No matter how many classes I take, no matter how many literary journals I read, poetry still makes me nervous. The distinction between brilliant and appalling sometimes seems to be made based on how much sleep you got the night before, and it’s just so scary to look at that line and realize that everyone else around you picked the opposite side.

It needn’t be that difficult, right?

All I ask of poetry is that it sends me off with strings of words that run themselves through my thoughts with the tenacity of a Top 40 hit.  I want to hear and see with the weird intensity that comes after leaving a movie theater.  I want to snuggle into images as I do my favorite memories.  This might be a childish way to read poetry, but so be it.  Because under those guidelines, Nicole Walker’s debut collection, This Noisy Egg, does all the right things.

Walker’s thirty-nine poems (nineteen of which have been previously published) meditate on conception of all kinds – birth, rebirth, beliefs. So much in these poems feels lost or unfulfilled for the many speakers though there are lighter moments as well.  “A Number of Things Are Scarily Lacking” – a list not unlike a Whitman poem or a Cole Porter song – counts on both the humorous (“9. A hotdog. No condiments.” “18. Telling your boyfriend that he looks like Alan Alda.”) as well as the crushing (“6. Your loud voice, no whispers, only walls acoustic.” “30. Turning. 30. No able-bodied Superman to spin the world backward—make up for lost time.”).

The physicality of being often emerges through the emotionality. “She doubled in size & split into you, your mother’s personal geometry. / One noisy seed caused a sea of regret & repainted walls,” says the narrator of “Bivalves.” And in “The Coroner Senses a Blackbird” – “My body told a story my mouth could / not hide.”

As might be expected, the collection wavers a bit in the middle. “What Is Wanted from the Suicides” is probably the weakest piece, not really adding anything to the thick stack of suicide poetry already in existence. I wouldn’t not recommend the book as a result of it, though. Especially by the time we get to my favorite lines in the collection, which are in the middle of “Where P is P & not P”: “You will / find the compass / which will / tell you what lines you must read.”  (Note: sometimes you stumble across exactly what you need to hear.)

While most of the poems fall into a standard page-or-so length, the penultimate poem, “The Unlikely Origin of the Species,” stretches for almost twelve full pages.  It is here where the changing rules of childhood parallel the just as random rules for which animals become pets while others are left to the wild.  It’s actually the narrator of “Canister and Turkey Vulture” that explains the themes most aptly: “everything that stands between the oh so obvious / and the almost can’t imagine.” (Almost can’t imagine – Darwin and St. Francis of Assisi in a tryst.)

The broken sections of the poem are marked with Greek symbols and headline-esque words. To that end, Walker’s note to the poem adds much to “Unlikely” as well as the collection as a whole: “But doesn’t it nearly make you cry when you realize the alphabet doesn’t have to begin with the letter A?”

Amy Whipple is an MFA candidate in nonfiction at the University of Pittsburgh. Readers can also find her at <http://www.amywhipple.com/>.

It’s been a busy ten years since Anthony Bourdain first let readers into the dark corners of his kitchen and his mind with the mega-bestseller Kitchen Confidential:  Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly.  The sometimes ornery chef has gone on to publish a hefty handful of books and articles while moving from country to country with his Emmy Award-winning show No Reservations.

Now retired from the restaurant kitchen, Bourdain proves that he has indeed learned a lot in his 28 years behind the stove. Like him or hate him, Bourdain does not pull punches.  He speaks with clarity about chefdom in his Confidential sequel, Medium Raw, revealing “the searing heat, the mad pace, the never-ending stress and melodrama, the low pay, probable lack of benefits, inequity and futility, the cuts and burns and damage to body and brain—the lack of anything resembling normal hours or a normal personal life.”

The book opens with a scene a la film noir in which a group of heavy-hitter chefs gather in secret to partake in illegal cuisine.  The chapters that follow touch on Bourdain’s reckless days on St. Barts, the conundrum of selling out, and the chef-author’s updated feelings on fellow gastronomic celebrities. “Rachael Ray sent me a fruit basket.  So I stopped saying mean things about her.  It’s that easy with me now,” a sanguine Bourdain admits.

Once a rogue and a provocateur, the Bourdain of Medium Raw is a sage authority.  “I am frequently asked by aspiring chefs, dreamers young and old, attracted by the lure of slowly melting shallots and caramelizing pork belly, or delusions of Food Network stardom, if they should go to culinary school,” says Bourdain.  “I usually give a long, thoughtful, and qualified answer.  But the short answer is ‘no’.”

