Dorothea Lasky - Be scared of yourself, The real self Is very scary

Dorothea Lasky, Black Life (Wave Books, 2010)

"You are born and it is to a black life
Full of abuse and strange things . . .
In her brazen second collection, Dorothea Lasky cries out beyond prophecy and confession, through to an even more powerful empathy. On the verge of becoming pure substance and sensation, Black Life is emotion recollected not in tranquility, but in radically affirming intensity.
I leave and I am a black life . . .
And I want to
Be what you made me to be"

"...While [Lasky] is thus endlessly confused by reviewers surprised at her "earnest sincerity" with the allegedly self-absorbed "confessional" poets of mid-century, for me Lasky has most in common with a stylistically diverse line of usually forgotten and mostly soulsick writers who've inhabited language literally, and risked using the poem as a kind of depersonalizing, radically signifying material ... I think immediately of Penny Arcade, Chris Kraus, and Eileen Myles, Catullus, John Wieners, Ariana Reines, Tao Lin, Tracy Emin..." —Robert Dewhurst

"The beautiful thing about Lasky, in all her work, but particularly here, is her ability to create that same sense of earnestness, the sense that she is telling you a secret over dinner, in something as confessional as “Mike…” or in a poem that is a little more tongue in cheek like “Have You Ever Read a Book Called ?” Every poem counts in Black Life, and that would be an achievement in itself if the poems weren’t so damn fantastic." - InDigest Magazine

Dorothea Lasky, AWE (Wave Books, 2007)

"An unforgettable debut: Lasky is a seductive prophet who delights as well as she terrifies. If the Book of Revelations had been scribbled in the diary of a precocious fourteen-year-old girl, the prophecies might look something like AWE. Lasky is a daring truth teller, naming names and boldly pushing the boundaries of confession."

"Brimming with bright-eyed assertions and candid feelings while maintaining a sense of humor, Lasky's poetry is surprisingly sincere and optimistic." —Katie Fowley

"[Lasky's] vision is not just in the pictures she shows us in her poems, but in the act of seeing them in the first place. In lines that remind me of the way William Carlos Williams insisted that only the imagination gives us access to reality, Lasky's poems evoke a practice of living, as bloody and awful and lovely as living can ever be." —Julia Bloch

"When you said I was smart,” writes Dorothea Lasky, “you probably meant I was a philosopher.” But in her new collection of poems Awe, Lasky asserts herself as a seeker more than a philosopher. “Being smart,” she continues in the poem “I Was Once Very Smart,” “means your mind has/been whipped by the large whisk of God.”
Lasky’s poems are violent and enigmatic, but also sensual and light-handed. Her often casual tone is balanced by themes of self-exploration, astonishment and confusion. Awe is a search for both God and love; God’s love, but mundane love too. Lasky is most successful at her simplest — successful and perhaps even awesome." —Sarah Egelman

"Lasky is a poet of amazing phrases and clear insights in such short, contained bursts, poking through and past what isn't important, straight into the essence of things." — Rob McLennan

"The logic in these poems is surreal yet wholly felt. Through her specific, strange, and always riveting voice, Lasky reveals truths about the self in relation to all that inspires awe, be it a sexual relationship and its unraveling or metaphysical confrontations with holiness. These poems read as prophetic and yet incredibly immediate. The poet honors her friendship with a named, real poet and God's relationship with the souls of lovers. Despite the range of the collection, the poems feel of a piece because of the brave imagistic leaps throughout the works." — American Poet

"With an odd blend of brutality and delicacy, Dorothea Lasky constructs an entire individual psychology in 70 short pages. The tone is ingenue, direct, at times percussively flat. And it is completely engaged. There is seemingly no distance between speaker and speech, writer and word. It's a complete investment that demands the same of the reader, and rewards it with vivid glimpses of the workings of a different mind, for the "I" here, quite refreshingly, makes no claim to universality. Instead, it flaunts its idiosyncrasies, and it is, after all, idiosyncrasies that are interesting... All in all, this poetry is extremely engaging--it's fast, determined, and generous; it is not emotion recollected in tranquility, but emotion still in the grip of its own feeling, and believing in itself." — Cole Swenson

"Most notable in this slim debut is Lasky's recurring and refreshingly un-ironic awe of God, the soul and the spirit. Amid Brazilian bikini waxes, cheating lovers and trips to the 7-Eleven, Lasky negotiates a young woman's world with true belief: "Save me O Lord.../ Save me from abuse and wisdom and red hot sin." Lasky deftly handles holy subjects in an unholy, and yet never disrespectful, manner. As well, she is rather adept at topics that could lend themselves to melodrama into affecting reading, as in the 10-part prose poem, "Ten Lives in Mental Illness," in which subjects such as anorexia and panic attacks are broached with a fluidity and grace. Unfortunately, uncompelling dream images and tired stream-of-consciousness musings bog down much of this work. In one poem, Lasky wonders, "Maybe I will never have a baby/ No, that can't be true, out my womb/ the tiny babies of the universe will explode." In the end it is Lasky's relationship to her God that inspires her best and makes this a surprising and worthwhile read: "To the fire in his heart and the fire in God/ That makes the whole world/ Thump in a beating music, heartbeats and mountains/ that makes the bluebird in the tree." - Publishers Weekly

"I can tell you about this book of poems, but I can't explain it. How, exactly, does Dorothea Lasky get away with the bravura naivete and sweet abandon of so many of her declarations of love, of despair, of friendship?
It's like opera: You want to believe it's possible to feel like that, in public. Lasky's poems come in shiny candy colors, like nail polish, but they are the opposite of unsophisticated. She is young, but her voice is ancient, the pure lyric yawp.
The lines are often straightforward, but when they add up, they don't quite follow, as if a person were speaking English as a second language: "Students... when you see a man six feet tall / You can call him a fathom." We wind up in dreamlike, surreal situations that suddenly, inevitably take on real-world complications.
The poems are characterized by emotional truth and hard-won wisdom, but such words to live by are not the "message" of the poems. The speaker who says "a self-ordered honesty / Was what to strive for" can just as easily say, "Whatever you paid for that sweater, it was worth it." The sincerity of the search for spiritual truth - the something between Awe and God that might be love - seems to be the point.
Fantasy characters, interlocutors, odd settings and childish thinking allow the speaker to say extraordinary things. Who wouldn't be interested in a poem (The Chinese Restaurant) which begins, "They had both gotten the same letter the other day. / One with gold writing from the 14th century." While there is generally a sort of closure by the end of a poem, one would do well to remember that "in not understanding, I catch the bird."
Walt Whitman, Kenneth Koch, Frank O'Hara, Andre Breton and fairy tales shimmer in the background while the speaker, clear-eyed, observes of a wolf we all know: "O the red room of his mouth / That I am sleeping so soundly in." Lasky beckons to us, in a voice bigger than her own, "Follow me, I know everything." - Melanie Hubbard

"Dorothea Lasky’s Awe is a beautiful work, both in presentation (I have yet to see something published by Wave that doesn’t feel and look great) and content. Still, this is a book that had to win me over: For every great poem title in here (“Whatever You Paid For That Sweater, It Was Worth It,” “The Mouth Of The Universe Is Screaming Now In Agony,” and, my personal favorite, “After The Apocalypse There Is Only The Apocalypse”) there are a number of titles that leave me feeling entirely too ambivalent (“Monsters,” “Love Poem,” “Your Heart,” “The Journey,” “The Lonely River”… I could go on). I’m a title guy, and, in terms of my expectations, a poem titled “Poem For My Best Friend” will have to work much harder than, say, “The Fire That Burns The Bird.”
And while these thoughts on titles initially read like an aside, they actually speak to a core component of Awe and what might be its greatest strength: Lasky’s book-length struggle with genuine sentiment, with quiet-but-still-startling-images, and with the calming sense of stillness she places between the two. In “Toast To My Best Friend Or Why Friendship Is The Best Kind Of Love,” Lasky opens with four plainspoken lines:
“Laura, Laura I am sad for you
But more than you I am sad for me
And when I make a toast to you
I make a toast to me, my friend”
And winds the poem through a straightforward ode… until we reach the last five lines:
“In friendship we are one together and in friendship
I am all soul. No that’s wrong, too.
What is a soul all aflame?
If it’s a bird in the snow
Then that’s what I am.”
There’s something appealing and classic and refreshingly honest in these final lines. Considering the contemporary poetic climate, Lasky’s “I am all soul” admission is a gutsy maneuver, and she shields it with an immediate rejection before twisting and building it into a rather beautiful image and a more complex realization. It’s a calculated move, but it’s also incredibly fresh in its honesty and self-awareness. Laura, the aforementioned friend, appears throughout the book (as do several other names), and, at times, Awe feels like something secret, like a text intended only for friends. Still, Lasky’s startling use of image pushes Awe past the book-of-poems-about-my-friends mold and into territory that’s as bold as it is revealing.
I should also note that Awe is a quiet book. Much like Joshua Beckman’s work, Lasky’s poems, even those driven by longer lines or those offering little in terms of visual white space, generate a specific and powerful sense of calm. “The Mouth Of The Universe Is Screaming In Agony” illustrates Lasky at her best:
“If Travis meets Monica but does not like Monica
then what’s the use? There is no use in love
without purpose. There is a bluebird in
the purple evening sky. He is not the blackbird,
bleeding jagged red and the trees are blue.”
In opening this poem she shows a strong grasp of craft: The first sentence generates a swift sense of movement, which she immediately undercuts with the short realization (and a great line-break) of “There is no use in love / without purpose.” Again, Lasky works with vague but still honest sentiments, pushing them toward imagery and resonance. She slows the poem and simultaneously pushes the general toward the specific—and the unspeakable.
Awe is a startling collection, a book willing to offer the reader a quiet intensity and a hushed honesty. Lasky, pushing aside the hip tendencies of our literary moment, writes from the place where poetry started: A genuine need to communicate emotion, to speak to our most human tendencies. And closing the book, pushing past its final page, I could only think one thing: We could use more poetry like this." - Tim Lockridge

