Your Own Back Yard – Michael Gillan Maxwell – Page 4 – Visual Art – Creative Writing

From North Beach

Like Quicksand

We walk the streets of North Beach
follow the footsteps of Ferlinghetti
and the ghosts of Ginsberg and Kerouac.
In Washington Square Park,
under St. Peter and Paul’s twin spires,
an old hippie sits on a bench,
finger picks a vintage Epiphone guitar.

Next to him, another man
stares off into space,
cradles his mandolin, listens.
Joe Dimaggio marries Marilyn Monroe
in that church, she lifts her veil,
steals a kiss on the granite steps;
here in Joe’s home town.

Italian restaurants and coal fired pizza,
storied nightclubs and tattoo parlors,
psychic readers, butchers, bakers
and kite makers.
The City Lights Bookstore
stands like a shrine, a beacon.
Ground zero for a revolution.

A man lies fast asleep on the ground, under
a sparkling, golden sky and a pile of clothes
in the middle of the afternoon.
Some changes happen before we notice,
others sneak by under our noses,
but Time, a slow train runnin’
creeps up like quicksand.

October 26, 2015 0

Guest Book Review: Carol Reid Reviews Audrey by Beate Sigriddaughter

I am very honored to feature Carol Reid’s incisive review of Audrey by Beate Sigriddaughter. Welcome to Your Own Backyard!

Audrey by Beate Sigriddaughter

ELJ Publications 2015

Fiction: 316 pages

Reviewed by Carol Reid

Audrey is the work of a kaleidoscopic mind; every emotion and interaction is broken down, assembled and reassembled as its narrator chronicles four seasons of an almost unendurable love.

Set in 1980 amid a loosely knit community of writers and artists, the narrative relates in minute detail the all-consuming relationship between the young poet Andrea and Audrey, a painter and self-professed healer more than twenty years her senior.

To Andrea, nothing is trivial. Her fervent wish is to live an exalted life in which she is part goddess and part angel, with time and opportunity to produce poetry and magic. Employment and men encroach regularly on her precious time. She attracts and enchants many male lovers, and loves them because, “if there is sex, there must be love”.

Enter Audrey,

She came with a painted dragon and cinnamon hearts for Valentine’s. Her name was Audrey and I am hard pressed to remember what anyone else brought to the party.

Dragons are diverse in mythology. In this novel they are presented as a sort of spirit animal connected with Audrey, but which variety– malevolent or wise, fire-breathing or powerfully protective?

Their first important conversation is generated by the painting of “Serena”, described by Andrea as having “a timid fawn-like nose and forceful amber eyes”.

“I’m so glad you like Serena,” [Audrey] said, “some people are afraid of her.”

Before Andrea can devote herself fully to Audrey, she needs to close the door on her relationship with Joel, whose gentleness, wisdom and acceptance of Andrea linger at a distance throughout the story.

This scene takes place during a rafting trip after which Andrea intends to end the affair-

The raft hurled headlong into waves, stood almost upright, despite our forward weight. Then we were flat on the water again, rocking through turbulence. We were drenched with ice-cold water. But the sun was warm and there was hardly any wind to chill us.

I leaned back and shook water from my hair, my poncho. I watched Joel. He was still concentrating. His arms pressed into the oars. His eyes were filled with love and reverence for the water, full of attention….if it were possible for me to love a man, I would have loved him. But I no longer believed I could.

Audrey is in some ways a gender-free novel. Traditionally masculine and feminine traits are exhibited by both male and female characters. Andrea’s gender struck me as not yet fully formed. She is at her core a sort of pre-adolescent, or as a psychic says of her, late in the novel, “an innocent”. This innocence allows her to believe in the possibility of pure, perfect love but of course makes her prey to being manipulated up, down and sideways by the more experienced and perhaps more irrevocably damaged Audrey. Occasional glimpses into each woman’s real, painful history are just enough to reveal how and why they came to be the way they are, separately and together.

Andrea articulates every feeling involved in an ultimately poisoned and poisonous love- torment, elation, enthrallment, hopelessness, selfishness and self-abnegation. Luminous moments are eclipsed by moments of despair. Any reader with a similar episode at the back of her emotional closet will recognize both Andrea’s and Audrey’s experience very well. This passionate love between two women, although it exists as an ideal in Andrea’s heart and mind, is not idealized nor exempt from betrayal, possessiveness and violence.

No one can spend a year in the mouth of a dragon and emerge unchanged.

