Lisa Bower

The Keening

priyanka — Sat, 11 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000

A. LaFaye’s The Keening is one part poem, and one part novel. Though the narrative is strong, it is the layered, considered language, and the dance with fantasy that make this novel something special. Both a modern-day ghost story and young adult novel, the book is complex, something that can’t be tied to just one genre.

This book’s protagonist, Lyza, lives with her father on the fringe of a Maine fishing village. With the family’s feet dug deep into fantasy and another foot tipped towards reality, the village doesn’t quite understand them. After her mother’s death from the 1918 influenza epidemic, Lyza has to decide whether she will head to Portland to take a college examination or stay and save her father from those who do not understand his obsessions.

Like many teenagers, Lyza is unsure of her place in the world. Often, she feels as though she has been “orphaned” from her family’s talents and creativity: her mother’s knack for sewing and her father’s carvings. This feeling of otherness or isolation is not helped by her oddball parents who are content to live away from the village. Mater and Pater, as Lyza calls them, do not care that the town ostracizes them or that they are talked about. They are comfortable in their world of sewing, carving, and creation.

Once her mother passes, Lyza’s search for her identity intertwines with the plight to save her father from being institutionalized. Soon, she taps into her family’s heritage and sees the souls in her father’s wood carvings. Like many children who shy away from the thing that makes them different, Lyza realizes that she is not unlike her father, her talents are otherworldly, and that much will need to be done to mend the wounds between her mother’s family, her father, and the different worlds between which she is caught.

The joy of this book is when the descriptions are subtle yet layered. The characterization in this novel is punctuated by sharp descriptions. For example, LaFaye writes “...Mater liked her meals with the tides—breaking her fast as it went out, setting down to supper when it came in, preferring to eat as gulls do between times—pecking at this or that...” In just a few sentences, Mater’s personality is chiseled to perfection.

If there is a misstep to the novel, it is its ending. Here, the speaker tries to wrap up each string or piece of the future: mentioning “the staircase leading up the cliff to home. To college. To anywhere the spirits and the Good Lord cared to lead me.” The final sections of the novel explain too much: The speaker’s realizations about paths—whether or not Kingsley Cove could be emptied out—seem too loud for such a dream-focused novel. The strength of the novel is diluted when the speaker puts her feet on the ground.

It’s moments like when Lyza’s Pater looks up and sees “angels in meteors” or when the writer describes her friend, Jake, and his inability to stand up to his father as “folding like a church lady’s fan” that this novel shines. The poetry in this novel is sharp and layered like Pater’s wood carvings. When Lyza finally learns not to “trip over her talent,” it’s like the glow of a lantern on a dark day. Soon, Lyza learns that if she paddles long enough, keeps her eyes, mind, and heart open, and listens to what’s around her, the shore is sure to come.

Written by: Lisa Bower, December 10th 2010

A Little Middle of the Night

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

By Molly Brodak

University of Iowa Press

Molly Brodak’s poetry collection A Little Middle of the Night is wide in its range: big dog topics like perceptions of art and the weight of tragedy are sifted through by a careful and talented poet. These poems tell the story of how "we stopped making up stories of how our horror was salvation/ and just lived it."

Brodak's poetry is "turning under and under every buried thing." The reader is expected to follow suit, to keep up, and do the work necessary to access and engage with the poems. Broadak says it herself in "The First Poem." The first line tells the reader to "get up" and the closing lines explain that "the first poem" never did "ask you to sit."

If there's one criticism that could be latched to this collection, it is that the poems are not immediately accessible. Then again, the purpose of poetry is not so much obvious meanings, but what poets can line in their pockets, sleeves, and grinning lyrics. Brodak's poetry is about the act of discovery. For example, in the final poem, "Real World Magic," both the speaker and the reader sense themselves "formless in force, disarmed by a little sun, waking." We may think we are awake, but these poems take new stabs at age-old mysteries and ideas.

Dream, the space of darkness, and the relationship between nature and art are all examined. Like a child experimenting with blocks, Brodak is happy to manipulate and experiment with the abstract and concrete entities, as well as the space between such ideas. The joy of these poems is that they do not always rest on an answer but rather to the joy of the problem, vision, or idea explored. The poems are like a wheel: there are many spokes of meanings. To read her, you must climb without searching for an exact point. To cling to such hope, would cause you to miss the surrounding scenery as well as the blood, sweat, and tears of the journey. There are many nooks, crannies, and possibilities in these poems if you only make the effort to look.

Written by: Lisa Bower, July 18th 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

Hotel Iris

admin — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Yoko Ogawa

Picador

Having been forced to drop out of school to work at her family's seaside hotel in Japan, a young woman named Mari suffers through days marked by routine. She cleans rooms, minds the desk, and attends to the needs of the guests. The novel Hotel Iris explores what happens when a girl breaks free of a life of controlled repetition, only to fall victim to an even more brutal cycle of submission and domination. Taking shape slowly, like the way breath comes on a hot summer day, Mari reaches so far into the depths of her own fantasy that she eventually chokes on it.

The story begins when a translator and a prostitute have a fight in Mari's hotel. The seventeen-year-old is drawn into the sureness of the man's "beautiful voice giving an order, with no hint of indecision," as he barks insults and orders at the woman. "Even the word 'whore' was somehow appealing." This is the beginning of the end for both the translator and for Mari, as they enter into a secret affair.

Violence is found in every aspect of Mari's life, even the common procedure of styling hair is painful and brutal. Mari's mother is so controlling that she insists on doing the girl's hair, the force of the tugging dependent upon the older woman's mood. Eventually, Mari leaves one dungeon for another, thus transferring violence from the hotel to the translator's island, an isolated home off the coast that can only be reached by boat.

Publicly careful and timid, Mari's time on the island is full of pain, pleasure, and submission. As the translator's violence increases, so too does Mari's desire. The translator is decifering not only Russian pamphlets but also this young girl's body, expanding her worldview. The suspense in Hotel Iris is as suffocating as the heat, and metaphors are both abundant and rich.

The physical action of the characters says more than psychoanalysis could, and Ogawa does not overanalyze her characters' behavior. Many writers fall victim to saying too much, but Ogawa's chief strength is that she doesn't feel compelled to explain her characters' motivations. Instead, the iceberg is acknowledged without being examined.

The restraint shown in the early sections of Hotel Iris is sadly lost in its final few pages. Too much is explained at once, and the result is a rushed, incomplete closing to such a poetic and nuanced novel. The tension that held the story together ultimately dissipates with little pay off. Ogawa's patient weaving of an enthralling tale is what keeps the reader suspended, waiting to see if everything will drop and knowing that, if it does, the fall will be far and dangerous.

Written by: Lisa Bower, April 11th 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

The Housekeeper and the Professor

admin — Fri, 08 May 2009 18:43:00 +0000

By Yoko Ogawa

Picador

If you want to read a book that is punch-you-in-the-gut beautiful, then pick up Yoko Ogawa's novel, The Housekeeper and the Professor. This novel is a careful meditation on memory and communication. The precision of the plot is such that you won't know what hit you until you finish the very last sentence; you'll feel as moved as you do gutted.

The premise of the novel is seemingly simple: the plot revolves around the relationship between a housekeeper and a once-famous mathematician, the latter of whom was in a car accident that left him brain damaged. This man's short term memory is shot; it lasts for only eighty minutes. Armed with only decades-old memories and his formulas and theories, the novel shows that despite such loss, affection and love are still possible. Math becomes the language that penetrates this man's mind and allows him to make sense of a world that has changed without him knowing it.

There are no bleeding heart miracles or learning curve love affairs in this book. Ogawa is wise enough to let the novel's plot unfold without explaining too much. In this way, Ogawa understands the mystical power of numbers and memory—that what is unknown is as moving and powerful as what is known. As the Professor says about God, you have to acknowledge the truth of what can not be disproved. Thus, although the Professor may not have access to memory, the ties that bond are there; they cannot be disproved, and thus, they must exist.

The complexities of memory and love are present in the relationship that forms between the housekeeper's son and the mathematician. The professor may not remember Root, (the son’s nickname) after eighty minutes have passed, but upon each introduction, he is as paternal, protective, and loving as before. He feels something behind concrete memory—an essence, an idea, a certain truth. Thus, memory becomes something of an iceberg, both seen and unseen.

Ogawa accomplishes the seemingly impossible; she makes numbers exquisite, exotic, and alluring. The language of love is contained in the pluses and minuses and equal signs that dot the communication between the characters. The poetry of the formulas will curl in and around the reader's mind so they can't help but fall into them.

By the end of the novel, math becomes the decoder ring for the relationship built between the housekeeper, her son, and the professor. The journey they take is one that is equal: the son and mother discover one another as much as the professor discovers them again and again. You'll never look at a prime number in the same way.

Written by: Lisa Bower, May 8th 2009

Hymn to the Immortal Wind

admin — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 22:23:00 +0000

By MONO

Temporary Residence

Mono's fifth studio album, Hymn to the Immortal Wind, is a gauntlet of an album: while listening to the tracks, the listener will sit up a bit straighter and lean, as if trying to get closer to the band's intoxicating rock-classical pieces. Pianos and strings vibrate along with guitars to produce an album that is as concise as it is full. Few albums today feel as considered and as thoughtful as this one.

