Meg Tuite’s "White Van" reviewed by Su Zi

 

Content Warning: Meg Tuite’s White Van

Monsters are an ancient memory, a symbol, a staple of genre. Works thus of horror tend to time the reveal of their monsters, be it a frightening fog or a franchise of mutated outer space lizards. Not so in White Van, where the monster are monsters, unnamed, unseen. While a typical horror offering might involve the eternally invisible, it is precisely the prosaic settings Tuite depicts that make the work so horrifying.

Reviews and blurbs of the work, however, emphasize Tuite’s craftsmanship, with quotations that tend to view the lines through a poetic lens. Certainly, Tuite overtly has skills; however, the hybrid nature of the writing as collected has blurbs which describe the work as poems, as prose, as mash-up. The text contains just shy of 50 titles in the contents. A visual inspection of the text reveals occasional use of shortened lines, the use of alternating bold and italics font, and an interesting consistency in stanza breaks: used for paragraphing, even prose-appearing sections will be broken at 20 or fewer lines with a double space break. While a typical hybrid work can sometimes be tipped in balance visually, the structure here is almost demure—it's the sequential nature of the narratives that build the arc of this work.

A sensibility is strongly present here, and a lazy interpretation might escalate the genre of the work from horror to obscenity. Here, the hybrid nature of the writing might be seen as a gesture to influence; contemporary readers might remember Acker, or ought to. White Van exists in ordinary settings, as ordinary as the vehicle named. Each episode has a victim, and violence survivors are warned that gruesome becomes ordinary here. The daily nature of each episode, “Dad roams for hitchhikers” (69), is belied by the overt and repetitive taboos “ A magazine article kidnaps me while on the toilet”(39) or “Oxycontin shaves on to tinfoil like a shot and a prayer”(47), so that each episode builds upon the flash narratives for the work’s overarching point of the infinite of intimate violence.

The volume itself is a recent release from Unlikely Books, the title nears the dozen mark for the author, and the list of where these episodes were previously published is a half a page; therefore, we can conclude that the title was released both as an individual offering and as a thread of consideration in the publisher’s catalog. Certainly, the book itself appears as ordinary trade as that of some of the monsters’ forms of employment in Tuite’s episodes. Perhaps that is the resonant horror here: how unspoken the violence is in consideration of the work, how ordinary the settings, how police blotters are full of these episodes. Our repulsion might be immediate from the text, but the serial nature, the sheer numbers represented here, are the too often unspoken horror of our times now, the keystone of all other violence being our deaf eyes to each victim. For readers untouched by the daily horror of personal violence, this text gives you enough gore and anguish to catch, at least, the scent of blood. 

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 "Sometimes the Light" by Rick Campbell

 

                                 Available from Main Street Rag Bookstore

The authentic voice: too often overlooked these days, too often put into the shadows by the glitz of more acrobatic literary endeavors, the authentic voice has been subjected to an unjust partisan divide that results in robbing the passionate reader of resonant experiences. Yet such work exists, and ought to gain readership among those who do value that which truly, if quietly, seeks to speak to us in a deeper way. Perhaps the griot nature of experiential work is lost on certain urban-minded people, but even the most cosmopolitan among us will realize how joyous is a blooming tree after months of a concrete gray winter. Thus, Rick Campbell’s work, Sometimes the Light , a prose work of essays that is also memoir, is a pleasant reminder that yes, the authentic world is still here, an authentic voice still exists in published work.

The work opens with a train ride, an essay of seven sections that observes the other passengers with a full sense of being participatory, rather than as subjects of classicist derision. Campbell’s discussion of train passengers includes a section about luggage:

Train people have really bad luggage—mismatched suitcases, garish colors—

            and many have suitcases much larger than what one could take on a plane […]

            A lot of train people don’t, if we are precise here, have luggage. They carry their

            belongings in paper sacks, pillowcases, and large plastic bags from department     

            stores. (4)

The reader is introduced to a setting that is neither or place, or time—as Campbell discusses the lack of synchroneity of train time, of time in motion, with that of fixed positions, such as arrival at train stations. In case the reader is a classist trying to slum along with Campbell, two sections in this opening essay later, Campbell aligns himself with the other passengers:

             I am a train person. My duffel’s cheap and patched on the bottom with duct tape.

