Category: Blog

Categories
Blog

Review of Bill Neumire’s Estrus

 

Last year Bill Neumire won our staff prize for his poem  “Think of the Mercy of Volcanoes” which appeared in mojo 2 and closes his recent book, Estrus.   The book was released by Alrich Press. Neumire’s collection establishes a speaker in combat.  The central drama of these poems is rooted in a recurrent claim made in the book, “The only thesis against nothing/ is everything.” The poems themselves struggle with whether or not this assertion can be proved. The high moments of the book, such as the poet’s joy in his children, argue for the value and mystery of everything. In contrast, the bleaker poems stress the arbitrariness of the physical world. Consider the closing poem, “the angel of orreries is spinning/ your galaxy, sending an asteroid/ toward your favorite city. Do not worry/ you do not know yet.” By connecting traditional symbols with the horrors of physics, he creates a devastating image then snidely undercuts it by insisting that we find comfort in our ignorance. As the poems oscillate between these two ideologies, the poet deftly threads the depth and agility of the metaphysicals with William’s insistence that one must not only search for the vividness in things, but also create something of value from one’s interaction with them.

The early sections of the book ground the speaker’s ideas in an experienced reality. Rather than praise the physical world, Neumire establishes the industrial complex as an enemy that can swallow the self. In poems such as “It’s the Hour of the Furnace,” “Father is the Factory,” or “My Father at the Bone Factory” one is reminded of James Wright’s fear of Southern Ohio’s industry.  However, the poet’s metaphysical heritage separates him from the deep imagist.  Neumire writes,

    …There’s no sleep

for us since Marx confessed

we can only ask what we can answer:

in a factory that never closes

my father worked until they buried him

in cogs & now I run the graveyard

& pray to the angel of stillness

& dark matter. Some nights..

The strained chain of causality which asserts that Marx’s confession leads to a factory worker’s doom weds the realms of introspection to the image. The insertion of the first person shows Neumire’s ability to expand the image by linking the problem of the industrialization and relationships to the incomprehensibility of contemporary physics. The techniques seem to be rooted in the French surrealist tradition. Neumire establishes causality, then after we get on board with it, he undercuts it by praying to a non-deity (dark matter) which can only be uncaring. The speaker, however, follows this gesture with agency rooted in real action. Later, he collects the junk left over by consumerism and solders it into “a porcupine/ or a man’s injured ego.”  Implying perhaps that the art of creation (artistic or industrial) allows people to bring meaning to the world even if it can only result in an imperfect self.

In addition to the poems rooted in the implied past of the speaker, Neumire’s “Think of” poems add a unity to the book. These poems allow the poet to again clash the ideas that interest him in a series of interesting catalogs. Like Whitman, his lists are founded upon a clever manipulation of the second person. By telling his speaker to “think”, he creates the sort of intimacy found between a mentor and tutee. In “Think of the Bioluminescence You Do Not Emit,” he writes,

        Think of how dull your skin is

        against the dark. How no spark ruptures

        into the evening waving out

        into the antique neighborhood

        of retired engineers & sleepy hounds.

        How many Aprils have you gutted the house,

        sick of what you’ve gathered?

In these lines the agility of the poem is on display. The “think” phrase guides the reader into a command; the repetition of the into’s creates speed for the poem which allows him to leap to a personal question.  In essence, the question of our lack of light becomes one of our worth which, like in other of Neumire poems, he’s happy to problematize, but prefers to leave in doubt rather than outright dismiss.

Taken as a whole, Neumire’s collection feels right for the contemporary moment. The poet’s mastered the immediacy of the New York school but refuses to adhere to the non-chalance of its descendents. Instead, he tackles the question of meaning by using the things left to us in the contemporary era: broken factories and suburbs, scientific miracles, and the tradition of deep philosophical unrest. The miracle of the collection is that he tackles these themes with poems that are immediately accessible, sometimes playful or heartbreaking, but almost always interesting. The collection can be found for purchase through the Aldrich press website: http://aldrichbookpublishing.blogspot.com/ or on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Estrus-Bill-Neumire/dp/0615768261.

–JM

Categories
Blog

How Pinckney Benedict’s Miracle Boy and Other Stories Changed the Way I Read.

It’s a rare thing for me to love a book unconditionally, so why can’t I stop myself from trying? Sometimes the best I can ask for when a friend lends me one of their favorites is to walk away unoffended. Similarly, the few times I bought a text based on its interesting cover or another blurb from the likes of The New Yorker … well, you know the cliché about book covers, right? Go ahead and add to my list of grievances that I rarely read a book out of the order in which I received it, a process that had until recently taken the form of a book tower in the corner of my bedroom. My goal? To spend a month linearly breaking the tower down until there was nothing left but a dustless rectangle – right up until that very point where even if I hadn’t found my fiction “soul mate,” I could at least say I tried.

