This Book Reveals Our Lives in Motion, On the Loose: Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz's Working Class Represent

I have heard that comedians are our modern philosophers. I have heard, too, that this is true of poets, the keepers of thought and inquiry, practitioners a sort of observation that could only belong to a writer. In Working Class Represent, Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz, however, transcends these categories — comedian and poet — as she is both. She surveys the way in which our lives may sometimes take sad and misshapen shapes, and creates these shapes anew while also keeping her good humor on display, showing that is possible to at once grimace, smile and even laugh.

With titles like “I’m Too Sexy for This Office” and “Dear Whoever is Sending Pictures to My Phone” and “Poem Written on Cold Medication,” Aptowicz wields her wit like a sword. And then there are other kinds of poems: “Heart Sweater,” “Close Out Sale” and “Disconnected,” there is an underlying loneliness, as if Aptowicz is turning to words to speak of her experiences because words are all she has. In “Disconnected,” she asks: “What did artists do before the internet?” Without poetic reservation, she replies:

Created their art, I suppose. Or cleaned their bathtubs,
cooked their meals, went to war, wrote and mailed
actual letters, rattled in their beds with consumption,
drank until dizzy, made love until dawn, or maybe
they did even simpler things: just stole outside
and sucked in the fresh blue-black night air to marvel
at the persistence of our bright, dumb moon, to stumble
tipsy into the path of an old lover, to stop and smile,
and to apologize, before stepping out of the way
and moving on.

Or instead, look at “Sexton and Plath,” a poem that considers the way in which female wordsmiths have “ripped life from their mouths on purpose,” who have committed suicide. She writes of “what it means to be woman and poet, the long beautiful death of it.” Then, as if turning some kind of funny and curious switch, Aptowicz gives us “Ode to College Cafeterias.” She says, “They say that your college years are the best years of your life. Don’t believe it. . . . But I will give you this: you will never again be exposed to so many awesome cafeteria options.”

And this rumination on modern-day eateries, of course, is how she follows the thread back to where she is now, a worker, one more in a million with a day job, back to us. With grace, she laments, and also cautions: “For one day you too, will be 25 years old drinking coffee you paid for and made yourself, staring into your bowl of Special K and thinking . . . I can’t believe it’s 8am and I can’t just pour some fresh soft serve ice cream on this tasty bitch.”

Now, I must confess: for a long time I didn’t know Aptowicz wrote her poems down. I had always only listened, even watched. She’s a hero of the slam circuit, after all. She can hold an audience like they are the lines on her palm, talk to a room like it’s dying.

Nevertheless, I can hear her voice ringing even on the page. In Working Class Represent, Aptowicz’s strength is that she uses accessible language to say what no one else can. She navigates the world of labor and modernity with fierce conviction, all the while questioning all that lies before her. She writes of a familiar place — New York as we see it today — and yet under her lens the mundane becomes foreign, even wild. Yes, this book reveals our lives in motion, on the loose. Simply put, if the world is a question then Aptowicz has the answer. And luckily, like our greatest explorers, she has written it all down.

The Empire That Once Was America

I’m a huge fan of dystopian/apocalyptic novels, mainly because — if crafted by good authors — they unravel an elegantly-weaved prescience into a gloomy and fast-approaching future we’ve recklessly created ourselves for ourselves. Think of Bradbury, Atwood, Gibson, Orwell, and of course Huxley’s Brave New World. In short, I am a fan of the Folly of Man, and all in favor of technology flipping the tables on us served in the form of a well-organized, worldwide revolution (helmed by the HAL 9000, naturally). I’m perfectly at peace knowing we’ll get what we deserve.

Michael Seidlinger’s new novel The Sky Conducting presents us with an America not too far destined; a country on the down slope of an empirical, majestic, and dirty decline, where all systems (political, social, familial, and otherwise) have failed. The America we find in The Sky Conducting has passed judgement on and eviscerated its own organic vital functions; the ultimate act of cutting the nose off to spite its face. All that remains is a whisper of an arrogant empire, which comforts itself with melancholia and the fossils of domestic symmetry.

