Moorefield House Publishing

Reviews
Reviews
Jacob Hammer's Review of The One Inside
Posted on February 19, 2018 at 8:00 AM |
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The One Inside by Sam Shepard
Reviewed by Jacob Hammer
I had only previously encountered Sam Shepard as a playwright in my literature survey courses,
so when I saw that he was releasing a novel I was excited to see his work in another medium. I
had been saving up spare cash to get it, but then my friend Santino loaned it to me with a hearty
recommendation and I set to it.
This was another novel that had a much looser plot structure. Shepard jumps between his
narrator’s childhood, near past, and what is likely the current timeline with frequent jumps into
dreams and dialogue. The book consists of chapters of only two or three pages, any of which can
move to any of these timelines. Despite this, the book is not awfully confusing to follow. One
way that Shepard achieves this is through chapter titles that hint at where the chapter will take
place in time. Other than that, he makes the timeline clear through his tone and other subtle
clues. He keeps from over-explaining, but also doesn’t let us lose our way.
Again, this novel does not lend itself to plot summary. The narrative we start out with follows
our narrator through a lucid dream state as he wanders through the desert surrounding his trailer
following the barking of his two dogs who are on the trail of something. Another timeline
follows his interactions with a much younger woman who is living with him in a relationship
whose boundaries are difficult for the narrator and her to understand. Piggy-backing on this
narrative is a series of dialogue pieces between the narrator and the girl over whether she can
publish their phone conversations as a book of some kind. They debate authorship, how people
will perceive their relationship (thus the actual nature of their relationship), and the merit of their
conversations as literature in this space. The narrator also leads us through his childhood,
specifically a time when his father was sleeping with a young woman and the turmoil that arose
from that both practically and for his own emotional states. These personal complications are
multiplied when the narrator and she sleep together at some point and made worse when the girl
(Felicity) commits suicide mysteriously. This leads to some other dialogue pieces titled under
“Interrogation” towards the end of the book. These main timelines are interspersed with general
reflections by the narrator on a variety of topics, dream sequences, and returns to the first
narrative, weaving it all together.
Shepard aligns all of these timelines well enough that we continue to follow the story virtually
seamlessly. As I was reading the book, I found that I really could only get through a couple
chapters a day. This was certainly not because they were difficult to read, but instead, because it
was something that I wanted to allow to sink in day-by-day. I enjoyed spending time with a novel
that provided such a confused narrator struggling not only with his past, but incursions of his
past into his present like a fog. I also appreciated seeing another aspect of an artist whose work
as a playwright had such an effect on how I looked at literature as an undergraduate.
Jacob Hammer's Review of The One Inside
Posted on February 19, 2018 at 8:00 AM |
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The One Inside by Sam Shepard
Reviewed by Jacob Hammer
I had only previously encountered Sam Shepard as a playwright in my literature survey courses,
so when I saw that he was releasing a novel I was excited to see his work in another medium. I
had been saving up spare cash to get it, but then my friend Santino loaned it to me with a hearty
recommendation and I set to it.
This was another novel that had a much looser plot structure. Shepard jumps between his
narrator’s childhood, near past, and what is likely the current timeline with frequent jumps into
dreams and dialogue. The book consists of chapters of only two or three pages, any of which can
move to any of these timelines. Despite this, the book is not awfully confusing to follow. One
way that Shepard achieves this is through chapter titles that hint at where the chapter will take
place in time. Other than that, he makes the timeline clear through his tone and other subtle
clues. He keeps from over-explaining, but also doesn’t let us lose our way.
Again, this novel does not lend itself to plot summary. The narrative we start out with follows
our narrator through a lucid dream state as he wanders through the desert surrounding his trailer
following the barking of his two dogs who are on the trail of something. Another timeline
follows his interactions with a much younger woman who is living with him in a relationship
whose boundaries are difficult for the narrator and her to understand. Piggy-backing on this
narrative is a series of dialogue pieces between the narrator and the girl over whether she can
publish their phone conversations as a book of some kind. They debate authorship, how people
will perceive their relationship (thus the actual nature of their relationship), and the merit of their
conversations as literature in this space. The narrator also leads us through his childhood,
specifically a time when his father was sleeping with a young woman and the turmoil that arose
from that both practically and for his own emotional states. These personal complications are
multiplied when the narrator and she sleep together at some point and made worse when the girl
(Felicity) commits suicide mysteriously. This leads to some other dialogue pieces titled under
“Interrogation” towards the end of the book. These main timelines are interspersed with general
reflections by the narrator on a variety of topics, dream sequences, and returns to the first
narrative, weaving it all together.
Shepard aligns all of these timelines well enough that we continue to follow the story virtually
seamlessly. As I was reading the book, I found that I really could only get through a couple
chapters a day. This was certainly not because they were difficult to read, but instead, because it
was something that I wanted to allow to sink in day-by-day. I enjoyed spending time with a novel
that provided such a confused narrator struggling not only with his past, but incursions of his
past into his present like a fog. I also appreciated seeing another aspect of an artist whose work
as a playwright had such an effect on how I looked at literature as an undergraduate.
Santino DallaVecchia's Review of Water Fragments
Posted on February 1, 2018 at 8:05 AM |
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Water Fragments. Catie Hannigan. Tammy, 2017.
Print. 40 pages. $13.00. Available at tammyjournal.com.
Review by Santino DallaVecchia.
Catie Hannigan’s second chapbook, Water Fragments, manages to be both sparse and dense,
brief and expansive, evocative and somber. It’s a book about water or, more specifically, about
who we are in relation to water. But who is the we? Is it just the speaker, a sort of omniscient
voice that seems like it could be the author, or is this a book meant to encompass us as a whole, a
species, or is it a communication yearning for its own kind, for those touched by water, by those
who rely on water not just for survival but for their sense of humanity? This isn’t a question
Hannigan poses or explicitly answers, but it’s one worth considering, inasmuch as Water
Fragments is equal parts transcendental and inscrutable. I felt drawn into the cadence of water;
I’m writing this now after having spent time in the woods, staring at a bog, and am immediately
drawn to this passage:
Not surprisingly, the trickling of water has led to other memory reservoirs. For
instance, W.B. Yeats, commenting on the inspiration of his poem “The Lake Isle
of Innisfree” (Part I, Islands), recalled that:
I heard a little tinkle of water and saw a fountain in a shop window which
balanced a little ball upon its jet, and began to remember lake water. From the
sudden remembrance came my poem “Innisfree,” my first lyric with anything in
its rhythm of my own music.
Water calls to water and even the memory of water leads us back to water. All I can see right
now is the green film over the still water and the impression it now has of both Innisfree and
Hannigan’s notion of water memories. So– this is a book especially for the water-haunted, and
perhaps it’ll make the most sense to any reader right after they’ve encountered water. Because
the collection of fragments– think maybe Maggie Nelson at her more academic or T.
Fleischmann at their most meditative– isn’t easy to read. It meanders and pauses and detaches
only to suddenly become wry and worldly only to shift again and become purely poetry. And–
like water– other things float along. The above passage is somewhat more straightforward than
most of the book, but it’s nonetheless representative of the interweaving of other poets into her
fragments. The net result is a full argument about the nature of human consciousness as it relates
to water, but one told over the great stretches and unities and divides between water’s different
forms and our differing relationships to these forms. Hannigan writes, “The crux of the work is
to use the source as the source. I wanted to see what would happen if I used my subject as my
only sources: water and poetry.” The work itself concurs– there’s little present that isn’t an
intimate mediation and meditation between water, its encounter with humans, and the poetry that
results.
Water Fragments leads us through many different kinds of water, many different bodies and
forms reservoirs of water take, and writes about them both boldly and humbly. Hannigan carries
on a careful balance: she omits our human inclination to anthropomorphize and ergo make
un-strange the massive and beautiful inhumanity that is water. But she concurrently refuses the
reverse inclination, that is, to think of the water clinically, as something outside the field of
human perception, which, for the purposes of any human discussion, is impossible. How do the
many faces of water look back at us, she asks, and how are those faces really us seeking
revelation through the water? In a final section, titled “Water Notes,” there’s a few pages of
almost unnoted endnotes; one reads,“Water is constantly receiving / it cannot give / and that is
why we feel we must take. We arrive as repenters, we leave as thieves.” The water isn’t feeling
here– it’s solely performing an action, the action endemic to its nature– where we, water’s
witnesses, are both supplicants and pilferers of its unknowing gifts. Exploring the ramifications
of this relationship is a central impulse throughout the chapbook. In one of the most moving
passages, Hannigan writes,
Although the sea is the one who waits, it also contains the immensity. It is wise.
Its wisdom reinforces its power, and this is why we seek it for guidance, why we
are brought to tears when we are face to face with the sea. This is also why we
can never be the sea, we are not built for such immensity. However, we possess
our own sense of the watershed. We have our own giving body, taking body, and
containing body, but we cannot be just one, or else there would be no flux, and if
there is no flux, then we are merely stagnant. Water is change.
