book reviews

Rising Up and Shouting: Review of Brassbones and Rainbows

04/27/2014

Rising Up and Shouting
Review:
Brassbones and Rainbows

by Jason Cantrell

Brassbones & Rainbows
The Collected Works of Shirley Bradley LeFlore
Poetry
2Leaf Press (2013), pp. 120
Cost: $17.09

Shirley Bradley LeFlore’s debut poetry book, Brassbones and Rainbows, is a vivid collection that uses a musical voice to address political and social issues. LeFlore’s word choice throughout her poems evoke the feelings of gospel and blues, and when reading the poems you don’t hear the writer’s voice speaking to you; it shouts and sings with passion you can feel in every line.

Many of the poems in the collection are written in a voice shouts from the page, making one picture the poet as one who is fighting against being silenced. While the words in the poems don’t specifically say who or what is trying to silence the poet, the undertone of racism and prejudice stands out as the ideology the poet is preaching against. The need to shout out loud and be heard is perhaps best expressed in the closing lines of her poem “Brass Reality,” which reads, “you can bury me in the east / you can bury me in the west / but I’m gonna rise-up and be a TRUMPET in the mawnin.” A reader might recognize these lines, and a Google search of them reveals similar lines in a gospel song, “You May Bury Me in the East.” LeFlore changes the message of the gospel in a simple yet riveting way. The gospel song repeats lines about Christians longing to fly away, and one memorable set of lines reads, “You may bury me in the east / You may bury me in the west / But I'll hear the trumpet sound / In that morning.” The line in the gospel verse indicates that the trumpet sound, playing somewhere off in the undefined distance, signifies hope with each new dawn. LeFlore’s poem, on the other hand, boldly declares that she won’t be waiting to hear the trumpet, but instead will rise up and be the trumpet, playing out loud to spread that hope.

LeFlore’s perspective as an African American southerner comes out clear in her choices of words that call out the stereotypes most commonly associated with her race. In one poem, “Sonnybrotherman Dance,” she writes about a man dancing in what feels like protest against oppression. She tells “Sonnybrotherman” to “Dance in a cotton field / a tobacca farm / a steelmill grind / on a watermelon rind.” The images thus evoked are of an oppressed man dancing to show his passion, his freedom. The poem then calls for the man to dance in order to rise above racism and climb above the insults and crude names he has been called. She tells him, “Dance that boy named colored down in the ground / Stomp that boy named nigga with your 200 pound / Dance that name deep.” These lines bring to mind an image of a man burying the names he has been called, “colored” and “nigga,” and continuing to dance as he leaves those names behind him, buried deep underground. Then, towards the end of the poem, she says, “You don paid your dues / Work a lil soft shoe / Dance your own tune.” These lines tell the message that the subject of the poem has earned the right to dance, and the freedom to dance in his own way, because of the price he had to pay to gain that freedom.

LeFlore also uses a distinctly southern voice in her writing, using a grammar and style that immediately brings to mind a regional accent. She uses alternate spellings of many words to express the accent in them, such as in likes like, “cuz I got a gee-zus complex,” and “jus a box recycled, with a bag of ole bones.” Lines like these add to LeFlore’s distinct voice, and it’s easy to imagine, while reading these poems, LeFlore standing before you like a gospel preacher, shouting out the words.

After reading LeFlore’s poems, one doesn’t have to know for themselves the struggles of being an African American woman living through oppression and fighting for her voice; reading these poems makes you feel as if you have experienced those struggles, and you can hear the fight in the voice on the page.

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Species/Spaces: A journey of blood and time

04/27/2014

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credit: Jordan Eagles

Species/Spaces:
A Journey of Blood and Time
Review of Jordan Eagles'
Blood Work
by Amelia Thatcher

A heavily populated Saturday afternoon echoes a literal mutter throughout the Mütter Museum, the living mingling amongst the dead, their voices hushing as a wall of skulls greets them beyond the foyer’s marble stairs. Even those who have been here before (including myself) cannot help but ponder the mummified past, the wax figures of the disfigured, and the alternately gleaming and rusting obstetrical tools which look more suitable beside a Torquemada or Mengele than in jolly old Franklin’s adopted hometown.

Above, the special exhibits room looks almost sterile, newer than its surroundings, reminiscent of Museum of Modern Art austerity, white walls and carefully spaced pieces, granting viewers a hint of intimacy. Below, thin and creaking wooden steps lead to crowded collections in jars; the sample and trifles and oddities of humanity which repel and draw the curious and strong of stomach. The reverse chronology of architectural and exhibition styles suit the venerable institution, a bequest of the University of Pennsylvania College of Physicians, and set in motion a walk backward through time into the American medical establishment.

