Matthew Derby
Little, Brown and Company ($13.95)

by Joel Turnipseed

Matt Derby is twisted. Then again, so is our world, if you take the time to look at it—and through the lenses of Derby's imagination, it takes on an eccentric quality as well. This collection of some ways linked, some ways not, stories are all of a theme: a grim, dystopic society constructed of pop-icon tropes and futuristic extensions of the 20th century's worst horrors that nevertheless finds within itself astonished moments of shimmering hilarity. Mostly, however, it's a grim world depicted in Super Flat Times, which begins with the killing of the men, strongest first, then the rest: "When the heavy ones were all accounted for, they took men who struggled, men who hid, men with sharp tongues, men with hair on their backs, men named Kevin. The men who did not resist, the men who were willing to die, were sent off to fight wars instead." So it goes, with a certain logic that wouldn't find itself totally outside the pale in certain advanced marketing studies or RAND strategic papers.

Like the art of Takashi Murakami (though Derby owes as much to the writer, Haruki), Derby has determined that the fantastic and terrible horror that inheres in our insatiable thirst for kitsch-pop and readily-available consumerism is interesting both as a medium for art and also as something begging to be flipped into disaster. Just as the old Japanese eccentric painters (from whom, along with anime masters like Kanada, Murakami took a lot of his inspiration) could take something as lovely as a plum tree and view it in such a way that it takes an ominous turn across the screens on which it's painted—rending, for example an ordinary Edo-period motif into a dark phantasm—so Derby, in "The Boyish Mulatto," turns our increasingly post-post work life into the scary absurdity it already is:

At the center my colleagues and I taught people different techniques of coaching food, getting the best performance out of a meal. This type of eating was called 'Eating,' and it involved an intricate set of stances that are illegal now. Our goal, stressed in the grueling two-hour instruction tape, was to teach people how to work in the table, the whole room. It was a lifestyle.

Still, for all its weirdness (and there's plenty), there's a tenderness in Super Flat Times that infuses the collection with hardy doses of well-wrought humanity. There's the orphaned boy, now raised by a surrogate robot father, who can relive the past with the Father Helmet—only to betray the mundane existence of his real father by imagining the fun he had with the robot dad instead. Similarly, in the final appeal of the book, the collection's narrator asks us to carry on the work of translating the horrors that we've long since forgotten how to put into words.

Derby's Super Flat Times are strange ones—but strange with the familiarity of our everyday, suffused with the tenderness that comes from being aware of just how fragile our lives are, and the dark foreboding that precedes the recognition of a vast, unrecoverable disaster. These stories crackle and grumble with a future that is already beside us, waiting for us to look out the corner of our eye to notice it.

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Jenny Davidson
Soft Skull Press ($14)

by Liz Brown

"I'm a person who feels emotion like a punch in the stomach," says Elizabeth Mann, the acerbic 25-year-old narrator of Jenny Davidson's first novel Heredity. Judging from the spare, blunt prose, the heroine took her slug to the gut sometime before the story begins and is still coughing, as if the quickest route to oxygen were the unadorned declarative sentence "I double-check the address, I climb the stairs, I ring the bell at reception, I speak to the manager." The stripped-down style evokes classic hard-boiled parlance, but Elizabeth still gives us the nudge, confessing to her lover's wife that she wants to write a detective novel: "Noir. Raymond Chandler. Chester Himes. Derek Raymond. Robbe-Grillet and the French new novel. No psychology. Lots of brutal sex and violence."

But what the brooding American Elizabeth really wants is her smug, adoring paramour, reproductive-health specialist Gideon Streetcar, to impregnate her with the clone of notorious 18th-century racketeer Jonathan Wild. Dispatched to London to produce copy for a budget travel series, Elizabeth happens upon Wild's skeleton among the medical curiosities at the Hunterian Museum. She also happens upon the water-damaged diary of Wild's wife, Mary, who, starting with her birth in Newgate prison, possesses a set of misfortunes worthy of Moll Flanders. Fueled by an obsession with these artifacts and a pointedly oblique aversion to her father, a famous fertility guru—"Heredity is overrated," Elizabeth tells Gideon—the novel's 21st-century narrator sets about to bear the child of "the sexy eighteenth-century organized crime guy."

