Category: Reviews

Review: Small Rain by Garth Greenwell

 

Review of Small Rain, by Garth Greenwell, Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux; $28; 320 pages; September 3, 2024                                                                                            Review by Brian Alessandro

Despite the limitless expanse of the mind, the body is a woefully constrained vessel. In Garth Greenwell’s new novel, Small Rain, a mysterious illness seizes, reduces, and ultimately enlightens a poet. While the medical dilemma of the protagonist is harrowing, his rich, compassionate interiority provides succor. “I became a thing without words in those hours, a creature evacuated of soul.”

The poet in Small Rain is an avatar for Greenwell who suffered an aneurysm a few years back and was left with a temporary inability to read anything save for the poems of George Oppen, whose work provides the protagonist of the novel solace. Analyzing one of Oppen’s poems, “And All Her Silken Flanks with Garlands Drest,” the narrator speculates: “It’s a whole theory of civilization, that image, the flowers and the slaughter, the flowers covering the slaughter. And all her silken flanks with garlands drest.”

Small Rain is as distressing as it is consoling. Greenwell’s stream of consciousness brings us close to the machinations of emergency room procedure, terror, and uncertainty. “Everyone had been so relentlessly heterosexual.” He unflinchingly illustrates the inherent humiliation of physical examination, the demoralization of pain (“It had become engrossing, the pain, it had become a kind of environment, a medium of existence”), and all our misgivings with the American medical establishment. Trauma attends the triage experience and the mysterious illness that plagues the protagonist until a dreaded diagnosis is ultimately disclosed: an infrarenal aortic dissection.

“There was something terrible about watching the people around me, terrible and irresistible, I wanted to see into their lives, but had no right to,” the poet admits. “Most of the people in the waiting room were like windows left dark, blank or withdrawn, scrolling on their phones or staring into space.”

Upon diagnosis, a fleet of doctors and nurses treat the poet like a medical anomaly. The micro emphasis on the protocol of hospital personnel and their intensive care procedures fosters an experiential nightmare. Timing is no friend either, as the poet’s catastrophic biological incident unfolds during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, and the risk of infection heightens the already nerve-shredding scenario.

Also buzzing in the background, finding its way into the poet’s contemplations, are the national demonstrations against police brutality in the wake of the Breonna Taylor and George Floyd murders. The poet is a highly conscionable empath, but Greenwell avoids tropes of virtue signaling. His poet is a complex human who is duly outraged by cruelty, injustice, and indifference; however, it is the juxtaposition of police brutality with the politicization of the coronavirus, mask mandates, and vaccinations that deeply troubles the poet: “Twitter was full of everyone calling everyone a fascist, so that the word meant nothing—which was the real danger, I thought, words meant nothing, the way any word could be made to mean nothing; it was a way of erasing reality, or of placing reality beyond our grasp, real facts, real values, it was a tyranny of meaninglessness.”

Small Rain is reminiscent of Margaret Edson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play Wit: a person of the mind is diminished and imprisoned by a dire medical condition, forced to confront memories and ideologies and shortcomings and desires and mortality. Here, the poet reflects on his life, including the fond introduction to his lover, moments from childhood (“childhood is not health…there is no bigger lie in literature”), exchanges with his mother, and growing up in an abusive household. There is a sense of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking and Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor in terms of disease and the literary mind. The cerebral, lyrical thoughts find art, history, and philosophy to help comprehend the dehumanizing dilemma and find meaning in the suffering. “Why do we love what we love, why does so much fail to move us, why does so much pass by us unloved.”  

Sometimes that literary mind—impractical and useless when met with a clinical crisis, despite its salvation of the soul—crashes against the cold, necessary logic of medicine and technology: “My ignorance was an indictment of something, me, my education, the public schools where I was raised, that I could be so helpless when it came to anything useful, that the only technologies I knew anything about were antiquated, unnecessary technologies: iambic pentameter, functional harmony, the ablative absolute. They were the embellishments of life, accoutrements of civilization, never the necessary core—though they were necessary to me.”

The poet, like Greenwell, possesses a generous mind, and his musing turns also to his husband, a renowned Spanish poet (“It was the least dramatic, the least anxious beginning to any relationship I had ever had: no anguished uncertainty, no sleepless nights, just a new fact in the world”); their house in Iowa, which is an old money pit in perpetual disrepair; his long-term teaching assignment in Romania; and his time in graduate school earning his MFA in poetry. The constant assault and failure and expenses incurred on his old house feels Job-like, and he finds metaphors to his health, as well as to birds and to poetry. He also considers the sad, beautiful demise of the oak trees on his property: “It was beautiful how they died, in the wild, in the forests; as they rotted and the wood softened, more animals took shelter in them, even after they fell, they served a purpose, enriching the soil, they had long lives and long deaths.”

Greenwell originally studied music in his youth, then poetry, and there is a musicality in his prose as a result. “I was the opposite of philosophical, a miniscule crouching thing, a bit of matter terribly afraid, utterly insignificant, the entire world.”  Small Rain is written with warmth, sensitivity, and great accessibility, but never with even a hint of treacle. Instead, the novel leaves us with a desire to embrace life’s clichés: live fully, passionately, openly, and hold to the people and things that enhance you, not the least of which is art itself. “Poetry,” the poet tells us, “is the accoutrement of the self.”

Share

Review: All The World Beside by Garrard Conley

Review of All the World Beside, by Garrard Conley, Riverhead Books, 352 pages, $28, Publication Date: March 26, 2024

Review by Brian Alessandro

 

Though Garrard Conley’s transcendent debut, All the World Beside, is ostensibly about an eighteenth century gay love affair between Arthur Lyman, a physician, and Nathaniel Whitfield, a reverend, the novel is chiefly concerned with the nature of desire and the salvation of the soul.

