Book Review - Proving Grounds by Jean-Paul L. Garnier

Proving Grounds by Jean-Paul L. Garnier
Reviewed by Susan Rukeyser

Proving Grounds, by science fiction writer and publisher, Jean-Paul L. Garnier, is a short and intense collection of anti-nuclear weapons protest poetry. It is a fierce reckoning with these terrible weapons, as well as our Cold War childhood fears that changed but never went away. This book demonstrates how powerfully poetry can become activism: returning our focus to a vital issue, reckoning with denial and apathy, and, finally, offering hope.

Pocket-sized, with spare, clean text, this book fits in your hand like a private missive from deep within the resistance – a critical call to action. The glossy front cover, designed by the author and Dain Luscombe, is a photographic collage of many different nuclear explosions. It lends a sense of urgency that sets the tone for the collection. Each page spread features a poem on the right, and, on the left, another photograph of another nuclear explosion. The repetition of these horrifying images, the sheer number of them, becomes part of the experience, always in the reader’s peripheral vision.

The exception to this pattern in the two-page poem, “13,890 Nuclear Warheads,” which ends with a shocking fact:

 and you have seen the image of the cloud

but not as many times
as they have detonated
two thousand and fifty-six

 

Immediately following this is the poem, “12 Missing Nuclear Bombs” which includes the line, “accidents every seventy-five days."

In “War Criminals,” Garnier references Operation Paperclip, which secretly brought Nazi scientists to this country, following World War II, to work for the US Government – another lesser-known fact that reminds the reader of the inherent immorality of these weapons:

 

what did the Jewish scientists of the
Manhattan Project
feel, as the Paperclip arrived
bombs away to space

 Details like these serve to jar the complacent reader into renewed attention on the nuclear threat. Garnier acknowledges, in “Remember”:

 

easy to forget, many wars since
drugs, terror, disease
enemies we cannot nuke

 The relatable, shared trauma of classroom “duck and cover” drills haunts this collection, perhaps most poignantly in “Under My Desk”:

 

under my desk

counting on little fingers

waiting for the Russian bomb

no one said why

 

Outrage for what that vulnerable child was put through, what we were all put through, burns through this collection.

Proving Grounds holds a pointed, seething contempt for former President Ronald Reagan, who fills the back cover with a photo from his movie star days, gun drawn and jaw set, as Deputy Marshall from the 1953 Western, “Law & Order.” Behind him is a fiery explosion.

From “Reagan Baby”:

 Reagan, you’re my birth rite

leader of a world

where everything is owned

and I’ll kneel under my desk
in your honor.

 

But Reagan is just one part of the larger military industrial complex. Garnier laments the devastation caused by “Lockheed, Boeing/ and all you engineers of death” in “Do What You’re Good At”:

 they could give us the stars

instead brought micro-suns
burned even the bones of the people
dusted every breath with cancer

 

Underlying this book’s fierce tone is heartbreak over squandered opportunities for peace. Hurt and anger are vented through vulgarity, used effectively at points throughout the collection, connecting us more directly with the strong emotional response that is appropriate when remembering how rich war mongers played with our lives and our planet. From “Shield Yourself”:

 I picture an impotent slob: suit, phallic tie

drunk on all the riches of life

wavering over the button

like an orgasm

one wants to hold

 

This book also takes aim at those who should have known better but were complicit. In “Feynman’s Arrogance,” Garnier writes:

 

play the game, all smiles
you play to mess with authority, with
restriction
as you open up nature to destruction

And then, with the final poem, “We Can Do Something,” there is a shift, an offering of hope through resistance.

The back of the book has a list of anti-nuke websites; QR codes to help readers find their Congressional representatives; and four pre-written form letters to tear out and mail to them and the President.

In the Afterword, Garnier explains what compelled him to write and collect these poems and how delving into such disturbing subject matter resulted in cognitive dissonance: “it is simply too great a horror for the mind to accept. … This inability to grasp the destructive powers, and their scale, causes us to feel powerless in the face of the bomb. But it is not divine forces we are up against; it is mere men … We can achieve total nuclear disarmament, it is possible”. 

