Cradle Book: Stories & Fables by Craig Morgan Teicher, and: Fables by Sarah Goldstein (review)

159 BOOK NOTES Cradle Book: Stories & Fables, by Craig Morgan Teicher BOA Editions, 2010 Fables, by Sarah Goldstein Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2011 reviewed by Kristina Marie Darling All too often, contemporary writing reads as a search for meaning in everyday life, rather than as an exercise in imagination . Two recent collections—Craig Morgan Teicher’s Cradle Book: Stories & Fables and Sarah Goldstein’s Fables— are rare exceptions. These finely crafted volumes focus on creating and sustaining fictional worlds, which prove at once unsettling and fascinating. Presented as extended sequences of short prose pieces, the two books present us with unfamiliar terrain that bears only a slight resemblance to our own surroundings. For Teicher and Goldstein, these invented places, histories, and cultural practices begin to illuminate the world we inhabit. As the two books unfold, the unfamiliar scenarios found therein become a vehicle for social commentary, most notably as these writers interrogate postmodern ideas about identity through their depictions of an imaginary “other.” For example, Teicher and Goldstein create fictional worlds in which membership in a larger community proves at once necessary and problematic. Such passages often read as subtle commentary on contemporary society, its ideological rifts, and the increasingly pervasive desire for consensus. In much the same way that individuals find it difficult to negotiate their own interests with the collective good, characters in the two books struggle to form allegiances that serve both their interests and those of the community. Throughout the finely cadenced stories in Cradle Book, Teicher depicts individuals as being marginalized by the desires of a larger collective. Consider “The Groaning Cows,” a fable in which villagers are plagued by the incessant noises of their livestock. In this carefully crafted prose piece, a young girl finds that she is the only one able restore silence to the village. Teicher writes, colorado review 160 The poor weaver’s daughter. She knew then, when she heard the groaning, that her life would never be her own. It would belong to the pigs and the cows, to the goats and the ducks, to the hens and the rabbits. Most of all, it would belong to the men, whom she knew would never let her be. Teicher suggests that, with the rise of civilization, this struggle to negotiate one’s own interests with those of others proved inevitable . In many ways, this fable reads as a description of the beginnings of this conflict. By appropriating the syntax and sentence constructions of biblical stories, Teicher creates a graceful matching of form and content, in which he situates his work within a broader tradition of narratives of origin. Sarah Goldstein’s Fables exhibits a similar interest in the origins of this conflict between individual and society. She writes in an untitled piece, Inside, we are perfectly absent of difference. Outside, we are creatures built like quilted skins. No stitch is the same; patterns overlap and pucker. I was once taken apart and remade as a hunter, but what kind of hunter am I? A map is creased into my cheeks, my ears are the whorls of a mountain, my crow's feet mark a small city. For Goldstein, misguided ideas about personal identity have made it difficult to promote a sense of community—in both fables and in everyday life. Although the speaker recognizes these differences as socially constructed, she presents the society she inhabits as being divided. The purposefully uneven cadences are wonderfully suited to Goldstein’s subject matter. Just as people are divided by their “quilted skins,” the fable itself is halved by chiasmus and caesura. Both books are filled with skillfully crafted pieces like these, in which fables become a vehicle for insightful social commentary. Approached with these ideas in mind, the myriad depictions of industry in Cradle Book and Fables read as an extended commentary on the costs—almost always borne by individuals—of civilization and technological advancement. Both Teicher and Goldstein present us with worlds that—through their depictions 161 Book Notes of agrarian life, unpaved roads, tracts of pristine land—evoke a distant past, in which urban industrial modernity has not yet intruded . Many passages in the two collections depict these imaginary worlds as being on...