Nick Lantz, “Battle of Alexander at Issus”

Off in the mountains a hermit checks
his rabbit traps before returning
to his hut for the night. The rabbits grow
bold near dawn and dusk, the hours
when clouds lower ladders of light
down the mountainsides. The hermit
hasn’t admired this light in decades.
At this time of day he is always bent
low, unfastening the thin leather snares
from around still-warm necks. If he hears
what sounds like thunder in the valley
one cloudless evening as he ties another
limp body to his belt, he thinks only
of returning home to bed, the rabbit fleas
that torment his sleep, the door that never
quite closes against the cold night air.

Back in February, I featured another Nick Lantz poem, “Lacuna, Triptych of the Battle,” from the collection We Don’t Know We Don’t Know. The poem above is from the second of Lantz’s collections published this year, The Lightning That Strikes the Neighbors’ House, which also contains “Portmanterrorism” (from The Writer’s Almanac). Oh, and back when I wrote about We Don’t Know…, I didn’t know you could find “Your Family’s Farm, Empty” online, or maybe you couldn’t, then.

Lantz discussed this book in an interview with The Rumpus: “It’s the much-revised remnants of my MFA thesis, and it had been collecting rejection slips since 2005. A poem in that book alludes to the Ship of Theseus, a boat that was supposedly maintained over many years by replacing its parts piecemeal as they deteriorated, begging the question of whether it was still the same ship, and, if not, at what point it ceased being that original ship. That’s how I feel about The Lightning. If you were to dig up my actual MFA thesis (please don’t), you’d see only a handful of the original poems. With The Lightning, I worked from the poems up. I was figuring out what that book was about as I assembled, disassembled, and reassembled it.”

By the way, Rumpus readers were also treated to the premiere publication of another Lantz poem: “How to Dance When You Do Not Know How to Dance.”

7 July 2010 | poetry |

Read This: Medium Raw

I’m a big fan of Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations, the Travel Channel series where he hops from one nation to the next, checking out local restaurants and regional cuisines. The longer the show’s been on, and the more places he visits, viewers have witnessed a major shift in Bourdain’s personality—or maybe it’s just that we’re seeing a side of him that Kitchen Confidential kept on the back-burner; I guess you’d have to have had spent a lot of time with him to be able to tell… Anyway, sure, he’s always going to be the abrasive, opinionated guy who just comes right out and says what he’s thinking, but in letting us tag along on his global wanderings, he’s revealed a deeply inquisitive aspect—he comes across as genuinely caring about the cultural issues that keep coming up during his travels, and though (as he points out a few times in Medium Raw, he’s no Michael Pollan or Eric Schlosser, his show has done a lot to raise awareness about the alternatives we have when it comes to dealing with our food: not just what we eat, but where it comes from, how it’s made ready to us, and so forth.

Medium Raw is a miscellany, a string of chapters held together largely on the strength of having been written by Anthony Bourdain: There’s some autobiographical confession,s there’s some reportage-based profiles of chefs Bourdain admires, there’s lists of the things he likes. And dislikes: The most passionate chapters are the ones in which he gives full vent with his frustrations about, to pick the three most prominent targets, the flat-out evilness of the American beef industry, the blissed-out hypocrisy of Alice Waters, and the douchebaggery of GQ food critic Alan Richman. (Really; the chapter is even titled “Alan Richman Is a Douchebag,” and even considering the biased perspective, it makes a strong case for its thesis.)

My gut tells me that these rants, as beautiful as they are, might not be the ideal introduction to Bourdain, that Medium Raw is ultimately for the fans who’ve been with him at least since Kitchen Confidential, and maybe even the earlier novels—which, I was delighted to hear when the deal that led to this book being published was announced, he’s going to start writing again. But if you haven’t read any of his earlier work, don’t let my fears stop you from trying Medium Raw. Heck, with a new season of No Reservations having just started last night, you could probably actually bring yourself up to speed pretty quickly…

6 July 2010 | read this |