Banango Lit

by Justin Carter

I recently received the following chapbooks in my mail box: tiny people by Russ Woods, He Is Talking to the Fat Lady by xTx, I Don’t Respect Female Expression by Frank Hinton, and make-believe love-making by Ana C.

I am going to write short reviews of each one and tell you why you should acquire them.

tiny people

Russ Woods is one of my favorite poets right now. I reviewed his online chapbook ‘pictures of salukis looking majestic’ here. This chapbook was released by NAP. It is about tiny people. Russ is one of the best writers in terms of creating poems that look exciting visually. Each page of the chapbook shows this off. Some pages feature words in small little boxes. Some pages feature lots of tiny boxes ‘wallpapering’ the background. Some pages have words in shapes. Sometimes when I read Russ’s online poems that do this, I feel a little disoriented, but when I read them in print, it is exciting and I do not become disoriented at all.

The chapbook makes me feel sad for the tiny people inside Russ Woods’s body. I don’t know if the tiny people are real. Maybe they aren’t. I don’t know.

make-believe love-making

Ana C is one of my favorite people in the internet literature. She edits New Wave Vomit, one of my favorite online journals. She sent me this chapbook during a “email me your address and I will mail you a free copy of my chapbook” thing.

This chapbook talks a lot about love and longing and sex. Ana’s writes words that make the speaker seem very vulnerable, words like:

my shirt is not touching yours

and i just feel really scared

because my seatbelt is off

remember i took it off

just for you

This chapbook feels vulnerable. It feels like it misses things. It makes love but, as the title says, it is not real love. Everything is pretend.

I Don’t Respect Female Expression

“All Of The People In These Pictures Are Dead Now” is possibly the best prose piece I have read so far in 2012. The rest of the chapbook are almost as great.

The longer pieces in this chapbook all seem to be about relationships and how they are shitty but finding a little beauty in them and the memories of them. Some of the relationships are sexual and some are family. Some are relationships between different parts of the self.

The shorter pieces also have this same theme but they focus a little more on the self, I think.

I want to write like Frank Hinton writes.

He Is Talking to the Fat Lady

xTx is another anonymous internet writer. Her chapbook seems very violent.

Here is an example of that:

He sometimes hits me and the hits hurt. The hits hurt for hours after they’ve been given to me. Days. Weeks. Years.

Throughout the chapbook, there is a constantly reoccurring theme of violence against women. This violence is talked about in a fairly neutral tone, but I think xTx is trying to highlight some serious issues. More than any of these other chapbooks, I think this elevates the most past “personal” issues and more into the territory of “important social” issues. I don’t know if this was the intention of the chapbook, but I left each piece worrying about the characters in it. I left the book with a fear in my stomach that bad shit was happening in the world.

 Bad shit happens in this chapbook. And while it is enjoyable to read, more than these other books it also is painful to read. I don’t think I would pick this up and read it again. I think reading again would causes me to feel the same fear it did on the first read. Again, I don’t know if this is the intention of the collection, but it works. It makes me feel something. Saying I don’t want to read it again is in no ways a “knock” on the book. I think it is a compliment. I think xTx made a strong book that causes me to feel and think about things that I don’t want to feel and think about.