Le Minh Khue
Curbstone Press ($12.95)

by Brian Foye

Near the end of “A Small Tragedy,” one of fourteen stories in Le Minh Khue's The Stars, the Earth, the River, a young man named Quang runs away from the woman he loves and hurriedly boards the Reunification Express. He is a French citizen of Vietnamese birth, but he's been forced to leave Hanoi for private reasons: his fiancée's father, it turns out, is also his biological father. Quang, the father, and the story's narrator (a newspaper reporter and cousin to this troubled family) are the ones who have pieced together Quang's identity. In the end the narrator receives a telegram that Quang has committed suicide in a distant hotel room. “Perhaps,” says the narrator, “behind every happiness or every sorrow lies the imprint of a culture.”

Le Minh Khue's stories from contemporary Vietnam are imprinted with separation. The mark of her stories, the imaginative pattern that fixes nearly every one, can be found in the forces at work which put and keep people apart. One historical approach to Vietnam would consider thousands of years of struggle against China's dynastic rulers and a century of struggle against French colonial interests, but it's hard to deny that the American War in Vietnam is the great divisive force that demands recognition. The devastation of that conflict is undeniable, almost indescribable. And yet there are other forces, all divisive, at work in The Stars, the Earth, the River: the land reform movements of Vietnam; foolish or corrupt government officials; profound human evil; simple human frailty. Le Minh Khue's gift, in her richly textured stories, is to see that these many forces of separation are often layered and inseparable.

In stories such as “The Almighty Dollar” and “Scenes from an Alley,” desire for the wealth and status of the West are woven into the fabric of startlingly violent and desolate lives. The characters in these stories are savagely anomic, and their separation from one another is violently clear. In even her brightest stories, however, Khue's characters are often physically and emotionally adrift. There are stories of star-crossed love, as in “The Last Rain of the Monsoon,” “Fragile as a Sunray,” and “Rain,” where the momentary joy of deep connection is marked by years of absent-spirited separation. Even the physical landscapes of her stories—a construction site in the central region that once marked the divide between the two Vietnams, a village committee building in a roadside hamlet, or just some place away from home—emphasize the sense of dislocation. The Reunification Express, full of that dreary irony of old-style communism, chugs through more than one story in the collection.

There is, as ever, hope for connection. The act of living, of forging ahead, is often a place for hope, and if some of Khue's characters are doubly crossed by their hard lot in life and their aching desire for a better one, then their self-conceptions are often direct and concrete. “Almost every morning some inconvenience would upset me,”says the narrator of “A Day on the Road.””But why did I still cherish that life and hope every day that it would keep getting better? I hoped that my pen would improve, that my tires and inner tubes would become more durable, that the rice would have fewer stones and fewer husks, that the ceiling of our house wouldn't collapse from too many leaks, and that I wouldn't have to live with any mice.”

Published by Curbstone Press, this book is the first in a series called “Voices from Vietnam.”Promising work by at least nine Vietnamese writers and augmented by an ambitious educational and community outreach program, such a series can only add to our inter-cultural understanding. The imprint of Vietnamese culture surely rests in all forms of connection, and in the finest sense of what a writer can achieve, Le Minh Khue's deep vision of the cost of human separation points the way to a genuine reunification.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Print Edition, Vol. 2 No. 4, Winter (#8) | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 1997

Rikki Ducornet
Henry Holt ($22)

by Carolyn Kuebler

Desire glitters, gemlike, at the center of these tales, flashing its sharp edges and catching the reader's eye with its intense color, allure, and singularity. Desire, these stories seem to say, possesses everyone at least once in their lives, no matter how chaste and ascetic, young or old, naive, promiscuous, or neurotic. While the pursuit of desire may leave its afflicted in a muddle of humiliation and confusion, it may also place one on the brink of the divine. For Ducornet, desire takes many forms: it can be fueled by a vision from a dream or a book, driven by devout curiosity, or fired by love (or pure lust) for another human being. It is also, however, likely to be tangled up in disappointment, driven by fear, thwarted by social and political injustices or by one's own shortcomings.

