Jumping Ship

I’m flying to Europe tomorrow morning and will be there until early October. After spending a couple of nights in Belgium, I’ll be in Portugal for the majority of the trip, splitting my time between the city of Oporto (top picture) and Monsanto (bottom picture), a Portuguese village in the mountains and which has medieval roots.

I may not find any time to blog during this period, but if I get a chance to put something up now and then, I will. And I don’t know how often I’ll be available on e-mail, so please don’t be surprised if there are any delays in getting back to you.

In the meantime, my longtime colleague and friend Tom Orange might put a guest blog post or two. Tom and I agree on many things but may differ on others, and all views he expresses are his own. I hope you’ll engage him in discussion if you’re inclined.

This is the first time in my life that I’ve not worked or been in school in the fall, and I feel a sort of pleasant, falsely romantic sense of shirking my duties, jumping ship, and traveling to unexplored lands.

Brief Reviews

Elisa Gabbert (pictured above) is a young poet whose work I’ve been loving for awhile. Several years back I blogged in some detail about her chapbook Thanks For Sending The Engine. Since then I’ve been following her writing closely, and these days she has many more avidly interested readers both of her poems and, lately, her blog: http://thefrenchexit.blogspot.com

After publishing several collaborative poetry projects with Kathleen Rooney, Gabbert’s first full-length collection, The French Exit, came out this year. The high energy and exuberantly dark poems in TFSTE are reprinted here, along with a number of other pieces. The book shows a much larger range in Gabbert’s poetic talents than has been on display before now. The biting, mordant psychosocial wit with which readers of her earlier work are familiar is surrounded by poems with a more sombre and melancholy tone, not to mention with some genuinely, although casually, brilliant social and even philosophical insights.

Still, Gabbert’s energetic sharpness on the level of the phrase and the line remains remarkably consistent. “Mysteried distance, resistant distance: it glimmers/ out of visibility. The distance that runs seamingly/ along all my images like a fold. Like a hairline/ crack down my mirror———I am always/ looking at the distance, at it splitting me.” There are more than enough new poems and, as she herself might put it, new moves, in this book for The French Exit to be a crucial purchase even for those who already own TFSTE. For those who don’t, it’s even more of a must.

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Gabbert’s partner, John Cotter, has also recently published a book, his first, a novella. Under The Small Lights is not the kind of book I usually review, but I have to admit that I found it an enjoyably wicked quick read, though people wanting literature that deals with the “most profound questions of our time” should look elsewhere. The story is set in summer mainly, and the book will serve just fine as a summer read at any time of year in which one might want that.

I doubt many people will like the characters in Under The Small Lights, but we’re not supposed to. This narrative of the young, aimless, and well to do, with their desperately literary sexual desires and confusions, pinions its subjects keenly, while somehow managing to teeter effectively on the edge between satire and believable sympathy. Think Brett Easton Ellis’ Less Than Zero if the characters in that book had gone to the country for the summer and hopelessly imagined themselves the next great writers of America.

Some of the descriptions in the book’s key slapstick action incident seem unfocused, but it’s dialogue that drives this novel. “‘Jack,’ she said. ‘You’re not still trying to get into her pants.’/’No.’/’Because you shouldn’t’/’Right.’/’Because they’re married.’” The characters don’t do much besides get drunk, have confused sex, and talk to each other constantly about themselves and about the books they’re not writing and probably aren’t going to.

My friend, the Boston-born novelist and poet Elizabeth Burns, once told me how often she had heard someone say something along the lines of, “I want to write a version of Kerouac’s On The Road about my summer at the Cape.” If you find that as funny as I do, you’ll want to read Under The Small Lights.

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I feel uncertain about Ron Silliman’s linking of Chris McCreary to New Thing (Silliman prefers “New Precisionist”) writers such as Joseph Massey and Graham Foust. McCreary’s poems are certainly often minimalist, and work with precision and understatement and tightly and oddly torqued phrasing, but on the evidence of McCreary’s latest book, Undone: A Fakebook, I’m not sure how much further the comparison goes. Whereas those writers are dour, observational and rather insistently non-urban (though Foust is significantly ironic) in their highlighting of male isolation, McCreary’s poems are poems of the city, urbane, ambiguous, witty, and populated--and most of all, much more whimsical.

There’s a devilish, almost child-like humor to many of McCreary’s poems in Undone, with a certain degree of lightness and joy. It’s a kind of humor I sometimes associate with parenthood, a way in which adult writers can tap into the casual surrealist fantasy-scapes of a youthful mind. Not that McCreary isn’t capable of sly, cutting, and very much adult insight into contemporary American urban alienation. “Common knowledge/as the lowest of limbos. Wall or cardboard bricks/as approximate graffiti. Screaming Green Gorilla/did the Dance Dance Revolution,/ left an Etch-/ A-Sketch in my teddy bear’s/intestines.” As a sort of break in the tight torquing, the several prose satires in the Great American Songbook section are howlingly funny for anybody interested in pop music criticism.

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Laura Moriarty’s A Tonalist is a significant contemporary work that not only deserves a longer review than I have time to give it but, if there is any justice in contemporary poetics (and sadly, there usually isn’t), should be the subject of much future in-depth critical analysis. A multi-part, deeply interconnected long work in multiple sections, A Tonalist is both a beautiful long lyric poem with a stunning array of keenly observed physical details and social situations, and a poetics essay, written both in poetry and prose, that makes a case for what a tonalist writer is. “I remind him that Jocelyn is writing a book of beginnings and he remembers that he knows that and likes the idea. I say there is something to be said for directionality/ Too exhausted to speak/Or sleep we listen to/The strangely sourceless airborne/Radio or TV endlessly/ I dream when I don’t sleep less clearly./ “Too much emphasis on the tonal,” the radio/ Says, “Creates a meandering quality/ Complicating the experience of the auditor.”

The book also quotes generously from other writers whose work Moriarty feels is crucial to the context she is trying to acknowledge, and highlights especially their involvement in “elegy and utopianism.” A Tonalist explores and defines both a poetic terrain and a geographical and cultural and political one, detailing Moriarty’s concept of Tonalist poetry both through the fact that A Tonalist is itself an example of such a poem and because it talks about the work of other writers who have helped move her towards the concept.

I picked up this book at the Miami of Ohio Postmoot Conference in April, and told Moriarty there that I had to admit, embarrassingly, that I didn’t know what it meant to be a tonalist. Now I have a better idea, at least to the extent that any firm idea of the concept is crucial, which maybe it isn’t.

Still, although it’s impossible to summarize the wide range of her richly tentative reflections, on the most basic level Moriarty combines the unique quality of light found in some Northern California paintings with the work of Bay Area writers. Moriarty’s concept of “A Tonalist” (for her, the phrase is always capitalized) deals with shades, subtleties, nuances, wrinkles, and of course tones, all of which tend to undermine the way U.S. poetry is often still discussed in binaries, such as avant vs. mainstream, or lyric vs. narrative vs. experimental, or literature vs. criticism, among many others. And although Moriarty’s focus is heavily on the Bay Area, when she suggests, at one point, that there are maybe many tonalist writers who don’t recognize themselves as such, I felt cheered, because I think, in some aspects of my work (and that “some” is crucial), that I may often be A Tonalist too.

Brief Reviews

My longtime colleague at The George Washington University, where I used to teach, Daniel Gutstein (pictured above) shares with me an interest in writing across genres. He has published poetry, fiction, and drama, as well as work in cross-genre forms as the prose poem. Although his work has appeared in numerous literary journals, and several of his chapbooks have been brilliant surprises, oddly enough Non/Fiction is his first full-length collection. The book veers between short fiction and memoir, and between story and prose poetry, blurring those boundaries as it goes. The pieces explore a variety of locales, including Washington D.C., Florida, and the American west, as well as Israel and elsewhere overseas. The bulk of these pieces focus on a working class milieu, although the stories cross with some frequency into describing characters living a creepily rootless yuppiedom. The book is particularly startling for its array of cultural mixing; in these stories, identity is always in flux, even as some characters rigorously assert its stability. The pieces are full of the unexpected, both in the quirkiness of the characters and in the purposefully torqued, poetic prose. “I’d sat on the stone with Mrs. Kelly, the black landlady who recalled the nervous white boy stepping, bayonet-first, beside the convenience mart. Part of the town bruised, she explained, her grey-black hair combined into a grey-black knot. “ It’s not too much of a stretch to say that in its idiosyncracy and gnarled prose and concern with character and culture, the work here resembles the short fiction of the great Isaac Babel. At times the twisting language even takes on a postmodern opacity. A unique book by a unique writer who’s capable equally of the outrageous and the poignant.



