Virginia Woolf
Edited with an introduction by Louise DeSalvo
Cleis Press ($24.95)

by Charisse Gendron

In the 1980s, scholar Louise DeSalvo's book Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work almost single-handedly reoriented the direction of Woolf studies in America. DeSalvo's discovery in Woolf's writings of motifs common to the stories of incest survivors struck a chord with many. While Woolf's posthumous memoirs, Moments of Being (1976), related a handful of sexual improprieties on the part of her half-brothers, DeSalvo went on to assert that "abuse or sexual violence" infected virtually every relationship among the ten members of the Stephen household. Yet DeSalvo's interpretations often relied on salubrious implication. By encouraging constant slippage between "abuse," including verbal bullying and emotional exploitation, and "sexual violence," she discredits her argument that incest is not an isolated event, but a family pattern.

Even more disappointing in DeSalvo's expose is her misreading of Woolf's own words—not the accounts of her abuse, which have never been contested, but her description of unrelated experiences (though to DeSalvo, none of Woolf's experiences is unrelated to her abuse). One of the most beautiful passages in Moments of Being, from which one can trace the evolution of Woolf's fascination with rhythm as the source of literary language, reads:

If my life has a base that it stands upon, if it is a bowl that one fills and fills and fills—then my bowl without a doubt stands upon this memory. It is of lying half asleep, half awake, in bed in the nursery at St. Ives. It is of hearing the waves breaking one, two, one, two, and sending a splash of water over the beach; and then breaking, one, two, one, two, behind a yellow blind... It is of lying and hearing this splash and seeing this light, and of feeling, it is almost impossible that I should be here; of feeling the purest ecstasy I can conceive... the feeling, as I describe it sometimes to myself, of lying in a grape and seeing through a film of semi-transparent yellow."

But DeSalvo is uninterested in Woolf as a writer except as the writing explicates sexual abuse. She says of this passage:

The fact of her own simple survival is what she remembers as having given her the purest ecstasy that she has known as a child. Her existence had been threatened from the very first days of her life. That moment of rapture was such an intense feeling for her, precisely because the more usual feeling for her, the 'normal' way that she experienced life as a child was 'the feeling... of lying in a grape and seeing through a film of semi-transparent yellow'... Children who have spent their lives in a state of chronic depression report precisely what Woolf describes.

Does DeSalvo not notice that Woolf's youthful ecstasy is not in opposition to but identical with feeling as if she is inside a grape—regardless of how depressing others might find that situation?

In spite of her imprecision, DeSalvo's impact has been considerable. At a major Virginia Woolf conference in the mid-nineties, participants wrangled over Woolf's biography: Whom did she love more, Leonard Woolf or Vita Sackville-West? Participants interested in formal aspects of Woolf's writing found no forum for discussion—as if her formal experimentation did not itself create a "women's language" to undermine hierarchical discourse. DeSalvo herself was supposed to appear at this conference, but she cancelled; a scholar known for her benevolence chalked it up to shin splints, saying "I've told her not to walk around New York in leather soled shoes!"

Shin splints may have spared DeSalvo a trip to the Midwest, but they have not slowed her industry. Her most recent production is Melymbrosia, an early version of Woolf's first published novel, The Voyage Out (1915). Actually, DeSalvo first published her reconstruction of Melymbrosia in 1982; now she has published it again with a new introduction. She claims that Melymbrosia is "a bolder rendering" of The Voyage Out, which Woolf declined to publish for fear that its treatment of sexual abuse, sexism, classism, and imperialism would attract censure.

Insofar as the two versions are different, Melymbrosia is more pointed than The Voyage Out, in ways that might support DeSalvo's thesis. For instance, when Melymbrosia's Helen Ambrose looks at her sleeping niece, Rachel Vinrace, she feels pity "Because you have suffered something in secret, and will have to suffer more." This line, possibly referring to child abuse, is not in The Voyage Out. Again, when Rachel has a repulsive nightmare after being kissed by a married man, Helen says, "No, I can't remember ever feeling that," suggesting that the dream signals a psychological disturbance related to sexual trauma. In The Voyage Out Helen thinks only that she is "really at a loss what to say," ascribing the dream to a mere sexual innocence that she does not feel it is her place to dispel. And in Melymbrosia, Rachel actually tells her friend Terence, to whom she will become engaged, that fear of men has been her first emotion, citing her father's bullying of her mother over money. For this passage, The Voyage Out substitutes a more abstract discussion of women's rights.

The two versions contain a few more discrepancies of this nature, and The Voyage Out adds several new transitional passages. The plots remain the same—there is no cowardly second ending rescuing Rachel from death by fever to disprove that she "is utterly unfit emotionally and intellectually to make her way through life because of her childhood," as DeSalvo describes her. Still, no one (not even DeSalvo) knows for sure whether Woolf envisioned Rachel as merely a victim of Victorian male tyranny or as an incest survivor who dies because, symbolically if not literally, incest kills.

