Box of Surprises by Teresa Peipins

Finishing Line Press, 2009
Review by Jamie Elizabeth Marko

The question of identity is a constant struggle for most Americans. We boldly declare our heritage, if we are lucky enough to know it, assuming that our ancestral homes innately impart some deeper meaning to our sense of self. What does it mean to be Irish? And how does that change when one is also German or Finnish or Russian? And can any of that be relevant when one is born American?

Teresa Peipins confronts identity in her collection of poems entitles “Box of Surprises.” Having lived outside of the States for twenty years, Peipins takes us through the journey of connecting with the ancestral land while living as a foreigner. While visiting Latvia, her parental home, she grapples with Europe’s dark history that forced mass diaspora throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. She questions the lives of her family, what was known and unknown, what was spoken and unspoken. Conversely, she details the curiosities of living, loving, and surviving abroad through her experiential Barcelona-based pieces. She takes the reader along the sun-soaked countryside without neglecting the dusty suffocation of cities.

Stylistically, Peipins provides clean, tight description. “Recognition: On Visiting Latvia” (p 5-6) paints a simple picture of arrival and discovery that captures the curiosity and pain of discovery. “Box of Surprises” (p 9) is cohesive prose in which she brings the stifling scents of the past that paradoxically open up her sense of history in her life abroad. It is deftly crafted without a word misplaced.

Peipins does, however, write from a very feminine perspective; she employs many references to water with images of pounding waves, submerged worlds, and swimming through oceans. She also refers to childbirth several times. Although this is not a criticism in and of itself, breaking away from typically feminine verse would likely provide Peipins with a wider readership.
That being said, Peipins aptly and beautifully questions who she is. In doing so, she helps the readers question themselves. What does it mean to be an American? What does it mean to live abroad? What does it mean to be a woman outside of her home? For anyone who has wondered, take comfort in Peipins exploration of self.

Jamie Elizabeth Marko is a PhD student at the University of Buffalo, specializing in cultural identity and power relationships in language.

auf Wiedersehen by Christa Holder Ocker

Plain View Press, 2009

Review by Hannah Eason

The ravages of World War II in contemporary art is not new. Many memoirs and documentaries have taken as their subject the deleterious effects of the war on families, particularly those within the Jewish community. auf Wiedersehen is the true account of the war as told by Christa Holder Ocker, whose father served proudly in Hitler’s Third Reich. Ocker’s story is that of a refugee family displaced by physical dangers and shifts in the political environment, but it’s far from the tragedy one expects based on these characteristics. Rather than giving us her demons, she reminds us that, even with grim realities pressing down upon the fragile dome which seems to encapsulate her family, she still had a childhood to conduct.

She misses her father when he is away fighting, and she admires him. She diverges from her sister’s seriousness, becoming the child who will produce puppet plays with other displaced children, and will tamely flirt with American soldiers in trade for Hershey’s chocolate bars. The perspective offered in auf Wiedersehen is a rare and beautiful find – a child’s voice emphasizing the goodness and solidity of institutions she has always known, namely that of her family. The very language she uses to describe a wheat field or an apple tree reminds us that our narrator is a little girl, her passion and simplicity apropos.

The most telling detail upon which Ocker lingers in describing her life through the Nazi nomadic period, is that of her mother. Christa – the character, the daughter – is able to respect her strength even at such a young age. Through her accounts, we are able to respect Anna Holder for virtues one rarely has the opportunity to see in another. Though her dismay is indicated in her sighs and moments of physical pause, Anna maintains her dignity – that Prussian pride, as Christa’s father calls it – and leads the way for her children to do the same. As the mama-bear pieces of Anna’s personality undergo contortions in the realm of things never considered, there’s no loss of quality in her will. While providing for the needs of her family, juggling the changing demands on a day-to-day basis, Anna manages to maintain her family’s sense of fun as essential. She does it the long-lost way – she creatively makes fun wherever the elements around her do not expressly prohibit it. She dreams, she aspires, and she lets the importance of these practices show to her young daughters.

For me, and I chance say for Christa, Anna was the hero of this story, pivotal to what makes it surprisingly enjoyable given its premise.

Ocker doesn’t make the mistake of trying to politicize her memoir. Also, it seems she chose the perfect age range through which to report her events. Had we become privy to her thoughts reflective on the war after she grew up and learned with solemnity the full nature of what had kept her father away, we would have known the struggles of her loyalty, a recasting of events given different hues, etc. Conclusions drawn along that line being easy enough to predict, we know the story would have primarily been a story of loss.

By presenting the story as seen and spoken by young Christa, she allows us to witness what she doubtless always found worthwhile in the story of her childhood: noble perseverance; her family, a bouquet of strong personalities; the instructive virtues of self-respect and hope and a little charm.

Toward the end of the memoir, I thought some scenes didn’t fit well in the cohesive body of the narrative, possibly because they began introducing darker topics which you fear young Christa will have to ponder and reject. Given the tone of this book, the reader is at once glad to see Christa move along briskly to the next topic and left with an impression that these scenes she leaves behind are incomplete, or at least rushed.

I wasn’t fond of the ending. Without going into spoilers, I wish readers were provided a little more at that stage of the narrative – more of Christa’s triumphant perspective on her journey, more details of her anticipations for the future.

On the whole, auf Wiedersehen is a lovely portrayal of human strength, especially in light of what that means for a family under siege.

Saints and Cannibals by Christine Hamm

Plainview Press, 2010

Reviewed by Georgia Ann Banks-Martin

She Did What?

Many books have been written and praised for their complex depictions of women. However, few writers are able to present readers with characters who seem as realistic and multifaceted as Christine Hamm does in her new book of poems, Saints and Cannibals.

In the first poem, Up from the Root Cellar, we are introduced to Ruby, whose mother, ravaged by intense labor pains, yells to her from the furrow in which she has fallen. While many daughters would run to their mother’s aid without hesitation, Ruby does not, her resentment at being forced to care for her mother’s other children palpable. For a moment, Ruby watches “the younger children shriek like crows, stuff dirty fingers in their mouths, clatter into the house.” The youngest child, Rachel, stays behind trying to get her mother to come into the house. This powerful poem comes to a close when Ruby “… remembers the elephant she touched once at a carnival, big as the sky, wrinkled as a map, dark eye fixed ahead.” In the end, Ruby does go to her mother, but only out of a sense of duty or expectation rather than genuine concern for her mother’s condition.

After Ruby we shift our attention to Enid, whom Hamm introduces in a poem titled Caldwell, Idaho, 1941. Enid, the daughter of a farmer, “hates it when the cats give birth in the hay; the afterbirth molders the straw, the cows won’t eat it/too many cats anyway.” We might be able to dismiss this statement as a throw-away statement made out of anger had we not learned in the first stanza that Enid’s shoes are held by strings. In the next poem, Enid Has a Visitor, we are again reminded of Ruby as Enid lies in a corn field bleeding and suffering from harsh cramps. We next meet Enid in a poem titled Fertility Rites For a Daughter. Enid’s desire to have a little girl is so strong that she tries sleeping with bottle caps and barrettes beneath her mattress. Her story continues:

She has opened the cupboard door and taken out the salt
Strewn it into stars on the floor
So a daughter will sit and stay, fascinated
By the constellations stuck to her soles

While this poem is humorous, it underscores the notion that there are “too many cats anyway.” Considered together, these few poems present us with a fresh look at the unique problems affecting women that resonate throughout the first half of collection, including the fight for control over the female body. Through these depictions we learn that this issue is not limited to concerns surrounding rape and male domination. Ruby wants her mother to stop having so many children, and Enid is raised by a family so poor they can’t buy shoes; yet, when Enid can’t have children, instead of relief that the same fate will not be suffered by her child, she is driven to desperate actions to increase her chances of giving birth.