After his own graduation from the Culinary Institute of America in his early 20s, Bourdain published two “unsuccessful novels” and kept his day job, which spanned an impressive number of Manhattan kitchens.  But the facts of Bourdain’s life are different now; he is older, he is a father, he is no longer a chef, and he deems himself happily uncool.  He has traded the fast-paced, sweaty, profanity-ridden days in the kitchen for the time and the pleasure to dream up new ways to vilify Ronald McDonald for his daughter’s benefit.  The bombastic and angry tone has mellowed considerably.

Medium Raw’s camera pans out slowly on the present, the scene spliced together with vivid shots of bygone years.  Bourdain manages to avoid sentimentality in favor of a studious take on today’s food culture, where the Food Network thrives yet Gourmet magazine is out of business.  Bourdain intelligently and humorously explores the effects of the economic crisis on the restaurant business, the ups and downs of Top Chef, a day in the life at New York’s Le Bernardin, the benefits of dozen-course tasting menus versus lure hamburgers, and his latest heroes and villains.

All of the skills that served Bourdain well as a chef—“creativity, technical skill, leadership abilities, flexibility, grace under pressure, sense of humor, and sheer strength and endurance”—have translated into his writing.  In one of the best and most candid moments of the book, he allows readers to peer in on his coveted “food porn,” describing himself devouring a pain raisin at a small, Parisian boulangerie:  “The reaction is violent.  It hurts.  Butter floods your head and you think for a second you’re going to black out.”

The tamed, more circumspect Bourdain of Medium Raw remains detail-oriented, hilarious, and sharp as ever despite the constant references to his age.  As impressive as his hyper-awareness of foodies and the food industry is his generosity in sharing an honest view of a world that blends food and travel with an intimacy that so few people ever experience first-hand.

Erin Lewenauer, a poet and freelance writer from Milwaukee, is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Pittsburgh. She is a graduate of Vassar College and has lived in Paris, Boulder, and New York City.

“Inherited Fears and Real Dangers: Being Visible as a Woman Writer”

All I needed was a decent copy of Joan Didion’s “Why I Write.” I found several online, all excerpts, and when I combed the digital archives made available to me through the university where I teach, I found The New York Times Magazine backlog stopped just short of the issue in which it first appeared (December 5, 1976).

I wanted to use “Why I Write” as a companion piece to “On Keeping a Notebook.” My summer composition course began in less than two weeks, and I wanted to teach these two pieces. I wanted to start a conversation about freedom, about writing as a means to express perspective, memory, and, in the case of “Why I Write,” as a vehicle for uncovering thoughts and ideas.

I finally stumbled across the essay in an anthology called The Writer and Her Work: Seventeen Essays by Twentieth-century American Writers. I ordered it, and it arrived several days later. I didn’t think about it again for a couple of weeks until I was tired: of reading student papers; of staring at blank screens, waiting for my own words to appear; of trying to be wife and mother a hundred miles from my home, my heart; of questioning myself, wondering what the hell it was that made me think that, at middle age, I should be, in my mother’s terms, gallivanting, shrugging my responsibilities in favor of pursuing what I want, what I’m driven to do, not what’s good for everyone else. Woman, take up thy cross.

I picked up Writer and Her Work and began reading. Janet Sternburg collected these seventeen essays (nineteen, actually, as the second issue includes an essay-length preface by Julia Alvarez and a second introduction-in-miniature by Sternburg) because, she says, “we have very little by women that intentionally and directly addresses the subject of their own art.” I don’t know if, in the intervening thirty years since its initial publication, ten years since its reissue, that statement still holds true—we women writers today seem much less reluctant to commit our process to the page—but the value of these women writing of their craft and their writing lives in the decades that feminists’ heralded the cracking and crashing of glass ceilings everywhere, it’s comforting for this woman writer to know my own insecurities, my fears, my occasional sense of isolation is not a regression or a betrayal of my sisters who’ve come before me.

Sternburg set criteria for this essay collection: First, they must be written by American writers (her rationale: “to ‘go abroad’ would scatter the impact of our own experience.”). Second, they must represent “many different kinds of writers, especially those who have worked in more than one literary form.” Third, the backgrounds of these women must be diverse, while at the same time “suggest what women writers have in common.”

