W.W. Norton

A Journey with Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet

gwen — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 08:00:00 +0000

“But if the tradition would not admit me, could I change its rules of admission?” Eavan Boland asks in her new book, A Journey with Two Maps. This volume honors the accumulated change wrought by earlier woman poets, the self-claimed permission for women to write identities outside of the feminine, and the female victory of bringing the ordinary into the canon. She also proselytizes for a transcendence of the binary: that the writer can perceive the contradictory aspects of poetry’s history and practice and reconcile them through her work, and then use these two maps to reach a poetic destination.

Boland frames critical reviews of women poets - including Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Elizabeth Bishop, and Gwendolyn Brooks – with an opening autobiographical essay on her perception of the creative process as influenced by her painter mother, and closes with a “Letter to a Young Woman Poet.” She presents insights of her youth, such as the realization that the sublime is not some entity storming through the heavens in order to overwhelm those who make art, but rather, their creation. Boland also describes her appreciation of Plath, not as the scribe of self-inflicted internal terrors, but as a champion of the domestic, wisely selecting Plath’s explication of “Nick and the Candlestick”: “A mother nurses her baby son by candlelight, and finds in him a beauty which, while it may not ward off the world’s ill, does redeem her share of it.”

She acknowledges that her appreciation of Brooks grew from perceiving her as an author in the tradition of urban documentarians – like Hughes, Eliot, Sandburg, and Crane – to a “critique of race and nation,” and acknowledges that this understanding was cautiously negotiated through qualified comparison with her experience of Irish colonialism, not through some claim of instant affinity. I was also introduced to Charlotte Mew, a writer who I spontaneously liked due to her wry to response to the mundane social inquiry, “Are you Charlotte Mew?”: “Unfortunately, yes.” She also wrote the lines, “It may be that what Father said is true, If things are so it does not matter why.”

A Journey with Two Maps, Boland illuminates, in prose both fluid and lucid, the reasons why, pertinent to the efforts of woman writers, and the significance of the matter.

Written by: Erika Mikkalo, April 28th 2011

Sonata Mulattica

priyanka — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 08:00:00 +0000

By Rita Dove

W.W. Norton

Rita Dove’s poetry is seductive. Her narrative verse reels you in because it’s like reading a page-turner of a novel that suddenly immerses you in her beautifully recreated world. It is always a world she has taken the time to carefully research. In 1986’s Pulitzer Prize winner Thomas and Beulah Dove’s subject was the adventurous and bittersweet epic lives of her grandparents, who survived and loved through the Great Depression and into the Jim Crow era in Akron, Ohio. I remember reading it in college and feeling blown away, challenged by the sophistication and intelligence of her work.

Now with Sonata Mulattica, the former Poet Laureate gives us the obscure world of George Augustus Polgreen Bridgetower, a virtuoso violinist and accomplished performer in his own right in the late 1700's before he eventually met, performed with, and inspired Beethoven. Beethoven’s famous Violin Sonata No. 9—or the “Kreutzer Sonata”—was originally written for and dedicated to Bridgetower, the son of a black man who described himself as an “African Prince” and a white Polish/German woman. It’s sad but true that were it not for what Dove describes as a “saucy remark” made by Bridgetower about a woman Beethoven possibly had in his sights, a remark that so infuriated the composer that he angrily erased his dedication to the young violinist, the world would know him. We should be calling it the Bridgetower Sonata instead of the Kreutzer Sonata!

Besides Beethoven, other key figures are given voice in the poems: his father Friedrich, a well-dressed philanderer who remained dedicated to the crafting of his son’s image and seized every opportunity to showcase his amazing talent; the famous composer Franz Haydn, under whose tutelage the young Bridgetower remained while he lived on the estate where Haydn was musical director; Mrs. Papendiek, Queen Charlotte’s “wardrobe keeper,” who watched the child progidy perform at Windsor and recorded her front-row experiences in her diary.

There is a short play among the poems called “Georgie Porgie, or a Moor in Vienna” in which Dove lets all the major characters hilariously act out the events leading up to the sonata episode. I enjoyed her funny exploration of the way it might have happened, but I am saddened by Beethoven’s hasty decision and attempt to erase the man’s name from his beautiful work of art forever, and hence musical history. Still, I am thankful for one woman’s poetic imagination bold enough to resurrect this fascinating story, and I am also thankful for one of my favorite films, Beethoven. In the movie there is a scene that lasts only seconds: a black violinist is warming up in a roomful of white musicians. (I don’t really need to say anything about the poignancy of that description, right?) It was this scene that sparked Rita Dove to begin her research. I haven’t seen the film in a long time but I plan to watch it again soon, just for a brief glimpse of the one and only George Augustus Polgreen Bridgetower.

Written by: Natalie Maxwell, January 29th 2011

Word Comix

caitlin — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 16:00:00 +0000

By Charlie Smith

W.W. Norton

Word Comix by Charlie Smith is a collection of poetry that often explodes with strange and unfamiliar words. Reading it, I kept getting the desire to grab a dictionary and improve my vocabulary. Oftentimes the poems, especially ones starting with ellipses, feel like jumping into someone's inner monologues, getting a peek into their secret thoughts about politics, romance, being middle-aged, waiting, living in the city, the natural world, and many times, just the intense feeling of solitude and loneliness.

Word Comix is Smith’s seventh book of poetry, and he also has six novels published, among having received a variety of awards, grants, and fellowships. It is interesting to note that he is also a fiction writer, which I think becomes apparent through both his prose poetry style and the way he seems to take on a variety of different voices and personas throughout the collection. These constantly changing voices keep the collection feeling fresh and wonderful.

The poems that resonated most for me were the shorter, structured pieces, little scenes of emotion. My favorite was "An Illustrated Guide to Familiar American Trees," in which the narrator moves through the city, speaking of the bursts of city sunlight and certain trees on a block which they "love...like [their] own brothers." A few times, I felt the more verbose pieces lost me in their "above my head" word choices. But, there is also an irony and a humor that runs throughout the whole collection, that kept me reading through even those particular pieces.

I wouldn't say Word Comix is a particularly feminist work, but there were definitely little snippets throughout the whole collection that moved me and that I felt I could relate to. Many pieces definitely deal with the desire for connection even while living among so many in such a vast city. Inhabiting a big city myself, this was a theme I definitely could understand. So, don't expect any huge revelations or radical thoughts when reading Word Comix, but also don't miss the small moments of beauty it offers up.

Written by: Lesley Kartali, October 20th 2010

What Goes On: Selected and New Poems 1995-2009

mandy — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 02:00:00 +0000

By Stephen Dunn

W.W. Norton

Stephen Dunn, an experienced poet with a litany of accolades after his name, has published a selection of works from the last fifteen years, along with a slim collection of new pieces, in What Goes On In a wry, raw voice Dunn’s poems touch upon matters of politics, success, and sex.

Stark and economical with his words, Dunn reminds us of the vicissitudes of life, how change, especially growing old, affect those base matters. Time and again, he returns to sex, like a craftsman reviewing his creations and turning each imperfection over and over again in his mind. I see in this a tortured yearning void that is made bigger by the discovery of inadequacy. He writes in “The Waiting”:

…My body was an ache, a silence. It could not affirm how long it had waited for you.

It could not claw or insist or extend its hands. It was just a stupid body, closed up and voracious.

With a poet’s flair for metaphor, “Flirtation,” recounts the first parries of a couple in a café as the room slowly becomes populated with the guests Illness, Boredom, and Sorrow. He writes, “Look, Sorrow’s just been let in and given its favorite table at the far end of the room. It’s taking off its cloak. They’ll not see it for while.” Although such moments in Dunn’s works seem pointedly and hopelessly morose, there are moments of celebration, of the “beautiful accident of her bra commingling with your sock on a bedpost…in what has been without a doubt an emergency room, / both of your having died and gone to heaven / and now, amazingly, breathing evenly once again.” This particular work, “Best,” stands out to me as one of the more deftly executed works in the volume. The quickening pace and uneven line breaks make this sexual encounter a vicariously visceral one for the reader.

While this volume does contain some minute samplings of moments, such as that in “Best,” they are few and far between. Often, Dunn’s tone, if not downright downtrodden, remains aloof and misanthropic. When reading a poem, I want to feel myself breathing in each line, tapping and pulsing and nodding along with a rhythmic compliance to the words on the page, the images rolling off the tongue. I was disappointed that Dunn’s verse often failed to do this for me, and was often left with the impression that the poet had some higher knowledge than I, that his phrases were indiscernible to but a few.

However, I feel some hesitation in making these claims. To me, poetry remains ever more subjective than prose. An intense emotional connection is more integral to feeling unity with a poem than with a novel. Unfortunately, I am not one of those people who feel such a connection with Dunn’s work.

Written by: Cristin Colvin, September 15th 2010

Forget Sorrow: An Ancestral Tale

admin — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 16:00:00 +0000

By Belle Yang

W.W. Norton

I jumped at the chance to review Forget Sorrow: An Ancestral Tale, an unconventional graphic memoir from writer/artist Belle Yang. While I am no expert on graphic literature, I did devour Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis series. With this medium, I enjoy (and envy) the way an artist can show emotions through inked illustrations, and use words more sparingly. Further, there is an intimacy created on the page, because the typeface and conversational style evoke a personal journal lying on a nightstand.

Yang is a Chinese-American woman, and her story, in part, tells of the identity struggles she experiences in separating from the Chinese traditions of her immigrant parents. When she travels to Beijing for art school, Yang has a chance to learn cultural history while not being bound to it.

At the outset of her tale, we see the source of Yang’s title: her Chinese name, Xuan, means “Forget Sorrow.” When Yang was thirty years old, she sought shelter from a violent boyfriend by moving back to her parents’ home. While there, she began to give shape to her father’s childhood stories in Japanese-occupied Manchuria, World War II, and Mao’s Great Leap Forward. Yang writes, “I have a voice in America. I won’t waste it.”

The art in Forget Sorrow is tender, powerful, and moving. One ink illustration that stands out is Yang’s nightmare about her abuser, which captures a feeling of stark terror. In contrast, Yang’s illustrations also evoke tenderness between father and daughter, a feeling of comfort for him as he shares painful memories.

Yang’s story demonstrates ways in which strength comes from relationships. Her father’s tales are painful at times. Under communism, family relationships were made subordinate to party affiliation. Important aspects of tradition, such as honoring elders, did not apply if those elders were deemed to be landlords or capitalists. The political side of Yang’s family story makes it very clear that social change should not come at the cost of human life or dignity.

Through telling her family’s story as well as exercising her voice and her artistic vision in Forget Sorrow, Yang found new freedom. As a writer, artist, and woman, she shapes her own future.

Written by: Lisa Rand, August 23rd 2010

Bar Book: Poems and Otherwise

admin — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 16:02:00 +0000

By Julie Sheehan

W.W. Norton

Julie Sheehan’s third collection brims with a jumble of lyric verse, snippets of conversation, and wry prose reflection. The pieces take their titles from the outlandishly suggestive names of drinks: “Brandy Stinger,” for example, the opening poem, features the voice of an older woman boozily bemused by the plight of the modern (divorcing) woman: “All right one more, and that’s final. I don’t envy you/ your loose fits, your quick change.” The bartender, tracking the ebb and flow of the bar through the course of her day (sections are “Lunch Shift,” “Swing Shift,” and “Night Shift”), also tracks the course of a marriage through its grisly demise. One of the great delights of the collection is “On Pouring a Good Stout,” the book’s last piece, which should not be missed.

While the premise might strike the reader as initially cloying (“How to Make a Shirley Temple,” “Whiskey Sour,” “Jägermeister, Double Shot,” really?) I was immediately drawn in by the raw emotional timbre that sustained a lively chorus of competing voices in their shades of irony, passion, and indifference. The bartender’s increasing bitterness and vitriol is not given a solo stage, but is crowded, challenged, and occasionally ignored by a roomful of onlookers: friends, quirky patrons, husband and daughter all get to have their own say.

I am convinced, at the book’s end, that the metaphor of the bar is in fact brilliant. In the seemingly simple analogy, numerous facets of this woman’s experience are illuminated: she works, she mothers, she serves, she fights for and against a marriage. The metaphor suggests also both fuzzy intimacy of social bonding and the dangerous potential of overindulgence, the violence and vomit that spoils intimacy. Apt for teasing out a relationship gone awry.

