Something Knows the Moment by Scott Owens

Book Review by Kim Grabowski

·         Paperback: 120 pages

·         Publisher: Main Street Rag (July 2011)

·         Price: $15.50

·         ISBN-10: 1599483025

·         ISBN-13: 978-1599483023

Scott Owens’ Something Knows the Moment, is an interesting, in-your-face exploration of God, faith, and immortality.  I am not a particularly religious person (I always say spiritual, not religious), but there is something so irresistible about Bible stories—and the retelling of Bible stories, in particular—that never fails to pique my interest.  Owens’ book is broken up into five sections: Acts of Creation, The Lives of the Saints and Others, The Angel’s Night Off, The Persistence of Faith, and What to Make of a Ruined Thing.  Each section blends old images with new in order to re-appropriate religious motifs, updating some and preserving others.

“Acts of Creation” follows the foundational stories of the Old Testament: God creating the universe, and Adam and Eve.  Though this first section of poems does have a more Biblical feel to it, Owens is already aiming to tweak the stories.  God, in these poems, is messy, he “pisse[s] stars across the sky,” and works best on a Tuesday and worst on a Saturday, when he’s “waiting for the night’s carousing,/ the next day’s sleeping in.” The foundation of Owens’ book is a God who is achingly humanized—lonely, ambivalent toward his creations, and disorganized. 

In “The Lives of the Saints and Others,” and “Angel’s Night Off,” Owens extends his reach to other figures, focusing more on Adam and Eve, angels, and other characters.  In “For Those Grown Tired of Angels,” Owens urges: “Better to stay this side of human,/ uncertain, unclear, imperfect,/ and constantly working/ towards what you think might last.”

In the final two sections, Owens takes a step away from the old stories and takes a hard look at faith and doubt in today’s world.  In “The Absence of Anything as Certain as a Burning Bush,” the poems speaker claims “You’re certain the signs are everywhere,/ but you don’t know what they are/ or worse what they mean.”  One poem explores the way in which our present-day society clings to some Bible quotes and discards or ignores others.  In a world like ours, how do we go on believing?  What does faith give us and what does it take away?  Is it possible that “the way to heaven/ [is] as simple as persistence?”  Ultimately, the poems seem to do more doubting than they do believing.  God, today, is banished “On the Island of Misfit Toys.”  But there are still moments that break through the speaker’s experiences and suggest there is something more than this world—his wife taking care of a feverish daughter, “All the atrocities of man assuaged by this hand, this hair.”

Overall, Owens’ goal is an interesting one.  I am always up for pondering the ways in which religion has affected our modern lives—how we cling to stories, and how those stories could have been different. 

Scott Owens is the author of seven collections of poetry and over eight-hundred poems published in journals and anthologies.  Owens is editor of Wild Goose Poetry Review, Vice President of the Poetry Council of North Carolina, and recipient of awards from the Pushcart Prize Anthology, the Academy of American Poets, the NC Writer’s Network, the NC Poetry Society, and the Poetry Society of SC.  He holds an MFA from UNC Greensboro and currently teaches at Catawba Valley Community College.  He grew up on farms and in mill villages around Greenwood, SC.

The Raising by Laura Kasischke

Book Review by Kim Grabowski

·         Paperback: 496 pages

·         Publisher: Harper Perennial, 2011

·         Price: $14.99

·         ISBN-10: 0062004786

Before I picked up Laura Kasischke’s new novel, The Raising, I hadn’t read a non-school-related novel from start to finish in a long, long time. We’re talking years, here. Usually, I spend my precious armchair-time (or subway time, or kitchen table time, or restaurant time … let’s face it, I bring a book along with me everywhere I go) glued to a book of poetry. It is not uncommon for that book of poetry to bear Laura Kasischke’s name on the cover. She has authored eight collections of poetry. Over my extensive winter break from Kalamazoo College, I made it my mission to read all of them, and Kasischke’s place as one of my favorite authors became more and more secure as I read. It’s possible that nothing else, short of a novel by Kasischke, would give me such incentive to crack open a 461-page work of fiction and run with it.

