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written by Diana Arterian
Victoria Chang, author of the acclaimed and incredible poetry collection Obit (Copper Canyon), shares her to-read pile with us this month. She writes: "I usually have stacks and stacks of books lying around for a few juries I serve on. This year is different because many books are coming in via email in PDF form. But here are a few books that I'm in the midst of reading or have started. I look forward to reading so many more this year and am just beginning to get my bearings. I think it's going to be an exciting year in literature."
Ruth Stone, The Essential Ruth Stone
Robert Hass, Summer Snow
Traci Brimball, Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod
Danez Smith, Homie
Natalie Diaz, Postcolonial Love Poem
Marianne Chan, All Heathens
Natasha Trethewey, Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir
Carolyn Forché, In the Lateness of the World
Jim Harrison, Collected Ghazals
Tess Taylor, Last West: Roadsongs for Dorothea Lange
Stephanie Burt, After Callimachus
Sejal Shah, This Is One Way to Dance
E.J. Koh, The Magical Language of Others
TIMELY/TIMELESS TITLES
Doing a business-as-usual post isn't how I want to approach the beginning of a month, considering the protests and uprisings around the country. So, in lieu of my own to-read pile, I've amassed a list of anti-racists reading lists for people who are interested in educating themselves further about what is at the heart of the unrest and mobilizing action across the United States right now. You can likely find a majority of these at your local library (which, if it's closed because of COVID, may offer a digital copy). If you want to buy a copy, I recommend BookShop.org as an ethical alternative the bookseller than shall not be named. I've also included a handful of PDFs/links to powerful and important literature/media that directly impacted my comprehension of how Black people are forced to live and move within the United States, as well as pieces that illuminate elements of whiteness and white mobility.
PDFS/LINKS
James Baldwin – "On Being White…and Other Lies"
James Baldwin, Harry Belafonte, Sidney Poitier, Marlon Brando, Charlton Heston – "Hollywood Roundtable" (30-minute video)
Gwendolyn Brooks – Riot
Ta-Nehisi Coates – "The Case for Reparations"
Kimberlé Crenshaw – "Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color" (where the term "intersectionality" comes from)
Angela Davis – "Rape, Racism and the Myth of the Black Rapist"
Angela Davis – Interview in Black Power Mixed Tape (4-minute excerpt)
Peggy McIntosh – "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack" (where the term "white privilege" comes from)
The End of Policing is available as a free e-book (have not read, yet)
ANTI-RACIST READING LIST ROUNDUP
EDIT: First, a really compelling and urgent essay on what, exactly, these lists do, are about, promise, but potentially fail to do by Lauren Michele Jackson: "What Is an Anti-Racist Reading List For?"
Ibram X. Kendi via New York Times(and his book How to Be an Anti-Racist is on many of the lists below)
Harper's
LitHub
Litquake
Loyalty Bookstores
Vroman's Bookstore
40+ Books for Anti-Racist Teachers
If you've gotten this far, and need some relief in something cute (which I know helps me), enjoy this absurd cat picture (source):
Victoria Chang's To-Read Pile + Timely/Timeless Anti-Racist Literature (June) was last modified: June 4th, 2020 by Diana Arterian
\m/ New Hotness \m/CommunityPoetryRequired Reading
Bad Poet: A Big Heart Floating on Dark Seas
written by Sheldon Lee Compton
House of Vlad Press
For years now Brian Alan Ellis has been serving up original voices from House of Vlad Press. Among several other titles he will release over the next year will be his new collection of poetry, Bad Poet. Leave it to Ellis to say a great deal in the title alone. But that has been his modus operandi for a long time; he's trying to be honest in every word. The first words of Bad Poet follow the table of contents and states simply, "I write bad poetry…" Two pages later, Ellis reminds us this: "…and I don't care."
And so begins his new collection.
Throughout the poems, Ellis continues his starkly honest evaluation of himself in all his racked emotions and self-doubts, often bordering on self-hate. But beneath it all there's this shimmer lying one layer below the dread, there are moments of small hope, hope that flashes just long enough to enable the reader to continue on with this confession.
A perfect example of how the confession becomes a call for strength comes late in the book and reads, "Don't give up./You need to continue being miserable just so you can give other miserable people/the strength to go on being miserable." It becomes clear pretty quickly that, despite the self-deprecating wit and charm, Ellis is the big heart floating on a dark sea in search of connection. He says again and again in so many interesting and imaginative ways that to live in this world means to be slowly broken by the general weight of surviving. But not all is lost. Ellis also calls out from the dark sea to say that even death can be dealt with on our own terms, titling one poem, "Dying is pretty goth, meaning we're all kind of goth in the end." So, a confession, one fused with Ellis's own brand of playfulness and goodwill. Such as this poem, included here in its entirety and titled "If your brain still works then there are no safe spaces."
Perhaps I seem easy going to some,
but inside I'm really just a person trying
to escape a burning building.
With this new collection, Ellis is not only confessing, he is acting as rescuer, a liberator who is battle-scarred and full of insight, a voice to friends in need. His statement that he might seem "easy going" to some of his readers is his way of directly speaking to the possibility that, in the midst of his word play and satire, he hopes his larger message isn't lost: yes, the world is difficult, life is hard, but you are not alone. Ellis is the host standing in the doorway saying, Come on in, join the club; we have jackets.
And this is more than a poet hoping to share with the reader that he has been through difficult times and was strong enough to make it through. Ellis is too sincere for that to be his only point. He is saying that you can make it through, too. He is saying this in the most grounded and truthful way possible. But Ellis is at his most powerful when openly contradicting himself to reveal his true center, such as with this poem, in which the title creates the underlying point:
Being my own therapist may or may not be going okay
Will someone please tell me
what's wrong with me,
mainly so I can just ignore them
and continue being wrong?
The body of the poem is straight-forwardly saying the speaker is fine without input from anyone as to his general well-being. However, the title leaves room for the possibility that the speaker may be completely wrong in his self-assessment and may even welcome help if it were made available.
The take away should be this: Brian Alan Ellis is not a bad poet; Brian Alan Ellis does not write bad poetry. His poems cut swiftly to his and our baser instincts with more genuine honesty than nearly anything else being written. In fact, with this collection, he has written his most complex and deeply moving work to date. The result is a collection of poems that question the reality of an easy or normal life while, in the same breath, harboring that small refrain of hope rising up beneath the hurt for the hearts of anyone willing to listen. My advice is to do just that—listen closely, and learn what Ellis is truly offering.
Visit House of Vlad Press and learn more about Bad Poet, along with several other HOV titles.
Bad Poet: A Big Heart Floating on Dark Seas was last modified: April 2nd, 2020 by Sheldon Lee Compton
Farooq Ahmed + Diana Arterian's To-Read Piles (October)
Farooq Ahmed, author of the very recently published and rad novel Kansastan, shares his fab to-read pile for the month of October. Check it out:
Not Everyone is Special by Josh Denslow
A Brief Alphabet of Torture by Vi Khi Nao
Exhalation by Ted Chiang
Meyer by Jonathan Lang
Tropic of Kansas by Christopher Brown
Former Possessions of the Spanish Empire by Michelle Peñaloza
Like a Love Story by Abdi Nazemian
The Testaments by Margaret Atwood
Kochland by Christopher Leonard
At a residency. My book pile is a little different here (and there are several more books en route).
– RESIDENCY BOOKS [not all hyperlinked as time is precious] –
Animal, Dorothea Lasky; Homesick, Jennifer Croft; The Cancer Journals, Audre Lorde; The Line Becomes a River, Francisco Cantú; On Being Ill, Virginia Wolff; Discipline and Punish, Foucault; Time Is The Thing A Body Moves Through, T. Fleischmann; Grief Sequence, Prageeta Sharma; Joy Enough, Sarah McColl; Mend, Kwoya Fagin Maples; The Tree Witch, Peter Viereck (on the shelf here, looks apt for October); The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel van der Kolk; No Archive Will Restore You, Julietta Singh; The Complete Illuminated Books, William Blake, Queer Blake, ed. Helen P. Bruder and Tristanne Connolly; William Blake and Gender, Mangus Ankarsjö, Heart Berries, Terese Marie Mailhot
– WAITING FOR ME AT HOME [and probably many more I've forgotten — I know Farooq's book is there!] –
Conference of the Birds, Farid Ud-din Attar; Potted Meat, Steven Dunn; Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado; Motion Studies, Jena Osman; The Winter Garden Photograph, Reina María Rodríguez (trans. Kristin Dykstra); Still Nowhere an Empty Vastness, Roberto Tejada; The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish, Katya Apekina; Uncanny Valley, Anna Wiener
Farooq Ahmed + Diana Arterian's To-Read Piles (October) was last modified: October 4th, 2019 by Diana Arterian
Nikki Darling + Diana Arterian's To-Read Piles (April)
Nikki Darling's fab debut novel Fade into You is recently out from Feminist Press! It's burning a hole on my shelf and I cannot wait to read it. She shared her to-read pile along with some pithy comments on each this month:
Artist Johnnie JungleGuts — meditations on therapy, dating apps, gay hook up culture and time spent as a research assistant in various jungles and frozen landscapes studying wildlife remains one of the best books I've read in the last few years and I return to often. (Johnnie JungleGuts)
A Lie of the Mind with the poem a "War In Heaven" by Joseph Chaikin is an all-time favorite. I reread the Chaikin poem often when I have writers block. (Sam Shepard)
Hard To Love, just started it but it's easy to love a book with an essay called "Spinsters." I much dug it. (Braillen Hopper)
East of Eden. Like the AA big book, I return to it often and find things I missed before. Always something new to discover in this masterpiece. (John Steinbeck)
Jessica Hopper's Night Moves about her years in early 0's Chicago gave my winter life. Her writing is alive, electric and pulses on the page. Quick staccato sentences.
12&12 gotta stay sobes to keep writing! This book is my spiritual home.
Anne Carson Autobiography in Red. Anne Carson is such a freak. So amazing this experiment in language and suspension of disbelief. Not on the table, but Dodie Bellamy's When the Sick Rule the World has an amazing meta-Anne moment.
bell hooks All About Love. Please let me absorb this knowledge and live it as truth.
I am really proud of how much I read on my shelf before going to AWP Conference and buying three (!) totebags' worth of books. Fun reading for months ahead of me. I'm hoping my shelf doesn't fall…
– NEWIES –
Roll Deep, Major Jackson
Killing Floor, Ai
Chateau Wichman, Ben Pease
A Sand Book, Ariana Reines
Mercury, Ariana Reines
Life on Mars, Tracy K. Smith
The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Michael Ondaatje
On Some Hispano Luso Miniaturists, Mark Faunlagui
Lucy 72, Ronaldo V. Wilson
Dissolve, Sherwin Bitsui
The Beekeeper, Dunya Mikhail
The Lice, W.S. Merwin
The White Card, Claudia Rankine
Potted Meat, Steven Dunn
Eternal Friendship, Anouck Durand
The Cancer Journals, Audre Lorde
Calling a Wolf a Wolf, Kaveh Akbar
Joy Enough, Sarah McColl
Why I'm Sad, Dorothea Lasky
Autobiography of Death, Kim Hyesoon
Monsters I Have Been, Kenji C. Liu
Two Hunters, Marina Blitshteyn
Deaf Republic, Ilya Kaminsky
Landscape with Sex and Violence, Lynn Melnick
Some Animal, Ely Shipley
Eleanor, or, the Rejection of the Progress of Love, Anna Moschovakis
Home Remedies, Xuan Juliana Wang
The Line Becomes a River, Francisco Cantú
Spectra, Ashley Toliver
Indecency, Justin Phillip Reed
Austerity, Marion Bell
The Empathy Exams, Leslie Jamison
Orient, Nicholas Gulig
Green-Wood, Allison Cobb
Black Leopard, Red Wolf, Marlon James (in progress)
– OLDIES –
Conference of the Birds, Farid Ud-din Attar; Confessions, St. Augustine; Known and Strange Things, Teju Cole; Severance, Ling Ma; Magical Negro, Morgan Parker; Fade into You, Nikki Darling; The Collected Schizophrenias, Esmé Weijun Wang; Experiments in Joy, Gabrielle Civil
Nikki Darling + Diana Arterian's To-Read Piles (April) was last modified: April 5th, 2019 by Diana Arterian
Required ReadingReview
To Laugh or Cry: The Complexities of Willie Davis's Nightwolf
Willie Davis's debut novel Nightwolf, published in July from 7.13 Books, moves fluidly through the streets of Lexington, Kentucky and explores the ties of family and place and friends, loss, memory, and longing, as well as anything written this past year. That's a lot for a first-time novelist to take on, but Davis seems to ease through it with little problem. However, a novel this tight and effective doesn't happen easily. To say that would take away from Davis's huge accomplishment.