About the author:

Beate Sigriddaughter grew up in Nürnberg, Germany, not far from the castle where she sometimes sat in a corner to write poems or rewrite fairy tales. She now lives and writes in Silver City, NM, Land of Enchantment. The background to all this enchantment, though, is living as a witness and participant in a world that is steeped in misogyny, ranging from subtle avuncular belittlement to legal or vigilante execution for infractions of male entitlement. The background is a world where people are addicted to conflict and competition and where peace and partnership are simply not (yet) sexy enough. In all of this, she still hopes to one day fulfill her lifelong dream of creating a language of joy that will triumph over a language heavy with addiction to conflict and sorrow, no doubt created and sustained in an effort to gain love and attention that way.

Beate has a B.A. in English and Philosophy from Georgetown University. Her published works include two novels, a novella, and many stories and poems. Three of her stories received Pushcart Prize nominations. She has also created the Glass Woman Prize to honor other women’s stories.

Carol Reid is a writer and editor in British Columbia, Canada.Guest

September 3, 2015 0

Book Review: F250 by Bud Smith

Book Review: F250 by Bud Smith

Piscataway House Publications 2014

Fiction 230 pages

“It’s a novel about a noise band, some car crashes, kids with bloody faces, strange loves….” Bud Smith on F250

Thus reads Bud Smith’s hyper minimalist synopsis of his own novel F250. While this does summarize some of F250’s plot points with hilarious, deadpan understatement, needless to say, F250 is much, much more.

Set against a backdrop of the Jersey Shore somewhere around 2003-2004, the novel’s narrator and protagonist, Lee Casey, plays in a noise band called Otter Meat. The band teeters on the edge of either breaking big or breaking up and the dream of moving to LA beckons like some sort of mythical land of Milk and Honey. Lee works a day job as a stone mason. He hauls rocks, gravel and cement, his scant personal possessions, musical equipment, and his friends in his F250, a battered old workhorse of a truck that seems to crash into things like a heat seeking missile. Lagoon House is the dilapidated house in the process of being systematically demolished that serves as living space, party house, crucible and metaphor for a colorful and motley cast of characters going through life’s momentous changes together.

F250 depicts a group of friends whose lives are changing and evolving into something new as their old lives fall away. Preconceived notions of personal identity morph and grow into something new. It’s a story of farewell to youth and coming of age into adulthood and a story of self examination and self realization. F250 celebrates synchronicities and the peculiar kind of ephemeral magic that occurs as peoples’ individual orbits briefly come together before once again separating and twinkling into the heavens like the Perseid meteor shower. It’s about how the flash of one monumental event can change everything forever. F250 is about coming to grips with mortality and human frailty as we learn to understand our own individual gifts and strengths. F250 is about learning to forgive and to accept ourselves for who we really are and others for who they really are.

Some passages of descriptive prose are pure poetry.

“Outside, everything flickered like the world was film being fed through an 8mm grindhouse projector. Splatters of light struck everywhere reflective, creating a slowly rotating light show – glass and high sheen metallics caught the last rays of the falling sun. Reality was exaggerated. Colors were over-saturated: thick green, gold, plum.”

With references to regional cultural icons like Kiss, Bruce Springsteen and Thunder Road, Seaside Amusement Park, beaches, boardwalks, the Pine Barrens, Jersey salt marshes and 4^th of July on the Jersey Shore, Bud Smith captures a unique slice of life and a snapshot of Americana at a particular time and place with lyrical agility and an unflinching eye. The book is also an exorcism, Last Rites, Kaddish, a memorial, and a celebration of life and love for each other.

With F250, Bud Smith has written his own “Moveable Feast” of sorts, with reflections based largely on his life as a younger man on the Jersey Shore; woven into a realistic work of fiction that is a totally enthralling and enjoyable read. With passages of cinematic prose and dialogue that captures moment to moment banter in spot-on colloquial fashion and characters large as life, Smith weaves a tale that is so engrossing and compelling that you won’t want to come to the end of it. At least I didn’t. It’s one of those books I could have devoured, but took forever to read, because then what the Hell was I going to do? It was like saying goodbye forever to my best friends.

F250 is a great book and Bud Smith is a hopeless romantic, which is a great thing to be in this fucked up world. I hope that Bud Smith revisits these characters in a future novel. The potential is there, and I would very much like to reconnect with these old friends as our lives once again intersect at some point down the road.

About the Author

Bud Smith is the author of the novel Tollbooth, the short story collection, Or Something Like That, and the poetry collection, Everything Neon. He works heavy construction, lives in New York City and has a pet jackalope.

