Tag: Aquifer: The Florida Review Online

From Knowing to Unknowing

An Earlier Life, by Brenda Miller
Ovenbird Press, 2016
174 pages, paper, $14.95

Winner, 2017 Washington State Book Award in Memoir

 

 

In her most recent collection of essays, An Earlier Life, Brenda Miller examines the rich assortment of previous lives she has come through on her way to the life she currently inhabits. “In an earlier life,” she begins, “I was a baker in a bakery on a cobblestoned street. I woke early, in the dark, to do my work . . . In the quiet, I brought something to life.” The image of Miller kneading dough in the quiet hours of morning bringing something new into being is reminiscent of her work as a writer, and she delivers a breathing work of art between the pages of this book.

 

In “Who You Will Become,” Miller reflects on a sign which always hung in the front hallway of her childhood home, the Hebrew letters for Shalom with its multiple meanings—hello, goodbye, welcome, good and peace. She explains, “In Hebrew, the word for God means, “I am what I am becoming.” This presence is always imminent, always evolving. When we say Shalom, we are in the midst of this transition: hello, goodbye, turning to face the past and future at once.”

 

With that, she begins a candid examination of her life beginning in childhood and adolescence, through her early adult years and into a time of reconciliation and healing. The theme that one thing—a word, an object, an event—can carry more than one meaning, echoes throughout the book.

 

Miller’s close observations illuminate the remarkable contained within the commonplace, making the scenes dance on the page, and readers can’t help but pay closer attention to their own surroundings. “In Alaska, you understand how light is now a substance of its own making—tactile, with particles and waves and something else. You understand how light finds the least pinhole and expands.” With these opening lines of “Understand,” readers are suddenly more aware of the light that plays around them. Miller’s vivid account of her physical world brings the geography of the readers’ own into sharper contrast.

 

Later, in the essay “How to Get Ready for Bed,” she renders the mundane task of shopping for a new mattress into a work of art, a study of all the mattress represents: sleep partners past and future from boyfriends to pets, sanctuary and isolation, and the best description of insomnia I’ve read. “It’s as if you’re afraid of something, but you don’t know what. Maybe you’re afraid of that moment you slip from knowing to unknowing—the moment you’re with your unpartnered self alone.”

 

Yet not afraid to be vulnerable, Miller allows us to enter the places she stalled, consider decisions that led to trouble or heartache, and experience the consequences of missteps. Even so, she doesn’t neglect to shine a light on the beauty contained in even the darkest places. In “Beloved,” an essay tense with the possibility of violence, Miller describes a day boating on a desert lake with her boyfriend. He’s drinking and flaunting the fact that he could do her harm, that she’s defenseless. The stakes rise when he steers the boat into a secluded cove, “A place,” she writes, “that in any other time, with any other person would be a romantic picnic spot.” Juxtaposed against the visceral sense of mounting danger is this description of her surroundings: “This cool air in the desert, over the water. It’s a land of contradiction, the light bright and subdued at once. You can motor along the wide expanse of the lake, find a small canyon to enter and look for the hanging gardens: plants growing high above the waterline, gaining foothold and flourishing on bare rock, while beneath you—far beneath—a ghost garden mirrors the one above.”

 

By age eighteen Miller writes in “L’Chaim,” she no longer attends synagogue, but there is a thread running through these essays that suggests a search for spiritual meaning—a desire to understand how each of her ‘earlier lives’ contributed to the full spectrum of her life as a whole. Miller carefully considers each remembrance as if she’s turning them over and over in her hands to consider every plane, seeking the places where light shines through.

 

As co-author of the craft book Tell It Slant: Writing and Shaping Creative Nonfiction, it’s no surprise that Brenda Miller’s writing is exceptional. Many of her essays are written in second person. Speaking directly to readers in this manner, she calls them to walk alongside her, to share in each choice that moves her to the next experience. A life unfolds full of music and grit and danger. The beauty, and the pain, and the wonder on her journey toward wholeness becomes their own, a life shared.

 

In the epilogue, “We Regret to Inform You,” readers are treated with an outstanding example of a hermit crab essay—a term coined by Miller and co-author Susan Paola in Tell It Slant. In the form of rejection letters, she highlights a string of her ‘failures’ at various roles and relationships—with her elementary art teacher to the babies she lost in miscarriages to her grad school boyfriend, and finally, an acceptance letter from a pet adoption organization. The letters are bittersweet, sometimes funny, and always insightful.

