A Review of Jamie Iredell's Last Mass

When I decided to take a look at Last Mass by Jamie Iredell, I was expecting some kind of recovering Catholic memoir. I knew Iredell wrote fiction from The Book of Freaks and Prose. Poems. A Novel., but I also knew about his nonfiction I Was a Fat Drunk Catholic School Insomniac. Mind you, I hadn’t had a chance to read any of Iredell’s full-length works, so I was pretty much going on faith.

As a side note, I should mention that I do have a certain Catholic fascination, having been raised Lutheran. That’s part of what drew me in just on my original impression. Lutheranism is only so far distanced from Catholicism, some things having been removed and some left with just the logic behind them removed. It’s confusing, but not as confusing as that first time I went to a Catholic service as a kid and everyone performed without being told, perhaps by secret radio signals or pheromones. In my Lutheran services, you were told exactly when to stand, when to sit, when to open your hymnals. In that Catholic service, everyone just knew.

Anyway, I came to Last Mass expecting certain things. And, true to when I expect things, Last Mass turned out to be much more complex. Memoir? History? Reflection? I’m just going to call it a book and move on from there. After all, in a series of paragraphs Last Mass flips between Iredell’s formative years as a young Catholic in California, the history of Father Junípero Serra (a significant force in the early missionization of California, after having been involved with the Spanish Inquisition), Iredell’s personal problems while trying to write the book, and larger reflections on the Church and world:

Father Palou relates a story that occurred not long before Father Serra’s death: a band of natives he calls the zanjones were reported coming up the Carmel Valley towards the Mission, all of them armed. A detachment of soldiers sent from the Presidio in Monterey came for protection. They were gathered at this time six padres at San Carlos, together there for the eminent founding of Missions San Francisco and Santa Clara. These priests all feared for their lives, but not the blessed Father Fray Junípero Serra. He kept the other priests up all night with his excitement over what he assumed would soon be his death at the hand of murderous heathen. He told them stories to reassure them, but he talked fervently, expectantly, of his death in the service of his Lord.

How did Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus feel while taking Jesus down from the cross? This thirteenth Station—unlucky number for an unlucky man. In Michelangelo’s Florentine Pietà—said by some to depict a Michelangelo self-portrait in the male figure holding Jesus’ body (Joseph of Nicodemus)—Jesus seems to grow out of the marble, rock out of rock. Michelangelo abandoned the project, which was finished by his pupil Tiberio Calcagni, a lesser, and today and unknown, artist. Michelangelo’s / Nicodemus’s / Joseph’s face, though carved of solid marble, looks old and soft as old man’s skin, caring for the dead body in his arms.

Wait wait, but I forgot: at the gate stood the first two guards, with submachine guns slung over their shoulders. A third guard in the yard carried a shoulder-holstered nine-millimeter. I knew this was sketchy but I went ahead because I could not walk away at that point. I had to follow through. Inside the cinderblocked cube that was the “store,” on the dirt sat the black and white TV going static and then to picture on a Mexican telenovella. This oddly reminded me of the Playboy Channel on my parents’ TV all those years ago, though now I would certainly not get turned on, and the cocaine would ensure that. The lone lightbulb swung overhead, no shade. Behind the card table the Man sat, this Tony Montana-ish mountain of cocaine piled. I’m not kidding; there had to have been a half-pound of coke piled on that card table. The Man sweat so bad it pooled under his eyes and his knee bounced constantly. He dipped the corner of a credit card into his mountain about every forty-five seconds and that corner disappeared up one nostril, and the next dip up the other.

Iredell interposes the confusion of growing up Catholic in California with the well-intentioned but horrifyingly brutal account of one of the men who brought Catholicism there and helped make it what it is today. He doesn’t attack the Church (in my view), but he certainly doesn’t hide what it has done, or his own shortcomings. He seems to question, and how could he not? He doesn’t appear to be devoutly religious now, but it doesn’t seem like a person raised in the Church ever truly leaves. The Church was a part of shaping who Iredell is just as it was, along with Father Serra, in shaping modern California. Good, bad, or an indeterminable and inseparable mix of the two, its unchangeably part of the modern identity.

The conclusions in Last Mass aren’t heavy handed either. To me, it seemed as if things were too complicated for easy conclusions to be drawn. It’s easy if you separate out what ended up being the willful ignorance of sophisticated cultures and the both intentional and unintentional obliteration thereof, but such a separation is artificial and doesn’t reflect the full reality. Iredell instead seems to present the complexity as complexity so the reader can puzzle over it in its fullness. Last Mass has some great lines, but it’s the structure that I really love. That single arc coming together from those individual differently pointing paragraphs was something I wasn’t expecting, and I love how it comes off. Last Mass kept me right in the moment on every page, engaged without being forced. I’d definitely recommend checking it out.

People and How They Live and How They Struggle: On René Steinke's Friendswood

René Steinke’s latest novel Friendswood will have its paperback release on May 26th. Steinke, a National Book Award finalist for Holy Skirts, offers the beautiful story of a small Texas town that has survived a tragedy, but never fully recovered. A number of families living in the same development lost loved ones to the suspicious emergence of rare cancers. The novel’s prelude offers a look at their idyllic life on the verge of disaster:

It was an evening that would melt into the summer, calm, humid, and expansive. The air did not yet smell of dead lemons. The red and blue sores hadn’t yet appeared on anyone’s neck. The black snakes hadn’t wriggled up from the ground. And she had no idea that this world was not without an end.

After being displaced from their homes, the controversy dies down and the town tries to move on. When bad things happen in Friendswood, Texas the town does its best to keep such things quiet. However, not all of the community’s members can abide the culture of silence and acceptance. Years after the tragedy, difficult ecological, religious, cultural, and economic issues percolate to the surface forcing the town’s residence to face what they would prefer to ignore. It is a silence that comes from many places, fear of course, but also the desire to hold onto the town as it once was; a wish from the community to forever live in a time when life was simple and pure.

This is a big book that deals with big issues, but it does not do so on a global plain. Instead, Friendswood is deeply personal, at times completely isolating. The novel’s depictions of struggle, sadness, perseverance, and loss register on a level only the individual can know. Each character’s failures and success happen on a synaptic level, rather than a town hall stage. Steinke calls on four different perspectives to tell the story: Lee is the reluctant activist looking to stop the devastation she experienced from being visited upon anyone else, Willa and Dex are two teens involved with an unreported assault that is quietly dividing the town, and Hal is a deeply religious real estate broker who wants to bring business back to Friendswood. The narrative breath of this braided novel gives the reader a pluralistic view of unilateral thinking. The differing points of view allow for a greater and more complex story. The different ideologies and hard held beliefs challenge the reader to see with another’s eyes. The result is extremely enlightening and very satisfying.

While each character’s perspective is essential to the whole, Lee’s story is the true north. She has lost her daughter to cancer. The diagnosis coincided with the emergence of strange, snake-like, oily protuberances from the ground. The neighborhood, where Lee’s family lived, has been laid low by the toxic soil from an oil refinery with shoddy disposal practices. Although the plant itself has since closed, it was never proven responsible for the cancer cluster. Lee finds herself struggling against the gentry, but is unwilling to let her daughter’s death remain unexplained. She endeavors to restart her quest for proof and justice.

She dug for another hour. She pitched the shovel into the ground…and threw it behind her. She didn’t’ even worry anymore about what the toxic shit might do to her…when the hole was the size of a small bathtub, she heard Jess’s voice in the sound of digging, Mom, Mom, Mom.

Hal on the behalf of other citizens in Friendswood moves forward with plans to build new homes on the site that is responsible for the cancer causing pollution. Seemingly setting up the good guy and bad guy, the novel has all the trappings of a thriller. Instead a much more powerful exploration of human struggle is revealed. It is one that largely plays out in the mind. These interior struggles, like carcinogens, are largely invisible to the casual observer and just as dangerous. “Hal sat down and just breathed for two minutes. He felt the ache in his heart for whiskey, and said a tired prayer. Help. He checked his voicemail…”

The writing held in Friendswood is astonishing; seeming effortless, in that way that only the most thoroughly practiced and equipped writer can pull off. It is style without its pretense; that rare book that is both literary and accessible. Beyond the gorgeous writing, the character work is exceptional. Steinke alternates from teenage voices and adult voices without losing any gravitas, accessibility, or realism. The novel uses a classic protagonist and antagonist dynamic that feels familiar and comfortable at first, but slowly digs into new and significantly richer material as the fight is clearly being fought within each character. This archetypal struggle revealed in the internal conflicts of the characters brings depth and nuance to each point of view. The complexity and richness of the internal lives makes them empathic and accessible. Even through this pluralistic lens, where an individual’s actions can be taken as either deplorable or laudable, their motivations are never left unexplored or misunderstood. When mapping the dramatic landscape of Friendswood the conflicts between people with differing agendas would be cartography, and what Steinke is doing here is spelunking — getting deep below the surface and to the core of things. “Dex knew he had an inside self that was still unfamiliar to him, a shadowy thing he glimpsed while driving straight on the highway.”

Yet, it somehow deals with these larger than life issues that can make heroes or cowards of anyone of us. In its most reductive state, this novel deals with the environment verses commerce, religion verse secularism, and the individual verse the society. However, its main preoccupation is people and how they live and how they struggle and how, every day, they are faced with the choice to move forward through life or be swallowed whole.

Colin Winnette's Haints Stay Is A Solid, Layered Work of Genre-defying Beauty

““Left to their own devices, people will live out every pos­sible variation of a human life.” ”

— from Colin Winnette’s Haints Stay

Every possible variation. The unexpectedness of Colin Winnette’s fiction is nothing less than thrilling; so much so that I fear writing this review will steal this thrill from you. Haints Stay is a western; this is the first surprise I must apologize for ruining. And as westerns go, there’s quite a lot of shooting and choking and . . . well . . . gnawing, but this will come as no surprise to you if you’ve read Winnette’s prize-winning Coyote and the two novellas collected in Fondly. Exploring the instinct to kill has always been there in Winnette’s stories. Haints Stay begins with Sugar and Brooke, two carnivorous killers wandering towards civilization, but I see these two characters as a sort of parental unit to the main story—which belongs, in my opinion, to the character of Bird, a naked boy dropped out of nowhere into the care of killers.

Haints Stay is a solid, layered work of genre-defying beauty—albeit a bit of a gory one at times; there is that. The overall work is circular like an absurdist play, returning to the same towns, the same camps, the same crime scenes; but also the same characters and their similar pursuits: killing, avenging, slaughtering. There is the exception of Mary, Bird’s fake wife, who hates killing and hates spiders, which is one of the funniest parts of this book by the way. As always in Winnette’s fiction, “horridness and dread” are tempered with razor-sharp wit and purpose.

We’re let in on this purpose by the character of Brooke. As he’s wandering through the desert, he muses that there has been a lot of middle in the tales of his killing but not much beginning or end. And that’s exactly how the tales wind through Haints Stay, edges “worn and indistinguishable”. This doesn’t stop him, though, from expecting things to end in total devastation; and more often than not, in this narrative, they do. True to this purpose, it is actually Bird’s story that has no beginning and no end but lots of middle.

Bird—as his name suggests—is a grotesque programmed to kill, but also to seek safety and food. His character, along with all of Winnette’s creations, is original and meticulously drawn, mostly through dialogue. Winnette’s dialogue uses repetition and stark, simple phrasing to reduce the characters’ motivations to instinctual impulses: “I want to kill it.” “Are we safe?” These phrases, and others like them, are guiding refrains in this story.

The most frequent refrain is Bird’s line that he’s going to be ready for anything that comes at him. That’s what his known life—his time with Sugar and Brooke and his not-so-pleasant time in the cave (which I’ll let you discover yourself)—has taught him: to be ready for anything that comes at him. “‘Lots of things are going to come at you,’ said Mary. ‘It is only the world saying hello.'” But Bird, who’s been crippled by the world, doesn’t really see it this way. The world sometimes—often really—wants to hurt you. And most of what comes at you is not what it seems.

