Amy Schutzer
Arktoi Books ($16.95)

by Laura Maylene Walter

A pregnant pot-bellied pig, a life-sized Elvis cutout, and a garage sale hoedown might share space in Amy Schutzer’s novel Spheres of Disturbance, but quirkiness aside, the novel also grapples with far more solemn subjects: the inevitability of death, the renewal of life, and how characters either confront or avoid mortality.

Spheres of Disturbance is structured in short chapters that alternate points of view. While the cast of characters is large and, at times, a bit unwieldy, the heart of the novel’s action surrounds the poet Avery, her girlfriend Sammy, and Sammy’s dying mother, Helen. As Avery prepares to host a garage sale that morphs into a full-blown neighborhood hoedown, Helen, a terminal cancer patient, makes plans to end her life on her own terms. Sammy, meanwhile, is willfully oblivious of the fact that her mother is dying and does all she can to distract herself from this reality.

The novel’s other myriad plot lines trickle into new territory like so many tributaries: Helen’s estranged family members, who long ago cast her from their home, seek her out in her last days; Avery struggles to maintain her relationship with Sammy while facing tension with an ex-girlfriend; and fifteen-year-old Darla comes of age to discover she, too, might be a lesbian.

That Spheres of Disturbance is consumed with life as much as death can also be observed in the surprising form of Charlotta, Avery’s Vietnamese pot-bellied pig. As the only non-human character granted a point of view in the novel, this pig and her gentle charm nearly steal the show. Charlotta is heavily pregnant and waits for the birth of her piglets with quiet resignation as the party carries on around her:

     She drifts, her eyes soft, staring out the door’s window; dusk settles in. The red light bulb is on outside and casts a rosy blush. The snow falls through the light like powdered sugar. The scent of wood smoke swirls with the wind that enters each time the front door is opened and closed. Wind and wood smoke, snow-tinged, brisk, and merry as the river. Curly patterns, lovely smells. Her eyes close as if something—the snow, the wind—has closed them for her, and the pinky light from the bulb outside has taken up residence inside her. What sweetness to roll in crackly red maple leaves and scout the woods for odorous morsels? There is more mud and fungi and the loot of decay, and Charlotta is drooling when the two girls find her napping.

Set in late autumn, the novel skillfully mirrors death through the changing seasons: as the book progresses, the temperature drops and the first snowfall drapes the world in white. These natural details call attention to Schutzer’s luminous prose: “The maple and linden leaves continue to pour down and scurry in circles. The river carries them like streamers. Many rise, like flames, off the water, then settle down for a long drift.” And Helen’s serene moment of viewing the newly fallen snow creates a moment of both peace and surrender: “She looks outside at the snow, and all of a sudden she is in tears, joyful. This is a last bit of good fortune, to witness the grace of snow, as nature surrenders to it, to be buried beneath its beauty without resistance.”

If the novel’s momentum feels a bit stagnant at times, or the ever-rotating point-of-view characters overwhelming, it is the persistence of the novel’s inevitabilities—birth, death, community, life, love, anger, and forgiveness—that come together to create the striking and beautifully ambiguous ending that lays to rest the complexities of the characters’ struggles and pleasures.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

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

Bill Cotter
McSweeney's ($25)

by Jenn Mar

Family history guides Bill Cotter's tragicomic The Parallel Apartments, an infectious, off-kilter novel that might best be described as the aftermath of a domestic drama that has been eaten alive by outsider genres. The Parallel Apartments follows Justine Moppett, a 34-year-old pregnant woman, as she flees an abusive relationship in New York to uncover her birthright in Austin. The novel spans three generations of Justine's dubious family history and sprawls into other storylines that careen toward a terrifically disastrous conclusion.

Cotter fearlessly brings on stage a sizable cast of over-a-dozen misfits, a number of whom are inconsequential to the plot, but whose appearance contributes to the colossal, offbeat production that is The Parallel Apartments' twisted parade. Cotter's weirder character portraits include Murphy Lee Crockett, a pathetically clumsy young man whose fear of blood prevents him from fulfilling his calling as a serial killer; Marcia Brodsky, whose growing credit-card debt inspires her to become a raunchy entrepreneur in the robotic sex industry; Marcia's prostituting android Rance; and April Carole, a deranged soap-opera singer whose ticking biological clock sends her on a sexual rampage.

For this 500-page novel, Cotter achieves a nearly flawless symphonic performance that masterfully arranges multiple storylines and switchback timeframes. There is a surprising amount of action in every chapter and plenty of red herrings and plot twists to keep readers guessing. The book's climax is the ultimate end point from which the chaos of these dozen-or-so-characters' interfering lives can be seen as intelligible, albeit from a downright sinister perspective.

At times, The Parallel Apartments feels like a soap opera rewritten by a literary prose stylist in thrall to a menacing, drug-induced vision of a gruesome world order. This is because Cotter subverts literary traditions with conventions from the thriller/horror arsenal. It's no coincidence that Justine watches marathons of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, a television series about psychopaths and their sexual-based offenses. Like the television show, The Parallel Apartments features psychopaths, ultra-heightened suspense, and titillating scenes that are inextricably paired with terror and gore. The beams of Cotter's novel, however, flex and groan under the strain of its more graphic depictions. The lurid content is sometimes meant to be tongue-in-cheek and other times meant to inspire horror; squeamish readers may find the passages excruciating. In one chapter, we're made to endure the cringe-inducing details of a geriatric's murder, a process involving electroshock therapy and an intricate contraption of tubes and a blood-pumping valve. While these scenes arguably achieve the jaw-dropping pyrotechnics of a literary spectacle, one comes to suspect that the sado-erotic violence serves less for character development than for entertainment.

McSweeney's has been marketing Bill Cotter as a Texan Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and this comparison has leapt into early reviews of The Parallel Apartments. Indeed, Cotter's prose shares the same stylistic exuberance, the echoing salience and delicately phrased, potty-mouth witticisms of Garcia Marquez's writing. Consider the drama and symmetry of this whopping sentence:

After ejaculating in her mouth, Franklin, Justine's first and last customer, gave her ten dollars, took her by the hand, brought her upstairs to Forty-Second Street, hailed them a cab, lectured her on insisting on payment before performing the next time she fellated a stranger, and brought her home to his apartment in Hell's Kitchen, a not-unpleasant one-bedroom, where she spent the next half of her life tolerating a triple-bogey boyfriend, denying him a child, avoiding his rampant, bar-sinister penis, and growing to like him less and less, while at the same time he grew less and less likable, more aggressive, meaner, more controlling, more Franklin.

Besides their shared love of the baroque sentence, there are other similarities between Cotter and the late Nobel laureate. Like Garcia Marquez, Cotter juggles multiple storylines and shifting perspectives within a marvelously disobedient structure, one that evokes the tangled mess of old Christmas tree lights in storage—surely, one of the more highly technical feats of storytelling. Yet Cotter's novel lacks the fraught poignancy, the graceful state of sustained incomprehension that Garcia Marquez so famously defined in his depictions of life and death, rebirth and suffering, and the menace of history repeating itself.

Cotter’s novel is undoubtedly a tour-de-force. Cotter has mastered, from the lowest to highest orders, the elements of fiction; his sentences are as grand as the sweeping architectural details of his book's structure. These features alone make it more than worthy of the reader's investment. But perhaps the one thing missing from The Parallel Apartments is that it lacks a coherent ethos, or simply a moral one. Cotter's novel is committed to an aesthetic of storytelling that is immediately pleasurable, but at the expense of a more lastingly gratifying metaphysical order. After all, The Parallel Apartments is a postmodern representation of an absurd, malfunctioning universe to which all human responses are inadequate. His characters struggle with problems that cannot be resolved, and the novel's recurring motif of the matryoshka doll will come to symbolize not only the nesting histories of a five-generation matriarchy, but the logical exhaustion of their tragicomic existence.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

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

Georges Perec and the Oulipo
Translated by Ian Monk, Harry Mathews and John Sturrock
Atlas Press ($34)

by Steve Matuszak

Is it possible that when he wrote his short story “The Winter Journey” in 1979 as part of a publicity bulletin for the French publisher Hachette, Georges Perec sensed he was initiating a collaborative novel that would involve almost two dozen contributors and span more than three decades in the making? It seems unlikely. After all, the story is modest in length and was relatively unknown by the time of Perec’s death in 1982. Yet, in his introduction to Winter Journeys, which collects the collaborative novel into one volume, editor Alastair Brotchie claims that “The Winter Journey” has become Perec’s “most oft-reprinted text, especially after his early death.” Then there are the other “Journeys,” those stories inspired by Perec’s that make up the bulk of Winter Journeys. The first appeared in 1992. Eight more followed by 2001, prompting a first edition of Winter Journeys to be published, and in the ensuing twelve years, that number more than doubled, necessitating this new edition. It is an impressive history for an almost forgotten story, and it doesn’t seem accidental. The very structure of Perec’s story invites one to make a “Journey.” And this invitation has been avidly taken up by his fellow travelers, members of the group of writers and mathematicians who call themselves the Oulipo, the “Workshop for Potential Literature,” who are devoted to creating and exploring new possibilities for the creation of literature.

Of course, Winter Journeys opens with Perec’s story, which tells of Vincent Degraël, a young literature scholar, who while staying with a friend outside Le Havre shortly before the outbreak of World War II discovers a curious book titled The Winter Journey by unknown author Hugo Vernier. Degraël quickly recognizes Vernier’s most striking lines from their appearance in works by other late nineteenth-century French poets. But as is evidenced by the publication date of The Winter Journey, Vernier didn’t steal from them; they stole from him. Increasingly sure of Vernier’s importance to French literature but lacking proof—even the copy of The Winter Journey that he’d read in Le Havre was destroyed during a bombing raid—Degraël ends his days after the war in an insane asylum.

The next two “Journeys,” by Jacques Roubaud and Hervé Le Tellier, establish something of a template for most of the others that would appear by 2001: they draw on all the preceding “Journeys”; their titles, to quote the (fictional) author Reine Haugure, “retain elements of the verbal (rather than graphic) sonority of George Perec’s original title” (Perec’s title is Le Voyage d’hiver, while Roubaud’s and Le Tellier’s are, respectively, Le Voyage d’hier and Le Voyage d’Hitler); and they claim that Perec’s story was true, not fictional. Their stories, then, expand the implications of “The Winter Journey” by adding new characters and settings as well as by drawing attention to the porous boundaries between fiction and reality.

As a whole, the “Journeys” are playful and erudite, deeper implications often glimpsed in their gamboling, ludic surfaces. But for all of the invention on display, and for all of the intriguing ideas they hint at, there are times when Winter Journeys seems to exhaust possibilities rather than raise or explore them, a feeling expressed by Marcel Bénabou in his entry “The Forthcoming Journey.” Appearing near the end of Winter Journeys, Bénabou offers what is essentially a work of criticism that deepens the myriad “Journeys” through his observations. At first expressing admiration for the other “Journeys,” Bénabou admits to feeling a degree of satisfaction in not having joined in. When he had thought about writing a “Journey,” he tells us, his “sole ambition was to carry out systematic research into the potentialities of Perec’s text,” an ambition he feels was not shared by the others, who instead “had given way to a self-congratulatory exhibition of virtuosity” that closed off potentialities, weakening his desire to make a contribution.

Ironically, it is what Bénabou admires about Perec’s works that might have led to such a proliferation of “Journeys” in the first place. As Bénabou enthuses, “For those who know how to approach them, Georges Perec’s writings not only provide a rare pleasure, they can also sometimes offer an even rarer gift: a sort of light, yet tenacious fever from which the only means of recovery—almost with regret—is to take up a pen.” In fact, sometimes their structures encourage writing. Bénabou tells us, for example, that following its own logic, Perec’s novel Life: A User’s Manual should have had one hundred chapters but had only ninety-nine, and Perec’s autobiographical work I Remember (receiving its first English translation this May) which consists of 480 entries all beginning with the phrase “I remember . . . ,” contained blank pages at the end.

“The Winter Journey” makes a similar invitation. The Winter Journey is the title of Hugo Vernier’s book, comprising two sections. The first tells of a young man on a journey that appears to be some kind of failed initiation rite. The second, making up eighty percent of the book, is “a long confession of an exacerbated lyricism, mixed in with poems, with enigmatic maxims, with blasphemous incantations” from which the other poets plagiarized. The Winter Journey is also the title of Vincent Degraël’s 400-page research diary, the last 392 pages of which were blank. Finally, “The Winter Journey” is a story by Georges Perec that tells of Degraël’s and the narrator of The Winter Journey’s failed searches. If it resembles its namesakes, Perec’s story too has a second part, one that is implied, including all that lies outside of it. While it might be true, as Bénabou claims, that “if these Voyages [“Journeys”] would one day come to an end, and make up a huge narrative jigsaw puzzle, in the spirit of Perec, it would be better if one piece were missing.” But he must also be aware that by leaving the puzzle unfinished, he invites more contributions, thereby reviving what he hopes has run its course. Thankfully, whether or not another “Journey” is written, it hasn’t.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

