Each Crumbling House (Melody S. Gee)

So this is something new. As you might know already, up until my graduation this past May, I was the Poetry Editor for the Southern California Review, USC's graduate literary magazine. One of the poets who I chose to be in the last issue, Melody S. Gee, just sent the review a copy of her first book! Two of the poems we selected for SCR are included in the book, and she even went so far as to thank us in the back. Well, she thanks a lot of people, but this is still a big deal for SCR, DG, and myself personally. This isn't so much a review as a shout out to an emerging poet with an amazing debut collection.

Synopsis

Melody is a first-generation Asian American struggling to find her place in the mix of opposing cultures that is her life. Her first book, Each Crumbling House, is a collection of poems combining all of her feelings towards dealing with what is essentially a life in transition. Many of the poems are written through the lens of Chinese immigrants either heading off to an unknown land or newly arrived in the United States. She depicts beautifully their isolation among those whom they travel or work with. She also writes lovely poems about her own experiences, though. In the poem "In Translation," Gee tackles the issue of not always being able to properly communicate with her own mother. There isn't always a direct connotative match in Chinese for the words she would normally use in English.

I am reading out loud at the table
where she has left ripe
ancestor offerings, reading slowly
so she will hear the texture of desire

that climbs my throat,
which I can only translate as selfish,
to want, or missing. Always
a word away from the word I need.

In "Giving" she addresses her issues with her family's practice of always providing food for their ancestors before a meal, even if it means going hungry. Gee's writing is intensely visual, but also evocative and emotionally clear. It's an excellent first attempt from a writer who I can only imagine will continue to produce beautiful work well into the future.

Rating

Each Crumbling House
by Melody S. Gee

As always, there is no real way to quantify merit in poetry. I will say this, though: I am extremely picky. The "reject" pile always towered over the acceptance pile at our SCR meetings, but Melody managed to get not just one but two poems past me (and almost a third, if I remember correctly). It's not always easy to put into words the reasons why certain poets or poems reach a person. Though it seems like Melody's work is the type that is not meant to be analyzed, anyway, but quietly accepted and understood. She reaches far enough into herself that she is able to find each one of us as well. I've never experienced the horror of having to leave my family to travel thousands of miles across the ocean and start a new life from scratch, but Each Crumbling House proves that it isn't always necessary to experience the same traumas in order to connect with someone on the most basic human levels. Very well done.

Chronic (D.A. Powell)

This year's Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award was given to D.A. Powell, a professor at the University of San Francisco, after the publication of his most recent book, Chronic. The award is a $100,000 prize given annually to an emerging poet with an established body of work who hasn't yet received much fame or success. Yes, I said $100,000. 1 and then five 0's. One hundred thousand dollars. For writing poetry. Clearly I had to check this guy out. I met him briefly at the AWP conference in Denver a couple weeks ago, and he passed along a copy of Chronic for me to review. Let's see if the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award winner can hold up to my personal standards.

Synopsis

I'm gonna level with you here: I have never been so emphatically unsure of my own feelings regarding any piece of writing as I am with this book. There is so much I absolutely love about this man's writing, and so much more than I just cannot stand. There was never an "eh" moment. To me, each poem was either genius or overdramatic; profound or cliché; heartfelt or hokey. I was completely drawn in by 90% of his titles (for example: "{not the musical:] south pacific," "shut the fuck up and drink your gin and tonic," "clown burial in winter," and "scenes from the trip we didn't take to the antarctic"), but was often let down by the poems themselves. But then I would turn the page and find a serious gem like "crematorium at sierra view cemetery next to the high school," which reads as follows:

impoverished graveyard: mangy green triangle where two freeways form a crotch

twenty yards from the gym and the AG shop: see, it's morty's mom's funeral today
there's morty in a tie, his dad's head rocking: the pendulum of a clock tsk-tsks

holes just the size of flowerbeds claim sleek boxes. marry me, you ruined seed

all semester they open and gnash their yellow teeth: there goes mike, we say—
his hearse lumbering through the iron gate—remember: he used to drive so fast

and then that smokestack poking its head above the surrounding grass

so that others—ever mindful of space, perhaps—could singe and shrivel on oven racks
blazing into eggshell-colored ash collected in old penny jars and in paper sacks

there goes dusty [pointing at the belching puffs that tumbled over the valley]

between PE and molecular biology the smoke you'd sneak: half tobacco, half human
white alloy of the usual carcinogens and damon pettibone's granny. or a bit of mike

that chest that—before it caved against the steering wheel—felt strong and sinewy***

I think that's a fantastic poem. It's only on page 8, so even though by then I was already a little conflicted, I was a bit more enthusiastic moving forward from that point.

But Brian, why did you dislike the other poems so much? Well, I'm glad you asked. D.A. Powell is known to be somewhat experimental in his writing, and not experimental in a funky Salvador Dali kinda way, but experimental in an I-don't-care-much-for-the-rules-of-this-language kinda way. The biggest evidence of this, and the one I had the most trouble getting past, was his strange use of enjambment and end-stops. Powell doesn't pay much attention to the usual laws of punctuation or capitalization, and that's fine. I would never fault a poet for something like that, it's petty and unnecessary. He uses punctuation when and where he sees fit. No problem. However, the particular way in which Powell chooses to utilize punctuation creates a situation where very few lines end in the symbols themselves. This can be very confusing, as it tends to lead the reader towards assuming that each line is enjambed, when in fact they are end-stopped. Add to this the fact that, once the reader has gotten used to assuming each line is end-stopped, Powell begins to toss in enjambed lines, and the confusion really starts to mount. I know it may seem like a small, nit-picky thing, but it actually broke up the flow of many of the poems in ways that I thought were disruptive rather than generated for effect.

Still, though, I couldn't just write the entire book off because I don't personally agree with the man's style choices. Chronic is nothing if not cohesive, and I thoroughly commend Powell for writing a book whose parts gel together so nicely. He breaks the poems into three sections—Initial C, Chronic, and Terminal C—that are easily managed and primarily well-constructed. While the entire book touches upon timeless subjects like death and illness, interspersed with contemporary references and language, the first section is somewhat lighter than the last section. I liked that continuity. The middle section, Chronic, is actually one long poem of the same name, a dream-like soliloquy that serves as a strong transition between the other two sections. Its first few lines:

were lifted over the valley, its steepling dustdevils
the redwinged blackbirds convened
vibrant arc their swift, their dive against the filmy, the finite air

the profession of absence, of being absented, a lifting skyward
then gone
the moment of flight: another resignation from the sweep of earth

jackrabbit, swallowtail, harlequin duck: believe in this refuge
vivid tips of oleander
white and red perimeters where no perimeter should be

While the last section of the book is heavier, as I mentioned, it's actually got some of my favorite poems from the collection. I especially like "confidence man," which opens with the lines: midway charmer, indiscriminately flexed his smile/a mask of liquor, the rowdy cowpoke. My favorite, though, is the final poem of the book, "corydon & alexis, redux," and its haunting final couplet: silly poet, silly man: thought I could master nature like a misguided preacher/as if banishing love is a fix. as if the stars go out when we shut our sleepy eyes.

Rating

Chronic
by D.A. Powell

After all that, I'm honestly still not sure how I feel about the book. It deserves to be read and experienced individually, as it is a book filled with somewhat experimental work that would likely garner different reactions from each reader. I'm curious to see how his other three books read—Tea, Lunch and Cocktails, for those of you playing along at home—and if they confound my senses as much as Chronic does. I mean, if nothing else, the guy just won a serious award with a serious cash prize attached, so he's got to be doing something right. My suggestion: check him out for yourself and let me know what you think. And, as always, keep reading, Genoshans!



***Many of the poems in Chronic have very long lines, so some of the line breaks presented here may not reflect the actual breaks in the book.

Words For Empty And Words For Full (Bob Hicok)

Poetry(!).

