Grist

The Journal for Writers

Searching the Roots of Female Existence : Melissa Queen’s Girls Named for Flowers | Review by Jocelyn Heath

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We may never meet young women named Zephyranthes, Ipomoea, and Caladium in real life, but we do in Melissa Queen’s Girls Named for Flowers. In her debut chapbook, Queen grapples with sweeping questions of femininity and identity. Where the title seems to beckon us toward pretty things, Queen shifts our gaze onto the muddier complexities entangled in each girl’s roots—and how she grows despite them.  

The title and opening poem situates readers directly in the conflict as it asks, “What could we daughters understand/of the corsages tied to our wrists?” Name binds gender and identity onto the girl child, a process so long-standing that, as Queen says: 

No one can recall where it began: 
if we were named, 
we for their blossoms 
or they for our constitutions (2).  

However pretty flowers and girls may be, their connection and concurrent assumption of delicacy forces women into expectations as identifiable as species traits. Revisiting the trio from earlier, Zephyranthes are a kind of lily, Ipomoea is a genus that includes morning glory and moonflower, and Caladium’s fuchsia leaves earn it the name Heart of Jesus. The lily’s graced many females with its name; the morning glory’s beauty lasts but a short time before the bloom shrivels up; and need I mention the complex relationship of faith and femininity? 

To undo the ingrained delicacy, the socially conventional stifling that finds women painting truths “with our tongues/on the cavern walls of our cheekbones,” will take a reclamation of the very language of self—“their own sounds/for these wild things” (2). 

The best poems in the collection point to the depths and vulnerability that must be confronted as part of the female existence, even when their primary subject seems different. Perhaps the most intriguing idea Queen delves into through her family poems is what it means to be a daughter. “Learn to Sail with Your Dad” explores the father-daughter dynamic through eight poetic vignettes. The father pushes the daughter’s comfort and intellectual boundaries—in her best interests, the speaker thinks, though she must remind herself “he is not yelling at you.” In every lesson, from sailing to calculus to a mother’s illness, he demands “these same standards of full comprehension” (6). In “Swim Lesson,” the mother figure, too, seeks to prepare her daughter for life with what goes unsaid: “you have to be ready to jump” (18). These themes of presence and absence likewise recur in the collection. 

“What I Know about Girlhood through the History of the Parsnip” revisits and twists the pretty/ugly binary explored by female poet predecessors like Plath in “Two Sisters of Persephone.” The parsnip, the “plain girl/of the produce aisle,” shares much with the carrot, “like two sisters/everyone mistook for twins/until she came into/her brilliant orange self” (8). Queen doesn’t stop at the comparison, though; she digs into the special hurt that comes with being the “lesser” girl who is told “you are so much sweeter” in consolation. Channeling the pain of every ostracized and overlooked teen girl, she writes, “the longer you feel left overlooked,/the more such sweet-on-the-inside/sentiments taste in your mouth/like the bark of a tree” (9).      

Readers who know the South will appreciate the specificity of place and moments in Queen’s work, which assumes an identity nearly as present as the feminine in these pages. “Gone by Way” laments the loss of “the thirteenth daughter born of kudzu thatch,/of trailer home, of thunderstorm” to the road, escaping her world of drinking and kissing “in parking lots of corner stores” (10). Similarly, “My Father’s Seasoned Ice” sits us on a porch swing with Spanish moss entwining its chain, beside a father drinking “Diet Pepsi and/Jack Daniels in blue/plastic cup” (16). One can almost imagine humidity and buzzing cicadas underlying the verse. 

Though themes of gender and self-invention emerge easily from the poems, the larger arc is hard to detect. Some thematic movement exists in the shift from trouble in the title poem to “Morphology of the Whale,” in which the speaker seeks to purge past existence “through soft levies of baleen, of hair, skin, or nail.” The poems focus on one female speaker throughout, though her identity samples more than journeys through her gendered existence.   

In all, Girls Named for Flowers offers readers a varied, nuanced look at some of the ways women grow and survive in the world. Queen’s ability to navigate us through the tangled-up questions of gender and existence make the collection worth a read. 

