When Publishing a Book Becomes More than Publishing a Book

When I think about You Can Make Him Like You I feel incredibly lucky to have published it; to have been any part of it at all means the world to me. My goal as a publisher has always been to honor great writing with great design, but YCMHLY went beyond that — it became a journey unlike any other book I’ve had to the good fortune to be a part of.

So, let’s see if I can trace this correctly. I’d seen Ben Tanzer’s name around. I knew he had a book published by Orange Alert, a place that had been an early supporter of my own writing. That book took its title from a Bob Dylan song, so obviously I was intrigued. But before I ever got a chance to pick up one of his books Ben submitted a short story to Artistically Declined Press’s .pdf ebook series. The story was great and I was excited to have a writer whose name I recognized, but with whom I’d had no personal experience submitting something. I accepted the piece within a week, and within days, maybe hours, Ben friended me on Facebook.

Ben and I exchanged a few messages and he mentioned he had finished a new book. He very cautiously made sure I didn’t feel like he was soliciting me when he told me he thought I would really dig the book, that he felt there was something going on — some sort of connection that made him feel like this book would up my alley.

Being the careful person I try to be, I told him I wasn’t looking for manuscripts, but to send it to me anyway, that I would like to read it. It was, after all, titled after a Hold Steady song. Naturally I was intrigued.

I knew within a few pages of starting You Can Make Him Like You that it was something special. I quickly emailed my publishing partner at the time and she responded in a manner that affirmed my initial feeling, that this was a big book. A book any small press would be lucky to get its hands on. A book that could easily be published by any major publisher. So for a relatively new publisher like ADP we both felt we better snatch it up. Quick.

Tanzer is not only a relentless book writing machine, he’s got an enthusiasm that spreads to all he associates with. Putting YCMHLY together was a great experience. It wasn’t without its difficulties, but where some writers might approach the publishing process as a self-centric journey, Tanzer focused on it as a team effort. Where I was constantly concerned with doing right by him and his book, he was constantly concerned with doing right by the press.

Sometimes you publish a book and the relationship with the writer is just about the book and there is nothing wrong with that. They can be fantastic relationships. But with Tanzer it went deeper. Our conversations never ended — rarely did they break for more than a day. It felt like I was talking to someone I’d been friends with my whole life. At AWP 2011, as we geared up to release YCMHLY, I met Ben Tanzer for the first time in person and we split a hotel room. Even if you’ve talked to someone a million times through emails it can still be awkward in person, but that wasn’t the case.

We’re moving toward the one-year anniversary of YCMHLY and the book’s seen some exciting successes. But more than anything, even more than being a part of publishing a fantastic book by a fantastic writer, the most exciting thing to me will always be how it gained me another brother.

I published YCMHLY because it was well-written and because it spoke to me both as a man, husband, father, and writer. While I might not relate to the particulars of the protagonist’s adult coming of age journey in the book, I recognize the soul of that journey. The urge and desire to be the best version of yourself as a man, friend, husband, and potentially a father without any sort of knowledge or road map for how to get there. I recognize the urge as a writer to deal with difficulties in relationships and coming to terms with what it means to have all the labels of man, father, husband, etc.

People often talk about “women’s fiction,” books that speak to women about their lives and mindsets, while entertaining them. Tanzer writes the very best kind of men’s fiction, and I don’t use such a label chauvinistically. Tanzer writes about every aspect of a man, whether flattering or not. He does it with soul, and that’s what makes people gravitate toward his writing and his personality. It’s why his books appeal to both men and women. It is what makes him the best sort of friend and brother from another mother, because What Would Tanzer Do? wouldn’t be a bad credo for any of us as writers or people.

Sometimes Ridiculous, Sometimes Funny: A Review of Ravi Mangla's Visiting Writers

I grew up in Rochester, New York. Telling people that sometimes results in condolences. In 2006, then-governor Eliot Spitzer compared the area’s economy to that of Appalachia. The unemployment rate has been high for decades, with no end in sight. One urban improvement project after another fails spectacularly. The snow is as awful as you think and the local pro football team is, well, the Buffalo Bills. But I love the place. I miss it, a lot.

