NOS (disorder, not otherwise specified)
by Aby Kaupang & Matthew Cooperman
(Futurepoem Books, 2018)

Reviewed by Michael McLane

There are thousands of books for caregivers of all types. They mostly deal in platitudes, with subtitles that rely on words like “hope,” “mindful,” “comfort” and “heart.” I tried to read many such books during the five years my wife and I cared for her father only to give up in frustration or disgust. My background in poetry didn’t help matters, as the literary contributions to this canon are largely non-existent. What no one tells new caregivers is that there are no books for this work—no map, no manual, no army of technical writers making sure you can’t get it wrong. At best, you make it up as you go, and hope you get parts of it right. Whether it be terminal illness, senescence, or profound, long-term disability, caregivers are dropped into an uncanny space between the diagnostic and the metaphysical.

The work is traumatic enough when a loved one is able to communicate their wishes, needs, and pains. When that ability is taken away, or never existed in the first place, all the Chicken Soup for the Soul is thrown out in favor of a kind of anguished ambiguity that becomes routine and is embodied in a seemingly endless two-part act of translation—one part for the doctors, specialists, and the diagnostic spectrum, the other for the family member whose every movement, wince, or touch may or may not be an act of communication in the eyes of the caregiver. The books skirt around the costs of this work, not the literal financial costs (though they are often considerable), but the costs to all else you love—your marriage, your family, your own health, say nothing of your professional and creative endeavors. They do not tell you to prepare to lose more. There is a profoundly different kind of absence involved in, and a wholly new kind of love learned from, caregiving because the loved one is right there within reach.

So perhaps it takes a poet, or in this case, two, to more effectively navigate such lyric territory. Aby Kaupang’s and Matthew Cooperman’s collaborative book NOS (disorder, not otherwise specified) arrives in this space as a revelation. It is a brutally honest exploration of the first decade of their life together with their daughter, Maya, who lives with a complex set of developmental and medical issues and whose care is intensive. The personal narrative is both contrasted and emphasized by a critique of the institutional maze they must navigate to find care for her and for themselves in the medical industry. Moments of intense personal reflection are undercut on the next page by medical charts or rebukes from doubtful doctors. Anyone who has ever advocated for a loved one can recognize the disconnect at play between these two modes. It is easy to feel completely at the mercy of medical staff and institutions, to sense that one is being literally cut off from the world outside the hospital, as an early section illustrates:

    they that were in the children’s hospital      they that on the pavilion
    parented    they that refined their faces in the sieve of seizure

    in the daylight met the carded men         the parking arm        
    the vertical blades of the guillotine elevator

However, for all the severing offered by expertise, parking arms, and elevators, Cooperman and Kaupang immediately recognize a community in that insistence on the “they.” It is a litany that carries on in the book, and one that suggests they acknowledge a camaraderie amongst the parents and the children present in such settings, in spite of the intense isolation they feel in the midst of Maya’s fluctuating health.

NOS makes it clear right away that it will not spare the reader any part of the corporeal or emotional space of its characters, be they Maya or her parents:

    The girl began and then so did the book, a mirror for sorrow or anger
    or fear. The book is a messenger, out in front. It canvases the halls of
    many hospitals.  Again and again at the ER soothing her body. The
    daughter  didn’t  eat, didn’t  sleep, didn’t  laugh, didn’t  shit, didn’t walk
    anymore. We went for a long visit. Doctors said autism, Valium,
    Abilify, sensory processing, seizures, inactive GI, they said tape a bag
    to her shoulder. We went again when they said she was crazy,
    a crazy summer when our little girl lived with other un-specifiable children.

Such overwhelming moments become routine here, and even the most practical aspects of Maya’s care take on far larger implications in the midst of such stress:

    She is an environmental crisis. We imagine the mountain she’s made, she
    daily makes, of diapers and shit and wipies and shampoo bottles and
    soiled car seats, and plastic toys, she cares not a whit. How can such a
    little pliant body make so much? She pushes and pulls and climbs her
    potty mountain to the end.

Maya’s life, and that of her family, shift from a domestic sphere to an institutional one, their days spent in an anxious ecosystem of highways, waiting rooms, and specialists’ offices, trying to nail down a diagnosis for her condition. The costs of this shift are high. Maya is not an only child and her brother, Elias, is largely absent from the text, an absence rectified in several crushing moments—such as being relegated to an item on one of the diagnostic “checklists” that reads “is one with the son who is absent” and is footnoted with the following: “The other one missing in this terra incognito is my son, Elias. I miss you…I’m sorry for all this I’m missing—.”

The disorientation Maya’s medical regimen causes in their actual day-to-day lives—one footnote reads “Distance from home/son to hospital/daughter = 92 miles”—combined with a lack of developmental milestones in Maya’s life—the kind of linear, horizontal trajectory from newborn to infant to toddler that most parents can take for granted—is contrasted by the presence of medical establishment in the poems. Medicine exerts its own inscrutable order on the family in several ways. The first is the form the book takes—eight sections, each of which corresponds to a floor of the hospital in Denver where the family spent large swaths of Maya’s early life. This provides a vertical or hierarchical progression through treatment that accentuates the missing linear/temporal milestones in her life. Ironically, we begin in the ER at ground level and end on floor eight where patients are discharged, a counterintuitive arrangement that metaphorically suggests the danger and uncertainty of walking out into the world with so much unspecified, but also emphasizes the increasingly wide or aerial view of what their care and love of Maya will entail, even if the specifics remain unclear.

Perhaps the most obvious way that medicine asserts its role in the book is the inclusion of numerous documents from doctors, hospitals and other medical entities. The coldness and confusion such medical charts, graphs, and diagnostic tools represent for patients or their families are further emphasized by Kaupang’s inclusion of several of her own diagnostic tools in such lists, which provide a far more empathetic view of their subjects. Interspersed amongst phrases such as “identifies property as an object” or “shows an interest/puts it down” are criteria such as “chooses to be in a collection,” “identifies as a diagnosis,” and “identifies poetry as a placebo.” An additional feature of these documents  is their ubiquitous use of acronyms (NOS, FOC=father of child, MOC=mother of child, among others) that seem efficient and useful from a medical perspective, but they belie the enormity of the task facing parents like Kaupang and Cooperman and only serve to further alienate worried parents who may or may not know their meaning. Ever the advocate, Kaupang not only learns all their meaning and implications, but incorporates them into even the more lyric sections of the book, adopting them as unconventional terms of endearment within their new living arrangement:

                                 our house was
         struck by lightning


                         the lightening     actually not so surprising
                         was humorous even      fire shot out the oven door
                         the instance   FOC leaping aside       was antic

Maya’s endless itinerary is trying for the whole family, but the lack of answers that medial experts provide, the perpetual unknowing is far more taxing on both parents, as illustrated by sections such as this one from “THE QUESTION OF DIAGNOSIS IS THE HISTORY OF GNOSIS”:

    There is a lost gnosis in our little girl, there is a lost gnosis
    in your little boy. The pronominal drift of allegiance
    pulls at the cell strings. Arias of dissonance.  

Dissonance and the unspecifiable loom large everywhere in NOS. It the nature of both Maya’s condition(s) and the nature of the task ahead for her parents. But uncertainty finds its way into every aspect and every relationship in their lives, including their relationship with each other. In what is perhaps the most searing confession in the entire collection, the penultimate poem begins with celebration and descends quickly into a kind of quiet chaos “We went into Marriage to see what we could sing. Ourselves and / others. The song. Co-mingled singing, they that co-sang there. / But biographical seizures, sleepless nights, not the song one intended to / sing, no, not singing at all.” However, this same piece ends on a note of survival but with an admission that the unknowing continues, “NOS. No one knew. Not if the daughter, the mother, the father, the / brother, the marriage, could survive. Only that days keep coming. Most / days are unspecified.”

It hardly seems an accident that this closing reflection is the only center-justified piece in the book (though others have moments of centering only to break away from that format quickly) as it seems a foundation of sorts, a leveling of the pains suffered and work accomplished as well as an embrace of uncertainty as a way of being, a fitting segue into the book’s final poem, “Good Day.”

In the interest of a late but full disclosure, I should say that I know and love Aby, Matthew, and Maya. I’ve known Maya since her birth and I watched, mostly from afar, as her parents struggled for years with a seemingly impossible situation. These poems and their early readings of them helped me survive and navigate the chaos of my own caregiving experience. Those performances were heartbreaking, as were some of the early reactions to the material which, as they note in the book’s final section questioned their attempts to speak for their daughter and even questioned whether or not they loved her.

         […] As if the repeated diagnosis, “Not Otherwise Specified,”
    wasn’t such a blow because no one could specify, could lead us to the
    her that was more than ill body, body ineffective. No one could name a
    thing so we couldn’t treat a thing.
      
         Maya means “illusion” and so we have wandered looking.

    Did we do this to her? Did your genes or my genes, or your drugs, or
    My drugs, do this? It’s not that the reader knows anything. We’ve
    Wandered and wondered and blamed ourselves all alone.

Guilt is an inescapable part of the caregiving experience. It cozies up to the fear that surrounds every new medication, trial, or procedure and never leaves its side. To be so reductive in one’s reading of a decade’s worth of daily attempts to connect to one’s own child, illustrates a literary parallel to the treatment of those practicing advocacy, particularly advocacy for others, within the medical establishment. In an early poem, one of the countless documents Cooperman and Kaupang salvage from their hospital trips contains a doctor’s notation that reads simply, “the parents are rude.” In a recent interview with Michael M. Weinstein in Michigan Quarterly Review about NOS, Kaupang addresses that moment in more depth:

“One doctor noted ‘the mother was rude.’ Perhaps parental advocacy sounds rude? The documents, too, reveal the lows of parenting and desperation. And sometimes, I think I would recall nothing of Matthew’s and my relationship, or our experiences with the medical establishment had someone else not written them down. Such interminable intensity is bound to deposit black holes in the mind. The texts serve as cues.”

And so too do the texts in NOS serve as cues, for a desperate need to understand, to survive as a family, however unconventional, and to continue loving Maya, both in ways she may understand and those she may not. Nowhere is this more poignant than during a visit that Kaupang has with the midwife who helped to deliver Maya:

    One day my midwife came and straight-talked, “Aby, I helped bring
    her into this world. I can help you bring her out.” And we talked about
    hospice. Talked about removing the feeding tube. Talked about what a future
    without Maya would be […]

Instead, they went “to the hospital one more time.” It was likely not the last time, but it was enough to continue on, to disregard all thoughts of a future without Maya. It is easy from afar to project motives onto such relentlessness, to accuse the advocate of some twisted form of narcissism. But advocacy is nearly always the reverse. It demands one be subsumed by the one you advocate for. Identity and individuality blurs for the advocate(s), helped along by the acronyms and negation of the medical establishment (i.e. FOC and MOC). But in the end, such criticisms are unimportant in the face of declarations such as,

    What is there to say of this child? She lived, lives through this.
       So did we. You want to know
    more about her. So do we.

Or more simply:

    Maya is real and worth writing for

NOS is a tremendous act of love, both for this single family and for a much larger community of parents and others providing such care to loved ones, all of whom almost certainly feel the isolation and desperation that is so central to much of the work in this book. It does not shy away from the screams, and tears, and shit inherent to such work. Language falters often at such times, and NOS allows it to falter, to jumble, to slur. But in the end, Maya is present and “[p]resent is / this gift of the daughter’s enormous need,” and “[it] is not hopeless—she brings a joy as ‘swim’ and / ‘more’ and ‘movie’—but it is wholly child, / a simple life without her own earned heartbreak.”

Conflict Tours by Jonathan Travelstead
(Cobalt Press, 2017)

Reviewed by Michael McLane

My day job entails organizing literary events around the state of Utah, including a statewide book festival that happens each fall. In 2015, a colleague sent me a copy of Jonathan Travelstead’s first book, How We Bury Our Dead, a wrenching collection of poems detailing Travelstead’s tour in Iraq with the Air National Guard, the loss of his mother to cancer, and his work as a firefighter in Illinois. I was floored by the work, and during a brief conversation at a conference that spring, invited him to Utah for a couple readings as well as a workshop with veterans.

A few months later, we were just a couple blocks from the VA hospital when Travelstead looked at me and said, “You know, I’ve never done this before.” He was nervous, and now I was nervous, though I tried to downplay it. It had never occurred to me to ask him if he had worked with veterans before. Something in his eagerness and confidence, as well as the candor and compassion in his work, just left me assuming he had. I had no reason to worry. What followed that exchange was a two-hour discussion of Yusef Komunyakaa, Anne Caston, and many others, as well as a poignant conversation on how writing allows us to navigate anxiety, loss, and healing that left even the most reluctant of participants captivated. Some wrote about their military experience for the first time in their lives. Travelstead looked like he’d been there a thousand times before.

It is this same Travelstead that we see time and time again in his second collection, Conflict Tours—throwing himself headlong out of his comfort zone repeatedly, because of curiosity, empathy, or simply a desire to be engaged, to be helpful. The conflict of the title is real, be it life and death struggles along the U.S./Mexican border, the literal and cultural fallout that remains in the Ukraine following the Chernobyl disaster, or Travelstead’s own struggles with ADD/ADHD. Both the military and recreational connotations of the word “tours” are at play, sometimes simultaneously, and Travelstead does not shy away from the complexities that the roles of soldier, fireman, or tourist carry with them.

The book opens along the U.S. border with Mexico, where Travelstead volunteered for a stint with the border patrol and witnesses the abuses that transpire throughout this landscape. He condemns much of what he sees, but also places such tragedies within a larger cycle of abuse that immigrants of all backgrounds have been subjected to throughout our history. In the poem “Field Worker,” he compares the black-lunged fate of his coal mining great-grandfather to the field workers of the Southwest exposed to agricultural toxins daily:
  
    My eyes open again on the fields, and I see hours when minutes
    are all we have, field workers trading

    the only previous thing they have for what settles in the hands
    before reaching the lungs, their family, I see the working dead.
    Grandfathers and children alike, their leathery hands

Or in the opening moments of “Border Patrol, Arizona,” where Travelstead is thrown immediately into the role of a medic with frighteningly insufficient resources:

         The square-jawed sergeant snatches my order.
    Nothing that matters burns here. Congratulations, Airman First Class—
         You’re a medic. Shunts me to female private beneath
    the basketball hoop, who, with an IV and an orange bruised soft as skin,
         instructs me on the military’s care towards aliens.
    Cups my hand clasping the orange in hers. Finds the sweet spot in four
         or less punctures. Suddenly it’s my lone hand holds the fruit.

Travelstead’s sympathies clearly lie with those wandering the desert, be it for the benefit of their families, or in the attempts to flee violence, only to find themselves in the arms of another, albeit slower, form of violence. The stories of his own immigrant ancestors are made flesh and blood repeatedly in the poems. The duplicity of those the migrants encounter is clear, as with the farmer in “Riding the Beast,” who is happy to have the help as “no one educated enough for English picks / in the upper branches” but then jokes about the dangers of train hopping his workforce endures when “a hundred chalupas atop a train is a family portrait, / but when a train car slices into a low-slung tunnel / it’s a damn good start […]”Ultimately, the border becomes a seemingly arbitrary and meaningless method of rationalizing greed, racism, and dehumanization. It is a place where we are left with the same question posed to the poet by two wild horses in a later poem, “Tell me who you are to draw a line / our myths cannot cross.”

The poems in Conflict Tours oscillate between concerns external and internal, but the poet’s personal conflicts receive every bit as much scrutiny as the troubles he witnesses in geopolitical hot spots and war zones. Ostensibly, section two and its detailing of long bike trips and Appalachian Trail hikes lands the reader in a lighter place than the border poems. However, it becomes clear quickly that the physical activity and endurance inherent to these activities are both recreation and an ongoing challenge, a means of working through anxieties resulting both from the poet’s professional and military experiences and from his own ADD/ADHD. “Ultralight” opens this section and is a litany of the objects in the speaker’s pack along with their corresponding weights in grams. It ends with a declaration of emotional weight and surety that would make Tim O’Brien proud:
  
    Closed, I clutch the blade
    dangling loose from the slipknot on my chest strap—
    less than a kilo of pull and it’s freed. Bumps
    tumoring my hip-belt pocket.
    Adderall. I know where everything is,
    exactly how much I carry.

The aforementioned Adderall, what Travelstead calls his “pitbull pills” are a constant companion in the poems. They become, in many ways, a character in and of themselves, as in “Rapture,” an ode of sorts to the clear-headedness they allow:

            […] Hummingbird
    nested in the space between ribs. Your last thought,
    you are it, sustained forever.

    O Benzedrine, Dexedrine.
    O cold blue angel of methylphenidate, Concerta, and Ritalin—
    I hum with praise, I hum with joy

The complexity of this relationship becomes central in the book’s third section, which is devoted almost entirely to exploring this state of anxiety and how a regimen of medications, physical exertion, and wanderlust allow a means of navigating through them. “Analysis Paralysis” illustrates how even the most banal tasks become impossible in such a state of mind, while the poem’s staccato, checklist form creates just such a state for the reader:
  
    A quick in-and-out and nobody gets hurt, you promise,
    popping a sleeved capsule before walking into
    the Kroger’s. Only suddenly
    it’s two-oh-five
    and you’ve been fingering packages
    of meat on Manager’s Special for fifteen minutes
    comparing orange stickers on sirloin.

The titles of the book’s third section alone are indicative of the ups and downs which Travelstead is both enduring and exploring in the work—“Pleasure Principle (Pitbull Pills),” “Scientist,” “Analysis Paralysis,” “Failure,” “Monster,” and “Ghost.” But there is also something in the long, expansive lines that populate many of the poems, and with which Travelstead is so adept, that strips the poems of ambivalence and makes his work an emotional tour de force. Nowhere is this on display more clearly than in this third section, in poems such as “Failure”:
  
    Better to forget what plateau means, and the law of diminishing returns,

    how muscle ceases making gains when worked the same way twice.
    Sometimes even I try unyoking myself but Failure’s been calling the shots
    so long he’s not going to give up. Laughs like a loon imitating a hyena.
    Jerks the chain tighter, and this time when he smears my face in it

    I come away with a bloody nose […]

Though its poems are more historical in nature and perhaps are more precise in many ways than the more personal work in the poems that precede them, Conflict Tours is at its best in its fourth section. The section is a collection of nine poems that traces Travelstead’s journey through the Ukraine, particularly his time spent in the “Zone of Alienation,” the restricted zone around Pripyat, the town evacuated after the meltdown of the reactor at Chernobyl. Here, we meet Oksana, his guide to the Exclusion Zone who, with the aid of various radiation detectors, helps him discern where he can and cannot go. We encounter glowing trees, the eerie, fly-by-night state of Pripyat, which is being reclaimed by the forest around it, and the abundant wildlife that has returned to the area. The cognitive dissonance that such a place should cause any visitor is a treasure trove for Travelstead, as in the poem “Proximity,” where he is astounded by the indifference of the nearby wildlife to their presence, to which Oksana responds,

                         […] it’s not curiosity

    or pride, but time and nearness that make us forget
    what is truly dangerous. A window
    on the third floor where her red hair blazed as she wheeled
    to the white wolf like rolling thunder in the doorway.

    it’s lupine breath, penny rot. 

Travelstead calls his travels “an addiction to traveling to places of internal or recent conflict.” It would be easy to dismiss such excursions as disaster tourism were it not for the empathy that is always centered in his work. Nowhere is this more evident than in the poem “The Liquidators” which functions as the heart of the Chernobyl poems. In it, we discover that Travelstead’s motivation for visiting Pripyat lay not so much in its devastation and reclamation, but in a kind of pilgrimage to the monument left for the liquidators—the fire fighters and other first responders who lost their lives battling the initial fire and trying to contain the subsequent contamination caused by the meltdown—and to research the hours leading up the hellish circumstances that cost them everything. The poem is an in-depth look at the interactions of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant Brigade and the Pripyat Brigade as the meltdown began. Travelstead is technically precise in the jargon and dialogue, while still compelling. We are thrown headlong into what are essentially lyric logistics, and they are heartbreaking:

    Thumbing the mic, I recall the rate of depletion, our half-life in these conditions,

    and the assurance in Newton’s Second Law that there is no death,
    but a changing of energy. Put out Reactor Four or they’re all going up!
    Some relief comes when Commander Leonid arrives,

    assumes command from the roof of Reactor Three where he directs
    extinguishment of five fires formed into tornados of their own weather.  

That Travelstead would journey across continents to one of the least tourist-friendly spots on Earth in order to pay the briefest of  respects to his firefighting brothers says as much about him and his work as anything I can say here. The complex empathy of the poem, the giving of a voice to those memorialized in a place that essentially no one can visit, only reinforces this. It is a feat he replicates throughout his work, and is perhaps best summarized in some of the final words of Vladimir Pavlovych Pravik, one of the two members of the power plant brigade to die that day:

    In the silence I mouth Thank you, that I am become a tool

    and not a weapon […]

WoO by Renee Angle
(Letter Machine Editions, 2016)

Reviewed by Michael McLane

Renee Angle wastes no time in laying out the premise of her first collection, WoO. Its preface opens with the declaration “I am the bastard great-great-great grandchild of Joseph Smith, in search of a textline, not a bloodline. I affirm the manner in which durability and transience are imposed upon the world of objects.” This is a far cry from the traditional Mormon testimonial of “I know The Church is true; I know The Book of Mormon is true; I know ___________   is a prophet of God.” Nonetheless, it serves a similar purpose, a means of delineating one’s place within, or in this case without, a tradition that is at once familial, cultural, and literary. For followers of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, this triangulation of identity, particularly for those of its early, pioneer stock, is every bit as crucial as the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. After all, it is The Book of Mormon, with its companion texts The Doctrine and Covenants and The Pearl of Great Price, that differentiates Mormonism from other Christian faiths.

Needless to say, any prophet who brings forth a work subtitled “Another Testament of Jesus Christ” is bound to stir a little controversy. Smith’s book, along with his political and sexual proclivities, cost him dearly. It is within this context that Angle adds her own contribution to the literary tradition started by Smith, a book she calls “a hagiography written under the spiritual guide of a heretic.” Ostensibly, WoO is a translation of the missing 116 pages of The Book of Mormon, pages Smith translated from gold plates provided by an angel and which he then allowed his scribe, Martin Harris, to borrow to show his wife and friends in order to legitimate his plans to finance Smith’s publication. For Angle, it is clear that her interest in these pages is an exploration of creation, not divination. The pages are
  
    Archeological syntax. Real estate hides behind Moroni’s
    etymology. I want to tell you want it means. Want to
    know what it means? But language is a skin, a mouth
    for wearing. Language is a kin to kinder flophouses […]

Angle’s lines are slippery and charismatic. It is easy to read right through the syntactic shifts and play and difficult to forget their idiosyncrasies once they are observed. Smith, though not especially literate, understood this characteristic of language. When the missing pages did not resurface, he understood the scrutiny he would face if he and Harris were to recreate them and the two sets of revelations were not identical. After the rest of the book was finished Smith provided a condensed version of the 116 pages, also via revelation. Such fears of scrutiny resound throughout Angle’s work, perhaps most strongly with the question, “What happens when you hand your relics over to science, and, what if science doesn’t want your saints?” Or, perhaps more pointedly,
  
    A crater muffled in the ruse. How ruseful to believe your
        own ruse. Bake it up, chamber desert […]

WoO is a textline made by one alienated by Smith’s legacy, ostracized by its patriarchy and made a bastard both in the literal sense—as a product of an implied sexual encounter between her ancestor and Joseph Smith that was outside of traditional marriage or the spiritual marriage (polygamy) that was integral to Smith’s church—and figuratively in that Angle writes as a non-believer outside the LDS Church’s sanctioned, faith-promoting works. Her speaker is:

                […] too organized to wander.
    Too practical to pray in a way that wants answers.
    Perhaps this want from answers is in fact a pheromone.
    Perhaps this wonk of answers is indeed a pheromone.
    I want answers.

While much of the book takes places in domestic settings, women are never named and rarely characterized beyond mothers, wives, a means to kin.

              In any given story, who is the fake? Is it the mother
    That does not protest enough and therefore fails to
    Protect her daughter from the lies of the father? Is it
    her father who we are not sure is lying in the first place?
    Is it the daughter herself, who could never know what
    Her real interests are, or what is set before her each
    morning?

There is a looming acquiescence and timidity to the women that speak to both their place within this tradition and the power inherent to Angle appropriating the keystone creative achievements of its founder. That said, it seems clear she counted herself among the LDS numbers at one time:

        I was happy to flip shadows on hinges. Now I can’t
    look at a shadow without him. I erase a set of out-of-tune
    church bells, parking lot full of police cars.

Angle confronts both the history the LDS church extols for the public and its membership, as well as the complexity that constitutes its much larger historical record. There is an idiolect at work in WoO that does double duty. For readers unfamiliar with Mormonism, it operates as playful lyricism, a litany of images, alliteration, and oddities such as salamanders, Egyptian objects, and words such as Urim and Thummim (names of seer stones used by Smith for translation) that seem more prosodic than thematic. But for those who share Angle’s background, such as this author, these phrases and images are the lynchpins of the “heretical” work in which she is engaged. They are a catalog of references to canonical Mormon doctrine, cultural mores and mythology, as well as mystical origins of Smith’s theology, which was built on a series of encounters with American spiritualism and other traditions that ranged from water witching and Freemasonry, to seer stones, treasure hunting, and  Swedenborgian philosophy. Early in the translation portion of the book, Angle writes:

    […] mummies curl in a pouch. Moon is itself inhabitant of
    marshmallow. Permanent charms pioneer the pavement
    mud of wheel ruts. It is the human form pinched to
    death with cold. Partly peeled from the element, radiate
    in red, one suspicious bowl. A ringside seat to Rosetta
    Stone, make hinge-friend. If we believe that the tongue
    Is a kind of tattoo. Primitive member, missing link.
    Between their piss and peace no mudpuppy, hellbender,
    or red elf crest. Salamandra salamandra, sugar up leaves […]

In one short section, Angle upends The Book of Abraham (a later text by Smith), seer stones, the hallowed ground of the pioneer myth, the translation of The Book of Mormon, and the White Salamander letter, a document forged by Mark Hofmann, a disgruntled member of the church eager to both discredit its current leadership and place Mormonism within the legacy of its mystical beginnings.

In its hagiography, WoO is much more akin to Fawn Brodie’s No Man Knows My History, with its in-depth look into the spiritiualist history of the Smith family and other questions of Smith’s legitimacy, than to Richard Bushman’s Rough Stone Rolling, both of which are titles referred to as source material for the book. WoO is every bit as much a historiography and bibliography of legitimacy and fraud as it is ecclesiastical biography or tribute. Scattered throughout the text, and acting as a transition between the preface and Angle’s translation are reproductions of images from Egyptian funerary papyri that Smith purchased from a traveling expedition of mummies and “translated” into The Book of Abraham, a scriptural text that would later be integrated into The Pearl of Great Price and which laid the foundation for a number of Mormonism’s more unique doctrines including the plurality of gods, the pre-mortal existence, and the planet Kolob—the star closest God’s home. These papyri and Smith’s translations remain deeply problematic for many members and Mormon scholars, yet they remain crucial to the “textline” from which Angle descends and they are only one of many such examples tied to Smith’s work. There was the supposed Solomon Spalding novel, long lost but written a decade or so before The Book of Mormon, that outlines the lives of the Nephites and Lamanites, lost tribes of Israel who washed ashore in North America. There were also the Kinderhook plates, further translations of ancient tablets found in an Indian burial mound near Nauvoo, IL, that turned out to be a hoax played on Smith by locals. References to these works and others weave themselves into WoO, tracing a literary lineage as remarkable from a creative standpoint as it is troubling from one of faith. Early in the book, she outlines the perils of the textline’s faith and artistry:

    Who would hang a fake?

    *

    A way to teach is to say faction is truer than nonfiction.
    We see the thought progressed in Plato’s “god must be
    represented as he really is.”

    *

    Who do you take sympathy with?

    *

    Which mind do you choose?

    *

    Whose style did you assume you might say?

Of course, it is almost impossible to invoke the word “fake” within context of Mormon literary history without simultaneously invoking the name Mark Hofmann, who in the midst of a crisis of faith and ongoing financial troubles, honed his skills as a forger to a nearly unprecedented level and would later turn to murder via mail bombs to try and cover his crimes, nearly killing himself when one exploded in his car. He forged founding American documents, Emily Dickinson poems, and much more. But his specialty was Mormon history. He loved provoking Mormon leadership and fomenting doubt and disagreement in their followers. One document, the White Salamander letter, was supposedly penned by Martin Harris and outlines how it was not the angel Moroni, but a white salamander (the salamander being a potent symbol in various mystical traditions) who led Smith to the gold plates.

Salamanders make repeated appearances in Angle’s work, as does Hofmann, “Krill bashed her squash / blossom necklace, but enter Hofmann’s & ‘Thou may’est see the burn marks yet.’ ‘Thou may’est’ papyri-sty / climb.” Later in the same piece, she writes, “Polygamy is not interested but it wants / his sperm count catered. ‘Mercury, or quicksilver, that most volatile of metals and a central alchemical emblem.’” It is worth noting here that Hofmann used mercury switches for his bombs, triggers that are particularly volatile. In these two short passages, Angle draws a direct line between the practiced alchemy of Smith’s spiritualism and mysticism and “alchemy” of creation, even for less-than-savory reasons, such as the creation of scripture or history wholly from the imagination or the making of paper and iron gall ink that can fool an appraiser.

In one interview Angle refers to Smith’s book as a “mongrel.” It was almost certainly pastiche. “Ready-made” may be a more appropriate word. Like Duchamp, who also makes an appearance or two in WoO, Smith had a keen eye for repurposing otherwise overlooked artifacts and texts and putting his own flourish on them. Angle takes up her place in this tradition beautifully, and with a humor and lyricism that Smith could only dream of. She is participating in other literary traditions as well, as she makes clear in her notes about source material for the book. Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let me be Lonely is named specifically, as is Harold Bloom, but it seems that Charles Olson is here in spirit as well. Like the aforementioned writers, Angle does not merely trace the violence and indiscretions of her topic, though they are numerous, especially if the legacy of his creation is considered. Instead, she builds a network of histories that spans nearly two centuries and at least one continent while encapsulating an enormous spectrum of motives behind the creative act. As a translator, she complicates her source material in a myriad of satisfying ways, understanding, as one passage in the book’s final pages notes,

    Eventually writers understand they must turn their backs
        on the original
    There is almost not an interval

    Objects are outside the soul, of course; and yet, they are
        Also ballast in our heads