Category Archives: Book Reviews

EPSPSP XVI: Adam Robinson

Posted by on June 30, 2011 No comments

Adam Robinson and Other Poems (Narrow House, 2010)

I’ve read Adam Robinson and Other Poems more than twice: some of the poems when they appeared in journals, the collection as a pdf, the collection printed out, etc. I read his poem about a bus (“I’m going to have sex with these people”) while riding a bus. The introduction calls the poems “disenchantingly meta” but I’d leave off the “disenchantingly” part. Take the poem “Skip This Poem for the Next One” for instance. It contains intertextual references to other poems in the book such as “Hey go give ‘Brahms’ another shot/Maybe there is more to it well no promises.” The “well no promises” is an example of a deftness that appears throughout the collection, a colloquial, tongue-in-cheek (maybe even breathless) quality that is nevertheless honed.

Adam Robinson… is very funny. Adam Robinson gets away with things that would seem difficult to do well, such as inserting a quote from David Orr at the New York Times. The quote describes the “trendiest contemporary style, which relies heavily on disconnected phrases, abrupt syntactical shifts, attention-begging titles, quirky diction…two scoops of John Ashbery and a sprinkling of Gertrude Stein.” By incorporating such a potentially undermining quote, the quote itself becomes subverted, conscripted for the poem’s purpose. And Adam Robinson reminds me more of Kenneth Koch than Ashbery. There is a humor and exuberance that dazzles, or that engages long enough to gut-punch you. “Curtis Ebbesmeyer, Leading Authority on Flotsam” begins with the quasi-comedic routine “What’s up with bottled water man” and presents a series of absurd, humorous images, before ending with

“You see what I’m saying broham
What’s the deal with bottled water
Sometimes as a whole we’re smart
And sometimes as a whole

We’re going to die in four years”

EPSPSP XV: Ben Mirov

Posted by on June 30, 2011 No comments

Ghost Machine (Caketrain, 2010)

Reading Ben Mirov’s Ghost Machine, I was conscious of at least two things: the techniques employed in the poems and the thoughts/feelings/reactions they (the poems) generated. It’s difficult to say whether the poems in this collection would do anything to anyone’s heart, but thankfully the heart is just meat. I’m not suggesting that Mirov agrees with this assertion.

Communication is distorted in Ghost Machine or it fails completely. The speaker “can only misquote what the voice tries to say,” “can’t tell the portal what’s on my mind,” and “the best way to proceed is to disconnect.” The speaker “wakes up in a construct.” The “construct” complements mentions of electronics (“the brainwork’s shadowy circuits,” “a TV flickers in my heart”) and references to email and texting that actually seem natural rather than inserted for the sake of gimmickry.

Dreams also figure prominently, and dreamlike constructions. One of my favorite lines happens to be quoted on the back cover: “I plan to be another language in the body of a deer.” The line’s origin, “Sleepless Night Ghost,” is exceptionally strong, as are the sources of other lines that excite out of context and provide texture to Ghost Machine’s creations. Dreams are announced as such, or are suggested, as when “she puts her face inside a bed,” “I walk through a whale carcass,” “I unweave a braid that grows from my stomach,” and “My penis looks at a table.” I don’t require plausibility from every line (or from any line, really), though those who do will hopefully find consolation in the invention and linguistic provocation of “can cities grow in your stomach?” or “I talk to a face inside the breeze” or “some islands turn grayish and blink.”

In the poem “Kid Dream Title,” a “huge brain controls the waterfall.” A brain is at work behind Ghost Machine, as is a set of observant eyes.

EPSPSP XIV: Ayane Kawata

Posted by on June 28, 2011 No comments

Time of Sky & Castles in the Air (trans. Sawako Nakayasu, Litmus Press, 2010)

After reading Time Of Sky & Castles In The Air I couldn’t help but feel thankful for Litmus Press and Sawako Nakayasu. Only in the afterword do you learn that because Kawata has been deliberately excluded from the limelight, she has no interest in her poetry being translated and had no interaction with this translation other than giving her permission. This makes for an interesting first translation of both books into English, and, since I know absolutely no Japanese, one I needed to take at face value. With that said, these poems read amazingly well in English, and some of the syntactical structures that Kawata has been praised for in her native language are clearly rendered here.

This book is actually a collection of two of Kawata’s books, published 22 years apart (Time of Sky in 1969, Castles in the Air in 1991). The only reason for their being put together appears to be their incongruity to the rest of Kawata’s work. Her other poetry is far more narrative, unlike these, her first book and her dream journal.

