Grist

The Journal for Writers

Finding Bdote: the Holy Place in Jon Lurie’s Canoeing with José | Review by Judith K. Lang Hilgartner

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In many ways a modern-day Huckleberry Finn, Canoeing with José, invites the reader to travel with the narrator and his young companion, José, as they seek adventure on the Minnesota and Mississippi rivers. Jon is a middle aged, down-and-out writer of Jewish origin and José is a Native American who identifies (as the note clarifies) as either Lakota or Dakota “depending on the topic and to whom he is speaking” (x). The differences in their heritage, social class, education, and age are salient throughout the book, but it is also clear that what brings these two anti-heroes together is that they have reached the end of their rope. The risky venture of paddling all the way from Minnesota to Hudson Bay allows Jon and José an escape from the immediate crises of a dead-end marriage and problems with the law. Ultimately, by communing with nature and each other, they are forced to face their inner demons. The journey, through backwoods lakes and provincial fishing villages, challenges their commitment and hope in humanity.

Although Lurie’s journalistic prose sometimes strikes more didactic than literary, one strength is his understated insights about human relationships. Recounting many instances of mediocrity during their extended camping trip breaks life down to a series of choices and reactions on a primal level; didn’t bring a poncho? You will get soaked. Get pissed at your friend because you are hungry? He bought you a Snickers bar… Whoops. Insult the wrong guy? Get ready for a bar fight. Canoeing with José is a lesson in cause and effect.

Lurie isn’t afraid to get grimy—literally. The reader can smell the stench of silt-filled socks and boots, in the same way that a lukewarm coke can taste almost as good as a home-cooked meal. After weeks on the canoe, the sound of paddling on the river and Jon’s inner monologue becomes the reader’s soundtrack for this book. The soggy monotony of the canoe trip is reflected in the occasional aimless chapter, and yet, it is precisely this vagabond sensation that gives way to one of the book’s greatest strengths: understated glimpses of the sacred. Interwoven throughout the narrative are sacred places that could easily be overlooked both by the reader and even the narrator himself. In the final chapter of the book, “New Horizons,” Lurie explains that “bdote” means “holy place” in the Native American Dakota language (292). This passage is reflected in Lurie’s belief that the sacred is not always pretty. It does not present itself announced. Canoeing with José reveals that true flashes of “bdote” are all too-easily overlooked, whether it’s an encounter between José and an eagle feather or Jon’s spontaneous tenderness towards a baby he will never see again.

As Jon and José make their way towards Hudson Bay, racialized tension sometimes gets the better of them. In one chapter, Jon makes light of a close-call on the rapids, and José blows up: “White people think it’s fun to have adrenaline rushes. Indians don’t. We wake up in the morning with an adrenaline rush because we don’t know how we’re gonna eat. We gotta find a way to feed our brothers and sisters while our moms smoke crack, and then there’s some police at the door about to put you out because your rent got smoked up” (236). José’s rants reveal that his insecurities haven’t dissipated during some utopian communion with nature. These periodic outbursts serve to reinforce Jon’s own disillusionment with society and the elusive American dream. Jon vacillates between viewing José as a hapless victim of society or a veritable threat to it. Lurie doesn’t shy away from representing his learning curve in dealing with José. More often than not, José’s outbursts push Jon deeper into silent passivity and introspection. Lurie’s realist style invites the reader to examine the failures and downfalls of two very human, screwed up people just trying to survive. Canoeing with José ends just before Jon and José make it to Hudson Bay. With this, the reader realizes that this entire journey was not about the destination; it was about the process. Whether or not they found healing on the turbulent river waters is up for the reader to decide, but one thing is sure, Jon and José started out their canoe trip alone and ended it together.

 

 

Canoeing with José
By Jon Lurie
Milkweed Editions, June 2017
Paperback, 302, pp. $16

 

 

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Judith K. Lang Hilgartner, PhD specializes in Contemporary Latin American Jewish Studies as well as Sephardic Studies. Her work has been published by Cave Moon Press, San Diego Poetry Annual, and the Jerusalem Post. She loves to dance to the rhythm of merengue while making fried plantains. In her free time, Judith enjoys playing piano and reading dictionaries. @LadinoLives.

Justin Boening’s Not on the Last Day, But on the Very Last | Review by Emily Corwin

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Justin Boening’s Not on the Last Day, But on the Very Last is a book that gives pleasure, a visceral sensation that starts somewhere in the chest and ripples down to the feet. These poems are wild, lush, and dreamy. I even love the way this book feels in my hands—it is smooth, vibrant, something easy to carry. Boening’s poems are rich, populated by horses and rivers and hair, mirrors and children and paintings. It is a place that I like being inside of, a place to return to.

As the title suggests, Not on the Last Day, But on the Very Last, examines apocalypse, the afterlife, and the ways in which the self navigates these endings. “Is there another world? Is it this one?” the speaker asks. Boening considers this world before him, looking closely at the things of this world, the land and plant life, the gods and animals:

The noise of the bramble
never leaves me.

I bless the cedar. The months go by. I bless your saw.

When you need
me to hurt, I’ll dim

in the linden leaves, I’ll hide
in the fire-scarred hills,

and the great guards
of my gilded name

will circle around to protect me.
And you’ll be there,

and I’ll know your name
as a god knows your name

This landscape is often internalized by the speaker, such as in “Proxy Baptism” when he states: “I shake myself to wake a deer bent down inside of me.” Pervading the book is this desire to transform, to enter a more primal shape. “Everything seems like something you’d say to me in a small town to keep me breathing like a little beast,” the speaker says, wondering too what happens if he becomes “wild again and no longer respond[s] to [his] name.” Boening’s speaker shape-shifts throughout the collection, imagining himself as the man sitting next to him, as a god or animal, as an opera singer, as nobody. By approaching the speaker in these various forms and bodies, Boening shows a self in motion, a self that adapts and dreams of other lives, that ponder the kind of life he could have wanted. This is seen particularly in the poem, “Nobody”:

And as we pushed aside a tangle of leaves to enter

a stolen wood, we knew we’d be joined

by no one not dragging their fat bags behind them.

And the poplars began to shake, or we did.

And the leaves reflected light as they twisted

in the dumb wind—a school of fish

shot through by sun—and nobody was bothered

by a reality that had already come, and nobody

was longing for the one that hadn’t.

The reality that has come to us, this world that we are given is so very tender, dreamy, yearning—a world we should lean into, regardless of our bodies, human or not. In addition to the transformations of the speaker’s body, the female bodies in this collection were particularly striking—the speaker seems often surrounded by a community of women. Women as mothers, women who take his hair, who weep, who button and unbutton his shirt, who fall asleep, who walk back to the house cradling a toy horse. The women feel far-away and mythic, a mysterious, kindred presence on the speaker’s journey.

The scale of this whole collection works on the level of mythology, with these images that can feel both archetypal as well as specific. It is as though we look at the globe from a distance and see its details with a microscope. This effect can be seen in the opening of “The Door”:

In the wilderness, a door

stands upright. Its paint

peeling, its knob

a little loose. I place a palm

of dead bees beside it

to remind the trees

of what it is

to be young.

Boening’s poems are ancient, mystic, sometimes wry, and always ardent. I will be returning to this book often, to spend time in the places these poems have built, to spend time with this speaker at the ends of the earth.

NOT ON THE LAST DAY, BUT ON THE VERY LAST
By Justin Boening
Milkweed Editions, 2016
Paperback, 61 pp. $16

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Emily Corwin is an MFA candidate in poetry at Indiana University-Bloomington and the Poetry Editor for Indiana Review. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Winter Tangerine, glitterMOB, Hobart, smoking glue gun, and Word Riot. Her chapbook, My Tall Handsome, was recently published through Brain Mill Press. You can follow her at @exitlessblue.