The most modern of these works-on-view, “Blood Work,” is the brainchild of New York artist Jordan Eagles, whose web site describes the self-invented process as “preserve[ing] blood to create works that evoke the connections between life, death, body, spirit, and the Universe…”

Plexiglas and UV resin hold the blood captive, revealing a luminous glow, an unsettling powdery essence “as a sign of passing and change,” and mixes in copper as a “unique, fiery energy.” Along one wall, “Roze Triptych” captures blood as textile, “a map of memory and homage to ancient wrapping rituals.” Indeed, each cloth-permeated piece could be batik, a fabric of the life force as its substrate once flowed.

Eagles isn’t the first artist to use blood as a medium. Modern feminist pieces, from spoken word to the 2008 outrage surrounding Yale University art student Aliza Shvarts’ use of her own menstrual fluids (and self-induced miscarriages, depending on whether you believe Shvarts or a suddenly gun-shy Yale), place a high premium on blood and its symbolism. Why not use one’s own body in the manifestation of art? Why not capture the force upon which life flows? Why not make the figurative literal and the intangible physical? Who gets to decide which artworks are creation and which artworks are destruction, and why destruction isn’t art? On the issue of art or “art,” the casual Googler will find a million and one comments at varying levels of rational discourse. However, the discussion’s very existence strongly suggests the work has indeed created a narrative to which even the most valiant anti-art fanatic has dipped a toe. With this narrative, the artist can claim success.

As the blood in Eagles’ work did not issue from his own body, perhaps he dodged the gender politics and/or personal ethics bullet. The animal rights folks (Eagles sourced the blood of “Blood Work” from a slaughterhouse) never made anything remotely approaching the mass media splash that the pro-life (and pro-choice) people did for Shvarts’ Internet-famous conceptual piece.

I manage to tear my gaze from Eagles’ backlit blood paintings, glowing gold and red and in some spaces, deep black. Where, exactly, does “Blood Work” fit into the historical Mütter?

Downstairs, the main collection remains shadowed in original wood cabinetry, scrupulously maintained, yet the glass’s shiny waves betray the age which blamed “miasmas” for spreading infection. Unhindered, modernity creeps in around the corners: numbered cards, far more recently installed amongst the flesh and bones, offer viewers a cell phone tour. Then around the corner, on the opposite side of a descending staircase, the revolving exhibit presently entitled “Broken Bodies – Suffering Spirits: Injury, Death, and Healing in Civil War Philadelphia” beckons, in sharp contrast to the glamorous and sterile bloodwork which drew us to the museum space in the first place.

Another corner, and the bloodless “Soap Lady” in her open casket wordlessly questions everything the nineteenth century knew about bodily decomposition. Why she’s tucked away in a corner of the Civil War, I don’t know, but standing between her and a model of Abraham Lincoln’s head wound is suddenly overwhelming.

Enough blood and bodies for one day. I walk down marble steps, a feature one might expect of a museum, whether or not it contains art or “art.” Eagles has chosen a brilliant venue for his work: the crossroads of art and exhibit case, life and death, energy and repose. Choose your dichotomy: Eagles has articulated the connection between them.

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Tears for the Mountain

04/27/2014

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Crying for Haiti Ended Long Ago
Review: Tears for the Mountain

Steve Royek
Tears for the Mountain
Chris Rakunas
Nonfiction
Divertir Publishing, pp. 173
Cost: $14.95

In the United States, where our national attention span seems to coincide with the length of a half-hour TV sitcom, it’s no surprise that the deadly, destructive earthquake in Haiti has disappeared from our national consciousness.

The January 12, 2010 quake killed more than 100,000 men, women and children and left tens of thousands more homeless.  News reports at the time told of office building collapses in the capital of Port-au-Prince that buried scores of people alive under tons of debris. In the days and weeks that followed, orphaned children wandered the streets and roaming gangs enforced vigilante justice while looting homes and businesses for food and valuables.

Despite an initial international response that led to more than $32 million in donations in less than a month, the scores of similarly horrific disasters since – including the current typhoon recovery underway in the Philippines – have shoved the Haiti story completely off the mainstream media radar.

A quick Google search of the phrase “relief efforts in Haiti earthquake” produces recent releases from the Red Cross, CARE and the Obama White House.  However, articles from such mainstream news sources as CNN, the Washington Post and the Christian Science Monitor carry publication dates as old as only a few days and weeks after the quake itself.

Filling this informational void, however, is a powerful nonfiction chronicle called Tears for the Mountain.  In his debut work, Chris Rakunas vividly shares his week-long experiences delivering ten tons of medical supplies throughout Haiti.

Originally published on January 12, 2012 – the second anniversary of the quake, Tears currently is receiving renewed attention due to the Philippines disaster along with the pending release of Rakunas’ third book, and second novel, The Eye of Siam.

The goal of narrative nonfiction works, such as Tears, is to provide detailed information about key situations, events and issues. Just as the Greek god Chronos wrapped his snakelike body around the legendary world-egg; a strong chronicle should wrap its arms around a topic and give us a comprehensive, opinion-free, non-judgmental account of what took place.

Tears meets and exceeds this goal by delivering the sights, sounds, feelings and smells of what it was like to be fully immersed in the hopeless tragedy that was immediate post-earthquake Haiti.

Chris Rakunas

The fast-paced book begins with Rakunas, at the time a southwest Florida hospital executive, racing across the state’s Alligator Alley highway to catch a cargo flight to Haiti two weeks after the quake. He and his orthopedic surgeon colleague, Dr. Stephen Schroering, are making the trip with nine pallets worth of surgical goods that were dropped off at their hospital.

From their middle-of-the-night arrival at the darkened Port-au-Prince airport – illuminated only by the light of an electrical fire in the remains of the terminal – to their exhausted departure six days later, Tears chronicles the pair’s experiences interacting with the Haitian people in exacting detail.

We can see the brightly colored orange, green and blue piles of wood shards along roadsides where small houses used to be, as well as the hundreds of boxes of supplies that Rakunas spends hours sorting and organizing and sorting again.

We can hear the joyous laughter of young children playing outside the orphanage Rakunas called home for a week, which stands in stark contrast to the plaintive wailing of mothers over the bodies of their dead babies.

We can feel the old man’s damaged thigh bone snap into place as Rakunas assists with the resetting of a fractured leg on a makeshift church pew operating table, and we share the feeling of fear with the author as he sprints to seek shelter behind a courtyard gate to avoid a gang of Port-au-Prince thugs.

We can smell the pervasive burning charcoal aroma throughout the island, along with the sickeningly sweet odor of rotting human flesh that is seemingly encountered around every corner.

The chronicle also introduces us to such inspiring personalities as Miriam Frederick, the director of New Life Children’s Home and Rakunas’ host and facilitator for the week. She’s described in Tears as a both “a miniature Phyllis Diller” and “the Mother Teresa of Haiti” for her appearance and her countless good deeds. We also meet the complex Guy Philippe, a local political leader who was quite helpful to the author on a delivery to the remote town of Pestel. We learn in the book’s epilogue that Philippe is suspected of being a murderous counter-revolutionary who was trained and funded by the U.S. government.

Tears for the Mountain – named after graffiti in Port-au-Prince depicting a map of Haiti with its tallest mountain Pic la Selle crying – is faithful to its time line and organized into chapters simply titled Day One, Day Two etc. We awaken with Rakunas each morning to the sound of giant cargo planes touching down at the airport and go to bed with him each night after the bracing, but refreshing, ice-cold shower that washes away the physical if not the emotional stains of the day.

In a recent interview, Rakunas said he’s constantly haunted by strong, sensuous images from his trip, an effect he said is intensified each time he attends a book signing and speaks publicly about the trip. These experiences so strongly felt by Rakunas nearly three years ago are effectively recorded in Tears for us to process and ponder in our own minds.

With his repute as a novelist continuing to grow, one hopes Rakunas eventually will step back into the nonfiction genre as he clearly has a firm handle on what it takes to produce a strong and significant chronicle.

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Review: Haute Surveillance

01/20/2014

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Inventing Reality
Review: Haute Surveillance

Katlyn Slough

Haute Surveillance
Johannes Göransson
Fiction
Tarpaulin Sky Press, pp. 191
Cost: $16

Johannes Göransson’s second novel, Haute Surveillance, first introduces his nameless narrator in the midst of confusion: he immerses his readers in a world of grotesque and vivid imagery, of “a thousand mute actresses with their mouths full of jewelry,” of a “cutting room” that is “full of soldiers masturbating.” He places readers in his piecework of violence, sex, art and emotion, in short snapshots of unexplained events, and leaves them scrambling to find their way out. Readers get one companion, one true character: an unreliable, determined, and probably insane narrator, and the reader slowly realizes this world is the narrator’s own.

Göransson makes it clear from the very first page that the reality of the situation isn’t important, what is happening isn’t even important. The ideas are.

