a nice, good chap

I'm stoked to be the chapbook reviewer for the forthcoming print publication Short, Fast, and Deadly Monthly, which will be launching in January 2012. I'll also be posting 420-character reviews on Deadly Chaps Press' Facebook page as soon as I get some scribbles down. On that note, if you wrote or published a chapbook or echapbook you want reviewed, please send it to me and I will be happy to promptly take a look at it and write about it. If you know of any chapbook or echapbook that is awesome or not so awesome, I would like to look at it and promptly write about it. Get in touch with me at christopher.vola@gmail.com because we all like chaps and you seem like a good person.

Also, I wrote this novel called Monkeytown when I was in grad school. It's a transgressive thriller about an orphan named Josh from Connecticut who gets involved with a bunch of faux-terrorists in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. I'm going to start putting chapters up on Fictionaut because I can't figure out what to do with it just yet: more submitting to skittish presses or the incinerator? Feel free to check it out and hate it and comment on its sophomoric vapidity and gore-porn. Or maybe you'll like it and don't want to comment. Either way.

Naked and Honest

Naked Glances by Carl-Henrik Björck

Deadly Chaps

Pub date: August 2010?

34 pages

Carl-Henrik Björck’s debut collection of 29 micro-stories and poems condenses an impressive amount of the universal stockpile of post-postmodern “human-ness” – nostalgia, love and its inevitable demise, an eerie sangfroid in the midst of disaster – into a series of glaring snapshots that are captivating, revealing, and occasionally disturbing. It’s a stark sequence of images whose focal points are made more compelling by what’s left blurry beyond the edges.

A native Swede writing in English, Björck employs a crisp, direct prose and a simple straightforwardness that belies many of the stories’ complex, ghostly tension. These transitive “glances” offer the reader a glimpse at the middle of the photo album. We know things have happened, we know more things are going to happen. What we’re given is the pregnant glimmer, the crux of the affair. The most common theme in the collection is intense and gnawing remorse at the inability (of anyone, it seems) to maintain any sort of connection, romantic and otherwise, a fundamental miscommunication of the body and mind. A phone number not given. A fly stuck to a window. The girl in the shop who can’t utter what she wants to say. The unrequited echoes of an infinite number of squashed possibilities. This underlying current of intense emotion endows the most heretofore passing physical details – raindrops on a dead-end road, “a blue stone necklace hanging down deep”, the reflection of streetlight in a woman’s hair – with a bruising importance.

This is not to say that Naked Glances’ narrators are engaged in a constant attitude of passivity. The collection’s best stories benefit from wicked twists that are shocking not only for their unforeseen abruptness, but for the deadpan, nonchalant way in which they are described. A woman is crushed by a car moments after a happy rendezvous with a lover. The unanticipated insertion of a child’s plea at the critical moment of an argument between his parents. Each time, a bomb has been dropped. We don’t know why. All we can do is watch the second of impact and imagine what happens next. There is also a call to the future, death to sympathy and tradition, a need to forget and move on. My favorite example of this grit is also my favorite story in the collection, “Saturday Night”, which concerns an encounter with a smelly bum: “…he says that God will bless me if I help a blind man who has nothing to eat so I kick his can over and keep on walking and I hear the coins clink against the gutter and now that also belongs in the past.”

I will say that the majority of the book’s 10 poems didn’t do it for me. Many employed a loose ABAB or AABB rhyme scheme that I feel distracts the reader from the stark naked ironic realism Björck so skillfully conveys in his prose, and adds an unwelcome element of juvenilia to an otherwise sophisticated collection. Other major ish? This might be a little MFA workshoppy nitpicking, but the stories’ titles (McDougal Street, Wedding, Short Love Story) are often greatly outdistanced by the quality of the stories themselves. Maybe it’s no big deal. Maybe it is. What is clearly evident, though, is that like that other finely crafted Swedish import, Björck has produced a durable, aesthetically sparse and pleasing, and emotionally charged piece of literary furniture. It’s a quick read that will stay with you long after you put it down.

Hello, Small Awesome Book

Hello, Darkness by Howie Good

from Deadly Chaps

pub date: July 2010

33 pages

Though Howie Good’s recent chapbook, Hello, Darkness is advertised as a collection of both poetry and prose, the distinction is a superficial, almost pointless question for Form 101. Good is a poet, a damn nice one, and his book is no slouch either.

It’s a disturbing and sublime jaunt to the brain’s bleary edge, the spaces in between, those gaps in the synapses that are only illuminated by “the sort of stuff you think about late at night.” That dark, naked hour before the dreams set in. The book’s 31 pieces (ranging in size from a ten-word pebble to a Facebook update) drip with quiet tension and an Anthrax-dipped apprehension of all the random shit that might go down. Of what usually does.

Unforeseen happenings drown in the chaos of an anything-goes half-awake where the scope of what’s contemplated ranges from the pleasantly esoteric (the length of a pig orgasm, a circus strongman who quotes Kafka) to the paranormal (rabbis flying in mini-vans) to the incredibly eerie (a famous historical figure’s genitalia impaled by an arrow, a former student’s body is found because of the odor emanating from it). The specters that are supposed to remain along the edges have crept to the forefront of the heretofore familiar.

                                     

But the journey to darkness isn’t just a passive one. The book’s longer poems are possessed of a distinctly self-aware personality that plays the dual role of imaginative observer and deadly participant: “Down in the street, terrible dreams pass each other with a nod. I wouldn’t trust someone like me either.” To follow the voice is to entertain the possibility of an evil that may not be the lesser of two (or three), but one that surely offers the best chance at revelatory potential, a long look at the sun without glasses, at tasting what’s really behind the curtain. It could be worse. This glimmer of morbid clarity is summed up wonderfully in the concluding lines of “Dance of the Iron Shoes,” one of the collection’s best: “Sunlight clanged against the window. Flies crawled around inside my mouth. It was often like this back then, the sky brightening enough just for me to see what wasn’t there.” And enough for the reader to see what is.

Yet Good, in my opinion, excels most brilliantly on the smallest of canvases. That one super-packed moment, unsprung like a shockwave, a zen-slap to the spinal cord: “Bombs Kill 95 / the headline says / beside the sunflowers / in a milk bottle”.

Hello, darkness. I think I’d like to hang out with you, too.