There are moments when the women of Saints and Cannibals are independent and courageous, but the choice to be so is costly. In The Weight of the World, we meet Claire, whose mother would do anything to keep Claire thin. She is happy with the doctor’s declaration that Claire is underweight, because this means that “the chocolate laxative,/the prune juice,/bananas, the enema bulb like a clown’s nose,/the suppositories/that glisten like worms, have worked.” Claire fights back, getting up before her mother each morning to eat cereal and milk, some of which she saves for later snacking. In Memoir of an Unrepentant Thief, the narrator is the daughter of a woman who spends her time reading romance novels instead of caring for her child. The poems opens as follows:

“If you were to shake my tiny sticky hand
You’d see a thin girl
With a rainbow-striped dress she’s outgrown
yellowish hair matted to one side of her head”

The narrator goes on to describe how she confronts the matter by breaking into the neighbor’s house, eating what she finds in the kitchen, and watching “…Sesame Street / until someone comes home.…”

Near the end, Hansel and Gretel appear in How the Witch Got Started. Once again, the setting is one in which there is too little food and too many children. The mother begins to kill the children and eat them; “afterwards she knew/ her daughter was safe.” By the poem’s end, only two children have survived, and they run away. Over the next few pages, we watch Gretel grow too tired and too thin to keep going, but she survives; in fact, Hansel, Gretel, and their mother live, and the mother even gets so fat by the time we reach the poem The Next Season that “she has splintered a chair/ just by sitting.” She spends her time giving food to the poor, never speaking of what she has done to her children.

In the end, Saints and Cannibals resonates with its readers because of Hamm’s skillful depiction of feminine characters capable of both good and evil. The poems in this book are memorable because, even if inspired by fairy tales, the women and their situations exist in the world. In reality, there are no fairy godmothers or evil step mothers, just human women.

Radha Says by Reetika Vazirani

ed. by Leslie McGrath and Ravi Shankar
Drunken Boat Press, 2010

Review by Hannah Eason

Wanting to read this poetry collection within a fair context – other than the context of my unfamiliarity with Hindu American poetry, that is – I often read over notes provided by the editors who collaborated to bring these last poems of Reetika Vazirani to light.

Within the freedom of poetry, any deductions drawn are fragile. It is an artform in which it never hurts to get acquainted with the poet’s body of work, known history, known political inclinations, and so on. This can help the reader begin with a working hypothesis, already somewhat wizened by past experiments. An explanatory note I found very helpful came from the elegant foreword written by Kazim Ali: “Breath moves through a poetic line beginning to end, but in Reetika Vazirani’s three volumes of poetry we see a different treatment of breath – breath that interrupts itself, sometimes in mid-exhale, breath that swirls around and returns, as it does at the top of an inhale or bottom of an exhale in the yogic practice of pranayama.”

In examples such as the following from “Preference of Vishnu” (pg. 9), breathing is highly detectable.

“now to switch a cloak a ring
who am I Arjuna’s charioteer?
discus lotus mace or conch?
do I drive whose wheels?”

The pace of her writing from one poem to the next becomes connotative of how easily or with what labor her breath comes as she broaches a certain topic. Her breath can be excitable, or it can be lengthy, monotonous, desperate for a break.

Radha Says is a collection in which the devices of poetry are so well integrated that they themselves further mimic breath – devices merging with message for the sake of a solid creation, just as yoga practitioners integrate mind and body with their practiced consciousness.

I found myself needing to read many of the poems a third then fourth time before feeling confident I had read what Vazirani wrote. This exemplified the analysis of her poetry provided by Kazim Ali, who stated that each line can answer the line before it, stand on its own, or open the door for the line that follows. This multipurpose aspect of her work seems to point to her perspective, to the purposeful integration of parts. The structure of her poetry seems to continually offer her readers the ghosts of past, present and future as help-mates. By brevity and depth, the structure then asks the reader to determine her own preferred mind-set among the three. Will the final impression taken away from a poem be reflective, forward-leaning, or clarifying of the present moment?

In the spirit of most subtly handled, skillful poetry, I believe Vazirani’s words can act to the reader as a mirror. In getting close enough to the mirror to make out finer details, one tends to see the fog of her own breath.

In Paran by Larissa Shmailo

BlazeVox, 2009

Review by Georgia Banks-Martin

I live in Paran

Larissa’s Shmailo’s collection of poems, In Paran is a mix of vibrant and audacious selections narrated by people that we might say are just a little odd due to their unabashed frankness. Yet, there is something about the people we meet in In Paran that leaves us unable to dismiss them.

In the first poem from the collection, Personal, the speaker seems to simply appear before us, forcefully declaring:

I want to know
what makes you
tick.

I want to know
what makes you
fickle; I want to know
what makes you stick.

However, it is not the speaker that makes us feel uncomfortable: It is the fact that the reader is being made to search for that which is almost unanswerable. Most people never seriously consider why they stay in one place or with one person, and if asked they normally offer the questioner a stock answer such as “I like it here”, or “I love him.” These answers will not work for this narrator, because the questions that he poses are fundamental to who we are:

which ion propels you
which soothsayer spells you
which folksinger trills you
which hardwood distills you
which downward dog twists you
which protest resists you
which neural net fires you
which siren desires you

These are the questions for which we fear we have no answers. The poem ends with:

what
makes
me

forget the right answers
consult necromancers
allow the forbidden
ignore the guilt ridden
unlearn all the learning
embrace this new burning

to know
what
makes you
tick.

And we realize that our failure to answer these questions, our failure to know ourselves completely, means that the narrator is losing the chance to learn something about himself as well. In this way the poem establishes a theme that reoccurs in the collection, the idea that we are always involved in a relationship with someone else, and that we all share in the pain that is encountered in our lives together.

At the top of My Lungs is a poem about a mother who feels unloved by her children:

At the top of my lungs I scream at you all,
Babies, I am your mother!
Love me! Let me in!
Excited by my love, I shriek and bang at your door:
I love you, let me in!

What?
You don’t want to?
Then I will slash my wrists,
And from my wrists will come ants and tired shopkeepers,
All the things you ever imagined or dreamed,
Bits of glass and fear
Will pour from these important veins:
You’ll see how much I love you then.

What is most striking in these lines is the admission that without love life isn’t worth living. This thought is further developed in stanza three, where the narrator notes more things she would do for children:

Like a scorpion I would carry you on my back,
My stinger poised, ready to kill;
Oh, how my babies would love me then!

Babies, I would bite off my hands for you,
Like an albatross or a whale, I would swallow you whole
And keep you safe in my stromach;
I love you that much;
Surely that’s worth something.

This is the real problem; the speaker doesn’t feel that all the work, and the protection, the declarations that she loves her children are worth anything to her family. Again, it is pointed out that our lives are shared and that we owe a debt to one another. This concept isn’t new, yet it feels new when we read In Paran because rarely are we confronted with honest demands for payment. If given the chance, In Paran is a book that that will inspire positive changes in the way the reader conducts relationships and lives life.

Weapons Grade by Terese Svoboda

The University of Arkansas Press, Fayetteville, 2009
Review by Georgia Ann Banks-Martin

Weapons! Everywhere!

In her latest book of poems Weapons Grade, Terese Svoboda takes on issues of war, politics, and everyday life. These are themes common to poetry, but Svoboda’s work asks the reader to consider events both as wholes and within context, and as events that we thought no longer were possible within our current moral context.

The first section of Weapons Grade comprises poems speaking to the impacts of war. The first selection, “Picnic Portents,” captures our attention by placing us in a park for a picnic. A young mother ties balloons, unaware the area is infested with spiders; she wears herself out hollering directions for those who are helping her decorate the park, unaware that her husband:

While parachuting down,
he pinned on stripes and medals—a corporal’s—
so they would treat him better.

These moments are rarely offered in a context such as this, yet they occur in every moment of our lives. This poem also reminds us of our constant risk to misdirection, and the threat of pre-packaged, incomplete, half-truths relentlessly distributed by twenty-four hour news engines. Throughout Weapons Grade, Svoboda repeatedly challenges that notion. In one instance by way of a young mother, who finds a way to care for her child in the absence of his father away at war. In Svoboda’s version, her experience will be left out of the final story.

In “Code Name: 731,” Svoboda speaks to the live human dissections performed by the Japanese Imperial Army’s Unit 731 during World War II, their aim being to see how chemical weapons affected the tissue of potential targets: live humans.

To be sure, this isn’t the first time the world has heard such stories, as we are all familiar with German persecution of homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Jews held in camps such as Sachsenhuusen, Dachau, Natzweiler, Buchenwald, and Neuengamme. Here similar experiments were carried out to see how potassium cyanide and arsenic affect the body. Some were exposed to deadly diseases like typhus and tuberculosis; many died or were disabled. But we find ways to absorb such stories and lull ourselves into believing that now that the details are known, we will never hear of them occurring again.

Svoboda’s work shows us that such hopeful thinking is misguided. In the 90s, this type of medical experimentation occurred again. This time civilians in Japan were infused with AIDS-tainted blood. The poems in this first section are dark. They make us nervous, but not without good reason.

Section II concerns marriage. These poems focus more upon intimacy and the search for balance. In “Susurrus of Sheets Goodbye,” the husband finds his wife’s body attractive, though she does not look like a model:

he leans across his arm, peeks
at her nose-crotch bed-height
her breasts doubling over.

In “Bicoastal,” a wife left at home with her young child struggles to understand and make sense of her husband’s absence from their lives while he works away from home. To the narrator, the time he will be away equals:

a month of cold phones, only food
children eat, not a marriage.

Section III recalls some of the themes from section I, but this time the fear and hate happens within our own homes. One woman is beaten by her spouse, yet cannot move beyond her love for him. The narrator justifies her abuse by conflating her wounded body with the vegetables that, as a “good wife,” she would have chopped and made into a proper dinner served in a white Pyrex bowl.

Section VI brings the book to its end, where we find the central point of the book in the closing lines of “Cycles”:

But Death says
we must, both of us,

and the road
we followed, the road
the car left,

will disappear.

This is powerful imagery, reminding us that no matter what we survive–be it war or personal struggles–all paths converge on a road where death will eventually overcome us. Weapons Grade is a challenging read, but well worth the extra time and thought.

Leftovers by Laura Wiess

MTV Books, 2008
Review by Mary Senior Harwood

The title sets the tone for this novel. Who really likes the leftovers? Don’t we all want to have first pick, the turkey fresh from the oven?

The leftovers in this book are two best friends, Blair and Ardith, two fifteen year old girls from very different – yet in some ways eerily similar – families. Blair’s mother is a successful attorney who is vying for a judgeship at all costs. She seems blinded to the fact that her ambition has ruined her marriage and set her daughter up for physical abuse. Blair’s father is no better. When he isn’t working, he’s seeing his mistress. Blair gets only the leftovers of her parent’s attention.

Ardith’s family has no rules. And no morals. Ardith, the only one who seems to notice or care, locks herself in her bedroom as protection from sexual abuse by her father and brother. Because of her family, she is scorned by Blair’s mother as a “bad influence” and Blair is forbidden to see her. Ardith is the societal leftover in the story.

The girls take turns narrating the arc of the story. As the book opens, it is clear they are telling this story to someone, but you don’t know who until much later in the book. Their narration swings between a first person past account, I did this, she said that, to a more unusual second person present narration that indicates how each girl distances herself from her own life. It is the introspective version of the royal we.

A third girl, Della, plays a major role in their story. Blair’s mother “encourages” her to befriend the much younger Della, who is a twelve year old in a 16 year old’s body. Della’s family is rich and influential and Blair’s mother believes the friendship will help her ascent to the bench. Della becomes a pawn to Blair and Ardith, who believe they had to set Della up to trap Ardith’s brother and show the world what a scum he is. But did they really set Della up? All they did was not protect her from him. Was she anymore set up than the girl in the very first pages of the book who is forced to give a bathroom full of boys oral sex? Weren’t they parroting their own parent’s behavior? How much blame is there from the things undone?

The book is small but powerful. If I were reading this when my daughter was 15, I would be horrified. It is a cautionary tale without a fairy tale ending.

Woman on a Shaky Bridge by Millicent Borges Accardi

Finishing Line Press, 2010

Review by Georgia Ann Banks-Martin

The Human Experience

Millicent Borges Accardi has been awarded fellowships by the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council, and the Barbara Deming Foundation, and her poems have been published in many well respected magazines, journals, and anthologies. However, her latest collection of poems, Woman on a Shaky Bridge, is perhaps the most important work she has produced to date. The short collection of poems captures moments that not only define us as male or female but as members of the greater human society.

It is impossible, for example, to read the first poem, On a Theme by William Stafford, and not feel the deep longing that the narrator has for a normal life, a life that includes living in a home and having a bedroom where clothes are neatly folded and placed in the bureau/ drawer instead of living/ from a suitcase, instead of living in hotel rooms. Most importantly, in the two stanzas and thirteen lines that comprise the poem, Accardi clearly illustrates the greatly underappreciated fact that career women, just like their non-working peers, give up significant portions of their identities, lives, and selves in order to shape and reshape our world.

The poem What People Do forces us to step back from our own conflicts, anger, and lack of patience to consider the idea that all people want the same types of things and have similar experiences. The most powerful statements made in this selection are the opening and closing lines. The piece opens with: they move to Mukilteo and throw/pots or play on the senior soccer league. When this line is read, the voice within that edits and filters everything says, No they move to Winter Park, they move to Selma, because in fact that is what we do. We work until we can no longer or can afford not to work, and then we set off to new worlds where we take up new hobbies, or reintroduce ourselves to games we have not played since our youths.

Yet, the poem closes with they call the police on the white cube truck parked / overnight / every night in the parking lot in front of their / apartment. That line resonates because somewhere in our psyches, we all know that the police are called most often not because our neighbors are racist or suffering from some unexplained insanity, but because they sense a danger that will cost us all something, force us all to feel so unsafe that we install burglar doors and windows, invest in expensive security systems, or worse, we move, run away from the problem, assign the problem to someone else for resolution.

Equally impressive is Accardi’s use of images to present the truths that never are considered. The poem In Prague is disturbing because we are presented with a scene where graves are being destroyed by a construction team without any form of relevance. The bones are simply exposed, collected and tagged:

A skull, embedded in a dirt wall seems, for a moment,
as white and round as bread. Jaws, on metal stands,
tagged with numbers, wait for a turn to be whole again.

There is nothing sacred about this place; the people are too caught up in their revelry and pursuit of progress to realize that they are deconstructing their past:

Here, there are no pebbles of prayer left behind
All is traffic, swollen construction, boroughs
and picture taking, stripping the city’s bark
blind with concrete.

The narrator’s closing thoughts are of a place where bodies are treated with respect and those lost to death stay forever connected to those important to them, a place where it is important that the dead once lived because their lives will always effect the way the next generation lives.

enough for stones and death is a long rope
wrapped around kin I cannot have,
wisdom for the hungry, thumb-prints
for the innocent, tombs for generations.
Take me where memory makes my legs move.
Take me where moss holds language.
Take me where we have a name for the things we do.

This combination of image and thought is not easily forgotten. We must stop to reconsider what it means to have lived, and died, to consider why we have such physical responses to memory, and to realize that only the body dies, only the body is committed to the earth; the spirit belongs to the universe and remains forever accessible.

Woman on a Shaky Bridge by Millicent Borges Accardi is a rare gem of a book that transcends the gender, culture, race, and biography of its author to present the reader with universal truths, and fit us all on the same continuum, a continuum where we gather understanding that no matter our life status, we first are born human.

Lena Vanelslander, co-author of Quills of Fire

by Shana Thornton-Morris

In the summer of 2009, a poetic correspondence occurred between two women over the course of three weeks. The result of their speedy discourse was the poetry collection, Quills of Fire. A continent separated Marilyn Campiz and Lena Vanelslander. They had never met in person and still have not shared a face-to-face meeting. Marilyn Campiz, an American living in South Korea at the time, proposed a thematic poetry correspondence to Lena Vanelslander who lived in Ghent, Belgium. Recently, Vanelslander shared the challenges and accomplishments of writing with speed and purpose as well as the poetic vision behind Quills of Fire.

Campiz and Vanelslander met over the Internet, after Campiz responded to Vanelslander’s blog. They shared similar interests and began writing. Campiz asked Vanelslander to read Tao Te Ching, an ancient Chinese text written by unknown author(s) and attributed to the enigmatic Lao Tzu. Tao Te Ching is a set of poetic perspectives about the themes of life.

“Going from that principle,” Vanelslander said, “of giving your life vision the different themes, she (Marilyn Campiz) came up with the idea of ‘why don’t we put something together for the 21st century, for people who have completely different backgrounds culturally, linguistically…’. One day she offered the theme and the [next] day I did, and so on and so on until we had an opus of poems. From our correspondence, we knew what was important to the other and what wasn’t. I knew that Marilyn had a very different opinion of love than I did, so I would propose the theme of love to see the places where our opinions converged and diverged.”

In some of the pairs of poems, Campiz and Vanelslander obviously express differing opinions about a theme. Often, they create a complimentary pair. Since their vision was clearly established at the beginning of their poetic correspondence, the two women remained intensely focused on the goal that was originally created by Campiz. They chose not to become bogged down by theories concerning creativity and originality.

“Marilyn’s strong vision about poetry is that poetry can bring the belief in something new,” Vanelslander said. “The quote that everything has been said is among writers and poets who clearly voice that opinion as well. There’s also that kind of difference in Post-modernism where everyone has their own truth. [Campiz is concerned with] that sort of philosophical streaming, but she is most concerned with, first, that there are still new things to be described, discovered and talked about. Also, breaking taboos is for her very important. (…) We hope that some of our themes point in that direction.”

Every day, after the theme was named, Campiz and Vanelslander wrote a new poem in the following twenty-four hours. Then, they traded the poems, at the same time, without seeing the other woman’s creation prior to finishing her own.

“Everyday our creativity was stimulated and needed to reach a climax,” Vanelslander said. “We were writing at the same time and did that very consciously. Marilyn and I have different backgrounds. For me, it was my first book. I had always thought that some day I might publish something, but I wasn’t concentrated on it at that moment. Marilyn has published books and poems already. She didn’t only want to do it as an exercise in writing, but said let’s do it as a voice for women. She wanted to offer the perspective of two women in a changing society who have new ideas and visions. (…) I thought in advance that reaching a large amount of poems would take a long time, but it was different. Marilyn has a very clear vision that books can be written fast, so you get the inspiration and you write it down.”

The speed at which they wrote the poems inspired the title, Quills of Fire. While Vanelslander wrote longhand, she said that she didn’t rely on a quill pen to capture her poetic lines. She relied on the symbol of the quill pen to influence her ideas about writing.

“The expressive force symbolizes the force at which we write,” Vanelslander said. “There are a lot of people who still prefer a book to the internet. There’s the ancient method and there’s also the new method that may be more efficient but sometimes there’s a stronger feeling that goes out from the ancient medium.”

Vanelslander did not consider herself a poet until a few years ago. She was a scholar, but others recognized her artistic talents.

“The way I came to poetry was very specific,” Vanelslander said. “I started writing when I was very young, but I thought, ‘Oh, what I have down here is just no good.’ Apart from a few poems that I had written in Dutch, most of what I had written in those years is gone. (…) I studied history at the University and I was earning my doctorate, but still no poetry. My doctorate was interrupted after two years and I was at home for a while, meditating on what to do with the future. That kind of spirit was roaming about in my mind. One day, I opened MySpace.”

From there, she was asked to guide people through a blog group about poetry. The person who had created the blog group asked Vanelslander to take over. She was surprised by the request and thought it would be a challenge to guide people in a blog group about poetry without being a poet herself.