 

 

GIRLS NAMED FOR FLOWERS
By Melissa Queen
dancing girl press, 2017
Paperback, 32 pp. $7

 

 

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Jocelyn Heath is currently an Assistant Professor in English at Norfolk State University, having recently completed her creative PhD at Georgia State University. Her poem “Orbital” won the 2014 Alison Joseph Poetry Award from Crab Orchard Review. Her work has also appeared in The Atlantic, Fourth River, Poet Lore, Sinister Wisdom, Bellingham Review, The National Poetry Review, and other journals. She is an Assistant Editor for Smartish Pace, and has reviewed poetry for Lambda Literary and others.

Avuncularly Pynchonian: Joe Ponepinto’s Mr. Neutron | Review by David A. Southard

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You have heard it before: you are the lead in the running film or the voluminous Proustian saga that is your life. This is what you tell yourself, whether as a result of confidence, privilege, evolutionary machinations, or sheer tyranny of will. It gets you through the day. In all likelihood, however, you, if you are anything, are the background actor moving his or her lips, standing naturally at your mark, engaged in silent conversation with another body as backdrop. You are a minor character, a friend of a friend at a party, a relative, or an ex—discarded in a throw-away line of dialogue. You are much closer to how Gray Davenport sees himself:  “a fraction of an atom, taking up an area of space so insignificant that it [is] no surprise to be regularly ignored,” and, like Gray, you want something different, you have ambition, you desire a function. Mr. Neutron, the new novel by Ponepinto, follows Gray as he transitions from backdrop to accidental lead, from weightless, charge-less neutron into something with presence, someone with a purpose. This novel—satiric, comic, slapstick, surreal—follows this floundering fool as he quests to change himself and the city he has so often failed.

Not only is Gray Davenport a loser, but he also works for one—Bob, mayoral candidate and small time thinker who serves as a perpetual candidate and joke to residents of the dumpy coastal city of Grand River. Gray serves as a “political consultant, but [is] not really political. Not republican, not Democrat, but not independent enough even to be an Independent.” Bob—stuffed with corn nuts and regurgitated phrases on crime and taxes—is just the perfect blank mass to reflect such mediocre indifference. Bob’s second in command is Patsy, a woman rarely, if ever, seen off of her rubber stability ball. Patsy, too, has contented herself to her permanent runner-up position and keeps Bob as hollow and superficial as possible.

Gray begins shedding his indifference, however, when the gigantic, hypnotic, and dimwitted Reason Wilder arrives, announcing his candidacy for mayor. Reason comes from nowhere, an “unknown Pied Piper . . . without a platform or a slogan” who speaks in simplicities and magically transfixes people across (and off) the political spectrum.

Gray, un-hypnotized by the naïve charm of the giant, smells something rotten from Reason, both literally and figuratively, and from there the novel unrolls in plot, characterization, and quirks like something from an avuncular Pynchon (sans elaborate formal stylings): there’s a mad-scientist huckster, conspiratorial underpinnings, a porn star turned political operative, corruption, reanimation, characters with suitable aptonyms, the stink of pollution, and enough losers to fill the leaky hot-tub of a deserted motel at the edge of town. The novel is avuncular in both its friendliness to readers as entertainment and in its comedic stylings, which surround a journey of misery and defeat for our titular neutron.

Do not misunderstand this as your typical hero’s journey, however, though many of the tropes and stages appear as the novel progresses. Heroes eventually heed the call to adventure, reveal strength in their road of trials, and experience clarity in apotheosis. In Mr. Neutron, Gray Davenport moves through his journey in a perpetual state of near capitulation to the permanent mediocrity to which he has been relegated. He remains lost, in fantasy and from success.

Heroes, though flawed, also tend to be more likeable. Gray Davenport is a sad, pessimistic, weak, sex-crazed, occasionally misogynistic, often irritating, but nonetheless engaging enough observer of his little mad world to carry the reader along. This makes him a difficult character in which to ask readers to invest time and emotion. Some readers may give up on Gray, while others will recognize themselves in, or at least respect, his persistence and determination.

Early in the novel Gray, imaging himself as the subatomic particle, thinks “Perhaps neutrons were necessary. Perhaps there was a higher calling for them . . . He just had to deduce what that purpose was.” The purpose finally comes for Gray, when a charge transforms this neutron, and a new(ish) life emerges. The change in the final parts of the novel is as absurd and funny as it is unexpected by both protagonist and reader.

Finally, though this novel is satirical, it is not overtly political. The fun it pokes at politics—corruption, collusion, amorality, idiocy, and gullibility—is universal. This may bother some readers who demand outright resistance or compliance to the current situation of America. Instead the reader gets something fun, something light, a reprieve from the static of screaming heads that fill every page and every screen. Sometimes that is what we need from a book: entertainment.

 

 

 

Mr. Neutron

by Joe Ponepinto

7.13 Books, March 2018

Paperback, 300pp., $15.99

 

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David A. Southard is a writer, musician, and teacher. His novella K. at Liberation will be published by BOSS Underground Press in the summer of 2018. He creates music under the moniker Building a Building. You can find him @davidsouthard.

Editor Recommends: An Everyday Practice of Starting Over in Stephanie McCarley Dugger’s Either Way, You’re Done | Review by Jeremy Michael Reed

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Former Grist poetry editor Stephanie McCarley Dugger’s first full-length collection of poems Either Way, You’re Done speaks from a rural environment of crops, tractors, catfish, and hawks. Dugger’s book moves through such archetypal images from her narrator’s past in order to make sense of her present and her possible futures in the face of the violence she’s experienced, witnessed, and feared. While each poem remains rooted in concrete actions observed and taken, Dugger’s often disjointed lines lend her debut a dream-like combination of the character’s experiences across her life, a dream whose main characters are left simultaneously hopeful and afraid.

Before Either Way, You’re Done’s first section, Dugger’s book begins with a floating poem titled “An Excavation” that acts as an ars poetica for the collection as a whole. As the poem progresses, Dugger’s world is set in motion with dogs digging under a backyard shed, a mundane “everyday / practice.” This daily excavation leads to a hole “big enough to crawl through, / big enough to hide in” that empties the world of the poem of all its markers, from cars to house to neighborhood, turning the world “inside out” in order to “start over, / moonstruck, / silent.” This newly discovered beginning in silence comes after the experiences of intense trauma that the rest of the book will explore, from sexual assault and harassment to abduction and family disagreements, digging up past experiences in order to reach a new position to begin from. While these important themes are shared by many poets writing today, Dugger adds to this contemporary conversation her rural perspective and her investment in a Marie Howe-like myth-making approach to understanding her narrator’s relationship with her family and childhood.

Dugger’s point of view on the difficulty of the position her narrator finds herself in is described in one of the lynchpin poems of the collection, “Packing,” which arrives near the book’s end highlighting a different kind of daily practice: “Puzzle making, puzzle / solving, / goes on for days.” The puzzle to be solved in this poem is the decision about what to do with the debris of a life and its traumas re-experienced over the course of the reading and writing of Either Way, You’re Done. As Dugger writes, “Emptying out / is a flood, / water moving / over everything, / leaving behind / something, too- / sticks, mud, / scrap metal, nerves.” Dugger’s narrator asks herself and her reader, “What to do / with the stones / I collected at the river,” carry them forward or leave them here?

Dugger uses the space she’s cleared in Either Way, You’re Done to hold these stones, memories she’s crafted and handled with care. The cumulative effect of the collection left me seeing my own world as the one Dugger sketches in her book, a world suffused with the wake of the past. At book’s end, I found myself returning to its first poem, waiting for what words come next from this poet after the generative silence she sought allows her to start speaking again.

