My Bright Abyss: Mediation of a Modern Believer
by Christian Wiman
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, April 2013
192 pages / $24  Buy from Amazon

“Silence is the language of faith” we read in Christian Wiman’s newest book of prose, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer. This seems counter-intuitive (or perhaps even hyperbolic) coming from a poet, especially a poet of faith, but he explains, “action—be it church or charity, politics or poetry—is the translation. As with any translation, action is a mere echo of its original, inevitably faded and distorted, especially as it moves farther from its source.”

Christian Wiman is the current editor of Poetry magazine (though he announced his resignation in January), the author of several books of poems, including the recent and widely acclaimed Every Riven Thing and a new translation of Osip Mandelstam’s poems called Stolen Air, and another book of prose, Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet. Wiman is also one of the most important voices today on the confluence of art, especially poetry, and faith. In fact, the two are so ambiguously implicated, so crucially intimate, he rarely writes or discusses one without the other.

In the preface of this stunning new book of prose, Wiman explains he wrote it for those “frustrated with the language and forms of contemporary American religion, [but who] nevertheless feel that burn of being that drives us out of ourselves, that insistent, persistent gravity of the ghost called God.” I think we will find, then, his intended audience is vastly comprised and includes many of us, for the synaptic tangle of spirituality in America is still, to use Wiman’s word, burning. It seems wherever I go I encounter those dissatisfied with the way we talk, not only about art, its role in our entertainment-consuming culture, but spirituality too; as what it means to believe becomes more and more nebulous, our language becomes more and more reductive. Americans are frustrated with the way language has been abused, consumed, violated.

It seems we are at a loss for words.

Maybe it’s that the interiority of our lives seems so abstracted from the language used to describe it. But then, isn’t that why we’ve always turned to poetry? The anxiety of limitation, this constant—however subtle—desire for transcendence, is as present in art as it is in faith, we learn from Wiman. The first essay in My Bright Abyss, the title essay, opens with an unfinished poem:

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Paper Dreams: Writers and Editors on the American Literary Magazine
Edited by Travis Kurowski
Atticus Books, August 2013
432 pages / $29.95  Buy from Atticus Books or Amazon

In 1891, Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts set off one of the most dazzling and hilarious newspaper battles in the history of London theater. From just two private performances, the play garnered over 500 printed editorials, responses, and reviews, catapulting it into instant infamy and consequently playing a part in moving English theater a few steps closer to full-fledged theatrical modernism. Ibsen’s play is only one example of the inverse relationship between aesthetic influence and commercial success that seems to be part and parcel of much modernist art. The literary magazine is, of course, no exception. In Paper Dreams, a new anthology from Atticus Books, Eric Staley echoes this sentiment when he says that “the best the literary magazine can hope to achieve is influence out of proportion to circulation.”

Paper Dreams recounts over a century of literary magazine history in the United States through primary and secondary sources, ranging from editorial pronouncements by Ezra Pound (a nearly ubiquitous editorial presence early in the 20th century) to the savvy branding strategies of George Plimpton (The Paris Review’s luminous impresario) and beyond to the current renaissance of literary journals flourishing on the internet like PANK, Brevity, and The Rumpus. The aim of the anthology is, as editor Travis Kurowski puts it, to trace “the backbone and the outer rings of American literature.” Kurowski—a creative writing and publishing teacher at York College of Pennsylvania—began the project back in 2008 for The Mississippi Review and continued to research the topic because he wanted to, as he says in an interview, combat his ignorance on the subject. Paper Dreams certainly made me come face-to-face with my own.

Although there are so many wonderful pieces that deserve comment, my particular favorites are the ones that do some much-needed historical re-visioning. Jayne Marek’s “Making Their Ways: Women Editors of ‘Little’ Magazines” and Linda Lappin’s “Jane Heap and Her Circle” work to reclaim the editorial reputations of Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap of the Little Review. Marek states, “[I]t is clear that women had far more to do with the support and evolution of modernism than has been generally acknowledged.” And Abby Arthur Johnson’s article, “Forgotten Pages: Black Literary Magazines in the 1920s” reintroduces the reader to important black periodicals like the Saturday Evening Quill, Black Opals, Stylus (which produced Zora Neal Hurston), and Harlem and Fire (both which included Langston Hughes as a founding member).