Sternburg solicited and received material from Mary Gordon, Nancy Milford, Margaret Walker, Susan Griffin, Ingrid Bengis, Toni Dade Bambara, Erica Jong, Maxine Hong Kingston, Janet Burroway, Muriel Rukeyser, and Gail Godwin. Among them are novelists, screenwriters, playwrights, essayists, literary critics, memoirists, feminist and Womanist critics, documentarians, and authors of children’s books.

They are recipients of many awards, including the Pulitzer, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Emmy and many others.

Julia Alvarez, in her preface to the updated edition, calls the book, “a liberating text for so many women writers who, like me, felt isolated and afraid.” Isolated and afraid? Check. I had to keep reading.

Anne Tyler addresses the Woman-Having-It-All Syndrome in her essay, a condition that began developing among independent-minded women sometime in the mid-sixties, morphed several times over the intervening decades, has been disputed, disproved, redefined, and, lately, appropriated in the most twisted sort of way by certain far-right conservatives [halting now my derisive tangent]. Tyler’s recounts the many intrusions into the writing life and brings a reader like me, one who “always did count on having a husband and children” back down to earth. She offers hope, says, “I’m surprised to find myself a writer but have fitted it in fairly well, I think.”

Not what you’re looking for? Then turn to Alice Walker, who begins her essay by answering the question about women artists and motherhood—you know, that one that implies we can be only one or the other, so what’s it going to be? She says: “Yes….[women artists] should have children—assuming this is of interest to them—but only one….Because with one you can move….With more than one you’re a sitting duck.” (Is that what I am, as a mother of four? A sitting duck? Hmm.) This is not to say that Walker maintains for nearly twenty pages a discussion limited to this one narrow (narrow?) consideration. No, she expands, blossoms, even, from womanhood to black womanhood, to criticism and representation (nonrepresentation?) of black women artists in feminist thought. She covers a lot of ground, ending, just prior to her closing poem, with the words: “We are together, my child and I. Mother and child, yes, but sisters really, against whatever denies us all that we are.” It’s worth the read to discover on one’s own what comes between.

Michele Murray’s[1] essay, entitled “Creating Oneself from Scratch,” resonated most strongly with me. It is a posthumous creation, comprised of selections from her diaries and covers a twenty-year period where she contemplates writing, motherhood, the agonies of motherhood in relation to her writing, and, the motivating force—cancer—that drove her on, in spite of the challenges of raising four children, to produce four books, two children’s books, an anthology of women’s literature (her bio mentions it being one of the first of its kind), and a book of poetry prior to her death. She yearned to live long enough to see the publication of the last, The Great Mother, her poetry collection. She died seven months too soon. It makes me wonder at we women artists, especially those of us for whom prominent identifying labels often shift, one day more mother than writer, another more writer than any incidental markers of DNA. What would we do, what would we produce, knowing our time is limited? How would we shift our time, how would we choose our priorities, what would we leave for our daughters, our sisters, what words of wisdom or folly would we commit to the page, not leave to chance and stardust?

My recommendation? If you’re a writer, pick up this book. If you’re a woman writer, pick it up and don’t put it down. Hold it close to you. Create.

Jody Lucas Kulakowski is current MFA candidate in Creative Nonfiction at the University of Pittsburgh. She writes about pain and spirituality, motherhood and rural womanhood, growing and dying. She lives between Pittsburgh and her home in Punxsutawney, where she much prefers peacocks to groundhogs.

A quarter of the way into Jonathan Lethem’s novel, narrator Chase Insteadman takes a break from the action to spend a short chapter describing the view from his window of a flock of birds in a church spire.  He’s described it already, but he tells the reader he wants to take make sure to get it right.  Then he completely fails to do so.   His description of language as the very thing that makes accurate description impossible is emblematic of the book.  “I employ it the way a dog drives a car,” he says, “without grasping how the car came to exist or what makes a combustion engine possible.  That is, of course, if dogs drove cars.  They don’t.  Yet I go around forming sentences.”  Attempts to find or convey some kind of meaning about the world consistently run headlong into the futility of language or the very idea of meaning itself.

