Grist

The Journal for Writers

The Death of Empathy: Anna Moschovakis’ Eleanor or the Rejection of the Progress of Love | Review by Amy Lee Lillard

By

Something has happened to Eleanor, the thirty-nine-year-old teacher and writer at the center of Anna Moschovakis’ debut novel. This thing permeates Eleanor’s daily routine of teaching, reading, and wandering her Brooklyn neighborhood. This thing also haunts Eleanor when she breaks her routine to track down her computer thief, take drugs with a commune in upstate New York, and finally move to Ethiopia to work in a Rimbaud museum.

But this thing, the “thing that happened—that she had caused to happen, or that she had not caused but merely not prevented from happening” is never named.

A few pages in to the novel, I assumed that “it” would eventually be named rape. When one is female and reading of female trauma, especially one tinged with guilt and self-blame, that’s perhaps our go-to response.

But Moschovakis resists and questions this reaction, and she does it with a bit of structural play that’s exciting and shocking. Interspersed with the third-person narration of Eleanor, Moschovakis adds an unexpected first-person voice: the writer behind Eleanor.

This writer details her revision process with her novel about Eleanor. She grapples with the critics: her own inner voice of self-doubt, and a male critic who questions her choices. This male critic assumes that Eleanor is a stand in for the writer, and demands simplicity and clear motivations of the characters; he wants the “thing that happened” to be named.

In some ways, the critic may serve as the voice of the reader who wants things to be explained and resolved. But at the same time, the critic is a certain kind of male that women know well, especially women writers. The critic dominates all their conversations, first with overly negative feedback on the work, and then with his own neuroses. He uses Eleanor as a therapist, an object of seduction, and an empty receptacle waiting to be filled. The writer recognizes what he’s doing, knowing he’s:

“one of those men…who speak only in subordinated sentences, developed theories…whatever insight emerged was of an apparent authority and completion that I knew from experience I could muster only after substantial thought, the painful suppression of doubt, and rehearsal before a mirror.”

Perhaps by giving this man the lines and demands that readers might also have, Moschovakis encourages us to examine how we view female stories.

That’s what I did. As Eleanor thinks of the “thing that happened” again and again, and the critic demands the writer name this thing, I started to think about how we react to female trauma in particular. If the thing that happened to Eleanor was rape, for instance, readers might pity her, while quietly (and perhaps unconsciously) poking holes into her account. If the thing was a parent’s death, we might feel sad for her, but may also want her to deal with it quickly and move on. If it’s divorce, or a miscarriage, or a lost job, or a meltdown, we might have more ready-made responses prepared.

And maybe we’ve developed these gut reactions because of the sheer volume of stories in the world. We see Eleanor herself may even do this: every day she shifts from social media to news feeds to books to films, consuming hundreds of stories in giant chunks. Most of these stories, on their own, could be deeply emotional, important, life-changing. But she reads and moves on. We’ve all had to learn to do this with the daily firehose of story, to read, digest, and move on to the next. When they’re stories of trauma, as they often are, we’ve learned practiced reactions to help us do that.

This may be the ultimate power of Moschovakis’ novel. Eleanor, and the male critic, and we readers, may no longer be able to feel real empathy, the book suggests. Detachment may be the new human state.

Eleanor for one recognizes this in herself, and tries to make herself feel something, anything. She tries sex, masturbation, drugs; she tries thinking deeply on the thing that happened. But time passes, as Moschovakis repeats again and again, and Eleanor “takes note” of events, and her reactions to them, from a distance. We may assume that this is the effect of her trauma. But really, this is life. This is Eleanor’s life, and this is ours.

Moschovakis’ book is a stunner, showing how we are detached, separated from our bodies, from empathy, from the world and its horrendous events, from time. We’re acting out patterns to cope, and in that way we make no progress.

But we still try. Eleanor does, ultimately moving to another country to simplify her life. She may still find a way to live in this world. Maybe we can too.

 

Eleanor or The Rejection of the Progress of Love
By Anna Moschovakis
Coffee House Press, August 2018
Paperback, 224 pp. $16.95

 

 

***

Amy Lee Lillard was named one of Epiphany’s Breakout 8 Writers in 2018. Her fiction and non-fiction also appear in Atlas and Alice, Off Assignment, Gertrude, and Entropy. She holds an MA in literature from Northwestern University, and an MFA in fiction writing from the Pan-European Program at Cedar Crest College.

