8 SPD Books Regarding Fragments
IN THIS MONTH'S SPD CLICKHOLE By Lizzy Lemieux
Qualms from my most recent movie theater experience: I could hear the entire soundtrack to the Aretha Franklin movie next door, the snackbar did not sell snowcaps, and the ˜film˜ I was actually there to see was formulaic. Sometimes it feels like I'm watching the same story over and over. And over. And if they're recycling storylines, can't I just recycle my ticket and stop shelling out 12 dollars for each show?
Sometimes I just want a story that breaks the mold. Which conveniently brings us to this month's SPD handpicked theme: FRAGMENT. These 8 handpicked books beat up linear narrative and stuff it in the trunk. They abhor the teachers 'one person speaks at a time' rule. They spurn every plot-hole ridden time travel film. They tell stories in broken pieces. They raise their multiple voices until it's a cacophony sans a single narrator. The go back and forth in time without almost having sex with their mother and disappearing from family photos.
Moon: Letters, Maps, Poems (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2018) begins with storytelling as it existed at its inception: as myth. Dedicated to "mythical women of [her] childhood". Jennifer S. Cheng writes, "In the story of the Lady in the Moon, there is only one ending: to live out her nights as a captive, over and over, as if some necessary penance, as if a sorrow to see a woman paper-thin against the lesser light." Cheng pushes this singularity into multiplicity, presenting all possibilities for the lady in the moon's departure from earth, exploring the question of feminine independence and love freed from "penance". "A woman is a builder...if the lady in the moon were to ask questions of construction, if she were to ask for tools and then drown the blueprint", muses Cheng. In many ways, Moon: Letters, Maps, Poems has drowned the blueprint for linear narrative, choosing instead to explore myths of fragment, told from multiple perspectives, and from multiple beginnings, middles, and ends.
Butcher Paper (Scablands Books, 2017), a graphic novel by Simeon Mills, tells the story of a father's endeavor to teach his teenage son to read, if only to prove his ex-wife that he is a capable caretaker. The larger, alcohol-tinged narrative gives way to bizarre fragments of school-supplied "readers" filled with animal-human hybrids and grotesque supernatural manifestations of masculinity, relationships and loss.
Sightings: Selected Works 2002-2005 (1913 Press, 2001) A collection of Chin Yu Pai's concrete poems on love hotels, gymnasiums, and food. Each poem reimagines concrete form, from eye tests, to playwriting, to nutritional facts on snack labels, fragmenting the idea of form. Line breaks create innuendo, sexuality and politics surfacing in the mundane details: hairpins are aligned with rubbers through branding, and a personified Wells Fargo converses with Sam Wong, although translation barrs true communication.
American Romances: Essays (City Lights Publishers, 2009) Irreverent nostalgia fuels Rebecca Browns essays, which use pop culture icons as trail markers while Brown traipses through American lineage, from Hawthorn and Puritanical Salem to Ellen as the girl next door ideal which Brown asserts is, and always has been, "a big old chummy dyke." Brown traces facets of modern culture back to their predecessors, revealing American strengths and flaws are not new but simply repackaged. "Witnessing" returns as as-seen-on-tv (and social media) oversharing returns as Brown's personal narrative in American Romances. It is a true romance for, as Brown writes, "Everytime you read a book you read what you desire".
ESL or You Weren't Here (Nightboat Books, 2017) frames Aldrin Valdez's story, of immigration from the Philippines to New York, in terms of language, weaving filipino and english together until their double meanings fractures cultural understanding. As Valdez writes, "And even if/ I didn't have polio/ my family in the Philippines/ still used the word/ to name/ my inability/ to walk or to walk without/ pain./ Just as we used/ Colgate/ to refer to any tube of toothpaste." Voices are split at the syllable, the page is re-oriented horizontally, turning over and over "forced migration", "vestiges of colonialism", sickness, death, and mourning.
What We Must Remember (Bamboo Ridge Press, 2017) is a Renshi, a form of Japanese linked poem, in remembrance of the rape of Thalia Massie and the subsequent charges brought against five Hawaiian men which lead to the kidnapping of Horace Ida and the murder of Joseph Kahahawai. In his introduction, John P Rosa writes, "And to remember is more than just to call to mind. It is to re-remember, to put pieces together in an attempt to make things whole." This renshi, a collaboration between four artists, Christy Passion, Ann Inoshita, Juliet S. Kono, and Jean Yamasaki Toyama, envisions 'pieces' in varying forms, including epistolary, persona, and dialogue poems, held together by "historical realities".
Flarf: An Anthology of Flarf (Edge Books, 2017) Google Search: What is Flarf? Result: “a kind of corrosive, cute, or cloying, awfulness. Wrong. Un-P.C. Out of control. ‘Not okay.’" Or: a form of protest poetry from post 9/11 America designed to force examinations of 'good taste' in art and politics. Search: What is Flarf: An Anthology of Flarf? Result: an inexplicable collection of 21st Century avant garde-poetry, which sourced material from the web during its "wild west" infancy. This dada-esque movement appropriates jargon readers might remember from 200's chain emails, chat rooms, and suggested searches, and collages digitally-sourced fragments to create comic, vulgar, and comically vulgar poems.
Concordance (Kelsey Street Press, 2016) Like much of Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge's work, Concordance began with a resonant image: a dandelion. This collaboration between Berssenbrugge, Kiki Smith, and Ann McKeown explores the transitory properties of nature and writing, as in "The way milkweed filling the space above a field is 'like' reading." For Mei-Mei, the writing process itself is fragmented. Working from "altered" and appropriated texts, she takes notes of resonant images encountered while reading, cuts out the notes, and rearranges the clippings until their proximity to each other forges new connections. She says: "Usually I consider all fragments the same as the whole, like holograms. But one day, looking at the horizon in Utah, I said: 'Where sky touches the ground is not the same as the whole.'"
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