Celebrating 25 Years of the North Carolina Literary Review
Both Firmat’s A Cuban in Mayberry and Smith-Soto’s Time Pieces center on the distinct and particular, what I would describe as localizations, as a way to make sense of and reconcile their own many in-between states of being as transnational subjects. Firmat ultimately argues that Mayberry, a world unto itself, is an exceptional place, not only because it is absolutely different from sitcoms such as I Love Lucy and Leave It to Beaver that present us with both urban and suburban Anywhere, USA, topographies, but also because it dies once the New South entrepreneurs take over and the bus stop becomes a bus station. Accordingly, since the town folks resist Wally Butler’s “continental” menu and the only progress in town is the building of a retirement home, the story of Mayberry ends with a deserted and dead town (77–78). What latinidad tells us about this narrative, however, is that it only exists within the ambivalent states of being there and here, a sort of allegory for the larger global South. This is perhaps why Firmat ends on his own imaginary TAGS episode, where Mayberry never dies but endures as a space for (trans)national negotiations: Opie befriends a “lost” Cuban boy and brings him and his Tía Maria to dinner where they are “found” and, thus, acculturated by the humor and hospitality of Aunt Bee, Andy, and Barney (148–51). In a similar mode, Smith-Soto’s poetic particularisms lead him to make universal declarations – such as his proclamation “Television / doesn’t know how to blink” after watching the news on the Venezuelan mud slides from the comfort of his Charlotte home in “Slide” – that result in a poetry in movement. The place of North Carolina, ultimately, provides a space for transnational lived experience in these works. n
FALLING AWAKE a review by Fred Chappell Valerie Nieman. Hotel Worthy: Poems. Winston-Salem, NC: Press 53, 2015.
Featured regular ly in NCLR, FRED CHAPPELL is Professor Emetirus of UNC Greensboro and a former Poet Laureate of North Carolina. He has received the Roanoke-Chowan Award for eight of his collections. His numerous awards and honors also include the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Bollingen Award, an award from the National Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as the O. Max Gardner Award and the North Carolina Award for Literature. He is in both the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame and the Fellowship of Southern Writers. VALERIE NIEMAN is the poetry editor for Prime Number magazine and an Associate Professor at NC A&T State University. She received her MFA from Queens University in Charlotte, NC. She has published another poetry collection Wake, Wake, Wake (Press 53, 2006: reviewed in NCLR 2007). Her poetry, including poems from this collection, has also appeared in NCLR 2011 and 2012 and NCLR Online 2012. She writes fiction as well as poetry, including a novel, Blood Clay (Press 53, 2011; reviewed in NCLR Online 2012).
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In the title poem of Valerie Nieman’s interwoven new collection there is a description of a traveling shot in a movie titled Charleston WV in 1932. Included in the shot, “there on the left is the Hotel Worthy and I realize I’ve been trying to check in for years but not enough hours in the day.” The ambition of attempting to improve the condition of oneself is a prominent theme of the collection, and Nieman approaches it from different directions. In “Release,” the introductory poem, it is offered as a homily: “lift yourself / through the blue // and swim.” But in Hotel Worthy a series of moralistic bromides – “The greatest way to live with honor is” ; “Confidence thrives on honesty”; The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is.”; “Better keep yourself clean and bright” – is undercut by the experience of testing these directives in the world we must inhabit: “always catch the teacher’s eye am I doing it right.” The abrasive irony of the differences between what we have been told and what we discover or uncover firsthand characterizes the lives of many if not most of us. If we were all required to live up to the ideal standards that our elders promoted and that society pretends to prize, none of us could ever check in to the Hotel Worthy. “The Bride Comes Home to a House Planted in a Field” is a narrative ghazal that dramatizes the situation of a woman trying to come to terms with a new, ungentle husband and a rough, rural way of life. She receives his instruction; she endures the daily discomfort. Finally a rebellious urge arises: