The Wideman Challenge Starts Today: Guest Reviewer Becky Tuch on FEVER by John Edgar Wideman

Today I'm launching the Wideman Challenge, in which I seek out one book reviewer for every book that John Edgar Wideman has written, and challenge readers everywhere to pick up a Wideman book. Have you heard of him? Wideman has been writing inventively, intensively, incisively, introspectively about Black America since 1967. In my experience as a bookseller, far too many people have not heard of him or his roster of over twenty titles of fiction and memoir, and I'm hoping to change that.

I'm thrilled to introduce Becky Tuch as the kick-off reviewer of the Wideman Challenge. I met Becky soon after she moved to Pittsburgh (where Wideman grew up and the site of many of his best books) several years ago. I loved hearing from her evocative novel in progress at a Big Idea reading, hearing the curiosity in her voice when she talks about writing, and hearing her enthusiasm for teaching creative writing. She's been teaching with Boston's Grub Street for many years and since landing in Pittsburgh now also teaches with Creative Nonfiction. Please enjoy her review of Wideman's stories:

*******

Fever: Twelve Stories, John Edgar Wideman. New York: Henry Holt, 1989. Short fiction. 161 pages.

What is the role of point-of-view in fiction? Traditionally, the narrator occupies a consciousness, or several, through which the story’s universe is interpreted. The reader may experience the interpretive lens of one character or many, yet one maxim remains steadfast: At all times the reader must be grounded. A story will not succeed when a reader is not firmly rooted within a guiding consciousness. We need, above all things, to know who is perceiving and when.

Here, then, is John Edgar Wideman’s Fever (1989), a short story collection that tosses aside traditional notions of point-of-view, offering readers something disruptive, challenging, and wonderfully different. In these stories, narrative perspectives shift abruptly; dialect changes mid-page. Stories within stories unfold, occasionally containing their own backstories, with new characters emerging to take over the narrative. Expectations are overturned; norms are shattered. If Wideman asks one thing of his readers, it is that you pay attention. In life, as in Fever, you cannot know what is coming around the bend. 

 In “Doc’s Story,” the collection’s inaugural story, we encounter an unnamed narrator, grieving the departure of his lover who “left him in May, when the shadows and green of the park had started to deepen.” Consoling himself, he plays pick-up basketball, talks to the other players, “cools out on reefer…[and] collects the stories they tell.” One of these player’s stories is about Doc, an older man who began going blind. In learning about Doc, we are shifted suddenly into another narratorial voice: “But one Sunday the shit got stone serious. Sunday I’m telling youall about, the action was real nice. If you wasn’t ready, get back cause the brothers was cooking.”

 “Doc’s Story” is perhaps the most autobiographical in the bunch. In Brothers and Keepers, Wideman’s memoir published four years before Fever, the author follows the life trajectory of his brother, who is in prison. Wideman writes, “However numerous and comforting the similarities, we were different. The world had seized on the difference, allowed me room to thrive, while he’d been forced into a cage. Why did it work out that way? What was the nature of the difference? Why did it haunt me?” In “Doc’s Story,” where a narrator shifts among different perspectives, merging the language of the street seamlessly with formal speech, Wideman appears to have transformed all that haunts him into a buoyant and refreshing mode of story-telling. 

In “The Statue of Liberty” Wideman’s shift in perspective takes the reader deep into delightful and wholly unexpected places. Here we begin with a narrator jogging in the countryside. The narrator describes the view and the people he passes along his route. One might expect a quaint story about jogging through rural landscape. Yet we learn, “Another way joggin pleasures me is how it lets me turn myself into another person in another place.” Moments later, the narrator says, “When the huge black man springs from the shadows I let him grapple me to the ground.” It takes a moment to understand that we have shifted from the point-of-view of the jogger to that of one of the farmers whose lives he is imagining himself into. What follows is a stunning erotic scene between the farmer and two joggers. The scene is sexually explicit, racially transgressive, packed with violent metaphors-- “The petals of my vagina are two knuckles spreading a fist stuck in your face,”--and fabulously engrossing. 

If it takes the reader a moment to realize who now holds the reins of the story, that is a small price to pay for the gift of Wideman’s larger philosophical and political aims. Indeed, Wideman has made clear his intention to use abrupt and at times disorienting point-of-view shifts toward not only aesthetic but much-needed political ends. “Think of that blood leaving you and running up in somebody else’s arms, down into somebody’s fingers black or brown or ivory just like yours,” he writes in “When It’s Time to Go.” In “Fever:” “Each solitary heart contains all the world’s hearts...Fever descends when the waters that connect us are clogged with filth.” In “The Statue of Liberty:” “We must move past certain kinds of resistance, habits that are nothing more than habits. Get past or be locked like stupid braying animals in a closet forever.” 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, blindness is also a theme woven throughout the collection. In “When It’s Time to Go,” we encounter a young boy losing his eyesight. The story begins from the perspective of a man relating the tale to his brother, then shifts to the boy, now grown-- “Yeah, they might could have saved my sight. Ain’t never gon forgive them that.”-- and finally to the perspective of a man in a bar talking about the blind musician-- “So that’s about all of it, my friends. Sambo could sure nuff play.” We encounter the blind musician again in “Concert” and “Presents,” the latter the most traditionally structured story in the collection. 

