Scary, No Scary Is Cleverly Costumed As A Hostess Cupcake

In fact, for the purposes of this metaphor, it is a Hostess cupcake. Out of the package, it presents itself as a gaudy, misshapen darkness, but it smells great and goes well with a cup of coffee. Its ingredients have familiar names, but it’s only a “cupcake” insofar as it invents its own vocabulary out of words we already know.

The collection is appended by an index of subjects, beginning with “Bats” and ending with “World, the.” The index serves as a catalog of recurring images and scenarios that aggregate layers of intrigue as the book progresses, as Schomburg constructs new worlds out of raw memory.

These worlds are bound by their own rules. The chair age precedes the table age, and so there is no table setting; the pond is inescapable with only one paddle; if there is a black hole present, someone will be pushed in without the slightest hesitation.

Scary, No Scary may be read either way.  Schomburg’s verse is always playful, and always deadly serious: “If we stand still long enough / a gigantic meteorite / will crash into our skulls and kill us.”

The paperback edition of Scary, No Scary has a single pitch-black page inside the front cover and immediately before the back cover, and the title poem invites the reader into a haunted house. The poems inside speak to intense loneliness, violence, and destruction, but they are also about love, simple kindness, and building boats out of eyelashes. The oppressive black exterior belies the complex nature of the white cream filling: there is careful nuance to the undeniably alluring flavor at the center of this foreboding cupcake.

A collection of quirky, surreal poems is fine. A collection of surreal poems as sincere, clever, and modest as these is remarkable. In three sections, Schomburg demonstrates his deft mastery of the well-wrought lyric sequence. The first time you see a hummingbird or a black hole, it’s charming.  The second time, these images have become touchstones in the midst of a strange mythology unnervingly oblivious to any distinction between the supernatural and the everyday. There is an extent to which anything is possible in these pages, but this strangeness is always tempered by honest-to-god humanity, which is utterly terrifying if you happened to choose “scary.”

Scary, No Scary is a wonderful book to have on your shelf, and an even better book to pull off and read while the spirits of the dead are rising from their graves. If you’ve missed a trip to a haunted house this season that’s OK, because this book is better. It’s immediately readable, hilarious and harrowing. It’s surreal and it all makes perfect sense. Read this book. When you do, when the hunched, old man invites you inside and gives you the choice, choose “no scary.” You’ll be glad you did.

Ethel Rohan On Reading

"I read, and the tiny diamonds in my wedding band are thrown back on the page; one, two . . . eight tiny stones, tiny refractions of light. I move my hand so and the brilliant reflections vanish. Move my hand again and there they are back. There, gone. There, gone. Safely in and out.

"As a girl, I didn’t own jewelry, didn’t have anything but the words coming off the page, and me right there inside the story. Safely in and out. My mother called and called, chores and mending to be done, but she couldn’t get me out of the page, out of the words, out of the story. She raised the head of the sweeping brush and brought it down on my book, my lap, and first one knee, then the second knee. Her face the most terrible cover.

"Something died that day. Something I’ve yet to name. Not my love for books, for sweeping floors, for my mother. All that lives on. Invincible."

Blake Butler On Reading

“Reading is eating. There are corndogs and there is cereal and there is lettuce. It's fun to get a lot of weird shit up in your waddle. You get really hungry sometimes, and other times you want to go for a good big walk. I like exercising on a stationary bike or running on a treadmill while I read because it's like becoming and unbecoming the fat boy at once, which pushes out inside doubly. Sometimes I drive my car and read. I drive better because of it. I want everything inside me. I want to see a dog squatting over America. Books have butts. They have legs and arms and money. Some will help you to the bed. Guns are in books sometimes and sometimes, less often, Hostess products appear. My mom taught me to want to read by showing me a big bag I was not allowed to look in. I took one book out at a time. I am a pig child and so I ate it and I ate the words and I got XL. I had to wear the shirts that looked like teepees. Thanks, books.”

If You Don't Succeed, You Only Have Yourself to Blame: A Review of Will Boast's Power Ballads

Will Boast’s story “Dead Weight” appeared in the most recent issue of Storyglossia. So what did I do after reading it (besides read it again)? Exactly what every person with a Facebook account does these days: I began stalking him. First I sent him a message to tell him how much I loved his story. This was accompanied by a “friend request.” Then I listened to his band. Here’s something else I discovered: Will Boast is a damn good drummer.

Boast’s linked collection of stories entitled Power Ballads (which won the Iowa Short Fiction Award), introduces us to Tim who is also a damn good drummer. In “Dead Weight,” Tim replaces the overweight drummer in an up-and-coming band after the label decides he doesn’t meet their aesthetic requirements. In other stories, we see young Tim playing tuba in a polka band and later gigging with a rock band past its expiration date. But a degree in music theory isn’t required here. The real music is in the interplay between the characters.

