Christine Wertheim
Counterpath ($30)

by Maria Damon

There is a way that language shudders into the very flesh, not because our flesh is made sense of through language, but because language emerges from and returns to the body.
—Jefferson Hansen (thealteredscale.blogspot.com, September 21, 2104)

What could be more fun than a tract of feminist psychoanalytic philosophy wearing the cloak of visual and sound poetry? I suppose one might think of several hundred candidates for such a status. And yet, feminist philosophy has been far more playful than one might initially assume. In fact, play has been one of its constituent elements, if only to offset the seriousness with which a patriarchal discourse top-heavy with “phallogocentrism” (the term itself is a feminist spin on “logocentrism”) takes itself. For every Socrates or Apollo, there is a Baubo. For every Descartes, there is a Cixous, whose “Laugh of the Medusa” certainly both thematizes and enacts its affirmation of a terrifyingly comical “écriture feminine.” For every Freud, there is a Bracha L. Ettinger, in fact for every Freud there is a . . . Freud. You get my drift. Not that male philosophers and writers don’t also play with language. Derrida, Lacan, Thoreau, and so on have been positively drunk on puns and the thoughtscapes they catalyze. The gender war of words and laughs is not really a war on the linguistic front but an exploration into the enabling possibilities of language itself.

Christine Wertheim’s mUtter-bAbel partakes of this serious-as-your-life whimsy in its evocation of the emergence of a human child first into the world and then into language, mediated by the osmotically omnipresent M / Other / Utter / Outh / Yth. In dazzling graphics that blend sound and visual poetry, the text unfolds as a series of cries, howls, murmurs and whispers that are themselves illustrations: digital and manually produced manipulations of handwriting, typeface, and other alphabetic technologies, spelling, in wavy and endlessly radiating replication, “thIsOng’s of the-M-any-Others’ flOw-er-ing vOIdSe,” or fat white snakes of undulating “sssssssssssssssssshhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!”’ s swarming across a black page. (The “I”s in all of the cited materials are actually vertical slashes, cuts that undermine the assertive declaration of the capitalized ego implicit in the first-person pronoun conventionally associated with the singular vowel or its upper-case incarnation anywhere in an English-language inscription.) The primordiality of emergence and the persistent mother-child bond as bodied forth in flowing/fragmented language has been written about by Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, and certainly others, but never so primordially, never so bondedly, never so embodied.

And the picture immediately becomes more complex, as the satisfactions of entering language with a triumphant “I’m meeeeeeee”-ness inevitably give way to certain inadequacies and conflicts when “mOther’s voIce turn[s] from an invitation to an imposition.” Handscrawled, messy, border-ignoring holes drawn in red and black join the elegant fonts and waves of digital graphics, as the gleeful meeeee-ness turns to a howl/hole of dissent and despair, a resistance to a kind of trap that, paradoxically, denies difference rather than aiding individuation. The primal is complicated by discomfort and rage. However, what in some psychoanalytic circles would be called the intrusion of the “law of the Father”—i.e. language, structure, hierarchy, etc.—is nowhere yet identified in Wertheim’s masterpiece as gendered or explicitly named. Nor does the father appear at all in the same way the mother does, except obliquely as the “babel” of the title. (mUtter-bAbel=mOther-fAther as the tower of babel defeats univocality, dissonantly echoing the fluid “money money money / water water water” of Theodore Roethke’s “The Lost Son,” where this phrase is a visceral response to the “lamentation being summed up,” the thirst for “the old rage, the lash of primordial milk!”) The drama, though internally marked by smears, bloody/fecal/salivary leakage and verbal/psychic violence, is a drama between mother and child, struggling for otherness/sameness in larval battle. A strange metamorphosis in the form of a power shift takes place. Paradoxically, “the-m-Others” emerge not as the powerful shapers of a child’s experience, but the victims of the child’s unrealistic expectations of life without inconsistencies or frictions. That is, as will become clear, the privileged of this world come to expect to be permanently infantilized, while projecting their rage onto the-m-Others—the poor, the have-nots—for having incompletely served their (the permanent children’s) needs.

This becomes explicit in “Interlude,” or

speculations on the effects of the shIt-hOwle in adult society
or
the politics of dung-prattle[,]

which adopts an essayistic, discursive tone even as the now extremely dense aggregate of hand-scrawled holes and typed letters take the form of mouth-holes, continents (Africa), bodies, parasitic speaking shapes. Expository prose, the language of the father (or, as they said in the old days, “phallogocentrism”), enters like a foreign tOngue, spreading order even as ordure spreads and chaos raises the stakes of what has been a private, dyadic conversation.

The final two chapters, “ShIt People” and “Pamela Aber,” focus this dysfunction in two case studies in which the larger socio-political violence of this seemingly private difficulty are spelled out. In these sections, the father trope appears horrifically in two case studies of the consequences of difficult individuation. The murders of young women at the Mexican/US border as the ultimate detritus of “shit people” (people unwanted, extruded from the MotherNation’s body back and forth between MotherNations, povertymisery compounded) indicate a surplus of rage, bloody self-laceration of a socius that cannot meaningfully expand to accommodate all its constituent beings. And then there’s the also-horrific testimony of Pamela Aber, a teenager who escaped from the Lord’s Resistance Army, Joseph Kony’s coerced aggregate that terrorizes Uganda by forcing its own youth to participate in killing and maiming the populace. Aber describes an incident in which orality is used to grisly and fatal ends: Kony ordered a group of children, on pain of death, to bite a girl to death, despite their pleas that they/she be spared this atrocity. When she did not die, despite profuse bleeding and wounding, they were then forced to club her until she finally died. This perversion of primal orality to kill rather than to nurture or be nurtured is an extreme exemplar of an adult’s need that children satisfy his insatiable desires for power through a deformed nursing ritual that destroys the psyches of the children; all are “blinded by blOOd.” And worse, this horror, beyond its spectacular humanitarian transgressions, is not an affront to the aims of imperial powers (i.e. us/US) who support the Ugandan government, whose deliberate destabilization of an ethnic group (Acholi) led to this political debacle. Thus, what at one level appears to be a deformity of normal human relations is simply a routine side effect of business as usual at the political level.

The way in which the book progresses tonally, discursively, graphically, and sonically from a terrain of chaotic but exciting possibility and discovery through an inevitable complication to the horrific effects of its irresolvability is masterful (with all the caveats that word enfreights) even as it plays with and roots itself in syllables and entities as primal as “me, “mommy,” and (the somewhat ghostly throughout) “babel.” The level of this achievement takes my breath away, that breath that is the ground of language, leaving me disembodied until I remember the art and care with which it was birthed.

Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2014 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2014

Wang Ping
Wings Press ($16)

by Andreas Weiland

Wang Ping’s new collection Ten Thousand Waves looks at a wide swathe of Chinese history and literature, and examines various issues stemming from immigration to America. Possessing a unique gift for telling small stories with powerful emotional effects, she conveys the voices of farmers and factory laborers, revolutionaries, writers, artists and craftsmen.

The title poem, “Ten Thousand Waves,“ was inspired by a tragedy that occurred on February 5, 2004: more than twenty Chinese laborers were drowned in Morecambe Bay, England, when they were caught by an incoming tide. The title itself is quintessentially Chinese: Classical poets in China would invoke “ten thousand” when they meant to say “many,” “a vast number” or, in combination with miles (“li”), that someone or something is “very far away.” To use the hyperbole now is not without risk; but strangely, used in combination with waves, it escapes the danger of becoming a worn metaphor. It calls up the image of endlessly onrushing waves. It ceases to be a metaphor. It becomes photographic.

Wang Ping, a native of Shanghai who lives and works in Minnesota, does not succumb to the lyrical and romantic histories of the phrase. She invokes no vast and peaceful plains, no multitude of mountains crowned by the cabins of Taoist hermits or by Zen Buddhist monasteries. In other words, she rejects the seductive option of being both easily digestible and anachronistic. The book’s title is an allusion to a tragic event in recent history with a very contemporary social context—that of the globalized economy. It was the cruel sea that took the lives of twenty undocumented Chinese workers when they miscalculated the return of the tide in Morecambe Bay, somewhere East of the Isle of Man, in Northern England. The book, and the title poem in particular, confronts real life conditions of so-called illegal laborers arriving in Europe, or in the States, in the twenty-first century.

Ten Thousand Waves is an active text, linking literature to the extra-literary world. The words on these pages have a relationship with social reality, historical reality, and nature (an aspect of reality soaked in social significance, exposed to social forces—more often than not of a careless, exploitative, often destructive force). Waves both wash people ashore in lands far from China, in the so-called “West,” while another storm of history crashes with great force on China’s shores, importing the turmoil of the world market, quick growth of riches and expansion of poverty, of sickly pollution and the slick machines that create it, a pendulum of devastation and shiny façades. The author’s words point to a dialectical relationship that both unites and opposes the different parts of the world, the rich one and the poor one, unleashing new dynamics that “make waves.”

And yet, using the term “ten thousand” is also an indication that the book itself, not just the title, employs many elements originating in Chinese literature. Wang Ping lived long enough in her native country to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree, and her poems reveal not only aspects of today’s China, they also reveal something about America. They show us the shadow behind the voice that speaks and is heard in these poems: a woman at the crossroads, a woman anchored now in America, who remembers the past and confronts the present in the “old country.” These poems engage in a dual critique of an American way of life and the West’s betrayed values, and of China today—the country, or rather society, that abandoned hopes for the sake of money and fast development. It is a country that produces, in the hearts and minds of its citizens, different reactions to it contradictions. They are reactions that reach from the wish to flee to the American dreamland to the desire to return to the simple, honest, and just ideal ensconced in Classical Chinese texts.

Saturated with echoes of two different cultures, this volume reveals the richness and vibrancy of contemporary American poetry. Clearly, the woman’s voice in the poems (an alter-ego of sorts) sets herself apart from her “American partner,” as they encounter Chinese men and women, also members of ethnic sub-groups (like the Hakka or kejia ren) or of minorities like the Yi or Nuosu. She is seeking to establish a closeness with the locals, no matter how much she is the Other out there—someone from America. In the poem “Bargain,” when the speaker and a hawker address each other, we witness the collision of traditional and modern ways of conveying deference or respect. “Big Sister,” as the local uses it, translates the word jiejie (elder sister), as opposed to meimei (younger sister) into English; it connotes both closeness and politeness, in addition to the old deferential way of acknowledging a hierarchy between younger and older persons. And here in the modern, alienated context, it is also a type of calculated sweet talk of the local girl addressing the imagined wealthy Chinese living abroad (who is expected to buy something from among the offered wares), while indicating simultaneously the lower position of the hawker—the “poor person” in this situation. Refraining from using the correlating term “meimei” (little sister) and saying “xiaojie” or “miss,” instead, the Chinese-American speaker of the poem painstakingly tries to make clear, I’m determined to be polite; I want to treat you as an equal, even if you get on my nerves with your stubborn refusal to lower the price. “Xiaojie” is a middle class and almost an upper class term; it is modern; it is formal; it establishes a formal distance. The inability to reestablish the jiejie—meimei correlation reflects the distance between the two.

The last lines of the poem tell us that she realizes the consequences of her formality when she is back in the States, looking at the “trophy” acquired for nine yuan during her visit to the motherland. She understands suddenly how she has internalized way too much of the new culture she has immersed herself in, after leaving China many years ago.

I put away my victory in a trunk,
never give it a second thought
until I’m pulled out of the line
at Minneapolis custom, maggot fingers
prodding socks, underwear, wrapped gifts,
and there it is—my bargain
red and loud like thunderclaps:
“You saved a dime, fool,
but lost your soul.” 

The presence of the voices of the Others—Chinese persons who have not left China, but some of whom dream of going to America—complicates the poems, turning what might be mere narrative into a dialogue, an exchange of standpoints, worldviews, sometimes a collision. In modern poetry, particularly in China between 1919 and 1949, this was a preferred poetic device that would render a social contrast more visible to readers. Wang Ping has used this device sensitively while transposing the modernist literary heritage of China’s great epic poets into a contemporary American English diction.

The poet’s alter ego often enunciates her thoughts, summing up or drawing conclusions that appear in combination with the descriptive elements of Wang Ping’s poetry. These elements reveal the alienated and alienating quest for a good life sought by careerists, the attempt of an ordinary man like the garbage collector to remain authentic (“The Collector”), but also the despair of people—as in “Paradise,” where a migrant laborer, devoid of all hope, jumps to his death from the towering “top of a billboard that says Welcome to Hangzhou—Paradise on Earth”—falling, the poet says, “into the pit of Paradise.”

These poems often speak with the re-born voice of Ai Qing, but also with the voice of Carl Sandburg when he recalls the cries of the factory girls jumping from the windows in the fourth floor of a sweatshop in Lower Manhattan that is ablaze. The same compassion is in Wang Ping’s poems, and the same brave attempt not to be overly emotional, not to become sentimental, but to remain the chronicler of small joys and great suffering, of mistakes made and uprightness. She is a committed yet detached observer, filled by a deep reverence and love for humanity, but also aware of this “busy monster manunkind” that we are. And she cares, no doubt, for both China and the country that has become her new home; it is a sad, bitter love that seeks to stir and awaken the reader, for she knows that all of us are thrown into an age of turmoil, wars, and fierce competition, where the necessary answer seems to be a clear-minded analysis of the impasses we face.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2014 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2014

rob mclennan
Chaudiere Books ($15)

by Brian Mihok

Sometimes it's painful to a writer to label his work, as if putting a name to it reduces its parameters. In saying what it is, you are also saying what it is not, and in doing so you might deny the ultimate strength of literature—to be layered with possibility.

At the risk of doing the potentially just-as-sinful inverse, I could instead try to write what rob mclennan's The Uncertainty Principle is not. For example, it is not a collection of stories the way Dubliners is a collection of stories. On the spectrum that delineates characteristics of fiction from poetry, the pieces in The Uncertainty Principle fall somewhere nearer to fiction; however, this spectrum is intersected by other spectra delineating fact from error, objective from subjective, author from narrator/speaker, etc. The book is mostly made of fragments, alternating between a story, a diary entry, a joke. Sprinkled throughout are strange and humorous un-facts, e.g., “Radium tastes like buttermilk. #IDon'tHaveFactsToBackThisUp.”

What makes the collection work is the sense of uncertainty each piece creates. Most of them can stand on their own, and each one chimes a tone of unknowing, either through an event in a story or through an observation. Take page 61, on which mclennan directly investigates the idea of unknowing:

If love has gone from noun to a verb, I no longer want part. Lately, the moon has edged slow through the sky dragging Jupiter, the closest its been to the earth in some decades. It winks back like Sputnik, like Skylab. One of a club of dwindling planets. We are known for our exclusivity. Jupiter, tell me: what do you know, and why won't you impart? It knows something we don't. It knows something we haven't quite figured.

Throughout The Uncertainty Principle, the mystery of unknowing is a kind of knowledge in itself—knowledge that any truth can be taken away from us, that no truth has permanence. It's an unnerving and beautiful notion.

The Uncertainty Principle is also not a book with an answer. Some of its playfulness comes from the one-liners like the “radium” one cited above; they end with the same hashtag, a remnant of these particular pieces' first home on mclennan's Twitter feed. The joke of the hashtag, unfortunately, loses its effect as it’s repeated. The claims made by these pieces are indeed funny and unbelievable, though there's something in their oddness that makes you think, well, maybe . . . That hesitation works within the confines of uncertainty the book presents, but the hashtag corrupts that feeling, asking the reader to chuckle rather than wonder.

This is a small quibble, however. The most important part of this book is that it isn't anything. It calls to the idea that uncertainty is always with us. And it shines a light in that darkness, but as the length of most of the pieces attest, the light must not linger on any one thing too long, lest we start believing what we see is true.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2014 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2014

Amy Catanzano
Noemi Press ($15)

by Cindra Halm

Let’s take a journey involving both quantum and cosmic universes, a point of view from “fourth person narration,” characters named for Greek concepts, and metafictional investigations of the human capacity to express in words. And, of course, a time machine.

Amy Catanzano’s Starlight in Two Million: A Neo-Scientific Novella is a mind-full, mine-filled, field of literary, aesthetic, scientific, and imaginative constructs that take forms as collage, cultural allegory, anti-war expression, epistolary conversation, and song-of-joy-in-risk-taking, to list merely a few. Exceedingly specific to its referents, exceedingly rigorous in its intellect, the book might be as intimidating as it is elegant. And yet, plenty of random openings yield trackable, if also mystifying, koan-type passages which may tantalize one’s curious poet of the mind as well as one’s sensual poet of the skin:

The Enduring Karmanaut
When I was born, I was a letter delivered by the sea in a ship crafted with no limit for travel. My fingerprint unlocked a supercivilization behind my throat. My cells write without sight. The ship sailed between the horizon and the sea to the land where I was born. I was born into a letter. My fingerprint was found by a supercivilization. When I was born, the sea unlocked a horizon behind my throat. My paradox will be wider than my cell.

In this full “chapter” of the self-described novella, one may note the iterations that organically mutate meanings by rearranging phrases and ideas as well as by playing with multivalent particular words (“letter,” “cell,” etc.). While each chapter expresses variations of length, look, line, and language, the theme and the strategy of mutability arcs throughout the entire book, highlighting the role that change plays in the novella’s (while commenting on our own) multiverse—a resonant word here if ever there was one, and a form of the title of Catanzano’s previous collection of poems, Multiversal (Fordham University Press, 2009).

So this book is a trip, in all senses of the word. Guides can be found in the four quotations which open the narrative, as well as in the highly recommended “Author’s Statement: An Artificial Intelligence” which closes it. Yes, even if you read theoretical physics for fun, whiz through Sunday crossword puzzles, devour utopian/dystopian literature, and think in highly connotative, simultaneous logics, beginning with the “Author’s Statement” will provide a grounding influence for “my investigation into quantum poetics, a hybrid critical-speculative framework that I am extending upon and developing in this project and others.”

The “Statement,” a manifesto that has delicious potential to spin into a series of essays, brings to mind Alice Fulton’s ideas and illuminations on “fractal poetics” in the book Feeling as a Foreign Language: The Good Strangeness of Poetry (Graywolf, 1999), which definitely seems an influence. One of Catanzano’s explicitly stated ancestors, Alfred Jarry, lends his “science of imaginary solutions” to the text’s exceedingly dense stew of postulates, constructions, references, paradoxes, and shifting cosmologies.

Starlight is a neo-hippie, alternative-future creation myth in which space-time limitations disappear and characters forge ever-developing notions of freedom, responsibility, and relationship, in settings of nowhere and everywhere. Catanzano comes across as a superstring theoretical linguist sensualist geek collagist, with instincts to parse, to layer, and to linger, in dynamic context or in contextual dynamism. A poetic attempt at the elusive Theory of Everything? Her work feels important, and full of wonder for what is and what could be. Scientists and artists share this.

Now, back to the crossword puzzle: word before “dust” and “light”: four letters. “Star,” right? Cue Joni Mitchell. Amy Catanzano also reminds us that we’re comprised of star-stuff, the matter, the energy—but in her version, even outer space is local. We don’t have to get ourselves back to the garden; we never left it.

Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2014 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2014

Arthur Sze
Copper Canyon Press ($16)

by Ted Mathys

In Arthur Sze’s stunning tenth collection, he departs from previous books by adopting new formal techniques to illuminate one of his enduring themes: how to account for the simultaneity of lived events in a poetic language that is damned to unfold over time. The book opens with an untitled page consisting of a single line of verse: “Black kites with outstretched wings circle overhead—.” After each titled poem in the collection another page like this appears, with a few unrelated image-lines, each ending with an em-dash. Their content slowly accumulates into travel journal, with images suggesting South Asia. The em-dashes leap out manically from the ends of the lines as if to suggest that something is about to happen or just happened to the traveler, but the transcription process couldn’t keep pace: “A naked woman applies kohl to her right eyelid— / The limp tassels of new ashoka leaves in a tomb courtyard—.”

Buried in the acknowledgments at the end of the book is the explanation that these lines belong to a single poem, “Sarangi Music,” which was first published as a whole but here appears in segments, dispersed, and stripped of its title. “Sarangi Music” thus exists for the reader in two places at once; it is posited as an ideal construct residing somewhere else but is experienced here in flickering, periodic fragments. This is the magic of Sze’s poetry. He creates artifacts in which the profusion of each present moment can be felt viscerally if not fully understood, in which “each fragment is a whole” precisely because “Consciousness is an infinite net / in which each hanging jewel absorbs and reflects / every other.”

Like much of Sze’s work, Compass Rose is anchored by numbered, serial poems driven by paratactic images and overheard snippets of language laid down in rapid succession. Sze privileges active present tense verbs (“an owl lifts,” “kiwis hang,” “he swerves,” “surf slams,” “two planets bob”) and temporal ligatures like “while” and “as” that make the actions in his poems feel coincident rather than causal. Though Sze sometimes adopts a deeply emotional lyric “I,” more often the work is peopled with characters who are typecast by occupation—“At the lab a technician prepares a response / to a hypothetical anthrax attack”; “A healer aligns / her east and west”; “A veteran’s wince coincides / with the pang a girl feels when / she masters hooked bows in a minuet”—all of which deepens the feeling that each of us is not an inviolably unique person, but rather an actor embedded in a larger web of physical life.

This goes for the poet, too. Even as he mines his surroundings for sensuous lines of verse, Sze’s speaker seems consistently aware of the limits of human perception and our insignificance, to borrow a brutal phrase from Mao, “as far as the universe as a whole is concerned.” In many ways the book is governed by a desire to contend with this in language, to make palpable the elusive natural forces that structure the present: “If I sprinkle iron filings onto a sheet / of paper, I make visible / the magnetic lines of the moment.” Magnetic lines, state lines, nanoseconds, meteorological isobars, ultraviolet radiation—Sze’s wide aperture, observational precision, and sustained intellectual pressure transform what seems beyond the grasp of the human senses into events in language.

In the compass rose, Sze finds an elegant metaphor for this poetics. A compass rose is the figure on a compass or nautical map that depicts the cardinal directions: North, East, South, and West. In its crudest form it resembles a four-pointed star, but many designs bisect the cardinal directions into smaller units such as Northeast, East-Northeast, and so on. The more precise the observational units on a compass get, the more its lines proliferate, and the more the pointed star begins to resemble an ornate rose in bloom.

Like a compass rose, Sze’s meticulous examinations of scientific phenomena ultimately yield aesthetic rewards, and what appears at first to be plainly aesthetic, such as “the heart-shaped leaves of spring,” is often revealed to be an illusory aspect of a more complicated system in which “dark energy and dark / matter enlace this world.” Indeed, in the title poem Sze draws a parallel between this scientific-aesthetic tension and the poetic tension between literal and figurative uses of language. “What closes and is literal, / what opens and is figurative?” he writes, only to reverse the aphoristic question a few lines later: “what closes / and is figurative, what opens and is literal?” These poems vibrate in the hidden, interstitial spaces between open and closed, literal and figurative, science and art, the land and its maps, the compass and the rose.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2014 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2014

Anthology of Contemporary Bulgarian Poetry
Edited by Katerina Stoykova-Klemer
Accents Publishing ($16.95)

by Holly Karapetkova

For most Americans, Bulgaria remains a shadowy presence, a nebulous country somewhere in Eastern Europe that was part of the former Soviet Bloc. It has not attracted the same political attention as many of its neighbors, and much of its literature and culture have similarly slipped beneath the American radar. Other than a spattering of anthologies and a few collections by individual poets, Bulgarian poetry in particular remains largely unavailable in English. The Season of Delicate Hunger, a new anthology of Bulgarian poetry edited and largely translated by Katerina Stoykova-Klemer, helps to remedy this dearth, providing American readers with a refreshing glimpse of contemporary Bulgarian poets.

