Ben Lerner
Copper Canyon Press ($14)

by Cindra Halm

Let's say the poetic mind is a storm chamber. Because of erratic winds, stuff blows in from beyond the usual waking sensibility; as in disturbed sleep, neighbors and friends end up next to famous historical figures; parts of speech collide with images of herbs and snow, literary theory with personal and collective wars. There's an electrical charge in the air--nerves replicate and repetitions frame, fray. When lightning surges, so does perception, singeing insight into matter. Hold on to your hat but not to your tongue: language here is at once astir and attached, both turbulent and still.

This is the conceit and the method of Ben Lerner's first book of poems, aptly named The Lichtenberg Figures after the branching patterns that sometimes form after lightning strikes. Indeed, each of the 52 (one for each week of the year?) poems "flash," most consistently in the way that they crack open time to express an astonishing inclusivity, and for the ways in which they crackle with paradoxically intelligent and illogical connotations. The book as a whole serves as both a critique and a catalogue of one mind's study of disjunctions as well as cohesions; of contemporary culture's inflammatory obsessions; and of the academic canon's absurdly serious or seriously absurd theories and constructs. As such, the shifting tones of humor, irony, meta-poetic schmaltz, poignancy, neurosis, wonder, bombast, irreverence, and hope, create infinite shades of tempest.

If surprise is the necessary, if unpredictable, twin of storm, then delight is the darling child of surprise. There is no lack of startling, multivalent, or pointed offspring on which the engaged reader will dote:

Now to defend a bit of structure: beeline, skyline, dateline, saline—
now to torch your effluent shanty
so the small rain down can rain. I'm so Eastern that my Ph.D.
has edible tubers, my heart a hibachi oiled with rapeseed. I'm so Western
that my Ph.D.

can bang and bank all ball game, bringing the crowd to its feet
and the critics to their knees. Politically speaking, I'm kind of an animal.

Simultaneously dissecting and advancing the histories of artistic forms, political and social constructs, and human emotions, Lerner employs aphorism, repetition, progression, digression, reversals, and even outright nonsense to confuse or eradicate boundaries between polarities (imagistic, thematic, etc.). The resultant no man's land is not neutrality but rather a charged minefield. Some lines, sections, and/or whole poems read as practical proverbs or troubled surreal confessions, others as mysterious zen koans, still others as self-aware deaths commenting from beyond the page, the grave, and even the world of duality. The need to shatter belief systems balances, or cancels, the propensity to sermonize—or vice-versa. Hyperawareness of life's contradictions exhibits as keen sensitivity and also as flat affect, a juxtaposition exacerbated by a dominant style of declarative sentences, end-stopped lines, and present tense awareness. Who can really tell where one belongs in the shifting landscapes of any weather, fad, class, or zeitgeist? It's the prevalent consumer culture's aesthetic which infiltrates all others: anxiety.

I attend a class for mouth-to-mouth, a class for hand-to-hand.
I can no longer distinguish between combat and resuscitation.
I could revive my victims. I could kill a man
with a maneuver designed to clear the throat of food. Tonight, the moon

sulks at apogee. A bitch complains to the polestar. An enemy
fills a Ping-Pong ball with Drano and drops it in the gas tank of my car.

It should be noted that each of the poems of The Lichtenberg Figures contains 14 lines, with the exception of one which has 15 lines (a loose thread? Rebel energy? A scar-charm against standardization's inflexibility?). Even though formal meter and rhyme don't play out here, the sameness of line count and the tradition behind the sonnet contribute to a consistency of felt weight throughout. Comfort? Complacency? Gravity? Rendering the structure automatic and therefore invisible so as to highlight other aspects? Nodding to the world of forms by participation even when dismantling that world? The reader alert to nuances will feel them all. Likewise, unencumbered by individual titles and section divisions, the poems either shine with individual charisma and with the collective sparkle of their accrued light, or they give rise to restlessness from a monotonous week. Somehow, the drama of The Lichtenberg Figures figures out how to play them, and play with them, both.

Images and themes are the stars that shine most obviously in the sky or on the stage, but they need a surrounding cosmos, a unifying energy, to hold them as a pattern. The “about” of this book (as in, “what's the book about?”) is something like the necessary and also futile use of references. It is only by comparing that we know things, and that we can never know things, really. Every poem dramatizes language's attempt to be more than itself; each poem's associations, lists, questions, and echoes demonstrate that there is always another word, another answer, another fleeting seared and branching possibility. Like the human mind's ability to imagine. Like the human need for limits like 14 lines or 52 weeks, lest we go crazy from expansion or from boredom.

How then to structure a premise like a promise?
.............................................................
How then to justify our margins?

One of poetry's achievements, if it's lucky, is to forge connections among neurons by creating new pathways, memorable patterns, and compelling figures. The Lichtenberg Figures is lucky. And skillfull. And, especially for a first volume, brilliant in its flashes.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Spring 2005 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2005

Sam Hamill
Shambhala Publications ($15.95)

by Christopher Luna

Sam Hamill's Almost Paradise: New and Selected Poems and Translations is an inspiring collection that boldly insists poetry matters. Hamill possesses the tender voice of a compassionate soul, and the vivid imagery that he presents reveals a refreshing generosity of spirit. Here is a poet who believes that “a few words can change a life,” and who endeavors to prove this belief by tracking the enormous effect that it has had on both his understanding of human nature and his development as a poet.

The book begins with a selection of Hamill's translations, most notably of poets of Chinese and Japanese antiquity. Hamill renders these ancient texts in a contemporary American English that allows them to be accessible without sacrificing the wisdom of their sentiments. Many of the poems address the life of a writer; Lu Chi's “The Masterpiece,” for example, describes the constant struggle of the poet who seeks to create a lasting impression of this life:

Wanting every word to sing,
every writer worries:
nothing is ever perfected;
no poet can afford to become complacent.

We hear a jade bell's laughter
and think it laughs at us.

For a poet, there is terror in the dust.

A selection from Issa's The Spring of My Life captures a parent's love as well as the profound loss that is felt when a child dies.

It is often said that the greatest pleasures result in the greatest misery. But why is it that my little child, who's had no chance to savor even half the world's pleasures—who should be green as new needles on the eternal pine—why should she be found on her deathbed, puffy with blisters raised by the despicable god of smallpox? How can I, her father, stand by and watch her fade away each day like a perfect flower suddenly ravaged by rain and mud?

Two or three days later, her blisters dried to scabs and fell off like dirt softened by melting snow. Encouraged, we made a tiny boat of straw and poured hot saké over it with a prayer and sent it floating downriver in hopes of placating the god of the pox. But our hope and efforts were useless and she grew weaker day by day. Finally, at midsummer, as the morning glory flowers were closing, her eyes closed forever.

Her mother clutched her cold body and wailed. I knew her heartbreak but also knew that tears were useless, that water under the bridge never returns, that scattered flowers are gone forever. And yet nothing I could do would cut the bonds of human love.

“A Lover's Quarrel,” the second of Hamill's own poems included in the collection, establishes two themes that recur throughout his work: a deep reverence for nature coupled with an acute awareness of human suffering. For example, “New Math” examines the etymology of “husband” and “wife,” then compares the union of two people to the cycle of growth and harvest:

We become the sum
of all we can give away.
The garden and the
gardeners, the soil and sun,
love and labor: all make one.

In “The Orchid Flower” Hamill ruminates upon the eponymous blossom, which remains “purely erotic” even “to a white- / haired craggy poet”; the poem ends with a moving scene in which the poet teases his wife, “who grows, yes, more beautiful / because one of us will die.” Hamill also demonstrates an ability to engage the poetry and mythology of the past, as in “Hellenic Triptych”:

it would be good to give one's life for the beautiful
if the beautiful would last. But the world
casts us out and it is impossible to touch anything
except one another. So we reach out when we can

for the outstretched hand of another,
knowing that when it is withdrawn . . .

Recently, Hamill has received attention for founding Poets Against the War and editing the volume of poems that resulted from his call for writers to post their anti-war poetry online. His own work addresses such issues quite effectively, exemplifying his belief that poetry has a role to play in stemming the tide of political violence. The lengthy poem “Blue Monody” is an epic meditation on warfare and the struggle for justice in which he successfully utilizes images of loneliness, his sense of poetic lineage, and his life in Port Townsend, Washington to declare that "we are not alone," despite the overwhelming endlessness of global conflict:

It is one thing to stand against murder,
and another to do without supper.
We stammer and cuss and blame one another.
The heavens continue to burn.

“The New York Poem” ponders how a poet might respond to a tragedy like 9/11, and asks whether our words have any effect at all. Not surprisingly, Hamill turned “to poetry, not prose” in an effort to understand the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center:

The last trace of blind rage fades

and a mute sadness settles in,
like dust, for the long, long haul. But if
I do not get up and sing,
if I do not get up and dance again,
the savages will win.

I'll kiss the sword that kills me if I must.

Many of the best poems in Almost Paradise celebrate the people in Hamill's life, including poets such as Gary Snyder, W. S. Merwin, Kenneth Rexroth, Olga Broumas, Adrienne Rich, and Denise Levertov. It soon becomes evident that one important aspect of Hamill's practice is expressing his gratitude for friends and teachers. In “To Adrienne Rich,” he thanks the poet for showing him “the deep sickness of men / of my grim generation.” Another poem dedicated to Hayden Carruth thanks Carruth for “doing / the real work of poetry” that showed Hamill how to open his heart. Here as elsewhere he rails against the commodification of art and implores his fellow writers to give their work away:

Fuck money. Fuck fame.
There are three worlds. In this one,
gratitude flows like honey.

The suffering world
brings about its own demise.
This world is neither
fair nor wise, but paradise
reveals itself in every line.

What finally, is love?
Willingness to face the end
without blinking? The
gift made—and given freely.
I bow to the poem, my friend.

Hamill returns again to the usefulness of poetry and reiterates how essential it is that it is not financially lucrative in the long poem that serves as the book's summation and crescendo, “Pisan Canto.” Part manifesto and part conversation with Ezra Pound, the poem chronicles Hamill's trip to Italy in search of some insight into Pound's genius and his madness. But there is also a journey of the mind, as Hamill invokes poets living and dead, and leaps from Spokane to Dante's Hell to New York to China to Iraq in his search for answers. Ultimately Hamill comes to accept a truth that we all must come to terms with, the realization that "The journey itself is home" and

the poem is a mystery, no matter
how well crafted:
is a made thing
that embodies nature.
And like Zen,
the more we discuss it,
the further away...

Of course, acknowledging this paradox does not discourage the poet's desire to know. Almost Paradise is a book that will hold meaning for those who have made poetry their life, and who persist in their stubborn faith in its transformative powers.

To believe in poetry
is to believe the heart can be opened,
and in the commerce of the heart,
thrift is ruin.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Spring 2005 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2005

Kathleen Fraser
Apogee Press ($12.95)

by Laynie Browne

If (woman) is a whole, it's a whole composed of parts that are wholes, not simple partial objects but a moving, limitlessly changing ensemble…an immense astral space not organized around any one sun that's anymore of a star than others.
—Helene Cixous, The Laugh of Medusa

Kathleen Fraser's recent collection, Discrete Categories Forced into Coupling, is divided into six sections and includes verse, prose, and a brief play. Throughout this carefully structured book is a unifying project in which all of the forms employed are versions of the same intelligence attempting to cross discrete categories. Or, as implied by the title, to couple. Diaristic details convey sense of place, relationship, and artistic endeavor with an emphasis upon visual art and images. Yet the intimate tone suggested as speakers proceed at various speeds through modern life (to brood, to rush) is fused with what lies behind or between utterances, what remains implicit within speech. Each act, whether mundane or transcendent, is infused with (rather than determined by) the racing and stalling of the mind, the chatter or clutter in a room. In other words, the moment is entered without a sense of limitation. In this way, Fraser creates an expansiveness at times seemingly without moving at all, and often in the midst of mental or physical flight.

In the opening poem, “Champs (fields) & between,” one is immediately launched into movement with various relations to time, and yet awake to these doings in a manner which elevates scurrying. “The air came down like rice. It scattered through unevenness and uneventfulness,” writes Fraser; as if time were matter which could fall and surround us tangibly, this work is “attainable in the private ear.” Fraser depicts a world which is bigger than, but does not exclude the personal. This text has a musing quality, at times philosophic, but there is no narrowing of the lens in order to achieve this effect. Details which are, in Cixous's words, “parts that are wholes” scatter meaningfully through Fraser's text as easily and plausibly as air becomes rice. The machinery of life is not neglected, nor is it glorified, nor does it take over to become the work. Instead there is a unity in the way daily life is woven into circumstances such as “One felt a lift of hope beyond the opposite building's surface attached to a resin of deep amber…” No hierarchy of being is suggested.

