Title: Cooking with the Muse: A Sumptuous Gathering of Seasonal Recipes, Culinary Poetry, and Literary Fare

Authors: Myra Kornfeld and Stephen Massimilla

Publisher: Tupelo Press, April 1, 2016

Hardcover, 494 pages

ISBN, 1936797682 / ISBN, 9781936797684

Link to purchase: http://www.tupelopress.org/

Or

http://www.amazon.com/Cooking-Muse-Sumptuous-Gathering-Seasonal/dp/1936797682/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1464723265&sr=1-1&keywords=cooking+with+the+muse

My copy of Cooking with the Muse arrived, cornucopic and gorgeous, after much anticipation. This hybrid treat – part literary and gastronomic history, part poetry anthology and commentary, part beautifully written cookbook – provides many sources of pleasure. The book itself is lovely to look at, comfortable to hold, and fun to read. Dip into it and you find yourself learning all sorts of interesting things about food and culture and poetry and inspired to run to your local market, buy a ton of healthy ingredients, and take on the kitchen with verve and excitement.

Stephen Massimilla and Myra Kornfeld, poet and chef, married to one another, have married their love of poetry and healthy food in a well-organized and inspiring way.

Cooking with the Muse announces itself as a visceral response to a virtual world and asks that the reader give care and attention to what the writers call “the poetry of food.” Beginning with a history of the intersection of food and writing, the book continues by first explaining how to select the best ingredients, teaching us some basic techniques, and then organizing its contents by season. For each season there is a collection of recipes with the inspired qualities of poems, concluding with suggestions for seasonal meals. And to each season are attached many poems and stories, commentaries and insights.

I open, randomly, to page 260. There I find “Goan Green Coconut Fish Curry.” The title of the recipe is itself a poem. I notice the alliteration in the title and the colors brought to mind. I trust the cadence of the words. Already I’m combining ingredients – my love of the sound of words and my love of good food. The recipe is preceded by a photograph — it is in resplendent color — and helpful instructions about exactly what ingredients to get and where to get them. I learn that the curry mentioned in the name is not the yellow powder that comes to mind but rather leaves that when “sizzled in hot oil . . . give off an irresistible citrus flavor.” I’m ready to run off to 26^th Street in Manhattan (where the Indian grocers can be found) and buy myself a bunch of leaves. Following the helpful advice is a clear recipe, with useful hints provided, anticipating the questions a cook might have in attempting to follow the instructions.

Following the recipe are notes by both the cook and the poet. In this instance, the poet has more to say than the cook. The reader learns what curry is and what it isn’t. The reader learns about Goan cuisine – “it almost always includes fish,” Massimilla tells us. And we learn about the relationship of Goan cuisine to Portuguese influence (“the most important ingredient in Goan cooking, the chile, was introduced by the Portuguese”). The next page contains a poem by Mrigaa Sethi, “All of Creation,” in which Indian cooking and love come together: “The secret of recipes is also the love made after dinners,” writes Sethi. Culinary and erotic joy permeate this book.

My random selection is apt because in their book Massimilla and Kornfeld have extended their search for good food and good poetry to the entire world. This book is multicultural and historical in its reach. The writers aim to capture culinary and literary traditions that expand our knowledge of time and place. So Mrigaa Sethi and Dorianne Laux, Basho and Rumi, Thomas Nashe and Roy Blount find homes for themselves in these pages. The range and erudition evident in this book instructs and delights.

The authors are advocates of healthy eating, but they are not caught in any doctrinaire culinary path. The reader can satisfy vegetarian needs, yes, but can also find meats and fish, grains and fats. Kornfeld and Massimilla oppose refined sugars but show us the glories of maple syrup and other natural sweeteners. Nothing in this book goes against pleasure.

Another pleasure in this cornucopia can be found in Stephen Massimilla’s own poems. Massimilla, in many cases following Neruda, writes about food in poems that employ a language as lush as the ingredients in the curry described above. This, from a poem called “Yellow From the Fire”:

                                    And in the Hagia Sophia, priceless in rays
                                       of the eggshell domes,
                                   a small plain bowl,
                                   most buttery of all the Sultan’s treasure,
                                   Byzantine perfection of its glaze;
                                   yellow from the fire, phoenix in the gyre,
                                   mixing bowl for ocher,
                                   pastry dough, chickee fluff, yolk.
                                   O life, luster, halo, joy:
                                   Be the Color-Meister of my soul.