             My backpack used to be my daughter’s, and it’s got weird stains here and there.

             I have been wearing the same jeans for four days (9).

The reader will not find any separation between the writer and that which is witnessed on these pages, Campbell stands shoulder to shoulder with the lives that people his work.

Campbell himself is a Pushcart winner, author of multiple titles in multiple genres, and a long-term editorial team member of a respected press. His choice to be of the people does not escape the meditative memoir of this text. In a discussion about a celebrity baseball athlete, Campbell compares the ranks of celebrity, of legacy, between baseball and the literary world via a consideration of nicknames:

                […] was ‘the Georgia Peach” That just doesn’t work.

                It’s rural, regional, Southern. It’s like local color Southern writers

                battling the New York crowd for attention and only coming away with the

                title Regionalists […] it gets them in the Norton, but […] (72).

While the essay itself considers the retrospective moral life of the creator (as an athlete) versus the brilliance of their work, Campbell’s conclusion both includes and passes by the academic with “I tell my creative nonfiction students” (73), to a pure and intimate moment that, in one paragraph, makes prosaic mention of “gifts”, of “synchronicity”, of “forgiveness” and of “redemption”. The reader then too, as silent witness, must acknowledge a kind of posited hierarchy of priorities; that how one is seen as a writer is lesser than the “significance of experience” (73) that a writer might encounter, and that this too must come from us each in our most actualized humanity.

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 "A Brief Conversation with Consciousness" by Marc Vincenz

Available on Amazon

    It is possible for poetry to be both readable and literary, strong enough of voice to be almost conversational, yet sophisticated enough in technique to pleasure the educated reader. In this full-length collection by Marc Vincenz, (Unlikely Books) the reader is presented with not only the new work of a well-published writer, but two critical essays at the volume’s final pages, positioning the book as also existing as a critical text for literary study. 

    The work is divided into seven sections, all named, with six sections for the poems themselves. While these sections are chapbook length, the section names are of a macabre nature, with four named for the corpses of wild born beings, and two for the sort of found trash prosaic to strolls. Of the two concluding essays (by Robert Archambeau and Philip Nikolayev), it is Archambeau who refers to Vincenz’s “typical, despoiled landscape” (127) as a binary seeking enlightenment through a kind of Jungian, intuitive process. A reader moderately aware of symbol structures will discover much meat in this collection: the angelic number of chapters is a strong clue of the symbolic path of the poems, a path that Nikolayev calls “a personal manifesto” (133). But while both essayists cite lines and sections that employ strong symbolism, their view of these symbols is either “a brief flash of satori” (Archambeau, 128), or “observations about insects and birds and other chitchat” (Nikolayev, 140).

   Perhaps a brief conversation can be had about the symbols themselves, perceived by Vincenz and repeated throughout the work. While the fluctuating use of pronouns might interest some readers—how sometimes the second person seems very specific, and other times a general address—or how the plethora of death imagery (“And so we climb/ Deep into the tomb”, 113-114) could yield full study alone, a view beyond the chitchat about birds is also revealing.A casual indexing of references of birds involves some two dozen occurrences throughout the book, with a half a dozen utilizations of egg.

   Vincenz directs one work here to a specific bird, “Hanging Out the Window for a Sparrow” (80), written as a prose poem. Rather than referencing the avian being as symbolic evidence for a meditative point, the poem makes its metaphysical point to the sparrow: “It rained on all of us, even you with your talons, even where the mad moth whirls or the wounded spring curls;” finally including birds as along for the ride, instead of a landscape the reader sees as a kind of fly-over state.

