Numéro Cinq

It’s the April issue, the vernal surprise, the annual ritual of renewal, the turning of the year, the lengthening of days, mud season in Vermont, moments of  astonishing optimism for no reason, that issue. We have amazing things for you. We’ll knock your socks off. You’ll find it more entertaining than Donald Trump and Ted Cruz (okay, well, maybe not).

We have a couple of group items this issue. The first is a massive nine-person interview/conversation on the subject of Latino writing in the United States, Mexico and Puerto Rico today. Jonathan Marcantoni is the moderator/interlocutor. The conversation is lively, startling. Punches are not pulled. There are also book lists and reading recommendations. This is the state of the art.

I think this is a destructive mindset that is born from a marginalized, colonized perspective. The Oppression Olympics. The Authenticity Maze. The relative slice of the literary representation pie is not large enough for Latinos to start fighting over. I don’t know which Latino group “dominates” who. (The question makes us sound like we’re all battling for literary supremacy in the octagon.) —Rich Villar

  Masande Ntshanga

 Ben Woodard reviews South African author Masande Ntshanga’s debut novel The Reactive (we also have an excerpt coming).

Masande Ntshanga’s engrossing debut novel, The Reactive, unfolds during the Mbeki presidency. Lindanathi, a young HIV infected man in Cape Town, spends his days huffing industrial glue with his friends Cecelia and Ruan. The trio work together to illegally sell Lindanathi’s extra ARV supply—Cecelia and Ruan are not infected, and Lindanathi is a lucky ARV recipient—to local reactives for quick cash. In lieu of chapters, the novel is broken into five parts, and the first dedicates itself to establishing the relationship between Lindanathi, or Nathi, and his friends, who casually float in and out of day jobs, HI Virus group meetings, parties, and cloudy conversations. Nathi tells his story in first-person POV, and the reader is swiftly immersed into the daily ennui of the gang. In many ways, his life is one of limbo, and death’s inevitability frequently crops up, whether Nathi claims, “It’s still a long stretch of time before I die,” or plays games like Last Life, which “is the name we’ve come up with for what happens to me during my last year on the planet.” —Ben Woodard

Cynthia Flood

We have a brand new story from Cynthia Flood, who has appeared here before and only gets better. This one is weird in the best way, a night wanderer, the clopping of police horses…

Strong feet stepped into the boy’s dream, came nearer down the hall, and he sat up, but the sounds went past, outside.

Quick, to the window.

Down the dark quiet street came four horses, two by two, with police on top. Streetlights shone on the animals’ rumps, the riders’ yellow vests. Clop clop. Harness glinted, tails waved, manes lifted and subsided. The horses too wore reflective yellow, in bands round their ankles. —Cynthia Flood

Mahtem Shifferaw

We have poems from Mahtem Shifferaw’s debut colletction:

I wasn’t taught to notice one’s colors;

under the sun, everyone’s skin bounces streaks of light.

Which do I claim? It is difficult to expla
the difference between African & African American
the details escape me, thin paper folding the involucre of a burning fire.

—Mahtem Shifferaw

Ruth Lepson

And a gorgeous poem from Ruth Lepson on the fascinating American artist Cy Twombly who spent much of his working life in Europe, coming after the Abstract Expressionists and combing their influence with a vast interest in Classical art that surrounded him in Italy.

your chair looks kinda wobbly
cy twombly

I think you’re an anomaly

you’re practically
sliding off the chair
the window’s
broken by lines in a grid
it’s time to stand–
but sit for another minute
give us your specifics
wait — you don’t care
what you get across
or to whom

……………………—Ruth Lepson

Portrait of Cy Twombly, Fielding Dawson

Pierre Joris

Pierre Joris, who also has appeared here before (as a poet, translator and memoirist), returns with a segment of memoir.

Myth, I had learned that very year upon encountering the work and the person of the American poet Robert Duncan — who was to write one of greatest anti-Vietnam war poems the very next year —, the word “myth,” “mythos,” is akin to “mouth,” i.e. myth is the story told, the story that accompanies the ritual action, some action that starts out as, or wants to turn itself into, exemplary ritual. But maybe it is the retelling of the story — whatever it is — that recreates the action that turns the story into ritual and thus self-reflectively creates the myth. —Pierre Joris

Richard Jackson & Robert Vivian

Richard Jackson, a poet, and Robert Vivian, in his latest incarnation as an essay writer, have combined their voices to produce a book of poems and essays from which we have a preview excerpt.

