America, then as later, was a sanitarium for every kind of statistic. We took care of them. We tried to understand them. We did what we could to make them well. Numbers were important because whatever fears we might have had concerning the shattering of our minds were largely dispelled by the satisfaction of knowing precisely how we were being driven mad, at what decibel rating, what mach-ratio, what force of aerodynamic drag. So there was a transferred madness, a doubling, between the numbers themselves and those who made them and cared for them.  We needed them badly; there is no arguing that point. With numbers we were able to conceal doubt. Numbers rendered the present day endurable, heralded the impressive excesses of the future and stocked with a fine deceptive configuration our memories, such as they were, of the past. We were all natural scientists. War or peace, we thrived on the body-count.

*The generations had to be not only racially untampered with but free of adultery too. “God bless the pure and holy” indeed. That was their purity. That was their holiness. That was the deal Zechariah had made during his humming prayer. It wasn’t God’s brow to be feared. It was his own, their own. Is that why “Be the Furrow of His Brow” drove them crazy? But the bargain must have been broken or changed, because there were only seven now. By whom? The Morgans, probably. They ran everything, controlled everything. What new bargain had the twins struck? Did they really believe that no one died in Ruby? Suddenly Pat thought she knew all of it. Unadulterated and unadulteried in 8-rock blood held its magic as long as it resided in Ruby. That was their recipe. That was their deal. For immortality.

*A selection marked by the previous owner of my copy of the book.

Gang of familiar of people in the Wigleaf Top Fiddy. Enjoy your Sunday.

• Cezarija Abartis
• Jen Knox
• John Minichillo
• John Minichillo
• Meg Pokrass
• Andrew Roe
• Angi Becker Stevens
• Nicolle Elizabeth
• Kristen Iskandrian

Reviewed by Adam Tavel
2010 C&R Press
74 pages, paperback

Much like Gary Soto and Larry Levis, David Dominguez is a child of California’s schizophrenia: urban and pastoral, bountiful and barren, Mexican and American are just a few of the wondrous dualities that have helped the nation’s most populous state carve its place in our collective imagination. This complex Californian identity is at the very heart of The Ghost of César Chávez, Dominguez’s lush and expansive second collection, as its plainspoken narratives cast the poet’s beloved landscape as an evasive muse in a quest for ancestry and belonging. While The Ghost of César Chávez suffers from discursiveness in its weakest moments, it remains a compelling catalog of one fierce heart’s search for the sublime, rendering its chief subjects—work, heritage, gardening, and the tenacious majesty of love—with candor, precision, and verve.

Dominguez’s voice is an earthy, rugged one, but his preference for straightforward syntax and diction belies his cinematic imagery and emotional integrity. We see this in poems like “Domestic,” “Empty Lot,” and “Money at the End of the Month,” all of which are rooted in that most universal of questions: how do we make, and keep, that precious thing called home? The Ghost of César Chávez is also refreshingly moral, at times adamantly so, when it tackles the stark realities of race and class in poems such as “Reading” and “Greeting His Fold,” both of which are among the book’s finest moments.

It would be easy to label The Ghost of César Chávez a political book—especially in light of the collection’s long title poem, which serves as its opener—but such a tidy classification would overlook Dominguez’s subtler effects, particularly in his shorter odes and love poems, where the sensuality of Neruda and Lorca is palpable. For all of its quietude, “Leaving Sanger” is a touching representation of Dominguez’s gifts for imagery and slant rhyme, and ultimately personalizes the political so both registers achieve greater resonance:

At night, my wife and I open the French doors,
slip into bed, and let the maple trees saturate the room.
Once, as the balcony filled with stars,
my beloved told me about her day:
how she saw a vixen and its kits reaching into a fig,
eat until plump, and skitter down a fence post,
and when the troop was safe,
the mother stared at my wife, its pupils warm in the light.
I can’t say, “We won’t miss it here,”
but the ranch will never be ours,
something my tenant heart forgets
when bullfrogs in the swamp begin croaking—
the rise and fall of a song soothing
as crickets grinding their legs under the leaves.

For all of these reasons and more, The Ghost of César Chávez is a vivid, unabashed chronicling of one imagination’s panoramic sweep. If you missed this collection in 2010, are new to C&R Press, or both, you no longer have an excuse.

