Category: Aquifer

Interview: Abigail Chabitnoy

     

 

Abigail Chabitnoy is a mixed-race (German-Aleutian) poet raised in Pennsylvania and currently living in Colorado. Her first collection of poetry, How to Dress a Fish, was released in 2019 by Wesleyan University Press and is described as a “historical reclamation” in which “the speaker … works her way back, both chronologically and spatially toward a place that once was home” (see Weston Morrow’s review in Blackbird).

 

Chabitnoy has been previously published in Pleides, Boston Review, Gulf Coast, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Tin House, and elsewhere. She was a Crow-Tremblay Fellow at and received the John Clark Pratt Citizenship Award from Colorado State University, and she was a 2016 inaugural Peripheral Poets Fellow.

 

Former Florida Review contributor John Sibley Williams interviewed her for us in the fall of 2019.

 

 

John Sibley Williams for The Florida Review:

“Everyone wants to see ghosts, in theory.” This line resonates across your entire collection. In a way, it defines your approach to storytelling. Tell me what this line means to you.

 

Abigail Chabitnoy:

It’s interesting that you’ve honed in on this line, as this was a later addition—and also one that does continue to haunt or inform much of my current thinking as well. At the most fundamental level, I’ve always been a bit of a wimp when it comes to horror. I’m fascinated by the idea of ghosts and the paranormal, but for an example, this past February I was a resident at Caldera in eastern Oregon. Midway through the residency one of the other artists asked the Programs Manager if any of our cabins were haunted, and I would not let her answer. I would not have been able to sleep in my cabin by myself, or leave that cabin after dark, if I knew there were ghosts on the premises—and to be honest, I don’t even know if I believe in ghosts. I was never allowed to play with Ouija boards or anything that could be considered occult growing up, which means I’m deeply uncomfortable with forces beyond my control and also that I’ve never properly unpacked my relationship with such forces. I don’t know if the other artists ever got to hear the answer when I wasn’t present, and in this context the example and line are quite benign. But consider the ramifications of such an unwillingness to face real horrors in this world, or real atrocities in history, or inconvenient truths that don’t prop up the narrative we want. See no evil, right no evil. The well-meaning narrative that we are a country founded by immigrants, for example, on the one hand encourages xenophobes to revisit the ghosts of their own past and their own relationship to this country, but further fails to face the violent genocide that cleared way for the first colonizers and earliest immigrants.

 

In terms narrower to the work, it’s a reminder of my own culpability in putting forth some stories and not others, and my responsibility to be faithful to my family’s narrative even when it doesn’t support the kind of rage or righteous anger one might desire for effect. My great-grandfather was removed impossibly far from his home, and it would have been incredibly hard for him to return. But the truth is: we simply don’t know if he even wanted to. Relationships were severed, but who’s to say they would have survived either way?

 

TFR:

I’ve found indigenous poetry often dually emphasizes place and placelessness, cultures thriving yet irrevocably changed by outside influences. Do you feel this is an accurate statement? Is it emotionally demanding to write from such a place?

 

Chabitnoy:

I can only say that this statement feels particularly accurate for my own work, and that’s because of how place and the removal from a specific place have shaped my family’s and my own experience of indigeneity. I’ve been fortunate that in tandem with my own searching for ways to reconnect meaningfully with my Unangan and Sugpiaq heritage, there have been various localized efforts by those communities to also revitalize the culture, to promote language acquisition and recover traditional art practices, and to take control of their own narrative, which has provided me with rich resources I can access remotely and has put me in touch with wonderful and enthusiastic people to patiently answer my questions, as the cost of going home is prohibitive (in more ways than one). I grew up with so many of the pieces missing that each one remains significant—including absence. And yet despite this absence, I do carry this visceral memory of home with me. I’ve always lived landlocked (first in Pennsylvania, now in Colorado) and yet as an anxious individual, there is a calm that takes hold when I am by the water that I am unable to find anywhere else. I find it extremely demanding to write from such a place personally, and the complexities I’ve just scratched the surface of here almost stopped me from sending the work out into the world more than once. It demands almost a constant othering of the self, a repeated rupturing, but then also a turning back toward a personal reparations of sort, some kind of healing.

 

TFR:

Your poems slide so organically between the tangible and ephemeral, body and legend, past and present. These elements all exist in the same sphere. For you, where does mythology end and contemporary human life begin? Is there a demarcation line? How do they inform each other?

 

Chabitnoy:

The boundaries of myth are still something I question and push against daily. I loved reading myths and folktales as a kid. In fact, it’s one of the few things I distinctly remember reading. It inspired me to get my BA in anthropology. (I was a latecomer to poetry, and it was in fact Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red, itself building on the Greek myth of Geryon, that won me over.) I’ve been thinking a lot lately of what the purpose of myth is, what it is stories do, and why we keep telling them, and the closest thing to a working answer I’ve come to so far is that stories are necessary to help us survive. They teach us, they connect us, they present possibilities we at once might never have considered and that are timeless at their roots. There’s so much crossover in the motifs across time and culture, which I find fascinating. But it’s also interesting to me that they’re always perceived in the past tense, similarly to how society still often expects Native cultures to continue in a vacuum, forever frozen as they were first encountered by [white] settlers. But to be timeless means to look both ways, forward and back. I think I see this blurring of the demarcation as a way of extending beyond the self and beyond the present moment to tap into something bigger, something more fluid.

 

TFR:

Is there empowerment in (finally) being able to tell your own story, in your own words, from your own cultural and personal perspective?

 

Chabitnoy:

I think I have found empowerment in the process of writing this book, but I’m not sure if in this way. Which is to say, I think the experience has made me truly recognize the breadth of stories and perspectives, to recognize the microaggressions that potentially—and sometimes actually—prevent those narratives from being told, and to push past those aggressions even as I recognize and sympathize with where they are coming from. But I also think the work has taught me to accept that there aren’t always answers, and to allow me to continue in the space of that uncertainty. Poetry isn’t necessarily about finding the answers—it’s about learning to ask the right questions, the hard questions. And it’s okay to dwell in that space of uncertainty.

 

TFR:

How to Dress a Fish paints a multifaceted portrait of betweenness. As a child of mixed heritage, you seem to question your prescribed place in both communities. Yet you celebrate them. How does communal and familial belonging (or their lack) impact your poetic vision?

 

Chabitnoy:

Despite my family and my mom’s family being somewhat large, it didn’t feel like I grew up in a large family. Our extended family seldom came together, and my family doesn’t really tell stories. I think perhaps that’s why I cling so tightly to my great-grandfather’s story, fragmented as it is. I think much of my poetic vision is driven by a desire for community, and I don’t think this is particular to one side so much as a reflection of the isolation frequently experienced in today’s society. I think that particular desire drives much of the thematic elements and motivations within the poems, but for me there is personally also a pressure on the work to generate a greater sense of community outside of the book as well. In 2018, I finally made it to Kodiak, and as beautiful as the island was, and as moving as it was to stand on the beach of Woody Island, to be on that water, to feel home, my favorite experience was visits I had with cousins whom I’d never met nor even been aware of (and still couldn’t articulate clearly the direct lines of our relation), and how easy and grounding it was to spend hours talking to these women, hearing their stories, what they knew of our family. It was a wonderfully peaceful experience of belonging, as natural as a fish in the water, and the forging of these relationships in turn puts further pressure on my work to be sincere and rigorous in its research and its motives.

 

TFR:

Tell me what you mean by “legacy as a blank space. A space that unlike a slate cannot be written.”

 

Chabitnoy:

This language was actually in response to a narrative I read about one student’s experience of the Carlisle Indian School, but also became emblematic of the larger challenges of responding to past trauma. In my own experience, there are questions I have of my ancestors that simply will never be answered. There are voices I can’t speak for, and to attempt to would be a disservice, another form of erasure. Rather than attempting to fill these blank spaces, these holes and wounds, I have attempted to leave space for them to be felt in their own right throughout the work. The slate also refers to the sociological notion of the child’s mind as a blank slate, further emphasizing the rupture and inheritance of these holes we carry with us as survivors and descendants of historical trauma.

 

TFR:

When discussing culturally significant themes that you have such strong feelings on, how do you express your worldview subtly, avoiding didacticism? How do you make a point without preaching?

 

Chabitnoy:

This has actually been (and continues to be) a constant subject of attention personally since I first began writing seriously. With this work in particular, I employed several techniques to avoid didacticism. One “cheat” I used was ultimately to use the problematic language of others directly in the work and let their prejudices speak for themselves. Another way I avoided this in the writing was in my approach to audience. Many of the poems were approached as conversations I imagined having, most often with Michael, or at least Michael as the character I tried to summon to the pages. But as the project unfolded, that individual became multiple, became fluid. Sometimes I imagined I was talking to the grandfathers I had never known, but that could become a bit intimidating, perhaps because I never had a grandfather figure, and because of the weight I gave these figures. So I tried to imagine a more approachable figure, a sympathetic figure. I began to think of Nikifor, I suppose as the character with the least narrative developed and thus the most space for potential, but also because it was brought to my attention that the women in the book were missing, and it was true, but—beyond an imagined address—I didn’t know how to bring them to the page. There was even less of them in the archives. I think this is where the more mythopoeic themes come into play as well, which further gave me room for more imaginative work that could create distance from more didactic trains of thought.

 

TFR:

Now that indigenous peoples have the chance to tell their own stories, unfiltered by “white men with pipes and elbow patches who study Natives from armchairs,” do you feel a sense of responsibility to set history straight? How does one go about rewriting a disingenuous legacy?

 

Chabitnoy:

I think poetry is a brilliant avenue for indigenous people to tell their own stories, and in their own ways and structures. But for me, I feel a personal responsibility to remain within the conversation of my own family’s story and experience, and beyond that to give as much voice as I can to the history of my ancestors in the Aleutian islands while also recognizing the limits of my own understanding given the circumstances of my dislocation. I think the attention to language inherent to poetry makes it a good medium in which to question, for example, historical and anthropological narratives written by outsiders. What some historians call a strategic military victory, for example, are otherwise experienced as genocide. But I also feel a responsibility not to extend myself beyond the honest reach of my own understanding, experience, and voice. That is, I am more aware of my responsibility not to claim to speak for others, or to speak in a generalized manner, to recognize the gaps in my own knowledge and turn instead to the voices of other indigenous writers to extend the scope of my understanding rather than purport to know more than I do.

 

TFR:

As you employ a variety of formal and remarkably unique styles throughout How to Dress a Fish, how do you decide which structure will best serve a given poem? Is it intuition, poetic experimentation, or an intentional choice? And what motivates these structures?

 

Chabitnoy:

I think a lot of it comes down to intuition and experimentation, which in turn generate their own sort of internal rules that develop throughout the work. A lot of it has to do with the feeling of the shape on the page. For example, the narrative is messy. It’s full of holes. It’s nonlinear. It interrupts itself. It sometimes promises order (the few that include numbered parts), but ultimately denies any order. Thus for the poems to neatly hug the left margin or exist in tidy couplets or even stanzas felt ungenuine to how the narrative is experienced. With that said, there are also elements that line up, lines that may break but continue to meet. And of course ultimately these are water poems, and so it’s right that they should—like a fleet of kayaks, an archipelago, or even wreckage that washes up on shore—drift across the white space of the page.

 

TFR:

Speaking of structures, you often use objective “non-poetic” forms like student records, grocery lists, and footnotes to explore your themes. What draws you to poeticizing these forms? What do you feel they add to the book’s ongoing conversation?

 

Chabitnoy:

One of the things I love about poetry is its capacity for accumulation, to hold multitudes. I was drawn to a kind of docu-poetics because of how it could potentially make this process of accumulation apparent. In some cases, I wanted to challenge the credentials of such forms and the contexts in which they are most frequently used. Footnotes, for example, are often used in scholarly texts and lend academic authority, an air of certainty, to a body of work. My family’s enrollment into the Koniag Corporation and my sister’s and my subsequent acceptance into the Tangirnak Native Village depended on Michael’s student records and birth certificates. The case for the “success” of the Carlisle Indian School rested on surveys and news clips, the release of which and survival in the record depended on their favorable reflection on the school. Such documents are given a weight of authority that other modes of record keeping—oral histories, for example—are not. I wanted to open those structures to the same kind of skepticism traditional knowledge and oral histories are frequently subject to, while also asserting that same level of respect for such narratives. The use of grocery lists meanwhile was an effort to bring the daily into the historical narrative, to highlight the confluence of the two.

 

TFR:

Let’s talk erasure for a moment. Sometimes you cross words out, which allows us to see what you chose to expunge. Other times you blacken words out, making them unreadable. What roles do these forms of erasure play in your poems? Do you feel erasure is inherently a part of exploring a misrepresented culture?

 

Chabitnoy:

Erasure has certainly been a large part of my experience, yes. And there are various reasons, from negligence to willful erasure to sudden deaths in the family. But also at the root of these erasures is a discrepancy in which narratives get valued, whose, what information is deemed at the moment worthy of preserving. And it’s not just the narratives that get erased. Sometimes the story is preserved but the storyteller is erased and credit given to the note-taker or “scholar.” And then sometimes there is a desire to remain anonymous, or a desire as note-taker to preserve the privacy of an individual. All of these possibilities play into what I’ve chosen to erase entirely and what I’ve chosen to leave legible even while I suggest that someone else might choose to erase that text, might deem it unworthy of recording. For me, such markings became another way of subverting traditional hierarchies of authority and knowledge and highlight the lack of transparency in the recordkeeping and writing of history. Additionally, one of the operative themes of the work is that our understanding of our history is a process, is not fixed in stone, is subject to scratch-outs and do-overs, to misspeaking and self-correction, which I somewhat approached in those words that were only crossed out as one might when drafting with paper and pen.

 

TFR:

I know this is a broad question, but what are your thoughts on the current state of indigenous poetry? What other authors would you recommend? And where would you like to see it in, say, ten years?

 

Chabitnoy:

I’m very excited about the current state of indigenous poetry. Of course the representation and recognition could always be greater in the various categories of accolades and outside of academic circles of discussion. But if your finger is on the pulse of indigenous writing these days, there are so many great writers to follow, and some really great new voices emerging. Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas came out in 2017 and garnered quite a bit of attention. Sherwin Bitsui just released a new book, Dissolve. And of course Heid Erdrich just released a great new anthology, New Poets of Native Nations. Craig Santos Perez, Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, and Brandi Nālani McDougall also recently released an anthology of indigenous poetry by Pacific Islander women, Effigies III.  In 2018 I had the privilege of reading along with several indigenous women in Seattle to celebrate the launch of Carrie Ayagaduk Ojanen’s debut collection, Roughly for the North, and also had the pleasure of hearing Cassandra Lopez’s work for the first time. Her book Brother Bullet was just published. I went to an amazing panel on Indigenous Womanisms where I heard work by No’u Revilla and cannot wait for more of it to be available. She was stunning. She’s one of the women featured in Effigies III. This list could go on forever. And, of course, I’d still leave people out.

 

Ten years is such a long time. I wasn’t even seriously engaging with poetry ten years ago. I hope the field continues to grow, in terms of writers but also in the breadth of style and subject, as it is currently. But maybe also it would be nice to see wider recognition of more than just one writer per genre at a time. It seems that outside of the indigenous poetry community, in more mainstream consciousness, there is always one Native fiction writer, one Native memoirist, one Native poet that everyone knows, almost like a box to check off and then move on, when in fact there are so many writers to be excited about right now.

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Are they starlings?

Should we go outside?

 

He sat out for the birds most evenings if he was able. Clipboard in hand, a drink to make it feel casual. As the minutes ticked on, a momentary panic could take hold: suppose they shouldn’t come? When they finally would arrive, he allowed himself modest satisfaction. The surge of a small hope realized.

 

When his birds finally would arrive, w hen the first group would pepper the horizon, he noted the time. Solitary birds didn’t count—it had to be a murmuration, a movement. On October 3rd, the first true group had shown itself at 5:31 p.m. They had risen like smoke over the horizon. They tumbled around the eastern sky together with one pulse. Then, as he had expected, they fanned out into a running stream. A chorus in cloud that streaked toward the blue-blush of the sunset.

 

His task was to record. The minute of their arrival, how long they held tenure over the little patch of sky capping his garden. Logging their departure, of course, was an unfair exercise of guessing and waiting. Suppose the last one should have been the last one? Yet he endeavored to maintain a faithful record. Most evenings, he faced the usual challenge: to lose one’s self entirely in the face of overwhelming spectacle. When his birds were thick overhead, the little edges of his day could curl up and allow the part of him that tired of a life in this body—a life without her—to slip out.

 

When his birds were kind, they were generous in number. They washed over him. The following Thursday, though, their advance lasted only eleven minutes. They were true to the sunset—just moments after—but on the whole, an anemic group. There were fewer birds in total, which distressed him more than he liked to say. However, the morning (and he recorded this on the line for observations) had been foggy.

 

Will it be any moment?

 

When he sat out for the birds, they eventually appeared. Not always when he expected, or in enthusiastic numbers. Occasionally, they crested the hill much farther south than he was accustomed to looking. His birds had their own brand of constancy. It comforted him very little.

He’d feel fairly sure that he had pinned down the window of their arrival, and then they would break with tradition. They might show up blindingly early, eclipsing a corner of the kitchen window as he washed up at the sink. Elbows dripping, he imagined confronting them over their indifference. “We are governed by different rhythms,” they would shrug, forcing him to see how petty and small were his complaints. Perhaps he’d love them all the more for this nonchalance. Such a response would speak well of him, he thought.

 

Are they starlings?

 

His birds were black without jeweled throats. They likely weren’t starlings. What’s more, they seemed quite large at times. He’d point at one and feel it drag his finger in a lazy arc across the sky. Large as a crow, perhaps.

 

The booklet said it had everything to do with self-preservation. They were afraid of being the first to roost. So they would take to the sky en masse, moving as one, where they could expect protection from the things gentle birds fear. Then they would alight together on waiting branches. It was defensive. Yet he feared for them all the same. His birds were nothing like the circling hawks, red in beak and claw. How easily they could be picked off, and how little they seemed to realize! Their numbers would not guard against disaster– they only promised a witness.

 

He greeted them prone on the 16th, his eyes fixed upward, filtering in the last of the evening light. They scrolled across the sky. He could not bear to check his watch and later found himself able only to record that there had been “a great many birds.”
How they were pitiless! His birds could not trouble themselves for the cares of a man outside on his back, crying to the heavens.

 

Will they come much after sunset?

 

It had seemed almost cruel to hazard a guess as to when they would appear. Then she would count the minutes starting in the late afternoon. The hands on a clock’s face eluded her, but she could still stand in front of the microwave.

 

“Now, it’s 4:24, and I’m sure of that.”

 

Depending on the season, when he came home it was straight out to the garden. In winter, there would not be a moment even to unlace his uncomfortable shoes. She’d see him coming up the walk and clap her hands.

 

Summertime, though, saw the evening stretch. She’d ask to fix herself an orange squash; he would assent. He knew when the sun would set and didn’t like to rush her if needn’t be. He’d leave her alone in the kitchen and listen from the hallway, warmed by the small sounds of her industry. If anything broke, he would be near enough to lift her bare feet.

 

She loved best the settling in. As twilight fell they would take to their chairs, side by side in repose. It was a happy ritual. He’d caution her against upending her drink, and she’d ask for the clipboard. Holding the pen aloft, she would nod gently while ticking off each cell—“There’s some writing there.”

 

They took such pleasure in these moments, lived in the anticipation of a great movement. Sweeping across the sky, the birds were haughty, exclusive. Yet at the same time, one felt urged along with the group. Their appearance was a nightly invitation to weep for the lack of wings.

 

Should we go outside?

 

He consented on November 7th to be taken out by cheerful friends, knowing full well this outing would make it impossible to collect the numbers. Rain was coming down in driving sheets, and the birds might respond in any of a number of ways. They could conceivably set out earlier due to the darkened sky, but it was possible they would wait for the sunset’s usual glory. They might hang around uneasily, exchanging glances: “It’s time to go.” “No, it’s not.” Surely, even now, he thought, they were squinting for the definitive signal. The one his birds must feel sure that they had been promised.

 

On the 10th, they were chaotic, outrageous. The birds arrived with the fair weather and apparently no idea of where they should go. Rather than their usual purposeful stream, they parted into opposing groups, dovetailing, wheeling back and rounding in on themselves. A piteous spectacle, these instinct-driven creatures who were suddenly unmoored.

 

The very next day they’d regained their composure. It was maddening in a way. It made him quite angry, come to think. They flew in a proud trajectory, as though the day before hadn’t been a sputtering disaster. His birds weren’t visionaries; they could be made so unsure of themselves. An early moon looming over the hedge or a stiff wind might send them into disarray.

 

By the end of the week, he no longer felt that he could trust them. Suppose the last time had been the last time? Sunday evening, he took to his car at their first appearance, determined to follow them to the place they roosted. He craned his neck out the window as he drove, cursing as their swooping progress turned in directions counter to his own. His breath shortened each time he reluctantly dragged his focus back, back into the vehicle, the body. Then he soared to join them. Back into the seat, a glance into the rear-view. A searching of the horizon. Pulling up short, he narrowly avoided a young woman and her dog who had stepped from the curb. Just as soon as he became aware of barreling through their shared space, he was past them. She had worn slim, reflective bands around her upper arms that bounced back the light.

 

He discarded this uncomfortable fact. He could not both drive and dwell on the boundless possible tragedies of each moment. His birds had presented themselves once more—(was it the group he had initially set out to follow?)—and their pace appeared to slacken as they neared their destination.

 

From the garden, it had always seemed they were chasing the setting sun. In reality, they streaked toward a stand of eucalyptus trees across from the Fred Meyer’s. He’d parked underneath those trees before, been irritated by the smattering of bird shit.

 

How long will it last?

 

The public broadcast station was playing that special on Western migrations again. Chinook salmon. His birds would have tucked their heads under a wing by now. He nursed a gin and tonic while not looking over to the picture window.

 

Her perch. She had installed herself on the tufted cushions after the incident with the pilot light, which he had said was no big deal. He trusted her, of course, and there was no need. He could switch off the line behind the range. It would be simple. Why had Mrs. Temple said she’d been on the bench all afternoon again when she was perfectly welcome? There was no need. She stopped thumbing through her book then, smiled at him dazzlingly.

 

“It’s cheerful here, really.”

 

How will we know when it’s really begun?

 

A group of six, though slight, might signify that it had begun. If they clustered together in formation, they could very well usher in the movement. They became together something far more urgent, more striking than they ever seemed alone. Once the beginning announced itself, it couldn’t be denied any longer.

 

One imagines a flock as a single mind, but surely one bird has to strike out for the sunset first. Was it a drop in the temperature, felt by those hollow bones?

 

Who could say the exact date it had alighted upon her? The first day, perhaps, it would have shown up on a test? The dawning realization of its inevitable course, the dread he had carried alone. He dutifully held and guarded her, tracked and fed and made the thousand loving gestures that measured a day. He saw to the milligrams, the ounces, the critical levels.

 

He had pictured such a disaster as theirs before. In his mind, the earth had rent in two; his birds on the wing would drop from the sky. He had never expected that anyone should have to preside over the fracas. In reality, their disaster was a startlingly quotidian affair. One that came with armfuls of bills and bottles. Over and over, the administration of it alarmed him – samples to be monitored, appointments to be scheduled. The slow thick glide of a dark, astringent syrup to be given up to three times daily.

 

Who will be the first to roost?

 

Nights he sat out for the birds, he bore witness to a homeward journey.

 

He was an imperfect observer. At times, he came in because he was cold. There was always the chance that he had missed an earlier group as he made his way outside. He usually sat in a patio chair, but once had chanced to stand and saw a dotted black trail disappearing over the valley’s edge. A group completely hidden from his previous vista. He felt abashed that he had failed to detect them when they were so close. But he couldn’t deny that these movements were happening in many places, so very many places he couldn’t see. And this felt like both a betrayal and a great relief.

 

No one had ever said what should be gained by recording these figures, he thought with no small amount of bemusement. He’d busied his hands taking down the information. Capturing the data resulted in little more than a ghastly approximation of the experience, though. There was a part of him that wanted to snap the clipboard over his knee in a great act of violence. It was a false prophet, a soothsayer. It promised regularity where there was none. Still, how easy it was to forget. He continued to sit out nights with his pencil poised, ready to fill in the next cell.

 

He came to understand how she must have felt when he smiled benignly and said, “Experience tells us, any moment now.” He came to understand that while there was a range of normal values, one couldn’t possibly produce any sort of estimate worth a damn. He came to see what it was not: which was to say not a dike against rising waters, not even an answer to the pestering of a sharp-eyed changeling. He ventured to the shore each night if only to unroll a feeler—a filament, a sustaining thread. He came to remember in his bones what it was like to be a pilgrim in a strange land, a visitor to a landscape whose patterns she had yet to discern.