I tell you this because my auto mechanic forcefully lent me Pinckney Benedict’s Miracle Boy and Other Stories after a routine oil change. Keep in mind that my mechanic has serviced my cars for over a decade. Include the caveat that her copy contained the author’s inscription, a lovely personal note commending her friendship and business integrity. Two issues here: the book held baggage, the kind you can only get from a loaner – notable because I am a page-frayer and cover-bender – and because a quick read was prerequisite. What if, for example, my slave cylinder finked on me again (a now twice recurring issue), or my clutch burned out after its nearly 130,000 miles of abuse? Surely my mechanic would want the book back as soon as any of the aforementioned failings occurred.

Thus, I grudgingly began what would soon become an all-out consumption. I admit that I expected Benedict to play it by the literary playbook. I looked for quiet moments and subtle exchanges between major characters that carry all the aplomb of a nasty stare from a significant other over dinner. Sure, icy girlfriends had the power to frighten and amaze me, but I cannot claim to recall the exact moment my chowder went cold. Or were we eating salad? Indeed, Miracle Boy is comprised of many such moments, if only to employ silence as a reprieve from a pervasive tension that infects every page. Likewise, I can remember every story for their images, their innovative plots, and their cryptic, hypnotic use of dialogue; I can’t make the same assertion about an instance where I was on my way to the dog house.

Perhaps most notably, the collection showcased all the thematic weight of a novel without forgoing the standalone power of a story. Every story pushed me further into thematic territories that required me to pay attention, learn, and grow as I continued to read. As the premises grew more complex, I too found myself compelled to see the collection for the sum of its parts, certain that the payoff would prove essential to my tasks as an avid reader.

Each of Benedict’s fourteen tales, at the very least, exhibit an inventiveness seldom encountered in literary fiction. Take for example, “Zog-19: A Scientific Romance,” a mishmash of science fiction and romantic tropes. On the surface, this is a tale that covers concepts as broad as time travel and planet-wide annihilation. But consider the protagonist, Zog-19, who steals the body of a West Virginian farmer in order to attempt the prevention of his species’ impending extinction. Zog-19’s is an omniscient alien race that can foresee the earthlings depleting the Zoglings of their sentient gas (their blood, essentially), to fuel future space travel. The plot, however, focuses on Zog-19’s effort to wear the rural-farmer’s face effectively. The extraterrestrial learns to assimilate to human expectations, gains knowledge of how to properly run a farm, and even makes love to the farmer’s wife (she is, of course, suspicious that he can no longer operate a stick shift, but ultimately none the wiser). Through his labors to become a better man, Zog-19 uncovers the value of human existence. The reader roots for Zog-19’s successful subterfuge, but wonders if his utility eventually causes his planet’s demise.

Or take the collection’s title story, an aftermath narrative which follows a young boy after he loses both his feet in a freak wheat silage accident. His father finds the boy’s feet, and has them stitched back to his severed ankles. This story uses the Miracle Boy to explore the cruelty of young boys, particularly the three who strip him bare to see his scars. At the height of their cruelty, they even toss his shoes onto a towering power line. The assailants eventually see the errors of their actions and redress the crippled boy, but his shoes dangle too precariously high to be retrieved safely. What follows is a tale of redemption and guilt, one which does not merely placate its protagonists and antagonists, but forces them to confront fear and forgiveness in a culminating scene at the top of the power line. Will the cruel boys find solace in risking their lives? Should I spoil the ending? I will allow you to spoil it for yourself. “Miracle Boy” sets the tone for the stories that follow, incorporating oddity while allowing themes like redemption and guilt to richly provoke a reader’s sense of insane humanity.

In sum, Miracle Boy and Other Stories changed the way I read. After I returned the copy to my mechanic, I promptly went home and knocked my tower down. I would stop seeking a book to love and instead let it find me. Nuts to the next book on my list, I thought, and I have never looked back.

– Charlie Edwards

Categories
Blog

Review of Mathew Burnside’s “Escapologies”

20 Reasons to Read “Escapologies”

Here are 20 reasons why you need to pick up a copy of Matthew Burnside’s new chapbook “Escapologies” from Red Bird Chapbooks. Each of these lines is from “Escapologies”, which was printed by Red Bird Chapbooks in 2013.

“in your mouth the stubborn stir of birds” (13).

“you look down at your daughter underfoot flapping her arms with the quickening hope of/hummingbird wings & know she will be clean” (14).

“That tomorrow a blanket of fog that had obscured the torch-tips of/tinny stars above could lift like accidental Baptism to lantern your way / home” (15).

“She’s sick of not knowing the question” (16).

“the lonely gears / that grind a man’s heart cannot be unwound” (17).

“Making art of his scars he swirls scab frescos” (18).

“The big bad wolf wasn’t born that way- it took years of / parental malpractice to make imperfect” (19).

“Now she can’t stop feeding her awful appetite” (20).

“Everything is never too late until it is” (21).

“Every muscle was a taut string in a grand piano missing / its white keys” (22).

