30.1November–December 2008

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Rick Flynn reviews James P. White

I Am EvEryonE I mEEt

Tabloid Books Inc.

“I Am Everyone I Meet is an experiment chronicling honest moments of contact

with perfect strangers.”

Henry Grinberg reviews Paul Pines

my BrothEr’s mAdnEss

Curbstone Press

“This is not an easy take to read, but it conveys stunning depictions of

emotional suffering.”

Sheri Reda reviews Robert D. Sutherland

thE FArrIngFord CAdEnzA Pikestaff Press

“I just finished reading a masterwork—or maybe I just finished riding it.”

Chet Kozlowski reviews Martin Golan

WhErE thIngs ArE WhEn you LosE thEm

Birch Brook Press

“Golan takes on matters of the heart in times of testy human behavior.”

Danny Rivera reviews M. L. Liebler

WIdE AWAkE In somEonE ELsE’s drEAm

Wayne State University Press

“Despite its very human core and honest sentiments, it is a book of

modest returns.”

Brian Allen Carr reviews Cliff Hudder

spLIntErvILLE

The Texas Review Press

“Hudder’s achievement with the piece has rediscovered

what Kafka showed in The Metamorphosis.”

November–December 2008 Page 1 L

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L.A. StreetSRick Flynn

I Am EvEryonE I mEEt

James P. White

Tabloid Books Inc.http://tabloidbooks.com56 pages; paper, $2.00

James P. White’s recent tabloid book, I Am Everyone I Meet, marks an experiment in book publishing. The intent of Tabloid Books Inc. is to provide a larger distribution for literary works by skirting the high costs of traditional publication and making works available in an inexpensive format that could make for easy distribution as a newspaper insert. The means of publication—the work is also available online at http://tablooidbooks.com in a PDF format—is not the only thing experimental about I Am Everyone I Meet.

Stories and novels tend to nail things down firmly and recover well-defined characters and their milieu. James White did this tenderly in his well-acclaimed first novel Birdsong (1977), which renders a small-town Texan’s world as he and his girl move from courtship to early marriage. In California Exit (1987), we get to know a cash-strapped academic tangled up with hostile in-laws and administrative turf wars, doing his best to keep his writing, work, and family flourishing. The Persian Oven (1985) records White’s short hiatus from writing and teach-ing as he manages a bakery. These realistic works are focused, with a short list of characters and their world coming fully to life.

White’s latest work I Am Everyone I Meet defies categorization. Studs Terkel’s Hard Times (1970) comes to mind as a distant cousin, if only because of the sheer number of interviews Terkel conducts. But even Terkel glues his interviews together with themes such as the Great Depression, race relations, or what we think about dying. While I Am Everyone I Meet does not have a unifying theme, we do have an experiment chronicling honest moments of contact with perfect strangers.

What holds James White’s I Am Everyone I Meet in place is the narrator’s gentle sensibility as he records these brief moments of connectedness. This kaleidoscopic view of greater Los Angeles contains one hundred finely drawn vignettes of people encoun-tered “in traffic, on busy sidewalks, in restaurants, gyms, coffee shops, parks and churches.” Most of the mix—rudderless homeless people, beggars, drug addicts, and retirees, and a range of hard-working folks—we see through White’s gentle gaze, rooted in his belief that our “Seeing the world as filled with strangers who threaten us or seeing it as filled with other people who are like us and who interest us, makes the difference.” Everybody presents a moment of honest contact. Only a professional channeler working out of a ratty motel manages to make the author quietly clam-up and seethe. Others reveal themselves to him as he reveals himself to them, reminding us what we often miss hurrying past each other, our focus blinkered with private concerns and haste. White defines his mission as “approaching part

of my life by listening to strangers tell about their lives.” They’re part of our lives as well, though we, as White notes, often consider them “background for our own thinking.”

Now, in the forefront of White’s thinking, we meet a teenage junky who excuses himself to shoot up in the restaurant bathroom between dinner and dessert, and returns to show White “several lumps along his veins” before explaining how the “veins get really tough.” The dialogue, which White claims to be “all true,” reveals a mixed-up, feckless kid whose ex-hippy parents first encouraged him and later were horrified later by his experiment with drugs. We know just enough about the kid—good talent and looks and many failed attempts to kick heroin—to wonder and worry, and know that others, including White, do so as well.

The fabric of short-lived intimacy is revealed in brief, telling snips. A homeless blond man and his Chicana girlfriend, given forty dollars by White, exit the bus and in his view:

They stand on the curb outside the win-dow and she looks at the folded money he holds. He is about to unfold it and see how much it is, then he glances up and sees me looking at them. He is embarrassed. He blushes. He puts the bills in his back pocket. He waves bye.

Thus, desperation and greed intersect manners before the luckless duo walks off with their “bedroll and a thirty year old suitcase” to find a place to sleep on the beach near Santa Monica.

I Am Everyone I Meet is an experiment chronicling honest

moments of contact with perfect strangers.

Where we normally avert our eyes, White pushes through to find something very human.

In another sketch, a ripe, homeless “black guy,” with “an unclean stench,” sitting across the aisle on the bus to Santa Monica is folding and un-folding three one-dollar bills before White, sensing his gentleness, surprises him by first snatching the bills from and then quickly returning them to the startled man’s hands. The result, maybe because of the gentleness that permeates the narrative voice, is not hostility from this begrimed thirty-three year old, but a moment of merriment and recognition because “[we] both think this is funny. My stealing from him. He keeps a smile, as I do.”

Soon, White asks to see his crack pipe and notices the “knots along his veins where he has shot up and scarred.”

This man’s story—the son of crack addicts fol-lowing his parents’ footsteps, recently ripped off, a book in his back pocket he has yet to finish reading since leaving high school—is capped with a pungent moment of sweetness when, White writes,

“He hesitates then seeing that I’m willing, he spreads his arms and gives me a tight hug. The smell does not bother me. ‘I love you,’ he whispers, bringing his face close enough to kiss me. ‘I really love you.’”

“I love you too,” White responds. In these fleeting contacts, we see keen eyes and

ears at work. People, White tells us, will reveal much to us if only we avail ourselves of the “sensitivity within us that can take the time we waste each day, and by paying attention to it later, allow us to sud-denly notice what we saw and felt.”

It helps also to have the nerve and grace to snatch three dollars from a crack addict’s hands and befriend him moments later.

The mosaic also includes many fortunate folks such as a youngish father sitting on a bench outside Versace in Beverly Hills whom White observes “reading endless emails [sic] on his Blackberry” and wearing casual clothes that are flawless and “shoes made of the finest leather.” In the space of a page, the accomplished writer and the investment banker with an apartment in Chicago and a condo in Rome understand they share good fortune.

Just a few minutes of talking and White reminds the thirty-seven year old that he should “keep aware of how much [he has],” and that it is “a wonderful thing.”

The young man counters, saying to White, “You’re here in the middle of the day. You’ve retired. You have a family. You’re a writer.”

“Have you published books?” the young man asks.

When White answers, “Yes,” the young man concludes, “then you have everything, too.”

Most sketches leave you wishing you had White’s simple decency and nerve, but in a comical sketch about White’s paid session with a profes-sional channeler, the stranger gets little kindness. After ninety minutes of utter, ear-splitting lunacy about channeling “with Herin Zopolater, a soldier in the world army in 2284,” who has admonished earthlings to “purify [their] environment” for their “salvation and that of [their] prodigy” [sic], White’s “head is pounding,” his rage at this absurdity barely suppressed.

Then, with brazen egoism, the lunatic fishes for a compliment, asking White, “He’s [Herin Zopolater] really something, isn’t he?”

Seething quietly, White answers, “Hmm,” and is soon relieved by the sunlight after fleeing the charlatan’s motel room.

Yet most encounters are handled with an envi-able grace and ease, surprising us with just how much can be shared with perfect strangers in an honest few minutes.

In the introduction, one of White’s dear friends,

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the late Christopher Isherwood, is quoted near the end of his life as telling White, “The people that I’ve known—they’ve touched me. They’ve touched me.”

White explains that Isherwood “said this be-cause he felt so strongly at that moment and he also said it so that I would know. Our lives touch each other. Being aware of this touching is what living is all about. It is the subject of this book.”

How we can touch each other daily, in the briefest of encounters, is the stuff of James White’s I Am Everyone I Meet. Most books make you feel connected. There’s a thematic wholeness and resolu-tion, while in this collection, I feel as if I’ve learned what it’s like to meet everyone I see and know in an airport lounge, everyone passing by but no one really touching me deeply. Thoreau says, “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation”: James White shows that

we can lead lives of quiet joy.With shutters open a whole world gone miss-

ing is revealed in James White’s I Am Everyone I Meet.