Proving Grounds reminds us that it is necessary. - Susan Rukeyser

______________________

Proving Grounds is available locally at
 Space Cowboy Books
61871 Twenty-nine Palms Hwy.
Joshua Tree, CA

Click here to purchase Proving Grounds on-line ($5.25)
proceeds donated to International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN)
Click here to purchase the musical audiobook

Click here to follow Susan Rukeyser

Click here to follow Jean-Paul L. Garnier

Achievement:

Review: Not On Fire, Only Dying by Susan Rukeyser

Not On Fire, Only Dying by Susan Rukeyser
(Twisted Road Publications, 2015, 277 pages)
Reviewed for Cholla Needles by Greg Gilbert

Boil down Westside Story, Romeo & Juliet, and A Streetcar Named Desire, Jettison the dancing gangs, the Capulets and Montagues, and Blanche DuBois, and what remains are two hearts desperate to beat as one. The question is always: Will love triumph? That’s what matters, after all. Susan Rukeyser’s premier novel, Not On Fire, Only Dying is a love story that doesn’t prettify love. It doesn’t offer flowers and clichéd orations. It doesn’t cast anyone in gauzed light or in slow dancing juke box scenes. What the book does is present us with love in its gnarly realness.

Lola says her baby is kidnapped, and the reader soon wonders if the child is real. Only Marko believes that the baby isn’t a figment of her mental instability and pharmaceutical haze. An ex-convict and drug-dealer, he is devoted to Lola and acts as her knight in an effort to right her world. Armored with his love, his honor, and his black oilskin duster, his allegiance to her fragile belief in the child is the great test of his knighthood. Though his eyes, we experience Lola as a fully formed person, at times jittery and ragged, and at times “better.” As for Marko, one may ask if he is an antihero. This is a central question in the story. Is he tilting at windmills, or is there a gallant obligation in his quest? Is true heroism founded in the heart of the warrior, regardless of the rightness of the quest? In a world of artifice, Marko may lack the qualities of a “leading man,” but just as Rukeyser’s depiction of love is cleaved to the bone, so too is Marko’s heroism. His strides are long, his love is true, his duster spreads behind him like a cape. He is all sinew and scars and heart. He is never ridiculous. Even his violence and his moments of confusion and doubt are virtuous – except for when his violence has the final word. And even then, we are inclined to forgive.  

Not On Fire, Only Dying is a compelling novel. Susan Rukeyser is a gifted writer and storyteller. Without relying on sentimentality, she draws us into the lives of her characters, some worthy of our affection and admiration, others deserving of our scorn. Her scene setting is brief and atmospheric, often poetic but never heavy-handed. Her pacing is patient, and her narration occurs from within the story’s interior. This is a streetwise book. Hardcore realities are commonplace, a one room apartment without a closet, bitter icy waters that promise infinite rest, hopes hung on a precarious balance, the world of pharmaceuticals and back-alley sleight-of-hand, and, hauntingly, in the background – the punctuating cries of a lone infant. The story of Lola and Marko is one where love is acid etched onto the hearts of two weathered souls who might become one another’s redeemer. This is a story that will sit in the reader like a personal memory.

Available at our local bookstores.

Click Here To Order On-Line

January Issue Released! Cholla Needles 61!

The fabulous writers who start off year six of our magazine are:

Susan Abbott
Roger G. Singer
Kate H. Koch
David Chorlton
Mark T. Evans
George Howell
Kent Wilson
David Groulx
Zaqary Fekete
S J Perry
and Timothy Robbins

click here to purchase on-line ($5.00)

This issue is a perfect example of why the position of editor is so exciting. I have the unique opportunity to watch creativity in action daily, and it’s really special when it sparks to life between friends. Susan Abbott’s beautiful cover started life at her friend’s house in Joshua Tree. Susan made a sketch entitled Saguaro in Joshua Tree and that later became both a plein air work of art and a poem titled “Lesson, The Curve”.  She shared the art and poem with her friend, Susan Rukeyser, who wrote the following piece:

Listen, I Heard

in response to Lesson, the Curve
by Susan Rukeyser

Before she embarked on her grand adventure, in the pause between chapters, a page held mid-air, the poet sketched the lone, tall saguaro cactus that stands before my little house in Joshua Tree. Saguaros are native to the Sonoran Desert, but this one was well established here in the Mojave, long before I blew in from the East Coast.