 

The story unfolds in Cana, Massachusetts amid the Puritan push for utopia. Arthur is married to the bold, scandalous Anne while Nathaniel’s wife is the accommodating, unwell Catherine. Both men have children. Arthur’s daughter, Martha, and Nathaniel’s daughter, Sarah, eventually become friends by way of Anne’s engineering, but it is Ezekiel, Nathaniel’s son, around whom the plot is framed. His letters to Sarah, years after the central events of the novel, anchor the story, providing an additional layer of tragedy.

 

We soon learn that Ezekiel, named after the prophet who saw the demise of Jerusalem, is answering for the sins of his father through exile. While Nathaniel is away with Arthur, Sarah becomes possessed by righteousness and castigates the citizens of Cana who are swayed by a swindler selling watches. She scolds them for their pagan proclivities, claiming they have become Satan’s puppets, especially her father who sins with Arthur, and her mother who hides his sin. Sarah feels responsible for the town’s great awakening. The Great Awakenings—a succession of religious revivals led by evangelical Protestant ministers that gripped believers throughout the early eighteenth century and into the late twentieth century—play a central role in the novel.

 

When Ezekiel’s mother calls a group of French sex workers “nobodies,” Ezekiel internalizes the notion of a “nobody” as someone without a home, free to do as they like, including finding a home as they see fit, a “terrifying and exciting” prospect. We learn that Ezekiel was cast off to the hinterlands because he would not betray Nathaniel and Arthur, his “two fathers.” In his quiet despair, Ezekiel questions a “God who has created such impossible conditions.”

 

Conley does not hide his numerous parallels to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter or Arthur Miller’s The Crucible: pilgrim judgment, shunning, damning ostracization, banishment, and the weight of mortal transgression, along with the characters’ names themselves. The novel intrigues and mesmerizes with its density of complex histories, scandalous pasts, tormenting secrets, and haunting lies.

 

Conley’s revelatory 2016 memoir, Boy Erased, also dealt with the cruel and ignorant things people do in the name of religion, but with compassion and insight. Homosexuality and Christianity coexist in an uneasy arrangement in Conley’s personal world, as in his fiction. The characters treat each other with care, tenderness, and concern for their well-being. Even Nathaniel and Arthur are protected and loved by their families and communities.

 

All The World Beside is largely a meditation on the simplicity, beauty, and goodness of nature and faith, despite the pain both cause. The characters are at the nonnegotiable pull of a wild will and its demands, as well as the imagined expectations of God. The punishments doled out by religious law seem unreasonable, even draconian, but in Conley’s view, these are the products of fear and reverence. In a moment of the metaphysical melding with the scientific, Nathaniel says to Arthur, “You said wounds allow love to enter the body more freely.”

 

Conley’s voice is clear but ambiguous, gentle but never coddling, and firm but not merciless. His spare language is imbued with an assurance that disarms with its sincerity. The novel was born of Conley’s conversation with his Missionary Baptist father, and a subsequent objective to prove queer people existed and even thrived during the 1700s. The eighteenth century was the Age of Reason, after all, and enlightenment meant privileging science over blind faith. These dualities are at play in the relationship between Nathaniel, a man of faith, and Arthur, a practitioner of medicine. Nathaniel is responsible for the town’s spiritual health while Arthur bears responsibility for the inhabitants’ physical wellbeing. The soul and the body intermingle. The divine and the material parry.

 

By virtue of the milieu and period, Conley tells an elemental story about faith and nature, free from civilized constructions and cultural touchstones. The focus here is on engagement with God, with imagination, with the soil, and, finally, with each other. Still, there pervades a din of the superstitious, the anxiety of bearing a mark and being damned, the devil lurking in the shadows, ready to claim his due. “The devil never forces a hand. He is cleverer than that. He tempts.” Nature itself possesses evil, or at least, indifferent properties. But God is everywhere too. The divine is a constant presence and a perpetual promise, a goal to work toward, and a pleasure to be earned.

 

The love shared between Nathaniel and Arthur feels like an invention, even if the men discover that their shared feelings are all too familiar. Theirs is the possible start of a freer land, one of not just national possibilities but also a sexual renaissance. “We just invented it,” says Nathaniel to Arthur. “Never before has another man done what I have done or felt what I have felt. God did not create this. It is not natural. It is not divine. It is nothing but what it is, here in this bed.”

 

Though the families keep their secrets, Nathaniel and Arthur’s love harms them. Sarah, in her rapturous call to duty, believes that their sin prevents the salvation of the town. “A town must be safe before it may be saved,” claims a parishioner named Priscilla. Conley maintains nebulous motives for his characters, especially the men’s families. Do they keep the secret of the affair to protect their husbands and fathers, or to protect themselves? To ensure the awakening unfolds unsullied, or to preserve the fantasy of their faith? Catherine tells Sarah, “Men have the power to change. Women cannot change, not really; they have no such luxury, but men change all the time.”

 

All The World Beside’s bittersweet tone is perhaps best captured by Catherine who, overcome by her family’s lot in life, laments, “There is life yet to mourn the loss of beauty.”

 

Conley ends with an academic postscript that rigorously assays the hidden history of LGBTQ life. He so expertly evokes the eighteenth century that the modern thoughts and words of the closing essay stand as a jarring contrast and pointed reminder of where we’ve been and where we are. In the end, Conley tells a story that feels ancient but somehow new, and he does so with grace, restraint, and generosity. His characters are as alive and urgent today as they would have been over 250 years ago, and the world, though changed, remains in many heartbreaking and healing ways, the same.

Share

Gator Country: Deception, Danger, and Alligators in the Everglades 

Review of Gator Country: Deception, Danger, and Alligators in the Everglades, by Rebecca Renner

Flatiron. 276 pp. $29.99 

Review by Samuel Zammit

Equal parts true crime and an exploration of Florida folktales, veteran journalist Rebecca Renner weaves together a thought-provoking nonfiction debut with Gator Country: Deception, Danger, and Alligators in the Everglades. Renner quickly delivers on the promise of the book’s provocative title, sharing truths more thrilling than fiction as she intertwines impassioned narratives and dispels myths surrounding conservation.

 

Gator Country follows the story of Officer Jeff Babauta, his involvement with Operation Alligator Thief, and his grappling with morality as he completes one last job. Despite being the action-packed story of a Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) officer going undercover to catch alligator poachers, Gator Country also presents difficult philosophical questions, bringing painful truths about poaching to light. As Renner tracks down Babauta, and their narratives collide, the book dissects the real lives of poachers, humanizing them in stereotype-shattering ways and calling the law itself into question. As Renner says, “The poachers in my life would balk at the idea that they’re hurting nature. They love nature.”

 

Renner draws on her experiences to bring to life the parts of Florida that only a Floridian could, and she makes careful use of her upbringing. Unpacking Florida storytelling motifs, Renner deciphers the tales of her fellow locals in ways an outsider might misunderstand. As such, Gator Country takes readers on an intimate romp through Florida swamps while simultaneously taking them on an undercover mission that feels like something pulled from the pages of a thrilling spy novel.

 

The story of Operation Alligator Thief, alongside Renner’s search for another folk hero of the swamp, Peg Brown, are delicately intertwined. Like a gator sinking beneath the surface, the reader is transported seamlessly between worlds: Babauta’s tale of the past and Renner’s hunt for the truth about Peg Brown and other seemingly kind-hearted poachers like him. Ultimately, these parallel stories converge into a bittersweet and satisfying conclusion for one of the biggest busts in FWC history.

 

Renner takes care to discuss the indigenous people who have had their land stolen, the impact of man on nature, and the truth about what realistically drives people to poaching, all of which stands in stark contrast to the cartoonish images of the British on safari at the turn of the century that readers might conjure when they hear the word poach. She highlights the positive and negative ways that humanity has interacted with nature and the livelihoods of their neighbors. Renner tells the story not only of nature, but of the people who have shaped and been shaped by the natural world.

 

Gator Country is a book for anyone looking for the juicy mess of reality in pages so suspenseful they read like fiction. In the end, Renner writes about the blurry morality of the law, friendships, betrayal, loyalty, and family, all while expertly building toward the crescendo of the true villain’s reveal, all of which gives way to an incredible ride and a riveting read.

Share

Review: All Bird: Brandi George’s The Nameless

Review of The Nameless, by Brandi George. 
Kernpunkt Press, August 2023, 199 pages, $18.00
Review by James Brock.

The late Dean Young famously instructs poets, “We are making birds not birdcages,” in The Art of Recklessness, expressing a gravity-defying Warner Brothers Cartoons ethos and New York School surrealism. Young committed to those ideas since his days as a graduate student (and one year as a nursing student) at Indiana University, some forty years ago. His ideas about recklessness broaden the scope of poetry, embracing creative processes that are truly disruptive, chaotic, comedic, and thrilling. (Anne Carson, Thylias Moss, and Denise Duhamel were busy with their own poetic larcenies those days as well.)

 

Meanwhile, there lived a punk-goth farm girl, haling from Ovid, Michigan, with living visitations from faery tale creatures and Old Testament demons; a Lady Gaga little monster who survived exorcisms and sexual abuse and suicide; a love-wrecked and love-worn lovechild of Walt Whitman and Thumbelina; and, eventually, a professor and Ashtanga practitioner. She would write unlikely long books of poetry, improbably to have them published. And that poet, Brandi George, has now gifted us with an incredibly demanding, rewarding, pleasurable, harrowing, and funny book of poetry, The Nameless. It is a monumental book that is all bird.

 

Part bildungsroman, part memoir, part enfevered vision, part nature study of fungi, and so, so much more, The Nameless is also the work of a serious, careful versifier, one whose mastery of iambic meter is as light and feathery as hydrae. It is also a book that runs some 200 pages, a visionary accomplishment published by Kernpunkt Press—a press that must be praised for its faith in the most unlikely.

 

Structurally, The Nameless operates ostensibly as a memoir, divided into two sections, and subdivided into short, individual chapters. And while one is to distrust the autobiographical in poetry as being merely factual, clearly the effort here by George is to construct a poetic record of her life. The speaker in her book is self-identified as “We”—and while that first appears to be a nod toward a gender-neutral self-naming, the “we” who speaks is a dissembling of voices, polyphonic, amorphous, and morphing. This expansive idea of self, certainly Whitman-like, finds its operative metaphor in the mushroom, in fungi. Yes, inside the pleats of the cap of a mushroom are ungendered spores, where 10,000 individuals can fit on a pinhead, and a single fungus constitutes the largest organism on earth, covering an expanse of over four square miles.

 

George’s “We” constitutes a self that is wracked with auditory and visual hallucinations, an identity we might consider as post-structurally fractured or profoundly schizophrenic, but one that becomes a representation of the poet, a being who is something of a receiver, without the usual filters, who hears the language of air and death in everything and who must then sing.

 

The book begins with death, where We, as a child, is the victim of sexual molestation—her parents instruct her to forget it—and, from that moment, death’s spores enter We’s body:

 

                          so now when we
completely forget      it Happened

the Thing forms      a fairy ring
inside our body     Now Death

lives inside us

Invariably, then, Death attends, embodies, and accompanies We through the book—a fact of her life that she has long been taught to ignore and deny. And, of course, in Ovid, death is everywhere, within and without, but with the promise of change and metamorphosis. For We, this means enduring an exorcism at her parents’ behest, the parents convinced their adolescent daughter is possessed by demons. They burn her poems. The irony, it seems, is that We is indeed possessed, but by Death in all its recombinant manifestations.

 

The book chapters are often prefaced by George’s brilliantly fractured tales of Thumbelina dying a new death with each iteration. We clearly identifies with Thumbelina—the strangest of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales—whose queer desires and chaotic imaginings are continually corrected by her elders. George’s Thumbelina is “genderless, many-faced, guiltless, green, and as mysterious as twilight,” a runaway spirit who meets death recklessly, fully, casually, and intentionally.

