Sampson Starkweather, THE FIRST 4 BOOKS OF SAMPSON STARKWEATHER. Birds, LLC, 2013.
As Jared White points out in his introduction to THE FIRST 4 BOOKS OF SAMPSON STARKWEATHER, "We live in an era when a book of poems is often a 50-80 page manuscript bound with a thin mustache of a spine." THE FIRST 4 BOOKS OF SAMPSON STARKWEATHER seeks to "upend this orthodoxy."
Distinct but kindred, these books are like four ecologically diverse quadrants of one realm, in a Disneyworld of poetry's possibilities. The poems themselves are invested in the purity of experiences and the varieties of contemporary language—news reports, video games, WWF wrestling, Mike Tyson. These poems are, as White puts it, "a phantasmagoria worthy of Arthur Rimbaud but a 'Rimbaud chugging Robotussin®.'"
THE FIRST 4 BOOKS OF SAMPSON STARKWEATHER is no less than this: a book of books about the lonely yearning to be transformed by poetry, and through poetry, transform the world.
THE FIRST 4 BOOKS OF SAMPSON STARKWEATHER are King of the Forest, La La La, The Waters, and Self Help Poems.
So if a book is an afterlife, why not have four? For these are indeed four separate books with their own forms and voices and preoccupations. KING OF THE FOREST—the title cleverly unites Jack Spicer’s wounded language lion with the title of one of fugitive novelist Benno von Archimboldi’s titles in Roberto Bolaño’s 2666—works in prose with the material of dreams, fantasy geographies and the sudden appearance of magical children, ghosts of childhood. LA LA LA fractures syllogisms, turning them inside out and reworking them into bass-voiced sexy soul-singer slow jams. THE WATERS steps into the footprints of Cesar Vallejo’s Trilce, gently inviting this paradigmatic work of modernist poetry to haunt a latter-day homage that is not a translation but, Starkweather instead suggests, a ‘transcontemporation.’ Residue of Vallejo—words rummaged through and arrayed like broken bits of stone—remain like a mineral deposit swirled into these poems that record the experience of a confrontation, a dialogue between ghosts. Bringing this passionate late-into-the-night conversation fully into the present, SELF HELP POEMS transfigures email dispatches into an exploration of poem-friendship and wounded, punch-drunk Harlequin-robocop masculinity. Disparate but kindred, these books are like four ecologically distinct quadrants of one realm, attractions in a Disneyland of poetry’s possibilities. - Jared White
Sampson Starkweather started a press in 2006, and while the vagaries of the Internet don't, in this instance at least, permit efficacious research into the author's personal biography, what's clear is that he started "Birds, LLC" with a number of recent MFA graduates: Dan Boehl (Emerson), Chris Tonelli (Emerson), Matt Rasmussen (Emerson), and Justin Marks (The New School). Perhaps Starkweather also studied in such a program and is merely shrewder about disclosing it; as of press-time, this author can't know and it doesn't really matter. What matters is that even as longtime darlings of the avant-garde--we know and thus need not name them--are conjoining themselves to university presses in Alabama, California, Connecticut, and elsewhere (or, alternately, offering literary fodder to the giant "trade" mills of New York City) the gaggle of MFAed youngsters behind Birds, LLC is self-publishing their own work with a vivacity and alacrity that would put seminal avant-gardist Louis Zukofsky to shame. The product of this homespun industriousness is a series of collections that not only eschews insider status socioculturally but also leaves more than enough room for the poems themselves to receive a similar assessment.
Sampson Starkweather is announced, with the publication of The First 4 Books of Sampson Starkweather, as a pioneer of contemporary American metarealistic poetry, something which would have been evident from this first publication (or, as one likes, the poet's first four publications) even if Starkweather's next, still-forthcoming work weren't entitled The Tennis Court Oath By John Ashbery By Sampson Starkweather. What Starkweather achieves, through Art, is a warm acknowledgment that planes of reality exist on an infinite loop without clear origin or terminus; we can and do move between these diverse metaphysical, sociolinguistic landscapes all day every day, and it's these movements which (at least when we fail to call them what they are) cause us so much unnecessary alienation, disillusionment, dislocation, and ennui. That contemporary living underscores the predicament Starkweather explores in verse--that is, that Starkweather is not merely a literary theorist with access to a computer and a Norton anthology--is a testament to the poet's ability to reorganize Art according to the praxis of Life and vice versa.
Starkweather implicitly references the Jungian "collective unconscious" on the first page of the first book of The First 4 Books of Sampson Starkweather; generatively cites his first Jungian archetype (the "forest") on page two; and concludes this second page with the phrase, "The trees in the trees," thereby foregrounding the Venn diagram of dimensional interrelation that (as you like) describes Jung's trifecta of "persona," "personal unconscious," and "collective unconscious," or (alternately) the way in which we cannot approach the fifth, sixth, or seventh dimensions of space and time--or, it says here, even the elongated elegance of the second and third dimensions--without the recalibrative function of metarealism.
Metarealism, a term most often associated with the Russian postmodernist poetry of the 1980s, aims to delineate, in "realistic" and readily-identifiable fashion, the hyperphysicality of all objects in space and all events in time. More to the point, and perhaps more digestibly, metarealism employs a form of non-visual metaphor called "metabole" to juxtapose separate realities (as metaphors do) without getting locked into the descriptive function that typifies discussion of individual planes of reality (a failing of metaphors). If that's still too obtuse, we might say that metarealism is preoccupied with the "superconscious"--the ability to see how the reality we experience is just one of many possible realities, a realization normally blocked by our universe's accursed three-dimensionality--whereas much lyric-narrative verse explores the ego, and much conventional avant-garde literary production various facets of the sociolinguistic subconscious. In other words, there is no "headier" poetry than metarealism, for it maps entirely ideational spaces we can long for viscerally (as many of us do) but not in the narrow emotional terms so common to discussions of How Things Are. The relational anxiety produced by the Program Era (and discussed in several of the reviews in this essay) naturally produces an instinct toward metarealistic verse, and Starkweather is one of our best examples of the trend.
It simply won't do to attempt a summary of the many excellences in Starkweather's debut. Each page offers stunning exemplars of how the younger generation of experimental writers is challenging received literary wisdom not at the level of the transcendent or the immanent but at the level of what we may call "hypersemantics" (the idea that a written mark's "meaning" is also a function of its dimensional context rather than merely semiotics and cognition). To many, the work will not immediately present as being of an experimental bent; we've been trained, in part by years of quasi-scholarly essays written by poets in the lineage of Language poetry, to see experimentation as consequential only when it theorizes language via what scholars deem the "philosophy of language" (or, related but different, the "philosophy of mind"). Consider this, however, from Starkweather: "The shortest distance between any two points (peoples' lives) is a straight lie." The reduction of a four-dimensional construct (the human lifespan) to a one-dimensional unit (the "point") permits Starkweather not only the realization that the investigation of hyperphysicality requires collapsing traditional lyric preoccupations--such as the ego--into geometrics, but also that the attempt to use relational logic while doing so ("the shortest distance between") is necessarily self-deceitful, even paradoxical. In other words, throwing out the conventional understanding of the ego (and the human gaze) requires, for once, tossing even the baby out with the bathwater. That Starkweather makes this observation using a parodic allusion to contemporary idiomatic speech (cf. "the shortest distance between any two points is a straight line") is the poet's wink to his readers: Readers (the poet seems to say), don't worry, I know we're still living in this reality, let's just all try to forget it.
There's little use to pursuing further this particular analytical vein; the joys of The First 4 Books of Sampson Starkweather are a Christmas present every poet should get to open for themselves. "The body is an obsolete barometer," writes Starkweather, and given the relational anxiety of the times the poet's prescription for moving forward--for awakening something more than the body--is an apt one. If language is, as Starkweather writes, "the zoo we all lose our nature to," how do we recover that nature without either a) reinscription of the sort of presumptuous metaphoric pablum that's been the province of (largely if not exclusively) bad poetry for centuries, or b) reducing language to commoditized material as dead in our hands and on our tongues as decades-old rock candy? "There is/ no difference between a poem and a tree. A crooked/ tree has no responsibility," says Starkweather, and in such proclamations we see the enactment of a dimensional collapse the philosophers of the Eleatic School--Monists like Zeno, who believed that because nothing was actually moving, not just language but all matter was part of an indivisible whole--would smile at approvingly.
The First 4 Books of Sampson Starkweather is (are) rife with the sorts of gestures we haven't seen in poetry in--well, perhaps never--and for this reason we must call this text not only thrillingly accessible, not only deeply thought-provoking, but also, and without exaggeration, historically important. This staggeringly ambitious debut collection is, in sum, to quote its author, "the sound of a finger pointing to some/ unseen thing. To be reckoned with, or perhaps,/ reckoned by." While not every poem (or "book") in this collection is consumed by the same preoccupations, enough of the work is committed to doing the intellectual heavy lifting mentioned in this review that, in its totality, the work stands apart and distinct from all others of the past few years.- Seth Abramson
from KING OF THE FOREST
The boy, mostly seaweed, was born in the forest. Specifically, where the forest meets the sea—
a floor of dead things and trees that won’t budge to any music, that complain about their roots,
that don’t know if they are dead or not, that listen to the boy’s thoughts like a radio, occasionally
swaying to his anger or leaked dreams, but mostly that compose a darkness, a darkness that is
its own color, a darkness that opens up into a bright shoreless sea. The sea where everything,
eventually, ends.
