Adam Robinson - I ran from the laundry machine to the bathroom Yelling Adopted! and You have a hole in your heart!

Adam Robinson, Adam Robison and Other Poems (Narrow House, 2010)

"Not only my favorite title of the year, but this is also a book I have been waiting to hold in my hands with great anticipation for quite some time - as a friend, yes, but more so in language glee. Adam can truly speak it in a way I have never heard anyone else speak. This is going to be one to drink milk in bed with" - Blake Butler

"From trompe l'oeil title to anomalous index, this is a book of pristine openings and closings, preoccupied with structure, literary convention, popular and intellectual culture, biography, genre and identity. Somewhat skeptically, it marks out a testing ground for poetry. And poetry, confident in those sparkling titles and last lines, jumps into the ring" - Mairead Byrne

"Adam Robinson’s accessible and erudite first book of poetry, Adam Robison and Other Poems, nimbly plays with the mutability of identity and naming.
Slightly more than half the poems are short biographical gems focusing on obscure angles of each subject’s life. “Frederick Law Olmstead” starts “He didn’t go to college because sumac poisoning messed up his eyes!” and mentions the park systems of Buffalo and Milwaukee before Manhattan’s Central Park. ”Codename: Ruby Blade” is about an East Timor activist orginally from Australia, born Kirsty Sword, now married to the first President of East Timor, nicknamed Xanana. Different identities and actions are connected to the different names she uses: Ruby Blade, her codename as an insurgent, “schooled the rebel in English and they fell in love and horsed around”, and “Kirsty Sword has a jawbone that could slay a thousand men” a la Helen of Troy.
Robinson also touches on names and the fragility of identity in “Some Men in My Family” about his two brothers, one adopted and one not; his father; and his grandfather, paralyzed and living in their basement: “That man down there would yell his own name which was Albert”. The narrator in “Some Men in My Family” screams at his adopted brother “You have a hole in your heart!” physically “A ventricular septale defect” but also an indirect reference to his brother’s being given up by his biological family. The latter phrase is a medical diagnosis, but the former is hurtful enough for the brother to kick the locked bathroom door off its hinges. The drama and depth make “Some Men in My Family” one of the most powerful works in the collection.
Robinson’s rhythm and skill with language reflect wide-ranging sources. “Joe Louis” has the staccato rhythm of a boxing match. “The Skeptic” recalls the childhood jump rope rhyme “Rockin’ Robin” with “all the little birds/on Jaybird Street”, while “More” echoes James Joyce: “Swim I said yes she said I’d go swimming”.
Robinson strays from the biographical works with mixed success. “Puke Nut 3000″ is one of the weaker poems. “It’s Down to MOM or CLAUDIIIIIINE,” however, perfectly captures a recovery from deep grief, “You will be so spitsoul sad/Then you will be okay/Then you will be sad that you are okay/Then mostly okay again and well this will continue”.
The index to the book, a complete list of even the most subtle references in the poems, is not to be missed.
Within Adam Robison and Other Poems are two poems about “Adam Robison,” the pseudonym the author uses when writing about himself. They’re among the less strong works in the collection, but there’s also a poem titled “Adam Robinson,” with the “n,” which starts:
Because I’m in charge, I’m in charge
Come on
(In charge–really, really in charge)
You know I’m in charge, I’m in charge
You know it
A triumphant, accurate battle cry for a poet writing about other people." - baltimore.readinglocal.com

"One of the first things I noticed while reading Adam Robinson's poems was that he was either a really bright guy, or a very inquisitive one with access to Google or Wikipedia. Frederick Law Olmstead, Erma Ruth Rogers Tyner, Max Schmeling, Joe Louis, Glenn Tipton, Bas Jan Adler, Soren Kierkegaard, Curtis Ebbesmeyer, Elisabeth Elliot, Brahms, Martin Luther, and many more people from real life draw Adam's interest and words. The next thing I noticed was the seeming lack of form, in general, in the collection. Not reading enough poetry myself, I'm not fully sure there really is a lack of form in this work, but the seeming lack of form was something that drew me into the work. What is did for me, after a couple of reads, was come to the conclusion that he was writing exactly what he intended to, and not being forced into tacking on extra words, or chopping off excessive words, in order to fit to a three lines per stanza type of poetry.
Glenn Tipton

To write this poem I listened to two songs by Judas Priest.
Holy cow.
When I was a boy Judas Priest was forbidden.
In Sunday School we laughed at their name and played with it like it was something hot. We did this with Metal Church and Black Sabbath too. We dared each other to utter these names.
And so begins, 'Glenn Tipton', one of the poems in the 2nd of 4 sections the poems are broken into. This section, while seemingly concentrating on biographical poems about different individuals, frequently lead to Robinson determining something that has more to do with his current life than with the life being discussed. For instance, discussing Judas Priest and other bands of this nature, Robinson slowly works to the conclusive line of the poem: "I feel like I wasn't raised to appreciate other perspectives".
There's a lot of death in Robinson's poems:
"We're going to die in four years" from 'Curtis Ebbesmeyer, Leading Authority on Flotsam'
"Brahms died in 1897" from 'Brahms'
"And my worst thing that died was a dog" from 'It's Down to Mom of CLAUDIIIIIINE'
And lines like these tend to end the poems. That's not to say that everything in Robinson's work is of a negative viewpoint. Not at all. He has the ability to write things like the above, that upon quick examination might seem like downer material, without having the reader feel crushed as each poem ends. There is something somewhat uplifting earlier within each work that these lines are just drawing the reader back down to level ground from.
I'm going to close out my review with what, at least of this last reading, is my favorite of the collection:
The Skeptic

I'm looking for a balance
between not God and God
like fruit
or feet
or all the little birds
on Jaybird Street
I enjoy this one, like many of Robinson's poems, because I like images and thoughts he suggests, without fully understanding them; they make me think a bit. I'm not fully sure he expects me to understand exactly what he's written - after all, these words come from inside his own head, not mine. They do make me think though, and typically with a smile." - Emerging Writers Network

"Regarding Adam Robinson’s poetry, the Baltimore City Paper said:
a mix of classical and mundane references imbues lines like “There would be a pronounced lack/Of throwing Nerf balls to paralytics/In the basement” with more meaning than they have any right to have.
That’s debatable. How do the poems in Adam Robison and Other Poems, which read like bad Wikipedia entries, become meaningful? I mean, some read as if they were written by that poet’s nosy neighbor from Pale Fire—as in they’re all self-involved, even when they’re about other people.
And many of them are about other people. For instance, these: Kierkegaard, Mike Schmidt, Black Diamond, Xanana Gusmao, Hélène Cixous, and Robinson’s grandmother. There is one poem called, “Two Poems, Neither About Bas Jan Ader.”
Bas Jan Ader was pretty cool. He died of sailing art. The poem that is not about him covers that.
There is a Danish term, “Hiin Enkelte.” It means, “That One.” “That singular individual.” “That solitary person alive in – what the eff is this? – the World.” I’m not saying that Adam Robinson locates such a concept in the amalgam of these diverse identities. What does seem to happen, however, is that through Robinson’s ecstatic syntax, it becomes fun to care about people and their junk. By “junk” I mean error, like the young professional who sits next to the smelly old woman on the bus in “I’m Going to Have SEX with These People.” Because it was Calvin who wrote the Institutes, not Aquinas as Robinson says in “Martin Luther,” and Brahms always had both of his hands.
By getting so much wrong, Robinson releases poetry’s pressure valve. Mistakes provoke the reader, make them winners with all their knowledge, make the book interesting, make them care about things. Perhaps that’s how it’s possible to learn about pollution based on a poem that uses the words “boy howdy,” “holy wow” and “broham.”
Overheard: “I didn’t like poetry until I realized that I was in charge of deciding what was ‘good’ and what was ‘bad’, based on what I liked.” Adam Robinson said that.
I, too, like it— all the genuine fiddle." - Adam Robinson

"Adam Robinson has lived in a bunch of different cities, but that probably doesn’t matter. His childhood was not notable except for all of the God stuff that he grew up with. He went to a Christian college, but only because his brother, his Irish twin, did. The Christian college was awesome for Adam (though it must be noted that this word often accompanies descriptions of religious experiences) and it was there that he learned that life is really terrible unless everybody forgives each other. Adam continues to be a Christian in spite of the fact that Martin Luther consummated his marriage to Katherine von Bora in front of his friends (or, possibly, because of this fact; it isn’t clear). Said another way, Adam is a dark and sad Christian like St. Paul. Now Adam works as a technology buyer for an asset management company, but that doesn’t really describe him. It isn’t who he is. He is a guitar player for Sweatpants and the publisher of Publishing Genius and a writer of poems and stories and songs, but he cannot be fully understood in these terms either. It is better to think of Adam in terms of the time he jumped out of a speeding boat (that he was driving) and crashed it. The boat didn’t sink and Adam didn’t drown. The boat got stuck in some seaweed and Adam swam back to shore. Adam made a similar jump when he left behind his life in Milwaukee and ran away to Baltimore with Stephanie Barber, who is awesome (like Christianity, but in a different way). The experience was panicked and great. It should also be noted that the farthest Adam has walked at one time is 28 miles and 
the farthest he has ridden a bicycle is 34 miles. He could go farther, though. He will go farther. In fact, there he goes now." - Michael Kimball

"How long have you been writing poetry? Could you tell us a little bit about your upcoming book, 'Adam Robison and other Poems'?
- I wrote poetry a lot in high school, but then moved to pretty much strictly fiction through college. I started again in 2006, on New Years, when I made a very deliberate decision to start to figure it out. I had been getting turned on by some very abstract stuff, like the work of Stacy Szymaszek, Anne Carson and Mairéad Byrne. Those are three very different poets but all very inspiring and thought-provoking. At the same time (and still) I was mulling over this idea by Helene Cixous (among others) that literature should be unreadable, so I saw poetry as the best way to explore this notion.
I think my favorite of those three is Byrne’s work, because at the same time as it bears out this multifaceted emotionality and often bewildering language game, it’s always really fetching. I mean, I find her play with language to be interesting on a level that asks, “Why is this important, why is this the best way to approach an idea,” because her poems are often rooted in mundane phenomena and they capture meaning on that level, rather than trying to reflect it through something more transcendent or ephemeral. So the parts of her work that I find fetching is what I brought to my book, ADAM ROBISON. I set out to write poems that can capture sadness and seriousness in a way that doesn’t forget about, for one thing, how little “I” matter and for another thing, that the way we process things is really funny.
So there are a lot of colloquialisms in the book.
Yeah, from what I’ve heard you read so far from that book, I dig the colloquialisms and the wordplay. I also like how you can make a poem very funny and very sad at the same time. One of my favorite lines, and please tell me if I’m quoting this wrong, since I’ve only heard you read it and haven’t seen it in print yet, is “I wish there was something between God and not-God.” Did I get that right? Or at least get the sentiment right? It’s really something that’s stuck with me because I understand that yearning. Like maybe we can feel “something beyond” ordinary reality but can’t quite figure out exactly what it is or the all too human Western God just doesn’t feel right. At the same time, atheism leaves us cold. Is there something inherently “spiritual” about literature? Does this somehow tie in to the idea that literature should be unreadable? What does it mean when we consider that what we write doesn’t really exist in any sort of physical reality (words are not the things the represent)?
- You got that line pretty close — it’s “I’m looking for a balance/Between not-God and God/Like fruit/Or feet/Or all the little birds on Jaybird Street.” I haven’t figured out the logic to it yet, but that poem strikes me as very honest, you know? Like, I don’t have to understand something I wrote for it to be honest. And it is a real yearning. So I don’t know if there is something inherently “spiritual,” but if you say that a basis for literature is desire, I would agree with that. I mean, that’s what they say in fiction workshops, right — what does the character want?
I think, probably, everything ties into the notion that literature should be unreadable. When literature is literature it’s unreadable because of the primacy of its multiplicitous signification. It means a lot that the signifier is distinct from the signified — I mean, it means “there is literature,” it makes literature distinct from sculpture — and I think also it means that we don’t have to try for direct representation. It’s not always interesting to try to capture “tree” when there is a more essential experience or observation that can be made, even if that thing, made in language, is nonsensical. But in another way, what we write manifests itself as a presence imagined, imagined therefore real as an immanence, and that being-with can exist in a more real place, and in a series of infinite, irrational, related, linked connections or meanings or narratives, than the chair you’re sitting in when you read — and that’s what is exciting. That’s what excites me about poetry.
When Colin Wilson described an Outsider, he said, “What can be said to characterize the Outsider is a sense of strangeness, of unreality.” So the Outsider Writer is someone who sees the unreality in reality. Which is not to say that she believes that ordinary, everyday reality is a total illusion, but there is “something more” out there or in there somewhere. Do you see this yearning in your poetry, this unreadable quality you just described as coming from a basic distrust of reality itself?
- I would hesitate to say that something “outside” is unreal, because I think it’s important that the otherness we’re discussing is quite real. I’m not sure if it’s a semantic distinction I’m making — it probably is — but to me poetry focuses on the real characteristics of what is commonly perceived to be unreal. I’m not drawing to myself what I don’t understand as a homogenizing act, but I’m going out to that impossible state to allow my thoughts (and thus my poetry) to be changed. It’s primarily a symbolic gesture because my personal life isn’t actually set up to be this ethical, but still it’s important to me and to my writing. I definitely see the “something more” that you’re referring to, or I catch glimpses of it, and I think that is the objective correlative for my work, as well as the starting point and constant motivation. And for me, reality is trustworthy because it’s predictable. You always know reality is going to blow it, is going to be painful. But what I distrust is the notion that our perception of reality is all that is the case. As an artist, that’s kind of a deal stopper for me. As a member of society, however, I can recognize and accept the value in going forward from this “reality is all we have to work with” presupposition — and it is in the tension between these two thoughts that I hang my poetry.
It’s really interesting to think this way. I haven’t done it in a long time, so I’m afraid I’m not being very sensible. I’m glad we’re talking about it though, because I think this is the framework for understanding ADAM ROBISON. Let me ask you a question: what do you think a literature that distrusts reality would be like?
Thanks for that question, Adam. I’ll answer it because it’ll lead straight into the next question I wanted to ask you. And because it’s a good question. I think that, for the most part, a literature that distrusts reality might use what we commonly perceive as reality but manipulate it or it might leave this reality entirely. In the past, I think the best example would be surrealism. To tell the truth, I think the stuff you’re publishing fits this description. It’s a very free, liberated, literature. Like Matthew Simmons’s A Jello Horse. On one level, everything in the book could possibly happen… hypothetically. But the second person point of view takes us directly into another person’s body, something that obviously can’t happen in this reality, and we suddenly feel ourselves becoming this other person. I’d like to believe that there’s a sort of destiny to life, like what happens at the end of the book, and that people can be that open to honest communication with people they don’t know, but I suspect that we were glimpsing reality as it could be. I don’t know, from what I’ve seen, everything you’ve published so far has this “something more.”" - Interview with Pat King

"there seems to be (or maybe i am making this up) a divide on the internet between those who like what is called "realism" and those who like, we'll call it, "surrealism." where do you stand. what are your thought s adam robinson?
- Well, I think I know what you mean. The boner in me wants to straighten out this term “surrealism” and return it to its proper roots in Satanism, and unpack the term “realism” and claim it for literature that calls into question the things we think are real – but I think I know what you mean and I’m okay with keeping things in quotation marks until the brainwaves coming from the ivory tower filter into our popular lexicon.
I read a story by Paula Bomer today called “An Important Day in the Life of Marjorie Wallace” that I think fits into the definition of the word “realist” (my quotes are meant to indicate the popular term, marked by straight prose where, for instance, the word “tree” denotes “a leafy plant with a trunk and branches”) and it was okay. It has a beautiful and effective conclusion that is worth reading the story for, but to me, the payoff doesn’t seem big enough to rationalize all the work she must have put into writing it. I mean, when the story was over, the sum of my thoughts was: huh. Not as a question or anything, just blank.
And plus, when you write that way – if you make a tiny little mistake, like she does with this clause – “a wonderful February sun falling onto her face” – you risk losing your audience. And mistakes like this are much more obvious in traditional, unmediated prose. Plus, in this story she has the main character, Marjorie, yell at a merely casual friend for not calling her six weeks earlier. I thought, “No one would do that.” So I was basically workshopping this story as I went along, even though I just wanted to read it for whatever reason people read stories. I did the same thing with a Barbara Taylor Bradford book I recently listened to in my car. With “realist” stuff, I always already feel like an expert on whatever a writer is talking about, and I get distracted by matching it up to my own perspective or something. I figure, why bother – unless there is some flat out stunning style to it.
I like Paula Bomer a lot, I think, and I know she’s intentional when she writes this way. I like that she’s sticking up for it. But when you do that other thing – where the language of the story is as essential as the story, and where the story is as essential as an exploded metanarrative, in the sense that it calls into question even the telling of the story, especially the telling (and that might not sound like it’s saying anything but it is) – you’re demanding that readers become familiar with the back or the inside story. When the reader invests like that for a work of art, when he allows himself to become a part of the work, its language and habitat and unfamiliar everything, he is more likely to dig in enough to appreciate it, less likely to discount it, shrug and walk away, as he might with something where he doesn’t “believe” one character would really say that thing, would really note the wonderful sun falling on her face.
I’m not really sure that nugget of theory holds up, and anyway I love impeccable writing, no matter what form it takes. I think my favorite novel is still The Brothers K by David James Duncan, at least in terms of emotional response, in terms of “holy crap, literature is amazareehing,” in terms of tears-to-page ratio. But nine times out of ten I prefer the mind-bending stuff to the “there is meaning in the accumulation of ordinary experience” stuff." - Interview with Dogzplot

"When somebody looks at the cover of your book, the first thing they are confronted with is a portrait that could be either Adam Robinson or Adam Robison. Then the title is Adam Robison and Other Poems and then author of the book is designated as Adam Robinson.
- The Adam Robison/Robinson thing isn’t supposed to be a dichotomy. I mean, they aren’t really two separate things. Robison isn’t my doppelganger. I think of it more like Borges and I, like I don’t know who’s writing what.
Just two weeks ago, I ate in Borges’ favorite restaurant in Buenos Aires, Munich, and the waiter said (in Spanish) that he used to wait on Borges. So the Borges/I and the Adam Robinson/AdamRobison/I, this comes up again in the first piece in the book, Introduction. In the third stanza, the I seems to be Adam Robinson (since he mentions “the fake name ‘Adam Robison’”). Then the I seems to be Adam Robison (“I, Adam Robison,”). And then in the last stanza, the figure described is Adam Robison and so would seem to be being presented from Adam Robinson (unless the piece has switch perspectives to third person).
- That’s an interesting and not totally crazy way to read the entire book, trying to parse out the parts that are Robison versus Robinson — but there isn’t a tidy distinction. That’s because there aren’t tidy distinctions. I am always both Robinson and Robison. Sometimes, in a way that is as real as anything else. I am also Kimball. I behave and think differently around you than I do around, say, Mom or Cats. Because I am Mom and Cats sometimes too. Why not? That’s the gist of the Cormac McCarthy epigraph — when John Grady Cole is arguing with what’s-his-face about how what’s-his-face wouldn’t have been born if his mother never met his father — but, like, how do we know that? How the eff did I get my consciousness and you get yours, which is so much different? There were 10 million sperms rushing to the egg – what if a different one had been the fastest?
I like that you further extend all this by having a poem called “Adam Robinson” along with two different poems called “Adam Robison,” but let’s talk about some of the other biographical poems – a range of people from philosophers like Hélène Cixous and Søren Kierkegaard to baseball players like Mario Mendoza and Mike Schmidt to musicians and religious figures like Glenn Tipton and Martin Luther to friends and family like Josh Maday and to Erma Ruth Rogers Tyner.
- The fact is that I never sat down with a “Robison voice” to write from, except to use it as an excuse to employ a silly vernacular. I don’t think the character is as fully fleshed as, say, Andy Devine, who becomes really conceivable as a person just from the things he writes. But Adam Robison is just one subject in the book, not the author. The book is so much about identity, and part of the title is a game about how much does my identity shift by deleting one letter?
And then, what happens to identity if I change every letter? Like, what if I make my name Glenn Tipton? Not much data about Glenn Tipton gets conveyed in that poem, but there’s a lot about me. “Glenn Tipton” was assigned by someone when I posted to a blog that I was taking suggestions for people to write poems about. I didn’t know anything about him, didn’t know he was in Judas Priest, but I had some keen associations with Judas Priest. So, yeah, most of the poems are really about me, even through the biography lens.
Two other poems that I take to be really about you even though they are a kind of essay-poem are “Introduction” and “Super Introduction.” I love what you’re doing with the form with those. Maybe just talk about how you came to write those and what you were after with them.
- “Introduction” started as a challenge (from myself) to figure out my point of view as a writer. It was kind of a “why do I bother” thing, because I’m often more interested in publishing or sometimes even my day job than writing. Sometimes I lack conviction or spizzerinctum. Rilke said a writer is a person that must write, and I think that’s crap. Anyway, it’s not me. I am primarily impelled by some amazing reading experiences that I want to recreate for others. So “Introduction” is a combination of reminding myself how astounding literature can be, mixed with figuring out my relationship to it, what I can add that ought to be added.
“Super Introduction,” which is the last poem in the book, is a similar appreciation of poetry — it’s as close as I’ll get to a manifesto, I suppose — but in this one I combine my reflections with thoughts on justice and forgiveness. I think there is so much personal stuff in ARAOP, which is okay with me because I believe sharing narratives is productive, but it’s also important to me to be clear about my intentions. I end with “Super Introduction” because I think the book’s takeaway is that poetry is our best shot at, um... can I say world peace? Or, to be less grandiose, understanding what’s understandable.
I feel as if we should stop there, but I have a random statement/question to mention. There’s an index, which is mostly biographical. And I noticed, for one, that Adam Robison isn’t listed and, for two, that the poem “Adam Robinson” isn’t listed under Robinsons, and, for three, that certain things listed in the index, which shall remain unnamed, are not explicit in the poems to which they are referenced. So maybe talk about the why of the index in relation to any of that or its very existence.
- I’m glad you spent so much time with the index. That’s really gratifying, because it’s meant to be a poem in itself, sort of. It’s not supposed to be a straight-up thing. Some parts of it are traditional — yes, I said “Matthea Harvey” on page 40 — but some things are meant to be clues. For instance, I don’t actually mention Michael Jackson in “Adam Robinson,” but his song “Bad” provides the key to unlocking that poem. I didn’t list “Adam Robinson” with my family because I think Adam Robinson, in the book, is a distinct character. And for Robison, he’d have to have every page listed, maybe. I’m not sure. It’s a mutable document." - Interview with Michael Kimball

Leslie Scalapino - Poetic action novel: World of fresh encounters where the 'hartebeest is wandering' and the 'vast shimmying fractionation is heard'

Leslie Scalapino, Floats Horse-Floats or Horse-Flows. Starcherone Books, 2010

«Miners, polar bears, insurgents sweeping the desert in Toyota pickups, a detective on the trail of illegal fur traders, Venus Williams' deconstructed forehand, wild horses, blooming chrysanthemums, tadpoles eating corpses in the Euphrates, and so much more - Leslie Scalapino's Floats Horse-Floats or Horse-Flows is a startlingly beautiful, politically engaged, poetic novel. Narrative moments arrive out of inchoate states - an alexia where unknown words create a future - and the reader is continually and unexpectedly moved by the buoyancy and breathtaking velocity of Leslie Scalapino's language.»

"This is a jewel book that has come out of the spagyric hinterlands of purest imagination, where it has lain for an immeasurable time alongside Burroughs's Cities of the Red Night, Hans Arp's poetry, Monkey's Journey to the West, and Mark Twain's Mysterious Stranger - and it blows with the elegance of a horse - or a wolf... Virginia Woolf." - Michael McClure

"Leslie Scalapino's writing reveals how far language - and therefore thought itself - can go beyond what we are accustomed to, and the forms in which she writes delightfully defy our expectations. Yet her work is infused with a seriousness, a passion, a timeliness, and an intelligence with which we profoundly identify. A new book by Leslie Scalapino is - always! - cause for celebration." - Lydia Davis

"What is an event anyway? This is a question Scalapino has explored before, but never quite as she does here. There is the known world where 'one-box-fits-all-words' make 'even plants indistinguishable from humans.' And then there is the world Scalapino creates, a world of fresh encounters where the 'hartebeest is wandering' and the 'vast shimmying fractionation is heard.' This other world isn't Eden, though it might seem so at first. Like the one we know, this world is filled with disaster and violence. The difference is that here we don't see it coming; we can't hide behind dead verbiage; we can't brace ourselves." - Rae Armantrout

"Floats Horse-floats or Horse-flows is an action novel. Using aspects of adventure, science fiction, and crime, Leslie Scalapino presents and represents an interwoven series that carries you along, ready or not. In fact, in this writing the sense of the present is the central action for the writer and the reader, as well as for the characters. 'No really it's one thing at a time but all at once...' There are horses and they do float and flow. In fact, there are pictures of this, as well as other photos. The sense of floating and flow is intricately, one might almost say intimately, maintained. There is time travel or, at least multiple times… It is a wild ride." - Laura Moriarty

