Family Secret, by Rich Murphy. Georgetown, KT: Finishing Line Press, 2008. $14.00

Murphy’s poetry collection sets the tone with “The Arc of Oops,” which describes the dangers inherent in relationships:

Pairs of people have accidents, catch
fevers, and get married. Later, the illness
cures itself, the injury heals, and there
is either divorce or braces-for-life for two.

Murphy’s language moves at breakneck speed, delivering evocative images that dig the reader’s heels into the dirt and yet push us onward. These poems focus on relationships gone-wrong and a crippled emotional life. In “Folk Art” he describes couples taking part in a “synchronized living competition” who coerce their children into similarly unhappy situations by limiting their perceived options or, “choking children/ spotting the water’s edge.” The ‘water’ here seemingly implying a kind of freedom. For Murphy, there is no elegance in the day-to-day struggle these people face. Perhaps because there is no sign of struggle—Murphy is talking about the middle-class, here, who “squat with mediocrity,” a whole culture of mediocrity. In “Pathos Eros” Murphy expounds upon the culture, “spoiled children/who are groomed, each to share/ a slow death with a spiteful stranger.” These strangers who are “passionate to secure the potential/ contents of the other’s pockets.” These are greedy animals who spawn children Murphy later describes as “the corner decorations” which are just as greedy as their parents.

“Marriage bottles behavior and delivers it…” Murphy’s poem “Wow Vow” begins. “A wedding/ and front lawn give birth to a civil nation” Murphy continues. He describes the lovers, “unquenched by commitment’s cupped hands.” Unhappy, unsatisfied, the partners “improvise their promises/over and around the rocks of the forest.”

What we see in Murphy’s portraits of family life is “doodads”; people coexisting with stuff. What we aren’t seeing is the work that is required to make these strangers into a family. Murphy isn’t necessarily attacking the idea of marriage, just what it can and often has become. These are cautionary tales, delivered in the hopes of change.

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a field of colors, by Charles Lennox. Fort Collins, CO: Mud Luscious Press, 2009. (free by request while available)

Spolier: Mud Luscious Press is releasing a mini-chap of mine entitled Texas, so bear that in mind when reading my review of something they published. Of course, I’ve already been paid, so I can say whatever I like, right?

a field of colors is a mini-chapbook (eight pages plus credits) that tells the story of just that—a field to which a man brings his daughters (“They are my girls for the week.”) to play. It is a fever dream image:

My youngest finds a rainbow stick & sucks on it like a candy cane & says to me later in the truck that rainbows taste just like pancake syrup & can she have some more before bed.

I tell her YES. YOU CAN.

Throughout the book, Lennox uses run-on-sentences and strings of “&”’s for pacing as well as spacing and BOLDED words for emphasis very effectively. It is structured in a series of eight vignettes, which each focus on the state of this field as the narrator’s daughters grow and become disinterested. It is a beautifully realized portrait of the relationship between father and daughter, in spare prose and effective imagery.
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book alter(ed) by David Wolach. Ungovernable Press, 2009. Available free online: http://ungovernablepress.weebly.com/

This collection of poems is divided into two sections, riverfire, and book alter(ed). riverfire begins with the line, “Water burns.” The image of burning and implication of passion is a recurring one. Wolach’s sentences are imagistic and cathartic; he speaks to the subconscious and lulls the reader into a null state of supra-awareness. He is speaking to and of the world, but at the same time, fighting against the constraints of its simplicity and familiarity. “One is taught lines with arrows,” he says, then destroys the image by comparing it to a “canned subsistence.” Wolach establishes ideas and then deconstructs them, giving the reader a kind of fractured glimpse into his, for lack of a better term, soul. Here is an example:

I invented your inventing me by trial and error. I am the Alexandrian thug. I let them use me for the
price of Tokyo. When you were younger I appeared as absolute white, a white that burns, a white that
caused you to say the new machine is on the verge of failure, we will be blind and happy. I am the
white that scrapes pure from your other asshole, an urge to the scraping.

Here’s another:

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library. I am the accident of water that licked
the doors of mythos. When they cut off all routes I was the candle on the sea that immolated us. Only
the dock can be measured, the rest of a shoreline is your wish to eat you, taste first the blood that is not
like but blood and only blood, why do you hesitate at the covered parts. Why do you hesitate at the
numerically non-identical. Why do you cling to impossible shale, sand, refuse, moss things with
names but things that are named for lack of.

One of the easiest to “decipher”:

They do not ask. They are afraid of questions that speak back. Where does the water. Where, land.
Where water, water meets water meets. And if water, then Zeno. And if Zeno, yardstick. And if
yardstick, then Home Depot.

Section two, book alter(ed), combines words with visuals. The words are short stanzes, usually two couplets, followed by an offset italicized line. The stanzas continue the exploration of ideas, whereas the italicized lines deal with more personal subject matter. Both these and the visuals depict a kind of yearning, a calling from the void. The book ends with the following lines, some of the most provocative of the collection:

something inaudible
is still a fence

for others, no longer learning
to make fires for hunger
----Afterwards I noticed your face
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Revealing Moments, by Wayne Scheer. Thumbscrews Press, 2009. Available online for free at: http://issuu.com/pearnoir/docs/revealing_moments

In the introduction, Scheer describes these stories as “tiny moments of revelation. ” These stories are deftly written—a rare feat, Scheer’s flash pieces feel complete, whether it be the story of a stripper having a mid-life crises (mid-life for a stripper being 30) or a young woman trying to decide whether to keep her mother on life support. The stories cover a wide range of topics, many dealing with marriage troubles, night-before jitters, and anxieties about relationships, retirement blues, but Scheer also offers up some refreshing perspectives.

“Scented Candles” is a portrait of a couple who, in their youth, marked their weekends with a shared bath. Now, at the end of their lives, the couple share a candle and remember back to their earlier happiness. It’s a touching story, substituting humor for the expected triteness.

Scheer understands that what makes a worthwhile story isn’t the happy ending, but the humanity. He describes his own stories as dark, but I think this is unfair because they are not needlessly so.

-Reviewed by CL Bledsoe