“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.

The post Local Magic and Poetry in Noor Al-Samarrai’s “El Cerrito” appeared first on Newfound.

Nevertheless, it has been said that history is the greatest teacher even though the life lessons are usually tough to accept. Historical fiction is a great way to introduce readers to bygone eras, and James Markert’s “All Things Bright and Strange” (HarperCollins, 2018) is a powerful novel about illusions and reality within America during the early 1900s.

Set in Bellhaven, South Carolina, this novel is a moving exploration of enigmatic concepts, such as life, death and the meaning of religion. Protagonist Ellsworth Newberry is a professional pitcher who at one point contemplates suicide. This character is very interesting because he is much like the eponymous Hamlet from William Shakespeare’s celebrated play because they both consider taking their own lives because of their own personal struggles with confronting reality.

Newberry also has a symbolic surname: “new” implies “rebirth” and “berry” is a homophone for that fresh fruits could be harvested after performing hard work with dedication. This character offers readers a sense of hope for the citizens suffering in Bellhaven due to the chaos of World War I.

Ellsworth Newberry has very difficult conflicts that he must deal with given the nature of his circumstances. For example, the chapel that is found in the woods brings about a lot of tension for the townspeople who want to overcome years of mourning. The mourning is almost like a pun because “mourning” implies grieving, but “morning” suggests that there is hope for a new day. James Markert actually does a fantastic job at combining universal issues that people face in order to create a powerful novel that offers a lot about what life really means.

The title “All Things Bright and Strange” references our wonder at the seemingly inexplicable phenomena that happen throughout life. Think of all the reports of unexplained or strange lights that appear in the sky—such as will-o’-the-wisp. James Markert dazzles us with his spellbinding prose in order to remind readers that some concepts are simply inexplicable (and sometimes require no explanation at all). Sometimes truth really can be stranger than fiction in this world of ours.

James Markert is an author from Louisville, Kentucky who writes with the charm we’ve come to expect from the American South. He blends fantasy with reality in order to create compelling prose that is simply a joy to read. Sometimes life is full of tough questions that rarely delivers easy answers, but at least Markert does his best to offer explanations for these mysteries. Life itself can be difficult at times, but sometimes having a sense of faith and trust are all that people truly need in order to understand what it means to be alive.

Alex Andy Phuong graduated from California State University-Los Angeles with his Bachelor of Arts in English in 2015.  He is very passionate about art, culture and anything cinematic. His has been previously published on a wide variety of websites ranging from Literary Yard to The Society of Classical Poets. Alex Andy Phuong writes continuously and voluntarily with the belief that his writing will make the world a better place.

The post James Markert Blends Reality with Fantasy in “All Things Bright and Strange” appeared first on Newfound.

“What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.” – Muriel Rukeyser

Poetry collection “Hunger” by Judy Jordan (Tinderbox Editions, 2018) is an honest, intimate account of a woman and her pain. The speaker in the poems faces homelessness after an accident that injured a spinal disk in the small of her back. When the hospital bills became too expensive and she fell behind on payments, the hospital seized the narrator’s bank account. Every dollar to her name is given to the hospital, leaving the woman alone, impoverished and homeless. She goes into the forest where she lives in an abandoned greenhouse, with hordes of plants and insects for Jordan to describe in detail. Our speaker is injured and unable to provide for herself, breeding a physical and spiritual hunger.

Jordan uses the protagonist’s unique situation as a playground for poetry and imagery, giving us thick, clamoring descriptions to guide us through this chaotic situation. Poverty, starvation, injury, isolation, botany, animals, nature, politics—there are no limits to the subjects that Jordan illuminates. One common theme throughout the poems is the community of nature. She never describes one animal or plant but sees nature as an intertwined society working together, reacting synchronously to the environment as a whole. Between these environmental descriptions and the unraveling background of the protagonist, one begins to better appreciate the beauty of the greenhouse and the protagonist’s relationship to her surroundings. Jordan creates a living, breathing setting for the reader to explore, through her accessible yet intricate landscape.

When Jordan writes, she catches the reader by surprise—one minute the words flow as they describe this splendor, and then you read a single, searing line that catches your eye. The work is profound while our speaker remains humble, directing the reader’s attention to lush imagery, telling us to focus on the beauty of the words rather than their author.

