Ninety-eight years ago, Vienna was preparing for carnival. This season, which lasted until the beginning of Lent, was kicked off in style by Countess Jenny von Haugwitz, whose automobile-themed ball in the Directoire salon of the Hotel Imperial saw guests dressed as Rolls-Royces and Mercedes-Benzes. The Bank Employees’ Club threw a Banknote Forgers’ Fest, which turned out to be almost as memorable as its Bankruptcy Ball of the year before. Nor were festivities confined to the upper classes. The Laundresses’ Ball of 1914 was quite an affair, even if the girls did join a protest march the next morning rather than return home with eligible gentlemen on their arms.

Vienna on the brink of the Great War was decadent, decadent in something like the way that Berlin would be between the world wars, in the way that New York was in the disco seventies, in the way Istanbul is now under Erdogan. But Vienna outdid all these latecomers in the excess of its enthusiasms, and, uniquely among the foregoing examples, combined sociocultural ferment with the rigid militarism of ancient dynastic tradition. The Habsburgs endured. Indeed, in January 1914 the imperial family had just celebrated the birth of Archduke Franz Joseph’s daughter. It would have seemed even to the most astute and cultured observer that whatever radical energies were coruscating through the capital at the time were little more than St. Elmo’s fire playing about the unsinkable rigging of the ship of state. The seeming madness of carnival was thus a reassurance and reinforcement of empire.

Of course Princip’s bullet was soon to reveal how brittle the crystalline splendor of the Austrian Empire was, which in four years’ time would collapse in glittering fragments, leaving far-flung vassal states like Bucovina to fend for themselves. The end of empire spelled an end to old certainties. The febrile art of Kokoschka and Schoenberg then seemed to express the spirit of the time, and in the coming years the lethal politics of Hitler and Stalin (both of whom sojourned in Vienna before the war) increasingly took center stage.

The central character of Gregor von Rezzori’s novel, An Ermine in Czernopol, now available in English in a handsome paperback from NYRB Classics, has no place in the new order, or lack thereof, that prevails following the war. An officer in a vanished army, “the manly ideal from a supposedly bygone epoch,” Major Nikolaus Tildy clings to the double eagle of the Habsburg order he once served. He is the ermine of the title, and, as we are informed by the frontispiece quote from the Physiologus, “The ermine will die should her coat become soiled.” Tildy’s coat is his reputation. Throughout the novel, it’s in danger of being soiled—in fact, it is soiled—by his sister-in-law’s constant indiscretions. But rather than turn against his family, Tildy rounds on those who call her what she is. He goes so far as to challenge his commanding officer to a duel over the point. He tilts at the windmills of plain truth.

Rezzori, though, is too subtle and mischievous an author to plunge us immediately into the drama of Major Tildy. First, he introduces us to Czernopol, a mean-spirited ethnic melting pot that stands in for Czernowitz, the capital of his homeland Bucovina. It’s a city that has made of schadenfreude a national pastime. Here the reader, like Rezzori’s youthful narrator who speaks as a “we,” is exposed “to a rich gallery of people, as colorful and aromatic as a bouquet of grasses and fresh meadow flowers.” These include the cynical and wise prefect Tarangolian, the eldritch Widow Morar, and the witty writer Năstase, whom Tildy in vain challenges to a duel.

Gregor von Rezzori

But a shadow lies over this circus. “Back then it wasn’t unusual for us to be afraid,” says the child-narrator, “since our hearts were still burdened with the memory of the war”:

houses destroyed by shells, soldiers’ graves scattered across the country, and dead horses with hideously bloated bodies, limbs jutting out stiff as wood, ants trickling through their eye sockets like red tears.

Tildy has been through this vale of tears. His bearing is that of the camp, and derives from a close familiarity with boot and horse. He is proud, inflexible—a living embodiment of “the glory of the sunken Austro-Hungarian Empire.” To the children of the novel, this makes him “the angel dressed in armor, the imperial sword-bearer”—but in Czernopol, aesthetics count for little. Recent history is, if not buried, then laid out on a slab in the open air. We are given to understand that Tildy does not belong. In this new world, the old forms and usages can only impede him, but he refuses to give them up.

His repeated attempts to defend the honor of his wife and sister-in-law by resort to martial means are terribly funny and also tragic, as are the actions of all men who have been carried out of their proper time. He is diminished when he becomes entangled in farcical events. The context of his actions changes from one of high drama to one of low comedy, and this dislocation irrevocably alters their meaning: “The hussar had dismounted and was rooting in the mud.”

There are many examples in European fiction of the noble-spirited, virtuous and slightly priggish hero who is set against a vulgar reality. In this tradition, which includes The Sorrows of Young Werther and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Rezzori’s novel stands somewhat apart, not only in its large and insistent cast of secondary characters but in its humor. One looks in vain for real humor in A Portrait of the Artist. Stephen takes himself seriously, as lonely intellectual young men will do. Gales of black laughter sweep through Rezzori’s novel. Only Tildy abstains from the general merriment.

Another swerve from the tradition is that Tildy is not an extraordinary individual. “His one great virtue was something beyond his own control; it was the legacy of the world he came from, a vanished world.” The children finally must accept the illusory nature of their outsize vision of the hussar. His one great virtue dooms him in a world that has no use for him or his principles. Horse and rider are lost for want of a kingdom.

Rezzori’s novel is enjoyable for the sly elegance of his language and for the lively rogue’s gallery he peoples his Czernopol with. It’s valuable for the baroque, nostalgic, ironic yet clear-eyed recreation of a world now long gone, stamped to death beneath the Nazi jackboot. But literature of the first rank must speak to us of our own time as well, must in some way convict or console us in our humanness, and this Rezzori’s novel does; for our world, like the profane and achingly beautiful one he depicts, is a world of uncertain values, a world of upheaval, “a world that has too many claims to validity, too many equivalences, too many relativities.” To revive this novel for a wide readership, there’s no time like the present.

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Born in 1936, Marge Piercy has made decisions that serve as scaffolding for her poetry and fiction. She has stayed actively true to her progressive, feminist convictions. She has returned, with depth, to Jewish traditions she was born into. She has maintained a complicated appreciation for the natural world, especially the environs of her Cape Cod home. She has remained in a long, loving marriage of encouraging equals, to Ira Wood, her sometime collaborator, and co-instructor when leading writing workshops. She’s also kept her sense of humor.

