The Dominion - Shane Patrick Murphy

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

April Books

hillarybain — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 09:27:15 +0000

New works by Xiao and Carson

The Cave Man
Xiaoda Xiao
Two Dollar Radio: Columbus, Ohio, 2009.

For Ja Feng, the protagonist of Xiaoda Xiao's autobiographical novel The Cave Man, the physical hardships he endures during a stint in a Maoist prison camp are overshadowed by the emotional turmoil that follows him, unshakably, out of captivity.

Convicted on a trumped-up charge of associating with a "counterrevolutionary organization" (i.e., a small group of friends), Ja Feng finds himself inexplicably sentenced to eight years in a camp. Soon afterward, following a complaint lodged in protest of another prisoner's murder, he is placed in solitary confinement—"the stone womb," as one prisoner remarks—for a total of nine months, the state in which we find him as the novel begins:

He could not sleep at night, and grew nervous during the daytime, watching through the food hole to see if soldiers or prison officers passed by. When they did, he would beg them to let him out, and shouted curses at them when they ignored him. Finally he got tired, and grew too weak to shout. It was then that he began to get used to sleeping with his body coiled. His dreams always lasted a long time, sometimes two days, sometimes three or four. They would continue even in the daytime when he was awake, so the old warden poked fun at him and said he looked like a madman.

Only the first 20 pages of the novel take place within the dank confines of Ja Feng’s solitary confinement cell, but like childhood, its influence stretches far beyond release from the condition itself. And like children who suffer abuse at home, the remainder of his life is spent reacting, in tragic hindsight, to the memory of a time when the sum of his experience was defined by the cruelty of his keepers.

Released after his brother-in-law calls in a favour, Ja Feng is stricken with nightly screaming fits and terrible nightmares. He moves from relationship to relationship, job to job, occasionally escaping into nihilism and finding comfort in the thought that "in less than a hundred years none of them would exist in the world."

Xiao himself was imprisoned for seven years for accidentally tearing a poster of Mao. The story of Ja Feng, he writes in the novel’s preface, is based partly on this experience, and partly on the lives of other camp survivors in his acquaintance, who “had expected that they would be able to enjoy the remainder of their lives freely when they stepped out of the iron gate, only to find themselves living in another prison camp larger than the one they had survived.”

Despite the intensity of its emotion, The Cave Man advances with a calm, straightforward candor that seems at once appropriately stripped of post-modern gamesmanship and somewhat lacking in narrative or artistic guile. But only within the book’s last quarter does this unambiguous style becomes its strength. Eventually, Ja Feng seems to find his metier as an artist and teacher in America. A reader is tempted to assume the protagonist-as-obscured-version-of-the-author has finally caught up to the present. Xiao, we know from the preface and author bio, made it to America after his release and became a writer. At this juncture in the novel, one imagines Ja Feng will find some form of fulfillment after all, teaching art and speaking about his experiences to groups of sincere undergraduates.

But Xiao has a skill for lining up his characters on trajectories that play on our need for narrative cohesion—a success story, a triumph over adversity—only to pull the rug out from under his reader by moving along, as life does, to a new chapter. Ja Feng's last years are as fraught as his first ones outside of prison, but when he returns to China for the last time, the tragedy of his adult life after prison comes into full relief. In the end, success, love and geography are all just illusions, or feel that way, compared to the reality of remembered pain.

—Robert Kotyk

Nox
Anne Carson
New Directions: New York, 2010.

A reticent professor who taught Classics at McGill for several decades, Anne Carson has found a surprisingly broad audience of devoted and adoring readers who would generally be more likely to read David Sedaris and Chuck Palahniuk than Sophocles and Sappho. Even though she operates in an obscure genre that straddles original poetry and literary translation, Carson's readers elevate her to mythic proportions. I would have never believed a cult could arise from such an assuming writer, but I've met several people willing to tattoo their bodies with her words and travel several hours to attend her readings. In universities she has always maintained her academic credibility, but she has successfully shaken off the potential stigma of an esoteric scholar by bringing poetic voices and individual passions to the forefront of her work.

Nox, Carson's latest and most personal writing yet, powerfully demonstrates her ability to radiate beyond a specialist audience. Two challenges run parallel throughout the book. First, she sets out to lament the death of her brother, a man who removed himself from his family as a young man and rarely connected later in life. Second, Nox documents Carson's struggle to translate an elegy written by the Roman poet Catullus to mark the death of his own brother. Through tracing her own losses, the act of translation becomes unflinchingly personal. As a poet, translator and scholar, Carson wields all her tools in Nox to painfully tie literature and mourning together.

While Nox blurs the lines between translation and original poetry, it is barely presented as a book. Packaged as a "book in a box," each page folds out like an intricate accordion. Words are laid out among family photographs and colourful prints to form a collage of Carson's life and work.

By the last page and picture, the translation of Catullus's elegy is an unfinished blur. Nox provides no conclusion to Carson's own elegy or her translation of someone else's. Coping and poetry both appear impossible tasks, but Carson's genius has never been better demonstrated than in the attempts she makes here.