In the radio booth they’re talking about the crowd. Looks like thirty-five thousand and how do you figure it. When you think about the textured histories of the teams and the faith and passion of the fans and the way these forces are entwined citywide, and when you think about the game itself, live-or-die, the third game in a three-game playoff, and you say the names Giants and Dodgers, and you calculate the way the players hate each other openly, and you recall the kind of year this has turned out to be, the pennant race that has brought the city to a strangulated rapture, an end-shudder requiring a German loanword to put across the mingling of pleasure and dread and suspense, and when you think about the blood loyalty, this is what they’re saying in the booth–the love-of-team that runs across the boroughs and through the snuggled suburbs and out into the apple counties and the raw north, then how do you explain twenty thousand empty seats?

Dan Chaon’s latest story collection, Stay Awake, has been described as “superbly disquieting” (New York Times), presenting “…the intricate, dark corners of grief….” (San Francisco Chronicle).

Michael Schaub of NPR Books said in his review, “… Chaon has a rare gift for creating characters who are complex, unique and real, and he depicts the weight and strain of their trauma with sensitivity, authenticity and, sometimes, terror.”

The stories in this collection were written over a span of a decade but the connections are strong and clear. What was it about these nightmare tales that kept you coming back to write more?

I knew early on that I eventually wanted to publish a collection of ghost stories. I came up with the idea after I published “The Bees” in 2003, and so every once in a while I’d try my hand at a piece, in between working on a novel.

But honestly, I didn’t realize how strong the connections were until I sat down to put all the stories together and see if I had enough for a collection. Then I was actually a bit alarmed to notice how many repetitions and recurring images there were—wow, I thought, I sure am obsessive!

My first instinct was to change the details to make these echoes less noticeable. Then, after thinking about it, I began to like the idea that they had a kind of déjà vu quality, that they were forming and reforming around the same knot of feeling. In the end, as I was revising the collection, I ended up adding even more of these echoes and connections from story to story. The final story, “The Farm, The Gold, The Lily-White Hands,” contains elements of all the previous stories –it’s like a mash-up of everything I was thinking about over the course of writing these. As a former DJ, this made me really happy.

In several of the stories you use the image of someone (a wife or paramedic or nurse, always a woman) leaning over and examining one of your uneasy dreamers. It made me uneasy every time, made me think of night hags and succubi. Is this what you had in mind?

The sinister, vampiric quality was certainly one aspect I had in mind. But I was also thinking of the flip side, too: the image of a mother hovering over a sleeping child, or a kind person caring for you when you are ill and helpless, or a lover kissing you just as you are about to drift off to sleep. This is one of those images (see above) that I’ve found myself returning to over and over, probably because it seems so full of contradictory emotions—dread and comfort seemingly coexisting, Janus-headed, flipping back and forth. I guess that’s what a succubus does best, right?

A common thread in these stories is consciousness fractured by grief and loss. The ability to make sense of life disintegrates. Language and communication disintegrate. Is the possibility of losing language something that gives you bad dreams?

It’s not so much a horror of losing language as of finding oneself in a place where there is no language for what you’re experiencing, a place where language is utterly inadequate. That’s what grief is like in a lot of ways, I think. When my wife Sheila died, I lost a whole part of the world—a whole complex net of memories and associations and conversations that were unique to our relationship, and that can’t ever be replaced, or even explained to someone else. I think it’s not unlike what people experience when they have a major stroke. A piece of your brain, yourself, has gone blank.

In several of the stories, particularly “Patrick Lane, Flabbergasted,” it’s not at all clear where the story is coming from and where it’s going. Something’s happening and you don’t know what it is. Did you approach these stories (or did they approach you) from an unusual direction?

In “Patrick Lane”—and a number of other stories—I was interested in trying to describe the experience of the uncanny, that thing that you feel but can’t put your finger on, that sense of something existing behind or above ordinary reality, that moment when you have a presentiment that something is wrong, terribly wrong.

So the stories are often an accumulation of moments that don’t lead to real epiphanies or conclusions, but only take the characters on a journey into a place that they can’t ever turn back from. Edward P. Jones says that a story is about a change, large or small, in the life of a character, and I think the scariest thing is when you intuit that something has changed, but you’re not sure what it is. I think of the ending of the Raymond Carver story, “Fat.” “My life is going to change,” the narrator says. “I can feel it.” Yikes!

A couple of years ago when we spoke about your novel, Await Your Reply, you mentioned that in that case, landscapes came to you before plot. There is a much more tentative sense of place in this collection. Did you deliberately keep the stories unanchored?

And speaking of novels vs. stories, which is your favorite child these days?

I’m surprised to hear you say that you didn’t notice landscape as much here, because it was certainly on my mind. A couple of stories—“Patrick Lane, Flabbergasted” and “I Wake Up” are very much about the Cleveland milieu; “Shepherdess” draws very specifically on my own experience in an emergency room in Los Angeles; and “Take This Brother, May It Serve You Well,” was originally simply a love/hate letter to Portland, Oregon. I do think the landscapes that I write about have changed over the years, but I still feel like most of these stories have, in my mind at least, strong landscape images behind them.

