reviews – Vol. 1 Brooklyn

Out of Ohio: A Review of Nick Rees Gardner’s “Delinquents and Other Escape Attempts”

October 16, 2024 No Comments

"Delinquents"

Nick Rees Gardner’s third book (So Marvelously Far, 2019 and Hurricane Trinity, 2023) is a linked story collection focusing on the fictional Westinghouse, Ohio. Right away, I was drawn to see Gardner’s world in connection with Sherwood Anderson’s linked stories in Winesburg, Ohio, and Gardner’s Delinquents didn’t disappoint. As the opening pages make clear, this Rust Belt collection is about a very different America than Anderson wrote about in Winesburg. They’re trapped; they’re often addicts; they’re seeking a means to escape Westinghouse; they’re looking to find love, meaning, connection, and some shred of satisfaction. Time passes or it doesn’t in Westinghouse, as the book points out. Too often, the characters struggle just to make it another day.

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Rhizomatic Reading: John Madera’s “Nervosities”

August 23, 2024 No Comments

"Nervosities"

In John Madera’s debut fiction collection, Nervosities, heavy concepts—diaspora, transversalism, the over-saturated and over-stimulated post-industrialized world Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man could only have dreamed about—are woven by Madera into human stories with such subtle, virtuoso touches, that Nervosities becomes much more than an objet conceptual.

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On the Road with Brain Modifications: A Review of Tobias Carroll’s “In the Sight”

August 19, 2024 No Comments

"in the sight"

Tobias Carroll’s fifth book, In the Sight, is a hip dystopian road novel. Farrier is the main character, and we follow his travels through roadside motels, eateries, gas stations, bars, retail locations, and secret reading rooms and societies across a futuristic American landscape. In the Sight was inspired by Destroyer’s 2002 album, This Night, and we trail after Farrier as he dispenses a mind-altering product which can change the trajectory of your life. A revision of life is what the product delivers. At first, I wondered if I was heading into Huxley’s Brave New World territory, or a new age reboot of Kerouac’s On the Road, but in a more nomadic picaresque journey. Rick Moody’s hilarious Hotels of North America even crossed my mind as well, early on, as I tried to figure out where Farrier was going and what he was aiming for in his journey. None of these truly fit what I found in this novel. We learn that Farrier and his friends Edwin Hollister, Lopez, and Erskine, all share a similar discontent about the lives they’re leading in university. Edwin names what they’re after: “Reincarnation…but without the death part.” The group experiments with DIY brain science alterations, which allow the recipient to begin a new life. Edwin partakes, revises himself, and sets off never to be heard from again, by Chapter 5. You wonder how many times Farrier has done the same.

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Ruptures and Raptures Resumed: A Review of Joseph Di Prisco’s “My Last Resume: New & Collected Poems 1971-1980 / 1999-2023”

August 6, 2024 No Comments

"My Last Resume"

I started My Last Resume with the Postscript, and I’m glad I did. In this short concluding essay, Di Prisco lays out a career in and out of writing, and his starts and stops as a poet. For those unfamiliar with his work, Joseph Di Prisco has been a novelist, a poet, a memoirist, a Catholic novitiate, a professional card player, a restauranteur, a high school teacher, a Ph.D graduate, an entrepreneur, and a founder of a nonprofit literary foundation. His resume is varied, full, and fascinating. That / mark in the book’s title spans a lot of ground and a life lived in service of others, as well as the written word. Di Prisco writes, “The explanation for the arrival of any poem or poet is or is not to be found, for better or worse, in the poem itself. Beyond that, maybe nothing can account for the rupture that creates the opening for a poem—or for that matter, the lifetime of a poet represented in his Collected Poems.” I was struck by the word rupture, and I realized Di Prisco’s collected works kept bringing me back to the joy and wisdom of the momentary, as eloquently championed by Robert Frost in his 1939 essay, “The Figure a Poem Makes.” Frost writes, “Every poem is a momentary stay against the confusion of the world.” This is an apt way to enter the world of My Last Resume.

