The Exchange by Sophie Cabot Black (Graywolf Press, 2013)
In our day-to-day lives we all make concessions, bargains, and negotiations with ourselves and those around us all in an effort to get what we want while, ideally, limiting harm to others. We tally these transactions unthinkingly, unlike our expenses, which we tally carefully. We may or may not follow the stock market, but it’s hard to escape the endless repetition of “the jobs numbers” from news media. NPR’s Marketplace Morning Report is such a huge part of my own morning routine that if I hear the phrase “let’s do the numbers” before I’ve arrived at work then I know I’m running late.
Every one of these exchanges is fair game as stimulus in Sophie Cabot Black’s latest collection of poems, The Exchange, and they are all woven together in tightly wound lyric poems that maintain emotional resonance, never feeling like statistics. Not that there are columns of numbers here by any stretch. Cabot Black manages to write poems about called “High Finance” and “Preservation of Capital” without losing any sense of what it means to be human. She’s more interested in the definitions of the words than the numbers the words refer to. Cabot Black appeals to the emotions of people rather than the cold logic of the market.
Indeed, Cabot Black emphasizes the ludicrousness of the finance world’s ruthless logic. Take “Private Equity” which begins: “To put one and one together making / Two and so on. A house appears, room / With a bed in it.” This adding up of dollars to make a house continues until, somehow, someone is able “To draw out more than what was put in.” The poems in The Exchange point out the absurdity of the system we’ve created wherein we all want “To end up where we start / again and look as if we gained.”
It’s not just our financial institutions that take more than from us than we have to give. In one of the last poems in the collection, “Pay Attention,” Cabot Black writes,
I took care of myself. I took care
Of myself, thinking much too often
I took care of someone else.
Everything feels like payment.
We not only “Pay Attention,” but we pay bills, we pay heed, and we pay homage. We’ve built our idioms on ideas of owing and owning.
Even life and death trade with one another, as in the poems about the illness and death of the poet Jason Shinder, one of Cabot Black’s close friends. Interspersed throughout the book are poems like “Diagnosis” and “Finally He Speaks About Dying.” “Once he lies down, he says, he is afraid / There is no getting back up[,]” she writes in “Biopsy.” The poem continues,
He is still afraid
And so I lie down first, which is to say nothing
Except I am not him, concentrating on the manufactured
Tiles above us[… .]
These poems are unblinking, viewing grief in all its complexities, trying to sort out the knot of friendship and sadness.
There is no excess language in Cabot Black’s poems, and what is there is taut and urgent. There’s an exchange between less and more that Cabot Black navigates—something being necessary to creating a poem; too much being clunky and undesirable; too little being frustrating and opaque. Only a handful of these poems spill onto a second page, but there is a tension in saying only what is necessary that Cabot Black maximizes, and each of the poems in this collection stands on its own as a well-made poem.
The Exchange explores the language of financial collapse, defining in poetic terms the words we’ve been inundated with from the media over the last few years. There is plenty of language to mine in the financial world and Cabot Black deftly weaves them into her own poetic voice to create a collection of poems that will serve as a historical marker, but also as a reminder of the way language can be used to conceal and uncover the schemes that are used to fuel greed, often at the expense of the voiceless many.
What other writers use or used current events as inspiration for their creative work? How have these works held up since the events have passed?
Woke Up Lonely by Fiona Maazel (Graywolf Press 2013)
As the old saying goes: sometimes, we don’t realize we’re standing in the fire until we begin to feel the burn.
Today’s society, fast-paced and booming with technology, is perhaps so absorbed in keeping up with ourselves that we’ve failed to see the flames; the warning signs showing us how our communities are changing. At least, that’s what Fiona Maazel argues in her novel, Woke Up Lonely. This novel —witty, wild, and utterly original — is the perfect smoke detector for today’s readers. As long as they can keep away from Facebook long enough to read it, of course.
Woke Up Lonely follows Thurlow Dan, the founder of the Helix, an American cult promising to ‘cure’ loneliness. The group attempts to fix this twenty-first century malady through a system of over-sharing — communes, speed dating, mixers, and confession-sessions — and has quickly gained an enormous national following. In the middle of this whirlwind, however, we find Thurlow: lonelier than ever, desperately seeking communication with his ex-wife, Esme, and their daughter Ida. However, as the cult grows more influential, Thurlow finds himself in a dangerous relationship with North Korea — and even further from his relationship with his ex-wife (who, by the way, is a covert CIA agent). Sound crazy? It is. Fiona Maazel’s fiction takes the reader through a fun house of turns and tricks, knocking American society off its axis, and transporting readers to a world that is only slightly crazier than our own.
Or is it? It doesn’t take long before the reader begins to wonder how different the two worlds actually are. Many of Maazel’s themes hit just a little too close to home: perhaps the Helix’s online communes are a bit reminiscent of Facebook; maybe you have a stronger impact online than you do within your own household. Maazel presents these questions beneath a layer of witty humor that, when paired with the author’s topsy-turvy plot, almost completely masks the novel’s dark reality. However, once you realize that your laughs are turning quickly to winces, you become acutely aware of Maazel’s message: even in our fast-paced, constantly-connected society, we are all collectively alone.
At many points throughout the novel, Maazel takes a break from her smart humor, using the short relief to zone in on her message. Take the following passage, for example, involving Thurlow and Vicki, the woman he routinely hires for — ahem — personal company:
“He thought about… his wife and daughter and the life they had together, pillaged by a lonely guy who screwed up every chance he got. The lights went out. A siren cried.
He buzzed for Vicki. At least Vicki would kiss him hello and put her arms around him and be happier for it. He buzzed for her again and got no answer.”
Powerful statements like this are riddled throughout Maazel’s prose, grabbing the reader’s attention and holding it long after the final page. The author’s exploration of technology and corporation in America becomes the smoky smell we’ve been looking for — an indication of the burn soon to come.
Before reading this novel, I had not personally been drawn to wild, twisting plots like Maazel’s. Until this book, my opinion had been that the more life-like a work is, the better a reader can relate to it. So, when I first picked up Woke Up Lonely, I prepared myself for a run-of-the-mill novel on a futuristic society I couldn’t even imagine, much less relate to. However (and I’m not sure if this was a result of Maazel’s prose or her genius plot-crafting), I found myself wholly connected to both the plot and the characters stuck inside it. I read Maazel’s humor with the sinking feeling that she knew something the rest of us didn’t — somehow, we were doomed to succumb to a society like the one she portrays in Woke Up Lonely. I couldn’t help feeling that perhaps someday, I will do exactly what Maazel predicts we will do: wake up lonely, with no way out.
I certainly don’t mean to be a downer, here. Of course, our society is different than the one Maazel portrays in many ways. However, my point is that the author’s message is hard-hitting and genuine, and much more relatable than I had anticipated it would be. By the end of the first few lines, I found myself completely sucked into Maazel’s world. And, by the end of the book, I found myself relating to loneliness in a way that made me feel (surprisingly) a little less, well, lonely.
Author Heidi Julavits describes Woke Up Lonely as “the novel equivalent of a sonic boom — it builds, explodes, it leaves your ears, mind, and soul ringing for days.” Truthfully, I couldn’t have said it better myself. My soul is still ringing from this novel. And that smoke smell, it sticks around.
Woke Up Lonely is a novel for today’s society. It’s fast, it’s gripping, it’s funny. Ultimately, it carries a message so real and so close, it’s hard for us to acknowledge. Fiona Maazel has, through intelligent prose and an intriguing plot, allowed us to step out of the fire for a moment — to smell the smoke, and to feel the flames singeing the edges of our lives.
Many authors have utilized this trend: sending a message to an audience through an over exaggerated, fictionalized, sensational story. How do you feel about these stories? Are you getting the message, or just hearing the fire alarm?
What We’re Reading: Incarnadine by Mary Szybist
Ten years in the making, Mary Szybist’s second collection of poetry, Incarnadine (Graywolf Press, 2013), is a formally playful and carefully crafted book with a sense of wonder. Through a grace and a little humor, Szybist explores spirituality and intimacy in the quiet moments of life. What makes Incarnadine unique is the uncertainty and occasional darkness that complicate any faith. Szybist balances heady philosophy with a focus on the body, with an eye towards discovering new ways to be.
Szybist, a passionate and devout skeptic, uses the Annunciation to touch on themes as myriad as motherhood, violence, and aging. The Annunciation, the announcement by the Angel Gabriel to the Virgin Mary that she would conceive God’s child, takes on different meanings depending on the language used. “Annunciation in Nabokov and Starr” employs text from Nabokov’s Lolita and The Starr Report, blended with Szybist’s own text to tell the story. Szybist italicizes the borrowed text, but doesn’t specify the source of any particular phrase:
I simply can’t tell you how gentle, how calm she was
during her cooperation. In the windowless hallway,
I bent toward her.”
The themes of sexual abuse through power that are present in Nabokov’s text and The Starr Report color this reading of the Annunciation in a disquieting way, ominous in how hidden they are. This postmodern act of hybridity plants Incarnadine firmly in a contemporary world.
The weight of the Angel Gabriel’s announcement never overpowers the images in the poems, however, and, despite some postmodern moves, the language Szybist uses is lyrical and lush. The white lily (and white flowers in general), symbolizing the Virgin Mary’s purity, are present throughout, as in “Long After the Desert and Donkey (Gabriel to Mary):”
But you were not solid.
From the first moment, when you breathed
on my single lily, I saw
where you felt it.
Elsewhere in the book, even the grass is given voice:
How many moments did it hover before we felt
it was like nothing else, it was not bird
light as a mosquito, the aroma of walnut husks
while the girl’s knees pressed into us
every spear of us rising, sunlit and coarse
the wild bees murmuring through[…]
–Annunciation (from the grass beneath them)
The precise language Szybist uses creates a world that feels palpable through all of the senses. She draws the reader in until there is nothing left to do but meditate along with her. These poems stick with the reader long after the book has been closed.
The strength of Incarnadine as a collection is a result of the muscle of the individual poems. There is an almost dizzying array of forms collected here, each uniquely suited to the content of the poem. Some poems are fairly traditional, with mid-length lines, enjambed more often than end-stopped. Other poems are prosaic, with lines stretching across the wide page. One particularly spectacular poem, “How (Not) to Speak of God,” features eighteen lines arrayed in a starburst pattern with no beginning or ending. (You can read Szybist’s thoughts on visual poetry, as well as her poem and the inspiration here.) These varied forms give the impression that Szybist composes carefully, with an ear and an eye towards doing what is best for the poem.
Though Incarnadine is only Szybist’s second collection, it’s clear her poetic muscle is strong. As postmodern as some poems are, Szybist’s subjects are universal and timeless. Through lyrical language and disquieting hybridity, these poems draw the reader in and force them to rethink what they thought they knew. Even if a third collection takes another decade, there is enough to unpack and experience in this book to last until then.
This Close, by Jessica Francis Kane (Graywolf Press, 2013)
New York, New York: the epitome of the American spirit; the essence of the American dream. Clocking in at twelve hundred miles from home, it’s not difficult to see why Midwesterners have taken such an interest in the city. To us, New York is the ultimate adventure. It’s the sun in the sky of America.
Well, to some of us, anyway.
To others, New York is dirty, grimy, crowded with people and propelled by capitalism. I suppose it depends on which way you look at it… and how others portray it, of course. In this case, the ‘other’ party is Jessica Francis Kane, and she has allowed us small-town Midwesterners a glimpse into her New York experience in her collection of short stories, titled This Close.
Let’s be honest, Jessica Francis Kane is not the first author to write about New York. In fact, I was rather surprised to learn that she had actually lived there, unlike many who choose to write about it. Realizing this, I opened this collection expecting to see one of two things: a glorified picture of a Never Never Land, or a cynical outlook on a city that has all but destroyed the American dream. What I found, however, was something entirely different, and completely original.
Jessica Francis Kane, through the twelve short stories in her collection, has managed to let her prose exist in the middle ground between these two extremes. Although she occasionally weaves toward one sentiment or another, she refrains from making any rash statements about the communities within New York. This gives her prose a very real quality; after finishing the book, I was under the impression that life in New York is quite similar to life in the Midwest, or anywhere else, for that matter. Through the plots of her stories, Kane depicts realistic — and often quite common — events. However, through the subtle construction of her prose and her spectacular mastery of language, Kane is able to communicate the importance of these events, and their significance to the characters experiencing them.
For example, Kane’s collection includes one story, titled “First Sale,” about a boy and his mother hosting their first garage sale. While Kane doesn’t seem to be striving for a specific emotional reaction in this story, by the end of the story, the reader is able to feel the complex and confusing emotions that accompany a yard sale. Nostalgia, helplessness, detachment, opportunity, hopefulness — somehow, Kane has managed to weave all of these emotions into the subtext of just sixteen pages.
And it’s not just the author’s plots that carry these subtle, yet impactful undertones.
Kane’s stories are often centered on just a couple main characters, many of which resurface often throughout the course of the collection. Just as in Kane’s plots, her characters seem relatively unspectacular. However, by the end of each story, the reader feels as though he or she has made an intimate connection with the characters — even though the author almost always writes in the (decidedly impersonal) third person point of view.
Author Hilary Mantel describes Kane’s character portrayal as follows:
“[Jessica Francis Kane] has discerned the enormous gap between what people say and do, and what is actually going on inside them.”
This is an accurate depiction of Kane’s character-building techniques. Somehow, regardless of the decisions a character made throughout the course of a story, I found myself turning each page feeling as if I knew the underlying motives behind a character’s actions. Kane has managed to craft her text in a way that allows her characters to float in the space between thought and action, just as her prose is able to drift between various extreme opinions of New York City. This technique, of course, does not exist in the words Kane chooses. Rather, it exists in the tone of the text: in subtle tensions that make themselves known only after the reader has closed the book.
While it may seem that a book that reigns in the ‘middle space’ would have little impact on its audience, Kane’s collection of stories does just the opposite. In fact, writing in this style allows Kane’s audience to fully empathize with the situations and characters she has chosen to present. As a result, the reader ends each story feeling as though he or she has gained a greater understanding of an otherwise common life. It does not surprise me that This Close was a finalist for both the Center for Fiction’s Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize, and the Indie Booksellers’ Choice Award; the mastery of prose displayed by Jessica Francis Kane allows her to stand among the other great short story writers of our time.
New York City may be twelve hundred miles away. It may be a foreign land to us Midwesterners. Certainly, it is one that is either glorified or hated — glamorized, or made notorious — among countless works of literature. However, through This Close, Jessica Francis Kane has given us both a window into this world, and a mirror into our own. In reading Kane’s stories, we are able to connect intimately with her characters, and in turn, we are able to understand ourselves just a little bit better. And isn’t this the goal of all great literature?