"I read Dorothea Lasky's first full-length book, Awe, in one sitting, or actually in one lying in bed, early one morning. By the time I was walking to work, it was a hot airy blue sky morning. The sun was right overhead. My mind still smarted at the sun of a truth, and other truths in the book. I felt as if a bottle-brush had gone right through my slow unhappy thoughts. Walking up the hill and then down the hill in the burning sun to school was the perfect way to feel and consider the levitating effects of Lasky's flame intensity of the mind, her visions melded with the quotidian, and her embrace of imperfection.
The first thing I noticed about Lasky's poetry was its radiant divine quality. She's read Blake, the press release makes clear, but you'd get this without the hint. Here's someone who'd sooner strangle an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires, for sure (Blake). And that boldness of mind is meant to recognize the immortal in every person and thing. In "The Mouth of the Universe is Screaming In Agony," Lasky writes, "The green music of the / earth is the spirithead of the earth and from / the spiritmouth we spit and from our spiriteyes / we blink.". The poem accelerates from this reasoning a large, moving picture of wisdom I don't think would be possible in another art, no matter how good the CGI: "The sun is hotter in our / minds than the situation. The spiritsun / is noisy with light." I'm not sure what made me happier: to see the bold eternal in contemporary poetry, or to read in Lasky's essay on recycling that we are about to turn a corner or are turning a corner and making poetry about faith again. Even if you don't believe in God, you can feel intense, clear-eyed goodness at work here, pointedly and purposefully, as in the end of "In the T-Station": "And inside God, the world of the heart rots and blooms."
The heady, ascentionist quality of the poems, their sheer passion, don't just bounce off into a poemy haze, or create the careful discursive acts so prevalent today. There are actual visions. You know, visions: overpowering, otherwordly warnings full of blood stains and blessings and blinding light. But the impatience within them comes through as solid and recognizable through what Lasky attributes to O'Hara, the habit of specific naming. The speaker addresses the particular friend, as in the start of "Toast to My Friend or Why Friendship is the Best Kind of Love":
Laura, Laura I am sad for you
But more than you I am sad for me
And when I make a toast to you
I make a toast to me, my friend.
In that poem and others dedicated to named friends, the specific address allows Lasky to, as Joshua Beckman notes, handle the large and the essential—without, I would argue, flying off into anchorless fancy. Sometimes the specific address is on, say, "Boobs are real," or John Albertson in "John Albertson in the summer sun." But where O'Hara named his day and those in it to manifest an urbane, specific personality, Lasky seems to name in order to insist on a love of the real:
Be scared of yourself
The real self
Is very scary.
It is a man
But more importantly
The man is tall. ("Whatever You Paid for That Sweater It was Worth It")
Finally, Lasky's poems pay keen tributes to what I will call imperfection, both technically and through her subjects. The Greeks built the Parthenon with those giant columns and knew not to space them the same distance apart, but instead, made those spaces a little uneven. They knew that nothing draws the human eye and engagement like a little controlled irregularity. Lasky too gives her poems, through lineation, a syncopated discursion:
The Red Rose Girls told the day anything
For there is nothing the day
Can't handle, its bright smart being
The way hell out of war and marriage… ("The Red Rose Girls")
This leads on to grace and so also creates an effortless quality (sprezzatura), or the feeling of something being created in a thoughtful fashion, like—as Brenda Euland would say—a kid stringing beads onto a wire, totally absorbed. This embrace of the incomplete often in Lasky beams to the reader a childlike wonder, and the awe that vibrates and trembles throughout the book. Even lines that, from other poets, might seem like empty surrealism—for the sake of "juggling monkeys"—show us the struggle of articulating awe, the pressure of awe and of being, as in the beautiful definitions of "Ten Lives in Mental Illness":
ANOREXIA
A bird is flying above a forest. I could say he was a Blackhawk but what's the difference? There is nothing living in the forest. Except the trees are there and the mudwort, but nothing is living like the bird
. . . .
MANIA
I am in a blue sea and I am wearing a red nightie. The nightie has been ripped in places most of all by the nighttime. This sea is made of girdle-doves and thing-a-ma-bobs. O yes and Bob too.
The ten brief prose poems define illness as misperceptions and, simultaneously, visions. These skip in logic, looping back to pick up what was said before and alters or contradicts itself, as within an engaged mind. Coupled with the naming previously mentioned, this ability to define what is mortally limited or imperfect (Laura, Mania, love) via what is divine and free within it, however painful and beautiful, feels like liberation and compassion themselves. This large, true simplicity is tonic for more than the mind, or one's pleasure in style. I actually keep this book with me because its complications make me feel clear-headed and happy, not as if I'm wading through someone's ironic, clever obfuscations, intentionally punny or not. It reminds me of the essential, its bursting power to awe us into seeing. Discussing moments of never having been "so in love," the speaker points to that power, and then sweetly, to those who haven't yet known it, at the end of "Never so in Love":
God too
Has never been son in love with the sun
As in this moment
He let go the sun
For us all to see.
Somewhere there are small children wading in a pool in the summer sun.
They have yet to know what love is." - Cynthia Arrieu-King

"Dorothea Lasky's debut, Awe, has the force of Journey's "Don't Stop Believing", the messiness of a battlefield amputation, the candor of a child who asks, “Were you born like that?”, and the craving of a customer who orders a banquet spread containing only marzipan and raw heart.
Inside my heart, there is a rat who
Eats soap and feeds her babies cakes of soap. . .
And the world from above is blue and brown and slightly sweet smelling.
And inside God, the world of the heart rots and blooms. -from "In the T-Station"
And my heart is the warm tap water encased in a block of ice.
And my runny warm heart runs all over him
Who is lying there and my spirit seeps out like a lonely river. -from "The Lonely River"
My friend's heart is perfume.
I eat her heart with care. . . .
And your heart I place on platters.
(It multiplies!)
And your heart I dine on with my children.
And we laugh at you, your little scowl
Is no mark for the great urgency of this world. -from "Your Heart"
The techniques Lasky employs appropriately build toward a bloody, all-encompassing embrace. For example, the unabashed pronouncements and careening dramatic narratives are well-supported by the syntax. Lasky tends to line breaks that fall naturally on sentence clauses, and sometimes uses these breaks as punctuation. The result is voice-driven and conversational; truthful and forceful, yet kind.
There are old plans now that should be new.
There are old thoughts in your head, my reader, and let them die.
Follow me, I am the crusader of the new
My spirit is a plastic rod that channels all our births. -from "On Old Ideas"
Lasky's contradictions serve to strengthen the voice instead of weakening it, and the structure of the book – not sectioned – gives it further urgency. The “heart” excerpts above are all taken from poems near to each other; the themes of the book progress organically but also seem to gain velocity with this progression, as in the poem Philosophies: "There is shit on my hands / When I have been playing around with specifics.”
And through these polarities and strange progressions concerning love, children and birth, art, and intellectual inquiry, there is always a mocking self-referentiality. But it's no use fretting over irony or to what extent the voice is manipulating the reader. The work is simply funny and dead serious – at the same time.
I can't lie that dreams are ridiculous.
And in dreaming myself upon the moon
I have made the moon my home and no one
Can ever get to me to hit me or kiss my lips. -from "The Process of Explication"
It's precisely this voice, this unabashed larger-than-life voice, that allows Awe to give the reader a hint of what might be encompassed in the title – everything, especially the “off-colored” and the “misshapen.” As Lasky writes in "Poem for My Best Friend," “In the imperfect way that / All humans are perfect / You are perfect and guess what else is perfect? All of life.”
. . . The blackbirds are
in orbit around its yellow body
like a burned-out picturescreen and when
we love it is us who breaks free, our
blackened bodies the nightsky to the
sleeping bodies in love, twisted and warm
and orbiting themselves around a paler sun. - from "The Mouth of the Universe Is Screaming Now in Agony"
The prophets say we are not one as humans, we are beyond one.
Let me tell you, I am beyond wind.
And the sum of me is as bright as the wind in the morning. -from "The Lonely River" - Stephanie Anderson

"One of poetry's great and necessary attributes resides in the ability of language to somehow still surprise us after all these years. On the surface, most poems take words we already know and simply shuffle them into an alternate order we hadn't thought of before. And Dorothea Lasky's Awe, a debut collection, certainly showcases the quality of surprise, among other strengths. Lasky constantly balances the oft-contradicting qualities of wisdom and innocence in these pages, also sarcasm and sentimentality. In fact, these poems work hard to blur distinctions, and the result is a voice we've not quite heard before. Many of these poems seem to have been ushered from an almost inhuman, supernatural place. Or maybe not inhuman, but a place all-too-human, like the opening lines of “Diabetic Coma”: “I got a brazilian wax for my engagement / But my old man was in a diabetic coma.” It's hard to forget that one. And there's more than a temptation to label Lasky's work as surrealistic. But at their best, Lasky's poems remain narrative. And like all great narratives, it's not the story being told, but how the story's being told that's important. “Outside Chattanooga, TN,” begins easily enough:
They have peaches, plums, cherries.
Dewberries, and bananas there on the trees.
My mother used to put the fruit in jars
To last us all winter.
Nowadays the young people they buy
A can of fruit at the store
The rest of the poem tells the same story a couple more times, and each telling gets increasingly bizarre and wonderful. By the end the speaker sounds angelic, no longer annoyed or angered by the idea of change, however wistful:
In my mouth though I will hold you
Even though they all have they all have forgotten
The sweetness of peaches
Another poem, “The Chinese Restaurant,” uses the same device. Two characters are eating a quiet meal, at one point debating whether to buy a truck. Quite suddenly, the poem erupts into a ceremony that spans an entire life cycle. Here's the end, after the couple's been blessed by the kitchen staff with holy water, among other things:
And sweetly they laid down in front of everyone on a golden bed.
Kissing and caressing the bodies they once hid from themselves.
Then the thief came in and stole their bodies forever,
But of course their spirits are still there
Playing hide and seek under the tables, and that sort of thing.
All of Lasky's strengths, however, create minor weaknesses. While she fashions a sense of surprise through her unpredictable shifts, she also creates an unevenness in other places. And sometimes the bright-eyed sentimentality she tries to use to great effect falls flat. These moments allow the reader to see through the craftsmanship so prevalent in other poems. However, you get the feeling that Lasky's voice is one we're going to be hearing from for a long time, and Awe has that irreplaceable quality all good books have: Once you pick it up, it's hard to put down." - Jay Robinson

