Fusing the Exceptional & the Everyday: Mimi Alpert on Catherine Brady’s The Mechanics of Falling

The Mechanics of Falling, Catherine Brady, University of Nevada Press, 2009

In many ways, a collection of one writer’s stories is analogous to a one-person exhibit of visual art. As well as being exposed to the impact of each individual piece, the reader or viewer  is given an overall impression of the artist’s skill and influences, and the general direction in which his or her work has developed. In Catherine Brady’s third collection of  short fiction, The Mechanics of Falling, the most powerful impression seems to be that of line drawings, not because of any lack of color but because each story has striking impact both in its  delicacy of nuance and its boldness of expression. However, in Brady’s unusually versatile and gifted voice, there is a seamless fusion between delicacy and strength. It is not surprising that this collection begins with an epigram from Chekhov, whose fusion of the exceptional and the everyday characterizes his finest work.

The delicate nuances of Brady’s writing are inherent in her sense of language, in her use of dialogue and imagery, and in the lightness of touch with which she infuses the most serious of issues with deft humor. She knows exactly how to capture the essence of a look, an exclamation or a gesture, so that, like a tiny sliver of glass or a needle sliding beneath the skin, it can penetrate the reader’s consciousness and leave its impression while hardly calling attention to itself. “Some people are too stupid to be afraid on a runaway horse,” Brady writes in the title story of The Mechanics of Falling, a revealing glimpse into the lives and loves of horse trainers at a stable near an affluent suburban community . “Some people freeze up. Some people turn cold and clear inside…and only start to shake afterward. Annie sails into trouble like she wants it to last forever, like she can skim off from fear only what’s precious.”

This same Annie, struggling with conflicting desires and the choices she must make, later bursts out, “I hate being young!” and instead of laughing at her – or perhaps, in addition to laughing at her – the reader understands all too well the causes and consequences, of her anguish, perhaps even recalling his/her own sense of clumsiness and lack of  social articulation at Annie’s age. The moral of this moment, perhaps, is that no one is worthy of being envied; no on, no matter how young, how nubile, or how gifted, e is too far outside the range of  helplessness and hurt to be admired beyond a reasonable doubt.

Brady’s  writing might at first seem  almost plain, but as the context of each story’s  situation unfolds, a fine-tuned understanding invariably reveals itself. The issues around which Brady’s plots revolve usually concern the struggles of a mismatched  or troubled couple; of their confrontation with some impossible situation and the general quandary of what each party of the couple needs to learn in order to survive. At the same time, her characters  sometimes seem diffident, confused, even comical.  Sometimes they are indeed so young  that they can’t even recognize what they’re feeling at any given moment. And yet  even when they’re not so young –even when, as frequently in these stories, they’re downright middle-aged — they seem to be searching for a way out of one of life’s myriad  ordinary dilemmas, whether social, personal, economic, or even physical. And in contrast to Brady’s frequently quiet, measured voice, the means of individual release is sometimes revealed explosively, under unusual or even violent circumstances.

In “The Dazzling World,” the second story of the collection, a couple, Cam and Judith – unmarried and living in separate apartments, despite having been lovers for four years –  journey together across Guatemala to visit a friend’s archaeological dig.  Cam  is a “journeyman actor;” Judith,  an illustrator of scientific articles and books. Although they have examined all the various issues and options of their relationship , both with one another and under the counsel of a therapist, they have not grown closer or dared to move in together.  But on this journey they are suddenly confronted by situations which they might never have expected in their reasonable and somewhat predictable city lives.

Even on the crowded bus that will carry them to the dig at which they  expect to be at most, guests and observers, they are accosted by the sense of the “dazzling world” overcoming their individual identities. They encounter forces over which they have no control but which surround and threaten them nonetheless. The bus lurches; a woman’s bag slams wildly into Cam’s body;  rather than exploding with anger as he might have done in his native, “civilized” city, he eventually responds with good humor, and the relationships begin to change. Then, on an isolated  road,  the bus is invaded by armed bandits and all the passengers are threatened, humiliated and robbed. Despite this, Cam and Judith find that they are able to continue their journey, arriving  frightened but relatively unharmed at their destination. And there, after being welcomed and comforted by their friend,  Cam and Judith witness the results of the archaeological dig they have come so casually to witness: they are present when the carefully opened trenches in the soft, pebbled earth are excavated and opened, to reveal a long-buried skeleton and an ancient flute. “Twelve hundred years in the ground had stripped from this body the taint of fear and sorrow but somehow left an irreducible beauty,”  Brady writes, and as the wind shifts loose earth from the trenches, Cam calls out, “It’s the spirit flying,”  while Judith fits her own fingers into the contours of the ancient flute. Without reading further,  one knows that both of them have been changed by these encounters, and that their new awareness may well bring about a transformation of their lives together.

Perhaps one of the most interesting elements of Brady’s writing, in this collection,  is her lack of fear of happy endings. After what has seemed to me a lifetime of expecting serious contemporary fiction to end  in sadness, confusion, or pain,  I found myself coming away from many of her stories with a sense of optimism, even of renewal and hope for human relationships. In the title story, the male protagonist suddenly realizes – in the most subtle and personal way – that he’s in love with the woman who has most specifically antagonized him. At the end of another story, “Last of the True Believers,”  what looks like a typically dysfunctional contemporary marriage turns out to be a construction of mutual regard as exquisitely engineered  and executed as the inlaid and bejeweled murals at the Taj Mahal.

As do so many of her characters, this author  takes risks. She allows herself to risk describing unadorned emotion, lifelong devotion and responsibility both to family and society,  and even bawdy humor in her characters’ actions and dialogue. There are a number of funny moments throughout the stories, but one of the funniest occurs when, helping her lovable but baffled Hispanic cleaner to decipher the instructions on a bottle of prescribed medication, a typically overworked wife, mother and professional woman reads them to a medical friend: “Vaginal suppositories. To be taken with food,” and then, exploding with exasperation, demands, “What’s she supposed to do? Shove a ham sandwich up there?”

It’s evident that Catherine Brady is a writer who seems content to leave us with a regard for our lighter side, our more ordinary moments,  as well as a healthy respect for those other, perhaps more powerful human emotions which contemporary fiction seeks so often—perhaps too often—to explore. No matter how elegant or bawdy her writing, Brady always brings us home to the truths of human engagement –  to the truths of our lives right here, in the cities and ranches and suburbs and remodeled houses and alternative radio stations and  summer resorts of our own modern lives; among full-time activists and  part-time waitresses and horse wranglers and overstressed mothers and wives, among wounded  teenagers  and young urban professionals and undocumented workers and  all the other survivors of our 21^st century world.

Stories to Make the World New: David Atkinson on Amelia Gray’s Museum of the Weird

Museum of the Weird, Amelia Gray, Fiction Collective 2, 2010

It is difficult to analyze a collection of stories that starts out: “One morning, I woke to discover I had given birth overnight. It was troubling to realize because I had felt no pain as I slept, did not remember the birth, and in fact had not even known I was pregnant.” In this first story in Amelia Gray’s Museum of the Weird, when the narrator notes the above and subsequently sees that the “child had pulled himself up to my breast in the night and was at that moment having breakfast,” her reaction is to simply say “Hello.”

Truthfully, I felt the narrator’s confusion at that moment; hers at suddenly finding an unexpected baby feeding on her seemed a lot like mine at finding this on the first page of the first story in the collection. I fumbled for a reaction. I ended up resorting to the same response as the narrator- I merely said hello. Then I kept reading.

These stories seem like they should be so normal, well mannered and plainspoken if you will, but then they just keep walking past the top of the escalator and right out onto the sky. Moreover, when I read, I felt like many of the characters were having a similar reaction to the absurdity that I was. They were trying to make whatever has happened normal, though some were on a related wavelength in that they themselves were the absurdity and were trying to act as if it was normal.

In “Fish,” for example, “Dale was married to a paring knife and Howard was married to a bag of frozen tilapia. Each had fallen into their respective arrangements having decided independently that there was no greater match for them in life.” However, the two men encounter into a women as they are out on a fishing trip. When she pokes fun at the bag of frozen tilapia and acts as if she might open it, Howard merely stares helplessly but Dale “clocks [the woman] on the mouth with his Rick Clunn baitcaster.” Remember, Howard is the one married to the tilapia, not Dale. To Dale’s confusion, Howard and him argue about what he has done, leading to Howard opening the bag and flinging the frozen fish (which is his spouse) into the water. And, “[w]hen they finally came ashore, the police were there with [the] woman” and Dale wasn’t “immediately sure why.”

As I read them, these stories essentially center on normal, ordinary parts of life- procreation, relationships, trying to make some kind of meaning in life, and so on. However, Gray brilliantly and quietly knocks me for a loop each time, presenting these routine topics in such forms as an armadillo with a Miller High Life and a penguin drinking gin out of a highball glass. These absurdities are so strange, so marvelously imaginative and odd, that it makes me laugh (and/or weep, depending) and look at what is routine in a fresh, new way. They fill the world with wonders for those who can no longer see the wonders that are out there. In short, Gray makes the old new again and manages to delight her readers at the same time.

In short, I found the stories in this collection to be the sort of wild, unique fiction for which I often turn to writers like Etgar Keret and Huraki Murakami, though Gray is definitely her own animal. I am thrilled to see that there are still Americans out there who can still write in new ways like this, intrigue me with something I have honestly never seen before. I loved this collection and cannot wait to find out whether Gray has more like it.

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David S. Atkinson is a Nebraska-born writer currently living in Denver. He holds an MFA from the University of Nebraska as well as a BA in English, a BS in computer science, and a JD. His stories, book reviews, and articles have appeared in Fine Lines, Gently Read Literature, The Nebraska Lawyer, and 2600: The Hacker Quarterly. The website dedicated to his writing is davidsatkinsonwriting.com

A Lush & Intriguing Set: Emilie Tarrant on Madeline McDonnell’s There Is Something Inside, It Wants To Get Out

There Is Something Inside, It Wants To Get Out, Madeline McDonnell, Rescue Press, 2010

“Wife,” the first of the three stories in There Is Something Inside, It Wants To Get Out felt like it was written just for me, just for my generation. This no doubt captured my favor early on. No, no, it does not play on generational divides. The book is heavy on trans-generational exchanges. It was the nostalgia as Wednesday, the story’s protagonist, reminisces the potential-laden romance of high school—the “eyelet skirts, candy necklaces, [and boys] in unlaced sneakers and unbuttoned flannels.” That is, as she reminisces on what I am certain many young lust seekers of the nineties would agree are the important things.

It was also the feminism. I was unspeakably amused, personally, by mention of the National Women’s Studies Association conference in Orlando. It was presumably slipped in for authenticity, but as one of two NWSA conferences I have attended, you might see how I was uniquely touched. More importantly, “Wife” accomplishes something for the book that contemporary literature is generally lacking. By acknowledging the zeitgeist and using feminism as a framework for character development, the story can resonate with feminists and non-feminists alike. Wednesday’s mom, Ms. Jefferson, is described as a second-wave feminist. It will likely be a familiar generational reference for many readers who came of age during the second-wave era or are the children of those men and women. Whereas fictional works are frequently received for a feminist appeal, or else shy from feminism entirely, There Is Something Inside, It Wants To Get Out bridges that divide by employing the topic for literary effect.

Many people have recognized author Madeline McDonnell as a savvy wordsmith, and the praise is certainly earned. Is it possible to be derisive and compassionate? McDonnell’s acumen makes the unseemly unification natural. The characters are impregnated with many antithetical drives that find easy cohabitation. The result is that protagonists Wednesday, Mary, and Lucy, as well as the others we meet, are a lush and intriguing set. Their banter can be both humorous and barbed. Their love is laced with mild disgust. Yet McDonnell harbors her characters from vilification. They are ambitious and self-directed, but they are navigating the world without a blueprint and sometimes falter. Herein lies their charm.

In their way, Wednesday, Mary, and Lucy unify the stories. Each woman narrates her experience. Each is self-reflective and strives to be self-directed. Each relates to the world through her body. Mary though, as highlighted through the anthropomorphizing of her white blood cells, is subject to her body. In this way and others, “Physical Education” distinguishes itself from “Wife” and “Trouble.” As events unfold by Mary’s telling, they open a window on her dad and make it his story nearly as much as it is hers. Grappling with her health, her dad finds an easy niche. Like the narrators, he falters, shows flaws in his affection, and is all the while well-meaning and endearing. Personalities are exposed and augmented by the intimate relationships of parents, children, and romantic partners throughout the book. But of the supporting characters, Mary’s dad is much closer to being a protagonist.

Ms. Jefferson would certainly give a nod to There Is Something Inside, It Wants To Get Out. It is rich with nuance—a trait she laments Wednesday’s boyfriend lacks. It is written with prowess. And tapping into the internal motivations of its characters, the book is cunning in its navigation of contradiction to find a sense of self.

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When not working at Los Angeles’ archives and museums, Emilie co-authors the culinary blog Ceci N’est Pas Un Repas (unrepas.blogspot.com). Proud to have read the Spanish translation of Charlotte’s Web this year, she is now reading the Armenian translation of her favorite childhood picture book, The Paper Bag Princess. She has been stuck on the first page for  3 months.

Of Things That Were and Could Have Been: Parth Vasa on James Nolan’s Perpetual Care

Perpetual Care and Other Stories, James Nolan, Jefferson Press, 2008

In one of the stories in James Nolan’s Perpetual Care, a boy stays in a house with his mother’s corpse for more than a week, until the police carry him out of the house by force. Going on living with something that was a part of your life, but is now dead: A lot of people do that in James Nolan’s universe, albeit not all as explicitly as the boy in that story. For some it’s a dead dream that they carry around, for some a way of life that ceased to exist. And still the stories aren’t morbid. They have beauty like the fall leaves that have the brightest color just before they wither away and die. The stories are mostly set in New Orleans or surrounding areas. In some of them Northern California is a presence. The former is a part of the country that could have been the Promised Land; the latter, a place that actually was until, as Nolan says in “The Immortalist,” it turned into “caricature and real estate.” The stories that are set in New Orleans can only be set in New Orleans. The grime, the moisture, the brown sludgy water held away by flimsy levees, the hurricanes; they are all required for the stories to be told. And yet, there is something universal in the stories. Something that I, a software engineer from India who shares hardly anything with the characters, can relate to.

I bought Perpetual Care from a bookstore in Faubourg Marigny about a month ago. I read the first two stories on my way back to New York and then took the book along when I had to rush to India to see the man who raised me slowly give in to cancer. It’s been two weeks since my uncle died. He stood by me for twenty-eight of my thirty years like a father. I saw him go from a fully functioning man to a grunting, stuporous mass of skin and bones in the last two years. After he stopped breathing, I stood by as the townspeople gathered around his body. They trussed him to a makeshift bamboo stretcher with rough coconut-skin strings, carried him to the beach close by, dipped him in the sea that he had always loved, and put him on the pyre. About two hundred people—Hindus (every possible caste), Muslims, Jains—carried planks of wood and placed them over his body. I looked on as they arranged him on the pyre. Then, as is the Hindu tradition, I took a shovelful of burning coals and tossed it on the pyre. Flames lashed out within minutes like the tongues of mad dogs. Within an hour and half he was reduced to ashes and smoke that went up towards his beloved Pleiades.

All this while I was thinking about the title story in Perpetual Care, I would rather put him in a tomb above the ground. As strange as the custom may be to the tourists to visit New Orleans, you don’t have to see the feet of the man who taught you to walk curl up as the rest of his body burns to ashes. In that story, an old French Catholic woman notices a black man’s voice singing a love song from the tomb of a white family known to her. What unfolds is a story of love tortured by social norms. Nolan could have used magical realism here to make his point, but he doesn’t use it as a crutch.

I read stories from the book while tending to my uncle when he was sick and in between the constant flow of visitors after he went. In some strange way it kept me sane. A smell emanates from the stories, a human smell of sweat and follies. That was what I related to. I have loved New Orleans from the first time I visited it. It reminded me of every place I had called home so far. I thought of the city and the stories as I moved from consoling my aunt, who had not spent a single day apart from her husband of thirty-three years, to hiding my live-in relationship with an American girl from my conservative Jain relatives, who wanted me start seeing girls from families they knew. The stories gave me a window to somewhere different from where I was (a hell and a home very different from mine but also very close to it).

The characters are in the stories are varied and from different walks of life. A private detective with bills to pay, a gay hustler with a glib mouthful of made-up life stories and missing front teeth, a retired mortician sick of tourists on “Vampire Tours,” a cross-dressing plumber, or as in a few stories, older Creole ladies still holding on to an idea of aristocracy that went bankrupt many years ago. Mr. Nolan describes the characters in a way you would talk about family with affection but also a bit of anger.

The characters are undeniably a part of their city but they are fleshed out enough to have similarities to real people in any part of the world. How different are the aristocratic Creole ladies withering away in their mansion in “Lucy LeBlanc’s last Stand” from the old man who lived across from my parent’s house, in India? He walked around in a tattered suit every evening, greeting people as if he was in a pre–World War II England. Couldn’t the story of Narda, the woman from “The Tower,” clinging to the soul of a San Francisco neighborhood long after its body has been killed by gentrification, be true of someone living in New York’s East Village? The language is rich and in parts beautifully muddled. What do I mean by that? It’s not crisp and clear cut like that of so many authors writing short fiction these days. There is a taste to it. If there is chaos within, that is the beauty of it. How would you describe a muggy summer in the French Quarter or the sickening heat that tires you out but also makes you want to feel? In “All Spiders, no Flies,” Nolan gives us:

At dusk everybody comes scampering out like roaches hiding from the scorching light. Then the neighborhood is one big cocktail party. Music blares out of open bar doors. Hunky guys in tank tops and cutoffs lean against car hoods sucking on ice cubes, rattling go-cups at you as you pass. People scream at each other from balcony to balcony, hang out on their stoops, draining beers and mopping their brows and shooting the shit with everyone who walks by.

It’s too hot to touch. And too hot not to.

 

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Parth Vasa is an Indian writer living in New York City. He writes software for a living and short fiction, narrative non-fiction, and short screenplays to make that living worthwhile. His film reviews have been published on www.slashfilm.com. He blogs occasionally at http://somniumcache.blogspot.com.

Word the World: A.T. Grant on 10 Mississippi by Steve Healey

10 Mississippi, Steve Healey, Coffee House Press, 2011

In 10 Mississippi Steve Healey sets out to build a city on the Mississippi (“Lifeboat, Wingspan”) from the detritus of contemporary culture. And there’s plenty of detritus drifting through this river world; birds, dead bodies, hamburger/meat (in several forms), text sampling, and the color red (also in several forms, including ketchup) are recurring motifs throughout the book.

Many poems relate eating and capitalism to the violence in our world. This is especially true in “Ketchup over the Park,” in which the troops become hamburger meat and we become “the eaters of grilled beef patties.” I get the sense that a passively violent backyard or community cookout is an appropriate backdrop in other poems as well (including “Animals among Us,” “Green Afternoon,” and “Slow Emergency”).

But my favorite poems work with repetition and variation in several different forms. Sometimes the repetition of a phrase or structure propels the reader forward at an alarming pace (see the twisting clauses of “Against Violence”—a 39-line sentence with several bends in its river). At other times a repeated image seeks to bring a stillness (the skipping record needle in “While I Held My Breath Underwater”). These poems let images and sounds accumulate. The river gathers this detritus and builds a world around itself.

Repetition and variation is most important in the title poem, the book’s ten-section centerpiece. The base image of “10 Mississippi” is a dead body being pulled from the river. But the image returns; it comes back changed, bloated or leaking. The body becomes many bodies, but we never get a fix on exactly who they are (or were) before they fell into the river. The faces of the bodies shift—notice the pronouns in the tenth section: “…he was about to enter / the water but was then pushed / into the water by the other man, / her body was pulled from the water.”

In part seven of the poem, Healey ties this image of a body pulled from the river to a childhood game of hide-and-seek. But we know that seeking the bodies that hide in the river is not fun. That the game has become a harsh reality. By the eighth section the river is eating bodies, and by the tenth a coroner reports that “the river is a monster.” Which relates back to the “violence of eating” in other poems. We built a world, but that world became a voracious monster. Worse, each body in the monster’s mouth has lost its “self,” and is faceless. But even though we have created and inhabit this violent world, Healey sees a possible redemption in children and words.

Again, Healey uses repeated images and phrases. This time the returning phrases remind us of how children free associate and play; how they notice something new in their world, then keep noticing it (and pointing it out to any animate or inanimate being in proximity). They must sense the power that words have. This power of words is an important idea in “The Invention of the Alphabet, or The Quick Brown Fox Jumps over the Lazy Dog.” Healey’s child narrator tells us: “Yesterday Mrs. Berger taught us a sentence that contains every letter of the alphabet. She said, don’t repeat this sentence or else something awful may happen.”

And something awful has happened in the poem already: the narrator’s school bus has hit and killed a fox.

We never read that the narrator used that dangerous sentence (or what it is). However, we know he likes to tinker with words and images (his teacher’s name “is a food that [he] likes to eat with ketchup. Her lips have a lot of red on them.”). We imagine the temptation to play with that dangerous sentence must have been immense for such a child. Finally he admits, “I know it’s my fault that the fox is dead.” Another game has become reality.

However, the experience does not destroy the narrator—it transforms him (and also, I would argue, the violence done to the fox). In the last line, he becomes the quick brown fox of the poem’s title: “On the sidewalk there’s a lazy dog curled up like baby Jesus. I jump over him.”

This is a narrator who wants to put words into the world because he knows words make ideas real. He even tells us, “The fox and the dog are more real than us because they know every word.”

This narrator believes that his words can bring a good world into existence; that they can transform reality. With narrators like this, Healey does more than build his city on the Mississippi. He encourages us to build our own.

 

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A.T. Grant is an MFA student at the University of Minnesota. He makes poems and songs. His band is called New South Bear. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Scrambler and Forklift, OH. He lives in Minneapolis.

Somewhere, Somewhere: Oriana Leckert on Christie Hodgen’s Elegies for the Brokenhearted

Elegies for the Brokenhearted, Christie Hodgen, WW Norton, 2010

Elegies for the Brokenhearted begins in a rush and never loses momentum. It is crafted with galloping long sentences, clause within clause within clause, that swerve the reader away and then back and then away again. The characters are so sharp, their scenarios so poignant, their interactions so painful and real… This book is a devastating joy.

It’s a novel in stories—or, more accurately, in elegies—direct addresses by Mary Murphy to five central people in her life, which tell the stories of their lives, or at least those periods where their lives intersected with hers. This nested-story structure is a kind of herky-jerky stop-and-start format that can sometimes be jarring, but Hodgen makes it work beautifully, telling us always the story of Mary while making it look like Mary is telling us the stories of those around her.

Mary herself has lived since childhood in an almost impenetrable halo of silence—silence as rebellion, silence as a defensive coping mechanism, silence as a sarcastic attack. She always lets others speak for her, or no one at all. And yet the whole book, written in second-person direct address to each person being elegied, seems to be Mary’s attempt to reconcile the silence she’s spent her life ensconced in, to make others see how important they were to her—once it’s too late for it to matter.

Every character herein is consistently striving, reaching out in wrong-headed ways for more, yet secure in the conviction that he is meant for something better, easier, more rarefied. Each person knows that she is infinitely more special than the mundane and bitter circumstances in which she finds herself, time and again. But most of them do nothing to hasten their transfiguration, adding to the general sense of despair and frustration that permeates the novel.

Another marked similarity between the novel’s disparate personalities is how each is obsessed with death. Uncle Mike only gossips about friends who have died. Carson, Mary’s college roommate, decorates the wall above her bed with a constellation of Polaroids of her deceased relatives. One of Mary’s mother’s dependable morning rituals is reading—and mocking—the obituaries in the local paper. The entire book, of course, stars a cast of characters who have passed away.

One more overarching similarity between everyone is a desperate, suffocating loneliness, coupled with a near-hysterical inability to love. And yet the whole book is a vindication, in a way, of all this sorrow, all this despair. That Mary, who has spent her life silent and resentful, can recollect and reify these small, sad, bitter lives winds up speaking to an inherent beauty in all of us. Her ability to penetrate the layers of meanness, of abuse and anger and petty fury, and to render people real, is a parting gift, a gift to those parted, an indication that, despite everything, for a time they were truly understood.

At one point in the narration, Mary states, “Even the evocation of loneliness was something undertaken with the purpose of communicating it to someone, who would hear it and perhaps understand it.” This is a beautiful summation of the crux of this sad novel—no matter how alone we are, no matter how we despair, in our private moments, that we will die without ever having made a true connection with another living soul, someone has been watching, someone has been affected. Someone, somewhere, if only for a little while, has understood.

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Oriana is a writer and editor living in Brooklyn with her longtime boyfriend and their two dogs. She edits for a slew of publishers, including McSweeney’s, Random House, NYRB, Melville House, and many more. She writes a blog about Brooklyn art and culture at www.brooklyn-spaces.com, and she reads like a maniac.

Terrifying for Their Brevity: Amy Henry on Dorothea Lasky’s Black Life

Black Life, Dorothea Lasky, Wave Books, 2010

Dorothea Lasky’s new book, Black Life, brims with the chaos of real life and real people, fighting to express themselves when shiny and happy words aren’t sufficient. A unifying component of the poems is frequent references to her father’s battle with dementia, and sprinkled among these are tiny images, made all the more terrifying for their brevity: helpless rest home patients with bald baby heads being beaten by staff. Fire as both purifier and destroyer also makes appearances in unexpected contexts.

Talking about life, she twists around the state of health into the dimensions of inner and outer well-being, with the two often in fierce juxtaposition. She muses on Emily Dickinson’s muse, on anorexia, and refers to pop culture as freely as old boyfriends and husbands. Her voice alters from that of a hyperactive teen, to a stalker, to an overly-kind ghost. In all of it, she is seldom quiet or sedate.

In frequent references to poetry, she contrasts the kinds of poetry that exist: pretty and intangible or ugly and real. Therein, she makes it appear that it would be worse to be ignored than blasphemed, and that flowery prose often hides an uncertain intent. From “I Am a Politician”,

I am a politician
Just watch:
I will be very nice to you
But when I turn around I will write the creepiest poems about you that
Have ever been written.
Or worse yet,
I will write nothing about you at all
And will instead
Write about the water cascading endlessly in the ocean
Full of flowers and lovers at their very best…

She doesn’t hide from revealing insecurity, such that her poems often appear inspired by it. In “I Just Feel So Bad”, she expresses both loneliness as well as the concept of needing pain in order to function, trying to understand what she has to give and what she can take when thinking “nice” thoughts doesn’t work. Her answer is in the final phrases:

I have no home
No bread
I am destitute
But inside me
Is a little voice
That must speak
It gets louder when you listen

“ARS Poetica” has a kinesthetic energy to it, almost as if it’s the adverbs that matter most…being whatever needs being, but in a big way.

There is a romantic abandon in me always
I want to feel the dread for others
I only feel it through song
Only through song am I able to sum up so many words into a few
Like when he said I am no good
I am no good
Goodness is not the point anymore
Holding on to things
Now that’s the point

The collection is varied and intense. Being about a decade older than Lasky, there were moments when I wanted to tell her to relax a bit and slow down. To realize that not all problems will be resolved as quickly as we’d like, but that it’s okay to wait them out. The vivid descriptions and staccato action at times felt like it was too edgy to get close to, like the wild person at the party who gets the attention and the laughs but who is terrifying to be alone with for more than a moment. Yet the liveliness prevails and relays an enthusiasm that I hope essentially remains.