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Lance Olsen
FC2 ($13.95)

by Rochelle Ratner

Far too little literature has focused on couples who consciously elect to remain childless. Until the 1990s, the subject was basically taboo, in conversation as well as the printed word. Or, especially when a male writer approached the subject, as Edward Albee did in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf and the more recent The Play About the Baby, we are introduced to characters that might best be described as dysfunctional, with a power-play at the center of the drama.

The couple portrayed in Girl Imagined by Chance is precisely the opposite, so anxious to please each other, taking such delight in the time they spend together, that readers might well wish their own marriages were equally stable. That caring applies to the extended family as well, particularly between Andi and her grandmother. Now, at age 89, what Grannam wants most in life is a great-grandchild. What Grannam doesn't know is that not only does Andi (which also happens to be the name of Olsen's wife) not want children, but she's gone through surgery to be sure pregnancy doesn't happen by accident. So when Andi and her husband, the novel's narrator, move to Idaho, about as far away from New Jersey as they can get, they see no harm in telling the old woman she's pregnant. And before long are telling other friends back east as well.

The moment Andi announces she's pregnant, Grannam sends a check. Then another check. The couple decides to start a college fund, and in return, they send pictures of the sonogram (downloaded from a website). Looking further on the web, they learn what is to be expected during pregnancy, and Andi develops her own variations on cravings, cramps and nausea. They shop for baby furniture. They drive to the hospital in the middle of the night when Andi goes into labor. They send pictures of the baby (baby pictures of Andi, put through various photo programs, and of course Grannam remarks on the strong likeness). They drive to the mall and study how toddlers think and act, so they can give accurate reports. Not only do they plan a visit with the baby, they actually purchase plane tickets.

At its most simplistic level, Girl Imagined by Chance is a fast-paced, hysterical sitcom for thinking readers. Especially during the first half of the book (or before things really get out of hand), I found myself laughing out loud. Particularly memorable is the couple's conversation while at a suburban movie theater, watching "a lightweight spoof about the wacky adorable things kids do":

I don't want something forming inside me that literally makes me sick day after day. Sciatica. Vomiting. The unstoppable need to urinate.
She helped herself to a handful of your popcorn.
Constipation, she added. Varicose veins.
The young couple behind you shushed you.
Andi turned in her seat and shushed them back.

This conversation goes on for nearly three pages; the couple behind them finally moves their seat, and Andi realizes the woman's pregnant.

Olsen is a master at incorporating everyday mundanities into his narrative. We see his characters chopping wood, painting the house, shopping and cooking, all of which adds to the book's grounding in reality, creating an atmosphere of familiarity that encourages readers to join in the fun. A more traditional writer would probably end here, and the resulting novel would be not only enjoyable, it could be made into a film.

But Olsen is anything but traditional, and here is where his intelligence—not to mention his rooting in cyberpunk, metafiction, and the like—comes into play. This is, as much as anything else, a book about the image of reality. An epigraph proudly quotes a Minolta ad: "It's hard to tell where you leave off and the camera begins." We see him doctoring photos (there are photos prefacing the chapters), and Andi is a photographer. He tosses in reflective and theoretical comments by Diane Arbus, Ansel Adams, Roland Barthes, Eadweard Muybridge, and others. He encapsulates the history of photography. He repeats himself. Even Andi's selection of the name "Genia" for their daughter has its roots in philosophy. "As in phototogenic? you ask?" Then the next day the conversation continues:

Your body teaches you a little more every day.
There's a small genie in it, too, you point out after a while.
And, says Andi, the tiniest hint of genesis.
Huh, you say. Sure. And genes, too, of course. Don't forget genes. Nothing overstated, mind you, nothing overdone.

Eventually, language and concept take over, temporarily blotting out Genia's antics and the efforts of her stressed-out parents to control her. Here some readers may find themselves unnerved that the book has shifted gears, as many demand a continuous plot no matter how fascinating the language. But the beauty of this book is that, despite a place in the middle where the need to create and then destroy this baby bogs down, it works on both levels. And then some.

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Michael Chabon
Hyperion ($22.95)

by Stephen E. Abbott

Chabon's first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, though noticeably constrained by youthful inexperience and the gimcrackery of MFA rote, nonetheless held enfolded within its pages the flicker of something wonderful yet to be. Wonderboys, Chabon's second novel, born out of a five-and-a-half-year effort writing a never-published, over 1,000-page tome called Fountain City, is a hilarious and mournful hosanna to this failure. At once a lamentation of lost youth and idealisms and a paean to his own ripening as a writer and as a man, the book displayed a rare delicacy of language, a profound intelligence, and an intuitive gift for effortless humor and sincere emotion. Then, with The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay—which is indeed brilliant, epic, beautiful, and heartbreaking—Chabon brought home the Pulitzer and established his reputation as one of the best writers anywhere.

Summerland is Chabon's first children's book, and it is crafted with undeniable charm and a deep reverence for the conventions of the form. It is the familiar story of an awkward and outcast young boy, Ethan Feld, who, when forced by necessity and altered by circumstances, awakens into an unlikely hero. Feld, the "worst baseball player in the history of Clam Island, Washington," is recruited by Chiron Brown, a nine fingered, ex-Negro League ballplayer turned pan-dimensional scout specializing in the finding and training of champions. It turns out that Feld is needed to save the universe from the scheming of Coyote, the original folkloric trickster himself, who has devised a scheme to hasten the end of the world. Prematurely forced into heroic service, the pubescent Feld is flung into an alternate dimension governed by Native American mythology and the rules and regs of baseball to lead a rag-tag assortment of mediocre ballplayers against some of the universe's toughest teams. In this race to the bottom of the final inning, Feld must save his captive father and thwart Coyote's attempt to poison the Tree of Life.

A consciously constructed pastiche, Summerland is an assemblage of numerous far-flung odds and ends of Americana. Incorporating everything from sasquatch to baseball to Paul Bunyan to feathered Indians, Chabon has steeped his tale in our country's collective mythologies. In the end, however, the result is more maceration than distillation. What is so out of keeping here is that the first half of the book works marvelously, establishing a rich setting and an array of complex characters that are trademark Chabon, seemingly presaging even better things to come. As anyone who once played little league and sucked at it can verify, Chabon nails the feeling of hopeless deep-right, daisy-picking alienation that casts a pall over an otherwise sunny summer day. But as the story unfolds a strange kind of entropy takes hold; the plot moves quicker and quicker, all the while getting thinner and more scattered until it begins to resemble something approximating a big-budget blockbuster: several big, showy things happen all in a row, but without the depth or vision of the earlier pages.

Oscar Wilde once said, "Miracles always happen. That is why one cannot believe in them," and he might have been speaking of Summerland. Beyond the suspiciously providential plot (whenever a character gets in a pinch some improbable magic or escape route is conveniently introduced), the book culminates in a Deus ex Machina to end all Deus ex Machinas. The result is that many threads are left dangling. For example, Chabon establishes a binary theme wherein the apocalypse being played out in one dimension is mirrored by the destructive practices of a real estate developer, TransForm Properties, on the pristine shoreline of Clam Island. The dénouement of this subplot is given in a mere three sentences: "The bulldozers were gone, the earthmovers and backhoes, all the warning signs that had been thrown up by the minions of TransForm Properties. But that was not all. The birch trees had grown back, to very nearly their former stature, or else they had simply been replaced, in the flood of healing." Although such neat endings are often dark and ironic commentaries on human frailty and expectations, this does not appear to be the intention here. And after having introduced environmental themes as serious as pollution and over-development—realities, mind you, with potentially disastrous consequences for future generations—it seems irresponsible to leave children with the expectation that such difficulties can be readily averted by the unlikelihood of story-book miracles. Certainly, maintaining a sense of awe and mystery is essential, but when magic and miracles are too easily happened upon, little of lasting worth can remain. To Chabon's credit, the story is captivating, and there are many deft maneuvers and tight twists of plot as well as a genuine effort not to write down to his younger audience, but the overall picture hangs too crookedly, marring its effect.

Perhaps Summerland should have been written as three books, for it seems too rushed, too small, as if it were a diversion or a side effort and not the main project. Still, the reader cannot help but delight in the disarming coziness and straightforward beauty of Chabon's writing. What's there on the page is great stuff, but without the scope or fullness of a Narnia or Middle Earth, or even of Kavalier and Clay's New York. As it goes along what's missing from Summerland begins to assert itself, to slowly creep its way into the tale, until you cannot help but wonder what might have been—those saddest words of tongue or pen.

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James Tate
Verse Press ($23)

by Melissa Maerz

Beep: The word worries the electrical engineer. Lately, whenever he greets his coworker Skip, the latter man greets him with the onomatopoeic outburst. Never how are you? or good morning or even just a nice little hello. It's beep-or sometimes zow, or when things are really bad, mutti-mutti-mutti-mutt-mutt. The two men will be sitting together, drinking beers, relaxing, playing croquet, or talking about Skip's kids, when a Tourretic yawp spontaneously erupts from his lips. These moments make the engineer think too much. Are the children beepers, too? Do miniscule insect-angels prattle about in Skip's head? And if so, why can't the engineer hear them? Such thoughts trouble him. "These are dangerous times," he thinks. And then, as if this is not a satisfactory explanation, he himself lets out a honk.

Honk: The word exhilarates James Tate, author of the short story "Beep." For Tate, honk is the reveille of our times, a signifier of modern life's complete disconnect. In his collection Dreams of a Robot Dancing Bee, every short story honks: None of the characters speak the same language, and some of the characters simply can't speak at all. In "Hedges, By Sam D'Amico," a lifelong plant expert can't bring himself to write so much as a paragraph about the titular shrubs. "Our Country Cousins" finds an urban man struggling to describe Tofutti to his niece. The nervous husband of "Raven of Dawn," who plans on leaving his wife, can only express his guilt by staring into the hole in his backyard. It's a predicament that, appropriately, Tate leaves largely unexplained, save for a single statement by the engineer in "Beep": "I was on the verge of being afraid," he admits, "because the continuity of any conversation could break down at any moment into nonsensical animal noises, which is not really fair to the animal world. Skip's voice was sand in the gears of life, grating and, ultimately, destroying the machine by which we live-making sense, cause and response irrelevant."

To a certain degree, Tate, too, has broken down the hermeneutic apparatus he's established for himself. Best known for his numerous books of surreal poetry—including Worshipful Company of Fletchers, which won a National Book Award in 1997, and 1991's Pulitzer Prize-winning Selected Poems—he has, in the past, refused any attempt to demonstrate his ideas plainly. Through the image, say, of a human head transformed into a multi-limbed pumpkin ("50 Views of Tokyo"), or a depiction of a society in which religious leaders are selected according to who throws up ("How the Pope is Chosen"), Tate made his fantastically absurdist visions vividly clear. But in Dreams of a Robot Dancing Bee, his first foray into short story writing, he chooses a voice closer to that of Raymond Carver or John Cheever than to Ionesco or Baudelaire. Consequently, he turns the model he's created for his poetry on its pumpkin head.

It's no small task to explain the surrealism of everyday life in easily recognizable terms, but Tate still manages to embody the daily grind's bizarre qualities within his every word. He hints that the pleasure of communication lies not only in his readers' ability to interpret his stories, but also in their enjoyment of his words' organic sounds—the poetry in his prose. One of Tate's protagonists, a Senator who can't decide why his life isn't what it could be, finds his two main obstacles in gibberish—"mush/not mush"—which he repeats to himself. The words are glorious abstractions of real life problems, as are Tate's stories. And that's what draws us to them. We may find the messy relationships and personal shortfalls detailed in Dreams of a Robot Dancing Bee to be the stuff of everyday life, but Tate's language makes each of them hyper-real. Though we may not quite understand a narrator's epiphany when phrased as "my husband is the raven of dawn," we can understand her (and Tate's) quest to make meaning out of nonsense—perhaps ultimately the very point of "everyday life." Tate details such simultaneously obscure and lucid moments eloquently, almost expertly—and for that we can only say beep. Beep, honk.

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Richard Schweid
University of North Carolina Press ($24.95)

by Allison Slavick

Pity the poor American who shuns the eel as a savory meal or snack. Eels—both the adults, which may be fried, boiled, or smoked or prepared in a mish-mash of other regional dishes, and the immature elver stage—are enjoyed throughout Europe and Asia where two billion dollars are spent on them annually. Historically, many have weighed in on the subject: Aristotle, Juvenal, Samuel Pepys, and Thoreau all had opinions about eels. Günter Grass included eels in The Tin Drum, in a scene in which a horse's head is used as bait—eels apparently being frequently found on drowned corpses.

All eels of the American and European freshwater species originate in the Sargasso Sea, and the Japanese species begins its life similarly in the Pacific. The tiny larvae make their way on ocean currents (it takes one to three years) to freshwater rivers where they transform into the bottom-dwelling eels that you're thinking of right now. After 20 years or so they return to the ocean to mate and die. Not much more is known about the natural history of eels. Adults have never been captured in the open ocean, and though they can be raised in captivity from their larval stage, they have never mated in captivity—indeed, they have never been observed mating in the wild.

The mystery and intrigue of eels is brought to life in the non-linear, picturesque stories of Consider the Eel. A kind of eel subculture exists in the rural estuaries of North Carolina, where "watermen" (the people who fish for eels) and eel distributors wouldn't allow an eel to touch their lips, but make a tidy living from shipping live eels to Europe and Asia. We learn that in northern Spain eels are intertwined with the lives of Basque separatists, who pay upwards of $60 a serving for a tasty bowl of the transparent elvers. In northern Ireland, where elvers costs $150 a pound, a fisherman's cooperative assists the elvers in the 26-mile journey upstream by trapping them and transporting them in a live-haul tank mounted on a truck. They are released in Lough Neagh, one of the five largest lakes in Europe, and home of the tastiest eel in Europe. This tastiness is attributed to the eels's primary diet of mayflies.

Most of the people who have eels in their lives—the people who fish for them, export them, sell them at fish markets and cook them—have been doing so for decades and provide charming (but not romanticized) glimpses and friendly asides of old world concerns. Richard Schweid has written a delicious stew of images, history, biology, and natural history of an animal that most of us haven't considered. Historical recipes, a bibliography, and a helpful index complete the package.

In the U.S., eel may be found occasionally on the menu of a Chinese restaurant, in sushi or as a bouillabaisse in French restaurants. Pollution and overfishing are contributing to the demise of eel and European and Asian markets are relying more and more on U.S. exports. Try some before it's too late.