Nightwolf reads like a slow fever dream in some sections and in others there is a starkness to the realism that hits the reader with a near-tangible force. Davis's greatest craft achievement in this book is the way he threads these two literary worlds together. Though it may in fact be his second greatest achievement. The first would be the characters he has created.
Set plot aside for the moment. Nearly everything that pops about this novel can be credited to Davis's immense talent to give us characters who are real and interesting and dynamic. The protagonist, Milo Byers, for instance, is certainly a not too distant cousin of Gregory Mcdonald's character I.M. Fletcher, better known as Fletch and better known also as being played by Chevy Chase in the film adaptations. But then I digress. The thing you need to know about Milo Byers is that you're going to be hard pressed to come across a funnier, wise-cracking character in a novel. I would offer one or two examples, but, seriously, just read the book. They're everywhere.
And, just as importantly, Milo is a tragic figure, along with his friend, the even more tragic Meander Casey (how's that for an incredibly good character name?). But in Davis's hands, tragedy becomes a chance for growth and introspection rather than moving the narrative into overly serious territory. And when his characters are doing this, Davis is at his best — plain spoken, honest, and insightful. But it's not all fields of deeper meaning. There is fun to be had in Nightwolf. A book with a fair amount of crime and violence, there are some of the usual suspects, including a roughneck named Hallahan, who is every bit as nasty as you picture him. There's the wise old man, if you're interests veer more toward the Jungian, and, of course, the enigmatic and entirely mysterious Nightwolf, the graffiti artist whose identity mysteriously twists throughout the narrative.
A novel replete with the disturbing and seedy aspects of a smaller city and rife with characters that should only ever be referred to as splendid creations from the midst of that torn community, Nightwolf will certainly not be the last we hear from Willie Davis. Davis undoubtedly has more wit and cleverness to deliver to us his message about seeking truth and purpose in life. There are books to come. Be sure of it.
To Laugh or Cry: The Complexities of Willie Davis's Nightwolf was last modified: September 8th, 2018 by Sheldon Lee Compton
Required ReadingReviewSpotlight
Offutt's memoir My Father, the Pornographer puts his talents and insight on full display
Chris Offutt has the combination that award-winning author Adam Johnson says is made up of the writer who is both talented at an important level and also has something important to say. Rarely does a writer have both, Johnson says. In Offutt's latest memoir My Father, the Pornographer this combination is on full display.
The child of a writer, Offutt grew up immersed in the world of a working man of letters. The demands on him and his siblings to remain quiet at home, the time spent watching his brother and sister while his parents were away at sci-fi conventions (Andrew J. Offutt was both a prolific and heralded author of fantasy and sci-fi novels), and, most of all, and this coming following his father's death, facing the rather overwhelming reality that his dad was also the author of hundreds of porn novels. Offutt sums this discovery up perfectly in the book, saying, "My father was a workhorse in the field of written pornography. After five decades he died in harness."
In his usual fluid prose, Offutt gives an account of his task compiling organizing his father's work into a comprehensive bibliography in this latest memoir. But how Offutt handled this task alone in no way sums up the large, human view the book projects. We learn, as we do with all of memoirs to date, as much about Offutt himself as we do about the subject of the book. In this case, his formidable years growing up in the tiny east Kentucky town of Haldeman, Kentucky, and then later, when he's dealing with the fallout from his father's death.
A great example of how Offutt managed in this book to keep a larger, human view in place while also telling the story of both himself and his father, comes fully into the light in the following passage:
"A few years later Dad began calling me late at night, maudlin from bourbon. He said he's been thinking about suicide. He'd even picked out the place — the bathroom shower — so it'd be easy for Mom to clean the mess. He figured he'd use a shotgun but had run into a problem. His arms were too short to reach the trigger. My first thought was practical: use a forked stick."
And writing — the act of creating — is also featured, often and beautifully, such as this passage in which Offutt speaks to his motivation to continue working on the craft.
"On the wall of my room I fastened a mirror directly above my typewriter. Surrounding the mirror were photographs of writers whose work I admired. My only hope of joining their company was sitting at the typewriter. If I didn't write, the mirror was empty. It was a powerful inducement to work."
For all that's accomplished in My Father, the Pornographer it could how candid Offutt is that stands out the most. His account of his father's life as a writer and his own ways of dealing with his father and the rest of his family is told in the very straightforward way that is a staple of his work. Recounting various events are done so with that same practicality he brought to the conversation about suicide on the phone with his father. But rather than what could have been a stoic, heartless narrative of two lives, Offutt's book pulses with heart and courage and purpose, with insights on every page.
There are very few writers producing better memoirs than Offutt and My Father, the Pornographer is further proof of that fact. Should you enjoy this offering, it would do you good to add to your reading list his other powerful works of nonfiction including The Same River Twice and No Heroes: A Memoir of Coming Home.
Offutt's memoir My Father, the Pornographer puts his talents and insight on full display was last modified: August 10th, 2018 by Sheldon Lee Compton
Literary SceneRequired ReadingReviewSmall Press
A Review of Shya Scanlon's IN THIS ALONE IMPULSE
Before opening Shya Scanlon's In This Alone Impulse, the cover art is already setting the tone for his trapeze act with all the same tools any writer can find. It's just that Scanlon has a certain ear, an instinct.
The cover is minimalistic – a gray background interrupted only by the title in red at the top left, Scanlon's name in white at bottom left, and, just off-center, what is left of a broken pencil lead, along with a fast mark, hectic, rushed, something incomplete but with a breaking power. Something impulsive.
Inside are prose poems, each seven lines in length. With the first, "A Bargain," Scanlon puts his style on the table for the reader to consider, easing him into the broken logic of language, of theme and tone, that will tie this book in a spider's web, both beautiful and strong. Here is the writer offering us a "bargain" on something brand new in the canon of prose poetry.
"I have a house. I have a house. It is not my house that I have. It is not my house, anymore…A have now house about me anymore."
The narrator could be trying to sell you the house, a good deal, a bargain. The narrator might just as well be talking about himself. But one thing is certain – we are in different hands, a writer taking a bold chance at the "word level."
The reader may not at once adjust to Scanlon's syntactic innovation. The risk is a practice in building trust, coming to know this author's voice so the stories can be told in a way that only he could tell them.
A key thing found early on is the use of the second-person point of view. Throughout much of the book, with a handful of exceptions, this is employed. But not exclusively.
In stories such as "Six miles south" the former John Hawkes Fiction Prize winner also speaks of "we" and "I" within the same story, grouping them with the second-person "you." In this story that decision gives the piece the feel of a letter, something shared among good friends or current enemies, those close conversations found only among people with knowledge of one another's pain, happiness, hope.
In "Six miles south" these three points of view are wed and rightly so as there is a sadness of tone beneath the sharing, one of learning and of growth – all the ingredients of any close relationship.
"You said something new, and let me learn, and I passed this along, and passed it wider, a broken kind of wideness, a small and splintered thing. We sat together and watched it spread…"
But these are some of the technical aspects within this book and, though important, are almost secondary to the work as a whole. Brian Evenson says of IN THIS ALONE IMPULSE: "…there's really nothing else out there like it." It's as true a thing said of a book in a long while. Whether it is with a surreal piece, such as "Skeleton clock" (I went into outer space this morning.) or a piece about longing and self-worth as with "Imagine next" (Erin, sugar biscuit, you took me in like you have now taken in a dog.) Scanlon is pushing an emotion off the page. And even in this, he moves easily from one form to another such as the straight-forward narrative approach in "Daresies: Backsies" or the linguistically experimental dialogue of "A neighboring insert."
The best part of the trapeze act? The fact that never is the core of this book lost amid these risks and experimentation. Scanlon achieves across 59 prose poems not as much a linked storyline as a consistent feeling of something unmentioned but known to us all, the inner voices of our secret lives.
A Review of Shya Scanlon's IN THIS ALONE IMPULSE was last modified: November 2nd, 2017 by Sheldon Lee Compton
FictionHot DamnLiterary SceneRequired ReadingReview
A Review of Best Small Fictions 2017
Guest Editor Amy Hempel
Series Editor Tara L. Masih
Braddock Avenue Books (September, 2017)
$13 (Braddock Avenue Books)
$16 (Amazon)
My general thoughts about the Best Small Fictions series are probably no secret. I've called both BSF 2015 and BSF 2016 the most important books published in their respective years.
This year is no different.
The most important book published this year is now and will prove to be Best Small Fictions 2017.
Now that's we've established that once again, I will say this year has been a particularly good year for flash fiction. The New Yorker has decided to publish flash stories throughout the summer (though some of those stories beg the question as to whether The New Yorker and those of us writing flash fiction actually agree on what constitutes the form). This year, BSF series editor Tara L. Masih worked with a writer who is arguably one of the best ever at this beautiful and supremely difficult form, the astonishing Amy Hempel. Hempel herself has said this of the series: "[T]his striking new series…has quickly become essential reading."
Yes, it has, Amy.
This year the selections are as strong as ever. The usual cast is present with veteran flash fiction authors such as Scott Garson, Jen Knox, Randall Brown, and Sherrie Flick, among others, while also peppering in some iconic short-short form writers like Joy Williams, Stuart Dybek, and Robert Scotellaro. But don't let these big names and longtime flash writers lead you too far afield from the others included in BSF this year. The talent is spread around.
Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello's story "The Sea Urchin" was the first story to stop me in my tracks this year. First published at Paper Darts, Cancio-Bello takes what could be a basic memory from childhood and creates a picture perfect example of flash fiction, employing nearly all the usual techniques in the most delightful ways, beginning with that always important first line: "Grandmother kept a diver's knife strapped to her thigh."
She continues the story and gives the reader a marriage of the beautiful and practical, along with strange tradition and other-worldliness.
"On my birthday, she brought me a ball of spines in a bucket, lifted its bit of ocean into my cupped hands. The creature's round mouth explored the cracks of my palm, tasting the salt on my skin, recoiling. An offering like the pincushions I often brought my mother, every needle threaded with a different color. Grandmother boiled garlic, soybeans, salt into broth, ladled the seaweed soup into a white bowl. She turned the urchin and broke it open, scooped out the ocher roe with a spoon, dropped it in among the kelp."
Another story as deserving for inclusion in this year's edition is the flash piece "Silent Hill" by Ras Mashramani, originally published in Pank. Mashramani takes a Playstation game from the late 1990s and creates a flashback world to when the character lost herself in the game while escaping a world in which her father was dying.
"There was a first generation Playstation video game about a young father who lost his child in a town where it snowed ash. Together you stumbled through foggy whiteness in the creature infested streets looking for her. Some early mornings you passed out in front of the living room TV screen watching hidden monsters behind your eyelids, ash in your hair, a fire burning forever underground. For so long it had been you and your father just like in the game running from stuccoed apartment to stuccoed apartment."
We are firmly placed in this world of father and daughter, both in the context of the video game and also the reality of the story. And when we find later on that the character finds herself allowing a boy much older than her named Marquise to live out a young lapgirl fantasy while she loses herself in the game, it's both a revealing and a supremely sad moment. But more than that it's a brilliant technique and wholly original, even for a form that is innately original in nearly any and all concepts of fiction. When a story stands out in such a way, it's no surprise to find it between the covers of BSF.
"You did this on the point of Marquise's knee, engrossed in game play, addicted to the focused labored attention of a teenaged boy with sexual behavior issues and the fear of the screen, the fear of touch, wanting the fear, flattening all the affect and focusing it into this character, the Father, and his quest for his kid in this ghost town, and it was hard to disentangle Silent Hill from Paramount, California, and the neglected section 8 pool and automatic gates that made up the Sierra Gardens apartment complex."
