Tag: Coffee House Press

A little poetic musing: Three recent or current reads and a poem of my own

I haven’t posted much lately, in part because I have been focused on some writing and reviewing for other publications, and also, because I’ve decided to list my house, concentrated reading has been somewhat disrupted. In the midst of all this, however, there is always time for poetry. I find lately that poetry has become an increasingly important part of my reading routine. So, I thought I would take a little time to look at a recent read and a couple of the collections currently vying for my attention.

Unbearable Splendor by Sun Yung Shin (Coffee House Press, 2016)

The intersection of essay and poetry is of particular interest to me. This collection takes a wide-ranging approach to the confluence of the two forms and stands as an impressive example of what can be achieved by filtering essayistic meditations through a poetic lens.

Sun Yung Shin was born in Korea and adopted by an American family at the age of two. The weight of her dual identity pulls the explorations that comprise Unbearable Splendor together into a loosely spinning orbit. Along the way, she weaves in elements from cosmology, linguistics, Korean culture, Greek mythology, literature and futuristic visions of being. The result is dazzling and devastatingly beautiful. For my money, the most interesting pieces offer strange and unusual angles on the cellular, spiritual, and genetic implications of being an orphan, often referring to herself in the first person plural:

As we task our memory-organ to remember our life in Korea, we breed dream after dream. False dreams? Truthful dreams? Hanging? Phantom shaped? They drop like ripe fruit, then disappear before hitting the ground, preventing bruising, rotting. Dreams are ephemera and have no body to violate, no flesh, to decay. They can remain fresh as the wind, recycled like hot rising vapor from the ocean, into the frozen clouds, and eventually back into the crashing black water, the source of all dreams, the living body of our planet.

Kafka and Borges offer inspiration, a series of essay/poems feature Antigone, and toward the end, she draws on cyborg and cloning technology. The language is devastating. However, if I have any reservations, it would be that some of the pieces fall awkwardly in between the two forms—too much an essay to be a satisfying poem, but not developed enough as a nonfiction piece to really flesh out an idea.

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Currently reading:

The Promised Land: Poems from an Itinerant Life by André Naffis-Sahely (Penguin Books, 2017)

This slender volume represents poet and translator André Naffis-Sahely’s first collection. Born in Venice to an Iranian father and Italian mother, he was raised in Abu Dhabi. The earlier poems in this collection deal with his childhood in the harshly surreal environment of a manufactured city, and his return visits in early adulthood. His shifting relationship with his parents, how he sees and understands them as their marriage crumbles and life in Abu Dhabi loses any lustre it may have had, provides the material for an strong series of poems. The second section, which is where I am currently biding my time, includes a number of poems that cross the globe and speak to a certain restlessness. Here, is a sample from the prose poem, “This Most Serene Republic” which opens with a description of Venice as his father experienced it when he first arrived in the 1960s and spent a cold damp winter huddling atop the wardrobes as water rose through holes in the floor of his flat. The son in his footsteps describes:

… Those old, porous palaces, whose upper floors housed the few penniless nobles whose hallowed ancestors once terrorized the Mare Nostrum. Those palaces, much like the one I’m sleeping in, smelt like Latin jungles: mahogany everywhere. I love this tiny room and its Franciscan sparseness. All my life, I’ve felt like a Jew, or a Gipsy, or some hapless scion of a lost wandering tribe, but they, at least, have Bar Mitzvahs, music… all I’ve left is this room. This was an empire ruled from rooms: chambers decorated for a single, specific purpose: to impress its numerous enemies. I can’t sleep. There’s a ghostly halo above my bed where a clock used to hang. One way, I suppose, to stake a claim on timelessness, if not serenity.

This is the type of collection I like to linger in, not to hurry through. A clear, authenticity shines through in Naffis-Sahely’s poetics, with a quiet reflective wisdom I am really enjoying.

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Jonahwhale by Ranjit Hoskote (Hamish Hamilton/Penguin India, 2018)

This book seemed destined to prove more elusive than Ahab’s famous whale. I looked for it in Calcutta, a copy was sent to me in late February, and finally assuming that that one drowned somewhere along the way, I placed an order with an Indian distributor that ships by courier and the book made its way across the globe in four days. Sometimes you do get what you pay for.

Ranjit Hoskote is a poet, translator, curator and cultural critic based in Bombay. I’ve just started into this volume and I’m very excited to see where its currents will carry me. I’m expecting a lyrical adventure along fabled waterways, through literary and historical channels. Hoskote’s broad cultural perspective promises a timely exploration of the political and ecological realities that shape and threaten our world. This, again, is a text, that invites careful reading. No need to rush on this journey. Here is a taste  from a piece called “Ahab”:

Captain of castaways, the pilot calls out and his curse carries
.                                          across docks, derricks, opium factories:
.                                           a typhoon in the horse latitudes.
He’s hurled his ship after the whale
that swallowed him and spat him out.
.                                     The monster is the only system he’s known.
At the bridge, he’s drenched in the dark:
locked on target, silent, furrowed,
Saturned to stone.

I have, as ever, several other books close at hand. I’m finding that short, single author collections from contemporary poets  hold the most interest for me at the moment.

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And, finally, this past week saw the publication at Burning House Press, of my own modest piece of poetry, a short prose poem called “Are We There Yet?” This is my first successful poem as far as I’m concerned, that is, something that came out as I intended. It was written in response to the theme “Liminal Spaces”, a perfect fit for a way of thinking about my own dual-gendered life experience. I did, coincidentally, advise the editor that he could consider it a poem or an essay, since I look at everything I write, no matter the form, to be nonfiction.

You can find my poem here.

You say you want a revolution? The Revolutionaries Try Again by Mauro Javier Cardenas

DROOL: I wish we could have gone to Stanford together, Leo.

MICROPHONE: I haven’t thought about you in years.

DROOL: We could’ve spiked our Who’s Most Pedantic with courses on phenomonlogy,  econometrics, non-retrogradable rhythms.

MICROPHINE: Only what end continues, pig.

DROOL: I would’ve been happier staying in Guayaquil with you and arguing with you about everything.

MICROPHONE:  Yet another half truth.

DROOL:  I’m sorry Leo I . . .

MICROPHONE: You really think you have to confess all this to me?

DROOL:  Everything’s implicit and not implicit.

MICROPHONE: Do you feel better now?

DROOL:  Momentarily. No.

MICROPHONE: How many times do you have to re-imagine a heart-felt reunion until it replaces  the memory of our paltry reunion?

The attempt to write a review of Mauro Javier Cardenas’ debut novel, The Revolutionaries Try Again, in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s election as President of the United States, finds me a little at a loss for words. Fortunately, Cardenas is never at a loss for words. Words tumble forth, careen across the page, distort the lines between English and Spanish, (falling entirely into Spanish for two short chapters extolling, if titles be trusted, grandmotherly advice), and, sometimes, sometimes he offers snatches of dialogue, scripted even. This is a multi-voiced celebration of language, capturing in its best moments, the complicated mess of thoughts, emotions, and memories that course through the minds of his protagonists.

revolutionariesThe beating heart of The Revolutionaries lies in nostalgia for the idealism of youth, and the loss of faith in one’s ability to be a force for change. It is, essentially, about growing up, and the inevitable sadness that entails. Yet old dreams, it seems, die more readily for those who have the least to lose; whereas they crumble in agony for those who have little to begin with, and thus the most to lose.

The central character is Antonio. Upon graduation from an exclusive Jesuit-run boy’s school in Guayaquil, he had had the good fortune to be able to leave Ecuador, to study at Stanford University. In the US, he soon fell in love with avant-garde music and flirted with the notion of becoming a pianist. By the time we meet him he is working as a database analyst, projecting a life built on myths that draw on the appeal of his Latin American exoticism. He allows others to imagine he comes from a family of great wealth, and strains his credit cards to dress the part. He is living the migrant’s life of fantasy-meets-reality and it’s taking a toll:

I drink so I can bear talking to people, Antonio wrote. I acknowledge my conversational alcoholism. The more people converse with me, the more alcohol I am bound to imbibe. My liver, that most handsome of organs, was heard gossiping to my other organs about the absurdity of my social neurosis. Thank god my kidneys stood up for me and said shut up liver, you’re drunk again.

When his childhood friend Leopoldo calls him from Ecuador to report that there has been a coup and suggest that perhaps it is finally time for them to have a horse in the political game, Antonio heads home after twelve years away. What unfolds, more than productive action moving forward, is a replay of past memories, mediated by banter between the two friends, and featuring cameo appearances by other members of their former social group. They fall into using old nicknames, and rekindle past glories and grievances. Behind it all is a deep nostalgia for a time in their lives when their faith was grounded in a belief that they could make a difference in the world. As adolescents, under the guidance and inspiration of their beloved Father Villalba, the boys would visit the ill and catechize to the poor—they harboured a sense of being chosen, and Antonio even dreamed of becoming a priest for a while.

A third friend whose story plays out against those of Antonio and Leopoldo, is Rolando. He had not enjoyed the same relative financial advantages as the others, and together with his girlfriend Eva, he is struggling to broadcast a little reactionary radio program for better or worse. Their concerns are more immediate, the risks they take are greater, and even if the effect is small, they are actually trying to do something. But their relationship is complicated by unspoken losses—Rolando’s sister’s escape to America and Eva’s brother’s disappearance and death.

This is a novel that is looking back and stumbling forward at once. Little progress is made. That is the point and that is not the point. The realities of Ecuador’s political and economic uncertainties are an ever present backdrop, one that steps forth with particular brutality toward the end in the stories of the two female characters. But all of the main male characters seem to be mired in their own pasts, for all their vain talk of revolution. What rises to the surface is a profoundly human blend of nostalgia, loss, guilt, casual racism, sexism, and masculine insecurity. But there is also humour. This book is a startlingly infectious read.

To bring the story to life, Cardenas employs a wide range of narrative techniques from the modernist to the boldly experimental–slipping in and out of perspective and style as needed to keep a strong link to the interiority of most of his key characters. One chapter which follows Antonio’s thoughts upon his return to his mother’s home in Guayaquil, consists of a single sentence extending over twenty pages. Elsewhere, too, long sentences—interrupted by asides, imagined banter, or stretches of dialogue—are common. Here Antonio, preparing to meet with Leopoldo for the first time since his return, thinks back to their teenage games (Drool and Microphone were their respective nicknames):

… although Antonio doesn’t remember the exact content of the Who’s Most Pedantic exchanges by Don Alban’s cafeteria, he does remember that their game consisted of refuting each other about everything, spoofing the pompous language of the demagogues, priests, themselves, digressing manically about reforms they would enact to transform Ecuador—external debt, what is?—Leopoldo shaking Antonio’s hand whenever he won and declaring Always Above You, my friend, and if Leopoldo were a woman, Leopoldo would have been at ease in Antonio’s life in San Francisco because all of his friends in San Francisco had been women, as opposed to his former life at San Javier, where all his friends had been teenaged boys who expressed their affection by taunting each other with homophobic insults or misogynistic interpretations of the language between husband and wife—where’s your husband, Drool?—Microphone’s at home ironing my shirts, where else?—and if Leopoldo were a woman Antonio would be able to say, I’ve missed you, Leopoldo…

The tone is decidedly different when the narrative turns from Antonio, Leopoldo and their more privileged classmates, to focus on Rolando and Eva. Here the pace is even more frantic. Their protest is immediate—on radio airwaves and street corners. With rumours that El Loco, the flamboyant former President, Abdalá Bucaram, who ruled Ecuador for less than a year in the mid-90s, might be returning, Rolando reaches out to the poor and dispossessed on his makeshift radio station:

Ladies that’s the perfect segue to our contest about what would you like to call our interim president?—Puppet of the oligarchy—Very nice Doña Aurora—Pompous pajorreal—We’re warming up folks—Bestia con terno—Keep them coming comrades—Radio Nuevo Día / la radio al día—Up next how to cook a seco de chivo without the chivo—Baah—Speaking of chivos—El Loco is said to be returning from exile in Panamá—Who’s voting for that thief?—If you tell me you’re voting for Loco I’ll go loco—Has anyone seen the mansion of this leader of the poor?—Call now!

