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The Static Herd
"When the body betrays it forces you to learn its language, turning patients and kin into spontaneous islands of urgent expertise. Through overlaid registers of plain speak and medical-ese, illustration and dreamscape, The Static Herd enacts a coming to terms with the kaleidoscopic loss that ricochets through a family befallen with grave illness. Hardly maudlin, Beth Steidle's lyric bravely inserts itself into the hard-fact lexicon of diagnoses and examinations. By turning unfeeling jargon out from within she creates a system for understanding. This debut book, to quote its author, is 'a creature that breathes.'" —Corrine Fitzpatrick
"The Static Herd is an abnormal tissue of medical records and memory, and a sublime poetic exhumation that precedes the final internment." —Matt Pieknik
"...the intense lyricism of the language is luminous in nature and beautiful and mysterious, as are the William Blakian illustrations...This remarkable volume is like a wondrous field guide to the painful process of entering the interior of loss. And what a fabulous tour it is." —Chuck Kinder
Fiction. With illustrations by the author.
"The Static Herd is an abnormal tissue of medical records and memory, and a sublime poetic exhumation that precedes the final internment." —Matt Pieknik
"...the intense lyricism of the language is luminous in nature and beautiful and mysterious, as are the William Blakian illustrations...This remarkable volume is like a wondrous field guide to the painful process of entering the interior of loss. And what a fabulous tour it is." —Chuck Kinder
Fiction. With illustrations by the author.
82 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 2014
40 people want to read
About the author
Beth Steidle
6 books1 followerBeth Steidle is a writer, illustrator, and book designer. She lives in Brooklyn with her turtle.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
August 13, 2022
I've deleted a few reviews of this book already because it keeps shifting as I think about it. I went in expecting surreal horror. What I got... I think it was much more concrete than its framing and prose style led me to believe. I feel tears in my eyes. This was a good book. I think further rereading of it would be rewarding. I don't want to reread it. I don't think I'd recommend it to a friend. But I think it's very well done, very well executed, very poetic, deeply unsettling, utterly unique.
May 7, 2015
A haunting meditation on the death of a person with cancer. It's poetically written and I ultimately understand what the book is about although there were a few parts that seemed a little confusing. Over all it's dark and beautifully written. The way it's written seems like it's a very personal story but I could be wrong. I actually read it twice because it's pretty short and I knew I missed things the first time around. If you are a fan of Blake Butler or Dennis Cooper I think you'll like this book.
April 27, 2014
A deeply lyrical and ultimately transcendent reflection on mortality. Haunting, beautiful and rare.
June 29, 2024
"I used to always be amazed [when I worked] in the hospital, because I saw a lot of people die, [but] nurses can't say they're dead, you need the doctor to come in and declare them dead. I mean if that's not religion I don't know what is... the priest has to come in, "right, yeah, he's dead," "okay, thank you." -- Hamza Yusuf
Hospitals seem like strange temples to suffering and death. The priests walk around with the same solemnity and pretension found in other religions. They wear white robes, they mutter their Greek and Latin to each other, and they charge exorbitant fees to enact their miracles. They prescribe and describe with surgical accuracy, but it all goes over our heads, since few of us are taught Greek and Latin anymore. They attempt to translate what it all means, but it seems unfair for us to expect them to be our therapists in addition to our saviors.
It's the translation which is always the problem, the carrying-across. It's easy for things to sit static, but it's hard to move, let alone navigate. The title is telling, because no herds ever stay static; if they do, they die. Likewise, the sterile medical details unravel and sometimes even manage to bloom. The central metaphor of a dying father as a stricken deer held promise but fell flat. Every page tried too hard to straddle the two worlds and as a result never made a decisive move. Some small beauties slipped through, like the few rays of light which hit the forest floor. But fifteen pages of black blobs, likely tumors, needed a lot more than just their measurements in cm and mm. The whole time I was hoping for some play like I saw in Body Clock, but nothing ever came of it. I respectfully flipped through those pages at a slow rate, like walking through an art gallery you neither enjoy nor understand. You put your hands behind your back because you don't know what else to do with them, and your eyes glaze over the art objects as you struggle to find a point of interest for your vision to latch onto.
That's how this collection felt. It felt like a "worst of" (instead of "best of") of my poetry and Court's poetry; it kept trying, reaching up, even sometimes managing to get the oxygen line out of the nostrils, but it never got out of bed. I've never seen a collection of poetry which was chronically bedridden. It struggled to make something of itself, but like an electric guitarist limited by the length of his cord, the poems felt trapped in the open. The amount of "real" poetry could probably fit on 20-25 pages, because so much space was devoted to medical speak which didn't do anything but add to the vibe. The problem is that you can create the exact same vibe by dropping some of those into the poems themselves, rather than using entire pages for medical jargon followed by one or two poetic sentences.
