Reviews of the Ephemeral

Posts Tagged ‘Ian Chung’

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Curbside Quotidian #3

In Magazine, online magazine on August 17, 2011 at 6:48 pm

-Reviewed by Ian Chung-

There is a range of strong and enjoyable work to be found in Issue 3 of Curbside Quotidian, although the featured artwork in particular is quite diverse, and not all of it may appeal. Personally, I found the two strongest to be Inge Hoonte’s Simulated Travel and Eleanor Bennett’s Sleep Anywhere. The former is a very simple black surface, over which text marches from left to right and five dotted arrows run through the text from top to bottom. The visual impact verges on being clinically sparse, yet pay closer attention and details like how the dotted arrows cut through ‘i’s in the text will emerge, evoking the deeper organising principles underpinning the artwork. The crux of the piece then seems to be the last line of text, ‘get immobility bonus for not flying anywhere’, as Hoonte is interested in ‘how notions of privacy, identity, and behavioral routines shape the tension between reaching out and keeping one’s distance in interpersonal communication and physicality’.

Visually speaking, Bennett’s Sleep Anywhere is the complete opposite of Hoonte’s piece. The colours here are lush and vibrant, but what is most striking is that brilliant blue iris staring out of the top-right quadrant of the artwork. The other eye is not exactly obscured by leaf litter, but because it is still cast in shadow, what is a beautiful image is given a subtly disquieting feel, intentionally or otherwise, as if there were something off-kilter about it that yet cannot be pinned down with any certainty. This juxtaposition of moods finds an echo in one of the poems, Daniel Fitzsimmons’s ‘Underfoot’, which opens with the violently visceral (but sonically pitch-perfect in its alliteration) ‘A dead cardinal is crushed crimson’, yet closes with a measure of wistfulness:

‘and the swift-footed commuters

slowed for a moment to wonder

if the photos hanging on the walls

upstairs were black and white.’

The editors of Curbside Quotidian must also be commended for their lively sense of humour, which surely played a part in their choosing to publish a poem like Kevin Heaton’s ‘Castaway’. Poems concerning literary rejection may run the risk of sounding bitter, but Heaton’s poem deftly avoids this by approaching rejection from a subtly different perspective. Rather than writing a poem about rejection from the poet’s point of view, he goes a step further and imagines a poet rejecting a literary magazine’s request that he take out a subscription. Substitute a few nouns here and there, and the poem would read like any polite form rejection from an editor, which detractors might say is too gimmicky, but as a one-off, I find it quite ingenious. The shape of the poem on the screen also plays on this familiarity with rejection by editors, with indents drawing attention to phrases like ‘thoroughly / reviewed the work’ and ‘lacking / in laudable characteristics’.

It is in the fiction offerings though, that Issue 3 of Curbside Quotidian really shines. The element of humour is again displayed in a story like Yaki Margulies’s ‘Failed Expectations’, which imagines what would happen if God actually came back to Earth and started living a celebrity lifestyle, only to become fed up with humanity all over again. Zealots will probably take offense, but more level-headed believers should be able to appreciate the satire, especially given the rise of megachurches and their celebrity pastors. Also carrying on the religious theme is Christine Utz’s ‘Ingénue: A Girl in Three Parts’. The three-part structure of the story may be a nod to the concept of the divine Trinity, but its subject matter is strictly mortal. The love stories that unfold grow progressively weirder, and by the third section ‘3. The Herpetologist’, the narrator is in a relationship with what is clearly stated to be a lizard. Even leaving aside the metaphorical implications of shedding one’s skin (‘To ask him to claw me so my new skin could emerge, too.’), this narrative hangs together precisely because it is never self-conscious about its oddity, allowing the story to coast smoothly to its end.

On the other hand, Danny Lalonde’s ‘\A Simple Function\’ deliberately fractures language, repeatedly defining (or appearing to define) specific words at scattered intervals. There is something almost schizophrenic in the way these definitions are mixed together with the parsing of grammatical functions, snatches of Robert Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken’, and the refrain ‘a space and then a line’. This effect is heightened by the story’s being narrated in the second person, a relatively uncommon choice, but which impels the reader to inhabit the story as it is being read. Finally, it is also worth pointing out that Nick Kowalczyk has an excellent non-fiction piece in Issue 3. ‘Dispatches From Home’ details through a mixture of anecdote and reportage Kowalczyk’s relationship to his hometown of Lorain, Ohio, and is an excerpt from a longer work that I would very much like to see in its completion.

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Brittle Star #27

In Magazine on August 4, 2011 at 11:05 am

-Reviewed by Ian Chung-

For a literary magazine that has been around for more than 10 years, Brittle Star’s online presence still feels curiously disorganised, despite the official website having been revamped in March 2010. A quick check with Google reveals that Issue 28 is already out and the magazine is reading for Issue 29, but on the magazine’s official website, clicking on a picture headed ‘Latest issue’ leads to a separate WordPress blog entry about Issue 27 (bizarrely, the actual URL ends in ‘/issue-24/’). Neither the blog nor the magazine’s Facebook and Twitter accounts have been updated since January 2011. If this were my favourite literary magazine, I would regard the effort required for keeping up-to-date with what it was doing as bordering on excessively complicated.

That said, it would be a shame if potential readers/subscribers missed out on Brittle Star because of this. For as Issue 27 proves, there is commendable work to be found in this slim magazine. The official website notes that Brittle Star ‘has earned a reputation for providing a platform for writers at the beginning of their careers, many of whom have seen their work in print for the first time’. In this issue, one such writer is Nick Boyes, whose poem ‘To a Slug’ strikes a balance between applying a child-like imagination to nature’s creatures (‘The ant is a Victorian strongman’) and deploying a more adult awareness (‘the hiding spider / is a cold war secret agent’, ‘you slug, you are a fat friendless child / who doesn’t know why’).

