CUTBANK REVIEWS: Unpeopled Eden by Rigoberto Gonzalez

By Rigoberto GonzalezFour Way Books 2013

Review by Luis Martinez

An imagination unlike a kite, unmoored. In Unpeopled Eden, Rigoberto Gonzalez’s poems are surreal, visceral, and most of all, important—not just for the reader but for American poetry— they root and uproot so much they’ll leave the reader asking if they themselves are displaced. A wide-ranging and fearless collection, where we see U.S.-Mexico bordercrossers, a gay man asking his dead father for acceptance, and a brother looking for his lost brother. Here, a young writer will receive important and sought permission to speak and write on subjects he or she might not always see; to write about home, family, the personal. Even in its most austere moments, Gonzalez’s bravery exudes, as we see in a section of a list poem titled, “things that forget their shapes,” which includes: snakes, beddings, clothes, an orange, memory. William Carlos Williams says, “It is difficult/ to get the news from poems/ yet men die miserably every day/ for lack/ of what is found there.” I think some of us make it incredibly difficult to get magic from life. We dismiss it. Abandon it. The great imagery in this book will force one to look for our imagination as if it were something we’d put away in a drawer. Though this is an insistent and successful testament to the reoccurring tragedies that occur on the open wound that is the border, this is not as Juan Felipe Herrera says, “a cultural anthology.” This invites everyone.

In “Unpeopled Eden,” the title sequence and perhaps the best of this collection, tells the story of the horrible deportation plane crash where 32 were killed. Gonzalez pays special attention to how only 4 of the 32 victims were named by media reports, while the others were simply labeled, “deportees,” marking it as an untold story. Earlier in the sequence, after an immigration raid, the fruit of an apple tree “lies flung like the beads from/ a rosary with a broken string,” and, “A radio without paws… cannot claw/ its chords to end its suffering.” In these moments of sheer brutality, we witness Gonzalez crafting music out of incorrigible suffering. He looks at the ugly and asks us to look again. Gonzalez caresses us, lures us to his page, points our chins to his words, and says, “look there, I dare you to eat.” At the close of the sequence, the speaker sees patient vultures waiting for the fruit to rot— pointing the finger at the reader, asking if we too will wait.

Gonzalez turns the stone of immigration and gives light to a different face, one that isn’t always explored: the abandonment of family members, especially women, as their husbands are forced to leave them in search of a better life. In one of the most startling poems, “In The Village of Missing Fathers,” we see the abandoned left to find a means:

in the village without handsome

men: suddenly they wear the shoes

that lose their way. Some say

they journey North to waste

their days as kitchen slaves. Some say

they trade their organs for quick pay

After shocking actions, they look to be bandaged, not fed, as we see in the end of the poem, where Gonzalez’s poetry shakes us till unpredictability has a new meaning:

and that their shame means begging

on the city streets for gauze or cotton,

stitches  or thread, to heal their surgeries

and stand upright again without

rattling like coins inside a cup.

Then we see his range as he writes about sexuality, in “Mortui Vivos Docent.” The speaker is able to speak freely about his sexuality to his father only because the latter is no longer living:

… an angry father come to claim his child.

He did not catch me then, but he caught me

walking home, my knees still numb from dancing

with the men who love their mamacitas pink

An incredibly important poem in macho Latino culture, in all cultures, spaces where we need these poems:

… So, papi, keep your only son holy as you stuff

me in the trunk: I’m wearing mother’s blouse, my mother’s skirt.

Raw and powerful, Gonzalez makes you go back and reread the poems again and again. It is hard to read this book without pausing and wanting to start one’s own poems. Lines like “Newspaper boats on the puddle/ are the only mystery: they refuse/to sink despite the heavy dream/ of travel…”  and, “A thread of hair pretends to be/ a crack and sticks to glass …” make the reader grab a pen and poke a hole on the page, wall, window, ceiling to let in more lyric, more magic. A remarkable book by an important voice.

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Rigoberto Gonzalez is the author of Unpeopled Eden (Four Way Books, 2013), Black Blossoms (Four Way Books, 2011), Other Fugitives and Other Strangers (Tupelo Press, 2006), and So Often the Pitcher Goes to Water until It Breaks (University of Illinois Press, 1999). He is also the author of bilingual children’s books, a book of short fiction, three books of nonfiction, and three novels. He is also an editor and book critic. He was born in Bakersfield, California and raised in Michoacan, Mexico.

Luis Martinez spent part of the summer at the Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets and is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize. He lives in San Francisco.

CUTBANK REVIEWS: The Mystery of the Hidden Driveway, by Jennifer L. Knox

The Mystery of the Hidden DriveyJennifer L. Knox Bloof Books, 2010

"Jennifer L. Knox Is Still So Funny It’s Sad"

review by Becca Klaver

It’s true what they say about Jennifer L. Knox—you’ve never read poems this funny before. Forget clever puns, whimsically surreal moments, or whatever else you think you know about humor in poetry. The poems of The Mystery of the Hidden Driveway, Knox’s third collection, will have you gasping and hissing “Oh no she didn’t!” before you can get past the first line, or sometimes even the title. Case in point: the title of the third poem—“The Fattest Woman I Ever Loved,” which crashes straight into the line “was a contralto who drove birds to suicide.” By the end of this darkly jaunty prose poem, you’ve come to realize that the speaker is most likely a dog. And now you’ve got the recipe for a Jennifer L. Knox poem: one part grotesquery, two parts absurdity, a shot of obscenity, with pathos salted around the rim.

Knox isn’t merely the poetry equivalent of Kristin Wiig or Sarah Silverman, she’s their peer: a potty-mouthed boundary pusher who ventriloquizes the voices of characters who seem to have just escaped through the back door of the Jerry Springer set. There’s a family that raises an alligator, a boy who has sex with his stepmother, and a woman who is disappointed that, rather than the Celebrity Rehab intervention of her dreams, her family instead “nabbed her scabby ass at a fake birthday dinner at TGIFriday’s wearing old lady stretch pants she’d found at Marco’s mom’s condo and a stained polo shirt straight out of the dumpster.” Try as you might, you can’t look away from these poems, each scenario a tinseled train wreck.

Nowhere is the crash-and-burn quality of Knox’s poetry more apparent than in Mystery’s second section, “Cars,” a 15-page prose poem sequence about every car the speaker and her father ever crashed, due to drugs, booze, or a good old-fashioned death wish. “Cars” is the emotional core of the book, and it’s tempting to imagine that the crying girl whose father makes her drive (and bottom out) an old truck against her will grows up to be Jennifer L. Knox, poet with a taste for life’s big and small disasters. In the most frightening episode in “Cars,” Knox writes:

The car swerved like a cat on ice skates. And it’s true: Your whole life does flash in front your eyes. It happens really fast but every detail’s in there, even the stuff you’ve forgotten. The car drove off the cliff, turned in the air, and landed 30 feet below upside down on top of a Joshua tree, its sharp green spines like saw blades thrust through the shattered windows. I ended up in a ball behind the passenger seat with nothing but a tiny scratch on my hip. Oh, how I mourned those shoplifted pants the EMTs cut off me.

The lament for the shoplifted pants seems carefully placed to undercut our sympathies, and this sort of ruthlessly self-indicting move is a Knox trademark. So, too, is her “cat on ice skates”-like ability to glide away unbruised. We’re put in the position of parents, an odd place for a reader to find herself in: should we give this speaker a talking to, or just wrap her up in an I’m-so-glad-you’re-okay bear hug?

If Knox has been granted nine lives, The Mystery of the Hidden Driveway is the one where she tries to survey the damage. With its Nancy Drew-esque title and cover art, Mystery is, believe it or not, less shocking and garish than Knox’s previous books, A Gringo Like Me and Drunk By Noon. Knox’s third collection is interested in following a life’s snarled wreckage back to its source. In many poems, the titular mystery turns out to be a family drama. The cast of crazy characters is still here, but in poems such as “Cars,” “Marriage,” and “Love Poem: One Ton of Dirt,” we sense that Knox is telling her own story, one that weaves in and out of the lanes of her invented personae. Through these more personal poems, we begin to understand the empathy that Knox holds for even her most deranged characters. What might seem like slapstick or mockery eventually emerges as an unexpected form of commiseration for the speaker who places herself, hilariously and humbly, as one misfit in a band of many.

At a few revealing moments, Knox seems to address the change in tone and perspective of her third collection: “These days, not so much regret. Brute will’s broke / as a petting zoo pony,” she writes in “The Earth Is Flat and So’s My Ass.” The whimsical pony and the half-crass title remind us that this isn’t so much a paradigm shift as an expansion of tonal register. Elsewhere, in “Old Friends,” a poignant confession slips straight into an assertion of superiority: “I’m thinking how different things are now, / especially me, how my heart can barely stomach the story, / which means I’ve become a better person, certainly better / than the woman I knew, who I would never be friends with / again—she probably hasn’t changed at all.” Knox’s speaker has taken a long hard look at herself and realized that in spite of all the cars she’s driven off cliffs, literally and figuratively, she’s still laughing. And we are, too. Knox may not be selling out amphitheaters yet, but Mystery is the work of a consummate clown, tears and all.

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Jennifer L. Knox is the author of three books of poems, The Mystery of the Hidden Driveway, Drunk by Noon, and A Gringo Like Me, all available from Bloof Books. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review and four times in the Best American Poetry series. She is at work on her first novel.

Becca Klaver is the author of the poetry collection LA Liminal (Kore Press, 2010) and several chapbooks, including the hot-off-the-paper-cutter Merrily, Merrily (Lame House Press, 2013) and Nonstop Pop (Bloof Books, 2013). She is a PhD student in English at Rutgers University and lives in Brooklyn, NY.

CUTBANK REVIEWS: Of Cities & Women by Etel Adnan

The Window Wide Open: A Dialogueon Etel Adnan’s Of Cities & Women

by Julie Lauterbach-Colby and Laura Maher

We begin as Etel began in her first letter to Fawwaz, the summer of 1990, Barcelona:

I go through the streets of this town “mentally” writing you a letter, and another discourse keeps rolling in my mind…Women, when in the street, don’t seem to consciously play a role, or live an exception: they are part of humanity, of a place, of a climate, of a country. They remind me that it is interesting to be alive, to be a human being, and to be part of a precise moment in time and space, that theories get lost when confronted with privileged experience.

I thus renounced the idea of writing you a formal letter on “feminism” and began writing that which was given to me.

Dear Readers—here is our own discourse, filtered through the lens of our experiences: our walks, our letters, our conversations with others and those overheard.

The writing naturally developed as fragments, echoing the ways Etel’s words became a part of our everyday lives. To read Of Cities & Women is to live an experience, to go through the streets in search of an open space, a privileged place where the free line of the horizon creates a pure pleasure.

We wrote letters back and forth to each other, hoping that our fragments would speak with Etel’s, which appear in italics throughout the essay—

Dear,

I sit down in front of my window (Don’t we always, when we write?), and even though the view outside is rather uninteresting—one could argue blank—I will not start the page as such. I have an address and your name—what I can return to—

This is the reality of my return. There is a point where I get so removed from daily life that I begin to miss these: cooking for myself, sitting in front of an open window, reading or writing. Just the time to think.

I have a lot of ideas about women, but reality obscures them more than it enlightens them. The problem is the heart can never be separated from the flesh.                I don’t know what else to tell you. I wish I could stay more.

Misreading this the first time, I wish I could say more, meant,

begin: Dear Friend.

Letters this morning. The opening—how beautiful to imagine the possibility—

—to imagine my reality, to give you relief:

The window was not enough for me. I had to be out in the world. I know you’ll understand what I mean.

Imagine, for a moment: The sun hanging high.

I resume my letter. I slept very poorly last night. In the heat, with the window wide open, I listened to the sound of the sea…

through the roads of her memory, her grief, her joys. We are as close as we could be.

I listened to the sound of the sea, her breath…

What did you do, and what did you feel while in the middle of it?

cold-to-the-bones—

The rest of the afternoon spreading out in front of me like a map.

People have all sorts of stories to tell me… But for the stories of women, it’s something else. The women have kept contact with the earth, if I may say, in the ancient roles of witness and memory keepers.

Friend, can you imagine? A dove, perched on the wrist. Perched on the wrist—

                                  How does one know pure pleasure?

I don’t know how to describe it except that it felt as life was—

the very space I occupied at that moment.

I look at the sea, as if there had never been anything else to do besides looking at her—

The letter writer—                                  she hasn’t run out of words, but found time to stay

The sun is hanging high over the sky, clear for winter, and warm—

Dear Friend,

Who is there, at the heart of her investigation?

beauty? The desert or the sea?

I look at the sea, as if there had never been anything else to do in this city besides looking at her. But the heart of this city is rotting, burdened with heavy sorrow… Do we love death because we don’t know how to live? Is it because we would rather lose everything than settle for less?

The seekers—

we write letters, yes, but why do we read letters? What stays in the imagination?

This confession:

Yes, I contemplate the sea, what else is there to do? To dive in. There is no separation between the sea and a woman and it is futile to look further [than]the essence of what is feminine: water, salt, phosphorus, plankton, all the minerals in liquid form, and the sun covering it all. To look at the sea is to become what one is.

To read letters:

we want to see the world

                                                  through someone else’s eyes.

The relief it affords us—to be outside of our own body—a letter allows us to transform.

Could it be a grace we give to others?

the boiling of my heart calmed

How many times have we written                  just to expel excess emotion: anger, sorrow, frustration, confusion, elation. And how many times have we written a letter

                                                                                        only to burn it afterwards?

those pieces of the self

determined—Dear Friend—the space to be born and to settle. A return to the familiar, a return to

the sea.

To look straight into the eyes of this open space, a privileged place where the free line of the horizon creates a pure pleasure.

Does it call to you as it calls to me?

We are guests of the wedding, dove on wrist, woman hauled away at night, Picasso’s nude, Lot’s wife;

we are steam bath and mountain, religion of the flesh, frail shoulders and old knowledge.

But, still: we are (a city and a date)—

Barcelona, June 25, 1990

Aix-En-Provence, July 23, 1990

Skopelos, August, 19, 1990

Murcia, November 10, 1990

Amsterdam, November 30, 1990

Berlin, January 28, 1991

Beirut, August 23, 1991

Rome, February, 19, 1992

Beirut, August 7, 1992

I return                                              return to this: A life on the page—since we can’t stay, let us hope to return and let it continue

asking to be opened,                          or filled,            begun again

                              Dear Friend

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Poet, essayist, and painter Etel Adnan was born in Beirut, Lebanon. She is the author of numerous books of prose and poetry, and is also a painter, sculptor, and weaver whose art has been exhibited internationally. Her collections of poetry include Seasons (2008); There: In the Light and the Darkness of the Self and the Other(1997); The Spring Flowers Own & Manifestations of the Voyage (1990); The Indian Never Had a Horse (1985); and Moonshots (1966).

In addition to Sitt Marie Rose (1977), Adnan’s prose includes Of Cities and Women (Letters to Fawwaz) (1993), a series of letters on feminism that Adnan wrote to exiled Arab intellectual Fawwaz Traboulsi; Paris, When It’s Naked (1993); and Master of the Eclipse (2009), winner of the Arab American Book Award. She lives in Sausalito and Paris with her partner, the artist and writer Simone Fattal. (biographical information courtesy of The Poetry Foundation)

Julie Lauterbach-Colby and Laura Maher are artists and writers living in Tucson, Arizona. They meet weekly for coffee, where conversations range from fairytales, to sustainable food practices, to their favorite vintage clothing haunts. Although they regularly write in each other’s presence, this is their first collaboration.