Three Title from Les Figues Press

Reviewer: JoSelle Vanderhooft


          About the press: Les Figues is a Los Angeles-based small press whose goal, according to its website www.lesfigues.com, is to create “aesthetic conversations between readers, writers, and artists, especially those interested in innovative/experimental/avant-garde work.” Annually the press publishes TrenchArt, a subscription series of two poets and two prose writers whose work stands alongside critical essays and inserts of visual art included to engage the reader in a conversation with the main text. Each volume is handsomely, sturdily and attractively bound, and its dimensions are taller and narrower than a standard trade paperback.

          A Fixed, Formal Arrangement and re: evolution come from the 2008 TrenchArt installment, called The Tracer Series. God’s Livestock Policy comes from the previous series, The Parapet Series, and is available now only through backorder.


A Fixed, Formal Arrangement
Allison Carter
ISBN Number: 9781934254073

          In her introduction to Los Angeles writer/designer Allison Carter’s work of prose/poetry, A Fixed, Formal Arrangement, author Danielle Dutton writes:

I was reminded of Woolf, of Stein, of Diane Williams…Renee Gladman, Thalia Field, Pamela Lu. A tradition of women writing. Of experimental prose.

          Dutton’s comparison of Carter’s work to that of Virginia Woolf and particularly that of Gertrude Stein is not only apt, but essential for the reader to keep in mind when approaching A Fixed, Formal Arrangement. Much like these grand dames of 20th Century Western literature, Carter uses disjointed language, repetition, digression and diversion to explore the frenetic human mind of the 21st Century and the many stresses and challenges bearing down upon it.

          A Fixed, Formal Arrangement is divided into two parts: “In Your Spare Time” and “Garages.” As the two are written in slightly different styles and have different concerns, they will be discussed separately in the review. The pace of “In Your Spare Time” is fast and frantic, in which Carter uses multiple commas—and the lack of any restful periods, colons or semi-colons—to careen the reader through the turbulent, in medias res life of a female speaker and her discontents with love, sex, dreams, space, and even the allocation of her spare time, as the title expresses. We learn little about the speaker aside from the fact that she is married and, presumably, has another male lover (the text remains ambivalent on whether her husband knows or consents to the relationship), and that many things seem to startle or unnerve her. Although this lack of detail appears to be Carter’s attempt to invite the reader to engage with words over character, and structure over narrative, one cannot help but notice a similarity between her nameless speaker’s words and the thought patterns of someone suffering through a panic attack, or a bipolar upswing. Take, for example, “Taking My Time” (reproduced in full):

I know, get lovely, take time, reach out until, taking time, one thing slowly transforms, an orange into a toddler, the happy kind, on a bike, talking about picnics, sand pipers, because I know to get lovely, to take time, but I lately, in reality, I speed up, get up on my own diction, I can’t help it, can’t help it, collapse in, lose all the lovely, get scrappy, looking for it, accidentally, would break teeth to get the lovely back,

          Or “Wall” (again reproduced in full), in which the speaker’s obsession with the door and wall in her room (and her husband’s reaction to her obsession) is eerily reminiscent of the obsession the nameless narrator in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” has for her bedroom’s hideous titular décor.

The white wall in my bedroom, the white door at the end of my living room, they go in, and out, no cat, no feral increment, no, white wall, white door, they go in, go out, goin, gout, goggg, go, they bounce, I tell my husband,

“You have to turn the corner,” he says, while behind him is a white wall, “Turn the corner,” I repeat, “Here,” he says, “I will turn you into an instrument,’ he attaches me to his chest, we are on the biggest love seat in the living room, he strums my back while impressing the frets on my shoulders, “Or an accordion,” he says, folding up my knees and compressing and decompressing my body, and accordion sounds come out of his mouth,

This is fun, but how else can I get it across, that when
The wall bounced, That is what it felt like,

          While perspective and detail shifts throughout “In Your Spare Time,” the speaker’s desperation and its fevered pitch remain a constant, leading this reviewer to form the opinion that “In Your Spare Time” is ostensibly “about” a woman whose mind is disintegrating. However, the ambiguity of Carter’s text seems designed to lead readers to a number of different conclusions, including some that contradict each other. While writers tend to come across as obtuse, cowardly or just plain unskilled when pulling this kind of “what does it mean to you?” trick, “In Your Spare Time” does this astonishingly well thanks to the furor of Carter’s prose and its linguistic contortions. By giving the reader several toys with which to play, Carter skillfully makes her points about the subjectivity of lived and read experience, the unreliability of narration and the ability of perspective and thought to shift without cause. In this sense, “In Your Spare Time” more closely resembles a museum installation than a work of prose. Indeed, the blurring of the line between the two in this part of the book alone make it well worth a read.

