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Waldrop, co-founder and publisher of Burning Deck Books, an extraordinary translator, and an accomplished poet whose work I have always found utterly breathtaking, just keeps getting better. I admire Waldrop’s lyrical stamina—she sustains long series of related poems with impeccable control over every syllable, there is nothing superfluous, careless, or casual—and her ability to ground the abstract and abstract from the grounded, from the world of objects and circumstances (driven, as she is, to abstraction). Continue reading “Driven to Abstraction”

In Missing You, Metropolis, the 2009 winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, first-time poet Gary Jackson uses the motif of comic book lore, with its hopeful yet unforgiving treatment of the superhero, to speak about childhood feelings of isolation and sexual maturation against the backdrop of a racist culture. Sometimes the speaker uses the comic book theme as a protective blanket, relying on the fantasy world it offers to escape the harsher elements of life that children often fail to understand. At other times, seeing the world through the anvil-heavy metaphors of the graphic novel helps the speaker come to terms with his actual environment. Good and evil are drastically polarized in this genre, which offers straightforward solutions to worldwide problems and therefore appeals to a child’s sense of simple justice. Continue reading “Missing You, Metropolis”

In Horse, Flower, Bird, Kate Bernheimer, editor of Fairy Tale Review, gives readers eight of her own dark fairy tales centered on sad heroines. There is a certain timelessness to the tales, except for references to things like easy-bake ovens, plasticine dolls, and Star Wars, which place these stories firmly in contemporary times, or at the very least post-WWII, due to the haunting references to people in ovens. In the opening story, “A Cuckoo’s Tale,” the protagonist is a young Jewish girl who likes to atone. She describes spending Yom Kippur downtown with perfumed ladies: “Neither she nor the perfumed ladies were much interested in God. They were interested in forgiveness and, the girl vaguely understood, people who had been cooked inside ovens.” The girl traces her own fear of ovens back to stories her grandmother told, which include tales of a witch who cooks little girls to eat them.
Continue reading “Horse, Flower, Bird”

Award-winning Canadian children’s writer Anne Dublin has created in The Orphan Rescue, an exciting family rescue story in the real world. Dublin constructs her story from her father’s story of a Jewish family, a boy aged 7 and his sister 12, living in the small town of Sosnowiec, Poland in 1937 (before WWII). Fortified by maps and real details of a poor family’s life and of a Jewish orphanage and factory, Dublin says in her Afterword, “l wrote the story inspired by the events of the time and because the experiences of the characters are relevant to young people today.”
Continue reading “The Orphan Rescue”

For fans of Sarah Ruhl’s fanciful often highly theatrical works (Clean House, Eurydice, Melancholy Play) the premise of her latest, Pulitzer Finalist play, In the Next Room or the vibrator play may seem a risky departure from her trademark style. For starters, it is a period piece rooted heavily in historically specific research. At the least, this venture could limit the scope of the timeless, amorphous worlds she often creates and at the worst it could stifle the lyrical beauty that often spills from characters in their theatrically heightened worlds. Fortunately, In the Next Room lacks none of the poetry of Ruhl’s early work.
Continue reading “In the Next Room or the vibrator play”

Melody S. Gee’s Each Crumbling House won the 2010 Perugia Press Prize. The volume advances the mission of the press, which “publishes one collection of poetry each year, by a woman at the beginning of her publishing career.” Each Crumbling House includes 52 poems, many of them autobiographical, in which Gee dwells on the challenges of negotiating relationships with lovers, family members, and history. Adding atmosphere and nuance to her verse, Gee’s Chinese-American heritage often haunts her speakers, as they navigate multiple continents as well as in-between spaces not found on any maps. Continue reading “Each Crumbling House”

Chad Sweeney’s Parable of Hide and Seek reads like the experience of stepping into someone else’s bizarre but magnificently imaginative dreamworld. In Sweeney’s world, deserts have doors and rats swim to the sun, calling to mind a surrealist painting. There exists also a prevailing wariness about the deceptive nature of cities, and the oddness of various geographical landscapes, which can be paralleled only in the absurdity of language. Continue reading “Parable of Hide and Seek”

In a poem that couldn’t be more aptly titled, “Poem,” the poet philosophizes: “The problem of meaning can’t begin / until you think it.” Judging from these quirky and oddly appealing poems, I would say that Hart thinks about meaning, meaning he thinks about thinking, a lot. His preoccupations—running, his dog, his marriage, his baby, his students—are excuses (reasons?) to think about meaning. Continue reading “Wolf Face”