Two Poems
from LA LA LA
from Self Help Poems
Nintendo always felt more real than life. Simple yet somehow beautiful worlds, constantly breaking down, designed, whether intended or not, as pixilated avatars of hope. Old school video games are perfect precisely because of how unreal they are. They don’t try to teach you anything, except if you see a hammer, you better grab it.
The binding is rendered from the excess stitches I snipped from my wrist. The cover is made of my melted G.I. Joe collection. Snake Eyes, if you’re out there, I’m sorry, if I knew how to pray, I’d say something about the classic geometry of your crotch and the screw in your shoulder I lost at the zoo. When the book opens, you can hear oars rowing, geese flying by, people pointing their fingers at the sky. The pages are made of paper, naturally, and everyone knows paper comes from trees; each tree was a persona from a Fernando Pessoa poem. The pulp of lost lives. Page 122 ripped out, rolled up in a pinch, a canoe full of burning grass…the smoke said… who falls…all of one mind…black dishwater of love…sunken spoon. Much of the ink is smeared like a slapped mosquito on the collar bone of a beautiful woman. The book is chained to a dresser in a Motel 6 in South Carolina. Its author has gone into hiding.
The Notebook by Ágota Kristóf translated by Alan Sheridan introduction by Slavoj Žižek (Grove Press, October 1988; CB Editions, March 2014)
The Illiterate by Ágota Kristóf translated by Nina Bogin introduction by Gabriel Josipovici (CB Editions, March 2014)
There is a book through which I discovered what kind of a person I really want to be: The Notebook, the first volume of Ágota Kristóf's trilogy, which was followed by The Proof and The Third Lie. When I first heard someone talk about Ágota Kristóf, I thought it was an east European mispronunciation of Agatha Christie; but I soon discovered not only that Ágota is not Agatha, but that Ágota's horror is much more terrifying than Agatha's.
The Notebook tells the story of young twins living with their grandmother in a small Hungarian town during the last years of the second world war and the early years of communism. The twins are thoroughly immoral – they lie, blackmail, kill – yet they stand for authentic ethical naivety at its purest. A couple of examples should suffice. One day they meet a starving deserter in a forest and bring him some things he asks them for. When we come back with the food and blanket, he says: 'You're very kind.' We say: 'We weren't trying to be kind. We've brought you these things because you absolutely need them. That's all.'
If there ever was a Christian ethical stance, this is it: no matter how weird their neighbour's demands, the twins naively try to meet them. One night, they find themselves sleeping in the same bed as a German officer, a tormented gay masochist. Early in the morning, they awaken and want to leave the bed, but the officer holds them back: 'Don't move. Keep sleeping.' 'We want to urinate. We have to go.' 'Don't go. Do it here.' We ask: 'Where?' He says: 'On me. Yes. Don't be afraid. Piss! On my face.' We do it, then we go out into the garden, because the bed is all wet.
A true work of love, if there ever was one! The twins' closest friend is a priest's housekeeper, a young voluptuous woman who washes them, playing erotic games with them. Then something happens when a procession of starved Jews is led through the town on their way to the camp: Right in front of us, a thin arm emerges from the crowd, a dirty hand stretches out, a voice asks: 'Bread.' The housekeeper smiles and pretends to offer the rest of her bread; she holds it close to the outstretched hand, then, with a great laugh, brings the piece of bread back to her mouth, takes a bite, and says: 'I'm hungry too.'
The boys decide to punish her: they put some ammunition into her kitchen stove so that when she lights it in the morning, it explodes and disfigures her. Along these lines, it is easy for me to imagine a situation in which I would be ready, without any moral qualms, to murder someone, even if I knew that this person did not kill anyone directly. Reading reports about torture in Latin American military regimes, I found particularly repulsive the (regular) figure of a doctor who helped the actual torturers conduct their business in the most efficient way: he examined the victim and monitored the process, letting the torturers know how much the victim will be able to endure, what kind of tortures would inflict the most unbearable pain, etc. I must admit that if I were to encounter such a person, knowing that there is little chance of bringing him to legal justice, and be given the opportunity to murder him discreetly, I would simply do it, with a minimum of remorse about taking justice in my own hands.
What is crucial in such cases is to avoid the fascination of evil that propels us to elevate torturers into demonic transgressors who have the strength to overcome our petty moral considerations and act freely. Torturers are not beyond good and evil, they are beneath it. They do not heroically transgress our shared ethical rules, they simply lack them.
The two brothers also blackmail the priest: they threaten to let everybody know how he sexually molested Harelip, a girl who needs help to survive, demanding a weekly sum of money from him. The shocked priest asks them: 'It's monstrous. Have you any idea what you're doing?' 'Yes, sir. Blackmail.' 'At your age … It's deplorable.' 'Yes, it's deplorable that we've been forced to this. But Harelip and her mother absolutely need money.'
There is nothing personal in this blackmail: later, they even become close friends with the priest. When Harelip and her mother are able to survive on their own, they refuse further cash from the priest: 'Keep it. You have given enough. We took your money when it was absolutely necessary. Now we earn enough money to give some to Harelip. We have also taught her to work.'
Their cold-serving of others extends to killing them if asked: when their grandmother asks them to put poison into her cup of milk, they say: 'Don't cry, Grandmother. We'll do it; if you really want us to, we'll do it.'
Naive as it is, such a subjective attitude in no way precludes a monstrously cold reflexive distance. One day, the twins put on torn clothes and go begging. Passing women give them apples and biscuits and one of them even strokes their hair. Another woman invites them to her home to do some work, for which she will feed them. We answer: 'We don't want to work for you, madam. We don't want to eat your soup or your bread. We are not hungry.' She asks: 'Then why are you begging?' 'To find out what effect it has and to observe people's reactions.' She walks off, shouting: 'Dirty little hooligans! And impertinent too!' On our way home, we throw the apples, the biscuits, the chocolate, and the coins in the tall grass by the roadside. It is impossible to throw away the stroking on our hair.
This is where I stand, how I would love to be: an ethical monster without empathy, doing what is to be done in a weird coincidence of blind spontaneity and reflexive distance, helping others while avoiding their disgusting proximity. With more people like this, the world would have been a pleasant place in which sentimentality would be replaced by a cold and cruel passion. - Slavoj Žižek
There are, among artists, two outstanding types: the artist whose work will last five years, and the artist whose work will last five hundred years. Metaphorically, this is to say that the present is a very uncertain barometer of art’s value, and what might be fashionable today will be easily discarded in the future. The unifying quality among artists of a high caliber, however, is a very deep understanding of the natural state of human beings and an extraordinary sense of detail when it comes to expressing that natural state.
In many ways, much art of worth (that is to say, art that will last beyond its own time) is concerned with the documentation of the inner life of emotions through the exterior form of nature. Frequently, art that stands the test of time expresses common emotion through common experience. (Perhaps this is why so many readers find The Da Vinci Code so poorly written: many of its author’s metaphors are not drawn from immediate experience, but from hypothetical or secondhand experience, giving an intensely unreal atmosphere to the book.) Thus, how simple and beautiful becomes Shakespeare’s description of a person whose character is as “constant as the northern star,” when we ourselves go outside night after night and gaze at that unmoving figure of that celestial body, the only seemingly unchangeable thing in the natural world? Shakespeare at once both expresses the depth of humankind at its best—loyal and with self-control—and the beauty and mystery of the world we find ourselves in. “Two things awe me most . . . the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me,” said Kant, and this is perhaps human experience at its greatest point of profundity and truthfulness. This understanding of both emotional and physical nature as experienced by human beings is particularly true of the work of Ágota Kristóf, whose prose concisely illustrates to the reader the very world around them in its most complete and tragic image. From this we can conclude, I believe, that Kristóf is a great artist, the briefness of her prose and the limitations of her subject matter being the only elements that keep her from the rank of the greatest artists. That Kristóf's work is becoming more widely available in English is commendable, and will hopefully bring the author the greater attention she deserves. Born in 1935 in Hungary, and forced into exile from that country as Russia invaded and strengthened its hold there in 1956—an event prompted by calls for independence that disconcertingly mirror the current invasion of Ukraine by Russia—Kristóf’s writing is marked by a sense of upheaval and sparseness that she endured for much of her life before and after exile. An emigrant to Austria and then to Switzerland, and adjusting in her new home to both the French language and a new body of literature she could now read (a canon she did not have access to during her early youth), Kristóf was an exile of both country and of language. Cementing her identity as an outsider, Kristóf would earn success in both her adopted homeland and her adopted tongue, publishing her first novel La Grand Cahier (The Notebook) in the mid-1980s with a major Paris publishing house after years of small-scale writing for the stage and for radio and factory work to support her daughter. The discipline Kristóf developed on the hard road to stability is everywhere evident both in the refinement of the author's short, elegant sentences and the caustic realism with which she describes the human condition. Her translators here expertly mirror Kristóf's precise and moving language, borne out of a discipline that is everywhere evident both in the refinement of the author’s short, elegant sentences and the caustic realism with which she describes the human condition. It seems appropriate, indeed, to call her prose as hard and precise as steel. Two works—one a short novel and one an autobiographical essay—that each frame the author’s experience in brief and quiet flashes, The Notebook and The Illiterate balance and flesh one another out wonderfully. Both books detail life in the progression and aftermath of World War II. Squalor and dejection are quite simply the building blocks of reality that characters must cope with in all parts of a harsh and merciless life. The Illiterate details Kristóf’s abandonment of Russian society as she exiles herself with her husband and young daughter to Switzerland and her eventual realization of her identity as an author, while The Notebook is a portrait of the moral desolation of Hungary just before it falls to Russia in the post-war era. Describing the lives of two young twin boys as their mother leaves them with a grandmother so that they will avoid the horrors of war, and ironically exposing them to some of its greatest horrors, The Notebook is as much about human development, and the conditions under which that development is either allowed to occur or hindered, as it is about life in wartime. The novelis dominated by profound tragedy and surgically precise language. In fact, the book’s