Joseph Harms
CreateSpace ($13.99)

by Jane Franklin

There is much to admire in this self-published Midwestern horror gothic—it contains amazing landscapes; the writing moves beautifully between the realistic, the satiric, and the lyric; and the whole thing operates as a denunciation of patriarchal religion and patriarchal sexuality. It also has a beautiful and well-designed cover (still too rare in self-published works). But Baal is both strangely sexist in its treatment of female characters and gleeful about its use of disabled and non-standard bodies as symbols of depravity and evil. It is a fascinating and accomplished book, but a flawed one.

Baal reworks the familiar story of two youths on the cusp of adolescence who discover that while Satanic evil is real, human evil is even worse. Cassius and Max live in an anonymous Michigan town, a place that brings together all the banal American evils: industrial decline and poverty, covert and overt racism and homophobia, religious hypocrisy and domestic violence. In the forests and rye fields beyond the town, they encounter monstrous beings; in the town itself they commit greater and greater acts of violence to fight back against the religious and patriarchal order that crushes them. In the end, the two worlds are shown to be the same.

Patriarchal violence and patriarchal sexuality are the substrate of the book. All fathers are violent and those fathers who are not sexually abusive seem, like Cassius’s drunken stepfather, continually to hint at this possibility. The bad father who hits you is part of the great chain of fathers, linked to the spiritual leader who conceals and justifies social violence and to God the Father who is also Satan. In Baal, there is no outside to this father system, only war against it from within, and all fathers are the Father of Lies.

To create this atmosphere Harms gives Baal its own language, rapid, dense and baroque—a language of darkness briefly and brightly lit, of the edges between nature and the city. Front-heavy and full of run-together words, the sentences have odd rhythms. They are difficult at first reading, then sharp and vivid, as when Cassius reflects on God:

Us untouchables born from the yawning mouth of a tree dead a thousand years in the center of a wilderness yet imagined who crawl from the dirt to return to the dirt and in our allotted time, make of telephonepoles corpseornamented alters to the real God who blesses every war waged by one alone and blesses none made by many. But Cassius could not pretend more than an instant that such a God existed.

Harms well describes the particularity of the waste places of the world, spaces we know intimately when we’re children—the territory where the suburb fades away into woods, a certain rotted tree marking a boundary unvisited by adults, the way it feels to walk through the semi-abandoned empty farmland on the edge of town. His landscapes are beautiful and nostalgic even when menacing, full of the gold of the rye fields and the drift of leaves. “Beyond the dark alleys between homes,” writes Harms, “the sussurant corn by lapidary moon cut and metalized looked like the foamy wake of a wave about to break.” But in these waste landscapes anything can happen. Nature isn’t a refuge.

This is the world as Bad Place, ruled by a Bad God. Cassius encounters a variety of believers, each attempting to put an acceptable face on the world. All make their cases; none convince. There are the trivially self-serving and ugly homilies at the church his mother forces him to attend, of course, but also powerful consolatory discourses like this from the African American security guard working a grotesque church youth event:

"Let me tell you something, kid . . . There is no white god. White people can’t believe in God ‘cause they think he’s white. But there is a black God. Giant and mighty. And he snuff you out you so much as bad mouth him in an empty room . . .
. . . 'Cause he know about pain and torture, son. He know about murder and rape. He know about stealing for food and killing for food. He know about being an outcast. 'Cause he was born an outcast . . . Black God sees us trespassing with blood and knives and guns and he weeps and begs us, son, begs us to come to him for forgiveness because he knows he’d have done the same thing in our shoes."

But all these discourses are inadequate to the sheer material evil of the world that Cassius encounters. Evil returns, generation after generation, seemingly unstoppable, steadily worsening: “Since the great fires what had happened here and there and mostly during wartimes happened everywhere in the city at all times.” Cassius and Max go to war against the Bad God, to fight what can’t be fought, to kill what can’t be killed.

