By Philip Levine
Reviewed by Josh Spilker
To be honest, I don't know much about Philip Levine, but now at least I know the characters of his life.
To be honest, I don't know much about poetry, but I like Levine's smooth, rhythmic free verse.
To be honest, Levine's Breath is some of the best everyday poetry that makes poetry seem useful beyond billboard rhymes and clever, alliterative sayings about beer.
In Breath, Levine focuses on the lessons of life learned by watching others, especially those around us. So he writes about those people in his life – his family members, his next door neighbors, the couple in the diner. Every poem, it seems, begins with an intro for a person and a situation where Levine explicates or imagines a life for them. He makes a turn with the last few lines to make a statement about their innocence, their defeat or their persistence.
Levine focuses much of his writing on his Detroit childhood, which is a conflict between the industries of Detroit and the meaning and purpose of work. His poetry is perfect and exact. Levine says what we unconsciously think about people all the time, except that his judgments are self-revelations as well.
One of my favorites is "The Lesson," in which Levine describes his encounters and lessons with a doctor he first meets as a boy. Levine ends by concentrating on the sounds of the doctor's voice, and by writing "I heard the lost voices of creation running/over stones as the last darkness sifted upward/voices saddled by the milky residue/of machine shops and spangled with first light,/ discordant, harsh, but voices nonetheless."
That is who Levine is and how he sees himself. A hardworking voice that is not the best, but a voice that has had some mishaps and some lessons learned, a voice contributing to the mass of creation. At least Levine gives us a way to listen to him, and that is the least we should do.
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Frankenstein: Prodigal Son Bantam
By Dean Koontz & Kevin J. Anderson
Reviewed by Deborah Beckers
Every dream was a nightmare. None frightened him. He was the spawn of nightmares after all; and he had been toughened by a life of terror.
It’s a scenario that we’ve all thought of at one point in our lives; What if the fiction we are reading is real? In Dean Koontz’s latest series (co-authored with best selling author Kevin J. Anderson) he brings Mary Shelley’s classic characters from Frankenstein into the twenty-first century with a bang, and a twist.
The novels in this new Frankenstein series were originally conceived as a television show for an American cable station (USA Network). Due to creative differences and production problems, Koontz elected to remove his name from the project and decided to novelize his vision. I, for one, am very glad he did.
This warmly visual novel plunges us into New Orleans in high summer; A steamy, shadowy place where a serial killer lurks. Someone is stealing lives and pieces of bodies in order to create the perfect woman. One obsessive-compulsive killer seems to spawn another and the delicate balance between what is real and what is possible becomes less and less distinct. As the body count grows Detective Carson O’Connor and her long suffering partner Michael Maddison have their work cut out for them. Disappearing bodies, missing parts and resentful squad members makes for high pressure for everyone involved.
The stress of the case coupled with the strain of taking care of her autistic younger brother almost pushes Carson over the edge. Holding herself together with force of will and industrial-strength coffee, Carson and Michael follow the leads that take them from the crypts that house the dead to the highest echelons of society in their quest for this diabolical killer
But the serial killer is only part of the story; Koontz and Anderson take us deep into the laboratory of a madman, hell bent on the destruction of all humanity, even as his experiments take on a life of their own. And we meet Deucalion, an ancient being who knows the price one has to pay for freedom. He is an unlikely hero, as flawed (or maybe more so) as humanity itself, even as he holds himself apart from it. All of the mayhem centers on the mysterious Victor Helios and his connection to the killer or killers.
“In the dream,” Jelly said, “the magician had two hearts… and he was stabbed in both.”
The cast is large. I would have liked more time to explore the relationships between all of these fascinating individuals, but I do realize that this is a series and that we will meet them all again. I only hope that now that we’ve been introduced to all these main and secondary characters the subsequent novels in this series will have a better balance between the relationships and the action.
Book One: Prodigal Son is an engrossing read and is a wonderful set-up for a series that promises to be a long and exciting ride. Koontz and Anderson have given us characters that are memorable and easy to imagine alive in the real world. No thunderstorm needed.
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Home Is The SailorHard Case Crime
By Day Keene
Kiss Her GoodbyeHard Case Crime
By Allan Guthrie
Reviewed by Casey Moore
Late last year I stumbled across a couple of books which had the old style of pulp covers I have always loved. They were the covers with an off pretty girl and usually a guy doing something tough or at least looking that way. The books had the imprint Hard Case Crime on their wonderful covers. Since then I have become addicted to what another reviewer called “the best crime books of 2004.”
The series is a combination of reprints and first publications, but it is doubtful any but the truly hardcore pulp aficionados have even read the reprinted book before.
Hard Case Crime has just released their latest two novels: Home is the Sailor by Day Keene and Kiss Her Goodbye by Allan Guthrie.
Home is the Sailor is about sailor Swede Nelson, who has been out at sea for three years and is ready to settle down. But after a wild drunken night he finds himself mixed up in the life and love of Corliss Mason. Nelson thinks he has found love with a beautiful woman who runs a nice respectable tourist court right off the beach in southern California. Nelson’s pleasant little new life goes south real fast when he is forced to kill a man for his love, and he soon starts to realize something is wrong with this ideal life he has landed in.
Kiss Her Goodbye is the story of Joe Hope, an enforcer and collector for the loan shark Cooper. After a night of collecting, Hope comes home to find out that his daughter Gem has committed suicide. But Hope doesn’t believe his daughter committed suicide, so he decides he is going to find out what really happened to her.
The writing in these books is pure pulp. The style is minimal and even brutal to read at times. I find myself completely addicted to each book after I start and I cannot bear to put them down until I finish since the plot doesn’t stop for reflection. These are books designed purely to grab the reader and drag him or her along on a seedy drive.
You can find more information about the authors and artists in the series and when future books are coming out at the company’s website: hardcasecrime.com.
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Reading Oprah: How Oprah's Book Club Changed The Way America ReadsState University of New York Press
By Cecilia Konchar Farr
Reviewed by Josh Spilker
Some of us may remember Oprah's "self-revelation" about ten years ago, when she made the jump from a trash-talker to a TV sheik. Instead of gossiping about peoples' families, Oprah changed her format to self-help, spirituality and Dr. Phil.
One evolution of this format was to use books as self-diagnosis. So Oprah changed the customary rules of TV and reading and made "Oprah's Book Club." She created her own legion of club members, and she was the leader, the teacher and the professor, and all of America's women (primarily) became her students. And this is where Farr noticed a conflict. Farr begins an analysis of not only the book club selections' sales, but of the content of Oprah's discussions. Farr realizes that Oprah is teaching a new way to read -- one that centers on empathy and character analysis rather than style or plot. Farr also tackles what she calls "cultural democracy," and how Oprah threatens the authority of the elite list-makers about what good books Americans should be reading.
Comments? Click here to let us know what you think.
Overall, Farr is supportive of Oprah's move to bridge the low-brow and high-brow gap into a mish-mashed middle-brow where both extremes (Toni Morrison to Maeve Binchy) are displayed. Farr does not have a problem with this, while Oprah selection author Jonathan Franzen, whose book The Corrections was chosen and therefore guaranteed success. But Franzen refused to appear on the show, believing himself too literary to stoop down there to the "middle," and making many of his fans and readers demand "no 'O'" on their Corrections covers. Farr offers no good defense for Franzen, nor does she let anyone else defend him. His objections are presented more as a hindrance to the equality of reading, rather than as a promoter of artistic method. Farr believes Oprah has allowed all readers to finally voice their likes and dislikes on an equal playing field as the so-called "literary elite." Reading books is finally for everyone. Thanks Oprah.
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