Radu Andriescu, Iustin Panta and Cristian Popescu
translated by Adam J. Sorkin, with Radu Andriescu, Mircea Ivănescu, and Bogdan Ștefănescu
Twisted Spoon Press ($15)

by Stephan Delbos

Essentially a three-part volume of selected poems, Memory Glyphsfeatures three contemporary Romanian prose poets, Radu Andriescu, Iustin Panta, and Cristian Popescu, translated and edited by Adam J. Sorkin, the leading American translator of modern Romanian writing. A wildly roving narrative sensibility and the ability to render surreal images with poignancy and humor is a shared distinction in the work of these three poets, whose singular achievements and stylistic idiosyncrasies make Memory Glyphsa strange compound of elements, at once playful, confounding, inspiring and ultimately serious.

Cristian Popescu writes most comfortably within the realm of imaginative possibilities, where anything is permissible; it is strange, then, that Popescu’s favorite poetic mode is autobiography. By mingling surreal and quotidian details with a cold eye—essentially a magic realist technique—Popescu lifts prosaic events to outlandish heights. Like all of the poets in Memory Glyphs, Popescu is at once logical and strange, as in the opening lines of “Cornelia Street”:

The first time I saw Cornelia was at a dance, at the Cultural Center at No. 3, where folk music was playing and night moths gathered on trumpets as if around a streetlamp in the dark.

By prefacing surreal imagery with prosaic details, Popescu plays images off each other, enhancing both the strangeness and comforting normality of each respective image. But Popescu is more than an image magician. There is a haunting sense of loss in his poems, the naïve tragedy of leaving childhood, and the realization that we are but playthings for God. One of the most poignant passages in Memory Glyphscomes in Popescu’s “About Father and Us,” an elegy for the poet’s father which serves as a testament to his entire family’s existence:

I wish I had a balloon blown up with your last breath. Every year on my own birthday, I could take a tiny gulp of it.

Even when Popescu addresses a single subject like his father, his poems are meant to be overheard by all of creation, present and future. Iustin Panta’s poems seem more sharply addressed than Popescu’s, in part because they are more precisely crafted. Panta often combines bouncing free verse with prose, creating sleek poems that advance through a series of logical statements to create a brilliant mosaic. “Magda,” the story of the poet’s first love, ends:

She adored the summer, one thing she told me is that
when autumn comes
she suffers cruelly and she’ll keep wearing shoes with
paper-thin soles through which she
can feel the asphalt,
wearing very light clothing,
she defies the season and in this way she hopes she
can delude it—
that’s about all I can remember of what we said to
one another.

Panta’s attention to radiant detail contrasts Popescu’s ranging yawp. His poems often resemble conceptual cut-ups; each image or statement has its own logic, which combines to form the polysemic metalogic of the entire poem. A tercet from the poem “Private Nelu” provides an example of how Panta uses techniques of surrealism, or “the stupefying use of the image,” as Louis Aragon called it, coining similes so forcefully the reader has no choice but to accept:

Just as you close a drawer and the toe of a sock gets
caught sticking out,
Private Nelu is thinking.

The sock image is perfectly logical, even familiar, as is the fact that Private Nelu is thinking. But Panta’s phrasing indicates a relationship of forced logic, creating a moment of strange clarity, much like a Zen koan.

Where Panta is concerned with the mind’s relationship to the world, Radu Andriescu has incorporated aspects of that world—specifically modern technology and American culture—more fully than either Popescu or Panta, which lends a fresh familiarity to his poems. Andriescu’s major themes are more clearly annunciated as well, as in “The Three Signs:”

He wants to furnish them with simple things, like thoughts about life and thoughts about death, but most of all thoughts about limits.

Limits, for Andriescu, means the individual’s smallness in the world. But Andriescu’s poems manage to retain a sense of humor against this vast and often terrifying horizon. “Rhymes for a Boundary and a Stove” presents a man stubbornly clinging to the hope of order in a brutish and uncaring—that is, realistic—world. Like Panta and Popescu, Andriescu’s poems create their own logic, perhaps as a defense against a lack of logic in the world:

His closest connection to the Heavens is his stove. Yellow and crumbling, with tiles held together in a framework of spongy clay . . . smoke that stretches to the sky, and its own massive weight pulling downward to the center of the Earth, the stove is the axis around which he spins his hopes of discovering order, few as they may be.

Andriescu recognizes the impossibility of order, and his poems flourish in a place beyond it. Hopes for us may be few, existing only in our imagination, but they are.

Each poet in Memory Glyphs takes his own path though darkness, humor, love, and mystery, and none is ashamed of groping aimlessly forward. The result is an unsettling pleasure, a collection of poems that grapple with our deepest questions, if only by representing the whims and cluttered wills of their authors.

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Clive Matson
Regent Press ($22)

by Tim Hunt

Diane di Prima’s Poets Press published the original version of Clive Matson’s Mainline to the Heart in 1966. This reissue of the long out-of-print volume supplements the original twelve poems and the Introduction by John Weiners with fourteen uncollected poems from 1964-1966 and an Afterword by di Prima. Reading the collection, it is easy to understand why it was published by a small press. Matson writes of addiction, sex, love, and spirituality in lines driven by his recognition that these may not be altogether different things. In “Talk About Love” he writes:

I’ve gone to Hell,
I’m addicted to heroin and want a habit
so bad it’ll break the deathgrip
of love’s terminal habit with Erin.

And in “Psalm” he adds,

God loves me
and He’ll fuck me when He wants,
laying the cool breasts against my chest &
the huge cock up my ass
while the words rise from me
like a big erection for I am God, too,
and I see only what I love.

If Matson’s at times harsh and explicit perceptions kept his poetry from broader circulation when it was first published, these qualities also make it worth discovering anew. Historically, Mainline to the Heartillustrates the power of the imaginative terrain opened by the original Beats in the mid-1950s, and the very first lines of the collection (“Fuck you, Huncke / Leave me / hung up for junk, waiting”) make this context explicit. But Matson’s poetry is largely without the underlying sense of self-consciousness about the poetic tradition that lurks in Ginsberg or the devastating satire of Burroughs’ presentation of addicted imagination. He wrote without a specific theory about literature or vision of the tradition, but his poems at their best have the power to make us forget about the category of literature altogether. Some poets dazzle us with their ability to spin out imagery and metaphor. Matson, instead, arrests us with stark observation and compels us with startling, dismaying recognitions. In “My Love Returned,” for instance, his attention to how

Time binds us tighter together
in orbit around our asteroid or lovely room
where we are each other’s parasite
and no friend in sight

illustrates his ability to see, and to compel his reader to see, beneath the usual evasions and comforting constructions. Perhaps nothing in the collection makes this clearer than his refusal to see his habit, his addiction to heroin, as the “disease.” Instead, life itself is the “disease,” at times painfully so, at other times offering momentary beauties and bits of epiphany.

The poems in Mainline to the Heart are a compelling document of the Beat literary scene in the mid-1960s. That would, by itself, justify this new edition. But Matson’s work is, to adapt Ezra Pound’s phrase, news that has stayed new. These are poems that can still startle, even shock; they are also poems that can make us grieve and see something of the beauty and richness that isn’t so much in spite of the “disease” that is life but because of it.

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Ariana Reines
mal-o-mar ($15)

by Megan Pugh

Summarizing Ariana Reines’s Coeur de Lion wouldn’t do this thoughtful book justice—it might sound too much like a soap opera for the hip intelligentsia. But the dramatic story—a woman, Ariana, addresses her ex after hacking into his Gmail account—isn’t what makes Coeur de Lion such a tour de force. Reines uses the love plot to investigate the nature of poetic address. She writes that she has been listening to Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, and Italian opera to help her “feel the popular emotions” of an “I” for an absent “you”; ultimately, Reines is less interested in her ex than in that most popular poetic form, the lyric. “I’m so fucking sick / Of you, but that’s the real / Me talking, and not the me / Of poetry. Where literature / Is concerned, ha ha, I’ve still / Got work to do.”

Reines’s “ha ha” is wry, self-deprecating, fun, and bitter—adjectives that apply to her project as a whole. She zooms through her ruminations in steeply enjambed blocks of sentences she doesn’t even stop to title, making the whole book a single, long poem one can race through in a sitting. This speed gives Coeur de Lion a kind of chatty urgency: there’s so much to say, and no time to waste. And Reines makes her poetic manipulation explicit: “I am writing this / In order to lose you / For my own purposes.” If Coeur de Lion is a confession, it’s not just about psychology, but about the violence lyric exerts when it reduces experience into the supposedly universalizing but ultimately “closed / System of another person’s mind.”

Coeur de Lion is the name of both a French camembert and a French king, Richard the Lion-Hearted, whose Crusades in the Holy Land led to the massacre of Jews. This conflation helps us see lyric poetry as both a process of commodification and a domineering conquest. Reines writes that “fermented things” like cheese are “More unsettlingly animal, somehow / than animal flesh.” She wants her poems—experience that has been aged and squeezed into shape—to be animal too, but this means confronting the stink of brutality, in both literature and life.

Ariana learns about Richard the Lion-Hearted on the internet—the same place she learns that, throughout their relationship together, her ex had been sending lusty emails another woman, Emma, complaining that he felt trapped by the “pretentious gypsy Jewish goth,” Ariana. Toward the end of Coeur de Lion, Ariana admits her revenge: “On August 27th I wrote to my / Friend Emma Wolf that I loved / Fucking you and that you might be / A bad writer, which made me / Nervous.” Until now, Ariana has had our sympathies, but this action seems unusually cruel. Reines is careful not to play the martyr: she wants us to know that cruelty is part of her work, as it is of lyric’s.

The identity Jake assigns Ariana, the “pretentious gypsy Jewess goth,” ends up helping Reines—whose book cover , it should be noted, is in a gothic font—to strike back. In Venice, Ariana says Gothic buildings look “like / Geometry and plants fucked each / Other and went insane, a simile that fits Coeur de Lion, too. Reines mates life with form, and their spawn feels alternately heavy and soaring, edgy, and thoroughly alive.

