Dec 31

Review by Alan Catlin: Born on Good Friday by Nathan Graziano


Nathan Graziano, Born on Good Friday, Roadside Press, available at www.magicaljeep.com 2023, 80 pages, $15

I was reading the recent anthology from Nerve Cowboy: Selected Works 1996-2004 ( a best of the early years of long running print poetry zine) that featured four poems of Graziano’s from that era, reminding me how long I had been reading work by this poet. Besides feeling old, the realization, re-enforced by the tone of his new collection, is that Graziano is now middle aged, settled and maybe not “still crazy after all these years” but still alive (as the peasant says in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, “I’m not dead yet.”) Which probably says a lot about me as well as an officially, much older than Graziano, well settled poet.

The Nerve Cowboy poems are signature Graziano poems that were the hallmark of his early work: lots of lost nights and down days after, the kind of Carveresque dissipation and hooking up that made his novel, not long out of print ( yes, I still have my copy) Frostbite, memorable. Some of the poems in Born on Good Friday reflect a looking back ruefully and wondering, “Why the hell did I do these things to myself. And how did I survive.” Been there and done that. Throughout his many collections of writing, Graziano has maintained a tone of engaged in this life style but not taking myself all that seriously. He always seems to successfully strive for, and find, the humor in the most outrageous and ridiculous things that he does. The key point is he knows they are ridiculous while so many adult children don’t.

Born on Good Friday is roughly chronological beginning with his upbringing in a traditional American Catholic family proceeding to a rejection of his upbringing and later antics of a young and not so young, adult. Like many of us who lived through an engagement with Sister Harridan of the Tricornered ruler with the wrath of God on her side, much of the education and indoctrination didn’t take root except to reject the tenets brought up in the faith. I guess I was reminded of the old cliché last told to me by a very Irish Colleen, “You can take the catholic out the church but you can’t take the church out of the catholic.” Proving her point, The same young lady was married in a church and she hoped, maybe even prayed fervently, that we would all survive the service without being struck by lightning from above given her wanton ways as a young adult. We did.

Graziano seems to prove his point that mellowing does not necessarily mean giving up or sinking into a near comatose middle age in front of a TV with packs of Marlboro Lights and cans of Budweiser mindlessly watching what passes for a sporting event on 24/7 sports TV. Not that he doesn’t like sports, he is a fervent Red Sox fan, but there are other things in life. Other things like loving his wife and children, writing clean well narrative poems, some recalling his crazy days and lonesome nights, and more contemporary ones; still rueful after all these years.

—Alan Catlin, author of Bar Guide for the Seriously Deranged

review first published in misfitmagazine.net, Issue No. 37, Winter 2024

Dec 20

Review by J. Nishida: And Blackberries Grew Wild by Susan Ward Mickelberry

Susan Ward Mickelberry’s poetry presents a “microcosm of body”—an intimacy of sensory experience found in whippoorwills and windows, fish bones and raspberries, mosquitos and moss, blood and thorns, a standard sink, a red tricycle. But this intimacy of detail, along with gentle rhythms of Mickelberry’s narrative voice, cannot distract from the sheer breadth of content carried in the poetry.  Reading her poems is like stepping into gentle waves of one of the beaches she writes about—the crispness of the water and sand and other minute sensations is vividly alive within the context of the vastness of the ocean itself. This collection moves from Apopka to Asmara, Muskogee to the Bahamas, the Ozark hills to Azores, exploring themes of “Everything”—love, sex, fragility, loss, abuse, revelation, consciousness, voice. And Blackberries Grew Wild offers us the unpretentious but rich and evocative life experiences of a deeply honest, thoughtful poet.
—J. Nishida, Poetry Editor of Bacopa Literary Review 2024

Dec 18

Review by Michael Hollywood: Street Corner Spirits by Westley Heine

One gloomy spring afternoon at the age of 13 I was feeling bored and restless, sitting at home roiling in adolescent malcontent, when I happened to pick up my brother’s copy of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island Of The Mind.

I was instantly transfixed by the playfulness and whimsy combined with hard bitten cynicism. Here was something that spoke directly to my reality. Not some flowery rhyming bullshit designed to soothe aching hearts, but something more like the punk rock that was starting to impinge on the fringes of my awareness. This was some freaking TRUTH!

