Fall 2005
LET IT RAIN COFFEE
by Angie Cruz
Simon & Schuster (2005) 304 pages, $23.00
ISBN: 0-7432-1203-7, FictionDon Chan Lee Colón reads three newspapers every day, cutting the headlines and piecing them together into paragraphs to form stories where the “real news” is revealed between the lines. He is one of the many characters given life in Angie Cruz’s second novel, Let it Rain Coffee, and like Don Chan, Cruz’s readers will find the substance of the novel “in between the words,” in the absence of what is left unsaid. Cruz’s sophomore effort is part family drama, part social commentary, and in the end, satisfying.
Let It Rain Coffee opens with the elderly Don Chan in his family home in the Dominican Republic: “The house sat in an abandoned landscape. Its faded rose-colored paint peeled off. The train stocked with cane stalks woke the lazy goats in the yard where they lay, as if to guard the aging couple who refused to leave Los Llanos.” After the death of his wife, Doña Caridad, Don Chan is too frail to remain in Los Llanos alone, so he moves to New York City to live with his son, Santo, and his daughter-in-law, Esperanza. As a younger man, Don Chan had been a political activist and led a resistance against the Trujillo government in the Dominican Republic. Santo disappointed Don Chan because he had married a woman with ties to the Trujillo government and lacked the political passion that fueled his father. Don Chan blames Esperanza for Santo’s tender side, but she is not to blame. Santo is a romantic, lured by music and women, not politics. When Don Chan arrives in New York, he brings the Dominican Republic with him, forcing Santo to remember his previous life before he immigrated to New York to drive a cab and live the life that his wife desired. While Don Chan regains the son he lost, Esperanza feels that she is losing Santo “to the island.” Don Chan represents everything that Esperanza fled. He is the Dominican Republic—politics and lazy afternoons.
The tension between Don Chan, Esperanza, and Santo is clear. When Don Chan moves in he causes Esperanza to examine her reality in Washington Heights. Esperanza longs for the life depicted on the television show Dallas. She watches Dallas reruns and styles her hair like Pam Ewing, names her children Dallas and Bobby, and imagines her own version of Southfork—the American dream. Santo works to save money for a house, but Esperanza scrimps and saves to buy designer clothing from questionable sources like neighbors and thieves. Eventually Esperanza loses control of her materialistic obsession, buying more, wanting more, and using charge cards that she cannot pay. She stashes the unpaid bills in a lingerie drawer before Santo can see them. “The more she bought, the more insatiable she became.” As the novel evolves, tragedy befalls the Colón family and Esperanza’s debt has consequences for which she is unprepared. As a result, her teenage children, Dallas and Bobby, are neglected, which leads to its own set of precarious events.
Although Don Chan and Esperanza are the more dominant characters of the novel, Cruz relies on many other points of view to tell the story of the Colón family. The narrative sweeps forward and backwards in time, providing historical background and allowing the reader to fully understand the lives and complexities of the characters. At times, there seems to be too many points of view, and just as you get involved with one character, you skip to the next. However, the occasionally disruptive narrative contrasts the characters and their situations to provide a fertile landscape for the novel.
The novel is not without its faults—some problems are too easily solved and the ending feels rushed. But these matters are forgivable for what could have been a didactic, dark novel proves to be one with humor and insight. By contrasting the Trujillo autocracy, Don Chan’s resistance, and Esperanza’s capitalistic lust, Cruz challenges our beliefs about our own society. You come to care for these characters because Cruz seems to know them and their situations so well. Her prose is lean, yet at times complex and rich. The voices of the characters are honest and distinct. Cruz’s novel may be imperfect, but we accept the flaws because Cruz’s effort and the Colón family are worthy of our attention.Victoria Moreland
SUCKERS
by Joseph Farley
Cynic Press (2004) 116 pages, $10
PoetryI was not familiar with the poetry of Joseph Farley, but with a title like Suckers, a publisher named Cynic Press and a cover sporting images of W.C. Fields, George W. Bush with a painted-on Hitler mustache and fish swimming in a circle, I expected a steady stream of irreverent humor and relentless lampooning of public figures in this collection. Instead, Farley delivers poems that are often dark and introspective, and to the extent they are critical, the criticism is usually directed inward or at mysterious characters known only to the author. At other times, the target is some social injustice or other, but the variety of poems and subject matter in this book is wide enough that no one label fits all.