In terms of the contemporary moment, the 2008 roundtable on the literary magazine was the most compelling. On the one hand, it revealed that not too much has changed in the last century. Editors still want to discover new talent, still hope to find that next great voice and all while dealing with perpetual money woes. They also continue to worry that there are too many journals and too few readers. As Algernon de Vivier Tassin said in 1916, “However barren were some departments of literature in the early days . . . magazines indicated at the outset their eternal disposition to multiply faster than the traffic will stand.” On the other hand, some things have indeed changed—the Internet, of course, being the most obvious. The distributive powers of the Internet are truly staggering; however, its ability to generate “noise” is equally awe-inspiring. Jill Allyn Rosser has the most interesting thing to say about the role of the literary magazine in our electronic age: “I don’t think that really happens anymore—the salon—and the magazine has become a replacement for that.” I am not sure if that is the case, but I want it to be true.

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Threads
by Jill Magi
Futurepoem, 2007
144 pages / $15  Buy from SPD or Amazon

I

Ghosts.
The ghost of the homeland (“isamaa” – fatherland).
The ghost of family history.
The shadow of the self.

Phantom limb:
“the sensation that an amputated or missing limb (even an organ, like the appendix) is still attached to the body and is moving appropriately with other body parts. Approximately 60-80% of individuals with an amputation experience phantom sensations in their amputated limb, and the majority of the sensations are painful. […] The missing limb often feels shorter and may feel as if it is in a distorted and painful position.” ¹

Fig. 1: Illustration of ‘paralyzed’ phantom limb sensations, Phantom Pain by Rebecca Brightwell via AgrAbility in Georgia (http://agrabilityinga.com/phantompain.html)

“most treatments for phantom limb pain […] are ineffective and fail to consider the mechanisms that underline production of the pain.” – Herta Flor, Dept. of Clinical Neuroscience, University of Heidelberg.²

The phantom manuscript.
This is the tale of Magi’s father, told in prose images torn & stitched.  Letters, maps: they hint at this other text, this fuller text which serves as the source for the book, but which we never fully see. The father text. The sensation of the story.

II

Father text/fossil text.
The tearing & restitching of the father’s map reconstructed by the daughter as an attempt toward understanding (image on pg 10 etc). Revisions are made; bloodline edits (edits made as we evolve…edits between generation & generation), Magi the writer as both the experiencer & the engineer of her history:

“Engineer precedes father precedes master precedes oneself, even independence[…]” (pg 16).

But also: an overlap of multiple identity. Layering of who you are under who you came from.
The father on the daughter. His image superimposed over her own. This is the true meaning of Americanism: the overlap of heritage (ethnic/local) with “american” identity.

“The meaning of natural.” (pg. 96)
The meaning of being natural. How does the process of editing ones history make history? How does memory spontaneously create itself?

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Engine Empire
by Cathy Park Hong
W. W. Norton & Company, 2012.
96 pages / $15.95  Buy from Norton or Amazon

Today’s political landscape teems with critical topics; the economy, women’s rights and our diplomatic relations with China are but a few. These issues carry catch phrases and slogans that are disseminated to the general public via media and pop culture. We, the public, are inundated with instant clichés at every turn: television, magazines and sometimes even in literature and poetry. However, those of us that enjoy poetry expect subtlety, skill and guile because when it comes to poetry slogans and political banter simply will not do. Enter Cathy Park Hong’s Engine Empire a collection that speaks volumes on “the issues” without declaiming from one single soapbox.

Hong’s latest collection moves through the Civil War era, modern day China and the future as it conveys a startling idea: that human greed, ignorance and apathy are not necessarily resolved by technology but helped along by it.