Its outlandish premise notwithstanding, Heredity sidesteps time-travel and science-fiction genres, one hand reaching for the crime novel and the other tightly clutching 18th-century British memoir. The shift in form lets air into Mary Wild's narrative, and the prose expands with descriptive paragraphs and juicy period squalor. Davidson's pleasure in her research is palpable; the 18th-century narrator dispenses home-grown treatments for jaundice and rubs elbows with sundry underworld sorts—brawling blackguards, termagant aunts, and even a snappish writer named Daniel Defoe.

In addition to Defoe, Davidson seeds the book with references to British novelists—Charles Dickens, Muriel Spark, Georgette Heyer, Laurence Sterne—but with two savvy heroines vying for the attentions of preoccupied men, the novel recalls not one Fielding but two: Henry and Helen. (For good measure, the author splices in quotes from John Gray's Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. Separated by locution and nearly 300 years, garrulous Mary Wild and taciturn Elizabeth Mann share a penchant for comic raunch; Mary yearns for "the rudder of [Wild's] affections" and Elizabeth wryly notes the bulge of Gideon's asthma inhaler before their first conjugal throes against a display case of medical instruments.

As detective fiction goes, the suspense is muted, with much dialogue devoted to the psychology and ethics of genetic engineering. Dramatic portent is propelled not by the characters' actions but by the longueurs of in vitro fertilization and book restoration. Heredity's page-turning passages belong to narrative digression, to Elizabeth's fetishization of medical history, complete with primers on exhumation and embalming.

Despite its profusion of bookish forbears, Heredity suggests kinship with a visual artist, formaldehyde aficionado Damien Hirst, whose installation "Love Lost" features a rust-encrusted gynecologist chair in a fish-filled aquarium. Like the grotesque decay and medical paraphernalia contained within one of the notorious Young British Artist's sleek vitrines, Davidson's curious literary hybrid is at once creepy, comic, and sterile.

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Kristen den Hartog
MacAdam/Cage Publishing ($24)

by Kris Lawson

The Perpetual Ending is a powerful book about small things, the things that resonate when one looks back at the past. As the novel opens, Jane, the narrator, finds herself stuck in a motel room. She is halfway between her childhood home and the apartment she shared with her lover. Appropriately, the first half of her narrative addresses Eugenie, her missing twin; the second half addresses her lover Simon, to whom she has lied about her past.

Drifting from flashback to stream of consciousness to story-within-the-story telling, not until the end does Jane make it clear whether Eugenie was real or another facet of herself. Jane prefers to think of the two of them as characters from her mother's stories: One and Tother, Chang and Eng, the Platonic whole divided. Jane even hates her name because it reminds her of her sister. "I would not have chosen a name that began with J, which was not even formally accepted into the alphabet until the nineteenth century. For hundreds of years it was simply the consonant form of I, a ghostly twin struggling for its own place."

Den Hartog has a spare narrative style, which includes humorous touches that lighten the grim story of why Jane has rejected her past. Without elaborate prose, she conveys the bright memories of Jane's childhood, shiny and glowing like the horns with which the characters of Jane's stories are burdened. In these works, Jane's loneliness, guilt, and rage are transformed into disturbing fairy tales for children. Each story she tells contains fragments of her past and images from her own and her mother's stories, recombined so as to convey triumph mixed with regret, as if to say nothing in life is free from contamination. But Jane attempts to keep the contamination of her painful past in her fiction; she rarely even admits to herself that her parents are still alive.

Jane's characters are usually girls with horns in their foreheads or sticking out of their spines, who have dry skin like sandpaper that no one wants to touch or who concoct enormous lies to keep people at a distance. They make fairy-tale choices and are unhappy with the results; luckily for them, in fairy-tale fashion they can go back to the way they were. In one way these fairy tale characters are all the same girl, but in another way they are all trying to change the past for Jane, rewriting the end of the story again and again, until she can put it behind her and move on: "time can move so slowly you don't even notice it going by, but it tricks you. Other than dying, there's nothing you can ever do to stop it."

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Uma Paramesweran
Broken Jaw Press ($15)

by Michelle Reale

In Mangoes on the Maple Tree, Canadian writer Uma Parameswaran gives us a forceful yet profound look at an Indian-Canadian family. The characters here negotiate the ordinary travails of daily life while acutely conscious of the one thing many people are hardly aware of: their national identities.

Paramesweran sets two family's lives, the Bhaves and their slightly more domestically challenged cousins the Moghes, amidst the 1997 floods in Winnipeg. Initially readers might feel as though they have begun reading a psychological study of a typical working class family, but slowly and with great skill, Parameswaran—a writer incredibly adept at subterfuge--shows that the conflicts are both internal and external, personal and political. Concurrently, each character struggles with a sense of duty to self, family and country. All the while, the flood rages on, a perfect metaphor for waters that both destroy and cleanse, that provide fear and challenges but at the same time opportunities and second chances.

There are times during Mangoes on the Maple Tree when one wishes for more "silent" space, where we might get a better look at the internal life of Parameswaran's characters—because they are, to the author's credit, so fascinating and multi-dimensional, one longs to "see" them away from the conflicted crowd. Instead we hear nearly everything through a copious amount of dialogue that occasionally wearies and obfuscates a point, paradoxically, by being too direct. Sometimes the dialogue and banter between and amongst characters seems forced and borders on the polemical, but that is a small flaw, compared to the graceful and intriguing story line and the suspenseful and satisfying finish. This is the story of two families that not only dive deep into dangerous waters, but surface and live to tell the tale.

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Joshua Ortega
Jodere Group ($24)

by Alan Deniro

Although it is set in the future, Joshua Ortega's ((Frequencies)) is not a science fiction novel. Judging it as science fiction would lead to a rather unforgiving review: the absence of cohesive world building, the clichéd totalitarian society, and the lackluster use of techno-thriller tropes would leave something to be desired. ((Frequencies)), however, occupies a space behind a different type of imaginary Wallace Line. The novel is essentially creative nonfiction disguised as science fiction, an empowerment narrative in Philip K. Dickian clothing.

It might be worthwhile, with such an odd duck of a book, to discuss its unusual publishing history. A certifiable self-publishing sensation, ((Frequencies)) was picked up by Jodere Group for a 50,000 copy hardcover run. The publisher, whose list is mostly nonfiction, defines itself as "a unique publishing and multimedia avenue for individuals whose mission it is to positively impact the lives of others. We recognize the strength of an original thought, a kind word and a selfless act—and the power of the individuals who possess them. We are committed to providing the support, passion and creativity necessary for these individuals to achieve their goals and their dreams." If one is to understand the novel's intentions, then surely this quotation is an auspicious place to start.

The story (only the first part of a series, alas; the novel ends rather abruptly) has as its premise that "all living creatures...vibrate at a specific frequency which can be measured upon a spectral bandwidth which he called the LIFE—living incorporate frequency emission—spectrum." In the totalitarian Seattle of 2051 they've decided that higher frequencies usually indicate subversive thought; McCready, an agent of a division of the FBI known as the Freemon ("FREquency Emissions MONitor(s)"), investigates and squelches frequency offenders. He becomes embroiled within the inner workings of the Huxton family, founders of the software company Ordosoft™ and Most Important Family in the World. He is assigned to protect daughter Ashley, a free spirit, from strange attacks upon the family, and he begins to open up in her presence. But this character development is itself odd. This future is culturally bankrupt, and the Huxtons are no small part the reason of that. Ashley runs around to "herb cafes" and exclusive clubs and begins to gather vague intimations of a revolution against the frequency hierarchy. It's hard to take this seriously, however, when she ruminates on free choice and politics from a pampered, Tibetan mountaintop estate.

Such oddness, whether intentional or not, doesn't end when the story does; the novel's appendices wear its heart on its pages. Despite the "freeky" appearances and the occasional typographical disruptions (such as the inclusion of Greek symbols, representing frequencies, throughout the text or the insistence on putting a trademark symbol after every mentioned brand name, as in "As the Polaris™ settled onto the roof of the Farmaceutical Solutions™ building, McCready pulled a pack of Kamel® Kloves™ from his trench's front pocket"), ((Frequencies)) is deep down a forthright document. In "Freekspeak: a glossary of frequential terms," the reader comes across, as an example, the following four definitions in sequence:

Canny: n. Cannabis, marijuana
Capoeira: n. A Brazilian martial arts/dance with heavy African influences. Pronounced "Ka-pway-da."
Carnivore: Officially acknowledged in the year 2000, Carnivore is the FBI's e-mail interception and surveillance tool. Essentially a wiretap for the Internet, Carnivore does for American e-mail what Echelon does for the world.
Casa: n. Spanish for "house."

For this reviewer, this verbose crazy quilt is more fascinating than many parts of the novel, though its breakdown in glossary format further demonstrates that we are not in the presence of a science fiction novel (which nearly always tries to put the world building "under the hood" to create a greater mimetic effect). Still, science fictional tropes have been used for far worse purposes (see Newt Gingrich's love of Toynbee and Asimov). ((Frequencies)) is worth reading, if for nothing else than to see how the New Age cogniscenti view science fiction, much in the same way that it is important to see how fundamentalist Christians use science fiction to elaborate on apocalyptic literalisms. In ((Frequencies)), as in those books—even though the political stance could hardly be more different—science fiction is only a tool, rather than a mode of epistemology. All of this somehow makes this first novel more interesting in its flaws than many smooth, ultra-competent novels possess in their strengths.

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Yvonne Vera
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux ($18)

by Christopher J. Lee

In The Stone Virgins, Yvonne Vera describes the sense of courage held by her two sister protagonists as similar to "sliding their hands in the cotton-soft coolness of ash, where, it is possible, a flame might sparkle and burn." This too is an apt description of what reading Yvonne Vera's writing is like. For readers unfamiliar with her work, Vera is a writer from Zimbabwe who has quickly established an international reputation through a series of books published in the 1990s, in particular Butterfly Burning and two novellas that have recently been re-released together as Without a Name and Under the Tongue. In a now signature style that places more emphasis on tone and symbolism than social realism, Vera's new novel guides the reader through an African landscape filled with pervasive beauty and moments of unexpected violence in equal measure. The result is a story that possesses its own sense of courage by choosing to explore emotions over historical detail when the latter would be an easier narrative option.

The Stone Virgins concerns the recent history of Zimbabwe, particularly the period after 1980 when white-minority rule ended following the prolonged Chimurenga liberation struggle. Historically this was a time of uncertainty and political violence between competing African parties. Despite the potential richness of this material for a social novel in the mode of Ousmane Sembene or Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Vera chooses instead to center the meaning of this period on the lives of two sisters, Thenjiwe and Nonceba, and through their experiences she underscores the psychological impact this period of transition had on common lives. This is a risky choice, in so far that some readers may be discouraged by the lack of contextual detail to situate the story. But this move also constitutes one of Vera's main contributions as an African writer: to explore the emotional experience accumulated by people and its personal meaning, beyond what surrounding facts of history might tell. In her words, "It is an intimate quest."

Named after English poets and lined with blossoming jacaranda, the streets of Bulawayo provide the initial setting for the novel, conveying senses of history, beauty, and order that contrast with later themes of violence, trauma, and recovery. The story quickly moves to the rural town of Kezi, where Vera invokes the primary events and imagery that define the lives of Thenjiwe and Nonceba. There are three situations in particular: a brief, if passionate, romance between Thenjiwe and a man named Cephas; the death of Thenjiwe and the near-death of Nonceba at the hands of a soldier named Sibaso; and the hospital recovery of Nonceba from this experience. The story is told from the perspectives of these characters, though in Vera's hands, the landscape that surrounds them, real and imagined, plays a crucial role in articulating the meaning of these experiences. In one passage, for example, Vera writes:

Among the rocks. Hidden. Everything is infinite; it is there, not you. The rocks continue in their immortal strength. You are separate. Transient. Human strength rises and wanes. Even at its summit, our strength is not rock: igneous. The mind is perishable. Memory lingers, somewhere, in fragments.

Here the natural world conjures a sense of stability and solace that is not found elsewhere. In a later scene of soldiers, Vera describes their behavior in the following terms:

They committed evil as though it were a legitimate pursuit, a ritual for their own convictions. Each move meant to shock, to cure the naïve mind. The mind not supposed to survive it, to retell it, but to perish. They flee, those men who witnessed Thandabantu burn. They flee from a pulsing in their own minds.

This frequent juxtaposition between the persistence of nature and man's weakening resolve in the face of violence forms one of the central dramatic tensions of this novel. It fills the emotional space that preoccupies Vera's characters as they attempt to reconcile a traumatic past that is still too recent to comprehend fully.

Vera is known for her lush lyricism, as these passages briefly illustrate, and this approach—though it can lend a certain sluggishness at moments—fits with her concern for charting emotions over factual detail. Her greatest strength is pointing out the connections between eros and violence, the intimacy and consequently the destabilizing effects of both. Such intimacy creates personal connections that can be both fatal and redemptive, as Thenjiwe and Nonceba experience by the end of the novel. This is a realm that is not often articulated in a body of literature that can too frequently lean on—and is too frequently interpreted for—political, cultural, and historical detail. Vera's attempt to move beyond this surface, as expressed through the struggles of her characters, constitutes the main achievement of this intense and challenging novel.

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Alicia Borinsky
Translated by Cola Franzen with the author
Hydra Books/Northwestern University Press ($15.95)

by Amy Havel

As many people know, love and pain can go hand in hand, but Alicia Borinsky brings this idea to a new height of absurdity in All Night Movie. Driven by stunning prose and whirlwind of frenzied action, the novel presents an oddball cast of characters, most of whom have a very skewed sense of tender loving care. The central character is a young woman who goes through a series of transformations amidst a backdrop of urban chaos, which includes an erotically charged telephone booth, several kidnappings, and a cult of angry young women bearing apples. Add to this a variety of narrative techniques consisting of diary entries, newspaper clippings, correspondence, and tango-lyric headlines, and you'll find that the novel's adrenaline alone makes it worth the read.

Matilde Felipa/Bochita/Juana (her name changes in various ways through the story) tries to kill a man that she loves, then moves back to her mother's boarding house, only to realize certain similarities are shared among kin. Love, at least for Juana, her mother, and Juana's lover Pascual Domenico Fracci, follows a seemingly inevitable path toward death, yet the path is also quite circular, with several actions in the story referring to the "cottony and circular future." For example, in another part of the book's landscape, a young striptease artist is kidnapped by a lesbian duo, Raquel and Rosa. The pair glue a uniform onto the girl's body, claiming that it's for her own good, but when "the Scarred Girl" (as she becomes known in the news) is rescued, she seems to want to get back in touch with her captors. In the end, her damaged body is covered with a suit of armor which shines brightly enough for people to see their reflections in it.

Bodily transformation plays a big part in the novel, especially with Juana, whose size changes and facial hair come and go. When she first meets Pascual Domenico and listens to his conversations with a woman named Lucia, she finds that shortly after "timidity and desire had seeped into her body and also without realizing it the very idea of Luica had transformed her. She was now a woman of short stature, chubby, with ankles slightly swollen, flabby muscles, in need of a massage." Later in the novel, she enlarges, then shrinks back to a "normal" size.

Just as bodily transformation indicates a change in the status of love in the character's life, happiness and comfort signal tragedy is about to strike. In a way, this tragedy cannot be avoided and is almost craved. When Juana finds out that Pascual Domenico is alive, she foresees their next meeting: "when she was strong once more and they loved each other anew with an unquestionable and serene love, she would be free to find the pistol again, come into the room, shoot him, steal the key to the door, and leave him on the floor to bleed to death."

In the background of all of this mayhem, the Eva girls, a cult of young women who roam the city, serve as a chorus to the story. While they are not direct participants, they are always around. They appear to follow Juana but never confront her or involve themselves with her:

As happened often, the girls of the Eva cult passed by her with no sign of recognition. They went on singing in blustery fashion, pretending to be crazy, because this week it happened that every one of them was suffering from premenstrual tension and according to a medical prescription had to chant special hymns for the occasion. A gang of boys followed them with signs, bells, and invitations to dances in dark houses where the father of one of them, a short paunchy gentleman, counted ticket after ticket seated at a marble table with a glass of chocolate milk at his left hand.

This small example exemplifies the world that Bornisky presents in the novel: carnivalesque but seamless as a collective vision.

Cola Franzen's translation from the Spanish provides excellent incorporation of tango lyrics, some left intact when they are easily understood by English readers, which successfully maintains the influence of the music and the Latin American atmosphere in the book. At times, the intertwining of the characters and their many transformations becomes confusing, and it takes a while to pick up on what's actually happening because of the flexible reality at hand. However, the many voices that Borinsky has created eventually begin to chime together, and the pleasure of entering this other world really takes off. This world, while on the surface filled with darkness and fear and loneliness, also consists of the promise of change and the abilities of individuals to adapt, by whatever means necessary.

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Ezra Pound
Edited by Massimo Bacigalupo
Arnoldo Mondadori Editore

by Steven Moore

An unsympathetic critic might grumble that Pound threw everything but the kitchen sink into his 824-page Cantos, especially since the book ends with a section of "Drafts and Fragments." But in fact Pound did leave a lot out, the best of which has now been gathered by Italian Pound scholar Massimo Bacigalupo for this edition of "Posthumous Cantos." The introduction and notes are in Italian, but the poetry is of course in English, and since there are no plans for an American edition, Canti postumi deserves notice.

The book is divided into eight chronological sections: it begins with the 1917 version of "Three Cantos" published in Poetry, different enough from those eventually published in The Cantos to be preserved. Then we travel from Paris (1920-22) to Rapallo and Venice (1928-37), then sections called "Voices of War" (1940-45) and "Italian Drafts" (1944-45), then outtakes from the great Pisan Cantos (1948), followed by what Pound himself called "Prosaic Verses" (written during his confinement at St. Elizabeths in the 1950s), and finally "Lines for Olga" (1962-72).

Some drafts offer longer versions of incidents that were compressed for the final book version, like a discussion between Pound and Eliot at Verona in 1922 that is merely alluded to in the published version. The couplet "Her name was courage / & is written Olga" from the final page of The Cantos is taken from a lovely 13-line poem published here in tribute to his longtime companion Olga Rudge, the embodiment of Venus invoked at the beginning of his epic. Other verses occur in contexts quite different from those in the final book and will aid Pound scholars in seeing those historical "rhymes" Pound made by yoking various eras together.

And throughout there are beautiful, medallion-bright images that take one's breath away: "Brows cut smoothe as if with a jade-wheel / Cool water of hill-lakes, water calm as the eyes"; "her red head a flask of perfume"; "The air is solid sunlight, apricus, / Sun-fed we dwell there." For all his obfuscation and hare-brained theories, Pound commanded poetic powers that continue to astonish, even in these drafts and outtakes.

There are images in Canti postumi of ruined castles, of "Empires end[ing] in the marsh." The Cantos itself is like a cathedral falling into ruins, attended today only by specialists, ignored by most readers of poetry. Canti postumi may only be fragments shored against those ruins, but these drafts remind us of the greatness of Pound's achievement, and the book even works as a teaser for those uncertain whether they want to take the grand tour. It is well worth seeking out.

