Newly appointed Washington State Poet Laureate, Kathleen Flenniken, recently released a second book called Plume, part of the Pacific Northwest Poetry Series of University of Washington Press. I will admit, as a reviewer I was fascinated by the idea of the book before I even read it, because Flenniken, like me, studied science before poetry; her father, like mine, worked at a nuclear site – hers at Hanford, mine at Oak Ridge National Labs; and her childhood, like mine, was spent in a small town supported almost solely by the dollars brought in by said nuclear site. Her language in this book, of dosimeters, Geiger counters, and unstable ions and their disturbing biological impact is heartbreakingly familiar to me. Her two degrees in engineering led her to work at Hanford as an adult, before she moved to Seattle.

What might be surprising to readers is how different this book is from Flenniken’ first book, Famous, a book of personal narratives about life in the domestic sphere – a quiet book almost modest in scope. If you enjoyed that book, you might not be really prepared for this second book, which is sweeping in terms of trying to capture a history, personal, political, and scientific. While the personal narrative poems still maintain a steady voice here, they are interwoven with lyric landscapes, fragments of historical documents and redacted government files turned into clever erasures, and meditations on the dangers of scientific hubris. The other difference is a palpable sense of threat, of lives at stake, of a dramatic story unfolding in the poet’s capable hands.

One of my favorite poems in the book is one in which she writes to the father of a childhood friend who died of a radiation-related disease, describing an event where her town had a televised event where she, as a small school child, dresses up to deliver the letters she and her classmates had been asked to write to President Nixon to prevent the closing of Hanford. “To Carolyn’s Father” illustrates how she makes the larger movements of the sixties – anti-nuclear sentiment, President Nixon’s soon-to-happen disgrace, and the treatment of children by schools as instruments of government propaganda – happen in the crystallized focus of a little girl nervous about appearing on television:

On the morning I got plucked out of third grade
by Principal Wellman because I’d written on command
an impassioned letter for the life of our nuclear plants
that the government threatened to shut down
and I put on my rabbit-trimmed green plaid coat…
at the same time inside your marrow
blood cells began to err…stunned by exposure to radiation…

In another poem of Flenniken’s childhood, she recounts how the children in her school were asked to lie in a whole-body radiation counter “and do a little for their country.” “Whole-Body Counter, Marcus Whitman Elementary” displays her (and by extension, all the people of the area around Hanford) chilling trust in the system: “I shut my eyes again and pledged/ to be still; so proud to be/ a girl America could count on.”

I was impressed by the variety of forms Flenniken used to capture different aspects of her story. Two lovely lyrics, “Plume” and “Green Run,” are concrete poems that reflect each of the environmental disasters that the poems refer to. A series, “Augean Suite,” referring to both the cleanup of the stables of mythology and to a statement of health physicist Herbert Parker’s to Congress about the ways to define the quantities of radioactive exposure, contains the piece, “IV: Augean Gray,” disturbing and beautiful at the same time in its vatic voice and the way the poem is broken over the page:

Women,
        take off your
                    dresses
                                    and undergarments.
        You babies,
                crawl naked
        in the grass.
                Lie down all of you
        under the August sky,
                and nobody ask.
…Lie down, patriot.
        Don’t ask.

Though the book brings together a personal memoir combined with the history of Hanford in an evocative way, Flenniken maintains an almost neutral tone, avoiding inflammatory statements or direct political commentary. She even jokes a little about her history in her poem “Again I’m Asked If I Glow in the Dark.” She does highlight interesting historical notes, such as how different Presidents, from Obama to Nixon and Kennedy, appear naïve in their quotes in the book – at times, dangerously so – about the powers harnessed at Hanford nuclear site. In her lack of condemnation, there seems to still be condemnation in statements of fact, in stories of workers dead from various radiation-related ailments. Yet her tone remains sympathetic towards the men making decisions, her neighbors, her father, her friend’s fathers, aware of the financial and political pressures they were under as well as the limited science about radiation exposure available to them. The awakening of the poet’s skepticism is one of the many stories that unfolds within the book.

Recently, for research related to my own work, I was reading a memoir by a radiation health physicist, Karl Ziegler Morgan, who had worked at Oak Ridge during the Cold War period, and his descriptions of the experiments they conducted there, including taping radium to the wrists of some of the nurses, thinking they might endure nothing worse than a mild skin irritation. It reminded me of the innocent, almost playful attitude people had towards nuclear power in the early days of its development. Reading Plume is not only an education about Washington State and its role in the Nuclear Age but of an awakening in the American public as well as the poet herself to the peculiar dangers of invisible poisons and of trusting too much the authorities of science and government.

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In Vanishing-Line, Jeffrey Yang writes, “But the birches of Yennecott/ recall his word-spirits.” Rather than using lines or stanzas as the basic unit of expression in this collection, Yang writes with something more fluid, more abstract, at a different level of reading. These “word-spirits,” delineated by tildes, congeal into an amorphous work; a floating world of art and poetry. Many readers will enjoy floating along, reveling in the unique ability of poetry to generate experiences and emotions beyond the logic of language. But I look for something solid to start from, a center of gravity that helps me organize my own thoughts and reactions, even if I eventually to decide to drift.

In “Harma Hissarlik,” Yang writes, “each form/ following its intention,/ each carving/ a hidden glory.” From that image I saw the work as a sculpture garden. You can wander through the “word-spirits,” focusing on what catches your eye, skimming over what doesn’t, enjoying the accumulated atmosphere of artistic experience and expression. In “Lyric Suite,” Yang writes, “…I walked with her/ thru the lattice streets of the island/ feeling lost but safe/ …streets where people/ read and cooked, played/ chess, elders watched children,/ commerce spilled into/ conversation, her neighborhood at the city’s/ brink.” From this, I imagined being lead around a village by an elder who shared the old names and old words, telling the histories and stories that defined the village.

Ultimately, Vanishing-Line is more focused and more coherent than a sculpture garden or a village tour. In “Elegy for Ling,” he shows us, “old men sorting thru rubble, brick by brick/ rebuilding the ancient walls/ while the ring roads expand/ while machinery explodes/ the celebrity architects multiply/ ignorant of the original design.” Vanishing-Line is a work of archeology. Yang examines places, people, and cultures in time, exploring their context, their causes and effects, their implications and consequences. He displays ancient words like Clovis points; “Izdubar,” “Zagros,” “(Manittuwond then Plum/ stone, Pluym or Pruym plume Patmos)” “qayaq.” He discovers quotes like potsherds, finding value and context in lines by great poets, historical records, and direct descriptions like those of the explorer Gertrude Bell. Finally, language itself is like a geological record. A culture describes itself through the words it uses and the words it doesn’t; “Lying and deceit are unknown among them because they cannot say it.”

This act of archeology culminates in “Yennecott,” a sprawling, ambitious, brilliant exploration of the discovery, colonizing and exploitation of North America by Europeans. Yang is trying to preserve not just the events of history, but the process of those events, discovering the emotions and ideas of today in the words and stones of the past; “From the ancient base of Piraeus passage/ wharves crowded with trade, sea wine-dark// West to the ‘final stop’ of Olson’s Pacific, Ahab/ ‘END of individual responsible only to himself’// Up to the moonlandings, rockets opening prospective,/ space, secret silo sites below, disgrace, Guantánamo, Bajram.”

But we already have archeology. We have museums and history books. Why apply poetry to a problem which appears solved. In “Yennecott,” Yang writes, “Bierstadt’s stereoscopic expedition/…His Rocky Mountain Lander’s Peak/ the ‘consumable landscape,’/ …Shoshone ideal, 1864/ staged tableau painting, among one/ hundred artifacts…/…today, in the museum gallery,/ mountain grass lake bathed/ in saintly sunset, figures/ of romance concealing/ a history of devastation.” (p111) For all its aspirations of fact, history is a form of storytelling, once used to romanticize as often (or perhaps more often) as it is used to reveal. Poetry has always been one of our primary romanticizers, making it uniquely able to strip conquering historians of their romantic veneer.

Yang’s poetics of archeology continue in the “Bibliographic Note and Acknowledgments,” which is more a manifesto than the usual boilerplate citation of sources and thanking of family. Yang argues for poetry as a technique and expression of history; a compartmentalizing of human events, as all works of history are, that does not sever the inherent connections of event to event, culture to culture, person to person. Though Yang doesn’t go so far as to argue traditional history is inherently inaccurate, Vanishing-Line is an attempt to fill in what is excluded by the rigors of fact and the structures of prose. In history as we understand it, “There was a before and after/ the during consumed.” All past was once “now” and poetry speaks to “now.” To Yang, poetry is capable of communicating the consumed during. It is a “library tablet found underground,” whose immediacy is not buried by the passage of time.

Different readers will have different experiences with Vanishing-Line. It can be devoured in one sitting. It can be picked at over time. Many will enjoy it as a sculpture garden or a village tour. Others will enjoy an even more transient interaction with it, drifting from “word-spirit” to “word-spirit,” content to soak up the artful arrangement of words on the page. But because so much of our poetry today seems to be focused on those isolated moments of emotion, I would urge readers to work with the harder more sustained themes in -Line. Yang is making a statement, something solid that can describe the world, and perhaps even change how we understand and interact with it. Though many readers and poets prefer to drift, to Yang, a poem is to dig.

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As its title suggests, Compendium, poet Kristina Marie Darling’s second book of poetry, is a short collection of poems compiling an incomplete history. Calling the book experimental, fails to tell the whole story. For unlike some experimental poetry, that shirks narrative, abandons traditional forms, and leaves an emotional distance between reader and text, Darling toys with traditional syntax, but leaves the reader curious, hungry, longing to restore the faded portrait that she keenly leaves unfinished.

Compendium has five untitled segments, the first containing a single poem, “Palimpsest.” This is the first of many poems in the collection that seeks to document the history of people and objects. “Palimpsest” is comprised of six prose stanzas, each subtitled Chapter One, demonstrating a dismissal of linear time in the succeeding narrative. The story told in the following pages is incomplete. In these pages, history, like the palimpsest, has been rubbed away, erased.

So, what then of the story that emerges? How do these poems communicate a narrative with so much missing? Darling’s deliberate choice of words in the second section’s six prose poems gives the reader equal parts music and silence. Here we are introduced to the heroine, Madeleine, as well as her nameless companion, the connoisseur. We aren’t sure about the nature of their relationship: lovers? former lovers? master and submissive? Perhaps. Darling’s nonlinear narrative avoids answering much, but the catalog of objects appearing and reappearing throughout the book give weight to the absence of plot structure. In the first poem, “The Box,” we are dropped into an unknown place and time:

That evening, the connoisseur presented
Madeleine with an usual box. Despite its array of
glass buttons and sheet music, he explained, one
must ever open the smallest compartment.

These window-shaped poems frame the repeated images texturizing the book’s themes of deliberate solitude, unfulfilled longing, and willful containment. Objects such as lockets dangling from red silk ribbon, countless rooms, silk gloves, music boxes, distant soirees, and black taffeta gowns, become clues that attempt to bridge the gaps between the reader the narrative.

While most of these objects’ specific histories are left unaccounted, Madeleine’s inaction in the poem “The Lockets” lends the objects their emotional significance. When the connoisseur dangles the locket’s photograph in front of her, Madeleine can, “do nothing but mumble before it’s sepia glow, her own blurred image, and the tiny pinhole from which the connoisseur had painstakingly suspended it.” This simple interaction hints at the connoisseur’s control over Madeleine through objects, thus layering the feeling of haunted containment. The items catalogued here are feminine in nature: silk gloves, embellished gowns, veils and broaches. Madeleine’s frustrating lack of agency is expressed through the objects she has some control over. She specifically chooses the “most somber gown” for the rustling noise it makes as she walks. A tiny slipper adorned with ribbons contains “within its past an elegy.” Curious rituals surround each object, the specific meaning of which has long been forgotten.

Darling’s focused use of punctuation and syntax deepens the pervading sense of restriction. Each poem is roughly six sentences, give or take one, and tightly ordered and structured. We enter each poem mid-scene or often following an event, as in the poem “The Homage” which begins, “It was only after the soiree…” leaving us to wonder who was invited and what they were celebrating. Each poem also contains a line of past or future dialogue, along with at least one fragment. These poems and their mysterious tone leave the reader longing for order, story, time, setting. Fragments are incomplete vessels; quotations marks act as containers for each character’s own words. On this deep linguistic level, these poems hold back. More specifically, the poems are not capable of offering more and that is quite the point. Mystery is not merely for mystery’s sake; this purposeful lack of context allows the reader to feel lost along with Madeleine in this house of endless rooms filled with faded portraits.

A series of six, small and untitled poems in the third section initially evoked frustration before a realization emerged: the poems were created from the prose poems of the second section. The effect is satisfying. The poems’ economy of language reduces the story to only the most significant words, while paradoxically opening the tightly-contained world of the previous narrative. Collected again are trinkets, accessories, and garments: “her sanctimonious blue / ribbons” “The lockets,” “tiny bells,” and “starched skirts” float in a sea of white space. The white space on each page says just as much as the handful of carefully chosen words; history also lies in what’s missing.

The penultimate section is entirely composed footnotes for missing texts, containing historical information, definitions, and unattributed quotes. Each begins at least halfway down the page, leaving a glaring mirror of white space. By now, we know we won’t have all the answers, but we accept this fact and allow these poems to assemble new, incomplete vignettes. Much like in real relationships, what is not said becomes just as, if not more important, than what is.

Kristina Marie Darling’s Compendium is a shadow box collection of antiques, each holding other worlds and histories. Darling achieved what she set out to do: write a concise and poetic compilation of a body of knowledge. In history, as in these poems, exact truths are impossible to attain. If, as Darling suggests, language fails to tell whole truths, perhaps experimental is a just word to describe Compendium. Darling has assembled a purposefully incomplete history filled with desire, mystery, music, and silence.

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Sibling rivalry takes many forms. Whether it’s Bart and Lisa Simpson choking each other in front of the television or Cain concussing his brother Abel the outcome is usually the same– someone always wins. There’s always a favorite, a golden child. But what about those who are left second best? Often the arrow that doesn’t quite hit the mark has a fascinating trajectory of its own.

Sergey Nabokov after all suffered from a type of middle child syndrome few of us could imagine. He grew up gay in a prominent aristocratic Russian family at the turn of the century and for the most part in the shadow of his older brother, Vladimir, the family genius. From their earliest childhood, Nabokov the elder stole Sergey’s thunder with his prodigious talent and promise. Later his adult life with its often improbable twists and turns, with its polyglot successes and the way he rode the crest of a changing world all the way to America, with pitstops in Hollywood and the Ivy League, seemed charmed. He literally bridged centuries, the old and the new worlds, totalitarianism and democracy, science and art, and he did it all with an off-hand aplomb about the whole affair. No wonder poor Sergey felt insufficient.

After the family had to flee the mother country when the Communist revolution went down, Sergey, who had already acknowledged as a teen his fate as an “invert,” having attended secret drag balls and committed furtive schoolboy trysts in dark alleys with his comrades in the “Left Handed Abyssinians”, a sort of queer Emo-clique founded by Sergey and his few like-minded friends, would naturally find himself in permissive, expressive Paris. No surprise either that he’d find himself on the fringes of the great salons and art circles of the time, a back row observer at Gertrude and Alice’s, a friend and friend-with-benefits to Cocteau, on the guest list but never the guest of honor, ever a B-list celebrity in his way, living off the fumes of his aristocratic beginnings and his brother’s rising fame. It would however be the backdrop for his emergence as his own person and his eventual demise as well.

Paul Russell’s The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov offers a fascinating if fictionalized portrait of this unknown Nabokov. Sergey’s also-ran status may have shaped the younger brother’s character but his is not the story of the other Nabokov. Sergey alone is the sympathetic heart of this story. Vladimir after all was at best aloof with Sergey, and at worst officially estranged, the two often not seeing or communicating with one another for years at a time. That his brother was or would soon be a world famous novelist, poet, and scholar is almost besides the point. In fact Vladimir, or Volodya as he is more familiarly called within the Nabokov clan, is actually much less present in the novel than one would expect. Maybe that’s a good thing. He was, in Russell’s eyes at least, a bit of asshole. From his earliest disregard and even cold rejection of his little brother during their boyhood to his essential absence from most of Sergey’s adult life when both brothers were part of the waves of Russian emigres in Paris and Berlin in the twenties and thirties, Vladimir cuts an elusive figure. He represents a missing piece in the lonely puzzle of Sergey’s heart, but in the end one piece only and one which Sergey long before resigned to never really possessing.

Perhaps though a youth spent eagerly at his brother’s dismissive shoulder prepared Sergey for his participation in the dizzying Paris stratosphere in which he found himself. He had become used to almost being there, comfortable around genius if never touched by it himself. Sergey could withstand the disregard of Paris’ bright stars just easily as he could ward off its more rapacious hungers. The effective portrait Russell paints of this uncanny time and place in fact is but one of the book’s satisfying accomplishments. It’s no groupie memoir however and there is no rose-colored nostalgia at work either. The Paris circles are depicted as the venomous, back biting, social climbing snake pits that they actually were. His Gertrude Stein is not the same avuncular hostess played by Kathy Bates in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris but instead a petty, divisive, self-appointed czarina with her own tenuous hold on her realm (and Alice B Toklas, her willing minion who gleefully does the wet work of excommunication). Russell’s Diaghilev, the great impresario of the Ballet Russe, is equally as repugnant, an obese, wheezy, whiny, debt-dodging paranoid pederast with, nonetheless, an impeccable knack for picking talent. Cocteau, more of a brother to Sergey than Vladimir himself, is treated much more favorably, if only because he was more genuinely charming and witty than the other top dogs of the demi-monde. (Many of the book’s wonderful bon-mots issue from Cocteau’s lips.) Perhaps his addiction to opium mellowed him a bit (he enabled Sergey’s own addiction to opium as well). Maybe it was that he lived with his mother, or maybe he just refused to take himself as seriously and for that appealed to Sergey the most. Like Cocteau, Sergey is an incisive observer of all the star-fucking mishegoss, but he has no illusions about himself. He learned early on he’ll never fit in anywhere, so he always seems one foot out the door no matter where he is, and that seems to suit him fine.

Paul Russell

After Paris, Sergey found himself in Berlin where he lived out the balance of his life, following a five month prison sentence for sexual deviancy imposed on him and his aristocratic Austrian lover Herman Thieme, with whom he enjoyed the longest and most fulfilling relationship of his life. Even in gay Paris Sergey had opted for an easy string of smoky evenings spent in Cocteau’s opium haze, pining always for a perfect love that despite a string of handsome and sometimes rich lovers that always seemed to escape him–none but a dashing Englishman, a Cambridge chum of Volodya’s of course, later lost in an RAF bombing raid and presumed captured or killed by the Nazis. Soon he is working for the Ministry of Propaganda, as many Russian emigres were initially supportive of the Reich and grateful to Germany for accepting them after their escape from Russia. His participation soon became less than consensual. He knew his days were numbered and is soon shipped off to a labor camp for uttering the unforgivable treason of suggesting that England was the superior civilization, most likely because it was the homeland of his one true love. He never found his Englishman by the way, and literally died trying.

Before he left Paris, though, he sought some kind of closure with his brother, some acknowledgment of their estrangement and some chance to express his love and receive Volodya’s in return. In a telling scene close to the last time they would see one another, Vladimir confesses that all of his correspondence with his brother was actually composed by his wife Vera, who never really liked or trusted the homosexual Sergey all that much anyway. Sergey realizes that the only way his brother ever revealed his soul to anyone was through his art. No wonder he was so prodigious and absorbed as a child. No wonder he disappeared from Sergey’s life, and when he was present was unable to express his love or admiration for his little brother.

In a similar way though Sergey is revealed through “his” novel. It’s a kind of Nabokovian sleight of hand Russell plays, lightly masking one story with another, building a text that is ultimately a mirror to a life, even if it is completely illusory, just like John Shade’s “shadow of the waxwing slain by the false azure in the windowpane”, in Nabokov’s later masterpiece Pale Fire. Sergey even broaches the topic of writing a book about their heroic martyred father, but Vladimir dismisses it. “And what do you think you might produce…A sham biographie romanceé where an infinitely graduated life is reduced to an artificially crafted plot, complete with characters and dialogue and dramatic scenes that never happened–and worst of all sentimental detours into the subject’s psyche, his innermost thoughts and emotions. No, I think I’d rather see poor Father’s corpse thrown to a pack of feral dogs.

Did this conversation really occur? Who cares? That Russell exhaustively researched this novel is apparent but not obvious, and that is the book’s greatest success. It’s a great story, not a history of Sergey, but a moving portrait of his soul, and as a salon populated by the divergent personae of Picasso and Dali would bear out, a “likeness” is subject to many interpretations. Russell is showing us too that he is fully aware of the unreliable nature of his own book. But there is nothing “meta” at play here. This is in the end not another bag of Nabokov-style tricks. It is entirely Russell’s book (and Sergey’s). It is however as real an account of Sergey Nabokov as we can get, and is also well crafted, luminous, lively, urbane story of one man’s search for love. It is just as Sergey himself saw life–heartbreaking, beautiful, and in most cases absurdly tragic. His brother would (probably) be proud.

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“It was silent and dark, and the children were afraid.” This the opening line of James Vance Marshall’s Walkabout, but isn’t it also the first line of all of our lives?

Walkabout, first published in 1959, is a petite book with a classic premise: two white children from Charleston, South Carolina are traveling when their plane crashes in the Australian outback. The only survivors, they set out to return to civilization, when they encounter a young Aboriginal boy who teaches them how to survive in the wild. A list of books with this essential set-up would take up the entire word count of this review, but suffice to say that Walkabout echoes Lord of the Flies, Robinson Crusoe, and A High Wind in Jamaica for starters. All books where people (often children) attempt to brave the world they originally, many moons ago, came from, a world they are now utterly lost in.

The two siblings are Mary, a teenage girl who hides her fear behind stern prudence, and her younger brother Peter, an amiable child who provides comic relief throughout the heavy tale. It’s clear early on that in order to survive they’re going to need saving. “Coddled in babyhood, psycho-analysed in childhood, nourished on predigested patent foods, provided with continuous push-button entertainment, the basic realities of life were something they’d never had to face.” Luckily for them the aboriginal boy is a god-send (perhaps literally?) who takes on the task of their survival. Despite not a single word of language in common, the aboriginal boy teaches Peter how to fish (see Bible) and provides the siblings with endless tips from where to find water to how to roast a wallaby.

On the first day of their meeting, the aboriginal boy inspects the two, sheerly out of curiosity. “He ended up with a detailed inspection of Peter’s sandals. Then he turned to Mary. It was the moment the girl had been dreading. Yet she didn’t draw back. She wanted to; God alone knew how she wanted to. Her nerves were strung taut. The idea of being manhandled by a naked black boy appalled her: struck at the root of one of the basic principles of her civilized code. It was terrifying; revolting; obscene. Back in Charleston it would have got the darkie lynched.” Of course, the unclothed boy is mostly curious as to why she’s wearing such a silly dress, but Mary sees it quite differently. She is so afraid of his blackness, of his nakedness, that it clouds her perspective. In fact, her main obsession throughout the book, is keeping her dress close to her body, her thinly veiled protective sheath.