Suddenly, poetry and literature went from something old dead people did to something I could and (more importantly) would want to do. It led to some other discoveries, and soon I was hip to an entire segment of counterculture that had previously evaded me.

I get that same vibe from my friend Westley Heine’s recent poetry volume, Street Corner Spirits. It’s been taking me a long time to get through it; partly because I’m savoring the poems inside like tasty razor-infused bon bons, partly because every third one or so just blows me away to the point I have to lay the book down and contemplate it for a week or two.

Wes comes out swinging against the hypocrisy of American Society and the vicissitudes of life with gusto, but also has the courage to point his razor sharp perceptiveness at his own faults and shortcomings; making for some intense episodes of what 12 Step Programs call a “Relentless Moral Inventory.” Serious art that’s also wryly amusing and entertaining as hell.

Someday, somewhere; some angry scared kid shall come across a copy of Westley’s book on an angst-laden afternoon and be stunned and transformed by it the same way that Ferlinghetti led me down the rabbit hole into counter-culture in its purest form.

If you know any talented but malcontent teens (or malcontent adults for that matter) in need of inspiration, you would be doing them a huge favor by giving them a copy of Street Corner Spirits.

—Michael Hollywood

Dec 10

Review by E. Lynn Alexander: They Said I Wasn’t College Material by Scot Young

“They Said I Wasn’t College Material by Scot Young is a collection that spans time and circumstances, by a poet willing to resurrect the sting of assumptions and expectations to turn the lens in the other direction. He challenges social gatekeeping, and the classist label culture that nurtures the privileged and pushes the rest of us toward their service. He understands what feeds self doubt and steers destiny away from us, and he goes after the source.

His poems celebrate the capacity to experience and feel honestly, when that is often suppressed: “when young boys cried/wiped tears before dads could see.” These poems convey love, nostalgia, hope, fear, anxiety, and more in connection with identity in a body of work that speaks to peeling back those expectations. Authenticity and humility draw people to connect with his poetry, and this is what he is after: “I only strive/to put one word in front of the other/ and hold it there long enough/ for it to matter/ to somebody.” It matters to us, for sure.

Young knows that crushing aspiration and potential crushes people, particularly at times when we have every right to see a future that is ours to shape. For those of us lucky to know Scot Young, we know that this is his cause- to remind us all of that most fundamental right. He shares what he has learned about the breakers and the broken, and he rejects the perpetuation of that power. Besides, there is dignity in choosing our own damage: “even bluebirds/ that are set free/ fly into windows.”

This is not the same as holding up the glass.”

—E. Lynn Alexander, Co-Founder and editor of Collapse Press

 

Reserve your SIGNED copy at https://www.magicaljeep.com/product/college/154

Oct 20

Local author Dan Denton chronicles blue collar living in new novel


BY JASON WEBBER/THE BLADE

Dan Denton does not imbibe alcohol.

Seated at a table in The Attic, Denton, sips Red Bull and cranberry juice, a far cry from the beer swilling protagonist of his new novel The Dead and the Desperate, which was just published by local imprint Roadside Press.

On Saturday at 2:30 p.m., Denton will give a reading from The Dead and the Desperate and be interviewed by Professor Kathe Devault of Ohio Northern University at Gathering Volumes, 196 E South Boundary St. in Perrysburg.

At 45, Denton has lived a life of great highs and crushing lows… READ THE FULL ARTICLE AT THE BLADE https://www.toledoblade.com/a-e/culture/2023/10/20/local-author-dan-denton-chronicles-blue-collar-living-in-new-novel/stories/20231020006

Oct 17

Review by David Alec Knight: The Dead and the Desperate by Dan Denton

If you have liked Dan Denton’s poetry, or if you liked his first novel, you know what you’re in for. And guess what? There’s even more now: he has grown much as a writer since, and this novel is even more important.

You might think, as you begin to read Dan Denton’s THE DEAD AND THE DESPERATE, that it’s going to be some blend of Charles Bukowski’s WOMEN and POST OFFICE, just set in a factory, and if so, you would be wrong — stick with it: he has his own voice and it asserts itself more and more as you read. Fans of such novels of Bukowski will find much to like here, sure, but there’s not much more of a Bukowski influence really than on any other American indie / small press novelist writing for, and of, the working-class, the middle-class, the blue-collar, the bottom classes, the backbone of the real America.

Denton’s writing is honest, raw, unfiltered — it’s an authentic voice, much like a documentary before it’s cut down to an 80-90 minute run-time so theaters can show the maximum number of showings per evening for maximizing their profits. There’s nothing on the cutting room floor here, so to speak. There is nothing that Denton leaves out in the depiction of his main character’s life — the drug addictions, alcoholism, the aimlessness, mental health struggles, a humor prone to ill timed sarcasm, and the sincere but hindered idealism.

He is honest with himself, and knows what he is, and what he could be. But this is far from a trauma dump: this character knows what has caused his life to be what it is. He knows what he has done to make it this way. And he is well aware of what others have done to make his life as it is, and the lives of his co-workers, and his blue collar brethren and sistren across America — it’s those powers who were, and those in power now, perpetuating a cold opportunistic machine that has been woven into the fabric of his nation.

He is aware of his place in the Machiavellian and Malthusian manipulations in the decades that preceded him, and the long half-life of Reaganomics. And equally aware of the falsity of the wars against alcohol and drugs, and in that the warring on marginalized peoples, and ‘bottom’ classes to do so, all while labyrinthine corporate institutions have been treating generations of workers so harshly no one can function for long without some kind of self-medication — ‘mother’s little helper’, soft drugs, hard drugs, alcohol, gambling, religion as opiate, whatever it takes to keep their cog turning in the machinations of the machine.

One of the strongest and most important exploration’s in Denton’s story is how the dehumanizing nature of the only work he feels suited for, in turn affects the worker when he gets home. Work directly affects home life and relationships more than anything else he’s dealing with (or not dealing with).

An unexpected pregnancy leads to an attempt to create a relationship with no real foundation, and a marriage with a lot going against it only weeks in. He does the things he feels he has to, and work as hard as he may, they always seem to be weeks behind the bills. He has mental health issues and addictions, and there are many interesting characters around him that feed into his addictive nature, because of course they have people in their lives that do same. Oppressive economic and social factors play their part too. Trips to a used bookstore provide a reprieve from a lot that goes wrong.

While his character isn’t in the best state to be in a relationship, what with addictions and mental health issues, and a marriage that neither he nor his wife were really ready for, Denton’s story very clearly shows how there are many negative external forces that come to bear on relationships. Dehumanizing work makes for dehumanized workers. Denton’s character knows this in his heart and mind and struggles to fight it on both fronts. Others around him fight it too, but many don’t. His in-laws seem to have bought into it and want him to sell his soul to it and be a good boy.

His is a life that many live, and is rarely represented, never made into made for-TV movies of the week back in the day, and never likely to be made into a reality show now, and rarely a docu-series. An entire class of people actively struggle day in day out, without their everyday reality known. Well, Denton’s book is part of that much needed reality check. And everybody deserves to know. Everybody needs a voice and THE DEAD AND THE DESPERATE is a part of that which gives voice.

Dan Denton’s THE DEAD AND THE DESPERATE could well do for factory work what Upton Sinclair’s THE JUNGLE did for the meat industry. If people read the book they will wake up. If they wake up they have the opportunity to do something. THE DEAD AND THE DESPERATE presents harsh truths that should not and can not be ignored. Changes can be made with enough will. We have to ask ourselves if we want to live, or to merely exist.

David Alec Knight is the author of Leper Mosh (Cajun Mutt Press)

Oct 10

Review by Westley Heine: The Dead and the Desperate by Dan Denton

The Beats and later Charles Bukoswki cleared the way for the working class poet, the outlaw writer, and the mental outsider to enter literature. After Buk died in 1994 no one has really replaced his mantle. In the vacuum has swelled a generation of writers who seem to think if they get drunk and write about pussy they are following the tradition. They are wrong. They are missing the point. Dan Denton may be one of the only novelists and poets out there today who can legitimately claim to be a 21rst Century Bukowski, but one with a political consciousness and a more enlightened understanding of the battle of the sexes. Some may say his never explicitly naming using his baby-mamma throughout his new novel is cold, referring to her as “My pregnant girlfriend” etc, but I would argue he is dutifully protecting her anonymity. On the flip side he doesn’t shield himself at all, but exposes himself to the light without wearing protection. He shares the truth. He shares the needle. He writes from the frontlines. He writes from factories, dive bars, cheap housing, the opioid epidemic, from Midwestern places where right-wing values and union concerns are purposely pitted against each other. It’s a lonely thing to be both streetwise and an intellectual in America. But we are less lonely with Mr. Denton. It begs the question: What are people afraid of? The truth?

Unlike others influenced by the gritty realism of Bukowski or the Beats, Dan knows when writing a good story it’s all about dynamics. A tender little voice for 400 hundred pages doesn’t mean much. A tough guy voice for 400 pages doesn’t mean a damn thing. But when a tough voice pauses, breaks down, and suddenly opens up now you know you are hearing the real deal. It’s like a Humprey Bogart film when he goes from “I stick my neck out for nobody” to doing the right thing at the end. It’s like Lou Reed singing “Heroin” and then suddenly hitting you with “Pale Blue Eyes.” We’re all complicated. We all have both sides. Dan Denton understands the meaning of Bukowski’s “Blue Bird.” The drama lies in first describing your mental armor, and only then cracking it open and letting the world see the light inside. The factory workers, the immigrants, the gay kids trapped in small minded towns, the prostitutes molested as children, from those clinging to religious values desperately to make sense of the world or to those hopelessly clinging to drugs to keep going… I know these characters. Perhaps Dan has gotten to know them more intimately. When one of the characters, Joe, a father who just lost his little girl to cancer, turns to the needle for salvation we don’t judge him. In fact, we understand. Yes Buk, it’s the information age. How can one help but be more and more empathetic? We can all hope our hearts will continue to bloom wide as history cascades forward. Congratulations Dan, you’re leading the picket line.

Oct 05

Review by Susan Ward Mickelberry: Nothing and Too Much to Talk About by Nancy Patrice Davenport

I read this poem “After a Miracle” and a few others this week at Poetry Jam at the Civic Media Center from Nothing And Too Much To Talk About by Nancy Patrice Davenport, published by Roadside Press / Michele McDannold

As I began to read the poems I was initially delighted, then excited. I really related to this poet, as often happens I believe when you are reading something really honest, refreshing, intelligent, and good. Most of the poems are about loss, love, and the poet’s own struggle to survive and thrive all treated as the “extraordinary ordinary.” And they vibrate with presence, quietude, and long reflection. Also, powerful, beautiful images. And words so spare that hold so much. How spare can you get? All poems written from an author with a pleasing combination of elegant mindfulness, Virgo groundedness, and scholarly underpinnings. A perfect combination for some really great poetry.

AFTER A MIRACLE

the ordinary is too
beautiful to bear

honeysuckle, blades of grass                     that thrive
in pavement cracks

the dead begin to rise

a while after the miracle
things begin

to seem ordinary
all over again

but satisfaction, a job well done                     things

the dead are laid to rest
years after the miracle

some attempts are made           to fall again
merely so

the ordinary seems
less so

gratitude           faith           say goodbye

and the ghosts rise
as life changes

forever while we
sit down for

dinner

purchase NOTHING AND TOO MUCH TO TALK ABOUT here>> https://www.amazon.com/Nothing-Too-Much-Talk-About/dp/B0C7JJB6H2

Sep 25

Review by Independent Book Review: The Dead and the Desperate by Dan Denton

The Dead and the Desperate
By Dan Denton
Genre: Literary Fiction
Reviewed by Maxwell Gillmer, Independent Book Review

Beautifully written and utterly raw—a
harrowing look at the life of an American
factory worker

There is no title more fitting for Dan Denton’s third book than The Dead and the Desperate. The story is borne of these two elements: those dead of this world, (one figure) and those desperate who are stuck living (the other). However, these two paradigmatic figures are by no means a simplistic demonstration of a forthcoming plot; they rather incite an explosion of realism and humanity that examines the struggles that come with American late-stage capitalism. These figures operate much like shepherds, always a step ahead of the sentence, casting a shadow over the world of the narrative.

