Lament of a broken brain: June book reviews

These are the books I read in the month of June, 2022—

Duplex by Mike Nagel

I picked this up because of Mike’s podcast conversation with Graham Irvin in which Graham says that his book Liver Mush and Duplex are “the same book.” I love Liver Mush. These books aren’t the same, but I still liked Duplex a lot. It felt clever, with a good mix of humor and honesty. Maybe it was sometimes slightly too aware of the fact that it was being clever and funny and honest? I was pleasantly surprised and impressed, though. I’m not sure why I was skeptical. 

Cheap Yellow by Shy Watson

Shy Watson is so talented. Each of her books has a distinct energy and set of preoccupations while also sharing an intimacy and generosity. I had to refrain from taking pictures of lots of pages and posting them onto the internet. I think this is maybe the only published book of hers I hadn’t yet read, unless there’s some obscure chapbook, which there probably is. I bought her last available copy of this one, I think, which also appears to be otherwise out of print, and she wrote me a nice note inside. That made me feel good.

June by Daniel Brenner

FENCE sent me this because I’m a subscriber. I’m confused about which books FENCE is sending, and when, and why. This one and some others they’ve sent seem to’ve come out years ago and have almost no action on Goodreads. This one was fine. It didn’t do anything obnoxiously poemy. There were some nice bits of language and images. It was short, hooray. I feel like I might not be FENCE Books’ target audience, or that maybe FENCE Books don’t have any single target audience. I’m happy for them to publish whatever they dang well please—they’ve put out some stunners, which means I’ll gladly grant them some leeway.

Dave: poems volume 2: I AM DAVE_HELLO #2 by Dave Poems

It’s pretty uncool that this pseudonymous joke poet is writing funnier and more emotionally pure books than so many “serious” poets who are “actually trying.” Yes, it all relies heavy on the bit, the character, but I’m buying it. This one felt less punchy, less organized than volume 1, but its aimlessness allowed more space for unexpected resonances. Another fun mini-game aspect of reading Dave is trying to parse out clues about who Dave is. There are a few hints here that lead me to believe Dave is actually a collaboration… but I’ll say no more.

The Vacation by Garth Miró

This seed was probably planted in my mind by the cover aesthetics, Jon Lindsey’s blurb, and the knowledge that Sam Pink also had a hand in editing this, but it did remind me of Body High, which I loved. This one is similarly outrageous, plotwise—even moreso, I’d say, and maybe less personal. There’s some fun had with language that gave otherwise action-packed sequences some artful flavoring. I’ve enjoyed Garth’s short stories online, and was interested in how his style would translate to the longer format — the chronological confines of a cruise seemed to help him give it arc and scope, within which it sprawled a bit.

A Picture Held us Captive by Danielle Dutton

Wowowow. This one is like a new prism through which I can’t help but looking at all the other stuff I’ve been reading. Danielle Dutton seems a little bit like a prophet. I’m sure she can do wrong, but I’ve yet to see it. This book is a nice book object, and is very short, adapted, I think, from a shorter essay and/or a lecture, which is evident. It’s the kind of original “artist-on-art” idea posed with some healthy conjecture and assertions, the right set of examples, and some “self” woven in to keep it interesting and honest—not too academic. This book delivered as a lecture would easily be the most memorable highlight of any given Bread Loaf or Tin House or whatever.

Until it Feels Right by Emily Costa

This book defied all of my expectations for what reads like a therapy diary in the time of COVID—seeing the threat of infection and heightened hygienic concerns through the lens of OCD was very jarring, and that novelty helped me look at something that otherwise feels too recent and still relevant to be able to reflect on in any beneficial way. I tweeted about this moment in the book: the speaker’s partner gives her a “vintage” Beavis and Butthead shirt for her birthday, but she can’t help herself from checking the tag, discovering that it was made in 2018, and then simultaneously getting mad at him for giving her another shirt (something he’s already overdone) when folding laundry is an especially difficult task while also being down on herself for failing to resist making it a thing. Beautiful human moment. I wanted more kid/partner/family drama like that, but maybe that’s greedy of me. Some things get to stay private.   

