The Dominion - fiction

Teenage Punk-Rock Vampire Novel & Prose Poetry on Plays

hillarybain — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 05:16:10 +0000

New works by Krilanovich, Ball

The Orange Eats Creeps
Grace Krilanovich
Two Dollar Radio, 2010.

The minute you tell someone you’re reading a novel about teenage vampires these days, you’ve got a lot of assumptions to recover from. Tell them it’s a teenage punk-rock vampire novel full of “narcissistic gypsy-slut shitheads” and “slutty teenage hobo vampire junkies,” and then they might get an idea of what The Orange Eats Creeps reads like. This novel is like notorious punk-rocker GG Allin showing up at a Green Day concert. And that’s not to say Grace Krilanovich is simply out to shock, although she shocks in almost every paragraph she writes. The shock comes in equal doses of blood, sadness and Robitussin, as she chronicles a crew of vagrant vampire punks that kill, steal and fuck their way around the northwestern United States.

All this overlapping blood, sex and death becomes both unsettling and normal as you get fired through this short novel. The evocative prose keeps the gore constantly in focus, yet the teenage narrator emerges as a reflective traveler lost in her own thoughts, in her own flesh. Then, every few pages, she is almost irrevocably lost in someone else’s flesh: either devouring or being devoured, and finding affirmations of life somewhere below the skin. The vampire motif is a perfectly morbid metaphor.

Although it sounds like an elaborate teen-angst allegory, the endless creepy details of bodily destruction in The Orange Eats Creeps act as a warning against literary deconstruction. This is a vampire novel: an unapologetic, bloody and brutal vampire novel. But somehow it doesn’t matter if these kids are supposed to be real vampires, or if their death-obsession is a nightmarish reflection of their crumbling insides. The novel is also a well-crafted memoir of a punk scene that has never quite found a literary voice. Anyone who even vaguely encountered the punk scene rooted in Washington and Oregon in the 1990s will chuckle as Krilanovich recounts the unintentional hilarity of interwoven Krishna Punks, Rockabillies, and riot grrrls. The vampire punks are just another clan of kids heading to Oregon to find death or life or whatever they can find.

Krilanovich draws from these scenes to build characters that most other first-time novelists wouldn’t dare attempt, and she writes it all in unrestrained profane language that you wouldn’t expect from someone garnering serious mainstream praise. This nervy novel is emblematic of the work coming from the excellent Ohio-based publisher Two Dollar Radio. This is fiction defined by its distaste for moderation. It is also fiction that’s guaranteed to offend and alienate many readers, but I’m sure Krilanovich would be happy to lose those readers to an entirely different kind of popular vampire novel.

—Shane Patrick Murphy

Clockfire
Jonathan Ball
Coach House, 2010

The actors reveal, for a small audience, the significant world events of the next fifty years. The audience listens, absorbs everything. When the play ends, all return home, silent. Now it is the audience's turn to act.

An exercise in formal cross-pollination, Jonathan Ball’s excellent new book of prose poetry describes a series of plays, theatrical experiences, and surreal art happenings that never (and in many cases, could never) occur in reality.

Written in weighty but never overly serious free verse, the book often induces a feeling of darkness and horror (“The play hollows them. What they once were bleeds out.”), and reads with a pleasingly antiquated tone, like a collection of literary feuilletons by Robert Walser or Peter Altenberg. The pieces are organized one per page, and the quickly shifting focal point of each poem—the audience itself, the strange happenings on stage, the effect produced afterward—is as stimulating as it is unsettling. If art is the result of the imagination’s confrontation with a series of material restrictions, what happens when those restrictions are lifted?

The actors improvise a scene. Then they improvise another. Until nothing is left to improvise. All possibilities are exhausted, put to bed.

Like the film Synecdoche, New York, in which a theatre project grows so large that its rehearsal period threatens to exceed the lifespan of its author, the poems in Clockfire find meaning in the gap between the practical realities of stagecraft and the infinite scope of what can be dreamed up on the page. Ball’s voice—peculiar, dark, and cultivated—is a welcome one.

—Robert Kotyk

Robert Kotyk reads and writes in Montreal. Shane Patrick Murphy co-edits The Dominion's Literature & Ideas section.

The Orange Eats Creep

Clockfire2

December Books

Moira Peters — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 06:32:43 +0000

New works by Hall, Rogers and With

The Certainty Dream
Kate Hall
Coach House Books: Toronto, 2009

I’m normally skeptical of a book of poetry containing multiple references to contemporary metaphysicists and epistemologists. Academic poets can be such stiff writers, getting stuck in a search for canonical purpose and intellectual weight. Their poems get “workshopped” until they are systematically drained of all their energy and inspiration.