—Shane Patrick Murphy

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

Xiaoda Xiao Cave Man

Nox

January Books

Kyle Hodnett — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 06:00:00 +0000

New works by Nickerson and Bolano, and a collaborative effort by Campbell, Boyd, and Culbert

McPoems
Billeh Nickerson
Arsenal Pulp Press: Vancouver, 2009.

Sometimes I feel I’ve missed out by never working at a fast-food chain. Apart from the drudgery, exploitative wages, and perilous working conditions, these restaurants are so geared for mass appeal that they become rare meeting points for a wide range of characters and classes. With a quick eye for anthropological observation, Billeh Nickerson recalls his years as a McWorker in this short poetry collection. Cleverly divided into thematic sections reflecting the questionable quality, service, cleanliness, and value of his employer, Nickerson recounts the mixture of mundane and surreal moments at McDonald’s like a clean-mouthed Charles Bukowski. Characters almost unbelievably bizarre such as “the unicorn”—a customer who orders soft-serve cones to stick on his forehead, or the woman who eats lunch then purges in the parking lot show a grim side of the restaurant and the world it inhabits.

Accumulated anecdotes form a bleak picture, but Nickerson delivers observations with humour that sustained during his time in the trenches. "Daylight Savings Diptych" passes on a Zen-like maxim that when the clocks change in spring and fall customers will yell at you because they arrive too late for breakfast or too early for lunch. McPoems offers a smart and witty insiders view over the counter for those of us who’ve never asked, “Would you like fries with that?”

—Shane Patrick Murphy

The Last Interview and Other Conversations
Roverto Bolaño
Melville House Publishing: Brooklyn, 2009.

Despite dying nearly seven years ago, each posthumous Bolaño release further cements his reputation as a literary icon of the twenty-first century. Brooklyn-based Melville House Publishing gets in on the action with this collection of interviews Bolaño gave as he rose to fame in Spanish-speaking populations. These interviews attempt to contextualize the ongoing debate over Bolaño’s acceptance by North American audiences. Is it his romantic left-leaning idealism that strikes a chord, or do his stories play into preconceived North American perceptions of a Latin America preoccupied with sex, violence, and obscure literary movements? While these interviews provide depth to his character and motivation to write, they offer only a glimpse into Bolaño’s perception of his own fame. The most in-depth interview in the collection is taken from the Mexican edition of Playboy, and depicts Bolaño as jokey and self-deprecating to a fault. Interesting to ravenous Bolaño fans, the uninitiated would do better reading The Savage Detectives or Nazi Literature in the Americas—his fictitious encyclopedia of the right-wing literati.

—Shane Patrick Murphy

A Thousand Dreams: Vancouver’s downtown eastside and the fight for its future
Larry Campbell, Neil Boyd and Lori Culbert
Greystone Books: Vancouver, 2009.

A Thousand Dreams tells grim stories of missing women, sardine and cat food diets, epidemic illness and the crippled support systems that struggle to manage the situation that is life, and survival, on Vancouver’s downtown eastside.

Although they never lived in the neighbourhood of which they write, the book’s authors spent much of their professional lives in its streets, meeting its residents and uncovering its secrets. The team, consisting of a journalist, a coroner-cum-politician and a criminologist document work being done in the east end community. Careful not to overlook the positive, the book shines a light on successes like harm reduction and InSite, the supvised injection site that won a recent constitutional challenge over the Harper Government. However,the battles depicted here are largely bureaucratic, and power is accessed through political clout.

Much of A Thousand Dreams details the health and social services available in the community, yet it is not for residents of the neighbourhood, it’s an introduction for outsiders. Compelling to read but not comprehensive; the book uses case studies to illustrate how an individual navigates the system, telling stories of a few as seen through the eyes of community organizers attempting to support them.

Outside of these studies the vast majority of the east end’s poor, drug-dependant, mentally ill and desperate appear faceless in the book, shifting indistinguishably like clouds overhead. No doubt, an impression not intended, but A Thousand Dreams focuses on challenges understood by most Canadians—ineffective RCMP funding, back-room maneuvering, high-rise developments, Da Vinci’s Inquest—not cat food for dinner, a dirty needle for dessert or a damp parking garage for a bed. The remarkable stories are about the activists, writers, organizers and health professionals who fight for the future of Vancouver’s downtown eastside

—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.

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.

October Books

Moira Peters — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 05:02:42 +0000

New works by Holbrook & Holtz, translation by Rexroth

Joy is So Exhausting
Susan Holbrook
Coach House Books: Toronto, 2009

On writing humor, Dorothy Parker said, “There must be courage; there must be no awe. There must be criticism, for humor, to my mind, is encapsulated in criticism. There must be a disciplined eye and a wild mind.”

Susan Holbrook’s Joy is So Exhausting is a collection to make Parker proud. Tongue-in-check tart, Holbrook’s poetry is full to the brim with truncated aphorisms (invented) and the juxtaposed rhetoric of double-entendres: “Your First Timpani? Take a deep Brecht and relapse.” Her words play musical chairs and broken telephone at the same time.