People have fled the country in gargantuan migrations, having ruthlessly and obtusely consumed all the land’s resources, leaving behind a ravaged, nutrient-deficient land (figuratively, as well as literally). Those we once called our neighbors, our friends, our family have become precious commodities, scarcely found on the continent. But despite the vastness, the horrible depletion and deforestation of America, one family has stayed behind in their home, unable to move on. By rebelliously inhabiting this skeleton of a country, they must forge themselves a second chance. Ahh, America, where everyone gets to tap dance themselves to the top again in a second act. Maybe.

Seidlinger’s prose is an exercise in brevity, with sentences, phrases, and dialogue coming at you like short jabs to the ribs, to the kidneys, to the jaw . . . advancing the story seamlessly. I liked the construction of the language, as well; building blocks stacked upon building blocks in short passages, making up the chapters.

Given my pessimistic outlook on the empire that once was America, this novel resonated and almost served as a mirror to all of those still waving flags and proclaiming that we are living in the world’s greatest country. I see them as noisemakers rattling sabers, banging on drums, yelling indoctrinated slogans into megaphones, all trapped on a bus that has quickly begun to slip into a deep ravine.

I read this book concurrently with one of literature’s heavyweight dystopian allegories: Jose Saramago’s Seeing. It made a great one-two punch and set me in a beautiful, savage landscape not too far from where we are today.

Pretending To Be Adult Enough To Make Adult Decisions: On John Cotter's Under the Small Lights

A couple years ago, a friend had told me that her friend, John, had a book coming out and that, since we’re both writers, we should probably know each other. Within a few weeks, a different friend, also acquainted with John, told me that I should probably know him because we do similar things — we both write fiction and used to (sort of) want to be actors, the parenthetical being 100% mine and only in hindsight — and by the way, had I heard that John had a book coming out?

After scoping out each other’s respective websites and exchanging a few brief e-mails, we finally met and he later read a couple sections from that oft-mentioned, then forthcoming book, Under the Small Lights, at the reading series I host. The whole room was in thrall while he read two scenes that had us thinking just enough about the characters and the book itself before we all started thinking about ourselves, which is admittedly what any group of young people will do.

That Cotter sets Under the Small Lights in Boston is not happenstance. Boston is a college town filled with young people and Under the Small Lights is a story of youth. It’s about Jack, a would-be playwright in his early twenties, and his handful of close friends who spend a couple years pretending to be adult enough to make all those adult decisions that compromise what we want with what we’re told we’re supposed to want, equating sex with marriage and money with education (and maybe even hard work). The book moves through a series of scenes that surface like memories, wandering the way our attention spans and affections will, from friend to friend until our rash decisions blast everything away, or until we have to make new friends or risk the inevitable outcome that accompanies emulating/lusting after/emphatically loving your friends.

Cotter’s characters remind me of my own experiences in an invasively tight-knit group. We were downright incestuous, unapologetically so, and while we all fell deeply in love with ourselves and each other every day, we felt obligated to regularly be the selves we put on for others. We assumed that everyone expected that kind of consistency, but it’s a folly of youth to think that a person is an individual. We each held communities within ourselves, including who we were before, after, between, and without our friends. It’s a balancing act that almost everyone I know has tried to strike during the dicey transition from adolescence to adulthood and it’s no different for Jack or Paul and Corinna, the married couple who Jack loves both collectively and individually. Although Jack is admittedly the most insecure of the group, through his conversations with Paul, Cotter reveals that performance is part of everyone’s growth spurt, quite possibly because it allows us to figure out who we don’t want to be:

“Does Corinna seem happy?”

I felt the way I usually did pressed to understand someone else’s feelings, hopeless.

“She’s twenty and she lives at her mother’s house. I don’t know. I think she’s found you and she loves you. I think she’s waiting for your life to begin.”

He nodded. “She’s lazy,” he said and smiled, realizing he was being too hard on her. “Well, she has to finish school.”

“What about you? Ever think about trying again?”

“I drive up to a house,” [Paul] said, closing the book, “and put out my cigarette, check my teeth in the mirror, you know how I do, and by the time I get to the front door, I’m there only for them. I’m whoever they want me to be… It’s deeper than acting. No offense. I really do want to make them happy, to say what they want to hear.”

Scenes like this one are familiar for their honesty, even if they’re words that my friends and I were never brave enough to say out loud. That Cotter lets his characters be so brave is their saving grace. What might otherwise be construed as a group of selfish kids is instead a group of self-aware kids, who are easier to relate to and easier to love.

An Interview with Leigh Stein

Rob MacDonald: Your first novel, The Fallback Plan, is doing very well, and I’m curious to hear how it feels to have your work in the hands of a wide audience. When you put out a chapbook of poems with a small press, you know that a lot of your readers are likely to come from within that poetry subculture, but when you put out a novel with Melville House that gets reviewed in Elle, the audience must cover the whole spectrum. Is that exciting or terrifying?

Leigh Stein: It’s true; they’re two totally different beasts. When I’ve had chapbooks of poetry published, I know who my audience is going to be: my friends in the poetry community, and their friends, who eventually become my friends, too, once we meet at AWP. Not even my family really reads my poetry (my mom and sister have read a little bit), so that’s how small the audience is.

Getting a novel published is bigger; it’s more like being on stage, which I used to love. There’s a distance between you and the reader (I’m not handselling my novel, like I’ve done with my tiny poetry chapbooks), and the reach is, of course, broader.

The hardest part of the experience for me so far has been the public reaction. All the major press I’ve gotten has been positive, but I initially made the mistake of reading all my amateur reviews on Goodreads and Amazon. These can be soul-crushing, personal, and vicious. I didn’t expect my book to elicit such a powerful response: I thought some people would like it, and some people would be meh. But instead, some people love it, and some people despise it (and me). There’s a lot of confusion over who Esther is: is she me? Am I a slacker readers can love to hate? ‘Cause I’m not.

RM: I made the mistake of reading some of those same reviews, and I was surprised to see how often people were getting hung up on the politics of moving back home after college. That aspect of the book felt secondary to me, and I didn’t get the feeling that you were trying to make a big statement about either entitlement or slackerdom — it was just another way of showing how life can fall short of our expectations, how reality doesn’t always live up to fantasy.

LS: The moving back home part felt secondary to me, too, while I was writing it. But publishing is a business, and my book is being marketed as having a lot to do with a particular moment in our economy / culture, so as to sell more units, and make my bed of money even fluffier.

But seriously, you hit on a good point: fantasies and expectations. Esther is an actress; she’s used to playing different roles and imagining fantasy scenarios, and that just carries over into her normal life. There are some fantasies, like winning the lottery, which are totally culturally acceptable. But the darker fantasies . . . that’s what’s controversial. I had a friend who once told me she wished something really bad would happen to her, like her mother dying, so people would feel sorry for her and leave her the hell alone. Successful, ambitious, hard-working people are under a tremendous amount of pressure (I’m including myself here) and sometimes our fantasies are about giving in and giving up. That’s Esther. Her invalid fantasy comes from pressure on the outside (“Get a job!”) and depression on the inside.

RM: Fantasy seems to play a significant role not just for Esther, but for all of your characters, regardless of age — Amy has her art, Jack and Pickle have their video games, and there’s that great scene at the end with May and the cicadas. As I was reading the book, I found myself thinking of fantasy as the element that survives even after we let go of our childhood — sort of a persistent echo of childhood itself.

LS: That’s true! Especially with Amy’s fantasies (or, sadly, memories) made manifest in her art, but also with May’s collection (and even the video games). Fantasy follows us, and I think is also what brings us back to literature (and there’s a lot of Esther going back to childhood books in the novel). Maybe we can’t dress up in capes and crowns the way we used to as children, but we can still read books that transport us.

Laura Miller wrote a book called The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventure in Narnia, which opens with a poignant, shimmering childhood memory: she’s standing outside in the California suburb where she grew up, wishing Narnia really existed and wishing she could go there. “I want this so much I’m pretty sure the misery of not getting it will kill me,” she says. “For the rest of my life, I will never want anything quite so much again.” Bam! That’s the opening paragraph! I loved this book. I read it when I was almost done writing mine (in other words, when I was already deep into my own Narnia fantasy), but it has so much to say about childhood and yearning and magic.

RM: That quote speaks to the danger that comes along with imagination — even though we can use books (and music and art) to hold onto (or reconnect to) childhood, maybe we’re just prolonging the agony. I know that Esther eventually decides to let go of her childhood, but did you find that writing the novel helped you to let go, too, or are you still hanging on?

LS: Am I still hanging on to childhood? Not like I used to. In my early twenties, I was so nostalgic. Is that weird? To be young and nostalgic? I think it’s something I just outgrew, novel or not. The novel I’m working on now isn’t so nostalgic: it’s about girls in their mid-twenties and problems with girlfriends and boyfriends. Maybe it’s immature, or obvious, to write about life as I see it happening (there’s Gchat in my next novel, for example), without more reflective distance, but that’s what I’m interested in.

RM: It’s really interesting that The Fallback Plan is trying to make sense of the present through the lens of the past, but a lot of your poems are looking back at the present from the future’s perspective. 

LS: It’s hard to exist in the “now,” without reaching forwards or backwards, and I guess my writing is a reflection of my personal struggle to stay in the present. Thich Nhat Hanh says, “The past is gone, the future is not yet here, and if we do not go back to ourselves in the present moment, we cannot be in touch with life.” This is good advice for living (smell the roses!), but my creative practice is fed, and inspired by, yearning for what is gone and what will come.

In and Around The Land of Pain: On Stacey Richter's "The Land of Pain"

When I was about four years old, my father decided to quit his job as a systems analyst and move our family to a tiny town — a hamlet, really — in the Sierra Nevada mountains, where he would become a utility man. He took a huge reduction in pay and prestige, and went from writing computer programs to dumping garbage and cutting grass so he could spend more time with his kids. He wanted to be able to come home for lunch and see us as we ran around town with our friends — a privilege we never would have had in Southern California.

My father was a very healthy man. He was a runner and, when he lived near the ocean, a surfer. And yet, one day, while lifting a garbage can, he ruptured a disc in his spine. The doctors seemed unsure how to treat his condition, so they experimented. They used him as a surgical guinea pig: fused his spine, broke it, put screws in without his permission, removed them, carved his back with scars, inserted a hockey-puck-sized morphine pump just under the skin of his abdomen, and then misplaced a decimal point while recalibrating it, nearly killing him. Over the course of ten years he had about ten surgeries. Pain became part of his daily life, one it seems they will never be able to fully relieve.

I don’t talk about this much, because people don’t seem to understand it. My father looks pretty normal. He gets scowled at when he parks in the handicapped spot, though he has a valid placard; you can’t see his pain most of the time, and when you can it presents itself with a limp and a scowl. He was once yelled at by an old woman who bought the seat behind him at an amphitheater (he’s 6’4” and long-bodied, so his torso might be that of someone four inches taller) who refused to believe he needed the thin cushion he sat on, or that he couldn’t slouch on account of his fused vertebrae. Because he isn’t in a wheelchair or visibly maimed (I sometimes wish he would lift his t-shirt for these doubters and show them the eight-inch scar down his spine) people aren’t sympathetic.

