“Live, then, and be happy…and never forget that until the day when God shall deign to reveal the future to man, all human wisdom is summed up in these two words,—'Wait and hope.'” (Edmond Dantès, in Alexander Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo)

Dangerous words, wait and hope. Especially in our drive-through, microwave, cell phone-fixated world. Also: how dare I start a book review with a quote that has the word “God” in it. But daring is the very thing that Gillian Conoley encourages, in every poem, and on every page, of Notes from the Passenger. Not the kind of daring that a cliff diver might face, although there are fearsome precipices within these poems, and there are pages into which one must fall, screaming quietly all the way down, in order to find out what’s really real. 

Be warned: God shows up everywhere in these pages, though not in the ways you might expect. And if expectations are premeditated resentments, prepare to have your sense of what’s divine (which will include “necrotic silence in a shed” and “—an invaginated spermicide / down pathways to an old / belief system turned glassine”) turned upside down. In other words, this ain’t Sunday School, kids. Conoley’s spiritual university invites us into a universe teeming with not only plenty of waiting and hoping; it’s a place where the nebulae within you will burn with the desire to read on.

​

In true, Transcendental style, Conoley makes her case immediately with the first sentence of the first poem in the book, “The Passenger:”

Once and for all mind-wanderings of the passenger.

only to circle back, as nature does, and as Emerson did, within that arc of what it means to return, but to return transformed:

The beer garden’s
composure in its death rattle,
  green partitions, scaled walls, backstroking
     waterways, lure to lure—

This is a new kind of fishing, as it were, where what once drew any of us along—things shiny and intoxicating (mind-wanderings, indeed)—are the stuffs that will help us start to name, and quickly, what we’ll be saying no to while on this journey: 

The passenger rejects projection,
  its limpid, mirror-like distortion—

We have entered a different kind of space, a place of unknowing, where what we think we know disappears into the what the poem’s closing lines offer:

It was most like night, this thing we walked into.

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And just as in any story that sticks, Conoley invokes in the subsequent poem, “The Messenger,” an antithesis that declares in no uncertain terms where we’re heading:

I am a messenger with epistolary anthropological epigenetic trauma

​

It is as if Ginsberg’s supernatural extra brilliant intelligent kindness of the soul has been shaken out of one’s pocket’s like a torn circus ticket. This messenger continues:

some deep ancestral thing floats over the greening hills
     surely you understand this the messenger said, at a loss— 

Here’s how one waits, and possibly hopes. Think back for a moment: when is the last time you were at a loss? What did you do, in such a state? Conoley encourages us to not play the cynic, but to stay open to the postures of ecstasy (read ‘what the body does when in a state of disbelief’) as something not only attainable, but also within practical reach of everyone:

The messenger was part of
the deep urge to sit, stand, lie down
in an aura of intimacy
awaiting the message

And in the only lines within the book that are written in all caps, the messenger continues to encourage, albeit using an air horn:

I have sent you a moonstone talisman via snail mail! says the messenger,
   attempting friendliness. Also, PAIN IS EVERYWHERE.
   WAR NEVER CLEANSES.

​

This is a messenger who has tried, when communicating with the passenger, all the tricks in the messaging book, and the echoes to whom we are listening reverberate mightily. This is the Buddha speaking, as well as St. Augustine. These are lines that could have been taken from the Talmud, or the Quran, or from the Dhammapada, though sweetly skewed by the grace that this particular messenger offers. Repeatedly, we hear:

I would love to begin to explain the many voices plugged in

And:

I would love to begin to say something to relieve the onslaught of

unleashed voices

As well as:

I would like to message you but the white powdery appropriation of

my throat

cuttlefish songbird vapor
in this body politic
or stringy cloud, everyone a sage
rising on a platform
a rapture massaged into all of the throats
multi-glottal, the collective dream of art
how even in death or in birth
dust motes glint the perineum of a celestial orbit—

​

I’ll leave it to you to assess just how intimate said motes might be. But make no mistake: this messenger is aiming for nothing less than your entire person, in whatever form you may understand it to exist. Iterations of Delmore Schwartz can be found here (“Patience, my soul, the truth is never known / Until the future has become the past / And then, only, when the love of truth at last / Becomes the truth of love, when both are one,”  ) as well as Kaveh Akbar (“If you’re immortal, God better be too. Otherwise? Otherwise.”  ) with the messenger’s ‘multi-glottal…collective dream of art’ as language that is in common parlance, and something worth waiting for, worth hoping for.

