Tag: Review

A Review of Delaney Nolan’s Shotgun Style: A Diagram of the Territory of New Orleans

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A Review of Delaney Nolan’s Shotgun Style: A Diagram of the Territory of New Orleans

By Christopher Lowe

Early in the title story of Delaney Nolan’s chapbook Shotgun Style: A Diagram of the Territory of New Orleans, the narrator describes winter in New Orleans as “barely a bruise.” As I moved through the collection, I thought again and again of that metaphor. I thought of bruises and winters that leave a mark. Nolan’s New Orleans is a bruised place, and it is inhabited by bruised people.

The pain of a damaged place is there in the eight stories of this collection. Physically, the New Orleans of Shotgun Style is still marred by Katrina. There are leveled houses and FEMA trailers, and the pain of those physical realities is at play, but the real pain, the pain that gnaws at the reader, is in the characters themselves. It is a pain that is rooted in loss. One of the best stories in the collection, “Little Monster” brilliantly illustrates Nolan’s skill with handling this loss. In the story, the main character finds a small monster in the gutter, takes it home, feeds it, cares for it. When it dies the next morning, she buries it by the river. The story is short, just three pages, but there is a fully formed narrative movement in that space, a shift from the strange allure of finding a monster to the graveside mourning of the final paragraph. “Little Monster” is a story that doesn’t reference Katrina, flooding, hurricanes, or even New Orleans. It is simple and direct, but there is an undercurrent of pain that throbs below its surface.

Nolan frequently pairs pain with desire. The characters in Shotgun Style yearn for something beyond themselves, something that they can’t articulate, something that may not even exist. In “We Shall Fill Our House With Spoil,” an unnamed narrator takes a job where she must contact people who have taken out classified ads and convince them to let her video them while they show off whatever it is that they’re selling. Her company will air these videos on public access for a portion of the sale. At first, she struggles with this, unable to connect with the people she calls. Eventually, she learns how to get a foot in the door. Once she’s inside their homes, watching them through the camera lens as they describe their possessions, desire takes root. She wants something from life, and she can see it, just out of the corner of her eye, as she’s videoing these people. She says, “I was looking for something. You would have been looking, too. I hadn’t found it in my family, in my sister… But I almost found it on that tape….” There is something out there in the world – call it connection or love or friendship – that she wants to grab hold of, but the only tool she has for accessing it is a camera.

There is a frustration, too, that mounts for the characters in Shotgun Style. It is frustration born from loss, from blocked desire, from lack of that “something” that the narrator of “We Shall Fill Our House With Spoil” is searching for. The beauty of the collection is in Nolan’s ability to take that frustration and pair it with a something more complex, something that hints at the possibility of healing, the possibility of connection, the possibility of “something.”

The final story in the collection, “Ninth Ward Hunters” is a brief piece, set during Mardi Gras. The narrator dances alongside a tribe of Mardi Gras Indians. She moves with them, tries to keep up. By the end of the story, her dancing has become something new. It is part funeral dirge, a lamentation for what is lost. As they move closer to the Ninth Ward, she says, “…now there’s nothing to see. Just government trailers. A bunch of overgrown lots. Just a bunch of empty space where something used to stand.” They are dancing toward this emptiness, and there is remembrance for what was there and for what was lost, but the other part of the dance is something else, something more complicated. A resurrection. “So we dancing towards it to fill it up,” she says. There is pain in that filling, but there is determination as well—a ferocity of intent. When she says, “Me, storm-wrecked, land-drowned, teeth out sharp like the right kind of animal: come to defend what’s mine,” we can see how it looks when the bruise begins to fade.

Delaney Nolan, Shotgun Style: A Diagram of the Territory of New Orleans, RopeWalk Press Fiction Editor’s Chapbook Prize, 2012.

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Christopher Lowe is the author of Those Like Us: Stories (SFASU Press, 2011). His fiction has appeared widely in journals including Third Coast, Bellevue Literary Review, and War, Literature, and the Arts. He teaches English and Creative Writing at McNeese State University in Lake Charles, LA.

Small Press Review Series: Adam Robison and Other Poems (A Call to Arms or At Least to the Continued Search for the Munitions Locker* of Meaning Where Arms Might Be Kept)

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Adam Robison and Other Poems
Adam Robinson
Narrow House (2010), 77 pages, $12

As an editor at a small press/journal, I wage daily confrontation against the sheer tonnage of quality work out there. After awhile, you don’t always ask yourself “Is it good in some objective measurable sense?” or even “Do I like it?” but “Does the literary world need this?” Of course this leads to a more fundamental question: What kind of writing, if any, does the world need? The shelves of bookstores and warehouses of Amazon are flooded with writing someone thought worthy of publication, and yet much of it is just more words on a page. The detritus of a culture with too much time on its hands.

As I read the charming Adam Robison and Other Poems by the not-quite-eponymous Adam Robinson, I wondered why this particular book needed to be published. As the title suggests, this is a work of fourth-wall-breaking experimental postmodernism. When I say that as an editor, I am seeking “the new,” I mean the truly new, not the merely “experimental” – which as anyone versed in their Barth and Barthelme knows is neither new nor actually experimental. It is, rather, another tradition like the more accurately named traditionalism.

Let me stress that Adam Robison is not a bad book. I even have a soft spot for this type of writing; I did pay for the book. The charm in Robinson’s writing is that it doesn’t take itself too seriously. In fact, it seems to directly position itself against serious interpretation. In this sense, asking whether the culture “needs” such a book is already answered, quite cheerfully, in the negative by the book itself. Its language is deliberately unpoetic and the poems tend to end on flat, declarative statements or sometimes even non sequiturs. Here are some representative endings, all as printed, without periods – suggesting that the poem’s ending is provisional or even arbitrary:

He had a pompadour or feather/A nom de plume was Johannes Climacus – “Soren Kierkegaard”

Brahms died in 1897 – “Brahms”

My grandmother is still alive – “Emma Ruth Rogers Tyner”

I know a lot about Mike Schmidt but he doesn’t know one single/solitary thing about me – “Captain Cool”

As I’ve already mentioned, and as is especially evident in the above quote from “Captain Cool,” Robinson’s prose is purposefully conversational, even comically so. From the same poem: One time Mike Schmidt hit a hit that hit a loudspeaker in Houston. That repetition is 100% grammatically correct and yet it’s the kind of move we rarely see in prose, let alone the heightened, compressed language of poetry. Or this, from “Curtis Ebbermeyer, Leading Authority on Flotsam:” What’s up with bottled water man…Boy howdy what’s the deal with bottled water. The missing commas only heighten the sense that these words have been arranged to resemble an overheard conversation, just more cultural flotsam, to echo the poem’s title. Such a tone and syntax seem to be saying, “Hey, none of this matters, but it’s kind of fun and interesting anyway.” This is a smart rhetorical position to take in this age of centerless postmodernism, but in its extreme – i.e.–when it’s used over and over throughout a collection – it leaves a reader a little sad and untethered. The trouble is that it’s not a trick meant to lead us toward the meaning at the heart of apparent meaninglessness. (See how, for example, David Foster Wallace uses postmodern means for traditional ends.) Rather, Robinson appears to believe in the meaninglessness of it all. Which leads me to the question: why a book of poetry? Is it just one more wet noodle thrown against the void? Robinson seems aware of this weakness:

My poems lack depth and complexity in which the reader can invest
They are bald things…
…Readers will grow bored and go about their day
“There’s no urgency” they’ll complain “No incision.”

And yet an admission of a book’s faults does little but reveal the impotent self-consciousness of the author; it doesn’t eradicate or reduce the faults (though it can mitigate them marginally). Robinson is not wholly without poetry, as that interesting word “incision” in the above passage suggests. Here’s a passage from one of the stronger poems:

Deathbed is one word made special for the place you die
But there is no one special place for your deathbed
On her deathbed what do you want your daughter to say
You will be so spitsoul sad
Then you will be okay
Then you will be sad that you are okay
Then mostly okay again and well this will continue
Even now I often feel sad that I am not sadder
And my worst thing that died was a dog

This piece strikes me as new and weird and truly experimental. It strikes me, which is exactly what literature needs – poems that act as a slap to our complacency. Who hasn’t felt “sad that you are okay?” And further, doesn’t it say something interesting about the paradox at the heart of Western luxury and ease that the speaker is saddened that his “worst thing that died was a dog?” And yet this is an ugliness that we rarely admit: that our lives are empty, and our poetry shallow, due to the fact that our lives are too good.

Probably it is unfair of me to insist that every book assert its necessity. When you get right down to it, Robinson and I are asking the same question: when the traditional is too retrograde and predictable to impact us and the postmodern is a dead end (and equally retrograde), where and how do we find meaning? I worry, though, that Robinson has settled for postmodern stasis rather than trying to find the hard path forward. Because I believe there is meaning in the world. People die – not just dogs – and along the way they suffer and kill and surprise with kindness, creating narratives about themselves and the world, just as they always have.


*Editors Note – But of course the munitions locker wouldn’t contain meaning itself but merely the tools to target that meaning. Or something. To append a Robinson-like ending: Oh well.

Drinking with British Architects

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A Not-Very-Objective Review

by Raul Clement

Recently, poet Jeff Laughlin sent me a copy of his first collection, Drinking with British Architects. This is a chapbook of less than 50 pages that went through a press run of 100 copies and is now sold out. I would guess that of those 100 copies, 90 of them went to friends or people at the small reading held for its release. To put that in perspective, more people will probably read this blog post than Laughlin’s collection.

And yet it is good. A full disclosure forces me to admit that Laughlin is a friend of mine, and that he offered to send me the book, free of charge, over drinks. So perhaps I wanted to like it; and yet I think, objectively speaking, that it is livelier than most poetry I read in major journals and that the fact that it was released so modestly is a testament to how hard it is to make it in this business, how much toil and sheer luck it takes, and how the cream doesn’t always rise to the top. This is especially true for first collections. Resumes are, of course, a self-powered engine: the more impressive your resume looks, the more likely a journal or small press is to seriously consider your work. Many of these presses are struggling to stay afloat and they probably shouldn’t be faulted for preferring an author with a track record. It does seem a little small-minded when you consider the miniscule difference in sales we are talking about here – does one previous publication in the Black Warrior Review bring with it a rabid cult following? – and yet when you are treading water, you will cling to even the smallest piece of driftwood. As someone who has seen the editorial side of this business, I understand and sympathize with this even while it saddens me.

But let’s look at the collection. The title sounds like a Decemberists song, and indeed, much of the work seems influenced by the new literary side of indie rock. Colin Meloy, singer of the Decemberists, is a graduate of the MFA program at The University of Montana; conversely, Jeff Laughlin was (until his move back to North Carolina from New York) the singer of an acoustic, ballad-based group known as Beards. Many of his poems have a sung quality, aware of their rhythm and canny in their use of repetition, and the overall attitude is one of romantic, drunken Tom Waitsism. This is particularly evident in the “women” poems, which apparently were supposed to be part of their own chapbook, but which the publisher insisted Laughlin include – rightly, I might add. The first is called “The Women I Know” and every stanza begins with that phrase. It is a critique of the pursuit of an empty, surface-type of pleasure at the expense of a deeper happiness:

The women I know crack their
clavicles if only to stick out their
chests.

This perfectly conveys the desperate need these women have to be thought of as sexual beings. Another line struck me as entirely accurate to a recent experience I had had with a young woman whose chief aim seemed to be worshipped by every man around her. That he had outed my interior life so accurately bespeaks the quality of the work.

The women I know go about their
pleasure the same way: without
love and continuously.

As you can see here, Laughlin privileges the strong opening word rather than the clever line break. Nouns like “clavicles” and “chest” get initial weight, not the last word. Lines don’t end so much as flow into each other. And here at least, he privileges abstraction over the concrete image – a preference that, as much as the extravagantly sentimental attitude, lends to the quality I’ve already identified as coming from the indie rock lyrical tradition.

But Laughlin is too skilled in other ways to be dismissed as a rock musician turned poet. The collection is united by several systems of images and titles that give it a formal quality its free verse lacks. There is an obsession with body parts – particularly the poet’s own broken and damaged parts. This is from “The Critic’s Worry,” one of a series.

There were grease marks along my arms—
Their length took me off guard.
I scrubbed until capillaries broke,
But my blood was not as thick as the car’s.

This stanza shows that Laughlin has the ability to paint a specific scene using concrete images. It also shows that he is not insensitive to the charms of formalism. Not only does he end every line on a strong monosyllable, but there is a definite respect for rhyme hinted at it in “arms”/”guard”/”cars.” Here are more broken body parts in the sister poem, “A Soldier’s Worry.”

We march through split heels,
chafed shouldertops, sprained ankles, compressed
knees, and, invariably, arthritic knuckles.

I particularly like that word “invariably.” Later more body part imagery, albeit now wed to some nice description of the physical world:

The most amazing things actually do affect us,
ever so slightly: groves of oranges, broken branches,
houses foraged with rotten wood, rain, broken vessels
on elderly hands or voices floating through light brush.

Here “affect us” is echoed by “vessels,” and “groves” by “broken.” Similarly, the repetition of “broken” unites “branches” and “vessels” – the world of nature thus equated with the human body. As the soldiers walk, they are beaten down by the physical world until they become it. Even the voices only come at them “through light brush” –a nice, simple image which also manages to convey painting, and thus art in the abstract.