 

EITHER WAY, YOU’RE DONE

by Stephanie McCarley Dugger

Sundress Publications, October 2017

Paperback, 88 pp. $12.99

 

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Jeremy Michael Reed is a PhD student in Creative Writing at the University of Tennessee. His poems are published in Still: The Journal, Stirring: A Literary Collection, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Knoxville, where he is the editor-in-chief of Grist: A Journal of the Literary Arts, co-directs The Only Tenn-I-See Reading Series, and tweets @jreed1490.

Exquisite Desolation: Emily Fridlund’s Catapult | Review by Sarah Appleton

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Emily Fridlund has had an eventful year: her novel The History of Wolves was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, and her short story collection, Catapult, won Sarabande Books’s Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, selected by Ben Marcus. Fridlund’s short stories are riveting; they tantalize in their description and submerge readers in the ominous, off-kilter world of her characters.

Fridlund entrances the reader right from the start of each story. “My wife could take your skin off with one glance, she was that excruciating,” begins the opening story, “Expecting.” This bluntness is characteristic of her narrators and their opening lines, and the underlying threat leaves little room to doubt that darkness will follow. These openings often skirt the plot’s central tension and speak instead to the narrator’s root of or excuse for their present situation, illuminating a quality of the character that tips toward deranged by the end of the story. “It wasn’t my husband that wanted the bear, it was me,” the narrator opens “Lake Arcturus Lodge,” a story about a couple starting a lodge and attempting to start a family too, although they are divided on this. In the titular story, the adolescent narrator says, “That summer I was reading vampire books, so when Noah said no to sex, I let myself pretend that’s what he was. I told myself: inside his mouth is a hallway to death.” Of course, the whole story, then, is about sex and not about sex, about a girl teetering on the cusp of not-quite-womanhood. As these opening lines demonstrate, the lines work to frame the character’s already off-kilter world, which tilts further as the plot progresses.

Perhaps the most unifying characteristic of the collection’s eleven stories are the fraught relationships between characters—husbands and wives, best friends, parents and children, those who are thrown together by circumstance, characters who are often waiting or stalled in a liminal space. In “Expecting,” the narrator thinks of his son’s pregnant girlfriend, “She looks devastated by her body. I tell her she looks nice because I’m afraid for her.” Later, when the baby is born, the characters are discomfited by her aloofness, her decidedly unbaby-like qualities. “She reminds me of my wife,” the narrator thinks, “and I pray that the baby will never learn to talk, never wobble onto her feet so she can walk away…We call her ‘the baby’ to her face to make ourselves feel better.” Before the baby, two females walked out of the narrator’s life, and this sense of isolation and being left behind pervades the collection. It recurs in “Here, Still.” The narrator thinks, “With most people in my life, I come to the end of myself pretty fast. I walk to my borders—where there’s dinner on a dropleaf table, maybe small talk or sex—then wave politely and turn back. [My best friend] made me sorry there wasn’t anywhere better to go.” This narrator, like others, is more than arm’s length from those around her, fundamentally incapable of forging a human connection with those she ought to be closest to, who love her most.

Characters also experience fraught relationships with their selves. “I was still holding out hope that my body could go back to being what it was a year ago, effortless and completely forgettable,” the narrator of the titular story says, “but that was starting to seem less and less likely.” Her thought belies her vulnerability, but smacks of Fridlund’s precise description, too, which enables readers to feel, like the narrator, the “effortless and completely forgettable” body she once had. In “Lake Arcturus Lodge,” a guest visiting the lodge gets drunk and tells the story about leaving his mother to die in an avalanche.  “‘I just wanted to survive,’” he says, “‘but now I can’t do nothing. I’m a napkin. I’m rust.’” The guest’s description of himself moves from something disposable to something already decayed, a description which rings with exceptional eloquence.

Fridlund also stuns readers with the preciseness and concision of her characterization: “Her mother is in her fifties, widowed, loyal to horoscopes. She is afraid of making decisions that work against her fate,” from “Time Difference,” and “I thought of how Tom combed his hair before he came to bed, the way he once wore swimming goggles in a snowstorm,” in “Here, Still.” Fridlund wrenches readers most, however, with her salient descriptions of the human condition and the relationships we cultivate. “Childhood, by then, had been sucked dry by the unremitting soullessness of adolescence,” the newly-teenaged narrator laments in the titular story. In “Time Difference,” the narrator notes, “The problem with living with someone is that your every act can be transformed into another example of their larger theory of you,” a sentence which may well sum up the experiences and relationships of most of the collection’s narrators given their insularity.

One of the most striking pieces of the collection, “Gimme Shelter,” is distinctive because it’s composed of short vignettes that build a life, and ultimately disorient the reader as the narrator, Lynn, becomes increasingly unreliable. The story is anchored by the house she grew up in and the family it once contained. In the second vignette, Lynn recounts a dream in which the house has a 19th century library that her parents have hidden from her and her siblings. She professes to understand “that [her parents] were just a little cruel, to hide the best room in the house from their children.” Although her parents have done no such thing, the sentiment sticks despite the apparent normalcy of her childhood. From this moment, Lynn’s psychological state seems to slowly and subtly deteriorate. In the end, Fridlund circles back to the structure of a house. Lynn, reminiscing with her siblings at her father’s funeral, reflects on the game of their mother’s invention they played as children: “it seemed possible to Lynn for a brief instant that no other reality had in fact ever fully existed for any of them, that there had only ever been that old car on the highway with all of them inside, each locked in their chosen rooms, and she wondered in anguish and awe how many times she would forget and have to remember this again.” Lynn reveals how isolated she’s felt all along, thereby becoming another of Fridlund’s isolated narrators despite their proximity to people who love them.

In short, Fridlund’s collection is a riveting read, and the blow of one last line leads to the scintillating opening sentence of the following story. At times, Fridlund may push her original detail a little too far, distracting readers from the central tensions of a scene rather than enriching them. This, however, is not the norm; on the whole, the collection is so enthralling that it can be read in one go, but its stories are so devastating that one yearns to read them repeatedly. “It’s all too staged, too obvious to talk about,” the frustrated narrator of “Lock Jaw” thinks. Like the narrator’s situation, these stories are conspicuously staged, set against desolate, decrepit backdrops, peopled with isolated, off-kilter characters. And yet, these stories are far from being too obvious to talk about. They are exactly what we should be saying.

 

Catapult: Stories
by Emily Fridlund
Sarabande Books, 2017
 ISBN: 978-1946448057
240 pp. / $15.95

 

 

 

 

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Sarah Appleton earned her MFA in creative nonfiction at Western Washington University. Her writing projects focus on memory, family, and feminism. She currently teaches at Cranbrook Kingswood School where she lives with  her fiancé and beautiful Australian Shepherd, Zoë. You can find her@sarahkapples on Twitter.

“Henry Puts the Casual Back in Casualty”: Conor Bracken’s Henry Kissinger, Mon Amour | Review by Allison Pitinii Davis

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In Henry Kissinger, Mon Amour (Bull City Press, 2017), winner of the 2017 Frost Place Chapbook Competition, former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger takes the speaker on a surreal tour of international atrocities. The collection’s absurdism deglorifies and satirizes Kissinger and his neo-imperialist policies. By posing as Kissinger’s lover, the speaker inhabits a self-incriminating position. This suggests that Kissinger represents both himself but also the oppressor in all Americans—we all are complicit in his crimes. The dark humor in this collection cuts both ways—by the end, to accuse Kissinger is to accuse the self.  

The title—a play on Alain Resnais’s film Hiroshima mon amour—foreshadows the themes of war and love. The collection’s 19 poems place readers in the aftermaths of military campaigns and state terror, especially Cold-War-era Operation Condor (1968–1989). The collection situates Kissinger’s involvement in the operation in the larger context of historic atrocity through its exploration of the Nazi-led Oradour-sur-Glane massacre (1944) and Papal-led Albigensian Crusade (1209–1229). These poems aestheticize the banality of evil—in “My First Day in Argentina,” “The Albigensian Crusade,” and especially in “A Short History of Operation Condor,” Kissinger and the speaker commemorate human suffering by gorging themselves on food, capitalism, white supremacy, and each other: 

We fed each other delicacies with dirty hands— 
dulce de leche under our nails, beefy 
sinews between our teeth. We flossed 
with the flags of every country but our own. 

