There’s a very poetic moment to which many of us want to return as often as possible. You’re sitting at a bar, waxing poetically about the end of the world. Outside, the night is full of promise, so you order another drink and nod when the right song comes pouring out of the speakers. Maybe you touch or get touched by someone. In a nutshell, even if nothing remarkable is happening, the moment feels just right. Out of that place and time comes the poetry contained in Liz Worth’s Amphetamine Heart. However, her words are not static and tend to visit the places and times that precede and follow that just-right moment, the second in which you realize none of it was that great and sadness sets in.

The book, published as part of Guernica’s First Poets series, is divided into four distinctive sections. Part one, entitled White Hunger, works as an intro by establishing the atmosphere. Worth uses spilled beer and cigarette smoke as the cohesive elements that bring her poetry together and give it a sense of location. The second section, Lowered Inhibitions, takes the reader deeper into the night and even beyond it, to a place of damp mattresses, ideas, regret and even a dose of quiet anger at the passage of time.

It’s the swamp rot of this
gin and tonic mouth
that signals my becoming an
asymmetrical diagram made to
mark the overload of insomnia.

Before the Thaw, the third portion of the text, begins to explore the body and consciousness inside the dark spaces of anger, insomnia and over thinking the words inhabit.

Anticipate destruction
before the tongue penetrates marked territory.

Between vaginal secretions, dimples, perspiration, swollen lids and even more lowered inhibitions, Before the Thaw is a warning of what comes next: Oral Fixations. While all parts flow together, the last segment of the book is what pushes it into must-read territory. Tattooed skin, fingers, legs, tendons, foreskin, metabolic rate, collarbones, thighs, mouths, blood, bile, shoulders, eyes, nasal passages, urine, lips, and underarms slowly add heat to the small tome and help Amphetamine Heart truly conflagrate in its last section.

Decadence and beauty come together in Worth’s work. The poetry in Amphetamine Heart is a celebration of the good, bad, and ugly things that come with late nights and drinking. Definitely worth a read (no pun intended).

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Liz Worth is the author of Treat Me Like Dirt: An Oral History of Punk in Toronto and Beyond. Her work has appeared in the Toronto Star, Exclaim!, Toronto Life, Punk Planet, This Magazine, and Broken Pencil as well as literary journals such as Chiron Review and The Toronto Quarterly. Worth is also a writer of avant-garde poetry and Amphetamine Heart is her first full-length poetry collection.

Gabino Iglesias is a writer and journalist currently living in Austin, TX. His work has appeared in The New York Times, the Austin Post, Business Today magazine, San Antonio magazine, Bizarro Central, MicroHorror, El Nuevo Dia and a few anthologies. He’s also a book reviewer for HorrorTalk, Horrorphilia, the Lovecraft eZine and most recently joined Black Heart Magazine as the Poetry Editor. He can be reached at gabinoiglesias@gmail.com.

The origin of the disease remains a mystery. Ignorance of its provenance fuels a growing schism that threatens to destroy the peace that the survivors’ descendants have built. Unwilling to wait for matters to get any worse, Charlinder decides to travel to where the Plague first appeared and find out the truth—which means walking across three continents before returning home.

Charlinder has never been more than ten miles from home, has never heard anyone speak a foreign language, and he’s going it alone.

He survives thousands of miles of everything from near-starvation to near-madness before he meets Gentiola. By then he’s so exhausted that the story she offers to tell seems like little more than a diversion… until he hears it.

Nothing could have prepared him for what he learns from her, and no one ever told him: be careful what you wish for. The world is a much bigger place than Charlinder ever knew, and his place in it is a question he’s never imagined asking.

If you’re into dystopian fiction, Charlinder’s Walk is straight up your very dark and bombed-out alley. Author Alyson Miers explores what happens after the world ends, following survivors who keep struggling for another day, as well as the questions that will inevitably arise when people find themselves in uncomfortable situations. Why did this happen? How did it happen? Did it have to happen? Charlinder is on a quest to find answers; like most young people, he’s curious and thinks he seeks the truth at all costs. But when he gets it, what will he do with it?

As part of a family of compulsive readers, Alyson eventually crossed the bridge to writing during a Peace Corps assignment in Albania. Teaching English at a high school in the small village of Kuqan, her sense of culture shock and lack of work to keep her busy led her to ponder an idea she’d had years before concerning survivors of a mysterious plague. After reading Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, she got a further grip on the story and began writing notes. By 2008 she had a first draft done, and in 2011 the book was finally published.

Charlinder himself undertakes two simultaneous quests. Though the first quest is obviously to find out what really happened back in 2012 when the plague first hit, the second part of the story is a coming-of-age tale, where naïve Charlinder learns that the world is a far bigger place than he ever could have imagined. Even as he discovers there’s a whole world outside of his hometown, he must deal with this new knowledge and figure out what he feels about this discovery. One could argue that his physical journey makes him a man, dealing with the hardships of life on the road. But it’s really his inner struggle to comprehend what he learns on his travels that brings the real transition from boy to man.

Charlinder’s coming of age parallels some of Alyson’s own experiences in Albania. A 25-year old woman in a foreign country learning a new language and customs will undoubtedly feel like an outsider, but like anyone in challenging situations, Alyson adapted as best she could. Writing notes toward the book that would ultimately become Charlinder’s Walk, Alyson drew upon both her own confusions and frustrations as an outsider, as well as the lives of the Albanians around her, who had been isolated from the rest of the world by a dictator named Enver Hoxha during the 1970s. Alyson imagined, through Charlinder, what life would be like for someone who had never left his own country.

In Alyson’s imaginary world, daily life as we know it has been destroyed, but the universe keeps on chugging along as it always will. The people in Charlinder’s village have reverted to a more agrarian lifestyle, keeping chickens for eggs and sheep for milk and wool, though they do not raise animals for slaughter. If they want to eat meat, they must hunt and kill it themselves. This “simpler” form of life keeps the members of his community busy for most of the day, with plenty of physical tasks that farmers have performed around the world for centuries. While this lifestyle may seem desireable, even preferable to big-city life, it is quite a lot of work—especially for people who are used to being able to use technology to get through their day. Would we big-city dwellers, indeed, be able to survive in Charlinder’s world?

The book also features some interesting discussions concerning religious beliefs, non-traditional healing methods and gender roles. Do these roles exist because we humans have created them, or are they the result of some divine plan? Is this just “nature’s way” or do men and women have choices about what they do with their lives and the people they will become? Is the work of a healer magic or science, and should we trust herbal remedies with no empirical proof that they work? These clashes of “modern” versus “traditional” ways of viewing the world appear as Charlinder learns more about how other survivors have chosen to live.

Whether you’re interested in reading more dystopian fiction or just enjoy a good story, Charlinder’s Walk is worth a read.

Connect with Alyson on her website,blog, Facebook,Twitter or GoodReads. Get Charlinder’s Walk on Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

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Chris O’Grady’s novel The Glorieta Pass follows a tough customer, Wilder, from being a day late and a dollar short to the town of Thomaston’s most wanted criminal in just 24 hours. Originally scheduled for a bit part in a robbery, Wilder gets mixed up with the town tart—who also happens to be married to the top dog. It’s bad news for Wilder, who takes the fall on a cop killing he never committed, and at first it looks like lights out for this common criminal. But our man’s no sucker; he sniffs out what’s really happening in Thomaston to clear his own name and escape the hangman’s noose.

Great character development off the top, with a pick-up scene and some erotic dealings with little Miss Glorieta. Once Wilder shakes loose her inhibitions, the dame gets a little too cozy for a one-night stand, but I guess even tough guys can fall for that sort of thing now and again.

