The best way to find an entry into this collection of tiny stories is not through themes and feelings and stuff—though rest assured, they are there in abundance—but through the words themselves. There is such an immutable specificity to each adjective used, to each scene drawn; yet, at the same time, each is equally as dexterous, folding the connotation of the vignette numerous times until it is no longer a piece of tiny fiction, but a small paper lighthouse with 274 steps. Possibly the one in the beautiful I am fond of you: An ode to Bull Shannon, the one that broadcasts .-. and -.-. I wanted to find that plastic walkie talkie I used to have, the one with the Morse code translator at the bottom, and figure out what the lighthouse was signaling to the land. Then again, I didn’t want to; rather, just let my brain re-imagine those pleas. (As of writing this, I still haven’t looked, though there’s an open window lurking beneath this screen with ‘Morse code translator’ in the Google bar, and I kind of like it like that, knowing but never knowing, and that might be the best encapsulation of the collection: ‘It makes everything into nothing.’ [p. 9])

This constant duality of the prose, the everything and the nothing, it’s scaffolded by words overworked and stretched to the point of snapping, words that snap and send bits of dust over the page, that fall and settle on paper and reform as images of Bull Shannon and prophetic songbirds, like in Something smells like rotten poison on fire: An Ode to Bull Shannon. A songbird lands next to the narrator and says, Whatcha doin’? ‘like this whole mess [it involves a knife and forearm and a flap of skin] is invisible. Like he can’t see me raising my arm to my mouth to taste and can’t see the look on my face, the sour and wrong feel of my own blood on my own tongue.’ And they ask the songbird, ‘[why] my own me taste[s] like poison.’ To which the songbird replies, ‘In the movies, they make blood out of corn syrup and flour. And it tastes like candy.’ [p.34]

At once funny (How’s the weather up there: An ode to Bull Shannon) and sad (Me and Theodore dress up like Eskimos while we roast chestnuts on a hotplate) and darkly comforting (We know what we are) these stories stretch dream until it is reality and segue from absurd to startling, all so quickly that you are left with only the memory of a gasp and the image of Bull Shannon dissolving the Huxtable family.

There is an unusual instance of book-ended poems here.  Geoffrey Kagan Trenchard’s, Almaden and Foxworthy, is a narrative poem about the tragedies inherent with living in dysfunctional relationships, and it ends with the narrator moving out on his girlfriend in the middle of the night.

Then a few poems later comes Suzanne Heagy’s, When He Left At Night, a similar story with this narrator being the significant other left behind.  The woman find’s no firm answers about her mate’s eventual return in her magic 8-ball, but the concluding line pretty much tells all: “He took his birth certificate.”

In a much lighter vein is Meredith Devney’s prose poem, Woman in the Super Walmart Bares All. This piece wonderfully illustrates how Americans are perhaps the most overly familiar people in the world, a farcical sketch that will have you thinking that it couldn’t be true.  Or could it?  After all, it is Walmart.

Lenore Balliro brings an updated version of Hints from Heloise and I make a mental note to avoid Lenore after, “To save on alimony, add ground oleander to the ex-wife’s chardonnay.” which is not the only unique turn on the older version!

I’m not certain if Bruce Weber’s, A Poem in Forty-Five Parts sets any records for a list poem, but it just might.  And Kit Kennedy’s piece, Whether Sunflower or Seed is a real hidden jewel.  This is the poem the editors wrote their introduction around, mentioning the opening lines,  “begin with gesture/begin with question/begin with petition.” I find the poetics in Kennedy’s lines closely in sync with mine, especially towards the end, “Know this:/every word pre-exists/articulated/or not.”

One of the most dramatic offerings comes from Elliott D. Smith in Matricide, which beings, “Dear Mother,/I have to kill you.” and goes into unforeseen territory from there.  I’m going to leave you hanging on this one.  It alone is probably worth buying the book for.

Puma Perl chips in here with The Perfect Man, a poem that should give all men lots of hope.  According to this poem, Puma can tolerate a fellow living three thousand miles away and can forgive almost anything, even misspelling, as long as he’s a bigger slut than she is and knows the difference between lay and lie.  I think she’s possibly the perfect woman.

