John Olson
Calamari Press ($13)

by Ellen Twadell

John Olson's The Night I Dropped Shakespeare on the Cat is hard to classify, hard to read, and hard to stop thinking about. There are numerous short chapters. There are sparse illustrations by artist Derek White. There are words. Mostly, there are words. Words without context or story, or so it seems.

Is it stream of consciousness? Not quite, because throughout the span of the book Olson emphasizes certain ideas and words. Is it poetry? The density of each page says no, but the attention to individual words demands the reader's attention on the same level poetry does. Is it fiction or memoir? There are compelling short spurts of story in which the author seems to be drawing on personal experience, but these are few and far between in a sea of language. While the pages resemble prose, Olson deliberately arranges sentences that make no grammatical sense. Something else is going on here.

Olson is interested in words. He is interested in how sounds and images represent ideas and things. By the end of the book Olson is more comfortable being explicit with his relationship to language, but the first moment of epiphany—when it becomes evident that he is using the word "jackknife" repeatedly, simply because he likes the word "jackknife"—is the moment the book makes sense. Yet Olson repeats words not at random, but spaces them like gems in a bracelet. He uses words that evoke the visual in a lush way: "Water turquoise and green . . . Water streaked with whorls of delinquent oil." Derek White's complicated composite illustrations, sparse at first and progressively denser towards the middle of the book, punctuate the prose.

What exactly are pictures doing in this sea of text? Even if they don't feed a narrative they participate in an idea of language. Olson evokes the visual with words because written words are visual creatures. Letters or characters have their own shapes. They can evoke images in the mind and bring about a burst of sensory recognition with one sense alone. Words and pictures are more closely related than both writers and artists perhaps admit.

Olson is also interested in the way words look on the page, or sound to the ear. He has a collection of double-letter words: jackknife, bubble, Mississippi, sweet. He has a few words that he repeats for their own sake, because they're words he likes, or finds interesting, or they mean something to him: crustacean, gravity, knot, creamy. At some moments, he becomes explicit: "Is any of this making sense? It is nutty to make an art out of language. Language and art are accelerated by creaminess. You know this."

Perhaps the point is that words mean something, and for many people words are very personal. They have associations that are unique. They can exist without narration or context. It is possible that we are not looking at just words, but Olson's love letter to them.

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Tom Sykes
Rodale Books ($22.95)

by Matthew Schneeman

In What Did I Do Last Night?, Tom Sykes recounts a classic tale of a rise and fall and rise again. Though a basic plot synopsis would lead you to think the story somewhat simple—man beats alcoholism—it is far from the truth. The originality that brings this memoir to life stems from humorous and blindingly realistic narratives that map out all the dos and don'ts of drinking. Do: Become a reviewer of New York City nightlife, all expenses paid. Don't: Sleep in a gutter while waiting for a seedy bar to open.

The book follows a chronological timeline, from Tom Sykes's first beer in a pub to the moment he decided never to drink again. We follow Sykes as he gets drunk at school, works at a strawberry field, and drinks beers with a man slaughterer. This takes us through the greater part of England, thus giving a tour of one of the most proficient drinking cultures in the world. We then head to New York where Sykes gets a perfect/disastrous job as the New York Post's nightlife reviewer. The vivid binge drinking descriptions breach the paradox of clearly portraying nights that were muddled by alcohol, weed, and coke.

Showing the pros and cons of the popular drugs of the time, Sykes displays ecstasy's beauty and danger, pot's enhancements and laziness, coke's festiveness and addiction, and alcohol's grand party and strangling grip on one's life. The end of the book feels like a close escape from a disturbing potentiality. Sykes has the uncanny ability to make the reader feel like a drinking pal during the good times and afraid for him as he deteriorates; we empathize and are still aghast when he says things like "I can't say the proudest moment of my life was frantically trying to sniff a few grains in the hospital bathroom before I went in to see Alice, Floyd, and their new daughter."

Sykes is a great raconteur, and he recalls many unbelievable stories that invigorate the reader—though whenever he tells a less remarkable story, the reader feels unsatisfied. Amazing or dull, however, collectively the stories leave us with a well-rounded version of Tom Sykes. What Did I Do Last Night? takes the reader into a life of indulgences and redemption. We feel the highs, the lows, the buzzes, and the hangovers in stunning detail and see the world through the bloodshot eyes of a drunkard.

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Dick North
Harbour Publishing ($19.95)

by Ryder W. Miller

In Sailor on Snowshoes, Canadian journalist and northern historian Dick North takes the reader on an expedition to The North to follow the travails of Jack London during the year he spent searching for gold in the Klondike. London, then a scrappy 21-year-old sailor and adventurer from California, joined the Klondike Gold Rush from August 1897 to July 1898, but he only returned to California with a few dollars' worth of gold dust. However, as North relays, The North had a profound influence on London and inspired some of his most famous work. As London said of his journey after he returned to the Bay Area, "I found myself. There nobody talks. Everybody thinks. You get your true perspective. I got mine." London quickly became famous around the world for evoking the experiences and harshness of The North in such blockbusters as The Call of the Wild, White Fang and "To Build a Fire."

Much of the book is taken up with North's travelogue of his personal expedition to search for London's cabin in the Klondike, though he makes references to London's life as well as the stories and books that were inspired by this wild and dangerous country. (London's cabin has since been found—an extensive investigation proved its authenticity—and was transplanted to Oakland, California.) London did not write much about the cabin, but he leave his mark on a wood panel: "Jack London, miner, author, Jan 27, 1898." Later removed, it was returned upon the cabin's discovery and found to fit in place.

North evokes the harsh setting for London's disappointing but inspiring adventure through personal reflection and quotes from London, embellished by stark black and white historical photographs. "We walked on. The darkness now enveloped us like a black shroud," North recounts. "The eerie howl of a timber wolf suddenly broke the silence and reverberated through the lonely forest. Then another sounded and still another. It was scary but better to hear them than suffer the incredible 'white silence' of the northern wilderness."

Sailor on Snowshoes certainly adds to the lore concerning Jack London, but it is lessened by not addressing, despite the clue in the title, that London was also considered "The Melville of the Pacific." London was more successful writing about The North, but he also wrote many adventures on oceanic themes. As this book shows, writers do not always wind up being remembered for everything they would like, but rather by how others find them.

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Gregory L. Blackstock
Princeton Architectural Press ($19.95)

by Eliza Murphy

A painstakingly rendered murder of crows line up on the cover of Blackstock's Collections—the extremely endangered Hawaiian crow, Iraqi pied crow, and the carrion crow stand in profile alongside others in the tidy rows that characterize Gregory Blackstock's artistic oeuvre. The back cover features similarly astonishing shoes executed with precision in his inimitable style. His compositions consist of rows of objects labeled with neat, capitalized identifying words, sometimes accompanied by information about the objects.

An artistic savant who earned his living as a pot washer until his retirement, Blackstock is a self-taught illustrator; most of the time, he only has to look at an object once before drawing it accurately, in pencil, on paper, then finishing each drawing in black markers, graphite and colored pencils. His ability to space his subjects in an even fashion on a single page, sometimes several sheets glued or taped together, is remarkable. During an interview at his studio home recently, he said he has no need for a straight edge or a ruler, but he does use an eraser: "I have to do it to make it perfect."

In this book, a veritable encyclopedia of the ordinary, Blackstock arranges the chapters by groups of objects, such as "our famous birds," "the noisemakers," and "the last but not least." When something intrigues Blackstock, his fascination is thorough, whether the object be as commonplace as balls or as exotic as "Nature's Insect Death Traps," which includes text that explains, in his matter-of-fact language, "the bladderwort— an aquatic carnivore with pouches to engulf and eat up tiny creatures after they swim inside the doors for food."

