Reviews of the Ephemeral

Posts Tagged ‘Ian Chung’

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‘Squawk Back’ #50

In Blogzines, online magazine on May 11, 2012 at 12:48 pm

-Reviewed by Ian Chung-

Squawk Back #50's colourful coverSquawk Back is an online publication that publishes on a weekly schedule, boldly proclaiming that it is ‘far less interested in exploiting emergent literary voices than providing them with a slightly louder box with which to squawk’. In an article on The Lit Pub, editor-in-chief Zak Block offers this description of Squawk Back’s aesthetic:

…greatly interested in what could be described as ‘postmodern-outsider-literature’: written works of prose, poetry, non-fiction and memoir that can, among other things, be appreciated through, or have been created in, a kitsch/camp spectatorial mode; and that have been created, in some cases, by dwellers of the very fringes of society: be they the abjectly impoverished, mentally ill or incarcerated, but almost un- or intentionally beautiful.

Issue 50 opens with ‘Grünerløkka’, a short story by Adam Moorad. What unfolds reads like a miniature Beckett play. An unnamed narrator wakes up in a backpacker motel bathtub, his roommate Malibu ‘sitting on the toilet beside the tub, in a bathrobe’. Moorad deftly paints a picture of the characters’ relationship within a short paragraph: ‘We had shared a bunk bed for about a week. He claimed to be an aristocrat and an avid surfer. He had no accent. I thought he was insane.’ Following some desultory conversation, the toilet begins flooding (‘The way the sewage spilled, it reminded me of a birth’), then a knock on the door brings not housekeeping but a ‘throng of skinheads’, who proceed to trash the room. ‘Nothing made sense’, as the final paragraph admits, but the story still manages to wrap the disconcerting enigma of itself up in an aesthetic moment: ‘We were lost there, somewhere in what qualified as civilization. It could have been daytime, but the sun outside held no more power than a sponge. In this light the smoke, which had been a bright orange, had turned a deep blue.’

Next up comes Elizabeth Walton’s ‘A Service Announcement’, a flash fiction that begins as a contemporary fable (‘One day there was a lion with no eyes but extremely keen hearing’), swerves into a critique of the politics of prize-giving (‘See, prizes are funny; awarded at the awardee’s discretion, no interview or funny poll or quiz beforehand in order to determine what would be most appropriate’), before getting completely derailed (‘Gifted with the powers of transformation and transmitigation and illustrious intelligent adjectives for which they pawned their underage daughters on the stock exchange’). The true bite of this flash though, is in its ending: ‘Grandpa closed the book and set it down on the old nightstand and folded his hands and eyes and lungs into a perfect square and sent me off to bed. I’m not sure if even he knew the moral of the story.’ Clayton Lister’s ‘Parsnip Pop, It’s Good for You’ is an offbeat tale of young love, set in the countryside, perhaps hinting at the tension of the urban-rural divide in its sporadic references to Leeds.

Yet of all the work in Issue 50 of Squawk Back, it is Schemelia’s two free verse poems that to me best reflect Block’s professed interest in ‘postmodern-outsider-literature’. In fact, one of the poems is named for Block, in which Schemelia writes, ‘I heard the disease last afternoon / … / the disease told me to close my eyes… / … / to have faith in something from some thing’. His other poem, ‘pyeon sai’, plays games with language, blending English and French (‘color me clear / as a mirage du mer’, ‘every / I say every / day, speak one more word than the jour before’), even as it insists:
‘plain
loud talking
and the pain what comes
to vain brains

has been known to cure aggressive infection’

The ‘infection’ in question is not explicitly named, although earlier lines like ‘the boy what forced his Irish accent / well into the tenth grade’ and ‘any prosperity begets suffering / as there is no king among the working class / except one’ are suggestive enough. The literal and metaphorical heart of the poem though, comes in the two stanzas ‘what spoils we’ve disrobed and rerobed in shocktoxic shame what nothing the / metropolitan with crinkled hands can do // but live because you are still alive as far as you care to tell’. That single line, isolated in its own stanza, sounds a defiant cry to hold on, a bold squawk from the fringes of literature, if you will.

As Squawk Back marks its first anniversary later this month, it is indeed heartening to see how far the publication has come, and it will be interesting to see how it continues to squawk back to more mainstream literature.

