“El Cerrito” primarily takes place in the stores, parks and landmarks of the Bay Area suburbs (like Albany, Kensington and Berkeley) where Al-Samarrai and friends wander, marking down their experiences and tapping into the local magic. The poet here often comes across as a kind of technician or historian, although her wandering is organic, each location seems to hold its own vast history and power which Al-Samarrai is able to tap into, inspect and explore.

In each section, the poet documents a new location and finds a new history. She takes the mundanity of each space and unearths what has been hidden underneath the surface. “El Cerrito” beautifully reveals these moments to the reader. I was often reminded of conceptual artist Sophie Calle’s project “Suite Venitienne (Follow Me)” in which the narrator follows a stranger through Venice, taking photos and detailing their movements. Only here it feels as if there is no real figure a step ahead of us. Instead, as if there is some unknown aura which moves the poet from one space to the next.

The first few pages of “El Cerrito” are almost deceitful. They keep the secret of the book’s later sections hidden incredibly well, because until the setting becomes the outskirts of Istanbul, I had assumed that we would remain in the Bay Area, wandering through various suburbs. Instead, Al-Samarrai abruptly (and almost metaphysically) rearranges the scenery.

Yet the structure and the objective seems to remain the same. Al-Samarrai remains a kind of historian/technician, entering these spaces and documenting their history as she tries to tap into the local magic. Where the suburban wanderings felt aimless and organic, the poet’s new trip feels more goal-driven initially, like she’s trying to reach Istanbul. Even then, we are only there for a moment before we again begin wandering these new suburbs. A familiarity soaks into this new environment and we return to that organic flow, drawn by the magic emanating from these locales and the movement of other bodies.

But now the scope of the book has become large and epic. The poet’s journey feels like a mutation of the hero’s journey (including a reference to Joseph Campbell himself), trimming the exaggeration and melodrama of the latter. With mentions of “The Hobbit” and “Lord of the Rings,” it seems that the poet has taken fascination with these vast journeys. But here, the subject’s movement through time and space is not driven by some idyllic boon. Instead, the movements of “El Cerrito” resemble the flâneur, Al-Samarrai takes up a position predominantly occupied by white men (Baudelaire as the most obvious example) and changes it into something less passive and mythical. Al-Samarrai’s wanderer is involved, active, discovering what each of these places is made from, archiving their histories, tapping into their magic. She is not the apolitical observer that Baudelaire desired his flâneur to be.

In these poems there is a focus on the local geographies of the suburban landscape, with these overlooked histories unfolding in the periphery of something much larger. Al-Samarrai expertly and beautifully examines these various locales. And I can’t help but recommend this book to everyone. It’s a perfect example of how the artist should wander and observe, the new definition of what a flâneur should be.

Mike Corrao is a young writer working out of Minneapolis. His work has been featured in publications such as Entropy, decomP, Cleaver and Fanzine. His first novel will be released in fall of 2018 by Orson’s Publishing.

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What I found most fascinating about this collection was the way these stories were arranged. Although none of them are connected (thematically or narratively), there is an impressive flow that forms between them as you read.

Leidner works with an engaging mix of realism and absurdism. In stories like “Under The Sea” and “Lost in Translation” the strangeness of the narrative is deeply rooted in our reality. A woman has an affair with someone she met at an arcade. A translator’s apartment gets robbed and he sends an email he shouldn’t have. In other stories, like “Avern-Y6” and “21 Extremely Bad Break-Ups” we are immediately pulled into the bizarre. This fluctuation between stories is what allows the collection to flow so well.

After “Avern-Y6” (a story about ants getting drunk as revolutionaries start a civil war) is the story “Garbage” (a story about someone having a rough day in a bougie cafe) and then after that “Void” (a battle of wits between a man and oblivion). This movement from light absurdism to heavy to light again keeps the reader on their toes. It prevents them from predicting what the next story will feel like, and from getting too familiar. Leidner expertly works within this eclectic frame.