This is not the case with Kate Hall, whose finished poetry sounds much more like Wallace Stevens than GWF Hegel. Some lines from the last poem capture the feel of this book as a whole:

“this became the dream his dream in which I did not allow him to speak
and the dream in which I imagined him speechless before me”

In Hall’s dreams, Thomas Aquinas is a self-help author. Hume is a tour-guide for bird watchers. Descartes is going to a Halloween party. Elephants and disembodied voices arrive in the mail.

The Certainty Dream weaves its way through absurdist outbursts and giddy indulgences of graduate-level philosophy while remaining rooted in the immediacy and, yes, the certainty of everyday life.

While Hall had me reaching out to Wikipedia to decode some of her academic name-dropping (I still don’t know if she means David Sosa, Ernest Sosa, or maybe Sammy Sosa), but she provides enough context and imagery to avoid turning her book into an academic in-joke.

Hall seems to be working in the same emerging style as her editor, Toronto poetry guru Kevin Connolly, whose Revolver was a Griffin Poetry Prize nominee last year. Like Connolly, Hall’s poems unfold with wit, colourful layers, and no overwhelming sense of ego or pomp.

—Shane Patrick Murphy

Paper Radio
Damian Rogers
ECW: Toronto, 2009

If poems are word-compilations that broadcast music from the page, it’s hard not to like Damian Rogers’ idea of poetry as a paper radio. The former arts editor at Toronto’s Eye Weekly uses this musical metaphor to transmit a disparate set of themes, ranging from inter-personal and family tensions to a preoccupation with Shakers.

There are moments of genuine intensity here, but Rogers plays it fairly safe in her debut collection. Her clever quips are some of the most memorable parts: “Your problem is my problem—which is why I hate hearing about it.” Or, “No one tells the truth anymore and we’re grateful—though the lies bore us to tears.”

When Rogers sets aside her bleak humour, she earnestly shares intimate moments and everyday epiphanies through characters that remain silhouettes, without much detail to draw us close to them. And occasionally the Shakers, with all their dance-mad celibacy, sound like a poet looking for quirky inspiration.

But Rogers’ sense of humour and quick pacing makes this an upbeat, melodic, and highly-experimental debut. We’ll be looking forward to future work by Rogers where she’ll inevitably sharpen the tuning and crank this radio’s volume.

—Shane Patrick Murphy

Having Faith in the Polar Girls’ Prison
Cathleen With
Viking Canada: Toronto, 2009

Having Faith isn’t about trust, belief, or religion. It’s about a girl having a baby girl while in prison.

Trista is one-quarter Inuvialuit and 15 when she has Faith, a premature child who is deaf, brain-damaged and diagnosed with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. Born into a violent night following punches to her mother’s belly and the bloody death of a store cashier, Faith spends the first three months of her life in a juvenile detention facility before being shipped south to a foster family.

Her mother spends those same months deluded, detached or drugged. As Trista gropes through her days at the Polar Girls' Prison, each brings greater loss and self-disappointment as her plans for motherhood are dashed as quickly as her approaching court sentence.

As Trista draws further into herself, novelist Cathleen With is at her best. It’s unclear what Trista remembers and lets ruminate in her head and what she shares with the staff and other girls at the prison. These monologues can be disorienting, but through the course of the narration, they become more frequent, more confusing and we can appreciate Trista’s own bewilderment, loneliness and longing.

The author lived and taught in Inuvik and here builds an insulated world of snow drifts, ice roads, wolf trim on parkys and the dark, northern secrets of molestation, alcoholism, gambling and neglect.

At the Writers and Readers Festival in Vancouver last year, With said she has seen girls “just go sideways.”

“They would talk about their life as if it were going to be over by the time they were 30. Suicide. Drugs. Whatever. Better get on with life.”

Born to a 13-year-old mother in Jackfish Bay, a remote, fictional town outside of Iqaluit, Trista inherits a world where men slip little girls fivers to get them off.

“Sometimes you don’t even know what the sexual assault is,” said With in Vancouver. And speaking for the young abused characters in Having Faith, “Oh, that happened too. Maybe that’s why I can’t get my shit together.”

Trista’s voice is urgent and desperate and sometimes buoyant. With opens the door for her redemption, but this novel offers little reprieve. The prose evokes cold climes, ghosts that haunt and forgive, sunless days and frozen bodies in the permafrost, but With’s scenes foster a sense of faith—a confidence in survival, strong women, intuition and love.

