James Boice Scribner
(Scribner Book Company, 2008)

James Boice’s novel NoVA is a harsh, beautiful worm’s-eye view of a contemporary America in the process of slow collapse, and possibly the best — the most fully realized, inventive and emotionally plangent — novel to appear in the last five years. Boice, who is only 26, combines an astonishing capacity for empathetic imagination with the ruthless eye of a documentarian, and he nails his consumer-glutted suburban wasteland and its deadening banality with complete authority.

NoVA — the acronym stands for Northern Virginia — opens with the suicide of a troubled teen named Grayson Donald, who hangs himself from the rim of a playground basketball hoop late one night. Boice sidesteps the potential cliché of this setup by eschewing a straightforward narrative in favor of a widening circle of alternating narrators, where Grayson’s mental deterioration becomes one thread in a kaleidoscopic tapestry of lives utterly drained of meaning by affluence, boredom, pornography, video games, fast food and mall culture. The perspectives of the other characters, including Grayson’s retired military father, his schoolteacher mother, a pair of their smug boomer neighbors and a thuggish teen slacker, are all conveyed through canny use of the free indirect style, that most slippery of narrative techniques. The only off note in this symphony of voices comes from the author’s attempt at inhabiting the lives of a group of itinerant Salvadoran gang members, whose cameo-like rampage feels both misplaced and superfluous. There is no need to import violence and despair into James Boice’s Centreville.

The author’s Wolfean eye for sociological detail, his unerring understanding of cars, music, clothing, prices, brands — all the endless crud and flash of contemporary American consumerism — is more than just picture-making or contextual authenticity. Writers from Flaubert to John Updike have understood that a fulgent style wedded to sordid subject matter is a basic version of the aesthetic experience; almost nowhere in recent fiction does this experience receive as forceful an expression as in NoVA. This profane, caustic, despairing book transforms its subject matter through the sheer dogged accuracy of its impressions and the beauty of its language. Look around you, it seems to say; you may not like what you see, but it can’t be denied.

From The L Magazine (March 4-17, 2009)

Daphne Gottlieb
(Soft Skull Press, 2008)

San Francisco-based performance poet Daphne Gottlieb is one of the most innovative voices in American poetry today, having carved out a space for herself out on the distant intersection of avant-garde verse, feminist theory, and popular culture. Her latest volume, Kissing Dead Girls, is another gleeful, high-speed smear of mordant humor, historical mash-up, and feral exploration of bodies, hearts, fluids, emotions, and scars. If in total the book is less startling and focused than Final Girl, her award-winning 2003 collection, it is because here Gottlieb is expanding her themes and experimenting with a broader set of poetic forms.

The poems in Kissing Dead Girls can be divided into two basic categories, the first being blunt chunks of prose poetry that often hang on a surrealist turn—a (what?) woman who thinks her clothes have memories (”carry-on”), a woman who, bored, replaces the moon in the night sky with her heart (”waxing”). These poems achieve varying levels of emotional impact; the intellectual reversal sometimes feels gimmicky rather than radically epiphanic, and one can’t help but feel that they benefit from Gottlieb’s renowned performance delivery, having at times the curiously lifeless rhythm that slam poetry can effect on the page.

The true brilliance of Kissing Dead Girls, and the source of its power, lies in the second category of poems, where Gottlieb’s penchant for engineering shocking juxtapositions comes into its own. With these poems she advances structures that are often either conflationary (alternating found voices, as in the scathing abortion poem “roe parasites”) or syncretic (combining two or more found narratives side-by-side, as in “our lady of the other,” which balances text from Julie Kristeva and Harriet Beecher Stowe). The effect is brilliant, troubling, and often funny: in forcing drastically different narratives together, Gottlieb has created a genre-bending synthesis all her own. Her sources—the appropriated voices and re-contextualized quotations—are the engine of the poetry, because she takes from a grab bag of cultural detritus high (Whitman, Stein, Orwell, Shaw) and low (pornography, tabloid headlines, The Exorcist, Marilyn Monroe, JonBenet Ramsay, crime shows) and swirls them around in a raucous vortex.

No one does this kind of verbal collage as inventively as Gottlieb. In fact, with the possible exception of Olena Kalytiak Davis, another poet of violent conjunction, no one I can think of does it at all, which marks Gottlieb’s achievement as a unique advancement. As recently as 2003 the critic Elisabeth A. Frost, in her book The Feminist Avant-Garde in American Poetry, could decry “the predominant models of identity politics on one hand and ‘feminine writing’ on the other—the two theoretical models that have dominated discussions of feminist poetics in the United States,” noting that the crippling “emphasis on personal voice—and the relatively transparent language that often accompanies it—supports an unspoken assumption that linguistic experimentation has little relevance to feminist writing.” Daphne Gottlieb’s revenants, “freshly dead and ready for love,” may have highly personal voices, but their language is hardly transparent, and all the more jolting and urgent for it. Gottlieb wills herself to be the lover of all these dead women, famous and obscure, and the force of her desire is both unnerving and invigorating.

From Zoland Poetry