This year's edition of BSF is a clear indication that the series is nowhere near a slowing down point, but is, instead, gaining momentum and prestige throughout the world of literature. When the history of flash fiction as a vital form is told, Best Small Fictions and Masih will be in the opening chapter. Of this there should be no doubt.
A Review of Best Small Fictions 2017 was last modified: August 13th, 2017 by Sheldon Lee Compton
Required Reading: Whereas / Lay Ghost / Zero to Three / There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce
written by Janice Lee
Whereas by Layli Long Soldier (Graywolf Press, 2017)
This is one of the most important poetry collections you'll read this year. This is the book to give to one who asks, Why poetry? What can poetry do? This is a fierce and gentle book, an affirming and questioning one, and one which understands that the kinds of political resistance we attempt to build in the broken and devastated places that we occupy have everything to do with our relationship to language, to each other, and to the earth, and that the care and precision with which we construct our poems and love letters to each other is a care that should also translate into an aware and sensitive existence, that we should move through this world we share with that same care. We long for and we remember, yet we also move and touch. We love while we trample. This book is a gift. You need only receive it with a completely open heart.
I begin a line about white buttes that bend chiseled faces and click stone eyelids at night, but abandon it. Instead, I push my love into this world and mail you a summer letter. From mailbox to door, you read the commas aloud. I've become a wife of bottled water comma black liner at the lash comma and sleeves to the wrist. These weeks alone alone comma I pull my body to a table of empty chairs and sometimes I cannot stop the impulse to command. Alone alone I instruct sit down comma eat up comma and I write in detail to hush an echo comma the rupture of a fault line.
Lay Ghost by Nathaniel Mackey (Black Ocean, 2016)
The elation of a boy tugging at his mother's sleeve but she is crying and the tears collect quickly and evaporate quickly and when he blinks the mother is gone. The desire of salt as sacred and snarling and adrift and consumed and sensing and a growing pile on the side of the road near a pool of muddy water. The abandonment of this world for that world or that world for this world because the prospect of war as a remedy for loneliness calls more often than one would think.
zero to three by F. Douglas Brown (University of Georgia Press, 2014)
In many ways, this book deals with issues around parenting, fatherhood, gestation. But too, the growth that occurs in a child alongside the parent reveals truths about parallel creation in general, how bodies are intertwined and how relationships between people are more complex and more interconnected and more distant than we often realize. What is seen in a momentary silence? What is felt from giving trust? Which are the actions we repeat, unknowingly, and upon which expanses do we lean on for support?
There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé by Morgan Parker (Tin House Books, 2017)
This book hardly needs an introduction. Simultaneously fierce, smart, vulnerable, fearless, and prescient, this book offers its title as more than just a thesis for existence in today's pop culture-infested society. Probe further, go further, look further. Terrance Hayes writes, "Morgan Parker is a fearlessly forward and forward-thinking literary star."
The President Has Never Said the Word 'Black'
To the extent that one begins
to wonder if he is broken.
It is not so difficult to open
teeth and brass taxes.
The president is all like
five on the bleep hand side.
The president be like
we lost a young boy today.
is guaranteed for all fellow Americans.
He is nobody special like us.
He says brothers and sisters.
What kind of bodies are moveable
and feasts. What color are visions.
When he opens his mouth
a chameleon is inside, starving.
Required Reading: Whereas / Lay Ghost / Zero to Three / There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce was last modified: March 28th, 2017 by Janice Lee
Required Reading: The Impossible Fairy Tale / Inherit / Recitation / Sonata in K
The Impossible Fairy Tale by Han Yujoo; Trans. by Janet Hong (Graywolf Press, 2017)
I love this book. The first chapter of the book simply reads:
Dog.
See the dog.
See the dog drifting by.
Immediately I was sucked in and blown away. So much about this book is about seeing the unseen, the subtleties in gestures and actions and movements, so much is strange and enigmatic, horrifying and violent, uncomfortably far and close and familiar. Who are these characters and why do they do the things they do? A brilliant meditation on the vileness of humanity and the ethics of narrative and storytelling, this book shows you the necessity (and dangers) of watching, listening, making.
Park Minsu remembers the bird. Pigeons and sparrows with no inkling of the fate that awaited them would sometimes fly in through the open window in the hallway. Anticipating such opportunities, the children carried slingshots in their pockets. Park Minsu was responsible for quickly shutting the window in order to trap the bird. The children loaded their slingshots with marbles, a marble bore through the bird, and the bird dropped to the ground. Then they put the dead bird in the slingshot, the bloody, nearly featherless pulp became a pellet to be flung, malicious boys aimed for the backs of girls' necks, and the girls who were hit shrieked. The boys laughed hysterically at this sight, unaware of the fate they would share with the bird, and were in turn beaten to a pulp by the teacher.
Inherit by Ginger Ko (Sidebrow Books, 2017)
God. This book is devastating. In the way, as a woman, we move through the world, the constant violence and tearings-apart amidst the desires, desires, so many desires. How as a woman to desire everything whilst being beaten, built up and back down, how as a daughter, also a mother a mother a mother a wife a woman a human a package, to continue and to not become one's own mother one's own grandmother one's own ghost or self or self again. The heartbreak of enlargement and of asking for more. The betrayal of family of memory of history of success. The inheritances, all of them.
It was so easy to forget the daily breakage of the small daughter, to lose control. She was a grandmother before she forgave her own mother.
The stylization of safety—money, husbands, property.
Recitation by Bae Suah; Trans. by Deborah Smith (Deep Vellum Publishing, 2017)
Aren't all narrators both reliable and utterly unreliable? Is an utterance also a recitation also a memory also a ritual also a gesture towards selfhood? Must everything be un-known before something can be known again? How does an intersection of identities become a trap become an opportunity become an unraveling? This book is beautiful, mesmerizing, and one that digs into you, into those parts of yourself that might yet need to be revealed.
The land from which my blood and bones were formed, upon which my ancestors lived, which will be forever unknown to me. But no, perhaps even right this moment I am really and actually holding a shabby bundle into my hand, leading my wife and children across that land, taking a lifetime to cross it on foot. Land that it would take someone their whole lifetime to cross. Given that to me this land exists in actuality as a second reality, running parallel to this one, having to decide the issue of its legal sale through a democratic ballot, here in this distant city, feels like holding a ballot to decide whether I will see Maria again. Your belief that two or more individual kinds of phenomena can coexist in one world will never fail to surprise me. If chaos is truly the fundamental nature o f time, as you maintain, then I will both see Maria again and not see her. Because those two outcomes will likely remain eternally undecided, or at least until the day when all of our lives come to an end. In that case, what will become of the land?
Sonata in K by Karen An-Hwei Lee (Ellipsis Press, 2017)
This book is somewhat hard to explain. The official description reads:
Who is Kafka-san? Is he a digitally remastered hologram of the famous writer? Or a golem engineered from a finger-bone excavated from a grave in Prague? Or just your garden-variety flesh-and-blood clone? No one is quite sure, least of all K, a Nisei woman hired to be Kafka-san's interpreter and chauffeur through millennial Los Angeles. In resplendent, incandescent prose, Karen An-hwei Lee fashions this short, strange trip out of a mind meld between the Czech fabulist of bureaucracies and a sun-hammered late-empire sprawl.
And in her blurb, Mary Caponegro asks, "What writer doesn't pledge allegiance to Kafka?"
So in some ways, there is a certain obsession, miming, perpetuation driving the momentum of this book. But of course, it's not that simple. It's also about simple human interactions. It's about place, here the sprawl of LA and it's aged agelessness. It's also about literature, its continuation, the romanticisms and petty pains of it. It is about the absurdness of continuing to live with such decadence in a world being swallowed up by catastrophe. How does the way one acts and speaks at breakfast relate to the way the world is burning down? How do the poems that are written after a meeting reflect the meeting or the person or the self?
Kafka answers the door flawlessly starched and suited as though he'd never slept in his traveling clothes, not even lightly rumpled, the noblesse of a violet-black calla lily in a marsh. However, he is unshaven: a four o'clock shadow. On the crown of his head, silky tufts stand up, faintly reeking of tangerine-sandalwood and amaretto. Stayed wide awake last night, he says, a solitary vigil, einsam.
Your insomnia?
Mice ran up and down inside the walls.
How many, do you think?
Countless.
Those aren't mice, Mister Kafka.
Rats, then? The hotel should get a cat.
No, those are pipes.
Organ pipes?
Air pockets clicking, drumming.
Mister Kafka?
In the night.
You heard mice, then.
The only way is to get a cat. Traps only mangle the mice not clever enough to sneak out with the bait, and then you fail to reduce the overall number of pests. Put the feat of God in them. A cat is designed to do just that in each of its nine lives.
Mister Kafka, I'll dial the hotel operator.
Required Reading: The Impossible Fairy Tale / Inherit / Recitation / Sonata in K was last modified: March 17th, 2017 by Janice Lee
Required Reading: The Yellow House / The Ghosts of Birds / Ghosts / Rock|Salt|Stone
Required Reading has been on hiatus for awhile. I know. Mostly that's because I've been on "hiatus" AKA dealing with lots of LIFE SHIT. But my "have read" pile and "in-progress" pile and "to-read" pile and "AWP-haul" pile are all turning into giant towers of books ready to eat me alive. So let me put a few of them out there. More to come.
The Yellow House by Chiwan Choi (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2017)
I hardly need to tell you anything about this book because really, you just need to read it, and it will break your heart over and over again. There is so much that Choi understands about the inevitability and embodiment of sadness, of the connections we make with other human beings, and the way we lose and break those connections again and again. How does one move through life and move forward, when the past refuses to let go, when the ghosts appear even in front of us, and when we can't tell the difference between the dead and alive. Why are the words the only solace, the only respite, the only things capable of breaking us apart over and over again, and piecing us back together, why poetry when death and why memory when love?
he looked at me from the floor
at the bottom of the stairs
before rolling away so I couldn't see his face
I stood at the the top of the stairs
hesitating
as I tried to hide all of my secrets
he couldn't call to me
and I wouldn't run down to him
because neither of us could measure
the distance between us.
The Ghosts of Birds: Essays by Eliot Weinberger (New Directions, 2016)
The essays in this collection are fragments of a masterfully swirling vortex. The vortex is the world, is the landscape, is the mind, is language. A stunning collection that comments on everything, it seems, with a roving mind and eye that is incredibly and generously observant. The juxtapositions are careful and surprising and insightful, and the form of the essay continues to get pushed in this world that continues to pulls back.
Ghosts by César Aira; Trans. Chris Andrews (New Directions, 2009)
So much of this book is about the absence of absence, the non-existence of silence. That is, the characters occupy an unbuilt/unfinished building, and though this seems to be about incompletion, the spaces are filled with music, with dialogue, with everyday tasks, and then, ghosts. The ghosts here work as a connective thread, remind us that we are constantly between worlds and spaces, and yet the work of human life must go on. The ghosts don't hold us back here, instead stand and watch and are vigilant. They seem to be ever-present, in the crevices of in-between spaces, and yet they are detached. Ghosts as neighbors. Ghosts as admirers. Ghosts as reminders. Ghosts as apparitions. Ghosts as us.
Her soliloquy was interrupted by a feeling she often had, the semi-epileptic impression that someone was passing behind her. There was no one behind her in the kitchen, and no room anyway, but through the open door she could see a band of ten ghosts watching her from the terrace, between the apartment and the stairs. What were those floury clowns doing there, she wondered crossly. She didn't like it when they interrupted her conversations with an intimate friend, all the more intimate for being in her mind and nowhere else. (Elisa didn't know it, but a few months earlier, ahorrific derailment in Concepción had claimed her friend's life.) Anyway, it wasn't their normal time. Were they going to start showing up around the clock? Or was there something special happening because it was the last day of the year? That could have explained why they were starting at her with their round eyes open wide in their stupid faces. As if they had something to propose to her. It was odd, because they were meant to be seen rather than to see. And since she was in the relatively dark interior of the kitchen, she may not have been visible from the outside. But she couldn't be sure about that, because even if the shadows hid everything else, her thick-twelve-diopter spectacles could reflect or condense enough light to make them visible (she had been caught out like that before): two shining circles, like the eyes of an owl suspended in the night.