She harnesses worldly concerns with matters of the soul, with a straightforward beauty that provides many examples from The Hunger Moon—New and Selected Poems, 1980-2010. It is her eighteenth volume of poetry.

“The visitation,” from What Are Big Girls Made Of? weaves in and out of the moment, making it exquisitely current :

The yearling doe stands by the pile of salt
hay, nibbling and then strolls up the path.
Among the spring flowers she stands amazed,
hundreds of daffodils, forsythia,
the bright chalices of tulips, crimson,
golden, orange streaked with green, the wild tulips
opening like stars fallen on the ground.

This, and more, before Piercy makes her point with language that is as right to see and hear as the deer is both lovely and a symbol of rough reality :

Graceful among the rhododendrons, I know
what her skittish courage represents : she
is beautiful as those sub-Saharan children
with huge luminous brown eyes of star-
vation. A hard winter following a hurricane,
tangles of downed trees even the deer
cannot penetrate, a long slow spring
with the buds obdurate as pebbles,
too much building, so she comes to stand
in our garden, eyes flowering with wonder
under the incandescent buffet of the fruit
trees, this garden cafeteria she has walked
into to graze, from the lean late woods.

Never be misled by forthright declarations in a Piercy poem. Each reverberates music it was meant to sound, as in “Wellfleet Shabbat” from The Art Of Blessing the Day:

The hawk eye of the sun slowly shuts.
The breast of the bay is softly feathered
dove grey. The sky is barred like the sand
when the tide trickles out.
The great doors of Shabbat are swinging
open over the ocean, loosing the moon
floating up slow distorted vast, a copper
balloon just sailing free.
The wind slides over the waves, patting
them with its giant hand, and the sea
stretches its muscles in the deep,
purrs and rolls over.
The sweet beeswax candles flicker
and sigh, standing between the phlox
and the roast chicken. The wine shines
its red lantern of joy.
Here on this piney sandspit, the Shekhina
comes on the short strong wings of the seaside
sparrow raising her song and bringing
down the fresh clear night.

“Shekhina” represents devine, female spirit in Jewish life, making this and other poems in the collection, read like prayers one’s foremothers might have wished for, had they time, not to mention a loving spouse who no doubt helps with the meal so that all at the table can be lit by the “red lantern of joy.” Generations of Jewish women fought to learn the language and rituals reserved for men, making Wellfleet Shabbat and its neighbors in these pages a kind of altar of acknowledgement and remembrance, sacred bricks and mortar.

Love poems. Poems confronting war. Poems about cats. All are notoriously difficult to write without falling into dogmatic babble or trite traps. Piercy avoids this, in selection after selection, as in this from “Implications of one-plus one” from Available Light:

Ten years of fitting our bodies together
and still they sing wild songs in new keys.

She suggests they’re still singing even after watching football together, deliciously possessing him and the game, announcing “Football is mine,” in “Football for dummies” a recent composition. The poem is pure fun, and you cheer for everyone.

“Peace in a Time of war,” quoted in part, makes my point about war poems and highlights Piercy’s versatility once more :

Ceremony is a moat we have
crossed into a moment’s
harmony as if the world paused –
but it doesn’t. What we must
do waits like coats tossed
on the bed for us to rise
from this warm table
put on again and go out.

And then there are the poems about cats. As someone who likes dogs and shares a bed with a man and one or more felines, I’ve written my share of terrible cat poems and am always on the prowl for good ones by others. In “Old cat crying,” as in all topics she seizes, Piercy is empathetically masterful, and in this case the mastery connects feline need to human need and loss :

He should not have died
before her. She cries
for him to come. She
sniffed his body and knew,
but she has forgotten
and he does not come.

Piercy apprehends what conventional wisdom sometimes disdains. We humans show emotion in ways, like sniffing (who among us has not sniffed a garment recalling scent of a long-gone love?) that can seem both feral and genuine.

Not surprisingly, for someone whose prose includes Sleeping With Cats, A Memoir, Piercy ends with a poem about the death of a cat. Like this entire collection, and like Breaking Camp, her first volume of poetry, published by Wesleyan in 1968, and well worth repeat visits, “End of days” engages the senses and enlarges them. Cats “see clearly/through hooded eyes, “we are informed, before being reminded how terrible it is to face the end of life while confined in “the silent scream of hospitals.”

Marge Piercy’s unflinching clarity of vision continues to be the kind of sturdy example so vital to literature. She has long been teaching and in the public arena, on the humane side of almost every contemporary issue. Lesser poets, lesser citizens have been appointed United States Poet Laureate. It’s her turn.

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George Orwell’s 1946 essay “Confessions of a Book Reviewer” begins with a setting, “a cold but stuffy-bed sitting room littered with cigarette ends and half-empty cups of tea.” A man in “a moth-eaten dressing-gown” sits at a makeshift desk surrounded by papers. We are told he is a:

a man of thirty-five but looks fifty. He is bald, has varicose veins and wears spectacles, or would wear them if his only pair were not chronically lost. If things are normal with him he will be suffering from malnutrition, but if he has recently had a lucky streak he will be suffering from a hangover.

A page later our man’s vocation is revealed: “Needless to say this person is a writer.” Almost reluctantly does Orwell decide to be more specific and call him a book reviewer; it is of no real consequence to him what kind of writer he is because “all literary people are alike.”

So much for the average writer. Virginia Woolf sketches the average reader in an essay from 1916 entitled “Hours in a Library”. This person, again male, is “a man of intense curiosity; of ideas; open-minded and communicative.” On the negative side he is:

a pale, attenuated figure in a dressing-gown, lost in speculation, unable to lift a kettle from the hob, or address a lady without blushing, ignorant of the daily news, though versed in the catalogues of the second-hand booksellers, in whose dark premises he spends the hours of sunlight.

Orwell’s writer is unkempt and disorganized. Woolf’s reader is hungry to learn but socially gauche. Both wear dressing-gowns, perfect attire for people who prefer to be indoors.

