E! Entertainment by Kate Durbin (paired w/ the World’s Shittiest Cosmo)

Review by Ess Wagner

E! Entertainment
by Kate Durbin
Wonder, May 2014
199 pages
$15

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I don’t watch much reality television, but when I do I tend to watch Keeping Up with the Kardashians. It’s mindless and relaxing. I like looking at their pretty hair and faux eyelashes and severe curves. It demands nothing of me as a viewer. But what does reality TV in book form demand of me as a reader?

Kate Durbin’s new book, E! Entertainment, at first feels very much like watching TV (except you can’t read it while stoned or eating Indian take-out). But the more of it I read, the more questions I had: Is this real? Did she transcribe this or is it fiction? Is this poetry? Is this parody? Social critique? What is this:

Wife Ette shakes her head. “You’re not going to suggest Hello Kitty shapes are you?”

“I saw it and it was really cute,” says Wife Josie. “They made sushi, like, the rice was like shaped like her head, and they put like accents, like the bow was like a little piece of fish and stuff.” As she talks about the bow she makes a bow-tying motion above her big hair and tilts her head to the side.

And the whole book is like that–eight chapters of reality “episodes” on nearly 200 pages of pink paper. The book can be discomfiting and disorienting at times. The “screen” image changes frequently, often zoomed in and probably cut from a different point in time and spliced in for dramatic effect but at the cost of irregularities–something in someone’s hand that wasn’t there before, boxes on the floor then the couch. The composition of each scene is very busy—so much so that characters lose their identity or fail to have an identity at all, often referred to in very literal terms: Blonde Mullet Woman, the Go-To Guy for Weddings, the Medium, Wife Kyle’s BFF, the Make-Up Artist, black silk shirt girl, fingernail-nibbling girl, etc. Or we just see a collage of a person via their bedroom and personal belongings, as in the “Girls Next Door” chapter:

This large bedroom is hot pink and organized. The Queen bed’s bright pink comforter is off-set sprays of black and white bunnies with bowties pillows. There is also a large Hello Kitty pillow…Inside the Control Clutter Closet are numerous glittering gowns and themed costumes, such as sexy devil and sexy angel. The closet is color and calendar coordinated.

Without substantial identity, the stars are also devoid of sincere emotions, tending to instead display scripted and/or inhibited ones, and the viewer must rely on the music at the beginning of each “scene” to present the emotional context of either what just happened or what’s going to happen.

To better understand how Durbin’s work both conforms to and bucks traditional literary and artistic forms, I turned to my old Marilyn Stokstad art history textbook:

1. “The elaboration of surface detail to create ornamental effects combined with an effort to capture the essence of form is characteristic of abstract art” …

2. “Realistic art…has a surface reality; the artists appear, with greater or lesser accuracy, to be recording exactly what they see. Realistic art…can carry complex messages and be open to individual interpretation”…

3. “Realism and abstraction represent opposite approaches to the representation of beauty” (Stokstad 19).

Durbin has created a work that refuses to be clearly defined. It meets the definition of both realism and abstraction. It’s a hybrid of prose poetry, flash fiction, and documentary/transcription. It brings to my mind James Hampton’s 1964 sculpture, Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly, which is made of old furniture, flashbulbs, and miscellaneous trash tacked together and wrapped in aluminum, gold foil, and purple paper. E! Entertainment is the throne, its viewers/readers are the nation’s millennium general assembly, with Durbin paying precise attention to the gold foil wrapped around vapid and otherwise uninteresting people:

Wife Kyle has long, shiny brown hair and big gold Dior hoop earrings. She sighs, looking out the limo window into the setting sun. Her hazel eyes glitter, along with her champagne.

“And believe me, Wife Camille’s likable,” says Wife Kyle, pointing out the window with her champagne glass. She has a gold Dior stud bracelet on.

“But if she’s mean to you, I’m obviously not going to watch her,” says Wife Kyle’s BFF, who has cascading strawberry blonde curls and a tiny, sculpted nose. Piles of Chanel pearls rest in her cleavage. She sits next to Wife Kyle on the limo seat.

“It was–a fluke thing, maybe. We’ll see,” says Wife Kyle. She is wearing a beige and blue Pucci dress with billowy sleeves. She is very tan.

“All I know is everybody adores you,” says Wife Kyle’s BFF. “You’ve had your friends forever.”

Wife Kyle nods. She takes out a Chanel compact and eye pencil from a black leather Chanel bag and starts lining her eyes.

Durbin elaborates on the ornamentation of each woman, never attempting to dig beneath the surface. All we get is what’s physically present and happening in the scene. It doesn’t matter much if these superficial relationships and self-involvement are part of the packaging; the picture itself is more important than the depth of the scene/conversation/relationship.

There are also numerous mentions of Delirium candles throughout the book. Delirium is apparently a popular brand of luxury candles, but the frequency with which they appear made me wonder if the reality stars who purchased them have an acute mental disturbance characterized by confused thinking and disrupted attention usually accompanied by disordered speech and hallucinations. Durbin gives us exactly what “reality” looks like, and by not giving us a fixed meaning behind the picture, she also gives us delirium.

It’s difficult to tell if Durbin’s work is transcribed or invented, much like the reality shows she studies. The note at the beginning of the book states that it’s a work of fiction, but is it fiction because the shows are fiction? The only thing I know for certain is that this is what we invest in culturally. It’s tacky social encounters dressed up in designer clothes. It’s lipstick on a pig. It’s a photograph of a painting. It is American Pop Culture.

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The World’s Shittiest Cosmo

by Aaron Krol, resident mixologist

I couldn’t wait to pair a drink with E! Entertainment. I needed a drink with the same effect as the book itself: the bewilderment, the fascination, and especially the need to pass it around the table: you have got to taste this. The characters, those wealthy, empty, hyper-fashionable mannequins, could only be matched with a cosmopolitan; but the book’s potent effect on the reader, that creeping feeling of what has my culture wrought, needed a little something extra. Hence, this flashy, crowded, utterly misguided cocktail that takes a classic cosmo and pours a bellini on top:

2 oz. vodka
1 oz. triple sec
1/2 oz. cranberry juice
1/2 oz. peach juice or peach puree
Prosecco sparkling wine
lime wedge

Mix the vodka, triple sec, cranberry and peach in a shaker with ice. Squeeze the lime wedge over the mixture. Shake thoroughly (this is a drink where you’d love to get little slivers of ice slush in) and strain into a cocktail glass. Top with Prosecco until the glass is too full to lift without spilling. Lift, spill, and drink. I think Stoli is one of the better inexpensive vodkas, and of course Cointreau for the triple sec. But really, you won’t taste anything but the fruit and sticky sweetness. And a lot of vodka.

The Man Suit by Zachary Schomburg (paired w/ Dark & Stormy)

The Man Suit by Zachary Schomburg

Review by Ess Wagner

The Man Suit
by Zachary Schomburg
Black Ocean, 2007
105 pages
$12.95

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I haven’t been sleeping well lately, for many reasons, so be forewarned this might get weird. Thankfully, reading some of Zachary Schomburg’s The Man Suit a bit each day made me feel like I at least slept enough to dream. His dark, surrealist, often recurring images follow a playful logic throughout the book; I felt like the floating coffin from the book’s cover had scooped me up to drift from poem to poem, like a (more) uncomfortable version of It’s a Small World, or a more grown-up version of Alice in Wonderland. Well, you get it.

In the first poem of the two-poem series “What I Found in the Forest,” the scene before the man turns in on itself again and again:

 1.

I found a group
of inappropriately dressed
women inside

a hollowed-out tree.
They all had hidden agendas.
When I asked Marlene

her name, she told me Madeline.
When I asked why
they were in a hollowed-out tree,

all of them became
suspiciously uneasy–
particularly Marlene

who told me to stop
talking as she handed me
some beautiful flowers.

2.

I found a group
of beautifully arranged
trees flowering inside

a hollowed-out woman.
They all seemed to be deciduous.
When I climbed the smallest one

it bent underneath my weight.
When I climbed the strongest one,
I could see forever.

But what I saw
was a dark forest of hollowed-
out women,

inappropriately dressed,
growing trees
inside themselves.

The beginning and ending of each section draw on the same pool of subconscious imagery, but dissected and reassembled. The pair of sections taken together remind me of a Jacob’s ladder: you can start in either orientation, watch it all tumble downward, and end up in the same place. And the movement is entrancing.

