Mutsuo Takahashi
Translated by Jeffrey Angles
University of Minnesota Press ($19.95)

by Amanda Vail

Just what is the nature of memory? It is at once tenuous and concrete, easily grasped yet often fleeting. Mutsuo Takahashi believes there are three different kinds of memories: those that are pure recollection, those that originate from the stories of others, and those that are a combination of the two. Throughout Twelve Views from the Distance, Takahashi explores his childhood and young adulthood by following the threads that connect his memories together. The twelve views are like twelve lenses—or, as Takahashi says, mirrors—each with a unique vantage referenced in the chapter title. One view is of snow, another the sea; still others are sexuality, his grandmother’s home, and his imagined father. Each of these views reveals facets of his lifetime and the lifetimes of his mother, father, grandmother, and grandfather. Facet by facet, the reader is immersed within the rich environs of southern Japan during World War II and the years thereafter.

Mutsuo Takahashi, a preeminent Japanese poet, grew up in rural Kyūshū, Japan’s southern island. He was born in 1937, just a few years before World War II commenced. Takahashi’s father, a steel worker, died of acute pneumonia when the author was an infant, and his mother was pressured into putting her infant son and young daughter into the care of her deceased husband’s relatives. Takahashi’s sister was raised in a different town by his aunt, and the boy’s childhood was spent partly in the care of his grandparents.

Each view in the novel is illuminated by numerous events plucked from the author’s memories with little regard for chronology. The exact timeline of what happened when in Takahashi’s life isn’t exactly clear—but it doesn’t need to be. More important are the events, large and small, and how they impact the lives of Takahashi, his relations, and their community. Japan’s war with China and subsequent involvement in World War II as portrayed through Takahashi’s childhood memories is felt not only in the loss of lives (his uncle’s included), but also in the presence of more barley than rice in the family’s evening meals. Rationed foods, the rise of nationalism, explosives in the harbor, and many other signifiers testify to the presence of governmental conflict in the lives of small-town Japanese citizens, and youthful Takahashi meanders through his life, passed from family member to family member, buffeted here and there by events beyond his control.

Twelve Views from the Distance does not hesitate to present uncomfortable subjects (violence, lust, death, adultery, greed) with as much honesty as moments of beauty, love, and charity. It is an elegant novel; the overarching imagery floats gently on the surface of Takahashi’s words, carried smoothly from memory to memory, shading the events of the author’s life and presenting avenues into the world of his childhood. Captured in his memories are the songs of schoolchildren, his grandmother’s versions of folktales, the quiet countryside of Kyūshū, and many other details of the time. For instance, shortly after comparing his mother to the sea that separated them for over a year, Takahashi writes, “the sea continued to rock beneath me, even after we reached Grandmother’s house. It was underneath the veranda where I sometimes walked and looked at picture books. It was under the path I took when I put on Mother’s clogs and went down to the general store to buy ramune. Even now, more than twenty years later, that sea continues to rock beneath the futon where I sleep and dream.”

Also of note, and not to be taken lightly, is Jeffrey Angles’s translation from the Japanese—every bit as elegant as Takahashi’s text. As he reveals in both his introduction and acknowledgement, this was a labor of love for Angles. He first met Takahashi in 1996, and began translating Views in 2006. Work on the translation was supported by grants from both the National Endowment for the Arts and the PEN American Center, which illustrates how critical grants of this kind are. As Angles points out succinctly: “Translation has the power to introduce new ideas, expressions, and concepts into a language or culture; it has the potential to reshape power and knowledge, thus changing the ways the world is understood.” In regards to conflict between nations, it is critical to build as many bridges as possible to facilitate greater understanding, even (or particularly) as many years after the fact as 2013 is from 1945.

Takahashi’s memoir presents not only the difficulties faced by citizens living through a war, but also the challenges of growing up in poverty, of being raised by a single mother who is forced to make ends meet in creative ways, and of exploring an alternative sexuality, among others. The novel presents twelve reflections on the time and place it depicts; some of the details are very specific, and many are universal. Throughout, Twelve Views from the Distance is unflinching, compassionate, and beautiful.