Sellout: The Major Label Feeding Frenzy That Swept Punk, Emo, and Hardcore, 1994-2007 by Dan Ozzi

I skimmed somebody’s substack post about this book—they’d skimmed this book for the bands they cared about. I cared about some of these bands in their heyday, appreciated some in hindsight, and have essentially grown past being able to sincerely enjoy most of them other than for the nostalgia hit they can deliver. Yasi shouts it out in some Bandsplain episodes, too, so I decided to check it. I was annoyed by the formula applied to each chapter—the way it distills each band and region and fanbase and subgenre into a conforming arc: 1) swearing they won’t sell out, 2) being courted by major labels, 3) selling out, 4) having disappointing sales (or not), 5) burning out or blowing up. It felt really reductive, almost like middle-school book reports. The quotations all blended together. In almost every section, someone says “we felt pretty sure so and so was the next Nirvana.” Boring! I listened to this one, and the audiobook narrator didn’t especially help.

The Cows by Lydia Davis

For some reason it felt really urgent that I read this, and for a while I couldn’t remember/figure out why or find it. I was convinced it should be collected in some volume I owned, but I came up dry. Then I realized it’s mentioned briefly as an example of Danielle Dutton’s expanded definition of ekphrastic writing in A Picture Held Us Captive, and I found a digitized version. It’s really good! It’s a permission-giving work: you can write about whatever. Just look longer and harder than most people usually do, and say what you see. That feels true of drawing/painting, too, not that I know anything about that.

The Red Truck by Rudy Wilson

I bought this because Troy James Weaver was talking about it. I’d mistaken it for Nat Baldwin’s Red Barn, which is funny because apparently Troy and Nat connected over a shared appreciation for The Red Truck. It’s a Lish book, for sure. The cover is kind of hideous. I liked the opacity of the book’s sexiness, which is to say, there is sex but it’s not sexy. Maybe it’s recency bias, or I’d think this of any “Bonnie and Clyde–like adventure,” but it had some parallels with Bud Smith’s Teenager. The perspective and chronology shifts felt a bit Faulknerian, too—I feel like I’ve read fairly widely, but still have so few reference points…

NOON 2022 edited by Diane Williams

I’d delayed ordering and reading this issue because I was feeling bitter and spiteful about my growing pile of NOON rejections, but Kathryn Scanlan cited Lydia Davis’ journal excerpts in the conversation we’re wrapping up for BOMB, so I felt motivated to get over myself. Scanlan’s pieces are standouts, fully deserving of the first pages. A handful of pieces from names I recognize and like were slightly disappointing. Hedgie Choi was a standout! Thanks to its aesthetic coherence and the brevity of each piece, it was a pretty propulsive read on the whole. I think it might not be too hard to train an AI to write a convincingly NOONcore short story. Have you seen those generated greentexts? They’re good! By which I mean enjoyable, though devoid of intent, which is, I guess, something I perhaps mistakenly expect from “art.” Reading Davis’s diary excerpts, I lamented the brokenness of my brain as I thought, “these would make great tweets.”

Avoka by Elle Nash

A while back, Elle was selling a few physical copies of this and I missed out by DMing a few minutes too late. I felt out of luck, assuming there was no other way to read it. Recently, while preparing to interview Elle about Gag Reflex, I discovered that this was freely downloadable. The chapbook excited me for the way it revealed 1) the consistency of Elle’s preoccupations (which clarity I think spares her work from feeling repetitive even when it touches on similar characters, settings, topics, and themes), 2) how much Elle’s grown as a writer in not very much time, and 3) an aesthetic attention, which was present here but has also become more pronounced. The structural idea of orienting some related stories around a town is a familiar move, but is nonetheless clever, and adds to a sense of both cohesion and also a kind of literary worldbuilding, where my mind starts to fill in gaps and guess at the other stories taking place around these ones.

Floating Notes by Babak Lakghomi

The more loosely I held the plot and curbed my impulse to “figure things out,” the more I was able to enjoy the impressionistic jumble of semi-paranoid scenes. I felt immersed in a hazy, rainy Bostoneque setting, or at least a mood that I associate with memories of something like that, though maybe I’m making that all up. Despite “knowing better,” I enjoyed assuming the protagonist’s name was “Babak” (I think he’s only ever called “Bob” in the book as a way of preventing people from mispronouncing it) which I heard spoken in my head by Giancarlo DiTrapano’s voice from when on podcasts he’d often speak highly of Babak. I’m excited for Babak’s forthcoming novel.