The &NOW Awards 2: The Best Innovative Writing
Edited by Davis
Schneiderman. Lake Forest College Press, $19.95 paperback (400p) ISBN:
978-0982315644
The
&NOW festival is a biennale art and literature gathering which was first
held in 2004. The &NOW Awards are an anthology that (as stated in the
introduction) is not related to the
&NOW festival, except for when it is. This second volume contains
material published or presented between 2009 and 2011.
The
anthology is thick, representing around eighty writers, two collectives and one
writers community that is actually one person. The central organizing aspect of
this anthology is at once a great, beautiful, powerful thing and surely
financially risky: rather than gathering writing around a theme, or a style, or
era (which would at least ensure a mildly enjoyable experience for a large
audience) the collection gets together all the risky, weird stuff that will not
make it into many (read: any) mainstream venues and gloms it together one after
the other. This is sort of unfortunate as, if one were to pick this up in a
bookstore and crack it open they would most likely (based simply off how widely
the writing varies) come across something that does not resonate with them, and
may find something so far from their tastes that it turns them off from the
rest of the collection entirely.
That
said, there is just so much here, and it covers such a mind bogglingly diverse
clump of styles and approaches and tactics from fairly straight forward prose
(like Roxane Gay’s I'm Going to Cook Our
Dinner in My Easy Bake Oven And You're Going to Like It or Matt Bell’s Justina, Justine, Justise) to language
poetry (Joyelle Mcsweeny’s King Prion)
to conceptual pieces presented as explanations of the process used (the Black
Took Collective’s ‘Accretion: Buffalo Performance’) and visual art pieces made
exclusively from letters (Nico Vassilakis’ STARINGS
and an excerpt from A. J. Patrick Liszkiewicz’s Alphabet Man) that even most mildly adventurous readers will find
at least a dozen pieces that appeal to their taste and probably a solid handful
that will blow them away, and will probably find them where they least expect
it.
This
potential weakness then is also what makes this collection pretty magical: you
do not have to read the whole thing (and most of the pieces are short enough
that you will not lose that much time reading them all anyways) but what you -
almost certainly - stand to gain is an introduction to writing which you would
have otherwise never sought out on your own, and would have never found.
Many of these pieces rely heavily on their
context. That is, read on its own a piece might seem boring or hopelessly
obtuse, but with a little searching into the efforts and process behind a piece
the work will liven up: gaps will be filled in, edges sharpened, meaning
constructed. A few pieces are prefaced with a short explanation by the author,
translator or editor. Some of these ‘Abouts’ are art pieces in themselves with
gymnastic language and theoretical leaps, others are fairly straightforward and
add substantially to a piece which might otherwise seem like a throw away. I
had qualms with a few of these as they unfortunately took the magic away from
one or two pieces by explaining a trick which could have better been explained
after the piece had been read. In future editions these explanations might be
more effective presented after the piece. This, of course, is a minor issue.
Halfway through the book the text flips. In the print
version this provides the cool effect that the reader may begin at either end
of the book and when the middle is reached, the reader has to flip the book
upside down and start from the other side. Unfortunately in the e-format the
flip is a little awkward and distracting as the reader has to scan the pages
from top the bottom then scroll up to reach the next page. Again, a minor
issue.
Since this review is already too long I have compiled a very short list of some of the pieces
that stuck out to me. I do not have a lot of good reasons why these spoke to me
and others did not. A lot of pieces turned me off almost immediately and only a
few left me without a strong opinion. Rather than a sign of bad writing I took
this as an indicator that most of the pieces in the anthology are at least powerful
writing, much of which just did not fit my aesthetic. If anything I find it
interesting how such cerebral and planned out literature as those presented
here can evoke these sorts of unexplainable gut reactions. My tastes skewed
pretty hard toward the more traditional, linear prose works. Your mileage will
certainly vary.
Right
off the bat there is Katie Degentesh’s I
Was Horny, a metamorphic description of the male body as an owl or raptor’s
body. The piece comes off like an elementary school report on owls where every
instance of ‘Owl’ has been cut out and replaced with ‘boys’. It manages to
capture so well that mixture of animalistic affection and fear which is
provoked by those that we might love.
An
excerpt from Arno Bertina’s ‘Anima Motrix’, translated from French by
Anne-Laure Tissut, is a series of apparently disconnected scenes: domestic
ennui, aimless wandering, and observations of life in a solid stream of
consciousness style. Bertina (through Tissaut) demonstrates a really nice style
that came off to me as lively and bubbling while moving with a constrained
force.
The
poems from Jose Perez Beduya’s Throng
were one example of a piece where the explanatory preface (here just effusive
praise of Throng) was mostly unnecessary. Beduya has some very good poems here
and informing the reader of this beforehand seems strange and unnecessary.
Joyelle
Mcsweeny’s King Prion was one example
where I was blindsided. Language poetry rarely causes a rise in me but each of
her pieces in the series is bursting with life, a cascade of imaginative tonal
links and mind bending imagery.
Of the
conceptual pieces, Nick Montfort’s Letterformed
Terrain, a (very short) perl script which creates a random string of
characters and spaces which stream by as a moving landscape, came off as both
an interesting concept and aesthetically pleasing.
So
here is the Whitman’s sample of out-there literature. Take a bite out of each
piece, throw away the cremes, jellies and chocolate covered nuts, then go out
and buy two pounds of the caramels. Cuz the caramels are worth it. (May 2013)
Purchase The &NOW AWARDS 2 HERE.
Reviewer bio: Sam Moss lives in the Pacific Northwest. He is currently working on a novel called Basic Analysis. He writes for the zine NADA at nadadadamagazine.blogspot.com and his blog can be found at perfidiousscript.blogspot.com .
Purchase The &NOW AWARDS 2 HERE.
Reviewer bio: Sam Moss lives in the Pacific Northwest. He is currently working on a novel called Basic Analysis. He writes for the zine NADA at nadadadamagazine.blogspot.com and his blog can be found at perfidiousscript.blogspot.com .
