Benjamin Evans
Executive Editor, Fogged Clarity

• Colin FlemingColin Fleming is a contributing writer for The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Boston Globe and The New York Times Book Review. His fiction has appeared in Boulevard, Texas Review, Slice Magazine and The Iowa Review, among other publications. Mushroom Wine

• Daniel SchwarzDaniel R. Schwarz is Frederic J. Whiton Professor of English Literature and the Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow at Cornell University. He is the author of numerous books and has published poems in journals throughout the world. Closure: 1986
• klipschutzklipschutz is a poet living in San Francisco. His poems have appeared in venues ranging from Poetry (of Chicago) to FUCK! (Tucson), along with many anthologies. His books include Twilight of the Male Ego and The Erection of Scaffolding for the Re-Painting of Heaven by the Lowest Bidder (o.p.). In 2006, through Luddite Kingdom Press, he issued the collectible All Roads. . .But This One. Upon Reading About Frank Lloyd Wright in a Rented Basement Room
• The Alpha Beta Male
• Dennis MahaginDennis Mahagin is a poet from the Pacific Northwest. His work has appeared in magazines such as 42opus, Exquisite Corpse, Night Train, Juked, Stirring, 3 A.M. and The Nervous Breakdown, among other journals. His chapbook, entitled Fare, is forthcoming in 2012 from Redneck Press.Fence Fragment
• Luke HollisLuke Hollis has studied at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln and currently is a student at the University of Oregon Master of Fine Arts program. He has received the Miriam Starlin Award and Irby F. Wood Prize for his poetry. The Co-op in Fairmont, NE
• Ron AntonucciRon Antonucci is a librarian and book critic whose reviews and articles have appeared in dozens of magazines and newspapers. He has had poems published in Whiskey Island Magazine, The Vincent Brothers Review, Pudding, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine and I Have My Own Song for It: Modern Poems of Ohio (University of Akron Press, 2002). He was fiction editor at Artful Dodge and currently serves as a contributing editor for The Journal. Supplicant
• A Picasso Blue

• Akos MajorAkos Major is a Hungarian photographer currently living and working in Vienna, Austria. Minus & White
• Maurizio AnzeriMaurizio Anzeri is an Italian artist living and working in London. Embroidery on Photographic Prints
• Michael ZimmererMichael Zimmerer is a fine art and commercial photographer who graduated from Savannah College of Art and Design in 2009. He currently resides in Orlando, FL. White Horizon

• Win Peter WintersWin Peter Winters is a chamber folk band from Upstate New York and led by Chris Bell.Self-titled
• The Fogged Clarity Session

• Bruce SniderBruce Snider is the author of two poetry collections, Paradise, Indiana, winner of the 2011 Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Prize, and The Year We Studied Women, winner of the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry. His poems and non-fiction have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Southern Review, Ploughshares, Gettysburg Review and Ninth Letter, among other journals. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow, he has been writer-in-residence at the James Merrill House in Stonington, CT as well as at the Amy Clampitt House in Lenox, MA. He currently lives in San Francisco and teaches at Stanford University. discusses his prize-winning collection “Paradise, Indiana”

• Scott HightowerScott Hightower is the author of three books. This fall, Self-Evident, his fourth collection stateside, is forthcoming from Barrow Street Press. Early next year, Oases/Hontanares, a bi-lingual book, is forthcoming from Devenir, Madrid. Hightower teaches as adjunct faculty at NYU and Drew University. A native of central Texas, he lives in Manhattan and sojourns in Spain.reviews the poetry of Steve Fellner

Hints of Southern Gothic tradition and beautiful instrumentation make this debut album well worth a listen.

~ Launch Pop-out Player ~

“(T)ravel Un(T)ravel” Neil Shepard
Mid-List Press, 2011, 978-0-922811-88-5, $13.00

(T)ravel Un(T)ravel, Neil Shepard’s fourth book of poetry delivers the dependable style and rational weight of Shepard’s previous books –– and it takes a step further out into both the geographic and literary world. Shepard is not a jangly voice of novice experimentation; he is not the adventure driven lone wolf. Nor is he pilgrim or pedant. The good poet takes measured, reflective steps from Hampstead Heath and Paris to Shanghai and the Marquesas.

He travels with wife and daughter, and though they may make very slight appearances in the poetry, their existence fleshes out the nature of this traveler. He is western educated, principled, with responsibility, artful, and, perhaps at times, even mannered – understandably; as the poet does not throw off his colonial, Euro-centric, American, Jewish, straight male vestiges or vantages. All are a part of the inhabiting voice of this collection.

Early on, Shepard evokes a “squid’s eye / stabbed with a heke stick, its inky signature/ floating across the coral reef” and the knowing “the abrupt dislocation of matter.”

“The abrupt dislocation of matter” points a bit in the direction of the artistic spirit of Kurt Schwitter’s collages or Elizabeth Bishop’s poems and watercolors. It does not mean to expect the lyrical turns and romantic evocations of Pablo Neruda. What follows is more a catalog of earnest philosophical inquiries in which the poet is closely speaking into the ear of the reader. The reader is the real designated fellow-traveler of this collection.

One of the best poems in the book also makes its appearance early in the collection. It is a poem that points to Sacré Coeur on Montmartre and evokes Lot and mercy:

… what’s important in your long walks along the avenues
And that is? That’s none of your business. Just as you’ll never know
the last thoughts
of any common criminal on his way to the gallows, guillotine, firing
squad, electric chair,
who turns back a last time to his executioners, or beyond them, to
the world
be never made but always wanted, the world always beyond him, that
made him
commit the first crime, and the next, and the one after that, until his
unbearable
heart lead him here, without remorse, thirsting, dry-eyed, still licking
his salt-wounds.

(“From Pont de L’Alma, Looking Back at Sacré Coeur on Montmartre”)

In epigraphs, Shepard evokes Wallace Stevens, Edgar Allan Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robinson Jeffers, Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams. I did qualify that Shepard’s is an American male reality and poetic imagination. And western. But the collection moves back and forth west to east, east to west. In a poem grounded in Shanghai:

And once in the evening, the patriotic music stiff and tinny…
its gut-wrenching one string bending music to querulous
interrogatives,
rising up from a street-level apartment—whither the future
of China, in spirit, or matter?–– and a listless answer,
a simple bamboo flute, the music floating down
from the rooftop where someone played, where caged
pigeons made their guttural calls and caged
crickets scraped their songs in early evening.

(“Rot and Blossom”)

In another remarkable poem in the book, “On the Way to the Pantheon, Crossing Rue Mouffetard,” the speaker finds his way past lively descriptions of blue-black men vending wares and foods in the Paris streets. The four closing lines:

this bright mélange on the cobbled streets
confounding the eye, confusing the tongue––

something tight in my throat, these small lanes, lines I have to–
navigate to find my way to the famous dead of Le Panthéon.

Shepard ponders mortality, gender, geography. He is a seasoned poet. Even at mid-career, his artistic growth expresses that there are more good things to come to us from his dependable, philosophically poetic voice.

When I travel the world goes away.

The tour books disintegrate––
The Insider’s Guide, The Outsider’s Guide—
mystifications made of last year’s desires and copyrights.

[It’s] my own voice so shallow
it’s the flat report from an Etruscan cistern,
so deep it’s the long black echo
from the wells of Karez.

(“(T)ravel/Un(T)ravel: The World Goes Away”)

“Mama!” her baby cries as she begins readying them both for the bus ride. “Shhh, Wendy, princess,” she soothes the baby with coos and talk. “It’s cold out. We must dress warm. So the snake won’t bite!” With a yellow blanket, the mother swaddles the little form into an almost unrecognizable rigid mass, then covers herself with her own coat, picks up her baby and throws a top blanket over them both, bonding them as one. “I love you!” the baby says with a clearer voice than you’d expect from one so small. So special. The mother smiles at her child and says, “I love you, too, my Wendy. Little Cinderella.”

***

Right away they notice as she steps up. People in the front seats of the city bus sight the woman with the dangling cloth obscuring the bundle she so watchfully carries. Whatever it is, it doesn’t look heavy. They observe her intently looking for a seat in the front among them. If you see something say something go the signs and announcements all around the public transportation system. The citizens on the bus are seeing something, but aren’t sure if that something needs saying.

And the woman with the bundle sees something right away, too. The eyes cast upon her. She suspects they want to know, as usual, what’s wrapped in the blanket clutched to her chest. A seat second from the first is made available to her, a center seat that causes the woman to have to wriggle her bottom between an obese lady with big bags and an elderly man packed in a puffy down coat. The bus begins to move. The woman holds her load securely so as not to drop it as she splays her legs for support. People still look as she adjusts the blanket at the top, gently folding back the edges. A peek of the side of a baby’s head. The passengers appear to collectively relax. A mother with her baby. Making sure to nestle its blanket around the infant’s head, folks witness a mother protecting her child’s ears and neck from any draft. Conversation in the crowded space livens up, talk about the frigid record-breaking February weather, and pieces of one-sided cell phone chatter erupt as the bus drives on to the next stop.

Still curious, some people keep watching, for after all it is a baby, and the sight of a baby has a habit of breaking deadpan dazes, seems to revive worn out New Yorkers, bringing smiles, or at least some small interest that awakens them from their otherwise ticking-time lives. Sometimes the mother sees other looks, though. Looks of remembrance perhaps. Sometimes mystified expressions. Maybe even jealousy. As if they long for a baby of their own.

At each bus stop bodies get off and new bodies board with brand new glances at the woman, as if they’ve never seen a mother and child before. The looks do make her feel a bit embarrassed, but in a way, also special. Without the baby she more than likely would go unnoticed, could be just anyone on a bus. But with the baby in her arms they know who she is: A good mother. Though after a certain length of constant ogling, she feels uncomfortable. They stare, seem to scrutinize her every move. The gawking, the gawking always makes her self-conscious, and even, well yes, a little angry. Is she doing something wrong? Have they figured it out? It’s not the first time anyone has done this, what are they all glaring at? She knows who she is, what she’s doing. They always do this, this glaring and eyeballing and then someone will whisper, “It looks like…like a doll,” or a comment like that. And then someone else will whisper back a thing like, “Doesn’t it? I think maybe, too. A little baby doll.”

She gets that a lot. She always gets that about her baby. And she knows why.

***

Little babies. Lined up behind glass, each nearly identical. Each little baby swaddled the same, in the same but separate, plastic cradle. On the maternity ward she’d learned how to swaddle them good and secure, to make them feel as if they were still in the womb.

“Nurse,” she heard, and saw the other faces that peered and longed to touch what they’d made, as they called for her through the glass partition. “Where’s my baby? Which one is mine? Can you hold my baby up so I can see him?” Only she could touch the babies. For now, they were hers. Brand new, unformed, who would have known which was which? Who would have known who they belonged to? She did, though. Nurse Florence.

At this point in their unlived lives, she knew them better than anyone. Their individual sounds became recognizable to her within hours of being born. Nurse Florence knew their needs. And she’d tend to her babies’ needs.

And then they were gone.

Little babies. She saw them everywhere. Saw them behind her eyes in her sleep at night.

***

For most of those years living with her mother she’d always thought that if she were to die, if her mother got sick or had a heart attack and died, or even had a stroke that left her so bad that she couldn’t speak or think and just lay there like a rotting potato, Florence would never be able to make a decision on her own. She knew in her heart that if Mama were to go she couldn’t possibly go on without her.

Someone had said to her once, “It’s not natural. Not natural to live with your mother at that age, when you’ve been a grownup for so many years.” This someone she thought had maybe taken those words right out of one of those self-help psychology books, or maybe heard a doctor on TV say, “It’s not natural for an adult to live with their parents.” This someone, she also thought, had never known alone.

But still, it wasn’t smooth satin this living together business. She often felt like her mother had no respect for her. None at all. Like her mother owned her, as if Florence were just a piece of property, her own thing she could use as she pleased. And as if that owner, like owners are entitled to do with their own stuff, could handle the merchandise at their own whim.

“Slut,” her mother would call out the second floor window, while Florence tended to the small garden of gladiolas, tomatoes, and herbs in front of their tiny townhouse. “You going out again to that bar to find a man? You’ll never get a man,” her mother would say, and Florence would hope as she bent over the basil and thyme, that none of the neighbors heard, “Who would want you? Why you going there?” But when Florence stood at the gate trimming the hedge, she could see plainly that people passing by looked up at her mother with her head craning on her neck out the window, yelling, “You’re too old,” and she knew they’d never heard their own Mama saying a thing like, “Too old for a man. Too old for having a baby. Nothing but a slut.”

After a long time, Florence’s thoughts changed. She thought now she’d made a mistake. She’d rather have a man upstairs to kiss than her mother, that snake. But for the relief of the burden of cursing love every day, for that reason alone, Florence begged death on, not caring what would become of her without her mother. And now since it happened, since Mama had passed, from that day on Florence could, and does, make every decision on her own. And they are hers, and hers alone.

***

Everywhere. Little babies. She sees them inside and outside and hidden behind eyes. On crowded streets eyes darting taking in new sights, faces in parks and crying on buses, and peering from car windows that stop and start again at green lights, and she thinks they want out, those unhappy eyes from behind glass, saying to her, take me home with you. And so if she doesn’t take them, take care of her babies, their needs, they’ll be gone— “Maam, why are you running? Oh my God! Is that your baby? Stop! Stop running. Stop that woman! Oh God! She’s got a baby. Stop her now, she’s almost out of the building.” She keeps running, and her mind races…. It’s not like it’s never been done before, it’s not like nobody else has never done this. I have a voice, I can speak. They think I’m out of my mind, but I know what’s happening, and why I’m doing it. I remember the lived pieces….Layers of living, layer upon layer cascade and crash into each other—“Mama!”—moments that have been lived are in moments now forming— Cinderella dressed in yella— all that collected living—kissed a fella— of moments, sights sounds smells tastes tactile touch thoughts ferment—made a mistake—and then fertilize moments of the future…little babies. Wendy— People knock to walls and doors and down side hallways in the hospital, security guards rush to apprehend the woman, and then as they pin the woman to a wall, her head knocks up against a glass case with shelves displaying get-well cards, hospital-logoed coffee mugs, stuffed bears and bunnies, all available in the gift shop in the lobby, “Oh, for Christ’s sakes,” someone else says, “it’s just a goddamn doll.”— 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8— She missed, OUT.

***

Little babies. Everywhere she saw little babies. Behind plastic windows in boxes all lined up, identical, which one would she choose? There were infant ones. Toddler ones. Which one?

Maybe she would just take the one right here in front of her.

“No, no,” her mother said, “Take it out from under your sweater.” And the girl did, pulling the doll out from under her yellow, two-sizes-too-big, hand-me-down sweater, putting the doll back on the shelf. “You mustn’t steal. It’s not right, Florence. I’ll buy you one. Which one do you want?” But they all looked the same. The ones on this shelf at least. “Here, take this one,” her mother said, reaching to the shelf above where there was one single box. She pulled it down and put it in Florence’s hands. “You’ll have this one.”

The writing on the box declared that Wetting Wendy, not only could wet, but she could speak. A special little doll inside. Florence turned the box over and saw a hole there in the cardboard back and poking out was a plastic ring that begged her to pull. When she drew the plastic ring toward her a long string came out, and then took its time slipping back as Wetting Wendy said, “Mama!” She could speak! Wendy could talk! and she spoke directly to Florence right here and now.

The little girl pulled the string again. “Hold me,” Wendy said, and so Florence put her arms around the box with the little baby inside. She longed to take Wendy out, save her from her isolation and hold her for real. She pulled the string until Wendy told the girl, “I love you!” and Florence whispered close to the cardboard side, “I love you, too, Wendy.” Again she pulled the string and Wendy insisted, “I’m your baby girl! Take me home with you!” And then Florence knew this was her baby. This baby had always been waiting just for Florence to come along so she could take good care of Wendy forever. “This one, Mama. I want this baby. I want Wendy.”

***

The big girls in the schoolyard had the jump rope going round at a good, fast, rhythmic pace, so that each girl could take their turn hopping in to show off their jump-roping skills. Florence just watched the big girls, always with her mouth hanging open, just watched. And listened. Heard every word the same as she’d mouth them, the words she used to lull herself to sleep at night. Just watched them hop and skip and sing:

Cinderella, dressed in yella
Went upstairs to kiss a fella
Made a mistake
And kissed a snake
How many doctors
Did it take?
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8—you missed, OUT!

From the artist:

“The erosion of cultures – and of “culture” as a whole – is the theme that runs through the last 25 years of my artistic practice. We are currently told that the paper book is bound to die. The library, as a place, is finished…

So I carve landscapes out of books… Mountains of disused knowledge return to what they really are: mountains. They erode a bit more and they become hills. Then they flatten and become fields where apparently nothing is happening. Piles of obsolete encyclopedias return to that which does not need to say anything, that which simply IS. Fogs and clouds erase everything we know, everything we think we are.”

View more of Laramee’s work here.

This exclusive studio session is nothing short of lush, and is perhaps one of the most skillfully orchestrated we’ve featured.

View more of Dunn’s work here.

Lorrie Moore, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?

Moore’s slim novel took me two tries. I sat down some number of months ago and read the first eight pages of Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?, the book’s opening section. It felt too dense and disconnected—I couldn’t find anything to grasp onto to pull myself through. I felt a little bored. I put the book away.

When I came back, the first eight pages were still slow, and it was still difficult to find my footing in the story. But then Moore cuts away from the present moment, where readers are with the protagonist, Berie Carr, and her husband, Daniel, in Paris, to Berie at fifteen, working at an amusement park called Storyland with her best friend Sils. In about two pages, the book suddenly becomes all the things I needed it to be—relatable, engaging—and it also very quickly becomes stunningly and beautifully written.

The book falls easily and naturally into a format that switches between Berie’s teenage life with Sils and her current adult life as she and her husband vacation in Paris. It’s meant for anyone who has ever been a teenager and now is not, for anyone who once had an idea about what their life might become and then entered reality, gained an adult perspective, grew up.

Moore nails the deeply complex and multi-layered lust-love that inhabits the intensely close friendships of teenage girls, as well as the longing and nostalgia one feels as an adult looking back on their younger self. She even brings life to the complacency, boredom, and resignation that accompany a marriage that is no longer fulfilling—a muted and lingering unhappiness. While doing all of this, she also writes gorgeously:

I often think that at the center of me is a voice that at last did split, a house in my heart so invaded with other people and their speech, friends I believed I was devoted to, people whose lives I can only guess at now, that it gives me the impression I am simply a collection of them, that they all existed for themselves, but had inadvertently formed me, then vanished. But, what: Should I have been expected to create my own self, out of nothing, out of thin, thin air and alone? (17)

Read this book. It’s absolutely stunning.

Thick coils, or as Mr. Pyle likes to call it: ‘The Weave’ mingle(s) to form abstract faces in this creative series. We find it refreshing to see an artist with a rock solid style that permeates every piece of his work.

View more of Pyle’s work here.

Kathryn Stockett, The Help

I’m happy to report that so far I’m about two-and-a-half times as fast at reading than I am at reviewing. : )

Stockett’s novel chronicles the lives of several southern women in the early 1960’s: Black maids caring for white children and families, as well as a few of the white women who have hired them. Just home from college and swept up by the momentum of the early stirrings of the Civil Rights Movement, Skeeter Phelan, one of the books protagonists, begins to question the treatment of the black families in her town. Along the way, she forms a close bond with Aibileen Clark, a black maid working for one of her friends, and together they embark on a complicated, difficult, and secret battle toward social change.

I started reading this novel at my grandparents’ house in Savannah, Georgia over the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend, which gave the book a really interesting (and extremely appropriate) context. As a child, I remember listening to my mother tell me stories of her family’s own maid, Nelly, who cleaned the house and helped take care of her and her younger siblings when she was growing up in Atlanta, Georgia in the 1950′s and 60′s.

I had dozens of questions for my grandmother while reading The Help. Nelly started working for my grandfather’s aunts and uncles when she was just seventeen, and by the time she began working for my grandmother, she was in her mid-forties. (“You can never really tell their ages,” my grandmother told me when I asked. “Who, maids?” I questioned, knowing of course that this was not what she meant, but she said nothing.)

My grandmother spoke repeatedly about how lucky her family had been to have Nelly, how special she was, and how she was “one of the family.”

“Did you make her use a different bathroom?” I asked, since this was a pretty significant point of contention early on in The Help, and I was relieved when my grandmother balked at this question.

“What? Of course not. Sometimes she would get in the bath with the kids. We didn’t care. She was great.” Then my grandmother told me a story about letting my mother, as a toddler, go home with Nelly one weekend after my mother’s insistent begging. She even went to church with Nelly that Sunday. My grandmother spoke of this memory fondly, laughing happily even now, almost sixty years later, at the thought of her young Jewish daughter at Nelly’s church. “She had so much fun that weekend,” my grandmother said, “she talked about it for weeks afterward.”

“What did your neighbors think,” I asked. “Was this type of relationship the norm?”

“No,” she said, and here, for just a moment, she looked a little sad. “I guess we were considered progressive.”

It was interesting for me to think of my grandmother, who I find to be a fairly conservative woman, as someone who was once called progressive by her community like it was a dirty word.

Nelly died when my mother was in high school, shortly after ending her employment with my grandparents as they prepared to move to Savannah. My mother came home from the funeral miserable and angry. She was one of perhaps only a dozen or so people in attendance, and she was, my grandmother seemed almost certain, the only white person present. I regret that my mother is not alive today for me to ask her about her own experiences with Nelly, to compare her life to what’s laid out in Stockett’s novel. My grandmother told me that she had a hard time reading The Help. “I got through about forty pages,” she said, “and then I thought, ‘I lived this, why do I need to read about it?’”

But, I’m embarrassed to admit, even after the perspective I gained from those conversations, the time period and lifestyle conveyed in this book were still difficult for me to comprehend in a realistic, meaningful way. Stockett does an excellent job of bringing an early 1960’s Jacksonville, Mississippi to life in the pages of her novel, but at no point can I reach beyond the text and picture the story as something other than fiction. This is in no way a failure on Stockett’s part—it is a deficiency of my own. Even the LGBT equality movement or what racism still looks like today in America can’t really equate to what this way of life must have been like. Trying to really place myself in this environment is like asking me to imagine what it would be like to run a recon mission in Fallujah. I can understand it as an abstraction, I can grasp why it’s horrific, but it’s impossible for it to feel truly real to me.

What was easy, however, was getting wrapped up in this book, to lose entire hours telling myself, “Just one more chapter….” The characters are engaging, vivid, and personable, and the story is thoroughly interesting. The pacing is slow in just a few places, but not in a way that makes it unreadable or boring; in fact, I felt that this lent credibility and authenticity to the storyline. The ignorance and hatred of some of the characters instilled plenty of anger and disappointment in me, and there were also several poignant and truly beautiful moments of community and outreach that brought me to tears. There is a lot of emotion packed into this lovely book, which definitely makes it one I’d recommend.

Karen Russell, Swamplandia!

Here’s the truth: It will be impossible for my review of this book to be unbiased in any way because I am just pretty much madly in love with Karen Russell. She’s a magnificent writer, and I’ve spent a lot of time with her impressive first collection, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves. Like her debut novel, it too is wonderful, and you should certainly check it out if you have not yet had a chance to delve into this gem.

Swamplandia! follows Ava Bigtree and the Bigtree family as they fight to save their alligator theme park, located in the Florida Everglades, in the wake of Ava’s mother’s untimely death and the opening of a bigger, better completing amusement park on the mainland. The novel becomes a triple coming-of-age story for each of the three Bigtree siblings, Ava, Ossie, and Kiwi, and it is also a painful exploration into the complicated cycles of grief and identity in the aftermath of such a tragic familial loss.

Having lost my own mother a few months after my eleventh birthday, just two years younger than Swamplandia!’s brave protagonist, the hurt in this story was immensely relatable. But even without this connection, one of the most brilliant things about this book is the way in which is takes its incredibly foreign and unique characters and setting (alligator wrestling, possessions by ghosts, a theme park modeled after Hell, a mysterious bird man, a depression-era swamp dredge, the list could go on and on) and makes them immediately plausible, ordinary, and familiar.

Another striking feat of this novel is that each sibling experiences a deeply complex coming-of-age almost exclusively alone (either physically, emotionally, or both), and the quality of Russell’s writing is so good that the burden of this isolation is magnified onto the reader. I finished this book feeling more lonely that I’ve felt in a long time—but it was partly that well-known feeling of loneliness born out of turning the last page of a great novel and knowing that you’re saying goodbye to a wonderfully invented world you’ve inhabited almost without realizing it, as well as to each meaningful character contained within it.

Despite the (frankly tired, in my opinion) criticism Russell sometimes gets about her unnecessarily extensive vocabulary usage, particularly when writing in a child’s voice (I think you’re doing great as an author if this is what people are finding to complain about, by the way), I simply can’t recommend this book highly enough.

Read it? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comment section below.

It was not that Tanyon Shotter was absolutely certain that he would not see his wife Keara again, but that did seem to be the unspoken agreement between them as she gave him a cold peck on the cheek in the early Holy Saturday sunshine of her parents’ Wellesley driveway.

He knew, of course, that he’d see her again in some capacity. Probably in a legal one, which worried him. But he was fairly certain that they would never come together in the manner of a husband and wife reuniting after a long day, with any of a number of pet names lining themselves up at the front of Tanyon’s mind, waiting to see what positive effect they might have on his wife. The creation and dissemination of these stockpiled names had become a sort of hobby for Tanyon. As he pulled Keara’s bags from the trunk of his still-idling Ford Mustang—a mid-life crisis car purchased a half dozen or so years before a mid-life crisis normally sets in—he reflected on some of his attempts to come up with a core group of honorifics that were supposed to become part of their daily back-and-forth. These names, he felt, need not have been all that serious, and they might even work better the more embarrassing they were. Playful names, he thought, were ideal—names that any one person only ever said to any other in private, beyond the hearing of a third party. Like a secret word that let you into a club made up of two members.

“Let’s see…there were the early stalwarts—Love, Sweets, Sugar. Very awkward, that Sugar one.” He looked up from his work to see Keara’s parents frozen in their familiar, judgmental American Gothic-style pose behind their dining room window, as though they had taken their places in the standing-room-only section at some kind of athletic contest.

“Ugh. Bad time. Bad time all around. Maybe I should wave to them?”

He started to raise his right hand, and then let it fall.

“That might make them enjoy themselves more,” he thought.

***

“I had tried to spice it up. It was a concerted effort. Legitimately. At the therapist’s suggestion. ‘Be as dirty as you can, be a cave man. Be cave lovers.’ Right. What a disaster that was. I guess that is why we are here now. But these things are rarely the result of a single moment. Even if everything does seem to crystallize in that moment.”

He had come home from the office early, having made some vague excuse to cancel his only post-noon consultation. Mrs. Faraguana was a hypochondriac anyway, she’d simply return the following weekday afternoon, like she normally did.

He picked up two dozen snapdragons at his regular Beacon Hill florist’s, a shop he visited often enough in his amends-making efforts that all the clerks knew his name, and would greet him as soon as he walked through the door wearing his normal look of apprehension as to what arrangement might work best.

“It’s getting to the point that I’m like Norm on Cheers,” he thought one night, after exchanging greetings with a newly hired clerk, who nonetheless knew him at first sight. He liked the idea of snapdragons, not only because Keara had once stated, back in college, that they were among her favorites—and because he’d get points for remembering that—but also because he appreciated the floral irony, and was confident that his wife would not pick up on it.

“I deserve a little joke. She does snap at me a lot. True, she doesn’t exactly breathe fire, but there are times when I wonder if she might.”

After the florist’s, it was on to a Charles Street market where he secured several cuts of filet mignon, three twice baked potatoes, and an assortment of asparagus glazes so that he could make his trademark roasted spears. He spent an unduly amount of time in the wine section trying to find a Cabernet that was both zesty and mellow, and then returned to his Rowes Wharf apartment. Years before it had been selected as one of Boston’s fifty best homes by Architectural Digest, a citation that he thought would please his wife, but only made her cry instead.

Still, he felt that his Cabernet selection would go over well. Keara had commented on a couple reviews in Wine Spectator a few weeks ago, post-coitus—“my once-a-month trip to the farmer’s market,” as Tanyon thought of it. He poured two glasses of wine and set one on his nightstand, and one on hers. He felt his courage growing. “Perhaps tonight—if all goes as planned—I’ll kick it up a notch. Maybe that therapist is on to something after all.”

He vacuumed the apartment, did the laundry, cleaned all the sinks, and even de-limed the shower head, which gave him a satisfaction akin to completing an extra credit assignment. And then he readied the bedroom DVD player with one of their favorite discs, and made a path, of sorts, with the snapdragons, placing one after another, from the front door to the bedroom. He felt a little silly doing this, and it reminded him of that episode of The Brady Bunch where the boys leave a trail of popcorn so that they don’t get lost in a Hawaiian forest, only to end up meeting Vincent Price in a cave.

“Ha. I wonder what that therapist of ours would make of that imagery. Maybe she’d just say sometimes a man in a cave is just a man in a cave. I don’t think I’ll tell her all the same though.”

As a final preparation he rounded up the dozen or so rusticated brown-copper votive holders that they kept in an antique midshipman’s chest, and equipped each with a squat candle, placing them at paced-off intervals alongside his snapdragon path. With the family room aglow, and his work complete, he went to the window and savored the dusk as the day’s last rays of sun spangled the harbor.

Keara arrived and set out on her husband’s path. She found Tanyon in the bedroom in his lightest, most sheer dressing gown. He moved to kiss her, but she had already bent down to remove her shoes, and his lips deflected off of her shoulder. He pressed play on the DVD player, and the pleasing voice of Rod Serling filled the room. They had watched a Twilight Zone marathon at the end of their first date in college, back when it was the three of them more often than it was just the two of them. But it was only the two of them now, plus Rod Serling, and Burgess Meredith, who had emerged from the vault beneath the bank where he worked, to find that he was the only man left on earth.

“I think this “Time Enough at Last” episode is my favorite,” Tanyon said as Keara swirled some of the Cabernet around her mouth.

“You would.”

“How’s that?”

“Well, the Burgess Meredith character is bookish, like you. And his wife—who dies, of course—is cold. As you like to imagine that I am.”

“That’s not true. Not at all. It’s just not true.” He paused and considered his options. Was this the right time to premiere his latest honorific? Could there be a better time? A worse time? Was the best and worst time one and the same? If so, should he just go for it?

He stood up from the bed and cupped his hands inside the lapels of his lightly-cinched dressing gown. He took a deep intake of breath, and separated himself from his robe, with a little shimmy of his left foot. He stood there naked before her—like a cave man—but this was not his great surprise.

“Why, that’s not true at all,” he resumed. “That’s just not true. Angel Tits.”

After making up the couch in the living room, he stood once more by the window. He pressed his head against it and felt a draft coming through, but it didn’t really bother him now that he had his heavier robe on. He could see the airport across the harbor. A plane landed. A plane took off. Three hundred yards away. Four hundred. Five at the most. He measured in football fields. He tried to count the blackened husks docked in the Charlestown marina. Some boats looked bigger than other boats, but they probably weren’t much bigger.

***

He wasn’t sure what to do next as he pulled out of the driveway of his in-laws, fighting the urge to flip them off.

“Well, I’m a free man now. With the whole weekend in front of me. What does a Boston bachelor do with two full days at his disposal?”

He could already feel his forced enthusiasm starting to wane. The last place he wanted to be was at home. He was shocked though at his own impetuousness as he found himself on I-95 South, bound for Manhattan to hit up some of his favorite Greenwich Village record shops. It would kill the day, and provide a nice surge of nostalgia harkening back to those times when he would pester his father to put off their yard work so that they could leave Ridgefield, Connecticut behind for the amped-up pace and pulse of New York.

Some of his fondest memories involved listening to old vinyl records by Illinois Jacquet, Don Byas, and Ben Webster—the great, stomping tenor men—in closet-sized record shops on MacDougal Street, as his father flipped through the racks of bebop and stride pianists, turning to his son and holding up his latest, greatest find whenever he came upon an Art Tatum or Earl Hines LP that he didn’t already own.

Tanyon liked that his father was a piano aficionado, and he was more of a tenor buff. It was as though they’d be able to harmonize with each other in some imaginary band—were either of them able to play their favorite instrument—rather than compete for the same spot. Sometimes he thought of the happier days of his marriage as Coltrane in his mid-fifties Prestige years, where everything was soulful and rhythmic; now, it was like mid-sixties Coltrane, when everything went atonal.

Many of the shops that he used to visit with his father were still in business, which both relaxed and excited him. “This is a pretty fine day after all,” he thought, pleased that the present had not completely dislodged the past. He bought enough records and CDs to fill the cloth bag in the trunk which he usually used when he went off on one of his wine buying excursions to his favorite shop on the Cape, and resumed his journey.

***

It was typical of him to think that the disassembling of his marriage had more to do with him than with his wife. There had been a period of heavy drinking—“guilt fallout,” as he put it, while Keara was away for a couple weeks in Milan. These temporary separations usually served to rejuvenate them, but in this instance, the reason for Keara’s trip was more in line of a meditative mission—specifically, some time apart to give some final thoughts to starting a family, an issue they had gone back and forth on, given Keara’s unhappy girlhood and an uncle who may or may not have—well, they weren’t exactly sure what he may or may not have done. Spotty details would sometimes be dragged to the surface—thanks to the same therapist who had hit upon the less-than-brilliant “be a cave man” strategy—but neither Tanyon nor Keara knew what to think, or what they should do.
“What if it’s a girl and I’m overly possessive? And too protective, and I don’t let her live her own life? And beyond messing up a child’s life, I’ll make you resent me too, Tanyon. And sometimes I already feel like it’s so hard to connect, to be part of something that’s more than just myself. I can’t even get the myself part right.”

He’d try to be agreeable. “I feel the same way. Like it’s impossible, sometimes, for me to be a part of something else either.”

This technique was among his least successful, and he never understood why lines of this nature would cause his wife to immediately race from his presence, like the sight of him was about to cause her to combust.

He wondered what each of them would have done if they had not ended up with the other. Keara was intelligent and attractive enough that he would have expected that she would have eventually met someone, the issues from her past notwithstanding. As for himself—there was Sindy back in Connecticut, but there was also the matter of what he believed that he and Keara had done to her. But back in college, he bounced back and forth between the two women, unsure who he ought to commit to. Not that he ever thought of himself as a philanderer. It was, simply, he believed, how young people lived at the time.

“No harm, no foul. So long as you’re honest with everyone.”

And he had been.

***

While Keara was in Italy, Tanyon took several trips of his own to Falmouth and his favorite wine shop, intent on stocking up the wine cellar he had had custom-built in the basement. On his way back on the day before Keara came home, he stopped at a forest preserve near Sandwich. It hadn’t been his intention to do so, but when he saw the ivy and the creepers that encrusted the edges of a sign heralding one of the Cape’s most idyllic spots, the bucolic temptation proved too great to resist.

As the car rolled to a stop atop a bed of nettles and auburn-tinged moss that served as the unofficial parking lot, Tanyon looked at his watch and saw that the sun would soon be setting. He decided to take one of his bottles of newly purchased ‘89 Bordeaux and trudge out to the coast and see the day off in style.

The shoreline proved to be further away than he had expected, but he could hear the sound of waves meeting rocks somewhere off in the distance as he padded along in the forest. He liked that there was sand amidst the carpet of pine needles, like he was at the very spot where two ecosystems came together. But he could no more find the shore than he could refrain from tucking into the wine as he walked, and eventually he had to retreat back to the car before he ran out of light or fell over.

He didn’t like admitting that he was drunk any more than he liked thinking about his upcoming discussion with his wife about the children they were going to or not going to have. The only thing of which he was sure was that it would feel cathartic to turn his car around in this darkened forest of a parking lot and gun it back towards the main road.

Which is exactly what he did—hitting a deer in the process, and knocking himself unconscious when the head of the animal penetrated the windshield. A state cop told him the next morning that he was lucky it wasn’t a buck.

“This time of year, with those antlers of theirs, they can impale you in a car like this. What were you doing up here anyway?”

He had made sure to get rid of the empty wine bottle by throwing it in the hollow beneath an overturned tree.

“I was thinking about a girl,” he answered.

“Ha. Aren’t we all, buddy…”

***

He figured that if anyone should be blamed, it was probably Duke Ellington, who had a way of making him feel braver than he knew he really was. His official reason to head further south and stop off in Fairfield County was to visit his father, and share his new bounty of jazz albums. The old man would get a kick out of some fresh sounds. But he knew he wouldn’t be going by the house, because he understood that an unannounced visit would tip off his father that something was wrong. And when his father knew that something was wrong, Tanyon only ever felt guilty, because he knew how much his father would worry.

He originally supposed, as he drove through Harlem, that he would simply return to the apartment at Rowes Wharf, worn out from his long day and tired enough that he’d be able to fall asleep without hours’ worth of effort. He called himself an idiot—out loud, even—when his thoughts turned to hoping that Keara might have changed her mind, and was now at the apartment, waiting for him, worried. But it was Duke Ellington—and, more specifically, Paul Gonsalves—that settled it.

There was always something about Ellington’s performance from the 1956 Newport Festival that pumped him up. He had found a remastered CD set in one of the Greenwich Village shops, which was now cranking on the stereo. Usually he hated taking the Merritt Parkway, because he couldn’t stand the rhythmic clicks that would emanate from beneath the car when the tires passed over each segment of the road—it was like driving over a bunch of LEGOs that had been stuck together.

But now, he noticed that the clicks seemed timed to fall between the beats of Sam Woodyard’s drums on “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue,” like an extra accent. As tenor man Paul Gonsalves began to blow his eighth chorus of his famous twenty-seven bar solo, Tanyon knew that he was going not to Ridgefield but to nearby Wilton to see Sindy, and offer something in the way of an apology for cutting her out of a business plan—however unintentionally—that had set Tanyon and Keara up for life—a life they were no longer to share together.

He never questioned how much he owed Sindy, and the good times with Keara were always undercut by a concern that someone else had helped put them in their particular situation. To be fair, he wasn’t exactly sure that the truffle idea was not mostly his own. He knew it was not Keara’s, although it was her father—and a few investment group friends—who put up a lot of the money to get them started.

Tanyon’s own father had a degree in agricultural engineering, a passion which—like jazz—he passed along to his son. He was also one of those knockabout inventors—the kind that legitimate inventors sometimes branded as a “quack”—who spent endless hours tinkering with formulas in hopes of coming up with some radical new food source or beverage that would yield amazing benefits for the human race, and give him something to shoot the bull about with his friends at one of his clubs.

At Tufts, Tanyon continued on in his father’s tradition, and thought, after joining an amateur inventor workshop, that maybe he could surprise the old man with a patent of his own—some wrinkle on a new way to make wine, maybe. He spent a lot of long afternoons in Bray Laboratory, where he eventually met Sindy, a gifted biomedical student who had actually been a neighbor of sorts in their pre-college days, although neither of them knew it at the time. She had more know-how than he did, and understood what he meant when he discussed his rather crude ideas about making wine out of something besides grapes. Like out of mushrooms, something that would offer health benefits beyond those normally associated with wine. He remembered reading that fungi can be a deterrent to breast cancer, which had claimed his mother halfway through high school, and turned his father into a perpetual tinkerer, wisher, dreamer—anything that might take his thoughts away from his pain.

“I’m sure I can help you come up with something,” she had said. “Although I wouldn’t exactly be sweating if I were Ernest or Julio Gallo.”

***

They worked on the idea over the next several years, while Tanyon wondered if he was meant to be with Keara or Sindy. He was prone to thinking in fatalistic terms, as though some things were simply going to happen, whether he wished them to or not. Sindy was the less guarded of the pair. She had a nonchalance to her that Tanyon envied, like she could just pick up and leave anything behind, if it no longer suited her or no longer brought her pleasure, or meaning. Keara was more rigid, but she committed more deeply, even when it hurt her, and Tanyon thought that he was probably the kind of person whom other people had an easy time leaving, so maybe Keara was best for him. But then he’d pick up in the lab again with Sindy, and he’d find some counter-argument to move him back in the other direction, a thought process he later blamed on the caprices of youth.

A few overly bored TAs became involved in hammering out a formula that might work, and finally hit on one that went off to a testing lab. It looked like a small success had been achieved, and the project, seemingly, came to an end. But months later, reports came back from the lab that they might really have something here. And then 60 Minutes just happened to run a piece on the salutary effects of black truffles—glorified mushrooms, of a sort—and Tanyon was able to find some investors in a small black truffle farm, led by Keara’s father, and the formula was pressed into service.

Six years later, Tanyon and Keara had a cash windfall on their hands, having introduced a new fad in wine circles that was the source of a number of feature pieces in the leading magazines, garnering further investments from different sectors of the health, wine, and biomedical industries. Sindy, meanwhile, was working as a real estate agent in her hometown of Wilton.

Whenever Tanyon would ask Keara about cutting Sindy in, his wife would say that she had already tried, but to no avail. And then she would often begin to cry, which confused Tanyon greatly, so he would let the matter drop and try to find something less upsetting to talk about. Perhaps he could make it right by Sindy at some point in the future, when he and Keara were in a better position as husband and wife. Or afterwards.

***

He drove through the center of Wilton on the lookout for the agency where he had read online that Sindy worked. “I wonder if it’s very depressing,” he thought, “showing houses to strangers that your friends used to live in.”

He was also hard at work on his opening line. Naturally, he didn’t want to come across as a stalker; nor did he want to use anything as trite as saying that he had been home to visit his father, and now, after all of these years, he had decided it was prime time for a visit with his old chum—to say nothing of the money she must have known she had a right to, and his wife’s confusing claims that she had tried to make things right.

He parked a little ways down the road so that he could sit in the car for a few minutes and gather himself. The agency was about thirty yards up the street. But just as he had finalized his opening line and was starting to get out of the car, there was a knock on the passenger side window. It was Sindy, who opened the door and sat down as though he had explicitly come to pick her up.

“I think we should probably talk.”

“What on earth…I mean…”

“I was at the diner down the street picking up lunch for the office. Keara had phoned and said you might be stopping by. You look good by the way.”

“Um…okay. That’s just odd. The thing about my wife. Not the looks thing. Same to you, I mean.”

“Let me just drop this off inside and tell them that I’m going to be out for a little while.”

“Okay.”

He thought about backing out and making a break for Boston—or maybe his father’s—but he figured that he probably deserved whatever he had coming to him.

***

She had him drive to Weir Farm, a spot he knew from childhood field trips. It was a home for several generations of artists, as well as a working farm. The entire notion of a farm—given the whole truffle business—made him even more ill at ease.

“You’re fidgeting something awful, Tan. I’m the one who ought to be anxious.”

“Um…alright. If you say so. I feel like I’ve gone down the rabbit hole, in a manner of speaking. I don’t know what you know. More than I would have ever guessed, apparently. So maybe this is redundant. My wife left me today—formally, that is. And I don’t know what the hell I’m doing driving all over the Northeast Corridor. And now I’m walking around with a bunch of goats and geese by my side with a former girlfriend of sorts, and my wife’s erstwhile best friend, whom I basically screwed in more ways than one and I’m just so sorry…And you appear disturbingly clued in. I tried to talk about you with Keara, but…”

“But I wouldn’t take anything. Financially.”

“Yes. But if you ever change your mind…God. I sound like an idiot. Even with the divorce. I’m sure we can work out something. But I’m glad that at least one friendship was saved. It’s just like Keara not to have told me though. We don’t really talk anymore. I don’t expect that we ever will again, in any real sense. There will be lawyers, of course. They’ll talk.”

“Your wife loves you very much, Tan…”

Her voice began to trail off as his eyes scanned over a nearby pond, where several painted turtles clustered on a thick branch that jutted out of the water. He looked back at her, unsure whether she had stopped talking or whether her words had been scattered by the breeze that had him reaching deeper into his pockets.

“I’m not sure what you’d call it. I started thinking that not having kids was a way to leave herself an exit, if you will. From us. From whatever we were.”

“Or maybe it was a way to keep your relationship with her different from your relationship with me.”

“Ha. That’s just odd. Because not having a kid—“

“A daughter.”

“Fine, a daughter. Or a son. Either one. You can’t have a combo.”

He didn’t know why he had said something so boorish and immediately lowered his voice.

“Sorry. Bad joke.”
“No. That’s not what I mean. Please don’t hate Keara for this.”

She grabbed his forearm and he could feel her nails through his coat. She was shaking and trying not to cry, with some degree of success. This made Tanyon panic all the more. Her pain was obvious, but she had some dominion over it, so it must have been a pain she had lived with for a long time, something she had worked at mastering.

“I didn’t tell you. I came here. Keara knew. But I didn’t want to complicate things. I was in my own head and I couldn’t get out. And you two were starting out. And I felt…betrayed. Not because of the money or anything like that. But because I knew you had made up your mind. And then Keara got in touch a few months back, and just started crying into the phone about how you were growing apart, and about having kids, and about…”

“About what?”

“About the daughter you already had.”

“I have a daughter?”

“You…had a daughter.”

He turned to vomit into the pond, and succeeded in merely retching instead—having not eaten all day—dispatching the turtles back into the water.

***

“What do you want?”

“I want to talk to my wife.”

“Tanyon…it’s the middle of the night. Sleep it off. I’ll ask her to call you tomorrow.”

He was not surprised that his mother-in-law sounded as alert as she did, never mind that it was quarter-of-three in the morning. She was always alert, like some sentinel looking over her daughter so that he could not cause her harm.

“Look…if she doesn’t want to talk now…just tell her I’m on the road. Back from Connecticut. Promise me you’ll tell her that. Tonight.”

“I don’t think she needs to know that you’re on your way home from visiting your father.”

He could tell that he only had a sentence or two left in him.

“I was not visiting my father. Please. Tell her.”

He hung up and tried to concentrate on the road. He didn’t know when he would be home. Probably after daybreak. It didn’t matter.

He wondered if he was being overdramatic by crying for someone he never knew, or if the very concept of a stillborn child mitigated against full-blown tragedy. It wasn’t like he had some three-year-old daughter die on him, one whom he—or someone—had gotten to know. And then he worried if he was in some kind of violation of morality by trying not to cry. His head felt heavy, and he considered that maybe nodding off wouldn’t be so bad after all. He went long stretches without seeing another car.

The Ellington CD was still in the player. When Tanyon turned it on, Paul Gonsalves resumed his solo. Tanyon knew it by heart. Gonsalves was halfway through. Thirteen and a half bars to go. Tanyon kept the volume down low, simmering the music. When Gonsalves wrapped up bar number twenty-seven, he cued up the beginning of the track once more. Again and again and again—he didn’t think he’d be able to get home any other way.

It was near five when he stumbled into his apartment. Darkness. He put his cell phone down on the living room table and saw a small piece of paper, which he gently collected and turned around in his fingers, as though he were filtering out any potential bad contents. He went towards the window, where there was a vague stream of light. A draft was coming through again, but it felt good against his forehead as he looked down at the missive that was probably some long-forgotten grocery list or one of the occasional notes he wrote to himself.

It was in Keara’s hand: Come to bed. Angel dick.

He could see the airport across the harbor. A plane landed. A plane took off. Three hundred yards away. Four hundred. Five at the most. He measured in football fields. He tried to count the blackened husks docked in the Charlestown marina. Some boats looked bigger than other boats, but they probably weren’t much bigger.

The Tan Vampires

A few words on year-end lists: Those who make them feel important for doing so.

More than a few words about this list: Though important, this list should by no means be  interpreted as a best-of arrangement.   The order, though important in terms of premium listening pleasure, suggests no hierarchy.  I do, however, have a few additional words for my first selection, which is currently in my cd player in my car on repeat:  Think of the Roots new album undun as a contemporary counterpart to Blind Willie McTell’s rendering of “Dying Crapshooter’s Blues”  (just puttin’ that out there!).  And one more thing concerning my sixth selection, “I found a Body” from The Tan Vampires:  This is a band you should keep a look out for, and listen closely to the lyrics on this one (wonderfully dark humor!).  I’ll let the rest of the list speak for itself.  Except for the Waits cut:  Is there a song out there that better captures the absurdity of a soldier coming home from war?  Time to shut up and listen to these songs one more time before years’s end.

1. One Time, The Roots Feat. Phonte and Dice Raw–undun [Explicit]

2. Holy, Holy, Wye Oak–Civilian:

3. Hell Broke Luce, Tom Waits–Bad as Me:

4. Medicine, We Were Promised Jetpacks–In the Pit of the Stomach

5. Et Tu, 13 & God–Own Your Ghost

6. I Found a Body, Tan Vampires–For Physical Fitness

7. Little Black Submarines, The Black Keys–El Camino

8. Landforms, Other Lives–Tamer Animals

9. She’s a River, Firehorse–And So They Ran Faster…

10. Colomb, Nicolas Jaar–Space is Only Noise

11. Runner Ups, Kurt Vile–Smoke Rings for My Halo

12. I Might, Wilco–The Whole Love

13. June, Jolie Holland–Pint of Blood

14. Born To Be Loved [The Kitchen Tapes], Lucinda Williams–Blessed

15. Codex, Radiohead–The King of Limbs

16. Drmz, AA Bondy–Believers

17. Santa Fe, Beirut–The Rip Tide

18. SWM, Tapes ‘n Tapes–Outside

19. Slow Lights, Sin Fang–Summer Echoes

20. Rising, Son Lux–We Are Rising

21. Don’t Play No Game That I Can’t Win, The Beastie Boys (Feat. Santigold)–Hot Sauce Committee Part Two [Explicit]

22. Lyric, The Sea and Cake–The Moonlight Butterfly

23.  Patton State Hospital, We Are Augustines–Rise Ye Sunken Ships

24. Crescent-Shaped Depression, Title Fight–Shed

25.  How Come You Never Go There, Feist–Metals

“Blind Date With Cavafy” Steve Fellner
Marsh Hawk Press, 2007, $12.50

“The Weary World Rejoices” Steve Fellner
Marsh Hawk Press, 2011, $15.00

Steve Fellner has published two books of poetry, Blind Date with Cavafy and The Weary World Rejoices. They could be a singular collection under the latter title.

From the very opening Fellner announces his subject and his approach… which fulminates in that appropriate title (snipped from a French Christmas carol, later translated by John Sullivan Dwight, an American): “The Weary World Rejoices.”

In “Miss La La” Fellner passes over a 1879 French circus aerialist memorialized visually by Dega:

Another of Fellner’s poem titles is “The Aesthetics of the Damned.” The title alone evokes the trope of a ship of fools or a set of the ludicrously dressed damned. One of Fellner’s speakers drinks straight from the bottle, another pretends to believe “fanged anorexic midget space aliens want to rape our pets,”–– the catalogue of speakers goes on from there: receiver of a suicide note, people waiting in line for God’s judgment, Satan “dressed in well-ironed khakis/and a pink Polo shirt.” It also comes up that we are one of the species “that has the capacity to fall in love with humans who look just like us yet strangely never love us back… that there may not be enough love in the world to write about.” Popcorn, Socrates, Li Po, Cliff’s Notes, Joice Heth, and Catullus get stirred into the mix.

Fellner likes epic scale. Consider these two sentiments from two separate poems which appear in different places of the book:

The Weary World Rejoices continues with Fellner’s highly terraced blend of pathos, cynicism, and romanticism. His songs of innocence and experience capture the homeliness of Birkenstocks. His poems – a kind of “Notes from Hell” ––include an uninspired childhood, the mall, hypochondria, and a styleless wardrobe and decor. There are poems that evoke a passed-around photograph of a deceased lover reduced to Internet bait, the U.S. mosque protestors, and oily birds. He is not one to subtlety evoke the muse and have her demurely pull back the veil of revelation. Rather, he has her throw aside the curtain like the Wizard of Oz dressed as a burlesque figure, hoist a tacky disco ball, and shout out across the heads of the audience, “One last round!” Of course it sounds more like ammunition than drinks. That statement is not condemnation –– but praise as ruthless as Steve Fellner’s poetics. In The Weary World Rejoices, Fellner braids together Walt Whitman, crystal meth, exclamation marks, Ritalin, car trouble, Matthew Shepard (half saint), Matthew Shepard (half lottery ticket).

Fellner is not sloppy. Nor is he a muddy writer, he separates the Absurd from the Surreal. The intentionally transgressive nature of his poetics is in-line with those of Jan Richman or Denise Duhamel. Not a racy as Tim Lui; not as romantic as Erin Belieu, Richard Howard, or Caravaggio. Though, in many ways alike, Fellner’s enterprise is less romantic than Caravaggio’s. One has a feeling he might refuse the final rise to metaphor and see, not the holy virgin, but—only the street whore-model; not the saint, but the untransformed sinner dolled up and posed. Fellner is oddly both Catholic and pagan – a bit like Blake with his songs of Innocence and Experience. One can also draw parallels to other poets: James Wright, Dereck Walcott, Alfred Corn, J.D. McClatchy, even Philip Larkin might be offered up. Fellner’s poems are a read for anyone with a heart, a creative eye, and a pang of sourness when faced with the broken things of the world.

In Fellner’s quest for merging the homily and the holy, I give him the last word:

The winner of the 2011 Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Prize and former Stegner Fellow discusses his latest collection, Paradise, Indiana.

In this stark and solitary collection Major explores places few others have.

View more of Major’s work here.

Akos Major is a Hungarian photographer currently living and working in Vienna, Austria.

Below can be found a seamless three-song studio session from Chris Bell of Win Peter Winters.

photo: Jonathan Fin

Sorry, streaming albums are only available during the month they are featured.

Lead musician Chris Bell envisioned this lyrically cohesive, classically-tinged concept album, the first ever released by his his band Win Peter Winters.

So, in the spirit of New Year’s Resolutions (who doesn’t love a little peer pressure?) I’m restarting my year of 100 books. Some will likely come from this original list I made last spring. Maybe I’ll add a few from the Man Booker Shortlist or James’ top ten picks from 2011. When my daughter arrives at the end of March, I’ll try not to switch over exclusively to cardboard children’s books. : ) As always, your suggestions are welcome in the comments section below.

A gallery of Anzeri’s electric, innovative mixed-media projects.

via Saatchi Gallery.

Maurizio Anzeri is an Italian artist living and working in London.

All of us at Fogged Clarity wish you a happy holiday season.

Benjamin Evans
Executive Editor, Fogged Clarity

• Ethel RohanEthel Rohan is the author of Hard to Say (PANK, 2011), and Cut Through the Bone (Dark Sky Books, 2010), the latter was named a 2010 Notable Story Collection by The Story Prize. Her work has or will appear in BULL Fiction, The Chattahoochee Review, The Los Angeles Review, Southeast Review Online, Potomac Review, and elsewhere. She earned her MFA in fiction from Mills College, California. Raised in Ireland, she now lives in San Francisco. Fire

• Howie GoodHowie Good, a journalism professor at SUNY New Paltz, is the author of the full-length poetry collections Lovesick (Press Americana, 2009), Heart With a Dirty Windshield (BeWrite Books, 2010), and Everything Reminds Me of Me (Desperanto, 2011), as well as numerous print and digital poetry chapbooks. Intimations of Flight
• Falling Backwards
• Assassination Tango
• Gary MetrasGary Metras‘ poems and reviews have appeared in Poetry, The Alembic, American Life in Poetry, Boston Review of Books, Connecticut Poetry Review, English Journal, Hurricane Review, The Pedestal, Poetry East, Poetry Salzburg Review, Small Press Review, Snake Nation Review, Tears in the Fence (UK), etc. His newest chapbooks are Two Bloods (Split Oak Press, 2010) and Francis d’Assisi 2008 (Finishing Line Press, 2008) with a poetry book, Captive in the Here, due from Cervena Barva Press in 2012. So Many Bones
• Changming YuanChangming Yuan is the author of Chansons of a Chinaman. A three-time Pushcart nominee, he currently teaches English in Vancouver. His poetry has appeared in Barrow Street, Best Canadian Poetry, BestNewPoemsOnline, Cortland Review, Exquisite Corpse and RHINO, among many other journals.S.W.E.N.
• My Crow

• Mario Corea AielloMario Corea Aiello is an Argentinian artist and architect with a long-spanning and prolific career. His most recent honors include being designated an Honorary Fellow of the American Institute of Architecture in 2010, a nomination for the European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture; and a XIII Biennale Donna career achievement award in 2011. He is currently developing both his professional practice (Mario Corea Architecture Studio), as well his academic career, giving lectures, workshops and seminars in Europe, Asia, USA and Argentina. 35th Street Series
• NY, Always NY
• Barcelona, Color & Collage
• John WestmarkJohn Westmark is an American artist, with a BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute and an MFA from the University of Florida. His paintings have recently been bought by the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, D.C., and the Frederick R. Weisman Foundation in Los Angeles, CA. Double Bind Series
• Folklore Series

• Daniel KnoxDaniel Knox is a pianist and vocalist living and composing in Chicago. To date, he has released the first two albums–Disaster and Evryman For Himself–of his planned trilogy. Knox has performed alongside Rufus Wainwright, Imogen Heap and Jarvis Cocker, among many other acts.Evryman For Himself
• The Fogged Clarity Session

• Bob HicokBob Hicok is the author of six collections of poetry, including his most recent, Words For Empty And Words For Full. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and The National Endowment for the Arts, and his poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry and The Paris Review, along with seven editions of The Best American Poetry. He lives and teaches in Virginia. reads and discusses his poetry

• Scott HightowerScott Hightower is the author of three books. This fall, Self-Evident, his fourth collection stateside, is forthcoming from Barrow Street Press. Early next year, Oases/Hontanares, a bi-lingual book, is forthcoming from Devenir, Madrid. Hightower teaches as adjunct faculty at NYU and Drew University. A native of central Texas, he lives in Manhattan and sojourns in Spain.reviews Jonathan Wells’ collection, Train Dance

1. The Instructions by Adam Levin:  An infuriatingly big and brilliant novel.
2. Riders in the Chariot by Patrick White:  The Nobel winner you may never have heard of, White is Australia’s rightful heir to Virginia Woolf.
3. Remembering Babylon by David Malouf:  Another Australian, Malouf creates scenes in this novel that I can almost guarantee will never leave you.
4. Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves by Siri Hustvedt:  This, Grasshopper, is book length “essaying” in the true sense of the form.
5. Blue Nights by Joan Didion:  OK, so I could read her instructions on how to brush one’s teeth.  Still, the way in which she universalizes personal suffering could, perhaps should, summon the weary to form cults.
6. 

   Adam Levin - The Instructions

   Flap by Mark DeCarteret:  After Googling this poet, read his poems and try, if you can, to come up with a cogent argument as to why he is not more well-known.
7. Otherwise Elsewhere by David Rivard:  A poet who taps at the cold fragile glass of the lyric form, leaving behind a splayed beauty.
8. How To Live or A life of Montaigne: In One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer by Sarah Bakewell:  A hymn to uncertainty.
9. The Art of Recklessness by Dean Young:  If you want some understanding of the aims of contemporary poetry, leave David Orr and Stephen Burt alone and let this slender little book lead into the necessary dangers.
10. Hard Ground photographs by Michael O’Brien, poems by Tom Waits:  A totally unrecognized “occupy” movement can be arranged simply from the notes of the once nameless and voiceless that grace the books final pages.

with Luca Fiore
music by Nodey & Omar
sound design by Moritz Reich

It’s obvious from the trailer that the film is well produced and artistically shot. I’ll be purchasing my copy soon.

Snow covers all in Zimmerer’s beautiful and desolate series.

View more of Michael’s work here.

Michael Zimmerer is a fine art and commercial photographer who graduated from Savannah College of Art and Design in 2009. He currently resides in Orlando, FL.

There never was a world for her/ Except the one she sang and, singing, made.

-Wallace Stevens, The Idea of Order at Key West

He begins somewhere in the back of the bookstore.  The bearded guy who announced him looks befuddled at first until we all hear him approaching through the rows of real crime books.  “Is there a poem in here somewhere?” he’s saying aloud.  “Where will I find it?”  This sort of thing.  And then he’s among us, those of us sitting patiently in folding chairs—most attempting to look away to avoid eye contact.   Some poor man with an aisle seat gets the brunt of it:  “Is there a you and an I or are we one?” he asks an unsuspecting sheepish looking fellow, who is no doubt focused only on summoning enough courage to read his own poem when the open reading starts.   I’m focusing on the spines of books now, reading their titles, comparing fonts, hoping my friend sitting next to me doesn’t catch my eye or, worse, nudge my leg.   I don’t want to discourage anyone, after all.  When he gets to the podium everyone seems a bit more relaxed.  We’re waiting for the poems now, wondering if he’s found them, but what we get is a ten minute definition of the difference between the soul and the spirit—how our culture has the whole thing muddled, how one is reaching down and the other up.

***

I started writing poetry because at the age of nineteen the outside world no longer vibrated at the same frequency as my insides, which, in their seemingly fragile and unceasing trembling, rendered me a fixture on my parent’s couch for a stretch of about two months.  I had finished my first year of college with a growing since of Otherness, a feeling I had kept at a safe enough distance with a concoction of recreational chemicals for most of my adolescence.  The formulas weren’t working anymore, however; I was running out of combinations of self-medication and growing more afraid of what waited beyond the haze.  I still have the journals I was writing at the time.  I was pushing at the limits of language I had come to accept as part of life’s incompleteness; I wanted to write what was happening to me.  The words flap wildly like spasmodic wings on the page, like an injured bird trapped in a shoebox.  I love their energy still:  “I’m tired of my mind and the silence of stones.  I want to chew the world to pebbles,” I write on August 5, 1988. The mixed metaphors howl and snap at an unknown foe.  I don’t know whom I was reading at the time or if I was even capable of reading.  That would come later.

***

I want to write this carefully.  How after the spirit/soul guy finished his definition, which I realized then was a poem, a woman rose to begin the open reading.  She looked uncertain as she made her way to the front.  She took a folded piece of paper from her purse and carefully pressed it smooth on the podium, a gesture that seemed to calm her for a moment.  “I’m a bit nervous,” she said.  “I’ve never read a poem in public before.  You see, I started writing poetry because something terrible happened to me.”  It was clear now that if I were to laugh involuntarily it would be unforgivable.  I even thought about stepping outside to avoid such a social disaster, but I didn’t want to her to take my departure personally, especially after the words that followed.  “I was sexually assaulted two years ago.”

One is always hesitant to paraphrase the contents of a poem, and considering the context here, the stakes seem even more dangerous.  And yet I suspect that I will never forget the image of a “turd” swirling around the bowl while being coaxed by a speaking toilet to “take the flush”(the poem’s title).  This metaphor is, of course, hilarious, if only for its scatological innovation.  But to laugh?  I was not alone among the hunched figures attempting to ascertain the poem’s intent.  Her face, too, was hard to read; she seemed earnest, yet capable of ironic self-defense.  What if she meant to be funny and we didn’t laugh?  What if she was attempting to heal herself through humor?

***

I can almost remember the fever with which I would search out a phrase I had come across in my reading that I needed to find again as a way of making some sense of my own body in the world.  I knew, for instance, that the line “Worm be with me, this is my hard time” came from a Theodore Roethke poem, but, pie-eyed, I would pour over the pages of his collected just to find somewhere in the middle of “The Lost Son” the actual inked letters that corresponded to the shape in the middle of my chest.