Chapbook Roundup: Wendel, Mennies, Wiseman, Scarff

Every so often, the Weave Reviews staff will highlight several chapbooks that have caught our collective eye. We believe that some of the best and most interesting poetry is being published by independent presses in non-traditional formats, and while the chapbook is hardly non-traditional, it can also be passed over in favor of the flashier full-length collections.

In our first Chapbook Roundup, Janet Edwards reviews Monica Wendel's Call It a Window, Laura E. Davis reviews Rachel Mennies' No Silence in the Fields, Mindy Kronenberg reviews Laura Madeline Wiseman's Branding Girls, and Thom Dawkins reviews Kelly Scarff's I Fall in Love with Strangers.

Enjoy!


The Human Condition in Miniature: Monica Wendel’s Call It a Window

Imagine looking through a series of windows, or even looking through the same window, multiple times a day, over the course of a few days or weeks or even years. Imagine how much you would see and learn in your time as voyeur; and how, with each new piece of information, you might change your mind about the people and things at which you’ve been looking—and even change your mind about yourself. Monica Wendel’s chapbook, Call It a Window, embodies this experience, as it inhabits and examines the generally conflicted state of humanity in thoughtfully wrought poems.

Wendel accomplishes this examination without sticking to necessarily “poetic” material, which gives the poems a relatable verisimilitude. She writes beautifully, but she isn’t afraid to get down in the grime of the day-to-day, because isn’t that where we are all, anyway? Wendel knows society’s faults (“Sexual Assault Awareness Week,” a found poem from jezebel.com, is a whip-smart, fantastic piece) as well as her speaker’s, and she calls attention to them. Among so many other things, readers encounter what it means to want to make a difference but be unable to help (“I wanted to be a pioneer woman – scrappy, strong, petite, with a poultice or herb to put on your hand. But I had nothing”); to find a place to call home but sacrifice parts of yourself to exist within it (“Sometimes it’s like/I come from a foreign country/where the only person who speaks the language is myself); to have principles but stray from them (“A question of what we own/and what we are willing to sell”); to develop a sense of self and then realize it might have compromised you somehow (“My problem is that I used to fuck/ like I was in love when I really wasn’t, and now I don’t know how/to fuck at all anymore”); and to be unsure of which version of yourself makes you happiest or most whole, if that’s ever the case at all (“I wish I could be the same in all of these places,/a singular self propelled forward – but I am like a river/that forks around land, becomes smaller or larger or more salty,/and then reunites, on the other side, with itself”).

With these various and illuminating views, the poems echo the title of the collection. One by one, the tiny windows of these poems become mirrors into which readers do not merely look, but become a part. The reader joins with the speaker and her subject matter, as they experience their own juxtaposing ideals and identities from Wendel’s perspective. In the collection’s last poem, “Summer,” for example, Wendel calls herself out explicitly: (“I want you to look at me. I’m a vegan/who sneaks banana bread without asking the ingredients/and who doesn’t stop the waiter who adds baba ghanoush to my falafel./I want to say I’ve already done my part, but that’s never true…Now I’ve sobered up./Now I’m waiting for a phone call from someone who I hurt”). In doing so, Wendel’s readers may feel their own shortcomings and pretenses wash over them, but at least they’ll have the poet’s company.

Reviewed by Janet Edwards

Call It a Window by Monica Wendel
Midwest Writing Center Press, 2012


The Messy Business of Bodies: Rachel Mennies' No Silence in the Fields

Rachel Mennies’ debut e-chapbook collection No Silence in the Fields (Blue Hour Press, 2012) is a heartbreaking narrative of a couple’s love that breaks beneath the cold realities of winter. The scene is set in the first poem, “The Barn,” which wonders, “Whose red shoebox, whose poisoned apple.” This list-poem first catalogues meaningless objects as if anthropologists were excavating them years later. It then turns from the tangible to recall events and emotions contained within the walls of the barn, asking “Whose constant uphill, whose flame from the stove, / whose lost child, whose tired body?”

Bodies are a central topic of No Silence; the fragility and rawness of people and animals: a cluster of cancerous cells, the delicate rib of a dead cat, a calf freezing to death. Loss surrounds the ill-fated story of the books main characters, M and V, a couple who sets up house in the aforementioned barn for the winter. Their story is told in multiple voices that alternate between M, V, and an omniscient speaker. Why they have come to the barn for winter is never addressed directly, but a simple guess is that they have no other place. The details leading up to their circumstances are less important than where they find themselves, however, as Mennies’ vivid images and lyricism weave a desperate tone through each poem, keeping the action in the present.

What we do know is that work is scarce for M, a salt-of-the-earth, hardworking man: “I slough the dusty skin / of horses; I listen to the hearts of dogs.” V is depicted by M in the same poem, “M Introduces Himself,” as, “the woman I love” who “makes coffee from water / and grounds. In the earth, the sleeping perennials / are hers.” An old-fashioned, gendered division of labor exists between them; these partners operate separately, each in their own domain, tending to their own needs. It is soon revealed that V is expecting a child, but she is also sick. The first time V speaks, she says, “Hello, lump—size of a million / curious atoms, soft against my hand,” as she finds a tumor in her upper thigh. Later, the inevitable miscarriage is personified in the haunting title, “Miscarriage is Like a Large, Hungry Gull.” Throughout the narrative, V and M are reminded again and again of their own mortality and the realities of being a human animal.

Mennies fearlessly tackles the messy business of bodies, both living and decaying. When the vitality of spring and summer arrive, they offer only bitter pain for V as she faces her own barrenness. On a trip to the farmer’s market, she is fenced by an “avalanche of blueberries” and other ripened fruits: “Around me, everything reproduces recklessly” and she is left feeling “light / as a bag in the wind, alone.” While this image may seem overwrought, by now Mennies has earned it. The final poem comes full circle, again depicting the things that witnessed V and M’s familiar story of fading love. These objects are heavier now, weighed by the meaning we have now seen hidden inside. Mennies’ beautiful, solemn first collection of carefully crafted poems is filled with the bittersweet evidence of what’s abandoned after love is gone.

Reviewed by Laura E. Davis

No Silence in the Fields by Rachel Mennies
Blue Hour Press, 2012


The Doll-Like Beauty of the Brand: Laura Madeline Wiseman's Branding Girls

How apt that in the early part of an election year where women are being branded (and pushed to brand each other) to further polarize their population and serve political agenda, Branding Girls has landed on our cultural radar. For those of us Boomers who were drawn to the feminist sensibilities of Germaine Greer and Simone de Beauvoir (yet succumbed to the 1960s Carnaby Street aesthetic of Twiggy and Go-Go boots), Laura Madeline Wiseman’s chapbook reminds us of the continual conflict and exploitation girls and women face in an aggressively consumer-driven society.

Using photographic essays by women photographers that capture the disturbing elements of “girl culture” for inspiration, Wiseman presents the reader with a series of evocative and sardonic female images—the “Elevator Girls” of Japan, whose doll-like beauty defies true identity:

Not geisha. Not madams.
Not hotel operators. Not
Mannequins. Not call girls
Or masseuses. Not school girls
In pleated skirts. Not angels
Or gods. Not accomplished
Grandmothers. Not stepford wives.

With their tailored and accessorized dress, they are posed and demurely poised, ready to “open doors to paradise, stories, worlds, dreams...”

In these fifteen poems we are introduced a variety of female “brands,” presented in language that is brutally beautiful, indignant and witty. There is the “Las Vegas Brand,” the show girl who adorns a stage or bomber planes, with “bottle blond locks” whose face is “a ruby ember at a cruising altitude/ of 35,000 feet…” The “Bridal Hand Brand,” where a severed appendage is both crime scene evidence and ceremonial artifact, and whose fingernails are “varnished red as tongues.” The “Good Wife Brand” echoes the discomfort of Sylvia Plath and Ann Sexton (who has her own homage in this collection, “Dead Poet Brand”), lamenting the absorption of the self that women experience under the brand of marriage:

I introduce myself as Ms., but most hear Mrs.
The Wife sits matronly on my chest,

a large shelf of expired ointments,
skin pasty, veined, and sore.

