Back of the Book

Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting
By Kevin Powers
Little, Brown and Company
112 pages; $23

The experience of reading Kevin Powers’ new poetry collection, Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting, is much like combat itself—long periods of calm and reflection broken by frenetic bursts of adrenalized action. Nowhere is this juxtaposition more clear than in the poem “Improvised Explosive Device,” in which Powers explores what was probably the biggest threat to American soldiers in Iraq. Those of us who drove the tattered roads of that nation remember too well the randomness and constant worry about IEDs, inanimate objects to which we had never before given a second thought. In the poem, Powers writes of the quiet moments before potential energy turns kinetic:

And if this poem was somehow traveling
with you
in the turret of a humvee,
you would not see the words
buried at the edges of the road.
You would not see the wires. You would not
see the metal. You would not see the danger
in the architecture
of a highway overpass.

“Improvised Explosive Device” is unsettling, each line teasing out the danger that lurks beneath the ground or in the trash. This theme of things buried—explosives, reality, grief, history—runs throughout Powers’ poetry, as it did in his 2012 debut novel, The Yellow Birds. Powers, a graduate of the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas in Austin, served as a machine gunner with the U.S. Army in Iraq. His poetry, like his fiction, weaves between Iraq and home.

In the opening poems of Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting, Powers’ narrator is relieved that he doesn’t have to choose whether to shoot a young Iraqi boy whose job it is to gather unexploded mortars for the coalition. In later poems, the narrator, back in the States, struggles to find his footing as he discovers that he no longer fits into the community from which he embarked on his tour of duty. He is a remnant of history.

And it is history that Powers explores next, reminding readers that so much of the United States was built with a disregard for the working class. “In the Ruins of the Ironworks” parallels this hazardous disregard—in this case, for coal miners—with that for green soldiers sent off to war. In “Church Hill,” the narrator laments his country’s ability to proceed with daily life despite knowledge of faraway—and even nearby—death. Depicting the called-off rescue of workmen buried in a collapsed train tunnel in 1925 in Richmond, Virginia, he tells us:

At some point
everyone stopped trying
to dig the survivors out and went back
to whatever it was they’d done before …
Everything’s exhausting.
No one should be blamed for this.

Frustrated with the repetitive cycle of destruction and its subsequent whitewashing, Powers’ narrator appears to abandon the theme of history’s significance and our ability to learn from it. Every beginning, he observes, is just a course correction, and each star is just a record of a million cities waiting to be burned and lived in again. “Order is a myth,” he concludes. In “The Locks of the James,” he walks by a statue of Christopher Newport, one of the earliest Englishmen to arrive in Virginia, and dismisses his record as a pirate and “murderer of indigenous peoples,” proclaiming, “If I’m honest, I don’t think I cared. / If I’m honest, mine is the only history / that really interests me, which is unfortunate, / because I am not alone.”

As with The Yellow Birds, Powers is at his best when he homes in on the restrained anger threatening at any moment to shatter the lull and disrupt progress—the narrator wanting to fight obnoxious young drunks in a bar, only to cry because he misses having his weapon; another veteran at the VFW saying he lost his leg, only to be rebuffed and told, “Naw, they took it, the fuckers.”

Powers other times drifts into philosophical extrapolations about humans’ place in the universe, as in “Advice to be taken just before the Sun goes Supernova,” in which he writes that we are just “another piece of sacking added to the swirl / of forgotten objects swinging round / a million little masses we can’t see,” or in “A Lamp in the Place of the Sun,” where he declares that “A complete picture of the universe / as it currently exists / is not impossible, / only difficult.” As a result of these digressions, the collection sparks a desire for more immediate examinations of veterans’ role in war and their troubles reintegrating into communities. This is what hits home—the attempt to throttle the angst built up during a deployment, or simply from years insulated in an aggressive bubble. What is the point of worrying about our role in the greater universe if we can’t even identify it at home? As the narrator tells us, trying to piece together the remnants of his pre-war self, “I am home and whole, so to speak. … But I can’t remember / how to be alive.”

Kevin Powers will talk about Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting with moderator Jake Silverstein as part of the San Antonio Book Festival on Saturday, April 5, in the auditorium on the first floor of San Antonio’s Central Library, from 4:30 to 5:15 p.m. FREE.

Powers will be in Austin on Tuesday, April 7, in conversation with novelist Philipp Meyer, at Stateside at the Paramount, at 8 p.m., presented by the Texas Book Festival. Tickets cost $15.

The Parallel Apartments
by Bill Cotter
McSweeney’s
496 pages; $25

Trying to describe The Parallel Apartments is like trying to pat your head while rubbing your stomach while reciting the alphabet backwards. In his sophomore novel Bill Cotter deploys a broad and complicated cast of characters, all of whom are riddled with budding psychoses. There’s the aspiring serial killer, the infertile baby-crazed lunatic, the sex-bot madam, the matchmaking hermaphrodite, and, at the center of it all, the collage-obsessed chronic masturbator. These and more come together briefly as residents of the book’s eponymous Austin tenement. Based on their quirks, and the title’s reference to the location of their intersection, it would be easy to label the book black comedy.

That would be a gross oversimplification. Even the weirdest and wackiest members of Cotter’s menagerie play second and somewhat discordant fiddle to the book’s true focus: the estrangement of three generations of Austin women and their paths toward reconciliation.

Charlotte, Livia, and Justine Durant have issues, to put it mildly. Justine, unintentionally pregnant in New York City, finds her way back to her hometown to decide whether to keep her baby. She’s also searching for answers regarding her own origins after a homeless woman cryptically informs her that Livia, who always told Justine she was adopted, is actually her birth mother. Livia and her own mother, Charlotte, are no longer on speaking terms for undisclosed reasons.

There’s a lot going on here, but if a cohesive theme emerges, it’s motherhood. The Parallel Apartments is a bizarre catalog of women who have babies but don’t want them and women who want babies but don’t have them, and how these predicaments leave mothers and daughters and childless women emotionally (and often mentally) crippled. It would be far easier to label the book a farce if these depictions weren’t so heartbreaking, and readers may be left wondering whether Cotter is trying to say something about childbirth (and if so, what?), or if it’s just another of his many fictive obsessions.

The mixture of satire and seriousness is what makes The Parallel Apartments so confusing; Cotter continually convinces us that his characters are jokes, then pulls the punch-line out from under us, leaving readers flat on their backs, bewildered. This constant subversion of expectations is also what makes the book an intriguing, if emotionally disorienting, read.

Every now and then ambition impedes cohesion. Too often the saga of the Durant women is interrupted by supporting characters, rather than complemented by them. And after the 15th scene of Justine masturbating, eye-rolling is justified, if not outright demanded. The book is peppered with self-indulgent geographical nods to Austin, and these unnecessary references to Bass Concert Hall, Airport Boulevard, the U.T. Tower and other Austin icons make the writer seem worried that readers might forget where the book is set, or, worse, that its author is an authentic Austinite.

But even as Cotter labors to present Austin as weirder than it actually is, and even as his characters do abominable and ridiculous things to themselves and to one another, I found myself pitying, even rooting for, his band of bawdy misfits. For each of the plot’s points of despicable nonsense, there’s a counter-instance of unexpected kindness, all filtered through Cotter’s conflicted mix of mockery and compassion. The result is both horrific and heartwarming, no matter how difficult to describe.

Things I’ve Learned from Dying: A Book about Life
By David Dow
Grand Central Publishing
288 pages; $25.00

There’s a certain amount of irony in appending the epigraph “I could write a book about what I don’t know” to one whose title foregrounds its intent to share the lessons gleaned over the course of a career, and one walks away from Things I’ve Learned from Dying: A Book about Life wondering if, in fact, there is anything David Dow has yet to learn. Perhaps the real question is: If there are things Dow still doesn’t know, what hope do the rest of us have?