August 31, 2015 0

Guest Review: Delicious Little Traitor ~ A Varian Pike Mystery by Jack DeWitt ~ Reviewed by AJ Sabatini

Your Own Back Yard is delighted to welcome Guest Reviewer AJ Sabatini aboard with his review of Delicious Little Traitor: A Varian Pike Mystery by Jack DeWitt

Delicious Little Traitor: A Varian Pike Mystery by Jack DeWitt

Fiction ~ Black Opal Books, 2015 http://www.blackopalbooks.com Reviewed by By AJ Sabatini

The settings and landscapes of Jack Dewitt’s Varian Pike mystery, Delicious Little Traitor, range from the small cities and sparse back roads of Connecticut to New York City and the outskirts of Philadelphia, circa the winter of 1953. This was an era when most ordinary Americans were settling into ways of living after the trauma and disruption of World War II. But the country itself was changing politically with The Cold War underway. Its dark winds chilled the pursuit of comfort as power hungry politicians, federal agents and ambitious government bureaucrats schemed to take control of the government and make life miserable for those who they accused of being “Un-American.” Although Varian Pike doesn’t bargain for it, he is thrown into the muck of vicious political intrigue almost from the moment he tries find out who killed a nineteen-year-old University of Connecticut college student, Lara Greenbaum. And why.

Pike, basically a loner, is a combat vet from the European theater with an acute sense of pain and human self-deception. He also has a low attention span for bullshit and thinks of himself, he tells us, as being part of a larger world, He talks about politics, jazz and painting, but also plays cards with his buddies and keeps up with baseball and boxing. After a poker game, one of his friends approaches him about the disappearance of his niece over the Thanksgiving Holiday weekend. Daughter of a Jewish dentist, Lara Greenbaum had an independent, intellectual streak about her and she was also alluring and sexy and knew it.

Pike meets with Lara’s parents and immediately takes the case. It is near Christmas and he drives up to for grey, frigid college UConn campus in what was a farm town then, Storrs. Pike is pretty frustrated by what he hears from a boyfriend, campus cops, Lara’s roommates and an edgy English professor who is frightened that his relationship with Lara and his political opinions could put him in danger. Varian checks out Lara’s room and steals her diary, only to find out that it is written in code. What did she have to hide? Within days, her naked and apparently tortured body turns up outside of Philadelphia in Abington, Pennsylvania. No arrests were made.

Lara, it turns out, was deeply involved in politics and had done research on a right wing, Communist hunting U.S. Congressman, Lindzey Hall. Even before Pike can track him down, so called Federal Agents start tracking him and telling him to lay off. The official story is that Lara was a rape victim, but no one can tell him why she was near Philadelphia. As Christmas nears and Pike wants to avoid everything to do with good tidings and the endless Crosby and Sinatra tunes on the radio, so he makes his way to Abington. A Happy Holiday does not ensue.

It is cold and dreary in the Northeast and everything Pike uncovers entangles him further in a sordid conspiracy which eventually brings him in contact with a handful of cleanly drawn though mostly unsavory characters. Some of them are helpful, a few try to kill him, he sleeps with one and has long, in depth conversations with others. Most of them have too much ego and something to hide. Louis, a friend of his, seems to have ties to the Mob, or worse. He lives alone in a modern style house in the woods, drinks French wine and owns abstract geometric art works. As Varian learns more from him and tries to get a handle on everyone’s motives, suspicions rise that Lara is not innocent in the dealings that surround her.

With a sure knowledge of American life in the 1950s, DeWitt drives the narrative from city to country, from a private Boy’s School to college campuses, to law offices, police stations and hideaways. Everyone Varian talks to seems to know something, but the whole picture never coheres. He does his best to stick to his code and find out the truth, but the Congressman and his goons play hardball and are not afraid to spill blood. But, through it all Varian is haunted by death of the smart, young woman and his obligation to her parents.

Varian drives a Chevy and finds radio stations that play his favorite Charlie Parker tunes, which give the reader the sense that the world is unpredictable and moving fast. His affair with a war widow throws light on women’s lives in post-war America. He and Louis ruminate about the real story behind ex-Nazis in America, spies and the Rosenberg trail and execution, the OSS, CDA, COS, FBI, Herbert Hoover and Joe McCarthy. What could being a “delicious little traitor” mean? Varian realizes he could care less about men in power, but is the murder of a young girl ever justified? And who knows the truth and who keeps secrets when it comes to historical and political machinations?

My guess is that DeWitt has more Varian Pike mysteries to write. The book has the feel of a serious novel of ideas, if not a movie. DeWitt, who has published several books of poetry and a study of hot rod culture (Cool Cars, High Art), knows the 1950s. I doubt Varian will start listening to rock and roll, though he might wind up reading Beat poetry and go on the road in a better car.

About Jack DeWitt

Jack DeWitt’s new novel, Delicious Little Traitor A Varian Pike Mystery (Black Opal Books), is the first in a series. His study of American hot rodding, Cool Cars, High Art: The Rise of Kustom Kulture is included in the Street Rodder Hall of Fame. For three years he wrote the column, “Cars and Culture,” for the American Poetry Review. One of the columns was chosen as a notable essay in Best American Essays 2010. Almost Grown, his latest book of poems, is about growing up in Stamford, CT. For many years he taught in the Liberal Arts Division of the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. www.jackdewitt.com

http://www.amazon.com/Delicious-Little-Traitor-Mystery-Mysteries/dp/1626942226/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1429482621&sr=8-1&keywords=delicious+little+traitor

About AJ Sabatini

AJ Sabatini is a Philadelphia –based writer and an Arizona State University Associate Professor of Performance Studies. For other reviews, see his entries at

http://www.broadstreetreview.com/authors/aj-sabatini

May 7, 2015 0

Bud Smith reviews Kevin Ridgeway’s “Riding Off Into That Strange Technicolor Sunset” for MadHat Drive-By Book Reviews

I am very pleased to welcome Bud Smith on board as a guest reviewer for MadHat Drive-By Book Reviews with his insightful review of Kevin Ridgeway’s “Riding Off Into That Strange Technicolor Sunset.”

http://madhatarts.com/madhatreviews/bud-smith-reviews-riding-off-into-that-strange-technicolor-sunset-by-kevin-ridgeway/

April 20, 2015 0

Guest Reviewer Sarah Lilius Reviews “The Burn Poems” by Lynn Strongin

MadHat Drive-by Book Reviews is pleased to welcome Guest Reviewer Sarah Lilius who offers us her review of Lynn Strongin’s latest collection: “The Burn Poems,” published by Headmistress Press.
http://madhatarts.com/madhatreviews/

April 13, 2015 0

Book Review: What Happened Here: a novella & stories by Bonnie ZoBell

My review of Bonnie ZoBell’s wonderful book What Happened Here: a novella & stories is up on MadHat’s Drive-By Book Reviews.

http://madhatarts.com/madhatreviews/book-review-what-happened-here-a-novella-stories-by-bonnie-zobell/

March 29, 2015 0

Review of This Wasted Land by Marc Vincenz on Heavy Feather Review

My review of This Wasted Land by Marc Vincenz annotated by Tom Bradley is published on Heavy Feather Review.

Thanks to Jason Teale for publishing my review.

http://heavyfeatherreview.com/2015/03/24/this-wasted-land-by-marc-vincenz/

March 24, 2015 0

To Sleep, Perchance to Dream

(attribution ~ http://americasstudies.com/)

My physician recently recommended that I undergo a sleep study. This took place in a sleep lab where my private room was like a high end hotel room without windows, a mini bar or private kidney shaped hot tub. And, by the way, I was hooked up to 30 electrodes, and a device pinching my right index finger while under the scrutiny of an infrared video camera. The electrodes were hooked up to various parts of my body, although the majority of them were attached to my head with some kind of waxy gel that made me look like a character in Clive barker’s cult classic horror film “Hell Raiser.”

Nighty night, sleep tight. I’ve never been one to count sheep anyway and it certainly didn’t work for me under those circumstances. Honestly, it felt like I didn’t sleep a wink. Although apparently I dozed off long enough to record enough data to analyze my sleep patterns, which revealed that I have severe sleep apnea.

Simply put, sleep apnea is a condition where your airway relaxes and constricts to the point where you actually stop breathing. This happens with enough frequency to actually prevent falling into a deep, restorative asleep. I had multiple such events recorded within a one hour period where I was not breathing for as long as 58 seconds. That’s almost a minute! I can’t hold my breath for a minute when I’m conscious. At that rate, I should be training for competitive free diving or spearfishing.

After learning some of the possible outcomes of untreated sleep apnea include obesity, heart attack, stroke, dementia and sudden death, I didn’t need too much convincing to begin using a CPAP machine. CPAP is an acronym for “Continued Positive Airway Pressure” which is delivered from a machine through a mask or nosepiece. The pumped air keeps my airway from constricting or closing altogether, thus ensuring that I continue to breathe while actually falling into restorative sleep. I figured I may as well go all in and opted for the complete Darth Vader CPAP Starter kit. This includes a Darth Vader mask, helmet, cape, storm trooper boots and a continuous recording of James Earl Jones saying: “Luke, I am your Father!”

So, now I now need a machine to sleep. It’s just comforting to know that along with all of my e mail, phone calls, credit card purchases and social networking activity being monitored by the NSA, all of my sleep data is now uploaded to a satellite in space. It’s nice to know somebody cares!

Although, as one of my friends pointed out: “They’re certainly watching but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they care.”