Sometimes that fascination inspires him to go places, and Blackstock catalogues his travels in his brief biography at the beginning. But pursuing his art seriously does not preclude his inclusion of humor, nor playfulness. In "The Noisemakers," he gathers together "UFO & old flying saucer helicopters," chainsaws, giant outboard race engines, Roman candles, and a cartoon-like face with a bubble filled with what appear as conventional signs for expletives, with the description: "loud filthy-mouth offender, the overemotional dirt bag."

Blackstock's innate inquisitiveness propels him to catalog and order a chaotic world filled with stuff, none of it too mundane to escape his notice. The foreword by Dr. Darold A. Treffert, a savant syndrome expert, offers a brief but incisive explanation of the condition. Treffert's sensitive understanding of this rare disorder makes it impossible to discount or pathologize Blackstock's drive to create. "Savant skills are as much a force as they are a gift. . . . these are more than frivolous compulsive outpourings. They are the language of the savant."

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Anna Moschovakis
Turtle Point Press ($16.95)

by Jason Ranon Uri Rotstein

The title of Anna Moschovakis's debut collection is cause enough to stop and consider. I Have Not Been Able to Get Through to Everyone may stand as one of poetry's best book titles of 2006. It immediately ushers in a poet of sharp irony, humble yet hazardous of limitations. Moschovakis is a poet not to be taken lightly and one not easy to digest. While she seems dispossessing, she gustily describes herself as a poet whose "biographer listens at the window." The thought must be sentimental folly, for Moschovakis's poetry does not demand us merely to listen to her poetry but to take a stand.

I Have Not Been Able to Get Through to Everyone is a book with no small agenda. The poems are a series of long sequences that can at times barely maintain a word to a line. In these poems, Moschovakis questions authority— especially the authority that language portends— and performs a sort of grammatology, renovating and questioning the many associations that naturally seem to inhere. The first poem of the collection concludes with these words, mapping her territory:

I don't remember my grammar
rules. I don't think English is very good
for a certain kind of inventioning. I gather
some readers don't like being
confronted with the language in every word.
I want to be a word. I would be abstract
with an inscrutable ending.

As one can see already from this first venture, her method is not psychological or interior but resolutely philosophical—she wants her poetry, and poetry in general, to ask "epistemological questions." She even imagines herself stalking around in the "Platonic cave." As she says, in the sequence of poems entitled "Preparations," where she seems to state an individual ars poetica, "Because Plato felt modern that day / he adopted ironic distance."

Leaving irony aside, the sequence "The Match," is a six-day journey in poetry ostensibly recorded at the rate of "one-poem per day," an exercise that does produce some standout verse. As in "Day 4":

Abstinence can actually alter your desires
or make them disappear.
The person you wanted to consume
becomes something you wear around your neck
or taste gingerly on your knees
leave enough for everyone

Where many of Moschovakis's poems talk at you, this poem conveys a distinct and shocking mood. This is the best of what the poet has to offer. Most of the time, she finds herself narrowly trying to skirt cliché, a challenge that seems troublesome for her to bear: "A view of sunlight filtering through trees can seem corny or kitsch." Still, her odd comparisons and catalogue of coincidences can at times be compelling, and her method produces an interesting first venture in speculative poetry, one that holds real promise for the future.

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Malena Mörling
University of Pittsburgh Press ($14)

by Miguel Murphy

"No ideas but in things" William Carlos Williams famously wrote in 1944; Malena Mörling's work is a contemporary echo of Williams' philosophy of the localized image, one set in relation to theoretical physics and quantum theory. In Mörling's hands, the poetry of the local becomes a way to record, preserve, and witness experience at the quantum level, as it travels wavelike, radioed into space. Theoretical physics, which proposes that any imagined possibility will at some point in time be true, is the underlying framework of this book. Mörling's poems work on one level as artifact, investigating the images of daily sights and moments. As such, Astoria is the manual to this world's experience, traveling at the speed of light, or memory.

In the opening lines of her book, "If there is another world, / I think you can take a cab there," Mörling rejects otherworldliness, heaven, soul, or life-after-death, since these are ideas that cannot be explored by experience. In "131st Street" she writes more directly: "I have never wanted to visit / outer space— // Though I have often thought / about how it never ends." Just as the light we see in the night sky may be that of stars that no longer exist, Mörling's work considers our own light, the experience of this place in time, sent out into the universe to unnameable ends. We are, instead, beings who "continue / in the weightless seesaw of the light / through a few more intersections / where people inside their cars / pass you by in space / and where you pass by them." What is left of us is the evidence of our wearing our place in time. "What will we become?" she asks in "Becoming A Coat," "Besides coats, besides shoes / that will continue to walk / a while longer / upon the earth."

Mörling's language is deceptively accessible. She is a master of imagery and the pacing of her lines is ultimately subversive, lulling by their movement from the familiar paraphernalia of the physical realm into a joyful nihilism. In "Seeing High Above" the poet's belief in "things" is clearly pronounced. Seeing "a scrap of paper" floating in the "blustery library / of the air" the speaker immediately knows "it is a message— // A message / that there is no message." Again in "In the Yellow Head of a Tulip" Mörling offers a catalogue of found objects that feel amazing by their arrangement alone:

an iron next to a nail-clipper next to a can of soup
next to a starling's feather
in the silence inside of stone
in tea in music in desire in butter in torture
in space that flings itself out in the universe
in every direction at once without end
........................................
that could be you
that could be me
that could be nothing.

Place for Mörling is both inheritance and anchor. If there is nothingness— if there is only particle and atomic half-life on the other side of experience, then beauty is both an accident and a byproduct of the marriage of space and the absence of a greater purpose, greater meaning. But the reward of this work is that it insists that the image of this place at this time is itself wondrous. In this book, Mörling recounts one beautiful accident of experience after another:

It's amazing
we're not
more amazed.
The world
is here
but then it's gone
like a wave
traveling toward
other waves.

Mörling's work resists easy versions of belief that provide a safe way to speak about the human spirit, though her work succeeds in being joyful, and never despairs. Spiritualism amounts to playfulness in language, an awe for the connectedness of human experiences— themselves as free as the particles as of light, or breath.

In "No Precise Location" she writes, "Our bodies / are lying here now / on this bed / in the dark / of a house on the earth— / A house as much in space / as the farthest star / in the galaxy of Andromeda." Nihilism is never dark in Mörling's work, but demands that we consider this too-swift miracle of being. This world, and all the characters of experience who inhabit it, is the only thing we know for sure, and Mörling's poetry quietly considers it in the context of theoretical time, in which space is the dilemma of our wonder.

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Landis Everson
Graywolf Press ($15)

by Adam Fieled

Landis Everson is a visionary poet. But that doesn't mean he leaves earthly desires, pleasures, fears and pains untouched—they are, in fact the basis for his visions. For Everson, the daily world allows the poet to receive insights that, mixing innocence and experience, might be called "divine." The paradox of innocence and experience comes to terms with sensuality, love, and loss in Everson's poems. They are directed, much as Blake's poems were, by a recognition that the small matters of our lives can have a numinous quality.

The visionary quality of Everson's poems is complemented and magnified by an easy formal elegance, a sparing approach to language that leaves room for subtle ornamentation. In "Famine," Everson has a dream-vision of deer entering his dark bedroom:

The moon through the window throws cold light
Upon their curved backs, making a forest
Of crossed antler shadows on sheets
That until now have been flawless and starved.

Everson, allowing us entry to a specific moment by writing in the present tense, crafts a song of innocence tempered by hard-won experience. Deer, representing nature in its most unmediated form, inspire Everson's vision of innocence led away from famine. The famine being effaced seems to be a spiritual state of being or consciousness—it could be bitterness born of experience, the "cold light" of the moon, or a sense of seclusion—and with the end of famine, the rebirth of innocence, complexity creeps in and flaws appear. Human salvation is messy and equivocal, whether salvation takes the form of a vision or a poem; Everson takes account of this messiness, in such a way that it would be hard to miss or ignore. The wisdom of experience cannot be forgotten, even when innocent joy returns.

