Field Recordings

Mark D Evans No Cover From Darkness is a nail biting coming of age novel set among the romantic and dangerous world of World War Two London during the Nazi bombing runs that razed the city. It's a horror story in the high romantic tradition of Stoker, Stevenson, and Shelley. Evans lays groundwork for a series that promises to grow into a pulpy action horror fun, but his origin story is all character, about an orphaned girl, Beth, who grows into a vampire as she moves into puberty, and the horrors of adult life, and all it's passion and thrill which are mirrored in her vampire awakening. Much of the action of Darkness is inward, and Elizabeth, or Beth, the protagonist is for the most part a normal girl, adopted into a middle class London family at birth, and raised in a sheltered world of school and pesky little brothers. The Nazis bombing raids wreak havoc upon the family's life, and the neighborhood, and between the terrorizing bombs and the aftermath of the explosi...

Jeff Gunhus’ Night Chills is an adult paranormal romp that will scare the bejesus out of parents and drive horror readers deep into the winter nights to discover exactly what the hell is going on in the sleepy, creepy small town of Prescott City in western Maryland. Jack Tremont is a tortured middle class husband married to an understanding doctor, who have recently relocated their family to Prescott City because Jack killed a young girl in a car accident in California. A fresh start. A small town. Peaceful, right? And at first, the novel teases us with Jack’s past. How will it come back to haunt him?  And when? Gunhus does not hold back the emotional punches. Night Chills owns its share of action, but the majority of the thrills early on have to do with parental anxiety towards losing one’s child. There’s Max, Jack’s new friend, who may or may not be what he seems, and his emotional battle with the bottle, and the potential death of his daughter from cancer; his inner confl...

Laurie Olerich’s Primani , first in a series of plucky, angel, action adventure novels is a fun, hopeful yarn. Mica Thomas is an above average girl in a world of hurt. Primani opens as she is assaulted by a small town psychopath. She’s nearly finished off in the novel’s first quarter, which sees her through the early stages of recovery from rape and assault. And who better to help her recover in the world than Sean O’ Cahan, a handsome, hunky, ripped, Irish young man who has arrived from out of town as Mica gets her feet underneath her? Sean and his buddies are not what they seem, and in the early stages where Mica and her friends lust over their finely sculpted bodies and pine for sexual release, Sean and his friends remain distant from the girls who lust after them. They offer distraction, safety, and mystery to Mica who only wishes for life to move forward. To forget about the recent violent past. The tension is palpable, and as Mica’s fate rushes towards a second encounter with h...

Kathleen Collins Realm Walker is an action thriller, complete with demons, vampires and werewolves, agencies of supernaturals, or Altereds, and a smoking hot dark fae heroine who likes to slug one back with the boys when she isn't working a case, only instead of whisky, she prefers vampire blood. Julianna Norris is a Walker, a kind of cop for the real world to keep supernatural beings in their place. She’s feisty, private, and has a track record for getting into scrapes and getting out of them with the hair on her fae head just barely intact. If her supernatural cop duties weren’t stressful enough, Julianna Norris is the mate of vampire Thomas Kendrick who like a lot of literary vampires carries himself with a holier than thou attitude. I kept wanting Julianna to smack him in the face, but like many obnoxious characters, he grew on me, mostly because Collins turns him into a shadowy protective figure who gets to whine about how kick ass his bride is. Julianna's fae magic c...

How to Teach Children About Desire - : This was published back on April 20th, as part of National Poetry Month, but it slipped my radar. Nothing like finding one of your creations wandering the wilds of the internet. Thanks to GMP and company for their publication and perspective on masculinity in the modern age. 'via Blog this'

John Sibley Williams debut collection, Controlled Hallucinations $14.95, FutureCyclePress, is bare ghostly work of vision. It is a work of negative space, a work of spare words, a work of economical images, and a work of ache. It’s a numbered collection, the poems themselves lacking titles, one poem sequencing into the next. The title evokes a Rimbaudian world of fever, delirium, and excess, but Controlled Hallucinations is just that, controlled, honed; the excess is cut from the carcass, leaving spare poems that form a body that aches. The collection opens with a dedication to the “coming extinctions” and prepares the reader for an apocalyptic vision, however, Williams’ apocalypse is a personal one; a collapse of relations, of love, of family, and work. The opening poem is call to vision, a call to being. “To be the effect./To be a thoughtful pause/and restrained response...To be the scent/translated as toxin/or perfume...To be love/itself,/neither the loving/nor the belove...

