Synesthetic Repast: A Review of Katherine Rauk's Basil by Mindy Kronenberg

cover credit: Black Lawrence Press

Basil by Katharine Rauk
Black Lawrence Press (2011)

Review by Mindy Kronenberg

There is a clever sort of alchemy at work in the poems in Basil, Katharine Rauk’s poetry chapbook. These thirty-one oddly compelling and challenging poems emerge as collective parables that, taken together, form a surreal, spiritual, and sensual guide to this and the next life.

Some poems combine prose and poetry narrative formats, transitioning between exterior and interior events, creating an effect of guided dreaming. For example, in “Suicide Rates Spike Near High Voltage Power Lines,” we meet a woman who knew “the metal switchbox outside her apartment window… was the very voice box of God,” and “ …felt God’s voice thrum around the rims of teacups, pulse along the floorboards’ crease.” As she lies on her bed awaiting her reward, the story breaks from prose into stanza, and the narrative distills into electrified testimony: [She felt]

God’s voice
sizzle in her teeth, she felt
God’s voice surge
down the wire
of her spine, and
God’s voice gather
in the satellite
saucers of her knees…

Rauk uses the same split in “Heartbone (I),” this time in the form of a wistful reverie, a poetic escape amidst a meal with repellent company. She has the ability to create micro-dramas with minimal context but tremendous tension, maintaining a visceral connection to the human dynamic in its many guises.

There are startling transitions in poems with such concrete titles as “Blood Orange,” “Basil,” and “After Cooking with Turmeric.” Each encounter is a journey that transcends culinary expectations. In the first, the poet asks: “Is this a fruit, / a wound, a lover?” In the last, an act of intimacy is savored as a synesthetic repast: “Now / we are opening / vaulted windows / to a sunlight of bees, / a thousand burnished / throats.”

Ultimately, there is a great deal of longing in the poems in Basil, desire entwining with ambiguity, seeking reason or redemption. In “Vignette,” enchantment and superstition take hold in a ritual for a woman wishing for motherhood. Rauk writes, “…so she tied a cucumber to her waist. // Cucumber vines crept beyond / the edges of the garden plot / like sticky fingers swiping from the sweet jar.” In “Heartbone II,” the poet/narrator seeks discovery in the intricate parts of herself—“My nub, my sweetness, my buried / bruise. My blue note and knotted / fruit stone, my blood knocking at the edge / of known…” By presenting an inventory of tactile and temporal elements (“root bits and flesh / snips, snarls of hair that won’t let loose. Made of loss, made of juice…”), she wonders if her own personhood will fully emerge among the sum of her parts. This speaks to the poet’s earnest process in each work in Basil, a hunt for the self within the confounding yet comforting sensory-tangled world.

Weave @ the Pittsburgh Gallery Crawl Friday, July 12th!

Weave will be in Pittsburgh this Friday! Check us out if you can. We will also be apart of the pop up bookstand on September 6th and Septembers 27th.

The Small Press Pittsburgh bookstand comes to Gallery Crawl this Friday night, generously hosted by The Toonseum! We'll be outside in the courtyard at 945 Liberty Avenue, from 5:30 PM until about 10 PM.

The Small Press Pittsburgh bookstand will feature Pittsburgh authors and Pittsburgh independent publishers, interspersed with choice selections from other cities. Books, comix, zines, and litmags--fiction, memoir, and poetry all will be represented.

This will be the literary block of Gallery Crawl, with Amazing Books open until 8:30 PM, Alexi Morrissey writing commissioned poems at Bricolage from 5 PM to 9 PM, and the Small Press Pittsburgh bookstand offering terrific wares of contemporary literature.

Small Press Pittsburgh has been showcasing Pittsburgh's literary scene since 2008. We have existed as a web directory, and we are currently exploring new ways to support Pittsburgh's literary and publishing institutions. 

Bittersweet Soup: A Review of Marsha Mehran's Pomegranate Soup by Nicole Bartley

cover credit: Random House, LLC.

Pomegranate Soup by Marsha Mehran is an intriguing narrative with a dash of wonder and one-too-many sprigs of enchantment. She gradually unfolds the co-dependent Aminpour sisters’ tale of evading mysterious pasts and a desperate attempt to establish a safe home in the small Irish town of Ballinacroagh. While there, Marjan, Bahar, and Layla rent a small cafe from an Italian landlady, Estelle, and introduce their secluded town to cultural cuisine. This results in both trusting friendships and despicable prejudices.

The Iranian, Irish, and Italian cultures are depicted only through language and food. Mehran created strong, distinct voices through realistic vernacular from Estelle and the Irish citizens. However the Aminpour sisters don’t present dialogue cadences. Instead, they use the same language structures as the narration: American. This could be an attempt to make the sisters as “normal” as possible for American readers and set them apart from other characters.

Mehran explores the sisters’ “otherness” further through their experiences with prejudice from the town gossip, close-minded society women, and the town bully. Although the sisters are never questioned about running a business without a man, the town (and author) focuses on their ethnicity. Among earlier instances of indirect prejudice, Bahar encounters hatred when she is angrily shunned by the butcher’s wife and men in a bar while trying to find Layla one evening.

“Something was very wrong here…. Something that went beyond the sad little curiosities of the old women in the butcher’s. Whatever she thought of that kind of small-mindedness, it was nothing compared to the bald hatred before her. It was an exclusion as foul as she had experienced in those scary early years in London, when the whole city was under alert of terrorist threats, and anyone who looked slightly foreign was watched with suspicion. Turning on her heels… Bahar pushed through the pub door, anxious to escape the dread that was rising in her chest. Just as the door slammed behind her, a sinister voice called out: ‘Go back to yer stinking camels!’ Raspy smokers’ laughs enveloped the rest of the smarting insult” (140).

The commonness of that insult connects with the characters, which mostly represent tropes. Bahar is fully developed and the overall story arc seems to center on her. Her abusive past resulted in mistrust of men, in addition to severe migraines triggered by fear and any conflict. She is constantly on edge, and her post-traumatic stress is enough to make readers want to hug her and hand her a bowl of abgusht and a cup of tea.

Because of this, readers will find common ground with Marjan. The narration follows her reliance on general kindness, food, and drinks as attempts to provide comfort. They also counteract her ineptitude of protecting and guiding her sisters. And, to ensure that they’re accepted in town, she uses her peculiar gift of making inspirational meals.

“Through her recipes, Marjan was able to encourage people toward accomplishments that they had previously thought impossible; one taste of her food and most would not only start dreaming but actually contemplate doing (78). … Evie and Fiona sat at one of the window-side tables now, each drinking her own bowl of red lentil soup as vague ruminations—prompted by Marjan’s magic—swam in their heads: Evie could see neon pink letters spelling out her name over the salon’s door, while Fiona imagined hers lighting up a theater marquee once again” (89).

But this relates to Mehran’s inability to remove excessive ingredients after her dish has been plated and served. Although Marjan’s cuisine provides a touch of magical realism, other poorly integrated fantastic elements cause hiccups. For example, Layla’s supernatural musk of cinnamon and rose is just enough for readers to suspend disbelief and enjoy the story. But Mehran unnecessarily explains the scent by killing the sisters’ mother in childbirth.

“Layla never knew her mother either, for she died shortly after pushing her out into the harsh world… The weary doctors in Tehran General Hospital had no explanation for the merciless bleeding and just shrugged with defeat when they told her father the news. They failed to mention that, as the last drops of blood seeped into the hospital’s sea green bedsheets, a tiny bud had popped out of his wife’s womb. When the flower seed fell into the pool of blood, it blossomed into the face of a full-grown rose. The fearful doctors kept this to themselves, partly to avoid a malpractice suit, and partly because the rosewater and cinnamon scent that accompanied the flower’s miraculous unfolding reminded them of a time when military guards did not hover behind every surgery room door” (29).

The background of the mother dying will gain readers’ sympathies, and it’s easy to believe that Layla’s natural musk is due to Marjan’s constant cooking with exotic spices. But a rosebud causing fatal hemorrhaging represents an elaborate need to appeal to readers, which tarnishes the story.

But Pomegranate Soup isn’t just a novel about family and finding a safe home; it is also, surprisingly, a cookbook. Each chapter is prefaced by recipes, and the rich descriptions of ingredients will make readers salivate. Overall, the novel provides enough intrigue and simplicity to keep readers turning pages without much thought. It will succeed when readers wonder if they, too, live in a provincial town that needs a bit of spice.

Review by Nicole Bartley

Pomegranate Soup by Marsha Mehran
Random House, 2005

Issue 09 Contributor List

*Artwork*

Bruce Barton

Marina K. Caprara

Susana H. Case

Sally Deskins

Andrew Ek

Bonnie Gloris

Christian Hendricks

Jason Johns

Mette Norrie

*Fiction*

Michelle E. Crouch

Julie Day

Amy Fant

Tawnysha Greene

Geeta Kothari

Brandi Wells

Nici West

Chris Yamashita

*Nonfiction*

Alicia Barnes 

Rachael Levitt 

Ioanna Opidee

*Poetry*

Bryan Borland

Anthony Isaac Bradley

Jo Ann Clark

Jarrett Eakins

Dakota R. Garilli

RJ Gibson

Lizi Gilad

Michael Hurley

Rochelle Hurt

W. Todd Kaneko

Sarah Leavens

Christopher Leibow

Naomi Lore

Rachael Lyon

Lisa McCool-Grime

Colin Meldrum

John A. Nieves

Emily O'Neill

Matt Pasca

Jan Priddy

Ann Robinson

Jonathan H. Scott

David Shumate

Danez Smith

Virginia Smith

Emma Sovich

Christine H. Stroud

Christine Tierney

Quinn White

Wendy Wisner

My Four Walls and Our Two Faces: A Review of Karen Lillis’ Watch the Doors as They Close