Rick Flynn is an English professor at a number of San Francisco Bay Area community colleges.

emotionAL reScueHenry Grinberg

my BrothEr’s mAdnEss

Paul Pines

Curbstone Presshttp://www.curbstone.org318 pages; paper, $15.95

Paul Pines, poet, novelist, jazz club owner, and psychotherapist, is the author of the memoir My Brother’s Madness. It relates in pitiless and heart-rending detail essentially a conjoined life: his own and that of his brother, Claude, two years his junior, diagnosed early in his twenties a paranoid schizo-phrenic. He also provides starkly eloquent portraits of his mother, an attorney, flamboyantly narcissistic and inappropriately seductive; his father, an Eastern European immigrant who became a successful physi-cian, but at home, with his sons, capable of veering between harshness and remorseful distance; and his father’s second wife, after the mother abandoned the home, a sadistic exploiter, who among other crimes is said to have poisoned the family dog.

Claude, immensely bright, perceptive, and talented, is at the same time, apparently from early life, progressively crippled by paranoid delusions: he claims people constantly talk about him, condemn and criticize him. His teen years are marked by repeated frustrations. He enters, and soon drops out of, schools, colleges, and programs that his brother, the author, hopes will steer him on a productive path. His parents, apparently preoccupied by their own demons, appear powerless to understand or help,

but seem by that helplessness to act as enablers. A major disappointment is Claude’s inability, after what seems a promising beginning, to complete his medical studies. After repeated attempts to maintain himself as a lab technician, he becomes completely disabled by his illnesses and is commit-ted for much of the rest of his life to an on-and-off regimen of mental hospitals and prescription drugs.

Claude is not a model patient. He refuses to accept diagnoses, hospital-izations, or medications, and when he does so, it is with utmost resentment. When he seems to relent, he is still rebellious, reacting alternately with rage, guile, and ingenuity to his confinements and medications. For the next forty years or so, his is a story of fruitless rebellion. There are heartbreaking decompensations and regressions interspersed with interludes of gentleness and love.

This is not an easy take to read, but it conveys stunning depictions

of emotional suffering. This frustrating, unwinnable fraternal battle,

this forty-year family saga, has been recorded by Pines, who is by turns compassionately, coura-geously, resentfully, and at times, ragefully, locked in battle with his brother—both of them victims—each apparently unable to abandon the other, but equally unable to discover viable solutions in either hospitals or antipsychotic medications. This is not an easy tale to read, but it is told with honesty and eloquence, and conveys stunning depictions of emotional suffering,

finally achieving resolution and even a sense of peace.

However, there is no happy end-ing. Pines describes a world in which psychiatric medicine, although marked by significant achievements, seems unable yet to match the remarkable breakthroughs of modern physical medicine. Psychosis is not always reachable, let alone treatable. Severe mental illness does not always or nec-essarily respond predictably to either drugs or psychotherapy. Every patient is different. Great care and much time

may sometimes need to be expended in the search for useful approaches. This means time and money, and private and public medical plans set dishearten-ing limits on what they are prepared to fund. Pines shows how some practitioners in psychiatric hospital settings are obliged to give up when a “difficult” patient does not fit certain frameworks.

This situation is ironically contrasted with the heroic efforts exerted near the end of the book to save Claude’s life when he is battling leukemia. The dramatic differences between what is expended to combat physical illness on the one hand, and mental illness on the other (where presumably practitioners might feel less secure or hopeful), is interesting, as they say.

Henry Grinberg is a licensed psychoanalyst. He taught literature and writing for forty-two years at the City University of New York and Yeshiva Univer-sity and is the author of the recently published novel Variations on the Beast (The Dragon Press).

eScher’S roLLercoASterSheri Reda

thE FArrIngFord CAdEnzA

Robert D. Sutherland

Pikestaff Presshttp://www.pikestaffpress.com

536 pages; paper, $15.95

I just finished reading a masterwork by M. C. Escher—in the form of a detective novel about an elusive piece of music. Or maybe I just finished rid-ing it. I have the same exhilarated, queasy feeling I associate with debarking from a particularly well-crafted wooden roller coaster.

