ReviewsF03

Iron Horse Literary Review

Fall 2003 Book Reviews

Against Consolation
Robert Cording. Fort Lee, NJ: CavanKerry Press, 2003. $14.00 (paper)

One of the qualities that impresses me most about Robert Cording's Against Consolation is that each poem maintains its focus on a single story or scene, a solitary truth, yet each poem fits snugly with every other poem: the book becomes not simply a scattering of poems but a cohesive whole whose message arcs from the first line of the first poem to the last line f the last poem. In the first poem, "Mappings," the reader learns that one's dreams are not necessarily made manifest. . .

The Body Artist

Don DeLillo. New York: Scribner's, 2001. $12.00 (paper)

Don DeLillo's The Body Artist is the story of Lauren Hartke and her coming to awareness about how time shapes life. In a way, The Body Artist is both a narrative about Lauren as she grieves the death of her husband and about time as a narrative, the narrative of life. The story begins, "Time seems to pass. The world happens, unrolling into moments, and you stop to glance at a spider pressed to its web." DeLillo opens several chapters in the novel with brief moments written in the second person. These instants, these "unrolling" moments, perhaps part. . .

Behind Our Memories

Michael Hettich. Easthampton, MD: Adastra, 2003. $10.00 (paper)

. . .While many of the poems deal with his family, his wife and daughter, Hettich's romanticism pours onto the page with his use of nature as another constant variable from his past. His connection between the movement of nature and the continual movement of our lives stays with the reader long after the book has been put down. his images are universal, but personal: holding hands with his wife next to a river, comparing the flow of blood to marriage, and the stark reality he creates in "Cello Music" when random nighttime creatures "crawl across. . .

Hungry Ghost: A Novel

Keith Kachtick. New York: HarperCollins, 2003. $17.47 (cloth)

What immediately drew me to Hungry Ghost is Keith Kachtick's use of second-person narration. It is a very difficult viewpoint to sustain, yet Kachtick makes it work brilliantly. As Carter Cox struggles (often bungles) toward his Buddha Nature or higher Self, the second-person narrative makes the reader a fundamental part of that struggle by placing the reader in Carter's position. When Carter muses on the reasons for coming to the Woodstock retreat, the second-person perspective implicates the reader as well: "If for no other reason, you're here. . .

Inventory at the All-Night Drugstore

Erika Meitner. Tallahassee, FL: Anhinga, 2003. $12.00 (paper)

Erika Meitner is as urban as can be. Titles such as "All the Pools in Queens," "Gateway Drug," "DWI," "Latex Empire," and "Metrocard" reveal a life lived within the city. Allen Ginsberg would have approved of Meitner's seedy settings replete with condoms and their wrappers, tattoo artists, beer cans, "magazine pages and mirrors, straight-edge skaters, / drama queens, hair gods and punk princesses / smoking in the back row" ("Gateway Drug"). Her invocations give her away. . .

News About People You Know: Stories

Robert Phillips. Huntsville, TX: Texas Review Press, 2002. $18.95 (cloth)

News About People You Know is a collection of stories loosely organized around Fallick, a familiar character to readers of Phillips's other fiction, and a thematic interest in ironically embarrassing situations. Fallick appears in about a third of the stories, struggling with issues of identity (of which his name seems suggestive). These stories involve his wife's false confession of adultery, his father's death, and Fallick's experiences with a group of hippies. The other stories have. . .

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Against Consolation

The Body Artist

Behind Our Memories

Hungry Ghost

Inventory at the All-Night Drugstore

News About People You Know: Stories

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