We've all had to face the inevitability of change. People move away. Relationships end. We get older, and we start to inspect our pasts under a new light, hopefully leading to some sort of acceptance or understanding. In Watch the Doors as They Close, Karen Lillis lets readers dive full force into the mind of a woman who recognizes that “everything flows,” and whose heart has been broken just days before the book’s opening. The narrator, by recounting and exploring some of the couple’s shared moments, seems to be trying to explain how two people could burn so brightly for each other in summer only to fizzle out by winter.

The entire piece reads like a discarded diary, with entries dating from December 12, 2003, to the end of that same month. The narrator is a writer who works in a bookstore and was seeing Anselm, a deeply troubled composer, from roughly August to December. In the first sentence, she admits that “this is the story of Anselm.” In fact, the narrator remains nameless throughout the novella. We learn so much about Anselm so quickly, including his sexual past in Paris involving three different women and his depression:

He calls it “the bad space.” When he starts going there he starts getting shaky and scared. Anxious. The shaky feels like after you've been crying for a long, long time. When he’s in the bad space he is almost absent to himself (though he seems to sit with it and try to cope with the accompanying anxiety – other times he just wants to be distracted, like watching movies – still other times he can’t bear it and he drinks to take the edge off) but he can seem strangely present to the person he’s with.

The quote above illustrates Lillis’ narrative tactics. Here, the sense of distance, of separation between Anselm and the narrator and the reader, is strongly established. Anselm is absent to himself while strangely present, just as he is absent and present to the reader through the narrator’s interpretation of him. Appearing within the first few pages of the book, Anselm’s depression casts a shadow over the entire relationship. It dictates the way the couple interacts and, often, how the narrator feels about herself. The sex stopped being sober relatively early on, and they live a sort of “desert island existence” not because the narrator is anxious about getting Anselm to meet her friends, but because Anselm is “so skittish among the living.” At one point, things are so awkward that the narrator has “a full-blown meltdown,” and “internaliz[es] his daylong inattentiveness into an inescapable feeling of ugliness and impotence, and just general ineffable anguish.”

Lillis’ choice of a diary format provides a level of honesty—in private writings, there’s no reason to leave anything unsaid. If the narrator were telling this story to a friend or family member directly, for example, there'd be more cause for skepticism. Lillis instead keeps the world of the novella very small, aptly mirroring the couple’s “desert island existence.” Minor characters are mentioned by name but aren't involved in the scenes.

The novella’s success comes in Lillis’ portrayal of a destructive relationship. The break up is so filled with subtleties that it really is heartrending. But, while readers empathize with the narrator’s sadness, the problem of Anselm’s tacit abuse is very real—his mood swings, his insularity, his drinking, his urge to leave without warning or explanation, not to mention the moments when the narrator simply feels threatened even though nothing is happening. Displaying typical signs of an abused person, she shares enough about Anselm’s shaky past to contextualize and almost justify his behavior. She has brief moments of clarity about the situation, but there is so much talk of confession, of her admitting to a wrong and returning to a “state of Grace,” that it seems she thinks she committed some sin. In the story we’re told, the narrator comes across as the victim but blames herself as the victimizer. She is so wrapped up in the World of Anselm that perhaps the truth is hard to acknowledge.

By the end of Watch the Doors as They Close, readers are left somewhat conflicted. While wanting to understand Anselm, there’s also a feeling that the narrator should stand up for herself and throw a few punches. But it’s not that kind of book. It is a personal and delicate attempt at tolerating change and moving beyond sadness and abuse. Just as the narrator says that “one has to sit very still and pay close attention to see where [Anselm’s] going,” so the readers must look closely to see some hope that the narrator will find solace and adapt. “I bought him some food for the bus and paid for a cab to Port Authority as if he still belonged to me,” she admits in closing, “but when the bus finally backed away, I hurried home to Brooklyn and dragged our futon to the curb.”

Review by Robyn Campbell

Watch the Doors as They Close by Karen Lillis
Spuyten Duyvil Novella Series, 2012