Book Review: Hanging the Moon by Jenny Yang Cropp

Hanging the Moon, by Jenny Yang Cropp, Rocksaw Press. Review by Sarah Pape.

In Jenny Yang Cropp's new chapbook, Hanging the Moon, published by RockSaw Press, we begin with a contradiction, a warning, or perhaps just what it's titled, an "Apologia." She writes, "Fall's beauty doesn't' move me [...] too scientific, / not enough wonder." Yet as you travel through the tight-knit collection of narrative poems, you quickly find yourself deep in the language of science-string theory, black holes, matter, measurement of light, stellar remnants. However, this is not a treatise on quantum physics as much as a deep dive into the theories of the surrounding environment transposed with concrete experience. In the poem, "Little Black Holes," Cropp writes, "When my boyfriend asks for the book / I borrowed and lost, I will tell him / subatomic black holes exist, and they take // what they want-memories, dreams [...]" arguing that we must hide what we want to keep safe from the appetite of the universe, always lurking. This movement of explaining circumstance with a hypothesis seems to be a way of understanding what defies the heart - grief, loss, violation.

If the scientific is the skeleton of Hanging the Moon, ritual and personal myth are the flesh. The trauma of the death of a sister become the focus midway through the collection, as in "Food for the Dead" in which the speaker of the poem dreams of her sister's death before being told of it:

One small photo all the papers will print
passes through me. Sister at the end becomes girl behind glass,

distorted, twisting into the familiar and out again,
until I wake up, blood still ringing from the blare of her face.

Cropp then follows with the editorial style prose poem, "Flushing teenager killed in a two-girl knife fight" in which the details of the sister's violent death are imagined, grappling with the unknowable, attempting to conjure a sense of witness.

We are told, "I am the child / who knows, and you are the knowing, why / she runs from light switch to bed but keeps her eyes / open, waits for the wall of dark to dissolve" in her closing poem, "The Visible Spectrum." And as the human eye can only distinguish a portion of the surrounding electromagnetic wavelengths as "light," Jenny Yang Cropp acknowledges that memory is incomplete, "leaking our dim light into pools visible from space" finding the darkness necessary for true illumination. This is an honest and raw collection of poems that create their own science of experience, lyrical and illusory as it tests its own hypothesis.

News Around the Net

Random House lays the final smack down on Andrew Wylie and The Wylie Agency and stops him from selling exclusive e-book rights to authors like Updike, Roth and Ralph Ellison to Amazon. Hooray for big, evil publishing!

The 2010 International 3-day Novel contest is coming up. That's right! A novel (or I guess more like a novella) in three days. It's on a weekend, so none of you have any excuses! Who else is down? Oh wait, I work. Never mind. But anyway, this is a great diary showing what it takes.

Here's a question for you: When's the last time you read a book by a female author? It makes me sad that I can't think of one at the moment.

Bad book recommendations. It happens to all of us. And it's why I don't usually give or take recommendations any more. I'll find my own way!

How to seduce a man into getting a free lunch using The Great Gatsby.

Anyone want a Twilight toilet seat sticker? An American Psycho belt buckle? A Sherlock Holmes finger puppet? (actually, yes, I do want that one.) But wait! There's more!

Calling All AZ Poets and Artists!

Whoever said you can't make money as a poet obviously hadn't heard about the Seventh Avenue Streetscape Demonstration Project.

As part of a partnership between the Seventh Avenue Merchants Association, Arizona State University School of Artchitecture, local neighborhood associations, City of Phoenix Departments of Street Transportation and Neighborhood Services, and the Phoenix Office of Arts and Culture, the Seventh Ave. Streetscape Demonstration Project is an opportunity for local poets and artists to have their work displayed publicly in what they are calling a "changing streetside gallery," that is at the cross-streets of 7th Ave. & Glenrosa Ave. in Phoenix. And as if that weren't incentive enough, selected poets and artists make $900 for their work. I'm pretty sure that's the most you're ever going to make for a single poem, unless you're this guy.

Submissions are due by the beginning of October, so get to work. Contact Jeanine Garcia at jeanine.garcia@phoenix.gov for submission guidelines (sorry guys, you gotta be in AZ to submit) and check out the website to see the current installation.

