Graywolf Press

I Just Lately Started Buying Wings: Missives From The Other Side of Silence

admin — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 16:01:00 +0000

I Just Lately Started Buying Wings is a collection of memories and letters, speaking out from places of silence. Throughout the text, Kim Dana Kupperman conveys an enduring need to bring chosen tragedies to light and does so vigorously. She talks about her past in a cautious and gentle style, like cleaning a raw wound with salt water: painful yet cleansing.

The book unravels stories about difficult moments in life, describing the deaths of her mother and father, the after effects of radiation pollution in Chernobyl, and failed intimacy in her romantic relationships. She explores the many inner emotions that come along with these trying stages in life, and exposes her past bravely. One of her stories describes her trips to Russia and Ukraine, a private quest to learn more about her family's history. She constantly uses her imagination to investigate her ancestors, like fantasizing her grandmother walking the streets of Kiev. She is constantly searching for a connection between her identity and kin, but instead, she finds herself detached and is “reminded that the business of returning to a place that doesn't belong to me is impossible.”

This intimately detailed storytelling releases sweet sorrow that is rich and poetic. Each chapter is full of vivid imagery that fully traverses all the senses. She inspects small details in her memories: the smell of her lover's breath, or the texture of her mother's feet. The reader is brought daringly close to these personal realities. However, within the numerous events and settings, there is a pervading disconnectedness that distracts from the powerful writing. The loose themes of ancestry and “failed flight” ineffectively tie all these tales together.

Apart from the dispersed themes, Kupperman's “missives” are pungent; full of pain, resentment, and bitter love.

Written by: Cinthia Pacheco, June 8th 2010

Unrest: Poems

admin — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 01:00:00 +0000

By Joanna Rawson

Graywolf Press

The poems in Joanna Rawson’s recent collection, Unrest, have the quality of things scrawled in the harsh fluorescent light of insomnia. The lines scurry in jagged lengths, infesting the broad pages with buzzing images of immigrants suffocating in a boxcar, feverish babies, a suicide bomber, and war. This pervasive sleepless quality doesn’t preclude craft, though: each line is balanced, as is the book, despite its overwhelming intimacy of terror.

Rawson, a former journalist, used interviews as some of the material for the fifteen poems in the book. The poems based on real events are stark but not trite, woven of fragments of stories and shards of imagery. “Requiescat” is constructed of those elements, but an elevated degree of hope occurs when a cellist continues playing long after the audience is annihilated. The cellist returns day after day, until suddenly “We’re talking now about years into the terror.” After twenty-two performances, “as if to oppose utter mortalness itself, he lay down in the heat’s siege/sawing at the animal guts of that instrument./By then no one else could hear it.” Here, the cellist’s refusal to allow mortal silence to fall over the rubble is tragic and lovely.

The poems offer few other moments of respite, and fear is alternately elicited through treatments of violence and war, and sick children and domestic unease. A sole moment of near-serenity occurs in “Return Trip by Night”:

Low-slung rain reddened at dawn and made of the whole air a wild vow.

Hush. It was exactly then—

then that the puncture wounds we’d put for so long into wherever of ourselves was left started to green at the edges, turn into history and heal.

The shaking eases up by late autumn, and then the pallor, as the blue asters open.

In this poem, tragedy retreats in a shadow, allowing quiet, sleep. Yet the scars of trauma and tendency toward restlessness are still evident, and when the neighbors break bottles in the alley, “the noise is a fury.”

Written by: Jonelle Seitz, December 27th 2009

The Delicacy and Strength of Lace

admin — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 17:05:00 +0000

By Leslie Marmon Silko, James Wright, Annie Wright

Graywolf Press

The Delicacy and Strength of Lace is a rare and beautiful collection, illustrating the power of artful expression in a time when communication is, more often than not, abrupt, cursory, and expedient. The book, composed of letters exchanged between Leslie Marmon Silko, a celebrated fiction writer, and James Wright, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, is an "epistolary classic," and it performs the remarkable feat of capturing, in a tangible, material way, the nature of a friendship.

Their correspondence ranges over little more than a year, and in that short time, their relationship sees Silko's divorce, child custody struggles, and professional turmoil, and Wright's own family tragedies, flourishing career, and finally, his illness and death. They write each other at a spirited pace, even while Wright travels through Europe and while Silko bounces across the United States; detailed address lists and itineraries are tucked into their notes about landscapes and heartaches. Their devotion to one another is made all the more extraordinary by the fact that their friendship was initiated and maintained almost exclusively through letters. Its success was due, in part, to their shared facility with language, which allowed them a candor that would have been lost in the hands of less capable writers. The missives are written with such charm and sincerity that they do not feel like mere evidence of friendship, but like the substance of it.

The correspondence begins timidly, with some mutual flattery and formality, but blooms almost immediately into intimate conversation:

"Dear Mrs. Silko," Wright begins, "I trust you won't mind hearing from a stranger... I have finally had the chance to read _Ceremony, and I am moved to tell you how much the book means to me... I am very happy that you are alive and writing books."_

"Dear Mr. Wright," Silko returns, "Your letter came at a time when I needed it most. So many sad things have happened with my marriage and my children—it is good to know that my work means something..."

Silko writes with the ease of a natural storyteller, ambling from anecdotes about her farm to her personal and professional troubles. "Dear Jim," she writes in her second letter, "I just fed the rooster a blackened banana I found in the refrigerator. He has been losing his yellowish collar feathers lately, and I'm afraid it might be that he isn't getting enough to eat. But I suppose it could be his meanness too." Wright volleys with his own observations about writing and teaching. Where Silko writes with tenacity and sadness, Wright's letters are milder but more ominous. "It has been a pleasure to teach and work here in Delaware, but now once again I can feel time closing in on me, and there are still many tasks to be performed and many duties to be met," he writes, a foreshadowing of the cancer diagnosis that will kill him a year later.

The Delicacy and Strength of Lace was first published in 1985, and its reprinting today seems designed to point out that these kinds of epistolary relationships have all but disappeared. One may be tempted to blame email and blogs and Twitter, but to lament the informality of modern communication is miss a greater truth: Silko and Wright's remarkable correspondence was born out of their mutual love for writing. Their letters were crafted with a mixture of skill and affection that has always been rare. The immediacy and volume of modern communication may have diluted the frequency of clear, heartfelt expression, but this collection shows that our appetite for it is undiminished.

Written by: Rebecca Zerzan, December 17th 2009

The Man From Kinvara

admin — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 23:47:00 +0000

By Tess Gallagher

Graywolf Press

Tess Gallagher's The Man From Kinvara is a richly written volume of short stories spanning the well-known poet and writer’s vast and prolific career. Who knew narratives of such everyday life could be so fascinating and provide captivating images?

“The Lover of Horses,” the first story in this collection, is a tale of a family legacy passed on to each generation. Passions that start out normal and then evolve into obsessions are front and center in the characters’ lives. Horses, gambling, and enabling haunt these intricately developed characters. My investment in this story of a daughter called home to help her dying father paid off with complete satisfaction.

Gallagher puts a new spin on the Avon Lady in her story “Turpentine”. Ginny is the unconventional wife, who has turned handyman, while her husband concentrates on his career as a computer programmer. When the Avon Lady visits her home, Ginny’s view of the future is changed forever.

“A Pair of Glasses” is a poignant story of a little girl, who longs to view the world through the fuzziness of lens that are too strong. She wants this so bad, she wishes for her eyesight to fail and attempts to convince those around her this has indeed happened. Finally her father relents and she is given a real pair of reading glasses from the five-and-dime. Reality comes in the form of a teacher.

Most of the stories in The Man From Kinvara are set in Gallagher's beloved Pacific Northwest, and she brings this area alive in her prose. These stories are bursting at the seams with true heart.

Written by: Ann Hite, September 19th 2009

The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards

admin — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 16:23:00 +0000

By Robert Boswell

Graywolf Press

We’ve all heard it a million times: Never judge a book by its cover. And I usually don’t, but when I received Robert Boswell’s The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards, I judged. The package wasn’t very compelling. It’s as if the author, publisher, or whoever the hell in charge of such things said, “Let’s completely cater to the teenage demographic by naming the book after the only short story in it to include a curse word. And oh yeah, let’s make the cover as completely fucking low budget and Hot Topic-inspired as possible.”

Pictured is a blond in a cherry-printed bikini. Her eyebrows are drawn on, her lipstick is blood red, and she has a look on her face that says, “Come near me and I’ll rip your face off.” Her companion, a baby-faced, tattooed, waif of a man, has a mohawk and is cautiously pulling the blinds open with one hand and holding a nearly empty Jack Daniels bottle in the other. The cover left me wondering what the hell this group of short stories was going to be about.

