The above text comes from the front cover—which coincidentally serves as the backcover—of Tan Lin’s Seven Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004. The Joy of Cooking. The text is only half of the metadata supplied, an excerpt from the Library of Congress “tags” that establish the content of the book officially. Lin’s book is a rhizome, a network, it is a book as a book, it is a book as a network as a book, it is a book as a book as a book.

Okay, let me start over. There are two ways one can approach Lin’s book. Of course, there are actually an infinitude of entrances to Lin’s book, but for the sake of this blog post, to ensure that it does come to an end, I will discuss two: the way I expected to enter the book and the way I actually entered the book.

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Rasskazy, an anthology of “new fiction from a new Russia” presents a reviewer with an interesting challenge: how to write about these texts as though they had something in common with each other. The book is held together by the assumption that the authors share not only a common language, but that their work is representative of “new Russia” in at least two important ways: in the authors’ political and cultural engagement and in their continuation of “the great Russian literary tradition.” In their preface to the anthology, editors Mikhail Iossel and Jeff Parker frame the texts within the politics of the Putin-era Russia that they see as “turning back the hands of Russia’s sociopolitical clock” and implicate all authors as opposition to this political process. The editors’ ideology in approaching this collection comes across in statements such as: “Russian writing has once again found itself invested with a higher purpose. The writers in today’s Russia derive their sense of relevance from having been adjudged irrelevant by the country’s rulers (i.e., nonthreatening to the latter’s political agenda).”

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“i like the feeling you get / from lies through omission / they make you feel / like a weird little / phantom”

One of the poems early in Kendra Grant Malone’s collection, Everything Is Quiet, talks about that moment after a good movie when we all have to accept the movie wasn’t real. When two people hang out in that moment, it’s excruciating, because they know “you have to / speak at some point / and you have to shatter / what you were just feeling / a moment before.” Much later in the collection, the speaker—let’s just say Malone because that’s what Malone says—talks about people who are “very beautiful” and other people who are “very drunk,” but ends talking about how she has no one to talk to “at this very / moment.” And it’s that isolation of Very-flavored moments that this book lives to talk about. Even though these spindly, skinny poems are gorged with excesses of violence (sexual and otherwise), excesses of ingestion and injection, their main concern is excessive solitude. Which gets no worse than when two people who want to be together are stuck living through those moments they don’t want to be together. READ MORE >