Notes from the Passenger is strewn with the visceral gifts of the quotidian, like one’s beloved and dirty dishes splayed in the sink after a good meal, all counterweights to the book’s cosmic bent. In “I loved, I voted” we hear “This hand with no war strength in it / this other that tore perforated ruins” as grievous rendering of those hands that hold the scales of justice, and which, indeed, belong to all of us. In “The White House,” sententialisms abound, the ‘governing home’ of the free world seen for what it truly is:

It was smaller than anyone ever expected.
Its lights were dimmed, though guards remained
In dreamy wigs, roasting pigs, as portraiture
was encouraged in this icebox—

These pieces comfort in the way that, when on a road trip, a dirty old McDonalds can offer familiarity and a place to rest, even if the thing itself is less than exemplary. Conoley invites ownership here, in ways that don’t exclude, but also don’t excuse, the dirty swirl of Americana:

Few acts are intolerable to a house.
Bed mites on night duty.
Riot gear,
A kiln of x=y.
A woman looking up under a glass pane.
A man climbing a wall.
We people, who cease to be useful.

​

“Thank You for the Afterlight” (for God) cuts through any sense of what niceness might yet remain after surging through the oceanic space of night and death, “where synapse thinks it saw a spirit.” The book’s penultimate poem, “Afterlight” revels in the real:

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                                       half
to one third of all thought
is cat vomit really in the middle of the night

And this, just prior to Conoley’s devastatingly beautiful assessment of where we find ourselves in this afterlight:

​

this bristly

prelapsarian keyhole of a hut where my finger
lingers as you row by
   is that all
to perception You are like

privileged Ivy League

assessing me    I am
another
white thing
    that little eggshell still stuck on my blouse
I cracked out of you I see that now

​

“There may have been someone who loved you / more than you loved saying” the poem continues, inviting the divine to don the clothing of humanity, thus divinizing the latter. What the world be like today, if we were to practice with and for each other, what the poet continues to say:

I try very hard to never close the parenthesis on you

Like a conch shell, with its center closed off from the rest of itself while remaining in perfect, proportional contact with all its other parts, “Perpetua’s diary” is the molten core of the book, holding its own gravity while limning the places where Notes from the Passenger has gone and will continue to go. Consider St. Perpetua’s redactor, sharing that “she wrote in her own hand and from her own experience.” This is Conoley writing about Conoley, without being either. That magic continues, the poem writing about itself, an Escher painting in words as its eponymous font leads to an Italian pencil with its “80% graphite powder derived / from industrial scraps and electrode manufacturing waste…also named Perpetua.”

​

Beware of martyrdom. It is more happenstance than choice, and Conoley invites us into the happiness of that circumstance. Perpetua vis-à-vis Conoley creates a mirror of eternity, asking ‘Who among us is not included in this thing called life?’ Substitute the word death for life, and the question retains all its gravity, and more. Notes from the Passenger is a treatise on the We-ness of the world, and it’s a very big world at that. “The Cosmos is within us,” Carl Sagan said. “We are made of star-stuff. We are the way to the universe to know itself.” Conoley’s similar invitation is to see, both what’s going on within ourselves, as well as what’s going on out there, in each other and in the world. In this way, she, too, writes in her own hand, and from her own experience, inviting all of us to do the same in our lives. I’ll close with a line from “Perpetua’s diary:”

I don’t want to read further because we know the rest of the words

aren’t hers

This is how I feel, after reading Notes from the Passenger. I don’t want to read further, either. And not because I haven’t been moved by what has percolated throughout the universe of Conoley’s words. I don’t want to read further because I, too, know the rest of the words—in my own work as a writer, and in the work of those around me—those words aren’t mine. They belong to all of us. And that’s a future, though fraught with possible conflict, which is worth waiting and hoping for, as Conoley’s formidable book reveals.

​

1  From Delmore Schwartz’s Summer Knowledge, “The World Was Warm and White When I Was Born."

​

2  From Kaveh Akbar’s Pilgrim Bell, “Ghazal For The Men I Once Was."

“An algorithm must be seen to be believed.”

–Donald Knuth

“The bottom line is that what you see is defined in large part by what you look for and expect to see.”

–Gregg Henriques

“Welcome to the world” our five-year old daughter would say, when our kitty cat puked on the living-room floor, or when a freight train stopped our sedan from coursing down the highway. She knew, early on, what it meant to hold the tension of opposites. When her little sister was born, she chose a Whoopee Cushion as her welcome present, saying (you guessed it) “Welcome to the world.” 

​

Zoë Hitzig’s Not Us Now welcomes us to a similar world of benevolent, if ominous, portent. Suffused with a Kindergartener’s wide-eyed wonder, although perched on the vertiginous path of the math of possibilities, Not Us Now proposes that life’s littlest pieces—from the mitochondria in our own bodies, to the microscopic insides of a computer’s diodes and solderings—these are the very things that add up to “Us.” That which is not us, however, is the heft of Hitzig’s disarming and formidable art, helping us descend into an algorithm of who we might yet become.

​

In the book’s foreword, Srikanth Reddy imagines Dante’s Divine Comedy as an epic algorithm, “a finite sequence of steps which, if followed correctly, might lead to the infinite.” Hitzig’s proposed sequences are indeed terrifyingly simple, like the guileless conjurings of a Miró painting, or the profound naïveté of a Gertrude Stein novel. But like a kaleidoscope’s swirling shards, the stained glass of Not Us Now will cut to pieces that which you may have regarded as believable. Section 1’s first poem, “Bounded Regret Algorithm,” states in its opening lines:

​

Mine is a life dedicated

to the calculation of loss.

I know with certainty

almost nothing. Yet here I am

executing legions

of decisions each moment.

​

This is the stuff of confessions, a commencement where the quality of mercy is not strained, although what follows is indeed gentle, albeit frighteningly so. Words, and symbols, drop from a heaven to which we’ll later succumb (in Section 3 of the book). But first, we must endure what it means:

​

To replace each arrival with

the nearest destination.

To keep you in what may

still be called breath.

​

as well as crossing that very modern desert, when our devices cannot connect to the internet, let alone to one another:

Then our coin machines

began to translate earth.

As if all our neighbors

unplugged at once.

A gangrene tonality. 

​

Hitzig forges on in this fiery place of all that we are not, its poems leading us to the City of Dys: “Technodysphoria,” (with “bodies soon / -to-be-blush / -ing embers of gestures,”) and “Technodysmorphia,” where “your index of memories obsolesced / heraldry shrunk to a point / classification codes dropped–.” She does not omit the phonic cousin of our Virgilian, algorithmic guide, “Dysrhythmia.” The lines Hitzig spray-paints on the walls of this new Dis (cf. the sixth circle of the Inferno) help us find the locus of our beliefs:

beyond the beyond-state

tremors the now swept

choreographed paths

and:

on the throat rendered

each gone heart

each pump slump hammer

finishing with:

the tangled vocals or

whatever murder chorus

sang that year

This is not the language of leisure or desire. Rather, in this parched place, we realize ourselves as unbelieving seers, “toxic molecules according / to principles invisible” welcomed to a world that is disintegrating. “Simplex Algorithm,” Section 1’s final poem, collects the language of this learning into a painful series of singular, monosyllabic line-sounds:

​

           am

             I

             the

             snake

             am

             I

             the

             bone

             neck

             lace

             can

             I

             air

             lift

             drop

             fruit

             from

             planes

             to

             save

             those

             rear

             of

             wall

​

Like Dante, we are welcomed into a new world. Section 2, its space “rear of wall,” qualifies as a place of purgatory. In this section’s eponymous poem, “Not Us Now,” we hear that:

             The family never thought

             it would be the last Christmas

             Eve dinner. By the gas

             fireplace. Drinking the after-

             dinner drinks. The sisters

             and the usual argument.