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Pamela Petro
Arcade Publishing ($25.95)

by Lynnell Edwards

In Sitting Up With the Dead Pamela Petro has undertaken a Chaucer-esque pilgrimage through the American South to report on the culture and the people who preserve it through traditions of storytelling. Hoping to understanding how the South has become that great national "Other," she explains in the "Prologue" how stories are a key to understanding ourselves as well as the South: "Stories provide the connective tissue of a community, a region, or even a big, overgrown household like the South. They link the skin of the present to the unseen organs of the past, binding them into a continually shape-shifting body, by turns beautiful and terrible and occasionally—disturbingly—reminiscent of looking into a mirror." Petro has outlined an ambitious project, and like The Canterbury Tales, the collection allows the voices and the tales of the tellers to sing. It falls short, however, in resolving the disparate themes of Southern identity that Petro finds mirrored in herself and in American culture at large.

The book is composed of four separate "journeys" and Petro's research and references suggest that she has done her homework. The result is a comprehensive survey of tellers and tales that ranges from as far north as central Kentucky to as far south as Florida and the Louisiana Bayou, from the Carolina coast, through the Appalachians and down into the desolate Georgia and Alabama interiors.

She begins in Atlanta, the "New South," where Akbar Imhotep, a professional storyteller, tells the story of Brer Rabbit and the tar baby. With this tale the format and mood of the book is established: Petro picks up the trail of a new teller, navigates her way through a landscape of strange food, bad weather, and suspicious lodging, and muses along the way in alternately academic, personal, and humorous ways. She finally finds the pilgrim she has been seeking, and discovers he or she is not quite what she had imagined, often startled at the teller's level and professional demeanor or advanced education or both.

There is no single strong narrative thread, however two individuals and Petro's relationship with them do provide some urgency and impetus. Early in the first journey Petro meets Vicki Vedder, a professional storyteller who adopts the persona of "Granny Griffin"—the Depression-era matriarch of an extended and poor central Georgia family, each with individual quirks and stories that "Granny" preserves. Curiously, Petro does not get a story from Vedder during the first meeting, but their communication continues through the summer via an e-mail conversation wherein Vedder contributes a philosophical perspective on the distinctiveness and tragedy of Southern culture.

Typically, Vedder's responses are offered as the philosophical meat of the book, and while certainly her perspective has a certain authority, it lacks sufficient emotion or intellect to be satisfying. In speaking to the persistent pain caused by generations of racism, for instance, she writes: "There is a common element that connects us (Southerners, black and white)—and I hope it is what disconnects us from innocent Northerners or Westerners. In the South, the blacks and whites are intertwined in wrongdoing—a vicious cycle of hurt...When one person (a family or society) commits a violent act on some other person, both people end up hurt. It may take some time for the offender to recognize this, or he may never, but what happens is that the air becomes filled with tension and pain, a spiritual hurt...In my opinion the South is full of misunderstanding about itself." While this observation is not untrue, and is perhaps even a generous way to avoid specific or political blame, it certainly seems simplified.

The other individual at the center of the various threads is Ray Hicks, a singular figure who tells "Jack Tales" (a version of the "trickster" tale) from his home in the hills of North Carolina. Petro dedicates the entire "Third Journey" to "Ray's Tale" and the afternoon she spends with him. Hicks, a National Heritage Fellow who has been the subject of other academic study, represents a mystical embodiment of the past and the present, the living and the dead, for Petro. She remarks, awed, "In his speech—I found I could understand most of what he said—I could actually hear the past. It was a miracle. Ray's tongue and teeth used the same ordinary air I was breathing to produce sounds otherwise unheard for three hundred years."

The rest of the pilgrims that Petro encounters along the way are as varied and as quirky as the landscape of the South she travels. There are ghost stories and trickster tales, tragic love stories and West African mythology. There are creatures as fantastical as singing turtles, flying Africans, and talking corpses. The landscape is alternately urban and rural, lush and barren. And there are persistent themes that emerge, particularly the idea that the storyteller tells a story specifically for an audience and that each story somehow chooses its listener. Petro also uses her experiences and the stories she hears to suggest that the dead are with us, at least in the South, and that the horizon between the here and the hereafter is permeable.

There are dimensions to this book that are fascinating. In an emergent way, Petro's collection considers how local culture bends and shapes archetypal narratives. She showcases, for instance two versions of a similar tale: "Ta'een Po" and "Taily Po." In the multiple versions of this tale there are common elements: a devil creature raids a poor resident's garden or home, loses his tail in the process, which the resident later eats in a stew, and then the devil returns for his tail and eats the farmer as revenge. The story varies according to the local culture and geography and the differences are telling.

There are also hints here at how stories can provide a subaltern map of culture and ethnic identity. The American South provides a particularly rich mix in this case; buried in stories are the dark history of the slave trade, the religion of West Africa, the Creole culture of South Louisiana, and the remnants of Anglo-Saxon history that persist in the speech and rituals of Appalachia. Even an emerging thesis about how the weather shapes the culture is a fascinating subtext to which Petro occasionally points. The South, on every coast and plain, is plagued by storms and temperatures of Old Testament proportions, and it is not difficult to argue that the supernatural must be at work, both aiding and assaulting those in its way.