In twelve stories that take place in many reaches of the world—India, Algeria, France, the U.S.—and in many periods of time, Rikki Ducornet explores “the many tenses of longing.” The frail father of the first story, thwarted by his robust wife's passion for life (and officers), desires the delicacy of carved ivory chess pieces, more baffled by the disorder of love than by the complexity of the game. A young boy, in “Roseveine,” wants nothing more than to capture the heart of his mother's friend, a woman who comes visiting with a mysterious collection of seashells and thwarts his father's perverse power by pissing a bright and subversive stream straight to his feet. In “Wormwood,” two children whisper stories and obscenities while an old man dies noisily in the bed nearby. The giddiness of children in the face of death, a man's quest for a four-armed divinity, a young woman's ill—fated marriage—Ducornet handles these scenarios with a voice that knowingly winks at the reader, swooning in the richness of language and imagery.

Ducornet's work has always been inspired by fairy tales and The Word “Desire” takes this proclivity even further. The short form, with its simple plot and quickly drawn characters, works to her advantage; she can set up and unravel a situation with shocking impact in no time at all, meanwhile remarking on the many faces of cultural and individual violence. Like fairy tales, these stories pulse with the latent forces of lust, death, sexuality, and ambition, and though the tales are often humorous, lurking beneath them all are darker forces that threaten to unravel any illusion of simple comfort or joy. Irreverent while at the same time utterly in awe of the powers of body and mind, Ducornet handles the brevity of the fairy tale form with the power of a skilled poet.

Christianity, and its ill-fated attempts to restrict (if not forbid) desire, is a particularly ripe topic for Ducornet's sometimes devilish imagination; she turns the ideal of holy chastity on its ear, as vows are broken and passions pursued. In one startling tale, a spoiled and dying old pope, high on opium, drinks human milk straight from the source. At the story's conclusion, Ducornet slashes at colonialism, religious hypocrisy, and the abuse of power with sweeping, linguistic fury. Instead of being heavy handed or pedantic, however, she takes on the voice of a bard, singing the woes of humankind, its wars and aspirations to immortality. Christianity takes another hit in “The Foxed Mirror,” the story of a bored and depressed young priest who spends one hour of passion with a dionysian (and blasphemous) painter, then lives the rest of his life in deep humiliation—not for this one great sin, but for his perpetual timidity in the face of life. What defeats him, finally, is not his succumbing to desire or even his devotion to the priesthood, but his refusal to live with any form of passion. The overly orderly woman of “The Neurosis of Containment” (a revealing enough title) not only forbids herself any physical passion, but attempts to ward off any intellectual adventure, eschewing ideas she deems Semitic, pagan, African, or unholy. The acute headache she develops, a ringing in the ears that sounds like “bees the size of . . . atoms, their wings . . . cymbals of brass,” is alleviated by a supernatural convocation with some very handsome angels; frightened and aroused, she runs from the scene of her “defilement,” the one moment in which her imagination overpowers her intellect and gives her a rare, if inexplicable, moment of pleasure. There is great danger in any religion (or government, or belief system) that denies desire, Ducornet seems to warn us. The demonization of nature, the denial of sexuality, and the refusal of new ideas all contribute to the destruction portrayed in stories like “Opium.” There is, of course, also danger in passion's pursuit. A moment of bliss is always tempered by its opposite. Nevertheless, these stories side with surrender, no matter how short-lived or futile.

While the desire for pleasure, for knowledge, or for adventure may hold her characters in its thrall, perhaps the greatest desire of all is for a language in which to speak of such things, for words to describe the wonders of the human heart and imagination and to unravel its dangers and duplicity. This desire informs every phrase of the book and accounts for its meticulous imagery. In light of this, the title suddenly seems most apt; it is for the words themselves that the most acute desire is expressed, the word “desire” being just another step toward a singular, passionate culmination.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Print Edition, Vol. 2 No. 4, Winter (#8) | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 1997

Stacey Levine
Sun & Moon Press ($11.95)

by Steve Tomasula

Being practical has always seemed a monstrous thing, Oscar Wilde once said, and Stacy Levine's new novel does a lot to prove he was right. Here is a world of workers in an industrialscape reminiscent of Eraserhead: it is dreamlike, if you dream in drab; the technology is monumental and spelled with a small 't'—oil-sweating planes fly indoors—even work songs are “outmoded”; people are synonymous with their function. That is, Dra— lays bare the secret of even the brightest resume: the diminishment inherent in making oneself fit into a system, a pattern, an expectation.

