REVIEW: Slant Six

BY ROMAN GLADSTONE

Author: Erin Belieu

2014, Copper Canyon Press

Filed Under: Poetry

Slant Six is an apt metaphor for this collection. The Slant-6 was a power engine in Chrysler automobiles manufactured in the 1960’s-1980’s (Valiant, Plymouth, Dodge Dart), and it makes its appearance in Belieu’s collection in the poem, “Time Machine,” when the speaker remembers, in flashback, the anger she felt at the driver of a Mercedes who had flipped her off. “It should be harder to feel/this angry all the time.” The speaker feels enormous satisfaction as her Slant-6 guns up the Mercedes’ rear: “the Wild Kingdom death scene/ of her composure as she scrambles/ to get away….” Belieu is the woman behind the wheel throughout these often hilarious, fresh, imaginative poems. She’s as unbridled as that other wild Floridian poet, Denise Duhamel.

The Slant-6 was a component of down-market automobiles, unremarkable, unadorned, and so emblematic of the lovable character Belieu creates for herself, an unremarkable, not-necessarily-over-the-hill-but-certainly-approaching-the-peak woman, from the Midwest, who feels uncomfortable in New York social circles (“When at a Certain Party in NYC”: “Wherever your from sucks/ and wherever you grew up sucks.” Or, a little differently at the conclusion of “Love Letter: Final Visitation”: “Peace, peace, I free and undream you./ The priestess of nothing, / I am pleased to be plain.”).  

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REVIEW: Watch Me Go

BY CHARLES RAMMELKAMP

Author: Mark Wisniewski

2015, G.P. Putnam’s Sons

Filed Under: Literary

At the end of the Prologue to Mark Wisniewski’s Watch Me Go, a noir meditation on love, families, guilt and forgiveness (not to mention an eerily relevant contemplation of race in contemporary America), Douglas Sharp – “Deesh” – one of the two narrators of the alternating chapters that follow, offers to affirm his innocence, “Ms. Price, you’re asking me to tell you a very long story.” Jan Price, the other narrator, replies, “Not necessarily, Deesh. I’m asking you to tell me the truth.” What follows in over sixty chapters, in a breathless, headlong prose style that is the very essence of the urge to spill, is a complicated tale that nevertheless seems intent on distilling certain bedrock truths – about friendship, betrayal, ambition, the tug of the heart.

Deesh is an African-American living below the poverty line in the Bronx. He is in Riker’s prison for the murder of a policeman but also the chief suspect in two other murders. Like Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO, and millions of others like them, he is also guilty of being black in the eyes of racist white America.

Deesh is consulting with his court-assigned defense attorney, Lawrence Gerelli, who basically regards him as guilty, when he receives an unexpected visitor, Jan Price, an attractive young white woman who has come to forgive him for one of those murders, to testify in Deesh’s behalf, bur she wants some straight answers, in case Deesh has other blood on his hands.

REVIEW: Each Day More

BY CHARLES RAMMELKAMP

Author: Elisa Albo

2014, Main Street Rag Publishing Co.

Filed Under: Poetry

There is nothing quite so heartbreaking as the death of a child, nothing more cruel than a parent surviving his or her own offspring. The tension between the fragile hope and joy of children and the finality of death is potent throughout the sixteen poems that make up Elisa Albo’s new collection, Each Day More..

From the opening title poem, an elegy for Alexander Standiford, a young man who died at eighteen, way too young, to “Hurricane Sandy,” a poem about two boys swept away from their mother to their deaths, at Staten Island, to several poems involving two young people, the poet’s cousins, Janet and Robert, killed in a Florida motorcycle accident, these poems ooze with the pointless tragedy of young death, including the anonymous deaths of the boy-soldiers in Iraq and the Middle East.

