Their escapades start off as relatively good clean fun: late nights, bars, bourbon, drugs, pickup trucks, guns, and lots of music. But things change once JAG is introduced to fallenangels—an online network for singles with extreme desires. What starts off as a tongue-in-cheek diversion quickly blossoms into full-blown obsession, and then a kind of spiritual mission. Operating under a series of screen names, JAG becomes convinced that he can offer some brand of sexual redemption to the women of fallenangels.

Soon, JAG has a hard time keeping track of all his online “friends.” The site crashes; he jeopardizes his church job in order to keep fallenangels alive. His overlapping online identities compete for control of his psyche. Cyrus and other flesh-and-blood friends disappear. The reverend turns attention toward political influence. JAG’s hopes for a life with his son look more and more unlikely. In the book’s final chapters, JAG crosses the line into violence and desperation.

This novel is exceedingly good at what it does. Few writers in García’s peerage could pull so many raunchy sex scenes so artfully. The narrator’s eclectic love of music is palpable and endearing. Much of the novel handles both sides of rural America’s cultural divide—reverend included—with balance and empathy. Cyrus—ostensibly a sidekick and minor character—is a beautifully rendered 21^st century Southerner. In fact, I’d argue that one of this novel’s greater triumphs is its refreshing vision of Dixie: finally, a piece of fiction that frees the South from those same tired, gothic tropes—what Barry Hannah called “the canned dream of the South…a lot of porches and banjos.” While it’s true that the Klan still marches through the streets in badbadbad, it must compete with a Gay Pride Parade across town.

badbadbad is not without its problems. The narrator’s brother and son are both characters whose promise doesn’t fully pay off. And though it’s well executed, there’s a lot of on-screen messaging—which, while it may be true to life, tends to grow tedious on the page. Most unfortunately, the exact nature of JAG’s mission on fallenangels is never fully fleshed out; it never seems to be about salvation so much as getting laid.

Still, this book is fast, fun, irreverent, and unlike anything else in the fiction aisle. García’s prose and imagery are well rendered and perfectly matched to his subject. Many of his scenes would turn zany and cartoonish in the hands of a lesser writer; his gift is the ability to describe excess with craft and heart. Totally fearless in its treatment of religion, race, sex, and rural America, badbadbad breathes fresh air into what sometimes feels like a stuffy literary landscape.

Extras

• Read the first three chapters of badbadbad.
• Here’s an interview with Jesús Ángel García at The Nervous Breakdown, where he was a Featured Author in July 2011.
• Below, watch FEAR, Part I of a five-part badbadbad documentary (also edited by García) featuring interviews with his readers from across the U.S. You can also listen to a six-song sampler from the badbadbad soundtrack, or check out the book’s chapter-by-chapter YouTube playlist.

Grossman proudly displays nerdy genre cred with allusions to prominent works from fantasy legends like C.S. Lewis, Ursula K. Le Guin, and J.K. Rowling. But he continues the work he started in Book One: upend the tropes! No derivative fantasy or a genre paint-by-numbers found here. Fillory is no Narnia, but a world being torn apart by its own gods. The latest installation continues to play with reader expectations. Grossman pushes further into the subversive territory of what real magic looks like and how far Quentin—and readers—will follow.

The Magician King picks up where The Magicians left off: Quentin and his friends—Eliot, Janet, and Julia—reign as the kings and queens of Fillory. Peace and idleness grow stale for Quentin, and jonesing for adventure he volunteers for a sea voyage to the outer islands with Julia to collect back taxes, aligning with the spirit of Lewis’s The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Once there, Quentin hears the fable of “The Seven Golden Keys,” a story about a man who loses his daughter and searches for her through of a network of gateways unlocked by magical golden keys. The tale holds the secret to preventing unfeeling gods from sundering magic from all worlds. The first golden key leads Quentin and Julia back to earth where they reunite with Quentin’s schoolmates and start their Sisyphean task of returning to Fillory.

While on earth, Julia introduces Quentin to the desperate, anarchical world of hedge witches and itinerant magicians. She is the only character to fail the Brakebills entrance exam, and Julia’s outsider status gives Quentin access to a network of mortals and immortals that the establishment rejects. This seedy underworld has its own cryptic structure and rules, and Julia’s scramble to learn magic through bouts of depression has a timely ring to it. Anyone tried looking for a job lately? Still, in this instance at least, hard work prevails. Julia is obsessive enough to memorize arcane languages, painful hand positions, and obscure cosmological theory, and thus reclaims magic from the privileged, the institution.

As a magician king, Quentin exchanges schoolboy melancholy for some confidence, though the traits that made his character lovable in the first novel—hopeless idealism and naive ambition—persist. Quentin still dreams about leading other lives in still other worlds (for some, one magical realm is not enough). Face to snout with a river dragon, Quentin fantasizes:

Somehow in the back of his mind he’d vaguely thought that the dragon might want to be his friend, and they would fly around the world solving mysteries together.

This moment is pure Quentin. Even in the face of marvels, he always wants more.

Grossman’s fictional landscapes are consistent and concrete. The rules and consequences for magic are still absolute, and his fantasy settings retain the patina of the quotidian. The underworld where the dead gather is an aging middle school gym with crappy board games with pieces missing. Grossman makes allowances for the passage of time between this and the first novel and embraces the possibility of magic as progressive. When Julia and Quentin sneak onto the Brakebills campus, the waiting dean explains that Brakebills upgraded their magical security system and can identify both intruder and intent within a certain radius.

These details plant the novel in the contemporary world, and Grossman considers how the convenience of modernity translates to his magical. Technology plays a greater role in this narrative. When Josh creates a portal from Italy to England, he uses satellite maps on the internet to pinpoint the portal’s stopping location. One character defends her use of a smart phone by saying, “But I used magic to hack it.” Technology enhances spellwork. Grossman builds a world where the real and the imagined intertwine in unexpected ways.

The Magician King tells of the hero’s journey, a lineage drawn from the great epic sagas, from the Nibelungenlied to Tolkien. However, Grossman refuses Quentin his overarching desire to return to and stay in Fillory. Being a hero is a risky business and heroes don’t always get what they want, even if they end up on the winning side. The parting image of Quentin roaming the Neitherlands, a series of portals to other worlds, acts as a foil to his longing to be exactly that: between worlds. The sly and roundabout ways that Quentin’s wishes are fulfilled remind one of another ancient form: the fairy tale. Grossman revives it with panache, and just the right amount of irony.

Further Links and Resources

• Follow Lev Grossman on Twitter: @leverus



• Get the inside scoop on the television pilot script of Grossman’s first book in the trilogy, The Magicians (via io9), including a pretty sweet artist’s rendition of Alice entering Brakebills.
• Interested in losing yourself in a fantasy world this winter? Read Leslie Clements’s review of The Magicians, and get started on the series itself. (Plus, you can read this dishy post on Grossman’s blog about the gratification of seeing a larger audience for the books, returning home from a book tour, and the tantalizing promise of a third—and probably final!—book in the series.)

Everett’s prose does not aim at flowery. In fact, the only elevated passages deal with Walker’s one passion outside his job—fly fishing the mountain streams of his jurisdiction. The straightforward, dialogue-heavy style of Assumption creates a cinematic feeling, allowing for a quick read. This refusal to editorialize allows the author to depict the West’s underclass without judgment or condescension. Prostitutes, meth addicts, hayseed bigots—the people Ogden must deal with—typically antagonize him for being black, yet the deadpan narration conveys their straitened lives with empathy.

To Everett’s credit, these novellas stretch the mystery genre’s formula. Some of the series’ strongest moments are Ogden’s many conversations with his mother, a woman constantly fretting over her son, always foisting food on him. These tender scenes take what could have been a familiar, hard-bitten protagonist and push him into surprising, real, and—at times—humorous territory. For example, in my favorite exchange, Ogden’s mother needles him for developing a crush on the daughter of one of the murder victims.

If the first two novellas take an expansive view of what a mystery can be, the final installment aims to subvert it outright. Specifically, a shift in point of view promptly throws everything that comes before into question. I won’t spoil the twist, but once you close the cover of Assumption you can’t help but feel that the book has flown in the face of convention. Rather than neatly solving its final puzzle, Assumption leaves us more mystified than ever, wondering if there can ever be such a thing as “case closed.”

Extra

• Listen to “The Appropriation of Cultures,” an Everett story that deals with race and class tensions in a bar full of drunk frat boys, and a nineteen-forty Martin guitar with a Barkus-Berry pickup. It’s read here for Selected Shorts by Ruben Santiago-Hudson.

Caroline Preston’s fourth novel, The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt, seeks to recreate that feeling. Preston put together hundreds of pages of hand-cut photos and captions to create the story of her 18-year-old heroine, who receives her father’s Corona typewriter and a blank scrapbook from her mother as a high-school graduation present.

To assemble the materials that would make up Frankie’s life, Preston trolled antique stores and eBay for Bakelite bracelets and ticket stubs, a war medal and a flapper purse, a cigarette holder and a pair of driving glasses, bobby pins and fortune-telling cards. She put these items into a scrapbook: “over 600 pieces of 1920s vintage ephemera, and that’s a lot of stuff,” she says in an interview on her website—and then pasted typewritten text around them to create Frankie’s narrative.

The thrill of that chase is evident in her voice during the interview; it’s the voice of an excited collector, someone who figured out how to translate her passion for ephemera in general and the 1920s in particular into a work of fiction that’s part literary fiction and part graphic novel. The book jacket deems it “a novel in pictures,” but it’s really the typewritten text that forms the story of an 18-year-old girl in 1920, leaving her hometown to see the world.

Through the pages of her scrapbook, readers learn that Frankie Pratt is the smartest girl in her small New Hampshire high school. She initially passes up a scholarship to Vassar because her family can’t afford it, but a failed romance provides an unexpected avenue out of her town and off to college, Greenwich Village, and Paris, not to mention brushes with Charles Lindbergh and Ernest Hemingway.

Frankie is believable and interesting, and it’s fun to spend a few hours in her world, but the unusual format of the book becomes its most interesting character. Imagining the joy it must have brought Preston to assemble this book—the countless hours of searching, the endless eBay surprise packages, the clack of the vintage typewriter, careful cutting and pasting, rubber cement on her hands—might even be a touch more enjoyable than reading the book itself. But for those of us who want to believe that agents and publishers truly are open to novel formats and creative risk-taking, and may be willing to venture into uncharted waters (even with a tried-and-true author), The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt offers a glimmer—a frisson, maybe—of hope.

Extras

Enter the Motherwells. Theo and Raquel are a smart and worldly young couple, the newest and most stimulating presence in this sleepy town. In their home, Ginger is treated like an adult, allowed to partake of their wine and their grown-up conversations on sex and mortality. To the chagrin of their parents and the puzzlement of everyone else, Ginger and Cherry spend all their spare time with the couple. But there’s more to the Motherwells than meets the eye. Ginger uncovers some cryptic details of their background—how they met and why they neither work nor want for money. It seems their reasons for settling in Wick are wrapped up in the town’s own secrets, and lead all the way back to the Salem witch trials.

As the story proceeds, a series of lines are crossed. Theo’s interest in Ginger turns from friendship to something more dubious. Cherry has a change of heart and severs ties with the Motherwells. The unlikely threesome of Ginger, Raquel, and Theo breach the town’s taboo spaces: the locked-up old mill, the male-only Social Club, and the reservoir—where the ruins of another town lurk somewhere below the surface. At the novel’s apex, Wick’s norms prevail violently upon the Motherwells, and Ginger is reduced to the innocent and impressionable young girl the town still wants her to be—a victim rather than an accomplice.

The plot of this book plays second fiddle only to its atmosphere. A master of mood and tone, Wolff is able to conjure up a wicked cross of fear and intrigue upon every page. The term ‘gothic’ is thrown around with abandon when it comes to contemporary fiction, but this novel adheres to some of the key elements of that genre, as practiced by the likes of Horace Walpole or Ann Radcliffe: a blending of horror with romance, a fascination with cryptic architecture, and the pervasive charm of magnetic outcasts.

Wolff manages to get her hands around some of the slipperiest aspects of the adolescent experience. She makes real Ginger’s dreamy escapes into books, her burgeoning sexuality, her infatuation for the Motherwells, and her subtle superiority towards other adults in her life. Ginger’s intelligent first-person narration splices the limbo between childhood and maturity. It is a rare and refreshing thing: a novel that takes teenagers seriously, that reminds us of how surreal our world appears to fifteen-year-old eyes.

Her prose style is also rare: a formidable lyricism that understands restraint. The music of Wolff’s sentences does not recall jazz so much as an old-time Appalachian folk ballad—full of sex and ghosts, mixing caution and temptation, obsessed with origins but somehow timeless, with the haunting images and lonesome sounds that hint at something sinister lurking beneath America’s bucolic surfaces.

Further Links and Resources

How refreshing, then, to read a novel like Jo Ann Beard’s In Zanesville, which she describes in interviews as written for a younger audience, but whose broad appeal transcends both gender and age. Indeed, short of Beard’s interviews, nothing about this book suggests it isn’t marketed for adults. Like the rare kid in school who is popular with all the cliques, In Zanesville can hang comfortably with anybody: the story perfectly captures the tenor of early high school without ever condescending to its characters or isolating its readers.

For one thing, the unnamed narrator is hilarious. Never cutesy or precocious, her dry wit and off-hand observations compliment a lyrical and authentic vulnerability. Her best friend Felicia (Flea) is – to borrow a term from Charles Baxter – an ideal counterpoint character. Their friendship is a reminder why everyone needs a war buddy in the trenches of high school. Whether negotiating the politics of a cheerleader sleepover, deserting marching band mid-parade, or cutting deals with God in order to effectively sneak out of her house, the plucky protagonist’s voice is sharp as a tack. And though the material is beautifully age-specific (the bananas-and-mayo diner orders, the atrocity of Mom bras), the implications of time and place are significant and far-reaching.

Set in a small Illinois factory town—perched between the rural obscurity of corn fields and the glittering architecture of Chicago, the landscape mirrors that in-between feeling the narrator experiences so acutely.

In addition, the tightness of Beard’s prose undercuts any potential sentimentality of her subject matter. The opening and closing sentences of this novel struck me as the best opening and closing lines I’ve read in recent memory (the first and last scenes both take place around fire, a lovely symmetry). Each chapter starts and ends with killer one-liners. The same is true before and after the white space within chapters. This book, on top of everything else, is a craft lesson in precise, elegant compactness.

Beard, whose gorgeous and heartbreaking The Boys of My Youth also bridged a literary canyon—that between short stories and memoir—clearly understands that good writing tells the truth through whatever medium the narrative demands. And like a good friend, her work stays with you as you age, taking on new meaning and reminding you of earlier selves with each new stage of life.

Further Links and Resources

People tell me that I am a poetic writer.

My response to this characterization varies from Thanks! to What does that mean? to Yes, my novel did sell like poetry to I want people to love my work in the way that poetry lovers love poetry, desperately and a bit dangerously, gripping the pistol under the pillow with one hand and the childhood stuffed rabbit with the other.

But what, really, does this cross-genre accusation imply?  It’s meant as praise (I’m fairly certain), but wary praise, as if I’ve stumbled into a neighbor’s backyard party, where I’m welcome as long as I limit myself to the potato salad.  It also suggests that there is an unspoken set of rules that govern each type of writing—a set of values rooted in aesthetics but also race, class, even gender.  If you doubt this, consider how often you’ve heard the phrase “muscular prose,” and how many times—if ever—you’ve heard the term “muscular poetry.”

As writers and as readers, we sometimes have a reluctance to drift too far from shore without reliable references to help us navigate our new surroundings.  Categories are the high, clear points on the map, the ones that we can find quickly when we are nervous or lost.  But what comforts us in these moments can also limit us—or worse, cause us to place limitations on others.  Those of us who teach writing need to be especially attentive to the way we critique our students, to the language that we use to describe their work.  How often are we encouraging them to take risks and create their own language for their work, one that is not poetic or prosaic, but something truly distinctive to their own sensibility?  And how often are we telling them—even inadvertently—to return to safer shores?

*

The academic world of creative writing continues to grow, but at the same time, in many ways, it is becoming more compartmentalized.  People apply to MFA programs as a poet, as a fiction writer, etc., pledging allegiance to one strand of DNA over another.  Some of this is function necessary to run institutions—we need to be able to predict how many students will be studying with the poetry teachers, how many with the nonfiction teachers, and so on, to spread the work equitably and to give each student relatively equal access to their professors.  But that same bureaucracy can create its own set of meanings, and not necessarily for the better, if students define themselves primarily in opposition to the other genres, rather than as a community of writers.

It was this belief in the benefits of multi-genre conversation that led to the anthology Lit From Within.  Our goal for this collection of essays about writing was—and is—to break down these divisions and remind each other of the ways that writing, of any genre, speaks to all of us.  In soliciting essays from writers such as Ron Carlson, Tony Hoagland, Rick Bass and others, Dinty W. Moore and I set out to recreate the kind of exchange that occurs when great writers are put together in the same room, regardless of aesthetic preference or school of thought; to find the connections that emerge when say, a Francine Prose essay on creating fully-realized characters (in fiction) is followed by a Billy Collins essay on creating fully-realized personas (in poetry).  As Robin Hemley writes in one of the book’s first essays: “The altar at which I worship is unabashedly dedicated to the ambiguities of artistic expression, regardless of genre.”  We write to find ourselves in these ambiguities, embrace them, make them our own.

*

One final story.  When I was a boy, my parents took me to a party where various kinds of exotic game were on the menu: bear, goose, snake—each one shot or trapped or killed by some other method by one of the flannel shirted men around the table.  There were heaps of potatoes, broccoli boiled to a light green.  Someone forked a piece of alligator onto my plate.  I had just begun to eat it when the host asked me, “So?  Does it taste like chicken?”

Even as a boy, I knew that my experience had been circumscribed, narrowed: my vocabulary for eating alligator was now limited to Chicken or Not Chicken.  Check the box and move on.  If I had known then what I know now—as a writer, teacher, as a person—I would have held up my hand and said to the other guests: Wait.  I don’t know what this is.  I may never know, but I’ll give it a try.  Give me a minute, and I’ll try to find the words.

• Read a conversation between FWR Contributing Editor Erika Dreifus and Kevin Haworth on Erika’s website.
• Kevin Haworth’s essay “Reading Beyond Genre” appeared in Glimmer Train Bulletin 54.
• Take a closer look at Lit From Within—including reviews, excerpts, and resources—at the Ohio University Press website.

North Carolina’s esteemed novelist, short story writer, teacher, and former poet laureate Fred Chappell came along at a critical moment in my writing life: when I was starting to hear voices.

Trained as a journalist but always identifying as a writer, I resumed a childhood poetry habit after it had been on hiatus during college. I began writing short stories as well in the early ’80s, and then started a novel. As I began to take myself (semi)-seriously as a writer, I started to attend conferences and workshops. That’s when the voices began. Don’t mix genres, the experts warned. Decide who you are. A poet? A science fiction novelist? A writer of literary short fiction? Don’t muddy the water, as though the urge to write in more than one manner was like rudely poking a stick into the Pierian Spring and stirring up silt.

“Ole Fred” appeared at one such event, the West Virginia Writers annual conference, talking about what I don’t remember, but he was kind and generous to the awkward fledgling writers hopping about him and flapping our stubby wings. I asked: Should I stick to one genre? I don’t recall his exact words, only that he laughed an easy laugh and followed it with his direct, thoughtful gaze. I should write what comes, he told me, all of it.

Of course, I was still insecure. When I was schmoozing with SF friends, I listened to them decry the preciousness of litmags. When among literary writers, I endured the scorn heaped on “genre fiction.” (A side blessing to Theodore Sturgeon, who when asked if 90 percent of SF wasn’t crap, responded that 90 percent of all film, literature, art, etc. is crap.)

I didn’t come to fully accept Chappell’s ecumenical approach to writing until the cover arrived for my first novel, Neena Gathering, a post-apocalyptic tale. It was, well, sorta lurid. When I wrote this to Fred, he responded with encouragement and a paperback copy of his novel Dagon, with its own startling artwork. I began to accept the writing, my writing, in its “fickle, freckled” forms. In the immortal words of Popeye, I had discovered that “I yam what I yam.”

I’ve read enough of Chappell’s work since to understand that a writer can indeed create masterfully in More Shapes than One, as he titled a 1991 collection of short stories that ranged from revisited history to the surreal, from magical realism to horror. So when I jump forms and genres, most recently into a literary/crime/Southern novel, it’s with a sense of positive transgression.

I still hear voices, but those are my characters talking.

Define Bizarro fiction.

Bizarro is literature of the weird. This isn’t the same thing as experimental fiction, which is weird in its structure and sometimes unreadable. In Bizarro, it’s the characters, plot, setting, or premise that is weird. Bizarro is linked to absurdism and surrealism, but being fun to read is more important than any particular theory or philosophy.

Carlton Mellick III called it the literary equivalent of the cult section of the video store. I think that’s a great analogy because it defines the genre in terms of the reader. You go to that section of the store because you specifically want a strange story. Like in the cult section, there are some books that are like Troma movies, some like David Lynch movies, some like monster movies, and some like grindhouse or exploitation cinema.

The people writing and publishing what is now called Bizarro fiction go back a little over ten years, but there is a thread of weirdness that goes back to the beginning of storytelling.

The genre—at least the term—is a fairly new one. What did you read growing up that informed your affinity for the Bizzaro aesthetic?

I was born overseas, so I didn’t watch much television. I listened to a lot of Grimm’s fairy tales on the record player and memorized a lot of nursery rhymes. When I was old enough to read, there was A. A. Milne, Roald Dahl, Lewis Carroll, and a lot of nonsense verse. I’ve always been a fan of light verse. In high school, I read a lot of mythology and some William S. Burroughs. In college, I became very interested in Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, Italo Calvino, Hunter S. Thompson, and Chuck Palahniuk. However, I still had a very classical mindset.

I think the turning point was when I took a class on Nikolai Gogol by Vassily Aksyonov at George Mason University. As Nabokov wrote, Gogol does something to you, and reading him, especially as taught by Aksyonov, completely changed my writing style.

Who are some of the writers working in the genre that you most admire?

The first Eraserhead book I bought was the Bizarro Starter Kit Orange. There are three Starter Kits: Orange, Blue, and Purple. Orange was the first one, and first novella in the anthology that I read was “The Greatest Fucking Moment in Sports” by Kevin Donihe. He’s still one of my favorite Bizarros. He has a new book out called Night of the Assholes, which is an interesting take on Night of the Living Dead. Instead of an outbreak of brain-eating zombies, there’s an outbreak of rude people. At first, it doesn’t sound like a very scary story, but these guys are very rude.

I like Jordan Krall’s work. He works in a Bizarro Noir style that is similar to what I do. Mykel Hansen is very good, especially in The Cannibal’s Guide to Ethical Living. Carlton Mellick III is one of the originals; just about anyone who reads Bizarro at all has to read him.

What are some presses dedicated to authors working in the Bizzaro mode?

The largest one is Eraserhead Press, which has published over 100 books. Eraserhead has a few imprints under it. Raw Dog Screaming Press and Afterbirth Books are the two other original Bizarro publishers. However, Bizarro attracts a very creative fanbase, so I wouldn’t be surprised if a few new presses have appeared.

Tell us about your new novel—any inspiration, influences, or context that would help the uninitiated reader enjoy your book more fully.

Bucket of Face is a story about a doughnut shop clerk, Charles, and the kiwi fruit he loves, Sarah. One night, an apple and a banana, both in pinstriped suits, walk into the doughnut shop and shoot each other in a failed mafia handoff. Charles steals what the fruit wiseguys are supposed to be exchanging—a briefcase full of foreign currency and a bucket of human faces—and disposes of the bodies by cooking them into doughnuts. This makes Charles and Sarah targets of Roma, a hit-tomato who kills and tortures people while dressed up like Michael Jackson.

This book grew out of my love of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Elmore Leonard, and a lot of those hard-boiled pulpy crime/detective novels, movies, and radio dramas. However, I wanted to see pulp noir Gogolized. I also like the thing Christopher Moore does in which he makes a completely realistic world and just changes one thing. Everything else stays the same. The mundane, annoying rules of the world still apply to vampires, Death’s father, Jesus’s best friend, and, in my case, to anthropomorphic fruit.

One thing about the story that I think is important to bring up is that Roma is a Roma tomato. Some people have visualized Roma as a round tomato, which is just ridiculous. The first chapter of the book is posted on my blog, FryingTheCat.com.

Further reading:

• Learn more about Bizzaro fiction at Bizzaro Central, the “online hub of the Bizzaro fiction genre”
• Find out why the Guardian calls Bizzaro fiction a genre “worth watching”

[Editor's Note: There are some differences between poems linked to in their original online forms and the newer published versions in the books themselves. All quotations are from the print collections.]

Post Moxie
by Julia Story
(Sarabande Books, 2010)

No, not just because of her last name, though it does tie in nicely, doesn’t it…

These are stories of angst and the Midwest and alienation, each held still for one stunning moment in an untitled, window-shaped prose poem. I found myself getting into bed at night and reading this book, something I don’t usually do with poetry, which generally requires a daytime alertness. But I didn’t feel any need to interact with these poems, and I mean that as a compliment. I didn’t interpret them or decode them. I simply let each one arrive and depart, and it told its story exactly as I needed to know it.

And I found that to be a wonderfully unusual experience for reading a poetry book. It’s not that these poems are shallow or simple. They have great eerie depths and resonance to them. They’re just so whole. “I am not very smart at the very beginning of spring, when even the sidewalk has hormones,” writes Story. In another poem: “There are this many heads I want to break with this many bottles of Night Train, but I’m blonde and from Indiana so I look at the floor and smile.” Interestingly, for poems that feel so whole, there is an awful lot of breaking up, and not in the romantic sense. “I prefer to forgo the body altogether,” Story writes, and that’s true only in the sense that her bodies seldom are “all together.” They are usually in pieces. The body gets rearranged and moved and even mailed around. It tunnels in and out of landscapes.

Story writes in a style that many of her poetry peers have written in – she accumulates surreal images and conveys deep heartbreaks with a disaffected postmodern shrug. Yet she manages to exist in a completely naturalistic way in this style, and that’s what makes this book truly distinct and memorable.

I take my harp down to the water, but
it isn’t a harp, it’s a person and we’re
falling in love. Birds land on us and I
grip the air with my eyes. Hills are arms
and the landscape is a bucket. His whole
body is taped to me or taped to a picture
of the world.

– from “untitled”

Thin Kimono
by Michael Earl Craig
(Wave Books, 2010)

It may be unfair to drag biography onto the stage, but Michael Earl Craig lives in Montana and shoes horses for a living, and these frequently seem like poems that might be spoken by someone who lives in Montana and shoes horses for a living. They are precise, cool, metallic poems, laconic and wry. They are the poems of observation and spun-off thought that might easily arise from solitary work. The language is plain, unflowery; it’s the disjointed logic of the images that turns the lines into spare poetry. The way white asparagus grows without the sun that would have made its chlorophyll surge, these poems feel like their story-lines have been cultivated in a different environment, so that there is something slightly alien and deprived about them, though you recognize their shapes. For instance, in one poem, a man at the bottom of a pool is “pretending/to be fixing a ladder” while a possibly possessed herd of synchronized swimmers practices around him. The moment has all the reverberations of a short story, but in only nine brief stanzas.

