Susan Daitch
Dalkey Archive ($14.95)

by Jason Picone

First published in 1986, Susan Daitch's debut novel is a challenging and complex work that defies easy categorization or simple description. L.C.'s intricate structure shows the author's considerable innovation, as well as her desire to upset a reader's expectations of historical fiction. The book contains a fictional diary translated from the French, the translator's introduction, an epilogue by yet another translator, and a history of the diary and the two translators. Though this might be disastrous in the hands of most first-time novelists, Daitch displays an assured, meticulous control over her novel; the disparate elements of the book cohere in a logical, circular manner that rewards attentive readers.

The novel is primarily composed of diary entries by a 19th-century French woman, Lucienne Crozier, the L.C. of the book's title. Despite the fact that she is newly married, Lucienne's initial entries are hardly the excited thoughts of a young bride; rather, she is critical of the circumstances surrounding her marriage, regretful that she had to marry for money. Her initial misgivings lead her to turn from her husband (who is abroad most of the novel) to the Paris social scene, where she participates in liaisons with the painter Eugene Delacroix and a prominent leftist, Jean de la Tour.

Lucienne's increased involvement in Jean's political activities provides her with some respite from her loveless marriage, but she is prevented from making a substantial contribution, or even voicing her opinion, due to her sex. Her situation becomes more frustrating and untenable, as she is forced to flee Paris with Jean, eventually arriving in Algiers, where she is not even allowed to walk outside by herself.

Sickly, waited on, passivity both enforced and desired, hidden away—none of this was the fate I would have chosen when I left my mother's house. Immobility is the worst of it. How did I get into this room? We had big ideas and slapped titles on them but I haven't done much of anything. My life looks like an inversion of what I set out to do on a large scale.

One of Daitch's many successes is the high degree of verisimilitude exhibited in Lucienne's diary entries. Fictional diaries face the difficult task of familiarizing a reader with the novel's world, while, at the same time, trying to resemble a personal piece of writing that is ostensibly intended to be read by one reader, the writer. Pronouns present just the right degree of uncertainty, as no one would qualify "she" in a diary; the author would know whom the word referred to. This realistic touch has the additional benefit of enlarging possible meanings; in the quote above, "We" ostensibly refers to Lucienne and Jean, but it also could be extended to all the women in the novel, whose ambitions are largely arrested due to their gender.

What is most remarkable about Lucienne is not her unromantic relation of her activities and affairs, but the painstaking gaze which she turns upon increasingly complex subjects. Literally caught in the violence of the 1848 revolution in Paris, Lucienne observes that:

Even if one was initially motivated by principles and politics worked out months or years before, one's actions become only reactions, and one is reduced to animal instincts. The lives of the survivors are changed, a corner is turned and even the memory of the street you left behind is altered. The statue on the corner, the fountain which never ran, all become precious or ravaged, depending on your recovery.

The idea that the meaning of an object changes over time, or that meaning is inherently subjective, is of great significance in L.C. The novel's primary object is the diary, which has been translated from the French over a century after Lucienne's death by Willa Rehnfield, an American professor whose introduction and notes accompany the text of the diary. Oddly enough, the diary entries conclude with an epilogue by yet another translator, Jane Amme, who offers a history of Willa and how she came to be in possession of the diary.

The introduction of Amme (whose name suggests a sort of anti-heroine, since it's Emma spelled backwards) is Daitch's masterstroke. Jane's period as a leftist revolutionary during the late 1960s in Berkley is paralleled with Lucienne's struggle for agency in 1848 Paris in a thoroughly compelling manner. Whereas Lucienne was unable to speak at political meetings and had to flee Paris, Jane was consigned to typing for her student group's male leader and was forced to flee Berkeley. Jane's view of Lucienne leads her to render her own partial translation of the diary, a powerful gesture that seriously questions the faithfulness of Willa's version.

The last twenty pages of the novel present Jane's vision of Lucienne, a depiction that is both strange and familiar when compared with the original translation. The possibility that Lucienne Crozier was an outspoken radical and a forerunner to modern day feminism is raised by Jane, perhaps because it is an authentic portrait, perhaps due to Jane's own political leanings. L.C. is a masterful examination of subjectivity, the politics of translation, and the numbness of unfulfilled desire.

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Michael Hemmingson
Forge ($21.95)

by Tim Brown

If Michael Hemmingson is not yet the high priest of transgressive fiction, then he certainly is among the church's leading members. The author of several novels and story collections and editor of the recent What the Fuck: The Avant Porn Anthology (Soft Skull Press), he has spent the past decade pushing the envelope in literary fiction. At first glance his latest effort, the novel Wild Turkey, departs from the transgressive mode. It takes the form of a contemporary noir thriller with a murder to solve, a conflicted hero, and a beautiful woman who leads the hero along a path of self-destruction.

Philip Lansdale is a disbarred attorney now living as a stay-at-home dad. He becomes infatuated with a gorgeous woman, Cassandra Payne, who lives across the street. His neighbor Bryan, a retired cop, shares his interest, and they spend their time boozing and observing her comings and goings, fantasizing about sex with her, and wondering why mysterious strangers visit her at all hours of the day and night.

Not long after she captures their attention, Cassandra's husband is ambushed and killed. Convinced that Cassandra is responsible for the murder, Bryan and Philip join forces to investigate. The watchful neighbor soon turns into a voyeur as he peers into her bedroom window and spies on her activities. Infatuation grows into obsession, which begets midnight trysts after she discovers him peeping. Ignoring the obvious dangers of tangling with a possible murderess, Philip yields to her seductions, and the couple embarks on a twisted relationship:

"Friday night, Mr. Lansdale," she said, "come back Friday night at the same time, and let's see how we shall transgress our little affair."
Affair. I guess this was what it was—I was being unfaithful to my wife, in certain ways. In many ways. I was committing adultery and I wanted to keep doing it and I wanted to "transgress."

As the plot further unfolds, it becomes clear that Hemmingson has somehow hybridized Mickey Spillane with Kathy Acker. Additional death and mayhem ensue, involving Las Vegas gamblers, counterfeiters, transsexuals, hit men, pyromaniacs, treasury agents, armed showgirls, paraplegics and desert rats. The bloody resolution to the story would make Spillane proud. Acker, the late queen of transgressive fiction, would have loved the bizarre characters that burst from the shadows.

Despite the potential for lapsing into utter nihilism, Wild Turkey is fundamentally a story of transgression, punishment and redemption. With sentences firing straight as bullets into the reader's brain, Hemmingson fashions scenes full of steamy sex, exhilarating violence and unbearable pain. Transformed into voyeurs themselves, readers share Philip's most intimate experiences—the pleasure, the pain, and the guilt for enjoying both.

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Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper
Harriet Scott Chessman
Seven Stories Press ($24)

La Tour Dreams of the Wolf Girl
David Huddle
Houghton Mifflin ($24)

by Carrie Mercer

You can't judge a book by its cover, the old adage goes. But what if the cover is not just something the art department at the publishing house cooked up to lure the ever-roving consumer's eye? What if it's real art? And by real art, I mean art that had a long and prosperous life of its own before some publisher plastered a title and author's name on top of it (not to mention one of those controversial Oprah stickers).

For most authors, pretty much the last thing on their minds when they write a novel is the artwork on the cover of their future book. However, for a few, that artwork would seem to be an essential element of the story. Hence, we have two recent novels, Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper, by Harriet Scott Chessman, and La Tour Dreams of the Wolf Girl, by David Huddle.

The first book's cover sports a painting of exactly what the title describes, though the painting's title is actually Woman Reading, by the famous impressionist painter Mary Cassatt. We learn from the novel that Mary's older sister Lydia was the model for the painting, and Mary posed her with a newspaper, instead of the (at that time) traditional novel, so that she might look more modern. This detail, like many others in the book, is culled from the author's extensive research on the Cassatt family. Where Chessman departs from research and dreams "my way into her world," is in her point of view: Mary's sister Lydia tells the story through internal monologue. She relates observations and feelings about relationships with her family, the color and bustle of Paris in the late 1870s early 1880s (where the family was living at the time), and perhaps most interestingly, how she sees herself in a different light through her sister's paintbrush.

The novel is structured around five portraits Mary did of her sister, and the main conflict, sadly, is not fictional. Much as Lydia loves to pose for her sister, she struggles to find the energy to do so as she gets sicker and sicker from a degenerative kidney disease. But she finds another self in Mary's paintings, where "sickness holds no place," and she takes comfort there. At times Lydia struggles with wanting to live "in that creamy world of no difficulty." Chessman creates a symbiotic intimacy between the sisters that deepens as a result of the paintings. Lydia needs to pose so that she can see herself through her sister's eyes, and Mary needs Lydia as a model, so that she can see her sister more clearly. After Mary paints Lydia Crocheting in the Garden, Lydia notices her features are "dissolving" and thinks, "It's illness she's discovered." Mary doesn't want to accept Lydia's illness, but in the painting, Lydia sees "not what [Mary] acknowledges, perhaps, but what she knows."

One of the delights of this novel is that we are provided with color plates of all five portraits and can study along with Lydia and so make our own discoveries. The meditative quality of Chessman's writing feels like an appropriate companion to the paintings; each has its dabs of color and momentary, passionate impressions. Chessman bestows Lydia with a painterly eye, turning her thoughts and feelings into composition and landscape: Lydia remarks how "the [orange] peelings make a sphere on her plate" and later how a look from Mary's friend Edgar Degas felt "like a storm on a coast, stirring the trees to wildness, shifting the dunes."

The cover of Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper, then, is a straightforward invitation to enter into a deeper contemplation of some well-known artwork. Chessman crafts a compelling examination of mortality through the musings of the dying Lydia. Lydia's acceptance of the life she's had—and its impending close—is complicated by her sister's paintings. In the end, she is somewhat contented by the idea that each of Mary's portraits "creates a kind of memory. Whether or not anyone ever knew me, she will offer a memory of me, for the world to claim."

The cover of La Tour Dreams of the Wolf Girl is, alas, not so straightforward an invitation. The only intimacy we experience with this painting is in its magnification: spidery cracks spread over a face so magnified that it has crowded out everything else, to the point that its circumference can only be imagined beyond the edges of the book's cover. And the face does not belong to the Wolf Girl of the title, but to the thieving accomplice of an old gypsy in Georges de la Tour's The Fortune-Teller.

So who is the Wolf Girl? She is the invention, not of La Tour, but of Suzanne Nelson, the fictional head of the Art Department at the University of Vermont, who is the invention of David Hubble, the author of this odd novel. Suzanne retreats from her failing marriage into the solitude of her daydreams, which she believes "help her create the narrative-based criticism no one else is writing." We never see this criticism, but instead are privy to her strange daydreams about Georges de la Tour, a 17th-century French painter whose work was credited until relatively recently to Caravaggio, among others. La Tour's paintings depicted the daily miseries of peasants with great accuracy, but what little is known of him personally indicates he was as unpleasant and violent as his equally talented contemporary, Caravaggio: court records note one incident in which he beat a peasant almost to death. Huddle's Suzanne is interested in La Tour precisely because of this disconnect between "the deeply humane vision of his paintings and the nastiness of his character."

In Suzanne's daydreams, the Wolf Girl is Vivienne, a shoemaker's teenage daughter who poses as a model for La Tour. What makes her the Wolf Girl is a "coarse thatch" of hair on her back. Vivienne's parents have kept from her any knowledge of this anomalous feature of her body, and on seeing it, so does La Tour. Whereas Vivienne's parents hide the hairy patch to downplay its significance, La Tour keeps it a secret because he is infatuated with it. He poses Vivienne just so that he can stare at her defect. This ongoing fantasy seems to parallel somewhat an experience Suzanne had in college posing nude as a life model for a drawing class. Suzanne was simultaneously aroused and repulsed by the slovenly instructor who posed her. In turn, this experience recalls an earlier encounter with Elijah, a handicapped boy who sketched as he sat next to her on the school bus. But where does this elaborate trail lead?

One thing it leads to is a lot of overwritten extramarital sex. "I came like a freight train. I came like the Fourth of July. I came like a sea elephant," Suzanne thinks after she sleeps with a man she hardly knows simply because she is turned on by his art. Likewise, Suzanne's husband Jack has an equally fulfilling morning with his lover, who "moved him beyond what he thought were the limits of his sexual capacity." Stagey dialogue makes Huddle's characters even more ridiculous, with lines like "Drive fast. Take some chances, Jack. I'll make it worth your while."

Where Huddle is most successful is in his examination of art as a tool we use to form our identities, often unwittingly. Thinking back to her schooldays, Suzanne "begins to see certain parts of her daily life in terms of Elijah's pictures. Or she remembers pieces of her experience as if Elijah had drawn them." Similarly, Suzanne's Vivienne keys into the power of deception as a kind of self-affirming art when she makes up stories about herself to satisfy La Tour's curiosity. "Until you began to ask me about my life, I never saw it," she tells La Tour.

Unlike Chessman's Lydia, who saw a thought-provoking but distinctly foreign self in her sister's paintings, Huddle's Suzanne believes completely in the representations her schoolmate Elijah draws of her and her classmates: "once Elijah had set it into a picture and allowed her to see it, she could grasp what she already knew." It's ironic that of the two novels, the one whose protagonist is most obsessed with art has the least to contribute to our understanding of the artwork on its cover.

Is it fair to require illumination from these novels? Fair or not, their covers create expectations that can be difficult to fulfill. There is potential for the novel to inform the artwork and vice versa, and when it works, as it does in Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper, we are left with something larger than the sum of the two works of art. When it doesn't, the cover feels like a cheap enticement. Perhaps Huddle's novel would have felt more complete had it not been paired with such a suggestive cover. Like Suzanne remembering drawings of events Elijah was never present at, some readers may experience the unfortunate side effect of imagining an added detail in La Tour's painting—the unseen hairy back of the Fortune Teller's young assistant.

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T. R. Hummer
Louisiana State University Press ($16.95)

by Justin B. Lacour

In his previous collection, Walt Whitman in Hell, T. R. Hummer contrasted Whitman's idealistic lyrics of America with visions of a blighted nation, culminating in the titular poem, where the ghost of the great poet wanders through the infernos of present-day Manhattan. Useless Virtues, his seventh book of poems, continues in the same vein, closely examining the tools for transcendence and redemption that we trust with our faith.

In the opening poem, three friends in a hot tub discuss The Book of Job, arguing, resolving only that:

It is about nothing
Except the incommensurability of everything,
the shitty drama of pain that stretches
From Behemoth down to the structure of the atom.
Nobody agrees. Even God refuses to be God
But breaks down in a windy turbulence.

If the desire for a traditional God-figure can be reduced to: "a passion / For form that would murder its own son, / Then invent the word sacred to explain what it had done," then we are left with only our seemingly endless capacity for language. However, Hummer finds this process equally fraught with its own limitations, and chronicles this struggle with characters that alternately declare: "I will not give in / To the fragmentary / I will make my language whole," or "Darker darkness: / No judgment in those words, just pure description, / inadequate as the phrases Whom I loved or In the beginning."

This theme receives its primary focus in the long poem, "Axis," which draws on Heidegger's theories of "the meaning of Being" as its primary source. Though dealing with obviously complex issues, the poem gains its true power from the juxtaposition of the philosopher and Hummer's father, treating them with a delicate mixture of intellectual and emotional observation, never resorting to the easy answers of sentimentality or outright condemnation. In "Axis," the ordeal of World War II is the crucial event that provides both men with a sense of definition, and since the philosopher's complicity with the Third Reich is also examined, it raises the issue of how useful Heidegger's genius and powers of articulation were in the face of overwhelming evil.