But the work as a whole falls short of satisfying any of these theses. There is not enough of Petro to be truly sympathetic or engaging, and only enough of the stories themselves to hint at what otherwise might be concluded about culture, race, history, or politics. There is certainly precedent for this subjective approach to ethnography—the sort undertaken by other pilgrims to the South like Tony Horowitz in Confederates in the Attic or John Berendt in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil—but to hear of Petro's every irritation with the heat, chiggers, a pulled back, inedible high-fat food, or poor directions is to flirt with the irrelevant, particularly in a book that has already proposed more theses than it can comfortably resolve.

And so the book itself is a cautionary tale for those who would chronicle the wildly divergent sweeps of history and culture manifested in folk stories: mirrors not only reflect; they also distort and even blind those who use them as guideposts. In Petro's "overgrown household" of the South, there are closets and skeletons and corners and cobwebs that must still be cleaned before anyone can see or hear clearly what is there.

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Sheila Munro
McClelland & Stewart Ltd. ($27.95)

by Meleah Maynard

When Sheila Munro was growing up, she and her younger sister Jenny would sit on the living-room floor and watch television while their mother, Canadian author Alice Munro, sat in a chair behind them reading a book. She was with them, but she wasn't with them. It was a feeling the girls would have throughout their childhood. While their father was detached in his own way, he did embrace his role in the family. He expressed great pride and interest in things like choosing and decorating the house they lived in and playing with his children when he got home from work. Their mother never seemed to care about such things. Sure, she did the laundry, waited on her kids when they were sick, and cooked dinner just like other moms did. But it was always clear that what she really wanted to be doing was writing at the little desk in the corner of her bedroom.

"She was like the young mother in [the well-known Alice Munro story] Miles City Montana, who sees herself as a detached observer," Sheila Munro writes, before quoting the passage in that story where she thinks her mother could just as well have been describing herself.

In my house, I seemed to be often looking for a place to hide…so that I could get busy at my real work, which was a sort of wooing of distant parts of myself. I lived in a state of siege, always losing just what I wanted to hold on to. But on trips there was no difficulty. I could be talking to Andrew, talking to the children and looking at whatever they wanted me to look at…and all the time these bits and pieces would be flying together inside me. The essential composition would be achieved. This made me hopeful and lighthearted. It was being a watcher that did it. A watcher, not a keeper.

A self-described weird little kid, Alice Munro never went in for ordinary things. She didn't ride bikes or roller skate. She didn't have friends to speak of. She was writing and planning a lengthy historical novel by the time she was eleven. Her parents were poor and she often argued violently with her mother, who died of a form of Parkinson's disease when Munro was a teenager.

Alice Munro had not especially desired a husband or children. But there were certain things young women did in the 1950s and in this respect, Munro followed the norm. Fighting to keep her writing under wraps in order to appear as normal as possible, she always left her typewriter to answer the door when the neighbor ladies came by unannounced to drink tea and gossip. Her husband expected that much; a demanding man with a volatile temper, Jim Munro liked the fact that his wife was an artist, but only to a point.

In 1997 Alice Munro asked her eldest daughter Sheila to write her biography. Sheila, 42 years old with two children and a sizeable complex about the fact that she wasn't a writer in her own right, didn't immediately jump at the idea. Six months later she decided she would do it, but not as a biography. She proposed writing a book about what it was like growing up as Alice Munro's daughter, noting, "For years I had been writing vignettes about my own life, but I could never find any framework into which they would fit; they seemed to be going nowhere, and I was growing more and more frustrated. It occurred to me that perhaps I could use a memoir as a framework."

The idea seemed perfect. All of her life, Sheila had read her mother's stories and seen her family's history played out on paper, as characters reenacted things like the tumultuous relationship her parents navigated for years before finally divorcing, or the time 4-year-old Jenny nearly drowned in a hotel swimming pool on a family vacation. Maybe Sheila believed that telling her mother's story from her perspective as a daughter would help the child whose existence has always been eclipsed by her mother's ethereal presence come into her own.

In the book, however, it soon becomes obvious that the author is still struggling with some complex feelings about her relationship to her mother. At times, it's hard not to feel like we're coldly climbing atop an eager and open-armed Sheila to get a better look at her more interesting mother. But thankfully, this is no get-revenge-on-mom book. Sheila Munro clearly loves and respects her mother. She's as interested in what makes Alice Munro tick as we are, and that's why we aren't really interested in her. Sheila saves the rush of feelings of jealousy and inadequacy until the last few pages of the book: "She is the gold standard by which everything else is measured, to whom everyone else is compared," she writes, "And I can understand why. I do not disagree. It's just that it makes her into an icon and I don't suppose anyone wants their mother, or their father for that matter, to become an icon. What is there to do with an icon besides worshipping it, or ignoring it, or smashing it to pieces?"