Given the cover, I was pleasantly surprised by The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards. Before reading this collection, I’d never heard of Boswell. After some digging I found out he apparently has an affinity for society’s undesirables and Middle America. I too have a thing for freaks and geeks and these pages are jam packed with emotionally stunted, crippled, and horribly confused working class Americans who seem incapable of wanting or expecting anything more from their barely mediocre, sometimes heartbreaking lives.

Aside from the types of people who inhabit the pages, the short stories themselves have no unifying theme. Much of the writing is hit or miss, either dead on or completely over the top. Each tragically flawed character is interesting in their own way, but some aren’t very believable. This, however, is certainly not the case for Father McEwen in “Supreme Beings.”

The priest has a penchant for bourbon and beer, and gets an erotic charge when nearly forced to paddle the bare behind of a teenage girl in front of her mother. It isn’t so much the idea of having a naked, young woman quivering and crying in front of him, but rather the idea of having power over her, and the ability to spank her causes him to masturbate while mentally replaying the scene later on in his room. Eventually, Father McEwen comes to terms with the fact that he’s lost the faith necessary to remain in his current position, but that, of course, occurs after his sordid affair with a married woman.

Many of the stories featured in The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards failed to move me in any spectacular way. (“A Walk in Winter” is as long, tedious, and meandering as the drive described in its opening paragraphs.) That being said, each story includes a biting observation spliced in, like small truths I found difficult to shake off because they seemed so sad, so uncomfortable, and so like thoughts I’ve had myself.

Take for example the story of Howard Duel in “In a Foreign Land.” He is a fifty-something divorcee who’s found himself in the very uncomfortable position of being the oldest person at a mostly twenty-something hipster party. Everyone’s a writer, everyone’s fabulous, and Howard can see through their bullshit. Surprisingly, he’s not there chasing skirts and looking for a younger replacement: “Like most recently divorced men, I longed for my ex. If you have to ask why, you must be eighteen and of no interest to me.” Well, I’m twenty-four and still intrigued enough to wonder whether or not that’s a common feeling.

The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards is filled with people waiting on those who will never come back. People hoping for things that will never happen. People longing for things that used to be. People who are so wrapped up in the day-to-day bullshit that they can’t even see how bad things have gotten. Essentially, we’re all reflected in Boswell’s writing. It’s just that sometimes he doesn’t really capture the feeling as well as you’d like. Maybe in the next collection.

Written by: Tina Vasquez, August 21st 2009

Picking Bones from Ash

admin — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 17:08:00 +0000

By Marie Mutsuki Mockett

Graywolf Press

Marie Mutsuki Mockett’s debut novel, Picking Bones from Ash, drew me in from the first sentence. Satomi, one of the two main characters of the book, learns from her mother at a young age that in order to be safe in this world, a woman must be talented—not well educated and certainly not beautiful, a woman must be talented. Satomi spends the rest of her life following this example, first as a pianist both in Japan and Europe and then as a successful cartoonist.

The story begins in Japan in the 1950s when Satomi is a little girl. Because Satomi has never met her father, and her mother runs an izakaya (pub) to support them, the two are outcasts in their small town, facing scorn from most of the women. Satomi’s mother eventually marries, largely for their financial security, to ensure Satomi will become a famous pianist. As Satomi goes to Tokyo, and later Paris, to study, she becomes increasingly independent and alienated from her mother.

The story abruptly switches narratives at a key moment in the plot, and suddenly the reader is introduced to a new protagonist—Rumi, Satomi’s daughter, who is living in San Francisco in the ’80s with her English father. Satomi, as far as Rumi knows, is dead. Under the tutelage of her father Francois, Rumi has become a gifted authenticator of Asian antiques. When she begins seeing a ghost, she’s convinced it is the spirit of her mother. Her quest to discover what happened to her mother leads her back to Japan, where the story takes some interesting, though not unexpected, twists.

Mockett seamlessly takes her story and characters through Japan, Europe, and San Francisco. Both Satomi and Rumi are compelling characters, although Satomi feels much more complex. Satomi’s selfish actions turn her into a somewhat frustrating protagonist, but this also makes her more realistic, and when Rumi narrates in part two, I often longed for Mockett to hurry up and return to Satomi’s story. Ultimately, Picking Bones from Ash is a story of mothers and daughters—the inexplicable bonds between them, and how the presence or absence of a mother can shape the daughter. Through each daughter, Mockett tackles a difficult reality. With the American daughter, Rumi, she addresses the struggles of growing up motherless and relating to her Japanese relatives. With the Japanese daughter Satomi, Mockett dares to address the unspeakable question: What happens when a daughter leaves her mother—or when a mother leaves her daughter?

If you’ve read Amy Tan’s The Bonesetter’s Daughter, it’s easy to compare the two novels. Both feature complex and often painful relationships between mothers and daughters, cultural and language differences among immigrant families (for Tan, China; for Mockett, Japan), and the “ghosts” of ancestors. (In fact, Amy Tan has praised this novel, calling it “a book of intelligence and heart.”)

Although I couldn’t completely shake the comparison as I read Picking Bones from Ash, it would be unfair to Mockett to leave it at that. She’s created a unique tale with two unique women who are talented and strong in unique ways. Picking Bones from Ash challenges typical ideas of how mothers and daughters relate without ignoring one simple fact that every woman knows: our mothers are always with us.

Cross-posted with Gender Across Borders

Written by: Alison Hamm, August 10th 2009

Praise Song for the Day: A Poem for Barack Obama's Presidential Inauguration

admin — Fri, 22 May 2009 00:24:00 +0000

By Elizabeth Alexander

Graywolf Press

Elizabeth Alexander’s Praise Song for the Day: A Poem for Barack Obama's Presidential Inauguration captures the essence of hope. Alexander unites all readers through illustrations of day-to-day activities. She begins “Each day we go about our business/Walking past each other, catching each other’s/Eyes or not, about to speak or speaking.” This opening stanza illuminates the monotony of daily activities by breathing new life into them. She gives hope life, which President Obama is all about.

Alexander continues her poetic ability by portraying the essence of American hard work: “Someone is stitching up a hem, darning/A hole in a uniform, patching a tire/Repairing the things in need of repair.” She manages to connect all of us through her words and even reiterates this point in her poem when she writes, “We encounter each other in words, words/Spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed/Words to consider, reconsider.”

Her diction invokes rich rhythm and strengthens the impact of each phrase. This is most clear in phrases like “in today’s sharp sparkle,” “brick by brick the glittering edifices,” and “a farmer considers the changing sky.”

The poem is elegantly printed on rich cream paper and features a textured dark blue cover. Gray Wolf was a little too generous with the spacing extending this fifteen-stanza, forty-three-line poem over ten pages. Despite this, the book as a whole captures the hope of January 20, 2009, in printed form—a form that can be passed on for generations.

Written by: Michelle Tooker, May 21st 2009

The Winter Sun: Notes on a Vocation

admin — Wed, 20 May 2009 10:46:00 +0000

By Fanny Howe

Graywolf Press

Fanny Howe’s ostensible concern in The Winter Sun: Notes on a Vocation is the origin and nature of her writing life. Poet, novelist, and essayist of distinction, Howe also engages her familiar themes of mysticism, art making, and social justice, as well as her familiar backdrops of Boston and Ireland, with her signature catholicity.

In the two anchoring essays of the collection, which is Howe’s second work of lyrical nonfiction, she explores the origins of her work through bits of straight autobiography (childhood and adolescence in “Branches,” adolescence and adulthood in “Person, Place, Time”) interwoven with meditations on the works and (often famous) friendships that have influenced her. These two lengthy essays are refreshingly offset by several brief pieces, including the terse, brilliant “America,” a meditation on social injustice and spirituality (two pages); the glitteringly weird “The Land of Dreams,” a meditation on Jesus (one-and-a-half pages); and the gorgeous “Evocation,” a tiny slice of memoir made more sensuous by its subtle, tannic bite (four pages).

A mid-length essay, "Waters Wide," brings us from narrative of Howe's history into her present tense and recent past, moving with an easy clarity through meditations on the natures of time and language, writing as work as prayer, and qualities of transreligeous experience. There is an intimacy in this piece that is often lacking in "Branches" and "Person, Place, Time" which have their strengths in reading as cultural and political histories as well as personal ones.

Throughout The Winter Sun, Howe employs a prose form that has drawn accurate comparisons to collage. While these essays are rich in content, readers new to Howe may find her idiom taxing in the collection’s two longest pieces, where her narrative can become so broadly associative as to suggest evasion. Fortunately, neophytes to Howe have her extensive canon from which to draw if __The Winter Sun_ proves a mixed first meeting, while veteran converts will likely find it a fluid addition to her body of work.

