We Are All Blocking Doors for You Modern-Day Illusionists: A Review of Jordan Stempleman's No, Not Today

With his new collection, No, Not Today, fresh from Magic Helicopter Press, a dateless diary of days both elided and repeated, Jordan Stempleman has offered proof that he is magical.

I experienced a significant portion of these poems for the first time while sitting at the kitchen table eating cereal in my parents’ house during the small hours of the morning. The latter half, with pita at midday. Each poem rang out to me loud and clear, conversational and tangy.

Personally, I’m more disposed to poems that feel like they’re addressed to someone. I’m the type of person who spends a lot of time alone, so when a poem makes me want to shout it out to someone, it’s always a good sign. These poems caught me up, clicked me into orator mode, drove me to read them aloud to the cat, the turtle (who ate the cat, slowly), to my younger brother.

But the magic, the magic. Stempleman’s poems strive to get off the page and into your life. Exhortative, colloquial little things, they want to get up and walk around your living room. Thursday wants to sleep in your son’s bed. Saturday asks if you’ve got any spare condoms, while Wednesday raids your medicine cabinet and hijacks your Ritalin.

But who are they talking to, besides us? For me, these poems seem like they’re addressed to a close friend or lover. Or, if we take them upon ourselves, maybe someone with whom you’ve already gone too far, to the point where they’ve ceased being a lover; someone who you’ve fucked, and then backpedaled. Someone who’s been intimate, like you know a little more than you’ll let on, and to whom you feel all right offering advice. Vicariousness is a strangely powerful thing. We could all be narrators.

On an early Friday, in the once-couple of p. 12, the narrator broods:

Perennial, bad romanticism.
Well, it depends
on who calls who babe.
You wrapped the robot all wrong.
I’m starting to get infected again.

It’s trouble in the second person, wounded domesticity, something interior that’s fallen apart. The next day, they’re in need of a pharmacy. Who’s open late on a Saturday?

This narrator is one who interrupts herself frequently — interjections, for emphasis, to spur the moment, “wait a moment,” “who’s kidding,” “I’ll say it again” — a person trying to impart this wisdom on the reader, but who’s having an extraordinarily difficult time focusing on what he’s saying.

I think I’ve narrowed down where the magic comes from. It’s all about the slippage, the shifts where the normal suddenly transposes with something else, something strange or fantastic or simply unexpected. The interjections foster the shifts, they say, “Hey, I’m talking to you, now let me take you away.”

To elucidate, I’d like to share the first part of a Tuesday with you, from p. 49:

Let alone the beach with its history
of never going too far out, suggests
what attracts us to this land of so much for ordering in
sandwiches for the receptions of our lives, is, on the one hand,
we are never idle because we can lie our way back,

If we peer in really close at this, we might find that it’s constructed of phrases that aren’t content to stay by themselves, little expressions that butt up against one another — a thought comes along and takes the preceding one over, like the Calvin clones that can’t get a word in edgewise because they’re all interrupting themselves. But each subsequent piece doesn’t just take over, it builds off of those around it, weaving them together to form rafts of words and phrases that float out into space.

This, the moment you realize the lazy waves are taking you, the moment you start lying — this is the slippage I’m talking about, the moments of pure magic: in others, it’s the moment the split halves of the head become an instrument, the insects become human-sized, the city becomes a girl, the typing hands become a bird with a stone tied to its leg, when the cat puts on the sweatpants. When you realize the second person is you.

From another Sunday, another favorite, a little piece of magic from p. 64:

Perhaps it’s difficult to understand we’re probably safe
before anything happens. As it is written, even the earliest biplanes
fell through the air, a sky unwanting to be fixed.

For the sky that rejected those planes, that pushed them downwards and into the ocean, the sky that was content to hang uninterrupted over our heads, keeping us safe just by virtue of being there — the poems in No, Not Today are also addressed to us, for me, and for you.

A Diagram of Longing & Rooted Energies: On j/j/ hastain's Prurient Anarchic Omnibus

There is a bruise pressed against my tongue, big enough to make a sound like a voiceover set against a silent film. j/j Hastain’s poetic and visual journey, prurient anarchic omnibus, is that moving image. Imagine body as a spool of film, projecting portraits  that can be spoken or felt — sometimes both or just one or combined — with various senses like taste and aroma.

A bruise is defined as two types of injury: damage to feelings of self and areas of discolored skin from burst blood vessels.

