Category: Aquifer

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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