   In the section dedicated to the tell of an avian accident, "Feathers of a Dead Turkey," centered in the collection and comprising of eight pieces, the opening poem “Of Cargo” Vincenz nestles this collection’s gothic meditation. Immediately setting the season, “In autumn”, which birdwatchers know to be legalized murder period for the species, the poem then follows a discourse of associative symbols, except these are references to human myth, concluding with violent Agrippina “her hairpins and hair/ // Overflowing in daises” (60). Later, in “Arrowheads”, two humans, apparently in bed, muse “Later still, sighing, you say:/ ‘How does one get away with murder?/ What century is this? What era?’/ Outside, the towers wobble” (65) Maybe it is here that this work’s migrating thought might roost. Any reader will respond to a symbolic investigation of the noun “tower”, making it a potent symbol. Beyond modern history, the easy mythology of tarot positions a tower as a symbol of expensive endeavor. Combining this with murder creates the sort of modern context of our ordinary anxieties. A view to the poem’s horizon has the reader realizing that this is a probable post-coital conversation. The poem’s title references objects from a pre-colonized human civilization, and the poem’s conclusion is a view of a squirrel—but not an ordinary squirrel, a mutated being who “sits curved, /His blue eyes trained on the soil.” The poem has dealt us a hand in this flock of symbols; the reader is subtly encompassed in an awareness of humanity’s sins. 

   The physical volume has a number of conclusions: a photograph of objects that named the chapters, a prose poem, “One More for the Road”, the two essays and a two-page list of the author’s previous works. Viewing this as either five or seven numerological points from which the reader can exit the book, the parting words of the author “Emerge, Sweet Creature, and light up the way”(119); of the critics , “spirit of exploration”( Archambeau) and  “ a mighty personal lyric chord”(Nikolayev) are a call to carry the book’s song with us, a sophisticated opera about a broken-hearted man in a landscape of death. 

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.

Marc Vincenz and Su Zi

Ron Cooper's All My Sins Remembered, reviewed by Su Zi

 

   In traditional folklore, humor and regionalism are intrinsic aspects that carry the narrative, sometimes superseding it, and sometimes allowing for parable to emerge. And although regionalism as a genre can be considered a spatial concern, or a standard shelf in bookshops, it does draw a binary line between those familiar with a particular place and those who are not. The tourist reader might be carried along by the narrative’s current; the native reader will recognize landmarks. While regionalist writing may find currency among tourist readers, as if it were a literary cuisine, some true measure of the work will be gauged by native readers keenly aware of authenticity. Thus, the tale is told of time and place and those who live there.

    In Ron Cooper’s novel All My Sins Remembered (Goliad), the reader experiences life as a law enforcement officer in Ocala, Florida, a community currently described as undergoing rapid population growth.  Indeed, the novel opens with specific, native sites,” Through the gap between the lines of trees along the far side of the Silver River[…]a slender bird, probably an egret, passed”(1), and the action throughout stays mostly within that local proximity. Cooper’s land of legend is the Ocala Forest, an annual visit spot for Rainbow People, whom Cooper , in no disguise, calls  “Starlight”, and who play an influential part of the narrative.  While Cooper’s depictions of these annual visitors is both accurate-- the groups preference for “funny hats”-- as well as exaggerated for humor “His lower lip was pierced with what appeared to be a dog whistle”(4), his depiction of the fictionalized but actual residents of the forest follows the same structure of accuracy and hyperbole, with the exception of a far more harsh humor. A scene of a local gathering includes “an old hog trough […] now used as a footrest[…]and as a spittoon by Edna Yancey”(100). While the tourist reader might notice a woman who chews tobacco, the native reader recognizes the name of a local family. That the implication of lowest social caste is attached to this family name might not be humorous to some native readers; Cooper is consistent here, all the residents of the Ocala Forest are painted as being of the lowest social caste—a local myth from town people that is resented by forest residents.

   Cooper might revere Florida’s Beat writer, Harry Crews, but his strength is the didacticism that threads through both this and his other works. In the scene at the weekly bluegrass and potluck barbeque, Cooper educates the tourists with “Blevins announced that he would do a song everyone knew. He sang ’Hold Back the Waters’ by Florida’s folk song hero Will McLean, and everyone around Moreno joined in on the chorus about the threat of a flood” (103), while also creating an intimate nod, perhaps, to his bluegrass duet and Florida blues scholar partner. Not all of Cooper’s references are obscure. A scene involving a family argument about religion contains this comparative analysis: “The Bible prophets knew all about suffering. Vanity is the bastard child of the ego. The bigger the ego, the more dukkha, the more suffering”(68) which is countered with “so then he wandered around the rest of his life eating other people’s, poor people’s food. Never turned a lick in his rich boy life” (69). The novel never bogs in such gems, and is cleverly structured to visit various persons, including a point of view change, that don’t overwhelm the reader with the work’s basic premise of the murder mystery plot, or the unlikely hero’s journey to redemption.

