Requiem for the Orchard

At what point does a poet discover his voice? For one thing, the question supposes that such a thing as voice exists, when, really, voice is nothing but a snapshot of the moment’s song. For another, little agreement, aesthetically speaking, on what qualities in a voice are admirable can be found across the generations. Yet, Requiem for the Orchard, the third full-length collection from Oliver de la Paz and winner of the 2009 Akron Prize in Poetry as chosen by Martin Espada, sings with full-throated splendor as it harmonizes wit and tenacity. Half-elegy, half lullaby, the book illustrates how memory can be a cracked and hazy lens through which we gaze backward and forward simultaneously, our hearts as flooded with longing as they are with apprehension, and an occasional moment of levity. But it’s not just the music of de la Paz’s poetry that holds our attention; it’s the stuff of these poems, too, that makes them great. Neruda, with his unflinching affinity for everyday objects, the very thing-ness of a thing, would have loved these poems so stuffed from start to finish with corncobs and storehouses, flames and horses, apples and anchors. Identity, metaphor–both themes dominate the book, and each becomes a critical component to the speaker’s struggle to reconcile the past with the present, all while the future and fatherhood beckons. Early on, “Self-Portrait as the Burning Plains of Eastern Oregon” looks back on the disquiet of youth, though the quest is hardly an attempt at reconciliation: "My name is not a fire. My name is not a story of fire. / I’ve got nothing in common with that element, save contempt // for the places of my youth and a hunger for air. Instead, what’s past is past, and cannot be returned to, for better or worse: “[W]hat’s left / ....crumbles to the touch,” the poem concludes. Again and again, the poet returns to his past. “Requiem,” a long poem split into sections, punctuates much of the book--with more question marks than periods. It’s both an elegy and a self-examination. But de la Paz also turns his eye to the future, and necessarily so. “No One Sleeps through the Night” finds the speaker as sleepless as his infant son: "Little no one, peace and go. / I’ll be watching while the sleep gods // lean and cast their shadows here." Later, the poem articulates the oddity of parental affection, how we love so swiftly and completely what we do not know: "Child, you are my moon apple. // My highly prized coin. Your bright eyes / leave blue glance tracks. Who are you?" One of Requiem’s strengths is its structure, too, how de la Paz knits together this book with recurring elements from poem to poem, title to title. The end result is a fitting conclusion. “Self-Portrait with What Remains” fuses it all, and notes how all that’s left of the past is the present where “...my son's outstretched arms / want[sic] nothing more than to be held aloft.” And it’s that very gesture, of holding aloft an ordinary life with a newly found sense of pleasure and responsibility, that define this book and make it something worth reading, and reading again.

A Million in Prizes

In some ways, Carl Phillips' selection of Justin Marks' A Million in Prizes as the winner of the 2009 New Issues Poetry Prize is a surprise, and not because the poems disappoint. Taken as a whole, the book reads more like three distinct chapbooks rather than a cohesive utterance. In fact, the book's structure mimics this: split into three parts--one part poems, one part long poem, one part prose poems. The best of these sections is, by far, the last. Marks' prose poems are both wonderful and strange; and they're also comic and tragic at times, often to the point that his voice makes it difficult to distinguish between the two. One paragraph of "The Detonator Always Has a Red Button" is particularly emblematic: "What's most important to me now is water, my complexion, and urinating. In bed last night, I kept my genitals to myself." Clearly, a sense of playfulness and mild nonsense characterizes these lines. But it's difficult to know how, exactly, we're meant to interpret that last sentence, which is precisely what makes it so great. Yet, the line also resonates. After we're done laughing, we wonder what emotional register resides beneath the humor: Desperation? Loneliness? Other poems contemplate the dilemma of interpretation itself. "Last Year's Model" is a poem more about the tremulous relationship we, as humans, have with language and less about being outdated: "I have this idea, but then I have to make the language. Which is more a reflection of the spirit of the market than anything else. On the palms of my hands are the words, Love me." And that's what makes Marks' poems, when they're good, really good--his ability to make the comic something worth returning to, and not because it's a veil for the truth, but because it's the truth itself. Thus, he asks questions many of us have long been asking ourselves, in quiet moments: "All I can say is, Where have I been my whole life?" Only he does this loudly. With laughter and unease in the background. Maybe a cocktail in hand. And some music overheard in the parking lot. If only these moments occurred with greater frequency. They will: This is, after all, a first book.