It makes sense: the band has been around for a decade. The instruments crash together to create an ocean of sound; true to form, the songs are like waves, sound rushing to both high and low pitches. The variation is as intoxicating as the combination of instruments like the glockenspiel and organ. If the listener closes their eyes and breaths in time with the work, it will feel as if they are sailing.

The album is able to capture the very essence of the wind: something that is both peaceful and turbulent. Thus, to single one track out of this concise set would be misleading; this is an album meant to be devoured in whole and not through careful bites. The songs included in this album are considered compositions that interact with one another. You can't experience the swell of the waves without the rocks that they smack against. This is what the songs are like. Mono paints a scene with their music, but it's one that is based more around the building of emotion than it is a liner account of a life. Instead, this album is exactly what it's declared: praise to something that is as essential as it is immortal.

Written by: Lisa Bower, March 24th 2009

Six Radical Politics Buttons

admin — Thu, 22 May 2008 02:03:00 +0000

By Bitter Pie

Making nice is not the focus of Bitter Pie’s products. Instead, with such loudmouth, all-CAPS statements as “Shut Your Pie Hole” and “You’re the Reason for the Jihad,” these buttons are certainly radical and proud with their politics. These buttons are small enough to place on a bag strap or on a lapel, and grouped together, they could be quite stunning, especially for the politically conscious.

The one downfall to these pieces is that the images are not always crisp and the font is not always clear. When this is coupled with the small size of the button, it makes their messages hard to see, literally. Though the images are sometimes grainy, this seems deliberate, a piece of the punk/DIY culture. Additionally, the sometimes unpolished look prescribes to the anti-corporation stance of some of the buttons. Chances are Bitter Pie wouldn’t want their products sold large department stores.

The buttons are perfect for the politically conscious individual who isn’t afraid of wearing their politics on his or her sleeve. Beware: Bitter Pie’s radical buttons are not for the casual user. After all, with statements like “Corporations are the real terrorists,” you can bet you’ll be noticed.

Written by: Lisa Bower, May 21st 2008

Invincible Summer, Volume II

admin — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 15:30:00 +0000

By Nicole J. Georges

Microcosm Publishing

Reading Nicole Georges’ collection of zines, Invincible Summer, is like opening a time capsule to not only the writer’s life, but also the community and time period in which she lived. The title of the eight zines collected in this book hails from an Albert Camus quotation that the author (zinester) found on an inspirational bookmark: “In the midst of Winter I realized that there was in me an invincible Summer.” And really, there’s a breathlessness to these zines, an excitement for life, that does make them an engaging experience for any reader.

The diversity of information in these zines is engaging. How can you be bored when you move from the recounting of a visit to the parental units to a list of the Top Ten songs Georges is digging to fun mini-comics and illustrations ranging from narrative to the random scribble of a pig. Additionally, there are times when Georges seems to directly speak to her audience, and then times that seem like explosive attempts at capturing an experience, whether it’s a trip or conversation or image.

Some zines fall into intellectual masturbation territory, but this book’s main strength is that it doesn’t take itself too seriously. Georges isn’t trying to play the role Ghandi or an all-knowing sage. Instead, Georges’ work seems hopeful and bright. Even when things don’t go her way, there is no doom and gloom. For example, old boyfriends are spoken about in sweet anecdotes and bad days are framed by humorous sketches.

The best part is that Georges does not romanticize her life or try to seem like a rock star. She’s just like anybody else. She “borrows” her roommate’s toothpaste, hunts (sometimes unsuccessfully) for jobs, and has trouble communicating with her mother. In short, Georges could be your friend, and reading her zines is like reading a friend’s letter.

Georges is as self-aware as she is talented. One of the funnier moments in this zine is when she realizes that she fits the Portland grunge stereotype. The best anecdotes in this collection are the ones linked to the smallest of moments: a night spent with a friend, a recipe, an image, and short illustrated synopsis of a day. To this author, the details of a drawing or moment are as important as its big events. This collection exudes an electric feeling of discovery. Life, as depicted in this book, seems open with possibility. In short, it seems invincible.

Written by: Lisa Bower, April 14th 2008

The Lyrics

admin — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 01:45:00 +0000

By Fanny Howe

Graywolf Press

Fanny Howe’s poetry collection, The Lyrics, includes poems that thrive on the lyric poem’s conventions; the poems include both the personal world of the speaker, as well as the universal world. Each poem is also a lyric by itself; each lyric comprises The Lyrics spoken about in the title. It is not uncommon for Howe to include first person plurals; the result is a collection that addresses the emotional journey of not just its speakers, but the people around the speakers.