“The opposite of wounded isn’t healed”: Emari DiGiorgio’s Girl Torpedo | Review by Allison Pitinii Davis

By

Emari DiGiorgio’s Girl Torpedo (Agape, 2018) examines how women creatively intercept trauma and redirect it, torpedo-like, back at the culprits. Pain often instigates these poems, and the speakers manipulate suffering into the energy needed to combat, survive, mourn, and reflect upon other women across time and space. These poems investigate the personal in global, social, and mythological contexts to answer the collection’s burning question: where, in this contemporary moment, “does a girl torpedo strike/an old battleship?”

This collection interrogating power, pain, and control makes the reader consider how we “read” another’s pain. Can we read pain across gender, culture, age, and time? How does our pain connect and isolate us? What roles do language and media play in aestheticizing pain and what others do with pain? In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag considers how our framing of another’s pain reveals more about ourselves than the trauma. In response, she advocates approaching the pain of others with difficult reflection rather than pacifying sympathy: “To set aside the sympathy we extend to others beset by war and murderous politics for a reflection on how our privileges are located on the same map as their suffering, and may—in ways we might prefer not to imagine— be linked to their suffering, as the wealth of some may imply the destitution of others, is a task for which the painful, stirring images supply only an initial spark.” Girl Torpedo, through its global and historic scope, situates the personal on this larger map. The collection especially interrogates the gaze of Western media and its role in monetizing suffering: For example, in “Toddler Pulled from Rubble in Aleppo,” it takes, “Two minutes,/twelve seconds to pluck the girl from stone:/a small trophy the men lift to camera.”

The question of how we approach and experience the pain of others is also formally enacted within the collection. Poems including “Un-naming A Thing,” “New Math,” and “More or Less American” can be read in multiple directions, and our ability to read “across” our experience depends on our willingness read and re-read, to accept that our initial understanding is limited, to suspect that our intuition leads us back to the self rather than deeper into the poem. These poems, each written in two-line stanzas organized into three columns, resemble a page of cells. In this collection about pain and power, the cell-like stanzas evoke the cells in Discipline and Punish, and like Foucault, DiGiorgio does not just want to free her subjects from physical pain but from the systems that create oppression.

The four sections of the book examine cultures surrounding personal sexual assault, parenthood, and global sexual inequality. The trauma resulting from intercourse alone shifts like a kaleidoscope of pain—rape, the loss of children, and the burden of children tumble into each other and reshape their shards with increasing horror. The body and mind are presented as the sites of infinite pain and love, and sometimes both at once, as in “The Infant Corpses at the Home For Young Girls,” which describes love as “pain from the beginning—that inexplicable spasm,/the first time you’re kicked from the inside.”

On the cover of the book, a woman’s diving body cuts a sharp diagonal across a cityscape. Like that body, the bodies in the book find ways to throw themselves against the grain of language and social constructs. In the “Little Black Dress,” the power of women’s clothing is not attraction but vengeance. In the poem, the dress’s wearer fantasizes about avenging the man who sexually assaults her not by spearing “a sabre through his ticker” but by making him eat the dress she was wearing:

Every day, he’ll eat
the same dress. Every day, he’ll taste me
and what he did to me. Every day, he’ll gag

on the tag, the small band of elastic. His one
meal because he wanted it so bad.

The assonance of the short “a”—“gag,” “tag,” “band,” “bad”—assaults the ear. The rhyme of “gag” and “tag” reworks the stereotypical “gag” of the blow job into the perpetrator gagging on the object he objectified. The poem takes the language of the assaulter and has him shove it back into his own mouth until he chokes on it.

Another poem that interrogates the culture and language of sexual assault is “Where Does the Rabbit Go When the Hounds are Loosed?” The poem, composed of questions, situates the speaker’s personal experiences with assault in the context of Monica Lewinsky-trial era America, and in doing so, engages in contemporary discussions about consent:

And Monica?

Where’s the scandal with his last name? Where did she go
down on him because she didn’t want to have sex?

Where am I not guilty of that, so guilty, I got good at it?

The poems in this collection depict a reality where “power” is taking assault in the mouth to discourage assault in the vagina. A reality where we’ve become desensitized to the pain that fills our news and our bodies. Girl Torpedo argues that when women cannot steer the ship then, as in “Beware, Beware,” they can recite “psalms that draw sailors to rocks” so that sirens can devour the “men gripping oarlocks.”

Girl Torpedo

by Emari DiGiorgio

Agape Editions, 2018

pp_. $16.00

 

***

Allison Pitinii Davis is the author of Line Study of a Motel Clerk (Baobab Press, 2017), a finalist for the Ohioana Book Award and the National Jewish Book Award’s Berru Award, and Poppy Seeds (Kent State University Press, 2013), winner of the Wick Poetry Chapbook Prize. She holds fellowships from Stanford University’s Wallace Stegner program, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Severinghaus Beck Fund for Study at Vilnius Yiddish Institute. She is a PhD student at The University of Tennessee.

The Wolf at the Door: Darren Demaree’s Two Towns Over | Review by Donna Vorreyer

By

Meet the wolf.  Seductive. Dangerous. In Darren Demaree’s Two Towns Over, drugs are the wolves that infiltrate and prowl the author’s home state of Ohio, turning the kingdom of his childhood into a fairy tale in reverse, haunted by lost dreams and lost potential. This collection, honored with the 2017 Louise Bogan Award from Trio House Press, delves into the minds of both addict and community, giving the reader a realistic yet empathetic view of the wolf’s kingdom.

Most of the poems in Two Towns Over are one page, and this short form suits both the documentary style and the keen, focused language of Demaree’s observations. The collection, although not technically separated into sections, does have three distinct parts. The first contains a series of numbered poems all called “Sweet Wolf.” The first poem in this series, “Sweet Wolf #1”,  allows the wolf into the veins and makes it the alpha inside our own bodies. In subsequent poems, the wolf shows itself in different ways. In #4, it becomes undressed inside of us because that’s how real monsters operate. Questions are asked in the wolf’s presence: How much self is left by the time we’ve mastered the science?  Regret is expressed: The children are ruined because they wanted to choose their own ruining. In this section, the speaker also articulates the poignant and realistic desire of anyone who longs for an easy escape: Demaree introduces us to the wolf’s charm and power without any condescension to or blame for its victims. As the book moves away from the “Sweet Wolf” poems, the inhabitants of the wolf’s domain take a stand by lying down. Where they choose to lie down builds the second section of the book.

Here, the poems are mostly titled with specific cities or townships. We learn how it is to live with the fangs of the wolf embedded in one’s neck, where to harbor its sweet danger. Here in “Hunt, Ohio” are those who need to be filled up/by anything that could be glory.//Fuck glory, fill me up. In “Pleasant Township, Ohio,” the fatal flaw of not feeding the dogs is committed by those who take more drugs than they sell. In “Monroe Hills, Ohio,” the reader receives a hard lesson in mercy and practical survivalism as Nobody tosses out the drugs of the dead. That’s not how it works.  The reader meets an artist in “Morgan Township, Ohio” who peels wallpaper to roll into papers looking for the good glue on the paper to help him reach a new plane. Everything in these places feeds the wolf. In “Monroe Township, Ohio,” we discover that you can’t smoke a bible-that thin paper tears and won’t catch. And everywhere, there is loss. I find no fault in those that take drugs to escape but/miss so many people/that never came back to me, explains “Utica, Ohio” though the reader knows that this could easily be the case in any town.

The ubiquitous places that one could find in any state across the nation are also offered here as places of safety and sanctuary, perhaps a bit like the brick houses that hold off the wolf in the story of “The Three Little Pigs.” In “Chain-Store Identity,” the speaker shows great reverence  for the off-brand, off-color revelries found within, for the bathroom to smoke in, for a place to belong, for A mountain of sugar/for a quarter/& a safe place to get//high, I name/you my naming,/a church of sorts.  “You Can Do Anything in the Walmart as Long as You Don’t Touch the Bicycles” gives us another house of my belonging, the speaker wearing empty twelve-pack boxes as shoes, eating marshmallows, changing all the television stations, feeling safe and being left alone until committing the crime of taking down and riding a bicycle. This particularly poignant poem reveals both the desperation and the child-like wonder of someone with nowhere to go, one who can find joy in a place that just allows him/her to exist in the world of those who the wolf has not grasped.

The third section of the book focuses on why those moments of normalcy in the Walmart or the discount store matter so much.  It takes us into the isolation of the drug house with a similar construction as section one. All of the poems at the end of the book are titled “Ode to the Corner of the Drug House Down the Gravel Road Off the Two-Lane Highway” and are numbered to distinguish them. This is a place where the real world does not intrude, where the wolf reigns supreme. Here the knots in the paneling are eyes, life is contained in four corners, and a fence made of dirty carpeting is enough to prevent escape. Even those who know this place well are bound more to the drugs than to one another as, in #18, we learn that alliances are worthless–I don’t even get a discount on the wolf. Those that live here are vessels: I am nothing being filled up with something from just south of your heavens.  And #60 gives us this heart-breaking question: I feel loss will find me once this shit wears off then what will I get to look out of?