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The Life of Elliott Smith
William Todd Schultz
Bloomsbury ($27)

by Scott F. Parker

Since 2010, William Todd Schultz has been the editor of the Inner Lives series from Oxford University Press. The series, which includes titles on John Lennon and George W. Bush and one by Schultz on Truman Capote, employs psychobiography: an approach to biography that, according to Schultz’s website, utilizes current psychological thinking to understand “the private motives behind public acts.” He is the author of Handbook of Psychobiography as well as a psychobiography of Diane Arbus that does not occur in the Inner Lives series.

Elliott Smith is an obvious subject for a Schultz psychobiography. Smith’s career flourished in Portland, Oregon, where Schultz was raised and resides today, and his work is preoccupied with the stuff of psychology—identity, attachment, abuse, trauma, depression, and suicide—to such an extent that at times it seems to plead for analysis. The divide between life and art for Smith was famously thin; the vulnerability he allowed in his music remains part of its appeal.

However, in Torment Saint: The Life of Elliott Smith, Schultz elects to write straight biography, leaving his psychological expertise to underlie and inform the narrative without becoming its primary mode of investigation. This approach makes sense for a couple reasons. First, it allows Schultz to provide the thorough biography we’ve needed since Smith’s suicide ten years ago (the publication of Torment Saint corresponds with that sad anniversary to the month). Benjamin Nugent’s biography, Elliott Smith and the Big Nothing, was a solid effort but suffered for being rushed to publication a year after Smith’s death.) Second, because Smith’s music and life are already subject to so much reductive psychologizing, even Schultz’s professional take couldn’t help but read as derivative, if also well informed.

With his uncommon abilities, Schultz is uniquely capable of understanding Smith’s inner life and making sense of Smith’s mental health (depression, addiction, paranoia). Combine this background with Schultz’s manifest devotion to Smith’s songs (though he never says so, the reader gathers the author was in attendance at La Luna and Satyricon in the mid-1990s when Smith was performing with his band Heatmiser and starting out as a solo artist) and we’ve got the opportunity here for a warm and generous book. We also have the opportunity for fawning—Smith is compared favorably to almost every major songwriter you can think of, and the lyrical analysis sometimes overreaches for significance—but I raise this objection mostly to dismiss it. Schultz’s thorough research and carefully restrained interpretation make Torment Saint the kind of detailed and compassionate biography Smith’s fans would hope for.

Schultz begins his book by introducing the familiar myth of the troubled genius, which he believes was as seductive for Smith as it was easy for fans to apply to him. “Elliott saw through it, at times he dismissed it, but he also bought in, just as everyone else seemed to be doing. It was cool to be depressed. It was expected.” The context for depression as affectation is the rainy, heroin-filled Portland music scene during and immediately following Seattle’s grunge blossoming and Kurt Cobain’s era-shaping suicide. Smith was correctly described by John Graham as “an avatar for artistic Portland.” Schultz relates a definitive antidote of Smith walking Portland’s bridges under moon-filled skies regularly enough for friends to learn that he didn’t need a ride, this was his way of writing. His early catalogue from these years includes numerous drug references—perhaps most memorably on Elliott Smith’s “Needle in the Hay”—but according to Schultz’s sources, Elliott used hard drugs only as metaphor in this period. It wasn’t until years later while he was travelling in the U.K. that he started using, and not until his L.A. years that he became an addict.

By losing himself in drugs—crack and staggering quantities of prescription pills on top of alcohol and heroin—Smith fulfilled the prophecy of his music and escaped the pain he felt in living, if only over the short run. Life was increasingly painful for him as drug abuse compounded his depression. Smith, according to Schultz, was always divided: “part of him wanted to go on making music forever, but part of him always wanted it all to end.” He gave his life to music with a commitment that was either profoundly admirable or cause for distress, depending how one values survival—but in any case it was remarkable. “To say ‘it’s only the songs that matter’ is a cliche. But Elliott meant it and lived, and probably died it.”

