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There is Something About the Weight of Words in our Hands: Salt Hill 28, A Review

5 Feb

There are a lot of things I’ve never done. One, review a lit mag. But when I saw the list of contributors for Salt Hill 28, I was excited. And when I read Salt Hill 28 in full in one sitting, I was even more excited. The editors note sets the tone stating,

Each of us is contained by and immersed in personal experience, our brackish travels of the past and their briny apparitions in the present. We bring these journeys to the page to create and confront life, to embody the paradox of being conscious…Yes this life may constrict but in its vessel, seas are held, ones upon which we both float and drown.

I love that. And I love the lines from the following pieces and the way in which that editor’s note  is fulfilled in each. In each one is multi-dimensional thought, thundering words and encapsulation that threatens to break boundaries.

From “Because Thought Isn’t a Prayer” by John Gallaher

We’re going through alone,
or asking for help, and how can we get there as us
or as ghosts, with this tin cup. This ocean.

From “Abstract Lessons” by Nate Pritts

Emphasis is a trick we apply
to the stupid animal hum when the real feeling
employed isn’t right, or enough.
Whenever I get confused I use maps
to help me; they show how our limbs
are nothing but bundles of blood & twisted.

From “Falling in Love with the Death Thought” by Zachary Schomburg

This is how you
love: you try over and over again to throw a
red balloon across the river from a tree.

“Foreign Wedding” by Maile Chapman and “Gown Rain” by Sarah Rose Etter also instigate, investigate and enamor.

Salt Hill Journal
$10.00

Take me to the Utility Room

3 Feb

More often than not lately I’ve found myself digging to get to the heart of every matter. It feels like I’m constantly wading through an endless amount of emails or trolling around twitter feeds and facebook timelines. This is a common argument: there’s just too much information out there. At the end of most days it is easy to feel that there is an abundance of dirt under my fingernails, and so little substance to carry in my hands.

The stories I’ve been craving are focused, honest ones. The Utility Room, by Michael Nye, is just the ticket. You need a break too, don’t you? Visit The Utility Room for a while. Meet Ellen.

On Thursdays, Ellen would find the sheets in a small pile by the door. The trash can was always emptied and relined with a plastic bag from the grocery store; the hall bathroom remained spotless. Other than the windows and the clump of sheets on the floor, it was as if they were never there at all…

Read the rest at the Atticus Review.

Get Lifted

30 Jan

I’ve been meaning to get off my lazy vouching butt bone for awhile to raise the roof for the new issue of Forklift, Ohio. Consistently a thick rad object full of poems and recipes and strange little pictures that seep human thinking, example the way humans think, thinking of humans on the page. Issue #23 is no exception, featuring those wonderful poets like Matthew Zapruder, Paige Taggart, Sean Bishop, and Weston Cutter, whose two poems were my favorite of the issue.

Here’s the beginning of Cutter’s “Is Hunger.” (Apologies to Cutter and you and Forklift for not being able to retain the cool spacing of this poem; imagine indentation as energy as movement as thoughts going)

A woman I’ll never kiss spots a five dollar bill
while running, shoves it
in her tights
between skin and lycra, runs, breathing even and
not sixty feet later
pulls the cash and
tosses it back, something returned, a moment for
some other winded
seeker to cherish.

Same woman, same path, different day: if it’s
a fifty? a hundred?
At what point does
value overtake value, how much does a moment
of almost, of oh look
cost?

Order the whole issue here, get your own cover with the one-of-a-kind continuous line drawing here, find more goodness here.

The Dry Voice in the Lush Story: The State of Kansas by Julianna Spallholz

26 Jan

If Lydia Davis knew more people who hung out shirtless in small places and owned pitbulls instead of pedigreed cats, her stories might look at little like Julianna Spallholz’s. Lucky for us, we’ve already got Julianna Spallholz to write those stories. Her debut short story collection, The State of Kansas, is recently out from GenPop Books, and it’s a wonderful,  lush read by a drily witty writer.

