girls in art (christina rothenbeck)

released just a couple of weeks ago, Girls in Art is christina rothenbeck's first chapbook, and it's available from dancing girl press (http://dulcetshop.ecrater.com/p/16193127/girls-in-art-christina-rothenbeck# ).

there are numerous reasons why you might enjoy this little book, one of course being its charming cover art. The poems in this collection touch on a wide range of subjects: egyptian miniatures, grey hair, fever dreams, laundry, frieda kahlo, nicknames, a robbery -- it's hard for me to pick a favorite.

rothenbeck's conversational tone makes her poems very accessible, and her evident interest in the world around her is contagious. the two recurring themes among these poems are the body and the mirror. observing her own body, at times as if it was someone else's, at times in pictures, at times in mirrors, she  manages to capture what it is to be alive in this world, and the desire to avoid, to redistribute some of these experiences.

"I could knit my own twin out of wire, / a little yarn for hair. Ghost double, mirror's mirror" she explains, "the unnameable growing inside me, / bundle of hair and bone and teeth. I've been hiding this / so carefully." (from I want to make someone feel this for me so I don't have to)

All Is Vanity by Charles Allan Gilbert (1892)

what i like most about her poetry is how it manages to subvert, to introduce the strange into the every-day: there is a certain domesticity to some of the poems here, but in the creases of that linen there is strangeness, the house is haunted, the girl is a ghost, tired of writing for the dead.

Suddenly there's all this noticing going on;
the light is almost painfully bright.
You're feeling everything at once --
like the world caught you watching
in the dark beneath its window. 

(from This is a troubling idea)

i thoroughly enjoyed this playful chapbook, and if any of the above sounds good to you, you might want to get a copy of your own. :)

Y (leslie adrienne miller)

thanks to the good folks as goodreads and the generous associates at graywolf press, i have this copy of the uncorrected proofs of leslie adrienne miller's Y right here beside me. with the madness of a busy semester behind me, i can finally give it the attention it deserves. here goes.

the book caught my eye immediately for two reasons: the one letter title and the gorgeous cover. the cover is actually photograph of another artist's work. australian artist ron mueck did a series of oversized, hyperrealistic sculptures of people (including that of the boy on the cover), and they are gorgeously detailed and uncanny. in a nice way.

but the book has much more to offer. after the code-switching, language-playing title poem about the y chromosome that makes half of the world's population what they are by its presence, and the other half by its absence, there's the lucifer effect -- and even while i was reading it the first time, i could tell i was torn: the poem works beautifully, it's very effective emotionally, it's like a giant fist closing around my chest. not a good feeling. but fascinating. here's a taste:

Learning her limits is a game he suspects
he shouldn't play, but sometimes he's quiet
on purpose: some funny place in him likes
to see her struggle to locate whatever he is
beyond squirm and din.

the boy like a predator teasing his prey, an elderly neighbour who is nearly blind. she knows he's there but she can't see him. and this is where, tacky as it sounds, this poem breaks my heart:

Crouched in a shrub, he waits
for the moment to unfurl its enormous flock
of risks, only to wheel back and settle again/
He waits until her smile begins to slide, until
the inevitable stumble, and there it is --
tingle of dark cause, sensation ajar,
rippling across his scalp. 

that slipping smile. it gets me. i've seen it. i have a soft spot for old people -- i grew up around old people. i got to know three of my great-grandmothers and several of their sisters. from very early on i learned the 'right' way to act around old people, how to respond to their occasional loss of context, how to learn their limits, not to play with them, but to respect them. what also gets me is how well 'the lucifer effect' is captured in this simple, short poem.

the collection is interspersed with 'adversaria' -- mental notes miller made while researching for her poems, tidbits of information, like petit fours of science. a particularly beautiful one is on page 15. it talks about roget's DNA, and says that it contains genetic palindromes. i suspect miller loves the research part of her work as much as i do for my own writing. it's these little sparkles in science texts that make the digging worthwhile.

(slightly adapted from gray's anatomy)

notes on a suprasternal notch talks about the body and being in one's own body, responding with the body through instinct and primal urge. playing with the vocabulary of anatomy, miller describes how even a view can turn the skeleton keys inside us:

[...] a view
of a man squatting to read
for a towel on a summer beach
his shoulders forward so the stunning V
of him ignites in you own nether notch

the suprasternal notch, by the way, is the jugular notch, the small hollow where your clavicles meet at the base of your neck. for random association, i remember it was of particular interest to the central character in the english patient when talking to his lover. in any case, now you know what that little hollow place is called.

the following adversaria section goes back to the image of primal responses in the body:

I believe that when I visit a zoo my muscular response changes as I move 

from the hippopotamus house to the cage of the weasels. 

and then, in cambiata. miller considers another peculiar experience where the body has its way: the breaking of a boy's voice. here, the boy is jean-baptiste maunier, a french singer and actor. his last great performance and his last release was in 2005, when he recorded one last duet before his voice broke, to "deliver ever after / only ordinary music, the round nub / of his Adam's apple rocking in grief."

there are lots more poems to explore in Y. this is a collections of poems that are concerned with the body, with our agency, our animal instincts, our peculiar emotional worlds. if any of the above sounds good to you, go get a copy of this book.

war music, not love songs (christopher logue)

updated!

war music is one of the books we'll be talking about this semester, and i have to say i am really enjoying it. this is english poet christopher logue's rendering of parts of homer's iliad (it contains books 1-4 and 16-19). it's pleasantly straightforward to read, with no attempt at archaic language etc, and i particularly like the little anachronisms and unexpected images. even though i am not in the least bit interested in war-themed stories, this book drew me in.

it's beautifully written poetry; at times it feels old, at times new:

Fearful as the toad in a python's mouth,
The priest, as if the world was empty, walked away
Beside the sea, then hung his head and prayed
Wet-cassocked in the foam
(9)

and in contrast, there are passages like this:

Nod.
Look. 
The gate. 
The compound.
Then:
Achilles' tent, a moonlit, Cubist, dune.
(26)

what is this story? here is what i've pieced together: the greeks have been trying to conquer troy for years, without success. they are tired of war but cannot return empty-handed, the price paid is too high.

achilles is a key player - not only is he handsomeness incarnate, he is also their bravest warrior. the greek soldiers are cursed with the plague because their leader, agamemnon, has taken the trojan seer chryses' daughter, chryseis, and refuses to return her even for great treasures.

seeing there is no choice (people are dying left and right) agamemnon has to give in and return chryseis. however, his pride is hurt and he will not give up a beautiful woman without getting a replacement. he chooses achilles' beloved 'she', briseis.

briseis is taken from achilles

achilles speaks up because he feels unfairly treated, and finally announces he will no longer fight for agamemnon but rather go home. this is unsettling for the other soldiers because achilles inspired a large part of their confidence in battle.

there is another love story - that of helen of troy, who is wife to the king of sparta, menelaus. she is said to be the most beautiful woman in the world, and so paris - who has been promised the most beautiful woman in the world by aphrodite - takes her to troy in menelaus' absence,  giving the greek soldiers a reason to attack the city - they are honour-bound to defend menelaus' and helen's union.

paris with helen

whether or not helen went willingly i'm not sure, and accounts vary. the illustration above suggests she did, though many others do not.

the leaders of both sides - tired, as i said, after so many years of fighting - decide to enter into a truce: the war should be determined by a one-on-one fight to the death, one greek against one trojan. the winner gets helen. of course menelaus is the obvious choice for the greek side, since he is helen's legitimate husband, and so it is determined he is to fight paris. menelaus clearly has the upper hand in the fight, but paris has aphrodite on his side. both survive.

the gods, who look down from their clouds every now and then to see what the humans are doing, mess things up again here: they cause a trojan to break the truce (in a very painful way btw). of course the greek won't have it - general slaughter and bloodshed commences.

patroclus, who is close to achilles, realizes they cannot win without him. when it is clear achilles won't budge, he asks to use achilles' armour, and achilles allows it, on the condition that patroclus only drive the trojans back, not try to take troy. dressed as achilles, he leads his men against the trojans.

they kill many. they drive the trojans back. patroclus will not stop there - something has snapped, and he goes off toward troy to continue his killing. needless to say, since he broke his promise and also since apollo is around (who loves troy), patroclus is killed. trojan leader hector takes achilles' armour off the dead warrior's body - he is mesmerized by it.

achilles is devastated when he hears of patroclus' death and promises vengeance. he has a talk with agamemnon the king, explains he is no longer angry, and the king admits he may have acted unfairly. he is willing to return briseis to achilles if he will return to the battle. of course he will.

with achilles, anything seems possible: when he puts on his new armour (magical no doubt, and given by his mother from the sea) the scene is like the entrance of a super hero:

Though it is noon, the helmet screams against the light;
Scratches the eye; so violent it can be seen
Across three thousand years.
(213)

achilles has nothing to lose now. troy will fall.

silver surfer, by cinar (deviant art)

on a side note, i thought this description of odysseus was interesting:

And then,
With his big, attractive belly rounded out
And just a trace of dark grey hair
Ascending and descending to his cloth

Odysseus (small but big)
(73)

he shows up in an earlier scene too, where he is part of a group of warriors listening to the king's account of his dream that they should conquer troy by total war. there is a pause in the king's story, and logue creates this beautifully:

'Make total war today, hero and host, as one,
Troy will be yours by dusk.'

The dawn wind pats their hair.

