Not Making a Fuss About Things: A Review of Richard Ford's Canada

In May 1863, Clement Laird Vallandigham, a former Democratic congressman from Ohio, was exiled to the South by President Abraham Lincoln after a military commission convicted him of treason for allegedly seditious words he had spoken in a public forum. Vallandigham was what was called a Peace Democrat because he wanted Lincoln to end the American Civil War and negotiate a truce with the Confederacy.

When Vallandigham reached the Confederate Army lines in Tennessee, nobody quite knew what to do with him. Although CSA politicians often reached out to Peace Democrats to encourage them to hamstring Lincoln, the Southerners really had little use for Vallandigham. The Ohioan made his way to the Carolina coast and boarded a blockade-runner. His eventual destination was Canada, a neutral nation that had a border with the Union. It did not take him long to sneak back into Ohio, where he would run for governor (and lose) and help shape the unsuccessful 1864 Democratic national platform.

For Vallandigham, Canada was just a temporary safe haven, a place to go when a wayward American son was looking for a way to go home again and re-establish his good name. One hundred years later, Canada would again become a safe haven for Americans in wartime. Draft dodgers and dissenters moved to Canada to avoid serving during the Vietnam War. These men made their decision to move north voluntarily. Many would eventually return home, but others stayed.

Richard Ford’s latest novel looks at the American flight to Canada in a totally different way. Unlike Vallandigham or the Vietnam-era protestors, his main character in Canada is driven across the frontier from his home of Great Falls, Montana, into Saskatchewan against his will when he is just a teenage boy. Why is Dell Parsons left with a lunatic hotel owner and an oddball hunting guide away from his family and country? Because his parents have committed an incredibly ill-advised crime, robbing a bank in North Dakota, after Dell’s father has made a series of blundering choices on ways to make money when times are particularly hard. Dell’s mother had left the fate of her children — including the boy’s twin sister — to a friend, who decided to preempt any attempt by the state of Montana to make them orphans and instead she plans to ship them to Canada.

While it is not the essence of this novel, what happens after the bank robbery and later the heinous crime that the hotel owner, Arthur Remlinger, the brother of the family friend, commits against two Detroit men is instructive. That is, we find out that Dell decides to stay in Canada, despite the fact he had been brought there his against his will. On the other hand, his sister, who also was supposed to end up in Saskatchewan after his parents were arrested for the robbery, skipped out of their Great Falls, Montana, hometown and eventually landed in San Francisco. She stayed south of the border; Dell went north and stayed.

In this way, Ford has written a Hardyesque novel, giving us the story of a family broken up by fate but then letting us see what happens as a consequence. Dell’s mother, a quiet, studious Jew from Tacoma, marries a hapless, though amiable Southerner who was a bomber in the Air Force during World War II. Dell’s mother Neeva has about as much reason to marry Bev Parsons as Tess does Angel Clare. Thus, Ford, in his tenth work of fiction, offers a cautionary tale about family and marriage.

At the end, Dell confides that in his adult life as a literature professor he has continually instructed his students to contemplate the long life of Thomas Hardy, who straddled two centuries (the nineteenth and twentieth) and two different literary worlds (the novel and poetry). Dell even cites The Mayor of Casterbridge, which starts with the protagonist selling off his wife, every bit the almost inexplicable life-changing event that the bank robbery is in Ford’s novel.

Ford, the Mississippi native who now lives in Maine, has struck it well along these lines, fixing the reader on his main theme. Ford asks his readers to contemplate the point of no return, when the border has been crossed and, unlike Vallandigham, one cannot go home again. Despite the god-awful hand he is dealt, Dell Parson somehow accepts his past and goes on to build a life for himself. He is, as he tells his students, a “‘Canadian conscript.’” That’s probably what makes this American writer’s novel so Canadian: having Dell keeping life simple, accepting his fate, and not making a fuss about things.

