spent ~2min trying to determine if blogger would allow me to upload an mp3, because of good memories i have of downloading mp3s from livejournal blogs in 2010. but it doesn't seem possible without leveraging a file sharing service. here is a cool unicode symbol i found instead: ▨ . and now here are some book reviews.
collected poems 2009-2022
by wallace barker (maximus): have chatted with wallace with varying
levels of indepthness and frequency on twitter. enjoyed and reviewed his
last poetry book with gob pile. most of these collected poems are written in a sort of
punctuationless, run-on, ideas-crashing-into-one-another style like
with arbitrary-seeming line and stanza breaks and a frequent 'final single-line stanza conveying a larger idea'. i understand this tag ending kind of thing conceptually but don't like it as a particularly dramatic affectation, i think. the
common themes though are appealing to me and include maturing into
adulthood, work drudgery, quiet despair, simple pleasures, guilt about
one's place in the world, and simple acknowledgements of love, e.g. for
his wife (i assume). deeply enjoyed many, seemingly skimmed others without fully
processing. enjoyed having as a book to pick up randomly to read 2-4
poems from, which is served by its length/nature as a 'collected poems'
book. would be good as a clothbound hardcover with gilt stamped cover.
literally show me a healthy person by darcie wilder (tyrant books): first time reading this. reads like a loose autofictional narrative via collection of tweet drafts -- i think some of the lines are tweets, or at least tweet drafts, often referencing twitter itself -- and longer paragraphs, maybe sort of like a liveblog situation. enjoyed the way the book is loosely based on her mother's death and its impact on her family/relationship with her father, and the unpredictable way the format frames out/conveys the 'plot points' throughout. but the interstitial of nonsequitor tweets within the narrative kind of bugged me and also reminded me of new tab by guillaume morissette, which i think though is the worse offender (his inclusion of tweet-like lines felt more pretentious and useless within the more straightforward narrative). although i do like how the short lines create a sort of topical 'burst' effect, where the individual thoughts tend to accrete around a new idea/point, e.g. problems with body image, eating peoples' cum, etc., but sometimes the sequencing feels deflating/'safe'. feeling conflicted overall on the reading experience but thought it was mostly good. the embedded tweet/short line thing seems like a pretty dated alt lit affectation looking back on it, today, but i can see how/why it was considered interesting/genre defining/etc at the time; scott macclanahan's blurb calls it the future of writing, or something to that effect. based on listening to various music critic podcasts, it seems common for something that at the time is described as 'the future of x' to sound very dated very quickly. feeling curious what the editing process was like.
the black book by tom drury: josh hebburn sent me this, unexpectedly, based on email correspondence around books from the 90s and kmart realism. definitely reads similar to something like freddy barth, but with a lesser emphasis on scene setting/transitions -- felt often like scenes just kind of run into each other within a chapter -- and less humor, or, maybe, a different kind of humor that didn't resonate with me as much. relatedly, felt interested in the meandering plot, things just sort of happening and time passing, the protagonist almost randomly moving onto new locations and meeting new characters throughout. large stretches of scenes where nothing 'interesting' happens, e.g. a brief tour of some stupid tourist attraction, listening to the docent's monologue, descriptions of the items in the museum, people going golfing, buying a car, etc. felt like the emphasis on random people being 'quite a character' made it sort of unreal and emphasizes this vague type of 80s-90s humor. but overall i found it interesting as an example of 'non-classic literary fiction from the 90s,' where people occupy this interesting space between the non-computer world of the 80s and the fully-online world of the 2010s and beyond -- people do stuff in person, talk on the phone, interact with strangers in restaurants, work in a physical newspaper office -- but also talk about being software engineers or having data entry jobs. kind of a dumb thing to write about in a review but it stood out to me as something interesting about the book. the book overall felt sort of unfocused, to me, maybe, severely long for its very thin 'plot'. the sort of wandering nature of it made me frequently put it down and not feel compelled to pick up for days at a time, but i enjoyed any given scene while reading, the emphasis on nature and architectural descriptions and random details. i think its length and meandering nature ended up being its strength, by the end, and the 'organized crime' plot seemingly needless.
boathouse by jon fosse (dalkey archive): i've read and enjoyed his book trilogy, and this book is similar in style, with long dense blocks of repetitive prose intercut with brief, naturalistic dialogue. this is a brief novel about a sort of loser guy who stayed back in his childhood home with his mother, in their small/shitty norwegian village on a fjord, and he reminisces about his old best friend from childhood, who he just saw for the first time in 10 years, and who is married with kids. the plot details strange, emotionally taxing scenes about interacting with the friend's wife intercut with childhood/teenage memories. each chapter is bookended by more or less identical, repetitive, choppy blocks of setting the scene/context of the book (i assume to indicate strong, obsessive anxiety/trauma response), which i got kind of tired of, but when the actual plot of each chapter started, i felt very gripped and mesmerized. impressed by how he's able to make a long scene about two kids playing in a boathouse, where nothing really happens for ten pages, so fascinating and compelling. also enjoyed the penultimate chapter where it's told in the first person but speculating in third person, like, the narrator writing from Knut's perspective, about the narrator, the interaction of third person narrative and 'I' felt unique and exciting.
aliss at the fire by jon fosse (dalkey archive): enjoyed the (ironically, in retrospect) escapism facilitated by the quiet, bleak, norwegian village life and scenery of boathouse so quickly picked this one up. a seemingly shorter, but denser, novel about, basically, intergenerational trauma written in a repetitive, run-on, fragmentary way. its content is presented in a series of hazy, hallucinatory, overlapping, ghostly death-related scenes, usually involving people named after each other, and specifically relating to death-by-drowning-in-the-fjord. enjoyed the various images, not really knowing what was going on sometimes (both for cultural and stylistic reasons), and the imagery and scenery of various specific scenes. enjoyed the effect of starting the book in first person but then not using the first person again until the very end -- felt surprising and clever, and worked well with the theme and execution of the embedded/overlapping scenes. took me a while to read, felt like the rambling, repetitive, run-on style was distracting at times. enjoyed the fossian effect of having every line of dialogue start a new line, regardless of who's speaking. wouldn't rank as high as boathouse or trilogy.
birds aren't real by d.t. robbins (maudlin house): have had random, brief conversations with dt on twitter and have submitted small things to rejection letters during his drunk pop up submission windows. he also asked to use a song i had recorded for his book trailer for this book; i enjoyed the trailer and other trailers he made for the book, but hadn't read anything from it prior to getting it. this book consists of short-to-mid-length stories that revolve around a few recurrent ideas/themes, such as people dying due to someone summoning satan/demons, drinking beer, listening to music, being/falling in love, allegorical and grotesque/cartoonish violence contrasting with boring white collar 2020s suburbia, and hating your job. overall felt surprised by how many stories center the same idea of a satanic summoning with people dying in slapstick ways, something like 4+ stories do this. most other stories feature some kind of fantastical, sci-fi, or arcane body horror/violence scenes -- melting skin, ripped up muscles, bones snapping, decapitation, etc; this recurrent, grotesque, psychedelic violence/murder reminded me of the adult swim cartoon superjail. but the book in this way also assumes death as more or less irreal, with people surviving this kind of mutilation, or enjoying it, stuff like that, reducing the imagery almost always to metaphor for catharsis, i think, e.g. in the first story, which is basically just a gripe about boring email job zoom meetings that ends with everyone being killed by a chainsaw demon thing. the stories all share a similar jocular, sarcastically excited tone, with lots of onomatopoeia, exclamation points, and phrases like "yippie!" and "hell yeah!" and "LOL!", which i felt was unique and effective at defining the tone of the collection. but i felt mixed on the books' wackiness -- some stories read like a high teenager recapping/pitching a plot from an episode of rick and morty, especially the one about time travel, with various different-dimensional versions of a character all teaming up to kick someone's ass, but i enjoyed the story that builds up an expectation for a reveal/explanation that never comes, which felt like a fun experiment in story telling from a craft perspective. overall though most of the stories devolve into, i felt, needless sincerity or melodrama by the end; accidentally boo'd out loud when one story's whole ghost story conceit ended up being a set up for the idea of looking in the mirror and seeing yourself look like your parent. felt like the book would have been more fun with more confidently stupid endings; it feels subversive, but not entirely so, like, safely subversive, or weird but still trying to be conversant with the more vanilla sad-twist-ending-flash-fiction scene. have struggled with trying to articulate my vaguely negative feelings about it because i find myself wanting to say things about it that other people have said about my own book of stories, which is funny and humbling. i am, interestingly, referenced in a story in this book (alongside bud smith), which made me laugh. i am excited about becoming a recurring character in the indie lit multiverse. i like that the stories feel unique relative to other stuff out there, overall.
salad days by laura theobald (maudlin house): short poems with a lot of similes; some poems consist of almost nothing but seemingly unrelated similes, as if pursuing this sense of poetry's purpose being to come up with novel, individual lines as much as possible, distilling a given poem down to just several interesting, free-standing lines or couplets. most of the poems throughout feel and look very similar, consisting of 2-3 similes and a few lines that feel very carefully crafted and clever, usually in playing with a mundane expression or figure of speech but changing the tense or something, e.g. (i'm making these up) "i am going to be a lot" or "i want to be going out tonight." enjoyed various individual lines throughout, especially one that says something like "the butthole of my chest". noticed a lot of references to generically poemy things, like moonlight and ripe fruit, and an emphasis on relationship-based insecurities. overall enjoyed it the book because of its dry, bored affectation and moments of provocative silliness. interested in reading more by her. would recommend.
if you dont love the moon your an asshole by steve roggenbuck (boost house): this is a very awkwardly physically small book of "poems and selfies". felt like various individual lines were interesting and funny but as a whole never felt myself getting excited seeing a block of text on the page, wherein he follows a template of intrusive-thought style, lol so random one-liners butting up against one-off attempts at poetic observation, usually about the moon or birds. very time-locked in that post-crunkcore period where it was broadly considered humorous for a small white man to ironically talk about "swag". enjoyed most of the very short poems, one of which includes the line "i masturbate here and there." the selfies and use of the word "frick" are all concertedly very bad. enjoyed the anti-blurbs on the back. i have inchoate thoughts on his inability to fully commit to either fully sappy romantic poetry or vulgar, misanthropic antipoetry, and how this does a disservice to both of his seemingly incompatible aims.
duplex by mike nagel (autofocus lit): a short, 'linked essay collection,' that sort of just reads like a novella-lengthed essay or autofiction, about mike and his wife moving into and moving out of a duplex in texas during the covid-19 pandemic. the humorous tone and emphasis on clever/self-deprecating dialogue and silly antics reminded me of Jonathan Goldstein from the Heavyweight podcast/older NPR shows, but a bit darker/self-destructive (e.g. emphasis on alcoholism), and less funny, or less funny via subverting expectations, or something, maybe. the aimlessness paired with a humor defined by the first person narrator relating his own clever/funny actions and quips feels vaguely offputting to me; for transparency, i had written a whole novel in this style and ended up feeling this particular approach was too artificial/pointless, and abandoned it. but i did feel vaguely 'relieved' to see someone else writing this way without it being terrible. aside from this vaguely negative feeling toward the structural conceit of the book and an emphasis on wordplay, i overall enjoyed it, the recurring themes and images, the BEEF HAM callbacks, various jokes and ideas. felt like it could have been longer and still be good. enjoyed there being a QR code in the back that takes you to a 'secret webpage' with links to author interviews and a white t-shirt you can buy.
blackbook by jerome spencer (public zoo press): jerome is cool, interviewed me and cavin for popscure, and has traded books/zines with me in the past. this is a very short novel with short chapters in two sections (SIDE A and SIDE B). it follows a crew of 15 year old graffiti punks who get into some antics and then, later, get involved in a burglary plot to pay back a drug dealer. greatly enjoyed its emphasis on friendship, graffiti, teamwork, and found family, in particular the scene of them doing their biggest/coolest tagging project. enjoyed the way no one character is reduced to a caricature. the use of slang and specific references felt natural and not like a way to pose. enjoyed the narrative pacing and the mix of earnestness, self-deprecating humor, and serious topics. felt that some transitional passages digressed confusingly to set up some plot point's relevance, and the 'twist' re Lowe's, while cathartic/fun, didn't make sense based on the motivating factor for the original burglary. but overall i found it fun, engaging. would have enjoyed it if it were longer. would recommend to people who like the scuzzy but warm-hearted autofiction stuff in indie lit.
the dandelion celebration: a guide to unexpected cuisine by peter gail (goosefoot acres press): a cookbook/manifesto about dandelions from the 90s. bought it used hoping to learn more about cooking foraged foods, especially as a lot of dandelions grow in my yard. the book is 40% summary of who eats dandelion and why, including a lot of random claims that dandelions can cure cancer and stuff, 10% a list of (presumably very outdated) contact info for companies that sell dandelions, and 40% recipes for the three main parts of the flower (leaves, buds/flowers, and roots). felt like the book could have just said "use dandelion greens any time you'd use another green or spinach" and save a lot of pages. laughed at the frequency with which the author notes that eating too much dandelion will make you piss the bed, and also at the frequent 'oriental' recipes which consist of simply frying something in oil and adding soy sauce. curious about trying dandelion root 'coffee.' laughed at a recipe that involved 100 pounds of pork. wouldn't really recommend the book overall.
the helios disaster by linda bostrom knausgaard: bought this, like everyone else, because she's uncle kok's ex-wife, and it sounded interesting. the physical book is normal-sized and has some kind of award sticker on it, but the text is set in a large font with comically huge margins, like it's basically a novella the publisher is trying to pad out to sell more copies, or something. anyway the story concerns a broody and mysterious protagonist who is born from her schizophrenic father's head splitting open, and she gets put in a foster home. there is a fundamental inconsistency between the first person narrative emphasizing learning about the world, especially words and ideas (lots of lines like (i'm making this up) "snow, that's a word i wanted to remember, soft and white") but still using a large number of cliche similes and expressions, e.g. feeling like being alone in the ocean, or something. so she knows what the ocean is but not what snow is? get outta here with that. couldn't get over this incompatibility within the narrative and generally broody, melodramatic tone. gave up on reading. probably won't finish. i've got better shit to do with my time, like read the cows by lydia davis...
bonus chapbook round
the cows by lydia davis (sarabande press): bought this because sebastian quote tweeted a picture of it, describing it as literary asmr, or something. the cover looked interesting and i bought it on thriftbooks. really enjoyed it. i felt endeared to its emphasis on trying to articulate the specific appearance of the cows in different positions/moments, this as a mix of both meditative artistic consideration act as well as a writing challenge. also liked the theme of the inherent mysteriousness of the cows, the lack of ability to personify them, and the tone she uses to write about this. also enjoyed the stylistic effect of undercutting a simile, as in (making this up) "the cows canter toward the middle of the field in a hurry, but there is nothing in the field to be in a hurry for." enjoyed the photographs. will probably reread frequently. would recommend. if you know of other books like this, please let me know.
the northerners by benjamin niespodziany (above/ground press): a short collection of ekphrastic poems about a movie, which means i imagine each poem is a description of/allusion to a particular scene or image in a movie, which i haven't seen. enjoyed the poems where a particular line is repeated, like "the coat rack is full" 2x in one poem. enjoyed kind of piecing together the cast and setting of the movie but mainly made me just curious about the movie. made me feel unsure about the point of ekphrastic poetry if you aren't familiar with the art it's describing, or maybe it's still the same, and not something i feel particularly interested in, in general.