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edited by Tina Chang, Nathalie Handal, and Ravi Shankar
W.W. Norton ($27.95)

by Craig Santos Perez

Not since Pierre Joris and Jerome Rothenberg’s Poems for the Millennium has there been an anthology of such impressive scope. Six years in the making, Language For a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond weighs in at almost 800 pages and includes over 400 poets from over 60 countries writing in over 40 different languages—all translated into English. In the preface, editors Tina Chang, Nathalie Handal, and Ravi Shankar frame this anthology as an interventionist response to the aftermath of 9/11. They ask: “How could we respond to the destruction and unjust loss of human lives while protesting the one sided and flattened view of the East being showcased in the media? What was the vantage point we could arrive at in order to respond on a human level, to generate articulate dialogue, conversations that did not fall into rhetorical fallacies of us vs. them?” To create a more complex view of the “East,” the editors provide the broadest interpretation of the “East” possible, including such diverse countries as Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Sudan, and Syria—to name only the countries starting with “s.” Taken as a whole, Language for a New Century truly transcends any narrow definition of Eastern culture, with all its “voices [converging] in the dream of shared utterance.”

Instead of organizing this anthology alphabetically, chronologically, or nationally, the editors arrange their vast materials into nine thematic sections covering childhood, identity, language experimentation, politics, mystery, war, homeland, mortality, and love. The editors juxtapose this organization with various cultural applications of the number nine: the nine-pointed star of the Bahai faith, the nine land divisions of feng shui, the nine primary personality types in the Sufi system, the nine-day South Indian festival called Navaratri, and the sum of the three letters that make up the word “truth” in Judaism. In addition, the editors claim that their organization “represents an entire cosmology of planets that . . . offers a glimpse into the complex array of voices that make up these regions’ poetry.” For pragmatic readers, the nine sections simply make the massive anthology more readable; I finished reading Language For a New Century in nine days. More strikingly, the thematic sections suggest that the poets gathered—and, by extension, all poets East and West—share similar human experiences and “a devotion to the transformative power of art.”

Another beautiful aspect of this anthology is that each section begins with a personal essay by an individual editor that introduces the theme, discusses a few of the poems in the section, and relates the theme to that particular editor’s personal experience. In the first essay, which introduces the childhood section, Tina Chang describes her memory of her father’s death in New York when she was only a year old. A year after his death, her mother sent her and her brother with their grandmother back to Taiwan. Chang remembers saying good-bye to her mother at Kennedy Airport, unable to translate her feelings of sorrow. After a discussion of some of the poems, Chang ends her introduction: “The most intricate of human emotions may have no lexicon, but the poets gathered here have offered a glimpse into that complex and wondrous realm.”

Throughout each section, the poets offer a glimpse into various complex realms of human experience. At the same time, because each poet is only represented by a single poem, the book outlines the breadth of rooted and diasporic “Eastern” cultures and poetries. In that sense, Language for a New Century is truly an “unprecedented collection,” as heralded by Carolyn Forché in the Foreword.

The sections “Earth of Drowned Gods” (politics) and “Apostrophe in the Scripture” (war) are perhaps the most powerful, offering a diverse range of possibility for political/politically-engaged poetry, emphasizing poetry’s role as defiance and witness. The sections “In the Grasp of Childhood Field” (childhood), “This House, My Bones” (homeland), “Bowl of Air and Shivers” (spirituality), and “The Quivering World” (love) are the most emotional, capturing experiences of exile, diaspora, memory, relationships, family, and God. “Buffaloes Under Dark Water” (mystery) and “Parsed into Colors” (identity) are the most complex, complicating simplistic notions of identity and lyric poetry. My favorite section is “Slips and Atmospherics” (language experimentation) because it presents a fascinating portrait of an “Eastern avant-garde.” This section features some excellent, well-known poets—Cathy Park Hong, Paolo Javier, Etel Adnan, Tan Lin, Jose Garcia Villa, Brian Kim Stefans, Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, and Jenny Boully—along with poets completely new and fascinating to me: Yang Lian, Rukmini Bhaya Nair, Che Qianzi, Arun Kolatkar, Yu Jian, and Ricardo M De Ungria, to name a few. As well, Ravi Shankar writes an intriguing introductory essay for this section.

Returning to the preface, the editors describe their belief that “looking outward toward a wide spectrum of poetry would give us the opportunity for discovery and transformative wisdom.” Indeed, this is true. However, this is just the first step; another lovely aspect of this anthology is the Country Index at the back of the book, providing readers with a possible guide for future reading. The editors’ vision of a shared community and of an ongoing dialogue between East and West will surely help “lay the foundation for a poetics of a new era.” Language for a New Century gives us hope that the renewing power of language will not only matter in the 21st century, but will also help make the century new.

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C. S. Giscombe
Dalkey Archive ($12.95)

by Paula Koneazny

C. S. Giscombe’s Prairie Style, which won a 2008 American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, is the final book in a four-part series that began with the limited edition book Two Sections from Practical Geography (Diaeresis Press) followed by Here (Dalkey Archive Press, 1994) and Giscome Road (Dalkey Archive Press, 1998). Prairie Style mirrors the series it completes, as it too is comprised of four sections: “Nameless,” “Inland,” “Indianapolis, Indiana,” and “Notes on Region.” In addition, a prefatory “Acknowledgments” section accounts for some of the sources for the language in the poems, and, as is usual for Giscombe, lists the locations where the writing took place: Pennsylvania, Scotland, Nova Scotia, California, and finally, a shifting location called simply “on Amtrak.”