As an expatriate, I have a particular fondness for writers who are influenced by western New York. Their stories are infused with fatalism and the resulting grim humor that seemed to permeate my own childhood. Reading stories by writers like Nicholson Baker, Joyce Carol Oates, Shirley Jackson, and George Saunders is satisfying. For me, sometimes it’s also like going home. I have the same experience when I read stories by Rochester’s own Ravi Mangla, and especially his new collection, Visiting Writers.

Visiting Writers consists of twenty-four stories in which a nameless narrator encounters well-known writers. The encounters are unstuck in time, and all over the globe. J.D. Salinger buys gummi worms at the grocery store. Thomas Pynchon rubs perfume samples from magazines all over himself. Harper Lee goes bowling.

The situations these writers face are sometimes ridiculous, sometimes funny, and often both. But Mangla’s subtle positioning of the characters within these absurdities lets us experience vulnerability that feels authentic, especially when the circumstances do not. For example, “1988’s” Richard Yates:

“I sat next to Richard Yates on a plane to Los Angeles. He was knocking back glasses of bourbon. One, two, three, four. . . . Nervous, I asked. About what, he said, unwrapping a pair of saltines. The Times was folded, tucked between his leg and the arm rest, and I asked if he was reading it. He said he would be, but first he wanted to sleep.”

Ravi Mangla could have written these pieces in such a way that the Visiting Writers took the center stage that the collection’s title suggests. We could laugh at Flannery O’Connor in a bumper car or Italo Calvino asking for directions at a gas station, and get on with our lives. But little comes easy in a part of the world that politicians once believed could be saved by a high speed ferry. I like to think that’s part of the reason Mangla always seems to know, whether in Visiting Writers or his other work, that humor is truly cherished when it also shows us something we’ve always worked hard to keep a secret.

An Interview with Meg Tuite

Robert Vaughan: I heard the “Linus & Lucy” instrumental song from Charlie Brown during the holidays. I realized how much I related to Charlie Brown and those characters as a kid. I played piano endlessly like Schroeder. Sucked a finger and carried a dingy yellow blanket everywhere like Linus. Do you have any fictional heroes from childhood? If so, how did they impact you?

Meg Tuite: My mom gave me the book Little Women when I was a kid and said “there’s a Meg in here.” I was mesmerized by Meg March, because she was such a tough ass and said it like it was. She was a writer and extremely flamboyant. I loved her. I read that book over and over. I was blown away when I realized that Louisa May Alcott had brought this fictional character to life. Meg March was alive, for me, and everything I wasn’t. I didn’t want to believe she existed only through the imagination of some woman writer. I was very shy, except at home when I bugged the hell out of my siblings with my endless dialogue to no one. Yes, I was in awe (still am) of the magnanimous Meg of Little Women.

RV: Families, functional or not (and what family is? I want to poke out the eyes of those who say their family was “purrfect!”) seem important to you as a writer. In your remarkable first novel, Domestic Apparition (love that title), the chapters are all little gems, vignettes, each barreling the story forward through complex family incidents. How did you arrive at the main character? This family? What prompted you to tell a story about this particular one?

MT: Oh, Robert, didn’t I tell you? Family Health and Overzealous Mental Balance, Inc. is just now pouring the bronze for the monolithic sculpture of our nuclear nucleus in homage to our raging consummate genetics. (Did that even make sense?)

Domestic Apparition is a novel-in-stories. Most were published individually and then I decided to put a collection together, altering content so it was the same narrator throughout, and the same family. My protagonist, Michelle, was based on many different personages rolled into one. But, most of the chapters / stories are based on a memory, a feeling or a character from my past. I had to put a piece of myself in there to bring this family alive.

My family did go to a Catholic grade school and there’s a hell of a lot of material to work with there. And my siblings are all wonderfully eccentric so I played with some of their idiosyncrasies like the character, Nathan, who had some of the same habits as my older brother, Kevin, when he was a kid. But no matter which chapter / story I wrote, it always ended up fictional, every piece took on a life of its own.

RV: Every piece certainly does have its own breath, and even more so when one collaborates. We have had the great fortune of our paths crossing not only through social networks, but also through the monthly Exquisite Quartet column you write at Used Furniture Review, and your stories appearing on Flash Fiction Friday, which I co-host monthly on WUWM’s Lake Effect. We also had the great fortune of reading our work together, thanks to fellow writer, Susan Tepper, at the KGB Bar in NYC in October, 2011. Then, there are the multiple places our work appears together such as Stripped, A Collection of Anonymous Flash. Can you address collaboration, what you like (or don’t) about it and the impact on your writing?