          The pace of “Garages” is a little slower in the sense that pieces at least end with periods. But Carter’s objectives remain the same. Through a polyphonic narrative of voices and locations (that is, several garage apartments and public garages), Carter explores not only the human relationship to space, but the commonalities an interaction with a similar cultural space creates between different people. For example, nearly all of the speakers in this section describe their garage apartments or the garages in which they park as dirty and unsavory, and define the goings-on within them (defecation, hallucinations, guilty sex, broken relationships, even an apparent murder) in much the same way. As Carter writes in the first piece of this section:

The garage is not empty. When the door is open a kid watches the car or TV. This is much extra stuff, quiet fundamental spots. Stalk prison cells, cafeteria tables, soldiering, n.b. moving through a garage is not like moving through a chess game not like cages/people in line, classrooms/cabinets or the periodic table, breastplates or lungs…

The fourth wall is incredibly unstable.

          The mention of the fourth wall in this and other sections of “Garages” is notable. If “In Your Spare Time” is a prose work that attempts to engage with visual art, “Garages” attempts to engage with the visual and kinetic medium of theater (interestingly, Susan Simpson, one of the two artists who created the work on the book’s back cover, is a filmmaker and theater artist). Indeed, the characters in this piece often feel (at least to the theater-educated reader) like those in a movement piece designed for the stage.

          A Fixed, Formal Arrangement is ultimately an attempt to use the “fixed, formal” qualities of prose to emulate the more kinetic and malleable forms of visual and performance art. Although this makes it of most interest to readers with experience in visual art, dance, drama or film, those who appreciate the work of Woolf, Stein and others like them will find the work fascinating for the ways in which its pace and narrative ambiguity expand on the work these authors of modernity began.


God’s Livestock Policy
Stan Apps
ISBN Number: 9781934254059

          It seems strange to mention Milton’s Paradise Lost in conjunction with a book like God’s Livestock Policy, because the two stand at cross purposes. Where the purpose of Milton’s epic poem was to “justify the ways of God to men,” the purpose of Apps’s experimental collection is to explain the justifications men use to distort God’s ways.

          As Apps explains in “This Book,” the argument to God’s Livestock Policy, the centuries of human thinking about God in human terms have contaminated God, much as a plant spewing toxins pollutes a river:

You can’t take the burned-up gasoline out of the oxygen. You can’t take human falsehood out of God. It has been put in, you breathe the air, you’re breathing someone’s soot, you think of God, you’re thinking someone’s self-indulgent fantasy…When you think of God, your head fills up with the stickiest most human love-notes and ambitions to kill people and build things on their land.

          While Apps writes that the almighty is big enough to diffuse such toxins, he says he nonetheless desires to claim his own territory within the expanse that is God—for, apparently, the purpose of claming it as so many have done before. Whether or not the poet himself believes in God—or even in what he is writing, as Michael Magee points out in his introduction to the collection, is not the point of God’s Livestock Policy. Neither is it the book’s point to declare, as some mystics have, that the almighty is unknowable. Rather, Apps uses satire and black humor to expose the human, intellectual and existential costs of the stories we tell ourselves about God.

          In poems such as “God is Love,” Apps explores the absurdity behind the platitudes and slogans humans use when referring to God by blending such clichés as “God is Love,” “God wants War,” and “God is Jealous” with such staples of American culture as the nuclear family, mega-churches, swimming pools, picnics and even real estate. The result is the construction of a post-modern, vacuous Tower of Babel, which negates God’s meaning by casually identifying him with everything.