[Note: these are my interpretations and are in no way intended to suggest authorial intent; this is just a survey of the many association these poems, like all good poetry, inspired in me.]

As I’ve already hinted, it is in repetition where Laughlin really excels. “Lists” finds the poet guessing at the contents of a list left behind by his roommate. Each verse is structured with the casualness of a prose poem and is yet another guess at the list’s contents.

No. You are a list of morose sights—deceased grandparents, bloodied fists, crooked-billed birds with feathers still falling from once-clean windows, dead dogs on the sides of dirt roads. You are the wrong vision at the right time.

Or:

No. You are a list of pragmatic decisions—split-ups before things got too serious, pets put to sleep, gifts exchanged on Christmas Eve, shirts in donations boxes despite still being in fashion. You are a remembrance of things still around but unwound from the mind.

There is further subtler repetition here in the mention of another dead pet, this one purposefully and pragmatically “put to sleep.” Similarly, the last lines echo each other.

Another repetition poem, appropriately titled “Simultaneous Reactions,” verges on the annoying but somehow transcends that by sheer brave bombardment. It begins: “Appetites are growing, finger-skin is getting more coarse, strength is waning.” (Another reference to body parts, specifically hands, which are mentioned over and over.) The use of the gerund here makes reading it a bit of a slog, but the joy is in seeing the different uses and combinations Laughlin comes up with. “Parachutes aren’t opening, cause is no longer affecting, science is calculating.” Here “calculating” can be a verb or adjective. Another example of the same: “Waitresses are finishing doubles, carrots are digesting, work is boring.” Not carrots are “being digested,” but are doing the “digesting” (though obviously they are also being digested). Similarly one imagines work “boring” into the speaker’s skull, like a drill. Many other lines have similar effect, making us question our preconceptions of the meaning of words. The sum total of all this repetition is to soak the reader in the variety of world. The poem ends, “I am brimming with capability, I am leaning side-angled into nothing, I am proselytizing.” Not only does this nicely bring the lens back around to the observer, it also hints at the meaning of all these “Simultaneous Reactions.” The poet is “brimming” with the possibilities of the world, but at the same time he is sunk in the infinite “nothing” of its excess, his only recourse “proselytizing” (really just another word for making poetry).

I wish I could sink my teeth more thoroughly into the meat of this collection. I’d like to talk about the series of “Autobiography” poems, the other “women” poems (especially “The Women I Don’t Know,” which flirts with and redetermines “The Women I Know”), or the absurdist “Not Titled,” a prose poem about, yes, a biblical rain of tacos. I hold a soft spot for the poem “Pregnant Crooked Horse,” having unwittingly inspired the title (long story), if not the subject matter, and so I feel like I have slighted it. I’d also like to discuss whether or not it was wise to have ended the collection on the title story, a strong poem which turns out to be deliciously less surreal than its name suggests, or whether it would have been better to end with another “Autobiography” poem, thus giving the collection a cleaner symmetry.

But I fear taxing the reader’s patience on a book he may never read. The good news is that the author is working on a new collection, one that he claims will be even darker and more alcohol-drenched. Until then I’ll leave you with my favorite poem in the collection, which sums up the entire history of literary friendships (the existence of which are, in fact, at least partially responsible for the writing of this review). Hopefully it will be enough to convince you that the underground of American poetry is alive and well – in fact, often more fully alive than the more heralded surface.

Upon Hearing Liakos Read From Another City While We Were Both Drunk

If you don’t keep that one
I will throw something at you.

It will be heavy,
and possibly wet.

It will be, most definitely,
something close and large.

It will be an object symbolizing
my obstructive frustration.

It will pass by your head,
grazing your cheek-skin.

It will remember you to
the sharks of your past.

It will recall the conquerable
people that made both of us.

It will punish you to leave a
contrail or convex or context.

I do not know much else about it
except that it will smash on the floor.

It will leave a mark on the ground
where I didn’t want it to.

I didn’t want it, I never ever did,
and it will crash, waking roommates.

You will look and we will laugh
but you gotta keep that one.

You’ve got to, got to—because
there is only one envelope left.

It will shatter next to the only envelope
left in the entire universe forever.

[Note: if you are interested in receiving a free electronic copy of this collection, email Jeff Laughlin at repetitionisfailure@gmail.com. I will post details about his follow-up collection as they become available.]