One of the other reviewers commented that this was a great rumination on death, but no, it really wasn't. It all ended up feeling thin and papery, like the 1-ply toilet paper you get in hospitals. It could have done something with the pregnant possibilities of surgery and anatomy and mortality, but it didn't. It sat there on its hands kicking its feet, those feet which hang off of the examination room bed. I'll leave some honorary mentions below, but otherwise there's just not much else to say.
In the barren wasteland of our waiting, commercials achieve a circadian rhythm.
With giant mouths filled with giant nights, we ask if he would like to be fed.
Now you are becoming light as it minnows into darkness. Now you are becoming darkness softly punctured with light. This particular firmament, this particular alignment of tumor and organ will not repeat.
The entire final page seemed worth quoting as well:
TECHNIQUE: Conjure the lush mongrel of future grief. Send it out to stalk the infinite strings. If you think you're better than this, you're not.
COURSE: Theretofore and hereafter, open upon walking. Practice weeping. The phone will go wild with brief and bioluminescent cycles. practice restrained wails, soft gestures. Rewrite the little speech. Measure the weight of your grief, consider the skin. Evaluate the bones. Wait, wait. Cradle what appears at the feet. These are gifts from the feral mouth.
Hospitals seem like strange temples to suffering and death. The priests walk around with the same solemnity and pretension found in other religions. They wear white robes, they mutter their Greek and Latin to each other, and they charge exorbitant fees to enact their miracles. They prescribe and describe with surgical accuracy, but it all goes over our heads, since few of us are taught Greek and Latin anymore. They attempt to translate what it all means, but it seems unfair for us to expect them to be our therapists in addition to our saviors.
It's the translation which is always the problem, the carrying-across. It's easy for things to sit static, but it's hard to move, let alone navigate. The title is telling, because no herds ever stay static; if they do, they die. Likewise, the sterile medical details unravel and sometimes even manage to bloom. The central metaphor of a dying father as a stricken deer held promise but fell flat. Every page tried too hard to straddle the two worlds and as a result never made a decisive move. Some small beauties slipped through, like the few rays of light which hit the forest floor. But fifteen pages of black blobs, likely tumors, needed a lot more than just their measurements in cm and mm. The whole time I was hoping for some play like I saw in Body Clock, but nothing ever came of it. I respectfully flipped through those pages at a slow rate, like walking through an art gallery you neither enjoy nor understand. You put your hands behind your back because you don't know what else to do with them, and your eyes glaze over the art objects as you struggle to find a point of interest for your vision to latch onto.
That's how this collection felt. It felt like a "worst of" (instead of "best of") of my poetry and Court's poetry; it kept trying, reaching up, even sometimes managing to get the oxygen line out of the nostrils, but it never got out of bed. I've never seen a collection of poetry which was chronically bedridden. It struggled to make something of itself, but like an electric guitarist limited by the length of his cord, the poems felt trapped in the open. The amount of "real" poetry could probably fit on 20-25 pages, because so much space was devoted to medical speak which didn't do anything but add to the vibe. The problem is that you can create the exact same vibe by dropping some of those into the poems themselves, rather than using entire pages for medical jargon followed by one or two poetic sentences.
One of the other reviewers commented that this was a great rumination on death, but no, it really wasn't. It all ended up feeling thin and papery, like the 1-ply toilet paper you get in hospitals. It could have done something with the pregnant possibilities of surgery and anatomy and mortality, but it didn't. It sat there on its hands kicking its feet, those feet which hang off of the examination room bed. I'll leave some honorary mentions below, but otherwise there's just not much else to say.
In the barren wasteland of our waiting, commercials achieve a circadian rhythm.
With giant mouths filled with giant nights, we ask if he would like to be fed.
Now you are becoming light as it minnows into darkness. Now you are becoming darkness softly punctured with light. This particular firmament, this particular alignment of tumor and organ will not repeat.
The entire final page seemed worth quoting as well:
TECHNIQUE: Conjure the lush mongrel of future grief. Send it out to stalk the infinite strings. If you think you're better than this, you're not.
COURSE: Theretofore and hereafter, open upon walking. Practice weeping. The phone will go wild with brief and bioluminescent cycles. practice restrained wails, soft gestures. Rewrite the little speech. Measure the weight of your grief, consider the skin. Evaluate the bones. Wait, wait. Cradle what appears at the feet. These are gifts from the feral mouth.
July 19, 2016
How do we write about death? Explain the inexplicable without sounding overwrought, cliché, false? Perhaps we don’t. Perhaps we avoid it, dance around it, mask it in metaphor until any real substance is lost. If this is the case, we might take direction from Beth Steidle, whose recent novel, The Static Herd, addresses the paradox of death with paradoxes of its own: a fusion of medicalese and poeticism, insight and obfuscation. Comprised of CT scans, “OPERATIVE REPORTS,” distilled memories, and dreamlike drawings, the book catalogues artifacts of death—opens a museum of them—and leads us through its haunting halls.
For my full review of THE STATIC HERD for Heavy Feather Review: https://heavyfeatherreview.com/2014/0...
For my full review of THE STATIC HERD for Heavy Feather Review: https://heavyfeatherreview.com/2014/0...
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews