The writing of a travel memoir is, from my perspective, very much akin to the unfolding of the journey described. In spite of copious amounts of preparation, forethought, and heartfelt intent, it is all too easy to stumble along the path, or even find oneself completely lost somewhere along the way. After all, how does one successfully navigate the terrain of readers’ expectations? Are they looking for landscapes captured through lush, photographic language or a dredging of the traveler’s inner landscape? How much anthropology, history, reflection or poetic license is enough? Perhaps too much? All the while remaining true to one’s own experience.
NewPages Blog :: Book Reviews
Check out book reviews of titles from independent publishers and university presses on the NewPages Blog.
The Estrangement Principle
As I read Ariel Goldberg’s The Estrangement Principle, a book-length meditation, examination, and critique of the term “queer art,” I was reminded of an essay I often teach: G. Douglas Atkins’s “The Return of/to the Essay,” in which he argues for a type of academic criticism which “reestablish[es] contact with the Anglo-American tradition of the personal or familiar essay without sacrificing intellectual rigor or forgoing the insights and accomplishments of recent theory.”
The History of the Future
At one point while I was reading The History of the Future, someone asked how it was, and I looked up and exclaimed, “The essays are almost too perfect.”
The Others
If you happened to glance at the number of pages in this manuscript (listed above) you’ll have noticed that it is much longer than your typical book of poems. In fact, The Others is not really a book of poems; it is a thick 4 x 7 paperback that looks very much like a typical novel. Amazon calls it a “gripping, eerie, and hilarious novel-in-verse,” and that description seems about right.
Nomadologies
Erdağ Göknar has a conversational way of writing poetry, yet his phrasing is not at all ordinary. He allows us to eavesdrop on his life in Turkey and America in his first book of poems Nomadologies. Göknar teaches Turkish and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University, and is an award-winning translator, but it has been a circuitous journey to arrive at his current status.
Lowly
The opening poems of Alan Felsenthal’s Lowly suggest a collection that will fall squarely within a familiar subgenre of contemporary poetry: newly crafted myths, fables, and parables. Taking up classic modes of speech and story-telling, many poems of this subgenre operate according to a fairly defined mechanic, developing tight, logical sequences that utilize inversion, tautology, and other structural maneuvers to arrive at illuminating surprises—often with a bit of jesting. This mechanic perfectly describes the first poem of Lowly, “Two Martyrs.”
Letters to Memory
On April 30, 1942: “my father and his family lost their freedom upon entry to Tanforan Racetrack, a designated Assembly Center in San Bruno, California, for the wartime removal of Japanese. Arriving by bus, [ . . . ] they were housed in a series of empty horse stalls named Barrack 14. This was just the first stop; from Tanforan they would be transported by train into the Utah desert to live in a concentration camp named Topaz.”
Everything We Don’t Know
Aaron Gilbreath’s book of essays, Everything We Don’t Know, posed a dilemma as I was trying to determine the audience for it. Taking the title at face value, I expected to find fresh ideas about people, places, and, of course, things. His first few essays appear as a memoirish charting of his drug addiction. Not really on my list of wanting-to-know-abouts. But before long, Gilbreath turns his focus to other subjects and fulfills my expectations.
The Great American Songbook
The nine stories in Sam Allingham’s The Great American Songbook include: an experimental modular tale describing the differences between the composers Rogers and Hart; the retelling of a quirky and complicated relationship between two baristas seeking love and finding confusion; a second-person epistle emoting on a relationship’s ending; a tragedy in which a newly widowed mother turns to hunting; an exploratory list of the characters we encounter in life; a hard-boiled parable (a lá George Saunders) about four assassins set against each other; a straight-forward first-person recounting of a childhood neighborhood friend who devoted his life to building the town in miniature; a bar joke that goes virtual and a talking duck becomes protagonist; and concludes with the lost letters of Artie Shaw to various friends before going off the deep end in a remote cabin. The Great American Songbook is a tour de force of style, theme, image, and wit.
In Which I Play the Runaway
Selected by Richard Blanco as the 2015 winner of The Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize, Rochelle Hurt’s In Which I Play the Runaway is a tightly-structured map of the human heart. Spanning the ventricles of mythical America, each section is named after a town: Last Chance, California; Hurt, Virginia; Needmore, Indiana; Accident, Maryland; and Honesty, Ohio—the author names the inner-workings of daughter, mother, wife, and poet. Almost all the sections conclude with a prose poem and contain self-portraits and dioramas. Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz provides a dramatic-persona through-line, much in the vein of Berryman’s alter-ego Huffy Henry, creating a close to perfectly-structured second collection.
