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Perla by Carolina De Robertis

Perla by Carolina De Robertis (giveaway following the review) is captivating and intoxicating in its setting, mystery, and the psychological unraveling of the main protagonist, Perla.  She’s growing into a young woman, but her cloistered existence threatens to explode until she begins to release herself in books and in her relationship with Gabriel.

The past haunts everything around her, though she does not know it at first.  She is proud of her family and her father’s naval career and her mother’s quirky penchant for picking up new hobbies and discarding them.  But her pride is suddenly shaken when she learns of the Disappeared, Argentinians who were silently taken from their workplaces and homes in the 1970s and 1980s by the government for allegedly being subversives.  In school she writes a short story that wins a prize and is published in the newspaper, but her story has other unintended consequences.  It opens up hidden fissures in her family, and forces her to rebel and question the father she’s loved with blind devotion.

“He was uninvited moisture.  He had leaked into this house.  I had every reason to find his presence an affront, to be enraged at his invasion, or at least to eject him in calm tones.  Certainly he made me feel combustible, unsafe in my own skin.  But though I didn’t know why, though the feeling shocked me, I did not want him to leave.”  (page 28)

The fluidity with which De Robertis tells the tale is much like the Dali painting, “The Persistence of Memory,” hung in Perla’s childhood home, weaving in and out of reality and shaping a psyche that is struggling with secrets that are too devastating to hold inside.  Perla is a novel about identity and how it is created or comes into being and whether it is alive within us before we are even born.  In accordance with this look at identity, the novel examines the harsh treatment society places on new generations for the transgressions of the past.  Struggling with the truth of her father’s job and how it may have contributed to the disappearance of many Argentinians is enough for Perla to deal with as a young adult, but she also must confront the sneer and the unspoken disgust in the eyes of her classmates and friends when her father’s occupation is revealed.

Retreating into herself and her books, Perla finds a way to cope and becomes strong in a way that even she is unaware of, and when she meets Gabriel, her strength is tested once again.  Can she love her father and still love this man who writes articles condemning the actions of former military and government leaders who now have immunity?  Can she reconcile the two worlds of her life into one and live with herself?  And how can she explain her love for her father amidst the knowledge of what his actions before she was born did to the country and to other families?

De Robertis takes readers on a psychological journey through Perla’s mind as she processes the revelations of her family life and the nation she was born into.  Legacy plays an important role and it is clear that Perla must uncover what that legacy should be as she grows into a woman and leads her own life.  The prose is so enchanting and intoxicating, hours of reading fly by as streets in Buenos Aires become crowded with footfall percussion beats and musical laughter countered with the closed off rooms of Perla’s childhood home and the dark, swirling violet waves of her aunt’s painting.  Water also is a significant image throughout the book as it gives life and sustains it in the womb and in the soil, but it also connects everyone and everything in the story, running underground and supplying the sustenance to the tale.

“Flowers lurked at every turn.  You could not rest your gaze without encountering a geranium, two geraniums, hundreds of geraniums, and you could not walk without the feeling that geraniums were following you close at heel, bright mobs of them, crowding the air at your back.  You could not help feeling vastly outnumbered.” (page 90)

In a few sections when Perla’s mother has taken up gardening as a hobby and begins overpopulating the house with geraniums, it is clear that these flowers are like the bodies of the disappeared blossoming despite the cover up and lurking around every corner, haunting those that took part.  These bodies even when the blossoms fade from lack of care, continue to haunt the house and its inhabitants, prodding Perla’s family to look about them, to question, to uncover the truth beneath the well-manicured soil.

Perla by Carolina De Robertis melds the supernatural with reality in a way that it becomes a testament to all of the disappeared and the children of the disappeared who were restored and not.  It is an examination of an ugly part of Argentinian history in which women, children, and men were taken from their families and homes without warning, tortured, and released from planes above the Atlantic Ocean — erased from existence.  De Robertis does not dwell on the horrors of those times, but on the consequences of those actions and the reverberations felt for generations following the political upheaval that caused them.  She does so with aplomb and breath-taking imagery that transports readers to a South American nation ripe with beauty and dark secrets to explore what it means to have an identity and to be an individual in spite of what your family may have done in the past.  One last note, get the tissues ready!  Another for the 2012 best of list.

Author Carolina De Robertis

About the Author:

Carolina De Robertis is the author of Perla and The Invisible Mountain, which was an international bestseller translated into fifteen languages, the recipient of Italy’s Rhegium Julii Prize, and a Best Book of 2009 according to the San Francisco Chronicle, O, The Oprah Magazine, and BookList. Her writings and literary translations have appeared in Zoetrope: Allstory, Granta, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She is the translator of Alejandro Zambra’s Bonsai, which was just made into a film, and Roberto Ampuero’s internationally bestselling The Neruda Case, which will be published for the first time in English in July 2012. De Robertis has been awarded a 2012 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

De Robertis grew up in a Uruguayan family that immigrated to England, Switzerland, and California. Prior to completing her first book, she worked in women’s rights organizations for ten years, on issues ranging from rape to immigration. She lives in Oakland, California, where she is currently elbow-deep in writing her third novel, which explores migration, sexual frontiers, and the tango’s Old Guard in early twentieth century South America.  Connect with her on Facebook, Twitter, and through her Website.

tlc tour host

This is my 37th book for the 2012 New Authors Challenge.