narrator recalls that imprecise language was treated with derision when sculpting out sentences during the process of learning to write: “Words that define feelings are very vague; it is better to avoid using them and to stick to the description of objects and human beings and oneself; that is to say, to the faithful description of facts.” The Notebook’s narrator is therefore quick to disregard all-encompassing words like “love” or “kindness” in favor of what can be readily understood and subject to precise language. And yet, one realizes, what is life like without such words? Are not “love” and “kindness” the only words to live for? The novel goes on to illustrate the consequences of such a life without those words. As the twins begin their descent into the moral wasteland of war, the conceptual web of their minds begins to lose the use of empathic words like “love” or “kindness”: it is as though their use of language mirrors the decline of their mental faculties. The caveat of such emotionless writing is that all sentimentality is abandoned as untruthful and all major emotions are subject to mistrust. For children who suffer mistreatment from authority figures, this is a sensible but tragic conclusion, and one forged in a violent and pitiless society. It may be said that the twins’ use of a language lacking terms such as “love” mirrors their growth as individuals who see no use for such words. They begin to lose all sense of trust and respect for truth, just as they abandon words that would express such concepts. Left to earn their meager existence in a bleak agricultural society, the twins quickly come to understand that if they are to survive, they must teach themselves how to outsmart, outman, and outdo the people around them. Bullies, abusers, and murderers dot the landscape in which they grow up, and the twins adjust to this harsh landscape with equal harshness, teaching themselves to slaughter farm animals to overcome an aversion to killing; to steal when rations are low; to blackmail in order to survive. All this becomes cruelly useful when the twins discover that a priest has sexually abused a disadvantaged girl living near them; the book does not lack for other exercises of self-denial and moral violence. The twins' actions often have misguided but good intentions. By threatening the priest with exposure of his crimes, for example, the boys are able to extort money for food for the young girl in winter, so that she and her deaf and blind mother will not freeze or starve to death. The protagonists never abandon a sense of goodness per se, but in the end their version of goodness permits the greatest evil to occur. As they numb themselves to the pain of living, they numb themselves to deeper emotion. The twins’ behavior is borne out of a makeshift ethics related to the protection of the weak against the strong. (A foreshadowing of Stalin’s rule as Hungary falls to Russia is always dimly apparent in the background of the story. Adult characters voice their fear of their imminent disappearance and execution, for example, as the thought of Russia taking over or an alliance with Germany occurs to them, or are forced into action by a fear of such punishment.) Indeed, the twins even have an affection for their cruel grandmother, in whose risky care they are left by their mother. The twins develop a work ethic largely to care for this old woman, whose drunkenness, theft of the twins’ money and clothing, and emotional abuse often turns into self-abnegation. Having no moral spectrum with which to compare their grandmother’s behavior, except their own quickly-fading sense of right and wrong, the twins withhold judgment against their elder. Somehow, they view her with both curiosity and a distant and unqualified affection. It is only as the novel progresses that the twins’moral system begins to break down. Without the anchor of experience to guide them, the twins simply begin to take the world as it is, reacting to each new situation with brute violence or dishonesty. Hearing an army officer speak of suicide, they gladly offer to help the man by shooting him to death. To them, there is no moral difference between helping someone to accomplish their aim and the long-term effects of their decision. Such, Kristóf seems to say, are the effects of war on the psyche, and such are we responsible for when we allow war to destroy all values. Do the twins pity others? Yes, to an extent. Do they have the framework to understand this pity, and develop it into empathic reasoning? No. Pity is shown to those who are left on the outskirts of society, and anger is reserved for those who take advantage of outcasts. But there is little grasp of varying moral gradients, and when larger ethical issues arise the twins seem to become lost in a psychological maelstrom they are unprepared to deal with. Manipulated by the adults in their society, the twins simply seem not to understand their situations. Under these circumstances, the twins abandon any sense of self-pity and accept their lot with spirit and cunning, acknowledging that in order to survive they must work under brutal conditions for the most basic of their needs. Tragically, this means that they also accept the misfortunes that come to them without defense or understanding. When winter comes and starvation becomes a very real possibility, the twins jump into action to keep themselves and those around them from death, knowing no other force will prevent a terrible end. Conversely, they fall in with a group of adults who take advantage of them, not recognizing the need for their own defense. As the year progresses, and the fighting in the war intensifies, the twins lose all sense of moral equilibrium, and slowly become psychopathic in the moral vacuum of this society, as survival amid brutality slowly turns into extreme mental illness. As the consequences of these changes slowly occur, the twins undergo a truly frightening transformation. Such negative subject matter would normally bring grief to its readers, but The Notebook allows its readers to empathize with and embrace its characters. The main virtue of the novel is its willingness to explore the depths of human experience. The reader hardly notices, in fact, just how brutal the novel’s scenes can be, and how easily the twins veer from preventing disaster or rectifying injustice to causing it themselves. The novel’s recurring character of “Harelip,” for example, a sexually abused girl that the twins befriend, is the most sympathetic of the story. Amoral but caring when first introduced, an inversion of what the twins themselves will eventually become, Harelip is essentially a human being in its most natural state after withstanding societal abuse: a victim of others. The victimizers are the unnatural ones in this story, for they balance their chances of survival by enacting cruelty to gain an advantage over others. Harelip, in her mental illness, and her longing to be loved, is much more like the filmmaker Robert Bresson’s character Balthazar the donkey, Christlike in her acceptance of the world’s violence. Perhaps a better comparison is Bresson’s Mouchette, the abused girl whose life becomes a never-ending nightmare. Unlike the twins, Harelip is not cunning enough to begin to emulate her abusers to survive. In her seeking of love, hers is the most heartbreaking of the stories of The Notebook. And how precise are Kristóf’s psychological portraits! Harelip’s abuser’s guilt is revealed in his mannerisms and furtive denials, and their grandmother’s by hers: slips of the tongue, lies that insistently reveal themselves. There is a slightness to these portraits that seems to place Kristóf beneath the sphere of truly great writers (how fascinating it would be to see these characters interact with good people! The children’s mother makes a late, brief appearance, but circumstances prevent the meeting from imparting moral sense or stability), but Kristóf’s eye and her understanding of human motivation and behavior are precise. What results is a great beauty of description and a profound revelation of human nature: that if we are to judge what is good or bad in terms of action, we must first seek to understand the thought process that engendered that action. We then might do much to prevent its happening again. In a sense, the novel is not about the twins at all, but about Hungary—and in fact all countries—under the threat of war and desperation. In Kristóf’s view, it is a condition that produces monsters. How relevant, when the United States has abandoned Iraq after the 2003 invasion. How many times will the story of the twins play out in that war-torn country, with its populace undeserving of all its suffering? The Notebook is a profound book, then, but one that sits uneasily in the reader’s mind—but all the more important for having caused us to reexamine our deepest critical faculties. The Illiterate, like The Notebook, gets to the sadness at the core of human existence, but it is a much faster story, covering years of time in the space of only a few chapters and pages. A minor work compared to The Notebook, it is nonetheless a fascinating read, especially in the author’s description of postwar Hungary under Russian rule. The event of Stalin’s death is treated with irony and slyness, and the general poverty and discipline of the age is described brilliantly. The author’s education in a spartan school and the warmth of camaraderie she develops with others demonstrates Kristóf’s own warmth of character: one feels in reading her work like a confidant and friend, and is sad to lift their eyes from the page for fear of losing her steady and disciplined voice. Kristóf’s stories also feel deeply resonant with current events. Indeed, the Hungary of the 1940s and 1950s seems to share a tone with the United States of recent memory, with poverty becoming an increasingly common state and a general sense of apathy filling the moral atmosphere. When Kristóf finally abandons Hungary, with her husband and infant daughter in tow, on a frightening exodus through the forest to the Austrian border—an escape in which she risked almost certain execution—we are glad to learn that she will eventually discover her ability to place her experience into words. The world would be a poorer place without Kristóf’s examination of our time. - Jordan Anderson
Like many authors in translation, the Hungarian writer Ágota Kristóf (and no, her name isn’t an eastern European corruption of “Agatha Christie”, as Slavoj Žižek admits he initially assumed in his admiring afterword) has not become widely known in this country. Yet this is not to say her most famous novel, The Notebook, remains an obscure case of succès d’estime, celebrated only by a small circle of devotees. The book, handsomely reissued by CB Editions, has been translated into 30 languages since it was first published in France in 1986 and last year it was made into a critically acclaimed film.
Little is known about Kristóf’s life, but most of what we do know is contained in her short memoir The Illiterate, which came out in 2004 and is now available to us in this excellent translation by Nina Bogin. (Bogin informs us that later in life, despite the lack of detail in these 11 short chapters, Kristóf regretted publishing the book.) Growing up in a remote village, the precocious Kristóf, whose father was the local schoolteacher, contracted early on what she calls the “reading disease”. In 1949, when she was 14, the first major disruption to her life came when her father was imprisoned by the communist authorities (we don’t learn what for) and she was separated from her beloved brother and sent to an orphanage-like girls’ boarding school in the city. It was here that, through necessity and loneliness, she began to write and act.
Without saying goodbye to her family, the 21-year-old Kristóf escaped Hungary in the aftermath of the 1956 uprising, crossing the border by night into Austria before finding a home in Neuchâtel, Switzerland. While working in a clock factory and navigating the precarious existence of a refugee, she painstakingly began to “conquer” and then write seriously in an “enemy language . . . killing my mother tongue”. Eventually Kristóf had plays performed in French in a local bistro but her breakthrough came with the publication of The Notebook, which brought her prizes and well-merited international recognition.