Stoykova-Klemer, an accomplished American poet and native Bulgarian, is the perfect vehicle for rendering the fragile body of the poem for an American audience. Not only is she acutely sensitive to the workings of Bulgarian language and culture, but she has an exceptional ear for contemporary American poetry, and her translations are so seemingly effortless that we forget we are reading translations and connect directly with the work itself.

The anthology is ambitious in scope and scale, taking on the voices of thirty-two living poets from a variety of regions, generations, and aesthetics; many of these writers are being made available in English for the first time. This wide range gives us the sense of a poetry that is as varied as the intellectual landscape of Bulgaria itself: the conversational digressions of Vladislav Hristov, the reimagined mythology of Kristin Dimitrova, the philosophical “Visions” of Kerana Angelova, the symbolist leanings of Ani Ilkov, the lyricism of Petar Tchouhov—all are present here in a single collection.

The anthology not only introduces a diverse group of contemporary Bulgarian poets to an American audience, but it also does what the editor sets out to do in the introduction: it conveys something of the Bulgarian mentality and literary sensibility. Some of the poems remind us how deeply the experiences of communism and the disappointments following its collapse are embedded in the Bulgarian consciousness. In Mirela Ivanova’s “What I Remembered, but Couldn’t Tell My Six-Year-Old Daughter, While We Were Stuck for 11 Minutes in the Elevator . . .,” the speaker thinks to herself, “I’d been stuck in the regime itself, and it felt / as if it wouldn’t end, and then I caught / the incurable inadaptability / to the bright future.” Other poems like Ekaterina Yosifova’s “You Don’t Need to Know Geography” tap into the cynicism and self-deprecating humor so prevalent in the Bulgarian psyche. When events seem out of whack in the world, a “girl ask[s]: is this map Bulgarian? / They smirked. / Everything made sense to them again.”

The anthology also includes poems that offer us a Bulgarian perspective on American society that is sometimes humorous, sometimes disconcerting, but always provocative. Vladimir Levchev’s “Justice for All,” notes ironically how “The rich man can buy a senator. / The poor man can / buy the rich man’s newspaper / and read / about the senator.” Ivan Hristov’s selection gives Americans a more humorous view of themselves, discussing an American dog “Snickers”:

Actually,
all dogs in America
are named Snickers
so it’ll be hard for you
to picture him

and a “Panera Bread” where the restaurant pager becomes “a tiny / spaceship”:

So why
am I writing
these things now?
No matter!
I just wanted
To dedicate
this poem
to everyone
who has ever thought
that such a thing
does not exist.

But while the anthology does communicate much of the Bulgarian sensibility, it reaches far beyond national boundaries and speaks directly to what it means to be human. The book contains powerful poems of loss and death, from Marin Bodakov’s intimate “Mud on My Palm,” where the speaker tells us how “with my little household shovel, / I finished burying my dad. / I wish this were a metaphor”; to Georgi Gospodinov’s pensive “Time Is a Neutron Bomb”:

Nothing will be knocked down,
the houses will stay,
the streets will stay,
the cherry tree in the yard will stay.
Only we won’t be here.
That was the lesson
about the neutron bomb.

I’ve known since then,
death is a cherry,
ripening without me.

These are poems that do not back away from the dangers and complexities of living, which a small nation at the crossroads of history— including, most recently, 500 years of Turkish rule, a communist dictatorship, and a failing democracy—cannot help but understand. Even passion and desire are marked with uncertainty, as in Aksinia Mihaylova’s untitled love poem:

thread the needle with a stronger strand
to sew up all fissures
in you and me, in the space,
the seclusion squats at the needle’s steel pinnacle,
one sleeve in your lap, the other
in my lap, hurry,
hurry, one matchstick is not enough
for the dark that will swallow us.

The pieces in the anthology startle us with their raw emotion; they show us our most vulnerable and most honest selves. In Valentin Dishev’s words,

Sometimes,
if a scream cuts through
your veins,
there is no need to look around.
Sometimes you are the blade.

Such moments make us reexamine our lives and reconsider what we thought we knew, as the best poetry always does. The poetry on these pages may be uniquely Bulgarian, but it resonates with a beauty and humanity no reader is likely to forget.

Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2014 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2014

Erika Meitner
BOA Editions ($16)

by Michele Balze

In Erika Meitner’s Copia, the abundance of language referred to in the title springs from the American landscape. From the suburbs to the decaying city of Detroit, Meitner uncovers richness of meaning in plain American language. Common objects and signage become mediums for recovering history and personal memory.

For much of the book, Meitner occupies the persona of a suburban mother who has left her itinerant youth behind. In the last section, she moves into documentary poems reflecting on the decline of Detroit. Throughout, she explores an American landscape of motel rooms and discount stores. Emphasizing the commonality of her persona, she writes:

I am a Walmart shopper, a tract-house dweller—the developments
you can see clearly from every highway in America that’s not jammed up
on farmland or pinned in by mountains. I park my car at a slant in the lot

Lawlessness underlies the banality of these surroundings, as Meitner points out by listing strange incidents that have occurred in Walmart parking lots across the country. For example:

In the Corbin Walmart parking lot a woman with a small amount of cash
was arrested for getting in and out of trucks. A man stepped out of his car
in the Columbus Walmart parking lot, and shot himself.