Everson is a poet with a substantial history. A witness of the Berkeley Renaissance, he was romantically linked with Jack Spicer, and had ties to Robert Duncan and Robin Blaser. The connection to Duncan is especially apparent, as they are both poets of transcendence, ethereality and, paradoxically, domesticity. It is at home that we find the greatest intimacy, and Everson is a poet of intimacies completed; as he writes in "Closet," "I see / the stars right through the back / of your head." Closet, in this context, can mean a space for storing articles or a space for denying one's sexuality. Everson lets the ambiguity linger in the air, but his own affect is visible and brimful—the closet is clearly not for him. In Everything Preserved, Everson has crafted a voice that blends the best parts of innocence and experience. His poems feel like acts of generosity, and the mythology built into them by the poet's history add to their already formidable aura. It is a joy to find a Blakean sensibility still alive and kicking.

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Barbara Jane Reyes
Tinfish ($13)

by Craig Perez

do you know what it is to witness an unraveling?

Barbara Jane Reyes's second book, Poeta en San Francisco, explores the translatable and untranslatable collisions of writing self and culture. We immediately become bound to the "lack of apology for what [the poems are] bound to do," which is, as the book's trinity-like structure suggests, to "orient," "disorient," and "re-orient." Throughout this work, we confront the crisis (or the "state of emergency," as Reyes puts it) of "no single, adequate translation" for writing personal and cultural experiences; these poems, however, create a momentary "cove to escape the flux."

Poeta inscribes and re-inscribes the voices of San Francisco and the physical characteristics of the city itself. San Francisco functions figuratively as the book's main trope and as actual landscape:

en esta ciudad, where homeless 'nam vets
wave old glory and pots for spare change;
she grows weary of the daily routine:

fuckinjapgobacktochina!
allthemfuckingooknamessoundthesame!

and especially:
iwasstationedatsubicbay.

Reyes reads the city through its interpersonal and historical violence against Asians in general, and Filipinos particularly. She doesn't suppress difficult histories or the voices that these histories have suppressed; instead, she allows an innocent conception of the city to be haunted by its ghosts:

north of market's upscale shopping mecca's center you can't miss the huge female personification of victory riding an erext 97-foot granite phallus to commemorate commodore dewey's victory over the spanish armada in manila bay on may 1, 1898 this monument dedicated by gun totin' fist shakin' rough rider teddy on may 14, 1903 to end a splendid little war to begin what is known as a small insurrection

Where "El Camino Real" ends, Reyes actively re-invents the city, scripting the Filipino presence in San Francisco's textual memory. Poeta's San Francisco is what Mary Louise Pratt, in Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Tranculturation (Routledge, 1992), defines as a "contact zone":

The space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict. . . . By using the term 'contact,' I aim to foreground the interactive, improvisational dimensions of colonial encounters so easily ignored or suppressed by diffusionist accounts of conquest and domination. A 'contact' perspective emphasizes how subjects are constituted in and by their relations to each other . . . in terms of copresence, interaction, interlocking understandings and practices.

Reyes's account of culture foregrounds the co-presence of different cultures and the interlocking histories of these cultures. The subject of Poeta, its I, is constituted and re-constituted through its relation to the other. Throughout Poeta, we witness the intersecting trajectories of body, self, culture and city:

we are penned in this narrow strip of land,
sutured by train tracks and high voltage wire,
where these piss and dank stankin alleys
embrace and tear us from our vigilance—
without so much as a sustainable gospel.

in our collisions, we learn to make new:
from our lacerated and fractured selves,
appendages resembling tails, horns.
and, siempre, wings to capture breath.