Jordan also plays with the classics; poems are titled “Io” and “Prometheus.” These are names from Greek mythology, and although the poems (according to my interpretation) followed one scattered story line, Jordan’s reference to Io is intentional. Io was a human admired by Zeus for her physical beauty, although Io rejected his initial attempts at seduction. Eventually, the two began an affair, and when Zeus’ wife Hera found out, Hera turned Io into a cow. This led to Io’s ultimate isolation and demise, a state that the protagonist of “Hunger” often finds herself in.

Although the pain and suffering of this character seem like the essential themes of “Hunger,” Jordan remembers to feed us the stunning words that we are hungry for. After all, they ease our pain. It seems as if Jordan wants us to relate to the injured character, to see her as a metaphor for life. Sure, we all feel pain and no matter the magnitude, it still hurts. Instead of focusing on all that has gone wrong, Jordan focuses on the beauty in the pain. This seems simple enough, but Jordan’s poetry is too complex to be so easily deciphered.

The entire collection is beautifully written, gripping and deep. The only way to discover how viscerally you will react is to pick up your copy and dive in.

Shane Hoyle, Staff Writer.

The post Beauty Eases Pain in Judy Jordan’s Poetry Collection “Hunger” appeared first on Newfound.

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.

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The speaker diffuses bits of herself and her very visceral memories to a friend, lover or regular haunt, but it also clear she has absorbed parts of these people and places into herself as well. Indeed, the collection opens with a poem FROM a Goodwill, which is a perspective I’d never imagined correspondence from before.

A decades-long friendship is celebrated in “Letter to Kelly from the Memory of Har Mar Mall,” recalling scenes like:

Do ​you remember going public braless? I can’t
but I can’t undo the truth of flesh-and-blood photographs.
Rip them and the smallest shreds contain atoms of the youth.

Intimate recollections like this suggest that the speaker’s life has fused with the people in it on the atomic level.

“Diffusely Yours” is a work about locations and personal memories, but also the speaker’s own body. Again from “Letter to Kelly from the Memory of Har Mar Mall,”

Spider
veins remind me of heaven and they’re reality now
that I’m 30, joke age turned real.

These poems witness a changing and aging body, and yet the intellectual or emotional connections made along the way remain constant.

The memories shared throughout this chapbook could come across as inside jokes that most readers are on the outside of. But the language is so sharp that the specifics illuminated actually point to broader, even universal, truths.

I think my favorite in this collection is “Letter to a Wife from an Almost-Wife,” in the voice of a guest at the wedding of an ex. The speaker is sloppy but still elated.

We will always need mothers
because we can’t sew zippers ourselves, will
always love thrifting for the romantic salvage
& rescue vibes. I’m writing on your two-thirds
anniversary because every month needs fresh
champagne.

“Romantic salvage” is an intriguing turn of phrase and, I would argue, the nucleus of the project that is Diffusely Yours.

Kate Garklavs lives and works in Portland, OR. Her work has appeared in Juked, apt, Leveler, Tammy, and The Airgonaut, among other places. She’s the prose editor for the Submission reading series. She tweets @ueberkatester.

Laura Eppinger is a Pushcart-nominated writer of fiction, poetry and essay. Her work has appeared at the Rumpus, the Toast, and elsewhere. She the blog editor here at Newfound Journal.

The post “Diffusely Yours” by Kate Garklavs Suggests We Are All Connected on an Atomic Level 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.

All nine erasure poems in “Night Vision” come from the wildly popular “Cosmos” by Carl Sagan, setting a reader expectation of wonder at the universe.

Loss an destruction are detailed instead, through Wahmanholm’s gripping yet elusive prose. Wahmanholm tells a story of an unnamed protagonist and their cohort surviving an apocalypse of some sort, featuring a violet sky and a world where animals are dying. Poem “Jellyfish” describes the creature drifting to shore and being admired for its immortality and translucent body. “Beasts” speaks of some unknown pack of monsters surrounding the protagonist’s group, the “sulfur of their fur thick on my tongue, their musk thick in the roots of my hair.” Finally, the revealing poem “The Last Animals” explains that in this world, there are not many creatures left, and humans no longer experience thunderstorms, tides, or acorns.

The story is not simply about creatures and their disappearances, but about the gruesome experiences of surviving in this apocalypse. For example, “Fuse” is about the group waking up to find out that everyone has bombs in their stomach that might explode at any second, and “The Carrion Flower” is a poem about finding a body bag in the woods and watching it rot. The prose is slightly psychedelic and strange which can make the whole narrative a little hard to follow. If you’re willing to pour through the poems to solve the puzzle, it is guaranteed to be exciting and rewarding.

I was most intrigued when I realized that four of the twenty-one prose poems have the same name: “Relaxation Tape.” The poems are based on a giant voice or projection on a tape which sounds a lot like a guided meditation. But as the poems flow, the voice is said to be coming from “the loudspeaker sky.” Either this is a fact of life for characters in this universe, or the characters are slowly becoming less attached to reality, making them unreliable narrators. The whole chapbook only gets more interesting as you read on.

The erasure poems are simply beautiful and helped break up the thick pages of text with long spaces in between. My favorite, “The Ocean Calls,” includes the line, “We are precious tendrils of light. We may be a sun to someone. Why should we be utterly lost.”

“Night Vision” is challenging and carries a lot of poetic weight in both the dense prose or in the sparse erasures. Claire Wahmanholm’s chapbook is incredibly gripping, filled with small details that add much to the style and the narrative. As I reached the end, I decided that one read was not enough, and read through twice more just to begin to create my own conclusions and fill in the gaps. “Night Vision” does something truly powerful: it begins in Wahmanholm’s imagination and ends in mine.

Shane Hoyle, Staff Writer.

The post Erasure and Apocalypse in Claire Wahmanholm’s “Night Vision” 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.

The post Poetic Territorialization: Reading Janice Lee’s The Sky Isn’t Blue appeared first on Newfound.

In “What Do You Love About Haiti?” readers get to know a little more about Rusch. He travels, including time in Haiti during an earthquake. The powerful images here suggest he witnessed the aftermath of the 7.0 magnitude earthquake in 2010, as Rusch states:

I’d never seen a dead body
before the earthquake. The earth
that day felt like something moving
underneath, in pursuit…
After the earthquake, I became accustomed
to the smell of death, no longer noticed it
clinging to my clothes, my skin. It became
the norm that houses should look like dioramas,
rooms exposed: staircases twisted and mangled,
kitchen tables tilting.

These words leave the reader uncomfortable yet compassionate. Indeed, uncomfortable yet compassionate is the theme throughout “Dualities.”

Issues with the narrator’s father are often present across “Dualities.” “Transitive Properties” exposes a father sexualizing his daughter, even when apologizing for sexualizing his daughter. Then in “Daddy Issues,” the narrator points out their own cliche of having an emotionally abusive father—for instance, a father who makes his young daughter grab her belly fat and tells her she was only beautiful when she was two years old—and how it had an effect on the narrator’s choice in significant others or lovers. It is shocking to hear horrific things parents can say to their children, but it isn’t too shocking to know it has a lasting effect on the child, even in adulthood. It is refreshing to see an adult analyze the past to see how they got to the present. This is the very definition of “coming of age.”

“Dualities” will keep you reading and while it may be tempting to live vicariously or play the voyeur by peaking into someone else’s sex life, these poems are more than titillation. Readers experience how these subjects grow from each experience. Rusch’s narrator gives up plenty of juicy, and sometimes painful, sex stories. In pieces like “Men Tell Me I’m Selfish” and “Querying,” a fearless voice discusses things from kissing to oral sex, and also the human growth that comes from sexual experience.

Pop culture injects a sense of fun into this work. “Erotic Jealousy” mentions those magazine or online quizzes we take to find out stuff we just had to know (or didn’t really need to know) about ourselves, and how sometimes those quizzes just don’t get us or give us appropriate answer choices.

“Facebook Knows” talks about what we all talk about. The advertisements we get really delve into our personal lives: what we search, what we talk about, and somehow what we think about.

I am not out, not even to myself, and yet a page for FtMs seeking to build muscle mass appears in my suggestions.

Safe to say, you can expect some entertainment or laughs in this emotional read. Still, growth and duality remain the focus of this collection. The narrator struggles with identity, sexuality and gender. This is a peek inside the dueling mind with dual personalities. On being born female with heterosexuality a foregone societal conclusion, and experience with bisexuality. Readers are made to to wonder masculine gender identity is a good fit. Then, unsure if it even matters. Does it matter?

“Dualities” won’t give us and easy answer but it also won’t disappoint. Read “Dualities” to interrogate what actually matters.

Megan Andreuzzi is an animal lover and a traveler from the New Jersey Shore. She earned a degree from Arcadia University in Glenside, Pennsylvania, USA in Liberal Studies with a dual concentration in writing and a minor in theatre.

The post Beyond “Dualities” in Poetry by Jason Phoebe Rusch appeared first on Newfound.

“Assertion” may be too strong a word. These 12 short-short stories employ what I suspect is purposefully dull and vague language, creating characters numbed by the constant stimulation of modern American society. Narrators (often unnamed) drift through recreation activities but don’t have any fun—they don’t feel much of anything. The sparse language evokes Kerouac, but with a more limited vocabulary.

“A Very Small Forest Fire” opens with the titular piece, where a stoned narrator seemingly sleepwalks through roller coaster spins and a theme park evacuation due to fire. Our protagonist was riding the park’s tallest ride while the fire broke out, but not even this woke up his senses. He reports,

We went out towards the parking lot, filled with trucks and crowds of people staring at them. This went on for several hours. We left to go to the bathroom and get hamburgers.

Kerouac’s biography comes to mind again during “Defecation,” a flash piece about a youngish man milling around unhappily in his parents’ house after a move home when college ended. That discomfort of returning to the suburbs after a cigarette-fueled adventure through less manicured places is present here and it was essential to the disjointed existence of Jack Kerouac. (Kerouac’s relationship to his mother: So. Weird.)

Throughout these stories, zoned-out characters are surrounded by books, computers and television programs but don’t focus on anything very closely. Not even food holds any pleasure in the universe of “A Very Small Forest Fire.” I struggle to imagine a less inviting meal than this one described in “Calling Back Home”:

She went to the kitchen. Fried chicken from the night before was left in the fridge. She microwaved it. She scooped some potato salad onto the plate, pushed aside some of the pot to make room at the table, lathered the potato salad and fried chicken in hot sauce.

This artless style is most convincing when delivered by a first-person narrator. It is easy for a reader to believe that these characters experience their own surroundings in fragments and could only describe them in broad strokes. When an omniscient third-person narrator is employed, the delivery is frustrating. The sentiments ring false. Again from “Calling Back Home”:

Patti quit smoking and drinking after her son was born. One reason was she didn’t want to set a bad example. A deeper reason was that she no longer felt the need to fill those desires. She held Donnie in her arms in the maternity ward and felt nothing else mattered in the world.

Probably every mother on the planet would call shenanigans on this. We humans write about motherhood a lot (A LOT) and it is never this neat or easy to describe. The notion that motherhood obliterates all desire isn’t new but it also isn’t authentic.

The most effective piece in this collection is “Everyday Mr. Kent,” formatted as a journal entry of the exclusively trivial aspects in a day in the life of one Mr. Clark Kent, reporter for “The Daily Planet.”  Superman isn’t called into action on this day, so regular old Clark lolls in ennui. He thinks about his own arc:

He imagines someone making a movie about his every day. It would reject all the tenets of conventional literature: plot, character, setting, conflict. It would focus on a man, but not the man as a character, but as an idea. The idea would be profound and simple and normal and real at the same time. There wouldn’t be any romance or drama or arch. It would just be a man, who was just an idea, which wasn’t ever defined, but rather, merely, felt.

This is actually what this story achieves, though perhaps another reason this works is that readers are likely quite familiar with Superman’s back story, so we can plug in the gaps in storytelling. Also, the corresponding cartoon illustrations help convey more ambience and setting.

I’ll leave it up to other readers to determine if the short works collected in “A Very Small Forest Fire,” resolutely minimalist and solipsistic, succeed in any other goals: breaking new ground, entertaining readers, maintaining interest. Though I suppose these characters would snooze through any critique, anyway.

Laura Eppinger is a Pushcart-nominated writer of fiction, poetry and essay. Her work has appeared at the Rumpus, the Toast, and elsewhere. She the blog editor here at Newfound Journal.

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