Vanessa Place's _ La Medusa _, reviewed by Janice Lee

La Medusa
Vanessa Place
Fiction Collective 2 (2008)
ISBN-13: 978-1573661454
Paperback: 616 pages, $22

reviewed by Janice Lee


The Phenomenological Landscape of La Medusa (City as Monster/ City as Literature/ City as Consciousness)

In 1832, Louis Albert Necker described a "sudden and involuntary change in the apparent position of a crystal" during his observation, his perception having spontaneously shifted while the observed object stayed unchanged.

In 2008, Vanessa Place likened the epic narrative of the city of Los Angeles to "the modern mind that is both expansive and penetrating in its obsessions and perceptions."

What Necker's cube and La Medusa relate is the idea that the original presentation of reality itself is metaphorical, that what is seen is always inextricably bound up with how one sees. What Necker's cube offers as a metaphor for consciousness is also a metaphor for a difficult text, recalling the consequences of facing the creation of an impossible perceptual world occurring in a physical one. La Medusa takes on the impossible challenge: to write a book about the legendary city of Los Angeles, a city so de-centered that no book could possibly encompass its vastly different representations, no book could avoid the ephemerality of an attempt at a concretization of LA, no book could represent the gaze, tame the city as monster and insert it into the artificially rendered pages of a book. But this is why La Medusa can, and does, knowing that the city is something that is constantly becoming but never is.

Los Angeles is a city that is there and here, a city constantly remaking itself and artificially rendered as well, so that the various consciousnesses that make up Place’s epic novel are not meant to be definitive, rather artificial versions of artificial realities that have left some feelers behind in the "real world."

Vanessa Place's La Medusa is described as a "polyphonic novel of post-conceptual consciousness," yet this novel is more than just a return to a Joycean experience, as Michael Silverblatt comments, and it is more than just a theoretical description of the phenomenal properties of consciousness in narrative. Rather, the novel resists Daniel Dennet's famous claim that consciousness is simply a kind of illusion or epiphenomenon and provokes the reader into a consideration of the wages of consciousness and the agency we so fervently believe it comes along with—that is, consciousness is often taken for granted as innately tied to everyday perception but is something rather more artificial and flexible. Not only does the novel offer a literary enactment of the kind of consciousness that drives the dream of Los Angeles, the reader must construct her own phenomenological self-model during the process of reading.

Vanessa Place has written elsewhere, "Ergo no single story can be told because there is never just one." Yet there is an ontological paradox of quantum physics, as she continues, "for it is only the single observer who can create wholecloth reality from piecemeal particles—the singular consciousness in all its individual multiplicity transforms the multiplicity of the quantum flux." Place's own book is an ambitious architecture of human consciousness mapped over the vast landscape of a sprawling city. Yet, as the reader delves in and out of the minds of characters (a doctor, a trucker, an ice cream vendor, a corpse—to name a few), what they learn to see is not the world through another character's eyes, but to see the world differently through their own again. The reader's own process of narrativizing-as-reading becomes mapped onto the narrative architecture of the multimodal world of the page. The text is fragmented into bursts of language and emotion, for as Max Planck discovered, on the quantum level, energy works in bursts, not in a steady Joycean stream.

So how does this text operate, on a quantum level or on a greater one? How does it look to the history of literature, mending the broken bodies of texts, tattered from history and time? It is easier to repair a broken pump than it is to heal a broken metaphor, especially when we have forgotten the difference. La Medusa maps a sprawling metropolis and metaphor for an artificial consciousness, ultimately asking the reader to reconsider their own preconceptions of the way their own minds work. It is in the constellation of lack, built upon the intrusions and disruptions of an architectural narrative, that we as readers realize that none of us are really in complete control of our own perceptions. In reading a text where we must learn how to read again, where does the dream of Los Angeles lie? La Medusa echoes softly: We are in the dream, and yet the dream is inside us.

****

Janice Lee is interested in metaphors of consciousness and theoretical neuroscience. Her work can be found or is forthcoming in Big Toe Review, Zafusy, antennae, sidebrow, Action, Yes, Joyland, and Black Warrior Review. Her first book is KEROTAKIS (Dog Horn Press, 2009), a multidisciplinary exploration of cyborgs, brains, and the stakes of consciousness. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from CalArts and currently lives in Los Angeles where she is a co-curator for the feminist reading series Mommy, Mommy!, co-editor of the online journal [out of nothing], and co-founder of the interdisciplinary arts organization Strophe.

Susan Wheeler's _ Assorted Poems _, reviewed by Greg Weiss

Assorted Poems
Susan Wheeler
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-374-25861-0
Hardcover: 143 pp, $25

reviewed by Greg Weiss


Susan Wheeler’s Assorted Poems is noteworthy for its excellence and stylistic trajectory, and the symbiotic relationship between the two. It contains selections from Wheeler’s four volumes of poetry—Bag ‘o’ Diamonds, Smokes, Source Codes, and Ledger—and charts a course from Ashbery-esque serious winking through, to quote Wheeler’s own allusion, “fractured fairy-tales,” before arriving, as of Ledger, at linguistically sparse but visually and thematically expansive poems that place Wheeler’s self and contemporary American capitalism/consumerism in a relationship not unlike that of C.P. Cavafy to Greek history. In a blurb for X.J Kennedy’s In a Prominent Bar in Secaucus: New and Selected Poems, 1955-2007, Donald Hall asserts that “many of Kennedy’s poems are wit itself. His wit is his way of understanding.” I agree with Hall, and would also spell out the implied mirror-image: “And understanding is his [Kennedy’s] way of wit.” Cavafy and Wheeler enjoy the same reciprocal relationship as Kennedy to “wit” in their treatments of “Greek history” and “money in contemporary America,” respectively.

To be perfectly honest, although the structure, language and punctuation in the poems from Bag ‘o’ Diamonds is standard, I often could not comprehend them effectively. (Or if I did comprehend them effectively, they didn’t affect me.) As is often the case with the poems in first books, the poems from Bag ‘o’ Diamonds are harder to comprehend and not as strong as the poems in the following volumes, which, although it sounds like a criticism (and is), is what I mean by the symbiotic relationship between the evolution of Wheeler’s style and her excellence. “Peanut Agglutinin,” like many of the poems in Bag ‘o’ Diamonds, features an intentionally difficult to decipher narrative which an appreciation of the poem depends on that does not seem to attempt to deliver a payoff which would justify its difficulty:

ffffffffffThe gore being chili sauce and rice didn’t mitigate
ffffffffffthe way she died. Done in,
ffffffffffcurtain furled at sunset then, the cat arced
ffffffffffand sped off behind the Donut Hut and we
ffffffffffsee against the tar curbside one lone foot splayed.
ffffffffffAnd what a plan it was, though most missed the boat—
ffffffffffthis way to the sawmill, inspector!

ffffffffffNell too fell victim to his terrible design.
ffffffffffOut in the ever woods where the tree trunks stood
ffffffffffthe blood seeped from plastic bags
ffffffffffand the crew had to make another ketchup run.
ffffffffffLissa was tired of peeling grapes for eyeballs,
ffffffffffand Buck of scooping mayonnaise into insulated gloves.

ffffffffffYeah, well here’s what she liked: hair, and lots of it,
ffffffffffpeanut brittle—when suddenly, a frost of cicadas,
ffffffffffrising like Lucifer, hums up the clouds—an
ffffffffffevening beside you: Do-right, do right again.

The poems from Smokes are more intellectually realized and less ostentatious, and represent a clear step forward. The narratives are less talky, more cryptic, and often bring to mind folksongs and nursery rhymes. For instance, “Meeting Again, After Heine”:

ffffffffffThe moon rose like a blooming flower.
ffffffffffThe tin in the hand clattered its charge.
ffffffffffWe walked by in the wavering hour,
ffffffffffI looking away, you chattering hard.

ffffffffffMet by luck, with like destinations,
ffffffffffWe startled again at what ended in pique.
ffffffffffStrollers out, seeing, had no notion;
ffffffffffA car alarm cycled its querulous shriek;

ffffffffffEighth Street sank in the crack of its nightfall;
ffffffffffYou pressed your satisfactions on me.
ffffffffffYou in your urgency remarked after all
ffffffffffKindling your passions was enmity;

ffffffffffPassions had finally erased your calm,
ffffffffffMade composure a prop of the past.
ffffffffffI mugged that street noise, din, bedlam
ffffffffffPrevented my hearing your story at last.

ffffffffffAs I walked home the strollers were thinning,
ffffffffffThe moon bobbed above roofs like a ball,
ffffffffffThe shade at the bus stop waved to me, beckoning.
ffffffffffAnd I nodded fast in the fast nightfall.

With poems featuring running into an old boss, clock-radios, and furniture warehouses, and “Ezra’s Lament” with its initial refrain of “I owe, I owe, I owe,” money and its family tree are in Smokes’s DNA. And while some of the almost uniformly excellent poems from Source Codes could have been written by Charles Bukowski, Frederick Seidel, Arthur Vogelsang, or Mark Levine, a few treat commerce, or trade, and its relationship to the world uniquely. My favorite lines in Assorted Poems open the final stanza of “Quincy in Lagos”: “How did we know what we see, we saw through the mind? / What citizen without cummerbund could Columbo yet find?” Whereas the poems from Bag ‘o’ Diamonds are very serious about being offhand, these lines are offhandedly serious—Wheeler gets at how severely limited our individual knowledge and experience is, and the effect that those limitations have on us as individuals and collectively, through a pitch-perfect analysis of Columbo (and I say this as a big fan of the show). And in “Rite Two: Two,” Wheeler understands an impending death in commercial language:

ffffffffffIt is my work that waits, not yours.
ffffffffffIt is my clock that ticks, not hers.
ffffffffffI have reason to undertake an expiry report.
ffffffffffThe dead will die, nonetheless.

It is Wheeler’s suffusion, in this stanza/poem and others primarily in Source Codes and Ledger, of American and global commerce, the personal and the more universal—“The dead will die, nonetheless”—that brings Cavafy to mind. Death, the personal and the more universal are similarly intermingled in the opening stanzas of “The Funeral of Sarpedon”:

ffffffffffZeus mourns deeply:
ffffffffffPatroklos has killed Sarpedon.
ffffffffffNow Patroklos and the Achaians rush on
ffffffffffto snatch up the body, to dishonour it.

ffffffffffBut Zeus doesn’t tolerate that at all.
ffffffffffThough he let his favorite child be killed—
ffffffffffthis the Law required—
ffffffffffhe’ll at least honour him after death.
ffffffffffSo he now sends Apollo down to the plain
ffffffffffwith instructions about how the body should be tended.

Both Wheeler and Cavafy begin their account of the death of an acquaintance by emphasizing the personal nature of the loss. Wheeler makes the emotional connection in the contrast between “my” and “yours” and “hers,” and Cavafy in his straightforward assessment of the depth of Zeus’ mourning, as well as Zeus’ level of tolerance. Wheeler and Cavafy’s tones imply that the emotional nature of impending and recent death precludes ornamentation. And as Cavafy places that emotion in embattled history (“Now Patroklos and the Achaians rush on / to snatch up the body, to dishonour it”), Wheeler does in the humdrum of commerce: “I have reason to fill out an expiry report.” And then both conclude, at least momentarily, in a combination of pragmatism and fatalism: “The dead will die, nonetheless…So he now sends Apollo down to the plain / with instructions about how the body should be tended.”

There are poems in Ledger that could have possibly appeared in the previous three, but there are also poems that are notably different in regards to their scope, length, and appearance on the page. Ledger brings Tom Sleigh to mind in the same way that Bag ‘o’ Diamonds invokes Ashbery. In both instances, Wheeler adopts a distinctive aspect of an influence’s poetry—Ashbery’s whimsical half-narratives and Sleigh’s sense of time and space on the page—and adapts it to her own needs. The result is poetry that advertises a lineage to which it is tangential. For instance, while Sleigh often presents, within a single poem, disparate snapshots that have the effect of identifying with both those captured moments and the vast scope of time and space that they belong to, Wheeler is concerned with presenting that belonging, the relationship between those moments and the vast scope of time and space. The manner in which narrative, thematic, and linguistic coherence and moral, emotional, and intellectual scope suffuse each other in the poems from Ledger is difficult to capture in excerpt, but the first three stanzas of “Short Shrift” provide at least some idea:

ffffffffffffffffffffI was at and about everything, nodding through the mall lot,
ffffffffffffffffffffffffcutting through the yard with quick, light steps.