As we read about Smith’s early years, his passion for music and his virtuosity are immediately apparent. We see him composing melodies, recording songs, and with time writing more and more lyrics. By his mature years, his talents coalescing, he is wildly prolific, writing songs by the dozens with an ease that impressed seemingly everyone interviewed in the book. For all the attention Smith’s depressive lyrics receive, it’s significant to note that it was his gorgeous melodies that drove him as a musician. He understood style through sound rather than intellect, saying in one interview, “You have to use your ears, not your head.” And in another: “It’s just that I like music. It’s not complicated.”

Unfortunately the music saved his life only until it didn’t. Schultz posits that Smith, who read Freud, thought that “if one could let it out, it might stop banging loudly on the door of consciousness.” Despite his intentions, catharsis never worked for Smith the songwriter. It’s too easy to think of his music as coming from a bottomless sadness, but it’s not exactly wrong either. Toward the end of his life, Smith would perform the song “King’s Crossing,” which includes the line “Give me one good reason not to do it,” to which his sister and girlfriend began responding, “Because we love you.” Whatever distinction there was been art and life was near gone in the leadup to Smith’s suicide.

If Dylan is our great ironist, Smith was among our most sincere artists. His story is a painful story, as those most inclined to pick up this book already know. In Schultz’s hands it is a well-told story, too. The author follows his subject’s lead and lets the reader know what it was like to be a person whose “songs were simply, essentially about what it meant to be a person.”

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Santiago Roncagliolo
translated by Edith Grossman
Two Lines Press ($17.95)

by Jenn Mar

Santiago Roncagliolo's latest story collection is a black comedy that exposes the incongruities of modern life. For the Peruvian author who was listed as Granta's "Best Young Spanish-Language Novelist," no subject is too profane. His stories follow some of literature's most perversely-misguided crackpots as they attempt to find human connections in shamelessly-obscene acts: an office drone engages in phone-sex involving coffee-machine burns and metal-pointed leather whips; a medical examiner intimately touches the insides of a cadaver's body.

Readers can bound through the book in a single evening, as the collection consists of an ungainly novella ("Hi, This is Conchita"), and three other stories of a broad stylistic range. The title piece is a smorgasbord of sex and violence: it follows the intertwining lives of a phone-sex operator and the client who loves her, a husband who hires a hit man to kill his mistress, and a serial drunk-dialer. Heavy portions of phone sex, pornography ("The actor playing Clarke Gable is sticking it in the mouth of one of the Confederate widows. It's to comfort her, I think"), and bathtub dismemberment all play out against the banal backdrop of billing statements and Meg Ryan jokes. Written entirely in dialogue, the story uses the gimmick of telephone conversations to plot out events, but readers may come to feel irritated by the task of checking the twisting plotlines against the telephone numbers that are displayed at the heading of every chapter in the absence of exposition.

In contrast to the speedy "Hi, This is Conchita," "Despoiler" keeps a measured pace, and is built on masterful sentences of architectural symmetry and echoing salience. It follows Carmen as she celebrates her fortieth birthday with her coworkers at Carnival. The nightmarish evening soon conjures the oversized beast that is her repellent childhood. The surrealism of costumed partygoers, dressed as wolves and skeletons, blends with Carmen's flashbacks as her internal landscape distorts the dimensions of her real life.

"Butterflies Fastened with Pins," about a man recalling the names of friends who keep killing themselves, is Roncagliolo's appropriation of the poetic tradition of litany. Meanwhile, "The Passenger Beside You" prompts absurdist comedy to consider the metaphysics of the human lifespan. This story is told by a young woman who speaks from the afterlife about the gunshot wound in her chest. After recounting the violence of her last hours, she describes the splendor that she is shown at the mortuary by a handsome doctor, who slides his hands inside her body in the ritual examination of the corpse, intimately touching her insides. The story is as breathtaking as it is grotesque.

Good comedy contains an equal measure of well-timed repetition and surprise, and Roncagliolo succeeds most when his comedy is agile enough to accommodate for tenderness as well as tragedy. In this collection, our lives assume the shape of a joke. The joke, of course, is that we've responded to our estrangement by seeking overblown fantasies, algorithm-inspired services, and flimsy machines to impersonate the impact of real human connections.