The ins and outs get tricky as the story moves forward, and it’s odd that Wilder trusts the word of virtually all the people he meets, despite the fact that they don’t trust him and really have no reason to tell him the truth. In a genre rife with double-crosses, the plot of this crime novel’s frame-up is strangely straightforward. It’s also a bit bizarre that a wanted man would sneak back into the very town that wants to string him up, aiming to unravel a mystery with no prior detective experience, no knowledge of the town’s layout or inhabitants, and nothing but enemies thirsty for his blood, but Wilder’s hellbent on exposing the town’s puppeteers—if only so he can spit in their faces.

In the end, it’s all about getting outta dodge, and Wilder seems to be a pro at this maneuver. Despite some unbelievable moves, he pulls it off and emerges victorious. He may not be any gal’s knight in shining armor, but he’s not such a bad guy. Wonder what kind of trouble he’ll get into next?

The Glorieta Pass
by Chris O’Grady
Twit Publishing
170 pp., $10
Also available at Amazon for 99¢

As a bicultural, bilingual writer with immigrant roots, Sheila Maldonado is in the position to become a vibrant new voice in American poetry. Her first collection of poems, one-bedroom solo, intrigued me. A young, female, Honduran-American poet? As someone who’s lived in Honduras, this book interested me from the moment I spied it.

Maldonado was born in Coney Island, but feels the pull of her family’s Honduran heritage.

I’m from a people so small
we might be overlooked

As she writes in “future tense (minor tribe: 2012),” the poem that opens the collection.

“Clashing in Coney Island” expresses the confusion of a first-generation immigrant growing up in two worlds.

In the 1984-85 picture of Class 5B [...]
Brooklyn, New York,
I’m wearing gray Lees and
a big white, gray, and pink sweater,
a style half-ghetto, half-Guido

The half-ness continues throughout the poem. Many of her friends are not Latina, like “half-Italian” Stacy who encourages her to buy oversized sweaters. Until the last strophe of the poem, it seems the poet is blending right in.

an old man
spoke to me in Spanish I had
the nerve to be surprised but he told me
Try as you might, you can’t hide.

Unfortunately, Maldonado doesn’t heed the old man’s advice—“try as you might, you can’t hide”—in this collection. Her poems are not raw or vulnerable. In a poem called “My Self-portrait,” she describes her 29-year-old self as

weird and happy and sad

all at the same time

Lines like this let me down, especially in comparison to other moments that suggest that Maldonado can be real and brave in her poetry. In “ten words from a dream,” she declares boldly,

I’m from here, so I have the right to say, fuck this city
Fuck all its runaways, all its stages, give me a theater

While this might not be her most poetic moment, it’s the most real. I’d have liked a little more of this attitude in her other poems.

Instead of attitude, Maldonado spends a lot of energy on life’s boring details. While there are poets who can take life’s simple things (Pablo Neruda’s Odes to Common Things, for instance) and turn them into extraordinary beings, Maldonado fails to do so. For instance in “Baked Good,” she attempts to pay humorous homage to pop tarts, comparing them to a drug:

The vending machine at work
hooks me up, two to a pack

The poem falls flat. It’s a desperate attempt at flirting with the reader. Other subjects she explores in her poems: body lotion, contact lenses, and the television show “Frasier.”

What had initially fascinated me so much about Sheila Maldonado—her Honduran heritage—feels like an afterthought in this collection. It’s used more as a trope than a truth. Many of the poems that focus on her identity as a Honduran-American are found in the second half of the book. They feel tacked on.

Honduras is more a part of Maldonado’s history than her present. In “honduras of despair,” Maldonado admits that she doesn’t really understand the “depths of scarcity” from which her family has crawled.

honestly, I’ve only known
known their depths
on vacation

In short, I was disappointed in one-bedroom solo. I had been so eager to hear what Maldonado had to share. Unfortunately, much of what Maldonado says is trivial and even boring. The poems that branch into something bigger are usually internally aimed, exercises in self-discovery.