All at once they picked themselves up from the barren fields and started walking toward the horizon, silent, solemn march going to the stars even as they tried to become them and rose the thrust and the warbler and the startled robin and I could see that the stones were naked but unabashed and unashamed wanting only to be rinsed again and rose the wind and the dust and where were the stones going but to another place not of their keening and to watch them go I felt abandoned and I did not ask the stones why… —Robert Vivian

Warren Motte

Warren Motte favours us with a really fascinating essay on exoticism and how recent French novelists have used/portrayed America in their work.

I realize, all of a sudden, that my title sounds like the name of a rehab facility in Arizona, a place where “happiness” is very rare indeed and where the “shores” are notional ones, at best. I am quite certain that Baudelaire was not thinking of such a place, as he conjured up a luminous vision of utopia in the first quatrain of his sonnet, “Exotic Perfume”:

When, with both my eyes closed, on a hot autumn night,
I inhale the fragrance of your warm breast
I see happy shores spread out before me,
On which shines a dazzling and monotonous sun.

—Warren Motte

Michelangelo by Daniele da Volterra, 1533

Julie Larios is back with a new Undersung essay, this time focusing on the sculptor Michelangelo, who also happened to be a surpassing poet. For centuries only a sanitized version of his poetry existed in print…

For more than 200 years, this version of the poems – “discretely doctored” to disguise the homosexual nature of them – was the only one available. By the mid-1800’s scholars began to look back at the originals for comparison; in 1893 the British homosexual activist and poet/critic John Addington Symonds offered a more authentic version, correcting the changed pronouns (from “she” back to “he”) and adding in several of the more explicit poems not included in the 17th-century edition. By 1960 a complete edition was published that included 400 pages of editorial notes referring to the originals. —Julie Larios

Julie Larios

Óscar Oliva

We also have poems from the Mexican poet Óscar Oliva. Yes, yes, we are beginning to tap a steady flow of Mexican lit.

I am just one more shoulder in the crowd marching through,
teargas fumes me,
derailed trains burnt out at the terminal
ripped up tracks and the attack
of the police, of the army, of the riot squad
all in battle formation,
the Zócalo is a rifle butt in the face,
there’ll be more battles… —Óscar Oliva

Thomas Simpson

 Tom Simpson returns with another essay on his beloved Bosnia-Herzegovina. Once again his guide and inspiration is the wonderful poet Goran Simic (who also has appeared here on NC).

Like an existentialist’s bad joke, Goran’s driveway sits on a dangerous curve. The circular, convex mirror posted across the street, where the sidewalk is, helps only so much. All it tells you is whether a car is bearing down on you, right now, from the left. Once you make your move, all bets are off. The best you can do is utter a prayer, or mutter a curse, before you lurch into the unknown. —Thomas Simpson

Goran Simic

And there is, as I always say, more. John Proctor reviews Patrick Madden’s new book of essays. We have an excerpt from the nonfiction anthology Dirt. There will be something from Ireland and a new NC at the movies. And Nance Van Winckel returns with an ekphrastic extravanganza, a series of creative prose responses to paintings by Kay O’Rourke, many of them by students from the Salish Language School in Spokane, Washington.

There may even be more, or there may be changes, things that surprise even me. There always are.

Joël Gayraud

March is coming, the new issue, the Exotic/Quixotic issue, the overflowing cup issue!

Striking a blow for freedom of expression and the protean nature of art, we like to publish things that don’t fit in conventional slots, especially those academic creative writing niche slots like the personal essay (you know, where you write about something interesting but bring in your relationship with your boyfriend as well). We love the aphorism, the short nonfiction form. We publish aphorisms and extended aphorisms and essays that are formally long aphorisms. We also publish memoir and place pieces and book reviews that bring in craft and structure. In the latter, I am firmly convinced, you express yourself in the choices you make (without having to mention, um, yourself or your boyfriend).

One of the highlights of this issue is the excerpt from Joël Gayraud’s The Shadow’s Skin, translated from the French by S. D. Chrostowska (whose own incendiary book of extended aphorisms MATCHES: A Light Book we excerpted in our December issue). Books like these owe much to the example of Nietzsche who wrote in fragments or mini-essays or thought experiments or, perhaps, Adorno’s Minima Moralia, one of my all time favourites.

It’s also worth noting that in this issue we have a veritable plethora (you have to get the word “plethora” in every six months or so) of book reviews. This is a consequence of our policy of (like the airlines) double booking reviews, which have a way of not coming in on time or disappearing entirely (this has more to do with the vagaries of publishing schedules and the mail than our tribe of reviewers, a punctual and hardworking group). But then every once in a while a whole bunch of reviews arrive at once and suddenly the double booked flight is, well, double booked.

So this is a huge issue!

The development of sadomasochistic practices contributes more effectively than many revolutionary discourses to undermining the psychological foundations of power. When, in the intimacy of their bedroom, couples experimented with the game of submission and dominance—even where the sexual roles themselves remain uncriticized, the mere fact that this game took place enables the objectification of old fantasies of domination and slavery—fantasies that, as a consequence of the brutal and barbaric establishment of relations of domination, have been buried deep in the breast of humanity. — Joël Gayraud

S. D. Chrostowska

Frank Stanford

Allan Cooper reviews What About This, The Collected Poems of Frank Stanford. Stanford was a great, undersung, Mississippi-born cult poet, one of those divine eccentrics. The book has been named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry, winner to be announced March 17.

If we’re lucky, once or twice in a generation an artist comes along who changes the complexion of our entire landscape and gives us a way of seeing the world as we have never experienced it before. Often these artists receive little or no recognition in their lifetimes, and it takes years–sometimes generations–for their genius to be acknowledged. I think of the work of William Blake and John Clare, Emily Dickinson, Vincent van Gogh, Paula Modersohn-Becker and the haunting, other-worldly poems of Frank Stanford. —Allan Cooper

Ivan Seng

New to the magazine, Carolyn Ogburn answered one of my want-ads for a music writer. This is her first contribution, an interview with the North Carolina musician/composer Ivan Seng. The title of the piece is “a random walk,” but you need to know what a random walk is. See below where Ivan Seng explains.

Well, random walk is a mathematical term. It comes from Brownian motion. Do you remember the story of the guy [botanist Robert Brown] who was looking though his microscope at tiny particles in water. He saw these particles and he saw them bouncing around – he saw that these particles were following this completely random motion, Brownian motion – and I think it’s how they realized that there were atoms, because it ended up being that these atoms were bouncing off of these small little particles and it was pushing the particles around… So if we took a very basic motion… say you have a 3-sided die, marked 0-1-2, and each number correlates to a particular movement.  And [your particle, or sound, in its own placement is affected by the dictates of the die] and you start at a certain number, 0, and you can go up a step or down a step. But it’s unpredictable. —Ivan Seng

Carolyn Ogburn

Kenneth E. Harrison, Jr.

We also have a fist full of poems from Kenneth E. Harrison, Jr., delicate, lambent, melancholy.

A morning difficult to walk across
the slain crocuses a song
or a silent movie
a memory of a wound
floated out to sea
at the beginning of the war
the fields covered by searchlights
at the edge of a garden before we were born

—Kenneth E. Harrison

Lina Wolff

Mark Sampson reviews the wild and wooly collection of fragments/stories Bret Easton Ellis and the Other Dogs by the Swedish writer Lina Wolff.

Wolff’s project – a text at once fragmented enough to pass for a short story collection and yet untraceably centred on the character of Alba Cambó, a writer of violent, horrifying tales who has been diagnosed with terminal cancer – draws a connection between the canine-like nature of human males and the limitations of revenge against their more animalistic natures by women.  — Mark  Sampson

Georgi Tenev

Natalia Sarkissian reviews Party Headquarters by the Bulgarian novelist Georgi Tenev.

In Party Headquarters Georgi Tenev reduces the traditional novel with its linear time, clear relationships, memory and complex characters to an indissoluble essence. Characters, for example, are nameless—they are merely bodies or even types. Memory, hallucination and current narrative merge creating a fluid world where time is relative. —Natalia Sarkissian

Alan Cunningham

We have this month inspired, comic, eccentric, Monty Python-esque fiction from the Irish writer Alan Cunningham.

Idea for a script, no, play.

No, idea for a novel.

•

A man – no, woman – too many men in literature, opens a suitcase in a living room of a building apartment, starts to place all these, like, well, all these different objects into it. Not sure what they could be – yet. She puts all these – well, things – she puts all these things into the suitcase, leaves her apartment in a city – let’s say, London – and starts walking. —Alan Cunningham

Richard Skinner

The English novelist turns his hand to short story analysis and structure, beginning his exploration with Alice Munro’s short story “Jakarta,” using a device called the Greimas Semiotic Square to parse a set of relationships he finds crucial to the short story.

