, Michel Foucault proposed that apart from the fundamentally unreal space of the utopia—an idealized site with no tangible expression in the real world—modern civilization is characterized by the heterotopia, the “other space” or “counter-space” from which we can imagine alternative ways of being in the world. The heterotopia is the space—Foucault compares it to a mirror—from which we see where we are not. We see that we do not live in utopia; we do not live in the world we would imagine for ourselves had we the chance. This view is both terrible and instructive: from the heterotopia we see the possibility of the ideal life, the possibility of alternatives to the everyday. But we also understand that we do not live in the ideal, and this realization is profoundly disruptive to our experience of the real.

Eli Brown’s debut novel The Great Days tells the story of August Russ, who is beginning to view the utopian ideals of the Arizona desert compound he calls home (referred to only as the Center) from an in-between space: he’s not quite disillusioned, but not completely buying it, either. When the book opens, August is a faithful citizen of the cult; other community members look to him as an authoritative figure, and he is being groomed for a formalized version of that role. Two key moments of betrayal by camp leadership raise the specter of abuse in the community and shake August’s faith enough that he flees the desert for the nearest city. August is so shaken, in fact, that his grip on reality is threatened: injured, confused, weak, and unable to reconnect with his family, he tries but fails to find his grounding in mainstream society. So when August is urged to return to the desert, he does, but with a newfound fierce determination to return the Center to its best ideals. August takes over leadership of the cult, with predictably complicated results.

When we first meet August, he steps away from a meditating group of his fellow cult members like “a match fallen from a box.” The metaphor is quiet, but instructive: August will soon be falling away from the core structures of the community that once sustained his faith in an ideal way of being in the world, and the consequences for those who surround him will be disastrous. August isn’t yet aware of how precarious the situation is: meeting up with “Papa,” the charismatic and egomaniacal camp leader, August’s perspective is almost cloying. “August looked up to see Papa smiling down on him, wet as a newborn with an ancient face,” Brown writes. “Papa’s hair grew so quickly!” The single-mindedness of Brown’s first-person narrative style frequently makes it difficult to see August from the outside, and this formal approach neatly models the hermeticism of cult life. But Brown’s suggestions of the community’s decay also keep the book from ever flattening August’s journey.

At the book’s opening, the community seems filled with a dry, creeping sort of danger: the camp has been overrun by invasive beetles; a skeletal, possibly imaginary, dog is haunting August; Papa has fallen ill with strange cognitive and verbal failings and calls on August to interpret his messages for the community. Despite all this, Brown fills his narrator with a basically earnest faith in all the trappings of the compound: its vaguely Eastern spiritualism, its ascetic approach to food and other sensual needs, the way each member’s individuality is being filed down like a soft metal. August seems comforted by the rigid order; he blames his own ego (or, rather, an abstract camp notion of capitalized “Ego”) whenever he finds himself chafing against the rules. “No more unconscious living,” he tells his sister in a letter home. “This is the best decision I’ve ever made.” August is a dutiful recruit; we even get the sense that some of the camp’s longterm members are irritated by his sincerity.

At the same time, there are signs he’s catching on to the precarious nature of cult life, and Brown communicates much of this turn with vivid descriptions of the finer details that frame August’s everyday existence: the thinning bodies of the recruits; the weak stalks of the camp’s crops; the harsh, exposed desert setting. The bleakness of the Arizona desert seems even to be written into August’s own vulnerable physicality, and Brown’s descriptions of the body contrast startlingly with his narrator’s apparent confidence. When Papa crosses a line in their fragile social compact, August goes into crisis and makes a series of erratic, unsettling choices that threaten his community’s sustainability. Those choices are all set against a blistering-hot backdrop that serves as a metaphor for August’s raw emotional state.

When August first leaves the camp for his failed journey into the city, Brown’s prose formalizes the transition as if we were changing lenses in a camera: the hue of the landscape shifts, things once in focus are thrown out of vision, and we suddenly trust our narrator less. I admire that Brown is willing to put distance between us and the novel here: it makes us work harder to follow August’s next steps, and culminates in a nuanced critique of the notion of ideal community. August has told himself a story about the Center, and when that story goes off the rails, so does our relationship to the book’s narrative authority. But not completely: if August occupies a heterotopic space, that space is, as Foucault says, always connected to other kinds of spaces, once isolated and penetrable. In fact, Brown's novel suggests that it is only from this in-between heterotopic space that we can confront the deepest social meanings of cult life, not from the outside or from the banal mainstream. August has to come partway out and then go back in for the next stage to happen.

The title of Brown’s book refers to the vague promise the cult’s leader has made: all their sacrifices to his megalomania will lead to some undefined kind of better life. When he realizes he can’t sustain the leader’s design, August confirms that his community is stuck in a kind of heterotopia, all those promises deferred, gazing into the mirror of impossibility. It’s no surprise that a psychic break appears in the climax of this book: were we truly to realize how out of reach our inherited ideals are, Brown seems to suggest, all hell would break loose.