The Orwell essay is famous, the Woolf less so. Hesperus Press has raided Woolf’s volumes of critical writing and rescued four lesser-known literary essays, grouping them under the title On Fiction. Each essay brims with insight and interpretation that is conveyed stylishly and authoritatively. Here is a writer expounding on the secrets of her craft. In one essay, “Women and Fiction”, she classifies criticism as one of the few “sophisticated arts”, something seldom practised by women, at least in 1929. She foresees more women tackling and mastering it, albeit in a “golden” future when they will no longer have to protest to be heard, being enfranchised, financially and socially independent and with “a room to themselves” – a reference to her most celebrated critical work, “A Room of One’s Own”, published one year earlier. The essays are bound by ideas that are perceptive and prophetic. She scrutinizes the worth of literature past and present but goes the extra mile to consider if it, and its practitioners, can improve and increase in value in the future.

That first essay, “Hours in a Library”, focuses more on the reader. After her generalized image of him she adds, somewhat surprisingly, that “the true reader is essentially young.” Woolf was prone to bold pronouncements but she was always able to convincingly corroborate them. “The great season for reading,” we learn, “is between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four.” This is a sobering fact certain to make some of us feel we have passed our prime; but it also conjures up an image of the young self-taught Virginia Stephen, losing herself in her father’s vast library. Later in the essay she asserts the power the classics have on contemporary literature – that a schooling in the past is vital for appreciation of the present – but by the same token the more modern books we read, the greater our realization that some classics are not as imperishable as we previously imagined.

Classic writers throughout the ages are revisited and scrutinized in the longest essay here, “Phases of Fiction”, originally serialised in three parts in The Bookman in 1929. Woolf praises and takes down canonical authors in equal measure. It is refreshing to read of the shortcomings of the exalted: Proust mires the reader by surrounding his characters with clutter, an “accumulation of objects”; Walter Scott’s plots are too often “scamped, botched, hastily flung together”; Dickens, while hugely inventive, created “substantial, lumbering worlds”. This last point is typical of Woolf’s appraisals in that a writer’s strengths are examined alongside his faults in the same sentence. “Substantial” is apt for summing up those Victorian doorstop novels, but “lumbering” can equally fit the bill. George Eliot’s mind, she tells us, is both “clumsy and powerful”. Only Jane Austen escapes complete censure. We pause when we finish Pride and Prejudice and turn our mind back to what we have just read, “rather than forward to something fresh.”

In “The Narrow Bridge of Art” (1927) Woolf writes on fiction’s limitations. Compared to poetry, and the “glories” of the Elizabethan dramatists, prose is relatively hamstrung when dealing with “the common and the complex”. For all that fiction writers can experiment (Woolf herself a good example) they cannot fashion their prose to “chant the elegy, or hymn the love, or shriek in terror.” In short, prose, for all its elasticity, cannot “say the simple things which are so tremendous.” This is Woolf at her most opinionated and certainly her most contentious, and we could argue that fiction has more than adequately managed to say simple and tremendous things in the last eighty years. But she is unquestionably spot-on when, in a better bid at prescience, she talks of the fertility of the novel, how it is a “cannibal” form that will devour other forms to create new ones so that “in ten of fifteen years time prose will be used for purposes for which prose has never been used before.’

“Cannibal” is a wonderful description, one of many in these essays. It succeeds on two levels. Firstly it opens up Woolf’s line of argument in an original and eye-catching way; secondly it reads beautifully. The main problem with these essays is not that we wrestle with any opaqueness of thought (each is remarkably lucid) but that there is a temptation to underline every second sentence, such is her dexterity with words. This, of course, is the great advantage of reading a critic who is primarily a writer. She writes of “the foam and flood of language”. Poetry “has remained aloof in the possession of her priests.” Henry James helps us explore “endless filaments of feeling” whereas Dostoevsky leads us down “miles and miles into the deep and yeasty surges of the soul.”

This fine collection reminds us of Woolf’s binary genius as fiction writer and fiction critic. In these essays her judgement illuminates and her descriptions sparkle. James Wood has noted that her essays are “written in the language of art, which is the language of metaphor.” It took her a while to be entirely satisfied with this language in her novels – it was only her last novel, Between the Acts, that she considered “more quintessential than the others” – but in the essays the language, like the thinking, consistently impresses.

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Rob Griffith, in The Moon from Every Window, attempts many things at once, which isn’t surprising from a poetry collection. What surprises, though, is how well he accomplishes them. In three very different but equally gorgeous sections, Griffith guides us through every poetic form from sonnet to villanelle, all while examining the idea of what it means to be in one place instead of all others, what it means not to know your own momentum and position at the same time, to never see the moon from every window.

In the first section, Griffith deals with domesticity, sharpening his poetry on everyday ideas. The collection opens with “The War at Home,” where a dog, “a boxer mix,” wages war on a springtime hydrangea by habitually using the bush as his toilet, but try as the dog may, he can’t win the war and kill the flower. What does this mean for the dog? For us, who may be trapped in similar wars at home that we will never win? Through the course of the section, Griffith explores a relationship falling apart. In Griffith’s world, we all become chained to monotony, even the undead. In “When the Zombies Come,” what is interesting is not that zombies descend; it is that the zombies quickly become us. The poem concludes:

I like to think they’ll mill and stare, then bend
to take up our uniforms, our jobs
and lives—a zombie checkout boy who sacks
the bread and eggs; the zombie line ref
who shambles downfield to make some bad calls;
and zombie teachers gurgling out declensions
for lie and lay. And at a desk, paused
with pen in hand, a zombie poet writes
a zombie sonnet for his sonnet love. He sings
of flawless gray skin, of eyes like curdled milk.

Here we see how Griffith shines. His exquisite verb choice (“mill,” “gurgling,” “paused,” “shambles”), his intriguing line endings (to pause on the word “pause” is at once obvious and effective), and his ability to make everything mundane (even a zombie invasion) show Griffith’s attention to language and the discipline of poetry.

The most notable and obvious evidence of his devotion to detail is his pervasive use of poetic forms. Like Natasha Trethewey in Native Guard, Griffith employs poems that adhere to forms at random, causing the reader to constantly ask, “Is this poem a form I don’t know?” Usually I am unimpressed by neo-formalism since form usually trumps content, but Griffith manages to utilize form without sacrificing what he has to say. “Heisenberg to His Wife” is a sonnet, “Patchwork Garden” is a haiku (and like all haikus, it is too short to be effective), and other poems show an impressive penchant for blank verse, as seen in this opening line from “For a Party at a Friend’s House,” “Not everything is elegy, thank God…” And this wordplay shows another of Griffith’s strengths: humor. Like the zombies, Griffith’s poetry does not take itself too seriously, even when it wanders into heavy physics.

The second section of the book focuses on two seemingly random and unrelated thinkers, Werner Heisenberg and Jonathan Edwards. In the first poem of the section, “Heisenberg’s Love Song,” Griffith begins with an epigraph from Heisenberg: “The momentum and position of a particle cannot / both be known at the same time. Knowing one will disrupt / knowing the other.” The section explores the idea of our inability to know where we are and where we are going. This builds off the collapsed domesticity of the first section. “Heisenberg’s Love Song” ends: “Are you moving toward me or away?” The final stanza of the second poem in the section, “Heisenberg to His Wife,” reads:

And nearly everywhere at once, it jumps
From state to state, absorbing and emitting
All those quanta—a light switch off or on,
No in-betweens. It’s here we are finally stumped.
Like love, the change is total, and I’ll admit,
The trouble lies in telling when it’s gone.

We cannot know our position and momentum, Griffith seems to say. Instead, as he declares in “Heisenberg in Old Age,”

each moment is simply a kind of waiting
for the next, a halfway house where no one leaves.
He wonders what it’s all for, a world
where the present is myth and nothing exists
but memory and anticipation.

Griffith, with all his deft wordplay and formal skills, is most impressive with his consistency to his poetic project. The Moon from Every Window meditates on the Heisenberg principle, that a particle’s momentum and position cannot both be known, and how it relates to people. By introducing the idea in the second section makes a reader rethink the first section, which is thrilling. With only a few exceptions, like “Ruth’s Alexandriad” which lacks impact, the poems in this collection succeed. The third section, with multiple poems about fishing, show a speaker on the move, either hitchhiking in Tennessee or finding his Chinese doppelgänger, showing a man now aware that where he is and where he is going cannot both be know, so he focuses only on where he is. The final lines in this strong, intriguing collection, in a poem called “Disappearing,” read: “…I’d just be gone, / like stars swallowed by the mackerel-light of dawn.”

Read “Disappearing,” a Rumpus Original Poem by Rob Griffith.

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Wayne Koestenbaum’s short book, Humiliation, is a provocative piece of writing.

As Koestenbaum considers humiliation from multiple angles, he thrusts and parries, sticks and moves, riffs, makes connections and then denies them, offers hypotheses and then lets them hang in the air, reveals himself and then hides. And there is much here to argue or take issue with, to be offended or moved or enlightened by. But mostly, it’s just a wonderful ride that implicates both the reader and author in fascinating ways at nearly every point along the way.

The book is made up entirely of numbered paragraphs set off in sections, ranging from simple sentences (“I used to consider my father humiliated when he pooped in the bathroom, especially if I could smell it afterward.”) to three or four page analyses or riffs.   The numbered paragraphs are organized into eleven chapters, which Koestenbaum calls “fugues,” an apt name, as he explains in an early parenthetical: “(I call these excursions ‘fugues’ not only because I want the rhetorical license offered by invoking counterpoint but because ‘fugue state’ is a mentally unbalanced condition of dissociated wandering away from one’s own identity.)”

Identity is almost a secondary theme here; along with art, identity often awaits on the other side of humiliation, a possibility for redemption. The book feels nearly reductive at first—everything, from reality television to all television to any kind of violence to language itself is seen in terms of humiliation. “’Humiliation’” means ‘to be made humble.’ To be made human? ‘Human’ and ‘humiliation’ do not share an etymological root, but even in Latin the two words—humanus and humiliato—suggestively share a prefix.” Note the trick Koestenbaum is playing: he has suggested an association even while admitting it doesn’t etymologically exist. This works in at least a couple ways—first, he has planted this association in the reader’s brain, to flower throughout the book, and second, and just as significantly, he has told us that for Koestenbaum himself, this association is unavoidable.

The reductive feeling does not last and the book quickly moves in the opposite direction, toward a sort of expansion: humiliation as entry point into so much of modern culture, art, writing, violence, and yes, humanity. In our world today, we cannot help being witnesses to humiliation—in the scandals of our politicians, the exposes of our celebrities, the actions of our military—and, as witnesses, we are almost definitionally culpable as well. At the same time he is moving laterally, Koestenbaum is diving relentlessly deeper, into himself, and into the work and lives of a number of his own touchstone artists and celebrities. Even when the subject is not explicitly himself—and it frequently is—we never lose sight of the guiding intelligence and personality behind the associations. And what an intelligence it is! With language that frequently borders on the aphoristic (“The instrument of humiliation—or merely its sheath—is geniality.”), Humiliation is a tour d force of language and logic, and if it frustrates the attempt to trace a single line of argument, its rewards are plentiful—part coming of age story, part cultural critique, part psychological exploration, part art criticism, part literature review.

Wayne Koestenbaum

Koestenbaum applies his mostly sympathetic attention to such celebrities as Michael Jackson, Liza Minelli, Judy Garland, Alec Baldwin, Eliot Spitzer and his wife. He takes up the case of Lynndie England, and her leering smile. For Koestenbaum, the very fact of being humiliated lends sympathy, but he almost always sees the one who does the humiliating as humiliated too. He often uses a Freudian lens, but nobody and nothing is allowed a definitive last word here. He predictably relishes the work of Jean Genet and Marquis de Sade. “The Marquis de Sade piles up humiliations, and I aim to do the same.” Humiliation is seen not just as grist for the mill of art, but almost as a necessary part of the process of art-making itself, whereby the self must be obliterated.  He lingers on John Keats, Sylvia Plath, Saartjie Baartman, Oscar Wilde, Harriet Jacobs, Antonin Artaud (whom he describes as “My favorite humiliated artist and writer”) and he reserves a special place for Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, late friend and colleague, who he credits with pioneering “shame studies.” In addition to a prolific writer, Koestenbaum has also served as a visiting professor in the painting department of the Yale School of Art and his considerations of visual artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat and Glenn Ligon, and the intersections they inhabit between language, visual art and humiliation, are particularly fascinating.

Koestenbaum moves deftly between nearly academic argument and personal humiliation, and the graphicness of some of this material has put off some reviewers, but I find his associations and juxtapositions much more disquieting than any of the personal details he reveals.

I have made several attempts to integrate the following fact into a paragraph about Liza Minnelli, but I have not been successful. Indeed the attempt to integrate the following fact into a discussion of Liza might easily be characterized, by a witness, as obscene. Liza’s humiliation—if we call it that—has nothing in common with the nightmare experienced by a prisoner in Guantanamo, a man named Mohammed al Qahtani, who, according to the Senate Armed Services Committee (reported by the New York Times, December 17, 2008) “had been threatened with military dogs, deprived of sleep for weeks, stripped naked and made to wear a leash and perform dog tricks.” The interrogative technique, the Times tells us, is known as “pride and ego down,” from the U.S. Army Field Manual on Interrogation (FM 34-52): the technique’s purpose (writes the Times) is to use “humiliation to try to overcome a person’s resistance.” There is no need to integrate this awful fact into a paragraph about a star’s downfall and rise; we are, however burdened with a consciousness that can be aware, simultaneously, of different levels of suffering, from the mild to the unspeakable, a progression we can’t call a continuum, although the same human body contains the dreadful potential for every variety of “dog trick.”

Note the similarity to the logic of the previous quoted section about etymology. And note, too, the similar provocation. He is denying the association, even as he is making it, castigating the very continuum that he is setting up for us. In fact, I was wary of quoting it here, out of context, for fear that it would, indeed, sound obscene. The truth is that by the time the reader has reached this point in the book, carried along by Koestenbaum’s fugues, it seems just right—it isa continuum that should be both posited and denied. The very next numbered section, immediately after a page break, begins suggestively, provocatively, damningly: “I enjoy looking at porn, mostly gay male, especially when the model looks directly in the viewer’s eyes.” To say that he is venturing into dangerous territory here seems redundant.

This book, indeed Koestenbaum, himself, seem like uniquely contemporary phenomena. He was weaned, he claims, on television, and proves himself fluent in the language of reality television and the debased star. He refers to YouTube as “my shame-kiln” and talks about experiences with internet porn and Craigslist. Yet there is something resolutely old-fashioned about him, in his need to make meaning of everything, to cut through the surface stimulation in search—always, always—of understanding.

Perhaps that’s why I felt a little disappointed by the last fugue. I wanted, and expected, Koestenbaum to move more deeply within, to perform the same kind of analysis on himself that he performs on Jean Genet, and arrive at some sort of primal moment. Though the last fugue does indeed turn personal, it does so in a nearly comprehensive, rather than incisive, way. He has written earlier about “the experience I consider the model for all humiliations I’ve seen or endured,” the paddling of the naked bottom of a childhood classmate, but the experience is someone else’s and it doesn’t come close to explaining why this moment is so primal for Koestenbaum. The last fugue teases, but at many key moments, including the last numbered section, the shots fired are fired across someone else’s bow. For all his talk throughout the book of his own humiliation, Koestenbaum pulls up just short of using himself as the ultimate test case. It’s the right flavor, I just wanted more, and, especially as relates to the subject of humiliation, that may be Koestenbaum’s final provocation—one that it’s hard not to be implicated by—and thus, also his final statement.

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There’s a saying that calms down even the most neurotic of us when we’re feeling like we’re losing our wits: “The truly crazy person never thinks he’s crazy.” This is a stabilizing statement, in which one gets to believe that, simply by recognizing that there’s a problem, there’s a way out of the darkness. The same can be true for misanthropy—the truly misanthropic person feels profoundly well-adjusted. And so we feel affection for any outsider that experiences a sense of shame, of displacement, and a hope for something redeeming to change their lives dramatically. The lonely professor Arthur Opp, one of two protagonists in Liz Moore’s novel, Heft, feels that tug of normalcy—even as he lumbers about his brownstone, hovering somewhere between 500-600 pounds, he imagines writing a confessional to expose his true state of living. “My house has grown so familiar to me that I don’t see it . . . I roam from room to room, a ghost, a large redfaced ghost.” He has devolved so far that he spooks himself, even as he considers his house a “cocoon”. Misanthropy isn’t something you grow out of. It’s something that simmers over many years, something that becomes as natural to you as a second skin. And it takes an extreme event—an impending visit from the child of a long-lost crush—to shake Arthur into imagining a different way of life.

Borrowing a page from Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog (in which an awkward but brilliant old lady meets a troubled yet promising child),Moore weaves Arthur’s narrative into that of a lonely teenage boy named Kel. Kel is the troubled yet athletically gifted son of Charlene Keller, one of Arthur’s former students and a pen-pal whom he has long held as a romantic ideal (though he remains unaware of her personal demons). Kel suffers from no illusions about his mother—he sees her as a full-blown alcoholic, and one who may jeopardize his promising future as a top-recruit baseball player from his elite private high school in Pells’ Landing. But when Kel comes home to their house in Yonkers to find a note taped to her bedroom door—“Dear Kel, Do not come in. Call police. Love, Mom”—his life and its carefully managed tower of secrets begin to crumble apart.

Liz Moore

Charlene’s charms, and any previous stability that may have come with them, are never fully illuminated to the reader, either through Kel’s recollections of her or through Arthur’s numerous letters. One has to wonder why Moore would make such an inscrutable character the catalyst for so much turmoil—we don’t know why Arthur loves her, beyond a bland sense of sympathy. And while the reader immediately feels the weight of Kel’s secret home catastrophe, which he desperately tries to mask, he seems to have a legitimate support system of friends and potential girlfriends to keep him afloat. Even his worst moment—a less-than-flawless tryout for the major leagues—is buoyed by a sense of desperate optimism: he almost tackles the scout with his pleas. “You have to give me another chance. You have to let me show you—in the spring. I’m so much better in the spring.” Only the dilemma of Arthur’s housekeeper—the sweet, feisty, and pregnant Yolanda—is legitimately bottomless, and even then, Arthur seems to placate it too quickly with a peanut butter sandwich and a gallon of milk.

It may seem ridiculous to fault a novel for being too balanced, well-structured, or measured out in its moments of tragedy and triumph. Yet Moore’s confident tone manages to undermine the tragedies that her characters are experiencing. Rather than feeling intimately drawn to Arthur and Kel as they struggle with enormous challenges, their evolution is so clearly mid-second act that we can already anticipate the rock-bottom and redemptive arc just around the corner. Even those characters meant to throw Arthur and Kel off-course—especially Yolanda and her zest for life, a manic pixie dream girl with an impending due date—feel more like staged and carefully inserted comic relief. And on the point of truly hitting rock bottom—well, they never seem to do so. Perhaps for Moore’s fear that if she lets them fall too far, they’ll never be able to crawl back up again. But I can’t blame her—if ever an author cared more deeply about her characters than Liz Moore, I haven’t found her yet. She is a profoundly compassionate writer, and in these two unlikely heroes, she gives us people worth rooting for.

Ultimately, the question of Heft’s…well, heft . . . depends on how deep you want your tragedy to go. If you’re craving a portrait of addiction at its lowest, most frightening state, then you can find more depraved portraits of what chemical or culinary dependency look like. But if you want to hold off, keep the horrors at a distance, and instead harbor desires for truly deserved happy endings, then you will relish every page of Moore’s neatly and sharply drawn prose.

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What a collection! Marianne Boruch’s The Book of Hours is the work of a grown-up, full of gravity and understanding. These poems are sharp reflections, half caught before they’re gone. The words don’t always line up in sentences with conventional meanings, but at the same time, you know what Boruch is getting at, and her insights are worth the attention.

I’ll write a poem down whole–these are impossible to subdivide and get at the sense of them. Perhaps that’s high enough praise of a poet? She’s making things whole and smooth; chopping one up is like slicing into a raw egg.

Take a look at this one, called “To live in the bird guide, the yellowthroat’s”

To live in the bird guide, the yellowthroat’s
down thicket and hedgerow, like any
storybook would have it. And maybe his
witchety witchety witchety is love my life!

Times three. It could be steely: how dare you
and what do you know of migration
and ice. It’s the edge, prime happenstance
between woods and field, most ordinary

tangle of vine into brush. But his new
pause before each overdrive triplet
means some weather’s coming, weather
said secret, with a spike through it.

No. I’m bad weather closing in,
his silence tripped by my noise, my shade.
four seconds of threat. He’s at it again,
his fate to say nothing he says.

Like Wallace Stevens and his “13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” this poem rolls around the yellowthroat, and you see why I couldn’t leave off any lines and still make any kind of point about it—as her phrases leave us off balance and looking around corners, “it’s the edge, prime happenstance/between woods and field, most ordinary” we wheel around the stand-off between the yellowthroat and the person—is it right to watch a bird survive for an aesthetic delight? The person’s shadow frightens the bird, even as she loves the bird’s life—and then, in the last line, a reminder how opaque the bird’s meanings and intentions are to the human mind.

Another poem, “In the crosshairs of mystery, they” juxtaposes the viscerally of death—one’s own personal death—beside the conventional phrases, the religion and the hospital IV.

Here it is, complete:

In the crosshairs of mystery, they
say to say: you can let go now (mother,
father, fill-in-the-blank). I know you’re only
holding on for us. Imagine. But imagine

the body. Imagine only half scenes and flashes,
decades of nothing between. You’re eighty,
in a diaper, everyone too nice, words
fast, too faint, making over the pretty flowers.

How many IVs? How much oxygen?
Our sitting there, our staring—she did let go of that,
the room, the cheap chairs, let go of Mondays, the guy
bringing the host to her from Mass, gravely aware

of his part in the drama, then someone else
entirely when no, she turned away.
Later, how to find her? I tried blurting out.
I tried letting go of the sentence, midsentence.

The poems jump into the air, twists around and land somewhere five feet away, you can see how impossible it would be to quote a line or two for purposes of review. These poems are sophisticated, mature works. I hope, in writing about them, that I don’t give the false impression that I’ve got to the bottom of what they have to offer. They’re often about the strange, complex and imperfect mapping of nature—human and wild—onto our 21st century lives. The nature Boruch has in her crosshairs; sometimes it’s the yellowthroat’s witchety witchety witchety, and sometimes it’s our own mystery.

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My kingdom for Dora Malech’s lexical agility! Say So is the second collection from this pedigreed poet, and it swings on elephant wings. By that I mean Malech manages to make nimble meaning out of our current crop of clichés by a variety of methods, whether that means mashing up figures of speech:

If I were an operation, I’d be fly by night
and very bloody. …
— “Face For Radio”

or applying a devastating twist to an aphorism:

The way to a man’s heart is through his ribcage.
— “Goodbye, I Love You”

or creating a slightly new aphorism that seems truer the more you think about it:

…Best
left unsaid: Oops. …
— “Note to So Sorry for Self

In our everyday language — which is so often blundering, clunky and obfuscatory — Malech finds, in her way, as much room for rejoicing as Whitman did. While the invocation of Whitman isn’t exactly right — Malech is more of a miniaturist (but then, next to Walt, isn’t everyone?), there is something about Malech’s reveling in the American demotic that is bound to draw comparisons to Walt (at least one, anyway), especially to his exuberance. Because Say So is exuberant, if subtler and more difficult than Leaves of Grass. Where Whitman’s lines are cataracts down cliffsides, Malech’s are levers in Rube Goldberg machines, each line activating the next one as the poem careens toward its end, one step ahead of the entire contraption’s collapse:

K.O. to my O.T. and bait to my switch, I crown
you one-trick pony to my one-horse town,
…
…Let me begin by saying if he hollers,
end with goes the weasel. In between,
cream filling. Get over it, meaning, the moon. …
…
My fruit bat, my gewgaw. You had me at no duh.
— From “Love Poem”

There is no solid footing here. Taking a tentative step onto “if he hollers,” we suddenly find ourselves at the other end of a different children’s rhyme, “goes the weasel”. As the line breaks, Malech seems to promise an explanation of how we got from “hollers” to “weasel” by telling us what came “[i]n between…”. Instead, we get “cream filling” — a figurative pie in the face.

That bit of prosodic slapstick is a Malech hallmark. She is often mordantly funny, as in this deadpan opening to a poem called “Inventing the Body”: “The lungs were my idea./Shins, his./Breasts, mine, though he agreed.” If I seem to be surveying Say So’s surfaces while dancing around the question of what these poems are about, well, I would argue (somewhat conveniently) that it’s unavoidable. For me, these poems are about unintentional association, the ways our minds wander even when — especially when? — they’re trying to wrap themselves around a given idea. These poems explore the mind’s language leaks, its mission creep, by enacting them.

Earlier this year, Malech told “Bookworm” host Michael Silverblatt “Uh oh” hugs ‘ha ha’ uncomfortably close,” which is the pithiest explication of the double-sided nature of comedy I’ve ever heard.

Malech’s playfulness with language extends past the aural, as her jokes and near-miss puns can also often be visual, so much so that you can sometimes almost mistake them for typos.
For instance:

For his sake I steered clear or flicker,
singed the noodles, sang for supper —
— From “Relatively Long Arms”

or:

Now solve for x where mph is speed and oomph is impact
— From “Them’s Fighting Words”

or:

Here lies the sigh begun nine lines ago.
— From “Flight, Fight Or”

The title of this last poem is one of four which seem to be from Malech’s imaginary index of clichés, which includes “Forever Hold Your Peace, Speak Now Or”, “Break, Make Or”, and “Go, Touch And”.

Say So also includes a group of prose poems which, for my money, are not as strong as her more whimsical, rollicking, rickety lyrics. (Further disclosure: I once worked at ReDivider, the Emerson College-based journal in which two of the poems Malech collects here first appeared. However, as Nonfiction Editor I had no input into the poetry content.)

That’s not to say the prose poems aren’t often enjoyable. In fact, they contain some of Malech’s shiniest gems, such as “Past tense is too easy, turns tale vestigial only.” or the haunting “Yes, I cross my legs and bolt my door, read boys/girls as boys slash girls.” Those lines are from “Canzone: How To” and the volume-ending, really excellent “Body Language.” In other words, I would not want to have missed the prose poems in this book, I am just less likely to return to them.

Because this is a book to be returned to — to be sampled and enjoyed and mulled over. For all my enthusiasm for Malech’s magnificent wordplay, it can become overwhelming in one sitting, as you feel yourself pummeled by double- and triple-entendres.

“The words too whoseoever,” Beckett wrote in his late work Worstward Ho!. “What room for worse! How almost true they sometimes ring!” At her best, Malech reinvigorates some of those worn out words and idioms, making them ring just a little truer. In the process, she reminds us, in her words, of “[t]he privilege of language,/the privy and the ledge.”

Read “Thousands are gathered outside the interior ministry,” a Rumpus Original Poem by Dora Malech.

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Lawrence Weschler shrinks the world. By demonstrating how small but highly significant pieces of it are linked across time, space, perception, experience, and language, he brings those pieces together so lucidly that you feel a brief, optimistic sensation that any such mystery of existence could potentially be so illuminated.

In this spirit, his new collection of old essays is no mere chronological hodgepodge, no mercenary recycling. Rather, the pieces are curated—grouped and ordered—to evoke the sorts of connections that the essays themselves are about. “Adventures in the Narrative,” reads the subtitle, and our fearless guide Weschler says or implies “bear with me here” on several occasions. You do, willingly. Why? How does he make these pieces, which are often cerebral and maddeningly, exquisitely detailed, so damn compelling?

Let me describe the book and perhaps it will become obvious. It opens with the title piece, “Uncanny Valley,” on the difficulty—near-impossibility, in fact—of creating a convincing digitally-animated human face. Apparently, we will feel rising empathy with a creature, a robot, for example, or Shrek, that is human-like, the more human-like it becomes, until a critical juncture around the point of 95% resemblance, after which that little bit that is not quite human becomes monstrous, “… no longer, that is, an incredibly lifelike machine but rather a human being with something inexplicably wrong.” The term “Uncanny Valley” refers to that dropoff, that gulf, which all the technological, mathematical and whimsical skills of Hollywood and Silicon Valley have failed to bridge.

Weschler quotes an essay by Jean-Paul Sartre on the face and what it does: “… now the eyes are becoming a look… they are not fastened in his head, serene like agate marbles. They are being created at each moment by what they look at.” Weschler continues on to Sartre’s conclusion, a quote he brings back several pieces later, in quite a different context: “… to be a visible transcendence is the meaning of a face.”

“’Being a visible transcendence’ is,” says Weschler, “Sartre’s way of saying (and at the same time, granted, emphatically not saying), having or expressing or being a soul. And try animating that!”

All the pieces take this intimate tone, including asides, digressions, even setbacks: Weschler’s own narrative of discovery. It’s as though he gives us his eyes, for this short, precious time, his mind, “being created at each moment by what they look at.”

When the Sartre quote comes back, it’s in an essay from one of the center sections of the book, the darkest, “Some Probes into the Terrain of Human Rights.” The piece, “Gazing Back: The Disappeared,” concerns an art exhibit memorializing the “disappeared” of Argentina’s Dirty War. The exhibit is full of faces, but it is the absent, the unseen, that the viewer most notices. The Sartre quote is transformed here: no longer a philosophical or aesthetic goal on the other side of Uncanny Valley, but an emotional one across an ethical gulf. At its precipice is the gaze “interrupted, cut short.” And beyond the gaze: Weschler goes on to discuss loss and redemption, invoking French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty and American poet W. S. Merwin—not building an argument, as such, but a densely layered thought sandwich, to be digested slowly.

Lawrence Weschler

And so goes the book. Next is “Four Easy Pieces,” a section devoted to a few unexpected encounters with art. The first another face-piece, “On Coming Face-to-Face With Myself,” in which Weschler unexpectedly meets up with a Hockney portrait of “mein very selbst,” as he puts it, in the home of an art dealer, and is at pains to describe the peculiar embarrassment he feels at seeing his own face living in this stranger’s home.

Several of the essays turn on such coincidences and the realizations they provoke, or “convergences,” as Weschler calls them, one of his pet topics. An example: Weschler is sitting on a train perusing a journal he likes and he happens to see a word, “Walloons” that reminds him of a joke he likes and then sees “ANC” which reminds him of where he first heard it, and then sees the words “There’s one a journalist told me…” This is a poem by Robert Pinsky about the joke, which Weschler told him once upon a time. Uncanny. This story is footnoted: it happened again. Weschler stumbled on a Billy Collins poem in which “a bearded man with a colorful tie” tells a joke. Weschler is wearing the same tie even as he finds the poem. “Uncanny, too, the way that, just like Pinsky, Collins couched the joke in what became a meditation on death, and an exceptionally moving one at that. But I guess the lesson of the whole story for me is that I really have to stop telling jokes to poets.”

The questions of geography and death accompany us into the section on human rights. The longest piece here narrates the proceedings of the Rome Conference that led to the formation of the International Criminal Court. While as zingily told as all the others, it is also the densest and the longest, the only one where I felt that some of the details were not perhaps as self-evidently compelling as the overall thrust of the story.

There are words Weschler favors and uses across subjects—luminous, pullulating—words which jump out only because the essays have been collected. This is not linguistic laziness. Rather, the words themselves start to become convergences. They are of a piece with Weschler’s way of seeing the world.  James Wood says it best, talking about similar examples in Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy: “Such things are rarely examples of haste and more often proof that a style has achieved self-consistency. And that a kind of Platonic ideal has been reached—these are the best, and therefore unsurpassable words, for these subjects.”

“Five Further Adventures in the Narrative,” the concluding section, for all the wonder of the others, was my favorite. While the collection demonstrates throughout the elastic limits of narrative, here Weschler enters the vexing territory of the “how.” These are intensely absorbing stories of artistic process, bound together by Weschler ‘s preoccupation with “…the workings of grace. You work and you work and you work, and then it is as though whatever happens, it happens by itself. It never would have happened without all that prior work, that preparation, but that prior work did not make it happen.”

Given Weschler’s interest in revelation, in convergence, in the possibility that jokes have a life almost independent of their origins or vehicles, it’s not surprising that the book’s concluding words invoke some divine spirit: “God invented Man, the wise man says, because he loved stories. And maybe the other way around: Man invented God for the same reason. Or maybe Narrative invented both of us… Hallelujah. Amen.”

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In the poem “Phil–,” the speaker warns of the dangers of “focus[ing] on one thing / and mak[ing] it stand for every thing,” which is a good piece of advice for any reader of One Sleeps The Other Doesn’t, Jacqueline Waters long-awaited second book of poetry. The book, which is just over 100 pages long, consists of 14 poems–not including the poems-within-poem that appear in “Hello Due to Confusion: A Guard: II.” And while many of the poems are long, discursive, and paratactic, the book resists being easily summed up or captured in a brief blurb.

The poems often read as an extended conversation with one’s self, or perhaps with an other. In “Garden of Eden a College,” which was originally published as a chapbook from A Rest Press, the speaker claims, “my affairs / are just my questions,” and later in the poem a voice, perhaps the speaker’s inner-editor, parenthetically says, “These are all very good questions but stop / asking them.” And so there is a visible struggle in these poems–the reader gets to see the speaker thinking through ideas, expressing her doubts, and all the mess and contradictions that includes.

This is especially the case in “Garden of Eden a College,” where two characters, Jacqueline and Lampwick, appear and seem to be in a constant back-and-forth, tug-of-war, question-and-answer. Lampwick exists in opposition to Jacqueline and interrogates her. However, a strange slippage occurs in the back-and-forth and it can become unclear who is speaking. For example, “Lampwick this is not what you are looking for / or it is and you are totally embarrassed,” most likely should be read as Jacqueline addressing Lampwick; however, after so many of these exchanges and the strange way the characters constantly address each other by name, it is easy to begin reading it as one might a play, “Lampwick[:] [T]his is not…” Ultimately, it doesn’t seem to matter who is responsible for saying what, as the struggle between the two characters could easily be a struggle within a single, splintered self. This sort of shift in voice, or talking to or questioning one’s self, works well at the close of another long poem, “The Saw That Talked”:

How I can frame it aw I don’t know
cut-throat
Not that I feel that way
but that it appeals to me
to what
to feel that way

The “to what” in the penultimate line–the stutter, or hesitation, or interrupting voice–adds an interesting layer to the poem. Instead of the poem as monologue, we have the poem as dialogue.

Like “Garden of Eden a College” and “The Saw That Talked,” the poems throughout the collection easily lend themselves to multiple readings. The overall lack of punctuation can draw into question where one statement ends and a new one begins, and that is one of the pleasures of these poems. Another pleasure comes in the strangeness and playfulness in language, beginning with the weirdly wonderful enjambment of the book’s title. One poem is titled “Guard of an Eaten Collage: A Guard: I,” and the next poem is “The Garden of Eden a College.” “Garden of Eden” is preceded and followed by “guards,” which is explained in a fourth poem, “Somnambulism.” Written in two columns, “Somnambulism” reads like two separate pieces: one half reads like a performance piece that would fit alongside the imaginative blueprints for plays that appear in Jonathan Ball’s 2010 Coach House release, Clockfire; the other half reads as a straight-forward explanation for the poems that precede it:

I thought if my produc-
tions would not or could
not protect me, I could, at
the very least, protect my
productions. To protect
one production I imagined
especially vulnerable I pro-
duced other productions to
act as guards.

There are a number of lines that can be culled throughout the collection that speak to the act of writing itself, but if one were to draw too much attention to these statements, one would be in danger of focusing on one part and trying to make it represent the whole.

Throughout the book, the tone often comes across as flat or indifferent. In the opening poem, “A Ploy,” the speaker claims:

no emotion is pleasing!
each must be rejected
        replaced by an opposite
in turn rejected and replaced by yet another
strain of undifferentiated sentiment

There is also a sense of exhaustion: “Jackie I see / Lampwick I tire.” This exhaustion, or perhaps emotional remove, lends itself to wonderful descriptions that get at the strangeness of so many things people have accepted as normal in their lives. For example, “The Tax,” looks at relationships and the odd exchange of saying “I love you,” which “Begets an I LOVE YOU back, or it falters / As it its harbor / Fails to find.” And later, the poem looks at the structure of relationships:

…they are structures
These arrangements: living together
Sleeping alongside, staying awake while the other one sleeps. You have
To care! Be the sun
shining through a watery cloud, or the cloud
Creased to a white veil
Since where you believe you have power you don’t
And where you do you refuse to wield it

In the opening poem, “A Ploy,” “you” are instructed to reject your emotions until “you find your ways / have rearranged you slightly.” Although this rearrangement is not as extreme as Rimbaud’s idea of a complete derangement of the senses, Jacqueline Waters is definitely onto something here. This slight rearrangement results in unique descriptions and a worldview that gleans from a wide range of sources–from Jack Lemmon, to Apollinaire, to Linda Napolitano’s UFO abduction–however, the biggest source seems to be Waters own inner-self. This is an intelligent and well-crafted poetry that demands multiple readings. And it is a voice–perhaps a bit apprehensive and damaged by experience–that seems willing to express it all, even the ugly and cruel.

Read “Scissor Half,” a Rumpus Original Poem by Jacqueline Waters.

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