Jennifer Kumar on Shiva's Arms

I admit, reading novels has been challenging for me over the years. However, when the novel straddles real life to the point of complete belief, leaving me thinking, "Yeah, this really can happen in real life," I am sucked in!

Being sucked in, not once, but thrice, was easy with Cheryl Snell's recount of the struggles and joys of living in a cross-cultural, interfaith and bicultural family in the novel, Shiva's Arms.

It doesn't hurt that I can personally relate to many of the joys and struggles faced by the characters:

- Being ''coached" by friends, family, and even my spouse in how to behave 'more Indian': what to say, not say, what to wear, what and how to cook particular foods, what to do or not do for particular festivals or occasions, etc. There are two examples I would like to share from the book:

(1) Alice sets a Shiva statue in the kitchen. Ram pulls it out, offended and disgusted, telling Alice 'it doesn't belong in the kitchen where it's impure.' Of course, Ram has no reason as to why this is so. These kinds of situations are a 'dime a dozen' in India; people being told to do this or not do that because 'it's our culture,' but not having any reason behind it or offering alternative solutions. This is a frustrating part for many foreigners (including Indians born and raised outside India) to Indian culture to 'get used to', if in fact, there is any 'getting used to it.' This increases the push-pull, clear like and confusing disdain at time for a foreign culture. (More below!)

(2) Another aspect of this cross-cultural coaching that is even more challenging, in my opinion is being coached on how to tell jokes to "Indians" or appreciating the humor in Indian's jokes. There are a few instances in the book where Alice tries to tell jokes, that turn out to be inappropriate for Indian crowds and Ram pulls her away very quickly. I can completely relate to these situations and I guess without them no cross-cultural narrative would be complete or completely believable!

- Feeling I am putting my spouse or his family 'between two worlds' when trying to bring friends together from the "American" side or the "Indian" side. I was moved and memories of similar episodes from my life flashed in my head when I read the recount of 'Alice's first home-cooked Indian dinner party for friends' starting on page 29.

- The wonder, excitement and overwhelming chaos that ensues at an Indian wedding (any wedding for that matter can be equally chaotic, but when an American is a bride or bridegroom at an Indian wedding, and it's a new experience, it's more overwhelming, confusing and exciting, especially if done abroad). What a better opening to the story and novel than this scene! It will immediately draw anyone in. I could feel for Alice when her mood shifted, especially because rather than being 'coached' through the episode, she was basically picked up and moved through the scene like a small girl retelling a story with her dolls. Alice was at the complete mercy of her new in-laws.

- The on-going acceptance or repulsion of being intertwined in another 'culture'. I have read, written and reflected on the idea of 'culture shock.' In many of the writings, the reader is led to believe that culture shock is a linear process, and once 'certain things' are learnt and adapted by the newcomer, the culture shock is overcome. I don't believe this is accurate. Even if we live in the same country our whole life, if we assume that, we would not change and grow. In different times of our lives we experience different things which compel us to like or be repelled by the same things. This is clearly shown in the book- Alice's push-pull love with Indian culture, always having a love for it, but sometimes being clearly repulsed. The two clear examples would be:

(1) When Amma comes to U.S. the first time, talks only in Tamil in the home (she doesn't know much, if any English) and turns the home into a 'tiny India', making it, I think a bit foreign to Alice, and Alice exclaims, "All right, fair's fair. I wanna show you guys some American culture now. There's a play I wanna take you to. Come on, now. Let's go." This scene reminds me vividly of some of my frustrations living in India, being over stimulated by the Indian culture and at times over-emphasizing some of my "American-ness" as I felt it was not really 'allowed' to do so. Or, it reminds me of how in America it is very possible and realistic that even in one's own home, it's possible to live a different culture inside the four walls of a home that is completely different from the outside world. I am sure immigrants from all backgrounds can relate to this. In such situations, stepping outside the house is like living in a foreign land! Of course, in the novel, we find out Alice gives birth soon after her almost 'psychotic break' at the play. It may seem over dramatic because it is a fast-paced novel after-all, but in some ways, to me such a scene seems completely possible.

(2) Near the end of the book, Alice comes to terms with her mother-in-law through nursing her back to health in this time; she has in-law staying in the home helping her. One of the 'tasks' given to the in-laws by Alice is to have Amma tell them stories, and they translate them from Tamil to English so she (Alice) can draw narrations to refresh Amma about her life's memories. In this exchange, Amma opens up and tells personal stories about her life she has not told anyone.

There are many, many more points I can highlight in the wonders of 'Shiva's Arms' and why I recommend anyone interested in cross-cultural family life, Indian culture, American culture, Hindu culture or any of the other subjects in the book to pick up this book devour it. I say 'devour' because reading this book is so engrossing, even at my third read I am engrossed as my first. It is also possible to read this book in less than a day because it is indeed so engrossing. So, unlike other novels that you may find it impossible to pass the first few pages or chapters, I really don't believe it would happen with this one! Looking for some really great summer-time reading? Pick up this book, go sit under a tree in the summer shade or by the lake or ocean and while soaking up the summer breezes, soak up the wonderful narratives in Shiva's Arms. I guarantee you won't be disappointed.

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!

First Words on Rescuing Ranu

This is very intelligently written so a complex subject seems very real.I learned about culture and tradition of another country and the drastic impact of cross cultural transitions. Excellent book.---Andrea Schaerf, on RESCUING RANU

Thanks, Andrea!

A Stunned Buzz

"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. I cannot praise it enough and feel privileged to have had the chance to review such a gem. The book is well-produced and does credit to poet and painter on every level. Janet Snell's expressionist art - vaguely reminiscent of Edvard Munch but intensely unique - broods over these pieces, depicting shape and shadow from the hazy layers of the subconscious. These presences shifting through space are the masks we tow our troubled worlds behind." Those words are from Rosy Cole' sensitive review of our book MEMENTO MORI. Thanks so much, Rosy!

We Heart Grady Harp

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

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.