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When he says “Movies are what we have in the United States of America / to save of from some poverty of Spirit,” (99) he speaks for humankind. That he does so in words that are passionate, elegant, and honest is his readers’ good fortune. Roy Bentley is one of the best poets writing in English, and The Wreck of Your Life on the Evening News is his best book to date.
Here, as elsewhere in this fine collection, Rammelkamp’s poetical plain style doesn’t attempt to call attention to its cleverness, but mirrors Coolidge’s own reserved eloquence. Or as Abraham Lincoln once ironically opined: if you keep your mouth shut, people will think you’re a fool. If you open it, they’ll know for sure.
Russo’s Vivienne is an off-putting montage that attempts to answer what art has to atone for, or whether it has anything left to offer at all. Women who are childish, nearly opaque, and naturally mildly misandrist are a rare and treasured sighting that I am delighted to have been granted.
The paronomasia here and all over trying x trying is astounding, and the cryptic title – trying x trying – likewise highlights Malech’s elusive cleverness, her coy, seductive use of words, her dexterity with language. Dora Malech’s verse makes you think of an acrobat who makes it look so easy, flying through the air, swinging on the trapeze, gracefully contorting, spinning, landing in a seemingly single effort.
That Haas is a successful screenwriter (Gremlins 2), comes through in the novel’s vivid and cinematic details. Every step of the way you participate in the sights, sounds, smells and real challenges of building a commune. At one desperate point, Benji bicycles from San Bernardino to Los Angeles, a remarkably believable trip.
Morphew’s background as both a poet and songwriter resonates throughout the collection. Some poems carry a musical cadence; others resist rhythm altogether. Morphew is unafraid to let his poems falter, stutter, or collapse into silence. He is a true artist—a virtuoso who is unafraid to take risks. He transforms his despair and life’s experiences into art—whether of body, of heart, or of legacy.
The story quickly transitions though as we’re carried by a bird and further out and down the rabbit hole via layered patterns of disassociative travel. Ischia encounters a dizzying array of wild circumstances which challenged my conception of the bounds of traditional storytelling.
The narration in particular demonstrates Levé’s artistry. The book’s speaker addresses his friend, recounting a wide range of events, conversations, and thoughts that took place before the suicide. But wait—he, the narrator, is recounting incredibly specific details about his friend’s life, quoting conversations, explaining worries and trains of thought that his friend, not the narrator, experienced.
The stories in Sentence thrive in the midst of foreclosed freedoms, a confining environment but never without a sense of curiosity and interest. Sentence may forego periods for the brief spaces allowed by commas, but the narratives are well-structured, darkly humorous, nostalgic, investigative in regards to the surreality of trauma, survivor guilt and paranoia.
Bequeath is a project of probing questions from the past and reifying them in the present through the burden of worry Wolff inherited in girlhood from her mother and felt, but never completely understood, even in adulthood. Her essays are the incarnation of that “delicately durable circuit” established in childhood sending into her “consciousness each day the sanctity of memory.”