The Secret Powers of Naming by Sara Littlecrow-Russell

The University of Arizona Press, 2006
Review by Kimberly L. Becker

I Write, You Listen

Sara Littlecrow-Russell is Anishinaabe (Ojibway) and Han-Naxi Métis, a single mother of two, a lawyer, an anti-racist organizer, and a professional mediator. Her first book, (italics)The Secret Powers of Naming(/italics), won the Independent Publisher Book Award (Bronze in Poetry) and the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award (from the Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights), and was a finalist for both the PEN/Beyond Margins Award and ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Award. The secret is out: Littlecrow-Russell can (italics)write(/italics).

With mordant humor, she not only “reinvents the enemy’s language,” but also incorporates her native language into her work, further resisting cultural genocide. In her author’s statement, Littlecrow-Russell explains that in Ojibway “survival” (“zhaabwii”) is a verb that means “the act of passing through intact” and that “this book is the search for the spiritual and political power of ‘zhaabwii.’”

These poems witness to survival–as a verb. In “Russian Roulette, Indian Style” “the spinning cylinder / of a 500 year old gun” is loaded with five colonial bullets: “Alcohol / Disease / Poverty / Violence / Assimilation / Survival is finding the name / Of the empty chamber.” Since “the sacred act of naming brings power over [what is named]” these poems serve as ceremonial acts.

Dance is central to many poems, highlighting cultural incongruities:

Skin-tight bellbottoms
strain against the muscles
of your Iroquois Smoke Dancer’s legs—
10,000-year-old rhythm collides
with hardcore hip-hop thunder.
You dance hard in a world
that does not welcome you as Indian,
but loves a delectable 12-year-old girl.

In one of the most moving poems, a widow dances to honor her slain husband, victim of a hate crime: “You danced, we cried. / The tourists snapped their cameras / And reached out to run their hands / Over the beadwork on your dress.”

Real Indians are often rendered invisible by stereotypes. In “Invisible Indians” those who are “nameless, invisible” under florescent lights of a 7-11 regain identity when “an owl shattered / Brittle moonlight of urban winter / With the power of naming, / ‘Ko-ko-ko!’ / We lifted our arms in greeting, / Spoke our names, / And were visible again.” Indian women, in particular, are subject to invisibility except as sexual commodity: “Half-naked maidens with feathers in their hair.” (Look closely at the cover art by Diane Way, Lakota/Cheyenne.) Littlecrow-Russell claims solidarity with women of all races, from “12-year-old Chinese girls / Imported for the 1900s sex trade / Forced to their knees…” to “Cheyenne grandmothers kneeling on the ground / Gathering wet fragments of their grandchildren’s skulls…‘We all have wounded knees.’”

The massacre at Wounded Knee was precipitated by the perceived threat of the Ghost Dance religion. Although “…History books say the threat is gone…/ Each time it rains, / I go out to the sidewalk, / Where the tree roots / Have broken the concrete / Listening to the water’s whispering: / ‘It is coming soon.’”

With poetry as powerful as this, Littlecrow-Russell’s second book cannot come soon enough.

Small Murders by Carrie McGath

New Issues Press, 2006
Review by Metta Sáma

Because of DNA

DNA everywhere. Hair follicles, eyelashes, hidden hot pink toenails, scraped knees, bruised fingers. Carrie McGath’s debut collection, Small Murders, looks for evidence with a trained, meticulous, inexhaustible eye. From indentations in beds to material inside a glove box, from the bent back of an assiduous artist to the wooden closet of a boudoir, McGath seeks out the tiny parts, the small murders, of the mind, the heart, the psyche, in order to detect the who, why, and wherewithal of love.

Small Murders opens with a tour through a small antique shop, where the perspicacious narrator frets over a series of fragmented doll parts. These “exact dismemberments” hang above the narrator, on display: “brown hair, red hair, dishwater blonde hair,/feet, arms, legs, and heads with eyes,/eyes with eyelids that shuttered when touched.” Despite the baleful atmosphere of this macabre backroom of the antique shop, the narrator sticks around, surveying, making notes of “the gunshot doll”, the “armless teddy bear”, and “two jaundiced plastic arms”, and returns a week later to purchase the small box that contains more parts: “two baby doll teeth,/a small nursing bottle,/a tiny dustpan in 1950s blue” (7). McGath specializes in broken, discarded left behinds, attending to these objects as nurse, scientist, surgeon, and lover.

She recalls the dashboard Virgin in Henry’s taxi, the woeful eyes of Hans Bellmar’s dolls, and a pomegranate rotting in an abandoned refrigerator with tenacious clarity. Later, she returns to the slaughter, more clearly, with “So Nice to See You”, “Rape Dreams”, “Nights Marred Like Crickets in Metal Fan Blades”, and “Murder Girl”. In poems like “You Are a Rifle in My Closet”, “Daylight Savings”, and “My Libido”, the violence is less bloody, yet the narrators suffocate under an intense need to love intensely. In “A Good Nympho Can Get a Lot of Guys Killed”, she writes: “And didn’t I call you a jackass/for not taking the love I gave you seriously?/And then I walked away wanting to cry but seeing the cool/absurdity of crying, so I didn’t” (9).

By the end of the book, I’m convinced this narrator (these narrators?) is “the loneliest girl in the time zone” (1, is “an ordinary object. A compact” (14), is the tremble, the “eerie paths”, the “scouring pads”, the “round and red as plums” nipples, and more and more and more. By the end of the book, I’m just as convinced the fertility of McGath’s imagination becomes overpowering, overdone, and indeterminate. Where restraint is needed, the hand is heavy.

And yet, this is a mesmerist’s narrative hope: to create a lyric fecundate, to unrestrain. Carrie McGath has accomplished this feat. Read it and watch your mind follow the beautiful tangle of dots.

Rising, Falling, Hovering: A Poetry of Ethics and Responsibility by C.D. Wright

Review by Shannon K. Winston

For many reasons, C.D. Wright’s newest collection of poetry, Rising, Falling, Hovering, is breathtaking. Stylistically, Wright’s poems are delicate, deceptively simple, and replete with striking imagery. For example, she opens “Like Having a Light at the Back You Can’t See but You Can Still Feel (1)” with the following lines: “As if it were streaming into your ear./ The edges of the room long vanished” (4). One of the greatest strengths of this collection is its refreshing variation. Wright is vigorous and attentive to all of her lines and each poem begins differently than the one that preceded it. The lines are double space which adds an airy quality to the poems that allows readers to slow down and contemplate each line without rushing. In the same poem, the speaker writes of two people: “they were not covering the air/with false words” (Ibid), which is true of Wright herself. Rising, Falling, Hovering is a very raw collection that abandons ornate language in favor of a vigorous questioning of what it means to be a poet in today’s world.

Related to the last point, one of the most important and compelling themes that reoccurs in Rising, Falling, Hovering is the question of responsibility towards others when the world is ravaged by war and injustice. Wright opens her collection with the following citation from Maurice Merleau-Ponty that sets the tone for the entire collection: “The momentum of existence towards others, towards the future, towards the world can be restored as a river unfreezes.” The reader can interpret each line in this collection, therefore, as Wright’s deeply personal and politically attempt to communicate and do right to others. Each line is a gesture towards a better, more equal future. While certainly utopic, Rising, Falling, Hovering also ponders whether a poet can foment significant change. Wright writes: “But we can’t leave it to the forces to rub out the color of the world/ What is said has been said before (space)/ This is no time for poetry” (15). But, if anything, Wright’s collection seems to confirm that poets have an ethical responsibility to write, to question their world and their place in it. In this hauntingly beautiful collection, Wright presents some of the most salient questions—what it means to be human, to live with others, and to experience both beauty and violence—in an artfully crafted and delicate verse. For all of these reasons, Rising, Falling, Hovering is not only a stunning read but an important one as well.

Correction of Drift: A Novel in Stories by Pamela Ryder

Fiction Collective 2, 2008

Nonlinear Flight
Review by Elizabeth J. Colen

What do you remember of the Lindbergh affair? That lost baby? Perhaps you heard once about how the man who flew the “Spirit of St. Louis” across the ocean lost his baby to thieves through the second-story nursery window. Older generations could never forget this sad and media-frenzied event if they tried, while younger generations might know no facts of the kidnapping and murder at all. Regardless of the amount of knowledge you bring to Pamela Ryder’s Correction of Drift: A Novel in Stories you will be horrified, saddened, yet overall entertained as she transforms this historical event into tangible personal histories of the people involved.