 

 

 

To enter for 1 copy of Perla by Carolina De Robertis (US/Canada), leave a comment about what you’d like to learn about the disappeared of Argentina.

Deadline is May 17, 2012, at 11:59PM EST

Astride a Pink Horse by Robert Greer

Astride a Pink Horse by Robert Greer is a thrilling ride steeped in the mystery of the west and its ties to the Cold War and nuclear missiles.  Elgin “Cozy” Coseia and Freddie Dames are college buddies who were drafted to major league baseball teams before an accident stopped Cozy’s career very short and they went into business as journalists in Denver.  A murder of a former Air Force Master Sergeant Thurmond Giles, a former nuclear-missile maintenance technician, has these boys running the bases faster than they ever did in college baseball, as they play tag with local law enforcement in Wyoming and team up with Major Bernadette Cameron of the Air Force.  The back-and-forth investigation has the journalists and Cameron working closer than her superiors want her to be, but a murder and possible national security breach are at the top of all of their agendas.

Greer intricately weaves in the story of the murder with anti-nuclear protesters from the 50s and 70s, a WWII Japanese-American internment camp survivor, and a hospital equipment transporter into the story in a way that keeps readers guessing as to how they are all connected to one another and possibly the murder.  Giles is far from well liked by anyone given his large ego and his womanizing, and navigating civilian and military investigations into not only the security breach at Tango-11 a decommissioned missile silo, but also the murder of Giles.

“‘As the pitiful-looking beast approached me, faltering with each step, I realized that it was carrying a rider who was charred almost black from head to toe.  I watched for a few moments as animal and rider, unaware of my presence, veered to my left and walked toward the river to disappear into the yellow haze.  Thoughts of my wife and children, coworkers and countrymen, worked their way through my head, but it was the image of the charbroiled rider astride a pink horse that stayed with me the rest of the day.'” (page 159 ARC)

Greer’s characters are eccentric and downright odd at times, especially WWII Japanese-American internment camp survivor Kimiko Takata who’s battling dementia and her nephew Rikia, who is paranoid that his math colleagues are eager to steal his work and ultimately the glory that he knows it will come with.  Egos are big with some of Greer’s characters, but what sets some of them apart is their purpose, like Freddy Dames’ search for the biggest story that will make his Web-based news service shine.  Cozy and Cameron are strong-willed and used to working alone, but in this case, they come to realize that standing alone all of the time can be too comfortable and lonely at the same time.

Astride a Pink Horse by Robert Greer is well crafted mystery that will leave readers guessing for most, if not all, of the book.  His characters are unique, eccentric, and witty, which helps keep the pace fast and the suspense thick.

The novel is a standalone, but Greer also has a mystery series with CJ Floyd.

About the Author:

Robert Greer is a native of Columbus, Ohio, who spent his formative years in the steel mill town of Gary, Indiana. He graduated from Miami University at Oxford, Ohio, in 1965 with a Bachelor of Arts degree and subsequently earned degrees in dentistry, medicine and pathology from Howard University and Boston University. He is a professor of pathology, medicine, surgery, and dentistry at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center where he specializes in head and neck pathology and cancer research. He also holds a masters degree in Creative Writing from Boston University and an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Miami University, his alma mater. Greer has lived in Denver for thirty years.  Visit his Website.

This is my 36th book for the 2012 New Authors Challenge.

The Last Brother by Nathacha Appanah, translated by Geoffrey Strachan

The Last Brother by Nathacha Appanah, translated by Geoffrey Stachan is a quiet novel that hits the heart, twisting it until tears pour from the reader’s eyes.  Beginning slowly with the main character awaking from a dream, the novel builds to a crescendo, followed by still powerful diminuendo of reflection.  Appanah and Stachan’s translation provide a sense of distance from the characters at first, but pull readers in through the magic of the dreams and the jungle, generating the sense of hollowness and fullness of love in tension.

Set in Mauritius, Raj is in his 70s and is looking back on his time as an abused child in a poor family and the one friend he made following a major disaster that struck his small village of Mapou, which forced his family to leave and live near the island’s Beau-Bassin prison.  Raj’s family is poor, but happy as his two other brothers — Anil and Vinod — look out for him, even though he is the middle brother.  He is the one chosen to attend school, which he gladly shares with his brothers when he returns home to share the chore of obtaining water from the well.

“. . . in the old days at Mapou we used to crouch down, eating our mangoes with both hands, with the juice trickling down our forearms, quickly catching it with our tongues.  In the old days at Mapou we ate the whole mango, the skin, the little, rather hard tip that had held it to the branch and we sucked the stone for a long, long time until it was rough and insipid, good only to throw on the fire.” (page 44)

The connection between the brothers is severed and Raj is forced to leave his home with his parents as his father begins working as a guard at the Beau-Bassin prison, where in 1940 Jews were exiled during WWII.  Raj is still a child by modern standards at age 9 when he discovers the true wrath of his father and the world around him.  His father is easily displeased, particularly when drunk, and he often beats his children after taking whatever displeasure he has out on his wife.  In many ways, this rage shapes the boy that Raj becomes — secretive and imaginative.  He spends afternoons in the jungle, hiding and observing, especially once he learns of the prison and the bad man his father says are imprisoned there. It is his father’s rage and beatings that send Raj to the hospital inside the prison to recover and where he meets David.

Much of Raj’s life after leaving Mapou has been empty, but meeting David awakens in him his childhood and renews feelings of brotherhood.  The Last Brother by Nathacha Appanah and translated by Geoffrey Stachan is stunning in its double entendre as the story of the last brother Raj and his own last “brother” David.  Raj is a deeply complex character as he looks at the past, his regrets about the choices he made and promises he could not keep, and his hope that the future will learn about the past so as to maintain the memory of those who have been lost.

About the Author:

Nathacha Devi Pathareddy Appanah is a Mauritian-French author. She comes from a traditional Indian family.

She spent most of her teenage years in Mauritius and also worked as a journalist/columnist at Le Mauricien and Week-End Scope before emigrating to France.

Since 1998, Nathacha Appanah is well-known as an active writer. Her first book Les Rochers de Poudre d’Or (published by Éditions Gallimard) received the ” Prix du Livre RFO”. The book was based on the arrival of Indian immigrants in Mauritius.

She also wrote two other books Blue Bay Palace and La Noce d’Anna which also received some prizes for best book in some regional festivals in France.

***I read this because of Anna’s glowing review at Diary of an Eccentric.

This is my 35th book for the 2012 New Authors Challenge.

Domestic Violets by Matthew Norman

Domestic Violets by Matthew Norman is written very frankly and is told from the point of view of corporate cube dweller Tom Violet, whose father just happens to be the famous writer Curtis Violet who has just won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.  Tom is having marriage problems, hates his corporate job as a copywriter, and continues to have daddy issues; he’s on the precipice.  At work, he cuts into his enemy Greg every chance he gets and flirts with his underling, copywriter Katie.  He’s filling his days with useless interactions and writing that has no meaning for him.  He’s aimlessly adrift, but still wants his father’s approval, but how far is he willing to go to get it.  Will he become his father and chase after younger and younger skirts?  Will he become pretentious and full of himself, while looking down at other writers?  Norman’s character is adrift, but blissfully unaware of it until he loses his job and his thin connections to the “real” world.

“Then I realize that despite what both of them must suspect about me and my abilities as a man, Anna and Allie are looking at me.  They’re waiting for me to do something.  Waiting for me to protect them.  Even Hank is looking at me now, perfectly still, the rigid statue of an ugly little dog.”  (Page 9)

Like the characters his father writes about in his novels, Tom acts on impulse and very rarely worries about the consequences, and in fact, on occasion, thinks that the consequences will be positive.  The banter between Tom and Greg is highly entertaining and almost surreal because in a normal work environment wouldn’t Tom have been fired after how many complaints were filed against him by Greg?

“She tried to read it, but she had to put it down, stunned that she’d married a man who is so bad at writing books.  On almost every page, there’s something egregious to change.  There are typos, cliches, errors in logic, rambling sentences, and narration where there should be dialogue.”  (Page 163)

When Tom uncovers the truth about his family and his father, he’s faced with a hard choice.  He has to either move on and forgive or continue to flounder in self-pity, regret, and indecision to the point at which decisions will be made for him.  Norman has a clear grasp of what it means to be a writer, full of self-doubt and self-confidence at the same time, and his characters are dynamic and incredibly flawed.  Although there are moments when readers will not like Tom or his father, there are other moments where their hearts will soften for him.

How do you domesticate a writer, who is trained to run wild, at least in his imagination?  Domestic Violets by Matthew Norman is about finding peace with oneself and their family even if events are beyond their control and immutable.  It’s an adventure for readers and writers alike, and a true page turner.

***This is a book I picked up thanks to so many great reviews, including those from Booking Mama, Rhapsody in Books, Book Chatter, and Literate Housewife.

Author Matthew Norman

About the Author:

Matthew Norman is an advertising copywriter. He lives with his wife and two daughters in Baltimore. His first novel, Domestic Violets, was recently nominated in the Best Humor Category at the 2011 Goodreads Choice Awards. Read more on his blog or follow him on Twitter.

 

This was a stop on The Literary Road Trip because the author lives in Baltimore and the novel takes place in Washington, D.C., Maryland, and Virginia.

 

 

This is my 34th book for the 2012 New Authors Challenge.

Every Possible Blue by Matthew Thorburn

Every Possible Blue by Matthew Thorburn, whom I interviewed for 32 Poems, will be published by CW Books in May.  His poems read like paintings that visually leap from the page to create vivid scenes in the readers mind, from moments in a Jazz club with trumpets blaring to mannequins in the stores down Fifth Avenue in New York.  Moreover, these poems have the feel of the 20s and 30s with references to Greta Garbo and Barbara Bel Geddes.  It is like stepping back and forth in time to experience what has past and what is still vivid and relevant today, while at the same time creating a “blue” mood, a longing for the simpler moments of the past.

From "Now is Always a Good Time":

. . . But Hoagy Carmichael does
a funny thing at the piano and my heart

swings open like a Murphy bed.  Now a hint
of stale Nag Champa tickles my nose, or is this
Chanel No. 5 letting go of someone's taut tan wrist?"
From "Self-Portrait in Secondhand Tuxedo"

. . . Now he's breathing a sweet
something in someone's ear (only her ear
makes it into the picture) and there's

hardly room for me to pull up a stool
in this last corner I'm shading in: my antsy hands,
my waistcoat pooching over my waist.

