The Montreal Fiores

David Fiore

Montrealfiores.wordpress.com

We’re not usually in the habit of reviewing unpublished works, but David Fiore’s online short story collection is a veritable diamond in the rough that might not make its way to you soon enough. Besides, after publishing a flippant review of his novella Chimera Lucida, we owe him one. But that’s not the only reason to check out his WordPress site.

The Montreal Fiores is a collection of charmingly skewed recollections that take the reader everywhere from the sordid depths of Verdun to the West Island. They lovingly recreate the down-and-out, shoestring adventures of our quiet hero, a snarky intellectual with a penchant for the unexpected and at times ridiculous. Make no mistake, the Montreal Fiores are not about David Fiore, nor are they memoires proper. These are stories about Montreal, with its beautiful losers, and the threat of genius slipping through the cracks alongside the riffraff. Fiore is not an I but an eye, and a damned good one at that.

Anyone who’s visited the Faubourg will laugh at Le Fuckedbourg’s dry account of the wasteland that spans between Guy-Concordia and Atwater’s mecca for the pathetic and forlorn, and perhaps even shed a tear, depending on the sharpness of their nostalgia. Le charme discret de Madame Bourgeois is a bitter ode to slumlords everywhere, with its tenant wars and Régie du logement ending. Ever wonder about the kind of louts who read pornography in public? Red Planet Funnies has got a tale for you. Something for everyone indeed – this is the real underbelly of our claustrophobic little island. And I for one appreciate the gift of sampling it from a safe distance. We’re talking track marks, hell-holes, clowns, and hookers. Fiore has seen it all.

Anti-intellectuals and those overwhelmed by the cryptic verbosity of Chimera Lucida will be relieved to learn that The Montreal Fiores takes on a much more natural, candid voice. Fans of word-play and Fiore’s wit will be relieved to find healthy doses of it punctuating the oft acerbic tone. When it comes to sharp, punchy dialogue Fiore succeeds – “This is a conversation with balls!” – and the never boring witticisms hit the mark and reel you in for more.

Still, Fiore does at times lose sight of the uninitiated: Le Marquee du stade could be about the mating habits of the Yuktun for all I know, and every so often an establishment creeps in whose nature I can’t quite decipher. In an unusual way however, the flaws add to the charm, and make these stories all the more genuine and heart-felt. What better way to examine the undulations of weirdos and dead-beats than through the yarns of a tender critic? Get thee to the internet O- philiac, this is an endeavour with balls. Reviewed by Marianne Perron, 2009.

Unisex Love Poems

Angela Szczepaniak
DC Books, 2008

“Hit Me With More of Your Sour, Puss”

Angela Szczepaniak’s Unisex Love Poems files alphabetical suit against a whole host of typographical errors that sentence us to symptomatic reading, through typecast eyes. By hailing their audience from a number of sites that are just around the bend of contemporary cultural plausibility, Szczepaniak’s narratroopers get the drop on some of the most deeply entrenched fonts of folly on the phoneme farm we’re all so damned committed to.

This series of riposte cards from the edge re-cooks the cookbooks, restores manual control over the dating conventions and puts the [sic] in the forensics that govern our daily lives. Of course, Szczepaniak knows better than to waste her imagination on a world completely free of these (and other, itchier, twitchier) irritants. For better or worse, the dietary, romantic and juridical models that we’ve inherited are here to stay.

The situation, the author appears to be saying, calls for rash action–and that’s exactly what we get, when Slug of apartment 5d begins running a diagnostic check on the brailled blemishes (each one a perfect letter h) that have torsaded his torso. Assuming that something within the building is responsible for this calligraphic callousness, he leaves no dust mote unturned–and no door un-knocked. The neighbors prove singularly unsympathetic to his quest, but he does make one ally of sorts: Butterfingers–the woman in apt. 4f–whose gossamered glossolalia provides an interesting verbal analog for his dermatological condition.

Together, these two chart a possibly-unnavigable course across a sea of experiences composed of equal parts affliction and affection. The author salts their tale with an extraordinary array of textual urchins–shuffling in excerpts from his-and-hers Victorian advice tomes (suitable to any occasion–from a tea party to the End of Days), affable spiders (and their less charming bites), character-acted cartoons, carnal recipes (for the likes of “Stomach Butterflies,” “Honeycombed Heart” and “Tied Tongue”–each one handsomely illustrated) and a lively team of 3-inch tall lawyers (Spitz and Spatz), whose petal-to-your-mettle talk will absolutely floor you. This last pair actually brings a whole raft of other concerns in their wake–including a memorably absurd take on (or take-down of) Lockean possessive individualism. Their dynamic relationship also generates a welter of–what?–wisdom?–that might answer to the worst of the distress caused by the welts (upon Slug’s person and Butterfingers’ versin’) in question.

In fact, by the time you reach the end of Unisex Love Poems, your guess will be as good as mine as to whose story has been interpolated into whose. This inventive study of life in the imperfect tense and the beatifics of bickering will chuff that kind of guff right out of your mush. You’ll be too busy preparing for that big date in court. Bring flowers. You never know whom they might impress. Guest review by David Fiore, 2009.

The Mechanical Bird

Asa Boxer
Signal Editions, 2007

Asa Boxer’s award winning The Mechanical Bird plays with the inconsistency of appearance and reality, poking beneath the surface of the world to get to where truth bends, and imagination starts. His poems rely heavily on imagery as well as imagination, and their success is in the writer’s ability to transform ordinary objects and words into enchanted ones.

The book opens with one of the most vivid poems in the collection, The Map. Here Boxer explores beauty and whimsy in the folding pages of a map, teasing our desire to situate our surroundings, and explore unknown paths simultaneously. The language and imagery is playful, and coaxes the reader into the traveler’s imagination – “Each turn and fold makes an origami creature of the world” – we see each delicate shape unfold as the lyrical arrangement and shuffling of words create a film-like progression in the mind’s eye. The endless possibilities of the world are captured gracefully here through the permutations of the map. And the reader, along with the traveler, retrains his eyes and prepares himself for the journey that is to come.

In the following poems animals and inanimate objects are stirred into a dreamy, enchanted existence where their interactions and nuances bring charm to the poetic voice. Boxer dedicates pages to drawing out the dream world of a polar bear and cat, attaching philosophical pondering to things like the slowness of a turtles gait, and using the language of love to describe a lamb being swallowed by a snake. In Maledicta, he curses animals, people, nature, and, finally, the universe for the misery and destruction brought upon the earth, interesting, as the curses only serve to sentence the world to more harm. In one good line he humorously curses the lovers, that they may “have more children than they can afford”.

Less whimsical and more serious poems, such as Terror in Jerusalem, and In Hitler’s Holy Land, prove that Boxer can move away from lighter material and offer something profound in his turn. This, however, is not always a strength. Take for example, Amad. A piece that comments on class and injustice, it builds on the idea of stardom in the cinematic sense – an unreachable universe for a man of low rank. The poet sympathizes with Amad, destined to a life of menial labor, despite his movie star looks. Unfortunately, the tone of this poem veers into the zone dominated by televised UNICEF adverts and Sunday school teachers. We know the effect he’s going for quite well, and even the least jaded readers are likely to feel their strings being manipulated. To top it off, the poem culminates in a series of rhetorical questions, including a very big one about love. I’d like to say it’s an interesting concept, but mostly it just reminds me of the pseudo-humanitarian lot I went to CEGEP with. Such subject matter must be handled with utmost care!

In short, Boxer’s writing is strongest when it sheds its sobriety and dips into the enchanted world so many of his characters dwell in. When the playful and the free-spirited come out, the poet loosens his tongue, straps on his thinking cap, and takes the reader for a ride. At such moments one discovers delight in the darndest of corners: the clockwork heart of a chugging train, a supermarket lobster in his tank, a little white lie. Reviewed by Marianne Perron, 2009.

Chimera Lucida

David Fiore

David Fiore’s Chimera Lucida is published by iUniverse, a service for writers that will publish and print almost anything. I think it’s wonderful that writers now can bypass the publishing house gateway and move their work straight from the computer to the reader. Hence the broken financial model of print is no barrier to writers, and absolutely terrible pieces of work are available right next to unknown and amazing ones.

Make no mistake, Chimera Lucida (“A Technodiegetic Romance”) is viscerally dire. I am sure some people will find it funny; they are the ones who talk too much at literary criticism seminars. It is bad in a way only the highly educated can achieve; there is so much word play it takes a puzzle solving mind to figure out what even happens. Not much does: somewhere near page one the main character dies, and the remainder stalks a web forum in which the participants, modeled on the most obnoxious people you have ever met at a party full of “subversive” graduate students, talk about it. They also talk about themselves. Endlessly. Which is an incredible achievement given that the whole ordeal, double-spaced, comes to less than eighty pages.