Spallholz writes the story of certain kinds of people in certain kinds of places.  We know these people; of course we do. We all knew a Billy Glock, the kid with diabetes,  who “when it was Billy Glock’s birthday, all the kids got regular Popsicles and Billy Glock got a special Popsicle that he had to eat sitting down with a fork and plate.”  The kid who never particular stood out otherwise, who hung around his hometown and eventually because a cop or a firefighter or a paramedic or something else pivotal to our society yet oddly invisible to most of us.  We all have friends like those in “Business Idea,” who:

sit at the kitchen table. They use fine point markers. They become excitable. They draft a budget for their business idea. They use imaginary money. Their business idea will not work.

We know the people Spallholz writes of in these stories. We are many of them. The one voice, the one persona we don’t quite get a handle on, is our narrator, or narrators. It’s not that they are unreliable, exactly; it’s just that she has made them into ciphers. They are a suburban secret, a window we can’t quite see into. They are what’s behind the lace curtains. They always seem a little separate, a little removed, which is of course exactly what allows those observations to be so sharp and painfully accurate. For instance, in “Tucson, Arizona”:

Some downtowners work at the little market, some work at the nicer restaurants, and some work at the bike shop. There are some banks and other offices. You could work at the University or at Raytheon, which is a place where they make weapons. A lot of people seem like they don’t have jobs, or like they have jobs that don’t take up too much time.

At the same time, Spallholz’s narrators occasionally expose their own isolation, in a blink-and-you-miss-it observati0n both funny and sad. This, buried in a bit about drink prices in Tucson:

Sometimes you end up getting drunk without meaning to. Entire days go by in bars. Entire weeks and months.

The people in the pages of The State of Kansas seem at times something more, or something less, than people.  They aren’t quite parable, either – they’re something in between that feels new and fresh and full of secret understanding. The almost parable-ness, comes from Spallholz’s lovely use of language, of repetition, of sing-song-ness. The way she uses language gives a fable-like quality to the rather sharp and subtle observations she makes throughout these short pieces.   Both “Your Maid in Real Life” and “The Body” make use of this extreme repetition, causing an almost total de-personhood of the maid, and separating the body from the being inside it.

And the fabled quality running through these stories allows Spallholz to do something else, as well, that is rather un-Lydia-Davis-like. She lets her characters, even her narrators, borrow hope. Her stories, then, become lush dreams in spite of themselves. Her stories become places where you find “the feeling of believing that every beautiful impossible thing could be real.” Even if it isn’t.

Julianna Spallholz’s debut collection, The State of Kansas, is available from GenPop Books.

It sounded like a reasonable request…. (A Review of Hunters & Gamblers by Ryan Ridge)

17 Nov

Hunters & Gamblers
by Ryan Ridge
Dark Sky Books, 125pgs, $12

Hunters & Gamblers? Not quite the clever title I expected from Ryan Ridge, the writer I came to follow because of the Ox poems, those strange LOLZ-worthy poems (like these at elimae). However, I’ve read these stories and it’s admittin’ time: I can’t imagine this collection being titled anything else. These pieces tumble around with names and labels and states of being. And boom, an explosion illuminating how a label can affect so much, how a person can be lifted above the junk or, in most of these instances, thrown in a whirlwind of weird and tragic.

Infectious? Is that word a good label? Anyways, once I started, I pulled this thing out of my bag during my lunch break, snuck off during work to read pieces, found myself reading them before bed and having some wicked dreams. Originally, I was gonna write a single-sentence review of this collection, but no no no, not fair to these stories that kicked a hole in my comfort gut and not fair to myself. I’ve been wriggling around for a week now.

But first: that single-sentence review–On these bitter Indiana nights when winter is a bit early, these stories remind me how there are worse places to be, how a safe place can make all the difference, how there are worse people to be.

And here’s more: With superb language and an eye for the right situation, Ridge has crafted stories big and small to remind us of the goodness we have by showing us the ugly. There are labels and then there is life, a often forgotten distinction showcased by Ridge’s method of showing us the banner, then waltzing out the awful and having them/it dance around for us.