ffffffffffWhen the rains came,
ffffffffffthey left the hillside
ffffffffffand moved to the high ground
ffffffffffwhere a quilt scrap sustained them
ffffffffffin late, dark readings from
ffffffffffIsaiah, bright
ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff“and they

ffffffffffregard the objectivity of the market as a disguise for an abdication of
ffffffffffffffffffffvalues and of intellectual dependence” WM PFAFF, 1981

The poems from Ledger seem, to me, those of a poet who has “found her voice.” I put “found her voice” in quotes to acknowledge the banality of the sentiment and phrase, but also to indicate that I don’t believe Wheeler’s voice to necessarily be wed to consumerism. It is tempting to view the confluence of new, or newly explicit, subject matter and one’s appreciation of a poet as a causality, but it is just as nearsighted to conceive of Wheeler as a “poet of consumerism” as it is to conceive of Cavafy as a “poet of Greek history.” What strikes me about both Wheeler and Cavafy, at their best, is their apparently effortless enactment of the oft-attempted but rarely successful combination of the personal and epic. Susan Wheeler’s Assorted Poems is excellent, gets better as it goes along, and is the rare volume that exhibits ambition while exuding quality.


****

Greg Weiss’s criticism and poems have previously appeared or are forthcoming in Boston Review, The Humanities Review, Cricket Online Review, Blue Fifth Review, Now Culture, The Columbia Review, The South Carolina Review, The Oklahoma Review, The Margie Review, The Southern Poetry Anthology: Mississippi, and others. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Southern Mississippi.

Eric Raschke's _ The Book of Samuel _, reviewed by John McCaffrey

The Book of Samuel
Eric Raschke
St. Martin's Press, 2009
Paperback: $9.99; 264 pages.

reviewed by John McCaffrey


Like all good fiction, Eric Raschke’s debut novel, The Book of Samuel, both captures and transcends time, meaning it provides readers with a detailed depiction of a particular place and moment in history, while exploring themes that have given men and women pause since antiquity. In this case, it is the suburban, ranch-house tundra of 1980’s Denver that serves as a fixing point for Raschke’s subtle yet steady probe of spirituality, family life and societal movements.

The book is narrated by Samuel Gerard, an adolescent whose view of the world – whether it be from the banana seat of a huffy or the bended knee of his Christ-obsessed father – falls somewhere between Tom Sawyer and the Terminator. More accurately, Samuel is Beaver Cleaver (his family actually lives on Cleaver Street) with an edge, a wide-eyed innocent who bathes each night with floating battleships and by day ignites dumpster garbage with found lighters. With his mother and father in a marital holy war and perched (negligently so) at polar ends of his ideological development, Samuel must find his own way in life. Like a tortoise without a shell, he inches forward from one calamitous experience to the next, absorbing the pains of maturation without protection, emotional blows that leave no trace on the skin but on his soul.

Raschke’s writing style is crisp, conversational and magnetic. The story in the Book of Samuel is told in a linear, forward-moving fashion, with short chapters broken into quick-hitting sections. Yet the book is not fast paced, it is calm and constrained, in parts methodical, but without repetition and always full of quirky surprises and sharp contrasts. For example, Samuel’s immediate family includes a far-left liberal mother who is working to test ground water pollution in the area, his father, a former professor and author who believes himself to be a messiah-like instrument of God and spends time mapping out bible passages in a backyard tent, and a holocaust-surviving racist grandmother who denigrates the T.V. Jefferson’s and their right (and all black people) to “move on up.” Samuel is also influenced in his thinking by a cadre of broken-home, bike-riding misfits who wage battle against Mexican immigrants and nubile girls who spark his hormones and provide his inquisitive brain with alternative ideas then what arises from his dysfunctional family.