Although true, it would be an oversimplification to say that Giscombe writes about place. It may be more accurate to say that he writes from places. His poetry is nomadic, both in inspiration and execution, always exploring what he aptly refers to as “range.” At the same time, his is a settled nomadism. Even though always about location’s ambiguity, what he refers to as “the verb for location” in Giscome Road, his poems do not just pass through. They are attentive to their surroundings; they stay a while and get to know a place. They never entirely move on.

Of the four books, Giscome Road is the one most interested in sheer geography; it takes place and takes up place on the page in a way that repeats the topography. Prairie Style, on the other hand, seems less concerned with mapping the page and more interested in space itself. It has more density (in the sense of compression) and more silence. Much of the geography of the Prairie Style poems remains outside the poems themselves, and the poet’s many concerns create multiple poetic trajectories: land and location (“Always the first question is Where?”) intersect with elements such as race, sex, architecture, music, language, and history. In an interview with Mark Nowak for the Poetry Foundation’s blog Harriet, Giscombe said, “I see that poetry, race, property, and geography are not one but form a very rag-tag and uncertain army, one with shifting ranks and alliances. What’s interesting to me here is that it’s possible or even necessary (at least for me) to read each one in the context of the others.” Thus, all features intertwine and overlap. They point to one another.

The impetus for Prairie Style, particularly the poems of the “Inland” section, may have been Giscombe’s tenure at Illinois State University from 1989 to 1998. Living in southern Illinois, he would have had to come to terms with the Inland Plains (also known as the Old Northwest) that lie east of the Mississippi. Considering Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio as the Old Northwest requires a leap of historical imagination, however such a leap may be built into a location, already-made. For example, the “Indianapolis, Indiana” poems of the third section focus on the history of the quasi-mythical Ben Ishmael tribe, “a tightly-knit nomadic community of African, Native American, and ‘poor white’ descent” that “arrived in the central part of the Old Northwest at the beginning of the nineteenth century, preceding the other pioneers.” The idea that a motley mixed-race group might have arrived before the official settlers of the territory disrupts the authorized version of the frontier story that recorded the push westward and the expansion of the polity called the United States of America. Color may not have initially determined who moved in, but it often decided who moved, or was pushed, out. Times have changed, but some things remain the same. In “Home Avenue,” a poem from the last section of the book, “Notes on Region,” the poet remarks that in Dayton, Ohio (Giscombe’s hometown) “nowadays black people live all over town except of course in Oakwood.” Everything hinges on that “of course”: two loaded words that will be understood in a certain way by virtually every American.

Just as Miles Davis’s version of the song “Human Nature” could be the sound track to Giscome Road, Nat King Cole’s 1948 rendition of the song “Nature Boy” plays through Prairie Style. In fact, Giscombe includes a poem with that title in the “Inland” section of the book. The word nature with its dual consciousness—both subject and context, simultaneously inside and outside—functions as a pivot around which the poems rotate, just as the prairie is the fulcrum about which the continent revolves. In “Call Me Ishmael,” Charles Olson referred to the Plains as “the fulcrum of America . . . half sea half land . . .” (Collected Prose: Charles Olson) and it is such duality (pushed to plurality) that the Prairie Style poems investigate. The poem “Nature Boy” and the speaker’s claim in “Canadian Nights” that “I’m still a nature boy” are new covers to a song that has long been a jazz and pop standard. Thus “Nature Boy,” itself a hybrid project, mirrors Giscombe’s overall re-contextualization of the prairie (the center). He revises the landscape from one settled solely by Euro-American homesteaders to one already inhabited by Nature Boy and Mistah Fox. Race enters the poems as story and history, one often looking very much like the other.

“Nature Boy” is seen in close collusion with “Mistah Fox,” who, although he doesn’t claim a poem of his own, trots through much of the book. The poet introduces Mistah Fox, wily as the Coyote and Br’er Fox of folklore, as a child and feature of the continent. Like Br’er Fox, he’s a product of miscegenation (as is Nature Boy), of Africa entering America. He’s a new twist on Native American and African trickster tales. In the poem “Very Far,” Giscombe writes, “I’d say Mistah Fox can match or resist the prairie with equal success,” a line that obliquely echoes one from Giscome Road: “I was / Africa & America on the same bicycle.”

C. S. Giscombe’s poems call attention to the shiftiness of language, in particular, to the shady border between reference and metaphor; they are all about comparison, about what’s there and what isn’t, what’s visible and what isn’t, what is stated and what is implied. For example, in “The Dear Old Northwest,” Giscombe employs juxtaposition in the service of allegory, where “Juxtaposition is a kind of melodrama. . . . Some are descendants of their own property; for others history is one miracle after another.” His is an ongoing acknowledgement that both environment and history are ambiguous, and where they most often meet is in a name. The title of the poem “I-70 Between Dayton and East Saint Louis, Westbound Lanes” reads as a cluster of coordinates, but once the poem gets underway, names enter that drag time (history) along with them: “Down to the left is Little Egypt, way off to the right’s Prairie du Chien and the Robert Taylor Homes of recent memory.” Now things get tricky. Is a name a fact or a story, or some hybrid of the two? If you look out the car window, what in the landscape of southern Illinois predicts the name Little Egypt? Why isn’t Prairie du Chien named Prairie of the Dog instead? What are the Robert Taylor Homes, and who is or was Robert Taylor? The poem suggests that landscape itself provides an insufficient explanation. We need history and culture for that.

