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

RB: Ryan Bradley is a figure skater. He is also a failed pitcher who spent years (and possible still toils) in the New York Yankee farm system. However, I imagine you’re actually speaking about the Ryan Bradley that is me. Above all things the Ryan Bradley that is me, who often pretentiously puts a W in his name, is a father and a husband. A guy who works really hard at crappy jobs and also at this thing we call writing.

MB: Let’s talk about this thing we call writing, Ryan W. Bradley the non-figure skater, although if figure skating were part of your repertoire that would be rad and I might demand pictures. I still might demand pictures of you working really hard at crappy jobs because that’s even harder than figure skating and speaks volumes about character. Are you a character, Ryan W. Bradley? And why writing? Goddamn. What is it exactly about this thing we call writing? Why, Ryan W. Bradley? Tell me why!

RB: I can certainly pull off at least a photo of me working at one or two crappy jobs. Me in figure skating outfits is something I’m not about to reveal, even fictitiously. I don’t know that I’m a character. That’s the kind of thing I feel Humphrey Bogart might accuse some bit player of in a old school crime drama, and I’d much rather be Bogart.

As for your more pertinent question: many writers, of much higher intelligence than myself have tried to explain the compulsion to write. And it is a compulsion. But beyond that I can’t explain why. I can, however, explain how. I came to writing through injury. I always loved reading, but hated writing. I was more into sports. And acting. But when I suffered a severe back injury in high school I found myself in a lot of physical pain without any of the outlets I normally took advantage of. That is when I began writing. I was lucky to recover from the injury, but my addled brain has yet to recover from the writing compulsion I developed.

MB: Do you subscribe to the notion that we’re exactly where we’re supposed to be? And that everything that happens in our lives happens for a reason? If you were never injured in high school where do you think you’d be now? Do you think you’d have found your way to writing through other, perhaps less painful, events, seen or unforeseen? And if so, would the association be different? Where would the writing inspiration squirt out, if not from between your vertebrae? Do you ever find yourself feeling grateful for the bad things that have happened to you in the past? And if so, doesn’t it feel goddamn good to be so wise and mature?

RB: Honestly the easiest thing in the world is to feel bad for one’s self, especially in the face of bad or hard times. And it’s not that I’m past that, by any means, but I’m getting better. I was told my whole life that things happen for a reason and it always seemed like such a crock. When I met and fell in love with my wife I realized all the crap my mom had always told me was true, and I’ve got to tell you it pissed me off a bit.

As for whether or not I’d be a writer without all those things I’m not sure. I think I would have been doing something creative, there are so many creative outlets that I love, I know I would have been doing something, but I kind of doubt that I was destined to be a writer. Maybe that’s me being ignorant once again.

But, yes, I am very grateful for all the stupid and horrible shit I’ve gone through in life, not necessarily because of the writing, but certainly because of my wife and sons, which I know only came about because of everything I’d gone through in life.

MB: Tell us about some of the creative outlets you love, Mr. Bradley. More specifically, tell us about Artistically Declined Press. The genesis? The progression? The authors? The offshoots? And do you see any correlation between your press and your family?

RB: ADP is a labor of love. It spawned out of two things, my love of book design (which has grown into one of my favorite outlets of all-time) and the support and encouragement of my co-publisher, dear friend, and amazing writer, Paula Bomer. We have had the good fortune to work with writers we love, which is what it’s all about for us. Ken Sparling took a leap of faith in being the first writer to work with us, and he has really become an important figure in my life, as a writer, an influence, and someone I consider a friend.

Between doing books and our journal, Sententia, I feel an overwhelming sense of pride in what we’ve been able to accomplish so far, and what we will accomplish in the future.

Along with my own writing ADP is the most important creative outlet in my life, but there are many things that I’d like to do down the road. Including other literary related ventures, as well as one day returning to music, and even filmmaking, which I briefly majored in during college until the head of the department and I had a falling out. And I really hope that I’ll get to expand my book designing, working with other presses and writers. Is it too much to ask for me to have a media empire? Books, design, music, and film? Sometimes I have these realizations of how ridiculous my goals are and I start to feel self-conscious and like I should learn to be happy with what I have. This is one of those times.

