Everything I Found on the Beach, by Cynan Jones, begins with police finding a mutilated body on a Welsh beach. What comes next is an unnamed woman opening an envelope, the contents of which fill her with high emotion. I could hardly wait to find out whose body it is and what’s up with the woman.
NewPages Blog :: Book Reviews
Check out book reviews of titles from independent publishers and university presses on the NewPages Blog.
Orwell’s Nose
British academic and writer John Sutherland lost his sense of smell three years ago during hay fever season. George Orwell (nee Eric Arthur Blair) apparently suffered from an acute sensitivity to smells, called nasal hyperaesthesia. Pair the two conditions, and Sutherland seized a new way of thinking about Orwell. He cites a quote from Orwell’s book The Road to Wigan Pier, which “contains the four words that have hung like an albatross around Orwell’s neck: ‘The working classes smell.’” From this was born Orwell’s Nose: A Pathological Biography, to be released this year.
Shock Treatment
If reading about bodily functions, bodily excretions, or strange items put into body orifices offends you, be forewarned, they’ll clobber you in Shock Treatment, the 25th anniversary reissue of Karen Finley’s 1990 book.
Bilgewater
For Jane Gardam fans, this new reprint of her novel Bilgewater will be a delight, almost as good as Old Filth. For those who don’t know Gardam, you’ll have a wonderful treat. There are some Gardam features which you need to be aware of: sometimes a lot of important information is given in one sentence so you need to be alert; Gardam is British, so sometimes you come across an unfamiliar expression; and this novel has a typical Gardam ending, which took this reviewer three rereads to figure out. But the discovery was fun.
The Market Wonders
The Dow that can be named is not the eternal Tao. This is the message of Susan Briante’s great and fun new work The Market Wonders. The economic market is a man made concoction, yet it behaves in an almost random manner that seems to follow rules of nature. In the beginning of the book she quotes, “Blake reminds us, ‘For everything that lives is Holy!’” and sure enough the market seems to be alive. This book associates a volatile reverence to money. The subject is about as transgressive as can be. Most people do not read poetry, half of us that read barely understand it, and certainly, nobody is making a living from it. That is to say, unless you’re Tao Lin or Ben Lerner who undoubtedly have other means of income. The rare Ted Kooser who can make a rock star’s living at poetry is once in a lifetime. But Briante builds a relationship between the flow of the market and the flow of words and poetry. The ticker at the bottom of the book is definitely the philosophical icing on the cake.
A Crowd of Sorrows
“The body of a child is a playground” -from “Red Rover”
Lisa Anne Gundry’s often sparse lines of poetry about childhood sexual abuse and its lingering effects is haunting. While some of her poems reflect a juvenile attention to the art, Gundry’s grasp of the subject matter is spot on—partly because she lived it and partly because she has clearly carefully researched each phase of her own pain and healing and just as carefully referenced these phases in her work. At 116 pages, A Crowd of Sorrows addresses neither too little or too much, spanning accounts of the abuse, counseling, trauma, and the reactions of family members to her confession that her grandfather was a pedophile who had violated both she and her sister in cars and on couches, during the day and at night.
Are You Here for What I’m Here For?
Tinged with mystery and magical realism, Brian Booker’s Are You Here for What I’m Here For? is an outstanding collection of self-contained short stories with themes of sleeplessness, sadness, and sickness. The characters, setting, and point of view vary from each story, which demonstrates the wide range of Booker’s fiction writing skills. Furthermore, the stories occur in different, sometimes undeterminable time periods, adding flavor and movement to the reading experience.
The Sorrows of Young Alfonso
“We live for a brief moment en este valle de lágrimas”
Maybe that’s why there is no resolution in my letters. There is no hero announcing at the end that good will triumph over evil [ . . . ] If my letters were a plea for sanity, then writing them was worthwhile [ . . . ] Remember, the observer of any artistic work changes the work, and in turn is changed by it.
Return to Arroyo Grande
When filmmakers turn to fiction, plot is always king. Characters and their motivations take a back seat, and the subtle components—the way fiction can get deep inside your mind and play with your inner voice—are often forgotten.