It’s not that I’m not happy with Wife
as I once was with Date, Lover, Girl,

with arrows of silk stockings to late nights,
of sex in theaters, stairwells, interstate rest stops.

Branding Girls amuses, alarms, and ultimately affirms in its eloquent confrontation of female stereotypes.

Reviewed by Mindy Kronenberg

Branding Girls by Laura Madeline Wiseman
Finishing Line Press, 2011


Strange Empathies: Kelly Scarff’s I Fall in Love with Strangers

Kelly Scarff’s debut collection, I Fall in Love with Strangers, is pierced by loss: former partners and present loves are kept at a distance, family gatherings are vaguely remembered by those left behind, and characters appear only as shadows of who they wish to be.

To say that these poems are pierced by loss, though, is also to say they are built with a different material entirely – an earnest, admiring love for the Strangers, whether they began strange or became that way.

I Fall in Love with Strangers is clear, declarative, and anecdotal. While each of the poems seem to be in the stark, honest voice of the poet herself, each story still seems to be spoken with the haunting, haunted breath of their subjects. One of the speaker’s neighbors wants to visit Christ in Medjugorje, for example, though he has seemingly killed his family in a drunken car crash, and Medjugorje is known for the appearances of the Virgin Mary, not Christ.

Despite the simplicity and earnestness of this collection and its characters, or perhaps because of it, these poems still have the ability to surprise: a gunshot victim finds love at H&R Block, a pomegranate becomes “prolific” at mothering, a game of Yahtzee with a father accomplishes more than Dylan Thomas’s desperate pleading could ever do.

Scarff’s litany of strangers never grows tiresome. In fact, readers may find themselves harboring some small seed of desire for the characters, perhaps that is the single greatest accomplishment of this collection - Even as we know that a lover or a loved one will be lost, we stick around to see how they will be loved and remembered.

Reviewed by Thom Dawkins

I Fall in Love with Strangers by Kelly Scarff
Liquid Paper Press, 2012

Weave's Growth Spurt

Open Letter to Weave Readers, Subscribers & Contributors,

Weave has been growing steadily since we began four years ago this month. What started as a two-person project has flourished into a team of more than a dozen, publishing hundreds of writers and artists. Yet, with a team consisting entirely of volunteers who all have jobs (including myself), it has become difficult to find the time to make any changes that will encourage further progress.

In order to keep up with this growth, we have decided to move the publication of issue 08 to winter, most likely early 2013. Therefore no issue will be released in June this year. We will, of course, fulfill any current or future subscriptions affected by this change; those that are owed issue 08 will receive it in early 2013. As a thank you gift, all subscribes to issue's 07 & 08 by June 31st will receive a back issue of Weave for free! So SUBSCRIBE today!

Some of the upcoming changes include bringing on new staff, experimenting with the design of our print issues, and developing more online content. Weave's online book reviews are already expanding under the leadership of our new Reviews Editor, Thom Dawkins.

Additionally, we are announcing a new reading period. As of today Weave is open to submissions September 1st through May 31st. We will remain open year-round for current subscribers. 

We appreciate your patience during our growth spurt over the next six months. We're excited about these changes and hope you are too.

Warmly,

Laura E. Davis
Founding Editor
Weave Magazine

Fragmented Elegy: Rebecca Lindenberg’s Love, an Index

In 2009, the poet Craig Arnold disappeared on Kuchino-erabu, a remote Japanese island, while climbing a volcano for research on his next book. Arnold had published two books of poems: Made Flesh (2008) and Shells (1999), which won the Yale Younger Poets Prize. The poet was a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, had been a Fulbright Scholar at Universidad de los Andes in Colombia, and his poems were included in Best American Poetry. Though a search party found his footsteps ascending the volcano, his body was never recovered and Craig Arnold was presumed dead.

Rebecca Lindenberg, Arnold’s longtime partner, published her first collection of poetry earlier this month. It is also the first book in McSweeney’s emerging poetry series. At its crux, Love, an Index is an echo. It is a continued conversation between the speaker and the subject, whose voice has been cut out. Lindenberg’s poetry is composed in quiet moments of remembrance and grief. It is not, thank goodness, a tour de force. It is too human for that. Rather, the speaker lingers on images of the body – a breath on the ear, a poppy colored birthmark under the eye – as well as meals shared, and trips taken. It is an attempt to reconstruct or offer documentation of a man who ceased to be. It provides evidence of Arnold in “fragments,” which the titular poem defines as “Parts suggesting the whole/they long to be gathered into.” Arnold is the book, and the book is a body sewn together from memories.

Love, an Index, is divided into three segments, with the first section detailing the evidence of love. “Catalogue of Ephemera” provides a list of all the gifts Lindenberg’s lover gave her, and can be interpreted as an exercise in putting memories into order. One recalls Joan Didion combing over closets full of her deceased husband’s clothes in The Year of Magical Thinking. After is the fall. The second section, and the spinal cord of the collection, is the alphabetical directory for which the book is named. In the third and final section, Lindenberg’s broken animal emerges, a haunted search without recovery, for her lover’s body and her peace. Her “Obsessional” is written in a villanelle, itself a compulsive poetic form. The central repetition evolves into a cyclical point of madness: “What makes a man impossible to find/on such a chip of land it’s hardly there?” But by the book’s end, there is grace: as a scrap of paper on its descent, the poet is saved on an updraft. The lingering image in the final poem, “Marblehead,” is the image of green, of all good, of all newness, an abstract concept anchored in the minutiae that compose the book’s pulse. “But now lobster steam billows/up the window, you gulp/purple wine, your pinky sticking out,/and the round olives are the green/all green things aspire to be.”

At times, the speaker seems to struggle with her multi-faceted relationship with the man who was both her lover and fellow poet. In "Love, N¹," a long poem composed of footnotes and references to love poems by Sappho, Plato, Frank O’Hara, and other major names, she includes quotes from Arnold, gleaned from conversation and his poems. The effect is twofold: she writes about her love in the context of a vast poetic dialogue, while also including Arnold as a source to be considered among the classics. The writer appears divided on this, his greater fame, and her success in light of his disappearance. In “The Girl with the Ink-Stained Teeth,” she writes she “knows she’s famous/ in a tiny, tragic way and condemns the man who disappeared, leaving her nothing/not even/her name.” That Rebecca Lindenberg will forever be seen in the context of her partner is unlikely. Love, an Index works through an issue, an obsession, but in it, Lindenberg executes her grief in measured, clean lines that speak of more to come. Turn by turn, her grief breaks down language into utterances. It comes to the point where a single word reaches out and takes the reader by the heart. Through her grieving she becomes an empowered voice. Her sorrow becomes a measureless depth.

While Lindenberg asks for empathy, she never wants pity. One would never read this book and feel an urge to apologize. It is notable that words such as pity, sorrow, and tragedy are words she left out of her central "Index." There is anger, and ache, and harbinger. There is divorce. Each dark image becomes coupled with elements of light, or physical matter to ground them in: interstate, lemon, and lyric. Mimosa. Like Anne Carson in Nox, Lindenberg is concerned with the echoes her lover left behind. Unlike Carson, who attempts to discover her estranged and deceased brother through lingering scraps of evidence, Lindenberg uses the echoes to explore the spaces in which the dead continue to exist.

And so, her collection is worth reading for the same reason that all good literature is worth reading: it preserves a man’s soul, long after his death. Or, in this very special case, the book preserves two souls, in the physical and emotional spaces they occupied together. This is a love story, for all affairs that have begun and ended, on various scales of magnitude. This is a mausoleum for an end that left no body behind.

Caitlyn Christensen

Congrat's to Contributor Anthony Varallo, Micro Award Finalist

Congratulations to Weave Magazine's issue 07 contributor Anthony Varallo, whose story "All Very Surprising" has been chosen as a finalist for the 2012 Micro Awards.

Founded in 2008, the Micro Award honors "outstanding flash fiction from both print and electronic media." This is Mr. Varallo's second straight year as a Micro Award finalist, placing him in a small group of writers to be recognized multiple times.

Don't have a copy of issue seven yet? Order yours online today. If you're attending AWP, stop by our table to pick up a copy in person.

