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Rust Belt Boy: Stories of an American Childhood is an outstanding portrait of Ambridge, Pennsylvania, a steel town which, like so many similar communities, helped shape and build the working America we know today. Gentle and loving, Paul Hertneky pays homage to the hometown he desired to leave for greater, unknown places. Hertneky’s descriptions left me yearning to travel to a version of the city that only exists in history books and his memoir.
Ben and Sandra Doller dive straight into a foreboding and brutally honest real-life account of their cohabitation with their newest roommate, cancer. The Yesterday Project was co-written by the Dollers in the wake of a life-threatening diagnosis: melanoma cancer, stage 3. The project lasts a total of 32 days with each writer taking a moment each day to go back and recollect the previous day’s experiences.
Where We Go When All We Were Is Gone is a twelve story collection that throws readers headlong into the deepest depths of the human heart. Each story explores the real life vulnerability people deal with in their darkest hours while seamlessly enchanting the reader with characters that are magically fantastic. Readers will find themselves lost in the mix of these lovely yet terrifying stories.
You may have noticed that today’s personal essays are rarely defined by the five-paragraph model—intro, three body paragraphs, conclusion—that is generally taught in English composition classes. What remains standard, though, is the significance of the personal element. Creating Nonfiction: Twenty Essays and Interviews with the Writers exhibits wonderful examples, and the interviews are enough to encourage current and future essayists to keep writing.
Prowl around Brooklyn back in 1995 and you’ll catch retired homicide detective Emil Milosec digging in his garden—well, actually, his late wife’s garden. What he unearths is a woman’s pinkie finger and an opal ring. The ring belonged to his wife. The finger didn’t. Such is the premise for Janyce Stefan-Cole’s novel, The Detective’s Garden: A Love Story and Meditation on Murder.
Available Light: Philip Booth and the Gift of Place is as much a travelogue of picturesque Maine, and especially the town of Castine, as it is a biography of the late poet Philip Booth. In Jeanne Braham’s tidy book, the town and the poet are pretty much inseparable.
The surreal collides with the real in Souvenirs & Other Stories by Matt Tompkins. While the situations presented are undoubtedly strange—a father evaporates and joins the water system, a man watches the world burn after a botched eye surgery, mountain lions move into a family’s basement, knickknacks and furniture appear in a woman’s apartment—they’re still grounded in reality.
It’s a mistake to call Invincible Summers a ‘coming-of-age story,’ even though that’s what the publishers say on the back cover blurb. Following Claudia Goodwin through eleven (not always consecutive) summers from the time she was six years old, I never got the sense that this was a character in search of herself, looking to grow into some kind of womanhood that was waiting for her—the womanhood defined by the 1960s – 1970s. Nor was she running away, breaking away, struggling to be or become. There was none of that. Instead, what I experienced reading Invincible Summers was a zen-steady character whose ever-changing and unpredictable world was nothing out of the ordinary from what millions of lives look like, if only we could read the lives of those millions of people who surround us. Claudia is a girl, and then young woman, who lives by responding to events, who makes choices which determine the route she takes as she ages, and who explores and comes to better understand the life she has lived.
In twelve stories linked by the bonds of family and friendship, The Enigma of Iris Murphy captures the lives of those affected by the life and works of public defender, Iris Murphy. Characters across the United States—from Omaha to Cincinnati to the Rosebud Reservation—are forever changed by Iris Murphy, in big and small ways. Author Maureen Millea Smith carefully weaves narratives together so that tensions grow throughout the book, and the collection truly reads as a novel in stories.
Any novel which opens with an assisted suicide posing as a public art happening is a book after my own heart. Such is the case in Bruce Bauman’s latest work, Broken Sleep, a story which gathers an eclectic band of characters, each involved in their own personal quests and forming a sort of modern day Wizard of Oz. Broken Sleep contains many a scene which may leave readers feeling slightly guilty for laughing. Case in point; the aforementioned opening gambit.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
“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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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 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.
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.
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: 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.
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.”
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.
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 [.]
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.)
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”
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 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”
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”
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”
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”
“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”
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”
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 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”
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”
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”
“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”
