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They Are On My Side, or Books For My Summer

1 Jun

I am not a superstitious person.  I say that knowing that no one is entirely reasonable, that like anyone sometimes I think about objects as though just by having them around they can keep me safe, that they are on my side.

Last Saturday I drove 13-ish hours to live in North Carolina by the beach for two months.  The couple weeks beforehand were a slow emptying of closets and furniture, edging up to leaving.  I am so thrilled to be to living in this beautiful place with beautiful people for the summer, but I’d dreaded saying goodbyes – guh, see-you-laters – so much that I didn’t look at the fact of departure directly, not until I took my leave.  Even this one that’s only a couple of months. I left to live by the beach for a summer a few years ago, but then I didn’t dread going at all; there weren’t as many people it hurt to leave.

When I first thought about what books I would take, these I immediately knew I wanted to pack were ones I’ve already read, all multiple times.  If I’m honest about how I think of them, they are little guardians, voices of conscience, talismans warding against forgetting who I am/want to be and how important books have been to that personal trajectory.  When so much else gets uprooted their steadiness moors me to some wispy feeling of safety.  If there can be such a thing as holy books for an individual life then these I knew I would come with me are part of an ever-expanding gospel:

Sermons and Lectures Both Blank and Relentless by Matt Hart:  The music of Matt’s poems is totally wild but still steady, intentional, an ocean always coming back to where you can walk up to meet it.  Leaving this behind would’ve been like not having favorite albums to sing me the way here.

If I Falter at the Gallows by Edward Mullany:  Reading these poems feels like hearing prophecies of a strange god you know will be fulfilled.   Mullany breathes a quiet but swelling kind of truth, thunder or bells tolling to more bells.

Come On All You Ghosts by Matthew Zapruder:  I’ve never read a book of poems and experienced as much gentleness and mercy and glimmer as from this marvelous thing.  It was given to me by someone who says I’ve called from them their ghosts.  I don’t know if that’s a thing I can do, but these poems help me remember how to inhabit haunted and fearful places with light.  They reassure me that a trembling heart is better than none at all.

The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman:  This is not the sort of book usually written about on here but yeah, okay, whatever.  I first read this just over ten years ago and my attachment to it still grows.  When I became an atheist after ten years of devout faith it took on special significance, this story of a ragged twelve-year-old girl pitted against a cruel, powerful god and his army of angels.

Several months ago I took the copy I first read from the public library in my hometown. I took it from the shelf in the young adult section I virtually lived in through adolescence and walked out.  There are some things that never leave you, and I had to go back for this one.

Visitors: Sheila Heti — How Should a Person Be?

31 May

Visiting us this month at Vouched is Adam Robinson, editor of Publishing Genius Press and author of Adam Robison and Other Poems and Say, Poem.

* * *

How Should a Person Be
by Sheila Heti
Fiction, 320pgs
Henry Holt and Co.
$25 (hardback)

This is the last day of May, which means it’s the last day of my Visitorship here, something I’ve enjoyed even if I haven’t posted in the last couple weeks like I meant to. But the last day of May means tomorrow is the first day of June, which is the month that brings us Sheila Heti’s amazing, vivid and vital novel How Should A Person Be? It comes out on the 19th, and you’ll want to bring a sleeping bag and camp outside the bookstore for this one.

The thing that is so remarkable about it, I think (as if there is just one thing), is its structure. The chapters don’t necessarily follow each other in a linear way. It’s like an umbrella — straight until you open it, then you see how all the parts were touching all the other parts all along. The novel, which is both fiction and non-fiction, and dubbed by the publisher “a novel from life,” really revolves around the titular question. It addresses it not just through the engaging story, but with deliberately philosophical and critical insights. For instance:

… the three ways the art impulse can manifest itself are: as an object, like a painting; as a gesture; and as a reproduction, such as a book. When we try to turn ourselves into a beautiful object, it is because we mistakenly consider ourselves to be an object, when a human being is really the other two: a gesture, and a reproduction of the human type. One only has to travel on a subway during rush hour and pull into a station and see all the people waiting to get on and off to be struck by how many of us there actually are in the world.

