“It is rare to encounter a first book of poems as clear-eyed and accomplished as Jim Tilley’s In Confidence. The press of everyday experience informs these deceptively calm poems, rippling with disturbing undercurrents. Whether imagining the incursion of windmills in Nantucket Sound (Vase of Tall White Stalks), or seeing ‘something fractal in forsythia’ (In Spring, Mathematics Are Yellow), Tilley’s imagination is fluent and unforced, his eye fresh to the natural world that he searchingly inhabits. At his best, Tilley writes about the ordinary moments in a life in an extraordinary way.” —Elizabeth Spires

Ship of … uh, what? This, after pipsqueak predecessors like, say, Shakespeare, Milton, Blake, Byron, Twain, and even a financial website called The Motley Fool? Readers love poets who run big risks, but Ship of Fool? Why not just forget about poesie in the face of THBD—the great god This Has Been Done? Who's the fool if the writer, accompanied by nary so much as a linebacker, steps in front of Jim Brown, third and goal at the three, and bids Mr. Brown a cheery good afternoon? Says the headline in the Plain Dealer the next morning, "Poet Last Seen Disappearing in Clouds over Lake Erie." Yet another mistake by the lake. But William Trowbridge has faced such risks before and flattened the bulldozing fullback. How solve the problem of THBD? The ancient, simple, unforgiving answer is one Trowbridge knows cold and hot: it's achieved by one telling word after another, phrase by hypnotic phrase, brilliant inventions unfolding moment by moment, year after year. Who but Trowbridge would feature King Kong across two masterful volumes? Even more to the point, Trowbridge has long since demonstrated in his eight books published since 1986 that he can transmute common American life and language to the highest pitch of art, his command of a vast range of tonal complexities always at work. Never glib himself, as the tonal depths of his poems irrefragably establish, he creates glib speakers again and again—when he wishes. He has shown a profound, unerring sense of how we talk, see, think, act, succeed, fail, take delight, and suffer. He has found authoritative, wholly personal ways to give his eloquent stamp to such material, even if that eloquence is often delivered in a deadpan as level as the Mississippi on a still night. He knows in encyclopedic detail how we make popular art and respond to it; he catches everyday language with his astonishing ear and distills it into a quintessence. He gives voice—and finds voices—that make his vision of daily life as clear and convincing as the music of Joe Turner or Mose Allison. Trowbridge gives us back ourselves but in his own intricate, electrifying manner. And if the writing is often shot through with pain, no American poet can be funnier when he chooses. Yet a quiet, trenchant understanding of trouble is steadily woven through the humor. Sympathy may be his greatest strength. In the present tripartite book he devotes the first and third sections to Fool, a splendid creation who struggles and stumbles, encountering terrestrial or even heavenly experience with a trusting forwardness, only to have trouble pound him repeatedly. (Yes, heavenly: many of the poems place Fool in situations of cosmic dimensions, Trowbridge suddenly very like the fluently, mockingly mythopoeic Byron of The Vision of Judgment.) In the process Trowbridge takes stock phrases involving "fool" and parlays them into titles like Ship of Fool and "Fool Rushes In," or he'll use other common phrases and plug "fool" into the mix for the same purpose ("Ninety-seven-pound Fool," "The Incredible Shrinking Fool"), the fun going full tilt. But in the second section, Fool leaves the stand (you know those lounge musicians: play forty minutes, take a forty-minute break), and Trowbridge moves into a series of poems that go deeply back into his real or imagined past. These second-section poems are often achingly sorrowful, as in "Obedience," which I'll cite in full: The ghost of it whimpered back last night [ no break ] from a wet November fifty years ago: a scraggly cocker that shadowed me home from school and, when I let it in, ignored a meal to snuffle crotches and hump legs as if to win us with what it knew of love, its sad pink dick unsheathed like a gut protruding from a wound, its rheumy eyes spinning with dread, its odor of mushroom and shit making itself at home in our carpet. [ stanza break ] "No. Bad dog. Down," we said, shoving it away till my father got it in the car, and we drove off through the dark to a cornfield outside town, where the rain blew and it slumped off right away, going to get lost, like a good dog. One sees the risk of worn subject matter, cloying sentimentality a millimeter away. But the lean, vivid, confidently astringent language makes the scene immediately unforgettable, evoking memories of troubled sorrow and compromises between sympathy and impatience. Trowbridge's words can hit like bricks in boxing gloves. This poem's interior lines are a reminder that a recent, relentless, brilliant but scarcely bearable Trowbridge chapbook, The Packing House Cantata, addresses his experience as a young man working in a slaughterhouse. The mythmaking is already sailing down the drag strip in the book's second poem, unsurprisingly titled "Fool's Paradise" (Trowbridge, after all, published a book called O Paradise), the prevailing pulse—a loose pentameter—doubtless a homage to Milton. Fool, thrown out of heaven when he's unwittingly too near "when God / swept the rebel seraphim into perdition," ends up first in what will become Hell, then in what will become Los Angeles. The poem's last of four stanzas reads as follows: Fool finds himself near the La Brea Tar Pits, in the first of his innumerable earthly lives, and Satan gets to use a gigantic flaming sword to chase Adam and Eve out of Eden to a world where they and their baffled descendants are subject to sin, disease, insanity, and death, all of which are invented for this occasion. Fool takes a deep breath of miasma, feels groggy. "This is great," he declares. "Couldn't be better."The third through seventh lines are pure Byron, especially the seventh, while the final line catches a certain crazy flavor of American cheerfulness perfectly. Indeed the whole stanza, Milton and Byron notwithstanding, is pure Trowbridge, the wackiness and jerry-built cosmos undercut by a disquieting awareness in the reader that "sin, disease, insanity, and death" are real and ubiquitous, whether invented by a ditzy god or not. There's not a shred of kidding in "baffled," a fine instance of how Trowbridge can isolate the tonality of a word or phrase from dissimilar material around it. Suddenly one realizes that in such undercutting Trowbridge may have moved closest not to Milton or Byron but to the Robert Frost of a poem like "Design." Next comes the 23-line, one-sentence "Fool Expelled from Eden," which continues the mythmaking, the whacked-out fun, the disquieting violence, and the final sense that one is trapped inextricably between the ludicrous and some comprehensive, unavoidable disaster—all of this delivered in a breezy language Trowbridge controls perfectly. The humor is dark but real; the darkness is sometimes funny but always just as real. On a first reading of the first section, one recalls from the table of contents that the book has three sections. Will all three contain such Foolish poems in a dizzying act of invention? No: the second section is waiting with its earthy realism, scene after scene from the daily American life Trowbridge enacts with such precision and power. But then the third section brings Fool back, and the book goes on. One of the later poems, "Fools Give You Reasons," finds Fool "[b]ack in the Celestial City for another reassignment." He wants to talk about what he's experienced on earth, but the office functionaries where he used to work have unceremoniously put a shredder on top of his desk and can't be bothered by his stories: They're sorry, but the Theology Department's two buildings down. They like to think of themselves as facilitators, the ones who polish those crystalline gears the system rides on, and are humble enough to admit they couldn't say exactly what that means. There's no time to suffer fools here. No time, period. Now Trowbridge has evoked Blake's hatred of pious passivity in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and There Is No Natural Religion ("The same dull round even of a universe would soon become a mill with complicated wheels"). In all of this the reader understands again that William Trowbridge, entirely himself, belongs with such earlier masters.

In his review of The Incognito Body, Gary Hawkins says Cynthia Hogue's poems "radiate with profound insight." American Book Review 28:6 (September/October 2007). [PDF]

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Cris Mazza discusses the craft of building a collection with The Short Review!

TSR: DID YOU HAVE A COLLECTION IN MIND WHEN YOU WERE WRITING THEM?

CM: Trickle-Down Timeline (Red Hen Press 2009!) was only the 2nd collection I've done where I did know I was writing a collection… I believe writers of short fiction have begun to, more and more, compose their collections with complete cognizance that they are doing so, unlike my first 2 collections when I basically looked back at the last 10 to 12 stories I'd written and called them a book. Luckily, something about where I was mentally/ emotionally at the time made those collections have a subtle cohesion I couldn't have planned.

Check out the rest of Mazza's wonderful insights into creating a collection by clicking the link!

http://www.theshortreview.com/authors/CrisMazza.htm

Atlanta Magazine has a short but sweet review on Atlanta native Summer Brenner's My Life in Clothes!

"Summer Brenner’s graceful slip of a story collection is more like a novel in delicate pieces…" – Teresa Weaver

Click on the link below to check out the rest of the review!

http://www.atlantamagazine.com/channels/books/story.aspx?ID=1372710

The Portland Press Herald posted a generous review of Ellen's novel, House Arrest.

"Her debut novel, "House Arrest," is a smart, edgy page-turner with characters who get under our skin."

To read the entire review, check out the link below.

Portland Press Herald review

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Saturday, February 5, 2011

Ellen Meeropol

Ellen Meeropol holds an MFA in creative writing from the Stonecoast program at the University of Southern Maine. Her stories have appeared in The Drum, Bridges, Portland Magazine, Pedestal, Patchwork Journal, and The Women’s Times. House Arrest, her first novel, is out this month.

From her Q & A with writer Caroline Leavitt:

I read that you didn't begin writing fiction until your fifties. Why not? And what jump-started your desire? What was that like?

Some days I wish like anything that I had started writing much earlier. That way, maybe I wouldn’t be publishing my first novel and applying for Medicare at the same time! I’ve always read a lot, and I often thought about writing fiction. For many years I scribbled ideas on napkins and corners of the newspaper and collected them in that “ideas” folder. But it wasn’t until 2000, when I was planning a two-month “sabbatical” so that my husband could write his book, that I realized that it was a perfect time for me to jump in too.

We rented a cottage on that island off the coast of Maine that I mentioned before; there I met my muse and she literally changed my life. I wrote all the time. Three years later, I entered an MFA program and then I took early retirement from my nurse practitioner job. Re-inventing myself in my fifties was both humbling and exhilarating. Regardless of my age and my past life as a competent profession, I was a beginner again, free to experiment and make lots of mistakes. It continues to be a terrifying and liberating experience.

The novel talks a lot about forgiveness, and how whether we actually should forgive. Do you think there ever is anything that is unforgivable? Should compassion rule us more than our laws?

I don’t really have an answer for that question, Caroline. Whether or not to forgive something that feels unforgivable is such a personal decision. If I wanted to tell people how to live, I’d…[read on]

Read about Ellen Meeropol's interview at Publishers Weekly.

–Marshal Zeringue

http://writerinterviews.blogspot.com/

Fiction from Emotional Fact: HOUSE ARREST

by Randy Susan Meyers

February 6, 2011, 11:48 am

HOUSE ARREST by Ellen Meeropol

A parent’s tragedy will always influence the life of their children—often to an overwhelming degree. Writing fiction from the emotional truth of one’s past can be liberating and also confusing. How do writers use their past without being wedded to events as they happened? How do we write honestly, without spilling family secrets that other’s want kept private?

Ellen Meeropol’s exploration of family loyalty, the aftermath of violence, and the possibilities of redemption in House Arrest fascinated me. How one reconciles the past and lives with tragedy that is not of one’s own making, but that color ones’ daily existence was the nub of my own book, The Murderer’s Daughters, where sisters cling to each other in the aftermath of witnessing their father’s murder their mother, building their lives in the shadow of his imprisonment. In House Arrest, a nurse responsible for the health of a pregnant patient (who is under house arrest for the cult-related death of her toddler daughter) is haunted by the consequences of her parents’ antiwar activism a generation ago. Her pregnant patient grew up troubled by her father’s connections to racially motivated violence.

I was only four when my father tried to kill my mother—an event I could never truly remember, despite being there. Then, after ten years of working with batterers and the women they’d victimized, I wrote a story of sisters who witnessed their father murder their mother and how they then lived as virtual orphans.

When Ellen Meeropol fell in love at 19, she had no idea that her husband-to-be was the son of executed "atomic spies," but his family story led to her political education and activism. Years later, when she started writing fiction, she had no intention of exploring the Rosenberg case, and she never has, not directly. But her characters led her to the intersection of political activism and family, of injustice and divided loyalties.