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Review: In Times of Fading Light

01/20/2014

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Humanity Behind the Wall
Review: In Times of Fading Light

Joseph F. Berenato

In Times of Fading Light
Eugen Ruge, Translated by Anthea Bell
Fiction – Novel
Graywolf Press, pp. 308
Cost: $26.00

My generation comprised the last of the Cold War Kids, and the Communist Bloc was still a very real thing during my childhood. It didn’t matter if we were talking about soldiers or scholars, presidents or peasants; any person beyond the Berlin Wall was the enemy. It was inconceivable to us that anyone who lived on the other side of the Iron Curtain could be painted as anything but “Godless Communists”. Yet that is exactly what Eugen Ruge did in his out-of-the-gate hit In Times Of Fading Light, which spans almost sixty years of family and national history.

The story is not told linearly; instead, the narrative jumps back and forth in a series of vignettes starting and ending in 2001 just days after September 11, and going as far back as 1952 (the year that the German Democratic Republic – East Germany – closed its border to West Germany). By telling these tales through a multitude of characters’ points of view – one story in particular is told from six unique perspectives on October 1, 1989, slightly more than a month before the fall of the Berlin Wall – Ruge gives us an intimate look at characters who are every bit as hopeful, talented, jaded and flawed as their Western rivals.

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Review: All of You on the Good Earth

01/20/2014

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An Ode to the World
Review: All of You on the Good Earth

Stephanie M. Kohler

All of You on the Good Earth
Ernest Hilbert
Poetry
Red Hen Press, pp. 96
Cost: $16.95

The sonnet has been given new life. It mulls over existence in loneliness and in the dingy places, people, and pastimes we often overlook. In All of You on the Good Earth, Ernest Hilbert uses this traditional form as a vehicle to tackle the ancient question, what am I doing here? Sometimes the place is real, West Philadelphia or New York, but no matter the setting, the speaker has the same agenda: to observe, to pick apart, to make sense, to come to a conclusion about his surroundings. As humans and as thinkers, this is what we do, Hilbert suggests.

In “Seneca at the Baths,” the speaker questions the purpose of mundane, unthought-of objects:
Is the ideal ruler to crack knuckles
Or shaft sited to repair fractured bone?
A trellis to train vines through a season
Or a fence to divide, secured by patrols?
It is the duality of these things that he is most concerned with. This is not to say that rulers, trellises, and ladders have multiple purposes, though they may, but that their purposes can be debated, based on perspective.

Needless to say, perspective is important. However, Hilbert insists that perspective, where and how we are when we observe, is everything. We don’t know who the speaker or the addressed is, who “I” or “we” or “you” signifies, but we can gather that these are never the same. Each sonnet is its own narrative peering into the window of a single moment – like a soliloquy, each 14-line poem is recited in isolation. Something has sparked a thought or an association, and the sonnet serves as a finite method to record and explore these moments. Hilbert often reveals where he is in the titles or in the first few lines. At one point, he is on “a crowded train compartment, regretting his life;” at another, he is “at a friend’s empty loft.” In these instances, he is explicit in stating his physical, spatial place, but there are also points where he is at a mental location. “Outsider Art” queries the origin and preoccupation of artists, particularly writers. Ironically, the last line speaks of “the moment something truly begins;” this is the premise of an idea, the captured moment of realization.

Just as Hilbert observes his modern world, he also reflects on the past, not his past, but that of humanity. He does so as if he was there, as if he able to time-travel and seize these moments for future examination. He writes of wise Plato and foolish dictators, Sophocles and Euripides. Why mention these greats at all? The prelude poem “Dusk in the Ruins,” though told in present time, describes a visit to Necopolis, Vulci. The speaker “arrives, one more uninvited guest” to a place where “whole histories, spread and cooled in their course,/Load this darkened air.” The atmosphere hangs heavy with history, and all that is left today, no more than ruins, exists amidst all the modernity. Hilbert recognizes this disconnect by acknowledging how his live presence disrupts the long-dead remains. Yet instead of separating past and present, he has compiled them into one collection that does not discriminate. He recites sonnets to both, constantly revisiting the ancient question.

A denizen of the present and an admirer of the past, Hilbert is human: he is an observer. He doesn’t overlook the not so pristine images of industrialism or modernity, but he also does not herald the great histories. Instead, he delves into both, mixing old and new, reaching for truth as he sees it, using one of the most classical literary forms, each sonnet a small window looking out to the larger view.

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March 03rd, 2013

03/03/2013

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A Helping of Southern-Style Crazy
Review: Stray Decorum

Jason Egner

Stray Decorum
George Singleton
Fiction - Stories
Dzanc Books, pp. 171
Cost: $15.95

According to George Singleton, the motto for the Southern States should read, “The land of the free and the home of the strays.” At least, that’s the picture he portrays in his new novel Stray Decorum.

Decorum, Singleton’s fifth book, aims to capture the enchanting, yet bizarre, Southern disposition through a collection of eleven short stories – all centered around small-town South Carolina living. Contrary to the illustration on the front cover, Stray Decorum is not solely a collection of anecdotes about man’s best friend. Instead, it’s a quirky and often hilarious ensemble of tales about strays, both human and mammal, alike.

The thematic notion of the South as a refuge for drifters rings clear throughout the collection, often mirrored through the actions of the characters as they “take in the strays.” It is almost an unwritten law that everyone takes care of each other – no matter how odd or imperfect.

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Review: Fires of our Choosing

03/03/2013

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Lighting the First Match
Review: Fires of Our Choosing

Phil Cole

Fires of Our Choosing
Eugene Cross
Fiction
DZANC BOOKS, pp. 195
Cost: $15.95

With most of Eugen's stories taking place in his home-region of up-state Pennsylvania, his characters and their predicaments are very much tied to their surroundings. Much emotional energy is drawn around this through looks exchanged at bonfires, cold nights spent in lonely dive bars, and romances beginning and ending at a peninsula reaching into Lake Erie.

Cross seems to like baiting the reader into projection. In many of his stories, you are nestled into a seemingly clean and simply-sequenced narrative only for your expectations to be shattered by some kind of unforeseeable event. In “Come August,” Megan, the protagonist, is preoccupied with boy problems and anticipation of going away to college for the first time. While babysitting her half sister and a neighborhood girl, Megan briefly falls asleep. When she wakes up, her concerns—which the reader has not only invested his or her self in, but also anticipates an outcome from—disintegrate when she finds the two girls have drowned in the pond in her back yard. This transition in the plot gives the reader a violent jerk from the relative comfort of melodrama to the all-too-real panic of death. We are then, through our own past acts of similar negligence, left to take on Megan’s guilt. By doing this, we are finally brought to grant forgiveness through a pragmatic sympathy that Cross adeptly puts into us like a spell.

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Review: Law of Strings by Steven Gillis

03/03/2013

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A Need to Connect
Review: The Law of Strings

Caroline Marinaro

The Law of Strings
Steven Gillis
Fiction - Short Stories
Atticus Books, pp. 182
Paperback Cost: $12.00

The title of Steven Gillis’ collection of short stories – The Law of Strings and Other Stories – couldn’t be more fitting. In Gillis’ fifteen tales, he examines the human condition through relationships with a keen eye for philosophical musings and theories of quantum mechanics. Some of the scenes Gillis paints for us verge on ridiculous but he handles the whimsy well. In the end, however, the stories are not about the plots: in each story, Gillis writes tragic characters who want nothing more than to be understood by and relate to others, even though numerous obstacles continuously prevent them from doing so. Using humor, absurdity, and scientific theories, Gillis illustrates the contradictory nature of relationships: how all humans seem to want is to connect to others and yet such a connection among such complex creatures is almost impossible. We all grasp at these metaphorical “strings” to tether us together while the world tries its hardest to pull us apart.

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Review: Alys, Always by Harriet Lane

12/11/2012

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Review: Alys, Always

Cherita Harrell

Alys, Always
Harriet Lane
Fiction
Scribner Press, pp. 224
Hardcover Cost: $24.00

In Harriet Lane’s debut novel Alys, Always, the reader is introduced to the narrator Frances Thorpe—a thirty something copy editor for a failing London magazine who stumbles on a car accident one night when returning home from visiting her parents. Frances’s actions in the beginning of the novel mimic those of an innocent do-gooder—a person who stops at the sight of an accident, and discovers a victim hidden by the darkness, buried beneath the crushed metal of her vehicle. Frances attempts to comfort the victim, who later introduces herself as Alys, while waiting on the ambulance to arrive. Frances is unaware of Alys’s injuries, and sits with her during her final moments of life—unable to do anything to save her. After Alys dies, Frances returns to her home, haunted by the woman’s death. Once home she takes stock of her surroundings and comments, “You’re not so badly off, are you?” convincing herself that her basic needs have been fulfilled.

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<< Previous

Rising Up and Shouting: Review of Brassbones and Rainbows

Species/Spaces: A journey of blood and time

Tears for the Mountain

Review: Haute Surveillance

Review: In Times of Fading Light

Review: All of You on the Good Earth

March 03rd, 2013

Review: Fires of our Choosing

Review: Law of Strings by Steven Gillis

Review: Alys, Always by Harriet Lane

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