brief book reviews

here are brief reviews of the last 3 books i've read:

 

I Want to Feel Happy but I Only Feel _____. by Mallory Smart (Expat Press): i bought this book for a few reasons: 1. mallory is nice to me and runs maudlin house, a book press and lit mag that i like, 2. giacomo highly recommended it, 3. i was ordering other expat books at the same time, and 4. bud smith blurbed it. these poems have a very alt lit introspection kinda vibe both in content (listening to indie music, feeling anxious and awkward, relationship stories, social media) and style (mostly lowercase text, lots of 'i want/i will' lines, limited metaphor/symbolism). i appreciate the book for this introspection and freedom of exploring feelings of self-consciousness in an unself-conscious way. the recurring autofictive elements, of traveling, for example, are nice, offering different perspectives of the same ideas/experiences, which complements the navel-gazey sense of unease, uncertainty of the self, etc. However, because of these common themes, some of the poems feel redundant within the collection. what's missing from this, that was in the alt lit stuff that came before, i think, is some of the flights of fancy, bored daydreams about godzilla or hamsters or the earth exploding or whatever - i'm not saying this book should have done that exactly but that this kind of external imagery worked to break up the internality of old alt lit poems (i'm thinking brandon scott gorrell's book here, mainly), and so something 'bigger' or even just different along some axis would have felt good in the collection. overall though i think it's good, it has a good rawness and leverages a lot of small details well to capture the landscape in which it was written. i enjoyed thinking about how it will be read a few years from now - it came out in 2017 i think and already in some ways it feels 'dated' in, like, i imagine a 17 year old gen z kid laughing at the references to the  now 'lame' millennial memes like grumpy cat. but i think this is just how things that are contemporary and real always end up, especially wrt the internet, or maybe it feels bigger now because the next generation is coming of age and the millennials are being edged out of relevance. it's not a negative thing, i think, just something i thought about while reading, which i think is a good thing, when personal poems make you think of bigger things.

 

Not I by Sebastian Castillo (Word West): i like sebastian's tweets (i've blogged about them before), his short stories on the internet, and his (chap)book 49 Venezuelan Novels on Bottlecap press. there is/was very little information about Not I posted on the internet prior to its release - i don't think i saw any excerpts anywhere, and the word west website doesn't list a genre or page count; sebastian seemed noncommittal about it being either poetry or prose or some kind of hybrid in a tweet, i think. so i had little to go on prior to reading. it's a short book consisting of 24 parts (12 sections with 2 subsections each). each section corresponds to a 'tense' in english, e.g. 'simple past', and consists of 25 lines, each using "I" as its subject and one of the 25 most commonly used verbs in english (according to a sort of prologue disclaimer) as its main clausal verb. sebastian is an english professor, and the book serves as a sort of love letter to 'the english language' from an english professor's perspective. there is no narrative, although there are clusters of thematically-related lines within a given section, e.g. about a relationship or about money. many of the lines are evocative and interesting on their own, while others are riffs on cliches/idioms/references, and others are kind of neutral. the way the book is structured, in my head, reduces each line to simply one interesting phrase or image independent of the more or less swappable tenses - the repetitive subject and verbs means that the first few words of each line kind of melt into the background - there's nothing meaningfully different to me about the impact of each tense (eg between "i have been trying to compose myself" and "i will have been trying to compose myself", as the tense doesn't necessarily interplay with the idea of composing oneself) so the real contribution of each line is just what comes after the tense markers or whatever. i might have preferred the book to just be a list of these images as gerunds or something, eg "feeling a breezy sangfroid / trying to compose myself accordingly / leaving my shoes by the door / calling for an insurrection against our friendship" but then he'd lose the gimmick and it'd just be a long poem, so, i dunno. my main critique is that, basically, the gimmick of the book was distracting, in that i felt frustrated by the lack of rigor/consistency in what is, at its face, supposed to be a rigorous/consistent textual exercise. for example, in some sections, he crosses out the beginnings of lines which he thinks will read awkwardly, eg. the 'want' lines in past continuous, as it would be 'ungrammatical' to write something like "i was wanting to go to the store". but he doesn't cross these lines out in other 'continuous' tense sections, so my frustration comes from the fact that there is nothing more 'awkward' about using 'want' in the past continuous than using it in the future continuous (both result in a progressive 'wanting'), but he strikes out those lines in one section and not the other. at the same time, striking out the lines at all felt lazy/frustrating (and invites the reader to propose their own lines - i would have suggested something like "i was wanting more for myself", maybe). a similar frustrating lack of consistency is that, up until page 73, every verb is unergative and in active voice - "I" is both the semantic agent/cause and the grammatical subject, eg. "I go to the park" - until page 73, when the 'know' line is randomly passive: "i was known to get out of hand;" the subject is no longer the knower. does this mean that some of the struck-through lines could have just been passives as well? why not "i was wanted for my crimes", etc.? also related to this inconsistency, in my head, is the use of phrasal verbs like 'come around' used in the 'come' lines, which, again, felt inconsistent with the central conceit of using the most common verbs - "come around" is a different verb than "come" from a lexical semantics standpoint; it is not the result of composing "come" with "around" but instead functions as a distinct predicate. i mean, he can 'technically' use phrasal verbs because they use the 'word from the list' (and he can do anything he wants, it's his book), but it strikes me as contrary to the heart of the 'english professor' exercise to not, like, be diligent about this kind of minutiae. there are <600 lines in the book so these arbitrary deviations especially stand out to me - maybe in a much larger/denser text, it wouldn't be so grating. it sounds like i'm being nitpicky or petty but i don't understand the purpose of a partial effort for a book like this - it'd be like advertising your book as being free of punctuation but then including a a bunch of hyphenated words and a couple semi-colons or something. i should clarify that i almost finished a PhD in theoretical syntax with a dissertation basically on unergative verbs, voice, transitivity, argument structure, etc. so i think i'm just "being a little bitch," and most readers probably won't care about these inconsistencies. aside from the gimmick of the book, there is good imagery in many of the lines [update: in personal correspondence, sebastian offers that this inconsistency was intentional, the narrative a comment on feeling constrained by the 'tools' afforded to us with language; i should have realized this based on the epigraphs and sebastian's interest in wittgenstein. i feel a sense of compatriotism in his risk/gamble in how the book could be read, cf barn poems]. i liked a good number of the ideas/phrases. i think he should publish a book of short stories or a long poem, but maybe he plans on making his bibliography some sort of postmodern performance art (cf 49, Venezuelen Novels consisting of 49 single-sentence stories) and never publishing a 'normal' book; i have no good, unselfish reason for why he shouldn't do this.

The Fountain by Kat Giordano (Thirty West): kat and i are twitter/writing friends and she asked me to blurb this, her debut novel, via unedited/uncorrected ARC pdf. kat is primarily known as/identifies as a poet but i have always been a fan of her prose, and this is her longest piece of prose to date, as far as i know. this is a 1st person narrative about an incredibly anxious/neurotic 22 year old woman who kind of semi-dates a 45 year old loser over the span of like two or three weeks. what i like about the book is that the first-person protagonist is incredibly self-conscious and socially awkward, but the narrator's prose is very confident and lucid - insightful, charismatic, full of jokes, relatable. i thought the way that you are wrenched through the obsessive, self-defeating actions with a very clear reflection was good and stands out to me as the purpose of the book. plot-wise almost nothing happens, with a lot of the scenes dedicated to stilted conversations and uninteresting/uncomfortable dates, which is realistic, i feel, and is sort of the purpose of the book i think: there's a strong theme of modern ennui, wasting time, feeling aimless, feeling isolated in spite of interpersonal relationships, etc. I do think at times the exposition gets redundant (when there are conversations about conversations) or inconsistent (when, after a long passage of minute details about interactions, whole interactions are left out of the text but then referenced later), but that's also part of its realism (and/or will change during the editing stage, based on a brief conversation w/ kat) - the minutiae is especially good place/time setting and i think will stand as a good representation of like the year 2015, with the stupid restaurants, awkward art fairs, the role of cell phones in public, lack of career opportunities, Netflix, etc. I also liked the downward character arc, the way that the protagonist struggles with going from feeling relatively strong convictions and openness to losing those convictions and closing off - following what one wants and then realizing it's not what one wants, especially relative to some of the other characters, and this role of arbitrariness, how everyone operates similarly aimlessly and with contradictions. i think the last chapter was my favorite, in its departure from the rest of the book in tone/content/pacing.