The longest and perhaps most impressive accomplishment in this book is a prose piece titled “Soft Pages,” which begins with a photograph of a foot, and moves cinematically through one interior the poet inhabits to include writing implements, the “receptivity of cheap paper to soft lead,” and intimate attire, tossed upon a radiator to dry. Fraser does not separate the thinking mind from material surrounding. Fraser is cognizant of, and adept at rendering, the foot which appears again and again as motion in a blur. Is one walking towards or away from the listener? Mind mimics this confusion which cannot be concealed by the body's longing to place itself in one place while existing in many locations simultaneously. “What shoes was she wearing, walking up and down hills…Her feet inside and outside of her grandmother's feet, the unbreathing ligaments of even earlier feet in courtly brocade bindings.” The foot is: the foot in poetry, the foot to the visual artist who renders an image, the foot in a yoga class where the poet learns to interlace fingers and toes. The foot here is a means of locomotion and also a foundation.

The sense of trying to retrieve something in motion reaches an unexpected crescendo when a place for a sentence which Fraser describes as missing or unlocatable is marked upon the page in the form of an empty rectangular box. In hope, or in memoriam, this blankness gleams upon the page, or as Fraser writes, “a geometric memory bank, not so much to contain or trap the sentence, but to give it a place to rest.” This space for what is perhaps temporarily irretrievable is also a form of meditation which Fraser practices throughout her work within visual constructions on the page. In this instance, strikingly placed within prose, the box creates a location where the event of the sentence, or its lack, is remembered and therefore safely abandoned. In other words, a place has been accorded for what we cannot at once recall, reveal, or restate. A silence may mark the song one once sang. The transparent sleep of the unsaid is afforded a discernible space.

In the short play titled “Celeste & Sirius,” which falls next in the collection, Celeste says to Sirius, “Whenever I paint a picture, it's called at least six things before it's finished.” The finished piece represents the culmination of the many layers of process, the complexity of thought, of being or endeavor. Nothing here is one-dimensional. There is no scanned experience which lies flat and dictatorially along a surface (an admirable and consistent quality in Fraser's work). Within this brief play, two characters consider: “If you're talking about the purpose of a life, then probably we should put on our hats before continuing.” They discuss the necessity of the creative act without hesitation: “I need to stand in a room with a brush or pencil in my hand and feel the paint or the line coming out of me.” And also without pretension: “I think you're going down the wrong road—more like a few wrong roads.” Though the dialogue is abstract, the movement between humor and seriousness is fluid.

In “From Fiamma's Sketchbook” we find various settings where the everyday meets “the interior stress of a leaf.” Here “the dirty bathroom” or “eating your sandwich” become photographic frames within “a private pink human in a cosmic field.” “Sketchbook” is an apt title in that the brief pieces are renderings of contained scenes—somewhat visual but not at the expense of interior delving. The moment moves and is constricted by thought which pins something, at times uncomfortably, to the eye of the reader. A small detail which makes a distant scene easy suddenly enters, “Not wayward nor bottled, containing foam from any excess.”

The section titled “You can hear her breathing in the photograph” is a suite of five prose poems which at times illustrate how “a gesture intended as an opening can turn everything in another direction.” In “The cars” we find the reappearance of the image of the foot, carefully threading through “the four-lane parallel rush of metal” of a freeway, and in the section's title poem we are presented with the question: “What causes a person—say, in a family—to feel he or she is different from the other members…?” Elasticity is brought to light, regarding intimate relations. What compiles the person? “Is arrival focused by admirable intention or by an off-camera genetic predictor…?” Again we are brought back to the foot with the image of Daphne and Apollo, and we learn that this image is the one discussed earlier in “Soft pages.” The poet asks, “Why must the photograph of the two of them come out of its envelope every year and be pinned to the wallpaper?” It is Daphne's breathing we can hear in the photograph. Thus, the gesture that turns everything may be Bernini's chisel lodged in Apollo's foot, or it may be “laying two fingers across the inside skin of the wrist at various points.”

The collection concludes with the moving “AD Notebooks” written for “Willem de Kooning and Marjorie Fraser, stricken by Alzheimer's Disease [AD] in parallel time.” Here falling is a new mode of perception. A history of drawing is explored, the life of the image, the line. “I could draw a line with my crayon,” Fraser writes, “but the other lines are swallowing it.” An image is clearly delineated while simultaneously being effaced, “red passages in crystalline absence and array.” The poem creates absence as it proceeds. Dropping hesitantly, confidently, that which is given over to loss, cessation, as if by succumbing to the passage of time and illness, one were to create a portrait by various unconventional means including erasure, “oozing fresh pigment,” “plaques and tangles,” and “silence.” Fraser enters the phrase, the line, sitting with possibility, unafraid to linger within “Grains of going away,” leaning into each image or stroke, and “Frequently dragging dust into white.”

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Spring 2005 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2005

RUDDY GORE
AWAY WITH THE FAIRIES
THE CASTLEMAINE MURDERS
Kerry Greenwood
Poisoned Pen Press ($24.95 each)

by Kris Lawson

What do you do when you're a gorgeous flapper with tons of money and heaps of taste, set loose in 1920s Australia with a band of loyal comrades, cute wards who require little in the way of real parenting, adorable pets, and a handsome married lover whose wife approves of you? The answer is obvious: you become the heroine in a long-lived series of novels.

Phryne Fisher, the above-mentioned flapper, appears in the ongoing mystery series by Aussie writer Kerry Greenwood. Introduced in Cocaine Blues and still going strong 14 books later, Miss Fisher is firmly established in the mystery genre, not relegated to the romance novel ghetto where many of us would never have met her. Poisoned Pen Press in the U.S. and Allen & Unwin in Australia are bringing Phryne's earliest appearances to light via reprints, so only the most impatient reader must resort to scrounging in used bookshops in Australia so as to own every Phryne appearance.

Phryne and her cast of merry companions live an improbably happy life in Melbourne, despite the Second World War approaching rapidly. This happy life, bothered by very little other than the occasional conundrum of a murder or a nasty remark on the characters' lifestyle choices, makes the Fisher books more adventure than mystery, and romantic adventure at that. Like most adventure/mystery series, they suffer from repetition and a certain glibness in mystery-solving, due to the author's need to adhere to character arc and formula. But Greenwood, a barrister who has also written fantasy and young adult fiction, does her research and keeps her books moving along quickly and entertainingly. Her plot twists are creative and she neatly resolves all hanging threads.

Phryne, a British expatriate, has a noble yet dysfunctional family back home in England, a storied history of decadence in Paris, and seemingly unlimited wealth. This, combined with her fashion sense and green-eyed, gamine beauty, would be enough to make all other women hate her, if not for her other attributes: a thoughtful, open-minded curiosity about everyone she encounters, tempered by realistic expectations, a snappy attitude, and a very agile brain.