For most of the book, Cassius is a compellingly written character. Sometimes he appears as a realistically portrayed bright, angry, frightened teenager, sometimes a prophetic voice, sometimes an outlet for the author’s own discomfiting comedy. He would be a stronger character if he weren’t right all the time, though, or if he were purely an allegorical figure and Baal an inverse Pilgrim’s Progress. Again and again, other characters are self-deluding and hypocritical, and Cassius calls them out. He is always right, always better, always heroic even when weak and in despair—and it starts to make the deck seem stacked in his favor.

We’re meant to see Cassius as the book’s moral center, but his actions are driven by the same logic as the actions of the fathers he fights—his morality is based around homosocial love for the males with whom he commits violence; his own violence is justified by threats of violence to women; he identifies himself with a fantasy of female experience while finding real women only unloveable hypocrites and naives.

Female characters in Baal are good (and ultimately dead) or else they’re bad examples who are schooled by Cassius. Almost all of them want to sleep with him except the ones he actually wants—but nothing good, plot-wise, comes of being a girl who friendzones Cassius. Most implausible is the sequence where the church secretary, old enough to be his mother, flirts aggressively with him in front of his entire religion class. Cassius attempts to seduce her and then helpfully tells her, “If you weren’t confused, you’d kiss me tonight.”

Cassius’s savage war against the Chief of Police is motivated by the Chief’s abuse of his daughter and the complicity of the Chief’s neighbors, something Cassius hears about second-hand. He gives a great deal of thought to the feel of the sexual abuse the daughter must endure, and to his “duty” of violence. Unfortunately the daughter herself is virtually absent from the novel. This is doubly frustrating because some of the most subtly written scenes in the book depict Cassius’s conversations with his mother and with a sexual partner, Tina—at least until they veer off into Cassius’s sage corrections of petty female misapprehensions.

Readers should also be aware that Harms’s characters use racial and homophobic slurs freely. Cassius is white and straight; his best friend Max is black and coming to terms with being gay. At one point the boys pretend to be a gay couple, mockingly and with grotesque exaggeration, in order to anger and disgust their enemies. The book’s handling of queerness and race seems sometimes almost to tip over into a kind of masculinity-sentimentality, but the book also manages to treat race, racism, queerness and homophobia all as aspects of the world rather than as special problem topics or as things which must not be named. Many horror novels are haunted by racism and homophobia; relatively few center gay characters or characters of color.

Perhaps the most difficult to accept aspect of Baal is its treatment of bodily difference. From the very first scene, when evil is introduced via a hermaphroditic man with Downs syndrome, Harms uses grotesque, rubbernecking descriptions of age, disability, and body size to signal the presence of evil. In the final, apocalyptic sequence, disabled bodies are torn apart and victimized, while Harms refers to each one as “a Downs.” Much is made of the fatness of these disabled men, and of what Harms perceives as their sexual childishness and ambiguity.

Fatness, indeed, justifies almost anything here. Fat Rosemary in “religionclass” is, naturally, a hypocrite and a bully, and we’re meant to sympathize with Cassius, Max, and their friend Henry as they target her. Tina’s mother is called “the Cow”; per the narrative, she has chosen to become too fat to get out of bed, just as she chooses to lie in her own shit. Fatness justifies the book’s rape joke—not only do we hear Henry repeat the old canard about how a fat woman is too ugly to be a rape victim, but Cassius reflects that “Henry is right, nothing is sacred beyond laughter.” No one laughs at Cassius, but the reader is invited to laugh at this trio of fat women.

Baal, in short, risks reinscribing for the reader the very hierarchical, hateful, violent father-system it denounces at a rhetorical level. That is by no means all this intelligent, creepy book does—but it is impossible to ignore.

Baal is a beautiful, fascinating and thoughtful horror novel—a Midwestern regional novel in a genre that tends to be either placeless or coastal, and a novel which names and foregrounds race and sexuality. But it still reiterates some of the more conservative horror tropes: abused and dead girls as fascination and motivation for the boys and as titillation and motivation for the reader, boys as heroes and moral actors, the physically different as a marker of evil. Perhaps future work from Harms will be as innovative about gender and embodiment as Baal is about language and region.

Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2015 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2015

Bryan Stevenson
Spiegel & Grau ($16)

by George Longenecker

Bryan Stevenson has been on the front lines of social justice, as an attorney representing some of the neediest prisoners in the nation and as executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative. Just Mercy is a compelling narrative on the themes of economic and racial bias. Using stories of his clients, he paints pictures of human beings on the margins of the U.S. legal system.

Henry was the first death row prisoner Stevenson met: “He was a young, neatly-groomed African American man with short hair . . . wearing bright, clean prison whites. He looked immediately familiar to me, like everyone I grew up with.” Stevenson began his visits to Georgia’s death row afraid of what he’d find; he left calmed by Henry’s appreciation and determined to do more to help him. “I finished my internship committed to helping the death row prisoners I had met that month . . . I went back to law school with an intense desire to understand the laws and doctrines that sanctioned the death penalty and extreme punishments.”

Stevenson says that he could identify with his clients because of his upbringing “in a poor, rural, racially segregated settlement on the eastern shore of . . . Delaware where the racial history of this country casts a long shadow.” Like the prisoners he represents, the people he grew up with were “marginalized and excluded.”

It is the marginalized and excluded that Stevenson focuses on in this book, and their stories are compelling. Some are on death row; others were sentenced to adult prisons as children and have served decades for crimes that would have warranted juvenile adjudication and probation in some states. Trina Garnett, for example, was sentenced to life without parole in Pennsylvania after she unintentionally started a fire that killed two boys. She turned fifty-two last year and has been in prison for thirty-eight years. Ian Manuel was a thirteen-year-old neglected child when he shot and wounded Debbie Baigre during a bungled robbery in Florida. He too received life without parole; when he arrived at the Apalachee Correctional Institution, the guards could not find a uniform small enough to fit him. Despite his victim’s plea for a reduced sentence after he spent eighteen years in solitary confinement, Ian received no mercy from the courts. Florida has sentenced more than 100 children to life without parole for non-homicide offenses, most of them black or Latino.

Stevenson tells these stories with skill and compassion. He goes on to remind the reader that when an innocent person is wrongly convicted, the real perpetrator goes free. Through his legal successes and failures, Stevenson has maintained his faith and determination. He speaks eloquently of the ineffectiveness and injustice of executions and child incarceration and gives faces to the castaways of American jurisprudence in a narrative interspersed with legal history and calls for reform.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2015 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2015

Michael Booth
Picador ($ 26)

by Poul Houe

The author of this book is a Brit residing in Denmark and married to a native Dane. A tightrope-walking journalistic juggler, suspended between his title’s reluctant admiration of the Nordic countries and his subtitle’s pseudo-objective delight in debunking their virtues, he labors with some success to keep his balance and do justice to both sides.

Booth is fascinated by the record-setting happiness the world so obsesses about in modern Scandinavia. He finds much of the alleged bliss inconsistent with the reality on the ground he has come to know, chiefly from living in Denmark and touring the other Nordic countries. An urge to drive a critical wedge—and to build a bridge of understanding—between these conflicting perceptions propels his book and accounts for much of its idiosyncratic zeal and entertaining wit.

So, how does such a progressive and egalitarian part of the world, blessed with social trust, free education, and universal health care, function in populations short of social intelligence and politeness? How does national happiness square with a dismal climate and sky-high taxes? How can social mores informed by ethnic homogeneity be considered inclusive without successfully accommodating ethnic newcomers? Booth is puzzled and dead set on decoding the enigma.

His journey through the maze of contradictions and ambiguities starts in his adopted Denmark, the happiest of nations. He detects the source of its happiness in the social communion that has arisen around Denmark’s incessant historical loss of power. An equally shared experience, it yielded the social trust from which the Danish welfare state emerged.

Secular Lutheran with a vengeance, Denmark has managed to sustain this costly design; but the inclusiveness has come at the price of vindictive social controls like the so-called Jante law, hidden by a facade of hygge, or coziness. The accretion of denial and complacency shows in prohibitive taxes, decreasing equality, schools promoting social cohesion by tilting towards lowest common denominators, and welfare recipients exploiting the system’s vulnerability.

A contrarian liberal, Booth is not advocating “the rampantly individualistic, child-of-Thatcher, ‘greed is good’ atmosphere prevalent in Britain” during his childhood. But he routinely challenges the Danish model with such alternatives, which—interestingly—were to materialize in a remote part of Scandinavia itself.

Of Iceland, he notes that its millennium-old offspring of West Norwegian escapees makes it Scandinavian at its roots. Yet its remoteness and puny-sized population, combined with Booth’s ephemeral knowledge of its history, warrant but a cursory story of modern day Icelanders and how their Scandinavian ways fell prey to neo-liberal capitalism at its worst. As its famed Blue Lagoon turns out to be a power plant’s wastewater, Iceland itself emerges from Booth’s account as an incestuous mini-nation of boozing elves leaping wildly from rags to riches and back again.

Contrast that, as the next and longer chapter does, with Norway, the Icelanders’ land of origin, which has also traveled from poverty to wealth in recent memory. The difference is obviously that its fortune (of enormous oil resources) has not been squandered. Still, as a land of nature, rather than culture, with periphery at center stage, the contrast is not complete. Norway’s “lottery rollover,” according to Booth, has excreted an oily psyche, a mix of spoiling laziness and low-grade racism.

The admittedly most favored nation in Booth’s rollout follows next: Finland. In one sense the most Scandinavian of all, in another not Scandinavian in the least, its understated no nonsense culture and population of unsophisticated, quiet loners appeal to the author, who barely winces when he notes a Finnish core of male alcoholic aggression and contempt for effeminate Swedes.

Yet while Finns may be better technicians than marketers, their deftness in foreign affairs and superior education domestically—all schoolteachers hold masters degrees—speak loudly of a taciturn nation of “rare, stoic heroism.” With its future ahead of it, Finland is part of Scandinavia and Europe at large, as the case may be, as one of Booth’s local witnesses testifies.

Finally, at book’s end there is Sweden. Its social policies have been spectacular, yet problems continue to pop up. The conflict shy Swedes are duktiga, or clever in a verbally reticent way, and they value consensus, the lagom: neither too much, nor too little. Compassion is in evidence but often seems bordering on indifference, if not rudeness.

Many find this social democratic modernity conformist and introvert, and Booth deems it at least benignly totalitarian and explains it with reference to Sweden’s dubious neutrality during World War II. Today’s multicultural political correctness is fit to divert attention from a record of shameful pro-German sentiments (and devotion to racial biology).

Some of these propositions are problematic, which Booth seems to realize as he spends his final pages on resetting the balance he initially set out to strike between fair admiration and well-pointed criticism of the Scandinavian way of life. For all its shortcomings, this region is “still the enviably rich, peaceful, harmonious, and progressive place it has long been,” and its exceptionalism is “a standard of education [that] is not only the best in the world, but the opportunities it presents are available to all, free of charge.”

Even Scandinavia’s controversial multiculturalism and immigration policies are now declared likely role models. Indeed, the restrictive Danish variant, blasted by Booth initially, is ultimately projected a winner—“I would argue that Denmark seems to be leading the way toward a properly integrated, multiethnic Nordic society”; as “the Danes have been confronted more directly with the challenges of integration . . . they have also made more progress.”

Why this partial retraction of earlier critical points? Weren’t they thought-provoking and deserving to stand uncompromised? And if an argument was overstated, as it sometimes was, ought the correction not to be made on location? Instead, Booth typically resorts to opening a polemic with self-deprecating humor. Or so it seems; what looks so disarming at first glance too often proves predictably self-serving on closer inspection.

A passionate outsider on the Scandinavian scene, Booth observes much that seems less visible to insiders but also misses much they would have noted. His disparagement of Swedish neutrality during World War II is but one case in point. He arrests the German leanings but not the safe haven provided for many Jews at mortal risk in Hitler’s Europe. He has pithy formulations about Sweden as a more technical than cultural society and rightly suggests a conflict between modern Sweden and the homegrown roots of its modernity. But he often lets personal, or British, biases—coyly articulated old world gender views, say—stand in the way of his critical pursuits. And many heavyweight authorities that could have helped restore his balance are conspicuous by their absence. He does cite a number of socio-cultural informants, but besides being quite few, they are disproportionately naturalized foreigners or expatriated nationals with perspectives akin to his, and with a knowledge that is similarly slanted or tenuously grounded.

