The Winter 2010 issue of The Chapbook Review is now live! It features interviews with Aaron Burch, Mike Heppner, and Catherine Kasper by, respectively, J.A. Tyler, Josh Maday, and John Dermot Woods, and reviews by Matt DeBenedictis, Anne C. Fowler, Steven Karl, Janey Smith, and J.A. Tyler.
You can read my introduction HERE, and find the current issue HERE.
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My review of Joanna Howard’s On the Winding Stair has been republished at Powell’s Books – Review-a-Day – American Reader #12. Hooray!
Here’s an excerpt of my review of Evenson’s latest book:
Brian Evenson’s work carefully navigates abundant, layered, cumulative sentences, sentences filled with recursive explorations, dynamic repetitions, and playful symmetries, with a kind of Spartan restraint on description and exposition, what Samuel Delany describes as “the stark economy of the tuned ear, the fixed eye.” There is nothing arbitrary in Evenson’s narratives, every detail is carefully chosen as if he were quietly building a bomb in some dark closet. This is not to say his stories are in any way mechanical but that every aspect works together so that it will explode in your hands at the intended time and place. And while the explicit potentialities are certainly interesting and gripping enough, it is the various subtexts, that is, the probing of murky psychologies, of spiraling contradictions, and its unresolved ends that keep me engaged.
Baby Leg, published in a limited edition by Tyrant Books, is another one of Evenson’s sinister nested boxes: Kraus, disturbed by nightmares of a woman who “clomped about on [an] adult-sized knee and [a] baby leg, wielding an axe,” finds himself locked within a game of Sisyphean proportions. Much like that unfortunate king, Kraus’s life here is on infinite repeat. But the repetitions, unsettling as they are, result in no greater insight, no greater awareness: Baby Leg’s circumference, like Finnegan’s Wake’s and Dhalgren’s famous loops, is one that never closes.
Check out my review of John Haskell’s Out of My Skin, one of the few books from last year I reviewed from the so-called major presses. Here’s an excerpt:
Out of My Skin is unquestionably brimming with metaphysical, epistemological, and psychological asides and glosses. It also overflows with humor of the deadpan, sardonic variety. It’s also a thoroughly engrossing love story, one that never lapses into sentimentality. And, while Haskell manages to get away with large doses of philosophical inquiry, he also convincingly allows the first-person narration to inexplicably, yet seamlessly, flow into an omniscient point of view. Just before walking into the patio where Jane, his lover, is, the narrator relates that “Jane thought to herself that the past is the past and the world does what it wants to do.” And later in the novel he goes into her mind for pages: “Jane is feeling a numbness in her mind, and because that numbness is spreading to her body, and because she wants to feel something other than numbness, she agrees to go.” This heightened awareness and these sudden moments of omniscience are never explained; but the narrator’s voice, governed by a slanted perception of things, is so convincingly drawn that the reader absorbs it with hardly a second thought.
JOHN MADERA—Writer, Editor, Publisher 