The story is set in some creepy near-future when "pointlessness is the point," and the colors of the physical worlds have all blah-ed down to gray. The narrator, Susan, is the daughter of a woman who died many years before on a walking tour of Wales. As Susan wades through old diaries, letters, and court transcripts to try to solve the mystery of her mother's disappearance, she is visited by a "strag," or straggler, one of the countless homeless wanderers that float all over the future world like dryer lint. Though the strag appears to be a kind of identity-less village idiot-without-a-village, his connection to his past is no less tenuous than Susan's.
"This is what happens when you barricade yourself against the past; the minute you forget what's been lost you also forget what it's like to feel desire." This book is about what happens when the past, your own or your culture's, falls off a cliff and you have to live with the ruins of it in your head. As much as you want to escape the past, you also want to bring it back. You know that "you only romanticize ruin when you don't have to live with it," but if you escape ruin, you always wonder what it would have been like. If only the dead could live again. If only things could be, again, the horrible, nasty, murderous way they were. Kathryn Davis knows. REBECCA BROWN
GAMES FOR NAUGHTY PEOPLE
by Brian L. Pellham
(Kheper Publishing) $9.95This book is mistitled! True, there are some games that require some drinkin', freaky lickin', and shameless strippin', but the majority of the games are for tightasses who need to learn how to ease up a bit on the social mores. There are eight categories of games, from innocent gossip to risqué drinking, with naughtiness levels ranging from gittin' soused 'n' nekkid to just breaking the ice with complete strangers. This isn't a book to hide with other contraband -- but it is one to reach for when the lackluster gathering at your apartment is in need of a kick. Pellham doesn't so much revive the once-so-instrumental middle-school kissy game as offer the opportunity to lighten up your company by embarrassing them (though the ol' "7 Minutes in Heaven" still works to this end).
What is the funniest/nastiest story you have related to vomit? When was the last time someone heard you fart? If you were a road sign, would you be "one way" or "watch out for falling rocks"? Would you rather glow in the dark forever or always smell like Swedish meatballs? Which one of your friends do you suspect uses up the most amount of toilet paper in a week? Have you ever schnooked a friend's recent ex?
It's healthy to know these things about your friends, and helpful to know what they'd say about you. Plus, getting drunk and stoned in your apartment time after time and debating the same old shit is wearing thin. Just think of the new, more interesting debates that will result! Let's start this party right. BRIAN GOEDDE
THE FATHER OF THE PREDICAMENTS
by Heather McHugh
(Wesleyan University Press) $19.95"Not a Prayer" opens McHugh's latest collection of poetry with 15 pages tracking and recording the language of death. This long poem turns and turns, traveling up and down the corpse, out to the extremities, and back again. McHugh's mother-in-law is dying, and death does not happen all at once, in some defined moment. In this poem, death uncoils a life. McHugh's exploration of the conversations and "delirious" outpourings of a deathwatch captures the staggering sound of dying. Her focus on language imbues the poem with a sense of truth and plainness, eschewing claptrap moments of tear-jerking drama for the symphonic effect of phrases, words, and stories repeated. Our fascination with "dying words" plays out. McHugh requires us to stare them down, hunting for clues up and down the body, inside and outside key phrases, until once-familiar words ring as strange, undefinable, syllabic sculptures.
McHugh breaks down language just as death disassembles the body. This is one of the more successful intellectual poems I have read encountering death; it is also the truest and most brave. The rest of the book is comprised of shorter, witty, spunky, and very clever poems. McHugh's affinity for words accumulates into a collection tinkling between love and conundrum. RACHEL KESSLER