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Taha Muhammad Ali
Translated by Peter Cole, Yahya Hijazi, Gabriel Levin
Ibis Editions ($11.95)

by Kim Jensen

Ibis Editions, based in Jerusalem, is a small literary press which offers work related to the Levant, mainly translations from Hebrew and Arabic. Ibis has published a number of interesting little books in the past few years, including Michael Sells's translation of Ibn 'Arabi's Stations of Desire and The Little Bookseller, Oustaz Ali by Egyptian poet Ahmed Rassim. In 2000, they put out a small but exceptional translation of Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad Ali; the volume, entitled Never Mind, includes an introduction by Gabriel Levin, a nice selection of poetry, and a gripping short story called "So What," about an impoverished village boy who longs desperately for a pair of shoes.

Something of a local legend, Taha Muhammad Ali's poetry is well known in the Arab communities of the Galilee and beyond. Born in the village of Saffuriyeh in 1931, Ali was already a young man by the time his village was razed by the Israelis in 1948. Ali became a refugee, settled a year later in nearby Nazareth, and eventually opened a souvenir shop in the souk.

Ali's poetry arises from the fertile yet relentlessly bitter grounds of personal and collective experience. His poems are suffused with imagery from everyday Palestinian life, both before and after "al-Nakbah" (the catastrophe). Combining a literary and colloquial Arabic, his work has taken on a folkloric status in the Galilee. A few of his poems, especially those about his fictional character, Abd al-Hadi, have become popular enough that they have variant verses and lines, as happens when poetry evolves in the oral sphere.

Ali uses a direct language in his poetry, which translates into English quite well. The poems have the story-telling quality reminiscent of such committed poets as Nâzim Hikmet, Pablo Neruda, and early Darwish. But their simplicity of language and structure belies a depth and swift lateral movement that make for a powerful undertow, as in exceptional poems such as "Abd El-Hadi Fights a Superpower," "Thrombosis in the Veins of Petroleum," "Fooling the Killers," "Crack in the Skull," and the heartbreaking "Warning":

Lovers of hunting,
and beginners seeking your prey:
Don't aim your rifles
at my happiness,
which isn't worth
the price of the bullet
(you'd waste on it).
What seems to you
so nimble and fine,
like a fawn,
and flees
every which way,
like a partridge,
isn't happiness.
Trust me:
my happiness bears
no relation to happiness.

Oscillating between tender nostalgia and its wounding laconic edge, the poetry's particular Palestinian sorrow finds its echo in the wider registers of the universal.

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Dorothy Barresi
University of Pittsburgh Press ($12.95)

by Hannah Brooks-Motl

Rouge Pulp is Dorothy Barresi's third book of poems, and it is by far her best yet. Eschewing the clumsy and often prosaic narrative structures that fill her previous book (The Post Rapture Diner) and dot her first (All of the Above), Rouge Pulp marries Barresi's ear for witty, fiery language with a series of compact, concise, and fairly lyrical poems that showcase the alternately serious and sardonic voice at the center of the book's universe.

Barresi's first two books were notable for her reliance on personal narrative—one rarely doubted that the person behind the voice was anybody other than Dorothy Barresi, the events anything other than what had actually taken place on the family vacation in 1969. In Rouge Pulp, Barresi also tells stories from her life (the death of her mother provides the book's central focus, and there are a handful to her infant son, Dante), but they're less constricted by the narrative mode. For example, "At the Posh Salon Called Ultra" could have easily turned into a heavy-handed indictment of cultural standards demanding women remain beautiful at any cost, but instead it is just as infectious, guilty, and pleasurable as a trip to "the Posh Salon" really might be, even as the stylist informs you that

... you are worth saving; I assure you,
we have seen worse.

And though it is far from cheap
dreaming yourself into our fashion,

cheer up—it is very becoming.
Girgio, Reynald, Coco—a sweep of curls in the dustpan, clank,

and the past is your natural color.
Pucker up. Bring me the big rollers.