In the face of these occurrences, however, the employee’s gestures of kindness express a genuine spirituality that Meitner labels as mercy.

The idea that spirituality manifests itself through common things runs through Copia, suggesting richness underlies an apparently barren surface. As she writes in “Cosmogony/Progeny”:

. . . there is still
the possibility of a miracle
happening in the form of
signs & wonders, wonders

& signs: CheckCashing or
WorkWear or BeautyMart.

Meitner’s use of found language illustrates how her view of copia runs contrary to that of the young man in “Big Box Encounter,” whose letters “feature intricate vocabulary, like soporific and ennui. / Like intervening and kinetic and tumult.” Seemingly random signs resonate as what Meitner calls, in “Post-Industrialization,” “the single greatest story of American success.” Ironically, as she later points out, “The truth is / even cities / are ephemeral.” What becomes important in the face of decay is recovering the stories of the people who inhabited the city when it was alive.

Meitner does this most effectively in “All that Blue Fire,” in which she draws out the lyricism of an autoworker’s voice as he tells the story of why he came to Detroit. Through repetition and line breaks, she gives the language of a common person the quality of a blues song:

Yeah, they go on down the line
like that. Then when it get out
to another part of the line,

they lay the motor down

Here the nostalgic voice of the autoworker captures the seduction of the industry that gave Detroit life.

Earlier, in the poems “Yizker Bukh” and “Yiddishland,” Meitner explores a quest for the past in terms of her personal history. Like the later poems about Detroit, these poems about her grandmother explore the loss of culture and a struggle to recapture the past. “Yizker Bukh” begins by comparing the process of memory to sifting through the fragments of a destroyed city:

Memory is
flotsam (yes) just
below the surface
an eternal city
a heap of rubble
debris smaller
than your fist

In the face of her grandmother’s death, Meitner uses the memory of the white turban she wore to link together a chain of memories. Acknowledging the limits of recovery, she writes:

. . . O memory how much you
erased how many holes                 we punched
in your facts since who knows the stories
she never told about the camps . . .

Insignificant details provide a means for recovering personal memory, but the historical memory evades recovery. The later poem, “Yiddishland,” reinforces the larger historical and cultural import of this loss of memory by framing her grandmother’s burial service with the larger cultural loss of Yiddish language.

The documentary poems in Copia echo this desire to recover both personal and cultural history. “The Book of Dissolution” figures the decaying city of Detroit as a text that leads to an understanding of the self. It opens: “Because it is an uninhabited place, because it makes me hollow, I pried open the pages of Detroit: the houses blanked out, factories absorbed back into ghetto palms and scrub-oak, piles of tires, heaps of cement block.” Meitner strives to read the fragments of the destroyed city, going on to write that “Burn scars on cement where scrappers torched the last bits of plastic off copper wire spell out code that reveals what the world will look like when we’re gone.” Ultimately, Meitner comes to identify with the landscape, writing, “I have been unoccupied I have been foreclosed I have been vacant for a long time.” For Meitner, this emptiness implies a fullness of meaning. As she writes in “Retail Space Available,” “though this world is changing, we will remain the same: abundant and impossible to fill.”

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2014 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2014

Philip Hoare
Melville House ($27.99)

by Ryder W. Miller

Many people feel beckoned by the ocean; there is something in the sea air that feels magical and poetic. However, because of the arduous nature of seafaring life, many people prefer to experience it via armchair travel with documentaries and books. With The Sea Inside, British author Philip Hoare takes the reader on such a journey.

The author is captivated by the ocean, and is a subscriber to the idea that human beings evolved alongside the sea:

The sea sustains and threatens us, but it is also where we came from. Some consider that the relationship is closer than we think. Callum Roberts, among other scientists, has noted that the ratio of subcutaneous fat in humans is ten times that of other primates, nearer to that of a fin whale. From an evolutionary point of view, such human blubber would make little sense for a land hunter, but it would be eminently useful for an ‘aquatic ape’ which developed by the sea.

The science may not be so great here, but it’s a very poetic concept. Although the book has an index, it is more literary than scholarly—the writing is reverential (if occasionally opaque), and addresses themes such as the metaphorical seas of human relations.

The Sea Inside is filled with references to British people, places, and events, and readers unfamiliar with the culture may not get as much from the book. As an island nation, Britain is home to some fascinating sea lore, and Hoare relates these tales so colorfully that the reader might feel seasick. In describing the ocean and its saga, Hoare addresses the spiritual and emotional as well as the scientific and historical:

. . . The Pacific is by no means a landless, uninhabited expanse. It is studded with twenty-five thousand islands, large and small, each with its own stories, of people, and animals. Their narratives crisscross the ocean in an embroidered web, drawn together in invisible lines of connection from shore to island to sea, transversed in ancient feats of navigation and migration that put our modern, computer-assisted efforts to shame. Here the remotest journeys ended; and here many began, too.