* * *

Julia Bloch's poems have appeared recently in Cue, the Sidebrow anthology, and Cricket Online Review; her chapbook The Selfist is forthcoming from Katalanché Press. Julia earned an M.F.A. in poetry at Mills College in Oakland and is now a Ph.D. candidate in literature at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a co-founder of the Emergency reading series at Kelly Writers House and lives in Philadelphia.

Albert Goldbarth's _ Griffin _, reviewed by Katie Eberhart

Albert Goldbarth
Griffin
ISBN 9780979118906
Essay Press, 2007
Paperback, 84 pages
$12.95

Reviewed by Katie Eberhart

Griffin begins “This seems to be the summer of com-, recom-, and uncombining.” (1) and so a breaking marriage (Martha and Arthur's) becomes the backbone of a structure of relationships and ideas. Only Goldbarth would think to explore the poetry of Catullus in conjunction with a hoped-for romance between two people who barely notice each other (Sweet and Danny), an impending divorce, and myriad other relationship waypoints. Goldbarth has pockets full of techniques—one is shifting point-of-view where the narrator steps in, saying : “I'm telling you now what I hope to do in the sections that follow: simply show how friends of mine have often inspired long thought on the subject of sexual pairing; ...” (3) but nothing is simple and the urge for context is strong, which in this case begins with DNA, not as a dry scientific accounting but in a literary sense and we're hustled back to Roman times, to Catullus and the question “So: what is and what isn't a proper coupling?” (5)

I wondered what exactly I'd gotten into when I saw the title of the first essay—“Roman Erotic Poetry.” How indeed are titles chosen? The title seems to hover cloudlike above the “pairing” and “unpairing” and mystery of why anything is like it is—and the people are specific, as are the actions:

Once a week I do (or “undergo,” if she's steaming away her angst at some ferocious power speed) a walk around (and around and around) Hill Park with Martha. Arthur's just moved out of the house this month, supposedly to “reconnect with himself” and reconsider the marriage. (1)

The not uninteresting question is why do some relationships stay strong and others fail? But what really interests me are the complicated traipsings (toward answers, if there are any), and context that might mean something or might not, but is nevertheless needed, as are the musings.

And then again there's Sweet and Danny. Can't they see it? Everyone else can see it. Every day he passes her desk, and she passes his desk, and they pass by “chance” in the mailroom, and the building—all ten stories of it—seems to realign itself in generous accord to the complicated physics of human attraction. (2)

And Ed, and Mister J and George, and in the first three pages this essay has been populated by people who need or want or don't have or couldn't care less apparently about their relationships, but what comes across is how much the narrator cares about these people, the characters who share the pages, his friends. And the book takes off and you begin to see the total delight of how Goldbarth manages, with grace and alacrity, to cover what seem to be terribly big and modern problems as if on a paradigm-shifting journey someplace where history, experience, pop-culture, and friends co-mingle.

And in the manner of turning a crystal over so the sun hits each facet, you learn (you must know) “It's not proper for a mortal to mate with a god (and still, it's possible in ancient Greece:...” (5) but then there is the long diatribe (digression?) and really I didn't know that Venus was married to Vulcan when she seduced Mars, or centuries later

In Shakespeare too: between the tangled worlds of Montague and Capulet, a chasm intervenes, so deep and wide across that the bodies of both sides' children will plummet helplessly into its shadows and be broken on the rocks at the bottom. (6)

And it goes on from theoretical, literary, or quaintly mythological, somehow slipping into a lot of puzzling and ruminating about why who gets together with who but then there is a contemporary and recognizable present (now) where Albert and Arthur are drinking beer

… in the backyard of [Arthur's] new place. Two or three beers each. Some lazy, cagey chitchat . . . chummy, but always carefully easing away from the raw lip of the troublous spot. So long as we don't stray over that line, everything is up-tempo from him. I've seen his new bed and his new bold, floral shirt and his new bold, floral acrylic painting, and in sixty minutes I've heard his cell phone beep him into seven brief but mysterious and smile-making conversations carried out in a hushed voice in the next room, ... (13)

And the poems of Catullus are indeed woven through this essay, as if to say: 'see how long this has been going on' (a way to check how little anything has changed in a couple thousand years), as is the griffin and theories of the griffin—“Classicist Adrienne Mayor posits that belief in the griffin was fueled by protoceratops remains, ...” (21)

Another thing that appeals to me about Griffin is how the narrative is explosively aural when read-aloud—like “often gusted by lust into treachery” (16) or “... sing-the-blues conflicted over being so pied a beauty in a world of so many similar pinto-spotted, checkered, and mongrel attempts to be life-long wedded for better or worse.” (16) It's as if there's a pace of reading required (not rushing) and sometimes you have to stop, take a time-out, and just listen to the power of a few words or a sentence to encompass time and space, and the size and proportionality of the universe like “On the scale of deltas being accreted grain-of-silt by grain-of-silt, on the scale of meteor showers and of zephyrs, ...” (71) but the deep seriousness drifts away and the cosmic list is knocked down so that “..none of this is any more implausible than a day at the NASCAR track...” (71)

