Blake Bailey. Cheever: A Life. Knopf. March 2009.
Blake Bailey, ed. John Cheever: Collected Stories and Other Writings. (Library of America, No. 188.) Library of America. March 2009.
Blake Bailey, ed. John Cheever: Complete Novels. (Library of America, No. 189.) Library of America. March 2009.

What happened is that it continued to decline. In the lurching stock market of literary fame, John Cheever’s has been fading for decades. “Who is reading him now?” the New York Times asked recently—in the course of an article on the television show “Desperate Housewives.” Times media critic David Carr refers almost apologetically in his recent memoir to having been born “into a John Cheever novel… a suburban idyll where any mayhem was hidden,” using the allusion as shorthand for the unremarkable and banal. This God- and sin-haunted man and the writing he produced so meticulously over the course of a half-century have come to stand, in our collective literary consciousness, for dullness, complacency, and an utter lack of relevance.

There are reasons for this. Many aspects of Cheever’s work—the domesticity, recurrently Christian vernacular, and near-complete absence of nonwhite actors—sound quaint to the contemporary ear. On a deeper level, the whole tradition of lyrical realism, of which Cheever, along with John Updike, is the quintessential postwar avatar, has increasingly come to be regarded as metaphysically suspect. In a thoughtful New York Review of Books essay, the novelist Zadie Smith recently wondered if a form where “even the mini-traumas of a middle-class life are given the high lyrical treatment” has exhausted itself. Smith sees lyrical realism at an “anxiety crossroads where a community in recent crisis—the Anglo-American liberal middle class—meets a literary form [the novel] in long-term crisis.” This is not a favorable climate for a writer whose primary audience was readers of the New Yorker, who celebrated his Yankee seafaring lineage, and who held, to the end of his days, an abiding faith in the power of traditional narrative.

This spring’s double-barreled canonization—Blake Bailey’s Cheever: A Life, firmly in the contemporary blow-by-blow biographical style, plus two volumes of Cheever ensconced in the Library of America—at least allows us finally to pose the question: Was Cheever great?
(more…)

Unstoppable: Joyce Carol Oates’s “Dear Husband,” (Ecco, $24.99) is savage, poetic and ruthless. Oates deals with characters and themes she has often covered before — violent men, desperate women, lives scarred by alcohol and poverty — but her touch has never been surer, her insights never more piercing. At least one of these stories (”Landfill”) can break your heart, and several of the others, astonishingly, are among the best things she’s ever done. Oates’s naysayers, who are legion, will someday come to accept that we are witnessing the steady unfolding of one of the towering careers in American letters.

New Kid: Wells Tower’s debut collection has generated effulgent praise, which is puzzling. “Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned” (Farrar Straus Giroux, $24) is moderately engaging, but in the end there’s not a lot here: some light, but not much heat. Tower has a hipster’s weakness for the showily offbeat; his characters come at their lives from odd angles, as if shyly proud of their eccentricities. If this book, with its mixture of the deadpan and the earnest, the ironic and the whimsical, were somehow to emerge from a time capsule, future generations would have an anthropologically perfect example of American fiction of the 2000s subgenre Quirky Young Misfit.

Across the Sea: “The Thing Around Your Neck” (Knopf, $24.95) is the third book from acclaimed Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who deploys her calm, descriptive prose to portray women in Nigeria and America who are forced to match their wits against threats ranging from marauding guerrillas to microwave ovens. Within its somewhat narrow range — the men are all feckless brutes, the women invariably resourceful and spunky — these stories are haunting. The devastating final piece, “The Headstrong Historian,” seems to carry the whole history of a continent in its bones: tragic, defiant, revelatory.

Love Slav: Reviewers find it difficult to resist comparing Aleksandar Hemon to Nabokov, since both men are expatriates whose preternatural facility in their second, acquired language seems shadowed by the ghostly overtones of their first. The stories in “Love and Obstacles” (Riverhead, $25.95) are intricate and droll, with tricky narrative rhythms that only occasionally stumble over self-consciously literary language. Like Adichie, Hemon gets well-earned mileage out of the reliable trope of the foreigner encountering the excesses of American culture. His narrative inventiveness and the sardonic twist of his humor set this collection above the crowd.