                                                                        (69)

Here’s what to do. Go out and buy this book. Go to the best market you can find and buy up the ingredients suggested in some of these recipes. Get together with the people (or person) you love the most. Take turns in the kitchen while another person reads aloud to you from the book. Eat your fill and go to bed happy.

Countless albums sit on history’s shelf, but exceedingly few create their own place in time. A place where we can revisit, enriched each time. While I will doubtless miss out on many albums that will carve their places after I am gone, I am fortunate to be alive today to visit the timeless place created by Trophy Wife‘s sophomore effort, Sing What Scares You.

Have you ever felt as if language lacked the power and nuance to express a feeling as it sprouted inside you? Like the feeling of spotting a young girl at a charity auction reading a comic strip titled Bizarre Gender-Swapping Girl-venture To Tantalize and Amaze. Like the feeling of being led blindfolded by your lover to pet the pony you’ve always wanted before your sight is returned. Like the feeling of getting your hands on Sing What Scares You directly from Trophy Wife drummer Katy Otto herself at the kickoff show of the band’s tour this past summer.

“If you want to,” Katy replied.

“I do. I want to. But I must warn you, I am a really slow writer.” I was reminded of Trophy Wife guitarist/vocalist Diane Foglizzo’s words even before I finished the sentence.

“I’m feeling the weight of expectations, for which I’m totally responsible,” she wrote regarding her thoughts on making the new record.

As I write this, I feel an overwhelming weight. Besides lacking words to adequately sing the album’s praises, I feel as if the review I had promised that hot summer afternoon would constitute my magnum opus. I am consumed with the thought that I will never write anything more important, more dear to the muscle that keeps me alive. In short, I will try my hardest to write a record review and not a love letter.

I will fail.

It’s three in the morning and I am lying on a park bench. Mere hours prior, I was at the Cake Shop for my third show in as many nights. I had started in DC two days prior, where I made the fated promise; then secured a ride to Philadelphia; then took an overnight train to the city that doesn’t sleep. Not even the hustle of traffic and bites from insects could keep my body from slumber. But I couldn’t sleep. I was in constant fear.

Sleep deprivation is torture of the highest magnitude. I was in enough agony that I begged for death. Yet it’s absolutely the best night of my life and will remain thus forever. To follow the band and witness its journey in cementing their place in history is priceless.

But what could’ve been
could’ve been
could’ve been

The introspective silence that follows embodies the spirit of the record. It conveys a seething anger calmed by the infinite potential of a better tomorrow.

I actually loath punk music, even though I appreciate its attitude. Abrasive notes and incomprehensible screams do not appeal to me and Trophy Wife is as punk as punk does. Yet I’ve easily spun the record five hundred times over the past half year. In agreement with Kathy Cashel of the band Cat Furniture, I can discern the shouted words of Diane and Katy. There is clarity in indignation here. And this is why the record shines above all others in a year full of magnificent releases. How you say something is just as important, if not more so, than what you say.

in your eyes
i see possibilities

One believes Diane when she utters those words with conviction. Her voice — saccharine, strong and solemn all at once — compels the listener to press repeat again and again. Her timeless, tender and touching delivery invokes hope.

Diane’s command of her guitar redefines awe. From the fierce chords in “Boundaries,” where one can hear her bow as she rocks out, to the serene symphonic lullaby in “Warrior,” it’s the intersection between wonder and love.

But to discuss Diane without Katy is like having fire without oxygen, the ying without the yang or a future without a dream. Katy’s drumming is magic personified. Restrained by the confines of mathematics, she masterfully gives birth to art. The drums become an extension of Katy. Each contact between woman and instrument releases an eruption of rapt emotion so palpable one can embrace it.