This paradox of erasing the self in order to survive gnaws unconsciously within Dra—, our heroine. She spends the first third of the book wracked by the sensation that though the whole world is getting a job, there is nothing for her. When she finally reaches the source of jobs, she finds a room full of people sitting on toilets and reading newspapers. Here Dra— gets her chance: a choice of jobs, actually, between classifying dust and monitoring a small water pump. Ultimately, the water-pump job is assigned to her and the remainder of the book is devoted to Dra—'s journey through this cavernous factory/office to report to work.

As in The Stranger or Waiting for the Barbarians, the narrative in this slim novel of ideas is archetypal, even iconographic: webs of associations are triggered by the “dank Employee Tunnel,” the school room originally “designed to be a furnace,” and the trains and toilets of Dra— (Freud resonates loudly). Walking down a corridor of the Employment Agency, Dra— believes it to be the same corridor that ran through her former grade school with its “clamoring upset students, long mottoes and teachers grown so furious that they vanished.” Parable-like language like this makes it easy for a reader to fall into reflective pauses, sometimes at the end of every sentence. What generally comes to mind are the habits of thought we sublimate in order to live with ourselves, especially “choices” that have become a kind of nature with narrowly defined paths, be they specific to gender, class, occupation, or any of the other markers we use to identify ourselves and categorize others. In Dra—, the refusal to choose or an inability to discern difference is an invitation to histrionics, recriminations, and lectures. When Dra— is distraught because she can't find her Administrator, a co-worker says, “She's probably dead and you'll be assigned another. Why make faces over it?” Why indeed, since politeness is considered a remnant from ancient times when “dogs smiled to signify deference.”

To get a sense of how such a tale of dread and loathing can be as funny as this one, though, consider the absurdity of Gregor Samsa worrying about being late for work the morning he's become an enormous bug. Similarly, Dra— finds herself enacting the vaudeville routine of the employee ordered to box pies as they come off an assembly line. Of course, the line begins to move faster than she can negotiate, only instead of pies, Dra—'s task is to get canisters into a pneumatic slot. And instead of splashing meringue, she contaminates herself with their toxic contents. Then she discovers that a man has been watching her the whole time, laughing.

Surely, this scene is enacted daily in the world outside the book. Just turn on any TV news show and join in. But we don't want to think about it. Or as another “friend” tells her, “jobs are tedious and death making” but “we're much too busy to have time for those thoughts”—a self-fulfilling prophecy that many people take refuge in (Levine should center another novel on “hobbies”), especially when we consider how easy it is to treat tollbooth attendants and other functionaries as animated vending machines. Like Camus and Kafka before her, Levine uses the self in relation to society to crack the oppressive ordinariness of normalcy—and this may be the book's one distraction: it so strongly evokes these antecedents that it's hard to read Dra— free of their ghosts. Still, if a comparison to Camus seems like faint damnation, that's how it's intended. Like those philosophical works, the achievement of Dra— is in its universals; Levine has managed to depict something everyone knows and everyone loathes in a style that mimics the very file-cabinet blandness of her subject, yet still makes for compelling fiction. More importantly, she's written a parable of America where the average citizen won't likely enter into the absurdity of a Kafkaesque trial but can't avoid the more subtle, spirit-crushing normalcy that would have us see a choice between MCI and AT&T as an expression of individuality.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Print Edition, Vol. 2 No. 4, Winter (#8) | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 1997

Paul Metcalf
Coffee House Press ($35 each)

by Ed Torres

With the release of volumes two and three, Coffee House Press completes its monumental repackaging of the works of Paul Metcalf. Originally published to little fanfare by the best small presses you've never heard of, these writings—bizarre marriages of prose, poetry, history, and found texts—force the reader to confront a radical Americanist avant-garde aesthetic; at the same time these books place us in the midst of America's bloody past, taking a look at everything from the seafaring explorations of the seventeenth century to the atomic detonations of the late twentieth. With over 1500 pages of some of the most enjoyable, provocative, and unorthodox writing of the century, the publication of Metcalf's Collected Works restores a significant segment of both literature and history.