By writing this book, Sheila Munro has answered that question for herself: she's trying to live with an icon the best way she can. Alice Munro fans will have a hard time putting this memoir down. Yet there is so much more we'd like to know about this woman who made headlines in the Canadian papers in the 1960s—"Housewife Finds Time to Write Short Stories."

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Milli Graffi
Translated by Michael Gizzi and Giuliana Chamedes
Burning Deck Press ($5)

by Chris Glomski

Embargoed Voice, a sampling of poems by Milanese poet Milli Graffi, constitutes a one-off departure from Burning Deck's regular offerings of recent German and French poetry, though not from its commitment to bringing out works that are engaged in rigorous experimentation. In the 1970s Milli Graffi was part of the Italian avant-garde "poesia totale" movement, and the selections offered here certainly evince a poet of an experimental, out-on-a-limb sensibility.

The opener, "Take One: Jazz Backdrop," launches itself sequentially across roughly half the booklet. As the title leads one to expect, there is a certain jazziness to Graffi's lines—the poems sprawl as if scored on the pages, with fluxing signatures, syncopations, and motifs—but the most palpable scrim in this sequence appears to come out of Graffi's background as a translator of Darwin. "Take One" is set on a sort of Galápagos which, in turn, situates "the landscape of meaning" encircled by the "bitter landowning sea" (i.e. the pages, spaces within which meaning is demarcated and defined). Words are likened to "toads offer[ing] themselves at the junction," yet despite this gesture the poet recognizes something predatory in their nature: they "gargle, grab you." As if leapfrogging upon their backs, an "I" enters the poem and seeks to locate in humankind's capacity for language, and specifically poetic language, something akin to a Heideggerean rift—design, although here it takes on a decidedly less mystical aura, cast as a mere vagary of evolution: "art is memory burned // sediment / of the whim / that descends the branches / and divides us together." These last lines figure as the poem's chorus, and the paradox they express is at the core of its investigations.

Graffi's speaker in this poem wears many hats, sometimes all at once: naturalist, phenomenologist, feminist, linguist, and archeologist. "Take One" finds her out doing fieldwork, sifting through the aforementioned "sediment"—it's as if the words of the poem are shards that have turned up in her sieve. "I search for the GORILLA-WORD" she writes, and her search puts her poem through the motions of confession ("I hear it understand / but not always"); pleading ("lay an embargo on my voice it's costing me"), and humorous reflection ("who knows if by grunting the pig interrogates himself / upon his true nature // certainly I / ask my overladen / grunt / to proffer some surprises"). But even her humor is pressed into the service of a serious business, one which needs to go deep into the objects under the poet's lens, whether they be "mountain pink," an "unthinkable absolute," the "first vowel" or the "I" itself: "Darwin knew it," Graffi writes, "poetry opens only when pressure is applied."

"Take One: Jazz Backdrop" is a polyvalent piece of writing that asks for, and rewards, successive readings. Reading Gaffi one is reminded of the dialogue the Italians have been carrying on with German and French theorists; her concern with gender and the figure of the "arch that enfolds and sustains" in "Take One" appears to engage some of Cixous's writings, and the poem's use of "sediment" puts one in mind of Derrida's "cinders." But as the "whim / that descends the branches / and divides us together" suggests, the work in Embargoed Voice is mainly preoccupied with what Gaston Bachelard has called "definitive intuitions," those distinctions drawn from gender, race, or any other dialectics of inside/outside, you and I, as is apparent in Gaffi's poem "Seven Rooms": "correspondence / between what you / HAVE / within and what there / IS / without." Gaffi writes a poetry that wants to pry open these divisional spaces and to ferret out "hidden misogynies / …hidden racism / … hidden ballots."

In rare moments the poet's obvious intelligence lapses into something like cleverness, as in the poem "Larval Shots," whose elbow-nudging refrain wants to make sure we understand that "when it comes to larvae / you don't want to fool around." At her best, however, Gaffi goes about her experiments with a sense of awe that can get Whitmanic in scale: "here's the job / a word we can name // grass burning in the electric inferno of midday […] // oh the / lyrical nameable watermelon word."

Embargoed Voice is, unfortunately, a monolingual edition. But the original Italian texts I managed to track down indicate that translators Michael Gizzi and Giuliana Chamedes have made every effort to render high-fidelity translations; they've taken pains to mirror Gaffi's line-breaks and to replicate the spatial appearance of the originals. If some sense of the interplay between "The String and the Beads" is lost in the English gerund's inability to designate number, it is more than made up for in the many shimmering passages within the longer poems. The challenges these must have posed are evident; the agility of their English speaks for itself-and is a credit to the translators. For those with an interest in Italian poetry, the European avant-garde, or experimental poetry in general, Embargoed Voice is well worth its five-spot cover price.

