Reviews
A Review for Our List of Solutions by Carrie Oeding
By Ryan Sanford Smith
Oeding, Carrie. Our List of Solutions. 42 Miles Press, 2011. $15.
I’ve begun to think Carrie Oeding has been out there somewhere in the Midwestern wastelands acting as something of a doppelganger as I’ve eaten the potluck food and pumped kegs at leaving-this-one-stoplight-town going-away parties, wondering when I’d get around to making it my turn. This is one long way of saying that as I read these poems I found myself often thinking: swell, I’m not the only one — in a way void of any kind of relief, a way entirely full of loneliness. This paradox often surfaces to my mind as an overarching gesture of the book — a crowded, noisy, tiki-light bordered backyard rumination on the unique brand of suburban dystopia that only the Midwestern fields of cows and corn can offer. The speaker of this book is one that seems often to come out of the blurred landscape that lies at the center of this paradox, perpetually vacillating somewhere between insider/outsider with a comedic and often sardonic distrust and annoyance as much with herself as the ever-present neighbors:
“Don’t wait for me to point out how people work.
Your friends will leave you for a stranger’s birthday,
and you’ll never get over it. I can’t wait
to tell you how your kitten will turn out.
Oh, I’m ruining everything.”
…
“Let’s get you a soda,
with two straws and one person
to love, who’d break your cake, cut your heart
and its songs of what a heart is.
Then maybe you can come over
and surprise me with something better,
something that I would really
never get over, something that would ruin us both.”
–from “Sandy, Will You Quit Saying Such Things?”
This epigraph from Frank O’Hara, set before the second section of the book would seem to capture this aspect of the speaker perfectly: “That’s not a cross look, it’s a sign of life, but I’m glad you care how I look at you.” The speaker might be providing all the cross looks but life remains everywhere throughout this book — the bizarre and complicated characters and their relationships that continually flood into all of the cracks in the fences are what really charge this book with a thick atmosphere of straining for ways to live and live with each other, for understanding in a way as hard to grasp as to articulate:
“What’s the safest way to swerve, crash, and avoid that deer?
How long can you hold out? How long can you hold?
Children of botoxed mothers, what facial expressions will you acquire?”
–from “Prelude to How the World Works”
Numbness is prevalent in many forms as the speaker’s own oscillations allow for varying distances, the farm-town malaise never quite as clean and static as the aerial photographs of patchwork fields might lead one to believe. What’s it mean to be ‘part of’ any neighborhood, anyway? The role of the neighbor itself feels like one that is comfortable, even benign, but again with the same kind of insightful pondering the speaker herself often seems wary of trundles on–as unstoppable as anything can be–nothing in this book is ever as simple or alone or connected or complicated as it might seem:
“I see there is no difference in happy endings.
I used to call from my porch
until I realized I had to.
I see no one took the stray cat I positioned on the playground.
My barbecue grill is simply past scrubbing.
I know too much. I am never disappointed
and will glean these chimes until I really know
what not to want.
…
You residents of tiny disappointment
and fragile potlucks,
what can we get each other not to say?”
–from “A Way to Live in the Neighborhood”
This last excerpt is one moment of several that felt like points of crisis or saturation, expressed as dramatically as one might reasonably allow oneself to feel them considering the quotidian backdrop and inspirations for such turning points–turning points on an infinitely generating track–sure you’re turning but where are we all going anyway? It ends on a lovely rhetorical bit that nicely encapsulates the broader, familiar angst of being over it all, but so what? “What now?” These thematic grounds may be thoroughly traveled in contemporary literature but having no answers one wonders if they can ever be explored enough; this is certainly a book that makes the case for poetry that wants to wallow in the absurdity of the cliche ‘human condition’.
All of these characters shimmer safely behind their botox-smile walls in one moment before falling cripple to a milieu of gossip and adultery and disappointment and tee-ball trophy victories the next. If some of these scenes were played out on stage we’d never be able to stop laughing and crying — of course the stage is just a mirror or wobbly-handed camcorder account of almost anyone’s Fourth of July extravaganza.
“It is easy to try hard. It’s easy to make sense of things. I never want
to give in to the stories.”