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‘On How The Cockroach, After Having Died…’ by V. Campudoni

In Kindle chapbook, Short Stories on March 25, 2012 at 12:38 pm

-Reviewed by Ian Chung-

V. Campudoni’s illustrated short story – On how the Cockroach, after having died, and after a short conversation with Saint Peter, entered the Gates of Heaven – is a sort of modern-day Socratic dialogue, in which a humble cockroach is pitted against a sanctimonious Saint Peter. As the proverbial keeper of the pearly gates, Saint Peter offers various excuses to deny the cockroach entry to the kingdom of Heaven, even as he lets through a succession of figures who appear to contradict the very logic of those excuses, e.g. he first insists that to enter Heaven one must be as tall as himself, and then permits someone shorter than him to pass through the gates. Saint Peter’s pompous manner comes across most clearly when he tells the cockroach, ‘I will miss you greatly. Our time together shall not be forgotten. Moments like these are to be treasured like gold, savored like wine, captured like a smile on canvas. […] You have enriched me and I shall never be the same.’ The exchange is later parodied after the cockroach has persuaded him to bring out ‘the smallest, tiniest, portion of bread’, which it then proceeds to lavish with extravagant praise, hailing the moment of charity with the same words that Saint Peter has already used.

On How The Cockroach

As charming as the dialogue between the cockroach and Saint Peter is, the overall story is not without its minor problems. On the one hand, the increasingly ridiculous reasons Saint Peter provides do make for some amusingly polite exchanges with the cockroach. Yet on the other, their repetitive nature also somewhat belabours the clearly evident point being made about religious hypocrisy through the story. Also problematic is the manner in which the cockroach eventually does make it through the gates of Heaven. Proceeding in ostensibly Socratic fashion, the cockroach succeeds in convincing Saint Peter that ‘if the perception that [they] are standing outside of the gates is indeed not reality’, ‘the alternative must be that [they] are standing within the gates’. The trouble is, of course, that the assertion depends on the assumption that perception and reality must always be ‘Completely different’, eliding the possibility of their coincidence. For a story whose exchanges otherwise rely on sound logic, however absurd the premises from which that logic is derived, this sleight of hand feels disingenuous.

Perhaps though, this is simply taking too seriously a story that calls for a healthy amount of suspension of disbelief in the first place. The overall point of the story—exposing the nature of our prejudices and the unreasonable lengths to which we will go in order to justify and maintain them—still remains valid. The stylised black-and-white illustrations also complement the story, being somewhat reminiscent of the kind of comics one might encounter in The New Yorker. It is worth mentioning that On how the Cockroach… might be thought of as a brief introduction to Campudoni’s only other published work, a novel entitled Wendal, His Cat, and the Progress of Man. This was originally issued in print in 1994, but has now been made available for the Kindle alongside On how the Cockroach…

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‘I Wrote This For You’ by Iain Thomas & Jon Ellis

In Object, Uncategorized on March 22, 2012 at 1:52 pm

-Reviewed by Ian Chung-

The digital age has seen the emergence of sites like Frank Warren’s PostSecret (2005) and Iain Thomas’s I Wrote This For You (2007) that have acquired loyal online followings. PostSecret made the leap from digital to print within a year of the site’s founding, and the book series now consists of five volumes. By contrast, it has taken just over four years for I Wrote This For You to make the transition into print. Published by Central Avenue, the book version of I Wrote This For You features selected entries from the site, as well as several that are exclusive to the print volume.

I Wrote This For You

For those unfamiliar with I Wrote This For You, the site is a transcontinental collaboration between Jon Ellis and Iain Thomas (aka @pleasefindthis), with the former providing the images and the latter writing the captions, which are always addressed to a person only ever referred to as ‘You’. The two men communicate online but have never met in person, as Thomas lives in South Africa and, until recently, Ellis was based in Japan (he now lives in Hamburg, Germany). For further insight into the thinking that underpins the project, read the HESO Magazine interview with Ellis or listen to Thomas’s talk at TEDxJohannesburg in 2009:

 

In a blog entry written on the day of the book’s launch, Thomas explains that the four different sections of the book version of I Wrote This For You ‘collect the posts into four distinct phases that describe, hopefully, the human condition. Sun is about looking for love or the potential for love. Moon is about the act of being in love. Stars is the loss of that love. Rain is about rediscovering hope in life, at the end of that cycle.’ Out of this arrangement, I suppose an oblique sort of narrative does emerge along those lines, especially with the last three posts (‘The Day You Read This’, ‘The Arrivals Lounge’, ‘The Last Thing You Said’). On the whole though, each picture and its accompanying caption still exist primarily as self-contained instances of what Thomas calls ‘ambiguous micro-stories’ in his TEDxJohannesburg talk. He goes on to explain that ‘by leaving out things like gender, age, race, location, people apply the stories to themselves’.

