New Michigan Press, 2010 (61 pages)
Reviewed by Will Cordeiro

If feelings arise from our embodiment in time among the orbits of others, the body itself is nonetheless dislocated, liminal, less a fixed point than a moving target. Jerrybuilt and duct-taped, our corporeal identities are an assemblage held together by a glutinous paste of memories and the porous molding of myths. Emotions are most often a mixed media, resembling a comet tail’s vapor, ice chunks, and cosmic dust slime-trailing on some vast sidereal circuit, or perhaps, better yet, wave nodes and flashpoints of fuzzy probabilities. The body is a disparate machinery of chemicals, which runs on language and desperate longings, oiled by blood and tears, iron and salt. Collectively, we’re a horde of self-dismantling cyborgs, tottering wayward and sideways, who borrow each other’s spare parts, eyeballs or bonemeal, in order to keep our jumbled galumphing up, if not always upright. At least, such is the impression one garners reading Eric Weinstein’s Vivisection.

Emotional honesty, under these conditions, requires an acknowledgement of the artifice of emotions. Poems, of course, are broken into lines, fabricated by fragments, stitched from little shards into an organic whole that pulses with a vivifying beat: their breaks and lacunae are peepholes or critical grafts into which we might allow our own feelings to leak. Poetry is the blood-work and dialysis of our affections, despite the fact that most of it has been Frankensteined in a sausage-factory. The best poetry helps shock our meaty head-case of nubbins to twitch and twitterpate back into life. Weinstein’s first book, as underscored by his title, presents a surgical theatre wherein the reader volunteers to be an organ donor, opened up to have the living tissue excavated. But, since “vivisection” also means an incisive analysis, these poems likewise peel back the layers which compose our cultural reflex-pathways, to anatomize the assumptions that structure our affective responses. Hence, the two-fold work of this collection: the poems convey the qualitative experience of interiority even as they find a correlative for it in the uptakes and electrums running down our vertebrae; they represent how we feel now, but also interrogate those very feelings as symptomatic of the capitalist, scientific, and literary paradigms we labor under.

In the poem “Diagnosis,” the speaker admits, “I have an unhealthy attraction / to hospitals.” The speaker demands urgent care, but must wait around for hours in a sterile chamber, as blood samples and paperwork get shuffled in and out. At last, the nurse mentions some parts are missing, which have been “removed like batteries,” but not to worry. Days later, the speaker receives a phone call:

Good news. . . You can live without your heart
(We have machines for that.)

the speaker is informed by a bureaucratic automaton. The institution has reduced the speaker to a robot in its own image while the speaker’s experience of pain seems to have issued from phantom limbs. However, the poem implies that this is not the speaker’s first visit—the speaker keeps returning to have more organs extracted because their absence quickens a sense of loss. The fewer parts the speaker possesses, the more the speaker feels until the body dissipates to little more than a brain-in-a-vat. Perhaps the speaker craves the visceral intimacy one undergoes during an operation, even though such trauma represses the memories it produces. Given such circular logic, the hospital manufactures the needs the speaker has, as the speaker’s addictive desire is also the speaker’s most potent disease. Ironically, then, the heart one can live without may be the thumping circulatory system of the triage unit the speaker is trapped within.

“Golem” takes up a similar theme of displaced embodiment, employing the figure from Jewish folklore: a bumbling humanoid lumped together from clay and language. In Weinstein’s version, the speaker burns down bullet casings and a baby grand, rigs up fake teeth and taxidermic specimens—an accretion of detritus left over in an apartment from a recent break-up—to create his doppelgänger as if it were a Rauschenberg combine. He digs in his wounds until he reaches some prelapsarian residue, homeless in his own skin, attempting to amalgamate a new man from the cast-off junk of the old one. The speaker is an unreliable narrator, however, who takes back the claim that “I could have built /thirty birdhouses from the body.” Instead of such flights of fancy, the speaker confesses:

No, not really. The truth is,
I’d designed a device to recite
my vices. It needed a voice.
I gave it yours.

The golem ventriloquizes the missing lover, symbolizes the baby they never made with its patty-cake of mud, and stands-in for the speaker himself who feels too numb to articulate his grief. One imagines the golem animated by a feedback loop of voice messages, guilt and recrimination echoing down the faults within this half-baked creature while the speaker takes his lumps. The relationship wasn’t working, the poem suggests, because the speaker was working too much on fashioning his body double. He was busy making up a simulacrum he could bring to life rather than making up with his living loved one.

Through such vivid metaphors, Weinstein depicts the way society downgrades us to stats and crunches us to bits even as our condition remains critical. His frequently clinical diction serves quasi-surrealistic narratives, reminiscent of the late Czech poet Miroslav Holub. One of Weinstein’s most spectacular poems, for instance, observes, “I believe the green light inside / the photocopier & the escalator are the same,” as if a common bioluminescent aura emanates from inside these commonplace mechanisms. The poem somehow pulls off connecting this image to the myth of Noah’s ark: “how long before the green dawn broke?” Then, the poem swerves effortlessly to mention “the rain walking around upstairs like bombs,” alluding to Vonnegut’s depiction of the bombing of Dresden.

We hear the rumblings of an ominous godhead as if it were bickering neighbors in the apartment above us, a deity who is as sadistic as “the boy with his magnifying glass” burning up a hive of “paper-wasps.”

The ascending buzz of paper-wasps brings us back to carbon copies as well as the swarm of reproduction that takes place over the green earth after the flood. For all the abundant life-force glowing within things, the poem intimates the fiery destruction that such fractured light portends.

Most poems in the collection succeed in striking a precarious balance between being poignant while remaining playful. Weinstein can smuggle in a few outrageous puns—“ferrous wheel” or “mortal coal”—while constructing a system of associations that take off into lavish revelations and linguistic ravishment. Although line-by-line the sense of these poems is unusually taut and clear, the juxtaposition of references and images produce connections that require quantum or dendritic leaps of faith on the part of the reader, yet which feel poised with a balletic grace. It’s as if the meanings a reader reaches at a poem’s culmination have teleported across some chasm that could not have been spanned by a referential, earthbound lexicon alone. A technique Weinstein often uses to accomplish this feat is allowing his narratives to play off the latticework of myths, bending and bundling archetypal patterns to produce warped zones for his own twisted stories to effloresce. These moth-eaten, worm-holed shrouds of signification enrapture by their bodying forth a clairvoyant headspace out of the crude materials from which they’re composed. “The hallways bend like spoons,” Weinstein writes, and we levitate down the twitchy florescent aisle of an oncology ward with radiation pulsing through our bones.

That’s not to suggest that there aren’t occasional missteps in this first book by a poet who is, enviably, only in his mid-twenties and has already published work in many of the top journals. In one poem the shrimp, plankton, and “diatomaceous folk” in the ocean exclaim “Fuck, yes” and “awesome.” I suppose they’re meant to sound like swilling groupies at some intergalactic rock concert deep in the Mariana Trench. Bathos is, proverbially, the art of sinking, and so it’s appropriate that the speaker dives down in a bathysphere to greet them. Perhaps there’s humor in egregiously committing the pathetic fallacy only to put such flaky things into the mouths of these little buggers, but to me the tone seems jejune, trying a little too hard to be hip. Nonetheless, by the end of the poem, I felt moved by the speaker’s sense of momentary connection amid dark gulfs of isolation:

. . . is there anything I can trade for
your whale song before I have to return

to the overworld, before I run out of air,
before I go off the air, before I go home?

The speaker simultaneously represents the thorough-going mediation of public space, as a member of a film crew, and the private glimmers of inner space reachable only by the extreme pressures of lyric depth. The speaker recognizes each measured inhalation counts down to death, when everyone’s program goes “off the air.” On the other hand, the first poem in the collection, about narcissus riding a motorcycle straight into a flying wren, is quite good until its ending: “There is a heartbeat, / a heartbeat, he was saying. Listen.” This heavy-handed emphasis on “heartbeat” feels a bit mawkish, trite, and overly self-conscious; with repeated readings, the overuse of the word “heart” in the collection as a whole can come to feel affected. But these are merely quibbles—after all, “heart” is only one motif among many. Birds, trees, mirrors, stars, waves, bodies, and machines are other images that get mashed-up and remixed throughout the collection in a deft fugue state of theme-and-variation.

Ultimately, Weinstein’s work is metaphysical in the best sense. His poems trouble the captious distinctions programmed into our language when physical objects are merely used as vehicles to express the tenor of some mental state; his work professes no easy dualisms, whether of mind-and-body or of head-and-heart. Instead, reading Weinstein’s poems about organ transplant patients or tin men, I am reminded of Whitman’s invocation that “what I assume, you shall assume, for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” Weinstein’s poems, like the narratives they present, create a new Adam who can assume into the empyrean, floating on wafts of inspiration, where overlooked particles are rendered into fecund sources of energy, redolent with sonic waves of pleasure.

He engenders a new mythology about the interchanges of body parts, telepathy, metamorphosis, and the cobbling together of feeling creatures from inorganic substances—parables which act as touchstones to convey the spiritual circulation of a material poetica, written as much in ink as it is in blood.

Weinstein’s poems portray the infinite that co-exists inside exiguous moments of mortality, when a pigeon dovetails into “a hole in the air” or a toy perpetuum mobile drinking bird “dips / & drinks from the glass, / dips: drinks: drips: repeats.” Catching the faint star-shot signals of moods both alien and intrinsic, Weinstein writes:

Sometimes I imagine my spine
is a tuning fork, bifurcating
beneath my shoulder blades,
broadcasting my thoughts at
the resonant frequencies of
water, my principle component.

Hopefully, we can be the recipients of repeated broadcasts channeled through this promising young poet; his poems, though they might seem written on water, are nevertheless grounded in the palpitations of the body, sharp as blades and shouldering an otherworldly gravitas. With this initial collection, his well-tuned tongue has already proven itself surprisingly sensitive and subtly forked.

————————————

Eric Weinstein earned his AB from Duke University and his MFA from New York University. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the Best New Poets 2009 anthology, Crazyhorse, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, The Yale Review, and others. He lives in New York City.

Will Cordeiro is currently a Ph.D. candidate at Cornell University. His poems have appeared in Baltimore Review, Crab Orchard Review, Fourteen Hills, Harpur Palate, Memoir Journal, Verse online, and others. He lives in Tucson, Arizona.

review by Rob Schlegel

Say the following words out loud:

Piano. Piano. Piano. Piano. Piano. Piano. Piano.

This is likely not the first time you have repeated a word with such frequency that the word sounds strange.

Box. Box. Box. Box. Box. Box.

The phenomenon is called semantic satiation, a term developed by Leon Jakobovits James to help describe the sensation one has when repetition causes a word or phrase to temporarily lose meaning for the listener, who then processes the speech as meaningless repeated sounds. In this way the word grows so familiar it becomes uncanny, a Freudian concept of an instance where something can be familiar, yet foreign at the same time.

The term “uncanny valley,” coined by robotics professor Masahiro Mori, holds that when human replicas look and act almost, but not exactly, like actual humans, it causes a response of revulsion in human observers. The “valley” refers to the dip in a graph of the comfort level of humans as a function of a robot’s human likeness. Almost more human than human, these robots behave not in accordance to their own unique biological desires, but rather by a series of predetermined algorithms.

When Jon Woodward writes in “Priscilla Lioness,” the stunning sequence concluding his latest collection, Uncanny Valley,

Narration
of one’s actions is monstrous. It
brings itself to construct a murderous woman
of algorithms…

he seems to be commenting not only on the nature of robotics but our culture’s overwhelming proliferation of human narratives constantly reflected back to us through social media networks, television and advertisements until all possibility for inimitable experience is quashed. But instead of trying to escape these tensions, Woodward harnesses them for profound linguistic and semantic purposes. In “Killing Flies Skyscraper Figurine,” repetitions are implied through images or shadows of images “reflected”:

“In what blue are its mirrors, and what
Girders write in its shadow down, and
Reflected, whose mirror reflects them?
A tiny friend of me who looks like me…”

Noteworthy here is the pronoun “me” Woodward repeats in the same line, as if warning against the potential horrors of a culture populated by humans whose thoughts and actions become so imitated that relationships otherwise based on chance and variation entropy.

It is a gross understatement to say that repetition plays a key function in Uncanny Valley. “Huge Dragonflies,” the long opening poem, repeats variations of the phrase “Hope dwells eternally there,” no fewer than 134 times. The final version of the refrain “Hopes dwell eternally there.” repeats thirty five times. It is important to note that the concluding twenty-two repetitions contain no end stops, suggesting that after extreme saturation, the phrase has finally shed its one-to-one referential duties, and is no longer constrained by the punctuation that helps a reader learn how to read it. As a result, the phrase becomes so meaningless that its immediate connotation transforms into “hope is nowhere.”

In the book’s haunting title poem, a disjunctive narrative about a car crash caused by trees falling onto a road, the reader is instructed to

Push the remote button and
The mechanical brayer brays

Lines notated like the previous two
Are repeated (as a pair)
As many times as the reader desires,
From zero to 255, before continuing.

Because the quatrain tells us how to read the couplet (notated with a short vertical line on the left margin) the invitation for repetition functions like a Choose Your Own Adventure narrative. How far down the semantic satiation rabbit hole are you prepared to go? One wonders if the structure, sound, and syllables in the couplet help to determine how many times the lines will be repeated. Is a reader more likely to repeat lines with fewer syllables? Or perhaps the reader is game for more masochistic challenges, choosing instead to repeat, “These thoughts are best left/To Ouagadougou’s bougainvilleas,” the maximum 255 times.

Either way, in the throes of such repetition one begins to sound robotic, as Woodward does in this seemingly exhausting performance of the title poem at the University of Michigan in 2012.

Uncanny Valley (part 1 of 2) from John Gibson on Vimeo.

All of the poems in Uncanny Valley are remarkable for their formal complexity. The longer poems are particularly successful as they employ extreme repetition (and subsequent variation) to collapse sign and signifier (and realism and fable) in ways that are disquietingly strange, and yet, strangely familiar.

——————————————-

Jon Woodward was born in Wichita, KS, and has lived in Denver and Fort Collins, CO, as well as Boston and Quincy, MA. His books are Uncanny Valley (Cleveland State University Poetry Center), Rain (Wave Books), and Mister Goodbye Easter Island (Alice James Books). Other recent projects include a 40-foot-long Möbius strip poem, called “Mockingbird,” which was typed on adding machine tape; a suite of time-dependent visual poems called “Poems to Stare At;” and an ongoing poem called “Copyleft,” to which quatrains are added at the rate of one per day. He lives in Quincy with his wife, poet and pianist Oni Buchanan, and he works at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, where he specializes in digital imaging and a variety of other curatorial activities.

Rob Schlegel is the author of The Lesser Fields, winner of the 2009 Colorado Prize for Poetry, and January Machine, forthcoming from Four Way Books in 2014. His poetry and prose have appeared or are forthcoming in Boston Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Jacket2, New American Writing, VOLT, The Volta, and elsewhere. With the poet Daniel Poppick, he co-edits The Catenary Press, a micropress dedicated to publishing long poems.

John Moore reading

Ryan Bell reading

Meanwhile, we have an equally inspiring piece of work before us this month. What better way to finish off this season of jərˈmān than by getting all self-reflexive up in here. “Feedback” turns the apparatus of the gaze back upon itself, capturing the static and crackle given off when filmic technology confronts itself. A moment of technological self-recognition produces excessive flash, only to quickly fade into its opposite: blind-spot, non-seeing. The work treads the tension of this dialectic as camera turns toward and then away from itself, mediating exposure and camouflage. Find an artist statement regarding the work as well as a brief bio of the artist below.

Feedback

Feedback from Incredible Bob on Vimeo.

Five cameras are placed in a gallery. One is fixed on a tripod and shoots another camera that is mounted on the rotating rack of fan. The camera pan left to right. Above them is a wireless camera that is mounted on the engine of the wireless disco ball and slowly rotate in a circle, shooting both cameras below. Other cameras shoot situation from distance.
All five cameras are connected with a quad-mounted device that edit signals every 2-3 seconds and includes the following camera. The image is projected on the wall behind the system. Fixed camera image is projected on a LCD screen on the side. On the floor below the camera projects a color test. The projected images are the background in sight of each camera.
Installation completes ambient drone sound with deep reverb.
In this installation, monitoring and control system is transformed into an absurd panopticon. Every day we are exposed to hundreds of camera views in the city. Big Brother is watching us. There are more and more 3D movies. The reality is expanded. The camera is an extension of the eye (McLuhan). Baudrillard’s simulacrum comes to its true form, and the Internet gives everyone 15 megabytes of fame. Each camera is now equipped with a night vision option that allows the impossible – visibility in the dark. Things that we used to see only on the screen become tangible and erases the boundary between the real and meditised, real and virtual, virtual and actual, visual and verbal. We no longer watch television, but television watching us. Driving along the highway, over time, we are being driven: turn, stop, slow down, move to the other side (Horkheimer). By Gržinić technology does not serve us, we serve the technology, as Flusser’s apparatus operators. We are becoming cyborgs, machized people versus robots – humanized machines. Australian artist Stelarc built himself a third, robotic arm. The technique achieves autonomy. The elimination of human is necessary because it can be a source of error and unpredictability, it tends to fatigue. Ten percent of the telephone calls was wrong, because of the human factor. Thus man becomes a inspector, who oversees the automated machines, unmanned aerial vehicles, steering mechanisms … In the near future, no one will use the pen. Everyone will write on your phone, computer. Manually becomes manipulative. Futurists advocated the cult of the machine, but it seems that we strive from the Society of the Spectacle to Society of Debacle.

—

Bob Miloshevic (aka Incredible Bob, Belgrade, 1978.) is a Belgrade based media artist. Bob works in a field of glitch art by recycling drops, bugs, pixels, scrambles, feedbacks and noises in a structural way.