This book is neither a scholarly dissertation nor a journalistic polemic. It’s an in between, executed with colloquial precision and general eloquence. Neither its share of factual errors and misconstructions, nor its occasional loss of balance on the tightrope between analysis and judgment, should discourage readers from dissecting its results.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2015 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2015

Lionel G. Fogarty
Vagabond Press ($25)

by Robert Wood

Precious little has been written on Lionel Fogarty’s poetic consciousness, or where to situate him in a global literary economy. An indigenous Australian writer, Fogarty is mostly considered alongside Ali Coby Eckermann and Samuel Wagan Watson in a red, yellow, and black identity politics triumvirate—and indeed, one can see in Fogarty’s writing a DuBoisean “double consciousness,” the common walking-in-two-worlds theme. But Eelahroo (Long Ago) Nyah (Looking) Mobo-Mobo (Future) demands a new analysis.

For Fogarty’s latest work, the term “homonymic consciousness” comes to mind. A homonym is one of a group of words that share the same spelling and pronunciation but have different meanings. It is thus about unity and multiplicity at once. Fogarty’s latest work shows a remarkable unity of purpose, voice, and outlook: it is not sameness, however, because there is thrilling multiplicity in his formal invention, from acrostic (“A-U-S-T-R-A-L-I-A”) to long narrative (“Thirty Years from 1983”) to numbered statement (“Register Donate”)—not to mention a multiplicity of emotion (from anger to admonishment to regret).

What results from reading homonymity into this work is the recognition of Fogarty’s distinct poetic idiom, which allows readers to reconsider indigenous sovereignty and power in a contested and occupied Australia. However, to label indigenous poetry simply as a poetry of protest undermines the work’s capriciousness and diversity. In Eelahroo (Long Ago) Nyah (Looking) Mobo-Mobo (Future), we get a complicated, dense, moving portrait of life in all its forms. The reader is challenged, opened up, and eventually lulled by this book. Moreover, we cannot separate out resistance from utopia; there is not only protest here, but also the evocation of a created world. It is this combination that makes Fogarty so compelling.

In his Sydney Review of Books essay on “The Poet Tasters,” Ben Etherington noted the prevailing whiteness of poetry and its reviewers in Australia. Fogarty not only stands out for his appreciable non-whiteness, but also because his poetry works to defamiliarize “the poetry community” from its linguistic surroundings. Few other poets can say they have a brother who died at police hands, and that othered experience comes through in his language. Perhaps Fogarty’s true poetic antecedents can be found in anthropological journals, colonists’ diaries, and explorers’ letters; in these sources we can read transcriptions of songs and myths told in indigenous voices but which deny an authorial identity. The emphasis on repetition common to many song poems comes through in poems like “Maps Gods To Whose,” “Country’s Sub’s No Suss Towns,” and “Olive Pink Fly Over Sums.”

There is also a root in ongoing oral traditions and an international context of which Fogarty is a part, which might account for why Fogarty writes how he does as well as for where we place him. Indeed, the reader will very much recognize the spoken voice in this book. Consider for example the lead poem “Murgon Brawl Cherbourg Brawls,” which begins, “They out there, not hidden / Have you heard of that brawl?” We can see a casual ordinary speech combined with direct address and line breaks, which, when taken together demand the reader to pause and reflect—is the poet speaking of us, asking of us, are we in the space of Poetry or a casual, passing conversation? The language might be ordinary but the rhythm is not. It reminds us, in its use of the vernacular, of some Caribbean writers (Mervyn Morris for instance), Black British writers like Linton Kwesi Johnson for its content, and some Americans, primarily Amiri Baraka, for its intensity. Recasting Fogarty in such a transnational Black milieu forces us to think through the nodes of association, the networks of relation, and the politics of criticism.

When reading Eelahroo (Long Ago) Nyah (Looking) Mobo-Mobo (Future), one will recognize the linguistic dexterity, unique sound shape, unity of purpose, and multiple meaning of words. For readers unaccustomed to his work, it is a good place to begin. For readers expecting more of the same, it is striking for its cohesiveness and power, which only grows with the volume. We must read Fogarty in light of traditions not immediately considered poetic, as well as in contexts that account for more than Australia. It is exciting to think of Fogarty as a starting point for many to experience the vast diversity of Australian literature.

Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2015 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2015

David Brazil
Roof Books ($15.95)

by Tyrone Williams

Over the last few years David Brazil has published two chapbooks of poems titled Holy Ghost. His last book, The Ordinary (Compline, 2013), concluded with a number of poems on, among other things, “the jew” vis-à-vis an upstart Christendom. Although Antisocial Patience is, in many respects, an extension of these previous works, it does not feature the multimedia collages and appropriated detritus of quotidian urbanity that marked much of The Ordinary. Instead, Antisocial Patience is, more narrowly, a series of meditations on the dilemma of works and grace, praxis and chance, for the “defeated” but righteous crusader-cum-activist.

John Milton raised this problem in a different, albeit related, context after his vision was seemingly “defeated” by his eyes. At the turning point of the well-known sonnet “On His Blindness,” Milton, wondering how God expected him to do the Lord’s “work” after the loss of his eyesight, writes,

But Patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies: "God doth not need
Either man's work or his own gifts: who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is kingly; thousands at his bidding speed
And post o'er land and ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and wait.

Allegorized, patience suspends disbelief, but if patience is also to be “personified” in one who is not part of the “thousands” who do God’s “bidding” by swarming “o’er land and ocean without rest,” how can one be “Patience” and Protestant at the same time? What are the proper stanzas—Donne’s “little rooms”—in and through which an ethos of protestation can engage the “social” by withdrawal from it? Is a stanza a nave or abbey only after its consecration by Luther’s theses? And is patience an analogue to or with (and the preposition matters) leftwing political “theory,” the condition(s) for the possibility of, social and political activism per Marx’s and Engels’ theses?

These are the questions at the center and margins of Antisocial Patience. In between is the music of stanzas, meted out in rounds of metrical and free verse singing at once sincere, parodic, bewildered, confident, angry, tender, etc. Brazil’s peripatetic poems, stanzas, and lines suggest neither patience nor protest but, rather, crusades without crusaders. Here is a soundtrack without a movie, songs of exhortation both demotic and stately. To these ends, Brazil turns scripture into script (though “what we strive for in this song is just exactly/ imprescriptible”), a template for our present circumstances and values which, separated by the very histories they unfold as, can only appear as outrageous (mis)fortune reified and/or rectified by wresting a future meaning-to-be from the tyranny of the meant.

Call it hope: the failures of social and political activism may be nurtured as the seedlings of “redemption” at some indeterminate time to come. Insofar as the “failed” Catholic but “successful” protester John Calvin is the “invisible hand” at work in these poems, the Jewish-Christian debate that closed The Ordinary is here supplemented, if not supplanted, by the Catholic-Protestant schism. This volatile divide functions as a “model” for state-enforcement of “the law” and citizen-activist resistance in the name of a “higher” law. Beginning with the given—a defeated, if heroic, left—Brazil ponders the remainder of “song,” of prosody, that both acknowledges and transcends defeat. Rejecting the commonplace narrative of the appropriation of the public by the private and the penetration of the private by the public—in brief, the problem of a “we” that does and does not speak for some (“compeers contra/ every cop who divvies up the/us into the getters and the gotten”) —Brazil rejects the temptation of a strict fundamentalist counternarrative (Marxist, religious, etc.). Instead, as a kind of negative capability or “patience,” he withdraws from the singularity of intent (stateless communism, heaven on earth) to “contemplate” plurality: any number of strategies and models for engagement must be reimagined (dead-ends entail forging new paths over or intersecting old ones) without—and with—institutionalization. This is, of course, as the epigraph makes clear, the position that Calvin took in the throes of his own personal crisis of faith. As Calvin knew, there is no refuge from the world or from The Church, a corporate body whose political, economic, and military power is the equivalent of a small nation: “a gunman in oikos & we” can always “prose us.” Brazil thus marks the constitution of Protestantism as a descant against (Anglican) London and (Catholic) Vatican cant—even as protest, suppressing its sectarian roots, towers into Protest, a twin of what was to be abandoned. The historical lessons to be derived from this relationship inform Antisocial Patience.