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Adam Langer
Open Road ($16.99)

by James Naiden

Adam Langer probably could not have published this absurdist literary thriller if J. D. Salinger were still alive; the late novelist was well known for employing lawyers to chase off everyone from sycophants to fans. His concoction follows an early middle-aged writer named Adam Langer who doesn’t know who his father is, only that he had once picked up a cocktail waitress in Chicago after a night of drinking and impregnated her. In the novel, Adam is married to Sabine, a European-born and a professor at Indiana University. He’s published one novel so far when the story begins.

An acquaintance and fellow writer named Conner Joyce enlists Adam as a confidant of sorts, telling him a wild story about a wealthy older man named Dex Dunford who contracts writers to pen a novel that only he will read. He pays very well, but the writer is to say nothing to anyone. Here Langer’s plot gets murky, as Conner is not the first writer to be ensnared by Dex and his henchman, Pavel, who under another name was one of the well-paid but captive writers; in the world of the novel so were such figures as Norman Mailer, John Updike, and of course, J. D. Salinger.

Langer’s pointedly satirical take on the world of publishing and the obsessions of the literati is not without its charms, even if the unlikelier aspects of the plot are never quite explained. His breezy style is easy enough to read, although his frequent lapses into banalities and clichés—“over the top; “bullshit” as a verb; “didn’t give a crap”—are disedifying. Still, he knows how to tell a story and moves his characters along in serviceable prose:

The train arrived. Its doors slid open and Conner followed the men into a mostly empty car. Conner sat in a window seat, Dex sat next to him, and Pavel on the bench behind as the train moved forward, accelerating out of the tunnel, following the eastward path of Interstate 90 toward the shimmering lights of downtown Chicago. Conner had seen these lights only once before, but this time they looked sinister; he felt drawn into the darkness that surrounded them.

In the end Dex is reconciled to Adam Langer when the latter visits Salinger’s gravesite in New Hampshire. While the book’s title is a stretch—designed, no doubt, to catch a few eyeballs here and there—The Salinger Contract is fast-moving, entertaining, and offers several hints that the author has the potential to write a more substantive book.

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Elizabeth Treadwell
Dusie Press ($15)

by Lightsey Darst

You can easily read Elizabeth Treadwell’s Virginia or the mud-flap girl on a single descent from altitude if you like: the book’s ninety-some pages are sparely printed with brief, short-lined poems whose syntax isn’t so much compressed, in the manner of the Metaphysicals, as eroded, seemingly beyond recovery. Repeats, refrains, a minimum of apparatus, and Treadwell’s habit of cutting her lines mostly at natural breaks all contribute to a speedy reading. Moreover, nothing of great emotional moment will slow you down if you don’t want it to: Treadwell doesn’t present a self in need of empathy, and lines like “the death of culture as a fragmentary state” exist themselves only in a fragmentary state, as if scurf flaking from an old scar.

The canny reader will not get this far without suspecting a reversal, though—and sure enough, a second reading of this book can feel as different from the first as the situation on the ground from the aerial view. On this closer view, Treadwell shows as a next-generation, California-addled Susan Howe, mashing Mae West, John Rolfe, Vine Deloria Jr., and others into a new history of America, one in which the current USA—Hollywood, politics, avant-garde poetry, “all the handsome signifiers / in the village heap” —is the scab and 1492’s contact the fresh wound we still feel. Treadwell’s version of that contact is original, physical, your-virus-meets-my-virus, but also linguistic and ideological: your culture virus meets my culture virus, Indian mound as investment bank/Metropolitan Museum, or as she puts it:

oh so soonly shall we toil
our awesome landfills

all the pick-magic some forlorn
source faces

there’s a boat in the sea fevertine
there’s a fawn in the feldspar
the sputnik of justice
swirls

Admittedly, Treadwell’s syntax makes any statement of her aim an overstatement. Agent and event are rarely clear; instead, her writing is miasmatic. A pungent scent of old blood and tidal swamp rises from her sharded and mulched wordstuff—and you’ll smell its reek more clearly if you supplement her book with some research into early America. Take the poem “P. vivax”:

a little god comes in & protests
will as extensity holler
in all your original flapping sins,
your 17th century arcade
beating down staunchest river
some summer slag-heap
in theory butler
bitten, plow
some jailed hintback
in the doctorlight

If the opening presents an attempt to master wilderness, the last few lines trade grammatical coherence for obscure suggestion. But what is it about? P. vivax is the parasite that causes malaria. Some say malaria killed Pocahontas; malaria certainly decimated Native Americans along the East Coast, and was a leading reason for planters to import African slaves, who were often already immune to the parasite. Treadwell points readers to the research (and perhaps to Judith Butler as well) as she breaks up English like a prisoner fashioning a shiv from a toothbrush.

This pointed desperation sets her writing apart from the “avant-garde” she amusingly lampoons throughout Virginia—for example, in the single couplet of “spot”:

the mini-cathedrals of the avant-garde
the bird-like attributes of the avant-garde

Of course, this is a straw man: there is no unified avant-garde. But Treadwell uses it to critique certain elements of contemporary poetry: its “fake relevance” and “crap manliness,” its “lite toxicity” and “unhinged sanctimony.” Her poetry may look avant-garde, with its erratic punctuation and capricious capitals, but innovation for its own sake is alien to her. Instead, she deranges language to express dream changes and ecological emotion, much in the line of feminist theorists who seek a sentence without phallocentric subjectivity.

Unfortunately, sentences without subjects often frustrate readers; poems without clear syntactical connections may come across as mere descriptive clouds; and poetry that can be ignored probably will be. Clearly, this is a risk Treadwell is willing to take—or maybe must take if she wants to get the reader to imagine something really different. This different vista is nothing less than a new Eden: a wild America whose fertility does not demand rape and control. Dimly, Treadwell discloses hints of this dirty Paradise—as in the title poem:

the mud flap girl creates
the mud flaps as she
moves through the mud
flaps. the new animal is
born of the new animal.

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Brenda Hillman
Wesleyan University Press ($22.95)

by Erin Lyndal Martin

In the year 6939, a time capsule buried as part of a 1939 World’s Fair exhibition is scheduled to be opened. Since the contents were cataloged and much of the element of surprise will be gone, it is difficult to estimate how much interest this will garner. Will it be the doll and thread or the vial of seeds that holds meaning to the people of 6939?

As in time capsules, one never knows what references or tonal registers will date a poem and which will prove timeless. Brenda Hillman took this risk at the outset of her recently culminated tetralogy of poetry collections, each volume using one of the four elements as its cohering device. A staunch nonviolence activist and member of the women’s anti-war group Code Pink, Hillman could not have predicted the world events that would occur during her writing of the quartet, and the urgency with which she addresses current global concerns is palpable. That urgency becomes increasingly visible as the reader moves from 2001’s Cascadia (which is focused on California and includes a number of poems about the California Gold Rush) to Pieces of Air in the Epic (2005), Practical Water (2009), and now Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire, which takes on metaphysical conceits while also wrestling with a slew of contemporary evils.

In Seasonal Works, perhaps the friction between the ephemeral and the eternal are the two timbers that give way to spark. A year before its publication, Tony Hoagland, addressing Hillman’s oeuvre thus far in American Poetry Review, posed a question that remains relevant: “Hillman’s work brings into relief one of the central poetic questions of our era—are the profits and burdens of self-consciousness worth it? In what ways does avante-gardish self-consciousness gratify and/or debilitate the work of poetry?” My lingering question is similar: Do the risks Hillman takes in creating a time capsule pay off? Like Practical Water, which name-checks Sarah Palin, Seasonal Works employs ultra-contemporary lingo via references to “Facelessbook,” Monsanto, AstraZeneca, Novartis, Halliburton, and many other institutions that situate the narrative within the extremely present moment, thereby risking some shelf life. However, Hillman also deploys a snippet of Hopkins (“dearest freshness deep down things dearest freshness”), includes an ekphrastic poem on a piece by the fifteenth-century ikon painter Andrei Rublev, and mentions the Latin name of almost every organism she describes throughout. “This is where poetry can be helpful. Poetry goes past the limit. It makes extra helpful nerves between realities,” she writes in “Experiments With Poetry Are Taken Outdoors.” Poetry, Hillman seems to be saying, is as relevant as ever and will be as relevant as we let it be.