You Must Fight Them
Maceo Montoya’s You Must Fight Them, a debut collection which begins with the namesake—a ninety-nine-page novella, in which Chicano stereotypes are deciphered, defined, mocked, challenged and rendered in heart-shattering detail—is poignant and entertaining. Montoya’s narrators are mostly bookish and well-educated. They are searching for identity and often do not find what they are expecting. The doctorate student is supposed to be tough and fight the brothers of a girl he worshipped in high school. Why tough? Why fight? Because that is how it is and always will be. Lupita, the girl, wants out of this macho-viciousness, but can’t figure out how. Nothing is cut and dry. Montoya deals with smudged borders and crooked lines.
Jewish Noir
A short story is the perfect medium for busy people, and Jewish Noir, heralded as the first book of its kind, presents a month’s worth of short stories to delight any reader of the genre. Editor Kenneth Wishnia sums up the lure: “[ . . . ] a majority of the world’s Christians are taught that if you follow the right path, everything will turn out well for you in the end. In Judaism, you can follow the right path and still get screwed (just ask Job). That’s noir.”
Detroit Muscle
Jeff Vande Zande burns the fat off our souls. At a recent poetry reading, the poet in residence, read a rather lofty ten lines about an experience in the California wilderness. Everyone stared ahead with reverence and when the poem finished, it was hard to tell if anyone noticed. He then told an anecdote about the origin of the poem. He used unpolished language and terse, powerful verbs, and, if I remember correctly, some foul language. Everyone laughed and looked around. I asked myself, “Why didn’t the guy write that as the poem?” Enter Vande Zande, who doesn’t settle for trying to sound like something. As a matter of fact, he almost eliminates pretense to a fault. He calls Detroit a “city of empty stories atop empty stories,” and in doing so strips the mystery from all of it while also alluding to that great hollow tale.
The Dark Will End the Dark
Phobia is defined, by my handy dictionary app, as “an extreme or irrational fear or aversion to something.” It’s debatable whether or not Darrin Doyle, intends to further encourage and perhaps even expand the catalog of possible phobias one might adopt in a lifetime, or whether he hopes that by delving into the darkest regions of psychic subconscious, his stories might locate the irrationality of a reader’s particular fear and give it permission to come into the light. In either case, his collection of short stories and flash fictions entitled The Dark Will End the Dark promises to satisfy the most twisted reader and the busily-untwisting reader alike.
Bonds of Love & Blood
Relationships are very complicated. They can either make us feel secure or alienate us. They define us in many ways and also become the symbolic representations of inner worlds we must face all by ourselves if we have to transcend and reach out to the real, brutal world outside. The collection of stories, Bonds of Love & Blood by Marylee MacDonald, explores intricate relationships within and outside familial ties and their effects on individuals who are involved in them. What sets this collection apart is the dominating theme of the collection: Fractured, failed, dead or dying, estranged relationships. These ties are problematic and layered for they cannot be salvaged, but they have a certain degree of intensity and beauty that makes them open-ended and real.
Becoming the Sound of Bees
Marc Vincenz’s eighth collection of poetry, Becoming the Sound of Bees, is rich with disorienting imagery and descriptive language. Vincenz uses vocabulary reminiscent of an album by The Mars Volta, yet the music here is uniquely his own. Readers are transported to variously strange landscapes and introduced to poems brimming with noise.
Four Cities
The world’s crying wolf when the words from a musical memory muscle through heartbreak and Middle Eastern melancholy before something sensational occurs: a compelling fresh poetic voice materializes. Hala Alyan’s Four Cities is a powerful reflection of a perception only seen from foreign skies. It somehow interweaves punk rock romanticism with a soft touch of bluegrass sensibilities (think Patti Smith with a touch of Old Crow Medicine Show). Her firecracker point of view radiates like Fourth of July on LSD. There is a lyrical sentimentality that shines sunlight over shadows. There is also tenderness in some passages where apathy would normally preside. Her poetical politics are worth every poignant line. “Sestina for December” reads like Parker prose but shines like a youthful Etal Adnan.
