Banango Lit

It’s high time for interviews. A Poem From Us is a poetry project that aims to “use technology to help folks share their love of poetry with others.” Initial participants received and distributed a set of stickers with QR codes which, when scanned, lead to the project website. Anybody can submit a video of themselves reading a poem for inclusion on the website. I was drawn to the project’s creative use of technology and similarity to other collaborative poetry projects like Poetry By Emily Dickinson. A Poem From Us is the brainchild of Felix Jung, who I interviewed below.           

First off, could you tell us a bit about yourself, and your background?

My name is Felix Jung and I’m a writer who slowly turned into a tech guy. I was an English major as an undergrad, and pursued an MFA in Creative Writing/Poetry. Near the end of my grad school career, I got interested in a program called (at the time) Macromedia Flash, looking to animate my poems. I got hooked on the program, and was lucky enough to land a job doing motion graphics full time.

The more I worked with tech, the more interested I became in finding ways to mix technology and writing. I’m a fan of both worlds, and there’s seemingly no end of new things to play with - multimedia, iPhone apps, API’s. Lots of stuff to explore out there.

Are you yourself a writer? How did you get into poetry? 

I got into poetry when I was in high school and kept a notebook full of my own, terrible poems with me at all times. It had a neon orange Queensrÿche bumper sticker on the cover. I was lucky enough to have a lot of good friends who were willing to remain my friends, despite how often I pressed that notebook into their hands.

The first time I came across a poem that took my breath away was in high school, freshman year. I was ignoring my English teacher and flipping through the textbook when I came across Blake’s “A Poison Tree.” I had read a few love poems prior to that, but when I hit the last lines of that poem… I was shocked:

In the morning, glad I see

My foe outstretched beneath the tree.

Here was an actual, dead body! I had no idea poetry could do such things, and was just in awe at how a small set of words sent me for a loop. I started looking for more poems to read, and eventually started writing my own. 

In my, uh… Queensrÿche notebook.

*cough*

Where did the idea for A Poem From Us come from? Have you ever participated in any other public poetry projects?

Last year, I had come across an organization called “The Awesome Foundation,” a group that gives micro-grants of $1,000 to projects they deem “awesome.” A group of 10 people gather to form local chapters, each person donating $100 per month… allowing the chapter to award a $1,000 grant each month.

I submitted a proposal last November to the Awesome Foundation Chicago chapter, and was lucky enough to receive the grant.

The idea for the project stemmed a lot from the mission of the Awesome Foundation: I wanted to create something fun and interactive, I wanted to involve as many people as possible.

A project I’ve long admired is “You Are Beautiful.” I first came across those stickers when I moved to Chicago, and seeing the sticker for the first time was like a friend, putting his hand on your shoulder. I loved the feeling, in that it took me out of my routine and made me take a step back.

I wanted to do something similar with poetry, and decided on combining QR codes and YouTube/Vimeo. My hope was to scatter these stickers into public spaces so that… when someone scanned one, a random poem from the project would play. And, if if things went well, it would be a small surprise, a stranger’s voice taking them out of their routine, momentarily.

Are the first set of poems on the website all people you solicited personally? 

They are. I reached out to friends and former MFA colleagues via Facebook and asked them to help seed the site. I wanted to have a small collection of poems already up, when the site officially launched. I loved all the entries, and it was nice having a set of videos available for others to see.

When you set a hat down for donations, you throw a few coins in first. That was the thinking.

Now that the project has been active for a few weeks, how has it been going? Do you have any metrics by which you’re evaluating its success?

Things were going pretty well near the start of April, but naturally, as the month progresses, it’s gotten a lot slower. I’d say there was a good, steady amount of interest in the first two weeks. Now, I’ll see periods where there won’t be much activity for a day or so, before things pick up again.

I don’t have a specific metric I’m looking to, to define success. The fact that I got anyone at all interested enough to contribute a video makes me feel pretty good. I thought I might be able to target a younger, tech-savvy demographic (one that also really dug poetry), but perhaps I misjudged this. Or perhaps I haven’t reached them yet.

We had a few notable mentions. Several organizations with sizable Twitter accounts mentioned us, which helped tremendously. We also got nice mentions from: The Millions, The New Yorker’s “Book Bench,” and The Next Web.

If you want to know a moment where I felt the project was successful? It was late one night, shortly after I saw two submissions had come in. One was by Morgan Joyce Williams and another was by Harm Hendrik ten Napel. Though I did contact Morgan via Facebook, these were submissions that came from folks I didn’t know, personally. 

Morgan was the Illinois State Champion for Poetry Out Loud, 2011 - and it’s clear why she won if you listen to her video. Hearing Morgan’s video totally blew me away, and wowed me beyond belief. After seeing her video, I checked out Harm’s… and that too, blew me away. I found myself sitting at my computer, with a hand over my chest - just totally awed that two strangers were able to move me so much, just by reciting some words. 