This book has an amazing cover. On it, one falcon, with a bleeding rabbit carcass in its talon, is being attacked, while flying upside-down, by another falcon. Nothing like this happens inside the book, so maybe it is some kind of metaphor. Who cares. It is an amazing cover.

I know this is crossing the line, but I’m going to wonder out loud why the author chose to format this for print. It follows a web forum. He could have put it online as a web forum. But I’m just the reviewer, it’s none of my business.

Listen, if you know David Fiore, you should buy this book. It’s just nine bucks; I mean, it’s less than the price of a pitcher of beer, and if you know David Fiore, maybe he’s bought you a drink or given you some cigarettes or talked you down from some emotional meltdown at some point in your university days together. I don’t know, maybe you don’t even like him. But come on, you aren’t going to miss the nine dollars, and maybe his next work will be better. Guest review by Patrick Edwards-Daugherty, 2009.

Kaspar

Diane Obomsawin
Drawn & Quarterly, 2009

Kaspar tells the tale of Kasper Hauser, the 19th century wonder who baffled society when he mysteriously appeared in the streets of Nuremberg without language or identity. A sealed letter reveals what little there is to know about the young man, who is taken in and enters the world as a curio to be analyzed and pondered.

In this version, graphic artist Obomsawin bases her interpretation on the actual writings of Kaspar Hauser, and from there creates a story of innocence lost, despite the skepticism and controversy that continue to surround his life and death. The novel takes a childlike and simple tone, most probably influenced by the way Hauser portrayed his own story. What results is a character subject to the whims and wills of the people around him, to whom he owes both his painful fall and the bittersweet pleasures it brings.

Reading Kaspar one is charmed by his appreciation of nature and his tendency towards poetic thought. The appeal of such a foundling, and the philosophical and humanistic implications of his unique condition, are presented here anew for a world unfazed by tall tales. Unaware of contrary accounts of the story of Kaspar Hauser, the reader is amused and intrigued. How can what he claims possibly be true? And yet, the pure and at times infantile way that Hauser views the world coaxes one into believing.

Obomsawin does a terrific job of ignoring public opinion and recreating the fable as Hauser would have had the world believe. Whatever her reasons, she proves that such a story, real or ruse, has the ability to charm and if nothing else, entertain. Kaspar tells of the suffering and joy of a man coming into the world for the first time: earnest and unadorned, it captures the novelty and wonder that such an unusual experience brings, and hovers delightfully over the rim of “what if”. Reviewed by Marianne Perron, 2009.

Exit Wounds

Rutu Modan (translation by Noah Stollman)
Drawn & Quarterly, 2008

Exit Wounds is the first full-length graphic novel by Rutu Modan, and it’s gotten lots of attention. Set in modern-day Tel Aviv, it tells the story of Koby, a young taxi driver contacted by a woman concerning the disappearance of his father. Faced with the possibility of his father’s death during a recent suicide bombing, Koby is moved to confront years of anger and disappointment while reluctantly assisting Numi in a search for answers to the mystery.

What at first seems like an open-and-shut case grows into a scavenger hunt for clues, as Koby and Numi follow the trail of the man they thought they knew (or, in Koby’s case, thought he didn’t know). What they discover leads to more disappointment, and unexpectedly brings them closer together. Both are haunted, however, by their inability to offer forgiveness for the pain they’ve suffered.

Artistically, Modan’s work finds the perfect balance between simplicity and complexity, creating depth without resorting to sentimentality, and depicting the horrors of life in Israel without emotional manipulation. Reading praise for Exit Wounds, one is repeatedly primed to encounter subtlety and nuance, and those are indeed Modan’s strengths. There are no fireworks or symphonies in this work. Instead Modan quietly works towards a picture of deterioration and sadness, and tells a story of deep-rooted anger and stubbornness in the face of forgiveness. Reviewed by Marianne Perron, 2009.

Penny Dreadful

Shannon Stewart
Signal Editions, 2008

In Penny Dreadful Shannon Stewart dives head-first into the world of the lurid and dark. We’re talking the real grime and grit: pig-farms, prostitution, sex, and violence are the fabric of inspiration in this horror show. Stewart takes the story of serial killer Robert Pickton and his victims, women from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, and spins it into a collection of poems that captivate just as much as they disturb. Using the story of the missing women and gaining inspiration from our fascination with all things sensational, Stewart pumps out poems that are at once perceptive and vulgar, tough as nails, yet heart-breakingly vulnerable.