What’s fascinating (and what makes me maddeningly jealous) is how Boast talks about music without talking about music. Sure, there’s mention of the hip blogs Pitchfork and Stereogum, as well as ruminations on the vibrant Chicago music scene. In each story, the characters are musicians at varying stages of their careers or the wives and girlfriends that come second to the music. But the trick is this: the book isn’t about any of that. These are people struggling to find their identity.

For Tim, who is the link between most of these stories, finding himself is hard when he’s constantly filling in for someone else. He’s the guy they call when a drummer drops out or isn’t good enough for the big time. If the money’s right, he will play with over-the-hill metal bands or quiet singer-songwriters. Tim finds fault with his father who is constantly starting over, finding new ways to make money and new places to live. He resents his father for not keeping a home for him to return to after his mother died. It’s not until the end that he sees the irony of his scorn, that he too is constantly reinventing himself for each new band and project. Just like his father, he can’t settle down.

That sense of identity, of finding your purpose, all hinges on the amount of fame you hope to achieve. This is summed up brilliantly by Sue, the wife of a non-stop touring musician in the story “Sidemen” and is something that I think every artist understands:

“Thirty years ago, people bragged about their sister or uncle or brother-in-law being personal secretary, gardener, caddy, you name it, to such-and-such city alderman or some bigwig down at Montgomery Ward.  Now everyone wants to be lauded on their own merits, adored if possible. Does getting by no longer constitute a life? Thirty years ago, you were proud to be a janitor, to scrub toilets in a good building, work for a good company. Now you despise yourself for missing the chance at something better, something that might have gotten you featured in a magazine. Fame is never out of reach; you just didn’t grab it when you could have.”

And that’s the heart of the struggle. If you don’t succeed, you only have yourself to blame. When Tim’s father gets hurt at his current job loading food into a freezer, Tim leaves Chicago to visit him in the hospital. They tell his father that he’ll never have to work again, and Tim knows that will be the end of him. These odd jobs define him. Before heading off to tour Europe with a jazz band, Tim goes to his father’s apartment to get him some clothes for his hospital stay, and he finds a shrine his father has erected in his honor. His father has pictures of Tim setting up his first drum set, watching Elvin Jones in concert and a drawing he made as a teenager of a stage with all the spotlights pointing at him. In the most poignant moment of the entire collection, he finally makes an admission:

“I felt embarrassed and shy to see that here, in this obscure corner of nowhere, I’d already made it.”

Read this book as soon as you can.

If the elements of this story were egg whites, Maso would have whisked them into stiff, firm peaks.

Although we tend to think of it as such, reading isn’t a singular action. It’s a collection of actions that result in having read something. When we read, we do a lot of things very quickly. We -- to name a few things -- guess, contextualize, interpret, critique, remember. We do a lot, and those who can accomplish these tasks simultaneously and quickly are called "good readers." Those who don’t do these things well can train their minds to do them better. But wherever we fall on the spectrum of readers, we can all agree that AVA by Carole Maso is the perfect book to remind us that some books are meant to be slow, that sometimes we need to stop and think about all those things that we do when we read -- and do them deliberately.

AVA's simple plot is the recounting of Ava Klein’s last day alive. Among memories of friendships, moments of critical theory, short good-byes, and sex, Klein lies in a colorless hospital room, dying. Bouncing back and forth from youthful indiscretions to her present, pragmatic end, the book takes us polyphoniously through Ava’s life, even saving a little time for her hopes for a future in which she won’t be here. Humor sits comfortably next to tragedy, next to snobbery, next to bawdiness, and although it might not be interesting to point out that the plot mixes high, low, and everything in between, because a lot of books mix those elements seamlessly, none that I know mix them so quickly and in so few words. If the elements of this story were egg whites, Maso would have whisked them into stiff, firm peaks.

And those peaks would be sentences. The book is structured as a collection of loosely connected, nonlinear sentences. If there is a narrative arc -- and I choose to revel in the lack of one -- it is subtle. The first sentence is as important as the seventy-sixth, which is as important as the last. The evenly distributed weight of each sentence creates this wonderful gravity toward reading for reading’s sake. If you read AVA and randomly eliminate five pages, you won’t miss anything ‘important’ about the book; you’ll still get the same ending, the same feelings, and you’ll know Ava. But what you will miss is the joy of reading those pages. Those pages matter because they are written, and they are good. They justify themselves.

To me these sentences were good from the start, but around page one hundred, I started questioning myself a little. Am I reading this right? How should I be taking this in? I suppose this is the reader’s equivalent to, "How does my butt look in these jeans?" But Maso is a kind guide, and like William Carlos Williams with regard to his masterpiece, Spring and All, she leaves hints of a rubric for analyzing not only her work, but Experimental Literature in general. A few examples: 

Words are less integers than points in a continuum. Indeed one might well describe the structure of the lyrics as the expression of the interval (40).

. . . Form and content constantly shape each other like the elements of the ecosystem and this allows truth,infinite possibilities for expression (90).