God is Love. God wants War. Love wants war. The
            largest mega-church of Mom agreeing. Wearing
            swimsuits near the pool. God is Swimsuit. God
            wants Wearing. Swimsuit wants Love Wearing.
            God is Grampa. God wants Pool. Gramps wants
            Pool retiring. Mom wants Grampa to relax, mind
            his condition. Skin wants Elasticity. The largest
            mega-church of Swimsuit Wearing.

          As one might expect of a book about God published near the end of George W. Bush’s term in office, several of the poems in God’s Livestock Policy focus on the particular destructive brand of God bottled and marketed by America’s Christian warmongers. Apps dissects, mocks and grapples with this attitude and the violence and absurdity strewn in its wake in poems such as “It was America,” “Ark” and “Psychedelic Snapback,” which Magee aptly calls “the closest we may ever get to being an internal witness to George W. Bush’s actual dreams.”

People imagine the almighty
because they themselves wish to be everything
and everywhere at once.
The almighty wants to kill their enemies because
the almighty is only an extension of their imagined
sovereignty. They, the people,
want to fill the world with themselves, impersonally,
keeping their eccentricities out of God.

          Of course, poets in the U.S. and across the world have been writing about the Bush administration’s failures, excesses and arrogance for the past eight years, to the point that the topic is beginning to feel somewhat overly mined. The best part of God’s Livestock Policy, then, is not its criticisms of governmental co-opting of the almighty or even the particularities of U.S. history and culture that make such co-opting a frequently recurrent infection in this nation. Rather, Apps excels at telling parables about God, many of which satirize, fantasize and bastardize the language of biblical parable and European fairy tale. The best of these include “Angels and Agents” (a take on the tale of Sodom and Gomorrah that is as much James Bond as it is Genesis) and “To Oscar Romero,” a spin on the life of the Catholic bishop and Social Justice advocate that miraculously manages to skewer both human cruelty and Marxist fable at the same time.

          But the book’s best parable has to be “God’s Cottage,” the themes, style and humor of which seem to be so closely in line with the cartoonish, over-the-top and gleefully blasphemous style of Bizarro literature as to have merited inclusion in either of Eraserhead Press’s Bizarro Starter Kits. “God’s Cottage” imagines God secluded in his small Alpine cottage hard at work on making more microbes to plague humanity. He is accompanied by an angel that stores the Universe’s laws of physics, a second angel that eats any bad code the first generates before it can damage the cosmos, and God’s butler Glathull, an “unfinished homonculus” with a taste of human pineal glands and a talent for tea-brewing.

          Although “God’s Cottage” is one of the lighter pieces in God’s Livestock Policy, it is also the piece that best illustrates one of Apps’s clearest points: whatever or whoever God is, the universe remains a strange, absurd and cruel place that seems to care far less for humanity’s continued existence than Christianity would have us believe.

          However, to summarize God’s Livestock Policy, as Magee does, as a Kafkaesque, even nihilistic, take on the universe seems an incomplete assessment. While Apps’s claustrophobic and oppressive tone owe a large debt to Kafka’s short stories, Apps does not appear to be giving up on the world as  the almighty does in “God’s Pocket Lint.” After all, if the world is a hopeless and absurd place, why have a conversation on humanity’s attempts to grapple with the divine? Yet, Apps does not invite this conversation simply to prescribe a 12 step program to make the world a safer, happier place (i.e. “stop thinking of God in militaristic terms, and everything will be OK!”). Rather, his purpose seems simply to invite the reader to wrestle more thoughtfully with the idea of the divine, a suggestion which is not only all that humanity can ultimately do when it comes to dealing with God, but also something that has been grievously lacking in U.S. discourse in the past decade.

          God’s Livestock Policy is a strong entry in Les Figues’s TrenchArt series that will be appreciated most by lovers of Kafka and Bizarro literature. Fans of the Bible might want to check it out, too.


re: evolution
Kim Rosenfield
ISBN Number: 978193934254080

          Frequently, the introductions to Les Figues’s TrenchArt books are not only illuminating, but essential reading for navigating the poetry and prose in the pages beyond. Typically, they are necessary not because they can serve as a decoder or “cheat sheet” for the following text, but because they exist (as per the press’s statement about the series) in conversation with the text. Sometimes, they even become part of the text itself.

          Although both of the TrenchArt books we have previously considered can stand apart from their prefaces, this is less true of re: evolution, a highly experimental and idiosyncratic dissection of scientific systems, feminism and evolution by poet and psychotherapist Kim Rosenfeld. It would behoove even veteran TrenchArt subscribers and the hardiest connoisseurs of experimental poetry to read Sianne Ngai’s introduction before essaying what lies beyond. Even better, the reader would be well served to read Diana Hamilton’s exhaustive afterward/analysis before the introduction; herein lies the key to Rosenfield’s map. Hamilton writes:

re: evolution lets science have its say. Kim Rosenfield’s ability to include multiple voices without submitting any to the criticism of a single author(ity) enables her to appropriate text from several sources, mostly scientific ones, to create a remarkable democracy of perspective.

          Among these voices and sources, Hamilton lists Darwinism (both scientific and its early 20th century social bastardization), creationism, psychotherapy, high school biology textbooks, Victorian taxonomy, the DNA molecule, and even cooking. Although some of these sources may be apparent to the reader who ignores introduction and afterward or saves them for later, it is still best to read the instructions before proceeding, as when attempting any scientific experiment or mathematical problem.

          Indeed, Rosenfield’s book is probably the closest a poet can come to melding the language of science and poetry so clinically and strangely. Take, for example, this selection from re: evolution’s Chapter 8, which mines the shelves of geology, paleontology and biology to discuss the often baffling evolution of flora:

Fossils document our imperfections
Then, there was the use of a great tree
Whose pollen was difficult to transport from
Tree to tree, but each tree had a
Tendency to have flowers with separate sexes
When the sexes were separated, there were
Masculine flowers with feminine qualities.

There is a tendency toward limited variation
I believe that antique structures
Improvise, transform, and by an internal force
Which constructs to support each individual in his or
            her contemporary variations.

          Or this humorous selection from Chapter 10, reminiscent of an (albeit bizarrely anthropomorphic and sexist) eighth grade lesson on electron shells.

The need of every electron to be different from all other
electrons results in some very interesting behavior.
We might facetiously compare it with the behavior of
stylish women who devote much time and effort to
finding clothes unlike anyone else’s. If they should
miscalculate and two of them appear in the same
day in identical hats, these two women would not be
found going along the same street together. Either
one would be moving at a much greater speed than
the other, or one would change direction and go along
the other side of the street or even along a different
street. Similarly with electrons. They rearrange their
“orbits” and paths so that they are all different.

          Rosenfield’s knowledge of evolution and the past five centuries of Western scientific and social development are encyclopedic, and her intermingling of references virtuosic, funny and deeply disturbing at times, as in Chapter 16 (here reproduced in full), which stands as a comment on the dehumanizing trend of post-Enlightenment science to rank humans along a scale of most to least human by sex and race. The structure of this poem even mimics such a taxonomy, proceeding down the page like a list.

She has
A Vulva
Labia Majora
And
A feminine
Urethra
Independent
Of
A sort of
Imperforate
Penis
Which
Might be
A
Monstrously
Developed
Clitoris.

She
Has
A
Vagina—
True
IT
Is
Very
Short
And
Narrow
But
After
All
What
Is
It
If
It
Is
Not   
A
Vagina?

          Although Rosenfield’s commentary on science and its discontents is deeply thought-provoking and skilled, it is, unfortunately, somewhat difficult to access, and not just for the casual reader who, like a bored student, foregoes the sample problems and dives headlong into the algebraic equations. To properly follow—to say nothing of decode— Rosenfield’s argument, the reader must have a working knowledge of scientific theory that at least approaches Rosenfield’s—or, at the very least, a scientist’s patience to read and reread, research, reconsider and ruminate over phrase after phrase, down to the syllable. While the book’s attempt to push the reader into the role of scientist is nothing short of brilliant, the less educated or more casual reader may, unfortunately, not pick up on its intent, or may be unwilling to meet the book at its level. Nevertheless, re: evolution is a fascinating and demanding read that scientists, students of science and language, and those with an interest in the intersection of poetry and science will likely appreciate for its daring and ingenuity.