Let It Die Hungry
I have never seen anything like Caits Meissner’s first solo collection: Let it Die Hungry. Brave. Eclectic. Essential. Especially in this day and age when the rats in power are filling the swamp with evil droppings. Let It Die Hungry is a manifesto, a manual, a survivor’s message-in-a-bottle and a battle-cry.
The Ladder
“Teach me to climb / Down from ambition. // Beyond my fingertips / rolls the moon.” –from the title poem, “The Ladder”
All the Difference
Imagine being a 13-year-old in the hands of a “large, stubble-faced man who was smoking a cigar. [ . . . ] a man who would spread his tobacco-stained fingers on my torso, breathe his sour breath into my face.” Sounds like a child about to undergo a nasty ordeal. Though it’s not what you may be thinking, Patricia Horvath did, in fact, experience this ordeal after being diagnosed with scoliosis, “a double, S-shaped curvature of the spine.”
Behind the Mask
Two years ago, Meerkat Press founder Tricia Reeks listened as co-editor Kyle Richardson talked enthusiastically about comic book superheroes. That led to issuing a call for submissions. Seven hundred stories poured in, 20 of which are published in the delightfully entertaining book, Behind the Mask.
Crude
Taylor Brorby is outspoken when it comes to the devastation of land in the Great Plains. To voice the issues he is most concerned about, he wrote a book of poetry called Crude. Brorby is a fellow at the Black Earth Institute, which defines itself as a “progressive think-tank dedicated to re-forging the links between art and spirit, earth and society.” He also educates people around the country by speaking about fracking.
Threnody
“Toward a flower- / ing I came // lowly lupine raised / wrist,” Juliet Patterson begins in “Toward,” the opening poem of her latest collection, Threnody, out last fall from Nightboat Books. And with these few lines, she deftly establishes the themes and sensibilities of her project: nature raised up into inspection, and with it, inspection itself (the wrist). Quiet, patient, yet often with a swarming force, these poems worry the fraught intersection between humanity and nature, where, as we quickly see, threat abides. If nature is a flowering, it is a flowering against the edges of nothingness.
This Sweet Haphazard
In the poem “16 Reasons You Shouldn’t Like Me (And I Don’t Like Me Either),” Gillian Wegener writes: “I mine the cupboards of memory / And all I come up with is / A treasury of embarrassments.” But there is nothing embarrassing about this new full-length collection of poems, This Sweet Haphazard.
House Built on Ashes
There is no doubt that House Built on Ashes by José Antonio Rodríguez is an important story. It focuses on the youngest child of Mexican immigrants, who cross the border frequently to visit family in Mexico but then return to their impoverished life in Texas, where a young Rodríguez confronts issues of poverty, of family uncertainty, bullying at school, and also Rodríguez’s own developing sexuality. The book is organized in vignettes, not a single plot arc, but rather a painting of a life told through one- or two-page essays and narratives, sometimes even bordering on prose poems.
Self-Portrait as Hildegard of Bingen
Poet Kate Fadick (who uses the pronouns “they, them, their”) has written a compact and thematically focused chapbook of poems inspired by the life of the German Benedictine abbess Hildegard of Bingen. Hildegard died in 1179 but remains remarkable for her ecological/cosmological mysticism as well as her achievements in music, theology, languages, playwriting, natural science and botany. Fadick, who only began writing poetry in their late 60’s, is the author of a previous chapbook of poems, Slipstream, published by Finishing Line Press in March, 2013.
The Trembling Answers
“I was made // to be good like this, a father / before I was done being my father’s / son.” -from “Tracheotomy”
While most of the nation is wrangling over politics, some poets, like Craig Morgan Teicher, are reminding us of our human fragility in this pandemonium of voices. Poets like Teicher are forced by circumstance to cultivate a stillness of spirit for fear of inhaling or exhaling too carelessly and thereby breaking the already frayed cord of life struggling to hold itself together—that frayed cord being the speaker’s son so consciously observed in this 88-page manuscript of poems, The Trembling Answers.
Some Bore Gifts
Some Bore Gifts is a fantastical take on the inner workings on the average person’s conscious mind. It is clear A.G. Harmon is precise and specific when it comes to each and every detail that he either includes or omits. The precise attention to detail and the playfulness applied to the everyday character in these stories will enchant and affect each and every person that flips through its pages.
Communion
TJ Beitelman’s Communion is unlike any collection before it. The stories are written in pairs that, like the body and blood of actual Communion, are strikingly different in form, but very similar in underlying meaning. Beitelman’s stylistic approach showcases his mastery of multiple genres. Some of the stories resemble flash fiction or prose, while others resemble free-standing short stories or chapters in a book. One thing is for sure, Communion will trouble its readers in the most memorable of ways.
The Bird-while
Nearly 20 years ago, I was a 19-year old community college student introduced to Keith Taylor’s work via his slim volume of very short stories, Life Science and Other Stories. Since then, I have associated Taylor’s work with a special kind of mindfulness. It does seem redundant to call any poet’s work mindful, really, but his newest book The Bird-while provided me with a more precise way of defining Taylor’s attention . . .
Nine Island
Jane Alison masterfully constructs an interiority unlike anything before in her novel Nine Island. The prose used in this novel is experimental, lyrical, and poetic. Alison takes the reader on a journey with an aging woman living in solitude with only the company of her cat. The story is constructed in such a way that the reader has no choice but to ride each and every intimate wave that splashes over the page.
At the Lightning Field
You may not have heard of conceptual artist Walter De Maria, but if you’re curious like me, you’ll want to know more about him and his career after reading Laura Raicovich’s book-length essay, At the Lightning Field.
Inside Job
“The proper study / of monkey-kind is man, / and the true study / of man is shenanigans.” So writes the playful, keen-eyed and accomplished poet John Skoyles in the poem “Evolutionary Shenanigans” from his fourth book of poetry, Inside Job. Inside Job is divided into three untitled sections, and the poems run the gamut from the autobiographical to sketches of literary figures like Jorge Luis Borges and Grace Paley.
Ghost Town Odes
If you at times find yourself (as I often do) feeling a bit bummed out by the overproduction of postmodern, fragmentary poems that deliberately eschew narrative elements of storytelling, a self or subject, and/or any sense of purpose and closure, then do yourself a favor and pick up Matt Schumacher’s Ghost Town Odes. This is an ambitious book of poetry seeking to narrate tales of tribulation and triumph in the Old West, particularly in Oregon, the state the author currently calls home.
Milksop Codicil
Spree MacDonald writes without punctuation in Milksop Codicil, conscious of the placement of the words, lines, and stanzas on each page and how they interact with space to produce meaning. The effect is attention to images and how they interact independent of grammatical constraint.
Lifeline
Jennifer Givhan’s Lifeline opens with a strong voice in the first poem, “Reupholstering a Chair,” that urges one to “look up from the base of your life.” This perspective continues to play a central role in all the poems in this chapbook; the voice remains strong throughout each piece, even (or especially) those that deal with difficult subjects of loss, shame, violence, love, and death. With the final poem, “Machine for Second Chances,” there is hope in a “machine that makes / meaning, like stardust,” and strength to navigate “the footholds steep / & the footholds careless,” as “we step into our lives.”
The Tornado is the World
Once, a hundred years ago, the tornado
was a young man being pulled along
by the Missouri River while his friends
laughed, then called, then screamed, then
went silent . . . . — “On the Origins of the Tornado”
Unbearable Splendor
Sun Yung Shin’s Unbearable Splendor is full of big questions: Where do we come from? What is our origin? What is family? What is change? What are our fetal dreams? What is an orphan? Why is adoptee not recognized in the plural? Were we born to love? Can the whole world see me all at once? What is a foreigner? Was Antigone the first cyborg?
Primitive
With great erudition and a fine eye for the lyric, Janice N. Harrington’s Primitive: The Art and Life of Horace H. Pippin is an essential biographical reflection which traces the life of one of America’s most underrated painters. Horace H. Pippin, born in Pennsylvania in 1888, fought in WWI in France. After being injured by a German sniper, he returned to The United States to paint.