In fact, the characters in Haints Stay are often not what or who they seem: complete strangers who pass as husband and wife and who later live more like brother and sister, children who aren’t really their parents’ children. Relationships come and go and seem to mean something for the moment but then morph, become meaningless after the next violent act. As important as these false relationships are to this narrative, an emotionless lack of self-awareness is even more central. The best example of this is Bird, who simply appears with no knowledge of who he is or where he came from, but there’s also Mary, another child with no past; there’s Sugar, who doesn’t even know his own gender. These are simple-minded creatures occupied with the satisfaction of their most basic needs.

Like food, water, and safety. The bands of marauders, wagon trains and ranch families spend most of their narratives worrying about where their next meal will come from, whether it’s safe to eat or drink. But there is also music; there is Martha, Bird’s fake mother and Brooke’s fake wife. Her piano playing serves as a placeholder for the sublime: for the feminine, for the civilizing of the lost and violent masculine—masculinized?—soul.

Most of the characters in this story are lost souls—as the title of the book suggests—in between towns, in the wilderness, wandering. Migrating? Like migratory birds? Wild animals? Herds? Creatures who are most dangerous when they happen upon oases of civilization? I think I could remove all these question marks, but I’m still trying not to ruin the surprises in this brilliant work of art.

And speaking of art, there’s a touch of surrealism in this story. I want to leave you with the conceit of a seemingly pointless, freestanding spiral staircase with an eagle sculpture at its base—a bird; the association is unavoidable. It’s in the middle of the town where Bird finds work as a killer. Does it lead to the higher calling that Martha pities the birds for not having? Or is it merely another metaphor for a life leading nowhere? A path of no certain origin and no apparent destination. But lots of middle.

Other People Are Necessary, But They Are Also Hell To Put Up With: A Review of Darrin Doyle's The Dark Will End the Dark

When I graduated, I couldn’t wait to climb onto a greyhound bus and put all that college stuff behind me. I debarked in a small Midwestern town and was roomed with a guy who was three weeks away from sentencing for holding up a convenience store. I went to the local music club by myself to see the bands and to be around the people that I was sure I was meant to belong to. I ate the same limp, greasy pizza the club bought for the bands, and sometimes I even sat at the table with them as we ate it. I had arrived at the most authentic version of myself. But of course, there were problems: employment was one of them. I worked as a dishwasher in college, when no shame accrued to that position. But after college, all I could find to do for money was to wash more dishes. And my emotional life sucked: I’d early on fallen hard for a girl whose bipolar disorder kept pushing me into the friend zone. A year after graduation, I was living the post-collegiate life I thought I wanted. Did I learn anything? It’s hard to know; those five years marked me, for sure, but I can’t say they improved me.

The characters in Darrin Doyle’s stories mostly inhabit the same emotional terrain, order olive patties from the same drive-thru burger joints, and sometimes even drink in the same bar, the Green Top, where I went with some friends to celebrate getting back a clean HIV test report. The Green Top is a funny place—a bar a couple doors down from the club and pizza place, it kept a coterie of townies comfortably numb but probably would’ve never survived if slumming alternative kids didn’t keep turning up there. But along the way, a rudimentary kind of role reversal happened: I remember looking around and thinking, this is what my life is like now, and it wasn’t the kind of feeling you left behind when you walked out the door and back onto the street. If you belonged at the Green Top, it means you brought it with you when you left.

In one of the longer stories in this collection, “Happy Turkey Day,” two of Doyle’s characters face a similar moment of recognition at the Green Top. Jonathan Turkey, high school basketball star and scion to a dwindling fortune and his classmate and lower rung dweller Claude Peuptic (pronounced, unfortunately, Poopdick) are drawn to the Green Top to make a relational swap: Turkey will give some of his prestige and ease in the world to Poopdick in exchange for some recognition that Turkey, too, has struggled, some.

