D. Nurkse, “Sonny Stitt at the Blue Coronet”

Jeremiah Kuhlfield

His fingers don’t seem to move
as he rips through secondary dominants
of “Boplicity,” “Simone,” “Ray’s Idea.”
The alto is a golden fishhook.

Why such blazing tempi when he’ll die
in six weeks? Perhaps in heroin
there’s a calm in which you can fit
a thousand notes into one beat.

Drums, bass, Hammond organ—
these are unnamed men, faces
you’ve met all your life
and bargained with, nodded to,
yet they have no difficulty
with the subtlest modulation.

The audience is three drunks,
one cursing an imaginary waitress,
one mumbling apologies, one sleeping.

Now try to eat your extremely salted cashews
so slowly there will always be one left.

A Night In Brooklyn is the tenth collection of poems by D. Nurkse, the borough’s former poet laureate. It includes “Summertime” (originally published in The Atlantic), “The North Side” and “There Is No Time, She Writes,” “The Bars,” and “Damariscotta” (which was originally published under the title “Newfane”). Several poems appeared in Poetry; in addition to the poem that gives the collection its name, there’s The Rain-streaked Avenues of Central Queens,” “Psalm to be Read with Closed Eyes,” “The Dead Remember Brooklyn,” and “August in the Dolomites” (originally called “Engagement in the Dolomites” and then “A Marriage in the Dolomites”).

Drunken Boat first published “Letter from Home,” and they also have an audio file of Nurkse reading it.

2 August 2012 | poetry |

Read This: Johnny Hiro

Fred Chao

I’ve been on a low ebb with my comics reading lately, but when a copy of Tor’s collection of the first three issues of Fred Chao‘s Johnny Hiro turned up recently, I flipped through the opening pages, and I was immediately hooked by Johnny’s fight against the giant lizard monster that came all the way over from Japan to smash the wall of his apartment and kidnap his girlfriend Mayumi. Things get even more delightfully weird from there: The panel I’ve sampled above is from a story where Johnny and Mayumi go to the Metropolitan Opera and run into somebody they knew back in Japan… and his enemies… Then there’s the big finale, an extended parody of the sitcom Night Court with Judge Judy replacing Harry Anderson—which even has a callback to Mayor Bloomberg’s involvement in the giant lizard monster saga.

I love Chao’s simple, straightforward line style, and his visual pacing is superb; so many gags in the script get an extra jolt from his ability to know just how much artwork to give them. His celebrity characters are almost never just walk-ons, but actually serve to drive the story forward; there’s a sequence where Grand Puba, who just happens to be a good friend of Johnny’s, is telling a story about the time he and LL Cool J ran into David Byrne, that winds up punctuating an emotional point absolutely vital to Johnny’s development at that point in the series. Even things that initially bugged me early into Chao’s storyline—specifically, Mayumi’s broken English—become essential components of a deeply thoughtful exploration of a young couple trying to find their bearings. I’m keeping an eye out for the next volume, and Fred Chao is totally high up on the short list of my dream illustrators for future ebook projects and Twitter avatars.

1 August 2012 | read this |