An excerpt:

mine

The same as Chrysanthemum having no feelings but she is only feelings. That pass over her seemingly, that is, lying as the heaving rolling hills of orange mail wet petals plastering her. A tiny dot on the hill is amidst the wave. The debutante offspring of Chrysanthemum is a copy, that is, unable to perceive anyone outside herself. No one is born. The miners are already there, drown, then more are in mine shafts. Also unperceived babies of many equal creatures are emerging, are there then in the wet. But any being born are dead. Though swimming. That wood is to be born. In the wood an oar borne on the orange flexing mail can’t move in it, short-circuits the pink shit. Aiding-Chrysanthemum the older can’t do good ever having never started to flips in the air glee at whatever suffering of others she sees which if she has not caused in notoriety tale-bearing carrying to inseminate she draws or brewing so others will be R sick at heart from it flat can’t do good having never started to is being lost here citizens already blow-torched by soldiers and being so, blow-torched by soldiers, dot the orange mail of petals pink in places that are waves with people’s blood and red mallards

forestless

circular petals of the chrysanthemum, not remembering what she’s said even as she’s speaking. But Petals replaces everything objects people silent with savaging. Mirrors for gold they’re barely reflected in her (Chrysanthemum’s) rage oar not even reflected to her. Globate roses bob in the sea of rain on boughs. The rain hangs on women who out wearing folds that expanding are black velvet rain then. Neither forest or air are fractionation: the forest and long grass being silent, the fractionation that isn’t the baby blue air either which quiet is later cobalt is an oar in it. Same as the insurgents’ oar? Resistance. A factor of Violet née Chrysanthemum being sightless is her pretending sightlessness? The passersby can’t tell if she’s pretending, supposing they thought of it and were asked. They’re mute. Because Violet’s mouth is a raging maw unlike violet flowers that are glinting, similar to the Cheshire cat chewing mouth in the sky. Sound apparently only floating mouth as autosuggestion. Her disembodied then cleistogamous smile hovering in the air seen red chrysanthemum trembling (seen by the fleeing doctor’s ear as he swims in the filthy street) moves on over sewage or dewage, since these are the same translated in the process of alexia imposed onto people who may even be writing chatter-boxes reading at three—they begin choosing words which they compare in the air, appearance and disappearance in sound there.

city harp

The cake of bullying had imbibed smarmy manner that seemed not so much to charm others, technical assistants, nurses, social workers, but to enforce her steely will laced as swine jelly with them, who may be innocent and kind or smarmy sourpusses too, both in an aspic of what’s expected by a ‘society’ apparently, though the Chrysanthemum never imagines anything outside. It seems still as throttling. City harp of sewage by those running in it or driving, horses at the same time, the cough of engines echoing on the rippling pool is in the midst of the hartel so workers walk stagnant. This outside present is invisible to Violet (violent, actually red) Chrysanthemum just as a yellow cheetah is with the present. She makes no presentation except her facial moods. Words can just be substituted. Outside is ignorant in her then hers is violent, her saying any cruel thing that comes into her mouth is stagnancy of a leaden smile or chrysanthemum, any negative motives of hers being opened outward as others doing something. Sherri’s face is always winking with hatred screwed up in a ball uttering vicious, neglectful, and lazy remarks, they’re violent, a friend of Violet’s (Chrysanthemum) she’s always there to help bully. Without there being any alteration of the individuals or the circumstance of that time, nothing forgotten, the wound heals, it closes up. The lips in air disappear sucked from inside into that inside."

See also:
http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/scalapino/

Leslie Scalapino, Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihedrals Zoom, The Post-Apollo Press, 2010

"This is not a poem or a story but a mystical vision. No one could imitate or reproduce it. It exists by chance to tell us about our ever-imminent present. It was in darkness that they saw a great light. So it was that word-blindness was the chosen method for writing this book. And from that blindness Leslie Scalapino has picked her way along an ocean now petroleum where gelatinous forms of life are left, a powder monkey, horse and owl, and slave boys and girls sleep on abandoned cars. Many enslaved children, just as there are in this real world. The gazelle-dihedrons are those that move fast-forward seen as only frontal spine slats of rib-cage zoom in to one almost as if omitting space. This writing (a full flower) stems from an act of heroic attention to the future." - Fanny Howe

"Here is more of Scalapino s jewel book that has come out of the spagyric hinterlands of purest imagination, where it has lain for an immeasurable time alongside Burroughs's Cities of the Red Night, Han Arp s poetry, Monkey's Journey to the West, and Mark Twain's Mysterious Stranger and it zooms with the elegance of a gazelle or a wolf... Virginia Woolf." - Michael McClure

"The intensity of Leslie Scalapino s poetic vision is staggering. The Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihedrals Zoom is the Divine Comedy for our age, with, if one could say, more humanity and more derision." - Etel Adnan

"The Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihedrals Zoom is an ekphrastic implosion inside our severed human-body/animal-mind. "Memory isn't the origin of events," Scalapino writes early in this magisterial work, which restores the synthesis of events to its place as meanings' origin. The Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihedrals Zoom - as much a work of grotesque science fiction as a poem -- cracks open the imaginary reality astride reality. In the stadium of its visionary composition, te everyday floats vivid strange: in time, as time, with time, beside time." — Charles Bernstein

"Scalapino, who died this past May, two months before her 66th birthday, is often clubbed together with her Bay Area Language Poet peers, and the designation is certainly not wrong. But it is beginning to be clear that Scalapino is one of the great Zen poets of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, one who reinvents the relations of poetry and practice with effortless movements of mind, sense, and sound in each book. This collection is the companion volume to Floats Horse-Floats or Horse Flows, published earlier this year. Written in prose, it has a complex "plot," which finds the diverse conflagration of "human-like creatures" from the title pivoting around the recent terrorist attack on Mumbai. Illustrations from artists Kiki Smith and Jess are interspersed, in a scene where "Day begins anywhere." The whole has a Bladerunner-ish quality to it, with avatars multiplying and "base runners" populating the "emerald dark." While Way (1988) remains the place to start with Scalapino's work, and posthumously prepared manuscripts are sure to see publication, this collection pulses with life and Scalapino's unmistakable voice." - Publishers Weekly

"The Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihedrals Zoom, though a complete and separate work, is the second book or pair of the prose work titled Floats Horse-Floats or Horse-Flows. The Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihedrals Zoom, in short chapters usually not more than a page or half page, was composed by process of alexia, word-blindness: unknown words were chosen by randomly leafing through Webster's Dictionary; these generate characters and events that cohere as a sci-fi novel in which the characters are apparently divided from their senses (said to be dysaphic, they are seemingly without tactile senses, without memory or seeing?though they are also said to see and touch); by virtue of this dysaphic quality they act to heal mind-body split visibly demonstrated by the dihedrons and the gazelle-dihedrals, humanlike creatures with structures opened to show their organs and muscles?who inhabit the emerald dark apparently either cyber or real space. These umbra creatures have been affected by "idea" being the goal and description of everything, divided from "being" itself.
The Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihedrals Zoom is an endless landscape in which new characters arising from the words, with their own lives and actions that briefly refer to outside events and history (such as Sara Palin, one of the characters for an instant), access spatial-sound openings, tactile and aural sensations, the conception being that we've been split distorted, cut off from our present-future-past, time acknowledged as really non-existent as we conventionally define it. The characters are particularly the abandoned orphan girls (left by parents or placed in orphanages as is occurring at present in China and India but here location is not specified, is as if a futuristic everywhere), millions of whom stream through the sci-fi realms in which horses roam as in Mongolia. Leafing through the dictionary I ran across the two words "base runner" from this, a main character arose, the base runner who is trapped in an emerald dark freezing space where he runs to reach widely separated bases, no one else present in the game from which he can't depart (if he does he will be killed); he's bound apparently in a cyber program possibly gulag from which terrorist actions arise or are reflected. One such event, the attack on Mumbai, is the origin and connection of all the events of the book. The avatars of the base runner are an eagle and an octopus; the latter frees the base runner by making love to a woman (another main character named the distaffer) as she is swimming in the sea after her plane with a load of orphans has crashed into the sea. The octopus and the woman "come" allowing the base runner to come to them breaking through from the emerald dark. The dihedrons (seen only sideways, they arrive without appearing to move) and the gazelle-dihedrals (different manifestation of the same creature but this version zooms only forward) are completely opened in the sense that their organs-musculature-skeletons are simultaneously displayed to be literally outside and inside at once. These creatures are either protective or threatening, akin to Tantric Buddhist figures; they are present while the human characters catch on fire in the emerald zone, the living people protected by their avatars (an octopus, a Silvertip grizzly, a white wolf-dog, an eagle).
The characters alter by their experience. Some who are the abandoned girl-orphans growing up become manifestations of characters (loosely conceived) from Greek myths. One main character is "the deb" (the debutant) who is the daughter of a slut named Chrysanthemum (a manifestation of a fiery red Mongolian wrathful deity, a figure of enlightenment); given the hardship of having such a mother, the daughter grows up to be Artemis whose avatars are a Silvertip grizzly and the Silver Wattle Tree. Another main character is a child, one of the abandoned girl-orphans, who grows up to be Venus/Aphrodite (also Venus Williams, the tennis champ). One minor character is Hera, a harridan who is abusive to one of the abandoned orphans.
The intent of this work is free rein of the imagination, as if "on a run" pushing it as far as can be to break through to have it "unite" with a sense of being real. The intent is also that one as reader have the sense of seeing one's separation from one's own senses in living in our society as our separation from paradise and as reading, to have even a tactile as well as mental sense of union with that paradise. Though since it is real, paradise as the book's reality includes also terrifying events of the actual world (as well as daily events, sometimes humorous).
The Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihedrals Zoom contains images by Jess, Masami Teraoka, and Kiki Smith. Images by Jess and Masami Teraoka (an octopus sucking a woman) are part of the meaning of the text, as if the images are memories of events in the lives of the characters (who have only single memories arising occasionally, or are devoid of memories until these begin to break through). Kiki Smith has given permission to use images from her Spinster Series, included as part of my text. Her figure of a girl (from her already existing series) is used as a reference to a figure of a girl in the emerald dark. The images by these artists are thus real events already existing outside, already experienced in the text independently, neither illustrating the other verifying each other as part of a huge background of sensory events.
The inside of action and of being in these actions at the same time?have the tactile sense that there is no present even seeing there in its midst experiencing sensations. The characters, the deb (debutant), the distaffer, and the base runner, with their avatars - so they have more than one manifestation at once - exist alongside and somehow programmed in relation to real-time events: a recent terrorist attacks on a cricket team and the recent attack on Mumbai (the two events conflated as if one). Akin to Henry Darger's endless landscapes, narrative is from the outside always?at the same time the intent is for the writing to be the sensation of having/being other people's sensations as well as non-human, that of flowers?not only to have the pleasure of this vivid life but the sense of not struggling for future.
This work, possibly referencing a cyber Alice in Wonderland is based in the sound of words intended to make a sensory realm, as if the characters while not having senses, have these given to them as the writing being all of the senses." - Leslie Scalapino

"I mentioned the difficulty of reading Leslie Scalapino’s wordfall, The Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihedrals Zoom, to Lindsey Boldt, who published the book with Post Apollo Press. She responded generously, saying
I agree that Scalapino’s work can feel very difficult, and this book I think feels especially daunting. Its prose is incredibly tangled and slippery to an almost maddening degree, which is what makes it so taxing but also so rewarding. I felt really anxious when I first sat down to read it and really fought to understand it on a sense-meaning level. I don’t think I’d faced such a literary challenge since college. I finally caved at some point and just let it turn into a sensory experience, which turned out to be really fun.
Certainly that’s an adequate and lovely review in itself, though it hardly matches the book’s blurbs: Fanny Howe calls it a “mystical vision” and Charles Bernstein said the book “is an ekphrastic implosion inside our severed human-body/animal-mind.” Talk about whoa! Michael McClure said the book comes from the “spagyric hinterlands of purest imagination,” and Etel Adnan called it our Divine Comedy but with “more humanity and more derision.”
So how is it that these syntactically dense word sets come to matter? Even the 176-page book itself is difficult to characterize; the jacket is fuzzy, kind of ugly, an aesthetic that goes hand-in-hand with difficult work in the same way that academic journals forgo cover art for a table of contents–a de facto caveat emptor: there’s no gloss here. In spite of that, this book is glossy, and justifies its $29 price tag with heavy, bright paper and fourteen provocative images by artists like Kiki Smith and Jess (Jess Collins). It feels as dense as it is.
Accordingly, I’m interested in how the bookiness affects the work; at first it increases the austerity and limits my interaction. The artifact in particular makes the writing challenging, while the writing challenges the book’s function; how do you design a serious but inviting book? I think Scalapino and her editors were conscious of the challenge, and the integration of the pictures helps (it’s made explicit, however, that the pictures are not illustrations of the work, or inspirations for it — just representations of the same reality).
But if you check out these excerpts from the book, you’ll see the poems don’t actually seem all that hard. In fact, its language is just the sort of thing an htmlgiant reader might expect to find propped here. I bet Chris Higgs will agree that this first sentence glows: “Out of which the silent dactylology from emerald wastes little girls crossing the roads arriving the green meadows full they do the cakewalk and are celebrated with cakes for their most intricate steps.” Like Lindsey Boldt said, as a sensory experience that linguistic pile-on is a blast.
From the introductory note by Leslie Scalapino:
'The Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihedrals Zoom was written by leafing through Random House Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary choosing words at random by process of alexia, not as mental disorder but word-blindness: trance-like stream overriding meaning, choice, and inhibition. The intention to bring about an unknown future was offset by this action of alexia making as it happens sensual exquisite corpses—leading to the discovery that there isn’t any future, isn’t even any present. Such an exquisite corpse, read, is in an instant yet not even in ‘a present.’ Outside’s events unite gluing to each other a single object. That which had already existed is by chance.'
Even that introduction frustrated me with how much it takes for granted. I understand how choosing random words can create sensual exquisite corpses, and I’m big into theories of time, but I am not following how these strings of words illustrate that the future and the present don’t exist. I don’t even know what that means. But when I read an introduction to a process, I’m just looking for a lucid explanation of what to expect. Scalapino isn’t providing a key for the reader, just another lock.
The more I read from the collection, though, the more I understand that in a meaningful way, through sonic and syntactic recurrence, through oblique references to things-which-stand-not-for-themselves (eg. Palin, planes, deb, something complicated about the basics of baseball), the text unlocks itself. Included in this unlocking are the ideas of time that Scalapino mentions in her note, and in that way I think the book becomes more than just a fun book for Kool-Aid drinkers of langpo. There is indeed some ekphrastic implosion, though I wonder if ekphrasis is the best way to characterize it. To me it seems more eschatological, or whatever eschatology would be if it didn’t exist. (It’s a keen strength that the book deprioritizes any thesis, allowing for this kind of joyful, highfalutin response, or this one: Bernstein’s nuts! It’s not ekphrastic, it’s clearly eschatology that’s imploding!) More than anything, the Scalapino dialectic is one of openness. The book can be ekphrastic or phenomenological, sociological or even geometrical, as the title indicates.
At this point I figure I have dabbled in the book, and it has rewarded that dabbling with (yes) a fun experience and an inkling of what is possible from this literature. A couple weeks ago I mentioned to Jamie Townsend, of the New Philadelphia Poets, that I was trying to read Scalapino and he smiled, saying something like, “That’s what everyone does.” I don’t know that one has to try, though, so much as to read her twice. Now that I have sense of the topology of her writing, I’m now going to read her a second time.
Close to the end of The Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihedrals Zoom, Scalapino unwrites her author’s note, enjambing the lines, deleting phrases and adding even more presumptuous ones, and by this time I have accustomed myself to her demands. What works best about this dilapidation, this uncutting of the stone, reminds me of what I like best about the second section of The Sound and the Fury. Faulkner forgoes chronology and structure the closer Quentin comes to death." - Adam Robinson

From The Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihedrals Zoom

Leslie Scalapinom, Orchid Jetsam,  Tuumba Press, 2001

Subtitled "A Detective Novel Series," ORCHID JETSAM includes two closely related mysteries, "Orchid Jetsam" and "Clear Land." In the first, San Francisco homicide detective Grace Abe - inhabited by the ghost of a U.S. Marine who had been an undercover assassin - runs as 'someone else' within her own frame in public space where people are becoming ill in crowds. The epidemic, which at first appears as much psychic as physical, is caused by hemlock spread in food and in the public transit system. Detective Abe is addicted to a drug whose effect is a clear elation as she running. Biographical information about Dee Goda is not available. However, readers of the widely admired Leslie Scalapino, may suspect that she had something to do with the writing. Of the many titles by Leslie Scalapino's available from SPD - the mostly recent are R-HU and THE PUBLIC WORLD/ SYNTATICALLY IMPERMANENCE.

Detective stories feature prominently in Leslie Scalapino’s innovative novels Orion, Defoe, Orchid Jetsam, and Dahlia’s Iris. The novels combine narratives of crimes and investigations typical of the detective genre with formal and linguistic disruptions developed and theorized by writers associated with Language Writing. This article traces Scalapino’s experimentation with the detective genre back to her confrontation with Language Writing’s exclusionary emphasis on formal disruption, articulated most fully in her 1991 Poetics Journal dialogue with Ron Silliman. Drawing on Nel Noddings and Judith Butler’s theories of interdependence and care, it argues that Scalapino’s detective stories foreground the constitutive nature of human vulnerability. In so doing, the article extends Joan Retallack, Małgorzata Myk, and Michael Cross’s recent studies of Scalapino’s philosophical poetics. It proposes that Scalapino’s critical engagement with the conventions of the detective genre informs her layered conceptions of being, experiencing, and conscious subjectivity and argues that her detective novels pursue a series of questions posed by Gertrude Stein and Walter Benjamin decades earlier: How do detectives do their work and what is the reader’s role? How do stories inspire or inhibit mutual understanding? Given vulnerability’s pervasiveness, who deserves care, who is responsible for providing it, and at what cost? - Nate Mickelson

Leslie Scalapino, Zither & Autobiography,

Wesleyan University Press, 2003

read it at Google Books

Zither & Autobiography is comprised of two parts: the author's autobiography and a book-length poem entitled "Zither." Both parts of the book are concerned with facts and their undoing. In Autobiography, Scalapino explores her shifting memories of childhood―especially of years spent in Asia―experimenting with the memoir form to explore how a view of one's own life develops, how "fixed memories move as illusion."

Zither opens with a unique narrative that the author describes as "samurai film as Classic Comic of Shakespeare's King Lear (without using any of Shakespeare's language, characters or plot)." Creating a complex spatial soundscape, the poem works formally to allow continual change of one's conceptions while reading. The juxtaposition of the two parts and the connection between them is "the anarchist moment...disjunction itself," a key concept in much of Scalapino's work. This vivid book reveals in every thought-sparking section just why Scalapino has been hailed by Library Journal as "one of the most unique and powerful writers at the forefront of American literature."

"This is a radically new work, a narrative blast."―Fanny Howe, author of Indivisible and Selected Poems

"Scalapino's work stands out as one of the most serious, innovative, and challenging undertakings in contemporary poetry. Her practice of, and reflection on, narrative are breathtaking. These two texts together (from A to Z) perform a fascinating textual acrobatics."―Pierre Joris, author of Poasis

Justin Sirois - Dreamy reveries, juvenile taunts, gorgeous descriptions of landscape, gothic depictions of vultures circling,and doses of humor

Justin Sirois, MLKNG SCKLS (Publishing Genius, 2009)

"MLKNG SCKLS is a short collection of Salim Abid's deleted Word documents written during his escape up the Euphrates from Fallujah to Ramadi. These texts could have been included in Falcons on the Floor, which is the novel Salim wrote about fleeing from his war ravaged city, but for sensitive reasons he chose to remove them. That metanarrative provides the conceit of this chapbook, lushly composed by Justin Sirois and edited by Iraqi refugee Haneen Alshujairy. MLKNG SCKLS provides a bristling and necessary look into the realities of living in Iraq, complete with dying laptop batteries, knock-off sneakers, and carnage-lined roadways."

“Sirois’ MLKNG SCKLS reads like what might happen if you crossed Gus Van Sant’s Gerry with the parts of an Iraq war documentary that the Bush administration had censored. A tight, spare and quietly tense gem of a book.” - Brian Evenson

"Sirois' masterful creation is not just a travel narrative, not just an epistolary, not just a war story. This is desert madness made universal, a coming of age rendered apocalyptic in language as sparse and beautiful and ultimately perilous as the desert passage it describes." - Matt Bell

"A book about Iraq. War-torn Iraq. It provides such a complicated narrative and emotional system that the didacticism inherent in political literature falls away. But, this book has great political potential. Justin leaves his characters bare to the reader so as to create an emotional connection and shift in values in the way we see an abstracted political conflict. The balance of power and our role in it will necessarily shift after reading this book." - John Dermot Woods

"Excerpted from the novel Falcons on the Floor, Justin Sirois’s MLKNG SCKLS is ostensibly the story of a road trip across a war-torn landscape. Actually, these aren’t excerpts but excised texts, deleted Word documents from narrator Salim Abid’s laptop intended for the novel Abid wrote while escaping from Fallujah to Ramadi with his friend Khalil. Salim’s epistolary accounts are composed on his laptop and are sectioned off by how much remaining battery power his laptop has. It’s a striking metafictional device that evocatively suggests that time may also be literally running out for Salim and Khalil. As Salim’s laptop’s battery power percentage decreases, the characters’ uncertainty increases. At any moment, you think that Salim will get the pop-up balloon saying: “Low Battery: You should change your battery or switch to outlet power immediately to keep from losing your work.”
And, in another symbolic turn, with only “44% Battery Power Remaining,” Salim describes a tender moment where he cooks and then “uncooks” a meal for his beloved. Why? “To show Rana how much I love her, I’d uncook an entire meal, the whole thing, just for her. Anyone can cook, but uncooking – that’s hard. That’s really hard. But it’d be so worth it.” It’s one of this short book’s many imaginative moments and may reveal Salim’s unconscious desire to turn back the clock, to somehow undo what was done to him, his family, his community.
And what exactly was done? Other than mentioning that these entries were written in April, 2004, while fleeing from Fallujah, nothing else is explicitly written. Salim and Khalil’s escape from Fallujah was presumably precipitated by the First Battle of Fallujah, codenamed “Operation Vigilant Resolve,” the U.S. Military’s disastrous attempt to capture the city of Fallujah in April, 2004. While 27 American soldiers were killed, hundreds of Iraqis including many civilians were killed in the offensive. It was later reported that the U.S. Military was guilty of using incendiary devices like napalm and white phosphorus in their offensive. Perhaps this is what Salim was referring to when he wrote “Now black skies burp fire and the water boils poisonous.”
While its rendering of fear and uncertainty is precisely and captivatingly drawn, MLKNG SCKLS opens up into much more. Lyrical evocations of loss abound as do reveries on desert life:
Windless as an aquarium, the night stretches itself from rim to rim with no beginning or quit. Forward past the darkened shoreline, beyond scrub brush and burr, the horizon is replaced by the river and only the river. North to south, it feeds the desert. Black water inks seaward across the prairie. The outstretched wingspan of water is endless with tributaries feathered into marshland. No one rides or floats. All night the water’s calm. The glassy black flows placid and quiet, and I stare hoping no one comes. No one has and no one will. Across the calm, at the river’s edge, palm trees and poplars poke the sky like crude weaponry.
Sirois’s prose glistens with precision. Its sparseness mirrors the parched desert through which Salim and Khalil travel, its lyricism one proof of how resilient we can be in the face of disaster. Clocking in at fifty-five pages, this novelette manages to pack dreamy reveries, juvenile taunts, gorgeous descriptions of landscape, gothic depictions of vultures circling, lapidary views of blood, and doses of humor (like Khalil’s tall tale about a man with a crippled hand whose life was saved by a cigarette) that spell the reader through a harrowing trip to a place that’s, with any luck, safe, or, at least safer. If MLKNG SCKLS’s excised texts are any indication of the quality of Falcons on the Floor, then, as readers, we have much to look forward to." - John Madera

"MLKNG SCKLS documents two young men, Salim and Khalil, on their journey through the desert as they flee Fallujah in April 2004. The narrative is told through Salim's brief diary-like entries which are demarcated not by a date, but by how much battery power remains on the laptop. With 91% batter power remaining, Salim recounts what it was like when leaving Fallujah: "Now black skies burp fire and the water boils poisonous. Boot heels collapse the necks of doorknobs. Men go and go missing." While the language is sparse, Sirois is still incredibly detailed, capturing the tone and mood through his careful word choices.
Salim is an engaging character whose wry humor shows up time and time again. He describes trying to sleep at night: "The night has no soundtrack but creaks and snaps. Every bird chirp could be a radio squawking attack; every splash becomes boots rushing us blind. I've sat up so many times I probably have a six pack from paranoia -- it could be marketed as The Ultimate, 480 Minute, Don't Stab Me in My Sleep Workout." Salim and Khalil give a human face to the Iraqis suffering in this war. They joke, laugh, love, are frightened, frustrated, angry, and they are not so different from us. In one particularly imaginative and touching scene, Salim recounts uncooking a meal for his girlfriend, Rana: "To show Rana how much I love her, I'd uncook an entire meal, the whole thing, just for her. Anyone can cook, but uncooking -- that's hard. That's really hard. But it would be so worth it." He then goes on to describe the process of cooking and then uncooking chicken curry while Rana waits. This scene in particular plays with the reader's desire to know more. Is this a flashback or a dream? Who is Rana? What happened to her? Though the reader most likely knows the answer to this last question.
If the purpose of this book is to build anticipation for Falcons on the Floor, the larger puzzle these pieces fit into, then Sirois is successful. These fragments are almost sure to engage the reader and leave him or her wanting more. MLKNG SCKLS is a smart and compassionate little book." - Gina Myers

"I’d say this book is probably the best thing I’ve read about Iraq – which isn’t to suggest that I’ve read all that much about Iraq, I’m sorry to say. Sadly, I’ve become sort of dull and deaf to the whole of what’s going on there, and this book coaxed me out of that numbness. There’s so little in news stories of the war in Iraq that makes me feel anything. This book made me feel sympathy for the main character, Salim, mainly due to all that was familiar and at the same time strange about him, the way his experience is at once unfathomable and very mundane. During his exodus, Salim is deeply attached – as I am – to a personal computer, and the book is structured as a series of documents Salim has written on his laptop. Salim dreams of posting his homemade films on the Internet. And he’s angry at the man-eating birds circling the sky and annoyed at his traveling partner – like it’s traffic or some other quotidian annoyance we’re talking about here. Justin does a great job of capturing what it’s like to be a refugee in the modern age or rather what it’s like simply to be living in the modern age.
Throughout the book there’s the sense that Salim is being watched or potentially being watched, whether by some sort of ominous army in the dark with lasers or light beams or or by a Western housewife nursing her child and watching Salim’s Internet video. And yet, while he seems to be constantly on the verge of being spotted, you wonder if anyone can actually see him. Salim and Khalil seem desperately alone in the land through which they are traveling, the last living humans in a world that doesn’t care about them, ignores them, wants to devour them – I’m not sure which. Technology presses down, heavily. It’s a connector and a compressor but also a separator – offering the illusion of connection where it doesn’t really exist, ultimately leaving Salim isolated. What exactly are Salim and Khalil running from? It’s left unclear. This is not about politics or battles or states or boundaries or anything so clearly defined but about people moving through the world, looking, longing for something, wanting to be seen, wanting to be unique. The writing is spare, beautiful and descriptive. Vultures are hungry “turkeys” with ruffled rear-ends, suggesting the US or perhaps some other parasitic, opportunistic presence. A woman’s hair “glistens like frozen Coke.” Scary and lovely.
When did you start writing the book?
- I started writing MLKNG SCKLS right after finishing the second edits on Falcons on the Floor. That was February ’09. I’d built up all this momentum and was in love with the characters and I just needed to keep going. After combing through the notes and sketches I took/made, routing through all these photos I’d collected online in preparation for the novel, I found ideas and scenes that didn’t make the final cut. These shorts stories in SCKLS came out of that wanting to expand the narrative.
Publishing the “deleted scenes” before the feature is a little backwards, but it’s been helpful in getting the word out about the larger project. Publishing Genius of Baltimore did a perfect job producing and promoting the book.
Can you tell me about the nature of your collaboration with Haneen Alshujairy? How did you meet her and how did this all work? Did you talk to her and then write your story? Or write your story and then talk to her? What was the process?
- I found Haneen after soliciting about 60 Iraqis on a language exchange website. I was honest and said I speak no Arabic and really just wanted to interview people about their experiences in and around the war. Three people replied and Haneen was the most responsive and curious. Even though she had fled the country in 2003, she was from Baghdad and has extended family in Fallujah. Her father was born there. We instantly became friends. After interviewing her for a few months I got up the courage to ask her to take a look at the first draft of Falcons. Reading 30 pages at a time via email, she gave me feedback and criticism, made some suggestions, and all of a sudden we were collaborating. We used the same process with MLKNG SCKLS.
How does a guy in Baltimore decide to write a book on Iraq, from the perspective of an Iraqi?

- That’s the big question. Who the hell am I to write a story like this? I was definitely motivated by the lack of news coverage in the US told from the Iraqi perspective. After learning more about the events in Fallujah in April of 2004, I was completely absorbed with the conflict and drama, the people and the places (Fallujah and Ramadi). If I could have traveled there, I would have, but it still isn’t safe for Westerners and working from the Green Zone would have been like working in any city in America. Isolated and detached from the reality.
When I was doing my research – reading as much as I could, watching every documentary I could find, and talking to Iraqis on the net – the thought of an American writing from an Iraqi perspective became more and more reasonable. SCKLS and Falcons is more of a story about people and friendships rather than a “foreign war” story. The more I realized how similar Americans are to the Iraqi people the more confidence I had in starting the project.
Haneen obviously adds an authenticity to the project that is vital. I wouldn’t have completed it without her.
What’s the connection between MLKNG SCKLS and Falcons on the Floor? Why did these scenes get deleted? What’s Falcons on the Floor like?
- Falcons is a bit different from SCKLS. It’s darker in some ways. The threats are more concrete and violence is everywhere. The reader sees exactly why Salim and Khalil are fleeing Fallujah, why their relationship is strained, and how desperate and confused they are. The landscape in the novel becomes a character in a way. That’s one large difference between the two books. There’s also perspective shifts in the novel that you can’t get in SCKLS as SCKLS are sections picked from a section in Falcons that is written on Salim’s laptop. The rest of the novel is told from a third person perspective.
Some of the scenes or ideas weren’t included because they distracted from the rhythm of the narrative. A few of the shorts were written after the novel was completed, but were based on themes or ideas that were edited early in the drafting process.
I love the scene in which Salim uncooks the meal. It’s very strange but not overtly so. Where did this come from? Have you attempted uncooking yourself? After reading this sad, tense, romantic scene, I kind of wish my husband would uncook for me.
- Oh, if only I could uncook for someone I love. Sadly, I’m not that skilled. It takes years of careful practice and a strong stomach for reanimation. I simply don’t have it. I wish I could have used a less commonly known dish, but the story is so exaggerated I thought it would be easier for the reader if the recipe was familiar. I think it unworks well enough.
The idea came out of wanting to taking a common act and reverse it, but still keeping it endearing and loving. Cooking made sense. I think everyone can relate to either Salim or Rana; i.e. cooking or being cooked for.
What does “milking sickles” mean?
- I really don’t know. I love the sound of it – the rhythm – the icky-ness.
Imagine idle men, unemployed men in the Jolan (a market in Fallujah) gripping the blades of sharpened sickles and milking them, expecting sustenance, but producing only blood.
I also hate cliché titles of books and wanted to name the collection something anti-informative… much like the stories themselves." - Interview with Ginny Parker Woods

Justin Sirois, Secondary Sound (BlazeVOX Books, 2008)

"As soon as any new gadgets are invented, artists stand ready to appropriate the thing and bend it for critique. In his exciting and danceable new book, justin sirois dabbles with the idea:
Technologies, they go:
development
marketing
immersion
adaptation
obsolescence
art
Accordingly, there's a land rush on literary innovation, a race to spike a claim on the newest forms. The epistolary novel worked out well, who can do the same thing with e-mail? Who's going to trick out Amazon's Kindle? Who will publish the first book comprised completely of IMs? Poets have been revising spam as poetry since spam became randomly sublime, and one of the most far out and successful experiments is Douglass Rushkoff's open source novel, which made it into print in 2002, five years before news broke about the role audience input played in Snakes on a Plane. And, thus, the fact that some attic trendsetter has done it better already is always the problem.
Secondary Sound, justin sirois's new book of poetry, brilliantly subverts all of this while exhibiting a keen awareness of it. It's natural that a book about a trend-savvy consumer-activist named (oh the savvy) "Pirate," who is commissioned to develop the greatest of all possible ringtones by a media conglomerate named the Grope Group, would include some graphical reference to text messaging. And so it does, but in a blithely noncontiguous, impossible way:
if you text::
I don't understand
to the number::
phenomenologically speaking, it's no longer about you, it's about the Tesla of palms collectively pressed to the prism of colliding idiom
you'll Katamari every dream in the Eastern Ameropean market . . .
Boxes are printed around the text messages, which is a suggestive way to separate the text message from the rest of the poem (most of Secondary Sound can be read as a series of individual poems, but it works most effectively as a comprehensive story, an epic poem). This delineation serves as inquiry about the relationship between "text message" and "text." It's a prescient line of questioning, considering that text messaging is, in a real way, an entirely new form of communication. It's the form that disregards formal rules in the service of meaning, that operates unmediated by teachers so that what the 11-year-old writes is indistinguishable from what her mother scrawls off of her BlackBerry.
You know—they go like this: "where r u" "at strbks"—text messaging strips from language its concern with grace, so that all that's left is meaning. This is Husserl's dream (he got on the phenomenology bandwagon early; it was his idea to "bracket" distracting phenomena and in this way to approach the ground of being), so—phenomenologically speaking—sirois is nailing all the right questions. Does he care? Nope, and who does, and who should? The philosophical underpinnings of Secondary Sound are tenable and fun to think about—but, but
but the thing that sirois gets best, and what makes the book so convincing, is the liquid language he uses to outline the story. Comprised primarily of instructional memos from the Grope Group to the Pirate, with a couple short story interludes, the book has a way of enticing the reader with sparkles of plot and sharp tropes while simultaneously befuddling any concrete assertions about what, exactly, is going on.
Because what's going on is that Pirate, by his existence and quirky day-to-day, is cataloging everything that needs to be included in this new chime. And every salable thing needs to be in there; the chime is an Hegelian endeavor to incorporate all history ("and film history because" it's pointed out, "film history is a separate history"), so we can expect a little vertigo from the narrator's perspective. In fact, the most dizzying abstractions are preferable. Writing sensory overload, sirois has nailed the dazed tone most capable of sensibly addressing the subject of our modern situation. This piece closes the first section, concluding the introductory memo from the Grope Group:
when the day is done their ears will ring & this is how they'll judge how the night went, wet with sounds dripping from drums, kettles of letters steaming like tea. In cabs they'll croon, make nookie in the books of napes & grapple with new text that tent chests
the night will be done because their ears are ringing
Apparently, the Grope Group aspires to develop more than just a ringtone, but by using the ringtone they will exert power over the consumers and over time itself; they'll ring in the night. And Google is taking over my life because I'm letting it—I use Google Docs to write, CheckOut to shop, their search engine to look up my friend's address—so the hegemony of the Grope Group is not implausible. What is more horrifying is that they have made Pirate complicit in their ambition. They will reach full power on the strength of what he creates, and he seems to be one of the conscientious few with the ability to resist their goals. As the hero, he is the other between the two modalities in the book, the business world and the daffy punk resistance. This latter group, like punks in the real world, seem to have given up serious protest and now take "antipolitical political action," like arranging zombie parties aimed at repealing the Estate Tax. Good times, sure, but not really fueled by the same urgency that their forebears had when they took issue with, say, the Stamp Tax.
All of this isn't a terribly difficult metaphor to pull out of the book, or to decipher. Take away his commission to create a ringtone and Pirate becomes practically every US citizen alive today—a person subject to the myriad imperatives of corporate marketing; Pirate just has a more involved role in the game. But sirois masterfully describes the principality of the powers not by vilifying any of the players (there is no clear Big Brother), but by highlighting the qualities of the ringtone. It's something that can't be escaped, and that's okay, because
when the chime is going for a run
or standing on the train
it won't annoy other passagers or pedestrians...when your favorite draught is being poured at an airport lounge, each bubble of foam will have this chime swirling inside...
The ubiquity of the chime is matched by sirois's ability to cross reference different sections of the text, which instills an equally vertiginous feature to reading it. Several pieces are called "echo"—that's a good gag, especially bearing in mind the books title. And at one point, Pirate takes exception to having to say "Private SNAFU" as a code. A later poem takes that acronym, expanded, for its title. Grope Group opens every memo with "Ahoy," a quirk that sirois knows might get old and which he addresses by way of apology: "Ahoy!/I hope that doesn't get annoying," and "oy vey! I mean ahoy!" There are so many links from page to page that the reading becomes blissfully hypertextual, and finding selections of the poem to excerpt is a simple task. There are two scoops of noteworthy nuggets inside this book, plenty at which to laugh, marvel or cringe.
I am enthusiastic about this book. I have rarely been more enthusiastic about any book." —Adam Robinson

"It’s a short book. Like 92 pages. The page count @ BlazeVOX is off. I only took one page of notes. It was my favorite passage from the book, which was this:
“& when I speak
I speak about every
bucaneer from Baltimore to Tehran
& the Group texts
someone stop this fucker
before he disassembles
everything we stand for”
I thought this part was funny. But the book was often funny. It boils down to a satire of modern inter-connectivty culture while it whole-heartedly embraces it. I don’t think he actually meant sailing the open seas pirates, though the imagery for that is too rich to not use, and so I think it makes a certain amount of sense that he did use it. He’s talking about intellectual property pirates, a group which I think we are all part of. The one clear theme in this madness is that the pirate is told to write music for a ringtone, but a ringtone is never just a ringtone. There was also a funny scene where he scores free tickets into a club. Like he’s always trying to score free things.
I don’t read a lot of poetry, I won’t lie. I like my words cohesive, clear, and more the conveyance of emotion than emotion on the page. But I read this because he gave it to me. And I’d have probably enjoyed this otherwise. I think BlazeVOX does an awful lot of work, and people like Justin Sirois are not appreciated enough. I think fourteen dollars is a small price to pay in support of those things, but I’m pretty sure the pirate himself won’t care much if you don’t. He understands your culture and takes part in it at the same time that he sees the joke and parallels of it. This I loved about the book. It wasn’t hard to read. It was worth the time I spent on it. And the least I could do to repay him for just giving it to me was write a short review, however shoddy it may be." - P.H. Madore

“the more I share, the more capital I receive. You’re a copy
of a copy, you’re a file rife with fire – in the ownership
society – in spite of normative code
let yourself be free & collect the monthly allowance
think about meme
copying youyou” —Justin Sirois “paralysis by analysis”
Secondary Sound, Justin Sirois's first full length collection of poetry, is a fun read through our current cultural situation in which new media technology and information gathering and distribution is constantly growing and changing. Comprised of three sections, the book defies the simple label of "poetry" through its use of multiple genres. Largely composed of poems in verse, there are also prose pieces that read more like short stories than they do prose poems, text messages, lists, and company memorandums. Like a walk through the city where one encounters flyers on street posts, advertisements on subway walls and the sides of buses, overheard bits of conversations, chants yelled by protestors, music overflowing from an open window, and text messages straight to your pocket, information comes from every direction, and for sirois, this experience of information is a valid and vital source for poetry.
The page marking section one introduces the character Pirate and his mission: "One: Bell -- in which a Pirate is hired to create the most alluring ringtone known to man." From there we follow Pirate through his journey as he develops a ringtone for the pervasive media conglomerate Group Grope - a journey that leads us through an organic grocery store to purchase tea (choose from HonesTea, RealiTea, IngenuiTea, BrutaliTea), past zombie performance artists calling to "Kill the death tax," into a folk psych-rock club in search of tickets to a secret show, and ultimately onto a ship called The Embarcadero whose destination is Stolen Kitten Island. Though it sounds far-fetched, Pirate's voyage is very easy to relate to and is very much a story of the present time.
In addition to the average poetry reader, the clever details throughout Secondary Sound will also appeal to theory jocks, pop culture fanatics, and tech junkies. Sirois masterfully documents the world in all its absurdity and glory as Pirate’s hero, the Well-Balanced Buccaneer, text messages his friends on his new keyless iAye, and the Grope Group board “Nikes this Converse sound into commercial licorice.” Topical and hip, Secondary Sound exploits the language of marketing and advertising in a period of time where workers have been transformed “from cashiers and bartenders to information workers nearly over night."
The book also offers a commentary on piracy, from DJs who are arrested for underground mixtapes to individuals being sued for downloads by major recording companies. Sirois seems sympathetic to the idea of free information and sharing: "It's not thieving if you're copping a copy of a copy," and admits to a past growing up “recording the sounds of ourselves, then traded each other inside cassettes decorated with highlighter, glitter, Sharpie, petrochemical wonder.” In this world Pirate is both critical and complicit, “a necessary evil in the gift economy” who is “just trying to work here.”
Generation Web 2.0 is user-generated, hypertextual, and backboned by social networking. Pirate advises to “Google yourself to make sure you’re good / both in quotes & without quotes.” Even though death lies ahead of Pirate, he knows his profile and homepage and avatar will wander forever. A book this concerned with new media is sure to have an online presence. You can become MySpace friends with the Grope Group or visit their website (www.gropegroup.com) for internal memorandums and job opportunities.
In conversation with his friend Jim, Pirate comments “Ridiculous.” Jim asks, “What part?” That seems like an appropriate question. It is all nonsensical, ludicrous, and silly, but we wouldn’t have it any other way." - Gina Myers