Like “Pussy (an Explanation).” It doesn’t get clearer what we are talking about, a boy whose coworkers call him a pussy. And as the story unfolds, from being about the speaker leaving work to get out of skinning deer, opting to take home a female coworker, it quickly unravels and then twists. The speaker, this whole time we learn, has been talking to his son in the story, explaining the elk head with a plated “Pussy” and the revelation that the kid’s mom is that same girl from that night, the one the speaker drove home. And we get it, how a label can collide with a life, like the phrase “jumping off a pier” blazing real once you’re in the mouth of the gator in the water.

Everything after the word becomes reality is shaken up:

Oh, I quit that bullshit job a couple months later, just after deer season. Your mother worked there a little while longer. Mike and Baxter even crashed our wedding. They showed up, called me a pussy, and said they didn’t think I had it in me and they gave us the strangest wedding present—
The mounted elk’s head with the word “pussy” engraved on it?
Yes son. I’m that Pussy. Does that explain things?
Yes, dad. Crystal. Hey, question.
Shoot.
Do you think you and mom will ever get back together?
Hard to say. The ball is in her court. You can tell her I said that.

Or like “After Fall,” a post-invasion story about a family trying to continue on after paratroopers took over. We see the craziness of life without order, or rather a jumbled order, with Girl Scouts selling single cookies for $20 or the women of a family gone, the speaker says to chase wildlife for food (but maybe we know better). Once the umbrella of “stable” government shuts, the power shifts and our comforts and expectations are toppled. The ending (besides an italics section detailing more of the takeover) is what gets me, the men of the family on the floor, asking for divine intervention, seeing how their safety net worked more smoothly when that umbrella was up: “It sounded like a reasonable request, and we were reasonable people, historically speaking. We just didn’t know what was hurtling toward us.”

But this is all to say that Ridge’s collection at once shows us life covered by its cloud of strange, pummeled by its raindrops of ugly, bad weather we call it.

I keep flipping back to the story, “Fuck Shop.” It goes like this:
“Welcome to the fuck shop,” said the old man in the red smock.
“I thought this was Wal-Mart,” I said.
“That’s funny,” he said, “I thought this was America.”

(Reprinted here with the permission of the author)

And that’s it, that’s perfect. If perception is more than a blip, but also a major catalyst for how we behave, also a label stuck to everything we see, also a hand in the back that pushes us forward and maybe down, then these stories are those rare stories that shake us awake, that remind us to stop gambling and hunt something that’ll keep us full, make us warm, keep us safe.

Available from:
Dark Sky Books | Powell’s | Amazon | Amazon Kindle

Someday This Will Be Funny by Lynne Tillman

1 Nov

Someday This Will Be Funny
Lynne Tillman
Red Lemonade, 164 pages, $14.95

During BookExpo America week, I saw Lynne Tillman read at Brooklyn’s WORD bookstore, and I was compelled to read her newest collection of short stories, Someday This Will Be Funny. As much as I was interested in Tillman as an author, I also wanted to engage with a product of Richard Nash’s new Red Lemonade Project.

 Intimidation is easy to come by, and as I thought about how this was a book that had been reviewed in the New York Times and how this was a book written by an established author, I also thought about how this is a book from a young publisher, a book that while prodding and introspective, is also accessible in that necessary sort of way. It is too much without being too much. It is transformative, but not paralyzing. And so we find, validation comes in many ways.

 While a collection of short stories, Someday This Will Be Funny, is not a collection that can be picked up and set down. At first, I was continuously trying to squeeze in a story here and a story there, and the words were not resonating as I wanted them to. And so, on a Sunday afternoon, surrounded by white walls and beige carpet, sitting on a couch that looks through a window to architecture that could place me anywhere, I immersed myself.