For a poet who exploring her own identity, Maldonado doesn’t get very deep.

Maldonado’s work is in such stark contrast to other contemporary writers who stunningly explore their own complex identities in poem. Take Nathalie Handal’s new book, Poet in Andalucía, for instance. Handal uses a collage of languages and cultural and historical references to explore the intricacies of her own multi-national identity. It’s a challenging and fascinating collection.

I also recently discovered Brenda Cárdenas’s 2009 book Boomerang which, like one-bedroom solo, often reflects upon the challenges of living in two worlds. In “Cornflowers,” the poet is surprised to find that her hair still “smells / like corn tortillas” even though she has scrubbed with scented shampoo. “I can’t believe my scalp / hasn’t soaked up / the scent of blossom,” she muses.

Sheila Maldonado is a young writer; one-bedroom solo is her first collection. It’s my hope that in subsequent work, she’ll take a cue from more-experienced writers like Handal and Cárdenas who have paved the way, beautifully documenting their own journeys.

one-bedroom solo
by Sheila Maldonado
Fly by Night Press
96 pp, $12.50

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After spending her twenties exploring warmer places like Honduras, Ecuador, and Tybee Island, Amelia Cook has returned north and is settling into her third decade of life in her home state of Wisconsin. She spends her days as Assistant Director for International Admissions at Madison’s Edgewood College and her evenings freelancing and teaching creative writing. Since 2007, she has been a regular contributor to Isthmus, Madison’s arts and entertainment weekly, covering local theater and other miscellany. She is currently pursuing her long-neglected love of poetry as part of University of New Orleans’ low-residency MFA program.

Michael Ondaatje has by now proven himself to be a writer who is like Nabokov in at least one respect: he can write about anything and make it shimmer.

Subject matter is rendered nearly irrelevant by the Canadian novelist’s approach to prose at the microscopic level. Whether he is describing epic adulteries in a war-torn desert, as in his most famous outing (The English Patient), bridge builders in an age before electricity (In the Skin of a Lion), a grieving family (Divisadero), or simply the manner in which a lamp illuminates a bunk in a ship’s cabin in his latest novel (The Cat’s Table), we feel not only that all the cards are on the table, existentially speaking, but that what we are reading is so formally impressive, such love comes through in the act of writing, that we don’t care what matters anyway. This is old fashioned and rare. Politics, philosophy, we put them aside because it is simply so beautiful, we couldn’t stop if we wanted to. He is an extremely sensual writer in an age when such sensuality has been largely cast aside by the literary establishment, deemed fit for popular entertainment and contrary to sophistication.

Additionally, Ondaatje is to be counted among the ranks of truly transnational authors in an increasingly transnational age. This is manifest in the book’s plot, which chronicles a journey from Sri Lanka to England via the Arabian, Red and Mediterranean Seas. Divisadero is set in California. His debut, Coming Through Slaughter, is set in New Orleans. The author himself was born in Sri Lanka to Indian ancestry, moved to England and then North America. The novel opens with a quote from one of the godfathers of such physical, worldly literature: Joseph Conrad. Following an increasingly prominent trend, Ondaatje recorded his own audiobook of the text, and the tone in which he delivers it is telling of the mood he set out to create: slow and quiet and ever so clean.

The Cat’s Table is also simultaneously a travel novel and a childhood novel, and it falls into the clichés of both, but the trite moments somehow enhance our relatively unsophisticated reading of it; we want to read this text in way we rarely read anymore, without irony, without cynicism—in a word, without theory. It’s a children’s story for adults; the drama is melodrama, but for all that it’s no less authentic. Ever present is the crippling and enlightening weight of the truth that the devil is in the details, that the subtlest gesture (a woman moving the strap of her dress an inch to the left) eventually constitutes the breath of a life.

The Cat’s Table
by Michael Ondaatje
Knopf
288 pp, $26

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Joshua Willey is a writer from California. He’s currently working on a novel about hitchhiking.