Bob performed with numerous artists including Deadbeat, Sutekh, Murcof, Kit Clayton, Dan Deacon, Konque, WoO, Mats Gustafsson and others, on festivals like Mutek, TodaysArt, Dis Patch, Communikey, EXIT, Terraneo, Elevate, Joshua Tree…
Some of his videos were screened on Transmediale, European Media Art Festival, Videoex, Mediawave…

EXIBITIONS
MANGELOS, Salon Muzeja savremene umetnosti, Beograd, 2002
S verom u sex, Galerija Remont, Beograd, 2002.
Globalni Seljak, Galerija Studentskog kulturnog centra, Beograd, 2003.
Backspace 000, Galerija Studentskog kulturnog centra Beograd, 2003.
Backspace 001, Cinema REX, Begrad, 2003.
NIGHT OF 1000 DRAWINGS – Artist Space, New York, 2003.
BELEF 03, 04Backspace 002, Galerija Doma omladine, Beograd, 2004.
Dis-patch, Presentation at Museum of Contemporary Arts, Beograd, 2004.
Upgrade! Belgrade, 2006.
FLICKER, Galerija Doma omladine, Beograd, 2007.
Kritichari su izabrali, Galerija KCB, Beograd 2008.
Za ovu izlozbu Sofija, with group Kosmoplovci, Galerija FLU, Beograd, 2009.
Patherns, with Lillevan Pobjoy, Galerija Progres, Beograd 2009.
Feedback, Galery Belgrade, 2012.
Preslisavanje 7, Remont Gallery, 2012.

AWARDS
Mangelos Award for best Serbian young artist, 2002.,
BelgradeAward for best documentary, 8. Festival neovisnoga filma,
Ljubljana Award for best soft porn film, Festival jeftinog filma,
Krško Award for best one minute film, 9. Festival neovisnoga filma,
Ljubljana Award for most funny film, 9. Festival neovisnoga filma,
Ljubljana Special award for film EUFORIA, Vojvodjanski Festival Filma i Videa,
Novi Sad Award for significant achievement for video ALGORYTHM, ALTERNATIVEFILMVIDEO 04,
Beograd Diploma for film (X) at TOTI Film Festival,
Maribor Grand Prix for film EUFORIA at Festival Amaterskog Filma, Bitolj

Khaty Xiong reading

Kevin Canty reading

Review by Sarah Ghusson

To float – through the air, or in water, an action that is either aimless or directed, perhaps both; floating through rivers and on seas to reach other continents, floating on the winds, like a bird, simply because the bird is capable by nature, or because it holds an ultimate destination at wing; humankind floats through space for discovery. In David Abel’s Float, this motion is captured in several related ways — his words mimic flotation in that they are conjoined in carefree looseness. This poetry, like something caught in water or on air, seems to merely flow wherever the current takes it. However, if attention is paid, and the current of Abel’s movements is tracked with consideration, the destination the author has perhaps intended through this innovative work will be reached.

The first section of three is titled “Conduction,” suggesting a process or movement of material through a medium, whether that material is electricity, heat, liquid, or sound. In this case, the material is meaning, and language the medium. “Conduction” is a montage of Abel’s poetic work interspersed with italicized passages from the work of others, sourced in endnotes. Thus the work already compels readers to hover between its first pages and its last ones, and thus begin their own process of conduction: drawing meaning through words. He writes: A combination of characteristics: dense, vibrant rhythms within constrained compass (thus the pattern almost parsable) – as in moving water (24). Abel’s work is rich and varied, it challenges and compels us to float with it and discover its nearly discernible design, but escapes perfect examination for: The meaning of a meaning / (its tendency) / is more than the sum, sequence, or / description / of its instances (15).

“Orbis Pictus” is named after the first picture book written for children, suggesting this section’s intention to function as its own “Visible World in Pictures.” The section is split into six parts, and the first two are drawn from volumes of Orbis Pictus. “Land Sought, Found, Claimed” contains vibrant imagery from historical events, colorful description of natural environments, enchanting bits of of fable and myth, and lessons of science. “Ambulatory Windows” enters the creation of blown glass as if an alchemistic attempting to produce wonder. Therein, David Antin describes glass as a desert / that transmits light / the thirst is not appeased (47). The motif of transference and the illusion of fluid are cleverly reflected in the material of glass, but the water-like substance will not satiate. It is another instance of the challenge of Abel’s work, where the reader’s thirst for meaning is continuous and ever-increasing. “Lebanon” is described in the end notes as a homage that draws from a book of Lebanese colloquial poetry, and so Abel’s work here is largely influenced by the poems of Michel Trad. He prefaces this piece by stating that bodies are the truest sense of words, emphasizing the human aspect of language, and the pivotal role they play in the interaction of words and meaning (51).

“Time Words” is a compendium of terms all containing “time,” and this broad search warrants results from a variety of subjects. This section speaks to the human desire to classify and contain even that which cannot be classified and contained, and perhaps the futility of such endeavors — with time serving as an ultimate example. “NEG” and “First to Last” function in a similar way, both sections gather sentences from other works in an attempt to create meaning beyond the source text; they are concerned with the intertextuality of language. The first collects example sentences from The New English Grammar, which itself reads like a source text, forming magnetic images of race contention and war, as well as motifs of water and epitstomology in lines such as: Knowledge is power / How much is there?, Swimmers are graceful, and We have our language problems (74-75). Abel again brings up the limits of knowledge through language, and the graceful swimmers serve as a metaphor of the desperate navigate towards meaning, floating through waters, words. In “First to Last,” Abel gathers first and last sentences from every work in an anthology of first stories by famous authors. In doing so, he creates a near fiction of his own. Throughout “Orbis Pictus,” one must gracefully swim through Abel’s semi-adapted creations, referring to his endnotes for clarity, seeking for meaning and hoping it exists.

The third and final part of Float, a single poem called “Times of Day,” is a long sequence of words, arranged vertically into mostly single-word lines. The act of reading this piece recalls the continuity of motion requisite for floating, the swift consistency of word after word is like the rhythm of waves lapping on a shore. The contradiction lies in the simultaneously jarring quality of language. When read aloud, the brain rebels against the logic of Abel’s word arrangement — it breaks with expected sentence structure. The disparity of these two characteristics forges comment on the duality of language, it can be used to inform and create, to convey meaning through academic and creative product, but it can also perplex, divide, and fail us. Abel’s book of poetry encapsulates the many possibilities language provides, and inspires a dedicated analysis of adapted texts and innovative forms. He encourages us to float, to delight in the floating, to seek what may await us at journey’s end.

———–

David Abel is an editor and teacher in Portland, Oregon and the proprietor of Passages Bookshop and The Text Garage. He is the publisher (with Sam Lohmann) of the Airfoil chapbook series, and edits and produces the free broadside series Envelope. A founding member of the Spare Room reading series (now in its eleventh year) and the collaboration collective 13 Hats, he is also a Research Fellow of the Center for Art + Environment of the Nevada Museum of Art. As an interdisciplinary artist, he has devised numerous performance, film, theater, and intermedia projects with a wide range of co-conspirators. In 2011, he curated the international exhibition Object Poems for 23 Sandy Gallery in Portland. His recent publications include the chapbooks Tether (Bare bone books), Carrier (c_L), Commonly (Airfoil), and Black Valentine (Chax), and the collaborative artist’s books While You Were In and Let Us Repair (disposable books, with Leo & Anna Daedalus).

Sarah Ghusson is working towards a BA in English Literature with minors in Creative Writing and Business Administration at the University of Arizona. She is currently composing a creative thesis of short stories within the English Honors Program. She work as a Publications Intern for Chax Press.

Rosicrucian Triptych

Envelope first, 1953

A ring of adults holding hands, burning candles, chanting, a series of levitations visible through the window—Tia Veronica claims she and Mama witnessed a séance from their cousin’s backyard.

Inside the living room, their frumpy aunts, half-drunk uncles, parents (my future grandparents), and strangers summoned spirits with one synchronized hum.

First an envelope floated off the table, then the gingham tablecloth spun off in a gust. Finally the table bobbed as if riding a cosmic wave.

Fried chicken and white biscuits Tia Veronica and Mama agree is what they ate for dinner that night, thighs and a twilight game of tag or hide and seek, depending on whom you believe. The levitations Mama refutes. When asked to explain them, she shrugs. Her tightened shoulders suggest a mental ruse, a hologram of boredom.

Esoteric Knowledge, 1955

Flying was out of the question given their income so they drove from San Antonio to Anaheim. Apart from a beach trip to Corpus Christi, Disneyland was Mama’s first official vacation. Tia Veronica, afflicted by motion sickness, stayed home playing card games with a relative, asking only for a mouse keychain.

It was not the thrill of rollercoasters that led my grandparents, my great -aunts and uncles west, but an international Rosicrucian convention held nearby. Masters and disciplines, the practiced and the novice all congregated in one coliseum. Statues and paper pamphlets trading hands.