If ever there was a poem serving as an atlas or guide for this collection’s reader, it is the poem “28.” from the first section of the book, “The Days.” This poem represents the journey that the reader, speaker(s) and poet are taking. Howe writes:

*A day is a freely given poem; it can be short or long. Contradiction, coincidence.

An emotional experience. Perseverance through hell.

A series of events you must not forget. Twelve sunsets, twenty nine dawns, all in one.

An epiphany. How long your hopes last

Until the next poem.*

This poem explains both the terrain of the poem’s conception and focus, as well as the terrain of human experience. The poems in this collection deal with “contradiction” and “coincidence” and how each “epiphany” leads to another “series of events.” The poems are short, but together they make one large poem. These “lyrics” are subtitled with numbers, as each forms the bulk of a larger poem. As the aforementioned poem is contained under “The Days,” it is both its own poem, as well as a piece of a larger poem. The lyrical poem’s “emotional experience” is what drives the collection’s pieces, but, oftentimes, the poems circle around subject matter just as humans see the world.

Gender has a prominent place in Howe’s book. If this collection is about the journeys we take and the accompanying emotions, then gender is a logical issue to include; afterall, Howe is not only a poet, but also a female poet. In poems such as “5.” - in the section titled, “Home” - power and equality are spoken about in the situation Howe presents. She writes about “the long pause” when “men and women/struggle with equal strength” and how, eventually, the man will “drag me through the streets” and how he “dropped me and the children at a station/Like statues he had cut, baked and broken.” Here, gender is spoken about explicitly. The male figure uses and abuses, and the female speaks as if beyond the grave of how “I must have been insane.” Here, Howe demonstrates the ways in which men and women have interacted, and how violent a traditional space, such as “home,” can be.

Patriarchal culture is also discussed in terms of war. In her poem, “6.” - in the section titled “School” - she writes how “humans and horses together” are “one thing.” Here, the culture is brought to an animalistic level; horses and humans, “pricks/in their pants…/draw up plans/for the continuing slaughter.” Here, the patriarchial violence is highlighted to draw attention to the culture’s violence. For this poem to exist in the "School" section insinuates the way in which violence and patriarchal culture are things that are learned.

The poems in Howe’s collection explore the world in which people live and the elements that affect each collective and individual experience. The poems contain inversions, repetition and an elliptical take on subjects such as religion, education, nature and gender. The world is broken into pieces, but the whole is created through each “lyric.”

Written by: Lisa Bower, July 19th 2007

Broken World

admin — Fri, 25 May 2007 13:40:00 +0000

By Joseph Lease

Coffee House Press

Don’t be fooled by the title of Joseph Lease’s collection of poems, though the world may be “broken,” the collection spends its time rebuilding, rationalizing and living despite it. Repetition fuels the elegy, “Broken World (for James Assatly),” a poem built in sections, a poem that works to remember a friend and writer who died of AIDS. The poem’s repetition is representative of how the collection operates: poems announce what things are not, only to reconstruct the world with its pieces. So, in the elegy, Lease repeats what things “won’t be”:

won’t be stronger. won’t be water. / won’t be dancing or floating berries. / won’t be a year. Won’t be a song. / Won’t be taller. Won’t be accounted / a flame. Won’t be a boy. Won’t be / any relation to the famous rebel.

The repetition - such as the repetition in Gertrude Stein’s pieces in Tender Buttons - creates a plain where things will be, where the poem allows for things to be stronger, a song, and taller. The other statement Lease repeats is “and I shatter / everyone who hates you.” The poem shatters not only homophobia, not only the loss of another person to AIDS, but shatters Assatly’s anonymity. In the back of the book, it’s stated that Assatly’s novel Hejira remains unpublished; these poems provide a space to praise Assatly.

The last poem of the collection exists in sections, each titled, “Free Again.” Through the use of space play and his use of the dash, Lease allows the reader to link associations, and to continue the thought. In this poem, Lease is offering a freedom of language and a freedom to make associations. Again, his use of negation offers the reverse. He may write, “... – there are no symbols, no spells –...” but the poetry collection is full of symbols and links of image, statement, and sound. The collection ends with the lines: “I can remember my secret book – / I was a ghost, you were the only one / who could hear me –.” By ending the book with not only the second person address to the reader, but with the dash, extends the conversation past the confines of the page. Lease’s space play, elliptical poems and second person address causes the reader to engage and read in a new way.