Goldbarth's literary palette shimmers and shifts, from a rich, earth-based poetry “THE HOOFPRINT OF A DEER in the snow: a perfect kiss.” (20) to sketches about relationships, not in a dry way but somehow connecting what comes from the past like “'SHOTGUN WEDDING': ...” (33) or “In the village of Elton in 1300, it would have been, I guess, a 'pitchfork wedding'.” (33) to “Springsteen has it just right in his song 'The River': 'Then I got Mary pregnant/...'” (33) to “But the genes don't care if we're miserable: the genes want more and better genes, ...” (33)

The second essay, “Wuramon,” chews on the big idea of what is life, more particularly “... on the scale of one life...” (59) and that becomes a panorama in every possible sense of the word or maybe IMAX, but also microscopic, and what you learn is that words are treated as things or body parts that must be loved and nurtured, just as so much from any life. And the connections come from “meteorology” or “musicology” or

'Economics,' we say—abstract and gassy. Of course it's also a woman, actually, heavy—with hunger; hair unrooted and drifting away from her scalp—with hunger, here in a daub-wattle hut on an otherwise clement day in 1828 in an uplands valley. If we were there, we could smell the sourness flimmering off her skin.” (60-61)

And Goldbarth has brought the reader into his fold, rather than separating us out, to be part of his pack, smelling “sourness flimmering” and sharing his imagination, peering into the scene from 200 years ago, but also perhaps wondering what is “flimmering” which is not that easy to determine except perhaps by reading poems by Carl Sandburg.

And what matters is the big question—like Annie Dillard asked in For the Time Being, and countless others, both theologically and secularly, have asked pretty much since the beginning of human time: What is a soul? Why are we here? Where do we go? And Goldbarth is at risk of losing a friend (the specter so many of us have faced one way or another).

I am the last one to want to read books about broken relationships or catastrophic illness because so often they are insipid and self-serving but in Griffin there is a passage

But the griffin?—leaves the talon marks of an eagle, bears the hooked beak of an eagle...has massively large, strong-tendoned wings; is partially feathered, black and cobalt and crimson—warrior colors, ...” (20)

and the griffin has lion parts, too, making it “... altogether an overpowering hodgepodge of an animal, ...” (20) but also “It lays eggs. It constructs nests laced with threads of gold, ... It confounds and beguiles and terrorizes: ...” (20) And whether by design or not, the ideas of this creature have been planted in my imagination so that I keep seeing the male and the female, ying and yang, eggs and warrior, and all the pieces-parts in the stories beginning with the statement that archaeological evidence of a “Neolithic village” is “... a line of rubble, layers deep in the earth, that … seems over millennia to have been compacted down to an even thinness, a horizontal quarter-mile of pencil line....” (59) to the “soul ship” (wuramon) of the Asmat people that is in a museum display—all of this, metaphoric or enigmatic, perception-pushing opportunities, really.

Goldbarth is a narrative chef with a knack for blending, like W. G. Sebald, but without the heavy melancholy. He explores the nature of truth, of illness, and relationships, deftly hooking together information and experience in a shape-shifting narrative that moves forward, reverses, follows surprising detours and tangents, settling for truth that resides in the complicated messiness somewhere between a carnival ride and a Carl Sagan lecture. The narratives tackle tricky topics like failing relationships, illness and mortality with the grace of a poet, the thoroughness of a historian (and student of “the contemporary”), sensitivity, and humor. In Griffin, the people inhabit a personal narrative vibrant with life, love, and respect. At 84 pages, Griffin is a slim book thick with ideas. It is poetically written and would indeed be an excellent choice for the “desert island” survival bag.

***

Katie Eberhart has a B.A. in Economics and Geography, M.A. in Agricultural Economics, and is working on an M.F.A. in Creative Writing. She was selected as an Artsmith Artist Resident in 2009 and was a “street reader” for the Palmer, Alaska Poetry Walkabout.

Chris Tonelli's _ No Theater _, reviewed by Christopher Salerno

Chris Tonelli
No Theater
Brave Men Press, 2009
Chapbook. 25 pages.
$9.50

Reviewed by Christopher Salerno

Chris Tonelli’s chapbook, No Theater, the first from Brave Men Press, feels like a flagship collection. Tonelli’s poems are highly Apollonian. As a whole they are sculptural, relying largely on their form, moderation, measure, and order. These poems are leaden, unmovable yet spare: “You wear your mask to bed, / so you never have to be asleep. / I’ll wear mine / while I’m awake, / so I never have to / be awake.”

One need not be familiar with classic Japanese theatre (the book itself presents no referential difficulty) to enjoy the poems of No Theatre. Often their worldly backdrops are quotidian: a canoe trip, a pier, autumn trees, a situation of crows, a snowy vista. Mostly the poems inhabit an introspective space, often getting by on only a few concrete particulars. But this accounts for the authority in these poems; we are in the presence of a person facing the impossible act of individuation. “Things” in these poems are never just decoration. If you are a noun in a poem in this collection, you are vital.

“Mask with no / apertures, I am losing / my emptiness.” In Noh’s centuries-old theatrical tradition, masks play a prominent role, and it’s usually the main actor who wears one on stage. Main actors and masks are a perfect point of entry into Tonelli’s collection, where the speaker is at times both deeply personal and deeply masked, to the point where he himself is anxious to grow into or even become the masked, other self:

               V of geese,
we've been extinct
this entire time.
             Evict
me. Evict me. Evict me.

