Meaningful Questions

There are two stories in the winter issue of the Chicago Review--one trippy, one rooted firmly in this miserable life. In Jim Krusoe's "In the Flagon," an architect called Dad builds a house underwater and lets an employee sleep there. Dad doesn't know (or care) that the guy's screwing his wife. Dad's got other things to worry about, like fishermen leaving mutilated cows at his doorstep. "All mystery is holy," Dad says repeatedly. This story's mystery is absorbing from start to finish. Why build underwater? And why stay in a house that keeps sinking farther beneath the surface, threatening to swallow its occupants?

Well...why not?

Michael Byers asks different questions in "Bartholomew's Island." For one thing, he'd like to know how strivers hold themselves together. Vivian and Gerald do, barely. In the story they meet in college, settle in DC and have two kids. Yet they never feelsettled, owing to a gnawing lack of money (at first). But they pull through. Then Vivian dies. Byers is pitch-perfect during the death scene: "Her son Ricky had the night watch, and when the agonal breathing began at midnight he put down her hand, now as frail and papery as a pack of cigarettes, the bones rolling within, and woke his sister and his father." This is unceremonious. This is white-collar poor. This is punishing.

I won't spoil the rest, except to say Byers expertly mines the chasm between siblings who have nothing besides each other and still live worlds apart. I wept.

Meanwhile, the poets are solid. Joanna Klink has a long poem called "The Radiant" that you'll come back to for the music. Listen: "It was enough to loosen the bones of the moon." The other poets have the same idea about language: make it new. John Tipton writes in "luck," "clues of order scar this little Earth." They do indeed, I've just never heard it put that way before. Endi Bogue Hartigan says in "Running Sentences," "The chorus is making sentences now: look./ A city's sentenced to its choruses now: look." Here's wordplay that questions order and embraces it at the same time--not a game, but a vision.

The editors have devoted a huge chunk of this issue to essays on and by Steven Rodefer, some outlaw poet now living in Paris with a large oeuvre. I'd never heard of him, but now I plan to buy all his titles. Rodefer's got some blistering insights. On reading (sort of): "But celibacy is better than no sex at all." On music (more or less) from his poem "Coughing Laughter Before Yawning Death": "Whatever are we doing here/ thinking, when we could be chanting psalms." On good books: "What is crucial is...that power to lift us out of our seats and keep us in them." When Rodefer posits, you listen. At least I did.

Of the 22 contributors listed, I counted no fewer than 15 with books to their credit. Carl Phillips is the biggest fish I recognized, and a few have dissertations in the offing. I've got a low threshold for academic writing, but I'll give these folks a whirl if I'm ever in the neighborhood.

They earned it.