I should mention that this collection also includes scintillating interviews with Claus Ankersen and Mark Doty, and shares their poetry as well.  Alas, space doesn’t allow me to comment on all forty-one poets, but each of them is unique and well deserving of their inclusion.  Do add this one to your collection.

This Robot Rapes

I read J. Bradley’s The Serial Rapist Sitting Behind You Is a Robot in the bathroom. I do a lot of my reading in the bathroom. It’s quiet there. No one can bother me. And I didn’t want to be bothered while reading this book. In fact, I don’t want to be bothered when I’m reading any book. It’s like being killed while in the Matrix. Not cool.

As I locked the door and took up my favorite seat, I didn’t quite know what to expect from the book. Truth be told, I hadn’t read much of J. Bradley, despite his massive visibility out in e-land. The dude is everywhere, doing everything. Always a good sign. It shows he’s a team player. Hard worker. I liked him already.

And what I also liked was that he was helping to lead the charge of Safety Third Enterprises, the brainchild of Captain Awesometown, a.k.a. Matt DeBenedictis. Now, I know Matt and I’m a fan of his writing, so maybe I had a bit of an idea of what to expect, given Matt’s taste. What I couldn’t have guessed was that I’d stagger off the toilet with two black eyes and a crazy need to find my childhood teddy bear.

The short fictions that comprise this chapbook hit hard. Very hard. J. Bradley pulls you in with a disarming voice and proceeds to pepper your mind with sharp, cutting images that’ll make your jaw drop. There is no pussy-footing, no romance, simply one man’s searing portrayal of sex, excess, and relationships gone awry. In tight bursts, Bradley effectively represents the twisted layers of our souls with bravado.

From Cloak & Dagger:

“I’m gonna fuck you so hard, you’re gonna have Down’s Syndrome,” Mary’s husband said as the headboard teethed the wall.

And from Primer:

“It didn’t take long for Paul to make my wedding band into a bullet. He handed me the round and an unloaded .38 Special.”

Granted, this may not be the best collection for those with delicate sensibilities, but it’s not supposed to be. It’s for those who scoff at the world through the bottom of a whiskey glass, role-play dressed as Abraham Lincoln, and snort sugar through a straw.

So, if you’re reading this, this book is probably for you, you drunken Abe snorter. Go get it.

And keep your eyes open for future titles from Safety Third Enterprises. I know I will. And I will read them, and be abused by them, on my favorite seat.

Purchase Serial Rapist HERE.

Visit J. Bradley HERE.

The story reeks of neo-noir. Yeah, it has flashes of early Palahniuk. And yeah, it’s a bit in the vein of Catcher in the Rye. But nothing can be Transgressive or question identity these days without being early Palahniuk, and nothing can be coming-of-age without being Catcher.

The Neverenders is neither of the two.

Sonbert’s debut novel stands on its own two feet. The prose is sharp, cut-throat, and completely believable. Although, we probably shouldn’t believe a fucking word that dribbles out of Perry Patton’s vomit-breathed mouth, seeing as he is constantly drunk, high on coke and never sleeps. This combination leads to some extremely convincing sections in the prose where the reader can’t be sure if Perry has gone completely mad, or whether the crazy underworld he has found himself stumbling into has gone mad around him.

At times I speculated whether there was something more at play–almost something spiritual, or not spiritual, but maybe supernatural; something much darker than the real world can produce. But not in a tacky way. In a very noir kind of way. Whether this was intended or not is hard to tell. It may very well have been Sonbert’s way of showing the darker side of the psyche. Either way, it certainly allows one to contemplate and look into the story, feeling every single blow that Perry feels. Instead of just putting the book down and going “Well, that was good”, it makes you mull over it. Thinking about what was hinted at, but never told.

This is one of those one-night-stand books. Not, that it’s good for one night only, but that you become so engrossed in it that you’re done before you even scratch yourself. You’re sucked in and dragged back out before you know it, wondering what the fuck just happened to you.