Hillman’s self-awareness has historically expanded to her use of form, with which she has experimented throughout her career. In Seasonal Works, the storylines are a bit easier to follow than they were in books like Cascadia. “I was being a little transgressive with the narrative impulse in both this book and the last because there is a big prejudice against narrative poetry in some communities,” Hillman said in a chat with The Rumpus Book Club. Asked to follow up on this remark, Hillman commented: “The narrative impulse at times has great appeal, and it isn’t just one thing—a block of rendering events. I don’t find use of narrative or emotion or story incompatible with experiments, innovations, concepts—in form, subject, syntax, and so on.” Even though the stories are rendered with a more linear nature here, there are still plenty of swing margins, em dashes (the whole book ends on one), and other techniques more often found in so-called experimental poetry. One particularly striking move is Hillman’s rendering of the same poem in both verse lines and prose poetry (“A Quiet Afternoon at the Office”). This telling and retelling, printed on facing pages of the book, forces the mind to think back upon its own traces, seeing what stands out in each version and ultimately forcing a closer look at both.

This desire to revisit the poem’s beginning carries through to the cycle as a whole: at the end of Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire, a thorough reader can’t help but feel compelled to crack open Cascadia, knowing only now what Hillman would find to put in her time capsule.

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Hannah Gamble
Fence Books ($15.95)

by Mark Eleveld

Hannah Gamble’s first book of poems, Your Invitation to a Modest Breakfast, was selected by Bernadette Mayer as a National Poetry Series winner. Told in three sections with a wide breadth of lyricism, the poems focus on gender, family, and the idea of aging, with a consistent reflection on relationships. The poems are engaging, thought provoking, and beautifully calm, with a dash of pensive regret.

Gamble’s poems are not breezy introspections, and reveal a signature combination of absurdity and pathos. Take “Everything That’s Alive Stays That Way”: “I asked my neighbor later / what it had been like to be alive before a time of war, / and he said it was funny / we even have a word for it, because everything / that’s alive stays that way / by tearing heat from the belly.” Although the tone does oscillate a bit throughout the book, her primary subjects seem never far from thought. In “Cocktail Party,” an absent father navigates to the poet’s mind: “The last time I saw my father alive / he was on his way to a cocktail party, wearing a tie / . . . just like the first time he went to a Rock & Roll Concert, / and his mother made him wear a three-piece suit.”

Contemporary poetry often spends too much time reflecting on the poem, the idea of the poem, the process of writing a poem. This is a danger that Gamble circumvents with her cleverly spring-loaded syntax in “Biotic/Abiotic”: “You moved around / me like a plastic daisy / on a plastic stem, spinning / in your yardwind. We never really / got it together. / . . . / I prefer poems, / but I understand that their human swell / is often troubling.” She continues to handle this topic masterfully in “How Early to Wake”: “Even when I was not being / a poet, I was deciding how early to wake— / how early to begin the business of approving / and disapproving of the shapes / I’d let my person take.”

The secret to Hannah Gamble’s charm lies in her uncanny ability to hold reality and a quiet, seemingly commonplace sadness squarely in her binocular-like vision. Her poems of quirky self-admonishment and effective disengagement are delivered in a style whose dizzying effects you are not likely to forget.

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Julie Marie Wade
White Pine Press ($16)

by Julie Babcock

In her debut poetry collection Postage Due, Julie Marie Wade investigates the line between poetry, prose, and ephemera to create a volume that illuminates the complicated interplay of personal memory and desire. Among lined and prose poems, readers can also find postcards and letters the writer has addressed to elementary school friends, enemies, and former role models like Mary Tyler Moore. The various forms highlight tantalizing acts of quasi-autobiographical performance, exploring questions about who affected the author in the past and what she wants to say to them now.

The book’s concept showcases Wade’s talent for writing about larger issues through surprising and personable details. For instance, in “Epiphany,” a poem about the ways in which Truth is often obscured by the strange rules of elementary school education, the poet moves from her own experiences to ask the reader, “Did you ever make a diorama? Perhaps from a shoebox & in the third grade?” Despite the question’s hyper-specificity, Wade knows most readers with a fairly standardized U.S.-based education will answer “yes.” These shared experiences illuminate other, more significant connections about what we are taught, what we experience, and the ways it affects us.

