Mini Reviews

Mini Review: With Deer
by Aase Berg (translated by Johannes Göransson)
Black Ocean, 2009
http://www.blackocean.org.
ISBN 978-0-9777709-7-7, 96 pages; $12.96

Aase Berg's With Deer is a book of frightening prose poems about the horror of nature. They're scary not just because they're about, like, blood bubbling from the eyeholes of foxes, but also they're unsettling in their fullness, in the way each poem in the collection slices into every other. This is a great book. The publisher, Black Ocean, made the artifact as lovely as the poems are fearsome, orange and spare in its elegance.

Aase Berg is from Sweden, a surrealist, and With Deer was translated by Johannes Goransson, that knight of translation apologetics whose brainy blog, Exoskeleton, indicates the degree of intellectual care that went into his work. My Swedish is very bad, so I can't evaluate the quality of Goransson's success, but each English translation is accompanied across the page by the native language, for those who like to cross-reference.

With Deer works like a first-hand witness to the collective unconscious of mute life. It is a visit to the creepiest forest ever, referenced in the poems by a first-person speaker that is mysteriously oriented to the sucking and shedding and sludging lorbs. I'm reminded of the "I" in Roberto Harrison's book Counter Daemons, which problematizes the notion of the subjective speaker and the location of the self-referent. The I-voice in With Deer exists impossibly. Who is it that says:

"The seal flesh loosened slowly. The body clumps slopped against each other—behind them the dough sucked shut...I too lay there and had sensations in my hull" ("Seal Mutilation").

"Slowly I choke the coral; greedily I swallow this tense fox heart with the smarting, blood-blue mouth" ("Fox Heart").

This is an easy book to excerpt; every sentence contains the lyrical sublimity and core sensitivity of every other. One that aptly characterizes With Deer comes as the penultimate line in "Harpy":

"Out there in the heart of darkness genes are bursting."

Mini Review: Midnight Picnic
by Nick Antosca
Word Riot, 2009
www.wordriot.com; $15.95

"Rat Beast," Nick Antosca's story published by Mud Luscious Press, is about a kid who can't focus on his schoolwork and (spoiler) whose parents and principal subsequently turn him into a diligent, focused rat. It's a masterfully written short-short, complete in its conception and execution. It was that cohesion that allowed me to embrace the untenable story. It's a memorable piece, and sets the stage for the impossibly unreal Midnight Picnic.

Bram is a shiftless young dude living on the edge of a skuzzy town. He sleeps with the other tenant in his apartment building but doesn't care to pursue a relationship with her. His mom is dead; his father is a soldier in Iraq. One day a retard finds the skeleton of a small boy and brings it to Bram. Mysteriously, the skeleton manifests itself as Adam, a boy, we learn, who was murdered by an interloper in the adjacent woods. The ghost of Adam holds sway over Bram and, by transferring the memory of his murder, Adam convinces Bram to exact vengeance on Jacob Bunny, his killer.

Along the way Antosca reveals the murderer's story too, which allows the reader to empathize with the man and complicate the revenge story. I was eager to switch my sympathy to Jacob Bunny because it doesn't take long before Adam becomes completely irritating. Antosca's development of Jacob's character comes about slower and more successfully, partially because he lived long enough for Antosca to justify his flaws. Jacob could have been a good man and it's sad to see his life go the other way. Adam, on the other hand, was killed before we knew anything more than he was a dickhead kid who cussed at his teacher. It was a savvy move by Antosca to switch the virtues of the killer and the killed.

Midnight Picnic is paced with deliberate slowness as Bram and the reader slip into an otherworldly afterlife where time and space function differently than what our terrestrial bodies understand. Antosca doesn't spell out the physics of this dead place, so readers can invent their own ideas of how things work. That's part of the fun of the novel. What isn't fun, though, is how tiresome Adam becomes in this world, and how grotesque. Given more than two decades to plan his revenge, all he can come up with is to barf up vicious dogs that will shred Jacob Bunny. After his first attempt fails I was hoping for a new angle of attack, something equally imaginative but less homely, but Antosca writes the same bizarre trick. Upchucking dogs is too weird and unbelievable for me, even in a ghost story where I'm inclined to believe that death is a place that can be driven into in an old car.

From Publisher's Weekly to Pop Matters, Antosca has been praised for his sharp voice and hailed as a young writer to watch. Midnight Picnic upholds the judgment. I defy anyone to read the book's opening scene and come to a different conclusion.—Adam Robinson