There’s a sense that all these fluxes are contained indivisibly within the sea’s vastness, where in
the human body, our “sense of watershed” occurs in varying states, in our very human
changeability. We see in the ocean ourselves perfected, but recognize this unattainability, and
steal away with a sense of both possibility and loss. This is the hinge on which the whole text
rests: the moving stasis of water in all its forms as a constant, with humans and our seeking of
water as a variable. Catie Hannigan immerses us in this meditation insistently and tenderly. “To
reject the water’s darkness,” she writes, “is to live in fear.” To help us not live in fear, she offers
a meandering story about water, and people, and poetry. She reveals the scope of our
interrelationship, and the depth of our spiritual need for water’s presence in her minimal yet
capacious little guidebook, Water Fragments..
Jacob Hammer's Review of The Resurrection of Joan Ashby
Posted on January 14, 2018 at 12:45 AM |
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The Resurrection of Joan Ashby by Cherise Wolas
Reviewed by Jacob Hammer
Someone described this book briefly months ago and made it seem so intriguing that I picked up
a copy as soon as I could. Then it sat on the shelf for a while and I forgot what the person had
said about the book besides their enthusiasm and my own at what they said. When I finally got
back to it for this month’s review, I saw that this enthusiasm was not unfounded. The
Resurrection of Joan Ashby is a book of incredible complexity and insight.
The book opens with a spotlight piece from Literature Magazine on Joan Ashby who is an
acclaimed short story writer with two outrageously successful short story collections. It includes
some excerpts from the stories and concludes that she has yet to produce a novel even though
years have passed since her last collection was released. From here the narrative takes off. Joan
has just discovered she is pregnant despite being up front about her desire to keep children out of
the lives of she and her new husband, Martin. She decides to keep the child and do her best to
love it. During the pregnancy she finishes the draft of her first novel, but when she looks back on
it, decides to get toss it and begins writing a series of short stories after the first boy, Daniel, is
born. They hire a nanny, and Joan is still able to spend a fair amount of time working on her
writing, though she does not publish anything. She is a perfectionist of sorts and what she writes
during this time does not reach her standards. Things are covered over in a feeling of foreboding.
After a few years, another boy is born, but Joan struggles more to feel attachment to Eric than
she did Daniel. Soon enough, Daniel begins to start writing stories of his own. Joan encourages
him, but keeps her own literary career from him. The years go by. More and more of Joan’s time
is taken up by her motherhood. She carves out a few hours most days, over the course of nearly a
decade, and finally completes another novel that she wants to publish, but puts off publishing
because of increasing demands from Eric for supervision as he proves himself to be a genius of
programing and starts a wildly successful business from his parents’ home.
This point is where the novel takes a turn. Joan discovers accidentally that the novel she had
hidden away has been published by someone else and split into two books. The thief only
bothered to change the gender of one of the characters before publishing it to wide acclaim. Joan
is thrown into fury of emotions and discovers through the pseudonym that Daniel is the one who
committed the theft, the son who she had always gotten along with better and who seemed to be
more on his feet than Eric in many ways. Joan immediately leaves for India on a trip she had
been wanting to go on for decades and notifies her agent of the theft. The book shifts from this to
transcriptions of an audio recording that Daniel creates to explain his theft and more importantly
explain how he has felt in a family of geniuses. As a punishment to himself for stealing the novel
his mother had carefully tucked away, he makes himself read the two short story collections that
won her early fame. This gives us even more looks at her work as Daniel reads passages of the
stories that he finds especially striking. After a while of this and Daniel’s decision to transcribe
his mother’s novel with minimal changes, we move back to Joan as she flies to India. She arrives
in Dharamshala shortly after for what she believes will be a three week trip. The trip ends up
being much longer than that. While there she meets people who help her along her way and even
eventually meets a very much changed Eric who has been there for some months already. She
begins to heal. With this healing comes her writing again. Eventually Martin sends a package
with the recording that Daniel made. After listening to the recording, Joan has more clarity about
her relationship with Daniel and though she is still hurt, she moves past it and decides to remake
her life in Dharamshala, divorce Martin, and continue to pursue her writing. The book ends with
a note from Literature Magazine saying that a two novels are set to be released by Joan that very
year.
What makes this book unique is how, through the use of Ashby’s writing, we get not only insight
into how she is processing what is going on around her, but also many more stories wrapped up
within the narrative. To add to this already complex view, we also have Daniel’s audio recording
that provides a whole additional perspective of everything that has happened so far in the novel.
The first half of the novel has an eerie feeling to it. Wolas expertly foreshadows Daniel’s betrayal
but leads us to believe that it will not come from him at all which makes the twist of it all the
better. This book rewards its readers for their labor with deep insight into the mental processes of
both narrators and a vast array of smaller narratives via the fiction of Ashby.
Review of Patient Zero by Tomas Q. Morin, Reviewed by Santino DallaVecchia
Posted on November 23, 2017 at 12:25 AM |
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Patient Zero. Tomás Q. Morín. Copper Canyon Press, April 2017.
ISBN: 978-1556594939. Print. 96 pages. $16.00.
Review by Santino DallaVecchia.
“I used to walk like a sloth,” writes Tomás Q. Morín, “eyes on the slow ground, memorizing
every pair of shoes in the seventh grade.” That this poem, from his sophomore collection Patient
Zero, is called ‘Stargazing’ may begin to give you a sense of how this book values gradual
revelation over any shock or gimmick or surprise. Morín’s poems are patient; they don’t rush to
make a point and they don’t grab your attention by image alone. Instead, they luxuriate in the
words they’re made of– you can hear as you read the gentle insistence of sounds and cadences.
And they draw connections through space and time that become dramatic not through absurd
logical gaps but through a recognized connection. In this, Patient Zero gives us a world brought
down a notch from the often hectic pace of contemporary poetry. The collection’s contents by
and large match this tone– the voice here is gentle and insistent, more likely to suggest a train of
thought that subtly realigns your worldview than to directly command you to change.
In one early poem, ‘At the Supermarket,’ Morín writes,
Salt for blood—A fresh loaf
for sleep. Outside, Sunday morning
has expired. The line is long
for this hour. When the doors open
the squawks of gulls blown too far inland
announce nothing is impossible. The cashier
vanishes again for the cigarette key
and the moment slows the way moments do
when the eye is fixed for too long—:
This poem, as many in the collection do, reveals where the lived instant transforms into the
reflected on moment. The lines break where a new action occurs, leading us to notice the minute
gaps between events and their consequences. ‘Sunday morning / has expired,’ and ‘The line is
long / for this hour,’ and ‘When the doors open / the squawks of gulls blown too far inland /
announce nothing is impossible,’ in all these observations, the result of the thing observed carries
forward, rather than remaining with its catalyst. Everything gently pulls apart in this observation,
‘when the eye is fixed for too long,' and in doing so, prompts us to question how the world we
inhabit fits together. Crucially, Morín doesn’t pretend to know the answer. The poem opens with
the ambiguous but evocative ‘Salt for blood—A fresh loaf / for sleep,’ and who can say precisely
what this means? But in context of the poem, it casts into relief the indeterminacy of both the
lives we lead and of the moments and objects that make them up.
As suggested by the evocative start of ‘At the Supermarket,’ the restraint throughout
Patient Zero doesn’t inhibit its lyricism or imaginative leaps– instead, it enhances both, in
allowing them the space to breathe. Within a poem, each line isn’t specifically vying for your
attention; they’re all working in tandem to craft an impression. If one line stands out, it makes a
strong rather than distracting impression, and if a poem goes further out on an imaginative limb,
we’re inclined to trust, not skepticism. So, when ‘The Food Critic’ reveals itself as a dystopia
poem, we accept it without the resistance that often accompanies poetry readers when we suspect
a genre piece might be sneaking into our literary diet. And when we encounter ‘Sing Sing,’ we’re
ready to be moved by whatever it is that Morín– gracious, patient, and tender throughout– is so
moved and intrigued by that he dedicates seventeen pages to it. I hesitate to give any of this
poem away, but it’s a sort of rumination and narrative on the idea of the Muse, and it’s at the
collection’s heart because the rest of the collection seems to emanate from it– what came before
we reconsider in light of it, and what follows is read in the light of its shadow. But these few
lines are an excellent measure of both its and the book’s quiet, patient brilliance:
What struck her
always about that night
Â
Â
was how far from the boat
the black crest of beech
and maples joined the
dark flat of the river
to make a green yawn
each second made
yawn even wider.
Â
She could never forget
this coupling of solid
and liquid darks so
unbroken and total except
where the buildings sat
locked arm in arm
along the shore.
Â
In a year of brilliant debuts and sophomore collections, Tomás Q. Morín’s Patient Zero
distinguishes itself through its graceful, tender, and evocative unfolding. He teaches us, in its
pages, how to let ourselves see the world, and gives us his vision of the world, in all its patience
and depth.
The Swimmer Reviewed by Jacob Hammer
Posted on November 17, 2017 at 10:50 AM |
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The Swimmer by Zsuzsa Banks (translated by Margot Bettauer Dembo)
Reviewed by Jacob Hammer
I picked up this book not entirely knowing what to expect. I was straightening the used
books in the store I work at when I saw the title of the book. I decided to take a look. The dust
jacket can only tell you so much though. I took a chance anyway. Bánks did not disappoint. What
I found was a remarkably well constructed narrative of a childhood in disorder and of the
connections that can be formed in the midst of that change.
The book takes place in Hungary in the 1950s. Within the first pages we learn that Kata,
Isti, and their father Kálmán have been abandoned by their mother, Katalin. This leads the
remaining family through a series of relatives’ and friends’ houses, staying sometimes for only a
couple months, and sometimes for years. Kata and Isti grow up this way. Eventually they stop
asking about their mother or hoping that she will come back. Kálmán is distant. Sometimes he
spends hours at a time unreachable staring at the ceiling or a picture of their mother. Kata calls
this “diving.” Since the novel is written from Kata’s childhood perspective, Kálmán's reasons for
moving them from place to place seem even more confusing, but displacement is a confusing
thing no matter the age. In each place that Kata, Isti, and Kálmán live in, they form bonds with
those they are with only to have those bonds stretched or broken when they leave again. This
lends the book as a whole a sense of slow moving tragedy heightened by the helplessness of the
narrator to control surrounding circumstances.
As we begin to connect a chronological narrative from the loosely chronological one that
Banks provides through the narrator, we notice that Isti develops odd behaviors as time goes by.
At first, it would be easy enough to say that these behaviors were just a child pretending or
something equally harmless. As time passes, he seems more and more convinced of the auditory
hallucinations and more stubborn in his behavior generally. He becomes convinced that he can
hear people’s hair screaming as it is being cut and other things impossible to hear. He also spends
hours in a daze similar to Kálmán's “diving.” All of this makes Kata anxious.
For a long time they live at a lake and it is here that they learn to swim. This is one of the
times that Kálmán gives them the most attention, to teach them to swim as he does. Isti becomes
obsessed with swimming and gets in the water as often as possible. This is, overall, one of the
happiest times for the family. They grow close with the people they are living with and the lake
gives them comfort. Eventually, they have to leave. Isti is extremely upset by this move and Kata
provides this insight into the family dynamic and especially to Kálmán:
I had the feeling that Isti and I were just two add-ons, stuck to him, to his life, that he
could never get rid of. We were part of him; in some vague way that’s how it was, and he
put up with us the way he put up with everything, no matter what it was—with
indifference…He broke off relationships so easily, leaving no trail for anybody to follow,
wiping out any trace of us…(pg 223).
Isti worsens somewhat after that move. Eventually they are staying near a river during winter. He
is told to stay away from the thinning ice, but does not listen. He falls through but gets back out.
Neighbors bring him back home and they are able to get him warm again, but he comes down
with a fever and eventually dies. This tragedy brings together many of the people that they had
stayed with in the last few years and leads to Kálmán and Kata returning to the lake soon
afterward and staying.
While this narrative is carrying onward, we also learn the reason why Kata and Isti’s
mother flees in the first place. She was running to the West and we learn that she is doing fairly
well there. Her letters and presents are often lost in the mail or intercepted by the government
which led to her total absence in the life of the family she left behind. By the time Kata and Isti
learn this, they have already given up seeing her again for the most part. We also learn of Kálmán
and Katalin’s love story meeting and early marriage before happiness left them. These jumps into
the distant past and separated present add to the tragic feeling of the novel as a whole. They also
allow us to gain some understanding of the seemingly unavoidable and unalterable circumstances
that pull Kata and Isti around so cruelly.
This was an engrossing book. Often it seemed stark in circumstances, but this was
balanced out by careful attention to the smallest gestures, kindnesses, and details of human
interactions that illustrate an incredible understanding of the understated actions that make up
human lives. The book’s slightly disjointed timeline and narrative, as well as its structuring
around frequent breaks– which could indicate a short jump in time or a launch into an extended
flashback or even a far jump forward in time– all lend themselves to an almost simultaneous
experience of the whole novel. It feels like your own memory because of this. This is a book that
I would whole-heartedly recommend.