Canada is not without a few flaws. It’s a tad too long, and there are moments when Ford interjects a contemporary political comparison that seems out of place. Yet, overall, the effect of reading Canada is fairly first-rate, much like reading his 1990 novel, Wildlife, which also is set in Great Falls. And while the title may be Canada, it is in many ways about American teenage life — a feckless middle-class kid tinkering with chess and pollinating bees, and then having to come to terms with a messed-up family.

And surviving it all.

A Zen Koan in Luscious Autumn Shades: Berit Ellingsen's Beneath the Liquid Skin

The 23 stories in Beneath the Liquid Skin offer a balanced mix of longer fiction and flash, with many of the stories weighing in at two or three pages. Berit Ellingsen combines elements of the universe, the self, folk tales, history, nonduality, and classical literature, which work together in alchemical synergy to produce gold. The author’s background as a science writer informs many of the pieces, but none are weighted with jargon. I never know where her stories will take me next, but I’m always pleased with the destination.

Ellingsen shines at packing punch with brevity in her flash pieces. “Hostage Situation,” the shortest story in the book, condenses timeless social commentary with a dash of humour into just a few lines. Prose poem “Sliding” reads like a zen koan in luscious autumn shades.

A personal favourite, “Sovetskoye Shampanskoye” is a spy story-by-numbers. Within the confines of three pages, the author tells the tale of half of a man’s life, framing it within the wider universe in which the man’s smaller story plays out. The tale proceeds at a measured pace like a documentary filmed through a neutral lens. Outdoor environments and indoor architectures all are important details within the man’s experience, but the external and the internal also meld to form a greater whole. Ellingsen’s lens zooms in on the main character and pulls out for long shots. This is perhaps the first spy-story ever told from a nondual perspective.

Some of the stories are non-plot-driven vignettes, mindful meditations and ponderings inhabiting a fuzzy borderland between prose and poetry, yet they do have subtle plots, with outcomes, futures and pasts implied. The haunting “Sexual Dimorphism – A Nightmare Transcribed from Sanskrit,” with its references to both Hindu mythology and Japanese film, has a rhythmic feel to its short verses. “Crane Legs” is a light-hearted piece that begins like a review of a TV show, but the painterly language turns it into a prose poem. The sudden ending leaves the reader with both the gut reaction of the (re)viewer and a clear aural and visual image of the show. The more serious “Polaris” takes a chilling look at exploitation, perceived lack, and doing things for all the wrong reasons.

The dream-like elements of some of the pieces conjure Borges or Kafka at times. “The Love Decay Has for the Living,” one of the longer stories, opens like a waking from a nightmare, the line between the dream and real life unclear. The tale shape-shifts between humour and horror, while borrowing lightly from Marguerite Duras’ The Lover. It delves into the balancing act of give-and-take in a relationship, and the need for nourishment on both a physical and philosophical level.

The beautiful folk tale-like “The Tale that Wrote Itself,” the longest story in the book, questions the possibility of altering the course of reality. “Still Life of Hypnos” is rich with references to Greek mythology and a surreal procession of decaying flora and fauna. “The Astronomer and the King,” a speculative fiction vignette, revolves around a real historical figure who served as both astronomer and astrologer to Louis XIV. The tale addresses the age-old search for the reasons for human suffering and for the existence of a god.

With its rich, evocative descriptions, “A June Defection” is one of my favourites. Set in natural surroundings that are at once beautiful and oppressive, this is a story about people doing what they must to escape. The writing in “Down the River” is rich with sensory details, the adrenaline rush of gaming and the need to be the best.  Stendhal Syndrome, a whimsical imagining of a character suffering the strange and disputed tourist disease of the same name, made me laugh out loud.

“In All the Best Places, Lightning Strikes Twice” is a bizarre tale that offers a wry look at some of the unfortunate consequences of monoculture. Not all of Ellingsen’s stories are surreal. The very realistic “Autumn Story” takes a critical look at food safety, questionable production practices and how our business and purchase choices affect the quality of life for ourselves, our livestock and pets. Many of Ellingsen’s stories deal with environmental, economic, ethical and social issues, but she deftly tempers the heavier topics with light or wry humour without softening the punch.