In “Surfiction,” the collection’s most experimental story, an academic is taking notes on a writer for an upcoming presentation. We follow the narrator’s thoughts on his own remarks, as well as his own deconstructive tendencies toward his own notes. “We are put into the passive posture of readers or listeners (consumers) by the narrative unraveling of a reality which, because it is unfolding in time, slowly begins to take up our time…” Some of this is charmingly witty, as when he observes, “Without authors whose last names begin with B, surfiction might not exist...Which list further discloses a startling coincidence or perhaps the making of a scandal--one man working on both sides of the Atlantic as writer and critic explaining and praising his fiction as he creates it: Barth Barthes Barthelme.” 

Funnily enough, it is Wideman who is explaining his fiction as he creates it. In the final and titular story, “Fever,” Wideman rotates through multiple perspectives to explore the ravages of yellow fever on a town. A contemporary reader will find many devastating similarities here with the coronavirus pandemic and those who have been on the front lines of caretaking. Throughout the story, Allen, a Black doctor, relates “How the knife was plunged into our hearts, then cruelly twisted. We were proclaimed carriers of the fever and treated as pariahs, but when it became expedient to command our services to nurse the sick and bury the dead, the previous allegations were no longer mentioned...We were ordered to save the city.” Or, put another way by the modern narrator who arrives at the story's end: “Yeah, I nurse these old funky motherfuckers, all right.” 

It is in the conclusion of this story that we arrive at the summation of Wideman’s vision. It is here that we encounter the dissection of a body, the weight of a kidney, a liver, a spleen, a brain. Yet we are also lifted aloft into the metaphysical realm, the attempt to transcend one consciousness and seamlessly enter another at the core of all the stories in this collection. “Right next to the heart,” Wideman describes, “the miniature hand of a child, frozen in a grasping gesture, fingers like hard tongues of flame, still reaching or the marvel of the beating heart, fascinated still…” 

The stories here, though published over three decades ago, have a potent urgency in our current world, particularly for writers and readers in search of new modes of storytelling. The rules, both aesthetic and political, are made to be broken. Let’s finally see one another, this collection cries out, and shred the norms that confine us. 

Guest review by Becky Tuch
Writer, editor, teacher
Founder of The Review Review
Find Becky on Twitter: @BeckyLTuch
And on the web: https://www.beckytuch.com/

*****

Find Fever and John Edgar Wideman's books here.

Follow the Wideman Challenge from now until the end of 2020. Check back at this blog or follow me, Karen, at Twitter: @BookstoreMemoir

Guest Review: Zarina Zabrisky by Polly Trope

Zarina Zabrisky, We, Monsters. San Rafael, Ca.: Numina Press, 2014. Novel. 316 pages. ISBN: 978-0-9842600-4-1

We, Monsters offers reader entertainment with both light and heavy topics – there be dungeons and dominatrices, manicure studios, the emotional frustrations of a housewife in American suburbia, spies in Odessa hotels, Vogue-smoking women in stilettos, a broken childhood, and the dream of an ice cream van, just to name a few examples. As a novel, it ties together beautifully the very flighty feelings and observations of fugitive moments--a reflection in a glass here one moment and gone the next--with the heavier, less digestible feelings and memories that can plague someone for a lifetime.

"I couldn’t unglue my eyes from the puddle. It was quivering, and the eggshell walls of my living room jiggled. My wedding photo and the rainbow-hued vase trembled and blurred. This is how my lost time always started."

As a special extra, the hip meta-twist, this novel provides in fact not only itself, but also a comprehensive set of footnotes and comment apparatus in the voice of a psychologist putting name tags to all the feelings and behaviors that readers will be shown. As it happens, it’s also a conversation with a psychologist that forms the center point of the book, neatly parting the novel into two halves. Those two halves of the book are complementary to each other but actually very different, so that readers are getting almost a double bill.

In the first half, we see a young-ish woman – approaching middle age, but not quite there yet – in the suburbs of San Francisco. She’s a dedicated wife, mother, and domestic goddess, and she starts letting "us" into her life as she is toying with the idea of working as a dominatrix, at the starting point of writing a novel on the subject. She shares with her reader, then, her preparations: how she gets herself one sexy outfit, phones up for the job interview from a gas station payphone, drives off to her first job in a dungeon, works under a grotesque man-woman character of a madam and alongside meaty other ladies, etc.

"Fat caterpillar eyebrows crawled up. Beady eyes drilled through me. After a long moment, the mustached upper lip twitched into a grin. A long hair sticking out from the mole on the side of the hooked nose trembled, and Margaret said, in the hoarse bass of a retired sailor: 'Come on in, doll.' "

Then we move on to girls, clients, and the torture garden madness. All along, the narrative female voice strews little hints and shadows of her childhood and youth, chapters of her life that she has left behind her, in Odessa.

