William Gibson
Putnam ($25.95)

by S. Clayton Moore

With his eighth book, Pattern Recognition, futurist William Gibson opens new doors while resolutely keeping a finger on the pulse of the electronic underground. His female protagonist lends a cohesive sensitivity to a novel that fairly throbs with pulses of electronic intensity that shoot through a world where identification as well as information has become the currency of choice.

By setting the story in a version of present reality—one year after the September 11th attacks—he has also produced a novel that is vastly more accessible to the general reader than the cybernetic cowboys and net runners of his recent books Idoru and All Tomorrow's Parties. These observations don't mean, however, that technophobes are welcome. If you've never been Googled, fear computer viruses as if they were Ebola, or your workstation bellows, "You've got mail," then this may not be the place for you.

Gibson writes, instead, for those of who revel in Bondian gadgets, German engineering, and the indescribable underground brotherhood of 'cool.' The author has never talked down to his reading audience, from the very beginnings of the award-winner Neuromancer to the globe-trotting adventures of Pattern Recognition's Caye Pollard—her name a none-too-subtle nod to his first novel's data thief, Case, as well as to the cult surrounding the prophet Edgar Cayce.

Gibson also reprises some of the same themes here as Max Barry's blistering satire Jennifer Government, in which marketing has so corrupted the world that individuals take the last names of the corporations for which they work. Cayce's fears are much subtler, however, and operate something on the level of the virus-model marketing at the heart of the story. A design consultant for the new century, she uses her intuitive feeling for invading the public consciousness to advise massive ad campaigns. With the eerie drawback of a psychic allergy to aggressive marketing, she's both enraptured and trapped by the global aura of fashion, wearing design-free and timeless clothing while falling sick from everything from Tommy Hilfiger to a simple Nike slash across her field of vision.

Pattern Recognition holds the same dramatic tension as Gibson's previous novels. Cayce has a missing father, a notoriously wealthy and enigmatic client, and a growing obsession with "the footage," a series of seemingly interconnected fragments distributed through the Internet. Events launch our heroine on a search for the mysterious filmmaker and the meaning of the footage.

Within that idea lies much of the appeal of Gibson's books as well: the search for meaning. Unlike the standard throwaway techno-thriller, Gibson creates the sense of the world underneath, something akin to what Cayce calls the "mirror-world," she finds in foreign travel. Another great pleasure in reading these stories is in the minutiae of their exotic locales. Gibsonian heroes jump between cities with as little thought as they give to crossing a street; black cabs in retrogressive London and the shining chrome and brilliant neon of Tokyo can coexist in the same chapter. Between the lines are the details and over the details pour the story.

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Joan London
Grove Press ($23)

by Bonnie Blader

When I taught English to high-school students, I used to ask of each male protagonist we encountered, "Could this character have been female? Could this have been a woman's story?" Of Holden Caulfield, of Conrad's narrator in The Shadow Line, of Camus's stranger, of Knowles's Gene Forester in A Separate Peace, students repeatedly said no, no, never—these were not women's stories.

Edith, Joan London's protagonist in her novel Gilgamesh, has internalized the same prohibition, despite growing up outside local conventions in Nunderup, Australia. Her father is dead, and her mother, unable to "take the life," is useful only in calling in the "chooks" at night; she and her sister scrape out a thin life on an unforgiving spit of land overwhelmed by the sound of the sea. Although unschooled, Edith is aware of a yearning to find "her story in the great swirling darkness of the world." It is when the visitors come—her cousin Leopold and his Armenian friend and driver, Aram, smelling of spices as exotic to her as the ancient cities they describe—that Edith has words for what the world seems to insist upon: "She had no part in the adventure. Women had no freedom to go adventuring."

Gilgamesh, however, sends Edith on a journey as improbable, and as full of youthful willfulness and naivete, as any archetypal journey in epic literature. Her baby son Jim, who is held up at birth and "spanked for being her child," is the vehicle of her final break with Nunderup: he is "a weapon in her arms, a source of power." She will go to Armenia—a place no more real than the color green on a map Leopold showed her—to reunite with Jim's father, Aram. It is 1937; she'll need the luck of the gods and the resources of her own "childhood solitude" to survive.

