Mere Smith's The Blood Room

I don’t often review prose, though my favorite medium to write/read is the short story; however numerous articles on quality v quantity of the price of literature have made me revise my way of thinking. At last month’s L.A. Times Festival of Books, which was, sadly bereft of many small presses, I came across one author who’d partnered with another author friend to cheerfully hawk their literary wares to passersby. I picked up a copy of The Blood Room ( © 2013 Evil Gal Productions), by Mere Smith, a short (40 pages), witty and almost way-too-frank tale about giving birth.

The Blood Room is not about Smith’s foray into motherhood, but her younger sister’s, who, against all commonly accepted odds (common in the sense of universally anecdotal medical evidence), becomes pregnant with just “one embryo” because her sister only wants “one baby.” Smith, a forthright independent soul, often finds her own preferences and moral values challenged in the face of her sister’s pregnancy (no smoking in the house, no drugs allowed on the premises, numerous cameras installed in her sister’s basement to film the home birth). Demands on Smith (and Smith’s mother) advance along with the pregnancy, but in spite of this, Smith rises to every challenge, even into the hours of her sister’s active labor, with a mixture of humor and mounting frustration:

So there I was, looking into that miniature grimy lake, heat radiating off my skin, knee throbbing, muscles screaming, adrenaline coursing yet still exhausted, feeling more than a touch light-headed, when all of a sudden my guts tried to pole-vault their way out of my mouth, right into the AquaDoula.

Thank God the first leap was small - aided by the fact I was so surprised by it, I quickly gasped for a deep breath that seemed to quell the second heave.

It was only then that I realized, Holy shit! You almost just puked on your sister!

The next micro-second brought, Goddammit, Mere, if she can endure 22 hours of full body torture, the least you can do is not vomit in the water her baby will be born in.

Marshaling every last ounce of self-control, i turned away - one hand keeping a cold towel still pressed to my sister’s forehead, one hand wiping sweat off my face with my T-shirt.

I would not leave her.

I would not.

And if that meant I had to puke on the floor right next to her, in front of her husband and our mother and the doula and the midwife and the midwife’s assistant and the cameras, then so be it. I would puke on the fuking floor.

For those of us who’ve decided not to, or have not yet had children, being not only proximate to a sibling giving birth, or in the case of Smith, an intimate part of the process, will be life-changing (Fun fact: I was just outside the door of my sister’s hospital room the moment she gave birth to my nephew Alexander. I heard it! It changed my life forever, and for the better). In The Blood Room, Smith is more than willing to graphically kvetch about the blood and gore that comes with giving birth, but she also gives to the reader, in equal measure, the wonderful and painful details of her own emotional growth.

        There are no best-selling Congratulations on Your Impending Aunthood, or What to Expect When Your Sibling is Expecting books out there, but The Blood Room will more than suffice for those who are about to go through this process, or who are curious about it. As for the length of the book, The Blood Room is a perfectly written encapsulated tale of transformation, and in this case, quality totally triumphs over quantity.

The Blood Room, Mere Smith, © 2013 Evil Gal Productions,http://evilgalproductions.com/,  ISBN 0989813606, $4.99, 40 pages.

artwork and prose content ©  2014 Mere Smith

article content © 2014 marie lecrivain

Rich Ferguson's 8th & Agony

  I’m adding my thoughts rather late to the mix, but I feel compelled to do so after reading through Rich Ferguson’s first collection, 8th & Agony (© 2013 Punk Hostage Press). I’m also compelled to disagree with one of his admirers who proclaimed Ferguson “the last of the great poets.” Instead, I choose to view Ferguson as one of the founders of a new generation of 21st Century poets who’ve fused the best of written word with the classical tradition of oral poetry, or in this case, spoken word/slam poetry, and, in doing so, ensures the survival of both.

    Ferguson has spent many years performing in showcases. films, and tv shows. His stories have been burned into the minds of thousands of poetry lovers worldwide. If you’ve never had the pleasure of hearing Ferguson perform, then you’re in a woefully uninformed minority. Fortunately, now there’s 8th and Agony, a collection of the best of Ferguson’s poems that leap off the page and into the mind of the reader with the same lyrical ferocity of his aural performances. It takes the twin gifts of a bard and a writer to be able to deftly straddle the words of written and spoken word. 8th & Agony has achieved that level of mastery.