And here's another poem, "Napoleon," in its entirety:

I feel
littler than I am.
               Nothing
seems possible.

This is the goal-to be
gone. To be the
same size.

Masks here are also symbols of potential, often allowing the speaker the distance he needs to gain perspective on nature and the self: “Memories, / interior resonance, you / are inventing / new natures.” If a mask is a symbol of potential, it is one that, for Tonelli, certainly doesn’t muffle the voice. The masks of No Theater are a vehicle through which the character navigates emotional complexity, and the result is often personal and forthcoming: “The audience, / a constellation / scalding the silence. / They are waiting / for my feeling. I am waiting / to feel their absence.”

The genius of these poems is in the impact of their formal attention (here, sonorously, “audience,” begets “silence,” begets “absence”). Not to mention the line breaks and pacing. Lines this short, this spare, offer a demonstration of voice we can’t ignore. The rhetorical ease of “we’ve been extinct / this entire time” or, “I feel / littler than I am. Nothing / seems possible” comes with an added weight when broken up and isolated into various breaths. Examples of fine dramatic timing can be found on every page.

Japanese Noh Theatre is characterized by minimalism in every way, which is an apt analogue for a collection that, formally, is full of spare poems that also manage to use more of the “field” than traditional, left-justified stanza forms. On the traditional Noh stage, the only ornamentation is usually a pine tree or some other natural element painted behind the actors. The result of the simplicity in both contexts is that the audience focuses more on the dance being performed. These poems convey that minimalism. Each poem is paced for concentrated thought, internal discourse. And the effect of this approach, while not overly dramatic or gimmicky, is a consistency of composition that often mimics choreography:

In order to survive,
Devolve. Until everything's
A given.

             The pier.
                        The thing in the air
above the pier.

I draw a figure of a man;
he has a weapon,

wears a mask of
                       endless redemption.

At times the poems seem to eschew the figurative flourish or the mere reliance on metaphor to get the job done. The diction is more Germanic than Latinate, more common than specialized. If metaphor is a way to distance oneself from existential pain or distress, the poems in No Theater welcome head-on the rawness of the encounter with the world. Rather than tell it slant, the poems are at times haltingly straightforward, favoring a refreshing brand of sincerity: “I protest my senses, / am the size / of all / I haven’t noticed.”

In one sense, the poems of No Theater demonstrate as healthy a relationship with the act of making poems as I’ve ever seen. This speaker can be bold, aphoristic, but at the same time he is also willing to be “ in uncertainties”: “Whatever it is / feels ancient. Whatever it is has / never happened.” And so the ethos builds on the sense that the speaker of these poems, as he does this work, this critical investigation of the masked and unmasked self, is going to learn stuff that you as a reader absolutely need to know. He’s a worker. And we benefit, for we probably have a lack of what is found in this fine little book.

* * *

Christopher Salerno's first book, Whirligig, was published by Spuyten Duyvil Publishing (NY, 2006). His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in: The Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Boston Review, Jubilat, American Letters and Commentary, Electronic Poetry Review, Barrow Street, LIT, and others. Currently, he teaches Writing at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, NC. He is Poetry Editor for The Raleigh Quarterly, an editorial team member of Drunken Boat, and co-curator of The So and So Reading Series.

Michelle Detorie's _ Ode to Industry _, reviewed by Juliet Cook

Michelle Detorie
Ode to Industry
Dusie Kollektiv 3 / Playful Rectangle Press, 2009
Design and Composition by Michael Labenz for Juliana Leslie
Cover Fabrication by Henrietta Bobbinclyde and Skip Out

Reviewed by Juliet Cook

“for it to work she has to look like a girl”: Michelle Detorie’s Ode to Industry

Ode to Industry by Michelle Detorie is a hot little off-sized chapbook with a highly appealing design, involving spray paint in neon green and raspberry and queasy bronze splayed into sexy splatters and provocative shapes on front and back covers. Since I only have one copy of the chap in my possession, I’m not sure if this design is uniform or variable from copy to copy, but my copy looks fancy fresh and graffiti-esque in an obliquely poetic sort of way.

Poetry prompts infiltrate my day-to-day in that fragments of what I’m reading, watching, listening to, and otherwise experiencing tend to infiltrate my poetic consciousness. Around the same time I was reading this chapbook, I also happened to be researching and writing an article about Rape-aXe, a rape deterrent device developed by a South African woman in response to the extremely high incidence of rape in her culture. The device resembles a female condom with barbs inside that are meant to snag and implant themselves into an invading penis, the idea being that the sudden pain to the perpetrator would give the victim time to escape, plus the device would need to be surgically removed, thus alerting police to the crime. An earlier prototype of this device was more akin to a tampon, but was equipped with spring-loaded blades that were meant to be activated by a penis invading the wearer’s vagina. I remember reading about this device and thinking what if it misfired or malfunctioned? Although I imagine the impetus behind the creation of such devices was well-meaning, they certainly have their problematic aspects, including the convoluted burden of women being expected to wear a dangerous weapon inside their bodies as a safeguard.