Hoare’s self-deprecating humor also keeps the book from being too grandiose, such as this passage in which he attempts to play like a dolphin:

But my body declines to act like a dolphin, and there’s as much seawater up my nose as there threatens to be in my lungs. I feel like a circus animal myself; and although the dolphins come to me of their own accord, I can’t help feeling they’d be better left alone. Exhausted, I haul myself up over the boat’s side. Sometimes it’s better to watch than to take part.

The account of the voyage is wonderful and profound, and the reader may be sad at the end of the book, when the author settles back into the familiar rather than the wild. Yet for some, this might be all the more reason to read it. A stirring book about both outer and inner depths, The Sea Inside shows that humans are intrinsically connected with the ocean.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2014 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2014

Jennifer Kelly
University of Illinois Press ($65)

Kelsey Irving Beson

In the introduction to In Her Own Words: Conversations with Composers in the United States, author Jennifer Kelly describes the obstacles to programming classical music by women:

As a conductor, I have found that published compositions by women can be difficult to come by, and, when located, they must be purchased because the scores do not exist in most rehearsal libraries. Although I was advocating for the importance of women composers, I found that I was not programming their music in my own concerts.

. . . without the benefit of having studied women composers as a matter of course throughout my education, I mistakenly believed that the number of talented women in music was small . . .

This lack of academic recognition (and resulting monetary support) causes the obscurity and dearth of female composers to become a self-perpetuating phenomenon. The goal of In Her Own Words, which features interviews with twenty-five female composers, is to counteract this trend by “filling voids where little to no information previously existed.” The book makes a strong case for a socially conscious music scholarship while also affirming that there is no such thing as a “typical” woman composer.

The interviews are organized to “illustrate both connection and contrast”—their arrangement simultaneously highlights the diversity of the group while encouraging the reader to draw connections across genres. Jazz conductor Maria Schneider’s interview is placed next to that of academic Augusta Read Thomas; film composer Deborah Lurie is juxtaposed with Jeanine Tesori, who writes for musical theater. The interviewees also vary widely in terms of age (from early forties through late eighties), recognition (from Pulitzer Prize-winning Jennifer Higdon to the emerging Hasu Patel), and nationality (from Svjetlana Bukvich, a refugee from the former Yugoslavia, to Libby Larson, who has spent most of her career in Minneapolis). Each interviewee also has a distinctive working style: methods discussed encompass traditional manuscript notation and technology such as ProTools. Similarly, creative strategies range from allowing the music to develop “organically” to working on several pieces at once under tight deadlines.

Perhaps most relevantly for the overarching theme of the book, there are also many dissenting opinions concerning the relevance of gender in music. All of the interviewees were posed a variation on the question of what it means to be called a woman composer, and responses range from “I think it’s kind of stupid” (Pauline Oliveros) to the affirmation that it is a “heroic struggle . . . With the wind flowing in your hair and the tattered flag in the background” (Beth Anderson). A few of the composers claim that they have never felt marginalized because of gender. Others are very vocal about the enduring persistence of sexism in the music world, and attest to the continuing relevance of women-centric projects and visible female role models.

While attitudes are diverse, there are also many concepts that run through the interviews and make the book feel cohesive. For example, across genres and age groups, many of the interviewees express enthusiasm for technology. Several are avant-garde artists that incorporate electronic elements to create progressive, challenging work involving multimedia. Film and video game composer Laura Karpman describes the computer as “an unbelievable tool. . . . I loved it from the day we met.” Another notable theme is that of new avenues for art music. In a climate in which many traditional orchestras struggle to attract patrons, concerts featuring nontraditional material such as avant-garde or video game music are popular with younger audiences and often sell out. The motif of the expanding utility of classical music is especially striking considering the stereotype of the genre as an archaic art form that changes at a glacial pace.

In Her Own Words’ most compelling idea is that women composers aren’t merely entering an established community and adapting themselves to it; rather, they are shaping it according to their own experiences and needs. In many cases, their embrace of new genres, technology, and compositional techniques seems downright revolutionary. Celebrated Welsh composer Hilary Tann is optimistic about digital dissemination’s potential to topple the form’s “pyramid structure,” saying that “the whole concert apparatus has been short-circuited” and contemporary classical music thrives “in certain people’s iPods” due to sharing technology. With lessening emphasis on traditional genre divisions and the hierarchical academy, listeners are allowed to experience art music through new venues and on their own terms. Scholars, fans, and concert programmers take note—although women composers may be marginalized, they just might be the answer to classical music’s prayers.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition Fall 2014 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2014