Because
There is an easy-going quality to the poems in Nina Lindsay’s Because that make this one of the friendliest books this reviewer has read in some time. Lush but clean, emotional but evenly wrought, engaging a diversity of styles over its five sections but with a voice that feels continuous and familiar, these are the sorts of poems one can fall into a deep absorption with. That is not to say that these are intellectually easy—indeed, it is the subtle peculiarities and soft surprises we find throughout that really propel us forward through these pages, and I can’t help but think that this would be an interesting book to teach in advanced courses, precisely because it is so unassuming.
Poetry: A Survivor’s Guide
Mark Yakich chose Carl Sandburg’s admonition, “Beware of advice, even this,” as his epigraph for Poetry: A Survivor’s Guide. But don’t jump to conclusions. This book is full of good advice, interesting asides and lively humor, while at the same time offering options. For example, Yakich writes: “Work on one poem at a sitting.” In the next paragraph it’s, “Work on multiple poems at a sitting.”
The Smoking Section
Before we get started and you make suppositions from the title of this book, allow me to quote editor Lizzy Miles—founder of the Death Café of central Ohio where any participant is welcome to come and discuss issues of mortality—from the introduction: “Despite any appearances to the contrary, this is not a pro-smoking book; neither is it an anti-smoking book. This is not a commentary on smoking in society: this book captures our personal love/hate relationships with cigarettes and the habit of smoking.”
Girl Power and Other Short-Short Stories
Girl Power and Other Short-Short Stories is divided into three sections exploring the trials and triumphs of a particular season in women’s lives: maidenhood, motherhood, and matronhood. Although the collection is organized in this way, Katie Cortese’s stories offer a landscape of women whose struggles vary widely. Some women deal with issues of sex and rape; others live in poverty or affluence; some are married, others are single; some are childless, others are mothers. Furthermore, the short-short stories in the collection slide between realistic and fantastic, reflecting Cortese’s ability to craft strong characters and plots regardless of genre.
The Suicide Club
Through eight carefully linked stories, Toni Graham depicts the rituals of small-town Oklahoma and how its inhabitants move forward through life with—or in perhaps spite of—grief. The stories in The Suicide Club each follow one of four suicide survivors: a man whose father swallowed pills; a mother whose teenage son hung himself; a woman whose boyfriend shot himself; and the survivor group leader, whose father asphyxiated himself. The group’s Wednesday night meetings are only a sliver of full and messy lives as the members work through addictions, infidelity, impotency, and questions of faith.
Wolf’s Mouth
John Smolens, a Marquette, Michigan writer, has written three novels set in the UP. The first, Cold, was about an escaped convict and his latest, Wolf’s Mouth, has to do with an Italian prisoner who escapes from a POW camp in Au Train, near Munising. Prisoners of war numbered 400,000 in camps across the U.S., and more than one camp existed in the Upper Peninsula (UP) of Michigan. This well-written novel offers fascinating information about the camps and especially how they were run, but is also a thriller with insights into human nature.
By Fire
By Fire: Writings on the Arab Spring, by Tahar Ben Jelloun, due out in June, is a fictionalized account of the suicide by immolation of a young Tunisian man named Mohamed Bouazizi.
Catherine Breese Davis
The final paragraph in The Unsung Masters Series book Catherine Breese Davis: On the Life and Work of an American Master reprints her 1996 journal entry. After years of trying to publish a book: “[ . . . ] sometimes when I get exasperated with all this, I think the poems will all end in a black hole. I certainly don’t want to have a posthumous book, but it may come to that.”
Contrary Motion
Contrapuntal motion is the general movement of two melodic lines with respect to one another. There are few variations within contrapuntal, being parallel, similar, oblique and finally, Contrary. Andy Mozina, ever the social dissident, has produced a work that moves in many different directions. It manages a solidarity that many strive to achieve. Mozina has a voice that speaks easily of the dark and laughs until it aches. It yearns towards Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift, but it is swift in the manner of an iPhone. The ease at which the language flows in Andy’s work is one of the highest selling points. The social constructions that he works are just a simple perk and by product of reading a great dark comedy.