8th & Agony also offers a positive message, poetically and mythically speaking, which is often absent from contemporary poetry. Underscored in all of Ferguson’s poems is an aching tone of wistful hope, even through the lens of grief, as in the poem “Excommunication,” which chronicles the final stages of death and resurrection from a long-term relationship, which could have at one time been romantic and addictive:

A corrosion of loss clotted in his still-unformed wings,

while somewhere in his ghostly remains of memory

lingered a woman’s kiss -

sweet as gardenia.

He could remember that much,

remember that much of his life. He knew

there’d be things like this

he’d always remember. He knew he could

never die of forgetting.

    Ferguson is, as many of his admirers have put it, a “poetic messiah.”I gladly agree with this assessment, as the majority of Ferguson’s poems pay tribute to the bruised beauty of humanity, (“Transition Into Turbulence,” “Certain Things About Certain Women I’ve Known”, “On Becoming an Urban Legend”). Ferguson is a comedic street-corner prophet preaching a new version of the afterlife through the streets of Los Angeles in what I regard to be the best poem in his collection, “The Los Angeles Book of the Dead,”

O’ Son and Daughter of Noble Birth,

if you’ve done wrong

you can’t go trading up karma like baseball cards,

thinking you’ll end up with that prized

Tommy Lasorda 1988 Dodgers World Series Winner.

So if you’ve lied, cheated, looted,

committed a drive-by shooting,

screwed your best friend’s girlfriend/boyfriend,

left your cell phone on during a yoga class or movie,

now is the time your conscience is collecting

those sins and numbering them

on the bones of a South L.A. body count.

Yet if you should find yourself

in a La Brea tar pit hell

filled with dinosaurs, saber tooth tigers,

space aliens, and earthquakes -

don’t worry.

Know that it’s merely being created

by the special effects experts at Universal Studios

to ensure your journey

is the most exciting ride possible.

It’s National Poetry Month, and the masses (including myself) will unashamedly push all kinds of reading recommendations into the ether. If you had one book to choose, I’d recommend Ferguson’s 8th & Agony as an experience to immerse oneself into, and as a journey to take alongside one of the best poets to exist in any time or place on this planet.

(8th & Agony, Rich Ferguson, © 2013 Punk Hostage Press, ISBN 978-0-9851293-6-1, 136 pages, $15.95)

poetic content/cover artwork © 2014 Rich Ferguson and Punk Hostage Press

article content © 2014 marie lecrivain

David Herrle's Sharon Tate and the Daughters of Joy

     David Herrle's Sharon Tate and the Daughters of Joy (© 2014 Time Being Books), is a hefty poetic treatise that explores – in Herrle's scarily well-informed opinion - the varied and contradictory reasons this world reveres and destroys all that's bright and beautiful, as well as the impact of macrocosmic events (history) on a microcosmic happenstance (the human soul).

     To prove this premise, Herrle devotes the first third of the book by paying tribute to well-recognized icons of beauty (Katy Perry, Rita Hayworth, Eva Braun, et al). Here, Herrle champions the girl on the pedestal whose unwilling/unwitting elevation to heights of glory both exalts and condemns her. Herrle compares and contrasts the ever-increasing modern day need for destroying that which you love to The Terror in 18^th century France, Hitler's Holocaust, and the invention of the atomic bomb. This sets the reader up for a one-two punch. The meat (no pun intended) of Sharon Tate involves Herrle's troubling look into the depths of three historical lovlies who, through no fault of their own, met with a grisly and tragic end: Sharon Tate (at the hands of the Manson Family); Marie Antoinette (under the blade of the guillotine), and Mary Jane Kelly (the last, youngest, and most attractive of the Ripper victims). Herrle doesn't spare the reader any time to feel remorse. To balance the equation, he also invokes the maddened minds of Jack the Ripper, Charles Manson and his followers (Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkle, etc), and various personages from the (pre/post) French Revolution (Jean-Paul Marat, Marquis de Sade, Napoleon Bonaparte). Beauty v Beastliness, Peace v War, Life v Death, Creation v Destruction; all of these themes are dissected under the blade of Herrle's excellently written poetic prose. In the end, why do we even bother?

