A Year of above/ground Press Reviews:
My First Installment as a Chap-Subscriber
I've had subscription to journals before; Prairefire,
Crazyhorse, The Parish Review. Most of my subscriptions (the Flann O’Brien
literary journal being the only exception listed here) are consolations after my
own creative pieces fell short of the shortlist for contests or were rejected for
publication altogether. My relationship to above/ground press is a little
different. rob mclennan & I have traded subscriptions; he receives anything
we do at Flat Singles
and I get regular chapbooks in the mail from Ottawa. This first installment of
reviews is a way of writing my thanks & giving chapbook presses some press.[1]
I
think the problem I bring up about journal subscriptions & rejection
pertains to marginalized writing. It’s an important issue and is (hopefully)
accurately described.[2]
Rae Armantrout’s Versed won her a
Pulitzer in 2010, but most readers will disregard the flimsy yellow Rituals (September, 2013) from
above/ground because it’s a chapbook. People who like & read poetry will
miss a lot of it because of medium—many poems that comprise collections are
published in ephemeral medium first rather than glossy journals sitting in bookcases
somewhere.
*
The Art of Plumbing
(January) by Brecken Hancock
“Gathering
my hair off the pillow, I rise from the spill on our sheets our sheets to
bathe” (1).
Beginning
in with a mythological prologue and extending through BCE, predicting the
apocalypse in the year 3300 CE, Brecken Hancock writes a history of plumbing.
These sequential poems flow through fiction & fact, examining our internal
plumbing and the external eccentricities of the public bath or the irrigation
ditch. She gives new consideration to bathtub
gin, or the depth to a statement like “I need to soak” hair that is
“spilt,” (9, 10). At the heart of these poems all our conceptions of
[un]cleanliness can be formed by The Art
of Plumbing.
~\
Rituals
“Many
have found it useful
to lie
down
as men
believing
themselves
to be
little girls” (Armantrout 5)
This
work (though too short to have an impact without three or four readings,[3])
is a regenbogen whirlwind of “colo[u]r and sound,” “secret identity” gender “madness,”
and “depression.” Of course, all of those references come from the same poem.
But, Rituals is a sampling of real
poetry—prize winning poetry, even.
As a
chap, the work is caught in the act of becoming a bigger collection/a fully
formed idea/a longer book/more heavily ‘themed’/“Holiday” from trade writing.
Armantrout takes great pains to refine & order the poems in such a way that
it’s hard to find them compatible with the incommodifable. And yet I have a
sense of missing/wanting more—the read[s] make the chap seem more like a
preview, but with each the poems become more & more resplendent.
>|<
An Overture in the Key of F (October) by Olivia Adams[4]
You
flourished in the floss and flow amid memory and mummery,
those
sweet drams that left us flush but anchored in the fluxion and
flyby-night
wire. We were fog bound and focused on the convergence
of
particles that begged an adversary, something attached, hung,
fastened,
extended. (Adams 6)
Fabulous
$four fare, fair—forceful (alliterative), funny as F---: fornicating, fortune, finely;
an overture truly in ef, cleft. Font, faint, fanned, hot, prosey fiend poems. “Filmland
and filmdom,” more than just F. But, F marks the spot where E & I converge
in “a finger wave… fringed and slender…to be both healthy and convulsing,” fit.
Flicker in pages of “flamboyant flak” flammable. Footnote frontage, the
function of foramens (& forearms)—all revealed & revelled in—forget yourself.[5]
—Joseph
LaBine
Works Cited
Adams, Carrie Olivia. An Overture in the Key of F. Ottawa:
above/ground press, 2013. Print.
Armantrout, Rae. Rituals. Ottawa: above/ground press,
2013. Print.
Hancock, Brecken. The Art of Plumbing. Ottawa:
above/ground press, 2013. Print.
[2] I welcome any discussion. I think
peer reviewing work (especially critical essays) is important. I’m very fond of
the e-journal I receive from the Flann O’Brien Society. I submit to academic
& creative journals regularly. This is all just small press fodder. But really,
if we’re all pursuing journals, who cares enough to read chapbooks?
[3] Reading rituals.
[4] I will only use F—words to
describe this book.
[5] There are no footnotes in these
poems.