Eyes Glowing at the Edge of the Woods
One should think of reading Eyes Glowing at the Edge of the Woods as a welcome to West Virginia. Sixty-three West Virginians fill this anthology with vivid poetry and fiction that serve to characterize their “wild and wonderful” state.
The Hero Is You
Perhaps one of the most difficult things about being a writer is knowing how you’re supposed to go about being a writer. Pretty close to the front of Kendra Levin’s The Hero Is You, she says, “Many books and writing programs place so much emphasis on craft, they neglect one of the most challenging aspects of writing: how to go about actually getting the words from your brain onto the page on a regular basis.” This book is, naturally then, trying not to be a book about craft, but rather one about establishing healthy work patterns.
June in Eden
Rosalie Moffett won The Journal Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize with her debut collection of poetry titled June in Eden. In this, her prize-winning book, Moffett shapes original ideas into poems that reflect her interest in family, science and technology. It’s dedicated to her mother and father, and they’re featured throughout.
The Bitter Life of Božena Němcová
Who was this 19th century Czech woman that Kelcey Parker Ervick writes about in her book, The Bitter Life of Božena Němcová? And why, she wonders, hadn’t she previously heard about this woman who is so famous in Europe? I also wondered why I’d never heard of her. In checking with friends in Prague, I discovered that Němcová was indeed a cherished figure who is introduced to school children and is still held in esteem almost two centuries later. In fact, she’s pictured on the Czech 500 koruna bill.
A Meditation on Fire
Poet Jason Allen is a poetical pyromaniac who guides his readers through a tour of hell involving scenes of addiction, suicide, homelessness, and family dysfunction. And even if we are tempted to withdraw from such smoldering carnage, ruin and rubble, Allen reminds us that “while we sleep, our worst nightmares / continue happening to someone else.” The thing is though, the poems in this debut collection are a controlled burn. The fire never gets out of hand, which is the mark of a skilled verbal arsonist. Paraphrasing William Wordsworth: a more amateur poet would have left too much spontaneous overflow of emotion in these pages without the necessary distance needed to craft the poems as they are “recollected in tranquility.”
Wild Things
Jaimee Wriston Colbert has created an incredible connection between the endangered nature of humans and the environment around them. Wild Things is a collection of linked stories that showcase desperation and heartbreak felt by both humans and animals, and the landscape they are all trying to survive in. Colbert crafts a world all readers will be able to vividly picture, and that’s if they haven’t already experienced the all too true reality in each of the stories.
The Courtship of Eva Eldridge
Drawing on some eight hundred letters and other research documenting over two decades, Diane Simmons illuminates the unusual life of family friend, Eva Eldridge during and after WWII America. Simmons, originally neighbors and friends with Eva’s mother, Grace, when she was just a young girl, became the executor of Eva’s estate upon her death, leading her to secrets “hidden away in the arid eastern Oregon attic” of Eva’s home. Drawn by return addresses from Italy, North Africa, “somewhere in the Pacific,” and from all over America, Simmons looked past “a creepy sense of voyeurism,” grabbed a knife and cut through the “loops of tightly knotted kitchen string” that held together envelopes “collected into fat packets.”
Girl & Flame
Over the past couple of years, more than a bit has been written about the re-emergence of the novella as a respected literary form. Given that most of us tend to be caught between a perpetual time crunch and a desire for the aspects of our lives that truly matter, it only makes sense. Shorter works are able to accommodate our constraints while providing that glimmer of the richer experience we seek. All the while, a move toward a relative minimalism has revealed that breadth does not necessarily equate with depth. Sometimes, an author’s choice to refrain from filling in all of the blanks just may allow for a more satisfying experience on the part of the reader.
The Careless Embrace of the Boneshaker
The mystifying title of this anthology—The Careless Embrace of the Boneshaker—calls for an explanation, which is forthcoming in the introduction. “Here are writers claiming who they are and screaming it from the top of their lungs. They are the boneshakers. [ . . . ] Like the 19th century bicycle prototype from which they get their name, they have no means of shock absorption.”
The Night Could Go in Either Direction
The Night Could Go In Either Direction is, as the subtitle states, a conversation; a conversation between speakers, Kim Addonizio and Brittany Perham both contributing to this conversation on facing pages of this twenty-five page chapbook covered in lux pink paper that shimmers slightly in natural light. I have never read Perham, but Addonizio’s poems, quickly recognizable, are reminiscent of her collection What is This Thing Called Love. Perham’s prose poems contribute a raw symmetry to this tale of love gone wrong while Addonizio is so Addonizio, saying things that only Addonizio can say in that very Addonizio way.
