Buzzed Books #85: Permanent Exhibit

08 Tuesday Jan 2019

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Buzzed Books, Creative Nonfiction

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Buzzed Books #85 by Drew Barth

Matthew Vollmer’s Permanent Exhibit

Think of a thought process and all the ways it branches out and around. The thoughts rarely stay in one place or along one singular train of thought for too long. It’s that aspect of his own mind that Matthew Vollmer examines in Permanent Exhibit. In this essay collection, he looks to examine not only what is happening in his mind, but what’s happening around it at all times.

The organic nature through which Vollmer shares himself in this collection really helps to reinforce both its structure and how the collection presents its content. We see first in “Status Update” the scene being set: it’s 2016 and this is like going through a Facebook feed. It’s a nonstop barrage of information until it cuts off. The essay is short, sweet, and gives us the founding seed through which the rest of the collection branches and grows. From there a reader is given Vollmer’s life during these essays—little bits of bike riding, the death industry, Grand Theft Auto, ruminations on the professor who changed his life. The essays build like concentric rings in a tree as they grow and crest upward.

It’s hard to talk about Permanent Exhibit without mentioning the collection’s structure. Forty-one essays and not a single paragraph break to be found. I love it. And for a few reasons. This helps to reinforce the idea of the mental process through which our minds go through when thinking—there’s no mental paragraph breaks, the brain simply takes a topic and runs with it. But in contrast, it helps to create this kind of focus throughout the essays. We as readers are engrossed in the words on the page because there’s nowhere for our eyes to wander and break from the flow. The essays are like a slideshow of images: focused and singular until we’re enamored with the next one. But they always stick to us no matter the subject. The structure presents us with a slab of words that makes us want to remember and devour the words before us so we can keep some of the beauty in them for a while longer.

And ultimately everything done with the essays is something that Vollmer does incredibly well throughout this collection—he makes the idea of the personal permanent. While some aspects of an individual change, there’s always this concrete, personal foundation that will subsist forever. And what Vollmer typifies here is what essay collections are: this deeply individual examination of the self and how that self interacts with the world around it.

The mind we’re peering into throughout this collection is one of compassion and principle. To go through this collection is to explore what is essentially Vollmer: the father, the husband, the man who bikes and plays video games. But his mind’s eye, the lens through which we see it all, always casts a light on small moments like enduring terrible pop music after his son’s dental checkup, the circus sideshow acts he saw as a child, or the articles his father emails him. He creates the meaning through observation.

It’s a universal experience, but the idea of this collection, his collection—the exhibit of the self and the personal permanence of the self—creates this fascinating look at Vollmer’s mind.

Drew Barth

Drew Barth (Episode 331) is a writer residing in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida. Right now, he’s worrying about his cat.

Buzzed Books #84: The Job of the Wasp

25 Tuesday Dec 2018

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Buzzed Books #84 by Drew Barth

Colin Winnette’s The Job of the Wasp

We’re hard in the holiday Season so that means it’s time for ghosts. Slight horror around the holidays seems like a kind of tradition—from A Christmas Carol to Santa Jaws—so I had to maintain the spirit of spirits. This is where The Job of the Wasp by Colin Winnette makes its entrance, and although not exactly a holiday novel itself, it still ticks off those Dickensian boxes of ghosts and orphans. The Job of the Wasp is one of those novels that excels at creating the kind of tension necessary in any good ghost story—we don’t believe in ghosts until the story makes us.

The Job of the Wasp

The Job of the Wasp is and isn’t a ghost story at the same time. We’re told that ghosts exist from characters outside our narrator, but that narrator completely rejects the idea at every opportunity. But the ghosts, as they appear, are something more interesting. Ghosts have become, in the orphanage the boys exist in, both tradition and a means of instilling fear. Ghosts offer control and a way of dealing with boys who aren’t necessarily well liked. We can see how Winnette sprinkles the idea of the ghost sparingly throughout the novel: little noises the narrator mentions, seeing faces that aren’t recognizable, a sudden body count. The distinct indecision is what makes the ghosts the most interesting—we can believe the narrator and accept them not being real, or we can get swept up like the rest of the boys.

The air of unreliability is thick throughout The Job of the Waspdue in no small part to our unnamed narrator. His actions, his paranoia, his constant internal monologue that paints pictures of grand schemes and conspiracies is what drives not only the story but the rest of the boys in the orphanage to hate him. And, at times, it’s not hard to see why they hate this unnamed boy.

Over the course of a few months, he fails to learn a single name or face and fails to attempt connections with the people around him. So consumed is the unnamed narrator in his paranoia that he is completely self isolated. And because we are so completely in his head, we get the sense that his unreliability is intentional, that the narrator chooses to see the world in his own way as a means of escaping from it.

Colin Winnette has crafted a deeply fascinating novel that combines some of the best elements of Dickensian character studies and Lord of the Flies-esque peril.

And ghosts.

A story is always great with ghosts. But still. The story is a mystery, a conspiracy, a treatise on never leaving boys to their own devices, and, more than anything, an extraordinary piece of fiction that gives us a slightly altered view of our world.

Drew Barth

Drew Barth (Episode 331) is a writer residing in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida. Right now, he’s worrying about his cat.

Buzzed Books #83: Rebekah Frumkin’s The Comedown

18 Tuesday Dec 2018

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Buzzed Books #83 by Drew Barth

Rebekah Frumkin’s The Comedown

Ever since reading One Hundred Years of Solitude, I get excited when I see a family tree at the beginning of a novel. It’s the possibilities a family tree at the beginning signifies: a multi-generational tale so focused on the minutia of family issues and how those ties break. So I got even happier when I saw two family trees at the beginning of Rebekah Frumkin’s The Comedown. But then the balancing of these two family dramas could prove difficultly delicate—we as readers watch the perilous tightrope act before us and hope for the best. And the best is what happens here. Frumkin is adept at weaving us between both families across generations while always keeping our attention on the story at hand.

While the story is concerned with the Bloom-Mittwoch and Marshall families and how one interaction between them would keep the families intertwined for decades, it is the way the story is told that is the most interesting. When I said balance before, I absolutely meant it. This is a novel told in non-chronological order and jumps from character to character, time period to time period, with only two moments of being in one character’s head twice. There’s a few ways here that a reader can end up lost. But Frumkin is a master at this tightrope balancing—each chapter is like its own story with a piece of the larger story’s arc intertwined. The leanness and precision of the prose only helps to reinforce the masterful work on display for we are given crucial story elements precisely when we need them, never a moment too soon or too late. The Comedown builds its tension and drama like Lego: piece by piece until we see every story thread from every character fully realized in an epilogue that could be the start of its own new story.

What makes Frumkin’s structure work so well is how immediately immersed we are once a new chapter begins. We are taken immediately from one character’s head to another and know nearly right away what kind of new character we’re inside. It’s a testament to how well thought out each charter is going into this novel. Even in a third person POV, the voices are always specific to each character. Fifteen characters make up the core cast of this novel, and not a one has a voice that’s quite like any of the others. We can see the precision of thoughts and actions from one character in the 70s to the meandering, profanity-laden thoughts of a different character thirty years later. And at no point do we ever stop and wonder which character we are, so strong are their mannerisms and voices throughout their chapters.

The Comedownis a great many things: family drama, drug-addled revenge, bildungsroman, social critique. But the story always manages to balance every aspect of itself, never once giving us the stomach tightening feeling that we’re about to watch this delicately beautiful house of cards topple over. The Comedown is a novel of trust as well—for the characters and the reader themselves. While the characters battle through their own ability to trust one another, we as readers are asked to trust Frumkin in her prose. We see the perilous heights the story reaches for with bated breath, but we know that through skill Frumkin will dazzle us as the story glides above. Only then at the last page can we exhale and know we’ve seen something marvelous.

Drew Barth

Drew Barth (Episode 331) is a writer residing in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida. Right now, he’s worrying about his cat.

Buzzed Books #82: Flavor

04 Tuesday Dec 2018

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Buzzed Books #82 by Drew Barth

Joseph Keatinge and Wook Jin Clark’s Flavor Vol. 1 (Collects Issues 1-6)

“Culinary consultant” may be my favorite thing I’ve seen in a comic credits page in a while. Seeing a culinary consultant, specifically Ali Bouzari, on a credits page in a comic that is about food in all its forms shows the reader from the beginning what kind of series they’re about to begin. Flavor isn’t using food as set dressing or as a background element while the rest of the story goes on—food is the heart and soul of the series from the first page. Keatinge and Clark have struck a balance with Flavor that isn’t often seen in books that are engrossed in a specific hook. Food is indeed at the heart of this series, but this is still the story of Xoo and how food shapes nearly every aspect of who she is as a character.

Flavor

At the center of this whole story is something that Keatinge and Clark do so well and is something that is typically one of the trickiest moves to make in a new series: world building with purpose. I’m constantly astounded by the depth and breadth this team achieves in utilizing character motivations, background detail, and panel-to-panel beats to construct a fully realized world simply within the first issue. Am I jealous? Maybe. But for good reason. Even the name of this walled city, the Bowl, conjures up so much potential just with the imagery of food utilized throughout as well as what a bowl is used for, be it mixing or serving. Because, again going back to the first issue, the story sets up something world-breakingly massive on its final page that goes right back to that idea of a bowl used for serving.

As a comic, Flavor is lean with its story in all the right ways: it gives us just enough to go on to keep us invested at the end of each issue, but still leaves us with a pile of other questions to be answered in the next. And they’re always questions that link back to either the characters or the world of the Bowl. Will Xoo get the truffles she needs? How long can an unlicensed chef like her operate in the city? What the hell was that on the other side of the wall of the Bowl? I don’t know yet, and I love it.Flavor is doing what many of Image’s best series are doing and that’s setting up almost everything right from the start with a first volume. Even if this is a series that continues for fifteen or forty more issues, we have the plot points in front of us already and now we get to see just how they connect in the long run.

Flavor is absolutely a series that wears its influences on its sleeve and wears them well. From the Ghibli-esque world building to the feeling of mystery and adventure of Avatar: The Last Airbender, Flavor takes what has been done before and works a new path in its own way. Through its art and world building, Keatinge and Clark want to show us something we haven’t seen before, something inherently different, but still a bit familiar. Not only do they accomplish what they set out to do, they do it so exceptionally well that Flavoris one of my favorite new series to come out this year. Flavor is a story that wants you to read and enjoy and immerse yourself completely in and it is so easy to lose yourself in its wonder.

Drew Barth

Drew Barth (Episode 331) is a writer residing in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida. Right now, he’s worrying about his cat.

Buzzed Books #81: Alyson Hagy’s Scribe

27 Tuesday Nov 2018

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Buzzed Books #81 by Drew Barth

Alyson Hagy’s Scribe

Let’s talk about magic realism. Magic realism is kind of odd and nebulous in how it behaves, but a reader always knows it when they see it. Magic realism gives off a feeling of being immersed, being familiar and yet not. These senses all come together with Alyson Hagy’s Scribe, a novel that centers around an unnamed woman renowned for her ability to write letters. She’s asked by a man named Hendricks to write and deliver a letter for him, but this request, throughout the course of the story, is made more difficult by the machinations of horrible people around them. Scribe is a novel centered on wants and needs—of what can be given and taken by individuals before consequences rain down like angry locusts.

Scribe

Hagy does something spectacular when she draws on an Appalachian loneliness to drive Scribe forward. Abandoned homesteads, dried riverbeds, old homes built by hand, and a constant sense of unease that permeates our main character’s soul. The loneliness and unease here are unique to their location. Myths and legends of the area, as well as the two sisters themselves, have already taken root and this informs the sheer believability and depth of Hagy’s world building. This is a world after some kind of civil war. Which one? Don’t worry about it. The war happened and this is the aftereffect. And this is a part of the beauty of the story as well: it’s very much rooted in a specific time, but feels timeless all the same. Hagy completely immerses us in the world she’s created, one that is foreign and absolutely familiar. And this goes back to the Appalachian loneliness, this unique blend of hearth fire smells and disquiet about what’s beyond the trees just out of sight.

This sense of unease that the setting reinforces only bolsters the sense of magic that permeates Hagy’s words. She’s built legends, yes, but legends exist in the past. She likewise mythologizes the present, letting the unnamed woman and Hendricks experience aspects of the world that are unbelievable but accepted. Trumpet horns from nothing, speaking in her dead sister’s voice, the presence of a group known only as the Uninvited. The world is informed by magic and myth; shaped by a chisel of realism. The story lets its magic flow freely, showing us with a lyrical eye the jarring and the beautiful in equal measure. The magic doesn’t save or delight. It is a magic that informs and heralds desolation as it rolls down our main characters.

Scribe is a novel of wonder and desperation. The story gives us a landscape painted in language both beautiful and uncanny while populating it with the kind of people who would murder for their debts. It’s a world that exists in a way only Hagy’s lyricism can show. Every page is a song sung by a blind man with a guitar in an empty train station. The words are raw, coarse in a way that is almost grating, but still billows with a beautiful sense of wonderment throughout.

Drew Barth

Drew Barth (Episode 331) is a writer residing in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida. Right now, he’s worrying about his cat.

Buzzed Books #80: Jason Heller’s Strange Stars

20 Tuesday Nov 2018

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Buzzed Books #80 by Drew Barth

Jason Heller’s Strange Stars

Stars, man. Also, Starman. We can bring in the 70s music scene with the crippling depression of the Altamont Free Concert, or with a blast of cosmic literature radiation that would seep its way into popular culture throughout the decade. And this explosion of new kinds of music, of course, shouldered by a single musician who would come to embody the blending of science fiction and music more than anyone else: David Bowie. While sci-fi music is at the heart of Jason Heller’s deep cut dive through the 70s, Bowie is the ever shifting soul that towers over all.

Strange Stars

Broken up year by year, Strange Stars takes us on a tour through the decade to witness the evolution of sci-fi music. We go from novelty to subtle references to wearing influences squarely on sleeves. Strange Stars is just as much a story about the music as it is a story about the growing changes in popular tastes and culture at the time. Heller never lets us forget that throughout the book. Changes in taste and accessibility act as a driving force behind popular music. After the novelty songs of the 60s ended, bands like Yes, King Crimson, Jefferson Airplane/Starship, even Neil Young begin this slow incorporation of the science fiction stories they love. But it isn’t just dropping names that makes this a different kind of book. Heller dives through interviews and adds a little touch of personal conjecture to explore. Why do these musicians add touches of sci-fi to their work? Their love of the stories is a driving force, but they do it also as a way to communicate ideas of technology, interstellar travel, and dystopia as they become more relevant throughout the decade.

Strange Stars is a book that’s as well researched as it is written. It’s thorough in terms of the music it includes, the books they reference, and the ways in which science fiction bled itself into the music of the 70s. In the case of Michael Moorcock, we seem him joining with the band Hawkwind to contribute lyrics and put on live sci-fi concerts. The exploration between music and science fiction here is something quite often untapped in terms of historical analysis. It wasn’t just the works of Heinlein, Dick, and Orwell that influenced the majority of these musicians. They move beyond influence. In the case of P-Funk, we’re looking at a group that created the very science fiction they’ve come to emulate. And that’s one of the core aspects of this book that we take away. Imitation and homage are fun, but creating something wholly new in the genre ends up being more rewarding.

Jason Heller brings us a new kind of insight on a decade in music that has been analyzed and examined longer than I’ve been alive. But it’s the twist that he brings to his analysis, the inclusion of science fiction as a driving force, that makes it something special. It is the kind of book that’s filled with insight on how these bands brought up their sci-fi influences as well as histories of bands that came and fell in the course of the decade. Strange Stars is history, it’s literature, it’s musical, it’s trivia (like I still can’t get over the fact that Patti Smith wrote lyrics for Blue Öyster Cult), and it’s showing how everything grows from something else. As the 70s ended, the sci-fi niche these bands established earlier in the decade became the mainstream. Science fiction became the world.

Drew Barth

Drew Barth (Episode 331) is a writer residing in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida. Right now, he’s worrying about his cat.

Buzzed Books #79: Spy Seal: The Corten-Steel Phoenix

13 Tuesday Nov 2018

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Buzzed Books #79 by Drew Barth

Rich Tommaso’s Spy Seal: The Corten-Steel Phoenix (Collects Issues 1-4)

Let’s talk about adventure comics. While DC Comics published their own, titled Adventure Comics in kind with Action and Detective, the realm of adventure comics as a genre is uniquely European. Hugo Pratt’s Corto Maltese, the various works of Jacques Tardi, and Hergé’s Tintin all typified what is considered a European adventure comic. From the high panel count, focus on onomatopoeia, and quick bursts of action that would fall back to let the rest of the story progress, these kinds of adventure comics became their own genre. And this is the pedigree that Rich Tommaso pulls from with Spy Seal. While the comparisons to Tintin are apt, Tommaso finds a niche in his unique blending of European adventure comic styles and American comic book action.

Spy Seal is exactly what the title implies: a spy who is also a seal. Although this is not completely unique in the anthropomorphized world that Tommaso has created with various birds, rabbits, and Gila monsters roaming on two legs, it does help the audience in honing in on our main character even in the largest of crowd shots. We find our titular Spy Seal, Malcolm, unknowingly dropped into assassinations, intrigue, and art heists by the third page. From there, it’s constant movement around the world to confront the mystery of the Corten-Steel Phoenix. However, this is only a part of a larger mystery, a mystery that we’re not privy to just yet. But this serialization of mystery is something that adventure comics thrive on—while a portion of this case has been solved, there’s a few dozen more questions to be answered much later.

Tommaso is able to create a sense of legitimate dread and intrigue in a world exploding with colors and animals. Much like Tintin, he’s crafted a story and world that is very much appropriate for any age audience while maintaining a maturity in how the story is being told. Between chapters, we as an audience are left to infer what happened to get us from where we were previously to where we are now. This method of compressed storytelling on Tommaso’s part allows us to see what moments in Malcolm’s story are most relevant. We don’t need a training montage or an hours long train ride when we could have the mystery and intrigue immediately. The immediacy in Tommaso’s art brings us along for a ride from moment to moment, scene to scene, panel to panel. Malcolm is swept away in his story, and we’re swept away with him.

Adventure comics today occupy this weird little space in comics due to its classic past, and Spy Seal looks to disrupt that space gloriously. It isn’t completely beholden to European adventure comic traditions, nor is it imitating American comic bombast. Tommaso is one of the most interesting artists creating comic art right now because of how he blends what he’s learned about comics into distilled wonder. Spy Seal is adventure comics following an old path with new boots and you want to see what lies at the end.

Drew Barth

Drew Barth (Episode 331) is a writer residing in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida. Right now, he’s worrying about his cat.

Buzzed Books #78: Edgardo Franzosini’s The Animal Gazer

06 Tuesday Nov 2018

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Buzzed Books #78 by Drew Barth

Edgardo Franzosini’s The Animal Gazer

Consider the elephant. Consider what you know about its form and presence, for that is the first thing the reader is asked to do in Edgardo Franzosini’s The Animal Gazer. We are given a picture of a sculpture by Rembrandt Bugatti, famed sculptor and brother of the known automaker. But what we’re being asked to consider here isn’t just the elephant itself. We may be familiar with Bugatti’s some 300 animal statues, but how familiar are we with the man who created them and ended his life at 31? It’s a question that Franzosini grapples with throughout the novel, and one that is rather difficult to answer. While The Animal Gazer is inspired by Bugatti’s life, we can only know so much from outside Bugatti’s thoughts. An internal examination of Bugatti is how Franzosini occupies the story. There are historical facts, but there are hidden truths among them that shape Bugatti.

For Bugatti, the precision of his sculptures was not his chief intent. Less anatomy and precision, more of the movement and mood of the animal. And this is something that Franzosini looks to replicate in his prose. This is historical fiction in snapshot. It is a novel that looks to capture the mood and the moment, not painstaking historical accuracy. As a result of this, we as readers are given an impressionistic tour through Bugatti’s later life that is genuinely beautiful. We breathe in the air at Antwerp Zoo in Belgium and feel the crispness of the mornings at the Jardin de Plantes in Paris for these were where Bugatti lived his life. His passion is Franzosini’s passion as the author brings us the animals that would inspire Bugatti’s works.

There’s an intricacy running through the novel in how Franzosini chose which moments of Bugatti’s life to highlight. The novel takes some liberties , as it must, with how events are portrayed or how Bugatti was thinking at the time. From his stay in Belgium to the executions of the animals at the Antwerp Zoo to his final days in Paris, Franzosini is able to create an arc of Bugatti’s life. He isn’t trying to theorize about his suicide or romanticize the moment. He only presents the suicide as a conclusion to the story.

And that’s what makes the story worth it by the end. Like the sculptures, this life story is a nebulous thing with half-remembrances and quarter-truths about large events and perfect snapshots of one salt shaker at a restaurant. Franzosini gives us this story how a friend would tell it: in pieces and filled with ideas about what may have been going through Bugatti’s head. And that’s perfect. We’re given a wonderful journey through what could be his eyes during small moments in his life. A journey through the zoo, antelopes in his studio, reminiscence of time spent with his brother, they all build into what we need to know about Rembrandt Bugatti.

Drew Barth

Drew Barth (Episode 331) is a writer residing in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida. Right now, he’s worrying about his cat.

Buzzed Books #77: Melissa Broder’s The Pisces

30 Tuesday Oct 2018

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Melissa Broder, The Pisces

Buzzed Books #77 by Drew Barth

Melissa Broder’s The Pisces

Let’s talk about mermen. They’re old lore. More or less. We’re all familiar with the general structure of a person with human bits on top and fish bits further down. But that’s just the myth, and myths aren’t the whole story. The backstory for The Pisces is this: Lucy is recently dumped, recently writer’s blocked on Sappho, recently suicidal, and stuck in Arizona. As such, her half sister puts her up in her home on Venice Beach to look after the place and her dog, Dominic. And then there’s the merman, Theo.

Love is the driving force at the center of The Pisces. The unconditional love of a dog. The love of a newly found partner. The love between people in similar circumstances. The love of those absent from our lives. But love isn’t sanguine here. This is the love hangover. This is what happens when love has pushed us to a point where we can see a merman and believe that he’s a good option. Because love in this context is something vicious. Lucy attends a support group for women afflicted by this kind of love through most of the book. They hold this fascinating mirror to Lucy to show what she could potentially be if she doesn’t find a balance. The women of the support group play like the Fates, showing the different paths that Lucy could head in should she choose.

At times, The Pisces feels like an extended Greek myth where we do get the whole story and not just a dozen lines from a broken carving. Lucy as a character almost follows the line of a Greek tragedy, from her dizzying heights to an almost meteoric downfall. Her story is so wrapped up in the ancient works, that she can’t see the story repeating around her even after the merman shows up. But we’re always so far in Lucy’s head that we can’t see these patterns either. We’re given her language and the flow of images that create a meaning from the small choices she makes. Every decision Lucy makes builds onto something else—from her love for Dominic to waiting on an ocean rock every night for her merman to arrive.

nd that’s ultimately what The Pisces does. The book gives us the fantasy, gives us the merman, gives us everything that follows a Greek tragedy, but twists all of that in such a way that we can’t help but laugh. Lucy’s exploits are heartbreaking and ignoble in equal measure, and yet the ridiculousness of having sex with a merman in her sister’s living room almost makes all of that okay. Broder gives us balance here, and that’s what we crave by the end: a balance for Lucy, a balance for her support group, her sister, Dominic, everyone. And it’s through that, we ultimately find peace.

Drew Barth

Drew Barth (Episode 331) is a writer residing in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida. Right now, he’s worrying about his cat.

Buzzed Books #76: Because Everything is Terrible

23 Tuesday Oct 2018

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Buzzed Books #76 by Will Rincon

Because Everything is Terrible by Paul Guest

Because Everything is Terrible

Paul Guest’s fourth poetry collection, Because Everything is Terrible, wastes no time pulling the reader into his world. “First this happened: you woke in a dim glade, / pine trees leaning in, all around.” The twenty-two-page opening poem, “After Damascus” is broken into thirteen sections. Guest forces readers to experience the poem’s narrative that weaves war with dreams by writing in second person perspective. Trained killers are sweethearts, you smell your own blood, and “imagine what must feel like to drown.” Downtrodden to the point where you weep after John Wayne films, the narrative youis lost “inside your skull” and wishes “to be more intensely American.” The prose, while lyrical, drags you through mud and waste, making you realize that beauty can still be found in terrible things. Guest’s ability to find the good in the bad becomes therapeutic until you become comfortable with pain and accept that “your body is strange.” Through stillness and singing, you can learn to love chaos.

The remaining sixty-six pages explore everything that is terrible. America is a big focus, and Guest sprinkles the current climate of the nation throughout: “Nothing will be again as it once was,” “nothing will be said of grief,” and “everyone I know is mad.” His poem, “Thinking about Disappointment” captures the uncomfortableness we often find ourselves in after waves of bad news in the media: “I want to be terrified. I want to sleep beneath / something so antique / even beasts won’t bother / to look beneath / no matter the ravening gush of blood in their ears.” Guest isn’t afraid to criticize what has become normalized: “the news / reads like a story of fire / and death and endless, insufferable / seasons” and an “industry / which will most harm you / upon its inevitable demise.” Often, his poems leave you with the somber realization that you have been wading through madness and there is no end in sight.

Guest’s obsession with destruction is somehow loveable. In his poem, “Being Reasonably Certain,” he pulls you down the spiral of accepting that “you’ve done the wrong thing, / even though it’s up for debate, / even though philosophy is no help / on the walk home, in the middle / of distraction in the aisle of a store / you swear is evil itself.” Like a beach current, you get pulled out in the tide. You know “that you will not be saved,” everything is in motion and “you’ve been thinking about obliteration. / All the time [you] spent swept up in its romance.” It is gospel, it is truth, it is “the idiopathic dumbness of dawn.”

And yet, Guest avoids melancholy. This destruction is celebrated for its utter completeness. The beauty is something to behold and it all feels like one long moment where you don’t want to look away. Such bleakness is shared by contemporary poets like Ephraim Scott Summers and James Longenbach. Guest embraces his approach and how few people will see his big picture in, “Eros Poetica”: “Always bad form to announce, this is a poem. / I’m not sure why. As if the few of us / who’ll ever read these lines / might think it anything else: / a letter to a dying monarch; / a guide to constructing something / without discernible parts. Like love.” And in a way, his collection is a guide. A hand to hold through all the bullshit that rolls downhill. A book to hug when we find ourselves in a muddy pit while the privileged look down on us. A part of ourselves that we are afraid to listen to or even consider.

Will Rincon

Will Rincon is an MFA candidate for fiction at the University of Central Florida. When he is not depriving himself of sleep, he enjoys board games, anime, and spending time with his family. He highly recommends you watch Battlestar Galactica.