     I believe, and I may be going on a limb here, we (in this case, Herrle) bother because to do so leaves us with nothing left to live for. Even in an existential world, there is a need for beauty, light, and a purpose beyond oneself. Everyone needs to be a hero (Joseph Campbell was correct). Theology, philosophy, art, music, poetry, none of these things matter if one cannot, even for one brief moment, transcend the visceral “anus mundi” to advance beyond the immediacy of their shitty existence. Herrle proclaims, “I'm... the Scarlet Pimpernel.”

     Herrle also dares himself and the reader to take their deeply ingrained ideas of beauty for a walk through the darkest depths of hell. Every artist must do this; question WHAT they believe in, put that belief through the ringer, abuse/rape/destroy it to see if that belief can/will survive. How would one's viewpoint change, say, if you it came to you, as it did to me, that I was born one day before the Tate-LaBiana Murders? How uncomfortable would it make you feel to know, as you were drawing your first breaths, that a couple hundred miles away there was a psychotic band of fringe hippies planning the murder and evisceration of Sharon Tate's baby, an innocent who should have been born into this world without harm the way I was? How ugly and intrusive the world becomes to me when these thoughts present themselves. How enraged I become when I read Herrle's imagined account of Tate's last moments, and those of her baby's life in the poem “The Baby Lived Twenty Minutes After Sharon's Last Breath”: “You begged those soul-midgets/to take you to their lair and kill/you after you birthed your son./The gleeful stabs that replied/seemed to make one girl cum.” If this doesn't lay you low, as it did me, if it doesn't make you question the cruelty of the world and challenge your premise of sweetness and light, I don't know what will.

     All is not lost. In the end, (sorry, no spoilers), Herrle is able to give the reader a glimmer of hope, like a wet towel on a bad burn. Sharon Tate and the Daughters of Joy is Herrle's stunning account of initiation into the deepest layers of self-doubt and the hard-won attainment of inner wisdom. Treat Sharon Tate and the Daughters of Joy as you would a copy of Liber AL vel Legis, The Torah, The Koran, or The Art of War. It's not a book for the meek, but it is a book that will make the reader stronger for the reading.

Sharon Tate and the Daughters of Joy, David Herrle, copyright 2014 Time Being Books, ISBN 978-1568092225, $15.95, 198 pages.

(poetic content © 2014 david herrle)

(article content © 2014 marie lecrivain)

Yvonne M. Estrada's My Name on Top of Yours

    Yyonne M.Estrada's My Name on Top ofYours: A Crown of Sonnets With Photographs (copyright 2013 Silverton Books) is a compact powerful distillation of poetry and photographs that pays homage to the most pernicious and rebellious of incidental artists; the tagger/graffitiartist. As Estrada explains, “a crown of sonnets is a sequence of interlinked sonnets in which the last line of one becomes the first line, sometimes with variations, of the next.” Estrada fuses both the classical form of the sonnet (Elizabethan) with the modern eye of photojournalism, and while there are minor poetic liberties (frequent slant rhyme) taken by the poet, overall, the book successfully conveys its message: taggers are practicing/will practice their art whenever/wherever time and circumstance allow.

     My Name covers not just the bravado of taggers in the poems “A long name on a freeway overpass,” and “A fresh coat of night ends another day,” but also how they affect their environment, as in the poems “Shoot them in the back with yellow paint balls,” and “She was fed up, that neighborhood was hers,” which explores the other side of the issue, that of the frustration from home and property owners whose walls become the defacto tagger's canvas. The environment Estrada deftly describes in her poems is one of mounting deprivation, territorial disputes, and the driving need to claim a piece of the world for oneself, often at the expense of another. What is an artist to do? Where/when/how is an artist supposed to express him/herself in a world that constantly attempts to annihilate individuality, freedom of expression, and, on a more personal scale, a human being's existence as Estrada so eloquently asks in the poem “Oh he's too high to shout, or hide, or run”:

Oh he's too high to shout, or hide, or run.