  Cooper is a clever writer: because of the adept complexities here, the novel’s marketability is Florida-based, mystery based, comedy based. Perhaps it is this last aspect that might leave a bit of aftertaste, as Cooper’s Ocala Forest is a town tourist’s view, but few would remark the lack of empathy; in fact, Cooper’s suicidal, family failure deputy is hardly likeable. The novel’s setting of a relatively unknown region rapidly loosing its local history does position the work as succeeding in a core value of folklore—illumination of a threatened culture, even if the story paints that culture with a severe eye.

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.

Justice Volume 1: The Enemy Within by Gavin C. Brown reviewed by Su Zi

Available from Bookshop.org

   Not every novel intends a literary audience only, and works with a specific intended audience are often enjoyable reading experiences. In the first of an intended serial story, the author is endeavoring to create a world beyond a single volume, and there have been populist successes in this area. While Gavin C Brown’s Justice series (volume two is intended for release for February 2022) exists as a single volume currently, the work is still a provocative and entertaining reading experience—especially if the reader has beyond-tourist familiarity with the work’s setting of New Orleans. 

 

   Perhaps most fascinating for both literary and pure pleasure readers is Brown’s hybrid structure in this work, which combines prose and poetry to create the protagonist’s lived world experience as a contemporary black woman. Brown, himself, is no poseur in this arena, having grown up on the Westbank in Algiers. In a telephone interview, Brown describes New Orleans as “ a lively city and there are complexities associated with that”(20 October 2021). The novel attends to some of those complexities with a dark roux of humor, such as one character’s response to Say Their Names by inclusion of black victims of violence in menu items: “the George Floyd Somebody Call My Mamma Hot and Spicy Jambalaya, the Emmett Till Battered Fish and Fries, the Black Lives Matter Seafood Platter, the I Can’t Breathe Hot Wings” which the character justifies as “ Every time someone takes a bite and spends a dollar, it not only goes back into the community through investment{sic}They are reminded of those victims and their sacrifices. Every time someone takes a bite, it’s a bite out of injustice”(31). The novel’s text, at this point, is a conversation, but Brown adeptly shifts into his protagonist’s inner thoughts through a poem in her point of view: “ Is that I don’t know how he/could possible not see/The negative effects of these actions,/Passed his own satisfaction,/This is not how you build/The Black Community/This is not Black Love/Or Black Unity/This is just exploitation/Of victims Black,/Like you and me “(32).  The fluidity of these genre shifts was, for Brown, the “biggest challenge” in writing; the character “is a poet” and Brown used the genre switch to “flow back and forth and climb into her head”(interview). Since this is volume one of an intended series, and Brown’s use of the hybrid form is so fluid, readers can hope to see this genre -bending format continue in the planned future work.

   What becomes striking about this short novel is that both the character and the theme of the work are concerned with justice. Brown himself remarked on his choice of a female protagonist as being “of far more interest…there are not a lot of black women protagonists…they are unappreciated and persevering. There are enough male heroes out there. I want to do something different. Not the same old thing”(interview). Indeed, most of the characters and groups of characters in this street-smart, maybe-not-fantasy-dystopia are women, hero and anti-hero alike. One anti-hero intends a murder in an unnamed hospital “She’s holding flowers, and she enters the room. […]’The Arian Nation sends their regards,’ the blonde says and pulls a gun, but she can’t shoot it with her face full of my feet […] ‘so, what do they call you’ I say. ‘ The Milk Lady’”(58). Lest readers think that the novel posits all white people as enemy, Brown creates a supporting character in the form of a tall blond called Iron Maiden who sees herself as “an exterminator looking for rats…most of my kills have been KKK and Arian Nation”(88-89). Thus the stuff of heroes and their tropes become the core characters of this work, with New Orleans supplanting a fictive Gotham with genuine, real world ills.

