AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW最新文献

Reviewed by:

• Porgy & Bess by Miles Davis by George Gershwin by Dubose Heyward by Jeffrey DeShell
• Jane Rosenberg LaForge (bio)

Deeply embedded in the American consciousness are at least two stories that allegedly capture the essence of Black life in the twentieth, and now the twenty-first, century. One is not set down in letters, or even sung, like the other; but it is one that has played out with alarming frequency on the impromptu theaters of America's streets, parks, and college campuses. It has no single name, although locations, such as Ferguson, Missouri; and the names of the protagonists, such as George Floyd and Sandra Bland, come to stand for these situations. The other is Porgy & Bess, the George and Ira Gershwin opera of Black poverty, violence, drug use, and murder. Revolutionary in its time—1935—for its all-Black, classically trained cast, Porgy & Bess has been revived and revised at least as many times as white police officers have killed unarmed Black people. The roles in Porgy & Bess may be recast, its sets redesigned, and its direction and choreography revamped, just as the circumstances of a police killing may differ as scenarios are reshuffled. But the outcome in both instances is always, always the same. [End Page 71]

In Porgy & Bess by Miles Davis by George Gershwin by Dubose Heyward, a Black graduate student is killed by a white campus cop after a confrontation in the hall of a college dorm. The facts are never in doubt. But the struggle over the narrative—who's responsible, who's been victimized or warrants vilification, and what kind of punishment should punctuate the production—is at the heart of the conflict. Francesca Fruscella, the fictional Denver detective whom Jeffrey DeShell has called upon to solve mysteries in two previous novels, is brought onto the University of Colorado campus, in Boulder, as an independent investigator. "You need to watch your language," she is told by a supervisor when she complains about the assignment. But the language she uses, to say nothing of the metaphors she will retreat into, or the "virulent corporate weasel speak" and other tongues she will encounter, are the real culprits, in a crime that is committed not during but after the murder.

DeShell has rendered his detective's odyssey without punctuation, which serves to make readers complicit with the reductive, racist cover-up that seemingly objective language will eventually provide. By withholding commas, quotations, semicolons, hyphens, and period

Reviewed by:

• Water Memory: A Novel by Tom Strelich
• Edward M. Bury (bio)

Fiction structured around a society grappling with some kind of dystopian challenge—a climate catastrophe, an economic meltdown, the breakdown of democracy, a renegade virus, propaganda overload, individual freedom quashed or curtailed—generally contains chilling scenes, strikingly nefarious characters, and plot development based on day-to-day survival and shrouded in impending doom and calamity. Writers concoct these bizarre tales with the intention of forecasting what awaits mankind should society continue with war, oppression, widespread disruption to the environment, and other large-scale affronts to the common good and a normal way of life.

The world described in Water Memory touches upon some of the maladies noted above, yet without the devastating fallout or breakdown of society. The dystopian condition presented can be characterized as one where the landscape of the United States (and apparently the rest of the world) is thrown off course—somewhat slightly but definitively—following a global seismic shift that reverses the earth's magnetic poles, causing everyone to grapple with memory loss of some sort. Remarkably, despite this cataclysmic event, life as we know it generally continues: businesses and farms operate somewhat as normal, local and national governments function, retail commerce continues, a lesbian couple strengthens their bond, and an empowered, larger-than-life evangelical preacher maintains a commanding presence over his flock on a sprawling campus in central California.

Furthermore, given the memory upheaval taking place, progress from a technological perspective abounds and becomes a part of everyday life. Artificial intelligence is incorporated to perform basic chores needed to maintain a well-groomed lawn and even fertilize and cultivate large vegetable fields, while those planning to engage legal counsel "could buy a LawyerBot app to [End Page 75] automatically analyze case law, conjure damages, counter sue, and appeal ad infinitum." And, the characters introduced within this seemingly strange new world are mostly presented as everyday men and women and have nothing in common with the ghouls, zombies, and decidedly frightening creatures that populate and drive the action in most well-known post-apocalyptic tales.