These words require immersion, seeming to say to me as I read, “The longer you spend with me in one period, the more you will benefit.” The collection takes on a sort of study feel. Some stories took over the whole book with their resonance. I felt as though I had been lost in this language for days. Jumping from context to context, I felt an almost overwhelming absorption, an increasing curiosity. Mixing verse and prose, Tillman creates sentences that drive the reader forward in a beautiful game of reflection.

 Tillman reinvents the idea of knowing what to keep and what to discard. She reinforces the idea that what is perhaps most important is telling stories. It was as though the words would not stop coming and when they did, on that final page, I was left wanting, my mind in a kind of wet chaotic expansion.

Another reaction to If I Falter at the Gallows by Edward Mullany

31 Oct


If I Falter at the Gallows
Edward Mullany
Poetry
Publishing Genius Press, 83 pages, $12

Christopher wrote a wonderful personal response to If I Falter at the Gallows by Edward Mullany last week, a wonderful book of poems released by Publishing Genius recently. So much has been said around the web recently about this book, I thought I’d sift through my own thoughts on the book as a way to add to the conversation:

1. An entry point? The epigraph. Charles Simic: “Who put canned laughter/into my crucifixion scene?” The pseudo-humor, a mark of ha-ha entertainment, slapped against the tragic, the personal tragedy, someone’s personal tragedy.

2. If I had to tell someone about these poems, I’d say something like “They’re short poems with lots of head space to roam, like a dot-to-dot picture that could be either a horse with flames coming out of his eyes or an old person serving soup to the homeless on the day he/she dies.”

3. We find that sinkhole brevity over and over, a little picture, a bearded man pushing another bearded man down a dune (“Comic Relief”) or retreating soldiers who aren’t supposed to be retreating getting killed anyway (“Either/Or”), and it’s kind of funny like in that AH THAT SUCKS way, but then in all that white space we stumble into questions like “WHY WAR?” or “WHY THE SHOVE?”

4. Why does anyone need to be crucified in the first place?

5. I guess I’m yet another reviewer person responding to what Mullany said about his poems in NANO fiction:

I don’t aim to write funny poems, but neither do I aim to write sad poems. I try to describe reality through the voices of people so stunned by their experience of reality that they see with a kind of insane clarity.

6. Insane clarity! I like that. It reaches out for something that I think the clarity-driven, plain-spoken writing that I encounter sometimes misses: a sincere interest in the craziness around us.

7. I’m taking it way out of context, but I’m reminded of this quote from Ways of Seeing by John Berger:

To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognized for oneself. A naked body has to be seen as an object to become a nude.

8. A naked poem can be cool I guess, where someone’s like look at this and it’s disturbing or funny, but what Mullany does, maybe a more accurate word is gives, what Mullany gives is an object, a nude object, transformed into this lovely other.

9. “To The Woman Who Jumped In Front Of A Train” is a poem from the book that exemplifies this point:

I am wearing a yellow
dress, and I am walking

with you towards a gate above
which is a sign only

one of us
can read.

10. Is this funny? Maybe, but also it is tragic and these two things slapped together are startling. This is obvious, but a good piece of art is not just the means of dealing with experience, but the place for such dealing.

11. I’m reminded of what Adam Robinson, lead man of Publishing Genius, said about his own poem “I am going to have sex with these people” from his book “Adam Robison and Other Poems” in an interviewer for Issue 1 of Beecher’s Magazine. The interviewer said that “the language of the poem is the language of you trying to figure out what the poem is.” And Adam responded:

Mairead Byrne said a similar thing on her jacket review for the book, that “somewhat skeptically” the book “marks out a testing ground for poetry.” I’m really happy about that. It wasn’t something I was doing intentionally in the language, but it’s always on my mind, more than in a “is this a good poem” way. Because I think Poetry (capital P) has a lot of vitality. Even good poems can be lame, can be who cares? So my objective with the bro-sona language is to move the process right onto the surface of the poem. Rather than have the reader cut through the craftiness, my intention was to start them off with, uh, crappiness and filter through that for the “poem.”

