ONLINE FEATURE : “A TASTE OF GIN: ISSUE FOUR”

A TASTE OF GIN: issue four

curated by Marie Conlan, Bombay Gin’s Web Co-Editor, Poetry Co-Editor, 2015

Featuring work by: Sally Lawton, Eva Carlini, Samy Sabh, and Spencer Hendrixson

A Taste of Gin Online Editorial Feature

Each month (or so) Bombay Gin Literary Journal presents an online feature by one of our editorial board members. We call this: “A Taste of Gin.” These tastes give us, as editors, the opportunity to share our individual artistic and aesthetic visions. We split our Bombay Gin third-mind temporarily in order to show you the nuances, quirks, and concerns we, as an editorial board, comprise. We hope you enjoy these future tastings.

Online Feature: Book Review – Then Go On

(Soma)tic and Micro Reviews

Mary Burger

Litmus Press

ISBN-10: 1933959142

ISBN-13: 978-1933959146

93 Pages

http://www.litmuspress.org/then-go-on/

Micro Review of Mary Burger’s Then Go On

The avant-garde style of Mary Burger’s writing arrives as a contemplation of the space between sending and receiving. The prose poems, or essay-like poetic explorations demonstrate a close attention to reality. The voice that guides the text is one of ebb and flow towards the cultural, philosophical, and social realities of modernity. In the poem “Orbital,” “A certain comfort with motion, at any scale, lets you shift between here, in this kitchen, and here, in this coastal weather pattern, and here, in this planetary orbital path, and here, in this unfurling galaxy.” The poem unfolds upon itself in moments like these, as if to illustrate that multiplicity is indicative of the human condition. To exist one must occupy numerous places all within the confines of the present moment. Writing towards the continuous epiphany of what it means to be fully alive, “The Current” shows Burger writing of that liveliness as “And our existence here due to the act that there are those willing to work for the only-imaginable.” The implication is that the dreamy state of one human being’s imagination leads to a sense of progress for society. Of the hope for humanity, the prose poem continues with “This paradigm shifts so that words are as nimble as neurotransmitters. Like a small chemical messenger, a word can do anything you can think of. A word can move muscles. A word can hold eyes.” Just like speech, the poetic prose located on the space of white pages bound in book form help to awaken the reader. Returning to that sense of ebb and flow, the reader is asked to think towards “A risk. To risk a little every day. To make sure you want it still. Invite opponents to attack. Risk gravity, velocity, impact, mass. Some can’t live without challenge. Some can’t ask.” As if to pull on the glorious idea of what it means to be fully able to create a once wild and precious life, the intention seems to be one of igniting a passion for luminous elements: speech, movement, art, nature, and even the seemingly ordinary right to dream.

Mary Burger is a writer, editor, and publisher. Her books include the following: Sonny (Leon Works, 2005), The Boy Who Could Fly (Second Story Books, 2002), Thin Straw That I Suck Life Through (Melodeon, 2000), and Then Go On (Litmus Press, 2012) amongst others. She is co-editor of the anthology Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative, and of Narrativity. She also edits Second Story Books.  She lives in Oakland, California. Her work may be found at http://www.maryburger.com

Reviewer: Melissa Barrett-Traister is one of  Bombay Gin’s Audio Archive Editors. She is a second year MFA candidate at Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics.

Online Feature: Book Reviews

(Soma)tic and Micro Reviews

Farid Matuk

Letter Machine Editions

ISBN-10: 0981522750

ISBN-13: 978-0981522753

160 pages

www.lettermachine.org/thisisa.html

 

 

 

 

Micro Review of Farid Matuk’s This Isa Nice Neighborhood

windows smeared in our own dust

if you want to come in here

light

you’ll have to go through us

from the section: Tallying Song

                                                                        – Farid Matuk

Farid Matuk explores and displays a world and its territories occupied by us – the immigrants, consumers, politicians, beggars, thieves  – the people.

“This is the age of information” he states, and is able to portray this world through numerous allusions of modern day figures, corporations, wars, disasters, literature and anything you can think of. Yet all these allusions are cast into the light of the absurd, the ridiculous sarcasm of the world and her ‘citizens’.

Through odd juxtapositions, like Huck tearing up his letter, refusing to believe… “the niggerfication of Jim” in the midst of Hurricane Katrina, and over the top language, “I only care that you love…testicles like oyster onions floating down the river,” Matuk humorously inhabits serious moments of satire and social commentary.

He embraces the impractical love/hate for celebrities and does not hesitate to use names,  “say it with me – Thank God for Dolly Parton” and a poem titled, But Richard, Will You Show Me an Ethic of Freedom, that begins “Richard Pryor is a criminal / and comes from criminal people.”

The speaker is not merely spilling commentary but often becomes the people portrayed, “I am Moroccan today… the shoes / I will buy will raise me, incline me / as the whole of Europe is inclined…” He distinguishes nations and peoples, “look at our pairs of feet / in the basin, Joe / your European toe / my American slope” while simultaneously acknowledging unity in that we are all people and preposterous, “We all joined the astronaut corps and are waiting in line for the moon.” At once we are disjointed and unified.

(Soma)tic Review of Ferid Matuk’s This Isa Nice Neighborhood

“…there / is no world there is / a world if

you stand at all / you stand against it”

 From the section: Dear Lengthening Day

– Farid Matuk

Prepare yourself for a lengthy travel: a journey full of dust and water and mirrors that don’t quite reflect, or hazy windows that refuse sunlight. Prepare to roam the earth.

First: find a ramp exit you can fly down like a dune that leads into a field or expanse, a far-flung stillness to hurl questions at. While crossing this expanse in search of water, breathe in the field, piss outside to affirm life, write something about spring coming through.

Stumbling upon the banks of a river, plant hydrangeas. Train a monkey to light matches then fling them into the moments, like disturbing little black pools of stagnant water – little sparks of the heart. Line squirrels in trees between the crosshairs of your finger and thumb then fire fire! Consider: “we learn to look at anything and recognize death.” Write something else about spring coming through. “Scrape wood to expose it to the air.”

Continue on in search of tall structures and people. Before you approach, roll around in dust, and then walk into the city. Lie about the things in your pockets. Play with people’s fears of thievery. “Beneath that: a sort of friendship. Beneath that: thievery.” Attempt to piss between dumpsters without being caught.

Come home. Wash your mouth out with soap and water. Read poetry to your dog then kiss her head and smell the spit over hair – “feel her jowl bags work over your hand like a jellyfish.” Be sure to start a pile of your toenail clippings on the coffee table; listen to the whispers of your naked toes. Paint your mother’s chest red to remind you of the red-breasted birds from another country, the places you’ve been. Consider you’ve kissed at least once in your dreams.

Imagine leaving once again. Traveling with your girlfriend. Fucking in the train-car bathroom – a chant of oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck

Realize that someday people will prepare a 9/11 reenactment.

Write something about spring coming through.

Reviewer: Shawn McDaniel is a first year MFA student in the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University and one of Bombay Gin‘s Audio Archive Editors.

ONLINE FEATURE: BOOK REVIEWS

Online Feature: (Soma)tic and Micro Reviews

Michelle Taransky

Omnidawn Publishing, 2013

ISBN-10: 1890650811

ISBN-13: 978-1890650810

96 pages

http://www.omnidawn.com/products-page/poetry/sorry-was-in-the-woods-michelle-taransky/

Micro Review of Michelle Taransky’s Sorry Was In The Woods

In Michelle Taransky’s book, Sorry Was In The Woods, the audience is taken into the woods with her, where she allows the nature of the trees to speak a new language, one that questions those which destroy it.

