Small
Press Feature
Jason Baldinger’s The Lady Pittsburgh (Speed & Briscoe
Books, 2012)
Early
on in Jason Baldinger’s collection of poems, The Lady Pittsburgh, the poet has the aside, “The years make things
different.” That standout line is
representative of one of the major themes in this, Baldinger’s first solo
full-length collection. Baldinger is a poet interested in history and
people—specific history but also history in general, and specific historical
figures but also people in general—and the poems in this collection often
concern themselves with time, the passage of time, and the change that passage
of time brings.
Baldinger’s
poems also seem to want to communicate a personal history, whether abstract or
concrete. In “Windber” the reader gets a
narrative in glimpses or a “lyric narrative.” The poem is woozy or fuzzy like the drunken night and hungover morning it is describing. The poet’s very strong ear is apparent in the
second stanza—“After fourteen hours, / no pink elephants for me / just
splinters of sun / through hotel windows. / Birds chitter August songs. / Delirium found in a sleeping bag, / almost safe from concrete
floors.”
In
“Berkman,” Baldinger claims, “There is another Pittsburgh.” There
definitely is. And it appears that
Baldinger is determined to observe and document that “other Pittsburgh,” the
Pittsburgh that people don’t know about or else don’t talk about. Baldinger
knows his local history and he puts it to good use in these poems, oftentimes
documenting or else rehashing history with Pittsburghers from the past. One recurring trope in Baldinger’s poems is
the idea that history and the present can coexist in the present, and in many
ways they do. This kind of idea is
apparent in the poem “The Parade.” I
don’t know exactly what’s happening in this poem, but it feels like a sort of
collage of a feeling, a pastiche psychically fitting together pieces of history
and landscape in a surrealistic parade. It serves as a kind of metaphor for history and also a sort of
quintessential Baldinger poem as this idea crops up
multiple times in his work.
One
of my favorite poems in the collection is “Life with Lions.” In much of The Lady Pittsburgh, Baldinger has a
very wide lens—he attempts to capture large topics with a broad sense of time
and history. “Life with Lions” distills
a single moment (a visit to a hospital room) and reflects on that moment is a
very direct, very profound way. With
this poem, the grand scale of Baldinger’s other poems is brought down to a
single, meditative—almost Confessional—aside. There is a very keen eye for detail in this poem, and a very smart move
is how the poet doesn’t rush to reveal the entire story right away. The relationship between the speaker and his
subject slowly emerges through the course of the poem, and the reader has a
sense of revelation once he reaches the end, the last lines sending shockwaves
up through the rest of the poem.
With
this book, Baldinger has proven himself to be one of a handful of great younger
Pittsburgh poets to emerge in the past decade. He is quickly becoming a master of large historical subjects, but he has
also shown his versatility in some very personal poems in this collection. This is a strong collection displaying a
broad range that indicates Baldinger’s bright future as a poet.
Daniel McCloskey’s A Film About Billy (Six Gallery Press,
2012)
I had been itching for a graphic novel when Daniel
McCloskey’s A Film about Billy fell
into my lap. A novel/graphic novel, it carries the heavy feeling but
levity of tone that I had been searching for. Between and amongst
chapters of text, we get these poignant illustrations of teenaged turmoil and
the slow descent of the world at large. The narrator, Collin Heart, grew
up on a military base in Canyon City, PA but moves in with his grandmother in
Pittsburgh in light of tragedy at home. The story navigates the dark waters of
suicide beginning with the death of Collin’s dear friend Billy.
Billy, Collin, his cousin Dan, and their friend Jeff—all high school pals—make
filming a way of life. The early
graphics of the book create a sweet tone of nostalgia, many of these from the
perspective of the camera. After Billy’s death, Collin moves to the city
and becomes the youngest person to win the illustrious Mint grant, which will
fund a documentary about Billy. The film takes on a life of its own and
indeed becomes a key character. But as we would expect from anyone trying
to breathe life back into a lost friend, Collin struggles with his task.
His relief comes from his interactions with his doting grandmother, his
invigorating neighbor and love interest Sarah, and his wise coffeepot.
Each character tenderly created lends a different
filter to Collin as well as life and a necessary closeness to the story.
Suicide, as it turns out, has become a worldwide epidemic. Though
it starts off slow, it becomes a sort of self-imposed apocalypse. A
lemming effect grabs onto people. The progression shows the delicate
balance between hope and resignation and how difficult the former is to hold.
McCloskey has woven all possible emotions into this
story in such a genuine way that each page feels like another day. One
moment hysterically happy and the next wrought with the unsavory, no part of
the soul could really go untouched here. It feels like all the
possibilities are being offered up to us, including the big round moon, so we
can see that none of it’s so bad after all. With equal strength in word
and drawing, inspiring and unexpected, A
Film about Billy leaves you with a vivacity that only death can evoke.
Mike DeCapite’s Creamsicle Blue (Sparkle Street Books, 2012)
I
didn’t know anything about writer Mike DeCapite when his Creamsicle Blue showed up in my mailbox. Pretty soon after receiving the slim,
handsome book, I cracked it to the first page and read some very pretty lyrical
prose: “Over night the year turns rainy cold. I’ve been waking up early. Four
o’clock, three. I’m restless with the
season. A change in season wakes me up
to myself.” I was curious. What is this book? It’s not big enough to be a novel. So let’s call it a chapbook. But was it a big prose poem, a short story, a
long story? It didn’t seem to want a
genre label. I read on.
A
narrative begins to develop. Our
narrator is a writer named Mike. Like
all writers, he thinks too much. Most of Creamsicle Blue is a kind of interior
journey—there are only two dialogue exchanges and both are very brief, both
ones that Mike has with his father. Like
some writers, our narrator Mike is struggling. He’s struggling with living the life of a writer while also trying to
live his life in the real world with other people. A romantic relationship develops. Our narrator is not so sure about it. The relationship fails: “There is no end to
the suffering and madness you can generate over something you didn’t want in
the first place.”
DeCapite
does a really nice job of managing time in Creamsicle
Blue. Over a number of pages, the
narrative bounces between two different times—driving through Ohio, Pennsylvania,
and New York in the present and living in San Francisco pursuing the
relationship four years before. There’s a sort of refrain of, “It’s back and
forth between New York and Cleveland.” That idea mimics several back and forth moves in this book—there is a
stylistic back-and-forth, there is a back-and-forth in time, etc.
A
handful of pages into the book, a somewhat sinister narrative starts to
emerge. Amidst the lush language, the
reader starts to notice doctors, waiting rooms, ERs. The narrator’s struggle with domesticity
begins to pale in light of a larger one—a loved one’s illness forcing him to
struggle with his own mortality. “Once
you understand you’re going to die,” he says, “your experience of time
changes. It’s not a lake anymore, it’s a
river. You’re no longer bathing in it,
you’re being carried toward death. Life
gets linear.”
About
half-way through, Creamsicle Blue takes
an interesting turn, a turn toward the philosophical. DeCapite writes, “Affection for one person is
the same as for another—deep down we’re no one in particular” and he writes,
“What is it that keeps going, beyond the scope of belief and disbelief,
illusion and disillusion?” Maybe this
isn’t a fiction chapbook at all. Maybe
this is a book of philosophy.
It
doesn’t really matter what the book is. DeCapite’s writing is riveting, a real pleasure to read,
even despite its tough subjects. The
book starts to wind down before I want it to. “We come off the bridge and Gene Clark is playing and the green treetops
are tossing, a canopy of them down to the Hudson. The car windows are open and the day is
breathing through us.” I’m ready to read
more as I finish up the book’s last two sentences: “Now I don’t live
anywhere. Except my own ribs and skull.”
Scott Silsbe is the Managing Editor of The New Yinzer.
Caitlin
Crawford is a Staff Writer at The New Yinzer.
