Glassworks - book reviews

The Road to Self Discovery

1/15/2015

The Road to Self Discovery
Review: Wanting It

by Carly Szabo

Wanting It
Diana Whitney
Poetry
Harbor Mountain Press
Cost: $15.00

Open the pages as a stranger and emerge a well-versed friend in Diana Whitney’s debut book of poetry Wanting It. This deeply personal collection of poems invites readers to explore feelings of regret, love, confusion, and that inexplicable longing each of us feels when our hearts aren’t ready to admit their true desires. Whitney brings you along on her journey of self-realization, reflecting on the movement from herself as she once was to the woman she always wanted to be through beautiful imagery and clever metaphor.

More than a mere assortment of poems, this book reads more like a memoir exploring such issues as gender roles and self-identity. Divided into four sections, each speaks to a different time in the author’s life and the inner struggles she faces at each milestone. “Watched Pot,” the first of these sections, details the author’s life as a free-spirited young woman exploring her sexuality and what it means to be a member of the female gender. The honesty in her revelations is at times harrowing as it reaches into the hearts of her readers to establish a connection they may have never realized existed. She details her changing definition of feminism as one who freely gives her body away to “city mouse and country mouse” (Peckerville) alike to her realization that there is more to being a woman than entertaining the male gaze. This changing definition has a push and pull effect on the reader, causing them to fluctuate along with the author. Whitney uses the nature surrounding her farm town as a means to communicate her confusion. The readers feel the author’s confusion about her own understanding of what it means to be a woman through her inability to subscribe to one definition of feminism and womanhood, just as the nature surrounding her is unable to subscribe to just one season.

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A Father's Enigmatic Past: Review of Cures for Hunger

10/1/2014

A Father's Enigmatic Past
Review: Cures for Hunger
A MEMOIR

Christina Schillaci

Cures for Hunger: A Memoir
Deni Y. Béchard
Nonfiction - Memoir
Milkweed Editions, pp. 315
Hardcover Cost: $24.00

In Deni Y. Béchard’s memoir Cures for Hunger, the reader is introduced to the author as a young boy enamored with his father. The author’s father, André, harbors a wild thirst for danger that burrows in his personality and threatens his family. We see this in the opening scene when André takes his children to sit in his truck over railroad tracks. As the train barrels toward the family, André pretends the truck has stalled until the last possible moment. Antics like this one terrify and thrill his children. Then there is the darker side, the sunken eyes and secrets. After the family’s escape from André—and that’s how it felt, kids packed in the car, speeding across the Canadian border in the middle of the night—Béchard blames his mother for taking him away from his father. In the years leading up to his fifteenth birthday, Béchard discovers pieces of André’s criminal record and resolves to move back in with his father. His hope to quench his fascination with André’s past is shadowed by the realization that his father is not the same man he remembers from childhood.

Béchard explores what it means to be in limbo between craving a father’s love and being repulsed by his lifestyle. In his memoir, the author appears troubled, wanting nothing more than a strong patriarchal figure as he picks fights at school and writes dystopian fantasies in his bedroom. But his redeeming qualities are limited.

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Confusion by Design: Review of Brief

10/1/2014

Confusion by Design
Review: Brief

Brian Maloney

Brief
Alexandra Chasin
Fiction
Jaded Ibis Press, pp. 196

$9.99 for the App, $15.00 for paperback

The psychiatrists were left scratching their heads. They could not understand how such a polite person who seemed together could commit such a heinous crime. They walked away empty-handed. From the time a reader encounters the first sentence in Alexandra Chasin’s Brief, “I have requested an oral argument because I’d like to try, if I may, why my representation and I have chosen this defense, uncommon though it is, and why I would take issue with the psychiatrists’ findings,” he knows there is something wrong. Our narrator seems a little off and eventually we understand why. But at the heart of Brief is a narrator who is trying to change our outlook on how we perceive other people.

Reading Brief is an experience unlike any other. It is the first book that can be downloaded as an interactive app that changes with every read and reread of each page. The pages inside are littered with torn magazine images that feel as though they came from the '60’s. If you flip forward a page, but then need to go back again to re-read, the page you have just left is not the same. The images have changed and so has the layout. Each new read will be a different experience for the reader. This idea of book construction is so unique that it is sure to be soon copied.

At the start of Brief, Chasin’s narrator gives clues to where she is taking us. She starts with an oral argument to begin explaining her psychiatrist’s findings. According to her they came up with, “bupkus.” Our narrator gives us reasoning as to why she thinks she vandalized a work of art. While many others would blame it on the parents, or her childhood friends, she blames it on the changing times of her youth.

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Rising Up and Shouting: Review of Brassbones and Rainbows

4/27/2014

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.

Species/Spaces: A journey of blood and time

4/27/2014

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.

Tears for the Mountain

4/27/2014

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.

Review: Haute Surveillance

1/20/2014

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

1/20/2014

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

1/20/2014

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.

March 03rd, 2013

3/3/2013

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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