Await Your Reply

Part thriller, part cultural commentary, total literary breakthrough, Dan Chaon’s Await Your Reply is a book you’ll have a difficult time putting down, even after you’re done reading. In fact, you might read it all again before it even finds its way to the bookshelf. I did. The plot weaves together three storylines. In one, a recent high school graduate and her former history teacher turned boyfriend flee their small-town Ohio life to run away together. You get the idea that they’re on the lam, but from what or from whom? It’s a question only one of them can answer, but it’s also a question the other is hesitant and ill-equipped to ask, perhaps until it’s too late. A second story follows one brother, Miles Cheshire, as he continues his desperate and futile chase of the other, Hayden, a man as troubled as he is troubling, which has little to do with Hayden's perceived schizophrenia and more to do with his unswerving penchant for swindling the wrong people. The brothers might be identical twins, but they are as different as two people can be, and in more ways than one. Finally, a third narrative follows a father-son team of computer-age crooks in rural Michigan as their past identities and present schemes catch up to them, with startling consequences. Their story is more complicated than that, of course, as is the rest of the book and how the narratives relate: Ryan, the son, has purposefully vanished from the only life he's known to be with his father, Jay, a man he was raised to think was his uncle.

In his blurb on the back of the book, novelist and essayist Jonathan Franzen writes, “I’ve been waiting for somebody to write the essential identity-theft novel, and I’m very glad Dan Chaon’s the one to have done it.” Thematically, Chaon meditates on the liquidity of modern identity, in terms of how the essence of who we are, at least according to the world around us, is nothing but data entry and busywork. We are expendable and interchangeable, which is both a good and a bad thing. But Chaon also expresses how this literal truth has become a psychological condition as well, a lens through which we not only view ourselves, but the entire society around us. And Await Your Reply succeeds because of Chaon’s masterful touch. Split into chapters that are split into sections, Chaon constantly dislocates the reader, thereby building suspense. But he also does things less noticeable. Time itself is conflated, and often unaddressed, so that, as a reader, you’re uncertain as to whether what you’re reading is sequential or not when compared to the chapters directly before and after. Metaphorically, that’s a good statement for what it’s like to live in the era that we do, filled as it is with endless white noise and imperceptible digital traffic. As the novel poses its essential question (Just what is the link between these three stories?), the relationships of the characters to each other, and themselves, constantly changes. Thus, as Chaon answers each question, three or four more pop up, each one of greater consequence than the last. Suffice it to say that Chaon answers every single one by the time it’s all said and done. More than a warning against the burgeoning threats of our era, Chaon’s novel poses an age-old existential question: Is it even possible to change who we are? Is anybody truly a dynamic character? Perhaps that's just an invention of novelists. Or, as one of the characters rhetorically reflects near the novel's climax, “What did you call an absence that ceased to become an absence, what do you call a hole that has been filled in?”

Girl Trouble

If you’re a fan of short shorts (No, not those kind of short shorts), Holly Goddard Jones’ debut collection of stories, Girl Trouble, isn’t the book for you. At three hundred plus pages, Jones’ eight stories prefer a longer narrative arc, even in their shortest instances. In terms of style, her narrative voice, whether in first or third person, is nearly one without a quirk, which becomes its own idiosyncratic gesture in today's multi-styled world of fiction. In fact, in a Q-and-A session with her former teacher Nancy Zefaris at the end of the paperback P.S. edition, Jones admits that she “like[s] seriousness and sweep and—to one of [her] professor’s constant aggravation—exposition.”

In a few words, Jones is smooth, serious, heartfelt, not overly intellectualized, and yet not especially descriptive either, with no shock factor in her tone. Which is a good thing, because the subjects of Girl Trouble are sometimes shocking themselves, both in event and character. At their best, the contrast between the soft style of Jones’ narration and the violence of her stories fuels a building and occasionally breathless tension. (Conversely, in the one or two stories where her narrators or protagonists are adolescents, or adults looking back on adolescence, the stories disappoint precisely because this tension is lacking. It’s hard, looking back, to see the trembling immediacy in some coming-of-age moments, however much it may have felt so one at the time.)

Thematically, Jones’ characters are most often introduced to us as they struggle to stay afloat in the wake of larger, disastrous events. All of the stories are set in and around Roma, Kentucky, and its working-class environment. “Good Girl,” the opening story, tells us about Jacob, a widower whose troubled, apathetic son has just been arrested for raping a fifteen-year old girl. Jacob realizes he can’t move forward with his own life, especially with his own newfound relationship, until he completely lets go of his past, including his son. The story’s structure, which tunnels farther into the past as the plot builds, reflects this. And it’s a choice with which Jacob struggles. Is he paralyzed by grief or guilt? Maybe both. In “Parts,” the consequences of a college-age daughter’s brutal murder include the eventual rupture of her parent’s marriage. While the father moves on, remarries, and prepares to become a father again, the mother, who narrates the story, refuses to do so, because harboring the memory of her daughter, Felicia, requires her to. Or so she thinks. Here are her concluding remarks when she speaks of both her husband and her daughter: “…I believed, despite everything, if I gave enough of myself I could have them back again. That wanting it badly enough could make a difference.” Jones is also comic,though: In still another story, “Allegory of a Cave,” a father introduces his son, not only to the adult and surprisingly human version of himself, but also to the larger world around them, by taking him to a strip club one afternoon while the wife and mother goes Christmas shopping.

One of the strengths of Jones’ writing is that she’s willing to shoot for the moon, to embrace the emphatic gesture, to paint a canvas as broad as she can imagine, and to do it her way. First books should always be read with the notion of potential in mind, and there’s a lot of that in Girl Trouble. Perhaps Jones voice is best-suited for a novel. She herself, however, might resist such an idea, and it would be interesting to watch her master the challenges of writing big short stories. Either way, it will be more than noteworthy whatever she does next; it will be something to which we should give our attention.

Too Much Happiness

What can be said about Alice Munro that hasn’t been said already? Even the complaints about the overused Chekhov references have grown as tired as the Chekhov references themselves. Too Much Happiness, Munro’s thirteenth collection of short fiction–if you count Lives of Girls and Women, her novel in stories, among those numbers–doesn’t find Munro covering new ground as a storyteller. It is, though, a return to form. Her previous collection, The View from Castle Rock, was a calculated departure (in style, on one hand, in how it used the facts of Munro’s family and personal history for fictional gain, but also in success, on the other hand, because The View from Castle Rock was an uneven collection, however much it appeased our collective voyeurism.) Around the time of its release, Munro even suggested the book would be her last. On a couple of levels, then, Too Much Happiness is cause for celebration, but not just because it finds Munro revisiting familiar territory, or because it signals Munro’s return to writing. (Most of the stories here, incidentally, were published prior to The View from Castle Rock’s release.). No, the stories themselves are damned good.

Two, in particular, showcase the uncommon gravity of Munro’s world. “Dimension” opens the book. The story explores the aftermath of absolute horror. A young mother whose three children have been murdered by her controlling husband struggles to break her connection to him, even after he’s imprisoned and continues to drift ever farther away and out of touch, physically and psychologically. What is she grieving, exactly? we ask ourselves. Just how enmeshed is she in her own subjective experience? And just when the mother, Doree, seems completely lost, deciding to do away with her only personal connection in the world, her therapist, Mrs. Sands, and just when we begin to think the story is going to drift into utter darkness, a different kind of calamity strikes, out of the blue, only this time it spares her. Almost literally, she learns to breathe again. Normally, Munro’s stories do not ascend to such brilliancy.

Another story, “Wenlock Edge” presents a familiar Munro archetype, the small-town-college-girl’s-abrupt-coming-of-age-in-the-big-city, with an unexpected twist: There’s a seduction without a seduction this time around, a striking scene in which the protagonist ends up at dinner with her roommate’s older, obsessive lover, a man who seems a strangely potent cocktail of reticence and restriction, fetish and feebleness. Needless to say, the protagonist agrees to dine naked while the man, Mr. Purvis, remains completely clothed. And while the two never touch, it’s an experience that alters the reality of every character in the story, including the roommate, Nina, and the protagonist’s cousin, Ernie.

The title story is the real gem of the collection, and also a change of pace. At fifty-plus pages, it’s too difficult to summarize in a few sentences. But it’s a piece of historical fiction that introduces readers to the life of Sophia Kovalevsky, a late-nineteenth-century Russian mathematician, both romantically and professionally, in the days before her death. In that story, and others, Too Much Happiness contains all the narrative fireworks of a typical Munro collection. At times, the book doesn’t feel as cohesive, thematically speaking, as previous collections, like 2004’s Runaway. In fact, one might wonder what Munro even stands to gain by publishing another book. If she succeeds, she only fulfills our expectations, nothing more. If she fails, she dents her own reputation. Well, suffice it to say that, after all the page-turning is over with, everything we think about Munro is still intact, and even strengthened.

American Salvage

If the characters of Bonnie Jo Campbell's American Salvage introduced themselves to you, such a meeting would likely begin with a closed fist rather than a handshake, a headbutt instead of a nod. Curses, grievances, and cheap beer would spray the air, not to mention your Carhartt. Forgive the analogy, but Campbell's second collection of short fiction is making a name for itself, and for its author. A finalist for the National Book Award in the fall, American Salvage was also recently named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

And how else to describe Campbell's characters? Hard luck doesn't cut it; the rural Michiganders of Campbell's universe have, for better or worse (mostly worse), authored their own sometimes miserable fates. Gritty or tenacious won't work either; those terms welcome affinity, embrace, the part of us that roots for the underdog. And in fourteen short stories, Campbell catalogues violence, addiction, abuse, cruelty, tragedy, and cold hard fact (though dedication, too, with sparse, underscored moments of grace), and her characters aren't easy to root for. In "Family Reunion," a teenage girl abused by her uncle refuses to speak. Instead she directs her quiet rage at her surroundings, obsessively hunting (and killing) deer after deer, much to her father's dismay, until she pursues justice less circumspectly. No need to tell you who lives just across the river within sight of Marylou's scope. In "King Cole's American Salvage," a junk yard owner's troubled nephew unwittingly contributes to his uncle's violent demise. It's a fate neither can embrace nor recover from entirely. Each must embody a new self, and do so on the fly. One bears a burden externally, the other internally. And while both men's circumstances have resulted in different scars, as Campbell writes, "...each of their bodies [still] contained a core of platinum."

Needless to say, with Campbell, the hits just keep on coming. Her prose is terse, her sense of place unmistakable. Starkness abounds. If there's a flaw to her work, she sometimes crafts too dense a canvas, in particular in her shorter stories. But such instances are few and far between. And, as readers, we keep hoping for redemption, a true and righteous reversal of her characters' fortunes. But Campbell is nothing if not relentless. Perhaps the book's final story, "Boar Taint," offers our best chance. Jill, a young woman married to an older divorcee, has abandoned suburban life in Ann Arbor, choosing instead to live on a farm. The choice has given her a life whose hardships she was, in part, unprepared for even after preparing for them. On the surface, "Boar Taint" is the story of an errand, as Jill leaves the farm one day to purchase a boar from a bleak and cruelly reticent family who offer Jill an outward representation of her most internalized fears. The ultimate goal of her errand is breeding pigs, though, as a way to both supplement her income and suggest to herself (and her husband) that she's made the right choice with her life, and so she's forced to go through with it. The pig is, to all parties, a metaphor, and, what's worse, Jill knows it. But just when the story looks bleakest, when her errand looks like a lesson in failure, the story (literally) rises from its own grave. If the miracle is a metaphor for Jill's life, it's also a metaphor for American Salvage. And precisely why you should read this book. After all, sometimes the things we think will turn out the worst, and leave us smarting, end up feeling very sweet instead.

The Hurt Locker

To date, the American films depicting the War in Iraq have been a mixed bag at best. Their collective efforts reflect nothing about the military conflict overseas. If anything, they show us the defining characteristic of our culture in the early twenty-first century: the desire to actively contextualize what’s occurring as it occurs, with analysis whose depth remains largely unquestioned by those who gravely depend on it. Perhaps the films have taught us valuable lessons, but it’s hard to recall what those lessons are when the moral to the story depends on the narrative’s conclusion. To put it another way: Hindsight may be 20/20, but do they even make a Blackberry App for that?

Some of the problems of these films, however, have also stemmed from their unwitting dependence on the war movie cliches of our century in a time when we no longer trust such devices as a whole, and for good reason. The Hurt Locker, directed by Kathryn Bigelow, succeeds by largely avoiding these traps. In the space of its 130 minutes, the lines between good and evil blur, but the great fog encasing the War and its origins is not overemphasized, let alone discussed. No larger narrative to the soldier’s purposes issues forth either, no discussion of the mission of the War. In fact, the characters merely exist in the moment, and their only hope is to keep on doing so. In the opening scene, Staff Sergeant Thompson (played by Guy Pearce), the team leader of a United States Army Explosive Ordinance Disposal (EOD) unit, is killed. (The film avoids big name performers, who, if they appear, are almost immediately ushered offstage, which is its own statement about the nature of armed conflict.) The opening scene, then, calls the rest of the movie into question: Anyone can go at anytime. Without warning. Thus, the pace is unrelenting, the adrenaline palpable. Parts of the movie take your breath away. Literally.

