Publisher: Balboa Press

Published: October 2020

Genre: Poetry

Pages: 90

“I listen to your / Motionless chest / The drum of life.” – Stan K. Sujka

Slowing down is a treatment people should follow more often. Those who have not received it consider a pace akin to trickling molasses a symptom rather than a solution. When the modern push and pull of life draws near, burning candles at both ends, a diagnosis would say burnout is the cure and anything below the speed of a hare is the disease. Overdosing on elucubration is fatal; it does not take a doctor to see that. Doctors do however see life at its peak, precipice, and pitfall. Urologist Stan K. Sujka, MD in his poetry collection Man Behind the Mask witnesses and celebrates bittersweet remedies for the trauma of memory.

Simple, heavy imagery through a confessional yet congressional tone explores the lifework (seen and unseen) shared by Sujka. A paleographic approach and motif of keeping the faith resounds in his vignettes. The poem “The Woods” observes the Jewish atonement ritual of Tashlikh, blending spiritual and secular beliefs. A baptismal rebirth and liminal dilemma take place after stepping into the past for forgiveness and leaving its pain behind for the future. In contrast, “The Featherless Birds” offers a peaceful protest against commercialized nature through the invention of the plastic flamingo and its inventor Don Featherstone. The Floridian symbol also serves as a twofold ironic one: a kitschy reminder of a beautiful bird and a fun-loving memoriam of a man who suffered from Lewy body dementia.

Dissonance between how memory and history represent truth presents a needed disquietude and sobering clarification. Sujka handles this through the event and theme of death. Deferred to solemn reverence, Sujka prefers to see death as a hopeful new beginning or a source of enlightenment. The life and death of Ernest Hemingway in “The Last Bars of Hemingway” illustrates the famous writer’s tactile dread on and off the page. Sujka wears his heart and heritage on his sleeve, creating a communion between the clinical and the clerical. His Holocaust poems such as “Aurora Borealis” (an account of the death marches of concentration camp inmates), “Kharon” (the fate of pediatrician Janusz Korzek and his orphanage), and “Auschwitz 2013” (the generational gap and synchronicity with the conflict between ancestry and anachronism) manifest a full-bodied tapestry of the nadir and zenith of humanity.

There exists a sterile sameness that blinds people to the unobserved life. There also exists artificial distractions, overbearing and misleading, straying away from the natural world’s simple pleasures (“Cow That Swallowed the Moon”). All in moderation still experience the abject and fragile impermanence of life. Among the dead and dying, beyond sentimental platitudes, knowing life goes on after death (“The Shroud”) affirms that faith without works is dead. Under the auspices of an augur and his bird watching, Sujka and Man Behind the Mask devote time to the observed life, touching moments with kind, discerning eyes and giving a name to the nameless.

Final Rating:

Green Rose

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Flat Jacket Author: Jill McCorkle

Illustrator: Steve Godwin

Publisher: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill

Published: July 2020

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction

Pages: 320

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“A story is easier to fall into than your own life…”

– Jill McCorkle, Hieroglyphics

Memory and history share a disingenuous and diverting crossroads, much of which becomes a diluted and dilatable personal history. Hieroglyphics by Jill McCorkle, recounts the elder couple, Frank and Lil (look to the past), the first a history professor and the latter a dance instructor, from Boston, Massachusetts. They possess an unsaid understanding communicated on the visage of blunt and esoteric notes that last into their retirement in North Carolina. The younger couple, Shelley and Brent (look to the present), a stenographer and car mechanic, have an unofficial divorce, leaving this mother and wife to rear her unenlightened and impressionable son, Harvey, in North Carolina. Frank has unfinished business with his past and to complete it, he must visit Shelley’s home, his childhood home.

Two tragical epochs, Boston’s Cocoanut Grove fire of 1942 and the Rennert, North Carolina train wreck of 1943, challenge these tragical couples as they overlap each other in a time-bending way through mementos, keepsakes, notes, and personal effects. Much of Hieroglyphics is headspace work, a tedium that promises and processes mundanity. In this sense, memory is made a personal history where the past catches up with the present and vice versa. The innate truth (the absence of identity) and the adaptive truth (the loss of innocence) create a transformative internal conflict. The value of Lil’s hording tendencies and her hair-splitting plurality is not without its sincere reasons, as notional as they often are. Frank is a believable history buff, lost in times not his own as he comes to terms with a rocky childhood and an avalanching adulthood. Similarly, Shelley’s and Harvey’s inappropriate but wholesomely exaggerated use of escapism leave the mother and son stilted and siphoned as a family unit.

McCorkle’s novel succeeds in its sparsity or narrowness but also suffers from it. Circuitous paths lead to an ineffability, one that poses memory, however unreliable or indelible, as akin to living beyond any timeline’s marker. The bottleneck then, and a necessary one, is knowing what to part with and what to hold onto. The trouble is knowing and remembering the fragility and mystery of words said or written and unsaid or unwritten. Deciding between meaning and meanings, death’s forgetfulness and life’s displacement or life’s forgetfulness and death’s displacement, for posterity. Hieroglyphics leaves more unsaid than said through memory as history, leaves the pieces behind to be picked up again by the impromptu historians, and runs out of track long before the train has left the station.

Final Rating:

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