This need for other people to know who you are, to be there beside you, animates almost all the stories in this collection. So, in “The Hiccup King,” the protagonist concedes, “He longed for a comrade. He wanted a companion for his unremarkable misery.” And in the story “Barney Hester,” this need for a companion takes a predictably sad formulation: “three is a good number. In a group of three, you’re always next to someone.”

In Doyle’s funny and disturbing stories, these anxious, all-important connections, hard to admit even when you’re drunk and loquacious, have a way of going wrong. Other people are necessary, but they are also hell to put up with. And so in “Happy Turkey Day,” this moment of incipient drunken bliss and bonhomie leads inevitably to shots fired and unlikely heroic sacrifice, as Poopdick steps in front of a shotgun blast meant for Jonathan. It’s not the death that should concern us, Doyle suggests, but the muck Peuptic crawled through on his way there, the way it didn’t redeem him.

It’s this same muck, this muddy bog beaten down by history and brainless struggle borne of apathy and momentum where most of Doyle’s characters live. So in another long story here, “Ha-Ha Shirt,” three man-children circle the drain of their long friendship, sexually abusing one another and emotionally abusing everyone they else, carrying with them a cloud of toxic emotional fallout. These same guys, they rented a house across the street from where I lived: the lawn was stripped of most of its green; glass forties rested in crook of a tree, and a sex doll held herself up on the front railing. They’d get loud, sometimes, but if you called the police, they didn’t come because guys like Shirt, Ha-Ha, and the narrator take care of themselves, if you just leave them to it. These are not beautiful losers, just losers.

The Dark Will End the Dark alternates between these longer, mostly realistic if cringe-comic stories and short, punctuated bursts of irreality, stories usually titled after body parts, like “Foot,” “Penis,” and “Mouth.” So, in “Foot,” a mommy, trying to find the limit of what it would take to satiate her infant, cuts off her own foot as a chew toy. When the baby isn’t satisfied, the daddy retaliates, taking off baby’s foot, which the mommy discovers isn’t quite what she wanted, either. In another body-horrifying flash, “Face,” a normcore father looks in the mirror to discover his features have slipped out of place, so his eye is embedded in his cheek, his nose and mouth have reversed positions. At first, he wonders if his family will recognize him, but then decides, this is the new normal, and proceeds to get on with it. In the longer stories, Doyle is patient enough to let the characters to do themselves in. The shorter stories, though, are characterized by swifter comeuppances. Characters don’t just have names that are more like job titles or org chart designations, but the stories themselves end so quickly, it’s like Doyle has pulled the trigger so we won’t need to see where it goes next. I like that decisiveness, the cruel shape that Doyle forces onto these stories. If only I’d had Doyle scripting my life. I might have reached a crisis point and moved out of that Midwestern purgatory sooner and saved myself a few years.

Intractable Ghosts or Kristina Marie Darling’s Personal and Imaginative World in The Sun & the Moon

Sometimes an extraordinary book lands on your doorstep and you’re grateful to be astonished again. Kristina Maria Darling’s The Sun & the Moon is a beauty to behold. A surprising, masterfully written long prose poem that reads like a novel, it weaves a story of a marriage deconstructed in a fantastical, surreal setting, whose strangeness is reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe: “I tore into the envelope & there was only winter inside, not even a card or a handwritten note.”

We’re invited into a mysterious, hypnotic, universe unfolding like a party: “You began as a small mark on the horizon. Then night & its endless train of ghosts. You led them in, one after the other. They took off their shoes, hung their coats & started looking through the drawers.” The reader can only fall in love with the ingenious writing as she/he falls under the spell of this haunted love story that reads like a long dream sequence.

Both modern and timeless, it echoes into past centuries, with eerie references to bouquets, lockets, and love notes: “I became aware of your voice calling me from the stairs, warning me about the silver lock on the door.” It reminded me of The Turn of the Screw, by Henry James, with its tight writing, suspense, and destruction. Inhabited by ghosts, disquieting, The Sun & the Moon compels the reader to sort out the living from the dead:

“One by one the ghosts left for the ocean, dragging the cold dark stairs behind them.”

