This Saturday at 5:00 pm. East Coast time, LIT BALM is thrilled to present Annie Finch and Haril Alluri plus open mic! Our question for this reading is "Page or stage?"
Annie Finch is an award-winning feminist poet and writer, author of Spells: New and Selected Poems, The Poetry Witch Little Book of Spells, and Among the Goddesses, winner of the Sarasvati Award for Poetry. She has published influential books on poetry and edited numerous anthologies, most recently Choice Words: Writers on Abortion from Haymarket Books. Her poetry has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Paris Review, The Penguin Book of Twentieth-Century American Poetry, and onstage at Carnegie Hall. Based in Washington, DC, she travels to teach and perform. Visit her website and schedule of classes at
www.anniefinch.comHari Alluri (he/him/siya) is the author of The Flayed City, Carving Ashes, and the chapbook The Promise of Rust. A winner of the 2020 Leonard A. Slade, Jr. Poetry Fellowship for Poets of Color and a co-founding editor of Locked Horn Press, his current projects are supported by grants from the BC Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts. His work appears recently in Anomaly, The Margins, Massachusetts Review, Poetry, Pulpmouth, and Quiddity, among others.LIT BALM is a new weekly interactive livestream reading series brought to you by Jonathan Penton of Unlikely Stories Mark V and Unlikely Books, Marc Vincenz of MadHat and New American Writing (Magazine), and Larissa Shmailo of the Feminist Poets in Low Cut Blouses.
Every Saturday at 5:00 pm EST.
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https://us04web.zoom.us/j/461603228Livestream at
https://www.facebook.com/LitBalmWebsite: www.litblam.org
I am honored beyond measure to be included in
CHOICE WORDS: WRITERS ON ABORTION. The book includes work by Audre Lorde, Margaret Atwood, Lucille Clifton, Amy Tan, Gloria Steinem, Ursula Le Guin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Joyce Carol Oates, Gloria Naylor, Dorothy Parker, Anne Sexton, Ntozake Shange, Sholeh Wolpe, Ai, Jean Rhys, Mahogany L. Browne, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Frank O’Hara, Vi Khi Nao, Sharon Olds, Judith Arcana, Alice Walker, Lucille Clifton, Molly Peacock, Carol Muske-Dukes, Mo Yan, Leslie Marmon Silko, Bobbie Louise Hawkins, Kathy Acker, Langston Hughes, Sharon Doubiago, and many other classic and contemporary writers. Huge congrats to editor Annie Finch on this essential volume!
Read Charles Rammelkamp's review of Sly Bang, which appears in the current issue of edgy print journal Into the Void.
Sly Bang by Larissa ShmailoReviewed by Charles Rammelkamp
“Sly Bang”NovelSpuyten Duyvil, 2019$18.00, 198 pagesISBN: 978-1-947980-98-3
Larissa Shmailo’s novel feels like a mash-up of William Burroughs’s paranoid mind-control fantasies and the kaleidoscopic space fantasies of superhero comic books. Indeed, the “sly bang” in the title alludes to the plot to destroy the universe by the – mad scientist? sui generis bad guy? – Prince Eugene (Genya) Ouspensky that the protagonist, Nora (as in Ibsen’s Doll House), aka, Larissa Ekaterina Anastasia Nikolayenvna Romanova, is determined to thwart. But this is not a traditional what-happens-next narrative, though by the end it does “feel” like a resolution has been reached.
But people die and come back to life all over the place, so who can tell, and we are often treated to flashbacks to World War II era concentration camps and Soviet gulags. Ouspensky pursues Nora/Larissa through the whole strange space-time warp of this science-ficitiony world. Ouspensky can read Nora’s mind, trying to control her. But “Larissa artfully dodges sex with Ouspensky by role-playing Anna and Vronsky, Lara and Zhivago, and he enjoys this.” Nora is an FBI agent (not necessarily a good thing, more sinister than salubrious) with telepathic, comic book superhero powers of her own.
Speaking of “sly,” Shmailo often makes these amusing, satirical references to the cornerstones of western civilization, from Heidegger and Nietzsche and Tolstoy to John Lennon and Patti Smith. “Hillary Clinton lay on the table wriggling, bound and gagged.” Johnny Depp provides occasional voiceover.
Shmailo uses a variety of literary forms in the construction of her novel. The book opens up, stage drama-like, with stage direction and setting and off-stage voices, as we encounter Nora masturbating on a leather couch. As in a play, the dialogue is written:
MICHAEL: Hey there!
NORA: Hello, Michael, are there walls between us, buildings, I hope?
MICHAEL: Yes, and I’ve triple-locked the door and bound my feet…
The writing then moves to a more conventional style of an omniscient narrator voice moving the story along. But don’t get used to any particular style! Shmailo seems to be having fun subverting readers’ expectations.
For just as easily, Shmailo will burst out into poetry, including sublime lyrics like HOW MY FAMILY SURVIVED THE CAMPS, Nora’s poem.
Was micht nicht umbringt, macht mich starker: What does not kill me makes me stronger. Nietzsche said this about other things. Not this.
How did my family survive the camps? Were they smarter, stronger than the rest? Were they lucky? Did luck exist in Dora-Nordhausen, Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen?
This comes from an episode involving Nora’s mother, Leda, in which we read in Nora’s backstory, reminiscent of the “origin story” of so many comic book superheroes. Leda, we learn, conceives Nora in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Williamsburg in 1946 “with the last sex she will ever have.” Of course, Leda’s resentment about this is a factor later on.
But it’s best not to give away the plot, spoiler-like, especially as the plot, like a dream, is subject to the interpretation of every reader, which may be the ultimate point of Shmailo’s satire. Still, after so much gore and blood and guts and sexual perversity, it’s hard not to smile at the fairy tale ending when the character Bensinck “dropped to one knee and took her hand” like Prince Charming swooning over Cinderella. Dim the lights. Shine a soft spot on the dude. With what seems the sincerity only an earnest fairy tale prince can display, he says to her, “No more undercover, no more faking it. Just us, and a quarter of the world’s land mass.” Hah!
And Nora, God bless her, having just a moment before read through a story she’s written about killing Ouspensky after he has an orgasm inside her (“ He starts fucking her with his tiny dick and Nora starts fantasizing about killing him and it turns her on.”), smiles sweetly and responds: “And create a world safe for our children, Albert? Or am I going too fast for you?”
But wait, that’s not all! The story is followed by APPENDIX; NORA’S SLAA SEXUAL HARMS INVENTORY (FRAGMENT). Her sexual ideal? “I have sex with a man whom I love and respect and trust and am attracted to and who loves and respects and trusts me and is attracted to me as part of a committed relationship and as a byproduct of sharing and partnership. Our sex is creative, playful, imaginative and hot. [following pages illegible]” There follows a series of fragments about various men and her “reasons for getting involved.”
Do you get the uncomfortable feeling that Shmailo is playing the reader, having us on? It’s this discomfort that’s finally at the heart of the writing, masterful satire whose object is constantly shifting and, yes, may be you. You just have to read Sly Bang yourself and come to your own conclusions. You won’t regret it.