             The sweater and the talk

             of burning the sweater.

​

Stories of family-holiday purgatories are legion, and laughably relatable. Hitzig reminds us that “The shadows on the long- / dead willow have time” due to the collision of opposites found in such spectacularly quotidian places: conversational battles at the dinner table between Grandma and Dad; or that hush of the crowd before a pitcher’s ball, and its connection with the opposing bat. “So many seconds came up close / then far then close again” she continues, words for the way time folds in on itself during a car crash, when seconds masquerade as years. And now, bleary-eyed from the whack of things coming together in such strangely consensual violence, Section 2’s subsequent poem “// tablets of unknown origin / 응 now us not are we,” churns out the computational arrangements that exist in its five words:

​

we are not us now

we are not now us

we are us not now

we are us now not

we are now not us

​

continuing until all the possibilities are exhausted, and finishing with:

​

not us now +++ ++

​

Have I unwittingly made this review into my own algorithmic reality? Maybe. And perhaps that’s part of this book’s magic. By allowing something to happen, by inviting an algorithm to follow its inherent path, we play craps with reality. But Hitzig, ever the seer, offers us a pair of pink, fuzzy dice to hang from our rearview mirror. She places them there on purpose:

​

z* pounding at the ground

as if the ground couldn’t

be found. Like past. So many

miles of past. Now behind

z*. z* sees a shadow

jump-cut across an empty

swimming pool. Come in says

a voice come in into my shadow.

​

There is little profit to be had, pounding at the ground of the past. Except, perhaps, in attempting to understand from whence we’ve come. Not Us Now revels in the brilliant, if fearsome, possibilities of a world rife with chance and change. In the foreword to his book on the I Ching, Carl Jung wrote:

​

The psychophysical event includes the observer just as much as the reality underlying the I Ching comprises subjective, i.e., psychic conditions, in the totality of the momentary situation.

​

This, too, is the world of Not Us Now, fomenting what’s already feared in the modern mind; that hard-to-believe sense of being seen in our scrollings, our online purchases, and in our relational preferences, algorithms invading most of the minutes of our lives. But Hitzig offers a paradise for all these pieces, the book’s final section storming through fieldnotes and questions and scans of fragments, until we reach “Exit Museum,” a place of honorable outlet: 

​

wake – up – too – ea - rly

too   –  ea - rly  –  feel  –  sick

mom – and – dad – gone

took – the – dogs –

​

Finally, we are placed solidly in the body, its progenitor’s nowhere in sight (we have learned our own way in this new world), and the dogs have been taken somewhere out there because, at long last, an arrival has happened. In section 3’s final poem, “Fieldnotes,” we are re-minded (and I hyphenate that intentionally) that something no less that our entire consciousness has shifted, a veritable metanoia if you will:

…we are

the brief soak of silence

when the power lines

in a storm went down

the music stopped

and what of the sun

if the quiver-sharp

valley like a church

could hold its music

then would we still

unravel the fractal

wardens of will

then would we still

then would we still

then would we still

​

Immediately following, three, extra-large, emboldened hyphens fill the center of the page. Consider the Merriam-Webster definition of what it has meant to “be” one of those: 

In the early 20th century, the noun "hyphenate" referred to a resident or citizen of the U.S. whose recent foreign national origin caused others to question his or her patriotic loyalties - with or without there being just cause for that questioning.

Thus, my proposal, far reaching as it may sound: might the language of Not Us Now be our aforementioned ‘sequence of steps…leading to the infinite,’ an elegant algorithm of poems leading us to the timeless and emergent reality that no citizen of the world we’re in (no-bo-dy) is separate, or questionable, or hyphenate? That exclusion of any kind, anywhere, is not us now?

What a large way to see. What an unbelievable possibility to live toward. Perhaps Zoë Hitzig is welcoming us to a world that we have never seen before, inviting us to believe that everyone, everywhere, belongs—and is welcomed.