The title poem refers to catfish fed/ under the waterfall/glued to the green/ stone dam as the fish scavenge the scum growing there. In the last stanza, we learn why: the rapids froth/ with detergent;/ the factories upstream/ look the other way. A point well made, and clear enough.
But the first part of the book in particular teems with short poems that seem to not have a point, or at least, not a point that the author makes us care about. For example, in “Circles,” a sparse poem of 33 words, Farley discloses that I never could stand/ for hours/ watching a toy train/ run in circles/ the way my father could; and in “Barges” (also 33 words), we learn that these vessels go across the water/ from the darkness/ into the fog. By this time, I was thinking the title referred to me, the sucker who accepted this assignment.
This book does have its treasures, though, and it is not afflicted with boring uniformity. In “January,” Farley introduces us to the urban decay that he, apparently, calls home: Sanitation trucks roll by while I wait/ for a street car./ A stray dog limps up to the newspaper box/ and crosses the street.// . . .I go to the obligatory job,/ and watch the dirty windows of the flower stores,/ diners and take-out joints blur/ with the stark faces/ of closed taverns and burnt out drug stores./ This is my America. A home of $10 blow jobs and multiple abortions,/ a land where the only decent people I know/ belong to A.A. or are atheists. At last, the cynicism we expected shows up. But watch how Farley turns this poem on his hope-filled sighting of a flock of seagulls: I would/ trade all my patched coats and dirty laundry/ . . .for one flight on the cold wind, to spiral and climb/ even as they do,/ and dip my wings once in greetings to the New World.
Someone probably told Farley he needed to get out more. So he went to China, and the series of poems about China tucked into this volume is outstanding. In “The Bamboo of the Mind,” he asks, Which grows stronger, straighter?/ The bamboo in the garden,/ or the bamboo of the mind?/ . . .Both have their seasons, and/ grow in the mind and body/ until the bamboo grows in the heart:// tall, straight, strong, unbending.
Equally worthy questions—the kind of questions theologians don’t ask—are raised in the delightful “Natural Theology”: What if Eve/ had handed Adam/ a turnip/ in the Garden?/ . . .What if God wore roller blades. . .?
So there is irreverent humor here, after all. There is more in “Penumbra,” which asks, What is the difference/ between kinky sex and perverted sex?/ Kinky sex is a feather;/ perverted sex is the whole duck.
Given the range of poems in this collection, there is something for almost everyone. Written in an accessible, conversational style, with spare imagery, these poems are thought provoking and at times, highly entertaining.Richard Allen Taylor
SECRET PLACES and Other Poems
by Brian Kenneth Swain
Self-Published (2004) 66 pages, $5
Poetry (Contact author at 2422 Netherwood Ct., Pearland, TX 77584.)Self-published poetry collections are seldom given the benefit of a critical review as it is usually assumed that, if the work did not win a prize or attract an offer of publication at the publisher’s expense, it probably is not worth the reviewer’s attention.
In actuality, winning or placing high in a poetry contest is such a crapshoot—often only one or two manuscripts out of several hundred actually get published—that it stands to reason that many worthy poetry collections go unpublished and unrecognized, unless the author takes matters into his own hands, or more to the point, his own pocketbook.
Secret Places by Brian Kenneth Swain is worth a look. This is a competent, well-balanced collection of free verse narrative poems that engage the reader in the author’s reflections on love, war, friendship, family, death and even Leonardo Da Vinci.
“To An Old Friend Across the Ocean” is a fine example of the “epistolary” (letter) poem, written in this case to a dead friend. The poet discloses that he has written several letters to his friend in the past that have gone unanswered, until one day he finds an envelope from your address/ but with my name/ written in an unfamiliar hand. He discovers that the letter is from The one who lived with you./ The one who knew no English./ The one who tolerated/ my bad German. The poem is written in plain but powerful words (as one might actually write such a letter) and, as psychotherapists will tell us, it is a healthy thing to write a letter to a dead friend, particularly if there was no opportunity to say good-bye.
The challenge in writing about one’s own problems is that it takes skill and good judgment to make the reader care about the author’s sorrow. The trick is to give the poem some punch but avoid being sappy and sentimental. Swain does it well with another epistolary poem, “My Friend Phillip,” which broaches the theme of suicide. How bad/ could things have been,/ that a family’s love/ could not assuage?// ...I was two hundred sixty one miles/ away.// ...I would have come./ You only had to call.// I would have come.
The author’s judgment is not as sharp in “Us. Talking and Walking.” As a breaking-up-is-hard-to-do piece, which most editors absolutely detest (they see so many of them), the poem has two strikes against it from the beginning. Yet, the poem starts out well enough, with two lovers strolling along a riverbank and talking through their problems. The poem has a good chance to succeed as long as it doesn’t end in a cliché—tears and moonlight, for example—but it ends with I reached out to wipe from your eye/ a single moonlit tear. Better to have one of the lovers jump into the river or be abducted by aliens! Spare us the tears and the moonlight. Even if that’s the way it actually happened, it’s still a cliché. This flaw is compounded by the fact that this poem is the first in the book. Introductory poems should be well crafted, representative of the poems in the collection, and should showcase the author’s originality. Poets beware: Get competent advice from a good poet or editor—someone who is not “emotionally attached” to any of your poems—regarding the selection of the introductory poem for your book.
A more original poem, by far, is one of my favorites in this collection, “Leonardo’s Lunchbox,” in which the author wryly speculates on the kind of midday meal the great philosopher, artist and inventor might have favored: I’m betting he was a/ bologna and cheese sort of fellow,/ no squishy formless egg salad/ for the master geometrician./ He would be drawn inexorably/ to the precisely circular/ slice of uniform pink meat.// ...[and] a hard boiled egg,/ whose shape would have pleased him,/ and whose yolk-ensconcing allegorical qualities/ would have satisfied/ his most philosophical yearnings.
Similarly appealing is the delightful “Gravity,” in which the poet declares, I remain stuck on this ball/ like a gnat on flypaper./ ...I sit,/ a prisoner of physics,/ bound tight as a stamp on a letter,/ centrifugal force be damned. Swain goes on to say that gravity . . .unerringly/ draws the buttered side of my toast/ to the linoleum. It is not simply that the poems about Leonardo and gravity are humorous, but these poems are original and contain some of Swain’s best imagery.
Secret Places has a few ragged edges, but overall this is a very enjoyable collection with a nice variety of poems about common if not universal themes.
Richard Allen Taylor
RADIANCE
by Barbara Crooker
Word Press (2005) 84 pages, $9
ISBN 1-932339-91-4, PoetryBarbara Crooker’s book of poetry Radiance is the winner of the Word Press First Book Prize and every poem included is, indeed, a winner. Crooker is a poet after my own heart—her love of language is obvious in her precise selection of each word; her passion for this life is palpable, and she refuses to turn away from its ugly underside, thereby saving her poems from any taint of sappiness. Instead, these poems ring with authentic, hard-earned joy.
Crooker has been published in numerous literary journals, including these pages. Her work has been nominated seventeen times for a Pushcart Prize and she has received numerous prizes including the W.B.Yeats Society of New York Award, the Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, three Pennsylvania Council on the Arts’ Creative Writing Fellowships and a prize from the NEA. She is the author of ten chapbooks.
Let me begin with the look of the book, which is lovely. The painting, Kaaterskill Falls, by Thomas Worthington Whittridge, graces the cover and sets the mood for the poems inside. When I first saw the book, I couldn’t wait to begin reading—I wanted to walk into that light.
This collection is divided into six parts with no more than ten poems per part. Crooker’s subjects include art, impressionism, the natural world, France, the problems and pleasures of long, married love, and autism. In “All That Is Glorious Around Us,” (the title of an exhibit on The Hudson River School) Crooker declares All that is glorious around us is not, for me, these grand vistas, sublime peaks/ but doing errands on a day/ of driving rain, staying dry inside the silver skin of the car/ 160,000 miles, still running just fine.
It is the common small pleasure that catches Crooker’s grateful eye, things such as sitting in a café warmed by steam from white chicken chili, or even the small rainbows of oil on the pavement/ where the last car to park has left its mark on the glistening/ street, this radiant world.
In “The Irrational Numbers of Longing, The Infinite Mathematics of Desire,” Crooker turns her attention to love. I want to relearn the language of plane geometry,/ the relationship of curves in space, the friction/ between positive and negative numbers, improper/ fractions, your lovely smooth surface, the angle/ of intersection, where we come together in the dark. The ‘relearning’ is what interests me most, knowing the ease with which long-term lovers can lose each other. Crooker approaches this dilemma several times throughout this collection. Each day we must learn/ again how to love, between morning’s quick coffee/ and evening’s slow return.
From married love to maternal love, Crooker also writes a couple very taut poems about her autistic son. Through brief glimpses into that strange world, we learn just a little about this mystifying condition. Sometimes, he stares through the mesh on a screen./ He loves things that are perforated:/ toilet paper, graham crackers, coupons/ in magazines, loves the order of the tiny holes,/ the way the boundaries are defined. And real life/ is messy and vague. He shrinks back to a stare,/ switches off his hearing. And my heart,/ not cleanly cut like a valentine, but irregular/ and many-chambered, expands and contracts,/ contracts and expands.
Though hard-pressed to select a favorite poem among these gems, “Happiness” would be one of my choices. Listen to the final lines: This is all there is: the red cherries, the green leaves/ sky like a pale silk dress, and the rise and fall/ of the sweet breeze. Sometimes, just what you have/ manages to be enough. How can one be alive and not fall in love with such a poet?Anne Barnhill
PERMANENT PARTY
by Michael Casey
March Street Press (2005) 32 pages, $9
PoetryIn this provocative chapbook, MPs at Missouri’s Ft. Leonard Wood during the Vietnam War prefigure the notorious keepers of military prisons in Iraq and Gitmo today. Jaded at best, sadistic at worst, the men described in Casey’s poems are on a “permanent party” from the war, where they are free to indulge their malicious sides.
When a prisoner, Mays, refuses to get out of bed, claiming that he’s praying, the guard, Lake, gets the pail filled with water / and drops it on the praying May’s face / I don’t mean just the water / I mean the pail. The book’s speaker witnesses these depredations and largely disapproves, although he sometimes sides with his fellow MPs as they confront recalcitrant captives.
When they’re not battling prisoners, the MPs battle each other. An MP from the South hates yankees / because some jayhawker / copped one of his family cows / a hundred years ago / or maybe it was a pig. South vs. North, noncom vs. officer, noncom vs. noncom, base vs. off-base, herein lies a microcosm of male conflict.
The speaker ultimately prevails over his predatory environment through a college education. Casey, a professor at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell, who doesn’t write poetry like a professor, makes clear education is the key to overcoming our base human nature — even if educated, well-adjusted people occasionally lapse into brutish behavior.
