Brief Reviews

Beautiful poems aren’t my forté, and I’m distrustful of poems that make an uncritical attempt to be beautiful, but the genuine lyric beauty of the poems in James Meetze’s (pictured above) new book, Dayglo, brings along with it the right degree of social and political awareness to make the beauty both earned and subtly undermined whenever necessary–and it turns out to be necessary a lot. Dayglo is full of remarkable insights into the physical and social landscapes of Meetze’s southern California home. These are indeed landscape poems, but they’re very aware of all the social constructions that shape ideas about landscape; these are landscapes filled with people and their contradictions.

If The New Sincerity ever really existed (did it?), Dayglo is the epitome of what it should have been: sincere while crucially incorporating irony, lush while never taking its eye off what is also annoying and frustrating about Southern California culture and politics. The book’s title poem is a successful attempt by Meetze at a longer, more philosophical lyric that’s almost painfully well-attuned to California’s immediately powerful physicality. “Mountains of earth rise from marshland/where we live background lives/ with basketball hoops in the driveway./A sporting chance for light to fill us./ Our digital children and their rapid-fire,/ virtual dreams, I see them bug-eyed in back seats,/ combat in every eye’s reflection.”

Several of the book’s later poems continue the title poem’s big camera-eye view of California environment and culture and take it into a broader historical scope, signalling that Meetze’s ambitions, so well-realized in Dayglo, are only continuing to develop.

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Loquela, by Allyssa Wolf, the fifth number in Insert Press’ Parrot Series, reveals a somewhat more pre-Raphaelite, Victorian, Art Deco romantic sinisterness than did her earlier collection, Vaudeville, which was more consistently noirish and explicitly violent. But while Loquela may be more plaintive and decorative in the kind of longing that it exposes, its concerns remain of a piece with the ones that Vaudeville established: that separation is unavoidable, that the desire to inflict pain on others is inextricably bound with physical love, and that sexuality may very well be the best, most intimate ground for exposing the mechanics of capitalist domination and its various control fetishes.

Wolf knows not simply that love is political, but that politics itself, from its most totalizing conceptual levels to its most individual material acts, invades every aspect of the human desire to touch and be in contact with others. “Blinding silence/In the glittery beige room, and/Hymn in the thorns: “doing nothing”/ Such control of doing nothing, with strings/With each small movement, again/A bruise flowers and flowers...” These are dangerous poems, alluringly feminine, sharply self-aware, and relentless in their nearly science-like attempt to expose the most intimate corruptions that mark human confusion about love and power.

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Allison Carter’s A Fixed Formal Arrangement has two sections. The first is a compelling section of prose poems which, using commas and no periods, feel almost like they sway as they move through a series of impressions, observations and a casual and oddly unique sense of alienation and isolation arisiting from unpleasant or difficult to interpret interactions with others.

The pieces in the second section, closer to flash fiction but still with significant prose poem influenced moves in direction and development, and with several numbered running series with titles like “Public Garage” and “Garage Apartment,” have a similarly disquieting and disorienting affect, as they move through a variety of garages (yes) and related urban and suburban settings. “I saw that you opened your mouth. Now there were three places: school, the rec room, and your mouth”(64). It’s a group of pieces about all the quiet ways people don’t fit the expectations of others, and it exposes and explores a powerful uncertainty about what there might be to want in the wasteland of contemporary American post-place no-place suburban pseudo-ideality. “Who wants to clean the garage floor, everyday, forever?” (79)

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A bit of Bruce Andrews-style jamming the frequencies, a bit flarfy overt political excess, and all bristling hilarious fury that can’t hide an essential good humor, Brian Ang’s debut chapbook Paradise Now introduces a new talent whose work I think people are going to be reading for awhile. “What is Intelligent Design anyway/When quantum giggity-giggity multiverse anti-Batman/ Leads masturbation upon Übermensch Picasso/It’s 6:18 p.m. on Judgment Day/Dear Dr. Stalin Augustine Manhattan/Seneca Cloud Strife Lyotard hello/”.

The chapbook flings a wide range of reference (especially regarding the history of Chinese communism) and theory and genuinely scary wild contradictions at its readers with an abandoned and daring glee. If the poems wear their influences a bit too clearly at times, and if a few lines overreach into bits of generalized rhetoric (“alienation is played out and global capital is bullshit”), that doesn’t significantly harm the unassailably charismatic social grid feedback going on in these poems. I’m interested to see what Ang does next, and I bet I’m not the only one.

Boycott the Koch Brothers' Products

The Koch Brothers use their financial empire to back all sorts of political activities harmful to U.S. citizens and in fact to the rest of the world. Some of the things that they actively push or that their money supports include:

●Attempts to destroy Medicare and to limit access to affordable health care for U.S. citizens.
●Attempts to lower and eliminate clean air standards and to eliminate other policies designed to protect people and the environment from the effects of oil spills and pollution.
●Attempts to eliminate rights for U.S. workers, to end the ability of U.S. citizens to collectively bargain for their contracts, and to destroy union rights and unions themselves.
●Political indoctrination of their employees in Koch Brothers’ political interests, and pressure, through group meetings and constant work place announcements, to make their employees vote for the candidates that the Koch Brothers support.
●Huge financial support for political candidates whose goals are to eliminate all government checks on corporate power and to support all the practices listed above.

However, you can take one small step towards reducing their damaging influence on the world. Don’t buy Koch Brothers products, and recommend to others not to buy them also.

Koch Products & Companies to boycott include:

- Angel Soft
- Angel Soft Ultra tissues
- Brawny paper towels
- Dixie cups (& napkins & plates)
- Insulair cups
- Mardis Gras napkins
- Perfect Touch (cups, paper products)
- Sparkle paper towels
- Stainmaster
- Quilted Northern
- Vanity Fair napkins & paper towels
- Zee Napkins
- Georgia Pacific products

 Home/Office papers:
- Advantage
- Image Plus
- Spectrum

 Other:
- Stainmaster
- Lycra
- Teflon

 Building supplies:
- Georgia Pacific

Source for the list above: http://www.boycottkochbrothers.com/

Fight back against the power of the Koch Brothers starting today.

First Southern California readings for The Quarry and The Lot

My first two Southern California readings featuring The Quarry and The Lot are coming up a few weeks from now. I won’t be reading only from the book, most likely, although most of the reading will certainly feature the book, which I’ve never read in public before. If you’re nearby, I’d love to see you there.

Saturday, May 7
7 p.m.
The evening will also feature literature in performance by India Radfar and Simone Forti
Agitprop Gallery
2837 University Avenue in North Park (Entrance on Utah, behind Glenn's
Market)
San Diego, CA 92104 * 619.384.7989

Thursday, May 12
6 p.m.
Pfau Library Room 4005
California State University, San Bernardino
5500 University Parkway
San Bernardino, CA 92407-2318
(909) 537-5000
Directions to Campus: http://www.csusb.edu/MapsDirections/Directions.aspx
Campus Map: http://www.csusb.edu/MapsDirections/img/CSUSB_Campus_Map_web.pdf

The Quarry and The Lot

Joseph Klein was a brilliant boy, talented—and dangerous. When he dies, at age 32, under uncertain circumstances, a group of his former friends gather for his funeral and see each other for the first time in some years. How did Joseph change them and what does he mean to them? What do they mean to each other, and why have their lives come to be what they are? The Quarry and The Lot is a novel about love and its limits, memory and history. It explores whether any truth can be stable when what’s happening is changed by what people understand and where what passes for normal is something far more frightening.


Mark Wallace's The Quarry and The Lot is a big, complex, tender, angry, haunted charting of how each of us is many strangers, any past many pasts, our biographies always-already written by others.  Ultimately, though, for me it's about that bland, dangerous medication called the American suburb--how, once you've had a taste of that stuff, it's almost impossible to kick, even as it turns you into a ghost, or a guerilla, or, sometimes, both at once.
            --Lance Olsen, author of Calendar of Regrets and Nietzsche's Kisses


My new novel, The Quarry and The Lot, is now available.

You can find it here from BlazeVox books.

For those who prefer, it can also be found here on Amazon.

And here, you can read a short, pre-release interview with me by Jefferson Hansen, based around his reading of the first chapter of the novel back when it was available in an earlier version in an online magazine, Big Bridge.

For those interested in potentially reviewing the book, review copies are available. To obtain a review copy, please leave an e-mail address and mailing address here in the blog comments, or drop me a note at markwallace1322@yahoo.com

Many thanks to all the people who helped me with the many parts of the process of the book, both in its writing and its publication. Any book is truly a group endeavor, and I couldn't have finished it and brought it into the world without a great deal of help from others.

If you're in Detroit on Thursday night

Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit Reading Series
Curated by K. Silem Mohammad, featuring Alli Warren and K. Lorraine Graham
Thursday, March 24th at 7PM

Please click this link for further details.

State Worker Pensions Aren't Bankrupting States

I really hate to break up with actual details the barrage of right-wing manipulative hysteria, but just in case you're a person whose political ideas might involve caring about facts, here's a good article on the subject of how state worker pensions are affecting the finances of U.S. States. Happy reading.

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/03/06/109649/why-employee-pensions-arent-bankrupting.html

Brief Reviews

With its not-at-all-as-dumb-as-I-sound slang, all elbows humor, and pseudo-historical research, Adam Robinson and Other Poems, by Adam Robinson (pictured above), is as fun a book of poetry as I’ve read in awhile. The poems in this book (published by Narrow House) make some use of google searches in a way that recalls both Flarf and Conceptual Writing without being either. Reminiscent of a New York School matter-of-fact-poet who has gone on a consciously ironic self-aggrandizing bender, Robinson consistently and playfully puts a sense of personality center stage. The poems have a wide range of reference that they handle wryly and about which they seem to ask, in an undergraduate drunken slur, “Am I going to be tested on this?” A big plus: This book has the first poem I’ve ever seen about Judas Priest, and it’s good. From the poem “Frederick Law Olmstead”: “He didn’t go to college because sumac poisoning messed up his eyes!/He thought slavery was bad business and wrote about it when he was a journalist/Also he was like a Red Cross guy in the Civil War/He designed the park system in Milwaukee and Buffalo”


Although its title suggests a potentially exaggerated poetic sensitivity that doesn’t appeal to me that much, Louise Mathias’ chapbook Above All Else, the Trembling Resembles a Forest (Burnside Review Press) turns out to be full of subtle poems with precise, understated twists of line and subject matter. These are minimalist elliptical poems, creased by hints, suggestions, and not-quite-hidden implications that purposefully never cohere around clear central stories, although love, alienation, abandonment, danger and violence are frequently invoked. Mathias contrasts an emotional fragility, one that in a few moments feels a bit forced, with lines of blunt physicality that effectively evoke never-quite-seen brutality and an always present sense of fear. “If you ask me to loosen my grip,/ Consider the source—/My father put his right hand through the glass.” If some of the scenarios suggested in her poems run the risk of seeming too expected, what Mathias does with those scenarios is always precise and unique.


Clay Matthews’ Pretty, Rooster (Cooper Dillon Books) is a strong series of sonnets notable in their understatement and their ability to make the casual and ordinary seem significant. The chicken art, in the cartoons that frame the collection and the flashbook that runs through it, gives some whimsical pseudo-down home flair to the deadpan humor. The repetition of the last line of one poem as the first line of the next poem was often memorable, although the method starts and stops somewhat randomly. Although no one is going to call this a significantly intellectual book, a convincing world view and philosophy does emerge, one involved in the maintenance and care of the particular. “I wash the gutters, try to patch the house/ together with some caulk. I can’t say that/ without you laughing. That’s how words run south/around here. I feel today I want at/ least to say something beautiful. The dog/licks his leg and we are alive.”


I liked Laura Cherry’s Haunts from Cooper Dillon Books best in its more biting, satirical moments (“Surely your next move/will be a twenty-one bagpipe apology,/with you in a hot air balloon high above/reproach, flaunting your star-spangled manner”. Many of the precise descriptions of character were also revealing and memorable. At times the tendency towards quiet understatement (there’s even a poem titled “After Li Ch’ing Chao) was very evocative and affecting, while at other times the drive to be evocative and affecting seemed overplayed in the context of not always inventive subject matter and situations that didn’t seem as emotionally moving as the language wanted them to be. While the satirical metaphors were often fantastic, other metaphors seemed strained or too conventional in their phrasing (“when I go there/like a butterfly on a pin/of narrow want”). Still, at their best moments (and there were many), these poems effectively highlighted the subtle absurdity and often unarticulated pain of contemporary Americans stunned by their own complexity: “You’re dead and I’m here with your ex-wife. Stranger things have happened, but this one/didn’t occur to me before it occurred.”