“Almost every religion’s history begins with one massive misperception; namely, making a fatal distinction between the sacred and the profane. Religions often put all their emphasis on creating sacred places, sacred time, and sacred actions. While I fully appreciate the need for this, it unfortunately leaves most of life ‘un-sacred.’”–Richard Rohr, OFM

Welcome to a temple that’s been pounded into its fucking place by Alex Dimitrov, stone upon stoned word. Ecstasy claims its space on behalf of the “...slightly lost but very forgivable / people like us.” And reader: that ‘us’ contains multitudes, as it were. The line to get inside this sacred structure is long and winding, but Dimitrov reminds us, in poem after poem, that we’re already there. How he re-minds us is part of his wickedly gifted prowess. As Henri Nouwen says, you don’t think your way into a new kind of living; you live your way into a new kind of thinking. Ecstasy offers a graduate-level course in metanoia, a wholly new kind of consciousness. The writer of this sacred text has taken great pains (aka ‘lived experience’) to open this temple’s doors, portals of entry into his mind, his body, and his throbbing, love-soused heart.

Profane: from classical Latin profanus, literally "before (outside) the temple.”  Prebendary that he intends to be, Dimitrov grounds us in the quotidian before taking us inside:

"Lunch is the saddest meal of the day

and October is beautiful.

It should come around twice.

But it doesn’t. Some things

are singular. I think of you always

even if people tell me you’re terrible."

And take us inside he does, as “Soul Fucking” continues:

"What do they know about

soul fucking anyway?

It’s sad how even sex

becomes eating an orange.

Exciting at first and then

juice. Only juice."

Dimitrov stays with the thing, and here’s its well-kept secret: that’s all there are; things, in their infinite variety.  But not, for Dimitrov at least, in the dismissiveness of detritus or refuse. There is no waste in this sacred economy, and Dimitrov doesn’t mess around, even if the exact opposite sounds steamily true:

"I only wanted the soul

and I’d soul fuck you

anywhere. Anyway.

I could watch you

peel an orange forever.

And right before death

we think of everything small."

Things ecstatic are things untethered, stuffs that do what they must need do, according to the demands of the day. “Monday” shows us how this can work:

"I was just beginning

to wonder about my own life

and now I have to return to it

regardless of the weather

or how close I am to love."

But even the ecstatic must return to themselves, to their ‘things,’ and one of Dimitrov’s things is whatever objet d’art happens to find itself within reach:

"We must pretend

there’s a blue painting

at the end of this poem.

And every time we look at it

we forget about ourselves.

And every time it looks at us

it forgives us for pain."

This is the definition of the coming and the going, the seeing and the being seen, that Ecstasy embodies. Consider, however, this locus of awareness, one day later, in “Tuesday:”

"I want to know you

like a dog touches the wind

with its tongue. I want to know

why time moves impossibly slow

when pain rises…."

Sex and sexiness run rampant through ecstasy, and through Ecstasy. After all, language itself is erotic, as Anne Carson reminds us in “Eros, the bittersweet:”

"If the presence or absence of literacy affects the way a person regards his own body, senses, and self, that effect will significantly influence erotic life. It is in the poetry of those who were first exposed to a written alphabet and the demands of literacy that we encounter deliberate meditation on the self, especially in the context of erotic desire."

The ubiquitous ache within Dimitrov’s words add up to the delicious tide of unfulfilled want, that thing not realized, made all the more powerful because of it. Carson continues:

"The singular intensity with which these poets insist on conceiving eros as lack may reflect, in some degree, that exposure."

Dimitrov drives this lack home, as he continues in “Tuesday,” exposing us to his own ultraviolet exposures of what it means to live in, and with, unrealized desire:

"and what makes [time]

speed up like two people

looking for each other

at the end of the night.

When was the last time someone

looked at you like a bridge

held by cold air?"

This closeness, though it may feel like a million-mile inch, also functions as a both-ness, an inclusive grace implicit in Dimitrov’s wide-open temple. Like a professor once told us, when studying the historical language for love used by the Greeks, as we tossed agape, and philia, and storge around the classroom, she said “For God’s sake, just get your eros right. Until you do, forget about that other stuff.”