These are poems that will launch you “Into the air & land, two feet before / Every syntactical permutation (green).” Covey’s syntactical permutations are designed to “keep you teetering / on the edge,” considering the “hollowed out dictionary” of our lives and the “unexpected rivalry between east and west” (that constitute “Meaning”). His permutations extend to card shuffling (“the fewer of spades,” “the thigh of hearts”); a restaurant meal (“A lobster targets your toe”); a “declaration” with alphabetical aspirations (“all all are ask bad be bring cease comes day date drive / earth end faith felt few give give grave groups hints hopes is”); and a truck accident (“Forcing a spin, what direction”). Continue reading “Glass is Really a Liquid”

Fashion student Lillith Zeremba wants to be noticed. She also strives to be the total opposite of her mother Beth, a famous feminist professor. This good Jewish girl and sworn virgin from the Upper West Side gets more than she wished for when she walks into the “ageless” sunglass-wearing Baron Rock’s classroom in Janice Eidus’s The Last Jewish Virgin: A Novel of Fate, an entertaining, original, and psychologically creepy variation of immortal love…for while Lillith suspects it, readers know right away that Baron is a vampire. Continue reading “The Last Jewish Virgin”

These linked stories of Nick Danze’s sexual experiences, though self-contained, are arranged chronologically from the age of fourteen through his adult years, and therefore read like a novel. Continue reading “Greetings from Below”

William Heyen’s Lord Dragonfly was first published in 1981 by Vanguard Press, but most of the copies of its paperback edition disappeared shortly after Vanguard sold to Random House. Although three of the books’ sequences have since been republished elsewhere, now all five are together in a 2010 edition by H_NGM_N BKS. The re-issue contains minor editing by Heyen, plus a glowing appreciation by Nate Pritts—the chief editor of the press and Heyen’s former student. There’s also an essay by Matthew Henricksen which maintains that Heyen’s “personal vocabulary of deep imagery becoming peak language…seems to have predicted the direction many young poets are taking today.” Continue reading “Lord Dragonfly”

Why We Make Gardens, Jeanne Larsen’s second book of poetry, is divided into five sections: “Elementals,” “Generations,” “That Green Expiring Close,” “Annihilating All That’s Made,” and “Pleasance.” Each poem incorporates the word “garden” in the title in some way—some are more metaphysical, such as “Garden of Bitterness,” and some are more literal, such as “Garden After Winter’s First Storm.” The book is unified through this theme of gardens, yet Larsen’s finely tuned sensibilities never allow the poems to fall into redundancy. Continue reading “Why We Make Gardens”

Adamantine is not what it announces itself to be. By which, I mean adamantine (impenetrable as rock). Compact, solid, polished, focused in on itself, grounded as rock, yes. Continue reading “Adamantine”

If you’re asking who are Wolsak & Wynn, I can tell you that, located in Hamilton, Ontario, they’re the publishers of “clear, passionate Canadian voices,” a literary press with more than 122 titles published since 1986, including many winners of Canada’s most prestigious literary prizes. I can tell you that they produce beautiful books with smart designs on exquisite paper. And I can tell you that their website is worth checking out if you’re interested in Canadian poetry. Continue reading “You Know Who You Are”

Note: All character name fonts have been approximated by the reviewer. Font-play isn’t her specialty. Forgive any stylistic discrepancies.

When Ollister’s infamous gray book goes missing, he and his love interest Adelaide plot revenge against The Platypus, head of the art mafia in a city dominated by the quest for talent. Adelaide obsesses over Ollister, the art school kids theorize about bad art, and a punk named PuNk introduces a potent sex drug. These anarchist art school teens come together in a frenzy of ennui to gossip about the sinister White Ball, hosted by none other than The Platypus and guarded by the White Sodality. Rumor has it that the art terrorism movement plans to crash the party and cause a postmodern uproar.

The plot circles around Ollister’s elusive gray book which is full of something that will rock the art world to its very core. It’s full of stuff and things and whatnot that, if revealed, will bring The Platypus and his adult art empire crumbling to the ground. Problem is, we never find out what’s in it. And despite the intriguing sound of that idea, this is no successful MacGuffin.

Ollister is a threat to The Platypus empire because he wants to – and knows how to – create something new, something beautiful. Something beautifully and painfully new. So, I ask, where is it?

Plague’s novel is postmodern art about postmodern artists titled Boring Boring – therefore we expect a satire that is anything but. On the visual level, Boring Boring is a satire of the art world, and, as such, uses the visual to hint at many levels of design absurdity – the overwrought, scrolling chapter headings; the excessive highlighting and italicizing of “meaningful” words; the use of different font types to represent different character personalities. This, I get. This is a novel idea. But underneath the catchy visual satire, there still has to be a good story. Underneath a novel idea, there still must be a novel. And this is where Boring Boring fails.