Odysseus gazes at his big left toe.
His toe. 
(65)

anyway, i can recommend this book for people like me, - not necessarily into history and all that war, but interested in people and words and images. the characters logue presents us with are credible and interesting. this is a great re-telling of the story, or re-writing, or whatever you want to call it.

i can see why those keen on historical accuracy may be alarmed by this book, (which is one of several btw, though they can stand alone) but for anyone else i think this might be a fine read.

child made of sand (thomas lux)

(poet thomas lux)

the second book i read / pondered during my trip back to mississippi was the advance reading copy of thomas lux's child made of sand. first off, it's a handsome book:

a lovely yellow / red / white colour scheme with a chunky sans serif. nice. now, let's talk about the 65 pages of poetry between those yellow covers.

what i noticed, reading the collection through from cover to cover for the first time, was a recurring image: a handless god. a god who is either literally or symbolically handless - possibly indifferent, possibly impotent, possibly resentful.

From Whom all Blessings Flow 

[...]
Nobody ever sees Whom around.
Whom gets credit
for what Whom never lifted a pinky
to do, or not to do.
Whom doesn't have, I think, a pinky.
[...]

the speaker of "every time someone masturbates god kills a kitten" gives god a proper talking-to: after a list of alternatives (why not kill rats, snakes, clams instead?) he demands, "how 'bout a little less hard-ass?"

kittens are not the only ones faced with death in this collection. there is a horse that drops dead, there is the thought of death in general, death by hanging, suicide, one's own mortality. there's "a frozen ball of rattlesnakes" we cannot be sure are dead or alive.

many of the poems in child made of sand are at the same time funny and disturbing, such as "ermine noose" and "graves rented by the hour". other poems are simply beautiful, like "not the same mud as in 'two tramps in mud time'"or "the drunken forest" or "the moths who come in the night to drink our tears". their strengths lie in the well-crafted images that suggest lux is an observer with attention to detail:

[...] the fog of mud, what first
grips your ankle so whisperly, a little warmer
than the water above it, a satiny sock [...]

(from: "not the same kind of mud")

images of illness go hand in hand with the theme of death, and there is illness in this book: leprosy, nervous breakdowns, birth defects: "boy born with small knife in his head". in "rue de la vieille laterne", lux eulogizes the french writer gerard de nerval (1808-1855) who had the endearing habit of taking his pet lobster for walks on a silk leash. de nerval, after three mental breakdowns, took his own life in 1855 (wiki).

then again, there are a few poems i find it hard to warm up to - the "elegy" for cesar vallejo, "the queen of truth", "madsong", and most of all, "the riverine farmers" - the ending in particular feels, to me, rather heavy-handed, possibly because of the dominant end-rhymes and a tone that - again, to me - sounds too educational, too intent. however, that's a matter of taste.

overall this is a lovely collection. when it comes out in november, you might want to check it out!

the curious life of the dead (stiff)

so i've been parallel reading howards end and stiff. since the semester starts again today, i wanted to tell you about stiff before the madness of school catches up with me. stiff was a spontaneous gift from a friend of a friend who noticed i was looking at it while they were practicing for an upcoming performance. i have to say that some passages made me feel a little unwell - i have a very vivid imagination, a very tangible, physical imagination, and if that is true for you too, be aware of it. at the same time, the book is not gross. it is in no way revolting or shocking. mary roach treats the subject of corpses with just enough humour, some detachment, and respect at the same time.

from: waterhouse: sleep and his half-brother death (1874)

the idea of death something like the waterhouse painting above is still quite common - it's a common trope in movies, faerietales, and the likes. death as the brother of sleep. death as something peaceful, something unchanging and permanent, but not utterly alienating. the body is not much changed, in fact death (on the right) looks only a little stiffer, a little less relaxed than sleep (on the left). roach suggests that in the past, often people who chose to not donate their body to science or not to allow autopsies on their loved ones did so because they felt the peace of the dead would be disturbed or the memory of the decedent desecrated. she argues that the increase in people's willingness to will their own bodies to research after death is a direct result of the increase in the general public's understanding of the chemistry and biology of the body, especially the dead body. considering the processes of decay a dead human body goes through naturally, or when buried, letting others use the body for a common good seems more of an option. eventually, each body will cease to exist, whether it is buried, cremated, embalmed or autopsied.

while i still don't know that i would offer my body up for research, roach's book has given me a much better understanding of what is in store for the body after physical death. the american practice of embalming both fascinates and frightens me: it involves replacing the blood of the deceased with a formaldehyde solution. the reason this is so popular is that it gives the dead person that "alive" look - refilling some of the tissue that has inevitably collapsed or shrunk with the dehydration and other effects of physical death. with the help of some special make-up (yes it has to be special, since most of what you and i may use normally is designed to work on warm, living skin, rather than cold) and some aces up the embalmer's sleeve [such as moisturizing creams, plastic eye caps to keep the eyes from looking sunk and collapsed, which due to dehydration they will, and then some tricks to keep the mouth from falling open], your loved one can be made to look like they were, indeed, just sleeping. as i already mentioned in my ramblings about janet frame's daughter buffalo, the whole idea of chemically treating the dead to postpone or (as in lenin's case) even halt for decades the process of natural decay seems a bit iffy. formaldehyde is not exactly spring water, and considering it is a proven carcinogen, allowing it to seep through into the ground and into our drinking water seems like a less than brilliant idea. i am relieved to know, now, after some reading up, that embalming is rarely done in germany. i know you're going to say, hey, you'll be dead, you won't even know what happens to you, but to be honest i still don't like the idea of strange chemicals messing with my body.

an ecologically sensible coffin, by http://www.englishwillowcoffins.co.uk/index.htm

 here are some eco-friendly ways to go, if after reading this book you still decide you don't want to serve in one of the many capacities corpses have served in over the centuries.

another eco-friendly coffin, made from recycled paper.

roach makes a good case for the important role of donated / willed corpses for research. these have allowed scientists to learn a great many things in many areas of our daily lives. yes, virtually all crash testing is done with dummies these days, but there was and is only one way to know the limits, the thresholds of the human body, how strong an impact can be before it does organic damage or breaks a bone. once these limits are established, we can work with dummies and probes and such, but we only know these limits because there were people who willed their bodies to research. much medical training, until recently, included work on corpses when available. how else could a surgeon know where and how to find or fix a certain piece of your anatomy, if s/he has never seen it in the big picture? in the past, say, the 17 to 1800s, the bodies of executed criminals were made available to scientists for these purposes, autopsy being considered an added penalty on top of death. there were not enough corpses to go around, and so a trade in bodies began - which roach describes in chapter 2, crimes of anatomy. consider this:

[Body snatching] was a new crime, distinct from grave-robbing, which involved the pilfering of jewels and heirlooms buried in tombs and crypts of the well-to-do. Being caught in possession of a corpse's cufflinks was a crime, but being caught with the corpse itself carried no penalty. [...]
Some anatomy instructors mined the timeless affinity of university students for late-night pranks by encouraging their enrollees to raid graveyards and provide bodies for the class. At certain Scottish schools, in the 1700s, the arrangement was more formal: Tuition, writes Ruth Richardson, could be paid in corpses rather than cash. (43)

the body snatchers were also called (ironically enough) resurrectionists.the situation is different now, - according to roach there is almost a surplus of donated bodies. while there is still research that needs doing, in forensics as well as in medicine and safety testing for vehicles etc, and plastic surgeons need close-to-life materials to learn and practice their procedures on, a lot has already been achieved. roach cites alert king's calculations, in 1995, that

vehicle safety improvements that have come about as a result of cadaver research have saved an estimated 8,500 lives each year since 1987. For every cadaver that rode the crash sleds to test three-point seat belts, 61 lives per year have been saved. For every cadaver that took an air bag in the face, 147 people per year survive otherwise fatal head-ons. (92)

one touchy area is, according to roach, however in need to more willed corpses: pediatric impact studies, or any studies really, i would imagine, where the bodies of children would be needed. children do not usually will their bodies to anyone or anything. it's not the sort of thing children worry about, and it's not the sort of thing they should worry about. and who would want to bring up the option of body donation with grieving parents? (95)

not all the bodies researchers work with are willed or donated. sometimes, the body is all they have to solve a crime or find out the cause of an accident, a plane crash or such. there are professionals out there who have studied the types of injuries different types of accidents or assaults will create, the type of decay that occurs naturally and under various conditions, and can tell much from "just" the body at the scene of an accident or crime. (yes i know, there are lots of tv shows / series about that, right? csi this and csi that. keep in mind, as you read this blog, that i don't even own a tv.) 

medical schools are beginning to work with digitized corpses, a collection of  images of a great number of "slices" of an actual corpse, giving a (re-usable) three-dimensional image for medical students to work with and study.

overall, this book is fascinatingly interesting. it is well-written and quite readable, even for someone as squeamish as myself. i still have about half of the book ahead of me, but i would recommend it to anyone who is curious about the human - dead - body.

more to read:

• preservation procedures for different countries: http://www.afif.asso.fr/english/preservation.htm#Europe
• formaldehyde myths & risks: http://www.themodernembalmer.com/pdfs/20090620myths.pdf 
• thanatos, the greek personification of death: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thanatos
• zeit: wie man in deutschland begraben wird (2004)
• hygienische totenversorgung: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygienische_Totenversorgung
• thanatopraxie: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thanatopraxie