While the forms of the poems are engaging, there are times when the overall effect is less so. The poems work so much with episodic memory details that often the sense of present conflict is lost. “For Anna Shope, Who I Always Hated in High School” begins as an interesting confession about the speaker’s annoyance at Anna’s good grades and, more importantly, about the writer’s obsession with Anna’s looks and ability to get boyfriends. However, as the poem continues, both internal and external conflicts are erased:

We both graduated with 4.0s. You went pre-med, & I became an English major.

Are you a doctor yet? Am I a poet?

I’m not sure how the measure’s made, but I feel sure you’ll make it. And as for me & my weak knees: I’ve been kissed that way I once could only dream.

In many poems, including this one, the speaker relates past problems from a current position of relative privilege, and this perspective makes it difficult to understand what is truly at stake. Because the language is so conversational, this avoidance of current conflict is felt even more acutely, and the poems can frustrate in their lack of resonance.

The postcard poems that appear at various points in the collection create the most direct and affecting confessions, and they are also the poems where the conflicts are least resolved. The postcards to her mother and father, particularly, surprise and evoke a tension that is often pushed away in other poems. The book’s organization into four parts—“Lent,” “Pentecost,” Advent,” and “Epiphany”—adds another layer to the themes of confession and retribution that run throughout. Having also published two books of lyric nonfiction, Wishbone: A Memoir in Fractures (Colgate University Press, 2010) and Small Fires (Sarabande Books, 2011), Wade is clearly interested in experimenting with the line between autobiography and art; we can look forward to reading more from her and to watching her autobiographical performance continue to evolve.

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Lorene Delany-Ullman
Firewheel Editions ($18)

by Steven Wingate

Lorene Delany-Ullman’s Camouflage for the Neighborhood explores a subject of much recent national concern: the effect of militarism upon America, both collectively and in its citizens’ individual psyches. While this territory has been explored by writers such as Kevin Powers (The Yellow Birds), Brian Turner (Here, Bullet), Ben Fountain (Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk), Jehanne Dubrow (Stateside) and Siobhan Fallon (You Know When the Men Are Gone), Delany-Ullman brings to this conversation a prose poet’s eye for the way that many small parts, like individual strokes in a pointillist painting, fit together into a larger canvas.

Camouflage presents a sweeping vision of domestic militarism in America, reaching from Cold War Los Angeles—the epicenter of the military-industrial complex—to our contemporary era with its protestors, over-deployed soldiers, and peculiar blend of blind patriotism and self-doubt. To her credit, Delany-Ullman avoids taking easy political stances on the personal and social histories she examines. It’s not so easy to bemoan weapons when a family has “feasted on venison, bear stew, tender quail” thanks to a grandfather’s gun. Through concise vignettes, the poet builds a world that’s difficult to dismiss because we’ve gotten to know the people in it.

The person we get to know best is Delany-Ullman—or her authorial persona—whose life is steeped in military presence. We see childhood “duck and cover” drills at Cold War schools. We see America pre-Vietnam War, when the country didn’t question its military nature. We see a young woman fated, early on, to date and marry military men: “My Barbie tried to love G.I. Joe. But he had married war.” We see the spillover of violence into the domestic arena, with kids shooting air rifles at each other and partially blinding a homeless man with a paintball gun.

In Delany-Ullman’s vision, domesticity itself is subject to the constant threat of micro-scale military action. I don’t want to call it violence, because it isn’t random or emotional. Instead it’s organized and purposeful: “Sometimes only our dog was in the line of fire.” In the broader theater of the international world, war can break out at any time in any era—in Beirut, in Israel, in the heart of America with a dirty bomb—and the unity of those times and threats knits the components of this work together.

Stylistically, Camouflage for the Neighborhood is a straight-ahead book; its formal approach is classical (typically one flush-left stanza/paragraph per poem) and its language does not seek to dazzle inordinately. Because it is so centered on individual experience, one can read it as an extended lyric essay. It is this very slipperiness that makes Delany-Ullman’s work a notable contribution to the growing literature of American militarism in all its faces—some angry and wrathful, some protective and loving, some adrift but forging ahead nonetheless.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2013 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2013/2014