Buzzed Books #12 by Nicole Callihan

Iris Jamahl Dunkle’s Gold Passage

In the title poem of Iris Jamahl Dunkle’s Gold Passage, she writes, “What illumines our path forward is what once consumed us,” and the book itself seems born from this exchange of consumption and enlightenment.

Steeped in music and place, Dunkle’s poems orient me: I become dinosaur and tree, moth and rust. Here, there is so much glorious naming, and such well-done naming—Leucadian leaps and Experimental farms, Gravensteins and Doppelgӓngers—but it’s in the edges where I find myself returning. Lines are occasionally, magnetically drawn to the right margin.

“[desire, please burn off],“

Dunkle writes, setting it off to the side, and I stay, for a lingering moment, there with her.

In Gold Passage, there is a sense of things being illuminated. The illumination itself is so bright and vivid—these poems are delicately and intricately crafted—that I tend not to care what the light is pointing towards, but then it hits just right and gets me in the gut. “Multiplicity is what we’re made of,” Dunkle writes in “Sister,” and I nod in agreement, but then, she continues, “Your breasts sag after 1000 years./Your uterus must be a galaxy of stars expanding, blinking on and off,” and I feel her in a whole new way.

These are poems of history, of sisters, of lovers, of daughters, of husband and wife (their little girls “a tether between two ballooned souls), of mothers: “But motherhood consumes the heart,” Dunkle asserts.

“here, is my

heart. It’s a tight walk between what’s left of self
and the far shore.”

Reading these poems again and again, I’m struck by how deeply feminist they are. The poet stands with Sappho and Medusa, Deborah Digges and Amy Lowell and helps us to understand and re-understand what it means to be a woman and to be made of multiplicity. How can I be all of these things and still be who I am, and still be who I was (a little girl who had a conversation with herself which was the size of an apple), and still be who I will be (“Light, lifting and gone.”)?

Dunkle refuses, ultimately, to be spelled out by anyone but herself. “I am an alphabet of bones,” she writes in the opening poem, “my own telling.” This book is that telling, and only with that telling can Dunkle move forward onto her own Gold Passage. By reading closely, it seems we too can move forward on our own passages. Somewhere between “the self and the heart,” we can say, like Dunkle says, like we all want to say: “I bloomed like a god-damned hyacinth,” and we can mean it.

Pair with: A Chardonnay from Sonoma.

 _______

Nicole Callihan lives in Brooklyn and writes poems, stories and essays. Her first book of poems, SuperLoop, was published in early 2014. Find her on the web at http://www.nicolecallihan.com.

Buzzed Books #11 by Stephen McClurg

Nicole Callihan’s SuperLoop

While re-reading Nicole Callihan’s SuperLoop, I noticed similarities to Charles Bukowski’s work, starting with form. In general, Callihan uses three forms: lists (including a recipe), sonnet variations, and thin, vertical columns that I’m not sure even have a technical name, but that I associate with Bukowski. The basic topics of the book are familiar: loss, memory, love, and family, but where Bukowski’s father plagues his work, a mother figure haunts SuperLoop. Also, Callihan’s clear and direct style is—on the surface—not unlike Bukowski’s. Even when she doesn’t use traditional punctuation (“The Wind” or “October, night”), her poems are easy to read. But where Bukowski mines slang and vulgarity, Callihan explores surrealism, and in these images is where the power of her poetry ultimately lies.

I was immediately drawn into the collection with its opener “August Afternoon.” In a list of “I did nots”that become “I wills,” the speaker tells us “I did not eat a peach today / or give birth or floss.” The images get increasingly complex, from “I did not drown // or remember to buy cat food” to the Cummings-esque ending of “O love, // even the peonies have noted / the pupils of your eyes.”

The images in these poems, as opposed to the style, can occasionally be dense and difficult, which is not a bad thing—one might argue that this is expected in poetry. But this also points to the problems of writing timely reviews that do justice to a poet’s work. I am only beginning to understand some of these poems and a few I’m not sure I comprehend or relate to on even a basic level. I appreciate that uncertainty, though; the book will attract multiple readings.

“It may end with my mother” is one of the poems that I’m still thinking about. There is something apocalyptic in the imagery, but I don’t know what to make of it. The speaker begins by saying “It may end with my mother / dog-chained to some fence / behind some double-wide trailer.” Or, the end may look more like “one boy looking for a whale / three busted doors / Hands off the mermaid / or I’ll blow out your fucking brains.” While I don’t know how to process the entirety, I love lines like a “casserole the color of sunset.” Like this poem, SuperLoop hits on all levels, from instant favorite to indecipherable. And like poetry in general, the possibility holds that what appears indecipherable now, may become a favorite later.

The closing piece, “The Poem,” is placed perfectly. It begins with a controlled and playful word association that continues throughout:

The poem may
begin with an article—

or an article
of clothing—

sweater—or of
one who sweats—

Later, several images return, including the mother, an unnamed lover, and bones. Overall, “The Poem” intoxicatingly brings the book to a close, while urging the reader to open it again.

Pair with: a snow rose martini.

   1 1/2 oz. vodka

   1 oz. white crème de cacao

   1/4 oz. rose water

   1/2 shaker of snow

   Organic, pesticide-free rose petals for garnish

 _______

Stephen McClurg (Episode 24) teaches and writes in Birmingham, Alabama. He also curates at Eunoia Solstice.

 Buzzed Books #10 by Jimmy Newborg

 Michael Carroll’s Little Reef

 “Imagine being this hungry and feeling sated, just like this, at the same time.”So closes “Barracuda,” the third story in Michael Caroll’s debut collection, Little Reef. This line carries with it its own sating effect, and is an appropriate statement for the book as a whole. Characters from Maine to Florida to New York City find themselves caught in various internal tugs of war–reality and dreams, youth and aging, satisfaction and discontent, one margarita or two.

Many of the stories tackle familiar subject matter, but Carroll avoids cliché with characters who are complex, and dialogue that is often both realistic and compellingly fraught. In “Referred Pain,” the reader is introduced to Diane. Though she is clearly dissatisfied with her life, her character transcends the two-dimensional, bored wife trope. Married to an “extremely popular” creative writing professor, she feels drawn to one of his students, a young woman named Taylor. As a party at their home winds down, Diane has an urge to confess to Taylor that she had an affair with a twenty-five year old boy, “for no reason except that it would be nice to confess something for once in her life…She thought Taylor could have been her friend.” But when Taylor reveals to Diane her desire to marry and have a sexually open relationship with her gay friend, Jesse, Diane becomes almost hateful, though this makes her feel “old and nervous and somehow afraid.” The connection she feels with the younger woman is laced with discomfort: Taylor speaks as if maddeningly sure of herself. We don’t subscribe to labels,” Diane says at one point, mimicking Taylor, “Don’t pin labels on us, we’re special.” Diane escapes the fight by going to her room to lie down. “It didn’t pay, and she’d never do it again, to entertain these obnoxious, self-loving kids.”

Just as the old and the young interact in the stories of Little Reef, so do the urbane and the provincial. The reader is taken from professor’s homes to Manhattan gay bars to small-town Florida to Memphis, Tennessee. The South echoes throughout the book, evoking the fiction of Alan Gurganus. “Pascagoula,” the sixth story in the collection, takes place in Memphis. The narrator, a middle-aged gay man (who is more accepting of his life than Diane, but equally as world-weary) meets a young and pretty boy at a gay bar and takes him home. At first he is made “nervous” by the boy and feels a “neediness or something worse” coming from him, but “he was too pretty and too here to ignore.” Again, Carroll evades cliché by making the sex between them little more than an aside: “It wasn’t much.” What’s important is their interaction, where Carroll employs his strong dialogue to reveal the perspectives of his characters. The characters speak to each other with a defensive flippancy about the most serious of matters. “You’re going to die,” the boy, Trevor, says. “I know,” is the narrator’s response. 

As the book moves into its second part, called “After Memphis,” (Part One is called “Before Dallas”), the stories become more dreamy and introspective, though there are a number of bitingly accurate discussions between the main character, Scott, and his family in the story “First Responder.” When Scott protests his mother calling him “an author,” she comes up with “But you know what I mean, thinking into people’s minds.” Thinking into people’s minds is precisely a writer’s job, and Carroll does it well. Scott and his older lover, a famous author named Perry, are recurring characters in Little Reef. We find them again in the story, “Avenging Angel.” Perry has had a stroke, the traces of youthful idealism exhibited by many of the characters in the stories before it are brilliantly contrasted when he recalls a conversation with an older poet several years earlier, the poet having told Perry, then in his 60s, “I was your age, I felt great, young. Now everything’s going wrong.” 

Despite what some of the characters may say or do, they are not hopeless, and the book provides wit, humor and charisma as much as it does melancholy and disappointment. Part of growing up is learning the lesson that we are never finished growing up. With probing, skillful prose, Carroll portrays this universal concept amongst a breadth of characters and locations. Readers of fiction by Bernard Cooper, Amy Bloom and Armistead Maupin will find themselves at home in the pages of Little Reef, but the rich and varied landscape of the book should appeal to most.

Pair with: Two margaritas.

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Jimmy Newborg‘s fiction has appeared online in Little Fiction and drafthorse: a literary journal. His non-fiction has appeared in Nylon GUYS magazine. He holds an M.F.A. in Fiction from the Bennington College Writing Seminars. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.