Basal Ganglia
by Matthew Revert
Lazy Fascist Press, Oct 2013
120 pages / $9.95  Buy from Amazon

On the evening of July 25, 1965, Bob Dylan strapped on a Fender Stratocaster and gave the audience at the Newport Folk Festival an electric rendition of “Maggie’s Farm.” The switch was received with a cacophonous chorus of boos and hisses. Dylan had gone electric, but the audience wasn’t ready. Almost fifty years later, author Matthew Revert is doing something akin to that with his latest novel, Basal Ganglia. One of the best absurdists in contemporary fiction, Revert has built a cult following based on his previous works, all of which have used humor as the cohesive element that keeps his mixture of bizarro, surrealism, and literary fiction together. In Basal Ganglia, the hilarity has been replaced with it’s exact opposite, but the sheer beauty and elegance of the final product is much more gratifying than any of the author’s previous efforts.

Rollo and Ingrid met when they were teenagers and escaped the cruel, abusive world they’d known by moving into an underground fort made from pillows and blankets that mirrors the structure of the human brain. The lovers spent 25 years building the fort and subsequently became slaves to it. The narrative begins years after the fort is finished and Rollo and Ingrid live only to maintain it. They lead an isolated existence in which words have almost disappeared, communication is practically nonexistent, their past has been forgotten, and their love has morphed into silent tolerance. To bring them out of this situation, Ingrid decides they should have a baby. However, afraid of what another person would do to their dynamic and way of life, she opts to build one from the same materials they use to maintain the fort instead of having one the traditional way. When the baby’s done, instead of bringing them together, it makes them paranoid and each believes the other will hurt the child. What follows is a strange and heartbreaking psychological war in which Ingrid and Rollo will be forced to realize how their seclusion has changed them and how important the past is when trying to regain their individual and communal identities.

Basal Ganglia is not an easy read. Revert has a way of stuffing his prose with meaning, but the nature of that meaning changes constantly. He loves language, but expresses it by deconstructing it and putting it back together in ways that change the original meaning and create new ones:

On the surface, this novel deals with universal themes like lost love, faulty communication skills, identity, parenthood, fear, distrust, and isolation. However, there are a plethora of underlying elements that make it unique and give it depth. For example, Rollo and Ingrid’s relationship is exceptional because it’s hermetically sealed from the rest of the world. When they feel lonely or scared, the emotion is augmented by their self-imposed confinement. The outside world was mean to them, but hiding in the fort eventually made them victims of their reclusiveness. Also, Ingrid and Rollo are trapped in a perennial state of agitated stasis, and it only gets worse whenever they try to figure a way out of it. Their stagnation is never a calm one, but their growing awareness of the situation and perceived powerlessness turns it into a maelstrom that affects their sanity.

Revert has a knack for storytelling, but what makes this one an outstanding novel is the stylish, smart prose. The microcosm Ingrid and Rollo in habit is exclusive, but the author takes their circumstances as a way of exploring collective truths:

The truth is often sad, and that’s exactly what it is in Basal Ganglia. Neglect, worry, and solitude all lead to a razor-sharp sadness that cuts to the reader’s core throughout the narrative and keeps cutting after the story’s over. Sure, Ingrid and Rollo survive an imaginary loss, a confusing revelation, and find a way to move forward even with the understanding that the cyclic nature of most things is inevitable, but those silver linings arrive after Revert has fully exposed the bleakest corners of the human condition. The characters are forced to find a reason to reconnect with themselves and with each other, and the reader is there for every step of that psychological/emotional journey.

Basal Ganglia offers an immersive and very satisfying reading experience. The novel’s merits lie as much in the secluded universe Rollo and Ingrid inhabit as in the author’s beautiful use/celebration of language. By abandoning non-stop weirdness and hilarity, Revert has taken a giant step in a different direction, and the outcome is cause for celebration. I really hope he keeps walking that way.

***

Gabino Iglesias is a writer, journalist, and book reviewer living in Austin, TX. He’s the author of Gutmouth (Eraserhead Press) and a few other things no one will ever read. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Verbicide, The Magazine of Bizarro Fiction, Z Magazine, Out of the Gutter, Word Riot, The Rumpus, and a other print and online venues. You can reach him at gabinoiglesias@gmail.com.