While Giscombe’s poetic line has gotten longer and longer with each succeeding book, in this final book of his series, he reaches the end of the line, so to speak; the poems have become prose, and almost in contradiction, quite brief. White space floats above and sinks below each poem, rather than insinuating itself inside the lines. There are fewer visual gaps, but the silences are vaster. And like the prairie itself—where the space between one location and another appears both immense and non-existent, and one’s attention is riveted both on the very far away and the very close at hand—in the Prairie Style poems, our attention is drawn both to the horizon and the nearby fox in the brush. These poems read as a “commotion” in the landscape, a word that the poet himself used in the opening line of Giscome Road, one that aptly describes the relationship between the poems in Prairie Style and the places they reference.

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Louise DeSalvo
Bloomsbury ($22)

by Suzann Clemens

To corroborate an unexpected sense of loss experienced in a move from her home of thirty years, Louise DeSalvo embarks on a journey of healing. The outcome is the author’s latest memoir, On Moving: A Writer’s Meditation on New Houses, Old Haunts, and Finding Home Again. Through a close examination of the personal and professional writings of an impressive array of writers and thinkers, DeSalvo explores the “significant emotional and physical consequences” of the human experience of relocation. This essayistic presentation of the author’s investigation not only presents the author’s findings, but also the therapeutic benefits that DeSalvo experiences in conducting her search.

The restorative qualities of writing are well known to this author, who also wrote Writing as a Way of Healing: How Telling Our Stories Transforms Our Lives (Beacon Press, 2000); because of her experience as a literary scholar, significant works of literature are a natural place for her to begin. Like DeSalvo’s previous memoir, Adultery, (Beacon Press, 2000) this new book uses literary works as filters for her personal examination. In this case, Virginia Woolf, Sigmund Freud, Elizabeth Bishop, Henry Miller, Pierre Bonnard, Carl Jung, Mark Doty, D. H. Lawrence, and many others reveal the gains and losses experienced in searching for a new home, leaving an old favorite, or exile. These narratives serve as jumping off points for DeSalvo’s examination of the history of her ancestors’ migration and her personal experiences of moving.

The inclusion of first-hand accounts of relocation and the ruminations provoked add texture to the narrative, while the retelling of Virginia Woolf’s preoccupation with houses, and Freud’s attachment to a collection of artifacts broadens the level of interest. But something seems askew. Perhaps the contrast of the author’s move—sixteen miles from Teaneck to Montclair in New Jersey—with the far more dramatic experiences of her celebrated colleagues produces the weakness in the narrative. DeSalvo’s affair hardly seems equal to Freud’s forced exile from Nazi-occupied Austria, Elizabeth Bishop’s frequent relocation as a manifestation of her endless loneliness, or the forced, tragic isolation of Pierre Bonnard as he managed artistic life with a woman who was chronically and severely depressed. These moves have been extracted from lives made extraordinary not only by their remarkable, professional pursuits, but also by their dysfunctions: alcoholism, child molestation, abandonment. Though DeSalvo suggests, “these creative people urge us to consider the complex subtext of moving’s meanings,” the complexity actually lies in the startling lives from which these relocation experiences come.

The imbalance provoked by this juxtaposition suggests an underlying mystery: why does the author think she belongs in this company? Is there more to her story that has not been revealed? This possibility taunts us as we move back and forth between historic, substantial moves and one that seems far less significant. DeSalvo attempts to balance this awkward association with the inclusion of a few less dramatic relocation stories and the wisdom of a small selection of philosophers and psychologists whose quotations are meant to substantiate the emotional reaction being explored. Both fail to achieve that balance; just beneath the surface of the reading experience lurks a desire to tell the author to “buck up.”

To be fair, DeSalvo does follow her investigation to those places that are both familiar and informative to her, and perhaps personal healing is accomplished by surrounding herself with stories far more poignant that her own. Meditations go where their authors’ minds take them, and though this meditation falls short to some degree, it does offer an opportunity for the reader to explore a human experience that “ranks as the third-most-stressful life experience (after the death of a spouse or the loss of a job).”

In addition to provoking important questions to consider when faced with a move, DeSalvo’s inclusion of significant relocation stories makes a important point: “their reflections attest to the fact that where we live matters deeply, that where we move to can enrich our lives, that wrong moves can be harmful, and that forced moves can prove tragic.” The memoir’s real success, however, may simply lie in its ability to serve as a model for how writing can provide healing when a writer is willing to explore.

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edited by Jeff Martin
Soft Skull Press ($12.95)

by Sarah Salter

Ever wonder if the electronics geeks are laughing as you wander lost among the plasma TVs? They are. In The Customer Is Always Wrong, Jeff Martin collects twenty-one retail worker perspectives; those going door-to-door share space with veteran shop owners and teenage cashiers. Unfortunately, many of the essays, though amusing on the surface, come down unnecessarily hard on consumers strolling in to conduct capitalist business-as-usual.