Weird Science: Kevin Wilson’s fiction feels like the work of a species entirely distinct from Aleksandar Hemon. For Slavic soul, substitute Southern anomie; in place of elegant continental modernism, put scattershot pop-culture mash-ups. Hemon writes characters who hate college football and cheeseburgers; Wilson depicts a puppy-love homosexual relationship that plays out within the mayhem of the video game “Mortal Kombat.” “Tunneling to the Center of the Earth” (Ecco/HarperPerennial; paperback, $13.99) gets under your skin, though; Wilson’s little time-bomb fables have a surrealist zip, like miniature Magritte paintings come to life.

Same Bright Lights: For a quarter-century now, Jay McInerney has been telling fundamentally the same story: Innocent newcomer to the neon jungle gains the world — or at least a book contract, a bespoke suit and a gorgeous girlfriend — only to lose his soul. “How It Ended” (Knopf, $25.95) presents a dozen amusing but ultimately self-indulgent variations on that theme. The short story is perhaps not the best display case for McInerney’s gifts. His characters need narrative time for their world-weary carapaces to crack, revealing hidden depths and vulnerabilities; in the shorter format, their sardonic defense mechanisms come across as shallow and bitchy.

Downtown: Mary Gaitskill’s career hits a speed bump with “Don’t Cry” (Pantheon, $23.95), the oddly subdued follow-up to her breakout novel, “Veronica.” These new stories sport a fillip of the surreal and a dash of riot-girl sass, but the prose feels simultaneously vague and fussed-over, in that portentous MFA-workshop way. The narratives, which often depict damaged or unhappy women bumping up against indifference or cruelty, seem unfocused and tired; at least two feature long descriptions of dream sequences, a sure sign of authorial laziness.

Uptown: If Mary Gaitskill is your impossibly cool older sister who wears black and smokes unfiltered cigarettes, then Caitlin Macy is your stylish and wildly popular younger sister who just drove off with the homecoming king. Macy’s fiction is all reader-friendly surfaces and sheen, and “Spoiled” (Random House, $24) comprises nine chronicles of preppy women gone off the rails. The ruthless acuity of Macy’s social observations puts “Spoiled” a notch — a slender notch, mind you — above those books with pink covers and martini glasses. Most telling sentence: “The woman quoted amicably that oft-repeated epigram about nannies in New York, that the good ones always got passed along.” Oh, right, that oft-repeated epigram.

From The Washington Post (July 8, 2009)

What ever happened to the American Man? You know, the one who bullied and swore and drank his way through novels full of cigarette smoke, big cars and red meat? The one who’d abandon his family for a prostitute, or coerce his girlfriend into a threesome, or sleep with the housekeeper after murdering his wife? What happened to all those Rabbits and Portnoys and Rojacks and Wapshots and Herzogs? And does anyone really miss them?

Judging from a sampling of recent male-penned fiction, the answer is no, not really. The five short novels at hand suggest that men want to be bad boys, kind of, but they can’t quite get there. They’re too comfortable, and they like women too much, to be engaged in all that operatic despair.

The closest thing to a Hemingway hero in this bunch is Sheriff Lucian Wing, the embattled lawman in Castle Freeman Jr.’s “All That I Have” (Steerforth; paperback, $13.95). When a Vermont state trooper finds a naked man tied to a tree, for Wing it’s the beginning of a run of knotty problems with his mercurial wife, intransigent underlings and Russian mobsters. Wing steers by the advice he was given by his aging mentor, which is 50 percent judicious wisdom and 50 percent cornpone gibberish. Freeman endows his leading man with a likable calm, though, and keeps the action moving crisply along, making “All That I Have” an estimable sequel to his first novel “Go With Me” (2007).

In “Nothing but a Smile” (Pantheon, $24.95), Steve Amick’s jaunty romp through World War II-era Chicago, Wink Dutton spends most of his time trying not to feel foolish as he struggles to keep up with Sal Chesterton. She’s the wife of his army buddy who’s still stationed abroad, but she’s keeping the home fires warm by producing homemade pinup photos starring herself. Discharged from the service for a minor wound, Wink finds himself living down the hall from her and helping her make those salacious pictures. Amick’s tone is PG-13-dirty and cotton-candy light; he seems to consider a woman who profits cannily from pornography an avatar of feminism — admittedly a far cry from the Hefner approach.