It takes a writer of extraordinary abilities to comprise a novel from nuggets like that. What’s more, there’s a sort of fatalism in that quote, I guess, but as a whole the book doesn’t come across as hopeless. Maybe the gist of it could be summed up by cutting “how” from the title — a person should be. We are given that should. It’s remarkably hopeful, the distinction between ”a person is” and “a person should be.”

My copy of the book is scarred with underlinings and the margins are blackened with stars — and I make it a point NOT to write in books. I practically read the 300 pager in one sitting. The unique way the novel works makes it difficult to contextualize things, or I would type out a few more of my favorite passages. Instead I’ll just offer my strongest recommendation that you take Amazon up on their discount. It’s currently $16.50 for the hardcover.

Good Good Story and New Thing: Ben Marcus at Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading

23 May

If you don’t yet know, Electric Literature is doing a pretty awesome thing. They want to support and increase awareness of great writers, journals, and presses, and so: every week they’ll publish a great story by a great writer at http://recommendedreading.tumblr.com/.

This week’s story is by the wonderful Ben Marcus, and it’s called “Watching Mysteries with My Mother.” As someone who’s growing older, watching my parents grow older still, this fearful and loving meditation on a parent’s eventual imagined demise struck a deep and painful chord of recognition with me.  Like so:

I did it to her as a child, too. I said good-bye and went to school. I said good-bye and went to camp. I said good-bye on a Saturday morning and who knows when I came home. When I did this, I left my mother dying. In doorways, in kitchens, in living rooms, on lawns. Sometimes even when she was sick with a cold in bed, I said good-bye from the bottom of the stairs, just as her chances of dying had crested to an all-time high. I said good-bye and went to college, when she was even more likely to die. And when I came home to visit, it wasn’t long before I departed again, leaving her to die. Just as tonight, after watching a mystery on PBS, I said goodnight to my mother and left her at home to die.

We speak of having one foot in the grave, but we do not speak of having both feet and both legs and then one’s entire torso, arms, and head in the grave, inside a coffin, which is covered in dirt, upon which is planted a pretty little stone.

Go here to read the whole thing. And check out the beautiful single sentence animation, too.

 

You Better Run: Bethard at PANK

20 Apr

[CONTRIBUTOR'S UPDATE: Sometimes two Vouchers really dig the same story, as you can see. Customarily, we wouldn't post about the same story within 24 hours, if at all. However, in the spirit of 1. Birthdays 2. Happy coincidences (Christopher and I both drafted these  Vouches for the same story without consulting each other or talking about it) 3.  and Fridays... we're going to let it fly. You really should read this story! ]

We are all monsters, no matter how good we try to be. Great stories make you face this, they grab you by the back of the head and make you look the worst in the eye. Ashley Bethard’s Salty Wounds, from the latest online issue of PANK, does this.

It shows us how we hurt ourselves:

She pretended for a second that the grains of salt were not grains at all. That they were blades instead. But blades took courage, and courage was just another word in a long list of things that she lacked…

We hurt each other:

She ran too far and turned around, coming face to face with an older boy from the other team. He snarled at her, hands raised into claws, and began to run at her. She wanted to run but the open space of the wood seemed to vanish like one last sucking breath, and she stood paralyzed with fear and excitement…

We hurt the world:

Summer had ended early that year, choked off by a vicious frost that forced the trees bare. On land she saw them standing naked, their limbs creeping across the brightness of a full white moon like ominous black lace, set to strangle. 

She Ran: Ashley Bethard at PANK

20 Apr

Technology told me today that it’s Ashley Bethard’s birthday, and since I’ve been saving this vouch for the past few days, it seems particularly apropos to post it today.

Bethard appears in this month’s issue of PANK with a story that will pull your lungs right out of your body. I don’t want to say much more about it, but just let the story do its thing to you. Here’s an excerpt:

When she was 12 she played a game of wolf pack with her cousins and their friends in the woods behind her uncle’s house. They split into two teams and raced through the trees, trying to attack their opponents and avoid being tackled. She ran too far and turned around, coming face to face with an older boy from the other team. He snarled at her, hands raised into claws, and began to run at her. She wanted to run but the open space of the wood seemed to vanish like one last sucking breath, and she stood paralyzed with fear and excitement.