In the second half of the novel, here we are at last, in Odessa with the seventeen-year-old self of that same now-mature woman who was just writing about dropping her children off at school in the suburbs of San Francisco. The Odessa part of the story moves backwards from the moment when the narrator’s beloved sister, Oksana, is turned into a prostitute by an army general, setting her up in a swanky apartment smack in the middle of town, covering her in diamonds and designer clothes.

"He fed her chicken Kiev and poured her sparkling sour champagne, and she never stopped laughing. In three weeks he rented a four-bedroom apartment for her—antique chairs with lion paws, crystal chandeliers and midnight-blue velvet curtains—right on Deribasovskaya. My grandmother marched there to claim Oksana, and I followed her, hiding behind taxicabs and chestnut trees. I would never forget her face on that day. Grandma Rosa never cried, not at her husband’s funeral, not at her daughter’s funeral (...)."

Like a sea receding at low tide, the story here (in between present tense scenes in the dungeon and suburbia) moves back and back, to more and more distant childhood memories, that are as painful to the narrator as they are narrated in crystal-clear detail, whilst, at the same time, they are presented in such a phosphorescent, glassy, iridescent light, that they elude grasp.

"When I was little, the world had colors. My past burst with the bloody red of cherries, the rainbow brightness of beach umbrellas. It was smudged with the jet black of Grandma’s pumps or Oksana’s mascara. It was 3-D (...)."

Here, the architectural design of the steps in Odessa, the famous stair built in such a way as to convey the optical illusion of infinity, becomes the vehicle of the wish to believe that the mother’s suicide at three years old was not real. Here, the adored older sister is seen selling pistachio ice cream on the beach, even if, as the close reader will observe, there was no pistachio ice cream in the Soviet Union.

The novel is rich in imagery and tropes, in particular those related to delicate colors, rainbows and iridescent patterns, which not only prettify the flow of the read and introduce a glittery sprinkle of magic in the style of the old Russian novels, ballets, and fairy tale cultural patrimony. These images looming in the background of the story also become symbolic dots that readers can connect in order to better understand the person telling the story, and to look inside the thinking and viewpoint of the narrator-character: this woman whose life is torn in half, whose new life is nothing like the old, and yet, is very much the same: all too much the same.

"I thought about Vickie, Vanessa’s sister, and imagined her climbing the railing, imagined being her: dizzy, out of breath, as if I were about to give a public speech—in English. Like Vickie, I lost myself."

In this sense, it’s as much a book about migration, about subjective space, symbolic times, and personal memory, as it’s a book about perverts ("monsters"), abusers, and the abused, and the circle of abuse--in San Francisco, in Odessa, or anywhere.

The things I’ve said here paint only a very schematic and subjective picture of a far more rich and complex, intricately structured novel full of interesting time lapses, one that shuffles nervously, yet gracefully, around a number of compelling spaces and characters, spinning out many extraordinary dreams. We, Monsters provides an utterly intense experience: a totally immersive reader-narrator fusion.

Guest Review by Polly Trope
author of the novel Cured Meat (Oneiros Books, 2013)
Read an interview with Polly Trope at Soundsphere: http://www.soundspheremag.com/reviews/book/author-spotlight-polly-trope/

Guest Review: Matt Dojny Reviewed by Jennifer Spiegel

Matt Dojny, The Festival of Earthly Delights. Westland, Mich.: Dzanc Books, 2012. Fiction. 400 pages. Illustrated by the author. ISBN: 978-1-936873-692.

A Book Review of Matt Dojny’s The Festival of Earthly Delights:
Who Can Take Him Seriously?

I don’t really know how to do a book review, though I like very much to “review” books. And since it’s that time of year when the literati and pretenders like me make lists about the best books of the year, I promised to abandon my Christmas plans if Karen Lillis included my book review of Matt Dojny’s book on her site, which is—let’s be honest—nicer than my site.

I only need to figure out how to really review a book. Well, then: form. The Festival of Earthly Delights is, eh hem, an epistolary novel (look it up) written by the protagonist, one Boyd Darrow, to the enigmatic Hap, whose identity you’ll eventually figure out. Boyd and his girlfriend-who-is-pretending-to-be-his-wife, Ulla, are young American expats in the imaginary Asian country of Puchai, where they both hold jobs in education, just as good Americans abroad often do, though Ulla is on the professional side of things.

What I really hate about writing book reviews is plot summary, so I’m going to skip it. The novel is a comedic novel. Epistolary and comedic. You’d be right if you guessed that there’s going to be all kinds of trouble, ranging from whacky food-tasting rituals to toilet humor (in one episode, I almost thought to myself, Enough, Matt! But, then, with further consideration, I thought, Well done, Matt! Well done!), from language mishaps to your usual foreign escapades involving drugs and whorehouses. Drugs and whorehouses are common, right? Boyd Darrow is utterly likeable, and we go wherever he goes willingly. He’s not an idiot. He’s not annoying. He’s just a young American abroad. Who lives with a girl named Ulla. In my opinion, one should always beware of women with names like Ulla. Generally speaking, women with the following names should be avoided: Ulla, Pippa, and Joss. Use your own discretion with Zoey.

In the short time I’ve got here, I’m going to focus on two aspects of this book: its comedic status and its rendering of the American expat abroad (Lordy, I love talking about that one).

It’s a comedic novel! Which means, in brief, it’s funny! You know, we’ve got to be serious for a second, and think about what this means. The comedic thing can be problematic. A bit of a stigma. I can’t remember where it is exactly, but I know that somewhere my own Love Slave is labeled comedic.

I don’t know about Matt Dojny’s response, but my response involved some disgruntled balking. Somehow, my writerly credentials were called into question. My legitimacy was at stake. Yeah, yeah, I read Catch-22. Yeah, yeah: Catcher in the Rye. In one of my non-review reviews, I grappled with the issue. The book was Tina Fey’s Bossypants, and I asked—with all sincerity—“Am I a humorist?” (The review can be found here: That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore.) Because maybe being a humorist isn’t such a good thing.

(Someone, incidentally, publically responded to my review by writing, “In answer to your question, No, you are not. ” I’m still suffering from that one.)

I’ve come to terms with the comedic thing. Dojny probably already has. There’s smart funny (which is marked by smarmy, sexy, true moments that contain beauty and sorrow and wit) and there’s dumb funny (sitcom TV with titles like “My Four Dads’ Sisters and Their Gay Neighbor” or “My Gay Neighbor’s Dad and His Four Sisters”). Funny, when funny is good, is smart. And Dojny’s prose is smart. Humor may be the best way at getting at this human thing, the core of what it means to be human. It seems like it’s the funny people who often see things more clearly. It’s not that they take life less seriously or that their light-heartedness is superficiality; rather, funny people are—dare I say it?—pretty damn perceptive, able to see nuances in behavior and thinking that other people miss. Fools!

If you can’t laugh at a good joke about excrement, something might actually be wrong with you.

Yeah, this book is funny. I’m thinking that the trick to humor is honesty—about everything. This is one super simple example. Ulla wakes up and says to Boyd, “I was just having a horrible nightmare. I was in a super-dirty bathroom, and my bare butt accidentally touched the wall.” I’ve had this dream! But here’s the important thing: though you’ve probably had this dream too, you may not know what to do with it. Dojny turns it into a comic moment, an honest moment. The gifted writer takes the common (like the bare-butt-on-dirty-surfaces nightmare) and renders them uncommon (magical moments abroad). That’s a real festival of earthly delights. Djony, gifted writer, does orchestrate a festival.

Let’s move on. Americans abroad! First, they are so freakin’ funny! Second, my first book—which is not comedic so don’t expect to laugh—is about expats (Shameless Plug: it’s called The Freak Chronicles). Third, I thought Dojny’s rendering of the American abroad was great. There are too many fine passages to quote from; I’m just going to pick a few. Though it’s common to draw upon the strangeness of food, Dojny does so with just the right tone. He’s gentle, without arrogance. He writes about Ulla’s fondness for this one dessert that’s like a “hot-dog bun filled with soybean ice cream, then smothered in creamed corn.” Sounds gross, but you’d probably like it too. I know I ate worse in Africa. There are bowls that emit the smell of “a hot burp, with a hint of black licorice.”

He captures the fear, the trepidation, the goofy white-kid-among-non-white people thinking which is heightened in extreme [foreign] situations. When a bunch of teenage malchaks (the politically-oppressed group, because there always is one) do potentially dangerous teenage stuff when Boyd walks in their part of the imaginary exotic locale, Boyd’s thinking goes like this: “I tried to compose my features into an expression that said: I’m just a gareng [foreigner] on my way home, minding my own business. I don’t think what you’re doing is cool, but I’m not judging you, either. It’s not really a big deal. Just don’t get anybody killed. I’m a visitor from New York City, the ‘Big Apple,’ so, believe me, I’ve seen much worse. . . I don’t view you as ‘the other.’ I know that the same blood runs through all of our veins. You may not have realized this before, but I know that you realize it now, as you look into my eyes: I am not afraid.” Boyd tries hard to communicate all of this in one facial expression, and this sums up what Dojny does in his rendering of the gareng experience: he captures a vast and complex collection of wild, important experiences in a series of quick, often funny, moments.

Well, he’s funny, but can he write? I like this line: “I woke up this morning with a mouthful of rubies.” Isn’t that what a good comedic novel is like? A mouthful of rubies? Think about it, reader.

I wrote my own little list of the Best Books of 2012, which was really the best books I read in 2012. However, my first choice was actually written in 2011, and The Festival of Earthly Delights was my second favorite read of the year. But since it was, in fact, written in 2012, it’s fair to say it was my pick for the Best Book of 2012! Yikes, that felt a little like a mouthful of rubies too. Don’t try to read this final paragraph aloud.

Summary: this is a really good book.

Guest Review by Jennifer Spiegel
Author of Love Slave (September 2012, Unbridled Books)
and The Freak Chronicles (June 2012, Dzanc Books)

Guest Review: Laurie Weeks Reviewed by Kari Larsen

Laurie Weeks, Zipper Mouth. New York: Feminist Press, 2011. Fiction. 144 pages. ISBN: 978-1-55861-755-3.

Laurie Weeks' Zipper Mouth is the story of a girl living in New York. New York is populated by jobs she hates as well as parties that facilitate ecstatic transformation, but the scenery is dwarfed by her unbearable, thunderous desire. This girl, without apprehension, is accessed by her desire on every level she has ever operated - as a child falling wordlessly for celebrities, as a teenager aching to establish a dialogue with Sylvia Plath - and Weeks conducts this chorus with a kind of mastery that is endlessly positive for young girls to see. Her story demonstrates how it is alright and it is beautiful for girls to want hard - for a better job, for love, for recognition, for things they cannot verbalize. While Weeks does come off through her intimate storytelling as the kind of writer young readers will be dying to talk to once this book finds its way to them, a passionate reading and re-reading of this book will serve to reassert that Weeks does everything right, provides all the words about desire for girls who do or did not have them. With this novel, Weeks has nailed it. Any young girl who reads Zipper Mouth will be armed with the reassurance and sense of belonging in her own desires that stories unconcerned with the scope and power of her own person fail to provide her. It is books of such indifference that make up the majority of what girls are prone to reading, and for the sake of teenagers, Zipper Mouth deserves the ubiquity of a series like Gossip Girl.

Recommended for collections of contemporary fiction, small press fiction, New York fiction, feminist fiction, women writing fiction, and queer fiction.

Guest review by Kari Larsen
Editor of Enigma Machine Press
Author of the forthcoming chapbook, Say You're a Fiction from Dancing Girl Press (summer 2012)
Blogger at: http://cold-rubies.blogspot.com/

Guest Review: LIFE AFTER SLEEP Reviewed by Joel Thomas

Mark R. Brand. Life After Sleep. Chicago: CCLaP Publishing, 2011. Fiction (novella). Available as an e-book or in handbound edition. http://www.cclapcenter.com/lifeaftersleep/

Mark R. Brand’s sci-fi novella centers around the premise that through the wonders of science, humans can get by on significantly less sleep. A device referred to as a “Bed” allows for full rest in only two hours. Will we use the extra hours in our day for education, cultural enrichment, and making the world a better place? Will we finally get around to donating blood and going to the gym regularly? Or will we simply possess a few more hours each night to help us keep up with our favorite reality shows? Surely we can find more “Real Housewives” adventures to follow, and their own reduced need for sleep will provide even more snippy banter and social catastrophes.

Fortunately, Brand takes readers down a more interesting road. His own background in science and medicine informs the novella throughout, allowing him to provide detailed exposition and explanations of the technology itself and its effects on each protagonist. As we all know, the literary world of tomorrow’s technology often turns out to be a curse more than a blessing, and this novel displays the personal dystopia that is Life After Sleep. Capitalism always wins, of course, and readers soon learn that corporations expect humans to work many more hours, often for less pay. The most glaring example: a war veteran with PTSD working an inhumane number of hours at a futuristic version of Walmart. His Sleep (Brand refers to the shortened version of sleep with a capital letter: “Sleep”) struggles prove nearly devastating, as do the hallucinations of a rest-deprived surgeon who blacks out during operations.

Even with an overarching social theme, the narrative stays focused on individual lives rather than sweeping political statements. This move keeps the novella lean and intimate. Readers meet characters who stay vulnerable and believable, beset by problems and conflict but never forced into saving the world. One major narrative branch, for example, portrays the difficulties of a couple trying to adapt back to more traditional sleep patterns after having a baby. As it turns out, Beds aren’t safe to operate near infants. The young father/husband works too many hours without the benefits of a Bed and its technology-enhanced Sleep, and the young parents both struggle to adapt to their physical needs for rest. In another vein, a successful band promoter pushes the legal and physical limits of Sleep while dabbling in other intriguing technologies (which this reviewer will leave unspoiled so the reader can take pleasure in discovery). Her own desperate lifestyle brings a hedonism and danger-driven appeal to the book.

With Life After Sleep, Brand doesn’t push extremes, keeping a sense of relative believability. Some readers may prefer fantasies so unbelievable that the enjoyment comes from reveling in the seemingly impossible, but this novella’s appeal comes in its chilling likelihood.

Recommended for collections of contemporary fiction, science fiction, medical fiction, and Chicago authors.

Available from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography, or from Amazon.

Reviewed by Joel Thomas
Midwestern adjunct writing instructor
http://thecasserolex.wordpress.com/

Guest Review: Stefanie Wielkopolan Reviewed by Margaret Bashaar

Stefanie Wielkopolan, Border Theory: Selected Poems. Detroit: Black Coffee Press, 2011. Poetry. 61 pages. ISBN: 978-0982744048.

Border Theory is the debut poetry collection by Stefanie Wielkopolan. Wielkopolan grew up in Michigan, but got her MFA at Chatham University and currently resides in Pittsburgh. In spite of us sharing the same small city and the same small but vibrant poetry community, I had never heard of or met Wielkopolan. We weren’t even friends on Facebook (gasp!), so I went into this collection knowing only what I have mentioned above about Wielkopolan, and excited to read a collection by a young poet living in Pittsburgh.

The title Border Theory is quite apt – the place of each poem is set up in relation to other places in the book. You travel in a relatively straightforward way – from Michigan to Pittsburgh to Germany to Kentucky. While Wielkopolan leads you on a physical journey from point A to point B with little back and forth between spaces, each space is not so often described by what or where it is, as often as it is described by how far it is from another space in the book, or how it is different from another space. Places are measured not in city blocks or square mileage, but in hours away from one another, in miles of distance between the people residing in them.

In addition to a linear progression through space, there is also a distinctly linear progression through time in Border Theory. The poems set in Michigan tend to be about the speaker’s parents and grandparents, about the speaker's childhood. Transition poems from Michigan to Pittsburgh feel like poems that are also about the transition from childhood into adulthood, and so on. This time/space progression deftly reinforces the ideas of borders, with each move from one point to the next almost a rite of passage for the speaker. The only point at which this linear progression of time breaks off is when the speaker visits Germany, at which point some of the poems become about WWII. This is also the only point in the book when the events of the poems do not take place within the speaker’s lifetime or family.

While Wielkopolan brings the reader through a linear journey, the reader often is brought into a poem after the action - poems often seem to be recollections or explanations of aftermath and consequences rather than descriptions of action themselves. When paired with the plain, almost conversational language of the poems, this lends the poetry of Border Theory to a wisdom of careful reflection within the poems’ lines.

I ultimately felt very satisfied by Border Theory upon completion of the book. If you are going to read it, I would definitely recommend reading straight through, from beginning to end in order to truly take the physical and emotional journey mapped out in miles and hours.

Border Theory is available from the publisher website,
Black Coffee Press: http://www.blackcoffeepress.net
and from select bookstores.

Review by Margaret Bashaar
Co-host of The TypewriterGirls, editor of the anthology Make It So, and author of Barefoot and Listening (Tilt Press, 2009)

Guest Review: Alex Kudera reviewed by Joel Thomas

Alex Kudera. Fight for Your Long Day. Kensington, Md.: Atticus Books, 2010. Fiction. 264 pages. ISBN: 978-0984510504.

Fight for Your Long Day’s protagonist, Cyrus Duffleman, does not fit the usual literary profile of professors – well-respected educators who juggle natural charisma and artistic brilliance, usually while battling demons available only to the privileged. Instead, author Alex Kudera gives readers a glimpse of the modern faculty majority: adjunct instructors. Like so many adjuncts, Duffleman’s story unfolds as he travels between low-paying teaching jobs and even a few hours weekly as a security guard. A dramatic adventure involving political assassination and dangerous troubled students unfolds around the well-intentioned teacher, but he doesn’t have time to stop and play the hero, especially without health insurance, until the novel comes to its madcap climax.

Kudera himself takes on a tough job with this novel. The writer clearly wants readers to understand the heavy load adjuncts undertake for low pay, and he includes specific details that real adjuncts will recognize as absolutely accurate. Students struggling with mental illness surfaces as a sub-theme, too, and he treats the topic with sensitivity even while illustrating inadequate resources for such situations at most colleges.

The author blends this gritty reality with humorous fantasy, deftly balancing heavy subject matter and an entertaining story. Hilarious caricature illustrates the idiosyncrasies and mounting frustrations for the character he affectionately nicknames “Duffy.” The novelist also cleverly sneaks in countless cultural references. This reviewer’s favorite appears when Kudera describes how Security Guard Duffleman stumbles into an underground punk rock show and gawks through scantily-clad girls’ mesh halter tops: “Duffy X-rays specks of” a body part, a pun that nods to readers who might also be punk fans. The plot involves some outlandish intrigue, with humorous references to a “President Fern,” a Homeland Security official with the surname “Cliff” (substituted for “Ridge”), and the dynamics of on-campus political radicals.

The combination of wordplay, satire, and over the top excitement make for an entertaining read. At the same time, Kudera’s thoughtful commentary reminds readers that Cyrus Duffleman represents many long, low-paying days worked by real adjuncts across America. The elements combine for an enjoyable book entertaining and exciting enough for a broad audience but thoughtful and sharp enough for university literature professors, even those fighting for their own long days.

Recommended for collections of contemporary fiction, academia-related fiction, Philadelphia-based fiction, social and/or political satire, working class fiction, and urban fiction.

Available from the publisher and at select bookstores.
Distributed by Itasca Books (who work with Baker & Taylor and Ingram).
Read more at Atticus Books.