Author Tom Strelich sets his story during some year in the early twenty-first century, as there are passing references to Walmart, Trader Joe's, TikTok, and even Donald Trump and Jeff Bezos; yet the novel presents a some

Reviewed by:

• Marvel (the Word) by Ellen Lytle, and: Day True by Roberta Gould
• Hilary Sideris (bio)

The past interacts a great deal with the present in Ellen Lytle's poetry collection marvel (the word). A New York City poet now living in the Hudson Valley, Lytle writes in fractured lines that eschew transitions. In lowercase and often in the present tense, she narrates quotidian activities such as cleaning and making a salad. These activities might also include a visit to the cardiologist, [End Page 97] where she observes her heart on a screen. Even as her mitral valve leaks "octopus bluish ink, backwards into her chamber," Lytle considers "mayonnaise or // hummus / chop or cut onion, celery / or spinach," paying attention to serious medical issues and dinner alike. Her flat affect provides a counterpoint to the tragedies that unfold—Trump's election, the death of a dear dog—and allows her to sidestep sentimentality and record the lived moment.

Lytle's matter-of-factness permeates such poems as "hurry them all to sea," which begins "usually after he muff dives my crotch / i laugh at everything," and "everyone needs something new in september," in which the poet packs up clothes, which is "almost like packing away people," and turns on a lamp, "guessing her return / will already be dark." Noticing a ripening squash on the kitchen shelf, she reflects that she "could have loved him / could have roasted that squash for him." Regret, that most useless of human emotions, crosses her mind, but not for long.

Sometimes Lytle opens the door to the past, and even invites it in. Struck by the cleanliness of her new apartment in the poem "death may be a visiting dove outside our window," she mourns goode, her deceased Welsh Corgi, remembering his "first relaxed sleep soiling" and his subsequent messes, "his few spots scrubbed up / as if they never were, all his toys, except punchy / donated." His memory lives on without his stroller, blanket, and "plump bed," despite his owner's attempt to render him "erased from the life scape" because, as Lytle acknowledges, "November's in charge."

The past also haunts the poem "caught between trees in a marsden hartley painting," which begins with delight in the moment when "celery stalks fit perfectly / into the cold water pitcher, sitting / joyously on the fridge shelf" and then recalls "stumbling with goode / through thickets of trees / as if caught inside a painting where it's impossible to foil cold," before del

Reviewed by:

• Glitch Poetics by Nathan Allen Jones
• Will Luers (bio)

In Glitch Poetics, Nathan Allen Jones extends the already extended meaning of the term "glitch," at once a technical error and a ubiquitous expressive art technique that in many ways has come to define a digital aesthetic. Jones presents glitch as a contemporary literary strategy that seeks to model and critique what it is like to live inside a global 24/7 technical infrastructure. The term was first used in 1962 by astronaut John Glenn in reference to an electrical surge on a space expedition and has since come to mean the result or outcome of a breakdown in any technical system. Glitch as a digital art aesthetic is an appreciation and celebration of such outcomes, when a computer's deterministic system gives way to something spontaneous, beautiful, and outside human intention. Glitch art's startling bursts of colored pixel blocks, often accompanied by glitched sound in commercials and popular movies, have become signifiers for our technical future—whether it is utopian or dystopian. But Jones is not interested in telling a history of expressive glitch. Such a task would be too complex to cover. When did intentional error in art or literature begin? In the eighteenth century, with Sterne's artful inability to tell a proper story? In the nineteenth, with Mallarmé tossing words around the poetic page? In the early twentieth, with Picasso's broken perspective? From 1970s experimental filmmakers scratching and burning film strips to 1980s avant-garde video artists bending and interrupting video signals, each new machine for artistic expression seems eventually to find cultural value in that machine's dysfunction. The frustrating glitchiness of the early web—plug-ins not working, pages failing to load, code interrupting flows of text [End Page 134] and image—was embraced by net artists such as the collective JODI and Olia Lialina. Jones does touch on these and many of the important visual glitch artists—Nick Briz, Rosa Menkman, Jon Satrom—but only to provide a context for exploring the mostly untold history of glitch in literary expression.

While visual and sound glitch artists seek out "wrongness" by manipulating code or disrupting hardware or software functionality, the "wrongness" in language arts has a different creative methodology. Literary glitch aims for what Jones calls "media realism." The performance artists, poets, and novelists explored in Glitch Poetics do sometimes play with devices, signals, and data, but with an intention to expose human/machine systems