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Review: Bender: New and Selected Poems

April 23, 2013 Reviews

Book by DEAN YOUNG
Reviewed by DREW CALVERT

Bender: New and Selected Poems Dean Young is one of America’s most celebrated poets, the author of ten poetry collections, recipient of numerous national awards, and a fixture of campus bookstores. His poems are tremendously fun to read, and often very funny; for me, his work is distinct in the way it channels the spirit of a stand-up comic. He nests his liberal politics inside a vortex of anxiety; disguises insights as farce; and codes earnest messages in irreverence and transgression. In his latest collection, Bender: New and Selected Poems, this spirit is even more pronounced: His new poems explore the same general territory with a darker, subtler confidence. Young gives the impression that the blank page inspires him the way an unpredictable audience inspires a comic:

Review: Playing for Thrills

April 22, 2013 Reviews

Book by WANG SHUO
Reviewed by KAITLIN SOLIMINE

“Even after the train had pulled up alongside the long platform and come to a complete stop, I couldn’t be sure if this was the city I’d wanted to travel to, even though it looked like it.”—Wang Shuo, Playing for Thrills

I discovered Wang Shuo in a fitting location: an unpaved alleyway outside Beijing University’s east gate, barely wide enough for two bicycles to pass, the shadows steeply angled in late afternoon. The year was 2000. I was a regular at the hutongcafé, Sculpting in Time (long since bulldozed), spending afternoons sipping Chinese-style iced cappuccinos (overly iced and foamed) and reviewing Chinese texts on U.S.-China relations. A few storefronts down, a Tibetan man studying at Minzu (Minority) University ran an independent film store. One day, I wandered his shop’s cardboard boxes of pirated VCDs (the predecessor to DVDs), looking for something interesting.

Review: The Gods of Heavenly Punishment

April 11, 2013 Reviews

Book by JENNIFER CODY EPSTEIN
Reviewed by PARKER BLANEY

Jennifer Cody Epstein’s The Gods of Heavenly Punishment is a sprawling novel, traversing the era of World War II from 1935 to the air-attack of mainland Japan in 1945, with an epilogue set in the early sixties. The time frame of the story is large, as are many of its scenes, such as Tokyo being firebombed or in the cockpit of a B-25 during Doolittle’s raid. This is a generous novel with heart. Epstein uses the simple device of a ring with a green stone to pull together the lives of characters from two sides of the Pacific Ocean, but the ring symbolizes a hope for a broader reconciliation. Though the two main combatants in the war for the Pacific have been allies for many decades, neither the U.S. or Japan have ever fully accounted for the devastation they wrought on each other: the U.S. decisions to firebomb and, ultimately, to drop atomic bombs on the civilian population of Japan and force its capitulation, as well as Japan’s choice to attack Pearl Harbor and commit war crimes in the Philippines and Manchuria.

Review: Speedboat and Pitch Dark

April 8, 2013 Reviews

Books by RENATA ADLER
Reviewed by SARAH MALONE

Renata Adler dedicated Speedboat (1976) and Pitch Dark (1981) for “A.” and “B.,” and like two LP sides, the novels, newly reissued by New York Review Books, are variations in a radical approach to fiction. They diametrically oppose E.M. Forster’s formulation that narrative is causation—not “merely” A happened, then B happened, but A caused B. Adler puts A next to X, with no apparent causal connection or temporal sequence. Many characters appear only once. But episodes’ consistent sentence structure and types of characters create a coherent tone. Its effect is hypnotic.

Review: Collected Body

February 25, 2013 Reviews

Book by VALZHINA MORT
Reviewed by PATRICK MEIGHAN

In the long prose poem “Aunt Anna” at the heart of Collected Body, the speaker muses, “so evasive is Aunt Anna’s body, it is impossible to hold a thought of it longer than an instant.” Throughout Valzhyna Mort’s first book of poems written in English, rather than translated by the poet and others from Belarusia as in earlier work, the reader finds that sense of commitment to recapture history, and thus the speaker’s own life.