On the surface, the film explores the lives of three soldiers as they finish the last months of their tour in an EOD unit in 2004. And, while the film avoids cliches, its characters are familiar archetypes we already know from past war movies. Sergeant JT Sanborn, played by Anthony Mackie, is the dutiful soldier who operates by the book and leads by example, even if he doesn't agree wholeheartedly with what's being done. Blond-haired Specialist Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) embodies each men’s fears and anxieties; in fact, he's a ball of nervous energy you know won't escape the movie without scars, physically and psychologically. And the third character, the centerpiece of the movie, Staff Sergeant William James, played by Jeremy Renner, is a familiar character who remains difficult to classify. He's somewhere between Apocalypse Now's Captain Willard and the man he pursues, Colonel Kurtz. James’ job is to disarm bombs while Sanborn and Eldridge provide both cover and communication. James has disarmed nearly 800 or so bombs in a row with obvious success. Instead of shrinking from conflict, he pursues it, craves it, and, as the film suggests, develops an addiction to facing his own mortality, sometimes to the detriment of the those around him. His character illustrates the notion that the very thing which affords us survival is often that which brings our survival into question in the first place, a fitting metaphor for the War on Terror. Is James crazy, or heroic? Probably both. Probably neither. Some have labeled The Hurt Locker as the defining movie of the War in Iraq. That remains to be seen. Suffice it to say it's a movie we should all watch, at least once, if only to understand what's happening, on a human level, on the other side of the world.

Destruction Myth

For a handful of years, Mathias Svalina has been an important voice in the collective and disjointed chorus of 21th century American poetry--through individually published (and sometimes anthologized) poems with a surrealist bent, and through the publication of chapbooks either individually or collectively written. Now comes his first full-length collection, a handsomely-designed book worthy of celebration, merit, and envy.

On the surface, Destruction Myth feels simple. Consider its title page: forty-four poems called “Creation Myth” followed by one concluding, longer work, “Destruction Myth.” (The vast majority of poems here are prose constructions). In addition, Svalina’s language is monosyllabic, his vocabulary accessible. Yet, simplicity exists on the surface alone. In fact, simplicity ends once you flip past the title page. The book’s opening lines illustrate this, and more:

In the beginning everyone looked like Larry Bird
but everyone did not have the name Larry Bird
& this was confusing. Everyone had a headache.

The response to Svalina’s work, especially lines like these, is laughter, and certainly comedy defines his voice on occasion. (How else do you read lines like, “After the beginning of everything the suicide rate increased dramatically,” or “In the beginning there was a void. A tuba”?) However, somewhere behind the closed doors of these poems a smoke alarm blares, and not because everyone has forgotten to change the batteries. No, in a dark corner of the apartment, maybe a closet we didn’t know existed, a small conflagration burns, fueled by objects and artifacts not usually flammable, and ones we didn’t even know we owned.

To achieve its end, surrealism requires a bevy of rhetorical special effects. Reversal, for example (though, not in the sense of peripeteia), is one of the tricks Svalina uses. In many of this volume’s sometimes comic, sometimes tragic post-post-modern myths, the creation of mankind is a kind of afterthought, as though humanity was born into a world already created, its streets paved, its traffic lights flashing from red to yellow to green. Only, perhaps, its bureaucratic impulses aren’t preemptively churning:

In the beginning there were only streets.
There were streets that led to cliff,
Streets that led to patches of dandelions....

There was, however, no Department of Transportation
& over the millennia the streets dissolved into cracks & weeds.
Eventually the living things arrived....

In other places, nonsense governs, and Svalina’s poems echo, therefore, the world we live in now by strange compliment rather than contrast: “In the beginning there was nothing. But the nothing smelled like bacon. No one could figure out how nothing could: a) have smell & b) smell like bacon.”

I could go on. Beyond the tricks, though, what these poems articulate has more to do with the stories we tell ourselves (how we interpret them, how we let them influence our lives and beliefs) rather than the details of the stories themselves. No reader will read the poems of Destruction Myth literally, or even be tempted to. No reader will confuse the voice of Mathias Svalina for a god. (No reader I know, anyway). Yet, the question this book poses places us before the mirrors of our own existence: If we can’t take these myths literally, how dangerous is it, then, not to treat the mythology of our own life in the same way, especially in terms of our past and how it helps to understand our present while also directing our future? Where, then, do we draw the line? Or, can we? Perhaps, as Svalina himself might suggest, we ought stop drawing the line, because the lines have already been drawn for us. Instead, we ought to start drawing outside of them. As soon as we can. It’s the only way to create a new and lasting mythology