There are poems in the book that react with frustration or anger rather than give us the addict’s voice. In “Middlebury Township, Ohio,” the population longs for the days when drunks were sent over to pad the votes because We know what to do with drunks. These people are eating each other’s faces off.  A parent raves about the midday robbery of his children’s  bikes in the one sentence gut-punch of “I Believe in the End of Forgiveness.” But mostly, these poems give the reader a realistic yet sensitive look at the tragic ravaging of communities and individuals caused by drugs, the losses that cannot be forgotten. The seduction of the wolf is simply and elegantly shown in the lines of “I Got Lost Every Time”:

We all missed
nowhere
& so I was trained

to forget everywhere
& I was trained
to fill light times

with darkness.
It changes,
but most drugs,

they work
almost every time.
It’s beautiful.

We are all confused. Somewhere, some sort of wolf is inviting us into his lair. In this collection, Demaree has given us a talisman to ward off the invitation. He has inhabited his speakers with both light and darkness. He has given the wolf a name, and by naming it, raises the consciousness that is needed to tame it. The fragility of all lives is brought to bear in these deeply human poems– to read them is to recognize this connection.

 

Two Towns Over

by Darrren Demarre

Trio House Press, 2018

Paperback, 84 pp, $16

 

***
Donna Vorreyer is the author of Every Love Story is an Apocalypse Story (Sundress Publications, 2016) and A House of Many Windows (Sundress, 2013) as well as eight chapbooks, most recently The Girl (Porkbelly Press). Her reviews have appeared in The Rumpus, Quarterly West, Sugar House Review, Cider Press Review, Tinderbox Poetry, and other journals.

 

Announcing the Winners of the 2018 ProForma Contest

By

We are very pleased to announce the winners of our fourth annual ProForma Contest!

  • First Place: Sara Ryan’s “Search for”
  • Runners Up: Christine Adams’ “Fourteen Adaptations of the Female Ceratioid” and Farnaz Fatemi’s “Sister Tongue”

See below for more about our winners and for what judge Emilia Phillips had to say about our winner:

 

First Place and winner of $1200: Sara Ryan’s “Search for”

Sara Ryan received her MFA from Northern Michigan University where she was an associate poetry editor for Passages North. Her work has been published in or is forthcoming from Pleiades, DIAGRAM, The Rumpus, Yemassee, Booth, Prairie Schooner, Hunger Mountain and others. She is the author of the chapbook, Never Leave the Foot of an Animal Unskinned (Porkbelly Press). This fall, she will begin pursuing her PhD at Texas Tech University.

Judge Emilia Phillips had this to say about Sara Ryan’s “Search for”: “‘Search For’ cannot be experienced only as a text that conveys information; its materiality—and even, paradoxically, its gestures of immateriality—are crucial to a reader’s engagement with the text. Exploring her fraught relationships with her family, most notably her mother, the speaker here combines short fragments—maybe prose poems, maybe micro-essays—with minimalist but rough-torn book illustrations and crumpled print-outs of anaphoric, autofill Google search suggestions: ‘forget what / forget what i said / forget what you know / forget what you look like / forget what hurt you.’ Upending our rote expectations for genre and form, ‘Search For’ resonates through its hybridity, challenging the tangibility of the body and a place as well as the intangibility of memory, the selves one once was. In the final section, the speaker says, ‘if things work out, maybe i’ll forget you too.’ And yet, this is one of the most unforgettable works I have ever read.”

***

Runner-Up: Christine Adams’ “Fourteen Adaptations of the Female Ceratioid”

Christine Grace Adams is a PhD student in creative nonfiction at Ohio University. She holds an MFA poetry from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro where she served as the Fred Chappell fellow and poetry editor of the Greensboro Review. Her work can be found in Best New Poets 2014, Best New Poets 2016,and Passages North, among others. She calls the great state of Virginia home.

 

 

 

 

***

Runner-Up: Farnaz Fatemi’s “Sister Tongue”

Farnaz Fatemi’s poetry and prose appears or is forthcoming in Tupelo Quarterly, Catamaran Literary Reader, Crab Orchard Review, Delaware Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She has been awarded residencies from PLAYA, Marble House Project, Vermont Studio Center, and I-Park Foundation, and honored by the International Literary Awards (Center for Women Writers), Poets on the Verge (Litquake SF), Best of the Net Nonfiction, and Pushcart. She taught Writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz, from 1997-2018. More at farnazfatemi.com.

 

 

***

Congratulations also to this year’s finalists and semi-finalists!

Finalists:

Max Carp
Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach
Beth Gilstrap
Matty Layne Glasgow
Brett Hanley
Kathleen McCracken
John Shakespear

Semi-Finalists:

Emily Alex
Tara Ballard
Jessica Cole
Hannah Clarke
Bailey Cohen
Carey Compton
Caitlyn Curran
Sandy Fontana
Andrew Jarvis
Mimi Kawahara
Brooke Larson
David Leach
Cat Leeches
Chrissy Martin
Cameron McGill
Jeff Pearson
Samuel Piccone
T.L. Sherwood
Natalie Vestin
Benjamin Winkler
Francine Witte
Alicia Wright
Jay Ying

***

The three winners will be published in Grist’s Issue Twelve in February 2019. To pre-order Issue Twelve, head over to our Submittable page.

A Conversation of Selves: Canese Jarboe’s dark acre | Review by Emily Corwin

By

 

 

dark acre

by Canese Jarboe 

Willow Springs Books 

ACME Poetry Series, 2018 

 

Neosporin Pussy Queen, Rodeo Queen, Rapunzel, figurine, showgirl, apex predator, a midnight bride with a 40-foot train: Canese Jarboe’s speaker is all of these and more, riveting us in their debut chapbook, dark acre (Willow Springs, 2018). I have been entranced, awe-struck with Canese ever since I met them (digitally) in 2016, and was floored to hear their chapbook had been selected for publication in the ACME Poetry Series from Willow Springs Books. I was honored to read and accept poems by them the following year for Indiana Review (which you can read here in IR 39.2), including one of the opening pieces, “Landscape with My Father & a Dead Man’s Harmonica.”  

After the sharp entrance to the book, “Using a Stolen Guide on Morse Code, I Send a Signal Out My Bedroom Window into the Cornfield” (a code which translates to: “I am still here”), the ghostliness of “Landscape…” follows with its hauntings and huntings, black ants, nail gun, a spirit in the rafters. Jarboe immediately provides us with the ethereal, the rural, the sensual corners of a self. Self as bride and bridle, self as bodied and already gone. 

Although dark acre is chapbook-length, it manages to engage wholly, to sew us into the side of this world, one of graves and blowjobs, wolf peaches, saddles, bull thistle and moths, taxidermy, magnolia, food coloring and gravel, a “nylon thong…bedazzled with river rocks” (25). The acreage of dark acre is concrete and touchable, constructed of tactile particulars we can almost ingest, almost absorb sponge-like. “I remember a horse in a parade with glittery, pink hooves. I remember when I had glittery, pink hooves” (15). Like the speaker, we enter into each image bodily, feeling it entire. 

For months now, I have been collecting poems which strike me, printing them out, and then taping them to my bedroom wall, like a vision board. Canese’s poem from this collection, “Rapunzel w/ Head Half-Shaved,” has been above my bed for half a year now. I am drawn to it for its startling moves, how it shifts from “There wasn’t any juice in the fridge” to “so, I drank the cow vaccine” without hesitation, from peonies to herons to calamine lotion to tetanus. 

Like in “Rapunzel…”, many of the pieces in dark acre play with white space, silences, the sense of images speaking back and forth across a distance. In the titular poem, for instance, the poem sprawls and echoes over several pages, often with text at the top and the bottom with a blank expanse at the center: 

 

Do you think I am under a curse?  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A banshee is just a rumor that a barn owl started (36). 

A conversation of selves, the speaker interrogating themselves in a vacant field, in a mini-fridge, in a nightgown. dark acre devours, it rushes forth with intimacy and pain, violence and survival, truly alive. Jarboe asks us to: “openthedooropenthedooropenthedoor” (33) and how could we resist? Bold and corporeal, dark acre is not to be missed, is meant to race upon us ferocious. 

***
Emily Corwin is an MFA candidate in poetry at Indiana University-Bloomington and the former Poetry Editor for Indiana Review. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, Gigantic Sequins, New South, Yemassee, THRUSH, and elsewhere. She has two chapbooks, My Tall Handsome (Brain Mill Press) and darkling (Platypus Press) which were published in 2016. Her first full-length collection, tenderling was just released from Stalking Horse Press. You can follow her online at @exitlessblue.