This knowingness also manifests itself in poems like Terry Jones’s ‘Birdsong’ and Michael Bartholomew-Biggs’s ‘A Beginner’s Guide to Fructiculture’. In ‘Birdsong’, ‘Their call-and-repeat-and-warn tapestries’ are immediately reinterpreted in the next line as ‘Sung territories of threat and feathered lust’. The sonic echoes in word pairs ‘tapestries’/‘territories’ and ‘threat’/‘feathered’ (with ‘repeat’ creating a visual triple) subtly reinforce the transformation of meaning. Although the poem closes with the apparently hopeful ‘Somewhere Cuckoo muscles into light’, in opposition to the evocative phrasing of ‘a dark rain of birdsong’, one wonders if a more ambivalent reading is not called for. The previous line (‘Rook guards his crown of thorns’) contains a Biblical allusion to the Crucifixion, which in turn points back to the rook’s folkloric association with death. Furthermore, many cuckoo species are brood parasites, laying their eggs in other birds’ nests, so the element of deceit further undercuts the attempt to read the ending as hopeful.

With ‘A Beginner’s Guide to Fructiculture’, Bartholomew-Biggs relocates the fruit of the Holy Spirit from Galatians 5 to a literal garden. The language of cultivation admirably sustains the conceit with startling ease, allowing the poet to play with both levels of meaning throughout the poem. While the final injunction concerning ‘Self-control’ is to ‘Prune away / extravagant growth’, this is surely not an issue for this poem. While the poem is not divided into stanzas, each attribute is economically dealt with in what almost feel like three-line aphorisms. Personal favourites follow:

Low-bush Kindnesses

are easy to pick. They bruise

with careless handling.

Small unassuming

Blossoms mark true Goodness from

Self-righteous hybrids.

Brittle Star also features short articles and literary fiction, and in this issue, Brittle Star intern Saskia Katarina Hidas’s article on the Norwegian poet Gunvor Hofmo is particularly interesting, drawing attention to a European post-WW2 poet who has been compared to Paul Celan and Emily Dickinson. However, in comparison to the featured poetry, the fiction largely feels like it falls short. Luke Thompson’s ‘Quick small steps’ is too chatty without seeming to go anywhere in the end. As for Michael Ranes’s ‘Jani and the boy’, it should just manage to avoid giving offense despite its unsubtle treatment of racial themes, seeing as there is always the excuse that the entire story is ultimately mediated through a biracial narrator. Even if that revelation feels more gratuitous than illuminating.

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‘The Tradesman’s Entrance’ by Cameron Vale

In Novella on July 12, 2011 at 4:00 pm

-Reviewed by Ian Chung-

The Tradesman's Entrance by Cameron Vale, published by Vagabondage Press

If humour writing were crossed with erotica, one imagines the result would read something like Cameron Vale’s The Tradesman’s Entrance, a novelette from independent publisher Vagabondage Press. The ‘About Us’ page at the publisher’s website states that they ‘dislike the tendency in mainstream publishing to categorize and pigeonhole authors and their work into literary ghettos’, going on to declare ‘a commitment to providing an alternative’. Indeed, with its frank (but not entirely gratuitous) descriptions of gay sex, it is hard to imagine a work like Vale’s being put out by any of the mainstream publishers today, even if the sex is really secondary to what the publisher calls a ‘laugh-out-loud gay romantic comedy and treatise on class dynamics’.

For on one level, The Tradesman’s Entrance really is a straightforward story about fantasy coming to life. Protagonist Stephen Patterson writes romance novels for a living under the pseudonym Patience DeVere, but as the reader subsequently discovers, he also happens to be a virgin. As if just to pile trope upon trope, Vale introduces Dave the plumber (hence the title’s sexual pun) two pages into the first half of the novelette, Act I – Unexpected: Stage Left. Dave conveniently happens to be ‘a tall, tanned Adonis…sprung straight from the pages of one of [Stephen’s] over-wrought novels — dark, shoulder-skimming hair glinting copper in the sunlight, tastily trim and muscular body squeezed, but not entirely contained, by a low-slung pair of blue jeans and a tight, white workman’s vest’.

What follows is plenty of bantering between the two men over cups of tea and biscuits, which primarily serves to build up sexual tension that gets consummated in the second half of the novelette, unsubtly headed, Act II: The Cherry-Popping of Patience de Vere. Admittedly though, it is entertaining, watching Dave steadily break through Stephen’s uptight defences (psychological and physical alike), and ultimately, bed him in graphic fashion. As far as repartee goes, Vale’s writing is slick and solid enough to carry the fantasy forward, seeing it through even to its perfect ending that has been telegraphed pages before it actually takes place.

Yet what saves The Tradesman’s Entrance from being simply a casual romp is precisely how self-aware the storytelling is. From the sprinkling of deliberately bad writing (courtesy of Stephen’s abortive attempts at his new Clarissa Hart romance novel) to the grotesque physical perfection of plumber Dave, it is hard to escape the feeling that while Vale is unabashedly deploying the tropes of the erotica genre at full force, she is also implicitly skewering them because of how over the top their cumulative effect is. Personally speaking, there is also something aesthetically satisfying about the circularity of the narrative, all that sexual comedy being bookended by scenes of Stephen writing at his desktop. (I would definitely read a novel called The Biscuit Tin Philosopher.) The biographical note at the very end tosses out one last titbit, revealing that ‘Cameron Vale’ is itself a pen name. Calling The Tradesman’s Entrance metafictional would be a stretch, of course. It is, however, undoubtedly a good-natured blending of two writing genres that are not the most obvious of bedfellows.