 

Miller’s ability to turn angst into art, to interpret the ordinary with extraordinary clarity is unmatched. Her work wakes up the senses—external and internal—and will resonate with readers of poetry, as well as prose. An Earlier Life sings to readers, and they can’t help but hum its tune while going about their own tasks. Like bite-sized treats, readers can consume these essays one taste at a time, or in a decadent cover-to-cover feast—the perfect balance of savory and sweet.

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Love Itself Can Be Dangerous

Further Problems with Pleasure by Sandra Simonds
University of Akron Press, 2017
72 pages, hardcover $49.95, paper $14.95, epub $9.99

 

 

Further Problems with Pleasure, Sandra Simonds’ latest book of poetry, addresses similar themes found in her other collections. All of her work addresses important, timely subjects, yet she has proven with each volume that she is not afraid of leaving her audience uncomfortable. Her poems require her reader to work hard in order to come to a blended understanding of both content and syntax. The payoff is well worth it. To me, the most interesting of her subjects are her explorations of violence against women, the dangers of love, the complexity of living in the South, and the potential of suicide.

 

She opens this collection with a five-page poem provocatively titled, “Poetry Is Stupid and I Want to Die,” updating Marianne Moore’s sentiment for the 21st century. As the title suggests, her lines are manic, almost desperate. By linking her syntax in nontraditional ways and by ending and beginning new sentiments without regard for punctuation, she establishes the manic voice, which emerges from her Lego-like constructions of grammar and yet ends up being hauntingly beautiful. The poem opens as the female speaker, alone in a room with a man, considers how she might escape “unharmed / the way a woman has to manipulate both mind and body.” As many readers know too well, women find themselves in situations that can turn dangerous in an instant. Here, we are reminded to always consider an escape route.

 

For Simonds, love itself can be dangerous. Such a forceful theme is apparent in much of this collection. In “Spring Dirge,” she states, “Some people call it self-destructiveness / but I call it love.” Even more explicitly, she writes about the violent repercussions against women in “A Lover’s Discourse”:

 

Every so many seconds a woman is hit by a man
 with direct tectonic rage. Geology
 is some rough sadism I know
 not what. Agony is property
 but it is also agony. Vow to me, agony!
 Declare your allegiance! (Or buy me a house.)

 

Simonds’ manic voice mirrors the complexity of these lines and the familiar, cultural position of the powerlessness of women. Here, the speaker considers the payoff of an abusive relationship, one defined by agony and rage, to that of material wealth. In poem after poem, Simonds positions her speaker in these places of opposition.

 

For example, another favorite poem of mine from this collection, “Our Lady of Perpetual Help,” juxtaposes ideas of the feminine. The poem, set in Mississippi, describes a group of nuns who are not who “they pretend to be / One is pregnant under her habit / One thinks she ought not to touch that / One buys a Diet Dr. Pepper and Twizzlers.” Because this poem is set in the South, I can’t help but wonder about the sins and terrors of this geography. Is God dead? Has he been false (like these nuns) all along? The poem digresses into a word and sound play on “nun” and “none”:

 

This is a place of weeping things
 where the world has wept
 and wept and no one has come

No Father None     No Mother None
No Baby None Comes     No Sister
None Comes No Brother None Comes
No One     like None
It’s that kind of place
 You’ve seen it before
 It’s blind to everything, everyone

 

Although they are not officially marked, I would say that Further Problems with Pleasure is separated into three sections. The middle section, titled “The Baudelaire Variations,” is broken into sixteen smaller poems. Simonds translates several Baudelaire poems, mostly maintaining a close reading of the original, yet modernizing them in order to bring them into the contemporary world. Most of the translations follow the path other translators have taken, but a poem like “I Love Wine!” is acutely different:

 

Today, omg, I’m just so spaced out and splendid
 as I walk this earth without death, without an apron
without being a wife and so my queer heart transforms into the nostrils of a
 winter
 workhorse whose exhalation breaks through the iced tulip sky.

 

A large majority of the poems throughout her book are in the form of an address, and here too, Simonds ends with an address—this time to someone named Felix, requesting a trip to the “Oregon coast / [to] relax inside the boxed wine paradise of our dreams.” Historically, Baudelaire and photographer Felix Nadar were very close friends. Baudelaire claimed that Nadar was the “most amazing manifestation of vitality.” Perhaps Simonds is playing with this historical relationship and a present-day character to whom most of the poems in this section are addressed. Felix changes gender and appears to be a muse or imaginary partner. Remarkably, the name Felix is derived from the Latin for “happy.” Felix, for Simonds, is the “manifestation of vitality” that often, poem to poem, seems elusive.