You will have literary texts that tolerate all kinds of freedom—Unlike the more Classical texts—which are not texts that delimit themselves, are not texts of territory with neat borders, with chapters, beginnings, endings, etc., and which will be a little disquieting because you do not feel the

Border.

The edge (113).

A common critique of what’s named Experimental, Avant Garde, Modernist, Postmodern, etc. is that the heavy focus on the structure takes away from the soul of what’s written. It’s a common critique because it contains some truth. Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy is brilliant and Ulysses may be the crowning achievement of 20th century literature, but they’re cold. They aren’t necessary, they’re just genius. Carole Maso’s unparalleled novel AVA stands out in this balancing act of soul versus structure because the book is accessible, universal, funny, poignant, and above all soulful. And all the things I love about the possibility of books live in this novel.

Brian Oliu On Reading

"My mother was a librarian and so after school each day I would get dropped off at the library. After finishing my homework and eating a snack bag of Doritos, I would start to read -- it started off with all of the children’s books, before I progressed to the teen books, designated by a small black bookcase that was relatively low to the ground where one would find your Sweet Valley Highs, your Christopher Pikes. I moved onto the 'grown-up books' -- first starting with the non-fiction books; favorites were ones that were about places and people: Sally Ride, Oregon, San Diego.

"As I got into my pre-teens I began reading the best sellers -- the library was the smallest in the state of New Jersey and would often get only one copy of the book, which would be reserved well in advance by one of the patrons. This meant I would have between the time the book arrived and the time the person would come in to pick up the book to finish reading it, often sneaking into the back room to read as I suffered from horrible night terrors after reading Dean Koontz’s The Eyes of Darkness when I was eight and I did not want my mother finding out that I was reading something I shouldn’t. Most of the time I wasn’t able to finish the books in their entirety -- I’d get a small snippet before someone came to pick it up, but it was enough to get a small sample of the plot and the language. Considering the majority of best sellers were thrillers or murder mysteries I would manage to scare myself half to death; not because of what was written, but because what I would imagine what happened next: a consequence of not 'drinking deep' and instead having my imagination fill the gaps with whatever horrible thing I could dream up.

"The most memorable instance of reading what I wasn’t supposed to was when the summer reading lists would be sent to the county libraries in order to help students pick out what book they would most enjoy and to be prepared for a sudden surge of requests for Lois Lowry. There was a huge uproar because the books that were selected for the 7th going on 8th graders were considered to be highly inappropriate for the age bracket. Not yet 12 years old, I would overhear these conversations and immediately track down the books in question: A Clockwork Orange, 1984, A Handmaid’s Tale. These images of dystopian futures, oppression, and, especially in the case of Atwood, issues of gender and sexuality, shocked and terrified me. The nightmares became more vivid, and now they had subtext!

"As a result of this, my reading habits have not changed much since I was younger: I look for writing that informs, that introduces me to concepts and worlds that I can think about and pretend to exist within. I also look for writing that will shake me to the core, that gives me a visceral reaction: of language that causes my face to scrunch up, or to nod my head, or to cringe or smirk. To me, words are some sort of magic code -- a series of letters that when put together in the right order cause someone to feel something. I think that is an absolutely amazing thing: that a series of words will give me chills or alter my thoughts. It’s a powerful and wonderful thing, and something I always keep in my mind when I do my own writing.

Assorted Thoughts On Beauty Was the Case that They Gave Me

-Mark Leidner is intensely clever.  This book is so dense with new ideas, so full of surprising juxtapositions that it puts many of the other books on my shelves to shame.

-These poems appreciate eloquence, but they understand that miscommunication is inevitable.

-The town I grew up in had woods and streams and swamps.  Reading this book reminds me of all the exploring I did as a little kid, mostly alone.

-While this book is, in many ways, a reflection of modern America, I’m sure that I’ll reread it in twenty years and love it just as much.

-These poems aren’t afraid of offending us.  They reflect the full spectrum of the real world; why can’t the most gentle man on the whole planet have a pedophile for a neighbor?

-Can a poem be socially awkward?  Awkwardly social?

-A sympathetic narrator ought to have doubts, regrets, shortcomings, etc.  I’m not looking for poems that claim to have all the answers.

-How many poets can write about sex without it feeling gratuitous or melodramatic?

-If I wanted to prove to a non-poetry reader that poetry is alive and well, I’d feel confident that this book could get the job done.

-It’s not easy to be funny.  Poetry that tries to be funny usually falls flat.  Leidner has a real gift, an effortless deadpan that makes his poems uncomfortable to read at times.  He’s got to be kidding.  He says he’s not kidding.

-Is it possible that someone could be content after reading the following two excerpts from “Romantic Comedies” and not feel the urge to read the rest of the poem, the rest of the book?

Everyone in his life has drowned and he hates dogs and she’s a collegiate swimming coach with a thousand dogs.

He is Norway but she is holding out for infinite fjords.