An Inquiry of Place
On the surface Jessica Bell’s life seems like an envious one, being born into a house of indie rockers and growing up to become a writer, publisher and artist. But a closer look at her life, at least the one that she offers readers in her memoir “Dear Reflection: I Never Meant to be a Rebel” (Vine Leaves Press, 2017), reveals it to be one big fucking mess (to put it lightly).
Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London by Lauren Elkin (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2016) is an uneven read that delights and also disappoints.
The problem is, there are two books trying to exist here, but neither has been given enough time or attention. History-Flâneuse tackles the concept of a flâneur: a wanderer, city-walker, bohemian, and man of leisure. (In French, this word was created in the masculine form, thus the concept has exclusively described men who live a dharma-bum lifestyle. Flâneuse is the female form and Elkin is trying to make Flâneuse happen.) Memoir-Flâneuse retells a few uninspiring stories of romantic relationships gone awry set in various cities of the world.
Ezra Dan Feldman’s poetry collection “Habitat of Stones” (Tebot Bach, 2016) is tied together by a certain “arrogant man.” This recurrent theme throughout the collection also bumps up against notions of the body: its finitude, its mortality and the struggles and regret of intimate relationships.
The poetry collection “Disinheritance” by John Sibley Williams (Apprentice House, 2016) carries a sense of weight and burden of many kinds but primarily of the private kind, of private memories, histories, families, of the past, present and the future.
What do I think of when I think of equality? A good question, and, no doubt, one able to give us as many answers are there are people willing to answer it. “The multi-faceted issue of equality is ubiquitous and incredibly relevant,” writes editor Paul Alan Fahey in the introduction to “Equality, A Collection of 25 Personal Essays,” (Vine Leaves, 2017) which covers sexuality, age, race, gender and more.
We do judge books by covers and blurbs even though we are taught not to do so early in childhood. The blurb of Nada Faris’s new collection of poetry “Fountain of Youth” (Vine Leaves Press, 2016) introduces her as a poet from Kuwait and a person associated with Iowa University’s International Writing Program. My only introduction to Kuwait has been through the electronic music of Fatima Al Qadiri (in many ways a true contemporary to Faris). I had no clue what was in store.
The reverence and lyricism of devorah major’s poetry collection “and then we became” (City Lights, November 2015) is a gift to all readers as we move into the darkest days of the year.
I picked up an early copy of this collection at City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, so it was a special treat for me to be able to match my own experiences with these sights and sounds with the scenes from the poem “brown lady in white”
i have seen her
scurrying down mission street
gusting through tenderloin
pushing past crowds on market
One strength of flash fiction is that it can transport you into a mood or state of mind in the time it takes to brush your teeth. One pitfall of flash fiction is that because of that brevity, it requires a certain diligence and attention to detail at a higher magnitude than short stories or novels. In this way, it’s more like poetry, except that flash fiction also requires a plot, where poetry usually doesn’t. Flash fiction has a beginning, middle, and end, just like a longer story. Something must happen, some turn must occur in the characters or the events.
Jack C. Buck’s flash fiction pieces in “Deer Michigan,” a collection coming out mid-November from Truth Serum Press, are different. They don’t adhere to a plot so much as they follow their own internal logic, a confessional “On the Road” style of unedited diaristic writing.
A leaf blower is a strange object to base a poetry collection around, one might think. It is not beautiful, it is not a part of any regular person’s life for more than an afternoon each summer.
Anne Boyer
’s newest book, “Garments Against Women,” is a poetry-prose hybrid that glides between sentences, paragraphs, and chapters with a sense of purpose, leading the reader to paused reflection.