Paula Regossy by Lynn Crawford

By Jim Feast

While in writing Lynn Crawford has veered between realism (as in Shankus & Kitto) and near sci fi (as in Fortification Resort), her new book, Paula Regossy, combines elements of both by mixing contemporary reportage into an imaginative novel  of spies and fairy tales.

The founding premise is one familiar from espionage fiction. The lead characters all work for an unnamed NGO, which is discreetly commissioned to bust crime. “We are contacted and hired by the few in the know. Our fees are high.” The operatives primarily investigate people who work for companies that balance on the knife edge between philanthropy and skullduggery. “Our marks are wealthy companies that wreak wide-scale damage yet contribute. For example, they authorize toxic dumps in waterways and launch and fund charitable and arts foundations.” Most of the chapters describe the experiences of Regossy and agents she has trained.

(Let me mention that in an email exchange with the author, Crawford said she sees these trained agents as aspects of the main character. She writes, “The book is titled Paula Regossy and is, in fact, a portrait of her. … No piece is ALL of her. Each one is PART of her. What we end with (in my head) is a picture of SOME of her but, of course, not ALL of her.)

Unlikely as this may seem, what is fundamentally a crime story is structured so as to allow Crawford a chance to display her knowledge of the Detroit arts scene. The title character has broken a rule of the agency by getting emotionally involved with a suspect and so has been reassigned to Detroit where, while getting her priorities back on track, she takes as her cover identity that of a Bohemian art maven, who supplies the reader with descriptions of the budding, bubbling creative community.  A note at the back of the book tells us that Crawford was inspired to compose this book by her viewing of a number of gallery shows, including some described by Regossy. She tells us, “Each chapter in this book is my personal (but faithful) response to works by various Detroit-based artists and spaces.”

In this way, the author grounds the cloak and dagger narrative in a world she knows well. However, if she gives it a realistic edge here, in other sections, she lets the story lift off into wild reaches of the imagination.  For instance, in a story that explains how Joan became an individual whose skills proved very useful in sleuthing, we learn of Joan’s devastation when her brother dies tragically in his youth. After this trauma, she develops odd physical symptoms. “For a while, I stopped growing. Then I shrank.” Next, her changes get even less explicable. “Another thing happened: my new body stopped respecting gravity. I was permanently airborne, hovering or flying. And I emitted a sound, a buzz.”

So far, I have dwelt on the novel’s extremes, from the most matter-of-fact depiction of art openings to the most fantastic, an agent moving from one species to another; but this might provide a slightly distorted picture as most of the book centers on more novelistic stories of the genesis and activities of agents. Most of these crime-busters have been touched early on by violent deaths, which oriented them to pursuing law enforcement careers. A few of these stories are almost procedurals where the detective explains how she or he nabbed a criminal, usually by employing unorthodox methods.

Another attribute of these agents touches on themes found earlier in Crawford’s Fortification Resort. There (with some tongue in cheek moments) she describes the activities of personal assistants, gym trainers, party curators, travel guides and others who work directly with a refined upper class clientele. This is a world slightly in the future where the hyper-sensitive services carried out for the elite have been enhanced. As I wrote, reviewing this book in Rain Taxi in 2005, Crawford’s “language is modeled on—and quietly spoofs—upscale New Age promotional writing, fluff that would extol a spa, new skin enhancer, Pilates program or other psychic or physical rehabilitation. Crawford never voices open criticism of the group, but offhandedly skewers the pretensions, muffled cruelty, and sometimes downright wackiness of her characters.”

The link to the present book is that this type of hyper-sensitive modulations of the self are not carried out for the elite but have become regimens used to attune agents to their jobs. Paula’s morning routine, for instance, is made up of “EXERCISE, BATHE, MEDITATE, EAT, DRESS, SOUL BUILD.” Each of these routines is precisely and subtly geared to her professional duties. As to her breakfast, “Morning meals vary, depending on what lies ahead. Desk days it is quinoa with butter and syrup. Push days usually mean a circle of nuts around something vegetarian.” She adds, “TANGENT: I do sometimes use nuts, usually almonds, to kill.”

While this theme links this book to the former novel, there is a perspectival shift. While Resort is a cutting, low-key satire on the New Age-y fads of the upper crust, in this book the trendy treatments are used to sustain and strengthen the principled fighters against abuse and corporate malfeasance. On this note, it might be suggested the novel is partly science fiction because at this point it nearly takes an alternate reality viewpoint to imagine an NGO facing off so resolutely (and effectively) against the corporate/governmental machine that is polluting the waters and air while killing off irreplaceable animals and plants. Paula Regossy is one of those creative works that reimagine social justice and ecological thinking. It is a vision within a forward movement, a forward movement that takes us backward to the world of indigenous, ecologically oriented   civilizations, where people were more in touch with Nature and willing (through prayer and ritual) to right the wrongs done to her.  

You can find the book here:  https://mocad.myshopify.com/collections/all/products/paula-regossy-by-lynn-crawford

Jim Feast is the author of the just published (August 2020) and long-titled poetry book A Strange Awakening of Light that Takes the Place of Dawn: Poems for Lady Bunny, Chicago: 1972-1975.

Waiting For The Light

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Alicia Suskin Ostriker is a poet who writes and lives in a city she loves with all its beauty and ugliness much like Charles Reznikoff, Suskin Ostriker is a walker. She writes of Upper Broadway, As the body of the beloved is a window/through which we behold the blackness and vastness of space/ pulsing with stars…  In this collection, it is the poems of Suskin Ostriker that pulsate with the passion of urban landscapes and polemical rendernings. Such as this from The Glory of Cities

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Let us now praise famous cities, our human fists against heaven, let us praise

      their devotion to wealth and power and art, goals toward which we swim

          ferociously upstream, tearing ourselves apart, to lay our eggs and die

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She writes of Biking to the George Washington Bridge:

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It sweeps away depression and today

you can’t tell the heaped pin-white

cherry blossoms abloom along

Riverside Drive from the clouds above

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A beautiful image from a poet who is an observer who casts her eyes upon life others may not see. Suskin Ostriker writes of the colorful quilt of her city, of immigrants from across the globe who have come here for a better life and hard work. Waiting for the Light is a collection of poetry full of praise, suffering and heartbreak. This is not a collection written through eyes covered in rose colored glasses but through eyes full of realism viewing the world and its landscapes of humanity.

 

You can find the book here: BookDetails

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

The Absent

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Review by g emil reutter

 

Rosalind Palermo Stevenson’s, The Absent, brings the reader on a forty nine year journey of the life of William Wright Martin. Stevenson’s research is outstanding as the book begins and ends in Philadelphia during the late 1800s with stops in the Wild West and Southwest territories of the United States. Martin and his wife Lucie are photographers, have their own studio yet live with his mother and aunt. Lucie and William are obsessed with the art. Lucie with portraits and what the images she creates reveal about people, he with structures and space.

…what silence speaks of…there is that apt gesture of silence, the hand closed in a gentle fist, the index finger raised and placed over the lips. It’s silly to stand there, the voice says, when you can lie down and rest. Yes rest. Enough time has passed—too many days. How many. Do you remember? You look worn. You look tired. It’s time. You agree that it’s time don’t you? 

As a child, William Martin and his mother are taken west from Philadelphia by his father. There at a young age he is being taught to be man by his rough and tough father although the mother is always protective. His father hears danger and throws the boy into the bushes where Martin witnesses the brutal slaying of his father by a gang of men. His mother brings him home to Philadelphia and his life begins again. He matures into a man who lives two lives, one in the reality of who he is and the other dominated by hauntings of what he has seen. Sleep evades him although he and Lucie are close in their marriage there are somethings, as the author says, you don’t share. They work in a studio where Lucie spends most of her time as he walks and photographs Philadelphia. They spend the off time at their mother’s house where Aunt Lavina also lives. Spiritualism and bird watching dominate the house. Suddenly his marriage is broke asunder, he is at a loss for Lucie is gone. He is there but is not. A haunted man, Martin makes seamless transitions from his real life to his dream state while awake or asleep. Martin is a man of tragedy who listens to the voices that haunt him.

Stevenson has a unique ability to develop the supporting cast in this work. The ever present mother and aunt, The Fell family who work at the studio and the interactions the complex Martin has with others in Philadelphia. During his mourning for the broken marriage he travels to the Mid-West on a photographic journey to the place his father was murdered. Stevenson provides a wide cast of supporting characters both in his journey to the Mid-West and again when he is surveying the Southwest. Native Americans, cowboys, hunters even a hermaphrodite who Martin oddly bonds with. New hauntings come to him, yet when he is returning to Philadelphia from his first trip to the Mid-West he meets Dr. Stiles and his daughter Angeline at the depot. The three travel to Philadelphia on the train as the civil war breaks out. Fell continues to manage the studio and over time his daughter Lucie is assisting him. A courtship begins between Angeline and William and they soon marry and live with Dr. Stiles. The couple remain childless and the ever patient Angeline lives with his love of the ever present first wife, Lucie, in his mind. She accepts his long term physical absence from her during his trips and walks about the city, although they as a couple also walk and go on carriage rides. There is a closeness between the two that is as bonding as is the absence.

You look worn. You look tired. It’s time. You agree that it’s time don’t you? 

Martin is a photographer of the era, always aware of the light and shadows. In The Absent, Stevenson has provided the reader with images of lights and shadows, of loss and love, of violence and peace. Of the complex nature of the mind and relationships. All of the characters come to life from the page in vivid detail in the haunted mind and life of William Wright Martin.

You can find the book here: http://rainmountainpress.com/books41.html

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