ROCK | SALT | STONE by Rosamond S. King (Nightboat Books, 2017)
Because bodies are not rocks but get weighed down by them when tossed into the ocean to drown. Because bodies are not consumed by mouths but are covered in salty sweat and can be beaten like meat. Because bodies have mouths but can not always speak without being stoned and sometimes the mouths make the wrong shapes and so the bodies become demons then ghosts then demons then ghosts again. Because the bodies wash up on the shore and wash up still. Because all things that are life become death like water or salt or stone or rock or other bodies and when not all the bodies fit together huddled on the rock, and so as some bodies cling to the hard surface with their bruised fingers and open mouths, other bodies shove those bodies off, without blinking, because blinking would be memory, and here, in the unraveling hardness and conjuration of demons, memory is not always honest and words are not always true.
Required Reading: The Yellow House / The Ghosts of Birds / Ghosts / Rock|Salt|Stone was last modified: March 9th, 2017 by Janice Lee
March 9, 2017 0 comment
Required Reading: #InternationalWomensDay Edition
Required Reading is (finally) coming back. You know. LIFE happens. For today, though, these red recommendations for 12 brilliant women.
Lust by Elfriede Jelinek
Incubation: A Space For Monsters by Bhanu Kapil
Are You My Mother? by Alison Bechdel
The Red Parts by Maggie Nelson
Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity by Alice A. Jardine
Haunting the Korea Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War by Grace M. Cho
La Medusa by Vanessa Place
The Vicious Red Relic, Love by Anna Joy Springer
Zippermouth by Laurie Weeks
Inferno: A Poet's Novel by Eileen Myles
Persepolis by Mariane Satrapi
Required Reading: #InternationalWomensDay Edition was last modified: March 8th, 2017 by Janice Lee
#7daysofcopingRequired Reading
Required Reading: #7daysofcoping #melancholy edition
10 texts to cope by:
#coping #apocalypse #melancholy #theworldhasnotendedyet
War & War by László Krasznahorkai, trans. George Szirtes (New Directions, 2006)
The only streetlights burning were those at the top of the stairs and the light they gave out fell in dingy cones that shuddered in the intermittent gusts of wind assailing them because the other neon lights positioned in the thirty or so meters between them had all been broken, leaving them squatting in darkness, yet as aware of each other, of their precise positions, as of the enormous mass of dark sky above the smashed neon, the sky which might have glimpsed the reflection of its own enormous dark mass as it trembled with stars in the vista of railway yards spreading below it, had there been some relationship between the trembling stars and the twinkling dull red lights of semaphores sprinkled among the rails, but there wasn't, there was no common denominator, no interdependence between them, the only order and relationship existing within the discrete worlds of above and below, and indee of anywhere, for the field of stars and the forest of signals stared as blankly at each other as does each and every form of being, blind in darkness and blind in radiance, as blind on earth as it is in heaven, if only so that a long moribund symmetry among this vastness might appear in the lost glance of some higher being, at the center of which, naturally, there would be a miniscule blind spot: as with Korin … the footbridge … the seven kids.
The Stranger by Albert Camus, trans. Matthew Ward (Vintage International, 1989)
Nothing, nothing mattered, and I knew why. So did he. Throughout the whole absurd life I'd lived, a dark wind had been rising toward me from somewhere deep in my future, across years that were still to come, and as it passed, this wind leveled whatever was offered to me at the time, in years no more real than the ones I was living. What did other people's deaths or a mother's love matter to me; what did his God or the lives people choose or the fate they think they elect matter to me when we're all elected by the same fate, me and billions of privileged people like him who also called themselves my brothers? Couldn't he see, couldn't he see that? Everybody was privileged. There were only privileged people. The others would all be condemned one day. And he would be condemned, too.
Melancholy by László F. Földényi, trans. Tim Wilkinson (The Margellos World Republic of Letters, 2016)
Melancholics are prominent…precisely because they are too full of life; because of them, existence overflows itself. This explains their unappeasable sense of absence: since they have left the world of moderation, overflowing is inconceivable without being emptied. The universe is damaged in their person; hence, melancholics' sense of being among the elect, but also their self-hatred to the point of self-annihilation. That makes them strong and outstanding, but also exceedingly frail. Their strength is infinite, because they have gained knowledge of the end, but they are unhappy, since having experienced the ephemeral nature of humans, they have lost their trust in existence. Their strength and frailty, their unhappiness and their heroism, cannot be detached from each other. This leads us back once again to the starting point of our argument, to the Aristotelian question "Why is it that all those who have become eminent in philosophy or politics or poetry or the arts are clearly melancholic?"
The Road by Cormac McCarthy (Vintage Books, 2006)
He started down the rough wooden steps. He ducked his head and then flicked the lighter and swung the flame out over the darkness like an offering. Coldness and damp. An ungodly stench. The boy clutched at his coat. He could see part of a stone wall. Clay floor. An old mattress darkly stained. He crouched and stepped down again and held out the light. Huddled against the back wall were naked people, male and female, all trying to hide, shielding their faces with their hands. On the mattress lay a man with his legs gone to the hip and the stumps of them blackened and burnt. The smell was hideous.
Jesus, he whispered.
Then one by one they turned and blinked in the pitiful light. Help us, they whispered. Please help us.
Christ, he said. Oh Christ.
He turned and grabbed the boy. Hurry, he said. Hurry.
He'd dropped the lighter. No time to look. He pushed the boy up the stairs. Help us, they called.
Hurry.
A bearded face appeared blinking at the foot of the stairs. Please, he called. Please.
Hurry. For God's sake hurry.
Bluets by Maggie Nelson (Wave Books, 2009)
1. Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color. Suppose I were to speak this as though it were a confession; suppose I shredded my napkin as we spoke. It began slowly. An appreciation, an affinity. Then, one day, it became more serious. Then (looking into an empty teacup, its bottom stained with thin brown excrement coiled into the shape of a sea horse) it became somehow personal.
2. And so I fell in love with a color—in this case, the color blue—as if falling under a spell, a spell I fought to stay under and get out from under,in turns.
3· Well, and what of it? A voluntary delusion, you might say. That each blue object could be a kind of burning bush, a secret code meant for a single agent, an X on a map too diffuse ever to be unfolded in entirety but that contains the knowable universe. How could all the shreds of blue garbage bags stuck in brambles, or the bright blue tarps flapping over every shanty and fish stand in the world, be, in essence, the fingerprints of God? I will try to explain this.
4· I admit that I may have been lonely. I know that loneliness can produce bolts of hot pain, a pain which,if it stays hot enough for long enough, can begin to simulate, or to provoke—take your pick—an apprehension of the divine. (This ought to arouse our suspicions. )
A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit (Penguin Books, 2006)
The world is blue at its edges and in its depths. This blue is the light that got lost. Light at the blue end of the spectrum does not travel the whole distance from the sun to us. It disperses among the molecules of the air, it scatters in water. Water is colorless, shallow water appears to be the color of whatever lies underneath it, but deep water is full of this scattered light, the purer the water the deeper the blue. The sky is blue for the same reason, but the blue at the horizon, the blue of land that seems to be dissolving into the sky, is a deeper, dreamier, melancholy blue, the blue at the farthest reaches of the places where you see for miles, the blue of distance. This light that does not touch us, does not travel the whole distance, the light that gets lost, gives us the beauty of the world, so much of which is in the color blue.
For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go. For the blue is not in the place those miles away at the horizon, but in the atmospheric distance between you and the mountains.
The Melancholy of Resistance by László Krasznahorkai, trans. George Szirtes (New Directions, 1989)
Driven by her sense of foreboding, she hurried on, feeling ever more convinced that she was crossing some nightmare terrain permeated by evil, then, as she got ever closer to the source of that now clearly audible puffing, and through the bars of the wild chestnut trees could see the heap of machinery which produced it, she felt quite certain that, exhausted as she was by her struggles against the powers of terror, she was imagining, simply imagining everything, for what she saw in that first glance seemed not only stupefying but downright impossible. Not far from her, a spectral contraption was moving at melancholy pace through the winter night down the middle of the road-that is if this satanic conveyance whose desperately slow crawl in the direction of the town centre reminded her of a steam roller struggling to gain each centimetre of ground, could be said to be moving at all: it wasn't even a matter of overcoming strong wind resistance on the normal road surface, but of ploughing through a tract of dense, refractory clay. Sheathed in blue corrugated iron and sealed on every side, the lorry, which reminded her of an enormous wagon, was covered with bright yellow writing (an indecipherable dark brown shape hovered at the centre of the inscriptions) and was much higher and longer-she noted incredulously-than those vast Turkish trucks that used to pass through town, and the whole shapeless hulk, which smelled vaguely of fish, was being drawn by a smoking, oily, and wholly antediluvian wreck of tractor which was making fearful exertions in the process.
Melancholy by Jon Fosse, trans. Damien Searls (Dalkey Archive, 2006)
I am a darkness without you. I miss you. I am walking up the street, but I can't see anything. I am my longing for you. And I hear laughter far behind me. But the laughter is just there, because in me is only my movement toward you. I am only a turning toward you. I am walking. I am walking to you, I am a turning toward you. I am my longing for you. I am only a turning toward you. I am walking. I am walking to you. I can't do anything else, I can only be a movement turned toward you, whether you're there or not. All I am is a movement toward you. A movement, a turning, toward you. I am nothing but you, who are not there. And it's precisely there, in what I am not, in that which is turned toward you, it's precisely there, in that which maybe isn't there, in what is just a turning, a movement, it's precisely there that I am in everything I paint and I see. I am walking down a street and I am my desperate turning toward you. Nothing else is.
Of Walking In Ice by Werner Herzog, trans. by Alan Greenberg (University of Minnesota Press, 2015)
I see ever so many mice. No one has the vaguest idea just how many mice there are in the world, it's unimaginable. The mice rustle very lightly in the flattened grass. Only he who walks see these mice. Across the fields, where the snow lay, they've dug tunnels between grass and snow; now that the snow's gone the serpentine traces still remain. Friendship is possible with the mice.
In a village before Stotzheim I sat on the steps of a church, my feet were so tired and a sorrow was gnawing at my chest; then a window opened in the schoolhouse next door, a child was opening it following orders from inside, and then I overheard a young teacher scream so harshly at the children that I hoped no one would notice that a witness to these terrifying screams was sitting below the window. I went away, although I could hardly put one foot in front of the other. I headed toward a fire, a fire that kept burning in front of me like a glimmering wall.
The Vegetarian by Han Kang, trans. Deborah Smith (Hogarth, 2016)
The feeling that she had never really lived in this world caught her by surprise. It was a fact. She had never lived. Even as a child, as far back as she could remember, she had done nothing but endure. She had believed in her own inherent goodness, her humanity, and lived accordingly, never causing anyone harm. Her devotion to doing things the right way had been unflagging, all her successes had depended on it, and she would have gone on like that indefinitely. She didn't understand why, but faced with those decaying buildings and straggling grasses, she was nothing but a child who had never lived.
Required Reading: #7daysofcoping #melancholy edition was last modified: August 1st, 2016 by Janice Lee
August 2, 2016 0 comment
Required Reading: I Am a Season / Remembering Animals / The Surrender / The Habiliments
I Am a Season That Does Not Exist In the World by Kim Kyung Ju, trans. by Jake Levine (Black Ocean, 2015)
The world of Kim Kyung Ju's poetry is both intensely alive and intensely dead. The poetry is mythical while remaining intimate, sublime while also describing the destructive, intensely startling and beautiful. These poems, though intelligent and emotional, don't hit hardest in the mind or heart; rather, they're like these gut punches. You feel a heaviness and twisting in your bowels, not distant from Suh Nam-dong description of han: A feeling of unresolved resentment against injustices suffered, a sense of helplessness because of the overwhelming odds against one, a feeling of acute pain in one's guts and bowels, making the whole body writhe and squirm, and an obstinate urge to take revenge and to right the wrong—all these combined.