Things I’ve Learned from Dying is an energetic three-part memoir delineated into sections titled “Beginnings,” “Middles,” and “Endings.” Dow, a professor of law at the University of Houston and of history at Rice University, as well as founder and director of the Texas Innocence Network, details his father-in-law’s death from a quickly metastasized melanoma, his family’s beloved Doberman’s death from acute liver failure, and one of his many clients’ final years on death row and eventual execution. True to its title, the book is peppered with sentences structured around the phrase, “One thing I’ve learned,” such as: “One thing I’ve learned is that there is a time to be silent and there’s a time to hold nothing back. What I might not have learned is which is when.”

Taking some liberties with its timeline and compressing legal cases that spanned the better parts of decades, Dow explains how to argue a death penalty case in Texas, along the way bringing to light some of the nuances of the appeals system—and some of the ways in which he longs for even more nuance. He outlines the four stages of a death penalty case: the trial and state court appeal come first, followed by the state court habeas proceeding; after that comes the federal habeas appeal; the final stage is what Dow describes as “all the last-minute freneticism when death penalty lawyers try to think of anything they can to save their client’s life.” In Things I’ve Learned from Dying, we enter death row inmate Eddie Waterman’s case at the third stage. Dow’s ruminations about representing Waterman before the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals show him at his most entertaining and opinionated:

People who think bogus legal proceedings happen only in places like Iran or China apparently haven’t been to Texas.

It hasn’t always been this way. … But decent judges have been replaced by bureaucratic hacks who reach results that melt their political butter no matter how much violence they have to inflict on legal principles on the way to getting there.

In the section titled “Middles,” Dow recounts offering advice to a younger colleague who is distraught after the execution of his first client: “Work on developing a cold cold heart, pal,” he says, invoking Hank Williams. But while there is evidence here of professional numbness—occasional decisions based solely on detached experience and expertise—this is not the narrative of someone unaffected by a life spent with the dying. Throughout the memoir, using passages from a journal he kept during his father-in-law’s illness and recreating other scenes from memory, Dow meditates on the instant between life and death. “One thing I’ve learned,” he writes, “is that beginnings are unambiguous, but endings are not.”

His story’s overlap of human, canine, legal and familial loss ultimately leads Dow to acknowledge the difference between the individual and the universal: “The deepest knowledge, I’ve learned, can be awareness of the chasm separating you from someone else.” In convincing prose, Dow shows what such lessons cost.

I mean, most poor people don’t even know they can do something… You don’t know. You don’t even know that you have recourse. And people ain’t been educated on fighting’ back unless it’s some street shit, like fighting your neighbors or beating up… fighting your family members, killing your best friend. And nobody like… fightin’ the government, the city. “What the fuck you mean, fight the city? You mean like… Houston against me?” —Willie D., Houston Rap Tapes

“Your city is only as big as the parts of it you allow yourself to see,” writes Lance Scott Walker in the preface to Houston Rap Tapes. Walker will be at Brazos Bookstore in Houston tonight at 7 p.m. signing copies of Houston Rap Tapes, the companion book to Walker and photographer Peter Beste’s documentary photo book, Houston Rap (excerpted in the January issue of the Observer). Walker will also be at Sig’s Lagoon in Houston tomorrow, Feb. 27, at 6 p.m., and at Farewell Books in Austin on March 1 at 1 p.m.

Houston Rap provided a window into Houston rap culture through the faces and stories of the producers, MCs, DJs, radio personalities and community members who shaped it. The photo-heavy book had room for only brief excerpts from nearly 10 years’ worth of interviews, so Houston Rap Tapes tells the rest of the story. The new book’s oral histories illuminate what Walker calls a “cross-section” of Houston hip-hop, and each person’s story reveals something about the larger story of Houston—and about the people and places that too often go unseen.

Though Houston Rap and Houston Rap Tapes offer a big picture of Houston, Walker notes that the picture is in no way complete. “I think there are a lot more stories to tell, and we’re successful if this encourages people to take another look into the history of Houston rap artists and learn more about the city. If you’re from the area or identify with the city, you end up learning about yourself along the way,” Walker says. “The great thing about finishing a project like this is that once it’s out in the world, it takes on a life of its own, and when that manifests in something that’s going to turn people on to the culture and the music, that’s good for everybody involved.”