What is perhaps most compelling about the collection—and the metaphor of the bar—is that it keenly appreciates the troubled role of traditional institutions. Marriage, the Church, Writing, as well as the ancient art of Mixing Drinks are all arenas in which the woman finds herself in a perplexing bind between loyalty and revolt. Some of the most compelling poems in the collection reflect on motherhood (“Malted Barley” juxtaposed with “Progress Report from Tiny Neglected Dears Day Care Center” is gorgeous); Shirley Temple is compared with the subversive prayer of Mary’s Magnificat, in which the privileged of the world topple; Religion is “Old Fashioned,” but the poems are both framed as, and interspersed by, prayers (the section “Prayers for the People” subverts church with realism and wit without losing affection for intercession); and the tradition of writing itself is emulated by the self-presenting poet, and subverted, as particularly in the scene in which famous poems are wrenched apart and used as ammunition in a confused and magical fight between the woman and her husband. In all these cases, the writer gracefully combines sober critique with affectionate appreciation.

The reader will cheerfully forgive some campy punning (“the mind of a bartender stays fluid”) for the delight of this biting, sophisticated, intoxicating book.

Written by: Elaine James, August 20th 2010

Toxic Flora: Poems

admin — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 20:30:00 +0000

By Kimiko Hahn

W.W. Norton

An extraordinary selection of poetry by Kimiko Hahn, Toxic Flora beautifies the ugliness of the scientific life and the elements of being human through poetry. Extending from the common small animals of the world to outer space, Hahn delivers a speckling of her work with both clever brevity and clarity. Projecting moments grasped from the New York Times, Hahn elaborates only the slightest amount necessary in her poetry, leaving the reader to ponder and to possibly wonder about the natural world and the human place in it.

Daily situations are approached from a poetic and often non-human aspect to bring feelings of the world beyond humanness. Prose poetry escapes definition in Hahn's description of wildlife that possess unknown talents and survival skills humans may understand when reading her poetry. To strike the reader, she sometimes utilizes italics to emphasize scientific horrors—irreversible human impacts. Sometimes humorous, but always thoroughly specific, Hahn's poetry possesses powers of imagination to reality. She expresses her yearnings while demonstrating her angst in asking questions throughout each piece while each piece connects and completes the collection. Her allusions to nature's subjection to pollution and a sullied environment again point out obvious human error.

Beyond her connections to nature, Hahn elaborates on the relationships of people to people, specifically father to daughter, lover to lover and mother to daughter. These human aspects help to signify the connections of all living organisms in the collection. Inserting herself into the poetry, Hahn brings relationships to herself. She alludes to her truths, her ways. Colorful and active, the poetry never leaves the side of the human living regardless of the role each human plays. Myths may exist, but Hahn again connects science to myth, deciphering bits of science for the reader.

Written by: Carolyn Espe, July 19th 2010

Elegies for the Brokenhearted

admin — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 16:01:00 +0000

By Christie Hodgen

W.W. Norton

Elegies for the Brokenhearted is a book about nobodies. The narrator, Mary Murphy, is a silent observer to the destructive forces around her that ultimately shape the outcome of her life. As invisible as her ubiquitous name, Mary is a shy—and at times optionally mute—child and young adult who finds very little to care for. We first meet Mary as a young girl trying desperately to gain the (positive) attention of her mother and uncle. As the reader learns more of these relationships, often one-sided with a young, vulnerable, Mary left aching for more, we understand why her emotions calcify at such a young age.

As silent as she may be to the other people in her life, as a narrator she is bitingly, viscerally descriptive, and engaging, and I found myself completely immersed in her world; always fighting for her despite her many shortcomings. The prose in this novel is engrossing and her world became very real to me, despite the overwhelmingly bleak, disappointing theme.

If the majority of the book was engrossing, the end left much to be desired. Mary, who had never found inspiration in anything—music, reading, working, even eating and talking—suddenly became a wonderful teacher of underprivileged youth and an effortless mother. The most destructive and formative relationships in her life, with her mother and sister, are terminated without closure, and she seems to heal from them effortlessly right in time for the last pages of the book. The reader had already come to accept Mary despite some loose ends; it would have been nice to see a more realistic, albeit less pretty, ending to the story.

This is not the cheeriest book you will read this summer, but the protagonist is a nobody that everybody will root for.

Written by: Colleen Hodgetts, June 19th 2010

I Was the Jukebox

admin — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000

By Sandra Beasley

W.W. Norton

As a poet myself, it’s inspiring to come across a writer like Sandra Beasley. Not only is she highly talented, but she’s also a young, female poet who has already published two book-length collections and received national recognition and awards. In her latest collection, I Was the Jukebox, it’s easy to see why she’s so successful. From the first page to the ninetieth page Beasley blends refreshing imagery with unique diction. She mixes myth and modernity. She creates lines that float from the pages and haunt your thoughts.

“You Were You,” which features the title line, is a primary example of Beasley’s mastery. From “I wanted to dance. I wanted a scotch. / I wanted you to take your hands off her” to “I played Aretha, Marvin, the Reverend Al” you can hear the rhythm in her poetry and you can clearly visualize the speaker’s life as a jukebox.

In “I Don’t Fear Death,” Beasley examines what’s behind nature and life from a female perspective: “what I really believe is that / we keep growing: infinite corn, / husk yielding to green husk. / I look back on the miles / connecting me to Earth, think / I’d have never worn those shoes.”

“Japanese Water Bomb” explores a relationship from both a male and female point of view. The subject of fragility is paired with Beasley’s vivid descriptions and musings and culminates in an explosive ending. Lines like “How the difference between an igloo and a block / of ice is only the body sheltered beneath it” lead to the powerful last few lines “How the moment splits, / a mitosis of love and chronology: how he is / her present. How she has become his past.”

Unlike many poets, Beasley effectively gives her subjects a voice. I Was the Jukebox includes a series of poems that allow things like an eggplant, a platypus, and a piano to speak. These poems make you stop and think “Wow, music really does seem to ‘slide loose’ from a piano,” and “Why is it called a duckbilled platypus anyways?”

Poetry is supposed to accomplish all that Beasley’s poems accomplish—it should make you think of something in a new way, it should leave you breathless, and it should follow you long after you’re done reading.

Written by: Michelle Tooker, June 13th 2010

Erotic Poems

admin — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Edited by George James Firmage

W.W. Norton

Love, sex, and springtime are fundamental themes in E.E. Cummings’ lifetime body of work, and in Erotic Poems, editor George James Firmage brings together pieces by Cummings’ that are especially sexual, exalting of fertility, and written in a voice that is at once fresh and wise, evocative of the dumb yet utterly precise instinct to procreate.

These poems, and the line drawings (also by Cummings), were selected from the poet’s original manuscripts and are diverse in their eroticism, tone, and form. Representing a spectrum of sexual desire, thought, and impulse, the poems range from humorous to romantic, graphic to tender. Some are raw, even violent, while others are philosophical, and still others are playful but intelligent. My favorites led me to laugh, delighted by both the humor and the poetic genius in the verse, or else moved me to a deep sentimental ache at the beauty and tragedy of love and the existential anguish in its inevitable loss.

A particularly evocative poem entitled "ix." has a dark shadowy edge evoking the violence of both desire and of life itself, as well as a melancholy awareness of eventual extinguishment of life. It begins:

nearer:breath of my breath:take not thy tingling
limbs from me:make my pain their crazy meal

Then climaxes with:

flower of madness on gritted lips
and on sprawled eyes squirming with light insane
chisel the killing flame that dizzily grips.

And finally concludes:

thirstily. Dead stars stink. dawn. inane,
the poetic carcass of a girl.

This is not your run-of-the-mill erotica! From the sound of the words themselves to the use of unconventional syntax and spacing, the poems in this collection wind up to a climax after following a cadence that varies in texture, from rocky to sinuous.

Perhaps my favorite poem, because it hit me so squarely in the heart, is "vii." After the lovers have made love and:

all the houses terribly tighten
upon your coming:
and they are glad
as you fill the streets of my city with children.