A brilliant, visceral, and necessary read. (A great review of the book at Angel City Review.)
Listening to the sound of water, having the premonition of winter, the insides of birds run deep. Into the smell of the wind, wet birds came and left, and I realized I needed a little more heat in my body. Humans walk along the line of the shore and the water at night rolls up into the color of the skin of a cucumber. Night throws away the wind, night rustles. The smell of the eyes of a beast that lies in the grass spreads over the land. Light takes off its clothes and the bones between reeds grow cold. At dawn clouds rise more transparent than a scream. Our nerves don't flow down the expressway of life like a perfect square. Even if several years pass, if you want to miscarry the heart, it is more effective to burn the moisture of heavy wind than set the grass ablaze. Picking up the burnt shadows if wind along with a few dead dreams, I realize these scars in the grass are not leftover pieces of wind, but the fever I carry inside myself that, little by little, becomes the color of a returning snowstorm. Hanging in every snowflake are particles of wind. What kind of consciousness would place the arch of a burnt foot inside that body? The sky is split with birds like lines in the palm. So what is the question then? I can't find a place to sleep. Until it's filled to the ribs, I watch the sleeping wind pile with snow. I hear the sound of cool water, inside eyes, inside winter fruit.
THE NIGHT THE CAT LICKS THE GLASS OF A BUTCHER'S WINDOW
Spiders crawl inside the ears
of children sleeping on the street.
Stuck to the window of a midnight butcher's shop, a cat
on its hind legs pawing the glass.
Makeup is peeling on the chopped off faces lying in the trash.
Hooks hung on the wall spread open their vaginas
and drop blood on the face of time.
Inside a fluorescent tube filled with water
bugs lay dead eggs.
Not wearing pants, a reclusive shadow
paces to and fro between chunks of flesh.
The cat stiffens its back. Scowls.
A black tongue begins to lick the meat's neck.
Drooling, while licking intestines
under the street lamp, the hunger of the cat is illuminated
and the humiliation, ecstatic, that the tongue is sucking
stuffs the mouth of a girl turning down the street.
The Habiliments by Joe Milazzo (Apostrophe Books, 2016)
From the publisher: "In Milazzo's linguistic landscape 'backyards explode with palaces,' 'the bones of rationale begin to knob and peep,' 'bone dreams merely of a snowmen's chorus' and 'your westward affections run senile like a river.' Quotidian reality wears a new syntactical and semantic garb as each poem seems to unravel language and a circadian rotation of 'dreams'— ambiguously of sleep, of aspiration, of nonsense, of the fantastic, or of the banal."
I had been anticipating this book for some time, and was fortunate enough to read some of these poems early on. These poems aren't easy to describe. This book is full of dreams, the specificity of dreams, only the kind of specificity which dreams can provide, but only while residing within those dreams. Somehow the specificity that usually evaporates into elusivity becomes known, and yet, because the source is the dream, what is known is radically different than what is known. Beautiful, haunting, and forgetting, these are poems that dilate and perspire and nod, or, nod off.
THE DREAM IN WHICH A GOD OBSERVES WITHOUT WATCHING
Dressing's procession is so slow.
I don't want to mention the tobacco
or the rollers. I want you
to shower with a different soap, better, brush
with no bar at all.
I let the alarm clock twitch
like the damned on the end
of its robe. Some mercy, I trust,
in running a glass of water for the bedside,
some fealty to some commandment
in neglecting it so
draw a razor nearer my throat.
THE DREAM IN WHICH YOU WONDER WHY I ACT AS I DO
You told me once your fingers
were well-acquinted
with the treachery of drawers,
less your glasses, which only really
have one good ens. Batteries the
size of pills, pill bottles full of
chalky screws, hot sauce, needles and
rubber bands. I could tame
these ravenous blocks, I might pacify
the imploring of this growth.
Somewhere within
are the edges that bite. Somewhere
the bezoar that still bristles,
masquerading as a thread whose end
is some prize. As blind as curiosity,
and as long. If you were to command
me: "Reach, but to not look."
Read more excerpts at Word Riot.
The Surrender by Scott Esposito (Anomalous Press, 2016)
This is an incredibly sensitive, devastating and perceptive book. It is heartbreaking, beautiful, honest, gripping, brave, and observant. I can't recommend this book enough.
Don Mee Choi said of the book: "Scott Esposito's THE SURRENDER is a page-turner, moving and intellectually engaging… THE SURRENDER is not only an essential read for gender studies, but for anyone who must live with doubled identity, and this is many of us: immigrants, refugees, exiles, nomads, translators…"
And from the book's description: "The Surrender is Scott Esposito's "collection of facts" concerning his lifelong desire to be a woman. It is a book that asks just what we mean when we say the word gender—what separates male from female, and how we gain access to those things that make us feel who we truly are. It is also a book about desire—how we come to know the true nature of our needs, and how we find the ways to fulfill them. In these three linked, genre-defying essays, Esposito chronicles his life-long dialogue with his desires, coming to know them better and better through the life-saving moments that came to him as though by grace: the films and stories, dreams and insights and kindnesses that have given him the courage and the understanding to delve deeper and deeper into this lifelong inquiry."
Living life this way makes everything one does into part of a great search for self. Everything around you is grist for this mill. You can try on anything to see if it's really you. Having done this, my conclusion is that both sides of this performance are mine. It took many years, but I have come to see how they are complementary, not opposed. I want them both—I want to play with them as the mood strikes, and I want the world to acknowledge my skill with each one.
This, I have learned, is a crucial thing. If personality is a performance, then there are certain parts of it that one only experiences in the presence of others. Shame, affection, desire, vulnerability; these are quantities whose experience in solitude is like the sound of a sonata heard by one faulty ear. The words that others bring to your performance, their gazes, their bodies, they all sow within the mind emotions that do no exist when one merely imagines people in absentia. In the presence of others, the scriptedness of practice gives way to reaction; we experience the feeling of authenticity; this validation, this spontaneity is like a special mirror that reflects out truer self. It gives us the choice to identity with what we see, or reject it.
The bohemian poet who was the first person to react well to what I had to say arranged that on a Friday evening she would come to my apartment to meet her. Thus began five of the most portentous days of my life. The tar-like sands that fell through the hourglass that week; the pounds I lost from anxiety.
And then finally, Friday. The last thing I did before I made myself up into a woman was to walk down the hallway stairs to the front door, unlock it, and tape a set of instructions outside above the doorknob. Then I walked back up the stairs and closed the door at the landing. I attempted to become as beautiful and feminine as I could. Later, I heard the sound of the front door opening and closing. I heard footsteps on the stairs, a timid knock at the door on the landing. I pulled it open, backpedaling behind it as though it were my shield. We stood like that for a moment, with just that plane of wood between us. I understand that she would not be the first to move.
Her first words to be were that I looked gorgeous, and I immediately comprehended that I was on unknown soil, because this is not a thing a woman says to a man so casually and so openly. A man and a woman are careful to protect themselves from that frisson. Here, however, there was no concern for those sorts of misunderstandings.
The lengths that were required before I would permit myself to be this vulnerable before another person.
Remembering Animals by Brenda Iijimama (Nightboat Books, 2016)
First, Brenda Iijima is an amazing, brilliant, wise, and generous human being. There is an honestly and openness in how she communicates with other humans, and animals, that is incredibly genuine and honest, but also questioning, inquisitive, keen. My own new novel that I just started writing (after 2 years of having my ability to write be strangely crippled), was kick-started after a stay at her house in Brooklyn where one of her cats (or her neighbor's cat, depending on the point of view), left some most marked impressions on me. While sleeping there, he would enter my dreams. And even after I left and arrived in LA, he arrived, in a dream, at my house, covered in blood, and asked to be let in. I love this long blurb by Judith Goldman, because I think both the book and the author are remarkably empathetic and telepathic, and that, under the surface of the writing, as in the real and natural world, the spaces open and close, mingle and oppose, expand and contract, and that understanding is often not at all about knowing:
"With new empathies and new telepathies, Brenda Iijima invites us to enter a somatic archive of the 21st century that incarnates a span from prehistory to post-permafrost. In the lush, angry text of Remembering Animals, page (en)joins corpus where your instinct thinks, in a biomagnified, graphic language of sharp impression, in elegant performances of internal textual memory passages repeat to insist. Never once does the abstract replace the visceral or the (flayed) viscera, as the work explores the depths of the skin-deep. Cell to landscape, micro to macro, here the spaces of biopolitics are traversed with scalar dexterity, whilst revealing, chillingly, how much of normalcy (or its maintenance) involves murder. This book takes full, earthly stock of such "human" adventures as Middle Passage and the Vietnam War, focusing, too, on ongoing formations of "white lock down." And it makes us look, close enough to smell, at kindred phenomena of zoo and laboratory, factory farm, slaughterhouse, and market, game enclosure, poached veldt, and poisoned jungle. "One monoculture designed to mitigate the other": somehow the solution in every toxic loop is to consume more, to feed the global circuits of our capital-sponsored extinction event. Remembering Animals powerfully scrutinizes symptomatic patterns of attachment and alibis of disaffection that allow this to occur. As Iijima draws out human cruelty's incongruent congruity with animal predation, she also anatomizes the bestialization of both animals and humans, animals enlisted in human scripts of hatred and humans sinking into scenario after scenario of ugly, unmythic therianthropy. Man is the bitch of bitches. When you're skeptical of standing on hind legs, let Remembering Animals permeate the blood-brain barrier. Given future temps, we all need learn to estivate. Barring that, we can use this kind of rabbit lesson."
Required Reading: I Am a Season / Remembering Animals / The Surrender / The Habiliments was last modified: July 21st, 2016 by Janice Lee
Required Reading: Harm / Mauve Desert / Ashagalomancy / Sidewalking
Harm by Hillary Gravendyk (Omnidawn, 2011)
This book was gifted to me by my friend Harold Abramowitz. It's a difficult book to describe and I'm not sure how to describe how it so sensitively and generously explores the possibilities for hurt and pain by the human body, but also the capacity for growth and love. There is this constant tension between life and death, between hurting and healing, on a general and molecular level that leaves the reader with these pointed sensations, like needle pricks. What of the body when the world is crumbling? What of the world when the body within is failing? Even more intensely sad and heartbreaking since Hillary Gravendyk died in 2014. I regret not knowing more of her before, but am grateful for her words now.
Ahead the sky is winnowed to its smallest feature. Starred with damage, the body. What was promised, what was revealed. A long staircase of wounds. Behind: unseen error. Or accident. Harm winking on, a neon sign that says closed. Pain glused to each window. The rooms shadowed with harm. You offered anxiety, a harness made from are. Curved handle, intention. Harm a kind of adhesive. Skin clusters around the opening, ridged and thick. There are lighter and darker marks. They disclose. Paper echo, gesture. Bleakness along the spine of narrative. Harm flat as a swept floor. As a drawn planet. A bright story is requested. What will be touched? Machines, that flashing support, a threaded needle. And the body, sutured to harm.
We sat on the reluctant
roof, watching miniature neighbors
set fire to each other.
A warm wind on our
foreheads. Cherry bomb
I held the heat in my hand
like an apple—
leaving has
a temperature, a
pressure.
Appetite, a front
moving in.
Mauve Desert by Nicole Brossard, translated by Susanne de Lotbiniere-Harwood (Coach House Books, 1990, Reissued 2015)
This book is phenomenal. I'm not sure where to begin, just that, you, dear reader, should read it. Margaret Atwood says of the book, "In Mauve Desert, Nicole Brossard writes from the point of impact; from the collision between languages, between forms and ideas, between cultures and genders. Her effects too are the effects of collisions: brilliant sparks and white hot fragments, alarm and the possibility of danger, and a momentary light in which we glimpse the bizarrely distorted faces of strangers, which turn out after all to have been our own." Indeed, there are these places there the language deceives and collides, closes and then opens up these layers within the space of possibility in terms of thinking, but also movement. Partially, it's a quest story. Partially, it's a story about desire. And partially, it's a story about the very stakes of creation: life and language, our bodies stretched out between and over these open spaces, and how we become distorted when we face the landscapes we both love and loathe. The book has a rather complex structure, layers that weave, and so, an excerpt from the very beginning of the book:
The desert is indescribable. Reality rushes into it, rapid light. The gaze melts. Yet this morning. Very young, I was already crying over humanity. With every new year I could see it dissolving in hope and in violence. Very young, I would take my mother's Meteor and drive into the desert. There I spent entire days, nights, dawns. Driving fast and then slowly, spinning out the light in its mauve and small lines which like veins mapped a great tree of life in my eyes.
