Reviewed Elsewhere [Vol. 3, #3]

Powells Books Reviews
Joel Brouwer’s new book of poetry AND SO

http://www.powells.com/review/2010_01_20.html

“The becoming of man is the history of the exhaustion of his possibilities,” wrote Susan Sontag while thinking about E.M. Cioran. Thoroughly up-to-date — meaning cut off from the future and removed from the past — a poet is stranded in the present, just like everybody else. But since the poet cares most about making a poem (”an emotionally disturbing structure made of words” — X.J. Kennedy), and since words are his medium, he feels the pinch, caught between the language of living a decent life (”please pass the salt” or “wanna go to the movies?”) and the explanations of that life by news anchors and expert witnesses. The saltshaker is almost always too heavy an object to lift into the imagination, and the Sunday supplement stains both the palm and the mind with a toxic petroleum derivative. So the poet cultivates both an aversion to power asserted through language and an urge to wield that power more tellingly. We have spent the past hundred years thrashing the underbrush to drive our motives into the open, but what did we gain? And so, we come to Joel Brouwer’s And So, his third book.

Brouwer’s materials are situational. His scenarios are described as if at the very moment they become visible, before any conclusions may be drawn — but the characters within them seem to have been living in this condition for hours, days, or longer. Although the poems’ microplots entail social situations, they cancel or disregard the potential for shared values or acts that may be performed together to create a third way.

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Read the full review:
http://www.powells.com/review/2010_01_20.html

AND SO: POEMS.
Joel Brouwer.
Paperback: Four Way Books, 2009.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/28/books/28book.html?ref=books

In one of the chapters in Zachary Mason’s dazzling debut novel, Odysseus — the wily warrior and canny voyager from Homer’s epic poem — emerges as the creator of his own legend. He’s a war-weary soldier who leaves the battlefield and finds refuge outside Troy, posing as an itinerant bard, a poet who begins by singing the classics and later takes “to telling the story of Odysseus of the Greeks, cleverest of men, whose ruses had been the death of so many.”

“It was when I was a guest in Tyre,” Mr. Mason’s Odysseus goes on, “that I first heard another bard singing one of my songs and it occurred to me that I had in my hands the means of making myself an epic hero. What good is the truth when those who were there are dead or scattered? I took to rearranging the events of Troy’s downfall, eliding my betrayals and the woman-killing, and making a good tale of it.”
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In “The Lost Books of the Odyssey” Mr. Mason — who is identified on the book jacket as a computer scientist specializing in artificial intelligence, as well as a finalist for the 2009 New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, given to writers under 35 — has written a series of jazzy, post-modernist variations on “The Odyssey,” and in doing so he’s created an ingeniously Borgesian novel that’s witty, playful, moving and tirelessly inventive.
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Read the full review:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/28/books/28book.html?ref=books

THE LOST BOOKS OF THE ODYSSEY: A Novel.
Zachary Mason.
Hardback. FSG, 2010.
Buy now: [ Amazon ]

Related posts:

1. Reviewed Elsewhere [Vol. 3, #6]
2. Reviewed Elsewhere [Vol. 3, #8]
3. Reviewed Elsewhere [Vol. 2, #50]

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