Ken Klonsky Life Without Quattro Books The latest offering from Klonsky treats a subject he knows well: wrongful conviction and the corruption of a supposedly just legal system. After the novella’s protagonist is falsely accused of murdering his wife and sentenced to life in prison, his struggle to remain hopeful drives the plot. Klonsky examines a serious subject with a sense of comic absurdity and jaded experience. Young-ha Kim Black Flower Charles La Shure, tr. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt This multifaceted novel tells the story of the littleknown Korean diaspora to Mexico in the wake of the Russo-Japanese War, which plunged over a thousand Koreans into indentured servitude in an unfamiliar and often hostile country. Kim employs this historical moment as a jumping-off point from which to explore questions of ethnicity, faith, and immigrant identity. July–August 2013 • 69 Nota Bene contentment.” This vignette is not only complete, it is chaste. Much of Wolf’s work is surreal, monstrous, and startling . A character in another tale toys with “the idea of shooting a bullet into his body, through his urethra,” to give one lucid example. My mind tended to wander, until I reached the dreamlike “49th Digression :TwelveChaptersfromanExposed Life.” Here, at last, we follow a singular character through his nightmarish global travels. The closing chapters are more linear and descriptive but remain completely mad. The entire journey through one part of Africa “was like a creeping fever, a mucous congestion, and after all this creeping I was nothing more than the slimy discharge of my own head,” recalls the storyteller. Grasping for deeper meaning, I assigned various metaphors to the narrator, for instance Time and Death. In doing so, the forty-ninth digression transforms from absurdity to profundity. Throughout Two or Three Years Later, the author skips across scenes and events like a stone across calm but dark waters. I yearned for Wolf to pause occasionally, to throw me further into his deeply disturbing rabbit hole. As one story concludes, “But there was something more I wanted to say. If only I knew what.” Shaun Randol New York verse Kazim Ali. Sky Ward. Middletown, Connecticut. Wesleyan University Press. 2013. isbn 9780819573575 There is a kind of fragmentation in contemporary poetry that fails to convince , that seems to have been born only in fragments, calculated to be partial with no authentic relation to a missing whole. And then there is the truer, more compelling form of fragmentation, the kind that hints at a fullness irrecoverable, poignant in its unsettling allusiveness. The poems of Kazim Ali fall into this second category . Sky Ward gives us hints of narrative —the story of Icarus, the life of the poet—but Ali skillfully prevents the narrative from ever coalescing. Storyline in Sky Ward is like the face of a friend you recognize from far away; you start walking in that direction , waving hello, until you are close enough to realize you do not know the person to whom you have been waving. But perhaps rather than as fragmented it is better to think of these poems simply as open, even if it is an openness created by elision. This openness is exhibited in the use of white space on the page as well as in a syntax that resists closure: “gorgeous I miss / not salvation but bliss I adore / discs of green melting snow reveals,” the 70 worldliteraturetoday.org reviews poet writes in “Journey to Providence.” These lines convey a sense of lyrical disruption, a stirring refusal to settle into definite meaning. This rejection of closure often produces in the reader a feeling akin to longing. Sometimes Ali channels this longing in erotic directions, as in “Baptism ,” in which the poet, imagining Eros, longs “to lie still, to be destroyed, wanting only / to kiss the hands of my winged assassin.” At other times, the longing is more generalized, as in the imaginative, elusive, and moving prose poem “Fairy Tale”: “It’s nearly a party trick the way he opens his mouth and butterflies pour out, closes it again and the clock chimes, reminding him of being a young boy, coming home to an empty house, sure that he had been forgotten, that...