I'm keeping company tonight with the bust
of Charlie Darwin, that lush.  He sniffs
the pale bud in my button-hole.  . . .

Readers will like when Thorburn directly references the paintings described or referenced in his poems as they can search the internet and gaze at images while reading. Like many of the scenes in his poems, there are mundane situations afoot, but with at least one element that is surprisingly awkward, which can be the narrator himself or other scene stealers.

There is a great deal of upheaval here and yet there is a sense of hope that continues to propel the narrator forward, and some of that can be attributed to the alliteration in some of these poems that make them musical and continuously moving (i.e. “Upper West Side Toodle-oo”).  What readers will love most about Every Possible Blue by Matthew Thorburn is the tug-of-war that happens between the past and future, lost faith and renewed hope, and failure and new opportunity.  A very human collection that delves into the internal struggles we face daily at every turn and yet still find a way to move forward.

Author photo by Takako Kim

About the Poet:

Matthew Thorburn is the author of three book of poems, Every Possible Blue (CW Books, forthcoming 2012), This Time Tomorrow (Waywiser Press, forthcoming 2013) and Subject to Change (New Issues, 2004), and a chapbook, Disappears in the Rain (Parlor City, 2009). He is the recipient of a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress, as well as the Mississippi Review Prize, two Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prizes, and fellowships from the Bronx Council on the Arts and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference.

His poems have appeared in literary journals such as The Paris Review, American Poetry Review, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Poet Lore, Michigan Quarterly Review and Pool. He is a regular contributor to the reviews section of Pleiades. His critical writing has also appeared in Jacket, The Laurel Review, Poetry Daily, Rowboat: Poetry in Translation and Rattle, among others.

A native of Michigan, Matthew Thorburn has lived in New York City for more than a decade. He is currently working on two new projects: a book-length poem that tells the story of one year, and a collection of poems about losing faith and possibly finding it again.

 

***For today’s National Poetry Month Blog Tour stop, visit Travis Laurence Naught on Facebook.

 

 

 

This is my 33rd book for the 2012 New Authors Challenge.

 

 

This is the 15th book for my 2012 Fearless Poetry Exploration Reading Challenge.

You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake by Anna Moschovakis

You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake by Anna Moschovakis, which was awarded the James Laughlin Award by the Academy of American Poets, is a collection of four long poems with a prologue and epilogue poem that discusses and assesses four books — The Tragedy of Waste by Stuart Chase, Death as a Way of Life by Roger A. Caras, The Human Machine by Arnold Bennett, and In Search of Wealth by Cyril S. Belshaw — from the twentieth century that the poet discovered in a used bookshop in South Kortright, New York.  The poems share the same titles as the books, and the title of the collection makes its appearance in the first poem.

Moschovakis makes a great many assumptions about the readers knowledge of the industrial revolution and their understanding of economics.  First she compares the lake to supply and the men and women entering the wood and approaching the lake as demand, but later, the lake becomes more ambiguous.  From the cycles of supply and demand in the markets and the growth of the workforce to the incessant bombardment of advertising, the narrator of the poem is questioning the capitalistic ways of society and whether those are not wasteful in terms of time and energy spent.  She also postulates that we are no different from nature in how we react to available resources, which begs the question just how civilized are we when we succumb to our basest instincts to use everything around us?

From "The Tragedy of Waste (page 27)

Behind the desk there is a window

A woodpecker is attacking the house
The sun is attacking the snow on the pavement

Everything helping itself
to everything else
 From "The Tragedy of Waste" (page 30)

dwarfed and shadowed by mighty buildings
subway trains wild as elephants

One goes blindly back to one's desk

In the second poem, death as a way of life is broken down into how it affects “the Other” and not necessarily the surface theory that death is merely a part of the life cycle.  In many ways this poem is about the necessity to kill and the pleasure in killing, and where are the lines to be drawn between animals and humans being killed or something more refined.  There also is speculation about what rights we have as humans to kill and is naming the “Other” just as violent as not naming it?  “I want to know about the ‘other birds’//Were they species unknown to the hunters/or insignificant birds not worth noting by name/or mutilated/beyond recognition/”

“The Human Machine (Thirty Chances)” poem is a bit repetitive and generates a sci-fi-like quality as chatbots talk to human machines.  Readers are likely to find this poem the most puzzling, though ultimately a kernel of understanding will emerge about the “people” we believe we are and who we actually are — in that we all have failings and do fail ourselves and others.  But it also touches upon what makes us truly human — an ability to empathize, which could mean that should a robot be able to do so, we would have to consider it a person worthy of saving and no longer “Other.”

“In Search of Wealth” is the final poem before the epilogue.  In this poem there are digs at a variety of religions, including Scientology and its ties to Hollywood’s elite, and there are ramblings on pay inequality that seem to go on incessantly.  In the collection, this poem seems to be more of a rambling and a rant then a well crafted argument.  If it were issued forth in a debate on wealth and capitalism, listeners would likely begin throwing rotten tomatoes if they had any in their pockets for the occasion.  The prologue sets up the collection to be poems that take up certain positions on the topics at hand, and while by all accounts they do, some are more well crafted than others.  The epilogue goes further to explain that the reason to take a position is to generate disagreement, which is closely linked with desire and ensures that life is anything but boring.

You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake by Anna Moschovakis touches on themes of wealth, “otherness,” conviction, and a host of other topics, but without having read the books mentioned in the acknowledgements, some of the references may be lost or misunderstood.

Poet Anna Moschovakis

About the Poet:

Anna Moschovakis is the author of two books of poems, I Have Not Been Able to Get Through to Everyone (Turtle Point Press 2006) and You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake (Coffee House Press 2011) and of several chapbooks, including The Blue Book (Phylum Press), Dependence Day Parade (Sisyphus), No Medea (a Tinyside from Big Game Books), The Tragedy of Waste (Belladonna) and The Human Machine (Dusie). Her translations from the French include texts by Henri Michaux, Claude Cahun, Theophile Gauthier, Pierre Alféri, and Blaise Cendrars, as well as the books The Jokers by Albert Cossery (New York Review Books), The Possession by Annie Ernaux (Seven Stories Press), and The Engagement by Georges Simenon (New York Review Books).

Currently a freelance editor and a visiting professor in the Writing department at Pratt Institute, she splits her time between Brooklyn and Delaware County, NY. Anna has been working with UDP since 2002 as an editor, designer, administrator, and printer.

 

***For today’s National Poetry Month Blog Tour stop, visit Caribousmom.

 

 

 

 

This is my 32nd book for the 2012 New Authors Challenge.

 

 

This is the 14th book for my 2012 Fearless Poetry Exploration Reading Challenge.

Nostalgia for the Criminal Past by Kathleen Winter

Nostalgia for the Criminal Past by Kathleen Winter, whom I interviewed for 32 Poems in 2011, is a piece of art that should be hung on the wall.  And like all art, there are references to other artists and art types within her poems, but there is more here — the art of being human.  In the first three sections, Winter carefully tailors each poem to touch on the connections we have to our animal selves, from the mischievous prankster in Eve who entices the snake to eat Adam in the Garden of Eden merely because she is bored in “Escape from Eden” to razor sharp focus of a hawk eying its prey in “Edge of February.”

There is a telling epigraph from Virginia Woolf, “I do not believe in separation.  We are not single.” that establishes the direction of Winter’s work as a look at us being separate as well as connected.  However, the collection is not only about being separate and being connected, it is about “being naked” and reveling in the “silos of time” we create (“Nostalgia for the Criminal Past,” page 9).  There is the past of our relatives and how it reverberates through the younger generations’ lives and how the past they share may be incomplete or slightly altered from reality, like in “Jellyfish Elvis.”  The narrator even questions the validity of the past whether told by others or lived, which calls into question whether the past should be revered or remembered and that we should merely live in the moment.

Winter shows a maturity in her imagery and line break selection that breaks boundaries and draws comparisons to the impressionists and abstract painters who defied artistic convention in their paintings.  From ” Hamster Thrown From Monster Truck,” “rumbling above us at the stoplight/like a frisky two-story building.,” and like “The eight a.m. sun moved out from clouds/like a well-trained MBA/adjusting to changed conditions./” in “Snapshot of a Boxer.”  Beyond the animal references, memories, and looks into the past, Winter uses water imagery in traditional ways to show reflections of what we want to see and what we desire, but provides readers with the punch in the gut when they realize the folly of those dreams, like in “Country Club Fourth of July.”

And despite the theme of appearance versus reality, there are other moments in the collection where the narrator will sink beneath the surface of the water in a tub to find an inner peace, like in “The Bath” and “Bathing at the Museum”:  “Like Bonnard’s wife/incessantly I bathe, sensations of liquid/intervening between mind//& body, blurring animosities./In dim flux the mind begins to lift,/words shimmer,//” (page 64).

The cover photo for this collection is reflective of its contents as the young girl looks circumspect about everything she is seeing out of that window, assessing it carefully, but wary of it at the same time.

The final section of the collection is a breaking out from the bonds of the past, and the passion that consumes those poems burns and takes action.  However, these poems also are reflective and playful, like “Wrong Sonnet: Mystery” where the narrator speaks to ghosts in a tongue-in-cheek kind of way.  Nostalgia for the Criminal Past by Kathleen Winter is another for the best of lists from theme, quality of the poems, and the imagery that illustrates the world in new ways.

About the Poet:

Kathleen Winter’s poems are forthcoming in Anti- and recently have appeared in Field, The New Republic, Verse Daily, 32 Poems and The Cincinnati Review. Her chapbook Invisible Pictures was published in 2008 by Finishing Line Press. Kathleen received fellowships from Vermont Studio Center and the Piper Center at Arizona State University. She is an MFA student and composition teacher at ASU.

Check out today’s National Poetry Month Blog Tour stop from Unputdownables.

This is my 31st book for the 2012 New Authors Challenge.

 

 

 

This is the 13th book for my 2012 Fearless Poetry Exploration Reading Challenge.

Indie Lit Award Poetry Winner: Catalina by Laurie Soriano

Indie Lit Award Poetry Winner Catalina by Laurie Soriano, which was selected unanimously as the winner and also is published by Lummox Press, is a cohesive collection that maintains more than one theme throughout and simultaneously.  The narrator travels from east to west coasts and from innocence to corruption and recovery; the journey is bumpy and fraught with obstacles and stumbles.  Soriano uses imagery that jolts readers to the heart of her themes; parts one and two focus on how the narrator grows up in an abusive home with an alcoholic parent, while the final two sections focus on parenthood and how the past can shape us, but should not rule our actions.