Review of Fantasy as a Means of Revelation and Justice: Eve L. Ewing’s Electric Arches
Posted on November 13, 2017 at 8:10 PM |
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Fantasy as a Means of Revelation and Justice: Eve L. Ewing’s Electric Arches
Reviewed by Santino DallaVecchia
I’ve come across a few calls for submissions recently that go out of their way to specify how
much they don’t want genre pieces– fantasy, science fiction, horror, and just generally
speculative fiction. And while this makes sense– few lit journals are interested in work that’s not
realism or at least realism-adjacent– it’s also somewhat disheartening to see such huge swaths of
writing discarded out of hand, especially inasmuch as many notable works in the past decade do
dance around the edges of genre work. Karen Russell’s Swamplandia! is a potent example, as is
the increased critical attention paid to Stephen King’s work. Man Booker Prize winner Marlon
James is currently writing a fantasy trilogy.
And this is to say nothing of poetry. Many poets are increasingly comfortable incorporating
elements of genre work into their poems. I think, since poetry is itself so symbolic, it’s a pretty
short intuitive leap to playing with imaginary things to represent a deeper truth, an escape from
the everyday into the desires and realities beneath it. This doesn’t detract from poetry; it
enhances it, offers it the opportunity to grow past its ostensible limits. It’s this willingness to
explore and ignore strictures about genre that makes Eve L. Ewing’s debut collection, Electric
Arches, so remarkable. Though it’s composed of words, it’s got the visual variety and depth of a
graphic novel, not just because it incorporates images, but because she embraces the exploratory
possibilities of poetry in representing her own memories. In a brief introduction, she writes,
“Anyway, as I rode my bike I would narrate, in my head, all of my adventures…. In this way, my
block became the backdrop of infinite possibility. The space in my head was as real to me as the
dirt beneath my feet.” Throughout the collection, she vividly re-creates this feeling, this sense of
the imagined real as being as deserving of space as the transcribed real. In many poems, she
splits between typed and handwritten text:
In each of these [a re-telling] poems, Ewing begins with a stark transcription of a memory in type
before finishing the story in her handwriting. Here, she takes the racist cruelty of a neighbor and
responds by using her bike to dizzy the old woman, and captures her in a giant net, hurling her
into a lake. This fantasy isn’t an escape from reality, as is often the charge against the fantastical,
but is instead a re-aligning of reality to better match the justice deserved when a white person
uses a racial slur.
Using fantasy as a means of both emotional release and retroactive justice is a central facet of
Electric Arches. In a long prose segment, titled “The Device,” she writes the story of a machine
built by a collaboration of a “hive mind of Black nerds, obsessive types, scientists and inventors
but also historians and archeologists and the odd astrologer here and there,” to allow people in
the present to communicate with those in the past, all so that a fifth grade girl can ask this
poignant question: “What words can you offer us to help us be free as black people in a world
that does not love us?” The fantasy offers no out; instead, it gives us back reality, revealed for
what it is. Electric Arches is an essential work for our time, a genre bending book that uses
comic book exuberance and freewheeling concept building to unflinchingly explore the injustice
of racism and the complexity of human interactions. Eve L. Ewing heroically recasts the world to
reveal, right, and write through wrongs.
Electric Arches. Eve L. Ewing. Haymarket Books, September 2017.
ISBN: 9781608468560. Print. 94 pages. $16.00.
The Minor Outsider Review
Posted on September 29, 2017 at 11:40 AM |
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The Minor Outsider by Ted McDermott
Reviewed by Jacob Hammer
Todd McDermott's debut novel, The Minor Outsider, is an engaging downward spiral. He
gives us a narrator who is often aware of his faults and the turn they are making in his life, yet he
makes little effort to change his behavior. Simultaneously, McDermott allows us to find
ourselves blindsided often enough to keep interest. This is by no means a predictable book.
When we are first introduced to our narrator, Ed, he is enjoying the summer after his first
year at a graduate program in Montana. He seems basically aimless, but not self-destructive.
Taylor is a new student that he accidentally meets while wandering the surrounding bike paths.
Almost immediately, he feels the terrible pull of love in him. Taylor has a boyfriend, but Ed still
seeks her out constantly, trying to play it cool. She stays fairly distant, but friendly, until she
breaks up with her boyfriend. The same day they start dating. Things go fairly well between
them for a while until Taylor feels the lump in Ed’s arm that is apparently a tumor. Ed has known
about it for some time, but has not had it checked on or told Taylor about it. She insists that he
should get it tested. Ed resists, but eventually does get it looked at. At first, he is told that he
likely has a less serious condition that produces benign tumors in the body, but that he also could
have a condition that will result in unremovable brain tumors. As if this was not complicated
enough, Taylor becomes pregnant. They remain optimistic though, or at least Taylor does. Ed
begins to retreat into himself and as he does so, he also begins to experience hearing loss. He
tries to ignore it, as it would mean that he has the more serious condition (that could be passed to
his unborn child) and retreats still further into himself. He finally goes to get an MRI so that he
can know for sure. He does not tell Taylor he is going even though she is extremely concerned
about his health. When he finds out that he has tumors in his brain, he drives for hours and ends
up in another small town and sleeps with a girl he meets there. As morning arrives, he is filled
with regret and hurries home.He decides that they should get engaged instead of telling Taylor
what happened. Ed is full to the brim with guilt. He finishes his writing program, but is unable to
find a job in the field. He ends up working as a baker for a cafe in town. Taylor continues to
work away at her writing while Ed’s falters. He hears less and less. At a hockey game, they run
into the girl that Ed slept with the night before he proposed and Taylor learns what happened.