Written by: Kaja Katamay, May 20th 2009

The Scattered Papers of Penelope: New & Selected Poems

admin — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 22:44:00 +0000

By Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke, Karen Van Dyck

Graywolf Press

The Scattered Papers of Penelope: New and Selected Poems presents compositions drawn from Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke's extensive oeuvre and includes five new pieces. A native of Greece, Anghelaki-Rooke was the winner of the Greek National Prize for Poetry and the Greek Academy’s Poetry Prize. Her poetry is lusty; corporeal; and rooted in flesh, color and tactile sensation. Verse and prose both vibrate with descriptions of a lush and living Greece. At the same time, Anghelaki-Rooke's words reveal a preoccupation with the vacillating power dynamic between the tangible and the intangible. At one moment, the body is its own autonomous king reigning over the spirit, a mere prisoner within; the next, the soul reveals that it is the supreme animator of bone and blood.

Van Dyck has carefully chosen the translations in The Scattered Papers of Penelope: New and Selected Poems, and acknowledges the fact that the author is “conjured” by a handful of different translators, providing the reader with a unique incarnation of the poet on nearly every page. The selected poetry spans Anghelaki-Rooke's career; the evolutionary cycles in her work create even more incarnations of the author. Van Dyck emphasizes a thread of voice that weaves itself through all of the poems, regardless of translation or time period. Anghelaki-Rooke's thoughtful, plush poems seem unharmed by their transition between languages. Whether this is due to the overwhelming voice of the author or the deft touch of the translators is arguable.

However, the real beauty lies in the differences between the poems. Case in point is the exploration of sex. Sex is grotesque and elicits feelings of squeamishness in the poem "Heat." Sex is transcendence in "When the Body" and annihilation in "My Plastic Thing." In fact, Van Dyck’s choice to use different translators (herself included) further emphasized with these contrasts. However, it would have been fascinating to see the same poem translated by an American living in Greece (Jane Assimakopoulos), a Greek living in America (Rae Dalven), a male scholar (Edmund Keeley) and a husband-and-wife team (Mary Keeley, wife to Edmund). It would have also been wise for Van Dyck to clearly note the date that Anghelaki-Rooke wrote each poem so that the readers could have appreciated the chronological differences in the compositions.

The weakest poems in the collection are those that invoke Penelope, wife of Odysseus, as a feminist figure. Despite the existence of works like The Scattered Papers of Penelope: New and Selected Poems and Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad, the famously faithful wife still seems a poor choice for a strong, independent heroine. Anghelaki-Rooke's strongest poems are those that deal with feminism in her own day-to-day life, not her re-imagining of Penelope’s long vigil.

As perhaps alluded to in the title of the collection, Anghelaki-Rooke's English-translated poems were previously scattered in small literature magazines and short runs. Here, they are united in a dynamic volume. Van Dyck's thoughtful compilation of her friend and colleague’s work is an enjoyable offering.

Written by: Jo Ristow, March 27th 2009

Findings: Essays on the Natural and Unnatural World

admin — Sat, 28 Jul 2007 19:11:00 +0000

By Kathleen Jamie

Graywolf Press

Jamie writes with sobriety, sensitivity and grace about the natural world and our human place within it. Her book is sparsely illustrated with delicate black-and-white photographs that picture many of her topics. She chronicles visits to places ranging from her own backyard to the Orkney Islands to Edinburgh and beyond, with a marked preference for those wilder spots where the human imprint may still be seen, but nature prevails.

In the Central Highlands she explores a glen scattered with “abandoned shielings,” small stone huts used by villagers for thousands of years as summer homes while they pastured their cattle on the fresh upland grass, and she reflects on a by-gone way of life. “Up here they made milk, butter and cheese, and it was women’s work. What a loss that seems now: a time when women were guaranteed a place in the wider landscape, our own place in the hills.” Living on and with the land is important to her; she pays attention to the seasons, the birds and fish, the trees and other plants, going about in all kinds of weather, walking, biking or sailing. At times she is with her children or friends; often she is alone. Always she strives to be alert, to catch that moment of revelation, “to glance up from my own everyday business, to see the osprey or the peregrine going about hers.”

The book opens with a chapter called “Darkness and Light” about the winter solstice, magical scenes of the half light of northern Scotland, her own desire “to enter into the dark for the love of its textures and wild intimacy,” and her pilgrimage to Maes Howe, a Neolithic stone cairn built with a long passageway arranged so that each evening, for a few days around the solstice, a ray from the setting midwinter sun shines through to light the chambered vault, like a promise, like a kiss. Nearly a dozen chapters later Jamie’s book closes with a joyous dolphin sighting off the coast of Tobermory, a celebration of life. Along the way she helps us see the value and vulnerability of an ancient, yet ever new, world now threatened by contemporary technology and human carelessness.