He rushed at her, knocking her down, still playing wolf as he snuffled into her neck, her hair, his hands grasping at her waist, her ass. She tried twisting away, pushing at his bony boy chest. When he finally let her up, he growled again. You better run, he said.

She ran.

Read the story in its entirety at PANK Magazine.

You Are What You Have Not: A Review of AYITI

18 Apr

Ayiti
Roxane Gay
Fiction | 126 pgs
Artistically Declined Press

A book is a mirror: if an ass peers into it, you can’t expect an apostle to look out.
-G.C. LICHTENBERG

The best fiction, I think, works hard to teach you something about the world or the human predicament without sounding like a raging shithead. Didacticism in writing tends to ruffle when it means to instruct. Perhaps this statement is a first step toward my theory of good writing. I don’t know. What I do know is—holy shit: I’m woefully ignorant about Haiti. (Add it to the list of other countries I know squat about. This is not a point of pride.) I start with my lack of knowledge because I want to show how Roxane Gay’s Ayiti owns a set of perspicacious eyes that aren’t so much knowing as they are accountable. (In the spirit of disclosure, I’ve met Roxane once, and she was lovely. She also writes for Vouched sometimes.)

First, I have to say again I’m ashamed (esp. after reading this book) of not knowing a lot about Haiti—and further, I don’t think my reading was ruined one way or another by my ignorance. Gay does a thorough job of delineating the most important aspects of life on the island and off. I imagine the whole book as a catalogue of possible ways to answer a Protean question, something like: “What is Haiti?” or “Who’s Haitian?” or “What does Haiti mean?” There’s no doubt that the answer isn’t gentle. In the book—which is truly a love letter, of sorts—Haiti doesn’t catch many breaks. People are constantly trying to flee the country or are reluctant to go back when they escape. And even when they find sanctuary in another country—generally the U.S.—they’re confronted with prejudice, ignorance, or fear, as if they’re aliens in a godawful terrarium.

For example, the third story in the collection, “Voodoo Child.” An unnamed female narrator takes advantage of her college roommate’s stereotyping after she finds out the narrator is Haitian. The roommate automatically assumes she’s into voodoo.

I do nothing to dissuade her fears even though I was raised Catholic and have gained my inadequate understanding of the religion from the Lisa Bonet movie that made Bill Cosby mad at her.

The narrator has no problem manipulating the roommate for better accommodations.

I leave a doll on my desk. It looks just like my roommate. The doll is covered with placed strategically pins. I like fucking with her. She gives me the bigger room with the better dresser.

A pattern within the collection is alive here: first, second, or third generation Haitians turning a person’s ignorance back around on the perpetrator, using a sideways version of their culture as a way to show a fool the foolishness. But follow “Voodoo Child” to the end, and you find that the narrator fulfills her own prank, when the women come out of a train station and meet an old woman, speaking Creole. The narrator asks what she wants, a bit worried, and when the old woman states the narrator is a famous mambo, or voodoo priestess, the old woman kisses her hands. The story ends: “I was still imagining all the dirty New York boys my roommate and I would later find.”

Does the narrator believe she’s a mambo or not? Will she take her new self-knowledge and ply witless men with it? Does it matter?

(more…)

A Twofer

21 Mar



I tend to go backward. As much of us do now, we ration, then devour. Especially with media. There’s no way I could’ve withstood waiting a week between episodes of Battlestar Galactica. No, Netflix was my friend there. And as for literature, I am samesies.

Issue Eight: Creation of Annalemma is a thin, sure blade compared with other hoss issues, like, say, Issue Six: Sacrifice. But it holds up well. Inside is a story “South Beach” by Ryan Rivas. Here’s the first paragraph:

After Eve ate the apple, God created South Beach. He, Himself, was a bit stoned at the time.

I originally read this story online because it was published after a story I had online. I was sad to see my story replaced in the featured position, but that disappointment died soon after I read the above. And continued. Rivas conflates and chops up the Genesis account with Christ’s New Testament cameo and sprinkles it with angel dust on a dirty hotel mirror.

When Christ turned sixteen, and realized His name came from a curse word spraypainted on a wall of the abandoned lifeguard tower in which He was conceived, He ran away from home.

The biblical language pervades throughout. “God underwent a spiritual crisis. He took a second look at the Bible and diagnosed Himself bipolar.” How much of the Good Book could be reduced to this summary? The Father and Son bicker and disagree like trailer trash, like a drop-out and a four-toothed mechanic. It doesn’t do much for the Florida Tourist Board or the Miami Chamber of Commerce. But it paints a new white coat on the Greatest Story Ever Told.

God had to admit, the boy had balls. To die like that, again and again. To block the bowels of Hell instead of getting high in Heaven.

Because the issue is centered on creation, Sam Libby’s story “And It Was Good” also picks up on the biblical-esque sense of cosmic lovemaking. “In the beginning there was darkness and time, but there was no God.” Both of these stories operate on similar levels. They both want to subvert classic lines. But they also deviate at that point. Rivas wants to put a cheap nail polish gloss on the holy trinity, and Libby wants to strip the polish off and show that there is no trinity. Only Nature.

As you may have guessed already, between the earth and the sky, well:

It was not to be.

The sky did not want to be touched. The sky didn’t want to lose the only thing that made it different from the darkness on its backside.

We will pause here because this is an important point. We’ll get to the fire and ice later, burning of deep desire–etc. But just a moment, please.

Buy Annalemma here, and read Rivas and Libby! 

Whatever Follows the War

20 Mar

Falcons On the Floor
Fiction, 300pgs
$12 | Publishing Genius

I’m at a complete loss for how to talk about this book. I’ve started this review now 5 times, and each time, my head clouds, thoughts make a mess of themselves, I stammer a few sentences into the keyboard, maybe a full paragraph, then cut the whole thing out and copy it into a waste file. Maybe a sentence or two will work for later.

The thing is, this book is important. It’s so important that I’m terrified of messing it up. There’s so much to this book that I could talk about: how well-drawn the characters, Justin’s lyricism, the authenticity Justin achieved thanks to Iraqi refugee Haneen Alshujairy, and maybe I’ll talk about that, but most of all, I want all of that to point to one very simple, true thing: This book is important.

This book isn’t without its flaws, of course. Let’s just get this out of the way. There are some mechanics towards the end that get a little loose, a few moments where a slip in narrative affected my ability to be fully immersed in the story. There are some typos. Okay. And these things I’m sure lessened the book’s impact to a small degree. To Sirois’s credit, he was managing some complicated shifts, and to Publishing Genius’s credit, this was the first novel they’ve undertaken. But I hope if or when you go to read this book, you’ll show grace, you’ll understand how even the most important things can go unpolished.

* * *

Ltd ed. print for Falcons On the Floor by Connor Willumsen

Falcons follows the trail of two Fallujan refugees, Kahlil and Salim, who flee the city before the Coalition forces first lay siege on the city. They make their way up the Euphrates River to Ramadi. Salim wants to find the Internet, to connect with a girl, to say “I’m alive.” Kahlil just doesn’t want to die for a cause he’s not sure he believes in.

In the hands of many others, this story at this point in history could easily become politicized, polarized (War is evil! or The jingos ate your baby, or America fuck yeah!), but Sirois manages to tell the story without a lean. He tells it on its human terms. All the characters are affected by the war, of course, and the war acts as an impetus for many of their actions, but this novel isn’t about the war; the war is merely its horrific background, a circumstance at most, a thing that humans do and that makes humans do things, whether brave or cowardly or both.

* * *

About 30 pages into Falcons, I remembered my cousin. My cousin has a bullet in his leg–its lead encased in a full metal jacket buried in the thick of his muscle, it would cause more harm to remove than to let become a part of him. The bullet became a part of him somewhere near Mosul, Iraq when he took part in the raid that captured one of Saddam’s sons. When Sirois writes about the start of the siege on Fallujah, I imagined Mosul, I imagined what might cousin might’ve seen:

A jet tore through the fading sunset. A slower plane trailed behind, growling low. The real siege had begun.