Here's an example, from the Phryne novel Ruddy Gore, of how Greenwood's heroine deals with violence in her own way, taking on three muggers attacking an old woman:

Phryne stepped lightly to a corner, yelled ‘The cops!’ and watched as two blue-clad toughs scrambled up and ran away. The other one stopped to kick the recumbent old woman again, and Phryne could not allow that. He had had his chance. She walked quickly up behind him, waited until his head was in the right position, and clipped him neatly with the hatchet, considerately using the back. She was clad in an outrageously expensive dress and did not want to get blood on it.

Ruddy Gore plunges the reader straight into the middle of the series. Phryne, firmly established with supporting characters in devoted attendance, investigates two murders and a haunting which plague a local revival of Gilbert and Sullivan's "Ruddigore." Aging actors find themselves pitted against hungry up-and-comers, the scandals are keeping the audiences away, and violence and bitchery ensue; in her element, Phryne solves the mystery and even manages to find a new lover, her previous flame having sunk into respectability. It is typical that Phryne, having learned by sad experience to keep an open mind, investigates the reports of hauntings just as seriously as the murders. It is also typical of the Fisher attitude that the adventure of the lover is just as important as solving the mystery.

The title of another Phryne novel, Away with the Fairies, refers to a phrase which, when used to refer to someone, means that they're daffy. In this novel, that daffy person is the murder victim, a magazine illustrator whose over-decorated villa reflects her obsession with fairies and pretty pink everything. Phryne, a la Lord Peter in Dorothy Sayers's Murder Must Advertise, goes undercover as a fashion writer to investigate the victim's coworkers. She uses the investigation as a distraction for her very real worry about her lover Lin Chung, who has gone missing, perhaps kidnapped by pirates, on a trip to China.

In The Castlemaine Murders, a dual adventure of sorts, Phryne investigates the sudden and strange appearance of a body at a local amusement park, while Lin Chung, newly assuming his head-of-family duties, searches for the resolution to a decades-old family feud. In this book Greenwood indulges to great effect her interest in Australian pioneer and gold-rush history—not just the European frontiersmen and explorers, but the Chinese immigrants as well. A bit of old-fashioned donnybrooking at the end is redeemed by Phryne's resilience and creativity in solving problems.

There's a whole slew of books that have this happy concatenation of fantasy, romance, adventure, and soap opera. They usually occur in series because it takes time to build up the characters' quirky habits, accumulate the useful and/or equally quirky companions, and, not to put too fine a point on it, gather a fan base. Perhaps this series phenomenon derives from the days when Sherlock Holmes appeared in installments in The Strand, or when The Shadow and Perry Mason were serialized on radio programs. But romantic mystery adventure has just as much to do with the invention of the Cozy, that fascinating, frustrating sub-genre of mysteries.

Cozies occur in a charming locale, packed to the gills with funny characters who say and do odd and quaint things. The main character is usually the lone voice of reason in a sea of eccentricity (or, occasionally, the eccentric in a sea of mediocrity). Murder may be momentarily unpleasant while the description lasts, but it quickly becomes a puzzle, remote and interesting, with perhaps a tinge of real danger to add some edge to it.

On the surface, cozies don't seem to have a lot in common with the old-fashioned adventure stories and their motifs like charismatic, often superhuman leaders, loyal-to-the-death companions, lots of fistfights and abductions, and fiendishly complicated plans spoiled at the last minute by plucky heroes. But they both have a certain slap-happy optimism, the same twists and turns, and a happy ending with all dangling plots neatly resolved.

In Phryne's case, she embodies many of the adventurer's superhuman qualities; her friends and servants are fiercely loyal but also eccentric; she is their lodestar and voice of reason. Any real danger and unpleasantness quickly resolves into a mostly-happy ending, and one always knows love will triumph over all. In the midst of all that action, Greenwood neatly inserts a nice little murder to solve. So for Greenwood and Phryne, mysteries and adventures fit together hand in glove. That glove may be ever-changing in order to keep up with fashion, but the hand is always the same: delicate, determined, and devilishly clever.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Spring 2005 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2005

Robert Mayer
St. Martin's Griffin ($12.95)

by Rudi Dornemann

The concept of the revisionist superhero carried a significant amount of shock value when Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's Watchmen and Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns appeared in the mid-'80s. These days, however, the idea of puncturing the superhero mystique by placing a flawed, multidimensional person behind the hero's mask, or by dropping a square-jawed hero into the midst of a complex, non-primary-color world, has become so commonplace that it's even made it to the big screen in Brad Bird's Pixar film, The Incredibles.

Robert Mayer's 1977 novel Superfolks arguably anticipated the whole revisionist superhero trend—the first chapter will make this clear, even if you miss the back cover blurbs or Grant Morrison's introduction to this reissue—but it's more than just an interesting historical artifact. Mayer may be using comic book source material, but his book succeeds by being a novel; the space and detail that a novel affords allows him to construct a narrative that's both a real-person-in-a-comic-book story and a superhero-in-the-real-world story.

The main character, David Brinkley, is a Superman-type hero who hung up his cape eight years ago and settled down in the suburbs to have a family. Although the book begins with Brinkley in his unheroic suburban life—taking the superhero-in-the-real-world approach—events (and various villains, super and otherwise) soon conspire to bring him back to his old vocation. By the time the more comic-book elements come to the fore, however, the polarity has shifted; in making Brinkley into a well-rounded character, Mayer encourages us to read Superfolks as a real-person-thrown-into-a-superhero-world story.

Even though Watchmen aspired to be as complex as a novel, and Dark Knight appropriated film and television techniques, Moore and Miller had to write comics that worked as comics. Similarly, Superfolks needs to work as a novel no matter how much Mayer plays with and against superhero conventions. It succeeds admirably, mostly because Mayer keeps the plot moving forward and periodically grounds the character (both literally and figuratively). Not that there isn't a strong element of satire throughout Superfolks—Mayer is as interested in mocking superhero conventions as he is in discovering the consequences of taking those same conventions seriously. And comic books aren't Mayer's only target—the book is laced with '70s references (such as Brinkley's next-door neighbor Kojak, or cab driver Bella Abzug) that add another layer of unreality to the proceedings. No matter how serious the novel may get, it's hard to forget that Brinkley hails from the planet Cronk, and therefore must avoid the debilitating effects of the element Cronkite.

In the end, it's the way Superfolks mixes humor and poignancy, and punctuates its tongue-in-cheek cynicism with moments of genuine emotion, that makes the novel distinctive—even now, when its once radical central conceit has become familiar.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Spring 2005 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2005

Marilynne Robinson
Farrar, Strauss and Giroux ($23)

by Ted Pelton

Marilynne Robinson's Gilead is very much a Midwestern book, a wonderful evocation of a regional temperament that Easterners, urbanites, and agnostics might see in others but never feel first-hand. True Midwesterners are capable of scheduling day-long outings to walk around in what seem to those used to oceans or mountains as flat, fairly nondescript fields. Iowa's John Ames, the narrator of Gilead, is full of such small observations: “Trees sound different at night, and they smell different, too.” And a true Midwesterner always seems to describe such things as ultimate. They admit that there are greater sensual delights to be found elsewhere, but they seem slightly frightened by the prospect of them, as if one escargot or ascent of Pike's Peak would ruin everyday life forever more. We like it here just as it is and just as we are, thank you very much.

I'm being facetious, but these two symbolically different views of life—one that seeks unusual experience and new sensations, and thus has an affinity with experiences of impermanence, and its opposite, what I am caricaturing as “Midwestern”—these are the two conditions, respectively, of Robinson's two novels, published nearly a quarter-century apart. Perhaps this was the author's intention. Having written in 1981's Housekeeping so remarkable an evocation of the Pacific Northwest, ephemera, uncertainty, natural disaster, and broken family life—all catalyzed by crazy aunt Sylvie, one of the most memorable characters in late 20th-century American fiction—Robinson may have pushed Gilead to investigate the opposite: a quiet life in a quiet place lived by a man who is to all appearances quiet, though certainly not without inner turmoil.

Gilead's conceit so unassumingly issues from within the Midwest—Ames, the elderly minister of a “plain old church” that “could use a coat of paint” and the grandson of an abolitionist firebrand, is writing his last remembrances for the son of his late years, 70 years his junior—that one hardly notices the appearance of a Sylvie figure in the form of his tortured namesake-godson, John Ames Boughton, the now-grown son of his best friend. This tension develops throughout the latter half of the novel: Ames fears the influence “Jack” will have on his son and his young wife, Lila, and with good reason; in a moment when the old man feigns sleep, Jack and Lila discover they both share experience of St. Louis, the big city, that the narrator has never seen. Though Ames is careful not to make his judgments of Jack's character public, they are in no way secret: he disapproves of Jack, and has from the time he was a boy. Robinson registers with dead-on accuracy the peculiar power of Midwestern judgment, where lack of overt condemnation leads to hugely oppressive conditions of unanswerable judgment, because the judge can simply fall back on the doctrine that it's not within his power to judge, though in practice everyone knows differently.

Ames, however, is also self-conscious and self-scrutinizing, and much of the novel is devoted to his fighting through to a place where his faith and position can mean something real; likewise Jack, who plainly suspects he is himself damned, has returned home in adulthood in the hopes of finding if the grace he has heard about his whole life actually exists. This is a novel that is ultimately as affirming of Christianity and the power of Christ's ministers on earth as Housekeeping was doubtful that anyone in authority would ever be any help at all, anything but a threat to be fled or hoodwinked. The conservatism of this cultural vision will no doubt disappoint many of Robinson's readers; Gilead is a Midwestern novel through and through, right through to its narrative requirements and stakes, and its denouement backs off from the terrible forces unleashed in Housekeeping (or even, to choose a Midwestern novel where the center does not hold, Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres). In short, it is a novel by an author who allowed herself an out at the end. It might bring us to the verge of collapse and tragedy, but then it dissolves into blessing and the feeling that life goes on, institutions intact, roll credits. It stops short of truly confronting mystery, contenting itself with a simulated confrontation with mystery through a character whose world is already so well established that it will remain in place despite whatever forces the novel allows to challenge it. Its drama is thus at one remove, and so a done deal, a settled question, like watching a thriller re run.

Despite all that, for sheer execution, Gilead will still earn any reader's respect. Robinson is a fine writer and doesn't sentimentalize, which requires something of a tightrope walk here, given the storyline. But if anyone should claim that this novel lives up to Housekeeping, don't believe the hype: this is not a novel that will require twenty-plus years for its author to overcome. Very few novels are, it's true, but Housekeeping was one of the rare ones—perhaps only Toni Morrison's Beloved is as perfect, clean, and organic a novel by an American author in the last quarter-century—and led one to hope that lightning would strike twice. But that's not the way things are in a certain Midwest, where you wouldn't want anything too disturbing. In the end they all like it there well enough, thank you very much.

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EUROPE CENTRAL
William T. Vollmann
Viking ($39.95)

EXPELLED FROM EDEN
A William T. Vollmann Reader
Larry McCaffery and Michael Hemmingson, eds.
Thunder's Mouth Press ($17.95)

a consideration by Justin Taylor

I. Where The Sublime is Invoked

“Of course I was also practical. As Heidegger writes: The upward glance passes aloft toward the sky, and yet it remains below on the earth.”
—Vollmann, "Maiden Voyage" (Europe Central)

In the middle of Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son—a slender whirlwind which does not know if it is a novel or a book of stories—there is a single sentence (repeated once later, so it appears twice in the text) which has stuck to the hard, fast insides of my skull and will likely always be with me. Johnson's drug-addled narrator surveys a landscape and asks: What can be said of those fields? It is a question for which there is every and no answer, which is why the sentence, once encountered in context, situates itself in the mind's great room like a piece of statuary added to a permanent collection. I think of it whenever I am overwhelmed or adrift in the beauty and confusion of the world.

If I had to pick a sentence of equal caliber from the unwieldy and multitudinous canon of William T. Vollmann, it would be a mere fragment, ten simple words that conclude a sentence almost two pages long: And I want to send history to the bright fires. That idea, anchored in the holy simplicity of brightness, is a sublime moment, a feat of literary transubstantiation which, once achieved, makes The Writer worthy of the time it takes to hold down the shift-key and capitalize that job description. Here, if nowhere else, Vollmann has his Moment.

Which is not to say that this is a singular brightness, shining in one fragment but otherwise missing from the millions of words comprising Vollmann's exquisite corpus, which even now expands and dazzles as surely as the universe at night: a heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.

II. Where We Confront Certain Truths

“The capacity to intend is like a flame, and the capacity to discern like the light that comes from it.”
—Swedenborg, Heaven & Hell

Let me dispense with all pretense and tell you as simply as I can the nature and peculiar difficulty of the task that sits before me. (My friend Megan, who is very pretty, sits on the edge of my futon, but this is an entirely different story.) Let us imagine the paradox as a figure model, naked and prone. Then we'll see what it takes to sketch the pale swells of the buttocks of our problem, the impossible folds of skin where the breast and the armpit conspire against me, forcing me to say, finally, that these are two important works by a man whose importance can hardly be overestimated, and yet I didn't particularly like either of them.

III. Where I Pose the Impertinent Question: Is Europe Central Another Argall?

“For the convenience of my countrymen who lose their way in Russian novels.”
—Vollmann, on including a list of patronymics in Europe Central

If it hasn't become clear to you yet, then you probably aren't paying attention; but, all the same, let me say that when it comes to William T. Vollmann I am an advocate, a fan, and perhaps a bit of a hero-worshipper. Think of Nicholson Baker writing U and I about John Updike, and what it means to truly be affected by a still-living author (whose complete works you may well not have read).

Of course, there are only so many reading hours in a lifetime, and so the right honorable reader (to borrow a phrase of Vollmann's) must be excused for making some difficult decisions. If, for example, I decide that The Rainbow Stories is so good I shall read it two or three times, then during such re-readings I read nothing else—not by Vollmann, not by anybody. And if every week I read The Nation from cover to cover, then whatever time I give to Arthur Danto's take on the new MoMA is lost to Danilo Kis (whose A Tomb for Boris Davidovich Vollmann cites as a work of signal importance to him), to the poet Anna Akhmatova (who plays a key role in Europe Central), etc.

One Vollmann title I've steered away from is the third installment in his Seven Dreams series, Argall, which explores the story of a pirate captain, the romance of John Smith and Pocahontas, and the further “settling” of the American continent—and all composed in Elizabethan English. Assuming readership of such an arduous work is exhausting even to consider.

Some may feel this way about Europe Central, a mammoth tome in which Vollmann captures the very essence of the Eastern Front and the broad and specific horrors of war. (At least it feels like he has. Vollmann, after all, has sought out battlefields. All I've ever sought from my Portland, Oregon, apartment is the writings of Vollmann—and, perhaps, in a moment of indiscretion, Megan). Vollmann conjures the socio-spiritual properties of the societies in question. The Russian stories shriek silently like skulls from beneath a sheet of dirty Moscow ice, from the blue-white core of their Russianness. The uncanny optimism of Nazi Germany (cut like cocaine into crack by the steady creep of its fate) blares from the page like the grand march from Tannhauser. This is a work that roils and teaches—a seemingly endless sprawl of historicism and empathy, secret police and love affairs. (Human, all too human, Nietzsche would have said, and he would have been right).

Yet, as with Jesus' Son, I don't think Europe Central knows whether it is a novel or a collection of stories. Both books feature recurring characters, a consistent narrative voice, and incidents in later stories that build on incidents in prior stories, making a linear reading (that is, treating the stories as chapters) more rewarding than a hunt-and-peck approach (like the one Vollmann encourages his readers to adopt in the foreword to The Atlas). But where Johnson's book is told by a common dope fiend, a fucked-up guy rightly named Fuckhead by his friends, Vollmann's narrator is not so much a person as a force, something like Philip K. Dick's V.A.L.I.S. crossed with Vollmann's own Big George, the undying and all-seeing thing that lurked in the digital backstreets of You Bright and Risen Angels. If I had to name this emanation, which (unlike in Johnson's book) is ostensibly many different narrators, I would call it The Bureaucrat.

As in the Seven Dreams works, which like this one are all painstakingly researched historical fictions (and all offered up as novels, I feel inclined to point out), Europe Central is governed by metaphysical and symbolic reagents which Vollmann uses to amplify the implications and significance of his war stories. He invokes Jewish mysticism first and to greatest effect in “The Saviors: A Kabbalistic Tale,” as well as elsewhere throughout the text as it suits his purpose. Music is also a fundament of both the book and the cultures it treats. Many of the stories concern the life of the Soviet composer Shostakovich, and Wagner's legacy alternately haunts or informs pretty much anything the Germans do in this book. But above and beyond the above-named items (and others I have not mentioned), there is The Telephone—the magic wand of our unlikely magician-bard The Bureaucrat. Sometimes an anonymous German functionary or a member of the Russian secret police, occasionally a metatextual and bodiless creature (as in some of the most underrated scenes from You Bright and Risen Angels, when Big George tormented The Author), the “I” in Europe Central just says what it came to say and then goes again. Sometimes it tells you who it is supposed to be, other times it simply speaks. And like Big George who controlled the computers and the network, the “I” is the voice on the other end of every telephone, and when “The Telephone Rings” something serious is about to happen (either to Shostakovich, as in the story so-titled, or to someone else).

Many will feel these “I”s are ugly intrusions into the otherwise intricate and seamless diegesis of Vollmann's dreamworld (a word I choose advisedly, thinking secretly to myself that perhaps this text is the unacknowledged Eighth Dream in his series). Personally, I found them refreshing and always welcome, as I was relieved—however briefly—of the burdens of meticulous historicism, of Russian patronymics and countenances, of the endless miseries and narcissisms suffered by Shostakovich. When Vollmann (again recalling You Bright and Risen Angels—this time the Clara Bee sequence) suddenly stepped in as himself in the middle of “Breakout” to lament being left by a woman who stopped loving him, I said: Ah, here is a voice I recognize, and telling of a hurt so familiar it is almost comfortable. (Perhaps my readers will think now of Megan, who has left the apartment to return a skirt to a store on Hawthorne Street—but no, she has never broken my heart and as far as I know we have never even been in love with each other.)

IV. Where the Problem of Excerpts and the Problem of Genius Are Both Considered

“If…Nabokov knew he was a genius back when he was writing Glory at the age of thirty, he knew it only intermittently: it was a fleeting suspicion, not certain knowledge, something incredibly exciting and jinxing and unthinkable that kept peeking at him over the rise of his best paragraphs, distinct from arrogance, mixed in with probably-nots and bright, leaping maybes.”
—Nicholson Baker, U and I

“The genius meets with a group of students. The students tell the genius that the concept 'genius' is not, currently, a popular one.”
—Donald Barthelme, “The Genius”

Also released recently, and certainly more accessible on the face, is Expelled from Eden: A William T. Vollmann Reader. Larry McCaffery and Michael Hemmingson compiled and edited this material, which spans the breadth of Vollmann's career. Selections from his major works abound (even two stories from Europe Central are included, and an excerpt from his forthcoming nonfiction work Imperial), as well as juvenilia (“A Bizarre Proposition,” for example, is a real letter Vollmann sent to the Saudi Embassy volunteering to be shot into space and mine asteroids), forewords and afterwords, journalism, appreciations, lists, and other miscellany.