She locks him out of their apartment and he tries to get in. They wrestle on the floor and the
police come when the neighbors call. Ed is arrested and kept in jail over a holiday weekend then
told he is not allowed to contact Taylor for ten days. He returns to obsessing over her. While
working on a freelance journalism piece, he steals a gun from a self-defense class. He thinks
about killing himself for a bit, but the gun is not loaded. Instead he decides to talk to Taylor. She
tells him to leave. He agrees. He goes to his car and writes a check for all the money that he has
to his name and drives away with the empty gun.
Throughout the book, we are constantly aware of the small mistakes that the narrator is
making. From the start, his interest in Taylor is rooted in their difference from each other. He is
brooding and in denial about his tumors. Taylor is optimistic and more perceptive. Ed seems to
hope that she will fix him without any effort on his part. He becomes complacent and Taylor
repeatedly points out how he doesn’t listen to what she wants; he just runs with what he thinks
she wants. This deafness to her needs eventually becomes literal as the tumors blossom in Ed’s
brain and confirm his doom. Ed continually refuses to reach out and admits repeatedly to
becoming stuck in his own head and his own thoughts when he should be reaching out, but he
does nothing. He is motivated by guilt to a fault. His first guilt is over money that he inherited
from his grandmother and then invested well. He never tells anyone about it and Taylor does not
find out about it until he writes that farewell check. Ed performs poverty with his friends in the
program and feigns worry over the costs for testing his tumors all the while letting this financial
guilt grow in him not unlike those same tumors. On to this he adds his guilt for cheating on
Taylor and the desperate attempt to hold things together that is his proposal to her. Again, he
props up his perception of what Taylor would want instead of asking and listening to her. This
deafness results in their final separation and his departure down the unknown road.
Maybe this departure and his final gift to her are the one time his guilt motivates him to
do something good for Taylor and their child. In any case, here we have an intriguing character.
The stripped down descriptions and dialogue move the book along quickly and work to convey
the awkward interactions between uncertain adults as they try to navigate the realities of
adulthood and their performed identities to each other. Definitely worth the read and something I
struggled to put down.
Review of Our Lady of the Ruins
Posted on September 8, 2017 at 4:05 PM |
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Poems of the Vague Apocalypse: Traci Brimhall’s Our Lady of the Ruins
In her sophomore collection, Our Lady of the Ruins, Traci Brimhall crafts a fractured set of
legends for our time, a collection of story-poems that look at us from our near future, all presided
over by the subliminal presence of the titular icon. It’s a rare feat. While post-apocalyptic or
dystopian poetry certainly exists, collections that sustain this theme and mood as their central
concept aren’t common, and that’s got a lot to do with how hard this mode is to sustain. Poetry
often works as a space of conceptual solace– even if its content is distressing or challenging, it’s
nonetheless a place we retreat to, and return from refreshed. A speculative work about our near
future imagined as a grim collapse of what we know, though, isn’t so much refreshing as it is
cautionary. These works tend to feel like odd, spectral warning signs, missives from artists who
see what could be. So, to create a poetry in a genre of warning signs and to craft small fragments
of beauty in the midst of horror isn’t easy, but it’s necessary. Through poetry, we’re afforded the
chance to witness dozens of different narratives, and to witness the individual revelations and
sufferings that take place in any time of strife.
In “Prelude to a Revolution,” Brimhall offers an evocative portrait of this future world, writing,
We go to prison windows and pass cigarettes, tangerines
and iodine through the bars. Anything we think
could heal a man. Assassins kiss our fingers.
Mercenaries sing us songs about unbroken light
as we mend their shirts. The bilingual murderers recite
lamentations in one tongue, and in another, young myths.
