Event Factory

I recently had a foreign exchange student from Korea. I don’t speak Korean, but his English was fantastic and he attempted to teach me his native tongue. We started with the word “beginner.” He would say “beginner” in Korean and I would repeat it exactly as I had heard it, then he would laugh. When he had his breath back he would say “beginner” again and I would repeat it again and he would laugh again. This was our impasse. I never learned to correctly say “beginner,” and I still don’t know what I was doing wrong in my attempted repetitions of his language, though after some months I did manage to say “hello” in Korean without him bursting into giggles. This is my personal equivalent for what Renee Gladman does to readers of Event Factory, putting us in the role of tourist, inquisitor in a dizzy spin of language that perfectly replicates how it feels to be lost in a place where even words elude us.

Event Factory takes place in Ravicka, a yellow-hued world where language is more physical than verbal, where characters’ bodies and gestures and facial expressions are the root of everything, and where any wrong slip or slide or flinch or flutter can change ‘hello’ into a cry for help or a call for death or an insult of the worst caliber. Most often, our protagonist, the tourist in this Ravickian society, is relegated to simply saying “hello” to people who pass by or meet her as guides, though in nearly every instance her words or attempted contact are met with confusion or silence or otherwise a way to keep her outside of Ravicka, a city-state she desperately wants to inhabit:

Events had found me, and I wanted someone, at the very least Simon, to know about it. However, bringing something back proved difficult. Listening to them was like gathering water without a pail. They never ceased explaining the shape and nature of things, but did so in too twisting a narrative to become memorable. Water gathered around my feet. I tried to capture it with my mind. I asked Dar to hold some. But it was water. Water you cannot hold.

Renee Gladman

The most triumphant aspect of Event Factory though is how Gladman manages to take us into this world that we don’t understand, and that the narrator can’t comprehend either, where the language is unknown and the protagonist mostly unable to communicate, and yet give us enough as readers to follow the plot and move forward with its characters. We get to wallow in the misperceptions of being a stranger in a strange land, but we are also still led carefully through the journey of Event Factory.

Ravicka is vast and ensconced, and was emptying out faster than I could stamp it with my tourism. I had not collected anything. A few people rushed past me, I believe, headed toward church. It was morning. Church was still important. Though my stay was nearly over, I had not reached that level of departure where any Ravickian artifact would do. What I brought back needed to represent exactly what is was like to be here. Yellow air swarmed the low-level buildings, heavy with loss. Yet, Ravicka was not dead. With a leap of the imagination, I told myself, one could go on as one always had. Only not in the posture of before. You had to draw closer to things, give up perspective almost.

As editor and publisher of Leon Works, Renee Gladman is no stranger to keen experimentations with language, but Event Factory is proof that as a writer Gladman has something new to offer, the perspective of invented linguistics encountered as a traveler, an outsider clawing to get beneath the surface of a yellow world where even the slightest physical movement can break the chain of understood communication, taking a person even further out from the core of Ravicka. Event Factory, the first in Gladman’s trilogy from Dorothy, a publishing project, is a boundless book that rides on the unknown yet keeps its plot intact, drags us through a distorted society amidst an upheaval that we can’t understand but with writing that ensnares us, that keeps us reading. I may never have learned “beginner” in Korean, but I’m learning to inhabit Ravicka a little at a time, and I’m eager for the next session to begin.

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Gary Lutz’s books know what it is like to see parents split. His first collection Stories in the Worst Way was originally released from Knopf in 1996, later adopted by 3rd Bed, and then when they went quiet, Derek White of Calamari Press picked it up for a 2009 re-issue. Lutz’s second collection I Looked Alive saw the same tumult: published first by Four Walls Eight Windows and then re-issued just this past year by Black Square Editions. Even the tiny Future Tense chapbook of rare and early Lutz stories A Partial List of People to Bleach was a combination of reprints and work previously available in The Quarterly. But what is unique about divorcer, the fourth collection from one of the most touted indie press short story writers, is that it pushes a thematic connection throughout the entire book, something not done in any of the previous collections, and one would hope that this, in additional to all the other merits of divorcer, will keep it from being one more book-child example of Lutz’s literary-separations.

From “Divorcer”:

Marriage had not worked out to be a doubling of each other’s life, though there were duplicate juicers and sources of music.

My parents didn’t divorce, so I don’t know how it feels to be a child held between them. I have been married for eleven years, so I don’t know how it is to walk away finally and forever. But divorcer, Gary Lutz’s most explosive story collection to date, makes it all tangible: the pulling asunder, the quiet unasked-for solitude, the loss. divorcer is a brilliant portrayal of the act of divorce, the separation of bodies, the rent of togetherness. Thematically cohesive and extremely well-wrought, divorcer is a book that should stand as Lutz’s exemplar for decades.

From “Fathering”:

Some married people report pain or inflammation and others will tell you that a well-adjusted partner feels no need to touch the other. To me, though, marriage had always seemed more like one of those medical procedures that, once performed, could never be undone.

Gary Lutz

divorcer is about the deed of but also the art in divorce, about the tangled performance of disunion, from both sides, from all angles, the odd expansion that happens when another walks away in their placid shoes with arms around boxes or while sitting beside us, idly unknowingly falling apart. What Lutz captures in each of the seven stories in divorcer is how it feels to watch this happen as if from a body that is not our own, but a body we fear might one day exist.

And while some may expect in this collection the generic rendering of an event, Lutz avoids the often frequented and typically cliché victimization of divorce by writing characters who are either a part of it or watching themselves be a part of it – and who in any case, do not weep. Also divorcer brightly and equally includes all form of relationships (male/female, female/female, male/male) as well as dissolutions that are wanted, unwanted, questioned, accepted, and forced, creating a complete and beautifully ugly array of dissemblance and desctruction.

From “The Driving Dress”:

Divorce, I kept forgetting, is not the opposite of marriage, it’s the opposite of wedding. What comes after divorce isn’t more and more of the divorce. What came after, in my case, was simply volumed time, time in solid form, big blocks of it to be pushed aside if I ever felt up to it, though more often than not I arranged the blocks about me until I had built something that should have been some sort of stronghold but in fact was just another apartment within the apartment in which I was already staying away from  mirrors, shaving by approximation, bathing in overbubbled water that kept my body out of sight.

There is no more precise and calculated writer working today than Gary Lutz, and divorcer is full proof of his abilities to put words where we will not expect them, to cut sentences into burst hearts, to play on our senses, to pray on our ease by making everything uneasy. divorcer is tenuous and sad and lonely. divorcer is rife with the empty that remains when a chunk of our world washes away. divorcer makes us feel as if we have or were or did, even if we haven’t, yet.

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Ben Lerner, renowned for his poetry, finalist for the National Book Award, and the first American to win the Preis der Stadt Münster für Internationale Poesie, comes at us with his first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, the story of a poet who travels abroad to complete an artistic project, consumes a constant barrage of stimulants, meets new people, and becomes both more and more obsessed with the evolution of his artistic being and by the possibility that the whole of art is meaningless, the search for artistic truth a relentlessly moot point.

Maybe if I remained I would pursue the project described so many months ago in my application, composing a long research-driven poem, whatever that might mean, about the literary response to the Civil War, exploring what such a moment could teach us about Literature now. My Spanish would rapidly improve; I would not read Ashbery or Garnett or anything else in English, but hurl myself headlong at the Spanish canon; I would become the poet I pretended to be and realize my project.

In the end, Adam Gordon, Lerner’s poet living on a fellowship in Spain, grows increasing disheartened with both himself and his poetry, diving somewhat hopelessly into the dissection of art at the point of failure. Leaving the Atocha Station, like our protagonist Gordon, is perpetually interested in this connection of art and life, either in intersections as simple as what books the characters are reading while exploring new cities, or in the more philosophical bent of questioning what it is that poetry does, what makes art good or worth what it has gained, or if poetry even matters in our increasingly chaotic world, one where apathy seems the new standard:

He asked me about my poems and I took four notebooks out of my bag and gave them to him and explained they were just from this week and I wondered which were his favorite poems and if there were any they wanted to include in the pamphlet. He seemed genuinely excited, and I thought to myself that that was both touching and somehow sad, but felt neither touched nor saddened.

Ben Lerner

This is the same indifference rampant in other sects of our modern literary existence, perhaps most infamously in the novels of Tao Lin, where, like in Leaving the Atocha Station, the world wide something meets with the poetic, and the result is a bevy of characters concerned more with the right mix of consumption (food, drugs, products) and less with art for art’s sake. Lerner’s protagonist goes abroad, but he also resides in a state of observation that is robotic and withdrawn, state-less, even as he is moments away from the stir of actual, literal history.

