Poetry With Bite, Rohan Chhetri’s Starkly Honest Collection: Lost, Hurt, or In Transit Beautiful

This is the work of a serious poet, let that be said from the start, and a seriously good poet at that. Skilled in the art, certainly, with a feel for structure and pace, but more than that he is a poet with an absorbing story to tell, and the means to tell it in an honest and forthright way. You’ll find no whimsical reflections here, or first-world obsessions escalated to tragedy; rather, you will come across the real thing: poetry alive with originality and striking images; poetry with bite. 

A Nepali-Indian writer now resident in the US, Rohan Chhetri’s work is weighted with place and tradition. A chaotic world of violence and hardship, superstition and familial love is introduced graphically in the first few lines of the opening poem, and continues throughout with legend and hard reality effectively combined to illustrate day to day existence in environments of conflict and poverty. We very soon encounter a shaman arriving in a village blowing a trumpet made from a suicide’s hollow shinbone—music robbed from the grave; people making love as electrocuted crows smoke above power lines; a relative waterboarded and force-fed earth “until it plugs his windpipe”. These are just a taste of what to expect from a series of almost matter of fact, though expertly drawn, depictions of a world a million miles from the West’s perceived ideas of injustice or privation.

Chhetri’s skill is evident in the various poetic forms he adopts; some conventional, others more esoteric, but each successful in conveying his ideas. Actually, Ideas is perhaps the wrong word, because what really drives the poetry is memory: memory translated, shaped and re-imagined, presented as a kind of mythical autobiography. In the wonderfully descriptive “BORDERSONG” for example, we learn of a boyhood home downwind of a mosque, a temple, a grimy brothel; downwind of the severed heads of Liberation Front leaders hung from the branch of a guava tree; downwind of a peaceful kingdom’s border. We hear of a doomed affair in New Delhi, and the author’s fear of running into his lover again in this vast city, which becomes too small for two; and we are told, in a beautiful but deeply sad poem, of his meeting an old school friend, not seen for many years, outside a monastery in Phuentsholing. Sebastian, sitting red-eyed on a cold stone bench, is a declining ghost of the boy he once knew, where just looking into his face:

“…was a vertiginous drop down
the cool dark of an abandoned well, & him
a thin shade at the bottom among the bones.”

It is a touching piece, adeptly handled.

His memory is used to good effect in a particularly fine poem, “THE INDIAN RAILWAY CANTICLE”, which colourfully brings to life a three-day journey home he experienced as a boy. Rattling through a land blighted by drought, religion, fratricide…, with “the sun bearing down infernal since dawn, breathing fissures into the earth”, he writes of a farmer’s suicide, of avoiding the unwanted attention of hijras and witnessing an unpleasant incident at a station. There are hucksters, lepers, “language changing every hundred kilometres” and all the clamour and stench of a crowded train, relieved momentarily by “fragrant mist rising off harvest hay in the morning”. Reading this short poem, you might feel you get a better idea of the country than any amount of travel guides could ever tell you.

There is a rather nice lyrical interlude which tempers, like a cooling draught, the heat and harsh realism of the preceding in “FISH CROSS THE BORDER IN RAIN”. It sees Chhetri and his father going down to the river on an old scooter, with the elder singing because “the breeze makes him young in the face.” They watch on as men with lead batteries tied around their necks wade chest high into the water to stun the fish and scoop them, belly up, into nets, only for them to:

“wake older dreaming brief new lives huddled
in a foreign prison gasping at each other’s
gills blinded like a sack of mirrors”

Surely that simile is unimprovable.

If one or two of the references in this shortish collection seem a little bewildering to the average reader, (and I’m thinking here predominantly of the details of political unrest in the state of West Bengal) then this is more than made up for by the absolute transparency of the sense, the feeling inherent in any particular piece. I might have said senses, because you could almost have been present at the scenes portrayed, taking in the very air of the village, the city, the countryside, such is the descriptive power employed. This is a poet at the top of his game: inventive and candid, assured but not showy, expressive without resorting to the lazy, the easy choice of word that comes unthinkingly to mind. These qualities are never more apparent than in the quietly provoking “TOWARDS SOME DARK”. It begins:

“They came at dawn, three angels
in jumpsuits, & felled the two ash trees
in front of the neighbour’s house”

and goes on to describe how a patch of blue suddenly released gives rise to the thought that this is how we arrive at clarity—“through some clearing of the living.” The idea brings to mind memories of his grandfather dying:

“…pleading through
the final hours to please pull the fucking shroud
off his head. It was the yellow mosquito

net hung low above the bed
where he lay hallucinating, furious
we were trying to ease him towards some dark.”

