Field Recordings

Without patience, a sailor I would never be—Lee Allred Bestselling novelist David Poyer speaks with a patient tongue, and with a shipwright’s steady and sure hand molds from words a vessel. And like a master shipwright’s work, Poyer’s naval thrillers are composed out of airy will as if they were the finest oak, the most durable cypress. Poyer novels are carefully wrought from research and experience. A frame built with patience and deliberate and meticulous strikes. “I like to do the research, not just the archives, but museums. Museums preserve the objects the people interacted with. Your job as a writer is to recreate the experiences.” To tell the best story you can. His voice is calm, patient, and rings with dedication. A sense of duty. No longer to the Navy but to the story, the alluvial flow of words that is the work of a novelist. Over the course of his career, Poyer’s novels have touched upon contemporary hot topics such as environmentalism, bigg

Bob Friedland’s Faded Love should come with a six pack, lace panties, a pack of smokes and the phone number of a really good lawyer. The characters in Love burn and pine long after their encounters with lovers and enemies have faded; their hungry hearts and hearty stomachs digesting booze, smoke, lust, and hate, as they, like sharks, circle the waters between Asia and North America. Freidland’s prose is elegiac, crafted and composed, the arc of the stories zigzag around the world, offering opportunities for characters to emerge and disappear and reappear like a rabbit out of a magician’s hat. Plus plenty of opportunities for sex. Faded Love opens in France but spends most of its time beating around the back wastes and hotels of Canada. The heaviest arc of stories concern the relationships between On Ning and Alex, a lawyer, who is devoted to her, so much he abandons his wife and family for the challenges and exotic sweetness a relationship with On Ning offers.

Helen Losse’s book Better with Friends (Rank Stranger Press, 2009, $14.00) echoes like a tough southern country gospel song, the burden of suffering and the longing for joy and peace are balanced with images and music of nature, the rhythms of the working class poor, and the loneliness of a woman trying to change what is wrong in the world. The pride of social justice is the backbone of many of these poems, and so often the company of social change is loss, disappointment, the falling down and getting up of those who fight the good fight. Or try to. Loss and elegy are common themes and modes of expression in Friends , as common as the railroads, fogs and flowers that pepper the landscape of these poems. Elegy, according to Larry Levis, is the American form of poetry and Friends opens with the fumbling grief and frustration of an elderly relative who falls closer and closer to the bottom in the middle of the holiday season. Throughout the painful hospital stays, the woman’s fi

Sleeper , Rachel Adams’ second chapbook, from Flutter Press, captures the spiritual weight of a fresh perspective. The poems latent content are very much about that moment when your perspective shifts, whether it's a workman lamenting his failures, or a father reading at home, or the experience of a rail sleeper car, Adams shapes a beautiful arc of poems in this handsome chapbook out of California. Sleeper also explores how work and the physical spaces we occupy affect us. Her use of personae poem, or dramatic monologue, allow the poet to explore history, both personal and historical. Adams makes the poetry of Sleeper look easy, and sound easy. Adams’s employs a casual, long rhythm style, like that of a trombone sliding over notes. Almost all of Sleeper’s poems use a combination of long and short lines, that contrast the reader’s eye, but lengthen the notes of the poem. Obviously this is Whitmasesque, in the true American style, yet the dark lyric notes of

Jax Miller’s debut thriller Freedom’s Child from Harper Collins remixes biker culture, religious cults, and criminal drama to deliver a fresh one-two punch of page turning fun. This is not a true crime thriller, instead it is at once an over-the-top redemption story, a rant against staunch conservatism, an elegy for parenthood, and a kidnapping mystery. Who took Freedom’s Child ? If you are a fan of crime novels, action, and misunderstood anti-heroes chances are you will read through your lay-over, or spend the afternoon on the beach flipping pages to answer that very question. Redemption, we love it when someone hits bottom, makes a profound change, and comes out the other end transformed. Freedom Oliver’s real name is Vanessa Delaney, and she’s in the witness protection program for killing her husband. She’s crude, rude, misunderstood, and drinks like a fish. She also speaks her mind, acts independently, and is emotionally tortured for giving up custody of her kids when she

GENERAL: How did you start writing?  I actually found my passion for writing in a counselor’s office while I was living in Kentucky. I was seeing an older, conservative man who’d cringe every time I said the F word in his office so he encouraged me to journal (which I found very soon after I loathed, not seeing a point in documenting the very things I wanted to get away from). I believe this was his attempt to not have to hear me. So instead, I wrote a gritty, fictional piece that I knew he’d hate. Imagine my surprise when he leaned over and said “That was the best ****ing thing I ever read.” I haven’t stopped since. How did you find yourself on the Eastern Shore of Virginia? I was born and raised in New York. My grandparents met while working at the World Trade Center, married, retired and moved down t o the Shore in 1990 (when I was 5). My sister and I would spend our summers there every year where we have our best childhood memories. When I was 21, I moved back dow

Dima Zales’ The Sorcery Code is heavy. Everything about the fantasy is leaden with importance. Zales wraps a steamy romance in a tapestry of magic, complete with fish-out-of-water subplots, magical intrigue, political deception, and not to mention the burden of inner conflicts. Zales’ weighty fantasy is loaded with backstory and cool magical spells such as Life Captures which allow for the user to envelop themselves into another’s life.  Code’s early strength lies in the rich description of the magical world, and the steamy sexual tension between Blaise, Gala, Augusta, Barson. The prose pushes forward with lots of heavy names, history, and themes,  and at times the forced relationships and political dalliances weigh down what should be a more fluid sexy romance fraught with danger. I’m not sure how much the average reader will care about Blaise’s hero Lenard the Great, or Ganir’s invention of Life Captures; most readers will be flipping pages for a bare chested bar brawl between

Rose Solari’s debut novel, A Secret Woman , is a double helix narrative following Louise Terry, a feminist artist seeking love and inspiration in the art circles, and bars, of the DC area, and her mother, Margaret, whose recent death has unearthed a mysterious manuscript about a woman with the gift of light, also named Margaret, a nun who lived, suffered, and sacrificed in the Middle Ages. Solari sets up a mystery wrapped in a social comedy of errors, wrapped in a family drama. There layers to her storytelling, the doppleganger characters living in various timelines, and the characters own artisitic perspective of the events in question. Its not just because the novel has a mystic heart that the publisher put a celtic knot in the cover design, its because Solari has served up a well paced novel rich in design. Why was crazy Mom interested in the saints? Why did crazy Mom cheat? Was there a curse? More than one possibly? Why did she leave her children they she did? These questi

Brie McGill’s Kain , a cyberpunk sci-fi adventure, is a noisy, nerve rattling ride through a future dystopia. Lukian Valentin, the protagonist, is a government experiment;a super soldier with a partitioned mind who escapes his fate to reinvent himself. McGill’s narrative plants us deep within the government’s psychotic grip upon its citizens, who exist to serve the military ambitions of it sprawling control. The novel unfolds with action and angst, and McGill pulls the reader through a maze of a first act. Eventually, Lukian senses a new life beyond his own reality, and finds his sense of duty eroding. He is either befriended or tailed by Aiden, another Empire drone, who rejects the Empire as he does. Lukian subsequently falls into a rabbit hole of identity crisis that threaten to bring him to the brink.  Just what is going on in his head? Who is Kain? Can it be he? Kain, and Lukian? And why is the Empire so interest

Simone White’s chapbook, Unrest , from Ugly Duckling Presse,  is a serial abecedarian poem about “writing when it is forbidden,” (from the publisher’s note) for and from the contemporary black experience as part of the press’ dossier series. White dialogues with a variety of voices and touches upon culture in this serial poem that is as much about human identity as it is about racial identity. It’s a handsome chappie, and dense, layered, full of small quiet moments such as staring her cat n the eye, skull to skull, or trying so hard to slide into designer jeans that are by design tight, uncomfortable, yet necessary if only to remind us that we live in “a state of bafflement over own decay.” The poems of Unrest touch upon the author’s experience of language in law school, as well as her experience as a young woman with her own “weird/ugly thinking about my sex.” Though White is writing about and from the African American experience, the poems of the sequence are rooted in the

Lenny Lianne’s newest volume of poetry, The ABCs of Memory , from ScriptWorks Press, mashes two books of poetry, with opposing ideals, together, a tradition that harkens back to Blake,  An Alphabet from An Ample Nation, and An Alphabet of Modest Means. Memory strikes a contemporary chord, both cherishing the past and tightening the belt on the future, a theme most Americans could identify with in these recent years of economic recovery. Lianne’s ABCs are broad in depth and range, and touch on cultural milestones such as Elvis, Nancy Drew, Wonder Bread, 9-11, and Ty Cobb, as well as personal memories of her family. These poems are celebrations, elegies, and like the titles of the books, or parts suggest, hint at a plethora of riches, or a plethora of troubles, big and small. Lianne speaks with authority about young men drafted into war in “Basic Training” and young boys peeking at their Centerfold cousin in “Finding the Playmate of the Month.” Lianne doesn’t just recount these

Jessica Jones will be released in November on Netflix, and if you have never heard of the character you are not alone. Chances are that your resident Marvel fangirl or fanboy are hyper aware of its existence, release date, and potential cross-over appearances. The little fanboy that lives in our house is constantly digesting MCU material. Where does it all fit in, Dad? What’s next in the Marvel Cinematic Universe? Potential viewers beware, the source material for the show Jessica Jones is not for kids. It’s for you, adults. For us alone. Can you feel the cheery Marvel buzz? I ate comics through the eighties and early nineties. I consumed as much as I could afford, trade, or borrow. And I thought I remembered Jessica Jones as a character from Heroes for Hire . Turns out, I was wrong, though the comic book tramps through Hell’s Kitchen, and Misty Knight shows up as a cameo. From author Brian Michael Bendis and artist Michael Gaydos, Alias ran from 2001-2004 on Marvel’s