The best offerings blend self-deprecation with nuanced observation, and rise above righteous indignation to supply the most successful entertainment. Colson Whitehead’s “I Scream” opens with mock Biblical gravity: “Mine is the story of a man who hates ice cream and of the world that made him.” Whitehead recognizes his own role in a crippling aversion to dessert, describing his ice cream struggles with humor instead of bitterness. Becky Poole’s retail ambition “to savor my neighborhood” delivers results: her essay pays loving tribute to a Brooklyn block’s characters. “In truth, the store feels more like a neighborhood social club,” Poole writes in a sweet, balanced account. Unlike many essayists, Poole displays a refreshing refusal to exploit the manufactured separation between customer and employee.

Martin includes several experimental selections, lending a welcome diversity to the collection. C.A. Conrad provides a stream-of-consciousness meditation, taking readers into a space far more disturbing than the break room—the mind of the angry clerk. “Some days I can’t believe my job is part of my life. It’s so painful, and I stand there ignoring everyone and pray for the Angel of Death.” In “Sixteen Retail Rules,” Catie Lazarus’s tongue-in-cheek advice effectively mixes contempt and hilarity. “When a sales clerk is helping someone else: a) Cut in, as you are in more of a hurry. Also, venting helps.” In her refusal to ridicule specific customers, Lazarus mitigates the cruelty of her pointed observations, ending the volume with a much-needed buoyancy.

Despite some standouts, much of the collection falls flat. Fatigue sets in as complaints appear and reappear. Customers demand attention; weeks merge together; hard work goes unappreciated. Eventually, even a sympathetic reader feels aggrieved by the self-indulgent slant of the least introspective pieces. While those on the employee side of the counter plead for kindness from the masses, they refuse to extend that same compassion to the buyer, miring the collection in self-absorption.

The problem is that many of the less subtle narrators, fueled by outrage instead of irony, cannot recognize the eccentricities of consumers as innocuous. Most people who have done time in the retail salt-mines know the real challenge: finding a balance between employee solidarity and tolerance for foolish, but harmless, purchaser behavior. A charitable outlook confers rich material on several essayists, while annoyance poisons the rest with excessive venom. Since, as Martin’s title indicates, the customer is always wrong, the employee must always be right. Ultimately, this distorted perspective taints the reader’s pleasure.

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Terry Eagleton
Yale University Press ($25)

by Emy Farley

English Literature and Cultural Theory professor Terry Eagleton is a bold man. The highly decorated literary critic begins his latest book, Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate, by brazenly admitting “since the only theology I don’t know much about is Christian theology, as opposed to those kinds I know nothing about, I shall confine my discussion to that alone, on the grounds that it is better to be provincial than presumptuous. As for science, my knowledge of it is largely confined to the fact that it is greeted with dark suspicion by most postmodernists.”

This statement should give Eagleton’s readers a glimpse into the book they’ve just picked up: a man who self-admittedly understands little about science or theology is here attempting to bridge the gap and provide context for the ongoing debate about the existence of God. The tone of Eagleton’s declaration will also give readers an understanding of the language awaiting them in Reason, Faith, and Revolution: a bit long-winded, rife with the presumptuousness he contends he does not have, and bound to go straight over the head of an average reader.

From the start, it is obvious that Doctor Eagleton (as he requests to be called, finding “Professor” too stuffy) has something he needs to get off his chest. He is tired of atheists missing the point, taking the easy road and rejecting Christianity as a whole rather than approaching it systematically. He is tired of the “ignorance and prejudice” of Christianity’s “rationalist and humanist” critics, and he is especially tired of two prominent atheist writers, Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins (later referred to as the singular derivative “Ditchkins”). Though blind belief stretches Eagleton’s imagination, he finds that Christianity itself has important things to teach about politics, about “death, suffering, love, self-dispossession, and the like,” so with Reason, Faith, and Revolution he attempts to move the debate from its current dismissive tenor to one that is more reasoned.

This lecture series-turned-book begins several interesting arguments that could become coherent and convincing chapters, but these arguments are either abandoned or “proven” by flimsy analogies, leaving the reader floundering to conclude Eagleton’s point on his behalf. Take, for example, the sum of Eagleton’s argument against Ditchkins’s stance that Christianity is a useless pseudo-science that “dispenses itself from the need of evidence altogether.” “Christianity,” asserts Eagleton, “was never meant to be an explanation of anything in the first place. It is rather like saying that thanks to the electric toaster we can forget about Chekhov.”

The main dispute between religion and science does not, Eagleton contends, concern the best explanation for how or why we’re here, but rather how far back one has to go to begin asking questions. Science looks for the spark of the Big Bang and the things that followed. Theology, he says, looks further: why is there anything in the first place? Why are we self-aware? Why do we want answers, how do we know we want them, and why do we assume the system works in a rational, explainable way?

According to Eagleton, God created the universe not because he had to, but simply for the joy and the art of it. This becomes the main distinction between liberal rationalists like Ditchkins and radicals like the author—can you see the world not as a question to be answered, but as a gift given for no reason other than love? The world exists entirely for its own sake. How do we know this? Because, explains Eagleton, in the Bible we have the story of the first rebel, the first hippie, the first slacker—and we are told to lay down our nets and follow Him.

In Eagleton’s telling of the New Testament, Jesus should be read not as a savior but as a political radical. He preached love, but not in the sense that modern audiences understand it—as an intimate, private, unique above-all bond. The love Jesus preached was the revolutionary, humanist, “justice is thicker than blood” type of love, where the good of all was ranked over the life of the individual. Through Jesus’s example, Christians have learned that through great suffering comes great faith, and, according to Eagleton, that humanity must suffer as Jesus did to “come into its own.” Ditchkins (and liberal rationalists like them) cannot understand faith because they lead easy lives in comfortable suburbia, and thus they reject faith as a whole.

Despite these frequent bouts of illogical causality, bizarre analogies, or stifling academia, Eagleton frames many fascinating questions and puts Christianity into a unique perspective. Sadly, rather than developing this arc further, the book instead becomes uncomfortably political, tying Christianity, radical Islam, atheism, and 9/11 together as a result of confusing faith with law. Eagleton spends much of the book philosophizing about politics, radicals, liberals, postmodernists, and rationalists, deriding capitalism, and using theology as a loose framework around which to hang his musings. The subtitle’s indication that Eagleton’s proclamations are “reflections” on the God debate is accurate; the book offers contemplation and consideration rather than a point-counterpoint discussion of opposing viewpoints.

Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate feels more like a highly educated professor theorizing with his other well-read friends at a pub than a true rebuttal to previously made arguments between science and theology. His points are well taken, but they are often not easily accessible to those outside academia or Marxism. With so many others writing on The God Debate, perhaps some readers should heed the spirit of Eagleton’s own words: “why bother with Robert Musil when you can read Max Weber?”

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2009 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2009

Yambo Ouologuem
translated and edited by Christopher Wise
Africa World Press ($34.95)

by Spencer Dew

In 1968—the year of the Paris Uprising—Malian writer Yambo Ouologuem found fame with the publication of his novel Le Devoir de Violence, an African epic drenched in blood, chronicling a history of cruelty and human treachery. The book, thick with assassinations, magical potions, and even orgies of drunken cannibalism, revolved around slavery and, more broadly (if not, as Ouologuem would argue, synonymously) the relation between white Europeans and black Africans. The dried asp venom scraped into a guest’s champagne, the vaginal douche of pepper essence and red ants, the roasting men whose bodies give birth to serpents—such romantic grotesqueries speak not only of a legendary past but also of a present political reality. The novel won the Prix Renaudot and established its author as a vital voice in contemporary African literature and thought, a critic of “négritude” whose tactic of truth-telling involved the language of violence, eroticism, barbed irony, and polemic assault. Yet some of Ouologuem’s language was not his own. Charges of plagiarism—involving, in particular, pages of Graham Greene used in Le Devoir de Violence—are frequently cited as the rationale for Ouologuem’s current retirement and seclusion.

The Yambo Ouologuem Reader brings together three of Ouologuem prose works, including a new translation of Le Devoir de Violence (here titled The Duty of Violence, as opposed to earlier English renderings as Bound to Violence) alongside the political “pamphlet” collection A Black Ghostwriter’s Letter to France and an excerpt from The Thousand and One Bibles of Sex, a work of erotica that likewise assaults the myths of the “open sensuality” of Africa, of “bodies overflowing and voluptuous under African skies.” In this short text, tourists on safari experience the “intoxication” of “an uncanny and aggressive style of sexuality, a sensation that evoked for them the violent eroticism of the bullfight.” Nodding to the French tradition of intellectual/mystical engagement with eroticism (see Georges Bataille, for instance), Ouologuem skewers White views of the so-called “Dark Continent,” sardonic even in his cataloguing of ripe fruits and reaching a climax (literally, with “lava… yellow like an egg-yolk, thick and abundant like the contents of an ostrich egg, spewing in every direction”) with an unnamed African (“The Black”) masturbating a lion.

In A Black Ghostwriter’s Letter, Ouologuem turns to “the satiric genre of the pamphlet” in the hope “that it will be ferocious enough that it will put an end to the comedy of the whimpering Negro, who is nonetheless untouchable—and that it will also cause both Blacks and Whites to at last stop wallowing in bad conscience, especially those who are audacious enough to love one another, but who endlessly complain of not knowing how to express it.” His thoughts here are arranged in letters addressed to various categories of people and addressing various themes—to racists, for instance, who find in their racist beliefs a profound use value, protecting them from the reality of the world; or on the formulaic nature of popular novels, which, Ouologuem argues, can be created just as simply using templates, asexquisite corpses for the mass market. Race relations and the legacy of slavery are Ouologuem’s foremost concerns, however, and he proceeds with the “contention that Negroes have lived up till now like slaves, since they have always defined themselves (not in relation to themselves) but first and foremost in relation to Whites.”

Translator and editor Christopher Wise, author of the critical text Yambo Ouologuem: Postcolonial Writer, Islamic Militant, includes a brief introduction, a tiny “Suggestions for Further Reading” (consisting entirely of criticism on Ouologuem and related African texts, with no listings for Ouologuem’s other work, including his poetry), and an essay by Kaye Whiteman, reprinted from the journal West Africa, offering some personal anecdotes regarding the plagiarism controversy (hinging on an account of seeing Ouologuem’s manuscript to Le Devoir with quotation marks and reference to incorporated texts). The attention given to the plagiarism charges vent anger at Graham Greene for not defending Ouologuem’s practice and conflate various forms of artistic borrowing, as when Wise insists, in angry defense of Ouologuem, that “few art historians speak of ‘plagiarism’ or ‘theft’ when discussing the paintings of Picasso, Braques, or Mogdiliani” (sic). Yet what this volume sorely lacks is any in-depth explanation of what, precisely, Ouologuem’s techniques of “borrowing” were and how such practice relates to his aesthetic sensibility or political goals. The protests of Wise and Whiteman are actually counterproductive in this regard, raising suspicion rather than representing a solid defense.