Hummer crafts intelligent, elegant poems directed by a penetrating gaze into contemporary anxieties and struggles, treating them with a scientist's eye for minutiae and a philosopher's tone. A great deal of the power of Useless Virtues comes from the sheer scope of these poems. Hummer can envision a world where the lives of three men in a hot tub are connected to the flight of a Cambodian refugee, and since the transitions are made so gracefully, these leaps make sense within the context of the poems. Hummer also has great skill in crafting an intricate network of details that drive the poems' narrative: "a red-eye flight to Dallas interweaves / Baseball, temple bells, roadkill, cemeteries, bread, / sexual ambiguity, and a poster of Pol Pot nailed / To the wall of a compound, monsoon-faded, laced/by bullet holes." While reading Useless Virtues as a whole may have the feeling of a journey, since the settings shift swiftly, the most interesting part of the trip is through the characters' psyches, which Hummer renders with precision. Hummer treats the reader to merciless portraits, but in return he reveals striking, painfully honest visions.

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Joseph Millar
Eastern Washington University Press ($14.95)

by Julie Drake

As the title suggests, Overtime contains many work poems. Joseph Millar now earns a living in academia, but before that he spent time working blue-collar jobs such as telephone repairman and commercial fisherman. It is these workers that Millar writes about—the deck boss on a salmon fishing boat, the mechanic at the brake-shop, the drywall crews, and men pulling fiber optic cables in new construction in Silicon Valley. Millar gives these workers a voice that is neither stupid nor terribly street-smart. Instead it is a quotidian voice, an authentic—sometimes putzy—voice that accepts what you gotta do to make a living. It is often contemplative, sometimes tired, but rarely sad. Millar punctuates his work with soft humor—not slapstick, nor cynical, but wry and world-weary: ". . . until I get off work / and collapse on the fake velvet sofa, a double order / of fast food bleeding grease through a bag in my fist. / He hasn't eaten anything green in a week" (from "Sole Custody").

Although several poems address paying bills, rent, and taxes, class issues run only as an undercurrent through these poems; Millar's working men do not call for sweeping social change. "Impossible anyone here would strike, / though we're comrades of sorts, / and hungry for something, / listening to rain pound the glass doors / of this palace paid for / by venture capitalists, whose appetite nobody questions" (from "Fiber Optics"). Millar worked blue-collar jobs for over 25 years after receiving an MA, a fact that reflects an all too common American employment plight—that the most educated do not automatically earn the most money and that learning a trade may be the best way to earn a good living. Millar treads much of the same ground as his contemporary Jim Daniels, but Millar's poetry reads as even more authentically average American, since Millar spent so long actually working these jobs and Daniels often writes the stories of his friends and family.

Other poems not about work reflect a wide range of everyday life, as Millar takes the reader on travels from the North Slope oilfields of Alaska to the California coast to the Pennsylvania of his childhood to the East Cleveland projects. This book is an American road trip with rest-stops at single fatherhood, alcoholism, gambling, father-son relationships, love affairs, take-out food, and heart attacks. Millar writes in simple language, in a tell-it-like-is tone. Any of his working buddies could easily understand these poems, and it's a shame that many of them will not read this book, having been raised to think of poetry as indecipherable or fancy.

Each of these narrative poems tell a story, but as the Billy Collins blurb on the back of the book states, "Millar never forgets, as a poet, to tell it line by line." Millar's best poems transcend everyday existence, not by tidily wrapping up the story with a moral message, but by doing the opposite—leaving the reader with glimpses into unfinished stories, as lives truly are. The reader has a feeling of kinship with the characters of these poems. It's as if we were looking in the windows of our neighbors' houses. Millar writes what he knows, and what we know—that life is often a pain in the ass and usually messy, but in spite of that, somehow, we continue to get up in the morning and go to work. As he puts it in "The Wayward Carpenter's Apprentice": "The bottoms of his workshoes want to wander off / by themselves, and the sweatstains growing cold / under the arms of the orange T-shirt / begin to dream they can fly."

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Joseph Lease
Jensen / Daniels Publishers ($4)

by Thomas Fink

A poet of lyric grace and specific, evocative images, Joseph Lease engages in trenchant, often startling associative jumps while also offering narrative's edifying vitality. My Sister Life, Lease's third collection, consists of three long sequences, two short poems, and one short prose-poem. If "Life's" "Sister" is "Death," then the title announces the book's main thematic preoccupation. As in his previous book, Human Rights (1998), Lease explores the Holocaust in relation to the situation of contemporary American Jews. "'the Jew with the hole in his voice'" exemplifies the strengths and challenges of Lease's associative method:

First we killed them, then they killed us. The wind is steel wool. Then, first they killed us then we killed green. Sunlight lathers blonde, oiled wood. Light from the hole that keeps unfolding under his stomach. She'll hear or not hear snow walking on the rooftop. She'll go for long walks late at night when the town is sleeping. She'll hear or not hear history walking on the rooftop. Families drowning, dancing in loops, singing words they loved.

