Four Chapbooks
Reviewer: JoSelle Vanderhooft


Yasmine Alwan
Elsewhere
Red Dust
ISBN Number: 9780873760997

          As I’ve said in previous reviews of flash or micro fiction collections, the line between poetry and “short short” stories is as thin as a razor’s edge and frequently pole-vaulted across. And now, I have a textbook example of this crosspollination. Yasmine Alwan’s Elsewhere is a slim chapbook of just eighteen pages and eleven pieces, which stretch across the page like prose, yet flow like poetry; which tell a story with a definitive beginning and end, but which speak purely in images. The result is work that draws from the strengths of both poetry and fiction in the creation of something new.

          Nearly every poem or story (at least in Western literature, the tradition with which I am most familiar) has a protagonist and a narrative structure. While this is also true of the selections in Elsewhere, the speakers in these mostly untitled pieces are nondescript and take a back seat to the action being performed: the act of looking into contemporary society with all of its confusion, cacophony, and isolation. In “Untitled 2,” for example (here reproduced in full), an unknown speaker has an encounter with a colleague from work.

After we had passed through the revolving door, we stood. We waited for each other to speak, aware that we had shared our meeting on time inside the building, having finished our meeting on time in that windowless room, having taken the elevator down and, on the sidewalk, we were now released from our roles at the table. He seemed about to say something, and I stepped closer, stopping to catch the gesture, the expression that would cross his face against and in sync with his words.

          While this prose poem describes a simple interaction, one that many office workers undertake each day, Alwan forces the reader to consider the moment in an entirely different light—one which illuminates the fact that each of us plays different social roles throughout the day, and that the transition between each role is rarely as smooth as we think. In doing this, Alwan lays bare a strange fact of living in the 21st Century: That we are all looking at the world through multiple viewpoints throughout the day—sometimes even simultaneously.

          Alwan spends much of this chapbook exploring other acts of looking, from a speaker’s father who believes that he has seen his long-dead brother at the library (“Untitled 4”) to an awkward conversation between two strangers on New York City’s N Train. In each, she reveals one of the saddest facts about human living in this or any other century: that we are, each of us, profoundly isolated from one another, and frequently directionless even among all of the street signs, cities, and social mores that surround us. As an unknown speaker says in “Untitled 10” (again reproduced in full):

… I had forgotten which direction was north. I came into the room and had forgotten where the bathroom was and, by extension, the name of the street outside the open door which was white with light. This is unusual. Even in a room without windows, I know the direction I face. If I were a cat whose humans moved to another state I would be able to walk back, even if no one knew or fed me…

          The fact that the speaker(s) of these poems go unnamed, ungendered, and dislocated from all but a few basic facts (that s/he or they are in a city, and that city is New York, at least in “Untitled 6”) is similarly important. Unless they are given an explicit reason to think otherwise, readers frequently assume that the speaker of a poem is the poet himself/herself, and that the subject of the poem is therefore autobiographical. But without even a gender for the speaker(s), we are left to guess in Alwan’s untitled poems. Are we listening to a man, woman, or someone of indeterminate gender? Are we listening to Alwan’s thoughts, or those of a made-up person? By keeping a speaker's identity vague, Alwan makes another profound point about contemporary living that only poetry can make so incisively: that identities can be fluid even while experience is similar. For example, I think nearly all working people have had trouble determining their relationships to their colleagues outside of the workplace, and even those who received merit badges in orienteering have found themselves wandering and confused, even among familiar surroundings. By stripping her speakers of identity, Alwan makes them every (wo)men and their experiences every (wo)man’s. Rarely have I encountered a poet who has done something quite like this, or quite so succinctly.

          Alwan’s writing is a perfect example of the qualities that make prose poetry/flash fiction among my favorite things to read: a narrative that tells a story through image and suggestion without sacrificing its structure. Those readers who enjoy the heights to which this form can aspire should definitely pick up Elsewhere.


Kayak Lessons
Eric Greinke
Free Books of Lowell, MI
No ISBN provided

          When I began reading Eric Greinke’s Kayak Lessons, I thought at first that an overworked publisher had mislabeled a small kayaking manual as poetry. As it turns out, this is the beauty of this little book. Indeed, Greinke’s book begins prosaically with instructions for balancing oneself in the small paddleboat (“Balance”) and selecting a durable, safe boat (“How to Choose a Kayak”), and by stressing the importance of bringing proper clothing for the rapids (“The Hoody”). These prose poems are, in a sense, deceptive in their functionality, yet they are necessary ground work for the places Greinke will travel—geographically, metaphorically and spiritually—throughout the chapbook’s twelve following pages.

          By the time the reader turns the page to “Excess Baggage,” for example, she or he may suspect that something more is going on than simple instructions for kayak preparation: "If you really feel the need to bring baggage, put it behind you, where it belongs. If you want to be buoyant, you must travel lightly." And by the time the reader reaches “Shallow Water” (here reproduced in full), the fact that she or he is now in, well, open water becomes apparent as Greinke’s pity, instructive language abruptly bursts into color, light, and dreamy image:

Sliding into a microcosmic world of tiny fish & underwater forests, my kayak is a floating zeppelin that eclipses the sunny beams, a giant’s shadow disturbing the peace. Looking from above, I enter the minnow world briefly, but then the roar of an airplane tears me from my reverie. The pilot looks down on me, then enters a cloud. A tiny turtle swims by, between the sand & the stars.

          From this point on, Greinke leads the reader through poetry that, like the rapids themselves, becomes increasingly wilder and more colorful. A cast of characters, including “bedded fawns,” “prehistoric paddlefish,” and “wild red roses on the river banks,” greet the would-be kayaker in “Spying on Wildlife,” while human detritus forces the kayaker to choose between gliding past or doing clean up duty in “High Water.” The kayaker floats in still pools (“Floating”), shedding “a delusion of destination” before losing his or her sense of “artificial time” in “The Outdoor Time Warp.”

Fishermen, kayakers, hikers & campers know about the outdoor time warp & plan, or don’t plan, accordingly. (Some wear watches to stay in touch, while others prefer to stay in touch by taking them off.)

          Eventually, the kayaker reaches the end of the journey and with it, spiritual insight in the book’s concluding prose poem (“Reaching Your Destination”). Here the poet tells us that everyone who participates in the sport “arrives at a different destination, even when “everyone leaves the river at the same spot.”

          While I always endeavor to refrain from simply summarizing “what happened” in my reviews, in this case I think that an exegesis is necessary; by themselves, Grienke’s prose poems are charming observations about a sport and that sport’s relationship to the journey of life—charming, of course, being used here in the positive sense of the word. But as a group of pieces and arranged in this particular order, they become the river itself, beginning gently at the kayak’s point of entry, building to a climax in white rapids, and falling back to gentleness as the kayaker disembarks and pulls up the boat back in quiet waters. This structure, combined with Greinke’s incisive eye for the river’s beauty and liveliness and a profound, even Transcendental spirituality, make this small book a moving journey for those who undertake it—kayakers or not. Additionally, Greinke’s comparison of a river’s path to the paths that life can take is also deceptive in its simplicity: While his maxims about baggage and staying upright in troubled waters may seem pat, they are offered earnestly and cleverly enough to make them seem not only fresh, but far more complicated than their everyday use has rendered them.

          Naturally, Kayak Lessons will do well in the hands of sportsmen and sportswomen, and in particular those who enjoy boating in all forms. Those who appreciate the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson will also find much to like here.


Love in the Time of Electrons
Ellaraine Lockie
Pudding House
ISBN Number: 1589987918

          For several years now, Pudding House has been one of my favorite poetry presses. Its prices ($10 per chapbook) are more than reasonable, its design aesthetic attractive, warm, and inviting, and the caliber of poets in its chapbook series consistently praiseworthy. Pudding House has continued its dedication to excellence in Love in the Time of Electrons, a chapbook by Western U.S. poet Ellaraine Lockie, whose Blue Ribbons at the County Fair I quite enjoyed (see review in issue 45). But while Blue Ribbons was a compilation of Lockie’s award-winning poetry, her latest collection has a much more focused theme: love in the cyber age, and all its attendant charms and discontents. As someone who met my current partner online and who knows many people who have done the same, I have long been surprised at the dearth of poetry about the internet—and in particular how this relatively new technology has altered our understanding of sex, intimacy, and love. Happily, Lockie has sated my curiosity and given me much to think about.