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‘The Day of Small Things’ (Valley Press)

In anthology on July 5, 2011 at 1:02 pm

-Reviewed by Ian Chung-

The Day of Small Things is the second charity publication put out by Valley Press, a publishing house based in Scarborough, North Yorkshire. It features articles, photographs and creative writing by supporters of the Bridlington Romanian Project, which is aimed at helping those living in a Romanian shanty town named Odoreu. The impetus for the project came from Bridlington resident Val Taylor, who first encountered the plight of ordinary Romanians more than 10 years ago, when she was visiting Romanian orphanages as a volunteer with the Women’s Voluntary Service. However, the catalyst for her to act occurred nearer to the present day (as recounted in the book’s forward), when she received a call inviting her to revisit the country. Funded fully by donations, The Day of Small Things is but one expression of Taylor’s continuing efforts to improve the lives of the Romanians in Odoreu, which have thus far included building wells to supply them with clean water and ferrying gift boxes from the UK to Romania.

On the back cover of the book, it reads: ‘It is hoped the book will raise awareness and generate funds to continue offering the hands of friendship and faith which have achieved so much so far.’ That phrase ‘friendship and faith’ is instructive. As the project is based out of Christ Church, Bridlington, there is a very strongly Christian element in the accounts describing the work that has been done, as well as in the creative writing that is interspersed throughout them and collected in a separate section in the second half of the book. Nonetheless, the aim of the book is assuredly not so much to proselytise as to highlight the work that has been, is being, and still remains to be done. In this respect, the book is unquestionably successful.

In a brief introduction to the creative writing section, Valley Press author Deirdre McGarry explains that most of it was the fruit of a workshop that she ran at Christ Church. It consists mainly of rhyming verse and haiku, accompanied by several short prose pieces. The poems are by and large disarmingly touching, almost like nursery rhymes, except rather than returning the reader to the incantatory simplicity of those familiar childhood nursery rhymes, what one gets instead are poems that poignantly narrate the stories of the Romanians in Odoreu and those from Bridlington who have tried to do whatever they can to help. What also makes the creative writing pieces interesting is how they have been inspired by photographs, usually printed alongside the pieces, thus becoming a demonstration of ordinary people reacting to the extraordinary circumstances depicted in the photographs.

On the Valley Press webpage for this book, it states that ‘every penny made from sales of the book goes towards providing more of the aid and friendship which have achieved so much already, and will continue for many years to come’. Reading The Day of Small Things, there is a pervading sense that while much has been accomplished so far for Odoreu, even more remains to be done, and more importantly, that the people of Bridlington possess the will to make this happen. This slim volume is a step in that direction, and deserves to be supported. Purchasing it may be a small act, but as the book repeatedly emphasises, even small acts are not to be despised.

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Saboteur Awards – The Results

In Saboteur Awards on June 16, 2011 at 5:40 pm

Saboteur Awards

The Saboteur Awards are a new award celebrating literary magazines. Over the last few weeks, a team of volunteer judges have been poring over the shortlist, posting to each other copies of the print magazines, getting angry at the mail and dealing with technical hitches. Whilst the top three became clear early in the discussion process, judges were impressed with many of the other shortlisted magazines. Positives could be found even in the magazines that were described as ‘not being my cup of tea’ (can you tell that the majority of judges were British?) In light of this, we would be happy to provide any of the magazines shortlisted with feedback, should they be interested in the particulars (get in touch at editor@sabotagereviews.com).

The magazines that most impressed us were those that had a unity of purpose, in other words a strong, cohesive editorial vision. Their design matched and enhanced their content. We feel that our top three deserve recognition for the contributions they’ve made to the literary world. They are exciting, innovative, fresh, and stretched the boundaries of what we thought literary magazines could achieve.

1st Place: Polarity

Judges were impressed by Polarity’s ambition and praised the range of formal innovations within its pages. They commended its strong editorial and aesthetic vision and deemed the magazine as ‘not just displaying art, but being a piece of art itself, without the form taking away from the content’. The theme of ‘Tax vs Death’ was deemed broad enough to allow inspired approaches, whilst still being a cohesive and echoing thread. The integration of the visual with the textual was seen as a particular success. Finally, as one judge said: ‘Who would have thought that surrealism could feel so…welcoming? […]  I could pay no higher compliment to the magazine than to say it has fostered in me a newfound appreciation for surrealism in art/literature.’

2nd Place: >kill author

Judges were all agreed that this was an outstanding magazine that successfully made use of the internet. Whilst conceptual and experimental, the content was still deemed accessible. Judges admired the integration of poetry with prose (and resulting cross pollinations). The slick, minimalist website received high praise; one judge said it was ‘like Jil Sander in website form’. As one judge said: ‘It was one of those things that made me glad that I’m alive now – in the times of the internet, anonymity and internationalist art. It really grasps the spirit of our time for me.’

3rd Place: La Petite Zine

La Petite Zine was deemed a touchstone for experimental poetry in bite-size forms. The content was found to be of high quality with one judge commenting on the ‘brilliant variety of truly potent poems’. The website was admired for being minimalist, clean, functional, yet iconic. In particular, judges appreciated the taglines that led into each poem. La Petite Zine, again, has clearly embraced the internet as a medium, and its multi-platform presence was praised.

Highly Commended for its use of web-integration: Moon Milk Review

A running interest during discussions was whether the magazines fully made use of their chosen medium’s potential. In particular we paid attention to online magazines that attempted to go beyond what a print magazine could achieve. For instance, judges appreciated the integration of recordings/video in Stone Telling (as well as in Goblin Fruit) as an example of added value and accessibility.

