Father & Son: Cormac McCarthy's The Road

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is post-apocalyptic, but, as has been exhaustively noted, it’s largely unconcerned with the cause of the world’s end. In this sense it breaks from the tradition of dystopia as political and cautionary. Though it earned McCarthy a spot on The Guardian’s 2008 “50 people who could save the planet” list, with environmentalist George Manbiot heralding it as maybe “the most important environmental book ever” (sorry, Rachel Carson), The Road is not actually a political novel so much as it is interpersonal, familial.

The novel’s stark prose and barren landscape are an ideal milieu for meditation on human relationships. (There really might be something to McCarthy’s bold dismissal of all but the barest punctuation as “weird little marks” that “blot the page.” In his interview with Oprah, he went on to say that “if you write properly you shouldn’t have to punctuate.” Is it disrespectful to note this in a parenthetical?) The Road keeps closest to its heart the relationship of parent and child — specifically, father and son. In the first pages the unnamed or nameless father looks out across the wasteland that is the present and says of his son, “If he is not the word of God God never spoke.” His words are amplified by the setting but are hardly bound to it: blasphemy and all, such a sentence might be said by a parent even before the apocalypse.

If the book were just about this aspect of the parent-child bond — if it were merely an invocation of the bond’s ineffable depth and the parent’s singular desire for or obligation to sacrifice for the child — the work might be overly precious. But McCarthy is masterful, and so the portrait of this father and son is rich and nuanced. It’s a dark book about desperate circumstances, but the mundane persists, and exchanges like this are among The Road’s finest:

What is it, Papa?
Morels. It’s morels.
What’s morels?
They’re a kind of mushroom.
Can you eat them?
Yes. Take a bite.
Are they good?
Take a bite.
The boy smelled the mushroom and bit into it and stood chewing. He looked at his father. These are pretty good, he said.

And then there is the far darker side. It’s not just survival at stake: it’s also integrity and human dignity. The father advises his son on how to use their revolver to kill himself if need be, rather than be taken by one of the roving bands of cannibals. In an act of love distinct from and perhaps beyond self-sacrifice, the father asks himself whether he could, if the situation required it — if the gun didn’t fire — kill his son to save his son. “Could you crush that beloved skull with a rock?” he asks himself. “Is there such a being within you of which you know nothing? Can there be?”

Maybe the most significant aspect of parenthood here is the parent as moral educator. The novel’s arc follows the father’s slow death, foreshadowed early on by his persistent cough. His illness, the dangerous terrain, and the real threat posed by other human beings all make most urgent the issue of what the father will impart to his son before he passes. The imperative is stronger, too, in a world devoid of society, a world in which even the family is reduced to its barest form (the boy has no siblings and his mother has long since killed herself). But ultimately this is an issue centrally important to any parent: What can and will you do to make your child a good person?

But the education — as educations tend to — goes both ways. The son is deeply uncomfortable that they must sometimes leave other good guys behind, and he eventually coerces his father into giving some food to an old, nearly blind man. Though the father appears to do so only begrudgingly, it clearly affects him. When he and the old man discuss why the boy wanted to stop when the father did not, the old man suggests that he might believe in God. “He’ll get over it,” the old man assures him. “No he wont,” says the father, seeing something beautiful.

Because it is so brutal, The Road has been called unsentimental. Certainly it’s not maudlin, pat, cheaply tear-jerky, or trite, but it is sentimental — and tender and hopeful — and that’s largely because of its brutality: the honesty, the way the gray nothingness of this future illumines the sacredness of this bond. I don’t mean to diminish the weight of the tragedy in this novel by claiming it is as much about parents and children as it is about disaster, beauty, and grace. I mean to do the opposite: to say that human relationships — here, parent and child — are loaded with this gravity, sanctity, and light. The Road brings this forth: it does not construct, but reveals.

Love and Rejection In An Era of Cocksucking and Gmail: Ariana Reines's Coeur de Lion

There is a fine line drawn between the intimate thoughts shared by a writer in their poetry and what the civil courts could determine to be “libel.” The balance between the type of raw, personal language that emotions like love and heartbreak demand and one that may effectuate a universal experience with which the reader can and will identify is intricate. If ever there were a book that teetered precariously (and perfectly) on that line, it would be Ariana Reines’ Coeur de Lion.