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

Ted Joans
Drawings by Laura Corsiglia
Ekstasis Editions ($15.95)

by John Olson

As Buckminster Fuller once noted, one ball cannot zoom around alone in the Universe. Without otherness, there is no consciousness and no direction. If there were only one entity-say it is a sphere called "me"—there would be no Universe: no otherness: no awareness: no consciousness: no direction. When one otherness complements another we have synergy: dollops of morning light bedazzling us all with hope and coral. Poet Ted Joans and artist Laura Corsiglia have pooled their respective resources to create a synergistic garden of words and illustrations, a magnetic field of surrealist energies mingling lines of visual fascination with lines of exuberant be-bop quincaillerie.

Quincaillerie is French for hardware. I find it not only richly onomatopoetic but redolent of Joans's work in general: quirky and jubilantly oral, keyed to the jingle-jangle jambalaya of speech. It is also the title of one of the poems in this collection. Joans's influences are as multifarious and multicultural as he is; his work is a conflation of jazz and surrealism. Laura Corsiglia, Joans's partner and sometime collaborator, is Canadian. She says she was "raised in northern British Columbia's Nass Valley surrounded by grizzly bears." Her drawings are a curious blend of the surrealist exquisite corpse and the totemic figures of west coast Native American design. Surprise and the quest for the marvelous are hallmarks of the surrealist enterprise, and Corsiglia's drawings are full of that: a woman whose shoulder and hair merge into birds, a totemic bear with human legs and pubis, her feet booted in upside down curtains, a man with the head of an eagle, solid legs delineated with heavily inked lines, one foot human, the other a bear claw, the long beak of a bird in the groin with its beak pointing up like an erection. The bizarre metamorphism resulting from the surrealist exquisite corpse is synergized by the inherent metamorphism of Northwest Indian art, then given an added boost with Joans's quincaillerie.

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Pattie McCarthy
Apogee Press ($12.95)

by Catherine Daly

A number of texts which relate to books of hours, heretic testimony, cabinet plays, and other early vernacular writing have recently come to press. Pattie McCarthy's new book, bk of (h)rs, joins Cole Swensen's Such Rich Hour and a new translation of Rilke's The Book of Hours. Because books of hours automatically problematize time, text, and prayer, all of which have a relationship to the internet, there are poetry books of hours online: Charles Alexander's A Book of Hours, Wendy Battin's Lucid Dreaming, and the collaborative The Book of Hours of Madame de Lafayette edited by Christy Sheffield Stanford. McCarthy and her publisher have generously made samples of this book available online: look up the poems to see how wonderfully they occur. Buy the book because it is a beautiful book which has been devised as a book.

The first section of McCarthy's book is focused on beauty, and is divided into matins, lauds, prime, terce, sext, nones, vespers, and compline, as the monastery day is marked by bell-ringing and prayer. The section is entitled "bell (h)rs." The "(p)salter" of the second section refers to the psalms in the Bible. The psalter is relevant to new poetry because it has a peculiar genre or genres. The third section is entitled "bk of (h)rs." It is poetry in prose. The poems in the three sections are visibly different, and each has its own texture. Each weaves medieval words, timeless scenes, and contemporary ideas together. In the first section poems, displayed in two columns, odd words like "pirn" and "pluvious" complement more ordinary survivals like "groan." Etymology appears again and again as an idea and as a strategy. A heretic is mentioned in passing by date, "burned one june thirteen-ten" (Marguerite Porete, in "lauds" ). The second section is the most disjunctive, because detail with a particular modernity is used: a factual comment, such as "the great vowel shift c. twelfth," is followed by an image which can only be from the twentieth century, "cigarette dinnertime. in the year of nostalgic cellar / wartime American swing." In the third section, each poem begins with an observation which blurs into a statement about poetics and language: "gun moll complex (or loose adaptation thereof). chance-medley of signs, chorus lines." or "alphabet of houses along a canal. and the alphabet of tools that made and unmade them."

McCarthy joins a post-confessional focus on information of various sorts as content in poetry with the still-increasing awareness that non-canonical texts from the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and "early modern" Baroque period were written, spoken, or used by women. She calls attention to survivals in the language which indicate survivals in the way we perceive our days and read old texts. She first immerses us in language, and a particular language of time and special case, creating a sense of intimacy and identification rather than identity. "[T]he clerestory as choice & not-choice" in "matins" is also a window in a cloister. A woman becomes "anyone who grew up behind / the wreckage of a pastoral screen door" in the following poem, "lauds." The word "door" changes the screen of a harem window, a Japanese Imperial Court, or a monastery into a contemporary screen for keeping the outside out and the inside in, the screen on the doorway of the sublime. Then she matches and mismatches her present situations, what she knows from experience, with images from the past, what she knows from reading and studying language. She is both writer and reader: her subject matter is both public and private. Finally, McCarthy establishes what she thinks about the women she reads and writes about, "glances and hair down, their bodies produce no sound." Their images, languages, and writings speak through McCarthy's prophecy of survival.

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