Beautiful Blemish / Cutty, One Rock: Low Characters and Strange Places, Gently Explained

[April 20th, 2005]

^Beautiful Blemish

By Kevin Sampsell Cover photos by Marne Lucas (Word Riot Press, 100 pages, $9)

Halfway through Kevin Sampsell's book of short stories, there's a point at which I had to stop reading for a second, make a grossed-out face and go "ugh." But don't get me wrong. It was a thrilling kind of revulsion; not many books (rumors of Chuck Palahniuk's vomit-strewn readings aside) can make readers actually squirm.

The story in question is "Earrotica," about a couple who are sexually frustrated because she likes it in the ear. "I give you only some of it," the narrator says. "All of it would not fit. Unless you got some kind of weird surgery or something." Well, guess what-that rule about nothing bigger than an elbow? Ha.

Sampsell (an occasional WW contributor) is a master of the deadpan outrageous. His best stories hit two notes at once: funny and gross, creepy and sad, pathetic yet noble. A married couple older than your parents have raunchy sex involving Magic Markers and dirty talk. A gray-haired mall-walker stalks a young retail clerk, then ends up banging her mom. A young guy adopts a retarded cat called Frankenstein, who "hurt his head once trying to commit suicide," loses his boyfriend and then breaks his leg in an attempt to rescue the cat from traffic.

The stories include brief, dreamlike glimpses into parked cars and graveyards and closets. One of the longer pieces, "My Old Man," is a clever riff on an expression-the elderly are taken in off the street, walked, fed and cared for like stray dogs. The story's cute, but it's also a pointed statement and a surprisingly touching portrait of loneliness. Most of the fictions here hit their mark-even if it's not always the aural G-spot. Becky Ohlsen

^Cutty, One Rock: Low Characters and Strange Places, Gently Explained

By August Kleinzahler (Farrar Straus Giroux, 155 pages, $19)

In his essays-turned-memoir, poet August Kleinzahler bounces between the twin poles of his existence, San Francisco and New Jersey, blowing one sweet riff after another about his childhood, his move west and the pain of reaching back to remember it all. Learn just a bit of his life story and you will understand why he needs to enter a fugue state to retrieve it.

Like so many families, the Kleinzahlers looked one way on the outside and another from within. Kleinzahler's brother attended the Wharton School in Philadelphia; his sister went to Smith College. They were not, like so many families around them in this breeding ground of Tony Sopranos, mobbed up. They had a dog and a decent home.

The book, shaped out of separate pieces published in such magazines as The London Review of Books and The Threepenny Review, skips around the writer's life like a photo album with key sections torn out. For all his wise-guy humor and love for dishevelment, Kleinzahler is an exceptionally pretty writer, and this shows in the incredible title piece. The poet describes his street-smart older brother's swift descent into debt, crime and self-loathing-and his own guilt over not stopping the slide. "For a twenty-year-old who was aiming to be writer," having a front seat to this show was better than a master's degree, writes Kleinzahler. As Cutty, One Rock makes abundantly clear, it also broke the young man's heart. John Freeman