I was wide awake in the questioning but inside me was a desire which free of obstacles frightened me like a certitude. Then would come the pink, the rust and the grey among the stones, the mauve and the light of dawn. In the distance, the flashing wings of a tourist helicopter.
Very young I had no future like the shack on the corner which one day was set on fire by some guys who 'came from far way,' said my mother who had served them drinks. Only one of them was armed, she had sworn to me. Only one among them. All the others were blond. My mother always talked about men as if they had seen the day in a book. She would say no more and go back to her television set. I could see her profile and the reflection of the little silver comb she always wore in her hair and to which I attributed magical powers. Her apron was yellow with little flowers. I never saw her wearing a dress.
Ashagalomancy by Abraham Smith (Action Books, 2015)
It is true to say that there is no one who writes like Abraham Smith. He is a singular and enigmatic and humble and supremely generous individual. There are few writers who, in their writing, create entirely new systems of thought, language, fortitude, song, myth. The writing is cosmological, so much more than what we can see. In this category I might include Will Alexander, Jose Lezama Lima, Helena Blavatsky. I heard Nick Demske once describe Abraham Smith as a "maniac prophet." I think I agree with this assessment. Johannes Göransson says of the book: "Smith confects an entire mythic system, singing into existence a universe made of the ruins of the last one, whatever's lying around the yard. Ashagalomancy shows us the poet at the height of his powers, a poet of reach, tenderness, ambition, a gimlet eye and a vatic voice." Beautiful, stunning, utterly moving and moved.
IN THE OLD DAYS the bears
sweets cheaters
fuego rocked in house fires
fell out the back doors
why how did we how come move the sweet confidant campfire
into the sweeter nested into the sweeter rests of the dead
and dig a cave there
and roast the cruel the missteppers there
pretty pretty beautiful in their fuego throes
gifted feathers answer dark
hair attention bolt gold
roots of fire foretell the flower
garden gonzo with not meant
surprised that's not mint? rune o'wild onion
the woods in winter is a silent fire fair distance lives there
i think a fire dances well is in goodly communion
beautiful in its undulating freaks and rags
i think a cheater plays with fire
i think a fired cheater is tyro via oxygen
i think life is a quick at the great big something nothing all
eat shit that's a fiery thing to say
oxygen myth that's weirder emergence
oxymoron digit ducat shut me off boys
if anything i will go against the heart
as a drowned ear as a third dais to
venerate caw caw if anything the heart
is a campfire it tends to take a skill to tending
tho there is this beginner's luck
about how this and that lean
you can't just throw it all on there
why not that broken shovel handle too
no a fire requires maximum coaxing
tilt it learn the bird lean nest logic
a Y a V a fallin in love
with a stranger's shadow ides
and nudging the unreality of yr shoulder again
now that no one will ever know
words are birds of snow not clay
and the hot silence of strangers'
envelopes lit on fire
wit da business end of a smutty cigar
Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles by David L. Ulin (University of California Press, 2015)
A really dazzling and profound meditation on Los Angeles, the spaces within the city, but also the unique characteristics of this particular city which we are forced to reconcile in different ways. I really appreciate how the essays in this book are inquisitive and patient. In a city which we usually are rushing through in a car, the slow walking pace allows one to appreciate, gaze, wonder, ask questions, feel. Bookish writes on the book: "In Sidewalking, David Ulin brilliantly reflects on the city as experienced by someone with a need to walk, a need to savor streetscapes, registering signage, vistas, vegetation, fellow citizens. And while Ulin walks, he thinks: processing traces of history, architectural styles, street plans, demographics, changes. A longtime L.A. Times book critic, Ulin, intimately familiar with the best that's ever been written about this sprawling, layered city, also artfully folds in the perceptions of others. Memories, observations, bygone L.A., 21st-century L.A.—Ulin's superlative tapestry makes this the latest of great literary takes on the City of Angels."
You can read the entire first chapter as a PDF here.
And another excerpt:
from Falling Down:
What do we talk about when we talk about Los Angeles? Is it the city? Is it the county? And what of all those independent municipalities (Beverly Hills, Inglewood, West Hollywood, Santa Monica, Culver City) that exist surrounded on all sides by L.A., neither a part of it nor apart? "Seventy-two suburbs in search of a city," Dorothy Parker once quipped. The same, to be sure, is true of its history. Founded in 1781, it remains, for all intents and purposes, a twentieth-century dreamscape, reliant, in the most concrete terms imaginable, on the interplay of speed and light.
Here we see what walking offered: a way of keeping the city bounded, of making it small. To move to this place had been, for me, a kind of culture shock. I needed a mechanism to rewrite the landscape in terms I could understand. Only a few months after I arrived, I spent an afternoon with Carolyn See at her home in Topanga Canyon, where she presented a first glimpse of a psychic map of Los Angeles. I had already read her novel Golden Days, with its admonition about the "real" L.A., which "had its thick, coiled root downtown, and on the east, little underground rooflets; obscure Mexican restaurants. Then a thin stem, the Santa Monica freeway, heading due west and putting out greenery, places in this western desert where you'd love to live—if things went right." Such a vision appealed to me, with its whisper of Manhattan, another long and narrow corridor, bound on the southern side by the freeway and on the northern by the Hollywood Hills, stretching from downtown to the beach. I could visualize that, I could see it; it felt like something I could grasp…
Required Reading: Harm / Mauve Desert / Ashagalomancy / Sidewalking was last modified: July 13th, 2016 by Janice Lee
Required Reading: The Hermit / The Wine-Dark Sea / The Good Dark / Proxies
After a hiatus, I'm back with more brief excerpts of books to be categorized as "required reading."
The Hermit by Lucy Ives (The Song Cave, 2016)
Somehow straddling the line between etymological, theoretical, grammatological and intimate, lush, heartbreaking, this collection is sparse in language yet profoundly dense in the evocations of individual humanity.
1. A man claims he makes a choice to be unhappy, since it allows him vigilance. "I am vigilant and suffering," he tells us. And perhaps this is the very anatomy of unhappiness: a choice to engage in a certain perception, which is to say, experience.
19. Necessity of finding an area in which one is not an impartial actor. Necessity of finding an area in which one desires the living of others.
24. Zachary talks about wanting to be with someone because he feels like he can be a better person for someone else. He says he doesn't know what he's doing, wishes he had someone to do things for. I tell him I think we are very different people.
41. Imagine that love between two people is of such parity that one has only to hear the other speak; then, in an instant, remembers years of kindness. Why won't the other speak now? Why does he seem to become lost, as if inside his own living?
76. You may think, "I will always feel like this." You may think, "I cannot change quickly enough," or: "I cannot change 'correctly.'"
The Wine-Dark Sea by Mathias Svalina (Sidebrow Books, 2016)
Of course the phrase "the wine-dark sea" already comes with its own lyrical context, Homerian triumph of language and yet failure to see color (indeed, why is the sea the color of wine, why dark, why not). And in this book the reader becomes stained with the darkness of the wine, drunken with the secrets that lie in the books and crannies of beings and places.
THE WINE-DARK SEA
First there is not enough water
& then too much.
The day eternal
& then asphalt spills
into the caesura.
The whole mess
fidgets there.
I live toward that.
I am on the island
that speaks a language
I can only understand,
where a wish
is anything rotting,
the shore.
It's harder to tell
where the world ends,
I can't think without Julia
so Julia is my mind.
Julia is my mind.
Robert is my mind.
Zach is my mind.
Jon is my mind.
Heather is my mind.
Josh is my mind.
Sara is my mind.
Dave is my mind.
Teal is my mind.
Sommer is my mind.
Noah is my mind.
In the sun I carry
everyone I know & I
am carried on their backs.
They are the wine-dark sea. And I
am the wine-dark sea.
The Good Dark by Annie Guthrie (Tupelo Press, 2015)
I had the great pleasure of reading with Annie this past May in Tucson and the quiet and intelligent beauty of her poetry really blew me away. Julie Carr calls The Good Dark a book of listening: "It listens to bird sound, thunder, the movement of a leaf or a cloud, the echoes and resonances of its own words — it listens even to silence which, as Guthrie tells us 'has no edge.' And THE GOOD DARK is a book of speaking: or shouting, whispering, confessing, and singing. In delicate and precise poems Guthrie addresses the darkness: the God gone missing or hiding in a mirror, the soul barely discerned. And this poetry, this 'sheet music' is so carefully rhythmic, so richly sonic, and so strong, it makes that darkness good."
all birds are representative
and the scene impeccably lit
to hold the beak, stroke down,
feel it up
feel it quit
what are you, crashed,
departed?
that stays around outside of heads
aloft, if not for chants
to discern the soul
there'd be a river in it
but by the bank, a shouter
shouting out sheet music
the chirp to wind
the shouter with mouth of blade
marking a target
dusk, grasses wind the hymn
silence if reverence
given everything
the give forms our lips
it's only the shape of zero
Proxies: Essays Near Knowing by Brian Blanchfield (Nightboat Books, 2016)
I feel really grateful that Brian Blanchfield's words exist in the world. He is one of the most thoughtful, sensitive, and beautiful writers I know. His poetry permits strange knowings on the borders of such recognizable emotions and the mystery of the unknown. In this book, these "essays near knowing," approach "knowing" both from a distance, careful and exacting and lyrical and observant, but also head-on, the heart fully forward, all-in, and achingly involved. These essays are beautiful and heartbreaking and incredibly insightful.
from On Withdrawal
Permitting Shame, Error and Guilt, Myself the Single Source
To withdraw—when it doesn't take an object, like: an offer, or a question, or the troops—to withdraw, as an intransitive verb, is, as it happens, always reflexive. If I withdraw, I withdraw myself. From what? From the race for city council, fro active cocaine dependency, from the relationship, from the chill night air. To withdraw is to vacate what has held or kept you, and implies movement away from that engagement. Pullback.
When I can, on a commuter rail line, I sit in a rear-facing seat. I like the illusion of being drawn from the present into the future. To sit there is to withdraw. I have my eye on what I've left. There's that famous passage in Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek when she's on the little footbridge over the rushing, swollen stream during the heavy spring spring snowmelt, when she asks what sort of idiot would rather look downstream from that bridge, at what's already passed beneath you rather than upstream toward what's coming. I think of this sometimes when I watch the scenery recede from a rear-facing seat, and eel a bit perverse for my predilection. Am I a withdrawn type, not as take-charge as Annie Dillard? By that comparison, almost certainly. But to so reason seems reductive, since, in effect, to choose to take the train to Natick, MA, from Back Bay Station Boston is the principal act of agency involved. The train is moving on its track no matter what which direction you point yourself within it. To face forward is redundant if you are already forward-moving.
Required Reading: The Hermit / The Wine-Dark Sea / The Good Dark / Proxies was last modified: July 13th, 2016 by Janice Lee
Required Reading: Plats, Farther Traveler, Cheer Up Femme Fatale
More brief excerpts of books to be categorized as "required reading."
Plats by John Trefry (Inside the Castle, 2014)
This is a difficult book to describe, and partially because it is a book that is so much about description. In the tradition of writers like Michel Butor & Philippe Sollers, but also seemingly so much in conversation with Gaston Bachelard and Rainer Maria Rilke, especially in relation Rilke's famous declaration: "For a long time nothing, and then suddenly one has the right eyes." The way in which the self notices the surrounding world, sees, notices one's own self and inhabits a body that perceives so profoundly in language, is explored on a level that becomes haunting, unsettling, yet addicting.
With my own obsessions with slowness and space, this book is both slow and urgent, mesmerizing and hallucinatory, and it's hard to look past things in the real world when the impulse shifts to looking within and without and between.