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anxiety attack implementing grounding strategy

for and after Daniella Toosie-Watson

 

the curtain is off-white

the faucets silvery metallic made to twist

adjust pressure the tiles segmented

borders like the body’s edges   we are always

in contact with something even if

it’s only the floor and air the green

bath-rug’s damp fluff   my skin

is brown is brown is brown

is down on its weak knees   the sink

is white the tub is white the walls

white the window frosted and on top

of that a layer of condensation

outside it there is a whole world

i know it even when it is not visible

that it is true and open and full of contradiction

under my nails the grime houses

a whole ecosystem millions of active

cells molecules mitochondria dried skin flakes

waiting to dislodge to fall   the towel is tan

i am a tangled knot a pretend pretzel person

trying to regulate my breathing and inside

the chemicals sending me information

the ceiling is cracked the ceiling is cracked

i cannot reach it i stop trying

i breathe the breath has no color I breathe again

the breath of dinosaurs and stars the breath

mixed with the breaths of billions of people

the breath encapsulating my skin

the particles of air real even in the unseen gas

i open the window i do not consider leaving

the wind is moody and frantic even more

than i am   it is a violent shimmy of invisible shoulders

it blows the shower curtain right off the rod

i pick it up   put it back on slowly

segment by segment   dull rusty hook by dull rusty hook

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Tetris

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Vermont Getaway: Thirteen Gays Looking at a Blackbird

I. Okay, first off—it’s Onyx.
II. What, are you blind? It’s clearly Deep Noir.
III. Fred was just saying Black Olive or Licorice but I—
IV. Well, Fred makes everything about food. On our first date, he said my eyes were rum-soaked raisins. Chaaarming!
V. I should’ve said they were Blackbirds, darling. Two rum-soaked Blackbirds who shit on anything I have to say.
VI. Knock it off, you two. Can’t we just enjoy our lovely weekend away from the city?
VII. I saw a Blackbird once. On Fire Island. Or was it Provincetown? I dunno. But it was definitely at a Black Party—I know that.
VIII. Remember that drag queen who did pantomime? Wasn’t her show called Ballad of the Blackbird?
IX. She was doing Kabuki, imbecile. And the show was called Memoir of My Last Turd. I’d know, I dated her kimono designer.
X. Hey, don’t Blackbirds have a high frequency of homosexuality? Like giraffes?
XI. You’re thinking penguins. And that’s your last mimosa, Danny. You’re getting like really loud. You’ll scare the little guy away!
XII. Oh, he split ages ago. Soon as Fred and Jose started going at each other.
XIII. No! I wanted an Instagram pic. He was so sweet. That’s it—next time we drive up, I’m gonna build him the poshest birdhouse you’ve ever seen.
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Rice Paper Moon

The day seemed destined

to be an origami swan

except I misfolded it

at each step, its pleats

askew, a twisted coot.

I swim in circles of wishing

to reverse my mistakes.

Then simple midnight

slides me a new page.

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Healthful Living

I have an ongoing project called “is this your book.” First, I find old inscribed books. Then I make erasures in an effort to ferret out the inner workings of the inscriber. Some are poignant, some are odd. This one is healthful and about living.

 

The original book is Healthful Living: Based on the Essentials of Physiology by Jesse Feiring Williams (Macmillan, rev. 1932).

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Two Bible Stories

 

These erasures use ephemera taken from children’s Bible stories.

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Season Cluster

 

As collaborative artists and writers, we work together to create mixed-media expressions of our shared experience. The mosaic or collage structure of our work quilts together individual moments in time, allowing them to be experienced simultaneously. This view from our Almanac #9, Fall, remixes lines and phrases from three poems about autumn: “After Apple-Picking” by Robert Frost, “That time of year thou mayst in me behold” (Sonnet 73) by William Shakespeare, and “To Autumn” by John Keats.

 

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Three Poems from Time Life’s North American Wilderness Series

1/ The Indomitable Peninsula

Taken by astronauts with startling  f  o  rce
 
 
 So the string-straight lines  and calculated curves
 
 So the mirrors of rivers,
 
 The vast emptiness       of         the earth
 
 
 
 
 

Above the line
______________________________________________________________________________________________________

 

                                                                             Below
 
 
 

Empty

 parallels without rain
 
 
 
A moon landscape  of gigantic            invisible           bones
 
 
 
 
 
 

One night I camped in a grove of cardon
 
 
 

I could hear     the coyotes   somewhere       singing
 
 
 
 you and the light
 
 
                                                The  rose  moon
 
 
                             the giant  dark

 
 
 
 
 
Before this
 
 
                                   between the cliffs and the shoreline

 
 
 
 

there must once have been birds

 

2/The Icy Road to Olympus

Honest                l                                    y
 
                                        This is             Destruction
 
                 Out in the vague breeze
 
 

which drops down dizzyingly into the darkness at our feet
 
 
            it was from some-

              where out
 
 
                  here,

 
 

that
 
            h         e
 
                     Caught sight
 
 
                                  of the mountain
 
bright blue
 
 
                        and                  spread                    out
 
 
 
on Panic Peak.

 
 

3/A Land Defined by the Sea

 

       By moonlight the waves broke
 
 
               and sometimes I saw the    faint lights
 
 
    We rumbled        by
 
 
that old road
 
This book
 
 
The country        where       i      ve            l       i       ve       d
 
 
 
 
the Sequoia Sempervirens  where the children have been reaching
 
 
 
Listen.
 
 
 

                There are still places where you can
 
200 foot high dunes
 
                 here and there  engulfing
 
                              the lonely
 
                         line             and sky

 
 
the border  enclosed within sight
 
 
of the                          mountain            s
 
                                    that rise
 
 
along the    earth
 
 
and                         the                       bracket.           of the              water:
 
 
 
 
The west
 
an assemblage                  of               peaks,
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
The Olympic Peninsula           looped  by a highway,
 
 
 
      A ribbon
 
 
                       the         Ocean
 
 
 

                    a tiny tangle of time
 
 
 
 
                                     I was
 
                                                                   the        Salmon feasting ,
 
 
 
Invader                and wild             tide
 
 
 
What keeps so much                    wild                      is          the wilderness
 
 
                                                                                                                   around the perimeter
 
              Sky
 
 
                                  Horse
 
 
                          The bulk        of the peninsula
 
 
 
 
 
                Green
 
 

                                               increasingly

 
 
                                  cut over

 
 
 
 
 
 

You cannot eat your wilderness
 
 
    There is no way to       headquarter       a               river
 
 
 
 
      West across The Great Bend
 
              The       Blackberry               fallen           from nearby

 

The beach             at low tide
 
                                                     the water
 
                                     the          voracious         well     below the              road
 
                                                           that winds
 
                                                  around houses
 
                                                like ours
 
                                             lined with
 
                                                     trees
 
 
 

Quiet September
 
in the mornings
 
when it burns
 
 
 
just once,

at dusk,

 

we saw above the still surface.

 
 
 

Balmy or starry
 
 
Or

 
 

Agonizingly         bright

 

 

These three poems are the first in a series of experimental erasures of Time Life’s North American Wilderness Series. They, I hope, interrogate the books’ previously colonizing language and relay my own anxieties concerning major climate events.

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Insect Erasures

 

 

These erasure hybrids are made from the pages of an insect encyclopedia (The Nature Library: Butterflies VI, edited by W. J. Holland, 1898) found on a sidewalk in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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Four computer-generated erasures

I have been researching computer-generated literature for many years now. Over the past few months, I experimented with reduction to dot-to-dot as a method of generating erasure poetry. It started with restrictions with Hershey text but with these works I have been able to make a more complex, more emotionally connecting style.

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Artifact

View from True North by Sara Henning

Southern Illinois University Press, 2018

Paperback, 76 pages, $15.95

 

 

In “Camera Lucida,” the second poem in Sara Henning’s collection View From True North, the speaker says, “Let me be witness, Lord,” and “the discreet // side of revelation still / calls me home.” Those lines delineate both intent and subject matter here, for the book is a long and heartbreaking catalogue of the ways in which human beings can be cruel to one another.

 

Henning acknowledges that her grandfather—her mother’s father—is the primary character in the book, and here is what we learn about him: he routinely physically and emotionally mistreated his children and wife; he routinely drank to excess, and was a mean drunk when he did so; he was a closeted homosexual, who kept a photographic and diary record of his many trysts, which his family discovered after he died; he infected his wife with an STD, then refused to admit it. Other poems center on the grandfather’s slow death from dementia, Henning’s father’s suicide, and an attempt at same by her mother.

 

The grandfather appears in virtually every poem in the book, and the poems assume a variety of forms, from couplet poems to prose poems to sonnet-like sequences. Henning skillfully matches form with subject matter throughout the book; the almost-sonnet sequences—extended meditations on the complicated relationship the speaker had with her grandfather and has with his memory— are among the most successful poems here.

 

But the salient features in View From True North are the highly inflected diction and the sometimes-knotty syntax. In almost every poem we’re reminded—explicitly—of the demons being dealt with. In “How I Learned I Had the Shine,” it’s “my grandfather’s rage / when his martini lunch / cuts through modesty,” and “Vermouth’s nude / currency flits through / his glass now.” In “For My Uncle, Who Learned to Fly,” we’re told of “the nights their father forced them / into the cellar, spurred him / onto his sister with joint locks / and vital point strikes.” In “Song,” it’s “blue notes / The kind a father sings / while forcing his daughter’s body / to the floor.” “Baptize Him in Dark Water” gives us “Sesame chicken // exit-wounding from his mouth unswallowed.”