However, the magazine that most impressed us in terms of web integration was Moon Milk Review. The magazine was praised for its abundant use of links, giving the impression that it was a fruitful launching pad. As one judge said:

‘that’s what beautiful (and dangerous) about the web – everything links up together and there’s a vast sea of information out there. Most other zines we’ve looked at feel much more insular by comparison, [...]linking to other places is something you can’t do in print and as such is very much an advantage of the online form. Moon Milk Review gives us an article you can dig around if you like, or can skim over if you don’t like it.’

The use of YouTube was also appreciated, whilst the Prosetry section was praised for taking advantage of the online platform and reinventing communication between the visual and the textual.

The judges were Anna Bogdanova, Ian Chung, Caroline Crew, Claire Trévien and Richard T. Watson

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New Linear Perspectives (Subversion Edition, April 2011)

In Magazine on April 30, 2011 at 10:38 am

-Reviewed by Ian Chung-

New Linear Perspectives (NLP) is a Scotland-based literary arts and culture journal, edited by Andrew F. Giles and Claudia Massie. The site clearly intends to be comprehensive in its coverage of different aspects of culture, with a growing archive that already features art and film reviews, photography, as well as a variety of new writing that ranges from poetry to travel writing, short stories to mini-essays. April’s Subversion edition draws from the diversity of the journal, bringing together a review of Chengdu-based artists by Allan Harkness, two parts of an ongoing graphic tale by Chris Pritchett, and two short stories by Andrew McCallum Crawford.

Harkness’s piece on the artists at Blue House Studios is a follow-up to his earlier post at NLP, which is a compilation of the artists’ interview responses in which they explain the motivations that lie behind their creations. In this edition of NLP, Harkness proceeds to place the individual Chengdu artists in the wider context of a ‘Chinese painting faced with the end of modernity, with rampant technological rationalism and with the further prospect of postmodern epistemologies (phenomenology, deconstruction and multi-perspectivalism) rather than simply the issue of construction of an artworld infrastructure and market (currently so dominant in Beijing and Shanghai)’. While this is an interesting discussion, I suspect it may not necessarily appeal to readers who do not themselves already possess an interest in contemporary Chinese art. That said, the samples of artwork featured by NLP can be appreciated in their own right, especially the two works from Zhou Chunya’s Green Dog series, which are disturbing in the way they are simultaneously familiar (because they are dogs) and alienating (because they are so vividly green).

Described as ‘approach[ing] architecture from a dark-tinted viewpoint and evok[ing] a brand new, exciting netherworld for this discipline’, Pritchett’s The Keystone is an unconventional tale about Sisyphus, an architect who wants to tear down the Pumphuset in Uppsala, Sweden, and erect a new monument in its place. All for the city’s benefit, of course. In this edition of NLP, Part III lays out Sisyphus’s rationale for his grand project, while Part IV hints at further mysteries to come in connection with secrets the Chancellor is hiding and the gravestone that Sisyphus kneels at as he says, ‘I miss you. I miss you so much.’ The black-and-white artwork of the series is moderately stylised and its attention to detail stunning. One minor complaint I have is that the dialogue occasionally sounds forced, and a number of spelling errors have crept into the text too.

NLP calls Crawford’s two stories ‘short, sharp snapshots of relationships and macabre goings-on that are at once menacing and human’. This is accurate, although I would qualify the description by noting the stories pull it off with different degrees of success. In ‘Mac & Wills’, the central question initially appears to be whether the titular characters are a couple or not. Yet by the end of the story, the unnamed narrator confesses, ‘We never did work out if he and Mac were a couple. Nobody cared. Not really.’ Those last two statements are instructive, since there seems to me a danger of them not becoming fully developed characters, being described in reductive terms like ‘He hated lots of things’ (Mac) or ‘He was usually pissed, in a Brideshead Revisited sort of way’ (Wills). This makes it somewhat difficult to truly care about what goes down in the Astoria that makes Wills punch Mac with a sound ‘like a large cabbage hitting a wet floor’.

Finally, ‘Yin Eyes’ presents a writer living in a dilapidated basement flat with no heating, drinking weak tea made from reused tea bags and water ‘free of live bacteria’ (a small comic moment in an otherwise bleak story). This story is effective because rather than trying to compress whole lives into a single pivotal moment like ‘Mac & Wills’ does, what we get is a comparatively narrow slice in time, which opens up into a wider picture of the anonymous writer’s life. While he does not get up to much apart from making tea, listening to his next-door neighbour cry, and clearing away a dead cat, incidental details dropped in (‘The bags were a gift from the previous tenant’, ‘She sounded inconsolable, as she did every night’) hint at the possibility of human connection amidst (or in spite of) the seeming mundanity of his life. Even the closing line offers a gracefully understated moment of hope: ‘He felt himself smiling, although he was trying hard not to climb into hopes of a thaw.’

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Unthology #1

In anthology, Short Stories on April 3, 2011 at 2:20 pm

-Reviewed by Ian Chung-

In the introduction to Unthology 1, the editors offer the following comments:

‘Constraining the short story to a one or two thousand word limit…often produces what seem like protracted poems, all glittery surface but with no room to manifest a greater sense of significance or surprise. The longer story, the story unafraid to chase a few clouds, to play with chronology and form, the story that might have some semblance of plot-drive risks dying of neglect.’

While I personally disagree that reduced length is necessarily a hindrance to telling a good story (consider Ernest Hemingway’s economical and oft-cited ‘For sale: baby shoes, never worn’), I think it is fair to say that Unthology 1 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’.

Indeed, the 17 pieces in the anthology present strikingly different narratives, albeit with varying degrees of success. A case in point is Tessa West’s ‘Parallax’, where the recurrent definitions of photographic terminology provide an effective counterpoint to the main story about a relationship teetering on the edge of a breakdown. Ending with the definition of parallax (‘the difference between what the viewfinder sees and what the camera records, especially at close distances’) is a brilliant touch, but unfortunately one that has already been somewhat undermined by the too-obvious snatch of dialogue a few lines before:

“‘It’s important for us. It means something. I want you to see what’s happened.’”

More problematic (but for far more prosaic reasons) is Sherilyn Connelly’s ‘The Last Dog and Pony Show’. Here is a narrative that sensitively reveals how even ‘in the midst of the kinkiest of the kinky’, one can still be ‘an alien’:

‘i am alone. there is only me. i am here without her, just as i would be if she sat back down next to me.’

The subject matter is definitely intriguing, and animal role play is described here with a refreshing directness, but the 10-page account is sadly marred by typographical errors, consisting of repeated words and misplaced letters. The typographical issues do crop up occasionally elsewhere in the anthology, and the odd slip is certainly understandable, but an average that works out to one per page is surely too much for a single story.

Unthanks Books' Unthology #1, reviewed by Ian Chung, edited by Ashley Stokes and Robin Jones

On the other hand, there are many other points at which Unthology 1 rises to a level that has earned my profound respect. Michael Baker’s narrator in ‘Bleach’ manages to come across as both deeply unhinged and sympathetic, a tough effect to pull off. James Carter’s ‘Herringbone’, unlike many of the other stories, is unconcerned with human relationships, devoting itself instead to an extended meditation on the titular object/pattern that culminates in a stinging twist that really deserves not to be spoiled here. With ‘Waiting Room’, Martin Pond conjures up a near-futuristic world in which a boy is about to take a test, except no one will tell him what it is about, which has disastrous consequences for him.

The two novel extracts on offer also make for arresting reading. Viccy Adams’s extract from Doing it by the Book is a disquieting, Kafkaesque exploration of a man steadily losing his identity, although the ‘why’ is presumably addressed elsewhere in the full novel. Sarah Dobbs’s extract from The Lemonade Girl also ends on a mysterious note that left me wanting to read more, precisely because of how she had built up her protagonist in the preceding pages, this writer-professor with an enviable life who is now fighting his longing for an ex-girlfriend that seems tied to a sinister event in his past.

My highest praise, however, is reserved for editor Ashley Stokes’s ‘A Short Story About a Short Film’, which is exactly what its title says it is. The story that unfolds is told via footnotes to a screenplay of a short film Kaliningrad, recounting the circumstances of its conception and filming. The method recalls Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, or more recently, Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, and the technique is put to interesting effect here because the reader learns a lot about the character of Lloyd Fernery from what he says and how he says it. His obsession with the faithless and fickle Lucile Delph is both amusing and menacing in its intensity, particularly since the footnotes are explicitly directed at Lucile, as if she were watching the film. I can think of no better compliment to pay Stokes than to say that after I finished the story, I went and bought his first novel, Touching the Starfish, also available from Unthank Books.

It would be impracticable for me to discuss all 17 of the stories in Unthology 1, but as far as fulfilling its self-declared aims goes, I would say that Unthank Books has generally succeeded with this anthology. The stories are ‘unconventional, unpredictable and experimental’, and the overall effect ‘hard-hitting, hilarious and entertaining’. As an avenue for showcasing the short story form, which I agree with the editors tends to fall into the cracks between the markets for novels and poetry, I genuinely hope that the publisher continues putting out more volumes in this series. Given the judgement they have shown in assembling this one, the next anthology should prove an interesting read.

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End of Year Round-Up: The Reviewers

In End of year round-up on December 18, 2010 at 11:45 am

2010 was the year Sabotage went from being just a thought to a fully-fledged website. To celebrate not just the wonderful reviewers who are the backbone of this site, but also the literature that has made our year what it is, I have asked several reviewers to answer these three short questions:

-Has 2010 brought to your attention any outstanding literary magazines (be they online or in print), if so, which?

-What event sticks out in your mind as the literary event of 2010 (it can be a personal accomplishment)?

-What was your favourite literary discovery of the year (it can be a single poem, a novel, a pamphlet, a press, …)?

Below you will find the answers of several of this year’s reviewers, and in a few days I will publish the answers of several authors, both of poetry and fiction, who were kind enough to take part.

To make things fair, here are my brief answers, then I’ll hand it over to the reviewers:

-Obviously the creation of Sabotage has brought my attention to several excellent magazines. My favourite discovery is probably Diagram. I reviewed its Summer 2010 issue for The Review Review. It was a bit of a surprise favourite as I tend to prefer poetry to short stories. This is what I said about it in the review: ‘The fiction featured displays an obsessive relationship to dissection and decorticates genres, voices, people. Sometimes this mad-scientist effervescence overwhelms the content to the point of un-readability, but more often than not, it elates. Diagram is a welcome shock-therapy to more traditional online journals – a breath of unruly air displacing paperwork.’

-There are several events that I could cite, 2010 brought the death of two personal heavyweight: Edwin Morgan and J.D. Salinger. Though with the latter, I could not help but feel a certain morbid curiosity for the work he kept hidden, as if he were the guardian of a treasure and finally defeated by a cocky young hero who knew the answers to the riddle. On a personal level, it was getting two poems accepted by Poetry Salzburg Review, a magazine I have long admired for the consistent quality of its output, and its vibrantly multi-cultural authors.

-Now that’s definitely a tough one. I discovered James Merrill’s ‘Charles on Fire’ and Charles Causley’s ‘Convoy’ thanks to Katy Evans-Bush’s workshop Making Poetry at the Poetry School, both have stuck with me for days beyond reading. Amongst pamphlets, my favourites were Mark Halliday’s No panic here, Jon Stone’s Scarecrows and Joe Dunthorne’s Faber New Poets pamphlet. As far as collections go two stand out: Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard and Karen Annesen’s How to Fall.

