Reviews of the Ephemeral

Posts Tagged ‘Tori Truslow’

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Top Website for Self-Publishers Award

In Uncategorized, Website on December 1, 2012 at 7:07 pm

-We interrupt the usual broadcast with Claire Trévien-

We were delighted to find out today that Sabotage Reviews was nominated by members of The Alliance for Independent Authors for their Top Website for Self-Publishers Award. Here is the shiny badge they gave us for it:

topwebsite

Also nominated and worth a look were:

  1. World Literary Café http://www.worldliterarycafe.com/
  2. Lindsay www.lindsayburoker.com
  3. Louisa Locke http://mlouisalocke.co
  4. Rachel Abbott http://www.rachel-abbott.com/
  5. David Gaughran http://davidgaughran.wordpress.com/
  6. http://www.bragmedallion.com/
  7. www.janefriedman.com
  8. www.IndiePENdents.org
  9. Joanna The Creative Penn http://www.thecreativepenn.com/

It’s also been wonderful to be name-checked in the Guardian recently by Dan Holloway, who recommends us (along with the fab  htmlgiant and 3:am) as a good place to find out about exciting self-published work (as well as ‘chapbooks, zines and true one-offs’: our favourite things! Send us more of those to review please!)

In this spirit, I have plunged into our archives and come up with eight recommendations of works that can be categorized as ‘self-published’, each interesting in its own right, but please, make use of the comment box to expand this.

I found this task harder than I expected, partly as we have not systematically tagged works as ‘self-published’, partly because Sabotage is so invested in indie enterprises that it is hard to know where to draw the line. I have mostly limited it to works produced and written by the same author. I probably pushed the boundaries by also including an edited work in the selection but it is such a one-off published by Claire Askew’s one-woman micropress that it seemed churlish not to. Some of these reviews have aged better than others, and it was sorely tempting to edit out sentences patting self-publishing on the back for being almost as good their ‘professionally’ printed counterparts. What I have come to appreciate in the two and a half years of Sabotage’s existence is that yes, while self-publishing can equate work of dubious quality, it can also be a veritable treasure trove of unique and exciting ventures, and I hope that we bring more of the latter to light in years to come.

Let’s all remember that fabulous China Miéville quotation:

‘We piss and moan about the terrible quality of self-published books, as if slews of god-awful crap weren’t professionally expensively published every year’

-Living Room Stories by Andy Harrod. Extract from Rory O’Sullivan’s review: ‘What a collection this is. It would be no exaggeration to say that I have not taken pleasure out of a reading ‘experience’ quite like this before. I think that this was helped by reading each story aloud while listening to the corresponding piece from Arnalds’ collection. Harrod’s work should be regarded as a new form that calls on influences from literature, poetry and music. This project is a stunning marriage of the three, and I cannot wait to see what comes next.’

-Muses Walk by Christodoulos Makris. Extract from Rishi Dastidar’s review: ‘the notion of the street as a muse is artfully explored through these sixteen poems, and Makris strikes an excellent balance between a sharp, urban sensibility, an unhurried languor and an elegiac air which reminds us that, even on our streets, there are always stories to be found, to be recreated and to be inspired by.’

-Starry Rhymes: 85 years of Allen Ginsberg  edited by Claire Askew and Stephen Welsh. Extract from Chris Emslie’s review: ‘Starry Rhymes is a loving testament to the work of an undeniably important poet. This shows in the care with which the chapbook has been conceived and collated. Its most powerful moments do not, however, rest in the flattery of imitation. [...] Undaunted by the not-small task of responding to a giant of modern American poetry, this assembly of thirty-three voices reflects (or possibly refracts) Ginsberg at his most feverish, human and heartbreaking. It is Michael Conley who best summarises how the poet himself might reply to a birthday gift like this: “I am grateful / you have kept me alive. / I am. Listen to me.”’

-Everything Speaks in its Own Way by Kate Tempest. Extract from Dan Holloway’s review: ‘Both sound and sight stand on their own (on which note I have to mention the layout of the words – presented on the page as paragraphs more than poems, which works incredibly well, not forcing us to guess or impose rhyme and metre but to let the words flow through us), but this does what beautiful artisan books should do – it is both a full introduction to an author’s work and a collector’s item, perfect for fans and newcomers alike, and a fitting way of bringing a genuinely landmark book to the world.’

-Anatomically Incorrect Sketches of Marine Animals by Sarah Dawson. Extract from Ian Chung’s review: ‘Far from being terrible, Dawson’s poems are lyrical observations, shot through with imagery that is tactile and visceral.’

-Reasons not to live there by Humphrey Astley. Extract from Afric McGlinchey’s review: ‘Today’s world is complex, and in his pamphlet, Astley has captured the confusion faced by the youth in Britain, where identity is no longer established simply by an accent. Here is a thinking poet, with a natural talent, whose work shows considerable promise.’

-lapping water by Dan Flore iii. Extract from Ian Chung’s review: ‘Ultimately, the most compelling feature of lapping water is its intimacy. The danger for the lyric ‘I’ to lapse into solipsism is averted in Flore’s collection because his poems frequently reach out to draw a ‘you’ into their imaginative space.’

-Markets like Wide Open Mouths by Tori Truslow. Extract from Claire Trévien’s review: ‘Truslow’s Bangkok comes across in this work as a culturally rich, touristy, buzzing, cosmopolitan, ghost-infested and endlessly fascinating city. In her hands, even a bus journey becomes extraordinary.’