While I’m less keen on the Canadiana in-jokes (Green Party, Conservative Party, Peter Mansbridge) and other CBC News refrains, I appreciate that even these dropped names exist in a galaxy far from purple.

Speaking of blue, Holbrook’s sexy lady-love responses to Lorca move liquidly, acting as a sort of Psalm and response style poetical liturgy. And “Poetsmart Training for Your Poet” is hold-your-sides hilarious. Show it to your scruffiest poet and get them in line already.

You’ll read Joy is So Exhausting with a dry pair of eyes; this writer’s whet her wit sharp.

—Melissa Bull

Written on the Sky: Poems from the Japanese
translated by Kenneth Rexroth
New Directions: New York, 2009

At some point, most Canadian pre-teens gain a rudimentary understanding of Japanese poetry. Unfortunately my exposure to this tradition has never branched out from those unrhyming lines of five, seven, and five syllables I learned in grade four.

Given this limited exposure, I was excited to learn something from this short collection. However, this is far from an educational tool. Apart from the names and genders of the poets, and the dates they lived, no background information is provided. But this lack of supplementary material is only slightly disorienting. When confronted exclusively with the poems themselves, you can uncover a lifetime of visceral images in these succinct verses.

I keep returning to Masaoka Shiki’s poem, which reads in its entirety: “Frozen in the ice / A maple leaf.” Bare and direct, that maple leaf can spark deep imaginative involvement. Then again, it can be just a leaf in the ice. Stripped of decorative phrasing and emotional triggers, each re-reading provides a new response.

Packaged in a glossy black and gold jacket with ornate flowers and butterflies, this collection seems so much like a romantic gift that they could have published it on pink heart-shaped pages. Cynical as that might sound, it’s probably damn effective as such.

—Shane Patrick Murphy

This One’s Going to Last Forever
Narine Holtz
Insomniac Press: Toronto, 2009

It’s one thing to look for love in all the wrong places; it’s another not to look at all.

Narine Holtz’s style cuts to the point and embraces our so-called sexual deviances, her characters share the same confidence to love and find love in the most unexpected places.

Take the sexy amputee who fulfills the fetishized desires of a man and wonders at the cosmic joke of “leaving her homophobic girlfriend” and finally discovering pleasure where she’d only known pain. The phantoms of her past disappear as “her cunt caramelized like sugar sweating in a hot pan.”

One of This One’s best lines is delivered by a middle-aged gay man who performs drive-through weddings dressed as Elvis. The words he speaks about his fag hag, Tracy, and the reasons he’s drawn to her eccentric drama, are among the most tender of this collection.

While the writing is not overtly sexy, Holtz delivers enough intimacy and eroticism to tease but not quite satisfy. This suspended gratification almost has me begging Holtz for a collection of erotic stories that fulfils the fill-in-the-blank anticipation of This One.

This collection of short stories is anchored by the central chapters, telling the story of Clara and her emerging politicization. If you weren’t a small-town Alberta lesbian coming out in Montreal in 1989, Holtz takes you there: “Even the meaning of the words the other students used—words like ‘colonialization,’ ‘hegemony,’ and ‘deconstruction”—weren’t clear to her.”

The greatest source of internal conflict for Clara is her sexuality, and despite her experience with men, she’d rarely known the pleasure of intimacy and love. Say hello to Gabby, who makes Clara blush when she says, “Feminism is the theory, lesbianism is the practice.”

However, Gabby’s loyalty is to women, not to one woman. Here Holtz, who was awarded the Alice B. Award for debut lesbian fiction for her previous novel, channels Nietzsche: “In the end, one loves one’s desire and not what is desired.”

Clara’s sexual soul searching may not have been written for comic effect, but her insecurities and coming-of-age epiphanies rarely failed to crack me up. On one hand, her voice is prescient, endearing and sweetly pathetic. On the other, it’s self-absorbed and tedious. Her doubts also flit through the minds of many queer women; she’s not alone and she’s not original. Once between the sheets with her lover, her mind is finally put at ease.

—Megan Stewart

Melissa Bull works in Montreal as a writer, editor, and translator. Her first collection of short fiction, Eating Out, was published by WithWords in 2009.

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.

September Books

Moira Peters — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 05:43:36 +0000

Short stories by Goldbach, humour by Leiren-Young

Selected Blackouts
John Goldbach
Insomniac Press: Toronto, 2009

Sometimes realism can be too realistic. Without narrative flare or insight from the author, superficial realism can spiral around banalities that make the life of an amateur literary critic look like an atomic bomb of excitement.

John Goldbach occasionally gets trapped by the boredom and frustration of his characters in Selected Blackouts, his debut collection of short fiction. These stories rapidly shift from exuberant experiments to monotonous dialogues with little compromise between the two. It’s a shame to see a few drawn out and directionless stories deter from otherwise brilliant moments scattered throughout this collection.