The Mask of Sanity
Jacob M. Appel explains the title of his mystery novel, The Mask of Sanity, by crediting psychiatrist and psychopathy pioneer Hervey Cleckley, who used the phrase as the title of his 1941 book. It referred to people who “at their cores proved incapable of feeling empathy or compassion for their fellow human beings,” writes Appel.
Bed of Impatiens
Katie Hartsock’s debut full-length collection of poems is a sprightly and sophisticated exploration of its title: Bed of Impatiens. Most probably know impatiens as a species of flowering plant, which, according to some 18th Century botanists, the flower is so named because its capsules readily burst open when touched. However, it also shares the same Latin root for the word “impatient” which has other definitions, including “eagerly desirous” and “not being able to endure.” Hartsock’s book has very little to do with a literal bed of flowers, but rather more to do with lying down in a bed of various desires that requires or inspires a restless (and lyrically fruitful) impatience.
Life Breaks In
Mood: a vast penumbra of feelings Mary Cappello tries tirelessly at defining through the guiding light of these dynamic essays. Our moods can be both fixed and elastic, light and heavy—intractable vicissitudes that alter the course of our days and lives. They are at once ubiquitous and unexplained, and influenced by any number of things: clouds and weather, music, sweets, the connotation of words, View-Masters, taxidermy and dioramas, picture books, other people’s voices. These are among the influencers that Cappello explores in Life Breaks In: A Mood Almanack.
Yes Thorn
You are most likely going to want a dictionary on hand to fully appreciate this deeply layered book of poems. I know: this may already be a nonstarter for some readers. But persevere and the rewards are plentiful. The best kind of gift is the one that keeps on giving, and that’s what this book does. You won’t need a dictionary for the whole experience, but Amy Munson is a poet with a wise and wide vocabulary.
Notes on the End of the World
Meghan Privitello is the recipient of a 2014 New Jersey State Council of the Arts Fellowship in Poetry and she is the author of the full-length poetry collection: A New Language for Falling Out of Love (YesYes Books, 2015). Her latest release, Notes on the End of the World, is the winner of the Black River Chapbook Competition and it is an intoxicating work of art that will leave you swooning and word-drunk after you have read it. Despite being 47 pages in length, this chapbook has all the aesthetic weight of a poetry collection double its size. The book contains 20 poems sequentially titled “Day I” through “Day 20” and they are bracketed by two other poems with the same title: “Notes on the End of the World.”
A Love Supreme
Arthur Pfister was one of the original Broadside poets of the 1960s: talented artists whose works were displayed on one-sided posters that expressed strong feelings during that chaotic decade of political and cultural unrest. In the intervening years, he has been a spoken word artist, an educator, speechwriter, and winner of the 2009 Asante Award for his book My Name is New Orleans. Eventually, Pfister began writing under the name Professor Arturo.
What She Was Saying
Regardless of how “evolved” our literary tastes may be, it’s probably safe to say that, amid the busy-ness of our lives, we may occasionally neglect to make time (or create the headspace) for subtleties, the nuances that allow us to reach a more tender place within ourselves, a place capable of recognizing that very tenderness within others. This is precisely the reason that What She Was Saying by Marjorie Maddox is a collection meant to be read during times of stillness, as a reprieve from the dissonance and incessant clatter of the world around us, so as to prevent the story beneath the story from being lost amid the din.
Literature for Nonhumans
In hybrid poem essays, Literature for Nonhumans, Gabriel Gudding has taken on the system in which we live at the level of mind and body, beliefs, laws, and values by way of our effects on the nonhumans sharing this planet with us. In “the nonhumans,” besides animals, he includes rivers, mountains, wetlands, trees, landscapes, bio niches. The nonhumans are looking back at us in their own right, subjectivity given to animals and landscapes, both seen as a “who.” By the end of the book we have a coherent viewpoint of the effect of humans on life for the reader’s consideration. The book is a disorienting set of ideas that produces a cry of the heart as we look through the lens of human ensconcement blithely operating the socio-economic system with its steamroller collateral damage.