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Unplanned Beauty in Dirty Waters: Brad Vogel’s “Find Me In The Feral Pockets”

June 19, 2024 No Comments

"Find Me in the Feral Pockets"

Brad Vogel’s Find Me in the Feral Pockets is a Whitmanic yawp for Gowanus. Often known as Lavender Lake, Gowanus became infamous as a dumping ground for local industries in the late 20th century and for the Mafia, if you believe the urban legends told of it. Now, it’s a Superfund site with a patron saint poet. Vogel’s poems come to life with glimpses of subway tracks above and the looming skyscrapers in the distance. The work ranges from pondering and playful to dark and depressive, as the voice takes careful stock of the strange hypnotic beauty of Gowanus, whether it’s roaming the streets on foot or floating down the canal via canoe. In “Black Mayonnaise” we see “Sick rainbows swirl/ Deep secrets bubble up/ Past percolating at low tide/ -And here I stand/ Bulkheaded, reeking/ Ancient timbers bowed/ A sponge garden/ With a runoff problem.” The stanza sets in motion so much of the volume’s energy; this place leads the voice deeper into itself. “I envy you, Gowanus/ We envy you, Gowanus/ You have an EPA/ To rid you of your PCBs/ A Superfund/ For your black mayonnaise/ Would that I could/ Would that we would/ Dredge ours up/ Omissions and failings/ Dredge ours up/ Half lives and toxic words/ Mix sludge with mountains/ With concrete/ To stabilize/ And cart it all away/ To some other state.” Poems like this one show the reciprocal relationship between speaker and setting—a longing to dredge up and cart away the toxins of the past to find some other state of being, to be strangely healed by regenerative powers of nature even in a state of pollution.

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Tennis Triangles and Dark Twists: A Review of Teddy Wayne’s “The Winner”

June 10, 2024 No Comments

"The Winner"

Teddy Wayne drops two clues in his novel The Winner’s epigraphs. First, “A little water clears us of this deed” from Macbeth. A sinister sign for what’s ahead. And then, from Allen Fox’s Think to Win: The Strategic Dimension of Tennis, “The true defensive player (or ‘dinker,’ as he is unaffectionately called in recreational circles) is prepared to hit ten, twenty, or more balls in the court per point…Dinkers understand the facts of life at the recreational level of tennis.” Both choices shed light on the narrative arc: dark, bloody waters ahead and defensive court volleys to score recreational points in a game. That’s our direction in this novel. The Winner transports us into wealthy, elitist Wasp America, and it sets up its social satire through tennis lessons and dark relationship triangles of sex, violence, lies, and concealment. It’s an entertaining, and darkly brutal twisting of the “rags to riches” tale, as it pokes at the dark heart of the American story of success at all costs.

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A Dog’s Life, A Dog’s Book: On George Pelecanos’s “Buster: A Dog”

May 24, 2024 No Comments

"Buster: A Dog"

George Pelecanos is a polymath who understands the Washington D.C. – area more than most authors. He was born in Washington D.C., he currently lives in Silver Springs, and he has fictionalized life in the beltway through scores of crime novels and story collections. Pelecanos’s creations are stark, also witnessed through his work as a TV writer and producer. His credits in this space include The Wire, about illegal drug trade and institutional corruption, The Deuce, about New York’s sex trade in the 1970s, and We Own This City, about police corruption.

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Journey Into the Self: On Vincent Czyz’s “Sun Eye Moon Eye”

May 10, 2024 No Comments

"Sun Eye Moon Eye"

Vincent Czyz’s novel Sun Eye Moon Eye traces the post-genocidal, and by extension post-apocalyptic, journey of Logan Blackfeather, a Hopi “of mixed descent.” On the surface, Logan’s story revolves around coming to terms with his father’s death; the suicide of the abusive uncle who replaced him (as titular father only); the knifing of a racist truck driver for which he is sent to prison and then a psychiatric facility; and his slow reemergence into the world via the therapeutic trinity of love—his relationship with Shawna, a woman he meets on the lam in Manhattan—art—his return to composing the music he’d given up on in the midst of trauma—and ethnic reconciliation—reclaiming his heritage from the legacy of colonialism and settlement. On a deeper level, Logan’s journey is really about his dwelling along the margin of where the waking world—one of broken families, addiction, poverty, deracination, violence—meets an animist dreamscape—southwestern geography fused to a Hopi mythography.