The Neverenders is a blinding debut, and I can’t wait for Sonbert’s next release. I can only hope it has just as much rock ‘n’ roll injected in its raging veins–something that is severely missing from contemporary literature and music nowadays.

So, do a Big Shot thing and buy the damn book.

Review by Matthew O’Donnell

Visit:
Michael Sonbert (the author)

Buy:
From Amazon.com

Take My Bloody Alibi for example, penned by Dominic Milne. Our two lovely ladies, Cass and Marcella, are fresh out of Holloway prison and looking for revenge on the scum who put them in there. They concoct a personality—Sylvana—and take turns dressing up as her, then go about seducing their way into position to wreak said revenge. Sylvana winks her way into the crooked heart of PC Jack Thorne, the man who shares a dark past with Cass, and Sylvana stomps her way up the platform and slides down the pole at The Alley Cat Club. Our two ladies have every angle of their twisted path to justice covered. Except, of course, for the ones that they don’t.

It’s never that easy, is it?

The inevitable kinks sink their claws into our ladies and force them to use all their fishnetted wits to scratch, hack, punch and shoot their way to freedom. Did I mention that there’s a lot of blood? Just remember Cock Boomerang while reading this novella. Oh yeah. It’s that awesome. For me, it was even more fun to read because I studied at a university just a few blocks from Soho, where most of this novella takes place. I could remember the smell of the Fitzroy tavern while reading one Sylvana seduce PC Thorne, could feel the slippery grime that covered Berwick Street as the other Sylvana strutted what the good Lord gave her. Milne hit the mark perfectly when creating atmosphere, and, man, did it make me nostalgic.

On the flipside (sort of) we have Eloise Murphy, the combat-boot-wearing, Agnostic Front-blasting heroine of Danny Hogan’s Killer Tease. Eloise isn’t posing as a stripper to seek revenge (and she would break your face if you referred to it as stripping.) Rather, burlesque is her life, yet the baddies find her anyway. Named after the girl from The Damned song, Eloise is the old guard of burlesque. She appreciates custom made corsets, understands that the pleasure is in revealing and not just showing. She’s the type to name her cat Sinatra and find comfort in eight-inch stilettos. But, she is also the type of person we like to see get pushed down. She’s quick to strike out with a vulgar comeback or a set of knuckles at the slightest indiscretion. Granted, the indiscretions laid on her generally involve some kind of sedative which results in memory (and undergarment) loss. But still: you want to tell her to just chill out. So when, within the first few pages, Eloise gets booted from her burlesque gig and replaced by girls younger, richer and with more…moral flexibility, you could say… you can’t help but feel a bit I told you so. Now down on her luck, she seeks solace in a cold G&T and her cat.

Enter the aptly-named Napolean Hammerstein, who makes her an offer she can’t refuse. Suffice it to say, things get bad. Real bad. Pulp bad. And this middle section is when Hogan’s character really flourishes. Eloise has already presented herself in a certain light, but despite her brash and abrasive demeanor, the few quiet moments we see take the genre stereotypes and flip them on their head. When previously we were rooting for her fall, we’re now screaming for her to stand up and fight against her oppressors. Oh, and she does: ‘She was going to bring it to them, old school.’ And for her, old school involves a hatchet. Did I mention there’s a lot of blood? Probably, but I think I forgot about the bits of skull that she wipes from her boots onto an assailant’s doormat. In true pulp tradition, Hogan unleashes fury, ‘opening [a double-crosser’s] face like a bag of crisps,’ and includes one of the most horrifying scenes I’ve read in a long while involving Sinatra the cat. I still cringe when I see my own cats lying in a certain position. As in My Bloody Alibi, some perverted sense of justice is finally achieved, and it comes with a sidecar of inventive, excessive violence.

