The Tension Between Domesticity and Artistry: On Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum's Madeleine Is Sleeping

When I submitted the unsure beginnings of a novel to my writers’ group, the wonderful Idra Novey recommended Madeleine Is Sleeping by Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum. I was, am, interested in novels in prose poems. Madeleine Is Sleeping is written as a series of lyrical, impressionistic observations on events or characters that range from a single sentence to a page or page-and-a-half in length. It’s a bildungsroman of sorts: Madeleine has fallen mysteriously into a deep, impenetrable sleep. Without being able to separate dream action from waking reality, the reader follows her as she leaves her provincial French village, joins a gypsy circus, and stumbles into an unexpected triangle of desire.

But in its fractured telling, the story only becomes clear on second read. The novel is more about the savoring of tangential reveries, odd corners and flyaway moments than the propulsion of plot. The inciting incident occurs when Madeleine is caught fondling the village idiot. Her mother dips her hands into a pot of boiling lye and sends her away to a convent. One short paragraph titled “bureaucracy” is given to the revelation and aftermath of Madeleine’s transgression, a single sentence on the same page to the lye. I missed it on first read. Still, the bildungsroman progression was clear, the emotions attending adolescence aptly muddied: The initial pleasure Madeleine, with her bandaged hands, takes in being cared for at the convent; her subsequent escape and discovery that when her bandages are removed, her hands have grown into mitten-like paddles; her determination to use her disfigurement as an acrobat in the circus; her unwitting conversion from victim to victimizer when she is made to paddle another performer, M. Pujol; and her ultimate longing — when this confusion becomes love — for fingers “to touch the soft hair growing there on the back of [M. Pujol’s] neck.”

There are other Freudian metaphors for desire and transformation. Among the circus freaks is Charlotte, who, longing to be touched by her asexual husband in the way that he touches his viol, morphs into a viol, growing black, horse-like hairs down the length of her body. As she unbuttons her bodice and draws a bow across the strings, she tells Madeleine, “Music, more than any other thing in the world, teaches us emotion.” There is the metamorphosis of Matilde, a luxuriously fat woman who inexplicably sprouts two sets of wings and flies up to housetops. An alter-ego for the author, Matilde travels freely between dream and reality, keeping a scientific journal, maintaining that if she meticulously records the details of life, the overall picture will emerge.

Madeleine is Sleeping is a novel that resides in the details. Charlotte’s story is complicated toward the end of the book, its heartbreaking particulars assiduously relayed by Madeleine’s sister, Beatrice, over the course of four sections. Claude, the younger brother, blurts out the ending at the conclusion of the first section, but the reader is rewarded for persisting, even as three interrupting sections cut away from Charlotte’s story. Alas, Beatrice never gets to the end of the story. “The story is too long, Mother interrupts. All those . . . corridors . . . I already know what is going to happen. Claude told us in the beginning.”  Mother is concerned only with the tidy marriage plot she has arranged for Madeleine, which Charlotte’s macabre marriage story quite literally upsets. I won’t be a spoiler like Claude, but ending or no, the rich middle of Charlotte’s story plumbs the tension between domesticity and artistry, speech and silence, and deserves not merely patience, but several re-readings, as it offers a multiplicity of interpretations.

Madeleine’s corridors are wondrous strange. When it’s discovered that not merely Madeleine, but all the girls, have played sex games with the village idiot, he is sent to an insane asylum. There, he mails Madeleine sketches of his brainpan that look like the “moon on its back.” “Conversion” describes how Madeleine’s brothers and sisters make kites from the accumulating drawings, how Mother decorates her preserves with their delicate cranial swirls. When the shared object of their love leaves them, Madeleine and the circus photographer pour over photographs of him. “This image, [the photographer] tells Madeleine, is literally an emanation of M. Pujol: from his body radiates light, which then inscribes itself on the very surface which in turn your gaze now touches.”

M. Pujol’s body emits not merely light, but “the most melancholy sounds [Madeleine has] ever heard: that of the nightingale, the grasshopper, the cuckoo . . . the strange and unearthly emissions reminded her of her home, and she wept.” Lest the novel’s enchantment become too precious, the ethereal is tempered by the body’s humiliations and grotesqueries, the surreal grounded in the sensual. Or rather, Madeleine is Sleeping transcends these divisions. M. Pujol’s musical flatulence is at once farcical and heartrending.