The Reviewers (in no particular order):

Richard T. Watson is a writer and director who has reviewed several works for Sabotage, most recently two of Sidekick Books’ publications, Pocket Spellbook and Coin Opera. You can find his review here, and his blog here.

-Its focal hero might make it seem a tad outdated, but I’ve enjoyed the Ben Jonson Journal (which I discovered in 2010, but has been running for much longer). It’s one of the many things I came across as a student that I wanted to get into in more depth, but never had time because of the looming deadline thing. But what I did read of the BJJ helped with my Dissertation, and all of it was fascinating.

-It’s not that long since National Poetry Week, which included a BBC adaptation of Chris Reid’s poem The Song of Lunch on BBC Two – which I think is probably my literary event of the year (and not just for the connection to my own University). The poem was translated more or less directly to the screen without addition or abridgement, a rare case of bringing poetry to mainstream popular culture. Having Alan Rickman and Emma Thompson involved helps as well.

-My favourite literary discovery of 2010 is Julia Bird’s poem ‘For my Brother, Relentlessly’, which is published in Coin Opera, a micro-anthology from Sidekick Books. It’s a poem in nostalgic praise of  arcade game classic Space Invaders, laid out like the screen of a Space Invaders game. The text itself is simply the repeated question ‘Can I have a go on the Space Invaders now?’ – but what I especially like is the way that the title’s comma conjures an image of a small girl asking this of her brother without pausing for breath for several minutes. Then, when she does finally take a breath, she says ‘please’.

Juliet Wilson is a poet who has written a series of reviews on environmental literary magazines for Sabotage, her most recent review can be found here whilst her website is here.

-2010 was the year I really became aware of Anon Poetry magazine. I knew it existed and had read an old copy but this year they accepted two of my poems and I found myself at the wonderful launch party at the Scottish Poetry Library and bought more back copies. The current editor Colin Fraser really knows how to choose good poetry (not just because he chooses mine!) and there are also a selection of intelligent and thought provoking articles about poetry in the magazine. Add to this that its a lovely neat format and fits quite easily into a handbag or pocket for reading on the bus, definitely a great read. The anon website is here and they’re on Twitter too:

-The event that for me was the literary event of 2010 was (sorry to blow my own trumpet!) the launch of my poetry chapbook Unthinkable Skies by Calder Wood Press.

-My favourite literary discovery was Lorsque j’etais un oeuvre d’art by Eric Emanuel Schmitt, an amazing, weird and wonderful novel about a man who is saved from committing suicide by an art entrepreneur who offers him the chance to become a living piece of art. A thought provoking exploration of what it means to be human written with the narrative drive of a thriller. I don’t know whether it’s been translated into English. I always find that reading an exceptionally good book in a foreign language intensifies the experience for me, as I meed to concentrate more and there’s a real sense of achievement in the reading!

Ian Chung is a poet who blogs here and tweets here. His most recent review for Sabotage is of the arts-collective website Lazy Gramophone.

-Polarity Magazine comes to mind. I came to it quite by chance, as the chief editor happens to teach on my university course as well and there was a launch event held at the university. It’s a print magazine, very professionally done, with each issue being ‘organised around two falsely polarised concepts’. The magazine’s website has some excerpts from the first issue.
-I’m going to go with a personal accomplishment here, and that was getting a couple of my poems accepted by The Cadaverine. It was my third time submitting, so I guess it’s true, third time’s the charm! Seriously though, it was an honour for my work to be chosen, and I’m looking forward to seeing it appear on the newly revamped website.

-I’m going to say it was Tom McCarthy’s Remainder. In a seminar last year, I’d read the Zadie Smith essay, ‘Two Paths for the Novel’, in which she reviews Remainder and Joseph O’Neill’sNetherland, and was intrigued by how she saw them as representing opposing futures for the Anglophone novel. I’d meant to read Remainder since then, but only got around to doing so over the summer holidays. It’s definitely an interesting read, in the way that its protagonist escalates the cycles of repetition that are the only means by which his life can anchor itself meaningfully. Smith notes at the start of her essay that Remainder took seven years to find a publisher, which isn’t surprising, given how its structure deliberately defies the sort of marketable narrative that would sit nicely in a chain bookstore’s window display.

Caroline Crew is a poet and a prolific blogger of all things poetic here.  She reviewed Blue-eyed boy bait for Sabotage here.

-For me the publications that have really sung that this year have all had a really strong sense of identity and of purpose. Literary magazines and projects that eshcew the normal manifestos on the submissions page. The ones that have really struck me this year have been Fuselit– a gorgeous magazine that runs of a spur word. Popshot, the illustrated poetry magazine that brings together the visual and the verbal to stunning effect, and my current favourite, > kill author, an online magazine that helped me rid myself of the silly preconception that print is inherently better.

-Sadly, for me that would have to be the passing of Edwin Morgan, at the grand age of 90. He was the first Scots Makar, and when it comes down to it, just a absolutely stellar poet. The death of such an imagination leaves an abyss.
-Well, moving across the Atlantic has been strange for me in many ways, but the epic differences in the poetry being written was definitely the most astounding. My favourite discovery so far would have to be Ada Limon. I saw her read recently and bought her excellent collection, sharks in the rivers, and cannot let it be out of my reach.

Jared Randall is a poet who blogs here, his first book of poetry, Aprocryphal Road Code, is now available from Salt Publishing. He reviewed >kill author for Sabotage here.

