The Butterfly Cemetery by Franca Mancinelli Translated by John Taylor

By g emil reutter

John Taylor has once again opened the door to the mind and works of Franca Mancinelli. The use of complex, creative metaphors throughout the collection encompasses the use of forms, of the here and now and the invisible.

We enter An Earthquake Story in a home with two young children playing, using the home as a playground and both are rather tranquil.  Mancinelli then brings us into the quake:

One afternoon, while they were playing in the room between the yellow floor tiles and the sofa, a dark silhouette sounded the alarm, shouting: “The children! The Children are here!” Wearing her black, flowered apron, their grandmother came back to utter these words in a tone that became more shrill, pleading. Following the wake of the call, the two siblings were drawn to the parallele-piped of the hallway, where vast movements were making the air shake and tilting the walls from one side to the other. The children stopped between the panels of a glass door that created a sort of anteroom, from which they could watch. At the other end of the hallway, their father and mother were fighting. Shaken at its foundations, the world was trembling. 

An amazing piece of writing. The peaceful beginning and then suddenly air shake, tilt, shaken foundations, world trembling in the world of the two children. A masterful presentation of the effect of domestic violence on young children.

In the piece, The Little Girl Who Learned to Fly, Mancinelli opens with:

A bird kept alighting on the windowsill and pecking the panes with its beak, brushing the glass with its wings, and then flying off. The rustling and the small beating sounds it made seemed letters of an alphabet to be deciphered. 

Beating sounds as letters of an alphabet to be deciphered is such a fresh image. Later in the piece Mancinelli writes of a beautiful transformation:

The hair bulbs had become bone: small feathers were popping up, like those of a sparrow fallen from its nest. 

And following the transformation:

She stopped to look down at the garden, the house where she had lived, and headed straight for the blue. 

Beats as an alphabet, transition as a sparrow, and then escape.

In Walls, Rubble, bird metaphor reemerges and in Central Station, the train station speaks to her. Mancinelli uses language, extreme metaphor and imagery as a master craftsperson.

The Boy among the Rocks opens with a powerful descriptor that brings the reader directly into the piece:

Near the seaport of Gouvia there is a small beach from which one can see the profile of the island all the way to the city of Corfu; opposite, uninhabited and barren, the mountains on the Greek-Albanian border rise from the blue of the sea, their yellow-ocher dotted with a few scattered woodsy spots. It is a sandy strip covered with dry seaweed to which no tourists come, only a few locals. 

Later in the collection we pay a visit with, Living in the Ideal City: Fragments in the Form of Vision. In her vision, Mancinelli leaves little doubt that there is not an Ideal City. The poet tells us:

The darkness beyond the door and a growing fear could have gripped my body and kept me from moving, but it was impossible: my steps continued towards the center while my terror was blooming like a black flower.

And what awaits in the darkness?

A beast looks at you with its hollow eyes, awaits you, pretending to sleep: six large square pupils in a clear mellow sky that tells you not to believe in the darkness, not to be afraid.

And of the life force of the city:

The city keeps changing before your eyes, half revealing figures that it removes without your noticing. You don’t even notice how, after staying here, your gaze has now become different. Behind these lines is a force field. One single point, like the one at which your eyes sometimes inadvertently stare. 

Simply a masterpiece by Franca Mancinelli translated by John Taylor. The collection changes before your eyes, strong metaphor, imagery and while you read it you will not know that you too are transforming for your gaze will now become different.

You can find the book here: https://www.amazon.com/Butterfly-Cemetery-Selected-Prose-2008-2021/dp/173465354X

g emil reutter is a writer of poems and stories and occasional literary criticism. He can be found at: https://gereutter.wordpress.com/about/

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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.

 

 

 

The Emily Fables

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Review by g emil reutter

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Reading, The Emily Fables, brings to mind several of Steinbeck’s works. There is a similarity in the use of poetic prose in these fables with Steinbeck. That being said, leave no doubt that Stephanie Dickinson is not Steinbeck like, she is forging her own road in these fables of love and tragedy, of the humanity and inhumanity of man.  She uses beautiful words and images that at times leave the reader breathless. For instance, these lines from Emily and Spring Cleaning, a chore performed millions of times around the world but in Dickinson’s fable she brings us this:

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In the lowest part of the attic under the eaves, I discover a painting. The walnut frame imprisons a black-haired girl seated at her piano, her downcast lashes stare sleepily at the single long-stemmed rose beside her. I stare, willing my broom handle to break the picture glass. Awaken the girl, whose gauzy green dress might be a hundred caught Luna moths. Her eyes blink, two emerald-winged insects. She inhales sweetness, the deflowered blood of the rose petals.

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There is the beginning of the fable, Emily and the Frostbite: The Hermit and His Woman.

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The hermit and his woman froze in the woods. There where the last pieces of sun were falling like long straws into the white trees, they washed their bodies and walked unclothed and knelt on the ground. Next to each other, but not touching. By dusk their nakedness had taken on a blue sheen, the lovers’ flesh not unhappy to be ice-hard like rocks from a forming star.

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Dickinson writes of the plaque of Diphtheria in the fable Emily and the Strangling Angel.  Annie is afflicted.

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They won’t let her into the sick room for fear of her catching the bull-neck. Diphtheria, the strangling angel of children, hover over the bed. Annie’s throat is closing and the bluish membrane on her tongue spreads over her tonsils and pharynx. She no longer speaks and is silent like a tree whose thrushes and wrens have fled. Her eyes try to talk, to hold back the room that is slipping away, the carved crescent moon with its thimble-size staircase that leads to a star. Dark blue eyes, blueberries picked before ripening, eyes blue as ruffs worn by medieval cardinals.

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Dickinson celebrates life in The Fables of Emily, the joys and tragedy, the beauty and ugliness of it all as a master wordsmith whose lyrically intensity in each of these fables brings great satisfaction to the reader no matter the topic. These fables cover a 61 year period. Dickinson an urban writer reaches back to her rural roots to deliver The Emily Fables to us and we are better for it.

 

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You can find the book here: http://www.booknook-eljpublications.com/store/p83/The_Emily_Fables.html

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g emil reutter is a writer of poems and stories. You can find him here:About g emil reutter