Underscoring the mythic quality of the story are chance encounters that feel like both providence and dream. Bickford, a "local carrier" in Nunderup, shows up in his jeep at the maternity hospital to smoke a cigarette just as Edith realizes she must take Jim and flee if she is to keep him. London marks this "the first of her and Jim's escapes"; in England, Leopold's mother sees that her niece won't be stopped, and hands her an envelope of money on which is scrawled, "The gods love those who are brave." The final section of the novel begins with the question, "Why did you come?" and the answer, "Because I was needed."

London can be usefully compared to Marilynne Robinson, who in Housekeeping also created female characters profoundly outside the conventions of the lives lived around them. Both writers, too, share a style marked by restraint. London keeps her sentences short; visual imagery is intensely rendered, yet compressed; Edith travels in closely noticed hermetic worlds. Because she is so unreflective, the reader isn't sure what she will do. She is authentically vulnerable; she moves in the direction of freedom and agency without a sense of consequence. All she has is her core. She is, in this, like Enkidu form the original Gilgamesh—a child of the wild. Of all of the doubles offered in both works—Gilgamesh and Enkidu, Leopold and Aram, Edith and Aram, Edith and Jim—it is the double of Edith the untaught and at risk and Edith in possession, at last, of herself that matters most in this beautifully realized work.

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Michael Disend
Green Integer ($12.95)

by Michael Price

Paraphrasing Frank O'Hara, the poet Ted Berrigan said "works of art that are not very amusing are usually not very amusing because they are not any good." He goes on to say that "amusing" does not mean funny, but rather something that "turns your muses on. That it makes you respond to it. Your muses respond to its muses—it is amusing to read a poem like 'Kaddish,' for example, which is about a rather gruesome subject matter. It's amusing in that it's beautiful, it's wonderful, it's gorgeous, it's touching. It's also horrifying, it's scary, it's vulgar. It's shocking."

My reasoning for this extensive quotation is to call attention to Michael Disend's primordial sutra-novel of 1969, Stomping the Goyim, recently reissued by Green Integer. Disend's prose works so very deftly at amusing, touching, and horrifying, all the while managing to be beautiful, wonderful, and totally original. This is possible because it is a book of truth—not in the sense of "not false" but rather as a force of purity, a work capable of returning the nonexistent to existence, so that what is gone comes back. To try and approach it with the standard academic crash test goggles is to miss the subtlety of wisdom beneath its unrelenting record of the post-psychedelic fallout, replete with draft dodge, poly-sexual revolt, and poetic beauty. Disend acknowledges and embraces the dichotomies: "Bad self can be assuaged. There is a path. Bad self is what this book is about.... But changes keep us dancing. Love has so many possibilities."

Like Kerouac's novels, Stomping the Goyim is a work of poetic fiction. Disend's prose, with its sure handling of wit and ironic dialogue, moves muscularly across the battlefields of a country ravaged by spiritual war on all fronts. No one is spared: Jew, Goy, Wop, Homo, Bimbo, Nigger, Honkey—all make their appearance in the book's depiction of a dark and trembling time.

Liz the localized troll did well: hooded her face and wept until, led by an irate, ring-tailed Arthur Ogle, my congregation reeled in from the living room. And they stood there, staring, captivated by Liz's dyke haircut, the tears. More—they gazed quivering, they leered blasphemously. A character delineation occurred. A paralysis in cotton panties. As the Bihders knew the menace of the Spoddy circle, we saw their teeth melt in the thrashing energy of dope . . .

Organized Bihder religion: a horde of women thrusting themselves upon the universal cock.

"I LIKE TO BITE!"

Although some readers may be tempted to write off such original and seemingly difficult prose as a mere cut-up of the stream of consciousness, what is actually at work here is a flexible, open receptivity, a direct feed from the absolute CREATIVE. There is a non-conscious sensitivity here that must not be missed: for it fails not to amuse in every sense of the word.

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Paco Ignacio Taibo II
Translated by Bill Verner
Cinco Puntos Press ($13.95)

by Kevin Carollo

Detective Héctor Belascoarán Shayne is not all there: in Frontera Dreams, he often looks in the "mirror without recognizing himself". By the time we reach this novel, the seventh featuring Taibo's beleaguered sleuth, he has endured myriad wounds, slashes, and lacerations. Although the action of a Taibo mystery stays close to the body, Héctor's injuries also document a larger history of what makes society unrecognizable to itself.

Frontera Dreams involves the search for a missing woman in the borderlands of Mexico. Héctor knows movie star Natalia Smith-Corona from childhood, when her last name was Ramirez. Natalia has named herself after a typewriter, becoming "The one she always was. The one she never was"—just like Héctor, just like Mexico. Through such depictions, Taibo stresses the impossibility of resolving the contradictions of life. This particular tome explores the televisual qualities of Mexico's frontier. Because the act of real life is most dramatically performed where languages, memories, and stories compete for center stage, where "You belonged and yet you did not", the novel keeps us—and Héctor—guessing about the nature and power of the "strange mix of territories" that make up the borderland.

Because of such concerns, the plot of a Taibo mystery may seem rather loose and incidental. The narrator cannot resist the allure of multiple metaphors and meta-commentary, and he revels in the spectral intangibility of everything--"A phantom detective on a phantom hunt for a phantom woman." Finding the phantom woman is only the beginning, however, for history is what we lose, forget, rediscover, retell, and lose again: the ultimate mystery novel.

In general, Héctor represents Mexico in its soap-operatic splendor precisely because a Mexican detective is "by definition a laughable solitary accident." The anomaly is the rule, and the incidental leads to the palace of wisdom. For Taibo, that palace is a strange borderland where stories can be retold until they sound reminiscent, but not the same. Frontera Dreams shows Taibo at his borderline best, in the heart of the heart of the country.

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Cathy Park Hong
Hanging Loose Press ($13)

by Gabriella Ekman

These days it is common to speak of the "borderland" tongues of second- and third-generation immigrant Americans—the hybrid linguistic pyrotechnics and "doubled consciousness" that result from growing up in two cultures at once. Cathy Park Hong is Korean-American, and Translating Mo'um, her fierce debut book of poems, certainly exhibits the split identity and alienation from Anglo-American culture that one also finds in the work of Virgil Suárez, Li-Young Lee, and many others. Yet Hong's meticulously honed, visceral poetic is wholly her own; she takes us far beyond the "borderlands" of the usual and expected. "Zoo," for instance, introduces us to "Korean" in the following manner:

Ga    The fishy consonant,
Na    The monkey vowel.

Da    The immigrant's tongue
as shrill or guttural.

Overture of my voice like the flash of bats.
The hyena babble and apish libretto.

Piscine skin, unblinking eyes.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Words with an atavistic tail. History's thorax considerably cracked.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

La    the word
Ma    speaks
Ba    without you

This is language that takes no prisoners, that startles and threatens rather than entices. Here, sand is "wolf-hued"; "antidepressants" line up "like clever pilgrims"; a word is "undressed" and becomes "blueprint, revolver."

In a language simultaneously beautiful and furiously anti-beautiful—using blanks in sentences, long parentheses, and sets of Korean and English that gradually transmogrify into nonsense (see "Wing 2" and "Wing 3")—Hong manages to create a space for the irreducibility of meaning, its androgyny and monstrous "not-belongingness." Her world, consequently, is not so much the immigrant's split and doubled landscape as it is the "many-limbed", many-countried realm of an array of Siamese twins, hermaphrodites, homunculi, "freaks in taxidermic clinics," and a "man who was only / a torso and head," recalling Ovid's Metamorphoses—after, rather than before, transformation.

And as in Ovid, breakdowns of communication haunt the peripheries of Hong's world. Her narrators speak invariably without being heard or reciprocally recognized: "a stutter inflated and reddened the face: / eyes bulged and lips gaped to form, / a fortune cookie cracked and a tongue rolled out. / Wagged the Morse code but no one knew it." Like the roster of historical "freaks" Hong conjures throughout the book--Saartje Baartman ("the Hottentot Venus"), Chang and Eng, Tono Maria--the translating "I" in Translating Mo'um seems doomed to mistranslation, to not being translated at all. "Still mute," we are told in "The Shameful Show of Tono Maria," "I was sent to Special Ed / with autistics, paraplegics, and a boy / who only ate dirt." The devastating "Ontology of Chang and Eng, the Original Siamese Twins," briefly, effortlessly, and often humorously sketching the outlines of two individual lives lived in-between a single body, culminates in the sound of a single voice, speaking and meeting no answer:

"My lips are turning blue, Eng" / Eng did not answer.

"They want our bodies, Eng." / Eng did not answer.

"Eng, Eng! My lips are turning blue." / Eng turned to his body and did not answer.

In the book's title poem, Hong confesses: "I took the gold, the ventriloquist's voice, the locks of hair, took / the code, the breasts, the lush vowel, and the infinitive / that could suit anyone (to eat, to suckle, to lust, to drink, to come, / to wash, to speak, to touch, to fuck, to speak. I have spoken, I have / spoken earnestly, I have lied.) I took the body." Reading Translating Mo'um, one can only hope that Hong continues to lie and speak earnestly, that she continues to grab, threaten and throttle "the wolf-hued sand" of "the body" of the word—so that it keeps burning, not only on her tongue, but also on ours.

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Sarah Kennedy
Elixir Press ($13)

by Mark Pietrzykowski

I'm sure there was a moment in the history of letters when the word "confessional" seemed a helpful sort of marker to pair with "poetry," when an author could claim to have written poems that mimicked the private hollows of their individual existence. It means little now, however, never mind if the poet claims autobiography, or has it thrust upon her, or avoids it with the gravity of one pursued; none of these will make "confessional" an adequate term because what occurs in a poem is always both more and less than the poet intended, and what is most interesting to the reader is not the poem's fealty to the author's lived experience but the experience of the poem as part of its own existence. A book such as Flow Blue, for instance, seems to confess a great many things, but identifying Sarah Kennedy as the 'I' of the poems is not particularly helpful; the characters in the sequence accumulate definition until whatever events might have inspired their actions fall away like plaster, revealing several distinct veins of characterization braided together into a book.

So sharply portrayed are the characters in Flow Blue that the poems lose individuality over the course of a chronological reading, and perhaps that is the point. The narrative bears us along through a violent and tepid rural existence with such ease that strangeness quickly vanishes and we are at home with the idiosyncrasies of the narrator's life, so that when a poem begins as "Talking Cure" does—"Old enough to bleed, my husband chuckles, / whenever my age is mentioned"—we feel no shock, but rather a tawdry familiarity. Indeed, this is the success of the book; the misogyny, brutality, and despair portrayed therein quickly become commonplace, and so the reader, too, becomes worn down by the experience. Events that might otherwise seem momentous are simply parts of the grind that manage to provide a brief sense of relief:

You wake me with a proposal the morning after
we decide to divorce: wouldn't it be sweet
to take a short vacation, a road trip south
to watch the maples tapped? Just a day's
ride, you say, a way to end our marriage

on a friendly note. It's February, after all,
the sap is down, we can come back feeling
like late winter turning to early spring.
(from "Sugar")

That the cohesion of the narrative depends, to some degree, on the lack of especially distinctive poems in Flow Blue could be seen as a terminal flaw, but in fact it may simply be a case of determinism overwhelming imagination: Kennedy has determined that she should tell this particular story this particular way, therefore chance must be excluded—even if that means she repeats herself rather frequently. And yet, as Heidegger said in Language: "Merely to say the same thing twice ... is that supposed to get us anywhere? But we do not want to get anywhere. We would like only, for once, to get just where we are already." These poems are not interchangeable, certainly, but neither are they individual. The fact that they are presented as a set of individual poems, each to its own page, is irrelevant; Flow Blue needs to exist as a single poem, and this is the confession it makes to the reader.

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Gary Barwin
Coach House Books ($16.95)

by M. David Dunn

The trend toward new realism may have swept the strange from North American literature, but spontaneous transformations can occur at any time. Think of poor old Gregor Samsa. A metamorphosis like that can really mess with a person's sense of self. In his most recent collection, poet Gary Barwin contemplates the unexpected weirdness of the mundane. Although he doesn't wake up as an insect, Barwin does follow the slip and tangle of thought to non-logical resolution when he observes in the title poem:

your right eyebrow
becomes you as a child
won't stop hitting
your left eyebrow as you drive yourself
to the hatbox where
you will be born before dinner
thanks! you say to no one in particular
and they don't reply.

