Chapbook Review

Whip and Spur by Iver Arnegard. The University of Southern California: Gold Line Press, 2014. 64 pages. Paperback.

In this stunning collection of six pieces of fiction, author Iver Arnegard takes readers on a journey through the Northern Plains—stopping in locations in Montana, North Dakota, and Colorado to name a few. With each new location, Arnegard makes us feel at home as we explore the human and nature struggles that his characters are battling. We begin our adventure with “Ice Fishing”, where a man reflects on a woman that appeared just as quickly as she disappeared from his life, and follow other characters such as the woman in “Recluse” who tries to connect herself with the man with the pale eyes, as well as Eric in “Made of Land or Water”, who returns home to North Dakota to deal with his hatred for his deceased father.

While keeping with traditional story forms, Arnegard also takes new approaches in “Seventeen Fences” and “What Rises”, breaking sections off by numbers that hold importance to the telling of the story. But perhaps what is more interesting is Arnegard’s use of close setting and detailed location in each story presented: “If you have an old map, you might still find Farland, North Dakota: the sod post office writhing with moles and the Wagon Wheel Inn, glass shot out of each pane, front doorway open and choked by a knot of tumbleweeds. And if you care to stop and untangle the years, you’ll find the last great boom when the price of wheat was up, cattle prices up, even water in the rain gauge up.” Arnegard’s talent for placing readers into his settings is magnificent, and something that stands out exponentially in Whip and Spur.

-Olivia Buzzacco, MAR

My Fault by Leora Fridman. Cleveland, Ohio: Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2016. 86 pages. $ 16.00, paper.

The ambiguity of Leora Fridman’s title, My Fault, is compelling. Perhaps this is a collection of confessions of guilt, intended to clear the speaker’s conscious? Fridman does not offer a direct answer to this question, but rather leaves it up to the reader to interpret the meaning behind her words. While her prose poems are very clear in language and sentence structure, the message is often hidden and requires a second or third read. Sentences that seem to be nonsensical at first, will eventually reveal their meaning, like in “Factions”, where she writes:

I have not found

any skin yet but I will

be there soon, just as

soon as I can fight off

the beavers peeling fibers

from my scalp, trying

to open my mind,

making me feel far

more awake than

I ever intended to find

myself, laughing at

how much human I am

My Fault does not focus on one particular topic, but on a plethora of personal thoughts of the speaker, evolving around everything and anything that is important to them.

– Tanja Vierrether, MAR

dear girl: a reckoning by drea brown. Gold Line Press, 2014. 47 pages. $10.00, print.

drea brown’s dear girl: a reckoning is the winner of the 2014 Gold Line Press Poetry Chapbook Competition and a hauntingly beautiful glimpse into the Middle Passage and the life of Phillis Wheatley. brown’s poetry attempts to envision not only Phillis Wheatley as the poet, but also Phillis as the girl aboard a slave ship struggling to understand not only her situation, but also her new identity as someone’s property.

Each of brown’s poems deals with a specific moment in the harrowing journey across the ocean and the themes of haunting, rememory, and giving voice to the dead. This theme of rememory, a term which brown borrows from Toni Morrison, is one that occurs in each poem and calls into question how memory itself influences not only an individual, but also perhaps, an entire group of people. brown tells Wheatley’s story not only to show how portions of the poet’s identity were erased or unacknowledged, but also to address how the girl in her poems could embody not only Wheatley, but also countless unnamed girls.

brown asks readers to reimagine, remember and employ rememory to give voice to the dead and through doing so, exorcise some of our own haunted, unacknowledged pasts and shared histories. The chapbook opens with a poem emphasizing the voices of the dead, but end’s with a similar request successfully closing the narrative. brown’s rich imagery, variety of poetic forms and narrative tells readers that the dead will have their stories told: “the dead will have their due. they will speak from graves or whisper into the ears of poets or search oceans, to begin here or rupture or capture loss” (45).

-Chelsea Graham, MAR

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