 

In “Through a Glass Darkly,” the speaker’s mother, after the grandfather’s death, finds a journal in which he chronicled his many homosexual assignations. For the speaker, the journal is an “artifact”:

 

 What she found—Polaroids glued on back leaves. Naked men posed over

 beds, their hard cocks stretched over bellies like sunning garter snakes.

 Barely legals standing akimbo, underwear cupping their scrotums. Entries

 itemizing names, prices paid in U.S. dollars, dimensions of each organ limp and

 aroused. The positions in which he fucked them.

 

In “Baptize Him in Dark Water,” we encounter “Jags of heat-whelmed ice too sultry // not to thieve through the specular reflection / spiral into a raid of light.” In “Concordance for My Grandfather’s Dementia,” “Fox piss, tail feathers, a geography / of organs lashed into countries—no / heuristic for this whole bruised longitude of animal.” “The End of the Unified Field” gives us “I’m ensnared by his stroboscopic / motion. I trace his dervishes through each illumination / angle-tangent plane. Surface normal. I watch him, / susurration in the sky’s braille of snow.”

 

It is, of course, through conscious choice and artistic inclination about how to approach subject matter that poems are made. But when such charged diction and syntax are used to present already emotionally loaded subject matter the result is a lot of surface noise. Again, perhaps that is Henning’s intent here; perhaps she feels that a more subdued approach would be insufficient to convey the impact of what is being described.

 

But the cumulative effect is to risk compromising subtext. Just as it is possible to describe a fish or a sandpiper or autumn in language that not only describes the creature or object but also implies the speaker’s connection to it, so it is possible to describe horrific human behavior and achieve the same result. In many places in Henning’s book I can vividly see the bruises and the emotional harm the characters are experiencing. But I have a more difficult time understanding why I am being told about it, what the speaker of the poem desires me to take from it. Revulsion, pity, shock—those are natural adjuncts to the stories we are being told. But a newspaper account can deliver that. On finishing a third reading of this book, I felt that I would not be picking it up again. I was sated, yet longing for a texture and substance that isn’t quite there.

 

There is no doubt that Henning is a talented poet, one who is adept with form and is well practiced in the ways of making poems. This reader would hope that in future books she might find subject matter that lends itself to more subtlety, that offers more than cruelty.

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To All Whom It May Concern

“To All Whom It May Concern” is a triptych of documents from the Civil War that includes: 1. An erasure of the first page of a four-page letter written by Lyman Jones to his parents while he was held a prisoner of war in 1863; 2. A later photo of him with wife and two children; 3. His discharge orders, over which a second erasure is pasted—words cut from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” as published in his 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass.

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Two Erasures

In a few months another baby will get to the internet

Still sore and broken
after its husband did wrong
betrayed by the woman
the world.

 

I was secretly hoping
that his eggs made a litter
because the meltdown didn’t happen
there is new news
that years
will soon spit
newborn shit on their hands

 

To cover that it’s a ‘man’s world’
I’m certain, therefore delighted.

 

We are expecting a November
named yesterday.

 

From his yes and into his sound
like the name of a California town

 

Somebody spiked the table
with fertility.

 

Either knocked up or out
and now

 

that grumbling might be Jesse James

 

It might be America
baking in her.

 

“In a few months another baby will get to the internet” is an erasure from a Dlisted.com blog post on 7/9/14 titled “In A Few Months Another Baby Will Get To Call Robert Downey Jr. ‘Daddy.’”

 

We choose to smile in the face

1.

We choose. We choose to look at time.
We choose fives. We choose zig, else zag.
We choose a lot of things, but,

choose us.

 

Happiness is enough.

 

We choose to live—

purpose.

 

Your scent, your style: try these fragrances.
Secret escape.

 

Everything is better with purpose.
Find out why.

 

An empty box is filled with possibilities
(find the bottom).

 

This box is full.

 

100%.

 

Don’t throw it away, it’s too pretty:
a light manufactured by Saint Louis,
owned by
société de produits

 

or used with permission in a dry place in the USA.

 

2.
Go.
With absolutely everything.

 

3.
Purpose in 3 simple steps:
Step 1.
Step 2: pour purpose in a box. Refresh.
Step 3: Unwind. Throw some shoes.

 

You want to worry.

Trust us. You’ll love it.

 

“We choose to smile in the face” is an erasure from the text on the back of Purina Purpose Clumping Cat Litter 23-pound box.

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Plum Trees, Astray, Verso, A Little Croquis, and Snow Still

My erasures, inspired by the letters of Vincent van Gogh during the period in which he lived and painted in Arles, are part of a collection that I have been working on for the last few years. 

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Wory Gardn

“Wory Gardn” collages/erases text and images from: Work That Is Play by Mary Gardner (A Flannigan Company, 1908) and The Want to Know Book by Alfred O. Shedd (Whitman Publishing Company, 1924)

 

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Seduction

 

Judith 13: 3-9 

 

 

prayer 

was left in the 

bedchamber beside his bedin her heart

 

Holofernes’ head

hung there

 

her might his head

his body the bed

 

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One House Back from One House Down

One House Down by Gianna Russo

Madville Publishing, 2019

Paperback, 96 pages, $17.00

 

 

The majority of the fifty-three poems that populate One House Down, Gianna Russo’s second poetry collection, are set in and around Tampa, Florida. As the poet guides us through a bit of Tampa’s history—the noisy streets, the voices of a hundred years and more—we locate the growth of a community. The constant is Russo, a poet of Tampa—remarkable and protean, not unlike the city itself. Russo’s poems are an honest record of a city’s quick evolution, but most importantly, these poems are a love song for the family, friends, and neighbors who inhabit Tampa with her.

 

One of the collection’s standout poems, “Where Letha Lived,” addresses the value of the places we get to call home. The speaker’s father begins the poem: “You know she helped raise you, says Dad. / They were lovely people. If you went by, she always invited you in.”  For the father, it is important that his daughter understand the privilege of acceptance, the willingness of another family to open their home to her. As the poem builds momentum, the speaker declares: “I don’t know how to feel about all this now.” The poet is on the cusp of discovery, and the early placement of the poem in the collection elicits expectation in the reader—will the poet discover how she feels about all this now?

 

The charm in “Where Letha Lived” lies in how we come to know Letha. About a third of the way into the poem, Russo re-introduces lines and images, and this process of doubling continues to the poem’s end. In a coy bit of plotting, the poem initiates the engagement of our memory. The stories Russo re-tells us about the life of Letha establish a sense of familiarity. Our memories become the speaker’s memories. Letha becomes recognizable. Russo’s use of memory, her coaxing us into our own memories of Letha is not coincidental. Lethe is the river of forgetfulness in Greek mythology. Russo is reaffirming her own fading memory of an important person in her life. The speaker says of Letha, “She must have had a kitchen garden. / Do I remember? No.” The poet also points out the cultural boundaries during this time in her youth: “One end of the street, a clutch of tickseed. / The other end, the Italians, their tomatoes and greens.” She sees, as an adult, the invisible lines of division we are ignorant of in youth—a part of how she feels about all this now.

 

Russo works in free verse, but she also employs other poetic forms with similar, deft skill. There is an ekphrastic poem, a pantoum, a poem in the form of a cookbook recipe, and a poem in the shape of a standardized test, but the literal centerpiece of One House Down is “Pecha Kucha for Big Guava.” There are interesting and unlikely cultural connections in that title alone. Big Guava is a nickname for Tampa, and pecha kucha is a Japanese presentation method involving twenty slides, each accompanied by twenty seconds of dialogue. American poet Terrance Hayes adapted this storytelling technique for poetry, and Russo puts the form to great use, galvanizing the collection.

 

Russo’s pecha kucha consists of twenty photographs of Tampa. Similar to the narrative construct of One House Down, the photographs move through time (1920–1954). The photographs are necessary for the poetic form, but the poems that accompany the photographs stand on their own. These poems are so exquisitely written; the photographs are rendered moot. Here, you’ll see what I mean—the poem without the photograph:

 

 She’s standing there like a ghost, but really

 it was her house first. Those cabbage palms,

 bougainvillea, white gardenia, beauty bush.

 Her crone of a house wreathed in cracker rose. Now:

 sandspurs, boarded up windows, a locked door.

