Read my latest story, "A Tale of Two Birthdays", at 52|250.

Last Summer

  cars baked in the stream
   pineapple sun had been up so long
  even dirt deep beneath rapid stones
  went dry
                  people stayed inside
  until their windows were blown out
then their bones were b|own away
|anding like a silk sheet
over pots of brittled p|ants

                 if the hose had anything left
we c[oul]d moisten the soil
        our share of the dead
    w[oul]d hold in the drink

our pumpkins, our sunflowers, our tomatoes
have left perfectly fertile zeroes
no sense to call them seeds that can no longer grow

                                 we devour them before each other
                                 we'll eat our loved ones first

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Joined Pipes

we've waited & rusted & even turned green
patches pretending to life  instead of squalid breath
scented with brackish hair clots
                                                   we've been forced to swallow
gallons of drinking water
for toilets & showers

                                           we've waited
for the day we would be pried apart
so we could crawl along this concrete
            or glass shards in the dump
                                                        and kiss because we want to

now our threads have melded
water's stopped

                                  no one will replace us
                                  or distant plastic lines already have

we're still too close to love
                                             the way you think we do

Costume Jewelry

if I fill this flat with homes
   a birdhouse from the dollar store
   a snail shell from Croatia
   a cracked aquarium full of glass   distorted by the sea
   a secret's clear bottle & cork

   strips of velvet & chains
of rhinestones
                        may just be soothed to sleep
in their second-hand oak box  on the rented dresser
and when I fasten them above my breasts
        their grogginess, my dreams
will let them rest   instead of pulling tight against my neck

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I’ve sat with this thin book for most of the summer trying to figure out how to review it. There is something in the voice(s) of The Silence of Sickness which, on a wholly subjective level irritates me. It’s an occasional flatness, as in the poem “When I heard the bear coming” which consists entirely of two lines:

my arms were filled with ten percent of everything I owned.
You cursed my name into a pillow, as I ran out our front door.

More often, however, it’s a certain precious cleverness that isn’t really all that clever as in the sixth stanza of “The Winter Migration of Blue Crabs” (an idea with remarkable surreal or magically real potential):

The night the blue crabs migrated to me,
I dreamt of acupuncture, a subconscious relief,
But still they poke at me and it hurts.

Now, I’ve never had trouble saying that I dislike a book, so why did I sit on reviewing this one? Because I believe that there are people who like this sort of voice; fans of Tao Lin will probably like this aspect of Zachary C. Bush‘s work, though in The Silence of Sickness there is a greater atypicality of narrative and image such that Michael Bernstein has called the collection “haunting”. Occasionally this unusualness approaches intensity, but it never quite got there in my reading experience at least.

I still could have forcefully imposed my subjective stance by doing an emperor-has-no-clothes piece, but I suspected that someone would show up in the comments and say that the flatness, the unclever cleverness was the point: it says [something] about (post)modern life. And they’d probably be right.

So I thought about whether I could ignore the issue entirely, but that would have meant ignoring content all together, which left me with a catalog of technique, form, and structure. There are prose poems. There are short to medium lines. There are very short (two lines) to short (or maybe medium by contemporary standards) poems. Occasionally a verse or line steps away from the left-hand margin. In “Ruins”, they even make a formation:

and closed their eyes. There were
                        colorful variations:

                                    Nebraska,
                     Nebraska,               Nebraska,
                                    Nebraska.

Some poems have irregular grammar or spaces in the middle of words instead of between them. Nothing stood out enough for me to make it the focus of a review, which is not necessarily a criticism of the work: artists are under no obligation to make life easy for reviewers after all.

So instead of a review, you get this: process notes and an explanation of why I can’t properly review The Silence of Sickness. Perhaps it would have been better to engage in my own silence, but I would have felt guilty, since I was given a copy to review.

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