Standouts in the Key of Same

American íeviGW Standouts in the Key of Same Chad Chmielowicz The Pushcart Prize XXX: Best of the Small Presses, 2006 Edited by Bill Henderson Pushcart http://www.pushcartprize.com 550 pages; paper, $16.95 The Pushcart accepts six submissions each from numerous small presses as well as wild card selections from its contributing editors, which would seem to produce a wildly various pool of possible candidates. This year's edition, however, ends up being relatively homogeneous. A specter of death haunts the anthology (the introduction laments the loss ofSaul Bellow and Frank Conroy) and the prose inspects especially the lives ofeuthanizers, widows, hunters, great (and ordinary) men and women gone, and the ill. It is difficult not to judge a "Best-of' by its weakest entries, especially when the pool is so large and the prize is dedicated to rewarding otherwise overlooked literary work. Though the anthology certainly has its standouts, a lot of the same gears are turning in the respective genres. Seven-ish of the twelve non-fiction selections deal with death. (I'm half-counting Cynthia Shearer's "The Famous Writers School: Lessons from Faulkner's House," because it dishes about the dead guy but also about the Coen brothers, who are very much alive.) Three of those are commemorative in nature—Hall's "The Third Thing" (on Jane Kenyon), Hirsch's "Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man" (on William Maxwell), and Gessner's "Benediction : On Being Boswell's Boswell" (on Walter Jackson Bate)—which essentially accomplishes the same task, eulogy, with the same tools. They are the counterparts ofthe recent slew ofbiopics: heartfelt, but voyeuristic and formulaic. "Comfort," about the death of a daughter, and "Glaciology," about waiting for test results, rely too heavily on catalogs (an excess in the other genres as well) to be moving. This listing consists of mostly stock footage. In "Glaciology," for example, the final paragraph accumulates things worth savoring —natural and domestic. They are merely specific, and though the speakerclaims to like "poor sorting," they feel very much arranged. Likewise, the heightened , poetic grandiosity (common elsewhere as well) that ends the piece is at this point a cliché: "Layers of dried mud, zinc, and iron. Blown milkweed and ashy cinder. Silvered cornfield." If "Silvered cornfield" were changed to "Billowy willows," no essential difference would prevail. The specificity distances the reader from the emotion precisely because it is specific, but not idiosyncratic. The strongest nonfiction here—Mamet doing a fine Barthes in "Secret Names," and "Notes on Uranium Weapons and Kitsch," by George Gessert —uses specifics to build case studies. Though they are more essayistic than the other nonfiction pieces, they nevertheless move the reader across a various terrain and elicit emotion—fear, mirth, sorrow—by allowing the reader to fill in the gaps to make meaning. One might argue that catalogs and dramatic heightening are lyric techniques, but many of the poems here fail along the same lines. Andrew Feld's "Best and Only," on Nixon and Bebe Rebozzo, has some nice moments in the first two sections, but the third and final section merely assembles a long list of pop-culture references. In Angie Estes's "Proverbs," a few too many clever riffs on language deflate a playful musing about verbs into a comfortable knowingness. Ellen Bryant Voigt's "The Feeder," an enumeration of birds, does practically nothing— simply collecting poetry-stuff doesn't make for a good poem. Likewise, the dramatic monologues that made it into the collection provide some compelling characters, but also some of the flattest language in the anthology. In "The Night Richard Pryor Met Mudbone," we read: "It was a day like that that I'm about to tell you / About, a day when all I could see were...." In "Pearlie Tells What Happened at School," we read: "Miss Terry has figured since we are / living in a coal camp, we ought to know geology, / which is learning about rocks." And in "Skin Teeth," we read: "On good Friday night I come home— / tired bad—and I can't find me children / or me husband." AU three poets are guilty ofcommittingproie. This isn't to say that the characters shouldn't have...