Reyes proposes that we fashion ourselves and histories within the "contact zone" of our collisions to develop a "sustainable gospel," a communal act of remembrance and invention. In a space where "the pure products of America go crazy" (a line William Carlos Williams wrote in "To Elsie" is quoted inPoeta), Reyes employs a lacerated lyric and de-centralized perspective to wing its fractured narratives.

Poeta also descends from a "poethnographic" tradition that includes Federico Garcia Lorca's Poet in New York, Aime Cesaire's Notebooks of a Return to the Native Land, Jean Toomer's Cane, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee, just to name a few. James Clifford's description of postcolonial, postmodern ethnography in The Predicament of Culture: 20th Century Ethnography, Literature and Art (Harvard University Press, 1988), further echoes Reyes's project:

A modern 'ethnography' of conjunctures, constantly moving between cultures . . . is perpetually displaced, both regionally focused and broadly comparative, a form both of dwelling and of travel in a world where the two experiences are less and less distinct . . . Ethnography, a hybrid activity, thus appears as writing, as collecting, as modernist collage, as imperial power, as subversive critique . . . a way of understanding and getting around in a diverse world that, since the sixteenth century, has become cartographically unified. One of the principal functions of ethnography is 'orientation' . . . But in the twentieth century ethnography reflects new 'spatial practices' (De Certeau, 1984), new forms of dwelling and circulating.

With textual formations continually moving through moments of displacement and disjuncture, Poeta is deeply concerned with "orientation" and the creation of new "spatial practices" in navigating a diverse world. This collection serves as both a poetry volume and ethnographic notebook, recording new multiperspectival cartographies derived from the "contact zone." At one point, Reyes asks: "wanna peek into my notebook? There may be clues hidden in it: instructions for viewing subjective catastrophe. rules of derivation." Learning the rules of derivation will help us understand Reyes's methodology: She leads, draws, and receives from a source. She procures an effect from causes, means, conclusions and opinions from evidence. She traces origin or descent, as in grammar or genealogy. She deduces one function from another according to laws of differentiation and of integration.

Reyes's contact perspective produces a "contact aesthetic," as various languages (English, Tagalog, Spanish, and an ancient script of the Philippines called Baybayin) interact with numerous formal experiments employed towards "the absurdity of navigation." For example, Poeta moves from unpunctuated prose ("do not dip your hands into fish sauce fermented shrimp paste vessels do not grimace tasting salty wetness do not forget to clean up your own mess here no frills leaving gratuity is customary mark of manners") to the epistolary ("dear love, / remember the bamboo tiger cages in those goddamn movies. and napalm, sinister rain, deathly tangerine vapor veiling the islands, for simulation's nothing like the real thing. the real thing. the real thing"); from confessional ("Forgive me father, for here have I faltered. / It has been thirty years and counting, / the process of my acculturation.") to urban-slam ("unsavory districts for kicky dining amongst lush and plush urbanoids, kooky and kitschy, freewheeling trendoids for even the moneyed sport funk-to-grunge artsy attire"); from notes on Asiaphiles ("1. A non-Asian male who prefers Asian women. . . . / 2. A white western male with a pathological, sexual obsession with Asians and their cultures. / 3. A non-Asian person, most often a white male, with yellow fever.") to outright storytelling:

one day she will build a temple from detritus, dust of your crumbling empires' edicts; its walls will hold with blood and spittle, brackish water and sun-dried grasses. within these walls she will inscribe her own terms of worship, upon every pillar and column, glyphs resembling earth and ocean. once she had no sharpened stone, no reason for stone, for once the wind bore her words upon its entire wingspan. Carved into bamboo, banana leaf, her river poems, her birdsong.

Reyes's ruptured fieldwork rubric resists objectivism in favor of "new forms of dwelling and circulating." The methods of seeing and writing culture d(e)rive the narrative through the diverse contact zones of the city and the resulting "subjective catastrophe." In this "state of emergency" where no grand narrative can adequately translate culture, Reyes offers us a shifting narrative that adjusts to variable moments of seeing.

