light

Cheryl plays Milhaud

Just click the title.

Skin Hunger

Cut

Fun

Here's something fun--Storycasting.com. It's a site that lets you fantasy-cast your novel with actors, and argue the merits of your choices with other folks. People use it as part of their virtual book launches. Cheryl played around with the cast of her novel, Shiva's Arms, and came up with THIS.

If you'd like a turn, here's the backstory on Cheryl's characters:

1. Alice. Wife, daughter-in-law, and depressive, she's the perpetual unsuitable bride.
2. Ram. The quintessential man in the middle, caught between his wife and mother.He runs away from his Hindu culture as fast as Alice runs toward it.
3. Amma. Matriarch of a Brahmin joint-family, she must either reconcile herself to the culture clash with which her son has presented her or protect tradition, at any cost.
4.Sambashivan, Ram's free-thinking father. “You must marry soon,” he says when Ram goes off to graduate school in America. “Otherwise, marriage will be for companionship only.”
5. Sam, the only child of Ram and Alice, the favorite of Amma, who sees in him a new beginning, a chance to rewrite her son’s saga until history threatens to repeat itself.
6.Nela, the disgraced daughter, ostracized for a small romantic indiscretion.Her accidental freedom is threatened under the weight of family need.
7. Nigel, an aging self-absorbed musician with whom Nela is romantically linked. He stumbles upon a situation where it’s easier to betray Nela than to lose his daughter to her nephew Sam.

Free Advice

Antonio Machado says "...wanderer, there is no road, the road is made by walking."
Piu mosso,then.

Review of Prisoner's Dilemma

Despite the chattering masses insistence that we have left behind the shackles of monochromatic forms, most lovers of literature remain lodged within the confines of the printed word. No pictures, no mixed media, no audio, no textile experiences invade the high and lonely silence of the mind’s contemplation of the slashes and curves that from a certain distance resolve into letters, and then lines of words, marching across pages bound for they know not where: oblivion certainly, sooner or later.

How strange then that this absurd comedy continues when it is so easy for the imprisoned to step outside of these confines. No jailor prevents it, except, of course, for the jailor we call the mind. The doors are all open to the foreign world that lies beyond but inside we stay as if cowed by possibility itself.

It is against this backdrop that Janet and Cheryl Snell’s Prisoner’s Dilemma is best read.



“Beauty is as Beauty does, I suppose, and of course

all rivers are beautiful, not necessarily

with the untouched beauty

of a head cheerleader at her beginning of things”

(from “Fire of the Cuyahoga”)



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 ebook 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. It has limitations that each experiences, and there is no fairness to those limitations, they just are, but every life will be lived within its formal constrictions. And then those constrictions end. But in between, how many of us take the time to convey a deep sense of the go-round? Not many, and certainly not with the depth and richness that you encounter when reading Cheryl Snell’s poetry and looking at Janet’s art.



"There is nothing

To be learned from this, no lesson,

Just as there is no reason

Why you should turn inside out

Over a pair of gloves at the bottom

Of a box earmarked for the trash."

(from “Lost”)



Lots of MFA trained poets can crank out lines sort of like this stretch. The diction is precise and bracing, like cold ocean water. The repetition, first at the level of idea (no learning, no lesson) and then at the level of refrain (there is no, there is no . . . ) reflects exposure to the severe music of Wallace Stevens (even if the exposure is second hand, that is no matter). My mentor, the wonderful poet Tom Sleigh called these devices symbol clashes because those gloves explode in the attentive reader’s mind. Most of the time, in most poetry, the effect is cheap: it hasn’t been earned. The poet doesn’t know why reality should suddenly come undone there, in those lines. They just bang symbols together because that is what they have been taught good poetry does. But Cheryl, on the other hand, knows. Her insight is hard won; the conveyance of knowledge from her to me as I read her is one that fills me with both respect for and gratitude to this team of artists.



In “Indigo Hour” Cheryl writes,



"I run my palms

Along the edges of the headboard

As if a boundary can prove

That the past is not present here."



The metaphysical complexity of this image is to be taken seriously. The past is present—more than that, the future is present here too. Outside or within the eddy that is the mortal there is always the immortal. That conflation is Cheryl’s true subject. Her lyrics capture various aspects of it, of the real as “a zipper tired of meshing” (from “Tear”). The tonalities of her poems go far beyond the little snippets I have typed here. The reader will find laughter and love and everything else. Prisoner’s Dilemma is a book that repays repeated readings. Art is not a contest. But if asked to name my favorite poets working today, I would place Cheryl Snell very high up on my list.

from MATTHEW BIBERMAN

thank you, Matthew!

What We Made for Mother's Day

Think she'll like it?

PS:That's Cheryl Townsend's photo on the cover, and some inside too.

Fishing for Invitations

We're going on a blog tour! The book in the spotlight is Shiva's Arms, and if you would like to have us visit your blog, or review the book on your blog, we'd be grateful. Send an email to shana@writerslairbooks.com to make arrangements.

...and the prizes go to...

Thanks to all who submitted their funny mother-in-law cooking story to the Mother's Day Contest to win a copy of Shiva's Arms, and congratulations to our two winners: Dan_Doll and Anon!
The prize-winning entries-

The first day I met her, she was cooking seafood. I said, "What's that?" and instead of tentacles she mistakenly told me "testicles."

The first time I cooked an Easter ham for my in-laws, I used my mother-in-law's recipe of baking the ham in a brown paper bag; her ham always turned out so delicious, but mine didn't, since I forgot to take off the plastic that covered the ham. The cake I made from scratch didn't go over so well either--I don't know how I screwed that one up, but you could tap on it with the handle of a butter knife and think someone was knocking on the door!