A Snowed-In Review of "A Little White Shadow" by Mary Ruefle

By Amanda Montell Mary Ruefle's "A Little White Shadow" may not be breaking news amongst poetry readers; but, when the weather outside is frightful and you're in the mood to stay cozily inside, rediscovering your own bookshelf can be just as exciting as diving into a stack of new-releases.  Ruefle's 5-by-4-inch book of erasures, so small and sweet you could dunk it in your coffee, represents what I think is the genre of erasures done right.  Ruefle takes the base work, a mysteriously arbitrary book from the 19th Century, and with her WhiteOut pen in hand, breathes a haunting life into each tight page.  "A Little White Shadow" (also the title of the erased work) is enchanting visually, with its antiquey type face, tea-stained parchment, and textured streaks of WhiteOut, which appropriately cast their own shadows down each page, leaving only a few careful words.  The paper alone, with all its high production value, counts for a lot of the specialness and intimacy of the erasures.  I experience Ruefle's book like a piece of visual art almost as much as I do a collection of poems.  A pocket-sized feast for the senses.The reader can't make out the work's original text at all, which gives "A Little White Shadow" an unapologetic vibrancy and sense of emotional purpose. The pages, though pretty, are sparse, with no titles, and sometimes less than a dozen visible words. This petite, pared-down style gives the poems a haunting wistfulness.  In one poem, everything on the page is shadowed-out, save for a few small words scattered throughout the last three lines:

It

was my duty to keep

the piano filled with roses.

Simple, direct, and ghostly erasures like this pervade Ruefle's tiny tome.  By creating long shadows of white space on the page, she makes excellent use of the erasure format in order to create suspense.  Forcing the reader's gaze to fall down the entire height of a page to reach a poem's completion contributes to the eeriness and tension.  The book's reoccurring unnamed character of "she" has a similar enigmatic effect.  By the time you arrive at the final page of "A Little White Shadow," it sort of feels as if you've just read an old, quixotic book of a stranger's secrets.  Personally, I have respect for any poet who can make me feel such an emotion, regardless of whether her pen was filled with ink or WhiteOut.So, in the few weeks left until West 10th's next issue is released, if you're feeling bored and restless with nothing to read, you might rediscover Mary Ruefle's "A Little White Shadow."  This teeny book may not keep you busy until April, but it can at least get you out of the snow for a while.

Mayakovsky's Revolver: A Double-Take On Matthew Dickman’s Latest

In my experience, the Dickman brothers and their poetry are polarizing topics amongst creative writers. Most people really do either love or hate them. I’ll admit that I was in the latter camp, – I was suspicious of the Dickman public image, which is very Portland, cool and offbeat, and this prejudice ruined what individual pieces of theirs I read or heard read aloud – until, like a critic should, I gave their work a fair chance.  When I actually read Matthew and Michaels’ poetry collections in full, I flipped.Flies won me over to Michael Dickman. Mayakovsky’s Revolver similarly convinced me of Matthew. The collection, which West 10^th reviewed earlier this month, is full of surprising language and metaphor. My favorite example occurs in The Gas Station, when Matthew encounters a gunman: “this guy came out swinging / a gun, his face like an apartment / that no one had lived in for years, / the gun pointing just above my head when it went off, …”Due to its thematic content, Matthew’s collection may not be entirely accessible on the whole. Not every reader has been threatened with a firearm. Neither have most readers lost a sibling to suicide, a narrative that runs throughout Mayakovsky’s Revolver. Regardless of how foreign some of the collection’s content may be, most of its poems are believable and engaging.This is due to the fact that the emotion behind the language feels honest. Before Mayakovsky’s Revolver, I’d unfairly assumed that Dickman’s poetry relied more on gimmick than on art and was more striking for its cool, modern voice than for its sincerity. Mayakovsky’s Revolver, for the most part, proves both assumptions wrong. The collection is consistently both artful and passionate.Only one piece, entitled Dark, made me think that perhaps my original misgivings about Dickman’s poetry, which are doubts that a lot of haters share, carried some weight. Dark occurs in Mayakovsky’s Revolver’s second section, Elegy to a Goldfish. In general, I am less enamored of this section than of the rest of the book. But, I have a definite issue with the piece Dark.Dark includes bits of different stories – a line about an abused boy, a line about a self-abusive girl – in an arc that focuses mainly on Dickman himself.  Neither the story of the abused boy nor of the self-abusive girl is developed; neither the boy nor the girl is even named. These two characters feel inauthentic, like archetypes of other people that appear in the collection; the inclusion of their stories feels gratuitous. In Mayakovsky’s Revolver, Dark presents a disappointment. It lacks cohesiveness and, I think, the emotional urgency that makes the rest of the collection so compelling.--Lauren Roberts, Managing Editor

"Your Father on the Train of Ghosts:" A Review

Lauren Roberts, Assistant Poetry Editor of West 10th, reviews Your Father on the Train of Ghosts by G. C. Waldrep and John Gallagher.

G.C. Waldrep and John Gallagher’s collaboration, YOUR FATHER ON THE TRAIN OF GHOSTS reads how an air vacuum surrounding one passing vehicle feels: the poetry can suspend time, steal breath from your lungs. Whether or not this effect is sustained across the collection’s 221-paged sprawl is debatable and depends entirely on the reader’s willingness, their ability to be surprised afresh with each variation of certain stock devices that appear throughout.Bridges, trains, windows and flames are some of the many, often revisited tropes that bind the collection together. These images serve as metaphors for many different things in turn: Bridges symbolize people; trains are relationships, weather, music. Windows are a very complex structural element that we’d prefer not to go into for brevity’s sake, and flames are what happens when you’re not paying attention. Bridges, trains, windows, flames; such reiteration establishes a rhythm like wheels on a track, signals an essential unchangingness even as the composition moves forward through varied landscapes.And to where, toward what end, are Waldrep and Gallagher driving? Nowhere, really. They’re less interested in a destination for YOUR FATHER ON THE TRAIN OF GHOSTS than in developing a concept: there’s art in “confusion / of desire and location, trust / and vector.” It’s a prettily wrought, if purportedly aimless trip that the poets invite us on. I’ll Decorate My House With You encapsulates this in its last couplet, the penultimate followed by an extended final line, “And then we invent something / for the dashboard that replicates the horizon, and we go for a drive.”

On the way to our version of the horizon, there are definitely things to marvel at. Especially in GHOSTS’ first third, where the collection’s central ideas are expressed with its most phenomenal lyricism. Poems here create and hold us flush against the skin of a weird, totally new atmosphere, inside of which the commonplace become unmoored, morph and blend together.Then, in the middle and beyond, every varied thing blends together almost too well. We’re no longer on the verge of any realization. Even awesome specificities, never before mentioned occurrences, have apparently happened before – “in Los Angeles / another designer wallpaper artist / dedicates her blog to / Krishna” ; “the hearses are circling the playgrounds again.”Another and again. These qualifiers occur until it becomes easy for a reader’s eyes to glaze over. Everything seems plain immutable, interchangeable; by page 87, one of GHOSTS’ narrators too falls sadly, dangerously deadened to what’s occurring as he perseveres with the collection’s theme. He sets the scene for On the Performativity of Grief As Ecstatic Culture, saying, “The curtains in the clown house were on fire again,” and doesn’t recognize the implications of that statement until “…the sirens approached. / Are they in there, / I remember you kept asking. Are they still inside?”It’s inconclusive whether any clowns died in the incident. The toll’s not important, anyway. The real potential tragedy is that maybe you couldn’t appreciate this startling and good poem because you were lulled into complacency after the last fire, pages back in the collection’s girth.