Dimitrov gets his eros right. Rather, and perhaps more importantly, he lives it, an embodied building full of places and spaces that others can enter, as in “100%:”

"After years of being in love

with the wrong people

I’m still open like The Paris Theater"

Openness, too, is eros; availability and receptivity, in bed with the pain of what it means to traffic in such ‘gifts.’ Dimitrov takes his pain straight to the original source:

"Hello, God. What now?

Will I ever learn how to cook

and not use my oven for sweaters?

Will I stop expecting the French to love me!

Will I carry an umbrella on days

when it says 100% rain?

What is 100% exactly?

How could anyone be that certain?

Not even love feels that way…."

Ecstasy keeps posing the questions, queries that blink their weary eyes against themselves. “Who wants to be what they are?” Dimitrov asks in “Everything always.” The answer to that comes from within, as Ecstasy will demonstrate, reminiscent of St. Teresa of Avila’s The Interior Castle. Listen to Mirabai Starr’s introduction to her translation of the same:

"There is a secret place.  A radiant sanctuary. As real as your own kitchen. More real than that. Constructed of the purest elements. Overflowing with the ten-thousand beautiful things. Worlds within worlds. Forests, rivers. Velvet coverlets thrown over featherbeds, fountains bubbling beneath a canopy of stars. Beautiful forests, universal libraries. A wine cellar offering an intoxication so sweet you will never be sober again. A clarity so complete you will never again forget. This magnificent refuge is inside you. Enter."

Why is Alex Dimitrov an ascendantly popular poet? Because he functions as an entry point, inviting everyone in, often at the cost of his own body and person. Some of that cost comes from those who don’t want the invitation at all (cf. Luke 14:13-14, and note well who on this earth is responding to St. Alex’s invite). Some of it hails from the inherent sanctity of one born into a world where things poetic are things often violently rejected or dismissed. Thomas Merton, renegade Catholic priest and tireless worker for peace, wrote “For me to be a saint is to be myself.” Alex Dimitrov, for better or for worse, is doing the work of being himself, basking, and sometimes burning, in the beautifully dirty holiness of wholeness. Ecstasy, in all its steaming, sexy mess, serves us nothing less than the whole enchilada. Tuck your napkin in for some of the spicy, suffering-filled sauce we find in “Blond summer:”

"I was going to write you the most delicate letter

but when I came home I couldn’t tell what I was.

Oh God. Oh Jesus. Oh Mary.

What the fuck am I supposed to do with myself?"

Add that question to our growing list of the same, a catalog replete with the wild and sometimes woeful openings that Ecstasy offers:

"Blond Chris in the summer of 1999.

You were my God once

but you know I have always been stronger.

And you were my blood here on Earth

but all you did was piss on my fear."

This is Dimitrov finding his own perfection, growing large from having to live in small spaces, and echoing Oscar Wilde in De Profundis:

"But it is when he deals with a sinner that Christ is most romantic, in the sense of most real. The world had always loved the saint as being the nearest possible approach to the perfection of God. Christ, through some divine instinct in him, seems to have always loved the sinner as being the nearest possible approach to the perfection of man. His primary desire was not to reform people, any more than his primary desire was to relieve suffering."

Thus, this review is not a reclamation. Nor is it an attempt at any kind of redemption. Those are words exhausted from the history of who’s in, and who’s out. The temple that Alex Dimitrov has built in Ecstasy isn’t concerned with those details, minutiae that they are. The essentials of ecstasy, where the subject dissolves and/or merges into the object, is the reality of ex stasis, of the outside-itself, the inequilibrium (unequal libriums) that build unequaled libraries, where every shelf in every room of Ecstasy has a brass plaque screwed into it: Read What’s In Your Own Soul. Ecstasy is the story of someone who poses the same threat to poetry that any great spirit poses to the powers of his times. To this point, Emerson says it best, in Self-Reliance:

"Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost."

Dimitrov does this, speaking his latent convictions in poems that are universal in their sensibilities, as he writes in “Tripping in the USA,” precisely because his inmost:

"I don’t like anything

that prevents me from the interior.

All my life, all I’ve wanted

is to touch where that is."

has become the outmost:

"When everyone

in poetry gave me shit

though not much

has changed

but the fucks

I’ve run out of.