As the book’s title suggests, Brazil posits the world outside individual consciousness as the realm of "anti-patience," a world where one acts and interacts with others. Thus the hermetic tendencies within Calvinism, an index of its relation to Catholic monasticism, are redeployed here as revolutionary "timing"—when to act and when to wait. Yet patience is, at best, a double-edged sword; it can be a high-level strategy as well as a ceding to the world. The revolutionary's metaphysics rejects the world as is for what might be (“fuck the escape that abjures/ renunciation of the merely given as/ my opening move”), and this orientation towards a future entails “voluntary” exile from institutional structures, private and public. If the oikos is thus exposed as the originary wound—"In/the text of the rite is a cut/in cloth of sacrifice”—what remains is just the wound, a mouth from which pours song. Song, like the singer, marks and is marked by scarification: “the pith of hymns will/travel to your ears and/dwell there, doing its/small work as fate majestic/over earth decrees.” Yet, song obeys its own laws (metrics, for example) and acts upon its singers and listeners—as persuasion sans rhetoric—without or beyond the reach of a law that comes to supplement the oikos, an "echo" of the original even if "flaws in wind told. building it had failed." For want of a law, a metric, or a pattern, possibility appears as participial, a bridge between the present and future, delicate as a houseless (if not homeless) law, "fortified by song.”

Song is, of course, central to the Protestant rebellion: song and speech over and above the law, the house. But insofar as the activist seeks the secular equivalent of religious resistance, he or she remains haunted by what one had thought to have abandoned: “your law was my houses/your law settled time & now I’m/ cast to outer dark & crying/aloud for the echo, yes.” Calvin, torn between passive and active resistance, between works and grace, could not decide if it were more “holy” to enter the theater of war against the world (including a Catholicism reimagined as Babylon) or wait for God to avenge his martyrs (“Vengeance is mine,” saith the Lord, in Romans 12:19). Nonetheless, in the face of daily injustices, we as humans find it difficult to merely “serve and wait.” Waiting may lead to withdrawal from the world a la the monk and nun, exemplars of Catholic patience, while the activist nails thesis after thesis (Calvinist, Marxist, Islamist, etc.) to a door of the built, that which refuses to open to some (e.g., Levelers) and gapes way too wide for others (Babylon as the whore who refuses no one and nothing). This motif—refusing what ought to have been accepted, accepting what ought to have been refused—is never far from fin de siècle sensibilities. Brazil tries to sidestep this trap by accepting every encounter as “possibility” no matter how insignificant it might seem, and thus far this sensibility informs all his work. Rhetorically, Brazil deploys anagram (snow=nows), pun (“be my name write or be my name razed”), catachresis (“Rave, I’m homeroom, me”), and malapropos (“The past tense of seeing is seed”). Modalities dominate as Brazil gleefully uses, and abuses, inductive and deductive reasoning.

Antisocial Patience constitutes an homage to, and deconstruction of, Calvinist and Marxist doctrine. Brazil’s writing remains informed by a dialectical fin de un monde/debut de aussi monde sensibility, neither of which corresponds with a fin de siècle worldview (though they do overlap). As with much of contemporary poetry, Brazil’s lexicon can at times remain trapped within the private language of a coterie. Given the stakes, the risks he takes are perhaps unavoidable, but one cannot say that the risks are “worth” taking since such a rhetoric attaches a predetermined value to future labor, arresting possibility in advance. Contrarian at heart, Brazil imagines the risks of a patience even if, especially if, it is not worth it.

Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2015 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2015