Leaving New York City behind, Karina, the narrator/protagonist, moves to a condominium in a small town in South Florida where she hopes to lead a quiet, idyllic existence of reading and writing. A pioneer in her mind, she is at first content to ride her bike, swim in the ocean, and dialogue with the birds, as well as with the friendly Hispanic laborers digging up the sidewalks in this newly developed neighborhood.  Keller writes all this in an open style of paragraphs much like stanzas of poetry—giving us more oxygen and the room to think.

Soon, though, she’s embroiled with her neighbors, one of whom professes that “I have to love you because you’re Jewish, my Lord and Savior was Jewish.”  Karina’s dream of “wandering lonely as a cloud” cannot remain exclusive of more direct and involved connections, though she ultimately need not embrace them.  She has carried herself down the eastern coast, carried all that is within her—all she has taken in from life and referenced or quoted writers not limited here to Walser, Aleichem, Markson, Borges [“Reality is under no obligation to be interesting”], Melville, the film “Kaspar Hauser” and a writer simply called “R.”  She carries all that in 2008 to the condo’s Meet & Greet.

The ensuing, messy reality—though under no obligation—does prove interesting and vividly relevant today.  Is there happy resolution to tumult?  Does a changed peacefulness emerge?  Here Keller quotes Kaspar Hauser on hearing music for the first time: “The music feels strong in my heart.  I feel so unexpectedly old.”  She parts from us with these lines:  “I, too, felt unexpectedly old, and I thought, this is what language does, this is why we live.”

This Is A City is a memoir we’re still living. It’s love, it’s a marriage, it’s a cross-country move & then back again. It’s cities within small towns within & more within. It’s us, it’s ours, it’s mine, it’s yours.

An elegant selection and poetic rendering of often harrowing trial testimony from survivors of the Triangle Fire in 1911, New York city, where workers died in the infamous fire at the shirtwaist factory.  Well-accompanied by illustrations by John Burgess that enact their own examination.

In No Finis: Triangle Testimonies, 1911, Deborah Woodard creates a book for our moment by excavating and illuminating a famous yet half-forgotten moment of past judicial and economic injustice against immigrants. These mordant, stubbornly human prose poems are collaged from the transcripts of the trial of the owners of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory. Woodard has an unerring poet’s ear for the alive language of the witnesses, a vividly pungent, insistent language edited and censored by the courts yet straining to be heard. And her book erupts with the wayward realities of human feeling struck out or made invisible by the unfolding narrative of the apparatus of the court. In No Finis, immigrant survivors continue to be heard even as they continue to be questioned and squelched to this very day. Testimony, John Burgess’s drawings of the social spaces the workers inhabited, from work lofts to graves, complements and completes this act of bearing witness.

Sample:

I seen a doorway open. I didn’t know what it was, whether staircase or elevator. Suddenly he started away, and I just got in. The smoke came from the floor below, and I was rubbing against the walls. I said, “Please, girls, my feet!” There wasn’t room for a pin.

See the interview in Adroit Journal:  https://theadroitjournal.org/2019/12/19/a-conversation-with-sheryl-st-germain-and-deborah-woodard/

Plus. see the review in the Literary Journal:  http://www.theliteraryreview.org/book-review/a-review-of-no-finis-triangle-testimonies-1911-by-deborah-woodard/

Poetic investigations of the art of Louise Nevelson and the fraught issue of being artist and mother simultaneously — Gard illuminates each at the same time, attracting us to both.

Day Grid

In lower Manhattan a black iron grate makes strict, predictable gridwork of a patch of the underground city – box of scattered receipts, wrappers and cigarettes swimming in water, spit, wet cube of air, trash and fluid flowing beneath the earth. Chaos framed by a measured, orderly system. 

Starting out with three poems based on letters from Virginia Woolf to Lytton Strachey, from James Agee to Father Flye, from an unknown Finn with an unpronounceable last name to Bertrand Russell,  the book moves on to a minimalist memoir centered on a house then on to a collection of short, lyrical prose pieces selected by the author, including “In Hartmann Hall,” “Im Zoologischen Garten,” “Sisters,” “Astoria Finns” and “The Ferry.”  Illustrated expressively; or, rather, illuminated by Cooper Renner.

John Burgess first intersected with the Lewis & Clark Trail at Three Forks in 1978 when working as the third man on a three-man survey crew in the Gallatin Valley of Montana. Since then, he has read the complete Journals of Lewis & Clark explored major sites they encountered along the trail from St. Louis to Fort Mandan and from Fort Clatsop to Lolo Pass.

“by Land…”, his fourth collection from Ravenna Press, and by far his most expansive, follows a narrative arc based on his intersections with the historic trail. The work is a collage of poems, handwritten lists, typewriter poems, cartoons (aka graphic poems), a memoir  in 10 fragments, maps and reassembled texts that riff on the Journals.

(A novel)

Every family’s past is Gettysburg, Eliza Schnable Friday discovers:  the battlefield of a legendary civil war where truth is the first casualty.  To rescue the wounded and bury the dead, Eliza must use every weapon in her arsenal—fierce devotion, uncompromising integrity, and regional pride.  Like Lee Smith’s Appalachian novels, Allegheny Dream alternates between a physical terrain of mountains and forests and an imaginary landscape lit by flashes of prophecy and echoing with ancestral voices. (Anthony Di Renzo)