God bless that.

God’s nowhere."

Maybe God’s nowhere because Dimitrov has helped us see the holes in everything, in the everywhere-ness of the divine, all those sacred places where the chewed-up bodies of those who’ve lived to say “yes” (to a world obsessed with “no”) can safely go, can fully belong. Sounds an awful lot like holy communion to me. But if you’re still in doubt about St. Alex’s sanctity, read the final lines of Ecstasy. Beware, however: who you are means everything, when it comes to love. And love is just another word for God:

"If you forget

who you are

why you’re here

where you’ll go

what you’re doing.

I’m with you.

I’m with you.

I’m with you

Forever."

Dear Gramma,

How big is my brain?

Only asking because of the book you sent me for Valentine’s Day.

It’s weird.

Love,

Joey

P.S. What is a Billy Collins problem?

Dear Muffin-Pie Sweetie-Donut Candy Bar,

I know you hate when I call you that, but I think Kevin Killian would applaud—and you know how much I love to hear clapping, which is something that happens—a lot!—in the book I sent you. Now, my question for you, Joey: how many kinds of clapping are there? Some clapping isn’t pretty (and I hear Mr. Killian clapping against Amazon’s damnable river of goods and not-so-goods). Some clapping sounds from soggy hands (that might be the Billy Collins problem, my dear; those who’ve wept into the very mitts that helped them write in the first place. And here’s the fabulous Killian fairness: there are those who weep out of jealousy, and those who weep out of comparative despair [“How can he be a famous poet?!”]). Kevin doesn’t care. He just wants to get all the mojo out of the way so that he can say what he has to say. To quote Mr. K, but to flip the compliment back on him, “There will be few books in this decade with the éclat or the brilliance of [Selected Amazon Reviews]. [He’s] so good he doesn’t even have to try and yet [he] does, again and again.”

I wish our friend wasn’t quite as fair, however, to Ezra Pound. Ask me about that some other time.

Love,

Grandma

P.S. - I hope you will write something someday as sweet about me when I pass on, as Kevin did about Janet Leigh, in his review of Psycho (Collector’s Edition). Just don’t thank me for how well I’ve screamed. (That’s your mother’s fault, in any case.)

~

Dear Professor Stolz,

Are you proud of me? I read the indices first. (And I can spell that word, too. I repeat: are you proud of me?) Guess what book I’m talking about.

Here’s a hint, as well as a question for you: what do Alfred Hitchcock, Jack Spicer, and Andy Warhol have in common? (This is a test, prof. Your class review depends upon answering correctly.)

Your favorite student,

Joe

Dear Favorite Student,

F is for favorite, yes. It’s also for framed, which is what you’re doing to me, in making this threat. F is also the grade you’ll get if you don’t start showing up to class.

But my answer is 1, 2, 3, in the order of those you’ve mentioned. 21 references to Alfred Hitchcock, and 18 for Jack Spicer. Sliding into third place, (and I wish I could see his face, if he knew), 15 mentions of Andy Warhol, in the index of Kevin Killian’s magical monstrosity.

My question for you: why are these three winning the tally? I’ll answer: Killian is telling us all about himself. Hitchcock wins because Killian hides, just like Alfred did in every movie, an errant visitor in the background of his own films. Killian does the same, his deliciously opinionated person flagrantly hiding in every review, fabricating a fiction that turns ever truer because of his intent: to help you see the you to whom he speaks (which is absolutely every single one of us, thanks to Killian’s cosmic comedy of inclusion). Confused? Me, too. And that’s the methodology of Killian’s spear-point; rather, how Killian goes in for the kill. He stabs at that which moves. And at the risk of sounding like a Jesuit (Hopkins appears on p. 505, helping Killian make fun of Roethke. I’ll go to confession on his behalf), Killian slices open the intestines of his own movements and counter-movements, as if to augur who leads to whom in his pantheon of mentioned persons. Allen Ginsberg reading “Howl” is Killian’s method of getting to Jack Spicer, our second-place winner, who was among the first to hear Ginsberg read his masterpiece at the Six Gallery, which Spicer helped form. Andy Warhol’s estate auction is the opening (or Killian’s periaktoi, that theatrical “trick” of turning a scene, quite literally and physically, into another scene) whereby we learn about the late auctioneer Robert Wooley, whose “gaucheries and nonstop bitchiness” Killian says are forgivable, since we’re all bargain hunters in the end, and life’s best deals (which, Killian says, include his wife) are worth bragging about. If that chain of omnipresence doesn’t sound like air, or one’s heartbeat, or the goddamned reliability of the sun, then I don’t deserve to be your professor. Killian’s blessedly bloated tome maintains its constancy of Hitchcock-like appearances that ultimately say “Everything’s gonna be okay,” even in the midst of horror. Can you think of a better book to come out and into the world at a better time?

