Manoleria by Daniel Khalastchi (review)

colorado review 156 term from Wallace Shawn. The essay is a poignant requiem for Perkins’s formal, deeply empathic style and for the bygone age of his form: letters. In a patently compassionate collection, few essays resist the gentle erasure of the censorious in Gottlieb’s critical voice, yet those that do adduce aptly chosen detail to support their wisely sardonic tone. To wit, “Becky in the Movies: Vanity Fair,” a critique of cinematic mises-en-oeuvre of Thackeray’s masterpiece, is a beautifully wrought eschewal of feminist representations such as Mira Nair’s or those that render Becky Sharp the cynosure of the audience’s eye. Though Gottlieb does not mention it, to this reader, the essay pivots on Thackeray’s own subtitle, “A Novel without a Hero,” a contention that adaptations should portray a society under great strain rather than an individual character’s storyline. The work of linear connection—understanding the organizational framework that underpins an essay collection—is that of the reader. To my mind, Lives and Letters is a matter of rearranging our sight lines in remembrance of things past. Gottlieb’s portraits provide historical moorings for the younger generation of film, theatre, and literary enthusiasts, in the same vein as David Thomson’s “When is a movie great? The perils of medium and magic” (Harper’s Magazine, July 2011). An occasional wish for a more stentorian note in his criticism is the strongest critique one might level, for, like Francine du Plessix Gray, he’s essentially “too decent” a person to let cavil shape his creative direction. Rather, his wry, warm ethos evokes Joan Acocella ’s in Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints, and his modest , empathic, and visionary approach recalls Geoff Dyer’s in Otherwise Known as the Human Condition. We, as witnesses and participants in this frame, are blessed. Manoleria, by Daniel Khalastchi Tupelo Press, 2011 reviewed by Kristina Marie Darling Recently selected as winner of the Tupelo Press/Crazyhorse First Book Prize, Daniel Khalastchi’s Manoleria explores the intersection of biology and personal identity while offering readers 157 Book Notes a graceful matching of form and content. Frequently pairing elegies, prose, and formal verse with lyric fragments, Khalastchi presents the human body as existing in a constant state of metamorphosis. The poems in this magnificent volume ask us to consider the nature of selfhood when the body becomes unrecognizable , a concern that is skillfully enacted in the style of the work as Khalastchi appropriates, revises, and dismantles received literary forms. With that said, Manoleria is at its best when these formal choices complicate the text itself. In a piece called “National Growth:”, for instance, Khalastchi suggests the socially constructed nature of biology. Although the speaker seems to tacitly accept information from cultural authorities, the poem’s subtle technical decisions foreshadow a disruption of the status quo. Khalastchi writes, . . . Somewhere a radio plays soft news of a shooting. A couple comes near holding drinks with umbrellas. I feel such weight lay heavy my stomach. See red heads of lettuce where I was told I have ovaries. As the parameters of political life are defined by cultural authorities , the speaker of the poem realizes that she is also powerless in the face of social ideas about biology. By enjambing the phrase “I was told I have ovaries,” for example, Khalastchi suggests that much of our understanding of the human body, its nature, and its limitations has been imposed on us from without. Although the tone of the poem evokes passivity, even resignation, Khalastchi’s formal choices suggest the possibility of subversion. His use of couplets, for example , exhibits an awareness of received literary forms that colorado review 158 have been imposed on us by previous generations, in much the same way that social and political ideas are thrust upon the speaker. While this may be true, the cadences one finds in Khalastchi’s “National Growth:” differ from those of more conventional poetry. By allowing fragmentation, silence, and white space to inhabit what appears to be a formal poem, Khalastchi suggests that these received ideas about literature, as well as politics and the body, remain in a constant state of revision. The poems in...