Perhaps these kinds of thoughts and contradictions had an influence upon how I viewed the cover art of Ode to Industry. The front cover of my copy features a prominent cylindrical shape with a rounded tip, which my mind’s eye perceived as penile-looking. Above the tip is a raspberry-colored spatter that could be perceived as an abstract spray of blood. What makes this perceived tableau all the more interesting is that there is a comb inside the phallus—and the comb is not merely an impression, an abstraction, or an ambiguous shape; it is literally a comb and is the only clearly concrete shape in the whole design. Well, after reading about women having to wear blades or barbs inside their vaginas, I liked the vice versa effect of seeing a foreign entity inside a penis— especially a foreign entity like a comb, which could be viewed as a domestic trapping and thus perhaps more closely aligned with the province of female-hood. Also, even though a comb is not a dangerous weapon per se, it would certainly take on an alternate meaning if it was inserted or implanted into a penis. I liked how the cover of Ode to Industry challenged comfort levels and got me thinking in some unsettling directions before I even opened the book. Fortunately, the contents of the book continued this work.

Many of the poems in Ode to Industry also present certain domestic trappings within unlikely contexts, so that ordinarily innocuous or even utilitarian objects suddenly take on a tone of menace or veiled threat. Seemingly routine assembly line rhythms are juxtaposed with an underlying sense of unease that just might spring forth like the blades in a spring loaded tampon, hidden within until a moment of hideous impact. Flesh containers and domestic constraints intermingle and brush up against each other, sometimes coalescing; other times, repelling or resisting.

Poems in this collection have titles like ‘OF THE TALLOW TRADE’, ‘SPINDLETOP, ‘SWEATSHOP’, ‘PINK TIDE’, ‘FABRICATION’,’SAFTENING SHEATHS, and ‘UNIONIZED NEEDLES’. Even such titles hint at the buzz and busily clicking needles of female-oriented factory work, humming along like a smooth machine, except perhaps we’ve failed to consider just how clamorous and potentially hazardous such machinery can be. Even the accoutrements of seamstressy trades, like sewing machines and needles and scissors are capable of being re-appropriated into weaponry and inflicting some serious damage. Here are a few hints of the impending danger hidden beyond the surface of women’s work:

“And inside there is humming
dense and thick like bee’s litter, hiving
not eggs and honey but automatic
teeth…”

(from SWEATSHOP)

*

“For every root there is a grub, ground
tunnel turned and funneled like a mouth
opening out. Uncovered dirt filled
with shovels. The twitch-light glinting.
There were teeth, and then there were
entrails…”

(from PINK TIDE)

*

“…modalities
for workers, bee-hives, honey comb.
Dark where there is pain, plastic
lit in plastic lights, polyurethanes
aglow. Scissors underneath
the tight-rope, the greased
machines. All along whose
wondering about the parts…”

(from FABRICATION)


Such snippets and the poetic fabric with which they are interwoven convey an uneasiness of industry with calamity lurking within, a flirtation with some kind of hideous resistance if the confusion of human and machine is taken too far. Some of these poems seem to be set in a terrain where it’s already gone too far and the human parts and machine parts are welding and warping and fusing into strangely sinister hybrids.

I also interpreted hints of the vagina dentata myth in some of these strange fusions. In many variations of the vagina dentata myth, a man earns hero status by conquering the toothed vagina, by removing or destroying its teeth. In Michelle Detorie’s variation, teeth and other sharp pieces keep appearing in unlikely and unpredictable places, such as places where humans have been forced into machinated rhythms or in contexts where they are taken for granted, disrespected, treated as expendable, or otherwise have their humanity compromised. In some of these poems, it seems as if the humans might as well be worker bees, buzzing away industriously, except they’re not located inside a honeycomb. This comb isn’t honey at all; it’s something harder to extract, consume, or wipe away. The system with which they are involved is much larger and more difficult to extricate from, thus they must grow teeth on the inside.

Other poems in Ode to Industry contend with topics such as fear and death and male/female gender dynamic communication issues (“See:/we were sitting on the side/of the stretch and the car/wouldn’t go. You were talking/about forgiveness. See! I wanted/to yell in your face. See! Yellow/line zipping by the mirror/not enough to hold both/my mouth and it” from ‘WHORE FORREST’, which begins with the line “How I want to tear your trees away”). I could really feel the speaker’s frustration in this poem, it feels almost violent in its desperation, and again I’m thinking of sharp blades, cutting things up, piecing them together in different ways, re-appropriating, trying to get someone else to see a picture from a different angle, even if you have to rip their blinders off or slice them away.

One poem that takes a more direct and obvious approach is ‘RAPE KIT’, a kind of statement on the terrible ridiculousness of the blame the victim mentality (“like who can really hear/ a needle or a gloved/finger or see marks/ or a red drink if they/weren’t there”), which uses italicized words to interesting effect to generate an almost sing songy accusatory rhythm. Although I can certainly appreciate the relevant message of this poem, I was more drawn to the pieces with motifs of unease morphing in the midst of seemingly neat frameworks into a soon-to-be-insidious entity or a toxic seep. I found the juxtapositions of human and machine rhythms to be disturbingly apt—furthermore, I found the machinated assembly line context to work as an interesting and unsettling metaphor for the idea of people (and more specifically women) being kept contained in small spaces by way of different kinds of fear.