Luckily, Goldbach’s humour often shines in original narrative structures and bleak subject matter. “How Much Do They Know?” is the inner-monologue of a character reunited with some long-time friends at a Christmas party. It would take timelines and diagrams to unravel the years of cheating, jealousy, and backstabbing outlined in this short story. But the essential point is the narrator knows several secrets about each person around the table. In listing his own collection of secrets, he comes to realize each friend likely holds an equal number of unspoken stories about himself and the others. The story’s conclusion is a straightforward and inevitable comment on friendship itself: “I really don’t understand why we tolerate each other.” The idea is familiar to most close-knit friends, but Goldbach infuses this everyday observation with his own insights and humour, which is what realism should set out to do.

Goldbach has a talent for unveiling the psychological tensions that awkwardly bind people together, but one story in particular, “Easter Weekend,” simply gets bogged down in tiring exchanges between characters who can’t express themselves. Here Goldbach takes a security-camera view, recording objective words and actions in colourless prose. There is some logic in presenting the teenage stock-characters in their own light: They repeat cliches, they interrupt each other, and they leave the most important parts unsaid. But too often Goldbach gives us only these mumblings while neglecting the anxieties brewing in the undercurrents. Unfortunately, a realistic depiction of a boring conversation makes for really boring reading. Nevertheless, these somewhat lifeless dialogues find their balance in Goldbach’s shorter, punchier, and more endearing pieces.

—Shane Patrick Murphy

Never Shoot A Stampede Queen: A Rookie Reporter in the Cariboo
Mark Leiren-Young
Heritage House: Victoria, 2008

A cub reporter haphazardly lands himself at a small-town community paper and over-uses the adjective venerable as if the irony were original.

Naturally, 22-year-old Mark Leiren-Young has a lot to gain from his months at the Williams Lake Tribune in the early 1980s and, 25 years later, he introduces the memoir Never Shoot a Stampede Queen with the goal of staying true to his younger self.

Stampede Queen won a Leackock Award for humour, but much of the prose struck me as condescending and aloof—not the insight and wit I hoped for. Maybe it’s the immature narrator’s persistent indelicate stereotyping after he arrives in the Cariboo, a ranching region in the central interior of British Columbia. But in time he dismantles many of his own caricatures and begins to write with pathos, maturity and even humour.

The narrator laments, upon arriving in Williams Lake, population not very much, “It was my worst nightmare. I was about to start work as a newspaper reporter in a town with no news.”

By the time he realizes how wrong he is, Leiren-Young is on his way back to Vancouver and restless to finish the profile of a local judge, an investigative piece on bigoted landlords, and the series on the town’s crime rate he committed to and was genuinely keen to report. He proves himself a very good reporter with natural storytelling instincts and a common touch.

Despite unfair leaps and character assumptions, Leiren-Young nails the reality of community reporting: an epic 24 news briefs and stories in one day; typing merely to fill column inches; covering issues of poverty, housing, and First Nation rights that merit national attention; wages that have barely risen in two decades; vicarious traumatization in the criminal courts; and the surprise of finding humanity where it’s least expected.

The strength of this collection of non-fiction stories is voice and storytelling. When he’s not making a Clint Eastwood comparison, Leiren-Young shares fantastic anecdotes worthy of broad Canadian attention. We hear the narrator grow up through language and professionalism—he becomes a better journalist and is progressively more open-minded. His writing becomes increasingly nuanced, and it seems as if Leiren-Young eventually sees past the cliches to connect with a more honest portrayal of the Cariboo.

—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.

August Books

Moira Peters — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 05:26:53 +0000

New works by Steinberg, Comeau

We Could Be Like That Couple...
Sarah Steinberg
Insomniac Press, 2008

Picture a paper plate. On the plate you’ve got some bite-sized quiche, a little cube of cheese, and fingers of tooth pick-skewered meats. You’re looking at a plateful of mini-meals. Sarah Steinberg’s tip of the iceberg collection, We Could Be Like That Couple... is like this dinner of hors d’oeuvres—her stories are Spartan, salty. They’d go well with booze.

The title of the first story, "We Could Be Like That Couple From That Movie That Was Playing Sometime” sets the tone of the book: wistful, colloquial, ironic. And it spoke to me immediately: “Do you know how it feels when you need a certain taste in your mouth and instead you have, like, the opposite of that flavour in your mouth and all you want, in that instant, is whatever it is that’s going to satisfy that craving?”

Having one thing but wanting another makes wanting a kind of having all its own. We Could Be Like That Couple’s parade of characters express their desires and dissatisfaction slant-wise. They don’t gripe, they just notice how things are off, how routine details take up so much space in their lives that their expectations get blurred.

The narrators consistently fit their stories: in the tragi-comedy “You Think It’s Like This But Really It’s Like This,” Rhonda, who lisps, appears “hand shoved deep inside the mouth of her purse,” rummaging for a tissue. She’s at a vernissage and her eyes are leaking. She’s hot for a teacher, who’s there, coincidentally. Maybe Rhonda’s stalking him, maybe she’s imagining they’re having a relationship. Professor Halle asks if Rhonda’s all right. She answers—with a line that puts Dirty Dancing’s “I carried a watermelon” to shame—“It’th okay. I jutht can’t control my eye excrethionth.”

Uncomfortable, long-suffering, judgemental and moving, Steinberg writes with a sharp, strong voice. Her stories often end with a shift from specific details to big ideas—a horizon, vertigo, loss, or a near-miss. There’s a breathing pace to the collection, and the way text is set on the page—sparse paragraphs with justified margins all cut by an asterisk—gives the prose room. It looks like a René Gladman text but reads more like Mary Gaitskill or Joyce Carol Oates.

We Could Be Like That Couple... is one scrappy, skinny book. I’d like more. This won’t hold me ‘til suppertime.

–Melissa Bull

Overqualified
Joey Comeau
ECW, 2009

Cover letters are a consistently depressing form of writing. After I finished a master’s degree, I spent almost a year finding new ways to say, “Choose me! I’m good! And desperate… horribly desperate!” Eventually I found work in parking lots, mail rooms, and a cowboy-hat factory before giving up and retreating to law school.

And that style of writing was all I really expected from Overqualified, a collection of cover letters by Toronto writer Joey Comeau. The angst and misfortunes of job searching can be amusing and predictable. But Comeau doesn’t get bogged down in the usual cover-letter routine beyond a few introductory lines to each letter. Instead, he spills out bits of autobiography, dreamscapes, perversions, and generally unleashes his id in a manner guaranteed to never land him a job of any sort.

Comeau takes the structure of a cover letter and completely removes himself from the job-searching context. We don’t learn much about what Comeau does for a living or if he’s looking for a job at all. We learn in gritty detail that his brother Adrian recently died in a car accident, his Acadian grandmother refuses to speak to him in French, and he’s got a girlfriend named Susan who he feels reluctant and relieved to love. He’s a self-confessed pervert who wouldn’t trust himself with a webcam. His dreams mix sex and violence. On top of that, John Wayne apparently calls him crying in the middle of the night.

A novelty act? Well, sure. The idea of making a book out of cover letters isn’t a grand innovation. But Comeau’s skill is to weave his life story, including its neurotic undercurrents, around a literary structure that encourages us all to sound like duller people, not to mention dull writers. These rambling cover letters are utterly bizarre, but they also present their author’s genuine complexity. Overqualified never unravels into an angst-soaked diary, even when it comes close. There is a compelling tension behind each letter which makes the book consistent and weirdly enjoyable.

–Shane Patrick Murphy

June Books

Moira Peters — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 05:02:27 +0000

New release by Bolano, new work by Fiorentino

Nazi Literature in the Americas
Roberto Bolano,
New Directions, 2008

Roberto Bolano’s Nazi Literature in the Americas operates on a principle expressed by the narrator of another of the late Chilean’s novels, The Savage Detectives: “In one sense, the name of the group is a joke. At the same time, it’s completely in earnest.” The speaker is talking about a literary faction, but he could easily be referring to the enterprise that is Nazi Literature, a book structured as a “Who’s Who” of the Latin American literary community’s extreme right wing. With each chapter taking on the form of a short biography followed by several handily provided appendices, the project reads initially like a Borgesian prank. But in the end, the sheer doggedness of the work (the joke-teller shows no signs of abatement) lends the tone a strange bleakness that persists after the formal novelty has worn off.

In reading Bolano it becomes apparent almost immediately that he was an insatiable reader and active literary scenester. But Nazi Literature’s peculiar strength is that it evinces a mind actively channeling, re-coding and at times parodying all of the writing that has been so zealously absorbed. Beyond the virtuosic, universe-creating scope of the book, Bolano tests the limits of readerly empathy with his characters; a parade of fascist monsters striving to make their own art through personal strife and political turmoil. Within such stories of artistic development, we are conditioned to root for success: the publication of the novel, the acquisition of enough means to pursue one’s craft, the achievement of some expression of vision. Such assumptions do not hold up, however, when what follows is a sentence like the one that concludes the chapter on fictional poet Jim O’Bannon: “He remained firm in his disdain for Jews and homosexuals to the end, although at the time of his death he was beginning, gradually, to accept African Americans.”

With this mysterious and bracing book, Bolano the mischief-maker reminds us that writers are neither saints nor saviours, that they ought not be lionized by virtue of their vocation and that they are, above all, a product of their time and place. It's a joke worth hearing.

Nazi Literature in the Americas is newly available in paperback.

–Robert Kotyk

Stripmalling
Jon Paul Fiorentino
ECW Press, 2009

Whenever someone gets around to writing the Great Canadian Novel, it ought to take place in a land of big-box stores and cluttered, unremarkable suburbs. It is not an easy place to write about. For the bulk of its population, Canada isn’t a country of wide-open spaces and endless, frozen landscapes. From most angles, it’s a practical place full of modest lives that don’t offer a lot of dramatic material for epic narratives. Jon Paul Fiorentino seems to be looking in the right place for a truly Canadian narrative in Stripmalling, his debut novel/autobiography with illustrations by Evan Munday.

When he keeps his story in the suburbs of Winnipeg, Fiorentino explores the darker aspects of the standard strip mall upbringing: the hopeless teenage jobs, the promiscuity, the fights and the boredom. But these familiar fragments are not at the core of the book. Stripmalling is really a novel about a young man who uncovers a creative instinct and leaves the strip mall to eventually write a novel called Stripmalling. Fiorentino attempts a quirky metanarrative, but nothing remarkable materializes in the text itself or the world beyond.

This is a diary of sorts. And you probably shouldn’t publish your diary until you’re dead. Too much of Fiorentino’s writing contains insights he should have kept to himself. An opening paragraph which references the “necessary unreliability of memory” serves as an early warning that for a book hyped on its comedic charm, someone is trying to make it awfully heavy. And there would be nothing wrong with that if so much of the novel didn’t come across as juvenile pontificating. For every nostalgic and vaguely beautiful image of a sprawling landscape, Fiorentino provides at least one empty rumination (“I do not want to thrive in YOUR world,” “Mine is a static literature.”). We never get the hidden stories of strip mall lives; we get romanticized pictures of places young Canadian authors glorify too often. Jonny ends up in Montreal (where else?), in the same cafes where, “Everyone is a writer, or was.” Despite initial promises, Fiorentino spews out stories of poverty, drugs and heartbreak like any other gloomy Mile-End amateur. Instead of sparking a literary imagination in under-explored places, Stripmalling reminds me of so many of my own strip mall nights: disappointing and easy to forget.

–Shane Patrick Murphy

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

March Books

Moira Peters — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 06:00:31 +0000

New translations by Bolaño and Storm

2666
Roberto Bolaño
Translated by Natasha Wimmer
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008

The reception of 2666, Roberto Bolaño’s latest and last novel to be translated into English, has often resembled an exercise in literary myth-making more than literary criticism. Critics have been competing for more lavish adjectives to praise 2666 ever since Bolaño’s other major novel, The Savage Detectives, gained a cult following. Now, just a few months after its release, the discussion has turned away from the novel itself and to the biographical details of the man who wrote it. Bolaño enthusiasts defend his romantic-bohemian image and viciously debate whether he really opposed Chilean President Pinochet, whether he was a drug addict, or whether 2666 was even close to complete when he died almost seven years ago.

So how did a 900-page tome by a formerly obscure Chilean nomad spark a fanatic following with English audiences? Its success has less to do with plot or genre and more to do with Bolaño’s ability to submerge his readers in hundreds of interconnected plots while he borrows from countless genres. To link its disparate parts, the novel has two thematic poles which become entangled by the end. The first narrative link—a reclusive German author who writes under the name Archimboldi—frames the first and last sections of the book. But the major backdrop is Santa Teresa, a fictitious stand-in for Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, and the ongoing mass killings of women there.

Bolaño’s depictions of rape and murder in Mexico go beyond merely graphic. They are painful to read, and that’s exactly the point. Bolaño’s political and moral outrage is expressed by forcing his readers to confront the carnage in its rawest form. There are times when every reader will pause and wonder if Bolaño is perversely enjoying the excuse to spew out lurid details that would make “true crime” fans salivate. After the hundredth continuous page describing the decomposed remains, the coroner’s report, and the known details of another teenaged victim, you’re either shocked, repulsed, or bored.

This boredom is one of Bolaño’s central concerns and it surfaces throughout the novel, starting with the epigraph from Baudelaire: “An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom.” Bolaño doesn’t expound the banality of evil; instead, evil becomes one escape from banality and poverty. Creativity and literature, as embodied by his character Archimboldi, form the alternate sort of escape. Unlike his other books, which obsessively document the creative process, Bolaño rarely details Archimboldi’s motivations as a writer. In one of several indications that 2666 is not quite a finished work, Archimboldi is left as a vague literary silhouette in a world of beauty and boredom where it seems everyone writes books, makes love, or kills people.

Bolaño once wrote: “We never stop reading, although every book comes to an end, just as we never stop living, although death is certain.” The several life stories in 2666 inevitably intersect, drift apart, and get forgotten. To digest each of these stories would require never-ending re-reads. And for Bolaño, now the most acclaimed Latin American author since Gabriel Garcia Marquez, his life and legend seem to be more vital than ever.

—Shane Patrick Murphy

The Rider on the White Horse
Theodor Storm
Translated by James Wright
New York Review of Books Classics, 2009

Theodor Storm's classic novella The Rider on the White Horse contains some meaty pearls of wisdom nestled within a portrait of Germany's sodden Northern Friesland region, but blink and you'll miss them: these flashes of Storm's perceptive strength never take precedence over his evocation of the setting. The land emerges as the focal point for Storm and the novella's characters—a rural community of no-nonsense types who would rather discuss the structural efficacy of their town's protective dykes than allow themselves the sinister distraction of philosophy.

Nevertheless, pearls there are, such as the disturbingly clear sketch of the protagonist Hauke Haien's seething drive to become the town's dykemaster:

Suddenly he felt furiously angry at those faces, and he actually reached out to grasp them, for they obviously wanted nothing better than to block his way to the very position which suited him and only him. These thoughts were never wholly absent from his mind. In such ways, in the living presence of the honor and love in his young heart, ambition and hatred grew up side by side. But they rooted deep inside him, and even Elke failed to suspect their existence.

If the heart of Storm's story offers pastoral beauty and occasional peace (albeit within a community where a catastrophic flood could strike at any time), there is a tension to be felt at its edges: the main tale comes mediated by no fewer than three mysterious narrators, layered one upon the other as the narrative slowly rolls out in the opening pages. We are offered at once a haunting ghost story and the poignant recounting of the life that produced it, a wondrous blend of fantasy and futility that spans over a century and a half and still feels remarkably contained, flanked by the North Sea's frigid depths.

—Robert Kotyk

January Books

Moira Peters — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 10:56:09 +0000

New works by Gander, Dodds, Cole

As a Friend
Forrest Gander
New Directions, 2008

When a successful poet sets out to write a novel, the results can often be mixed. From E.E. Cummings to Al Purdy, major poets often see their ventures into prose go long forgotten while their poetry remains revered. By the time a poet has become established – which often takes far longer than a single lifetime – it may be in the best interest of both writer and reader to stay within the bounds of pre-established technique. Forrest Gander, a leading American poet and translator, has carefully taken this plunge into the world of prose with his recent novel, As a Friend. However, Gander’s work remains immensely successful by making only the slightest concessions to the novel as an established form. At only 106 pages, As a Friend consists of four distinct sections that cover an admirable amount of stylistic and thematic territory. Gander’s greatest accomplishment is that he consistently knows when to inject his poetic observations and when to sit back and allow the story to unfold.

The novel opens with a mother in a hospital watching her teenage daughter struggle through a difficult birth. Gander’s depiction – interspersing poignant asides throughout a clear and neutral narration – becomes so palpable and gripping it feels as though he has gone through labour himself. From that loosely connected introduction, Gander explores the unintended consequences that extend from individual choices. The central figure of the novel is a poet and part-time labourer committed to exploring the multiple and often contradictory opportunities that life offers. He marries one woman, lives with another, sleeps with a revolving cast of extras. His goal is to find a “different way to be in the world,” but through love and friendship his iconoclasm leads a path of failure and pain, death and grief. It’s a stark and somewhat dreary tale, but Gander’s instincts as a poet allow him to build a mass of emotional insight without sentimentality, clichés, or wasted words.

—Shane Patrick Murphy

Crabwise to the Hounds
Jeramy Dodds
Coach House, 2008

The title of Jeramy Dodds’s Crabwise to the Hounds suggests a connection to circuitousness (crabwise) and surrealism (ditto), but the result is an unambiguously confident debut collection from a rich new Canadian poet. If one of the creatures from a Marcel Dzama watercolour got its paws on some John Ashbery, the result might sound like Dodds, whose voice is unmistakably local though far from provincial. Running through the collection, in other words, is a rigorous sense of taste, as several of the poems’ first stanzas open with a provocative declaration (“In his stovepipe hat, he hunted / to extinction the animals that brought / us déjà vu.”), that beckon the reader towards the subsequent lines packed with the most lushly rendered imagery.

Dodds’s spectacular diction and the wide range of his subjects reveal an unconventionally educated imagination and spirit of inquiry aimed at the natural world. Strange, pseudo-Canadian landscapes appear in “Crown Land,” ("Some warped beasts pinched off / the rag-and-bone rack, ones that / bit by barbed bit were forced to / fisticuffs in the scrub slump of hills"), while the breathless showstopper, “Glenn Gould Negotiates the Danube in the Company of a Raven,” provides the capstone for this dazzling book by a young talent already refined.

—Robert Kotyk

Things on Which I’ve Stumbled
Peter Cole
New Directions, 2008

Peter Cole is a major American poet and translator based in Israel who brings Hebrew and Arabic poetry to the English-speaking world. In the title poem of this collection, Cole attempts to make a new and original work out of fragments of medieval Hebrew texts he discovered in the archives of Cambridge University. The Cambridge collection contains what was found in an uncovered geniza in Cairo – a storeroom of abandoned Hebrew texts. The fragments are not always poems; they include legal contracts, commercial correspondence, and brief personal letters. As Cole weaves these texts into his own poetry, the result is a strange amalgamation of the sacred and the profane in writing that ranges from highly lyrical to purely pragmatic. In less capable hands, the results might have been a mess, lacking in either historical insight or poetic expression. However, Cole’s multifaceted talent allows the poetry to thrive, turning these obscure fragments into a unique work all its own.

—Shane Patrick Murphy

October Books

Moira Peters — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 03:29:14 +0000

New works by Bolaño, Lerch and Ohle

The Romantic Dogs
Roberto Bolaño
New Directions Press: 2008

Five years after his death, it’s hardly surprising that Roberto Bolaño’s name is becoming increasingly familiar in the English-speaking world. The lauded Chilean’s works reverberate with sex, exiled Latin Americans, literary obsessions, literary pretensions, violence, politics, and, well, more sex. While Bolaño is mainly known for his novels and short stories (The Savage Detectives being the best known), he wrote in prose only as a reluctant admission that, like many of his characters, poets earn one lousy living.