Joe Milazzo writes in a review: "Still processing the complexities of this text. Shades of Butor, Philippe Sollers and even Baudelaire in Trefry's careful, even sometimes carefully grotesque, prosody—so, French—but this is a book that is deeply American in its concern with the self. Plats is also one of the most original meditations on sensory experience I can recall reading. And, yes, there is a narrative here, and it possesses dimensions (modern as well as ancient), but this is a book the requires you to perceive it first and only to read it 'later,' that is, through the medium of your own deliberation." (Also read this great conversation between Joe Milazzo and John Trefry on Entropy)
Enormous things change. The ocean laps back and forth between the coasts and swirls down underneath itself into lightless caverns. The sand drifts along down the beach and the sky where it was filled with clouds turns bright brown and where it had been white a faint rain falls and will go on falling. I try to keep it off of my skin. It is a sudden discovery of old pain, rootless and rattling. It runs down my coat and over my shoes and through the veins on my hands. I lift the hair off of my neck and when I walk a raindrop falls under my collar, runs between my shoulderblades and soaks into my underclothes. It makes my neck hard and I feel that I need to pivot my head to keep my neck from crumbling into flakes. I stop under a street tree.
Each color body drifts through the fabric of the air bearing the profile of a local object: a chair back, a long conical pleat, a stack of table cloths. With a breath, the spectral furniture is drawn in, and exhaled in a cloud. The poses of the hall are exacted in the emptiness among the richly moist air. The darkness between the floating beads conjures the foliate pattern of the rug in waxy negative space and the air between each bead is the pale mauve of swollen breathing. The air space between each bead, each complete refracted room containing a breathing body, is an empty chasm filled with that breath. Each bead floating away from the rug makes visible the entire expanse of its pattern. In the space between breaths, in stillness, reflection is the ideal depiction of a disintegrating reality.
Farther Traveler by Ronaldo V. Wilson (Counterpath, 2015)
Desire and loss, mourning and fucking, the spaces in between, the crevices, the heartbeats and the waste, the trauma that belongs to someone who desires, the trauma that belongs to no one, love and weeping, nose hairs and stinging aggression. I wish I could articulate better what the writing of Ronaldo Wilson is and does, but more than existing, it moves and traverses, and more than doing, it complicates and enacts. Because the writing is so much more than simply being about something, the writing evades any label. Good. Labels are often so unproductive. I've admired Ronaldo Wilson for awhile. He is fierce and intelligent and witty and active in a way that seems transcendent. I remember one morning at a literary conference on my way to a morning panel, running into Ronaldo while on his morning jog.
Required Reading: Plats, Farther Traveler, Cheer Up Femme Fatale was last modified: March 9th, 2016 by Janice Lee
Required Reading: The Sorrow Proper, Maison Femme, Hospice
The Sorrow Proper by Lindsey Drager (Dzanc Books, 2015)
It is probably not a coincidence that I read this book on the plane ride to Denver, and in the way that the book rewrites loss and grief and intimacy between people and their bodies, I looked ever more forward to meeting Lindsey for the first time and to our conversation at the University of Denver where we would discuss mourning and failure and memory and I would leave Denver having had a strange and wonderful and necessary weekend of healing, the light of a different and distant city that reaches more closely towards the clouds and occupied by different bodies: friends, that allow for permutated emotions, realizations, ideas. Something about the word "proper" in the title stands out so much to me, the contradictory layers that the word contains and the ways in which it permutes "sorrow," stretches it and refines it, the image of collecting spoons as the structure of grief.
The photographer is ill. The deaf mathematician takes off work and sits next to him in bed for hours as he sleeps. She grades papers in red ink, puts tiny stars next to each question answered correctly.
At one point, she glances over at him to study his hands. When he was young, before he knew what pain was, his father broke a mirror and the child held the pieces of glass in his hands. When he made fists, the mirror entered his palms and fingertip pads. The deaf mathematician thinks of the photographer in this way often, his tiny hands gripping the glass so that he might see his reflection, perhaps for the first time. And then the rush of red and how, with a wound like that, pain isn't felt at first. How for a moment he might have recognized that there was a world inside of him that he hadn't known about. Then, she thinks each time she thinks of this, how the knowledge of pain hit and this was the first union of body and mind. How he signaled his hurt with a howl and then his parents came in to hold him and begin to close the wounds.
She studies the scars now, which are thin and raised. She notices the way the skin curves and twists in an attempt to suture itself, to close the gals it knows should not exist. She sees how the long lines on the inside of his palms break often for scar.
Hands will become tools to him, she thinks, if this thing between us lasts. He is already starting to sign; HELLO, GOODBYE, PLEASE, DRINKS? and LET'S GO TO BED.
How sad, she thinks, touching his hands now, fingering the marks where glass once stood in a time that is as foreign to him as to her, when the hands become the mode for thought instead of simple limbs. She has never known them as anything other, and she lets her eyes shift from his to her own, the nails clipped close, the pads stained with ink, the pattern of tiny hairs that peeks from the pores between the knuckle bends.
He stirs then, because she has stopped stroking his hands, and when his eyes open he sneezes, then smiles.
I will need you exactly always
she writes on the pad that they keep on the table by the bed.
He loops up at her wide eyes and instead of objecting, stretches his neck to kiss her forehead, then rolls over to fall back asleep.
It would be impossible to tell her, he thinks, that in no world is always ever exact.
MAISON FEMME: a fiction by Teresa Carmody (Images by Vanessa Place) (Bon Aire Projects, 2015)
Part of what made my trip to Denver such a HEART-FULL one (I'm not sure how else to describe the feeling of my heart having gone through so much and having felt so stretched and full), were my fantastic conversations with Teresa Carmody. I read this book a couple of weeks ago, and felt such sharp and intelligent wit behind each of the sentences, an intense stacking of prose and fiction that built a strange skeleton and mirrored much of what was happening outside the pages, and, at several times, reading about writers in the book that so were so familiar and resembled real and ridiculous writers in the actual world, I laughed out loud.
Required Reading: The Sorrow Proper, Maison Femme, Hospice was last modified: March 9th, 2016 by Janice Lee
Required Reading: Abductions / The Sleep of the Righteous / The Morning News is Exciting / The Book of Feral Flora
Some brief excerpts of more books that I utterly consider "required reading."
Abductions by Chiwan Choi (Writ Large Press, 2012)
This book brought me to so many tears. It's so breathtakingly heartbreaking and tragic and beautiful and observant in a way that seems so essential and sacred. I confess I started reading it almost a year ago when Chiwan first gave me a copy at my old apartment in Silver Lake, and I started reading it that night but had to stop. I was already going through such an intensely emotional time, and I cried all night and couldn't handle the added heartbreak. I finished it this morning and I can't say articulate the honesty and tragedy and beauty of the language contained in these poems. When I started the #finalpoem series, I asked this:
If the world were to end next week, what is the final poem you write, the final poem you give away generously, treacherously, genuinely, fearfully, necessarily, beautifully?
That tomorrow it may very well all end, and we would know to bear the pain as the day rose and broke.
That the present is undying yet death awaits us all.
That words can still connect and touch, that we still know how to offer to others a piece of our soul.
That space yet expands and we know when to keep breathing and when to stop.
That poetry can yet be given and received, from one human being to another.
This book is the book I would give.
her journey
at the emergency room,
they kept using the word 'spontaneous'
and as i held her hand,
trying to stop myself from shaking,
i almost told her everything.
i got as far as saying that i was to blame
and staring at the floor.
but she said
i was being ridiculous,
that these things couldn't be my fault,
as my fingers gripped the steering wheel
of our car that wouldn't move
in the hospital garage,
calling my mother to tell her
and listening to her say nothing back.
it began with her
as the war broke out in korea,
the abductions.
she first saw the lights above her
as she hid in a row board,
lying still and quiet on her back,
smiling at the way the colors in the sky moved,
and days later, when her father tied her to a chair
in the back room because he had to save his family
from the communist invasion
and one more girl was too much of a burden.
he told her to be quiet
but she wouldn't.
she screamed and she cried there alone.
they came, the ones from the lights in the sky,
untying her
and taking her over the ocean.
dad says it started for him around the same time
during the war that divided our homeland.
his father, my grandpa, the one with the belly
and the first one of us that made contact,
how he tried to buy time for his family
with a handshake deal while
my father, his second son,
carried his little sister
across the border in the night
to hide from the lights above.
sometimes i hear him angry
that we have been stuck in this life of running,
of hiding in the jungle in paraguay
as the invisible dragons circled
the air above chile,
of accepting our ability to sacrifice
friends and lovers to save ourselves.
it is strange.
the first they told me this
was on gramercy drive,
the living room with the gray carpet
of unit six, 950 gramercy drive,
my parents sitting on the couch,
how he leaned forward and tapped
mindlessly on the coffee table with his paint
caked fingers while my mother
started adding the pink yarn to the blanket—
standing in front of them
with my arms straight down to my sides
as he said,
son, in this life, you can't have friends
because you will have to lose them.
he never warned me about what happens
to our children,
how sometimes they are taken
before we can even know their skin,
or maybe i just hoped it would be different for mine.
it's been over two years now
since she's been gone,
taken on her journey from judy's womb.
spontaneous.
but last night,
she was here.
i rolled over to my left
and in my half sleep
saw her standing five feet away.
she had grown,
in a pale dress and boots,
a jacket hugging tight around her shoulders.
she looked to be around ten years old
and in that moment i couldn't remember
how long ago was that day
that i can never escape.
she smiled, standing in a beam of light,
her hand lifting into the air,
to say hello, to say stop, to say stay,
and i bolted up,
waking up screaming,
hand reaching out across my wife's body,
to the light that filtered in through the window,
judy startled
wrapping her arms around me through instinct
as i began to wail at the fading light,
telling her
that i thought i heard
our baby say
The Sleep of the Righteous by Wolfgang Hilbig, translated by Isabel Fargo Cole (Two Lines Press, 2015)
Scott Esposito sent me an advanced reader's copy of this book knowing I would love it, and with an introduction from one of my favorite writers László Krasznahorkai, I was immediately sold. In his introduction, Krasznahorkai writes: "The horrendous, deathly, unquiet, baleful, murderous everyday situations of the petty bourgeois. These routine occurrences do not pass. The petty bourgeois does not pass. … Wolfgang Hilbig is an artist of immense stature. He discovered a wondrous language to describe a horrific world. I admit this is a sick illumination. Nonetheless, it is illumination. Unforgettable."
from "The Sleep of the Righteous":
The dark divests us of our qualities. — Though we breathe more greedily, struggling for life, for some fleeting web of substance from the darkness…it is the darkness that forms a mute block above us: intangible matter our breaths cannot lighten…it seems to burst apart at each answer from the old man, each lament of his breath, yet sinks in again swiftly to weigh down still closer, in the cohesive calm of myriad tiny black, gyrating viruses. And we rest one whole long night in this block of black viruses, we rest from the toils of the day: from the everyday toil of circling around each other, still and hostile. By day we keep silent, we know too much about ourselves, and our resolve to skirt of ignore this knowledge of ourselves is unshakeable. For years no contention has arisen between us, it seems settled that we respect both our lives, that we grant ourselves our existence. His existence is that of the father of his daughter, mine that of the son of a mother, no more and no less; the woman we mean, descendant of a dead woman, sleeps in more distant back rooms.
from "The Memories":
And he'd left the door unlocked when he went to the mailbox. Afterward, he'd returned to the apartment with the absurd suspicion that someone had been there in the meantime. The smell of a stranger hung in the chilly air. There was quite clearly, almost too clearly, a muteness in the silence that was not his own muteness. Once again, for several minutes, he'd listened at the door of the little back room: not a sound had emerged. — Dark and bowed he stood holding his ear to the gray-yellow wood: in the room behind the door it was still.
What memories are sleeping, sleeping on behind that door…for how much longer? And after that I fell asleep at the table myself, deciding to postpone my trip to the mailbox until the next day he thought. Or I only thought I did. And I only thought up the steps in the stairwell, they padded solely through my imagination. And then I thought I saw a shadow, dark and bowed, in the kitchen doorway, making a grotesque attempt to grin and saying:
They're all under the ground…
The words were hard to understand, like a noise I'd left far behind me, and they were swallowed by the stillness. Or drowned out by the town as it awoke at last.