While one can imagine connection between The Book of Samuel and South Park, the popular animated television series and satire on conservative and religious mores set in central Colorado, Raschke’s tome is a much more blunt and effective instrument in smashing down societal walls. Yet this destruction is never mean-spirited – Samuel is without guile and absorbs knowledge and ignorance, wisdom and hate, all what life has to offer, like a sponge. It is when twisted and constricted, put through the proverbial ringer, that the essence of the story drips out and Samuel, acting as a human distiller, taking in all that is good and bad around him and releases, to the reader, the truth.


*****


John McCaffrey received his Master's Degree in Creative Writing from City College of New York. His short stories and reviews have been published in numerous literary journals and have been anthologized in Flash Fiction Forward. He recently completed his first novel, "The Book of Ash." To see more of his published work, access www.jamccaffrey.com

Derek Beaulieu's _Square Root_, reviewed by Ross Brighton

Derek Beaulieu
√¯¯¯
Default Publishing for Dusie Kolektiv year 3 (2009)
(pdf here)

This is a wonderful example of the book as an object, proving that the book-noun is not restricted to, or synonymous with, the codex (though this is often assumed to be the case – see Keith Smith's "The Book as Physical Object" in A book of the Book, edited by Jerome Rothenberg and Steven Clay (Granary 1999). This has obvious implications for the future of the e-book, which as of yet has mostly consisted of codex-simulation.)

The endeavours of many of the presses involved in the Dusie Kolektiv move beyond (or improvise upon) the codex’s generally accepted mode of existence as a semantically invisible vehicle for text, as is the case with this series of visual poems.

The concept of the codex is exploded here in a burst of multidirectional physicality, with the usual single, chronologically regulated trajectory replaced by a series of flaps, each operating as a breach or rupture in the book’s planar field, and containing one of the pieces in this series (constellation?).

This rupturing is not contained to the idea of the book, but also takes place on the graphemic level. Each of the four pieces that comprise this work exhibit a futurist/vorticist dynamism, exploding textual normalcy, which signification is made subordinate to the jouissance of visual dynamics. This bears resemblance to the calligraphy of graffiti artist’s bombs, or the logos of metal bands, where typographical aesthetics and excess subsume signification (take as an example of the latter the Xasthur logo, which, after the insertion of the central sigil, has become completely illegible). Like both of these, there is the remnants of a typeface, yet they are scattered, superimposed upon one another. There is no previous text to decipher, no history. There is just what this text will become in collaboration with a reader.

As such the flower-like opening of this work serves a similar function, while also telling of the potential existent in folds and cuts – I’d love to see what could be achieved in the collaboration of a visual poet and publisher doing something like Jack Ross’ Borges translations (especially with the beautiful production values of someone like Peptic Robot).

The only complaint I have is small, and that is the quality of the poems’ printing – they’re a bit blurry. However interesting issues arise here concerning reproduction, distribution, and the existence of the image; and thus the poem/book: where/what is the original? And if this lurks somewhere on a computer, as an intangible sequence of ones and zeroes – what, then, are the implications?

Jessica Bozek's_The Bodyfeel Lexicon_, reviewed by Natalie Lyalin

The Bodyfeel Lexicon
Jessica Bozek
Switchback Books, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-9786172-4-0
Paper: 101 pp, $14

Reviewed by Natalie Lyalin


The Bodyfeel Lexicon, the first single author collection from Jessica Bozek, begins by presenting us with an introductory letter from a figure simply known as the editor. This letter serves as a compass of sorts, describing the contents of The Bodyfeel Lexicon as a set of found letters and documents, and giving these items a name—The Peary Assemblage. The finding of The Peary Assemblage, “while exploring a former wolf den in a rocky outcropping” (1) reminds me of the history surrounding the 1946 discovery of the so-called Dead Sea Scrolls, by Muhammed edh-Dhib, and his cousin, Jum'a Muhammad. edh-Dhib fell into an ancient cave only to emerge with one of the greatest textual recoveries of the 20th century. The finding of the scrolls—a collection of communal regulations, mystical treatise, and ancient Biblical manuscripts—was an exciting religious, archeological, and anthropological event. In recent years, however, a veritable industry has been created around the mystery of the discovery—with almost total disregard for the scrolls’ content.