Website of the Week: Anis Shivani at HuffPo

This week's Website of the Week is a fairly obvious goodie, one that's already pretty popular amongst the mid-20's to mid-30's age range, I-voted-for-Barack-Obama crowd for quite a while now: The Huffington Post. But we aren't here to plug HuffPo as a whole per se (even though I am a big fan); rather, we want to draw attention to one writer who has been stirring up a cauldron of controversy the past few weeks with his bold, no-holds-barred literary posts that have been at the center some pretty serious comment threads.

Meet Anis Shivani. Anis is a Houston-based fiction writer, poet and as you will soon discover, quite vocal critic. He's been writing for HuffPo since the beginning of the summer, but it has been his last few posts that have really been fun reading. Take for instance his post, The 15 Most Overrated Contemporary Authors. Featuring everyone from William T. Vollmann to Billy Collins to Jonathan Safran Foer, Anis dishes out some pretty harsh critiques. Take Vollmann for example: Anis calls him a "third-rate Pynchon desperate to impress with quantity rather than quality." Yikes. As one commenter puts it, "the article is entertaining and amusingly vicious."

Check out everything Anis has to offer over at The Huffington Post, and then stop by his website where you can check out some of his other writing.

Book Review: The Imagined Field by Sean Patrick Hill

Review of The Imagined Field by Sean Patrick Hill, Paper Kite Press, 2010. Review by Bryan Tso Jones, author of Raking the Hollow Bones, Bedbug Press, 2009.

Sean Patrick Hill's first collection, The Imagined Field, asks us to turn our gaze outward as travelers to a wide sprung geography, to see what can be found to root in ourselves. Spanning locations in Ireland, through Andalusia, to a long journey across the United States, this field is one that reveals itself gradually. From a distance, we might see wheat or cleared out scrub, marked by defined borders both physical and otherwise, like in “Exact Change”: “I write poem about crickets in the field, / then get up from the chair / and walk out the motel door to the field.” At closer inspection, we discover this field littered with holes that tunnel the reader into dirty motels, broken neon signs in small towns, filled with people who are in a sense rooting through the underbrush to sieve what is left.

The narrators in this collection are always questioning, always searching, either for a sense of self, or of the place they inhabit. Poems like “Rearview Mirror” for example, use objects like “an abandoned wreck” left on the side of a road as extended metaphor to represent the sometimes unacknowledged struggle human beings have with resolving their past experiences: “You can drive off into the fragrant sagebrush and never turn your head. / The only thing that wreck recedes from is from the rearview mirror. / It never really goes anywhere does it?”

Another example of how The Imagined Field attempts to root experience to place is in the elegiac “Inland Among Stones,” dedicated to the poet's father. In this poem, the speaker journeys from the United States to Ireland with his father, to see “the plot / You bought for yourself on a hill top.” What's interesting here is that instead of tying this solemn, bonding experience between father and son explicitly to the locations named in each of the poem's six sections – The Bells of St. Mary's, The Tower on the Cliffs of Moher, and so on – the poem frequently utilizes local legend from these places to help ground the reader in a geographic terrain. In the St. Bridgit's Well section, the reader learns “how they say / An eel lives in the water and brings luck / If you're lucky enough to see.” It is local legends like this that the speaker then juxtaposes with what happens inexorably, that places and the meanings tied to them change despite the persistence of such stories. In the same section, the speaker's father attempts to gather water from this well in a vial but the speaker mentions later the water “spilled in your suitcase.” Dramatic turns like this occur in poems such as “No Country I Know,” “Coin-Op Binoculars” and “The pond that wouldn't freeze in winter”; they speak powerfully to one of the themes of the collection, which is how an individual – whether they are homebound or homeless – maintains their sense of identity in a world where places they have come to know change or disappear entirely. In “The pond that wouldn't freeze in winter,” the speaker mentions the cultural loss that occurs when relief money for a flood in Elmira, New York is spent on dikes, and the city decides to tear down the Langdon House where Mark Twain lived to build “a shopping plaza.” Everywhere there are the brutal signs of fading, of places plowed over by concrete, signs on cliffs being changed. Even the speaker acknowledges the power of human recollection as fallible in maintaining the personal ties an individual has to a town, such as when trying to recall the location of a foundry in Elmira that manufactured fire hydrants and later, when the speaker recounts doing stone rubbings in grade school: “I remember laying the butcher paper / over the letters. I used charcoal, maybe.” The childhood experience itself is qualified.

The language in The Imagined Field, like the wide geographic terrain it canvasses, runs a gamut, but remains colloquial in tone. This is not to say the poetry in this collection lacks power or muscularity. With lines like, “Patience is the longest shadow on the face of the earth. And yours” from “Rearview Mirror” and “Mine is a Midwest winter, / a crease in an empty sleeve / of snow,” in “No Country I Know,” Sean Patrick Hill subtly reveals his skill as a wordsmith without pressuring the language into artifice. As a whole, the collection reminds us of the importance of place and though our struggles are wide ranging in scope, in the end, like a river stone in the current, we “turn over once...and come to rest.”

News Around the Net

The Guardian is asking us to find the funniest novel titles we can. I think I'm willing to say that Penetrating Wagner's Ring is the best one thus far. Too funny.

Why having the right place to work isn't nearly as important as actually working. Does this mean that my new desk doesn't do the writing for me? I assigned it a story last week and was going to check in on it today. I thought I was ahead of the game.

More about the struggles at Barnes & Noble. We could be headed for a very different place than we're used to. Maybe they'll add grocery stores to every location! That would be convenient.

Everyone spends a lot of time hating on Barnes & Noble and Amazon, but how often do we see a good independent bookstore fight nowadays? To use the immortal words of Justin Timberlake, cry me a river, Open Book!

I know we had Jonathan Franzen last week, but he's a pretty big deal. Possibly worthy of two weeks in a row. Here's an incredibly awkward seeming Franzen in a video talking about "the novel".

Here's a good interview with the new editor of The Paris Review, Loren Stein. Other than that poetry acceptance/rejection fiasco, I'm somewhat sold on him.

Finally, a three-year-old plays with toys, recites Billy Collins poetry.

Website of the Week: Better Book Titles

Whether it's the literary canon or the New York Times Best-seller List, everyone knows there are the books out there that are "must-reads." The books that people who haven't finished a book since high school have read (see: The Da Vinci Code). The problem is, as a reader, you can't really make your "to read or not to read" decision based on what your great uncle says or the pretentious kid in your lit class; you need a good indication of what you are getting yourself into before you dive into a Bukowski novel or a Glenn Beck bestseller, a brief summary of what lies ahead.

Enter Dan Wilbur and his blog Better Book Titles. Dan has taken those books that everyone and their neighbor has been recommending to you and gives them new, more revealing titles; titles that summarize the books so you can better decide if you're really serious about reading The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, or if you just want to take your mom's word that it was "life-changing."

Here are a few of my favorites:



Check out all the revised titles at Dan's blog, here.

Book Review: The Last 4 Things by Kate Greenstreet

The Last 4 Things by Kate Greenstreet, Ahsahta Press, Boise State University, 2009. Review by Deborah Lechner.

Kate Greenstreet’s poetry is, first of all, image-driven. Her background in photography informs her aesthetic in imagery, so as the picture develops, it builds at a steady pace, from the first words appearing on the page, which often announce the theme in tone, then in outline. Little by little details emerge that are in themselves memorable, until the whole of the idea is apparent and fixed.

Her wording is intimate, but conversational and factual, as though telling a story to a friend. In the first section of the book, The Last 4 Things, there is this:

The world was ending, and everybody knew.
We lined up to say goodbye.
I saw some people out on the bridges.
One guy said don’t worry─when it comes,
there’ll be nothing left.

Another gorgeous example of this technique is from the second section of the book, 56 Days where she writes, "The camera has two purposes: one is to help the person holding / it to see. The other, simply to draw light into itself."

This volume comes with a DVD containing two short films with audio voiceover from the author. The opportunity to see Greenstreet’s visual work and hear her poetry read in her own voice is a superb bonus.

