Buzzed Books #80: Jason Heller’s Strange Stars

20 Tuesday Nov 2018

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Buzzed Books, Uncategorized

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.

Buzzed Books #75: Convenience Store Woman

16 Tuesday Oct 2018

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Buzzed Books #75 by Drew Barth

Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman

There’s familiarity in a convenience store. Safety, even. We walk into a convenience store and have certain expectations about what’s likely going to happen. Familiar drinks, chips, candy, hot dogs rolling away.

Convenience Store Woman

It’s within this familiarity we find Keiko Furukura: thirty-eight year-old part-time convenience store worker at her local Smile Mart. We’re given a glimpse into the life of a woman with thoughts like:

It is the start of another day, a time when the world wakes up and the cogs of society begin to move. I am one of those cogs, going round and round. I have become a functioning part of the world, rotating in the time of day called morning.

Simply the thought of remaining a dedicated store employee keeps her sleeping well at night. It’s a position that’s typically overlooked. But they are brought out into the fluorescent light for us to see.

As a character, Keiko Furukura is fascinatingly strange. She has worked in the same convenience store since eighteen and has no issue with this vocation at all. And it is through the convenience store that she has become a person. With each new employee or manager, she takes on aspects of them as a way to appear more convenient to them. A character, Sugawara, has a particularly boisterous way of speaking in the morning. As such, Keiko adopts aspects of it into herself. Another character, Mrs. Izumi, has a particular taste in fashion that Keiko then slowly begins to imitate after researching certain brands. These subtle mannerisms she picks up only reinforces her own character: Keiko is a blank slate without the convenience store. But as a character, that’s what she wants. Even if the world around her, namely her friends and her sister, scream and cry for her to change, she is incapable of doing so because who would she be without the Smile Mart?

At times, this book can be devastating. The interplay between individuality and conformity, work life and real life, all unwind as we question ourselves. Is my work self just a modified actual self? Do I make these decisions for myself or for the people around me? It’s this constant undercurrent in a novel that is fairly light in tone. It’s as though Keiko herself is so direct in her thoughts and actions that the Smile Mart self is the only self that exists for her. And that’s what makes this book devastating in a good way. We as readers can see something askew in Keiko, but does Keiko see it in herself? Possibly. Or maybe she’s just what she wants: a good convenience store employee.

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 #74: The Only Harmless Great Thing

09 Tuesday Oct 2018

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Buzzed Books #74 by Drew Barth

Brooke Bolander’s The Only Harmless Great Thing

There aren’t that many books I’ve read that include exploding elephants. There are even fewer books that include exploding elephants that have an emotional impact that hits with the force of an exploding elephant. And yet here we are. The elephant in question is an elephant we may be familiar with: Topsy, famous for her public electrocution in 1903. And this is where Bolander sets her alternate history, time-jumping, perspective-switching novella. There’s a lot to take in here in just a short amount of pages.

The Only Harmless Great Thing

We as readers are given eighty-four pages and are witness to the Radium Girls, the after effects of the radium on one of the narrators, another woman in the present grappling with the morality of glow-in-the-dark elephants, and passages from the perspective of captured elephants. A more precarious balancing act I’ve yet to read. And yet we’re given to a deftness of pacing and structural skill that knows when to let a moment linger just long enough before switching perspectives and letting us grip the page in glorious tension. The building of momentum as we switch from an elephant’s perspective to the past and into the present gives the novella a weight and balance. To have all three narratives shown chronologically robs the stories of momentum. We understand the ethical quandaries of glow-in-the-dark elephants as a result of radium poisoned elephants a few paragraphs prior. It’s this back-and-fourth structure that gives readers the tools to fully build the story in their mind’s eye.

Give me time, and I’ll give you close to eighty-four pages on how precise and expressive Bolander’s prose is throughout this novella. A line like,

the ache in her jaw has gone from a dull complaint to endless fire blossoming from the hinge behind her back teeth, riding the rails all the way to the region of her chin. It never stops or sleeps or cries uncle”

makes me clutch my own jaw for the phantom pain conjured. It is all to perfect effect, pointing the reader toward the pain of Regan, our lens into the festered suffering of the Radium Girls. Each narrator has a voice that is distinct and precise. From a few words, we immediately know which character we’re following. It is prose and character voice done exquisite.

Alternate history stories are a literary blind spot to me. I’d viewed them as simply “what if someone else won the war?” fantasies and not much else. But The Only Harmless Great Thing does something different here. It doesn’t imagine a new world under different war circumstances or different global politics. It gives us a new look at characters and cultural icons. We never got Disney’s Dumbo here, we got Disney’s Topsy. We have elephants utilizing sign language to testify against their treatment by US Radium. It’s small, but significant. And that’s what makes the story so intriguing. It’s the same history, but with a couple things switched around. It never once shies away from the suffering during this timeline either. It is gruesome and crushing, but necessary.

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 #73: Some Hell

02 Tuesday Oct 2018

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Buzzed Books #73 by Aurora Huiza

Patrick Nathan’s Some Hell

Patrick Nathan’s novel, Some Hell, opens with terrible secrets. Colin, a young boy troubled by his queerness, secretly watches his father hold an unloaded gun to his head and pull the trigger. Colin later sneaks into his father’s empty study, finds the bullets, and loads the gun for reasons he doesn’t understand.

Some Hell

The loading of the gun is akin to the way we stand on rooftops looking down dizzy at the ground below, confused by our impulse to jump off the edge. Colin’s father soon, inevitably, commits suicide with the gun that Colin loaded.

Colin is condemned to live with his dark secret. His dawning queerness is his second dark secret.

These hidden afflictions doom him to a painful adolescence and a confused sexual development. The family descends with Colin into uncertain, ugly hell, which causes it to fragment altogether. The people he loves leave, one by one. Colin ends up alone and under the perpetual “excruciating threat of being half-loved” both by his family, and romantically by other men.

The difficulty with the disintegration of Colin’s family is that we lose characters as readers. Many of the relationships that Nathan sets up in the beginning prove unstable. Colin’s mother sends his autistic brother Paul away to a special home, and his sister Heather runs away with her boyfriend. His best friend Andy turns on him after they have a brief sexual encounter, and we don’t see much of him after that. We lose any possibilities of seeing these relationships, and characters, develop further. As a result, we are stuck in Colin’s head for much of the middle of the book.

Simultaneously, we learn extensively about his mother’s equally uneventful therapy sessions. We often crave more real action and less psychology. Grief pushes people apart, especially when relationships are under pressure, but in the context of a novel, this stasis makes us lose momentum as readers. Depression is not in itself a dramatic conflict.

At the end of the book, Nathan sends Colin and his mother on a road trip, where they have countless dinners together and make jejune observations about life and travel. The introduction of strange divine intervention at the close of the novel is jarring.

Some Hell explores depression, suicide, autism and queerness with commendable bluntness and honesty. Some of the prose that Colin’s deceased father writes in his private notebooks is exceptionally striking. He predicts the family’s descent into hell. He overhears someone say they’ve been through “some hell” in a coffee shop and attempts to define it, musing that “perhaps it was some hell of many hells.”

Colin’s sister similarly predicts the family’s tragedy at the very beginning of the book, telling Colin coldly that he will die soon. “It’ll start to snow when it happens.” Colin’s foretold death is tied to his father’s death, which is a beautiful, terrible notion on Nathan’s part. Nathan creates a sense of foreboding throughout, and a central theme that loving is inherently destructive. He writes that Colin’s mother wants to grab Colin’s father and “tear him apart in her hands, just to bring him closer.”

Some Hell is uneven, but some of Patrick Nathan’s risks are dazzling and memorable, lightning flashes in a world sunk in depression and melancholy.

Aurora Huiza

Aurora Huiza is from Los Angeles, California. She is an undergraduate student at NYU studying English and Creative Writing. She writes fiction and creative nonfiction.