We bought islands we couldn’t even stripmine.  
We were white and alive and in love 
with the little pulse in each other’s wrist 
that went give and take and give and take 

and take take take take take take take. (5, 9-17) 

Eating and loving are conflated with exploiting—Kissinger cannot act without exploiting. He is depicted as a system that converts every movement into acquisition. Even when giving, Kissinger is taking, as if every act he commits is surrounded by an absolute value sign that ensures that he ends up on top. Tonally, from the title onward, the collection forces language into a similar machine—no matter how violent the atrocity, the high-satire allows the collection to discuss it like it’s mundane. The result is that Kissinger and the speaker’s language itself commits an atrocity: it makes the immoral tonally moral. The form of the collection enacts its contents: for Kissinger and the speaker, “We bought islands we couldn’t even strip-mine” is an act of giddy luxury. For the reader who is in on the satire, it is a chance to get deeper into the psychology of evil than a more solemn collection would have allowed. Allowing the reader in this close is uncomfortable, and that is a success of the book. Bracken doesn’t hide behind self-righteousness, and in result, he doesn’t allow his readers to find refuge in their own feelings of innocence. This is a collection that asks us to look at and listen to Kissinger only to realize that Kissinger is a mirror, an echo.  

Speaking of looking at Kissinger, the speaker does it a lot, and in this collection about mass murders, it is significant that the body we see most mangled is Kissinger’s. Perhaps the most provocative poem is “Henry Makes a Suggestion.” Kissinger’s suggestion is that the speaker turns Kissinger’s body into a canoe. The list of specifics is funny until we reach the skin: 

His legs the oars, an arm the tiller, 
the ribs and spine a sturdy frame over which 
to stretch and batten the skin 
I’ll have to shave and tan and oil first (15, 3-6) 

These lines that ask the reader to imagine Kissinger’s skin being stretched and tanned cannot avoid asking the reader to think about the irony of Kissinger’s history. Kissinger, born to a Jewish family in Germany in 1923, fled Nazi persecution in 1938. These lines recall the popular accusation that Nazis—most famously, Ilse Koch—made lampshades out of the skin of concentration camp inmates. Kissinger extended the cruelty to others that Nazis wanted to extend to him and his family—he narrowly escaped persecution only to persecute others. These lines suggest that perhaps Kissinger has awareness of this, and this poem is as close as Kissinger comes to admitting guilt. 

Kissinger’s dehumanized body situates Kissinger’s irony within a larger historical lesson: the oppressed can become the oppressor.  In the final poem of the collection, “The Vulgar Luxury It Is to Be,” the speaker enacts Kissinger’s violence when he kills a chicken and imagines, to relieve his guilt, that the chicken wanted to die. The speaker believes, like Kissinger, that he has the right to transform his victim’s suffering into a larger narrative about the oppressor’s suffering. The speaker imagines that his own hunger “is a sacrament/even this chicken knelt to take.//I believe I am owed this” (35, 25-17). Kissinger and the speaker (and thus, the reader) become one, and the collection intentionally leaves the reader with nowhere to wash our hands of the union. 

 

Henry Kissinger, Mon Amour
by Conor Bracken
Bull City Press, 2017
 ISBN: 978-1-4951-5768-4
48 pp. / $12.00

 

 

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Allison Pitinii Davis is the author of Line Study of a Motel Clerk (Baobab Press, 2017) and Poppy Seeds (Kent State University Press, 2013), winner of the Wick Poetry Chapbook Prize. She holds an MFA from Ohio State University and fellowships from Stanford University’s Wallace Stegner program and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Her poetry and reviews have appeared in Best American Poetry 2016, Crazyhorse, The New Republic, The Bind, The New Orleans Review, and elsewhere. She is a PhD student at The University of Tennessee.