Can the prose-poem's first sentence be glossed by a later assertion, "Those to whom evil was done did evil again as ghosts"? Perhaps the Jews annihilated in the Holocaust "slay" the Nazis with moral judgment, but Lease may refer to the tendency for oppressed people to go on to oppress others (and perhaps to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.) As in "The History of Our Death," a long sequence in the book, the murder of "green" probably alludes to ways in which historical nightmares overwhelm individuals' capacity to enjoy nature's bounty. "Sunlight"—no spiritual illumination—is like cheap soap, and the capacity "to hear" the natural substance of "snow," as well as exigencies of "history" (including "families drowning") is very much in doubt. The prose-poem itself is "dancing in loops" of images and diverse assertions that refuse facile closure.

In the long "Broken World," Lease's examination of death/life focuses on pressures of contemporary U.S. society rather than specifically Jewish experience. The opening stanzas of the first section represent a dying—whether accidental, natural, or suicidal—in images so spare and elegantly tuned that they haunt while withholding determinate narration of a specific man's fall:

faith and rain
brightness falls

blank as glass
brightness falls

until he

can't bend
light anymore.

"Blankness" cancels light and the ability to "bend" it to human purposes, and it may even cancel a sustaining "faith." A lamentation cataloguing negations measures the absoluteness of loss: "Won't be stronger. Won't be water. / Won't be dancing or floating berries. / Won't be a year. Won't be a song. / Won't be taller." In an ambiguity produced by a felicitous placement of lines, the living poet registers the destructive effect of death on his psyche and his determination to combat those who would dishonor the deceased's memory: "You are with me / and I shatter // everyone who / hates you."

In contrast, the single prose paragraph of Section 2 presents a free-wheeling social critique: "To be a man, to be, to try. I hate the word man. I'm not crazy about the word husband or the word father either. To try. To heal the night or day. I'm busy selling fighters and bombers. The NASDAQ moves in my face." Queasiness about particular language involves despair about a masculinist culture in which the hawking of destruction and obsession with material acquisition displace efforts "to heal" and in which the denigration of women is ubiquitous: "Two blocks from campus, a boy, maybe ten or eleven, yelled at a Junior High School girl: 'Ho-bag, incest baby, spread your legs.'" Similarly, the record of economic colonization and postcolonial exploitation in U.S. foreign policy has proved more than embarrassing: "America equals ghost. The wrong side of history." To re-establish faith in a camaraderie that death cannot undo and to honor the intensity of death's mark—to move past paralyzing disillusionment with U.S. society's violent banalities—Lease returns in the third and last section to reconfigurations of the potent lyric motifs of the first: "Arrows on water; // you are with me— / rain on snow—"

In My Sister Life, "histories of death" that haunt Joseph Lease spur him into haunting, innovative song.

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Chelsey Minnis
Fence Books ($12)

by John Erhardt

Part of the allure of a prose poem is that there is one continuous "line"; every word is on a level playing field, so the content of the poem takes center stage. In her first book, Chelsey Minnis has discovered a way to write prose poetry while uniquely stressing individual words and phrases, thus creating a brand of prose poetry that draws attention to itself internally without sacrificing the very thing that makes it operate. Her technique: to populate the prose poems with lengthy ellipses, sometimes ranging hundreds of periods in length, creating varying distances yet maintaining connections. Actually, it is inaccurate to call these true "ellipses," since nothing at all is omitted from her poems; rather, they function as ligaments:

............when my mother.......................................
....................was raped.........................................
......................................................................
...a harpsichord began to play........................................
....................................red candles melted....and.........
.......spilled down the mantle........................................
................................there was blood in the courtyard......
.............and blood on the birdbath................................
...and blood drizzled....on brown flagstones..........................
........................as a red fox bared its teeth..................

Let's get one thing straight: the abundant periods in Zirconia are no more a distraction than the absence of all punctuation is in Merwin's work. In fact, if we take a poem from the book and lineate it, we produce a very Merwin-esque poem:

and it is torture for my mother
that I am now luscious
and she is dead
and that I have
bare shoulders
and a flower behind my ear
as I beat gentleman rapists
with bronze statuettes
so that the blood
oozes down their handsome sideburns
or give them
a poisoned mushroom
or corsages and corsages of gunshot

We've spent decades praising Merwin for his innovations, and Minnis deserves to be extended a similar courtesy; her poems, like his, offer a meandering single line with no definitive beginning, middle, or end. Thus, she manages a relaxed and readable tone, yet retains the enjambed quality of a well-crafted line break. Minnis proves that you can have it both ways.

She is no one-trick pony, though. While much of the book's mystique arises from her playful formal constructions, there is real charm at work here ("When I was a young girl, my parents hated me and wouldn't give me the right kind of food. I used to steal Barbies and hide them in unique places all over the house, but I took no joy in it.") The voice of the book teases us into following wherever it wanders. Likewise, the characters that inhabit Minnis's poems are somewhat cartoonish, yet we never question their reality. They have exaggerated allegorical professions (such as "head torturer" and "terrible ballet teacher") and they inexplicably prevent Minnis from living out her fantasies:

...uh..........I want to wear hot pants............................................
..................................................................................
..................................................and rest my boot on the back
of a man's neck...............................................................