Buzzed Books #72: Prism Stalker Vol. 1

02 Tuesday Oct 2018

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Buzzed Books #72 by Drew Barth

Sloane Leong’s Prism Stalker Vol. 1 (Collects Issues 1-5)

The best kind of science fiction is the kind that blends genres, forms, themes, social issues into a stew that heartily sits in a reader’s stomach. It’s this kind of blending that makes Sloane Leong’s solo Image Comics debut so tantalizing. From panel one we’re given psychedelic fantasy, inter-planetary refugees, and impossible alien forms. And all of this is the plate on which we’re served issues of displacement, individuality, colonialism, and the slow erasing of the self in service to obstinate authority.

Prism Stalker Volume 1.jpg

We begin with Vep, adrift in space. She and the people of her world are refugees of an unnamed tragedy that has made home unlivable. It is only through the intervention of a secretive empire of worlds known as The Chorus that they are able to continue living. It almost sounds like an antiquated pulp premise, but Leong works magic with. Vep is taken from this new home and is started on the process of separation from herself. And this is done in the most colonialist way possible: violence and deception. She has the promise of potentially finding a new home to settle, but not before being trained to forget herself. To exist in the world of The Chorus, there is no individual. Their will supplants all others. They teach an instinct for violence that runs counter to what Vep knows in her world. Her self is slowly erased over these first five issues.

Prism Stalker Vol 1 detail

The synthesis between visual art and story is one of the most peculiar things about modern comic storytelling. If one doesn’t complement the other, the overall effect is lost to the reader. Leong’s methods for storytelling in this visual medium absolutely sing to the story she tells. As readers, we’re shown worlds unlike our own and can feel lost in the unfamiliarity. This is what Vep as a character experiences as well. This is unfamiliar; this is strange; this passion fruit-looking cocoon is not a bed I’m familiar with. The art goes beyond their standard grids while text bubbles disappear into the bleed of the panels to complement not just what Vep sees, but how she experiences.

Prism Stalker Vol 1 detail 2.jpg

It’s technicolor psychedelia while her consciousness is being dismantled because that’s how malleable her mind has become in the story. To see this destruction of her mind reflected in a way that’s jarring yet fascinating is a testament to how well planned each panel and page is throughout each issue.

Drew Barth.JPG

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 #71: Earthling

25 Tuesday Sep 2018

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Buzzed Books #71 by Will Rincon

James Longenbach’s Earthling

Few poetry collections can connect with both poetry aficionados and newcomers alike the way Earthling does. Professor and critic, James Longenbach exemplifies contemporary poetry with his fifth collection, one that draws readers in with simplicity into the themes of childhood, mothers, and nihilism. The speakers of these poems wander between reality and metaphor, animals and forests, while memories of mother intrude in poems much like everyday life.

Longenbach Earthling

“The Crocodile” explores the perspective of the “pebble worm” and the speaker’s final moments with his mother. “I survived the great extinctions, / I pretended to be myself.” But, beyond that, primeval themes of hunting, evolution, and self-discovery are explored through the giant lizard. “If called to, I could wait beneath the water a long time. / I could let a bird pick leeches from my tongue…My throat / Was capable of many different sounds but the pleasure / was in keeping it silent, letting parts of me be seen.” The style and the analogy is deft.

Reality is often bent when entering the forest throughout this collection. Dogs disappear with “no shadow, no narrative,” wear raincoats, and run free. They desire to escape, and we are to follow their example, remember what it was to run free in our youth. Subtly, readers find themselves wishing to be lost in the woods and not be tied to the leashes of employment and responsibilities. “Running in circles, / getting tangled in the leash. // It’s hard remaining human in the forest.” Longenbach’s symbolism is haunting throughout. Dogs and death reappear, echoing the untamed. His love for nature is often reminiscent of Robert Frost with a similar sullen air that reminds us of where we come from.

Ultimately, Longenbach explores what it is to be an earthling with calm, controlled poems rooted in soul and wonder. The truth in his words should make an impression on any reader: “I love you, earth. / What space I inhabit / You’ll fill with water or sky.”

Will Rincon.jpg