As far as having a favorite child—the short story has always been my first love. It’s just that I need that sugar daddy of the novel to pay the bills.

“The Farm, The Gold, The Lily-White Hands” immediately took a spot on my personal list of best ghost stories ever. Fascinating in terms of structure and in its meandering point of view–hypnotic, mysterious in so many ways. Actually physically spine-tingling for me at one point! How did this story develop and was it as breathtaking to write as it is to read?

I’m so glad that you liked the story, because it’s one of my favorites, too. It’s funny, because the story actually started out as a game I was playing with my students for Halloween one year. I told them I was going to write twelve ghost stories, one for each student in the class. And I wrote these twelve little vignettes…then found that I really liked some of the pieces…then began to play with them and make them more and more interconnected. The final piece doesn’t resemble the original very much, but the form remains the same: tiny stories, like an ensemble film, which slowly intertwine. It was super fun to write, and it’s my favorite of the pieces in the book.

Story after story you keep on turning the screw. But there are times when a grotesque sense of humour surfaces. This moment of macabre hilarity in “Stay Awake” stood out for me:

“After the head was removed, would they bury it?” he wondered vaguely. “Would it require a headstone?”

How do you see the role of humor in horror?

Humor and horror are different sides of the same coin. For example, Road Runner cartoons are only funny if you don’t identify with Wile E. Coyote. I was always aware that the grim situations I was writing about had their funny side, and there are some stories in the collection that I thought of as straight-up humorous, like “Long Delayed, Always Expected,” and “Slowly We Open Our Eyes,” and “Shepherdess.”

Reviewers often mention how bleak the stories are, but its humor that has kept me going. Even if it’s gallows humor.

I admired Cormac McCarthy’s apocalyptic novel, The Road, but I think there are a few things he got wrong. I think the end of the world will include a lot of great jokes. And singing. Laughter and music are probably the last human thing that will be taken away from us.

Please tell us a little about “Dreaming Awake” the course you’ll be teaching at the Indiana University Writers’ Conference this June.

I’m running a workshop that is going to be an exploration of the daydreaming process. We’re going to be practicing ways in which we naturally imagine and create narratives—and how that can lead to creating short stories and novels and other kinds of art.

Thanks for your time, Dan and thanks for the stories!

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Dan Chaon can be found online here, he also tweets @Danchaon.
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Carol Reid is a contributing editor for Emprise Review.

Artistically Declined Press, 2011
126 pages
Reviewed by j/j hastain

As someone who rabidly composes and reads mixed-genre works it is often the case that I can only open a book of “prose” or “stories” and read a small portion of it before I begin to get distracted or frustrated. I admit that I am a stimulus junkie and the usual pace of more traditional prose or story-based works is hard for me to stay in.

However, Roxane Gay’s Ayiti, coming out in traditional-ish sentences, is far from traditional prose or story. Rich/rife(?) with octane eroses and griefs, Roxane’s book is an acidic opera. I call Ayiti opera because of the way/s that it employs and embodies content not as linear drive through a lengthy span of pages (as is often the case with more traditional narrative) but poetically—rendering these valleys of sensation and collapse that force a reader into new ways of gauging its content—that force us into new ways to gauge its content as that content moves into our bodies. Ayiti is content that stays inside.

If a reader were to pick up this book as a “book of prose” or a “book of stories” and bring along with them all aspects of what those terms traditionally and historically mean, they might be met with deluges of sensation they were not exactly expecting. I am stricken to stay in Gay’s Ayiti because there is so much in it that I am not sure about (un-resolvable) while simultaneously there is so much within it that makes me somatically sure.

The following is some of what I feel unsure about in Ayiti: are the many gorgeous scenes in this book premeditated? Meaning (due to my fondness of how Ayiti works as a sensation-inducer), how was this book actually composed? How much of it relates to the writer’s own life? How much of it is imagined? How relevant is that question if this is not a memoir? How much of the stories are created from feeling / desire vs actual event? I am interested in asking these kinds of questions because the meta-works within the whole book have incredible stamina. They don’t stymie. They build and they enliven.

The somatic sureness I mention comes from the way that Gay’s gorgeous phrases almost combust in on themselves, exploding initial sensation into a thing that might make weeping—I am saying I kept grunting and moaning out loud (which means truth?) as I came into contact with these shapes of phrase that are almost sensory-ly an eternity / infinity sign: “He was always overcome with the vague feeling he had seen her somewhere before while she was overcome with the precise knowledge that he was the man of her dreams” [] “the stone path to his front door was lined with the tears and soiled panties of the women [he] had sexed then scorned” / “My mother recalls how her mother wailed, her voice pitched sharp and thin, cutting everything around her. In the front yard of their modest home, a large coconut tree fell, its wide trunk split neatly in half. The fallen fruit rotted instantly” / “She took river mud into her hands, eating it, enduring the thick, bitter taste”[] “she drank the memories in that water” [] “we chew on our pride. The dirt we do not eat.”

Now to include the eroses: “[He] will find comfort in the arms of a woman who is not his wife. He will go home with her and in the darkness, as he cups her breasts with his hands, and listens to her breathing against him, as he presses his lips against her neck, and shoulder, then licks the salt from her skin, he will imagine she tastes like home” / “I think about his teeth on my neck and the weight of his body pressing me into our bed. Sex is one of the few pleasures we have left” / “He sinks his teeth deeper into me and I can no longer see the fine line between pain and pleasure” / “He gently rolls me onto my stomach and kneels behind me, removing my panties as he kisses the small of my back. His hands crawl along my spine and again I can feel their wisdom as he takes an excruciating amount of time to explore my body. I arch towards him as I feel his lips against the backs of my thighs and one of his knees parting my legs. I try and look back at him but he nudges my head forward and enters me in one swift motion. I inhale sharply, shuddering a moan trapped in my throat. [He] begins moving against me, moving deeper and deeper inside me and before I give myself over, I realize that the sheets are torn between my fingers and I am crying”—these luscious and non-abbreviated sensation-hubs feel to me like prurient rooms where necessary but usually not-so-obviously-elucidated erotic grafts are taking place. These are the details of bodies accruing themselves along a stratum of need and it is the ways that these phrases (indications of the bodies) feel indelible to human existence and experience that makes them locate me so rooted-ly in Ayiti. I see my own need to be bound in them. Here I get the gift of seeing that the bondages that I need to experience both mirror and contrast the particular binderies of others.

Then to the griefs: “I make so many promises I cannot promise to keep” / “When he was inside her, she thought her heart might stop it seized so painfully” / “They followed us for weeks until a white man went missing and my story no longer mattered” / “I hung up because he was lying and he didn’t know it” / “There is no time for anything tender” / “My grandmother ended up in the river. She found a shallow place. She tried to hold her breath while she hid [] there was a moment when she laid on her back, and submerged herself until her entire body was covered by water, until her pores were suffused with it”—the shapes and phrases of the griefs (I omitted so many that I had written in my notebook for sheer consideration of length of review) strike. In Ayiti there are inter-cultural violences (via soldiers slaughtering cane workers), there are cross-cultural violences (via kidnapping and rape of an American woman in Haiti), there is information about the anguish of cross-cultural pressures to appropriate to American norms and standards (“HBO”), there is class and racial violence between American men and the Haitian women that they pay to belittle via sexual force / encounter behind boulders on empty beaches.

Perhaps it is a quality of genius to make the embodied realms of eros and grief less and less delineate-able (oh threnody!): “A popular lullaby from her country, about a mother with thirteen children. The mother kills one child to feed twelve, so and forth until she is left with one child, whom she also slaughters. Finally, she returns to the middle of a cornfield where she slaughtered the other children, and slits her own throat because she cannot bear the burden of having done what needed to be done” / “He ate her food. He shared her bed touched her body with his soldier hands; he filled her and frightened her and she felt something she didn’t understand” / “The warmth of her body, the way she welcomed him inside her, the taste of her skin were all things he would walk away from” / “She ran out onto the street, threw her hands in the air, stared into the incandescent sun. She cried as the light spread over her. A joyful sound vibrated from her throat, through her mouth and into the city around her”—Gay has made Ayiti an incandescent vividity–a place where forms are forced into varying states of subversion because they are in the life that subsumes them–because they are not transcending via leaving but instead via deeply living that life.

Zora Neale Hurtson dug into the cultural histories of the Zombi(e) in Haiti (see the return of Felicia Felix-Mentor after her death and burial at age 29) and in that digging found scientific grounding (and not just imagination or ceremonial relevance) for the case of zombi(e)s. Or Zombi(e)s as partial animates which are under the control of the “bokor.” How sharply you mirror many of the characters in Ayiti. Characters with no systemic privilege (context) from which to compose resolutions to the trials and griefs of their lives (“we will never have enough money to leave here”). Or Zombi(e)s as partial animates without their own will. How sharply you contrast many of the characters in Ayiti. Characters who have nothing but their own will to push themselves along the stratum and evolution that they find themselves by way of. A grandmother and her lover drag themselves across the desert scape—fingers entwined—unable to stand for fear of being slaughtered. They will themselves forward until for a moment, entwined, they rest together in a church.