MT: I am thankful for all of the collaborations with you, Robert! You’re amazing and I love Flash Fiction Friday on WUWM. I was honored that you read one of my stories on air. That was a special occasion. And our reading in NYC was exceptional. I always love reading with other writers and NYC was remarkable because I got to read with some of my favorites. I’ve just worked on two collaborations with photographers and really enjoyed it. Jennifer Tomaloff’s anthology is Bending Light Into Verse. She’s sublime. The other is Lost in Thought Magazine; Kyle Schruder is the editor and the photographer is Valerie Chiang. I was totally inspired when working with someone else’s images. They evoked these whole new worlds for me.

Exquisite Quartet is an extraordinary experience. I collaborate with three other writers on a story each month. I start a narrative and then pass it on. All four of us pull together the strings of a tale and then I do some final editing each month to make sure it works cohesively. It’s exciting to see where each writer will take the story. Some writers really flow with it. The Exquisite Quartet Anthology of 2011 is now available. All thirteen stories were published by the stellar Dave Cotrone, editor at Used Furniture Review. It’s been a surprisingly gratifying year working with all 38 outstanding writers.

RV: I’ve ordered two copies of Exquisite Quartet already — can’t wait to read it. I’m also collaborating on Jennifer and Kyle’s projects, so I relate to that same sense of awe that comes from combining two artistic mediums: photography and writing. The act of writing can be so insular, and that our paths lead us to so many other talented artists is certainly a highlight. Can you tell me about the ways you like to craft? Music or silence, public or office? What is the ideal set-up for your pen to fly (or is it the keypad?)

MT: I am always curious about the diverse scenarios that are necessary for someone to write. Some writers need a TV on in the background in order to concentrate! Wow! While I was writing during NaNoWriMo last November, I met a group at a coffee shop, but all the conversations drove me crazy. I followed them instead of what I was writing. I’m a writer who needs solitude to really focus, go deeply into the story. I prefer to write with a pen first and then the computer to type, editing as I go.

RV: I’m the same way, pen first, then computer. And I know what you mean about too much noise, it can be so distracting. We both have the luxury of quiet space. I have woods surrounding my house, and I don’t take that for granted. I’m wondering if you have any literary mentors, or writers past or present, who you feel may have shaped your writing?

MT: I can’t say that any of these writers have influenced my writing, but I do return to them again and again for inspiration. I love Flannery O’Connor for her inimitable metaphors and her dark sense of humor. I used to study her collection of stories and actually counted how many metaphors and similes she had used. I was obsessed. Bruno Schulz, a Polish writer, only wrote two small collections before he was killed by the SS during WWII, but those two books hold entire worlds inside them. His work is sublime. Djuna Barnes is one of my favorite writers. Her dialogue is genius. Flann O’Brien, an Irish writer, wrote at least four novels and I go back to those repeatedly. A brilliant writer and so incredibly funny. And I’ve always loved to read and memorize poetry: Dickinson, Rilke, Sexton, Dylan Thomas. I could go on and on with this list of writers I adore. And of course there are many current writers out there that I admire: Lidia Yuknavitch, Kristine Ong-Muslim, Michelle Reale, Mary Stone Dockery, Robert Vaughan, Len Kuntz, Jim Valvis, Howie Good, Sara Lippmann, Susan Tepper, Julie Innis. . . . Like I said, it really is endless! I’ll stop now.

RV: I think it’s healthy to have mentors, or writers you like to read at the very least. We share many similar tastes. I know from our conversations in NYC last October that you expressed a desire to write more poetry. Funny how from there, you leapt right into that NaNoWriMo novel writing month! But looking ahead, what writing turf might lie unexplored? You’ve published Domestic Apparition, your excellent first novel, have a chapbook collection coming, collaborate on the Exquisite Quartet monthly column. You are quite the busy gal! Not to mention being nominated for not one, but FOUR Pushcart Prizes in 2011. So, what is the scariest thought of writing you might take on? Is it a play? Non-fiction or memoir? Everyone seems to be dabbling in that currently.