What’s the point here? It is partially this: there is a great power in the mysterious discovery. This mystery generates a myth that transcends the contents of the discovered. Our minds turn to the hidden authors—in the case of Lexicon they are the shadowy figures of Wolf and Leon Szklar. Who were they? What were their lives like? Wolf and Szklar are tucked so deeply beneath the layers of an entire history-cum-myth created by Bozek. It may seem easier to overlook them and gallop away on the excitement of what we imagine is a true re-discovery of their past than to stay in the present narrative of Lexicon. Like the Dead Sea Scrolls, The Bodyfeel Lexicon finds its start with an act of recovery. But the book quickly leaves the scrupulous details of that recovery behind. The mystery of The Peary Assemblage draws us in, and Lexicon’s strange and obscure narrative and fearless language-play keep the reader hooked.

There is a pleasantly grand set up to Lexicon: an opening letter that creates as many questions as it sets out to answer, the mysterious editor, and the authors of The Peary Assemblage, the opaque lovers: Leon Szklar and Wolf. The act of correspondence serves as the outline of The Bodyfeel Lexicon. The Szklar-Wolf correspondence is fragmented, liminal, shifting in and out of the realm of human possibility. Lexicon’s sections provide moments of great linguistic leaps and fantastical imagery.

Leon Szklar writes:

ffffffffffFar enough now to be vitric remembrance, another figure to ignore
ffffffffffup on a ledge. Would you have me pressed, carnival, or etched?
ffffffffffHobnail or crown? (17)

Wolf writes:

ffffffffffWe can’t tap a hole in the side of a head, stick a milkshake straw in,
ffffffffff& simply film. (18)

And later, Szklar:

ffffffffff…as rough rounds corkscrew the sky
ffffffffffthe grounds of my love—sweat-peel, tragus-ring smatter, cuticalia—
ffffffffffair-lit by the replica moons of a three-hole punch (43)

And later, Wolf:

ffffffffffPlease, miss, bring me a blanket for conjuring claws & the pups’ fast
ffffffffffclinging licks, as if they could shape me into a wolf with their
fffffffffftongues. (56)

After reading Lexicon’s two sections written in a letter format (the other sections contain documents and “exhibits” that resemble poems) I got the sense that Wolf and Szklar are somehow morphing—from human to nonhuman, perhaps even from male to female. Though Wolf is presented as female and Szklar as male, this is not a concrete fact. After all, if one can shift from human to non, the shift from male to female seems like a tiny transition. The correspondence between Wolf and Szklar is a long way from being a traditional set of linear letters and documents that create a coherent history of a relationship. The assemblage is deconstructing the traditional notion of communication. If one were, for example, to remove the salutation and valediction from all of the letters we would be left with few markers to identify the text as a means of communication. And yet, Bozek makes it so that we trust that there is a form of communication taking place. Wolf and Szklar speak to one another in imagery, in the absence of a typified experience, in the lack of banal emotion. It is not the typical exchange one would expect from a set of letters or documents—questions are posed but not answered, comments are made but not reciprocated. It is as if Wolf and Szklar are more interested in the act of writing rather than actually communicating with one another, as if the act of creating is more important than understanding and responding. Or, theirs is a communication of code that the reader is not privy to. But their project is interesting, shocking, and unusual, and the reader is compelled to keep reading because the intention behind the non-linear nature of the entire assemblage is almost irrelevant in comparison to the beauty and weirdness of the writing within it.

I return to the notion of deconstructing communication rather than establishing a traditional set of facts and ideas. Because of Wolf’s (and possibly Szklars) shifting abilities it seems a miracle that they have a way to communicate anything at all. At which point in time and space can half-human-half-non / male-female figures find a way to say something to one another? And what are they saying? Bozek does not seem interested in providing an explanation for these questions. Her focus appears to be on the language’s slippery and exciting acrobatics. In a poem titled “EXHIB. 6A” we see the language seemingly straddling the line of obscurity and familiarity.

fffffffffflow with others

ffffffffffwe lend heater-limbs shed a party to slouch into a solidity
ffffffffffffffffffffof down/save the first pick for alpha

fffffffffftunnel-moan then I knew how (76)

There is a somewhat hypnotic s sound here, and a variety of e and o sounds that in combination make the mouth move around pleasantly. There is a rolling sonic quality that is also very pleasing to the ear. This poem, like the others, sounds really good and is fun to say out-loud. There is perhaps desire to obscure meaning and to propel the sound of the language. These lines are akin to the howl of an animal, meaningful to some, but impossible to understand for others—difficult to fully understand, but chilling and exciting to hear.

Lexicon works hard to establish itself not only as a collection of correspondence, but also as an exhibit of Szklar and Wolf’s collaboration. In other words, Lexicon is both the correspondence and an exhibit of the correspondence. Bozek achieves this difficult feat by compiling numerous items within Lexicon. The book is comprised of seven sections, an opening letter and poem, and appendices. Two of the seven sections are the Wolf and Szklar letters, two sections, titled “The Matchbook Fragments” appear to be Wolf and Szklar’s collaborative poems, the section titled “The Transport” is authored by Szklar, and the section titled “An Airborn Torpor” is authored by Wolf. Between the sections Bozek provides illustrations of bones, cells, teeth, etc. taken from actual zoological tomes. The appendices include photos of the actual matchbooks on which the sections titled “The Matchbook Fragments” are written, a glossary of terms that establish their unique definitions within Lexicon, and an appendix titled “Some Proposals for the Bodyfeel Repository.” All of these materials are used to ground the myth of Szklar and Wolf in our reality. With the inclusion of these items Lexicon acts as a museum catalog, as proof that Wolf and Szklar existed and collaborated to create The Peary Assemblage. Lexicon pushes the boundaries of “book” and locates us in a myth told beyond the pages. It takes us into a museum, where just like a skeleton is a partial reference to hidden prehistoric time, so too are the illustrations, appendices, and photos a reference to the exhibit of Wolf and Szklar’s collaborative myth. (It is interesting to note that the three of the four men credited with the illustrations that appear in Lexicon, Richard Owen, William Henry Flower, and Sidney F. Harmer, were at one time director of the Natural History Museum in London.)

Of course it is not necessary to know who authored what to appreciate the writing, but Bozek seems intent on underlining the collaborative and individual efforts in Lexicon. There is a need on her part to highlight the act of collaboration and to differentiate it from individual writing. As a reader I was glad for the careful explanations and identification provided by the introductory letter. But I have to wonder what my reading experience would have been like had I not known the background to the assemblage. I spent a lot of time flipping back to the introductory letter to find out an author of a section or to ponder the importance of the discovery of The Peary Assemblage. Similarly, I am not sure of the role of the appendices in Lexicon. Their mere presence implies that they are necessary to the understanding of the book, but there is so much information in these sections that I wish they were more present in the main part of the book rather than at the end. However, I do appreciate their being included and find them to be impressive and interesting. They nicely round out the grand scope of Bozek’s project in placing The Peary Assemblage into the reader’s reality. I come away from Lexicon being deeply impressed with Bozek’s careful efforts in gathering, providing, and shaping information for her reader.

The idea of the creation of a myth hovers in Lexicon but it is not concrete or tangible. There is no obvious parable in this book, no warning or instruction to believe one thing or to avoid another. Instead, Bozek creates a narrative where the perceived distinction between human and nonhuman is blurry. Where the language play is most exciting yet only slightly illuminating of the protagonists’ concealed inner-landscapes. This is exciting and much more interesting than the alternative—I am not looking to read a simple fairytale imbedded with moral lessons. I prefer the complex weirdness of Wolf and Szklar’s correspondence. In Lexicon, language is used to create a bridge, as a plan for preservation, and as always, a way to communicate. In the end, Szklar and Wolf’s work amounts to an insistence on a textual survival—they were alive, they had thoughts, and they communicated. These documents and letters are evidence to this. Jessica Bozek’s writing pushes the reader around, turns its back, says weird things, and shocks with startlingly beautiful images. There is mystery in the pages, but it is the language, the illusive breath of Wolf and Szklar that propel us forward.


*****

Natalie Lyalin is the author of Pink & Hot Pink Habitat. She is the co-editor of GlitterPony Magazine. She is spending a part of this year in Jerusalem, Israel, but will soon return to Philadelphia, PA.