Then again, maybe I should revise my first statement. It would be wrong to call Kasischke’s new novel “non-school-related,” as one of my major points of praise is the accuracy with which Kasischke represents college life. The story is set at Godwin Honors College, a small residential college that is part of a larger, fictional university in Michigan (though the setting does share many qualities with the University of Michigan, where Kasischke teaches, the story is not limited to the realistic institution). The novel centers around the tragic death of a seemingly perfect, angelic sorority girl, Nicole Werner, the result of a car accident. “And all the winds go sighing,/ for sweet things dying,” reads the epigraph, a quote from Christina Rossetti. The campus is devastated. Nicole’s sorority sisters at Omega Theta Tau want revenge.

But what if Nicole isn’t really dead? Or, what if she’s back from the dead? Not only have students reported seeing her on campus, they’ve reported sleeping with her. Kasischke’s novel explodes down this plot path. At first I groaned a little bit inside, weary of my generation’s obsession with the undead. In retrospect, this is the exact reaction Kasischke intended. What begins as your run-of-the-mill vampire/zombie story begins to break down and blur the lines between reality and fantasy. Is Nicole really back from the dead, or is this all just superstition running amok in the campus community? If it really is superstition, why do I, as a reader, start to wholeheartedly believe in Nicole’s return?

We want to believe that we can cheat death, especially when we’re young. Maybe I am, as a college student, especially primed to believe the legend being woven at Godwin Honors College. The book’s exploration runs deeper than fantasy versus reality, though. Kasischke is also prompting us to reexamine what individuates us, as opposed to what makes us like everyone else. When one character condemns the conformity inherent in sorority life, Josie, one of Nicole’s former sorority sisters, counters: “ ‘Like that’s not how it is with everybody?...Like all the counter-culture kids, or all the conservatives, or all the professors or librarians or bookstore clerks around here aren’t, every one of them, completely interchangeable?’”

There is something comforting, almost instinctual, about our need to belong. But, as a result of that need, do we, ultimately, lose ourselves? Are we condemned to erase our own senses of individuality, pay a steep price to be a part of some semblance of a whole?

Ultimately, I think Kasischke would champion individuality. This book prompts us to take a long, hard look at ourselves. I noticed, when I was thinking in terms of “anyone” versus “one,” that, although the book is told from a multiplicity of perspectives, a sorority girl never takes narrative center stage. They don’t want us inside their head (and I say “head,” singular, because the sorority in Kasischke’s novel is one undifferentiated body). There’s a community there that is just as grounded in the people who are kept out as those who are let in. You can defend the Greek system all day and all night if you want to, but you would be missing Kasischke’s point. “Types. Ideals. Representations. Nearly exact copies of one another.” How do we escape it? Or, more importantly, do we want to?

I became so attached to this book. By the end, I felt as though I truly knew the characters. They were far from interchangeable. As I suspected, Laura Kasischke’s fiction did not disappoint. “The scene of the accident was bloodless, and beautiful,” the book begins. From that moment on, we are catapulted into a world of suspense, a world simultaneously aching for truth and fantasy. Before I set out to read this, I joked that my attention span was no longer suited to long-form fiction. With The Raising, Laura Kasischke has reminded me what it feels like to pick up a novel and feel as though I haven’t taken a breath until I’ve closed the back cover on the final page.

Thirteen Departures from the Moon, poetry by Deema K. Shehabi

Book Review by Kim Grabowski

·         Paperback: 92 pages

·         Publisher: Press 53, 2011

·         Price: $12.00

·         ISBN-10: 1935708236

·         ISBN-13: 978-1935708230

Deema K. Shehabi’s first book of poems, Thirteen Departures from the Moon, invites readers down a path with a speaker on a search for identity.  Shehabi’s poetry is lyrically rich, setting up an image palette of “the blue of Palestinian pottery,” the tides, and, again and again, of roots.  My first impression, upon finishing the slim volume, was that I had just been travelling to places that felt, at once, foreign and familiar.   

“Freedom is land” insists the speaker of the poem “Blue.”  But if this is true, how do members of a diaspora find freedom and wholeness?  Shehabi’s book is ambivalent toward the answer, as it is not a question that warrants a simple explanation.  Instead, her poems seem to weave land, flesh, and heavens together, claim that “we grow large with rootlessness.”  At the very moment we can’t be defined by our roots, we seem to pick them up and carry them with us, until “ ‘There are no boundaries/ between you and the moon…’” 

This, to me, was one of the most interesting aspects of Shehabi’s book.  She could have left us with twenty-nine poems that explored a search for belonging, and the book still would have been interesting and richly constructed.  But, then, she does not allow things to remain so simple.  Shehabi is constructing a narrative of what it means to belong in a diaspora today, what it means to pick up the fragments of Palestinian pottery and fashion art out of them, as well as longing. 

Beyond Shehabi’s fascinating subject matter, Thirteen Departures from the Moon is a book assembled by a poet who is deeply concerned with craft.  I was especially interested in the way Shehabi wove together narrative and lyricism, as well as how she pieced together words from other source material.  “For every one gone to earth, one hundred roots are planted,” speaks one poem, a line taken from a Palestinian peasant saying.  In the poem “Khadijah,” the speaker wonders if she has become “fractured/ and preoccupied only/ with [her] own mending,” which is a line adapted from Frank Gaspar’s poem “It’s the Nature of the Wing.”  In writing this book, it appears Shehabi was acutely aware of a goal to allow form to reflect subject matter, in that the poems give off an aura of inheritance, of fragmentation, and of wholeness, all at once.

Deema K. Shehabi is a poet, writer, and editor.  She grew up in the Arab world and attended college in the US, where she received an MS in journalism.  Her poems have appeared widely in journals and anthologies such as The Kenyon Review, Literary Imagination, New Letters, Callaloo, Massachusetts Review, Perihelion, Drunken Boat, Bat City Review, Inclined to Speak: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Poetry, and The Poetry of Arab Women.  She currently resides in Northern California with her husband and two sons.  

Space, In Chains, poetry by Laura Kasischke

Book Review by Kim Grabowski

·         Paperback: 110 pages

·         Publisher: Copper Canyon Press, 2011

·         Price: $16.00

·         ISBN-10: 1556593333

·         ISBN-13: 978-1556593338

Laura Kasischke’s new book of poetry, Space, in Chains, is the work of a masterful poet who has resolved to inhabit her imagination even more deeply than ever before.  The poems take a hard look at the lives we are living, and ask us to free our minds for associative leaps that connect the known with the unknown.  “Animal shudder.  Something’s coming” warns the speaker of the poem “Dread.”  Indeed, Kasischke does not intend to lead her readers anywhere safe.  What are our stories, and where do they come from?  What is health, what is death, and how does the earth hold onto us after we’re gone? 

Kasischke is known for an image palette that is sometimes described as surreal, and is most definitely highly original.  Her poems seem committed to breaking down our minds’ organizing principles—“Hamster, tulips, love, gigantic squid. To live.  I’m not endorsing it.”  What we think is simple, given, ordinary, is, Kasischke reminds us, the world at its most absurd. 

Space, in Chains, also sets itself apart in its formal aspirations.  Kasischke’s characteristically intuitive line breaks take on a new character, with some lines stretching out into prose-like stanzas.  It is clear that Kasischke means to guide us through her imagination, setting up a mode of reading that allows us to follow her on her suprising journeys through image.  Aspiring poets can learn much from this mode of line-breaking.  Rather than allowing line-breaks to dictate the shape of the poem, Kasischke allows the poem to choose its own line-breaks.    

Kasischke is a poet interested in fragmentation, in narrative by means of charged moments, and sensory appeal.  The Boston Review raves “The future will not—should not—see us by one poet alone.  But if there is any justice in that future, Kasischke is one of the poets it will choose.”  It is clear that Kasischke follows her own path through poetry.  Her trust in imagination opens the door for us to trust it, as well.  What might appeal to future generations, as The Boston Review is intimating, is that Kasischke is one of the poets of our time who is most strikingly demonstrating a movement toward newness.  What is most compelling about Kasischke’s work, however, is that this newness does not, in any way, seem forced or deliberate. 

I have been a loyal follower of Kasischke’s poetry since I was first assigned one of her books during my freshman year of college.  Space, in Chains is an exciting read for followers such as myself.  It is as if Kasischke threw caution to the wind and stepped onto the page committed to acting on her impulses, and her impulses, alone.  As the blurb on the back of the book suggests, “Kasischke’s poetry insists upon asking hard questions that are courageously left unanswered.”  In that sense, it takes a courageous reader to experience this book fully.  Several poems entitled “Riddle,” as well as several other strange meditations, will not only interrogate you, but force you to interrogate the poems and the world. 

“They told us it was a dance, a party, a pageant, so we ran laughing together straight into the disaster” laments the speaker of one of the “Riddle” poems.  This is what Kasischke intends for her readers: to send them running, laughing, straight into a world full of disaster, grief, and beauty.