Stoners and Self-Appointed Saints by Annie La Ganga
Coming Back from Chaos- A review by Stephen Pettinga
In late 2009, Red Hen Press presented to the world a collection, styled “A Memoir” on the front cover, of confessional prose poems. Stoners and Self-Appointed Saints starts from the grounding premise that we human beings are easily wounded, easily addicted and easily alone. In a particularly despairing passage, author Annie La Ganga says, “There are plenty of reasons to live, I’m just not convinced there are any good ones.” The ostensibly modest prize sought through these pages is to find one or two of the “good ones,” to find a way to live well in the present after surviving the bullshit.
In one of the last pieces in the book, La Ganga writes “I visited chaos and came back with stories.” Indeed the reader will sense that La Ganga stretches the bounds between poem and vignette, fiction and memoir in the hero’s journey of this marvelous debut collection. With the exception of two short poems and a sonnet, each piece is a single paragraph that runs anywhere from a handful of lines to several pages in length. This form allows La Ganga’s writing to work its wicked acrobatics with a conversational intimacy, full of surprise turns in the flow of the speaker’s consciousness as she negotiates her present by coming to terms with her past. She says as much in her opening poem, “The Tour Guide’s Apology”: “I took the escalator down, down there. I went down to the dirt of myself, dug around with a bent fork, found seashells and Popsicles and two-headed snakes.”
She ain’t lyin.
Turns out she takes the down escalator and comes back with plenty. She comes back, for instance, with her “second or third serious live-in husband-type boyfriend” in “He’s Married Now,” a man who, she says, “wanted to be magic but was willing to settle for clairvoyant or multi-talented as a craftsman.” Or Crazy Mary, who “had beautiful pictures to draw, she had songs to sing, but no one ever let her get around to making them,” in “Performance Artist.” She brings these characters into the light, characters who become, in the work of the book, differing reflections of the speaker, different personas for the poet to try on for size. Perhaps most telling of these characters is The Screamer, a character the speaker envies in the poem “New Orleans Christmas Diary”: “I wish I could stand in the yard on big shards of broken glass and scream out my sexual frustration aria before God, the neighbors, and everything. I wish I had that power. Instead I go to Starbucks and indulge in silent fits of journaling.”
The speaker faces a hunger she tries repeatedly to name in her stories: hunger to scream, hunger to shop for a new pair of Nike shoes, hunger for “tickle tickle,” hunger for a pound of hamburger. She makes associative leaps across the years and across the geographic spread of her history. She apologizes and she forgives. She remembers the details.
Well, she doesn’t always remember the details. Her poem “Daddy” says that “he died when I was twenty-five or twenty-six. I was high all the time then, so exact dates remain fuzzy.” Compare it to “When my mother died, I was five years old. . . . The linoleum had a brown and white ogee pattern, like harlequin onions, and she was mopping it and she fell twisting and eye-rolling.” Such differing levels of awareness of the events surrounding her serve to underline the struggle in the book: the struggle to lucidly articulate a history of association with self-proclaimed saints. Whether they be family or peer, these individuals, each a mirror into which the speaker gazes, could never be canonized by the world outside their heads, and so they make claims for themselves, claims that perpetuate their emotional isolation from their communities.
Isolation of the self in society is not just a clinical definition of psychological disfunction in these poems; it is the world. In a world of such isolation, regular interaction with others will not mitigate the loneliness. Thus a craving for magic and a stroke of luck runs throughout the book. Whether it is to be figured as a death goddess or to win the lottery, to take meds or to self-mythologize, both the speaker and her subjects cannot see a way out of their fates through any effort of their own.
Yes, isolation runs deep in these poems. Because of this, moments of connection shine like moments of unspeakable grace. Poems like “Coca Cola Co.” and “Robby’s Dad Kissed Me” dial in on simple gestures that in another setting might seem utterly inconsequential. Here, however, they might just change the world:
It surprised me. It was delicious. It was the first time ever I imagined how you could like
kissing a grown man person, how men are a thing that is different from boys or ladies or
your own dad. How you could do stuff with them and it would be warm and fun and you
would feel like your body was big and right and adult and it would be hot and dirty and
good.
And yet, largely, feelings of connection in these poems are cast into the future as impossible promises. But then perhaps these promises are enough. And by the end of this book of poems, La Ganga can say with only the slightest twinge of irony, “That lady was right, people are the real joy, the real adventure, the reason.”
And in reading this work, after having inhabited the self-loathing and self-destructive behavior and moments of connection, after having seen exactly how stacked the odds are against us, we can see the prize all along was a simple one, to own our stories and to find joy in every character who inhabits them. Simple, and impossible, to fall in love with all our worst decisions and not need to repeat them. To go down into the “rotten garbage and vestigial bullshit,” and come back with “words, music, a song really.”
And like it.
Buy this book:
http://www.amazon.com/Stoners-Self-Appointed-Saints-AnnieGanga/dp/1597091553
http://www.powells.com/biblio/73-9781597091558-0
In late 2009, Red Hen Press presented to the world a collection, styled “A Memoir” on the front cover, of confessional prose poems. Stoners and Self-Appointed Saints starts from the grounding premise that we human beings are easily wounded, easily addicted and easily alone. In a particularly despairing passage, author Annie La Ganga says, “There are plenty of reasons to live, I’m just not convinced there are any good ones.” The ostensibly modest prize sought through these pages is to find one or two of the “good ones,” to find a way to live well in the present after surviving the bullshit.
In one of the last pieces in the book, La Ganga writes “I visited chaos and came back with stories.” Indeed the reader will sense that La Ganga stretches the bounds between poem and vignette, fiction and memoir in the hero’s journey of this marvelous debut collection. With the exception of two short poems and a sonnet, each piece is a single paragraph that runs anywhere from a handful of lines to several pages in length. This form allows La Ganga’s writing to work its wicked acrobatics with a conversational intimacy, full of surprise turns in the flow of the speaker’s consciousness as she negotiates her present by coming to terms with her past. She says as much in her opening poem, “The Tour Guide’s Apology”: “I took the escalator down, down there. I went down to the dirt of myself, dug around with a bent fork, found seashells and Popsicles and two-headed snakes.”
She ain’t lyin.
Turns out she takes the down escalator and comes back with plenty. She comes back, for instance, with her “second or third serious live-in husband-type boyfriend” in “He’s Married Now,” a man who, she says, “wanted to be magic but was willing to settle for clairvoyant or multi-talented as a craftsman.” Or Crazy Mary, who “had beautiful pictures to draw, she had songs to sing, but no one ever let her get around to making them,” in “Performance Artist.” She brings these characters into the light, characters who become, in the work of the book, differing reflections of the speaker, different personas for the poet to try on for size. Perhaps most telling of these characters is The Screamer, a character the speaker envies in the poem “New Orleans Christmas Diary”: “I wish I could stand in the yard on big shards of broken glass and scream out my sexual frustration aria before God, the neighbors, and everything. I wish I had that power. Instead I go to Starbucks and indulge in silent fits of journaling.”
The speaker faces a hunger she tries repeatedly to name in her stories: hunger to scream, hunger to shop for a new pair of Nike shoes, hunger for “tickle tickle,” hunger for a pound of hamburger. She makes associative leaps across the years and across the geographic spread of her history. She apologizes and she forgives. She remembers the details.
Well, she doesn’t always remember the details. Her poem “Daddy” says that “he died when I was twenty-five or twenty-six. I was high all the time then, so exact dates remain fuzzy.” Compare it to “When my mother died, I was five years old. . . . The linoleum had a brown and white ogee pattern, like harlequin onions, and she was mopping it and she fell twisting and eye-rolling.” Such differing levels of awareness of the events surrounding her serve to underline the struggle in the book: the struggle to lucidly articulate a history of association with self-proclaimed saints. Whether they be family or peer, these individuals, each a mirror into which the speaker gazes, could never be canonized by the world outside their heads, and so they make claims for themselves, claims that perpetuate their emotional isolation from their communities.
Isolation of the self in society is not just a clinical definition of psychological disfunction in these poems; it is the world. In a world of such isolation, regular interaction with others will not mitigate the loneliness. Thus a craving for magic and a stroke of luck runs throughout the book. Whether it is to be figured as a death goddess or to win the lottery, to take meds or to self-mythologize, both the speaker and her subjects cannot see a way out of their fates through any effort of their own.
Yes, isolation runs deep in these poems. Because of this, moments of connection shine like moments of unspeakable grace. Poems like “Coca Cola Co.” and “Robby’s Dad Kissed Me” dial in on simple gestures that in another setting might seem utterly inconsequential. Here, however, they might just change the world:
It surprised me. It was delicious. It was the first time ever I imagined how you could like
kissing a grown man person, how men are a thing that is different from boys or ladies or
your own dad. How you could do stuff with them and it would be warm and fun and you
would feel like your body was big and right and adult and it would be hot and dirty and
good.
And yet, largely, feelings of connection in these poems are cast into the future as impossible promises. But then perhaps these promises are enough. And by the end of this book of poems, La Ganga can say with only the slightest twinge of irony, “That lady was right, people are the real joy, the real adventure, the reason.”
And in reading this work, after having inhabited the self-loathing and self-destructive behavior and moments of connection, after having seen exactly how stacked the odds are against us, we can see the prize all along was a simple one, to own our stories and to find joy in every character who inhabits them. Simple, and impossible, to fall in love with all our worst decisions and not need to repeat them. To go down into the “rotten garbage and vestigial bullshit,” and come back with “words, music, a song really.”
And like it.
Buy this book:
http://www.amazon.com/Stoners-Self-Appointed-Saints-AnnieGanga/dp/1597091553
http://www.powells.com/biblio/73-9781597091558-0
Stephen Pettinga has been active in poetry communities in Chicago, Austin and Iowa City, where he received his Bachelor of Arts. He enjoys book-reading, bookselling, bookmaking, book design and witnessing the lives of plants. He currently works for the University of Chicago Press and is preoccupied with the roses busting out on his porch in Hyde Park.