The whole book is steeped in a dark atmosphere, and every poem feels set at nighttime; but the truly peculiar thing is how none of the poems, despite their grotesqueness, feel like a nightmare. There’s something eerily calm in the world of The Man Suit. Maybe it’s because the poems happen around the reader-as-observer, sometimes reader-as-receiver-of-dream-instructions: “The white telephone is an instrument of death. Do not answer the white telephone.”

Or maybe the weird calm stems from the sincerity of each poem and the collection as a whole, like in “The Things That Surround Us”:

When you asked me if I was an island, I told you that I was not. When you asked me to join you in the drawing room, I told you that I could not, that I was in fact an island and I couldn’t join anyone.

Saddened, you revealed to me that you were not the two things that jut outward into the sea as I had assumed, but the little bit of gray sea between them.

Then I told you that I’m the entire Arctic Ocean sometimes.

It’s an intimate moment where a bit of the speaker’s conscious mind bleeds into his subconscious, and you can see a real relationship, or event, or connection, falter. Surrealists all let you into their dreamscape, but not all of them make you feel as welcome as Schomburg. Part of why I enjoy surrealist art (literary or visual) is because it’s surprisingly relatable and open to a vast array of readings. And being let into the subconscious of the speaker and willfully entering requires a level of trust to be established between reader and speaker. There’s one series in particular where this trust comes to the forefront, pictorially titled “Black Telephone, White Telephone.” I’ll just leave you with one excerpt:

The black telephone is owned by a man with no limbs and no voice box and no ears and no brain. There is no need to dial up the black telephone.

The white telephone is God. There are only a handful of people with the telephone number. Its ring is infinitely loud. This is what killed the dinosaurs.

Everything in The Man Suit is true and real and mine for my subconscious to do with what it pleases.

*     *     *

Dark and Stormy

by Aaron Krol, resident mixologist

Ess chose the drink this time, and it’s a good one. If you’ve never had a Dark and Stormy, the ginger is as much a sensation as a flavor. Despite the name, it’s not an imposing drink; in fact it’s very inviting, no matter how much it tries to cloak itself in darkness.

2 oz. dark rum
3 oz. ginger beer, or to taste

Pour first the rum, then the ginger beer, into a highball glass with ice. Stir gently to mix. Just to lend a little mixological perspective to Ess’s excellent choice: some people like to add lime to a Dark and Stormy. I approve of that, but don’t go overboard; you’ll want one wedge of lime, squeezed gently over the drink and dropped in. To me, the brand of ginger beer matters much more than the brand of rum. A lot of ginger beers have a heavy dose of pineapple in them, which tends to ruin the spirited shock of a Dark and Stormy. Fever Tree and Barritts are very nice brands for this drink.

Mortal Geography by Alexandra Teague (Paired w/ Gin Sling)

Review by Aaron Krol

Mortal Geography
Alexandra Teague
Persea Books, 2010
$15
88 pages

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It’s amazing how regional American poetry can be. There’s every reason to think Alexandra Teague’s Mortal Geography should be in fairly regular circulation – it won both the Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize and the top poetry prize in the California Book Awards, which, I mean, it’s California, there must be some pretty stiff competition there – but here in Boston I managed to never hear about or run across it at all. But I took a trip to San Francisco recently where I saw it in a bookstore, and I read the first poem, “Adjectives of Order.”

So, yeah, for my fellow East Coasters who may be in the same boat as me – this is a book where to read the first poem is to buy it.

“Adjectives of Order” sets a great pattern that you’ll see recur throughout the book. A lot of poets like to sneak meditations about language into poems that seem to be about something else entirely (well, we would, we’re a pretty language-focused bunch). Three-quarters of the way through a poem like this, you’re supposed to go, “Oh, she’s been talking about language the whole time.” We can be pretty pleased with ourselves when we do that.

Teague likes to do the opposite. This particular poem starts,

That summer, she had a student who was obsessed
with the order of adjectives. A soldier in the South
Vietnamese army, he had been taken prisoner when

Saigon fell. He wanted to know why the order
could not be altered.