Neither home-care nurse Emily Klein, nor her pregnant patient Pippa, are happy about being thrown together in House Arrest, but despite their differences, they make a connection. As anti-cult sentiment in the city grows, the women must make decisions about their conflicting responsibilities to their families and to each other—facing in some sense the same issues as did their parents.

As an activist and a mother, author Ellen Meeropol often worried about what would happen to her daughters if she were arrested, imprisoned or hurt during a demonstration, or if she were targeted by an overzealous security apparatus. Her husband was three-years-old when his parents, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, were arrested and charged with conspiracy to commit espionage. He was six when they were executed. When Ellen started writing House Arrest book, she had no clue where Pippa and Emily’s story would take her, but it’s not surprising that themes of politics and families wormed their way into the narrative. Both her characters are haunted by their parents’ actions – very different actions – and both have been constrained by these legacies.

Meeropol’s characters have empathy for people who’ve done awful things and made terrible mistakes—mistakes that caused death and destruction. A large plot concern, revolving around a religious cult, is handled with great wisdom, managing to avoid the heavy hand of the usual judgment shown around this topic. This, I think, is the genius of House Arrest, the cult is portrayed as a collection of people. Whether exploring an imaginary cult or real ones, we’ll never be able to prevent tragedy borne of zealotry unless we can see into the hearts and minds of those attracted and those repelled by such intense, and sometimes misguided, loyalty.

In researching cults, Ellen Meeropol found a quote that must have guided her work, as she walked the line of finding a realistic moral compass and empathetic burrowing into a character’s heart:

"…if you believe in it, it is a religion or perhaps 'the' religion; and if you do not care one way or another about it, it is a sect; but if you fear and hate it, it is a cult." Leo Pfeffer.

http://web.redroom.com/blog/randy-susan-meyers/fiction-emotional-fact-house-arrest

Orlando White Explores Navajo Identity Through Language in Innovative “Bone Light”

The first book of poetry by Orlando White offers unexpected innovations.

By Alex Young, Guest Writer, 1-28-11

Bone Light

by Orlando White

Red Hen Press, 64 pages, $15.95

When I heard the title of Orlando White‘s first book of poetry, Bone Light, and learned that White was a Navajo poet who had grown up on the Navajo Reservation near Tolikan, Arizona, I wanted to connect this intriguing juxtaposition of words in this title to the austere landscapes that I associate with Navajo country. I naively imagined something like a Georgia O’Keefe painting, maybe a ghostly skull of some buffalo hovering over a distant mesa.

What I found inside the pages of Bone Light, however, was a poetry that unsettled the sort of easy assumptions about the relationship between poetry and identity that my first musings on the title had inspired. White’s tightly focused poetry is devoid of the representations of landscape and the coherent sense of “rooted” identity they are often associated with in the poetry of the Southwest.

In one of the last poems in the book, White addresses our desire for identity, saying,

We only want to be written,

to have content.

But language likes to dress us up.

Positions us

next to one another

so we exist as characters.

In White’s poetry, identity is not something the poet finds in a landscape, or any other solid ground outside the poetry itself. Identity in these poems emerges within language, existing in our ability to understand ourselves in relation to our position “next to one another,” where we live “as characters,” performing ourselves. Bone Light brings us to this point in a series of lyric poems in which the most basic elements of meaning are contested: White meditates on the form of the characters on the page themselves, the ink that composes them, the white spaces between them, and even on the bleach that makes the paper white, and that could wash the letters away.

As the poems progress, the relationship of the material letters on the page and human identity begin to be established through skeletal metaphors. In a poem entitled “Ats’iits’in” the (Diné word for skeleton, or literally “body bone"), the poet imagines the form of an “i” as a skeleton:

Below the skull there is a part of a letter

shaped like a bone. But the skull is not a skull;

it is a black dot with white teeth. And the piece

of the letter under it is not really a bone,

rather a dark spine. This is not the end of language.

This last declaration in a way sums up the work of Bone Light: this poetry is never seeking an “end,” a solid relationship between language and the world, but rather finds its beauty and its depth in the playful unfolding of the poems themselves. Towards the end of the book, after several poems in which meaning seems to dissolve just as quickly as it is presented, a strange narrative emerges: White imagines “i” and “j"–mere characters (material letters on the page) as characters (people represented in a story). “i” becomes “a man in a dark suit and a white necktie” while “j” becomes a woman in “a white scarf and black gown,” entangled in a love story. Removing these “characters” from their role in producing bigger narratives, he finds a new level at which we can imagine meaning.

While all this might seem hopelessly abstract to many readers, White’s curious poetics are not meant as a repudiation of his own life experiences, or his Diné (Navajo) heritage, but are in fact intimately connected to them. The first poem in Bone Light, “To See Letters,” is a narrative of the poet’s early childhood. In it he first remembers his mother playing word search puzzles, and the times when “she would give me the pen. I would circle random letters. She would smile and give me a hug.” He then recalls another episode in which his stepfather David, attempting to teach him English, becomes abusive: “I remember the way he forced my hand to write. How the pencil stabbed each letter, the lead smearing.” The violence of this process culminates with a blow: “When David hit me in the head, I saw stars in the shape of the Alphabet. Years later, my fascination for letters resulted in poems.”

This story, connecting well-ordered language to the violence of the stepfather, and linguistic play to the kindness of the mother, takes on a new resonance considered in light of the matriarchal tradition of the Diné people. Too often, outsiders reading Native American literature want to see it as an expression of a timeless and monolithic culture that has survived in the face of the indeterminacy of the “contemporary” world. White contests this view by showing us what he has inherited from his culture, through his mother, is in fact the opposite of the unchanging identity imagined by anthropology: part of his Diné identity is the ability to imagine new meanings in a society that seeks to impose meaning upon him. In readings and discussions of his work, White emphasizes the fact that in the Diné language, the verb is the central part of speech: filtered through this language, the world is not a place of stable objects that humans act upon, but a place where people, animals, and things exist in a constant state of transformation and movement.

The conflict between an imposed linguistic order and the playful flux of poetry is most vividly dramatized in the last poem in the collection, “Writ.” White puns off of the ambiguity of the title–"writ" could be simply something written or a legally binding document–as he stages the writing process as a sort of old West shootout:

A man in a black suit with a zero

for a head follows me. He carries a gun

shaped like language; wants me written

and dead on the page.

The poet, like a fugitive, is ultimately running from himself (the “i"): we are all ultimately defined by the words we use to imagine our identities, despite our attempts to escape such fixed definitions. For White, however, poetry is a wilderness into which we can endlessly return, a place in which language creates rather than simply describes:

I see the white door of paper;

I open it and enter. I was there forever it seems,

thinking of the origin and the end of poesis.

The poems in Bone Light, with their vivid austerity, will long be bringing readers back to this place of creation that is the “origin and the end” of poetry.

Alex Young is a writer who is pursuing a Ph.D at the University of Southern California where he holds a Provost’s Fellowship in English, and is currently working as a research assistant for the Huntington Library-USC Institute for the Study of California and The West.

http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/orlando_white_explores_navajo_identity_through_language_in_innovative_bone_/C39/L39/

Bitten by the writing bug

Sunday, January 30, 2011

By RITA MARKS

This week's release of Ellen Meeropol's debut novel, "House Arrest," marks a major milestone in her career as a writer. Most remarkable is that, now in her 60s, she didn't start writing full-time until six years ago. Her transition from nurse practitioner to novelist proves, as 19th century author George Eliot said, "It's never too late to be who you might have been."

A Western Massachusetts resident, Meeropol didn't change careers because she felt unfulfilled. Quite the contrary. She loved her work and achieved notable success. An expert on latex allergy, she lectured, published articles in nursing and medical journals, and received the Chair of Excellence Award from the Spina Bifida Association of America.

Always a voracious reader, she often thought about writing a novel but, she says, "it was nothing more than a pipedream."

Then, in 2000 she took a fiction workshop – online, "because if I was really bad no one would know."

The writing bug bit.

"Initially, I didn't think about leaving my nurse practitioner practice, but by 2005 all I wanted to do was write."

She retired that year to pursue a writing career, and took a part-time job, not surprisingly, in a bookstore. It wasn't easy. "I went from being an expert in my field," she says, "to being a novice writer."

Like most novelists, Meeropol mines the raw material of her life for her fiction, exploring experiences that seem to defy understanding.

"I'm obsessed with the stories of people who live at the intersection of political injustice and family life. People who become outsiders because of their activism for human rights, and have to deal with the consequences of those choices. Much of what I write wrestles with the question about how to be true to your beliefs, without harming those you love in possibly unforgiveable ways."

Given her family history, her obsession is well founded. A lifelong political activist, she's married to Robert Meeropol, who established the Rosenberg Fund for Children in memory of his parents. He was 6 years old when Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed after a controversial trial that drew worldwide protests.

Publisher's Weekly describes "House Arrest" as a "tightly composed" first novel, "unflinching in taking on challenging subjects and deliberating uneasy ethical conundrums."

Set in Springfield, Mass., and Maine, the novel delves into an unlikely relationship between two women. Pippa Glenning is pregnant and under house arrest for the death of her first child. Emily is the nurse assigned to manage Pippa's prenatal care. Both are haunted by childhood tragedies caused by their parents' political actions. When Pippa asks a favor that could jeopardize Emily's job, Emily must challenge her own beliefs about right and wrong, justice and injustice.

Today, Ellen Meeropol is living her "pipedream." She writes full-time and, with a recent master of fine arts degree in creative writing, teaches fiction workshops.

She claims she's "incredibly lucky," but such modesty undervalues the determination and hard work she's invested to become the writer she was meant to be.

Rita Marks is a free-lance writer living in Springfield, MA. She can be reached at ritawmarks@gmail.com

http://www.masslive.com/springfield/republican/index.ssf?/base/news-32/129620283887170.xml&coll=1

Ron Slate reviews New Hope for the Dead: Uncollected William Matthews, edited by Sebastian Matthews and Stanley Plumly!

"The poem features the Horatian qualities one associates with Matthews…"

The rest of Slate's review is just a click away!

“

Janice Eidus' The Last Jewish Virgin has a place on the Midwest Book Review's "Small Press Review" fiction shelf for January 2011!

"Vampires are a staple of literature, but Janice Eidus takes them in a whole other direction. "The Last Jewish Virgin" tells the story of Lilith Zeremba, a young Jewish woman seeking her own way through life, and finds herself drawn between two men. Eidus twists the vampire mythos for her story and brings a new collection of thought and opinion to the table for a very different read. "The Last Jewish Virgin" is an intriguing read that will prove hard to put down with its originality."

Check out what else made it at the link below:

http://www.midwestbookreview.com/sbw/jan_11.htm#Fiction

Amy Lennon's collection of poetry, "Saint Nobody", received an in-depth review from the craft-focused community of Centrum in Port Townsend, Washington!

"Poet Amy Lemmon, whose just-released collection “Saint Nobody” is now available from Red Hen Press, understands—as did Whitman and Eliot, not to mention Tu Fu and Li Po—the pace of her contemporary readers’ worlds…" – Centrum

Check out the rest of the analysis at the link below!

http://www.centrum.org/writing/2011/01/a-review-of-amy-lemmons-saint-nobody.html

Rigoberto Gonzalez of The National Booki Critics Circle named Kurt Brown's collection of poems, No Other Paradise, as a 2010 Small Press Highlight!

"If other poets examine the mysteries of our broken world, Brown excavates them, mining through the rubble of curiosity, confusion and contemplation to construct these haunting poems about the silence, the fleetingness, and the end of things." – Roberto Gonzalez

Check out the rest of the review on the link below:

http://bookcritics.org/blog/archive/small_press_highlights_2010_edition/

Scott Brown received a wonderful review in the 2010 Hawaii Edition Review for his "brilliant political farce", Far Afield.

"Far Afield is an enormously entertaining novel that exposes our media’s preoccupation with vacuous stories and recycled messages while telling a character-driven tale of loneliness and rediscovery. Brown capably brings the familiar into the absurd while juggling real emotion and motivation with the ridiculous plots and plans of the island’s inhabitants." – James Calvey

Check out the rest of the review below:

http://www.hpu.edu/index.cfm?section=acadprograms11849&contentID=11849&siteID=1