[SIC]
by Davis Schneiderman
Jaded Ibis Press, October 2013
154 pages / $16  Buy from Jaded Ibis Press or Amazon

As an undergraduate, Professor Barrick (my physics instructor) taught me that white light is all of the colors combined; in painting, white is the absence of pigment – it is the anti-color. I lead off with this seemingly paradoxical tidbit about the shade? color? absence? white because white plays an important role in Davis Schneiderman’s new novel? conceptual art collection? book? book [SIC] (Jaded Ibis Press 2013), as it did in the first installation of his Dead/Books trilogy, BLANK (Jaded Ibis Press 2011).

In BLANK, white is the empty space on the pages that follows chapter titles representing common occurrences in common novels. “They meet” and “They fall in love” and “They fall apart” and “A character dies” are all there tantalizingly introducing nothing at all. The idea, of course, is to get us to think about the fact that no matter how clever the writing may be, the same damn things happen again and again. And just in case we believe it might all stop someday, there are even sections entitled “You die” and “I die,” though afterwards the book itself goes on.

The white in [SIC], however, is not a repetition of the previous work. For those who couldn’t imagine buying a book full of blank pages, here there is a heaping helping of words … none of them written directly for the project at hand except the Introduction (which, true to form, was not written by Davis Schneiderman, but by Daniel Levin Becker). And so [SIC] contains works in the public domain (some of my favorites being “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and The Confidence Man), works not yet in the public domain which have been translated in and out of a dizzying array of languages (though back into English in the end), chain letters, songs, recipes, etc. all attributed to Davis Schneiderman.

Photo Credit: Andi Olsen

With this glut of print, how could there possibly be any white? The white, in the case of [SIC], is found in Andi Olsen’s black & white photographs of Schneiderman in a white, Lycra bodysuit. The pictures depict famous landmarks (the Louvre, the Shakespeare & Co. bookstore), vacation scenes (a man buying postcards), everyday life (a man sitting at a restaurant), and even the more unfortunate parts of our lives (a man apparently kidnapping a child), but the focus is always on a glowing white void, the outline of or erasure of a person? alien? being. George Segal, in his tableaux, portrays people who are so anonymous they lack color, though they remain inherently human. The effect is melancholic: we wish these folks could find a way to break out of their plaster casts. Olsen’s photographs, on the other hand, are not about the human, they are about the post-human, or perhaps the not-quite-human. The glowing white entity in each picture may have two arms, two legs, and a head, but, in the end, it is only pretending? parodying? attempting? the human.

What is the effect of this combination of already published, though now newly attributed work and photographs depicting an eerie, white entity that may or may not be human? All colors and no color. By attributing every conceivable work to himself, Schneiderman makes himself the central figure in all of literature; by erasing himself from the photographs, however, he is saying that he doesn’t matter. Both the former and the latter are common writerly sentiments, though at different points in one’s career: I am important; I am no one. Their amalgamation, however, is revolutionary. To accept one’s presence and absence simultaneously is to accept the paradox of being an artist. I am everything art has led up to; I will be used as grist by future generations.

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Rough Honey
by Melissa Stein
The American Poetry Review, Oct 2010
96 pages / $14  Buy from Amazon or IndieBound

Melissa Stein is the 2010 winner of the APR/Honickman First Book Prize for her book, Rough Honey. In the introduction, Mark Doty notes that Stein’s “sentences are beautifully choreographed; they start and stop the motion of her poems with a nearly invisible, effortless authority. Best of all, her concurrent attention to sound and to image makes the world, on these pages, viscerally real; she employs one of poetry’s oldest powers, yoking the referentiality of words to their sheer sonic force ” ( xi).