The photographs of M. Pujol were taken for the widow, a rich old libertine who hires the circus to pose in lecherous tableaus for her pleasure. Except the photographs offer her no pleasure. She teases a scientist who interviews her for his study of libertines, “so strenuous were his attempts to manage her perversions, to render them immobile. What you must . . . understand about my predilections (the scientist leans forward: at long last, the secret!) is that my desire does not take; it turns, as milk does.”

Throughout, there are the motifs of desire’s slipperiness, aberrance’s resistance to immobility. The beauty of Shun-Lien Bynum’s vision makes us embrace the strange — what does not fit and is not clear — which seems to me the province of the prose poem. The successful novel in prose poems manages to resist immobility, to open a space for ambiguity. I recently read We the Animals, a novel that similarly refuses the traditional bildungsroman trajectory, that uses the liminal form of the prose poem to get at the fierce space between a family’s power to sustain and destroy.

Through the meticulousness of her language, Shun-Lien Bynum manages to simultaneously inhabit and contain desire, aberrance and transformation. The tension between form and the sublime, the combination of a voice at once extravagant and matter-of-fact, indulgent and constrained, made me think of Anne Carson, whom Shun-Lien Bynum lists among her favorite writers. The artist bildungsroman themes in Madeleine is Sleeping are closest to Autobiography of Red, but I think of Decreation, which searches for, and ultimately explodes, various forms to contain the Sublime — opera librettos, screenplays, poems, oratorios, essays. “Every Exit is an Entrance (A Praise of Sleep),” an essay in which Carson writes about how authors use the space between waking and sleep, seems particularly relevant. Here Carson writes about how To the Lighthouse falls asleep for 25 pages in the middle section, “Time Passes”: “Changes flow over the house of the story and penetrate the lives of the characters while they sleep. These changes are glimpsed as if from underneath; Virginia Woolf’s main narrative is a catalogue of silent bedrooms. . . Down across these phenomena come facts from the waking world, like swimmers stroking by on a night lake. . . . [Mr. Ramsay, stumbling along a passage one dark morning, stretched his arms out, but Mrs. Ramsay, having died rather suddenly the night before, his arms, though stretched out, remained empty.]” In Madeleine is Sleeping, the major plot points similarly “float past the narrative like the muffled shock of a sound heard while sleeping.” The novel’s emotional and poetic density is both allayed and heightened by sleep pauses, recurring pages containing a single sentence: Madeleine stirs in her sleep.   

Carson goes on to discuss The Voyage Out, in which Woolf writes of six people traveling to South America on a boat, afloat between waking and sleep. “The dreams were not confined to her indeed, but went from one brain to another. They all dreamt of each other that night, as was natural, considering how thin the partitions were between them and how strangely they had been lifted off the earth to sit next each other in mid ocean.” The characters in Madeleine is Sleeping meld in the same porous way, all of them manifestations of adolescent fears and scars and becoming. Madeleine is Sleeping uses the space between sleep and waking to traverse the liminal territory of adolescence, the space between disfigurement and beauty, the bawdy and the holy, abjection and attraction, asceticism and ecstasy, impotence and power.

In Shun-Lien Bynum’s second novel, Ms. Hempel Chronicles, this sepia­-tinted dream of pseudo-Victorians and fairytale grotesques gives way to a linked collection of stories about a seventh grade English teacher that resemble personal essays in their retrospective composure and resignation. Ms. Hempel puzzles over her reverse metamorphosis, from parti-­colored butterfly to monochromic caterpillar:

“Mr. Dunne, her college counselor, was the one who first noticed the discrepancy. Impressive scores, mediocre grades. A specialist was consulted, a series of tests administered, and a medication prescribed. The bitter pills, her father used to call them. The prescription made her hands shake a little, but that wore off after awhile. And then: a shy, newfound composure. Her mother entrusted her with the holiday newsletter; she wrote film reviews for the university newspaper. She had a nice way with words, a neat way of telling a story.

To her ears, though, her stories sounded smushed. As if they had been sat upon by accident. None of the interesting parts survived.” She remembers the story she told at her father’s funeral: “Beautiful was not what she intended.  Her story was not about safety and concern and anxious attentions.  It was a tale of danger, intrigue; a story from the days before her medicine. . . . This was the story she wanted to tell. Then how did something altogether different emerge?  Something she didn’t even recognize as her own.”

My first book was my Monster in a Box. I finished the first version at 27 in LA, where I’d moved for love and where love and I didn’t seem to make sense. I wrote in my underwear in a roach-ridden hotbox of an apartment; I wrote from inside the wound, unspeakably sad and angry and alone, Baldwin, Woolf, and Carole Maso my closest friends. A large part of this book was about my father’s entrenchment in an authoritarian cult that talked in circles about Rules and Tools, so I had a vested interest in breaking formal rules. I returned to New York alone and dropped this unruly 600-page beast on the desk of an agent who called it an “epic quest full of moral force and luminosity,” who feared that if I cut it down it would “shrink from a big, tawny lion to a skinny cat” and believed we only had to find someone who let it speak to them. I didn’t find that someone and in the years that followed, this first book went through countless visions and revisions. I worked on it for too long, long after its rawness had dissipated. I whittled it down to a skinny cat I hardly recognized as my own.

I don’t devalue the understanding of craft and editing I gained, but I am trying, in the gestation of this second book, to unlearn some of the rules, to locate the intersection between the dream and the analyst. Since it’s the dream that must first be protected, I’m grateful for the unruly extravagance of Madeleine is Sleeping, its courageous insistence upon the strange, misshapen magic of claiming one’s own cracked voice.

I Would Never Want to Spit Them Up: An Open Letter to Brandi Wells

Dear Brandi Wells,

It was night and we were in my room and my mattress was on the floor. A friend was sitting on it, talking about his fractured heart. Another friend was there too, licking her fingers over an empty box of pizza, empty except for the residue of grease. I was leaning up against my desk, which had a stack of books on it. On the top of the stack was yours, Please Don’t Be Upset. I remembered how I had taken it all in in one gulp. I remembered the way your words felt when I read them out loud — to myself — how they had at once made me feel too small and too big.

I wanted to read them again.

I wanted everyone to listen, to know what your stories could do. So I picked up your book and started reciting a story I’ve since nearly memorized, “Seven Things I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You.” I called out the title to the room and my friends got quiet and I started to read what you had written. “I want to put my fingers in your nose,” I said, “so I can feel where the life goes inside you.” I continued: “When I am trying to fall asleep, I think about flattening you with a giant iron and wrapping your carcass around me like a blanket. When the blood turns cold, I will wear you anyway.”

I finished reading and the room stayed quiet.

My friend with the grease on her fingers reached out and took your book like she was defending it, started over like it was the most important thing on earth.

This is what your stories do.

This is what your stories have done.

This story is true.

Brandi Wells, your book is one that transcends genre. The narrators of your stories are so honest, I wonder if they are really you. They are often unsentimental, other times brutal and yet they are tender. I’m thinking of an excerpt of your story “Bald”: “I find myself drawn to balding men . . . those men in process. I think it’s the idea that they have a chance to say goodbye to their hair. It’s a slow parting.”

So really, the book transcends itself, too.

After reading it I could no longer call it a book, but instead knew it as only a part of me, like a new lung, or an extra arm. Did you plan for that to happen? Did you know I would swallow your words whole and never want to spit them up? Are you hearing what I’m trying to tell you? I’m trying to say that I hope you are happy even though your stories are sometimes sad. I hope that before you sleep each night you pause to think about how your book is out in the world, that people are reading it, reading it again. I hope you are somewhere warm, but not too warm, and that you are still writing.

But I was talking about “Bald”:

“I sit by myself in diners and watch them drink their coffee and fiddle with their toast. Balding men are slow eaters. They are awkward. They do not know what to do with a piece of toast. It’s a flirtation. They see the toast, they are getting to know the toast and then the toast is inside them. This is the way with all relationships.”

This, too, is the way of your Please Don’t Be Upset: suddenly inside me, twisting, showing my guts what they’re made of.

Thank you, Brandi Wells.

Always,

David

Drawn Toward the Portal of the Mirror: A Review of j/j hastain's Verges & Vivisections

For a minute or two in the late 1990s/early 2000s, I played Myst and its first sequel, Riven. I loved the way the games allowed me to closely explore the world on the screen, down to what was then an unheard-of degree of detail. To be honest, I spent more time putting my virtual nose against the pixel-shine of various digital game gewgaws than I did in actually trying to solve the puzzles and complete the games. For me, the point of playing was to prolong the immersive experience as long as I could; completing the game would mean . . . well, it would mean it was over!

Maybe that’s why I enjoy viewing (and making) visual poetry so much. Because visual poetry operates on more than one sensory level, it too can provide an experience of total immersion, in a way that video cannot. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not anti-video (I make video poems myself). But video perpetuates a sort of techno-tyranny, through the device-dependency of its medium and the limited opportunities for viewers to actively influence their own experience of the poem itself. On the other hand, a visual poem lets you choose the nature of your experience with it. Open a collection of visual poems and determine your own trajectory. You can start at the third-to-last one and go backwards, gliding over the pieces to get a brief collective impression. Or you can start on the first poem and gaze at it for half an hour before proceeding to the next, and so on. Hold a poem close to your face, or view it at twenty paces. What you get is different each time.

There are hundreds of visual poets all over the world, but j/j hastain is one of the most interesting and prolific. A recent collection, Verges & Vivisections, is a great choice for anyone who loves to get caught up in other worlds. Any individual poem in this collection is a multi-sensual window onto another place, but viewed amidst its fellows, each piece vibrates with the uncanny harmonics of relationship. There are a lot of relationships in these poems; the eye meanders over and into a given poem, pondering the text, the image upon which it literally rests, and their interaction. And then the page is turned and the experience of the previous poems informs that of the ones to come. Each page in the collection contains a whole untitled poem composed of an abstract photo or photocollage by the author, with lines of text affixed to the image.

For example, one piece presents a wall made of vertical pale boards, gleaming with a satiny shine. The image is composed so that the oval mirror on the wall is just above center.  The mirror reflects more planks of the same wood — but these are horizontally aligned. This creates a pleasant, fascinating disorientation. We are drawn toward the portal of the mirror. The text at the bottom of the poem pulls us even further in:

that this is how i understood an angel

wood holding

what reflects wood

We might let ourselves become trapped in the mirror with the wood’s reflection, and the angel, and our own self-awareness. Or we can turn the page and slide along to the next world. Brave viewers can also experiment with Verges & Vivisections as a single, long poem. The immersive effect is extended across the whole volume. The whole is otherthan the sum of its parts.

Alienation from Society and Loneliness: On Joshua Baldwin's The Wilshire Sun

The dust jacket of The Wilshire Sun describes the book as an anti-bildungsroman. Since a bildungsroman is usually defined as the story of a person’s development into adulthood, Baldwin’s novella is ostensibly a story of a person’s failure to mature. A tribute to stasis, a paean to the flat-lining potential of the human spirit, The Wilshire Sun is similar in subject matter to Seinfeld. Indeed, its protagonist, Jacob, is more or less a younger George Costanza, although Jacob has vague writing ambitions that George never did.

The Wilshire Sun begins with Jacob heading west from New York to write film scripts in LA. There, he plans to meet his writing partner and only friend, who is coincidentally named Jerry. Sardonic and unreliable, Jerry fails to give Jacob the warm reunion the latter had expected, instead leaving only the following postcard.

Jacob,

I’m laid over in a small Arizona town right now, thinking, over a glass of seltzer, why don’t you like my novel? My opinion is that you’re jealous of me. But I am also jealous of you and that complicates the matter.

-Jerry

Jacob has little time to track Jerry down, for almost as soon as he arrives in Los Angeles he gets sick and has to return back home to Brooklyn. Four pages into the novella and the personal gains with which Jacob began the story have evaporated. Such a turn of events is typical in The Wilshire Sun; what appears at first to be a small step forward for Jacob actually proves to be two or three large steps back. As the minor tragedies compound into a major human catastrophe, one gets the sense that one is witnessing not stasis, but rather regression.

Indeed, in my opinion what Baldwin has created is less an anti-Bildungsroman than, to borrow Seinfeldian terminology, a bizarro-Bildungsroman. The Wilshire Sun actually does capture a young man’s development into adulthood, it’s just that the development is a shrinking instead of a growing, the resigned acceptance of permanent childhood instead of proud entrance into newfound maturity.

Despite its dark conclusion, The Wilshire Sun proves a light-hearted and whimsical read. Baldwin’s writing style is brisk. His sense of humor is deadpan, often challenging the reader to identify when his protagonist is being absurd. “Dreaming is good for writers – it’s the same as writing, really,” Jacob says at one point. At another point, he call the experience of making a sandwich “surprisingly difficult, yet deeply meaningful.”

From the quotations above one should see that Baldwin has mastered the rhetorical flourish of putting an additional emphatic phrase where it does not belong. That, along with the widespread use of inter-textuality, are in my mind what defines Baldwin’s authorial signature. In addition to the postcard from Jerry to Jacob found on page four, there are upwards of thirty letters peppered throughout The Wilshire Sun.

Of these, 23 are notes written by Jacob between characters that he himself has invented. These excerpts are, on the surface, self-contained vignettes that have little or nothing to do with the larger work. On reflection, however, it becomes clear that the epistolary material in The Wilshire Sun is not simply ephemera, but rather plays an essential dramatic role. The letters prompt the reader to wonder, “What sort of person would write notes between made-up people?” No doubt, someone fascinated by the possibility that people would have something to say to one another. Such a person would have to be one who felt he had nothing to say to anyone and that no one had anything to say to him.

The epistolary material in The Wilshire Sun, far from being a distraction from Jacob’s story, is actually a symptom of Jacob’s fundamental problem: his alienation from society and loneliness. It is a testimony to Baldwin’s talents that he was capable of making the widespread use of a risky device like inter-textuality actually work on a dramatic level. The Wilshire Sun is an accomplished debut from a promising young writer.

A Vocabulary of Alarm: A Review of Emily Pettit's Goat in the Snow

I have always been a sucker for what’s been called UMass surrealism. There’s certainly something in the water up there that gives poets the exact skills and tricks they need to appeal to me. Of the magazines and presses I subscribe to, at least half have some connection to UMass Amherst. So it come as no surprise that Emily Pettit’s debut collection of poems, Goat in the Snow (Birds, LLC, 2011), has become my favorite book of the winter. That’s Emily Pettit, publisher of Jubilat, co-editor of nosnostrums, co-founder of Flying Object, and one of the forces behind Factory Hollow Press. In other words, if something is in the water in Western Massachusetts, Pettit’s got a fire hose — several of them, actually — and they’re aimed right at us.

Did I go into the book expecting to like it? I did. But while you’ll find some of the hallmarks of contemporary surrealism here (wordplay really at play, the Hegelian dialectic run wild, a big heart), what sets Pettit’s collection apart from the rest is that these poems address the two most basic questions of philosophy: What can we know? How should we live?

In “How to Recognize a Stranger” she writes:

“We would like to speak to the operator.
Are we speaking to the operator?
The problem is solved. We etch-a-sketch
the problem being solved. It’s pretty
complicated looking. It looks like a duck,
until we shake it. And when we shake it,
it looks like a new stranger, a fancy glance,
too many telephone poles, a twitching mind.
We are working on recognizing the noise a twitching
mind makes. That we would know this noise,
that we would act accordingly.”

These poems have a graceful movement to them. In fact, I’ve never seen such smooth disassociation. The collection’s closing poem, “How to Build a Fire in the Snow” just carries you along on the strength of its language and the flow of its thought. This often leads to beautiful thought experiments, as in “How to Carefully Consider Interstellar Space Travel”:

“. . . There is a chance that the elasticity
we want will be ours. All there is, is a chance.
And everyone knows chances are strange.
And sometimes chances are like planets
that get too close to their stars.”

At their best, which is often, these poems do not offer cognitive dissonance, but the illusion of cognitive harmony. There is a comfort in the false promise of Pettit’s “How to . . .” titles, a comfort in the false confidence of the speaker’s delivery: “. . . Who needs a map of the friction / when the lightning looks like a plan?” (“Go Airplane, Sway Tree”).

What made this collection truly special to me is that it crystallized why I love this style of poetry so much. I don’t know Pettit, but I think we’re about the same age (I turned 30 earlier this month). Our adult lives began on September 11th. For the past 10 years we’ve been mired in wars with undefined missions. For the past 4 years we’ve seen the world economy on the verge of collapse. Why do I find such comfort in words of those compassionate, raving New Englanders? Because just as the original Surrealists were reacting to the horrors of WWI, Pettit and her clan are reacting to the reversals and uncertainty of the 21st century; uncertainty, not in the sense of “I don’t believe this is reality,” but in that a common construction through which we understand the world, the reality of our assumptions, has fallen apart. What can we know to be true when everything we thought we knew proved false? How should we proceed?

In that sense, these are poems in a state of emergency. These are poems that are going through something and we’re all going through it too, as in “How to Avoid Confronting Most Large Animals”:

“ . . . You know
you know you know. It’s all uncertainty
and your neck. You walk slowly
in a calm voice.”

They are poems distrustful of even the most basic tenets — “It’s like our deal with gravity, / it continually deceives,” from “Your Job Is to Look Both Ways” — but doing their best to carry on. “The world is potentially over and we are interested / in potential. Now go back to where you were / and try not to light everything on fire,” she writes in “Building Smoke Detectors.” First off, damn those are some good lines. Second, this is exactly how I feel a lot of the time. Everything is falling apart, but we’re doing our best to keep things going and not make things worse.

With uncertainty, there is almost always fear, but in Pettit’s hands it’s not the fear you might expect. These poems aren’t quite paranoid — nothing that dark, at least on the surface. You get the sense that the speaker is at the best party, but is somehow disconnected from the rest of the guests. “Someone” is always saying something, but we don’t know who. The fear is of greater disconnection.

When Pettit writes in “Go Airplane, Sway Tree,” “I want to know why I’m not whispering this / in your ear. Why is it that you can’t hear me,” we don’t get the sense that the person the speaker is addressing is dead, as we might in a Poe poem, but rather that they are unreachable, and these poems, or the speakers in these poems, are trying to do nothing if not communicate. They may not know or understand what is to be communicated, what instructions are to be given, but what matters above all else is that the communication continues, that a connection is made, even in confusion, between two people. And that, to me, is poetry.

Falling Asleep With a Kleenex in Your Nose

Once upon a time I was a poet. I listened to music until I cried and read poems until I cried and sat at the edge of any body of water I could find and cried.

Then a few things happened:

1. I went to a writing conference in Prague and some girl said that I only wrote poems about men who didn’t love me.

2. I wrote the worst collection of poems that has ever been written. It was about, one could argue, men who didn’t love me.

After that I didn’t write a poem (or anything) for two years.

When I came back to writing (or did it come back to me?), I wrote fiction. There, I thought. See this? No one can accuse this of being about me.

Of course everything that we write is about us, even if it’s not: the mother who has an affair, the man sitting by his dying wife’s bedside, the child yelling to be heard by her deaf mother. I know this now.

What I came to love most about writing fiction was the space it allowed. I had a poetry professor in college who handed back our poems with lines through every “unnecessary” word — articles, prepositions, conjunctions — until our poems were unrecognizable, as our own and as English.

At the end of our last class he gave us an assignment to write a poem without any unnecessary words. No articles. No prepositions. Nothing that didn’t absolutely have to be there. I came in the next day with a prose poem containing only words he had forbidden. I thought it was an interesting take on the assignment. He didn’t. He thought I was snubbing him. That I was being obstinate. That I was looking for attention.

I wasn’t. I was trying to write a decent goddamn poem.

What I love, then, about Megan Boyle’s Selected Unpublished Blog Posts of a Mexican Panda Express Employee is the space in her poems. There isn’t the compression of syntax or the insistence on figurative language that is present in what most people call “poetic.” The poems lollygag. They travel aimlessly from fleeting thoughts of past lovers to a list of lies she has told in her life.

A poet friend of mine told me that a new trend in poetry is to write poems without purpose. You just write what’s real and what’s happening because it’s real and it’s happening, not because it’s particularly beautiful or poignant. You don’t assign meaning to it. It is on the page because it is happening, and because it is.

Of course, as a student of literature, the premise that words on a page could have no meaning goes against everything I’ve studied and argued and found compelling about literature. But let’s go with this notion for a second. Let’s just let these poems exist because they do. They’re irreverent:

“i want to hang a piñata full of emotionally damaged lobsters between a high school and a pond”

And they’re funny:

“last night I slept next to ‘a good school’ by richard yates. i only wore underpants. i fell asleep with a Kleenex up my right nostril. when I woke up i thought ‘i am fucked’ and ‘this is probably how a lot of lonely computer programmers fall asleep’”

While reading these poems I was reminded of a passage in Michael Cunningham’s By Nightfall about ordinariness and art:

“Gus the [limo] driver is everywhere and yet he appears nowhere, not in portraits or photographs, not even in the stories of men like Barthleme and Carver, who were all about guys with jobs and prospects like Gus’s but who insisted on more sorrow, more angst, than Gus remotely manifests. If Gus weeps sometimes for no reason, if he stands despairing in the aisle of Walmart, it is not apparent in his daily demeanor.”

