Guest Review: Felino Soriano reviewed by Lynn Alexander

Felino A. Soriano. In Praise Of Absolute Interpretation. Desperanto-Foster, 2010. Poetry/prose. 90 pages. ISBN: 978-0-615-38013-1.

In Soriano’s latest work, In Praise of Absolute Interpretation, the poet celebrates the experience of allowing one’s self to respond to music viscerally, giving the mind the autonomy to instead tether to the unconscious over the intellectual, to feel music’s more inner motions. He both honors the work and produces inspired words- images coaxed- the mind urging text from this more earnest and primal terrain. He shares what the various pieces inspire on a level beyond what might be called our intentional perceptions, subjective and layered with preconceptions.

Soriano’s work brings to mind the experience of musical immersion and the deconstruction of perception in order to make way for the intuitive, and from there build the weave of his jazz-inspired poetics, the raw rendered beautiful.

Reviewed by
Lynn Alexander, co-editor at Full of Crow and Fashion For Collapse, and production assistant at Blink Ink
www.fullofcrow.com

Book Review: THE LOVE BOOK by Ken Wohlrob

K. Wohlrob, The Love Book. New York: Bully Press, 2007. Fiction. 216 pages. ISBN: 978-0615171425.

These stories of sex and death, attraction and repulsion, men and women, start out in a gritty mode, exposing the less pretty realities of some of life's unfortunates. One triumph of The Love Book is the tenderness Wohlrob reveals in the course of writing each relationship, a raw and recognizable humanity he brings to the surface in places the reader least expects: Compassion for just the characters with whom I was most uncomfortable crept over me in absorbing Wohlrob's deft and distilled prose. The stories in The Love Book are never veiled autobiography, but add up to an original vision all Wohlrob's own, one that has been piercingly and wisely lived, felt, and imagined. Recommended for collections of contemporary fiction, short fiction, suburban fiction, small press fiction, New Jersey authors, Italian-American authors.

Book Review: The Way the Family Got Away

M. Kimball, The Way the Family Got Away. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2000. Fiction. 143 pages.

Michael Kimball breathes life into American experimental fiction in this moving debut novel. The tale reads on one level like timeless myth-making, as the family makes its way from Texas to Michigan with their infant child, a few days past his funeral, in the car trunk. But the unusual narration, and Kimball's adeptness at imparting grief through both the telling and the silences, make "The Way the Family Got Away" the freshest literary fiction. The stories of the death, the family, and the trip north are told through the alternating voices of the surviving young brother and sister: The brother tells the tale in terms of which possessions the family must barter to get from one town to the next, while the sister narrates the doll version of the family drama and hopes to bring her baby brother--magically--back to life. In Kimball's novel we find a domestic fiction more often rendered by women: an emotional tale of narrow parameters and deep impact. This writer is one to watch: Highly recommended for both academic libraries interested in literary or American fiction, and medium-to-large public libraries.