A Literary Triptych: Fabulous, Furious, and Striking

Bricklebank continuedfrom previous page modern creative writing program (as genetically modified and grown in Iowa) and how it shucks the life out of the stories it processes. Rather than chloroform and pin it as a new genre, however, I enjoy it as the satiric short-short it is. Conners suggests in his introduction that in prose poetry topicality is generally felt to be unacceptable . The Forche and Violi prose poems already disabuse that notion, but pieces in Conners's book such as Kent Johnson's "Lyric Poetry After Auschwitz , or: 'Get the Hood Back On'" also refute it. This prose poem, which isn't in the least lyrical, takes the form of six approximately half-page paragraphs , ostensibly monologues of US interrogators addressing a variety of Iraqi individuals in the now infamous detention centers. The cruelty, the racism, the registers of insult and intimidation, as well as the backgrounds of the interrogators— little league coach, member of the 700 Club, et al.—pour forth, until the last, "anAmerican poet, twentyish, early to mid-thirtyish, fortyish to seventyish," opens up the indictment that all of us are to some degree implicated , despite our having had "poems on the Poets Against the War website" orthat we "really digArab music" or "voted for Clinton and Gore, even though I know they bombed you a lot too, sorry about that. . ." (And how devastating is the vapidity of voice in "bombed you a lot" and that weak-grinned apology). The piece, to its credit, then turns against its own selfrighteousness the way the colonel in Forche's classic utters his contemptuous line—"Something for your poetry, no?"—making one consider the relationship of the poet to our ever-uglier political realities. Perhaps it's language—that element that distinguishes us from our fishy-reptilian primordial soup past—and where it's taking us that ultimately disappoints in this anthology. Arielle Greenberg's piece leaving blanks, like a form (in which versions ofyou seem to fit), Martha Ronk's moody piece hung around a lightbulb, Brian Evenson's humorously blunt espousings in "Garker'sAesteticals," and Gary Lutz's admirably playful attention to word choice all illustrate that the book has its moments. Here's Lutz's exacting description of a torn cushion: Atiny unparting ofthe threads at first, and then a liplike tear that took on howling length and width as weeks went loudly out. What showed through wasn't the siftings, the stuffings, he would have expected , but an earlier coverature, a dated floral patterning—plushier, staled—that was trouble to touch because of how thoroughly it mongered up the previous, unhelpful life of hers. This said, there's an overstuffed, overmannered quality that wears a little thin when this initial pleasurable fussiness chokes on its own overwritten density overall. Like much in the book, it ends mildly quirky, merely clever. Much of Peter Conners's anthology of pushme /pull-you organisms straddling two spheres, lacks shape and bite. Much feels anecdotal, unfinished, undercooked, fragmentary, or facile. Even grounding the reader is often ignored. One piece labels itself a "Rash Novel," leaning on the derisive notion that the designation of "Rash" denotes something distinct and of value, but what happened to PP/FF symbolizing that we're all free (hurrah!) of the constriction ofthe market's oppressive labeling? And I know I'm not supposed to believe size matters—believe me, it does—but it's also thirteen pages long, clearly short story territory, unless "short story" is a dodo term in the gassier, jumping jack Age of "Flash." Short forms, though, are a part of the Zeitgeist in this respect: in the feeding frenzy to get published, they extend the range of hope and, on the more admirable side, of stylistic and structural variegation, a free-range wilderness away from an oft exclusive mainstream. But what mildly variant forms are emerging can only be said to be a new taxonomic order ifthey're strong enough to survive—and ifthey prove consistently entertaining and insightful. On the evidence ofthis anthology, much is single-celled and isn't going to last long enough to develop a backbone. Let alone a readership. There are thoughtful prose poems...