Heather Christle's The Trees The Trees

Last month, Julieanne Smolinksi wrote a sardonic essay about the fight against whimsy, urging women to avoid men who “confuse dating with an opportunity to showcase a series of highly cultivated quirks.” Too often, it seems like people are confusing personality, artistry, and talent with the ability to cultivate and strategize the right quirks. For this same reason, I find it difficult to recommend small press poetry to my friends outside of the small press publishing world. It’s hard to say, “this is beautiful and unpretentious and the quirks are ENCHANTING and not INCREDIBLY ANNOYING.”

I only write this here because I would earnestly call Heather Christle’s poetry “enchanting” (Cathy Park Hong says the same thing in her blurb and I’ve got to say, it’s been too long since I was enchanted by poetry). The whimsy and the quirks are there -- a lot of strange visions and circumstances -- but they never feel like forced posturing. You start to imagine that Heather Christle is the girl you really want to be friends with because she’s just so damn cool. And pretty.

That’s another thing. Christle’s writing is pretty -- really pretty -- and the images are surreal and often sweet, but they are also so vivid and genuine that you almost wish you could be in them. Take, “When the sun went down they kept growing,” below:

Christle dedicated the poem to the poet Amanda Nadelberg, and after I read it I kept thinking how badly I wanted to be friends with both of them. Also note Christle’s spacing and formatting on these poems. The entire book is like that. One building block after another.

Naturally (pun!), trees are mentioned in many of the poems, and throughout the entire collection there’s an undercurrent of physicality and growth -- reacting to it, getting there, wanting not to be there. Perhaps this is why these blocks can be both surreal and real -- she uses those images (sometimes taking you into trees, above them, through their branches) to get down to some accessible experience.

Many of the poems are also funny, when it comes right down to it -- because while they’re pretty they’re also self-aware and sharp, making them feel like a nice dose of real talk. Which, again, makes them completely accessible. Christle never confuses artistry with whimsy. She just makes beautiful things happen. This is the kind of book I would give to my best friend from high school and my new friend who just got a raise at her job.

When’s the last time you found a book of poetry you could say that about?

Lisa Fishman's Flower Cart

You find a letter from an old lover. It is five years old. You find lists for groceries on the backs of faded receipts from Best Buy. Become aware of the daily and the small. Of the holes in everything, which aren’t really holes. But portals toward new meaning.

I met Lisa Fishman at AWP Denver in a dimly lit bar. She signed my copy of her book: to Erika, in a bar in Denver. I was drunk and debating on whether I should drop out of grad school (for the second time). Maybe it was all that wine. Maybe it was the high that comes from being in a room full of writers, poets, artists. So I ask her:  Lisa, do I stay or do I move to NYC? Her answer isn’t really of importance here. The asking is. She probably thought I was crazy but I didn’t care. Poets, to me, especially poets whose work has moved me, are oracles, shamans, holy-people. My best friend introduced me to her work while we both studied/suffered in North Carolina. I loved Dear, Read. I found more of her work online. R and I now live in different states. We Skype. We edit one another’s poetry. We email each other amazing poems we find on the internet and suggest new books to one another.

“Have you ordered Lisa Fishman’s new book yet?”

“No.”

“You know you can pre-order it? I already pre-ordered it.”

I lagged. I was coming out of a very long seasonal slump. I was re-reading Creeley. I was re-reading Berger. Fact is — I was only re-reading. I didn’t want to gamble. You know that feeling — when reading becomes this nurturing escape. Very much a drug. Your favorite blanket when you were four and still sucked your thumb. It holds you during those moments when nothing really can. I only wanted home runs. I did not want to risk reading a book and hating it. Then R began sending me photos of the inside of Flower Cart. She would send me one page at a time. One page at a time. A wonderful tease. I became hooked to phrases:

I want to shoot the birds

            she sometimes thought

There is so much that happens

in the little words

I kept bugging her to send me more and then I finally ordered it. I received it in the mail on my way to the beach and read it on the car ride there. There is nothing better than that first read and the satisfaction of arriving to the end. Once there, one has a better feel for the author’s stride, their cadence. Then you go to the pages you have dog-eared and you re-read those. You read some out loud to your sister over the phone who lives states away. She doesn’t get poetry but you don’t care. You re-read it on the train on your way to work. You think why that word and not the other? And then you start feeling that feeling again. That I need to write right now feeling.  

I love this book for its intimacy. There are writers who form intimacy in very technical and clinical means. Crafted and contrived, the words tell us what to feel. What we are seeing. Our reactions have already been well carved out. Though well meaning, it never feels authentic.

Inside of the book, right at its center are two other books, unfinished and found. One was gifted to Fishman by another poet, Richard Meier. The other by Bridget Lowe. At first I did not understand the rationale behind these two small books, Trees I have Seen and Herald Square – Notebook. I’m not even sure I still do. I feel that they create a sense that the reader is looking over someone’s notes. A list of observations. A journal. We do not know much about the speaker. But here is this list. This grouping of words. Things have been filled out. Some are left blank.

November first

tapioca pudding

tower of London

darn the socks

doughnuts and coffee

I appreciate the space Fishman allows her readers. To breathe. In this room the reader creates connections between words. Personal and direct, these ties steer us in multiple directions.

if letters can house a word

then words are not made of letters but letters are made of words

a shape makes a letter            a body

                                                                        ladders,

                                                                        Arms

alternatives / argument

Nothing is just one thing. One solitary article. The sparseness of the sentences, the vivid images, all create a sense of multiplicity. Unornamented, the words move beyond their existence as identifiers and towards one where they become unpinned from meaning. Hanging, perhaps, in how the eyes of the reader react to the written, I find a sense of freshness. A subversive and specific voice leads us inside. I keep coming back to fragments.

we have the sun on us and a sentence

I hope you do too.

The Correct Other

I enjoy a book when the experience is challenging & entertaining, but for me to recommend a book I need to learn something from it, something no other work of art could teach me. It’s hard enough to write in such a way that holds an unwavering mirror up to yourself. But Andrea Rexilius teaches me what happens when a writer holds a mirror up to herself & finds someone else looking back. It reveals an intimate being with the same role as the self. To me, as a reader, it results in an endlessly exciting exploration of the self in relation to another, as a sewn-together object.

Rexilius writes:

“I returned home from visiting my mother in California. My father and I lived in Illinois. I returned home and another girl was wearing my clothes and sleeping in my room.”

The girl, almost the same age as her, was her new sister. They shared everything. They slept in the same bed. They became telepathic. Through effortless intricacy the book’s opening sections explore the nature of this mirroring of self. It is as chilling, beautiful & thoughtful as a Remedios Varo painting.

Later sections of the book center around the images of stitching, sewing, hemming. Rexilius obsesses over the nature of conjunction, of coming together. The nature of sisterhood & sororial love extends outward to the work of love & the presence of the body in the world. She writes:

“The body has been said to mimic the act of sewing. In The Symposium Aristophanes defines love as an impulse that has its impetus in our constant search for a second half. This half was once sewn to the back of us.”

And this act of seeking the union is one that happens in the writing as well. She writes in “History of Reading as Stitching” that:

Every remove should correspond to a passage. It is how we know who we are. Mary Rowlandson ate raw meat and blood ran down the edges of her mouth. Dickinson a manifestation of this same uncertainty. To shut the door more fully. She stitched her poems into pamphlets. One’s physical location locked away. One’s body becoming less necessary, or more so. Dressed in white blank paper. Teach us how to read.

I find myself following her, fascinated by every extension, absorbed in Rexilus’ exceptional mind, & delighted to be so.

While the ideas of the book fascinate, what is most exciting to me is its constant feeling of correctness. Rexilius ignores any barrier between myth & reality, between the logical & the absurd & this makes the real dreamlike & the fantastic real. She relates incidents from her life that actually occurred, such as this performance:

  . . . a series of still movements taken from Muybridge’s photos of the human body. I would pose as one of the stills for one minute (counting out this minute in my mind) and then turn, into the next still (repeating my count). I wore a blindfold during the rehearsal of the performance to experience how I would be affected when I was not able to see the audience. Counting out each minute took a great deal of concentration. I could think about nothing but the unit of time and what number I was on in my count. No longer being able to see away from myself, I found I was able to become the sentence my body was making.

At other times, she relates incidents of interior understanding, such as this, from one of the poems entitled “Essay on Sisterhood”:

“A sister is an echo chamber. She is a nun, but the naked kind. Having religion is having a sister to speak in tongues with.” Yet between these two incidents, I have a hard time feeling like one is less real, less the world I actually inhabit.

This sense of correctness is hard to come by. It’s something I look for in my own writing: that feeling that the idea could not be said any other way without it being untrue. While I love Rexilius’s dazzling use of image & metaphor, it’s this correctness that draws me through the book, seeking a wisdom that arrives through the concurrence of disparate ideas.

To Be Human is to be a Conversation opens endlessly, each poem & each image intertwining, suturing to another, as the meaning is made more full by the reading. It is a book you’ll learn from, a book you’ll keep in your bag for months, always dipping into briefly for small bits to dazzle & oblige you with its beauty & truth.

Praise Mark Leidner's Twitter account.

That's why this book exists. I followed and really enjoyed his contributions to HTMLGiant for a while — videos like this or this — and then somehow found his Twitter account. Every tweet of his contained something salient, and I'd often stare at some for a long time, figuring and refiguring their beauty, their doomed solutions, on and on.

I eventually realized: this is a book. These aphorisms need to be collected and presented in the form I love to hold. Mark and I worked on the book for a year and a half.

The design of the book seemed self-evident: a dictum: give each truth its deserved space. One aphorism per page. No page numbers. A perfect square, 5x5; five letters in the Sator square, too. The cover is the first idea I had for it; yes, a paradox, but can't we fit most paradoxes into a box?

Following Chris's book is a tough act, but The Angel in The Dream of Our Hangover contains enough wisdom and imaginative leaps, sprent across so many domains, to last a lifetime. I believe that. I love this book.

The Most Perfect Thing I've Ever Read: Richard Grossman's The Book of Lazarus

This novel is a puzzle or maybe a labyrinth as much as it is a scrapbook of the dead.

I had always dreamt of a book that can be read in any order, and this is that book. I'd recommend reading it from beginning to end, but I'm certain it can be read in any order, by simply flicking to a new section and beginning, then on to another and another until all is read.

It's a novel that defies easy categorization and is likely considered a difficult read by many, with its enigmatic poetry and aphorisms and its singular perfect contribution to literature: a seventy page sentence fragment that is surreal, beautiful, and wholly consuming. It, in my mind, is the most perfect thing I've ever read.

The novel is tied together by a noirish novella that gives, in simple terms, the plot, though the plot is incidental to the greater work. Very much something where the novel is infinitely more than the sum of its somewhat disparate, albeit connected, parts.

Grossman has captured so much in this by giving so little, or, rather, by being particular with what he gives. He has taken the narrative apart, thrown bits in different directions to float where they will, and in this process of deconstructing, he has filled it, created so much that could never have been there before. Fleeting scraps of the dead bundled together to make something like life.