Often, the point of departure on a journey into the past is the physical body. Gardens of an ancestral village “shrink by perspective into a single bush, as if it were the pubes of a woman, lying flat on her back, naked.” When Aunt Anna later in life walks from Siberia back to a childhood village, the speaker states, “This time she walked there for no man, for no village girl’s dream of the neighboring village; this time she walked for the memory of that pubes, for what it concealed – the source that her mouth was hungry to embrace.” More than only a springboard, a sensuous physiology becomes also the destination and the vehicle that carries Mort, and with her the reader, along on that journey.

Review: Dear Life

February 11, 2013 Reviews

Book by ALICE MUNRO
Reviewed by SARAH MALONE

The fourteen stories in Alice Munro’s latest collection, Dear Life, are terser than her stories of a decade ago. Her 2001 collection, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, nearly identical in length, contained only nine. Many of the new stories trace characteristically oblique paths. Munro draws opening scenes with particular details that seem intended to alert the reader to crucial moments and relationships, and then, instead of continuing those relationships chronologically, she sidesteps to previous events, or heads off in directions not initially suggested. Some stories traverse so many years that their openings, while always fitting, no longer seem the only possible entry points. Often, sections slip into others by association rather than cause and effect or chronology; in “Gravel,” a dog, mentioned in passing, turns out to be central.

Review: Daniel Fights a Hurricane

January 29, 2013 Reviews

Book by SHANE JONES
Reviewed by LINDSAY STERN

Daniel Fights a Hurricane, Shane Jones’ third novel, takes place in two worlds. One is an unnamed American town made concrete by its familiar landmarks—Target, McDonald’s, Dick’s Sporting Goods. The other is the phantasmal world of the protagonist, Daniel Suppleton—a thirty-two-year- old employee at a Stuart Services LLC, a pipeline construction site—who develops a crippling paranoia: that a Hurricane will descend and “erase everything.” The book chronicles Daniel’s retreat from the familiar world into his imagined one, and the struggle of his ex-wife Karen to coax him back to sanity.

Review: The Orchardist

January 15, 2013 Reviews

Book by AMANDA COPLIN
Reviewed by ANNAPURNA POTLURI

The Orchardist

Amanda Coplin’s debut novel, The Orchardist, takes place in the Pacific Northwest, a land of dusty rural outposts, ancient forests, and cold deserts. We begin in 1900, in the fruit orchard of William Talmadge, on a farm his mother founded years before in Oregon Country by leading her children “north and then west, west and then north, as if drawing toward a destination already envisioned…” There are rows of apple and apricot trees on this grand, but desolate, estate. Talmadge is a bachelor and an orphan. Talmadge’s solitude is heightened by the many years of his youth spent fruitlessly searching for his dearly loved sister, who went missing shortly after their mother’s death, leaving only her bonnet and basket as clues. This early trauma foreshadows the losses to come. Talmadge has only two friends: a mute Nez Perce man named Clee and a local midwife-cum-apothecary, Caroline Middey, who has long helped him with minor ailments and the embarrassing venereal afflictions of his younger days.

Best of Reviews

January 1, 2013 Reviews

During this holiday week, The Common is presenting highlights from the past year. Today’s highlights come from “Reviews.”

Read Melinda Misener’s review of Townie by Andre Dubus III, here, and Sarah Malone’s review of NW by Zadie Smith, here.

Review: Collected Poems

November 27, 2012 Reviews

Book by JACK GILBERT
Reviewed by DREW CALVERT

The San Francisco Renaissance, that loose federation of poets and novelists who gathered in the Bay Area after World War II, is most famous for having organized the first public reading of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” (and thus given birth to the Beat Generation), but its influence was more far-reaching than that. It was also more varied. As with any renaissance, this one was cliquish, even factional: while Ginsberg cultivated his image as a twentieth-century Whitman and Kerouac descended from madcap literary celebrity to middle-aged alcoholism, a lesser-known group of near-surrealists gathered at the State College of San Francisco for a workshop called “Poetry and Magic.” Taught by Jack Spicer, the workshop combined a modernist aesthetic with elements of ‘theosophy,’ a strain of mysticism that, earlier in the century, had captured the imagination of William Butler Yeats. “Poetry and Magic” occasioned a kind of sub-renaissance (sometimes called ‘the Berkeley renaissance’), and it had a notable influence on a number of successful American poets, including the young Jack Gilbert, who died in mid-November at the age of eighty-seven. His Collected Poems were published in March, 2012, not long before his death.