Collin Kelley’s Render

I was introduced to Collin Kelley’s work when we did multiple readings of his poem “Wonder Woman” for Nic Sebastian’s Voice Alpha site. So when Collin’s book Render was released from Sibling Rivalry Press, I wanted to see if the other poems were as charming as both “Wonder Woman” is and Collin seems to be. (I only know him in the virtual world, but we share many interests including music and Doctor Who, so I’m sure we’d get along fine in person.)

The collection is firmly rooted in the turbulence of the 70s and 80s – early mentions of Vietnam and Three Mile Island hint at the domestic and personal implosions that will follow. The reader is whisked into the family album and shown not just the best photos – the ones in frames or carefully-pasted scrapbooks – but the candids, the blurred shots, the ones that company usually never sees. These narratives of descent into family disintegration and of the wild upward splash of emerging sexuality are firmly rooted in popular culture – a Barney Rubble bank saves the day when the car breaks down, the Members Only jacket means belonging, and Pam Grier and Wonder Woman are role models. No details are spared, although some of them may be a bit folded, faded, and rounded at the edges like old Kodak prints from the 70s.

The opening poem “A Broken Frame” sets up the idea of the narrator as outcast as its refers to a relative “marked/out, maybe with black wax,/which runs to the bottom corner/where the frame is cracked.” The manuscript is divided into sections – in the first, called “aperture,” we read of a childhood and young adolescence marred by the infidelity and illness of the speaker’s mother and an awakening sexuality in the speaker. In “blowup,” the speaker’s sexual life (from first crushes to one-night stands to hustling to acceptance of his bachelor life) is both simple and explicit enough to be real. And the last and title poem provides us with a “resolution” that uses photography terminology in a more experimental form.

These poems give us narrative scenarios that function much like scenes from a movie. Kelley is also a fiction writer, and those skills show in this collection of poetry. Each poem has a narrative arc and, more often than not, loops back to the opening detail in some way. My favorite piece in the collection is “Broken Things” which begins “My mother hovers now, whipping this world/with damaged blades, her selective amnesia/is rudderless, requires a stabilizing hand/from my father, the elephant who never forgets…” The poem revisits many of the themes in earlier poems and ends “and even from this distance I can hear/her distress call, waiting for a message/that I have forgiven her, and I have./Even broken things can still fly.”

You can find the book at the link above. If you are a child of the 70s or like your poems with a strong narrative bent, then Render will be a collection you want to read.

Shine by Donnelle McGee: A Review

“What’s up with the name Shine? 

His eyes, man. You never seen his eyes?”

Shine by Donnelle McGee is the story of Bray “Shine” Philips, a street hustler with a voice that immediately draws the reader into his world. A new release from Sibling Rivalry Press, McGee’s story defies categorization: is it a novella, an extra-long short story, a little of both? However you label it, this work of fiction is affecting and original in its approach.
The short fragmented sections of the narrative – the longest at two and half pages, the shortest at one word – vary in tone, length and voice. One section may be Bray’s internal dialogue and the next a poem written by his ailing mother. All sections work cohesively to create a picture of not only the main character, but the other planets orbiting around him in his universe.

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It is remarkable in that, despite its economy of language and lack of extensive exposition, the reader connects with each character well, from Bray himself to a detective named Armstrong who circles the edges of the drama. For all of its compression, it covers a sweeping emotional landscape of identity, sex, disappointment, confusion, illness, empowerment, discovery, and love. When I finished reading, I was left with the feeling that Shine’s story is both uniquely his and a part of the larger human narrative.

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I admired McGee’s ability to convey all of this in these short (mostly paragraph length) segments of chapters. There are seventy-nine of them, but the book is easily read in one sitting and pulls the reader forward with cryptic pieces of conversations, tight descriptions, and frequent point-of-view changes.

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McGee’s stance of writing with an observer’s indifference, of letting the circumstances tell the story, heightened the impact of the emotion for me. Although there were moments toward the beginning that were disorienting – I wasn’t exactly sure who was who or who was talking- those quickly passed and changed to a need to find out the fates of these characters.

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If you are frustrated that I am talking around the plot or not giving more of Bray’s story, all I can say is that it would do the book a disservice – McGee’s structure and storytelling method are so different and engaging that to tell you more would ruin your reading experience. And that is something I don’t want to do.