Dave
Newman’s Two
Small Birds (Writers Tribe Books, 2014) John Grochalski
I’ll
admit right off the bat that I’m a Dave Newman fan. When I was asked to review
Newman’s new book, Two Small Birds (Writers
Tribe Books, 2014), I jumped at the chance. I still can’t tell you why. I’m not
a book reviewer, as will be evidenced by this piece. I know what I like and
most of the time I can’t tell you why I like it. It has a feel or a vibe. So
far be it from me to tell you what you’re going to like, right? But something
about having the chance to express my fandom and adulation for Dave Newman’s
work really struck me. I wanted the guy’s words to slug you as they do for me.
Two Small Birds tells the story of Dan Charles (our
hero from Raymond Carver Will Not Raise
Our Children) in his younger and more vulnerable years. Dan wants to be a
poet. Dan wants to write words and have them matter. But the fault lies not
within his drive or talent, but in being born into and of blue collar American
stock. There is no room for art in America and Dan is quickly coming to realize
this. This is the slow erosion of a dream at too young a time. This is life
both desperate and unrealized and unformed. It is a blur of cheap drafts and
mixed drinks in bars. It is a blur of fuck buddies giving fast food salvation. It
is English lit and writing courses in offshoot university campuses, low-paying
jobs, money worries, and shithole apartments infinite.
The
novel is about truth and need. And it’s not just Dan who’s floundering in this
environment. There’s his brother John. John is a few years removed from Dan,
out of college with barely a savings account, maxed out credit cards, and the
endless black hole of college debt. For John more than Dan, there is a hopelessness
that is already made manifest in the dearth of opportunity that exists for him.
He’s already immersed in the horrors of the work-a-day traps of being on-call
almost 24/7 as a sales rep for an industrial company, hunting down machine
parts at all hours of the day and night. John needs a plan. Dan needs a purpose
or at least a separation from the spinning meat grinder of college and
impending ennui. And that’s where the plan to stock and sell high grade
industrial wire comes in. But the brothers need capital. So John stays on the
job, pushing and plugging away. And Dan…Dan takes to the road as a truck
driver.
One
of the things that I love about Dave Newman’s writing is the way that he has
his characters interact. There is a flow of dialogue between two people that
swims in lyrical bliss at times in his work, albeit a rough-edged lyric. Dan
may read Whitman and Sandburg, but he and his ilk talk like the guys putting a
few back at the local tavern. But what’s more poetic than that? Some of my
favorite moments of the novel are when Dan and John are together hatching plans
in bars, or talking on the telephone when Dan is out in desolate America all
hopped up on fast food, caffeine, amphetamines, and alcohol, trying his best to
make it happen. There is a genuine banter between the brothers. There is a
genuine love and rivalry and care that comes across when they speak. It’s comedic
and stilted and brotherly, and has a pent-up violence at times that can only
exist between flesh and blood.
Dan’s
other major connect is Becca, a girl he met at
wedding and starts seeing shortly before he goes on the road. Initially, I had
some problems with Becca. She seemed to be everyone’s
hot fuck buddy willing to burp a burger and shake her little ass all in the
same moment. But she grew on me, and maybe it’s because I’m a red-blooded male.
Or maybe it’s because what saves the character for me is in the ways that
Newman has her interact with Dan and in the ways that he has Dan think about
her, describe Becca, with lines like this: Becca, who I hated, who I loved as much as I
could for a woman I hated, just comes across as pure honesty in my book.
Especially if you’ve ever been deeply in lust.
There
is a wonderfully playful, sexual, and even hateful banter in the way that Dan
and Becca connect and disconnect. He is bold and
dismissive and wanting all wrapped into one. And she is stupid and sexually
suggestive and seemingly the most brilliant woman in the room in some scenes. And
yes, that can border on male sex fantasy…but, hey, stereotypes exist for a
reason. And although Becca can straddle the
virgin-slut trope at times, Newman carries her with a genius that makes her
real and wholly authentic and a character that comes to, in some peculiar way,
symbolize for Dan the comforts and people that he misses at home.