Resting now, the lovers embrace, and it is Cummings' description of the melding of their bodies and hearts that, for me, so poignantly captures the sense of oneness between them:

you are a keen mountain and an eager island whose
lively slopes are based always in the me which is shrugging,which is
under you and around you and forever: i am the hugging sea.

The line drawings are themselves poetic, expressive, and emotional. Their style is reminiscent of Egon Schiele, Chagall, Picasso, and the deco illustrative style of the 1920s. (Interestingly, Cummings worked as a portrait artist for Vanity Fair magazine from 1924 to 1927.) The drawings are a great complement to the poems, as each holds large and complex movement, lovers' limbs and torsos twisting and twining around one another, floating in passion.

The book itself has been beautifully and simply executed; when I took Erotic Poems out of its mailing envelope, I had the sense of receiving a valentine. Its white cover is sparely punctuated by rose and black text and a shadowy crease evocative of the furrow at the center of an open book, or the entry point in clean white sheets ready to be mussed. The fashion in which the poems are headed—with non-sequential Roman and Arabic numerals—didn’t make much sense to me, but that wasn’t really a problem. There were poems that seemed to continue into one another and a few that could work as a triptych. While this may not necessarily be intentional on the part of the poet or the editor, it is indicative of the streaming and deeply subliminal nature of Cummings’ poetry and this collection in particular, which reveals the interior erotic landscape of both body and mind.

Written by: Matsya Siosal, April 29th 2010

The Wave-Maker: Poems

admin — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Elizabeth Spires

W.W. Norton

If Elizabeth Spires' poetry collection, The Wave-Maker, presents a single image, it is something deceptively simple, like the flick of a blouse hanging on a clothesline. Difficult subject matter such as death, aging, and the meaning of life are examined by peering in to closely examine the minutiae. Here, life is made up of the smallest of things: the snowy hill, the snail's shell of a home, and how everyone needs a "a place to be quiet in."

Spires's poems are spare and airy. In "Story of a Soul," light enters a room where the "journal is deliberately cryptic." Like the windows the speaker wipes clean, this collection's poems are streamlined until they "everything is immaculate." The smallest of details are made mystical: the courage of a snail teaches something the speaker is not quite sure of, a white room suggests existence or lack thereof, and the tenacious bamboo in the midst of a thirsty backyard is in need of the speaker's hand. The Wave-Maker is bold because it asks what will happen once we leave. It is brave because it heeds to the present as much as it hints or recounts the past.

One of the best poems in the book focuses on the popular computer game The Sims. Spires retells the game as "explained by a child." Deceivingly simple statements make for a sharp poem full of meaning. Spires writes how "you design the people" and "adults don't have to have jobs they can cheat: / push the rosebud & money appears." Clear cut definitions of concepts like 'family' and 'love' shake readers into considering what is real or true. Spires writes, "a family is anyone who lives in the house with you," and "If you have Free Will you can starve or drown yourself / then you wander around as a ghost." Such details are chilling when considering the realities we form for ourselves.

Sadly, some of the lean lines seem brittle, as if the marrow has been sucked clean along with the flesh. All of the watching and observation sometimes results in a stagnant feeling. A line like "Foolish or true, the rose blooms only for you" seems too basic and loud for such a smart poet, and the poems' questions seem too obvious for such a subtle collection.

The Wave-Maker shows there is no beginning or end to the world. Instead, the wind comes or it does not. Meaning is brief and subjective. Spires's poems are careful waves that will wash over the reader, carrying him or her into poetry-centered meditation. We are all pallbearers, and we are all heroes. We can understand that we are all "a shell / a monument / a memory."

Written by: Lisa Bower, April 15th 2010

From Rage to Courage: Answers to Readers' Letters

admin — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Alice Miller

W.W. Norton

Alice Miller alleges that "most people (ninety-five percent of the world population) were beaten as children." You might think these are some pretty hefty charges: so did I. This book, in my opinion, does not seem to have any purpose besides encouraging readers to read Miller's other works, and also for blaming bad parenting as the root of every societal illness.

Perhaps I would have better appreciated From Rage to Courage had I been familiar with Miller's research, or if the book provided any empirical data supporting her claims. Instead, I was inundated by Miller's recommendation that readers acknowledge the childhood abuse they suffered, even if they didn't remember it happening. This book encourages everyone to delve into their psyche to try and find some hints of abuse.