Much of the book concentrates on what Minnis desires, or what she feels she's ready to experience ("I'm ready to plunge into furs.....and reject the standards of my past"). In this sense, she offers direct mental transcriptions of her craving to be released from the now. Her poems are moments of decadent sexuality and unattainable fantasy, and they demonstrate what happens when the world consistently gets between us and what we want. Minnis's world is a world of conspiracy. And she's gotten it right: In the end, we suspect everyone's in on it but her.

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Dennis Finnell
University of Georgia Press ($15.95)

by Daniel Sumrall

More than ten years ago Alice Fulton introduced the concept of fractal verse, however few have been the poets willing or able to implement such a poetics without falling back into techniques more akin to language poetry, neo-confessionalism, or post-modern bricolage. Fractal verse reveals itself as a more necessary form as our contemporary age moves closer and closer to a viewpoint expressed by Fulton in a recent interview: "Who needs more reality? There's enough of that around us everywhere. What I like, and what we need, are forms that go beyond or extrapolate reality." Far from being escapist or transcendental, Fulton posits following through the myriad possibilities of the present tense. Fractal verse doesn't ignore the present or the past, but has a grander approach to historicity. The fractal poet seeks to demonstrate, through the poem's "varying densities," a "modulating depth of field" which would allow "us to experience the poem as a construct of varying focal lengths." Therefore, fractal verse "is interested in that point of metamorphosis, when structure is incipient, all threshold, a neither-nor."

It makes sense then that Dennis Finnell should choose as his threshold Gauguin's painting Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? This painting is merely a point of reference; the resulting poem-suite, as Finnell says in an end note, "does focus upon the painting, yet not at every moment; it also considers my origins and identities and considers whether any individual's story is a mutual story." However, The Gaugin Answer Sheet is hardly a sort of hyper-ekphrasis or confessional springboard. Finnell views the painting from right to left while coupling this exegesis with an intimate chronology moving "backwards to Mary Keenan, my nineteenth-century great-great-grandmother." In effect, Finnell is 'plugging-in' the factors of his non-linear equation, resulting in a creation of "dimensions—time and space, painting and history" that, to use Finnell's word, "interlocute."

Fulton has suggested that before we declare a poem fractal we ask "whether comic, bawdy, banal, or vulgar lines are spliced to lyrical, elegiac or gorgeous passages" that we may cross-reference with these fractal precepts: "Any line when examined closely...will reveal itself to be as richly detailed as was the larger poem from which it was taken; the poem will contain an infinite regression of details, a nesting of pattern within pattern...; digression, interruption, fragmentation and lack of continuity will be regarded as formal functions rather than lapses into formlessness; all direction of motion and rhythm will be equally probable...; the past positions of motion or the preceding metrical pattern will not necessarily affect the poem's future evolution." The last three precepts are perhaps what we may most clearly recognize in a poems' form and content, and Finnell's poem certainly embodies these, engaging the notion that "the search for a style is a search for a language that does justice to our knowledge of how the world works."

What comes to the forefront immediately upon encountering fractal verse is the prevalence of flush-right margins which halt "the eye abruptly, almost rudely, stranding the gaze in an unbidden white surround before deflecting it leftward and into the next line." This formal device stresses the poem's constructedness, yet while such a device tempts the reader to assume a different speaker has arisen, "the speaker doesn't necessarily change when lines are indented. It's more as if another part of the self, another subjectivity, breaks in." The poem/section entitled "Come, Endure" illustrates this (while also providing an example of mixing the bawdy with the comic and elegant):

We've migrated from the bed that orphans us to the next cushioned chair that adopts our shape. We trail the harvest of desire or necessity, all because someone's eyes or our stomachs make us take just one more step, or because a voice says, "I can't live without you."

then later in the poem:

::

But he undrapes himself, his hard-on
under a tiny straw hat, fitted up like a village idiot,
a smile in mascara just under its crown.

"April fool's," he says.

"Who's the idiot?" she whispers.
"Take that stuff off, love me good."

Soon they are mouths, kissing—

::

(We at this window know their pleasure,
how touching is always
untouched, as if yesterday's caress left no residue.)—

An ambiguity arises concerning the proper mode of interpretation: "is the use of white spaces mimetic, abstract or temporal; do such effects serve to emphasize or to defamiliarize the line?" The maneuver changes the manner in which we read the lines, both aloud and silently, leading to the posing of the question which stresses the necessary occupation by the reader and the poet within the space of interpretation, effecting what Fulton terms "the orchestration of verse through echo."

Also, by paying attention to techniques like refrain and repetend we may grasp fractal verse in a somewhat more 'tangible' way. Making use of these techniques, Finnell introduces the symbol of the coin in the opening of the book:

A coin is a guess with somebody's face on it.

This penny flashing Lincoln's face,
then Lincoln's Memorial in midair
is a fatalist's stab in the dark, no matter
how it comes down on the back of my hands: heads, tails.

Whose in our indivisible nation
is more legal tender, its face of dirty copper,
my freckled one?
(from "Some of you look into this, my mouth")

Alluding to commerce between individuals, the symbol of the coin through its passage from hand to hand in anonymity problematizes, in its real presence, the relational lines from one to another. Finnell links this sentiment to Gauguin's work implying the ethics of the face crouched in post-imperial/colonial terms:

A coin is a guess
with someone's face on it, and whose on our indivisible globe
is more legal tender, your faces of Tahitian
dirt at the end of Gauguin's hand and brush, or my freckled one?

Your face is as good as mine.
(from "Out of Mouths")

At this point the nationalist currency of the coins has faded, or obscured itself through attention leaving only the call of the other's face, which in "Ultimata" is re-inscribed as

A face is a guess
and whose is more tender, yours of Tahitian
dirt at Gauguin's hand, my freckled one?
My face is as good as yours.

Reciprocity is established through this repetend: one's face for the other's, the other's for one's own in such a way as to cast the individual's responsibility to the other in immediate terms. A coin has a face upon it, a coin is anonymous, a guess toward identity and is exchanged (sometimes given) to another whose face is a real presence although still a guess. All that may be concluded is that commerce trades on contact, possessing within its procession the act of recognition that at any moment may call an individual up to address, just so:

A coin is a guess,
and whose is more tender, yours of dirt, my freckled one?
Your coin is a good one.
(from "'From, from...'")

The symbol of the coin here becomes a 'souvenir eye' embodying the moment of contact and its memory, but also the casual novelty of interest that at any moment may turn to disinterest. This would seem the tentative fact of human relatedness.

Finnell's application of repetend parallels his use of refrain. Speaking for two of the painting's characters, "Gauguin's two skeptical girls still cock their heads. / 'But where do we come from?'" This chorus not only mirrors but coalesces the sentiment of the repetend, appearing more regularly. This device illustrates the fractal form's structural replication in which "Increasing detail is revealed with increasing magnification, and each smaller part looks like the entire structure, turned around or tilted a bit." Because Finnell applies these devices in a manner that fulfills the fractal precepts, because the structural surface of the poem is so fluid, and because the "poem's growth and resolution are activated by self-determined imperatives rather than by adherence to a traditional scheme" we may identify his poem as fractal. Fulton admits to us, and it is an admission of proper involvement by the reader, that fractal verse may only exist if "readers imagine or build, identify or locate, the representative works themselves." Finnell factors out a fractal poetry, but does so in order to address the concern "If parents give us two genetic legs to stand on, / grandparents make us quadrupeds.I am a spider, I am a millipede" (from "Aorta, keeping the white caps white"). This concern appears only able to be addressed through a fractal poetics, which Finnell has spun out quite well.

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Alice Notley
Penguin ($18)

by Dawn Michelle Baude

Alice Notley's latest book, Disobedience, is a feisty, irreverent volume that gives the finger to many of the received ideas and unexamined assumptions inscribed in dominant culture. More discursive in many ways than other of Notley's recent books, including the Pulitzer nominee, Mysteries of Small Houses (1998) and the epic Descent of Alette (1996), the poems in Disobedience are organized in five sections of chronological units, beginning on July 30, 1995, and running through August 28 of the following year.

Within the sections, black lines stride across the page, segmenting the poems into sequential units of journal entries, lyrics, narratives, dramatic monologues, rants, philosophical meditations, and various, hybrid forms. Unlike other devices that Notley has invented to open her work to new measures—such as innovative use of parentheses, ellipses, and dashes—the lines on the page in Disobedience are less prosodic than visual. Cumulatively, they become almost strident, as if by some strange act of collaboration, they could bar the political, social and artistic injustice that the poems protest.

Although Notley has never been one to pull her punches, she has perhaps never been so outspoken as she is here. The "disobedience" is, in part, saying what you think instead of what you're supposed to say. Describing "life as the shape of the ways I've been fucked / by prevailing thought & practice," Notley announces a political campaign to redeem the "suppressed," what I take to be the life force that is censured within and stymied without.

The topical, objectified world—in this case, France at fin-de-siecle, with its strikes, its political imbroglios, its precious culture, its 'local color'—is apt to be on the receiving end of her mordant, even vitriolic commentary, as are Republican senators, the affluent, the greedy and other power-mongering "you's," but the real target of the politic campaign for the suppressed is individual psychology. In Disobedience, Notley takes on sexuality, the soul and the 'source' of poetry, as well as the vagaries of identity, art-making and death.

The principle subversive strategy in the book is to rupture the façade of daily life by encouraging, even forcing, an exchange between the "conscious," and "the various / levels of unconsciousness: dreams, and then / below that / is that grailish?" The poet charts these largely unexplored reaches of interiority by writing in a sustained hypnogogic state; by training herself to wake up and transcribe dreams; and by writing with the unsocialized left hand. "Hypnotize self into a fantasy world / a world of caves," she writes, "(Yes, I do this, I can)."

Followers of Notley's work will recognize the caves, the owl, and the 'guides,' as well as other of the poet's symbols, from her previous books ("Descend descend descend—I do that in all my poems"). What makes Disobedience very different is the seemingly direct insight it gives into the poet's thinking processes. It's a great read, even for readers unfamiliar with Notley's work. "To change the world, as I always say, / change the forms in our dreams."

