The Exiles
by Matthew Kirkpatrick
Ricochet Editions, March 2013
49 pages / $10  Buy from Ricochet Editions

In Matthew Kirkpatrick’s chapbook, The Exiles, we find ourselves instantly swept into something strange. A young boy’s mother asks him in a car ride home how sixth grade was. This means that he must have just finished sixth grade. He answers that he can’t remember. Lately he’s been feeling confused over the things around him, that happen to him, what he sees and the things he dream: “Things he remembered seemed unreal, and the things he forgot, like what had happened to him only hours before, disappeared from his memory as dreams upon waking.” At the same time, the neighbor girl routinely runs up and down and backwards on her front porch. We don’t know why yet, and so this makes us wonder if she is running backwards in reality, or if this is another confusion in the young boy’s vision. These two have something in common besides their oddities, and that is that they watch each other. In fact, each person we are introduced to in this world seems to watch someone else for one reason or another. The young boy James mainly watches in hopes of resolving his confusion over who really is real – his Dad at the dinner table, or Dad in the basement. The neighbor girl watches in reaction to those who watch her. Neither James, nor the neighbor girl seem to be aware that they are exiles under the watchful eye of their exiled world, but Dad in the basement is barely cognizant: “At times, he thinks that he exiled himself, and other times he thinks he was exiled; surely, he has done something.”

We begin with the young boy James, initially unnamed, his sister and mother going in the car through the rain. We end with the same boy (or is he really the same?), whose name we now know as James, with Sister and Mom (and possibly Dad?) going again in the car in the rain, only now the rain is warm because it is almost summer, whereas the opening scene is absent of season. We don’t know what season it is, but we do know that this trip in the car that opens the text is not the first of its kind: “There they go again in the car through the rain home.”

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The Moon’s Jaw
by Rauan Klassnik
Black Ocean, Feb 2013
76 pages / $14.95  Buy from Black Ocean or Amazon

Rauan Klassnik writes and makes ugly things seem kind of beautiful.

Rauan Klassnik is a writer I follow on Twitter. A while back he sent me a tweet asking if I would like to review his new book, The Moon’s Jaw, and of course I said I would. Several days later, a package arrived in the mail containing two books, The Moon’s Jaw and Klassnik’s previous work, Holy Land (2008), both with autographed and illustrated title pages.

There are recurring images in both collections of prose poetry: shooting guns and shooting cocks, the female body (sometimes bruised, sometimes being ejaculated on), circles, god, duality (simultaneously: man & woman, love & hate), birds, restraints, death.

The images in The Moon’s Jaw add up to bizarre dreamscapes of the fearful, beautiful, and grotesque. Lines read like excerpts from an erotic horror film script:

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Taipei
by Tao Lin
Vintage, 2013
256 pages / $14.95 buy from Amazon

1. “Paul dreamed something about his cube-shaped room being a storage facility in which he’d been placed by an entity that believed in his resale value.”

2. “He felt like he was trying to remove the surface of a glass bottle by pawing at it with oven mitts.”

3. “‘Nice,’ said Paul staring transfixed at Fran’s delicate and extreme gaze, like that of a skeleton with eyeballs, or a person with their face peeled off.”

4. “Daniel arrived with his friend Fran, 22, whose intriguing gaze, Paul noticed with interest, seemed both disbelieving and transfixed in discernment, as if meticulously studying what she knew she was hallucinating.”

5. “He awoke at night fifteen hours later and, while showering, felt like he lived in a module attached to a spaceship far enough from any star to never experience daylight.”

6. “The book party, like algae, feeling its way elsewhere, moved slowly but persistently from the bookstore’s basement to its first floor, to the sidewalk outside, converging finally with other groups at a corner bar…”

7. “There were times when his memory, like an external hard drive that had been taken from him and hidden inside an unwieldy series of cardboard boxes, or placed at the end of a long and dark and messy corridor…”

8. “Daniel was standing with limbs and neck uncoordinatedly extended, slightly striding in place–the pre-predatory stance of a chained thing that had broken free and didn’t yet know where to direct its vengeance, or what to do generally.”

9. “…watched the police car, or a police car, zoom past in the left lane, with emergency lights on and sirens off, quick and soundless as an apparition or the hologram of itself.”

10. “One the plane, after a cup of black coffee, Paul thought of Taipei as a fifth season, or ‘otherworld,’ outside, or in equal contrast with, his increasingly familiar and self-consciously repetitive life in America, where it seemed like the seasons, connecting in right angles, for some misguided reason, had formed a square, sarcastically framing nothing–or been melded, Paul vaguely imagined, about an hour later, facedown on his arms on his dining tray, into a door-knocker, which a child, after twenty to thirty knocks, no longer expecting an answer, has continued using, in a kind of daze, distracted by the pointlessness of his activity, looking absently elsewhere, unaware when he will abruptly, idly stop.” READ MORE >

1. Factory Hollow is the publishing division of Flying Object, which is located in Hadley, which is an over-the-bridge walk from Northampton, which is probably my favorite place in the world.

2. I love Northampton so much that I once kidnapped Mike Young and held him up in Baltimore for ten months. Every day, he had to interact with a dog. The two of them got along just fine.

3. Dick move alert—I waited until the last day of AWP before picking up Mark Leidner’s and Seth Landman’s books. They’re $15 a piece, but I think I got them for $20 total. Take that, capitalism.

4. Before AWP, I had pre-ordered Rachel Glaser’s new book and Heather Christle’s new chapbook. I paid full price for these. Take that, Mark’s Paypal balance.

5. I’m about to review all four of those books in one LeBlog James.

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