 

The first and third sections of her book include both poems that reveal the hectic, intense inclinations of the speaker’s tone as well as poems that are tight, clear, and adhere to grammatical order. In both the first and third sections, the word “suicide” frequently occurs. It is a conceit that makes sense considering the desperateness of a suicidal mind. Mania and suicide go hand and hand. Simonds’ opening poems make the claim “I can’t imagine why anyone / would feel the desire to hurt a woman / who thinks about suicide every day.” Occasionally, the speaker of a poem declares that they don’t want to kill themselves, or they implode grammar into one important conviction in lines like “This is my life / I don’t want it I do.” Poems like “Ode to Suicide, Delirium, and Early REM” advertise from the beginning the difficulty the speaker has with life. Always keeping in the contemporary world, Simonds’ brilliantly contrasts a Twitter or Facebook posting about the shape of a women’s eyes to those of Mary as an icon:

 

mine are not almond-shaped, like my sister’s, my tips are “downturned,”
 something medieval and sad, something fenced-in the manuscript or
 economic,
 the way they paint the little strawberries are a technological advance,
and deep green vines up the gold-vermillion boxes to keep the text in, to keep
the lion in, to keep the flow
 of the blue flow robes in,
 Mine point down (Almond eye surgery for downturned eyes? please help,
 photos)
 the way Mary’s tips point down, the hue, a libidinous blue,
a corruption, wave, metal star work of mournful
 space —

 

I so admire how Simonds takes what to many of us might seem trivial social media moments and reminds us of the bombardment of criticism and difficulty that comes with simply surviving in the modern world. And, unfortunately for many, it becomes too much:

 

I follow these downward tips
 my eye sockets
that are not beautiful after all
 but eternally plain
as coffins.

 

In “Elysian Fields” the speaker asserts “Life is evil / That is all / I want to live because I’m stubborn.” The poem takes its title from classical mythology as the final resting place for the blessed. It also references a place or state of perfect happiness, paradise. As it is situated as one of her final poems in the collection, might Simonds be addressing the one thing her speaker searches for poem after poem? Further Problems with Pleasure, as the title suggests, is the elusiveness of that pleasure and all the obstacles that get in its way. Readers must endure the mind of one who toys with suicide and addresses difficult themes stemming from social to geographical limits and confines, but on the other end lies something real and rewarding and magical.

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Five Poems from Atopia

I like to photograph old signs 
when I drive along the Emerald Coast.
“Florida Hotel: American Owned” and
“Rachel’s Restaurant” I dreamed 
a beautiful poem up by the sea but
forgot it by morning; Make America 
Great Again vs Occupy Wall Street.
We talked about extreme weather 
and the stock market in the Gulf,
the water fluctuating around the sun
and pelicans, text message alerts
for tornados and when I got home 
I googled sinkholes and clicked on
the interactive map—14 by 12 foot,
8 by 6, 1 by 1, and read the warning 
signs, maybe the doors to your house
don’t close, maybe there are cracks
in the walls, maybe there are depressions
in your lawn, now imagine a bed
and furniture instantly falling into
the lawmaker’s hand holding up a piece
of limestone talking about an amendment
which will outlaw fracking in Florida forever 
“I’ve changed positions,” she says, “Look
at this limestone. It’s fragile. It’s porous”
and wishing I remembered my dream
of the sea by the sea, the dream enclosed
in the bulb of the sun, my body
covered by seawater, “It was almost
like there were colored rings around
the sun” your dad, the archaeologist, said
and driving home, the eye-level pelicans
and their prehistoric flight, seemed
calm, the bridge both flowing into
and forged by the metallic clouds
—
Philomel, lost cause, not quite, operatic as doves
 the oatmeal is cooking this morning and it will be a long
hurricane season from June
 to October, that season of hell as we approach
 an apocalypse, as showers fill the heart unable

 to process what is happening.
 Alone in your cabin, the outside world
 has a tongue, has words, scrolled
 and scrawled along the ridges of the bleak sky. 

 Oh Philomel, I have no pictures to post, no landscapes
 to paint, my song is sung in vain, and it is composed 
 of rubble. Fear not, Philomel.
			
Now the oatmeal burns inside its weeping pot
 and revenge is its own constellation of anguish,
 its own pattern of swallows moving across
 the luxuriant atmosphere.