   While readers familiar with the choreography of fighting moves will find plenty of meat in the frequent action sequences, there’s no dismissing the ambitiousness undertaken here.  Brown has multiple font changes-- to record the journal entries of Iron Maiden, conversations in italics, --and a use of street-level language that is currently taboo in general culture. This may be volume one, but it’s also the initial development of a hero world, one where corrupt charities and street thugs eventually get caught, where a girl from the St Bernard project becomes a defender of women. Readers of Brown’s “insider audience…because it’s such an African American centric piece” might laugh out loud a bit more, but the work is well worth the read—as shocking as it might be to consider complex issues of social justice through an action hero trope, Brown’s smooth handling allows also for a sense of delight and fun.             

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.

                      

Su Zi's review of FATA MORGANA by Joel Chace

   

There are those for whom scholarship still matters -–that ancient practice of study and dialogue with a text, outside the temporal constraints of our mortal transience. Sometimes, this scholarship might take another form than the philosophical treatise; sometimes this scholarship, this dialogue with a text, will result in a variety of other written genres, sometimes even poetry. In the instance of Fata Morgana (Unlikely Books, 2021), the opening section is a poem in response to another poet, Jack Spicer; which is, in turn, also in dialogue with the process by which the poem was written. While experiments in spacing, unreliable narration and odd trim size are not new to literary endeavors, Fata Morgana makes ample use of these techniques to try and prompt the reader to consider multiple ways of reading while reading; there’s no definitive approach to this work beyond the traditional format of opening the book and turning pages.

   The book as an entity is an object of 8 by 8 inches, which does not fit tidily on the shelf, and thus demands consideration of its physical nature: a perfect-bound volume of less than 80 pages. Within these pages are graphic devices, simple drawings, which both divide sections within the book, as well as sections within poems. While the paper for the book is traditional enough in trade volumes—standard weight, matt cover, low gloss for easier reading of the text—the physical appearance of the text, in two columns, makes the decision for the extra wide pages a logical, editorial choice.

   The title poem is a seven-page section in the volume, presented in two columns with an underscore line creating a graphic connection from the end of the left stanza to the italicized column on the right. This presents the reader with the decision of how to read the poem, to follow the graphic right and left and right again, to read the left column through before that of the right, or to beg a scholarly patience from the reader by reading the poem multiple times. In seeking from the text itself how it wants to be read, the reader discovers the dialogue between, apparently, the two minds of the author: the left column presenting a more traditional poem, the right presenting a mind considering aspects of consideration external to the poem. In the case of this title poem, the external consideration is a meditation on architecture, which “is about asking questions concerning the/meaning of human ha-/bitation”(35). While the narrative of the entire poem is the sort of curious disaster found in local news, Chace uses overt allusion to clearly demark the poem’s genre as also being that of a ghost story:q“ if he is a Banquo come/back to tell them[…]that those/ he returns to instruct or[…]murder will not stay murdered/ or instructed, unlike/a Banuo who returns but/cannot be unmur/dered”(37-38). Chace’s meditation on the ghost here returns to the external consideration of philosophy and architecture, as if the mortal lives that appear in the poem are more dust to him than the ideas their lives might represent.

   While the book presents itself as a work of poetry, it is also an obvious philosophical work about the distance from life events that critical thought requires. Ironically, the last section of this volume contains 14 poems written during the first flush of the pandemic. In these poems, the dialogue of the scholarly mind in the right column begins to break down into a counterpoint of other physical observations, into comments about music, and finally into auditory verbs. The poems’ narrative scaffolding seems to retreat from a wider world view into an observation about sanitation workers. 

    Yet, still the sense of dual thought, of observing and thinking about what is observed, is consistent through this volume. Whether or not such meditations are of value, or whether or not the pursuit of a critical and philosophical endeavor is mere mirage is a larger cultural issue of our time. For those for whom such intellectual endeavors are still crucial, this work posits a number of worthy considerations.

Fata Morgana is available on Amazon.

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.

POWER by Linda Hogan, reviewed by Su Zi

  

The hungry reader can be a seeker, a welcoming mind to ways of perception that sometimes influence our daily realities, a person for whom certain works may be their touchstone in life. Perhaps the discovery of a work fulfills the dream of being soul-feeding. Sometimes, the hungry reader will discover a work and also discover many works by this writer; to what wonderment we might find whole canons, whole Wikipedia lists of a previously, perhaps minimally, explored genres. Such might be how a reader receives Linda Hogan’s Power (Norton, 1998). Hogan has a resume of books, awards and residencies that position her merit, and is included in low-level search responses for Native American Writers, as well as an extensive list by Wikipedia of Native American Women writers.

The influence of the first people of any area is often present in place names, sometimes family names. In the general culture, beyond the fight against slurs, there’s the horror of appropriation and embarrassing grammar. Sometimes, beyond woo-woo and performative uses of leafy incense, dead bird parts and other totem objects, there might come the perception of this other way of being, this other way of life beyond that of the dominant culture. For multi-cultural people, the presence of personal culture in their  life can be a frictive experience, and reviews of Power tend to emphasize that aspect of the novel, along with the coming-of-age modernization of the hero’s journey. A literature course that includes this work might also include a list of two dozen binary considerations as essays topics; the novel hoists these with ease –- for our ways of being include dates versus seasons and how we view the land. 

While Hogan’s novel has a plot based on true events, and a symbolic array of characters, the considerations of the work extend into a view of environmentalism that Hogan handles with a deft use of elegiac language: “It’s the way she lives in the place where Cuban lizards climb trees and plants look enough like gold in the deep shade and slant of afternoon sun that the Spanish believed there were riches here, in this place that is now darkening with storm and smelling of rain”( 17). In the best hurricane sequence since Zora, the novel proceeds to lay out the multiple symbols, characters and events that propel the narrative. Of note is the re-occurrent and apparitional appearance of four women who are ‘walking slightly above the ground as if they are gliding and have no feet”(24). These women appear, together or singly, throughout the novel, and they are both literal and symbolic figures of ancestry, of a way of being at odds with the culture of cars and casinos.

Lest the reader fear for their air conditioning, Hogan almost spoonfeeds this ancient world perception to the reader, as it is everpresent in a manner that is deemed lyrical or beautiful on dust jacket blurbs. Perhaps an academic would note this as setting, but Hogan’s work endeavors to give voice to nature, to force the reader to perceive how it would be to live with that awareness: “The frogs are loud this morning”(102) or when visiting the town “A few trees stand, alien and foreign, in a ground that not long ago was all theirs. The ground belonged to them and the marsh birds and the possum. I believe they are surprised to be alive at all, those lonely trees, and nothing in the world acknowledges them”(115). The sense of the living world, of life forms beyond our own having birth on our shared earth is more than mere plot mechanics, it is a perception steeped onto every page.

With the effects of climate crisis being now daily news, Power’s now nearly quarter century of existence as a publication highlights aspects of our awareness that are overdue for overhaul. It might be that the reader has recently come to some speculation about how we experience time, and maybe how the land upon which we live begs us to reconsider our ways of being, if we would only listen.

Linda Hogan has had awards and fellowships. from The Lannan Foundation, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the NEA, and was one of three finalists for a Pulitzer when John Updike received it. It was her first novel; MEAN SPIRIT. Her other books have also received awards or nominations. She has a fellowship from the Native Arts Foundation. She also received the 2016 PEN THOREAU AWARD, an honor also awarded to EO Wilson and Peter Matthieson. Her novel PEOPLE OF THE WHALE has been very popular in Taiwan and China, POWER is set in Florida, with a focus on the Florida panther. It has been used with both adult and younger audiences. SOLAR STORMS includes both the James Bay HydroQuebec project in the far north, and is also about adoption in Native communities. DWELLINGS has been a best seller in Japan and done well in U.S. Her new and selected book of poetry, DARK. SWEET. is now available, and she has just finished a new novel, THE MERCY LIARS, not yet in print. Hogan is respected for her work in Indigenous knowledge, Native Science and wildlife rehabilitation as well as her writing that includes ecosystem research. She has a new book of poems, A HISTORY OF KINDNESS coming out from Torrey House Press in April 2020, and a book of essays on relationships with animals and their place in her wilderness region, in Native life, and as fellow travelers with us in an increasingly difficult world. This will be published by Beacon in Fall of 2020. The Radiant Lives of Animals.

Heidi Blakeslee's review of Su Zi's CHIRP (Hysterical Books Press 2019)

First, Chirp is a consummate work of art.  From the minimalist title to the quirky colorful cover, this book stands out visually.  But inside.  Inside is all of the nature bird magic I had hoped for and then more.

The entire work is wonderfully and lovingly crafted into strict haiku stanzas.  There are no titles, rather the work flows consistently from the beginning to the end.  All bird names and many words depicting nature are capitalized, while oftentimes new stanzas are not.  The effect is brilliantly jarring at times and achingly lovely in turns, much like a bird sighting.  It gives me the feeling that nature is being revered and deserves the extra dignity of a capitalized descriptor.

Digging deeper, some stanzas kept me saying “damn” under my breath.  The amount of restraint and imagination that it must have taken to write a book of this magnitude should be respected.  The selection of descriptor words chosen for each stanza is flawless.  I have never read a work like this, and probably won’t again.  No word is out of place.

I think of Basho.  I think of Adrienne Rich.  I can picture myself in the woods jotting down every bird call and every colorful wing I saw.  The work captures the spirituality of time spent in nature.  Jam-packed with honesty, color, and lyrical precision, “Chirp” is a joy to read.  Su Zi just gets it.

From page 21:

new leaves glow under

ambling clouds gray with promise.

Time past, parents wed.

at morning, scrubjays

collective conversation

matches the gray wind.

prodigal, their white 

elliptical strut hunts bugs

no regrets, Egrets.

afternoon, Mockingbird 

Griot of his odyssey

some lost, ancient songs.

WHAT MAGICK MAY NOT ALTER by JC Reilly, reviewed by Su Zi

Every now and then, a book comes along that is pure joy to read.

As experienced readers, we might be a bit jaded, a bit prone to preference; nonetheless there’s also the euphoria of finding a talented voice, a voice that is adept, even to a classically educated ear. The experienced reader may or may not be a professional artist of language, but certain elements are prosaic in any communication: the line of thought and how that line becomes calligraphed. Even in the children of language as common as television, there are still classical structures: character, plot, setting – and if the setting is historical, we get to witness the test of the research in play before us.

Historical fiction, as a product of industrial publishing, has been packaged as a women’s read, mostly. Overtly feminist works, unless they are the products of those produced to be famous, require the reader to be familiar with hunting university or small presses, or astute independent bookstores. If the work’s text concerns ancestral religious practices, the volume might find some proximity to the shelf of tarot decks. The reader might expect to find perhaps instructions on dancing naked, or a narrative with unusual character names. What might be egregiously overlooked is the work’s setting and how faithful it might be regarding authentic regionalism. Of course, the experienced reader is familiar with those in the canon who used their settings as righteous influence on the characters, ever better when the setting is carefully researched. The reader might even have favorites for repeat readings, narratives of resonance, a beloved novel. 

But in poetry?

Yes. Here in What Magick May Not Alter  (Madville, 2020) are seven chapters of poems, researched from sources as varied as newspapers and The Mabinogion, which comprise a full length volume , a narrative structure of the coming of age of twin sisters, Tallulah and Vidalia. The book opens with a vision the two sisters repairing a quilt, as a single introductory chapter told in prose sections that bloom into prose poetry. The first poem in the work is about a photograph, a family portrait that introduces the characters “[…] The twins,/tall for their age and fluffy as meringues/in yards of white, ruffled lawn, hold hands before her”(6)” The work continues through the family saga, with notable inclusions of spirit practice and of place, that give the reader the experience of this family as if through scrapbook and legend.       

Of fascinating placement in the work are three poems "The Colonel’s Last Stand", "Blue Moon" and "Old Wives’ Oak", Again, with the Colonel poem having seen literary publication. The Colonel , “this sage magnolia […] dubbed ‘the Colonel’ after her papa,/ planted on a rise overlooking/the lake when her parents wed (33)” is a landmark for the family; the lake is the Caddo, is named in the text, and the poem both recenters the setting to a specific, authentic place, and foreshadows the curve of the narrative. The following poem, "Blue Moon" asserts, “so the Blue Moon is Judas’ Moon:/ the Old Church would grieve its arrival/ in Lent as the Betrayer, In 1901, (35)”  gives a tone to the work reminiscent of the Greek chorus’s function in Sophocles. The reader is gently wafted with the narrative complication in the assonantly titled "Old Wives’ Oak", Again when one of the twins remarks on the suitor to her sister,

 “ I could not spare/

 her, once the Old Wives’ magick//

 struck; as dumb love clouded her eyes, 

/fate’s yellow trumpet resounded/

through somber-bare branches, like a sigh (37)”.