The trees in the book breathe their natural beauty, and not the decisions of man to destroy them for security and home.  The bodgers, woodcutters, and cabinet makers are made less in the work, and one can get a sense of new form/realization when entering the woods with Taransky.  She lets the woods speak to her through this piece, “Sorry in the woods where I am looking for a language with a word that means we must see it all differently: the accounting for their symptoms when we are calling it a day using the wage to mark our place as the place that makes crimes build and own shelter out of arguments facing past,” here Taransky cleverly reminds us how we take advantage of the woods that have become our resource for security comfort and home; insisting we have stolen from them. Taransky is realistic in the work using her own memory of household and family, as well as the contextualized historical accounts of bodgers and woodcutters, and how this process by man destroys a natural order in nature for the sake of our comforts.  She then mixes in these actual histories and accounts with her travels into the woods as they whisper their allegory to her, making for new doubled edged meanings in this experimental work.  What Taransky does best in her book is capture the woods in deep contemplation between man’s nature and the nature of the woods without man. In one poem, “A Thought The Same As The Bough,” she writes,

It’s the piece of the tree growing symbolic, if you let them
Expect woodpeckers to be plastic and panicking from
Sorry, the carpenter is not a painter of the forest.

Through the book, Taransky seems fed up with the world destroying the wood, at times saying, “Sorry, I’ve went to the woods,” as though she is done listening to the plans made out by man, and at other times in the woods states she can hear the wood moaning.

(Soma)tic Review of Michelle Taransky’s Sorry Was in the Woods

The Woods Owe You Nothing

In the Seven Woods

We have a machine

We cannot explain

Why watching the event

We making all facts be one fact

To watch parents

Watch their parents

Mount a rebellion

          

The Surburban Shit House of Smog and Car Pollution smiled across the streets with its invisible, saying it wasn’t as noticeable to the 21^st  romantic children of the big building laughter, industrialized in the faces of the glint eyed innocence leaving, who jamming their top rap music of the day laughed in the Sedan over Big Spinners, Diamond ICY Watches, and other false monument & escapism along the way to a standardized idea.  I

simply,

had wooden teeth put in, then grinned at you.

This was  an ode to a book in the woods by Michelle Taransky.   An experiment of leaving what we were taught behind and listening to the giving resourcefulness of the woods and Taransky’s thoughts within.

It’s a hell of a forest, the true insides, what one can hear that isn’t industrialized and an attachment of pure nature flourished in front of your eyes.

“You, can’t pry my wooden smile,” I said, “not in this shit hole.”  The City And Things were made out for these new age children, the future who the city controlled in material, and at this early age would be dragged along the strip by their noses into a state of rotten jaded lies .  It shimmers falsely                           across the dying sky.  And so, I’m not apologizing for going to the woods again, just watching this from the hideaway, through the canopy in the trees.

A job that left them with a nice picket fence was all they need.  The one surrounding a small home of orders unordered, where they the inhabitants would soon feel too controlled and want a vacation, or cut themselves, reinvent, or go to drunk, sex, loathing, prescript…

The woods talk a bigger game than you do in the city.  “Want to go out for lunch?”  No.  I was in the woods, a real recluse on whiskey listening to the contemplation of Michelle Taransky , who said            she saw something more natural,  and I felt her when she made it out in paper, and the piece so moved by the whispering of the branch bark and leaves falling their own lessons through it, it can’t make the proper apologies for the nature of this bustling traffic and your ugly faces pinched.  Why is that you want to paint the cabinets white?  After hiding in them for three days straight, only to come out and pour a coffee that will make you nervous about Bill in the Office and Who stretches you from limb to limb in the affair of your own human emotions in the social hierarchy you’re not part of?  Fuck this, I’ll be in the woods, had have you been, there, the woods, would have told you the word on : Just Where We Fucked Up and What we are made of.  I guess I’m a little angry, naturally, and going to the woods.  You check a mirror.

Sorry, Michelle, they can’t hear the woods from here, maybe they should go In and take your book with them?

Michelle Taransky lives in Philadelphia where she works at Kelly Writers House, is Review Editor for Jacket2, and teaches writing at University of Philadelphia and Temple University.  She is co-coordinator of “Whenever We Feel Like It” a reading series and has published other books, Barn Burned, Then (Omnidawn, 2009) and is featured in the Anthology: The City Visible:  Chicago Poetry For The New Century (Cracked Slab Books, 2007).  Take her work into the woods and experience new ways of their words, symbol, truth, and meaning.

Reviewer: Brandon Petty is a southern writer and journalist. He is first year MFA student in the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University and Bombay Gin‘s Book Reviews Assistant Editor.