Tag Archives: John Madera

Review of Rikki Ducornet’s Netsuke

Posted on July 26, 2011 | Leave a comment

Check out my review of Rikki Ducornet’s Netsuke in the latest issue of American Book Review, alongside reviews by Gabriel Blackwell and John Domini. Here’s an excerpt of my review:

Rikki Ducornet’s Netsuke, where allusions to a panoply of gods and monsters abound, where some characters are, at times, avatars of those divinities, gives lie to the idea that intertextuality etiolates a narrative, chokes it beneath so much classical or whatever drapery, peoples it with cardboard cutouts for characters, relegating it into a facsimile of something far superior; these references serving, instead, as enriching threads woven within hefty narrative weft. Carefully limning the interstices between obsession, rage, desire, truth, and intimacy, as well as attentively traversing the planes of same, Netsuke castigates a life, and perhaps our society as a whole, in which Eros has gone awry, while also offering a cri de coeur against dubious psychiatric palliatives.

My Review of Ted Pelton’s Bartleby, the Sportscaster

Posted on March 20, 2011 | Leave a comment

Check out my review of Ted Pelton’s Bartleby, the Sportscaster in Rain Taxi: Review of Books, Spring 2011 Print Edition. Here’s an excerpt:

While Bartleby, the Sportscaster is certainly faithful to the plot of Melville’s novella, Pelton seamlessly replaces the office drudgery with the somewhat carnivalesque atmosphere of a dumpy baseball stadium, rounded off with a hemorrhaging team. And Pelton distinctively includes some comical elements, like the surprising way Bartleby’s refusals serve as a catalyst for the narrator’s creativity and self-actualization, however short-lived. It also offers a far more overt meditation on depression…

My Review of Bradford Morrow’s The Diviner’s Tale

Posted on February 22, 2011 | Leave a comment

Check out my review of Bradford Morrow’s The Diviner’s Tale, an ensorcelling novel limning memory’s many mysteries. Here’s an excerpt of my review:
When you think of it, your past is like your shadow, and your shadow, whether it’s following you or running ahead, away from you, is, nevertheless, attached. Bradford Morrow’s The Diviner’s Tale is as much an exploration of the interstices between fantasy and reality—that space where those two zones collide, no, overlap: the place Morrow describes as the “realm for which there were no logical words”—as it is a flashlight on one flawed but resilient woman’s road to independence. Morrow charts the ways in which that woman’s shadowy past, whether dragging from behind or nagging before her, must be addressed, while realizing that though the addressing may not result in triumph over the past, it may lead to a kind of reconciliation with it. The Diviner’s Tale seems like a response to Robert Graves’s admonition in “Sick Love” to “Walk between dark and dark—a shining space / With the grave’s narrowness, though not its peace.”

My Review of Robert Steiner’s Negative Space

Posted on February 10, 2011 | 2 comments

Check out my review of Robert Steiner’s Negative Space, a poignant portrait of one man’s emotional disintegration, at Rain Taxi: Review of Books, Online Edition: Winter 2010/2011. Here’s an excerpt:
Negative Space is a portrait of paralysis, a study of stasis, an analysis of the anguish felt by the abandoned. Though the prose is, like the narrator’s postmortem, interminable, it’s still pleasurable, forcing us to follow its twists and turns toward some kind of understanding about what may ultimately be incomprehensible and irresolvable. Taking its title from a term in the artist’s lexicon, which defines the space around and between an image’s subject, the novella explores the space surrounding betrayal, that space moving in and out of focus, often becoming the primary focus, as if it were a version of Rubin’s vase, that famous optical illusion where the vase is supplanted by two faces staring at each other. In fact, this book might have been subtitled “Toward a Syntax of Figure-Ground Reversal,” to be placed on the shelf alongside Steiner’s critical work, Toward a Grammar of Abstraction.