Compared to these two, Kieran Sweeney has it easy; all this guy has to do is stay out of the way while Kitty, his feisty fiancee, dispenses with a troublesome pig, an officious absentee landlord and a pair of 200-year-old ghosts, all of whom, the reader senses immediately, are badly overmatched. The plot in Joseph Caldwell’s “The Pig Comes to Dinner” (Delphinium, $22.99) — the second volume in his porcine trilogy — is a rickety armature of cheerful nonsense about spirits, seers and castles, frightfully bonny and twee and Irish. Caldwell’s arch Wodehousian tone comes off as either hilarious or wearing; either way, it speeds by.

The adult lost boy in Patrick Somerville’s marvelous debut, “The Cradle” (Little, Brown, $21.99) starts out beholden to his pregnant wife’s obdurate demand that he retrieve a long-lost cradle. On this dubious premise Somerville builds a road narrative that gradually accumulates the mythic echoes and dreamlike inevitability of allegory. Matt’s search for the cradle takes on a picaresque nobility; he’s like a blue-collar Odysseus, crisscrossing the Midwest in his quest to return home to his Penelope. What gives “The Cradle” its potent emotional resonance, however, is the way Somerville’s prose calmly, relentlessly pulls at the Gothic skein of family tragedies that lurks behind the peeling paint and sagging porches, where a sense of inherited sin settles like a thick fog.

Which brings us to a tale told by a schizophrenic teenager, John Wray’s dizzyingly seductive “Lowboy” (Farrar Straus Giroux, $25). Wray’s protagonist is on the lam from a mental institution, loose among the commuters and winos and rolling thunder of the Manhattan subway. Making your central character deeply insane is, of course, a risky and ambitious trick, but Wray carries it off with a fluid, inventive style that rises at times to a frightening pitch. Lowboy is an amplified hero for our times; despite his violence and craziness and incoherence, he is fundamentally sweet and in search of love.

All of these protagonists are men in a curiously post-feminist way. They’re defined not by a thrusting, swaggering, consuming ego-force, but by resilience and loyalty, by a hard-earned sense of limitations and boundaries. We’ve come a long way, baby.

From The Washington Post (April 29, 2009)

It was always hard not to be secretly a little annoyed at the late John Updike for being . . . well, so good at everything. The famous novels aside, memoir, travel reportage, children’s literature, humor, literary criticism and essays on everything from Renaissance painting to Boston Red Sox great Ted Williams poured from his typewriter.

Despite seven previous collections of verse, dating back to 1958, he was perhaps least known for his poetry. “Endpoint and Other Poems” may change that.

The slender volume, rushed to publication by Updike’s longtime publisher, Knopf, is an accomplished if slightly schizophrenic affair. The title sequence, a series of linked poems written in the months leading up to his January death from cancer, is as measured and poignant as any verse in recent memory.

The language is beautifully cadenced, displaying the same feel for the music of words that made his prose so distinctive and memorable.

Death is “a pin-sized prick of light winked out,” while the poet’s memories “in their jiggled scope collide / to form more sacred windows.” The ugliness of aging, of hospitals and CAT scans and bedside visits is transformed by the rhythms of Updike’s verse and the keenness of his observations. He made even dying sound stylish.

The other sections of the book include charming but basically slight meditations and sonnets on such mundane subjects as television, plane travel, baseball, and, er, a bathroom act that my father still refers to using a basketball metaphor. These are fun, in limited doses.

On a scale of difficulty, with 1 being your average limerick and 10 being “The Faerie Queen,” these poems check in at a friendly 5. Updike’s strong suit as a writer was always the precision of his observations; a line describing the tentative light of early spring as “just trying brightness out” or a “fabled velvet death-black sky / salted with stars” sticks bracingly in the mind.

Some minor objections remain. ” Endpoint” has a cleaning-out-the-drawer feel to it, with the sublime side by side with the silly. The shorter pieces, as amusing as they are, carry a whiff of the self-satisfied cleverness that detractors of The New Yorker magazine claim is the house style.

Traces of Updike’s flaws linger underneath the keen intelligence and virtuoso wordplay. He was a bit of a male chauvinist, to be sure, and his basic stance on life and society was fundamentally reactionary. His attitudes were molded by the 1950s - a decade vividly recalled here in light-handed elegies for Frankie Laine and Doris Day. And while his curiosity never abated, an elderly fussiness peeps around the edges of some of the poems.

All that aside, ” Endpoint” serves as a worthy if faintly anticlimactic coda to a towering career in American literature. As an epigraph to one of the poems, Updike has taken a line from a letter that his editor William Maxwell wrote to him: “Please go on being yourself.”

That he did, right up until the end. We readers are the richer for it.

From The Cleveland Plain Dealer (April 20, 2009)

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

D
(The Armory, July 2008)

Cake is a smart, speedy little bomb of noir fiction by a writer whose nom de plume is simply “D.” This slim novella is the latest offering from a new “street-lit” imprint called The Armory, from edgy Brooklyn house Akashic, and if you detect a whiff of coded language in the term “street-lit,” then you won’t be surprised to find that Cake is the unapologetic story of a young black drug dealer and a week in his violent world.

The anonymous narrator has fled to Atlanta after a murderous drug deal gone wrong flushes him out of Brooklyn, and despite half-hearted efforts to go straight, he inevitably gets caught up in the same hustle. When the narrator’s bungling cousin skips town, he is left holding the bag on a small-time drug operation that quickly escalates into a gang war. The maneuvering of the rival factions is relatively conventional crime-thriller stuff, but D’s descriptions of the atmosphere — the hopped-up cars, strip clubs, seedy apartments and motel parking lots — are quick and vivid. The dialogue sounds, to a bookish middle-class white man at least, authentically clipped and slangy. When the book accelerates toward its violent denouement and a final, jarring twist, there is no denying that D has mastered the tightly plotted structure of the genre.

The only criticism one could make of this mayhem-filled book is that, paradoxically, it perhaps doesn’t go quite far enough into the darkness at its heart. For all his badass hip-hop bravado, D retains an old-fashioned Raymond Chandler sense of character: he is very careful to preserve the moral center of his hero, who gets involved against his better judgment out of loyalty, and who never kills unless he has to. It would be hard to say for sure, but I suspect that a true gangster would be ugly on the inside and out, and no better than his surroundings. Whether this represents a failure of fictional nerve is hard to say. What we can say is that Cake updates the crime thriller with juice and grit to spare.

From The L Magazine (October 15-21, 2008)

Paul Auster
(Henry Holt, August 2008)

In Paul Auster’s inventive new novel Man in the Dark, an aging writer named August Brill narrates stories over the course of a single long night to keep his mind off a devastating series of recent family tragedies; near dawn, his granddaughter joins him for an intimate pre-dawn conversation. In the hands of a less gifted writer this would be barely a short story, yet upon this slender armature Auster hangs a tale that incorporates magic realism, science fiction, Kierkegaardian dread, postmodern metafiction, and a burning evocation of the terrors and dislocations of war.

The strongest part of the book is the story-within-a-story that the insomnia-wracked Brill makes up on the fly, a Vonnegutian whopper about a man who is transplanted to a parallel reality where the United States is mired in a brutal civil war. The crabwise relation between story and creator—a familiar theme for Auster, beautifully handled here—invests the episode with a dreamlike anti-logic that recalls Flann O’Brien. The adventures of Brill’s creation (tellingly, a magician named Brick) tap the primal power of one of the most enduring scenarios in science fiction: that of the outsider suddenly transplanted to an alien world. Brick’s bizarre experience in this alternate America mirrors the strangeness of post-9/11 life without slopping over into the didactic or obvious: Auster leaves the reader to register his own emotional response to this peculiar fable. Unfortunately, Brill grows tired of his jeu d’esprit and abruptly truncates it, returning to the obsessive plumbing of his grief.

When Brill is joined near the end of his restless night by his granddaughter Katya, equally shattered and adrift, he relates the story of his courtship and long marriage to his recently deceased wife in a sustained gulp of anguished reminiscence. Katya responds with some deep secrets of her own, and despite some tinny dialogue (“Why is life so horrible, Grandpa?” “Because it is, that’s all. It just is.”), the cross-generational connection between these two damaged souls is both odd and touching. Man in the Dark’s sole glimpse of surcease comes in the halting reassurances the two offer each other.