Except, to say Insteadman takes a break in the action might be putting it generously.  There isn’t actually too much action to speak of.  Surviving off residuals from a teenage TV career, Chase Insteadman drifts aimlessly through the novel, attending fancy dinner parties, eating cheeseburgers in greasy spoons, and getting high in the ratty apartment of oddball ex-rock critic Perkus Tooth.  Insteadman indulges Tooth’s obsessions, from paranoid delusions about Marlon Brando and something called the Gnuppets to a religious awe of a type of pottery that can only be seen by bidding on it on ebay.  Yet anytime they might be in danger of following one of these obsessions into something resembling a plot, Lethem quickly moves them along to some new and equally fruitless pursuit.

Meanwhile, Insteadman’s astronaut fiancé writes love letters to him via weekly tabloids while trapped aboard a space station.  A giant tiger that might not actually be a giant tiger patrols the city, wrecking buildings that are coincidentally inconvenient to urban development.  A very literal grey fog hangs over the financial district.  Blending science fiction with surrealism, Lethem artfully renders a Manhattan that’s both strange and familiar, not to mention almost entirely populated by people with silly names.  The aforementioned Insteadman and Tooth are joined by the likes of Oona Lazlo, Laird Noteless, Georgina Hawkmanaji and Strabo Blandiani.  It’s the type of book where someone named Bloody Chicklets or Kilgore Trout could come strolling by at any moment.

There are dangers in following in the footsteps of Pynchon and Vonnegut.  For one thing, it isn’t the 60s anymore.  What once seemed new and profound now can seem an awful lot like random stoner-talk in Perkus Tooth’s living room.  Yet Lethem takes care to place such concerns in contrast to the novel’s hyper-modern surroundings.

Sure, there’s a conspiracy in Lethem’s Manhattan.  There are hundreds of them.  The question Lethem’s characters ask, though, is not what is reality? but in a place like this, what isn’t reality? The world Lethem creates can be a cold and alienating place.  Still, it has room for friendship, genuine human moments, and the promise that something new and indescribable lurks in the writing around every corner.

Steve Gillies is a current MFA Candidate in Fiction Writing at the University of Pittsburgh. He was born in Brazil, raised in Alabama, and spent a considerable amount of his adult life in Chicago. One time he made a comic book that was called “the stupidest I have ever seen” by a noted Environmental Chemist.

If I recounted a handful of the stories from Maile Meloy’s most recent collection, the book would quickly begin to seem sensational.  In “Red and Green,” a teenaged girl has a sexual encounter with a much older man (a client of her attorney father); in “Lovely Rita,” a widow raffles off her romantic services to her dead husband’s colleagues; in “The Girlfriend,” the father of a murder victim, desperate to understand the mind of the man who killed his daughter, interviews the murderer’s girlfriend.  But what is most remarkable about Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It is that the experience of reading it elicits much more complicated responses than a simple summary of its plotlines might suggest.

A skilled sustainer of tension, Meloy writes stories that don’t so much resolve as arrive at a lingering uncertainty.  Like most real-life conflicts, the tensions at the center of Both Ways break only because some force shunts them aside.  In the final paragraph of “Travis, B,” after Chet Moran has had his hopes for intimacy dashed by a young lawyer named Beth, he stands in the darkness trying to determine how to proceed.  Just before the cold weather forces him inside, he takes the only action he can at that moment—he removes from his pocket the piece of paper that contains her phone number, memorizes it, rolls it into a ball, and throws it into the wind.  Such an ending contains within it both a finality—the piece of paper is gone, after all—and an uncertainty—if Chet intends to call Beth, why has he felt it necessary to rid himself of all physical traces of her?

It is Meloy’s economical use of language that enables her to sketch these stories in as emotionally complex a way as she does.  The A. R. Ammons poem from which this book’s title comes conveys in just sixteen words—“One can’t/ have it/ both ways/ and both/ ways is/ the only/ way I want it.”—the at-times excruciating nature of the decision-making process.  Similarly, in Meloy’s collection, the complications that underlie characters’ actions are lain bare in short sentences and paragraphs that feature the simplest possible diction.  In my favorite story in the collection, “Two-Step,” a medical resident, Naomi, listens as her friend Alice relays her suspicions that her husband is having an affair.  Five pages into the story, Meloy takes us inside Naomi’s head: “Naomi hesitated.  She had told her husband that she was leaving him, with the understanding that Alice would simultaneously—or at least soon—be told the same thing.  It had been a difficult week” (94).  These three sentences entirely shift this story’s trajectory, but Meloy conveys this reversal in the simplest language possible—“It had been a difficult week” is one of the best examples of understatement I have recently come across.  Because she reveals Naomi’s adultery in such a matter-of-fact way, Meloy avoids the melodrama typically evoked by the other woman and, instead, extends the reader’s sympathies.