Paradoxically, it is precisely this stripping away of detail that allows the posts to acquire a certain universalised/universalising resonance, as though they capture something intrinsic about the experience of being ‘you’. Some of the post titles alone are already brilliant, e.g. ‘The Circus Is Cheaper When It Rains’, ‘The Place Sentences Go To Die’, or my personal favourite, ‘The Shop That Lets You Rent Happiness’. At their shortest, the captions themselves read like haiku (‘The Things That Are Left’: The world made me cold. You made me water. // One day we’ll be clouds.) or epigrams (‘The Skeletons In The Sea’: Truth is the last thing I can take because it’s the last thing you took.), while the slightly longer ones work much like prose poems (‘The Simple Shattering Of Water’: ‘It’s because you and them were made of the same pieces. And afterwards, when you put yourself back together, some piece of them remained.)

Ultimately, Thomas suggests in his talk, ‘There’s no story I can tell you that is as powerful as the story you can tell yourself.’ This is where the true power of a project like I Wrote This For You lies. At the risk of courting the scorn of those who would prefer to remain fashionably cynical, I would like to suggest that I Wrote This For You is an inspirational book and project. Not in the trite sense of cheap and easy Hallmark-style sentimentality, but because working together, Thomas and Ellis seem to have distilled something of what it means to remain profoundly human in a digital society. It is difficult to summarise the effect of I Wrote This For You beyond that, so I would definitely recommend visiting the project site  for a taste of the duo’s work, treating the book version as one possible shaping of the project into an overarching narrative.

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‘Hellhound On My Trail’ by D. J. Butler

In Novella on February 29, 2012 at 11:30 am

-Reviewed by Ian Chung-

Hellhound on my trail - D. J. Butler

In Hellhound on My Trail, the first instalment of his Rock Band Fights Evil pulp fiction serial, D. J. Butler introduces us to a motley crew of musicians engaged in a battle with the powers of darkness. Clocking in at ten chapters, the installment makes for a quick but highly entertaining read. Butler throws the reader right into the thick of the action within the first couple of pages, as the titular Hellhound bursts out and interrupts the band mid-set. The pace does not let up thereafter, effectively making Hellhound on My Trail one extended fight scene, albeit with enough tantalising plot reveals scattered throughout to keep things interesting.

This parsimonious manner of expanding the in-story universe actually reminded me of Jim Butcher’s urban fantasy series The Dresden Files, in which lead protagonist Harry Dresden, private investigator and wizard, has the misfortune of constantly having to wrestle with the supernatural underbelly of Chicago. A compelling first-person narration has allowed that series to spin out its narrative twists and turns for 13 books and counting. Butler looks set to do something similar with Rock Band Fights Evil, since at the time of writing this review, the next two instalments, Snake Handlin’ Man and Crow Jane, are already available on Amazon and Smashwords (see the series website). The difference here from The Dresden Files is that each instalment appears to track the unfolding story from a different character’s perspective.

In the case of Hellhound on My Trail, that character is the hapless bass player Mike, whose position as the regular guy suddenly confronted by the supernatural mirrors the reader’s experience of the story as it develops. Mike starts off as someone who is just filling in for the band’s previous bass player. A life-and-death fight scene later, he learns the bass player was impaled on the player’s own instrument. A page after that revelation, he also finds out that he has the Left Hand of God on him, and while that means he is condemned to Hell, it is also the reason why Jim, the band’s enigmatic singer, has allowed him to tag along with the band, in the wake of the Hellhound’s completely destroying their gig venue. Jim himself is a fascinating character, who spends most of the story in silence while dealing damage to various minions of Hell. However, it turns out that Jim is one of the Devil’s progeny and he cannot speak because the fallen angels are listening out for him, whereas singing is perfectly fine for him because ‘[t]hey can’t even hear singing…They can’t hear any music. Music is Heaven’s gift to the angels, and when they rebel, they lose it entirely.’

While I really enjoyed the overall idea of a rock band that fights evil because of personal vendettas against the forces of darkness, changes its name for each performance and can never be signed by a record label, there were a few elements of Hellhound on My Trail that nagged at me. One such was Mike’s dead brother, Chuy, whose ghost haunts Mike throughout the story. What started out as a promising plot device (‘He hadn’t seen his brother’s ghost all day, and he needed a drink to keep things that way’) seemed to be sidelined once the supernatural action fully got underway. Even when Chuy pops back up at the most inconvenient of times for Mike (like while trying to escape the spawn of Hell), it is still hard to believe Mike’s tortured feelings regarding his brother.

Another problem was the overall lack of character development. Pretty much all the characters can be boiled down to some individual quirk. Besides Mike and Jim, the band consists of Eddie (the guitarist) who sold his soul to (unintentionally) become the world’s most awesome tambourine player, Twitch (the drummer) who is a transmogrifying fairy, and Adrian (the resident wizard) who is cursed with narcolepsy that appears to kick in whenever he tries to perform too many spells. It might seem unfair to criticise a work of pulp fiction for lack of character depth, but I would imagine there is still a limit to how far the quirks can propel the story without beginning to wear thin on the reader. That said, I expect these are minor issues that Butler will begin to resolve as the succeeding serial instalments flesh out more of this rock band’s gripping story. If Hellhound on My Trail is anything to go by, they should prove to be exciting reads.

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‘Poland At The Door’ by Evelyn Posamentier

In Pamphlets on February 27, 2012 at 10:30 am

-Reviewed by Ian Chung-

Reading Evelyn Posamentier’s Knives Forks and Spoons chapbook Poland At The Door, which Michael Heller describes on the back cover as ‘resembl[ing] a series of atomized clusters’, I was reminded of the poetry of Paul Celan, whose later poems especially were often similarly short and compressed. The work of both poets is also shot through with the horrors of Eastern European history, marked as it is by wars and the Holocaust. However, although Heller also characterises Posamentier’s poetry as being ‘semi-effaced characters like those inscribed on ancient rune-stones or stelae…double-edged ciphers’, I personally found Poland At The Door less opaque and enigmatic than say, Celan’s Fathomsuns and Benighted, while still making for an intriguing read.

Poland At The Door essentially functions as an extended poem cycle, the individual verses always preceded by the chapbook title in capitals. At the typographical level, this has the effect of partitioning the page into what increasingly resemble little rooms in which the verses are to remain safely corralled. The room-as-protection motif runs throughout the language of the poem as well, but here it is the poet seeking protection in the physical integrity of the room’s space: ‘oh god, I’ve left / the door unlocked’, ‘hold on. hold on. / don’t answer the door’, ‘they can’t find me in this room’, ‘it’s good to be a portable room. / ‘i gather the walls around me.’ Towards the end of the cycle, however, the ‘wobbly room’ appears to take on greater agency:

which door? the portable room

steps forward to accept the challenge.

the guests know not why

they have come. the room

shields itself with its own

pretense of freedom.

With this shift, the room mutates into something that paradoxically seems to simultaneously expose and hide the poet, expressed in lines like ‘the room withers my walls / closes in to conceal me’. Yet if ‘poland at the door’ is cast as the threat of history waiting outside, the room never seems to become entirely complicit in endangering the poet (‘this room / can carry me anywhere. / it is my lover, stepping lightly.’), functioning rather as a kind of interface with the world beyond the door (‘someday the room will escort me / to the free air, which of course / is no longer free’). It is also within the cocoon of the room that the poem reaches its crisis point on the penultimate page, as language symbolically fails to turn away the knock of ‘poland at the door’:

i shred these frozen notebooks

who make a mockery of my desk

i don’t care about their smirks

& willful pages, sneering

through helpless words.

a typewriter seethes in the corner.

wait for me, says the wall.

it doesn’t matter, says the opposite

wall. the neighbours read their lines.

i feel them pass the door.

Seen from this perspective, the last lines of the poem might appear curiously passive: ‘my planet stands still’, ‘the footsteps have followed history / into the town square. / they have passed.’ After pages and pages of attempting to avoid ‘memories of / ancestors on the attack’, ‘the guests’, ‘the neighbors’, ‘poland at the door’, has the encounter with history then not palpably changed the poet after all? I would suggest this apparent problem can be resolved by recourse to earlier lines in the poem: ‘did someone say something / about a meeting point? / it must be beyond the door.’ If ‘the door might swing open / like a shiny new century’, then stepping through it is to look in two directions at once, embracing the future even as one is embraced by the past. Since the final lines of the poem imply that the ‘i’ of the poem is still observing from within the room, the ‘meeting point…beyond the door’ has not yet been approached. Thus in declining to offer a tidy and convenient resolution to its ongoing narrative, the poem instead leaves the reader poised on the cusp of change and meaningful engagement.

Ultimately, I believe that Poland At The Door is a fascinating read because it carefully regulates its own approach to that singular final moment, paring the journey into manageable portions. Taken in isolation, the verses’ imagery can sometimes seem downright hallucinatory, but what binds the cycle together and keeps it grounded are the linguistic repetitions running through it. While the repetition of the title fosters a looming sense of urgency, this runs parallel to permutations of the phrase ‘the days of awe, the days between’. This seems an apt description of what history actually looks like to most people, with days that leave an indelible psychic mark on personal or collective memory and the days in between them that can just pass us by. Typically occurring as single lines interspersed among the other verses, the phrase acts to slow down the poem’s pace. What could otherwise have been a frantic attempt to shut out the memory of the past is transformed into a moving chronicle of the poet’s steady journey towards engaging it. We all have our personal ‘poland at the door’. Reading Posamentier’s chapbook is one way we can begin to address and welcome it.

