… after reading Jeff Jackson’s brilliant interview with TS author Joyelle McSweeney and then scrolling around and thinking Wow, Fanzine publishes a lot of good stuff. Including a lot of work by women. Weird and witchy women. Hell yeah.
1. Lucy Tiven’s review of Melissa Broder’s Scarecrone (Publishing Genius):
Melissa Broder’s Scarecrone is a gestural book. Its poems reach out as they reach in, investigating their own wild and witchy language. Though Broder’s mental landscape is characterized with acts of transubstantiation, prayer, and ceremonial fire, the collection’s central ritual act is that of language itself….
Broder picks up the intonation and vocabulary of spiritual yearning; admitting to damnation through pleas for deliverance and ritualistic demonstrations of humility. She speaks of a spiritual confinement: that the body is itself a prison, and the pain with which we feel another mode of energy/being present and remain unable to reach it. Which, in turn, becomes a pain itself…. [Full review]
2. Stacy Elaine Dacheux’s review of Kate Durbin’s E! Entertainment (Wonder):
As I binge read the entirety of Kate Durbin’s book: E!, which transcribes reality television clips into an experimental literary remix, I emerged with new clarity on these stories and my own role as viewer, most notably in Durbin’s text when Kim Kardashian confesses to Stepdad: “It’s like I’m forgetting what this is all supposed to be about.”
I am reminded of how cults work…. Isolation, “amnesia” and “refashioning identity” seems rampant in what makes reality television work too, and not just for Kim Kardasian, but both of us. I am implicated here as well, alone at home with my screens, focusing instead on subject and signifiers more so than the humanity behind it, often forgetting– Kim Kardashian is a real life, feeling person, or, this is what I’m reminded of as I flip through the pages of Durbin’s book.
Unfortunately, the production of television transforms or “refashions” Kim into a container for where I can stuff my thoughts on class, commercialism, or gender. She is a symbol of upper-class identity, akin to Patty Hearst, a kidnapped media heiress. Did she go willingly into the bank with a gun? How much is the real Kim implicated? … [Full review]
3. Laura Carter’s review of Valerie Mejer’s Rain of the Future (Action Books):
Raúl Zurita introduces Valerie Mejer’s poetry with the following words: “only through radical vulnerability can the urgency of love arise.” He calls her work a series of photographs, allowing us to claim what we find in her verse as hemorrhage, weakeness even. Mejer, a Mexican poet with roots in Germany, Britain, and Spain, is a unique voice writing in a postmodern state where things don’t always seem so whole….
Mejer interrogates our animal bodies, the things that make failure inevitable (and beautiful) in a world where bad things happen, as we all know too well. She weaves a story of sleeping and waking, always perpetually coming out of a dream but then finding that this “aliveness” can’t quite last. [Full review]
4. Sarah Rose Etter’s interview with Megan Martin (Nevers, (Caketrain)):
Martin: There’s nothing I love more than writing a sentence: it’s the supreme thing I care about. I never want to write a boring sentence and I hate writing filler sentences that get you from here to there, so I try to skip them and hope the reader is cool with making unexpected leaps with me. I think that’s part of how we get from foxes to R. Kelly to suburbia. The other thing that made these sentences was the process. All of the pieces in the collection emerged from just automatic writing by hand and not censoring myself. Many of the leaps happened because they were created by being open to what entered my mind, as opposed to homing in on a particular noun or idea or line and writing a story that projected outward from that one thing or moment. [Full interview]