And then there’s the duet in “Identifiers”.

etymology (the n is silent) / take flight from this world
classification is off / in your skin you’ll be born again

The two musicians trade phrases in perfect tandem. Their voices intertwine like knowing caresses between lovers. The amalgamation is so enchanting that the listener misses the diminuendo of the guitar and drums until Diane and Katy are almost whispering, luring the listener even closer, closer to the ultimate beauty, to truth.

There is no favorite moment one awaits for from start to finish of this album. Every note is breathtakingly precious. The record suffers from only one almost unforgivable oversight. At thirty five minutes and change, it is far too short. Sing What Scares You isn’t just the anthem of punk or even of life. To paraphrase Nietzsche, without it, life would be a mistake.

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

How does one summarize an entire life of more than 60 years? When faced with this ominous task, too many self-published writers produce rambling, episodic narratives that fail to capture the true drama and beauty of their lives. Fortunately for author Mathias B. Freese, he is a gifted essayist who has been writing essays for decades. By collecting his favorite pieces, he gives readers insights into both his personal life (which is, sadly, full of tragedy) and his views on such topics as education, psychotherapy, blogging, and, of course, writing. The book, as a result, is one part personal memoir and one part intellectual analysis.

This combination elevates the book, but it also means it is a book best read slowly. Readers are likely to find themselves pausing to contemplate the message behind each essay. Freese is direct and opinionated, and he often takes an opinion counter to popular thinking. Take, for example, the essay “Teachers Have No Chance to Give Their Best,” where he begins by railing against students for their “puerile minds” and “vacuity.” But while these words are harsh, he lays the blame squarely on teachers. As a former teacher himself, he strongly suggests that schools need to do more to encourage creativity and self-reliance.

Just when it seems he has given up, labeling the educational system as “a great Arctic mammoth wandering aimlessly,” he offers up a glimmer of hope: “Take any five decent, well-intended, creative and committed teachers and administrators, people who care, people in passion, free men and women, and one could wreak a reformation in weeks.”

Such is the power of these essays: he sets up problems in stark language, but he also points to the possible positives that we, as a society, could reach for. Whether writing about the challenges of the current publishing scene or the historical record of the Holocaust, he shows readers both the ugliness and the beauty of each topic. He shares valuable insights from his time as a psychotherapist, and he waxes eloquent on some of his favorite movies and classic film actors.

The personal essays in the back of the book provide a look at his family’s trials and grief. From the tragic loss of both his first wife and his daughter, to coping with memories of a neglected childhood, he writes powerfully when he is at his most personal. In many ways, these essays might have been a better way to begin this collection, since it would have helped to provide a real sense of the writer, in a personal way, before the denser, academic pieces.

This is a book that will stay with the reader, that will occasionally pop up as an undercurrent to conversations. While it doesn’t quite reach the heights of his fiction masterpiece, The i Tetralogy, it is a thoughtful, compelling read.

View all my Goodreads reviews

As in his earlier book, Twentieth Century Bread, in In Vitro: New Short Rhyming Poems Post-9/11, poet Leland Jamieson paints a vivid landscape using rhyme and diction. A formal poet by nature, his best efforts are tightly-crafted examples of form meeting function. With his verse, he explores childhood memories, extols the beauty of nature, and contemplates the history of human life on earth.

Jamieson’s poems about his youth are often sprawling but packed with detail, such as in the sestina “Sunshine,” where he begins with a compelling image:

My cousin Jack and I, arms out for balance,
toed still-warm rails. Our blue jeans’ pockets carried
great rusty spikes (one each) that we bent double
plucking from ties. I couldn’t catch my figure,
stilts-like, racing east in setting sunshine,
lashing the rails no end with skinny shadows…

In addition to retelling childhood stories, he turns a poet’s eye to even the most mundane activities, such as throwing away the ashes from a wood fire. In “Ashes,” he writes:

I can’t just throw away, and waste, the gray
wood ashes flecked with charcoal chunks that fall
down through our Jøtul’s grate, their flame’s ballet
too cool at core to dance the night’s short haul.
When cold, I dump them in our woods. They sprawl,
volcanic cones upon a sea of snow.

In a perfect example of how sometimes quirkier language undermines what comes before or after, the next line is “(Oak-acid soil cries out, ‘Please sweeten — Yo!’)”

Then again, too few poets demonstrate a sense of humor, a willingness to toss aside a serious tone and instead, just laugh at themselves. In “Frontiers,” Jamieson pokes fun at growing older:

We used to wonder why most older folks
in restaurants talked so little during meals.
Now we’ve turned older, and we find the joke’s
on us. It’s hard to hear.

No topic is too small — or too lofty — for Jamieson, who is equally comfortable examining shells or pondering the celestial origins of humans. As he did in 20th Century Bread, he includes several poems about the Anunnaki space travelers who, according to an ancient Sumerian manuscript, influenced life on Earth. In this collection, however, he does a better job of explaining the sources for these stories, in the notes at the back of the book. Perhaps, in order to make that series of poems more accessible for those who fail to read the notes, such a plain retelling needs to appear in a poem, as well.

Overall, Jamieson’s collection is a thoughtful, careful examination both of one person’s life experiences and about the nature of life experiences in general.

Passion Contents

Saturday detention lasted four hours, but I was awestruck by the first bathroom break.  I wouldn’t realize the relevance of the book’s opening quotes (Dostoevsky, Miss Manners, and the Talking Heads) until I was finished, but even these were brilliantly chosen.  American Psycho is written in the present tense.  Patrick Bateman seems so normal at first.  It’s the late 1980s, and it seems everyone in Manhattan is extremely rich or extremely poor.  Patrick Bateman and his friends are young, insincere Wall Street assholes.  Like everyone else he knows, he is manically preoccupied with his tan, his stereo, his favorite trashy talk show, securing a good table at the newest good restaurant, scoring good coke, smoking good cigars, his clothes and other people’s clothes, and literally, his wallet — gazelle-skin —t hat he reminds the reader was $850 at Barney’s, again and again throughout the text.  But Patrick Bateman also kills people.  No one is spared for any particular reason.  Nothing matters: age, race, class, gender (though most victims are women).  And it is gruesome.

The violence in this book cost Ellis a publisher.  Simon and Schuster dropped it, but Vintage picked it up.  The violence is horrific.  Tortures and mutilations are detailed for paragraphs, pages.  As much as I love this book, even I can’t reread some sections.  Once was enough.  To be honest, once might have been too much.   I’ve read interviews with Ellis, and writing these scenes was very difficult for him. 

But it had to be done this way because everything in the book is meticulously detailed.  Everything.  It’s ridiculous, disturbing, and just so damn smart.  People are cold.  People are shallow.  People are greedy.  People are cruel.   And believe it or not, it’s funny. 

…the temptation to kill McDermott is replaced by this strange anticipation to have a good time, drink some champagne, flirt with a hardbody, find some blow, maybe even dance to some oldies or that new Janet Jackson song I like.

See?  Funny.

Patrick Bateman’s thoughts are everywhere, and whose aren’t?  One paragraph might go from his shoes to someone else’s shoes to bottled waters to Bon Jovi lyrics to what happened in the porn flick he watched that morning.  The sex is also graphic in this book, but after the orgasm Patrick pulls out a nail gun or severs some limbs, so don’t get too… comfortable.

The man can string a sentence together.   Ellis’s writing is exquisite, beautiful.  I do like his other books, but nothing comes close to this.  I think the rhythm of the language in this book might be the biggest influence in my own work.   At the very least, it has taught me to take risks when telling a story.   Art can happen without taking risks; great art can’t.  American Psycho offends so many people, but so many people love it.   I promise we’re not all harboring terrible fantasies.  Not that I haven’t done some bad things in my life, like cutting class, but I served my time. 

Class.  I cut class, not people.  Even though I kind of wanted to kill those little fuckers crying at 8 in the morning.

So what bothered me about this account, on a second reading? I could not, until I neared the end of the book, say exactly why I felt disconcerted in a way different from simply reliving my own grief as I read about Didion’s. She names places, favorite restaurants, vacation trips taken, items of clothing with reportorial accuracy, no less so than in her previous prose works. How I felt about the book, I realized with anger and shame, had become colored by the fact that The Year of Magical Thinking is a distinctly privileged, indeed upper-class experience of illness and grief. John Gregory Dunne’s funeral took place in New York City, at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine; the couple’s close friend Calvin Trillin, a New Yorker writer, spoke at the service. The scarf Dunne left draped over a chair was cashmere; Didion recounts extensive foreign travel and expensive restaurant meals; Dunne was pals, as Didion tells it, with one of the doormen at their apartment building, and had a running joke with him about whether Osama bin Laden might be hiding in the building’s penthouse, “maisonette” (whatever that is), or fitness room. Most tellingly, when Didion’s daughter collapses in California, Didion has the financial security to have her medevaced across the country, on a multi-legged journey, back to a neurology institute in New York.

Of course Didion did what any mother would, and should, have done: she used every means available to ensure that her daughter had the best possible care. No reader can fault her for this. But in between mentions of the hospital at UCLA and New York’s Rusk Institute, in between discussions with cardiology specialists at Beth Israel hospital, one wonders how radically these experiences would have differed had this been a more ordinary couple. What would a woman do if she and her husband were not both acclaimed authors, and there was no doorman’s log of entry and exit to reread obsessively in her attempt to understand her husband’s death? What if the daughter and her husband had had to remain in exile across the continent, without the money to transport the daughter anywhere, much less to a specialist institute? What if, indeed, any one of these parties had been without insurance — or belonged to an HMO that stipulated access to only certain doctors and treatment facilities?

In a destroyed economy that analysts are slowly beginning to acknowledge as a second great depression like the one before World War II, it may be increasingly difficult for the reader to relate fully to reportage of such immense privilege. That is not to say that Didion’s life, or accurate reporting of it, mars the book in any way; The Year of Magical Thinking will always remain an important book, one with such power that it has been adapted for the stage — Didion has been played variously by Vanessa Redgrave and Cate Blanchett. But who plays the single mother who works two jobs, neither of which provides insurance? Film portrayals like Julia Roberts’s Erin Brockovich, or Cher as the mother in Mask, have fallen out of fashion in the new century; instead we have comedies about the sexual problems of middle-aged white men, or movies like Sex and the City 2. I predict, without a dog in the fight, that the latter will have little lasting societal or artistic impact.

No memoir can be rightly condemned for the simple fact that its author enjoys privilege. Were this the case, John Gunther’s Death Be Not Proud, another classic of illness and grief, might be dismissed out of hand. John Gregory Dunne’s death is not less important, nor its impact on his loved ones less profound, because he graduated from Princeton in the same year as Donald Rumsfeld. Indeed, The Year of Magical Thinking may be taken as useful evidence that not even white, heterosexual, cisgendered, upper-middle-class privilege insulates its author from the violence of grief. But recounting her actions later, Didion never stops to wonder, for example, what might have happened at UCLA had the mother been working poor, more daunted by authority, less willing to badger and harass doctors as Didion does over every detail of her daughter’s condition. Taking the book as sole evidence, one would never know the grieving woman was aware of a world outside her own, a New York other than hers, whose inhabitants might not have evenings in Paris to remember.

I will keep Didion’s book close to me and return to it again; I believe that she understands and articulates grief with unparalleled excellence, and my own magical thinking is that, thereby, she understands me. But I wish I could also read the stories of patients on Medicaid, of those without insurance at all, who go through similar ordeals. The single mother with the two jobs might be Virginia Woolf’s proverbial “Shakespeare’s sister”; she, too, might be able to illuminate human experience in haunting and important ways. Will she have time, I wonder, or the sense that her words count? The assurance of being heard is in itself a special type of privilege. Who now collects or considers the stories of those who are not already successful novelists? For the moment, the answer seems to lie with newspaper and newsmagazine bloggers, or with people who somehow find time, strength, and will to track their own journeys via Web 2.0. I will not stop hoping that the Shakespeare’s sisters of this millennium will be published in book form. Not either-or, but both-and: the excellence of polished prose writers like Didion, but also the unfiltered, often uncomfortable truths of that increasingly large category: the rest of us.

Combining fiction with zoological information, in A Whale’s Tale, Daniel S. Janik explores the undersea world of the Pacific Humpback whale. The book is described on the back as a “Read-Aloud, Color-Me-Please Book.”  It follows a particular whale from his birth until he begins his own family.

The idea for this book is a noble one: to interest children in the natural world through a character with whom they can identify. The narrative, however, could pose problems for young readers, whether they’re reading it themselves or listening to an adult. Some of the vocabulary, for example, such as “inseparable” or “increasingly tolerant” might be above them. More problematic, though, is the structure. At the beginning of the tale, it is unclear who is speaking, but it turns out to be the whale who would eventually become the young humpback’s mate. It would have been better to tell the whole tale from the main character’s perspective.

Since the story is told from a whale’s point of view, it downplays scientific terminology and describes things from a sensory perspective. For example, it describes the phenomenon known as “bubble net feeding,” where whales combine forces to blow bubbles around small fish, which then confine the animals in a small area where they can easily be scooped up. However, for young people unfamiliar with this technique, an appendix or a sidebar describing the process in clear terms would have helped.

Ruth Janik contributed the illustrations, and her cover art is beautiful. It’s too bad the interior art could not also be produced in color. In addition to featuring the central characters, the book also includes other sea life, including an incongruous mermaid. Since these other fish and sea creatures are not mentioned in the story, a caption containing some information about them would have added to the learning experience.

While this story may interest children initially, there is little action aside from migration and feeding, so that might discourage repeated readings.  Still, any tale that  could help young readers appreciate the environment should be lauded, if for that spirit alone.

Rating: ** (2 out of 4 stars)

Savant Books and Publications, 2009; ISBN 1442105062

Disclosure: A review copy of the book was provided by the author.

Wild Transitions Contents

As he writes in the poem “The Calm Clam,” poet Changming Yuan yearns “to be a voice empowered / For all around me.” In his collection, Chansons of a Chinaman, he strives “To translate my loud pain / Into a muted pearl,” to reconcile his Chinese ancestry and his American life.

To do so, Yuan, whose work has appeared in Wild Violet, draws from history, mythology and natural imagery. In natural images he finds personal comfort and resonance, as demonstrated in the poem “Name Changing.” Here, he defends his choice not to Anglicize his name, which his parents created by “rearranging the sun and moon / vertically and horizontally” to give the name a balanced power. In the final stanza, he writes:

But to retain the subtle balances
In the wild wild world I wander
To hold my father’s sunbeam
With my mother’s moonlight
I fiercely refuse to change it.

In “Passengers” he turns racism on its ear, drawing power from his difference. He begins the poem with a litany of societal assumptions: “I speak aloud in tongue / I eat noisily with bamboo sticks / I appear everywhere like locusts” and then addresses directly those who might fear or even despise him for his “otherness”:

You can feel my Chinky shadow
Until we touch down
My breaths will invade
Your private space
My chanting will beat your eardrums
While you pursue your dream

Finally, he casts away such fears, saying, “I am not a phoenix / No more or less than a fellow traveler / With my own destination”. In the final lines, he calls for togetherness and understanding to replace fear and distrust: “So, feel free to do whatever comforts you / We will travel together”.

In the final section of the book, Yuan travels to China to seek out connections between his family history, his life today, and the legacy he will pass to his son. Once more, he finds inspiration and comfort in the natural world. In “Chinese Chimes: Nine Detours of the Yellow River,” he personifies the river as a toothless ancient one with “brownish wrinkles” whose “love for the Loess Plateau often overturns and overflows”. Although the river’s course is “crowded with holes and crevices”, Yuan finds hope within the river’s perpetual flow:

You may be tortured or burned to steam
But you will eventually find your impossible way
                                To the sea of blue sky

While occasionally prone to melodrama, for the most part, Yuan’s collection serves as a sort of guidebook: a translation between cultures, a nexus between past and present. In his best poems, Yuan’s work marries mythology and modernity with simple diction for a highly-accessible read.

Rating: *** (3 out of 4, Good)

Leaf Garden Press, 2009; ISBN: 978-0-557-08922-2

Disclosure: A preview copy of the book was provided by the publisher.

Wild Transitions Contents

Write what is hardest to say, my poetry instructor in grad school used to urge us, and Suzanne Richardson Harvey does precisely that. In A Tiara for the Twentieth Century: The Collected Poems of Suzanne Richardson Harvey, the poet tackles subjects ranging  from motherhood, family relationships and aging to bulimia, AIDS and homelessness.

Whether approaching a big issue (such as the aftermath of Chernobyl in “The Wheat Fields of Chernobyl”) or celebrating small marital moments (in “The Merits of Dining at Home”), her phenomenal word choice enables her to find the music in language. Take, for example, these lines from “Delivery Room”:

My body is a canvas stretched
To catch a falling wing walker
Pulsing like a tom-tom in some obscure and distant jungle

While a free verse poem, there is nonetheless an almost implicit meter: the insistent beat of these lines mimics the rhythmic stages of birth.

Harvey makes skillful use of poetic techniques, such as repetition, in “The Year of Gambler’s Anonymous”:

Love was 20
You could rest your heart in that
Love was a pair of 8’s
You could carve in two
Love was 11
You could mold that into magic.

Through this repetition, she captures the compulsion which drives the central character of the poem.

Such deft choices contribute to this collection’s success. Rather than taking easy outs of lapsing into abstracts, Harvey meets each subject head on, distilling it into essential moments and imagery. In each case, she finds the language to communicate truths in a powerful, specific and often tactile way.

In “Confronting AIDS,” she takes a personal approach to this devastating disease, acknowledging the impact it’s had on society and the investment many people have in finding a cure:

Those crippled cells you can’t claim alone
They’re lodged in the chambers of my heart
Where labels like syndrome and sarcoma
Are blank as a forgotten Christmas tag.

With this collection, Harvey, whose work has appeared in Wild Violet, has indeed crafted a tiara, a delicate coronet crafted from years of skillful, intuitive use of language.

Rating: **** (4 out of 4, Must Read)

Fithian Press, 2009; ISBN: 978-1-56474-489-0

Disclosure: A review copy of the book was provided by the publisher.

Wild Transitions Contents

If you like humor, real-life stories or just plain good writing, you will enjoy Idol Musings: Selected Writings from an Online Writing Competition edited by Sophie N. Childs. Idol Musings includes some of the best entries from LJ Idol, an annual online contest for Live Journal modeled after American Idol. Entrants come from a variety of backgrounds and experience. Some are established writers and some have never been previously published. What they do share is a love of blogging.

Childs has included entries on a variety of topics; there is something for everybody. While there some humorous pieces included, the book’s strength lies in the intensely personal pieces.

Some pieces, such as “Once Upon a Baby Doll” by Darcy Bridges, deal with the writer’s financial struggles. That is something more and more people can relate to.

Pieces also deal with other common themes such as love and loss and family. There several pieces on the theme of  “cracking up.” Although we may not have had experiences exactly the same as the writers, many of us can relate to the feeling of being overwhelmed with our lives. Other entries deal with experiences that may be unfamiliar and may even be uncomfortable for some people to discuss.

“How I Learned to Love the Bomb or Why I Stopped Being Angry and Started Living Life” by a writer known only as SG, describes her experiences as a lesbian dealing with other people’s homophobia. She starts her piece saying: “Ninjas are much cooler than pirates.” She explains that she has gotten tired of being angry at people who hate her because of her sexual orientation and has decided on a more subtle approach to dealing with them. “All I can do is live my life, the best way I know how and hope that maybe, just maybe, they’ll come to see me (and my wife) as more or less just like them, except we happen-to-be-gay.”

In “To the Ghost I’ve Never Met,” the anonymous writer addresses her ex-boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend that gave him herpes. The narrator talks about what it is to be a “one in six” statistic. The entry is a surprisingly compassionate treatment of a subject that can be uncomfortable for people to discuss.

Entries like these are so blunt in their openness, they may be shocking. But they also touch your heart. It’s worth reading Idol Musings to gain new insight into a new form of writing that is still emerging the blog. You will also gain insight into the online community at Live Journal. Like any community, there may not be disagreements, but it’s obvious there is a bond this online community where they can share their personal experiences.  Most importantly, by reading Idol Musings, you will gain insight into the human experience.

Rating: **** (Must Read)

Fey Publishing, 2009; ISBN: 978-0-473-15100-3.

Disclosure: A review copy of the book was provided by the publisher.

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