Robert D. Sutherland’s The Farringford Ca-denza, published by Pikestaff Press, led me up stairs that descend into the bowels of organized crime, down industrial avenues that end in open ports, and through a maze of second-hand shops, cheap hotel rooms, sumptuous concert halls, and vehicles ranging from trains and planes to pickup trucks and limousines—all to arrive where I started, laughing

from joy at the ride. It also placed me in the company of characters I rarely deign to identify with, including a duplicitous and somewhat clumsy detective, a mor-ally bankrupt accountant, a couple of violence-prone professional thieves, a Rasta man, and a priapic pillar of the community.

The novel starts out with the deliberate sense of anticipation that only a gifted storyteller can con-struct. Like an Escher print, it begins with clarity of line: a train, slowing to a crawl, carries a dead man whose pajamas are oddly awry. An obituary identi-fies the man. News items decry the loss to the world

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of a cadenza the dead man had composed but never published.

With these spare but intentional strokes, Suther-land identifies the mystery, configures the subsequent quest, and encodes the novel with underlying mean-ings available only to the reader, who is never omni-scient but always one step ahead of the crowd. Like a roller coaster, the novel chugs slowly and carefully out of the gate, groove to track. Once the reader has a grasp of its foundational events, the story takes off, collecting characters and confounding expectations at an increasing, mind-rattling pace.

I just finished reading a masterwork—or maybe I just

finished riding it.

Ostensibly, this is a novel about a cadenza—which I now know is not a piece of furniture but an instrumental solo passage in a concerto. Until the nineteenth century at least, cadenzas were solo virtu-oso performances. Often, they were improvisational, never to be repeated, and thus ephemeral, like ballet, or theatre, or any other live, embodied experience. As the century progressed, the cadenza fell prey to our modern mania for recording, preserving, and attempting to “keep” experiences. Thus, the novel’s illustrious Mr. Farringford has meticulously com-posed his celebrated cadenza, a masterwork within the masterwork of his concerto. His manuscript is the engine that drives the story.

In life, the human impulse to hang on to what is, in essence, ephemeral creates heartache and drama. In Sutherland’s novel, it creates the same thing—plot. When Farringford dies mysteriously after perform-ing the cadenza, the score disappears, too, and it becomes, over time, an icon of desire and a grail. For one collector, it promises the satisfaction of a hunger to have and thus in his mind to be all that is first, most, and only. For another, it represents mastery.

For a few seekers, the cadenza has become the embodiment of love or the lack of it. For a good number more, it’s worth nothing but cash. And for one man, who dogs the trail of the others, it’s worth more lost than found. These competing desires run a classical gamut up, down, and around the overlap-ping worlds of high society, high finance, and art,

revealing each to be a complex and oddly funny intersection of ambition and desire.

The novel roars into action in Baltimore, where a hapless grad student finds the music in a second-hand shop. But it trundles from Baltimore to New York City and back several times, with an additional short jaunt to St. Croix, in a chain of events that link Farringford’s family, his colleagues and patrons, col-lectors, musicians, academics, island dwellers—and those privileged few who once heard the cadenza. The privileged include a man who wants to publish it, a man who reveres it as an aphrodisiac, and a ridiculous, vicious man who thinks the cadenza can cure his lard-induced impotence.

Sutherland calls his novel a spoof of the detec-tive genre, and it does poke good-natured fun at the elements of noir. His Italian gangsters, for example, carry ancient Latin rather than Sicilian last names. His detective, whose name has no vowels at all, eyes the bottom of a barrel before a third of the story is out. Repeated attempts on Trntl’s life become in-creasingly ludicrous, until she is locked in a pantry, with only canned goods and a mop to protect her, and still wins out over her foes. The message: enjoy the action, folks, because this meditation on desire is embedded in good old-fashioned fun. And the rules dictate that Trntl cannot be killed. That’s not to say that every character is safe from harm. Bad guys buy it in droves, and some of those deaths are guiltily satisfying. A few (relative) innocents are placed in harm’s way—and then harmed. No one is squeaky clean, of course, just as no one is entirely evil. There is room for calamity, regret, and dismay as well as an occasional shout of victory.

As one who is only a rare reader of thrillers, detective fiction, and noir, I am used to getting lost fairly early in a plotline, stumbling through char-acter outlines and inexplicable events until the end of the story, when the author explains it all for me. Or doesn’t. Sutherland has turned the tables on that tradition, however, by keeping the reader at least vaguely in the know, at least part of the time. I rarely knew where Farringford’s cadenza was at any point in the novel. But I knew more than Scaevola or Trntl or Zzzyznski, who hates people with names from the beginning of the alphabet.

I had the fun of wanting to shout, “Look behind you!” and “No! Don’t go in there!” I got to chortle, you’re right, but for the wrong reasons. And I got

to feel like a teenager by reveling in the grossness of the rich and the powerful: I alone was privy to the complete corruption of some characters and the well-intentioned stupidity of others.

It was a wonderful ride, though I could see the end coming. And then I didn’t. Or, it didn’t. Instead, like the path of desire itself, the novel circled back and began again almost where it had started. Though Sutherland says Farringford was more than a decade in the making, and he hasn’t promised another word on the topic, I found myself longing for the next installment.

Nothing else in the recent past has kept me up long past midnight, thinking not one whit about war, foreclosures, campaigns, or my kid’s curfew. I want a sequel, and I want it now. Maybe Sutherland’s got one hidden somewhere safe, in his study….

Sheri Reda is a professional writer, educator, and storyteller living in Chicago. Like the rest of us, she is a slave to her desires.

the noveLLA mAtterSBrian Allen Carr

splIntErvIllE

Cliff Hudder

The Texas Review Presshttp://www.shsu.edu/~www_trp

78 pages; paper, $14.95

I’m always amazed that the novella isn’t a more popular form. It seems with society’s ever-shrinking attention span that all things would be appreciated in smaller doses. But the novella’s proportions seem unfair. They’re like a single drink for a recover-ing alcoholic—simultaneously too much, and not enough.

For readers, the short story proves more

convenient, and finishing a gorilla-sized novel is a badge of accomplishment. But the novella offers no peripheral appeal.

Thus, the novella stands as the 1,200 meter. An inherently less popular race. We train to sprint, or we train to run marathons. We are absolute creatures that want things either fast or forever.

That’s not to say that the novella hasn’t made an impact. Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (1915) comes to mind. But there is a definite reluctance to the form. It is often accompanied by other works. That is it’s only historical context. It is the meat of the short story collection. It is “The Dead” of Dublin-ers (1914).

Cliff Hudder’s Splinterville seems self-con-sciously aware of this fact. The novella, winner of the 2007 Texas Review Fiction Award, is presented as faux scholarship complete with footnotes and an academic foreword. But rest assured it is a work of fiction. Carr continued on next page

Splinterville is the supposed recreation of a holograph produced by a Confederate soldier toward the end of the American Civil War. The letter, written on a continuous forty-one-foot scroll, is the recount of a friendship to the father of a deceased soldier.

It’s an interesting device and well handled by the author.

Hudder’s characters are as crass and colorful as you would expect confederate soldiers to be.

“It came four in the afternoon by Pard’s silver watch, then in comes our Enemy, clacking his guns like a boy with stick on piling, only faster than any boy with stick can clack, and yellow cloud drifted. Clinch said it was louder than two skeletons f-king on a tin roof. You know how he talked.”

Clinch, the fallen friend of the letter’s author, is a pint-sized, loud-talking, Texas-born Confeder-ate with a pension for curse words and an obscured intimacy. He serves as a perfect muse for Hudder’s

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yarn. That being said, there is some difficulty to the

delivery. Hudder’s creative presentation makes for a

slightly jarring read. The letter, written by the war addled Private Henry Oldham Wallace, is pep-pered with inconsistencies and written in disjointed language. This is, of course, intentional. The in-consistencies are addressed in foot notes, as is the language.

The novella follows Wallace, Clinch, and the rest of their brigade through a trek from Arkansas to Georgia, during which time they inadvertently eat hallucinogenic mushrooms and take part in the largest recorded snowball fight.

That the novella functions as a letter excuses much other story line. The work can be seen as a glimpse into the daily life of confederate soldiers, though entertaining nonetheless.

Hudder’s characters encapsulate that fractured conundrum of youth participating in battle. On one hand, they are killers. But at the same time, they are children. The effects of the duality are generally devastating to the psyche, and Hudder renders this well.

“This I mean to say in its real sense, we wept and moaned with tear and grimace of sorrow, and I am not sure from where it come or who it started…we sat snow-covered like ghosts, we shivered like fish, we had a big boo hoo.”

But there is a further complexity to the slim volume. In its presentation as a real-life letter, the scholar Jules H. DeRossier has made it clear that the authenticity of the work is questionable.

Hudder’s achievement with the piece has rediscovered what Kafka showed

in The Metamorphosis.

“I am aware that few besides specialists in this field and a small albeit vocal group of interested par-ties are even familiar with this peculiar document, the authenticity of which has been debated for de-cades.”

This allows Hudder the opportunity to set up a defense, in footnote form, for the validity of the transcript. The effect is humorous. DeRossier is a catty scholar bent on taking pot shots at his intel-lectual adversaries.

“While willing for the most part to assign a motive of genuine scholarly skepticism to Colflatt and Dickinson for their obsession with attacking the legitimacy of the letter, it is difficult not to be-lieve they also act at least in part from…misplaced patriotism.”

I’ll admit that the sixty footnotes, though often entertaining, are distracting. Especially considering the total length of the book—sixty-nine pages if you include the foreword. But the authenticity debate makes an interesting game for the reader. I might recommend reading the novella twice, and ignoring the faux scholarship the first time through.

Fans of footnotes or not, Splinterville is an interesting novella and an impressive debut. Hudder’s achievement with the piece has rediscov-ered what Kafka showed in The Metamorphosis. That, if nothing else, the novella is a great format in which to experiment.

Brian Allen Carr teaches and writes in the Rio Grande Valley. His most recent fiction can be found in Smokelong Quarterly and is forthcoming in The Texas Review.

returning to hiStoryDanny Rivera

WIdE AWAkE In somEonE ElsE’s drEAm

M. L. Liebler

Wayne State University Presshttp://wsupress.wayne.edu

92 pages; paper, $15.95

As cultural leaders, musicians and poets are in a unique position to examine the exchange of values between peoples of different nations and perspectives, particularly as those values relate to the common man. Indeed, M. L. Liebler, as a teacher, working musician, and poet—whose previous work has focused on his native Detroit, the importance of revolutionary ideals, and the role of the worker—has done much to further the cause of the neglected and the downtrodden, the forgotten and the dispossessed. His newest book, Wide Awake in Someone Else’s Dream, continues the tradition of the artist as activist, while looking at themes not deemed popular by the majority of our modern poets: selfless love, faith, and man’s inhumanity against man. Regrettably, however valuable the discussion that the poet aims to advance, the work here, due in part to lackluster language, does not push these concerns into brighter relevance.

Liebler’s latest collection, divided into four sec-tions, traces the author’s excursions to Russia, Ger-many, and Israel. It opens with a poem called “The Letting Go,” a title which suggests not a little bit of irony, given that the poems, whose subjects explore the unwashed cloak of history and memory and grief made palpable by regret, are not about relinquishing, of loosening the reins on a past “written with blood.” Instead, readers are made aware, by virtue of these poems, whose voice continually examines the scope of our ancestor’s missteps, of a reluctance to unhand time—as if to signal that it is our responsibility, as those who have been charged to maintain religious and ethnic lineages, to carry on with the weight of

guilt and lament. It is this unwillingness to part with the legacies borne of violence, social injustice, and political strife that, perhaps unintentionally, deepens the stain on our collective human experience.

Despite its very human core and honest sentiments, it is a book

of modest returns.

It is not clear whether the dominant voice in this collection, always honest but also dangerously sentimental, is interested in accepting the role of the past, or whether it aims to further views which have done much, particularly during the Cold War, to strain relations between East and West. For example, the first section, “Blue Alone in Red Square (The Russia Poems),” loaded as it is with the polarizing rhetoric of politics, is concerned mainly with elevating senti-ments that underscore the inherent distrust between democracy and communism, and between the US and Reagan’s view of the USSR as the “Evil Empire,” as in the following stanza from “Politics and Its Long Russian Scar”:

When America thought It had won the Russians’ Hearts and minds, America never Realized—it had neither.

The reader holds no doubt that the poet has a genuine appreciation for the people he has en-countered in his travels, and that he is concerned with matters that, for many throughout the world, have meant the difference between life and death, between liberty and oppression. Unfortunately, it is quite difficult to write about these themes, espe-cially as they are rendered in these pages, without the poems collapsing under the weight of their own overwrought and clichéd phrasing. In this manner, the poet is enacting a certain kind of violence—not only against his own responsibility to language, but also towards the subjects themselves, which deserve to be treated by a more skillful hand. Herein lies the true tragedy of this collection: were it not for the tired

statements which remind us that “time is not kind to those who wait” and “while things change, / [o]thers are clearly the same,” the people who inhabit these verses, presented as those who are isolated from their own natural and emotional worlds, would have a true voice in Liebler, would have their lives, experiences, and concerns validated.

This point is not to suggest that politics is the exclusive domain of such luminaries as Paul Celan, Allen Ginsberg, and Octavio Paz. How-ever, readers should have some expecta-tion, whatever the topic and tone with which it is delivered, that the work not contain heavy-handed language, stripping it of the power necessary for it to be remembered. The writer also fails when the poems are removed from the sphere of literature and thrust headlong into the realm of propaganda, as when an article in the Jerusalem Post is transformed into a found poem, “50 Miles from Beirut—We Are in Charge”:

This checkpoint is set up To protect you from terrorists, And to further serve our efforts To pressure their government. We know this siege is meant To smuggle captives out of our range.

The second section of the book, “Germany Is the Broken Heart (The Germany Poems),” represents something of a shift in tone, as the voice considers “the ghosts of my family,” those links to the “broken pieces” of the past, either on a literal or metaphori-cal level, that serve as constant, gnawing reminders of fractured families and nations. This idea of the “ghost,” “soul,” or “spirit,” an entity that is as ephem-eral as border crossings and the whispers of a once “golden” Germany, is quite strong, and furthers the notion that those things which haunt us do so with a

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certain purpose; we are, if the poet is to be believed, to remain attached, lest we come to terms with wounds both physical and psychic, to “[a]ll [that] is memory.” It is no surprise then that the poems in this section, which carry real emotional heft given the focus on love and family, can only be described as heartfelt, and speak to a sense of displacement—so clearly alluded to in the book’s title—that echoes alienation in all its desperate glory:

Is this where they all have gone? Back to the homeland. This is Our old neighborhood. Germany Is the broken heart I have Never forgotten. The origin Of who I am. I have come

Home to my beginnings, And my family has waited For my return from an America That I never really knew.

Wide Awake in Someone Else’s Dream is emo-tionally rich, yet despite its very human core and honest sentiments, it is a book of modest returns. The author explores subjects of historical and timely importance; it is how he delivers those themes, how-ever, that almost serves to remove their importance. The poet should be praised for his tackling lofty and challenging subjects, subjects of historical and timely relevance—from the Holocaust and communism to labor relations and the plight of the common worker. I admire his readiness to speak for those people whose

voices are seldom heard, like Detroit autoworkers, for example. Intensely personal lyricism serves him well; however, his language is often overwrought. The poet, despite his best intentions, has not produced a book that is able to fully crystallize his excursions and views with the kind of literary intent that read-ers of modern poetry demand and should rightfully expect.

Danny Rivera received an MFA in Creative Writing from The City College of New York. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Washington Square, Dislocate, Sonaweb, cold-drill, and The Strip, among other journals. He lives in New York City.

humAniStic PurveyorChet Kozlowski

WhErE thIngs ArE WhEn you losE thEm

Martin Golan

Birch Book Presshttp://www.birchbrookpress.info

176 pages; paper, $18.95

It’s easy to like the lilt in Martin Golan’s writ-ing: his word choices are crisp and his tone effer-vescent. The twelve stories in his collection Where Things Are When You Lose Them snap, crackle, and pop in their examination of modern travails. Subur-bia is, for the most part, Golan’s milieu, and it’s one he negotiates well. His characters tend to be white and affluent, and the rigors of the working day or making ends meet are not such a concern. Rather, Golan takes on matters of the heart in times of testy human behavior. He uses hefty topics—ranging from sexual etiquette to domestic abuse to the grim specter of assisted living—to catapult his people into their moment of reckoning.

Golan’s greatest strength shows when the characters talk; he has a fine ear for the way folks express themselves when they’re damaged, or trying to break through, or seeking to deflect. His dialogue is economic and his use of dialects and teenage slang, which is no easy thing to render and into which he delves several times, is convincing.

Many of the stories have a straightforward structure: a phrase or image is introduced, used symbolically to counterpoint the action, and then returns to wrap things up in the denouement. The typical narrator is a middle-aged male, looking back at a life-defining episode. This perspective can be poignant, as in “The Shape of Water,” in which the protagonist reminisces about a love lost amongst the emotional debris left by swinging couples in the 60s; the stirring image of his lover diving off a boat into the ocean is its central metaphor. “When Annie Fell Off the Mountain” uses its freeze-frame of a woman (also suspended in mid-air) to draw us into a story of unwanted pregnancy in the days before legal abortion, which, despite the gravity of its sub-ject, allows for some dark comedy in the confusion that comes from juggling too many agendas and bad directions.

Golan is most comfortable writing about men. In “The Loneliness of Men,” married Jonathan joins his bachelor pal Roger for an uneasy night on

the town at a bar “that smells damply of sex and regret.” That footloose Roger is playing the bon vivant to deny a grave illness comes as a well-timed surprise that changes the mood of the piece from fratboy frivolity to one of melancholy. The pair of male confidantes in “The Perfect Woman” strolls through a snowy neighborhood by night, ruminating about collapsing marriages. The topic turns to their notion of the ideal woman, a checklist of attributes that reaches its crescendo when they happen upon a woman undressing in a nearby house. They spy on her, undetected, and the story becomes a potent allegory for being outside of life and its rewards.

When Golan writes about women, he’s less certain, and the results are often more interesting. “Making Sandwiches” is a wry piece in which Sha-ron, a housewife, busies herself with the minutiae of everyday life and casual flirtations to buck up her courage for the day’s true purpose, when she’ll confront her Alzhemier’s-afflicted mother with dev-astating family news to cleanse her own soul. In “The Cicadas are Throbbing,” Golan creates heartbreaking empathy for Carolyn, a newly divorced woman who finds herself the social equal to (and rival of) her budding teenage daughter, in a wonderfully volatile situation that the author handles deftly.

Golan takes on matters of the heart in times of testy human behavior.

Some of the stories are experimental. The ironi-cally titled “Intimacy” is all dialogue, just cabbies sitting around talking, one fresh from a fare that he may have helped escape the commission of a murder. “Nora, Standing Naked” offers a multi-testimony col-lage ostensibly about breast cancer that ends up being mostly about, well, breasts. Several characters weigh in on Nora’s physical endowments. The various male voices come off as blunt, in contrast to Nora’s own, and its revelation that, despite the welcome attention from men, she is more than the sum of her parts.

There are some disappointments along the way. Often the stories have the quality of chronicle, of wanting to get them down rather than contemplate them. They’re airtight, more like memoirs than fic-tion, as if to head off any alternate interpretations. “The Arena,” which touches on the major events of a life in the span of a cross-town car ride, is too heavy-handed in its extended metaphor; Golan spells it out as if he’s afraid we won’t get it. “Tommy Matson’s Luck,” a modern parable about the anticipation of imminent wealth, suffers from its omniscient narra-tor: the storyteller and the perfectionist protagonist

are indistinguishable, and that affects the attitude of the piece; Tommy’s voice would be much stronger in first person. And for all its virtues, the above-mentioned “Making Sandwiches” ultimately doesn’t go deep enough in its disclosure of familial crimes; skimming through the details comes off as a last ditch effort to add heft and social conscience.

But these are quibbles. There are so many grati-fying jolts of truth along the way: the sudden under-standing about sisterhood that comes to the hapless ex-boyfriend in “Annie Fell Off the Mountain,” the despair that settles like a toxic fog over the enabling friend in “The Loneliness of Men”; these revelations are substantial and spot on.

Golan saves the best for last. “Streets of Flow-ers” is set in a grad-school writing workshop and, despite the stereotypic setting and labeling of the characters (giving them names like “The Aesthete,” “The Tie,” and “Braless Josie”), takes some real risks, structurally and in its lively study of complexity versus simplicity, and their role in literary preten-sion. The title story is the gem: in “Where Things are When You Lose Them,” a man named Paul must decide whether to remove his dying father from life support. He is tentative and marginalized, leaving the reader truly unnerved by an unpredictable out-come. Paul is Golan’s most engaging protagonist, the shmoe we’ve been waiting for. He artfully plays off scenes with Paul’s disaffected teenage son and distracted, cell phone-obsessed brother, to portray a man caught in the middle, and as a result hits just the right balance of the monumental and the mundane. The device here is clean and unforced: a lost credit card as a symbol of mortality.

Martin Golan identifies himself primarily as a journalist. His novel My Wife’s Last Lover was pub-lished in 2000, and several of the stories in Where Things Are When You Lose Them have appeared in other forms. While not achieving (or trying for) the quiet wisdom of a John Cheever or Melody Beattie, who worked similar territory, this author is more purveyor than poet, a clear-eyed observer of the human condition, creating believable incidents and sympathetic characters with a neat directness.

Chet Kozlowski lives and writes in New York City, and teaches at The City College of New York and NYU. His stories have appeared in Guernica, The Brooklyn Rail, and Global City Review. He is cur-rently completing his first novel, Kosti’s Song.