-The Offending Adam is probably the most intriguing online lit mag to catch my eye this year. TOA has taken the online lit mag format and run with it. Editors Andrew Wessels and Co. present weekly features that you can read in a relatively few spare moments because they focus on (usually) a single poet’s work. This focused brevity includes a brief statement from the author or a third party about what they think of the work and how it has come into existence. What is more, TOA takes care to ensure this glimpse behind the scenes/recommendation lends a sense of literary justification and thoughtfulness without descending into either facile interpretism or the chance to merely sound off on one’s poetic opinions.

Rather than browsing for a mag’s hidden gems among a multitude of works that may serve as mere fodder, every entry of TOA leaves me excited for next week’s installment. TOA’s eye for quality and the breathing space they leave to really consider the work at hand fly in the face of the common “dime-a-dozen” argument against online literature journals. You can sign up for weekly updates via email or Facebook and always know that your next poetry fix is in the wings and that you won’t have to wade through scads of authors to get to something you’ll truly want to consider.

-I don’t know that I’m qualified to give a grand literary pronouncement of what event was most important on a grand scale, but I did experience a very personal circle of memorable events at the end of 2010. The circle involves the publication of my own first book of poetry (Apocryphal Road Code) but really centers on the National Book Award in fiction as won by my former Western Michigan University undergrad professor, Jaimy Gordon.

The background of this story goes back a decade. Jaimy’s was my final fiction workshop before I dropped out of school for nearly four years after ignoring her advice to stick with it (no exaggeration). Of course, she was right, and, in 2004, I went back to school, finished up my degree, and from there received my MFA at the University of Notre Dame. How ironic that, barely a week after my first book came out, I was privileged to hear Jaimy read from her award-winning Lord of Misrule at the Kalamazoo Public Library.

This event, with its local southwest-Michigan flavor, was a culmination for me. I reflected, while waiting in line to have Jaimy sign my copy of her book, on the good fortune I had to study with great writers in the Kalamazoo area while in undergrad. I realized, after Jaimy spoke on the importance for her of finding a character’s voice, how I, too, learned the importance of voice from her all those years ago. Voice is important in my recent book, and I knew in that moment that I owe Jaimy more than I had either suspected or remembered.

Though it comes from a true prodigal, I believe I can safely say that all of us who have studied with Jaimy know how good she is, how careful and precise and insightful are her critiques. I could not be happier on her behalf for the recognition she has received, and I can only hope to enjoy a touch of the same in the future. Also, if you have not picked up a copy of Lord of Misrule, do so. A great book to curl up with over the holidays!

-I did not have to think long in order to settle on Chad Sweeney’s Parable of Hide and Seek from Alice James Books. Chad is a writer who is also local to a Kalamazoo area rich in talent, and I fell in love with his new poetry during a reading he gave recently. In particular, his poems “Little Wet Monster” and “Holy Holy” struck such a personal chord with me that I had to acquire his book right away.

The first is an incantation, a welcoming, a calling forth of an unborn child: “Come antler through the gates my thingling/ Your grapes contain the houses// Unmask the stones my darkling grief/ Come whole my homeward early// You alone devour the night,” and so on. The child comes from the dark womb but brings the secret of light, a rich paradox among many in Parable. Mother and father voices merge somehow in a poem that Chad reads with a lot of courage and all the real passion of a father who appreciates the mystery and precious gift that is life. I jive with that, being a father of four with another on the way.

In “Holy Holy,” Chad also manages to get me where I feel it deep down. It begins, “For me speech is/ a way of touching,/ a rummaging under/ for what’s not meant// to be moved,” and continues, “a sentence begun// before my father was/ beaten for his stutter.” I adore the double to triple meanings of these enjambed lines as they turn on one another. The poet then asks for “courage/ to fail publicly// in ordinary tasks,/ give/ me corner beams laboring/ without grace.”

The humility and gentle sensibility of Chad Sweeney’s poems are, judging by his reading and conversation, wholly genuine. Their surreal yet familiar landscapes pull me in, and I think they will you, too. Give him a try at www.alicejamesbooks.org or your favorite seller. In fact, treat yourself to an entire Kalamazoo, Michigan, literary romp! There are plenty of authors to choose from, whether recently published or from years gone by.

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Lazy Gramophone

In All of the Above, online magazine, Performance Poetry on December 7, 2010 at 10:40 pm

-Reviewed by Ian Chung-

Lazy Gramophone is a London-based arts collective, established in 2003. In 2006, it began hosting live events, as well as setting up an in-house press that publishes work by the collective. The first publication was Adam Green’s debut novel, Satsuma Sun-mover, which went on to be nominated for the Dylan Thomas Prize in 2008. The current, third incarnation of the Lazy Gramophone site showcases work from 48 artists, with more available in the archived copies of the site’s previous two versions. Each artist has a separate page, where content is further categorised under the following headings: Journals, Pictures, Music, Words, Links, YouTube, and Video Gallery. All this makes for a very rich and immersive navigating experience. The new site design is also clearly intended to make full use of Web 2.0, with the ability to share links to content through various social networking sites just a click away.

 

Given the diversity of the collective’s membership, it does not come as a surprise that the quality of work varies substantially. The rhyming in poems like Sorana Santos’s ‘This Road’ and ‘Fissures’ gives them a musical lilt, but the sentiments captured by the lines remain fairly pedestrian (‘I see her face when you make love to me’). They also happen to demonstrate a problem that I feel recurs throughout the site, i.e. typographical inconsistencies. I am willing to grant that Santos’s poems at least, deliberately bury their rhymes in the shifting line lengths. However, I am less convinced when faced with say, Charlie Cottrell’s ‘The Dress’, in which a moving meditation on an old memory is marred by lines that break off mid-word and odd characters that intrude for no apparent reason.

 

It is also unclear whether pieces such as ‘The Dress’ (of which there are several from different artists) are intended to be read as poetry or prose. On the screen, they certainly look like free verse poems, since the prose pieces elsewhere on the site do make full use of the screen’s real estate for their typesetting. Yet when they are read, their rhythms and syntax sound curiously like those of prose. In short, if this is poetry, I think the lines breaks generally do not justify themselves. If it is prose, Lazy Gramophone might want to reconsider its content formatting, as the varying line lengths can be distracting and impede narrative flow.

 

Still, there is work at Lazy Gramophone that makes for rewarding, as opposed to frustrating, reading. Sam Rawling’s poem ‘Hung’, taken from his collection Circle Time, is a stellar example. There is a keen sensitivity to the relation between sound and meaning on display here. To begin with, the internal rhyming of ‘Humble’, ‘crumble’ and ‘stumble’ connects the couple in the poem to ideas of breakdown and impermanence. The subsequent alliteration of ‘stumble’ and ‘stomach’ reminds us that the locus of the poem’s (in)action is ‘this lonely table’, where the couple is caught in stasis, fit for a ‘scene / Displayed on a wall’.

 

Perhaps the clearest example of the aural intricacy of the poem occurs in the last six lines:

 

‘For the violence silent so beautiful between us,

For the slits across our wrists

Sown simply now by its title.

If only this frame wasn’t so fragile,

Then maybe one day we

Could have hung it.’

 

The echo of ‘violence silent’ is wonderfully evocative in its juxtaposition of eruption and repression. That ‘silent’ alliterates with ‘simply’, which in turn assonates with ‘slits’ and ‘wrists’ should hardly be viewed as an accident. The troubled undercurrent of the poem has been brought into the open, and everything culminates in the last three lines’ graceful understatement of regret.

 

Moving on from written to spoken word, I would highly recommend Mat Lloyd’s performance poetry. He has three audio recordings and one video up on Lazy Gramophone, all of which offer social commentary whilst being very fun to listen to/watch. ‘I Apologise’ is a consciously self-reflexive apology for poetry’s existence, while ‘Suicide Note; Bank Manager Lament’ is a hilarious diatribe, which will definitely resonate with a post-financial crisis audience. His animated poetry video ‘Blokes’ won Best Film at the ShortCuts Festival in 2009. It offers a penetrating examination of contemporary male friendships, invoking the vocabulary of laddish banter (‘Every time I bone your missus / She gives me a doughnut. Slut’, only to pull the rug out from under the viewer in its final, wrenching seconds.

 

On balance, I would say that it is definitely worth checking out the Lazy Gramophone site. Formatting issues aside, there is a good deal of solid work to be found, far more than is practicable to comment on in the space of a review. The collective also clearly contributes to the arts scene in London and the UK, and it would be interesting to see what else their press arm puts out in future. Finally, although I have not commented much on the artwork displayed on the site, I would urge visitors to take a look at Zoe Catherine Kendall’s cross-disciplinary pieces, where the artwork complements the writing, as well as the haunting pictures from Daniel Regan and Evelina Silberlaint.

 

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Turbulence #4

In Magazine on October 8, 2010 at 9:09 pm

-Reviewed by Ian Chung-

The Editor’s Note to Issue Four of Turbulence makes a bold claim for the current issue: ‘a very strong selection of poems…from some quite excellent poets’. The magazine itself is a humble, minimalist affair on the inside, although this issue happens to have a delightfully quirky, paint-splattered cover design that suits the magazine’s name admirably. (That said, I spotted a couple of typographical errors and inconsistencies that marred an otherwise professional-looking publication.) While Turbulence is based out of Hull, from which it appears to draw the bulk of its contributors, its reach is nevertheless now trans-Atlantic. A remarkable feat for what appears to be a labour of love being run on a (presumably) shoestring budget, and the team behind the magazine deserve to congratulate themselves on this achievement.

It is true that there are some exceptional poems in this issue. Margaret Fieland’s ‘Snapshot’ is a compact aural gem, delivering a rolling series of visuals in lines that are held together by the acoustics of alliteration and internal rhyme. Julian Woodford’s ‘Spare set of keys’ is a delicately rendered Shakespearean sonnet, which also demonstrates a similar playful awareness of the sonic possibilities of language. Its closing couplet embodies finality in the curtness of the ‘shut’/‘cut’ rhyme, especially when compared to the long vowels that are in the preceding quatrains. The most striking poem, however, is surely Cameron Conaway’s ‘Eva’ sequence, which reels you in slowly, before delivering a smack-in-the-gut ending that is harrowingly frank: ‘i can’t / take this shit and sweep it clean’. Along the way, you also get a reworking of popular carol, ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’, whose ending is equal parts hilarious and chilling when situated in the context of the sequence: ‘and a cartridge in a glock twenty-three’.

However, there are also a good number of poems in the issue, especially from the younger poets like Charlotte Bartle and Arielle Karro, which seem unfinished, for lack of a better word. Consider Karro’s ‘My Muse’:

‘An endless view, color splahes [sic],

In every hue. Imagination soar.

An open door. I walk through.

Discover unseen core.

Let me explore. You.’

Here one finds the same playing with sound that occurs in the poems of Fieland and Woodford. The trading back and forth of the vowel sounds within the lines is an interesting touch, but by the end of the poem, one is hard-pressed to say why exactly it was necessary to pay a subscription to read a poem like this.

Thus the sole misgiving I would express about Turbulence Issue Four is that when considered as a whole, it seems to me not quite to pull its weight as a subscription magazine. Considering how the Internet has led to the proliferation of online magazines, writing of a standard (and style) similar to the likes of Karro is simply not very difficult to find. Admittedly, this is not really the fault of the Turbulence team, but it is nonetheless a fact worth bearing in mind for a magazine that asks potential readers to pay for access to new poems, however nominal that fee actually is.

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