MB: I don’t think having a media empire is too much to ask, Ryan, if it makes you feel any better. In many ways you already have one, and from the sound of things it’s only going to grow. We’re gonna have to start calling you Genghis pretty soon, or now. Tell me, Genghis, about your own writing. What are some of your favorite things to write about? And what are some of favorite pieces?

RB: It’s good to have one supporter in my pocket, so I’ll take that vote of confidence, Mr. Bosworth. I will also accept Genghis as a nickname, because I am a big fan of giving nicknames, but have rarely been the recipient of any decent ones.

I primarily write about people trying desperately to get along with one another through difficult situations. I’m fascinated by the human ability to have relationships that function, especially for extended periods. I also like to write about my home state of Alaska and the blue collar jobs I’ve worked.

To be honest my favorite stories comprise the Alaska-themed story collection I’ve been sending out, GLACIERS, but many of them remain unpublished. One will be coming out with the Potomac Review at some point, and I’m excited about that, and one recently ran in Pear Noir 4. The two stories that I consider the best things I’ve written are still making the rounds and I look forward to the day that more people get a chance to read those. I think they will show people a lot about my work and what I’m striving for.

MB: You’ve got some big things out there and some big things coming up, Ryan. What’s the scoop with your chapbook Aquarium? And what’s the scoop with your forthcoming novel Code For Failure? GODDAMN, Genghis! You’re a busy bee. And feel free to babble all you want here. The floor is yours.

RB: First, you should know better than to give a writer so much freedom.

AQUARIUM is a collection of my quirkier poems. It’s the middle section of my full length collection, MILE ZERO which I’ve been sending out. In the midst of that collection it acts as a intermission between the other two sections of mostly confessional poems. As a standalone I think it’s a fun set of poems that highlights a lot of my different poetic influences. From Bukowski to Peter Sears. The chapbook turned out quite gorgeous, I’m really thankful to Amanda Deo at Thunderclap for liking my poetry enough to undertake the project.

CODE FOR FAILURE is an adorable little novel based on when I was kicked out of college and worked at a gas station. I really can’t stress how many ways the main character of the book screws up, but I can tell you there’s enough juicy that you’ll want to pick it up just to try and surmise what stupid stuff I actually did and what I made up.

I realized after writing the book how much it leans of the style of Kerouac. The book is part of an imagined trilogy of novels based on my college years, the others highlighting my time working in a mechanic’s shop on the Oregon coast and being the frontman in a punk band, respectively. There’s no saying if those other two will ever be finished, but they have been started.

CODE FOR FAILURE will be out in 2012, so I’m trying to pace the buzz, but I’m really excited for people to read it and start thinking “WOW, that dude Ryan is really messed up.” In the meantime I’ll be brainstorming ways to build up the buzz for the book as it draws nearer so if you or any readers have ideas let me know.

MB: Building up buzz can be a tricky thing but I’m pretty sure that nudity might help, and you’d be amazed at what people on craigslist will do for $20. “Always keep your camera at the ready,” is my motto. But anyway.

I’d like to thank you for being such a good sport, Ryan, and for taking the time to do this interview with me. Huge congrats on all of your projects, brotha. I think you’re gonna be doing some big world shaking before too long. You’ve already got the tremors going. Just one last question and then you’re free to go. I’ll even make it multiple choice.

One of your sons comes to the foot of your bed one night and says that he wants to be a writer. Do you:

A) Embrace him
B) Cry uncontrollably
C) Push your face into the pillow and pretend you didn’t hear him
D) Other (feel free to elaborate)

Actually, whatever answer you pick, feel free to elaborate. I like the way you talk.

RB: At first I thought you meant me being nude, which would only work if it was a threat…. which still might be something to stew on.

It was a true pleasure doing this interview, and I was honored to be asked, so thank you, sir. Hopefully I can live up to this hype I’m always trying to build about myself!

I’ll try not to get too longwinded here, but I think the best way to answer such a question is to start with the story of what my stepfather told me. Early on in my road toward writing, making music, making short films, my first year or two in college, my stepdad sat me down and told me how talented he thought I was. Being an amazing artist of many kinds, I knew he wasn’t just blowing smoke. He told me if I wanted I could make money doing the creative things I enjoyed. But, he told me, that I was currently on the path to being more avant garde, which wasn’t the way to make money if that’s what I wanted.