          Critics often call online dating and relationships false, emotionally immature, and unromantic. The most striking thing about Love in the Time of Electrons is how deftly Lockie disabuses readers of this outdated and, quite honestly, rather sad notion. In “Ann Landers on Love,” for example, she beautifully compares emails, instant messages, and online chatting to the love letters shared between Victorian poets Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, and in “Lines” (here reproduced in full) she shows the ways in which these electronic love letters can often be preferable to the pick-up lines and cliché compliments people hurl at each other offline. Note the amusing pun of the title.

She’s heard them all
You’re the most beautiful woman
I’ve ever met from a male poet
To Can I come over for morning coffee
from a manly neighbor a week after her divorce

To We were made for each other
from her best friend’s husband
To I like older women as the kid
servicing her car leaned into the open window
To You have sensual hands
from a man who didn’t know how to hold them

To The best sex I’ve ever had
from a past lover
To You’re my kind of woman
from a mime on a Madrid sidewalk

None of these lines pulled taut
But when an electronic letter read
We are writing to each other at the same time
Our e-mails brushing across the wires
She knew of course this was the one
That could reel her in

          In poems such as “Long Distance Elixir” (about receiving the strange love token of a male lover’s sweaty t-shirt in the mail), “Marked for Deletion” (on the delight of hoarding romantic voicemails until the machine erases them), and “Star Gazed” (which explores the fantasy that two long-distance lovers are staring up at the same heavenly body), Lockie explores the beauty, excitement, and fantasy of romances carried across wires through simple but nonetheless surprising imagery and an honesty that always makes her poetry a refreshing read. But as anyone who has ever spent a lot of time online can probably attest, the internet is not entirely a balm for the cuts and bruises love delivers. Just as many of the poems in Love in the Time of Electrons explore the downsides to the internet—not, thankfully, the often and shrilly repeated admonition that predators stalk every chat room and message board, watching innocent women’s every move. Rather, Lockie writes about a much more common problem: What happens when the excitement of this wired love cools. In the very same poem, for example, in which she praises emails as the new Victorian love letter, Lockie writes the following:

Words that once again make women wet
and men hard as marble
fill screens with fiction and fantasies
The lure of living in a co-authored novel

is outflanked only by the addiction of flesh
When it begs for a bigger fire
But unlike the Brownings’ marital bliss
Reality oft rains on the flames for the rest of us

If we’re lucky
And Ann Landers is wrong
In the ashes of one another’s words maybe
we’ll find the nonfiction of friendship

          In other poems, Lockie explores how the internet can become a less-than-benign escape for people who are in loveless relationships, or who are just lonely. In “Stuck in the Web,” Lockie darkly reprises “Lines,” twisting the first poem’s subject matter to show how a love for the internet and the Browningesque endearments one can find there can also, well, become a trap.

After a desire draught of months
I’m imagining harvest
and a slow dance to Willie Nelson
When he says There’s a half-price sticker
on the sleeve of your shirt

A clear-day sunshine smile
Crinkles infinity in his eyes
My hog-caller laugh
having little to do with the price of my blouse
bellows over the espresso machine thunder

As a woman carrying coffees walks up
to fence-in her cowboy with a barbed frown
And I go home to roam
the easier electronic open range

          The best thing about Lockie’s more critical poems is that she is not, ultimately, saying that offline relationships are preferable to online relationships, but rather that love in any form is complicated, frustrating, and often heartbreaking. The chapbook closes with the poem “Keeping It Alive,” in which the speaker craves the life of an African lion who lacks a “language for relationship or complexity.”

The pattern is always the same
whether it’s electrons that once flew back
and forth like balls sapped off a racket…
Or the calloused hands of a spouse rubbed smooth
by robot stroke of the same body
Looking for illicit hard labor to work a libido numb.

          Lockie’s newest chapbook is remarkable to me not only for Lockie's honesty and her willingness to confront heartbreak, but also for her honesty and willingness to say that no matter what technological advances we make, human relationships will always vacillate between fantasy and reality, ecstasy and pain, beginning and end. The fact that she can say this at a time when people still believe that the internet is a scary new tool is nothing short of revolutionary. I highly recommend Love in the Time of Electrons to all readers who are interested in poetry about technology (particularly “soft science” poems) and those who like their love poetry sprinkled with a bit of battery acid.


Swallow
Jendi Reiter
Amsterdam Press
ISBN Number: 0982222157
ISBN 13: 9780982222157

          The first thing that strikes the reader about Jendi Reiter’s Swallow is, naturally, the unusual cover illustration, which appears at once to be a multi-eyed cherub (the proper Old Testament kind), a brace of clothespins, a flock of nightmare birds, sewing needles, bent nails, and a heart-shaped crown of thorns. While one may have a difficult time explaining all of this, one need only know that this image by Richard C. Jackson is the best visual realization of the horror, madness, blood, and beauty that infuse Reiter’s work: Like something out of a fever dream, it just makes perfect sense.

          In reading Swallow, I was struck by how much Reiter’s work appears to have been informed by the conventions of horror poetry. Namely, both frequently concern themselves with the strangeness and gradual decay of the body, altered states of mind, and grotesquery. The first of these themes appears prominently in “Body I” (here reproduced in full), which I consider to be one of the chapbook’s finest poems. Here Reiter makes a subtle and powerful statement about the baseness of life and the commonality of death that would seem cliché in the hands of a lesser poet. Yet Reiter’s conversational tone and her suggestive use of repetition and imagery make this poem truly sing.

Here’s the thing about a body:
There’s no one inside.
Here’s the body the body was born in:
In the ground.
Here’s the body that went into the body:
A small sword withdrawn.
Here’s the thing that came out of the body:
The sane bury it.
Here’s the thing that came out of the body:
The mad write with it.
Here’s the thing that covered the body:
Keep washing till it smells like nobody.
Here’s the thing the body needed:
Take it away boys take it way.
Here’s the way it entered the body:
Enough holes to breathe.
Here’s the thing that holds the body:
Pinewood planks for a final ship.
What holds the body becomes the body:
All hands meet underground.

          By not specifically naming many of the things that go into and out of the body, Reiter builds a sense of mystery and, subsequently, a sense of horror. What, for example, is the thing that comes out of the body that sane people bury? Is it excrement, or is it a baby? What is the thing that the body needs? Is it intimacy, drugs, or self-harm? And what, ultimately, is the thing that enters the body with enough holes to breathe? By juxtaposing these descriptors against the poem’s powerful final two lines, Reiter manages to create a sense of horror that is either amplified or calmed (or, given your perspective, perhaps both) by the poem’s end.

          Along with death, Reiter’s poetry focuses on another common human fear: that of contracting a mental illness or, more colloquially, “going mad.” Perhaps because of my own mental health history, this isn’t exactly a trope that I admire about horror. But happily, Reiter is a far too skilled poet to give any convention in this genre a straightforward, easy treatment. In “How to Fail a Personality Test,” for example, Reiter turns this chestnut of a trope on its head by parodying the Rorschach (ink blot) test. While this may seem like an easy target, the clever, punchy answers the speaker in this poem gives to each card make this piece a dynamic, deeply funny read.

I know, it’s not actually an ink blot. There’s no ink on
          it, now, is there?

It’s a photograph of an ink blot. That’s what it signi-
          Fies. “What Derrida might have called the absent
          Present. Or was it the poison Gift?

No, I’ve never been tempted to drink household
          cleansers.

You want me to say that one’s a bat, don’t you? I
          know, I saw it on Wikipedia.

          And, of course, Swallow has its share of monsters. Like many in horror poetry, these are not literal monsters such as werewolves or vampires, but monsters that crawl underneath the skin and into the margins of the psyche. In the elegant “Teratoma,” the speaker describes the vestiges of an unborn twin left behind in her body: “teeth/ and hair, life hungers flexing/ into life through blind/ through no-one.” Puppets, which have also unnerved horror aficionados for generations, also appear in “The Fear of Puppets and the Fear of Beautiful Women,” a poem which is equal parts horror, kitsch, and psychoanalytic criticism:

The fear of puppets
And the fear of beautiful women
Have in common that your tongue is not your own,
Is a hand reaching up through your throat,

Making your plastic eyes roll a hard eight.
You have to look at whatever the hand wants,

And it wants to make them laugh, the beautiful women,
But not the way they’d laugh at a dog,

Which is what you are. You are covered in fur,
The cheap kind, someone decided you should be orange

Like a rug from the decade where everyone was blind
Even the beautiful women…

          Reiter’s chapbook is wonderfully inventive, unsettling, and deeply funny, just like the best horror poetry should be. I highly recommend it to fans of writers such as Marge Simon and Bruce Boston and to all speculative poetry readers who are curious about work not necessarily being published by the genre’s usual magazines and presses.