“That’s the way that I started writing poetry again and that’s the way I rediscovered the parts of myself and my creativity that were normally dormant,” Vanelslander said. “I actually am grateful… because not only is poetry functional and has its merits, but the feedback between writer and reader is interactive. Also, for the writer it’s a healing act to write frequently and about the things that go through your mind and pinpoint them and give them a certain direction and then move on.”

The theme of “Sedation” is one of Vanelslander’s favorites from the book. She thought that both Campiz’s poem “Forced Sedation” and her poem “The urge to live” demonstrate the complexities of required drug use for terminal illnesses and the problem of over-medicating unnecessarily.

“A lot of people in society get sent to psychiatrists,” Vanelslander said. “The problem of over-prescribing is prevalent.”

Since Campiz and Vanelslander wanted their poetic collaboration to represent the issues of the 21st century, they began the writing process with the intention of seeking publication for their correspondence. Both writers wanted their work to reach the largest amount of people. PublishAmerica offered to reach a sizeable global audience. The publisher also allowed the authors’ work to remain as they intended without the influence of editors, though Vanelslander said that Campiz did most of the editing. She assures the reader that they did not make drastic changes to the original correspondence.

Since last summer, both authors have relocated to different countries. Campiz is now in China; Vanelslander has moved to Italy. Vanelslander says that she still has a vast collection of poems that she eventually intends to publish. Quills of Fire was a one-time collaborative project between Campiz and Vanelslander. They felt that overworking the idea would lessen the creative experience and message.

Quills of Fire, 2009
by Marilyn Campiz and Lena Vanelslander
PublishAmerica

Half Girl by Stephanie Dickinson

Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2008
Review by Elizabeth J. Colen

Characters like Angelique don’t like to settle down. The story moves best when she’s on the move. Trapped inside a cold farmhouse, with an unkind stepfather of questionable morals and by turns a doting and neglectful mother, and the ghosts of fetal pigs dead from hog cholera and butchered for meat regardless, adolescent Angelique feels the pull of a stranger’s flirtations and gets on the road.

In the bath before her departure, Angelique shivers with fear. “Fear was white not a pale yellow, a bright white, the color of all the talk of what happens to girls alone on the road” (11). In this we get a sense of what’s to come. We get a sense that this will be the story told between the leaving and the ditch runaway girls get found in. For who doesn’t want to know how girls disappear if only so ours don’t?

Dickinson introduces us to great characters, fresh and interesting people saying things and doing things we haven’t heard or seen before. Of the first driver who picks her up (with two small boys who turn out not to be his sons in the backseat) she asks, “Do they look like you or your wife?” Then surmises silently with discomfort, “In this little world of the Cutlass, I was his wife, no matter if he wasn’t in the least bit attractive to me” (47). Other minor characters include a bouncer who tries to rape her and robs her instead and a lesbian truck driver in love with a lot lizard along her run.

Queerness in the book is fluid and unselfconscious, adding to the significance of the title and ongoing motif of half—people and animals and environments as comprised of more than one element. In Half Girl we meet “half fags” and “half animals” and no situation is ever as clear as it seems.

We are led to believe this is the story of a girl who runs away and comes home again, not unscathed. But it isn’t exactly. What it really is is the story of boy (half fag) meets girl, boy loses girl, boy finds girl (or rather she finds him when she’s ready to) again. That it’s a love story is not immediately clear. If your expectations or voyeurism or thirst to see a young girl get destroyed are sullied, bully for you—plenty of bad things happen to her. Whether we’re pulling for her or not from the beginning, toward the end we get a sense that she might just be okay.

My only real complaint comes when Angelique faces her biggest challenge, a half-coma state in a hospital bed. While the dexterity with which Dickinson moves in and out of internal scenes and memories and the external world of the hospital is admirable, we never really feel like Angelique won’t pull through. And knowing this, this interim, lying-down time in the book seems to drag a bit long. Angelique the silent patient remarks once that everybody smells of dirt. Perhaps she is smelling the earth they’re pulling over themselves in the bed of their potentially early graves, but never once do we give up on her.

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