He's pinned under the ghetto-bird's spotlight,

then unfreezes, drops the bag and it's on;

he bolts past squad-cars, escapes into night.

Torn pocket and blue under fingernails

help him tell the story all the next day.

Homies in dead cars go over details,

migrate inside to play World of Warcraft.

Any motivation goes up in smoke.

Their boredom rolls downhill, getting bigger.

They feel it close in, they know it's no joke;

they're not at work, they're not in jail either.

They're just taggers, each one has what he has -

his name on a freeway overpass.

     My Name on Top of Yours is a cautionary tale of what can happen to art, and to freedom in a society that's overwhelmed to the point of entropy. The next time you see a splash of graffiti, consider viewing it as not an intrusion on the landscape, but as a manifesto for art and life on the most personal level.

My Name on Top of Yours, Yvonne M. Estrada, copyright 2013 Silverton Books, ISBN 978-0-9629528-7-6, $7.59, 36 pages.

(poem and cover art © 2014 yvonne m. estrada)
(article content © 2014 marie lecrivain)

Don Kingfisher Campbell's An Alternate Sky

     Don Kingfisher Campbell, poet, educator, and editor of the San Gabriel Valley Poetry Quarterly is not an artist who can be pigeon-holed into one specific literary category. He proves this truth with his newest chapbook, An Alternate Sky (copyright 2013 Don Kingfisher Campbell).

     If you know Campbell (and I do), then you can’t help but like him. He’s an amiable guy from Pasadena who works hard to make sure that he - and all the poets he nurtures - are fairly represented, respected, and have a turn at the mic - and he carries this principle into his poetry.

     An Alternate Sky contains 36 poems written in a similar style (narrative, short stanzas), but each one has a distinctive voice. There’s Campbell the romantic (“Fuck to the Future”, “Seven Courses”), the teacher/facilitator (“Workshop”, “Prose Poem Inspired by Perfection”, “Summer School Senryu”), the social critic-commentator (“Not So Still Lives”, “Big Bangs”, “CNN Universe”), and my favorite (and where I believe he shines best), Campbell the dreamer-philosopher (“Did I Planet”, “Issa Frequency”, “Curiosity”). Campbell is a poet who respects his work and audience in equal measure. Each poem visually and lyrically unfolds in the mind of the reader like a series of well-crafted films, as in the poem, “Curiosity,” a revelation of what gifts Campbell has gleaned from viewing the Mars Rover Curiosity’s pictures from the Red Planet:

Why can’t I walk

on this pebbly dirt?

Why can’t I traipse

up rocky brown slopes?

Why can’t I climb,

ridge by ridge, plateau?

Just because it is too far

to reach without a ship,

just because there’s not

enough money for a mission,

just because I will be dead

before an expedition leaves.

At least, I can enjoy the robot

photographs from the rover,

and without hesitation believe

I am seeing familiar earth,

minus plants, animals…

now sporting human-made debris.

Campbell the poet has much to teach us about the nature of fair-play, with ourselves and in relation to how we as wordsmiths interact with our poetry. With An Alternate Sky, it’s a lesson many writer-poets can learn and refer back to in the future.

Note: For those of who weren’t fortunate enough to take advantage of Poetry Super Highway’s "9th Annual Great E-book Free For All", you can still purchase Campbell’s newest collection, An Alternate Sky, as a gift for the poetry lover this holiday season, or better yet, as a gift to oneself.

An Alternate Sky, copyright 2013 Don Kingfisher Campbell, 36 pages, $10 (includes shipping and handling. Details at http://dkc1031.blogspot.com/2013/11/book.html )

© 2013 marie lecrivain

Zarina Zabrisky's We, Monsters

We, Monsters (© 2013 Numina Press), the debut novel of emerging writer Zarina Zabrisky is the literary equivalent of a Jackson Pollack painting: a multi-layered, amazing, and seductive mess. Before I begin, let me say that Zabrisky has done something I have yet to do -  write a novel. However, as a fellow storyteller and a reader who likes to follow the evolutionary arc of a writer’s work, I appreciate what Zabrisky has achieved.