There are some satiric qualities to these poems as well, like in “Betty’s Dive,” where a young woman takes on a dare and pays the ultimate price, and those issuing the dare laugh at what they think is her mock “dead-man’s float” until realization slowly creeps over them.  There is a great sense of irony in some of Soriano’s poems as well, such as the “no dogs” sign that is clearly the subject of many dogs’ walks in “Venice After Work.”

In addition to the deft use of these literary devices, the poet also clearly ties her poems together as a story unfolds, and it is most prominent in the movement from “Red Wine” to “Crash.”  In “Red Wine” (pages 44-5), the narrator is descending into the alcoholic abyss of her father: “. . . My hands/grip the flesh of their waists as I stumble/further toward the land of my father,/the shifting land of regret and soggy laughter./” and “I ask daddy if we want win.  He fills/our glasses like love, daddy never loved me/like wine, and we start thinning our blood/with this red stuff, our words flow/like liquid, we laugh fit to bust, and/we walk home arm in arm,/like we never did.//”  In “Crash” (pages 46-7), the narrator has followed the path of her father with her drinking and now driving along, experiences the worst kind of regret and shock:  “the effect of all our causes,/you and I shuttle separately to the spot//where our masses would marry/and your blood would stain the street./For a moment, one of those out of time,/we hung in the air, as breathless as sweethearts,/before we came together, your motorcycle/tearing a path through my car,/as your body flew/three car-lengths forward.//”

Soriano’s poetry is highly emotional, leading readers into tumultuous memories and through happier times, and in many ways, her poetry reminds me of the poetic prose of Beth Kephart.  Each writer’s words are chosen carefully and it shows — quiet little powerhouses of emotion that grab the heart strings and do not let go, though they may release their stronger grip for a moment or two depending on the mood of the poem.  In Part three — “Being Here” — Soriano emphasizes the “in-the-moment” nature of experiencing new life and parenthood, which can include struggle and joy.

Catalina by Laurie Soriano is more than stunning; it’s luminescent.  It’s a collection that will stay with readers long after reading, and will share a space on the shelves with those books that you’ll want to re-read again and again.  One of the best collections of the year, and unconventionally, this review is going to end with my favorite lines:

From "To the Attacker" (page 42-3)

You've slashed apart the ripe
abandon of my trust, torn away
the quietude I wore like a dress.
I am left with what is in the box.

Other Indie Lit Award Poetry Panel Reviews:

Diary of an Eccentric
Necromancy Never Pays

Poet Laurie Soriano

About the Poet:

Laurie Soriano is the author of Catalina (Lummox Press 2011). Her writing has appeared in Orange Room Review, FutureCycle Poetry, Flutter Poetry Journal, Gloom Cupboard, Heavy Bear, and West/Word, among others. She is also a music attorney, representing recording artists and songwriters and others in the music industry. She lives in Palos Verdes, California with her family.

Please also check out her interview for the Indie Lit Awards.

 

***For Today’s National Poetry Month blog tour post, visit Mr. Watson.***

 

 

 

This is my 30th book for the 2012 New Authors Challenge.

 

 

 

This is the 12th book for my 2012 Fearless Poetry Exploration Reading Challenge.

The Day the World Ends by Ethan Coen

The Day the World Ends by Ethan Coen, one half of the Coen Brothers film making team with great films under their belt like Brother, Where Art Thou? and No Country for Old Men, is a twisted and unexpectedly thoughtful collection in places.  The limericks are bawdy and remind me of Christopher Moore’s humorous prose, but less in the smart and sassy humor and more in the low-class bathroom humor sense.  Necromancy Never Pays stated that the poetry in the volume is geared toward a male audience, and in most cases, that is true — particularly with the dirty limericks.

"Stone-age man, thawed from glacier, aghast:
'Was some snowman in my recent past?
And if so, who fucked who?
My dick's numb and quite blue
And there's freezer burn all up my ass.'" (Page 28)

Additionally, Coen appears to love rhyme, no matter how trite or over-stretched it might be.  Readers could find this collection amateur at best in how Coen chooses his rhymes, even when they have a tongue-in-cheek quality.  Like the “bathroom” humor, these rhymes can get tiresome.  Take for instance the rhymes in “Vine-Covered Verse” (page 53), “Lord, keep this farmer’s soul in peace,/For, though he dallied with his niece,/And cow, and nephew, none can claim/He, during, failed to praise Your name;/And how commit a lesser sin/When neighbors are but kine and kin?//”   However, even in this poem, there are moments of deeper thought in which the narrator is asking what sins are worse and should they all be forgiven or all be condemned.  It also questions how well we know our partners or other humans in general and what secrets they will take to their graves.

Coen’s poetry in this collection seems built for laughs among men mostly, though there are moments in which the poems are not trying so hard to be humorous.  There are some with an anachronistic quality to them, while others like “My Father’s Briefcase” are more serious and reflective.  “Therapy” uses humor and disdain to point out the inane struggle we have against aging and the depression that accompanies the process of aging, as the narrator talks of his depression to a less-than-helpful therapist.

The Day the World Ends by Ethan Coen is not for everyone and could be trying if read from cover to cover, but for those looking for a humorous romp on the underside of humanity, take a dip into these pages.

Poet Ethan Coen

About the Poet:

Ethan Jesse Coen is one half of the American film making duo the Coen brothers.  Their films include Blood Simple, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, No Country for Old Men, and True Grit. The brothers write, direct and produce their films jointly, although until recently Joel received sole credit for directing and Ethan for producing. They often alternate top billing for their screenplays while sharing film credits for editor under the alias Roderick Jaynes.

To enter to win one of 2 copies for US/Canada readers:

Leave a comment about what tour stop on the National Poetry Month Blog Tour you’ve enjoyed most, either here or on one of the participants’ blogs.

Blog, Tweet, or share the link on Facebook for up to 3 additional entries.

Deadline is April 30, 2012.

***Today’s tour stop is at Arisa White, so check it out!***

 

This is the 11th book for my 2012 Fearless Poetry Exploration Reading Challenge.

 

 

This is my 29th book for the 2012 New Authors Challenge.

Hurrah’s Nest by Arisa White

Hurrah’s Nest by Arisa White is an illustration of the “untidy heap” or “tangle of debris that can block a stream” that family can become, and it will remind readers how birds create their nests out of the most unwelcome or tossed aside elements of the world from hair to fabric strings and twigs.  There are scars here, deep ones rooted in absentee parents and relatives whose ways of doing things countered the practices the narrator was taught.  Minor acts of rebellion scream out in dreadlocks and boyish haircuts on girls.  There are other poems with child-like qualities in which panties become parachutes and beaded braids become like seaweed in “Last Bath,” which represent happier memories and playfulness shared by young siblings with great imaginations.

In “Portrait Painter” (page 19), White’s narrator ponders the evident differences between herself and her brothers, whom she is called out of childhood into adulthood at a moment’s notice to help raise.  “It’s different/how our mother looks at us/with sweet and brick/of romances gone,” she observes.  A deep sadness and resentment pervades the poems in this collection as the narrator looks back on the waffling of her mother who in turns cares for and gives up care of her children, and threatens them with foster care when they’ve not behaved as they should, particularly in “Chore.”

Ostracization happens inside and outside the family for the narrator as she experiences typical classroom jokes coupled with the laughing she endures from her mother, brother, and step-father.  Her mother even chastizes her for her sensitivity, saying that it is like a “broken leg” in “Helicopter, Heliocopter Please Come Down. If You Don’t Come Down, I’ll Shoot You Down.” (page 28).

In “An Albatross to Us Both” (page 41-3), the theme of protection and strength is strongest as the narrator and her siblings “wear each other like amulets.”   Hurrah’s Nest by Arisa White is a lesson to us all that despite all of the “mess” we create with our lives and the messes that we live through, there are nuggets of wisdom and strength that we carry with us and nurture.  Strong imagery combined with themes of loss, separation, and togetherness create a powerful collection about the beautiful mess that families are and how they shape us.

Poet Arisa White

ARISA WHITE is a Cave Canem fellow, an MFA graduate from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and author of the poetry chapbooks Disposition for Shininess and Post Pardon; she was selected by the San Francisco Bay Guardian for the 2010 Hot Pink List. Member of the PlayGround writers’ pool, her play Frigidare was staged for the 15th Annual Best of PlayGround Festival. Recipient of the inaugural Rose O’Neill Literary House summer residency at Washington College in Maryland, Arisa has also received residencies, fellowships, or scholarships from Squaw Valley Community of Writers, Hedgebrook, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Prague Summer Program, Fine Arts Work Center, and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2005, her poetry has been published widely and is featured on the recording WORD with the Jessica Jones Quartet. A blog editor for HER KIND, and the editorial assistant at Dance Studio Life magazine, Arisa is a native New Yorker, living in Oakland, CA, with her partner. Her debut collection, Hurrah’s Nest, was published by virtual artists collective.

****Check out today’s National Poetry Month Blog Tour stop at Seer of Ghosts and Weaver of Stories.

 

This is the 10th book for my 2012 Fearless Poetry Exploration Reading Challenge.

 

 

This is my 28th book for the 2012 New Authors Challenge.

2011 Indie Lit Awards Poetry Runner-Up Review: What Looks Like an Elephant by Edward Nudelman

What Looks Like an Elephant by Edward Nudelman, published by Lummox Press, was the 2011 Indie Lit Awards Poetry Runner-Up.  Initially, readers may fear the collection’s use of math and science, but Nudelman’s poetry makes these concepts accessible in most cases.  Broken down into four sections, the collection explores the known and the unknown, that which we fear and that which we do not.  There is a tension throughout the collection that will push and pull the reader with each poem’s exploration of the human condition steeped in nature imagery, math concepts, and scientific analysis.