Volume Two covers the ten-year span of 1976 to 1986, arguably Metcalf's most fecund period. At the core of the book is Both, which conflates Poe and Booth—pronounce both names at the same time—through the use of a linchpin narrative called “Waterworld,”a riveting tale of cannibalism and gender confusion on the high seas. If this sounds a bit confusing, well, Metcalf doesn't connect the dots for his readers; instead, by offering a set of images and texts that just might reflect one another, he invites the reader to enter his meditation on American literature and history, those twin supporting beams whose integrity he's suspected since his groundbreaking novel Genoa (contained in Volume One). In U.S. Dept. of the Interior, Metcalf poses a synergistic link between fault lines in the earth and migraines in the brain, while musing on his role as a lecturer at an Alaskan history conference. I-57, “an ideosyncratic approach to a place,”yokes the author's shaky state
of mind during his fifty-seventh year to a physical journey along the corresponding interstate; it is perhaps the finest comment on, and certainly the most unusual example of, the road novel. (Despite what must have been considerations of space, Coffee House wisely presents I-57 and U.S. Dept. with their original photographs and drawings, whose presence is not incidental but clearly part of Metcalf's overall experiment in what constitutes a meaningful text.) Volume Two's longest entry, Waters of Potowmack, is also its most heady and historical, reimagining our nation's capital from the Mesozoic era to the Johnson administration. Yet Metcalf's powerful obsession with American history should not suggest his poem-proses are too intellectual or without humor; in an author's note to the short homage Willie's Throw, he explains: “I am a lifelong baseball fan, brought up with, and still pledging allegiance to, the Boston Red Sox. I therefore need no lessons in suffering.”

Metcalf continues his collage-like explorations of history throughout Volume Three, where once again he folds texts from old books, newspapers, and travelogues together to illustrate North America's violent and chaotic past. Golden Delicious assembles multiple narratives into one book, giving us a brief look at the Puritans in New England, the gold-diggers' grueling and gruesome trek West to California, and the history of apple-growing in the Pacific Northwest. Amarinta and the Coyotes juxtaposes the astounding story of Harriet Tubman's work to free the slaves of the South with accounts of Mexican illegal aliens who risk their lives for what equals slavery in the “free” U.S. As usual, Metcalf doesn't comment on the material he presents, leaving it up to the reader to piece together an interpretation of these often brutal and almost unbelievable events. Furthermore, his direct citations from earlier texts are informative not only for the what, when, and where but for the language used, which better than anything reveals the bigotry, hypocrisy, and occasional generosity of its original speakers. Metcalf's own voice is most apparent in “. . . and nobody objected“, a piece written for the 500th anniversary of the “discovery” of America, which takes its title directly from Christopher Columbus's report on his first voyage. Here Metcalf asks, who exactly was Christopher Columbus—a preincarnation of Don Quixote? a fearful Spanish Jew? or simply an outrageous, wholesale liar?

Volume Three is more chaotic than its predecessor, as the later Metcalf ranges formally into essays and plays, yet these divergent paths offer further vantage points from which to assess Metcalf's contribution to American letters. The short essays from Where Do You Put the Horse? question our acceptance of the categories of poetry and fiction, probe our responses to literature and creativity, and revisit American icons from Melville to Buster Keaton; the longest of them performs “a gesture toward reconstitution” of Metcalf's friend and mentor Charles Olson. The plays have more in common with his historical texts in their use of the actual words spoken by figures from the past. The Players—his only stab at comedy (and this still a “documentary comedy-drama”)—for example, consists of a rowdy dialogue between Walt Whitman and John Burroughs (“bird watcher, bird lover, and all-around celebrant of Nature”), playing off of another dialogue between two baseball stars, Mark “The Bird” Fidrych and Don Luciano. As plays, these works are highly unconventional fare, but as in Metcalf's other works, necessary imaginative leaps are justly rewarded.