We, Monsters is the story of Rose, a Russian emigre who lives the American dream: successful husband, beautiful children, and house in the ‘burbs. Rose nurses aspirations to be a writer, which her husband doesn’t understand and the rest of the people in her life patently ignore. She has a rich fantasy life born out of her Russian literary heritage, her need to escape the banalities of her current existence, and the traumas of her childhood. She applies for a position as a dominatrix in a dungeon to research material for her book. Predictably, the further Rose delves into the world of BDSM, the more difficult it becomes for her to keep the parts of her life - as well as her past and present - from clashing together.

Running through each chapter of We, Monsters is a series of footnotes that explain Rose’s psychological pathology. The reader may find this intrusive. Indeed, it takes a measure of concentration not to get distracted from Zabrisky’s prose. In the heart of the story, Rose meets “Motherfucker Mike,” the most creepy (and litmus test) of the dungeon clients. MM is indirectly introduced via Rose’s study of a book called Deviants, an in-depth treatise on BDSM behavior. Rose’s first encounter with MM turns We, Monsters on its head. From this point the story instantly becomes coherent and cohesive even as Rose’s internal and external worlds fall apart.

What I like best about We, Monsters are not just the disjointed narratives that finally meld together, but the characters Zabrisky creates out of thin air. Each person in We, Monsters -  Rose’s husband Luke; her children, Nick, Olga and Roxanne; her fellow mistresses Mommy, Zoe, Greta, and Susanna; even the Latina gas station attendant and the quirky clients come to life through the lens of Rose’s fractured consciousness. With a few well-chosen words and a humorous tone, Zabrisky paints a full-blown, thoroughly believable portrait:

The session was held in the Dungeon. The spy turned out to be a fragile, red-faced man in his seventies. He had the radiant blue eyes of an iconic saint and an infectious laugh. He offered us a bribe of Moet champagne and two glasses.

“It’s a bribe,” he chuckled.

I hesitated, but Susanna gulped hers down, so I followed her example and soon felt all bubbly and light-headed. As we tumbled between the ob-gyn table and the golden shower tray, Susanna transformed.

Her angelic face twisted, she scowled; her pupils widened, making her olive-green eyes almost black. Her upper lip twitched and raised and for the first time I noticed her sharp, uneven teeth, like those of a small rodent, a squirrel maybe. Her gentleness was gone; she’d turned into a wicked bloodsucking witch, and once again reminded me of Potemkin, Potemkin the Huntress, a dying mouse hanging between her bloodstained teeth.

“We are mean! Nasty! Baaad!”

Her voice was bubbling, like the champagne we were drinking. I felt adrenaline rushing through my veins and my heart pulsing.

“I will torrrturrre you in a KGB way! You will forrrget your own name!”

I caught a glimpse of my burning face in the mirror next to Susanna’s; all we’d need in order to fly was two brooms. Susanna cursed and spit and grunted. We were shouting, hitting, kicking, fighting, hurting, and it felt breathtakingly sweet. We drank more champagne, and pushed the old man around on the floor. He was laughing like a baby and shoving dollars into our thongs… - (from the chapter “A Spy Fantasy/We, Monsters)

As with IRON, Zabrisky is unapologetic, as well as forthright. With We, Monsters, Zabrisky takes a great risk in alienating the reader with diametrically opposed points of view, but her gamble pays off handsomely with a novel that won’t soon be forgotten, and in some cases, may leave the reader questioning his/her own reality. I wish more writers would take this risk, as it would, in my opinion, bring literature back to where it needs to be, in the realm of Art.

(Note: We, Monsters will be released in December 2013. Check Zabrisky’s website for where/when to purchase, and author dates)

(We, Monsters, ©  2013 Zarina Zabrisky, ISBN 978-0-9842600-4-1, A Vox Nova Book, published by Numina Press, 300 pages, price TBA)

© 2013 marie lecrivain