All these magnificent stories are highly organised, intense studies of humans interacting and behaving oddly with each other. They throw light on sublimated desires and warped motives. Ultimately, however, in all of these stories, it is some kind of lack, absence or failure of one corner of the square that triggers catastrophic change and collapse in the other three. There must be a black hole, a sacrificial lamb, for the story to work and it is these black holes that are the secret keys to the stories. Through them, we slip down a wormhole and emerge at the story’s end with fresh understanding of just how weird and wonderful human beings can be. —Richard Skinner

Julian Hanna

Julian Hanna contributes an offbeat What It’s Like Living Here piece, Julian walking in Madeira where he lives, a tale of a complicated beauty, of a place both difficult and enticing.

If I dig deep, I think it’s that I love the contrast – between the breathtaking beauty, the tropical flowers and sun and sea on one hand; and the plague of traffic and stupidity and all kinds of human failings, which are universal failings, on the other. Anyone who has travelled in southern European cities like Athens or Barcelona or Naples, not to mention the cities of the global south, knows this contrast and its peculiar frisson. Something about the ugliness and beauty of human life, the union of pain and pleasure, is ultimately why I live here and why I walk. I like things to be difficult. —Julian Hanna

Karen Mulhallen

Karen Mulhallen returns to the magazine with a handful of love poems, mad love, foolish love — is there any other kind?

It can’t be helped
I wasn’t ready, or maybe I was really ready
ready for love
had no defenses
wasn’t prepared
just jumped in
and now
the undertow is
taking me down.

—Karen Mulhallen

Richard Farrell

Richard Farrell continues to mine the stories of his past, especially his years as a prospective U. S. Navy pilot — this time a sublime and sublimely sad essay about a classmate, a plebe, who committed suicide at the Academy.

Ten years after the Worcester Air Show, still pursuing my dream of becoming a Navy pilot, I returned from physics lab to my room at the United States Naval Academy, only to find that a plebe from 10^th Company had climbed out of his fifth-floor window and plunged to the brick walkway below.

His shattered, uniformed body was visible from my window as paramedics rushed in vain to save his life. Ambulances, fire trucks, and police cars had cordoned off the road, but the air was eerily still. I expected sirens, but heard only the chirping of birds, the rustle of a breeze off the Chesapeake. Again, it was September. A warm, clear day sparkled. Spinnakers billowed on the Severn River as sailboats tacked their way out to the hazy bay. —Richard Farrell

Jenny Erpenbeck

Frank Richardson reviews a book he loves, Jenny Erpenbeck’s The End of Days.

The End of Days, a book of elegant style and penetrating insight, filled with arresting characters and provocative questions, is a book to come back to a second time, and a third, and . . . who knows how many times? Erpenbeck writes with a gentle intensity—a feeling light as a dream yet so grounded in the moment that if a grenade exploded outside your window, you wouldn’t jump. Although death frames the novel, The End of Days celebrates the beginning of days, for it affirms life’s multiplicity and the potential of every human life. Erpenbeck quotes W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz in an epigraph; in part, he asks—“where will we be going now?” This question vibrates throughout her novel and remains with us as we move on from this book, and this life, to the next. — Frank Richardson

Sam Savage

Jeff Bursey sums up the life & works of the great Sam Savage.

Sam Savage has a genius for getting inside his characters’ heads and bringing out their worst and best traits in such a way that we are never in doubt that the individual—it can be man or woman or, yes, animal—is a presence who has felt pain and sorrow and has a story to tell. His lead characters are intensely believable because the language is intense and believable. This exquisite combination of words and psychology, along with Savage’s knowing penchant for idiosyncratic behaviour, is rare indeed, not found in fiction as frequently as we might desire. —Jeff Bursey

José Eduardo Agualusa

Jeff Bursey, who appears twice, yes, in this issue, reviews the novel A General Theory of Oblivion by history-obsessed, Angolan-Portuguese author José Eduardo Agualusa.

…strong women, women praised for their beauty, ignorant men, thick-headed and greedy men, victims of tragedy, and the kind-hearted. Above them all is Ludovica (Ludo) who has accompanied her sister, Odete, and her new brother-in-law, Orlando, from Portugal to Angola just before independence is brought about. She is the figure Agualusa focuses on. Through her, despite her isolation in an apartment building, we are given an overview of Angolan history and society. —Jeff Bursey

Roger Weingarten, Self Portrait through a Keyhole

And there is, as I always say, MORE! Including art work from the poet Roger Weingarten, excerpts from the anthology DIRT: A Love Story, a new NC at the Movies, and new work from Ireland.