Besides being a "poethnographic" project, Poeta en San Francisco is also a prayer. Writing from within one of the many cultures of U.S. imperialism, Reyes expresses an urgent plea in her native tongues in which "breath is word is spirit":

pray for us sinners         ipanalangin n'yo kamin makasalanan
now and at the hour      ngayon at kung
of our death                      kami ay mamamatay

amen

Although Reyes offers a prayer for her community, she doesn't speak for her community; instead she speaks honestly, intimately, and lyrically within and through her community. In this sense, writing culture becomes "constit(ch)utive" of poetry and prayer.

Turning to the final stanza of Williams's "To Elsie," we read: "No one / to witness / and adjust, no one to drive the car." Through Poeta en San Francisco, Reyes re-imagines the single car as variable narrative vehicles; in addition, she re-imagines the "no one" (the "no single, adequate translation") not as an absence, but as an opportunity to navigate these vehicles through a new, sustainable perspective: "The blank space on your map, that's where I was born. . . . Can you appreciate the neither here nor there of it all?" Reyes shows us that the blank space on our maps are not blank at all, but open. It is their openness that we must appreciate and redraw in order to navigate the blinding lightness of the "neither here nor there." Poeta performs this adjustment at every textual moment, and we are present to witness her unraveling prayer:

she whispers desert trees, thorn-ridged, trickling yellow candles; roots
spilling snakes' blood
virgin of ribboned silk; virgin of gold filigree
one day's walk westward, a crucifix of fisherman's dinghy dimensions
washes ashore
virgin adorned in robe of shark embryo and coconut husk
she fingers mollusks, wraps herself in sea vines
virgin of ocean voyage peril
she wills herself born
...............................................................
virgin of naming and renaming places inbetween

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Alicia Yànez Cossìo
Translated by Amalia Gladhart
University of Texas Press ($19.95)

by Kristin Thiel

Alicia Yànez Cossìo's 1985 novel, recently translated into English, is recounted breathlessly, as though time or circumstance might soon prevent it from being told. Some sentences are short or list-like, moving the reader quickly through details, as in the description of a town fair: "There are platters of guinea pig bathed in peanut sauce that look like drowned mice. There are potatoes in their jackets . . . There are baskets of steaming hominy." Other sentences stretch into paragraphs, winding their way through setting, character, and commentary, as with the novel's opening line:

Clip-clop, clip-clop, clip-clop, striking showers of sparks against the rocks carved by the water of the rivers whose terrifying currents carry whole settlements to the Oriente, over the round stones like hard rolls, like the bread eaten by the sweat of one's brow, the bread that is burnt at the oven door, stones that have been placed one by one by the calloused hands of the Indians, gallops Magdalena Benavides, and she thinks that the day will come when people from far away, who are the ones who discover foreign lands, will be amazed and come to see with their own eyes the hand-laid cobblestones of the town's streets and its long roads.

This narrative style fits well with the novel, which is all about talk and the urgency to convey one's own version of events.

There are two families in the book's Andean town: the Benavideses and the Pandos. The Benavideses are conservative, religious, and the caretakers of the town's prized icon, the Potbellied Virgin. They are also blonds, being of both indigenous and European descent, and they see this as physical proof of their superiority and right to govern the town. The Pandos are dark-haired mestizos, who used to own the land, but who were dispossessed years before when the Benavideses manipulated legal documents to take control. The plot turns on the Pando family trying to regain power from the Benavides family. Yànez Cossìo also weaves in a couple "misfit" characters, such as a Benavides woman who wants to escape small-town life and a Pando who avoids everyone to publish his subversive newspaper.

Much of the novel pokes fun at the Benavides family. Sometimes the jokes speak to serious issues; for example, in such an isolated and impoverished town, the Benavides' Sisterhood of the Bead on the Gown of the Potbellied Virgin keeps its icon "radiant in her white gown embroidered with gold threads and baroque pearls; with her crown of one hundred and thirty-six diamonds and eighteen emeralds as big as cymbals and her scepter of solid gold that she can't hold up which they have had to tie to a post." Sometimes the humor is lighter. The town has cycled through numerous priests in quick succession because no one can stand working under the neurotic rule of Doña Carmen Benavides, the head of the Sisterhood. She develops an anxious tic in her left eye trying to get one to officiate the Jubilee of the Potbellied Virgin, which makes people nervous that she's flirting with them. Eventually, in a move that is more comedic than threatening, she kidnaps two missionaries who are passing through town and forces them to lead the celebration.

The end, for both the novel and the Sisterhood, brings into full view a third player, the military, another oppressive and absurd force. Whereas the Pandos and the Benavides both speak partially in local proverbs, indicated in italics throughout the novel and demonstrating each group's place in the community, the military men do not. With their entry into the book, they begin to bear some of the ridicule the Benavides once faced mostly alone.

Much about Ecuador's history, attitudes toward race, and play between religion and the military has been addressed in this slim novel—and in the translator's excellent nine-page introduction. But in the end, as in life, everything hinges only on which of history's storytellers was heard.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2006-2007 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2006-2007

B. H. Fingerman
M Press ($12.95)

by Jessica Bennett

We're all familiar with the legions of sexy, forever-young, brooding vampires that have dominated vampire fiction from Bram Stoker to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Well, being immortal loses some of its appeal when you've got to spend eternity working in a cubicle and dining on the dregs of humanity. B. H. Fingerman—better known as Bob Fingerman, the disturbingly, delightfully dead-on comics artist behind the acclaimed chronicles of hipster New York, Minimum Wage and Beg the Question—here explores what happens when the undead are unglamorous, and the results are morbid and droll.

Phil Merman is a reluctant vampire, so guilt-ridden over his need to feast on human blood that he limits his diet to vagrants and criminals in the hope that he'll minimize his impact on society. He lives in a drab Brooklyn apartment, works a tedious job cataloging news photos (the graveyard shift, natch), and rues the day he became a creature of the night. Initially, he tried to hide his vampirism, but his marriage fell apart soon after he was turned in 1974, and his parents grew suspicious of his agelessness before their deaths; his only friend, and his sole remaining connection to his old life, is a swishy, pathetic drunkard named Shelley who makes the occasional inebriated pass at Phil in between sordid stories of his (likely imaginary) girlfriends.

Things change when Phil makes a new friend in Eddie, a fellow vampire he meets while on the hunt. As Eddie begins to introduce him to others of their kind, Phil begins to question his solitary life and embrace his identity as a bloodsucker. He enters a new underworld of vampires from all walks of life—the rich and decadent as well as relative good Samaritans. Realizing that his distaste for the depravity which comes with being undead is a bit of hypocritical reverse-snobbery, not to mention self-loathing, he begins to let loose and, for want of a better word, live.

Fingerman does a fantastic job fleshing out the details of Phil's life through a first-person narrative filled with self-deprecation, endearingly peppered with groan-worthy Catskills-comedian one-liners, and entirely blasé throughout about the gore. And gore there is—the accounts of feedings, coming as they do in such an ordinary voice, often have a stomach-twisting power sometimes muted in more gothic depictions of the macabre.

The story is compelling and Phil is an endearing character. In fact, he's such a sad sack, the reader may find herself wishing he would just go out, enjoy a nice meal, and stop beating himself up about it, already. Unfortunately, the mystery itself falls a bit flat (as does the Catskills schtick at times) when Phil's somewhat unsurprising sire is revealed, but no matter— Fingerman rescues the ending and manages to wrap things up with gruesome panache. Ultimately, Bottomfeeder is a tasty morsel and a welcome antidote to the velvet-draped world of predictable vampire fiction.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Winter 2006-2007 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2006-2007