REVIEW: Mimi’s Trapeze

BY ROMAN GLADSTONE

Author: J. Allyn Rosser

2014, University of Pittsburgh Press

Filed Under: Poetry

If John Updike was the Fred Astaire of poetry – nimble, dexterous, witty, graceful – J. Allyn Rosser is the Ginger Rogers – witty, nimble, graceful, seemingly doing it “with the greatest of ease,” as though soaring on a flying trapeze. As they said of Ginger Rogers, she could do everything Astaire did, and on high heels and backwards. There’s an element of Erma Bombeck’s sardonic humor in Rosser’s poems, but add to that the graceful, seamless use of rhyme, meter, poetic form, and she has you waltzing from page to page, speaking Tagalog in Manila or “wiseguy” in New York, pirouetting through museums, cemeteries, malls, with odes to loss, failure, futility and break-up that evince just enough metaphysical speculation to make John Donne and Andrew Marvell drool; odes to a comforting, comfortable old shirt, pelicans and Canadian geese, seemingly almost any old thing that captures her attention.

Two poems stand out as particularly impressive tours de force, if only for their sheer length as lyrics. Rosser’s wit and insight are on display in the title poem, a five-page narrative about the speaker’s great-grandmother Mimi, who ran off to join the circus, leaving her son Louis behind. The narrator relates the tale to a friend while giving her a tour of her home. In the study they come upon the trapeze. The tone is conversational, confidential, even as the story is a bit jaw-dropping, not to say scandalous. Mimi does return to her family, briefly, but then disappears again, this time for good, though she leaves the trapeze for her son.

REVIEW: One Nation Taken Out of Another

BY CHARLES RAMMELKAMP

Author: Zackary Sholem Berger

2014, Apprentice House

Filed Under: Poetry

At the outset, I need to say that I am only reviewing half of this book. Half is in Yiddish and half in English, and I don’t read Yiddish! However, the themes and the tone — whimsical, urgent, mystical, fond – are consistent throughout and display Berger’s talents as a poet, his sharp intellectual curiosity and his scholarly depth. His immersion into all things Jewish is evident throughout.

The poems address Biblical themes, many of the titles taken from the parshe, the weekly Torah portions read during Shabbat services, and riffing on those. For instance, the poem “Korach” refers to a portion beginning at Numbers 16, in which Korach rebels against Moses (“WE ARE HOLY! they burst out together…”), but it’s not a simple narrative, more free-associative meditation. “Vayikra” (Leviticus 1), “Vayeshev” (Genesis 37), “Vayigash” (Genesis 44), and “Acharei Mos” (Leviticus 16) are others.

REVIEW: The Americans

BY CHARLES RAMMELKAMP

Author: David Roderick

2014, University of Pittsburgh Press

Filed Under: Poetry

The title of David Roderick’s new collection, The Americans, points us to what he is up to here, a snapshot of the American psyche – a picture of a kind of rootless despair that pervades everything, but this despair feels both universal and personal, not necessarily “American.”

Still, it’s an arresting title, and the poem, “After de Tocqueville,” in reference to the nineteenth century French sociologist/historian who famously analyzed American society and politics, reinforces the conceit. The epigraph, attributed to former French president Jacques Chirac, does too. “Nous sommes tous Américains.” The phrase, an echo of JFK’s “Ich bin ein Berliner,” appeared in Le Monde two days after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

So the whole world is American? Fair enough.

Indeed, there is a potent theme running throughout the collection of lives adrift in a material world, hoodwinked by a pervasive mythology that doesn’t stand up to examination and actually blinds us to “reality.” Five poems addressed to “Dear Suburb,” punctuate the collection.

                        Though you live

inside me, though you laid eggs

in the moisture at the corners

of my eyes, I still dream about

your sinking empire twenty feet above

sea level, and the many things

you fail to see: beautiful bleached

gas can, tomato posts bent into art,

how half of a butterfly, cut crosswise,

still looks like a butterfly, etc.

The book title is also an homage to the photographer, Robert Frank, whose similarly titled collection of photographs earned him a comparison to de Tocqueville. Interestingly, Frank’s book, ultimately published in the United States by Grove Press in 1959, was originally published in France with the title, Les Américains. The introduction to Frank’s book was written by Jack Kerouac, and the poem, “After de Tocqueville,” concludes with the lines:

Even in religious fervor, said our prince

Walt Whitman, there’s a touch of animal heat.