And regardless of the drugs that Gordon ingests and simultaneously justifies by way of art, the inclusion of pseudo-love instant messaging dialogues, and a myriad of other modern tactics, it is impossible to ignore the all too many connections to another literary time, that of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises: Lerner’s characters soak in Spain’s sun, relationships bloom and die, art is at stake, and the drive of prose is often focused on outdoor cafés and descriptions of food or alcohol. This is not to say that Leaving the Atocha Station is a wholesale bleeding of Hemingway’s genius or a poet wrongly digging at the roots of one of our most accomplished American novelists, but even with the addition of terrorist explosions, Lerner is still mostly writing in readily identifiable Hemingway-territory, if Hemingway were a poet authoring his first novel: “Isabel came to me and pulled my head against her and said something to comfort me that included the word ‘poet.’ Rufina was rubbing my leg. I saw myself as if from the yard, amazed.”

And this is where Hemingway and Lerner really differ, in the poetry of their phrasing. The Sun Also Rises, along with the body of Hemingway’s work, is rightly lauded for its use of simple yet beautiful phrases, while Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station revels in overly long phrases, sentences with such length that they often breed tangles. More than anything, these lengthened lines set Leaving the Atocha Station apart from the expat grace of Hemingway, making Lerner’s first novel an interesting yet not entirely fulfilling read. Lerner covers territory by train that has been covered by other tracks and writes at times like a modern or post-modern coat atop a classic body, perhaps not evoking enough to call this debut novel more than an entertaining and sustainable read, showing Hemingway as a poet to rival our contemporaries.

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Steve Himmer’s The Bee-Loud Glade is a rubber-band, stretching from nature to virtual reality and back.

Steve Himmer’s The Bee-Loud Glade is a rubber-band. Its style is concrete narrative with a base-coat of philosophy and sometimes poetic accents, but its mission is elastic, stretching and ranging outward with constant snapback, as its reader yearns to decide between one direction or the other.
The premise is clever enough: our protagonist Finch is fred from his job as a media- advertising blogger for an artifcial plant manufacturer, a trade that was literally consuming his own life, making more happen in blogospheres than was happening in his own living room. But with his dismissal comes the turn in Himmer’s narrative, Finch is hired by a millionaire to occupy his garden estate as a hermit. A strange job for sure, but with millions offered and nothing else to do, Finch accepts. The rules: Don’t speak and do as Mr. Crane, millionaire-proprietor, asks. Finch reflects:

“I choked a bit and wasn’t able to answer that yes, fve million dollars would be more than okay. It would also be more than I’d made in my life. How could I have said no to money like that, to being paid so much to do what sounded like nothing, to sit in a garden and think about trees? To sleep in a cave with catered meals and be made a millionaire for it? With that kind of money, I could hire my own hermit someday. I thought about all the animals in the nature shows I’d been watching at night, the snow leopards and tigers and bears, and wondered if they knew they could be so well paid for their work.”

From this turning point in the book, the narrative is more or less straight-forward – how does a man learn to stay silent, to meditate when the world is so brightly buzzing, to break from his own technological and societal customs in order to properly embrace the world of real plants and real life, to be a person instead of pretending to be one. Himmer takes care in this direction, always specifcally pushing one thing next to its disparate other, making us read both in the same lines. This is not, however, to say that The Bee- Loud Glade is a book that says yes to nature and no to everything else; this novel simply asks the reader to stare at both through widely open eyes and to continue grinding our thoughts on each of these possibilities.

“Then [Mr. Crane] turned away from me, back toward the hill and back toward the big house that stood hidden over its rise, and he walked away without another glance or word spoken to me. I hurried after him, assuming I was meant to, but he seemed so engrossed in talking to himself about rivers and fshing that I doubt he knew I was still there. So as we passed close to my cave, I went home and watched him head away up the hill, hands clasped behind his back and head bent like a monk or a minister in meditation.”

Steve Himmer

The constant juxtaposition of technology and nature, like the cave vs. the mansion, is the most fascinating element of The Bee-Loud Glade. Not only does Himmer bring in the pseudo-realities of blog-living in comparison with the communication-free life of the hermit, but he opposes each and every piece of our technological and hyper-living with some aspect of nature or more natural living: artifcial plants vs. a garden, clothing vs. nudity, painting the horizon vs. meditating on it, and even animals on television vs. Jerome the real lion (who was released cautiously into Finch’s living space).