The final two pieces of this volume appear here in print for the first time. Huascarán, a historical/poetic telling of the earthquake in Peru, May 1970, proves to be one of Metcalf's most succinct and sympathetic histories to date, while The Wonderful White Whale of Kansas is a humorous and clever retelling of The Wizard of Oz, interspersed with surprisingly relevant sections of Moby Dick.

In the essay “Totem Paul: A Self-Review,” Metcalf muses on his many books: “They are printed on what paper the publisher chooses, to last as long as it may . . . the books to be reprinted as anyone may or may not wish, as time goes on. Let the future take care of itself.” Happily for us, it has done just that. Yet these Collected Works are not complete; Paul Metcalf, at the age of eighty-one, continues to piece together historical poetic narratives that still seem in many ways ahead of his time and outside of his tradition. That's their strength. There is work to be done if we're to catch up with him.

Click here to purchase Paul Metcalf Collected Works Volume II at your local independent bookstore

Click here to purchase Paul Metcalf Collected Works Volume III at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Print Edition, Vol. 2 No. 4, Winter (#8) | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 1997

Frank Lima
Hard Press ($12.95)

by John Serrano

Frank Lima first published in 1962, and though he dropped out of the poetry scene he never stopped writing, as evidenced by this recent volume of selected poems. Skip the disastrous "New Poem" that opens the book, as it reads like a prose memoir chopped into lines for no apparent reason, and begin with Lima's energetic youthful output, which quickly makes apparent why Lima wowed poets like Kenneth Koch back in the day. Lima speaks in metaphors as if they were everyday slang—"your heart's a tin cup / begging for wine" he writes of his freshly widowed grandfather in "Abuela's Wake"—and approaches love, sex, and the body with a refreshing matter-of-factness. His work becomes less bombastic and messy as he matures, but still retains his quizzical approach to the sensual world, as in a beautiful series of flower poems; and his take on New York School style surrealism during this period is nothing short of terrific. The more recent poems in this book betray an earned weariness ("The universe is shrinking / Like a small lifeboat") but still offer a wry humor ("Ron Padgett's hair is a billion years old / An international team of 439 scientists is / Working on his eyes") whose presence sometimes leads toward the inconsequential but whose absence would diminish the overall generosity of spirit these poems exult. It should also be noted that while Lima constantly weaves his Hispanic background into his poetry on the level of language, he never once uses it as an easy shorthand for emotional content (except, again, for that unfortunate anomalous memoir-poem). Such a triumph is rare in our identity-driven culture. "The face of poetry / is an expressive cut of meat that gives us a glimpse of truth," Lima writes in the magnificent "On Poetry," and his work more than lives up to this credo.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Print Edition, Vol. 2 No. 4, Winter (#8) | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 1997

Ann Lauterbach
Penguin ($14.95)

by S. P. Healey

I found a joke in an obscure encyclopedia of poetics: A man walks into a bar with a parrot on his shoulder and says to the bartender, “What's the difference between good and bad experimental poetry?” The bartender looks at the parrot and says: “I'm sorry, we don't serve humans.”

This gets at the dilemma Ann Lauterbach finds herself in. Like most daring poets, in order to get at the truth, she messes with our expectations of what the human voice should look and sound like on the page, but this risks sending readers into oblivion, or at least frustration. In her new collection, On a Stair, when that voice breaks down the result can be a poem with the personality of an instruction manual and the readability of a palimpsest (as eyes scan the page, one layer of text emerges and vanishes, then another, and so on). But more often these poems find that fine edge where an alien language becomes familiar:

Father, I am deliberately
missing the events
by which time is told.
I refuse nourishment, I am
an old woman
ranting on a stoop.

And this is why Lauterbach transcends her surface resemblance to Language Poetry and its tendency toward fractious wordplay, and continues to emerge as a serious contender in American poetry with this, her fifth volume.