Boyfriend and Shark, a twisty tale tinged with both humour and melancholy, ponders the way we hold onto things, and the way attachment can cause us to hold back or imprison others, be they human or animal.

While the philosophy of nonduality informs many of the stories in the collection indirectly, it comes to the forefront in the final three. Characters and situations from Ellingsen’s first book, The Empty City, return in “From Inside His Sleep.” Reminiscent of a Kundalini awakening, main character Yukihiro struggles with lucid dreams.

Science meets silence in the far north in The White. The most overtly nondual story, it raises questions about the nature of awareness and being. “There is no way to argue with the present. You can only be here,” and “Everywhere is here.”

“Anthropocene” also combines science and nonduality. The last lines of the story and the book leave us with a new beginning and hope in the face of hopelessness. It is in this story that we discover the heart of the book’s title, and in the final lines that Ellingsen puts forth the immutable beauty of the universe, regardless of how ugly the situation may get.

While most of the stories in Beneath the Liquid Skin are very short, they condense whole worlds, some fantastic and some quite plausible, into polished gems. Ellingsen’s writing invites a new way of reading and thinking about fiction, but her style and voice keep the stories from becoming mired in obscurity. Though I had read most of these stories before, (all but three have appeared previously), it was a pleasure to read them again and to have them all in one place. Best of all, I like being able to pick out a story to read according to my mood, like a chocolate truffle from this gourmet box.

One Can Feel His Presence and Hear His Voice: On Kathleen Rooney's Robinson Alone

In 1955, Weldon Kees — poet, filmmaker, musician, and artist — disappeared. His car was found on the Golden Gate Bridge. Kees’ body has yet to be found, but one can still feel his presence and hear his voice in Robinson Alone, a novel-in-poems written by Kathleen Rooney.

Rooney spent ten years working on the collection, as evidenced by its historical and biographical detail. Interspersed are snippets of poems, letters, and popular advertisement jingles:

A peach looks good

                                                            with lots

                                                of fuzz

                                    but man’s no peach

                        and never was

            Burma Shave

However, equally impressive is the collection’s skillful musicality and the complete picture Rooney paints of Robinson’s complex and contradictory interior life: his desperation to leave the Midwest and his disillusioned view of the city; his love for his wife and his growing frustration with her drinking; his haunting despair and his nagging dream of escaping into a bright new life:

Aware that to be a functional human being means
to deny death, but having lately suffered a loss

of interest in that fact, Robinson has taken to staying
inside — curtains drawn, phone off the hook.

Who was Robinson really? And whatever has become of him? In this collection, Rooney provides proof that “poetry” and “page-turner” can mutually exist, and that the best books don’t “set the score straight.”

They set our unanswerable questions to music.

Amplified with the Accumulation of Additional Constraints

Matthew Vollmer is a cheater. Not the kind of cheater who breaks rules, mind you, but that’s almost worse. He’s the kind of cheater that twists every rule to his own devious advantage and smiles an artful smile as his dumbstruck peers watch on in seething jealousy. He’s not the easily dismissed kind of cheater, no — he’s terribly smart, and generally a compassionate human being, besides. He’s the kind of cheater you want to have around in literature. In fact, he’s a little like Tom Sawyer.

Inscriptions for Headstones is a remarkable deception. The project of the book is astoundingly audacious; the volume is comprised of thirty short essays that unfold over a single sentence. All of these essays are epitaphs. Of course none of these epitaphs would fit on the face of a headstone (unless the were chiseled in really tiny letters), but what they accomplish with such a constraint is truly remarkable.

Writers struggle, I would think, with what to leave in and what to leave out. Perhaps the most important rule of writing is that a writer has to be choosy. Given a finite amount of space and the scope of a single project, the challenge is to express that which needs expressing. In the service of the whole, whether it’s an essay on a single subject, a single chapter in a biography, a short poem, or a single, marvelous sentence, it is often necessary to leave certain things unsaid. If the act of writing at all presents this de factoconstraint, then it’s effect is only amplified with the accumulation of additional constraints.