Tabloid fodder fuels the book’s headline-influenced titles, and the freaky and bizarre seep into even the most innocent lines. Much of the book’s punch comes from Stewart’s ironic rendering of the gruesome as mundane, and her daringness to package the disappearance of so many women as quotidian. What results is a commentary on our ability to absorb the abnormal, how quick we are to dismiss.

Lots of things go missing every day:
keys, watches, teeth, sunglasses.

The women in Penny Dreadful turn up everywhere: on pig farms, in the speaker’s house, the ice cream shop, far away cities, exotic spas. They taunt the reader with their sexuality, rearrange households, hold relay races, form communities. And always they are strutting, putting themselves on display, selling themselves. The women in this book are not delicate creatures, they are tough and independent, yet they turn up dead, victims of animalistic violence. In one poem entrails, bones, and blood are transformed into perfume, lipstick, and shampoo. There’s something eerie about the way that Stewart plays with femininity and death in these poems, and how close we feel the speaker is to these women, like they have invaded more than her house. Equally unsettling is the interaction between female, male, and animal, continuing the age-old struggle between power, sex, and violence.

Where a man
meets a woman,
bone and blood
will out themselves –

Aside from the Robert Pickton case, Penny Dreadful uses the surreal, and even the grotesque, to comment on the contemporary world, and hold up a fragment of what ails us. Although it is the poems’ crude subjects that make them humorous and smart, these very same ideas, when pushed to extremes, make the writing difficult to sit through. Stewart’s cleverness is lost at moments when her message becomes too forceful. Her tone sometimes teeters over into the register of voices we’ve all heard before: a five-part exploration of pejoratives comes off as more than slightly Riot Grrrl, and in Bête Noire the speaker sprouts a tail and slowly metamorphoses into a furry rodent. If Stewart tends, at times, to tread the beaten path, she more than makes up for it with her darkly humorous scenarios, and wild imagination. Reviewed by Marianne Perron, 2009. Purchase

Chase and Haven

Michael Blouin
Coach House Books, 2008

Chase and Haven is a nonlinear narrative that jags from one fragile moment to another, trying to assemble an image of broken childhood within its dark constellation. Together, the fragments tell the story of siblings wedged together by a sad and violent childhood. Modeling his novel after the patterns of human memory, Blouin moves the story from character to character, spanning undefined periods of time, as he visits and revisits different moments in the lives of Chase and Haven and those that ripple around them.

Growing up in a trailer in small town Ontario, Chase and Haven tiptoe around the moods of their abusive father, an angry drunk whose rages are unpredictable and fierce. The intuitive Haven does everything within her power to protect her younger brother, hiding food, finishing his homework, and trying to keep him out of their father’s path. The novel cuts from the dismal details of childhood, to the children’s escape, and moves forward into an equally somber adulthood, haunted by the past, and far from free of misery.

The novel offers little respite from this somber tone. Even the peaceful moments are tinged with the melancholy film that hangs over everything: finding solitude in an empty closet, Haven unconsciously digs a hole into the plaster wall; an older Chase watches his lover sleeping and contemplates how he will leave her. Violence is everywhere in the novel, from bloody beatings at their father’s mercy, and accidents with knives, to a surprising and gory end. Blouin works hard to maximize the violence in unexpected places; grown-up Haven studies to become a doctor and the book is peppered with the gruesome imagery of corpses she is made to examine as a student.

Blouin assembles a dark and compelling novel that strives to attain something greater than other tales of neglect and abuse. By weaving between childhood and adulthood he hints at the bitter tinge that taints a life forever. By avoiding linearity he mimics the way memory builds around the layering of painful instances. The result is that the mystery of plot is stripped away and the reader is able to absorb every moment as it passes. Yet, while it is the narrative style that separates the book from similar novels, this choice at times seems like its very undoing.

Chase and Haven is separated into three sections that organize  events into mornings, days, and nights. Within these sections are smaller divisions, sometimes pages, sometimes a single paragraph long. The shorter bits tend to get lost within the longer episodes. Often, individual paragraphs are more disorienting than illuminating, particularly the less coherent ones. The novel has bouts of stream of consciousness that are at odds with the established style. Often repetitive, these bouts distract from the more cohesive moments. At other times, however, the writing is strong, lean. It is then that the short sections are effective, and communicate just enough to send a shiver down the reader’s spine.

The overall effect of Chase and Haven is that the reader roots for the children even though they seem sadly doomed, holds their breath when the father’s rage is roused, and wonders just how cruel one man can be. Of course we know the answer is much crueler than what we witness within these pages, but that doesn’t stop Blouin’s writing from being poignant and raw. Reviewed by Marianne Perron, 2009. Purchase.