I don’t remember where I was when I first read one of Stein’s poems, but I do remember that I immediately ordered the book.  I was struck by the combination of visceral and sensual language of her work. In “Whitewater” she begins with the flip of a kayak and an adrenaline rush:

like academics, frothfoamgrit and the taste,
what was it, asphyxiation, psychedelic Escher
in blackwhite cubes (6)

There is something sensual, almost first sexual experience whimsical in linking froth, foam and grit into one word to illustrate the initial plunge. There is a hint of the graphic results in her word choice “asphyxiation” (6).  The shift upon the speakers face plant into a rock is an unusual blend of both sensual and visceral:

White protrusion of bone – white petals and light,
Pearl-solid, luminous, all fourth-of-July and scattered,
Pipe bombs bottle rockets Christmas crackers, oh,
What a party, annihilation (6)

The leap from “white protrusion of bone” to “petals and light, / Pearl-solid, luminous” (6) and pairing “Pipe bombs bottle rockets Christmas crackers” (6) is an example of what Hoagland (2006) calls the “pause that would never occur in “natural”, uniformed speech” (62), a self-conscious move that deepens the experience of the poem.  It brings a range of emotion to this singular event, from war to holiday, in very few words.

Her voice is similar in style to how Hoagland describes Louise Gluck’s in his essay, “The Three Tenors”.  Here, Stein’s “radiance and gravity [like Gluck’s] grow out of the enormous pressure exerted on the contents of a small container” (Hoagland 52). It’s no surprise since Stein considers Gluck to be one of her early influences.

Her tone is dialectical, passionate, detached.  Stein shifts the tone of her poems by using the interplay between the sensual and the visceral to detach and create space.  Again, in “Whitewater” after the initial thrill followed by impact, the speaker reflects on the surroundings in a sensual way as if none of this has happened:

the tenderness
of paint sable-brushed against silk, powdered
throat of the foxglove, flushed curve spiraling/into a conch
velvet crowing the doe’s nose,
arms embracing the cello’s hips”  (6)

Here, she clearly illustrates what Doty has called the “start and stop motion of her poems” (vi). There is the flip/rush, the smashing of face into rock followed by that place where this is no pain.

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A Handbook for the Perfect Adventurer
by Pierre Mac Orlan
Trans. by Napoleon Jeffries
Wakefield Press, October 2013
104 pages / $12.95  Buy from Wakefield Press or Amazon

It’s easy to be intimidated by a dude who has written upwards of 130 books, not counting flagellation erotica. But then you take a look at the sketch of him on A Handbook’s first page, labeled “Private First Class Pierre Mac Orlan, Military Cross,” and (if you are like me) immediately relax:

That’s the story of reading A Handbook for the Perfect Adventurer. Peppered with (actual, academic) footnotes, headed by chapter titles like “The Various Categories of Adventurers” and “On the Role of the Imagination,” you get the sense starting out that you’re delving into some serious study of the adventurer’s role in early 20^th century French literature.

Part of this weird effect comes from what Wakefield Press does with the book. Design is stark, almost academic—but handbooky, too, with that authoritative streak the pocket-guide folks always mean to bestow. The 13-page introduction (and this is for just over 50 pages of content) has actual history in it, from a brief discourse on the French novel at that time to a contextualization of the book within the aftermath of World War I. Even the translator’s remarks on A Handbook’s inherent, decontextualized value is a sober meditation on its potential synecdochic value with relation to the history of adventure at large.

But once we get into the text, the book turns out to be pretty fucking hilarious. Mac Orlan keeps you on the rocks for a while, taking pains to distinguish the “active” from the “passive” adventurer, the cavorting blockhead from the armchair fiend of imagination. It’s still possible, in these early sections, that he’s entirely serious about the theoretical structure he’s setting out. Until we start getting stuff like the list that accompanies an account of the Active Adventurer’s troubling youth:

It goes on. Details like this end up being a serious redeeming factor of A Handbook for the Perfect Adventurer. There’s something about their oddball quality that tingles for having crossed the century in the way it has: slowly, as only three of Mac Orlan’s books had been translated into English before this one. It feels good that there were folks in 1920, too, who prioritized being funny and a pain in the ass, leaving more “serious” tomes to the hand-wringers.

Though with the tongue-in-cheek mode, as we know, a whole lot that is of interest can be conveyed anyway. There is certainly something being said about the dreamer here, when Mac Orlan outlines the strict “exercise” regimen the Passive Adventurer must undertake:

If one considers Passive Adventure as an art, some natural gifts have to be allowed for in future initiates. These gifts must be practiced and perfected. It is a question of intellectual gymnastics that include daily exercises and in particular the methodical training of the imagination.

The cool thing here is that he’s not affecting a take-down of anyone in particular. Sure, he’s giving a reasonable amount of hell to the person whose pulse begins to race at the words on a page that represent a steaming sea battle, or a life-altering meeting with the natives of a remote island. But this is more of a poke at the idea of adventure at large. (Ah, Napoleon…the introduction was right!)

While Napoleon Jeffries’ portion of the book remains fairly staid, aiding Mac Orlan’s straight face, even he occasionally jumps in on the fun in the text of a footnote. Eye the prioritizing of information in this one, one of many clarifications of Mac Orlan’s name dropping in the text:

26…Adolphe Thiers (1797-1877) was a politician, historian, and in Karl Marx’s words, a “monstrous gnome”; his best known work is the multivolume History of the French Revolution.

By the end of A Handbook, we’re digging it. Under the heading “Benefits an Adventurer Can Gain from Traveling,” Mac Orlan has included:

The self-same chapter ends, totally inexplicably, with the single paragraph:

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House to House
by Laura Kasishke
Likewise Books, October 2013
32 pages / $8  Buy from Likewise

 
Laura Kasishke’s work rarely resembles itself. In her last full-length collection, 2011’s excellent Space in Chains, she oscillates from prose blocks to bone thin stanzas, from whispery pastorals to searing, phonetically prickly poems about domestic abuse. The book’s strength comes from the constant mood of anticipation it creates and then, poem by poem, evades.

Kasishke’s latest, House to House, is a chapbook of just forty pages – not much room for the schizoid self-differentiation of Space in Chains – but, as the title suggests, Kasishke still achieves an impressive amount of movement from cover to cover.  The book spends most of its time in the realm of memory – in almost every poem the word remember crops up or, very loudly, does not – but as the collection progresses, Kasishke departs from the typical nostalgia of reminiscence to a stranger ambition: she seeks to remember as an act of creation, to use memories not to solidify her identity but to unharness it and allow it to wander landscapes of memory in whatever form she chooses.

In the first poem of the book, “Daysleep,” Kasishke uses her own memory of “sleep, in May, in the afternoon, like / a girl’s bright feet slipped into dark new boots,” as an entryway into the collective realm of sleepy memories. Sleep becomes the link between the poet and a “smiling child hiding behind / the heavy curtain of a photo booth,” “brides in violets,” and “sleepy pilots casting / the shadows of their silver jets / onto the silver sailboats / [sailing] / on oceans miles below.” Here, she sets her consciousness free to alight on each of these “personages,” casting about their mundane but evocative experiences. The poetics of memory become the poetics of deterritorialization, pulling Kasishke out of herself instead of further inside.

But this project of self-emancipation through memory is rarely so successful. Throughout the collection certain images appear in poem after poem and act as barriers that interrupt the disembodied flow of Kasishke’s identity. These images are of doctors, hospitals, angry fathers, or absent gods and they appear in the poems like malevolent ghosts. In the poem, “House to House,” Kasishke demonstrates her failure to use her memories however she wants:

The moths, at first a metaphor for poetry’s ability to move freely from porch to porch as demonstrated in “Daysleep,” become “jilted” and transform, in the last lines, to nurses in “tattered hospital gowns.” This bleak, spooky image resonates with pain and resists the type of free association necessary to escape the identity-forming tendencies of memory.

The further Kasishke goes into memories the more she runs up against these types of images, hiding in the dark corners, poised to remind her of something awful. The poems become charged with the tension of an erratic psyche struggling to escape some terrifying baggage, and Kasishke’s unpredictable and often disturbing imagery communicates that terror well. Suspense in poetry is rare, but the startling turns in House to House from images like a “girl’s feet slipped into dark new boots” to a “gull snatching the diamond necklace from the drowning girl’s neck” demonstrate the dangers of reckless remembering in way that transmits the experience instead of simply describing it. While the specifics of Kasishke’s memories stay buried, they darken the atmosphere of almost every poem in the book and, like a ghost moving through a house, exasperate and terrify by refusing to step out into the light.