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

Bai Hua
translated from the Chinese by Fiona Sze-Lorrain
Zephyr Press ($15)

by John W. W. Zeiser

Bai Hua has only published roughly ninety poems in thirty years, but he is a central figure in contemporary Chinese poetry. His poems are full of the passionate intensity that so often accompanies periods of great historic change, and Wind Says is at once an excellent introduction to one of China’s foremost modernist poets, the turmoil of post-Mao China, and the post-Misty movement, which positioned itself as the most artistically modern of the poetry movements in 1980s China.

Bai’s predecessors, the Misty poets, first coalesced around the magazine Jintian, or “Today.” Founded in 1978 by poets Bei Dao and Mang Ke, its inaugural issue appeared on the Democracy Wall in Beijing. Initially, Chairman Deng Xiaoping encouraged the democracy movement’s “seeking truth from facts,” an overture to the movement that he was serious about reform as he struggled for party control. Jintian’s editors signaled a desire to liberate poetry from party control—what Gu Cheng once called nothing more than “a competition of rhyming editorials.”

While purposely obscure and metaphorical, Misty poetry had a biting, political edge, reacting to the violent excess of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Gu Cheng’s “A Generation” became its clarion: “Even with these dark eyes, a gift of the night / I go to seek the shining light” as the poets sought to wrestle beauty and aesthetics from the party, to liberate the soul. However, in 1980, Jintian was censored for its criticism of the party. By 1983, with Deng’s power firmly consolidated, Misty works were among the “spiritual pollutants” conservative party officials attempted to purge from public discourse. Deng may have loosened economic restrictions, but he and the party had no interest in meeting Chinese intellectuals’ demands for democratic reforms.

But this heady period of experimentation also opened the door for other, less overtly political projects among literary circles. The one that would capture Bai and his contemporaries was one of aesthetics. Interest in l’art pour l’art resulted in the post-Misty school, and by 1986, this third way was in full swing. It was a way in which poetry would free language not from the party, but from its own formal and traditional constraints—it’s no coincidence that Bai trained as a scholar of Western literary history. Much of the theory deployed by post-Misty poets and critics finds parallels with modernist poetry of early twentieth-century Europe and America. Post-Misty poets saw their purview as narrowly confined to language itself, not that which was outside it, much like the New Critics. (Bai, in fact, read Eliot voraciously.)

Translator Fiona Sze-Lorrain, who renders Bai’s uncompromising, discursive style well, notes in her introduction to Wind Says that, according to critic Zhang Di, the post-Misty poets “adopted a nihilistic attitude in public, but in their writing they are in fact able to clearly delineate the tradition they face.” That tradition drew on Misty poets, Chinese modernism during the Republican period, Western poetry, and traditional Chinese poetry. But post-Misty poets saw the act of writing as paramount, not specifically writing poetry. Bai Hua took this to heart and his newest writing follows through on these youthful ideas of “mingling all linguistic genres into one melting pot.”

In Wind Says, we first meet Bai in March 1984, in “Sea Summer.” A year after anti-spiritual purges, “History and skulls fall in flames / Who is warning, burning and wrecking / impermanent sea summer.” Bai’s diction bursts with violent lyricism tinged with hallucinatory incantation. Summer has “fiery hair,” lonely beaches are assaulted by “flying daggers.” It’s the template of his modernist project, full of destruction: “Mood of dusk, feel of blood / destroy finely, destroy willfully.” We are far from the realism of the Misty poets, operating instead on visceral feeling.

Bai’s early poems are often intense and unrelenting in their message. “Or Something Else” makes explicit this new mood in Chinese poetry:

perhaps a huge pore
a tuft of hair standing on end
a patch of fine skin
or a typewriter’s warm voice
could also be a flange knife

Signs and sounds have dual meanings. They are mundane phenomena that also harbor the violent potential of the new, singing with the post-Misty spirit. Rarely in his early work is there a hint of Bai’s inner monologue, only his unmitigated, sensual perceptions as a way to express this aesthetics. In place of a Bai Hua, we are given external personas; cities, seasons, silence, and time that act as characters rather than settings. His writing exudes the conscious sense that the writer is secondary. The words carry the weight.