The Dead and the Desperate calls into question the function of the novel’s title and how it, in an abrupt vision, can initiate a story, much like a portal into another space and time coerced by capitalism and plagued with struggling. Though, what summary is there to give for a story in which a person struggles in their entirety? What plot is there of a beginning, a middle, and an end when the story existed before the first page
and continues beyond the last? What Denton offers is the life of the novel’s unnamed narrator—a factory worker. It doesn’t matter what kind of worker, it doesn’t matter what kind of factory; in this universe, reflective of our own, people appear trapped.

The story begins with Ohio, a place to which the narrator said he would never move again after leaving behind lives of divorce, rehab, jail, and homelessness, and yet somehow, he finds himself sucked back after getting a woman pregnant. He does what he is told is right: marry her, get a job at a local factory, support the kid, have another. But for the narrator, living day to day by way of onerous “factory math” where a 12-
hour shift feels like 18 hours of labor, what is deemed “right” never seems to pay off. The narrator falls back into a cycle of misery. This marriage looks like it’s headed toward divorce; those misdemeanor charges are piling up; he can’t pay his utility bills and his rent is coming up next, and on top of all of this, he has to work another 12-hour shift at the factory. No matter what he does, he can’t seem to escape. As a result,
he’s drained of life itself. He seems stuck on a track ending at the bar after his shift ends, throwing back dollar beers and two-dollar shots that feed a fire in his body. He returns home drunken and enflamed and fights with his wife. Slowly the narrator finds his life unwoven, thread by thread.

The Dead and the Desperate is a heartbreaking story of the tragedies of life defined by late-stage capitalism filled with potent imagery and written with tear-jerkingly beautiful prose. The narrator admits he is the ideal American factory worker, saying “I’m a college dropout with a high school diploma. I don’t have any skilled trades licenses, or technical training. I’m smart, and don’t mind working hard hours and long hours. I’ve worked in almost all the kinds of plants and factories you’ll find in the Midwest, and I’ve ran almost all the kinds of machines they have in those factories.” He can do anything, and he will do anything because he has to. Under American capitalism, it doesn’t matter who you are or where you are; all that matters is what you are. And he is defined.

But what the book’s specters, the dead and the desperate, see, the narrator cannot. He grasps for rationales to understand why his life and the lives around him are crumbling under the weight of long hours, heavy machinery, drugs, and alcohol. He intermittently traces American histories of mental health care, wage gaps, divorce rates, and alcoholism and drug use in search of an explanation. The book is a flurry of topical substance that the narrator uses as tools to analyze how and why life around him could be so agonizing, but The Dead and the Desperate is not a polemic in its form.

Susan Sontag offers a distinction of narrative argument as either proof or analysis in her essay “Godard’s Vivre Sa Vie.” Sontag defines proof as a narrative in which something happens in its entirety—a demonstration of events as a result of given precipitants—while analysis is a narrative that seeks “further angles of understanding, new realms of causality,” and is, as a result, “always incomplete” to explain how and
why. Sontag argues that art trends toward proof rather than analysis, but Denton’s The Dead and the Desperate reflects the existence of both within a story of an individual and one’s tendency to seek a greater truth.

The novel as an argumentative tool of analysis, especially when dealing with an intimate relationship of a first-person narrator, runs the risk of pathologizing inexcusable behavior (racism, homophobia, sexism, etc.). When behaviors are depicted as pathologies, the perpetrators of these behaviors may place the onus of
their actions onto the source of the affliction rather than themselves. What makes The Dead and the Desperate powerful is that its offered analysis extends beyond the system that governs the individual and includes the individual within self-governance.

The book does not seek to absolve him of his sins and neither does he. People throughout the novel call the narrator a scum bag, and he never denies it. But the entire scope of the characters and the universe in which they operate must be known in its entirety to demonstrate a story beyond one single character and offer humanity to those who even do him harm just as he does harm to others.

This process of broken analysis is constant throughout the book. Just as the narrator is about to complete a singular path of analysis that would remove his culpability and place blame on the system of capitalism, the narrator steps back. In one instance, he admits, “I have done things in life that have hurt others, and I have had hurts done to me. None of that serves as an excuse.” Rather than an excuse, the narrator implicates himself, demonstrating that he can simultaneously be a person with an unchecked bipolar diagnosis and an addiction to drugs and alcohol with no support system, while also including him as a part of this world that oppresses other people, namely women in this story.