MT: I’d like to finish that novel I started for NaNo. The first draft is almost complete and then, of course, the deeper work begins after that. I have a collection of short stories that I’ve assembled. I’ve never written a play, but was asked to write a screenplay for someone. I didn’t get very far, but will continue to attempt it. I keep dabbling with the idea of memoir, but it hasn’t taken off like I was hoping. I do always come back to the short story. I love writing them and I have a list of magazines I’d like to get published in. I am writing some book reviews also, so there’s a bit of NF writing, but haven’t written an essay in years. I think the scariest notion for me would be if someone asked me to write a sci-fi story or a western. Ha! So maybe I should just go for it and do it! Face my fears!

RV: Yes, the poet Howard Nemerov, brother of fantastic photographer Diane Nemerov Arbus, once wisely said, “The only way out is the way through.” Sage advice. But before we get all scholarly and shit here, how about some quickfire questions . . . our buddy, Anna March has started up her excellent music column at The Rumpus, so in her honor, what are five of your fave songs from 2011-12?

MT: Oh, this is a great question!! Thanks to Anna March for her amazing columns! I’ve picked five, Robert, but now I can’t stop listening to music. And it was a tough choice!!

Amy Winehouse singing “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow.” Kills me every time I hear it. I love her and miss her desperately!!!!

Patti Smith singing “Dancing Barefoot.” One of my all-time favorites.

Radiohead performs “Creep.” I love all their work!

KD Lang performs Neil Young’s song, “Helpless.” I get chills every time I hear it!!

Gillian Welch and David Rawlings perform “Red Clay Halo.” I wanted to be Gillian when I first heard her. They never cease to blow me away!

RV: All excellent choices, complete with video links! How about five “secret” celebrity crushes?

MT: Hehe!! Okay!

Any kind of sex with Denzel Washington!

Oral sex with Oral Roberts!

Make out session with Dame Judy Dench (wait, she was already spoken for, wasn’t she? Damn)!

Heavy petting with Dr. Phil!

Missionary position with any Mother Superior!

RV: Oh what fun this would all be! How about . . . I know you are originally from the Chicago area. So five things you miss about the Midwest, or Chicago in general? (And you can’t say Liz Phair because she’s mine!)

MT: Damn, you get Judy Dench and Liz? Hmmm.

I’d have to say I miss the Cubs games. We’d sit in the bleachers, soak up the sun and drink beer. It was the general meeting place before internet dating sites.

Going downtown with my mom when I was kid to see the tree, shop and have lunch at Marshall Fields.

Summers we’d spend in Michigan swimming and causing trouble wherever we could.

I liked that we could walk to school and to our friends house or take the el to get somewhere in the city. We didn’t rely on cars as I do now living in NM.

I miss the great Blues bars downtown. We heard amazing music. Most of the good bands don’t have NM on their itinerary when touring, but always Chicago.

RV: Ahhh . . . the blues, so we are back to music. Which reminds me, there was a recent trend on Facebook: track down the #1 song of the week that you were born. Mine was “Itsy, Bitsy, Teenie, Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini!!!” How perfect for a writer (those commas!) and a poet to boot! What is yours? And how might it relate to you (or not? You can Google it via Billboard or Wikipedia)?

MT: My song was “The Letter” by the Box Tops. Ha!

I love their outfits!!! I have to say it’s all about the letter from his baby to bring him back home. I had no baby. I’ve been traveling forever but never got a letter to come back home. I think I was writing a letter that I wasn’t coming back home!

RV: “My baby, she wrote me a letter!” How cool! Okay, now I am going to give you a first sentence as a prompt. You can incorporate it, and continue . . . or you can take off wherever it sends you:

“A woman fell in love with a man who had been dead a number of years.”(From “Love” by Lydia Davis.)

MT: A woman fell in love with a man who had been dead a number of years.

He was a disappearing act in the cafe they both went to and out on the streets of the city. Once a lady sat right on top of him, drank her coffee, made phone calls on her cell, read the newspaper and then left, without excusing herself or acknowledging him in any way.

The woman loved him for this. He abided many things. He got to the cafe at 9AM prompt for years and she sat at a table nearby. He drank his coffee with two packets of sugar that he stirred in slow methodical swirls while he stared off into space.

The woman thought of approaching him. He wore impeccable suits and his shoes were always scuffed from the long walks he took and all the people who stepped on them. He never spoke to anyone. Death hovered around him like a vaporous camouflage. It was a hazard. He was pummeled on the streets by crowds that ignored him. He never became annoyed.

The woman loved him so much that she would walk in front of him and part people like the red sea to keep them from damaging him anymore than he already was. After all, he was dead. She would sometimes walk backwards in front of him, stare at him intently, but he didn’t notice. He might have been a philosopher or someone who had suffered much loss.

After years of obsession, watching decay fester his eye sockets further into his skull and his rugged skin turn to gray stone she picked up her coffee and muffin and went to sit next to him at his table. His bones swam inside his suits. She was afraid there would be no trace of him soon. She had rehearsed many things that she might say to the man, but now was at a loss for words.

At some point he looked over at her. He smiled. She didn’t mind that his lips were a memory and his teeth were brown as his beverage.

“I’ve been waiting for you,” he said.

Her heart was entombed in some kind of mausoleum, expanding with each breath she took. She didn’t know that he saw her too.

“We have a lot to catch up on,” he said.

She merely nodded, buoyant with the potency of the moment.

A loud group of boys came up to their table. One sat on top of the man and another sat on top of the woman and the other two boys pulled up chairs. The one lodged in the woman’s lap was quite globular, but the woman didn’t mind.

The man looked over at the woman and smiled. “You see, nothing is ever as uncomfortable as you imagine.”

RV: You are a master crafter, Meg! I say submit it! One more little glimpse of your talent with another way to open up a flash piece? We’ll play word bank! Here are five words and you use any of them in a piece, 50 words or less (thanks, Joseph Quintela, of Short, Fast and Deadly!) And the words are: loose, coarse, unnecessary, chunk, rope (all taken from From the Umberplatzen: A Love Story by Susan Tepper).

MT: She kept falling. The coarse chunk of a rope was too damn loose. Why didn’t they have some manual on how to hang yourself? This was just embarrassing and an unnecessary waste of time.

RV: Those darn loose ropes, I’ve had a few! Haha . . . now some quickies: Do you sleep naked or in pjs? Boxers or briefs?

MT: I love the pjs in winter and ass to the wind in summer. Would definitely go with the boxers!

RV: No pjs here, naked year round. If you had to live one other place than the good ‘ol USA, where would it be?

MT: You’re HOT, RV!!!! I’d choose one of the Greek islands. Paolo and I like to fantasize about what our life would be like there. We’re still waiting for some unknown rich-as-hell relative to drop a load of cash on us and then will be on our way. Any day now, I’m sure.

RV: Lucky you, Miss Mykonos! Hurry up and move, you two, so we can come visit! Now, tomorrow morning, you wake up and discover you have turned into an insect (a la Kafka’s Metamorphosis!) What insect are you and what is your destructible character trait that might be your untimely end?

MT: No question, I’d like to be a preying mantis. And I must be a male, because once the female mates with me she bites off my head.

RV: Yes, those female preying mantises!!! What supreme power they have. Now we are in sixth grade . . . and all the girls are, well, gaga over you-know-who. But you have a secret crush. Mine was Alex: brainiac, so quiet, nerdy. Blushed during lunch when I stared. Yours?

MT: Gene. He’d come over to my house and sit on the steps. My mom asked me what the hell we saw in each other. I blathered on about god knows what and the poor guy just sat there listening. He never said a word and then after about an hour he’d say “alright then, see you later,” and that was our love thing. He ended up becoming a cop in L.A. You think I pushed him into it?

RV: Maybe he was that cop in L.A. who used to come over and . . . oh, never mind! Say you’re a man, maybe even became one through a sex change. And you’re about to meet your first date from an internet site at a local pub. What happens next?

MT: Oh yeah, I saw that porn flick about the cop in LA, hehe!!

Okay, if she giggles or has stuffed animals in her house, I’m out of there so quick! If we get past that and she has no girly bullshit we order beers and since I’ve had a sex change I’m wondering if she notices my last-of–the-mohican chest that I’ve been working to get rid of with hormone injections. We have a few beers, then decide to go to her place. She’s ready for the action, but discovers I’ve got different apparatus. “Oh no, oh dear,” she cries and then realizes she hasn’t had much happening on e-Harmony and says what the hell. We go at it and the rest is either history or historical.

RV: Or both! So, lets wind this puppy down, even though I don’t want it to ever end. Which brings about this: how do you feel about endings? Both in writing, and in life?

MT: It’s always a great time hanging with you, Robert!

I love to write endings in stories. Sometimes they arrive easily. I’ve also sat with a story for months before an ending erupted out of the fog. I find it satisfying when endings show up as a complete surprise to me.

In life, I’ve dealt with a lot of endings. I work in hospice and so I know that with each person I am spending time with, an end is inevitable. Sometimes I have years with them, but usually it’s less than six months. I’ve met the most extraordinary people over the last ten years and what a gift to hang with them during that time of their lives. They are open and introspective and I get to hear their amazing life stories. I love the work and some of the endings are difficult, there’s always mourning that accompanies it, but there’s so much truth that shines through these wise folk before they go.

Thank you so much, Robert, for a sublime interview! Your questions were exceptional and once again, I never knew what was coming next from you! You are the bomb!!!

RV: Right back at you, Meg. This was a blast.

This Is Not A Book For The Shamrocks-and-Guinness Crowd: A Review of Robert Mclaim Wilson's Ripley Bogle

Several years ago I challenged a friend to read the first 10 pages of Ripley Bogle and then put it down: “I dare you to walk away after ten pages. I bet you can’t do it.”

I should come clean about something before you (wise reader that you are) go much further than this sentence. Here it is: I’m an evangelist for Ripley Bogle. It’s one of those books I’d take to a desert island because it’s on my top ten list, usually floating around the #4 or #5 slot. Here is an example of excellent writing and every time I pick it up I find something new, something brilliant. Whenever I get asked to recommend a “good read” this is the novel I mention and I do this because so few Americans have heard of Robert McLiam Wilson. Yet the voice he creates in Ripley Bogle is memorable, hilarious, and fearsomely intelligent. I like to say that Ripley Bogle is a collision between Charles Dickens, the punk movement, and the Troubles in Northern Ireland. And, if I’m being totally honest, I’m also jealous that he wrote this sparkling gem of a novel when he was only 25 years old. That’s just unfair.

Some background perhaps. Yes, you deserve this.

I moved to Belfast in the early 1990s when the Troubles were still going on. Car bombs popped around the city and headlines announced that yet another person had been shot. Men roamed the night with machine guns and baseball bats. This little spot of earth went about the business of tearing itself apart between 1969 and 1998. It was a civil war fought in slow motion. It was mean and vicious and terrible. Hearts were broken. Blood was spilled.

Belfast, you’ll understand, was not exactly a city for tourists. Catholics were shooting Protestants. Protestants were shooting Catholics. The British Army roved the street in massive armored trucks while, high above the city, there was the constant thud of military helicopters. They were always up there, spying. At night they turned off their running lights so you couldn’t see them. You’d hear them though, and they shook the glass in windowpanes. They became a weird kind of white noise as you drifted off to sleep.

This was the world I entered. My mother was born and raised in Northern Ireland, but since I grew up in America I didn’t know the place very well. And I really wanted to know it well. So I packed my bags and became a citizen of my ancestral city. It was important for me to talk with Protestants and Catholics, Irish and British, Unionists and Republicans. I wanted to understand why the violence was happening and I wanted to listen to the voices beyond the headlines.

This is how I stumbled across Ripley Bogle. By the time I arrived in the early 1990s it had already won a pile of prestigious awards and it was in all of the bookstores. I picked up a copy and sat down to read about this character — this young man named Ripley Bogle — and I was mesmerized by his use of language, his dark humor, and how he challenges the very notion of Irishness itself. This is not a book for the shamrocks-and-Guinness crowd because Ripley Bogle is a direct assault on nationalism and cultural nostalgia in general. The main character is more interested in poverty and what it means to remember the past.

And remembering the past is what Ripley Bogle is all about. Set in the mid-1980s, the main character is currently homeless in London. As he wanders around the streets and tries to stay warm, he remembers his violent childhood in Belfast. We move back and forth between the violence of Northern Ireland and the rough streets of London. Bogle moves around London like a modern-day Dickens even as he recalls what it was like to grow up in the warzone of Belfast. We read about a tar-and-feathering he witnessed when he was a boy, we learn about the executions and punishment beatings he saw, and then we return to London where he is freezing. He sits outside the Queen’s palace and imagines her looking at him.

The subject matter is dark and grim to be sure, but Bogle’s voice tugs us forward and we want to hear more. He has a wicked sense of humor and the entire narrative is sprinkled with imaginary conversations with Dickens, Orwell, and a host of other literary giants. We also run across frequent songs that Bogle makes up, like:

“Twinkle, twinkle, little star,
Don’t give a toss to what you are,
Up above the world so high,
Like shiny acne in the sky”

Or this:

“Our Ireland is a lovely place,
A supergroovy nation
Bigotry is her pastime
Death her occupation.”