The Morning News Is Exciting by Don Mee Choi (Action Books, 2010)
I don't think it's a coincidence that I read this on the same morning I read Chiwan Choi's book, and during a time I've been doing some contemplation on certain pasts, histories, and trajectories. I've long admired Don Mee Choi's work as a translator, and am ever grateful for introducing Kim Hyesoon's work to me in English, which then allowed me to reread her work in Korean. And the sheer power and complex issues she deals with in this volume are significant. I'm reminded of two conversation. The first conversation I had with Azareen Van Der Vliet Oloomi at an &NOW Conference several years ago in Boulder. We were sitting at a panel together and were sharing with each our stories and certain pressures to write from "accurate" and "ethnic" points of view. I related to her a question I had been struggling with was, if I even wanted to attempt to tell my family's history, how the ideas of "accuracy" and "correctness" would factor in. For example, the stories my father has told me about his experience of the Korean War and its aftermath are very subjective, and therefore personal. But there are details in accounts that contradict historical ones. Some events are out of order. etc. But an attempt to "rewrite" and "correct" these details in order to match the historical record would then wipe out his personal version, though flawed, containing a different and very important truth as well. Azareen had been struggling with a similar question, and with her story, she felt that the "accuracy" and "precision" would be at the forefront of critique, that subjective histories are not allowed within objective ones. The second conversation I had in LA with my friend Saehee Cho. She lamented the fact that a very particular amount of time had passed since the Korean War had happened, and recent stories in the media reminded us that in a few years, all of the first-hand witnesses to these events would be gone, that it was perhaps our duty to record these stories and ask more questions of our parents and family members before these stories deteriorate to second and third-hand accounts. These conversations are tangentially related to some of the issues Don Mee Choi grapples with in her book, but as time move forward, certain events are also being pushed further back, and though memories of violence should not be treasured, they should be held on to as their disappearance signals a different kind of violence.
I arrived below the 38th parallel. Everyone and every place I know are below the waist of a nation. Before I arrived, empire arrived, that is to say empire is great. I follow its geography. From a distance the waist below looks like any other small rural village of winding alleys and traditional tile-roofed houses surrounded by rice paddies, vegetable fields, and mountains. It reminded me of home, that is to say this is my home.
Close up: clubs, restaurants, souvenir and clothing stores with signs in English, that is to say English has arrived before me and was here even before I had left. PAPA SAN, LOVE SHOP, POP'S, GOLDEN TAILOR, PAWN. I follosed the signs and they led to one of the gates to Camp Stanley, a heliport, that is to say language is not to be believed but to be obeyed, and to compel obedience. A woman in her seventies lived next to LOVE SHOP. She was taking an afternoon nap. She has never left below the waist and eventually came to be regarded as a great patriot by her government, that is to say she followed the signs and suffered from lice infestation during the war and passed the lice on to the GIs. I followed the house that reminded me of home. They led me to another metal gate and barbed wire. Another woman was having lunch at My Sister's Place. She did not remember which year she had reeturned except that she remembered hearing about the assassination of our Father, that is to say she was here and I was still elsewhere and the unity of language is fundamentally political. She told me a story about her right index finger. Her finger fiercely pointed to her mouth, then between her spread legs, and then her behind. She had no choice under the GI's gun, that is to say she had no choice about absolute choice, that is to say her poverty was without choice and when absolute choice was forced upon her she chose a GI, that is to say she chose empire because empire is greather than out Father, that is to say she followed and left her daughter to its geography and her index finger had no choice but to be fierce under absolute choice, that is to say she had arrived home.
The Book of Feral Flora by Amanda Ackerman (Les Figues Press, 2015)
What appeals to me about Amanda Ackerman's writing is that in its intelligence and experimentation, there is an utter tenderness with which she articulates and creates relationships. She asks difficult questions and considers what it means to exist in the way we have continued to exist, questions our relationships with other life forms, and looks for balance in ways perhaps previously inconceived. There's a sort of reference and respect that she bestows upon the subjects of her writing, upon the language itself, an offering of water and words and wonder. Amanda Ackerman write about the process of getting plants to write poems here. She also writes about compromised bodies here.
from "The Triangulations: seeding and saving":
I am choosing to tell you this story. There were 2 sisters who lived in the belly of a whale for 6 months. But forget me (oh, the weight of the heart.) I should have lulled you into this story before mentioning this heavy, dripping heart. I could sweetly bludgeon you later but I tend to blurt out my secrets. I raise carrier pigeons. I like geometry. I was numb. I was dead.
Personally I can't say that I'm not scared of death and ghosts. As soon as we consider the body itself, we think of this living flesh as a banner for fitness, but already one day dead. Of the two sisters, Sorrel's face had the potential to one day become haunted. Rose, on the other hand, had a face for the new millennium. A perfect balance of masculine and feminine traits.
But I am returning to the heart's weight.
The heart's weight. It looks like –
a ship's anchor, a distorted pink diamond, a bloated locket forged from a ton of brass, a granite wrecking ball. Too many fractures. I leave it in the ground. I pretend to bury things in the spring. I pretend my heart is light. I am making choices all the time.
from "Feral Iridium Animate Matter: flower uneconomical language":
I now count fourteen irises. The irises, the very exercising of scales. As if iridized. Like those glazed, involuted tissues on tall unwavering but bending stems. We too. What tells us, each instant, to—,
Time is circular. I can't figure it out. Because the way you smell is harbinger of soil deep down before it even becomes soil, wet and powdery and plummy. Because if you smell like the color of a plum in a cellar as the soil creeps back through the cracks and the plant life starts to regain the world—the world is in ruins again, at least from my perspective. No, the world is not in ruins. It is new. Back when people thought bathing would make them ill, they used irises to mask the scent of the armpits and loins. They used the powdery balsamic scent to mask the odor of their greasy hair rumbling pores and rough glands. And kings loved the smell of this king-flower this sword. The mark of sovereignty, gold, a shrinking enemy of the world. A faucet for tracheal bends, golden sauces cooling into permanent form, the jewel, the grail, and all I have now is words when you die again. I don't know what it's like to die a plant's death.
Required Reading: Abductions / The Sleep of the Righteous / The Morning News is Exciting / The Book of Feral Flora was last modified: January 6th, 2016 by Janice Lee
Required Reading: Journal of an Ordinary Grief / Mess and Mess and
I recently read two books that both blew me away, both in their intense beauty but also the absolute importance of both of these texts. At this particularly apocalyptic moment in time, one both absent of and brimming with hope, these texts offer important perspectives and I can't recommend them enough. I want to say very little about them, as I think the texts speak much better for themselves, so I instead offer a few excerpts from each.
Journal of an Ordinary Grief by Mahmoud Darwish / Translated from the Arabic by Ibrahim Muhawi (Archipelago Books, 2010)
I came across this book while wandering through a used bookstore friend friend/writer Harold Abramowitz. I picked the book out of the shelf because the title jumped out at me, but while I was holding it and about to flip through the pages to get a better look, Harold glanced over, saw the book in my hand, and immediately declared to me how good of a find it was.
I read the entire book in one sitting while sitting on my patio in Altadena, surrounded by trees and mountains, and sipping my coffee, and found the language staggering, heartbreaking, intense, sad, inspiring, moving, and absolutely essential. Several times I found myself having difficulty breathing and several times I had to hold back tears. It's hard to articulate the emotional effect this book had on me. Hence, some excerpts:
from "The Moon Did Not Fall into the Well":
—Why are you avoiding me? Are you trying to put a distance between yourself and the past?
—To make it clear to you that I do not defend a past happiness, exactly as I do not celebrate a past misery. Perhaps it is due only to our high opinion of it that our homeland is justice and beauty. Yet it did not become so beautiful merely from projection caused by deprivation. It is a dream in its actuality, and an actuality in its dream. We do not long for a wasteland, but for a paradise. We long to practice our humanity in a place of our own.
from "The Homeland: Between Memory and History":
The map is not the answer. And the birth certificate is no longer the same. No one has had to face this question as you have, from this moment till you die, or repent, or become a traitor. To be content is not enough because contentment does not bring about change or blow anything up, and the wasteland is immense. The desert is not always bigger than a prison cell. So, what is a homeland? It is not a question you can answer and then go on your way. Your cause and your life are one. And before all this – and beyond it – it is your identity. But when you returned, you found nothing. What does that mean? It would be the simplest thing to say, my homeland is where I will die. But you could die anywhere, or on the border between two places. What does that mean? After a while the question will become harder. Why did you leave? Why did you leave? For twenty years you have been asking, why did they leave? Leaving is not a negation of the homeland, but it does turn the problem into a question. Do not write a history now. When you do that, you leave the past behind, and what is required is to call the past to account. Do not write a history except that of your wounds. Do not write a history except that of your exile. You are here – here, where you were born. And where longing will lead you to death.
The homeland that is in your memory and in the cells of your body is entangled with the homeland in their fists and their "returning" suitcases.
from "Journal of an Ordinary Grief":
The solution lies in the sea. Early in the morning you head for the beach to put out your fire in the blue water. The waves draw you away and do not carry you back. You have to return on your own. In solitude you lie on the warm sand in the open air. Why does the sun squander so much of its energy, and why do the waves break? There is a huge amount of sun, a huge amount of sand, and a huge amount of water. All around you people speak a language you understand, but your sadness and your loneliness and your alienation intensify. A desire possesses you to describe the sea to your girlfriend, but you feel lonely. With reason, or without, they curse your people, yet they enjoy what your people have left behind. Even while swimming or joking or kissing they damn your people. Is the sea not capable of granting them a single moment of innocence and affection so that they can forget about you for a moment? How can human beings feel hate while they are stretched out on the sand? Saturated with sun, salt, and longing you head for the beach snack bar. You drink a beer and whistle a sad song, and all eyes turn to you. You busy yourself with lighting a cigarette that has no taste, and you buy an ear of corn and eat it all by yourself. You wish to be able to spend the whole day at the beach in order to forget that it's a feast day and your family is waiting for you. But the time of your daily appointment at the police station is approaching and you remember all that is happening to you. And in the blink of an eye the color of noon, the sea and sky turn even more blue. Then you leave.
from "He Who Kills Fifty Arabs Loses One Piaster":
Here they sleep. The sunset grows larger and changes into forests of dry trees. There is no hour to commemorate their death, no occasion and no appointment. The stones themselves are time, and the expanse of the pale sunset is time. What name shall we give them?
from "Happiness – When It Betrays":
They taught you to be wary of happiness because it hurts when it betrays. But from where did it come from all of a sudden?
Suddenly you laugh. Equality makes you laugh. And you resist, that you may not be secure in your happiness. The days have taught you not to trust happiness because it hurts when it deceives. Where has it from from, then, all of a sudden?
You are not responsible for anything that happened in the past. The past was not made by you, or by any mistakes you made. But it is your heritage.
from "Going to the World":
—Why are you waking the world from its slumber?
—What you hear is not my voice. It's the sound of my corpse hitting the ground.
–Why don't you die quietly then?
—Because a quiet death is a degrading life.
—And a loud death?
—It is to stand firm.
—Did you come to announce your presence?
—No. I came to announce my absence.
—Why do you kill, then?
—I don't kill anything except killing. I kill only the crime.
—I am coming from hell.
Mess and Mess and by Douglas Kearney (Noemi Books, 2015)
I've long admired Douglas Kearney as human being, as a writer, as a poet, as a teacher, and so much more. Several moments in his last book, Patter, brought me to tears, and I often teach his work in my writing classes as there is so much to learn from the way he stretches language in every possible way. Because his work is so layered in what it says, performs, reads, overrides, poeticizes, turns, and theorizes, this book, a strange and messy amalgalm of theory and discussion and poetry and performance, becomes a crucial text, not only to delve deeper into Kearney's own work and find new points of entry, but also as a resource to read so much of what is happening in the world today. Some excerpts:
Required Reading: Journal of an Ordinary Grief / Mess and Mess and was last modified: January 4th, 2016 by Janice Lee