The novel, written in nine stories linked by content and separated by nine different perspectives (from the kidnappers, to Lindbergh, Mrs. Lindbergh, the maid, wife of the accused, etc), contains the beautiful and unconventional/experimental poetic style for which this press (FC2) is known. Sometimes the prose moves through events and descriptions purposefully, as when Ryder is describing the immigrant culture of New York City in the early part of the twentieth century. Other times the language is playful, pure poetry—“Did he ever see the birds that dip into the waves, just above the foam where the sea becomes air?”

Moving from the first to the second (and title) story, the extreme close third-person narrative, including ominous flashbacks to the kidnappers’ childhoods, has become the highly self-conscious compulsiveness of a man who has always been so careful to see to every detail trying to come to terms with what overlooked factors could have led to his son’s disappearance. Thanks to Ryder’s elegant prose one can almost agree with him. How could someone steal a baby out of a room with a newly silvered mirror? “There had been self-reliance, priority, order.” Cross-atlantic flight is compared to “solitude, safety of woods surrounding the house.” At times the comparison becomes too adamant, “he sees the crib, the rails, the bars of moonlight”—as if for one second the reader might miss the parallels, the repetition. Even these distractions can be overlooked as Ryder’s wording remains lovely and engaging throughout.

As the second (his) story turns into the third (written in the bad grammar of the ransom notes), then fourth (Mrs. Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s perspective), his focus on details leads to her fastidious homemaking. In his story we note her meticulous dress, in hers we see the commanding woman of the house who keeps her famous husband together. While the characterization of Mrs. seems simplistic in its primary focus of things commonly known, such as her love of fashion and seashells, we are drawn in by the repetition that runs parallel to Mr. Lindbergh’s checking and rechecking. In this (her story) his tendency to thoroughness is used against him. That the nursery window never shut tight is a contentious detail that becomes an obsessive, recurring image that shifts slightly in tenor with each passing mention. Even their luggage in leaving becomes equated to the window: “She will attend to the lock, the straps, the latch. She will see to it that nothing else is lost.”

Each subsequent story not only adds something new but also complicates and transforms, building upon and re-imagining the previous stories and information given. With the novel wrapping up in a tourist’s perspective of visiting the house years after the fact, it seems the only angle missing is an account from one of the many men who have come forward claiming to be the Lindbergh baby.

Also striking is the heavy use throughout of historical headlines about the event to precede each story. The headlines, often heartbreakingly conflicting, fill any gap in the reader’s basic knowledge of the Lindbergh history, so that Ryder’s lyric prose can get at the emotional experience behind each separate perspective. A truly fascinating read.

The Palace of Illusions by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Review by Grace Andreacchi

It is impossible to take this book seriously. It professes to be a re-telling of the great Indian epic ‘The Mahabharata’, from the point of view of a female protagonist, the Princess Panchaali. But the writing is so awkward and the sentiments so hackneyed and cloying, we know immediately we have been relocated to the sprawling suburban sensibility of modern America. If this were meant as a sharp-tongued critique thereof then there might be something in it, but alas, the author seems to have adapted thoroughly to the style of her adopted country, and so is bereft of irony. What is one to make of such sentences as ‘I was fascinated by Krishna because I couldn’t decipher him’? Or this: ‘I felt dejection settle on my shoulders like a shawl of iron’. Like a what? Or this: ‘A problem becomes a problem only if you believe it to be so.’ That this sort of trite sentimentality passes for ancient wisdom from the mouths of the gods is only one of the things wrong with this book. The unevenness of tone, which veers wildly back and forth from a kind of by-your-leave-Miss storyteller’s affectation to the banality of the shopping mall is another. Merely to label a book a ‘feminist re-telling’ is not enough, the reader must find therein an engagement with the feminine experience that somehow both transforms and illuminates the ancient material. Instead we have a series of tired slogans.

The best that can be said for this book is that certain passages are not without charm, as the colour and sweep of the great epic itself sometimes take over. The Princess Panchaali is said to have been born of the sacred fire, and occasional flickers sometimes light up the pages, like signal fires glimpsed through the fog. But one would do far better simply to read the original than to bother with this pallid offspring.

I had high hopes for this book, for I consider the territory of myth and legend to be one of the most fertile and rewarding for the writing of good fiction. That this book fails to interest or excite me is not due in any way to the subject, but rather to its tedious and awkward handling. There is probably a good book to be written about the vivid princesses of the Mahabharata. Sadly, this is not it.

A White Girl Lynching by Elizabeth P. Glixman

Pudding House Publications, 2008
Review by Kimberly L. Becker

Color Theory

Elizabeth P. Glixman is a poet and writer, as well as interview editor at Eclectica. Her work appears in many journals and anthologies, including Frigg, The Pedestal, Wicked Alice, and Women of the Web: A Poetry Anthology. An animal lover, she also has a blog devoted to shelter animals. In addition, she is a visual artist (B.F.A. in Studio Arts and M.Ed. from Clark University) and the poems in her chapbook, A White Girl Lynching, reflect this artistic sensibility.

A carefully selected frame both highlights and protects the artwork within. Glixman frames her book with an author’s statement: “These poems are…about respect for all individuals and races…many of the poems [are] about what happens to people when they are ‘lynched.’ I interpret lynched as meaning to have an important element of individual dignity taken away from an individual or group.” Glixman takes a risk in dissociating lynching from its historical context and connotation. With her statement, she wisely protects her title’s integrity of intent. Without it, the title itself would run the risk of seeming to disrespect African American victims of literal lynching. By highlighting her definition of “lynching” that occurs across color lines, Glixman frees the reader to appreciate more fully the artistry of her poems.

Accompanying each Pudding House chapbook is a Position Statement on the Value of Poetry Arts that reads in part: “You selected language art that took as long to create as paintings or other fine art.” This statement is especially fitting for Glixman, whose own artwork graces the cover and whose poems are informed by her training as a visual artist. “Painted Stories from the Dutch,” an ekphrastic poem in eight parts, draws inspiration from Rembrandt, Vermeer and other masters from the Golden Age of Dutch painting, according to her blog,(italics)In the Moment(/italics), in which she also notes that quality of light and details of texture characterize this period. (Given the title and theme of the book, the fruit and hanging, bloodied rabbits depicted in this poetic still-life cannot help but recall more sinister “Strange Fruit.”)

The white girl of the title, who suffers a vicious beating, “covered her black blue / fruity bruises with pancake makeup.” The heavy application of cosmetics recalls the artistic technique of impasto, which Glixman also alludes to in the stunning line: “Dance with me in darkness and light / In the thick impasto of secret lust.” Glixman applies the principle of chiaroscuro to the light and dark side of racial relations. Her poems emphasize the danger of being “pulled into one point perspective” when it comes to viewing others. Despite the violence of “The Modern Annihilation” Glixman seeks connection: an executed son of a friend is “still in the arch of all things.” Further, “the path of all things is a miniature painting / Luminescent and telling.”

Glixman mixes colorful characters (a hallelujah-shouting Momma, a cat named Rabbi Simon, a Manoschevitz-toting Eve) to test her theory that it is not race or even species that divides us, but lack of compassion: “Who knows who is who in this world of sorrow?” Glixman paints an answer at once anguished and hopeful: “We cry and wonder, for the confusion of lost things / and arrive in a space of astonishment.”

The Best Women’s Travel Writing 2008 edited by Lucy McCauley

Travelers’ Tales, 2008
Review by Suzanne Kamata

The traveler’s tale my husband and I tell most often is about the time an arsonist set fire to our Vancouver hotel and I was rescued by hook and ladder. It was a small fire, no one was injured, and we got a story out of it that we would tell for years to come.

Likewise, many of the selections in The Best Women’s Travel Writing 2008, edited by Lucy McCauley, emerged from well-laid plans gone awry. For instance, in “Ski Patrol,” Anne Lamott learns a life lesson from falling out of the chair lift, whereas Laura Resau bonds with her Mexican date’s mother – after he stands her up - in “My Ex-Novio’s Mother.” Kira Coonley writes about the devastating tsunami that wrecked her vacation and changed her life in December 2004, while Kari Bodnarchuk’s contribution, “On the Dark Side,” tells of a kayaking trip in Patagonia that starts off with an overturned boat, and a friend in the water.

Adventure aside, many of these essays bring small, seemingly inconsequential moments to light. Christine Sarkis’ irresistibly titled selection, “ Dipping Girl, Flying Girl, Heart Attack,” is about a woman needing to empty her bladder while enjoying fondue. How she gets to the bathroom is basically the whole story. C. Lill Aherns (“A Simple System”) writes about stoking the coal stove early in the morning in her Korean apartment building.

These essays take the reader from Italy, to India, to Madagascar, Papua New Guinea, and El Salvador, among other destinations. While some detail interesting vacations, others do not fit the usual conventions of travel writing. Momena Sayed’s contribution, “Paradise – Lost,” for example, is a memoir of her life in her homeland Afghanistan during war-time, written while the author was a student at College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts. In “A Life Together, Worlds Apart,” Tracy Slater, who is married to a Japanese man, writes of dividing her life between Osaka, where she lives part-time with her husband, and Boston, where she teaches literature and gender studies to the incarcerated through the Boston University Prison Education Program. And Marianne Rogoff’s trip to Portugal (“Alive in Lisbon”) takes her not to a resort, but to a hospital, where she has been invited to read from her book about her deceased infant daughter.

A disproportionate number of these writers have a connection to the Boston area, where editor McCauley lives, which makes me wonder about the selection process. What would have happened if she had cast her net a bit wider? Nevertheless, this is a solid collection featuring a wide range of travel experiences by both established and emerging writers – cheaper than a plane ticket, the next best thing to being there.

A Piece of Cake by Cupcake Brown

Crown Publishing Group, February 2006
Review by Vanessa Dora Murray

It Ain’t Over Till It’s Over!

Cupcake Brown, an attorney who worked at one of the 25th largest law firms in the nation, has traveled all over the country to deliver a motivational speech. “My goal is to hopefully inspire as many people as I can and to let them know that no matter what challenges they may face in life, they’re not alone—and any challenge can be overcome,” she says in one of her many interviews since the writing of her debut book, A Piece of Cake.

A Piece of Cake is an awe-inspiring coming-of-age epic account—written in first-person and Brown’s own vernacular—of hope and survival.

At age 11 Brown finds her mother dead in bed. She is tossed into a sadistic foster home and her life spirals down into a world of physical abuse, rape, drugs, prostitution, and gang banging. By age 13 she finds herself pregnant by one of her johns but lose the unborn baby when she is brutally beaten by her foster mother’s daughter. By her 15th birthday she is told by doctors that she’ll never walk again after she is shot in the back with a 12-gauge shotgun by rival gang members in South Central Los Angeles. She does walk again. But her addiction to crack grows out of control. She hates her life and wants to die so she tries to contract AIDS. By her mid twenties, she walks past a window after living behind a dumpster for days, “And saw my reflection. My eyes were sunk in my head. My lips were burned and scabbed from the crack pipe. You could see my ribs. I had seen death before on other people. But I’d never seen it on me,” recalls Brown. That day was the beginning of her spiral up. She entered a drug rehab, got rid of toxic friends, and without a high school diploma or GED, Brown graduated college magna cum laude. In 2001 at the age of 37 Brown graduated nearly top of her class from the University of San Francisco Law School. Brown has received a slew of scholastic awards including the University of San Francisco School of Law’s Judge Harold J. Haley Award for Exceptional Distinction in Scholarship, Character and Activities, the McAuliffe Honor Society, the National Law School Dean’s List, and the San Diego State University’s Donald Leiffer Outstanding Alumni Award for Distinguished Service.

A brutally straightforward memoir, A Piece of Cake will have readers sniffling throughout this 480 page heart-wrencher sprinkled with a modest amount of humor.

Scholarship Girl by Lesley Wheeler

Finishing Line Press, 2007
Review by Rachel Dacus

Can memories be passed down through generations? This is the question at the heart of Lesley Wheeler’s fascinating new chapbook of linked poems on the theme of her mother’s World War II era Liverpool. The book begins with a poem whose title challenges ideas of thought and memory, and where memory resides. “Remembering My Mother’s Childhood” dares conventional ideas of memoir by giving it a twist: the concept of a parent’s experience transmitted through living language, full-blown and layered as if experienced by the child. That initial poem begins with definitions critical to the question:

When she says stove she means fireplace,
a great soot-blackened maw. When I say
Liverpool I mean an unreal city, purified
of reeking detail like a fairy tale

But this is no fairytale world that Wheeler’s poetry evokes in rich detail. With a startling authentic voice and “remembered” imagery, the poet layers the present day daughter and her questions about origins with cultural inheritance, even questioning the possibility of such questions being answered. She declares the ambiguity of memory in the poem’s last lines: “I invent this blitzed, hungry, smoke-thin world/ because it invented me, and lies/ are my birthright.”

The layers in Wheeler’s poetry are most deeply revealed in the book’s adroit crown of unrhymed sonnets, “The Calderstones.” The initial sonnet sets out its scope of history, making it as solid and yet mysterious as its subject, a ring of ancient stones. The poem ends by showing the destructiveness of time on culture and memory and even on megaliths: “Liverpool shrugs and shrines/ topple.” The callousness of history becomes part of history and culture.

Wheeler’s deeply rooted – if borrowed – sense of place pervades this collection. At times the poems reminded me of English poet Alice Oswald’s marvelous Dart, a book-length poem that traces the course of the river Dart from its source to the ocean, folding in all its people and occupations along the way. At other times, the idiomatic voices and terse commentary made me think of Eliot. Using a rich blend of artifact, dialect and rhythm, Wheeler points to the mysterious accretion of cultural patterning while simultaneously shrugging them off with the observer’s detached stance.

“No elegies here,” declares the last line of the last poem. Yet I felt in these poems a river of plaintive tribute to the power of language to transmit a deep sense of place. The final poem begins with lines that might be anti-ode, an elegy for memories that cannot completely cohere, but still resonate in the time capsule of verse:

There is no way to prove to you how
my mother’s Liverpool sounded,
the slosh, the rattle of it, the catarrhal
school girl recitations of “Daffodils”

there is no grooved disk, no file
to click, no black-and-white child
to stand on the chair for a song

me auntie Mary had a canary
up the leg of her drawers

In refusing to pen elegies, Lesley Wheeler has instead poignantly recreated another world and another time.

Voice of Ice by Alta Ifland

Les Figues Press, 2007
Review by GA. A. Banks-Martin

True Birth

Voice of Ice, a collection of prose poems, by Alta Ifland, an ambitious group of poems in which the speaker seeks to discover her true self. The poems are highly descriptive and many times highly surrealistic often leaving us with the sense that we have just been somewhere familiar but unfamiliar. For example, the first lines of Birth:

I was born in a lapse of time, my hand clinging to a
dandelion, my feet gripping a vine leaf, my nose on my
back, and eye on my ankle.
Of course, no one remembers being born but it is safe to say that this description is far from the truth. However, as the poem develops, so does an explanation:
My mother wasn’t present at my birth or maybe she was
there and her pain of being torn apart still throbs in my veins.
The idea that the infant was born with what seems to be several malformations is really a way of introducing the book’s primary theme: deconstruction of self. The narrator
must return to the point at which she is purest, the point at which all knowledge is innate, to be reborn and reopened to basic learning.

That learning includes discovering there is something worst than being unhappy: having been abandoned by your own unhappiness. As is the case of My neighbors, a couple who have tried to find contentment via plastic surgery and antidepressants only to find that those solutions lead to more plastic surgery and antidepressants. Surgery has left the wife’s face so distorted that it sounds as if her surgeon was really a cubist painter, the husband shows no physical signs malady but has the odd ability to discuss prescribing information and general concerns encountered while taking any antidepressant. They are so unhappy they no longer know they are unhappy; unhappiness has become a lifestyle.

The last lesson of the book is simple, we have been educated to understand everything, is recycled, thus, Even death is no longer final. While the poem Death illustrates this well, the basic thought was quietly developing along side all of the other ideas, as the poet has translated each poem into French, her native language, symbolically, the lost, and regaining of national identity.

Therefore, when we reach the end of Alta Ifland’s Voice of Ice, we have witnessed the fascinating rebirth of a human being, a being free of ego, preconceived notions of identity, national or otherwise, and formal learning. What we encounter about life and ourselves is funny, uncomfortable, familiar and difficult but refreshing and well worth struggle.

The poet, Alta Ifland, was born in Eastern Europe, studied literature, and philosophy in France, and lives in California.

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