“You just stand there & stare, your suit covered in ash, the altar catching fire behind you.”

“Still you just stand there, light shimmering in your hair, the room catching fire all around you.”

We inhabit a dreamlike universe filled with fire and ice, where past and present mingle:

“Before I know it, we’ve started another fire.”

“I could already feel the sky burning through the ice on my dress.”

“Somehow you keep dreaming, heaving that frozen sky behind you.”

I love Darling’s alchemy of turning destruction and despair into something so exquisitely beautiful, painful, and seductive all at once. We’re reminded of the searing poetry of Djuna Barnes in Nightwood: “That’s what I loved about you. Somehow you just stand there, a handkerchief folded in your pocket, the room burning all around you.”

Through repetitions like mantras, incantations, iteration and reiteration, Darling weaves circles within circles, holding the reader captive and mesmerized:

“There was nothing I could do, so I kept trying to tell you good night.

“I could only stare.”

“By then I could hardly speak.”

“It’s the strangest things that keep me from leaving.”

“We stand there and watch…”

In their crumbling inner world, the two main characters are petrified and set afire at the same time, the narrator constantly on edge:

“It’s always the smallest things that put me on edge.”

“It’s always the strangest things that make me feel restless.”

She finds comforts in darkness and is unsettled by light: “and I was unsure if the light was a promise or a threat.” A very Jamesian sense of fatality is pervasive throughout the book. The narrator comes to terms with the implacable and finds a form of acceptance:

“By then I was sure there was nothing that could be done.”

“By then there wasn’t much that could be done.”

“I realized how little I knew about our house…”

“My desire to romanticize, I realized, had been a form of grief.”

A story of perseverance, testament to human stealth and endurance, mystery and ritual, The Sun & the Moon celebrates the redeeming power of beauty: “Still I wondered how you could ever leave, to live as a king without his court, without his crown.”

Making Ghosts Take Flesh: A Review of Eric Pankey's CROW-WORK

The title leads palindromatically:  CROW-WORK.

Caw and walk. It is as symmetric and opaque as the wings of the bird.

But as with all good repetitions, it involves a progression. We trade a “C” for a “K”. Crispin returns from the sea as Krispin, an imperceptible and apocryphal transition. The sea in Eric Pankey’s newest collection is the palimpsest canvas of the world, where bees invade a lion’s carcass, Buddha statutes are formed from ash of Junta sticks, “mountains wear down to silt. / The silt sifts into dunes. / Things move around—A snowdrift’s grammar.”

With these objects in tow, Pankey writes a meditation on the fringes of the material world where the divine effaces the poet at his work. The collection is richly allusory, with the opening poem describing a collapsing Buddha statue made by the artist Zhang Huan. These mystical considerations are accompanied by a poem on Venetian scenery, one on a still-life by Giorgio Morandi, and many others on foxes, crows, flowers, and the worlds they inhabit.

As the speaker interrogates these objects, we are invited to consider themes constant in Pankey’s work: encounters with the divine in the ragged wilds, how art can approach the phenomenal substance of the world in its semi-ordered but inscrutable forms, how the poet claims identity in this perpetual flux.

Each theme involves frustration and disenchantment. The reader is told to strike a rock in the desert, and nothing happens. Tension builds serially. “Rain. Clouds like ravens’ coats. A brawl of water over rock.” Images build upon image, often in fragments. Even when it rains, there is no climax or denouement, just constant flux: “Empty hills. Clouds bank against evening. / Voices in the distance, but no one in sight.”

This is the world the speaker is born into – frayed at the edges and needing stitches. Change abounds – again, mountains wear down to silt – but the transformation one longs for is always deferred to a later hour, a more distant hollow.

This evasiveness – evoking the Desert Fathers and Buddhist traditions – is the major substance of the book, challenging the will of the reader as much as it challenges the will of the speaker. Some poems bear fruit, “Record[ing] the last cache of August daylight / As the dark hollow of the plucked raspberry.”

Others offer chaff and stubble. However, the voice here is consistent, startling, and carries enough authority to keep us turning pages. Pankey is nimble, even virtuoso, with the meditative mode, and his voice is well-established. The tone of Reliquaries, Cenotaph, The Late Romances, and the whole line of Pankey’s prior publications is well-preserved in this volume. It is furthered in fragments and pieced-together poems in this volume, where variety creates a multi-tonal chord of harmony and disharmony.

This facility is seen, in “Fragment,” for example, where we’re shown an

Evening river.
A ladder of fire extinguished one rung at a time:

The yellow of buckthorn berry, burry hatchings on gold leaf.
The tense of pain is the present.

From rivers to ladders of fire, buckthorn, and pain, these lines slide so fluidly from one object to another. In doing so they employ a Hopkins-like alliteration and a renga-like fluidity. I am particularly smug with the ladder of fire image, which equally applies to the river-reflected sun receding – and thereby being extinguished, as it retreats up the river – as to the early-autumnal blaze of the buckthorn berry.

In this way, the topical fluidity builds amalgams to mirror those that Pankey honors in the natural world. In doing so, they create a renga-like continuity of form spread across a patchwork of changing subjects, that is pleasing and productive in this botanical world.

Not all of the poems are so abundant with fruit, but there is a clear reason for that. This book requires a journey through the desert. Deliverance cannot come immediately if it is to be felt completely. As a result, thematic turns arrive later than the hedonistic reader would like them to. Regardless, this is a consummate work.

Consider the speaker’s dilemma in “Ash,” where we are taken to “the threshold of the divine.” The holy white noise of silence transmutes to a songbird’s habitation in a thicket, and the Buddha made of joss sticks stands before us.

With each footfall, ash shifts. The Buddha crumbles
To face it, we efface it with our presence.

And more so, we are effaced by it:

… turn[ing] away as if
Not to see is the same as not being seen.
There was fire, but God was not the fire.

This mutual effacement spans the seventy pages of this book, wherein the divine constantly retreats as the speaker advances, and the speaker grows silent, losing words and identity in the presence of the divine. In that progression, one is stupefied, for the

“blaze [is] so bright it would silhouette one who stood before it.

A blaze so bright
It would hide one who stood behind it.”

The erasure is so total that the speaker must be forgiven for thinking his body is gone. In a grocery store, he knocks “[s]omeone’s … bag from her hands” and is heard in his apology, somehow. Somehow she “[h]ears [his words] and makes sense of them. / (that is, it seems, the miracle: that I am a body, not a ghost;…).” To a writer, that is miracle enough.

We should all be so attuned to that reality, and Pankey calls us to that acknowledgment. The world is real, our bodies too, no matter how ghost-like our thoughts and aspirations may be. In that reality, Pankey also calls us to the crow-work at hand: surveying the wreckage from above, gleaning through the chaff, and piecing together our stories from mere vestiges of the original text.

The Logic of Jarring in Julia Cohen’s I Was Not Born

Julia Cohen’s collection I Was Not Born (Noemi, 2014) lives in the cleft between lyric essay and long-form poem. This at-once fractured and mythic narrative takes as its central drive the something that unfolds between two bodies when one of those bodies is dealing with the impulse of suicide. It is the story of N. and J., who fail, both independently and together. It is also the story of how that story unfolds, for J., our narrator, both confesses and withholds as she copes with the impossible task of telling.

To say more than that about the story in I Was Not Born would be to populate voids that are very intentionally left empty, as we are not offered a comfortable arc with which to see a pair of people uniting or coming apart. Rather, the narrative follows the laws of collage, where juxtaposition is used to illustrate contradiction and echo. For example:

Jar the crab legs. Jar the white stones. Jar the chrysalis but punch holes through the lid. Jar the sparklers into smoke. Jar my cough. Give me back a pulse. Give me back my pile of paper. My clothing, clean hair. I am sitting on the stairwell is sickness, in pale face, in fragile gown, listening to dinner clink below. I drink juice, swallow ten pills at a time. I was taught to fight this body & no one told me how to stop.