I am bruised. I am gathering up each emotion like seeds scattered over torn up soil and massaging each shape of feeling I have from these words.

j/j writes:

this is the body/learning what is beyond itself     through itself

I enter this book as a poet, who not only writes along these lines of body and skin cell’s memories, but also as a human who is often in need of a refitting inside this body. j/j creates a narrative I can read in various orders and directions, allowing for a journey that is experiential, emotive, and never the same.

prurient anarchic omnibus is an x-ray, a diagram of longing and rooted energies.

A new year has just begun.

Resolutions are gathering, cracking, solidifying.

I hunch my fleshy skeleton over my desk and write. I begin this day negotiating time and coffee-scented gasps.

The air outside is too cold to declare any type of fashion sense; yet, right before exiting cluttered bedroom with blue bag full of dirty laundry, I catch my reflection; pressed down and wrinkled, unencumbered by gender distinction. Then I drop my bag, open up j/j’s book as though it is a magic 8-ball from childhood, where weighty questions are answered with a swift shake and reveal. I flip to page 62:                                   

I need to be bruised by this

to have my gender        fractured

into more musical

than binary

I decide my laundry can wait, because suddenly this book is less about bound words with ISBN and more of a declarative unpunctuated voyage that does not insist upon clean clothes or brushed hair. I am rooted. I am under siege, commanding my insides to get involved. To respond.

The space in which j/j writes from is like a window without the frame attached . . . it is magnified musculature and intuitions memorizing its unhinged construction. j/j’s images offer an illustrative shape to each word, sound, and peculiar image that not only bruises our own expectations of language, but redefines the discourse of lustful mayhem cocooned inside one’s gender-full, constantly shifting, retranslating mind.

I Thought I Felt Myself Crack: On Susan Tepper's From the Umberplatzen

Tepper’s 47 short shorts and/or prose poems (From the Umberplatzen: A Love Story) each one page or less, offer a linear narrative about an ambivalent, two-year relationship. In each section there is a dialogue between the woman narrator, Kitty Kat, who is from America and married, and “M,” her German lover in an unnamed German city with a park and a species of deciduous tree she calls “umberplatzen (“Of course that is not the true name of the tree. I can’t ever remember the true name”).

She has moved to Germany to escape her ex in America, though they are still married.  Her means of support are mysterious.  As she reveals, almost as an aside in the 47thsection, M. used to teach physics at the University and travel a lot.  When they first met, presumably in the park, she’d joked about biological warfare chemicals affecting his brain, and he’d picked up on the joke. “They say it’s all chemical,” writes Kitty Kat, remembering. “His chemicals invading mine. Some sort of cross pollination.” The park too “had a kind of force field that drew us together.” They have separate apartments. Neither have children. He is divorced from a woman in France. We learn that he once studied medicine. Also that he’d once been a champion parachutist, but hates flying. He is virile and sexy, but above all he is witty, as is she. Both appear to be Catholic.

Nearly every section is structured on some topic of their disagreement: the trees, favorite movies, favorite paintings, hair styles, bird song, kites, shoes. They start off happily, then either she or he suggests an idea or a preference, the other disagrees, apparent misunderstanding or offense sets in, and they part. Then M. makes amends by sending some token or message across town, which arrives next day, and disarms or further perplexes Kitty Kat. Distance and intimacy are their necessary dialectic.

Kitty Kat can’t give up her past (her husband, her country), but revels in M. as her German holiday. For M. Germany is home and he wants Kitty Kat to share it with him permanently. Every now and then, despite their verbal parrying (much like the couples’ parrying in Hemingway’s “Cat in the Rain” or “Hills Like White Elephants”), there are lines of crisis.  “We stood there facing off. A kind of crossroads”; “You can’t boss me”; “You want a baby by yourself”; “I’m not ready for a ring.” In terms of story, as seasons turn, and as attempts to amuse each other wear thin, there is no big argument or break up scene, no final, bittersweet “wisdom.” But we know from the opening section that Kitty Kat has returned to her ex, who also sent messages and tokens across the time and distance (“My ex had sent me . . . three jars of peanut butter . . . He no longer hated me”), and that the 46 sections that follow, while wonderfully immediate, are fulfilling her promise to M. that “I will remember everything.”

Tepper’s ear is pitch perfect. None of the dialogue is attributed and put between quote marks in the usual way, but the reader is rarely confused about who is speaking. Her packed segments in dramatizing two witty, bright, and sexy individuals even seem to suggest a screenplay (Neil Simon meets Truffaut or perhaps Bertolucci). All the dialogue is there, as in this passage:

It’s my time. I don’t mind he said. I do. Women. And he shook a finger at me. Your body is my body. OK then I’ll buy your body. When my flat gets sold. M had laughed. To the coldest bidder he said. OK We’ll get beer. We’ll get beer and sausage. We’ll dance out the day into the night. He hugged me so hard then. I thought I felt myself crack.

This is a classic, unsentimental love story about ambivalence; it’s often comic; both characters are imaginative. There are moments of whimsy, astonishment, anger, and beauty.

Tepper asks the reader to work, and the work pays off.

The City as Humanity’s Conception of Nature: David Rhodes's The Last Fair Deal Going Down

David Rhodes opens his first novel, The Last Fair Deal Going Down, by having its protagonist, Reuben Sledge, state that the book is a “chronicle of myself hidden in the grayness of a story of the people and the city itself.” The city in question is Des Moines, Iowa, and its people are as murderous, amorous, and plain as the citizens of any other. These traits are in no small part due to Reuben’s family moving to Des Moines — the Sledges are predisposed toward talents both utilitarian and chaotic. One brother is an incredible mechanic, another a Midwestern Don Juan.

I’m intrigued by the idea of cities, and have been ever since I was brave enough to live in one. A child of small-town Ohio, I’m more aware and used to nature than people. Living in a warren of them I got the feeling that a city is perhaps one of the most natural expressions of humanity we can create. They are created environments, organisms. Cities have spirits — the right ones do, anyway. Rhodes’ depiction of Des Moines is as a complex, preternatural city. There is a key idea here I’ll get to shortly.

I picked up David Rhodes’ The Last Fair Deal Going Down while on an ill-conceived excursion to San Francisco. I found the book at City Lights, was intrigued by the title — one of my favorite songs by Robert Johnson—and dug the Milkweed cover, which is a clear picture of heavy, dark mammatus, possibly over Iowa, but every bit as likely to be Nebraska. The back cover was a little vague, suggesting a very urban story, only slightly indicative of the supernatural. I quickly found the back cover to be, to put it mildly, inaccurate. Reuben’s opening statement is a much better précis. It’s an autobiography, a family history, a mystery, at times dry and others effulgent. There are cannibals. There’s a phantasmic horse. An involved diary of a stalker. Haunting the pages more than anything, though, is the “city within a city” which exists below Des Moines proper. It’s this city which exemplifies my feelings about the nature of cities, the how and why we build them.

Rhodes’ “lower city” comes as a complete surprise. The back cover does not do the idea of it justice. The reader quickly finds it is not metaphorical but literal, supernatural. It is a deep hole in the ground, streets leading into it as though it were only a warp in the cities fabric — a place of higher gravity. Covered in fog, no one has ever truly seen the city, and the people who enter it never return. Things are lost in the lower city. People, cars. The Sledges live with the hole beginning in their backyard and every so often they hear the sound of something opening in the fog. Discovering the city is part of the point of the book, and so I’ll only say a little more. What does it say about the people who built the place that it was necessary, that its pieces and parts were needed for its function? Who would build such a place? Cities are something like organisms, and that which does not make a city stronger is soon dissolved, eaten, and replaced. This lower city seems to be an organ designed to lure and contain the souls of the lost. Not to wax too poorly poetic about it.

The Last Fair Deal Going Down seems to contain as much of everything as Rhodes could fit. How he makes it work is a mystery to me — and perhaps he doesn’t. Perhaps I was just charmed. But the book is charming, very much so. This was Rhodes’ first novel, and for that you may find the spine of the book buckles, that whole sections could and should be cut. I loved every ludicrous moment. Every turn was unexpected, and the book itself seemed to be evolving as I read it, becoming what it needed to be — a story somehow independent of the need for a reader, simply needing to be told. And there’s a reason for that. I found the book to be a different beast from what I had bought according to the cover, and again different from what I had read in the beginning, and on and on until I reached the end, when the book took on a final shape, or perhaps its true shape was revealed.

Thinking back on it Rhodes had, for me, captured precisely what I look for in a city and in a book; a spirit. He created for Des Moines a spirit that runs through the pages, that captures everything, the life and death of its people, and that in a way understands its own creation, is reflexive. In my head, as twisted and tangled as the book itself is, I see it — the book, somehow — complementing the city in the same way the lower city does. These three things are inextricably linked, each of them necessary to the next, each horrible and beautiful, and both of those things because they were made by us, by Rhodes, by people. The city as humanity’s conception of nature.

A Beautiful, Off-Kilter Viewpoint

“The horizon is a miasma of dream. Ghosts float through its skin and beckon me with snake-like arms. Wipe my eyes.”

There are few imaginations like Craig Wallwork’s. There’s a magic in his eyes, a beautiful off-kilter viewpoint that causes the world to turn in different directions, highlighting the bizarre and the caustic and the grotesque and the beautiful. And he’s certainly not afraid or ashamed to make the reader cringe at every sentence, making us oddly aware of our sphincters.

“‘Protect me,’ said the Minotaur.”

The stories in Quintessence of Dust create a world where Minotaur exist, drink too much, get in fights, and are afraid of the dark. But, more than that, the story “Men of Blood” is a profound meditation on friendship and the way that people grow together and then grow apart. It’s the kind of story where a man punching a Minotaur in the face can make you cry rather than be an act of heroism or a joke. He creates worlds where you can deliver a baby, kill a demon with an umbrella, and have your first kiss while hundreds of demons fly through the air, eating people just outside the bus you’re trapped in.

And though many of these stories push the boundary of possible and impossible, blurring reality’s lines, there are stories like “Railway Architecture,” a beautiful story about desire and commitment and the lengths one goes to for love.

“Three years after getting married, Peter Rankling fell in love with his wife, and about the same time, she fell out of love with him.”

“Anal Twine” is a story that only Craig Wallwork could have written, and, if you can’t guess by the title, it’ll make you cringe, but it’ll also hit you in places deeper than your rectum, somewhere near the heart as it struggles with questions of identity and memory and lust. And then there’s “The Whore that Broke the Camel’s Back,” a story that manages to be beautiful, satirical, and affecting despite its talking camel, bestiality, and extreme body modification. Or ‘Skin,’ where love involves literally climbing inside of the girl you love.

“Her heartbeat was the only noise, a dull rhythmic thud. I crawled into a ball and rested against the walls of flesh, pushed my head into my chest and brought my knees up. It’s the way sanctuary must be for the fallen. It’s the way life is before it starts.”

I’ve read a lot of short story collections in the last year and realised how difficult they are, not only to write, but to arrange. I was spoiled, all the previous collections I had encountered being by people like Borges or Nabokov or O’Conner, so it came as a surprise that some collections, even ones by writers I enjoy, simply don’t work and can feel like running waist deep in molasses, not because the stories are bad, individually or collectively, but the homogeneous nature of some writers can make collections more trial than enjoyment.

Quintessence of Dust manages to avoid this, singing and dancing, breaking hearts while its laughter rings through the halls. These stories are very much about love, lust, desire, and the difference between those words. They’re about fatherhood and marriage, about growing up and growing old: they’re about life. If Etgar Keret had grown up in northern England instead of Israel, he might’ve turned out to be Craig Wallwork, but Wallwork, I think, somehow hits harder and more often, both with humor and insight. I’ve known Craig for a few years, admired his work longer, and his début collection is somehow more than I expected it to be. I’m not sure if I’ve ever read a short story collection in one sitting before, but Quintessence of Dust never left my hands. And that, I think, is maybe the most impressive part of this collection, that all the stories work and keep the reader wanting more, needing more.

“Fifteen years later and Milton Ball can still feel the lump on his head, and every time he does, he is reminded of how ugly he is, and how wonderful a burning house looks at dawn.”

This is a collection I cannot recommend enough, and so I’ll do it as many times as my life allows.

Beheadings and Verse, Forethought and Spontaneity: A Review of Adam Robinson's Say, Poem

I just finished reading Lewis Carroll’s Alice books not long ago and throughout her adventures with chess pieces and playing-card royalty, Alice is fairly well awash with poetry reciters. She is asked to recite some verse herself — poems that she has evidently known for some time, but they never come out quite (or at all) as expected. The plots of the Alice books are like a biathlon, in that they are a string of strenuous or stressful situations separated by verse. Poetry readings are like this: public performances of works that the poet has worked over and rewritten and polished over the course of years, interspersed with segues that, more or less, involve a good deal less forethought than the poet — who, in all likelihood, tends to spend quite a bit of time alone and writing — generally feels comfortable with. Skiing and archery, beheadings and verse, forethought and spontaneity.

And anyone who’s gotten books together knows that by the time that book goes to print you are sick enough of it that you never want to see it again. Perversely, the best possible scenario one can hope for in the writerly world is to read from it, speak on it endlessly, be interviewed about  it — to be doomed to read those words you’re so tired of — for the rest of your days.

Adam Robinson’s wonderful Say, Poem (which, with Adam Robison and Other Poems is his second book released in 2010) solves this dilemma. The title poem is essentially a script for a poetry reading, including poems and those difficult in-between times. After a while a poet in the middle of an endless string of reading from behind battle-scarred podia can’t help but sound rehearsed. Robinson pokes fun at the inter-poem banter, the disorganized paper shuffling, the reading of works-in-progress.

As we go, we find that we are in the middle of the exploration of the plight of the poet in this world, with writers “raking the leaves / of failure wearing / too many hats.” After briefly contemplating amusingly off-kilter Japanese sign translations, one of the interior poems asks, bleakly, “How can poetry compete with error, / in this economy of attention?”

Even if the Poet can keep an audience focused, for how long? It’s full of very hard knocks, the writer’s life. The tools and images writers use get tired and lose their usefulness. Times change. “Soon,” the speaker says, “you’ll have to rename your / quarterly review.” So much that makes it to print is forgotten: “We’re going to fondly remember / all of those poems swept / away on muddy banks.”

Even that seems wistfully optimistic until we read the next lines: “Those banks will crackle in the sun // like the toes / of the socks / of the poets”. The speaker in “Say, Poem” offers perspective: “What do I do? I divert / myself with sports. And in the / fluidity of a great athlete’s movement, / which is purely beauty, I perceive / so much that matters without thinking.”

In “Say, Joke,”the second of the two long poems in this volume, we get a string of one-liners and intimate confessions, and it’s here as well that the hook of the poem curves around and tries to catch at the impulse to write. After the tossed off gag “What do you call a two-legged dog?/ Why bother” we get something far more earnest:

No, what do you call a two-legged dog?
Give up?  Move out of your lahvly apahtment into the dirt-
wore rurals.  Then: labor.  As your body tires and replenishes
itself through muscle-happy elation, when the light refracts
incandescent, his pair of ragged claws will come scuttling
now across the floors.

The Poet is up there, battling it all out in front of the audience, or battling it all out in front of the writing desk, thinking about “meaning” in the face of so much that doesn’t require or even want it. But still, the directives continue:  “shake off your nervousness again.” Whose voice? In reading the Alice books, my mind couldn’t help wondering where all of these poems were coming from. She hears recitations from mock turtles and misshapen twins, and all the time she’s sleeping.

In Say, Poem, we are drawn, too, to whose voice it is we are reading, this bossy stage manager dictating what jokes are told when and how long the pauses should be before continuing. With both, it is the poetic impulse, the drive that is beyond the poet that says what must be done. The best the writer can hope for is to continue to follow that voice. In Robinson’s fascinating, darkly funny book, “we have to come back tomorrow — this poem goes on forever / to the best misty star.”

Barely Touching the Brush on the Canvas: Neila Mezynski's Men Who Understand Girls

She started dancing. She liked dancing with short quick steps. She liked being at rest on the floor, body suspended in a certain position, waiting. She liked to start up again rapidly with the next step. She liked when the music skipped a beat.

She started painting. She liked painting with all different types of strokes. She sometimes liked to form the base with long heavy strokes, fill it in with short quick strokes. She sometimes liked to start with violent undersized strokes, finish it off by barely touching the brush on the canvas. She liked to paint trees. She liked to paint dresses.

She started writing. Words sentences stories and poems. She definitely started writing. Leaning words against more words to form sentences that curve and twist when read. Forming the basis for a new way of understanding how words relate to language to a reader to a page. Short bursts quickly are over and then commence again in sometimes longer but usually just as short bursts.

In Men Who Understand Girls, she writes about relationships. How those relationships emerge into something. Something that is unique to men and girls and also something that is not unique to men and girls. Something rather that is understood by all as long as there is a relationship between one and another not necessarily being men and girls. She also writes about how those relationships fizzle into nothing. Nothing that is understood by all as long as there was a relationship between one and another not necessarily being men and girls.

In Men Who Understand Girls, she writes about writing. Her writing is art. Her writing is dance. She writes about how writing is a thing and a concept. She writes about how writing may be the only that is a thing and a concept. She uses ideas from dancing and painting to show her words to a reader. She uses devices from dancing and painting to explain her words to a reader. Her dancing and her painting are important to her writing. How she dances and how she paints shapes the center for how she writes.

She writes about men who understand girls and girls who understand the men who understand girls. Miniature relationships made large.  She understands that men who understand girls can sometimes not understand girls. She understands that men who understand girls can understand but then girls may not understand men back. She understands that it does not always work out as planned for men who understand girls and the girls that they understand.

And sometimes it does. And sometimes it does.