Consider the obituary. The single sentence. The epitaph, which has to hold the whole of a person, and is a one-time affair. There are no second epitaphs, and that’s one rule that Vollmer breaks. Or maybe he just bends it. Is church-camp Matthew Vollmer the same Matthew Vollmer that whiles away the hours in his writing room, devouring animated GIFs instead of writing epitaphs? Is melodramatic bath-taking Matthew Vollmer the same Matthew Vollmer that records the trials and tribulations of parenthood? If the answer is “no,” “maybe,” or “kind of,” then perhaps this is a rule bent and not broken. In this context thirty epitaphs might be permissible, if not entirely “fair.”

If the rules governing epitaphs can be made more fluid than they might seem, there is one that must certainly go unbroken: the deceased must not be aware of the specific content of his epitaph. Maybe. Tom Sawyer, though, happened to die without being dead, and found himself privy to the goings-on of his own funeral. Whether he knew it or not, this afforded young Sawyer an opportunity for reflection. He saw, in a moment, that his small, stupid life was sad, happy, and beautiful, and that it was impactful in ways that few readers might have expected.

Inscriptions for Headstones is all of these things and more. It’s honest, it’s hilarious, it’s sad, and it is awe-struck. Most importantly, given that this is my only opportunity to recommend it to you, it’s damn good. This collection is thirty good ways to spend a few minutes reading a very good sentence. One could ask for more, but you may find that you don’t need to.

Ten Things Ugly Men Say

Maybe we can learn to appreciate “the ugly”? If not appreciate, perhaps respect?  There’s a certain respect, at least, that I have for an ugly thing: that ugly blobfish, Jocelyn Wildenstein (a Swedish woman apparently famous for being ugly), and even Scott Rickard’s TED talk — the talk where he attempted to create “The World’s Ugliest Music.”  And Adam Prince’s collection of short stories, The Beautiful Wishes of Ugly Men, like the aforementioned uglies, these stories captivate you with their ugly — that straight, honest, can’t-take-your-eyes-off-it-type ugly.

So, in this little top-ten list, I’ll be a little lazy and a little more honest than usual. For the most part, I’ll let Prince’s finely-tuned characters do the talking.

It seems natural that I start with the pick-up lines:

1.  “I’m a man . . . but if I had to, y’know, switch, then I’d want to look just like you” (98).

2.  “If you want me to—I will unloose the primal me” (155).

3.  “There’s something else in my pants too.  You should see, um, what it is” (74).

4.  “Cashiers do it fast and friendly.  Carpenters do it with wood.  Fishermen do it with their flies down. Basketball, baseball, football players or whatever do it with balls . . .” (143).

Here, listen to my buddy Jocko brag a little?:

5.  Jocko says: “I got an offer from this producer buddy of mine, Bill Boyd, to manage the Steppenwolfe reunion tour.  You remember Steppenwolfe? ‘Born to Be Wild’? Hell yeah, I was.  Sober three years and it bore the shit out of me” (16).

6. Then, Jocko says:  “Wait till Crystal gets here. You’ll love her. Smoking body and she’s got this clit ring . . . I haven’t fucked her yet, y’know, because when I’m in a relationship I’m in it, but now, you know, now . . .” (16).

7. Jocko slaps the table, waves around his beer, and says: “did I tell you I’ve got this whole other name? Yeah, I’m really someone else, man.  Kyle Windward.  My real mom’s part Chippewa Indian.  I found out all about her.  I could stalk her or whatever.”

Here, let’s move to some other acquaintances of mine: 

8. Says Keener:  “I’m . . . on a journey. . . . To find my lost artistic. Vision. I. Took a bus” (140).

9. Says Rod:  “I love my wife! I love my jealous, fundamentalist, social-retard wife!” (106).

10. Says Edwin Edward Holt:  “The whole difficulty . . . arose because she refused me fornication excepting when Jay Leno was on.  Neighbor, I attempted compromise. I taped the program.  But I could just lay there with my hard-on sticking into the air as far as what concerned her” (133).

Hey, listen, I’m doing my best here.  See, here’s a bonus:

BONUS

On a particularly hard day, when I was actually considering Rogaine for my male-pattern baldness, I sat down to write a very detailed email to Adam Prince.  I told him that his collection The Beautiful Wishes of Ugly Men is imbued with that classic ugly, the type of ugly captured by Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man is Hard to Find, Raymond Carver’s Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, and David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men.

Because it is, damn it.  It is.

Then, I pitched him the idea of the Top Ten List, hoping he’d have a quote to share.  And then, he wrote me a nice follow-up email with this to say:

“I don’t know if I have a favorite line of dialogue, exactly. The thing about dialogue is that it’s so contextual, depends so much on the back and forth exchange. So there are some lines I really like in context that out of context would seem sort of flat or empty. But here’s one from “Action Figure” that I like:

“God,” says Kid, “it’s bright in here. Isn’t it bright in here? Probably so the security cameras work better. But you feel like you’re on an operating table. My dad’s a surgeon. He does face transplants. Isn’t that weird? Face transplants? It means you’re one person but you’re actually someone else. My dad has tons of money, but he doesn’t give any to me. No Barbie cars or other cars, either. Hey, let’s go get a Christmas Eve drink.” Kid flashes his money clip to prove how many Christmas Eve drinks he could buy if he wanted to. (54)

I just like the way his mind works here. The shifts that happen from sentence to sentence. They’d seem like leaps to someone more sane, but once you know Kid and how he works, then they all make a kind of sense. And that’s so fun. To create and convey what sense means to someone entirely different from one’s self.”

It Was Not Something I Would Do Again, Except that I Probably Would: An Interview with Gabriel Blackwell

Shome Dasgupta: Wonderfully, you have two books coming out in 2012 — Shadow Man: A Biography of Lewis Miles Archer (CCM, 2012) and Critique of Pure Reason(Noemi, 2012) — what’s going on behind the scenes? Is it hectic managing the release of two books?

Gabriel Blackwell: It’s maybe appropriate that these two books are both coming out at roughly the same time; I wrote them more or less in parallel. Still, that doesn’t make it any easier to deal with them now that they’re almost here. I really have no one but myself to blame. I make my own work — nothing that I’m doing now is “required,” and I could probably just be taking it easy and letting things play out the way they’re going to anyway. But I can’t bear leaving things entirely up to chance. I don’t know if there is an ideal reader for either book, but if there is, I want the book to find her, somehow. I only know how I find books to read, so I’m trying to do the kind of things that would get my own attention; presumably, I’ll find other readers like myself. You can see the problem — doing things in this myopic kind of way is very limiting. Fortunately, I’ve had a number of really kind, really generous people help me out and offer opportunities that I wouldn’t have thought to ask for, and maybe together we’ll get the books into people’s hands.

SD: Did you find any similar obstacles while working on both of these books? Was one harder to write than the other? What were the differences or similarities in the experiences of working on one book compared to the other?

GB: Critique of Pure Reason seems the easier of the two now because it was mostly done by the time that I realized that it was an it. At that point, I had been working on what it would be for four years, and all but three of the pieces had been published or accepted for publication. My work on it last spring leading up to me sending it to Mike Meginnis at Noemi was a matter of putting the various parts together in a way that made meaning out of the whole. But thinking about it in that way discounts the four years of work that went into its components. It’s deceptive, I mean, but when I think about Critique as a book, that’s usually what I think about — the process of ordering it, rather than the process of composing it.

Shadow Man was very different. It felt difficult throughout because of how complex it ended up being, and because of how concentrated my work on it had been by comparison with Critique. By the end of my revision process, I was reading through the entire book each time I changed a line, just to make sure what I was changing wouldn’t disturb something earlier on. I sat at my desk for ten, eleven hours at a stretch. I gave myself acid reflux. I had to sleep sitting up for weeks. It was not something I would do again, except that I probably would.

SD: While writing, editing, and revising — what did you learn about the process? What stuck out to you that you hadn’t thought about before?

GB: I learned as much in the two years I worked on Shadow Man as I did in the two years I spent in graduate school. Maybe more. There’s no substitute for creating and revising something so sustained. It is its own pedagogy. But, because I finished it very early in 2011, and because I’ve since finished another book (The Natural Dissolution of Fleeting-Improvised-Men), I’m not sure that I can remember specifically what I learned while writing Shadow Man. I learned how to write Shadow Man, and I would guess that all of what I learned is on its pages somehow. Very little of that learning carried over to NDFIM. Even the processes of composition were radically different — I wrote my first draft of Shadow Man in three weeks or so; it took me more than a year to complete a draft of NDFIM.

SD: Just by reading the excerpts of your upcoming works, it looks like there was some heavy research being done (in particular, Shadow Man) — how did this play a role in your works?

GB I’m not a big fan of hermetic stories or novels, honestly. I prefer work that has something to say to the world around it, that acknowledges that it will never really get its readers’ undivided attentions. I try to create parasitic works, building on others’ creations—not just acknowledging the reader’s life outside of the book but (so I hope) pointing in fruitful directions for his or her distraction. Obviously, I have to know something of those other creations if that’s going to be successful, so I do research.

SD: You have so much going on — your own writing, teaching, being the reviews editor for The Collagist, writing for Big Other, and you do so much more — how do you manage your time? What is your schedule like when you’re writing?

GB: This isn’t a life that I would have wished on my younger self, but it seems fine for now. I learned late how dedicated I needed to be to be a writer I’d want to read, and I feel like I’ve been trying to catch up ever since. There is no substitute for working with language on a daily basis, even if it isn’t your own; honestly, it seems better to me that it isn’t my own, often. I don’t need to be more prolific (though there are plenty of writers who are, and who are fine writers), so, even though my work for The Collagist or Big Other takes away from my typing time, I don’t necessarily think of that as a bad thing. I think I’d prefer that I was different from story to story, and that seems to me to require that time passes. If I can spend that time working with language, all the better.

As for my schedule, it varies a little. When I’m typing something, I usually get up early and write before work so that I can spend the late afternoon / evening taking care of my other responsibilities. If I put those off for too long, they take over my schedule and it becomes difficult to find time to write. So I have to be very disciplined. I very rarely take a day off, but I don’t think that makes me different from most of the writers I know — like I said, it seems necessary to be working with language in some way every single day. The few times I’ve tried to “do nothing” for a day have been disasters.

SD: What’s it like being a reviews editor?

GB: There are substantial rewards — I get to work with some really smart writers, find out about books and publishers I never would have known about otherwise, and help get the word out about some really great books. I don’t know if it’s perfect for me or if I’ve perfectly adapted myself to it, but either way, it feels completely natural now, two years into it.

SD: Do you have any book recommendations? What have you been reading lately? What are you looking forward to checking out?

GB: I’ve been so pressed for time lately that I read while walking the dog — I read Christopher Priest’s The Affirmation, Amber Sparks’s May We Shed These Human Bodies, and Brian Carr’s Vampire Conditions walking around my neighborhood—and I’m doing research for a new book, so most of what I read at home isn’t exactly by choice. But I’m trying to make time for Michele Disler’s [Bond, James], Mike Kitchell’s Variations on the Sun, Kellie Wells’s Fat Girl, Terrestrial, Elena Passarello’s Let Me Clear My Throat, and Matthew Vollmer’s Inscriptions for Headstones.

SD: Who are some authors you find yourself admiring? Why? What is it about them or their works that appeal to you?

GB: This seems like a question whose answer would get out of hand in less than a sentence, so I’ll just say that I seem to have totems for each book I write, and for this latest one, those totems are David Markson and Christopher Priest. I’m not sure what that means or if it means anything at all.

SD: What about journals? Which ones do you find yourself reading regularly?

GB: I read Conjunctions cover to cover. I also look forward to new issues of DIAGRAM, [out of nothing], Puerto del Sol, Tin House, Black Clock, and Artifice. And I’m really looking forward to the second issues of two new magazines, Uncanny Valley and Unstuck. I’m sure I’m forgetting dozens of others.

A Kind of Mechanized Urban Decadence: On Johannes Göransson’s Pilot

Johannes Göransson’s Pilot (“Johann the Carousel Horse”), written in nearly equal parts English and Swedish, is a curiously named book.  The “Pilot” to which the title makes reference remains obscure, and the subtitle doesn’t (at first) seem to be of much help either. The poem entitled “Johann the carousel horse” is left blank. It appears to have a counterpart-poem, written in Swedish, called “Johannes Karusesellen,” but this leaves any Anglophone intent on puzzling out what to make of the book’s title stuck pondering the half-comprehensible Swedish of Johannes Karussellen.

In a sense though, this Case of the Missing Carousel Horse acts as a signpost for how to read this book: paying careful attention to the “other language” in this bilingual collection offers enormous rewards, even for those of us (most of us) without a lick of Swedish.

When I say you don’t really need to know Swedish to engage with the Swedish poems, I really do mean it. Take the first few lines of “Mjukstycket om att skära” (Google renders this as “Smooth passage of the cut”) and its English counterpart “A soft cut about spasms:”

Vi lär oss blindskrift
skriver ett brev till
presidenten grisar ut
retoriken detta är lyxkött

We learn braille
write a letter to
the president pig
out rhetoric this
is luxury meats

It doesn’t take much in the way of language-learning chops to get from “Vi lär oss blindskrift” to “We learn (us) braille (blindscript),” and in the process of puzzling this out the Swedish comes to look like English in a fun-house mirror, and vice versa. But these poems don’t ultimately behave the way poems in “translation” are supposed to behave, each facing the other quietly from either end of the recto / verso divide like Korean soldiers at the DMZ.

The Swedish and English poems in Pilot do much more than simply mirror each other. Swedish poems cross-pollinate with English poems and vice versa, such that adjacent poems behave less like mirror-images and more like pairs of chromosomes: counterpart poems don’t so much reflect each other so much as copulate. English poems take Swedish titles, poems in both languages borrow freely from the lexicon of the other, and the English poems, at least, seem to have been “infected” by some of the linguistic habits of the Swedish. The relentlessly concussive rhythm of these poems, appropriate to a book that concerns itself so frequently with “pounding,” “banging” and “cramming,” is aided in part by Göransson’s fondness for smuggling in Swedish-style compound neologisms into the English poems — see such poem titles as “Pig the losangelessoft mouth” or “Throughthronged and expensive.”

Ultimately the poems resulting from this all of this linguistic meiosis make for a swirling “carousel” of repeated phrases, motifs, and images, simultaneously evoking fecundity, decay, sexuality, violence and a kind of mechanized urban decadence. If that sounds like a lot, it is, but it’s really all there, over and over again. To pick an arbitrary example:

Technological transcendence

The shellshock will pearl
apart megaphones as tourist
catastrophies bang
on hospital dance floor
while los angeles
confetties in front
crameras hurt
in front the imperial
imagery depict a wound
seduction of a part
that cannot bloat

The poems in Pilot return again and again to these motifs, all of which (decay, death, sex, fecundity, urban decadence) represent or enact states of transition. Pilot lingers in these throbbing transitional spaces, just as it lingers in the space between English and Swedish, turning each poem into a kind of orgiastic, bilingual  “Threshold party,” unleashing and enacting a set of processes equally and invested in procreation and necrosis. Pilot is a living carousel, a linguistic swarm, a “losangelessoft” explosion of pearls, meat, and television; it is, finally, a bass-heavy “Exaggeration music” fit for the times in which we live.