Aptly titled, On a Stair tries to locate us between up and down, here and there, but it's also a reminder that, as a liminal space, the stair always invites us to take another step, and moreover, may not even be attached to a grounded staircase. So dislocation is a force in this poetry, unleashing violently enjambed lines and a syntax that defies gravity. But rather than abandoning us in the confusion, Lauterbach usually uses it as a tool to build a true illumination of the mind working to know itself.

Among the most memorable poems in this volume are the most idiosyncratic, in part because they scout possible paths Lauterbach might travel in the future. Scattered throughout, there's the series of gemlike lyrical odes, each titled “ON” followed by its given subject in parentheses. At the book's midpoint, there's the formidable twelve-part epic that colors nursery rhyme innocence with a metaphysical hangover. And the penultimate poem is a confessional juggernaut called “N/EST” that explores the speaker's history of abortions and childlessness intersected with her impulses to become a poet.

Lauterbach followed these impulses like stairs toward something brilliant and sublime. If every choice is an opportunity, it's also a sacrifice. If the poet has any responsibility, it's only to write good poems, which may be what the bartender in that joke is really trying to say: a good poem is one that serves humans, and Lauterbach remembers this again and again.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Print Edition, Vol. 2 No. 4, Winter (#8) | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 1997

James Tate
Ecco Press ($23)

by Kelly Everding

Caution: Shroud of the Gnome may induce temporary aphasia brought on by profound cognitive dissonance. James Tate wrestles with reality, combining the bizarre and the sublime, the ridiculous and the wistful, hesitant despair and bone-crushing absurdity. The unsettling situations which arise achieve a level of profundity beyond the enjoyment derived from their imaginative expanse and wit. Yet however one may try to dissect a poem from this collection, it is liable to lift off and slip away from the examining table. The devious and playful quality of Tate's poetry may resist exegesis, but layers of meaning reside, tucked between “felisberto” and “mergotroid.”

Within the cosmology of each poem, Tate guides the reader much as Willie Wonka guided children through the chocolate factory; the poem is a kingdom and dictates must be followed, but you're never quite sure where you'llend up. In “Never Again the Same,” a malevolent sunset exacts an irrevocable change upon its viewers. In “Smart,” a theory is freed after a long captivity within the speaker's old cage of a mind. And these are among the few poems which are mildly paraphraseable. The poems exude an eloquence which rivals any late nineteenth-century poet—“Spherically wondrous sunbeam / dwelling in the mansion / of the pine of chastity, / today we bought an ice pack / for Mildred's injured foot” (“Per Diem”)—yet they are not afraid to sample language from colloquialism, nonsense, or implicative idioms—” and I'll keep a watch out here for the malefactors / all the while ruminating rumbustiously on my new / runic alphabet, mellifluent memorandum whack whack” (“Faulty Diction”). As meanings mound, a multi-metaphor pile-up ensues so that at times we are struck by pure rhythm and sound.

For all the zaniness, a fragile sensibility emerges in these poems. In the fantastic “Dream On,” the speaker muses that “Some people go their whole lives / without ever writing a single poem.” After enumerating the many banal moments in a life lived without poetry, the language becomes suspended within a moment of reverie:

all day, all night meditation, knot of hope,
kernel of desire, pure ordinariness of life,
seeking, through poetry, a benediction
or a bed to lie down on, to connect, reveal,
explore, to imbue meaning on the day's
extravagant labor.
And yet it's cruel to expect too much.

From here the poem undergoes a strange metamorphosis: the inability to categorize is likened to a rare bird whose song is unhearable, a dragonfly that flits here and there, and finally becomes a dream. “And the dream has a pain in its heart / the wonders of which are manifold, / or so the story is told.” A paradigm of loss pervades these poems, buried in a surrealistic, semantic structure that parallels a dream. Nothing can be explained away. Any story carries within it a perceptual slant, a fairytale quality that turns the stress and sorrow of everyday life on its head and maintains the integrity of language no matter what form it takes.

Tate is utterly unique. Shroud of the Gnome allows us entrance once more into his bewildered home, in which the poet exonerates reason and unreason alike.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Print Edition, Vol. 2 No. 4, Winter (#8) | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 1997