In reading Ayiti I am reminded of the miraculous migratory flood of a certain genus of Monarch butterfly that cross unimaginable distance from Canada to Angangueo, Michoacan, Mexico. The distance they cover is seen by many theorists as an “impossible” progression yet they continue to fly it, regardless. This is volition that makes continuance is asymptotic evolving–is the “reaching for something that could never be reached” but against all odds, continues
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to be reached.
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j/j hastain is the author of several cross-genre books including long past the presence of common (Say it with Stones Press) and trans-genre book libertine monk (Scrambler Press). j/j has poetry, prose, reviews, articles, mini-essays and mixed genre work published in many places online and in print.

• The poet’s desperation is the outlaw’s desperation. The only difference is a loaded gun.
• To advance one’s reputation by attacking those who have already fallen out of favor—as Rexroth did with Jeffers—or by savaging the aesthetics of a bygone milieu—as Woolf did with Dickens—is to open fire on a white flag.
• Resentments are inevitable, but making enemies is avoidable.
• Division is not an ethos.
• The delay between acceptance and publication is just long enough for a poet to doubt what she’s written.
• Letting graduate students run a university-funded magazine by themselves is to subsidize a tree-house club.
• A poem should not be a commodity.
• The moment a poem is published it becomes a commodity.
• A book of poems is the most tragicomic of commodities.
• To praise or condemn conceptual work for its length, grandeur, or myopia is to merely describe the mode and skirt the poems at hand.
• It’s always easier to skirt the poems at hand.
• One hypothesizes that future generations will justly condemn much of our contemporary verse for being falsely haunted. The first lesson of Hamlet is ghosts demand our blood.
• Arrogance is a necessary ingredient.
• The worst thing that can happen to a young poet is ego validation.
• The best thing that can happen to a young poet is passive underestimation.
• The best starve.

Helen Vendler on metapoetry:

In the code language of criticism when a poem is said to be about poetry the word “poetry” is often used to mean: how people construct an intelligibility out of the randomness they experience; how people choose what they love; how people integrate loss and gain; how they distort experience by wish and dream; how they perceive and consolidate flashes of harmony; how they (to end a list otherwise endless) achieve what Keats called a “Soul or Intelligence destined to possess the sense of Identity.”

Emprise is devoting a section of the next issue to metapoetry and we’re eager to see what the indie lit scene has to offer in the sub-genre. Contemplations, musings, etc. on the craft–the creative process in bringing poetry to the page, what you have to say in that regard. We’re looking forward to finding out.

If submitting metapoetry:

• Please mark it as such in the title field.
• Please keep metapoetry submissions separate from other submissions.
• Five poem maximum per submission.

Note: We are still accepting general poetry submissions.

Examples of metapoetry:

Paradoxes and Oxymorons

by John Ashbery

This poem is concerned with language on a very plain level.
Look at it talking to you. You look out a window
Or pretend to fidget. You have it but you don’t have it.
You miss it, it misses you. You miss each other.

The poem is sad because it wants to be yours, and cannot.
What’s a plain level? It is that and other things,
Bringing a system of them into play. Play?
Well, actually, yes, but I consider play to be

A deeper outside thing, a dreamed role-pattern,
As in the division of grace these long August days
Without proof. Open-ended. And before you know
It gets lost in the steam and chatter of typewriters.

It has been played once more. I think you exist only
To tease me into doing it, on your level, and then you aren’t there
Or have adopted a different attitude. And the poem.
Has set me softly down beside you. The poem is you.

A High Toned Old Christian Woman
by Wallace Stevens

Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame.
Take the moral law and make a nave of it
And from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus,
The conscience is converted into palms,
Like windy citherns hankering for hymns.
We agree in principle. That’s clear. But take
The opposing law and make a peristyle,
And from the peristyle project a masque
Beyond the planets. Thus, our bawdiness,
Unpurged by epitaph, indulged at last,
Is equally converted into palms,
Squiggling like saxophones. And palm for palm,
Madame, we are where we began. Allow,
Therefore, that in the planetary scene
Your disaffected flagellants, well-stuffed,
Smacking their muzzy bellies in parade,
Proud of such novelties of the sublime,
Such tink and tank and tunk-a-tunk-tunk,
May, merely may, madame, whip from themselves
A jovial hullabaloo among the spheres.
This will make widows wince. But fictive things
Wink as they will. Wink most when widows wince.