Derivative of the Moving Image by Jennifer Bartlett

I’ve always enjoyed a book of poems that takes me on a journey: be it a full narrative, a lyrical fragmentation, a jaunt into surrealism, or, say, a basic concept: here is a soundscape beginning with A. I’ve mostly enjoyed how these books transgress their own rules, how they break apart the narrative moment to explore a lyric’s unsettling powers to transcribe a narrative on the outer edges of a cup, how they refuse to be stalled in a pattern. A poetic impulse, perhaps, to reconfigure, to remake; to piece together the puzzle while being wholly aware that on those puzzle lines, between those miniscule breaths that the pieces create, there are stories, moods, moments of un/reconciliation. The stories are always on the lines.

Jennifer Bartlett’s Derivative of the Moving Image (DotMI) is one such book. Divided into five titled sections (“When I Got My First Tattoo I Was.”, “Derivative of the Moving Image”, “Essays on Birds and Light”, “The Music Of”, and “Hypnagogic Diary”), each devoted to its own form/al construction: prose/like poems to lined poems that make use of the page-whole. Bartlett’s poems often teeter, often spin, often skip, often drown in the process of grieving.

A friend once said that prose poems should be neat little blocks; the poet who doesn’t make the block is lazy & not doing justice to the poem. I thought the friend was a little rigid and too invested in rules. When I read the first section of DotMI, however, I paused to reconsider that rule. The poems in “When I Got My First Tattoo I Was.” are quite heart collapsing, honest, and vulnerable. Many of them deal with the death of a sister, or death and dying in general. There is loss: of the body (“Her one collapsing lung thrown/onto the emergency room floor” (“When I Got My First Tattoo I Was.” 18, 19)), of what is real, of what one wants (“Why do you desert me? You know/my limbs are fragile (“Ghost Boy” 4, 5)), of what one can(not) hold (“That is why the moment my sister left her body our parents/made us turn from her” (“Elegy for the Trees” 16)), and of course, there is the perpetual impending loss (“This is/where we begin to give up, the both of us” (Coup de Grace 23, 24)). I can only admire the bravado of writing through such quakes, of that intense desire to excise from the psyche those hauntings.

And yet, I wonder I wonder I wonder. At what moment am I reading (Lord help me) poetry. Yes, I’m ready for the attacks. Bartlett’s first section read like the beginnings of essays, the beginnings of poems, the promise of that distilled insight. But these are the beginnings. I hesitated in writing about this book, because I, too, have lost and suffered and wanted nothing but the thing itself out of me. And poems helped me to deliver those things. Poems were the matter that could hold the fragments, the fractures, the dissonance. But, is the book of poems the place to house these beginnings?

Grief is difficult to write about, yes. There are clichés that sit with us (“Angels lie with me against these/worn sheets, assuring my journey” (“Coup de Grace” 2, 3), “my limbs are fragile; like paper dolls” (“Ghost Boy” 5), “Your house smelling like tattoo ink, if it can have a/smell” (“When I Got My First Tattoo I Was.” 5, 6)), and so on. There are tropes that hold the fort (moths that appear (perhaps only) to the person who has lost a love; moths that transform from annoying little pests to creatures “more beautiful than butterflies” (“From a Paris Hotel Room”)). There is the overstatement (“Tulip Farm” and “Elegy for the Tree”) that can create and destroy an entire poem.

So, I sat with this book trying to decipher where the poetic impulses were, where the tight sprawls of insight were, where the (dare I say it) craft was. I wonder: if these prose bits (in sections 1 and 3-5) were “tighter” in outward appearance, would Bartlett have sacrificed some of the easy pronouncements, some of the excessive overmakings (the dependence on the prosaic syntax, for example) to get to the bone? (In other words, could this book have survived without that first section? The other sections pick up speed (although there are still those moments of syntactical proseyness that stalls the emotions), and while filled with trepidations (“I plan on your leaving”), there is a bravado that transgresses the small worlds (“I am getting good/in this practicing”). Yes, there is a sweet wickedness in the I who is “[c]omplete in [her] autobiography of dirty feather” (“Whose Music Excels the Music of Birds” 20).

I love a first book of poems. I’m curious about structure, about voice and tone, about playing it safe, about jumping hard on the burning hot crushed glass, about temperament and musicality; I’m curious about all of those little poetry no-no rules broken or embraced or both. I’m curious about that workshop hand and heart, which is often vibrantly apparent in many first books. Mostly, I want to know that the poet has somewhere to g(r)o(w). Bartlett’s Derivative of the Moving Image is filled to the brim with a willingness to risk it all, and for that alone, I look forward to (a) lullaby without any music.

Lily in the Snow by Yan-Li

A Different type of Woman

Before immigrating from Beijing to Canada, Yan Li worked as an instructor, translator and journalist. In her latest novel, ‘Lily in the Snow’, it is obvious that these early life experiences have inspired her writing. The novel focuses on the life of a young mother named Lily, who has left her native China to live in Canada. Upon her arrival, Canada unfolds like a roll of duck canvas before her and her son, who is referred to only as “Baby”. The culture feels formless to her; there is no oppressive government forcing cultural or social policy upon its people. Instead, what greets Lily is a university where she can enroll without anyone asking invasive questions, a community of Chinese people who for various reasons have also taken-up residence in Canada, and an unrelenting Christian Church that is trying to convert as many new immigrants as possible.

Li’s depiction of Lily, as she struggles to reinvent herself in this world, is almost hyper-real. Lily is a young woman and an experienced journalist, but she finds that her advanced education is worth little in her new country. Her job options include working as a maid in a private home, a maid in a hotel, a factory worker, or a secretary in a failing lawyer’s office. In addition, Lily’s critical and overbearing mother soon follows her, in part to see if Lily’s life is really better and, in part, to find herself. Together, the two of them embark on a life together.

Along the way, we meet other women who underscore the life that Lily does not want for herself – Mrs. Rice, who spends her days teaching the word of God and visiting those whom she might be able to convert; Camellia, who is often beaten by her husband, but who will not divorce him due to pressure from the church; and a woman Lily calls “Madam Jewelry”, who speaks in tongues and finds that this conflicts with church teachings.

In the end, all of these women, even Lily’s mother, are characters who are unable to write their own scripts. Lily doesn’t want to become like any of them. Yan Li’s depiction of Lily’s life is so well done that readers immediately feel like they know Lily and the other women of her community. Through them, the stories of women we all know, regardless of ethnicity, are given voice. ‘Lily in the Snow’ is a lyrical, funny and real snapshot of the strength and commitment that is required to become a fully self-aware and individualized woman.

Yan Li is the director of the Confucius Institute at the University of Waterloo and the coordinator of the Chinese Language Program at Renison University College, both of which are located in Ontario, Canada. Li’s other published works include her first novel written in English, ‘Daughters of the Red Land’ and her other novels – ‘Married to the West Wind’, ‘Red Duckweed’, and ‘The Lambs of Mapleton’ – all of which are written in Chinese.

Not Quite Paradise: An American Sojourn in Sri Lanka by Adele Barker

It takes a certain kind of woman to up and move from Arizona to a war-torn, wet country on the other side of the world. Such a woman is Adele Barker, who, in 2001, shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States, brings – drags? – her fifteen-year-old son Noah to Sri Lanka where she will spend the next year teaching Russian literature.

Barker and her son settle in a house at the edge of the jungle where they quickly realize that they are not alone. Along with many ants, the house is inhabited by rats and geckos, and frequently visited by monkeys, one of which steals the television antenna. Although Barker has been planning on doing the housekeeping herself, and resists anything that smacks of colonialism, she soon finds herself with a maid, a tuk-tuk driver, and a gardener. After all, these people are depending upon her for employment. Over the course of her stay, these people also become her friends.

The author never explains what initially attracted her to Sri Lanka. She spends a lot of time trying to sort out the conflict between the Muslim Tamil Tigers, revolutionaries who have pretty much taken over the north of the island, and the Buddhist Sinhalese. (Barker lives in primarily Buddhist Kandy, where there is a shrine housing the Buddha’s tooth.) She is also curiously remote about her personal life. Although she mentions the break-up of a friend’s marriage, she never writes about her own romantic entanglements. (Don’t expect Eat, Pray, Love in Sri Lanka here.) Also, as an expat mother myself, I was interested in her relationship with her son. How did she convince him to go to Sri Lanka? What was his school life like once he got there? Was he adopted? (She mentions that he is from Paraguay.) Does he have a father? Although she alludes to some problems that Noah is having at school, and to his boredom in a place with no TV or decent soccer pitch, she doesn’t go into great detail. Perhaps this is out of consideration for her son’s privacy, or an innate reserve, but I wanted to know more.

