Chapbook Review: Waiting for the Enemy by Brandon Davis Jennings

Waiting for the Enemy by Brandon Davis Jennings. Kindle Edition, 2014. 44 pages. $2.99, electronic.

Brandon Davis Jennings’ Waiting for the Enemy is composed of five distinct, yet connected, stories examining the life of men linked to the United States’ armed forces. This collection is aptly titled because these stories explore the moments and experiences of war when there is no clear enemy present; however, just because there are no depictions of the traditional battlefield does not mean that this collection lacks urgency. We see the characters deal with trauma, loss, horror, and detachment.

The title story, “Waiting for the Enemy,” best encapsulates all that Jennings is able to accomplish. In this piece, the narrator and his comrade, Rake, are stationed to keep watch in a control tower, and while they are there a camel falls into the barbed wire that surrounds their location. The characters’ respective personalities are revealed and explored in the ways that they react to the trapped and tormented animal. In fact, it is this injured animal that most haunts the narrator years after he returns from war.

Jennings has crafted five pieces that can stand well on their own, but when viewed together create a cohesive view of war’s effects. While all of the connections may not be clear the first time through, this fact allows readers to uncover new discovers with successive reads—each one as rewarding as the first!

-Dani Howell, MAR

Interview with Fiction Editor Teresa Dederer, No. 4

Mid-American Review welcomes our new Fiction Editor, Teri Dederer, to the staff! Teri grew up in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains north of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and attended the University of Pittsburgh. She is currently a second-year graduate student pursuing an M.F.A. in fiction from Bowling Green State University, where she takes long walks alongside corn fields with her beloved dog, Ori.

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Q: What drew you to the writing world?

T: A love of reading! My parents are big readers, so our house had hundreds of books, and when you live in the middle of the woods (literally), summer breaks were usually spent reading on a couch. I started writing after a sixth grade teacher gave my class a creative writing exercise. I wrote a story about how Edgar Allen Poe might have died from rabies after an unfortunate encounter with a black cat.

 

Q: How has your time in the MFA been?

T: Being around my cohort and the graduate faculty here at Bowling Green has been expansive. I’ve encountered new authors, new styles of writing, and I think it has pushed my own writing to be more daring. I’ve also made some lifelong writing buddies who have introduced me to the pleasures of wine tastings. Still debating which was the more important discovery.

 

Q: What makes you want to accept a submission?

T: Tough question—I tend to like a variety of things and styles. But if I’m going to take something, it needs to be great on every single page. I like pieces that pack an emotional punch, and quirky and unusual stories tend to draw me in. It needs to feel fresh and new and shiny!

 

Q: What’s your favorite story/poem MAR has accepted?

T: Maybe it’s my favorite story because it’s the first one I accepted since taking over as Fiction Editor, but “Goon” by Micah Cratty, which will be featured in the next issue. The voice is comically tragic, and so well-crafted that I wanted it immediately, and I still can’t stop thinking about the image of a ditch with cows looking on.

 

Q: What’s the best advice a writer has given you?

T: Probably just to keep writing—something that several writers/mentors have told me. It’s easy to say, ‘I’ll write tomorrow’ when you’re feeling stuck or blocked, but sometimes the reason you don’t want to write a scene is because you’re scared to write it. And those are usually the most important ones. I’d rather write it and revise it than sit there feeling guilty about not writing.

 

Q: Best experience in Bowling Green so far?

T: Seeing my dog try to hide in the neighbor’s cornfields. He thinks he’s so clever.

Chapbook Review: The White Swallow by Anna Kovatcheva

The White Swallow by Anna Kovatcheva. Los Angeles, California: Gold Line Press, 2015. 52 pages. $10.00, paper.

Anna Kovatcheva’s The White Swallow was the winner of the 2014 Gold Line Press Fiction Chapbook Competition. Broken into five sections, The White Swallow explores the complexities of fulfilling expectations and the sacrifices one makes to take care of others. The forbidden love surrounding two young girls suffers both external and internal complications as the two try to navigate their unsatisfying world. In the story, the healing bird, based off Bulgarian folklore, brings both life and destruction.

Kovatcheva’s language also balances both grace and gore. In the opening section, the swallow burrows into a dead baby; “The bird pecked at the baby’s open ribs, and its small head disappeared inside.” Later, Zina, the girl carrying the bird inside her, tries to heal a cat. The line states, “She heard ribs grind and straighten, heard them knit together. The cat’s ruptured stomach stitched itself whole, skin and fur slide back into place. The lungs reinflated.” However, each gruesome reconstruction is paired with a beautiful song; “She opened her mouth to fill her lungs, and the bird song came. A high trilling, desperate and earnest.” The magical realism adds another layer to the piece rather than distract from the very real horrors of everyday life. While these characters are destined for tragedy, The White Swallow allows for momentary glimpses of hope through beautiful imagery and profound emotion.

 

-Katie O’Neill, MAR

Katie O’Neill is a second year MFA candidate at Bowling Green State University. She is from Lake Winola, PA.

“Pastoral” by John Beardsley: A Review

Published in Vol. XXXVI, no. 1, John Beardsley’s poem “Pastoral” is reviewed by an editor of Mid-American Review.

As we enter Beardsley’s “Pastoral,” we take from the simple and familiar title a sense of impending rural comfort. The compendium of our experience with the pastoral rushes forward and leaves us anticipating a romantic exploration of rural life and landscape. 

We then are given the first line of this “Pastoral,” in “The snow sang like a shot,” and immediately know that there is a complexity here. Our attention is called to a dominating feature of this landscape, the snow, which seems to live so fully and joyously that it sings, but like a shot. The juxtaposition of the staunch violent noise of a gun firing with the purity of a living, singing snow leaves the reader fascinated about this world, this pastoral, in which the violent and the beautiful can exist in such magnificently direct proximity.

