Noel
Sloboda. Art by Marc Snyder. Sunnyoutside Press, $15 paperback (106p) ISBN: 978-1-934513-39-2
“Bequest
Narrative,” the first poem in Noel Sloboda’s Our Rarer Monsters, feels like an invitation, a prose poem that
reads more like an introduction. We’re
told of a man who wears a different hat every day constructed from the pages of
his late librarian father’s extensive book collection. Sloboda’s fable calls to mind fables
themselves, how we collect them, how we distribute them, how we treat
them. It calls to mind the “point” of
the stories we tell. And it entices us to
read more.
The poems
are accompanied by linocut illustrations by Marc Snyder. The linocuts are striking portraits inspired
both by characters in the book and by the first poem, each wearing a different
hat. The portraits are at once iconic
and made new by their respective hats and by the emotions carved into the
faces. They are portraits that make you
imagine the rest of the story.
Our Rarer Monsters is full of the familiar
characters inside renewed myths.
Sloboda places mythological heroes and villains into everyday life. Grendel is having marriage problems in the
suburbs. Prospero was kicked out of the
retirement home and must live in his Citron.
Baba Yaga is a recurring character, serving as a Pez dispenser icon, acting
as a figure drawing model, annoyed when her house lays an egg. She becomes a character we look forward to
seeing.
Often,
the book moves away from the fantastic and rests in the domestic. The poems offer us the fabled characters in
our own lives, the fraternity pledge in “Initiation” or the expelled student in
“Discipline” that have become part of school lore, those tales with twists at
the end. And then there are the
personal myths, what our anecdotes become, no matter how simple. These poems often touch down in childhood,
showing us the aftermath of a teen neighborhood prank or a child’s belief of
what a plastic snake in his pocket whispered to him. Most striking are those that focus not on the story
but on the moment, like “As Above,” where the speaker dreams of the seedlings
that have taken root in the gutter, of waking “to find/tendrils snaking
through//AC vents,” to be reminded “of just how//far from the sun I dwell.”
While
the imagination in the poems is often intriguing, many of the poems settle into
preciousness. The poems seek to be
clever, are written toward a punch line.
The Jolly Green Giant used to be a red meat eater. A clip-on-tie salesman shouts out failed
sales pitches. A speaker gives a list of
instructions to his stunt double. I found
myself wanting more from these poems. While
the premises are certainly interesting, I wanted them to go beyond the premise,
to go beyond the punch line. I wanted
these poems to exhaust the idea, not necessarily to offer all the answers, but
to complicate things.
That
being said, the poems are written with tight lines and an attention to form
that feels appropriate for the fable.
And the playfulness in the poems, the way they keep calling into
question the myths we tell ourselves, may well be enough
to keep readers satisfied. (May 2013)
Purchase
Our Rarer Monsters HERE.
Reviewer
bio: Christy Crutchfield writes and teaches in Western Massachusetts. Her works
have appeared in Mississippi Review online, The Good Men Project,
The Collagist, and others. She blogs about writing and other monsters at
thehopelessmonster.blogspot.com.