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Niteblade Volume #19

In Magazine, online magazine on August 3, 2012 at 1:34 pm

-Reviewed by Tori Truslow-

Niteblade is an e-zine of fantasy and horror, published by Rhonda Parrish, which sets out to deliver, in the words of its submission guidelines: “unusual, high quality work that uses language and form to deliver content that will make our hearts miss a beat.” This, its 19th issue, was my first try, and while I would not describe every piece as unusual or high quality, the best ones did fulfil those criteria and will stay with me.

Niteblade 19 cover

The issue’s fiction is an eclectic selection, varied in style and quality, with a couple of gems. A stand-out story is K.V. Taylor’s ‘The Silver Quarter’, a lively adventure centred around a teen boy and girl in a Mediterranean-flavoured fantasy city, both seemingly trapped in the sex trade until they help each other escape. This story eschews the gratuitous grim darkness that seems so beloved of epic fantasy in the Game of Thrones vein; it’s necessarily gritty but doesn’t wallow in it, instead focusing on its characters’ resourcefulness and friendship. Told through the eyes of the boy, Elanzah, who prostitutes himself to a solider in exchange for sword lessons and the empty promise of one day being allowed to join the city’s Elite force, the story manages just the right balance of worldliness and naïveté, shifting in a few sentences from starry-eyed lines like “he smelled like sweat and tobacco. Like falling in love” to the matter-of-fact acknowledgement that “fancy serallos and pimps were better money, but no kind of protection.” This one zings with colour and energy, and is a nice antidote to the gloomy machismo so often found in its genre.

Another strong piece is ‘Three Great Loyalties’ by Lindsey Duncan, which presents an intriguing scene: the wedding of a sorcerer’s daughter to the ghost of a prince, all told through the eyes of the wedding band. At heart it is a story about the complications of marriage when love and politics are at odds, but it certainly comes at the scenario from a novel angle, and I wanted to know more about this world and its rituals. I also liked the way music was used as a narrative device: the observing musicians deliberately use their instruments to soothe or exaggerate tension as events play out.

Nicki Vardon’s ‘Forbidden Fruit’ deserves a mention for its sumptuous language, and for doing an animal point of view well. The narrator is a witch’s cat, whose asides are great fun: “Seventeen years ago my mistress wished for a daughter, so she fed the tree a bullfinch’s heart and ensnared a husband with the harvest. I never heard him complain. Such a waste of a good songbird.” However, despite the rich descriptions of food – “She reaps her orchard to bake tendersweet cherry pies, plucks a pheasant for the spitroast, breaks leaves for smoky tea on the stove” – and striking sexual imagery – “They are quaint creatures, melting into one, sharing each breath, black and ashen hair entwined” – the story could have used a little more meat on its bones, and the ending feels rushed.

The horror pieces have an old-school pulpy feel, which is no bad thing in itself, but for the most part these attempts to marry the colourful, the creepy, and the gruesome – all tied off with the obligatory twist ending – don’t produce anything particularly interesting. A lowlight is Terence Kuch’s ‘Alice’, in which a woman is left by her latest commitment-phobic partner with a “Robo-Doll”, which desperately wants to be loved and, inexplicably, cannot be turned off. She ends up locking it in a cupboard and running off to “the mysterious orient”. The doll, again inexplicably, turns out to be flesh; it dies and decays, the end. ‘Careful what you wish for’ stories are often tiresome, and this one – with its implication that the woman is a terrible person for not wanting an irritating robot baby – especially so.

Of the ‘freaky happenings’ type stories, Wayne Faust’s ‘It Was Limbruner’ is the best: the tale of a photo booth that shows people their future, written in a believably obsessive voice that eventually shows the narrator up for the creep he is.

The poetry is also mixed: Sonya Taaffe’s ‘The Coast Guard’ takes flotsam and jetsam and swells them into mythic forms, conjuring “a ferryman for strand-flung souls / in the tarry seaweed heaps, a salt-stained / and steel-rimmed and cable-knit oracle”. Its rhythm captures the seashore’s “hish and rattle”, and the strangeness of the sea, gorgeously. Far less to my taste was ‘A Hellbound Tragicomedy’ by Stephanie Smith, a poem filled with screams, laughing demons and “ribbons of blood”, with no apparent crafting of sound or metre beyond some irregular rhymes.

A longer piece, Dan Campbell’s ‘The Wake of March’ is an interesting one, presenting an eerie agrarian land where “there is something wrong with the year”. It contains frequent echoes of The Waste Land – soil, storms, cocks crowing, crickets, strangers on the road – but is a more cohesive poem than Eliot’s, something that tripped me up on the first reading, as the allusions to something so famously fragmentary seemed to be at odds with its linear thrust. Further readings are rewarding, however, with lingering images like fields “all red with churning, with our offering / winnowed out over the empty acres” hinting at a bloody fertility ritual narrative; the Waste Land (and, by extension, Golden Bough) allusions come into their own, then.

Niteblade smaller imageWho is Niteblade for? Judging by the contents of this issue (although other issues may well have a different balance), it will be enjoyed either by those with very catholic tastes, or fans of traditional horror motifs and imagery, while individual stories and poems might stand out to fans of other styles and fantasy/horror subgenres; personally, I found it a mixed bag with some pleasant surprises.

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‘This Is The Quickest Way Down’ by Charles Christian

In anthology, Short Stories on May 5, 2012 at 6:18 pm

-Reviewed by Tori Truslow-

Small-press speculative fiction is often where the interesting stuff is, so I was intrigued by Proxima, Salt’s new fantasy/sci-fi imprint. One of their first offerings, Charles Christian’s This is the Quickest Way Down, is a collection of “dystopian sci-fi, dark fantasy and urban gothic” fiction that promises to “tread the fine line between the normal and the fantastic, where the unknown lies behind every unopened door and every unread email.” Unfortunately, the collection seems rather to tread the fine line between the banal and the fantastically clichéd, where the “unknown” takes the form of eyeroll-inducing stereotypes.

Take flash fiction piece ‘Already Gone’, which offers a twist straight out of Goosebumps: the protagonists arrive home, bantering about their crazy car ride, only to see a car crash on the news and realise it was them – they’ve been dead all along. Betcha didn’t see that coming.

This is the Quickest Way Down by Charles Christian

Even the less hackneyed stories show a depressing dearth of imagination. In ‘Kastellorizon’, a distant-future tale of space exploration and interstellar war, humanity has penetrated deep space. Yet the narrator refers to “blogs posted over the Net” and “news bulletins coming in over sub-space from CNN and Sky”, suggesting that despite immense advances in space technology, information networks and social media have barely changed since the early years of the internet. Perhaps the book’s constant corporation-namechecking and product placement – I was sick of Starbucks and BlackBerries by page 20 – is supposed to be a comment on the superficiality of modern society, but it felt lazy, especially in the futuristic stories.

Most of the stories are written in a conversational first person mode, padded with jaded observations: “modern life sucks. We all have bills to pay and we all have our price,” the narrator of ‘Waiting for my Mocha to Cool’ tells us; a few pages later: “modern life sucks, but people always get what’s coming to them.” If the fantastical elements were more engaging, or the narrators less myopic, this style might have been tolerable, but I found it grating.

My biggest problem with This is the Quickest Way Down, however, is the women. From the goth chick who (surprise!) turns out to be a demon to the “hot chick” dressed as an alien who (surprise!) turns out to be an actual alien, they are often one-dimensional and uniformly sexualised. Sure, the male narrators are one-dimensional too – self-confessedly so, in several cases – but they aren’t used as objects or plot devices first, characters second. This is a book that sets the tone on page 1 with a blowjob, delivered by a woman described as “emotionally sterile, empty, unlived-in”, and goes on to present a stream of female stereotypes, filtered through a relentless male gaze. Diet-obsessed women notable for their “amply filled pairs of designer jeans sashaying their way across my eyeline”, weepy suicidal women, clingy women, femmes fatales. By about halfway through I was ready to quit, but kept going, forlornly searching for some – any – redeeming quality.

Then I read the title story. ‘This is the Quickest Way Down’ gives us a “cute Asian chick”, who catches the eye of a student at a party. A scant three pages, this one offers up some fetishised exotica – “with my brain now packing a suitcase for an imminent trip to Karma Sutraville and my brain trying to remember some tips I once read in an article about tantric sex, I slip one hand beneath her choli” – before the big reveal. Surprise! She’s the goddess Kali, who apparently has nothing better to do than hang around a British university town and butcher people. Playing straight into colonial stereotypes, this story has no apparent purpose other than to titillate and scare: the Orientalist nightmare-sex-fantasy, alive and well. This is the low point, but it doesn’t get all that much better.

‘The Hot Chick’ is, I suspect, trying to be a clever role-reversal story. Our hero is a “C-list science fiction writer” who makes extra bucks writing sci-fi porn, and attends sci-fi conventions for the female fans – women who lead dull lives, for whom science fiction is an escape, “who are so grateful when a fully-grown adult member of the opposite sex pays them a few compliments and takes an interest in their costumes and characters, that after a couple of drinks or six they are happy to act out some of their fantasies in the comfort of a king-size hotel bed.”

The twist here is that he meets a sexy blue-skinned alien and, assuming she’s in costume, jumps into bed with her; turns out she was secretly filming him for a porn channel back in her own galaxy. But if the narrator feels exploited it’s not made anything of, and his own exploitative attitude towards women goes unexamined. As for the descriptions of female fans, let’s just say that as an attendee of sci-fi conventions, it wasn’t the aliens in this story that tested my suspension of disbelief.

Ultimately, This is the Quickest Way Down failed me as a reader but it also failed on its own terms. It claims to “nudge” the everyday into the weird, then offers ‘weird’ elements that are so predictable as to have no effect. Proxima calls it “daring”. I guess Proxima is not the answer to my search for thoughtful small-press British sci-fi.

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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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Steam-Powered II: More Lesbian Steampunk Stories

In anthology, Short Stories on November 3, 2011 at 10:24 am

-Reviewed by Tori Truslow-

If books are like airships, and let’s say they are (both being imaginative human constructs, soaring above the reliable quotidian and carrying their passengers off on adventures), steampunk books are reality-hopping, time-tampering airships – rollicking good stuff, right? And yet my reproachfully teetering to-review pile contains several steampunky tomes that I haven’t yet brought myself to pick up, knowing from past encounters with their ilk that they’ll contain all of the steam and none of the punk. That suffix should imply a subversion that is often all too lacking in Brit-centric gears-n-gaslamp offerings. Thankfully, the crew of authors assembled by editor JoSelle Vanderhooft for Steam-Powered II put some of the punk back in – and some of them take the steam away entirely.