12. Maybe in a little different way than Adam meant for his own poems, but definitely with the same core, Mullany starts and ends with the “crappiness” of life, the peculiarity of living, the tragedy of a bunch of humans being together on this stupid earth.

13. The reader, if patient, can walk around on the surface and slowly sink in, instead of sinking in from the beginning.

14. Like “Either/Or,” “Ode To The Bayoneted Soldier” meanders within one of the suckiest parts of human conflict, war:

In the woods beside the snowy
field, the footprints
continued.

15. Christopher, in his response to the book earlier here at Vouched, mentioned that overwhelming feeling of “what does anything matter,” and did a great job of exemplifying how Mullany’s poems connected to him and this question.

16. Looking at “Important,” which was the first poem Christopher singled out, I’d say that Mullany’s poems again and again, for this reader at least, point out that what matters depends on the person, but some things (should?) matter to nearly everyone, like art or war or death.

17. The poems in If I Falter At The Gallows snips the most affecting bits from these BIG THINGS and spreads them out where the reader can roam around.

18. Realization is beautiful.

If I Falter at the Gallows by Edward Mullany

25 Oct

If I Falter at the Gallows
Edward Mullany
Poetry
Publishing Genius Press, 83 pages, $12

The first book I ever read from Publishing Genius Press was Easter Rabbit by Joseph Young, a book of sparse, tight microfiction. I read the book in a single sitting. It wasn’t just for the contest. I remember distinctly the feeling of language bending. One of my favorite things about Publishing Genius is how often their books force me to reimagine and rearrange my ideas of what language can and should be, what language can and should do.

I sat down to read Edward Mullany’s If I Falter at the Gallows at 11:15 last night. At 12:04, I finished. My cat was asleep against my leg. The house was quiet and dim. A feeling of futility wrestled at my arms and chest. I wanted to read Ecclesiastes, but I didn’t want to wake my cat. I wanted to do a lot of things, but didn’t want to wake my cat. Against all the futility I felt, there was something purposeful in its slow, plodding breath.

I keep saying futility. Let me explain.

Mullany’s poems are as equally sparse as Young’s Easter Rabbit, but there is a futility in Mullany’s lines that brought to my chest a feeling I’ve been wrestling with the past few months, a “what does anything matter” question that is perhaps as cliche’ as it is historic, that’s perhaps best exemplified in the poem “Important”:

The newspaper said a painter who is dead and whose
paintings are exhibited in museums in the country
he spent most of his life in, as well as in museums in
other countries, would have been one hundred today.

I read that poem over at least 5 times last night, I thought of the painter’s life, I thought of my life. I laughed. My cat stirred. I laughed more quietly.

I went back and reread previous poems, the dark and quiet irony of “Important” coloring everything now.

I read “A Suicide in the Family,” and understood the how useless words can be:

The doorbell rings. Or a mountain
speaks to a mountain

in a language only
mountains understand.

I read “The Birthday Present Analogy”, and finally got the joke:

Inside the box, you
find another

box. And so
on. It is only

a joke if
there is a first

and a final
box.

After I stopped laughing, I sent an email. I picked up my cat, cradled her in my arms. I carried her in to bed and rested her next to my wife. I took off my glasses, plugged my phone in to charge, set my alarm for the morning.

I have plenty to do before I find the final box. And so do you. You have this book to read at least. Whatever you do after that, do it well, and take care.

10 Oct

I saw that one of my favorite journals, Sixth Finch, had a new issue out. With the online journals that I read most of the work from every issue, I like to take an evening to sit down and read it, instead of reading a few pieces here and there like I do with other journals. Tonight was my date with Sixth Finch, and as usual, the thing delivers! Below are some reactions on the issue.

————–

Cover art feels a little grittier, a little edgier than I’m used to seeing when I pop up Sixth Finch. Rad.

I dig dig dig the color schemes they use.

The first piece, “Summer Camp for Sirens” by Kathleen Balma, takes some serious strides. To go from “We get a new flag for everything we learn. There’s even a new flag for learning how to earn a new flag!” to “We are taught never to talk about this. Our organs do the talking for us. The mouth of all pain is called the brain” (and have it work so well!) is just fantastic.

I’m glad to see Sasha Fletcher continues to refuse to tame his imagination. Gorgeous leaps and laps in the poem here, “Let Me Tell You About My Day.” 

I don’t know what to say that would sound cool or smart about “Butterfly” by Elizabeth Hildreth, but here’s a part from the middle that I can’t stop thinking about:

         Being inside the sea

if you like the sea must be

like being inside a body

you like, inside hiding,

inside a song you like,

the motor running,

hanging in the trees.

“TMI” by Dara Wier reminds me why human interaction is so beautiful. The strange flow of conversation. The awkward moments and how we handle them. The unrelenting desire to say what we think, what we know. GOODNESS.

I don’t know much about visual art, but I think Sixth Finch is trying to change that, not letting me skim over this section ever. I particularly enjoyed Family Day’s eeriness, Canopy #4‘s movement, and Finding Balance‘s difficult-to-place endearing strangeness.

An Intricate Dance of Objects and Words: A Review of Left Glove by Mac Wellman

29 Sep

Solid Objects is shaping up to be a solid and lively new small press. Their first offering, Master of Miniatures, was a gorgeous and poignant Jim Shepard novella about the special effects wizard at Toho Studios during the heyday of the Gojira (Godzilla) films.

Their second offering shares the same eclectic vibe but is a unique creature in its own right. The play-as-poem-as-wordlove by Mac Wellman, Left Glove, is a spirited sprint through the adventure of a single glove, lost and then found. Wellman proves, with deft wordplay and tongue-in-cheek seriousness, that objects can be stars in a universal drama. He uses acrobatic sentences, chants, poetry, singsong, and a Greek chorus (of gloves, of course) to nimbly dance us over the chasm between object and soul, between person, place, and thing. He proves that objects can be funny, fun, and quite serious in their inherent meaning.

Or, to put it another way: This is the proper and fitting version of that dull plastic bag dance in American Beauty that people who’d apparently never thought about anything (A plastic bag can dance! O my eternal soul!) touted as the deepest thing they’d ever seen. This is a truer, wiser, funnier ode to lost things, to the power of the object as projection and also somehow as a rejection of projection. For we are told that Yamaha Nazimova, the loser of the glove, is a person:

of whom
Nothing is known. Not where she comes
From. Not where she goes. Not what she
Does if anything she doth. Her said character
A mystery. Likewise the place of her birth.
Age, status, comportment, and deportment
Nay…

The same is true of the finder of the lost left glove, a certain Jewel Beckett, of which we are told:

Not a stitch of Jewel Beckett is known to the rest;
Not a stitch of Jewel Beckett: not her height, not her weight,
Nor the meaning of her mysterious name;
Not a stitch of Jewel Beckett is a matter to bother;
Not a stitch of Jewel Beckett is a matter to care;

Of course, in a way this intentional, repetitive anonymity suggests a glaring absence, a person alienated and more truly lost than our glove. The glove, at least, is promised a mate, for there is always a Right Glove out there in the universe. Indeed, we get a rich, strange life woven around our titular left glove. Our glove is praised, disparaged, prophesied over, made to pass through trials, and finally given a happy ending of sorts. Metaphysical discussion, parody, and play circle throughout the telling. Indeed, a play this fanciful and fun could only have been written by a longtime playwright, someone who has an ear for the music of language and how it works both on the page and on the stage. Corporate speak and choral speak and pop-culture speak are scattered throughout and soaked in the surreal images that make up Left Glove.

Did I mention the book itself is an object of art? Did I mention you should absolutely read this book? Because you should and moreover, if you want to get the most out of it, read it aloud. Grab a few friends and a few copies and a big bottle of bourbon and spend the night dancing among the words in Mac Wellman’s lovely meditation on the universe of lost people and things.

Left Glove, by Mac Wellman, is published by Solid Objects, and is available at SPD for purchase.

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