The poems continue through the lives of these sisters and their family, and the time, and the place. The reader is as swept into this world as if a novel, except that this is a poem sequence of over 70 poems.

Epic poetry is rare in literature overall, with the archetypical journey employed as a way of advancing the text into parable. This text is a history-based journey, but here, the protagonist, the mythic hero, is a Louisiana girl; her challenges are genuine, but of a different realm than the physical battlefields of life.  What Magick May Not Alter is more than a verse novel, although it can be read with that ease; in this work, researched history becomes poetry instead of academic essay, and the lives of women in a family become both testament to region, to their time, and to an unacknowledged heroism.

What Magick May Not Alter  is available through Madville Publishing.

The author is on twitter @aishatonu

and has a blog  JC Reilly: Poeta Venum

Su Zi's review of THE GREEN ORCHID by Connie Helena

First books are definitive entities: the labor of the writer born into the world and flown to the reader; emblems of hope, sometimes. Some first books are as self-published as Whitman and sit as comfortably on the bookshelf as books from presses large and small. An enterprising reader might have once stumbled upon a debut collection in an independent bookshop, but nowadays a debut work can pop up on social media and be acquired with a fiddle of the fingers. Such is the case with the debut collection of both poetry and prose by Connie Helena, who posts art on Instagram as creativeflorida.

In a perfect bound, trade sized edition, with a 2020 copyright, Helena presents six short stories and a section of poetry. The poems are separated as individual poems by sometimes ending on the page, with the next page’s poem continuing often without title. Since the topic of these poems is a particular and romantic relationship, the poems lend themselves to being one long poem in episodes. During this excursion into intimacy, the poems’ lines alternate between a loose narrative structure and moments that hold much promise for further work from this writer: “ I am a bruise shaped like a butterfly” (79) is followed two and a half stanzas later with “ I’m your angel sugar pie/ I’m your sweetness super fly”(80). Helena is wise enough to filter the traditional trope of love through personal perceptions that include momentary references to the seasons to indicate the passing of time.

Helena’s short story offerings here are of another genre, uniting in various dystopian views that include ironic humor. Each story begins with a shocking premise: In “ The Cardinal”, the opening story, an infertile woman harasses patients at a health clinic; in “Cannibals” a teacher is undone by a false student; and in the book’ closing story, “The Last Violence”, a crew of astronauts seeks to introduce humans on a distant planet. It is in these stories that Helena shows a deftness in writing—each story’s premise is a bit nauseating, as if culled from distasteful news stories and re-envisioned. Of these, the premise of “ The Last Violence” might be the most appalling, as our beloved planet is destroyed in the story’s opening action. The reader is then introduced to the characters, who are mostly symbolic—the large male security soldier, the earnest communications officer. Also introduced is the division between these characters of those who engage in physical sex versus those who meet their neurochemical needs with a pharmaceutical cocktail.  “He could tell right away she did Natural—it was in her eyes and the way she walked. The long hair indicated it as well because most women cut theirs short once they began taking maintainers in the teen years (103)”. It is this absurdity in the story that clues the reader to the forthcoming twist. 

In the six stories presented here, told with varying tempos to their narrative arc, there is a hyperbolic moment that clues the crash of a climax. Each story ends with a bit of dark humor. Helena’s knack here is taking the most ordinary conceit in a story, prosaic and Hollywood enforced narrative cliches in character, and detailing their undoing.  If a debut collection is a promise of what else a writer might have to offer in time, then readers ought to keep lookout for this writer’s short stories; witty and slyly feminist, darkly amusing, Connie Helena debut’s work is a fine start indeed.

The Green Orchid is available on Amazon.

Connie Helena