Scattered Light: July 2009

Wednesday, July 22, 2009

Monday, July 20, 2009

MEMENTO MORI
A Cache of Fireflies and Other Joys

'Memento mori' is another term for still life which is another way of describing observed carefully arranged items worth remembering, Memento mori is a particularly apt title for this collection of poems and paintings by the sisters Snell. Cheryl Snell, the writer poet, combines her sparkling little observations of life and ordinary things such as childhood reveries and mental notes of things/incidents/people she has observed and transformed into poem form: Janet Snell, the visual poet, continues to create aqueous paintings of expressionistic nature that pull the eye into worlds of fantasy and illusion. Part of the joy of the collaboration of the two artists is that they resist the temptation to 'illustrate' each other. That would be the expected result in a collaboration - one artist has an idea and the other elaborates on it.

Not so with MEMENTO MORI. Opposite Janet's wonderful little painting 'Gorkyesque' Cheryl places 'Poem with Bugs":
First they appear as paths
of dying stars, sparks arcing across
the old oaks. Imagine the presence
of bats whickering, the field full
of rushing shadows. The ghost of your father
is closer now, coming toward you
without grief or regrets. no one is to blame.

In the backyard of your childhood home,
upraised branches bloom with wings.
Someone else's little sister cups fireflies
in the indigo moments before bed, tossing
them into the empty spaces you must turn from
before the dusk backs into what it was -
failing light and fading voices,
a vast goodbye, the shimmering dark.

Across from Janet's painting 'Narcissism' is Cheryl's wonderful 'She paints herself into a corner.' And as the book flows - a feast for the eye and a recalled pleasure of reading memorable poetry. An Excellent book, this!
Grady Harp

order MM here

Friday, July 17, 2009

New Novel, plus a good deal

Announcing Cheryl's new novel,Rescuing Ranu. Print copies can be ordered HERE
and the e-book is HERE. That's our mother's art on the cover.

What's it about, you may ask. Well, Nela Sambashivan returns to her native India to research the mathematics of collectives and is drawn into the lives of ten year old Ranu, the cunning motel-keeper who exploits her, and an unscrupulous Uncle who believes that everything is for sale. Nela’s transformation from abstract thinker to selfless guardian begins when she and her lover, Jackson, rescue Ranu from a forced marriage, but it is only when the child unexpectedly fails to thrive that Nela confronts her miscalculations about sacrifice, survival, and the mysterious alchemy of love.

Since we've released our poetry and painting chap,Memento Mori, Cheryl's stories,Words in Edgewise, and this novel fast on the heels of our collection Prisoner's Dilemma, we'd like to offer you any one of those books free with the purchase of any other one.

Send proof of purchase to prisonersdilemma2@gmail.com and we will send you a signed copy of whichever book you choose. Offer ends on July 30,2009.
Thanks for supporting Scattered Light Publications!

Tuesday, July 14, 2009

First Look at Words in Edgewise

Scribd featured WORDS in EDGEWISE and gave it a gold star! So make like a library and check it out.

Monday, July 13, 2009

Live Mannequin Envy

READ THIS !!!

Tuesday, July 07, 2009

Wish us luck!

Introducing Scattered Light,the MICRO-PRESS!

Thursday, July 02, 2009

...in which we present our new collaboration

Introducing Janet's and Cheryl's newest duet, a collection of oil paintings and poems from Scattered Light Publications called MEMENTO MORI. It's a 48 page, 6x9 inch paperback
on sale now for $13.00. If you'd like to try before you buy, there's a preview on the left side of the blog.

Ouroboros Review

IT"S LIVE and Cheryl's in it.

Prisoner's Dilemma, Reviewed

OUTWARD BOUND

“Stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage.” *

But for mystics, the disabled and convalescent, those in enclosed orders, those dedicated to fulfilling their genius, those in jail and those who exist in a mental straitjacket, whatever the cause, there is always a conundrum:

Does the elusive Truth exist on the Inside or Outside?

Hostages like Brian Keenan, Anne Frank, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, all attested a life of the spirit and the imagination that would not and could not be limited by physical and ideological constraints.