Written by: Lisa Bower, May 25th 2007

Check the Rhyme

admin — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 14:13:00 +0000

Edited by DuEwa M. Frazier

Lit Noire Publishing

Talk about a breaking silences; we finally have an anthology speaking to women of diverse backgrounds, backgrounds usually ignored or tokenized in more traditional publications. Check the Rhyme is a new anthology and one of the first dedicated not only to women of diverse backgrounds, but to both “female poets & emcees.” What do I think? I say: Hallelujah, Hallelujah; thank the stars this anthology exists! For one of the first times, female emcees and poets speak about issues as diverse as hip-hop, hair, Hurricane Katrina, and Black history. Long ago, the quest to break silences was begun by such artists as Nikki Giovanni and Audre Lourde; this anthology continues the struggle to have new histories and perspectives discussed.

The goal of the anthology, as its editor writes in the Introduction, is to “teach young girls” that this anthology exists. Finally, we have a collection does not “other” its subjects; the realities set forth under such section titles as “About Hair,” “Growing Up in the Hood” and “I Dream of Hip Hop” are presented as empowering, lyrical communications of realities one may not find in the next anthology of this and that. With both received/traditional forms such as the haiku existing in the same space as rhyme/rap forms, this anthology presents not only a diverse view of the world, but a diversity of poetic forms. Rather than villanize hip hop, this anthology offers new perspectives and offers a space to socially conscious emcees. In Mikayla Simone’s poem “American,” she asks “Where is my country?” I think her America exists in the space of this anthology tackling class and ethnicity and class and love and family, among other subjects.

Frazier’s anthology offers a new perspective of our nation(s), our world(s), and of identification. The result is a publication that empowers and will hopefully throw light on what has been marginalized or unseen.

Written by: Lisa Bower, March 1st 2007

Artistic Native American Postcards

admin — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 04:01:00 +0000

By Swaneagle Harijan

Transformation and prayer highlight Swaneagle Harijan’s art. Her paintings are rich with color and focus on women in a many states of being. We have grandmothers lifting their grandchildren to the moon in “Grandmother Dineh Supporting Future Generations," a white woman with a child of darker skin and blue eyes fleeing as a fairy catches the mother’s tears in “Mother and Child Flee" and more transformational characters as a woman with wings and flowing feather-like hair lifting a leaf to a thumbnail of a moon in “Deva of Herbs.”

The common denominator of these paintings rests not only in the vibrant reds and blues that pervade the sample of work I was able to see, but also in the depiction of women as they are connected to their environments. The settings are natural, but otherworldly; I couldn’t tell you where these women are, though the rust reds and yellow and orange landscapes might suggest the American West. The figures of these pieces are shown in natural worlds, the moon or sun are present in every single postcard and, in many of them, the women are lifting their eyes to these entities, as if in prayer.

Many of the movements presented in the paintings are painted with brush strokes that are also in perpetual movement. For example, in the painting “Mountain Mother Race Mixer” the trees seem to be woven and leaves curl forward, mimicking the shape of the woman’s wings and the manner in which she’s holding the child. Swaneagle’s paintings provide spaces where women are diverse in terms of both color, age and even their bodies.

Written by: Lisa Bower, February 26th 2007

Bitch (Issue #34: Green)

admin — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 12:33:00 +0000

B-Word Publishing

Trust Bitch to subvert their very own issue’s theme! In their Winter 2006 issue, they approach what has been become a trend in the magazine world from Elle to Vanity Fair: the “Green issue.” Thankfully, in the spirit of their moniker, the magazine offers a creative response to the very definition of what “green” might entail. Bitch turns its snarky eye toward the color, including such “green” issues as money, jealousy, and, of course, the environment.

Despite the theme’s popularity, Bitch’s approach is anything but typical; I don’t think Elle is offering a articles as diverse as “Wendy Somerson’s Knot in Our Name,” which discusses activism within knitting circles, or articles such as Audrey D. Brashcich’s “Sweet Nothings,” which discuss how girl power became a marketing tool. Along with such obvious topics as Sarah McAbee’s engaging article “Green and Not Heard,” there is also a history and analysis of the Girl Scouts in Aimee Dowl’s piece, “Troop Therapy.” Timely, as always, Hawa Allan’s piece “When Tyra met Naomi” peers in on race issues in the modeling world, particularly focusing on how the fashion world pit Tyra Banks against Naomi Campbell because there can only be one “other” or “minority” supermodel. Moving from modeling to a spiritual mode of money management, Bitch magazine hasn’t lost its diversity of focus and approach.

Written by: Lisa Bower, February 22nd 2007