“…we explored the one billion/ possibilities of bumblebee assassination” (23).

“He is unafraid to die” (24).

“I’ve never seen anything as sinless as your pale thin/wrists–file under Things I Should Have Told You When I Had You Here / In The Passenger Seat ” (25).

“Judas kissed the wrong guy” (26).

“Language is broken” (27).

“We returned to the sacred cows” (28).

“rain eventually swallows everything” (29).

“give me the neon knives of your eyes clean careening, in free flight at/ maximum aperture” (30).

‘girl, your Sega Genesis heart is so precious” (31).

“everyone is hungry for / something everyone is full” (33).

By Kallie Fallanday
This review originally appeared on Kallie’s site: www.telltellpoetry.com

Categories
Blog

Review of Rick Bass’ In My Home There Is No More Sorrow: Ten Days in Rwanda

Rick Bass visited Rwanda in 2011 with his wife and teenage daughter, accompanied by Terry Tempest Williams. The group put together a writing workshop at Rwanda’s only remaining national university in Butare, and they briefly toured various parts of the country as well. In My Home There is no More Sorrow was released as a result of the trip in 2012 by McSweeney’s Books. Though the work largely consists of a travel narrative, detailing Bass’ experiences and a linear trip through a beautiful landscape, the prose is rich with significant pathos. Through seemingly anxious reflection, Bass confronts personal histories and humanity; a dialogue and language are then created, not only for an American audience reading his words, but for the voices of those who have suffered more than we can imagine. This work of non-fiction was made to finely tune your empathy, and should haunt your memory for all the right reasons in which a good book can.

Bass appears split by what he wants to remember, what he wishes to first convey – the image that will set the overall “tone” of his book. This catches the psyche that remains present throughout the text. At every turn, the land displays an inherent beauty, but anyone with even a rough knowledge of history knows Rwanda’s past does not always reflect the images of its lush jungles and rolling hills. For the traveling writer, this presents a paradox, and so Bass begins by writing:

“Every word I spend here without getting to the bones feels like I am shirking or betraying the obligation of witness. And yet, seventeen years after the fact, the thousand hills are greener than ever.”

The seventeen years indicates the time between his visit and the 1994 genocide of the Tutsi people. Shrines – memorials of bones – dot the countryside, mostly in churches where many people were massacred. The bombed out and blood-stained shells of these buildings are all that remain; life continues in peace now, but this dark history weighs heavily on the consciences of those who remember, whether they were a victim or survivor, a killer, or someone who had only grown up listening to the horrific stories, knowing this is a part of who they are. Bass details how difficult this is to write from an outsider’s perspective, and he brings this nervous evasion of the past to the writing workshop in Butare.

That being said, the most successful parts of this book take place during the writer’s workshop, in which the local students and their own teacher challenge Bass and Williams’ approach.

“Terry told him that we are being cautious; that we are visitors.”
“ ‘No,’ he said. ‘You are writers.’ ”

From here, Bass goes beyond the conventions of a blundering traveler in a strange land. Doing away with the alienation we often see in travel narratives, he offers useful perspectives regarding not only the workshop and the students, but the notions by which we typically regard a once war-ravaged country like Rwanda. Instead of urging the reader to forget, to move on, Bass confronts these issues by indulging the students’ need to construct a language for their past. Largely, this book seeks to validate art, a fresh kind of writing, through this recycled pain. In order to produce any work of value, Bass suggests that we expose ourselves, reopening old wounds and shaping them into ideas, stanzas, paragraphs – he admits to actively avoiding this approach, and considers how we are wrong to do so.

At first, the latter half of the book might seem to flag in its emotionally-charged progression, returning the reader to a trip’s itinerary as the group heads off to see the Gorillas living on a tri-country preserve in the highland forests. However, this provides a balance to the prose, so that you are not constantly beleaguered by that feeling of dread; Bass does not riddle his text with guilt or sorrow. He writes what he believes is necessary, which also means he cannot simply focus on the negative because there are parts of this place, history aside, that maintain a significant natural beauty, which is delivered succinctly throughout the text. Without this part, the dichotomy Bass hopes to deliver would fail.

Because this section of the book lacks the powerful connection between cultures, one might wish it excised in favor of the deeply personal interactions with the students at the national school. Perhaps for this reason, Bass includes some of the work produced by those who attended the workshop. This is wonderful – it offers an insight not even Bass himself could give the reader. Instead of hearing the detailed history of these survivors, this new hopeful generation, from a third party, one can admire the raw severity with which these poems and narratives are written. To know that anyone can survive such a thing and transform their experiences into writing, that useful art by which we express ourselves, means that we too can take on this cultural interconnectivity, and fill the gaps where we find our empathy with honest and meaningful language.

If you come across this book, you should read it, and allow it to calibrate your vision into a world where qualitative writing is being born from tragedy, where it is new. Just as Bass invites the reader into this striking experience of humanity, so should you invite someone you know to read this book as well.

Review by Ryan Gannon