Part of the problem may rest in the fact that the volume is constructed for the reader who is already familiar with Ouologuem and interested merely in a fresh translation. There is scant contextualization or explanation of Ouologuem’s ideas, despite the fact that a basic understanding of “negritude”—especially in the thought of Léopold Senghor—is essential to understanding The Duty of Violence. A responsible editor would have situated Ouologuem in terms of African nationalism and devoted at least some space to the specifics of the “négraille” that Ouologuem offers as a dramatic contrast to Senghorian negritude. In a footnote Wise explains that he has rendered this word as “black-rabble” rather than, as in other translations, “niggertrash,” but these terms signify in radically different ways, with “black-rabble” hardly packing much derogatory emphasis, which was certainly Ouologuem’s intent with “négraille.” The footnote mentioned above is, moreover, one of very few notes in the text, which lacks a critical apparatus and offers no commentary on the Ouologuem works themselves, neither tracking the known cases of textual borrowing nor glossing obscure or puzzling references (such as the occurrence, throughout The Duty of Violence, of what seem to be muqatta`at, the mysterious letter combinations of the Qur’an).

“The truth is that the various journalists, sociologists, ethnologists, Africanists, literary types, Negrophile ‘specialists,’ and so on, who write about Africa, are seeking to invent an Africa that can serve as a backdrop for them to reveal to the entire world their own genius,” Ouologuem writes in A Black Ghostwriter’s Letter, insisting that Africa continues to be enslaved in “the magic lamp of literature.” The most pressing question raised by this Reader, however, is to what extent Ouologuem was aware of his own tenuous position in regard to this dynamic. How did Ouologuem imagine his violent vision of African history, his assaultive pamphlets, and his engagement with eroticism as a means of breaking such enslavement? While Wise has offered a potentially valuable contribution to the Anglophone world with these translations, this volume is too enigmatic to be of interest to anyone unable or unwilling to research and contextualize Ouologuem on their own.

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2009 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2009

edited by Gerald Nicosia
Noodlebrain Press ($21.95)

by Mark Spitzer

The only child of Jack Kerouac, Jan Kerouac lived a colorful and chaotic life. She was a raven-haired, blue-eyed beauty who shot heroin at thirteen, became a prostitute, surpassed her father in globetrotting goofery, and published poetry, fiction, and two memoirs: Baby Driver (St. Martin’s, 1981) and Trainsong (Henry Holt, 1988). Her highly awaited last novel, however, which was supposed to be published posthumously in 1999, got caught up in the legal struggles that dogged Jan toward the end of her short life. Like her father who died from complications from liver failure, she died of complications from kidney failure. Both were in their mid-forties.

To keep her memory alive, Kerouac biographer Gerald Nicosia has assembled an anthology of first-person narratives remembering Jan. This book includes essays by Aram Saroyan, Brenda Knight, Phil Cousineau, John Allen Cassady, Jacques Kirouac, and others, as well as an in-depth interview with Jan by Nicosia, who was her literary executor, friend to the end, and champion in life and death. If anything, this collection of new material provides further insight into the two major thematic battles of an extraordinary literary life.

The first has to do with Jan’s search for her father. His absence affected her psyche tremendously, and led to abusive relationships, fantasies of incest, and pressures to distinguish her own voice from that of her “noodlebrain” father’s. But in the interview, she basically exonerates him for abandoning her. “I didn’t want to bring the harsh reality of my needs to him . . . If he had hung around and been a father to me, he wouldn’t have written all his books.”

Jan’s other major battle was with John Sampas, the brother of Jack’s last wife. Sampas managed to commandeer the executorship of Jack’s estate, exclude Jan from her inheritance, and manipulate some powerful publishers into censoring any mention of her from numerous books by and about her father. Hence, as Nicosia notes in his introduction, “this book comes as a response to the fact that Jan Kerouac—both her life and her work, indeed her very existence—is being systematically erased from literary history.” This refers to one of the most polemically charged and complicated scandals in American lit, which came to a head in 1995 when Jan was prevented from addressing the audience at a New York University Jack Kerouac conference. At this point, she was already on dialysis four times per day, living in constant poverty, and had amassed medical bills she could never pay. Jan died exactly one year to the day after being booted from the conference, and in Florida her grandmother’s will is still being contested for forgery.

Meanwhile, Nicosia’s collection is full of reflections, meditations, anecdotes, speculations, and loads of engaging biographical material on one of the most overlooked writers in the wanderlust/lust-for-life lineage pioneered by her father. The chapters are brief, the voices reverent, and there’s a cache of rare photos collected for the first time. In an age when “the women of the Beats” (Edie Kerouac-Parker, Carolyn Cassady, Hettie Jones, etc.) are beginning to be recognized as artists outside the shadow of their men, Jan Kerouac: A Life in Memory is indispensable reading. It is also highly entertaining, provocative in many ways, and ultimately, a tragic portrait of the inescapable on-the-road spirit that has captivated generations.

Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2009 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2009