Hosho McCreesh appeared recently on the Crow Poetry Hour (link to August 13 show) and I had an opportunity to not only hear him read, but also discuss some of his work and views on a few small press topics. You can hear the discussion in the Crow Radio archives, which will be linked additionally on our Audio Page. Back to the eChap: McCreesh’s “Glowing, Smoldering” is a new digital offering by Right Hand Pointing, which has evolved into a pretty cool site featuring great work by a diverse assortment of writers and artists. Some of his photographic images are included as well, and the reader is taken through the poetry collection in steps: you click the pointing hand to proceed, sequentially.

McCreesh begins with the “last meal” before an execution, considering what passes for “mercy”. Do such comforts make the reality of these hours to come any easier, any better? Certainly not. What makes one’s inevitable death palatable? It is, after all, inevitable for all of us. What kind of mercy do we find ourselves pursuing?

It is short, to the point, the reader is then forced to consider the roles: who is doing the hanging, and who partakes of the gratuitous comfort? For what end, on either side? McCreesh won’t give you answers, but he asks a lot of questions in these poems. He zooms out, taking a broad view on humans at large, then he steps back in, close again, moving from clustered “hordes” to individuals:

each / indulging their /  madness in / personal and / specific / ways

Personal and specific? How unique is the madness of a man when you really get down to it? Sure, we want to believe in the novelty of our own suffering, but for the most part a group of people in traffic are hollering about their inability to control a situation, it becomes less about a situation and more about ourselves with each passing moment. It frustrates, it brings out the inner brat like nothing else, indulging in madness-yes. Far too often.

Individuals, collectively, live against the meter, stepping together toward death, “meted out / polite, civil, and / woefully / unobtrusive. Death is the lifespan, extended, broken down into moments, each bringing us closer to the completed expanse, what happens in that expanse is subject to our own notions and for some, spiritual speculations.In the end, like a car stuck in traffic, control is a delusion. You have little to say about the nature of things.

Like all poetry, you take certain things that resonate with you and you neglect other aspects. With McCreesh, I admit to a tendency to fixate on a bit of the philosophical, I tend to go there. That will not be true for everyone, of course.

These are not poems about existential angst, they are not even poems about meaning, at times they are poems about the capacity for meaning and to understand that as a context for our lives, our sense of meaning so often elusive.

Where is happiness in all this? The poet tells us that happiness is found in what remains when we give up on everything- one could say that McCreesh has gone a bit zen here, or more directly, nihilist. Beyond giving up, we have to come to realize that it did not matter much in the first place, giving up is more acknowledging the indifference of the universe to your sense of purpose.

Just as “freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose”, McCreesh has adopted some spiritual reductionism in the pursuit of “a point”. Happiness might not be “meaning”, but if you consider the relationship between stripped down happiness and more hedonistic views on meaning, perhaps what we can come away with here is the sense that in these poems, they are inextricably linked.

Just as the forest hungers for the flame in “Tired Of Rot”, we are driven to proceed through the moments of death “meted”, we have no choice. But the flame can be an enticing way to go- perhaps taking a more hedonistic view adds the excitement of an accelerant.

“Tired Of Rot” stands out, despite being a relatively short poem. The full title is longer than the piece, a “McCreesh Quirk”. For me, one of my favorite poems, not just in this collection, but in general:

And They’ll Ask Us

“Why Fire?”

And we’ll say

“because it’s pure,

because it loves and hates

everything equally,

takes kingdoms and

shanties same,

trades beauty for ash,

because it is fair,

because it is just,”

we’ll say as we hang,

“that is

why

fire.”

Later, he wonders why we don’t just get on with it, dispense with pretending to care about saving the world while doing nothing. Why? Like I said, McCreesh is about questions…he already has his answer, I suspect. And I suspect that his answer is only a word or two longer than a two word title.

Read them, in sequence, in one sitting if you can, at Right Hand Pointing. Then, look up his other stuff: He has art and poetry in print, audio, and online. Chapbooks available from Bottle of Smoke Press, sunnyoutside, Orange Alert Press, and Propaganda Press; broadsides available from 10pt Press.

Link: Hosho McCreesh on Full Of Crow Poetry Hour, August 15.

Pushing verses

Past their limits

R.M. Engelhardt acknowledges that there is a difference between the passive participant and those who live a passion-driven life, but can often be seen in “Versus” wondering if there is a difference in the end. Passion clearly perpetuates the creative  imperative, manifest in poets like Engelhardt as non-negotiable, but to what end? There comes a time in the life of the poet where this question has to be dealt with. It is one thing to accept the terms of “the muse”. It is another to toil in the direction of some outcome, some goal. What, beyond that yielding and succumbing, is the poet desirous of? Fame, significance, appreciation, relevance?

The poet succumbs because he or she must, but it doesn’t end there. The poet is driven to more just as the living are driven to interact in this world beyond survival. We do more than eat and breed and sleep, there is something that pushes us. But why?

In the years that I have been aware of Engelhardt’s work, it is this willingness to examine these concerns head on and in a surprisingly candid manner that I think captures my interest the most in his work, which often gets into the problematic terrain of ego, and the ways that we relate to one another through not only our life’s work but through love and community. He states rather directly in “Versus” that poetry is dead, he comments on the state of popular culture and asks the obvious questions about the poet’s role in it. Why bother, and why persist?

Persistence, I think, is the theme in Engelhardt’s work that prompts people to characterize him as “romantic” as many of the poems convey a sense of pining, portraying people desirous not only of love but of transcendent relationships. “She believes in something unseen”, (8, “Perhaps”) “I’m just sick of passing romances”. (“In Cleopatra’s Eyes”, 9)

In ‘Versus”, we see that relationship between the speakers and both issues: wanting to do more than write, wanting to do have more than a date on a Saturday night. (“toys”, 6, “More than just another dance”, 2) This idea of wanting more, wanting to believe in and have faith in that but at the same time considering one’s observations and wanting to be rational.

Persistence then is challenged by cynicism, both inner and external:

“The time for poets has passed”

“And someone once told me that honest people don’t exist anymore in the 21^st century”

“And someone once told me ‘That love…is dead.”

Do we persist, press on anyway? In “Naïve”,  Engelhardt describes the urge to avoid the trainwreck. In “Truth” we see people opening boxes, digging through metaphorical “boxes” of expectations mingled with mythology. What happens when people confront truth? Some thrive, some perish, some vanish immediately in the sight of their realizations. This brings us back, again and again, to the questions in “Versus”. What are we after? And can we get there?

‘We all grow older/Still trying to find our way/Like children” (“Any Day Now”, 11)

Many poets grapple with a maturing phase not unlike the point around mid-life when one begins to really take stock about where to put energy, what to be concerned with and what to let go of. Some describe it much like finding their way, having gone through what some describe as a period similar to the honeymoon phase of a relationship. There are burdens in the poet’s world, choices about resources and time and energy and in the beginning there can be a sense of eventual payoff that in later years we learn can be quite elusive. There’s no denying that Engelhardt has love for the craft, but he pushes us to consider what that means, and to perhaps distinguish between the love of writing and the expectations. In some instances, the object of love can be easily interchangeable with “the muse” as both are subjects in these poems of that transcendent longing. The love that leaves for the man who promises everything, the “angel” who vanishes, the losses are connected: the poet wants to believe in more, wants to have faith in more, but life can be a series of losses, followed by grief.

Engelhardt closes “Versus” with a shout-out to those who persist, who don’t give up, who keep searching and don’t give in, who stay true to the realm of dreams.

“Michael McAloran sets inner demons to words. He is an artist of sense, a tamer of Muse.” –         Nobius Black.

The Gathered Bones represents the latest collection of poetry by the prolific Michael Mc Aloran in ongoing partnership with Calliope Nerve Media- where Mc Aloran is hardly a stranger.

It opens with the following quote by Georges Bataille: “He who is damned bites at the sky…”

First- why the quote? What does it mean to be damned, to Mc Aloran, and in whose estimation? His sky is the “black vault”, unreachable, unmoving. The existing damned become the leaving damned- and in that process gesture  to a vacuum of quiet, venting words from impotent jaws, emanating from hollow bodies housing damage. The damned, in “The Gathered Bones”, are those who vanish into oblivion in full witness of a seemingly indifferent universe.

Of love

A cadaverous waste

Like shit

Spat at the sky

The unlimbered

Black sky

The density of a

Silent tomb

He describes these states of vanishing, dying, being of the void or approaching it- by bringing us repeatedly back to the body, to the blood and skin and layers of tissue and things corporeal:

“Breath of wasted air”

“Wasted slashed flesh”

“The closed fists of

My flesh”

The flesh is where emotions manifest, at times the object of abuse and at times expressive. The flesh is the interface between living and oblivion, between energy housed and contained within the body and energy snuffed.

McAloran has this way with word economy and density, his lines are quick strokes but in those few words he manages to convey a lot:

“Teeth

Breaking ajar the

Valves of

Nothingness”

And here:

“The wastage of

The bones

Playing their silent

Dead airs”

Over and over, the body rots before the black nothing, or in the sun, the bones “whittled”, the body leaving and the self left decomposing in sight of the “sky vault”:

Upon the

Dark

The gathered bones

Stretched

Raw

Does the body rejoin the blackness of origin? The bones move from their natural configurations to “gathered” and we can’t help but spend some time on this transition and wonder what, or who, Mc Aloran invokes or implicates here. Who renders these states? Nature, design, a creator, what is this drive to give life and in this manner, strip life away from the living?

They become the “gathered bones, dressed in naked amber”, stripped of flesh but bearing the hues that echo that flesh against bones that are now the only remnants, and “the marrow burns”.

Who is implicated, a deity, a creator? “Guillotine of Nothingness/ Cutting the screams/ From the absurd” ? Are we just extinguished, like the snuffed candle? Or is there more to it?

The “absurd”, depending on the literary and historical point of view, are often those who subscribe to the unknowable, to conclusions that are not only a stretch to settle but whose characteristics are unfathomable. To be so certain of the unknowable is therefore “absurd” as is the idea of deriving some higher purpose for the living. If there is a plan, if we have significance- how would we ever become aware of it? There might be more, but we won’t know it- that is a common theme in “absurdist” thought. I don’t know that the poet intends that connection in his choice of words, but there are some parallels in the kinds of questions raised in such work.

I won’t go so far as the say that McAloran was actively pursuing such lines of thinking in this collection of poems- but I do think he is getting into this territory whether he is mindful of any deliberate effort to do so or not. He still makes mention of the nothingness, the black sky, the vague sense that there is a force at work upon this body that is rendered in various states of leaving. Does the body vanish, to the ethers? What becomes of the gathered bones?

We know that there is the distinction between earthly significance, on earth they bear the “earthen kiss of tears” in their burial. (“meat to tear”) But then all is empty.

When McAloran states “I am the impotent flame of absence” the reader again wonders about real absence, “absolute absence” – and what he intends to say here about being truly gone, and is there such a thing? Later, in “Skull”, the vault becomes the skull, again the focus shifts back and forth between death as processed in the intellectual sense and death and questions of significance in the context of our spiritual beliefs. (or lack of) The “salve” and “heavenly smoke” is telling here, salve comforts, salve heals, salve lessens the sting. Is the desire to be more than a flame, snuffed, our salve? Is it our way of dealing with mortality?

To me, these are poems about mortality, they focus on the flesh that falls away to bone but McAloran is expressing a very specific regard for these remains that echo what he seems to see as the corporeal context: the body becomes as dust, shit, existence like spitting at the black sky.

The first time I read “The Gathered Bones”, I found that it was easy to cruise through the pages because of the succinct style of his writing and the brevity of the lines. In that first read, however, I missed many details that when strung together made the collection take on an entirely different meaning. Michael McAloran’s poetry can be read quickly, but I have now learned not to do so and will not underestimate his ability to bring layers of complexity to a relatively simple construction.

Michael McAloran is an editor at Calliope Nerve.

Healing, Optimism, And Polarization: A Collection Of Political Poetry Musings By Jennifer C. Wolfe, published by Blaze VOX Books. Reviewed for Crow Reviews by Lynn Alexander.

Jennifer C. Wolfe has put together a collection of poetry that explores the political mindscape of America on the cusp of the post-Bush age. There’s no doubt that we, in America, had high hopes for change with the election of President Obama- many of us want so badly to see change on so many levels and we have come to recognize that we need a certain kind of inspiring leadership to get there. Even the cynical and disenfranchised by choice share a strong sense that there has to be a change in course because what we have been doing has not been working and is now dangerously unsustainable. Is Obama the change? Who knows. At the time of writing these poems it is certainly too soon to tell.

Hope, optimism, unity…these are difficult ideas to tackle, because the diversity that makes us strong is also the diversity that fosters pluralist animosity that renders reconciliation so elusive. Wolfe aims to touch on the dynamics of competing interests, and the nature of polarization in a society where groups tend to compete before they cooperate on mutual goals and opportunities and where divisive strategies seem to rally citizens and garner support and even rouse the apathetic. Can we heal? Can we come together, find common ground? Is it absurd to hope for change, are we that far gone?

Wolfe opens with a poem about change, via the election of President Obama who ran on the promise of it. It seems hard to imagine the culture of corruption and the status quo being shaken, but perhaps it is the nature of optimism by necessity to want to believe. Wolfe touches on the subjectivity of change and how it is responded to: change is a divisive thing, change is the enemy of people who benefit from the status quo and who need to hold onto their perceptions of the ground they’ve gained. She confronts the strategy of propaganda and the ways any opposition can and will seize on fear to capitalize on the public’s sense of threat: Obama is a socialist, his changes will hurt you, “change is vile”. Change will lead to lines at the doctor’s offices, change will make us Canadian, change will make us soft on crime and let our enemies run free. Change will come along and take your first born!

When we decide not to change, we are making a choice. We are choosing to stay oil dependent, for example. We are choosing to ignore climate change. We are choosing to stay with policies that have failed or behaviors that seem counter to our nation’s identity.

Wolfe addresses that in her second poem “Close Gitmo” where she uses plain direct language to essentially lay out that argument: that Guantanamo Bay does not reflect the “American Way”. She also makes that case for the practice of rendition.

“Close Gitmo and we may open our minds to what America is, what it can be.”(Close Gitmo)

“Let’s render those we classify as our enemy” (Rendition)

In “Polar Ice Caps In America”, (polar also as in polarization, a similar double entendre in “Rush Week” ,college pledges and Rush Limbaugh) Wolfe places much of the blame for the challenges of change on post-election political rivalry, and the subsequent thwarting of efforts along partisan lines regardless of the interests of America. “We are polarized”. Polarized, refusing to meet in the middle.

Ironically, when she gets to “Government Motors”, Wolfe returns to this accusation of socialism and the new era of financial jargon including such concepts as companies being “too big to fail”.

The selective amnesia in America seems to lead us to forget how we got to these places in the first place and under whose leadership. It doesn’t matter who is responsible as there are few mechanisms for accountability anyway.

In many ways, Wolfe’s poetry- from Ann Coulter to Sarah Palin to “cash for clunkers” to lead paint toys reads like a trip down memory lane. Her poems are full of the headlines and buzzwords of recent years and the personalities that everyone talked about- from The Daily Show to Talk Radio, to CNN to the papers. At this point, many on the left are fighting back now armed at last with some talking points of their own- and not a moment too soon. Wolfe is probably pretty happy about that.

Wolfe makes very basic observations, she doesn’t get into theory or get bogged down with the nuances of the issues, she essentially throws out a list of egregious examples of things that need fixing. For a collection of political poems, they are  pretty low key. She doesn’t get radical on the soap box, she comments in the way people across America comment.

“…the food police should first police themselves”

“Health care that is recognizable/Makes consumer confidence sizeable.”

Over the years, much has been made about this notion of political poetry- some love it and some hate it- and I want to get into that here because this collection is an example of what both fans and foes of political poetry are often talking about.

I had no idea that there was venom out there about political poetry until a heated discussion broke out about it a few years ago and I saw how quickly people at the venue took sides. Some thought it to be the poet’s job to speak out, to serve as witness, to lay out the issues using the tools at their disposal: their words.

Being a believer that everything is fodder, I saw no problem there. But a faction soon chimed in that political poetry constitutes a misuse of art, a hijacking of the point to get “all partisan” and worse- to be “one of those preachy poets”. This is a reaction I have encountered since, and it still surprises me. What gives?

Wolfe’s choice to express her political observations poetically is no less valid than writing about trees and creeks. The fact that she has put her energy and gifts in the service of her concerns is something I personally applaud, and would like to think will always have its place.

I wouldn’t say that there is a burden or moral imperative on the writer to do so, but I definitely see the personal as the political, and the political as the poetic. Wolfe, like anyone willing to put their views “out there” in the face of agreement or scrutiny, displays courage with this collection.

Check out Blaze VOX books here.

“Sui Generis” And Other Fictions is a digital collection (e-book) available now from ISMs Press. It contains 23 stories that Lowe identifies as being written while he was living in Japan from 2004 to 2006. The stories have been published in various zines and publications around the web but are now assembled in one place, which really gives the reader a sense of what he has been doing as a writer and how much he departs from “conventional” fiction. I really liked the stories he chose, and I think Lowe is one to keep an eye on.

The collection starts with “Sui Generis”, a dabble into the mad pond of situational parallels and Logic, as it was presented to many of us for the first time in high school Geometry class when our instructors-shifting gears or going crazy-suddenly backed off the shapes to start covering the board with directional arrows followed by or preceded by P’s and Q’s.

We see a character trying to make sense of the unlikely with both logic and probability: what are the odds that all of the bathrooms in a three story building would be undergoing “maintenance” at the same time?  If this condition is true, this other situation cannot be true, and so on…What is real, what is likely? Things don’t make sense, they don’t line up, but the character is disturbingly nonplussed and simply resorts to piecing together his observations in his head despite the fact that they neither add up nor fit. We see this in many of the stories, characters that remain nonchalant in the face of weird occurrences, things that defy “normalcy”.

Welcome then to the odd stories of Marc Lowe, who weaves scenarios and characters into stories only to slice them up and lay them out on a platter so we can get pictures of his groupings before we start to pick.  Some are layered, some disoriented, some straightforward and linear but with their share of twists. He pulls things apart, and puts them back together again in a new sequence, part of the looping strange.

The twists will undoubtedly plunge Lowe into the surrealist fiction column, but don’t be too hasty with the labels as he can hold his own in other columns as well. Lowe does juxtapose fiction with “surrealist” elements (and futuristic synthetic babies and animal jurors) but he does it in a way that brings the format itself into the mix, all aspects are up for grabs. He brings a mature surrealism that thankfully goes past the simple gimmicks of switching out weather men for talking chickens. He gets the entertainment value of doing that, he gets silly and strange -and he is no stranger to either-but Lowe’s work presents with a deeper deliberation.

The difficult thing about discussing a collection, even when all of the stories are by the same author and perhaps even thematically related (these are not, as far as my perception), is that they are unique pieces and the style and execution is not the same for each.

And yet- we don’t want to turn our discussion into a series of micro-review paragraphs. It is for this reason that I wanted to focus on Lowe’s style, while avoiding that kind of a break down.

My personal favorites: “Anchor”, which is just odd and trippy and exactly what I like to read.  It almost becomes hybrid fiction-poetry, which is what my favorite fiction reads like.

“Light And Accomplished”, immediately following, is gory and a bit nasty but you won’t turn away from it.  It was a different read the second time.

“The Skeletal Bus And The Tunnel of Youth” :

“you and your cohorts, riding your skeletal bus, possessing neither wheels nor engine nor driver, encroaching upon me like a cancer while I take the reverse course, my limbs and organs growing younger with each passing second, growing stronger even as you howl and grind your decayed teeth, your hair falling out and leaving a trail of gray threads behind in the stinking pissandshit water below”

“Strange Things”:

“You never listen, she says. I flip an egg. That’s it, I’m leaving, she says. The yolk oozes out, spilling onto the hot Teflon coating inside the pan, hardening instantly like gelatin. It sizzles, seethes. I’m listening, I say, straining my ears. I flip another egg. It sticks to the side of the plastic spatula. From where I stand I can see the empty baseball field. It is cov­ered in damp leaves: damp, silent leaves. No one is there, but a black crow is perched on a rusty metal can on the (left) side of the field. It is eating something. I approach, taking extra care not to startle the bird. The stick is in my hand, drawing me forward like a magnet. I turn to look at the house. It is still there, obscured by grayish mist. The bird blinks its eye. The eye is like a giant black marble staring back at me. I flip an egg. It breaks; the yolk spills out, bubbles, a trail of smoke wafting up from it.”

Marc Lowe’s Biography:

Marc Lowe’s work has appeared in 580 Split, Big Bridge, BlazeVOX, Caketrain, elimae, >kill author, Farrago’s Wainscot, Pindeldyboz, The Salt River Review, Sein und Werden, Storyglossia, and other publications, and is forthcoming in the anthology Quantum Genre on the Planet of Arts (Crossing Chaos Press). His novelette, “Girl with Smear,” was recently published by the online journal Prick of the Spindle.

Having received an MA in Japanese Literature in 2004 and subsequent­ly been a teacher of English in Japan, he is currently pursuing an MFA degree in fiction writing at Brown University in Providence, RI (gradu­ation date: spring 2010). His website’s URL is www.malo23.com. (here)

This e-book is available as a free download from ISMs Press Here.

Low Life is one half of a Tainted Coffee Press “69 Porn Flipbook”, meaning that it is a book with two sides, one Koweski’s and the other inhabited by Melissa Hansen’s “Her Machine”. The 69 porn part is self explanatory. Right?

I never tried to write about porn on this site before. I mean, we’re all about diversity here. I’m not uncomfortable with it, I’m down with the dirty. I guess it just never came up. Really. It just never did.

I can only speak for myself and my  “review” process here at Crow Reviews, and say what I have been saying about the way I approach creative work. I am not interested in- nor am I qualified to produce- a thumb’s up or down critique and also believe that it would be a joyless act to try. I am about looking at a book, exploring a book, expressing what I feel stirred to say about a book. I won’t say what porn stirs, but let’s just throw it out there: porn elicits a response of one kind or another for damn near everyone, some more coy about it than others.

So is that where I start? How do we look at porn? Do we think craft, or do we think hotness factor? Is there some porn rubric out there, some criteria you get in a workshop somewhere with some famous porn writer-turned instructor? Is the goal excitement, escapism, entertainment? I think Koweski would say all of the above and then scoff at the word rubric as being gratuitous. He would probably say in his Clintonese: “You either like it or you don’t, whatever.” I did like it, or I would not have finished it. And I read it in one shot. Does that make me sick?

I think it is about the individual author’s intention.  What is the writer trying to do, or perhaps not do: write well developed fiction or follow some formulaic path to successful smut?  Can a work accomplish both? I think it can, but it doesn’t have to. Koweski never apologizes for his work being what it is. If it gets you hot, bonus. But if not, was it a fun read?

What Koweski accomplishes consistently is that strange balance of humor and smut, juxtaposing sex and weird scenarios and delivering a collection of stories unlike most of what I have seen- which admittedly, doesn’t run the gammet.

But still- I might not be properly schooled (yet) in porn-lit, but I am fairly confident that costumed clown sex is not a mainstay, nor explosively voluminous pubes a staple. He’s interested in more than just the smut angle, which he certainly doesn’t neglect, he also tells a story in between all the skirt chasing antics.

If you know a bit about Koweski’s work, you know that he has a bit of an Amish fixation and he likes his characters to be “all natural”, women with nary a razor or lipstick in the house. He writes about real people, with real flaws and real insecurities and real… genital challenges. His sextagonists aren’t served up as dishy busty blondes- they are store clerks, pregnant but curious, homeless, clowns, clown fetishists… Who the hell knows where he comes up with this stuff but it’s funny as hell and Koweski will make you grin no matter who you are or what turns you on.

And Brian Fugett at Zygote In My Coffee/Tainted Coffee Press deserves props for not only producing porn-lit, but for making a quality book at the right price point. Fugett prices books so people can actually buy them, so the work gets out there- going against the trend of twenty dollar or more commercially printed books that only seem to make a profit for the printers and make the book a tougher sell because of their price tag or complicated distribution. It was simple- ordered, shipped, six bucks. No hassle.

Get it if you can. And with it you get two books in one, so “Low Life” and “Her Machine” will show up at your door. It won’t be in brown paper discreet packaging, but your neighbors won’t know and Fugett won’t tell. Unless you talk trash about him in which case your name and likeness go up on the website.

No. That’s a lie. Your secret enjoyment of clown-on-clown action will be safe.

The Gravedigger, a novel by Ilan Herman. Reviewed by Lynn Alexander for Crow Reviews. This is Herman’s debut novel from Casperian Books, released this Spring.

Sometimes he thought that all life was wasted. That was the nature of life- to be wasted. No bending words could change that.   -The Gravedigger

Ilan Herman admits that questions about mortality and purpose remain unanswered, despite our best efforts to confront them. Perhaps there is something in us that wants to keep trying, perhaps a stubborn tendency that makes us unwilling to let these questions go despite the obvious fact that we seem to come up empty. For some it is not a matter of pursuing purpose, but pursuing faith, choosing to have faith or being moved to simply accept or believe things even in the face of those questions.

Sometimes a writer does not presume to give us answers, but has come to understand that the processing and confrontation sets a wheel in motion in our own minds to chase our own struggles. I think that, above all, is what Herman wants us to come away with after reading The Gravedigger- that sense of being stirred to think. Why do we live?

Starting off with Noah and Adam, Herman establishes these characters and illuminates tendencies in their thinking about people and the particular vocation of preparing graves. We suspect right away that there are some deliberate choices among Herman’s details whose symbolism come to light later on and whose placement set the stage for the story’s elements. In the initial exchanges between the men, we see their regard for life and “purpose” manifest, begin to understand the connection to the act of digging a grave. Does the gravedigger traverse life and death, “the void”  (p.27) or ferry the living back to the resting place of earth, nature?

Does the gravedigger bring closure to living?  In digging, does he carve places in the world for people to inhabit, places of significance, something permanent?

The men are even carving in the cabin, carving potatoes, rendering them. The masks that are removed later are nameless people, given shape.

We live for thousands of days until, one day, none remain…

I won’t spoil the story, but it gets interesting during a visit to one of the  mausoleums (tomb), where Adam is forced to rethink many things that he had considered settled in himself. Herman describes these kinds of pivotal moments: when we learn terrible news, when something tragic happens. What happens to Adam is just as rattling and furthermore- old wounds are opened.

The Gravedigger takes the reader to unexpected places, and challenges our habits: just when you think you know what Herman is setting up, you find you guessed wrong. And if you think that this is a novel that will wrap itself up neatly in a formulaic package, you’d be wrong again.

We are taken on this journey of characters, each struggling not only with life’s purpose and sense, but with the relative morality of their actions. We see similar questions considered by strikingly different people. Herman contrasts evil with innocence, seemingly deserved tragedies against unthinkable loss that seems cruel in its randomness.

The Gravedigger ultimately struggles with what people, irrespective of eon, age, geography, or circumstances struggle with: What happens when we die?

What happens to the living? How much of what we believe comes from our desire to feel comfort about loved ones lost, or ourselves and our mortality?

This is a remarkable first novel, from an author who joins complicated concepts with accessible storytelling to produce something that both engages and moves us.

The Gravedigger is available from Casperian Books, www.casperianbooks.com

When the Cats Razzed the Chickens by Mel Bosworth, Folded Word Press. Reviewed by Lynn Alexander.

“I saw his face grow into his eyes, those big lake blue eyes…”
There are the boys talking about physics, in a bathtub debate, and would-be celebrities spooning in their hut after a street show gone awry. I was glad to see one of his well known and deservedly praised pieces “Leave Me As I Lessen”:
“The children call me Melting Man. I hate pictures, but smile anyway, teeth dripping down my throat. Mom screams when my ears fall off and ooze like slugs to the ocean. My watery toes give dawdling chase.”

Cynthia Reeser has an excellent, thorough review of “Razzed” at Prick Of The Spindle, and you can check that out here. You can also peek in at Mel here, at his blog.

Check out Folded Word here.

When the Cats Razzed the Chickens  by Mel Bosworth

ISBN: 978-0-9778167-2-9

Folded Word Signature Series, 2009

“Charactered Pieces” by Caleb J. Ross, reviewed by Lynn Alexander. “Charactered Pieces” is the second publication of the new Outsider Writers Press. It follows David Blaine’s poetry chapbook “Antisocial” as their second release.

Ross delivers exactly what you have come to expect from him: smart layers of fiction with thematically related elements. We see attention to strange details…and we see sick things that on occasion seem nudged into the foreground from where they stood, poised in the periphery. Perhaps Ross does this to add depth to the characters, rendering them alongside their context.

“Charactered Pieces” refer to flawed diamonds, a marketing ploy developed by the character of Lori who is herself a “charactered piece” and as such, seems unable to win the approval of her mother.

Ross moves on to “My Family’s Rule”, where concealment is part of the game of pushing people to decipher what we want and judging them accordingly. Trying to please the father, the offspring involved want to purchase proper presents, as opposed to presents that signify something negative in his eyes as in the case of the shotglasses: “white trash” presents.

Again, we have the dynamic of parent and child, the child unable to get it right, parent unable to budge.What do our choices say about who we are, and how much of that is wrapped up in the desire to be respected?

What we begin to see is not a pattern of intolerance so much as a pattern of protection, a “for your own good” kind of scrutiny. These are parents who want to bring an understanding of how the world really works to their children, and their years and experience have taught them that the world can be unkind- particularly in the face of our flaws.

These are parents who, in their own ways, mean well. They want to spare the kids:

I turn quick to the living room; ensure Aaron is still occupied with

the television. “Why didn’t you tell me at the time?”

“Don’t ever tell me again that I don’t protect you from bad things. I

do. But this one, you wanted. You’ll never get the image of a falling man

out of your head. Welcome to fatherhood.”

This is when I remember why I admire Ross as a writer. This is when he is in the game, in these kinds of moments, when he shows himself to be a writer with chops.

In this little exchange between a father and his son, he is really exploring the hidden side of parenting: the worries that aren’t shared, the truth, the things spared.

The next story is downright touching, another father and son- and again a father who wants to step up to the plate:

“A guy goes his entire life blaming everyone else for his problems, then a blank slate drops from between a pair of legs and the only thing he cares about is not being a point of blame himself. He stops smoking. He stops yelling. He curbs his drugs and almost stops swinging those fucking fists of his.”

I won’t say what happens, but like the mothers Ross describes from Pompei, the mothers who try to shield their babies from ash- we again see the parent who tries to do the right thing when there isn’t always a right thing. Like the mother who seeks new starts in her vacation planning, who grieves but tries to get out from under it- we see regular people who are trying to do what they can.

The pairing of innocence with tragedy and the parental dilemma forms- at least to me- the subtext of the “Charactered Pieces” stories. Thinking back to what I have read, Ross is at his best here. This book is a true credit to him, and to the fledgling Outsider Writers Press.

Outsider Writers:

With Charactered Pieces, Caleb J. Ross presents a varied world of familial discord, one where a dead fetus evokes more compassion than its mother (“Charactered Pieces”); where two brothers offer the destruction of a family legacy as a birthday gift for their aging father (“My Family’s Rule”); where one brother’s love of Holocaust documentaries pushes his family through the aftermath of his assumed suicide (“The Camp”). Charactered Pieces peels away the superficial armor of public life to reveal the flaws beneath and treats those perceived weaknesses not as hidden sources of pain but as reasons to celebrate life.

Order from Outsider Writers here.

While legions of writers and poets struggle with punching up colorful words in just the right shade to elicit emotion or punctuate their meanings, Ross Vassilev manages to connect his work with the reader in black and white. Mostly black.

Vassilev, editor of Opium Poetry 2, and Asphodel Madness, has 10 of his works featured in the eBook, Village Idiot, published by Full of Crow Press. Vassilev doesn’t rely on carefully crafted prose or just the right word combinations to create a mood or elicit a response from his readers. He speaks viscerally, in short bursts and with blunt phrasing that often punches his readers right in their gut.

There is an ache and dull flatness in V.I. that concusses one into re-reading the work over and over, giving rise to a certainty that you must have missed something the first time around.

His piece, a miserable profession offers the lament of the poet who has been forced to move back into the home of his parents:

I’m the poet who moved back in with his parents

after getting fired from his last job

I’m the 6-foot-1 poet who’s fat and diabetic

I’m the would-be pseudo poet who’s giving it a try

I’m the poet who sits on the patio summer nights

listening to crickets

and staring up at the stars

………….

Vassilev’s voice speaks to the disenfranchised.  There is truly an irony in this. As we move into the second decade of the new millennium, the obsession with social networking and the insatiable need to connect even with people we are likely to never meet, Vassilev’s prose resonates with those on islands created from their own doing. In the eponymous work, village idiot, the protagonist finds himself fired from work, too lazy to shave, with energy for nothing much beyond staying up all night watching Fellini movies:

I’m a bum.

an idiot. a loser.

I’m a Sandinista.

I’m a goddamn

good-for-nothing foreigner.

…………………..

this country is overrun

with village idiots

………………..

give us all a hand.

Don’t confuse colorless with bleak, or without emotion. There is plenty of punch and even humor in Vassilev’s work. His writing is wry, sardonic and plays with both satire and outright rebellion.

Vassilev is nothing if not prolific. His work is all over the web and in addition to the above zines you can read him at Strange Road,  Rusty Truck, Word Riot and countless other venues. FOC exhibits a light touch with their monochromatic design on Village Idiot. The look contributes to the overall stark feel, a perfect foil for words that stand very nicely on their own, no Technicolor required.

Michael J. Solender blogs here: Not From Here, Are You?