On a side note, Pulp Press has a very noble philosophy behind it. They understand that reality TV and the internet are, in many ways, changing the way we read and think. They acknowledge that people today have much shorter attention spans than they used to. But instead of railing against that like so many other ‘Literature’ columns, they use it to their advantage. They look for stories of a certain (shorter) length in order to entice people who normally don’t read to pick up a book. The awesome covers don’t hurt their case, either. Staying true to the roots of pulp and crime writing, when the dime novels and penny dreadfuls gave a more accurate representation of the collective experience than the ‘accepted’ novels, they are an outside entity who is generally overlooked and disregarded and quietly lighting fires that, hopefully, will consume the elitism that plagues a lot of literature. These writers are paying homage to those who ground out stories on Underwoods and simultaneously reinventing these tropes, showing that stories, like evil and violence and love, have no boundaries.

So: ‘Turn off your TV and discover fiction like it used to be…’

The Books

The Press

Review by Nik Korpon

Caught on the horns of an unemployment dilemma, Thomas L. Sullivan took a short term job as a driving instructor to pay the bills. He starts out arrogant: better than his students, his employer, pretty much the world. He has a lot to learn, and does.

Life as a driving instructor ain`t a drive through the country. The company Sullivan signs up with has ancient cars and even more ancient driving routes. Sullivan is given maps for rural routes that turn out to be beyond dated—where a country store should be, there is a mall.

Equally problematic with poor equipment is abusive planning. Lessons can be half an hour or longer. They are tightly scheduled. Periodically instructors must drive clear across town at rush hour to make the next appointment. If they instructors are lucky, more or less, the appointment shows up. If the kid doesn`t show up, the instructor receives only a minimal fee.

And the kids? Sullivan spends a lot of pages about them and their parents. The school instruction he provides is essentially to high school students in a wealthy area. The mothers (he did not seem to deal much with fathers) engage in a friendly competition with each other as to how is more ‘booked’. Between preparing for final exams, soccer games, piano lessons and the rest, driving lessons are one more item to squeeze in. Some of the children seem aware, while virtually all the parents appear, well, driven.

Sullivan’s story is told with growing awareness. His tone towards people gradually softens as he realizes some of his own shortcomings.

Oh, and you will learn a great deal when reading this book about how to drive properly.

Life In The Slow Lane: Surviving A Tour Of Duty In Drivers Education
By Thomas Sullivan
Published by Uncial Press, an imprint of GCT, Inc.
http://www.uncialpress.com

Reviewed by Victor Schwartzman

In the liner notes of How They Were Found, Michael Kimball says that Matt Bell ‘can do what so many fiction writers can’t: [he] can make anything happen.’ Though I agree with that sentiment, I’ll take that to the hyperbolic next logical step: Matt Bell can alter the order of events in lives (specifically mine [See: Incident One.]) I offer the following documents as proof:

A: A few weeks ago, I saw Inception, and was quickly leveled by it. On the ride home, blasting Edith Piaf—a sight as funny as it sounds—I found myself in a winsome mood, ruminating over love and storytelling and love of storytelling, and like after any good experience with art, wanting to prolong the mood. As I approached my front door, I saw that my copy of How They Were Found had arrived. I sat on the back stoop to read a story then continue with the rest of my evening. At least, that was my intention. Three times, I read the opening story, ‘The Cartographer’s Girl,’ each time hearing the mournful refrain of Piaf floating somewhere along the torn edges of the Cartographer’s maps of loss. His attempts to document his life with the girl are as maddening our own. This is one of the best depictions of the way we as a society impossibly try to compress our lives and emotions into an ordered system of grids. If I were trying to pick up a NYU girl, I might say the story was a post-modern meditation on the human condition. But really, it is a uniquely presented, wrenching story of love and loss that is told so beautifully, you would gladly deal with the loss because in order to have felt something so true as the love. And in fact, the state of loss is achingly gorgeous, as well.

B: After finishing How They Were Found, the next book I read was The Pugilist at Rest, by Thom Jones. Similar to the prior unexpected reading combo (Incident One) it struck me as uncanny how similar—at heart—these two collections are. Though Bell delves into much darker territory, each author pins a man down then subjects them to excruciating trials in order to find what really lurks in shadow regions of the heart. In ‘His Last Great Gift,’ a preacher foregoes his entire community’s welfare for the sake of his machine, which is built according to directions given in a series of revelations he’s not sure he even understands (a lovely commentary on the process of writing.) In ‘The Receiving Tower,’ a group of men are stationed in a remote tower, under the reign of the seemingly tyrannical Captain, and slowly disintegrate to little more than the static and snow that surrounds them. Like the Vietnam soldiers and boxers who populate Jones’ work, these men are compelled to preserve the core of their self. To the end, any consequence, regardless of how dire, is frankly irrelevant. And it is the mark of an excellent writer that when these characters eventually self-destruct, the reader is helpless but feel it was still worth it.

C. Michael Kimball makes a good example that Bell can in fact make anything happen, but I’d venture to say that his greatest talent is to take something shocking and then normalize it in order to expose its true horror (refer to ‘Hold on to Your Vacuum’ as a poignant example.) The characters in How They Were Found are doomed to endlessly slog through the cycles which, while destroying a bit more with each repetition, simultaneously liberate them in some perverse way. They relive their traumatic pasts in order to find peace, a peace which can only come in fleeting spurts.

-A grandmother, a granddaughter and a wolf consume each other while hacking one another to bits in ‘Wolf Parts.’

-The man in ‘Mantodea,’ who has swallowed dirt and broken lightbulbs and staples and ‘a lot more drain cleaner than you’d expect, if you’re trying to kill yourself’ in order to ‘clean himself out,’ approaches a woman in a bar, only to encounter an ill-fated ending. He swallows hard and ‘when [he] didn’t die, he went back for more.’

-In ‘Dredge,’ which was included in Best American Mystery Stories 2010 (and the fact that I’m only now mentioning a story with such accolades speaks highly of how good this collection is,) a man pursues a relationship with a bloated corpse as both a romantic interest and cathartic totem for his absent mother.

The subjects who wander through the haze of How They Were Found are all horribly damaged hopeless souls who bump against travesty after tragedy. They are ugly, gnarled, deformed and maligned. And probably, this is the reason they are so affecting: they do unspeakable things both to themselves and others, and there is but a negligible delineation between them and us. Perhaps, even, they have the courage to act on their impulses, and we can only hope to be so brave.

How They Were Found by Matt Bell

Published by Keyhole Press

Review by Nik Korpon

“Stolen said this was a city of storytellers. That The City itself was a collection of stories and tales told and retold and retold. That The City was built on these tales just as it was built on concrete and steel, and sometimes these stories shifted like geological plates, shifted and rubbed, and the earth trembled, and The City, in kind, trembled. Without these tales, The City would just be a city, but this city folded itself within the other folds of stories and tales, and all the residents of this city were storytellers and soothsayers chanting nonsensical incantations, letting smoke drift from their mouths as they twirled and twisted, tight around their own worlds, the world around them into knots of “nots” and other words, so one never knew what to believe or not believe here” [pg 94].

Bliss Inc. opens on Nel Lowry’s transition from a small town in Ohio to The City, a stateless metropolitan collective that beacons to outsiders in the way any romanticized city might, stretching its magnetic characteristics into a dystopian commentary tinged with magical non-realities. Those familiar with the allure of Jose Saramago’s The Center from his novel, The Cave will immediately recognize The City’s irrational hold, as will any real-world citizen susceptible to the world’s intimidating cities, from Chicago to New York, London to Dublin. Bliss Inc. succeeds in allowing us to identify that irrational draw and perhaps better appreciate our own suburban and small town lives.

Bliss Inc. is structured around the physical fluidity of The City. This is a place where buildings are “built so closely together that only several inches lay between them” (pg 23), and apartments contained “not one straight vertical wall,” and “didn’t look so much built or constructed as beaten into shape, a solid block of matter chipped away haphazardly to clear enough space” (pg 24). Citizens, perhaps because of their co-misery, are exceedingly friendly. Via a series of vignettes toward the middle of the book, we learn that living arrangements are a strangely haphazard affair. Nel nomadically moves from living in a perpetually flooded basement with a woman whose furniture is stationed on floating rafts, to a man whose face constantly morphs and changes, through twelve other situations before settling (and even then, not for long). These environments are depicted as a not-too-cloaked form of magical realist commentary on the absurdity of fighting to live in The City—any city—considering the inherent struggles.

Nel’s motivation for following The City’s call is a job promise at a mega-corporation called Bliss Inc. The company exists as a micro-kindred to its surrounding strangeness, though “micro” may be misleading, as Bliss Inc. represents the idealized conglomerate, even being cited as the birth of contemporary capitalism. Nel’s primary motivation is securing a coveted “Lifetime Employment” position within Bliss Inc., and with this chase comes Bliss Inc.’s driving plot.

Bliss Inc. beautifully teases the reader with resolution, from the opening description of arrival to the final page, and even then the reader is left with encouragement in lieu of conclusion. But it is because of this encouragement that Bliss Inc. should be on every reader’s bookshelf. Upon finishing, I knew I would forever look at cities, and my own suburban life, differently. Bliss Inc. is a truly phenomenal book, and I am comfortable with saying that it will easily make my top books of 2010 list, perhaps my top books of all time list.

Visit:
Ron Burch (the author)
BlazeVOX Books (the publisher)

Buy:
From Amazon.com

Hating Olivia presents a situation we’ve read many times before, that of the struggling writer eschewing traditional employment on the romantic ideal that he will sustain himself (mentally more than financially) by way of his prose. Sharing Max Zajack’s dream is his live-in, on-off girlfriend Olivia Aphrodite, who he lovely calls Livy. It becomes quickly apparent that the couple is more in love with the idea of writing than the act. Months pass without a single scribbled sentence, and ultimately the couple resort to what they consider the worst of all outcomes: they get jobs.

Perhaps best appreciated by a writer rather than the casual reader, SaFranko’s story propels along with Zajack’s various writerly phases, from the finding of his voice (page 20) to the unexpected epiphany (pg 129), throughout, mentioning (re: paying homage to) writers who have come before him:

“So like Bukowski entering the U.S Postal service, or Melville at the customs house, or Kafka and his nameless insurance company, I reported like an automaton to the front desk, to be inducted into the ranks of corporate America” (pg 76).

Of particular note is the way SaFranko periodically embodies Henry Miller, particularly his Tropic of Cancer:

“I’d had a few women in my life, but I was to learn something new about sex from Olivia Aphrodite (her true middle name). We were to take the plunge together into the subsoil of raw concupiscence, from which both ecstasy and madness spring, and forgo the dusty, worthless upper strata of passionless habit and duty that most humans know. I would come to live for fucking Livy. For the first time I knew what it was to truly bang a woman, to ram like a batter, to bury my body, obliterate my self, in the mysterious folds of a cunt. Like a devoted master of the Kama Sutra, I discovered the rude pleasure of enjoying the female in an infinite number of contortions, to forge onward when there was no juice left, to bludgeon myself into insensibility from the sheer act of fornication. We would finish our sessions in a state of complete and utter exhaustion, in a delirium, really, oblivious altogether to the outside world” (pgs 25-26).

Hating Olivia wavers constantly on the verge of falling to a juvenile tale of romantic idealism and angst against the Corporate Machine, but SaFranko navigates those cliffs beautifully, always artfully rescuing and re-establishing the book to its deeper, emotional heart. I know a book is good when I’ve reached the end to realize that I’ve written hardly any notes. Hating Olivia escaped with barely a half page.

Visit:
Mark SaFranko (the author)
Murder Slim Press (the publisher)

Buy:
From Murder Slim Press (the publisher)

This new Field Guide to Prose Poetry is an ambitious and remarkably well-executed concept. Following the original Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction, this new guide is again a dual anthology, essays accompanied by example poems, contributed by a diverse group of authors and educators.  When it comes to something as subjective as defining a genre, the perspective needs to come from a broad field.  Readers won’t be disappointed here.  There are thirty-four essays of various approaches, and no matter their own creative styles, readers will find valuable ideas articulated.  Readers will also find that the accompanying sixty-six prose poems helpfully illustrate points made in the respective author’s essay.

Some essayists also present the work of additional poets.  I especially admire writers who defer to the voice of another when they feel it helps better illustrate their thoughts.   Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Russell Edson, and Robert Bly are mentioned repeatedly here.  These are some of the writers who have had a profound impact on many currently practicing prose poets.

While a field guide to birds might help the reader differentiate between a mockingbird and a cardinal, and a field guide to mushrooms may have the even more critical objective of identifying what is edible and what is not, these are all objective calls.  This field guide sets out with a far more subjective task, not only to identify prose poems but also to examine the support and acceptance, or lack of acceptance, the genre has received over the years.

In their introduction editors McDowell and Rzicznek mention, “…the distrust that some of the gatekeepers of the contemporary American poetic community have of the prose poem form.”  In his essay, Thankfully, Phillip Larkin Will Never Read This, Kevin Griffith mentions, “…not only do the usual haters of poetry detest prose poetry, many free verse poets do as well…a hundred or so years ago, people couldn’t stand it when poems stopped rhyming in obvious ways.  Now they can’t stand it when poems don’t have obvious line breaks…the only thing that never changes is people’s resistance to change.”

Referring back to their introduction, the editors assert that T.S. Elliot praised the prose poems of both Baudelaire and Rimbaud, while at the same time objecting to the authorial intention of naming a new form.  Indeed, many points discussed in the book aren’t the “What makes it a prose poem?” variety, but “Why isn’t it simply prose?” or “What’s the difference between prose poems and flash fiction?”

In his essay, Split, Mark Wallace mentions students asking, “But why is this a poem?” Wallace explains, “One answer is that it doesn’t matter.”  “Another answer,” he continues, “is that it’s a prose poem.” A bit further on Wallace amplifies with a third answer, “…that the prose poem questions such genre distinctions and raises issues about the human desire to distance, categorize and control rather than engage.”

In her essay, Happy (Or How It Took Me Twenty Years to Almost Get the Prose Poem), Denise Duhamel shares her thoughts:  “Prose poetry and flash fiction are kissing cousins.  They are kissing on Jerry Springer, knowing they’re cousins, and screaming “So what?” as the audience hisses.  They’re kissing on One Life to Live, unaware one’s aunt is the other’s mother.”  She goes on a bit later, “A prose poem parts his hair on the left instead of the middle, and his barber tells him he’s flash fiction.”

In Crashing the Party, Beckian Fritz Goldberg sums it up succinctly when she writes, “The key, I think, is to discover what you want from a prose poem and forget what you think it is or is supposed to be.”

Some contributors have focused on writing tips that work for them.  In these essays readers will likely find themselves weighing the degree to which they agree or disagree with the speaker.

In A Carnival Comes to Town Gerry LaFemina quotes Louis Jenkins’ suggestion that to write a successful prose poem, “One must pack carefully, only the essentials, too much and the reader won’t get off the ground.  Too much and the poem becomes a story, a novel, an essay, or worse.”

In Close to You, Mary Ann Samyn shares, “I work off titles and/or beginnings.  Not ideas, mind you (ha!), but language.  The surest way to write a bad poem is to set out with something important to say.”

Finally, in his essay, Whatchamacallit & Me, John Bradley leaves us with, “How many prose poets does it take to change a lightbulb? Ask me later.  We’re still debating the question, What is a lightbulb.”

After finishing this collection, a reader could come away with more questions than he had to begin with.  But the book imparts a strong desire to move forward and dispels much anxiety over prose poetry’s ambiguity.  There are many ways a teacher could utilize this material in a classroom setting, and poets themselves will find it provides a great inspiration to write.  At the onset the book seemed like it would take a long time to read, but as I moved past the midpoint and toward the end, I found myself feeling that it had ended all too soon.  If that is your experience, don’t forget, there is also the Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction available!

© 2010 by Rose Metal Press, Inc.

Edited by Gary L McDowell
and F Daniel Rzicznek

192 PP, Trade Paperback
ISBN 978-0-9789848-8-5
$16.95 US.