The poet took her sketchbook with her, the drawing a memento of her view from this house, its walls humming with progressive feminist and lesbian poetry and prose and art and our conversations about all that and much more. This house where I—like her, a sister of sisters—waited for her safe return to my house of curves, where it is understood: Straight lines are impossible.

The poet drove away alone, following curves that lead east and south and north and west. Along the way, she was reminded, again: the world is womanly. Curves and mystery, strength and surprise—how beautiful the world is, everywhere.

Saguaros do not belong here, in the Mojave, but somehow this one thrives. Someone believed it could grow to belong here. The saguaro did the hard work, sending roots down, arms up and out. Every season, growing boils that stretch into phalluses that burst into showy white flowers. The saguaro is just trying to survive, like the rest of us. It doesn’t mind a little attention, once in a while.

The poet returned as the virus approached. More distance, they said. Flatten the curve. The poet sat alone with her memory, imagination, and inks. Through her, the saguaro became fantastic and playful, infused with ecstatic colors, texture, and personality. It is green and robust, with spines that gleam like a halo. And there is something holy about it—joyous—in its appeal to the sky. Each mark is applied with a painstaking point. The background evokes swirling desert winds and sunsets and starry nights. And the virus. I see stars that could be our homes, our selves. I see how we are held in terrible, necessary isolation. But we are held. A heart appears in the sky, tipped toward the saguaro. Love can weather some distance. How much longer until we can embrace, speak close, stand near? We cannot bear it, but we do.

What lesson will we take, when the curve holds our page from turning? What future will the road curve towards? What will flatten; what will grow instead? What mementos will we keep?

This holy saguaro reminds me of something not of this, or any, desert: the minaret of a mosque at the center of old town Sarajevo. It rises high above the bazaar in a still-healing city that is deliberately tolerant, desperate for peace, its people coexisting within walls pockmarked by bullet holes. Five times a day, it calls out its reminder: We are here. We wait together. Wash your hands. We all hear that.

I tell the poet: let the saguaro-minaret call you through uncertainty, grief, pandemic dread. Let it call you from the endless curves of road or loneliness. Let it remind you of the friend who listens to art, as she listens to you. Let it call you back where you are heard.

Watch Susan Rukeyser reading Listen, I Heard

Follow Susan Rukeyser at www.susanrukeyser.com

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Susan Abbott Watercolors (Facebook) 
and/or @smtabbott (Instagram)

Review of Whatever Feels Like Home by Susan Rukeyser

I love the poetry Susan Rukeyser includes in her fascinating flash fiction. For example, this line about a goldfish: “His translucent fins fanned like the scarves of an old burlesque dancer still going through the motions.”

These ten stories take us deep into the lives of the characters, and not the normal fiction characters of politics and fame. Susan instead focuses on our friends and neighbors, and manages to reach in and expose my own foibles to myself. My gut tells me that you too will find yourself in at least one of these stories, and members of your family in other stories, and for sure your next-door neighbor. And, those characters whose stories are unique and new to you will become life-long friends due to Susan’s love of her characters. I know Hank now has a soft spot in my heart, and I wish him a long life with good friends.

Susan’s descriptions of events are precise and vivid: “And wasn’t this what you did, when you lost a guy who probably wasn’t your forever guy but what if he WAS? You go crazy. You rage. You weep. You break into his trailer and sit on his couch with a knife across your lap, so he will shit himself when he opens the door after a long shift, sore and beat, and all he wants in life is a shower and to be left alone.” Another story paints a colorful picture of living together full-time, “Resentment, old as this marriage, sticks to doorknobs and window sills. It gums up the corners.” 

I marvel at how Susan seemingly effortlessly embeds seventeen syllable micropoems into her stories. I just stare in wonder at and savor the skill, and admire the work that goes into this precision. From two different stories: “Mrs. Anderson stretched as birds chittered, a brook sputtered over stones.” And “You were the girl who could never leave. How did they know you slept through it?” With this careful, pristine writing throughout, I highly recommend this book for your reading pleasure. The stories I have seen previously live just as strong with re-reading, and I know this will be a small book I’ll return to with pleasure.

Click here to order online 

To order by snail mail, send a $5 check (add $1 for postage in Canada; in US, add $2; outside North America, add $5) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9.

Susan will have signed copies to sell at The Folk School during the Local Authors Book Release Party on February 27, 2022: