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.

"The Symptoms of Language Made Useless"

When Johannes Göransson contacted me to see if I wanted a review copy of entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate, I kinda freaked out. For a while, I have followed Johannes’s group blog Montevidayo with great interest. Being primarily a prose writer, I get frustrated by how most fiction writers talk about form and content as fully separate things, and how this separation seems to wind up associating the political only with content, and never with aesthetics. But Montevidayo’s contributors seem to take the politicization of aesthetics and the aestheticization of politics as a given, and are already engaged in an advanced conversation about the relationship between art and “otherness.” But although I received, read and devoured my review copy of entrance to a colonial pageant months ago, I’ve remained too terrified to write a proper review. My own theory background is mostly in social movement theory, not art and lit theory, and I’ve been worried I would not be literate enough to engage Johannes’s ideas at the level they deserve (for a really sharp analysis of the book, I highly recommend Nick Demske’s review).

In her book Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest, feminist scholar Anne McClintock examines colonial explorers’ use of fetish objects -- spears, rifles, helmets, leather -- to assert their domination over the unfamiliar landscape they fear will engulf them. In entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate, it’s too late, we are already engulged. Johannes presents many of the familiar symbols and images of colonialism and nation-building -- there are horses, a colonel, “innocent” children -- but presents them corrupted, perverse, refusing to function in service to any sort of narratively or ideologically coherent agenda. In Johannes’s sentences, all language, like all nations, is always already forged, contaminated.

In his critical writing, Johannes is a big advocate for an aesthetics that embraces kitsch, excess, surface, and other modes or qualities dismissed by many purveyors of “true” art. All art, he argues, is counterfeit, and he is more interested in what he has called “the dynamics of softness and the rabble” than the so-called “natural” and “authentic.” As I have explored my own interest in aesthetics that aggressively embrace surface over interiority, Johannes’s writing has inspired me. Johannes’s relationship to surface is shaped in part by his experiences as an immigrant; he sees the immigrant as a destabilizing, unnatural figure, as inherently kitsch. In my own texts and performances, I have begun using sequins, pop songs, fashion and glamour to explore gender, desire and authorship as unstable and counterfeit. I think this may have something to do with why, out of all the bloggers at Big Other (the group blog for which I am a contributor), Johannes sent me a review copy, and also why I have felt too intimidated to write a proper review.

entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate lays out in in great detail stage directions for a performance that is deliberately unperformable. Yet when I flip through my copy of the book, which has now taken up residence on the shelf beside my desk, what I find is a performance already in progress, perhaps the ultimate realization of language’s performative potential. For me, this book is now a go-to resource, an open idea file of images and sentences that are simultaneously hilarious, delightful and discomfiting. It is a book I will continually return to, that has already influenced my own writing and thinking and will continue to do so.

What Makes These Five Chapbooks All Belong Under One Cover?

Early in his short story “The Black Cat,” Edgar Allan Poe has his unreliable narrator declare, “And then came, as if to my final and irrevocable overthrow, the spirit of Perverseness.”

“Who,” he asks, “has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or silly action, for no other reason than because he knows he should not?”

This spirit of perverseness -- this counter-intuitive yet irresistible impulse toward the icky, the ridiculous, the self-destructive -- is at least part of what cannot be contained in the collections that make up the anthology They Could No Longer Contain Themselves.

In each of the five chapbooks that comprise this book, various characters find themselves engaging in activities which might make the reader agree with Poe that “perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart -- one of the indivisible primary faculties, or sentiments, which give direction to the character of Man.”

To wit: In John Jodzio’s Do Not Touch Me Not Now Not Ever, the narrator of “The Two Malls” says, “Sometimes at the expensive mall, I buy a cup of soda from the hot dog stand and then balance it on the aluminum railing.  I walk away to the other side of the mall and I wait until someone below is about to walk underneath the cup.  I hit the railing as hard as I can and the railing vibrates and the cup dumps onto the person below.”

In Mary Miller’s Paper and Tassels, the narrator of “My Old Lady” says, “Mama likes it when you slap her, I said, and his eyes narrowed like he didn’t remember mama liking that but he reared back and did it anyway.  My eyes leaked into her pillow.  Then it hit me: the pillowcase had been washed in Gain.  When he finished, he pulled out and said daddy didn’t really like that and I said mama didn’t really like it either, she just wanted to see what it felt like.”

In Elizabeth Colen’s Dear Mother Monster, Dear Daughter Mistake, the narrator of “Rule of Thirds” says “Today my girlfriend and I had sex while a man took pictures in the back yard, I start, in a letter to my mother. This letter is not really intended for her, though when I start I pretend it is.”

In Tim Jones-Yelvington’s Evan’s House and the Other Boys Who Live There, the narrator of “Slime Me” says “Abner was a child who wanted to get slimed. He hungered for the spread of slime across his skin, his favorite the viscous kind that crept to cover, coat, encase. He oozed homemade do-it-yourself Mad Scientist slime though his fingers and hoped someone would cover him in goop.”

And finally, in Sean Lovelace’s How Some People Like Their Eggs, the narrator of “Wal-Mart” says “‘I don’t know a girl named Kristen!’ I shout. (I do.) ‘I never touched her!’ I shout. (I did.)”

The pleasure of reading each section of this book is inextricable from the pleasure of knowing what’s good and choosing what’s bad, of knowing the right thing and doing the wrong one. Poe called this compulsion “the imp of the perverse” and the characters in these stories are certainly driven by this demon. But in the hands of Jodzio, Miller, Colen, Jones-Yelvington and Lovelace, this impulse is revealed to be an inseparable piece of what makes humans so human.

xTx is not a nun.

When I first started getting to know xTx, I thought she was a nun. There had to be a powerful reason why she wouldn’t put her name to her writing. Service to God seemed like a reasonable explanation.

xTx is not a nun.

I don't care who xTx really is. Her pseudonym is the least interesting thing about her. I might, in part, feel this way because I know something about the woman behind the virtual curtain. We’ve spent time together. I know that there is, in fact, no mystery at all. However, even if I didn’t know xTx as a person, the mystery would not be as interesting as her writing.

When I decided to start a small press, I had a list of writers I wanted to work with. At the top of that list, there was one name -- xTx -- not because we’re friends (she published two books before working with THP and will publish countless books long after working with THP) but because her writing is fierce and beautiful, sometimes haunting or horrifying but always, always endlessly interesting and engaging. Her writing exemplifies the aesthetic I wanted to cultivate. Whatever book we worked on would be a book we could always be proud of.

At times, it seems like people forget xTx is a writer. Names are important until they aren’t. With a collection like Normally Special, you know everything you need to know about the woman and the writer because she bleeds on every page and reveals, perhaps, the truest parts of herself.

The power of this collection is that xTx will break your heart while holding it gently. Every single story in this book is one I love and continue to read and re-read. I could pick each and every one of the twenty-three stories that make up Normally Special as my favorite because they are all that strong, that moving, that powerful.

Normally Special is the kind of book that includes, “She Who Subjected the Sun,” a story about a dystopic near future where women are subjected to a stringent set of rules, bought and sold as chattel, trained to please masters. What makes this story so chilling is that we don’t really know how  and why such a circumstance has come to pass. We don’t see what the women are subjected to as much as we are given room to imagine. That freedom to imagine the unseen horrors is probably the most disturbing element of this story -- what happens to the women is only as dark and disturbing as our minds will allow. The potential is terrifying.

Many of the stories in Normally Special are like that -- we know terrible things are happening or have happened, but these terrible things are often alluded to. Rarely are they explicitly detailed. We are given the responsibility of pulling back the curtain to see what it hides. Again, the horror is only as pronounced as we allow.

There are all kinds of freedom in this book -- the freedom to imagine what we are not explicitly told, the freedom to place ourselves in these darker lives of others, and most of all, there is the freedom of the words in these stories about desperate mothers and tormented girls and daring daughters. Ultimately, that is why I don’t give a good goddamn who xTx is -- the mystery of the woman behind the pseudonym is a small price to pay for the freedom she revels in through her writing.

Over the coming weeks, you’ll hear from other writers who are equally taken with Normally Special, the woman, the writer, those three little letters, XTX.

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.