The aboriginal boy is a clear Christ figure from the outset: pure of heart, generous, someone who lives only to help others. When Peter and Mary meet the boy, he is in the middle of a walkabout, a rite of passage in which young men set out on a six-to-eight month journey through the desert alone, yet he abandons his mission because the children are in need of his help. “Unless he looked after them, they would die. That was certain.” Some lines from Walkabout seem as though they’re lifted right from a passage in the Bible. “It was his people’s way to accept individuals as they were: to help, not to criticize, the sick, the blind, and the maimed.”

Yet despite the fact that the boy provides Peter and Mary with security, food, shelter, and sacrifices his spiritual journey for them, it does not succeed in quelling Mary’s institutionalized racism and fear. For the real fear does not rest with whether or not they will survive physically, but whether or not they can deal with their spiritual and psychological crises. For “…then, quite suddenly the children were walking into their shadow.” And what shadow is that?  The dark, deep-seated fear that the presence of the aboriginal boy draws forth from the reserved virginal Mary.

One day, her suspicions causes her to give him a look that “could only mean one thing: that she had seen in his eyes an image: the image of the Spirit of Death.” Apparently within Marshall’s rendering of Aboriginal culture, autosuggestion of death is enough to kill someone. The aboriginal boy ends up dying from catching the white girl’s fear (or perhaps more realistically the white boy’s cold), and in the moment of his death, he lays his head on Mary’s lap, a Christian echo of the mother Mary cradling Jesus’ dead body. “It was the smile that broke Mary’s heart: that last forgiving smile. Before, she had seen as through a glass darkly, but now she saw face to face. And in that moment of truth all her inbred fears and inhibitions were sponged away, and she saw that the world which she had thought was split in two was one.”

It’s a deep reversal. Mary’s fear and ignorance is so potent that it kills the boy, and yet in the moment of his death, its his fearlessness and Christ-like forgiveness that transforms her. Oddly, the book’s death scene doesn’t have an air of deep grief. In fact, it seems to be tinged with transcendence. As we know from Christ’s tale, death is only a mirage; life is always resurrecting.

For a book that’s only 120 pages, small pages at that, it’s so densely layered with symbolism as if to verge on being overwrought. Yet the book is saved by its focused narrative path, interior character portraits, and lush descriptions of the outback. In fact, the language is so rich with flora and fauna (the author’s pseudonym is borrowed from an Australian nature writer he admired) that I felt myself almost plucking the fauna off the page for a quick sniff.  In such a short space it asks some of the most profound questions. What is behind language? Who are we when we can’t rely on that limited form of communication? What will save us from the never-ending wild?

There’s an idea that there is something that touches the languageless place within us, outside of symbolic language and the imaginary, something known in psychoanalytic thought as “the real”. “The real” cannot be spoken or written. It’s the neo-natal, primal place we have been forever severed from through our inescapable introduction to language, that cornerstone of “civilization”. The aboriginal boy represents that place for Mary and Peter, a place they have long since lost access to. Lacan’s statement “What does not come to light in the symbolic appears in the real” is revealed in the brief moments between the three: laughter, eye contact, the embrace of another. These are moments when the “real” cuts through the symbolic, moments of pure existence. Perhaps, even when we are lost in the wild, whether it be in nature or the endless wilderness of the psyche, when we encounter another, we can always speak with them, one way or another.

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Faking out death is a feat usually reserved for Evil Knievel or Jesus Christ or video game characters. But if you think of lyric poetry as a kind of suspended disbelief in temporality as well as other inexorable facts of life (i.e. DEATH), for as long as the song lasts, then yes, poets fake out death, too. (Maybe the most successfully because words last forever?)

Emily Kendal Frey’s compact, laconic poems from her first collection, The Grief Performance, outwit, outlast, and, eponymously, outperform not only death, but failure, ennui, and despair. How, you ask? For starters, the speaker of The Grief Performance treats poems as if they were contingent to experience (perhaps, because they are).

Poem 11 from “Meditation on a Meditation of Frost”:

Elves, backyard pit barbeque, lilacs,
termites in the backseat:
the sum of it makes a person
want to: lemons, lemons, lemons.

Or, Poem 9 from the same series:

Everybody has their own thing
that they yell into a well about

It isn’t life, in other words, that disappoints—it’s the poems about life—or, what we choose to see. “There are three dead people inside me,” says the speaker, who carries this oracular burden (the dead want a place at the table, too) with a gravitas that at times borders on hilarity: at others, as a bonafide momento mori. Deleuze’s notion of “becoming-animal,” or “becoming-molecular” (both tied to the political aim of “becoming-minor”) surface throughout this aphoristic text—not as forms of shape-shifting or as means of identification with the natural world, but, rather, as a more expansive view on subject-object relationships—and the relationship between material reality and ideology.

Poem 4:

“ . . . because I forgot
how soft . . . ”
I heard you say
as you turned me over
like a split white fish,
ribs flapping. The other half
of the sentence lost inside
your other manuscript.

The speaker’s beauty, and the beauty of the other, undergo transformations—but again, from the level of an internality or subterranean reality which cannot be spoken of it not already experienced (“This will meaning nothing/ to you/ unless you live underwater/ with birds”). This underwater terrain, in other words, is a world wherein values still abide, hence: “Because you are unkind/ to me, you have become/ less beautiful.”

From the serial poem, “The End”:

I miss my beauty
in the field

the long
tree

yelling
palls of hair

my dead
mouth

open
no bird

And, from “Hasp”:

In the sun
pants riding
my hips I was
so beautiful

Why did you leave
me open
like that?