Although Auster’s prose is precise and burnished, at the heart of August Brill’s meditations lies a self-absorption and petulance that eventually feels weary and circular. Brill’s mind is a claustrophobic place, and no amount of mental games and allusions can fully open it up—readers can be forgiven if they occasionally wish that the guy would just fall asleep, already. More to the point, the horrific tragedies he has endured do not necessarily make his pain feel earned, and Auster’s inclusion of several unrelated vignettes of catastrophe, riot, and war feels like piling on. Still, this somber, elegant book, rife with nuances and subtle echoes, crisscrosses the line between memory and loss, reaches for the profound, and very nearly finds it.

From Rain Taxi, Fall 2008, Volume 13, No. 3

Louis P. Masur
(Bloomsbury, April 2008)

I had never seen the photograph that is the subject of Louis Masur’s The Soiling of Old Glory: the Story of a Photograph That Shocked America, but I recognized it immediately, viscerally, on some unconscious level. Boston: that photo was taken in Boston. Although I moved there some fifteen years after Stanley Forman’s Pulitzer-winning photograph put an indelible face on the fury and racism of the anti-busing riots, I felt that it was part of my inheritance, part of the air that pooled, fog-like, in hot summer nights of my adopted, and adoptive, hometown.

I knew people in South Boston, where, Masur quotes Forman as saying, “I was shit.” Not well; but an Irish family-owned press printed the jackets for the books my company published. I would go down there, and we would stand on the press floor, looking at proofs, and then they would take me for drinks in places where the sense of shared community was palpable. They were honest, kind, patient. They weren’t racists. They didn’t go around beating unarmed black lawyers with flagpoles. You can say I was naïve; I was. The men I drank with in Southie might have known Joseph Rakes, the flag-wielding image of bigotry run amok.

Louis Masur understands this. The Soiling of Old Glory is a good book, scattered and over reaching at times, but genuinely nuanced about Boston’s messy history, and legitimately insightful about the nature of mass-disseminated visual imagery, its power to shape perceptions and change lives. Its power to make us see, and to remember.

From The Brooklyn Rail (April 2008)

Chris Martin
(Copper Canyon, 2007)

With this lively debut collection Chris Martin establishes himself as a young poet with an arresting voice. American Music is a series of light-stepping meditations on city life that manage to be both profound and playful, with an unpretentious freshness that sets it apart from the usual hipster-in-the-city banalities.

Like all true New Yorkers, Martin comes from somewhere else — in his case, Colorado Springs by way of St. Paul — and like many before him, he finds New York City a fecund source of inspiration and wonder. Martin’s most immediately identifiable literary predecessor would be the Frank O’Hara of the City Poems era. As in O’Hara, the narrative content of the poems is aggressively unremarkable: the poet is saddened by the animals during a visit to the zoo, distracted by interloping teenagers during a Chelsea gallery jaunt, and excited by pretty girls, it seems, almost everywhere — but it is Martin’s unlikely perceptions and inventive language, the effortless leap from the specific detail to the universal truth, that transcends the quotidian details. On the subway “every winking turn traps / You into thinking that life / Is a meticulous plot dimly allotted / To you alone”; a wrong number “Has not stopped / Me from feeling a consequent / Note among many.” The blur of happenstance and sensory overkill becomes the raw material of verse.

Stylistically, the author has found a form that is both distinctive and austere, as all the poems consist of fourteen to twenty-six unrhymed tercets, ending with a single long line. It’s a good armature, simple and flexible: the tercets are rhythmically supple, and the closing line, as with a sonnet, gives each poem a pleasing note of finality or of questioning. It takes admirable discipline for the author to stick with this one form for the duration of a full-length book, but such restraint gives the verse an organic transparency — an uncluttered directness of expression — and the volume benefits from its smooth uniformity of form and internal consistency.

The true appeal of these poems is located in the way the observation of gritty realities can serve as a springboard for abstract and metaphyscial considerations that would not be out of place in the work of Wallace Stevens. In “I Am No Proprioceptivist,” for example, the sight of a man pissing into a trash can leads the poet to contemplate how “to be a thing / That is, that organizes other / Things into its own harmony / Or discord…” Martin has a well-tuned ear and a sprightly wit, and the poems’ compactness and conversational vernacular allow them to wear their philosophical underpinnings and occasionally slightly-daft speculations very lightly indeed. American Music is a superior piece of writing, and Chris Martin is a welcome addition to the ever-expanding roster of contemporary poets.

From Rain Taxi (Vol. 13 No. 1 Spring 2008)