Coeur de Lion is a detailed account of the range of feelings involved in falling out of love. Composed of a series of segmented reflections written almost entirely in second person – addressed directly to Jake, the narrator’s former object of affection – Coeur de Lionweaves seamlessly between an utterly personal narration of this love and a more objective examination of the writing process itself.

At its most seemingly candid, it is the ramblings of a madwoman hacking into Gmail accounts, describing various sexual encounters with blunt force, recounting run-ins with mutual friends and whining about old habits that annoyed her; countering this are meditations on what the narrator desires, the nature of being a woman, the schism between “you” (her former lover) and “you” (the reader of the text – quite certainly a different person than the first “you”) and running allusions to famous works of literature and art, the motifs that grant Ariana an understanding of her own relationship.

Early in the book this delicate balance begins to display itself quite clearly. At one moment the narrator actively questions who the “you” she is addressing in her poems truly is:

I thought about you and how scary it is

The way you keep your distance

And I thought about the cherishing feeling

I sometimes have for you.

Thinking about a person.  Surely

That act releases something

Into the atmosphere.  A toxin?

Now that I am not addressing you

But the “you” of poetry

I am probably doing something horrible and destructive.

But this “I” is the I of poetry

And it should be able to do more than I can do.

In simple discourse like this, what was between Ariana and Jake instantly becomes a deeper reflection on the nature of the love poem and the disparity between the poetic “I” or “you” and the referents that these pronouns are supposed to be signifying. Moments later the text returns to a sexual encounter in Venice.  Here the narration turns back to the intimate experiences unique to Ariana and Jake:

You fucked me

You came somewhere on me

I had a painful zit on my upper lip

And we were covered in dust

Constantly, Ariana speaks so bluntly about her relationship that she seems to trivialize it. The effect is that, at times, she is trivializing Jake as well. That is why, at its most malicious, people could interpret the collection as libelous, an ill-willed revelation of just how awful Jake is, or at the very least an attempt to perturb him over his shortcomings and warn other women. But I think the intellectuality and those moments of uncertain introspection lend themselves to a better understanding of Coeur de Lion as a poet’s catharsis, wherein the narrator was able to exorcise her feelings for this boy through writing about them. Furthermore, Ariana’s concern is not centered on destroying Jake, but lending a voice to those who cannot express so poignantly the wrongs they have suffered.  That is, after all, the poet’s job.

This is why that poetic “I” could inflict much more pain and damage than the real “I,” for the narrator speaks not just for Ariana, but also for every wronged woman, mistreated and marginalized for love.

Any review of Coeur de Lion would not be complete without further mention of its unabashed contemporariness. The theme of love in modern society runs prevalent, as Gmail espionage plays a central role and we barely reach page three before we hear about jpeg’s of other women. Reines uses this unambiguously modern setting to examine the role of women in an era where they are supposedly equal to men. Early on Reines speaks of being the “Gallery Girl” and what that entails: being interested in proximity to rich artists and buyers, or “acting pretty and disdainful,” despite being neither of those things.

In another poem, she compares her own writing to that of the medieval chivalric genre:

All that medieval love poetry

With its military metaphors

The woman as the fortress

The errancies of gallant knights.

Maybe long ago things were too

Too solid, and now we live in an ether

Of ex-sentiments, impossible

To make sense of. . .

This scrutiny of what it means to be a woman today and how a woman may be strong without coming of as “petty” or a “bitch” is essential to legitimizing Ariana’s right to defiantly publicize her and Jake’s intimacies in the first place. After all, some readers might see her as a madwoman for hacking Gmail, or a slut for fucking on a sidewalk in Venice, but this realness makes the text unquestionably relatable to the contemporary reader. Poems about love and failed relationships are not a new thing, but there is something about Ariana’s syntax and word choice, her blend of metaphysical reflection and sex without condoms, of words that are Greek to the contemporary reader and everyday swear words (“perfidy” and “cocksucking” need no distance between them in this epic), that makes Coeur de Lion impossible to shake off.

Its unique exploration of writing, romance and gender roles make Coeur de Lion an essential read. While the original Mal-O-Mar edition was out of print for a while, Fence Book’s newly edited version is out now, so there is no excuse to not have this in your library.

See the Place Again Where They Had Discovered and Lost Each Other: A Review of John Colman Wood's The Names of Things

Before I started reading The Names of Things by John Colman Wood, I found myself thinking about what I expected out of a novel that centers on an American’s experiences in another culture. At the minimum, I decided that I expected a vivid presentation of the ‘other place.’ I wanted to live it like I was there. Really, I was expecting something like a vicarious travel experience. However, I found as I read that I was a little off base with what I expected from The Names of Things. As I found out, the book was much more than I expected.

Mind you, that is not to say that Wood does not vividly paint the remote African desert and the nomadic culture that the narrator encounters there. This sample should dispel any possible doubts of that:

Each morning the sheep and goats went en masse to pasture, and then, about an hour later, after they, too, were milked, the camels left with the older boys. It was a great to-do. The small stock streamed out of the thorn-branch pens, and, though many, they moved as fish in school, the hooves together making the patter of rainfall across the pebbles. They were gone before you knew it. Not so the camels, which were loud and impatient. The huge animals stood in their corrals anticipating pasture. They face the same direction, groaning and snuffling and snaking their tawny heads at one another, as if to argue over the exact moment the humans would come and let them out. When their herdsman finally came, the camels, like passengers at an airport gate, edged forward, jostling for an advantage that evaporated as soon as they were on the other side. As one corral left, long necks ticking forward like metronomes, the camels in other corrals groaned the loader, envious, worried that they would be left behind. The young men in charge would beat them back with sticks so they’d come out of their gates in order and not all at once. The moaned together like a colony of seals.

What I mean is that The Names of Things is not a simple vicarious travel novel, in either presentation or effect.

After all, the narrator may be in the African desert. However, he had been there before. He is an anthropologist and had come to study the nomads of the area, forcing his wife to accompany him. After they returned home, his wife died of an unnamed illness. The narrator’s grief is complicated when he discovers that one of their nomad friends also died of the same illness, making him wonder if his wife had an affair:

On the next page was a portrait of Abudo, his friend and informant.

He was not jealous by nature, but jealousy is a feeling of want, and at the moment he was empty. He wanted her, wanted her more than he had wanted her when she was alive. Of course he did: wanting is never as acute as wanting what one does not have. She was dead. He had lost himself.

Now this.

Here was his wife, his partner, his best friend, drawing pictures of herself with another man.

* * *

Abudo’s death untethered him. If he was adrift before, he was now without sight of land. What most disturbed him, what filled his head with whirling, deafening voices and drained his heart of ballast, was to learn that Abudo died of the same scourge that killed his wife. That fact set in motion a confusion of feeling he wasn’t able to shrug off.

He then returns to Africa and the nomads.

However, the narrator is not really investigating whether or not his wife was unfaithful. In truth, he never even seems to really ask anyone. Instead, he is doing something different:

He returned to campus the following week but was more elsewhere than ever, though elsewhere now had location. The idea had come to him. He would go back, as soon as the semester was over, to visit Abudo’s family, to travel among people called Dasse whom he and his wife had known together, about whose rituals of life and death he had written two books and numerous articles, but mainly to see the place again where they had discovered and lost each other.

Wood weaves a wonderful tale here. Though the narrator’s travels in Africa are depicted marvelously, the narrator’s journey is more internal than external. He wanders through who his wife really was, who he and his wife were to each other, their competing views on life and how it is to be lived, and numerous other things. The narrator may travel the physical world extensively, but such distance is small compared to the internal distances he travels.

In the end, satisfactorily Wood presents more questions than answers. He presents more in the journey, as only this particular narrator can perform it, than in any particular factual accuracy or resolution. The result is beautiful and haunting. I highly recommend reading this book.

The Last Novelist: On David Markson's "Notecard Quartet"

I am considering abandoning this review of David Markson’s “Notecard Quartet.”

It’s rare that I get to review a book I would much rather just hand you, rarer still I’d have to hand it off while admitting, I have no idea why this works, it should fall apart, but it’s beautiful. As a writer, I need to understand how fiction is made, so I can steal from it. And as a critic, I need to intellectualize and make myself feel superior to the text, especially a text I admire, by being able to say, I see what you did there. So when a book comes along — in this case, four of them — that seems to’ve invented its own reason to exist, its own set of rules, and that seems so simply conceived and executed you wonder why no one has done it before, even as you realize that the work is inimitable, the result is a kind of ecstasy, a simultaneous lifting of spirit and sublimation of the skeptical mind that would tell you, This shouldn’t succeed, and of course you can’t explain ecstasy to anyone who hasn’t felt it for themselves without looking like a madman from the mountaintop.

Nevertheless, that’s where we are with Markson’s Reader’s Block,  This Is Not a Novel, Vanishing Point and The Last Novel — a quartet arranged as a series of seemingly disconnected facts, anecdotes, and minutiae on famous artists’ lives, their financial troubles, their affairs and illegitimate children. Biographical notes, unattributed quotations, literary allusions. Philosophy, history, metaphysics. Stays in debtor’s prisons, hospitals, madhouses.

And artists’ deaths. Let’s not forget that. Lots and lots of artists’ deaths.

These facts or vignettes, culled from the pages of Markson’s extensive personal library — in notes and checkmarks, scribbled questions and underlined quotations, talkback — he would copy onto index cards which he kept in shoebox tops, and when he’d filled a certain number of these, he had a new manuscript.

And why do I say arranged, several lines up, instead of structured?

Dinnerplates are arranged.  Wooden blocks are arranged.  Novels are structured.

Are these not novels?

Of course they are, though I’m not certain I can tell you why.

Emily Dickinson’s refusal to sit for a photographer.

Kant almost certainly died a virgin.

Sure I posed.  I was hungry.

William Faulkner once allowed himself to be interviewed on radio during a University of Virginia football game.

And was introduced as the winner of the Mobil Prize.

Tennessee Williams choked to death on the plastic cap of a nasal spray.

The above excerpts, just to illustrate, have been pulled from not one but all four of the books, and put together via good old cut and paste. Or, not “good old” cut and paste, which would imply scissors and glue, which is how Markson would have managed — working on a typewriter up to his death in the untypewriterly year 2010, copying vignettes onto index cards longhand, marginalia from the actual margins of actual books, rather than a simple search of the Google. Upon Markson’s death this personal library, half-marked with annotations toward a fifth notecard novel, was donated to his beloved Strand bookstore, a purveyor of new and used books.

Which promptly put the books out on the shelves, among the other used books, and sold them off, one slashed coverprice at a time. [1]

How Marksonian.

Salvador Dali’s perception of Jackson Pollock. Fish soup.

Roland Barthes died after being hit by a laundry truck.

Nobody comes. Nobody calls.

My music is best understood by children and animals.

Said Stravinsky.

Thomas Mann’s definition of a writer.  Someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

The likelihood that Anne Hathaway could not read.

How these books take on a form and subject which don’t automatically scream novel at all, prompting Reviewer to consider such questionably non-specific terms as novelness — i.e., “the essential novelness of these books” — which I admit makes my eyes roll back in my head and I’m the one who typed it. Fiction or non-fiction? Personal essay? Lyric essay? No characters, no plot, yet clearly novels, because they evoke that feeling within me. Only, made up of non-fiction . . . and I don’t mean in the sense of the “non-fiction novel,” a term hardly anyone uses anymore, and which I suspect was invented just so Norman Mailer could refer to himself in the third person.

Prepared to re-abandon this review upon typing novelness.

Adding novelness to my laptop dictionary with shame.

How Markson’s life and work seem inseparable here, a fallacy of some sort, one would think, with his narrator someone the reader associates with the never-named character of David Markson, though the narrator is never called that, and is actually referred to differently in each book — in Reader’s Block, Reader; in This Is Not a Novel, Writer; in Vanishing Point, Author; The Last Novel, Novelist. But it is undeniably narrator-as-Markson, or the reverse, even in the narrator’s attempt to find a form that would give us the very book we hold in our hands, and which places the narrator’s artistic trials within the context of those famous artists’ struggles which make up the text. Almost as if the whole of art were a single continuous unbroken act, the drive toward creation, of finding a new way to say it, passed on from previous generations back to the beginning of art, passed on to us, and then by us to the next . . . and, at a precise moment within the continuum, aware of it and taking a long look around, Markson’s quartet. But these books also suggest and exemplify how art need not be bound within tradition to be part of it, needs no proscribed form or approval, no recognition or monetary award (the anecdotes bear this out faithfully, bleakly) nor any more justification to exist than the simple fact that it exists.

