Su Zi's Review of Robert Archambeau's "Alice B Toklas Is Missing"

A Summer Fun Read: Robert Archambeau, thank you.

The experienced reader, being well-versed in the greatest hits of most major anthologies, might occasionally have a need to read when concentration is not optimal; institutional wait times can be balanced by the comfort of a book, and the mere thought of a delicious read in a pleasant location is a vacation in itself. Of course, the experienced reader can never be fully oblivious to craftsmanship, and often the seasons hits can have a frost burnt or stale flavor. But here comes Robert Archambeau with Alice B Toklas Is Missing (Regal House 2023), beguiling us to guffaw.

The novel’s protagonist, Ida, “copies old paintings. That was what she did. She copied old paintings for an old lady with old money” (13), appears as part of a Fitzgeraldian duo in a cast of characters that includes a “tallish, trim, and in his mid-thirties, she guessed, dark hair carefully parted and smoothed” (14) that turns out to be “Tom Eliot”.  Archambeau is artful with the layering of amusing characterizations, and is not short of an adept eye

Shelves of books both new and old lined the walls, but the center of the bright little shop was set up like a parlor—low comfortable chairs and rickety occasional tables ringed a large, faded carpet. It was used like a parlor too—at least by one thin man with thick glasses and a grubby black suit, who crossed and re-crossed his thin legs, sipping a cup of tea in one hand, and holding a small, squarish magazine inch from his squinting eyes with the other (34)

This character is introduced a page later “he stood, proffering his bony hand ‘Germ’s Choice, but you can call me Shame’s Voice’     [...]        ‘Mr. James Joyce,’ said Sylvia, by way of clarification “(35).    The cast of characters who make occasional appearances does read almost as a syllabus for the Parisian influence on twentieth century culture, although any fans of Wyndam Lewis ought to note that he becomes, ultimately, the bad guy.

But this novel offers far more than a romp through roaring literary figures. Archambeau’s attention to his setting elevates the work past a light romance with historical characters. Consider these few lines as the author propels Tom Eliot into a chapter of characterization

To enter the Bristol hotel is to enter a world that speaks so quietly it almost whispers. The clerks at the desk do it, and the guests—mostly British—find themselves matching their tones to those of the dark suited staff. Whether you stand on the checkerboard tiles of the lobby or sit comfortlessly in one of the pew-like benches beneath the small statue of Artemis, who might hear the building itself whisper.”(196)

The scene involves an introspective moment of Eliot in memory of his marriage, then shifts in point of view through the hotel room’s open door to the bellhop, who “saw Tom’s quaking back and turned discretely away. A weeping man is best undisturbed (198)” Archambeau posits Eliot as a man haunted not only by his difficult marriage, but by visions of his forebearers—a far more empathetic view than that of any textbook’s formal biography.

Although Claude McKay “rumored to be departing soon for Harlem” (252) makes only that moment’s appearance, Archambeau is intent on a trilogy, with the second title scheduled forthcoming, and readers might hope for more of an appearance by that illustrious and historical community in this evolving series as well. For those needing to review the period, the novel offers a delicious experience. Readers familiar with these literary ancestors will happily devour this tasty offering as from a sumptuous meal, and as  maybe find themselves equally as eager for future feasts.

Su Zi is a writer, poet and essayist who produces a handmade chapbook series called Red Mare. She has been a contributor to GAS from back when it was called Gypsy Art Show, more than a decade ago.

                     

Check out her author page on Amazon.

Su Zi's Review of Juliet Cook's REVOLTING!

 

For a generation now, or better, writers have been able to connect with each other through electronic methods of writing. While some writers may use these means to disseminate their work, others tell us about new works in the hopes that a few of us will buy a book, a physical book. It is in this way of announcement that we who read are presented with opportunities for our personal libraries; and herein it must be stated that civilized people have personal libraries, and these collections ought to contain a few rare items, such as chapbooks. For the book lover, holding a rare and potentially fragile print entity speaks to intimate and hidden histories: it’s a physical experience.

Often, the chapbook might come from someone we actually do not know. Oh, obviously we saw the post about this new work, and maybe other posts from the press or the author, but we don’t really know their favorite flavor of ice cream. We are gambling that perhaps there will be something here to ponder, something that speaks to our interior selves. 

When the book comes, it is folded into a few sheets of colored, better weight printer bond that feels as if it’s part of the cover. The cover itself is a collage printed on cardstock stapled to cream colored hot press paper that enhances the readability of the standard font used. The work has neither contents or pagination, and it’s not necessary with a chapbook that’s a dozen folded sheets. The book is a pure example of the chapbook format, and this one has a subtle and elegant presence. Ironic to this perception is the book’s title Revolting (Cul-de-sac of Blood, 2024), the work being a recent offering from Juliet Cook.

Those unfamiliar with Cook are provided with both an acknowledgments page and an author bio that testify to some years dedication to poetry. The website for the press includes a purchase option through PayPal; potential readers are thus assured that this is a more professional indie press. There’s also a list of other books from the press, and the website has a submission link for the press’s periodical zine.

Thus, we can confidently approach the poems. Cook’s style oscillates between the conversational and the surreal without ever being derailed from the poem’s thesis. There’s a fun energy here, a sense of play, even when the topics themselves might not be lighthearted. The centerfold poems in this chapbook discuss being a poet on the left side, “Fifty Mice” and a physical injury on the right, “Thorns Stuck Inside My Left Foot”. Both poems use a conversational language, with “Fifty Mice” employing repetition and interior experience, while “Thorns [...] Foot” employs a narrative sequence. However, the acuity of imagery and the use of self-deprecation elevate this poem. The first stanza of “Thorns[...]Foot” shows an elegant fluidity

I fell down on a Sunday.

Better to fall than to bow.

I fell down in a restaurant,

Landed on my knees with my feet bent backwards,

almost automatically bruised, as if

to teach me a lesson for walking for myself

My left foot looked like a strange stigmata

with the blood stuck inside, growing dark.

The reader is in the scene, a relatively ordinary slip fall agony, but is immediately struck with the facetious tone reinforced by “better to fall than to bow” and “to teach me a lesson for walking”, so that the empathetic ouch leads not to tragedy but transforms into the familiarity of self-derision. The sonically sensitive will also note the opening slant assonance in “down/Sunday/bow/down” shifts with the plot to long e with “knees/feet/teach” and the various a vowels that culminates in “strange stigmata [...] growing dark” , so that the poem itself howls e—a as it opens and we all fall.

As rare as it is to physically resonant with a poem, to feel it in our physical selves, it is a moment in reading that reinforces why we read—the connection with other selves. And while chapbooks aren’t often found in bookstores—when they are, they require patient inspection—becoming mostly centered in the ouroboros realm of book festivals, they are the bread and butter of many an independent press. In our times now of needing to prioritize individual makers over global producers, it does a greater good to buy a chapbook for our libraries. Sometimes, the author even signs it.

Su Zi is a writer, poet and essayist who produces a handmade chapbook series called Red Mare. She has been a contributor to GAS from back when it was called Gypsy Art Show, more than a decade ago.

                     

Check out her author page on Amazon.

Comfort Music (Marvin Gaye’s “Mercy, Mercy”): Essay by Su Zi

GAS: Poetry, Art and Music welcomes Su Zi as a monthly columnist!

Zoeglossia Fellow 2023

Poet-writer, artist, equestrian

Creates Red Mare, an eco-feminist, poetry chapbook series that is handmade (each cover is a numbered block print, each copy is bound by hand sewing, editions limited to under 50, publishes at summer and winter solstice).

Publications in zines as well as full titles in poetry, essay, art – Multiple contributions to Unlikely Stories, automachination, GAS.

Titles from various publishers include: Danke, Flux , Chirp, Sister Woman, Solstice Epistles, Three Days, Chicago Poems, Pillar of Salt, Lit, The Tissue of Language , Building Community, Transgression in Motion,Tropical Depression, #100TPC

 Comfort Music (Marvin Gaye’s “Mercy, Mercy”)

In the social unsettlements of spring, we might find ourselves spiritually beleaguered. For those for whom the old ways of community interaction are no longer viable, there’s respite in archival music. While current times see archives themselves as being under a bit of a barbaric threat, it’s our history—the embers we pass forward as our legacy. 

If we consider the span of time for a generation to be around the half-century mark, we may find the influences of our forebearers upon our current culture. In the case of music, many automated playlists will routinely include music composed at a different time. Of all the arts, music has become the most accessible form, for while it might be some privilege or risk to attend live music performances, recorded music allows for a timeless and global experience.

In the case of plundered libraries, archival activism exists to ensure preservation and often these are curated from private collections; in music, these collections might include the holdings of a broadcast company, or someone’s private collection, and a variety of swap meets. Of course, there’s the accessibility of cyber download, from songs to the entirety of an artist’s work, and for the reason of accessibility, let us consider a widely disseminated work as viable for general social solace.

A half century ago, a single musical work that was widely disseminated was a hit, a cultural moment; as our culture has staggered into our current era, how hot is that once hit tune? While the complete works of this artist are indubitably influential, for our needs for solace, allow a listen to Marvin Gaye’s “Mercy, Mercy”, which has an Apple AI falsely cheerful introduction that includes “the revelation is that political music [...] can be inviting” and an odd reference to hippies.

A cautionary note for this-century listeners: this is analog music. There’s an orchestra playing every line of sounds on this recording—the credits list some twenty-five musicians, including two groups for additional vocals, and two people playing violin. The production team—those who published this work a half a century ago, number just under a dozen. This vintage work, an auditory composition of just over three minutes—a work of art with minimal physical existence—was the collaborative effort of dozens of people.

The piece itself begins with multiple instruments, including a piano, playing a chord twice, followed by two chords a half step higher on the scale, and then the initial vocals, which begin with the song’s chorus, it’s thesis “things ain’t what they used to be”, the repeated refrain occurring four times in the song’s three minutes. Gaye sings the single, seven syllables within the four beat bars as ditrochaic, emphasizing the “Things/What/Used /Be” and sometimes using a more trochee rhythm to stretch his tenor on the vocals for the following line. The song’s lyrics are two-line stanzas that may or may not employ end rhyme or consistent meter; instead, they read like koans, although they are structured as three citations of evidence with a fourth being conclusionary. This conclusionary stanza poses the still unanswered rhetorical question:

“What about this overcrowded land? /How much more abuse from man can she stand?”

Gaye sings the multiple syllable word as a ditrochee, speeding up his enunciation in a manner that was (and still is) a demonstration of technical ability, but which both matches the timing of the song’s general tempo. 

In counterpoint to Gaye’s smooth vocals is a saxophone solo that comes at about a minute, and after the lyrics conclude with a five-line supplication that is a change from the four, two-line lyric stanzas that support the song’s thesis.  The saxophone plays for six bars that climax with the blues squeal famous from that instrument.  It is here that the tempo’s emphasis on the third stress is most audible, and listeners often find this opportune for dancing—for interaction with the work. The final minute of the piece engages additional vocals for six bars, and a kind of denouement of instruments, a soprano voice.

Despite the remove of time, Gaye’s lyrics are unfortunately relevant still, and, in certain lights, the use of the pronoun “she” to reference the planet might still be controversial. Indeed, the song itself might be seen as controversial, since the thesis is one that asks for compassion for our obviously distraught planet. Nonetheless, the song’s elegant orchestration, still-relevant thesis, and Gaye’s sensitive tenor are still a rich offering of musical food for our soul.

Su Zi's Review of "This is My Body" by Jonathan Fletcher

The chapbook has a two-hundred-year history, and a search overview describes the chapbook as originally a type of street literature. Certainly today, there’s a potential for multiplicity, for revealing voices that might be too Other for the increasingly oppressive monotone of the more corporate presses. For anyone dedicated to the literary arts, a support of the chapbook is more than crucial.

Some chapbooks become into existence through the auspices of an institution, and the book is intended to be laudatory, the author presented as a debutante to literary society. In the case of Northwestern University Press, an established institution—that of an expensive school—presenting a chapbook seems to be more of an aristocrat endeavor than a funded effort at street literature. Since chapbooks tend to be the annoyance of booksellers --and thus often require special order-- a well-heeled sponsorship of a chapbook does present a middle ground between world bank publishing and that of the threadbare independent press. Thus, we might approach these works with our determination at inclusion still held dear.

If finding new voices is the reader’s goal, the chapbook often contains poems that were individually published, often by periodicals with their own position on the publishing spectrum. A discerning reader will not let the voice of status overshadow that of the work itself, although authors are pressured into the Sisyphusian task of complying with a market that rarely considers the work for its own merit. What can be equally annoying to a serious reader is a superficial introduction to the work itself, as if the work were a magic trick instead of an artistic endeavor with the potential for layers of nuance. In the introduction for Jonathan Fletcher’s This Is My Body (Northwestern University Press, 2025), the work’s introduction, with two authors, seems to consider the first poem only, a childhood recollection. Nonetheless, this first poem, “Jonathan”, contained the striking stanza

As we bathed together,

 compared bodies—mine brown 

and foreskinned, yours light

 and circumcised—we wondered 

whose was better, cleaner. 

And while the introduction’s authors find the work “nakedly intense and overwhelming at times”, they appear to leave it to the reader to discern the vowel shifts from “brown/foreskinned” to “light/circumcised” and the triple alliteration of “we wondered whose” that speaks to a consideration of technique, in addition to the intimate action portraited.

Each poem in this collection is a portrait of an intimate moment, many of which might create binaries of experience among readers—those for whom the poems resonant, and those for whom the poems frighten. Fletcher’s language seems conversational and smooth, balancing topics often barely whispered. In “Medusa”,

       The way you attach 

electrodes to my scalp,

 let them drape behind

 my head, I must 

look like a Gorgon. 

Though punished

by no goddess, I feel

cursed. Though not quite

a Hippocrates, you diagnose,

 treat. Though no oracle,

you foresee recovery: (15)

The resonance is the now, often-fraught medical experience—a cultural hotspot, too ubiquitous now to be a taboo topic. Even the specificity of electrodes is balanced by the classical allusion. Once again, Fletcher uses a subtle vowel shift to shift the point of view. A look at the assonance shift from the a vowel of “Way/attach/scalp/drape” gives us that physical moment of touching, which shifts to the more distant view posited by the allusion to a monster and the use of “cursed/punished”.  That intimate perception, those personal reckonings that too often happen because of medical settings, are still also too often the taboo topics that surround the stigmas of disability.

Fletcher’s portraits of intimate moments do give the work the overall feel of memoir, but the work doesn’t follow that as a sequence. In the closing poem “Boys”, the scene is of a slumber party and action figures, with sound effects and off-stage directions (“time for bed”),  a scene culturally seen as utter normalcy. The poem concludes with

[...]Our heads atop

 your X-Men pillows, our bodies beneath 

your matching comforter, we’d fall asleep,

 warm and peaceful, in one another’s arms. (26)

the rhyme here of “beneath/asleep” does not conclude the poem, but leads up to it, as if musically introducing the concluding assonant that sonically seems a sigh.

Whilst those who bean count status might just become aware of Fletcher’s sublime offerings through the ivory influence of the press, for those to whom the work itself matters would be advised to add Fletcher to their personal collections. His social media profile, and this chapbook’s acknowledgements, show him to be a diligent producer of work. This Is My Body is a strong start for a writer worth watching.

Su Zi is a writer, poet and essayist who produces a handmade chapbook series called Red Mare. She has been a contributor to GAS from back when it was called Gypsy Art Show, more than a decade ago.

                     

Check out her author page on Amazon.

 

Review of Su Zi's DANKE by Jonathan Fletcher

Danke

Su Zi

Ethel Zine and Micro Press

2024

49 pgs.

$10

“Darkest moon cycle: / ritual of dawn and dusk, / wet wind bends dry grass. . .” (Su Zi 3). And so begins Su Zi’s Danke (2024), a chapbook-length poem in quatrains.  Though small in dimensions, relatively short in word count, Danke is anything but lean in subtext, diction, meaning, or description.  Within the compact pages, each rich in detail, crows summon mornings, moons melt, and a horse “allows a long embrace” (ibid. 18).  Though full of such unique and skillful instances of anthropomorphism, Danke does much more than lend nonhuman characters human attributes; it invites the reader into an environment too often (and equally sadly) foreign to a modern reader. 

 

As if aware of the cultural divide between such a reader and the pastoral, the speaker addresses Red Woman, presumably one of a handful of equine characters, at various points in the chapbook.  In such intimate moments, however, the reader gets the sense that the speaker is gesturing toward them as much as the horse, and maybe even the author herself. In such moments, too, the speaker nearly (and implicitly) bemoans the tragic and irrevocable separation of humanity from its primal habitat while also (and equally fervently) celebrating, even ennobling, the nonhuman characters and their georgic environment.  Su Zi’s choice of capitalization of the common names of the various animals (e.g. Mourning Dove, Cardinal, and Warbler) only lends further support for such an interpretation.

In Danke, Su Zi wisely eschews ornate language for plainer (though not plain) diction.  Though not exactly minimalist in nature, Su Zi’s descriptions are simple (though not simplistic) in syntactical construction.  Take, for example, the following quatrain: “never forgetting / hungry years, palomino now learns gentleness. / following difficult steps / those of a beloved ghost” (ibid. 7).  Or, to take another example: “grass is burnt with frost / yet my red sister searches / for sleeping green roots / disinterested in grain / it seems she dreams of sweetness” (ibid. 31). Or, yet another example: “these simple moments: / cranes come to peck corn and dance, / sun sweetens damp air / so Sister Mare cleans all seeds, strolls soft-eyed in golden light” (ibid. 35).  Though arguably quiet and reflective, Su Zi’s minimal language emotionally charges such otherwise interior moments.  Though neither metered nor rhymed, Danke operates with an informal rhythm.  It operates with alliteration and assonance (“awful arctic air” being an example of the former,” “flit of the left oat” an example of the latter) (ibid. 23, 21).  It operates with anaphora: “this moment’s wet wind / this moment’s intimacy / this forever in the now” (ibid. 19).  Though never overwhelmed by such conventional poetic devices, Danke allows for just enough and, in doing, so not only informs and enlightens the reader but transforms them.

Although Su Zi’s chapbook-length poem is indeed a quick read, it is one that stays with the reader long after.  It is one that begs for a reread. Several, in fact. Don’t pass up this literary revelation. Pick up Su Zi’s chapbook today, and let it settle within you. Let it rumble.  Let it rise.  You won’t be disappointed.

Jonathan Fletcher holds a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Columbia University School of the Arts.  His work has been featured in numerous literary journals and magazines, and he has won or placed in various literary contests.  A Pushcart Prize nominee, he won Northwestern University Press’s Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize contest in 2023, for which he will have his debut chapbook, This is My Body, published in 2025.  Currently, he serves as a Zoeglossia Fellow and lives in San Antonio, Texas.