By engaging a range of narrative voices—at the personal and the socio-political level—visions of romantic idealism meet the harsh realities of class division. The shifts in perspective and energy keep The Revolutionaries Try Again moving at sharp pace, yet for all the sensation of being in freefall, Cardenas’ novel is, in fact, a tightly orchestrated achievement. In an interview published at Electric Lit, Cardenas shares a spreadsheet tracking the characters, conversations and narrative styles employed in one scene of the book. And this attention to detail at the formative level is what makes this cacophonous work succeed. Transitions between monologue and dialogue, present and past, are so smoothly handled that the reader is swept along with the sheer literary enthusiasm. But make no mistake, this is a novel that is as enjoyable to read as it is fundamentally melancholy and devastating at its very core.

The Revolutionaries Try Again is published by Coffee House Press.

In the window of a passing train: Faces In the Crowd by Valeria Luiselli

“All novels lack something or someone. In this novel there’s no one. No one except a ghost that I used to see sometimes in the subway.”

Faces in the Crowd, the debut novel from the young Mexican novelist Valeria Luiselli, is indeed a book of ghosts. The narrator is a young wife and mother living in Mexico City. As she tries to carve out time and space to write a novel, she draws the reader into a reflective exploration of ghosts – the ghosts that haunt her present house, the ghost of a life she fell into living and working in New York City, and the ghost of Gilberto Owen, an obscure Latin American poet who lived in Harlem in the late 1920s.

And for a book of ghosts it is brilliantly, shockingly alive.

crowdThe novel opens with a deceptively simple narrative feel. Contemporary domestic life is played out against her reflections on her past life in New York City when she was younger, unencumbered and working as a translator for a small independent publisher. She catalogues the friends and lovers that drifted through her spare apartment. One day she happens to encounter the work of Gilberto Owen on a search for potential material for translation, but before long her professional interest turns into an obsession. She tries to pass off her translations of his work as translations by a better known poet, an attempt that comes dangerously close to succeeding. She rescues a dead plant from the roof of the building he once lived in. She imagines that she sees him in the subway – more than once. Finally it is clear to her that she must leave:

“In the subway, on my way home, I saw Owen for the last time. I believe he waved to me. But by then it did not matter, I’d lost my enthusiasm. Something had broken. the ghost, it was obvious, was me.”

For all the empty space in her earlier life, married life is clearly suffocating our narrator. She continually finds herself unable to breathe, struggling to focus on her writing in a large house, cluttered with toys, distracted by the demands of her children – simply referred to as “the boy” and “the baby” – and the jealous curiosity of her architect husband. As the fictionalized first person account of Owen’s life begins to assume a greater prominence within the story, her marriage starts to unravel (or perhaps she simply writes her husband into the background) while the overall narrative structure seems to disintegrate, boundaries blur. The novel within the novel becomes enmeshed with her day-to-day life, folding back on and re-envisioning the experiences recounted from her earlier life in New York. Or was that Owen’s life?

Echoing the continually reshaped game of hide and seek between mother and son running throughout this novel, Faces in the Crowd lays out a metafictional game of hide and seek. Can a horizontal novel be told vertically? How is such a story to be read? Where in translation does truth lie? And when can you play with truth? It winds up to a delightfully oblique ending. Or lack of ending – rather, an invitation to imagine, to reread.

I opened this book completely unprepared for the heart-stopping luminosity of the prose or the way that the narrative is fragmented and rebuilt to create a rich meditation on the nature of story telling. Valeria Luiselli demonstrates a maturity and confidence that belies her age without ever falling into a heavily somber tone. The translation by Christina MacSweeney maintains the lively, poetic flow of this impressive debut. I was pleasantly surprised by this intelligent and enjoyable read.

Faces in the Crowd has been longlisted for the 2015 Best Translated Book Award (BTBA).

Faces in the Crowd by Valeria Luiselli, translated by Christina MacSweeney                Coffee House Press, 2014