Maybe only a truly great stranger can see it.

Said Kerouac to Robert Frank, You got eyes.

 

What are we seeing? What are we not seeing?

The poet asks in “After de Tocueville”: “Must nostalgia//walk like a prince through all our rooms?” Must we be held hostage to a vision of “the good old days” that never actually happened? Roderick’s poem, “New Directive,” is a reply to Robert Frost’s 1947 poem, “Directive,” in which Frost mourns the loss of the simple joys of long ago. The epigraph is from Frost’s poem – “First there’s the children’s house of make believe…” Frost’s poem goes on: “Some shattered dishes underneath a pine,/The playthings in the playhouse of the children. Weep for/what little things could make them glad.”

Roderick writes:

            Look for them

You’ll never find their dishes,

their goblets or knives.

You gape at screens.

You’re dreaming up places

where the real news is made.

Nostalgia: inventing the past. Poems like “On the Bullet Train from Hiroshima,” “Love Field” and “Ambassador Hotel” point to other, sad, tragic versions of the American past. The latter two are about the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers, and perhaps hint at “where America lost its way.” If he is indeed making commentary here, note that Roderick was born in 1970, after these events took place.

But I don’t want to quibble about “messages.” Roderick’s poems are frequently beautiful, eloquent, original expressions. Take that line, “Must nostalgia walk like a prince through all our rooms?” Wish I’d written that! Indeed, the collection is divided into two parts, and certainly the first part seems to be more about “the Americans,” whereas the second part seems much more personal, to me, at least. There’s a 5-part poem called “Green Fields” that partakes of Irish nostalgia, legends of the diaspora from the emerald isle, and Roderick also includes a couple of poems inspired by the Japanese Zuihitsu form, sort of stream-of-thought expressions without a form (the word means “follow the brush”).

There’s also a lot of noticing things in the world, the flora and the fauna, the stuff of the real world. As he writes in “Letter to Shara in Amman”:

                                   I can’t explain what

I was looking for beyond the animals –

God, maybe. It had something to o with

my divided self. Crazy Hart Crane had it right:

My only friends – the wren and thrush,

            Made solid print for me across dawn’s broken arc.

It’s as if these living things in nature – the Passionflower, the locusts – are the only “real,” unmechanical manifestations of “reality.”

The Americans is a collection of poems that gives pleasure from any of a variety of perspectives or intentions. Pick one.

Similar reads:  Howl, Allen Ginsberg; Collected Poems, Langston Hughes

REVIEW: Marvel Comics: the Untold Story

BY AARON BLOCK

[This history of the celebrated and reviled comic book publisher is a C4 Great Read.]

Author: Sean Howe

2012, HarperCollins

Filed under: Historical, Nonfiction

Find it at Goodreads

I suspect many people who grow up reading comics have had roughly the same relationship with Stan Lee as I have: at first he is the face of Marvel Comics, beloved for his role in creating the X-Men and Spider-Man; then, as I grew up and learned to appreciate Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, Stan Lee seemed less important, more hokey uncle than genius storyteller; finally, when I began to learn about the company’s history and the disputes over credit and iffy work-for-hire contract claims, Lee became a traitor, representing the company’s business interests while masquerading as an enthusiast for the medium. In a plot twist that could’ve come out of an issue of The Amazing Spider-Man, the once friendly father figure turns out to be the villain.

But classic Marvel villains are always somewhat sympathetic, and though Sean Howe’s superlative Marvel Comics: the Untold Story, recently reissued in paperback, doesn’t exactly reframe that narrative, it does find gray areas, caveats, and compromises to complicate my rather simplistic take on Lee. Still a company man through and through, the version of Stan “the Man” offered in Howe’s history is wracked by guilt, frustrated by unrealized ambition, and ultimately reduced to a figurehead role in a company he planned to one day escape.