When the sham world blows you kisses,
the real world knows you at last.

The poems in Rouge Pulp are more formally ambitious than anything in Barresi's first two books, as well as more allusive. These are crowded poems: Duke Ellington shows up in a poem about Sylvia Plath's father, "The Heaven of Otto Plath" (and Plath shows up herself on two separate occasions); Hart Crane is mentioned, as are Theodore Roethke, Lenny Bruce, Jackie Kennedy, Richard Speck, Bobby Kennedy, the New Critics, and, in one of the best poems in the book, the stripper Lily St. Cyr. That poem, "Glass Dress," is a good example of the new sort of poetic techniques influencing Barresi's most recent work. The declaration that opens the poem—"Lily St. Cyr is dead"—gets repeated throughout the poem and not always where you'd expect it, creating a dirge-like refrain whose flatness works perfectly with the glittery, gaudy images Barresi swirls around it:

Her generating curves,
her spirals,
her vector rotation of planes and onstage bubble baths
are the swellest immorality for those
wrecked and crippled boys
in the front row.
Lily St. Cyr is dead.
Knock back a whisky. Dim the spot.

The poem's also about the end of innocence, about GIs returning from the war and an America full of "vast warehouses of exhausted capital," and it falls flat only when Barresi overexplains herself, giving us the meaning of "ecdysiast" ("'ecdysis' meaning 'shedding,' / or 'nothing.'") when the simple rejoinder that follows, "It's true," would have been enough.

There are other such moments in Rouge Pulp when Barresi's wish to make sure we get it interrupts the flow of the poem. These mostly occur near the end of the book when the poems begin to sound more and more like the Post Rapture Barresi who hasn't quite loosed herself from the sentence and syntax, from relying on prose sense to do the work that the Barresi of the first half of Rouge Pulp has discovered can be accomplished via aural effects, line breaks, and, at times, inference. Take, for example, "Fifties Song (or, We Are All Born under Eisenhower)," a poem notable in Barresi's corpus for its utter lack of narrative and reliance on anaphora:

Unto the altar of argyle,
Unto the Lenny Bruce of nod,

Unto the spondee of babies,
Unto the lawn mower of fear,

The poem ends: "Unto the bowling alley of family love, / which is none-of-your-goddamned-business. // Unto red meat and milk." And it works—as Barresi's poems often do—as a look back on a baby-boomer childhood through the shattered lens of the present. What Barresi's poems don't often do is use the line as a unit upon which the poem is built. Other poems in Rouge Pulp do similar list-like work less effectively, partly because they don't rely on readily available cultural markers—tweaking, refuting, or aggrandizing them as in "Fifties Song"—and instead depend upon conventional notions of mother-daughter, mother-infant relationships, which often slip into sentimentality.

Still, much of Rouge Pulp is great: innovative, exciting, and most importantly fun (e.g., "Sock Hop with the New Critics"). In her best poems Barresi manages to be as accessible as she is verbally and aurally interesting. The poems want to say things, to make points and spin social commentary, and a handful of them do so with flash and wit and even daring. The best parts of Rouge Pulp significantly complicate Barresi's interest in personal narrative and the cultural framework that influences and orders an individual life. The book is a formal grab-bag: there are four poems that use anaphora, two dramatic monologues, a prose poem, an elegy, and a surreal collage poem ("Little Dreams of War," probably the least Barresi-like poem Barresi has ever written). There's much to be admired in a poet who, two books and two major prizes into her career, displays such a willingness to play with a proven formula, to take risks with her verse and experiment with form and structure. Dorothy Barresi isn't a "new" poet, and Rouge Pulp doesn't herald a new talent, but the book should stand as a model to other poets who find themselves stuck in the rut of their own first or second successes. For all its unevenness, it's an energetic, highly enjoyable collection of poems from a poet sure to go somewhere different next time as well.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition, Summer 2003 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2003