Antidote for Night
Marsha de la O situates her poem “Crossing Over” in time and space as follows:
This time of year, gold lingers
in thin autumn air
ether-light shining
crossing over [.]
Come In Alone
I hate to focus so much on form, but in this review of Anselm Berrigan’s Come In Alone, form will take center stage. Or more accurately: form will frame the way we encounter Berrigan’s electric and vocally driven sensibilities. Because the very first thing you will notice when you open this book is the simple but profoundly innovative design, which runs all of the text as a border around an otherwise empty page. (You can look at sample pages here at the publisher’s website.)
Problems
Maya has problems. In fact, Maya has Problems with a capital P. She’s in a boring marriage with Peter, an alcoholic with a conservative family she doesn’t fit into. She’s having an affair with Ogden, one of her former professors who is more than twice her age. She struggles with an eating disorder. Her mother has MS and struggles to care for herself. There are changes happening at her job which may leave her desperate for money. And she juggles all these problems under the haze of her biggest problem: a budding addiction to heroin. Jade Sharma guides us through the haze in her forthcoming, aptly-named novel, Problems. Continue reading “Problems”
I Want to Be Once
A friend of mine said Google killed the revolutionary. The 99% feel rich. We’re numb and fat. I have access to everything I could ever want. As a matter of fact, my imagination no longer seems as vast as the possibilities created by the internet. However, M.L. Liebler confronts this notion a bit. It is a nudge of awakening. In a generation of Americans with infinite privilege, poverty isn’t even true poverty. He has seen the revolutions in Detroit and the raging in the desert on the other side of the planet. I Want to Be Once has the heart of a sage bringing wisdom to those without experience. While I may be stuck behind my computer, living a life of privilege and low conceit, seeking out only those things pertinent to me, Liebler delivers the news of reality and a slant to go along with it. The revolution is in the letter. Continue reading “I Want to Be Once”
Strange Theater
Strange Theater brings us a reality where words can deposit you, drop you off, let you move struck by what you know, yet cannot quite believe (this is where we are at?). John Amen is in conversation with us. There is a we, and we have come to a turning point, we of this culture, we of this species, not knowing what we thought we were: Continue reading “Strange Theater”
Some Versions of the Ice
Reading the surrealist essays in Adam Tipps Weinstein’s Some Versions of the Ice, one is quick to make comparisons. The most obvious is to magical realist writers such as Jorge Luis Borges or Italo Calvino, but there are many other resonances. His essay “The False Pigeon: A History”—a fictional account of a natural history museum—reads like it dropped straight from the pages of George Saunders’s CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, and the deceptively straightforward expositional tone that he employs throughout—which Michael Martone mentions in his wonderful blurb as a “hyper-rational empiricism [running] stoically and joyfully amok”—often echoes Lydia Davis. Continue reading “Some Versions of the Ice”
Slab
Selah Saterstrom’s Slab opens with a gripe, or a warning, perhaps, that the play won’t start. But then it does, and from page one, the story takes off at a breakneck pace and proceeds with all the force of a hurricane. Continue reading “Slab”
Like Family
Italian novelist Paolo Giordano’s novella Like Family, in spite of its short length, encapsulates as much of life as his well-known novel The Solitude of Prime Numbers. His previous career as a physicist shows up in both works, while in this one, he is married with a small child employing a housekeeper. As the husband, father, and employer, he is the unnamed narrator in the story. The housekeeper, a central character, is also the child’s caretaker and confidante to the couple. The housekeeper is a middle-aged widow whom the narrator refers to Mrs. A while at the same time being named Babette by the couple (after the Karen Blixen story and film about a woman who prepares a fabulous feast to strict, frugal northerners). We do not know the housekeeper’s real name until the very end, which is important: she is family to the couple but they barely know her. Continue reading “Like Family”
Truth Poker