 

This is the second volume in what looks like it will be a yearly series, and it builds impressively on the foundations laid by the first. For a good idea of the Steam-Powered ethos, it’s worth looking at Amal El-Mohtar’s afterword, ‘Winding Down the House: Taking the Steam out of Steampunk’. The argument is an important one: wanting steampunk to be all about steam robs much of the world, and many groups of people, of the chance to join in with everything that’s good about the genre – unless they corset their stories up in Victorian-style trappings. El-Mohtar talks about the writing of her own (excellent) story in the first volume of Steam-Powered, ‘To Follow the Waves’, set in Syria – where ‘there are better things to do with water than make steam’ – and how making the story’s technology steam-driven ‘would have meant my Damascus would be London with Arabic names tacked on, and that Syria could not participate in the exciting atmosphere of mystifying science that characterised Britain in the same period without developing precisely the same technology.’ She concludes: ‘I want a steampunk divorced from the necessity of steam’. Steam-Powered II, while not totally divorced from steam, offers various ways to question its necessity.

Steam-Powered 2: More Lesbian Steampunk Stories Tori Truslow JoSelle Vanderhooft

‘The Terracotta Bride’ by Zen Cho is a steamless story, set in a Chinese afterlife that seems part-traditional and part modelled on contemporary society, featuring a corrupt demon bureaucracy, paper hell-houses, and a living terracotta construct whose arrival changes everything. Is it steampunk? My first thought was, ‘who cares; it’s glorious!’ But what steampunk does (among other things) is to present worlds and eras changed by anachronistic technology – hopefully in a way that asks questions about those eras, and by extension about the present. Cho’s hell is an afterlife altered by technology in a way that also asks questions about the world of the living – steampunky in spirit, but no steam required.

 

Of the stories that do contain steam, several subvert the romanticisation of the steam age that characterises much of the genre. C.S.E. Cooney’s ‘The Canary of Candletown’ gives us the dark side of steam power with a harsh tale set in a Wild-Westy coal-mining settlement, where love blooms in cruel working conditions with heartbreaking results. Others point to the imperial overtones of steam power, as in Stephanie Lai’s ‘One Last Interruption Before We Begin’, set in an alternate Malaysia with water-driven technology. The British love-interest, an airship captain, quizzes the Chinese-Malay protagonist on their eschewal of steam:

“So what do you do with coal?”

“Don’t have,” Shun Ping says. “We don’t have it, so we had to not need it.”

“Surely we would have kept trading with you,” Elizabeth says. “The Queen would never have left anyone without sufficient resources!”

The story’s polemic comes out a little heavy in the dialogue, but the points are well made – not to mention that the setting is just really damn cool.

 

Stories like this one, and ‘The Terracotta Bride’, and Shveta Thakrar’s ‘Not the Moon but the Stars’ – set in a world where Siddhartha Gautama does not become the Buddha but a great king who employs wonder-working court engineers – make it clear that this anthology is not intended to cater to a homogenous readership. This cultural diversity is one of the anthology’s great strengths, as is the general diversity of the characters – ‘lesbian’ certainly doesn’t mean just one thing. Even more so than the first volume, this one presents a real range of protagonists and relationship structures. A few follow a fairly straightforward girl-meets-girl pattern, but there are also established relationships, some stable, some dysfunctional; all-woman love triangles; and other types of female relationship – familial or professional ties, rivalries, and even, in ‘Journey’s End’ by Elizabeth Porter Birdsall, a partnership between an engineer and a sentient ship. Two Western-style stories feature two beautifully drawn relationships: ‘Fruit Jar Drinkin’, Cheatin’ Heart Blues’ by Patty Templeton and ‘Deal’ by Nicole Kornher-Stace. The former pair make moonshine and give each other hell, and we only really meet one half of the latter, who spends the story spinning tall tales about her lover to throw detectives off her trail – both couples are totally believable, brilliantly voiced, and give a nice kicking in the teeth to the notion that the Western has to be a male genre.

 

Another highlight is Alex Dally Macfarlane’s ‘Selin That Has Grown in the Desert’. This one’s also low on the steam. As a whole it’s a brilliant, understated anti-steampunk tale – and structurally a kind of anti-romance – which manages to do all that and still be sweetly (but certainly not saccharinely) uplifting.

 

Of the stories where both romance and politics play out in parallel, some pay more attention to the complexity or their interplay than others; stories like ‘One Last Interruption Before We Begin’ and Nisi Shawl’s ‘The Return of Cherie’ – a tantalising extract from a novel set in the Belgian Congo with characters navigating postcolonial concerns, global politics, and old love – worked better for me than ones like Sean Holland’s ‘Playing Chess in New Persepolis’, which features some enjoyable political intrigue via larger-than-life steam-driven chess games, plus some romance, but without the two ever quite meshing to the interesting and difficult degree that it does in the Lai and Shawl stories.

 

While certain stories shone out for me above others, they were all strong – 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. Go on, let it take you for a spin.