That’s always stuck with me. There’s a choice in anything we do, whether it’s a creative outlet or otherwise. I have made the choice to follow my inspiration rather than to worry about whether or not it made me financially successful. I would pose this reality to my sons. And I would give them one other piece of advice that my stepdad gave me. There will always be better. Which means you always have to work as hard as you possibly can to achieve the type of success you want to make for yourself.

So, I guess that’s option D. Though I’d probably cry for them later, worried about the torture they’d be putting themselves through.

**visit Ryan W. Bradley HERE.

**visit Artistically Declined Press HERE.

**Quick Contest(!): Ryan W. Bradley had kindly offered to give away a free copy of Aquarium to the first person to request it in the comments below. Jam on it!

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

Kiss-kiss. Did you crawl under them
on your knees?
wipe your hands on the aunties’ aprons?
see them flap, flap in the wind, those aprons
while the aunties danced out on the pier where the red sun and clouds
dervish themselves into the sea?
Did you play the slots at the train station?
Cross yourself in front of those noisy altars?

Did they tell you His Holiness is coming; the Cardinal no less–
did they mention how he used to
kiss the dice before he got religion?
were his hems still wet from the Aegean,
his dress more purple than Bouboulina’s as if HE had defeated the Turks?
She, darling, she!
Defeated them! Didn’t they tell you?
Her statue is there on the island, looking out at the horizon.

And did you notice how the uncles’ hairlines recede like the water table?
those uncles, yes! all day in the black muck
of the quarries, the graves
did you see their shovels fly? I mean the dirt off them?,
joking about the old country, so good it was, eh?
did they wipe their eyes for you?
swear the carp jumped into the boats of their own volition,
the corpses into the graves?
the net of time
will catch you, too
drop you into its hold. Ok, they scared me with that one!

They scared me with the cave in the middle of the plaza, too
the one made of books the elders forgot to burn
old yes men in brittle jackets, spines broken,
whose letters slither from margin to margin.
And did the Pashto kiss you on both cheeks?
Swill the tea in their mouths before spitting it back into the pot?
Did they sniff the scarves of the girls before or after they stoned them?
Look at me! Tell us the truth now—all of it!
Show me those little bugs in the amber of your eyes.

Shower Curtain with Antique Car Motif

Ah, the old Packard–you said it was an accident
that the passenger seat
reclined the night you
took Dawn Riski to the drive-in;
as if you were actually surprised that
she slapped you!

And, God! the Nash Rambler–
remember how a godzillion trucks
jackknifed on I-94 all the way to Chicago
that weekend in the blizzard of the century
the kids in the back seat
with no seatbelts and the roads icing
as if Hell really had frozen over
and the Pope actually cancelled Mass because no one
was going anywhere anyway?

And the ’56 DeSoto, geeze!
though the one we had was salmon
with fins and power everything and a leather interior
and Dad could really could go 120 mph on the new, unopened freeway
between Columbus and Toledo
making us swear
never to tell our mother!

At fifteen I thought I would gladly
die for love in Gary Cs ’63 Ford—
the one you had to pull on a string
suspended from the rear view mirror
to operate the windshield wipers.
the same one we sat talking in
late one night under the streetlamp
until my mother
swooped down on us
marched me up the stairs
with a tongue lashing so awful it was no accident I
wished she’d been in that ‘63 Buick
Prussian blue, my favorite color
that went off the bridge and severed my best friend’s tongue
when her head slammed through the windshield.

Alinda Wasner’s work has appeared in Fresh Water: Women Writing About the Great Lakes, New Millenium Poets, Passages North, Wayne Review, Wittenberg Review, Comstock Review, Detroit Metro Times, Inkwell, and Michigan Natural Resources, among others.

Winner of the Tompkins Prize for Poetry, Fiction and Essay, an Amelia Press Award, the Wittenberg Poetry Award, , a Mr. Cogito Press Award, a MacGuffin prize, Chicago Poetry Center juried award, and a Prague Writer’s scholarship, Wasner lives in Lansing, Michigan.

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.

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

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