The adults rotated attendance at the conference, a measured relay to keep Mama’s attention fixed on the theme park’s talking animals, costumed rodents with plastered smiles.

Of Pesadillas, 1987

Sundays at mass the same gitano sat at the end of our pew. Unruly gray hair, striped linen shirt, black trousers, a hat on his lap. Without fail, he sought out my great-aunt Fatima’s hand for the sign of the peace.

Who is he, I asked her one afternoon at home while we took turns filing each other’s nails. It was clear he knew her from another vector of youth.

Don’t talk about him, she hushed, clicking her tongue.

Already Fatima had observed me turning off radios with my mind, overhead lights. Occurrences I had not exerted energy to control or hide.

Nights later I intercepted Fatima in her dreams. We lingered in front of my grandparents’ house, the sky musky with secrets. A business envelope secure in her hands. My adolescent naivety failed to recognize the ritual of initiation.

She warned me, before turning away, “He’s coming to meet me. It’s best you leave, Tatum.”

The back of her head, a maze of black zigzags, pointed to future generations.

“Jennifer L. Knox Is Still So Funny It’s Sad”

review by Becca Klaver

It’s true what they say about Jennifer L. Knox—you’ve never read poems this funny before. Forget clever puns, whimsically surreal moments, or whatever else you think you know about humor in poetry. The poems of The Mystery of the Hidden Driveway, Knox’s third collection, will have you gasping and hissing “Oh no she didn’t!” before you can get past the first line, or sometimes even the title. Case in point: the title of the third poem—“The Fattest Woman I Ever Loved,” which crashes straight into the line “was a contralto who drove birds to suicide.” By the end of this darkly jaunty prose poem, you’ve come to realize that the speaker is most likely a dog. And now you’ve got the recipe for a Jennifer L. Knox poem: one part grotesquery, two parts absurdity, a shot of obscenity, with pathos salted around the rim.

Knox isn’t merely the poetry equivalent of Kristin Wiig or Sarah Silverman, she’s their peer: a potty-mouthed boundary pusher who ventriloquizes the voices of characters who seem to have just escaped through the back door of the Jerry Springer set. There’s a family that raises an alligator, a boy who has sex with his stepmother, and a woman who is disappointed that, rather than the Celebrity Rehab intervention of her dreams, her family instead “nabbed her scabby ass at a fake birthday dinner at TGIFriday’s wearing old lady stretch pants she’d found at Marco’s mom’s condo and a stained polo shirt straight out of the dumpster.” Try as you might, you can’t look away from these poems, each scenario a tinseled train wreck.

Nowhere is the crash-and-burn quality of Knox’s poetry more apparent than in Mystery’s second section, “Cars,” a 15-page prose poem sequence about every car the speaker and her father ever crashed, due to drugs, booze, or a good old-fashioned death wish. “Cars” is the emotional core of the book, and it’s tempting to imagine that the crying girl whose father makes her drive (and bottom out) an old truck against her will grows up to be Jennifer L. Knox, poet with a taste for life’s big and small disasters. In the most frightening episode in “Cars,” Knox writes:

The car swerved like a cat on ice skates. And it’s true: Your whole life does flash in front your eyes. It happens really fast but every detail’s in there, even the stuff you’ve forgotten. The car drove off the cliff, turned in the air, and landed 30 feet below upside down on top of a Joshua tree, its sharp green spines like saw blades thrust through the shattered windows. I ended up in a ball behind the passenger seat with nothing but a tiny scratch on my hip. Oh, how I mourned those shoplifted pants the EMTs cut off me.

The lament for the shoplifted pants seems carefully placed to undercut our sympathies, and this sort of ruthlessly self-indicting move is a Knox trademark. So, too, is her “cat on ice skates”-like ability to glide away unbruised. We’re put in the position of parents, an odd place for a reader to find herself in: should we give this speaker a talking to, or just wrap her up in an I’m-so-glad-you’re-okay bear hug?

If Knox has been granted nine lives, The Mystery of the Hidden Driveway is the one where she tries to survey the damage. With its Nancy Drew-esque title and cover art, Mystery is, believe it or not, less shocking and garish than Knox’s previous books, A Gringo Like Me and Drunk By Noon. Knox’s third collection is interested in following a life’s snarled wreckage back to its source. In many poems, the titular mystery turns out to be a family drama. The cast of crazy characters is still here, but in poems such as “Cars,” “Marriage,” and “Love Poem: One Ton of Dirt,” we sense that Knox is telling her own story, one that weaves in and out of the lanes of her invented personae. Through these more personal poems, we begin to understand the empathy that Knox holds for even her most deranged characters. What might seem like slapstick or mockery eventually emerges as an unexpected form of commiseration for the speaker who places herself, hilariously and humbly, as one misfit in a band of many.