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Mythic Delirium #24

In Magazine, online magazine on August 21, 2011 at 7:52 pm

 -Reviewed by Tori Truslow-

Not infrequently, I come across people who are perplexed by the idea of poetry having genres. I suspect some of these people are those who believe that ‘genre’ and ‘literary’ are mutually exclusive. Mythic Delirium, a biannual subscription-based magazine of fantasy, SF and horror poetry, cheerfully puts paid to that yawnsome debate. Its 24th issue contains some damn fine – finely crafted, finely balanced, finely nuanced – poetry; it also, in good speculative tradition, feels like an adventure from the get-go. Editor Mike Allen, in his introduction, lays out a trajectory for the issue: ‘we’ll begin with planets and aliens, shift into the stuff of myth, zip out into alternative futures and curve through alternate histories before finally descending into mediations on the very nature of stories.’ Although there are plenty of places to pause and reflect on the nature of stories and poems earlier on, too.

One thing that becomes apparent quite quickly is that this is a publication for those who like a strong dose of story in their poetry. Hurrah, I say. Burying a story under precarious piles of images can work very well – and there are a few examples here of poems where the what’s-going-on needs to be teased out, like Nima Kian’s lovely, lingering ‘A Semblance’ (‘people sit/at the edge of their prayers below/black clouds that cannot rain’) – but style doesn’t have to negate narrative. The second poem in the issue, ‘The Wine of Mercury’ by Joshua Gage, has just the right balance of both. The poem begins with a technical history of human attempts to terraform Mercury, the language dry and technical:

‘But the deadly crust is rich in helium-3,

enough to fuel a fleet of torch ships.

The soil also abounds in iron, titanium

and magnesium ores.’

This changes, as the planet is colonised and it is discovered that grapevines ‘thrive’. The register becomes lush, full of echoes of Earth’s myths and literatures. Wine is made; one is tellingly described as ‘earthy’ in flavour. In the poem’s vision of space exploration, some things don’t change – we still love a good wine, and we still invent wonderfully precious ways to describe its flavours – but leaving our home planet shifts the way we see, feel, and taste, and this shift is marked in the way the poem describes pleasure. The narrator lists Mercury’s wines, their growing conditions and their flavours, including those of the ‘Boccaccio Estate’, whose

‘…signature is “Decameron,”

a Primitivo grown from old world vines

from southern Italy, rich with the hint

of a naked kiss after a year-long stint

in space against a background of tart cherry.’

I can’t help but read this as a story about science-fictional poetry itself, moving from hard science-language to a headier mix of the technical and the mythic, synthesising space-images with ‘earthy’ ones and carrying old human passions across new frontiers.

Elsewhere in the issue the storytelling waxes whimsical, poems offering flights of fancy with dark, toothy things lurking in their corners. ‘Behind the Greasepaint Door’ by Marcie Lynn Tentchoff is a rhymeless ballad about a questing mime that faces something terrible in the land ‘Where Carneys End’. ‘The Last Dragon Slayer’ by Elissa Malcohn mixes prose-poetry and verse, and from its first lines clearly does not intend to play nicely with the dragon-slaying hero trope: ‘She is the wet dream of every budding knight, the centerpiece of every quest. Her scaly head on a pike makes the ultimate maiden magnet.’ In all these poems the central figure is changed irrevocably by journeying beyond what they’re used to; the reader, too, has their preconceptions of certain archetypes neatly twisted around.

Theodora Goss’s ‘Binnorie’ is short and sharp, and similarly upends a popular balladic motif: the bone harp, made of a murdered woman’s remains. ‘What is it about being made into a harp […] That presents such an appropriate allegory/For being a woman, and therefore an instrument/Of fathers, husbands, or sons?’ it asks. It then goes on to ask whether the harp is actually a metaphor for being a poet. Woman-writer and woman-as-muse clichés are bypassed entirely, and poetry is cast as a father, a husband, a son. The poem is formed in its entirety of two sentences, both questions, which don’t have quick answers; for me, this is the poem that lingered the longest after reading.

Other highlights were ‘Counterfactual Photos’ by Ian Watson, an intriguing alternate-reality concept played out over deceptively straightforward and regular three-line stanzas, and ‘Wisdom’ by Sonya Taaffe, a beautiful musing on Jewish folklore migrating to the big city; both are worth reading a couple of times over. Between those poems that danced and sparked and asked difficult questions, there were a few that simply lay flat for me, made all the more noticeable by the ones that did catch fire. The ones that didn’t stick in the memory, for me, had a certain sense of closedness, a feeling that they had told me what to think rather than leaving me with questions. But I wouldn’t say there was a bad poem among the 20 selected here.

Laying the merits of individual poems aside for a moment, the journey promised at the beginning is well-plotted; Allen is an excellent helmsman, steering his passengers between delight and darkness. To labour the metaphor, the black-and-white illustrations provide pleasing views along the way. And the culmination of the journey, the promised ‘meditations on the very nature of stories’ in the final three poems, is triumphant. ‘The true poem’ by Serena Fusek is light and fleet and pure magic, and perfectly complemented by its woodcut-ish illustrations. Here’s a taster:

‘The true poem

may seem slight

but the must of

wild mushrooms

and leaf mold

worm through the lines.’

Following it are two library-themed pieces. ‘Torn Out’ by Ann K. Schwader is another mix of prose and poetry, descriptive paragraphs followed by short snatches of stanzas, a form that suits its subject matter – something, we suspect vampiric, stalking prey in a closed library – very well; it’s what’s not said here that makes it so deliciously creepy. And then Shira Lipkin’s ‘The Library, After’ comes along, magical and wry, a prose poem about an abandoned library where the books ‘told each other to each other’. You could read this as whimsy, you could read it as a bit of thumb-biting in the direction of rigid genre classifications – “New genres formed and split and reformed, tangents spilling out like capillaries. Freed of the responsibility to be useful and to fit human desires and expectations, Story explored itself in Mandelbrot swirls” – whichever way you look at it, it’s clever, funny and affirming. Literary fashions come and go – as we learn, ‘The science-noir-unicorn genre was shortlived’ – but story keeps on going. The image of stories continuing to twist and transmute after we’ve stopped looking at them is a perfect note to end on.

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‘The Winter Triptych’ by Nicole Kornher-Stace

In Novella, Short Stories on March 18, 2011 at 12:27 am

-Reviewed by Tori Truslow-

A kitchen girl creeps through a winter-wrapped tower, crossing paths with the ghost of a long-dead queen. A hundred years ago, in a different winter, the same queen swells with child and ruthlessly quells rebels. Nicole Kornher-Stace’s strange, whispering novella darts back and forth between the two, slowly drawing them together

It’s structurally brilliant. The two halves are told in alternating chapters with titles like “The Maid: detail, right panel” and “The Tower: detail, left panel”. The reader quickly picks up that the right panel is the present and the left is the past, each scene a ‘detail’ of the bigger picture, and each picture one half of the whole story. The artistic terminology works well, evoking the image of an actual triptych and thus the question: where is the central panel in all of this? As the two halves of the story draw inexorably closer the question becomes more pressing, the blank space all the more noticeable by its absence, so that when the first piece of the ‘centre panel’ appears and brings the two halves together, the payoff is as aesthetically satisfying as it is enthralling.

The story is like winter: seemingly sparse but with dark things brooding underneath, hidden under drifts of dreaming prose. Ghosts, witches, cursed princesses and other such familiar fairy-tale figures haunt its pages, and it has all the blood and cruelty of the old tales, but certain details – the kitchen maids chained up to sleep; the fate of the rebels – make the characters’ pain less mythic, closer to the bone. The monster, when it appears, is chilling and gruesome, all the more so in contrast to the quiet snowy story-scape it appears against.

The Winter Triptych, by Nicole Kornher-Stace, reviewed by Tori Truslow for Sabotage

The language is at once folkloric and incisive: witness sentences like ‘she wrapped stories round her sins like poultices, but the guilt still paced her like a caged cat, far too wakeful for her peace.’ The dreamlike tone works best when there is little dialogue; the first few chapters are heavier on the dialogue than the rest, and the numerous ‘thees’ and ‘thous’ feel somewhat awkward, if suited to the setting.

It’s visually gorgeous, too. Oliver Hunter’s cover art is a luxurious picture-story in itself. The book comes from Papaveria Press, who produce limited edition hand-bound books as well as paperbacks like this one; their website is worth a browse for anyone who likes beautiful books. Now is a good time to check them out, because Papaveria are currently donating all their profits to the work of Doctors Without Borders in Japan.

[ED: Following the tsunami devestation in Japan, Nicole Kornher-Stace has also pledged to donate royalties from copies of The Winter Triptych sold before March 21st - you can help out this cause by buying from her publisher's site at www.papaveria.com/the-winter-triptych.]

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Steam-Powered: Lesbian Steampunk Stories

In anthology on February 1, 2011 at 10:51 am

-Reviewed by Tori Truslow-

Once a little-known subculture, Steampunk is now studded all over the fantasy genre like so many burnished bolts, its gears a-whirring with the excitement of history-that-never-was, valves opening with the hiss of adventure, pouring forth veritable clouds of Victoriana – and there’s the rub. Steampunk often ends up being highly West-centric, somehow equating ‘the nineteenth century’ with ‘Victorian London’. But there’s a whole wide world out there – and Steam-Powered: Lesbian Steampunk Stories does a damn fine job of exploring it. Not only is this anthology delightful in that its characters – its adventurers and inventors, its rulers and airship pirates, its heroes – are queer women doing things on their own terms, but also in that they are multicultural, from all over the world, or from alternate worlds that are more than just magical versions of Europe.

From sweet pistol-totin’ romance down in old New Orleans in NK Jemisin’s ‘The Effluent Engine’ through to Amal El-Mohtar’s alternate Damascus and breathtaking dreamscapes in ‘To Follow the Waves’, editor JoSelle Vanderhooft has chosen stories diverse in character, setting, genre and mood. If the first couple of stories follow an enjoyable but predictable romantic trajectory – a pair of very different women meeting, sparks flying – the book as a whole doesn’t fall into that pattern. There are brilliant new spins on old tropes, and some stories that twist expectations around quite sharply – Matt Kressel’s ‘The Hand That Feeds’, which seems to be building towards a romantic criminal escapade through a magical New York, changes tone in a sudden and shocking way that’s very well done. The same story is a particularly bright example of the diversity that is such a strength of the book, with an Indian and a Jewish woman taking centre stage. Jessica and Divya are both flawed and likeable, their defiance and decisions in the face of hardship thoroughly believable.

Though most of the stories in the anthology are enjoyable, the best are those that are utterly engaging works of fiction in their own right and examinations of Steampunk and fantasy in general at the same time. Amal El-Mohtar’s tale of an artisan who cuts dreams into precious stone is a beautiful piece of worldbuilding, an aching romance, and also a deeply probing examination of romance and worldbuilding. Shweta Narayan’s ‘The Padishah Begum’s Reflections’ is a gorgeous alternate Mughal history that is both playful and heady in its layering of narrative, a story about power and storytelling. And Mikki Kendall’s disturbing ‘Coppers for a Trickster’ is full of weird magic and looks at what happens when its characters apply their own narratives to an unknown land.

This is a surprising and brave book, uplifting and harrowing by turns, that delivers what it says on the tin and a whole lot more. A worthwhile read for anyone interested in the way dominant narratives can be picked up, tinkered with, de- and re-constructed or just plain opposed.

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Stone Telling # 1

In online magazine on November 13, 2010 at 1:53 pm

-Reviewed by Tori Truslow-

‘Those who cross boundaries live in a place between silence and speech’ begins Rose Lemberg’s introduction to this new online magazine for literary speculative poetry. It’s worth reading that again. It’s not saying boundary-crossers live in silence, nor is it saying that speech is the only alternative to silence. Like a line of poetry it flares its meaning in the spaces of the brain and lingers on. It illuminates another place, from where a voice can call but risks going un-listened-to, because it’s not what the hearers expect, not what they recognise as speech.

Lemberg asks: ‘once we cross over, how do with give our experiences voice to share it with others?’ But she doesn’t use her capacity as editor to give a neat full-stop answer to that question. The ‘silence to speech’ theme unfolds in as many directions as there are poems in this issue. The poems don’t sit politely next to each other, or flow quietly along. They are loud in their difference. Take the first four. A brand new poem by Ursula K. Le Guin, ‘The Elders at the Falls’ opens the issue, telling the wrenching story of the falls at Celilo, a community’s meeting-place and fishing-spot turned to a ‘flat lake of silence’ by a new dam. This is a perfect poem to start with – not just because of Le Guin’s legendary status, but because it is so full of voice and sound, repeating ‘voice’ and ‘tell’ and ‘story’ – and shows all of that being reduced to nothing:

The voice they listened to

that had spoken all their lives

and all the lives before them

telling its story, their story, that great voice

Celilo

grew smaller, became less,

became quieter,

all day, until

at twilight

it was silent.

In doing so, the poem gives an almost-soft, unassuming sort of horror to the word ‘silence’, which goes with the reader even as the following poems take off in different directions. Next is Karen Neuberg’s surreal ‘Fatigue of the Marionettes’ which takes its name from a Man Ray painting, followed by Mary Alexandra Agner with the fleet, hungry ‘Owl Woman’, and then ‘Star Reservation’ by Tara Barnett, which abruptly shifts the tone to a science-fictional one, opening ‘Grandfather gave me a star for my fifth birthday’.

Stone Telling continues in this unpredictable vein, startling from one poem to the next. There’s a bewitching prose-poetry mix in Samantha Henderson’s ‘The Gabriel Hound’, and a video poem, Peer G. Dudda’s ‘Train Go Sorry’. This is performed bilingually: in English and ASL, letting the poet communicate in two languages at once – and so the moments when he only uses spoken English, but doesn’t sign, are a kind of silence, and bring home the layers and the pain of the lines ‘Your silence / Silenced me.’

Many of the poems are accompanied by audio versions, like Shweta Narayan’s ‘Nagapadam’, which allows the sibilants in the poem to be drawn out and compliment the snaking shape it takes on the page. But the reading also – in dripping with sound and imagery and seeming to flow smoothly between words from different languages, while talking of split tongues – destabilises the idea of speech. The bitterness in its ending –

I echo
your bleached facets
knot my tongue, and you

think

I speak.

– again brings the reader to a place that isn’t silence or speech but in between, and is a breath-knocking note to end the issue’s poetry on.

These poems are followed by several non-fiction columns, which are all fascinating and worth reading, though I’m focusing on the poetry in this review. The final piece, entitled ‘Stone Telling Roundtable: Diversity’, provides further context to some of the poems and articles (but is well-placed at the end, so the pieces discussed still stand for themselves), and shows a questioning, searching spirit which promises good things to come from future issues. The multiplicity of voices throughout make the reading/watching/listening a noisy experience, which feels like the only thing it could be. None of the poems feel like they’re being held up as examples of what diverse speculative poetry ‘is’, but together they present a flurry of suggestions as to what it might be – strong in their own right, they’re also a many-tongued crowd engaging in a robust exploration of voice, difference, and going beyond the known. Which is the heart of the speculative, after all.

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Moon Milk Review: Issue 7 Vs. Issue 8

In online magazine on September 21, 2010 at 10:33 am

- Reviewed by Tori Truslow -

Reviewing an issue of a publication means considering it as a whole (what sort of shape do its parts make? Is the sum of its voices harmonious, interestingly dissonant or an unlistenable mess?). But a magazine is a serial creature, evolving from one issue to the next. So, working on the theory that reviewing two issues back-to-back might illuminate an editor’s aesthetic and scope better than holding the magnifying glass up to one issue, I give you:

Moon Milk Review #7 VS. Moon Milk Review #8

Moon Milk Review is interested in “magical realist, surrealist, metarealist and realist works with an offbeat spin”. The layout changes little from issue to issue: a clean white screen with bold black headings slicing each issue into sections (Gallery, Fiction, Poetry, Interview, and so on).

The simple black/white contents page lets thumbnails from the more visual sections stand out: it’s eye-grabbing from the start, and hints at the eclectic flavours that hide behind the headings. The virtual gallery accompanying each issue is a great idea. Unfortunately, in Issue 7, which has an overarching Spain/World Cup theme, this seems like a bit of an opportunity wasted: the gallery, subtitled ‘The Spanish Masters’, features a painting apiece from Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, Francisco de Goya, and El Greco, all gloriously unsettling in their own way, but with no linking commentary or anything to make me feel I’m getting something more than what a google image search for ‘Spanish Surrealists’ would produce. Why these paintings in particular? We may all have heard of these artists already, but even a little trivia would lend this part of the magazine more presence. Issue 8’s gallery is quite the opposite. It contains 16 works by acrylic artist Jim Fuess and an informative blurb, letting the viewer get a quick shot of immersion in Fuess’s world. The paintings are bright spreading/coiling/bleeding colour-forms, all with a look of movement or metamorphosis about them; sometimes treelike or abyssal, sometimes like butterfly wings or internal organs or almost-fish, suggestions of scales and roe. In ‘Evolution’, a spreading of black blot-shapes suggests creatures unfurling. Score one for Issue 8.

A real strength of the magazine, going hand-in-hand with its multimedia aesthetic, is its sense of fun, which is very much present in the first of Issue 7’s special features: an interview with Paul, the prophetic octopus who rose to notoriety during the 2010 World Cup. Gabriela Romeri is well-qualified for the task, having interviewed other octopuses in her time, but she meets her match in Paul: “I knew Paul would be formidable–enormous brain,  species billions of years old—but I wasn’t quite prepared for the equally evolved  arrogance.” He proves to be quite the curmudgeonly cephalopod, which makes for entertaining reading. Issue 7 has to get a point for this alone.

Following the interview are two videos: one a slideshow of Spain Vs. Netherlands highlights set to Shakira, the other a Flamenco performance by Sara Baras. Don’t be fooled by the lighthearted feel of the issue so far: MMR is unafraid to take sharp turns in tone, and this Flamenco piece is intense. Give it your full attention. Baras dances on a polished stage, by a campfire, in front of a full moon projected onto a screen, but the racing rhythm of her boot-heels and feminine-muscular movement make the sparse set look wild and cold, and turn the guitar to something warm and beating. These features are all a fantastic demonstration of a simple theme – the Spanish World Cup win – spiking off in very different directions, just unified enough that each diversion is surprising. The video feature in Issue 8 is Rachel Bloom’s milk-snortingly fabulous ‘Fuck Me Ray Bradbury’, an irreverent (read: filthy) anthem for fangirls the world over. Overall, in the multimedia camp, 8 gets points for bold stick-in-the-brain painting and comedy, but 7 wins for variety and cohesiveness.

In the ‘Fiction’ section, Issue 7 continues the Spanish theme with Luisa María García Velasco’s ‘The World Behind the Wallpaper’, presented both in the original Spanish and in translation by Ian Watson (who wrote the screen story for Spielberg’s A.I.). This is a succinct age-of-materialism fable with its metaphors swarming out from behind the descriptive sheen. I can’t speak for linguistic effects in the Spanish, but the translation’s crammed prose works to good effect in evoking a room made claustrophobic by slick-suited males and their gadgetry, and carries over neatly to the crawlingly vivid image of a living layer of cockroaches behind a hotel’s luxurious wallpaper. Issue 8’s fiction doesn’t really compare in quality to this. Ben Loory’s ‘On The Way Down: A Story For Ray Bradbury’ sets the somewhat grim absurdist tone for the section, and works the best out of the prose pieces on offer. ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ by John Emerson appears to contain a story, but it’s hard to tell if it’s real or a hallucination or a metaphor, and hard to care when the first few paragraphs read like a regurgitated thesaurus and contain the description of light as ‘swirling’ and ‘iridescent’ twice in as many sentences. Another score for issue 7, then, not only because the fiction is that much better but because the parallels to original and translated texts do more to further MMR’s boundary-crossing ethos.

As well as having Fiction and Poetry sections, each issue is rounded off by ‘Prosetry’: a monthly contest to write a piece of microfiction based on a featured piece of art, and the winning entry from the previous month. Another lovely idea, encouraging work that sits in the spaces between literary forms, and between written and visual art. July’s winner in Issue 7 is ‘Gravitas. Gravity. Gravitas.’ by N. Stebbins, which uses its central figure, a man who is at once sumo wrestler, clown and balloon, to tread the sensitive line between lightness and heaviness (in both the literal and emotional senses). Issue 8 offers ‘Archaeology of the Present’ by Minal Hajratwala, which does a far better job of saying something with fluttering, evasive imagery than ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ did earlier in the same issue. It starts creepily enough: “My sisters and I lived among the skin-lamps of earth.  The They walked by on rattlesnakes, alligators, eels, cows, trade-beads of ivory and ebony — all words for the bones of the living” – and only gets more disconcerting from thereon in, complimenting the source picture, Dali’s ‘Three Young Surrealist Women Holding in Their Arms the Skins of an Orchestra’, wonderfully. I think Issue 8 just about wins, in this case.

It seems that Issue 7 works better overall, perhaps because its potentially mundane theme provides a solid grounding from which its contents can take flight. But it’s clear from these two issues that MMR is onto something special, mixing entertainment and unsettlement to make a thought-provoking whole, with the prosetry competition providing a thread running from issue to issue. The multimedia aspect is bold and inviting, the contents just the right size to keep a hold on our skittish and multi-tabbed attention-spans, and its consistent interest in crossing genre and media boundaries, in things interstitial, in juxtaposition and surprise, make it an exemplary online magazine.

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