It’s Too Late To Say I’m Sorry
by Joey Comeau
Loose Teeth, 2007

Read the TDR Interview with Joey Comeau

Gone and Back Again
by Jonathon Scott Fugua
Soft Skull, 2008

Kissing Dead Girls
by Daphne Gottlieb
Soft Skull, 2008

Reviewed by Nathaniel G. Moore

It’s springtime, and rightly so, in between cleaning rituals, recycling your snow shovels and washing all that awful salt off the sidewalk (use organic salt always, that includes you chumps at city hall) why not throw on some vintage Pet Shop Boys, New Order, B-52’s, and Frankie Goes To Hollywood (not simultaneously unless you’re a dee-jay) and pick up this pretty pink book by the original club kid?

What is the book? Freak Show, the debut novel from James St. James, the legendary social chronicler famously portrayed by Seth Green in the murderously tasteless film Party Monster. The film, which also starred Macaulay Culkin was adapted by James’s non-fiction release Disco Bloodbath, a book that was nominated for the Edgar Award.

In Freak Show, St. James takes readers through the fabulous anxiety of protagonist Billy Bloom in a novel that minces the earnestness of an after school special with the guilty pleasure scripts of America’s Next Top Model (actually, come to think about it, James has appeared as a guest on a few episodes). The set up is perfect; a rich white uptight Dwight D Eisenhower Academy suddenly confronted by Billy Bloom, a drag queen to say the least. Actually, Billy calls himself a Twinkle Queen.

"Sometimes I make believe that I’m married to Alex Trebek and the two of us hold court on the Jeopardy! Set. We are to the twenty-first century what Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller were to the twentieth."

Billy is a dreamy precious seventeen-year-old boy who watches a lot of Gilmore Girls. "I’m a sultry redhead with sissy-soft features and a voice like a mink foghorn, I don’t know what that could mean either." Hilarious as his self-perception is his sense of fashion oblivion. Billy goes over his wardrobe plans with the reader. "Fab, right? What’s straighter than a pirate? Ruffled lace shirt, unbuttoned down to THERE. High-waisted blue pants, practically sprayed on." You just can’t help but feel for Billy, you can’t help but want to see him get through the semester unspoiled, but you just know he’s going to get his ass kicked.

The novel is addictive as candy in a dark movie theatre, full of energy and empty calories, crazy melodrama that gnaws on anxiety and social pretentiousness and throws them up on purpose just to look fit. The marvellous barbed and campy dialogue swells around Billy finding salvation in the school’s golden boy Flip Kelly. An irresistible guilty pleasure if you dare to show your inner-bimbo out on the patio this season, let this be your glowing cocktail.

*

"My father died in New Orleans, standing on a balcony above Bourbon Street with his hands full of beads. It was two months after Mardi Gras had finished, but New Orleans will help you pretend all summer long." 

So begins "XXX" one of a dozen stories in Joey Comeau’s most recent fiction collection It’s Too Late To Say I’m Sorry. Comeau has a way of putting together quirky juxtapositions; retelling experiences and fusing in moments of calm reflexivity or hyperbolic prank dialogue.

Frustrated, urban and visceral, Comeau’s is birthing a literary vermin, a controlled fiction spree that creates pathos, even in the most simplest scenes.

"You weren’t moving." Clara said.

"I have to be moving all the friggin’ time?" Nan said. She shook her head and pointed at Clara.

"It’s bad enough that you people wake me up every day to shove gerbil shavings down my throat. Now I’m not allowed to sit down for a break? I can’t listen to my music in peace? Goddammit."

The stories in this collection teeter from evil wit to pedestrian philosophy; bringing us to wonder how it is possible at all to not on occasion, stop in the middle of a commute and begin behaving very badly, to question everything, feel nothing, then feel everything. Sometimes Comeau’s writing is so concentrating, the results are haunting and involved. 

In "One Foot Underwater" the dark statistic that is infant drowning is reinvented through well-placed reveals and asides, offering a powerful retelling of a fateful afternoon in a backyard pond. "But the water began to roll in the middle of the pond. It rolled gently on the surface, circles moving away from a shape that was rising from the water, Simon’s pale face, and then his shoulders. He came closer and closer to shore, though it didn’t look like he was swimming. He simply moved through the water." 

With another release forthcoming within the year (ECW, 2009) Comeau is someone to watch, so track down one of his existing books now from Vancouver’s Loose Teeth Press.

*

Catching up with Richard Nash of Soft Skull Press is a memorable experience to say the least. In addition to a few free books, Nash is so full of facts and statistics and enthusiasm for the writers he publishes, their influences, personal histories, and strange pet projects, you wonder why he doesn’t do monthly salon talks or pay-per-view podcasts. 

Soft Skull now operates out of two rooms in the Counterpoint offices near Chelsea in New York, and has a bevy of interns from the local colleges who help churn out the presses innovative titles. We talked about book distribution, some Canadian writers he’s been enjoying, some graphic novels coming out in the fall, and the ongoing quest all small presses face for getting books reviewed.

Losing a part of himself with every household move, Caley finds himself caught up in another family upheaval in Jonathon Scott Fuqua’s Gone and back Again. Fuqua’s ability to stay true in the adolescent voice of Caley while providing depth for the reader is admirable. In describing an adult named Stan, one of many adults who orbit the ever-changing line-up of care-givers in the family, Fuqua writes, "Stan, in case you want to know, was tall with a body like an egg over two legs."

Fuqua’s equally skilled at creating tension by simple dialogue. Never over-doing it on the overdone child-adult themes, his efforts are apparent, the subtleness comes across as useful cogs.

"I said, "Do I really have to be a student ‘til I’m sixteen?"

"That’s right. So make the best of it."

I looked at his baldness and thought he couldn’t teach me anything.

He said, "You know, Caley, life can be difficult."

The world of small press poetry still relies on quotidian safe collections to pad funding blocks and meet other strict criteria for all intents and purposes. Hundreds of books are manufactured and hyped, promoted and boxed up for retail purgatory. Thankfully for every quotidian canoe paddle through butter collection, there are the maladjusted books that can accrue its own emotionally deformed audience.

*

Kissing Dead Girls by Daphne Gottlieb is exquisite, globally-sourced, beyond the realm of the "everyday", which for some reason, in addition to the word "weave" has become routine review words for poetry criticism in recent times. It’s quickly become my favourite poetry release of 2008, though I feel like a real creep reading it in public because of the title, which of course, is way creepier when I write about that in a review than simply well, not mentioning it.

Gottlieb teaches at the New College of California and is the editor of Homewrecker: An Adultery Reader and the forthcoming Fucking Daphne, as well as the author of Final Girl, Why Things Burn, and Pelt. At times Gottlieb is operating without a poetry manuscript manual, corrosively entering and occupying the literary spaces of other genres including drama, the novel / fiction and the essay. Her found poetry, crafted from special interest web curiosity, culls and gels in a sort of erasure style, using italics to different sources that include musings and mashings of existing work that compliments and challenges original form. 

Kissing Dead Girls is quite simply superbly crafted, chameleonic. Though it is quickly dressed and out the door before you remember their name, you can’t write it off as a pretty poetry fuck-a-thon.

With post-gender realism and none of the sentimental drivel driving points home no one cares about, the voice explodes and shatters with human special effects. Open it up anywhere and you’ll find a cerebral interrogation, hell bent on expressing all of life’s pitiful pitfalls. It’s a collection suffused with passion, aggression and linguistic finality: Gottlieb’s prowess is not excessive but a tool to reveal poem characters caught in the tantalizing web of a sexual dysfunction. In the throes of poetry, this work would be worth seeing performed live.

Using dialogue, confessions, interviews, erotica, Gottlieb’s sexual manifesto is intelligent, lyrical and giving, reminiscent of The Happy Birthday of Death, or Pussy King of the Pirates, Kissing Dead Girls moves in and out of categorical restraints, voice and form, and is entirely worth investigating. Not a safe release, not throwaway smut, but essential smut, reclassified as purging catharsis, as found in ‘The Real Deal’ where Gottlieb revisits Sylvia Plath’s "Daddy" a monster rendition of agony, shame and reality:

"She is ready to be a good little girl, the best girl, she wants to be Daddy’s best girl. She doesn’t make it to work for two days. Her jaw is sore. She can’t sit down because her ass is welted and her cunt is raw and Daddy leaves a message on her phone. It’s Father’s Day. She didn’t call him."

‘Glass Onion’, is a calm musing on the disposable culture of sex. Gottlieb’s poetry itself enters the difficult terrain of recreating physical empathy and has obviously toiled hard for a meaningful work that cannot be classified as everyday, the official word of 2007 poetry criticism worldwide. The perfect book for the confused pedestrian who thinks in text speak and grunts, with too much "everyday" weaving in and out of their truly miserable lives.

NGM is criticalcrushes.blogspot.com