Buy this book, read it, scribble down lines you want to share with others, talk about them, reflect on them, enjoy a renewed connection with nature as well as a heightened awareness of our need to protect it.

Written by: Kittye Delle Robbins-Herring, July 28th 2007

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

The Resurrection Trade

admin — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 12:44:00 +0000

By Leslie Adrienne Miller

Graywolf Press

The Resurrection Trade is a collection of poems that details early anatomical research performed on female corpses from the point of view of the author, Leslie Adrienne Miller, who also provides glimpses of her own life as a daughter, a wife and a mother. There are over 44 poems in this collection, and taken together they create a rich tapestry about “the resurrection trade,” which is “the business end of trafficking in corpses,” and Miller’s experience in writing about it.

Miller conducted extensive research of historical documents and medical illustrations in studying this process, and she includes a multitude of resources in the notes section that were used in writing the poems. (Visiting the notes section is highly recommended while reading through the book.) All of this research lends a weight and authenticity to the poems that reminds the reader at every turn that the bodies, the people described, actually existed. At the same time, the reader is made aware of the way that women’s bodies were objectified in this process.

One poem, the title poem, is divided into stanzas that describe mezzotints, colored prints, Miller viewed. The most difficult poem to get through due to the graphic nature of the topic; this poem depicts corpses in different poses and at different stages of “undress.” For example: “She entire, arm raised, profiled looking left,--unwrapped entirely of skin except for two--breasts, neck and one greeny cream of shoulder.” Miller highlights how the bodies of women are still sexualized in death and dissection.

Equally disturbing but fascinating is “Mother and Son,” in which Miller makes comparisons between the bombing of the twin towers and a mother’s diseased body to help a son understand impermanence. “He’d seen the footage at school that day,--heard the talk meant to help him ‘process,’ and yet,--he couldn’t help himself: he had to ask his mother—to put her body up.”

The poem “Parous in Paris” brings together the reality of studying corpses and Miller’s life. She writes, “I’ve left my only child--home in another country for this walk--into a history of the body of woman--in labor,…the coppery scent of formaldehyde--sticking in my throat, I fight down--the unthinkable news delivered--at dawn via e-mail: someone else--is in my marriage bed,…”

[The Resurrection Trade(http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1555974635?ie=UTF8&tag=feminrevie-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=1555974635) is a revealing look at the one of the ways women’s bodies have been constructed over time through the eyes of men. The book remains grounded through Miller’s writing of her present day experiences that contain the humanity that is lacking in the tinted prints she has studied.

Written by: Shelby Smith, March 10th 2007

If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit

admin — Sat, 17 Feb 2007 23:58:00 +0000

By Brenda Ueland

Graywolf Press

As a writer, I was excited about reading and reviewing Brenda Ueland’s book, If You Want to Write. I thought that it would give me helpful tips on honing my craft. The book is full of tips, but not the kind I had expected. Subtitled “A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit,” the book is more philosophical than anything else. Ueland goes to great lengths to avoid dispensing advice on style or form; she believes such advice kills one’s writing faster than anything else. Her main concern is with freedom – the freedom to write straight from your imagination without fear or reservation.

The book is a bit dated, having first been published in 1938. It soon becomes clear that Ueland is addressing women, and one of her chapters is entitled “Why Women Who Do Too Much Housework Should Neglect It for Their Writing.” Upon reading this title, I thought that this chapter might no longer be relevant, until I came to the following passage:

In fact that is why the lives of most women are so vaguely unsatisfactory. They are always doing secondary and menial things (that do not require all their gifts and ability) for others and never anything for themselves. Society and husbands praise them for it […]. The poor wives are reminded that that is just why women are so splendid – because they are so unselfish and self-sacrificing and that is the wonderful thing about them! But inwardly women know that something is wrong (99).

This may still teach women something after all.

Ueland comes off as a Christian – although she does mention writing from past incarnations – and she believes that what is referred to as the “Holy Ghost” is really none other than the imagination where one’s creativity and inspiration flow from. To deny or silence this is the greatest sin.

The bottom line of If You Want to Write is that we must rediscover the creativity that has been murdered by teachers, parents and critics of all kinds. If we write to make money, get published, or please others, our work will always be dull. We must write for the pleasure of writing, because we have something inside of us that must be shared. She presses the reader to understand the fact that despite what we may think, we all do.

Written by: April D. Boland, February 17th 2007