–from “Sandy’s List of Solutions”
Ah, what a beautiful slice of self-deception our speaker offers here at the close of the book. Even as would-be documenter, willing deformer of every last dream and conversation she never fails, poem after poem, to fail to let herself off the hook. The space the speaker occupies throughout the book cannot be overlooked; while often an observation outpost on all the things mentioned here and more, the poems essentially revolve around the speaker’s core experience, interpretation and reinterpretations of self using the only available context of stilted surroundings. Often the most compelling poems for me were the ones where the vision of the book scaled back down to the speaker’s experience of the lonely isolation of herself alone–at home pleading to the porchlight–these moments reverberate with a kind of deafening silence, a ringing in the ears after an all-night concert that all these other poems stand as. This finally to me became the final vibration of the book, between the complications of self in relation to others and oneself as an other even to oneself when that is all that one is left with. And always the soft undercurrent of assurance that tomorrow the light will still have burnt all night for all the reasons in the world (there are(n’t) any) and … we never liked Louise anyway, did we?
Our List of Solutions is the first full-length book of poems from Indiana University South Bend’s 42 Miles Press.
A Review for Sky Booths in the Breath Somewhere by David Dodd Lee (our Series Editor)
By Jay Robinson
Lee, David Dodd. Sky Booths in the Breath Somewhere, the Ashbery Erasure Poems. Blaze VOX [books], 2010. $16.
When people discuss David Dodd Lee’s poems, they gravitate to simile because Lee’s recent work—so wonderfully original and strangely formed—inspires only equally original comparison. John Gallaher has said of Lee’s haunting Orphan, Indiana that “…it’s as if a manic tour guide were speaking to you on an intermittent intercom on a tour bus riding the back lots…” In less than a calendar year, Lee has released three books. Each feels like a distinct stylistic breakthrough, and each also feels like a slightly different version of the same mesmerizing thing. Of the three, Sky Booths in the Breath Somewhere, The Ashbery Erasure Poems is the most unique, though not in what it says via subject, theme, and execution, but in how it was written according to the terms of a self-invented form. Lee explains in a prefatory note: “The rules were simple enough….I had to construct my text by moving through the source poem, selecting words as Ashbery ordered them (consecutively), while omitting the rest. In other words, were I to white-out my omissions on the page of an Ashbery text one would have little trouble, reading from left to right, deciphering the words and phrases that make up the ‘narrative’ that are my erasure poems.” By its nature, Sky Booths in the Breath Somewhere doesn’t call into question where a poem comes from; however, it broadens that scope, and implies that poems can come from anywhere. And can do anything. If we want to, we can tell our stories simply by erasing words of other people’s stories.
And yet, there’s little difference between these poems and the poems of Orphan, Indiana or The Nervous Filaments (though Lee employs greater use of multi-lined stanzas in “The Ashbery Erasure Poems”). Reading them, Ashbery’s influence isn’t the faintest echo; it’s more like a house in the distance hidden in the fog, a house you only know is there because you’ve lived in this town for years. Written with inconsistent end punctuation and few line breaks—because the poems often unfold in a series of one-line fragmentary stanzas—Lee’s poems form narratives through juxtaposition and association. In fact, they deconstruct and construct narratives, and they do so simultaneously. Lee is, I think, nothing short of a collagist of the relentless internal monologue of human experience. His poems surprise us by continuing to surprise us. “In favor of life” exemplifies his style:
nobody knew where to buy a minute
after God was forgotten
long shadows wider each time
names in the fabric like pain
so when will God be able to
disconnect us from all that is real?
you think of desire as a lit stone in hell
The poem’s theological implications seem clear enough: Life is hell sometimes, but so is hell, even if it’s something we’re only willing to engage on a conceptual level in the 21st century. Therefore, other concerns make the poem engaging. For example, “disconnect” is a key word, as parts of “In favor of life” refer to what’s off-stage and never-revealed. Whose “names”? The “fabric” of what? But Lee doesn’t just pose such questions indirectly. His poetry actively pursues them. It’s as if he’s really asking, Is a simile effective if we don’t know what the comparison is being compared to? Is it more effective?