I
was worried that these interactions would dissipate once Dan was on the road. But
I needn’t worry with prose in Dave Newman’s hands. True, the connections Dan
makes on the road aren’t as long-lived, fulfilling, or steeped in familial
blood as those with Becca and John, but Newman makes
the most of the characters that Dan meets while out in America, and gives you a
good cross-section of the people shuffling about in all of the freedom and loneliness.
Moments with other truckers, waitresses, hookers, and even his dispatcher gleam
with the wit and intelligence that I’ve comes to expect when the dialogue gets
popping in a Newman novel. They resonate. And that matters.
But
what really got me was how much Newman rose to the occasion with this prose. Admittedly,
he’s no slouch. Still, it can be hard to have one character out there in
roadside America with nothing but his own thoughts and kid fears to keep him
grounded. And Newman does a damned fine job with this as well. From contemplating
his family to his future to great works of art, the gritty, heart-racing solace
of Dan Charles against the American landscape becomes such a factor in this
novel that I had to check my own road-weariness when he headed off the highways
for some R&R at home. I found myself exhausted and strung out too. I was
tired of spools of highways, and wanted to hide beneath my own sheets for days.
But it was a dazzling tiredness, folks. And I just don’t get wrapped into prose
like this that often.
But
this is it, kids. This is my recommendation. Read Dave Newman. Read Two Small Birds and then go and read the
rest of this man’s oeuvre. I’m probably going to say more here than a have in
the previous one-thousand words, but Dave Newman is my kind of writer. He
writes the truth. He takes the hard-scrabble and he makes it sing. Newman takes
the ugly and awkward and turns them into swans, man. He writes about the people
who need to be written about. You. Me. All of us.
For
further readings of Dave Newman: Please
Don’t Shoot Anyone Tonight (World Parade Books, 2010), Allen Ginsberg Comes to Pittsburgh, The Beer Factory, Raymond
Carver Will Not Raise Our Children (Writers Tribe Books, 2012), and The Slaughterhouse
Poems (White Gorilla Press, 2013).
Karen Dietrich’s Girl Years (Matter Press, 2012) Teresa Narey
“You
feel time differently when you’re a girl,” writes Karen Dietrich in her second
chapbook, Girl Years, a work of
compressed nonfiction comprised of sixteen short pieces. According to The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts,
the online weekly published by Matter Press, compression means “saying more
with less,” writing about the small things that live inside of us, and using
“lean language.” It is fair to say that Dietrich fulfills all of these
expectations. Though our girl years represent only a fraction of our
experience, Dietrich demonstrates that they can have the most impact on how we
perceive and interact with the world. For Dietrich, girlhood is more than
innocence and bows; it is the beginning of fear and desire.
Each
piece in Girl Years represents events
that shaped Dietrich’s girlhood. She writes with candid whimsy about playground
fun and sexual exploration. Like most adolescents, the girl in Girl Years is mature enough to have
sexual urges, but young enough not to understand them. In the title piece,
girls are “seas of pink” playing ring around the rosy, “hoping the boys will
catch up. . . lie us down and peel off our clothes.” In “Clouds,” Dietrich
discovers the spot “right there in the middle of [her]” under her underwear, an
act she calls “reaching the dew point.” In these instances, Dietrich blends the
real with the dreamlike to capture her adolescent self’s existence between
knowingness and naïveté.
Desire
is a significant theme in Girl Years.
We learn a lot about what Dietrich is not allowed to do. She is forbidden to
touch the pulley system for the windows in her sister’s bedroom, to part her
own hair because her mother says it looks as “crooked as a dog’s hind leg” when
she does it, and to stand too close to her mother, who likes her air “clean,
free of little girls and [their] milky breath.” Perhaps most telling is what
happens when Dietrich gets something she wants. In “Wanting,” she begs her
father for red licorice and consumes the entire package, only to throw it up. The
image is one of loneliness, with Dietrich “in yellow underwear and nothing
else. . . the toothbrushes star[ing] silently all in
a row.” Here, fulfilling a desire can mean facing consequences and facing them
alone.