Trista inherits aspects of her grandmothers’ cultural knowledge and skill—but barely. She cherishes their values and generosity, but doesn’t have the social support or maturity to embrace it. With has surrounded Trista in female role models who flash through the narration as potential futures for the inmates at the detention facility.

Having Faith speaks to trust and spirit, but Trista learns it’s also about having faith in family and the friends we chose as family.

With received acclaim for Skids, a short story collection about kids living in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, and again in Polar Girls, With brings us a harrowing and mesmerizing voice of a young Canadian fighting to survive on the margins of society.

—Megan Stewart

Megan Stewart is an independent journalist in Vancouver, where she is completing her graduate degree at the University of British Columbia.

Shane Patrick Murphy is the former executive editor of the McGill Law Journal. He is slowly getting around to writing his first novel, Still I Dream of Grandeur.

May Books

Moira Peters — Sun, 24 May 2009 05:00:52 +0000

New work by Connolly, new release by Green

Revolver
Kevin Connolly
House of Anansi Press, 2008

It’s painful to admit, but poetry can be pretty predictable. This is especially true for Canadian poetry that gets nominated for major literary prizes. A reader can usually expect some variation of contemplative, lovelorn verses building up toward a climactic, self-realizing epiphany. Kevin Connolly, in his new Griffin Prize-nominated collection, Revolver, is refreshingly aware of these conventions without falling victim to them. Instead of adopting a lone voice to examine a set of well-trodden themes, Connolly pursues a gamut of unexplored poetic possibilities. Nearly every poem touches upon a different subject matter and engages a different structure. Connolly rejects the role of the poet as sullen narrator. Disarming as it is upon an initial reading, there is no unifying voice, tone, or narrative in this collection. This is a poet clearly enamoured with poetry itself, making verse out of whatever sparks his gushing imagination.

The risk, and maybe the downfall here, is that Connolly’s collection can feel more like an anthology than the work of a single author. From the goofy to the downright depressing, Connolly bounces between the extremities of inspiration without any segue or transition. You can almost hear Connolly's muse asking: How about a nature poem? A love poem? Got any about sports?

What first strikes you as plain novelty and quirkiness gradually becomes endearing as Connolly's many personalities all carve out original and gripping poems. From the start, the book opens with a table of contents that lists the names of vaguely familiar rock songs. A turn of the page reveals that these are not the actual titles of the poems at all. We're left guessing whether this was Connolly's soundtrack while writing the collection, or if it's a poetic collage on its own. Once the poems get started, we are given one poem that sounds like a graduate-school admission exam from hell, one that parodies the catechism, and another that is composed of a few columns of disconnected words under the heading “Three Sonnets (Assembly Required).”

Connolly's inspirations are spelled out explicitly in his notes, ranging from Mark Twain, contemporary American poets like Charles Simic, and the Welsh noise rock band Mclusky. After taking account of his sources and then reading the collection a few times, Connolly becomes strangely cohesive and coherent. Even as the poems clash stylistically, his reoccurring preoccupations provide a tiny modicum of unity that gives this eccentric and disparate collection its own vitality.

—Shane Patrick Murphy

Back
Henry Green
Dalkey Archive Press, 2009

Back, Henry Green’s 1946 novel of wartime homecoming, is loaded with enough individual suffering that it could almost take place on the battlefield from which its amputee-protagonist, Charley, has been salvaged.

Charley returns home to England to find that his pre-war sweetheart, Rose, has died in his absence, while her look-alike half-sister, Nancy, remains tortuously close at hand. The novel’s chief complication arises here, out of the sad fact that Charley’s wartime trauma and accompanying waves of self-preserving amnesia bar him from fully absorbing the news of Rose’s death. In meeting Nancy, Charley incorrectly assumes that he’s being reunited with his departed lover. Moreover, when Nancy rejects his affections, Charley descends into a confused turmoil, at one point enlisting the services of a handwriting expert to prove that the two sisters are one and the same.

Just as Green’s more touted masterpiece, Loving, documents the hermetic world of a tightly knit group of servants in a secluded Irish castle, Back bends around the wounded psyche of its protagonist with engrossing singularity. In one passage, the setting perfectly captures the muddled roiling of Charley’s simultaneous grief over Rose’s death and his hurt over Nancy’s persistent brush-offs.

He fled Rose, yet every place he went she rose up before him; in florists’ windows; in a second-hand bookseller’s with a set of Miss Rhoda Broughton, where, as he was staring for her reflection in the window, his eyes read a title, “Cometh up as a flower” which twisted his guts; also in a seed merchant’s front that displayed a watering can, to the spout of which was fixed an attachment, labelled ‘Carter’s patent Rose.’

Green emphasizes the inescapability of Rose’s memory by using the past tense of the verb “to rise” (“she rose up”) in the very sentence that introduces the ubiquity of her namesake. And amid Charley’s solipsistic bewilderment, Green the master stylist is out in full force. Beautiful, simile-laden descriptions like “[s]he was crying so much it made her face look like a pane of glass in the rain” crop up generously, appearing in scenes filled with Green’s meticulous simulation of English working-class speech.

Back is newly available from Dalkey Archive Press with a brilliant afterward by screenwriter and academic George Toles.

—Robert Kotyk

September Books

Moira Peters — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 11:27:32 +0000

New works by Venart and Stiles

Woodshedding
S.E. Venart
Brick: London, 2007.

If her work is any indication, S.E. Venart’s poems are made up of dispatches from a writing life that is underway with admirable vigilance. Woodshedding, her first collection, ferrets out space for its intellectual labours around the contemplation of the ordinary, but time moves neither too fast, nor too slow; the poems emerge from life’s infrequent furrows of solitude with refreshing tranquility.

The poet shares this pursuit with bird-watchers, monks and joggers: inhabitants of what Venart calls “privileged openings,” pockets of inspiration that open up with circumstance (“There are sudden canopies/of silence between the low tones/of speedboats”), but which become worthy of safeguarding when the moment lingers (“Touch, I think, is mostly overrated.//It makes for only the luckiest/misunderstandings. I prefer the syllables of birds.”).

The full end-stop between the line about touch and the next reflects the exalted status that Venart affords to this sense of aloneness and sequestration, but the poems encourage a certain level of interior play even amid the hustle and bustle of one’s daily commute. This dual mode, mingling worldly tumult with the concerns of the self, can be heard in a line from “Sightings”: “I’m back in the city, stopped for a red light, reading the off-ramp’s/sprayed messages,” which echoes an earlier poem, “Lanes,” ending with “The sun overcoming me. . . /throwing light down on me as I bring/flesh and soul together, and fall/again into the moving traffic of myself.”

When a musician friend of mine makes a trip “out to the woodshed,” he means to remain there; anywhere, that is, so long as he cannot be reached by phone, e-mail, Facebook message, or any of the other brazenly intrusive gizmos of this early 21st century; for as long as it takes to learn a part on his tuba.

References to musicianship pervade Venart’s work-—her own epigraph invokes the improvisatory play of a jazz musician—-but as another definition of the collection’s title included in the epigraph attests, “woodshedding” also refers to the administration of a “sound parental thrashing.” Venart perhaps means that her work reveals itself only with the avoidance of easy pleasures and through an embrace of an ascetic self-discipline. If so, her collection reflects this principle with uncommon beauty and maturity.

– Robert Kotyk

Taking the Stairs
John Stiles
Nightwood: Gibson's Landing, BC, 2008.

Stiles' protagonist, Jarod, is a struggling writer whose phone is simply ringing off the hook with job offers. His friend Elliot wants to pay him exorbitant amounts of money to write a screenplay, and it's all Jarod can do to evade his would-be benefactor so he's free to endlessly re-read his abortive short story attempts and fret about his unfinished novel. High doses of implausibility and inaction can kill just about any novel and Stiles' choice of subject matter only furthers these problems.

The “writing about writing” genre is an extremely tricky one to make engaging and Jarod spends a tedious amount of time bellyaching about what a chore it is to stuff his work into envelopes and mail it off to literary magazines.

Although Taking the Stairs is written in the first person, Jarod's personality remains curiously opaque. He fights with his girlfriend; he works odd jobs; he holds circuitous telephone conversations with people he's trying to avoid. Stiles has included in Taking the Stairs several excerpts from Jarod's oeuvres, which are bad without being atrocious enough for comic effect and it's unclear just how much we are meant to sympathize with Jarod.

Stylistically, there's not much here to save this book from itself. “He says that when people jump off bridges, they land on their feet and their legs get jammed up inside their bodies and have to be pulled back out with a huge set of tongs,” is as interesting as it gets, unless you count the anatomical curiosity of the phrase, “She looks fine with her round spanish ass in a tight, tasteful blouse.” Must be quite the figure.

– Linda Besner

May Books

Moira Peters — Wed, 14 May 2008 05:00:36 +0000

New works by Wickers, Vuong-Riddick, Boyko and Bryan

Stations of the Lost
Brian Wickers
Mansfield Press: Toronto, 2006.

This book offers readers something remarkable: the chance to engage with a captivating voice and enlist the experience and lifetime observations of an extremely erudite and affable poet. Here we have a complicated and finely textured emotional landscape of ex-wives and teenage daughters, elderly fathers and the children who look after them. There is a solid quality to the voice in these poems, a sense that the speaker has withstood life’s inclement weather and will live to withstand more. In addition to carefully wrought images and phrases, Wickers is adept with sound; in the lyric “A Seashell From the Seychelles,” the ‘s’ sounds mimic the sea, and the resulting miasma of sound and meaning is beautiful. Wickers shines when he’s being ostentatiously humorous, as in “Marginal Questions, Winter, English 101, Frost.” The poem riffs off questions a teacher might ask students – mentally and verbally – while teaching Frost’s famous poem: “Who owns the woods – in which of several senses?/ do you own property have you ever tended to animals.” These poems span the pains and joys of life while reflecting on what it is to be human.

--Matthew J. Trafford

The Evergreen Country: A Memoir of Vietnam
Thuong Vuong-Riddick
Hagios: Regina, 2007.

As a child in Hanoi and later a student in Saigon, Vuong-Riddick witnessed Vietnam's turbulent changes in the second half of the 20th century. Historically under French colonial rule, Vietnam was occupied by Japan during World War II, then reoccupied by France, only to be split in two after Communist rebels led by Ho Chi Minh captured Hanoi. The Evergreen Country is Vuong-Riddick's vivid memoir of these times, brimming with historical, cultural and personal insights. The tone is straightforward: events are presented chronologically, with occasional welcome asides to describe relevant cultural details or social practices, including feet binding, teeth dyeing, betel chewing, and the use of the "shame pole" to punish immodesty. Vuong-Riddick casts both sides of the political conflict in a suspicious and violent light, and only hints at where her biases may lie. Vuong-Riddick is a likeable narrator, and we become interested in her personal growth and family, even as we're drawn into the larger historical narrative. Despite the ever-present tension of war, what emerges from the book is a colourful picture of a vibrant and dynamic country.

--Sam Fraser

Blackouts
Craig Boyko
McClelland and Stewart: Toronto, 2008.

First short story collections often possess a restless quality, as the developing writer casts out his or her net as widely as possible to determine just what sits within reach. In Blackouts, individual sentences often show signs of overextension, falling into the kind of exploratory wordiness that signals a young writer straining to broaden or discover the range of his abilities. Occasionally this effect works: “It sounded like a word she’d borrowed from her husband, the psychiatrist, the psychologist, whatever.” As this sentence from “Black Ink” presses outward, each word becomes essential to one character’s conception of another: first a tossed off statement of designation, then a frustrated amendment, and finally exasperation. At other moments, the unchecked forward momentum weakens the impact of some of the poetic passages. Subtle differences between the modifiers notwithstanding, sentences like “Science pursues truth impersonally, dispassionately, disinterestedly,” from “In the Dark,” would benefit from greater concision. The stories in Blackouts are extraordinarily varied in style and subject matter. Given the ambition of this collection, it may only be a matter of more time spent in the workshop for Boyko’s trials to yield major results.

--Bob Kotyk

Gerbil Mother
D.M. Bryan
NeWest Press: Edmonton, 2008.

D.M. Bryan’s first novel is a marvel. From the first few sentences—“Take it on trust—the moment's a bad one. Not Greek tragedy, but ordinary doctor's office despair, regular as a diagrammed digestive system”-- the narrative voice jerks us awake. Bryan has taken a classic character—the harassed mother of small children overwhelmed with noise, sleeplessness and loneliness—and, with the use of a judiciously chosen device, both heightened and deflated its pathos. Gerbil Mother is narrated from the point of view of a foetus, which is unusual in itself, but Bryan has gone one better and made this foetus a bully. The foetus tells us from the beginning “I see at once what a bad mother we have,” and it takes us several chapters to realize how unreliable this narrator is. This judgement mimics the actual voice a selfish toddler might use were it capable of eloquent expression, and the effect is startling. Bryan's language is sophisticated and vigorous, and every paragraph pops with images like this one: “Ref in a dirty diaper, shaking the ropes of the ring. The crib.” A tough and imaginative debut.

--Linda Besner