Grist

The Journal for Writers

Hard Lines: Rough South Poetry | Review by Paige Sullivan

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7635Hard Lines: Rough South Poetry anthologizes contemporary Southern poetry filled with the “visceral, gut-level realism” of a gritty South that swiftly denounces “the sweet-rotten effluvium of magnolia in the moonlight.”

Readers will find 20th and 21st century Southern poetry stalwarts–James Dickey, Charles Wright, David Bottoms, Leon Stokesbury, Yusef Komunyakaa, Dave Smith–represented, but the editors make admirable gestures toward a more inclusive listing of Southern poets, many of whom they describe as “part of what’s changing the definition of the South […] a place of transregional, even global connectivity,” such as Natasha Trethewey, Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, Kwame Dawes, Frank X Walker, Tarfia Faizullah, TJ Jarrett, and Ricardo Nazario y Colon, to name a few.

Much of the subject matter and imagery of Hard Lines will be familiar to Southern literature readers. Jeff Mann’s “The Shepherdstown Sweetshop,” Christopher Martin’s “Visiting Wildman’s Civil War Surplus and Herb Shop,” and an excerpt of Natasha Trethewey’s “Native Guard” all contend with the living legacy of the Civil War. Jake Adam York takes on the loss of innocence and loss of lives during the Civil Rights Movement in his “Inscription for Air,” and Terrance Hayes reflects on his complex relationship with South Carolina’s racially-fraught history in “Palmetto State”: “If I say ‘I love you’ more // Than ‘I hate you,’ if I say ‘I love you’ several times / A day it will accumulate truth, South Carolina.”

Hunting, fixing cars, and baking pecan pies find their way into these pages, too, but in equally fresh, compelling ways. While poems like Paul Ruffin’s “Gigging Frogs” depict the stealth and glory of animal conquest, Michael Chitwood’s harrowing hunting memories in “Skinning” –“he’d pull the fur down the body and over the head / the same way you’d tug the pajamas off a child”–makes for a neat complement that puts pressure on such a hyper-masculine tradition.

Tarfia Faizullah’s “Nocturne in Need of a Bitch,” however, contains little to no instances of Southern “iconography” (it takes place not on a country road but in an urban environment), and yet it remains one of the collection’s most potent pieces–“Tell me why being human is so lonely, / why this man turns now to embrace // no one beside him”–proving that “regional” writing is boundless in its universality.

Hard Lines is best read slowly, a few strong poems at a time. It celebrates the enduring tradition of the narrative in Southern poetics, and the collection is at its most thought-provoking when poems embody a present-South that interrogates its past-South shadow. There are too many exceptional poems to list in this single review, but a poem like Hastings Hensel’s “Jump-Start” seems to best encapsulate the goal of Hard Lines: “To forgive what’s said, that’s the trick, / but don’t forget, remembering now / how not to get shocked bringing back / the dead[.]”

HARD LINES: ROUGH SOUTH POETRY
Edited by Daniel Cross Turner and William Wright
University of South Carolina Press, April 2016
Hardcover, 312pp. $49.99

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Paige Sullivan recently completed her MFA at Georgia State University, where she also served as the poetry editor of New South. Her poetry and prose have been published in Terminus, Mead, American Literary Review, the Bitter Southerner, and elsewhere. She currently lives and works in Downtown Atlanta. Find her online at @bpaigesullivan / bpaigesullivan.wordpress.com.

Rosa Liksom’s Compartment No. 6 | Review by Torrie Jay White

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9781555977474Compartment No. 6 is a tense, terse, dense novel. In less than 200 pages, Rosa Liksom jails the entire, crumbling Soviet Union, and gives it to us to unspool.

This novel, published in early August by Graywolf Press, starts in Moscow. A girl—we never learn her name—boards a train bound for Mongolia. She’s leaving something, that much we know, and craving the silence that a solo cross-continental train ride will afford her, but as the train is leaving, another passenger joins her.

Vadim Nikolayevich—the man, as he’s most often called—is crude, brash, and talkative. He smashes her solitude. Vadim begins to talk. Right away, he is both threatening and appealing. Vulgar and abusive in the way that he describes his relationships with women, emphatic and excited about the Soviet Union, and generous with his food and his money, Vadim paces between friend and foe. She tries to seek reassignment, and tries repeatedly to repel him—turning down his advances and even dumping nail polish remover into his vodka—but she and Vadim remain together. As the girl becomes resigned to him, she warms to him. They become traveling companions, odd, but united. As their train crosses Siberia, Vadim drinks himself stupid, waxes poetic about the Soviet Union, and tells stories about women and work camps and a lifetime of deprivation.

The girl listens, and watches.

We spend the whole novel inside her head, but we only hear her speak once. Like she does here, Liksom pairs physical setting with the girl’s emotional undercurrents: “She rested with her eyes closed. And that’s how they travelled that whole long twilit evening, each of them sleeping and waking in their own time. She was with Mitka in his room. A Jefferson Airplane song wobbled out from the little blue record player.” This fluid structure gives the story an intimate, yet voyeuristic feeling. She watches Vadim drink himself into a stupor, sees the filth of the train’s washrooms, notices snatches of rural life, and witnesses the desolate beauty of Russia. Yet rarely is she ever active—in the train, she listens as Vadim speaks, and in the small towns the train stops at, she observes without engaging the people or scenes she watches. Only in her memories of what she’s leaving and occasionally in the cities that the train stops in do we see the girl act. She spends the novel trapped—clearly escaping something, but paralyzed in her flight.

The novel becomes quiet, its roaring power kept outside the train’s windows. Between the stories that Vadim tells and the countryside that their train moves through, Liksom catalogues the Soviet Union, using her extraordinary prose to gather the details of an entire nation—promise, want, poverty, corruption, brokenness, hopelessness, hopefulness—into dense, lyrical language. Each word is precise, a note on a piano played well, and when strung together, they make the Soviet Union as real and complex as it is. Compartment No. 6 quickly becomes not about what the girl is traveling to—Ulan Bator and ancient petroglyphs—or what she is traveling away from—a boyfriend with mental health issues and a love affair with his mother—but about Russia, the Soviet Union, desperate in its final years.

The train sped east and everyone waited for morning. The girl thought of travelling in the hot train across dreaded Siberia, how someone might look at that train and long for Moscow, someone who wanted to be on that very train, someone who had escaped from a camp without a rifle, without food, with nothing but wet matches in his pocket, traveling on skis stolen from a guard, a rusted knife in his pocket, someone willing to kill, willing to suffer freezing and exhaustion, willing to throw himself at life.

This is the core of the story: Underneath the deteriorating empire, underneath the relentless want, underneath the primal desperation of the escaping person, there is brutal and persistent hope. Even amidst the girl’s passivity, there is the thrum of life and of a fierce and potent energy. Vadim is that prisoner, and as the girl listens to him recount the ways that he, starved, suffered and savage, threw himself at the merciless world, we feel the deep thrum of her passivity breaking. She is preparing, her desire for life overwhelming her weariness.

This novel is extraordinary in its scope. It’s relentless in its mission to bear witness to a complex and now lost nation, but it always, always remains specific. Compelling and repelling, it’s a story that takes you in, and holds you. Liksom drags her readers through the waste and ruin and beauty of Russia, and only when she’s through with you, will she pull back the curtain, and let you see its hope.

COMPARTMENT NO. 6: A NOVEL
by Rosa Liksom, Trans. by Lola Rogers
Graywolf Press, August 2016
Paperback, 192 pp., $16

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Torrie Jay White is a writer based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She holds a degree in English literature and History, and currently works in museum education. Her work has appeared in most recently in fields and Litro Magazine, and she is currently working on her novel, This Dark Place. She talks writing, books, and personal stories at https://torriejayw.wordpress.com/, and tweets wit and wisdom from @Torriejay.

In the Room Made of Broken Mockingbirds: Ocean Vuong’s Night Sky with Exit Wounds | Review by Jeremy Michael Reed

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night-skyOcean Vuong’s debut collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, has received rave reviews from seemingly everywhere, but, beneath all of this fanfare, his poetry speaks in a quietly strong, self-questioning tone. From cover to cover, Vuong narrates the process of discovering the multiple truths of his and his family’s experiences in Vietnam and America, of his poetic and personal relationships, and of his words.

While other poets have treated these themes, it’s the multiplicity Vuong uses to shape his book that makes it deserving of not just praise but continued re-reading. His text makes space for multiple voices and languages to speak to each other even when they don’t understand each other, as is the case for his English-speaking audience as they confront Vietnamese. With this, Daniel Wenger of The New Yorker wrote of the book, “Vuong has fashioned a poetry of inclusion.” But Vuong’s is an inclusion not just of what’s represented in his narratives (immigrant life in a warring America, romantic and sexual relationships), but in the forms, voices, and languages used to build them. Vuong shows many of the forces that have influenced his voice in their fully complex realities: his parents and the violence they have suffered politically and personally, the history of his country of origin and of America, and his own experiences and languages.

Vuong’s voice has been shaped by a legacy of painful experiences, and he argues in these poems that the history of violence can be taken up as a tool to learn how to live anew with those oppressed pressing its name “to their tongues / to relearn the word live live live”. Throughout the book, relearning how to name the process of living molds the reader’s and speaker’s shifting understandings of national borders, family ties, love and intimacy, and literacy. If, as he says in “Untitled (Blue, Green, and Brown): oil on canvas: Mark Rothko: 1952,” he stands “waiting in the room / made of broken mockingbirds,” then his readers stand with him, ourselves broken, repeating our histories in tandem. Learning from his words, we not only recognize the generational trauma of the succession of wars in recent American history but also recognize our ability to deviate from the kind of life we’ve seen our parents live. Because we are broken mockingbirds, we don’t repeat the song exactly.