In
opposition to desire is fear, a feeling embodied most by Dietrich’s mother,
whose life is overtaken by superstition. We learn the mother longs for her
deceased parents and siblings, seeing them reincarnated in animals, penny
candy, clouds, spilled milk, even her own aches and pains. Knowing this helps
us make sense of her exchange with Dietrich in “Shooting Stars,” when she tells
Dietrich there is a star for every person and so when one falls, someone dies. She
leads Dietrich to believe that if you can find the spot where the star falls,
“that person you love won’t die after all.” Of course, such a task is
impossible, but it does not deter the mother from instilling other strange
concepts: eating twelve grapes at midnight on New Year’s Eve will bring good
luck throughout the year and shaking a purse at the moon will guarantee riches.
Such superstitions add order to the mother’s life, but prevent Dietrich from
taking risks; Dietrich believes she has to stomp fives times before the garage door closes or take eleven sips from the water fountain
before she stops drinking or else. She
admits she does not know what “or else” is and being afraid to find out
suggests she is experiencing a very limited world.
In
the final piece, “True Stories,” we learn the mother had a stressful childhood
and wonder why she yearns so much for her family. Just before this, Dietrich
expresses her own dissatisfaction with her parents not being much help in her
own life. The juxtaposition of these sentiments encourages us to ask: What is
it that girls need from their families and why are they having such a hard
time? Dietrich attempts a resolution when she writes:
My
mother wears stories. They live somewhere inside
her.
My mother is a well and these stories spring from her.
She
can control when they come out. She gives me a sprinkle
here
and there, a small dollop of sadness when I need it,
when
I forget about suffering, about our history. Don’t
let yourself be happy, because that’s when it will find you. The
stories
will always find me, just as they have always found my
mother.
Moments
of happiness triggered moments of sadness for the mother. As a girl, Dietrich
could not escape this; being in her mother’s care meant that when her mother
was unhappy, her feelings affected everyone else’s. Here, the mother cannot
escape her past, and the message she sends to her daughter is that she will not
be able to either. The mother aches for own girlhood and therefore cannot give
her own daughter one of encouragement and love.
Despite
all of this, Girl Years is not a
story without hope. In “Ballerina,” Dietrich concludes, “I can’t die for my
mother. Each of us can only do what we’ve been designed to do. I’m afraid I’ve
been designed to live.” By telling these stories, Dietrich is not waiting for
them to arise. She is not waiting for them to manifest in spilled beverages or
pets or a headache. She is freeing them, and in return, she is freeing herself.
Kristofer Collins’s Local
Conditions (Coleridge Street Books, 2015) Don Wentworth
We
humans move through space in time, and time as space: Einstein said that. On
occasion, there is a dovetailing transcendence of the two, the loud crash of an ashplant stick into a whorehouse chandelier, and all
… time … stops: Joyce said that.
All
is one, all is one: Buddha said that.
And
it passes, in a moment, in an hour, in a day, in a life–and, suddenly, we are
back, with a raging hangover, and a sheepish smile, from a glimpse of the
divine.
I
said that.
From
the title, Local Conditions, onward,
poet Kristofer Collins offers a deep, calm-abiding
meditation of place, a sense of where we are and what we do there, how each
influences the other in this pas de duex we call
life. Friend, hold on tight to this notion: the emotive landscape of place, the
now then-ness of time.
In
the opening poem, “I Am Not Kahil Gibran,” a kind of
transcendent chord is struck in the literate portrayal of a seemingly ordinary
teenage horndog, via the age old come-on known as
‘poetry.’ The poem pivots in the last 4 lines in James Wright fashion,
illustrating that words themselves may simultaneously serve as a seduction tool
and another Way altogether.
With
the door swung open, we enter “My Wife Goes To War With The Deer,” which
presents Walt Whitman taking a perfect turn as a
… fat old groundhog that bumbles
around sometimes
In the yard just digging up
bulbs and setting them
Almost tenderly on the walk
A
few lines later, we uncover Ol’ Father Walt as a
savior of more men, both literally and figuratively, then many an established
faith.