And with the trees gone, the wind “flits on our porch like a young unremembered thing”; but “it has lost something, & doesn’t know it, sniffing about the heavy stink of sawdust & brine”

“…like it has stepped on so much blood
drying small wounds.”

There’s something about this piece which is really quite affecting in the way its imagery and sentiment come back, entirely unbidden, again and again. It’s a quality born essentially of truthfulness.

I had thought to open this critique with a detailed appreciation of a remarkable poem which struck me on first reading, and even more so on subsequent visits, as one of the finest I have reviewed for quite some time. “LAMENTATION FOR A FAILED REVOLUTION” is a bitter account of a “long summer of bullets” punctuated by episodes of such brutality, such shocking wantonness, as to be barely credible. I was tempted to quote freely from the text, but random lines would be quite inadequate to convey the bleakness of the whole. I will content myself merely with the following, a summing-up perhaps, or judgement on that unhappy period: “Every failed revolution is a child / learning the edge of himself / every revolution is a child / grown before fire”; and urge you to read this poem in full to appreciate the desolation within the piece, and the mastery with which it is related.

Lost, Hurt, or in Transit Beautiful is a grown-up collection; a considered, a philosophical evocation of a culture and a history little known outside of its borders. It is an engrossing, if often troubling picture deserving of the widest audience.

The Gavel’s Impact: On Wayne Miller’s We the Jury

This fifth book of poetry by Wayne Miller, a catalog and career spent making deceptively small observations and connecting the personal to the broad inertias of history, is not a volume that pretends to have answers. It does not propose an argument. It merely presents what is with an atmosphere of calm acceptance. Acceptance, of course, does not constitute agreement, and the poems in We the Jury embody critiques of human violence and American violence and how those relate to the slow violence of our dystopian present. At times, Miller pilots a morbid curiosity of biology, the distinction between “dying” and “dead.” The author juxtaposes this wider, more abstract philosophizing with more intimate fare: observations of personal loss, familial failures, images of renewal in the form of curious and needy children. Miller does not use this latter to dilute his book with something so misleading as hope. Rather, these poems unfold with the same sense of acceptance and acknowledgment as the rest of We the Jury: just as there has been a past, there will be a future. Together, these not-disparate elements showcase the current state of American humanity, a decrepit decadence that we share responsibility for even as it affects us. Despite the book’s ambitious scope, its language grounds the reader, rendering the poems and their big ideas relatable, accessible, in some cases indicting visitors to the page.

The book’s short, direct sentences work well to carry the heaviness of their meaning. With most poems made of short lines and broken into short free verse stanzas of varying length, these statements are given room to breathe, letting the collection become driven by atmosphere and implication. The author does not often have his poems deliver explicit judgment on their own, but their observations and presentation lead the reader to an intended conclusion—Miller positions his lens, and we see ourselves, from a handprint on a fogged window to contemplations of how the present will manifest as future history. The book is broken into four unnamed eight-poem sections (plus a cold open), and many of the poems are themselves sectioned, but the resulting effect is less about symbolizing ideas of division than about letting the poems’ straightforward observations and phrasing resonate into the blankness. Silence is a sonic tool, and white space has visual meaning, and Miller leverages these skillfully and confidently, directing readers’ attention to the spare yet self-assured language of his work.

We the Jury is a book best enjoyed in a single, reflective sitting—and surely repeat visits later on—from the collection’s opening pair of lines, which baldly couples capitalism and death, the author is, poem by poem, section by section, compiling new and recurring fascinations, directing attentions to unexplicated juxtapositions, delivered through profound and simple formulations. Though the focus and momentary topic are constantly shifting, the pace of the collection never feels rushed, thanks to the arrangement of lines and blankness, and the book achieves a unified, cumulative effect: no matter how we perceive them, the elements throughout this book are not unconnected. This is not a book about separation—IVF and rain and racism are all things that exist alongside one another.

In “Stages on a Journey Westward,” Miller reaches a contender for the core of the book: “Here in America / we are engines // drowning out what lies / beyond our interiors.” He quickly follows this section with an anecdote about a child defecating in a hotel pool. The attention given to intimate family moments, and the attention given to any subject that appears, shows that while individual things may capture our physical brains for a short time—often out of physical necessity—that doesn’t mean the rest of the world stops moving. This accumulation, “the weight of our entire existence”, comes to a head in the collection’s title poem. Just as all these topics exist simultaneously, all of us who live exist simultaneously, and the word “We” on the cover of the book, as well as throughout this poem, points us towards collective accountability. The world weighs on us, and we weigh on the world. In the face of dystopian stagnation wrought by our own humanness, any potential solution must come from the plural.

A Review of Naoko Fujimoto’s Glyph

According to Merriam-Webster, the word “poet” comes from a Greek word meaning “to make.” The poet is a maker. Naoko Fujimoto and her new graphic poetry collection Glyph (Tupelo Press, 2021) fully embody this meaning in a powerful and stunning way. Fujimoto has skillfully combined two art forms (word poetry and visual art) to create a third: graphic poetry. In Glyph’s introduction, Fujimoto describes graphic poetry as “trans. sensory,” meaning word poetry that has been translated into words and images, which invites and encourages the reader/viewer to transport the senses into a fuller experience.

In an interview on Poetry Today (a City of Highland Park PEG Access TV program), I learned that Fujimoto’s graphic poems begin as fully-formed, well-crafted word poems. She then goes through a process whereby she decides which words to remove and represent graphically. The title Glyph, meaning a non-verbal symbol, is apropos. The original word poems were not included in the book, because they are not of the form Fujimoto wanted to highlight in this collection. However, those who are intrigued by her translation process may want to google some of the titles to read the original word poems.

In Glyph, Fujimoto has assembled forty-five graphic poems. They are all strikingly different in subject matter and design, and each one is a mixed media feast for the eyes and mind: cutouts of various materials, original drawings, paint, pastel, ink, and words written by hand. Each layout is uniquely organized, designed with plenty of freedom.

One of my favorite poems in the collection is “Enough is Never.” I googled the original text of the poem (published in RHINO 2017) out of curiosity. There are only two lines from the original fifteen-line poem that appear in words: “I will take the trash out….” and “…enough is never enough.” The other lines have been translated into images, and here’s where it gets really fascinating. It’s not just an image-for-word translation but also an expansion of imagination that takes place in the process. The second and third stanzas of the word poem read as follows:

Our hearts, like rhubarbs,
liquidate in a garbage disposal.

Magpies bring pieces from the glass company
adding more stones to the riverbank.

Yes, there is a red-orange heart (organ) anchoring the upper left of the page with two large blood vessels resembling plant branches (presumably rhubarb stalks). But Fujimoto introduces a large pair of scissors not found in the word poem to cut the stalks, spilling blood and water to the bottom of the page. This liquid also represents the river implied in the second line of the word poem’s third stanza, as there are pieces of glass and stones filling the heart and draining out of the vessels.

The last two stanzas of the word poem as published in RHINO read:

We hear her lively laugh—
a neighborhood girl raises her sunglasses

with freckles on her clavicles,
her white dress flares.

At the bottom of the page in Glyph, there’s a female figure who raises a wine glass to catch the falling liquid. The freckles are on her white dress. Although there is room for interpretation in word poetry, this expands in graphic poetry where the specificity of words is reduced.

With expanded imagination and opportunity for interpretation, there’s a mysterious richness in each poem. The reader/viewer can find something new to consider every time they go back. One may never fully uncover all the significances constructed into the poems, since many of the choices in selecting materials and images are personal to Fujimoto. For instance, she reveals in the Afterward that paper from Matsukado Stationery Store in Takayama was used in “Grandfather’s Left Eye.” She says, “Since I was a young girl, my grandfather used to buy me origami and washi papers from that store.” I suspect there were many untold decisions like that made in other poems.

The full-color production of the book is beautiful, and because it’s at a magazine-size of 8.5” x 11,” the words are readable and the mixed media details are clearly discernible. Whether or not you have ever entered the world of the graphic poem, Naoko Fujimoto’s Glyph is an essential addition to your poetry collection.

Poker After Funeral: A Poem by Hayden Bergman

Grandma flicked a deck of fifty-two
from a Shreveport casino past her
thumb, mimicking the noises in the dark.
All day we worked deep-sixing grandpa,
and now the day was gone,
so we sat in the dark
to play a game of five-card,
hoping that his soul was somewhere else, not stuck
inside the shallow box of lacquered cedar.
Uncle cut the deck and grandma dealt,
growling deuces wild as she snapped
her wrist. The bet went to my uncle,
check then to my second cousin, check.
And then it came to me check. Grandma’s
eyebrows lifted from her eyes. Three
dollars she said and pushed twelve quarters
to the center of the table. The bet
went to my uncle fold then to my second
cousin fold and then to me, call. I threw
three ones on the table. The family
and lookers-on raised their heads and voices.
Grandpa would have been howling
to her right, you ain’t got nothin’!
so I told her, you ain’t got nothin’.
We both drew another card, hoping
we would dig up luck, some glossy gift
buried face down in the deck. Neither
of us did. We played the cards that we were dealt.
Cards to chest she said, you first and so
I slapped mine on the table: triple aces.
Grandpa would have told her, give up
while you can — but I didn’t say that.
She laughed, exhaled, and showed her hand:
full house: three tens, one king, a wild deuce to pair.
She leaned forward, pulled the pot to her side
of the table. She threw her arms around the cash
and change, and straightened up her back.

---

Author’s Note: This poem was published in 2019 in Gravel Magazine — I can’t find their website anywhere on the web, either through their old URL or some new one — a casualty of COVID, I guess, the fate of many of our favorite magazines. I remember being so grateful for this publication, not in the least because a fellow wrote a sweet note to me about the poem — also, much of my first (and forthcoming) manuscript is informed by the narrative present in this poem.

Here and Away: A Review of Music for Exile by Nehassaiu deGannes

Nehassaiu deGannes is the author of two previous chapbooks: Percussion, Salt & Honey, published in 2001 (which won her the Philbrick Poetry Award for New England Poets) and Undressing the River from 2011, winner of the Center for Book Arts Poetry Chapbook Competition. Chapbooks, of course, given their limited print runs & circulation most typically among fellow poets or people in academia . . . don't usually arouse very much interest from the mass-market of more casual/occasional poetry readers; even if they have garnered many prestigious literary accolades. So it is then that Music for Exile now warrants the designation of being deGannes' first real official full-length poetry collection: a kind of new beginning or proverbial opening-up to a wider potential audience. As a poet who is primarily also a well-known actor and overall theater-person, deGannes is able to cultivate a certain ironic distance from the notion of big Poetry with a capital "P" while also keeping the poems formally inventive, personal and also political (the latter is a rather loaded modifier here) all at the same time.

The "exile" of the title provides the first hint as to deGannes' unflinching exploration of the idea that in fact the personal is always political. Her experience of her own life is like a fragment broken off from the larger structure of the history of countless others she feels herself corresponding with in a number of ways . . . sometimes literally in epistolary forms, or sometimes as with the imagistic poem "Bessie's Hymn" it is more abstractly in terms of music and allegory: 

The door, I’ve been
shouldering

is ajar—a spoon of light, a threshold
of honey—

a cataract, a riot, a trumpet

Whether or not we recognize some of the characters/proper nouns in these poems as historical figures or they're names we've heard in the news before—or they may be people from deGannes' actual life or dreams she recorded—depends largely on where we are coming from as readers. There are no footnotes, but when deGannes summons a headline and/or piece of newsprint from the San Jose Mercury News about an unarmed man being brutally shot by police, this particular act & art of appropriation feels as organic as when the poet pulls any of her other and perhaps more traditional or to-be-expected poetic tools out from her toolbox to build something on the page that we can wander through. The headlines and the newspeak, if you will, cut harder and faster than your average lyric . . . suddenly the reader is kicked off the dreamy Parnassian fantasy cloud of poetry and thrust back into the present real-life political and overall social reality we are all slogging through today. Something about the all caps, too, girds the sense of outrage at the horror, obscenity, inhumanity and senselessness of racist violence. Also inhuman is the stock-ticker like stream of the enjambement and the strange indifferent details, the rather ornamental word choice ("erstwhile"?) which I guess we can assume was made by some journalistic underling:

AND FOUR HOURS LATER, AFTER OF-
FICER BRUCE UNGER PUMPED THREE
OR FOUR BULLETS INTO THE ERSTWHILE
FOOTBALL STAR AS HE RAN TOWARD
HIM, IT WAS CLEAR THAT SOMETHING
WAS CLOSING ON ROGERS FAST.
San Jose Mercury News

This appropriation causes a certain interesting rupture amid the poem-space of the page, it is basically collage, one of the oldest Modernist tricks in the book . . . yet here it suggests that poetry can be in fact located within a real-life political project for social justice, that the poet is bringing these perhaps all-too-soon forgotten injustices to light so that we may finally, fully remember, understand and ideally work together to prevent them from ever re-occurring. It is the poets' prerogative to find a way to do this without, perhaps, being too literal in any case . . . preferring the free play of language as melody, rhythm and image, inflecting it with personal experience while also demonstrating an assiduous knowledge of objective history. Sometimes the poems address the author's family or close friends or deceased relatives, and the writing is rather idiosyncratic while also being accessible and swift . . . somewhat colloquial at the threshold of attention where we first begin to see the poems unfolding before us.

Another interesting spatial event that happens right away in this collection is a kind of stylistic pre-empting of the traditional order of the book. A four-page poem "Letter for Khadejha" begins the book immediately after a quote from Kamau Brathwaite in the book's front-matter ("to be blown into fragments. your flesh / like the islands that you loved") and this is even before the official beginning of the collection: the table of contents and the rest of the sequence of the poems that make up the bulk of the collection occur only after this first poem grabs our attention. It's a compelling gesture, call it an overture if you like, or some kind of sneak-attack that defies or expectations:

Letter for Khadejha

Hummingbird    servant of hybrid Light
and of Asé   to the

twelve tribes which are scattered
abroad  Greetings

Caught your exhibit at the AGO this August
Entering the Millennium   Didn’t even know
you were there in the room at the end
of the corridor of British painters a few Henry
Moores   Picasso and some African masks

DeGannes starts things off with a sense of the everyday, and a degree of casualness, waving hello to her audience, with an almost-list poem that brings to mind any number of antique Modernist/Postmodernist styles, with some name-dropping of famous painters and a recalling of a stroll through a museum, nicely parallel the reader's stroll through this poetry, which can resemble a kind of museum. This idea would seem to go hand-in-hand, perhaps, with the idea of exile, or even of language: how an object could be in exile from it's origin, like language could be positively exiled, somehow, from it's original use or context, as it may be used anew to make more meaning in a new context, like that of poetry. The term exile develops a definite two-or-more-fold meaning here . . . being a poet may be a kind of automatic exile from mainstream culture, or even what we could even call the basic social contract. Exile could also just mean the act of leaving home, whether by choice or because of circumstances, putting everything suddenly behind you, or  the act of going elsewhere, anywhere beyond . . . growing up, moving on; some of this could be self-imposed in certain cases. The term may even resonate with us all as we find ourselves more and more exiled from our own reality . . . or what could be called a shared civic or political reality.

And while this book does in some parts enact an inevitably politicized expression of the author's real-life identity—there is no getting away from this really, ever, for anyone writing, especially these days—Music for Exile accomplishes it with much more grace and, as a book of course, without relying on or at all referencing social media. Ironically and unfortunately, it would seem that the tacit marginal utility of that particular style of poetry (which is not deGannes') is how it offers for the potential reader a comfortable proxy for any real-life political action; like the kind that might have even prevented the 45th President from ever getting elected in the first place. Instead, as New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino wrote in her 2019 debut book Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion, on the surface we may think we're getting a more visible, tangible brand of "diversity" in any number of realms, like poetry online, in at least an aesthetic and/or pseudo-cultural sense . . . as one novel form of representation; though it is not in itself a step towards greater political representation for anyone. Given the distorted social dynamics of the internet & social media algorithms . . . how people get stuck in their echo-chambers, etcetera . . . this all comes usually at the expense of any greater IRL solidarity: " . . . solidarity [becomes] a matter of identity rather than politics or morality . . . the most mainstream gestures of solidarity are pure representation [ . . . ] and meanwhile the actual mechanisms through which political solidarity is enacted, like strikes and boycotts, still exist on the fringe." Poets end up helping social media tech giants (largely run by white men) become more and more influential throughout politics, and we the writers and readers become only further trapped, as Tolentino describes . . ." at the intersection of capitalism and patriarchy . . . " because in the end, all we each may really care about at the end of the day is individual success, right? It's a pretty bleak portrait of human nature. In regards to the #MeToo movement, for instance, Tolentino questions the function of the hashtag, noting how it seems to erase the variety of women's experience. It is actually the difference between women's stories that matter: " . . . the factors that allow some to survive, and force others under—that illuminate the vectors that lead to a better world."

DeGannes may in her own way understand the problems of poetry better than anyone. A poem cannot, for example, get on a bus to travel to picket in a far-off state where people's voting rights are in jeopardy, nor can it repatriate stolen artifacts back from a museum which was probably bankrolled largely thanks to colonial violence. Poets are not politicians; politicians don't care about poetry. And the poets politicians hire sometimes are just there to trick us into thinking otherwise,  to model poetry as some sort of alternative leisure lifestyle that goes well with say, a bunch of other & more expensive consumer products we should really be buying more of to help the economy, rather than using poetry to awaken new ideas of how to restructure things like the economy . . . who knows? Music for Exile feels free from many of these common contradictions and hypocrisies, delving into the personal and the political. It is rooted in the present while also showcasing a certain recollection of a past that is not quite lost, but does seem to be perpetually in danger of fading fast from our public view, which could be seen as macrocosm for anybody's personal experience or family history. Exile can happen to anyone and often does, it's a state of being that can however be well-suited to poets, just like old Dante Alighieri. Similarly, we get the sense of deGannes owning up to the uncertainties she feels in her own life, the idea of a perpetual crossroads, at a fork, figuring out which way through the wood to go, making sense of it all via writing, and as readers we may even be able to read this book and make sense of our own lives in a more humane fashion. We may further learn that we are not alone, or that there is after all something we can do to help others feel less so.

Fields of (Missed) Opportunities: A Review of Shawn Rubenfeld’s The Eggplant Curse and the Warp Zone

In many ways, it’s easy to think of the 1995 film Mr. Holland’s Opus as a feel-good movie. When Glen Holland (played by Richard Dreyfuss) retires as a musician and composer to become a high school music teacher, he’s hopeful that he will spend more quality time with his wife and compose his own symphony. Although over the next 30 years Mr. Holland inspires students to become passionate about music, even when budget cuts threaten the arts program, he never spends the time he thought he’d have on his own work, and after being let go, he’s merely left to conduct his final performance with the help of an auditorium full of ex-pupils. While the ending may appear to put a neat bow on Mr. Holland’s career, what is apparent to the close observer is that he settled for a job that although he was suited for, didn’t measure up to his dreams. In Shawn Rubenfeld’s debut novel The Eggplant Curse and the Warp Zone, Joshua Schulman’s life in many ways follows a similar trajectory to Mr. Holland’s, and when he convinces himself that the sudden opportunity to teach at a prep school a few thousand miles away from New York is the right choice, his goal of collecting the most prestigious retro video games begins to slowly dissolve, and the feelings he develops for a fellow teacher become much more complicated that he expected.

A debate that has arisen within academia lately is the extent to which attaining a PhD is worth pursuing. The job market, especially given the past year and the pandemic, is not necessarily the best for recent graduates, and academia can be a cutthroat world when job candidates are attempting to move into more secure positions. While Joshua recognizes the reality that awaits him, his life during the course of his studies is falling apart: divorce, mother with cancer, father turning exclusively to religion. Inevitably, Joshua loses interest in his own work, which he comes to believe might not have any real-world application and point (his research centers on Yiddish dialectology). When life doesn’t go our way, we all turn to something that helps us cope, and for Joshua it is collecting retro video games, a casual hobby that turns into a passion that turns into an obsession he becomes increasingly good at. Joshua’s pursuit comes with online bidding wars, constant monetary transactions, and gaming conventions, and it is at one of these conventions where he makes the mistake of tripping The Eggplant Wizard, a character from the Kid Icarus series (imagine an anthropomorphized eggplant with one giant eye and a staff). Conventional gaming wisdom says that doing such a thing will lead to a dreaded “curse,” but Joshua’s luck doesn’t seem to change for the worse, at least not initially. In fact, he receives an email shortly after with a job offer to the Fairbury Academy of Roll, in Roll, Iowa, population 1,412. Seeing that there is little left from him in New York, Iowa seems like the best idea, but Joshua quickly discovers that when that landscape becomes barren, and there is not much else to do than refine his online buying skills, the need to connect with something more becomes overwhelming. Enter his coworker Natalie Grey, a married woman with her own interests in higher education.  

This is the classic “boy falls for girl” narrative, but what Rubenfeld does so masterfully is show how sometimes simplicity has the power to sway even the most skeptical of people. Natalie is not remarkable in the traditional sense of the word, but she is honest, witty, and true to herself, and her stability (marriage, job, the desire to learn) represent for Joshua everything his winding days in New York didn’t. She makes Joshua laugh. She pushes him beyond his comfort zone (convincing him to go on a hike), and most importantly, she takes an interest in his video game collection. The irony in all of this, however, is that Natalie is by no means the model of stability, at least not on the surface. While divorce has become quite common in many societies, there are a number of reasons why people still remain in a marriage they deeply want out of, and though there are hints here and there with her conversations with Joshua about wanting to break free from her stasis, it’s evident that Natalie believes that her marriage and her future are set in stone. She recognizes that despite her attention to Joshua—holding hands with him on their hike, rubbing the tension out of his neck, going over to his place to enjoy a few hours of gaming—she can never be with him, and—call it fate, responsibility, obligation—she knows she has to distance herself from whatever it is they can claim they had, which becomes a much clearer task to do when she learns Joshua’s been lying repeatedly.

Part of the stipulation for Joshua’s employment in Iowa was that he continue and complete his PhD. Even though he acknowledged to himself that he was not returning to that path, he indicates, in a state of panic, to Dr. Kirkland (the Head of the School) that he was well on his way to attaining his degree. We all know how one small lie can lead to another, and another, and another, and Joshua’s own experience was no exception. While he knows his lies will eventually catch up with him, he continues lying, even saying to Natalie that his wife (who in the spur of the moment he calls Natalie too) has recently died. Joshua suffers what we all suffer in our lives: he yearns for affection and attention, and because he fears that the real him will not live up to how he thinks others view who he is, he digs his hole even deeper.

The guilt that he begins growing inside him, however, starts to manifest as an old foe, The Eggplant Wizard. He sees the character, in the same custom as at the convention, randomly throughout campus, and these sightings intensify when he fails to receive the coveted game BattleSport from an online buyer. The buyer avoids Joshua’s follow up messages and begins taunting him in online posts. Subsequently, Joshua loses all concentration and even becomes physically unwell. He eventually loses in the game Splat (a game the students and staff at Fairbury Academy participate in and whose objective is to smack your target with a stick when they don’t have their own stick in their hands). In the end, Joshua succumbs fully to his guilt, since he knows that he can no longer pretend to incorporate huge details of his life that are untrue. In confessing everything to Natalie, he understands that he has closed the door to their relationship, and even though he suspects he will continue with his job, he won’t be able to share the joy he finds in it with anyone else.

It’s never revealed who exactly is The Eggplant Wizard was (best bets, however, would lie with Dr. Kirkland), and there might be parts in Rubenfeld’s novel that feel slightly underdeveloped—the teachers-student relationship he has with Tyler, the banter with the other staff members. But even if readers don’t find the answers that we were hoping to find, there is no doubt they will see part of themselves in Joshua Schulman, and just as with Mr. Holland, or any character of that matter who has had their dreams interrupted, you will find yourself rooting for him every step of the way.

Say: A Poem by Jamie O’Halloran

Say it is the furnace clicking,
when the house twips
animal in its walls

Say it is the neighbor
shouting obscenities at his wife;
the epithets, the fence tumbling
honeysuckle you share

Say it is the dog’s nails
needing to be clipped, only you
haven’t a dog

but you listen anyway
to the clatter of dust
coating the hardwood floor

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Author’s Note: My poem “Say” was published in Southern Ocean Review in January 1997. SOR was an online literary magazine out of New Zealand that closed shop (and disappeared from the Web) after its 50th issue in 2009. It was doubly exciting to have my first on-line and international publication in one go. “Say” is one of the only poems I’ve written without punctuation, and since the late ’90s, I use initial caps for all lines. Other than those difference in presentation, my voice is in the sound and imagery of the poem.