In some instances, Nudelman uses the scientific method to carry readers through a series of images and questions about what we know to be true and what we think is true.  Like Socrates, the scientific method ensures that hypotheses are tested with experiments or examples and counter-examples to uncover the truth or guiding theory.  Beyond the use of math and science, Nudelman’s observation skills as a scientist still shine without them, like in “Arrival” (page 18),  “Outside, a dog wants in./Inside, a soul wears slippers and sips iced tea.//” and in “The Corners of Rooms” (page 35), “On sultry evenings while mosquitoes squeeze/through screens, you remain safe in the vertex/of walls.  Better to dazzle in a little gray light/than crisp-up in the middle of the oven./”

Beyond the science, the math, and the poetic observation, there are pieces of the great poets here, including Robert Frost in “Something There Is That Doesn’t Love a Garage.”  Nudelman is tackling the seen and unseen in his poems from what death looks like and how his touch affects us every day in “Trump Card” to “Gorilla Flower,” which revisits the old saying if a tree falls and no one is there to hear it, did it fall? — though in this case, it is the existence of a purple bloom in the midst of a white jungle, an anomaly that shouldn’t exist and yet does.  Themes and topics run the gamut here, and one of the gems is “Tracing Roots,” which is a tongue-and-cheek look at genealogy through the eyes of a scientist.

What Looks Like an Elephant by Edward Nudelman is looking into the heart of the matter, human matter.  He seeks the truth in poems through science, math, nature, and philosophical discourse, trying to make sense of the world and how it works.  While his narrations acknowledge finding the truth is often a futile endeavor, the journey . . . the experience is worth doing and sharing.

Poet Edward Nudelman

About the Poet:

Edward Nudelman is a poet, scientist and literary critic from Seattle.  He has two poetry books and his latest collection was runner-up for book of the year.  Check out his Website.

Stay Tuned for my interview with the poet on April 19. Also, here’s a video with Edward Nudelman reading from the book:

***For Today’s National Poetry Month Blog Tour Post, visit Diary of an Eccentric for The Girl’s post.***

Other Reviews of What Looks Like an Elephant from the Indie Lit Awards Panel:

Diary of an Eccentric

 

This is the 9th book for my 2012 Fearless Poetry Exploration Reading Challenge.

 

 

This is my 27th book for the 2012 New Authors Challenge.

Wild Place by Erica Goss

Wild Place by Erica Goss is a chapbook, published by Finishing Line Press, examining the wild places within ourselves and our interactions with nature.  Wild and untamed, the verse sings the beauty in the blame as humanity encroaches on nature, sometimes leading to its destruction and at other times unveiling the beauty beneath the scars.  Goss has a talent for using few words to create a powerful and vivid image that sends a message to the reader about the wildness of nature and ourselves.  From “This Is a Wild Place” (page 10), “The little junk birds peck at foil,//and I am called away from my body/to forage for my life/out in the open.//” and from “New Colors” (page 16), “in an anonymous/coffee shop/a child waved/to me from//his father’s arms/fingers opening/and closing like/pink fronds//of a sea anemone.//”

Some poems are haunting, like “The Redwoods,” in which she compares the trees to whales sifting krill and how they sing in the windy darkness.  She tackles the fears of aging and clinging to the the past in several poems, including “The Redwoods,” but rather focus on nostalgic rose-colored images of the past, she highlights the splinters that gnaw at our sensibilities and the scars they create and how they shape who we become.  There is a certain wisdom that we all garner as we age, and rather than celebrate it, many times we are too focused on what might have been.

Although the California landscape and other West coast settings play a significant role in her poems, Goss also takes us out of our American element with poems like “Strange Land” and “Woman in the Berlin Airport,” in which she tackles assumptions of Americans about how foreigners act and react and how they see us.  From “Strange Land” (page 24), “America takes practice/mother prepares/our daily lessons//each morning we emigrate/our fermenting lunchboxes/ripe with foreign stink//the war of two languages/leaves us mute in school/speak up, the teacher says//”  Goss tackles the hardships of fitting in when one comes to America from somewhere else and the expectations that places on them and their children, but within the same poem, there is a nod to the past — in this case, WWII — and how it is best left in the past and not brought into the new “shining” future.

Even as Goss uses nature imagery to pull out her themes of aging, fitting in, and moving onward, she also does an excellent job providing breathtaking verse about mechanical objects, such as the airplane in “Leaving Frankfurt.”  Readers will rise and fall with the aircraft as it leaves one city for another and the narrator immerses herself in the experience.  Wild Place by Erica Goss is stunning to the point where readers will not look at the world in the same way; they will be forced to look further, to think harder, to accept more — broadening their perspective and horizons so that they become more conscientious about themselves and the world around them.

Poet Erica Goss

About the Poet:

Erica Goss is the winner of the 2011 Many Mountains Moving Poetry Contest. Her chapbook, Wild Place, was published in 2012 by Finishing Line Press. Her poems, articles and reviews have appeared in many journals, most recently Connotation Press, Hotel Amerika, Pearl, Main Street Rag, Rattle, Eclectica, Blood Lotus, Café Review, Zoland Poetry, Comstock Review, Lake Effect, and Perigee.

She won the first Edwin Markham Poetry Prize in 2007, judged by California’s Poet Laureate Al Young, and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2010. Erica teaches creative writing and humanities in the Bay Area and is a contributing editor for Cerise Press. She holds an MFA from San Jose State University.  If you live in California, please attend one of her local events near you.

***For today’s National Poetry Month blog tour stop, please visit Indie Reader Houston.***

 

This is the 8th book for my 2012 Fearless Poetry Exploration Reading Challenge.

 

 

This is my 26th book for the 2012 New Authors Challenge.