In stark, concise and sometimes bleak terms, Permanent Party reveals many social divisions. Shifting, arbitrary lines are drawn between you and your enemy, the Vietcong, and you and your supposed friends, American prisoners and other MPs. Without an ounce of loyalty in their nature, Casey seems to say, human beings are locked in a war pitting all against all.Tim W. Brown
beneath the valley of the blue-eyed boys
by Mark Hartenbach
Pudding House Publications (2005) 34 pages, $8.95
PoetryDid you ever listen to the profoundness of a madman? Their delicate genius tweaking your ideas of normal and obscure and questioning your own beliefs and interpretations. Hartenbach’s poems make you dissect those perceptions down to their foundation and reassess the simplicity of just being. He writes a fragile strength that blatantly reminds you to harken to the whispers because there is where the truth hides. In these pages are sketches of childhood memories from a struggling Appalachian life. These modest testimonials of survival are stoic wanderings of his understanding, superseding his age and limited surroundings. Intertwined with current times, the poems have such innocence and vulnerability that they cry true for any age.
From his poem “hide out”: i can still hear muffled voices rising in anger, sometimes/ i think i hear my name. i pull more things off hangers,/ trying to bury myself deeper that any repercussions. i have no/ other options. they’ve been removed one by one while i/ watched helplessly.
It’s hard to say when these demons plague him. Is this childhood abuse or unwelcome visitors to his psyche? Mark is the perpetual blue-eyed boy. He always looks to be in need of a heartfelt hug and, given his timid nature, you can’t help but give it. These poems exemplify that gentle spirit with childlike clarity. From his poem “king mok”: i’d sit for hours alone at a small desk that my/ grandmother bought me. losing myself drawing/ stories that i could slip into & out of with ease. And you picture him there. Big, oversized pencil in his small hand, tongue licking his lower lip base, hunkered over stories of heroics and escape. There’s the local swimming hole, the train rumbling by, the 5 & 10 store, haunted houses, curmudgeon neighbors, and red-ball jets all appear here to remind us of our own youth and how lucky it may have been and how, no matter how bad it was, there was a childhood eye of making it fun. I think Mark still has that gift and he’s sharing it with us here.Cheryl A Townsend
THE INFLUENCE OF PIGEONS ON ARCHITECTURE
by Timons Esaias
Yellow Pepper Press (2004) 42 pages, $6
ISBN 0-9762450-0-0, PoetryIn The Influence of Pigeons on Architecture, Timons Esaias ruminants on artifice in its various forms. He begins and ends with poems that prick at the seams of ars poetica. “Lines Written to an Unknown Audience Waiting for the Night’s First Act” wonders about the poem’s readers that can never be known and sets a wonderful scene that builds an image and ultimately a metaphor for the gap between writer and reader which the poem tries to bridge. And in the final poem “You Must Not Be Taken In,” Esaias asks us not to believe the mask of the speaker, a mask so often worn by confessional poets that it cannot remove the stink of autobiography.
Reviewing, too, is artifice. And in a review form, I would most often hold any criticism to the end, before giving a final judgment on the book, tempered by those criticisms. Art and artifice are so on display in Esaias that he calls the critic to mind perhaps too soon. His line breaks are jarring and waste potential. Take, for example, “In the Whole History of Time?”: Has anyone/ ever/ standing in the ruins of a/ collapsed relationship/ said to themselves:/ It was/ my fault. It was/ all/ my fault. This poem also illustrates Esaias’s propensity for the tired subject, as bad a fault as his taking on easy satirical targets, like kabalists.
So we can see the pigeon droppings on Esaias’ poetic architecture, but what he lacks in style and sometimes subject, he makes up for in accessibility and intention. His poetry pushes beyond the simple confessionalist poetry endlessly on parade down the marketplace stymied only by the obscurity of lyricists who value the image more than meaning. Esaias, at least, has a sense of play, whether having Superman too apathetic to change back into his secret identity or revising a Rubaiyat or ignoring Pythagoras. And we can all use more poetry that doesn’t take itself so deadly—and deadeningly—serious.S. Craig Renfroe, Jr.