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Bruce Andrews
Coach House Books ($22.95)

by Joel Bettridge

Lip Service is a sexy book, with its sexiness functioning both ironically as cultural critique and erotically as an exploration of desire. All uses of the phrase "lip service" are in play at once: as insincere complement (for Andrews, the ironic turning of social graces back on themselves), as oral sex, and as the erotic language of phone sex. This implosion of desire creates a poetics which implicates a reader in his or her own sexual politics and also revels in the linguistic possibilities of sexual vocabulary:

I'll talk to you just as long
as you're fucking me, wounded lips pawn
a milky roll mixture bouquet hesitant
stiff kittens' heartbeat finger

then later on:

on top of me—plump & pliant leash bended knees to sleep
tracing knees on cream abandonee.
Coy close again cameo
I'm hocking for this guy licks lick it off
rubber gets the juices going off your purpose—

Importantly, the dual move to both parody and excite sexual encounter works to dispute the very terms and social function of desire—often heterosexual male desire. Certainly Lip Service moves past this category by shifting the gender of the first, second, and third person positions throughout the poem, as well as by obliterating any recognizable stable sexual "identity"; disrupting the patterns of a dominant sexual division clearly drives much of the work.

Often this disruption of sexual identity in Lip Service gets played out as tension: the tension between a sexualized body and the desiring subject; the tension between a sexual culture of desire and the individual subjects within it; and the tension between erotic language and that language's tendency to first undermine and then transform itself:

There's romance in a zipper, reaching for that little
membrane of lambskin—de-heinous denunciamento
clings to clitoridean penalty dissolves
co-fecund craving cleft bliss bare wax won
horror only intoxicates zest
& languished denium orality:
abject adore harder bedroom—

In this passage the sexed body disappears as the fetishized objects "zipper" and "membrane of lambskin" mediate the sexual act. By removing the individuals from this sexual encounter, Lip Service undercuts any power dynamic available to a sexualized subjectivity. Be they male, female, homosexual, or heterosexual, all bodies in this passage, because they are only available through association, are subjected to the sexual act instead of controlling it; as soon as a subjectivity is read into the passage, the sexual subject is put into a dependent and secondary position to the fetishized objects. Importantly, this move reverses our normal roles where these objects would be our tools.

The erasure of a clearly defined sexual identity is not, however, only a form of subtraction. The somewhat abstract language of the above passage achieves a similar register as the ecstatic state when it foregrounds the tumbling words, "clings to clitoridean penalty dissolves / co-fecund craving cleft bliss bare wax won / horror only intoxicates zest / & languished denium orality." In other words, this passage is also about cumming. The sounds and pace of these lines push the reading forward in such a way that they become the drive to climax in the material of language itself. This is language ecstatic in character; regardless of the circumstances, or how you feel afterwards, the moment of orgasm is a decidedly egocentric, even an out of body, activity. In this sense, language as a material rhythmic movement is erotic over and above any single use of sexual activity. Lip Service is nearly seamless in its move between highly sexualized lines and lines that are more wide ranging. Much of the book, like other Andrews's work, outruns itself through an attention to rhythm and sound above phrase content, creating a near rapturous appreciation of the material sounds and movements available to the English language:

prong disarming saints' leakage threshed passé passive glass sure
vaccinates the vision,
sordid spatialized vicar of virtuals
the lessons of quiet—Don't Call Me—
immediacy of the flesh weighs heavily how it gets from zero
to one.

In characteristic Andrews style, a reader must recognize language operating beyond narrative and signifying functions at the same time that signification helps move him or her through the poem. Certainly there is not a narrative point, but words makes each reader think of specific, worldly things. For one, "Don't Call Me" automatically brings to my mind the opening line of Moby-Dick. If we are now not to call "you" anything, then the stable narrator, to say nothing of narrative as a literary project, loses its grounding. The lines "immediacy of the flesh weighs heavily how it gets from zero / to one" suggest a sense of the burden of our physical, particular lives as they try to come to grips with the different, multiple ways of being in the world that occur, not just someplace else, but in our own "flesh"—its physical, particular, sexual context. To make meaning in a world that seems more and more out of joint we must confront language on its own terms and our place within it—where meaning is always only possibly taking place around us. To find a way to get from here to there, a place of "value," a place where we count ³from zero to one," we must find a way to make meaning in the possibly meaningless act of speaking and writing.

The exquisite rhythm of the above passage reinforces this persistent movement as it beats the poem's sound into prominence—and with it Andrews' exploration of possible meaning in the more physical registers of language. The strong dactyls, trochees, and alliterations of lines like "prong disarming saints' leakage threshed passé passive glass sure / vaccinates the vision, / sordid spatialized vicar of virtuals," overtake the reading before it can begin to sort out any signified meaning. The textual pounding of lines themselves comes up against the difficulty of meaning in language by forming a hard hitting oral/aural wall. This physical sound texture drives the poem forward, keeping it from resting in developed imagery or metaphor, and in doing so, the poem becomes a work of political and social hope, regardless of its textual violence and difficulty. To look for new meanings and formations of sexual subjectivity means believing in the possibility of new meaning and new social realities, and Lip Service is a decidedly affirmative poem in this way. Too often the "language poetry" practice, and Bruce Andrews's poetics in particular, is read only as an attack on reference or the political status quo. And yet, at the heart of Lip Service is a poetics that has faith that our words' refusal of our attempts to make meaning finds us in a condition in which we approach words as things that make us, not as things we make.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Spring 2002 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2002