Both Ways is not perfect.  A Montana native, Meloy is at her best when writing about rural locales and the people who populate them; when the collection ventures elsewhere, Meloy’s characters lose some of their complexity.  In “Liliana,” the titular character reads like a caricature of a flamboyant European doyenne, and her miraculous return from the grave ends up indulging in the sensationalism that the rest of this collection so judiciously avoids.  Likewise, when the aging Argentinian hero of “Agustin” tries to help a former lover who has lost everything, he comes across as merely kind-hearted, not as a character with whom the reader feels aligned.

In the vast majority of Both Ways’ stories, though, Meloy’s unresolved tensions and her simple language help her to achieve near-mastery of the short story form.  These stories challenge the reader to do that most difficult of things—suspend judgment of characters and, instead, exist with them in the tensions they inhabit.

Loring Ann Pfeiffer is a doctoral candidate at the University of Pittsburgh, where she studies Restoration and early eighteenth-century drama.

-Salvatore Pane

Editor-in-Chief

Readers who remember the final scenes of Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood’s 2003 entry into speculative, post-apocalyptic fiction, may not be surprised to find that she has written a sequel. The Year of the Flood (whose narrative is staged simultaneously with Oryx and Crake’s) suggests an alternative to Crake’s diabolical destroy-the-world-to-make-it-new vision. Here, an anarchic cult called God’s Gardeners has reinterpreted the Bible to support a version of eco-Christianity, erected a hierarchic monastic order to ensure the success of its eschatological project, and reclaimed various ruined urban spaces so heavily under the heel of the all-powerful Corporation. The Year of the Flood, for the most part, attempts to offer a less problematic utopia than that imagined by Crake in the first novel, even if achieving it still requires the deaths of 99% of the world’s population in what God’s Gardeners call the “Waterless Flood.”

Though assuredly a worthwhile, thought-provoking, and interesting read, The Year of the Flood, like the soon-to-be overexposed film 2012, is yet another contribution to the glut of what I call “eco-jeremiads.” Atwood’s consideration of the apocalypse only exacerbates the manipulative and weighty rhetoric of the genre. While Oryx and Crake raised some serious metaphysical and ontological questions through its use of eschatological catastrophe, it is unclear what the new novel is attempting to accomplish beyond its gesture toward the generalized anxiety that “we should be more environmentally conscious.” In the same way that nuclear disaster narratives often merely point out the banally obvious—it would be really bad—The Year of the Flood relies upon the apocalyptic thrust of disaster primarily to highlight the author’s serious (if unambiguous) environmental engagement. It appears that Atwood truly intends much of this novel as a model for a lifestyle that moves past the “green” and “eco-friendly” into a wholly-revamped mode of operating in the world more naturally and responsibly. There are hymns interspersed throughout the book (and set to music on the website) that are explicitly intended for readers’ “amateur devotional or environmental purposes.” Major figures in history of ecological activism form a religious canon for the Gardeners: St. Rachel Carson, St. Dian Fossey, St. Al Gore, St. Julian of Norwich. But Atwood isn’t really exploring much territory beyond that of other eco-utopian or eco-apocalyptic novels (most notably the bundle of work from Kim Stanley Robinson).

Adam One, leader of God’s Gardeners, asks in his final speech, “Do we deserve this Love by which God maintains our Cosmos? Do we deserve it as a species?” If the major goal of this novel is to answer “No, we don’t, but we should all work individually toward a place where we would deserve that love,” then it is quite successful. But everything from Carson’s Silent Spring to Shyamalan’s The Happening has effectively already covered the same ground. For Atwood, the possibility of a collective, emergent movement capable of effecting change gets derailed in favor of a thrilling yet normative narrative with an emphasis on the individual’s relationship to the environment. Basically, The Year of the Flood comes off as being far more programmatic than aesthetic, and it is difficult to discern much in that program beyond the cliché: “think locally, act globally.”

(That said, if the endings of Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood are any indication, Atwood may be inclined to contribute one more post-apocalyptic novel to this universe. A third volume might provide an interesting and necessary engagement with our penal system and culture of ubiquitous surveillance. But we shall see.)

Bradley J. Fest, a PhD student studying 19th through 21st century American literature with an emphasis on literary representations of the apocalypse, recently reviewed Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice for Hot Metal Bridge.