***

The pressure put upon the poem when the lines are one- or two-words long, is significant, as is the success borne from the tensions that ensue between the stanzas, the couplets themselves, and on the individual line between the two or three words (if that many are included). While the formal experiments of The Grief Performance vary (e.g. the prose-y “The History of Knives”; the block stanza of “I am the Scenery”) the desultory and yet strategic language of the terser poems proves the poet’s economy of expression as a rare gift—and even rarer aesthetic choice, in today’s light verse culture.

More sincere than a new sincerist (because more convinced that rather than being f-ed over by god, capitalism or the government, “We’re being/made love to”?), Frey’s debut collection is akin to the bird described by the poet in “Birds are So Soft”: a small creature whose faiblesse is its vulnerability to life, and to love. Walk this line with this poet, upon initial and multiple re-readings, and the promises extended to the reader in “Birds are So Soft” may be, as “an act of magic,” revealed.

Birds are so soft.
You can’t imagine . . .
They get pin feathers.
New feathers that grow in plasticky sheaths.
You have to break them up with your fingers.
Fabulous. A head massage for the birds .
They coo, close their eyes,
and coo. You’ll see . . .
Remove the sheath. It’s heavenly.

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Although he has been writing art criticism for the past four decades, and now stands on the more distinguished side of life, Joseph Masheck begins his new essay collection, Texts on (Texts on) Art, by introducing readers to his boyhood self. “Art history appealed to me as a youth in two different ways,” he writes. “There was first of all the then still contemporary high modernist excitement of the works of two great artists: Mondrian, only a few years gone, and Mies van der Rohe, still thriving. But there was also… excitement in the promise of research into origins and influences, an approach to historical understanding that seemed marvelous from as soon as I became aware of it.” This vision of young Masheck—thrilling to intellectual pursuits and seeing seminal artists as vital and within arm’s reach—stays with us as we delve into his ten lively essays that explore art, texts, history, and perception.

His goal is one of “sourcing:” to trace artistic phenomena throughout history, with the question of influence ever in mind. “I always want to know, even with contemporary art: Where have I encountered such a thing before.” Masheck shifts fluidly among disciplines, painters, and periods—drawing connections between art and psychoanalysis, architecture and philosophy, Jarry and Joyce and Duchamp—as he pursues his “extensive project in sourcemanship.”

In such fluidity, of course, there lurks the danger of being facile. Masheck acknowledges as much, both in his introduction (where he gives a nod to the existence of “mere coincidence”) and throughout the book (where, with respect to one detail, he admits his “already fragile historical speculation”). These acknowledgments disarm the reader’s skepticism, as does Masheck’s explanation of his project: “frankly, I hardly care, at least to start, whether the artist was conscious of a particular source or not. That is a mere point of curiosity compared with whether such and such a move has ever been made in the game.”

But what convinces us more than anything else is Masheck’s scope of knowledge. This game—the game of ideas and of art—clearly holds just as much delight for Masheck now as it did when he was a boy, and his enthusiasm is fueled by a deep, broad command of his subject. (And, one would assume, this command is in turn fueled by his enthusiasm). To get to it: one of the more provocative essays aims to connect the subversive artist Marcel Duchamp with the conservative pragmatic philosopher George Santayana. The point of connection resides in the mind of a Harvard undergraduate, a onetime student of Masheck’s, who studied with Santayana and claimed that he resembled “Leonardo’s Mona Lisa with a little pointed beard.” This image evokes Duchamp’s readymade L.H.O.O.Q., a cheap postcard reproduction of the Mona Lisa with a mustache and goatee penciled in.

Masheck dutifully explores the probable likelihood of a deliberate connection, but already the reader, like the author, is beginning to see such as an exercise as a “mere point of curiosity.” The important part—the urgent part—arises when Masheck begins to overlay the thoughts of these two great, yet disparate minds: “Santayana really deserves only one bad mark, for not taking modern art seriously…the main reason why he decided to go with beauty…was not after all so unlike Marcel Duchamp’s rejection, in the next generation, of ‘retinal’ value: namely, that art seemed in general insufficiently rational, which suggests that his stance was maybe less unlike Duchamp’s celebrated Leonardesque portrait of the cosa mentale than tends to be supposed.” In placing these two figures together, Masheck asks us, implicitly, to rethink the connections we have always accepted without thought, and to make room, perhaps, for less expected ones.

Joseph Masheck

Other sourcings are less comical—or, at least, deal with less comical material. The second essay considers the early-twentieth-century American painter Albert Pinkham Ryder alongside Matisse and the art critic Roger Fry (who coined the term “postimpressionism”). The connection between Ryder and Fry is a well-documented one; the exploration that Masheck makes here is a possible tie between Ryder and Matisse, forged through textual similarities between Matisse’s Notes and Fry’s writings on Ryder. The ninth essay returns to Duchamp, but in the more somber context of Joyce and linguistic colonialism. Duchamp’s Large Glass famously includes the image of a funnel, an image which Masheck reads alongside (among other texts) a passage from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Near the end of that book, Stephen Dedalus (who, incidentally, also expounds his theory of aesthetics) argues with his dean about the English-ness of the word for funnel.

It should be said that Masheck’s activities here do extend considerably beyond sourcing. Throughout these essays there is the beating, insistent pulse of the question of art: what is it, what is it not, and what is its status today? Masheck may not care so much about the precise answer to this question, but he does care fiercely about the question’s subject. A streak of social protest runs through the texts: in a pair of essays that discusses religion and art, Masheck pushes against the “bourgeois-materialist West.” Herbert Marcuse, he observes, pointed to art and religion as “the only two departments of Western culture not hopelessly contaminated by capitalist exploitation. …now that the artworld is overrun by insider-traders for whom criticism is an unwelcome obstruction, we must be down to one.”

But it’s the final essay that asks the art question with the most directness. Here, Masheck considers Andy Warhol’s Brillo boxes; contemporary artist Mike Bidlo’s replicas of the Brillo boxes; and critic Arthur Danto’s question of the “end of art.”

When Warhol produced his Brillo boxes in 1964, he exhibited art objects indistinguishable from the actual mass-produced product. Danto declared that, in this moment, art had reached the end of its imitative purpose. “Why,” Danto asked, “were these boxes art when their originals were just boxes?” Masheck responds to this issue in light of Bidlo’s works, which have since recreated this ostensible final moment. Masheck’s response is previously unpublished. “What happens now,” he asks, “when Mike Bidlo goes and re-does the Warhol Brillo Boxes anew, interjecting their once perversely good-sport cheer into the downbeat early ‘nineties?” Masheck’s analysis sees Bidlo’s Brillos, in part, as “almost imperceptibly more refined…as like inevitably idealized adult recollections of youth.”

One senses here, as in the introduction, Masheck’s unshakeable affection for the works that he critiques. He concludes by quietly, yet assuredly, asserting the place of the critic alongside Bidlo’s (and, one thinks, nearly all) work: “it is not that the second-time embodiment has no authentic ‘birthday,’ but that in a way it has two—or a birthday and a ‘name day’ too.”

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• June is Novella Month

Many of the most interesting lyric books of the past few years have attempted a sort of reckoning between contemporary life and the reality of ceaseless war. Nick Flynn’s The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands, Fanny Howe’s Come and See: these are books that consider what it means to live familiar patterns, yet know that elsewhere persists an unthinkable and unconscionable violence in which you are complicit.

Jessica Fisher’s second collection, Inmost, is a deeply felt and deeply thought addition to this train of thought. Fisher’s first book won the 2006 Yale Younger Poets Award; Inmost is the winner of the 2010 Poetry Prize from Nightboat Books, one of the most exciting presses active today. In this collection, Fisher focuses on the tensions of bringing a child into a world of war— of living your regular, daily experience while knowing that others die by violence, both down the street and across oceans. Never moralizing and never failing to implicate herself, Fisher instead locates these tensions in language, exposing with care the dual meanings, connotations, and shared histories of the words that form her place in the world.

“Things that can’t be held, can’t be helped, in the mind. The latest horror of the latest war, never on these shores,” the collection opens, at once announcing its primary concern and accepting its own eventual failure. We are told that there is the war in the same line that we are told it will not reach us. It is a dreadful reality and the speaker is, in a privileged lie, safe from it. This is daily life for many people (although, importantly, many more are not so lucky), but Fisher from the start expects more from herself than a simple realization of her own position. The violent reality “can’t be helped, in the mind.” However, with the introduction of a child, the mind must still attempt to help in some way, to hold what she can’t hold. “Talk is in the head when shushing a child,” the poem reads. “She is practicing erasure, she is practiced at it. Turn the dial: they’re turning to the war. Stitched, like a slip, on a bias. It gives a sense of the body underneath.”

Fisher is a writer of rare agility and grace. Her poems often move through ideas, form, and language with a singular restrained gesture. It is through these gestures that she manages to find something like a balance to the conflicts deeply rooted in Inmost. “We say mortar both for the shell and what it struck, brick & or stone &.” Language is the site of her exploration, the gauzey space where the daughter becomes a mother, or where the body gives birth. It is a place of multiple meanings, and so of course a place of puns, “Immanent or emanant.” It is the way we move through thought and the way our movement is restricted. “A month or a region, something you pass through. The roads on either side impassable, otherwise of course one would have chosen a different route.” And it is in that movement that Fisher stays, not arriving or departing but seeing what happens if the language is taken for all its meanings. It is a dangerous place to be, and it is where we are.

Inmost concerns itself with motherhood and war, two well explored topics in literature. And it lacks any grand structural or conceptual conceit, instead settling comfortably into restrained, precise language, with essayistic strains of etymology and lyricized images. Yet somehow the book feels incredibly unique and needed, like it is using its beauty in order to draw our eye somewhere we knew we should have been looking but for some reason hadn’t. So much of what is unfathomable must be considered, “the little heart an impossible thing / nevertheless marked by a sign.” In “Ravage,” one of the longest and most explicitly narrative poems of the collection, Fisher declares “Thought I could live in it / & not let it in, impervious as / a body floating in saltwater // eyes open to the shifting sky.” Inmost, thank god, places us there, exposed to the beauty and harm of our own inexcusable failings.

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Tania James follows her well-received debut novel, 2009’s Atlas of Unknowns, with Aerogrammes, a collection of nine short stories which delve into topics as variant as professional wrestling, chimpanzee adoption, and graphology (the study of handwriting). James’s stories are populated by lively, spectacularly fallible (yet persistently hopeful) characters that toil, mourn, dance, and play—sometimes in rapid succession. Two of the stories, “Aerogrammes” and “Girl Marries Ghost,” while not brand new, have been substantially changed since their initial publication.

To read Aerogrammes is to be transported back to adolescent (or pre-adolescent) days dominated by dance classes, playground politiking, and jumping off (or cowering before) the high dive. These rites of American childhood, infused with James’s attention to family discord, ethnic discrimination, and psychological trauma, become crucial to Aerogrammes’ particular sense of social and cultural memory.

James is at her best when chronicling adolescent awkwardness—something she does with unremitting honesty. In “Ethnic Ken” the school’s social order is shaken up by the advent of Cotillion. Amy, an Indian American with a brown Ken doll, can no longer chat with her friend Newt without the Cotillion posse taking offense: “Betsy made a gagging face. Some of the surrounding kids turned to smirk. Amy Abraham: flirting! My face burned.”

Interestingly it is these types of moments which continue to hound (or haunt) adults throughout Aerogrammes. In “Light & Luminous” Minal Auntie, a dance instructor, supermarket checkout worker, and part-time babysitter hones her dance team’s skills for an India Day festival. Minal Auntie is so mortified when her dancers find her using a skin-lightening product (“Ew. It smells like pee.”) that she locks herself in a bathroom stall. It’s something straight out of teen movie, but more wrenching, by far, to see the over-exuberant, self-conscious Minal Auntie falling through these traps.