So does narrowed focus confer a sharper and profounder vision, offering its compensations? Or is Freedom only to be found upon the exterior, in the prolix toil and muddle of human activity where opportunities for discovery abound? Even where choice is possible, aren't these states mutually exclusive?

Cheryl Snell in a new chapbook, Prisoner's Dilemma, explores this theme in situations concerning many kinds of effacement. Each short poem is offered like a remnant of woven fabric placed under the microscope so that the colours, slubs and knots and arabesques, can be appreciated. The imagery is often stark and reminiscent of Sylvia Plath, the emotion bottled which, unstoppered, pervades an air of vaguely fragrant stoicism. Where the subtext is menacing, it frets away at a blithe surface like a sliver of glass stuck in the weave. But, often, it's uncompromising, violent, in-your-face, leaving the reader with no more than the merest scintilla of hope. The images juxtaposed in Snell's phrases cleverly release new flights of meaning as, for example in Dirty Laundry:

Tumbling from the fold
of a fitted sheet – balled-up
silk, some foreign lace. Things come
and go in this house. Last night, an earring
tangled in the wrong colour hair, everything
gone bloodshot and damp.

The man's non-sequiturs circled the drain
of his stranger's ear: Let lovers go fresh and sweet
to be undone. How else to go
with a come-on like that – innocent as soap,
pink bubbles bursting like an alibi
on the verge of coming clean.

The collection as a whole hangs together with the shape and atmosphere of René Magritte's surreal painting The Empty Mask and, in miniature, I don't doubt is as accomplished. Cheryl Snell ably demonstrates that Richard Lovelace was right!*

RJC
(Rosy Cole)

Chapbook hauntingly illustrated by Janet Snell.

A Must Read

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What They Say

The Blend of Visual and Written Art

THAT FEEL is one of the finest collaborative books published by the sisters Snell. Cheryl Snell is a fine poet and her sister Janet Snell is a fine expressionist artist. In their previous books there was often the question of whether Janet was illustrating Cheryl's poetry or if perhaps each artist made her art and then combined it in the most suitable manner.

Now it is obvious that the art that spreads across both sides of an open book is unified and equally involved in the nidus of expression. The poems and art of THAT FEEL seem to be more visceral than those that came before them - these are poems from the gut, art about alienation and longing and rapturous moments that fade too quickly (or were they even there?). For example in the combined expression of the following, the painting accompanying the poem is that of two faces distorted by reflection in glass or mirror or memory:

REFLECTIONS IN CRACKED GLASS

Each brush stroke had been its own allegory

and could not reconcile the break. I felt for

connection in blind corridors, whispering

Who's there? from within the room's glass

eye.

Maybe I was dreaming. The facts were hard

to parse and sometimes lied. I did, too,

confused by what my reflection showed. The

glass distorted it and the fissure widened from

a thin red line. It splintered our embrace and

again I was alone.

The book may be brief but it is a powerful one. The only criticism about this latest opus is the somewhat disjointed feeling of the varying fonts or typefaces the artists used. Those wide variations of print diminish the tone of the poetry/art like unwanted audience distracters. But that is a minor complaint in a book that further substantiates the excellent collaborative efforts of the sisters Snell. --Grady Harp