The Dead and the Desperate is a challenge—it is a hypermasculine narrative looking intimately into the psyche of a character who abuses women both emotionally and physically. However, in its refusal to take the final step in pathologizing the narrator’s behavior as something outside of his control, it shifts to a narrative of proof that stands on its own. There is no justification in this shift because justification would be beside the point. It offers a look into the mind of someone who has been scarred—someone who does scar.

Denton tempers the urge to fall too far into portraying his characters as strictly victims by redirecting the narrator’s voice away from melodrama, saving the narrative from becoming self-pitying in its depiction of hardships, and replaces it with a detached narrative style. The style permits the reader to see but never truly hear what is going on, such as when fighting with his wife. In these instances, spoken words are given
with little direction on how the reader should feel. But is this formal distance a prescription of impersonality or a degree of intimacy? It is a trick that encourages empathy—the reader is only given so much, and not because the narrator is withholding, but because the narrator is unable to give. The reader must cast aside any predilections and instead observe the situation as an invited participant.

The reader doesn’t have to know entirely why the narrator acts in the way that he does because the narrator cannot. Denton arranges an observation of what the narrator, much like the other characters in the book, is left with: moments of pain and moments at which the pain can be assuaged. The narrative is a reflection of this human tendency to reach for analysis, though ultimately being left in a position of observance. The novel is humble in this sense that it does not try to complete the interminable search however interminable in its struggle.

But there is a profound exhaustion that courses throughout this book at the expense of this search and struggle. The mind can just barely comprehend the suffering it endures, and when faced with the need to escape, the people of the story turn to the carnal: sex and drugs. On a sex- and drug-fueled bender, the narrator writes, “It felt good to not feel anything. To not feel the factory aches in my knees and shoulders
and hands. To not think about dead kids and kids you haven’t seen. To not think about how you’re gonna make the rent next week, or whether you were gonna go to jail at next month’s court date.” The narrator in searching high and low for moments of feeling tries his hand at different approaches to finding peace in his life, however fleeting, as if life, itself, is a partner whom he must understand.

The Dead and The Desperate in this sense is something like a Danse Macabre, twofold in its imagery. The first being that image of the title—the specters of the dead and the desperate moving together—and the second being the narrator and his life.

When one seeks to dance with a partner, one must know that partner’s footing. The specters of the dead and the desperate dance with each other just steps before the narrator. The desperate appears to struggle with its partner, death, and the narrator observes. He watches what the others do, attempting to trace why—what of this cruel world allows children to die and leaves so many others in agony—but while turned, he finds himself placed in the throes of his own missteps in the dance with his life.

The title, in this sense, does not just offer elements that act as the catalyst, but instead, it pulls the characters through in a duality of being: death and life; struggling and surviving. Only when the narrator can turn back and face his life as it stands before him can he find his footing.

The Dead and the Desperate is a massive undertaking of American life and struggle. Denton doesn’t bite off more than he can chew. He nibbles. He gives just as little as the narrator is given. Life, after all, is not all-encompassing, and only a small few are given it in its entirety. The Dead and the Desperate is one in one thousand. It observes the destruction of the American Dream and the American Life, and it offers a look into
an individual’s tendency to make sense of it all.

 

The Dead and the Desperate is available for pre-order at magicaljeep.com and will soon be available online wherever books are sold.

Sep 11

Review by Scot D. Young: Born on Good Friday by Nathan Graziano

In Nathan Graziano’s latest book, Born on Good Friday from Roadside Press, the poet tells the story of a good Catholic boy’s coming of age that develops into a 40 year story that most of us can relate to. He checks all the boxes growing up and eventually leaves the confessional behind. Graziano’s book reads like a good novel enticing the reader to keep turning the page. It is a poetic memoir from childhood through middle age. Toward the end of the book in the poem “The Old Zip” when he and his friend are playing catch in the backyard and he decides to throw some heat, he realizes he still has it and although drinking wine their wives decide they still love them. I typically don’t do reviews as it isn’t my strong suit but I can recommend this one as a must have even if you don’t like poetry.—Scot D. Young, author of All Around Cowboy and editor at the Rusty Truck

 

 

BORN ON GOOD FRIDAY is available at the Magical Jeep https://www.magicaljeep.com/product/friday/146 or at online retailers everywhere.