 

And in this large book, there are abundant touchstones for We beyond Thumbelina: Kurt Cobain, tarot cards, success and the po-biz, and even animal husbandry. This is a poet’s memoir, after all, a testimony of the empathetic spirit, and here, with death living inside her, We’s empathy is almost debilitating. She feels too much (and this seems to be her chief sin, at least by her family’s reckoning). For instance, We recounts her work at a dairy farm, where her job is to separate the male calves from the female calves, after which the baby bulls will be sold for veal:

 

back in the barn we try to console the new calf
name him     Bocephus    after Hank    but without his mother

                                            he’s petrified
trembling    we hold him to our chest like a child

           his grief is so deep we can feel it    glacial    nothing will ever
absolve us of this

 

As much as We disassociates herself from her family, from middle-America banality, and from the grind of capitalism, she is inescapably complicit. Where others in her family and community routinely deny responsibility, she feels it keenly—it is the death in her. The poet’s task, it seems, is to receive everything, to name it, to own it.

 

Even so, much of the book is doomful, doleful love poetry, a tribute to We’s beloved Annette, an equally wild spirit (and later to We’s husband Michael, who co-authors several poems in the book). Here, the poetry is tender:

 

In the backyard we practice
flipping our hair
She-Ra mermaid rock star
it’s our thing hair      then eyes then

will we ever be beautiful?

          our longing for beauty is
crush of petals down our shirt
     leaves under our feet
dandelion heads on the sidewalk
                       sunburn like a hand

 

So, amid all the chaos, the disorientation of hallucinations, and the broken wheel that is the self, George’s reckless poetry continually finds its purchase in these fleeting moments. This unguarded work seems the very product of Muriel Rukeyser’s question: “What would happen if one woman told the truth of her life?” The world that Brandi George has split open contains all the invisible names of death, all the fecund beauty we long for, and a billion seeds that will germinate from the dead.

Share

Review: Undress, She Said by Doug Anderson

Review: Undress, She Said by Doug Anderson
Four Way Books, September, 2022
$17.95, 102 pages
Reviewed by Thomas Page

Undress, She Said by Doug Anderson Cover

What would happen if someone were to break down our stereotype of the male poet, the one spending his time typing away at his keyboard about his problems with his body and those he wishes to share it with? Doug Anderson seeks to find this answer in his latest poetry collection. Undress, She Said is a vividly crafted poetry collection that takes the reader down the path of the traditional masculine poet-voice and his relationship with his sense of place. This sense of place forms the backbone of the collection’s debate about how pride, sexuality, and memory impact the mind of a man in a war-dominate society. Doug Anderson opens with “Prophesy,” setting the stage for the theme of accepting fate that is pervasive throughout the collection. In support of this theme, he writes,

 

“There is a storm coming,
clouds opening, closing their fists.
No point in boarding up the house” (3).

 

The speaker in this collection is subjected to a variety of influences that make him desensitized to the many problems of the collection’s world. Undress, She Said is divided into four parts that talk about each of these influences: “Love in Plague Time,” “The War Doesn’t End,” “Homage,” and “Mythologies.”

 

In “Love in Plague Time,” Anderson writes about the convergence of religion, morality, and desire that complicate how the speaker interacts with his world. This is the longest section of the book and serves as a “part 1” to the collection’s themes. The content of the poems in this section ranges from mental health (“When the Plague Came”) to sexuality (“Masturbation”). This section is imbued with the apathy that comes from a life conflicted between what the speaker wants to do and what he should do. For example, in “Skeleton of Water,” Anderson toes the line between these two ideas, writing,

 

“I was a failure as a libertine, always falling in love,
lacked the detachment of a true rake, drank to hide
my heart’s anarchy, the knowledge that the angels
I wrestled with were divine” (30).

 

His technical approach in this section is to alienate the voice from his world through various snapshots of his past. The focus on the past self and the present voice helps to characterize the kind of voice that will be taking the reader throughout the reflections in the rest of the book. The speaker discusses how life in an idyllic setting can make him feel ostracized by his own people.

 

Anderson centers these themes of morality into the realm of military veterans who come from his society in the second section, “The War Doesn’t End.” This section is primarily focused on veterans from the Vietnam War and how the war has affected their lives. In the title poem “The War Doesn’t End” Anderson reflects on a mixed-race solider he meets in Ho Chi Mihn City after the war has ended, saying that the soldier is:

 

“Mixed black and Vietnamese, unwelcome here,
unwelcome there, son of a soldier gone” (65).

 

This “soldier gone” forms the narrative backbone of this second section as Anderson navigates through the indoctrination the Marines received (“Killing with a Name”) to how this allowed them to inflict turmoil on others (“Somewhere South of Danang, 1967”). Anderson demonstrates his narrative skill in his poetry through the lyrical story his voice tells in this section. He also connects the speaker’s problems with his life before in “Love in Plague Time” to the lack of interest in the problems of “The War Doesn’t End.”

 

The two sides of the speaker—the apathetic citizen (“Love in the Plague Time”) and the desensitized Marine (“The War Doesn’t End”)—melt away and meld in the third section of “Homage.” Anderson spends most of this section in conversation with Li Po, another poet, about how his life’s two previous phases have affected him. He reflects on his aging (“Homage to Li Po”) and how that affects his ultimately nihilistic outlook on life (“Anonymous Civil Servant, T’ang Dynasty”). However, in “Two Poets Drinking,” Anderson realizes that this line of thinking is destructive and that being a part of a relationship is vital to survival:

 

“He keeps me from stepping off the cliff,
I catch him when he falls.
And fall he will, as will I” (79).

 

The speaker’s journey throughout this section is to destroy and rebuild who he was in this life, revealing the ways he is trying to be a better person. The conversational form of the third section serves as a paradigm shift in the collection’s overall tone and theme. Indeed it is the bridge of the collection’s lyrical structure.

 

Anderson ends his collection with “Mythologies,” a contemporary reflection of the themes of Greek mythology and Biblical stories with the themes and settings discussed earlier in the book. Some of his subjects are Odysseus (“Cyclops”) and Adam. In “Survivor,” he combines the legend of Circe with the setting of a strip club:

 

“I saw my men in that topless bar
that Circe ran, throwing their
combat pay up on the stage,
her tucking the bills in her g-string” (96).

 

He circles back to the themes presented in “Love in Plague Time” under the guise of using myths and stories to reexamine the themes of alienation. The section and the collection ends with “Age is Asking Me to Give Up Love.” Much like the cyclical nature of myth, Anderson says,

 

“Might be easier if love gave me up.
It won’t, nor has it sublimated
into something holy” (102).

 

Anderson’s text is striking due to its streamlined lyricism and juxtaposition of the natural and artificial. This is well-exemplified in the line  “I was shocked, thought in our madness you’d bitten my lip. But it was only blueberries” (82).

 

Undress, She Said will stand out to readers through its varied reflection of the male poet within the last century.

 

Share

Review: Marble Orchard by Emily Corwin

University of Akron Press, May 2023

68 pages

Emily Corwin’s third full-length book of poetry, Marble Orchard, subverts expectations of how we talk about anxiety and depression. This graveyard is divided into four sections that tackle mental health issues and physical ailments: “delicate as organ,” “my black sleigh,” “the wicked accident,” and “a field walks through me.” Each of these corresponds to a different framing style: a formal presentation of “lunacy,” ekphrasis of film, a collage of voices overheard, and the ekphrasis of paintings.

 

Though ekphrasis, the use of art as a framing device, is often used as a tool of distance, in Corwin’s latest collection, pieces feel personal and universal. One notable piece, “Kat Harvey,” named after the protagonist of the 1995 Casper movie, is a portrait of the namesake character:

 

to go. Dusty star anise, eyebright, the rosarian says,

good morning. And you, what were you like as a living thing?

 

I’d like to make contact. Can you hurt me? Can I hurt you?

Slither with me to the Lazarus machine, primordial muck.

 

I’d like to see you not see-through. Can I keep you? Earthy as a

cabbage rose—my woody perennial, my mortal slow dancer.

 

Corwin uses “Kat Harvey” and Casper to consider the separation of the mind and the body, and resurrection after a physical and even metaphysical death. The poem uses the movie to craft a painting of herbal medicines such as “dusty star anise,” that suggest healing properties. Death is only addressed with a rhetorical question: “What were you like as a living thing?” The biblical reference to Lazarus, the name of the machine designed to bring Casper back to life, arises again as “a/ cabbage rose—my woody perennial.” Here the reader may note “perennial” is a type of plant that comes back to life every spring and could signify the cyclical nature of mental health struggles.

 

The opening section of the collection, “delicate as organ,” begins with a bang and contains some of the most compelling pieces in the collection. Its first poem, “Lunatic as Abecedarian,” sets us up thematically for the rest of the book. The speaker of these pieces, “lived against it – a/ brutal music; I lived in it in/ clinics, in dresses disposable.” This section examines “lunacy” and “lunatic” by employing a myriad of forms that challenge us to reframe our relationship with these words.

 

Corwin is at her best when she deconstructs and rebuilds the world around her. In one of her “Lunatic as Erasure” pieces, readers see an “erasure of Fluoxetine medication guide” that takes medical packaging to create a portrait of what it is like being on an antidepressant.

 

“there may be            change in mood, behavior,

actions, thoughts, or feelings, especially severe.

acting on dangerous impulses”

 

Corwin captures the possible contradiction of antidepressants, stabilizing mental health—while potentially delivering terrible side effects. She notes, “if you take too much, call poison control,” highlights the fiction between pill as “medicine” and hazard.

 

The “wicked accident”, which consists of a multi-page poem constructed out of conversations overheard in public spaces, was another high point in the collection. Whether Corwin’s intention or not, this piece evoked the motif of “voices in your head” that is often associated with lunatics, a thread established at the beginning of the book. “I wasn’t there when it happened. You see where the crack started.” Corwin’s disembodied voice chimes two-thirds of the way through the piece. This brilliant landscape skips to a Betty White reference and the meme of the actress being older than sliced bread: “That was the old Wonder Bread Factory. We used to drive the turnpike/ to visit Betty.” Corwin subverts expectations, offering us a voice that is reflective, witty, sarcastic, and left me wanting to “cross my fingers,/ I mean, cross my heart.”

 

Corwin’s Marble Orchard delicately balances themes of mental illness with art and found poetry. Though its first section ran slightly long in its dissection of lunacy, Corwin’s meditation on mental illness offers a strong collection that will likely resonate with many readers.

 

Share

Review: I Felt the End Before it Came by Daniel Allen Cox

Viking Books, May 9, 2023
240 pages

In his tenacious and sharply written memoir-in-essays I Felt the End Before it Came, Daniel Allen Cox details his experiences as a queer man struggling against the lasting effects of his childhood indoctrination into the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Cox’s fifth book and first memoir is a culmination of what he describes as “a lifelong project to redefine words that had once been used against [him].” Throughout the book, Cox trades the church’s Paradise for a Paradise of books and music, and a theology of shame for “a theology of queer tenderness.”

 

The memoir’s episodic essay structure is original and inspired. Each piece focuses on how Cox experienced and ultimately rebelled against a different method of indoctrination. “A Library for Apostates” highlights the Witness’s suppression of Cox’s education, and details how he became a writer and educator despite this. In “The Witness is Complicit,” Cox criticizes how the Witnesses use the promise of salvation from Armageddon to recruit new members, then ties this to his experience writing against the church during the COVID-19 pandemic. Cox’s effort to balance information and anecdote often results in a satisfyingly profound insight.

 

“The Glow of Electrum” powerfully delves into how Cox was shamed by members of the church for his early speech impediment, which made him, in their eyes, a “defective missionary,” then explores how he eventually “allowed strangeness of speech” back into his life. The essay does an especially good job of seamlessly moving between anecdote, research, and synthesis, never staying in one mode too long, and plays with language in a way that fits well with its themes, defamiliarizing the experience of stuttering. “Not all hesitations are composed of the same materials,” Cox writes. “A filler word can sound like the real thing. Sometimes the body continues moving through a word; the mouth freezes but the foot taps on.”

 

In some stretches of the book, Cox will focus on information more than memoir, or memoir more than information. In “Moonwalking to Armageddon,” Cox spends much of the chapter on Michael Jackson’s and Prince’s experiences in the Jehovah’s Witnesses. “The End of Times Square” is almost entirely focused on the story of Cox’s time as an adult photography model in late 90s New York City. It can feel like these parts lose focus on the book’s project to serve as a blueprint for identifying and overcoming indoctrination, but they give a satisfying picture of the inner workings of the Jehovah’s Witnesses and an intimate view of Cox’s life, and keep the book from feeling monotone.

 

Cox’s memoir is smart, funny, and gripping throughout. “We Are the Ones Held,” an essay about his alcoholism, is filled with moving self-indictment and cultural critique, while also showing off Cox’s knack for choosing details that show his humorous, yet always sensitive and empathetic, view of himself and others: “I dismantled the wine rack in my bedroom and put it on the street, where someone picked it up within the hour, no doubt to set it up in another bedroom nearby.”

 

The most memorable essay in the book is the aforementioned “Moonwalking to Armageddon,” about how Jehovah’s Witnesses view the supernatural. The essay abounds with fun anecdotes and juicy insider strangeness, detailing, among other things, his church’s enmity with The Smurfs. Cox is especially playful with his barbs here. He suggests, for instance, that Witnesses might be “jealous of Smurfs because they live an exclusive Paradise.” The irreverence of the essay elevates a critique of the Witnesses’ hypocrisy by showing it at its most absurd.

 

In I Felt the End Before it Came, Cox ruminates with wit and insight on the universal themes of shame, identity, censorship, control, and emotional manipulation, while telling the story of his ongoing attempt to define his life outside of the church’s dogmatism. His meticulous approach to dismantling and overcoming methods of control and manipulation will feel cathartic to many readers.

Parts of I Felt the End Before it Came appeared in The Florida Review vol. 45.2 as “Death Trap”

 

Share

Review: Origami Dogs by Noley Reid

Autumn House Press, 2023.
Paperback, $17.95, 216 pages.

Origami Dogs, Noley Reid’s fourth book and her second short story collection, is not about dogs. Through Reid’s clean, often razor-sharp prose, the characters’ animal companions trudge alongside their emotional turmoil, both witnesses and hostages to the ways they love and harm each other.

 

Still, even as the animals are not the focus of these stories, they often serve as vessels, important points of connection that convey the characters’ emotions. In the title story, a young girl, Iris, is overwhelmed both by working in her mother’s breeding farm and by her first experiences with boys. After losing her virginity leads her to be ignored and neglected by her two romantic prospects, Iris names every dog and pup in the barn, breaking her mother’s rule to only refer to them by numbers. The pain of her own objectification leads her to break the cycle of distance and humanize those around her, reclaiming her own agency in the process. Similarly, in “Movement & Bones”, even as the narrator, a recent amputee, struggles to connect with her husband, her dog mirrors her movements, offering physical comfort and also representing the barriers between them: “He moves his body up against mine, as much as the dogs in between our legs allow.”

 

The connection between human and animal doesn’t always provide consolation. In “The Mud Pit,” when the narrator’s boyfriend’s old dog, Kizzy, passes away, she offers to replace her as an emotional safe haven, but he rejects the offer. “You can’t be my safe haven from you,” he says. Indeed, there is no safe haven for these characters: their relationships float on the page, tinged with melancholy and an unfulfilled sense of longing. Devotion, from human to human, manifests as a heavy weight that the characters struggle to carry.

 

In the more experimental second-person narrative “How Trees Sleep,” Reid carefully paints the portrayal of a young girl lying next to her mother, stopping herself from asking more of her. And in “Once It’s Gone,” a husband grapples with his wife’s past infidelity, having raised a child that isn’t his. As he contemplates leaving his family, he watches an elderly woman from the neighborhood feed a group of ferocious stray cats. “I don’t stay to see her scared to cry out for fear of chasing them away,” he says. Instead, he returns home, since, as all these characters, he must sit with his hunger.

 

Amidst the longing for human connection, perhaps inevitably, parenting emerges as a major theme. The narrator of “Once It’s Gone” is partially motivated by his hurt over his stepdaughter’s decision to have an abortion—not out of a religious stance, but because, as he says to his wife, “it could have been ours.” It, the nameless fetus, could have been what the narrator craved, something to fulfill his desire for a deep relationship. Similarly, the protagonist of “The Mud Pit” hopes to use her unborn child as a way to connect with a dead childhood friend. Another piece, “No Matter Her Leaving,” features a father grieving his runaway daughter, waiting alongside her old dog Malone. In her absence, the dog withers. Before the narrator is forced to put him down, he watches Malone put his nose inside a bowl and glimpses a trace of hope: “Have I found something he can love?”

 

This question looms over the collection. The characters search, untiring, for the love they crave, whether from a distant partner or a conservative mother. When the narrator’s daughter returns in “No Matter Her Leaving,” the piece—and by extension, the collection—ends on a note of hope. Brimming underneath, though, there is still the sense of something inherently tragic, in an unrelenting, animalesque sort of love.

 

Share

Review: Questions from Outer Space by Diane Thiel

Ren Hen Press, 2022
Paperback, $16.95, 119 pages.

 

 

Diane Thiel’s third collection of poetry, Questions from Outer Space, comes after an interlude during which the poet devoted her energies to a travel memoir (The White Horse) and the translation of contemporary Greek fiction. Her first two collections (Echolocations and Resistance Fantasies) garnered acclaim, including the Nicholas Roerich Award, for their intelligence, wit, wordplay, and attention to form. These earlier poems explored family history and contemplated contemporary manifestations of mythic archetypes. Her latest volume skillfully deploys many of the same aesthetic characteristics that distinguished her first collections, while the new poems range widely from past to present to future, from house and home to international, interplanetary, and even interdimensional settings. It is a volume full of vivid, imaginative poems, a good many beginning as thought experiments that call to mind Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics.

 

The title of the volume suggests that the act of questioning will be both a central motif and the principal modus operandi of the poems that follow. And, indeed, a number of poems instantiate this propensity for questioning, e.g., “Questions of Time and Direction,” “Questions from Four Dimensions,” and “Navigating the Questions.” The intellectual bent of the collection is summarized in “Listening in Deep Space”: “looking for answers / telling stories about ourselves, / searching for connection.” In one way or another, the poems in Questions all pursue this heuristic. For Thiel, “the simplest question” is capable of “opening the world again.”

 

Many of the poems recognize and ponder the complications that science and technology introduce into our lives, especially the consequences of relying too greatly on gadgetry. “Tritina in the Time of the Machine,” for example, addresses the implications of intrusive technologies at a time when “in nearly every pocket,” there’s “a small methodical machine” always “grinding on.” Another poem, “Remotely,” wittily mulls the consequences of living in the remote and virtual modes forced on us by pandemic realities. Whether it’s a remote control, internet access, Zoom video conferences, or even the electric typewriters of yore, in poem after poem the poet mulls the benefits and drawbacks of incorporating new technology into our lives.

 

Thiel’s wry and sometimes whimsical way of looking at the world (a trait readily apparent in her previous volumes) is woven throughout these poems, often making light of, or even mocking, the slippery and careless use of language in social and corporate settings (“KwickAssess”). Other poems play with familiar expressions (“Sleeping Dogs,” “Baby Out with the Bathwater,” “Under the Rug”) and in so doing discover new angles on old clichés.

 

While Thiel’s outlook is sometimes droll, she is just as often attuned to darker concerns. The poet repeatedly worries over “a tear in the continuum.” Some poems, for example, evince a plangent concern for environmental degradation (e.g., “Navigating the Questions”), a concern that is carried forward from her earlier volumes (such as the powerful poem, “Punta Perlas,” in Resistance Fantasies). An underlying theme of these poems is “the way our actions decide / who or what is now / expendable.”

 

A central conceit in the book, running through several poems, involves the first-person observation of life on Earth from the standpoint of sentient, empirical beings located elsewhere in the cosmos. In the view of these distant observers, humans “generally / complicate things” and are “highly irrational.” The poem “Field Notes from the Biolayer” uses the distant observer conceit to tie together the volume’s key themes of technology, environment, and connectivity. Thiel’s extraterrestrial observers—whose view surely coincides with her own—note that as humans “are forced / to rely on the virtual world, some begin to realize / what they had been missing” and are now “recognizing the way their world is connected / within and also beyond—the rivers, the oceans, the air— / the lovely layer that makes their existence possible.”

 

As has been the case throughout her career, in these poems Thiel evinces a meticulous concern for the craft of poetry. Most notably, the poems are attuned to sonic patterns and echoes, or what Dana Gioia has referred to as the “intuitive music” of her poetry. She employs rhyme—full, slant, and internal—to good effect. There is also a good deal of assonance and consonance at work, as in this passage from “Time Won’t Do It”:

 

We expect too much of time,
give it mythical powers,
believe a certain set of hours,
days or years will be the salve
to solve it all. We treat it
like an oracle, believing
time will tell, expecting
time to heal because
our sayings say it will.

 

While Thiel is not a strict formalist, she pays close attention to form, with many of the poems taking one or another of the traditional forms, including a sestina, a pantoum, a villanelle, a tritina, along with several sonnet or sonnet-like poems, haiku, and tanka. When not employing traditional forms, Thiel devises nonce forms and often resorts to repeated stanzaic patterns. Several of the poems—e.g., “Sleeping Dogs” and “In the Mirror”—have a concrete quality. In her use of forms and sonic patterns, Thiel has much in common with her coeval, A. E. Stallings (the two poets share a connection to Greece as well, as both poets are married to Greeks and have spent significant time in Greece).

 

Thiel’s past work has shown her to be a smart, well-read poet, with a keen awareness of the poetic tradition. The range of references in this volume reveals some of her varied influences, both aesthetic and thematic. There are echoes of or direct allusions to numerous poets, including W. C. Williams, Richard Wilbur, William Stafford, Robert Hayden, Elizabeth Bishop, D. H. Lawrence, Auden, Keats, and Swedish-language poet Edith Södergran. All in all, it is a collection rich with references to literature, science, music, and art.

 

In “looking for answers, telling stories…and searching for connection,” these poems succeed in “opening the world again.”

Share

Identity and Empathy in America and Assam

His Father’s Disease by Aruni Kashyap

Context / Westland Books, 2019

Hardcover. 184 pages. 

 

Cover of His Father’s Disease

 

In His Father’s Disease, Aruni Kashyap asserts himself as a master of the skill of empathy-building. This is no fluke. It is common to read the debut story collection of an author and feel that there is a lot of technical prowess—say of dialogue, or of voice, or of structure—but little sense that the characters are in fact alive, or come from a lived space. Kashyap, however, who is from the Northeast Indian state of Assam, has already established himself as one of India’s rising literary voices. He has published novels in both English (The House of a Thousand Stories, Viking, 2013) and his native Assamese (Noikhon Etia Duroit, Panchajanya, 2019) and edited an anthology of stories centered on the experience of insurgency in Assam (How To Tell the Story of an Insurgency, HarperCollins, 2020). It is no surprise, then, that in each of the ten stories in this collection, one reaches the end feeling completely immersed in the world Kashyap has created.

 

The stories in His Father’s Disease can be roughly divided into two settings: either a remote part of the Indian Northeast or a provincial American suburb that a Northeastern Indian has made their home. Kashyap addresses this dichotomy directly in “Skylark Girl,” a metafictional narrative of a Northeast Indian author being paneled at a festival in Delhi, interval-led with a folk story about a woman who is killed out of pettiness, only to come back to haunt the village as a ghost. During the panel’s Q&A session, a woman asks the narrator, Sanjib, “why [he] had . . . decided to write about this magical world, instead of the insurgencies, the violence, and the more immediate topical stories. [Sanjib finds himself] surprised by the question because . . . back home, his Assamese readers did not expect him to write about this or that topic. He was free to write anything.” Much like Sanjib, Kashyap’s stories are foregrounded by a Northeastern perspective, not because he wants to limit himself, but because he feels the freedom to write whatever he wants. Perhaps he chooses to write about Northeast India because this part of India is rarely portrayed in international literature.

 

Again, this is by no means a limitation. In fact, part of what makes Kashyap’s stories work so well is that they mine locations the author knows so well. The most successful story in this regard is “Bizi Colony,” which details the haphazard and troubling life of a youngster named Bablu, told from the perspective of his brother, who explains how Bablu’s glue addiction and penchant for violence affects everyone in their family:

 

“Long before my younger brother Bablu began telling our neighbours that Ma sucked Papa’s best friend Hriday Uncle’s dick while Papa was away on official tours to New Delhi, he would touch the breasts of our forty-year-old maid and ask her how it felt. When the timid Geeta-baideo wept, saying that she was the one who brought him up, washed his ass after he crapped as a baby, he beat her up with a cane.”

 

Bablu is a heinous example of a twelve-year-old, with all of the makings of a sociopath. He causes his mother to cry at odd times and take out her anguish at her husband, just as he causes his father to reflect after traipsing around the house, “‘Am I a failed father?’” The story is a melodrama; what saves it from the common pitfalls of that form is the sense that while Bablu sells drugs and associates with prostitutes, tarnishing the family name with no self-awareness, his behavior is fully his own. Glue addiction is a common problem in South and Southeast Asia, and there are children who seem almost born to be malicious in all parts of the world. No matter how heinous Bablu’s decisions appear, they are rooted in realism.

 

Kashyap also foregrounds “Bizi Colony” not as Bablu’s story, but as a story about the effect of Bablu’s behavior on his family. When “Bablu [breaks a] tall, thick juice glass on [Ma’s] head because she’d refused to give him money to buy Dendrite or Eraz-ex,” we don’t see it from Bablu’s perspective, but from the narrator’s, who doesn’t cry but “[feels] a strange burning sensation in [his] chest, and a strange, choking lump in [his] throat.” This distance allows readers to observe Bablu’s actions while still benefiting from the emotions and proximity of the first-person peripheral narrator, as if Bablu’s behavior is very much happening in front of us.

 

 “The Love Lives of People Who Look Like Kal Penn” is another story that benefits from Kashyap’s command of point of view. The third-person narrative tells the story of a writer heading to an international conference in Michigan. He bonds with a woman on the plane, in a way that suggests a possible sexual attraction, until she says, “‘You know, you remind me so much of Kal Penn . . . you look like him, quite a lot, do you know?’”

 

I am a person of Indian origin, so I too receive this comment often. The actor Kal Penn is one of the very few people of Indian heritage who is prominent in American media, so people are quick to say that anyone who is South Asian looks like him. Therefore, I relate more than the average person when the narrator Arunabh is offended and frustrated by the comparison. The manner in which Kashyap arranges Arunabh’s reaction in language is what summons empathy for readers of any background. In the taxi after this encounter, Arunabh “[studies] his reflection in the rearview mirror, and more than once had considered asking Jim whether he saw any resemblance to Kal Penn. And he will always remember the fall colours, his first fall in America: the gold, the yellow, the orange, the red; the blue sky that was slowly turning grey; and his yearning for snow.”

 

By melding the reaction to a very particular moment, and the feelings evoked by the natural world framing the scene, Kashyap creates multiple spaces for a reader to react to or reflect on Arunabh’s experience. If they cannot relate to Arunabh’s gripes, seeing fall in a new country for the first time may resonate, and if not that, provide a sense of nostalgia through the colors, sensations, and feelings of fall in the USA.

 

Kashyap also employs this multi-pronged narrative approach to empathy-building in the titular “His Father’s Disease.” The story details the frustrations of widowed Neerumoni as she discovers that her son Anil is homosexual, much like her own husband. She repeatedly walks in on her son with men and finds herself bereaved. The village also reacts hostilely to her son’s sexuality. At one tragic point in the story, soldiers shoot Anil’s lover. The idea of the scene is harrowing enough, but what grounds it as a piece of literature is how Kashyap describes the aftermath: “The blood looked like a red rose blooming on the white bedsheet, and the room smelled like coconut water.”

 

In choosing such evocative language, Kashyap renders the moment not merely as a violent one, but one grounded in nature. The scents and colors give the reader a critical distance from an extremely emotional moment. The reader is allowed to come back into the scene with their own feelings attached to it rather than only those evoked by the violence.

 

The power of fiction is to make the reader feel as if these imagined characters are very much living real lives, and more, to feel connected to them even if they reside in completely different worlds. Kashyap understands that to write is not simply to get lost in the individual sentences, but to create characters that resonate. Anyone who reads fiction to explore emotional spaces, both interior and exterior, should absolutely seek out His Father’s Disease. They will find themselves not only intrigued, not only inspired, but utterly absorbed into the world of Aruni Kashyap’s imagination.

Share