Engine Empire has received a good amount of praise. The collection is full of imagination and creativity. However, something must also be said about its authenticity and the way in which the book makes its social commentary. The diction in “Ballad of Our Jim,” the first section of the book, is pure Mark Twain. Hong creates music that is unforced, hard at its colloquial best and authentic, “A horse hair tightrope tied from one barrack to another, / and the crowd jeers and rails / til a rouge-doused banker in a stove pipe hat / is pushed from the balcony, trembling against the ledge.” In an interview with the Paris Review Hong described some of her research for the book and for the opening chapter, “I read Zane Gray, Larry McMurtry, Mark Twain, Cormac McCarthy, Faulkner’s Light in August. I had a couple of wonderful Old West dictionaries.”

The aforementioned “Jim,” separated from his family during a raid, is the chapter’s silent protagonist, moving along the frontier with a band of brothers; a rag tag family of gold rush fevered low lives.

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AIRY BABY: AN EQUAL TO THE ATE NIPPLE?//I worry/I don’t/Believe in Books/or do owly///
by Debbie Hu
Perfect Lovers Press, 2013
Edition of 100 / $5  Buy from Perfect Lovers Press

Debbie Hu wants you to think about baby, but all I can think about is what baby means for poetry. Mac Low starts off his 17th dance with the realization/instruction, “Someone has a baby or seems to have one.” Yes, obviously, we are always having some kind of baby. Notley—to whom Hu gives a much necessary shout out—once questioned, “Do you think women & men have kids in order to become immortal?” Why baby and why now? Are we making baby or is baby making us?  Is it baby or the process of baby? Poets used to have babies now they have the Internet.  Poets today let their babies do unfathomable things and leave their tiny baby lives in shambles. Contemporary Poet Jennifer Pieroni’s baby is primarily unlucky. In “Unlucky Babies,” she locks her baby out of the car and does not even allow for it to learn to type. Contemporary Poet Chelsey Minnis puts her baby on secret trial: “A baby on 9/11 was definitely in love with me and the parents did not know.” Hu’s baby lives in a similar place. It is part voyeur, part chauffeur, and part Gucci waiting in the wings.  She writes:

Hu’s baby has been taught to type because Hu’s baby is sometimes herself. Most often, though, baby is more of a symbolic bystander than a conduit. Baby is not always the most important thing but this book seems to be baby’s own creation. Perhaps it would be best to say that Airy Baby, is a kind of intertextual baby book; for the gentle omnipresent-omniscient baby, there is Ke$ha. There is charming organizational risk AKA formal chaos. There is the political as it battles with the personal. There is Cantonese then New Zealand. There are penises or shame. The narrative voice is distinctly cohesive yet polyvocal in a very necessary way.

Hu switches between the hyper casual and the “large idea” casual. She goes from “I wore a candy stripe dress / To the General Assembly and my pleaseface until I / Become a pop star my pleaseface is a dontrapeme pleaseface becuz / stay away my cunt smells terrible” to “it wounds me to read that she craves solitude and no / accountability, I feel like I am all despicable money” in just one page. She is sometimes Gurlesque transgressive in a blunt way like Ariana Reines, but most often a very idealistic type of gross-delicate, something that makes me think of Jenny Zhang’s first collection. Feng Sun Chen, from whom Hu quotes extensively, also comes to mind.

While very much composing a “poetry” book, the pieces are sometimes epistolary fragments and other times stolen bits from the pages of some tangentially yet brilliantly related thing. Airy Baby has titled sections, but they’re largely irrelevant; demarcations and page numbers become nobody’s business. Pieces start and stop wherever they’d like—pick back up then quit again.  Baby, itself, operates similarly, waiting in the background for its opportunity to be the savior or the disgrace. To be the distraction. Baby is present for pages then not at all; it vanishes.

There are epiphanies laced throughout but, much like the emotional content of the book, these realizations are muted. The writing is laced with a certain sense of overwhelming comic unhappiness—the kind of thing that surfaces with any period of introspection. Hu jokingly alludes to David Foster Wallace in the book’s preface, and, like Wallace, uses footnotes to distract and “confuse” the reader. Here, though, it would seem that Hu employs these asides to soften the intensely emotional or personal. We are always returning to humor because humor is the only way to comprehend humanity.

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The Era of Not Quite
by Douglas Watson
BOA Editions, May 2013
160 pages / $14  Buy from Amazon or BOA Editions

What’s the point of reading a book when, regardless of the book’s brilliance, you’ll still eventually end up dead? In his award-winning debut collection of twenty-three fabulist fictions, The Era of Not Quite, Douglas Watson takes up this question by knocking off characters left and right. In one story, Watson tosses a luckless schmuck into the void. In another, he flattens a thoughtful library patron with a dump truck while the patron’s daughter contemplates wonder. In the penultimate tale, a seven-year-old girl, poor dear, is bucked from a newly invented breed of miniature horse. Deaths stack up, morbidity becoming its own joke as nihilism loops back on itself again and again. The result is absurdity, hilarity, heady contemplation, and killer prose.

Of course, there’s nothing like a good literary offing to cleanse the palate, and this book offers deaths galore. But Watson’s stories run deeper than clever premises and guillotine giddiness. In this first book, winner of the BOA Short Fiction Prize, Watson adds his unique voice to postmodernism, joining the ranks of Barthelme, Beckett, and Calvino and holding his own. With playful experimentation and linguistic prowess, Watson mocks the conventions of fiction, making us wonder what stories really are for in this post-literate era when the masses can read but literacy fails to deliver us from unexceptional lives. Before you can lose hope, though, Watson shifts away from farce, showering us with moments of linguistic sublimity that remind us why fiction endures.

Watson drops us into folkloric lands of kings, wolves, and dragons as readily as he places us in nondescript contemporary landscapes of billboards, busses and, yes, libraries of all things. Then there are stories where Watson muddles time, inserting props from commercial culture into the sparse world of the fable. Take the story “When the World Broke,” where a golden-haired peasant boy living in a remote village on the edge of a forbidding forest fills a water bottle—ubiquitous thing—before slinging a bag of oats over his shoulder and venturing off through valleys lit by thousands of electric lights on a quest to save his beloved ailing mother and the world. It’s as though Watson is saying, hey, this is the realm of fiction, an artificial space, no? Fairy tale setting? Depressingly realist small town complete with Unitarian church? What’s the difference when neither really exists in a book?

Into these confused and anachronistic settings, Watson focuses his gaze on down-and-out characters, friendless, discouraged, but not without hope. Take Hal Walker from Watson’s title story “The Era of Not Quite”:

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Mouth of Hell
by María Negroni
Translated by Michelle Gil-Montero
Action Books, April 2013
112 pages / $16  Buy from Action Books or SPD

“So dark and deep and nebulous it was,
try as I might to force my sight below,
I could not see the shape of anything.” –– Dante, Inferno, Canto IV

“Then existence was a must, and I remain unborn. I’ve traveled with ghosts, or worse, drudged through discontent, destroying what I desired, which didn’t exist. Awkward to thrive as humanity atrophies, only to shelter in a garden of stones. And yet, in all that dismal jubilance, something sings: the soul, a tiny light that sounds among great monsters, growing always more equal to itself, thirstier for white words.” –– María Negroni, Mouth of Hell

***

Mouth of Hell is inspired by Manuel Mujica-Lainez’s Bomarzo, a novel I’ve never read, which itself is based on the eccentric Duke Pier Francesco Orsini, a 16^th century nobleman who commissioned a sacred garden of monsters to be built in his honor. Negroni’s Mouth of Hell is composed of brief untitled prose poems, the proclamations of the decadent aesthete Orsini at the exact point of his death, which occurs inside the garden’s hellish grotto. These poems act as jolts of energy and are the culmination of a peculiar life as seen from the edge of consciousness.