As in:

Writer is sick unto death of making up stories.

A lament of Schopenhauer’s:

Over how frequently the mere purchase of a book is mistaken for the appropriation of its contents.

A novel with no intimation of story whatsoever, Writer would like to conceive.

Raymond Chandler lived with his mother until her death when he was thirty-five. And then almost immediately married a woman seventeen years older than he was.

Plotless. Characterless.

This is even an epic poem, if Writer says so.

Requiring no one’s corroboration.

What is a novel, anyway?

What makes Markson’s “Notecard Quartet” remarkable as a work of experimental fiction is not that it points to novelistic conventions in order to “free” the novel of them, the approach of countless well-intentioned and ultimately antiseptic literary exercises. There is no linear (or nonlinear) sequence of events to exploit with a wink-nudge because there is no novelistic time employed at all, no events that would require such sequencing. The novels don’t merely attempt to reveal their own construction while being constructed, pointing to the trap doors or mirrors or invisible wires that make the trick work, never mind that looking at invisible wires is about as thrilling as looking at an invisible naked person.

Instead Markson frees the novel of its conventions by freeing the novel of its conventions. And the voila of the trick is in the revelation that a novel is less about what it’s made up of than about its particular effect upon a reader (which the conventions only exist, really, to produce) — the rise and fall of emotion, the continual rise, release, and re-rise of tension, moments sped up or sped past and moments where the reader stops to consider the relationship of what she’s just read to her own experience. These are novels in no easily definable sense except that they’re experienced as if they are, they linger in your imagination as if they are, and they reveal a deep resonance, as all good novels do, between the lives explored on the page and our own.

*

[1]  The wonderful website Reading Markson Reading — which popularized the term “Notecard Quartet,” sparing us the alien-sounding tetralogy — has set itself a mission of finding, scanning, and sharing annotated pages from Markson’s sold-off book collection, and offering insightful commentary along the way. Well worth your time.

Searching For Burlee: A Review of Burlee Vang's The Dead I Know

I should tell you, I know Burlee Vang. However, it’s been a long time since we’ve spoken or even been within a glance. So I should say, I knew Burlee Vang, because of that slight technicality and because it feels okay to talk about him in the past — that’s how we talk about people who are important.

I should also tell you that I’m not writing this recommendation because I knew him. Actually, here I write about a Burlee Vang that I didn’t even know — Burlee Vang the poet. I never met this part of him. For half a year, we were in the same fiction workshop. I caught glimpses of his poetry in his prose, but it wasn’t until this, The Dead I Know: Incantation for Rebirth, that I held poems of his.

The Burlee Vang that I did know and I didn’t talk much. I didn’t know him the way most people can say of their friends. Didn’t know where he lived. Didn’t have his phone number. Didn’t know his wife. Didn’t know the things that upset him (I never even saw him upset). But I did know his favorite writers and that we liked the same ones — their pains and their ability to love despite it, perhaps because of it — and that was enough to begin a friendship, the kind that had small and few conversations, like poems actually, that briefly say a lot.

He was a serious writer, more than anyone I knew, so after our short conversations I imagined him running to the house I didn’t know, and writing with the things I did know — a spiral notebook that he folded like a newspaper under an arm, and a Bic. Still, I wondered if I had been right. Had he gone into a room to write all day? Had he committed every minute of his day to writing? Was he having the same problems that I was experiencing — loneliness, frustration? Those were things I always wondered, and still do, so I read this book of poems like answers. As if this Burlee, the poet, was telling me about the other.

In his poem, “Eating Without the Poet,” I found a possible answer to my previous questions. The wife of a poet calls her husband to dinner, pleading with him to join his family. “Again, husband: how many hours have you/ spent with your poems? Come sit beside us now./ Look, the sun is bleeding outside our kitchen. . . .” The husband responds, “Still too much beauty to speak of . . .” And she replies, “Do you know that letting go is a kind of beauty?”

But I still don’t know. Was he the poet missing from the table? Was he searching for peace through his writing? Did he refuse to eat in an unsettled state? Why did he write? In his ars poetica, I hear him say, “Maybe because I’m dying,” and “Perhaps I desire too much/ the things I’ll never have/ Or the things I’ve lost.”

I had these questions for Burlee because the prose of his that I read during our workshop gave me the feeling that we had the same blues — diaspora blues. Mine, the Mexican-American blues. His, the Hmong-American blues. Now I know that I probably didn’t see much of him because he was putting this book together — writing his blues into songs. In these poems, Burlee Vang welcomes us into a pain he has kept honest while crafting for us to enter and walk away with truth and history without suffering its consequences (the way the people in his poems have). We will not know what it feels like to be a Hmong man living in hiding, shot when searching for food, and then begging to be carried by the living things in the river where he lays half-dead. We won’t know what it’s like for a Hmong woman and her son to leave a war-torn country, only to enter a new kind of battle and struggle in the U.S. We won’t know what it is like to be a poet writing about an ongoing war while his brother dies in that war. But we do exit hurting differently — a pain that comes with understanding a truth, a secret, kept away from us as is the story of the Hmong.

The last time I saw Burlee was in our English department’s hallway. We knew it would likely be the last time we saw each other, so we stopped to exchange our final words. I can’t tell you what we said to each other. I’ve tried to remember but can only recall some words. I can tell you that after reading this book, I now put lines of his poems into the missing dialogue of that memory. When I enter that last conversation in my mind, I tell him of my sadness, how I feel like I die as I see my aging parents fade with their work, and he says, “spread your shadow as if in flight.” When I tell him about my writing and the sacrifices I’m making make for it, he understands, and says, “I’ve told the dead to let me sleep—/ they can talk forever.”

This is a book for everyone searching for answers. The answers are here.

Something About Being True to Yourself: An Interview with Chloe Caldwell

Here’s a moment that hit me early, from the end of an essay called “On Snooping”:

“I can accept that all I’ve ever wanted is not very special — all I’ve ever wanted, like most people, is proof of love.”

Chloe Caldwell’s debut, Legs Get Led Astray, is exactly that — a proof of love. Which is what writing ought to be. Be it love of the subject, love of the form, or just plain loving language, the best writing (and by that I mean what you, dear reader, consider “the best”) captivates us because it speaks some kind of truth directly to us. Great writing wants us to believe in it, to love it. I mean love here in the mutual sense. I mean love in the two-way-street sense. The writing we love most, we love because it loved us first.

Caldwell’s essays in LGLA take us around the world as it is in your early twenties. Everything is possible. Everything is art. Everything is as beautiful as it will ever be, or at least it will be when we’re done with it. Friends are family and family is unconditional love. You can become homeless when your apartment building collapses and wake up next to a bottle of gin in what may or may not be the Strand Bookstore. Jobs are not yet careers and careers are for your thirties. Work is the Strand Bookstore. Home is the Strand Bookstore. A friend is anyone with a yellow Strand bag in his or her kitchen. There are housewarming parties with buckets of black paint to make the walls more interesting. There are babysitting jobs with naked little boys as obsessed with their penises as their full-grown counterparts. There is music, so much music. And there is love, love, and more love.

If you couldn’t tell, I loved this book. And I was grateful to get in touch with Chloe over the last couple weeks to ask her some questions about it.

* * *

Joseph Riippi: I’m interested in the role music plays in these essays. Many of the people you’ve loved in your life you associate with different songs — be it your mother and Rufus Wainwright’s “The Art Teacher,” the score of A Chorus Line as a child, or a past boyfriend and Bon Iver’s “Skinny Love.” What is it about music that works to plot point memory so well?

Chloe Caldwell: Music is a very strong trigger for memories because there’s an emotional response to senses. The sense of hearing (music) is much more of a layered and luscious sensation. Also — I grew up in a musical household and now I live above and work at, a music store. And when I first moved to New York, I lived with my brother who is a musician and we’d have lots of conversations, meditating on music, went to tons of shows, stuff like that. I guess it’s just a huge part of my life, so it comes through in my essays, like all of the other reoccurring threads.

JR: You write that most of the people you met upon first arriving in New York City worked at (or lived with people who worked at) the Strand Bookstore, and in Williamsburg you and your brother left a typewriter in the bathroom with “Please continue the story” written in sharpie above it. For all the references to specific songs in specific places in these essays, there are far fewer references to specific books or poems. How is writing’s role in memory different than music’s? How do they complement (or contradict) each other in your life?

CC: I did this subconsciously. I don’t craft my essays thinking about this kind of thing. I stick with what naturally comes out. But maybe music sets the tone more. Books more tell what kind of person you are.

A good example is from the essay, “My Mother Wanted To Be Betty Boop.” I open the essay with “My Mother wanted to be a dancer. In the living room when I was a kid we danced to “Stop In The Name Of Love. . . .” And later in the piece I say, “My mother’s books next to the toilet in the downstairs bathroom: Uncertainty. Anger. When Things Fall Apart.”

Which of these details is more affective? I guess that depends on the reader. Some people can hear the song “Stop In The Name Of Love” more easily than visualize the cover of When Things Fall Apart, and vice versa.

Also, books are maybe more internal and personal to you. Music is more universal or communal. Like, you’re at a party and a song is playing and you get excited. Someone at the same party might be reading a cool poem out loud but that just doesn’t happen as much. Maybe there’s this to consider as well: By the time a person turns 22 (ish), they’ve probably heard thousands of songs. But how many books have they read? It depends. Maybe 10. Maybe 100. But still, that’s like 10,000 songs verses 100 books. I’m just thinking out loud here.

JR: One of my favorite moments in the book is in “That Was Called Love,” a kind of love letter to New York City from Seattle, when you write: “Last night I described New York to a rock climber in Seattle. ‘It sounds like, New York is for you, what the mountains are for me.’” Since then you’ve moved back to New York (but now just outside the city). Have you found for yourself a permanent mountain?

CC: No. I think “mountains” or “homes” are specific to what you need at that time in your life. For a long time, I truly did think you could count on a place to make you happy. Like, when I moved to New York City, I was young and so affected by it that I thought it was alive. Now I see that just like people — there is not one person or place that you can get everything you want from. It’s all about compromise. If I could mix my mother’s backyard, Brooklyn, and Portland together, that would be a pretty sweet home. When I left the city to move to Washington, I thought that Seattle would be as new and exciting. But it was far from it and for a while, that was hard for me to cope with and accept. It’s like this quote by Fran Lebowitz: “When you leave New York, you are astonished at how clean the rest of the world is. Clean is not enough.”

If you’re asking me what I’ve learned now about finding a “home” within the world, then I would say you have to find it within yourself. This is going to sound new age-ish but in yoga, they say to treat your body as a temple, not a dump. It’s kind of like that. If you keep moving cities or trying different drugs or men to feel safe, it will never happen. You have to look inwards and love yourself. Then you can be (pretty) comfortable anywhere, I think.

JR: I notice you left out Berlin in your answer to that last question, when you say you’d like to combine Brooklyn, Portland, and your mother’s backyard to make a home. You write in “Berlin: Strange Like the Music of the Doors,” that “every day in Berlin is an existential crisis” and you couldn’t wait to get back to “Metrocard land.” However, when I began reading the essay and found you’d gone to Berlin, it made sense: I was struck by the parallel of your falling-apart home at 156 India Street, where “the doorknob was hanging by a thread” and “‘the back wall of your building began to crumble,” with Berlin, a city that is itself constantly in a state of not only rebuilding, but finding a new identity. Your essay is beautiful in describing the “existential crisis” bit of your time there, (the regressing clock, etc) but at the same time I can’t help but wonder what deeper difference drove you away from the city. Was it just the wrong place at the wrong time, or something more? (I should disclose that it’s one of my favorite European cities, so I’m quite curious).

CC: Well, you just reminded me that I left a large component of why I was unhappy in Berlin, out of that essay. The original plan was that I was going to Berlin to visit my brother for five nights. But I never took my flight home; I decided to stay for a few months. That threw everything off. I was there, in Berlin with one pair of jeans, two shirts, one bra, one notebook, no job and no apartment. I totally forgot to mention that in my essay, huh? Whoops! Isn’t non-fiction a trip? So since I had no real reason or desire to be in Berlin, it was completely jarring. I was totally aimless and depressed. I’d also had my heart broken right before I left, so that was more fuel to stay in Berlin, slash, another contributing factor to why I was so upset there.

The thing about Berlin is that it’s amazing. That summer was incredible — we could drink outside, there were playgrounds for adults, the sun never went down, and I met a melting pot of interesting people doing creative things. But yes, it was bad timing and bad decision making on my part. I’d love to try it again at some point.