"As the French would say, Quelle une bummier. I thought my review of Dorothea Lasky’s thrilling and seductive poetry collection Awe was slated to appear somewhere, but alas, it hath been usurped by someone else’s very thoughtful and nice take on the matter. Anyway, I shall now share it here, in case anyone cares. I really enjoyed this energetic collection, and found that it did exceedingly pleasant, zinging things to my brain and spine. I’ve already read it several times, and perhaps you should too.
This makes an exceedingly long blog post. For that, and for everything else, I apologize.
It is perhaps too easy to excuse American readers for ignoring poetry, barricading ourselves behind the justification that “the strength of American poetry depends on the fact that hardly anybody notices it,” as James Longenbach wrote recently in the New York Times. But how can we look away, even for an instant, from a lively collection like Dorothea Lasky’s debut “Awe,” from these muscular poems that prove, as Lasky writes, “the alphabet is full of blood”? Lasky tackles the problem of poetry in “The Sign Element and the Ability of the Speech Animal”: “A poem is like a sparkly ring,” she writes, “It must be glittering at different points as the light hits it. / Its great vision of art is one of simultaneity” -- a sensible if ambitious definition that she eventually rejects (“So says you and you know nothing”). Still, it is helpful to think of these poems as gems of simultaneity, since their defining characteristic is one of unlikely juxtaposition.
The poems in “Awe” are mashups of the sacred and profane, transcribing a world in which angels and God locate themselves alongside forests, subway trains, and boob jobs. Lasky possesses an unsentimental attention for the spiritual, for things living in the heads and hearts (sometimes literally) of other creatures. “Awe: a Dialogue” is a raw exchange between heartbroken narrator and faceless interlocutor: “And is love art? / No, art is nothing like fire / And how do you feel? / I am burning / And what is happening? / My spirit is ascending, my soul is trapped / And what is trapping it? / God. God and awe.” The poem acknowledges that love, like God, is difficult for a person to believe in unless she feels it burning this way inside her, an understanding that allows Lasky to write about God in a way that feels intimate and refreshing. One of the poems is titled “Love is the Answer to God’s Question” – “God is love,” minus the flower power.
Because it’s not as if we are bombarded here by hippie-dippie love, peace, and togetherness. The imagery throughout the book is an intense, unfiltered, almost exhausting palette of birds, snow, ice, blood, red, the sun. There are many mouths, much rot and decay, and the most common action is one of devouring. The collection’s unique voice is characterized by a juxtaposition I kept thinking of as “the sacred and the valley girl” but which is probably more accurately an acknowledgement that a one can be a young woman living in the world and still be profound. Deep thoughts come here, as they tend to in life, bookended by the trivial: “Art cannot be without love./There are no paintings done out of hunger./That is longing you are thinking of, not hunger.…I am eating tropical jelly beans and drinking coffee./I have just gotten satsuma body wash.” Similarly, a poem that begins with the startling command, “Be scared of yourself / The real self / Is very scary,” is called “Whatever you paid for that sweater, it was worth it.” Lasky’s voice is sly, brave, winkingly funny. She knows that “The Mouth of the Universe is Screaming Now in Agony” can be a suitable title for a poem that starts with the seemingly mundane old story, “If Travis meets Monica but does not like Monica / then what’s the use?” Right – even Travis and Monica can scream in agony.
There is more to discover here, too, particularly a beguiling series of observations about the peculiar power of female friendships. Repeatedly in these poems Lasky reaches out to her friends. In “Toast to my Friend or Why Friendship is the Best Kind of Love,” she writes: “Here on the front porches of our lives, / I toast to you, with goblet raised. / And the house of our lives too, glittering / with decay.” Lasky zeros in on what it is to be in one’s twenties, at once world-weary and keenly aware that you are still on the front porch of your life, creating an identity and a world for yourself made up, in part, of friends. She writes fluently about the love between friends and the love between lovers, acknowledging the unique powers of both. On one hand, “Never So In Love” captures in a few spare lines one of the great mysteries of romance: how people become more attractive once they are unavailable. On the other hand, in “Poem for my Best Friend,” she writes, “When you are loved, life fills in you / And there is reason for us all.” The love between friends is a different thing altogether, and though it can have the heft of a love affair, friendship rarely gets such thoughtful attention as in these poems.
This study of the varied flavors of love hearkens back, in the end, to the collection’s preoccupation with the inexplicable and the spiritual. In the final dreamscape-y poem, Lasky’s narrator moves past husband and mother to a friend who is “having a baby. / And she handed me the baby and I kissed its bleeding head. / And we sang songs together and being each other / We kissed each other lovingly for the very first time. / And the world opened up and great light shown.” This intense, unnameable love – not being with each other but “being each other” -- is described with imagery both biblical and apocalyptic, calling to mind the magnetic light of near-death-experience. God is love, indeed.
But perhaps we should not be surprised to find so many ideas, observations, and revelations packed into this energetic collection. After all, towards the end of the poem “The Sign Element and the Ability of the Speech Animal,” Lasky provides what may be a far more satisfying metaphor for a poem than a “sparkly ring”: “Here we stand at the feet of the specialized elephant. / Its translucent spine echoing out all we’ve ever known of death.” Poetry may be a specialized elephant, but hey, its translucent spine echoes out all we know of death, or, that matter, of life." - moonlightambulette.blogspot

"Dorothea Lasky’s first book, Awe, is an impressive, powerful and eclectic collection of poems that, at its best, fuses a sense of religious wonder, confusion and—surprisingly enough—faith with a conversational sincerity akin to Frank O’Hara. It is, in my opinion, a very contemporary book. Its best moments occur when William Blake and O’Hara (two of the author’s stated and perhaps most apparent influences) are simultaneously present and illumined by Lasky’s often heavily enjambed stanzas that endow as much efficacy to the momentary pulse of life and the poem as they do to a larger, thematic goal.
In “The Mouth of the Universe is Screaming Now in Agony,” she begins: “If Travis meets Monica but does not like Monica/then what’s the use? There is no use in love/without purpose.” What begins as a simple and funny scenario starts to accumulate a jaded (compounded by the line break after “love”) and weary tone by the end of this passage. It’s a compelling and subtle outset, yet what makes this poem one of my favorites is where Lasky takes it from here. She has provided a strong platform to build upon; we are grounded in both an occurrence (Travis meeting Monica) and an evolution of ideas from that occurrence. I make note of this only because it is interesting when poets successfully create the space to do something wacky while maintaining a sense of order and logic. From Travis and Monica we progress quickly to this gorgeous part of the poem:
There is silence among birds and I have
need for silence. There is a noise in my heart
and I think it’s my spirit. For instance it is the
spirithead that clangs.
And later:
The green music of the
earth is the spirithead of the earth and from
the spiritmouth we spit and from our spiriteyes
we blink. The sun is hotter in our
minds than the situation. The spiritsun
is noisy with light. The blackbirds are
in orbit around its yellow body
like a burned-out picturescreen and when
we love it is us who breaks free, our
blackened bodies the nightsky to the
sleeping bodies in love, twisted and warm
and orbiting themselves around a paler sun.
There is so much happening in the bulk of this poem. It transitions from a conversational tone, one I would locate in a café somewhere or on a short bus ride, to a self-referential, self-involved, flowery, romantic and surreal account of, essentially, the feeling of love. The poem has created its own universe and, while doing so, has set the course for smaller, momentary universes toppling upon each other. Nearly each line of this poem reads evocatively and beautifully on its own. They also confer with and refer to each other so that the idea of bodies in love orbiting a paler sun (an unconventional depiction of love) is grounded in the context of the previous line “the sun is hotter in our/minds than the situation.” Love becomes an escape from the blinding, loud and raucous spiritworld of the mind into a purer reality.
I recommend this book mostly for the portion (maybe about half) that is similar to the previous poem. The rest of Awe is often forgettable and expected. One poem is about not understanding how much you love something until it’s gone, and ends “Somewhere there are small children wading in a pool in the summer sun,./They have yet to know what love is.” There is a narrative about a confused teenage girl with boy troubles and a best friend that I found mildly trite and definitely unsurprising. The sequence “Ten Lives in Mental Illness” is full of great images but fails to accrete in a more substantial way. A few of the more benign, talky, O’Hara knockoffs don’t seem to go much of anywhere.
That’s it. I really like the book as a whole, and even the poems I’ve just mentioned are pretty good.
What’s more fun to discuss is humor and Lasky’s adroit use of it. “Diabetic Coma” is a perfect example of her sense of dark comedy. We are introduced to a speaker whose fiancée is in a diabetic coma. Friends, family and the speaker discuss his situation protractedly, and the poem’s tone is light and funny. “We pricked him and he whimpered a little,/But really nothing.” It continues this way for a few more lines and then reaches conclusion:
I got my back-up dancers and we tempted
Him with the sin of women,
But his sugar level was so rich he couldn’t see.
So we slipped him under the ground
And let the bugs eat him
Since that’s what he really wanted anyway.
The last line appears to me the only serious one in the poem; and so full of anger and loss. It has the structure of a perfect joke, the punch line imbued with an emotional and sarcastic gravity that seems to have no place beforehand.
Awe is a wonderfully puzzling, often fearless and hilarious book. Read it. I can’t wait for a second from Lasky, which I hope will further explore the paths she has begun in her first." - Jess Grover

"So, just when I fear that Wave Books’ style and tone (a smidgeon on the homogenous side, I don’t think they’d mind admitting) is starting to feel oppressive, I read a new one of theirs that changes my mind a bit. Dorothea Lasky is a little more earnest than the rest of them, a little more Midwestern-feeling, a little less slick. Her new (and, proudly) first book is Awe. It is kind of like (for girls of the prairies, born in the late '70s) getting chapped lips at a slumber party, after an intense round of Cyndi Lauper lip-synching/dance performance moves, in the fifth grade or so. Or, maybe, it is also like chewing off the edge of your hangnail in the wintertime, and then walking home from a bar in your static-inducing hat, and then getting in the soft and dirty sheets of your bed to warm up. The poems feel just like someone you know -- glamorous only by virtue of illustrating the spiritual struggle that exists within the quotidian. And, actually, that is rather glamorous. The poems (and, really, the persona that emerges) appeal to some sort of silly, old-fashioned notion of “the heart.” Lasky says in an interview at Kickingwind.com, “I think that poetry, when coming from an authentic place, has the ability to transmit the necessary human information of the spirit -- something that is often unsaid.”
There is a sort of nodding here to the Confessional poets. Certainly, Lasky wants to make of her own existence a record; and that record presents itself as poetry. There is also a heavy sadness to most of the work, which comes off as lyric intensity.
Students, I can’t lie, I’d rather be doing something else, I guess
Like making love or writing a poem
Or drinking wine on a tropical island
With a handsome boy who wants to hold me all night.
I can’t lie that dreams are ridiculous.
And in dreaming myself upon the moon
I have made the moon my home and no one
Can ever get to me to hit me or kiss my lips.
And as my bridegroom comes and takes me away from you
You all ask me what is wrong and I say it is
That I will never win.
Lasky goes on to write poems about a one-night stand with a nameless bank teller, a painful and despairing search for the presence of “god” somewhere, the choice to be a poet despite the practical evidence against such an endeavor, low morale (in general), sadness, friendship, definitions of love, imaginary and real conceptions of mental illness. Beautiful weirdnesses like this pop up: “In your rib, a bird looks out.” The things that fuel it all are: modern (self-styled, maybe?) feminism, artistic philosophy, and straight up belief. This woman really holds on to some of her notions. Even the wavering, the examination of identity, proclaims itself as a kind of belief-system.
Friend, we are entering an apocalypse. That apocalypse is called Lack of Divine Image. This apocalypse has crushed our very general heart and is in danger of crushing our very specific one.
Later on: “Inside my heart, there is a rat who/ Eats soap and feeds her babies cakes of soap... And inside God, the world of the heart rots and blooms.” This sweet-ish nastiness of Lasky’s is, for me, a real charm. “I got a brazilian wax for my engagement/ But my old man was in a diabetic coma... his sugar level was so rich he couldn’t see./ So we slipped him under the ground/ And let the bugs eat him...” (and here’s the outrageous punch line): “Since that’s what he really wanted anyway.” Early on in the book, Lasky is gentler, and it comes off as naïveté. But I still like it. “Upon a mountain/ The angels smile sleepily as they stretch/ Their very long legs, thinking of us./ And wise they might seem, us and the angels,/ But really it is only God who is wise.”
The book’s collection of titles alone warrants a look-see: “Whatever you paid for that sweater, it was worth it,” “The mouth of the universe is screaming now in agony,” “The Lonely River,” “I will explain my scheme,” “You ain’t gonna get glory if that’s what you came here for.” She’s got a tone, down pat, that’s so free of the veil -- no secrets at all, no mystery other than the ones we share. It is, I think, a rather unexpected voice right now." - Olivia Cronk

You wrote on your blog that “the best contemporary poetry today is the kind that gets its formal structure from hip hop. That is what I try to emulate, at least.” What specifically do you try to emulate? How does this take form in your poetry? If it doesn’t, how would you like this to take form in your poetry?
- I think that I try to emulate hip hop in maybe two ways. I’m most interested in emulating it in terms of its form—its syntax. But I think that there is another way. I deeply respect hip hop in the ways in which it deals with pain and life and that it’s able to sum those up in a way that’s entertaining and for lack of a better word, danceable. In terms of form, I think I’m most interested in hip hop because it plays with the power dynamics between speaker and listener. I’ve always been interested in how you can put power into the form of a poem. Sylvia Plath is one of my favorite poets, and what interests me most about her poems is how she owns a poem and how she is able to take that power over the reader and contain it in her syntax. There are various ways that hip hop can gesture towards that. Either by saying “I’m The Best” in every way possible, but also being able to do something that the listener cannot by creating syntactical structures that are danceable or get stuck in the listener’s head. I think that the means by which hip hop achieves its power is something I’d like to emulate, and certainly think that the poems that I like, that are being written today, might emulate this power play whether they intend to or not. It’s a kind of music that is in the consciousness of people today—a consciousness of vast power differences, pain, aggression, and beauty that deals intimately with language.
On The Poetry Society of America’s website, I read your list of Desert Island Discs. You said that if you were stuck on a desert island, you would want to have Notorious BIG’s Ready to Die. You said something about how you would want to write a book comparing him to Catullus.
- I majored in Latin in college, and Roman poets are a really big influence on me for a very similar reason as hip hop. Roman literature and poetry is also very interested in power almost in a militaristic way, completely owning the reader and making the reader know that the writer is the boss. I think that there are various ways in which Catullus deals with pain and power that would be really wonderful to connect to Notorious BIG, who I think is one of the best rappers that has ever lived.
You mentioned Sylvia Plath. How do you think your experience as a woman in today’s society makes your poetry differ from Sylvia Plath’s?
- It’s funny because I came to loving her strictly in terms of her poems. It was a long time before I completely understood her biography. I didn’t always pay attention in the ways that I should have in terms of her relationship to the 1950’s, and being an American woman and the pressures that she felt, that she ultimately succumbed to in terms of her role with her household and what she was able to feel like she could do.
Despite her large influence on my poems, later female poets have given me license to be more expressive than she has. An example is Bernadette Mayer. Someone like Mayer has given me the kind of freedom that I don’t think Sylvia Plath had—even if she had, maybe she didn’t feel like she had. I don’t know, It’s hard to say when you read her poems that the kind of turmoil she felt as a woman in society is totally important. I always want to think of people like that as not always being tied to their gender and time, which is impossible obviously. I don’t know if that place in society is in just the poem itself. As a reader and writer of poetry, I always want a blankness of time and place applied to a poet’s work that seems silly to a poetry scholarship that depends on the importance of such factors upon the poem. Still, I don’t want Plath’s poems to be read as just about being an American woman in the 1950’s. It seems incredibly boring to read her that way. It seems actually pretty sexist, too.
What’s been a sad thing for the way we read Sylvia Plath’s poetry is that all of the biography has been flattened on top of it. If I had become a literature scholar, maybe a greater purpose of mine would have been to try to uncover her from all that biography that is sitting on top of her, just push it aside. If we did, we’d really be able to see her work more magnanimously than we do now. The way she gets anthologized and talked about is really unfortunate. I do think that it’s largely in part of the way her husband presented the poems that were left after she died. That “Daddy” poem always getting anthologized drives me bananas. It’s kind of her worst poem. Not even kind of actually. It’s the most tied to the biography people associate with her, but formally it’s not her best poem. I’d love if we’d start anthologizing “The Moon and The Yew Tree” instead." - Interview with Luke Degnan

Stephen Thrower - A kaleidoscopic journey through the heyday of Horror and Exploitation Cinema in America

Stephen Thrower, Nightmare USA: The Untold Story of the Exploitation Independents (FAB Press, 2008)


«Nightmare U.S.A. The Untold Story of the Exploitation Independents” is an invaluable textbook that explores Independent horror films from 1970- 1985.
Written by Stephen Thrower, this is a bible for the midnight movie lovers. Choosing several directors and films that he feels best represent the genre, Thrower’s book is a well-detailed account that not only includes his in-depth analyses of the movies, but also first-hand accounts from the people that made them. It took him several years to perform the research for this book and this is made apparent in his scholarly approach to movies that are often looked down upon.
Thrower breaks the lengthy book into three sections. The first is a detailed essay on the underground horror independents and explains some of the highlights and low points. It even examines pictures (”Forced Entry,” “Hardgore”) that pushed the genres into depraved oddities of violence and sex. Section two consists of several chapters devoted to specific movies, their history and interviews with the directors and or the producers. Section three includes brief reviews and interviews for over 100 films, from “The Alchemist” to “The Witch Who Came from the Sea.”
It is a worthwhile read that leaves no lingering questions about the making of some of these films. The directors of these pictures simply relish in recounting the tales of the production of, for most of them, their only attempt to break into Hollywood. Their tales are relatable to anyone with a dream of making a movie someday and how these hardships never kept them down. It is great that their stories are finally told.
The funny thing is that while reading these accounts, you remember that their basic dream was to make a movie about a raving lunatic in the city or the woods. Sure, first-hand accounts are great, but what about the films in the book? “Nightmare” is the good, bad and ugly account of horror films.
Even if you don’t necessarily agree with Thrower’s review, he makes a well-documented argument as to why the movie is relevant. That is made clear in the first chapter, which details “Don’t Go in the Woods… Alone” and makes it sound so much better than the actual experience of sitting through it. This is especially true when we hear first-hand from James Bryant (”The Executioner Part 2.” There was no “Executioner” part one by the way.) about what it was like to direct the production.
But don’t let that chapter turn you off. The chapters to come will teach you about many great horror films that you may never have heard of including, “The Centerfold Girls,” “Don’t Go in the House,” “Fight for Your Life,” “The Strangeness,” “The Child,” “Schoolgirls in Chains” and “Death Bed: The Bed that Eats.”
Section three even covers some great films including “Boarding House” (Featuring an interview with director John Wintergate) and “Let’s Scare Jessica to Death.” Some other movies chosen for this chapter are considered not worthwhile by Thrower, so their inclusion is puzzling.
Time and time again, studies are done on some of the great and historical films of our time, but Thrower has jumped into waters that no one else has dared to tread and creates a new perspective for movie lovers. The retail price maybe considerably high, as it runs for close to 60 dollars on Amazon.com, but for hardcore movie aficionados, it’s a purchase you won’t not be sorry that you made.» - Anthony Benedetto

«Stephen Thrower once again pulls on his galoshes and wades deep into the mire of latex and tangled videotape that is the horror cinema underground. In previous books, Thrower has focused primarily on European output; but here he begins an epic assault on the American exploitation scene from 1970 to 1985.
For Thrower, these are halcyon days, when nothing got in the way of a fast buck and localised home-grown output could respond to current events and the national mood far faster, and often more effectively, than their bloated major studio counterparts. By the mid 1970s, however, the studios had caught on and began churning out schlock of their own, much of it lacking the hungry zeal, spontaneous panache or plain loopiness that makes the good stuff so appealing. Following this, the independents toned down their own material to better emulate the majors and the cycle began again – America eats its young and the great Ouroboros of culture is sated once more.
Thrower brings a finely-honed analytical eye to the material, one that few of the films’ creators can ever have expected to receive, but his writing is never dry. In fact, his enthusiasm can be downright alarming at times. Following a lengthy, heartfelt paean to the starkly choreographed thrills of the slasher genre, even the author feels it necessary to note “perhaps I’m getting a little peculiar in my old age”.
The bulk of the book combines detailed reviews with biographical interviews and reminiscences from many of the filmmakers, and it’s here that we sense the passion and dedication – even heroism – involved in getting these films onto the screen, as well as the labyrinthine career paths taken by some of their creators. Who would have believed that the writer/director of monster mashup The Deadly Spawn taught High School English to David Copperfield, that Sopranos maestro David Chase cut his teeth on Grave of the Vampire, or that the director of Devil Wolf of Shadow Mountain would end up making a new-age docudrama starring mystic astronaut Edgar Mitchell?
Cultural archæology of this kind is increasingly important in our throwaway world, particularly for those of us trying to gain a better understanding of the fringes inhabited by fortean phenomena. The drive-ins, grindhouses and VCRs that beamed Godmonster of Indian Flats or Frozen Scream into the churning collective unconscious of America’s youth are the forge of future forteana, urban folklore and moral panics. These are the cinematic equivalents of Fort’s “damned data”.
A final note on the lavish production values – Nightmare USA may be pricey, but it’s all sizzle and all steak, with the text complemented by coffee-table-sized colour pages of rare photos, posters and lobby cards from the filmmakers’ own collections.» - Mark Pilkington

«Let this review serve as proof positive that my love affair with the UK's FAB Press is due to the consistently excellent nature of their books, and not simply due to the fact that publisher Harvey Fenton and company tend to send me a free review copy of damned-near every book that they publish. No, in the case of "Nightmare USA", FAB's new book by Stephen Thrower, I bought this sucker myself. I proudly (but, I will admit, with some trepidation at the almost scarily high price of this almost Macedonic book, not to mention the 20 bones it cost just to get the thing shipped to me from the UK) preordered this book many months ago...long before the oft-delayed book came out. So, suffice it to say, my relationship with FAB is one that demands commitment. So, were my fears (and dollars spent) all for naught? Or, did FAB come through yet again with another book that will be destined to become a priceless addition to my horror and cinema-related library? Read on...
Many of you are familiar with FAB Press' "standard" format... large-scale books crammed to bursting with thoughtful, witty editorials and articles, stills, candid shots, promotional materials, and in-depth reviews. It's no secret that this very website is designed to somewhat emulate FAB's "style", and for good reason. Nobody does horror/exploitation reference books better than FAB. It really is as simple as that. This is a fact of which the good folks at FAB are no doubt aware, and I hope they consistently pat themselves on their backs in richly-deserved self-congratulatory gestures. Hell, if they don't, I'll do it for them...in print. Come here, you...that's a boy...*pat pat pat*...who's a good fellow, then? OK. Now that that's out of the way, let's actually take a look at the book itself, shall we? "Nightmare USA" is structured like many of FAB's books. If you are a fan of this kind of thing (and let's face it, you probably wouldn't be reading this if you weren't), you'll find much to chew on. As with his previous cyclopean tome "Beyond Terror: The Films of Lucio Fulci", Stephen Thrower is at the top of his game in "Nightmare USA". His observations are always valid, and even if you don't always agree with his opinions, there's no getting around the fact that the guy simply knows whereof he writes. A keen familiarity with his subject matter might be enough for some publishers, perhaps, but not FAB...oh ho ho no. Instead, they demand that their stable of writers be witty and unpretentious, too. Thankfully, Thrower fits the bill nicely.
It's almost impossible to write a review about a book like "Nightmare USA", if only because the depth and breadth of the thing is so immense, while still sticking to such a particular niche that it keeps fans/readers happy and interested throughout the book. Lest this review consist solely of gushing fanboy hyperbole, I feel I must point out one or two "sections" (not so much "chapters") as particular favorites. Maybe it's a cop-out, but the "Introduction" itself (clocking in at over sixty pages!) is as good an overview of independent American horror and exploitation cinema in the 1970's and 1980's as has ever...or ever will be...put into print. It reads like a fucking doctoral thesis, for crying out loud. Yet, it's always entertaining. Again, I can't stress this enough, if you're hungry for knowledge, then this book is like a ever-lovin' Super Sized Meal 'o' Horror. Also of note (and by "of note" I of course mean "of incredibly high merit") is the chapter entitled "It Came from New Jersey!" which deals with Douglas McKeown's struggles to get his film (fan favorite The Deadly Spawn) off the ground. It's a beautifully-written and executed piece, filled with the kind of anecdotes and remembrances that pretty much guarantee that McKeown will fade into history with an almost Ed Wood-ish aura of mystery, goofiness, and love for cinema.
Probably the most interesting thing about "Nightmare USA" is how effectively and neatly puts all other stabs at this subject matter to eternal shame. I mean, let's face it...this is very likely the best book ever written about the golden era of American independent horror cinema, and it was written and published by the English. So, not only is this an important book when taken for its own merits, it totally calls out the American indie horror community to take notice of stuff that's happened on their own turf! Why the venerable Chas. Balun never wrote a book of this magnitude and/or breadth is totally beyond me. I love the guy, but I guess he was too busy (like most of the rest of us from that era) worshiping Lucio Fulci and Ruggero Deodato. I digress. The point is that "Nightmare USA" should serve, if nothing else, as a wake-up call to American fans of indie horror. It should rile a whole new generation of young filmmakers, writers, effects artists, and would-be producers to swift action. Maybe, in another twenty or thirty years, someone (Thrower himself, perhaps?) will write a book about your piece of blood-soaked Americana. It's only going to happen if we, as a community, take notice. If the Brits are taking notice, then so must we!
So, summing up, "Nightmare USA" is yet another resounding success from FAB Press. It serves as a fun read, an encyclopedic tome of arcane cinematic lore and knowledge, and it's damned attractive sitting on a coffee table. What more could you want from a horror cinema reference book? Nothing! That's right, nothing! The price tag might be steep, but trust me...this will be the best chunk of change that you've spent on a book in a dog's age. Thank you, Stephen Thrower, and thank you, FAB Press, for yet another reminder of why you folks are at the top of your game. Highest possible recommendation.» - Matthew Dean Hill

«Do you think modern audiences would enjoy the well-made “Let’s Scare Jessica to Death”, which does not deliver any chills until the last 10 minutes?
- For me it delivers chills all the way through, but they’re subtle ones and it’s mainly an exercise in mood and emotional dislocation. By the time the “zombie” locals attack, I think the film has already done much of its work. There are a few subtle ghost-themed horrors around these days, but they tend to need some kind of high concept payoff, like “The Others” or “The Sixth Sense.” It would be hard to get a film like “Jessica” released today, but audiences looking for something out of the ordinary, and who enjoy the 1970s brand of horror, should definitely seek it out.
What interviews can readers expect in volume two of “Nightmare USA?”
- Already written, I have chapters on the following: “Tourist Trap” (David Schmoeller (writer/director); “The Children of Ravensback” (Max Kalmanowicz, director); “Honeymoon Horror” (Harry Preston, co-writer/director); “The House That Cried Murder” (John Grissmer, writer); “Night of the Demon” (Jim Ball, producer); “Unhinged” (Don Gronquist, co-writer/director); “Lemora” (Richard Blackburn (writer/director). And features on the late Robert Burns (“Texas Chain Saw Massacre” designer, and director of “Mongrel”); the late Harry Kerwin (“God’s Bloody Acre”, “Getting Even”, and “Barracuda”); Simon Nuchtern (director of “Silent Madness”, co-director of “Snuff”); and Worth Keeter (Wolfman, Rottweiler). Plus, lots more as I get stuck in to new material.
“The Child” mixes several genres to become one interesting little film. Why do you think it works in that picture?
- What I love about “The Child” is that it normality gets discarded very early on and the whole movie feels like a garbled dream. It doesn’t waste time trying to be plausible: there’s dry ice wafting around the forest and tilted camera angles right from the start. The director, Robert Voskanian, made the movie without previous experience. He was an Armenian immigrant who enrolled at film school then just went out there and did things his way. He now works in the nightclub business and this was his one and only stab at filmmaking. I love that it’s so oddball and illogical. Just about the only practical model they had when they made it was “Night of the Living Dead,” but by adding the psi-power theme and the “evil child” theme, they deviated so far off that template! I love “evil child” films anyway. I always identify with the kids. “The Child” is quintessential 70s exploitation to me. When I started writing “Nightmare USA,” it was very high on my list of “must-cover” titles.
How did you become involved with re-scoring the music for the 1977 film, “Death Bed: The Bed That Eats?” What is your musical background?
- While I was corresponding with George Barry, the director of “Death Bed,” we discussed music a lot and I sent George a selection of CDs I’d produced. When I put him in touch with Cult Epics, who released the film on DVD, he asked me to provide the new title music, as the score had never been completed back in 1977. George was very keen on a track from Luminous Darkness, an album I recorded with my group, Cyclobe, so I re-recorded it with some new details to give the piece more of a psychedelic feel.
What fueled your passion for this genre?
- I’ve been drawn to horror since childhood; straight away, as soon as I could read sufficiently, I was delving into weird fiction. I read Poe and Lovecraft when I was 10; I gobbled my way through masses of short stories and “macabre tales” in my teens and as soon as I could get into cinemas showing “X” certificate films (the UK version of “R” in the 1970s), I did so. The first horror films I saw that made a real impact on me were David Cronenberg’s early films – “Shivers,” “Rabid” and “The Brood” – and Lucio Fulci’s early-1980s films such as “City of the living Dead” and “The Beyond.” Then, when video came along, I relished the opportunity to see films that I’d read about but which had not been released in UK cinemas – such as the Herschell Gordon Lewis and Andy Milligan films, or “Last House on the Left,” “Cannibal Holocaust,” “Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS,” et cetera.
Do you feel the Independent horror scene had an influence on the slasher franchise movies? “Nightmare on Elm Street,” “Friday the 13th” and “Sleepaway Camp,” to be specific.
- Oh definitely; it’s well-documented. Quite a few of the slasher franchise people had roots in the independent scene anyway – Sean Cunningham and Wes Craven being the obvious examples. What’s less commented upon is the way the “major studio slashers” had a negative influence on the exploitation independents. As long as films like “Scream Bloody Murder” or “The Ghastly Ones” were playing on 42nd Street or at the drive-ins, mainstream critics barely noticed them. But when “Halloween” and “Friday the 13th” cleaned up at the box-office, all the majors decided they wanted a bit of the action and released their own versions – “Terror Eyes (Paramount), “Happy Birthday to Me” (Columbia); “When A Stranger Calls” (Columbia); “He Knows You’re Alone” (MGM), for instance. I like those movies, but they’re far more polite and tasteful than they should be. The rawness was diluted. Even then, they attracted lots of bad press from uptight killjoys in mainstream film criticism. Their increased commercial presence, newspaper adverts and TV spots and press screenings, meant that mainstream critics – Siskel and Ebert, Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris – were going to see slasher films. And they hated them. Even the bland, comparatively bloodless ones, they hated. They took a holier-than-thou, why-must-we-tolerate-this-filth attitude; they wrote scathing, hostile, morally alarmist reviews and that embarrassed the majors, who subsequently watered down the format even more. Meanwhile, thanks to all of this studio dabbling in the slasher genre, audiences were getting used to horror films looking glossy and expensive. They began to expect production values that the true exploitation independents couldn’t afford. So the majors really screwed up the game, by getting involved in a genre that really ought to have stayed slightly underground, or at least not quite mainstream. A TV critic would never have bothered to comment on a Herschell Gordon Lewis film; but they sure as hell wanted to pontificate about “Silent Night, Deadly Night,” because they could see the poster campaign uptown on the way to work. Horror had escaped the blue-collar picture-houses and the sleazepits and that’s why the genre ended up being neutered in the mid-to-late 1980s.» - Interview with Anthony Benedetto

Piotr Szewc – Story about a day in the life of a town: it is beyond reality, both metaphysical and mystical, like a biblical canticle

Piotr Szewc, Annihilation, Trans. by Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough (Dalkey Archive Press, 1993)

"Like Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood, Annihilation is about a day in the life of a town - in this case, a Polish-Jewish town shortly before World War II. The reader participates in the life of the town instant by instant - from the moment when the local courtesan pours the contents of her chamber pot out her open window up to the moment when the city policemen return to night duty. For the narrator, every object, every person and event belongs to the world he strives to save from impending annihilation: the landscape of beer drops left on a counter, the dance of the Hasidim before the Town Hall, the taste of mint drops in an attorney's mouth. As the minutes on the Town Hall's clock measure the day's passing, and as this day's passing brings the town one day closer to its historical annihilation, a Book of the Day writes itself, preserving the town in memory against the ravages of time and history. Already a success in Poland and in translation in France, Germany, and Italy, Piotr Szewc's novel has been compared to the novels of Proust and to the paintings of Chagall."

"Though the story takes place during the 1930s, we feel the future on every page, or rather the absence of a future. If the author works assiduously and with an engaging simplicity to chronicle 12 hours, only 12 hours in the life of this small city, it is because he knows, and we know, that is has already been annihilated substantially if not totally. The parks and the buildings are perhaps still there, but not the Jews, engulfed in the shadows.
It feels like an album by Roman Vishniak: a series of photographs annotated by an author who sees clearly and knows where to look and what to keep. When he does not know, he admits it. And he proceeds to another person, another fate.
Men and women, children and adults, Jews and Christians, some dreamlike, others nightmarish: Capturing them in his 'camera,' or incorporating them into his memory, and into his reader's, the author offers to eternity what we can only hope to find in a few lucky encounters... He knows, Szewc knows, that life is made up not of years but of instants. So he collects them and welcomes them between two blinks, between two sighs, between two regrets. He knows, and so do we, that the city in his story no longer exists." -
Elie Wiesel

"Annihilation... is one of the most extraordinary, tremblingly beautiful and chilling novels I have ever read... The author has managed a miracle of enshrining not only every moment of this day, but of recreating, like jewels, each dust mote, each pop of bubble in the nearby stream, and every whir of the pigeons that fly above. Szewc's writing resembles the sharp perceptivity of Proust and the bizarre but lifelike gamboling of Chagallian scenes... Annihilation is a sob choked in the throat of all who remember." - Jewish Currents

"This homage is neither nostalgic nor anecdotal. By capturing the fugitive, it is beyond reality, both metaphysical and mystical, like a biblical canticle." - Quotidien de Paris

"[Szewc's] aim here is to make a story like a sharply etched grainy photograph of all the minor actions and events that make up ordinary life in an ordinary day. To see, he says, to remember, to record scrupulously, to follow what disappears, not to miss anything... He captures all of this, amazing to do it in a hundred pages or so. He hasn't missed a thing." - Alan Cheuse

"Nearly bereft of dialogue, this daring, beautifully understated experimental novel recreates a single day in the life of a Polish-Jewish town doomed to be destroyed in the Holocaust. On this single day in 1934 nothing much happens: children play; a lawyer visits a prostitute; cheerful Hasidim dance in the streets; merchants, policeman and citizens go about their business. Although the Nazis are nowhere in sight, the townsfolk's premonitory dreams hint of disaster to come. In meticulously re-creating an ordinary day, the omniscient voice of the narrator consecrates the everyday reality of a world he wishes to save from annihilation. Seemingly trivial events--a Gypsy reading fortunes, a rooster's crowing--take on momentous import given the horrific foreknowledge that the town will one day be obliterated. The smooth translation conveys the elegiac tone and underlying tension of Polish novelist Szewc's jolting first novel." - Publishers Weekly

"Your home town is about to be annihilated. What would you save? What epitomizes this place that will soon be no more? Szewc's answer to these questions is an elegiac meditation that reconstructs individual moments in the life of his hometown, razed by Nazis years before his birth in 1961. The tastes, smells, and mundane activities of an ordinary day in a small eastern Polish town are preserved here for posterity. A single day is minutely and lovingly resurrected, all of its lost opportunities and inconsequential details savored. All life here is cherished and suspended, innocent and ignorant of the passage of time. This first English translation of a mesmerizing first novel published in Poland in 1987 is highly recommended for all who revel in poignant imagery." - Ruth M. Ross

"Told in the second person plural, Annihilation takes us on a one day tour of a small Polish-Jewish town just before the Second World War. We can move around at will — onto rooftops, from street to street around the town, and even, following memories, into the past — but are limited to an external perspective. We watch cloth merchant Hershe Baum and his family, woman of loose virtue Kazimiera M, a pair of policemen, attorney Walenty Danilowski, tavern-owner Rosenzweig, a group of visiting Hasidim, and gypsy woman Rosa. And every so often we stop to frame photographs.
The photographs are presumably among those Szewc had before him while writing Annihilation — the town it describes is based on the town he grew up in, but he was born in 1961 and must have relied on secondhand sources. Szewc also brings to his tour a photographer's feeling for light and space and perspective. The framework might not have sustained a longer work, but Annihilation is a striking and original short novel." - Danny Yee

"Annihilation is a day in the life of a village full of people who are all about to die. They don't know it, but of course we do, because the village is in Poland and the citizens are primarily Jewish. Piotr Szewc's novella captures the essence of place, time and memory; he avoids action completely and dialogue mostly, instead focusing on those meaningless moments of time that, when added up, constitute a life that was always assumed would be lived another way. Life tends to happen to us whether we will it or not, and Szewc understands this, devoting time to people getting ready in the morning, or idling by a puddle made from yesterday's rain, or sharing a quiet beer with a colleague at the end of a work shift.
The tone of Szewc's novella is set from the start, and holds up well over the course of the day. The narrator is a firm character, and while he does not possess any traits or qualities as such, he is very much in control of the text and where our “camera” will roam while observing the village. The narrator talks to us, asks us questions, and ponders mysteries. Szewc notes early on that “Data, documents, and credible explanations are unavailable.” He is referring to Persian butterflies, but the quote easily applies to the text as a whole – it is no accident this line comes halfway into the first paragraph of the novella. Because we cannot refer to data and documentation, then, we must instead rely on Szewc's languid roam from one area of the village to another. He wanders inside a house, out along on the street, up above the houses on to the rooftops, and a little ways outside the village where there are branching trees and cool streams.
The word camera above is apt, because Szewc often refers to the photographs he is 'taking' as the novella progresses. A particularly vivid scene will inspire the narrator to commit it to film, which usually then leads to a description of even greater detail:
We are at the edge of the market square, where Lwowska begins. One of us takes a picture. The photographer can shoot at will. Only the width of the lens curbs his freedom. The world is frozen for a fraction of a second. What do we see after the film is developed? Unnatural, somewhat grotesque figures of passersby and of a bicyclist. Two policemen are entering the tavern. The swinging door hasn't quite closed. Through the crack we see a raised hand holding a beer stein.
From here, the narrator examines each discrete portion of the photograph, exploring the history of the policemen and their beliefs about duty, wondering who is the owner of the raised hand, and so forth. Again and again the narrator will capture a scene as a photograph, and sometimes he will even consider photographing before, ultimately, discarding. There are hints (often quite explicit) that the narrator is in fact leafing through a photo album many years in the future, long after the annihilation of the title will occur.
But what is this annihilation? It is never stated outright, but of course the reader coming into the story knows what surely must happen. Szewc refers only rarely to the doom we both know will eventually occur, and this obliqueness adds to the poignancy of the images collected by the narrator. Early in the piece, the narrator comments that:
Those few minor events most likely will not influence future events universally considered most significant. The minor events will vanish in the turmoil surrounding more important events and will not be salvaged by memory or photographs. They belong to the past that isn't studied – they are question marks left by each successive generation. Like burned paper, they, together with similar facts and circumstances, will turn to dust scattered in time.
Szewc's primary characters throughout the novella are the town itself and the narrator. That said, there are touchstones characters and places we return to again and again. One such location is Rosenzweig's tavern, and it wouldn't be far off to say that all the characters essentially revolve around it, coming and going throughout the day. The Attorney Danilowski is another touchstone, and it is with him we spend a good chunk of the first half as he goes about his day. Another character we return to often is Kazimiera M, a sensual, lazy woman who enjoys admiring her body in mirrors, and who perhaps relies too heavily upon the favours of wealthy men about town.
I wrote, “as he goes about his day” above, when referring to Danilowski and what happens to him. It's true that that isn't much of an explanation, but that is really how Szewc's novella flows. The characters never do much, not really – or they do as much as you or I would do during an ordinary day from our lives. Which is to say, to summarise would be boring, to expand upon would create Annihilation, or something similar. Time, memory and place are very strong for each of the characters, but they are times, memories and places of their own, things that are important to them. Szewc shows us them, but he does not embellish or enhance. Each character's day is described with honesty, but the day itself is not special.
But a day that is not special can certainly be beautiful. Szewc writes well of ordinary moments, both those that deal with person to person interaction, and those that require simply that we possess five senses and are receptive to our surroundings. A good example of this is the following quote:
Blended with the hot steam, the smell of lavender wafts in the bathroom. In June, likewise, hot steam, blended with the smell of simultaneously blooming herbs and grasses, wafts through the meadow air. Because June comes only once a year, the warmed-up meadow vegetates recklessly, impetuously, with every leaf counting the pieces of sun that keep falling from the sky. The attorney likes the atmosphere in the bathroom, the sweat flowering in large drops on his skin. A tiny window at the level of his head is closed. Steam covers the windowpane.
Perhaps the best way to describe Annihilation is to consider the following: If you have ever watched a person – or even an animal die – then you will understand the intensity of Szewc's prose. There is a time, when a living being is dying, where they breathe out, slowly, very slowly, and it seems, for an extended moment that stretches and stretches, that they will never inhale. While you wait for what you so desperately want to see (the jagged sounds of ailed inhalation, the lungs expanding, the continuance, however brief, of life), the world loses its focus and becomes blurred, and all that matters is the breath inward. Szewc's prose is this moment, expanded out to one hundred pages. We all know that the waited-for inhalation never actually occurs – the Jews die – but we don't know which breath, exactly, or when. Szewc's scenes are maddening in their ordinariness, their smallness, as we wait for the axe to fall – but it never does.
Annihilation is that rare gem, a work of literature which takes a well-worn subject and finds a new way to approach it. Its menace lies in what is not said, and that which is not done within the confines of the pages. Everything that is really important – and again, it is critical that these people, and the village itself, remain unaware of their future – is off in the distance. But it is there. It is no accident that Szewc refers to a train heard from a distance in the last few pages of the novel. This image, brief amongst the rest, reinforces the dread of what will be. Szewc laments that, no matter how will a time and place is captured, there is always something missing, and that something is everything. All that can be done is one's best, and the implication at the end of the novel is that this is Szewc's best effort at capturing the truth of his small town before he was born, before the Holocaust." - Damian Kelleher

"In the second half of the twentieth century, the literature of the Holocaust developed a tradition of indirection, wherein attention shifted from the reality of the Holocaust to the reality of our cultural memory of it. Taking for granted the horrific factness of the event, novelists turned to something more immediate—the ways the Holocaust has shaped our sense of self, or the strategies by which humans continue to make sense of both the event and its repercussions. The great novels of this tradition of indirection, by authors such as W. G. Sebald, Thomas Bernhard, Georges Perec, and David Grossman, approach the past with particular attention to the mechanisms by which history comes to us—the changing structures of both official and personal memory—so as to bare history’s narrative devices, to expose its received ideas, and ultimately to understand the Holocaust as an irreconcilable presence rather than as mythic, unchanging, and remote.
Polish writer Piotr Szewc’s 1987 novel Annihilation is a small masterpiece of this tradition, not only for how indirect it is (it is set prior to World War II and does not mention the Holocaust by name at all), but also because the fictional world Szewc creates—a world of details, of small observations and whimsical asides—involves the reader in a different (non-narrative) type of historical accounting. In this way, the novel offers an alternative to the official narrative of events and causes by which the past most often comes to us. History, in the context of Annihilation, is revealed to be a story that is badly told, one that creates its own hierarchy of events and consequences then pretends that this hierarchy is not invented at all, but is, instead, reality. But reality—Annihilation seems to tell us—is everything that we experience. Sometimes beautiful, sometimes horrible, reality is always, if nothing else, utterly mundane. And it is in recognizing the particularity of this mundane experience that we do honor to it.
To all appearances, Annihilation is a very simple book, quiet and charming. Its most immediately remarkable aspect—the thing the reader notices right away—is that it is composed almost entirely of details. Set in 1934, it recreates, from morning to night, a single July day in a town modeled on the eastern Polish city of Zamosc, which prior to World War II was a center of Jewish culture. In 1942, Zamosc was declared the “First Resettlement Area” by the Germans, after which “ethnic cleansing” began and tens of thousands of the city’s inhabitants were either killed or shipped to extermination camps. What is surprising about Annihilation is that, with the exception of the title and some indirect foreshadowing, none of this destruction is found in its pages. The text itself, its surface, maintains a tone of tenderness and unhurried observation, concerned not with the future but only with its present ambition to “chronicle the events in the Book of the Day,” of which everyone and everything in the town is a part. Thus the novel’s ambition is not to create a narrative of events and causes (i.e., a history) but rather to perform a massive act of attention, to force the reader, through unabashed insistence on detail, to inhabit a present that is otherwise irretrievably past.
We might ask how a novel composed entirely of details, a novel with almost no plot, nonetheless maintains momentum, creates literary tension, and manages not only to avoid being boring, but to carry considerable emotional weight. In the case of Annihilation, the answer is not by being aggressively subversive: the fictional world Szewc offers is, on the surface at least, familiar and inviting, and more importantly, its readerly satisfactions are immediately available in a way usually associated with realist narrative. Szewc manages to provide this satisfaction by replacing standard devices of narrative (for example, plot) with what we might call devices of attention, which create and satisfy expectations of attention just as narrative works create and satisfy expectations of action. Acts of perception replace narrative action; details, in a sense, stand in for verbs.
This process starts from the first word of the book, which is an unusual use of the pronoun “we”:
We are on Listopadowa, the second street crossing Lwowska. In one of the tiny backyards close to the intersection, Mr. Hershe Baum is standing near the house and feeding pigeons perched on his arm. Here they are called Persian butterflies. Isn’t it a beautiful name? In all likelihood they were brought from Persia. But is that certain? We won’t be able to verify it. Data, documents, and credible explanations are unavailable.
This “we” proves extraordinarily slippery, involving the reader right away in a high level of intimacy—“we” share a single perspective throughout the book—but existing separately as well, a kind of tour guide of the imagination. The narrator occasionally makes reference to the future, to how “we” will look back upon this day, this town, but even these gestures are speculative, looking forward from the particular space and occasion of this past in which “we” exist as a surrogate character, a physical-yet-invisible presence, knowledgeable about the town’s inhabitants but unable to affect daily events. “We” can see into characters’ thoughts but cannot verify most factual information, and are vaguely aware of the future but not explicitly concerned with it. A typical line in Annihilation —“As our eyes follow the cart, the sun, reflected off a window that someone is opening, blinds us” —reinforces the reader’s position inside this shared perspective, which, though physically impossible, is nonetheless extraordinarily intimate, two consciousnesses sharing a single pair of eyes.
The intimacy of “we,” its conflation of the roles of reader, narrator, and character, allows it not only to provide the reader with details of the day—what any narrator could do—but also to ground the reader in the physicality of this town on this day by insisting on specific acts of attention, acts that “we” perform and are repeatedly made aware of as acts. The difference between the sentences “The sky is blue” and “Let us stop and look at the sky, which is blue,” for example, is the difference between an observation and an experience, between information and participation.
Moreover, when the narrator says, “Let us stop and look at the sky,” he also insists on the need for this action, that “we must not miss anything, even the clouds.” Nearly all the functional action in Annihilation is of this sort: explicit acts of attention, of framing perception, that belong to the reader/narrator, i.e., to “us.” There are also characters in the book, they walk places and do things, but in general the events of their lives are given no more importance than any other details of the day (the light reflected by a mirror, a child spitting out a piece of maggoty apple, pigeons landing on the brewery roof). Instead there is a flattening of experience: every aspect of life in the town is treated equally as a detail, and every detail, in turn, carries the immediacy of an action—an act of attention that implicates the reader and that carries “us” along.
In addition to creating a world that calls our attention to the beauty of particulars, Szewc continually reframes the reader’s experience of this world. “Our” role is always shifting: while in one sentence we are noticing the flight patterns of birds above the town, in the next we are analyzing the slipperiness of human perception—and then we are watching birds again. Szewc regularly digresses this way into psychological and philosophical, narrative and non-narrative spaces, including the characters’ pasts; the narrator’s reflections and speculations on memory, history, and time; and an ongoing series of mental “photographs” that imply a future perspective (“we” will look back upon the events of this day) that is nonetheless nowhere made palpable within the book. In such digressive moments, Annihilation performs a kind of juggling act with perspective, moving the reader subtly into and out of the book’s imaginative present without ever ostensibly “leaving” it. This accumulation of perspectives allows Szewc to create meaning on many levels at once, and to maintain a sense that what is happening inside the book is both apart from and connected to the world outside—the world of history but also the world of experience, the reader’s present.
The ongoing movement between the imaginative universe of the book and the world outside prepares the reader for Annihilation's central act of literary subterfuge, which is to evoke loss in and around a text that is itself concerned almost exclusively with the immediacy and presence of the world it has created. This is how Annihilation—this book-length act of attention—finally turns into a story of sorts, an elegy created by the juxtaposition of the vibrant world of the book and the horrific fact of the Holocaust. Although the town’s impending destruction is never named, there are images of doom woven throughout, unsettling the overall calm. The only direct reference to the town’s specific fate occurs on the final page, after the sun has gone down and the “Book of the Day” is ending:
The boxcars carry huge logs hewn in the forests of Zwierzyniec—a priority shipment to Lvov. The sparks flying over the cars vanish, die down, leaving not even a faint trace.
That trail of sparks, irretrievably vanishing in our eyes, will shoot up again many more times, though at another place, at another hour, over another train.
At this moment, it is as if a vacuum has been created by the book’s lack of plot, and history is pulled in to fill it, the Holocaust serving as the unwritten end of the book’s present. The imaginative world that we have come to care about suddenly becomes a thing of the past, of historical narrative, and we experience the weight of its loss, an actual displacement (when the reading stops) more immediate than any past-tense recounting of a historical event. The effect is devastating. The trick—for it is a kind of brilliant trick—is that we have not been reading about loss at all, but its opposite. We have not been focused on destruction but have been intimately involved in the creation of something beautiful and particular. Then the reading stops, and history rushes in." - Martin Riker

"If there was ever a story that could outshine a photograph, Annihilation is it. A whole series of photographs would tell fewer words, as the author, Piotr Szewc, shows us in his short but poignant first novel that illustrates one day in the life of a town, documenting life before its destruction. The town is modeled after his own hometown, Zamosc, an eastern Polish town, and is set shortly before the Holocaust, when both towns, real and imagined, faced annihilation. With this fact in mind, Szewc's tale is especially heart-rending, but it is his style and compassion that makes it so worth reading.
He uses several elements of what we might call "real life," such as the details and intricacies of nature; the sun as a universal measure of time; and an inexpressible metaphor of dream, art and imagination as metaphor for life. We discover that the statement that "nothing is happening" is easily disproved when one looks at, for example, one's footprints in the dewy grass and see how quickly they fade.
The novel is told as part of the Book of the Day, whose chapters attempt to chronicle every movement- every possibility, in fact- of one full day encountered by several people in the town of Zamosc. It takes the paradoxical point of view of an intimate stranger, invisible and able to change locations in the town at will, but still limited to an almost-human visual perspective, which is only widened beyond the town itself by climbing onto a rooftop.
We are also privilege to the thoughts and dreams of highlighted individuals, especially the attorney Danilowski. The author dips into the attorney's memory as a young boy frequently, and this is one of the best ways in which we see Time as a beautiful, horrific, ever-marching beast. (devil dogs, perhaps?) At each moment (note: at times it is minute by minute, others, one long extended moment in which many things happen simultaneously, and at other times several passing minutes that we cannot retrieve,) the important events that take place are documented.
To Szewc, this includes the pale ribbon of smoke rising from the Baum's chimney; the time it takes to suck one mint on the attorney's way to work, the possibilities surrounding Kazimiera M's evening activities. He tells us, "Those few minor events most likely will not influence future events universally considered significant... [They] will vanish in the turmoil... and will not be savaged by memory or photographs... we shouldn't ignore all these minor events that are occurring before our eyes."
As the reader, we act also as a photographer, taking pictures at will; these photographs omit crucial details, seemingly unimportant and soon forgotten. That is why we are here, to catch every minute of this day, to demonstrate how impenetrable Time is to our memories. They must be documented before this extraordinary (or ordinary? to whom?) town is annihilated; not only by the Nazis of course, but also by Time, which has a way of erasing such things.
Our glimpses into Danilowski's memories are a true gift then. He recalls himself as young Walek, during brutal winters in this same town, as well as tepid spring days to be explored as thoroughly as only a thirteen-year-old boy can. The surprising levels of detail in these memories contrast with the perceived dullness of his adult life (at least insofar as his career is concerned; we discover as the day ends that his amorous life is much more exciting.)
One of the most tender moments Szewc describes is Walek's curious examination of a blade of grass; "Descending to the sources, to the root (it's not a metaphor)... he can see where the life of life runs and how long it is... where the line of life will cross the line of death." (page 25). This is essential to the understanding of one's lifeline, which Walek studied so carefully, much the same way Roza, the Gypsy woman, reads the lifelines on palms of strangers for a few coins. How important these lines are! What a wonderful metaphor for natural life and its progression!
The same can be said of the meteorite that fell that night, "that trail of sparks, irretrievably vanishing in our eyes... like the sundust noticed by only one policeman, will vanish in our memory. For its own sake, our memories determine the hierarchies of what is or isn't worth remembering... Yet the pain is always the same because we have managed to save barely a fraction of events happening simultaneously."
Additionally, Szewc uses the sun to demarcate Time on this very special day. It is the overarching symbol of time in almost every culture; not just daily but regarding lifespan as well (why else would we refer to our waning lives as "the twilight years?") The first chapter of the Book of the Day mentions that the sun has been particularly bright the past few days. We follow the path of the hot July sun from east to west, and seem to hold our breath as we anticipate its peak. This sun is said to send sharp rays onto the pavement of the market square, leaving behind "sundust" (mostly) unseen to the human eye.
However, another sun rises over the town to match the other's ticking. At noon, the Town Hall dome with its clock, this second sun, shows us that the market square is the true Center, brilliantly white, just like the Center where the beginning and the end of the world take place. It seems that at any minute the second sun will burst into flames and roll down the streets into the market square, if one looks closely at the sun bouncing on the pond. In its reflection, everything seems to soar above the town, covered in fire. We wait for this by taking more photographs, recording more footsteps.
While we are taking pictures, Rosenzweig, the busy bartender exclaims, "Surely this day will never end!" We know for a fact that his is merely his perception. For Rosenzweig this day is not as pleasant as it is for our two policemen, or for the Baum's five children. It is only at sundown that he is able to rest, and ironically, that is when all pleasantries end for Officer Romanowicz and the Baum's oldest son. Clearly, events as insignificant as a goat wandering and a child being punished have a disproportionately large effect on the future of our beloved attorney and Kazimiera M.
However, it seems strange that Rosenzweig would make such a claim, considering he is privy to incredible secrets. First, he recognizes the possibilities: "from the sphere of probability, he throws in details and facts known only to him... What could have happened is as important as what did happen." (page 36). One of the secrets of this town is the presence of the Hasidim, who fade into the shadows of the Jewish Cemetery so completely that we can't be certain they were ever there at all.
"All the events we witness are certain and obvious, but the presence- and existence- of the Hasidim is and was uncertain... [like] the white steam sliding down the brewery roof." (page 74). We didn't document these things. We were not able to capture the steam or the singing of the Hasidim, and both were unknown to the tavern owner, who knew that "what we can't ascertain with our own eyes we should bring to life by the law of probability."
One last secret is contained within the painting on the wall of the tavern, apparently unnoticed by the patrons for years. The scene shows a small town that looks very similar to this one, especially because it is bathed in sunlight; in fact, the only difference seems to be the people soaring through the air. Wrapped in flames, they fly high above a fiery ball rolling down a narrow street. "The scene is like a snapshot from an improbable dream." (page 37). People who were beginning to leave the ground now soar among the others; the fiery ball crosses the market square; now it is rolling onto the floor and sending off sparks of light.
This is very important to the understanding of Time and its inevitability, as most dreams are. What does it mean for this town, which stands on the edge of annihilation? Szewc painstakingly records these details so that we might do the same in our own lives, because our lifelines may be short. We have no idea when we might encounter our own annihilation, and we all want to leave behind more than ambiguous photographs, incomplete stories of who we were; we want to smile lazily in the face of uncontrollable Time." - Stefanie Biancaniello