Playing Fast and Loose With Rules

My review of Jailbreaks: 99 Canadian Sonnets is up at The Rover.

Belly of the Beast

Just finished In the Belly of the Beast (Letters from Prison) by Jack Henry Abbot. One of the most gripping testimonies I've ever read, still a classic of prison/institutional literature. The book is both a clear-eyed account of prison violence and a plea for sympathy, but the reader's relation to the narrator, who is at turns searingly angry, trenchantly brilliant, clairvoyantly wise (pls. excuse my blurbolexical adjective phrases), is rendered all the more complex by the knowlege that less than six weeks Abbot's release from prison, largely won by the acclaim for this book and by Norman Mailer's action on his behalf, he committed another murder and was sent back to prison, where eventually he put an end to his life. (Credit goes to my partner's bookcase, where I found it....)

Yesterday at the Hotel Clarendon

The other day, I finally finished Nicole Brossard’s novel Yesterday at the Hotel Clarendon. It was one of those tedious masterpieces where I was frequently conscious of what page I was on, and precisely how many pages I had to go. The reading however yielded rich rewards, breathtaking passages like those quoted earlier, here and here. Like James Joyce and to a lesser extent Samuel Beckett and Julio Cortazar, Brossard eschews the many of the customary tricks of the novelists’ trade – plot, obvious conflict, secrets and their disclosure, suspense—and relies entirely on the quality of writing – the keen witnessing of moments between moments, and extraordinarily well-written reflections – to engage the reader. (Beckett, while he seems to discard all, holds suspense close to his chest while maintaining a most fascinating poker face… to me for that reason he’s the absolute master of suspense.) Of course, Brossard is very much aware of what she’s doing. She seems to anticipate criticism by including her own astute diagnosis of the formal problems of her novel, within the novel itself:

We are in front of four female characters. There is a family tie between the youngest one (Axelle) and the oldest one (Simone), a work relationship exists between the latter and the narrator, and a circumstantial relation based on affinities has developed between Carla and the narrator.

The fact that there is no conflict-generating factor (competition, antagonism, discord) between these women makes it particularly difficult to provide the script with moments of extreme tension, even of the verbal violence on which theatre is generally predicated. Indeed, there are no couples here, no visceral connections nor passion-ties. No jealousy, hatred, love. No intimacy, no daily life between the characters. In addition, one may wonder when, at which degree of intimacy, major conflicts, meaning those whose scope is symbolic, are born.

I’ve always found it fascinating that the most experimental and innovative art – and Brossard is frequently referred to as an “experimental” extraordinaire – hinges on something static, vacant, entirely missing. In a number of Jean-Luc Godard’s films, essentially nothing is going on story-wise, and precisely because of that he is free to entertain us through weird camera angles and whispered thoughts and exquisitely idiosyncratic juxtapositions… without seeming to intrude. It’s as if an experimental narrative were a sort of Oblomov lying on his couch, mind free to indulge in all sorts of fantastic twists and turns because he is, after all, lying on the couch. The scope for formal experimentation … does it depend on a substantive lack?

Brossard’s novel, while having more tension and passion-tie between two of the female characters than is suggested by the above passage, is in part narrative, in part journal-like reflections of characters, theatre script (partly in vernacular latin), and book list. And as if to foil any sort of expectation, that central tension is left deliberately unresolved… not particularly frustrating, because resolving that tension is definitely not the point of this novel. (Sorry, tension-seekers, to spoil the book for ya…) Along the way -- and it's the along the way that matters -- she provides remarkable insight on the unresolved nature of our lives, in all their incompleteness, interruptedness, and simultaneity.

Interesting that I temporarily abandoned this book for Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code. (See here for my reflections on that one...) Plus a couple of other easy-readers. But it was refreshing to return to this pure, high-octane writing. Personally though, I am never quite satisfied by a novel that, no matter how artfully executed, is so static that it makes me count the pages. Something in me wants it all -- to stick the soul inside the body, the beautiful, innovative writing inside a damned good page-turner.

… if not David Copperfield, at least Cortazar’s Hopscotch…

DECIPHERING THE CODE

From its first paragraph, all expectations of literary quality are tossed out the window:

Renowned curator Jacques Saunière staggered through the vaulted archway of the museum’s Grand Gallery. He lunged for the nearest painting he could see, a Caravaggio. Grabbing the guilded frame, the seventy-six-year-old man heaved the masterpiece toward himself until it tore from the wall and Saunière collapsed backward in a heap beneath the canvas.

Need it bear pointing out how awful this paragraph is? I expect most of my regular readers would see it right away, but… identifying the character as a “renowned curator” right off the bat, telling us his precise age (all these details could be worked in later, of course, suggested through action, dialogue or deft description), the awkwardness of the phrase “heaved the masterpiece toward himself”, the hackneyed vagueness of “collapsed backward in a heap”, the cliché of the guilded frame …

Welcome (or welcome back) to pulp fiction. The purple prose school of Dean Koontz et al.

Needless to say, not my usual fare. It so happens a discerning friend passed this one on to me as a pre-birthday gift -- with a note, “Here’s a real brain teaser for you!”

So with all the hype and the movie which has just come out, I decided to give it a whirl.

And frankly, I enjoyed this one. Despite myself. Despite the novel’s narrative and stylistic clunkiness, despite the lack of any real characters, etc.

I think the book is so entirely refreshing because it's so bad and so ingenious at the same time. I couldn't think of a cleverer way to make 250 million dollars myself. Way to go, Dan Brown! We must give the man credit where credit is due…

Maybe he’ll set up a poetry prize.

Alright, enough sarcasm.

__________________________

On one level DVC is a typical murder mystery. That in itself is not particularly interesting: the same scenario, with seemingly infinite variations, gets played out on TV every night of the week. But what is interesting about this one is that it revolves around some pretty engaging themes: an age-old conspiracy to suppress “sacred feminine” by the Catholic Church, and in particular, Jesus’ possible marriage to and children by Mary Magdelene and plans that she succeed him in leading the church. Along the way, we are introduced to some heady historical, mythological and intellectual material. Things I enjoyed learning (or re-learning) about: the mysterious and inspired quirks of Leonardo da Vinci, as well as his Mona Lisa, the Last Supper, and other masterpieces; the demonization of pagan symbols by the early Church; the existence of dozens of alternative gospels; practices of bodily mortification by some members of the Opus Dei; that strange misogynistic Renaissance text, Malleus Malificarum; the uses to which anagrams were put in the middle ages; the role of the Knights Templar; the symbolism on the tomb of Newton; the fibonnacci sequence; PHI (or Divine Proportion); the Rose Line in Chapelle Saint-Sulpice and the symbolic intricacies of Rosslyn Chapel; etymological origins of words like villain and crucifixion.

Part of the fun, of course, is that much of the information is true and yet much also false or unsubstantiated -- despite the author’s claims to factual authenticity. (I will not waste words getting into high dudgeon about Brown’s documentary irresponsibility in what is after all a work of fiction… Here, an elaborate site devoted to the factual merits and demerits of the DVC.) Indeed one of the best ways to enjoy this book is to read it beside your computer and look up the extravagant claims and references as they come up. The experience of reading DVC can then become culturally enriching indeed. Along the way I discovered some extraordinary sites, among them, this high resolution tour of the church in Milan that holds The Last Supper, and this site on Scotland’s Rosslyn Chapel. Just contemplating those cultural treasures is utter delight.

__________________________

A plot machine – that’s how Ron Silliman describes Dan Brown’s authorial presence in DVC, and for all the information the book contains, it is the blatant withholding of information that moves that plot along. I like what Silliman has to say about this:

For all the excess detail at the start of chapters, Brown’s favorite word in this novel is actually rather vague: something. As in “You and your brethren possess something that is not yours." Brown’s formal problem, chapter after chapter, is how to advance the narrative without giving away key details – in this sense, the book resembles nothing so much as the old Flash Gordon serials from the movies of the 1930s & ‘40s, with their brief episodes lurching from cliff hanger to cliff hanger. And, indeed, the Indiana Jones movies are a kind of homage to those same movies.

It would have been nice to be able to do a word search on the text to see how much the word something comes up, but flipping through the book I found these:

If it went as planned tonight in Paris, …. (he) would soon be in possession of something that would make him the most powerful man in Christendom.

Confused, he read it again, sensing that something had gone terribly wrong.

Something tells me you will eventually find what you seek.

Otherwise, Brown depends on an assortment of vaguenesses, indefinite articles and pronouns that are pretty much the equivalent of something. The most egregious of these:

That instant, (she) could finally see what they were all witnessing. As she staggered back in horror, she felt the image searing itself into her memory forever.

What that image is, we don’t learn until almost 200 pages later.

Get a load of these sentences. Most are final sentences of chapters or at least to be found in the chapters' final paragraphs, followed by scene changes in succeeding chapters (I've hidden the identities of characters so as not to run a spoiler risk):

X felt an unexpected apprehension.

"Follow my directions very closely."

X was about to escape … whether he/she wanted to or not.

X decided to stay there in the darkness and watch Y's every move.

On the glass, six words glowed in purple, scrawled directly across Mona Lisa’s face.

First, I want you to tell me everything you know about X.

Now X had another problem. . . Where do I take them?

"Our work tonight is not yet done."

“You and I have much to discuss."

“So you tell me sir. Tell me.”

“You had better explain yourself. You have not been honest with me.”

X pulled the pistol from his pocket, and inched down the hallway.

When X read the label above the empty peg, he knew he was in trouble.

X dialed zero, knowing the next sixty seconds might answer a question that had been puzzling him all night.

X felt shaky as he inched deeper into the circular room. This had to be the place.

All part of the stock and trade of thriller writing. In most of my fiction reading, such authorial tricks are so muted as to be truly slight-of-hand. Reading Brown has at least momentarily heightened my sensitivity as to these devices, so that now I even find myself spotting them in a Nicole Brossard text. (Which I temporarily abandoned, by the way, to read this much more compelling page turner…)

__________________________

The book itself, as well as its sheer popularity (60 million copies sold so far), do constitute a weird warped reflection of the collective psyche of these information-stuffed, spiritually starved, mundane yet desperate times. Simplistic and dummied down though it may be, there is a passionate argument within the DVC that’s well worth heeding. Notions of alternative takes on traditional religion – especially those that privilege the individual and the primacy of women – are tantalizing and I would say entirely justifiable in this era. What DVC and other texts refer to as the Judeo-Christian suppression of the sacred feminine is, generally speaking, true, and the subordination and indeed demonization of life-affirming pagan elements of our culture, equally obvious. Although the early and neo-conservative church are portrayed as the heavies in this book (I’m not taking this book seriously – am I?), it seems a similar suppression has taken place in practically all of the world’s religions and cultures. If there’s any conspiracy, it seems pretty clear that it’s more unconscious than conscious -- more the product of collective forces than any particular individuals or institutions. Conspiracy theories though are wonderfully appealing to the human mind – especially to us bottom feeders who are kept in the dark as to so much of what goes on.

So if you haven’t read it yet, buy this book – or have one of its 60 million readers pass you a copy. You may not like it, but you'll enjoy it immensely. It’s a phenom. (There’s a plug for you... do I get a commission, Mr. Brown? Even .1% would set me up pretty nicely...)

JOSEPH EPSTEIN

"The modern essay," writes Karl Shapiro, "has regained a good deal of its literary status in our time, much to the credit of Joseph Epstein."

Well, he is a marvellous essayist, that I can attest -- an elegant prose stylist who writes with surpassing insight, clarity, and aphoristic flair. I just finished reading his 1980 book Ambition: The Secret Passion -- one of more than a dozen books of commentary authored by him (he has also written two highly acclaimed books of short stories). In this book he argues that ambition, no matter how ambivolent we may feel about its excesses (and rightly so), can be defined as "the fuel of achievement", an answer to a deep seated need to realize our potential as well as (ok, I'm quoting from the book jacket now) an honourable way to influence and advance civilization. An absorbing as well as, I must admit as far as I'm concerned, a sobering read. For an update on his views, I highly recommend this 2004 piece in The Weekly Standard, entitled The Perpetual Adolescent: The Triumph of Youth Culture. I guarantee, especially you"perpetual youths" out there (oh yes, we are many), that you're in for a provocative as well as highly stimulating read.

BARBARA PELMAN

Perhaps my most exciting find poet-wise at this year's LCP AGM was Barbara Pelman.

One Stone, her first trade book, came out this year -- but poetically speaking she is no neophyte. At 50- something, she has been a full-time secondary school teacher for more than two decades, teaching and writing poetry all that time, patiently developing her craft in various writer's groups, submitting here and there, publishing occasionally in some of Canada's more established journals. At the new members' reading, she read this poem, which took my breath away -- and impressed me enough to buy her book. The book is about coming through a divorce after 20 years of marriage. In this poem, the final one in the collection, that painful process becomes analagous to the Isrealites wandering through the desert into the promised land. This association -- she said as much at the reading -- was a private one, but that level of meaning becomes clear in the context of the collection itself.


COMING THROUGH

400 years in a narrow land,
our veins thick and stagnant;
blood runs thin in a place of dust.

When we crossed the Red Sea,
the waves rising like walls
and the land dry before us,
we thought we were free.

But there was the desert --
our minds could not fathom
the space, saw only sand
and no water. Sand.
No water. Our garments,
of Egyptian cotton, fell from our shoulders,
in strips and rags. The sun beat
our backs, burned our hair
white. Soon even our tears
dried in the desert air. There was rock
and no water. We sat on stone,
looking back at the green fields,
the small huts of Mitzrayim.
Why look forward
upon nothing?

Miriam led us from well
to well, cool water at the end
of a long day. But there was no place
to build, only a moment
of shade, sun reflected
on the palm frond, wind
scratching its spiky fingers:
wind on the hot face, a cup
of water.

Now is the time
for turning. Between us and Jericho
is only a stretch of grass,
tender green in the spring breeze,
and a wall. In my hand,
the ram's horn, a smooth bone
of sound -- with my breath
I can shake the walls, stir the stones
into flight.

In front of me, the shadow of a wall,
In my hand, a trumpet.

The writer of The Journey of the Magi could do no better.

Thematically, this poem is immense; technically it works so well on so many levels. I love, for instance, that "smooth bone of sound" amid all that aridity, and water/heat contrast is so natural one is somehow not immediately reminded of Eliot; it's been a while since I read a poem where the linebreaks were so effective. For instance, in the second stanza

our minds could not fathom (SPACE)
the space, saw only sand (NOTHINGNESS)
and no water. Sand. (AGAIN NOTHINGNESS)
No water. Our garments, (SOMETHING ELSE?)
of Egyptian cotton, fell from our shoulders,
in strips and rags. The sun beat (WHAT? WHO?)
our backs, burned our hair
(SURPRISE) white. Soon even our tears (WHAT?)
dried in the desert air. There was rock (PAUSE -- WHAT ELSE?)
and no water. We sat on stone,
looking back at the green fields,
the small huts of Mitzrayim.
Why look forward (NOTHING)
upon nothing?

In many poems this kind of "pregnant pause" or "leave the reader hanging" linebreaking seems a kind of cheap trick, as in say (I'm making up something here, but I'm sure many of you have seen similar)

I turned the light
off. Was thinking about
calling you up as I went to
bed.

but here, because of what the poem is about -- coming through such an inhospitable environment towards such an uncertain goal -- it serves its purpose well in slowing the reader down, in suggesting a number of uncertain possibilities before one, much as the narrator faces uncertain possibilities with each and every step as she/he makes her/his way through.

Her collection, at a 104 pages, is longer than most first books, but having only read part of it, I can see she takes us on quite a journey, along which she delivers a number of poems as strong as this one.

__________

I first saw Pelman on a panel about teaching poetry in the schools. It soon became clear that she was the most experienced teacher on the panel, and had come up with a number of inspiring formulas for teaching high schoolers to enjoy poetry ... a pretty daunting task at any time. People that age need anything to be strongly related to them personally to be at all relevant. One of her more striking assignments (maybe this idea is from the literature, but I have never heard it before) was for the student to choose from an exhaustive list a poet who was born on his or her birthday, write an interview with that poet, and then write a poem in the style of that poet. To get students away from the trite but universal impulse to write confessional rhyming poems, Pelman emphasized (this seemed to be her own formula, and teachers, as she said, always need them), the "Three P's of Poetry", ingrediants found in any good poem:

Passion
Persona
Play

Passion here is pretty self-explanatory. By Persona, she means a certain indirectness (persona of course meaning mask), i.e. an idea expressed by Billy Collins, that if you write about your father write about anything but your father... rather images & impressions either associated with him or somehow imbued by him. By Play, of course, she means play with language, and she suggested a number of interesting ways to impel the students toward that.

Anyway, Pelman struck me as a great teacher, giving the lie to that old GB Shaw walnut, "Those who can't do, teach..."

A PLUG FOR CIRCLE

Victoria Chang's Circle is one book I just had to order as soon as it came out. I just had to get to know the poetry of/within/behind that extraordinary poet blogger so many of us enjoyed and admired.

I finally got it last week, and finished a first read-through yesterday. (Seems it was delayed... so was another book in the same order, Janet Frame's Angel at My Table, which still hasn't arrived at this table...)

Anyway, it's nice to report that this is one book I'm really glad I did order. Every poem was engaging -- the standout poems, the OK poems, even the poems I felt could have been better realized. Each offered rewards. V Chang definitely offers significant things to learn from a poem-making point of view.

Certain poets make one feel the force of their mastery of one or two elements or strategems common to much good poetry, but which are particularly salient in theirs. Robyn Sarah, as I was saying a few weeks back, makes one feel the force of her concision, of her precise control of conversational language;Victoria Chang makes one feel the mastery of another element: the laying out intelligent clues.

The strongest poems in the collection -- excellent poems by any standard -- were, for me, Yang Gui Fe, Eva Braun at Bershtesgarden, Kitchen Aid Epicurean Stand Mixer, and Lantern Festival. In these a whole life or lives seemed to hang on an image or line, and in almost any given poem, a sequence of deftly placed lines or images outline a deliberate "story" or subtext.

If there are weaker poems in the collection, it seems to me that the clues provided are meagre, arbitary; they don't connect with a sufficiently strong necessity to satisfy me. "The Laws of the Garden" is one; "The Goal" and "Majority Rules" are two others. However, the poem that first appeared in Slate, Holiday Parties, struck me in an annoying way as one of these, but a careful re-reading reveals it to be a remarkable depiction of the social pressures faced by a young woman coming of age in a Chinese American family in the incongruous context of socially-disconnected North America. So at this point word is out on a number of these "insufficient" poems; for me, perhaps, all they deserve is a careful re-reading.

Anyway, I'll leave this as a sketch of a review -- a review in process, if you will, if I ever follow through. Clearly, though, Circle is well worth reading, and re-reading... & Victoria Chang a talented poet worth watching...

THINGS I'M READING RIGHT NOW

Things I'm reading right now:

A.R. Ammons, A Coast of Trees. Winner of the 1981 National Book Critics Circle Award, with big metaphysical poems like Swells and Easter Morning. Lyrical poetry of his later years.

G.C. Waldrep, Goldbeater's Skin
Actually I'm re-reading this one. Fiercely intelligent, interior, hierophantic. Opens doors to linguistic risk. Provokes a desire to read the dictionary from cover to cover and find obscure words to use purely for their evocative, aesthetic properties. Love it. Poet's poet.

Billy Collins, Sleeping Alone Around the Room
One couldn't imagine a poet more different in style and approach Waldrep. Accessible, charming, brilliant. A romp. If humour columnists Josh Freed (Montreal Gazette) or Gary Lautens (Toronto Star) wrote poetry, this is how they would write. Actually, I find a lien to Italo Calvino. In particular, Mr. Palomar.

John Ciardi: How A Poem Means (© 1987,second edition, co-authored with Miller Williams).
A delightful read, if you haven't read it. I had the good fortune to pick this up at a second-hand bookstore. Written as a text book/anthology for undergraduates, it seems designed for poets who want to/have to resharpen their critical/editorial pencils outside of an MFA program (My pencil dulled by lack of use… well, that metaphor breaks like a pencil under scrutiny…switching horses in midstream, as Dylan (Bob) put it!) . How A Poem Means is informed by a passion for literature and sympathy for poet as creator, the writer being not just an academic but an excellent translator & pretty fair poet himself. Ciardi selects poems - as a semelier would fine wines -- from all over the canon - traditional ballads, poems from the renaissance, modern, to discuss their tastes & textures from point of view of symbolism, language, rhythm, meter, etc. I love the discussion of rhyme in English (as compared to Italian), language vs. diction, hard and soft diction, (which I'm reading right now). A great way to revisit old favs, like Ode to a Grecian Urn or Rime of the Ancient Mariner and discover newer poets (Nemerov, XJ Kennedy for example). Can't say enough in praise of this wonderful book….

2004 Best American Poetry: So far have only read a few selections of this anthology guest edited by Lyn Hejinian… includes Ron Silliman, Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein of the "langpo" movement (a group I'm extremely curious about), a bunch of younger poets, older poets. A much more "kicked back" collection than the 1994 edition edited by AR Ammons, also on my shelves… although that one includes, curiously enough, Hejinian.

George Elliott Clarke: Whylah Falls, a series of dramatic monologues that is itself a drama, by this acclaimed black writer from Nova Scotia. My reading of this one was interrupted by summer teaching & other things; it needs to be read like a play script, so I'll have to start over. Was very impressed by the sensual, colloquial yet learned beauty of this man's language. Somehow though, the work's preoccupations are tangential to my own - a kind of romanticized, sepia image of an earlier time - so I didn't resume. But definitely will…


Lots of good stuff on my shelves waiting to be delved into, including
Best American Essays, 2002
American Linden by Matthew Zapruder
Jorge Louis Borges, Selected Poems (bilingual edition) edited by Alexander Coleman and translated by a dozen or so poet/translators
Don McKay, Camber. selected poems by a marvellous Canadian poet who I hardly know as yet. Speaks of poetry - or those first inspirations -- as "the tiny sea in the ear/ and the moth wing in the mind, which wait."
Susan Gillis, Volta
A.R. Ammon's Garbage.
Hat on a Pond, by Dara Wier
Mary Oliver, New & Selected Poems Volume One
Side/Lines, A New Canadian Poetics, edited by rob mclennan
Anne Simpson, Loop, this year's Canadian Giller Prize winner

Green Light by Matthew Rohrer

I just finished reading Green Light by Matthew Rohrer (Verse Press, 2004) which a friend bought from the poet at a certain New England workshop and lent to me. (When I find out the name of that workshop, I’ll revise this post accordingly.) Rohrer, who was born in Ann Arbor and now lives in Brooklyn, is also the author of A Hummock in the Malookas, which won the 1994 National Poetry Series and was published by W.W. Norton. I found the poems in Green Light engaging enough that I read through the entire book (about 85 p.) in a couple of days. A poem that caught my eye, as exemplary of his style:


CATECHISM


Of my parents and origins I have little to say.

In church they actually told us
Catholicism was
“a big house full of cool, old stuff”.

I spent my time sitting
in the darkened apse
imagining the actual house.

Your Dominican mind tricks don’t work on me.

My knees suffered through Kumbaya.

Then there was the incident
of the professor who sneaked the holy water
out and poured it into the ocean.

He wrote a letter to the bishop
informing him that
all the world’s water was holy now.

He was also a harborer of homosexuals.

I am still in the dark
imagining the actual house.


James Tate on the back of the book writes, “There are poems in A Green Light that can break your heart with their unexpected twists and turns. You think you know where you are and then you don’t and it is inexplicably sad. You experience some kind of emotion that you can’t even name, but it’s deep and real. That’s the power of Matthew Rohrer’s new poems.” Break your heart? My heart is not exactly broken. That I take as literary hype-erbolese. But the unexpected twists, the strange emotion and inexplicable sadness, are very apt description. The sadness has to do with abrupt (but eminently artful) juxtapositions, incomplete resolutions, and the blasé-seeming sparseness of Rohrer’s work. All these suggest disenchantment, inner deadness, emotional damage…. and yet the poems crackle with sardonic, understated wit. Rohrer sketches a mini-cosmos. Darkness abounds. The second poem in the collection, called I Hail From The Bottom of the Sea, The Land of Eternal Darkness is a ferocious, if highly ironic, tract. It establishes for us that he’s serious. But also (somewhere UP THERE, he writes) there are skies with “mysterious machines, burning and turning in our heads”, that questionable God, and everywhere, the Unnameable (or semi-nameable, as it turns out):

In the center of the universe
is an enormous emptiness
that’s teaching us something
about ourselves.

Sometimes, though, I feel that Rohrer’s deadpan style is a pose. In the poem above, Catechism, does he really have little to say about his parents/origins? There are poems that twist toward trendiness, like one called We Should Never Have Stopped at Pussy Island. But still. But still. There are frequent lines of great pith and resonance, evidence of great intelligence at work…

Reading Rohrer, other writers come to mind, but such inner reminders I find extraneous, so I tack them on at the end of this review: I think of Yannos Ritsos, whose poems could be described as picturesque little postcards with disturbing cracks in the corners that catch you up short with their reminders of mortality, violence, etc. Or of the Bosnian-born fiction writer Aleksandar Hemon (The Story of Bruno, Nowhere Man), whose every mordant line expresses the great solitude and brutal violation of his own past, that of his ancestors, and by extension, humanity…