Review of Howie Good's Little Tragedies

Little Tragedies, poems by Howie Good. India: Graffiti Kolkata, 2011.

Being a fan of Good, I immediately noticed that many of these poems were longer than his usual fare, though they continue to be the surreal, yet poignant, snapshots at which Good excels. “Scene of the Accident” is the opening poem. Good hints at a scene of tragedy in the first section with a “nurse in white clogs” who “has to give the boy with the cuckoo clock heart a sedative.” The second section covers reactions, for example, “Pedestrians stood weeping at the crosswalk.” And in the third section, Good paints a vivid final scene, “The light doesn’t last all that long, of course, but as long as it lasts, we become like souls with red-painted toenails, the fallen factory chimneys along the Merrimack, dancing peasants scantily clad amid the snow of a Russian prison camp.” There is joy amidst the wreckage, here. Though there has been tragedy, there is hope because these characters don’t let the ‘accident’ overwhelm them.

“Exit Visa” describes a narrator who “woke up speaking another language.” The narrator can’t seem to communicate. He (I assume it’s a ‘he’ though this isn’t made clear) is a kind of romantic hero, alienated from the world and unable to bridge that gap. And the world is a terrifying one. “I started home, but cops were beating a man on the corner. It might as well have been the fall of France, or the day Sacco and Vanzetti were executed.” Even the weather offers no solace: “The sky was the dismal gray of neglect.” I could quote the whole poem, there are so many standout lines. Good uses surreal language in a Kafka-esque manner to heighten the alienness of the narrator’s situation.

Good uses war imagery throughout this chapbook, “the last Jews in Krakow are hanging from lamp posts,” “blackened corpses, mounds of rubble,” “the sound of a shell being jacked into the chamber.” These scenes are often set ‘far away,’ either in location or time, but they could just as easily be a warning for the future. The poem “9-1-1” brings this idea home by portraying a hostile world in which naked women resemble corpses and the narrator sleeps with a weapon under his pillow. What should’ve been a ‘safe’ world has been changed, tainted; even sex has been tainted.

Even though these poems often tend towards the surreal, they are grounded in reality, often a horrible reality. Let us not forget that the incorporation of surrealist elements into literature really grew from a reaction to the atrocities of war in the early part of the Twentieth Century. The characters in Good’s poems face fractured realities in which joy and horror come equally as unexpectedly, and can end just as suddenly.

-CL Bledsoe

Review of Howie Good's The Devil's Fuzzy Slippers

The Devil’s Fuzzy Slippers, poems by Howie Good. Flutter Press, 2012.

This chapbook begins with “Prophets & Martyrs,” a prose poem which introduces the theme of faith while simultaneously questioning that faith. In section 1, Good writes, “The panhandler holds up a piece of cardboard. Beep if you know Jesus, shakily written in black marker. Cars behind me do.” Good also touches on questions of cultural morality; do these people beeping truly know Jesus if they pass this panhandler by?

“We All Fall Down” continues this theme from a different approach. It begins, “You’re the person who only resembles the person who committed the crime. I’m the officer here to arrest you.” Good introduces what could be a very heavy topic, but he handles it with skill. He continues, “You’re a novel that people start reading but can’t finish. I’m the sound of falling asleep on a flat rock sheltered by an apple tree.” Here, Good has disambiguated the cultural experiences of these characters in a telling, but immensely readable way.

“Undertow,” is one of the more powerful poems in the collection. Good is a master of portraying subtle yet powerful emotion. One of my favorite lines I’ve ever read is, “All the people/you admire are either dead/or secretly sad,” (2-4), which develops the running theme of alienation, the outsider at odds with a nonsensical world. “You feel//the undertow of everything/that has gone missing,” Good continues (4-7). The poem implies more than just the ennui of the outsider, though. There is an iceberg below the surface, of which we can only see the tip. “I should have been there/with you when the little//black flowers broke open,” Good continues with a simple, yet effective image on loss (8-11). “I should have watched/for children like the sign said.” (12-13). What does Good mean by this? Did the narrator ignore this sign and run over a child? Or is it more existential; has the narrator simply misplaced his values? Good leaves it ambiguous, which makes it all the more powerful.

The question is, what does the title mean? The Devil is in fuzzy slippers, so he’s comfortable. He’s at home, perhaps. Maybe the world offers him so little challenge (i.e. the world has become so evil) that he doesn’t have to work very hard. On the other hand, perhaps the Devil is Howie Good. Perhaps he is comfortable with his ‘badness’. Maybe he’s come to terms with it and no longer concerns himself. We could synthesize these two ideas and say that the narrator represents someone who has come to terms with his ‘badness’, but he’s not the only one, which is what allows the world to be evil. I don’t actually think the first two theories are mutually exclusive, at all; in fact, I think they both work for the collection.

Regardless, this is one of the stronger chapbooks I’ve seen in a while. Good is very readable and very pertinent, but he’s enough of an artist that he doesn’t hit you over the head with meaning.

-CL Bledsoe