ÜBERCHEF USA by Jennifer Juneau

By Charles Rammelkamp

Jennifer Juneau’s debut novel is a real riot.  A mash-up of reality television shows – principally cooking competitions a la Gordon Ramsey, but with a nod to Survivor as well as disaster movies – the novel also confronts the eternal questions, does art imitate life, does life imitate art, does art imitate art imitating life… or, more succinctly, what is reality? The possibilities seem reflected endlessly back on one another as in a funhouse mirror.  Indeed, the fun, zany plot of ÜBERCHEF USA is exactly like being caught in a funhouse mirror!

Related in the first person by one of the contestants, Greta Gupenheimer, the novel is told in twelve “episodes,” as befits a TV show. In the first, the audition, Greta explains her motivation to Maggie, a waitress at the Corner Diner. Friendless, obviously viewing the other contestants as competition, Greta comes to regard Maggie as a confidante.  (“The Corner Diner had been like a home. Maggie, a mother.”)  In the diner after the audition, Greta confesses to Maggie: “I can’t even cook.”

“Why enter a cooking contest to begin with?”

“Because making a fool out of myself on TV is easy money.”

So true! Remember the free Frigidaire contestants used to get on The Newlywed Game for humiliating confessions about the first time they “made whoopee”?  

“The world would be depressed without television,” Maggie soothes her elsewhere.  Greta is a starving artist, a painter, broke, about to lose her New York apartment for failing to make rent – it’s one of the reasons she’s come to LA to participate. Greta’s specialty? Eggs and toast. Not an auspicious start, but Greta has pluck. Through her eyes we meet the judges and the other contestants.  She has a funny way of sizing things up that makes the reader smile. “Looking at Bud was like looking at a vending machine full of junk food,” she tells us, describing another contestant.

As is true of the format of all “reality” competitions, there are three judges. But these guys are more like the Three Stooges – Slick, Gram (later, “Gramb”) and Chef Crank, who is the “Moe” of these stooges. They are constantly bickering, cutting each other down, belittling the contestants, throwing them curveballs. All that’s missing is the fingers in the eye – and maybe that’s not really missing!

After the ten contestants are chosen, the cookoffs begin with seafood.  Only, the contestants have to go out and catch their fish. Greta observes that her “fish looked like a worn-out tennis shoe.” Then, when they are back in the janky studio to prepare their dishes, they discover that behind the wall of their soundstage, the soap opera that’s being taped on the adjacent set is audible. A woman, Jane, is about to be stabbed “fifty times in the heart” by somebody. John? Of course, the contestants and judges become absorbed in the soap opera as the novel progresses and characters like the wealthy Drina Sanchez appear (“Her voice was like a long, black cigarette holder. Long black gloves.”). Did Jane die? The contestants argue back and forth among each other as viewers of soap operas often do.

“I bet John and his lover are in it together.”

“No, the girl in the hospital bed was an imposter.”

“It’s obvious that John hacked up Jane and flushed her down the toilet.”

“Jane was sucked into some vortex.”

The fact that nobody can actually see the soap opera actors underscores the whole notion of “reality” that’s so potent in this novel. (The epigraph to ÜBERCHEF USA comes from Academy-award-winning director Steven Soderbergh: “Reality shows are all the rage on TV at the moment … but that’s not reality, it’s just another aesthetic form of fiction.”)  Listening to the dialogue behind the wall, they are like the blind men and the elephant in the parable.

The next episode, after the Nurse is eliminated, is a spoof on Survivor. The contestants are divided into two teams and go out into the wilderness with guns. They are going to prepare a dish centered around a yellow-bellied marmot, and they are preparing the meal for monkeys. In episode four, it’s ice cream cones for clowns at a circus.  In episode five they go to Italy. One contestant is eliminated after each episode.

But just when you think you may have the plot figured out, a countdown to the winner, American Idol-style, think again. Just as the three remaining contestants prepare for their next challenge, in episode eleven – preparing the favorite childhood treat of one of the three judges (all dressed as children, Chef even wearing a cap with a propeller) – “reality,” the soap opera and the cooking competition all collide and mix like a spilled plate of spaghetti. Indeed, as Greta observes, “What happened next could not have been more surreal had the scene been an online video definition of the word ‘surreal.’” A group of terrorists from the “real world,” disguised as animals, invades the set…and that’s as much of the plot as I’m giving away.

Along the way, we are introduced to a variety of colorful screwball eccentrics, like the celebrity guests blind Helen and the vegan Agave. The Lighting Director, the Cameramen, Jim and Mike. There are the contestants, Ben Jax whose specialty is tacos, Keri, the precocious thirteen-year-old, and all the others from Bud and Tamara to the Nurse and the Mute, the Zookeeper and the rest.  The sponsors? The makers of the cleaning products used on the show, Klootz, Fick, Peedo and Skuzz.

The reader is never sure what’s coming next, but whatever it is is sure to be amusing. And indeed, what’s coming next from Jennifer Juneau? ÜBERCHEF USA is going to be a tough act to follow!

You can get the book here: https://www.amazon.com/%C3%9Cberchef-USA-Jennifer-Juneau/dp/1948510200/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=jennifer+juneau&qid=1575155925&s=books&sr=1-1

 

Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for Brick House Books in Baltimore and Reviews Editor for The Adirondack Review. A chapbook of poems, Jack Tar’s Lady Parts, is available from Main Street Rag Publishing. Another poetry chapbook, Me and Sal Paradise, was recently published by Future Cycle Press.

Cesare by Jerome Charyn

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By Lynette G. Espositio

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Just in time for 2020 reading, Jerome Charyn gives us a novel of war-torn Berlin and a love story extraordinaire.  Published by Bellevue Literary Press and just released this month, Charyn takes the reader back to a World War II timeline and the dangers and complexities of war intrigues, plot twists and character revelations.

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Before the novel’s first chapter begins, Charyn uses several literary techniques to prepare the reader.  He presents a list of major and minor characters; a glossary of definitions, and a dated letter to set up time, place and situational attitudes.  I like these techniques because it helps the reader have more intimacy with the storyline.  The letter in particular sets the time and situation:  February 11, 1943 from the desk of Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, Berlin.  The reader is ready for war.

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The 367 pages of intrigue presented in seven chapters moves at a quick but controlled pace.  The reader is introduced to Erik (Cesare) in a Jewish orphanage sent there by a council of whores who, according to the narrator, sent their “little wolf” there for a better life.  The whores subsidize the orphanage.  War changes this.

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So the main character is in an orphanage going hungry, is Jewish and alone in World War II  Germany.  How can the plot twists turn to positivism?  An uncle saves him, his mother reappears, the Nazi movement flourishes.  Great reading as the characters reveal themselves and their survival techniques in troubled times.

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One of techniques Charyn uses to reveal who a character is involves common stress relievers that an average person might employ when dealing with poor solution scenarios.

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One of techniques Charyn uses to reveal who a character is involves common stress relievers that an average person might employ when dealing with poor solution scenarios.

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                              Erik went on fewer missions.  He’d walk the streets

                              at night in his black leather coat, but he could not save

                              the Jews of his own district.

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In a later section he reveals

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                               He’d kill himself, fall under a moving truck, if he had

                               to follow the admiral’s prescriptions.  He’d save entire

                               families or no one at all.

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It is easy to perceive Erik’s anguish and frustration and for the reader to identify with the character and his situation.  But yet, for all his self conflict and remuneration, Erik  survives.

Charyn  presents the journey of Cesare, rescued by a conflicted Nazi, as he finds his way from his Jewish childhood, the loss of his father at two, the disappearance of his mother, to the life of a Bavarian aristocracy through his sister’s brother and to so much more.  The search for self as the self is changed and changed again is clear and well presented.

Cesare who was Erik seems to be living the preverbal nine lives.

There is a love story that propels the storyline forward.  Joyce Carol Oates says of Charyn in a New York Times Review. “Among Charyn’s writerly gifts is dazzling energy—a highly inflected rapid-fire prose that pulls us along like a pony cart over rough terrain.”

I agree. The prose keeps the reader aware and interested throughout the novel. The storyline shows how love does not conquer all but at least gives life meaning.  Cesare is a well-crafted book and well worth reading.

Cesare is available from www.b.press.org and www.cbsd.com

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Lynette G. Esposito has been an Adjunct Professor at Rowan University,  Burlington County and Camden County Colleges. She has taught creative writing and conducted workshops in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.  Mrs. Esposito holds a BA in English from the University of Illinois and an MA in Creative Writing and English Literature from Rutgers University.

On an Acre Shy of Eternity: Micro Landscapes at the Edge by Robert Dash

By Greg Bem

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“When it comes to exploring, it’s possible to travel real distances without going far at all.”  – Robert Dash, from the “Preface”

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Epic encounters across time and space are often represented with examples of time and space. Such is the case of the 2017 book of poetry and images by photographer, naturalist, and educator Robert Dash. In his insightful, exhausting collection, where he examines the microscopic through the lens of the human, Dash reveals that time and space do not need to be large to be encompassing. This is a book that at its core explores the artistic fervor of the scanning electron microscope, Dash’s tool and medium of choice, and it is a book that explores how the photographer might internalize and become captivated by the worlds that fill their imagery.

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“A community of processes, creatures and tools–termite jaws, fungal hyphae,

tunneling earthworms, wind, ice, drizzle, springtails, pecking nuthatches,

chemical magic, entropy, the ruthless blender known in slang as time–built this bridge.”

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(from “Gossamer Thin,” page 99)

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On an Acre Shy of Eternity reveals what an artist can do in a confined, constrained landscape. The muse cries out as a collective: from cliff rock to bunch of moss, the inherited imagery that is within, beneath, deeper still, is that imagery which is cherished and collected. In making this book, Dash situated himself across time while focusing on the subject of his home: the microcosmic subject matter within and along the periphery of his property, his corner of one of the San Juan Islands in the Salish Sea. The world is vast and vaster still, and it is one of mystery and intense—enormous even—forms of inclusion.

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Camas Lily, by Robert Dash

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The book is divided into four natural categories: plants, animals, water, and stones. Their presence reveals a quasi-alchemical relationship to reality and materials, and yet the subjects within carry range and precision. These are real images, a captured reality freakish and exquisite. Like the description of the X-Ray in Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, the use and results of the scanning electron microscope feel hyper-potent and, at times, unfathomable. And in their space of fringe, in being known and untouchable one and the same, Dash provides juxtaposition, and tension. This leads to romance. To poetry. To feverish, undoubtedly spiritual insight.

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“this one hops me back across decades

and reveals every wave, leaf, cloud, shadow and feather

as a trace of eternity.”

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(from “Small Wonder,” page 57)

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This circumstantial structure is directed by Dash’s own poetry. The poetry begins with the photographs themselves. Dash has given relatively straightforward descriptions to the plates within the book, which when strung together read as a poem themselves: “Grass pollen: four hundred pollen grains would span a pinhead,” “Garry oak leaf in autumn,” and “Cliff ice at sunset,” to name a few. The educator, the naturalist, in collector’s mode, constructor’s mode, educator and describer, traveler of the unknown universe beneath our limbs.

Poetry is here: poetry is reflexive, and it is functional, and it is emotional. The photographs may be visual poems through and through. And then, too, most of the photographs in the book are paired with their own short, lyrical poem. The text is elegant and brief—enough to entice and allure. It is poetry that is as cleverly portrayed as the subjects of the photography. The verse may commentary on the process itself: “and you can’t parse these facts / and sometimes life falters even when relief is at hand” (from “Relief at Hand,” page 72). And at other times, Dash extends the lesson or intention of the photograph with additional explanation:

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“Down below, water shatters bedrock, free silica for diatoms

who float free to make half the globe’s oxygen,

only to come back around

wed to hydrogen

a lover returned.”

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 (from “Water is a Lover,” page 82)

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Dash’s efforts to provide a mixture of science and art is what I consider this book’s best quality. The photographs and the images each add to the weight and the significance of the overall message within the book. Much of this has to do with the flow of material across pages. Book designer Robert Lanphear allows Dash’s work to shine—quite literally, the expansive and intricate imagery is set evenly alongside the text. Images and poetry complement and provokes, in a dance between representation and self-awareness. As much as this book is about the tides that sit swollen alongside Dash’s island property off the coast of Northern Washington, so too is this book about the rhythm of the artist who inhabits, who occupies, who respects the surrounding and enveloping world.

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Camas Lily Pollen by Robert Dash

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All but three of the photographs in the book were taken on this small nook of island geology. Three others were taken while in a boat, not far from the property. This proximity is fascinating when also considering the process of Dash’s poetics. The invisible hand of the writer, the invisible hand of the photographer: a sense of place is only afforded through the work itself. But Dash is generous in his literal descriptions of the work and offers challenges to the reader after setting the stage. This context, this establishment of bond, I can’t help but imagine reflects the bond Dash has discovered between his life in the macrocosmic alongside his life in the microcosmic.

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Since the publication of On an Acre Shy of Eternity, Dash has continued his use of and passion for the scanning electron microscope, and the abundance made visible with such a tool. His collection Food for Thought – Micro Views of Sustenance: Threats and Prospects looks at the resources we (and the world) consume, from food to soil, from crops to deforestation, and the conversations in between in the context of climate change. Dash’s photographic work has evolved into even greater levels of precision, and curation. To see his early microscopic work thrive alongside his recent, empowered imagery is marvelous.

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You can find the book here: https://www.amazon.com/Acre-Eternity-Micro-Landscapes-Edge/dp/0578188716

Greg Bem is a poet and librarian living on unceded Duwamish territory, specifically Seattle, Washington. He writes book reviews for Rain Taxi, Yellow Rabbits, and more. His current literary efforts mostly concern water and often include elements of video. Learn more at http://www.gregbem.com.

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There’s Never Been a Better Time to Buy Die by Bernard Meisler

By Jim Feast

Bernard Meisler’s new detective novel, There’s Never Been a Better Time to Buy Die, centers on a flawed character who acts as a sleuth. If we look over some of the classical gumshoes, from Phillip Marlowe to Travis McGee, going back to Sherlock or, for that matter, Hercule Poirot, all of them, while differing in lifestyle, methods of investigation and personal involvement in the cases, are basically decent human beings. In radical contrast, in Meisler’s novel the sleuth, real estate salesman Rick Davies, is a petty chiseler, failed business investor, over drinker, and all-around skunk, who sets out to investigate some crimes in Mill Valley, a tony community north of San Francisco,

And it’s this a-bit-unsavory narrator who gives the book its irrepressible zing. For one, while our larger-than-life protagonist, always on the lookout for the main chance, spends his time trying to find the truth behind a murder linked to some illegal drugs he found in an old house he was prepping for sale, he accompanies this with a running, scathing commentary on his fellow, equally flawed but generally much richer, neighbors and suspects. For instance, in labeling the different suburban lifestyles, he mentions: “Let’s not forget the trustafarians. Their grandfather invented Velcro or Sterno or whatever. They dress like bums, torn t-shirts and ripped jeans or else eccentrically, sporting Victorian gear and top hats, killing time, waiting till the sun goes down so they can get loaded again.” In another classical skewering, he watches a rich yuppie getting out of her car with her kids. “Her kids popped out of the SUV like maggots out of a dead rat’s eyes, the girl in a ballerina outfit, the boy in a baseball uniform, still carrying his little bat. It could have been the cover of White Privilege magazine. ‘Zooey! Hunter! Let’s go.’”

Indeed, while detecting these motes in other’s eyes, he is also amusingly aware of the beam in his own. He characterizes himself, “People [in the area] like to hike and commune with nature but me, I’m a dedicated indoorsman.” And, to go back to the earlier comment on trustafarians, he ends his diatribe with this, “Believe you me, it might sound like I resent them but I don’t. I want me some of that fuck-you money too so I could smoke weed all day, drink all night and sleep till noon.”

But let’s be clear – and this is one of the gutsy moves of the book – the funny patter doesn’t make our protagonist a loveable bad boy, he can be a real shit.

The second strength of the book is that while trying to solve the crime, Davies must also keep trying to earn a living as a real estate broker, and in doing so he lays bare the scamming and over-hyping that are standard practice in a field, which, like a con game, depends on the cupidity and vanity of the clients to keep the money rolling.

He explains, for instance, that what the realtor wants is a quick sale, not the highest price. He says, rhetorically, “Do you think I’d rather sell your house in the first week for $900,000, or take 3 months of work to sell it for $1,000,000? That a $100k difference for you but not for me. See, I can make $13,500 in a week or $15,000 in 3 months. Which do you think I prefer?” Not that he lets the seller find that out. He goes on, “Meanwhile the suckers – I mean my cherished clients – think I’m out to get them top dollar. They think I’m their friend. Who am I to disillusion them?’

I appreciate learning the (often nefarious) workings of this business as well as the way Meisler keeps the pot boiling, that is,  keeps the clues popping up and the mystery unfolding. But most of all how he puts center-stage  a narrator with two major “character defects,” using my special meaning of the term. I am taking it to mean not the personality-based shortcoming of  the character in a story; but to defects which hit at the character’s functional role in the narrative.

Perhaps from what I’ve said already you can see what I’m getting at. A basic innovation in Meisler’s approach is in giving the story over to a lead character who violates two conventions. Davies is a detective who lacks the traditional good sportsmanship and decency of the Chandler type P.I. And, along this same line, he does not even have the charm and saving grace of the bad boy scamp, such as Hammer (as played in Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly, for instance), who may have gotten drunk too often or let his partner get killed. No, Davies is not so lovable. For god’s sakes, when he sees he can get away with it, he even steals money from an old lady.

Add to that a second violation. He breaks with one regularly honored convention of satire. Like Juvenal, he “lashes the rogues,” treating those who deserve contempt with contempt, but he refuses to make this judgment from a lofty place, looking down at the lowlifes. Davies admits to sharing similar vanities and cupidity with those he condemns, shares them without having the strength to grow out of them

So if you want a book that, in the process of delivering a good mystery, on multiple fronts challenges the accepted way of doing things, in that case, while there may be a better time to buy, they’ll never be a better time to read this book.

You can find the book here: https://sensitiveskinmagazine.com/books/theres-never-been-a-better-time-to-die-bernard-meisler/

Jim Feast is the author of the poetry book Time Extends Life to Those Who Survive, Fly by Night Press, and the novel Long Day Counting Tomorrow, from Autonomedia.)

Misguided Behavior by Leah Mueller

By Charles Rammelkamp

“I walked purposefully down the cobblestone streets, as if I knew exactly where I was headed. I’d figure out the direction as I went along, like I’d done many times before,” Leah Mueller writes in the story, “Leaving Bisbee.” It kind of sums up the narrator’s modus operandi throughout these tales. Subtitled Tales of Poor Life Choices, the stories are not so much about “misguided behavior” as they are about improvising with the less than ideal hand you’ve been dealt.

There’s a sly humor at work in these stories, too, as is evident from the very title of the book. Mueller can also finish off a tale of hardship with a spark of dry wit. Take the story, “Other People Ruin Everything,” a bit of graffiti she reads on the wall in a bathroom stall in a bar in Seattle. (“Hell is other people,” Sartre famously wrote in No Exit.) She’s gone into a bar she used to frequent, for old times’ sake, only to be waylaid by the other customers there, people with their own agendas. When she leaves, she finds a parking ticket on her car: the whole neighborhood has been gentrified since she was last there, along with new parking restrictions. The whole evening underscores the wisdom of the graffiti. But she concludes with the reflection, “On the other hand, most of us manage to do a damn good job on our own.” Hah!

In these autobiographical tales that span over three decades, we follow the protagonist from one weird job/situation to another, starting with her mother, in “Running from the Law.” Polly drives up to Chicago from Mexico with several pounds of marijuana stowed in the car.  She has a half-baked idea to sell the pot for a fortune – or rather, to have her daughter sell it for a fortune! (Later, in “Queen of Rage,” she will goad her son to steal a Christmas tree!) Needless to say, it doesn’t work out.

Then there’s the telephone sex scam (“The Lust Peddlers”), the pole-dancing in a New Orleans bar (“Nobody’s Prerogative”), life as an itinerant astrologer reading tarot cards, and in the soul-numbing, yet funny story, “The Clown Chronicles,” dressing up and passing out fliers on Michigan Avenue in Chicago for a sketchy outfit called the Education Zone.  The story begins: “An extended period of abject poverty led to my decision to become a clown.” She answers an ad that begins: “Fun job! Man or woman with cheery disposition and friendly personality….” Cheery? Friendly? You can imagine how that job requirement goes down.

It’s a life of invention, ad-libbing, extemporizing, as she gets blindsided left and right, and yet, she maintains a stoic attitude. “Despite my own hardships,” she writes in “The Other Side of the Cage,” a story about being stoned and lost in a zoo in New Orleans with her boyfriend, “I remained entrenched in the belief that my luck would change.”

Not all of the stories are about jobs, of course, but also about complicated relationships. The narrator’s dumped and been dumped by more boyfriends than you can keep track of, married at least three times. And then there’s that strange mother! Talk about having to make adjustments on the fly!

“People tell me I’m an extrovert,” she writes in “San Francisco Heart,” “but I don’t believe them. I’m way too fond of losers to be an extrovert. Losers are awkward, unable to play well with others. They’re my tribe.” Elsewhere she writes, “I felt infinitely safe with fucked-up people.” “San Francisco Heart” and the following story, “Leaving Ypsilanti,” are about a problematic relationship with a character named Greg, with whom she carries on an affair while being married to another guy named Roy. Yeah, it’s complicated.

In one amusing story, “Cities Where You’ve Lived, As Boyfriends,” Mueller mashes up these threads of romance and making a life for yourself (job, family, etc.). “Portland is your hipster boyfriend with a tongue ring,” she starts. Kalamazoo? “…the boyfriend who gets drunk, smashes your possessions, and steals your laptop so he can sell it to buy crack.” Then there’s Chicago, Tacoma, Seattle, where she ends with characteristic Mueller sardonic wit: “Seattle won’t even answer your calls.”

And where does it all end? Remember, this is a person who is confident her luck will change. The protagonist of these tales is an optimist, essentially, who refers to her “grim, Germanic sense of responsibility.” In “Time to Go, Grasshopper,” the narrator remarks, “I can sleep at night, knowing I’m not too much of a fraud.” Is there such a thing as karma for this person?

The final story, “The Sunshine Court,” set in 2025, depicts a rosier finale. The protagonist, Lola (mostly the narrator identifies herself as “Leah” in these stories, but Lola has similar attitudes, habits and outlook), a woman in her early 60’s, has settled into a retirement community in the state of Oregon that sounds too good to be true. Simpatico neighbors who look out for each other in interesting ways. A fantasy? A happy ending? You decide.

These stories are funny, erotic (“The Great Canadian Beaver-Eating Contest,” for one, set at the Burning Man festival in Nevada), insightful and brave.

You can find the book here: https://www.amazon.com/Misguided-Behavior-Tales-Poor-Choices/dp/1989225241

Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for Brick House Books in Baltimore and Reviews Editor for The Adirondack Review. A chapbook of poems, Jack Tar’s Lady Parts, is available from Main Street Rag Publishing. Another poetry chapbook, Me and Sal Paradise, was recently published by Future Cycle Press.

We Are Beat, National Poetry Festival Anthology

By Lynette G. Esposito

Beat poetry is defined as poetry that has no conventional form and which is unencumbered by conventional rules. The We Are Beat National Poetry Festival Anthology published by Local Gems, a small press in Long Island New York and edited by James P. Wagner (Ishwa) is a gem of 267 pages of delicious verse written by poets from many walks of life from firefighters to engineers to lawyers to teachers to spoken word artists both national and international.  The poetry is as varied and interesting as the poets themselves.

The authors are presented alphabetically by authors’ last names.  The poems proceed in no other order or credential and are standalone pieces of art.  The authors’ credentials follow each poem.  When the reader dives into this river of poetry, the water is very inviting all through the anthology.  For example, on page 23.Carolyn Chatham presents We Will Drink From Broken Cups. The poem begins:

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                                        We will drink from broken cups

                                        This bitter brew

                                        A country scene of trees and cows and grass

                                        and lads and lasses dallying together

                                        adorn its rim

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This is such a sweet scene but the poem twists to an explanation of climate change and unanswerable explanations of a world we slew.

On page 168, Juan Perez writes Eyes Closed and Dancing.

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                                        I close my eyes and I am dancing

                                       At the senior prom, in 1987

                                       With a smoking hot brunette

                                       Things are great so far….

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The sixty-six line ten-stanza poem details life after the amazing dance and the amazing life that follows.   Perez uses images that are common to most readers, marriage children old age and the realization of mortality.  He answers the question of what happens when we close our eyes and look back over our life when we are about to leave.

Ron Whitehead speaks of Shootin’Up Poetry in New Orleans on page 254.  It is a narrative poem in prose form that successfully explores the loss of poetic inspiration and its successful return.  It begins in Algiers and ends in The Howlin’ Wolf Club in New Orleans. The narrator laments I’m feeling burnt out, tired to the bone.  The narrator calls on previous poets such as Jack Kerouac for help.  When inspiration hits, the narrator says:

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                                  The word sets us free.

                                  And I think of Allen Ginsberg

                                 And what he said about taking someone’s hand

                                 Cause we’re all in this together.

                                 We’re pullin’.  We ain’t pushin’

                                 We’re lettin’ it be.

                                 We realize that when one is lifted up

                                 We’re all lifted up

                                And I realize that Poetry is life

                                And life is poetry

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Outside the Howlin’ Wolf Club all is well.  The 48 hour INSOMNIACATHON will go on and be a success.  There is a full smilin’ moon in New Orleans. The intensity of  the resolution leaves the reader with relief like finding your Rolex  in the lost and found.

Many fresh voices from many different countries can be heard in this anthology.   It is a pleasure to read.

Local Gems Poetry Press is a small Long Island, New York based poetry press.  It has published over150 titles.  Local Gems can be reached at www.localgemspoetrypress.com

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Lynette G. Esposito has been an Adjunct Professor at Rowan University,  Burlington County and Camden County Colleges. Her articles have appeared in the national publication, Teaching for Success; regionally in South Jersey Magazine, SJ Magazine. Delaware Valley Magazine, and her essays have appeared in Reader’s Digest and The Philadelphia Inquirer. Her poetry has appeared in US1, SRN Review, The Fox Chase Review, Bindweed Magazine, Poetry Quarterly, That Literary Review, The Remembered Arts Journal, and other literary magazines.

A Slow Boiling Beach by Rauan Klassnik

By Greg Bem

“The sound of a train, ship, flute. Children drift into the trees. Heads on poles, on the back of a truck, firing into the air. They sing birthmarks and stiches all over me. Red and green mirrors. A blurring knife.” (from “MOTHER AND CHILD”, page 11)

Rauan Klassnik, author of The Moon’s Jaw (2013) and Holy Land (2008), has once again painted a portrait of a universe as disrupted as it is confident, as demented as it is formulaic: A SLOW BOILING BEACH is that portrait and it is as fascinating as it is ornamental, brute ugliness and attraction rippling with horror and total, existential embrace of traumatic moan, sigh. The language of an interior of pain, violence, and sexuality is masked with hallucinations and thrills. There is the heartbeat rhythm that lines these pages as they slice and splay organized disorder from page to page.

“I wrap it around me as I’m jerked up into the burning air. Cold swaying hooks. A knife pushed slowly into my heart. The dog’s head comes off in my hands.” (from “A DESTROYED NERVOUS SYSTEM”, page 13)

The “antithetical literary work” contains a fairly structured format. Six sections composed of scattered prose that strings together the monstrous, horrific story of an individual or sequence of individuals (depending on how far you lean over in your chair while reading it) who come together to merge or separate in active, desecrating union. There is a sexuality that is vicious and filled with animosity. There is a figuring of Thanatos that flares time and time across the individual pieces. These motifs blend and blur. They exaggerate and suffocate. They are united as much as the human and other animal figures are united. And it is profound, A SLOW BOILING BEACH, in its potency to persist as an unnerving guffaw into the 21^st Century abyss.

“An owl sits in a tree. I’ve had enough pain and euthanasia. When I climaxed it felt like someone shoving knives in my eyes.

“You are asleep, digging into the cold. I swallow them all gliding in over the snow. Boys hanging in the trees.” (from “IN A PYRAMID”, page 38)

The book’s six sections have underlying threads, which show their surfaces elaborately and illusively. There is illusion and there is provocation. Tones move from mercurial to vainglorious. There is ever the hint that this world can be refracted. It is at once cubist and at once dominant in its language and the underpinnings of the literary reality that may or may not matter. In the end: these are prose poems that can continue to end as much as they can continue to begin. Like Battaile and Camus: the mythos is captured through an ever-consuming sense of awe and dread that glistens and terrifies one in the same. For Klassnik’s speakers, the swirling appearance of this horrific reality is both urgent and disturbed, both inspiring and damning. It is a kaleidoscope of realization (epiphany towards meaning) and function-meets-nonfunction. It is opportunity and it is suffering. The resulting aesthetic, developed across the pages, is one of shadow and that which is long-since wrought. It is, as the title of the book suggests, a slow boil.

“A sky bruised like a corpse. So peaceful. A horse dipped in gold. And she’s sitting in the garden, painting the lunatics. Bloodshot. Thieves.” (from “THE RICHEST YACHT”, page 43)

As with Klassnik’s former collections, there is a distinct emphasis on the multisensory imagery of material and surface. That which we (as living, livid beings) are composed by. That which we must work with. That which we can use and abuse. In which we find constraint. There are holes, niches, corners, and funnels. There are places of privacy and intimacy, and places of public affect. There is metal, plastic, and wood. There is flesh, feather, scales, shells. Materials are universal, collected, and polarizing. Within the book, examined is the material world of detritus that forms our contrasted realities and perceptions of the agony of experiencing and knowing within those realities. It is also the material world that affords us the symbols that allow us our rituals. From anuses to eyeballs, from fetuses to cakes, living means confronting all of the lived experience without exception. It is fuel for the speakers of this book to persist in their desires and their agonies.

“I take the bus. A bunch of convicts lighting up the skies flowing beneath their cages. They love the river. And the gaudy azalea bushes. People are killing. People are kissing.” (from “PHEASANT IN THE ROAD”, page 51)

Much like Dante and de Sade, the realities by which and through which Klassnik writes are largescale and appropriately daunting. They are unconquerable, indomitable, and forever chastening.

“You call out like birds.

“You are filled with mist, a scent, livid, flying and triumphant.

“You come from the womb and anus. A giant eye with little eyes hidden around it in the branches and grass. Plague creeps through.” (from “POLLEN”, page 95)

Philadelphia’s Kim Gek Lin Short partially describes the book as a “slashed paradise to the max—the civilizing byproduct of subjugation.” Both inviting and unreasonable, A SLOW BOILING BEACH finds its invitations and antagonisms through its sourness, its revolt. It is the difficult to swallow. The awkward and punishing. It is the bright that leads to blindness. It is ripe with upset and disintegration, and can cause brows to raise and buttocks to clamp shut ever-so-slightly. Ever so demonically, ever so mildly. It is a book that stiffens the back and smothers the breath. And it is also a book of imaginable solutions to the world that has shattered and fragmented. Through Klassnik’s megalomaniacal efforts, the poetry of this landscape still rings with Keatsian romanticism. It is still raw with the rupturing, inescapable beauty of our consciousness, no matter how agitated and impalpable at times its heights reach. To be with these efforts is to swallow Klassnik’s worm, to approach Klassnik’s giant eyeball, to await the outpour of fluids and results and to process them the way we always process them: with the agonizing intention perpetuating hideous and beautiful growth and, like the speakers themselves, a drowning sense of fatigue. And it is our sense of fatigue, collective, systemic, and from the skull that weighs all of us down towards the earth. “Its face is a skull. It pulls a soft face on,” writes Klassnik (“MY WEDDING DRESS”, page 74), and with this meeting of the intimate we find the grotesque, clever and relentless as ever.

You can find the book here: https://www.amazon.com/Slow-Boiling-Beach-Rauan-Klassnik/dp/1688984313

Greg Bem is a poet and librarian living on unceded Duwamish territory, specifically Seattle, Washington. He writes book reviews for Rain Taxi, Yellow Rabbits, and more. His current literary efforts mostly concern water and often include elements of video. Learn more at gregbem.com.