And because Bogle smokes cigarettes the way the rest of us breathe oxygen, he frequently thinks about getting cancer, as in this song:

“We’re the boys from Deathsville
The lads from Cancer Alley
We dogfight with the cellular
And add them to our tally

[…]

So look out for Melanoma,
Watch out for Dermoid Cyst
If you meet Carcinoma,
You’ll quickly not exist.”

Ripley Bogle is hugely entertaining — yes — but its greatest triumph is allowing us to peek into the Troubles of Northern Ireland as well as homelessness in London. We’re used to narratives where the Irish speaker is good-hearted, folksy, he loves Ireland, he cares about the countryside more than the city, and he never lies. Ripley Bogle turns all of this on its head. Here is a narrator who isn’t good-hearted, he plays magic tricks with the English language, he is an urban pacifist who hates Ireland, and we’re never entirely sure if he’s telling us the truth or not.

For my money, Robert McLiam Wilson has written the best novel to come out of Northern Ireland in the last 30 years. It’s hugely readable and it’s unfairly good. Ripley Bogle is the kind of novel you’ll appreciate having read and, I dare say, you may became an evangelist for it yourself one day: “Wait, wait,” you’ll say. “You’ve got to read this book. I dare you to read the first 10 pages and walk away. I triple-dog-dare you.”

*

PS. I should also mention his other critically acclaimed novel, Eureka Street, which was published in 1996 and also takes place in Belfast. Since then, Robert McLiam Wilson has been working on a novel called Extremists but, year after year, it has been delayed. He seems to be like JD Salinger in both his cult following and his endless work on a new but continually postponed novel. (If you ever read this Robert, I’d love to interview you. You’re a writer that makes other writers very jealous. Email me. I’ll fly to Paris and pay for all the coffee).

Melissa Broder On Reading

I am a very hungry and thirsty girl.

I have an infinite god-shaped hole inside.

I want to be sated and de-thirsted 24 hours a day.

If I can’t be sated and de-thirsted 24 hours a day I want to be lifted up out of my body so I don’t have to feel anything or so I can feel only euphoric.

Sometimes poetry does one of these things for me: sates or de-thirsts or lifts.

I read my first poems at six.

I wrote my first poems at eight.

I have since tried many other ways to fill the god-shaped hole, but poetry is one of the safest ways I know how.

The main consequence of reading poetry, for me, is writing poetry.

This Is Free Verse At Its Finest: A Review of Amy King's Slaves To Do These Things

The title of Ms. King’s most recent collection of poems never fails to evoke sentences uttered by women I grew up with, usually spoken while they toiled at women’s work, sentences beginning with “I wish we had” or “We should have.”  But these poems have little to do with women’s work or America’s shameful past (or present), except obliquely.  One could say, confronted by the intentional queering of their language, that they have little to do with anything, except obliquely, but somehow, by some poetic alchemy, using this skewed approach, King’s poems end up having to do with everything: the culture wars, Brooklyn, our sham economy, ecology, our actual wars, fashion, sex, patriarchy, food, God, loving a woman as a woman in the middle of this whacked milieu, none of them simply about any one thing, all of them managing, like a kaleidescope, to make a pattern of some fragmented vision glancing through a mixture of themes.

Upon first reading them I found myself disoriented, and, I confess, a little spooked. How’d she get in my head like that? Her syntax performs a mimesis of the subconscious. Sentences jump ship midstream. The epigraph for the book, from Baudelaire, is a clue that we’re in for a wild ride: get ready for dreamtime. The dream comes to us in the form of a five-act play. Each act has an epigraph: a poem title or phrase, the attributions of which are listed at the end of the book (adding to the sense of mystery that pervades it), which casts its spell over the poems in that act and encourages a perception of narrative arc or progression, despite the uncertainty the reader may feel at the end of any particular poem as to whether she has grasped anything more than her own shadow.