 Personal history? What can we really
 make of it after so many years? 

 The metal bends, the apartment saturated with ash.
—
Our masters shift; this is the definition 
of domination
Still, Esmerelda, if you would like to take 
a dip in the filthy lake, I’m game 
and if you still have the impulse to be mesmerized by love,
I’m down for that too

I can even transform into a nude before your very eyes 
I promise
I can become just like a painting of paradise from the olden days

We could do this for a little while
before we have to go back to work again

inside the impenetrable flesh factory
where the meat screams

even though it is already dead
I’ve never known why this is 

Why does it scream night and day?
Maybe because it has no identity 

Esmerelda, they want our blood because 
they must know how sunny it is

how, long ago, we fed the horses and wept and sang 
by the fireplace; they must know

that we had such intense passions, 
that we thought the grasshoppers

eating the yellow fields were beautiful

and we looked at both the creatures
and the fields with a kind of awe

Our masters did not like this and our passions 
had to be held down
by a corresponding cruelty

the formal laws of the state
O the networks
of subjection are infinite
—

Read of an ICE raid:
men, women and children sent
to a detention center
in Crawfordville, Florida

Turn the page

Bought erasers, pencils and summer
workbooks for my children

This is a cell
All living things are made of cells

This is the earth
The earth is always changing

If lyric poetry is cruel, I am forlorn
at the loss of our wilderness

There really is an “anti-parks”
congressional caucus whose aim
is to shovel the plants and rocks
and trees into black plastic bags
and throw those bags into the sea

It is important to stay safe in Science
How do we stay safe?
Follow the rules and use the right tools 

The goddesses of Sunday welcome you
We bring you this bowl of peaches
and serve you with our porcelain fingers

Here is a napkin
Here is a knife

Your wife and children
are welcome too
— 
Glandular fever punctuated by tropical storm Cindy which
was a dud; many weeks of rain, the lymph nodes swollen, many weeks
of wind while my children play inside the supernova-like sinkhole,
Green tea and raw honey even though bees struggle for survival, Alex
searching for climate-controlled storage spaces, I yelled at everyone, the black
diamond and rattlesnake rattle fell upon me, I could tell you were trying
to communicate, I suspected it was your fault, seizure like substance
of air turned to current, maybe I blamed you for my illness, I knew
you were the one taking me down through this amber realm,
this dream space, fragile, filled with neurons, jammed with signals
signals from the dead, then the realm spilled into the black hole
of the summer solstice and out of the storm; O Angel, you were born.
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Aquifer Open for Submissions

Posted on by cahcmsadmin

After our first few months of establishing the tone and caliber of Aquifer, we are now happy to open to general submissions. We are seeking top-quality digital stories, graphic narrative, creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry. Take a look at what we’ve been publishing, and see our Submit pages, starting with General Guidelines. Please note that, while our print-magazine submissions will remain open year-round, our Aquifer submissions will be open on an intermittent basis, depending on how many submissions we receive. Don’t worry–we’ll have at least two substantial reading periods every year. We look forward to seeing and reading your work!

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New Website Live!

Posted on by cahcmsadmin

Welcome to the new Florida Review website, also home to the brand new Aquifer: The Florida Review Online. With Aquifer, we introduce weekly literary features (poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and graphic narrative), as well as interviews, book reviews, and digital stories. These will be available free online, and later this year we will open up submissions to these new online categories. We hope to welcome more readers to the Florida Review family and create an even stronger sense of community around the great work we publish and the authors and artists we feature.

This moment has been a long time in the making, and we have many steps to go before the website is perfect. In addition, we have many more possible features in the works that we hope to add over the next year to make Aquifer: The Florida Review Online a fully multi-media arts and letters site. We are truly a work in progress, and we hope you will both forgive us and inform us (at flreview@ucf.edu) if you notice any problems.

In the meantime, we hope you will begin to enjoy the fabulous work that we will be adding on a weekly basis. We start off our literary features with two love poems by Major and Didi Jackson–to both celebrate the season of love and to focus us all on the nature of hopes and dreams. In addition, we have an online interview with Julie Marie Wade, whose poem “Katabasis” is featured in our current issue (40.2) of The Florida Review in print. Last but not least, we start off with two book reviews, Dana Roeser’s on Elizabeth Powell’s Willie Loman’s Restless Daughter and James Scruton on Kim Addonizio’s Mortal Flesh and Bukowski in a Sundress. Enjoy!

We have more terrific work coming! Check back regularly!

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