When Barker leaves at the end of the year, she vows to return one day to hear the northerners’ point of view on the civil war, but then something bigger happens – here, where most people had never heard the word “tsunami” before, a 30-foot wave crashes over the coast of Sri Lanka washing away tens of thousands of people. Barker returns to the country, this time without her son, who is now a college student, to check up on friends and survey the damage wrought on “the day when the sea came to the land.” She finds heartbreak and loss at every turn, but also resilience.

At one point, she admires a woman’s gold necklace:

“It was all we had left,” a young woman who looked to be pregnant said. “When the sea came to the land, many of us had our saris on. Do you know how to wrap a sari?” she asked me with laughing eyes.
“Don’t test me on it,” I replied, “but kind of. With help. With pins.”
They all laughed.
The one who was all smiles continued. “We lost our saris in the wave. The sea unwrapped them from us. When we came out of the sea, we were nearly naked. Some of us had slips on. Some of us had nothing. But we had our jewelry.”

Although Barker herself remains something of an enigma, her affection for the people and the country is never in doubt. And as one disaster supplants another in the public imagination, she presents a clear portrait of an island nation persevering in the face of challenges.

Suzanne Kamata

Author of Losing Kei (Leapfrog Press, 2008)
Editor of Love You to Pieces: Creative Writers on Raising a Child with Special Needs (Beacon Press, May 2008) and Call Me Okaasan: Adventures in Multicultural Mothering (Wyatt-Mackenzie Publishing, 2009)

In a Pale Blue Light by Lily Poritz Miller

Many books have been written about the Holocaust, but few, if any provide the added perspective of the extreme racial predjudice of South Africa in the same era.

Miller’s book reads much like memoir, with the slow pace that often accompanies that genre. We are pulled in through Libka, a teenager who has just lost her father. Her parents moved to South Africa in 1930, part of the last wave of Jewish immigrants out of Lithuania before Hitler’s occupation, and her mother has never fully assimilated to her new home. The family is distant – socially and geographically – from other Jewish families. Libka grieves by further withdrawing from her peers, which ultimately leads to expulsion from school and to a “school for difficult girls.”

Through Miller’s story, we experience a time period when Boers ruled roughly, with little difference between them and the Nazis the family left behind. Libka’s attachment to one of their black servants leads to trouble, as does her friendship with a Malay boy she meets on the beach. In each case, Libka looks beyond the racial barriers and sees the person within, whereas few other characters in the book see Libka for herself, not even her own family. Her brother Beryl is too wrapped up in himself and his social life outside the Jewish community. Her mother is withdrawn in her grief and sees little of her family other than the most immediate and basic needs of her growing family.

Sara, her mother, is advised by a rather well-drawn Mrs. Peker, a nosy, blousy woman who has decided to run Sara’s life. Mrs. Peker tells her to hire a man she knew in her shtetl (Yiddish for home town) to run the family factory. In her grief, Sara does not see beyond the man’s obsequious manner. At one point, he almost rapes Libka and is found to be a thief.

Throughout the story, Libka, through rebellious, is internal. She is not an active catalyst for change, like her friend Anya. The result is the one flaw I find in the book. The pacing is slow and the mood so internal that, especially in the beginning, it is difficult to get into the story. Very little happens for the first 50 pages, and at times throughout the book the writing bogs down, sounding almost like a translation to English. The author makes a liberal use of Yiddish and South African expressions throughout, and includes a glossary. While she does this to add authenticity, at times the phrases become barriers. No one likes to have to flip back and forth to a glossary to read a novel. This is one of those times when I could see how a little could go a long way.

In spite of the book’s shortcomings, it is a story that takes us to a world seldom shown in North American literature.

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.”

Next Page »