In
“City Forge” we stumble into a “country of killers,” where the present seems a
transparent palimpsest of the past. “Molina” gives a cosmic specificity to
somewhere bordering “West Virginia and The Vatican,” an imaginary locale Dante
would surely recognize. In the very next poem, “The Old Stories,” that cosmic
POV slips in an out of focus:
When I wake before you
And quietly move through the
house, it’s not ours anymore
But some foreign place with a
climate all its own, with ways of
Paying for things we haven’t
come to yet.
Local Conditions is full of disquieting moments like
this, where past, present, and future blend in a miasma of worry and wonder.
Sometimes transcendence is in a minor key, a dissembling sort of revelation,
the ineluctable nature of change within which we continue to ask the
unanswerable, and then ask again. “The Old Stories” concludes with something of
an answer, an answer the narrator gives that is a kind of cipher of the
question itself:
This place
is warm and dark and
Soon you will join me here and
share this with me. I have
Not taken a new name, but still
I am different.
“Heaven,”
too, is a place Dante might recognize, a place entirely removed from the world,
another place where past and present converge, “a place where our fathers
came,” for a very different, very human nirvana: “There is no time here. /
Nothing happens by design. It is wonderful.” That the here is the communal
man-cave known as the neighborhood bar is of little consequence: heaven is
where you find it. In the poem that follows, “Some Days Are Like This,” the
seeming artifice of “Heaven” suddenly has a very real appeal considering “the
stupefied face of this stunned planet” and for the fact that “for all / The
satellites we throw up there at the stars, not one / of those damned things
shows us a better way.”
We
move back and forth in both time and space, from Pittsburgh to Baltimore to
D.C., the present to the Civil War (“Fix Bayonets”), from child to man, via
crayons as swizzle sticks (“The Truth About Abstract Expressionism”). Poem
after poem evokes how it is by way of how it was, with an occasional quick left
at how it might become. “Anger” shows us a bar that is no heaven, where son is
doomed to repeat mistakes father has come to regret, twice slipping from
present to past and back to a conclusion as measured as it is damning.
“Ants,”
too, deals with places here and gone, places we don’t see under our very noses,
places where cockroaches “perch on walls like tiny Picassos,” and, ultimately (as
in “I Am Not Kahlil Gibran”) an answer in the form of
a lyric question is found glimmering in nature itself, with
A lone ant intrepidly marching
across our kitchen floor.
Poem
after poem, too many to cite in a cogent review, explores the geography of
place and the archaeology of time, the poet searching, looking “through this
snarl of foliage” to “find the right constellation, the true north,” like a
giant galactic map marked with a miniscule pinpoint with the simple rubric,
“You Are Here.”
Here
we are, indeed, in a place that Kristofer Collins
psychically maps so precisely that we, the readers, can but knowingly nod,
gazing off into the middle distance of our very souls.
John Grochalski is the author of The Noose Doesn’t Get Any Looser
After You Punch Out (Six Gallery Press 2008), Glass City (Low Ghost Press, 2010), In The Year of Everything Dying (Camel Saloon, 2012), Starting with the Last Name Grochalski (Coleridge Street Books, 2014), and the novel, The Librarian (Six Gallery Press 2013). Grochalski
currently lives in Brooklyn, New York, where he constantly worries about the
high cost of everything.
Teresa Narey’s poetry has appeared in several publications, most
recently Misfit
Magazine, No Tokens, and Pittsburgh City Paper, and anthologized in Extract(s) Volume
2: Poems and Stories 2013 and The
2013 Robert Frost International Poetry & Haiku Contests: Winners and
Selected Entries. She has reviewed books
for The New Yinzer, Poets’
Quarterly, and The Mom Egg. She has an MFA in creative writing from
Chatham University.
Don Wentworth is a
Pittsburgh-based poet whose work reflects his interest in the revelatory nature
of brief, haiku-like moments in everyday life. His poetry has appeared in Modern Haiku, bottle rockets, bear creek haiku and Rolling Stone,
as well as a number of anthologies. His first full-length collection, Past All Traps, was published in 2011 by Six
Gallery Press and was shortlisted for the Haiku Foundation's 2011 Touchstone
Distinguished Books Award. His second full-length book, Yield to the Willow, is recently out from Six Gallery
Press.