JR: Also in the Berlin essay is a moment when you ask your brother where he’d like his ashes scattered after he dies. He answers, “I don’t know. I don’t care. But wherever you do it, plant tomatoes. Then I could live inside tomatoes. That would be cool.” I love this moment so much. There is so much siblingness in it, tenderness, emotion. For a last question, then, I have to ask you to top your brother: Where would you like your ashes scattered? 

CC: I love that moment, too. Thank you. I would want my ashes scattered in the backyard of the house I grew up in, where my mother still lives, in the woods, near the dilapidated tree house and swings. It’s where I feel most at home, most like myself.

Submission Is the Only Window: On Amy King's I Want To Make You Safe

Amy King’s I Want To Make You Safe is densely packed with “the songs of undiscovered tribes” extant by way of versions of an urban feminist tonguing. Led by a brand of narrative that is not traditional at all, these poems are “an eye to cancel [a] planet’s core out.”

In this book I experienced pleasant dislocations. A slow suddenness wherein what had previously been my own light was replaced (not squelched or snuffed out but strategically altered).  This happened by way of the quality of the language (rich with shock and jolt regarding sound: (“this immersion has made me a model / for your captivity digest, a cavity” and “she used to dive the veins / for other steeds closer to the bone” and “milk is a mythical moth” and “scream on fire, sirened).

The sound in these poems interacted with their content (“submission is the only window” and “the grief of winter without seed” and “I cry/ to remember what I saw” and “the destiny you choose is the one you live through” and “to torment your undone sin”) in ways that created in me a very specific sense of non-ease. Non-ease was existent in me because — how am I to integrate this manifold confession? There are so many inclusions (“are we still talking to the same god”) that I would argue are certainly necessary) and so many diversions in these poems (“I don’t want to hide my wine” [. . .] “the wine from which we drink free will” [. . .] “please reattach the orifice if / I’m ever to hold your love”). Gorgeous diversions to fill the space as I try to reach to meet this work and then to divulge.

How best to divulge from something so gorgeously divergent?

This sense of non-ease that I describe above made me vulnerable, which made me able to be swept up and carried off by King’s own core declarative (“I want to make you safe”). I am saying that it is precisely the destabilizations that occurred in this book, that made me vulnerable enough to need to be made safe again — and I let this happen because “to give yourself always keeps / yourself still.”

In this way there is deep alchemy! Alchemy by agency.

Next I have to admit a pleasant exhaustion in reading these poems. This does not surprise me post contact with King’s other books: Slaves to Do These Things, Antidotes for an Alibi, I’m The Man Who Loves You (and other chapbooks). In King’s work I generally find myself being consumed by a vast and incremental longing that is rooted in examinations that are current, and I find that that longing presents itself in such beautiful curves of language (“follow stigmata for dust” [. . .]“we have always been the first fruit and the first to rot”).

Stasis is impossible in King’s I Want To Make You Safe. In this book there were so many figures (Natalie Portman, Oedipus, Tim Modotti, God/s, Roman Jakobson, Mahler, Popeye, Ossian) and pledges (David Wojnarowicz) and presences and pronouns. In fact, there felt to me like an extreme importance of pronouns as bridges throughout the poems (“you think I am she. She is you and everyone who adjusts too well” [. . .]“here am I / is he” [. . .] “how much we want we”). Yes, truly, a system of wes conducted my read of this juicy and taxing book!

The poems also rubbed me as feminist via their obsessions with women and women speaking and the vulnerabilities of gender positions and what is taken during the performance of those (“I miss my DNA” [. . .] “I practice identity” [. . .] “I am that love you light yourself with / and my gender is powerless in this”). But regarding this aspect I saw King’s poems’ interests in the large spectrum of woman, not only (though certainly not excluding) in fringe communities where women fuck women. I sense these poems have obsession with “a branch [that takes] root/ and gulp[s] the sleeve of the planet in signature orgasm / Eve.”

The poems in I Want To Make You Safe felt to me like anything could exist in them, and though that is true they did not feel like poems of surplus or excess or even secretion. They felt very whittled and scripted by way of the correlation that I have mentioned throughout this review — the precise correlation between sound and content. I almost hear some spoken word in these poems and this makes a longing in me to hear them performed. I wonder if King has ever considered making a CD of this inherent amass and awash?