I am skeptical of Miller's proposition that ninety-five percent of the world's adults suffered childhood abuse, but what really struck me as odd in this book is the claim that victims must embrace rage and shun forgiveness to cure themselves. I believe that anger can be a very liberating emotion, and I agree with Miller that victims of abuse should acknowledge the perpetrator's role in hurting them. However, I do not think a lack of forgiveness and a permanent angry state is even remotely healthy. My experience with anger leads me to believe that when a victim holds on to grievances, she is the one punished—not the abuser. Anger leads to bitterness, and both poison a person from the inside out. Forgiveness is not something that excuses the person in the wrong: it is a means for the victim to make peace with their past and go on to live their lives without dwelling on their pain.

According to From Rage to Courage, abuse victims need to dwell on this pain in order to "free" themselves. Without an explanation as to how this is accomplished, however, the book just sounds like an exhortation to permanent resentment, without any means to get to the next step of recovery. Perhaps Miller outlines this in her other works, but as a book considered in its own right, this one doesn't stand up.

Make no mistake: child abuse is horrifying, and probably occurs much more than is reported due to the helpless nature of its victims. I fully support awareness of this issue, as there is no doubt that child abuse affects people negatively all their lives. Alice Miller's collection of her own letters just seems a bit melodramatic to affect any change, and her goal seems more to increase her book sales than to offer solutions.

Written by: Sam Williams, March 20th 2010

Where I Live: New & Selected Poems 1990-2010

admin — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Maxine Kumin

W.W. Norton

It’s truly a shame that poetry is so often thought of as inaccessible, hopelessly and purposefully snarled with obscurity and flabby with rococo intellectualism. Great poetry should work on many levels, and thus appeal to a wide audience from those who appreciate it for its pure beauty and those that delight the complexity of further analysis. Maxine Kumin is a poet whose entire oeuvre is rooted in what she knows: her farm in New Hampshire, where she works in the ground, keeps horses. Her poetry is the dirt, it is the food scrap, it is the snort of horses, but she makes these mundane details peal out their secret beauty; she makes them transcendental.

Where I Live is a collection of poems that spans two decades of the poet’s illustrious career, which includes a Pulitzer Prize, a stint as Poet Laureate of the United States and countless other honors. The collection allows a reader to follow along with the contours of Kumin’s life. As with any life, there are personal and cultural landmarks, some common and others not so: marriage, giving birth, creating a home, a broken neck suffered by falling from a horse at age seventy-three, the death of a close friend, Anne Sexton. All are contemplated with a true, ringing voice and simple grace.

More interestingly, though, are those elements held constant. Kumin’s love for nature and animals alternately stings and sings. The reader can also feel her all-consuming vitriol for those who mistreat land and beast alike:

Damn all of you with dumpsters.
Damn all who do not compost.
Damn all who tie their dogs out
on bare ground, without water.
Damn all who debeak chickens
and all who eat them, damn
CEOs with bonuses, corporate jets, trophy wives.

Her poems of celebration are absolutely reverent: in an ode to her garden plants, she writes, “O children, citizens, my wayward jungly dears/you are all to be celebrated/plucked, transplanted, tilled under, resurrected here […] For all of you, whether eaten or extirpated/I plan to spend the rest of my life on my knees.”

It is from this celebratory spirit that she approaches her craft, too, referencing and playing with other poets, taunting and engaging them in her own verse. Her belief in the healing and cleansing power of composting and mucking out and gardening easily becomes a metaphor for her own work as a poet. Her exhilaration for both nature and language sustain one another; in fact, they feed one another, and Kumin, in her eighties, has much fertile land left to till.

Written by: Jo Ristow, March 19th 2010

New Collected Poems

admin — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 01:00:00 +0000

By Eavan Boland

W.W. Norton

Combining eleven of Eavan Boland’s books, New Collected Poems presents readers with her finest work. Boland, a contemporary Irish poet, guides readers across thirty years of her work in this 307 page tome. During the journey, one begins to traverse tradition, grasp snippets of myth, and peer inside the life of this extraordinary woman.

Most of Boland’s poems are written in traditional forms, which give her work a smooth consistency. The reader has a map of what to expect in terms of sound, but is still surprised line by line. Boland has a keen ability to construct proper syntax while remaining consistent in sound. She employs this technique in all her poems, even the ones that break from tradition.

While many of her poems explore Irish politics and myth, Boland also focuses on issues of feminism. In “The Other Woman,” she describes the role of the abandoned wife. With eloquence she captures the heartache of infidelity with lines like: "I know you have a world I cannot share/Where a woman waits for you, beautiful/Young no doubt, protected in your care/From stiffening and wrinkling." In “It’s a Woman’s World” Boland speaks to all women of the sad fact that not much has changed for women over the course of history and ends the poem with “a burning plume/she’s no fire-eater/just my frosty neighbor/coming home,” which speaks to many women's contentment with their lot in life who live without a fire for something greater.

Boland holds mastery over her words and New Collected Poems is a travel through sound and thought.

Written by: Michelle Tooker, March 13th 2010

Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen

admin — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 00:54:00 +0000

By Marilyn Chin

W.W. Norton

Forget fairytales and fables that threaten rape and violence to women who go off the beaten path, deny their parents, or refuse to marry. Marilyn Chin's novel, Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen, doesn't lock away its female protagonists into a tower so a prince can climb up their hair and doesn't ask the women to honor and obey their parents. Instead, Chin's twin protagonists are riot grrrls of the immigrant set: they take on everything from gender and sexuality to Chinese mythology and the immigrant experience.

Duality is a central component to the book: the sisters at the heart of the stories are like night and day. It's no coincidence that the sisters – Moonie and Mei Ling – are known as "double happiness." There is the hypersexualized sister, and there is the asexual sister: each is as wild as they are rebellious. Mei Lin throws herself into fling after fling as she makes deliveries for her family’s restaurant while her sister rips her away from too-willing American men again and again. Here, the contradictions of stereotypes are thrown into the face of the reader. The Madonna/Whore dichotomy was never so smartly articulated.

Chin is not unaware of what is at stake for her protagonists. Their boldness is spoken of when Chin writes of Mei Lin's reckless promiscuity: "It could ultimately mean the death of your tribe and your people." The children of immigrants often have high expectations to fulfill. They must honor their cultures and succeed in a new world. The tongue-in-cheek statement certainly has some levity behind it: Failure is not an option for the first generation child.

Chin drives the stake through the heart of the matter when describing the twins' reaction to a fellow first generation immigrant, Donny Romero: "Now he's on the East Coast studying art at Yale. How spoiled is that? First-generation immigrant and he gets to study art." While the girls rage and rebel against this expectation, they do indeed fall into it. They become the Ivy League successes predicted by their family and by the world around them.

The collection's only misstep is that the narrators, and consequently Chin, sometimes seem too pleased with themselves. Chin knows what she's doing, and like the adventurous Mei Ling, she seemingly has so much pushing the envelope that the message of the pieces is sometimes drowned out by the volume of the sexual escapades and wink-wink criticism of assimilation. For example, "Wiping One's ass with the Sutras" would be more than fine, but when coupled again and again with sexually explicit language, the rebellion at the heart of the collection is dulled because the nail is hit one too many times. The profanity is meant to jolt the reader, but without some relief from the jolting, the risk is desensitization.

The growing pains of the Chinese immigrant experience are bursting at the seams. These twins do not reject their heritage; they simply poke holes through its hypocrisies. These sisters do not blindly accept American culture, and mock its excesses. These are the new stories of the immigrant nation. It's no accident that the restaurant owned by the twins' family is called Double Happiness. Here, making one's way means working hard, sacrificing, and forging a path to the Ivy League schools, something the twins expect as much as the mooncakes they deliver. These vixens rebel and buck and crow against expectations: this "double happiness" of living in a new land with old world expectations. The twins make their own path without rejecting the history, expectations, and hopes of their family.

Chin does not offer a happily-ever-after-type ending nor does she offer a tragedy. Instead, the twins play in murky water and shed new light on old struggles.

Written by: Lisa Bower, January 17th 2010