We fold and unfold our shawls, and the men squint
into the sunlight, dumb with hope. Some days they confuse
the walls of their cage with their skin. Some days,
the sky. They see their deaths in the sweat darkening
our dresses. To sweeten the hours we share scandals
from the city, how curators removed an elephant's heart
from the museum because it began beating when anyone
in love looked at it, how the coroner found minnows
swimming in a drowned girl's lungs. They ask if it's true,
if slaves are chained together on ships to prevent suicide.
We say they'll never be free. They warn us one night soon
the judge will wake to find his bed alive with wasps,
while across town the night watchman will stare stunned
at the moths circling before he realizes he's on fire.
As this poem reveals, the collection isn’t so much a post-apocalyptic text as one set during an
apocalypse. It isn’t Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, where any hope for a meaningful
reconstruction of society is lost, but it’s conversely a world much further devastated than your
average dystopia. It balances delicately between ambiguous circumstance with very definite
consequence. Brimhall writes so eloquently about her motley assemblage that we don’t care
about the cause as much as the effect: it’s the fallout that matters, and the many portraits of
women in the aftermath. The poems reveal that while we may not know exactly how the world
will become one of ruins, we can guess the kind of harms that will be inflicted. What is a world
fallen apart, Brimhall asks, for women? There’s a poignant awareness surrounding her topic–
namely, that women are very often relegated to less than equal positions even in the most
progressive of places, even in what we until recently believed to be the most progressive of
times. The collection provides a portrait of the world in a future that seems eerily familiar, but
through the eyes of many individuals, whose unique experiences reveal the dangers and the
possibilities in a broken apart world. Our Lady of the Ruins is a somber, lyrical, sublime
reminder of what the world could be, and of the way our species could exist in that world.
Our Lady of the Ruins. Traci Brimhall. W.W. Norton & Company, April 2012.
ISBN 978-0393086430. Print. 96 pages. $15.95.
A Line Made by Walking Reviewed by Jacob Hammer
Posted on August 28, 2017 at 8:05 AM |
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A Line Made by Walking by Sara Baume
Reviewed by Jacob Hammer
Sara Baume presents in her second novel a book that gives its readers a personal look
deep into its narrator’s life. This, on its own, would not distinguish it from any number of
novels out there on the shelf. What Baume does that sets this novel apart is to give us this
perspective while weaving in multiple back stories seamlessly and providing us with a wealth
of art knowledge.
The novel begins with the narrator musing on her Grandmother’s death and the more
recent death of a robin. She has moved into her Grandmother’s cottage after a near
breakdown in her flat in Dublin and is full of all sorts of emotional turmoil and self-doubt.
The cottage provides shelter from some of those stresses. The dead robin is the first in an
emerging series of photographs that she is taking of dead things. Each one of these ten
animals that she finds in the countryside and garden surrounding the cottage is an opening
through which the narrator explores herself. Sometimes the animal will make her reflect on
her early childhood or on more recent events. Further paths down memory lane are cleared
via various items of her Grandmother’s that remain in the house after the rest of the family
has gone through to get the things they find precious or useful. From these we begin to create
an image of Frankie’s past and how she ended up at her Grandmother’s cottage cutting
herself off from the world and taking pictures of dead things by the side of the road. With her
we begin to see the fog of the recent past clearing and a way onward emerge.
One thing that made this book really striking was Frankie’s constant references to art.
She is an artist and studied art in university so as she ponders things over she tests herself on
works of art relating to whatever it is she is thinking about at that moment. These pop up
throughout the book. And allow for even more insight into how she is feeling or what she is
thinking based in her interpretation of the work and the works that she chooses to mention.
On top of that, the author includes a detailed list at the back of the book that lists every art
piece mentioned by chapter to encourage further investigation by the reader.
Another striking feature in the novel is its unconventional pacing. As one moves
along through the novel there are frequent pauses indicated by extra space. This indicated a
passage of time that can sometimes be very brief or sometimes signal that a memory
sequence is starting. The space created and the anticipation of a shift ahead help the reader to
reflect on what they have just read and hold it in their mind almost like the photographs that
Frankie takes or the works of art that she mentions. We hold each moment separate, but are
also reminded by those parts of the mind trying to align things linearly that there are multiple
stories all being told at once to create this whole.
I enjoyed this book because it made me think about the how we hold memories and
how they are cued by the things around us in a constant stream. I enjoyed it because of the
intriguing art references that enticed me to learn more. Most importantly, I enjoyed this book
because I wanted to know more about Frankie. I wanted to learn how she would emerge from
the funk that she was under and to know how she came to be an artist questioning her ability
living in her Grandmother’s former cottage and passing the days riding a bicycle through the
Irish countryside and taking photographs of dead animals. A great read and something I
would happily recommend.