Salim waited for Khalil to pivot around. He never did.

They both face Fallujah and the escalating barrage until an earth-cracking concussion thunderclapped and sucked up all sustenance, backlighting the silouetted palm trees like black and frozen fireworks in the sky. Embers sparkled, perishing in the wind. The rancid tang of phosphorus chlorinated their tongues until it was all they could taste.

This is what Sirois does throughout Falcons. There are these times when Sirois’s language makes the book come to life in such a way you can taste the musk of the Euphrates, where in your teeth you grind at the grit of the Iraqi sand–I half expect Salim and Khalil to turn towards me, to ask for help: a gallon of fresh water, a can of anything other than chick peas, a blanket.

It is important for me, for us, to read this book, because to understand what is happening in this world, we need to understand, if even vicariously, what it is like to have war waged upon us. My cousin went to war. The war didn’t come to my cousin. This is an important distinction to understand, how we are a part of waging war, and of war waged, how we are a part of everything, and everything a part of us.

* * *

The river that is part of our bodies just as it is part of the country. We will carry this river with us. We were born from it and we will return to it, and like the soldiers in the boat riding its cordial passageways the river treats each visitor equally–with the same complacent undertows and swells, currents gravitating seaward, Khalil and I struggle against its flow, against the natural order of war and whatever follows the war.

If we are escaping one thing, we are following something else. Are we brave enough to admit this?
-from the laptop of Salim Abid

Purchase Falcons On the Floor from Publishing Genius Press.

Forthcoming!

8 Mar

Everyday Genius has been doing its cool usual thing, everyday content of hmmmm….goodness. Lately, it has been excerpts from forthcoming titles. Rad rad rad forthcoming titles.

Like J. A. Tyler’s When We Hold Our Hands (Dark Sky Books)–

When our house becomes a boat there will be all the canned goods lining the shelves and in the pitch of our movements the food will roll our hallways and clunk down the stairs and make its way out the front door. We will have left it open to go and see if this morning, unlike other mornings, the sky will not be red.

Like Zachary Schomburg’s Fjords vol.1 (Black Ocean)–

On the other side is a mountain town. The air is clean and cold. I can hear the ice breaking in the distance. There is a woman in a long black dress and a black scarf over her face. Welcome to Spitzbergen she says. Then she lifts up her dress. Nothing happens next.

Like the pieces from today from Laurie Saurborn Young’s Carnavoria (H_NGM_N)–

Translated from the Russian

One notices without fidelity
how moss covets stone

and ice crystals build
themselves into cold dirt.

Existence repays the favor
and it becomes easier to love

parenthetically, without ever
mentioning the breasts.

Exits Are at Artifice

27 Feb

It took no time at all to fall completely in love with this Exits Are project from Mike Meginnis, a series of collaborative stories written in the manner of old school text adventure/roleplaying/Choose Your Own Adventure stories, hosted online by Artifice Magazine. Basically, a match made in heaven.

Here’s the run down:

A text adventure is a game that takes place in prose. The computer describes a world to you one room at a time, writing in the second person. “You stand in the center of a cool, dark cave,” says the computer. “Exits are north, south, east, and west.” The computer waits for you to tell it what you want to do. “Go east,” you might say. Or if there is a key, you might say “take key.” The computer parses your commands as best it can and tells you what happens next. [...]

I love text adventures, but they usually disappoint me. I wanted a way to make them more open-ended, less about puzzle-solving and more about language: its weirdness, its beauty. So I started playing a game with some of the writers I knew. Using gchat, I pretend to be a text adventure. The other writer is the player. We use the form of the text adventure to collaborate on some kind of strange, fun narrative. The only rule is that we take turns typing. We never discuss what we’re going to do in advance, so the results are improvisational and surprising/exciting/stressful/upsetting for both participants. Every time, the player does things I never could have seen coming.

So far stories by Matt Bell, Blake Butler, and Tim Dicks have been posted with an equally amazing troupe of writers on deck: Aubrey Hirsch, Brian Oliu, Nicolle Elizabeth, AD Jameson, Robert Kloss, &c.

This is something you want to follow.

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