I read it back in early spring, but A Model Year, by Gina Myers, is as good a first book of poems as I’ve come across in awhile and has stayed clearly in my mind. The poems are understated, often memorable, and frequently haunted and melancholy, which may come as a surprise to those who know Myers’ energetic work in social activism and local arts in her troubled state of Michigan. There’s a casual tone these poems that can be associated with the New York School (Myers lived for a time in NYC), but the social environment and individual consciousness on display here has a moodiness that seems more connected to Midwestern financial and emotional dourness, and the poems featured a more denuded landscape than one typically finds in New York School verse. “April snow & no/way to go, no turning/forward, motion lost/flickers across the wind-/shield & is forgotten./No scene waiting/to be seen, no unforgiving/space, empty drawer/& shutters shut.” The book’s final, title piece, “A Model Year,” attempts a more extended sequence, and almost stalls on its carefully crafted restraint, but ultimately works because, like in the rest of these poems, underneath the melancholy is a fierce desire to live a meaningful, socially engaged life.


Two chapbooks by Sandra Simonds, Used White Wife and the self-published Made From Scratch, are fascinating and energetic reads. In UWW, Simonds’ flair for high octane, historically detailed Surrealism takes a flarfy turn for the outrageously comical: “You’re not supposed to fuck your first cousin, expert/ on Reform Era pamphlets,/ or eat an oatmeal-flavored Powerbar on/the toilet. Even my dog, Scruffy-Pie, knows/not to shit in the room/where you sleep or sleep/where you’re not supposed to think of the clitoris.” UWW is hilarious, but also psychological insightful, a rollick through the ages that turns up a lot of hidden cultural embarrassments. Made From Scratch has a few outrageous moments, but seems more personal, historically specific, and sad by turns, and at times its emotional power runs deeper than that in the other chap. Both books feature Simonds’ startlingly rich vocabulary. She’s a writer who is only continuing to grow into the range of what she can do.


Another impressive first full-length collection, Occultations, by David Wolach, is more hardcore avant than the above books. The range in Wolach’s work is first and foremost formal, combining surprising uses of spacing, multiple overlays of text, and visual art, among much else. The book’s first of several extended poem sequence, “transit” is both the most lyrical and the most powerful and direct in the book, dealing with the author’s physical pain but also revealing a social awareness that’s too broad and informed to be solely an exploration of individual body and self, and the poem’s lyricism remains jaggedly unconventional. “What are we to do now/dark drawing its own outline/the wild/ child tapping terror pane/ your lands and grooves/ evidence/ of hallas, your hands their re-appearing/act/ leaves glass behind leaves all possible codes behind/” The later, even more experimental pieces are fascinating as well, and are full of political insight and outrage, as well as a sophisticated understanding of theory and culture. If there’s something occasionally a bit first bookish about Occultations, it may be that at times, Wolach wants to throw everything at once at the reader. The book is full of busy pages, to put it mildly, and the greater minimalism of the final piece, “ book alter (ed),” makes for a crucial contrast that wraps up the work nicely. Still, Wolach takes a lot of necessary risks, and Occultations is a demanding, rewarding book.

Cati Porter, Jeanine Webb, and Louis M. Schmidt at Agitprop August 7

We hope you can join us this, Saturday, August at 7 p.m. for a reading by JEANINE WEBB and CATI PORTER. An opening reception for LOUIS M. SCHMIDT's "We're All in This Together for Ourselves," on display at the gallery, will follow the reading.


Jeanine Webb's work has appeared in ZYZZYVA, The Antioch Review, Louis Liard Magazine, the San Diego Writers' 2010 anthology A Year in Ink and online in the Summer 2010 issues of The Latent Print and WTF PWM. She holds a M.A. in Creative Writing from the University of California, Davis, where she taught workshops in making poems. Her manuscript Flash Paper was a finalist for the 2008 Cider Press Review Book Award. Her work concerns images of apocalypse in relation to late capitalism, sci-fi, connectivity, surf culture, historical realities as shaped by technologies, modern mythography, media spin and pop culture. Jeanine lives in San Diego. Look for the literary magazine she'll be editing, Greater Than Or Equal To, which should exist at http://www.greaterthanzine.com/ sometime late this summer or in early fall.


Cati Porter is the author of a collection of poems, Seven Floors Up (Mayapple Press, 2008), as well as the chapbooks small fruit songs: prose poems (Pudding House Publications, 2008), (al)most delicious, an ekphrastic series after Modigliani's nudes (forthcoming in 2010 from Dancing Girl Press), and what Desire makes of us, a series written during NaPoWriMo 2009 (forthcoming from Ahadada books as an e-book with illustrations by her sister, Amy Joy Payne). She is founder & editor of Poemeleon: A Journal of Poetry . In June 2010 she will receive her MFA in Poetry from Antioch University, Los Angeles.


Louis M. Schmidt is an artist currently based in San Diego, CA. His work addresses personal and societal unhappiness, the many failures of history and myths of progress and upward mobility. Schmidt's most recent body of work, "We're All in This Together For Ourselves," is an immersive, mixed-media wall drawing that presents itself as a cyclic fragment, a frozen section of negative feedback loop that evinces a dark pool of truths about humans, about Americans, about the now to which our ideologies have delivered us.


Please share this information with friends and any interested parties.

Agitprop readings are free, but donations to the gallery are always welcome.

We hope to see you there and for festivities before and afterward!

AGITPROP POETRY SERIES
Saturday, August 7, 7 p.m. reading (8 p.m. Art Opening)
AGITPROP Gallery
2837 University Ave in North Park (Entrance on Utah, behind Glenn’s
Market).
San Diego, CA * 92104 * 619.384.7989

Unnatural Acts: Events at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions

I'll be participating in the Friday and Saturday events for Unnatural Acts, part of the Les Figues Press Not Content project (http://www.notcontent.lesfigues.com), which is described by its curators as "A series of text projects curated by Les Figues Press as part of Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions year-long initiative Public Interest."

Here's the full list of events and participants for Unnatural Acts:

UNNATURAL ACTS
July 21-August 11
Los Angeles, California

Taking its name from the historic collaborative writing marathons led by Bernadette Mayer and others in NYC during 1972-73, Unnatural Acts will explore the themes of hunger, war, and desire through public acts of collaboration.

Beginning with two days of installation and performance by Amina Cain and Jennifer Karmin, a group of eleven writers/artists will gather on the third day to write together over the course of eight hours.  In a daily ritual inaugurated on the fourth day, the outline of a new person’s body will be traced onto the bodies of text until the exhibit closes on August 11th.

ALL EVENTS OPEN TO THE PUBLIC - 6522 Hollywood Blvd
http://www.welcometolace.org/events/view/unnatural-acts

July 21: Amina Cain
Installation (12-5)
Hunger Texts Read in the Dark performance (5-5:30pm)

July 22: Jennifer Karmin
Installation (12-5)
4000 Words 4000 Dead street performance (5-6pm)

July 23: Unnatural Acts
8 hours of collaborative writing (12-8pm)
Collaborators include: Harold Abramowitz, Tisa Bryant, Amina Cain, Teresa Carmody, Saehee Cho, Kate Durbin, K. Lorraine Graham, Jennifer Karmin, Laida Lertxundi, India Radfar, and Mark Wallace.

July 24: Presentations
Artists’ Talk (2-3pm)
Collaborative Reading (4-6pm)
Readers include: Harold Abramowitz, Tisa Bryant, Amina Cain, Teresa Carmody, Kate Durbin, K. Lorraine Graham, Jennifer Karmin, India Radfar, and Mark Wallace.

AMINA CAIN is the author of the short story collection I Go To Some Hollow (Les Figues Press, 2009), and a forthcoming chapbook, Tramps Everywhere (Insert Press/PARROT SERIES).  A recording of her story “Attached to a Self” was included in the group show A Diamond in the Mud at Literaturhaus Basel in Switzerland in 2008; other work has appeared in publications such as 3rd Bed, Action Yes, Denver Quarterly, onedit, Sidebrow, and Wreckage of Reason: Xxperimental Prose by Women Writers.  She lives in Los Angeles.
http://aminacain.com

JENNIFER KARMIN's text-sound epic, Aaaaaaaaaaalice, was published by Flim Forum Press in 2010. She curates the Red Rover Series and is co-founder of the public art group Anti Gravity Surprise.  Her multidisciplinary projects have been presented across the U.S., Japan, and Kenya. A proud member of the Dusie Kollektiv, she is the author of the Dusie chapbook Evacuated: Disembodying Katrina. Walking Poem, a collaborative street project, is featured online at How2. In Chicago, Jennifer teaches creative writing to immigrants at Truman College and works as a Poet-in-Residence for the public schools.  http://aaaaaaaaaaalice.blogspot.com

COLLABORATORS:

Harold Abramowitz's recent publications include Not Blessed (Les Figues Press) and A House on a Hill {A House on a Hill, Part One} (Insert Press). Harold writes collaboratively as part of SAM OR SAMANTHA YAMS and UNFO, and co-edits the short-form literary press eohippus labs.  http://www.eohippuslabs.com

Tisa Bryant is author of Unexplained Presence (Leon Works, 2007), co-editor, with Ernest Hardy, of the anthology War Diaries (AIDS Project Los Angeles, 2010), co-editor of The Encyclopedia Project's Encyclopedia Vol. 2 F-K, due out Fall 2010, and has work forthcoming in Animal Shelter 2 and Mixed Blood.  Her creative process demands she write longhand, one of her favorite words is 'autochthonous,' and she teaches in the MFA Writing Program at CalArts.  http://www.encyclopediaproject.org

Teresa Carmody is the author of Requiem (Les Figues Press, 2005), and two chapbooks:  Eye Hole Adore (PS Books, 2008), and Your Spiritual Suit of Armor by Katherine Anne (Woodland Editions, 2009). She lives in Los Angeles and is co-director of Les Figues Press.  http://www.lesfigues.com/lfp/24/requiem

Saehee Cho holds a BA in Literature/Writing from The University of California, San Diego and an MFA in Writing from Calarts.  She has just completed her first collection of short stories tentatively titled Form, Composite.  Her work has been featured in Shrapnel and Ex Nihilo. http://www.thesproutandthebean.com

Kate Durbin is a writer & fashion artist. Her full-length collection of poetry, The Ravenous Audience, is available from Akashic Books.   http://www.katedurbin.blogspot.com

K. Lorraine Graham is the author of Terminal Humming (Edge Books). Visual work appeared in the 2008 Zaoem International Poetry Exhibition at the Minardschouwburg, Gent, Belgium and the Infusoria visual poetry exhibition in Brussels and Ghent, 2009.  http://www.spooksbyme.org

Laida Lertxundi, (Bilbao, Spain) works on film making non-stories with non-actors that play with diegetic space and a particular sound and image syntax to create moments of downtime, of a time between events. Her work has been shown at MoMa, Lacma, Viennale and the New York Film Festival views of the Avant Garde among other places.  http://www.laidalertxundi.net

India Radfar is the author of four books of poetry: India Poem (Pir Press), the desire to meet with the beautiful (Tender Buttons Press), Breathe (Shivastan Publications) and most recently, Position & Relation (Station Hill/Barrytown Books) and one chapbook, 12 Poems That Were Never Written (Mind Made Books). She has lived in Los Angeles for the past 6 years.  http://www.stationhill.org/authors/profile/230-India_Hixon_Radfar

Mark Wallace is the author and editor of more than fifteen books and chapbooks of poetry, fiction, and essays. Most recently he has published a collection of tales, Walking Dreams, and a book of poems, Felonies of Illusion.  http://wallacethinksagain.blogspot.com

A Portuguese Silence

Because I'm trying to finish a novel, and several reviews, and am also planning a fall trip to Portugal, I don't have much to say on this blog right now, and I don't have time to say it.

Silence has long been a key idea in Portugese literature and culture, and is one of the most commonly used concepts and images in Portugese poetry. Given the current silence on this blog, I thought I'd offer the above photo, not my own, as a case in point on the political and cultural complexities of silence.

I'm going to try to put up some short reviews here when I can find the time.

Gurlesque: the new grrly, grotesque, burlesque poetics

There has already been a lot of discussion–and more than a bit of heated debate–about this anthology. Much of it has focused on the identity of the writers in the book: are they too white, too straight, too suburban, too American, too physically abled? The term “Gurlesque” has caused concern also: does its focus on girlhood subtly disempower women? Having read, and witnessed in person, many discussions about the Gurlesque long before the anthology itself was even in print, I was pleased to finally have a chance to read the book and take a look at the specifics of the poems.

The introductions by Arielle Greenberg and Lara Glenum seemed credible regarding both the creation of the term and the fact of the emergence of some suddenly common, but until then undescribed, features in contemporary women’s writing. The Gurlesque involves “writing about and through femininity in a new and exciting way,” according to Greenberg, a way that “brashfully, playfully, provocatively, indulgently” moves away from the “earnestness, sensitivity, and self-seriousness that marked many such poems stemming from Second Wave feminism.”

A great deal of work in the anthology hinges on the idea of self and identity and language as performance rather than essence. Through what Glenum describes as “hyperbole,” much of it seeks to break out of notions of proper behavior and language through which American women’s lives and writing still often remain closely guarded. While the degree of newness that the anthology represents may be an open question, a point that Greenberg herself acknowledges, both essays also find many historical and literary sources for the development of the Gurlesque approach, suggesting not so much an absolute break with the past as an intensification of some key concerns that more widely asserted themselves in the 1990s.

In reading the collected pieces, I noticed myself deciding which ones interested me more along several lines: level of energy (often intense); sense of rhythm and line; and description of the world with which the performed self is interacting. This last one was crucial, and surprised me a bit: I was most interested in those pieces that described others intriguingly as opposed to those that dwelt more absolutely on performance of self. Brenda Coultas, for instance, was represented by some of my favorite work in the whole anthology, and highlighted self as a performance within a dizzying array of social and family concerns (“I remember our pigs without the aid of hypnosis or memory drugs”). The more thoroughly interactive the self was with the world, and the more complexly that world was explored and exposed, the more I seemed to care how the self was performed. I suppose I could try here to assert some mainly specious distinction about social art vs. confessional art, as if discussing the self didn’t always also require involvement with things beyond the self. But my reasoning was probably simpler: in literature, as in life, I’m more interested in people who talk about things other than themselves.

I often especially enjoyed those poems that had more twist and surprise and kick in the lines. It’s difficult to think of someone doing more with rhythm than Catherine Wagner (“shudder out the little-girl/legs with a little/girl head mostly eyes, no ears,/bug brain, aimless/Send her to school”), and the tremendous movement in Dorothea Laskey’s work (“Instead no one is so weird/They have muscles/I write these poems instead of sitting in a bed/Sweaty all day/With men who are truly fuckable”) makes her pieces practically jump off the page. While some of her poems were a little rhythmically safer, Danielle Pafunda (“Slow me and fence it. I hock shop I gold play I leaking/valuables. There is a window, a roll call, a vile plastic stack.”) also worked in some pieces with an especially unique set of rhythms for which I can’t think of any immediate predecessors. Cathy Park Hong’s poems, not really possible to recreate well in blogger, had a precisely clipped sense of phrasing and spacing.  And Nada Gordon was represented well by some typically ragged, watch-this-fall-apart-but-not-quite flarf (“Sweet Kitty kiss my ghosts Kitty doesn’t like/the soup, Mama, but she sure likes the cream.")

Gurlesque is without doubt a hybrid anthology, making no significant distinctions between those writers whose work draws more on the history of avant garde poetics, or confessionalism, or from backgrounds in narrative prose. Much of the work also collapses distinctions between high, low and pop culture and art, while other pieces undermine distinctions between poetry and prose, or poetry and drama. Stacy Doris (“An ember falls from the chandelier onto the marquise’s (MARQIUSE “A”) bouffant and—poof—she’s burnt to a crisp”) and Kim Rosenfield “Miss Wiggles is a sensitive/large quantity of limpid urine”) had particularly unique approaches. There were also some very effective, primarily prose works: I loved the keen, psychologically disturbing descriptions of family and intimate others in the work of Geraldine Kim (“My parents were going to name me after the patron saint of fertility. Then when I came out they saw that I didn’t have a dick”) as well as the medieval carnival gone wild in some of Elizabeth Treadwell’s prose pieces (“dedication to giant grotto recreation of ussong the camera xo.”). The anthology also features a collection of Gurlesque visual art, which highlighted the range of cultural contexts in which Gurlesque work has appeared.

Overall, the energy level in the book was remarkable. The work of Ariana Reines (“Being a night inside of the mouth of a loved boy. Red black and shiny teeth with a tongue. The world of a loved boy has sense.”), less intriguing to me in terms of the world around the self that it describes, nonetheless has the power of a very high speed something or other whose path it would be dangerous to be in. Yet much of the rest of the writing here was only barely less intense. Some other pieces that I liked less, poetry or prose, felt a bit more wordy or leaden. Still, if one of the things that has haunted pretty much all anthologies promoting so-called hybrid work (a term which for me means something else than it may for others, which you can read about here) is a distaste for overly crude imagery and energy, there’s no shortage of that in this anthology.

Despite the debates about identity that surround the anthology, as crucial as they are (debates about which I’m not nearly as capable as others will be of offering a well-informed perspective), what readers will find in Gurlesque is a very impressive, often powerful collection of literature. It’s a much more impressive collection, in fact, than other recent anthologies of contemporary work that include poetry, from whatever place in the always contested world of literature they have come.