Reviewed by:
Joel Thomas

Midwestern adjunct writing instructor
http://thecasserolex.wordpress.com/

Guest Review: DEGREES OF ELEVATION reviewed by Doug Mathewson

Charles Dodd White and Page Seay, eds. Degrees of Elevation: Short Stories of Contemporary Appalachia. Huron, Oh.: Bottom Dog Press, 2010. Anthology of short fiction. 186 pages. ISBN: 978-1933964393.

To successfully capture a place; to transport the reader to a different world using words alone is a mighty feat. By observation or remembrance writers create narrative portraits of a place. People are often shown to us through their language and peculiarities of culture. Capturing a sense of the land is harder. The dialogue of Stephen King brings us back to his native rural Maine. E. Annie Proulx, with her sharp eye and careful ear has taken us on a long journey from Newfoundland, down through Vermont to Texas and finally to Wyoming. Every place is unique, as are its inhabitants. Both are woven tightly together in a finely detailed pattern. They seem to be inseparable. This tie between place and people is incredibly strong in this collection of new Appalachian short fiction. Degrees of Elevation published by Bottom Dog Press is a treasure. These seventeen stories introduce us to the independent-natured people who live in a very natural land entirely dominated by coal. These are fictional works, telling the stories of people who are very real.

I was honored to be introduced to Scott McClanahan’s kindly “Mary the Cleaning Lady” who helps a young girl gain a greater understand of the world. Silas Hound, Richard Hague, and Denton Lowing treat us to their determined eccentric characters. Each living life to its fullest. When I read Alex Taylor’s story “The Coal Thief” I felt I knew Uncle Ransom from somewhere. Then I recognized him as every mythological trickster from the Monkey King to Br’er Rabbit!

Hard times, doubt and depression offset with the smallest kernel of hope prove the most stringent tests of people. These tales are beautifully told by Mindy Beth Miller, Jim Nichols, and Sheldon Lee Compton. I earnestly cared for every one of their characters. Marginalized sub-cultures are explored by Crystal Wilkinson and John McManus. These writers introduce us to people we may not even know exist. “Horseweed” by Chris Offutt and “Into the Gorge” by Ron Rash both show us so much in so few words about the wooded hills of Appalachia, and how times have changed.

Several of these stories may well stay with the reader for years. Two in particular will always be with me. “Haskell” from Chris Holbrook’s “Upheaval” is heart-breaking man who is coming apart physically and mentally. The story is told in specific small language that is so much a part of this man’s life. In “Country Boys” by Rusty Barnes, Reena puts Jimmy in some enticingly difficult situations till he gets over his head, and has to decide. Jimmy’s choice is not easy, but yours is. Support small and independent press by purchasing this fine collection of stories written by some of the very best authors you will find today in American short fiction.

Degrees of Elevation at Bottom Dog Press:
http://smithdocs.net/recent_titles

Degrees of Elevation at SPD: http://www.spdbooks.org/Producte/9781933964393/degrees-of-elevation-short-stories-of-contemporary-appalachia.aspx

Review by
Doug Mathewson
Editor at Blink-Ink
http://www.blink-ink.com/
Published by:
Full of Crow Press and Distribution
http://www.fullofcrowpress.org/

Guest Review: Allen Frost reviewed by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE

Allen Frost. The Mermaid Translation. Huron, Oh.: Bottom Dog Press/ Bird Dog Publishing, 2010. Fiction. 140 pages. ISBN: 978-1933964409.

I know nothing about this author or his intentions. As I read this I wondered what it would've been like to read it at age 8. I reckon that might've been when it would've seemed the most magical to me. It seems like it'd be in good company if it were to be grouped with L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time, Evans G. Valens' Me and Frumpet: An Adventure With Size and Science, & Tolkien's The Hobbit - all of which stimulated my imagination, sense of wonder, & ability to daydream when I was 8 or 9. I'm further reminded a tad of novels for adults like In the Days of the American Museum by Robert Edric & Leonora Carrington's The Hearing Trumpet. While in some respects the novel seems surreal it's not really stream-of-unconsciousness enough to be surrealist. It's more stolidly in the tradition of kids books everywhere - there're ethical underpinnings that're a relief to me as an adult who's often exasperated by the boneheaded macho behavior of the male world. THIS BOOK IS (mostly) GENTLE - & thank goodness for that. The chapters are short, the language is simple, the characters are 'exotic': a former deep-sea diver, a mermaid, dolphins, a magician, elephants. The world is post-empire & the forces of fantasy are free-ranging.
http://smithdocs.net/BirdDogy/BirdDogPage.html

Reviewed by
tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE
http://www.thing.de/projekte/7:9%23/tent_index.html

Guest Review: Johnny Ryan reviewed by Eric Nelson

Johnny Ryan, Comic Book Holocaust. Oakland, Ca.: Buenaventura Press, 2006. Comics. 128 pages. ISBN: 978-0976684893.

In the graphic, gleefully offensive world of Johnny Ryan, body parts fly through the air and all bodily orifices (both natural and unnatural) are ripe for penetration. From the creator of Angry Youth Comics comes this book of sketches skewering comics ranging from Krazy Kat to Hi and Lois. Many times the jokes have little to do with the original content or turn on a dime into a wild tangent, an interesting choice considering every comic is exactly one-page long.

While some criticism has pointed out the fact that for Ryan, the laugh lies in how horrible the joke is in the first place, leading to the question of "Why do we need a full book of this?" I think one thing that's neglected in that discussion is the amount of detail given to each piece. While obviously the jokes won't be for everyone (Archie tells Jughead about his plan to put a firework in poor Betty's ass for being "a bananahead"), enough darts are thrown at the board to make a reader (and especially a writer) go back at the end, knowing they missed something. Highly recommended for comics nerds and those with a nasty streak. Guaranteed to put you on anyone's naughty list.
http://www.buenaventurapress.com
http://johnnyryan.com

Reviewed by
Eric Nelson, zinester and author of Silk City Series (Knickerbocker Circus Publishing, 2010)

http://knickerbockercircus.squarespace.com/books/

Guest Review: Peter Blair Reviewed by Robert Isenberg

Peter Blair, Farang: Poems by Peter Blair. Pittsburgh: Autumn House Press, 2010. Poetry. 80 pages. ISBN: 978-1-932870-34-3.

In Thai, farang means “outsider.” Specifically, a white outsider. The farang is the gringo of Southeast Asia, and there is no question, as one reads Peter Blair’s verse, that he is an outsider. But Blair is also deeply imbedded in Thailand, and as Farang progresses, we see not a mere outsider, but a man caught in a cultural tide-pool.

Among Westerners, Thailand enjoys a happy reputation – easy to fly to, traveler-friendly, full of exotic wonders. But when Blair began work as a Peace Corps volunteer, he found a different Thailand – a troubled country wracked by loathing and political turmoil. Blair dates a woman named Siripan, but her father “doesn’t like her/dating a farang.” He meets a “bar girl,” the infamous victim of Asian sex-slavery, who “says her father sold her, 10,000 baht,/to a Bangkok bar.”

One could expect such cultural dissonance in a country 7,500 miles from Blair’s native Pittsburgh. Blair seems savvy enough, but nothing could prepare him for the drowning of his friend, Ampon. This accidental death is a shocker, and there are many such moments in Farang – there is even a coup, while Blair is “up-country” – and they are all treated with an eerie Buddhist calm.

Blair adapts to Thailand, slowly and painfully, and by the time he returns to Pittsburgh, he sounds ghostly with new perspective: “In O’Rourke’s Bar and Grille, a mile/from where I grew up,/I’m a farang,” he declares in his penultimate poem, “Back in Pittsburgh for my Father’s Funeral.”

Farang has been described as a travel narrative, but the volume is something more – an intimate account of life on a cultural frontier. Blair is not only a white outsider, but a first-worlder living in a country ravaged by foreign powers. Like Steinbeck, Blair comes uncomfortably close to his subjects, and the proximity burns him. But this is what makes farang such a masterwork; if Blair can’t bring us all of Thailand, he can show us the tragic beauty of his scars.

http://www.autumnhouse.org/catalog/farang-by-peter-blair/

Reviewed by
Robert Isenberg, author of The Archipelago: A Balkan Passage (Autumn House Press, 2011)

http://www.autumnhouse.org/the-archipelago-a-balkan-passage/

Guest Review: Julia Wertz reviewed by Eric Nelson

Julia Wertz, Fart Party, Vol. 1. Baltimore: Atomic Book Company, 2007. Collected comics. 178 pages. ISBN: 978-0978656935.

Brooklyn-based artist Julia Wertz began publishing the online comic Fart Party when she was still residing in San Francisco over five years ago. Since then, this biting and brutally honest autobiographical comic has developed a well-earned following. Wertz, who also recently published her debut feature-length graphic novel Drinking at the Movies writes earnestly about the embarrassing, mundane and ridiculous events of one female cartoonist.

The genre of autobiographic comics is often plagued by self-consciousness and insincerity. I think the best example of this is shown by Jonny Ryan in a one-off comic about Art Spiegelman running past the Twin Towers saying "Pulitzer, here I come!" While many of Wertz's comics are to be taken facetiously, they refreshingly lack any sense of irony or vanity. A large portion of the material (80% of which was never featured on the original website) is relatable even as she waxes non-poetic on cheese, comics and the 101 things that irritate her. The collection also touches on the more serious as multiple comics deal with her relationship with her now ex-boyfriend. While one can easily find many of her comics online, the book is a necessity not only to witness the evolution of her visual style and subject content, but also because many of the best panels can only be found there. Definitely someone to look out for in the future.
http://www.fartparty.org
http://www.atomicbooks.com/index.php/fart-party-volume-1.html

Reviewed by

Eric Nelson, zinester and author of Silk City Series (Knickerbocker Circus Publishing, 2010)