Grist

The Journal for Writers

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.

Seeking Stars: Jordan Rice’s Constellarium | Review by Hannah Widdifield

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In her debut collection of poetry, Jordan Rice guides readers through the transformative process of being and becoming. The central topic at hand is Rice’s transition from biologically male to female, but as the title of her collection suggests, this is only one in a series of processes of change, not only for herself, but for anyone engaged in living. These processes, regardless of how we try to tidy and organize them, are perhaps only fully appreciated when they are spread out before us so that we may make our own myths and tales out of self-constellations.

Divided into four sections, Constellarium begins with a series of poems wherein Rice wrestles directly with her personal transition and gender identity at both a conceptual and actualized level. The opening poem’s engagement with the mundane experience of laser hair removal transcends to profundity as it invokes the fear, pain, and visceral sensation of transformation as she smells the stubble on her face singe.

The second section confronts identity, bodily integrity, and the struggles that surround its realization in a more indirect fashion, offering poem topics that range from the strain of military service to the Columbia space shuttle disaster. “Inheritance” sees the poet struggling to reconcile not merely her gender identity with her body, but her body to her spirit. The poem addresses the gravity of violent death, invoking brutal wound imagery, all the while quietly philosophizing about the material barrier that a body can be, separating our soul selves from the rest of the world: “Even if a bullet strikes us dead center, we can still fire back, though the body in shock won’t hear a room flash into silence.”

Passover, the next section, is the shortest of all, comprised of only three poems, and is perhaps the most challenging to place within the narrative of the collection as a whole. Addressing both war and a sort of family-tradition-religion triad, this section maintains a nervous energy that compliments its erratic organization. The poem “Passover” is no longer a biblical tale, but is replaced with stories of a family trip and an uncle far away in battle. The poems within this segment serve as a refreshing reminder that not all experience can be trimmed and fit into a grander narrative and must be accepted in its raw and ragged form.

The fourth section sees Rice at her most experimental in terms of format, but also includes perhaps the most painful of her verses. Calling upon violent experiences like sexual abuse and kidnapping, the poet situates her own painful struggles in the context of the world’s painful struggles. And yet, the section and the collection end with “Saudaude,” a salve for the soul, which is Rice’s most easily graceful poem. In it, she recounts her pre-transition loss of virginity to a young woman she genuinely cared for in a hotel that the young woman’s father owned. The narrative is tender and uncomplicated: the highest bit of conflict is the threat of being caught by the girl’s father. In it, Rice’s past self already knows how necessary the moment will be in getting through her future struggles. She implores herself: “Remember her palms placed together on your chest, and her breath at your shoulder, past the men she will love and those she will take as lovers, the nights you lie alone and begin to regret.” This final poem is a rich foil to an earlier poem in the collection that talks of her child who will gain a mother, but ultimately lose a father once Rice transitions. “Saudaude,” however, encapsulates the essential opposite of regret, whatever that may be—nostalgia, reverie, or a quiet and simple love of a moment of beauty from another life.

Constellarium
by Jordan Rice
Orison Books
ISBN 978-0-9906917-7-8
90 pp.  /  $16.00

 

 

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Hannah Widdifield is a modernist and a disability studies scholar currently working on her PhD in literature, criticism, and textual studies. As a disabled scholar, she is interested in exploring the ways that modernity shapes societal conceptions of disability.

Mostly in Dreams: Chris Santiago’s Tula | Review by Tyler Burdwood

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Chris Santiago’s first book of poetry, Tula from Milkweed Editions, opens with a definition. It turns out “tula,” referring not to four letters but two syllables, two sounds, exists as many words in many languages. Many poems in the book are titled only, “Tula,” and each time the words’ multiplicity of meanings render the title as withholding as “Untitled.” Tula can be “slang for cock in Chileno” or a pre-Aztec Mesoamerican city whose name translates to “near the cattails.” In Santiago’s unnamed “mother tongue,” Tula means simply “a poem.” This is likely a meaning of Santiago’s own making, as one poem addresses his childhood listening to his mother “[sing] a soothing song / in the language I never learned.” Not knowing the words’ definitions, he would make his own. Santiago’s interest in the overlap of sound and meaning, words’ transformations across cultures, permeates the collection. 

Santiago’s fascination with a word’s meaning across languages and cultures is easy to trace. The son of Filipino immigrants, Santiago has taught English in Japan and Japanese in California. In “ultra / sound,” the word “kibo” gets the full “tula treatment,” a poem springing from its definitions in three languages.  

Of course, one word in another language with another spelling, another alphabet, is not the same word at all. It’s a sound. Two recurring written characters separate the book into sections. I first took these to be the author’s stylized, sideways initials, but they turn out to be the pre-colonized Philippines’ phonetic spelling of “tula.” In “Transpacific” the word morphs into “Tulang: poem pluralized to strangeness. / Made nasal, ng  a sound / that will never start its own word / not in this tongue.” The book has no shortage of fresh imagery and storytelling around music and sound. The inner ear is described as a fetus. One poem ends with a family listening repeatedly to the last remaining LP, one none of them enjoys, “after the world has ended.” Santiago’s poems venture in and out of surrealism with ease, always more riddle than psychedelia.  

Lullabies (or hele), definitions, islands, and waves reoccur throughout the book. One poem, like many others titled “Tula,” opens with the warning “I live mostly in dreams.” Its speaker shifts from an inmate to a bird lost flying over open waters, hinging on the word of an uncle who “speaks / the language of the dead.” The poem tempts strict interpretation, just as dreams do, but has just enough of the shimmering undefined. But elsewhere a dead and imprisoned uncle refers to Fluellen Ortiga’s imprisonment in solitary confinement and his killing by the Marcos Administration’s secret police. Shadows of political violence are addressed throughout the book with a straight-faced frankness. Solitary confinement is described as “learning how not to drown in time.” 

Santiago never resists looking closer, diving deeper. What reads as ars poetica, “Island En Passant” describes building a piano of found materials on an island. There is a meditation on cultural exchange there, but the magic comes from the description of living things taking over the piano, “afraid of their own infinitesimal steps: / music the stars would make if they // were as small as they looked.” The mystery latent in tiny ecosystems reappears as a reference to Malasia’s Taman Negara national park, a 130 million year old rainforest which never experienced an ice age and thus has incredibly rich biodiversity. The poem is called “Photograph: Loggers at Kuala Than,” which chronicles the poet’s drinking with the laborers in process of the natural wonder’s deforestation. The poem doesn’t dwell explicitly on his forest, and instead follows the speaker’s efforts to develop the photo, his broken promise to send them a copy. Something of the resonances with a picture stealing a soul, the poem stealing their biography, the loggers transforming the woods all push and pull together.

Santiago’s poems feed thought. The ideas are big, the details tiny and inventive. He’s a musician’s poet, a linguist’s poet, a poet’s poet. Tula is a good read for anyone.  

 

TULA
by Chris Santiago
Milkweed Press, December 2016
Paperback, 100pp., $16

 

 

 

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Tyler Burdwood plays, writes poetry, and sings in the power pop band, Bellwire. He manages the blog and record label, Spark & Fizz.