What is so good about Megan Boyle’s poems is how it captures what “beauty” and “art” purposely leave out: how weird it feels to go down on a girl, cast changes on ER, falling asleep with a Kleenex in your nose, being lactose intolerant. These poems are literal and unexciting, and I mean that in the best way possible. They shirk romanticism and refinement and grandiose depictions of nature or human experience. They capture just how goddamn boring and unsentimental life can be. They exist in the reality of moments that most writers isolate and later manipulate into art.

(I’m doing it right now. I’m not being honest. I’m not telling you, as Megan Boyle would, that I’m sitting on my couch with my dog snoring beside me in his bed that smells because I haven’t washed it in the three years since I’ve had him. No. I’m writing. I’m revising sentences so they sound beautiful. I’m repeating words and images to deepen the emotional resonance of this review. I’m using parallelism in my sentences [right this very minute!] to build to a climax that will be perfectly poignant, rhythmic, repetitive, and, if I’m lucky, connected to the clever anecdote I used at the beginning. Here I go:)

Megan Boyle’s poems are unattractively true. They are courageous and unflaggingly honest. They detail that which poetry shamefully misses: the nose picking, the STI’s, the contents of our daily food consumption. They linger, unabashed, among the articles and prepositions that may not be as beautiful, but are just as much a part of our language and our lives.

Fact or Fiction? Your Guess Is As Good As Mine: Herta B. Feely's Confessions

I’ll admit it. I really respect James Frey. I followed the controversy surrounding A Million Little Pieces (which contained numerous exaggerations and lies) and its aftermath. I watched the Oprah interviews — when she grilled him, and when she made peace with him. I watched it all, and if there’s one thing that really stuck with me, it’s a comment that Frey made in his final meeting with Oprah. He said, “Let’s say you look at a cubist self-portrait by Picasso. . . . It doesn’t actually look anything like Picasso, or if it does, it does in ways that might only make sense to him.” This seems to suggest that there are more leniencies (and perhaps undeservedly so) in the categorization of genres in visual arts than in literature.

Before the start of his work of fiction, Bright Shiny Morning, Frey stuck in a humorous disclaimer that stands as an acknowledgement of his past: “Nothing in this book should be considered accurate or reliable.” If Herta B. Feely were to do the same, it would probably read something like: “Some of the stories in Confessions should be considered true, but it’s up to you decide which ones.”

Confessions is an anthology comprised of twenty-two short stories and memoirs whose genres remain unrevealed unless you look them up in the “answer key” at the book’s end. This format provokes questions regarding the boundaries between “fact and fiction,” the degree to which the traditional definition of “truth” is acceptable, and the consequent liberties that authors take as a response to their own interpretations. Feely seeks to engage readers in the subject — to invite them to examine if they wanted a story to be true or not, and if they felt betrayed when it wasn’t what they expected.

Knowing the way the book was set up, I read Confessions much more skeptically than I’d even read a newspaper. I was a juror and each story was a case. It frequently seemed that certain feelings were described specifically enough that one would have to have experienced them to write them so well. But still, “reasonable doubt” existed. I would often end up contemplating whether these segments seemed to be described a bit too specifically — whether more detail was revealed than one would have naturally noticed if the said events did, in fact, occur. On the whole, verdicts were difficult to reach.

At the heart of Confessions lies the big question: Does genre even matter, and do authors have a responsibility to inform their readers of the truth (or lack thereof)? George Nicholas, author of the anthology’s “If, Then, But,” states, “Pulp magazines of the ‘40s and ‘50s enticed readers with ‘True Confessions’ in 48-point type on their covers (would their reader have turned away from ‘False Confessions’?).” Nicholas goes on to say, “The Sonoran desert is part of the United States. It is also part of Mexico. But whichever side of the border you’re on, it’s still the desert. That’s what I think about fact or fiction. Makes no difference. It’s the story that counts, and the line has been blurry from day one.”

Confessions is an enthralling literary guessing game. Reading it, I often found myself disillusioned, stranded in the middle of the desert, wondering where the borderlines were and if it even mattered.