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

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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

 

 

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

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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

 

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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.

 

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

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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. 

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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.

The Cracks are How the Light Gets In: Amy Strauss Friedman’s The Eggshell Skull Rule | Review by Donna Vorreyer

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“For every//passageway leads to potential/and to poison. We drink//what we can, reaching and grateful.”
 
This line is from the titular poem of Amy Strauss Friedman’s collection The Eggshell Skull Rule. The poem’s epigraph explains the meaning of the “eggshell skull rule.” It states that the unexpected frailty of the injured person is not a valid defense to the seriousness of any injury caused to them. This poem stands alone, outside that book’s three sections, as prologue and warning. The idea that one may never know the severity of damage caused but is nonetheless responsible for it, is a terrifying way to look at the relationships that populate this book and all of our lives.

These poems have many voices: mother and daughter, lover and island, and navigate many roles with a steady gaze toward survival. Several poems in Strauss’ collection point out how the influence of all relationships, especially the strained ones, lingers despite distance and circumstance.

In “Archipelago,” a kitchen renovation serves as grounds for a  tumultuous mother/daughter dynamic:

“We’d like an archipelago,” I told her.
Each our own small island to return to
 
when the salt water my daughter and I feed each other
trammels the tides of our throats.
 
And in “Some Give in the Joints,” a mother and daughter do a toxic dance that somehow is still beautiful and even sustaining:

We heave the holy bricks
into layer cake.
Spin mortar into silk.
Work in tandem
to block the sound of the other
until we can’t hear
our gasping, breath
growing shallow. Until we lie
on opposite sides
of the same partition,
culling breath from the other’s lungs.
 
No matter what role is being explored, Friedman’s speaker writes with authority about how to refuse, how to forgive, and how to heal. The speaker in these poems recognizes the harm done, studies it. In “Rebirth, Reimagined,” the speaker forgets in order to forgive : No longer do you pick at scabs of old wounds/bleeding me into an intolerable tomorrow/ […}I absolve you/through your erasure. This need to erase the past, to refuse its ruin and start again, recurs throughout the collection’s terse and simple diction. This refusal is amorphous, as in the poem “Splintered Objects Resist Classification” where Friedman writes:

 My heart’s a movable city, transplanted.
  Mother uprooted it often. Watered it bloody.
  Traced its cracks with twigs,
  mapped to a tree split by lightning.
  A rivulet run dry.
 
Need and damage are intertwined in these poems as Friedman alternates between naming a mother’s failures –“empty cupboard cruelty, chalk-line absences– and longing for a deeper connection–she would swallow mother still/coat her lungs in fairy tale. The mother figure in the collection haunts the white space of each poem, even when she is not referenced in the content. There is mourning here, but a mourning that promises release, as in the poem “Larger Than Us”–

White mass indicates the tumor has grown
but all I see are the outlines of seagulls
 
eroding at the edge of a beach.
 
In this litany of injury, there is a sense of escape, that the victim has survived to be a woman who will prosper. In “The Past is Prologue” Friedman hints in the title that this woman will make her own mistakes, but will do it on her own terms:

Children do not wash easily down the drain.
They clink inside pipes, backlog sinks.
Drown in puddles of want.
Expan when we cannot save them.
What do I call an expanding girl? Alive alive alive.
 
The poems mostly occupy single pages, ranging from tiny prayer-like odes to lyric poems of resilience and from prose poem explorations to pop culture references. The speaker throughout the book questions, unearths, and regains her agency, most clearly seen in the poem “What I Would Salvage in a Fire.” The poem lists unmade mistakes, dead-end jobs, mean unspoken thoughts, family photos “gritty as sandpaper/ and saltwater soaked// in heaving, throaty secrets.” But then there is a reclamation with the line “I’ve earned the right to burn them myself.” 
 
In this same poem, Friedman includes lines that speak directly to reader, almost an auto-review of the collection: “There’s an economy of words/that feels wrong here//and too much to rescue/I can’t reach.” These poems, simultaneously sparse and rich, mimic the yin and yang of an eggshell itself. It is a throw-away item, but it also incubates life. With the poems in this collection, Friedman has struck a delicate balance between these opposites, revealing how powerful and how fragile all human relationships can be.

 

The Eggshell Skull Rule
by Amy Strauss Friedman
Kelsay Books, 2018
Paperback, 78pp. $14.00

 

 

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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.

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.