The struggle to connect to a native cultural narrative from modern, multicultural American or England gets to the heart of conflict in Aerogrammes. In the title story Mr. Panicker receives a script-in-progress from his son Sunit, an aspiring writer in New York: “It belonged to a growing subgenre, he said, not quite Bollywood, not quite Hollywood: Indians in America or England Torn Between Identities.”

Tania James

This reflexive gesture, half in jest, gets to James’s visions of “Torn Between Identities.” For Aerogrammes the tearing of cultures is, above all, emotionally disruptive. Alienation, prejudice, and overt clashes of multiculturalism factor prevalently, but it is the personal relationships (often between family members) imperiled by differing cultural memories that shapes the sadness of these stories. It is, finally, memory and loss that James meters out among her characters. Tellingly, Mr. Panicker dismisses Sunit’s sentiment, worrying “how a thirty-eight year old man could still be writing about his twenty-year-old self.”

Switching from novel writing (Atlas of Unknowns) to the short story, James, in Aerogrammes, features a disconnectedness that is appropriate to both theme and form. Take this excerpt for “The Scriptological Review”:

Before me the lake seemed to widen in a gray-black haze, and all at once uncertainty swept over me, as it still does sometimes, because I seem to find comfort only in fragments, because there is something impossible about shoring them into something larger, just as there was something futile and frightening about the borderless world beyond that lake, how the sky exhaled and expanded with no outer limit, the stars slipping farther and farther away, like everyone I loved.

This moment is representative: confronted with the “borderless world” characters preserve their cultural memory in small things. Old Ahmed, the partially deaf cook, comes to London with Gama the Great, the Indian wrestling champ, to cook pehlwan food. The narrator of “The Gulf” borrows a violin so that she might hear her father play as he did in Dubai. These moments of smallness build upon on another. The writing, by extension, is a similar attempt to ‘shore’ the memory in a limitless, overflowing world; James writes, “These few words are pinholes of light in an otherwise impenetrable wall.”

Despite its many virtues, Aerogrammes does have several challenges, foremost of which is its over-attention to craft. Objects, endowed with meaning, do too much of the heavy lifting. Photo albums, aerogrammes (light handwritten letters for international postage), and musical instruments are simply given too much intelligence. This can make for neat, clean narrative arcs (each of the nine stories is roughly twenty pages), but can make the stories seem, at times, overwrought. In “Lion and Panther in London” the wrestler Gama the Great plays chess with his brother Imam. Dramatically realizing he has been used by the entertainment industry, Gama corrects his brother’s praise: “No chotu. I am just a pawn.” Disjointed or forced moments like this are scarce, however, and readers will find much of redeeming quality in the endearing moments (awkward though they might be) that James does convincingly render into “pinholes of light.”

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• Risky Moves

Sex is the first word and ironic driving force of Daniel Sada’s Almost Never. It is the activity the agronomist Demetrio Sordo decides upon to break up the monotony of nightly strolls, cups of coffee, and games of dominos. The only way this can work, he decides, is if he partakes every 24 hours, and so he goes to the red-light district where he meets Mareya, a prostitute who falls for him. Soon he is in the small town of Sacramento for a wedding, though, where he sees and covets Renata, the last virgin daughter of an upstanding family. The novel can be broken down as a farcical takedown of the macho and the pastoral, as a fun play on the oldest dichotomy—virgins and whores—and it is those things, but Sada’s senses of rhythm and humor elevate it. They dust off these old tropes and present them anew.

Almost Never, originally published as Casi Nunca in 2008, has been translated by Katherine Silver, who’s done exceptional work on Horacio Castellanos Moya and César Aira. Before his death in November of last year, Sada published nine novels, eight short-story collections, and three books of poetry. He was a student of Juan Rulfo’s, and is viewed as the maximalist counter to Rulfo’s extreme minimalism. Though Sada is most lauded in the Spanish-speaking world for his 1999 novel Porque parece mentira, la verdad nunca se sabe, which was written in various meters, this is his first novel to be translated into English. It was not written in meter, but its structurally fascinating rhythm is pushed forward by Sada’s poetic use of colons, em-dashes, and ellipses to stop and propel the action, enacting Demetrio’s back-and-forth.

Daniel Sada

Self-sacrificing but conniving mothers and mother figures, thieving members of the lower class, pimps with guns—this is Demetrio’s world, even as global change is happening. When his landlady attempts to discuss news of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, he gives her a nihilistic brush-off and we move on to the mechanics of his next lay. These are small lives that Sada seems to relish blowing up, in a manner akin to Manuel Puig. For both these writers, the objective is to act as an unseen voyeur, bringing humor and unmatched style to the ordinary. Whereas Puig excels at understanding and enacting the feminine, Sada takes a far more masculine approach; he tears down bravado even as he clearly deeply understands its motives and origins. He doesn’t go deep within interior lives, but stands to the side like a bemused bystander.

As it turned out, the half hour passed in a trice. Then the immaculately platitudinous good-byes we can well surmise: no embrace, no fleeting kiss (not even) on the sweetheart’s forehead: a most respectful one on the face (still so far away), nothing! Then, damn, both their hands moving at chest level (arms bent) while he sketched out his plans to return soon to Sacramento to see her—see her! see her!! The looks in the eyes of two saints who, buried deep down in their spirits, longed to be a bit like dirty devils. That’s another story.

Throughout the novel, as Demetrio goes between Mireya and Renata, brothels and chaste courtship, he also jumps from work on farms as an agronomist, to gambling, to opening up a billiards hall. It is this open foray into what is perceived in the small-town mind-set as depravity that allows him to make his final move. Demetrio’s fate is almost incidental, though, as it’s been the way Sada’s pushed and pulled that’s drawn you in, into a long-gone world studded with timeless characters and contemporary humor. If this was not even his best, according to the Spanish-speaking world, we have much to look forward to.

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