 

One House Down is a deep map of Tampa and of the poet’s familial connections to its neighborhoods. It’s not quite written to the scope of Ulysses, but this collection reads like a peripatetic narrative. What the reader discovers is a southern landscape replete with oaks, azaleas, and magnolias. “In the Midst of Magnolia” is a singular, southern poem that is dedicated to Joelle Renee Ashley. Russo conjures the aroma of the magnolia: “Your stories buried in the blooms, the creamy bowls of magnolia.” The alliteration is wonderful. But the speaker struggles to get it right—this poem in dedication: “The fading house on Rainbow Road / where voices ping-ponged in your brain,” or “A raunchy clause where the sexy you stretched herself out.” These descriptions lead to the poem’s conclusion:

 

 The poem I wanted for you has failed me. Here:

 

 On long drives out to your house stars made a cliché of the sky.

 There was a gateway to grief and you walked through it.

 

 Magnolia perfume is the gist of it.

 

The speaker wants us to believe that these final lines are what exist on the other side of failure—how all of us feel, or should feel—about love, about friendship and family, but especially about the places we call home.

 

The collection ends with “Somewhere Jazz,” a poem of exuberant reflection. Russo writes, “I wanted this to be about the house.” It’s easy to believe the speaker is referring to the poem, but Russo has made this move before—directly telling us where her narrative intentions have gone off the rails. The speaker is talking about the book itself—the house of the book holding all of her loves, “The house where you called down all your ancestors. / Much before the house I thought was me was thrumming— / pure inside with jazz.” And there’s the turn, the moment where the poet figures things out. Russo has become the house she peers out from as the collection begins, and the house she dances within as the narrative of these endearing poems refuses to end, but instead plays on.

 

Please also see “After the Poetry Reading: A Condom” by Gianna Russo.

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November Nineteenth [On Erasure]

This erasure is from Donald Culross Peattie’s An Almanac for Moderns, a book of daily essays on the natural world written in the Midwest and published in 1935. Moore uses the book as part of a daily erasure practice, erasing the correspondent day and seeking to radically transform Peattie’s meditations, dramatically shifting the topic and focus of the original entries.

Peattie, Donald Culross. An Almanac for Moderns. Editions for the Armed Services, 1935.

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Of extinction

Of extinction is a videopoem in conversation with its source text, Elizabeth Kolbert’s “The Lost World.” An erasure poem in practice but not in spirit, the piece as a whole explores climate change, fear, comfort, loss, fossil fuels, discovery, and more.

soundtrack by Justin Linton

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Selections from VIOLETS

The source text is Violets of the United States by Doretta Klaber (A. S. Barnes and Company, 1976). 

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Voicing Ghosts

MOTHERBABYHOME by Kimberly Campanello

zimZalla Press, 2019

Vellum paper and oak box or readers’ edition book, 796 pages, £47.00 GBP

 

     

 

A vexing problem for the poet is how to write for the dead. Inherent in the endeavor is an appropriation, a betrayal, and a reduction. I know this dynamic well as my first book of poetry, The Sunshine Mine Disaster, was an attempt to speak to/for the 91 miners who died from carbon monoxide poisoning in the most productive silver mine in the United States in 1972. There’s a point where the dead unveil the poet’s futility and hubris, where the dead say “not enough,” where the dead say “too much.”

 

Or I think of Muriel Rukeyser’s attempt to capture the thousands of deaths caused by silica exposure from the Hawk’s Nest Tunnel disaster in the 1930s. There, she traveled with photographer Nancy Naumburg to study, document, and capture the suffering of the laborers and their families. The result was an abbreviated, incomplete section of U.S. 1, “The Book of the Dead,” where the project resisted containment.

 

Thus, I come to Kimberly Campanello’s MOTHERBABYHOME, an excavation into the deaths of some 796 infants and children, who were housed from 1926 through 1961 by the St. Mary’s Mother and Baby Home under the administration of the Bon Secours Sisters, on behalf of the Irish State in Tuam, County Galway. These children were lost and buried in unmarked graves. Perhaps thousands of others were illegally adopted. They were, in essence, shame-ridden chattel of the Irish State and the Catholic Church; neither they nor their mothers had bodily autonomy.

 

Campanello’s work is a 796-page compilation of conceptual and visual poetry, of great expanses of nearly blank pages, disruptions of language and fragments, poly-layered type, explosions of text, all on large, letter-sized sheets of lightly transparent paper. In a brave collaboration with Tom Jenks of zimZalla Press, Campanello constructed both a reader’s edition, a bound paperback volume with a map of the institution grounds on the cover, and an “avant object” edition, a small set of individual copies made on loose sheaths of vellum paper housed in a hand-made oak box. Physically, both editions approximate the size of a coffin that could very well hold the skeletal remains of an infant.

 

The fragments—while highly manipulated by the poet, as they contort and bleed and reiterate on the page, as they communicate with other fragments visible through the layers of paper—are all external to the poet. They come from contemporaneous letters, documents, reports, decades of anguished cries and discomforting disavowals. They also come from current expressions voiced on the internet and in newspapers in response to the disclosures of the deaths by historian Catherine Corless in 2012. And so, among the fragments are harrowing words of mothers, rationalizations by priests, legalistic dodges by the government, and angry protests by Catholic apologists.

 

On one hand, it mimics the chatter of our currency—these could be tweets lost in the algorithms—and on the other hand, it channels the dead, directly, in their own words, buried, misaligned, and decomposing on layer, upon layer, upon layer of page. And as an anthropological record, the one lineal linkage is the chronological listing of the identified dead, the infants and children, all in impossibly tiny font (4-point, perhaps), with the years punctuating the individual sections.

 

One poem is a repetition of a single fragment, “programme of DNA,” reprinted three or four dozen times, overlaying one another, to form tiny stars, coalescing signifiers. Another poem is a four-page catalogue of diseases, ailments, and medical conditions. Clinically, the work on any single page may echo some early 1980s L*A*N*G*U*A*G*E experiments, a flashy and active deconstruction of language. But there’s a source content to Campanello’s work that goes deep and has absolute essence, and there’s an argument that challenges the reader to do the exhumer’s difficult and soul-demanding work. This book is a distressed artifact.

 

The final tenth of this book is a study of the word “delay,” a point that is amplified by the delayed report of the Mother and Baby Homes Commission, which was supposed to have been released this February (after one extension), and will not release its findings until early 2020. The deferral of accountability continues, remains suspended. MOTHERBABYHOME is clear and uncompromising in its keening.

 

Campanello herself acknowledges antecedents to her task in M. Nourbese Philip’s brilliant Zong! and in Thomas Kinsella’s Butcher’s Dozen, in honoring the voices of the unjustly dead. That is, from them, she has learned to put aside her own voice, to contend directly with the recorded voices themselves, and to cull through the officially sanctioned narratives. But it is in her indebtedness to H. D., who re-positions the poet as ritual maker, where Campanello’s considerable genius and courage come to the fore. Here, she compiles these documents and records, captures and releases all the noise among the living and the dead, and in composing upon ghostly translucent sheets, she builds a coffin and a monument. Each page is prayer. Each page is holy.

 

I need to say two more things.

 

First, the book, in its entirety, overwhelmed me. Its weight, these ghost voices and their truths, has the heft of the remains of one baby and her mother, times nearly 800. I feel that weight looking at just one page, which reads, “reverence / for / the grave / may / Dunne Patricia 25/03/1944 2 mths / derive / planting / centuries.” The grief expressed, released, is not individual, not of a single lifetime, but what will require centuries of collective work. There is no easy reconciliation.

 

Second, Kimberly Campanello’s steadfast commitment in this avant object is breathtaking and humbling. This is the work of a great, great artist, and of a single, attentive human being who listens with intelligent receptiveness and with full love.

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Milk Glass Serenade

I cannot see what flowers are at my feet, nor you,

not yet born, your eyes and body of milk glass.

 

Here, let me

tell you an old saw:

 

A county of men filled a valley with lake, shaped

like an urn. They bestowed on it

a spillway, baptized The Glory Hole.

The surprising dark. A tunnel to the very center.

The oldest say you can see the steeple

 

in a dry year, impaling serous sienna.

For months, these men excised canned goods, locomotives,

the dead. Every Beware of Dog, gazebo, five-and-dime—

 

but left all ambitious underwater elms, which above-surface

had dropped off from Dutch elm disease.

 

Please become born, baby,

so I have someone to serenade. In kindness,

I’ll lie: lullabies moved from the valley,

with the children to whom they belonged.

 

When you lose your fresh pearl teeth

I’ll draw parallels to caverns in the hills.

And should you be unlucky enough to be beautiful,

 

I will tell you of the trees in this novel lake:

the forced dance, the bend

and break, trunks as carefully preserved as crow’s feet

in a wax museum grin. Trapped in line so thin, so dear

 

you cannot see it: the mobile of refuse, waving hello baby.