The way Vuong includes voices of both care and harm astounds, in part because he crafts the experience of reading for nuanced representations of pain and hope in such minutely specific ways. He creates a pattern of accumulation that builds on certain themes (language’s ability to represent experience, the relationships between generations, the ways people experience and then live with trauma, and how to draw distinctions between the past and present) and, by presenting so many competing truths to each theme, complicates his readers’ and his speaker’s understanding of them. He slowly assembles a vocabulary of images repeated until they become a set of metaphors that make meaning in multiple, contradictory ways: skies, forms of water, flowers, fires, knives, cars, and skin carry competing connotations from poem to poem. By letting those shifting symbols stand in productive tension, Vuong creates a shared language with his readers.

This shared language and the conversations it engenders are central to Vuong’s poetics as they exist in their contexts of violence, love, and the attempts to express both. As he puts it at the end of his poem “To My Father / To My Future Son,” he writes out of a desire to allow those after him to be able to “put [his body] down,” an ability that would free those future poets and readers to find a way to use the words he’s given them to understand their lives and surroundings, “to prove how the stars / were always what we knew / they were: the exit wounds / of every / misfired word.” In order to give tools to those who use the shared language of poetry after him, Vuong questions his own genuine attempts at connection alongside the misfired and misused, the violent and the harmful, creating a sometimes painful song from which, with time and patience, we can learn better how to hear and sing ourselves.

NIGHT SKY WITH EXIT WOUNDS
By Ocean Vuong
Copper Canyon Press, April 2016
Paperback, 70 pp. $16

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Jeremy Michael Reed is a PhD student in English-Creative Writing at the University of Tennessee. His poems are published or forthcoming in Red Paint Hill, Still: the Journal, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and elsewhere.

An Injection of Independence: Megan Volpert’s 1976 | Review by Michael Shou-Yung Shum

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1976_Front_CoverFirst things first—Megan Volpert informs us in her introduction to 1976 that she was born in 1981, and that, therefore, this invitingly messy collection of essays, observations, and verbal assaults on our Bicentennial Year is by definition not a retrospective, but a retrospeculative. In other words, this is a history book, and Volpert is one hell of a historian. Over 230-odd pages, she vividly dissects the meaningful political and cultural events of that contentious year, filtered through a deeply subversive lens. Her perspective: an admixture of punk rock informality and sharp, incisive sense of humor of the thirty-something author who, Volpert tells us, would have been dismissed as a total sell-out by her teen self. 1976 attests to the author’s ability to braid many disparate, fascinating elements into a most delectable Gordian knot, spinning off constellations of cultural references into the atmosphere effortlessly. The author’s fertile imagination very much appeals to the hyper-distracted reader of today, and every chapter opens to a new set of mysteries.

Each chapter is a month of the year except July, the Bicentennial month, gets two chapters and an interlude all on its own. Most aggressively interrogate the accepted history behind the events that transpired in that particular month. The focus is on the newsworthy—the Carter-Ford election, the Soweto student uprisings, the film Taxi Driver—but the character of each essay is quite different. They range from the horrifying, like the author’s brutal reflections on Pol Pot’s regime, to the sublime. Always rumbling underneath is the powerful engine of the author’s voice—sharp in its pivots, and authoritative:

Just as my body grows old and crabby, so too does the body of my bike. I have to learn its preferences and be accommodating. Likewise, my bike will have to accept the fact that we leave the house at 6am to go to work, no matter how wet or cold it is. We are sharing a body, making decisions together. If the bike does not always do what I tell it to do, it’s because I have failed first to respond to its needs in some way. A bike must be kept happy or it cannot keep its driver happy. At our best, we are sharing one cyborgian consciousness and cruising together in one body—corporeal, incorporated. (73)

Like the bands she espouses—The Ramones, The Sex Pistols, Joan Jett—Volpert 1) takes shit from no one, and 2) tells it like she sees it. Which is to say, we trust her like we trusted our favorite bands in high school. Her knowledge of the decade is nigh-magisterial, but the book teaches the reader lessons about today, how the more things change, the more things stay the same; how outrage always ends in complacency; and how getting old is about learning how to buy into something you never wanted to believe in the first place.

1976
By Megan Volpert
Sibling Rivalry Press, April 2016
Paperback, 240 pp., $19.76

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Michael Shou-Yung Shum’s stories and essays have appeared in The Writer’s Chronicle, Barrelhouse, Midwestern Gothic, and Burrow Press Review.  His first novel, Queen of Spades, will emerge October 2017 from Forest Avenue Press.