Beardsley continues to develop his initial image by crafting the snow into an all encompassing entity that “sunk all it could see / into its curves and blued / barrels…” The snow takes the underlying forms of the pastoral landscape and makes them its own, adopts them into its own intimate contours. But this pastoral snow is as willing to reveal as it is to consume and “gave it out / again blistering.” The snow releases the forms held within it just as strikingly as it takes them in.

Once we find ourselves situated within the poem’s snow capped pastoral body, the speaker of the poem enters, a voyeur over the snow, “looking across it.” The speaker looks through the snowscape “at the long black body / of an animal I cannot / name…” Just as the speaker cannot identify this black creature streaking through the trees, we are left with a blurred image of the animal fleeing from the “shot” through the white gleam of the snowy landscape. The animal “…moved like / a loss a blood through / paper birches.” We are struck again by the brilliant contrast of beauty and violence involved in the image of an obscured animal moving fluidly, “like a loss of blood,” through the trees of the landscape, staining the glistening snow with the ruby traces of its recent wound. The bark of the “paper birches” seems to magnify the contrast of red and white.

Next, we arrive joltingly at a sense of isolation within the snowfield, as “it was talking to itself.” The landscape maintains its sense of life and voice, but now it seems highly personal, as if the speaker of the poem is overhearing the field’s intimate laments. But the speaker is not obtrusive. Instead, they identify with this overhead self-intimacy, identify with the field talking to itself, “as I do at night.”

At this point, we see the speaker and the landscape as two isolated, intimate figures that share a sense of value in the personal voice.

But the speaker must address this bleeding figure that runs through the snow topped, birch-laden woods. This unnamed animal that seems so integral to the scene at hand. “O stranger in the distance,” the speaker announces, “I’ve made you a fetish / of neck-wrung chickens / to keep off our fathers’ / hungering ghosts…” In this shocking moment, the speaker reveals a depth in his sentiment for the distant stranger. The motives and actions of the speaker are brought into question, as well as the history involved in their complex present state.

The obscurity behind the “stranger in the distance” allows our minds to wander, wondering if perhaps the stranger is no longer the wounded animal, wondering if perhaps the stranger is now, to the speaker, something or someone beyond this scene in the snowy woods. We become aware of a depth in the obscurity of the images.

Still, the speaker is engulfed in the interaction of beauty and violence that has so far saturated the poem, as “I bound / their throats in my sawn-off hair.” But again, their internal stance on this interaction is questioned as they cry out, “O god of embarrassment, / god of bullets-in-the-back,” and make a sacrifice to this addressed being, exclaiming that “I give you my teeth, pink / at the root.” They proceed to “Sleep in this lot I’ve dug / where even the snow can’t see.”

We arrive back at the initial image, the all-encompassing snow that has taken every feature of the landscape under its vast white arms, into its body. But not the speaker. The speaker arrives at a point so personal, a point so privately intimate that they sleep “where even the snow can’t see.”

The final line of the poem revisits the ongoing theme of beauty interacting with violence. It weighs the joy of song against the brutality of retrieving that joy from within the core of a conflicted individual, as the speaker proclaims, “I’ll scrape out the song from my lungs.”

Accepted: “The Barnum Interview” by Michael Hurley

In the poem “The Barnum Interview,” Michael Hurley crafts an imaginative interview with P.T. Barnum, who becomes a completely unlikeable—but strangely seductive—speaker.  As with all well-done persona poetry, Hurley’s Barnum casts an unusual view of the world, but one the reader wants to believe could be real.  Barnum’s observations accumulate into character, perhaps most chillingly with the statement that men and women are “all small enough to fit inside a cage.” 

This persona sees everything through the lens of the circus, with other humans as its commodities, and unfolds in a finely-engineered, call-and-response format.  There is just enough of a looseness and disconnect between the questions and answers to create an eerie atmosphere, but all seem inevitable of Barnum’s character. 

The questions asked of Barnum generate as much interest as the answers: They are plausible, but uncommon to the celebrity interview format.  He is asked, “When did you realize you were mortal?” and responds with an anecdote about a man selling him an x-ray of his teeth; the first time Barnum understands that he has a skeleton inside of him, even though the x-ray is later revealed to be no more than a crude drawing.  A mix of long and short answers—ranging from full paragraphs to two-word, matter-of-fact conclusions—tightly control the pacing of the poem, and offer a wealth of world-and voice-building.

While the work is interesting on a first read and gives a quick first impression, this piece is one that yields more with each perusal.  It tackles large issues (God, death, human cruelty, money) with fine-tuned details that age well: teeth as cranberries, a train as success, humans as owls, mandrakes as a trick.  Barnum doesn’t care to know he lives on a spinning planet, and instead turns his attention to hedonistic pleasures and whatever happens to exist within train’s reach.

These strange images also play with the clichés of the circus.  The phrase “The crowd goes wild” leaves familiar territory when it is used to answer “What happens when you die?”  This poem does not avoid those images and phrases known to the circus and the time period in which P. T. Barnum lived, but rather recasts them in new material.

All of this adds up to a persona that can relate any image, any theme, and any question to the circus and the personal character it takes to lead one.  By reflecting on his own experiences, this Barnum indirectly shows the reader what he offers his circus audiences: the knowledge of mortality, but given by an illusion that forces you to think about what’s inside yourself. 

Barnum himself knows he is not above the call of the entertaining con man, and when asked about the x-ray he knew was fake, “Did you buy it from him?” responds, “Of course.”  This punch of an ending reminds the reader how captivated a human can be by what’s constructed and what’s cruel.  Even though readers of this poem will and should dislike this Barnum character, he couldn’t have built the world’s most well-known circus without the support of a roaring audience.