Interested in Hybrids?

Hybrid Forms, that is. I am! My new book, She Returns to the Floating World, has a plethora of hybrid forms in it, including the Japanese haibun (which Aimee Nezhukumatathil wrote about in this season’s American Poet newsletter – this blogger discusses the article)

I’ve read three books recently that really turned me on to a new thing going on with fiction, especially the fiction of young women. Flash fiction with an ear for interesting language, sassy female voices tinged with sadness talking about subjects like marriage, war, apocalypse.

It all started with winning a zombie poetry prize – and a copy of Lizzy Acker’s new book from Small Desk Press, Monster Party. The pieces in the book are a couple of pages long, and the voice is a casual vernacular. The narratives go all over the place – couples bicker over video games, sure, but also, a girl ponders the birth of her mutant child and aliens play bingo. Sample sentences from “Baby:” Now you know baby I am thirty-two this year. The oldest human being left on earth. We’ve had a good run sugar but I know the symptoms of airborne syphilis and I feel these are my last moments with you…” I liked these pieces – and listening to Lizzy read them out loud, I noticed I could not immediately tell whether she was reading poetry or prose. Interesting, I thought.

Then I received a copy of Katie Farris’s new book from Marick Press, BoysGirls. The language inside is immediately recognizable to a poet (say, me) as poetry – careful, sonically graceful, and the sharp impact of the short piece. However, the pieces could also be described as little fictions – fables, fairy tales turned on their heads. The devil shows up and a girl grows to twenty stories. Sample sentences from “The Invention of Love:” “The Boy with One Wing sits in a waiting room, watching people enter, leave, examine the waitlist, attempt appointments. They carry their most precious, destroyed things.” My kind of work, right? Again, this was a kind of writing that resisted easy definition – was it poetry or fiction?

On the recommendation of no less of a highbrow literary publication than Elle Magazine (and hey, I discovered Louise Gluck through Cosmo, so…) I picked up a copy of Helen Phillips’ And Yet They Were Happy (LeapLit). Once again, I turned the page expecting long chapters and a traditional narrative, but found, instead, over a hundred connected short form pieces – about two pages apiece – with narrators that shifted, apocalyptic overtones, characters from Greek mythology and the Bible, and monsters. Of course, I fell in love with the book. (Snow White even makes an appearance!) From “Regime #6:” Because our government is concerned about the low number of infants being produced by our population on an annual basis, a National Reproduction Day is declared, and the lights on the subway are turned to their lowest, rosiest settings. Slender white candles are given out free of charge. All married citizens of childbearing age are ordered to stay home.”

It’s no coincidence that people describing both Katie Farris’ book and Helen Phillips new novel/collection invoke Calvino, because the combination of intelligence, whimsy, and wit are certainly there – but I think this is something new, more contemporary, some seizing of some momentary zeitgeist. I think poets should go pick up a copy of Monster Party, boysgirls, and and yet they were happy, and read them as we try to decide: what hybrid form will we wear today? what hybrid will be born to us today?