This book might serve as a good introduction to Vollmann's style and concerns, but I don't think the selections from the larger works do justice to the wholes from which they are extracted. To experience Vollmann fully you need to confront him—or better yet, let him confront you. This problem isn't so grave with the short stories, which are self-contained, and I'll grant that McCaffery and Hemmingson are remarkably good at selecting portions of the novels that can stand on their own. But still. A scene like “The Agony of Parker” is first-class writing, but I can only guess whether a reader who does not know it in context will be able to comprehend what Vollmann is getting at.

Another handicap is that McCaffery's "chronology" of Vollmann's life goes on for over fifty pages—most of it not about Vollmann. McCaffery tries to explain this away by writing that he has “also included references to historical and political events that Vollmann has written about in his fiction and journals.” That “also” is an understatement so bold it borders a lie: the "chronology" starts in the primordial era with the sentencing of Atlas to hold up the world, then notes the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden, and proceeds in this fashion for almost thirty pages until finally, in 1959, William Vollmann is born. Sure, a lot of this information is interesting, but it's all obtainable elsewhere. McCaffery has taken up a significant fraction of the total page-count of this book and has offered little we couldn't have gleaned from reading the novels and stories themselves. Vollmann is not the kind of writer who attempts to mask his influences or interests; the blessed majority of his books have appendices rife with citations, source notes, even suggestions for further reading.

In the final appraisal, Expelled from Eden is more a book for fans and scholars of Vollmann's work than a way to discover him. Some of the most interesting inclusions here are letters from Vollmann to his editors or prospective publishers outlining his literary goals, arguing against manuscript cuts, comparing Whores for Gloria to The Grapes of Wrath, and so on. In these forthright, telling selections, we see exactly what William T. Vollmann thinks of himself and his “life's work.” His suspicions are not fleeting, as Baker imagined Nabokov's must have been. Vollmann knows exactly what he is. His struggles derive not from trying to achieve genius, but from trying to get it all out, to keep it intact, and to do something good with it. Such honesty is unfashionable, and it's certainly a bit disconcerting on the first read, but Vollmann's statements, which could be construed as incredibly pretentious, are devoid of bravura or self-congratulation—“distinct from arrogance,” as Baker put it.

For an audience to read of such high self-regard and not come away disgusted, however, it takes more than a lack of braggadocio. Agreement with the author's conclusion is practically a precondition. That is: if you think, as I do, that Vollmann is a genius (in precisely that Barthelmeic sense which persists despite being unpopular) then these selections offer a rare chance to get inside the head and heart of such genius. Surely Baker, who agonized over questions like these apropos Updike, would have given his non-writing hand for an Updikean volume analogous to Expelled from Eden. On the other hand (the one which was not severed), if you didn't think Vollmann was a genius already then hearing him say he is one is not likely to convince you.

Genius aside, Europe Central and Expelled from Eden help us understand, more than ever before, that William T. Vollmann is an utterly unique beast in the fields of literature. What can be said of those fields? Let Vollmann take you with him, if you can. There is something there that cannot be discovered anywhere else.

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Edmund Blair Bolles
Joseph Henry Press ($27.95)

by James Ervin

Though he continued to work on theoretical physics for decades after completing his general theory of relativity in 1915, Einstein's refusal to accept the implications of quantum mechanics, the great physical theory he himself helped create, caused many physicists to label his later years “a great tragedy.” In this accessible scientific biography, Edmund Bolles explores the philosophical sources of Einstein's defiance, challenging the notion of his decline.

Quantum mechanics describes the behavior of subatomic particles with incredible precision, yet has a non-intuitive quality which led Richard Feynman, a prominent later theorist, to quip that “nobody understands quantum mechanics.” Niels Bohr clashed with Einstein over the proper interpretation of quantum theory for years, culminating in the famous Bohr-Einstein debates at the 1930 Solvay Conference, widely viewed as Bohr's victory. This long-running feud occupies the majority of Bolles's narrative, beginning with the struggle over Einstein's theory of “light quanta,” the packets of light known today as photons.

Einstein's 1921 Nobel Prize was awarded not for relativity, but for his work on the photoelectric effect, which occurs when light strikes metal, producing an electric charge. His original 1905 paper proposed that, in this instance, light worked “like soccer balls,” knocking electrons out of the metal. By 1925, Bohr's rival hypothesis, a statistical treatment of light as waves, was discredited by several experimental results, and the photon was accepted as fact.

However, light still exhibited characteristics of both waves and particles, and Einstein “could not reduce the paradox to one experiment that brought the contradictory measurements together”—no vivid mental image akin to the soccer balls presented itself. Bohr and his colleagues soon formulated the “Copenhagen interpretation” of quantum mechanics, which embraced the wave-particle paradox. Only the probability of the outcome of an atomic collision can be calculated, and measurement can only capture one aspect—wave or particle, but not both—of this interaction.

In the Copenhagen interpretation, reality is indeterministic, and the laws of physics no longer purport to describe physical reality in terms of mechanical causes and effects, but are merely useful mathematical abstractions. “Something new was afoot when scientists no longer believed that physical events lay behind physical laws.” Einstein resisted the new orthodoxy. Believing that “quantum mechanics was both right and a dead-end,” he never ceased searching for the reality underlying the mathematics.

Though the literature on Einstein is immense, Bolles's book stands out among the popular expositions. Lucid yet substantive explanations of Einstein's earlier work on molecular motion and relativity admirably demonstrate the constancy of Einstein's belief in physical processes explicable by natural laws. Bolles also depicts the intellectual climate in Europe between the wars convincingly, with informative and humorous anecdotes about the Dadaists, Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust, and other cultural figures.

The 1930 Solvay Conference in Brussels was to be the last of significance, as the German scientific community soon dissolved under pressure from the Nazi regime. Many of the founders of quantum mechanics abandoned the field, perhaps finding its strangeness unsettling. Bolles ends on a note of elegy, not for Einstein but for physics itself: “Bohr had won, scientific realism had fallen, and with it the belief that the world is objectively comprehensible… [yet] Einstein never saw himself as tragic, nor his defiance as futile.”

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Chloé E. Atreya
Festina Lente Press ($25)

by Jaye Beldo

Complex Adaptive Systems (cas) describe the myriad non-linear connections and interdependencies of everything from ecosystems, economies, and genetic codes to species evolution and galactic superclusters. While cas are usually coldly spelled out in calculations, flow charts, and bar graphs that only the scientific elite can fully understand, they seem to aspire on their own toward embodiment in ways that the more artful of aspirants can grasp.

Thanks to Chloé E. Atreya and her work Invisible Cities: A Metaphorical Complex Adaptive System, the possibilities of holistically and intuitively understanding cas are made quite apparent. The author describes the many bridges between cas and Italo Calvino's intriguing, imaginal travelogue in ways that are more accessible to the analytically challenged among us. Parallels between Calvino's wondrous cities and such unlikely things as the periodic table of elements and protein molecules in DNA are deftly described throughout. These illuminating analogues encourage us to see just how integral cas are in our lives, and how critical a non-scientific understanding of them might be in regards to the survival of our species and planet.

Atreya also clarifies just how much structural forethought Calvino put into his book, demonstrating that the cities he created are not just the consequences of some ambulatory fantasy. She then provides effective illustrations which describe how not only cas themselves work but how Invisible Cities functions holistically. Her enlivening approach to Calvino's work is something very rare in the world of literary criticism. She also provides her own artwork which diligently charts out the complexly meshed coding system that Calvino used during the composition of his highly unique novel.

After reading Invisible Cities: A Metaphorical Complex Adaptive System one will begin to appreciate how Calvino himself valued imagination as a means to understanding the various cas which permeate our lives, metaphorical and otherwise. Atreya's book initiates a crucial dialogue between the disciplines of science, art, and literature, and will surely spark some cross-disciplinary revelations that will further bring cas to light.

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Ron Silliman
Salt Publishing ($14.99)

by Mark Tursi

Early in Under Albany, Ron Silliman suggests that he has “spent 17 of the last 24 years actively undercutting expectations within form.” This statement seems hardly debatable considering the evolution of his work, spanning from Ketjak (1978) to The Age of Huts (1986) to his newly finished 26 books of The Alphabet, and including the immense output of commentary produced on his internet blog (http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/). Silliman quips further about his process regarding form: “This thought makes me wonder if I shouldn't think now of proceeding in yet another way.” It seems he's done just that in Under Albany, which resists genre labeling and the easy jargon-laden qualifiers (non-referential, constructivist, language-centered) so often associated with Silliman. The text even resists Jackson Mac Low's description “perceiver-centered,” as it seems to create and reinforce a way of reading that is based squarely on the experience and personal history of the writer, yet somehow avoids the conventional memoir. This isn't to say it shuts down a perceiver-oriented reading: it deepens the ways of seeing each sentence, each phrase, and each shift in language; and it invites the reader to explore them more cavernously, but through Silliman's own autobiographical lens. His multi-layered, expansive approach serves to debunk numerous myths about what Language Poetry is or is not, and it demonstrates the complexity and the mindfulness implicit in all of Silliman's work.

The book is a deeply personal account of how and why one of Silliman's earlier poems is constructed; the author elaborates on, expands upon, and at times even explicates “Albany,” first published in Ironwood 20 in 1982. He takes each line—each “new sentence”—and describes a number of possibilities, all relating to its construction, some of which include the following modalities: (1) the catalyst/impetus for the sentence, (2) when and where it was written, (3) how and/or why it was written, (4) the events and people involved in its writing (i.e. the historical, social, cultural, and personal context surrounding it), (5) reflections about the time it was written compared to his current state of mind and ideas, and (6) opinions/responses/diatribes about particular events or situations. He doesn't explore all of these possibilities for every line, but, often, incorporates several, as in this passage, which expands on the phrase “Off the books”:

The idea of poetry as a “career” in a society that doesn't value literacy is an inherent contradiction. I have worked as an encyclopedia salesman…a shipping clerk, an accounting clerk, a mail sorter, an amanuensis for blind graduate students, a janitor for Giant Hamburgers…

Some of these explorations deal with the specific details of day-to-day life, relationships, and familial interactions while others explore the political milieu of the time. This includes student anti-war protests in the 1960s and '70s on or near the Berkeley campus, the ins-and-outs of the prison reform movement for which Silliman was an integral part, the socialist and labor oriented movements from the last several decades, and the massacre at Jonestown. Other sections include Silliman's encounter with other poets and his development as a writer. Each section—like a personally and creatively charged annotated bibliography of quotidian reality—seems to evoke an earlier line from Silliman's Tjanting: “Build an Onion.” If he has a modus operandi here, this seems to be it. Albany is the building of the onion and Under Albany is the peeling away to see the various possible layers.

This re-presentation of the personal is interesting in light of Silliman's adamant opposition to “the poem as confession of lived personal experience, the (mostly) free verse presentation of sincerity and authenticity.” But, what exactly is happening here in terms of the lyric, the personal, and the autobiographical? To borrow a term from Rae Armantrout, this text is largely “ambi-centered,” centered in reality and experience as well as in language; they are not mutually exclusive, and language must be representational in some way, even if resisting and challenging these references. Silliman's method is ambi-centered because he foregrounds his own process, enabling the personal to bubble to the surface of the language, but not to overtake it. He enacts what Charles Bernstein calls a “constructivist memoir,” enriching the text with explorations of its “context to reference, subtext to meaning, back story to presented experience, and composition to poetics.” This description calls to mind Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's idea of the text as a rhizome that splits and attaches to various other possible chunks of language and realms of meaning. Always though, Silliman makes us aware that the original lines from “Albany” are not simply a mimesis of the experience in which they were constructed, but rather a part of, an additional object within, the already existing flood of language, memory, and experience. The final line of the book, “It is not possible to ‘describe a life,’” is an acknowledgment of the impossibility of imitation and description to accurately portray human experience, yet his attempt demonstrates that the effort is, in fact, necessary and worthwhile.

At moments, the book is very meditative and philosophical, as when Silliman writes: “I crossed a line in my life from which I have never stepped back. This, in a sense, is the exact opposite of telos, but rather a recognition that choice is central to freedom. With both its intended and unintended consequences.” At other times, it is a touching narrative about his own life, as in the elaboration of the line “Here, for a moment, we are joined,” a narrative description of he and his wife Krishna falling in love. The very personal tone of the book is increased by certain sections which seem direct addresses to his two sons, for whom the book is dedicated.

Overall, Under Albany shows us that “Albany,” a representative of Silliman's characteristically language-centered work, is not a product of random language, chance operation, or chaos, a charge often directed at writing like this. Rather, it is a profoundly complex exploration of the mind and emotion that is directly connected to the world and experience from which it emerges. If for Silliman “The relation between agency and identity must be understood as interactive, fluid, negotiable,” this text demonstrates that one level of this negotiation involves a strong personal impulse where language is seen as grounded in the day-to-day. Thus, Under Albany does not explain “Albany,” but rather it complicates it on another level. The dislocation and fragmentation of the poem is still there, but now it is imbedded in more layers and more possibilities that reveal Silliman's unique life and signature.

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