One kind of constraining fear is threat of violence, such as sexual subjugation, bodily harm, or even loss of life. Another kind of constraining fear is intertwined with economic necessity, such as the risk of ending up homeless if one can’t manage to conform enough with the system to make ends meet. Whatever permutation such fear and its imposed containers assume, how long will it be before those so stifled start to mutate or evolve and develop parts sharp enough to cut their way out of someone else’s stultifying fabric? While reading Michelle Detorie’s Ode to Industry, I could hear the clicking of unruly needles; the song of an underlying horror transforming into a resistance and furiously snipping at the seams.

*

Further Reading:

Rape-aXe: Is It a Good Idea?

Sylvia Plath’s ‘An Appearance’

* * *

Juliet Cook’s poetry has recently been published or is forthcoming in Action Yes, Columbia Poetry Review, Diagram, Diode, Oranges & Sardines, Robot Melon and many more online and print sources. She is author of numerous chapbooks, most recently including MONDO CRAMPO (Dusie Kollektiv 3), PINK LEOTARD & SHOCK COLLAR (Spooky Girlfriend Press), and Tongue Like a Stinger (Wheelhouse), with a new chapbook, FONDANT PIG ANGST, coming soon from Slash Pine Press. Her first full-length poetry collection, Horrific Confection was published by BlazeVOX in 2008. For more information, feel free to visit her website

Blake Butler's _ Scorch Atlas _, reviewed by J.A. Tyler

Blake Butler
Scorch Atlas
ISBN 978-0977199280
Featherproof Books, 2009
$14.95

Reviewed by J.A. Tyler

I hold a copy of Blake Butler’s Scorch Atlas and am caught in an awe of books that is rare and seldom overtakes us, happening only when we cradle these pieces of literature and understand that we are seeing something new, something different, something nearly indefinable, something that will change us and our literary perceptions.

The pages are frayed in mock-burns, crumpled in digital disarray and otherwise tattered by design, the genius of Zach Dodson / Bleached Whale, and the spine is scarred, the pages wet with an unknown substance and dirt gritting between chapters, the very real hand-destroyed effect of Blake Butler himself throwing this book into the street, standing on its edges, smearing its face with real-world soot. This, the magic of appearance, the wonder of enormously creative production, before we even begin reading.

With Scorch Atlas, Featherproof Books has made it so that we feel we are picking up a lost history, that we are reading into a broken past, that we are reaching inside a mirror of ourselves but the backing is gone and the image is shattered and what we see frightens us. To give a book such latitude, such design, it is to teach us not to forsake our words, to instead hold them tight and in panic, for they can change the ways in which we see.

But outside of the trippingly slick design aspects and the phenomenal aesthetic presentation of Scorch Atlas, what is it that makes this book hum, that brings it to a higher level of writing, of literature, that makes us see Butler as more than avant garde, as more than new, as a writer who is simultaneously challenging us and begging us onward? In part, it is this notion of interlocking-stories, and the way that a structure of this type creates something other-worldly, a factor of going beyond.

Scorch Atlas, a belated primer, or in the year of the cyst & tremor, or in the year of the worm & wilting, or obliteratia, or a bloom of blue mold along the backbone, or a slip of tongue in the year of yeast, or hide his eyes in the hive blanket, or ilblissum akviss noebleerum iglitt peem or ______________, or no window, or spoke into the soft skin of the mother, or want for wish for nowhere, or coma ocean, or goodnight. [from the title page]

The through-line of Scorch Atlas is of apocalypse, the degradation of the world through glass and static, dirt and floods, but the characters are mostly nameless, usually relegated to easy cultural nomenclature: mother, father, etc. and there is, as such, no exact or absolute protagonist / antagonist. Certainly Butler has set-up the book in such a way that weather elements and societal devastation antagonize each moment of the plot, and there is certainly as well a sense that the carry-through, the following, is of a narrator combing through rubble, the rumbling leftovers, but these are merely interlocked and not forcedly glued to one another. They are a notion, an idea, not forever pock-marked and immovable but malleable, tidal, rising in and out with wax and wane.

The day the sky rained gravel I watched it drum my father’s car. A Corvette he’d spent years rebuilding. He liked to watch his face gleam in the hood. He kissed the key before ignition. He read the owner’s manual aloud. When he lost the strength to stand he left the car uncovered in the street. Each morning I took a Polaroid and we tacked it to his headboard—a panorama of slow ruin. [from ‘gravel’]

The gravel here plays as detriment, as the chaos of loss, and it carries this one narrative portion into the other stories of Scorch Atlas, the relationship built not by the character of dad or the car pelted to dents, but the storms that wages above them all.

To interlock means that Scorch Atlas has, as Jesse Ball mentions in his back cover blurb, created a map, an outline, so that readers are merely led one point to the next, tangents included, rather than stifled and cloistered by a confining and burdensome absolute of narrative.