At a few revealing moments, Knox seems to address the change in tone and perspective of her third collection: “These days, not so much regret. Brute will’s broke / as a petting zoo pony,” she writes in “The Earth Is Flat and So’s My Ass.” The whimsical pony and the half-crass title remind us that this isn’t so much a paradigm shift as an expansion of tonal register. Elsewhere, in “Old Friends,” a poignant confession slips straight into an assertion of superiority: “I’m thinking how different things are now, / especially me, how my heart can barely stomach the story, / which means I’ve become a better person, certainly better / than the woman I knew, who I would never be friends with / again—she probably hasn’t changed at all.” Knox’s speaker has taken a long hard look at herself and realized that in spite of all the cars she’s driven off cliffs, literally and figuratively, she’s still laughing. And we are, too. Knox may not be selling out amphitheaters yet, but Mystery is the work of a consummate clown, tears and all.

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Jennifer L. Knox is the author of three books of poems, The Mystery of the Hidden Driveway, Drunk by Noon, and A Gringo Like Me, all available from Bloof Books. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review and four times in the Best American Poetry series. She is at work on her first novel.

Becca Klaver is the author of the poetry collection LA Liminal (Kore Press, 2010) and several chapbooks, including the hot-off-the-paper-cutter Merrily, Merrily (Lame House Press, 2013) and Nonstop Pop (Bloof Books, 2013). She is a PhD student in English at Rutgers University and lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Samantha Duncan reading

James Nokes reading

The Next Big Thing Interview

Kristin Hatch’s chapbook, Through the Hour Glass is currently available from CutBank Books. She was tagged in the “The Next Big Thing” self-interview series. Her responses are below.

Q. What is your working title of your book?

A. Through the Hour Glass

Where did the idea come from for the book?

The title takes its name from, “Like sands through the hour glass, so are the Days of Our Lives,” the opening of the daytime soap opera and Lewis Carroll. The poems in the chapbook are all titled for characters and plotlines that happened on the show while I was growing up in the 90s. The project tries to link the rabbit hole of being a kid with being brainwashed to believe you are a princess. Or special date nights with candlelit musical montages. And maybe something about lowbrow art (“lowbrow art” all proper or not) and poems and maybe wanting stuff a little more goofball, a little more joyful.

What genre does your book fall under?

Poems!

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

The shock of the new actor seems particularly prevalent in soaps. Suddenly it’s a Tuesday and there’s a new Lorenzo and you have to get used to new-Lorenzo’s new face, but you feel really betrayed until you’re like, “what am I doing holding this pig-baby, I have to go play croquet with the queen!” For some reason I found that scene in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to be extremely terrifying as a child. Looking back, I guess it’s kind of Mulholland Drive-y. Which I also found extremely terrifying. Point: give me Deidre Hall or give me death.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

It’s a chapbook kind of about the soap opera, Days of Our Lives.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

CutBank Books published this chapbook. It turned out very beautiful and they are very nice. They should make everybody’s chapbooks.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

The first poems happened in grad school some years ago. I forgot about them. Then I found them again and binged on You Tube videos and Wikipedia entries. My stories! Soap opera Wikipedia pages are a labyrinthine and impressive, a marvel. Maybe six months-ish? It seemed real fast versus the full-length book. I guess because it was: months versus years. But it was nice to work on something small and focused while the rejection letters poured in for the full-length manuscript. But rejection letters no longer! My the meatgirl whatever won the National Poetry Series and will be coming out on Fence in the winter. Thank you, Universe (and K. Silem Mohammad)!

What other books would you compare this collection to within your genre?

All the great ones and none of the bad ones.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

Backlighting, the devil, feminism, my friend Doug.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

There is a guillotine scene. And the cover drawing by Amy Sollins (and laid out by Clint Garner) is really, really pretty. So even if you hate (or “eh”) the poems, you get to experience this extraordinary drawing.

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Kristin was tagged by Kiki Petrosino (http://www.sarabandebooks.org/?page_id=1581) author of the forthcoming Hymn for the Black Terrific. As per the rules, Kristin is tagging:

Mary Margaret Alvarado: http://www.dosmadres.com/shop/hey-folly-by-mary-margaret-alvarado/

Greg Lawless: http://www.backpagesbooks.com/product/foreclosure-gregory-lawless