There are five sections in Raising Eyebrows, each in their turn warping somatic and thematic assumptions. In Barwin's world, the body is a trickster, capable of anything, driven by a consciousness other than will. Basho is re/uninvented:

old pond leaping
into mind of frog

old frog leaping—
the mind of frog

***

old fr spl po ash og nd

(from "Ukiah Pond: frogments from the frag pool")

Bashed by language, holding on by the width of his pen, Barwin seems to subscribe to André Breton's assertion that language exists to be put to "surrealist use," and does so without faltering. As he writes in "Red Cave", one of the collection's longer poems, "your ear has now taken my mouth's place"—all in all a fair trade.

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Carole Maso
Counterpoint Press ($24)

by Laura Winton

Composed in Carole Maso's unique poetic and fragmentary style, Beauty is Convulsive: The Passion of Frida Kahlo is many different things at once: a highly condensed biography of Kahlo's life, a voice for her words, and Maso's artistic "conversation" with Kahlo.

Beauty is Convulsive samples freely from biographies of Kahlo, weaving these texts with Maso's own writing and impressions. We've become used to this style from filmmakers and rap artists, but it is still unusual in books, where we're accustomed to singularity of voice, clear quotations, and citations with footnotes and page numbers. Maso's rendering of Frida Kahlo requires a certain suspension of disbelief, a willingness to experience the artist's life as we abandon our usual literary constraints.

The book focuses on three defining elements of the Kahlo mythos, the first being the serious bus accident which had repercussions throughout Kahlo's entire life, including chronic pain in her back, legs and feet, and an inability to have children. Her subsequent miscarriages make up another recurring theme, and the third is her marriage to fellow painter Diego Rivera.

Maso's halting, disjointed writing style suggests a life lived in fits and starts, as in the section "Votive: Child":

Its birth certificate filled out in elegant scroll His mother was
Frida Kahlo

take this sorrow: child

I would give you fistfuls of color
if only
alegría

I would have given you.

Because I wanted you      come to me

the cupped butterfly, painted black.

One of the hallmarks of Maso's writing is repetition, and the word votive features in the title and text of many of the pieces in this book. "Votive: Vision," "Votive: Courage," and "Votive: Sorrow" are among the pieces that lead the reader on a meditation, a wish, a prayer, almost as if walking the stations of the cross. In between the votives and other pieces are short epigrammatic statements from Kahlo herself, each entitled "Accident," which serve as interludes:

I am not sick. I am broken.
But I am happy as long as I can paint.

and

Nevertheless I have the will to do many things
and I have never felt "disappointed by life"
as in Russian novels.

Maso's sampling of Kahlo's journals not only gives voice to Kahlo the artist, but also highlights Kahlo the poet, particularly when writing about Diego:

From you to my hands I go all over your body, and I am with you a minute and I am with you a moment, and my blood is the miracle that travels in the veins of the air from my heart to yours . . . Diego, nothing is comparable to your hands and nothing is equal to the gold-green of your eyes.

Lest one think that Maso is merely a collage artist, arranging the words that Kahlo has written and what others have written about her, Maso intertwines her own meditations on the artist's life and her work:

She remembers when her mouth—pressed to the ear—to the
hum of the paint the blood:
don't kiss anyone else
magenta, dark green, yellow
And she watches him.

Gradually, contemplatively, Beauty is Convulsive gives us a picture of the woman and the artist, and the effect she still has on those who wish to enter her world.

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Arielle Greenberg
Verse Press ($12)

by Michael R. Allen

In Given, Arielle Greenberg makes dazzling explorations into the secrets embedded in language. Greenberg deals with words as strange objects that offer obscure meanings which might explain life, but she is no simple "experimental" writer—rather, she remembers that what poetry does best is produce complex meaning in the never-ending possibilities language affords.

Greenberg's success is fitting considering that Given is partially an homage to Marcel Duchamp, that pivotal explorer of material phenomena; "Given" is the translated title of Duchamp's final work, Etant donnés. Of course, "given" also conjures the poet's gift of poem to reader, as well as the perhaps divine gift of words to the poet. Greenberg's title hints at the power of her word choices: getting away with swift and easy meaning is not an option for a reader of these poems.

Consider the first stanza of "The Alexander Technique," which runs nimbly through cultural references and poetic evasion:

Joe DiMaggio has not told me any secrets for so long.
God's lonely eye has not turned to tell me any secrets.
Freud developed psychoanalysis to cure his own talking of secrets
out loud to me.
Virginia Woolf's shawled Indian girl hasn't told me any secrets.
A problem.

An American icon has not told (given?) the speaker any secrets lately, but immediately DiMaggio is replaced by "God's lonely eye," something more important but also more abstract. Freud is also involved in the lack of secret-telling, but then the famous psychiatrist is replaced with a modest literary character, and finally the series ends with the definitive statement "A problem." Yet the reader still has no idea about what secrets are being told or going untold—if any. Perhaps the secrets, usually a tantalizing literary puzzle to unwrap, simply serve to facilitate the creation of other mysteries, such as what the speaker wants to know.

Sometimes, however, Greenberg's words give up their mysteries. The interlude joining the book's two sections, a sequence of five poems entitled "(caveshow)," is a beautiful centerpiece that presents the profundity of the peculiar, repetitious patterns of dream recollection. Likewise, the brilliant "House of Precision" revels in its own failure to show the way to its title—"There are maybe three blocks between x and the House of Precision"—"x" evokes the supposed precision of mathematics, but the "maybe" reminds the reader that the poem is not an equation. The prose poem "Nostalgia, Cheryl, is the Best Heroin" offers not directions but shaded memories: "This is a terrible story, Cheryl. It is an instructional essay for a sweet beating. It is an open letter to linen closets everywhere." These memories seem painful, but the poetry seems to recall something longed for as well.

Often with dry wit, Greenberg shows that a poem is an incomplete set of directions to the secrets of life—secrets that are very real and easily knowable if only we were given the precise directions. Through these poems, we might understand some of those secrets, even if we may never know them as prosaic facts.

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Nick Flynn
Graywolf Press ($14)

by Mike Chasar

A mysterious and entrancing sequence of short lyrics that journeys through the violent, erotic and even gothic world of the honeybee, Nick Flynn's pocket-sized volume Blind Huber feels appropriately like a combination of prayer book and field guide. There is no shortage of book-length sequences in American poetry of late, but Flynn's voyeuristic and disconcerting poems find a suitably tactile vehicle in becoming one of the sweetest and memorable reads this year.

Led through the "labyrinthine comb" by Flynn's version of Vergil—François Huber, an 18th-century blind beekeeper whose observations formed the basis of what is now known about the honeybee—we hear from the drones and workers, their queens, Huber's assistant, and from a hovering narrator who alights on the role of honey and beekeeping in human history. The result is a risky, almost hypnotic polyvocality, what we might call a poetics of the swarm: "we lift, // like the soul as it exits the body," Flynn writes from the point of view of his bees, "except you can see us // & we are not quiet."

Blinded in childhood by scarlet fever, the priestly Huber—whom we hear from in nine poems—explores the hives through the eyes and hands of his acolyte assistant, the sighted but unlearned Burnens. "I no longer know," says Huber of this relationship, "what is outside my mind // & what is in." That partnership has its counterpoint in the hive, a complex society where terrifying military power and precision only thinly veil drunken bursts of violence and chaos. "The virgin / flew this morning / as we dragged the old queen / out," reads one poem:

A drone

failed to follow, a young one,
gorging himself on honey,

& ten of us surrounded him,
held his mouth shut. We are

infinitely more abundant
& we are all the same.

This is a world of primordial desire, power and fear, an unnerving world where the individual is the group and the group the individual.

Flynn's first book, Some Ether, explored the effects of a mother's suicide and a father's homelessness on the coming of age of their son, and it's tempting to locate the genesis of the second book in a passage from the first: "She tells a story of how I swallowed a wasp, / I don't remember / but I always felt a nest building / inside me." One of the more riveting poems in Blind Huber seems to deliberately invert this image, as the obsessive beekeeper and Burnens cover the interior walls of a house with honeycomb "so we can live inside a hive, // my chair dead-center, beside my / queen." Flynn retains the short, clipped, unflinching lines from his first book, but, as the contrast between these passages might indicate, his perspective seems to have shifted.

A poem near the end of Blind Huber mentions how "Archangels // came down once, ordered bees to build / honeycomb in your mouth." In that image is the combination of sweetness and disquietude that makes up the worthwhile poems in this book.

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