The second story in the collection, “21 Extremely Bad Break-Ups” almost functions as a short story collection in and of itself (so much so that it was first published as a Newfound chapbook, a winner of the Newfound Prose Prize) and really accentuates this eclectic kind of absurdism. The piece constantly shifts between different perspectives. Moving from one vignette to the next, slowly piecing them together into something much larger. Lieder is not introducing a larger narrative but slowly creating the kind of fictional world that all of these relationships (and subsequent break-ups) could happen in: a place full of renegade buses, barhopping performance artists, and aliens assigned with protecting the Earth. Each time a new section begins, there’s no predicting in what direction it might head. The reader is forced to ease their grip on the wheel and let the car slowly curve off into a field or over a cliff.

This eclectic style is also aided by the multitude of narrators in “Under The Sea,” who each display very different and lively personalities. Never did I notice a narrator coming with me from one story into the next. April, the narrator in story “Bad-Asses,” shares little in common with the unlikeable middle schooler of “K-4” or the disheartened translator of “Lost in Translation.” Each of these characters makes for a story that can so clearly distinguish itself from those surrounding it. Leidner creates these fully formed humans with ease.

It’s rare that a short story collection flows as beautifully as “Under The Sea.” At times I thought that I might be reading a novel, perhaps a collage of short narratives in the style of “Soft Machine” by William S. Burroughs. A reader will never think, “We’re done here, time to move on to the next story.” Leidner is an exciting short story writer, working with original and playful ideas. “Under the Sea” is proof of this, and certainly worth your time.

Mike Corrao is a young writer and filmmaker working out of Minneapolis, where he earned his B.A. in film and English literature at the University of Minnesota. In 2016 he was an artist-in-residence for the Altered Esthetics Film Festival. His work has appeared in over 20 different publications, including Entropy, decomP, Cleaver, and the Portland Review. His first novel, Man, Oh Man will be released from Orson’s Publishing in the fall of 2018. Further information can be found at www.mikecorrao.com.

The post Eclectic Absurdism: Reading Mark Leidner’s Under The Sea appeared first on Newfound.

spending a good deal of time at a gas station, drinking Miller beer or following around a young woman he thinks might be his daughter (but probably isn’t).

Protagonist Shep has a very unusual relationship to time. He experiences a Bergsonian kind of duration, where time doesn’t progress past to present to future but instead leaps around from present to past to future to present. His movements between these temporal settings are sometimes jagged or abrupt, but more often they feel smooth and natural. He flows from one moment to the next.

Shep also experiences a fragility of memory. He often has lapses, forgetting hours or even entire days. He has given himself over to this kind of temporality, evoking Billy Pilgrim of Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse Five.” Unlike Pilgrim, Shep approaches this new reality with a kind of grace. He understands that he cannot change it or bend it to his will and as a result, he has learned to exist in this passive state.

This isn’t to say that Shep is a passive character. He is active within these constraints, as he decides to follow this young woman or to watch over the gas station when the owner is away. The passivity of his character is merely temporal, not an obstacle to overcome but the criteria of his existence.

The prose of this work remains clean and robust while it balances detail, thought and action. It does so in a way that begins to resemble television. Descriptions might feel like inner monologues or voice over, actions become cinematic and visually oriented and the repetition of certain locations (like the car, the apartment and the gas station) root the narrative in its setting.

These locations within Coldwater Canyon are the set of the literary “filming” and the strong sense of familiarity and repetition gives the novel a beautiful flow. Every return to the gas station hits the reader with relief. No matter what has happened, we will not be taken away from this place. We will always be in Coldwater Canyon (or at least in LA), locked in one moment of time or another.

The physicality of this novel is rooted in this kind of familiarity, this way in which the various locations appear and reappear. The gas station becomes homily and welcoming, a personal territory. As readers we become attached to and feel protective of it.