Often the poems of Sky Booths in the Breath Somewhere probe the boundaries of experience through unswerving self-interrogation. At his best, Lee juggles moments of honesty and levity. Listen to the opening of “On a nameless road”:
I flash merrily
when people think
if only we could get the cows
to consider voting
Levity for levity’s sake? Hardly. The comic gesture complements the poem’s conclusion by addressing the pervading existential helplessness at the heart of the punch line. But Lee tells us nothing new in doing so. How he tells us, however, is a different story:
I don’t know if I’ll ever look young
pitiful morning,
sooner or later,
one’s apertures
start looking disingenuous
desire is never enough
The lack of punctuation and stanza breaks—even the use of white space—each force the reader to make leaps, to connect what might not intend connection, via intuition, whether those connections situate the grammar of what may or may not be a sentence, or whether they let us put a couple of the poem’s puzzle pieces in place on the kitchen table. In that way, Lee’s poems yield us control. Or the illusion of control anyway.
Other poems dissect issues of identity. At some point, all contemporary poets show their debt to Whitman, who famously claimed, “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contract myself….” Such a moment arises in “Erotic Double.” The poem is more investigative than erotic, but quite unlike Whitman in its aesthetics:
Another go round?
Rescue me before the night does…..
I can hide it. I choose to.
You. You are a very pleasant person.
And just who does the speaker of the poem address? Who is this ‘erotic double,’ if not the speaker of the poem, a poem which articulates very deftly how we can desire something and its opposite all at once?
Perhaps the greatest compliment one might pay Lee and Sky Booths in the Breath Somewhere is that these are truly original poems, made all the more fascinating, all the more engaging and likely to outlive so many others, as is the great gift he’s given us of insight into the creative process of doing so.
I can think of no finer poet to read at this moment than David Dodd Lee.
***
Christine Garren – The Difficult Here. 42 Miles Press, 2011. $12. Reviewed by Ryan Smith.
The Difficult Here by Christine Garren
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
More so than with any poet I’ve yet to read, Christine Garren’s poems always leave me with an impression of what I imagine to be her ‘process’, which is the only word at hand for what feels like the machinations of a writer with the abstract, nuanced, first-mover kind of creative patience that forgotten deities would do well to gather around to take notes on.
These poems are absolutely precise, pristine, free of any recognizable scaffolding, having been spun into motion and carefully watched over, waiting for each of these scenes to suss themselves out with a Darwinian cruelty towards the unnecessary. The ‘scenes’ come in and out of view not so much with quickness as with a quiet consciousness of whatever it is a particular poem might do on its page, refusing to mill around at either beginning or end, waiting to be noticed.
In several of these pieces an attitude almost resistant to the reader-viewer flares, opening with a biting bitterness toward “the young, // with their fake cleavages and fake fingernails and fake-colored hair–that cheap / looking flock”. Like all of lines here, this scathing sweep never really swings home; there’s a periphery of empathy constellating around, a subtle but emotional tell that pulls this compelling chapbook together. This feeling of continuity was my central, overarching feeling while finishing this book, as its titular lines show in the poem ‘Late January’:
“In the air that was violently cold, in the grey unforgiving light of morning
I drove past miles and miles of houses. Forever the road went
and though it was the end of January, in every other yard it seemed
a fake wretched-looking reindeer stood abandoned–or a life-sized creche
wasted in the freezing weather. In the end it was impossible to ignore
the repeated frostbitten glare of the virgin staring out into the street
or the elegant, flesh-eaten camel who stood beside her infant
swaddled in ice–as they stayed on this year, living with us
a little longer now–suddenly stranded in the difficult here.”
While this poem seems lonely in its absence of any human presence save the speaker, it stands with an even greater degree of starkness in the context of the rest of the book, where life and motion teem over. This poem seems to me one way to frame the rest of the book, in that the compartmentalized feeling of each poem and their swift arrivals and departures remind me of the houses the speaker likewise passes; the ‘here’ becomes both some faintly concrete place as well as a more heady location carried through all of the poems, stringing them together like the various trees mentioned in nearly every poem both figuratively and, faintly again, literally as they can be found manning the gaps of the textual landscape from one piece to the next.
The ‘here’ is so difficult because of the experience of reality itself, passing as one does through the grey murk between both joy and bitterness with either too much speed or not enough, lulling around at times in the wet late of a January, the decorations either forgotten or somewhere near it, looking as weathered as we all usually do. The warmth of the holiday has passed–everything is passing–but will, of course, be coming around (and leaving) again. The ‘here’ is the small moment, the tedious and unforgiving one that sits between the various, kindly-regarded ‘real’ moments that constitute the whole of life. But even these moments and micro-moment snapshots prove rich, exponentially layered with even the fewest lines. There’s a grace to this, and a grace to such moments that Garren allows to permeate this chap; the effect is light but stalwart, never letting both feet on the ground while making a kind of ineffable sort of stand. Just don’t expect superficial, easy meaning to answer you in return; ‘here’, we’re absolutely on our own, whatever we make that out to mean:
The Living Star
“we forget we are dying
and spin
on and on drifting nearer
then apart–living just as you do–all the time
we see you in the fields near your Autumn fires–your faces tilted upwards
toward us
as if we held an answer–when we live just as you do–nothing
about us is free”
‘The Difficult Here’ is the first book from Indiana University South Bend’s 42 Miles Press.
***
Kelcey Parker – For Sale By Owner. Kore Press, 2011. $16. Reviewed by Ryan Smith.
For Sale By Owner by Kelcey Parker
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Kelcey Parker’s debut collection of stories will leave you feeling, among other things, very surprised. The surprise at work is not because of the material she works with—the seemingly quotidian bricks of the domestic Midwestern suburbs—but in the way she infuses those materials with a truly unique velocity and darkly playful touch. The suburbs and soccer moms and unfaithful husbands aren’t the ones you read about in books or watch on sitcoms, but the ones you yourself drive past every day and speculate about as your mind wanders.
To me these stories have done what few have managed, and that is to bypass what we think we mean with terms like ‘realist’ that are supposed to reference a familiar framework—our own ‘real’ lives. So we’ll find ourselves or people we know in them, their stories are ours, and so goes their supposed (and often effective) premise. But Parker has done the real trick, has reached a territory of the real that shows just how far fiction of this typ might push when it bothers to stop and trouble itself first. You might not find your story in this collection but they all seem close at hand, in the yelling from the neighbor’s house or the lone woman you spot checking into a dingy motel.
I was also at all times enjoyably perplexed by the emotions and humor Parker has woven, complicating every thought and piece of dialogue such that it seems one might labor under the very real sensation of experiencing several, even conflicting emotions at once. Are these stories hopeful? Nihilistic? Heartbreaking? Heart-affirming? Every sentence seems to turn where you think they’re going, which is the real key to this kind of reality, the one we genuinely recognize as our own: the stories don’t know, the characters don’t, just as we often don’t. Sometimes we do feel affirmed or utterly broken, but such concrete places are few—these stories aren’t selling anything or playing dress-up.
This notion leads to my final appreciation which is that this collection feels like it comes from a veteran source; there’s no lack of confidence or deftness to Parker’s gesturing, a steadied hand at the wheel as she careens us around the burning suburbs of her sophisticated, sharply imagined inner world.
***
Zachary Schomburg – from the fjords. Spork, 2010. $10. Reviewed by Clayton T. Michaels.
With the publication of 2009’s Scary, No Scary, Zachary Schomburg cemented his status as one the most compelling and original poets publishing today. As with his debut full-length The Man Suit, his less-is-more aesthetic, which relies primarily on repetition to create rhythms and build tension, made Scary, No Scary both incredibly readable and deceptively dense; it holds up to multiple readings and reveals something new each time.