What follows is a whole bunch of interrogation of the way we string adjectives together. Why is it “warm homemade bread” and not “homemade warm bread”? Is there some inherent rationale behind the phrase “lovely big rectangular old red English Catholic leather Bible”? Would it be wrong to rearrange it?

You’ll probably have guessed already that the poem is ultimately more interested in the student’s experience as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. I won’t spoil the ending, except to say that the two halves of the poem come together with all the satisfaction of a snap fastener. What I will say is that Teague has realized that her questions about language are interesting enough that she doesn’t have to shuffle them into the poem in disguise. Of course I want to know about the student, but I also want to know what the logic is behind the order of adjectives. It’s something I had never thought about before, never even realized there were unspoken rules about. But “homemade warm bread” sounds wrong, and now I want to know the rules. Language is mysterious.

Teague keeps coming back to that well – most memorably, to me, in “Explanation to a Student,” about navigating Elizabethan diction, and in “Performative Language” – but let me convince the readers who aren’t swooning over the idea of reading about language all the time that Mortal Geography is still a book you want to read. Is it enough to add that Teague writes lines like “In the beginning was snow, fluffy and colored / like cabbage,” or “her heart / sprouts like a brash corsage”? Or, in a blunter mood in “Arkansas Churches”:

As the atheists’ daughter, I had an open invitation to be lost
at ten different churches. Heaven was offered once each year

like pastel dresses for Easter, but Hell was ongoing.

No, I think what you really need to know is that her obvious love of what language can do spills into everything, no matter what her subject. She relishes in the twistier forms – you’ll find both a pantoum and a sestina here – and will gladly invent her own, including in one absolutely wild poem called “Two Drafts Written After a Fight” whose second half utterly transforms the first by changing nothing but the punctuation. I still can’t decide, after four or five readings, whether that poem is a work of original genius or too clever by half, and honestly I lean toward the latter. But then, how often does a poem pull off either?

Does this all sound a little ivory tower, or at least, a bit like she’s writing to impress more than to connect? Listen – this book contains “Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Poem,” which is, yes, just what it sounds like. It includes “From The Spell Tables,” which milks a Dungeons & Dragons rulebook for emotion you’d never imagine was hiding there. It’s not interested in language like a grad student is interested in her thesis topic, it’s fixated on language like a six-year-old with a new set of Legos.

There are fascinating things going on with language everywhere, and this book is for everyone.

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Gin Sling

This is definitely a gin book – the emotion eases in, not jolting you out of your seat but settling over you like a bath, and you’ll want something dry and crisp to glide through it with. I’ve chosen a Sling for its easy flavors that let you just enjoy it as a refreshment if you like, or really relish in the tang of the gin if that’s your style.

2 oz. gin
1/2 oz. Cointreau (or, seriously, any orange liqueur is fine)
1/2 oz. lemon juice
chilled club soda to taste

Shake the gin, Cointreau and lemon juice together and strain into a highball glass. Top with club soda – I like just enough to feel the fizz, but in a classic Sling it will be half the glass or more – and stir gently. If you’re using fresh lemon juice (because you’re one of the good guys!), you can drop a lemon wedge in. A Sling calls for a more citrusy gin; New Amsterdam is a good price and will do nicely.

More: LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs

TwERK by LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs (paired w/ Mexi-Kyoto)

TwERK by LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs

Review by Ess Wagner

TwERK
LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs
Belladonna* Press, April 2013
$15
112 pages

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I don’t often judge books by their covers, but I do let the titles heavily influence me. I didn’t think twice about purchasing LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs’ TwERK based on the title alone. I expected it to be the sort of poetry collection that would jostle me out of the MFA haze of academy-appropriate poetry. I graduated a year ago and immediately went on a writing/reading hiatus for the next 8 or so months. Now coming back into the swing of poetry, I craved something that would pull me by both hands into something fresh, bold, and unknown. TwERK did exactly that.