REVIEW: I Kill Giants

BY SEAN CLARK

[This touching, character-driven graphic novel is a C4 Great Read.]

Writer: Joe Kelly

Artist: JM Ken Niimura

2014, Image

Filed Under: Graphic Novel, Literary, Fantasy

I think it might be more difficult for graphic novels to walk the line between the poignant and the maudlin than other media. Or maybe it’s just not something most of us have come to expect from “comics,” even those of us reared on Calvin & Hobbes. They tend to either be primarily fun, or stylish, or serious, or whatever else. My favorite stories are those, like Calvin & Hobbes, that blur the lines between imagination and reality, and if they can push the emotional envelope at the same time–without going too far toward the aforementioned maudlin or shlocky–then I’m enamored.

I Kill Giants is about a young girl named Barbara whose imagination and role playing takes over her waking life. Obsessed with protecting her home from fearsome giants and titans, she sets traps on the nearby beach and carries around in a heart-shaped handbag a tiny rock hammer which she believes capable of transmogrifying into a mighty war hammer (which she has christened Coveleski, after an obscure Phillies pitcher nicknamed “The Giant Killer”).

Barbara wears rabbit ears to school, and prides herself on being a ruthless Dungeons and Dragons dungeon master. She has friends but none particularly close, and so when a friendship buds with the her new neighbor (who is, by default, not a social outcast, and by experience not much of a geek like Barbara), Barbara struggles to know exactly how to approach the relationship. Bullies hound Barbara, and even when her new friend comes to her aid, or the school psychologist offers her authentic compassion, Barbara struggles to concede any real trust in another person.

REVIEW: Exiles and Expatriates

BY ROMAN GLADSTONE

Author: Eleanor Swanson

2014, Hollywood Books International

Filed Under: Fiction, Short Stories

Alienation and adjustment are central themes in the dozen stories that make up Eleanor Swanson’s fine new collection, Exiles and Expatriates, just as its title implies.  Often, characters are coping with the death of a son, a sister, a fiancé, or even just a person they knew casually at work.  How the characters come to terms with their loss is the source of the tension in these stories; often there does not seem to be a resolution, just further exile and continued sorrow.

In “Solitary,” the protagonist Beth has come home to her parents in Florida from where she lives in Colorado, to tell her family that her marriage has fallen apart.  Ever since her brother Jess’s death in a traffic accident she has not been the same and this has taken a toll on her marriage – her husband has gone off with another woman.  When Beth goes to visit Noah, Jess’s best friend, who is likewise shattered by his death, she breaks down crying, but while this may be cathartic, it doesn’t seem to solve anything.  Indeed, when her husband tried to make her forget the tragedy, Beth thought: “But he’d never understood that she wanted to remember everything.”

Similarly, Katrina, the girlfriend of Pavel, the protagonist of “The Singing Mistress at the Window,” which takes place in Prague, has just broken up with him – probably because he is such a depressive.  Libby, an American who is in Prague researching a book on Kafka, sees the same haunted look as Kafka’s in Pavel’s face.  As it turns out, Pavel’s sister Martina threw herself in front of a train, and his mother, the singing mistress in the title, went mad with grief.

REVIEW: Snowpiercer (Vols. 1 and 2)

BY AARON BLOCK

Writers: Jacques Lob (vol.1) & Benjamin Legrand (vol. 2)

Artist: Jean-Marc Rochette

2014, Titan Comics (originally published in 1984 by Casterman, France)

Filed Under: Graphic Novel, Sci-Fi

Snowpiercer, a series of graphic novels by Jean-Marc Rochette, Jacques Lob, and Benjamin Legrand, has only just been released in English thirty years later, but its critique of late capitalism remains potent. In fact, the optimism of the premise – that humanity would find some way to survive a climate disaster, even in a compromised way – seems quaint today. Rochette, Lob, and Legrand seem to have intended Snowpiercer as a warning, but reading it now it feels more like a lament.