Bai wanted Chinese poetry to engage directly with the modernism that so frightened party conservatives rather than hark back to tradition. He’s aware of his antecedents, but he keeps them at arm’s length. In “Precipice” Bai concludes, “organs shrivel suddenly / Li Ho weeps / hands from the Tang era will never return.” Bai is determined not to look backwards.

Though the thrust of his project centers around aesthetics, Bai wasn’t immune to the tense political climate of late 1980s China. Several of the poems in Wind Says provide glimpses of this roiling atmosphere, exploding urban populations: “soon, the city had no mass / a true center, masses fight for summer,” hatred that “springs from the flat breasts of ideology.” But even here, his voice remains distinct, saturated with times and places that hang like humid, melancholy memories, “arriving in my life of so few experiences.”

In the ’90s, Bai’s poetry grows sparser, more fragmentary, but also more personal. His sequence of twenty-seven fragments, “Hand Notes on Mountain and Water,” composed between 1995 and 1997, is full of the odd revelations one has revisiting daily scribblings: “Once I wrote a line, Shoot at laughter, / how strange.” They take us to states of mind untethered from narrative or structure. Their succinct observations are the documents of a man growing into middle age:

In Berlin
I grew the first strand of white hair
as a souvenir

Then suddenly he stopped writing poetry; for nearly a decade he turned to other matters. Bai’s output was never large to begin with, and this is a significant gap for a writer so integral to contemporary Chinese poetry. When he finally began writing again, in 2007, his poems had adopted a more reserved, contemplative tone. As if acknowledging his self-imposed silence, he admits, “Life can’t always come in a gush.” More conscious of poetry’s artifice, he begins “Jialing River” with the assurance “Don’t be afraid, this is just a mirror / facing a distant past —.” Gone are the bold proclamations, replaced by a growing awareness of the limits of modernism and a renewed interest in the personal.

Wind Says is an evocative historical document of Bai’s artistic trajectory and the expansion of poetic Chinese modernism. His early work fits the uncertain times of a communist China after Mao. In 1985, he could write without irony that “your dreams are in transition // this is the best moment.” But transitions are only one facet of dialectic and eventually his palette broadened while his artistic zealotry softened. The Bai Hua who wrote those lines in 1985 has become one who could acknowledge in 2010 that “the mourning son is also aging / I have since lost my years of educated youth.”

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

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

Michael Ruby
Ugly Duckling Presse ($17)

by Marthe Reed

In American Songbook, Michael Ruby re-mixes the popular music of the twentieth century—blues, jazz, pop, rock, rap—with a poet’s eye and ear for sound- and word-play, pitching the reader, feet tapping and throat humming, through the American musical archive. Channeling Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey, Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, Elvis Presley, Diana Ross, Janis Joplin and Lou Reed, among many others, he creates a field of playful experiment in which American musical culture meets poetic experiment and a collage-aesthetic of composition. Ruby’s remix, offering the reader a re-encounter with a playlist of seventy-six familiar songs, is both ambitious and spirited.

Using signature lyrics from the songs he revisits, Ruby uses these phrases to invoke the original and to drive the verbal interventions he imposes. American Songbook opens with early blues songs such as “Pinchbacks—Take ’Em Away” and “Frosty Morning Blues” by Bessie Smith and “Black Cat, Hoot Owl Blues” by Ma Rainey, emphasizing the origins of American popular music in the African American blues tradition. In “Black Cat, Hoot Owl Blues,” alliteration and anaphora supplant sense with “non-sense.” Ruby’s improvisations riff on scat singing, nonsense lines supplanting scat’s nonsense vocables.

Meow the right bandit bargain
Scat you populous domination system
Black cats multitudinous and invisible
Black cats position legislation
Foremost windowsill
If one reams the dog of its danger
The maples don’t cross me
Another phlegmatic practiced perp
The gameboy will
Bad luck hangs from a bar with one hand
Mesmerize the harmony if I’m silent
Bad luck smiles
Empty the baseballs if I cry
Still mo’ tubas to tape together
The Morgan flames if I die

The noisy flotsam of human culture from ancient Greece to the late twentieth century enters this blues referentially, though what sustains the poem’s origins in the blues are not only the borrowed lines from the original song, but misery and oppression—“Meow the right bandit bargain / Scat you populous domination system / Black cats multitudinous and invisible”— the racial persecution that gave rise to this music born in the American Deep South.