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Interior

In this series Mary Tautin Moloney’s poems are inspired by and paired with photographs taken in the subway stations of New York by photographer John Moloney. The work captures the desire to connect alongside the alienation that can come with being alive; how these forces bear on one another and affect us. Mary Tautin Moloney is inspired by what she hears and observes in everyday life: the character of a place; linguistic quirks; her children and motherhood. Her collaborator, photographer John Moloney, is drawn to taking the familiar and making it unfamiliar. In both rural and urban landscapes, he plays with scale, light, and texture to create moments of seeing something for the first time. As one poem leads to the next, a journey emerges through an entirely new landscape, one of the emotional life lived. A touchstone for this project, and Tautin Moloney’s writing in general, is to “cleave to the legendary,” advice once given by Stanley Kunitz to Mark Doty. With this series, photography becomes the entry point for speaking to our larger, shared emotional existence.

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bluebeard’s servants

I ran out on the sidewalk

under the broken streetlight

 

dry leaves chuffing overhead

like someone rubbing their palms in a black room

 

a muffled radio from a parked car

blue drool dribbling from its tailpipe

 

the green needle of the radio dial

like a knife’s edge in a dream

 

I heard you calling my name

like I was in trouble

 

like you were right there beside me

with an unwashed cup in your hand

 

but I knew you weren’t outside

I watched you leave the yard

 

barefoot in your robe of fireflies

I knew the house was empty

 

the lukewarm sleeping flank of the drier

the dishwasher’s matted pelt

 

the long black velvet box of the hall

blood on the keys

 

I was always the child who had to look

who went in the study with the torn chairs and stuffed birds

 

who upended the trinket box and found your fob

my breath rattling in my throat like bones shaking in a dice cup

 

I saw the hot coil a carful of blue smoke

why didn’t the driver help me

 

Mother shrugged as you led me away

to the inevitable chamber

 

where dead girls moulder in velvet gowns

locked in like wives

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Pushing against the Familiar

Termination Shocks by Janice Margolis

University of Massachusetts Press, 2019

Paperback, 258 pages, $13

 

Famous Children and Famished Adults by Evelyn Hampton

FC2, 2019

Paperback, 160 pages, $13

 

Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea by Sarah Pinsker

Small Beer Press, 2019

Paperback, 288 pages, $17

 

           

 

There is a familiar and sort of empty phrase that we come across from time to time in blurbs and reviews. This book left me wanting more. It’s an odd notion. Applied to novels, it’s essentially unfathomable: what more could be asked of Moby-Dick—Ishmael’s intervening years? Or Invisible Man: do we need “Part 2: Still Down Here in the Coal Bin”? Perhaps, while only seeming to laud, the critic-reviewer is giving a sneaky backhand, and that I want more actually implies there’s not enough here.

 

Maybe when applied to collections of short stories and poems, the phrase “this book left me wanting more” has somewhat sturdier—if still wobbly—legs. Perhaps the reader–critic enjoys the author’s use of language or metaphor so greatly that reading even more would simply be lovely . . . so, really, all that’s happened is that the critic–reader has tapped into his pleasure principle. Or maybe it’s something else; maybe it’s the setting of the scenes or the fascinating characters that entrance our reader–critic: a bit dulled by his own daily life spent watching baseball and eating Doritos, he’d prefer to linger in the well-imagined fictional setting, in a space richer and with people more interesting than those in his own poor surroundings. But if that’s the case, it’s not so much that the critic–reader wants more of the book—the poor fella just wants less of his current existence.

 

Left me wanting more. When describing authors’ first books, it takes on even trickier meaning (because if we don’t want more now . . .). As luck would have it, under review here are three such debuts: Termination Shocks by Janice Margolis, Famous Children and Famished Adults by Evelyn Hampton, and Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea by Sarah Pinsker. Having read all three, I can honestly say one thing. I want more.

 

Quick admission: a few years ago, a collection of mine received the Juniper Prize. While Termination Shocks has also received the Juniper Prize, I don’t know Janice Margolis, and my current ties to UMass Press are more or less non-existent. That’s not a complaint, just a fact. UMass is an academic press, and it doesn’t have the family feel that many literary presses strive for. My point is that there’s no conflict of interest in my discussion of Termination Shocks.

 

I began Termination Shocks with hopeful anticipation. Here was a book chosen for its prize by Sabina Murray, a talented writer interested in language, tone, and structure. And the book begins strong—the first of its five stories, “21 Days,” is impressive in its reach. The story is a feverish first-person history of Liberia as told through the point of view of an orphan stuck in her family hut for Ebola quarantine in the days following the death of her mother. The title refers to the length of her quarantine, and the story foregrounds language, form, and meaning (social commentary) over plot and even characterization. Here a rat has as complex a characterization as the narrator’s romantic interest, or her teacher, or her mother (it’s a cool rat). Margolis relays the narrator’s experience cleanly and beautifully:

 

Everything crackles inside me. I could be made of lightning. A dying bird beats against my brain, swoops between my ears, pecking songs Mama sang me. It makes the notes bleed between my legs, and I cut the gold-and-green dress into beautiful rags to catch the falling sounds.

 

Of course, the situation Margolis has chosen to write about is one of intensity, sorrow, and fear, and the narrator’s feverish reveries lead to wonderfully revelatory moments, such as, “[My teacher] tells me how animals groom each other in the most vulnerable positions. How humans groom each other with language. Miss Browne grooms me for hours.”

 

“21 Days” is a beautiful work. And it does raise questions of appropriation, too—a white American author writing about a Liberian girl possibly stricken with Ebola. But to my reading, the story seeks authenticity, and it tries to dramatize the moment in brutality more than in beauty; the only villains are, if anyone, the white medical staff. It’s a challenging story to read and a challenging story to write, and credit goes to Margolis for taking the challenge on.

 

After “21 Days,” I read the second story in the collection, “Being Tom Waits.” This is a story narrated by a person who has become Tom Waits. I know very little about Tom Waits. He seems to need a shave. And I like the song about Singapore. But I also feel that what I enjoy about Tom Waits is not what fans of Tom Waits enjoy. This did not interfere with my enjoyment of the story. If you want to read a story version of Being John Malkovich transferred to the mind of Mr. Waits, here you go, minus the scheming plot. We are immersed fully in the head of the fictional Tom Waits. The story is plotless, but no matter—it’s funny, irreverent, referential, absurd, and loving:

 

Speaking of Normal Mailer, he and I had a brief correspondence in the ’70s. For some reason, a fan letter I’d written gave him the impression I was a tall dirty blonde. I didn’t disabuse him of his mistake, and allowed a non-existent part of my body to be described in a particularly lascivious exchange he later insisted was meant for Gloria Steinem. As requested, I destroyed the letter, which, as a lover of history, I deeply regret.

Incidentally, am I the only one who notices that incessant ringing?

 

The story veers between confused recollection, wanderings of Los Angeles, Waits’s frustrations, paranoias, conceptual albums, lost genitals, and more. Between it and “21 Days,” my expectations for the final three stories in Termination Shocks were considerable, but the returns diminish a bit. The fourth story in the collection is narrated by the Berlin Wall, an interesting concept that becomes a bit static (and very removed from the present day). The concluding title story is another structural experiment, wedding the stages of rocket liftoff with personal relationships; by the story’s end, the design feels more scattered than accumulative. The collection’s middle story, “Little Prisoners,” is an interesting outlier: a 170-page novel-length piece written as straight realism, even as historical fiction, following an archaeology student in Syria who falls in with government protesters and becomes accused of spying, which leads ultimately to a big reveal about her past.

 

Termination Shocks is an odd collection that creates, at its best, wonderful literature. It features two challenging, strange stories—one risky and rewarding, and the other inanely effusive and immersive. While the final two stories also lean toward innovation—of structure, of concept—they, and certainly the very long “Little Prisoners,” don’t quite match the sheer ambition and exuberance in the first two pieces. It’s fair to say that the collection left me wanting more.

 

In her debut Famous Children and Famished Adults, recipient of the FC2’s Ronald Sukenick Innovation Fiction Prize, Evelyn Hampton includes quite a few stories: twenty-two that collectively span just 160 pages. Given the stories’ relative brevity, it’s only logical that this is a very different book from Termination Shocks, especially in terms of the foregrounded fiction elements. Rather than progressive narrative tensions (“plot” is a four-letter word here), or characters existing over long periods of time feeling the deep impacts of upsetting life events, the stories in Famous Children and Famished Adults are swifter, stranger, and more concerned with language and the mindsets of their many strong-voiced narrators. These stories are elusive in terms of being plot-reducible; that the collection was chosen as FC2’s Sukenick prize-winner by Flournoy Holland is no surprise, since she is a writer as much immersed in mood and the line and deep evocations of point of view as anything else. Hampton’s fiction seems very Holland’s type of fiction.

