When I first picked up J.G. Ballard’s Crash, I did not expect its premise to impact how I see trauma on the body and the suspended concrete freeways that so many drivers like myself love to hate. A quick search online makes the book seem like some perverted Bible. There was an essay of praise from Zadie Smith here, there was a Cronenberg film adaptation there with a fancy award from the Adult Video Network for best alternative adult feature film back in 1996; all these results and more gave me the impression that the 200-page book, with an innocent blue cover and calm drawing of a car crash, held some secret, some power that might burn my hand if I held it in my hands for too long. The novel, as told by a fictionalized version of the author himself, begins with a deliberately explosive crash into Elizabeth Taylor’s limousine (she survives, no need for Elizabeth Taylor fans to worry). We learn that the mastermind and driver behind this horrific act is Vaughan, a Charles Manson-esque leader who preaches a new sense of liberation through a deep sexual attraction to violent car crashes; he has just committed this last act of complete “unification” and the narrator feels more stirred than shaken by this explosive feat.

To make things clear, Vaughan, as well as the other “thrill” seekers, do not share the serial-killer mentality found in every true-crime podcast. No, murder and death are pretty much an aftermath for the characters. It’s the mutilation of the bodies being slammed against concrete and metal that becomes their painful yet poetic sense of freedom and vulnerability. That freedom and escape from what we expect to be tidy and clean, in both a physical and psychological sense, becomes the most relevant lesson this 1973 novel offers for contemporary readers: Crash shows how liberating it can be to speed past trauma, and the subsequent cost of achieving that liberation.

The book will send readers like myself into a state of shock and disgust as fluids of every type splatter from organs against a cold, apathetic concrete. There’s even a point in the first chapter where the narrator stares into the pool of blood and vomit from a woman who just finished performing a blowjob in the car after a crash. And yet, Ballard majestically presents it as a hidden revelation or a forgotten cure to our sense of alienation, writing: “in this magic pool, lifting from her throat like a rare discharge of fluid from the mouth of a remote and mysterious shrine, I saw my own reflection, a mirror of blood, semen and vomit, distilled from a mouth whose contours only a few minutes before had drawn steadily against my penis” (16-17). I didn’t feel very well after reading this scene, and not just because of its disgusting castor-oil like description of vomit. I’ve never felt such a visceral sense of disgust mixed with a shocking appreciation for descriptive storytelling. There was nothing else for me to explain. It was a deeply vivid image. I didn’t just witness a disgusting mess of blood, semen, and vomit; I saw a deeper glimpse of Ballard’s insecurities towards the body and its functions within our lonely world of fast cars and concrete freeways. And then I read the rest of the 200-page novel feeling like I witnessed some firework show of blood, concrete, and descriptive writing.

All of these moments, of course, are surprising and gruesome subjects to read. However, after reading certain passages in the book, such as the description of bruises on the face as “outlines of a second personality, a preview of the hidden faces of her psyche which would have emerged only in late middle age,” it’s obvious that this book is a meant to be a mental trip. Whether you’re holding the corners of the book while wearing surgeon gloves or clenching its pages a bit too close to your face, Crash is an experience and a revelation. Lights flash as angelic beams signaling salvation. Bodies are kissed and scars are caressed like secret hickeys. Concrete will never look or feel the same again.

Author Biography

Ariel is Anastamos’s copy editor and the co-host for the reading series, Write to Read. He received a B.A. in English from UCLA in 2017. You can follow him on twitter @tiesto_eliot.

“Some people say words can’t ‘happen’ to you. I say they can.”

Boy do Lidia Yuknavitch’s words happen to you. Tumbling its way through a topography of sex and violence—trauma and love—her acclaimed memoir The Chronology of Water hasn’t lost any of its impact in the years since it was published. With a film adaptation in the works, it’s time to renew the hype. If this book slipped by your radar, you’ve got to pick up a copy while there’s still time to read it before seeing the movie. If you’ve read it before, you should read it again. You don’t have to take my word for how good it is—it has won awards and received many very positive reviews.

With a bare breast on the cover, even before the gutpunch of its opening “The day my daughter was stillborn,” the book challenges taboo, refusing to varnish any truths—as long as you do as I did and peel off the cover band, an enormous grey censor-bar of paper stuck down with clear retail stickytack. If you’d be ashamed to read a book with a big ol’ tiddy on the front in public, this may not be the memoir for you—or it may be just the memoir you need.

When it came out in 2011, The Chronology of Water exploded conventional notions of what a memoir could be, opening the field for the rest of us. Like a mosaic composed from the remains of something precious shattered in anger, this book is built of small cupfuls of narrative, of many different colors—a series of short, individually titled sections pounding runaway train one into the next until you look up and realize you’ve finished the book. It’s impossible to stop after just one more. Yuknavitch brings a self-awareness, a careful attention to form, creating a reflection of grief’s “endless patterns and repetitions accompanying your thoughtlessness, as if to say let go of that other more linear story, with its beginning, middle, and end, with its transcendent end, let go, we are the poem, we have come miles of life, we have survived this far to tell you, go on, go on.” Anything but thoughtless, this less linear story takes us through miles of life and tells us how to go on. It needn’t wait for the end to feel transcendent.

I’m not alone in being an Oregonian thrilled to claim Yuknavitch as one of our own. A significant portion of the book is set in Oregon, and Yuknavitch successfully captures the vibrant, pulsing love we tend to feel for this place, with its “perfect drizzle of home.” Her rich depiction of Oregon, its forests, coasts, and rain, reads to me like it burst from my own heart. That magic of corporeal empathetic response runs throughout Yuknavitch’s prose, at times blisteringly, in-your-face vulgar, and at others quietly poignant and profound.

The sexuality in the book is blunt and shockingly honest, certainly titillating, “a girl bomb in her panties” and probably yours. But “sexuality is an entire continent,” Yuknavitch tells us, and as warm as your face—and perhaps other parts—might be while reading, the shape of this continent begins to emerge through the steam of eroticism, showing us things we have felt and not wanted to look at, seen but been unable to see. Don’t get me wrong, this book is frankly sexual and frankly hot—“I got the motherloving juice spanked out of my pussy until the bed flooded”—but the sexuality carries a vital spiritual and physical energy and so much insight it’s a little scary. “All the crucibles of my life were now available across the surface of my own body,” Yuknavitch tells us, being transformed or transforming herself through intense, psychologically fascinating sadomasochistic play. Yuknavitch navigates for us a startling path through trauma recovery, through finding or making a place for ourselves. As she begins to heal, it’s through her pain, with it; as she says, “Like my wounds had something in them besides hurt.” That something fuels the book and reaches out to grab the reader, pulling us along and out of the woods.

Unsurprisingly, words and writing have a large thematic presence—“It is possible to carry life and death in the same sentence. In the same body.”—juxtaposed brilliantly with the bodily. “The body doesn’t lie. But when we bring language to the body, isn’t it always already an act of fiction? With its delightfully designed composition and color saturations and graphic patterns? Its style and vantage point? Its insistence on the mind’s powerful force of recollection in the face of the raw and brutal fact that the only witness was the body?”

It’s hard to imagine how this secret, bodily, yet carefully composed witness will be captured on film by Kristen Stewart—did I mention queer icon and absolute babe Kristen Stewart is writing and directing?—though I’m sure the adaptation is going to bring its own angle on the material. With KStew at the helm, I anticipate Yuknavitch’s vibrance, pathos, and eroticism to translate to the screen with the same face-punching, pussy-spanking intensity that’s alive on the page.

Phoebe Merten is currently working towards her MFA in Creative Writing and MA in English at Chapman University, the natural followup to her BFA in Theatre Arts with an emphasis in Lighting Design. She writes poetry and prose and tends to disregard the distinction between the two. She prefers precise and loving use of language, with each word collected and fondled like a jewel. Her current projects of varied genre focus on love, connection, and the inherent dangers therein.

Featured Image: provided by Phoebe Merten – personal copy of The Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavitch

Enclosed in Wesley Rothman’s poetry collection, Subwoofer, are poems about how music lives inside the body. The poems, which touch on history—both the poet’s and the world’s—and race as well, follow a wave-like rhythm, growing in volume then returning to the quiet. Rothman writes of coming to terms with his whiteness and how that affects his love of music, of certain songs. With a strong voice, Rothman questions his place in sound with language and song. He proves his musical knowledge. Each poem calls to a tune, a musician, or genre, until the reader herself can hear it, can step inside the music too.

Many of the poems in Subwoofer explore not only how we are affected by sound, but how language affects the way we view the world. In “The Sleepers,” which is one of the collection’s best poems, the poet recalls being a teenager and finding a strange power in voicing an ugly word with his friends, “lobbing the word like a football / with no referee.” The poem opens:

Forbidden combinations of syllables

Hijack the mouth   the throat   shoulders

The delegating mind   If the word is taboo

Understood or otherwise   a body says it

Most abundantly   I did not know

The anatomy of it

The poem questions, What does our privilege allow or disallow us to do? How is language like a weapon? How are words a mirror? What are we forgetting when we speak? The poet writes into this poem what he now knows: “We were grateful   unbridled   no one / Victim of the word was around.” Within the poem, there is an absence of punctuation, and instead, small spaces where periods or commas would be. At one point, Rothman points to this, connecting the blanks in the poem as blanks in a gun, and the word he used as a teenager, a real bullet, something that could wound or kill. The word was “a coded cue,” he writes. “No one knew / They were training us.”