Time of Sky is comprised of 90 very short poems (2 per page) dense with abstract imagery and incongruous syntactical arrangements. The poems take on an aphoristic quality—eventually the rhythms feel as if you’re quickly tearing pages out of self-help calendars, the only problem being that instead of quotes from Dr. Feelgood you get stunning and sometimes terrifying pleas, like “O whip/Beating its wings toward the invisible sky/while dragging out that final-hour scream.” Read more »

EPSPSP XIII: Michael Bernstein

Posted by on June 28, 2011 No comments

Nanostars (Greying Ghost, 2010)

Opening anything from Greying Ghost is like getting a 7” from some DIY punk label, pouring onto the counter (table, lap, control board) buttons, yellowed fairy-tale playing cards, collected scraps of comics, whatever other flotsam they choose to include alongside poetry pamphlets from the GG Free Pamphlet Series, and of course the chapbook you bought. Sifting through the contents, I felt like I’d bought a Lifetime record from Jade Tree and spilling out with it was an Owls patch, a Trial by Fire button, and a single from Kid Dynamite.

That’s all to say that you might accidentally toss aside Michael Bernstein’s Nanostars (like I initially did) while searching for it. This tiny hand-made bad boy runs probably under a hundred words divided into 14 sections/stanzas/units. Each contains a word or phrase in the corners of the stanza with a fifth word or phrase in the middle. The whole business feels like erasure poetry, but I’d like to think of it more as what you see after getting punched out, or maybe tossing a bunch of books into a high-speed Tilt-a-Whirl and reading the words that get puked up on the back wall. Here’s one from the middle of the book that is as indicative of the style as the rest:

bruises                                                              instress
                             boom for days
catwalk                                                             heaving

Read more »

EPSPSP XII: Brad Liening

Posted by on June 22, 2011 No comments

Ghosts and Doppelgangers (Lowbrow Press, 2011)

With Twitter, the news-feed, the rolling marquee news channel techniques, ADHD composition of television programming, it is hard to distinguish, most of the time, whether we are over-stimulated or bored. And if we aren’t bored, is it because we’re so bored that we don’t realize that we’re bored? Ghosts and Doppelgangers by Brad Liening indicates that this conundrum is comprised of all wholly true statements, the design of a fierce clusterfuck.

To explore the terms of this situation, he creates celebrity personas to satirize both the exciting and banal. Whether he is Lil Brad getting his sexy on, the President of the World with Mickey Mouse as his Secretary of Defense, or Brad Liening (the man, the legend—before he became ‘Lil Brad’), his tone cannot be rivaled. There is something inherently likeable about it, which I think is precisely the point. Many of the poems take on a listing quality, items to be checked off upon completion in the droll life of whichever chosen character. Even in his most megalomaniacal moments, we are immersed and deeper still:

My brain?
Totes made of stars.
When I die, exactly how foxy
will I look?
Answer: so foxy.

Read more »

EPSPSP XI: Daniela Olszewska

Posted by on June 22, 2011 1 comment

Halfsteps + Cloudfang (Plumberries Press, 2011)

You know what they say: life is a cycle, life goes by so fast, life is what you make of it, et cetera et cetera. Contingent with these clichés, life can feel like a lackluster merry-go-round enclosed by a collapsible gate with a toothless carnie pulling all the levers. It seems paradoxical, given its wild nature, but Daniela Olszewska’s Halfsteps + Cloudfang is here to make out the images for you, to describe the experiences that move too fast to distinguish or put your hands on from high up on your plastic pony.

Each poem is compressed with punchy sonic pleasures: “she made them / ground-dumb // with leg-lag / + scratch-patch”; “all pearled / by proxy” and her games with syntax add surprise to the already surprising: “especially unfortunate / is just who exactly / you think you are during / the low temperature / portion of the program” and “bracelets made / of black pot // + blacker kettle / parts stolen special.” Each break leads deeper into an unsuspecting image and a more exciting way of telling. This poetic move is the building blocks to a voice whose power swells throughout. It is not annoying or uncomfortably confrontational, but statements are always made with the kind of sass that is authoritative and unwilling to bend. Lines like: “I don’t think we are forever / yet, don’t go waiting for me / to start unslinging my insides / any time even close to soon” are embarrassing for whoever the direct address is intended for, as if to say “Duh, don’t make me repeat myself.”
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EPSPSP X: Joshua Harmon

Posted by on June 20, 2011 No comments

Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie (University of Akron Press, 2011)

The spleen of Poughkeepsie is not a reference to an internal organ that filters blood; spleen is commonly defined in a poetic sense as melancholic or of foul mood. In the case of a city anthropomorphized, spleen becomes the spirit of a place, which inhabits and affects more than an individual; the place’s experience with itself is both micro and macro, all the while self-reflective and “human.” Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie by Joshua Harmon is toying witth Charles Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris: prose-like poems attempting to capture the essence of the modern Parisian spirit and landscape, as contradictory as its attributes may be. Instead of Paris, Harmon choose Poughkeepsie: a small river-city situated alongside the Hudson River, the last stop on the Metro-North (the train connection to New York City), site of Vassar College and the early 90s murders committed by Kendall Francois.

At the risk of revealing my bias, I grew up no more than 10 minutes from Poughkeepsie and find its demeanor quite charming like an alcoholic boyfriend who picks bar fights every night but also cries during Sleepless in Seattle. I can attest to Harmon’s veracity in his description of the discordant and seemingly depreciated place, a place inclined “to build a life from happy accidents / of scrap metal and dumb luck’s dumber // purpose.” The way he captures the city thankfully avoids sentimentality or exaggeration all the while not allowing its lugubrious mood to be overlooked or underplayed. A poem in “Tableaux Poughkeepsiens” ends with a desperate question “as in, ‘Can we just get rid of / Poughkeepsie little by little?’ which I imagine is met with a morose answer, suggestive of a city in a revolt against itself.
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EPSPSP IX: Justin Marks

Posted by on June 20, 2011 No comments

Voir Dire (Rope-a-Dope, 2009)

Voir Dire in its very title implies that the poem swears to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. What happens, though, when the truth is proven unstable in the exact moment its truth is realized? Justin Marks writes to quell the anxiety that stems from the revelation that truth is subjective, time is fluid, and this is all inexplicable and beyond our control.

The central preoccupation of Voir Dire is the state of flux created by the movement of time. The unpredictability and unruliness of it can be exciting: “It’s an adventure / inside my body right now, / not knowing what will happen,” while other times the inability to maintain authority over his own life is recognized as a nuisance: “I wish sleep / was a switch I could simply throw. / Sobriety and intoxication as well.” Time is represented throughout the poem in many ways: generational distinctions, lineage, the transition from child to parent. Marks’ awareness never wanes although his grasp on the truth (and, most notably, how he understands himself) is constantly shifting.

The poem progresses with vivaciousness and whimsy while he explores the idea of transience. Potential energy builds in the enjambment and imagery, much like a flame just about to rise off a match from the friction of a strike:

One of the more satisfactory
experiences of my life

was moshing so hard
I broke my retainers.
Twenty five years ago.
The pendulum and gears
in an antique clock still
keeping time.

Read more »

EPSPSP VIII: Eileen Myles

Posted by on June 15, 2011 No comments

Sorry, Tree (Wave Books, 2007)

Reading Eileen Myles’s Sorry, Tree feels almost like the kind of eavesdropping you can’t tear yourself away from no matter what level of overheard intimacy, names you don’t recognize, or partially explained situations. Myles doesn’t shy away from anything, writing with complete abandon about sex, moms, society, dog shit, the sounds of things. “Culture” is a poem that freely and honestly encapsulates the bent of Sorry, Tree. Its opening lines read, “It accepts all / marks & none / So I’ll just write / into it.” The poem goes on to explore what Myles experiences as ‘culture’: the plane rides, the friends, the sickness, the cities.

But she throws a wrench in, unadorned, no line or stanza break to warn you: “Okay I’m talking about an invisible / Culture. I wish I could help.” This nuanced vacillation in the poems keeps them interesting and dynamic.

Myles writes through desire. I got a sense of that before I came across maybe my favorite lines in the book in “For Jordana”:

I think writing
is desire
not a form
of it.
It’s feeling
into space,
tucked into
language
slipped
into time
opened,
felt.

Read more »

EPSPSP VII: Brett Foster

Posted by on June 15, 2011 No comments

The Garbage Eater (Triquarterly, 2011)

“The physical means nothing beneath / the small fear of dying, which fears / only unworthiness more than death.”

The closing stanza to the opening and titular poem of Brett Foster’s collection Garbage Eater ushers you into the book with an abstraction that earns its significance by acting itself out in poem after poem. Foster obsesses over the physical, describing each element of a scene in vivid detail. Death inches its way in, and those details become markers for deeper contemplation—similar to what the garbage eater from the title poem adheres to in a daily life of complete material sacrifice. The subject of worthiness or unworthiness permeates the poems and connects the past and the present, questioning everything.

All are affected and entrenched in a present tense that can trace its roots to places and people and experiences so far removed yet still evident under the busy surface of reality. Through Foster’s eyes the scenes of his life—set in Boston, California, New York City, and other recognizable places—are puzzles to be taken apart and reassembled, attention paid with equal weight to the individual pieces themselves and their place in the big picture. A homeless person with a sign asking for prayer provokes a two-page treatise on spirituality and the politics of charitable giving. Watching flies in an Olive Garden becomes a claustrophobic obsession tied to the strangeness of the faux-Italian surroundings and a piece of complimentary cheesecake. Read more »