Schomburg’s latest is from the fjords, a chapbook from the ultra-hip Spork Press, and it is another fantastic collection from a poet who seemingly can do no wrong. This is not to say, however, that from the fjords is a kind of Scary, No Scary redux; in some ways, the poems in this chapbook are a departure from Schomburg’s usual style. For starters, the repetition that was such a large part of his previous work is much less frequent in this collection, making it seem more varied than some of his previous work; each of the prose poems in this chapbook could stand alone instead of seeming like parts of a longer sequence. There is, however, still a great deal of thematic unity that makes the lack of repetition seem more like a natural evolution in style than some kind of radical reinvention. His characteristic dark sense of humor is still very present in these poems, too: for example, in ‘Meat Counter,’ the speaker wakes up inside the meat display case in his grandfather’s grocery store; in ‘New Job Serving Fried Pies,’ the speaker’s three co-workers mysteriously drop dead inside their pie trailer; and in ‘The Donut Hawk,’ the speaker is hunting, as the title would suggest, hawks made out of donuts.
Any review of from the fjords would be incomplete without a mention of the look of the chapbook itself. From a purely aesthetic perspective, Spork is putting out some of the best looking chapbooks around—with their letterpressed rawboard covers and hinged spines, they look like hardback children’s books from the 1970’s, and each book comes with a two-color vinyl sticker of the book’s cover art. A lot of time and care clearly goes into the design of each chapbook, which is one more reason to own a copy.
***
Graham Foust – A Mouthful in California. Flood Editions, 2009. $14.95. Reviewed by Clayton T. Michaels
Graham Foust is a deceptive kind of poet. On the printed page, his work seems innocuous enough; he writes tightly paced, well-crafted poems that are visually inviting with their short lines and concise stanzas. The poems themselves, however, while often quite clever in their use of language, are often impenetrable, leaving the reader little to hold onto after finishing a collection. So, while it’s easy to admire his earlier work, books like Necessary Stranger or Leave the Room to Itself, for its craft, his poems aren’t always easy to like. This is not the case, however, with Foust’s latest, A Mouth in California. The same elements of craft are undeniably present, but there’s a new readability to his poetry that easily makes this his most enjoyable collection to date.
And part of what makes this collection so satisfying is it is more various (and often more expansive) than some of his previous work. There are still the shorter, elliptical poems that characterized much of his earlier work, but the poems are less nebulous and invite multiple readings. Take, for example, the poem,
“That Panic”:
When your head
was as busy
and indiscriminate
as flames, you kept
on sucking.
Given thinking’s
blown gland, another
breath was at least –
or was at best –
not nothing.
The poem still tends toward the inscrutable, and the images still fascinate on an intellectual level, but there’s an emotional resonance, especially in the last few lines, that isn’t as readily apparent in some of his earlier work.
The real revelations in this collection, though, come in the longer poems, some of which, like the second stanza of “From a Mouth in California,” even approach the conversational:
Watch the world and it’ll crack.
You’ll see star dirt, sure, but let the sun
not be a lesson. There’s a bruise at the end
of the light still hurts from way back.
There’s this disease runs from “quit-
to-keep-staying” to “pressed-
for-safekeeping” and yes,
you can recycle it.
The people bells are different from
the God bells, but how?
The hell’s a ghost before it gets to us?
You are only not thinking out loud now.
Again, there’s still the inscrutability that one would expect from Foust, and the wordplay, but there’s a clarity to the internal logic of the poem that makes the poem, and the collection as a whole, engaging on multiple levels.
None of this is meant to say that Foust has become more mature or accessible or anything similarly as contrived. Graham Foust is still writing distinctly Graham Foust poems; these Graham Foust poems just happen to be the most satisfying ones he’s written to date.
***
Dean Young’s The Art of Recklessness: Poetry as Assertive Force and Contradiction
a review by Ryan Smith
I’ve always sworn that the day I actually use the cliché designation ‘a tour de force’ is the day I should stop writing reviews, but I can honestly say that phrase, at its most genuine sentiment, is what needs to be bannered across the cover of this book, practically as a genre all its own.
I should admit some bias here–as a young poet directly in the middle of earning the degree everyone and their grandmother has an opinion on, the MFA, this book felt almost supernaturally conscious of me and many of my own convictions and concerns regarding poetry. Young’s accusations are nearly universally my own; his passionate beliefs are ones I myself share and his articulation of them not only offers the welcome comfort of knowing that I Am Not Alone In This Room, but also that they have been spelled out far more brilliantly than I could hope to.
The accusation here, to boil many down to one, is ‘simply’ that poetry has been relegated far too often (and far too easily) to the realm of craft, with all the neatness, perfection, and of course streamlined efficiency one might associate with that word. What has become neglected, Young asserts, is the primitive, the way that poetry might be seen to spring forth both out of and in response to our ‘first needs’, the so-called human pang, a kind of emotional and spiritual dialogue with everyone and no one, transcribed literally.
The ‘answer’, to use a somewhat reductive label, is what one might expect, which is to say the opposite of the above. A return to this primitive, a dismissal of what Young calls ‘The dry-ice fog of experimental poetry’, among other examples of what we might term gimmickry. Young’s convictions seem to be settled bravely into a renaissance of sincerity, the very beginning of which is an acceptance of its validity.
Many of those even tangentially aware of the landscape of contemporary poetry will probably be quite familiar with the two poles of current belief, envisioned in this book as ramparts of sorts. On one extreme we find, forgive the term, ‘old school’ poets that hold firm beliefs regarding tradition, convention, ideas about indoctrination (watch them cringe at the word while getting red-in-the-face at those who run wild of being pulled in), and…well you get the idea. On the other we have newer, often times (but not always) younger poets, experimental in nature (they’ll get red too, just refuse to call them avant-garde!) that denounce all forms for the previously mentioned.
In this book, Young’s brilliance is his honest and often nearly incandescent way of finding a middle ground that in no way assumes any kind of compromise; this is not a matter of grey area, it’s a matter of worrying about shades to begin with. Both ‘sides’ have got it wrong, and they got that way by thinking there were really sides at all and then worrying about where they wanted to stand–often more sincerely, where they wanted to be seen standing.
On the very first page, Young proclaims “I believe in the divinity of profligacy”, and this serves perfectly enough as a capstone on the book as a whole. The poet must allow for mess, total carnage and wreckage, must not be afraid to be stained. Forget the cleanly ritualized balance of free writing and revising; one should organically work into the other. One idea among many, but the heart of the book.
This book is not a manifesto. Young’s aim is not to shake anyone up through hyperbole and insult. In many ways I perceived this book to be a prose equivalent to the kind of poetic activity Young both admires and hungers to see more of; there are no agendas here, no gimmicks or jingles. Young isn’t trying to sell anyone anything in this book, he’s only trying to take his own advice and get back to a primitive drive, the drive for a ‘first need’ to see this kind of discussion about poetry going on, any way that it has to happen.
Young’s love and pride for poetry as well as art as a whole is really the sheen on this book. This book defies any accusation regarding its own sincerity, and the effect on at least this reader is proof positive of its prescription’s validity, and efficacy.
***
This Admirable Miry Clay - Talia Reed
The world’s in trouble. Does anyone care? Talia Reed does. “We suffer through this generation. . .” her chapbook begins, and she proceeds to tell us how using many arresting images and strange juxtapositions (“A routine of curve-fill and become”). Life is alarming and something to get through – and get through we muist – though “[n]othing can save us.” Reed’s subject matter is the quotidian: the marriage, the family of origin, the shopping trips, the funerals. Her style, though, is neither confessional nor experimental, and she employs a more formal rhythm and rhyme when needed. This from “Marriage Lullaby”":
after all the trash is drug outside,
after the draughty house is dry:
The soothing rhythm belies the message, and that’s the point. We will never stop searhing for comfort, however, and in the poem “Legends” she mentions those tangible objects that help us: “The Indian dream-catchers [that] dangle. . .from rearview mirrows/and angle statues everywhere.” These are the talismans, she notices, people use to stave off doom. Reed mostly observes and doesn’t judge.
Here’s a poet who pays attention to white space. She says in “Disintegrate,” “Life is burning and we’re all afraid/of what’s being made. . .” That horrific image next to this beautiful art that chips away the excess and creates absence so that what’s left are poems in their spare and silent form. What’s being made, in contrast, is art that cures and “some hearts can’t catch their breath.” This Admirable Miry Clay is a good first book and Talia Reed is a poet to watch.
Nancy Botkin
Indiana University South Bend