In this book, the comparisons are too numerous to count, but they all work together to create an elastic effect, where we as readers are continually pulled to nature and thenback towards technology, away from what we thought was important and in the direction of something newly signifcant. As a book that pulls allegory apart, The Bee- Loud Glade does a wonderful job, and in the end, even Finch is left happily stunned:

“After dinner, while the evening sky bruised as if its body, too, had worked a long day, I walked down to the river for a rare sunset swim. I wasn’t in the habit of swimming at night, not for any reason except that I wasn’t, but I hadn’t been into the water since starting my garden had given me so much else to think about. As I foated the knots in my muscles untied, my back and arms and legs loosened as if they were water themselves, and my blistered palms soaked and soothed in the cool balm of the current. Fish glided past underneath, leaves and seedpods sped by on the surface and a rustling wind up above, and I lay between those three layers and thought about nothing at all.”

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Built on a walk through a privately-owned museum, a four-chambered version of art, Color Plates is not an easily defnable book.

Rose Metal Press prides itself on the hybrid nature of its titles, and Adam Golaski’s Color Plates is a perfect example of this cross-genre publishing niche. As with all good books, Color Plates has layers, a surface underneath a surface underneath a surface, but there is more at play in Golaski’s book, more refnement than simple addition, more complicated existence than just putting one on top of another – Color Plates sheds skin in each passage, reveals a depth beneath a depth, and unpacks words in a venturous way.

from ‘Book One: Éduoard Manet’:

“When the balcony breaks loose from the house, it rises up, Antoine falls out of his chair to his knees–his chair–in pieces, fies off the back of the balcony, smashes to bits against the mansion–Antoine’s cigar tumbles sparks, Berthe is thrown back, out of sight, and Jenny struggles to keep her balance, she’s on all fours and she’s screaming, to me, for help, or she’s just screaming her confusion (her voice a violin). I tumble over backwards, but not down the hill, I’m carried on the crest of the hill–the sky, big, huge, empty, blue.”

Built on a walk through a privately-owned museum, a four-chambered version of art, Color Plates is not an easily defnable book. Of course hybrid texts force this defying of genre, but Golaski’s book is a particularly apt example. This is not a novel in a narrative walk, but a curated visage through four rooms of a museum: Éduoard Manet, Edgar Degas, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Mary Cassatt, as told through sixty-three loosely overlapping fash-length stories. Golaski’s writing is vivid and poignant, full with intense phrasing, but there is also the added bonus that what seem to be separate stories based on artwork, are in actuality a narrative unto themselves, compiling and compounding with each room we visit.

from ‘Book Two: Edgar Degas’:

“The girl cut fourteen little ballerinas. She cut a mirror from white paper–the way white paper caught color was like a mirror, the girl thought. With watercolor, she dabbed peach and pink on the ballerinas: a bow, a fower. She cut an instructor, an old man with a cane. The girl missed the instructor: she cut him from a sheet of bright yellow.”

Adam Golaski

And while Color Plates intentionally confates genre throughout its stories, it also pushes its hybrid nature into the header of each piece too, introducing the individual color plates by a description of the concrete art that spurred the writing, i.e. “[Plate 23] / ‘The Dancing Class’ / 1880, 24 3/4 x 18 7/8”, and followed up with a poetic addendum that seeks to stretch the gap between reality and the stories themselves.

from ‘Book Three: Henri De Toulouse-Lautrec’:

“Of course, my wife had found the moment, that image I carried with me; she seemed to fnd it over and over: right leg bent, toes to the foor; left leg locked; body bent slightly at the waist; focused on the task of pulling up a dark stocking; green-blue blouse around her neck, held up by her shoulders; breasts uncovered, sun bright on her chest; red hair, tied back but tumbled forward. Yet—“

Golaski builds this book on visual art, but my hybrid reference point is in literature. In terms of style and phrasing, reading Color Plates is a lovely cross between The Great Gatsby and contemporary writers like Lydia Davis or Norman Lock – a blend of the smooth and fuid Fitzgerald parties, where the night sky is lit with strung blubs, and the curt, often cold, nature of writers like Lock and Davis, who step on our veins as they work their way across our bodies. Stem to stern Adam Golaski’s Color Plates does what it intends: fusion.

from ‘Book Four: Mary Cassat’:

“Here, in the country, the darkness outside is deep. I’m used to moving by the slight- light as the moon sets. Used to the numb trees and the spike darkness between. Animals come out of the forest and drop to the lawn, grass that has grown wild and high. Sleeping deer: these animals crash to the ground, their sleep-poses unnatural. There was a string of time during which I woke only in the small hours. After a while I could no longer imagine anything but hunger-ache and black grass and sleeping animals. A fox asleep next to my head. Broken-winged birds pepper every feld. I hope some of the city remains and is brightly lit as cities are meant to be. I want us to be visible from space for as long as is humanly possible.”

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Robert Lopez has charmingly stirred readers with his previous two books, 2007’s Part of the World and 2009’s Kamby Bolongo Mean River. Both received various raving accolades and garnered an audience for Lopez’s beautifully thin but aggressive language.

Lopez is a sentence crafter, belligerently curt but marvelously poetic, a writer who uses nicely balanced repetition with a unique and refined minimalism. His debut short story collection, Asunder, does nothing but solidify these characteristics, firmly establishing Lopez as a contemporary writer to look up to.

She can’t believe he doesn’t want to celebrate her birthday.

Closer to home, I’ve been bleeding.

Every time I brush my teeth or shave it’s a bloodbath.

She and he are they to me. Them. A man and a woman walked into a bar. Hopeless.

If I were a hemophiliac I’d either be dead or God knows what is the bottom line. By that same logic I’ve often said if I were an Eskimo I’d kill myself, so where that leaves you I don’t know. Although I’m not sure if that is in fact the same logic.

She has black hair and a gold wristwatch. He is wearing red suspenders. Near as I can tell neither of them is bleeding. (From “Bleeders”)

Asunder collects a wealth of mostly flash-sized stories, nearly all of which swirl around people who are confused, or missing, or confused about having gone missing. People with missing parts, or lost relationships with other missing people, or lost relationships with the parts of them that have left. Aptly titled, Asunder is about being torn away, being stripped from our feet and floated into a sky where description is mesmerizingly concrete, but where we are no longer sure of the difference between our wife and the “despicables,” between surviving and being sucked under.

People can either be rescued or recovered. Survivors or victims. However, there are victims who are never recovered, their bodies. These are the people lost at sea. There are songs written about them. Boats are lost at sea, too. They are mentioned in the same songs. Drowning is different. Drowning is for people who can’t swim or who can no longer swim due to injury or exhaustion, or people who choose not to swim. Something happens, then they take on water, then they drown. They sink right to the bottom. The water can be deep or shallow, rough or calm. There is little difference. Water fills the lungs making life at first difficult, then impossible, to sustain. (From “In the Boat About to Drown”)

Robert Lopez

And while these flash pieces are overwhelmingly smart and slick and delightful to read, there is another bonus to Asunder: the inclusion of Lopez’s novella-in-shorts, The Trees Underground, which collects and throughlines the stories of Lopez’s characters Blind Betty and Pity Jimmy, whom discerning readers have met in a number of literary journals over the years. Pity Jimmy is the sad frontman for the story, taking care of Blind Betty, whom he simultaneously desires, envies, and pities. This long piece is perhaps the best of Lopez that there is to be had—readers get the quick pace of his flash fists with the arc of a longer narrative, expertly delivered, plus the chance to see Lopez work in the third-person point of view after beautifully crushing the first-person in many of the earlier stories.

In cafeteria when Blind Betty says the trees underground are outside blooming all over. Blind Betty is blind so you don’t know if you should believe her sometimes. Thing about Blind Betty is she’s fingered all the Braille books on flowers and nature so she knows about these things she says. To regular people the trees underground are dandelions but to Blind Betty they’re trees. Blind Betty says when she was a kid she had a baby brother who was a retard and she’d tell him that dandelions were the trees underground. Blind Betty says this is the kind of thing you tell retards but she doesn’t say why. She’d tell him there was a world underground the opposite of the aboveground world. So if you were blind aboveground you were deaf in the underground world and if you were a retard in one you’d be a genius in the other. It don’t make no sense to me that if you’re aboveground you’d be deaf in the underground but I like it when Blind Betty tells us stories about her retard brother so I don’t say nothing. (From “The Trees Underground”)

If Lopez’s earlier books didn’t prove to readers that he is a word-storm, a force of literary nature come unhinged, blowing shutters against readers’ houses, then Asunder surely will. This is a collection as proof, a collection as loveliness, a collection as rippage, and we are lucky to get it into our waiting hands, its words into our heads.

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The thirteen stories in Matt Bell’s first full-length collection, How They Were Found, are of differing payloads and sizes, but his persistent and precise control keeps them all working at the right speeds, building optimal momentum and shattering open only when he wants them to.

Bell brings us everything: symbolism, futurism à la David Ohle, devastation, surrealism, scenic energy, fractured fairytales, consumption, struggle, claustrophobia, and family decay. But this is not to say How They Were Found spreads itself too thin or is too chaotically varied; Bell knows how to keep his world in check, his every word balanced against another, delicately, like a system of weights.

We see Bell’s powerful management of language even in the first piece, “The Cartographer’s Girl”, where a man maps the symbolic units of his loss:

Ground truth disappears, is replaced by something else, by the truth as meaning, as yellow brick road, as key to a lock to a door to an entrance. He widens the error in his map, one phrase at a time, each annotation requiring its own accommodations. He writes their truth upon the city, and the city bends to it, its streets and avenues warping around his words: This is the place where we met. This is the place where we fell in love, and so is this one and this one and this one.

Even when presenting easily misunderstood characters like Punter, in the story “Dredge,” Bell tips a reader nearly over the emotional edge without ever letting us fall:

He wasn’t bad anymore. He was a person with a disorder, with a trauma. No one had ever believed him about this, especially not the therapist in juvie, who had urged Punter to open up, who had gotten angry when he couldn’t. They didn’t believe him when he said he’d already told them everything he had inside him.

When Punter pictures the place where other people keep their feelings, all he sees is his own trapped scream, imagined as a devouring ball of sound, hungry and hot in his guts.

Matt Bell

In Bell’s stories people drown, they get lost and buried and destroyed, yet we don’t feel wet or lost or suffocated: We feel pained and wanton and struck, as in “Ten Scenes From a Movie Called Mercy”:

She curls onto her side, turning away from the sunshine slicing uselessly through the surface of the river. Underwater, everything is the same color, and what looked like a riverbed of pebbles from the shore appears here as layers of baby teeth, their cavities worn white again by the flow of water unceasing.

He will not allow us to get lost, has spent too much time rendering and maintaining that precarious space between cliff’s edge and freefall. Like Red, the main character of “Wolf Parts,” we are shown the power of order:

As commanded, she climbed into the bed naked, speaking in soft, mock-innocent syllables, pretending not to notice that the figure in the nightgown was not her grandmother, so that the great, hairy wolf would feel safe to reveal his true intentions. She waited, polite and acquiescent, and as soon as the wolf forced himself inside her, she sprung her trap, showing him that she too knew what it meant to consume someone whole.

Portions of How They Were Found appeared as the chapbooks How the Broken Lead the Blind (Willows Wept Press) and The Collectors (Caketrain), and though they clearly indicated Bell’s skill and magic, they did not fully demonstrate how he could consume the reader, how he could become the whale that swallows us whole and lets us live inside his belly. We read as Homer lives in “The Collectors”:

Homer experiences the lack of guideposts, of landmarks, of bread crumbs. He knows his brother is dead or dying and that finding him will change nothing, and even though he wants to turn around he’s not sure how. He tries to remember if he climbed the stairs or if he crawled upward or if he is still on the first floor of the house, twisted and turned inside it. He tries to remember the right and the left, the up and the down, the falls and the getting back up, but when he does the memories come all at once or else as one static image of moving in the dark, like a claustrophobia of neurons.

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Divided into sections, the overall text is still somehow connected by word associations: trees, hummingbirds, bones, empty houses, hauntings. And this is what made it so great for me, because it didn’t read like a collection but instead like fractures of an epic poem, fragments of a (prose) poem novel(la). I dove through once as soon as the mail came because the cover is vibrant and torturously teasing, but then the close of the text, ending with a new version of The Pond, one of my favorite releases from Greying Ghost, it begs you back through, asks you to wander again, electrified by its words.

Zachary Schomburg understands how to tilt a board filled with language up and towards his mouth. He rolls you down like that, to the teeth, staring at a black throat threatening everything. Scary, No Scary made me love poetry again, made me understand how it can fit together, how a collection can be a book, and how a book can stir and pour over me, ruffling all my feathers into new flight.

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