Though most often working in the vein of improvisatory extension rather than compression, in some cases Ruby carves down the songs via erasure, the lyrical “meat” foregrounded in the poems. In re-working the Carter Family song “Keep On The Sunny Side,” the poet radically opens up the song’s lyrics, spilling his text across the white space of the pages. The remnant phrases from the titular chorus cycle down the page in stutters of hope rooted in despair, the possibility of “keep[ing] on” taking on ironic potency, paring back the spiritual uplift of the original. Ruby hints at the here-and-now sufferings for which promises of “by and by” are inadequate compensations:

keep
on

greet
with
moment

cloudy
trust
savior
always

Ruby principally reworks the songs using a process he has described as dropping a line into his subconscious and drawing up the language that returns to him via associative processes. The poems thus have their impetus not only in the American songbook but also in the tenets of Surrealist practice, the logics of the subconscious as revelatory source of poetic and artistic insight. The incongruous imbalance of power in Aretha Franklin’s “Ain’t No Way,” a woman’s cry to love and be loved by an indifferent and faithless lover more deserving of scorn than adoration, has its absurdity made manifest in Ruby’s careening imagery:

It ain’t no way-ay-ay-ay this rosebush palooka
holiday sandwich
you know
like random ice cream
Ain’t that right
Stickman
That is passato remoto

Ain’t no way the register tells
It ain’t no way inside the telescope

These poems are not the chart-topping hits of their origins, but attentively textured engagements with American culture (musical and otherwise), as well as with the emotional and nostalgic associations attached to these songs. In “Blue Skies,” dedicated to Maxine Sullivan, the effervescent hopefulness of the Irving Berlin song is satirically bent to address a whole catalog of cultural tropes including war, baseball, sausage makers, organ grinders, poverty, and the national debt. The fabled “blue skies” are cloudier in Ruby’s poem than those of the original, while the poem’s intrinsic rhythms, anaphora, and alliteration give it a song-like musicality that marks its origins as strongly as do the borrowed lines:

Never saw the sun open its predictions
foolproof oven so bright
Never saw things ring so much glass
the rooks’ deportment so right
Noticing the days embossed nooks
sausage makers hurrying by
When you’re in love with blind organ grinders
Golden Florence my how they fly
Bluebirds and Mandarin debts
Mayan professionals all of them gone
Nothing but bluebirds inside this bowl
smoke and mirrors from now on

Drawing on readers’ memories of and associations with the songs, as improvisations the poems in American Songbook are dependent upon borrowed language. Ruby uses a variety of strategies in his adaptations of these songs, from excerpting and extending elements of a song or compressing the original via erasure, to having an emblematic line arrayed vertically to initiate the lines within each stanza. “Star-Spangled Banner (II) / For Jimi Hendrix” is an example of this latter technique. Much as Hendrix built his version upon the musical bones of the national anthem—introducing dissonant squeals, screeches, and guitar wails to voice not only the violence of the war described in the anthem and of the Vietnam War of the time, but also the violence of the nation against its ethnic “others”—so too Ruby’s poem satirically recomposes the lyrics of “Star-Spangled Banner” emphasizing the perversity of American jingoistic hubris and the economic (and otherwise) violence which is its cousin:

O the dogs perform this loving mascara
say dildos break sound barriers
can aardvarks begin before wafers rise to dice degree
you polish the holsters of opportunity
see pool cues tolerate loss
By godforsaken tomahawk crystals
the elegant loss column assents in this felt precision hooliganism
dawn’s megalomania assumes a holistic heuristic
early to pet wrongdoing with tongs pursued for their hesitation
light for telepathic ransom
What delegation telescopes this parallel demarcation
so tomcat in the pustule
proudly engineer this finite eating tree
we traced the irregular pie to its salvation show
hailed olive longjohns to perfect the oval
At livid telecommunications bursar
the perfect roundabout holiday earrings
twilight’s burn collects a pardon to braise
last full tectonic horror movie
gleaming period piece amen