This collection of his poetry, the first to be translated into English, serves as an intriguing complement to Bolaño’s prose, but it probably won’t convert many readers who haven’t encountered Bolaño before. Although his romantic subject matter is well represented here, Bolaño’s novels are addictive largely because of the wild, ecstatic voices of his narrators. In his poetry, Bolaño takes on a more contemplative, detached tone that makes his poetry, if nothing else, less fun.

Most of the pieces in this collection are short vignettes that recall the loneliness and desperation of Bolaño’s formative years as an exile from Pinochet’s Chile. In front of this political backdrop, we find his preoccupation with love and literature. The short pieces give us some glances into Bolaño’s sense of black humour and satire: “Father, in the Kingdom of Heaven that is communism, is there a place for homosexuals?” (from “Ernesto Cardenal and I”). But it is the longer pieces that allow Bolaño to really be himself. One of the longest, “Visit to the Convalescent,” gives us a youthful narrator who has escaped from a fallen country to run wild in Mexico City while “the rest of the world’s cities are drowning in uniformity and silence.” Such sentiments show Bolaño at both his best and most irksome. These laconic verses make it nearly impossible to determine the depth of his irony and naivety. Bolaño’s writing is impossibly cool to the point that we are never sure whether the author is laughing at himself or his readers. In these short poems, Bolaño still manages to draw us in with his wanderer’s tales. Then once we are comfortable, he offers the occasional stab to the rest of the world who sat at home while he spent his life drifting from country to country, book to book, and love to love.

– Shane Patrick Murphy

Witness and Resist
Marilyn Lerch
Morgaine House: 2008

The very first poem in Marilyn Lerch's Witness and Resist makes clear what the poet feels a poem should accomplish: “to witness for beauty and resist despair.” This is a collection that confronts the state of the world with all the compassionate empathy and emotional activism essential to giving the individual a voice and sense of importance within that world. Lerch boldly takes on a wide range of personalities: Chilean tour guide Maria Luz, who has flashbacks to being raped and seeing her baby burned alive; dead soldier Joseph Terry Riordon, who "dutifully toured the First Sitting Duck Gulf War;" and widely looked-up-to intellectual role model Dick Clapp, who became a small town judge and "put a bullet in his brain." Lerch ups the ante by assuming the viewpoint of a dying man whose black skin is “shiny on knobs of bone:”

My life,
like the diamonds and zinc and oil
that lay under those black voids
on the old maps,
is being taken from me.

This powerful New Brunswick poet not only plays the empath, but unashamedly includes herself in a universe of vulnerability with a ten-page exploration of and letter to her father: "Your absence was our intimacy, so/ how could I not believe/ this profound indifference to life/ included me?" Although the narrators' unselfconscious tales do at times get lost in obscure references that over-shelter the greater implications of the work, any confusion is quickly surmountable. Fearless of dealing in darkness, it is no surprise that this wide-eyed work also catches sight of the light: "Yes,/ always the dark and/ new stars in the making,/ the bombs will fall, compassion/ always possible.”

— Maya Rolbin-Ghanie

The Pisstown Chaos
David Ohle
Soft Skull Press: 2008

Whatever one might think of Cormac McCarthy’s father-son doomsday travelogue The Road, it is a novel that may present as doleful an elegy for the debasement of the American family as anything yet written this century. In a related (but different) vein, The Pisstown Chaos, the zany and strangely beautiful new novel by David Ohle, exhibits none of McCarthy’s penchant for scenes of sad kinship at the end of the world as we know it, even as it mines our cultural moment of extreme uncertainty in the service of a similarly apocalyptic mode. Ohle’s novel is a family dystopia in a more eccentric key: it whizzes between the radically divergent fates of its characters, the formerly wealthy Balls clan, with scatological merriment, from one depredation to the next, like some strange unproduced episode of Arrested Development collectively written by Anthony Burgess, George Saunders, and the Marquis de Sade.

In so doing, Ohle frequently opens up space for trenchant satire in the form of short news stories and community bulletins, collagistically laid out before each chapter. As one begins: “An imp herder working one of the Reverend’s meadows is fit to be tied. He found his most productive female dead in her pen yesterday. The belly was scissored open, the teats cut, the heart carried off. The herder wants to blame stinkers for the latest raid on his stock. The incident is doubly sorrowful, coming so soon after the same herder discovered the wings of his favorite banty imp nailed to the stump of an oak. Neighbors testify that he now spends his time stalking the reaches of the Reverend’s property, pistol drawn, so anxious to shoot a stinker that he has accidentally killed three of his best stud imps.” The bulk of the story pits ordinary citizens against the “stinkers,” a parasite-ridden lower caste of zombies, while the nation’s despot is a political bloviator and reverend seemingly modeled after right-wing American talk show host Bill O’Reilly. The result is a weird and precious addition to the growing literature of the gloomy. Bleakness has never looked so rich.

— Robert Kotyk