 

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‘Bugsworth Diary’ by Neil Campbell

In Pamphlets on January 25, 2012 at 10:00 am

-Reviewed by Ian Chung-

Bugsworth Diary

A strong sense of place pervades the poems in Neil Campbell’s Bugsworth Diary, published by The Knives Forks and Spoons Press. In an interview with Irish writer Nuala Ní Chonchúir for her blog Women Rule Writer, Campbell remarks, ‘I write poems sometimes, entirely on instinct. Landscape is playing an increasing role in both [my poetry and fiction]. In fact, all my poems are nature poems really.’ In the same way that Egdon Heath behaves like a character in Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native, Campbell’s chapbook is dominated by the natural environment of Derbyshire and the Peak District, as the poet chronicles (all of the poems are dated) moments spent in its surroundings.

Birds are one of the creatures that constantly pop up in these poems. In particular, jackdaws seem to recur the most, with what they signify changing slightly with each (re)appearance. Early on in the sequence, they are a thwarted expectation: ‘Waiting for jackdaws / It’s a raven that comes first’ (‘Black Roses over Portobello’). In ‘Black Brook Heron’, around the middle of Bugsworth Diary, they have become something that can be counted upon, a cyclical pattern of nature (‘Contemplating the return / Of jackdaws at dusk’). As the poems emerge from ‘previous months of winter light’ (‘Jackdaw Fly-Past’), the poet develops a keener awareness of the particularity of this bird:

So close that for the first time

I could appreciate the silver

On their necks, missed at a distance

And mistaken for black

In previous months of winter light.

Although they make appearances in subsequent poems, ‘Jackdaws on Election Day’ feels like the culmination of this species’ trajectory in this chapbook. The poem is dated May 6th, 2010, polling day for the UK election that ultimately saw the current Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition gain power. The jackdaws are transformed into a figure of consolation for the poet (‘I didn’t know what to do, where to put myself / And I was drawn to the jackdaws at dusk’), and this is predicated upon the element of reliability already established by the earlier poems (‘I had watched them so many times before’). Interestingly though, the poem ends with the emphasis of this expectation of reassurance, rather than its fulfilment: ‘I saw there and like never before needed them / To lift from the trees that second time.’

This deferral is suggestive, especially when read against a poem like ‘What We Look For In Animals’, one of the shortest poems in Bugsworth Diary. Given its title, the poem reads like a warning against ascribing too much significance to nature and its patterns. The ‘woman next door’ and the cows do not appear to interact, and although the cows ‘look at her curiously’, they do so ‘While dropping great quantities of shit’, completely undermining any attempt at poeticising the moment. By the next stanza, they ‘turn away and follow each other / To the other side of the field’, while another stanza later, the woman ‘goes inside’, retreating from an abortive encounter with nature. To call this rejection on the cows’ part would only be to fall into the same trap of investing the animals with human agency. What they display would better be described as indifference.

Yet this indifference cannot run both ways. While nature’s cycles can affect human activities (think natural disasters), they also carry on regardless of us (think seasons), whereas human activities are constantly modifying the natural world, practically inviting interference from it at times (think flooding of seafront residences). This is brought home most forcefully by Campbell in the final portion of ‘Chinley Chernobyl’:

I had been enjoying

My Monday morning until the

Part when I came upon

A demolished factory littered

Around the base of a still

Standing though condemned

Chimney. And I realised that

Something resembling a disaster

Resided among these green hills.

Later that night some damp wood

I’d put on the fire began

To stink, and I wondered what

I might be breathing.

The alliteration of the title and ‘Chimney’ points out the industrial aspect of the ‘disaster / Resid[ing] among these green hills’. The sound of ‘demolished’ finds an echo within ‘condemned’, with the consonantal ‘d’ carried over into ‘disaster’, and later, ‘damp wood’, as if infecting and contaminating the latter. Those final lines highlight how the threat emanating from nature can in a way be an unanticipated punishment brought down upon ourselves for our inability to leave nature alone. That said, on the whole Bugsworth Diary did not particularly strike me as an attempt at environmental activism via poetry. What it did seem to be was a heartfelt celebration of the refuge that nature can still provide for the human psyche, if we learn to just be in it and allow it to do its work, as opposed to us trying to work it.

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Fiction Reviews: A 2011 ‘Top Ten’

In End of year round-up on December 17, 2011 at 10:05 am

-Decided by Richard T. Watson-

It’s the time of year for lists again: lists of things, lists of people, lists of events and occasionally, just occasionally, lists of lists. I think lists of lists are my favourite.

It’s also a time to look for Christmas presents. Sabotage’s own Claire Trévien has already provided a Top Ten list of pamphlets for the poetry-lover in your life (or soon-to-be poetry-lover, once you’ve wowed them with your poetry pamphlet selection), so now here’s a list of suggestions from Sabotage’s fiction division. A Christmas Top Ten, if you like, of prose presents for the people in your life who like a bit of short story or novella every now and then.

I say it’s a Christmas Top Ten… It’s not a Top Ten based on any sort of reader feedback, bestseller charts or in-depth critical reading on my part. [The critical thinking has mostly been done by Sabotage's reviewers, who are a lovely and hard-working bunch – thanks, guys!] I’m basing my list roughly on our most popular reviews on Sabotage, so maybe even if you don’t get the books themselves you can enjoy the reviews while hiding away from the family over Christmas and New Year. But y’know, the books are worth getting hold of too.

It’s more of a ‘Who did well this year’ list. Oh, and there’s only three entries, not ten. So, maybe a Christmas Sabotage Fiction Top Three…

1. Armchair/Shotgun #2 (indeed, all of their issues, but we covered the second) has an admirably egalitarian attitude to authorship, claiming: ‘Good writing does not know one MFA program from another. It does not know a PhD from a high school dropout…and it does not care what you have written before. Good writing knows only story.’ Good storytelling is central to Armchair/Shotgun #2, with our reviewer (Rory O’Sullivan) saying: ‘Many of the pieces illustrate grassroots story-telling at its very best [...] and there is a freshness and a spice to this collection that brings to mind the originality of the Beat generation.’

2. We’ve had a review of Steam-Powered: Lesbian Steampunk Stories before Sabotage had a fiction division (I’m going to keep calling it a division, until someone suggests a better word), but the follow-up publication, Steam-Powered II: More Lesbian Steampunk Stories definitely makes this list in its own right. Both collections have been popular on Sabotage, and they sound like really great reads. Certainly if our reviewer’s opinion is anything to go by (and it is). The review (by Tori Truslow) says: ‘this anthology was a marvel to read, a real magical mystery airship tour crewed by rebel mechanics and guerrilla historians. If the first Steam-Powered was daring, the second is dazzling.’

3. My third entry to this list is a bit of a cop-out. We’ve reviewed both of the anthology publications from Unthank Books this year, winningly entitled Unthologies, and both have sounded well worth the read. Ian Chung reviewed Unthology #1 back in April, and agreed that it ‘largely achieves what it sets out to do in terms of ‘showcasing unconventional, unpredictable and experimental stories’ and ‘inject[ing] fresh venom into the shorter form’.’ Then Elinor Walpole reviewed Unthology #2 in October and concluded: ‘With such a variety of styles, voices and visions of what it is to be human, I believe that this makes up a very decent and edgy selection of ‘resonant tales for anxious times’.’

I’m also going to add this one (Ian Farnell’s review of Stefan Tegenfalk’s Anger Mode) in as a consolation fourth place, mainly because it’s amusing and references Bruce Springsteen a few times.

Finally, on a deliberately Christmas-themed note: if you haven’t bought presents yet, can I ask a favour of you? It’s not a difficult one, don’t worry.

If you’re willing to shop online, please have a browse through the retailers on Sabotage’s Spend and Raise page. Spend and Raise allows not-for-profits like Sabotage to raise a bit of cash via the commission on your online Christmas shopping – most importantly, it doesn’t cost you anything extra: you pay the amount you’d pay anyway, and Sabotage is given a percentage. All you have to do is go to the retailers through our Spend and Raise page, instead of directly.

Thanks a bunch, we really appreciate it.

Happy Christmas, and merry reading!

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‘Dark Steps’ by Martin Pond

In anthology, Short Stories on November 29, 2011 at 11:15 am

-Reviewed by Ian Chung-

Dark Steps, by Martin Pond, reviewed by Ian Chung

As a reviewer, I always find it exciting to re-encounter a writer’s work in a different context. In this case, my first introduction to Martin Pond’s work was back when I reviewed Unthank Books’ Unthology 1 back in April, which includes the subtly disquieting ‘Waiting Room’, here positioned as the first story in Pond’s Dark Steps collection. The power of this dystopian tale is primarily derived from the growing discrepancy between the knowledge possessed by the narrator and that available to the reader. When the ending comes, it is not entirely a surprise for the reader, but it still packs a punch because of that discrepant awareness. These related techniques—narrator-reader gap and ending with a twist—are exploited throughout the rest of the collection, albeit with varying degrees of success.

Instances where I think they fall short are the festive-themed stories like ‘Egg’ and ‘A Bit Christmassy’, where the reader is able to assemble the full picture too easily, and therefore anticipate the twist too early in the story. Another is ‘Dream Feed’, where the story’s denouement does not feel sufficiently rewarding. Pond mentions in the introduction to the collection that this one was ‘an exercise in writing what [he] like[s] to read – the unsettling short story with a twist ending’, and I think this was one that needed to move further away from the ‘exercise’ aspect in order to really take off as a story. There are interesting elements swirling around, to do with the baby, the Latin overheard on the baby monitor, the temperature dropping in the nursery etc. The potential for profoundly disturbing horror is there, but in the story’s current form, it has been curtailed in exchange for a moment of emotional release: ‘For the first time since our daughter had moved into her own room, the nursery was suddenly filled with crying.’

On the other hand, when the techniques succeed, the outcome is masterful. In ‘Resolution’, using a countdown to the New Year to segment the narrator’s stream of consciousness allows the story to rapidly cover a swath of emotional terrain, only for the ending to take a decidedly sinister turn. The final word, however, is given to the crowd’s cheer of ‘Happy New Year!’, which juxtaposes the normalcy of the occasion and the narrator’s deviant decision in the preceding paragraph to great effect. Or consider ‘Near-Death Experience’, where the surprise reveal of what has really been going on throughout the story comes in its very last paragraph, but this forces the reader to rethink the significance of everything that has just been read. Like ‘Dream Feed’, the twist ending does not provide complete explanations, though in the case of ‘Near-Death Experience’, I think this feeling of incompletion that the reader is left with is less frustrating than intriguing.

Dark Steps closes with two slightly longer pieces. Pond notes that ‘The Inheritance’ was ‘the first complete story [he] wrote after resuming writing in 2007’, and that he ‘had grand plans for this, once’. Reading it, one can definitely see its influence on his subsequent work, although he is right that its central twist, which is integral to the story’s logic, probably does not stand up to the plausibility test. It is also possible to see what Pond means by ‘grand plans’, as the ending of the story does feel more like the finish of an opening chapter than the last word for the character.

This in turn brings me to Pond’s ongoing online novel, the opening of which is excerpted in Dark Steps. The project began in June 2010, and the excerpt combines the first four posts he made on the blog. I found the excerpt promising, and looking at the cast of characters Pond has posted on the blog, it certainly seems like the story has expanded considerably beyond what is offered in the Dark Steps excerpt. Pond’s stated goal is to post a few hundred words every Friday, which reminds me of the way 19th century novels used to be serialised, or more recently in 2002, when The Guardian serialised Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White.

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‘Anatomically Incorrect Sketches of Marine Animals’ by Sarah Dawson

In Kindle chapbook, online chapbook, Pamphlets on October 20, 2011 at 9:42 am

-Reviewed by Ian Chung-

Since this is a review of a chapbook designed for the Kindle, in the interests of full disclosure I should mention that I have never owned one. Nor do I plan to, no matter how shiny the various companies make their e-readers. (To be fair, I do read on my iPhone, but mainly stuff on McSweeney’s Small Chair app that has been specially formatted for it.) I probably own enough books to start my own library lending service, and though my bookshelves at home and at university are groaning under the weight, I would not have it any other way. This is less a case of my hating the digital revolution, and more a case of my remaining largely indifferent to this aspect of it.

 

Frankly, the experience of reading Sarah Dawson’s chapbook, Anatomically Incorrect Sketches of Marine Animals, has not changed my mind about e-books. This, however, has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of the poetry or its presentation, both of which are excellent. On her blog Poetry After Ink, Dawson states that her goal was to self-publish a group of poems she was proud of. As for choosing the Kindle format? In her own words, ‘I kept reading that formatting poetry for Kindle was close to impossible, and I wanted to prove it wasn’t.’ I read the chapbook on both the Kindle for iPhone and for PC apps, and I have to say that whatever Dawson did in terms of formatting (details in this blog entry), it works perfectly, e.g. line breaks are preserved when resizing the text.

 

Turning to the poetry, there will always be those who remain sceptical about the quality of self-published work. This is not the place to rehash the debate, apart from registering my assent to Dawson’s comment that ‘[t]he ideas that digital formats cheapen poetry, and that all self published writers are terrible are self perpetuating’. Far from being terrible, Dawson’s poems are lyrical observations, shot through with imagery that is tactile and visceral. The opening poem, ‘Barceloneta, May 2010’, is short enough to quote in full:

You were mining breaststroke – the universal

sign for swimming. Found the beach, whilst I was

 

watching silken laundry sea that lapped the

pillars. Beneath, fish were sewn from thousands

 

of silk scraps – seams that faced out, unhemmed

loose threads, labels, that you ached to cut

 

they brushed each other; coats they ached to shrug off

 

There is a patterning of sounds in this poem, an ebb and flow to the manner in which they appear, go away, reemerge in new configurations. The image of the ‘silken laundry sea’ introduced in the second couplet regulates the rest of the poem’s sounds. The fish become transformed into ‘silk scraps’, as if they have merged with the sea at an essential level. Yet when the poem performs its own merging by pulling in the ‘m’ sound from the first couplet, a curious moment of linguistic play occurs. Pronouncing a word like ‘unhemmed’ presses the lips together, but the meaning points to something coming undone. Cleverly, ‘seam’ is also linguistically janiform, since it can mean both a junction and a fissure. The tension between these two impulses, to join and to separate, is caught up again by the last line, where ‘brushed’ echoes ‘breaststroke’ in the first, even as the fish are still trapped in ‘coats they ached to shrug off’. It is inconceivable not to acknowledge such patterned economy of language as deserving admiration.