“Katherine’s son was about to wrestle a blind boy. . . .” So begins “The Blind Wrestler,” the first short story in Mark Brazaitis’s collection Truth Poker. Surprising, intriguing, declarative sentences like this sink teeth into you and don’t let go, until you’ve reached each story’s satisfying ending. In “The Blind Wrestler,” Katherine has an affair with her son’s high-school-wrestling opponent. She regularly meets the handsome young man in a vacant house, “a den of mild iniquity,” where she confronts not only the loneliness in her marriage to a man eighteen years her senior, but also the way she blindly trudges through motherhood toward old age, without enjoying the journey or considering her destination. Continue reading “Truth Poker”
The Revolution Will Have Its Sky
As I sat down with The Revolution Will Have Its Sky by Maria Garcia Teutsch, I was, in the longer term, in the midst of reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace. I could never have guessed Maria Garcia Teutsch’s Revolution would be a perfect pairing with that venerable epic, and yet, much to my delight, it is. The Revolution Will Have Its Sky is, of course, much shorter in length, but it explores and illuminates many of the same themes and dichotomies of Tolstoy’s epic novel, and to similar thought-provoking effect. While that may seem hefty praise, I challenge any reader of Teutsch’s work to disagree that its ideas, comparisons, and discoveries succinctly coincide with those long found in War and Peace. The Revolution Will Have Its Sky is in its own right an enticing, nuanced, and many-layered collection of poems that will keep you satisfied while you read, and deep in thought long after you have put it down. Continue reading “The Revolution Will Have Its Sky”
Almost Home
“Stories, like real life, can strip you of the prettier features of illusion.” This is exactly the kind of line that ensures us we are in capable hands with Githa Hariharan, who narrates her travelogue Almost Home: Finding a Place in the World from Kashmir to New York more as a travel guide, less as the star of her own world. To read this book is to venture on a rigorous journey around the globe and through pockets of time. As a fellow travel writer and having also lived a peripatetic life that crosses continents and hemispheres, this is the best travel book I have ever read. Continue reading “Almost Home”
The Great Spring
Part travelogue, part Buddhist meditation, Natalie Goldberg’s latest book, The Great Spring: Writing, Zen, and This Zigzag Life, was published this past February along with the 30th anniversary edition of her classic title Writing Down the Bones. Through graceful prose and occasional humor, these essayistic memoirs weave between the covers as she tackles a reel of subjects such as death, the promises and faults of Buddhism, stalking, and, of course, writing. Continue reading “The Great Spring”
Chord
There is saying that “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach,” derisively suggesting that teachers only resort to teaching because they are professional failures in their chosen fields. But Rick Barot’s Chord is the kind of book that will make readers see the reality that sometimes those who can—like Barot—are also willing to teach. Luckily for us. Continue reading “Chord”
System of Ghosts
In addition to traditional rain showers, April 2016 will bring the launch of Lindsay Tigue’s book of poetry, System of Ghosts, winner of the 2015 Iowa Poetry Prize. In this, her first book, Tigue has mastered a technique of taking facts—some obscure—and using them as a springboard to wherever her imagination leads her. Judge Craig Moran Teicher says these bits of information are “gathered magpielike,” leading to insight. Continue reading “System of Ghosts”
Bystanders
Bystanders, by Tara Laskowski, due out May 2016, contains thirteen short stories with titles that make you want to see who the bystanders are and what they’re up to. The majority center on young couples, and several pieces would be right at home in the old TV series “The Twilight Zone,” like “The Monitor” in which neighbors see each other’s babies on their own baby monitors. Plus, there’s another strange figure who keeps appearing. Continue reading “Bystanders”
Where the Wind Can Find It
A collection of short stories that drips with artistry and revelatory truths, Where the Wind Can Find It is a masterful exploration of the struggle between who and where we were and are, and who we want to be. Continue reading “Where the Wind Can Find It”
Dead White Guys
If you half-snoozed through the classics at school, reading Matt Burriesci’s Dead White Guys is a shrewd way to refresh your knowledge. The book is subtitled A Father, His Daughter and the Great Books of the Western World. It includes visits to philosophers and storytellers such as Plato and Plutarch, Montaigne and Shakespeare, John Locke, Adam Smith and other notables. Author Matt Burriesci deftly combines their teachings with his own experiences and ideas to equip his daughter with lessons for a good life. Continue reading “Dead White Guys”
Companion Animal
Magdalena Zurawski began writing her poetry collection Companion Animal in a state of doubt about her own abilities as a poet (to cite her final selection from the book, “Dear Reader,”). In 2009, when she was feeling particularly unsure about her abilities to write, a close friend encouraged her to read and write poetry daily and cultivate a loosely-supervised writing routine. The poems that stemmed from this exercise explore the realities of daily life—financial stress, relationships, lost loved ones, and of course, the companionship of a tiny dog—while questioning the relevancy of poetry and the act of writing itself. Continue reading “Companion Animal”
Of Things
Michael Donhauser is an accomplished Austrian poet, essayist, and critic whose books date back nearly thirty years, but he is not widely known to English readers. It makes him a great candidate for Dichten—Burning Deck’s translation series, which brings this rich and varied collection, Of Things (first published in German nearly twenty years ago), to a needed new audience. It’s a dizzyingly varied work, finely translated by Nick Hoff and Andrew Joron. It is philosophically poised but historically informed, personal, scientific, whimsical, and serious—showcasing a real rucksack of literary tools that Donhauser brings into the field with him to sketch, like the plein air painter, his subjects. Continue reading “Of Things”
I’m No Longer Troubled by the Extravagance
I used to laugh at the notion of singularity because it objectified the pluralizing concept of always wanting more. Good poetry is like that; it is circulatory, a wheel constantly spinning between the yin and the yang of existence. I don’t mind that one poem is different than the next, only that somehow the wheel doesn’t get stuck and I become lost in the duality of it all. Continue reading “I’m No Longer Troubled by the Extravagance”
Sex and Death
The blank page, always a canvas with vocabulary a pallet and creativity the brush, is a daunting image; it is there though, hanging in the balance like a friendship on a tightrope. It is what can be done with such a task that matters the most. And Ben Tanzer emphatically delivers with an unapologetic stroke in his latest collection Sex and Death. Continue reading “Sex and Death”
Phantom Pains of Madness
Phantom pain is one of those peculiar syndromes that has received widespread recognition for its oddness, mostly. Noelle Kocot’s Phantom Pains of Madness trickles and drips with oddity as well, the entire piece written one word at a time. Each word receives its own line, which makes the book very easy to read: a delight in the modern age. It also gives the book a dimension and heft that is incomparable. But Noelle’s humor disarms the reader often and keeps the book light, while its content is quite heavy. This is her seventh book of poetry, and there is no doubt that she has achieved a wringing out of all that isn’t her. Phantom Pains of Madness is a truly original work and a very rewarding read. Continue reading “Phantom Pains of Madness”
The Last Mistress of Jose Rizal
Sometimes our roots are someplace else and we craft our whole lives in places away from our original source like outsiders wishing earnestly to ‘belong.’ We absorb a lot of what is new and retain or let go of our past. Generations pass, the memory of the roots begin to get weaker, yet it filters through families, countries, history. History absorbs the effects of immigration and narrates his stories, her stories, their stories. We meet people, engage in relationships, progress through situations, and separate moments from our different lives converge at common points of emotional realizations. Continue reading “The Last Mistress of Jose Rizal”
Startle Pattern
The mythic and the humane combine in Startle Pattern to create an arrow of divination that pierces the heart of injury and healing. Larissa Szporluk delivers prophecy in the form of bone, loss in the form of tone, and violence in the form of stone. Continue reading “Startle Pattern”
The Good Dark
Annie Guthrie’s first book The Good Dark is a rhythmic journey where darkness occupies the spaces in between silence and belief, morphing into the things needed most: sand, sight, star. Guthrie’s haunting sonic landscape shakes the foundation of belief, and gives darkness a cadence to its face. Continue reading “The Good Dark”