While such interventions against nostalgia give American Songbook compelling heft, the inventiveness Ruby brings to re-composing and presenting these songs is equally a pleasure, from the measured movement of tercets across the page mimicking the tempo of “Summertime / For Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong”—the tercets recapitulating the three beat rhythm of the song’s title—to the two-voiced call and response of “The Desert Blues / For Hattie Ellis,” to prose poems and lineated poems which align left or not, sprawling across the page in long prose-like lines, in dispersed spills across the page, or in interleaved columns. In poems such as “Something’s Got A Hold On Me / For Etta James” and “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again / For Bob Dylan,” the space on the page mirrors the performers’ phrasings, the singers’ shifts and pauses marked in white space for the scanning eye. Reading these poems, I sometimes found myself longing for a soundtrack of the music underlying the poems: Etta James’ emphatic “I say ho, I say ho, I say hey hey.” At other times, reading for example “Trucking / For The Grateful Dead” or “Walk on the Wild Side / For Lou Reed,” the original songs were so present in my imagination that a soundtrack was superfluous:

Hey babe break that
Take a walk for the popular liberation
On the wild side and pallbearer monstrosity
Hey babe giving head
Take a walk under the holiday mandorla and purple escalator to parking and
underground alerts
On the wild side open for mandragora sessions
Do do-do do-do do-do-do . . .

Reading American Songbook conjures the image of the poet wearing headphones, letting the rhythms and lyrics of the songs drop down into his receptive mind and bubble back in altered form, extending, improvising, emphasizing what he has heard, much as the reader listens in to her own internal soundtrack.

Ruby’s collection draws to a close with the close of the century. Before the final poem, riffing on Santana’s “Smooth”—the final Hot 100 number one song of 1999— Ruby pairs two songs by Tupac Shakur with a song by Christopher Wallace (The Notorious B.I.G.). These two rappers were seminal figures in ’90’s rap, artists antagonistically staged against one another in an east coast/west coast rivalry that ultimately left both dead in drive-by shootings. Against the pathos of the blues songs that opened the century and American Songbook, Ruby turns at the end of the century to the collateral violence welling out of the poverty and despair that pulls apart the communities of which Tupac and Biggie rapped, illustrating the enduring distress in communities of color fifty years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act:

You know how it is torah of withdrawal
You know how it is poking fourth digits through the cheesy prevalence
We killin’ toystore boyhoods
We killin’ breathing vagabonds
We killin’ ourselves
We killin’ dogs Home Depot peace
We killin’ McGillicuddy ( from “Hit ’Em Up”)

Re-representing the twentieth century through the lens of seventy-six popular songs—the number echoing the date of the nation’s founding—Michael Ruby’s American Songbook invokes the poetic counterpart of musical improvisation, tuning our ears to the narratives of popular culture through which we have so often understood and defined ourselves. Marrying musical nostalgia, language play, and satire, American Songbook also returns to us the freight of American cultural mishap and failure for which this music served as soundtrack. Ruby’s re-mix of the American musical canon offers an unaffected homage to its beloved sources while riffing on and opening up those iconic songs in a richly inventive series of experiments with the intersections of poem and song.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

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

Jen Coleman
Trembling Pillow Press ($16)

by Jonathan Lohr

In an essay Jen Coleman wrote for the Poetic Labor Project website about her work at an environmental advocacy nonprofit, she said “In my job, I use the same words over and over: / Critical. Health. Action. Climate. Water. Toxic. Dollars. Strategic. Now.” This limitation of vocabulary creates a sense of aura around those words through repetition. How much of any given worship is a repetition of language? Chants, prayers, litanies, hymns, all carry with them an elevation of their subject through their anthemic nature.

Coleman’s Psalms for Dogs and Sorcerers very deliberately creates this sense of song through repetition. “Book Shield” opens with a heave of violence that is counterpointed with a bouncing delivery:

Bombings and battles and the war is over
with bombings and battles galore.
Waves of invasion and the war is over
behaving with waves of invasion.

The rhythm of the lines gives the sense of a post-World War celebratory jingle or playground chant, but when the poem says “the war is over,” it isn’t a celebration of peace, it’s a statement of the violence that has happened.

Images of human violence are delivered throughout the book by a dancing language. The use of lilting repetition might lead one to make comparisons to Gertrude Stein, but while Stein’s repetition works to cause distance between the word and the reader, Colman’s language works to develop within the reader a willingness to join in communion with the poem. This can be seen in “Soothsayer”:

You are the ward of a word and the word is you
who would stoop for a crumb of light.
You are born of a word and the word is flesh
and small as a snowflake, small as a pill,
a brain pill, a smart pill, a thrill pill, small
as a get thinner faster pill, a youngness pill

The poem envelops the reader, setting itself up as a textual deity with “the word made flesh.” But at the same time, the word is a small pill ingested by the reader, one that performs any sort of bodily or emotional task the reader might need.

Indeed, perhaps most striking about Psalms for Dogs and Sorcerers is how it deploys the body throughout it. The body is placed firmly within the world, within violence, within and around language, but the world in which it resides is never forgotten. Coleman’s poems create the lush ecosystem surrounding the body. “Doctrine of the Rude Dream,” a multi-sectioned poem, begins:

What the Milkweed Pod said:

What the Brain has bestowed
is the Rude Body;
this Rude Body is Naked.

Naked may not be left for an instant.

On this account,
the Rude Body reaches wide and far
and yet is secret.

The Milkweed Pod is set up as an oracle figure speaking the riddled-truth of the body. The body is “rude,” harsh to the setting around it. Another reading of “rude” could be “of crude construction,” which points to the next poem, “Yellow Tower Crane,” a description of the toll that corporate construction takes on its surroundings.

Ultimately, Jen Coleman’s Psalms for Dogs and Sorcerers weaves a deconstruction of the body. The sense of worship in the poems isn’t placed upon the body, but like countless medieval treatises on the flesh, it creates a fluidity between what gives the body life and what takes it apart. During this dismantling, the reader realizes that all along the awe of the language has been pointing to the setting of the body, to the omnipresent and immutable world in which it is petulantly writhing.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

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

Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé
Red Wheelbarrow Books ($19.50)

by Mandy Pannett

The Arbitrary Sign is a poetry sequence that follows the shape of an alphabet; the symbols of twenty-six letters are used as title headings for the keywords of complex philosophical thoughts. If this sounds heavy, know that Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdé’s poems are so rich in imagery, so neatly structured with the juxtaposition and compression of metaphors, that one can read the book with increasing pleasure without an erudite knowledge of the background.

The title The Arbitrary Sign comes from the writings of Ferdinand de Saussure, who believed there was no necessary connection between a symbol and its meaning, but while ideas behind linguistics are important here, this is really a book about encounters and connections—a labyrinth of passages of thought which, like the poems, may come to sudden or inconclusive ends. The look of the book, with its black pages between each section, lends itself perfectly to this, as does the unpunctuated, lower case form where meanings shift into ambiguity depending on how one reads each phrase. “beyond and beneath / the text,” says the author, “are its “inside and outside / all wound up together then dispersed.”

The central concept behind this sequence is Gilles Deleuze’s idea that everything is of one substance and on the same level of existence; although there are repetitions and simulacra nothing is ever identical, and with constant change reality is not a matter of being but of becoming. Underlying and underpinning this concept is the image of the rhizome. “because ginger candy is sweet / and so is the rhizome of deleuze and guattari / which reads like a big prank of a tome / or the roar of an opus of crackling laughs.” Prank or not, this is a fitting image to suggest connections, for the rhizome, like a labyrinth, is below the surface, may follow shortcuts or detours, and can shoot off in confusing and unforeseen directions.

Other images and allusions create atmosphere and enrich context. One of the strongest is the reference to Francis Bacon and his “bloodied history;” the poet devotes a section of his book to describing the “desire / to escape from one’s own body / its frame and bones and beating pulse / no less a prison than these four walls /we call home or an abode or comfort.” The philosophies of Jacques Lacan also have their part in The Arbitrary Sign, such as the idea that there is only a certain amount of pleasure a subject can bear; the poet sums this thought up in one neat image as “a limit to true enjoyment / so much you removed the chocolate / from the pudding and left / as little to enjoy as possible.”

This is a rich and fascinating poetry collection—elusive in that “no two things like utterances / are completely alike” and poignant too, because the last word is “dissipation.” We are left wondering if our lives are “a series of accidents” or if there is “something left of the vase of peonies,” something “post theory and naked,” a sense of quietude “before the tunnelling and the orbs tumble.”

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