***

Parker Smith is a writer of fiction and poetry living in Salt Lake City, Utah. His poetry has been published in the likewise folio and in Inscape. He has fiction forthcoming from Bodega. He currently teaches elementary school in a town near where he lives.

April 1988. A Murder & A Hanging.
by Michael Bussmann
Patient Sounds, PSS004, February 2013
14 pages / $12  Buy from Patient Sounds

Only one chapbook among my small library of codices made the journey with me this summer from my home in North Carolina to New Haven, where I’ll live for perhaps only enough time to make it a home. The postmark on the miniature manila envelope housing the chapbook dates the mailing for February 11, 2013, and upon my arrival to my new dwelling place in August, I had yet to pinch the tiny metal wings to open the package. Six weeks of seminary soon handed me a divine urging for more verse, and because I had recently overdosed on Wiman in preparation for sharing the same building as the man, I opened the envelope waiting on top of My Bright Abyss. Shipping tape covered those metal wings, so I ripped it open with my teeth.

I wish I hadn’t waited so long to travel back to April, 1988. A Murder & A Hanging (Patient Sounds, 2012). Michael Bussmann, one of two poet laureates of Fort Collins, Co., during the year of the collection’s printing, curates his first chapbook under a theme of “hyper-local horror poetry.” Specifically, he tells the story of a real murder, or rather murders, in his small Colorado town using seven poems. Bussmann first heard the tale (likely over beers since he works for the brewery that now makes the town famous) from a buddy, and the swiftness of death from life has haunted him since.

Bussmann sets the stage in his introductory note:

With “this fair town,” Bussmann shows, not tells, of his intimacy with Fort Collins, and it’s this relationship of place that contributes to the upsetting impact the horrid ballad has on him. “I have seen the sight [perhaps a purposeful homonym error] of the murder, and the hanging,” he notes. “And I have seen a piece of the rope they used to hang him.”

****

Bussmann begins his retelling with the site in “The Night Before” that ends with Eva’s ending the day of. He draws from his long nights in bars, on the job and other wise, in his deft description of James: “Long in night, he returns home too soon, / breath hot and rancid, stale from tall tales told.” Waking up in the morning after yelling, pints, and a forgotten teeth-brushing session bring me to James’s state. The taste is my mouth is a cross between peanut butter, sour patch kids, and old soy sauce.

It’s not long before Bussmann pairs these crude offensives with “beatings / and threats with knives” and Eva’s self-defense offense that starts as a thought and, like a buried lead, ends up a fatal action:

Bussmann’s spare but insightful use of a line break not solely before a transition shows he knows how to balladeer with suspenseful pauses (Compare, “He sometimes lunched at home, but never / was the trunk packed.” with “He sometimes lunched at home, / but never was the trunk packed.”) But I could have done without the concluding ode to Jerry Garcia. Instead of alarmed by a husband stabbing after his wife after she tries to leave an abusive relationship, I’m left thinking of “Sugar Magnolia” and Garcia’s missing middle finger.

Nonetheless, Bussmann soon recovers from a trite train of cocaine with the next two first-person poems from Eva and James, respectively. They further entrench the reader in the minds of two victims (everyone in this tale is a victim)—in a visceral, stream of consciousness manner. Quick, staccato pacing defines most of “Eva Howe, number one” as she looks down, unsure of what to do, where to go, and if she still lives:

Bussmann’s alliteration of “breech,” “bleedables,” and “bleeding” drives how much “red, wet” flows around Eva after James stabs her. With later mentions of “muddy ways,” “arterial,” “deluge,” “pool was warming,” and “wet and dead,” Bussmann wants the reader soaked in the drained liquid of life—now unlife.

He shifts viewpoints to the killer in “James Howe,” who appears more occupied with thoughts of his bed than on his poor dead mate:

Bussmann’s parentheticals focus the reader’s attention on the newness of James’s situation. We discover the acute changes in James’s life at the same time he does. We don’t read after the fact; instead, we read with the fact.

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Light While There Is Light: An American History
by Keith Waldrop
Dalkey Archive, 2013
220 pages / $14  Buy from Amazon or Dalkey Archive

“What I would like, I think, is to live a while longer. But not again.”