I’d resigned myself to this fact until I read “The Land of Pain” by Stacey Richter, the ninth story in her second collection, Twin Study. I had never thought to look for fiction about chronic pain until I stumbled across a story about it in my stack of prospective thesis books. It felt fated, especially when I discovered the story had originally appeared in the journal, Willow Springs, where I interned, edited by my thesis advisor, and was written in the second person: my favorite point of view to play with. What amazed me most was that the story handles the subject subject glibly, yet it’s so apt:

“You go for a walk and during the walk something happens: you trip, you fall, you dive off a cliff; you crash, you twist, you type for hours, you age. When you get home, you notice that your house looks slightly different than when you left — mushier, if that’s possible, with misaligned corners. You open the door and are surprised to find a foil banner hanging over the mantle.

“It says: Welcome to the Land of Pain.”

Reading this without understanding what chronic pain can do to a person, this might seem light. It might seem silly. And that’s the thing about this story — and nearly all the stories in Twin Study — Stacey Richter chuckles her way through some of the most intimate subjects, adding flash with fast-paced prose and quirky characters. She sends Barbie-loving cavemen through a time tunnel, douses a rock-star mother in champagne and makes her sing, switches the lives of twins, and puts a princess in the emergency room. She grows a mindless clone, teaches her ballet and yoga, and watches her twirl in her favorite tutu, but then her face straightens, and she stops to ask, “How can you say goodbye to your unbroken version, the good version, the one that dances?”

I sent “The Land of Pain” to my mother once, and told her she and dad might find it interesting. She read it, then wrote back: It was so sad. A simple review, and one you might not expect from a second-person piece of pseudo-science-fiction. I tend to forget, between readings, how much Richter toys with my emotions. I flip through the stories and decide to read “The Cavemen in the Hedges,” mostly remembering the cavemen and their penchant for glitter, but by the time I finish reading, I’m devastated. I’ve sat through the drum circle by the Burger King, wallowed in loss. I have to read the next story to get over the last one, and on and on, until I’ve finished the book and want to start over again.

A Small Congregation of Nerdy Younger Kids: A Review of Ben Tanzer's So Different Now

During the final session of my MFA advanced fiction workshop, my classmates and I read our answers to some questions our professor had cribbed from Paris Review interviews. The idea was to take a step back from our work, which we were all probably sick of by that point, and examine it from more neutral ground. The exercise reminded me of that SNL sketch where James Lipton was interviewing himself, but I did the best I could to not sound like an asshole as I read mine aloud.

In response to the question about hidden flaws in my work, my response was that I have a lot of trouble writing from character because I don’t really understand human interaction at all. I mean, I engage in it (with varying degrees of success), but it’s largely out of reflex. My professor told me that the best writers didn’t understand people either, and that great characters come from those questions about how people would act in certain situations or circumstances, or around certain other people. The unspoken second half of this theory, I think, is that being able to decode people interferes with the process of developing characters and telling stories through them.

It’s a gratifying theory to hear, but it flounders before a writer like Ben Tanzer, who really does seem like he understands people. He sets his own parameters on his characters’ interactions and familial circumstances, as we all do, but you never get the sense that his characters are being moved around like chess pieces for some grander literary purpose.

I’ve reviewed Ben’s work over at my own blog before, and I remember saying that Ben makes writing, specifically the process of building a character arc, look way easier than it really is. His new collection of short stories, So Different Now, shows that his already-impressive gifts for astute narrative observation have sharpened. It’s infuriating. And you can’t even hate him for it because he’s so damn nice and helpful.

Anyway, “Stevey,” the third story in the collection, is the best example of what I’m talking about. The story is anchored by the advice doled out by Stevey, the titular character, to a small congregation of nerdy younger kids that includes the narrator. Any credibility Stevey has is due to his hot girlfriend and cool dad, and because the narrator and his friends “didn’t yet know the difference between being confident and being smart.” This should ring true for anyone who looked to their peer group, rather than their parents or siblings, for guidance.