The title alludes to the “Big Notebook” of secret diary entries kept by young twins during the tail end of an unnamed war in an unspecified country. Their mother evacuates them from the Big Town, which is under siege, and deposits them at their grandmother’s house on the edge of the Little Town. Grandmother, who makes it clear that she doesn’t want the boys, is a miserly old crone known as “the Witch” and is rumoured to have poisoned her husband. The twins devise toughening “exercises” to immunise themselves against the physical and verbal abuse meted out by Grandmother and strangers alike. They arm themselves with a razor and lash each other with belts, gradually learning to stop crying. They commit, with unnerving calmness, senseless acts of violence, kill animals and conduct experiments in fasting and “immobility” (lying face-down on the floor for as long as possible). Through play-acting as deaf and blind beggars, they learn to scrounge in local taverns; drilling holes in the floor of the attic, they spy on the masochistic foreign officer billeted in Grandmother’s spare room.
The boys strip corpses they find in the forest beyond the garden, full of war deserters and locals attempting to escape across the heavily guarded frontier into “the other country”. Once the occupying forces retreat, as the “New Foreigners” advance to liberate the Little Town, the twins break into what is clearly a concentration camp, heaped with charred bodies. Even without the facts later borne out in The Illiterate – reminiscences of growing up in a border town under Nazi and then Soviet occupation – such details confirm the feeling that The Notebook is a thinly veiled parable of Hungary towards the end of the Second World War.
The boys have their own set of skewed values but just when the reader believes they have displayed some sign of humanity, they jolt you with new heights of pathological cruelty. In this land devoid of moral agency, riven by nameless foreign armies, deportations, forced disappearances, air raids and “liberators”, they clinically record their exploits in the Big Notebook kept hidden in the attic. The aim of these strict “composition exercises” is to set down a record unadorned by opinion or information superfluous to a straight record of fact. It is the spare nature of the narrative that sets up The Notebook’s most grimly humorous moments and makes it such a compelling read.
Most shocking are the accounts of the twins’ hare-lipped young neighbour, who is so starved of intimacy that she indulges in bestiality, later to die “happy, fucked to death” by a gang of foreign soldiers. When the twins’ mother is killed by a shell blast, they bury her in the garden where she fell but later dig her up, polish her bones, re-articulate the skeleton with wire and hang it from a beam in the attic. The Notebook is a transfixing house of horrors. - J S Tennant
Ágota Kristóf , The Notebook, The Proof, The Third Lie: Three Novels, Trans. by Alan Sheridan, David Watson and Marc Romano. Grove Press, 1997.
These three internationally acclaimed novels have confirmed Agota Kristof's reputation as one of the most provocative exponents of new-wave European fiction. With all the stark simplicity of a fractured fairy tale, the trilogy tells the story of twin brothers, Claus and Lucas, locked in an agonizing bond that becomes a gripping allegory of the forces that have divided "brothers" in much of Europe since World War II. Kristof's postmodern saga begins with The Notebook, in which the brothers are children, lost in a country torn apart by conflict, who must learn every trick of evil and cruelty merely to survive. In The Proof, Lucas is challenging to prove his own identity and the existence of his missing brother, a defector to the "other side." The Third Lie, which closes the trilogy, is a biting parable of Eastern and Western Europe today and a deep exploration into the nature of identity, storytelling, and the truths and untruths that lie at the heart of them all. "Stark and haunting." - The San Francisco Chronicle; "A vision of considerable depth and complexity, a powerful portrait of the nobility and perversity of the human heart." - The Christian Science Monitor
There’s an old adage that says history is written by the victors. And another that says war leaves no winners. In her dark trilogy set in a world clearly modeled after post World War II Europe, Agota Kristof questions the realities of war, and puts forth that war leaves behind no truth. These three novels (about 150 pages apiece) vary in style, but build thematically on each other to build a harrowing allegory of war and humanity. The writing is excellent, and the deep emotional ties between twins Lucas and Claus that stretch yet never sever over a lifetime make for compelling narrative. This is the sort of literature that is linguistically accessible and emotionally threatening, with a rewarding end result that leaves readers affected greatly.
The first entry, The Notebook, is also the only one that breaks traditional form. It is written in short one to three page chapters and narrated by both twins in the first person plural. Abandoned to live with their cruel grandmother in a small border town, the twins become resourceful and hardened, learning to rely only upon each other to survive. The town has branded their murderous caretaker a witch, and the exile this causes is magnified by the unforgiving and violent world in which they live. It is a world where the next day is an uncertainty, and humanity wanes:
Two or three hundred of them pass by, flanked by soldiers. A few women are carrying small children on their backs, or cradled against their breasts. One of them falls; hands reach out to catch the child and the mother; they must be carried, because a soldier has already pointed his rifle at them.
No one speaks, no one cries; their eyes are fixed on the ground. The only sound is the noise of the soldiers’ hobnail boots.
The Proof follows Lucas’s life after Claus escapes across the border to the enemy’s country. His life is difficult to say the least, and the book is as cruel and grim as the first. Lucas is one of the most interesting characters I’ve read in a very long time, an outré man both compassionate and pitiless. At fifteen he takes in a woman and her incestuous crippled son, and cares for them as if they were his family. Yet Lucas’s motives are never selfless. His emotional scars show all the way to the surface, and it is hard not to become completely immersed in his eccentricity.
He takes his harmonica out of his pocket and starts to play a sad song, a song about love and separation.
Lucas fastidiously keeps a notebook (a practice he began with Claus in a search for truth amid the lies around them, and presumedly the contents of the first novel) of everything in his life, intended to keep Claus from missing a single thing upon their reunion. It also serves to establish proof of existence for both brothers, who don’t exist in government records due to their unsanctioned upbringing.
The Third Lie is downright heartrending. Much of the reality of the first entries is called into question as Lucas and Claus look to attach truth to their lives and ideas of self while longing for their impossible reunion as a single entity. Some characters and scenes from the previous entries begin to morph and meld together, and the twins’ efforts to define their lives transform a tale of war and failing humanity to something greater. Says Claus:
I answer that I try to write true stories but that at a given point the story becomes unbearable because of its very truth, and then I have to change it. I tell her that I try to tell my story but all of a sudden I can’t–I don’t have the courage, it hurts too much. And so I embellish everything and describe things not as they happened but the way I wish they had happened.
She says, “ Yes. There are lives sadder than the saddest of books.”
I say, “Yes. No book, no matter how sad, can be as sad as life.”
Kristof’s trilogy ends as it begins: truly sad and sinister. But beneath it all there is thin warmth in the assurance that the strongest bonds can never be broken, though the wounds of war are clear:
I go to bed and before falling asleep I talk to Lucas in my head the way I have for many years. What I tell him is just about what I usually do. I tell him that if he’s dead he’s lucky and I’d very much like to be in his place. I tell him that he got the better deal, that it is I who is pulling the greater weight. I tell him that life is totally useless, that it’s nonsense, an aberration, infinite suffering, the invention on a non-God whose evil surpasses understanding.
The ultimate confrontation between the brothers is hard to bear but understandably necessary. Like Lucas’s harmonica song, this trilogy is a sad story, a story about love and separation. Sometimes the saddest stories are the best though, as sadness can speak volumes. Anyone looking for a great piece of literature with complex themes and characterization and isn’t put of by a little gloom and violence and despair should definitely read it. - Sean Clark
“On balance, I would say that 70 years is sufficient. I have lived long enough.” Long enough – and this was in 2005 – to have entered into the history books of modern literature as one of the few writers capable of capturing the horrors of the times. Agota Kristof, Hungarian by birth, Swiss by adoption and French in her writings, is the author of The Key to the Lift (1999), Yesterday (2002), Revenge (2005) and Where are You, Mathias (2006) as well as numerous plays, but is perhaps most well-known for her Trilogy of the City of K. (1988-1998). Witness to the invasion of her country by Soviet troops in 1956, she fled with her husband and risked arrest as an anti-communist in Swiss Neuchatel (a city which she never left). She was forced to work in a clock-making shop and arrived late to the written word. But she arrived with all of the psychological and moral desperation of a daughter of a shocking and pitiful experience, full of the devouring nostalgia of the exile and the radical breakdown of values of a civilization devastated by war and misery. Two twins animate the trilogy (The Notebook, 1986; The Proof 1988; The Third Lie, 1991), even if they are not always together, beginning with a narrative “we” to a surviving “I” waiting to be re-joined. Two kids in a world, without place or time, crushed by a terrible and unexpected conflict (the Second World War but also the unexpected and unacceptable “red” occupation), are forced to learn how to survive before they can begin to live: to get by, to lie, to leave, to kill, to avoid order and take advantage of disorder. And eventually sow it. Kristof makes this consecutio the framework of her narrative (war equals physical but also moral annihilation). Her relentless style, which imbues her words with the violence of life, invites the reader to comprehend the failed nihilism of the times, in the conviction that there is no human thing which can act as a remedy. That phrase, “you need to know how to kill when it’s necessary,” has resonance, unfortunately, and is not easy to contradict when everything has lost meaning, when an unspeakable totalitarianism crushes affections, conscience, individual identity and community memory and imposes an intolerable present, canceling any future hope. It is no mistake that the protagonists of the Trilogy are adolescents, at least in the beginning, because that is the age when the official lie destroys the fairy tale and installs the tragedy; the brutality of the contingent substitutes the myth and an informed judgment on that which is happening is replaced by the knowledge that something impossible is happening, or rather, has happened. Denied their normal existence and violently forced to grow up too quickly in an illogical world, they are transformed into inflexible assassins, cold and implacable, but just, according to them. (A condition which brings to mind street children, child soldiers, Palestinians, Africans, “da rua,” and so on.) Agota Kristof does not speak through symbols or metaphors: their ferociously dark gestures are “assisted,” so to speak, by a crude and cold lexicon, sadly and willingly “distant” from the object narrated. Yet, every stylization is felt and suffered, tormented, penetrated and perturbed. The zero grade of writing, almost telegraphed and never narrated, which in a total absence of light demonstrates gestures and words in the voracious emptiness of a black tale, leaves the reader with the need for air and sky; more than a direct cry, an exemplary warning. - L’Osservatore Romano
16 Artists, Writers, Thinkers and 16 Personal Maps. Each one exploring the idea of what a map can be. The result is a book of maps that will leave you feeling completely lost.