My family huddled hidden under one another in the house our Dad had built alone. The house where we’d spent these years together. The old roof groaned under the pouring. The Leaking basement filled with goo. [from ‘Bath or Mud or Reclamation or Way In / Way Out’]

Here too, like everywhere in this book, it is equally about the family as it is about the rain, the flooding, the bursting of clouds into mud or dirt or fragments of some other progressive decay. And the through-line of the family, at some point, becomes irrelevant. As we read it becomes less and less important whether this Dad, huddled in hiding, is the same Dad carving himself in the gleam of his Corvette. If they are the same, then we are given the story of this family, of this Dad, falling into abandon. And if they are different, if one Dad is distinct from another, one family separate from the other, it is still the story of fathers, of sons, of families pickled in these massive earthly abuses, wrecking with the landscape. Scorch Atlas is still and always the devastation, the debris, the remains.

This is a sharp and clever structural choice for Butler as well since stories of ruin most often are given the task of rendering each and every moment of the collapse in grounded footage – in order to convince us that this altered reality is somehow still our reality – but with the presentation here as interlocking stories, with no claim to explain or justify how / when / where, Butler is able to loosely weave an apocalypse together without stopping along each point to build readily definable expositional markers, which would inevitably undermine his purpose and clutter the book with unnecessary waste and immaterial moments.

She spread across the wrecked earth and refracted through the ocean to split the sky: a neon ceiling over all things, a shade of something new, unnamed [from ‘the gown from mother’s stomach’]

Scorch Atlas is a world of mold, a world of festering wounds, a world of hurt. Scorch Atlas is a carefully and meticulously distraught world of language, a trembled and shaken line of thought, a vibrant dead trance of phrasing, the measure of words put together all and in the right ways. Blake Butler has made something enormous here, in the reams of his Scorch Atlas, and if nothing else, we are simply destroyed by it, mistaking our skin for its cover, our blood for its damage, our eyes for its violent and broken images.


* * *

J. A. Tyler is the author of the novel(la)s INCONCEIVABLE WILSON (scrambler books, 2009), SOMEONE, Somewhere (ghost road press, 2009) & IN LOVE WITH A GHOST (willows wept press, 2010) & has had recent work with Sleepingfish, Caketrain, Hotel St. George, elimae, & Action, Yes. He is also founding editor of mud luscious / ml press. For more details, visit: www.aboutjatyler.com.

Alexis Orgera's _ Illuminatrix _, reviewed by Mark Rockswold

Alexis Orgera
Illuminatrix
Chapbook.
Forklift, Ink., 2009
$5

Reviewed by Mark Rockswold

Illuminatrix is Alexis Orgera’s first chapbook publication, and one of the more playful and dynamic collections to be published anywhere this year. As the title suggests, the book is a search for light, an illumination of the body, language, gender, humor, the abject, and the poetic. In the world of the Illuminatrix, Orgera combines particle theory with the confessional, mathematics with jealousy, baseball with astronomy, and Hershey’s candy with Piers Plowman. We have epigraphs from Lucretius, Empedocles, and Courtney Love alike. Here the epic and the everyday not only intersect, but collapse into a surreal, non-sequitor experience in the tradition of Apollinaire’s “Zone,” or Ginsberg’s “Howl:”

Dear sun emitting and absorbing light on the field
and from the field.
Dear Newtonian corpuscle, the anticipation of dots.
Dear wave wave wave slip sliding from its momma.
Dear big, big love.
Dear woman with night in your eye.
Dear pathos, and a mirror praying that reflection bears
a holy message.
Dear surviving everyday radiation.
Dear, oh dear, Moses parting legs like an infrared sea (8-9).

It’s this collapse that creates the immediate playfulness and humor of the collection, and Orgera’s speaker’s unique ability to state anything at any time keeps the language sudden, bizarre, and beautiful: “Your gills are the zenith of math,” (13) and “All around us, the ganglia of language / linked by synapse and spit” (13). Her willingness to say anything also helps create the collection’s strong sense of humor, albeit sometimes a sardonic one:

Ah, the man
with the F-O-O-D sign. He’s a fucker.
If I ever go to hell I hope it’s because
of my motherfucking mouth. And if hell
is a waterlogged shrew, perpetually
washing my tongue with Irish Spring,
then so be it (18).

But it’s a humor that’s ultimately softened and complicated by more subtle moments of ambiguity and errors in translation—a sensibility which inhabits Joshua Beckman and Matthew Rohrer’s Nice Hat, Thanks: “Sayonara, the driver said to me, / but I heard Sighing Aura, / and I thought, / what a nice way to put it” (18).

Illuminatrix also questions the rigid boundaries between high and low art, the sciences and arts, and language’s conceptualizing work in general: “there are mighty critics, illuminators deft / in the art of finding meaning /where none should exist” (30). Therefore, in the midst of its own illuminating project, the collection asks, is illumination a good thing? What is lost in the process? To have illumination, there must inevitably be darkness—in this way paradox and equivocal possibility become Illuminatrix’s only sure reality.

* * *

Mark Rockswold is the co-publisher of SpringGun Press. He is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and lives in Denver.

Skip Fox's _ For To _, reviewed by Megan Burns

Skip Fox
For To
ISBN 1934289728
BlazeVOX [books], 2008

Reviewed by Megan Burns

Skip Fox’s newest book For To is nearly three hundred pages of various and intricate poems detailing the poet’s search for quantitative answers in what is understandably an oroboric quest. In fact, the image of the oroboros arises several times throughout the book, less a symbol and more a totem animal—a conundrum in form that parallels the poet’s wrestling with language. In his search for “straight answers,” Fox asks the hard questions and seldom lets up in his relentless gaze. His verse focuses on the smallest and most obscure human details, the odder the better. Fox is especially enamored with the absurd; language is paraded out to perform acrobatic acts of saying all and then some. The poet muses on the mouth of his sock as much as he does on the delicate rays of dawn punctured by the groans of bullfrogs on a southern Louisiana morning.

Fox tells us early on: “Even the boy raised by wolves had a language” (15). He wavers between presenting language as quintessential to the human condition and also limiting and laughable in its design. In witty aphorisms and slingshot asides, Fox pokes fun at us, the users of language, who think we know what we’re talking about when we do talk. “Reason is one thing that happens,” (61) he quips. Mathematical precision as a trope recurs throughout his examination into the accuracy of words. Fox’s poems read like math problems found in the school of ultimate knowledge. If we could solve them, the kingdom of bliss could be ours they seem to proffer. Take “30-31 Curriculum for the New Millennium: Basic Oblivion” that asks:

What is the nominal ‘distance’ between what you think you should feel and what you do feel, and all the supple calibrations gliding across your skin, touching with their tiny bare feet all the tender deposits of lives, the kinds of families, relations you may have had, and those you didn’t.

These questions have the ability to send the reader into paroxysms of doubt questioning all they thought they knew or more accurately all they never thought about at all.

Fox brings to the surface those items often overlooked; “very delicate, a word,” (36) he tells us as he celebrates the magic in the obscure. He manages to tilt our eyes downward and inward uncovering the invisible chemical reactions that make up our existence and laying them out in figurative language often reserved for fiery sunsets and lover’s laments. Fox describes the predicament of being human in all its flawed and messy compartments. All the while he is cognizant of the fallible tools in his toolbox: “all measure is metaphor” (52). In the same vein that a mathematical equation seeks solutions, these poems also seem to be searching for answers. In truth, Fox reveals, the search itself is the process and the pleasure: “I’d not miss it for the world” (127).

Form is a net that Fox refuses to be caught within; his poems throughout the book range from concrete poems to prose poems to lists and pages of notes and footnoted texts. At his most sublime and romantic, Fox muses:

insects passing my ears, cars
on the curve, rusty hinge
of bird in the field, cricket
frogs again,…once they
opened a door and I
walked in. It
seemed simple. (150)

These tranquil reflections are interspersed with wild “Sure Shots” as Fox calls them, a random recording of thoughts and witticisms such as: “Actually you can catch more flies with a corpse. (Sticka for the Godz!)” (199) or the flippant multi- choice option: “Eat what you fuck. Sticka for a. cannibals, b. cattle ranchers, c. post-feminists, d. ADM” (200). There is even the occasional Zen koan: “Zero is nothing realized, nothing beheld, not even absence, requires no article.” (199). It’s hard to pin down where Fox’s leanings are poetically, when he is constantly pushing the subject on what poems can say or how they should even look like while they are saying it. In “Forty Titles,” Fox will serve up the titles for poems that should probably never be written while a few pages later, he begins a concrete poem almost shaped like a heart with, “That little fuck, what was his name?” (217). Fox has the ability to unhinge the reader’s steadiness by vacillating between lyrical verses that lean towards the more familiar use of images and allusions to explicitly raw and hysterically funny lines that you won’t find in the pages of the New Yorker in any near future.

Occasionally, Fox manages that oldest of poetic tricks, to sum it all up in a line so poignant that all other lines seem superfluous as in the poem “Monday Nights: Ode to Mom”:

This should be titled “Miles to Go” with a trumpet solo that would blow into your notions of existence such ripe conception that you might live it again, all over from the beginning, as they say, only this time without the hardship.

The reader can see the nostalgic snowy paths of the past sounded out as a long horn solo calling us all to a place we will never venture again, except for here in the poem. Maybe that is the answer to the puzzling title of Fox’s book; whoever it is “for” and whoever it is “to,” they will know when they enter into the exchange with this poet that promises never to offer the expected.

Fox is not afraid to let his poems laugh or even laugh at him, and they reward him by revealing a lexicon that measures out our own careless joys from childhood. In lessons long forgotten, we see here again how playful language is and how mindful it can be of our own precarious conditions. Fox takes both the serious and the futile, compressing time into moments caught in his various forms for getting the words down. Far from simply playing with language like a toy, Fox confronts the reader with the open-ended question that rejects the neat closure in exchange for the messiness of life.

* * *

Megan Burns has a MFA from Naropa University and edits the poetry magazine, Solid Quarter. She has been most recently published in Callaloo, Constance Magazine, and YAWP Journal as well as online at horseless press, shampoo, trope_5, Exquisite Corpse and BigCityLit. Her book Memorial + Sight Lines was published in 2008 by Lavender Ink. She lives in New Orleans where she and her husband, poet Dave Brinks, run the weekly 17 Poets! reading series.