Review: Personals, by Ian Williams

You know, I read Ian Williams’ first book of poetry and enjoyed it a lot. Felt it was a solid effort, a pleasurable collision of the personal and the postmodern. I had a feeling, after finishing that collection, that Williams would go on to do something grander and even more impressive. Well, he has lived up to that promise and then some with his 2012 collection Personals, which was shortlisted for the 2013 Griffin Prize.

Much like You Know Who You Are, Personals is able to impressively blend emotional—even sentimental—experiences with some finely wrought experimentation. The collection takes as its premise the idea of personal ads providing a poetic structure to reach out and connect with our fellow humans, but the book is actually much more than that. Many of these poems read like incantations, charming us with a series of repetitions that build an alluring velocity in Williams’ verse.

We can see examples of this from the book’s opening salvo, “Rings.” Here, each section of the poem ends with a closed loop of words forming an actual ring. But the real propulsion comes from the constant and deliberate use of repetition in the more standard lines:

Like, a girl on our lawn says, you want to hear me talk
like my sister when she’s on the phone? Like she always
says like. Like this. Like me and my boyfriend
went to the mall and like I saw him looking at a girl
and like she was totawy into him. Like I can tell.

We see examples of this sort of repeating poem throughout Personals, in poems like “American History I” with its rhythmic use of the word “right” and “Personal History I, Canon” with its almost identical use of the term “copy.”

Personals also comes loaded with references to all manner of popular culture and consumer products. Everything from UFC and Wal-Mart to Bran Flakes and Old Spice cologne make an appearance. These allusions give Personals a certain down-to-earth immediacy: readers will be able to situate themselves in a middle class, post-capitalist world even as Williams takes them through an emotional or linguist journey. The contrast between the poetry’s references to everyday objects and its more experimental approaches creates some pleasurable connections that will stay with the reader.

Williams writes about personal relationships with a great deal of brio and the various constraints of this collection only help to enhance those preoccupations. Personals is very personal, and well worth reading.

Acceptance: Now or Never Publishing

Well, you know what they say: why have one book on deck when you can have two? Yes, I'm very pleased and excited to announce that Vancouver's Now or Never Publishing has offered a contract to release my short story collection, tentatively entitled The Secrets Men Keep, in 2015. This will come in the year after my novel Sad Peninsula will be published by Dundurn here in Toronto. I'm of course tickled pink to now have two books in the queue, especially considering it's been six years since Off Book came out.

For those of you who are interested, I did do a blog post about the manuscript about a year ago. Several of the stories in it have been published (or accepted to be published) recently: one appeared in PRISM international earlier this year; one is in the current issue The New Quarterly; one is forthcoming in The Antigonish Review. In total, eight of the 13 stories have found homes in journals in Canada and the United States.

The good folks at Now or Never Publishing were very fast and very enthusiastic with their response. I submitted to the press just a few weeks ago after reading The National Post's review of Liz Worth's new novel PostApoc, which NoN published this fall. They also released my fellow Norwood Publishing refugee Charles Crosby's latest novel back in 2008, as well as other notable titles.

Anyway, very excited by all this and am looking forward to working with them. Stay tuned to the blog for further updates as things develop.

M.

My review of Giant by Aga Maksimowska in The Antigonish Review

... has appeared online at The Antigonish Review's website. My take on Maksimowska's novel is a bit mixed, but on the whole I found it a beautifully written and intriguing read. Anyway, I'm posting it here for your reading pleasure. Let me know what YOU think.

Also, speaking of The Antigonish Review, my short story "The Fantasy" is still forthcoming in the journal and (I think) will appear in the next issue. So keep your eyes peeled for that as well.

M.

My Quill and Quire review of The Last of the Lumbermen by Brian Fawcett ...

is now online at the Q&Q website. I was pleased to give this rivetting novel a star review, even though it had as its subject matter two topics I have little interest in: hockey and small-town life. Just goes to show that one can overcome personal taste if the writing is good enough. Which Fawcett's is, so go check out his book when you get a chance.

M.

Acceptance: QWERTY Literary Magazine

I'm happy to report that I received a lovely acceptance letter from the good folks at QWERTY Literary Magazine for a poem of mine entitled "A Millisecond of Gravitas." For those of you who don't know, QWERTY is an undergrad-run literary journal out of the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton. It has published lots of cool writers over the years, and I'm extremely pleased that I'll be appearing in its pages. I've been told the issue containing my poem will be out sometime in December, and I'll post an update here when it is.

M.

Review: M/F, by Anthony Burgess

One could say that Anthony Burgess was doubly cursed when it came to recognition. He always wanted to be known as a composer of music who happened to write novels on the side rather than a writer of novels who happened to compose music on the side. Worse, the novel he was best known for—A Clockwork Orange—was something he dismissed as a minor work, a hack job he pounded out in six weeks that just happened to be made into a popular film a decade after it was published.

So which novels did Burgess want to be recognized for? Earthly Powers, his magnum opus shortlisted for the Booker Prize, was certainly up there, but so too was this slimmer, more manic picaresque, M/F, published in 1971. In fact, one might argue that M/F is, from a strictly technical standpoint, Burgess’s most accomplished work of fiction. The layering of puns, the word games, the well-timed comic barbs, the allusions to the theories of French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, the Freudian symbolism—all lend credence to Burgess’ voracious intellect and versatility on the page.

M/F’s “plot”, to be sure, must be ingested with the sort of increased suspension of disbelief reserved for highly experimental novels. When Frank Kermode himself wrote that the story is difficult to synthesize, you know you’re in for a challenge. But here goes: Twenty-year-old Miles Faber has been kicked out of his New York City university after getting caught fornicating on the school’s library steps. Despite the efforts of his dead father’s lawyer to stop him, Miles sets out to the Caribbean island of Castita, where he looks to unearth the unpublished poetry of a creative genius named Sib Legeru.

The reason for his father’s posthumous attempt to thwart Miles is because strange familial connections, rooted in an act of incest, await him in Castita. Miles discovers a sister he didn’t know he had, as well as a perfect (and perfectly vulgar) doppelganger. When Miles accidently kills his double to save his sister from rape, he is forced to masquerade as him in order to trick the double’s mother, and in doing so finds himself in a position to marry his own sister. What unleashes is deeply comic exploration of the Oedipal complex, the nature of superstition, and literary power of wordplay. Like the great Greek tragedy that lends this book so much of its inspiration, M/F hinges on the solving of a riddle.

I must confess: I have but an undergraduate knowledge in the theories of Lévi-Strauss, and my tolerance for Freudian analogy can only stretch so far. Yet it is undeniable that there is a deep tendon of genius under the surface of M/F. Burgess weaves his puns and his allusions expertly and with great deliberation. Thankfully, one can read M/F simply at the level of its convoluted plot, missing much of its subtext, and still get a lot out of it. You’ll laugh. You flip the pages. And you’ll probably increase your vocabulary by a wide margin.

At least 10 years overdue

It was great to see Lynn Coady win last night's Giller Prize--an honour that is long, long overdue in my opinion. I was disappointed back in 2011 when she didn't nab the award for The Antagonist (see my review of it here), and I also feel she could have easily won it for her novels Strange Heaven (published in 1998, when she was just 28) and Saints of Big Harbour (published in 2002). At any rate, so pleased she finally took home the honour. I was also pleased that the shortlist was comprised of such a crop of young-ish writers (no one was born earlier than 1964), a real feat considering the Giller has been traditionally dominated by Baby Boomers or older.

M.