Jorge Monteleone’s superb introduction and the translator’s preface do excellent service to shed some light on the historical Duke Orsini as well as the novel Bomarzo. This convergence of sources and voices sort of mirrors the fragmentation and reconstitution of selfhood that occurs in these poems, all happening in the heightened reality of the monstrous sculpture garden, “my biography and my park of monsters, who I’ve despised, envied, admired, and loved, deep down, terribly.” Speaking of the park’s sculptures, Orsini said, “Each rock represented an enchanted figure, in my memory or imagination.” Each poem in Mouth of Hell could do the same, creating a fascinating interplay of life, art, creation, dissolution, and rejuvenation of the senses.

“A lot could be said of my hideout. It is here where I ruminate and write, where I wield my inhuman right to dissent. Deep in the light, I draw my self-portrait: the high signs of a fearsome counterdance. Here, I play at life. Nestled like a hoard of jewels, I even possess what I’ve denied myself. In a word, I play with death. My den is motionless. Like the world, an untouchable relic within.”

Mouth of Hell, in part, chronicles a human soul gaining knowledge of itself upon death. These are finely tuned revelations of deranged nobility, commemorating “a lascivious earth to an uncertain beyond, the thread of my hallucinated life.” These are memories, sensations, fantasies, and proclamations of “the body whirling into conviction” at the brink of death. For this reason it occasionally feels like a radically condensed take on Dante’s Inferno.

“The forest dark as ever, without latitudes. An aide-de-camp to say something about nothing and guide us up the river of blood. As if there were cover under human tabula. Things strewn here and here, for worse and better. And later, in the middle of the road, the end of the endless, an immense door, passable and impassable, like the glacial spaces of the soul.”

Orsini’s garden of monsters remains after hundreds of years a singular artistic oddity. Monteleone informs us that above the crude demonic mouth is the inscription, “Lasciate ogni pensiero voi ch’entrate,” which can be translated, “Abandon all thought ye who enter.” This curious variation on Dante’s famous line suggests a total annihilation of the personal self. A journey into the underworld is nothing less than a chance to merge with the archetypal, with the infinite formless monsters of the abyss.

The sculpture garden, “the estate of the sensual,” is a monument of excess, and the demonic face that graces the cover of this book is as comically grotesque as any of Iron Maiden’s album covers. The opening of the mouth serves as a meeting place of two worlds. Just as death is the edge of life, the brink of the abyss is the edge of the visible.

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Plural
by Christopher Stackhouse
Counterpath, Nov 2012
64 pages / $14  Buy from SPD or Amazon

It wouldn’t be wrong to call the poems in Plural slippery: content just eludes you, as does the floor plan of a consistent or memorable form. Stackhouse has a playful but terse and lateral style that leads you to wonder why most poems start or stop where they do or aren’t combined. Two careful reads didn’t reveal many clues for the reader so, like I mentioned, while the book is interesting in synopsis form the individual poems stay slippery, just out of reach.

And to present the book in synopsis form: Plural incorporates poems in the same tone but different formatting strategies, notes from art world lectures that are interestingly similar to the poems, and a movement across the course of the book from being concerned with the mind and consciousness to reveling in the body. The lecture notes are actually some of the most interesting parts of the book because not only do they give the surrounding poems context, they serve as a map for Stackhouse’s cognition. And although the notes are about primarily visual art, a lot of what Stackhouse notes bleeds into not just his writing but the idea of writing, as in “Notes from Panel Disc. @ The Fish Tank Gallery”:

Those last two lines are important as applied to Stackhouse’s mostly brief poems, which seem more concerned with transmitting meaning than creating it and lack much broader context other than being in the same book. This is not a bad thing; if you’re looking for lots of meaning consult your local public library for probably a few dozen books of free verse heavily into creating meaning, for what it’s worth. But the poems arrive with the same matter-of-fact record-keeping as the lecture notes, which can render them frustrating at times not because you’re desperately searching for meaning but because you’re wondering, given the consistency, “why X and not Y?”

An example of the bulk of the book follows, from a poem about midway through titled “Chew the Candy”:

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Peter Tieryas Liu reviewed Fun Camp by Gabe Durham last week (read the review here), and now, in addition, Peter Tieryas Liu with Angela Xu have made this cool video review using some great archival footage from a 1950’s YMCA commercial. Check it out: