ISSUES | summer 2011

Featuring reviews of:

Trespassers Will Be Baptized: The Unordained Memoir of a Preacher’s Daughter, by Elizabeth Hancock. Center Street Press, 2008, 288 pp., $9.99 (Kindle edition).
Easter Everywhere, by Darcy Steinke. Bloomsbury, 2008, 240 pp., $14.95 (paper).
Vows: The Story of a Priest, a Nun, and Their Son, by Peter Manseau. Free Press, 2006, 416 pp., $15.
A River Runs Through It, by Norman MacLean. University of Chicago Press, 2001, 239 pp., $12 (paper).
The Preacher’s Boy, by Terry Pringle. Algonquin, 1988, 280 pp.
Mama’s Boy, Preacher’s Son, by Kevin Jennings. Beacon, 2006. 267 pp., $9.99 (Kindle edition).

In order to achieve a higher awareness, Malevich believed that people had to abandon logic and that art was the gateway for doing so. He had felt an urgent need to release art from rationality: “I give warning of danger. Reason has imprisoned art in a box of square dimensions.”

This text is not currently available online.

Featuring the poems: Enchantment, Kaputniks,The obliquity of the ecliptic, The girl in the Blue Öyster Cult onesie, The daring sleeper

Featuring the poems:

Prologue, Epilogue; Beyond the Horizon; The Evaporating Braid

Featuring the poems: White violet, not so much an image
I can’t listen to music, especially “Lush Life,”

By the summer of 1984, bankruptcy was so close we could taste it. It tasted like beans, which we ate with growing frequency, and it tasted like fear. It tasted like the cigarettes my mother lit one off the next. My father, meanwhile, fell into deep silences. He stood with his arms crossed, contemplating our many orange Herefords, once valuable enough to warrant his near-constant attention, now worth less than three dimes a pound. The cows looked back, chewing their cuds, oblivious to soaring feed prices, unacquainted with terms like “mortgaged” and “remortgaged.” Neighbors came by to look at the equipment, offering such trifling amounts that my father’s face reddened. He turned them down, but they called again, offering less.

This was when they lived in the eternal city. It seemed possible that the trio’s little corner of the Kurdish spring—the square chimneys of the brick kilns unfurling their listing columns of black smoke into the high, clear light, the sloped, red sides of the river, secreted within the ellipses of bank woods and seething with insects in the lambent dawn before the air filled with the clattering gossip of the washerwomen and the collisions of the silver-voiced children worrying its shallows—had, since the beginning of time, continued in just this way in its sounds and habits, relying on no allegiance other than the residents’ curious sense of belief in their own perpetuity. This was when Bajh and Asti and Araz all lived there together, when they were young and the fields and herds still seemed born entirely anew each spring; this was when it was still their city to have.

Her breakfast tasted like whale. It was a perished, fishy flavor that covered everything on her plate. Pauline swallowed her bacon and beans in several masses, leaving only drips of pork fat to be sopped up with yesterday’s bread. She and Ezra ate in silence while the baby slept. When Ezra’s plate was cleaned, he wiped his hands on the linen of the tablecloth, gulped down his coffee and rose to dress for work. He put on his bloodstained clothes.

Henry is in the part of the dream where his father carries him piggyback through the shoulder-high waves. His father’s T-shirt is soaked through, and the salt water is making the cut on Henry’s elbow sting, when a woman’s voice calls out, “Henry . . . Henry.”

Why had Amy gone off for a walk? He knew that her conference—an international gathering of Emily Dickinson scholars—did not begin for another day. Was she angry at him for sleeping so late? The night before, she had quickly brushed her teeth, worn her old nightgown and fallen sleep, but he had stayed awake, jazzed by the long flight from Boston and the taxi ride through the strange city. He’d moved in close to Amy, wanting to feel the curve of her long body, but she’d muttered in her sleep and turned away. Sleep, when it came for him, had been a series of jumbled dreams.

I sometimes wonder why the best literature so often has a element of unlikelihood: why one of the great novels of the twentieth century is an 800-page description of an ad salesman and a student walking around one day in Dublin; or why one of the defining American classics is about living in a shack on a lake for a couple of years; or why one of the finest English lyric poems is a depiction of an antique urn in a museum. Why is the most memorable stuff so often the miraculous transformation of a seemingly limited subject?

The year after my wife died, I compulsively watched television. I needed distraction, to be entertained. What I could not stream online or order through the mail I sought out at the local video store. I was living in a suburb of Indianapolis, about a mile from a strip mall where I could rent, in a pinch, midseason discs of The Wire, The Office, Friday Night Lights. I got to know the clerks by name, then their shifts, finally their tastes. Once, I tried to make a formal complaint against the corporate headquarters regarding the suspicious and perpetual absence of Battlestar Galactica. It seemed unjust that the universe would conspire to deny my knowledge of its fictional origins. I worked up a good head of steam before leaving, distraught. The offense was egregious, and entirely my own. I went back a few days later, during a different shift.

As a tenth-grade biology student in suburban Cincinnati, Ohio, I was required to assemble a leaf collection. Aside from the catalpa, gingko, oak, maple and maybe buckeye, I can’t recall any of the other specimens that I ironed between two sheets of wax paper, identified by kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus and species, then handed over in an awkward three-ring binder with embarrassing sloppiness and bare-minimum ambition, to our teacher, Mr. Matthews. I squirm today to think of how my dunderheaded, adolescent indifference then was an insult to whatever Adam first named the hickory and the larch, the locust, the hornbeam and the leatherwood, and to all those later poets who tuned the language of the flora even further, with names like frosty lacebark elm, Warren’s red possumhaw, mountain silverbell, common rose mallow, weeping purple European beech, prariefire crabapple and sparkleberry winter holly.