Chris Carosi recommends
Laura Walker's third collection, bird book, composed of fragments, illusory speech, and disjunctive phrasing, is a fascinating field guide that both satiates and disentangles the impulse of metaphor. Each poem ends with the name of a bird, sometimes acting as a caption to the description above, and sometimes complicating description of human communication. This causes some extraordinary physical reaction in the reader. The compulsion of phrase to expand visually, as if in flight, then to land on an indirect statement or an obscure detail seems to conjure memory and action semi-consciously. These are very short poems, but the sheer agility of Walker's talent can be deathly still and peaceful or politically enormous in the amount of time it takes to go from phrase to bird. There is also an attention to the materiality of language, which might texture a quotidian action as bizarrely symbolic (often in the form of infinitive phrases, "to turn her head"), or a disguise for the action of a bird ("he walked through pines"). These descriptions/metaphors are shared by the observer, the characters, and the birds, and it becomes clear that at the level of line, this relationship is shifting every moment an image passes. The amount of possibility that the reader engages is so dynamic, that there are too many examples to list here. The book is a welcome replacement for any field guide, not just birds, and can be read as such, flipping through the book and reading the poems in whatever order one pleases. Some of the phrases or characters repeat (or are suggested to repeat), as do some of the bird names, and reading them out of sequence increases the sense of bird tracks, or bird shadows, allowing for the possibility that metaphor or memory might reveal itself in various forms in the same consciousness. A superb and fascinating book.
January 2012
Nicole Trigg recommends
Bhanu Kapil's experimental prose, in her new book Schizophrene (Nightboat Books, 2011), explores and enacts a relationship between migration and psychosis. She notes in an afterword, "I learned that light touch, regularly and impersonally repeated, in the exchange of devotional objects, was as healing for schizophrenics...as anti-psychotic medication. In making a book that barely said anything, I hoped to offer: this quality of touch." So what Kapil's book does not "say" is offered instead as body. The content is a testament to, and by, bodies in motion. There is the manuscript Schizophrene, which traveled in an arc from the author's back door to her garden in winter where it endured ice and thaw and ice again before Kapil re-gathered, transcribed and remade it, and there are the displaced persons and communities of India and Pakistan, and there is the author herself. The effect of relocation on all of the above is modeled by the text, lush with color and texture yet consistently and jarringly broken by white space or cancelling imagery. In "blanked out jungle space," there is invariably a veil or screen between the implied whole and the subject. Metal trees "snap" and break, desire is linked with caging and surveillance, families are meat and deal meat inside of burnt, smoking architecture, black and indigo dyes are "leaking" into "pocks" on the grid... Barred from its continuity, the sumptuous image becomes a disturbance, as if lit by strobes. Importantly, Kapil documents without victimizing her own and others' diasporic bodies-ultimately the body perseveres even as it records its broken history, and its senses never dull. The resultant book then, is indeed what the author intended: an object for healing, in the permanence of its ink, thickness of its paper, limits of its form.
January 2012
Israel Cisneros recommends
This is one of the best books I've read in years. I first picked up the book because of the gallant cowboy on the cover. As I read the first few stories I wondered how he fit in the novel. Then I realized that Ridge is a literary cowboy, doing things his own way with a rugged sense of structure that makes you wish you had his swagger. Ridge tells us stories from all directions, of psychics, of religious zealots, of war-time drummers, all with their own very specific set of issues. To say that his characters and his situations are unique is a bit of an understatement. Ridge deviates from our societal conventions and preconceived cultural notions in way that seems to describe our modern lives more accurately. Ryan Ridge just makes you step back and look at his words as they are, and through those words you find yourself looking at how things in life "actually" are.
January 2012
Israel Cisneros recommends
Mike Topp's writing is the literary equivalent of observational stand-up comedy... except it's actually really funny. His stand alone statements are the best kind of awkward. I advise that you slow down a bit after each line and take the time to enjoy the white space moments that he's left for us on page.
January 2012
Charlie Wormhoudt recommends
Solar Poems, translated by George McWhirter, is composed of alternating pages of the original poems in Spanish and the English translations, so that they face each other across the spine of the book like a standoff; like lovers; like an object and its reflection in water. Immediately this reminded me of the book of poems by Pablo Neruda that I bought in Argentina thinking I would learn Spanish through poetry (what a romantic!). That book was stolen and never recovered, but in Solar Poems I find redemption.
The benefit of a translated work constructed in this way is that the English speaking reader with some knowledge of Spanish can figure out what the original poem felt like—the cadence of the language and the looping quality of lines like “Virgen de los ojos encendidos.” Readers may also gain an appreciation for the art of poetic translation when reading a clever conversion like “igneous eye” for “ojo de fuego.” Igneous eye! Or you might pick up a new word of Spanish, like sonrisa, meaning smile.
More importantly, the dialogue between languages is echoed throughout the book in parallel binaries. The first poem, Poem to the Sun, is literally a conversation between a painter and a poet. They converse about the sun and its light, using the metaphors of their respective disciplines. In the middle hangs a question: in the beginning was the word, or in the beginning was light? This initial conversation engenders dozens of others in the poems that follow—between the poet and his dog, the poet and his dead parents, the poet and himself. The collection as a whole has the levity, fluidity and intimacy of a conversation. We feel we are listening in on close friends talking.
Like Neruda, Aridjis was a Latin American diplomat as well as a poet, and so there exists within the author yet another dialogue. Why do the two occupations seem so at odds? The erotic quality of Aridjis’ words and his beheld subjects, like rolling grapes around in the mouth, contrasts with our idea of a calculating man with a suit and a brief case. And yet there have been other poet-diplomats: Claudel, St. John Perse. Perhaps it makes sense. After all, wordplay is the name of the game for both poet and diplomat. But would that all politicians were also poets! There must be some transferable virtue in noticing that the glow of someone’s eyes (yes, lots of eyes) is “more intense than mango skin,” or believing, “Man's task / to not be sad under the light.”
February 2012