The first thing I noticed about TwERk, just flipping through before actually reading any of it, is the many languages Diggs uses throughout the book, in single poems, and even in individual lines. “Mungkin (mencintai) mungkin” (meaning “possibly (to love) maybe”) is written in Japanese, Malay, English, and Spanish:

taisetsu na tu mio guagua nyamuk
how beloved you my baby mosquito

engkau imponente gila murasaki buaya
you awesome insane purple crocodile

karakau mi cinta sampai saya chi es habuk
how precious you my baby mosquito

Although she does do side-by-side translations like above, it’s more typical of Diggs to imbed English words into lines of foreign language, encouraging us to read slowly/carefully, and to read things we don’t understand or that make us uncomfortable (because we don’t understand). Take for instance the fourth song in “March of the Stylized Natives: the lost verses of kantan pescado,” which is written in Chamorro and English:

                               yute’ gadi ya’un falagu.               throw your net and run.
chunge’-ku, hokka my seedlings            sweet fair stern        pick
from the earth, my eyes too                                                               .
        pa, tupu malago’-hu                              pa, sugar cane is what I want
adahi hao, my nest is weak                                         be careful

If you let your eyes skim to the solely English side, you miss gems like “my nest is weak.” Each movement into or out of a language feels like a tiny jerk, but the whole dance of the poem is very playful, seductive, and fluid. It becomes hard not to completely give yourself over to Diggs as your sort of linguistic tour guide, to take a line like, “yute’ gadi ya’un falagu” and let it roll around on your tongue. Diggs is an avid explorer of language, experimenting with what all languages can do, which is essentially anything the body can do: twist, shake, jump, collapse, and (of course) twerk.

But TwERK is more than just an experiment with language; it’s also a study of how one culture can adopt/adapt style from another culture, for better or worse. In one of her monolingual poems, “bacche ka potRa,” (which is Hindi/Urdu for “nappy”) “the dandelion dance of Keisha’s mane” becomes “plumes burnt. / crunchy bacon. / her puberty looms early. fizzled particles / stuck on a flat iron. / [. . . ] wave / adieu corkscrew.”

In “April 18th” Diggs meditates on the name Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes chose for their daughter, perhaps considerably longer than they themselves did. Suri Cruise’s “birthright a name renamed & claimed by the famed deranged.” Suri, Diggs notes, is an ethnic tribe in Pakistan and Afghanistan; Suri is a flightless bird native to Patagonia; and it’s a type of alpaca with silky dreadlocks. In Hebrew, Suri means “princess.” In this poem, Diggs sings all the different Suris:

Suri, you rare breed of colors reading at a bookstore in Punjab.
Suri, planning Pashtun trilogies with regard to sightings of Rhea.
You mimic robust gummy grubs in the Amazon suckling lychee.

Suri, not to be found, but discovered in a rare & precious alpaca dreadlock,
who swallows & spits the gelato of Aphrodite.

And it’s difficult to not mention, given the title of the collection, the recent adoption (kidnapping?) of twerking by young, white females. A little over a year ago,  feminist blogger Sesali Bowen wrote an article for feministing.com on the commodification of poor and minority cultures:

It is super-easy to borrow from the experiences of others as a way to be “fun,” or stretch boundaries on what is “acceptable,” without any acknowledgement of context or framework…

I can’t stress enough that pop culture trends like twerking… are all rooted in someone’s lived experience.

Diggs’ collection calls into question how much we take superficially from other cultures for fun or trends, and what are we losing by not digging deeper. Diggs is an observer of appropriation but she’s also a participant. She draws inspiration and material from other cultures for her own artistic purposes. But the difference is that she keeps those cultural roots intact and forces the reader to face them, and we’re given a much richer experience because of it.

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Mexi-Kyoto
by Aaron Krol, resident mixologist 

TwERK makes a bold impression, but its joys are surprisingly subtle – and with lines like “open your eyes baby shark / color your lips sour plum,” it’s not afraid that its sweetness will detract from its complexity. This made me think of the neon green, sweet-but-lingering Kyoto cocktail. In a nod to the book’s restless internationality, I’ve mixed in some elements of a Paloma, with tequila instead of gin as the base, and white grapefruit instead of lemon providing a slight citrus note.

1 1/2 oz. silver tequila
1/4 oz. dry vermouth
1/2 oz. Midori
1/2 oz. white grapefruit juice

Pour the ingredients in a shaker with ice. Twerk the shaker vigorously, then strain into a cocktail glass.

The combination of tequila and vermouth is a little unusual; you normally only see it in tequila martinis, which I always regarded as a bit silly. Feel free to omit the vermouth, but I think it makes the tequila a little less brash. Read responsibly.