My ability to receive the meaning embedded within these poems varies according to my willingness to walk in the dark. Sometimes I get nowhere, and sometimes I get to the end and they make total sense. But even on the days when I find them opaque, they give pleasure. By King’s admission, these poems underwent more conscious polishing than her previous collections. The language is crisp in the mouth and often downright fun to say. She uses every tool in the poet’s toolbox except regular end rhyme. This is free verse at its finest. And on the days they do make sense, when like a jeweled puzzle box something clicks, opens, and is revealed, I feel myself in the company of a thinking, caring, feeling human being who grasps the world’s ugliness, grapples with its demons, transcends her limited identity, and still manages to engage the beauty of a tulip and find herself, with her lover, happy. Such a presence is good company, indeed.

To enjoy the speaker’s journey it’s not necessary to realize that the book was written during a protracted illness — the course of the journey, of descent and resurfacing, is archetypal — but it does help explain a poem like “You Believe in Everything,” in Act IV, which seems to be about the speaker, apparently not as recovered as she’d hoped, having trouble holding her food down, out late at a cocktail party. Of course, like the rest of the poems, this one is not really about its surface narrative and ends: “There. Now you’ve / subsumed just how much / I love the way you tune. / Allah, creeps, amen.” The fact that King is a lesbian is another aspect of her umwelt and aids in the attempt at semiosis with her poems. The way she herself imagines her way into the umwelt of the Other in her attempts to understand those who hate her renders her perception of the world universal. One gets the feeling, as one does with the best of poets, that King has tapped in to that part of herself, her ground of being, which she shares with all of life. As mystics have always reported, this leaves one, “happy, in fact” (the final words of the final poem, “We Are Great Songs”).

But enlightenment is a moment-to-moment enterprise, and saddled with these bodies and all their attributes, sometimes bedridden, sometimes confronted with irrational hatred of one’s simple being, it can feel like serious work. She closes the first poem of the fifth act, “Anarchy’s Tiptoe,” like so: “Enclosed in this forgotten basement, / the galaxy is an awfully big place, / and I am still feeling/the walks between steps, / drowning in part, / footed forever with this forever / project of waking up.” Indeed that is the biggest project, one that might be the most worthwhile project a human being can “foot.” And one that leaves the idea of “slaves to do these things,” or anything that would deny anyone their human rights, unthinkable. Good books help us wake up to that which is best in ourselves; this is one of them.

Fear: Uniting the Surreal and the Real

Danish poet Carsten René Nielsen’s first book of translated poems, The World Cut Out With Crooked Scissors, prepared me for his style of writing — the surreal prose poem focused on minute things or instances — but the subjects were much broader in the 2007 collection than in 2011’s House Inspections, assumedly because it was an amassing of selected poems from, at the time, nearly two decades of work. House Inspections is a continuation of his style, but with a much more focused subject, and it’s in this honing that the fear is clarified.

Translated by David Keplinger (just as with Crooked Scissors), House Inspections defies the question, “What’s it about?” just as much surrealist poetry does — however, here, I noticed a trend when I tried answering this question, asked by a friend as I read while he played a Final Fantasy. It’s about a town — no, it’s more about a specific block — well, I guess it’s just one house. No, it’s about a room. No, a table. No, a plate. No, the absence of anything in a room, and the absence of a room, and a house, and other houses, and a city. The impact of these poems relies not only on the appearance of unique imagery, but the disappearance of it as well. Take for example the poem “Mail”:

“After an acquaintance remarked that a certain, newly erected building looks like a piece of set design, the mailman, more and more, has entertained the possibility that there’s nothing on the other side of the house fronts, no floors either, but that the letters, as soon as they have disappeared through the letter flaps, continue their fall downwards, whirling through an all-engulfing darkness.”

The fact that the building’s falsity infects even the ground it stands on, turning it into a void, shows how these poems subtly move beyond pointless absurdity. The absence provides depth.

Not all things missing are literal. In the titular poem, policemen pore over the minutiae of various houses, asking, “And what’s the trouble here?” The repetition implies that there istrouble to be found, and their inability to find it puzzles them, so they ask one another, “What is the trouble here?” The answer never appears, just as their purpose never appears — something one could ask of authority figures in many instances where they attend to trivial or harmless situations. After reading this poem, my mind leapt to the time when I was 13 and was yelled at for riding my bicycle on an empty sidewalk. Such personal reminders, connected to our emotional reactions of the poems (and in the case of House Inspections, the common, nearly constant reaction was fear), are what give surreal poetry its power and prevent it from simply being silly nonsense.