“We really like the idea of starting an adventure through maps. The ability to find yourself in the unknown and discover new places – that’s what exploring is all about.” —Google Maps Team
“Where You Are is beautiful. Its contents delight the mind, its composition the senses.” —Will Gompertz
“These imaginative and irreverent personal cartographies expand the conception of a map as a flat reflection of geography and reclaim it, instead, as a living, breathing, dimensional expression of the human spirit.”—Maria Popova
Where You Are is a book of maps. And it’s also a website www.where-you-are.com.
It’s a collection of writing (non-fiction and fiction) and visuals (drawings, photographs, paintings) that explodes what a map is. A wide range of writers, thinkers, artists responded to what their map would be, bringing together human stories about modern, everyday personal lives and mapping.
Those stories range from Chloe Aridjis’ short story mapping out the daily journeys of a homeless woman in Mexico City, to John Simpson essay that looks at the perils of following GPS systems in South Africa, to James Bridle mapping the technology and looking at how GPS was developed in the first place, to Geoff Dyer mapping out his childhood in Cheltenham according to sex, death and drugs, to Leanne Shapton documenting her everyday desk objects at the end of each working day. Where You Are plants the flag at an amazing map-shifting point: from one kind of map — the geographical kind that gets you get from a to b — to another kind of map altogether — a life map that tells human stories about our everyday. Where You Are begs the question: What would your personal map be? Here is a book of maps that will leave you feeling completely lost.
Contributors
Introduced by Will Gompertz, BBC Arts Editor
Chloe Aridjis Lila Azam Zanganeh Alain de Botton James Bridle Joe Dunthorne Geoff Dyer Olafur Eliasson Sheila Heti + Ted Mineo Tao Lin Valeria Luiselli Leanne Shapton John Simpson Adam Thirlwell Peter Turchi Will Wiles Denis Wood
The last couple weeks have been fantastically Where You Are-ful. We hung out with Tao Lin and his burrowing lunar hamsters with Sheila Heti and her re-imagined every day decision maker I Ching, and Joe Dunthorne and his literary landscape map with Geoff Dyer and his Cheltenham childhood map before black screens sent Geoff into a technological ether.
Today is our official tadada day for Where You Are. We’ve talked about the maps in their treasure box, all those lovingly produced paper maps. The book in all it’s epic Chinese production is a few days away from physically landing on shelves in shops and hands at home. And there’s another epic something. Live. Today. www.where-you-are.com.
Our Where You Are live events gives you the chance to hear Geoff Dyer and Joe Dunthorne, and Sheila Heti and Tao Lin tell you all about growing up in Cheltenham, mapping literary landscapes, modernising the I Ching to help find your way when you’re lost, and mapping crazy sci-fi hamsters in 2027.
For those of you who loved our new look Tristram Shandy, our tactile experience Tree Of Codes, our delightfully disorientating Composition No. 1, our turnable Kapow!, here is a first peek inside our latest and very nearly on our shores Great Looking Story, with 16 very different maps to make sure we all get fantastically lost.
The suspense. Oh the suspense. And now, Where You Are is here. And it’s real. It’s really real.
It looks big. It feels lush. It’s full of texture: outside the box and inside, oozing with 16 different maps.
“I have good news and bad news”. We’ve been there before with Tree of Codes for different reasons. But still, when a printer says that, we’re back to balancing on the knife edge of the bloody carcass of crying and the happy summer fields of laughing hysterically.
We are so close to being ready to share more about our book of maps Where We Are.
With a Ryder dummy archive box already made and the contributions each making up their own individual maps as designed by Bibliotheque – one for each of our 16 contributors – we’re at the stage of getting the last bit of input from our amazing group of writers before the final press-green-button-to-go.
We’ve been wonderfully submerged, lost even, in the shaping of our book of maps. It’s our very first collection, with a super exciting line-up of talented contributors, and made with help from Tom Uglow at Google’s Creative Lab.
In the week where the run-up to the holiday season feels in full gear and the year end shut down is within reach, we thought it would be nice to raise our glogg filled heads and do a bit of lift-lidding on our new book in a bid to kick into fresh beginnings.
The new book is called Where We Are. It’s a book of maps. Put another way: it’s a book that celebrates getting completely lost.
Peter Turchi’s brilliant “Roads Not Taken”—one of sixteen booklets that make up Visual Editions’Where You Are (2013)—is a meditation on all the hypothetical parallel versions of Turchi’slife that never materialized. On paper the piece reads like a smart personal essay, with some funky, overwrought formatting punctuated by chromatic street sign icons. At one point Turchi writes, “Ideally, The Map of Roads Not Taken would be four-dimensional, moving through time and space, with still pictures as well as audio and videos of what have happened alongside clips of what did.”Upon reading this description I began salivating at the narrative potential of such a map, but of course the power of the image relied upon the fact that such a map could never exist.
Except that the online version of “Roads Not Taken”is a formalistic nod to the infinite allure of this impossible map. The story is laid out on a limitless, scrolling window. The semi-contrived street sign icons suddenly take on an essential role in this context, for as we begin to scroll and scroll, we also begin to search for direction. I found myself wondering: Did Turchi actually write an infinite story? I couldn’t find the seams. The form of this story so perfectly matched the content, it brought the piece to an entirely new, metaphysical level. It is perhaps the most successful moment in all of Where You Are, on screen or in print.
Indeed, what makes Where You Are so fascinating is its dual existence as a box containing sixteen physical booklets and a website, where-you-are.com, to which this content has been ported. While many print books have attempted a similar multi-platform extrapolation, Where You Are seems particularly suited for a dual paper/digital edition given some of the central themes of the project, which seeks to explore how we locate ourselves in a swiftly changing world and how these methods of location have evolved since the rich mnemonic stomping grounds of our childhood.
London-based Visual Editions—which previously brought us an intricate new edition of Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy, Gentleman as well as Tree of Codes, Jonathan Safran Foer’s palimpsestic die-cut reworking of The Street of Crocodiles—are clearly interested in exploring the boundaries of print technology, incorporating old book-making techniques with new visual aesthetics, and Where You Are’s twin existence feels a natural extension of this trajectory. The projectfeatures sixteen different writers, artists, and thinkers offering a range of interpretations on the ways in which we map our experience, both literally and metaphorically. We get contemporary art, musings about adolescent snogging spots and paper routes, diagrammatic explanations of GPS technology, cartograms of playgrounds or a homeless person’s urban trajectory, fictional maps depicting writer’s block and imagined planets. As with most collections, the work is a bit uneven—some of the pieces feel as if they were created for another purpose and then hastily retrofitted for Where You Are. Despite this, a number of the booklets—particularly those by Turchi, Geoff Dyer, and Will Wiles—feel essential as they cleverly scrutinize the borderlands of map, identity, and narrative.
But even more than the content of Where You Are, the cross-media transposition of this content seems ripe for analysis, particularly because a) this is increasingly the direction that print publishing is heading, and b) this transposition is rarely done well. - Reif Larsen
According to Frances Burney, 'Awkwardness is, perhaps, more interesting than grace.' Forfeiting the opportunity to be graceful, Grace Period: Notebooks, 1998-2007 would like to be something more interesting.
Full of curious knowledge, the book collects aphorisms, sketches, and fragments from ten years of life. Notes on various subjects, written hastily, using the first words that suggested themselves. Diagrams of relationships, denuded of situation, and infused with richness and depth of feeling and mental tentacle. Portraits of unidentified people by way of their handwriting, characteristic thought patterns, and tones of voice. Definitions of colloquial expressions, what they mean and how they are used. Detailed descriptions of people eating, with enough tea to float away on. Advice on love. Prayers, curses, dreams. Moral maxims. Occasional rhymes. - www.lettermachine.org/
The special beauty of incomplete form depends on unachieved potential: because they are imperfect, fragments suggest a variety of perfections. They retain traces of their original context, as well as the charm of having escaped it.
Kunin s grace period started in 1998, when he moved to Baltimore; in 2007, he was in California, where he lives now. During that time, in these little notebooks, he was learning how to write.
Here you will find at least two worlds, and then some. In an interview conducted by Tom Fleischmann in Seneca Review, Aaron Kunin said: “Is my interest in the gesture of withdrawal from the world compromised by the worldliness of the speaker positions in my writing? That is a real problem. The solution is dualism. Where in the world can I go that isn’t in the world? I can’t. To get out of the world, I need at least two worlds. That is the paradox of misanthropy: in rejecting society, you project another one.”
Fair warning: Aaron Kunin’s notes are totally addictive. - Jen Hofer
Grace Periodcomprises a decade of notebooks from quasi-conceptualist Aaron Kunin, whose previous works have become known for their ability to re-approach old forms in ways that make them seem entirely different. Here, over the course of 19 different journals spanning periods of often somewhere around six months, Kunin opens up his personal sets of individually numbered inquisitions, aphorisms, lyrics, dialogues, cryptic fragments, dreams, commands, and all other sorts of jotted ideas. It’s interesting to watch Kunin’s mind switch through modes over the course of the book, developing preoccupations, ways of thinking, and passing ideas, which slowly accumulate into an image of the development of a highly provocative vision. “Some people have the right to touch you,” says a note from an early notebook, in 1998; then, in 2002, “I get annoyed at art that asks me to participate, which is just to say that I don’t like being told how to participate,” and in 2005, simply, “The bed breathing under your back.” In total, these complied ideas are a strange museum, somehow comforting to peel through, fall around in, eat from, poke, and roll. - Blake Butler
The title of Aaron Kunin’s Grace Period: Notebooks, 1998-2007 (Letter Machine Editions, 2013) provides a more or less straightforward explanation of what readers will encounter between the covers of this book: the contents of a writer’s notebooks over the course of a decade.
Early in the collection, in what can be read as a meta-critical observation of his work, Kunin writes:
My teachers were indulgent of the chaos of my thoughts. (Luckily?) Would it have been better if they had held me to a standard that I could not recognize (or value)? —Better to preserve your thoughts in their original chaos. (49)
And it would appear that Grace Period does just that: it preserves the “original chaos” of the author’s thoughts as they move from one fragment to the next, documenting the patterns of a mind at work.
Stated differently, the form of Kunin’s notebooks, and thus his mind, are “bits and pieces of useless information” which he collects: “touches of knowledge” that he isolates “from the impurities” of the “environment” surrounding them (79).
Of course the “uselessness” of these touches of knowledge that Kunin collects is relative. On the one hand, they are “Ancient emotional material for [his] poems” (260) and, therefore, quite useful; on the other hand, while “His method makes it easy to collect material for poems,” it does not make it any easier “to assemble them” (274), calling into question their efficacy.
Kunin’s meditations, though, are more than meta-critical observations. He attends to subject matter as diverse as awkwardness, food, conversation, dreams, love, community, and poetry. Yet one of the more fascinating objects of contemplation is the author’s handwriting. Throughout the book, he creates “graphological portraits” that focus on the nature of his penmanship. For instance:
He often went over letters to add feature that hadn’t come out clearly on the first pass. This tended to give the letters a worried aspect; there were lines all around them, pouring out of them, and deep creases in the places where the lines joined, as though they had been losing sleep.
The halo of uncertainty around each of your letters.
The mantle of shyness that your writing wears. (8)
While this portrait offers a psychological self-analysis of and via his handwriting, it also emphasizes the materiality of Grace Period and the absence of the original artifacts. Which begs the question: how do the material circumstances of one’s composition dictate what one composes? And, what do we gain and what do we lose from a printed version of his notebooks? Later, Kunin emphasizes this point when he writes:
Try to look like you’re working. Seated in odd positions, or standing and pacing. Ah, he’s writing; this looks like work. If only the notebook were in larger format. What can he be working on. Such tiny pages, etc. Nothing that could be shown easily since no one could read his little writing. (218)
Focusing on his material conditions yet again, Kunin laments the fact that the notebooks are not of a “larger format.” This constraint forces him to write in a “little” hand, which, no doubt, contributes to the fact that he composes primarily in the aforementioned “bits and pieces.”
But just as compelling as the material considerations, Kunin wants to “look like [he’s] working,” which highlights the performative nature of his writing. To this extent, Grace Period is a public display of the writer’s private thoughts for the sake of intellectual and creative showmanship, wherein materiality becomes performance, and composition (or form) an actor. - vouchedbooks.com/tag/aaron-kunin/
Aaron Kunin, The Sore Throat & Other Poems, Fence Books, 2010.
How about someone from another planet?—Peter Gizzi
This would make a great chorus for “Nosferatu.” - Marjorie Welish
It’s the real thing.—Keith Waldrop
Aaron Kunin believes that the part of yourself that you’re most ashamed of is interesting and can be used as material for art. The poems of The Sore Throat, his second collection, come out of self-imposed semiotic limitation, yet manifest a fully inhabited psychological environment. Within a limited vocabulary, Kunin finds hymn, epigram, ode, elegy, ballad, conversation, invective, confession, epitaph, inability, protest, love poem (praise, valentine, aubade, seduction, defense of inconstancy), riddle, cosmogony, theodicy, vanity, and misplaced concreteness. Combining formal procedure with a kind of automatic writing, The Sore Throat produces poems of unlikely, and heightened, sensitivity to nuances of feeling.
Here is perhaps the most disturbing, initially unpleasant collection in years; it’s also among the most original. All the poems in Kunin’s second book confine themselves (like The Cat in the Hat) to a small set of words, 170 to 200 in all, including I, you, know, somebody, but also moron, rat, dick, laughter, machine. The poems in one section use syntactic or formal patterns from Ezra Pound’s “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley.” The poems in another “translate” (i.e., rephrase parts of) a play by Maurice Maeterlinck; some adopt visual or metrical schemes from other, older poems. Yet none seem old-fashioned. They seem bizarre, as befits their derivations (explained in Kunin’s preface and conclusion) from the poet’s nearly lifelong habit of “transcribing everything I say, hear, read or think… into a kind of sign-language,” a set of hand movements unintelligible to anyone else.
These “binary hand-alphabets,” mimicked by the verbal repetitions within the poems, suggest (though Kunin never says so) the fidgets and tics of compulsive disorders such as Tourette’s syndrome and OCD: “How hard it is to change your habits,” Kunin writes. “Or not to have habits.” He seems compelled to shock us with four-letter words: “Your dick in my ass, / music, and I don’t like it, but I desire it… At last I’m sore down there, and I must // have it again.” Pseudo-Tourettic coprolalia, the poem as fidget or tic? Or Catullus in loose translation (odi et amo), revealing the contradictions of the soul?
How close are involuntary tics to the idiosyncratic verbal behaviors of poetry? Closer than we might think, Kunin suggests, and both come closer than we might think to the everyday repetitions of conversation. Malfunctioning people repeat themselves, like robots; but so do the all-too-normal people who spend their lives chasing instinctual gratification. “For the moron, what’s good is a hard-on,” Kunin writes in “What’s Your Pleasure, Brother?” If you are not a moron, you must desire “more than pleasure, more than talking… But what you desire is not on the earth.”
Some of these poems sound as if nobody speaks them, as if they are the product of mere procedures, or programs. More often, they conjure speakers upset about how procedure-bound they sound, how little they can reconcile themselves to their predictable existence, how little (as if they all had one “sore throat”) they can say: “‘The god of the sore throat is not a just god,’ she complained.” Kunin sees—as Samuel Beckett saw—the thin line between a wisely cultivated indifference to the world’s repetitions and an emetic, instinctive disgust: “Pleasure is but a can / Of earth, and the soul / No more than / A great bladder.” A bladder: for urine, but also for air, wind, voice.
“I hear your voice as if it were my own,” The Sore Throat ends, meaning not that Kunin’s I finally understands his evasive beloved, his sexually unavailable you, but that your and my, I and you, have lost their meanings. Through poems in dialogue, essays, and lyric stanzas, the book presents not characters, exactly, but “a complete system of bad habits,” language-games that might be nothing more than “a machine / for concealing my desire.” And yet this book does not feel mechanical, and most of the time it does not feel predictable. It feels sad, repellent, fascinating, paradoxical, the work of a human being dismayed to see how much like other machines (badly programmed ones, too) our brains and behaviors can be.—Stephen Burt
The Mandarin does at least pretend to be an ordinary novel. It is set in places that no longer exist in Minneapolis--houses and apartments where one of the characters used to live, businesses and restaurants that have closed or moved elsewhere. Its narrator, Willy, writes boring novels that put everyone to sleep. The plot develops recursively rather than progressively, as a kind of theme-and-variations; usually one of the characters is in a house or a room, and the others are outside trying to get in. The Mandarin is written almost entirely in dialogue; as a result, actions and events tend to occur within a nimbus of uncertainty. Consciousness tends to be communal rather than personal. The Mandarin preserves the conventions of the novel: the speakers are individualized characters speaking in an identifiable situation. This means that, at any moment, the characters might stop talking and start doing something. Of course, they won't, but this option is always available to them.
Unheimlich children of Virginia Woolf and Oscar Wilde, the Modernist Novel and a decadent despairing of it, Aaron Kunin’s characters are embodied by speech—witty, philosophical, narratological. They speak and they think, occasionally, about problems of the novel, but just as often about slights, real or imagined; originary issues of form and content; things to eat and drink. They are “walking mind-body problems.” The volume of psychological realism and emotional force they acquire as they go along in fraught relation to one another comes therefore as a surprise boon, a delirious trick, a happy byproduct of their unimaginable contextualization in a Minneapolis they do not quite inhabit.
“The many minds of this novel perform thought with the hilarity and impertinence of a b-movie choir: their robes don’t match, they’re too busy talking to sing the songs, and their audience is asleep. However, where in most cases this would be a recipe for disaster, in The Mandarin, it proves the perfect combination for creating a new kind of iteration, one where knowledge is less something individually won than something collectively made. Aaron Kunin’s The Mandarin is a much-needed contribution to the future of fiction, and an absolute delight to read.”—Renee Gladman
The prospect of writing an innovative novel could be a contemporary poet's nightmare, for who wants to be confined by mainstream devices of the conventional narrative, and how does a poet turned novelist avoid the blunders of monotony (or as Kunin writes on pg. 28, “a lifetime of needless repetitions”)? At best, how does this novel pursue a previously overlooked approach? Aaron Kunin's first novel The Mandarin is hardly coy in dissecting the heavy sentiments associated with such a pursuit. The lines between the writer and the novel's panoply of characters, between the reader and the read and among the novel's personalities (both human and their inanimate counterparts -- e.g. a TV set, toenail clippings, umbrella, telephone, ad nauseam) are brimming with pointed opinions, intellect and desire -- they are infinitely built, demolished, rebuilt and tinkered with. The Mandarin requires the strictest attention; its pace is quick, odd and askew but careful not to exhaust. One could almost declare that Kunin's book, along with being a disappointed jester of our current political and spiritual state, is a questionably harmless enemy of the predictable and linear.
There are topophilic undertones, considering the presence of Minneapolis as a nostalgic harbinger of memory, regret and expirations. This city fills the shoes of both friend and foe, similar to an ex-wife who holds the key to certain forgotten experiences that one has spent years trying to erase. The characters don't quite fit in the now Minneapolis they once roamed -- restaurants they enjoyed are no longer, previous jobs have desisted, houses they once occupied are unwelcome. Chapters are punctuated by a set of off-kilter illustrations by David Scher -- several provide uncanny, metaphorical expressions for one's interaction with the novel in question. For instance, three childlike sketches of staplers coupled with the caption, It all happens on a molecular level. Another: Is the snake immune to its own poison? Or an image of an abandoned phone booth, phone dangling, neglected, with the words, You don't know me well enough to make fun of me.
It is true. After reading The Mandarin, I don't know the novel's intentions well enough to make fun of them -- much less sully them. This work will not provide most with quaint answers to boring questions, and if one finds that it does, no Q&A goes undeserved. One might find the answer to a previous question pages later, forced to reformulate an inquiry all together. Kunin provides the reader with his own awkward code to reformulate the page; he chooses to problematize literature, and The Mandarin is no exception. The novel dismantles rhetorical tricks, criticizes and provokes art making, laughs at itself -- similar to an only child forced to play within the confines of a cornered imagination because he hasn't discovered how to play with others (in this case, others equal previously published horrors). The Mandarin is a lonely, insecure experiment, but it simultaneously enforces that there is hope for a novel that dissects its own pursuit of novelty or popularity, thereby becoming humorous and infectious.
Almost entirely filled with dialogue (omit a few chapters) highlighting fraternal-sororal affiliations of Willy and Natasha and Hallamore and Mercy, they are eerily connected in dreams yet disjointed in reality. As Kunin explain in his own reflective synopsis, “actions and events tend to occur within a nimbus of uncertainty,” one can accept the narrative illogic or new logic that Kunin has constructed -- this acceptance should not be equated with truth, for The Mandarin is no blind advocate of dogmatism. Instead, it emphasizes a divide and conundrum between the doers and thinkers of our world, between readers and non-readers, between “softies” and the hardened, unpleasant souls we sometimes find ourselves to be. The poet in the novelist illustrates a dire placelessness of the masses, where some shadowbox one way, others another way, and some: not at all. The world of The Mandarin is littered with failed jokers, yet Hallamore comments, “We are all comedians. Every comedian is wrong about something. There's a place for those of us who don't belong.” Despite placelessness as a primary theme, it is recommended that Kunin and his existential archaeologists find a home in yours. - Jacquelyn Davis
1) Language is a form of disobedience.
2) Or: words have no loyalty. Or: language facilitates perversity. Or: to speak is to be reminded of language’s inescapable techné. Or: to employ language is to court malfunction. Or: to write is to run the risk of making more sense than you ever intended. Or: language is always on the cusp of being carried away. Or: talking is almost always talking back. Or: language was designed in emulation of water, a force, a flow without shape but the rare ability to hunt direction down and wear it out. Or: nothing could be more nonsensical than if our every utterance were understood literally. Or: you teach a child to say “no” at your own peril; those early “no“‘s are no ventriloquism act. Or: the so-called precise word is precisely that, so-called, a chimera. Or: to speak is to confuse irrevocably the matter of whether one is announcing something before it happens, or whether one is announcing something as a way of compelling its presence to coincide with its occurrence.
3) Aaron Kunin’s novel The Mandarin is a self-conscious (perhaps even sentient) construction of language, some phenomena I wish to differentiate from the notion of a linguistic construction… For I want the suggest that The Mandarin is more like a self-organizing discourse than it is a “work” composed-slash-authored. The Mandarin is thus less a novel as commonly defined in terms of “long story” than it is an exercise in novel-ese, or the novel as style. This is not to say that either text or author fail in any way to fully realize whatever metaphysical potential is latent in the novel-as-form. Rather, what I want to claim for this book is that it is a brilliant, occasionally scathing, yet ultimately poignant tribute to the inherent limitations of an imagination whose eide and eidola alike are utterly—dimensionally—verbal.
4) Or: The Mandarin is an exceptionally manneristic “novel of manners.”
5) Or: if you squint at it in the proper way, this is a conceptual novel. Kunin supplies a 3-page synopsis that you need not read past, excepting you wish to satisfy your curiosity regarding the novel’s execution. Quoted in full, however, I find that this explanation is just a scheme for disclosing a question that, in order to be dramatic, cannot remain undisclosed; that is, must be secret, only formerly. Is this synopsis a lie?
6) In a sense, the book is naming itself every time one look at its cover or spine, insisting that it has to remind you that it is a novel, a book that has to be taken “seriously.” And, as much as this title’s prodding is about a kind of salesmanship, the relationship between word and world is more suspect than that. Most “things” can’t speak the way a book can, nor do they suffer the arc of the Lomans. (The main character and narrator upon whom Kunin depends is a Willy.)
7) And what is a mandarin anyway? A living etymology, thus a kind of fossil, a word that survives despite going largely unused; a museum exhibit that does not have to be put on wheels because it installs itself everywhere around you the moment you decide to judge it into being. (And every time you recall Henry James.). Mandarin: it’s a pejorative, and what makes our mandarins so worthy of disdain—and so funny—is the complete un-self-consciousness (rather: blind narcissism) of the pose. Such is pedantry, this trying-so-hard-all-you-do-is-drown-flailing-in-gelatinous-effort. Even if taken as an adjective, “mandarin” is a point-of-view compact in its three syllables. An evaluation, and a coping with something which looks familiar but which we, uttering, would like to believe has naught to do with us or our position. But the use of a term like this is a power-play: it elevates us, uttering, to some superior vantage from which we can describe a sham noble. And phoniness makes of such rare essence the cheapest cardboard: what a noun like “elitism” names, just as that The here qualifies and specifies. So I think.
8) As one reads, one discovers that The Mandarin is a novel-in-conversation, but it could not be more different in tone and (apparent) intent than similar “experiments” such as Duras’ The Square or Gaddis’ JR, to take but two examples. For the exchanges here do not move toward revelation via vaguely Socratic gestures; unlike The Square, very little is asked in The Mandarin. Instead, much is pronounced. But neither does the narrator evince an obsessive’s commitment to “how people really talk”, the kind of photorealistic prose that, in Gaddis, turns everything into plastic and a kind of dense, you’ll-knock-your-knee-or-elbow-against-it nausea.
9) Rather, Kunin, through careful application of a few linguistic effects, seems to be after a parody of novelistic prosody. Example: here are “characters” who speak without relying on contractions.
“I have written a play for Natasha,” said Hallamore. (9) “Without our burnt offerings,” said Mercy, “St. Peter would have to eat in the kitchen.” “St. Peter must love abandoned restaurants, because he made so many of them,” said Hallamore. (13)
Perhaps it is not so much that contractions are absent here, absence in this instance implying a forgetting, or a negligence: a grammar active, but only in the form of exiting / having left the stage. Rather, the contractions feel avoided. They have been deliberately excluded, so long as the characters retain control of their emotions or do slip from the perch of their poses.
And there’s softness for you: shit. [Mercy speaking] (5)
10) Grammar is being acted upon. All of which reinforces or superimposes again, needlessly, the presence of authors, narrators and characters (the narrator, Willy, writes novels that may also be soporifics), the last two of which are authors manqué anyway.
11) So, The Mandarin invents, over and over again, realms of conversation which are not “conversational” as that expectation has been created by the majority rule of contemporary American literary fiction. Instead, they are words in a novel, have the pretense of being “real”, vocal, but belong to no voice, only to the text itself. They are neither interior nor exterior to anyone involved here: characters, narrator, author, readers. They have hollowed out some third space which they then must occupy. And how they do sprawl all over the elapsed Minneapolis of The Mandarin in setting up residence where they once lived.
12) Chekhov, quoting De Maupassant in The Seagull: “And it goes without saying that it is as dangerous for society people to pamper and encourage writers of novels, as it is for corn merchants to breed rats in their granaries.” What Maupassant means, I think, is that nothing uttered in a novelist’s presence, no matter how inane, innocuous or intended to be impermanent, is ever innocent. Almost as if the novelist him-/herself, in his/her compulsion to transform every experience into “material” (and, in The Seagull, it is Trigorin, the writer but also perhaps the least aesthetic of the play’s characters, who gives eloquent expression to how dissatisfying existence in that minor circle of Hell—The Realm Of The Once-Removed—is), destroys the order that ensures the social, and precisely by recording that order. Preserving it. Rendering it perceptible. In other words, much of what is “said” in novels is the normally-unsaid posing as the enunciated. Call it subtext, or circumlocution, or the dictates of repression. Perhaps this explains why Kunin’s various voices all aim for a narrational authority—to speak in the voice of the book—to escape the quotation marks between which they are condemned to appear. Or: the quotations marks which are the basic condition of their appearance.
13) The only way out of the prison of voice for these characters is via another kind of constraint, a volunteered-for deafness to themselves, and themselves only. This is quite different, I think, from a phenomenon we often note in “bad” novels: that all the characters baldly ventriloquize for the author and the author’s agenda. The authenticity of any given literary voice is always fraught with artifice. Is Kunin’s point—or one of his points—that the real, in its dreams of power, always aspires to be ideal? That seems awfully heavy for a book filled with voices that have a certain frothiness to them.
14) But do the subjects of The Mandarin actually qualify as people, much less constitute a family (brothers and sisters), i.e., a miniature society? Hard to know in a novel such as this, in which setting is so ghostly, and “society” is constantly in a state of dysfunction. I.e., unstable, all positions contested if out of grasp.
15) On page 162 of The Mandarin, it occurred to me to write: “If it is true of most novels that one need not read every word, then how much more true in this novel. A novel, from a certain poetic perspective, is a tremendous waste of language. And breath. The novel as a rubber dinghy that can never be inflated, hand to mouth.” This is not to say that The Mandarin‘s language is not painstaking. But one feels this meticulousness most whenever Willy (also known as Aaron and Flavio), Hallamore, Mercy and Natasha (who only speaks in one chapter) become participants in dialogue… as conducted by the Marx Brothers on barbiturates. So, where does this waste accumulate? In the novelistic convention of “he said,” “she said,” and “I said,” of course. This constant marking or accounting (I originally wrote “flag-planting”) punctuates every vocalization, and in only one of two ways. A) Fermata: “Spoken falsely,” said Mercy, “like a true novelist.” (66); B) Decrescendo: “There’s not enough room for truth in the novel!” I said. (66).
16) I suspect Kunin wants to direct our attention to this clutter, this clatter, the busy hands of identification. And I will confess that there are times when it is easier and more enjoyable to read this novel as a rhythmically supple weave of interruptions and underminings. To hear it as a subtly modulating drone of “I / he / she said”‘s rather than a play of pretend voices.
17) But what happens as your attention penetrates further and further into a drone, which is, from one vantage, just silence in an excited state? Individual particles (or is it valences?) begin to emerge and command or at least magnetize the attention. I would say The Mandarin is quite comparable to a filed of coded information, the dimensions of which make it impossible to “take in” in any perceiving’s present. As any novel is… further, I think of the first time I experienced Robert Altman’s Nashville and its multi-tracked, “natural” (an authenticity artificially crafted) sound. I knew I was hearing many different voices speaking simultaneously, over-lapping, at times canceling each other out—sensibly, and at the level of frequency and wavelength—even as I could not actually perceive all those voices in all their difference all at once. And, were I to try and puzzle each voice out (to “read every word”, truly), I would miss the more crucial if hazier effect.
18) Since this novel is not about elaborating any sort of plot, why are these attributions necessary at all? If no one is actually going to be affected or incited to change by what anyone else says—and saying is all that occurs here—why is it important to keep one voice sorted from another? As Kunin notes in his prefatory synopsis, only when these characters agree on what is happening in their world—read: are all playing the same game, each equally a contestant—does the story achieve any propulsion. In fact, this possibility haunts the book, this suspicion that The Mandarin is actually one of Willy’s novels. What difference is there, if any, between this narrator Willy and the author, Willy, of such unread (within The Mandarin) titles as Sick of Irony, a novel?
19) But what is one of the cardinal rules of narrative? “Agreement makes for poor stories.” And, true, the agreement to which Kunin refers scratches out a space in which these these voices jockey most fully for co-existence. Agreement for the sake of a differentiating disagreement, or, conflict for the sake of conflict. Perforce, imitation—a weapon most cruelly and expertly wielded by children and idiots—injects protecting coloring into what would otherwise be a dispiriting or spiritless sameness, making that sameness rational… just as all warfare is.
“I’m making fun of you, Willy!” said Mercy. “I’m imitating you!” “You don’t know me well enough to make fun of me,” I said. “In fact, I love it when you make fun of me, because it only shows how little you understand me.” “I know you well enough to telephone you,” said Mercy. “So I can make fun of you even if I don’t understand you.” (124)
20) Or: Kunin (better: The Mandarin) likes to repeat phrases and certain syntactical formulae, and have them pass from character to character, too, like a benign parasite. This wandering anaphora confuses consciousness, of course, but it also creates a certain continuity, and it certainly gives the prose here a distinctive cadence. Because metaphor does not seem to work or be terrible relevant in this fallen Midwestern metropolis, parroting serves as a characteristic trope here. The emphasis remains, again, not so much on the personalities behind or responsible for the words, but the words’ as wearable, discardable characters… the sheets these ghosts are donning as they float up and down these corridors that are actually closed to their haunting (so they keep bumping into things, maybe because, Schulz-style, they forgot to cut eye-holes in those sheets.)
“You’ve become a Board of Welfare for me,” I said. “You control my thoughts by making it impossible for me to think of anything else.” “I must learn to content myself with proximity,” said Mercy. “To become indispensable… until there’s no difference between the contents of our heads, yours and mine.” “Being inside a person’s head is not the same as knowing a person,” said Hallamore. “It’s not even a way of knowing.” (125)
21) And, as I read more and more, I feel this is becoming a “bigger deal”: are these characters jockeying for the power to narrate, to write their own novel? Or is to be a narrator to put in a kind of straitjacket, forced by form to repeat the obvious, to be redundant, with every action?
22) Oh, and objects speak in The Mandarin. They deliver dialogue. They offer commentary. They hail and farewell. They name. And these objects speak more like recognizable human beings than the novel’s ostensibly human actors. Maybe because the objects are given some rather funny lines. “Great wine, Flavio,” said the Christmas cactus. “Yeah, not from concentrate,” said the dust-ruffle.” (150). Yes, these toenail clippings, T.V. sets and so forth are comic characters in a rather traditional novelistic sense. They are Forster-flat, and are possessed of more exaggerated linguistic capabilities than the ostensibly creative, adaptive, “fleshy” characters here. Really, Shakespeare is being invoked… the depth of shallowness when it comes to relief. A fool will say anything, thank god. And, always, always, Kunin’s characters are talking without saying-qua-materializing. They are always talking about speaking, as if speaking begins and ends with explaining.
23)
What is certain is that the characters are speaking—and the speaker is always clearly identified—but it’s never certain that their speech accurately describes the situation in which they are speaking. They may be talking about what they’re actually doing in the place where they’re really standing [read: narrating], or they may be remembering or imagining something they did or would like to be doing in another place [read: acting]. (ii)
24) I have just finished reading The Mandarin. It is a much more tragic book than I could have allowed myself to imagine.
25) Do we really know what we’re volunteering for when we say, so blithely, that novels are capable of a “greater truth”, of materializing it? Or: language is a machine, perhaps even the primal machine. And novels are particularly complex instances of heavy industry, constructed out of many intricate, minuscule parts that have been wrought out of some obdurate, graceless material. A contraption powered by steam, poised in its reproductions between the noxious and the efficient. Novels manufacture consciousness, and this novel is somehow no different. Except The Mandarin is very different in the way it runs its assembly line. So long as one reads The Mandarin, one remains in the same predicament as The Mandarin‘s characters, trapped, coerced, a servant and a mouthpiece. Yet, reading or not, as creatures never apart from the levering power of language, this is our common predicament. Our realization of this dependency may or may not be cathartic, but surely it counts as anagnorisis, and a most ennobling brand of irony. - Joe Milazzo
Aaron Kunin, Secret Architecture, Braincase, 2006. Human value propositions. This feels high stakes, like rehearsals for a lover's argument. Also a prospectus for the small cruelties of cohabitation. I like that the first word, "although," can begin either a concession or a refusal to compromise. And the final resolution, the accommodation of taint, something like Moore's proposition that "it is human nature to stand in the middle of a thing, but you can't stand in the middle of this." - Andrew Maxwell
With alarmed intelligence, Folding Ruler Star exposes the violence of an expectant look and synthesizes the organic and the robotic, then unzips them just as machines unzip/concrete dividers/on the highway. May Aaron Kunin make all the rules, and may our capacity for facial communication finally collapse within his tremendous Dionysian orderliness.—Jacqueline Waters
If the measure is that which disfigures, then Aaron Kunin’s hinged ruler needs to be placed alongside Duchamp’s standard stoppage as an equally ingenious corrective. In Folding Ruler Star, the security zone of the book is breached without shame, so that to live becomes reason again—Miles Champion
In 1986, Noam Chomsky published a book called Barriers, elaborating a theory of what kinds of grammatical elements can combine, what kinds can’t and how it happens. Kunin’s debut treats language in precisely that way, and also sees it as in a completely synecdochic relationship with its users: language’s parts stand for our wholes and are every bit as mechanical, modelable, automatic, desirous, thwarted, blocked and explosive as people are when they try to approach one another. And there are major constraints here: the entire book is composed in five syllable lines comprising three-line stanzas; every poem is “mirrored by another poem with the same title,” as Kunin notes in a preface. The dual-poem format, coupled with violent, sexualized content (deft but definitely disturbing) gives the impression of very fraught attachments indeed. The book is certainly about having feelings like shame, disgust and grief, but it is also about how they get produced—and registered within a system that may be human in seat, but not in origin: it may be divine. To that end, there are references to Paradise Lost and to Renaissance body part love poetry (the senses here represented by “Five Security Zones”). This is beautiful, complicated poetry from a poet exploring “the device in the/ assumed direction/ of its mouth.” - Publishers Weekly