.

Palilalia

Jeffery Donaldson
McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008

“Palilalia is disordered speech. According to the Oxford English dictionary, this lesser known vocal tic is ‘an involuntary repetition of words, phrases, or sentences.’”

Defined on the back cover, Palilalia sets the tone for a particular type of wordplay, one where the reader is dragged into a repetitious patterning of language and imagery. If you expect Donaldson’s poetry to skip like a broken record, however, you’ll soon discover how wrong you are. Donaldson works inside the grooves of sound, and manages to avoid redundancy while letting the beats catch just enough to create layers of meaning.

Crafting his poems with utmost care, Donaldson puts down words with a sophisticated precision, creating complex patterns that must be explicated with equal care. Repetition does, in fact, play an important role in his work; the astute reader will notice words, images, and concepts reappear ever so subtly throughout the collection. These repetitions are anything but involuntary, as we learn from the poet himself.

In Museum the poet is visited by the ghost of – is that Northrop Frye? – while waiting for a subway in a darkened tunnel. The apparition comes to shed some light on the poetic process, urging the perfectionist to loosen his necktie and let the “metaphoric roughage” loosen his output. Here we learn of his Touretter’s tics, creating mental hiccups the poet struggles to withhold, lest they disturb the precision of his stanzas. Instead the tics manifest themselves in the obsessive distribution of sounds and words, all the anguish worked out in the brain rather than on the page. One wonders what the effect of such loosening would be on the final product: would Donaldson’s verse take on the effusive rambling of Whitman’s were he to mimic his barbaric yawp?

In Palilalia, the title poem, Donaldson weaves a pattern of repetition into the structure, reusing language from the second and last lines of a preceding stanza in the first and third of the next. The effect is a braided inversion that picks up the inheritance of the Touretter’s son, and echoes the obsessions of the father:

“those unruly tongue-clucks, snorts, and growls.
The unfinished poem you circle towards
is the obsessive’s curse: revise, revise
always until the listening stills. Let your mind rest.”

Palilalia is more than an exploration of sound. Divided into four sections, the book breathes new life into familiar topics such as death, sexuality, and memory. Despite this, the poet’s strength lies in his ability to examine less explored material with sensitivity, as he does beautifully in Ultra Sound, Life-Guard and Four Echoes, and Cashew. And while the writing has a tendency towards density, his stylistic control over the page lessons this effect. Overall, this is a book to be enjoyed, and a success hopefully to be repeated. Reviewed by Marianne Perron, 2009. Purchase

The Other Sister

Lola Lemire Tostevin
Inanna Publications, 2008

At 97, Julia Brannon, still feisty and independent, moves into the Evenholme retirement home in compliance with the wishes of her daughter and granddaughter. Forced to acknowledge her advancement in years, Julia begins a journal of her past as a gift to her family. In this journal she records her relationship with Sissa, her identical twin Jane, as they come of age, are courted, and eventually grow apart. Aside from this exploration of her own history, Julia befriends Lena, another identical twin haunted by her suffering at Auschwitz and the consequential loss of her sister, and Daniel, a retired mathematician. Through these new friendships Julia is able to overcome some old prejudices, therefore deepening her compassion even at such an old age.

The Other Sister has all the necessary ingredients for a successful end-of-life novel – an old cynic given reason to examine and recount her past, a tender romance between two people old enough not to have expectations, a progressive granddaughter with whom the protagonist can exchange banter, a valuable lesson learned late in life, and so on. The execution, however, could have been stronger.

The narrative alternates between third person omniscient and first person for Julia’s journal entries, in an attempt to bring intimacy to some of the story’s larger themes. The entries, however, focus on very selective parts of the twins’ lives, providing a pat illustration of these themes and rendering them more than slightly sentimental in the grand scheme of things. They do little to illuminate the nuances of this particular relationship, and leave the imagination wanting.

In addition to this, the banter and exchanges between Julia and her family quickly become predictable, and her experiences at Evenholme fail to strike a nerve. Instead you have a novel hoping to communicate several large ideas about generational gaps, anti-Semitism, and sibling rivalry, and trying to tie them together through a gimmick: the flashback. Add to this a slightly ambiguous genealogy that launches a surprise attack on the unsuspecting reader, with a wholly unjustified plot twist in the last stretch. True, everything gets tied together rather neatly in the final chapters, but the result is less than satisfying. What we have here is a book trying to go out with a big bang, but succeeding only in creating a cacophony of little moments. Reviewed by Marianne Perron, 2009. Purchase