Three Books: Jane Rosenberg LaForge, Laura Read, & Thomas Stock

Reviewed by GEORGE WALLACE

With Apologies to Mick Jagger, Other Gods, and All Women by Jane Rosenberg LaForge (Aldrich Press, 2012) 

Being and on-being, Lao Tzu said, produce each other. Rosenberg LaForge’s third chapbook of poems is smart like that. A prismic oscillation, with explorations and transmutations as ephemeral as dust that rises like mustard, as day that liquefies into heat. She offers up country girls who, failing to subsist on water and lard, diminish into sand.  Faces of loved ones flicker into and out of being like improbable origami. Locked in the cambric of the world’s relentless weaving, it leaves us where it begins, where all things begin—in the whistling wind which sings in the heart of bone.

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Instructions for My Mother's Funeral by Laura Read (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012) 

In these poems we find Laura Read in some unusual places; leaning out through a car window into the Wyoming dark, to avoid not hearing the silence of the man she rides beside. Riding the Octopus in Coney Island, heart like salt water taffy, screaming to get off.  In the kitchen of a donut factory squirting raspberry filling into donuts, fingers thick with sugar and lips still swollen from a night of long dragged out kisses in ditches littered with anonymous boys.  This is the America you were born into, dead so long you don’t even remember its voice, empty as pink Depression-era glass. “These breasts are heavy,” she intones, “Louisiana sweating down between them, and my body’s gone limp like the trees.” It’s enough to make you want to cut off your hair and offer it to the wind.

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Hidden Agenda: A Poetry Journal by Thomas Stock (Writers Ink Press, 2012) 

We find poet and naturalist Stock "walking among pitch pines (and) mosses, crouched and touching their breast" in these placid and centered poems of his adopted home within the Long Island Pine Barrens  ecosystem. Stock teaches us to live richly on little things—dragonflies in a zinnia patch, green frogs on the edge of a small pond. Stop here for a daily dose of the tender beauty of nature unfolding from the sometimes prickly stuff of bone-dry woodlands and tannin-brown water.

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John Amen and Daniel Y. Harris: The New Arcana

The New Arcana by John Amen and Daniel Y. Harris, NYQ Books, 2012 

Reviewed by CINDY HOCHMAN

arcana [noun]:  (Spirituality, New Age, Astrology & Self-help/Alternative Belief Systems) either of the two divisions (the minor arcana and the major arcana) of a pack of tarot cards.

Sometimes you can judge a book by its cover, especially when the cover art boasts a glossy texture and a modern, cutting-edge feel which accurately mirrors the lush and lively text. The New Arcana both inside and out, offers a stylish, sexy, intellectually challenging, genre-jumping discourse which poses several questions: How can we live productively and contentedly in this frenetic and kinetic, high-tech world without succumbing to dementia or despair or death; how to choose between ambition and ennui; and to what extent are we willing to die for our art. Beyond the camp and hyperbole, this is a serious work that avoids pretension by not taking itself too seriously—it is, at once, a multi-faceted mockumentary, replete with sound bites, sidebars, and a deconstruction of the lexicon, and a veritable theater of the obscene and absurd. John Amen and Daniel Y. Harris have embarked on a daring and daunting collaborative effort that demands a good deal of attention, but rewards us with highly caffeinated, and often hilarious, entertainment.

Over milk, hypodermic restlessness, and mango sherbet, Sadie and Jughead

discuss their fluttering day.

Since it is de rigueur these days for reviewers to compare the work at hand to a seminal literary work of the past, please indulge me while I opine that The New Arcana, in spirit and form, lies somewhere between The Waste Land and Plato's Republic, with a bit of Alice in Wonderland,in all its satirical whimsy, tossed in. But perhaps it would be more useful to forego the comparisons and discuss why this book is unique, and important, in its own right.

My ennui shall be my tabernacle,

                temple, Delphi.

   It shall lead me through rapacious waters

   past sirens and reefs, deliver me

                safe to Ithaca.

The cadence, throughout, is in striking alignment with the content. There is a vibrant breathlessness to the prose, which perfectly captures the wild fluctuations and hysteria of our daily lives.  At heart, Messrs. Amen and Harris are poets and, as such, the dialogue is peppered with lyrically appealing, spiritually astute, imagery:

A hot wind whips across the eternal landscape;

archaic symbols are sold at auction north of Disneyland

to diehard antique-mongers and melancholy pedants  . . .

Then, a flipped coin fell from the blue sky like an afterthought.

Will you stick round to hear the details—how it landed—

as they are cast and analyzed by the aging excommunicants?

Although there is no overt attempt to derange the senses, á la surrealism, the authors do play havoc with the reader’s notions of what, exactly, is vital to the zeitgeist.  It is no accident that the book begins, “Our Father who art.”  While, at first glance, there is a seemingly religious significance, it soon becomes clear that the real focus is on the word “art,” and how we define it. All roads lead to the Muse, who manifests in many colorful variations: high art co-exists peacefully with low art (i.e., discussing Descartes while stuffing money in a g-string); and the abandonment (or, even, annihilation) of the creative force altogether.  Of course, there is also a healthy undercurrent of fetishist sex, if you are so inclined.

There are five discrete chapters, each one setting up a dichotomy (or maybe an existential crisis, depending on your interpretation). The first dramatic presentation, drawing on pop culture and wild imagination, features Jughead Jones (wasn’t he a character in the Archie comics?) and Sadie Shorthand (isn't our language these days a sort of texted shorthand?)

Alas, I am being bombarded by wings, black embers,

velcro, and coupons, Sadie thinks, removing her 4-inch

heels, hanging the riding crop on the smoke-yellow wall . . .

Too late, between crumbs of Cartesian hypochondria,

saturated fat of dictum, logic, syllogism . . .

The high-spirited debate focuses on the value of math versus theology, which can also be translated as:  abstract versus concrete; spiritual versus physical; and, within the context of literature, experimental versus linear.  The authors are decidedly on the side of free expression.

And, oh, did I mention there is sex?

It seems fitting that the sexual deviance of choice is adults masquerading as babies.  But once you get past the symbolism of dirty diapers and breast-pumped milk, you can see this regression as a way to mitigate the stress of overwhelming stimuli that living in the real word entails, or, quite simply, a desire to shirk responsibility:

. . . Jug and Sadie confabbing in the milk-white kitchen,

             pacifiers and Lego kits

strewn about the floor, bills unpaid . . .

In Chapter 2, we are treated to a mock trial in a kangaroo court, wherein the competency of one Constance Carbuncle is to be determined. The real question, though, is whether madness is a necessary by-product of a think-outside-the-box worldview.

Constance Carbuncle

                 waved goodbye

 to a few more neurons:

                                warrior cells and regenerative dendrites

were insufficient to counter her family’s wacked legacy.

But who are the final arbiters of Constance’s fate? Justin Nurm, Constance's lover, “once flew into a rage when a hotdog vendor neglected to offer him mustard for his salty pretzel” and has “a penchant for eating lightly sautéed worms.”  Dr. Yistrum Lee “challenged the dust mites to a vocabulary duel” and “once stuck a pencil up his right nostril while tweezing his left eyebrow.”  Lead Advocate Hortense rehearses his closing statement in front of an albino doll.  Let the judges themselves be judged!

“The actors . . . sit with their backs to the audience.  They speak

neither to each other nor to the audience, as if they are completely

disassociated from both themselves and their immediate surroundings.” 

By the next chapter, and as depicted in the above stage directions of this play-within-a-play, the characters have descended into apathy and disconnectedness. In this regard, perhaps I should not have been so hasty in discounting comparisons — there really are elements of The Waste Land here, although the sprinkling of foreign phrases is in French (and sometimes Hebrew) rather than Latin. T.S. Eliot staged a séance; Harris and Amen reference the tarot deck—both are intrinsically linked to the concepts of sex and death. The torrent of non-sequiturs denotes a similar decline in engagement, both due to untenable outside forces. But while The Waste Land, in each successive stanza, plunges further into chaos, The New Arcana does not, in the end, give in to pessimism, even despite the fact that most of the young practitioners of the new art have drawn the death card.  The last chapter culminates in dialectical verse, laid out symmetrically on the page, which attempt to restore order and reconcile all previous disparities.

The New Arcana is not for the lazy reader. But for those who believe that  contemporary American writing ought to push as many envelopes as possible, this book is not only worth the intellectual investment—it’s a really enjoyable ride!

The New Arcanaby John Amen and Daniel Y. Harris, NYQ Books 2012, ISBN:978-1-935520-59-7

Cindy Hochman is the editor-in-chief of the online journal First Literary Review-East. Her poems are upcoming in the New York Quarterly, CLWN WR, and the Cancer Project Anthology. Her latest chapbook is The Carcinogenic Bride.

We accept book reviews for our website. Please query via the contact page before submitting. Reviews must be under 1000 words. Our aim is to support new and emerging writers, and other small presses. Poetry and experimental prose reviews preferred. Review submissions accepted all year round.

Stephen Caratzas: Past Present Suture

Past Present Suture by Stephen Caratzas, Drifting Man Press 2011

Reviewed by OLIVER WOLF

Although possessed of his own unique voice and aping no one, Stephen Caratzas’ latest book of poetry, Past Present Suture, would sit very comfortably on any bookshelf next to the best of Huncke, Bukowski, Trocchi—that gang. But before it sits on any shelf, it needs to be read, because the entries in this book make you feel, and cause you to see just how much the writer feels…a hammer blow to the heart and mind. Pathos always leavened with black humor, as in “My Least Favorite Memory of You”, the last line of which slayed me (just read the poem). Or the heartbreaking conclusion to “I Still Reach For That Book”, easy to relate to by anyone who’s ever been in a failed relationship but where feelings still linger. This is brutal, hilarious stuff.

Judging by the quality and depth of what’s on display here, it would seem that—much like the book cover model’s face—Mr. Caratzas’ poetry ambitions are pretty much all sewn up and the places where his writings can take the reader appear limitless.

Past Present Suture, Stephen Caratzas, Drifting Man Press, 2011. $10

Oliver Wolf has been in various bands/musical projects around New York City for the past twenty-five years or so. He is trying to pass on his love of books, art, and music to his two boys, and says  "surprisingly it's working!"

We accept book reviews for our website. Please query via the contact pagebefore submitting. Reviews must be under 1000 words. Our aim is to support new and emerging writers, and other small presses. Poetry and experimental prose reviews preferred. Review submissions accepted all year round.