– Keith Waldrop

Light While There Is Light is called variously a fictional memoir, an autobiographical novel, and a masterpiece of twentieth century American fiction. I appreciate that the Dalkey Archive released it as Fiction. Somehow it feels better to call this a novel – and Waldrop seems to understand that. In reality I think that most readers assume a first person narrator should be equated with the author – what’s satisfying about this book is that it doesn’t seem to matter if you do or not. Despite the obvious allusions to the life of Keith Waldrop the person, and even the pictures that show Keith Waldrop the person in the text, this is a novel, not a memoir.

Compared to, say, Waldrop’s other work, this book is very accessible – readable even – and I’ve returned to it multiple times since receiving the book. I’ve enjoyed returning to it to go back and read a passage. It’s also illuminating (the book is full of light puns) to return and notice the kinds of motifs and themes that Waldrop uses throughout to create a kind of unified whole. It’s something that I would be happy to continue to read and reread, but also recommend that almost anyone read – It’s something that I’d recommend to friends, family members, writers, etc. There’s something to be learned from Waldrop’s sentences.

Despite what I would call a “straightforward” quality of the prose, every bit seems composed with intense attention to diction and pacing. It’s poetry, and it also bears poetry’s intense loyalty to peculiar internal logics:

Waldrop meanders through his own life thematically more than chronologically – though it does proceed in a relatively ordered fashion. Light Where There Is Light reminds me of W.G. Sebald’s books, and most specifically Rings of Saturn.

Both have the kind of detached, slightly melancholic, and drily humorous narrator, and easily shift from memory, to recollection, to reminiscence. There’s also the peculiar feeling that the narrator might not be trustworthy – or that the narrator might be fabricating half of the story (a kind of death of the author double bind, wherein the reader is trapped in the belief that at least the author is fabricating one story, instead of multiple layers of story) for the sake of symmetry or cohesion.

One anecdote, that Waldrop calls, “The spookiest story I ever heard,” near the beginning of the book, I actually wondered for a second if it was was from a book by Sebald – though I haven’t gone back to try to confirm or deny this suspicion. Not only was Light Where There is Light composed before Rings of Saturn, but it also seems completely irrelevant where the story comes from because it is so essential to this book., or at least to the understanding of the book.  The little parable is so evocative – so essentially metaphorical and like a synecdoche for the whole work that it’s almost hard to believe that it’s anything but an invention of Waldrop’s.

The book starts as an origin story. It’s not really an origin story of Keith, the Narrator, but more like the beginning of the root cause of the series of family misadventures that form the book.  The narrator’s own birth and conception remain obscure.

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I Am Ready To Die A Violent Death
by Heiko Julien
Civil Coping Mechanisms, Nov 2013
Book Page at CCM

In I Am Ready To Die A Violent Death, Heiko Julien presents to us a kaleidoscope of images, ranging from the suburban, to pop culture references, memes, and the internet, presented through a meditative narrator questioning everything they see, while at the same time doubting what they are saying. Ironically the writing is both positive and self-deprecating at the same time, mirroring the multi-faceted life we inhabit online through different personas; we are both the nice, tolerant and compassionate person, and we also want to die a violent death, alone, so we can feel something that is real in a physical sense, not just through social networking.

What strikes me first of is that these pieces began as either self-published e-books, Tweets, or Facebook posts. This way of sharing ‘content’ online seems to be central to ‘Alt lit.’ Heiko has already begun a dialogue with his audience before the book has been published; I had read most of these pieces online before coming to read this book. This is quite a unique trend that is happening in the publishing world; there isn’t one way of ‘being a writer.’ And the idea of publishing itself has become quite flexible. I feel that Heiko is aware of this, and the writing in this collection reflects the continued dialogue he has with the Alt Lit community, which he seems to be a major part of.

“Facebook is the void that talks back.” (facebook post)

Heiko is well aware of the power of memes, in a similar way Steve Roggenbuck talks about the memeplex, which he defines as “a grouping of associated memes that are consistent and which support each other.” And that a  “meme” is a unit of culture and/or anything that is spread by imitation (stylistic moves included). Heiko also uses the language of memes to project this view; via different forms of online language, be it advertising, tweets, Facebook, or blog posts.