Weave reviews Christian Wiman, Every Riven Thing

Poetry arises out of absence, a deep internal sense of wrongness, out of a mind that feels itself to be in some way cracked. An original poem is a descent into and expression of this insufficiency… You spend years sealing up the gaps in your uncertainty, shoring fragments of fact and reason against your ruins, all the while praying that in rare moments some ghost of that good unknowingness – call it spirit, call it the unconscious, call it God – will slip back in to save you from your best efforts.
–Christian Wiman, “A Piece of Prose”

Christian Wiman is hardly the type of as-yet-unlauded, needs-to-be-heard poet I would normally review for Weave, and having already mentioned him in a previous post, I feel a little ashamed to be covering a book that has already gotten its share of attention. And yet, there are times when a book feels so massively important, so necessary in terms of both poetic weight and cultural commentary, that it would be equally irresponsible to let the opportunity pass.

Previous reviews of Wiman’s Every Riven Thing seem to have been written with the large strokes of a fat-bristled brush. They make much of the poet’s job as Poetry Magazine editor, the diagnosis of his rare and dangerous cancer, and of his (early distance from, then later returning to) Christian identifications. All of this is a large part of the work, granted, but I have always been more interested in the craft of the work, not its origins.

The first thing I noticed about this book is how wide-reaching the subjects can be: Salvation and moral purpose play against American identity and the dangers of nationalism; disease and health are here too, but so are a searching for masculine identities and the long look back at a troubled family history. Almost unnervingly, Wiman keeps the collection from seeming too schizophrenic by giving each poem its due attention and its own identity. Eschewing a “style,” Wiman instead seems to be taking his direction from the gospel of paying close attention.

A poem like “The Mole,” for example, refuses to speak its subject, but rather reveals it almost unconsciously – the short lines and terse images, though bring forth the affect and the limited senses feared by the hospital-bound. The poem moves from the discovery of disease to the “diviners, machines / reading his billion / cells” to the nostalgia for “mountain / aster and ice / wine, Michigan / football, Canes / Venatici and / the Four North / Fracture Zone,” and so on, combining and coalescing images large as constellations and simple as pedestrian memories. In the poem, too, Wiman describes a machine of “glass and chrome / so infinites- / imally facet- / ed it seems / he lives inside / a diamond,” several lines that not only point to the poet’s ability to see the fine details of the sublime but also to his willingness to probe a terror to find them. Of course, there is also the intended effect of having the signified meaning literally broken away from its signifier, while at the same time, the breaking itself becomes its own sort of sign. Better said, these poems not only speak to brokenness, they demonstrate and display it.

It would not be unfair to say that each of Wiman’s poems represents a struggle at the interstices of darkness and light, and I do not think it is inaccurate to say that he does so with varying degrees of success. Regardless, the overall effect is masterful, and the technique, even when it feels familiar, is always thoughtfully enacted. This is true in two poems that could very well have come from Bishop’s Geography III – in “Five Houses Down,” the poet finds identity and masculinity in an older man’s scrap heap, while “Sitting Down to Breakfast” is a tender portrait of an old aunt who stands as a symbol for everything that is disappeared or disappearing from both life and memory. Both of these poems are working hard to mean something, but, like Bishop, we never seem to mind when they end up doing just that.

In a recent piece in Poetry’s 100 year anniversary, the poet V. Penelope Pelizzon muses whether she, or any poet writing today, will become the rubble of our era. We do have to wonder which of our poets will be disregarded in favor of the Few Big Names, and of course I want to say that a few of us will escape. I also want to say that Christian Wiman’s Every Riven Thing is a book that could define our age. It certainly has a voice and a presence that feels like it speaks for all human time. And yet, the honest answer is that even the greatest poems will not save us, even the greatest poems cannot define us. Then again, the poems in this collection still recognize that limitation, and yet they still seek some divinity or salvation.

Every Riven Thing may just be the book that represents this era’s cautious optimism. In Wiman’s words, “To believe is to believe you have been torn / from the abyss, yet stand unwaveringly on its rim.”

Thom Dawkins
Weave Reviews Editor