An Ampersand Megareview by Megan Scarborough

Ryan J. Davidson’s poetry collection Under What Stars focuses on themes of travel, soul-searching, and loneliness — UnderWhatStars something of a holy trinity. Â The collection centers around the places Davidson has lived in and traveled to throughout Asia, Europe and the U.S., but these places are less settings than memories. Indeed, as the book builds force it becomes clear that it is above all a book about memory, about the moments we use to construct our identities, and the fragility of those constructions.

Davidson brings to these poems a hard-won worldliness. He is unwilling to buy into the wisdom of others, determined to draw his own conclusions at whatever cost. In ‘The Ramifications of Knowing,’ the speaker declares:

I‘ve been away for years,
quietly mapping my American sub-conscious
from an expatriate perspective,
and learned that if it’s snowing anywhere it’s always here.

This weariness, which can’t be anything but real, is yet, thankfully, belied by moments of humor and hope. He says “no one / explained the value / of solitary nights on a bed in Mexico”, but he doesn’t tell us what that value is. We’re welcome to follow him on his journey, but any answers we walk away with will be our own. Those are the house rules.

And it is, for the most part, a fun, exciting journey — full of heartache and humiliation, but after every failure, every betrayal, every hangover, he rolls up the metaphorical sleeping bag and heads for the next city with a sort of courage that we can’t help traipsing after. As the speaker in ‘Papers Please’ puts it, “I think I left home / to go home to start a new home, / or something equally improbable.”Â There is ambivalence here, along with confusion and a profound sense of disorientation, but there is no lack of hope.

One of the strongest poems, ‘Questions I’ll Never Ask of the Moon,’ describes the poetic process in a very illuminating manner, as the speaker declares:

I’ve been building my own moon,
using scraps of conversation for the surface
and things not said for craters
and canyons,
but I managed to see the real moon

and I must begin
again.

Here we encounter the tension between art and reality. The speaker struggles to put both his inner world and the outer world into a poem, and to make something beautiful out of the contradictions contained therein. Yet one look up at the sky, and his inadequacy has him starting over from the beginning, convinced he hasn’t gotten it right. It’s a powerful moment of artistic humility.

There are moments when the language is playfully inventive, clever in the best way. He describes a smile at a stranger as a “microwaved moment,”Â and, while sharing a particular memory, confesses a stretch of the truth by saying, “this isn’t my childhood– / more like the infrared end of the spectrum.”Â These leaps of imagination demonstrate a truly creative mind at work. There are other moments when the language isn’t as tight as it could be, when awkward word choice detracts from our enjoyment of a moment. On the whole, however, this is a well-organized and coherent collection about searching for a home in this world. Who can’t relate to that?

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DoSomething Joseph Riipi’s novella Do Something is a book about the things we can and cannot change about ourselves. It’s a book about running away and about going home. The characters in it struggle constantly to define themselves, to control their lives, and to feel as if they are making progress. Some of them succeed, but there is a great sense of despair, and many of the characters wind up at the end no closer to the truth about themselves than when they began.

The book dances around the life of a young man in a mental hospital. The crime that has landed him here — shockingly violent and perpetrated while he was drunk — has also estranged him from what is left of his family. Still, his sister goes out to visit him in the hospital, and there seems to be a hint at a possible reconciliation until it becomes clear that she is so tangled up in her own messy, damaged life that she can’t really help him at all. Â The book shifts around constantly. It changes point of view, vacillates between past and present, and turns from the main story to various fictions-within-the-fiction and back again (it seems nearly every character in the book is some type of writer). It becomes difficult to keep up with all of these twists and turns about halfway through the book. Italicized passages mark one of the main character’s notes in a monitored journal he keeps at the mental hospital, but even then he segues from fiction to his past and back so quickly that even the different typeset doesn’t necessarily provide clarity.

Still, for its sometimes-confusing twists of plot and manipulations of reality, there are moments of profound tenderness and emotional truth in this book. When a particularly gruesome story is shared during a group therapy session, one of the main characters confesses, “No one said it, but everyone in the circle was jealous of that story.” It’s an uncomfortable moment, but it feels raw and true. Later, a bereaved woman walks into a bar and demands a gin and tonic. She doesn’t say much at all, but when the woman walks out, the bartender grasps the gravity of what has just happened. “That woman had never tasted her husband’s drink,”Â she observes, “didn’t know what it was that made him feel important. She only knew what it smelled like.”Â This is a powerful image that conveys the distance that can exist between two people, even a married couple. Finally, near the end, we are left with a visual image that is striking because it is both comical and sickening: a child kills a snake by tying it into a knot. It’s a moment that holds real weight without the heavy-handedness of lines like, “Whiskey is the sweet, unspoiled caramel of the life before.”Â The book could probably do without that one.

Do Something takes on a complex range of emotions, and in the moments when it hits the right notes, it is quite lovely and genuine. As one of the main characters puts it, “That’s what fiction is: reality tilted in such a way that the reader can see the truths of the world more clearly.”Â Though the plot occasionally suffers from convolution and the language from sentimentality, the stronger moments do hold bittersweet truth, and do indeed tilt the world in such a way as to make it just a bit more clear.

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Dodging Traffic is a collection that doesn’t dodge any uncomfortable subjects. J. Bradley heads right for the danger zone and doesn’t look in the rearview mirror for the comforts of pretty poetry. The poems in this collection are racy, raunchy, and rough. Something like looking at porn under a microscope. These are not veiled references to “making love,” whatever that means. He’s talking about fucking, and he’s calling it like he sees it.

Bradley’s originality finds material in unexpected places. Â Many of the poems take on subjects of pop culture, such as pitting Juno McGuff against Bristol Palin in a frank discussion of abortion and politics. Â Nor does Bradley stick to traditional poetic templates. A poem can be a personals ad, a valedictorian’s speech, or a wedding vow. His sense of humor and predilection for the grotesque lend both levity and relevance. This is a book of poetry that will probably appeal to a lot of people who wouldn’t otherwise read poetry. Yet, at certain points, the book slides down that slippery slope into cleverness, and a couple of the pieces just read like jokes. Take “What Makes a Man a Man” for example. The answer? ” Chasing butterflies / with automatic weapons.” Har, har. True enough, but I don’t come to poetry looking for punchlines, and I wonder why Bradley doesn’t give stand-up a go and leave the cynical jokes out of what might otherwise be a fearless and impressive collection.

And the language in this book is indeed fearless. Â Quite a few of these poems could stand to have their mouths washed out with soap. Â But there is something brave about that. A lot of poets don’t know what to do with the grime of real life, and Bradley at least tries to polish the shit up for us. Â There are moments when it seems to almost shine. If you’re of the life-ain’t-pretty school of thought, you’ll probably find these poems right on the money.

The metaphors in this book are, at times, dizzying. It becomes difficult to trace the similes and analogies and leaps of literary imagination that liken boners to army squads and sperm to flowers. Sometimes it is successful, a fun ride. But this book suffers from some serious uneven tone issues. Â Moreover, clarity is here and there sacrificed for wit or a creative turn of phrase, and while I was consistently amazed by lines like, “You cannot wear Wednesday / like a codpiece and expect Friday / to be kind to you,” (from “A Habit of A Highly Effective Person”) I often found myself wondering what this or that oddball figure of speech actually meant.

John Gardner writes that, “Novelty [in literature] comes chiefly from ingenious genre-crossing or elevation of familiar materials,” and in this collection Bradley attempts to elevate some of the most squeamish and intimate trash you can imagine into art. This is pop culture porno-poetry of a new hue and degree. But whether or not this novelty amounts to anything more than novelty is up for debate.

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cover Melissa Broder’s collection When You Say One Thing But Mean Your Mother is an energetic dissection of contemporary American life. Its pop culture references are encyclopedic, referencing everything from fast food to celebrities to the phenomenon of over-medication. It also focuses on religion and spirituality — examining the legacies provided us by our parents as well as the new-fangled and sometimes ill-advised fads we take a stab at in hopes of finding some meaning in this life.Much of the collection is set in California, land of yuppies, hippies, and hipsters. Broder’s observations on the meaning and nonsense of pop culture are penetrating and illuminating. Drugs, particularly pills, take on a star role in her demonstration of our ailments and the bandages we attempt to put on them. In Â ‘Meet Your New Counselor”Â the speaker declares of the therapist,

It’s anybody’s guess
whether she holds the door to the planet
but does she ever have pills. A republic
of laquer candies rests in a bone box
for showstopping dreamtime, there’s no shortage
in that department.

Even the guardians of mental health aren’t guaranteed to have the answers. But they’ve got medicine, oh boy do they! It’s a sometimes-damning portrait of our culture, but Broder’s not here to criticize. This is a book about the way things are.

Of course that isn’t to say that it rests in the realm of “reality,”Â since metaphors, allusions, and narratives often bring us into a world where anything can happen. Even cynicism may end up incinerated by an unexpected moment of beauty, as in ‘The Wait for Cake’. The speaker is anxious to leave a boring wedding, but another guest convinces her to stay until the cake is served. The speaker then admits the error of her premature pessimism, saying, “When a person wants to go / why not let her go? / Stay for cake and get kissed.”Â Even when you least expect it, the world can surprise you for the better.

The collection also revolves around the question of where we draw the line between sane and crazy. There are characters who think they’re crazy but aren’t, characters who believe themselves perfectly sane, but au contraire! One speaker admits the familiarity of this tension, admitting,

It’s safe on this side to talk about crazy
like a war going on in some other country.
At home, each of us brushes against it.
Jon takes blue pills, I’ve got grey and pink.

Other characters behave crazy for their own reasons: “Once you ate paper in / Science class / to make people laugh. Love alone, totally / sane, illumined you.”Â We may act crazy, but so long as we are still capable of love, perhaps it will all work out in the end.

One thing Broder does particularly well are Didion-esque character portraits, as in ‘Double Dubuque.’ She describes a woman named Sheila as:

–46, thin,
invested in solar. She rolled tight spliffs and knew Grace Slick.
I let Sheila bathe me in rosewater, wrap me in hemp robes
and place me in front of the sunset like a TV.
Everybody said that I glowed like a firefly.

The rich descriptions and incisive takes on pop culture phenomena make this a vibrant and eclectic collection. It occasionally suffers from clutter but mostly leaves the reader with an expanded sense of what all of this ephemera means, of where we are and where we’re headed.