Jacob M Appel’s The Biology of Luck is a wonderful novel, a love song to both New York and to beauty. It’s a comedy, a satirical look at human folly and desire, fame and fortune.  The novel is two stories, one about Larry Bloom and his adventure to navigate the city of New York during a particularly tragic-comic day, trying to both find a letter from his publisher, and reach a date with Starshine, who is the heroine of Bloom’s manuscript The Biology of Luck .  Bloom hopes he will become a published author and perhaps literary darling, and he hopes Starshine will fall in love with him. His book is about the day where she fell in love with him. Bloom hopes and yearns for Starshine in an earnest way reserved for the lucky or stupid.  The manuscript is basically a pick up line, and by revealing his manuscript about Starshine to Starshine, he hopes to win her heart. The second story in Appel’s The Biology of Luck is excerpts from Bloom’s fictional manuscript where a fictio...

Blood & Roses: Dan Gutstein's new work “occupies” poetry Perhaps it's that ubiquitous word of the last six months: occupy, that makes me view Dan Gutstein's newest work of poetry, Bloodcoal & Honey, as a piece of architecture, a living one that occupies imainative and emotional space. Or perhaps it's Eric Grienke's perspective on how poetry should evolve, still fresh in my mind (see my review of his work in the last BKR), that BC&Honey manages to landscape experience, firmly grounded in emotional places. Gutstein's poems take various forms and create a physical and abstract space for our imaginations to wander. His poems occupy space. It's a feeling, mind you, when you find a poet who tells stories without giving away any ending, or cause. BC&Honey's language is precise “I crouch on the edge of the wheat/as the wind doubles back” as it is visceral “gun clatter off brick./ I followed blood clots behind a dumpster....” and...

The Dream Geni: 13 th century gets modernized in Deannuntis' Master Siger's Dream If you like your 13 th philosophy and philosophers stoned, drunk, and mish-mashed with anachronistic technology ala steam-punk, oh yes, and emeshed in papal and religious conspiracies then A.W. Deannutis' Master Siger's Dream is up your cobblestone alley. Deannutis turns historical fiction upside down by introducing us to his brilliant, bumbling, and libidinous Master Siger of Brabant, whom I had no idea was actually a person, much less a revolutionary of philosophy who pissed off the Catholic church. Siger was guilty of teaching “double truth,” saying that one idea could be found true via reason and the opposite through faith; whatever that means. It is argued and accepted that Siger was as important as Thomas Aquinas to Western faith. Now I'm no philosopher, but the tale Deannutis dreams up makes the heady intellectualism go down like candy. One of my favorite moment...

Bradley Harrison’s Diorama of a People Burning , from Ricochet Press, an imprint of Gold Line Press, is a exercise in reduction, a de-evolution of text , and sequences, or cycles of poetry. The chapbook features six poems, and their variants whose parts have been “erased” by the author to reveal a new poem, a process that repeats until the final variation is little more than a shoestring poem. Each poem contains the words and images for the other variants in the sequence, as if the poems were Cornell boxes that the author rearranges. To understand what is happening on the page, we should begin with an explanation. The sequence of poetry begins with “Her Problem of Gravity” which is followed by “Her Probe of Gravity,” and then “Her Gravity” and finally “Gravy.” The erased variants look as if the author has used white out to reveal a poem hiding underneath. The good folks at Ricochet Press have even pulled out the stops so we can almost see the text ghosting out from under the w...

A Passion for Apathy: The Collected and Rejected Poems of Vittorio Carl i, a small press gem of punk rock poetry, carries poetic traditions in its teeth. Punk rock because of the in-your-face-anti-establishment irony and earnestness in Carli's presentation of his verse, traditional in the homage and muse tradition of poetry. He writes to and for those and that which enlarges his voice.  Carli's work reads like a cross between cultural commentary/homage to persons as varied as Lawrence Welk to Woody Allen, to snapshots of socio-political unrest, which are flags of protest. My favorite is the “The Trouble with Librarians (for Andrea)” where Librarians are cast as the progenitors of closed information; they are “all closed books/with a couple of pages missing.” He's a poet, and I imagine him in some stacked room typing madly, or in transit,  to and fro Chicago, scribbling on the back of brown paper bags. He works it. He's out there living poetry.  Proof. My copy of t...

Andy Fitch’s 60 Morning Talks, from Ugly Duckling Presse, is essential reading for anyone with an interest in contemporary poetry. The premise is this: Fitch interviewed 60 poets about their most recent work, exploring language (and l=a=n=g=u=a=g=e), the future of print, the state of poetry, and anything in between. Talks belongs on your bookshelf right beside I Wanted to Write a Poem , a transcript of a conversation between Edith Heal and William Carlos Williams about all of his published works (and anything and everything in between). Both books are about poetics, and both books are transcripts, and both lay bare, or at least attempt to, the machinery of inspiration, language and presentation. Fitch eschews academic pretentiousness. He doesn’t open Talks with an essay, or a thesis, he just gives us the interviews, the questions, and the answers. Reading Talks is like reading a script, or listening to a conversation (it would make a great independent film--or series of youtube ...

Natalie Peeterse's first chapbook, Black Birds: Blue Horses, An Elegy, is a walk through grief, a mystic catharsis hammered into leaping images and sweeping environs written for Nicole Dial, killed in Afghanistan with three others as they aided the International Rescue Committee. The elegy begins with a machine gun phone call  “one two: three four:...The heat blasts on...”, and the speaker is off, and in a classical sense becomes a walking poet among gods, a prophet against war. Her capital is not Rome, but Washington, and of course the heart, where all things human are governed. Peeterse's imagery allows for taxi drivers, muggers, and DC streets to become points of reference as she travels through spaces, “a slide of time,” almost crossing over into death as she passes through stages of grief as if they were neighborhoods, boroughs, "glittering roads."  The DC setting is loaded, for sure, but wisely used as geography versus political soapboxing. It's not th...

From oustide the lines: Cormorant Beyond the Compost By Elisavietta Ritchie   Cherry Grove Press, 2011 Elisavietta Ritchie's latest volume of poetry Cormorant Beyond the Compost burns with eroticism and life, and reading some of her poems is akin to watching a wick sizzle down on a firecracker, waiting for the pop, the smoke, and the final hiss. In the first section, Saint in a Box of Glass , Ritchie's world is polarized, the artistic voice versus the real world. There is a tension that builds in the opening poem “Tradecraft in Iambic Pentameter” where “true tales remain confined within the cage/of my long skull” and continues  through the first section where the speakers of these poems struggle with waking with reality, to creating one's own reality, best illustrated in “Ito Jakuchu artist b. 1716, Kyoto” where the young painter resists his father's ways, arranging vegetables in the market, soaking his senses in the fresh skin and smell of the produce for sale...

Maurizio Cucchi’s poetry is fragmented. Reading his work is like looking at a collage work that is both fascinating at the level of piece and whole. The new translations by Michael Palma, from Chelsea Editions $20, gathers his best work from 1965-2009 in No Part to Play .  Palma’s introduction makes a case that Cucchi is like T.S. Eliot, or Pound, relying on images and fragmented poetics to best illustrate the human condition. In his work you are likely to find narrative, lyric, philosophy, poetic dialogues with Beckett, fellow Italian poets, as well as references to soccer, computers, and the cosmos. Like the modernist before him, Cucchi takes in a world and chews it up and spits it back out in his verse. Cucchi’s own biographical history is woven into the poems throughout the work, and while this is true for most writers--on some level-- it is interesting in Cucchi’s case because his father disappeared. Vanished into thin air, a mystery to the young Cucchi for years until he...

Elisa Nader's Escape from Eden is a action packed YA thriller set in the jungles of South America, and pairs perfectly with other dystopian YA thrillers released this year, particularly Jeff Hirsch's masculine macho cult thriller, The Darkest Path . Like Path, the main character Mia, seeks a way out of the confines of religious life. Strict cult guidelines shape both Path and Eden , and both authors are pluck upon a new strain of the dystopian genre.   Eden features a cute heroine, who has mommy issues (and it’s easy to see why) and along the way becomes close with the handsome rebellious Gabriel, a new addition to Eden's Flock. Like Path , Eden explores heavy concepts, religious control, human slavery, deception, and the mundanity of evil. Eden's Flock, named after a character, Reverend Eden (the town is Edenton) is like many other cults, separating children from their parents and reinforcing traditional gender roles, and upholding a patriarchy. Reverend Eden i...