 

Which is great. It leads to the publication of stories like Hampton’s, works that push against the familiar. It’s hard to group the collection: these are stories as glimpses, hints at strange characters in stranger relationships—and we’re only ducking in to watch them a few moments. This is seen often, in stories such as “Choo and Cream” (a couple joined together by a “a nearly transparent child who clapped its hands not out of glee or approval, but because of the awkward way its body was dangling”); “The End of History” (a nameless female narrator “wants to discover . . . a framework for her content”); “Every Day an Epic” (among other things, we learn that the narrator has “been looking at the world through a lens,” enters into it, and “open[s] intervals and unravel[s] across them”); and many more.

 

There’s a slightly tendency in Famous Children and Famished Adults toward the surreal parable in metaphorical situations that explore more mundane experiences (“Choo and Cream” could be read as a metaphorical description of what it’s like to have a newborn). But even that tendency isn’t very pronounced; more than anything, it’s easier to say what isn’t in the collection. Throughout, Hampton shows an impatience for context and clarity, which makes the normal experience of fiction—enjoyment, emotional impact—a bit hard to come by. One piece, “At the Center of the Wasp,” goes thusly: someone who bottled and sold scents has died; there’s an island that is either literally or figuratively made of shit; the dead person has to be buried; the narrator doing the burying (and complaining all the while about the shit and the island and the smell and burying) is related to the dead person. The story is an effusion of frustration with context barely provided; it’s like stepping onto an elevator with a person on a cell phone engaged in a furious conversation you cannot quite piece together. Which can be enjoyable and meaningful, especially if you sit back and enjoy the lines, the point of view, the strangeness.

 

“At the Center of the Wasp” lies at the far end of the collection; most of the stories have a bit more clarity, and the strangeness shines rather than muddies. In “Cell Fish,” the narrator learns that her significant other is dying, and Hampton tells this story through elision rather than a more predictable head-on style. Her patience and ability to let white space do work is admirable, as is her ability to let small gestures convey tone, character, emotion: “The doctor pressed her fingers together, enclosing the space in front of her face. When she spoke, the voice seemed to come from the space enclosed by her hands.” Rather than pursuing the story into the territory we might generally expect—hospitals, progression of disease, the impact on day-to-day life—Hampton more often keeps us caught in the impending doom rather than stepping into the more familiar literary ground of the doom itself. This is a harder task; with most writers, it’s not intuitive. That Hampton prefers in her fiction to move us into—and to remain in—those quiet spaces before the dam breaks is impressive and admirable.

 

A great thing about story collections is that they rest on their strongest pieces. For me, the greatest works in Famous Children and Famished Adults are the ones that, perhaps begrudgingly, do allow more narrative context. A bit of familiarity, for me, makes strangeness even stranger, as it allows situation, voice, and language to become more uncanny rather than entirely uprooting the reader. The story “Jay” is the easiest example: the narrator’s friend, a possible spy, has vanished from her life, and we see the impact of the two’s strange interactions play out over a longer period of time. Other stories, too, give us more context: “Fishmaker,” “Cell Fish,” “The Slow Man,” “Since All the Cats have Vanished,” for instance, let the reader in a bit more and so, at least for me, have greater impact. At its best, Famous Children and Famished Adults is a successful, unique, and commanding collection, though sometimes it’d be nice to get a larger picture of a given story’s disaster, a larger sense for how it plays out on the characters’ lives. Just a little more.

 

Sarah Pinsker’s debut, Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea, is less like the other two collections here under review. Foremost, it’s not a contest winner chosen by an academia-established literary author; rather, it’s published by Small Beer Press, an indie known for works that, while literary, lean toward the fantastic. It’s no surprise that the stories in Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea were previously published in genre-aligned journals including Asimov’s Science Fiction and Lightspeed. While Hampton and Margolis certainly feature experimental-leaning fictions, their works are, at least to me, a more familiar type of literary experimentation—more academic than commercial.

 

I opened Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea with a feeling I had when I was much younger and reading books not as a writer but simply as a reader, with no expectations, no hopes or skepticisms, no begrudging or apprehension. Pinsker’s stories only magnified my childlike sense of excitement and wonder: the worlds they contain are imaginative, vivid, and well-designed, almost like Cornell boxes—vividly adorned and other-worldly while still being tilted versions of our own. “A Stretch of Highway Two Lanes Wide,” about a young man who loses an arm in a work accident, sadly and poignantly captures the longing, interestingly, of his replacement robotic arm:

 

It didn’t just want to be a road. It knew it was one. Specifically, a stretch of asphalt two lanes wide, ninety-seven kilometers long, in eastern Colorado. A stretch that could see all the way to the mountains, but was content not to reach them. Cattleguards on either side, barbed wire, grassland.

 

Other stories throughout the collection twin the surreal with the poignant ordinary. “Remembery Day” features an annual parade for military veterans; the twist is that on this day, the veterans vote whether or not to lift their “Veil,” a perpetual forgetting of their war traumas. In “No Lonely Seafarer,” a genderless narrator confronts sirens who have laid waste to a town’s shipping industry. “Wind Will Rove” asserts the need for people to hang onto the seemingly unimportant textures of their shared history—especially while stuck on a spaceship adrift in the universe. The title story features a scavenger who finds a woman stranded ashore in a boat; we learn from a slightly unwieldy narrative style that the lost woman was living, as many do in the story’s world, on a cruise ship, playing bass in a house band that exists to entertain the privileged wealthy. In the quietude of the scavenger’s abode, we see a collision between consumerism (the musician) and being a hermit (the scavenger), between a life of accumulation and a life, if lacking in material things, more attentively lived.

 

The stories in Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea remind me in style, tone, and world-construction of the stories collected in Ray Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man; this is true of their thematic underpinnings, as well. If Evelyn Hampton’s stories lean toward the parable, Pinsker’s don’t lean so much as announce meaning via loudspeaker. As with Bradbury’s, these are message-driven works of fiction. Their intricate architectures are often overlaid onto moralistic messages, and at times this serves to reduce the stories’ emotional valence. There are cautioning moments, as well. “The Low Hum of Her” is implicitly a Holocaust story in which a father has built for his daughter a replacement robotic grandmother; this story, too, is poignant, as the daughter begrudgingly comes to love the robot, but as the story doesn’t once mention the horrible sufferings of the Holocaust, the fraught setting seems almost whimsically chosen.

 

Of course these aren’t boxes—they’re stories, ranging from as brief as three to as long as forty-plus pages. But to carry the Cornell comparison further, as with the artist’s famous boxes, the stories in Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea rely on the reader to infer from or project emotional complexity upon their dazzling arrangements, and as we gaze at the design elements, some of the more literary elements—especially character complexity—get shorter shrift. For a debut collection, Sooner or Later shows remarkable promise—if only the real complex human stuff of it were given a little more attention.

 

One last side-note: while these three collections are very diverse in terms of form and craft, it’s important to observe diversity of both voice and represented experience, as well. Other than “21 Days,” I’m not sure these collections are expanding diversity in those ways. These are three very white collections, very middle class. That’s just an observation, not a criticism. Of course, writers can only write best what writers can only write best, and Janice Margolis, Evelyn Hampton, and Sarah Pinsker are writing awfully damn good fiction. There is plenty here—plenty to admire, to envy, and to praise. These three collections are pushing against the ordinary, pushing against the familiar (if imaginary) line that wraps neatly around what fiction, what literary fiction, should be.

 

And they should be pushing against that line; they should be pushing against any expectations. That’s what we should expect from these books given to us by such innovative and important presses. While the reader–critic in me thinks, I really hope Pinsker/Hampton/Margolis goes out now and writes a greater novel with more emotional impact, the teacher–writer part of me rolls his eyes and disagrees. Shut up, critic–reader. To hell with your notion that fiction should conform to your expectations. You’re not in charge. They are, these three talented authors. Let them keep on doing their work. They’re doing a great job—well more than enough.

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The Mother, the Bee, the River’s Edge: A Story from The Kalevala

 

This comic strip is an adaptation of part of the first Lemminkäinen cycle in the Finnish epic, The Kalevala. The Kalevala is an adaptation of the oral folklore of Karelia and Finland written by Elias Lönnrot and is considered a major cornerstone of Finnish identity and culture. I started reading The Kalevala to get a better context for some of the metal music I listened to and found myself drawn to the women in these narratives. To me, they were as interesting (if not more so) than the male heroes. Lemminkäinen’s mother, in particular, is my favorite character, despite not being given a name herself. In this comic, I hoped to capture her own heroic journey and how her son’s happy ending did not necessarily lead to her own.

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