The concept is intriguing, I’ll admit. And many of the images are beautifully rendered:

His nose had been broken so many times that it looked like it had never been broken at all, or rather that it had stopped growing when he was about 7-years-old. It was small and squat, and the interior was regularly exposed to view. A viscous cache of hair and bloody mucous that required a constant sniffling, just to keep the stuff from trickling down his face. Even so, there was usually something unrecognizable hanging out of it, or around it. Although this nose was not without its seasons, often it was shiny pink, cracked and peeling, bloodied from a coke binge or scuffle.

But without the promised ideas that transcend the boring boring art world, we end up with nothing but boring boring banter. I found myself more interested in The Platypus and his wife (the only two characters who hint at complexity) than in the plights of the art kids.

Ollister, for example, claims to want to rise above the bullshit art scene and yet he attends all of the bullshit parties. For someone who claims to be so bored with this scene, he seems awfully involved with it. Other characters poke fun of clueless artsy types and yet remain embedded in this same art world:

Jolene had most of the requisites for her position. She was thin attractive in a birdy sort of way. She wore a black turtleneck with thick black framed glasses under dyed-black hair. Her family was wealthy. She would perform fellatio on the gallery owner, never intercourse. Her apartment was so minimalist as to be empty. Her tone was just condescending enough to sell art. She did not, however, have a foreign accent. This was her only clear disadvantage.

But in poking fun of these absurd artsy types, Plague (not his real name) becomes one himself. He becomes the Ollister type who lives to create something that rises above art. Problem is, he doesn’t. So where does that leave us? It leaves us with another story that deteriorates into a soap opera web of misunderstanding, cheating, and revenge.

But maybe that’s the point. Maybe Boring Boring is supposed to be boring boring. Maybe its only goal is to capture the absurd ennui of young, inexperienced art students. If that was, in fact, its goal, then it succeeded.

The novel does, however, have many highlights, most notably the Appendices in the back. I’d hoped that the characters would be as interesting as they seem in the appendices, which served as brief and fascinating character sketches. I found myself drawn more to the back of the book, to the sections following “The End,” than to anything before that. If this book does happen to fall into your hands, read Appendix C2, Appendix B. Read Plague’s wonderful list of party guests (pp 71-2); read the “Art Terrorism” interlude:

“some dirty hipster” grabs the microphone at Uni-Arts Lecture Day: “All you kids make me sick. Revolutionary, my ass. Nobody likes to be preached to, and that’s what you’re doing with your fucking “concept.” Preaching through painting, bullying us into your boring boring worldview by telling us what we know. You give no aesthetic value, no beautiful alternative to the shit you are whining about, be it your own banal shit, or the insolvable shit of the world. You are cowards. If you want to change things, change them, if you want to change the world, I don’t know, go fucking change it. stop fucking around with art. Because this is not the tool that makes that happen. And, also, you suck at it. and your bullshit “cause,” your piddling “concept,” is poor cover for that.”

Boring Boring comes from a perspective that still believes that parents and education are anti-enlightenment. The impression we’re left with is that this infamous gray book is nothing but a young artist’s composition book, full of ideas that he considers deep and meaningful in a hazy college dorm sort of way.

At its core, Boring Boring follows classic juvenile literature’s quest of the hero. One kid up against evil adults. The outcome? The kid, using his wits and his courage, outsmarts those foolish adults and saves the day. In the end, we’re searching for a glimmer of the divine – the thing that rises above the bullshit. If the art critics, buyers, and sellers are blind, as the art kids believe, then we need to have our eyes opened. Maybe the answer to all of this is in the gray papers, maybe not. Point is, we never find out. And all we’re left with is a group of uninspired art students who survive on drugs and disgust.

David Kirby is the rare poet who juxtaposes humor and satire with a serious academic and classical knowledge without pandering exclusively to one or the other. It is a balancing act that is quite successful because it appears effortless. Mr. Kirby has a niche and a style that does not vary stylistically from collection to collection, a consistency that is not a weakness but a strength. If you desired, you could group David Kirby’s witty poems with the likes of Tony Hoagland, Dean Young and Bob Hicok. Kirby is a specialist, strumming his voice, his lone unique instrument, like a speed-reading comedian who makes the reader read until they are out of breath but rarely dissatisfied. In his new collection, this exploration of humor through knowledge and vice versa is gladly continued. Continue reading “The Temple Gate Called Beautiful”

Recently, I failed to participate in National Novel Writing Month. But…while I wasn’t writing a 50,000-word novel, I was staying abreast of NaNoWriMo’s weekly missives from well-known authors. I caught the pep talk penned by Lemony Snicket in the same week I read Curtis Smith’s Witness. “Writing a novel is a tiny candle in a dark, swirling world,” Snicket wrote. Continue reading “Witness: Essays”