The poems of Thin Kimono are often about people in bleak situations who encounter the indifference of others, whether it’s a man whose dog won’t help him out of the snow or the speaker whose girlfriend throws him out into the night “just as one cracks open the window/of a passing sedan and pokes out/a wrapper.” Other times it’s the speaker who is unsettled but passive in response to images of violence around him–a war photo, a brutalized mannequin, a doomed robin, a stinging behind his own face “like some kind of a problem behind a billboard.” Craig blurs the line between the person confronting and the writer capturing. Feeling like “a man in a park, dripping wet with gasoline,” he is told he is merely experiencing “writer’s block.” Fortunately, nothing has blocked these strange and evocative poems from the page.

Suddenly it was time.
A single black llama ran briskly up a hill.
There was pinochle in another town.
The hungry actress ordered sea bass.
And somehow from my poem came your feeling of consent.

- from “I Was Thinking”

Noose and Hook
by Lynn Emanuel
(University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010)

Let me just say upfront that the middle section of this book is a morality play in which the main character is a dog who speaks in a baby-talk Cockney dog dialect.

OK, maybe I should have worked up to that. Please don’t go, at least not until I’ve told you that this one of the best books of poetry I can remember reading in years. Noose and Hook is recklessly brilliant, both animal and intellectual. It is about world-wearines, poetry, the self, and the way war erodes us, even from a distance. Think of the unapologetic minds of Gertrude Stein and Anne Carson, and you will have some sense of where Lynn Emanuel harkens from (even though she tries to renounce Stein in a late poem). This is her third book, and it has an advanced career quality to it. Not trying to impress, not trying to behave, it can go anywhere the poet wants, and it’s exhilarating.

Now back to that play, “The Mongrelogues.” As if the dog’s language were some sort of Middle English we might find alongside that of The Canterbury Tales, Emanuel takes up the dialect and invests her canine character with a puzzled, then trusting, then indignant take on the world that alternately shelters, abuses, abandons, scapegoats, and interrogates him. The dog’s mistress is named Mistrust, and Dogg must absorb her fate, her reaction to “middle age” and to troubled times. Dogg’s fraught relationship to his mistress is revealed in the way he calls her a speaker of “Engleash,” revealing both the language and power divide between them in one invented word. References abound – to the Bible, Berryman, Wordsworth, and Neruda (“i am tired uf bein dogg,” laments Dogg, just as Neruda’s man laments the exhaustion of being a man), to name just a few. Not unlike Shakespeare’s Caliban, Dogg becomes a kind of litmus test of humanity’s ability to be kind as it explores its own power to judge and dictate another’s fate.

Emanuel has embraced poetry’s devices–its bizarre twists, its metaphors, its music, its puns and wordplay–and yet she has written a book that might well transcend poetry and appeal to many differently tuned minds, simply because of how go-for-broke it is.

Into the clearing of…
she climbed and stood

up from the black boots of her blackouts
into her body.

The coat wept upon her shoulder,
it hung upon her, a carcass heavy on a hook,

and in the sockets of the buttonholes
the buttons lolled and looked.

As she climbed into that clearing
it shook as it took her.

A fever wrote the sentence
and screwed it tight with ache

and the long hair of the grass grew silvery and weak,
lay greasily against the skull of dirt.

My mother was a figure armed with…
and came toward me

flew to me as though I were a sentence
that must be mended, that must be broken

then ended, ended, ended.

– from “The Revolution”

The Madeleine Poems
by Paul Legault
(Omnidawn Publishing, 2010)

Trying to figure out who Madeleine is and why these poems are hers, one can’t help but think of Proust’s madeleines, the bite that evokes lost worlds, and wonder if Paul Legault wants his character of the same name to be a similar device. Yet there is nothing nostalgic in these poems, in which every title remakes Madeleine in a new form: “Madeleine as Home,” “Madeleine as Matador,” “Madeleine as New Frontier,” etc. Ultimately I tend to think Madeleine is really just a material, like carbon, something elemental, of which things are made (“a new thing/of an old thing made/anew”)… or perhaps the pioneering spirit itself, the alter ego/embodiment of wanderlust with its accompanying rudder of shame and violence.

In the only poem that’s just Madeleine in her own skin and voice, she’s just as elusive as anywhere else, announcing that she is the “Madonna of chosen things” and that she will “outlast” us. She’s also a cold and brutal presence, inasmuch as she is present at all. In the end, who she is and why she’s the vessel for these poems is perhaps the least interesting thing about the astonishing images of this book. The way Legault makes abstractions feel visceral is what’s most notable. His grim, ghostly half-history is mesmerizing, peopled with Walt Whitman and Christopher Columbus and many other personas and lands, both identified and suggested.

Though the poems can grow a bit indulgent in their withholding and sometimes circular syntax and heightened, fragmented language, they are more than saved by moments of audacious clarity, as in the poem “Madeleine as James Dean and the Whale,” when the body of the whale is described as “stone washed,” literally so, evoking Dean’s famous jeans in a flash. And even in some of the withholding and circular language, there is a purposeful feeling, something darkly sexual, acerbic, and enticing, not merely remote. “In one of the rooms, time gets really close,” writes Legault, and, with still no idea of what that could mean, you feel it.

These are challenging poems, and this is probably the book that least obviously belongs on this list, but for the adventurous reader/writer of more cerebral fiction, it offers up a great reward.

- from “Madeleine as Tourist”

American Fanatics
by Dorothy Barresi
(University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010)

Dorothy Barresi has described her ideal poetry as “poetry that knows what it knows for only a second, and loves the brute world anyway.” I’m not sure about the fleetingness of the knowledge, but there’s no doubt about the brute world.

The title of the book tells you Barresi’s not messing around, and the first poem gets right to work, taking on religion and its slow burn into extremism in the very first stanzas. The great danger in this world is that it is made up of people who seek “a genesis wrapped/in exodus,” who believe that the better world can begin only when the competing world is destroyed. Her take on this predicament is at different moments profane, worried, questioning, brash. Through it all, God is the essential shape-shifter. “God is hammy as an old rock star,” in one poem, a “brass-knuckled, wire-tapped tough” in another.

Political poems often, with their litany-like and incurious approach, defang their subjects even as they infuse them with more growl. On the other hand, lyrically innovative poems can treat current events and anxieties as unworthy of their high-shelf beauty. Barresi, however, can discuss fanaticism head-on and then wrap her conclusions in this beautiful, vivid image: “Reading the newspapers lately, you’d think/American had been educated/In a single ray of handsome and murderous light/By which we see/individual belief is everything, being free.” She can also pause, amidst poems mostly focused on human foibles, to notice “fog mumbling along/the numbest parts of the morning’s throat” or the way turtle eggs glow “as though they had been pressed through immaculate doorlight.”

Not every poem here is perfect, but even those that don’t quite hit their stride tell us something about ourselves: whether the preening we do through diets and midlife crises or the more serious ways we confront faith, security, and responsibility. They are about looking squarely at those deciding what they’d kill for, while we decide what to live for.

Did I mention that in my catherdral a cardinal’s hat
hangs from the rafters like a tiny blood clot?
Caught up so high, so far into the brain of the thing,
that you can barely make it out?

And a full ration of gently
apoplectic saints
holding their breath in the side chapels,

and one priest
in elegant surplice

coming up from behind
everyone
like Groucho Marx goosing Margaret Dumont.

O velvet lash of the short vowel sound
laid over a flaming poker!
to burn awake
my intentions each day
as I raise myself from the dead.

- from “It Is Good To Be Amongst Catholics Again”

Further Links and Resources

- Ordering directly from the presses is a great way to keep poetry alive and well! To order one of these books directly from its publisher, click on its title in the review.

Julia Story / photo from Sarabande

- Sarabande’s website for Post Moxie features an interview with Julia Story, writing exercises, and recommendations (from the author) for further reading. Two more poems by Story, “Bride/Beer Can” and “Glossary,” can be read at La Petite Zine. Verse Daily has also featured several poems from Post Moxie, including “From Its Plastic Light.”

- In this interview at HTML Giant, poet Michael Earl Craig talks about Thin Kimono, fudge, soundtracks, and “den wash.” At Octopus Magazine, you can read the poem excerpted above, “I Was Thinking”, and two others.

In this video, he reads “I Am Coming Over to See You” and other poems:

Dorothy Barresi

- This interview with Dorothy Barresi (American Fanatics) at Words without Borders focuses on the writer’s relationship with Los Angeles and its role in her poetry. Another interview at West Branch Wired offers a link to two of her poems that first appeared in West Branch 62. At chaparral, you can read two of her poems, “How’s the World Treating You?” and “Responsibility.”

- On the University of Pittsburgh Press’s website, read a longer excerpt from Lynn Emanuel’s Noose and Hook. Via Slate, listen to Emanuel read “The Revolution” (the poem excerpted above). Here, watch her read–backed by a full orchestra–her poem “Desire”:

Emanuel reads more poems from Noose and Hook on the Poets’ Co-op TV Show (Episode 33):

Paul Legault / photo from Omnidawn's website

- Read several selections from The Madeleine Poems on Paul Legault’s website.

Julia Guez at BOMBLOG also highly recommends this book and features an interview with Legault; find out how studying screenwriting informs his poetry and why he recently published an “English-to-English translation” of Emily Dickinson’s poems.