Best,

Prof. Stolz

P.S. - You didn’t mention Barbra Streisand, whose lowly tally of two mentions in this seven-hundred-page book deserves at least a raised eyebrow, for reasons we can discuss at your leisure. Though perhaps it has to do with Streisand’s face, as Killian writes in his review of Meet the Fockers: “Whoever did Streisand’s makeup should be taken out to the Everglades and shot like a croc.”  See you in class…or else.

~

Dear M,

The secret’s out: there is no backstage, according to Killian. Well, according to his apt eye, whereby what happens behind the tormentors (did you know those curtains onstage are called that?) of history can’t truly hide anything other than who the next actor will be to step into the story of humankind.

By the way, what is the story behind the burn in Leonard Bernstein?  Asking for a friend.

love,

J

Dear J,

Everything belongs, baby, as the mystics are wont to say, or as Kevin lives, and I do mean that. His reviews don’t just talk the talk; they walk it, too. He, too, knew what it meant to spend his life with an exasperating genius (like Charlie Harmon did, writing about his years as Bernstein’s assistant, in On the Road and off the Record with Leonard Bernstein), because Killian was an exasperating genius, albeit a beloved and regarded savant of the almost unsayable (cf. the book’s astonishing “Afterword” by Dodie Bellamy which includes T.S. Eliot’s “These fragments I have shored against my ruins” as evidence against those who’d speak garbage about the powerful poetry inherent in Killian’s reviews). Killian masterfully cuts through the crap: “One chapter of this is fun,” he writes of Harmon’s book about being Lenny’s right-hand man, “but at length it grows tedious and one longs for Bernstein and his complicated crew to get rid of the sad sack.” This is part of Killian’s quest, to unmask what’s messy, and bless it with an hilarious honesty, all while using that lowly contraption provided by one of the most capitalistic monopolies to have existed in the history of humankind: a written, five—or less!—star review. Killian revels in unpacking stories that have been disallowed by the corporate monster. “Just when it looked like [E.M.] Forster would die a virgin, he went to Egypt and met Cavafy and some sparks flew between them,” he writes in “The Man Who Wrote ‘Only connect!’ and the Connections He Made in Underground Gay Life,” his review of Wendy Moffat’s A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E.M. Forster. Killian’s review titles alone could form a poem all their own: “It Was Like My Brain Died and Went to Heaven” reviews Jennifer Packard’s A Taste of Broadway; Food in Musical Theater. Or for the Bernstein book, “Four Years of Hell, and Some Fun Added.” But Killian’s confession best describes the fire within that led him to do what he did: “The obvious philosophical problem is that I was [writing these reviews] without being paid, in the service of a huge multinational corporation that was killing bookstores and perhaps writing itself. But some defended me and said ‘He’s torquing the system from within; they’re not actually reviews, they’re poems,’ so it was a poetic project.”

Who says poetry can’t change the world, J?

Your friend in ripening and in the rhyming wildness of time,

-M

P.S. - Killian writes, in his review of Emily Curry Hitchingham’s All Men Scrapbook Pages: Inventive Ideas for Masculine Layouts that he’s “written many books, but never one as important as The Kevin Killian Scrapbook of Being a Man.” Bet he didn’t know he was prophesying the appearance of the book you’re holding in your hands right now, one born out of a monopolizing machine that ate up brick and mortar stores, but which has become a scrapbook all its own, putting other scrapbooks to glorious, giddy shame.