Kate Greenstreet is the author of The Last 4 Things (Ahsahta Press, 2009) and case sensitive (Ahsahta, 2006). Her new chapbook, "but even now I am perhaps not speaking" will be out on Imprint Press this spring. Her previous chapbooks are This is why I hurt you (Lame House Press, 2008), Rushes (above/ground press, 2007), and Learning the Language (Etherdome Press, 2005). Statues, a Big Game Books tinyside, was available briefly in 2006. Her poetry can also be found in the anthologies 13 Younger Contemporary American Poets (Proem Press, 2010), The Harp & Altar Anthology (Ellipsis Press, 2010), Disco Prairie Social Aid and Pleasure Club (Factory Hollow Press, 2010), Letters to the World (Red Hen Press, 2008), The Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel - Second Floor (No Tell Books, 2007), and Diagram.2 (New Michigan Press, 2006). She has also published a great deal of visual, audio and printed work online. She received a Fellowship from the NJ State Council on the Arts in 2003

Check out Kate's website to learn more about her and her work. While you're there you can view a great sample clip from the video included with The Last 4 Things and listen to the author reading a number of her poems. You can also purchase The Last 4 Things for your personal library.

News Around the Net

Jonathan Franzen is on the cover of Time Magazine. Evidently, he's the first living novelist to receive the honor since Stephen King in 2000. So, kind of a big deal. His new novel, Freedom, is also being released at the end of the month.

For Penguin's 75th anniversary, they're releasing a super cool book looking into the best book cover designs they've published. The book is complete with commentary from the authors and the cover art designers.

Mcsweeney's has named their selection for best e-reader on the market. The newspaper.

Barnes and Noble is getting a taste of its own medicine. Do e-books and online sales spell the end for the bookstore chain?

Since Google wants to digitize every book in the world, so logically, they asked how many books are in the world. After doing numbers stuff with equations or whatever, they've come up with an exact number. It's a big one.

Literary writers, want to sell more books? Change your name and write chick-lit.

A 4th grade summary of Portnoy's Complaint. Probably explained better than I could explain that book.

This Week in Literary History: Feeling friggatriskaidekaphobic?

Tomorrow is Friday the 13th, which means everyone needs to stay home from work, shut the blinds and curl up in bed with a good book to avoid the tragedies that inevitably await us if we dare to venture out into the world. There is a higher risk of traffic accidents on Friday the 13th. Charles Manson, John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer and Saddam Hussein all have 13 letters in their names. Coincidence? I beg to differ. Seriously though, I was born on Friday the 13th and I turned out just fine. So all you friggatriskaidekaphobics out there, take a chill pill. I'm pretty sure the only bad thing happening this Friday the 13th is this.

It was on August 10, 1821 that Missouri joined the Union and became the 24th state and future homeland to such literary heavyweights as Mark Twain, T.S. Eliot and William S. Burroughs. If I'm ever in Missouri for whatever reason, I'll definitely be visiting the Mark Twain Museum in Hannibal, MO and checking in on Old Bull Lee in St. Louis.

August 9 is the birthday of poet Philip Larkin, whose poetry was influenced greatly by the Missourian T.S. Eliot. Larkin cited Eliot as one of the writers who was "speaking out loud and clear" in the post-war time when poetry was kind of in the dumps. Buy a copy of Larkin's Collected Poems for your Friday the 13th bedridden reading.

And in honor of Missouri's birthday, pick up a copy of The Missouri Review to feed your lit journal needs. Back in 1997 (Vol XX, Number 2), The Missouri Review published a poem by Bob Kaven called "Aubade" which just so happens to be the title of Philip Larkin's last great poem before his death. Check out Larkin's "Aubade" here, and subscribe to The Missouri Review here.

Unusual Calls for Submissions

Consequence Magazine Calls for Poetry Submissions
Consequence is currently looking for poetry submissions that address cultural issues and consequences of war. Prize is $200 and a three year subscription. The author’s work will be published in both the online and hard copy editions of the magazines. No entry fee is required. Submit up to three original and unpublished poems, including a cover letter with biographical information, address, phone number and email address before September 30th. Only poems in English, no translations accepted. All work will be judged by poet Joyce Peseroff, who will also present the award. Submissions are accepted in both mail and email. Visit Consequence Magazine’s website for further information.

2010 Submissions for Rio Grande Review Now Open
Rio Grand Review has a question and they’re looking to you for the answer. They’re wondering what the words “Kitch and Camp” mean to you. Share your answers with them and earn a chance to be featured in their upcoming 2010 issue. Any genre, ranging from art, poetry, fiction or animation is accepted. Submit any and all work here or visit Rio Grande’s website for FAQs and further guidelines. Visual media will be presented on Rio Grande’s online sources. Deadline is September 10th, so get your thinking caps on!

First Annual Still Journal Writing Contest
Still: The Journal, is holding its very first literary contest. The online publisher has their sites set on authors who have a good understanding the Moutain South, or who might have an established connection to that region. Winners will receive $100 dollars and publication in their Fall issue. The work will be judged by acclaimed authors Ann Panake, Maurice Manning and Janisse Ray. Fiction, Poetry and Nonfiction are all accepted. $8 entry fee upon submission, nothing that exceeds 6,500 words or 100 lines of poetry please. Authors are encouraged to submit via mail or email. Deadline for email is midnight, August 15th and the winners will be notified the 15th of September. Visit Still: The Journal’s website and contest page for all other submission criteria and info.

Call for Submissions: Kweli Journal
Kweli Journal is now calling for submissions to their Fall/Winter 2010 issue, themed “Sanctuary”. As the editors state: “Kweli is a new online literary journal established to identify, promote and nurture emerging writers of color. Our mission, as editors and publishers, is to find a broad, international audience for the artists that we publish. We seek high quality literary work that is beautiful and sustaining, profound and powerful.” Kweli Journal encourages authors to submit either one prose piece, double spaced accordingly, or up to three forms of poetry, single spaced, for a chance to be featured in the upcoming issue. Last call for submissions is September 16th and authors will be notified immediately if their work is accepted. Mail your work to submission manager Nicole Vasques, Kweli Journal, Inc. P.O. Box 693, New York, NY 10021.

Crow Talk Poetry looking at California Writers
Crow Talk, the Poetry Anthology is seeking local poetry and artwork from it’s fellow California residents. If you think you’re capable of incorporating crows or ravens in a significant manner into your poetry or artwork you are strongly encouraged to apply. Each published contributor will receive a free copy of Crow Talk’s latest issue featuring their accomplished works. Submit your one, unpublished or previously published, 1-5 page single spaced poetry piece here. Or submit 1-5 files of your artwork or photographs in the form of a low res, JPEG or TIFF attachment through this email. Please include a 75 word bio upon submission, as well as the author’s name, address, phone number, email and mailing address. If poems have been previously published in any form, include the publication name, publisher, date and issue #, for credit in acknowledgments. Submissions are due before or on September 30th, 2010. A public reading will be held in the Santa Barbara/ Goleta area to kick off the release of the anthology!

-An independent publication is looking for poems for their up and coming anthology. The organization is seeking out authors who have shared an experience of growing up, living in, or having left the trailer park community lifestyle. Contributors will receive the first issue of the journal for free. New and emerging poets are both encouraged to participate in this event. Send your work via email here, and include name, address, phone number and email on each submission. There’s no limit to work that’s been previously published. Deadline for submissions is February 28th, 2011. This is a great opportunity to try something new!

Illinois’ Crab Orchard Review Now Accepting New Material.
Think you’ve got a handle on the Southern States? Crab Orchard Review is looking for authors to participate in their Special Issue: New & Old - Re-visions of the American South. As the literary publication states: “COR is seeking work for their Summer/Fall 2011 issue, focusing on writing exploring the people, places, history, and new directions that have shaped and are reshaping the American South.” (This includes, but is not limited to, bilingual as well as facing-page translations as well) “All submissions should be original, unpublished poetry, fiction, or literary nonfiction in English or unpublished translations in English.” Writers who are accepted and published will receive $25 per magazine page, $50 minimum for poetry and $100 minimum for prose as the contest rules state. This will also include 2 free copies of the issue as well. Authors have between August 10th and November 1st, 2010 to make their submissions, and the issue will make its debut by the end of March 2011. Visit Crab Orchard’s website for the full article, submission guidelines and all the extras!

Website of the Week: Dead Advice

Felix Jung is a former HFR contributor (Issue 24) and the creator of a new website that hands out advice on how to make your life more fulfilling. This isn't your average Dr. Phil self-help website though; the advice on Jung's new website comes from you. Just a more dead version of you.