Cheryl Snell's Shiva's Arms (novel review)
by Matthew Biberman

Any one who frequents the fiction section of a good independent bookstore knows that there is something of a cottage industry of writers currently churning out fiction invested in capturing the lived experience of ex‐pat Indians who have moved to America. One of the more distinctive elements of this sub‐genre is its investment in detailing life in India as well as in America, most often in ways that include, often in great detail, the back stories of the
characters before their decision to move away from their home land.
A recent addition to this stack of books is Cheryl Snell’s first novel, Shiva’s Arms. I know and admire Cheryl first and foremost as a poet, a fact that inevitably colored my reading of this book. Indeed I would encourage anyone who begins Shiva’s Arms to keep this fact in mind because I believe it influences the writing of this novel all the way down to its essence. Cheryl’s poetic eye is not just visible in the felicitous phrase, though the book is filled with such moments. A conversation in an Indian cab takes place in a dialect that sounds “like gravel in their mouths.” When a character unravels, we see that her eyes are “blue puddles in her slack face.” Food gets sopped up “in a baseball mitt” of bread. But to read Shiva’s Arms for its precise, poetic imagery is to skate along an iced over lake without any thought to the depths below.
The true challenge of Shiva’s Arms is to recognize that it is a very ambitious—indeed, innovative piece of writing. It is an experiment in what I would call a transversal novel. Shiva’s Arms takes shape somewhere between the sonnet craze that swept Shakespeare’s England four centuries ago and the cinematic techniques often identified as producing the Rashomon effect in twentieth century avant garde film.
First we must think about that now largely obsolete form—the sonnet sequence. Generally understood to have been popularized by Petrarch with his love poems to Laura, the sonnet sequence flourished in the late sixteenth century in London. Shakespeare’s effort is a very late example, and perhaps for that reason, breaks new ground. For the first time, the poet is repeatedly identified with the speaker of the poems (think of all those puns on Will) and the beloved is not simply idealized (famously, her eyes are nothing like the sun) but also unfaithful. Nor is the narrative clear. When you read Shakespeare’s poems it is as if you are reading a novel in snap shots, but with this twist: as you read it dawns on you that somehow the poems are no longer in chronological order
While keeping that experience in mind, let us flash forward to the art house movie. Famously, Kurosawa made a film‐‐Rashomon (1950) that retells a crime from four different perspectives, a device that highlights the complex and dynamic nature of reality. What the Rashomon effect
highlights is the truth that though reality is intersubjective (that is, reality is a collective formation), this “collective hallucination” (to use Freud’s term) is inevitably being made by individuals who are experiencing what is happening in ways that are always at once congruent and divergent.
What Cheryl has done in Shiva’s Arms is to present the story of an extended family in a novel that combines both of these techniques. The result can be described as a novel where each chapter operates as a kind of intense short poem, that is‐‐ as a sonnet. The chapters do not,however, anchor the reader to one character. Rather, the reader is passed from character to character. We begin tied to the American Alice, but then pass on to her husband Ram, and then their child Sam. This primary pattern is however interrupted with detours into Ram’s mother Amma, and ‐‐ with increasing frequency as the book builds to its conclusion ‐‐ the shunned sister Nela. With each shift, a different perspective is showcased. In strategy, the result is reminiscent of some of our most celebrated modernist novels, books such as Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway come immediately to mind. But in those works, the effect encourages the reader to separate out the characters so that the readers gains a satisfying sense that people are unique, yet isolated, grounded but limited to their bodies.
The effect that Snell produces in Shiva’s Arms is striking because it works in reverse. People in families get caught up in each other so that the configurations shift and change. Suddenly the notion that we are limited to our physical bodies falls away. We meld in our struggles, mix and combine in ways that defeat the macro laws of physics both in terms of space and even time. In this, Snell’s work is reminiscent of Djuna Barnes cult masterpiece Nightwood, though the overall mood is far more evocative of Paul Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky.
For me the high points of Shiva’s Arms come when Snell renders the rapid blooming of a state of existential dread. The effect is positively unsettling in its intensity, most especially early in the novel after Alice’s marriage precipitates a psychological crisis. The concluding confrontation between Amma and Alice is even more impressive, coming as it does so effectively after the dramatic resolution of the dinner immediately preceding it. Fights in Shiva Arms do not end with characters walling themselves off. Everything drives toward mixture, a fact highlighted by Ram when he observes that “we are all just chemistry labs.” This theme is made overt via the role food plays in this novel complete with Recipes, a crowning touch.
According to western cliché, cooking and food illustrate how each of us enjoys a unique and colorful heritage of goodness. True to its radical nature, Shiva’s Arms upends that idea and puts in place the notion that each of us is but an ingredient, a blend that makes up the bigger whole.
Shiva’s Arms is a satisfying novel that demands much from its reader. Its strengths are many but if I had to pick one on which to end I will stress that this is a book that provocatively challenges many of the most cherished presumptions propping up many well known examples of Indian – American fiction, or indeed of multicultural literature generally speaking. Despite paying lip service to the idea that western notions of subjectivity are not universal, most writers working in the genre of the English novel continue to present nonwestern forms of consciousness via free standing western characters. In stark contrast, Shiva’s Arms invites you to imagine characters that are interconnected parts of a larger whole. Such a radical insight can only come from a novelist of great talent and skillful execution. With luck, future novels from Cheryl Snell will deepen this exploration. As a reader I certainly look forward to the adventure.

Prisoner's Dilemma:...The diction here, precise and yet off-hand, coupled with the unexpected coupling of ideas (beauty – rivers – the girl who knows all the boys desire her) places Snell on intimate relations with the main currents of twentieth century American poetry, a landscape marked by masters such as John Ashberry, Mark Strand, Louise Bogan and Louise Gluck, to name but a few poets associated with the style Alan Williamson (himself a fine poet) dubbed the new American surrealism. And yet Snell—or rather the Snells—for the book I am reviewing, The Prisoner’s Dilemma, is a collection that alternates between Cheryl’s short lyric poems and Janet’s pencil drawings -- stands apart.

The difference is hard to explain, so lets be blunt: in the best of Cheryl’s work, the style regains its vigor, enlivened by the poet’s deep sense of what it means to be caught up in life. A digression on Freud may help here because we are on the subject of digressions. Freud could never stop being fascinated by the notion that it is life that is the interruption. Not death. The immortal is the natural state. But somehow we find ourselves shunted and routed out of the immortal and into the detour of the mortal for a brief go round before flowing back into the immortal, back into death, and the beyond of death. Cheryl Snell’s poetry, and Janet’s art, together illuminate this insight: that the detour into life is a circular whirlpool. --Matthew Biberman

It could be the case that those human heads are floating in a paradoxical space: yes, obviously human (and all that that signals to us) but also pure moments of form. Cephalic shapes to circumscribe color-vacuums, lending force to the other “objects.”Another impression jumps into my own head, beyond what I said above about...well, whatever it was I said. For me, I feel like I'm looking at a negative-image of consciousness. The subconscious? Maybe. And what's weird and cool is that those heads, drained of color and feature detail, seem to express more human soulfulness and depth than even a portrait by Rembrandt!...Tim Buck

There is something of Keats's “negative capability” revealed in this poignant story: it is a mystery to me how a female author can so perfectly inhabit the hurting corners of a middle-aged man's soul. And her striking turns of phrase bring delight to the reader, even as he squirms and winces in sympathy with Roger...Tim Buck

The imagery is often stark and reminiscent of Sylvia Plath, the emotion bottled which, unstoppered, pervades an air of vaguely fragrant stoicism. Where the subtext is menacing, it frets away at a blithe surface like a sliver of glass stuck in the weave. But, often, it's uncompromising, violent, in-your-face, leaving the reader with no more than the merest scintilla of hope...Rosy Cole

...This is a collection of poems to be lingered over, like reminders of first views or experiences we usually keep to ourselves for fear that speaking of them will make them lost to us. Snell has captured these moments and we can only hope she will continue to write such tender thoughts as well as in MULTIVERSE. ---Grady Harp

Marilyn Kallet, on Multiverse:
"Cheryl Snell's poems are rich, integrative, witty, and beautifully composed."

This is not poetry merely to beguile the imagination; it is experience by vital proxy, full of pulse and texture and radiance. Memento Mori is a tour de force. (R.Cole)

"... Both Snells' (author and painter) works soar in this lovely book. It was interesting to watch the movement of fear between the poems...A nervous and wonderful collection of art fused with poetry."--Andrew Demcak, on Multiverse

Dorothy Shin, Akron Beacon Journal--
"Her work is dark,mysterious, seemingly drawn from the subconscious...Foreboding, regret, entrapment, longing and enigma vie for prominence while gestural, expressive brushwork gives the forms a supernormal tension and energy..."

Bob Grumman, Taproot--"Macabre, comic, mysterious, and subtly erotic, these fascinating drawings constantly flirt with disgust -- a perfect example of graphic black humor. "

"A series of charcoal drawings that go darkly anywhere via an expressionism that reminds me of Egon Schiele and Francis Bacon. Snell provides poems for her illustrations that generally extend rather than just rephrase them-- ."

... varied and beautifully imaged lyric narratives...Again, she stuns us with her imagery.---Comstock Review

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