Both poems were love poems and I totally felt that love, watching and listening to these two. That was a particularly magical moment for me, and made everything related to the project worthwhile. All the website mentions and Twitter retweets were great… but the moment I’ll remember most is that night, utterly moved by these two recordings.

What’s the most exotic place you’ve sent a sticker? How about the most surprising?

I’d have to say: Kosovo. I’m not even sure if I got the address correctly, but I’m hoping it arrives there. That request caught me by surprise.

There’s been one less than fun surprise. On April 20th, the project got listed on a “freebie” website. What I mean by this is that the website was all about places on the web where people can get free things. They linked to our Stickers page, and within a few hours… I started to see a ton of requests come in. As the morning went on, other “freebie” websites picked up on the link and much of our traffic was centered on the Sticker giveaway.

I ended up having to take the sticker request form offline, and it’s been that way for most of the weekend. I’m going to honor the first 30 requests that have already come in, but my feeling is that most folks were simply requesting stickers just because they were free. It was like a feeding frenzy.

I’m nearly through my first set of 1,000 stickers and have placed another order for 1,000 more. My intention was to cover postage for stickers throughout April, but at some future point… I’ll switch things to a SASE (Self-Addressed Stamped Envelope) model. If the freebie sites continue, that might happen earlier than planned.

What was the most challenging part of the project?

The biggest challenge that I seem to have with many of my projects is marketing: sharing the project URL via Facebook, Twitter, and getting it mentioned on enough sites/blogs where it starts to trigger momentum. I have a handful of places where I tend to always go to try to, but after I exhaust those resources… I feel like I end up having to rely on others to spread the word.

Since the start of National Poetry Month I’ve been monitoring hashtags on Twitter, and then contacting people/organizations via Facebook. I’ve tried contacting numerous local/Chicago news outlets, but surprisingly/sadly no one’s taken an interest so far, despite the various Chicago angles. 

My marketing approach is pretty slow and limited, and I’d daresay this is the toughest part of any project of mine - trying to get other sites/people interested. A big part of me feels that, were I better at self-promotion, some of my projects might have gotten more traction.

Do you imagine that A Poem From Us will come to a natural end? How long do you think it’ll go for?

That’s a really good question. I’ve been talking a lot about how the project has launched to coincide with National Poetry Month, but my intention is to keep the site up and running for far beyond April. Whether there will be continued interest after everyone’s moved on from National Poetry Month remains to be seen.

The project isn’t going anywhere, and worse comes to worse… it’ll be something that can pick up steam again, once next April rolls around again. 

I have an older Flash project called “pi10k“  that was something I did nearly a decade ago, when I was first learning how to program using ActionScript and Flash. I was learning how to manipulate strings, and came up with this fun idea of using the first 10,000 digits of pi… putting them to music. 

Every year, around March 14th (Pi Day, 3/14), I see a great deal of traffic. Even if the A Poem From Us project goes dormant for most of the year, I’m certain it will get a small resurgence every April at the very least.

How is technology changing the way people write, find, and consume poetry? 

I’d like to think it’s helping. We’ve never had more writing apps to help us along, and I daresay there’s a generation of writers now who’ve never had the pleasure of typewriters (and the sloppy tediousness of white-out). We’re able to record and revise our thoughts with such amazing ease. I think of software like Scrivener for novelists/essayists, and it’s staggering the kinds of tools that are out there for writers to use.

And finally: what exciting projects, poetry or otherwise, are up next?

Ha! I’m not sure just yet. I’ve spent a lot of 2012 working on prepping the project, and much of April trying to get the word out. The idea of taking a break seems like a really nice one.

I have a few other ideas that aren’t very well formed yet. A backburner project of mine involves me reading my own poems, using Creative Commons licensed video as background. I was working on bundling everything into a free iPhone app… so that might be something I return to.

I’ve long had this idea of doing crowd-sourced versions of Larkin’s “This Be the Verse” and Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays.” I’ve tried a few times (unsuccessfully) to get those projects off the ground, so that might be something I try again. Although having hit up all my friends to participate in this project… I may have exhausted all my goodwill, at least for a little while.

I usually go through periods of intense activity and lulls where nothing much happens. I don’t have a specific next project yet, but when I get that spark or idea in my head, I’ll be off to the races again.

Thank you, Felix! Check out A Poem For Us here.

BY: RACHEL HYMAN

3.23.12

after megan boyle’s ‘selected unpublished blog posts of a mexican panda express employee’

i have been meaning to play around with different styles of reviewing

justin already reviewed megan boyle’s selected unpublished blog posts of a mexican panda express employee and i bet if i went to the muumuu house page i could find a lot of other reviews for it [UPDATE: yes]

i wasn’t going to review the book because i’m working on a lot of other projects right now but liveblogging my reactions as i read through seems easier than writing a ‘traditional’ review

and (ADULTS DO NOT READ) i am consummately lazy ~20% of the time

also we’ve been discussing Art and Alt Lit and Being Human and this book seems appropriate to those discussions, maybe even emblematic (too strong a statement?) of alt lit

disclosure: i actually got the idea to ‘liveblog’ the book when i was ~1/3 of the way through (the book has no page numbers) but i’m just going to go back and start from the beginning

Read More

BY: RACHEL HYMAN

Disclosure: I was sent a review copy of this book.
One of the blurbs on the back of Michael J. Seidlinger’s The Sky Conducting (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2012) says, “This is the obscure voice-over for the back-alley director’s cut of our lives as American actors. And the cameras are still rolling.”

Does anyone else get intimidated by such descriptions, often more gilded than the book’s own prose? With respect to Sky Conducting, I’d sooner say that the director is dead. So is the art of film. The Sky Conducting is more the shaky home video (a la Blair Witch Project, Cloverfield) of post-apocalyptic America, except the cameraman doesn’t die at the end. There is gray. There is ash. Bloated with consumerism and the great Dream perverted, America has died of a heart attack, and the gloves are off.

The Sky Conducting reads like a fable. The prose is simple and sparse, spaced out on the page into distinct blocks. The blocks are separated by a symbol that represents the “solemn, falling icon of an American home.” The Sky Conducting focuses on a family, the nuclear family. They are known only as the mother, the father, the daughter, and the son. The text is mostly confined to America post-death but sometimes floats over to the pre-death side, giving the story a fluid, dreamlike feel.

America is dead, and the family is on a journey to fill the holes inside themselves. They are led through the “listless, soiled and spoiled land” by Johan, a foreign mercenary who profits off of America’s death by selling off artifacts from the country’s past. The family all has their little pathologies. The mother prefers to look back towards a happier time when America was thriving. She carries mirrors with her to catch the past, knowing that it’s only looking forward that you see America’s ruin. The father, given over to drink, turns to consuming ash when the liquor runs out. When the family dog Fellow runs away, the son becomes a shell of himself, a “slow, shy, hapless little son,” burning out like America’s own promise. The restless daughter is the family member with the independent streak, making escape plans and drawing up a list of everything that inhabited America’s past.

One of my favorite scenes is the flea market where foreigners are shilling any and all vaguely American wares. One man has collected a shack of pornographic video, audio, interactive multimedia, and will trade his stock for the “real thing.” A woman fills her booth with “droppings, shaved off and partly melted hair,” asking the father for his own hair. There are vendors selling city landmarks and broken homes.

I like that the rest of the world keeps going when America expires, sending over mercenaries to profit off its death (is there anything more American?). I like that it focuses on one family, the quintessential nuclear, yet splintered, family. I like that the austere, post-apocalyptic landscape was reflected in the simple prose. And the introduction of Johan, the mercenary who comes around to the nuclear family’s ways, kept the book more interesting than if it had just focused on the family.

I wish I had come away with a more cogent message about what’s ailing America these days, though I don’t think that was the book’s prime purpose. There were a lot of ideas scattered around about America’s Problems, and place, and identity: “Where you come from says everything about who you are.” “America was its own enemy.” These ideas didn’t all cohere. The Sky Conducting feels like it should be a fable, but I’m not sure what the moral of the story is.

Maybe nobody can precisely diagnose America’s Problems, though. The Sky Conducting was a nice twist on the post-apocalyptic genre (not a single mention of zombies, thank God). In 300 pages of a fever dream, Seidlinger shows us what happens when America’s scaffolding crumbles. It isn’t pretty.

By: Rachel Hyman

So apparently there’s some big conference going on in Chicago that people pay money to go to. You might have heard of it. AWP? I also know that there are a whole host of off-site readings going on over the next few days. Tonight’s reading was sponsored by The Rumpus. I forget that not everything is on punk time. Apparently “doors” at 7:30 means the room will be packed by 7:35.

After an introduction from Rumpus editor-in-chief Stephen Elliott, Brian Spears, the poetry editor of the Rumpus, kicked things off. He began with what he called “information overload poems”: he wrote a poem for every single Cubs game, combining lines from the broadcast with whatever he was doing on his computer at the time. I’m a little unclear on the methodology, but I like the result. The poem he read was from a game on June 11, titled “27-33,” indicating the Cubs’ record at the time. Apparently all the poems in the series are titled this way. “27-33” is fluid with imagery, almost too fast to keep up with. One of my favorite lines was “Two hour trip to Walmart was worse than my hospital visit.” His next poems were about his visits to the doctor after having a vasectomy reversed, and they were funny and heartwarming. He refers to his doctor as the “jizz doctor” and describes the ancient VHS tapes in the room where he has to come forth with a sperm sample. Thank God he put porn on his iPhone. His final poem was a series of lines under the hashtag #middleagewerollhard, which the audience recited after each line was read. It was basically a bunch of aphorisms. Some of my favorites—and there were a lot—were:
“Is there ever any reason, once you’re in a hammock, to get out of it?”
“Drunk flossing can be a challenge, but don’t let it beat you.”
“Warm socks rule.” 
And the closer—“Sauvignon Blanc and Starbursts, motherfuckers.”

Next was Sommer Browning. One of my favorite poems she read consisted solely of the lines “And this one’s called _______.” Towards the end, it devolved into something like “And this one’s called that would look good on a t-shirt.” “And this one’s called I wouldn’t wear it though.” “And this one’s called yeah.” Sommer also read a few of her comics, which worked better in practice than I thought it would.

Peter Orner read an excerpt from his book, Love and Shame and Love. The book centers around four generations of the Popper family, in and around Chicago, and his excerpt finds us in a Comfort Inn with Alexander and the pregnant Kat. My mind wandered a bit during his reading, but my interest was piqued enough to check out the book.

Dan Telfer (whose name I have in my notes as Ben Kelper—thank god for the flyer) of the Onion gave us a little break with some stand-up comedy. He had some alright small bits, but really hit his stride when he told the story of riding a jerry-rigged zipline with a massive boner and pornographic confetti in his pockets.

The aforementioned Stephen Elliott read the first letter, which he authored, from the Rumpus Letters in the Mail program. Apparently Letters in the Mail has been more popular than anything Stephen Elliott has written, which caused him some consternation. The letter was a story about himself, and females, and letters.

Cheryl Strayed, who writes the Dear Sugar advice column on the Rumpus, commanded the room as she read one of her most popular Dear Sugar pieces: Write Like a Motherfucker. The person who wrote in was a “pathetic and confused young woman of 26” struggling with being a woman writer. Sugar counsels her kindly, but firmly, to humble herself, “get [her] ass on the floor,” and write. “Dear sweet arrogant beautiful crazy talented tortured rising star glowbug,” Sugar says, “that you’re so bound up about writing tells me that writing is what you’re here to do.”

I thought Nick Flynn was going to read, but then the last performer was announced as a girl who would be playing ukulele. Maybe Nick Flynn is hiding something? I left at that point, but well done, Rumpus. I enjoyed pretty much everyone at the reading and now I have some new people to look into.

Many things came out on Valentine’s Day 2012. Most of them will be reviewed here. Some of the bigger things will be given due consideration and reviewed at a later point. Read on.

OKSTUPID by Walter Mackey
reviewed by Justin Carter

Walter Mackey wrote a story about love for Valentines Day. It is about Sarah and Greg. They meet through OkCupid. They are both depressed. Greg is in an emo band. They talk on AIM. They meet at a library. They discuss things like ‘being straight edge’ and ‘being vegan’ and ‘Skype sex’. The story is told in a very deadpan way. It reminds me of Tao Lin sometimes. It uses details to draw emotion out of the characters and the story.

I think the story here is interesting. I think the writing might be a little rough in spots but there is clearly a lot of emotion in the story. I think that the emotion and the way that Walter pays attention to small details and uses them to build up the characters is good. I feel like you should read this. I feel like Walter Mackey has a good grasp on human emotion. I am unsure how to comment on the Paul Cunningham controversy surrounding Walter because I have never read Zachary German. I don’t know. There is a gchat excerpt from Spencer Madsen and Stacey Teague at the beginning of this ebook and I find that interesting.


Pretty Flowers by Gabby Gabby
reviewed by Rachel Hyman

Gabby Gabby wrote a chapbook called “Pretty Flowers.” Pretty Flowers blows the Black Dot Series out of the water. True to its name, the words in the chapbook are pretty. They’re also conversational, and evocative, and sweet. I read the chapbook and imagined Gabby Gabby sitting on her bed, or maybe by a window, with a faint smile, speaking half to me and half to whatever’s out there. Pretty Flowers is wry but quiet in its beauty.

She says:

I don’t think I really like state fairs but I like the idea of being the type of person that likes state fairs.

I think if I tried hard enough I could really be that person.

She speaks of buying a corn dog just to hold it at the top of a Ferris wheel.

She moves from state fairs to the 50 states, wondering if the people on one side of Michigan miss the people on the other side.

She thinks about the square states in the Midwest, and how she would spend her whole life trying to be a circle if she lived in one of those square states.

She shows us, with a picture, how Virginia slopes upward or downward, depending on your point of view.

In one of the last few lines, she admits, “Maybe I am an optimist. At least for today.”

Reading Pretty Flowers makes me optimistic for the future of alt lit. It’s casually pretty, effortlessly touching, without being overly quaint or twee. Highly recommended.

Love Stories/Hate Stories by Russ Woods and Brett Elizabeth Jenkins
reviewed by Jackson Nieuwland

I’ve been looking forward to this book for a while

because Russ Woods has been one of my favorite poets for a while.

Once I made a facebook status update about how awesome Russ Woods is.

I don’t know anything about Brett Elizabeth Jenkins.

The concept is simple:

Russ wrote love stories

and Brett wrote hate stories.

These stories are in the form of poems.

These poems are my favorite type of poems.

They are short.

They are witty.

They are fun.

They are funny.

They explore the concept of the joke as poetry, which I am very interested in (the joke form is just begging to be utilized in poetry, right? Especially since failed jokes are always funnier than successful ones, right? (shout out to Adam Robinson)).

They are spare/minimalistic.

They are beautifully balanced (I love a poem that uses line breaks well like so many of these do) (the collection as a whole is also really well balanced because the two writers play off each other wonderfully. Maybe a few poems could have been cut though because a few jokes/references were recycled).

They are not obvious.

They are well laid out.

They are making me write a review that is so overwhelming positive that I want to think of a few detractors to throw in to make it seem more balanced…

Ummmmmmm

…

Nah

Everything is fantastic


Kimbra by Zack Schuster
reviewed by B. Barrera
B. Barrera attends an MFA program in fiction at a university in America

“Love is like a silhouette in dreams.” 

When Kimbra sings this line in a hot pink dress in the official Youtube video, I have no idea what she’s talking about.  Zack Schuster, in his story Kimbra, however, manages to turn this idea into something palpable in a relationship between two characters.  This story is made up of tiny moments, wiping a  stray hair from across the face of a beloved, feeling the cold on bare feet, and these tiny, stolen moments are all this couple has to work with as a relationship.  They seem to be “Cameo Lovers,” able to share only night time with each other until one of them is pulled away from their bed into the unremarkable realm of the awake.  There does seem to be something else hinted at about their relationship.  At one point the man leaves his sleeping lover voluntarily for—what?  an affair perhaps?  With such sparse prose it’s difficult to really tell what else is at the heart of their hurt, besides just never being awake at the same time, but there is definitely something deeper at work.

The prose, while sparing, is lovely.  The atmosphere of Kimbra is wistful and romantic, everything colored in black and white.  The warm, dark fullness of his lover’s hair and their bed together vs. the cold room, the man leaving the bed in his “tidy-whities,” a color palette worthy of Kimbra’s own signature look.  And the setting where the lovers finally meet, awake at the same time when their love becomes something real and not just a “silhouette” is suitably colored “brown.”  The use of Kimbra lyrics in between sections of prose is lovely, the black-and-white atmosphere of the silhouette love the characters have is perfectly heartbreaking, I just wish there had been a few more “brown” moments with the characters interacting, that they had really “opened up [their] heart to me,” instead of kept me at a distance.        

I’m going to fuck. And that’s a place you little asshole, not a verb by Pancho Espinosa
reviewed by Walter Mackey

If there is one thing Pancho Espinoza is good at, it is creating imagery. This little collection of poems completely blew me away when it comes to translating words into images in my fried little brain. From lines like ‘I’m like a Windows ‘98 screensaver at [night]’ to ‘I know there’s people lined up outside of Best Buy right now’—you really get a sense of how Pancho’s words form these beautiful pictures in your brain that you would have probably not even thought of if you hadn’t read this collection entitled ‘I’m going to Fuck and that’s a place you little asshole, not a verb’.

I thought it was really funny that Beach Sloth in his review decided to do some further research to find out if there was actually a place called ‘Fuck’. However, he states that ‘The title is incorrect. There is no place with the name ‘Fuck’. A town in Austria is called ‘Fucking’. Unsurprisingly that small town in rural Austria has a serious problem with people stealing its signs’ [Beachy Beachy Sloth Sloth 2012]. Nevertheless, I think there should be a place called ‘fuck’. I mean, in my province of Newfoundland and Labrador in Canada, there is a place called ‘Dildo’. Yeah, I’m serious. Look it up. In the excerpt from the Dildo, Newfoundland wiki page, I think it’s really funny that it states ‘It is located on the southeastern Dildo Arm of Trinity Bay about 60 kilometres west of St. John’s’ [Wikipedia 2012]. I mean, I think ‘Dildo Arm’ just sounds a Hell of a lot worst than Dildo. Right? Upon hearing Dildo Arm, I just recall my first experience to a sex shop and being emotionally damaged for weeks.

The poem ‘yes, I am mulder and this is scully’ really reminds me of a Steve Roggenbuck poem. I can really picture Steve shouting in his Mr. Bean voice ‘i am like a retarded seven-year-old when I am with you’. Also, I think the poem at the end of this collection is Spanish. However, I don’t effing know because I’m from Canada and French is my second language. I’ll have to ask Jacob Steinberg about this because I don’t know if I could even have a conversation with Luna Miguel. I always click on the ‘view translation’ links on her statuses and they always appear in really broken English.

Overall, this was a really great collection. I felt depressed after reading most of these poems but I feel that is okay. I am depressed. I am really content with being depressed. It gives me character. It’s part of my ‘brand’. Being ‘depressed’ is totally ‘in’ these days. Feeling depressed? Pop a Xanax. Feeling depressed? Write a poem. Feeling severely depressed? Read ‘I’m going to Fuck and that’s a place, you little asshole and not a verb’.

Oh, also, Pancho Espinoza, I think your writing is incredible and your blog is even more perfect. I luv u, lil bb.


the moon looks red and the sky looks black by Keegan Crawford
reviewed by Justin Carter

Keegan Crawford completes the trifecta of the new emerging voices that I am about to, at this moment, dub the “Screaming Seahorsers.” (The others are Walter Mackey and Gabby Gabby). Keegan’s v-day release is in the form of these tiny little vignettes. The “forward” and “back” links in the collection function as part of the text also. There is a self-awareness in Keegan’s writing that I really like. Here is an example:

Sometimes I wonder if wearing enough black will make me completely invisible, and then I think about how that’s really dumb.

Every piece in this feels like it has strong emotions, but the language is very concrete, for the most part. The emotion in the text comes more from how the reader interprets the writing than from the writing itself. I hope that makes sense. Keegan shows very good control over the language of these pieces. They are easy to understand. Here is another example from the text:

Slow song and I hold you and you put your head on my shoulder and we kiss by a tree and try to find some other place to go but we go home instead and a couple years go by and I still have the ticket in a box in my closet and I still kiss you the same way.

Whereas, I think, other writers in the ‘alt lit’ scene would have a tendency to try to focus more on how these characters are feeling, Keegan gives us the details. He uses language that makes the details clear and forces the reader to understand perfectly what he is trying to say.

*****
Other things that dropped on Valentine’s Day include:

-NAP Issue 2.3
-Pank Issue 7.2
-UP Issue 2
-i’m not a slut, i’m a romantic by Jacob Steinberg (paypal jrs542@nyu.edu $1)

Dave Shaw can be found on Tumblr here. He also runs the website Lit Mixtapes.

By: Rachel Hyman

It’s funny that Dave Shaw’s newest chapbook, recently released through NAP, is called Less of Everything. It’s chock-full of images (the word kind), details, people, places, things.

Less of Everything centers around a character named Anxiety. I like this, this idea that Big Things like anxiety and 2008 and indifference, all characters in the chapbook, can be personified. Anxiety doesn’t actually seem so anxious or panicky. He takes action: plays a set, corresponds with a poet in Chicago, hooks up with girls. He reads books like the Canterbury Tales and the Pale King, he listens to music like Titus Andronicus and Pepper Rabbit. I had to actually look up that last one to make sure they were a real band. They are.

Anxiety seems like he has a life with a normal amount of anxiety. His panic is low-level. He worries about relationships, like the rest of us do. In fact, this chapbook seems specifically tailored towards the Internet generation, those denizens of a world where there’s an almost unbearable amount of stuff coming to pass every single second. A lot of this stuff happens in Anxiety’s life, to Anxiety, around Anxiety. But his movement’s all lateral. Maybe it’s because I’ve been reading old Tao Lin reviews lately, but Shaw’s style seems very Lin-esque. It’s deadpan, but there is emotion.

One of the funny moments in Less of Everything is right at the beginning, when Anxiety is sitting next to a girl on a bench who is talking on her phone.

Anxiety considers grabbing the cellphone out of her hands and telling her to stop what she is doing because no matter what she does nothing will ever change.

He imagines the girl stabbing him to death with his a knife. Instead, he gets up, “collecting the muscles in his face into a polite smile. He wants to say something like ‘I’m ready’.”

He doesn’t, though. When Anxiety is in line later at Subway, a man tells the sandwich artist (that’s what they’re calling them now, right?) “I’ll think about it” when asked what kind of cheese he wants. Anxiety (who points out later that “everyone knows how Subway works; they’re not going to ask you anything you haven’t been asked before”) “turns to face the man and smiles.” His thought on the common knowledge of Subway mechanics is followed by him imagining himself “saying this at a comedy club doing a Jerry Seinfeld impression. ‘Subway isn’t going to throw any curve-balls at you; take comfort in this.’”

I love this, this politeness that completely masks Anxiety’s inner monologue. I imagine him smiling and taking a deep breath, about to say something then thinking better of it. I do this a lot too, and then think “never mind.” There’s a tension between these two spaces, the external and internal worlds, and Less of Everything constantly mediates between them. With this in mind, it makes perfect sense to have anxiety personified as the central character. Bringing my inner world into collision with the outside makes me anxious, too.

By: Rachel Hyman



All Her Father’s Guns is a novel by James Warner. It was published by Vox Novus in 2011. Disclosure: I was sent a complementary copy of this book.

As the 2012 primaries and eventual presidential race get under way, as the hope and change touchstones of Obama’s 2008 campaign ring hollow, as we find ourselves faced with new movements like the Tea Party and Occupy—a political satire seems especially apposite.

Irony is an essential element of satire, to be sure, but the latter seems to differentiate itself from the arch irony that pervades a lot of corners these days (are you listening, David Foster Wallace?). Satire has different ends, a different affect. Maybe the stakes are higher with the political subject matter.

All Her Father’s Guns takes place in 2002, between 9/11 and the start of the Iraq War, reminding us that these last few years aren’t the sole provenance of political turmoil. It bounces between two characters. The first is Cal Lyte, a gun-toting, audacious venture capitalist who’s plotting to sabotage his ex-wife’s campaign for Congress in Arizona. The second is Reid Seyton, a British transplant, boyfriend of Cal’s daughter Lyllyan, and not-so-consummate academic in the UC Berkley Department of Theory.

All Her Father’s Guns habituates us to ridiculousness. As crazy as Cal is—he wants a gun in the hands of every American, including kindergartners, and lives in a libertarian gated community for trigger-happy paranoids—his ex-wife Tabytha is even worse, making Cal look like a bleeding-heart liberal. As Cal says,

I’ve never favored sending in the troops, not after what I saw in Thailand. I mean, we’d never have had to fight the Civil War if we’d all just smuggled guns to the slaves, like John Brown tried to do.

Tabytha naturally planned on going down in history for helping “liberate the Middle East from the Arabs.”

Alright, so maybe they’re both pretty ridiculous. With craziness being the rule, of course Cal falls in love with Viorela, Reid’s colleague and a Lacanian therapist who says things like “What is truly oppressive is one’s own superego, which Libertarians project onto the government to conceal from themselves their own self-repression.” And it’s hardly surprising when we find out that Cal’s company is under IRS investigation for seemingly selling missiles to China in a botched scheme. By the time we get towards the end of the book, the kidnapping is par for the course. Absurdity like this saturates the entire novel.

What’s really enjoyable though, are the scenes of academia—and Reid’s tumble from it, as he can’t compete with his colleagues in the Department of Theory who study things like continuity errors in Casabalanca and teach courses like Hermeneutics from Mallarmé to Tarantino. Most readers of this blog, myself included, don’t need satire to get acquainted with the wacky and wild world of academia. While Cal tries to keep his ventures afloat and keep Tabytha from running for Congress, Reid attempts to find life after academia, keep his relationship with Lyllyan afloat, and figure out the ending to the bedtime story that his now-dead father told him in childhood. I do wish that Reid’s sections were longer, and I felt that Cal’s could drag on for too long.

For all of its mockery of politics and academia, All Her Father’s Guns is, in large part a story about family, not so much dysfunctional families as families with gaping holes in them. Reid looks up to Cal as a father figure, despite residing at the opposite end of the political spectrum. And teaching him to use a gun, Cal sees Reid as a son, given his frayed relations with his daughter Lyllyan. I felt that Lyllyan was a little underdeveloped as a character, as the novel was primarily concerned with Cal and Reid.

This focus on the family (heh), on people, is where All Her Father’s Guns really shines. The novel isn’t just a vehicle for some wry political commentary. For all of its zany gun talk, the core story—having, losing, finding anew—isn’t so out there. It’s clever, but not just for the sake of being clever. Regardless of your own political stance, you’ll find that All Her Father’s Guns is smart and surprisingly touching.

Russ Woods and Meghan Lamb live in Chicago. They are married. They run Red Lightbulbs. Russ just published “Pictures of Salukis Looking Majestic.” Meghan just published “Love, Jennifer Jason Leigh.” Justin reviewed “Pictures of Salukis Looking Majestic” and Rachel reviewed “Love, Jennifer Jason Leigh.” Rachel and Justin are not married.

Rachel Reviews Meghan Lamb:

I realized I wasn’t sure whether to call “Love, Jennifer Jason Leigh” a chapbook or a story or what, because it’s not structured as a series of poems. EDIT: it’s billed as a zine on Meghan’s site. The first part, “SECRETS,” is an exchange of emails showing Jennifer Jason Leigh, who is Meghan Lamb (or Meghan Lamb, who is Jennifer Jason Leigh?) applying for a CW reality show about “professional, polished, and successful women” who have problems. The second, longer part is entitled “MARRIAGE” and centers around an exchange of emails between Meghan Lamb/Jennifer Jason Leigh and a woman named Olga, courting one another through the service of a marriage agency. Pictures of young posing ladies are sent back and forth. Both parts of LJJL are written in broken English that I have no shame in admitting reminded me of that sage of our generation, @horse_ebooks. You know how before @horse_ebooks got hacked, it would spit out these serendipitously poetic phrases? That happens here too. The emails are charming in all of their bumbling language:
 
i too am in possession of a gnawing lack of patience, as for the lack without your shine, and the snaring, the space of your words.

I wish to find such the man which will look at me not as on a toy or hobby and as on the person who has ideas and the opinion….I think, if love, do not look on his age, and the main thing that him is good also they are happy together.

dreamsee the shine….you are a moonshore.

I liked how there were these especially poetic ribbons strewn throughout LJJL even though the structure was not overtly poetic in the way a chapbook full of discrete pieces is. The flipside is that this story-like structure creates expectations that a more explicitly poetic work might bypass, like character continuity throughout the whole piece. Jennifer Jason Leigh was definitely the same character in the first and second parts, according to the style in which she wrote, but I didn’t really perceive these parts as extremely connected. I liked the MARRIAGE section better, because it was more of an exchange between characters, whereas SECRETS just focused on Jennifer Jason Leigh.

It seemed like neither Jennifer Jason Leigh nor Olga were aware of the mutual language barrier. They weren’t completely talking past one another: many packets of words were directed and hit their mark. Olga was 32 and Jennifer Jason Leigh was 20, but the age gap, as well as the fact that they were two women connecting through a marriage agency, was never noted as strange by either character. Also unnoted was the fact that Jennifer Jason Leigh’s emails were “From: Meghan Lamb.”

With the cover featuring jigsaw pieces of an eye and a lip, it’s like Lamb threw Gossip Girl and Pretty Little Liars and other shows of that ilk into a prism, picked up the pieces, and arranged them into “Love, Jennifer Jason Leigh.” LJJL felt vaguely dystopian. It was challenging for me to get a handle on whether it was more fiction or poetry. I think these categorizations matter because we structure our expectations for a work around them. It was a good challenge though, and I found “Love, Jennifer Jason Leigh” ultimately worthwhile.

Justin Reviews Russ Woods

I hate to admit it, but before I read the first poem in this collection (when Russ posted it at Let People Poems not very long ago) I did had never read anything by Russ. I had read things from the journal he edits, Red Lightbulbs, and I had really enjoyed the work in the journal. But I had not read anything but Russ.

So I read the poem he posted a link to on Facebook.

It made me feel very excited and happy.

This poem, the first in the chapbook, is called “All We Grow Is Old” and is a list of reasons that the speaker does not want to get into arguments. There is a ‘surreal’ quality to Russ’ work, I think. The reasons he does not want to get into arguments are clearly reasons that grow increasingly less probable, but this doesn’t really matter. The tone of the piece matters. The feeling that the reader feels matters.

I have this theory that in a lot of contemporary poems, the actual narrative is only as important as the feelings it evokes. It doesn’t need to be believable at all or even really make sense, as long as it creates in the reader the feeling that the poet wanted it to make them feel (or any feeling really, since the authorial intent is not really that important).

Russ’ work gives me that feeling. In “City-Girl,” I am not really sure what is happening in the literal sense. I know that there is a girl and she is a city, or maybe vice-versa, or maybe both. I don’t know. What I do know is that the poem makes me feel very hopeful when it begins and then by the end I am feeling sad, when the girl has a nightmare.

“Dog-Arms” works in the same way. The poem is about someone that wants to have arms made out of dogs. This doesn’t make much sense on a literal level. Would you feed the dogs? What would it eat? The poem begins with a type of bravado though. I will have dogs for arms and they will do cool shit, but then it ends with the sadness of the dogs eating the speaker. This, again, causes me to feel sad.

    A lot of these poems follow a similar formula, although some differ. “Soon, Every Tiny Person Inside Me Will Die” does not really make me feel hopeful at any time. It makes me feel bad for all the tiny people inside the speaker. The poem ends in a hopeful way though, with the speaker thinking about the tiny people living on in his thoughts.
    I think this may have been the best chapbook I read in 2011. I think everyone should read it. Right now. Please.