I am afraid of men but I am a smart boy so i intellectualize my fear in the form of Cool Shaming and Tight Blaming. If I’m being honest, I would like to be the Number One Dude. I admire strong guys. I like to watch them play sports. I relate to the idea of a Buff Bro. I like a dude so top heavy I can topple him with a good push. I like to push dudes into pools in the summertime.

For Heiko, as well as others in the online community, memes also constructed through online ‘brands’ or ‘personas’, where ones identity becomes a meme. This feels like one of the central themes to not just Heiko’s writing, but to the ‘genre’ of Alt Lit. What makes Alt Lit a unique genre, however, is that it feeds into the aspects of an online community members and environment which Heiko references a lot in his writing, and the online community all construct different personas, or identities, through different social media outlets. In this way, Heikos writing puts a mirror up not just to himself, but the community he responds to. The writing does not just reflect the community that is Alt Lit, however, it also stems from something else, something more ‘human,’ or ‘natural‘, whatever that may mean in the ‘internet age‘ that we all live in. Social stereotypes become crystalized through online media, which in turn become memes, and a part of the online language that Heiko channels in his pieces.

But I guess what I most want is to be in actual love with a woman who actually loves me back until we die painless, unexpected deaths simultaneously, but someone told me this was already done in a Bad Movie.

There is a strong sense of irony in these pieces, that the only meaningful things that can be said have already been said through media, and that is all the narrator knows. Memes have become our ‘language,’ our way of communicating in our ‘environment,’ and these pieces show the point of where a meme stops and the human being typing them begins. The writing is a projection of the narrator’s own inner dialogue, while at the same time being mixed in with memes and other online jokes. In this way, we are constantly reminded that there is a person behind the writing, a person who has their own desires, goals, and emotions.

and we are dancing
like we know people
Out There
want to take our money
and kill us
and we still think they are beautiful

Notice how “Out There” has been capitalized, this “other” could possibly mean something like a world free from online content, something more ’real’, but the narrator, by calling it the other, has no idea what this could be. In doing so, we are shown a crisis the narrator is having, and one that we are all aware of; all we are becoming aware of is our online presence, then what is our ‘real’ identity?

You can see a lot of Rare Vids of Young Dudes hanging out at home and doing funny voices if you search Just Chillin on YouTube. Go ahead and try this and maybe then you will learn how to love without needing to receive anything in return.

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Rude Woods
by Nate Klug
The Song Cave, 2013
76 pages /  $17.95  Buy from The Song Cave or SPD

In his Deformation Zone, Johannes Goransson writes of the nature of translation saying in the process of rewriting a text “the ‘meaning’ may have been ‘lost’ but the materiality of the text is brought to life.” Nate Klug, in his latest book Rude Woods (The Song Cave, 2013), embodies this type of translation at its most intriguing and productive. Eschewing the constraints of a strictly “faithful” translation in favor of a more multifaceted dialogue with Virgil’s Eclogues, Klug himself becomes one of the lyrical shepherds he invokes as he responds to the Eclogues which are themselves, he writes, “poems about responding—listening, picking out, and answering back the pleasures of song.”  Klug’s brief examination of each of Virgil’s original ten eclogues offers a contemporary take on the pastoral tradition that brings to life both Virgil’s lyric refinement and dynamic content.

Most refreshingly, these are not your mamma’s frilly little nature poems. The pastoral as an idyllic scene is revealed as artifice; in its place the earth as complex, fraught, psychic landscape is shaped. Here, Virgil-via-Klug becomes a sensual experience in the most dynamic way as it invites readers into physical observation of and participation in the environment while invoking, as W.R. Johnson states in the forward, a “severe concentration on emotion [that] determines these poems’ unique form.” Take a moment to experience the following lines:

from “A Hymn to Prophecy” (from Eclogue IV):

“wool will never have to dye: for the rams / will trick their fleeces, from boiled-saffron-yellow / to the deep purple produced by shellfish juice.”

or from “Against Epic” (from Eclogue VI):

“even this young orb called earth, / spinning dry, hardening, until things slowly / owned their own forms.”

or, lastly, from “Two Longer Love-Songs” (from Eclogue VIII):

“I saw you once and was lost. / Something wrong and warm carried me off.”

What we get here are emotion-driven images, but they are not grounded in the typical poetic gesture “I emote therefore my poems have gravity.” Instead, they are vivified by the transformative power of sensual detail. Not only are “wool” and the “earth” and the “you” brought to life for us as readers through the uniqueness of their portrayal, but the portrayal itself is metamorphosing—”Right there in the field, grazing lambs will go red” (from “A Hymn to Prophecy”).

But I must admit initial skepticism. A moment of strong lyricism will get my attention but often for the wrong reasons. The lyric, as many writers and readers know, has a tendency to overindulge. An emotive, senses-based series of poems about love and loss and shepherds singing in a flowery pasture could be a hotbed of disastrous pitfalls. But what Klug does well is interrogate these tropes and traditions even as his words participate in them. He creates tension by restraint—not through expected thematic or plot-drive narratives but through the imagistic and sonic qualities of the language itself.

In his translator’s note, Klug refers to this quality as “the rough music I sought”; it is “rough”—and “rude” and bitter and bruised. It is also imbued with a “sweetness” and beauty that, in moments, startles with its clarity of vision. It is this complex “song” that ushers forth the unexpected, “unnatural” environment of the new pastoral, a landscape that becomes less of a tangible place of sheep and shepherds, and more of a conceptual space in which sensual experience serves as the landscape itself.

Rude Woods does at times feel burdened by these heavy underpinnings. The overarching structure of emotional registers spoken through sensual detail may feel exhausted by the end of the text. Yet Klug makes brilliant self-referential moves to address the process of finding balance in these lines. On the whole, he takes his own advice (via Virgil) to maintain a fascinating lightness, an ethereal quality, that he writes of in “Against Epic”:

“A shepherd should keep the flock fat but his lines refined, like exquisite thread.“

There is indeed a threadlike fragility to these poems; there is also, to continue this metaphor, a strength in how tightly woven the poems are through their imagistic and sonic complexity. Though there are moments when the translation may feel too heavy handed, Johnson is right when he notes, “most translations of the Eclogues attempt to reflect the original’s intricate language with some variety of high style. . . Klug has devised a conversational idiom that relies on spare diction and spare syntax, on a pure clarity of sight and sound to give us superb poems that give Virgil’s pure lyricism a genuine ‘answering form.'”

By the close of the text, we have been privy to a complex and dynamic series of contemporary translations that pay homage to Virgil’s intentions while reaching interestingly beyond the bounds of the tradition from which they arise. As the prophet-poet rightly tells us in “A Hymn of Prophecy”:

“It’s here, the beginning, or the end of everything, / as the Sibyll has sung; time for the great order / to start over . . . the insurgence of a new kind of human being.”

***

Jessica Comola is an MFA candidate at the University of Mississippi where she serves as poetry editor for the Yalobusha Review. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Anti-, Redivider, and Everyday Genius, among others.

Trays of live worms for consumption, a nightly stroll with the shells of dead animals, and an arm covered in yogurt and soy sauce that smelled like strawberry grease for a whole afternoon; these are the ingredients for this new video book review of Gabriel Blackwell’s book by Gabriel Blackwell and meta-Gabriel Blackwell from CCM. I don’t know which of them is real. I think I’ve been hypnotized by Joseph Michael Owens’ music tracks. But I didn’t make this video. My wife did. She says she’s never seen any of the footage included and doesn’t understand why I’m crediting her. I don’t like strawberry soy sauce covering my arm so that my hands are unctuously melting into my chest. I’ve never eaten living worms before. I need to go back to America and have cheeseburgers made of artificial cheese and meat so I can have a culinary epiphany and shit out truths inspired by film cuts of scatological epics. You should read The Natural Dissolution of Fleeting-Improvised Men from CCM by Gabriel Blackwell reviewed by Peter Tieryas Liu and Angela Xu with music from Joseph Michael Owens and edited by Janice Lee.

(Read the previous review on HTMLGIANT here)