My Kafka Century

by Arielle Greenberg

Poetry. Jewish Studies. In her second book, MY KAFKA CENTURY, Arielle Greenberg raises the gothic, European ghosts sealed under the glib facade of contemporary American culture. Trying on the sometimes hilarious, sometimes discomforting guises of Jewish folk humor, pop eroticism and kiddie epistemology, she reveals and revels in the cracks and contradictions of a bristling, brainy Babel. "Greenberg remembers that what poetry does best is produce complex meaning in the never-ending possibilities language affords"--Michael R. Allen.

Genres: Poetry

103 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Arielle Greenberg is the author of My Kafka Century (Action Books, 2005) and Given (Verse Press, 2002), along with the chapbooks Shake Her (Dusie Kollektiv, edited and made by Jen Hofer, 2009) and Farther Down: Songs from the Allergy Trials (New Michigan Press, 2003). Her poems have appeared in journals including the American Poetry Review, Denver Quarterly, Black Warrior Review, Crazyhorse and American Letters & Commentary, as well as the 2004 and 2005 editions of Best American Poetry and other anthologies. She serves as poetry editor for the journal Black Clock and is one of the founding editors of the journal Court Green, and is the founder and moderator of the poet-moms listserv. She is co-editor, with Rachel Zucker, of the anthology Women Poets on Mentorship: Efforts and Affections (University of Iowa Press, 2008) and, with Lara Glenum, of the poetry anthology Gurlesque (Saturnalia, forthcoming). The recipient of a Saltonstall individual artist's grant and a MacDowell Colony residency, she is an associate professor at Columbia College Chicago and is currently living in Belfast, working on an oral history of the current back–to–the–land movement in Waldo County.

Reviews

[Abi (The Knights Who Say Book)]

I don't think I could rate this collection when I frankly didn't understand most of these at first glance (and wasn't interested in picking them apart for deeper analysis). I simply enjoyed those I did somewhat understand, and the simple reading of many others that I still don't understand.

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

i need to go back and spend more time with this but what i read i really enjoyed. There was something though that had me putting it down over and over...

[Patrick Duggan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Arielle Greenberg is renaming, reclaiming, reconstructing, and having fun doing it. In My Kafka Century, she builds a grotesque new world brick by brick, line by line. Blocks of memory become the air and soil of her poems, the fragmentation of which both stutters the reader and beckons him or her on. She creates a web of obfuscation, rhetoric, and image. Her writing is that oft sought after combination of accessible, sarcastic language with a densely layered intellectual project.

Greenberg weaves the struggles of gender politics and femenist identity, within the world and within the narrative I, so cleanly and plainly that it becomes an unquestioned hum, like the everyday expectation of voices and cars outside our windows. Her poetry is the poetry of the old city, be it European or American. My Kafka Century makes it quickly evident that simple description can invoke paranoia, desperation, and gravity, from line construction down through the very nouns and verbs she circles with. There is an urgency in her images, and a simple calm in her rhetoric.

My Kafka Century is both a communion with God and a struggle away from him. Faith becomes trial and ordeal, plea and hymn. A flight from God and an awakening to a new, more real, God. She takes every part of herself, her heritage, her identity, and dissects it piece by piece, wraps it inside out and ends up with something wholly new and astounding. If God made Greenburg in his own image, then the reverse must also be true.

Greenberg’s poetry is of the body without the body, without the mind needlessly taxing every feeling and whim. The great paradox of My Kafka Century is that her poetry is also the mind speaking without the weight of the body to narrow its scope. Her tales are broken nursery rhymes told dejected and after the fact. The book is staggering and unpretentious. Her words are musical and funny, distopic and prosaic, narrative and New York School, German Jewish and crass austere.

Greenberg takes a step back from the world, looking at it with laughing yet serious eyes. Humor and melancholy often go hand in hand in the human experience, and that comes across with great care and poetic furor in her lines. It’s been said that the good comedians see the world as a ridiculous place, the great ones don’t. My Kafka Century is something great.

[Russel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lines like Out of the Past: "is your face fucked into the mattress" make me look up & say "really? really? is anyone else buying this?" but then I quite like the poem about the man who eats his mother & runs around with a goat & a songbird & the poem about the park bench that wants someone to take it home, I mean, it kills me.

But poems like Museum ("the milk. the knife. the boy. the water / the spoon. the hand. the wolf. the glass. / the tongue, eyeless. the house. the bulb....") just make want to wring necks. On what planet is this ok. Is this poem necessary.

& then I think with complete conviction "every time we say part of it was good & parts of were not so good, we are killing poetry." & I really mean it. I'm sure of it. But I can't remember if I mean the poets or the readers.

Too many poems maybe & what we think about them just makes us feel more alone.

There ISN'T any more to it, you know.

[Juliet · Rating 5 out of 5]

"I am having an affair with a gallon container of strawberry and vanilla ice cream by not eating it myself"

Arielle Greenberg


*

4 3/4 stars.

Although there are definitely some poems in this book that did not work well for me, there were some I loved so much that the book is almost worthy of 5 stars.