The collection—which provides essays that live independently but also collect to craft a body of prose that explores themes as varied as illness, love, selfhood, and art—is bookended with two longer essays in which we are offered therapy transcripts of a discussion between J. and “Dr.” These interviews work to ground the more lyric and exploratory essays in the very concrete reality of dealing with a traumatized partner, ultimately producing a rich tension between aestheticizing the story and recording the ugly facts. The transcripts, which are highly performative in their employment of colloquial speech, live in stark contrast to the intense privacy practiced in the more poetic places, and calls to mind both the plays of Nelly Sachs—a figure who haunts the book as another woman dealing with a suicidal partner, Paul Celan—and the Socratic dialogue that has become so closely associated with asking questions not necessarily in service of finding answers.

This toggling between moments of grounding realism (“N. introduces me to H.D. & Deleuze, to riding a bike as an adult, to multiple orgasms, to broccoli rabe sandwiches & homemade sauerkraut”) and ontological questions about self and art (“What is a minor person?” “Do I live the way I read?”), suggest that the book adopts the narrative logic of the verb jar. Here jar has two, perhaps contradictory, meanings: to withhold and contain inside a closed space, and also to rupture the familiar through surprise. In this way, we read “if you have patience, jar it” both ways: keep your patience confined and also disrupt it. This is how the book itself jars; it is an attempt to collect and enclose the violent circumstances of living with a suicidal partner through recording and it is also a celebration of the refreshing possibilities of art that embraces instability and dis-ease.

As our narrator says, “Sickness takes a certain kind of patience.” Later she provides an example of the wait:

Who can pay attention the longest? So many songs come from the shower. Laminate leaves or clean out the drain, the grapes, the fury of its avenging families. Flies cling to memory like a cenotaph. Say aaaaah. Say ache.

What is revealed in this short excerpt is the rich possibility that resonates in that twilight space between sentences. A prose artist might desire to close this cavity, to permit bridges to surface where the gaps loom distant. But a poet working in prose here offers few bridges, requesting instead we jump and in jumping, risk. Or, to provide a metaphor more appropriate to Cohen’s uptake, the space between the sentences act like split skin, where the reader’s work is to suture the flesh of the story together. And this is how the book embraces a beautiful array of paradoxes; it is a narrative that offers somehow both a rough scaffolding and an empty casing, the bone frame and loose skin. Here the reader becomes not an audience for but an agent in the making of meaning, for those authorities on disorder in the body—doctors—repeatedly fold. “Say aaaaah,” our speaker demands, in effect requesting we open our mouth in service of the story. “Say ache,” our speaker demands. The book is both literally speaking the word “ache” (ten of its twenty-one parts are titled “The Ache The Ache”) but also—perhaps more so—the book itself is, like heartache or headache, literally suffering from sayache, or the pain that escorts the work of telling.

This ache-in-saying is made most clear in what I might argue is the book’s central conundrum; this is, How do we narrate the story of a human’s desire to end his own life? Or, perhaps more accurately: how do we narrate the story of beholding a human’s desire to end his own life, a human whom we happen to love? How do we narrate the attempt? Not incidentally, of course, the word “essay” comes from the Latin for “to try.” It might be that the only form willing to take on such a grave task is the essay.

If I Was Not Born is an object study in the art of jarring, it succeeds; not only does the book serve as a vessel for the haunted reality of locating the place where the self ends, but it is also an encounter with the suddenness of the unexpected. There is a poignant tension at work here between loitering in the present, arrested by the poem, and moving ever-forward through time, propelled by the story. The paradox performed by at-once feeling suspended and feeling compelled to advance is one at the center of perhaps our most complex human emotion: grief. Here Cohen performs grief to its exhaustion, and we, in reading, participate in “the ache the ache,” both riveted and troubled in the healthiest way.

“How to prolong the lyric moment?” Carole Maso asks in her essay, “Notes of a Lyric Artist Working in Prose.” The answer is Julia Cohen’s I Was Not Born.