Dead Advice encourages you to "imagine, for a moment, that you have just died" (cause of death is negligible, but for the sake of personal satisfaction, mine was something truly heroic). Then write a letter to someone - whether it be your kids or your husband or "the rest of us still living" - and tell them what you learned from the life you just finished, what lessons you took away and what guidance you would give to those who are fortunate enough to still have some time ticking away on their proverbial death clock. Talk about love, friendship, work, the underestimated value of an Arnold Palmer on a hot summer day (my personal addition); whatever it is that you would look back on and either recommend or discourage your living pen pal(s) from doing in their own life. The only rule is that every letter starts the same way: "Now that I’m dead, I want to tell you a few things.”

It's an interesting and insightful reflection on how we live our lives. We all say we want to die with no regrets, but Dead Advice kind of forces you to think: "What am I doing to make sure that actually happens?" Reading through some of the more somber entries can actually be inspiring, which I think is the overall goal of the Dead Advice project: to inspire people to take advantage of life, before it's too late.

Visit DeadAdvice.com where you can view all of the letters submitted (categorized by topic) and write your own letter to your friends or your cat or whoever you think will most benefit from the little tidbits of life experience you gained during your short reign here, with the rest of us.

Book Review: Raking the Hollow Bones by Bryan Tso Jones

Review of Raking the Hollow Bones by Bryan Tso Jones, Fairweather Books, 2008, Winner of the 2007 Rhea & Seymour Gorsline Poetry Competition. Reviewed by Toni L. Wilkes, author of Stepping Through Moons, Finishing Line Press, 2009.

Bryan Tso Jones’ debut collection, Raking the Hollow Bones, is a reckoning with the past, in particular, the past of his Chinese ancestors who fled Mao’s Red China. The book opens with a monologue from the mythological figure, Zhang Xian, “protector of children, warden of dreams” who becomes the poet’s guide on his journey to recover the ghosts of his ancestors and, thereby, himself. In “Zhang Xian and the Boy with the Gold Key,” the poet enters a door “we shut in our youth” and is instructed to “Gather the threads left by ghost whispers / into this silk embroidery.” What emerges is a silken tapestry of family stories, legends and myths as the poet claims himself by claiming his past.

In the title poem, the act of raking leaves links poet and grandfather: “Raking leaves, I bend like curved wood in a bow, / like my grandfather bent to plant rice.” What unfolds as the speaker “pour(s) over stories whispered by relatives” is a re-imagining of his grandfather’s past in a time “before peasants marched under red banners.” But Bryan Tso Jones brings honest reflection to bear on his task, acknowledging that any re-imagining or retrieval of a distant past is a struggle and, on some level, futile: “Difficult for him to imagine his footprints // washed in the monsoon would make / a grandson’s attempt to return more difficult.”

In “Sichuan Pork,” the poet prepares a meal “in this way taught to me” and suddenly, the chopping of garlic and the mashing of ginger evokes a grandmother hastily gathering possessions in her kitchen to flee “because Mao was coming.”

Food and the preparation of meals becomes a recurring motif throughout the book. A powerful and appropriate motif. The sense of smell harbors memory and so cooking becomes a mechanism to revisit a grandmother who “was pungent in the baskets arrayed with five-spice.” Ritualistic, cooking evokes familial tradition and therefore, a link to the past such as occurs in the poem “Study Cooking,” where the poet’s mother and grandmother demonstrate “how tender vegetables become when sliced against the grain.” At the end of the poem, the speaker “…listened as their mouths named things / gathered by the tongues of generations.”

Mouths, tongues, names, voices become further recurring motifs—family and history born and reborn through language: the naming of things and people, the delivery of stories and rituals such as the Buddhist funeral of a grandmother and the annual cleansing of the ancestor’s graves. Because, as the poet claims in “The Fading, A Talk-Story by Zhang Xian”: “When Memory forgot, only ghosts mourned.”

The generosity of Raking the Hollow Bones extends beyond concerns over relatives to include legends, myths and stories ranging from Odin to the Ganges Ma to a December rite still upheld in Germany and Austria where young, single men clad themselves in masks and animal skins and large cowbells “to bring luck to the good and punish the idle.” The best of these renderings share tales and stories less familiar: an ancient Chinese empress deceiving conspirators, Japanese WWII scientists engaged in human experiments in China for biological warfare.

Along the way, Bryan Tso Jones’ poetry demonstrates a measured control, a sure confidence and startling, original imagery: “the curves of traffic light bell peppers,” a poet’s fingers which “grew intimate with the belly of garlic,” a dead grandmother’s fingers “cold like the lungs of a cave.”

Over the course of the book, the poet accepts the place made for him in the family and claims what’s past. Early on in “Stone Chop,” the poet’s grandmother “…declared I should have a new name / to bear witness to ancestral ghosts who dwell across the sea.”

And so a carver chisels a stone chop, a personal seal, and the poet is “born again under his hands.” Later, the poet reconciles English with the Chinese of his grandparents. In “Romanization,” the poet presents the struggle to access the past through the spelling of Chinese words with letters in the Roman alphabet: “…Whisked like eggs, dofu, / luxurious food packed in a vacuum, / to the unaware ear curdles into tofu.”

There’s a humorous, self-deprecating and poignant moment in “Chinese School at Grace Cathedral” when “I called my teacher 'mouse' instead of 'teacher.' // The inflection wrong, it perched in my mouth / like an acrobat before the fatal slip.”

Finally, triumphantly, the poet achieves an integration of Chinese words and their etymology in “The Kitchen God’s Lament”: “In my thirtieth year, I wash spinach leaves in a colander, / but the Chinese for what I do falls in the shui / that drops, rain into the sink.”

Deftly, the poet’s journey concludes toward the end of the book in “Looking at the Bamboo in My House” where the past—family, heredity, culture—become engrained in the speaker’s daily life: the bamboo in the house, like the poem, a palpable object to harbor memory, ritual and identity—recovered, released and migrating toward a next generation:

When I was young I stuffed your cousin’s

thick joints with birthday and New Year’s coins…

When I smashed him open against the broken concrete,
smiles burst down the street, a flock of geese.

News Around the Net

Sean Penn is in talks to play Max Perkins, the editor for F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe and others, in a biopic.  Who else is ready to cast Fitzgerald and Hemingway?

Why lying in historical fiction is a good thing.  Because then William Wallace wouldn't have been Edward III's father, duh.

Something useful to almost all of us:  Matt Stewart, author of The French Revolution, tells us how to generate first novel karma.

Memorable last words of literary legends.  How to go out like a gangster, literarily speaking.

A story of ebook prejudice.  Coffee shops trying to slow the revolution!

Find that reading books is losing some of its kick?  Maybe a good literary drinking game is just what you need.

This Week in Literary History: Money isn't Everything

August 1 is the birthday of American novelist and poet, Herman Melville. He's the one who wrote the 800-page novel about whale fishing. You know, this one. While Melville never got to live up his literary celebrity in his lifetime (he only made about $10,000 from all his writings), in death he has been recognized as one of the greats. If American literature were an ocean, Melville would totally be a really big whale.

On August 3, 1861 (ten years after Moby Dick), Charles Dickens published the third installment of arguably his greatest work, Great Expectations. By this time, Dickens was already a wildly popular writer in both the U.S. and across the pond in Britain, and unlike Melville, was able to enjoy the fruits of his labor in his lifetime. Harper's Magazine has an article that explores in depth the influence that Dickens had on Melville's work.

There's success as a literary celebrity, then there is success as a literary celebrity who is also the President of the United States. August 4 was the 49th birthday of Barack Obama, our Commander in Chief and the author of two books, Dreams From My Father and The Audacity of Hope. Obama reigned in a 1.9 million dollar advance for a three book deal from his publisher. Every president since 1952 has published a book, all commercially successful but kind of a drag, considering real writers like Melville didn't even make enough bring home the bacon. Dreams From My Father is supposed to be actually good though; Phillip Roth was even a fan, calling it "well done and very persuasive and memorable too."

As I was flipping through the Winter/Spring 2010 issue of Sycamore Review, I came across Rebecca Longster's review of Steve Hely's novel, How I Became A Famous Novelist. The book is about a "voluntarily-down-on-his-luck writer" who seeks vengeance on his former college girlfriend by becoming a famous novelist so he can "steal [her] thunder at her own wedding." The book's protagonist follows a prescriptive formula for novel writing and pumps out a bestseller. Chaos, hilarity, and self-reflection ensue. Check out Rebecca Longster's review of the book Herman Melville should have read by picking up a copy of Sycamore Review. You can buy a copy of Hely's novel online, here.

Website of the Week: Auto-Summarize

Rhode Island-based artist Jason Huff has found a pretty convenient way to get the gist of the 100 most downloaded copyright-free books on the internet: plug the entire text into Microsoft Word and use the Auto-Summarize feature to condense the novel into 10 sentences. The results are sometimes funny, sometimes poetic, and sometimes pretty darn close to an accurate summary of the book.

It's an interesting idea that has wielded some pretty awesome results. Take for example, Kafka's Metamorphosis:



Huff has put together all 100 summaries into a book, which you can purchase here for only $7.00, a pretty fair price for a sure fire conversation starter. You can also view the whole book online, here.

I took the liberty of plugging his book of auto-summarized books into Microsoft Word. Here's the ten sentence summary of his book:

[Illustration]
[Illustration]
man.
Man!
34
Man! MEN. MEN. MEN. MEN. Men.

Sounds like it would be more applicable to this book honestly.

Book Review: Where the Dog Star Never Glows by Tara L. Masih

Where the Dog Star Never Glows by Tara L. Masih, Press 53, LLC, 2010. Review by Debrah Lechner.

Tara L. Masih is a vivid, lyrical writer, and in this anthology of short stories, she applies that gift to a wide number of societies, natural settings, and wonderful, distinct, intriguing characters. Each story in this collection, which spans two decades of her work, stands alone as a piece worth the price of the book.

Some are primal in setting, such as the story “The Sin Eater,” which begins:

Most days, like this one, he lives like a snake coiled peacefully on a warm rock ledge down in the gorge, listening to the low grown of frogs and the high-pitched buzz of flying insects.

In this story Masih merges vengeance and redemption into a whole, one thing, both repelling and beautiful, a gestalt there is no word for in English. To articulate an experience for which there is no term is a pretty impressive accomplishment.

In the story “Asylum” the narrator is forced by circumstance to undertake a life-long quest to distinguish her identity and the meaning of her life from that of her mother, a schizophrenic woman that she cares for. Her isolation, dedication to her destiny, and the challenge she faces are no less harrowing than that of the snake-eater because of the modern and familiar setting:

You’d think with a name like Bliss that I had a good life, wouldn’t you? But I was named by my mother more from hope than intuition. She wanted me to have what she knew she would never have. She wanted to protect me in the only small, powerless way that she could.

Notice the word “hope” in that passage. Redemption in Masih’s stories come, as it does in most cases, in the form of hope. What I like most about the hope that she writes about is that it relies on a firm sense of self. There is nothing remotely resembling luck, answered prayer, or any other Deus-ex-machina: it is knowing who you are that promises salvation.

Tara L. Masih has earned numerous awards and nominations for her fiction. She is also the editor of The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction: Tips from Editors, Teachers, and Writers in the Field, which is also a book to consider acquiring.

Visit Tara L Masih’s website to learn more about her work and to read some of her flash fiction, poetry, and essays. You can also receive a free bookplate personally signed by the author! Just email your address. Be sure to purchase Where the Dog Star Never Glows for your personal library at Amazon.com, and while you are there, check out the five-star reviews from readers.

NewPages.com Reviews HFR!

Man o' man is this a nice way to start off the month: NewPages.com has posted a flattering review of Issue #46 of HFR! It really made us blush a little bit.

NewPages reviewer Sima Rabinowitz called issue #46 "one big, bold, brilliant effort" and one of our "best issues ever" (I totally agree). She raved about our cover featuring Brian Dettmer's "New Books of Knowledge" and showed the diversity of HFR contributors by quoting from Kazim Ali's “The People of the Book” and Phil Estes' "surreal narrative," "Parties After the Afterlife Are a Lot Like Parties in Dayton, Ohio."

Overall, it was an incredibly generous review and it feels nice to know that people out there are really enjoying something that we all put a lot of work in to. Thank you Sima and the staff at NewPages!

Read the review in full, here.