Kinney’s work here is very impressive. Even though she isn’t experimenting with form or content, what she’s done here is honest and beautiful, full of smooth and flowing imagery, lush with interesting ideas and moral dilemmas.

Mike Corrao is a young writer and filmmaker working out of Minneapolis, where he earned his B.A. in film and English literature at the University of Minnesota. In 2016 he was an artist-in-residence for the Altered Esthetics Film Festival. His work has appeared in over 20 different publications, including Entropy, decomP, Cleaver, and the Portland Review. His first novel, Man, Oh Man will be released from Orson’s Publishing in the fall of 2018. Further information can be found at www.mikecorrao.com.

The post Movement Through Duration: Reading Anne-Marie Kinney’s “Coldwater Canyon” appeared first on Newfound.

In the first section (titled “Salton Sea”), Lee explores her memories of and relationship to a certain image: the dead fish. She creates an assemblage out of the fish and the abstractions attached to it. The product of this process (the assemblage) is a beautiful piece of writing that is both honest and otherworldly. “Too, the murmur of a dead fish, the endless wonder locked in an image that is a thing in a place.” The fish becomes a medium to project other images, the body of water from which further ideas will surface. From the image of the dead fish, Lee finds herself examining the strange movements of time and what it means to be a person.

The essays throughout this book tend to fluctuate in form, sometimes looking like paragraphs and sometimes looking like lines of poetry. The language itself occupies space in a melancholic and distant way. When a paragraph ends and it’s preceded by poetry, the page begins to open up as the words grow farther apart. This fluctuation really had me noticing the amount of empty space on each page. This emptiness accentuated the inherent poetry that space is capable of containing and the effect that this inherent poetry can have on the reader.

I think that we can define Lee’s work here as a kind of “poetic territorialization” where the poem acts as an assemblage, constructed by the multiplicity of objects in a space. In other words, the poem is made from its surroundings (both physical and abstract). It is something to be extracted or witnessed. “The poetics of space has to do with articulating the inarticulateable,” Lee says. It is the examination of minutiae or the discovering of images hidden behind a facade. The familiar as it is stripped of its signification. The thingness of our surroundings.

In the second section of Lee’s “The Sky Isn’t Blue,” we see the ways in which the bed (and the surrounding room) become poetic. The physical space is made up of objects: the bed, the window, the floor, the ceiling. The abstract space, which lays itself over the physical like a blanket, is the significance of these objects. The objects of the bedroom are imbued with meaning. Each contains old memories and passing thoughts. The anxieties of being are found manifested in the everyday mundanity of this environment.

What this implies is that the poet is not the contents of a poem. The poet is the builder of the assemblage and the parts of the assemblage are taken from these physical and abstract spaces. The bedroom poem is made from the components of a bedroom. It is the “house unfastened.”

In creating this assemblage there are certain areas of difficulty. Lee asks herself how to write a space, how she can linguistically represent or mime these environments. And the truth is that this tool is inadequate. Language cannot do what we want it to, what we at a young age assumed that it could. The incomplete and vague nature of language has made this act of assembling difficult and risky. The act of writing a space is never comprehensive. The entire space cannot be contained. Here, Lee searches for ways to contain the parts of a space by using her own personal relationship to it.

“The Sky Isn’t Blue” is a series of assemblages, made out of various locales (like the bedroom or the Salton Sea) and the parts of Lee’s being that are tied to them. It is a discussion of the poetics of space, and an example of how space occupies and informs poetry. Janice Lee has made something incredible and ambitious, something certainly worth reading and learning from.

Mike Corrao is a young writer and filmmaker working out of Minneapolis, where he earned his B.A. in film and English literature at the University of Minnesota. In 2016 he was an artist-in-residence for the Altered Esthetics Film Festival. His work has appeared in over 20 different publications, including Entropy, decomP, Cleaver, and the Portland Review. His first novel, Man, Oh Man will be released from Orson’s Publishing in the fall of 2018. Further information can be found at www.mikecorrao.com.

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