 

Another example of Dawson’s craftsmanship occurs in ‘Lug worms, rag worms’. On her blog, Dawson mentions that this poem began life as a pantoum, which she subsequently edited down. The version that appears in the chapbook has been pared down further, and while no longer recognisable as a pantoum per se, still does something interesting in the way bits of the repeated lines seemingly ‘burrow’ into each other, like ‘worms’ moving through the ‘sand’ of the poem. As the poem comes to a graceful finish, ‘Plucked from / our burrows, now exposed, our frayed threads / antagonize each other’, the compass of its central metaphor expands to connect worms and people in the same predicament, the threat of being ‘exposed’, of being made vulnerable. Where a lesser poet might have worked in a pun on ‘bristle’ and linked it with ‘antagonize’, Dawson’s use of the unrepeated ‘exposed’ stands out as a moment of subtlety.

 

Earlier, I stated my lack of interest in e-books. (At least when it comes to buying my own reading material. I read plenty of digital stuff for reviews!) To reiterate, this has never been a value judgement, but purely a question of personal preference. Perhaps then, the highest compliment I can pay Dawson’s chapbook in closing is to say that had it been published as a physical chapbook, I would have happily bought it, which is what I normally do anyway when I read something I like online that is also sold in hard copy. As it stands though, in the case of Dawson’s chapbook e-reader converts certainly have one up on people like me, and I am glad to admit it.

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‘An Animal’s Guide to Earthly Salvation’ by Jack R. Johnson

In Novella on September 23, 2011 at 2:10 pm

-Reviewed by Ian Chung-

In Jack R. Johnson’s An Animal’s Guide to Earthly Salvation, protagonist Jeffrey Rawlings is an assistant at a veterinary clinic, but as the publisher’s blurb notes, ‘it’s not just the animals that need a cure’. Jeff’s family is rife with dysfunction, from his hypochondriac mother Dorothy, to his sister Caroline with dollar signs for eyes, and not to forget the overbearing Uncle Raymond, who has spent his whole life making Jeff feel bad about himself. The neighbourhood Jeff lives in is no walk in the park either, especially when resident transvestite Scott starts handing drugs to Clara, the runaway whom Jeff suspects of being underage after he has slept with her. All in all, a crazy cast of characters that seems ripe with comedic potential.

Oddly though, I think this potential doesn’t get explored fully in the course of the narrative. There is that moment in Chapter Seven where Jeff has brought Clara to visit his mother in the hospital (who was finally warded at the start of the story with an actual life-threatening illness), and at the end, out of Clara’s earshot, Dorothy says to Jeff, ‘She is sweet. But…that girl doesn’t eat enough’, rather than commenting on her chewed and dirty fingernails or her dubious political affiliations. Otherwise, a lot of the humour in An Animal’s Guide to Earthly Salvation involving the human characters tends to come across as overly scripted. Even what should have been the big reveal of Jeff’s mother and Uncle Raymond’s affair in the next chapter feels like it was included for the sake of further (and somewhat predictably) complicating the entanglements of the Rawlings family.

On the other hand, when the animals become involved, the story can rise to a blackly comic level or invoke moments of pathos. Chapter One actually opens promisingly in the former vein, with Jeff trying to break a dead Doberman’s legs, so he can take it out of a cage and to the dumpster. Except he fails and a colleague has to do it for him with a fire extinguisher because ‘That’s the way you have to do it.’ Cue shift of gears in Chapter Two, when Dr. Fitzhugh at the clinic appears to save a German Shepherd through nothing more than the sheer power of prayer. It might be cheesy to some, and Jeff himself is clearly sceptical, but honestly, what kind of person would you have to be in order to hope for that dog to die?

Perhaps the problem with An Animal’s Guide to Earthly Salvation is that after getting through it, a reader might sense that there are two competing stories trying to be told here. One has to do with Jeff’s human relationships, although even the strand of the plot that tracks his relationship with Clara, the most sustained one apart from the drama revolving around Dorothy’s illness, is more a stutter-stop affair than something that organically evolves. The other attempts to tie together animals and philosophy, dropping in a bit of Kierkegaard here and there, while offering up handy aphorisms like ‘Humans are animals that failed’. Yet even Johnson’s breezily readable prose style, capable as it is of propelling readers through the book’s largely episodic structure, is not quite enough to seamlessly stitch the two stories together.

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