With this story, Tanzer displays a tiered understanding of how young men seek out role models. The shallow reason is because they’re attracted to success, whose definition is relative to their peer group, and another explanation might be that the narrator is “careening from one fuck-up to the next,” so the illusion of control Stevey has might as well be the real thing. Tanzer’s approach gives the narrator much more agency – he is so desperate for some kind of help structuring his entry into adulthood, which he knows is above his head, that he chooses to heed advice like “don’t ever date girls with dirty nails,” even though he identifies it as one of Stevey’s quirks rather than something to be generally assumed.

Even when this relationship unravels, when the narrator sees evidence of domestic abuse in Stevey’s house and laughs at Stevey’s insistence that “sweat is the biggest fucking turn-off you can imagine,” the writing avoids melodrama. The narrator may brush off his own skepticism, but actual evidence that Stevey “wasn’t in control all the time, that he was flawed, and . . . he struggled just like everyone else did” can’t be so easily brushed aside. It’s the moment where the narrator sees his own path emerging, whereas before it was either follow Stevey’s advice or spend adolescence rudderless and adrift.

I don’t think a writer who didn’t get people could drag those last few paragraphs out of me, because that writer couldn’t handle a coming-of-age piece without relying on the same stereotypes and operatic emotions we’ve seen play out for generations. Hell, someone who didn’t get people couldn’t write teenagers at all, I don’t think – they’d read like miniature adults on the page. Tanzer’s work, by contrast, makes statements like “good writers don’t have to ‘get’ people” sound like flailing self-justification.

What It Is Like To Be Alive In This World: A Review of Matt Hart's Wolf Face

Whoa. So here we are, human beings. “Sing it, We are human beings.” We are lying, cannibalistic husbands and wives. Wolf Face howls the hard truth into us, and then invites us into a home to care for a crying baby. “Bathing in purple, we are bathing in O. / The violets are brewing,” and if you don’t already know, you missed a hell of a book in 2010.

As a poet hanging out with poets in the real world, I’ve come to know “meaning” as a bit of a problem word. A blurb from Darcie Dennigan on the back of Wolf Face says that this “record of what it is like to be alive in this world” is “particular to one man.” That’s probably true, but I think that this is a book about Matt Hart living with Matt Hart in the real world. Which is to say, this book is about a universal experience.

Looking for meaning in these pages, a reader runs the risk of running into a wallpaper wall. Things are what they say, until they give way to something more expansive. Hart writes: “It isn’t necessary that life seem meaningful at every turn, / only that it mean something in the face of you.” Wolf Face is filled to the brim with things that “mean” for Matt Hart. We visit the poet when he is thirty-nine, thirty-six, when he’s married and when he’s meeting his wife. We visit him when he’s paying a mortgage and when he’s renting 434 Grad Avenue, Apt. 4 in Brooklyn. We see him pulling on a few very different faces, each entirely genuine.

The handsome cover design invites us into a very personal space right off the bat. Right at the bottom, plain as day, Hart displays four lines of a type-written draft of the titular poem, pen-marked, scribbled-out, and re-written. “Alive with a terror that blends in the snow” is re-molded into “Alive with an error that shakes in the snow,” the line that appears in the book. More terrifying than “terror,” the revision speaks to the way that these poems mean.

Wolf Face has a remarkable range, evidenced by titles like “Matt Hart Running with Daisy, His Dog” and “I Gave Away the Sky,” each magnificently different in scope and plausibility. But we’re not just reading from one Matt Hart, either. He’s thirty-six and thirty-nine. He wears a “Wolf Face” and an “Electron Face.” All of this is to say that the scope of plausibility in this book transcends the routine, the memory and the domestic by inhabiting those spaces wildly. The book transcends the wild by being it, by carrying on an honestly primal existence through meticulously-constructed poems that rage while they calm, and vice-versa.

This is a hell of a book. You have to turn it sideways to read it. No joke. But when you do, you’ll figure out that coming at things sideways is the best way to get to the genuine. Let this book eat you — you’ll survive. You’re human.