Synopsis

I know it's been a couple weeks since I've gotten a real review up, but Bob Hicok's new book, Words For Empty And Words For Full, has made it worth the wait. I first found Bob's work—one second: Bob, can I call you "Bob"? I've read so much of your poetry, I feel like I know you now. And it's more fun than calling you "Hicok"—where was I? Oh yeah, I first found Bob's work through Verse Daily, a great little site that posts a different poem/poet every single day. He hit me immediately. It's hard to explain, he's kinda got this "Hey, I'm a poet, I take my work seriously, but there's no reason I can't write about silly things seriously, or serious things sillily, or something" feel to his writing. Does that make sense? No? Here, take for example an excerpt from "In Michael Robins's class minus one," a poem from Bob's last book, This Clumsy Living. It begins with the line, At the desk where the boy sat, he sees the Chicago River, and follows that metaphor closely throughout the poem:

Have you written a poem for us? he asks the river,
and the river reads its poem,
and the other students tell the river
it sounds like a poem the boy would have written,
that they smell the boy's cigarettes
in the poem, they feel his teeth
biting the page.

That's how many of Bob's poems go. He introduces readers to a situation or an idea, and then leads them down a curious path, sometimes stopping to notice the people and things important to him, but more often driving onward towards an attempt at understanding. Understanding what, exactly, is often a mystery, but Bob's poems are always full of mystery.

Words For Empty And Words For Full starts off rather slowly, with few poems of any immediately apparent significance in the first quarter of the book. There are a handful of poems referencing serial killers and dubious motives, some more quirky than others, but it all seems rather innocuous. The book absolutely explodes, however, once that true mystery of the collection appears within "So I Know" on page 37. "So I Know" is the first in a compelling series of poems dealing the Virginia Tech massacre that took place three years ago today. Bob, a creative writing professor at Virginia Tech, was on campus at the time of the shootings and had close contact with many of those affected by the tragedy. "So I Know" kicks off the series beautifully, expressing well the mixed emotions that the poet experiences in the wake of such a gruesome event:

He put moisturizer on the morning he shot
thirty-three people. That stands out. The desire
to be soft. I could tell the guy from NPR
that's what I want, to be soft, or the guy
from the LA Times, or the guy from CNN who says
we should chat. Such a casual word, "chat."
I'm chatting to myself now. You did not
do enough, I write to myself, about the kid
who turned in writing about killing
a few buildings from where he killed.
With soft hands in Norris Hall killed.

Bob opens up to his readers, revealing candid thoughts about the tragedy as he attempts to cope with both loss and a level of survivor's guilt. Don't know why the kid didn't come after me,/I nearly failed him, the poet admits at the beginning of "Whimper." Eventually, though, he moves on. Or at least pretends to, by acknowledging that others have, most notably in "Terra incognita," where he writes:

And on the seventh day, as if someone said,
"May the healing from the refrain
'May the healing begin' begin," we have Frisbees,
exuberant grass and thighs
against spring air, the sound
of sanding wood in breathing hard
not far from Norris Hall with suddenly
a fence around it. "Life goes on" is also painful

to hear, to see in truth that we have to get back
to wondering if eight of us can fit in the car
and where's the goddamned pizza with three meats
for $11.95?

The rest of the book takes its own advice and moves on, a little sadder, perhaps, but no longer dealing directly with one specific tragedy. There are others, though. "First do no harm" begins vividly: While trying to extract a fly from a spiderweb,/I pulled one of its legs off. This quasi-amusing look at tragedy in general is one of the things that makes Bob Hicok's work so accessible. He writes poignantly about topics that other poets can only handle by being lofty and aloof. He has a colorfulness about his work that enables him to successfully link physics and his wife and flowers and vacations, without appearing scatterbrained. Most importantly, he speaks his mind. It just so happens that his mind is filled with the unseen connections that all things share. Words For Empty And Words For Full is no exception. All of these poems are connected, but not in such a way that they cannot be appreciated on their own. Bob Hicok is a master at his craft, and after reading his work, one can't help but feel like they've not only gotten closer to him, but closer to themselves as well.

Rating

Words For Empty And Words For Full
by Bob Hicok

You guys know the drill by now: there's no numerical rating for poetry. Everyone has different tastes. I happen to love Bob Hicok's work, but you might hate it, and that's fine. I highly recommend that you at least check out some of his work, though. This Clumsy Living is a great introduction to his work if you don't want to jump right in with this book, but really any of his poems can give you a clear example of his voice and tonality. Give him a try! I think you'll really enjoy his work. Until next week, keep reading, Genoshans!

Dearest Creature (Amy Gerstler)

It's been a while since the last poetry review here at the Daily Genoshan, and that one sucked, so I thought it was about time to try again. We need to read some good poetry around here, considering that, ya know, that's what I normally write anyway.

Synopsis

Dearest Creature is California poet Amy Gerstler's umpteen millionth book, but it's the first that I've read, so we're gonna pretend for now that those others don't exist. I wasn't entirely sure what to expect—the cover features a half-dozen plastic animal heads mounted to the walls of what looks like a doll's room—and I'm rarely satisfied when I read a poet's work for the first time, but I have to say Gerstler pleasantly surprised me. The book is broken into four parts, Refugee, Creaturely, Maidenly, and Elegy, and each has its own distinctive feel, which is nice. It's good when those kinds of things aren't entirely arbitrary. All of the sections also reach back to the title, though. Most are letters to or from someone, or conversations, or other forms of direct contact. This direct speaking quality brings the book together in ways that the contents of most of the poems never could. Compare the first few lines of "Moon Salutation," from the first section—

Even as I sleep in a ravine
on a mattress of dead grass,

bright jawbreaker,
I do salute you.

—to the opening of "Interview with a Dog," from the second section:

Q: Why on earth did you eat that ten-dollar bill? It can't have tasted nice.

A: Don't be gruff. Anything that falls on the floor is mine. Can I have a cookie now to change my mouth lining flavor? Can I? Can I?

The third section deals mostly with the feminine, as evidenced in poems like "At the Back of a Closet, Two Dresses Converse" and "On the Fatal Consequences of Going Home with the Wrong Man from the Chicago World's Fair, 1893," but each feel at home in the collection. Take for example these lines from "Mrs. Monster Pens Her Memoirs," which again uses the voice that, by this time in the book, the reader has either connected with completely or flatly disregarded (in which case, they probably aren't reading anymore anyway, so who cares?):

Here's a technical question.
Dare I write my fractured past
(squirrelly girlhood, ravenous
adolescence, late-emerging sober
matron graces) in first-person
singular when I'm fragmented
as an undone jigsaw puzzle?
Plural as a litter of kittens?

From here the poem goes on for several pages, detailing the life of this patchwork woman. Now, I don't usually like long poems. To be honest, I don't even really like medium poems. I'm very much a fan of short, concise poetry, but Gerstler keeps her content and word choice interesting enough to hold a reader's attention. I never found myself drifting off in the middle of a page, which says a lot about the quality of her writing.

The final section, Elegy, takes a turn for the slightly depressing, but manages to do so in the same humorous and direct tone that I'd come to enjoy from the first three sections. The poet never overloads us on sorrow, but instead finds smooth roads to slowly lead the reader to an underlying sadness. In "Elegy with Peonies" she opens by saying:

Peonies may indeed be the sluttiest
flowers. Sunk in their ruffles, high on
their own old-rose perfume, they're

all voluptuous appetite. Heavy-headed
billowy blooms in botanical drag,
they make showy hibiscus and

thick-pistilled lilies look like wallpaper
motifs from a more uptight era.

The poem continues on like this, discussing the tawdriness of peonies, for a while, but then abruptly changes to the news she's just received of a friend's suicide. As she thinks back on the man's life and the way he lived it, the reader begins to see a parallel between the departed and the peonies, until ultimately the poem ends with:

I hope the heaven you're in
is replete with heavy metal riffs, science quizzes,

bisexual angels, endless wildness of mind,
and fields of eternally peaking peonies.

It would have been very difficult to understand the peonies as they pertain to a summation of this man's life without first going into the fact that they "may indeed be the sluttiest / flowers." Gerstler handles the poem beautifully.

Rating

Dearest Creature
by Amy Gerstler

As I've mentioned before, I don't think it's right to rate poetry on any kind of numerical system. You either connect with it or you don't. Personally, I think Dearest Creature is a fantastic book that covers a lot of ground, but does so in a clear voice that brings the entire collection together. So far, in the last year, there have only been two poetry reviews, and the first one sucked. Hopefully you take my advice on this one and look for Amy Gerstler's work the next time you're searching for something new to read.

Keep reading, Genoshans!

1,000 Apologies; or, 5x500

Unfortunately, due to circumstances beyond my control—some very good, some very, very bad, and some indifferent—there will not be a book review this week.

Please feel free to visit http://fivebyfivehundred.wordpress.com/ instead. There are new posts up every day, Monday through Friday, so catch up on what you've missed so far. I'm the Tuesday writer, and tend to secretly—or sometimes not-so-secretly—write about things relevant to that date in history.

Synopsis

5x500 is genius, and full of extremely talented writers. Especially that guy who writes on Tuesday, what a catch.

Rating

1,000,000,000

Keep reading, Genoshans!

Time and Materials (Robert Hass)

This is a book of poetry, so let's see how this works out. Robert Hass is a highly renowned American poet. He's won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, twice won the National Book Critics Circle Award (once for poetry and once for criticism), and he's even been Poet Laureate of the United States. I hear he's a pretty decent writer.

Synopsis

Time and Materials, released in 2007, is the book that won Hass the Pulitzer Prize. It's quite a well-respected book. Now, I'm a poet. I've studied poetry, I've written a lot of poetry, I'm getting a Masters in poetry, so it's from a lofty, pretentious, highly informed poetic pedestal that I attempted to look at these poems. Apparently I'm not poetic enough, though. I had a tough time connecting with these materials (see what I just did there?), and believe a full appreciation of this book can be obtained just by reading the following series of words:

August, October, aspen, dawn, summer, thrush, pine, hawk, cottonwood, trees, trees, dawn, river, birds, trees, dawn, woman, birds, trees, dawn, sunlight, water, Czeslaw Milosz.

I wish that was an exaggeration. Every single poem in this book is a variation on one general theme: relate an anecdote that could be considered a philosophical experience, and make sure to include as many of the aforementioned words as possible. Here's an example, an excerpt from his poem "The Problem Of Describing Trees:"

The aspen glitters in the wind
And that delights us.

The leaf flutters, turning,
Because that motion in the heat of August
Protects its cells from drying out. Likewise the leaf
Of the cottonwood.

Compare that to another excerpt, this one from "A Supple Wreath Of Myrtle:"

Poor Nietzsche in Turin, eating sausage his mother
Mails to him from Basel. A rented room,
A small square window framing August clouds
Above the mountain. Brooding on the form
Of things: the dangling spur
Of an Alpine columbine, winter-tortured trunks
Of cedar in the summer sun, the warp in the aspen's trunk
Where it torqued up through the snowpack.

Or to "That Music," a poem of only 8 lines that still manages to contain several of his favorite words:

The creek's silver in the sun of almost August,
And bright dry air; and last runnels of snowmelt,
Percolating through the roots of mountain grasses
Vinegar weed, golden smoke, or meadow rust,

Do they confer, do the lovers' bodies
In the summer dusk, his breath, her sleeping face,
Confer—, does the slow breeze in the pines?
If you were the interpreter, if that were your task.

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that he isn't an excellent poet. I think that Robert Hass is an incredibly talented writer, and has a poetic mastery over the ability to convey emotions that words normally have trouble reaching. Individually, I enjoyed many of the poems, especially "Winged and Acid Dark" and "The Problem Of Describing Color." It's hard to take him seriously when so many of his poems end up looking exactly the same, though. It's borderline satirical. I recently attended a Robert Hass reading, and despite how engaging and animated he was, I found it difficult to follow him after the first few poems because they were so similar. It was hard to distinguish where one ended and the next began, especially since he tended to pause and comment on his own writing in the middle of some of the readings. I spoke with him after, and he's a great guy, but I wouldn't highly recommend his work.

Rating

Time an Materials
by Robert Hass

I've decided not to do ratings on any poetry reviews. Poetry is an extremely personal art, and it's much harder to judge such a subjective thing by objective criteria. Some people are more attracted than I am to the naturey, Midwestern feel of Hass' work. If any of the excerpts I've provided here hit you in a way that they hadn't affected me, check out some of his other work and let me know what you think. Or better yet, tell me why I'm wrong, and why Robert Hass is the greatest living American poet. I'd love to hear some of your opinions!

Keep reading, Genoshans!