Like “The Sleeper,” the best poems in Subwoofer write about music through a human-involved narrative lens. “Sinnerman,” a poem in which the speaker runs while listening to Nina Simone, utilizes this lens well. “Down to the dark tides / Of deep notes, she calls up / Cacophony,” Rothman writes, the sounds of the lines turning in readers’ mouths. Along with the runner, the power of Simone becomes physical, wrapping itself around a tree. Rothman is able to find words for the ache of listening to Simone, specifically the song “Sinnerman,” recognizing himself as both someone yearning to do good and someone who knows he has done wrong. It is a kind of poem to knock you out.

The following poem finishes the job. In one of the shortest, simplest poems in Subwoofer, we find one of its brightest gems. “Esther” is an elegy about a widow, who lived inside a closed room and prayed with her rosary beads. The language in this poem is careful, each word adding to Esther’s image. Rothman writes, “For years, / Each morning she muttered / From five to six. How she prepared / The day like a potter.” But even a poem that does not seem to be about music finds a way to let sound in. The poem ends like this:

The last time

I saw her she was grinning & speaking

In tongues, about her life, I think. I don’t know

If that was torment or ecstasy

Delivered by whoever might have been listening.

Overall, these poems give us the strange and wonderful gift of seeing music. Some, like “The Republic of Beat,” share this by the poem’s format, long and winding, with an asymmetrical shape and playful line breaks. Others connect sound to vision, like “Song, Remembered,” which thinks of a punch as an echo. The “Rupture of epidermis (some steps removed from skin / which belongs to a person, the wince & burn / That is theirs)…” The effect is magical almost, letting the readers experience a new connection and perspective on sound.

The way Rothman is thinking about bodies, the way he thinks about sound challenges his readers to consider their relation to the world around them. Finishing this book, I listened to the sound of my legs stretching out on the couch. I heard the noises of people outside, then went out to greet them. When I returned and opened my laptop, the sound of my typing and the turning of pages seemed to my ear, for the first time, to be music.

Meg Boyles is an MFA candidate and poetry fellow at Chapman University. She holds a BA in Creative Writing from Hendrix College. She has been recognized by The Eudora Welty Foundation for her poetry. Her writing has appeared in several journals, most recently in B O D Y, Apricity Press, and The Cortland Review.

Featured Image sourced from:  https://www.culturalweekly.com/slice-summer-poetry/

While readers familiar with the Medea myth will appreciate and understand more of the subtleties in the text than a novice reader, Theis’s Medea stands on its own as a possible introduction to the story, especially given its adaptation to modern terms. The most difficult portion of the book is the satyr plays at the end; without a grounding in Greek theatrical tradition, this inclusion may be too jarring to be easily understood. Even with knowledge of Greek theatre, the satyr plays stand out as an unusual choice. Theis claims in the introduction that they are “to brighten moods” after the conclusion to Medea’s story. Certainly the transition between the two sections is jarring, deliberately, with the most ribald of the satyr plays immediately following the melancholic ending to Medea, but upon the close of the final satyr play, the two moods have become inexorably entwined, and not particularly bright. The interplay of passion, sex, and violence in the larger story is disturbed and reexamined by these short “plays” (really some of the most poem-like poems in the book) at the end, opening the work to a broader variety of readings and further stretching the work’s genre.

Theis brings fresh, new life to an ancient story. As a character, Medea exists as a kind of echo of herself, seeming to recall all her various incarnations from Euripides to this one, in present day Montana, despite here living through her betrayal yet again. She already recalls poisoning her children; on the next page, she hints at a new pregnancy. The banal, quotidian marital life Theis paints of Medea and her unnamed husband is a thin veneer over the boiling pit of Medea’s passions, her rage rekindled with each reincarnation. It breaks through her language, destroying her ordinary conversations with strange prophetic images. No other character in the work has Medea’s force of personality; the whole world of the play turns on her. Despite her wrath, Theis’s Medea also burns with love, and the dual choruses of The Milky Way and The Flames allow for reflections of this double nature, the passion that leads to love flowing from the same well as that which enables murder. Theis explores in this way the nature of myth, murder, and womanhood, imbuing her iteration of Medea with the depth of all which came before. Medea is truly an ecstatic book, in the Dionysian sense.

Phoebe Merten is currently working towards her MFA in Creative Writing and MA in English at Chapman University, the natural followup to her BFA in Theatre Arts with an emphasis in Lighting Design. She writes poetry and prose and tends to disregard the distinction between the two. She prefers precise and loving use of language, with each word collected and fondled like a jewel. Her current projects of varied genre focus on love, connection, and the inherent dangers therein.

Featured Image: provided by SAIC licensed under CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0

I’m a huge sucker for books that allow us as the reader to know more than the characters, and this book put the suspense on a whole new level by giving the reader the illusion that they know the whole story. That Anna (the mother) just needs to get a few more clues and she will see it too, while keeping enough doubt in the pages to never let the reader go so far as to think that they actually know more than Anna does.

When you get to the end of the book, you realize that not much actually happens in its present moments, but you are so transfixed by piecing together the past that you don’t even notice until it’s over and you are yearning for more. Good as Gone will make you question whether you’re a good parent or not (even if you’re like me and don’t have kids), make you question the truth and what reality really is, make you delve into trauma in a lucid dream-like state, give you pieces to place together only to lead you down a different path where you find more pieces but none that match, and so on. A wonderful debut that will make you feel like Nancy Drew figuring out a mystery, only darker, so you might have to keep the light on at night so long, slender fingers won’t wrap around your doorframe when you aren’t looking.

From the opening lines of the first poem, “Bang,” Park uses sounds in a same-different way. She writes, “Just what they said about the river / rift and ever. // And nothing left was for the ether / there either” (1-4). The poem contains rhymes, but it also contains the not-quite-rhyming sounds just before each line ends. The last line, in this way, becomes an expanded version of the last word of the line that came before it. River becomes almost ri-ft and e-ver. This playfulness within the sounds and structures of words continues throughout the first section, “The Same-Different.”

This playfulness continues into the titles of the poems, with the next six poems titled,  “Another Truth,” “And a Lie,” “One Truth,” “And a Lie,” “T/F,” and “P’s & Q’s.” Two of the poems have the same title but stand as different poems, again fitting the same-different paradigm. Also, placing “Another Truth” before “One Truth” heightens the unexpectedness of how language and order are used. Typical logic is removed, but there remains enough familiarity to follow. The last two of these six poems also show opposites and ways that they are similar in their titles, such as how true and false are different, but linked.

Not only does Park play with the similar sounds of different words, allowing for interesting ways to link them together, but she also plays with the differences in the same words in the titular poem, “The Same-Different.” At the end of the poem, she writes, “leaving with We’re // a lot alike, meaning: O love, a love / I loved, and the lot I liked” (12-14). This time, instead of expanding a word, she uses it multiple times with multiple meanings. Most notably, she changes the meaning and context of love three times in six words. “O love” denotes someone in particular; it is much closer and familiar, something you would speak to the one who you love. “A love” is similar, but more general; someone could be longing for a love to whom they would be able to say “O love.” “I loved” turns love from a noun into a verb and resituates the action as internal. The first two noun forms of love place the love upon another person, who becomes the love. When love is turned into a verb, the love is centered around the I, not the you, as it has become progressively become less passionate and moved towards the speaker. This movement continues when the two likes are contrasted. In the start of the stanza, “a lot alike” denotes a closeness, one that mirrors “O love” that comes after it. However, in the similar sounding, “the lot I liked” that comes at the end, the lot and like have been transformed. Without any context, this may seem to mean a similar thing, since one would assume that people would like those who they are alike. Coming after the cascading loves, however, it further removes and disimpassions the love. Now it has gone from “I love” to “I liked.” The love has left the poem.

This kind of playfulness with and awareness of the interior of a word fills Park’s poetry with a liveliness that is not often seen. She is able to morph words and their sounds in a way that shows why and how poetry can be so powerful.

After the free verse language-play of the first section, the poems embody the same-different mindset in a set of sonnets about mythical figures in her second section, “A Mutability.” As she writes in the notes section at the back, the sonnets “are rooted in myths, fairy tales, and folklore from different cultures. The titular characters are hybrids, chimeras, or shape-shifters” (59). In this section, Park eschews traditional rhyming and iambic pentameter, creating poems that have the same fourteen-line structure, but that is all. The structure of these poems contains that same-different ethos, varying the stanza pattern of the sonnet form. In addition, the subject matter is mythical characters who blur the boundaries between familiar and strange.

In her last section, “Fear,” Park has one long poem: “Preface to Fear/False Spring.” Here, she continues the playfulness with language, while also playing with the structure of a long poem. The section appears to be many smaller poems without titles, but the linkages between them create, in fact, one long poem. This play with structure, breaking up a long poem so that it does not go from the bottom of one page to the top of another, establishes yet another same-different moment, with the poem looking the same as and different from both multi-page and one-page poems.

All of this comes together in an incredibly entertaining collection. Park’s deftness with language and how to reshape it elevate this collection and make it a worthwhile read.

Robert Coover’s The Public Burning is a searing satire about a kind of political witch hunt. No, it did not involve the President, but two Jewish-Americans blamed for passing atomic secrets onto the Soviet Union. Historically, Julius Rosenberg certainly did pass classified information onto the Soviets and his wife aided and abetted in note-taking and recruiting other people for their cause. The issue then, in both the novel and history, was whether they deserved the death penalty. The book takes place from June 17th to sundown of Friday June 19th in which lawyers and judges are frantically pouring over last-minute stays, and the American people, led by Uncle Sam himself—a capricious Greek-god like figure with a taste for sodomy—are building a public execution stage in Times Square.

Our guide and chief narrator is Vice President Richard Nixon. Coover’s Nixon is an Augustinian confessor; confession being an act of performance, of notoriety, of justification and self-defense. Nixon craves the power of the Presidency, to have Uncle Sam possess his body and take control of the nation. He is vain, ruminating and delusional. His every interaction is marred by gaffes and nervous tics—day-dreaming while in the Senate, misunderstanding a cabbie, falling pants down on the Times Square execution stage. Any perception below the surface reveals that he is so obviously a fraud. His deepest held beliefs, mired in political cynicism, could be passed around as a Trumpian quote, “You’ve got to win, or the rest doesn’t matter. I believe in fighting it out, in hitting back, giving as good as you get, you’ve got to be a politician before you can be a statesman…” And while the two may sound like each other and each has had suspicious campaign practices, Coover manages to deliver a kind of sympathy for Nixon. In a pre-Internet age Coover must have exhausted himself building the exact biography he needed for Nixon. Most interestingly is the fact that Nixon was a stage actor while at Whittier College. A fact that connects him and Ethel Rosenberg—whom he romanticizes before he ever meets her. He’s bumbling, self-righteous, ambitious and a bit cowardly, but he knows the forces that have shaped him. He understands himself as a player in a drama with a role to play, even if it’s not always the most popular role.

It is then the “Public” that is so scorned in this book. Both the people and their need for exhibition are central to Coover’s excoriation. The election of Donald Trump was a public statement from a forgotten mob gathered in whatever the Rust Belt’s equivalent of Times Square may be, declaring that they wouldn’t be subjected to politics as usual. They wanted the man they’d seen on TV, exorbitantly wealthy and with simple catchphrases: “You’re Fired,” “Build the Wall,” “Lock Her Up.” Coover’s Soviet Phantom has transformed into the boogeymen of ISIS and immigrants and the brash and mouthy Donald Trump was the Uncle Sam that would stand up to them. If there is any one character that is most like Donald Trump it is indeed Uncle Sam—the Supreme Id of America who enunciates in a disarming folksy voice that always bespeaks the terror abroad. Uncle Sam’s brand of patriotism is culturally fascistic, coated in a religious zealotry: Americans are the freedom loving Sons of Light grappling with the cruel Soviet Sons of Darkness. The novel’s ancestors, ultimately, are works like Hawthorne’s The Scarlett Letter and Miller’s The Crucible—the latter of which is even name checked in the book. Hysteria is rampant.

In between Nixon’s chapter is a panoply of world events and famous figures, overstuffing the page like the chyrons and twelve talking heads on cable news. There are so called “Intermezzos” that render events in the form of stage scripts, operas, and poems. What Coover displayed was that straightforward narrative was no good. There has to be a pomp and circumstance to everything that Americans do. Our campaign trail is reported as less of an investigation of policies and more of a serial tracking of Page-Six gossip.

Tom LeClair argued, in an essay for the Daily Beast this January, that Coover’s The Public Burning anticipated Donald Trump. But rather than anticipate, perhaps it reveals certain narratives and archetypes that have always existed in America. As Faulkner said, “Most men are a little better than their circumstances give them a chance to be.” Donald Trump did not come out of a vacuum. Large forces stretching back to at least the Goldwater campaign, and the birth of the Southern Strategy, allowed him to exist. Donald Trump is much more of ourselves than we like to admit, but that Coover so directly scorned four decades ago. Trump’s campaign was full of drama, intrigue, fear, humiliation, but it was always interesting. It was always something new. It was always eminently captivating. Coover was not just anticipating Donald Trump or a Trump-like figure, he was telling the American Public that their personal conscience could best be understood by what spectacle there was to watch. America exists to be audacious. Which leads us to wonder: what fresh audacity is coming this summer?