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Communion
Fiction. "If O'Conner, Mattheissen, Danielewski, and Saunders got together to play Exquisite Corpse, they might produce something akin to Beitelman's COMMUNION but with the startling control of language of a poet. These twenty paired narrative artifacts are part flash, part poetry, part traditional short story, peeling layers of a world of grace, absurdity, and the long complicated effort to create meaning in the self and in relation to others in our familial and cultural constellations. Time, place, landscapes are all elements, but so, too, are the simple issues of the body, like our need for sustenance: a peeled orange, hand-made crab cakes, blood. Characters consecrate this living, our rituals, liturgies, survivals, re- enactments, and transmute the wounds that make us who we are." Laura McCullough"
194 pages, Paperback
Published November 1, 2016
12 people want to read
About the author
T.J. Beitelman
10 books34 followersTJ Beitelman is the author of a novel, John the Revelator, a collection of short stories, Communion, and three poetry collections, This Is the Story of His Life, Americana, and In Order to Form a More Perfect Union, all published by Black Lawrence Press. His hybrid memoir, Self-Helpless: A Misfit's Guide to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, is available through Outpost 19. His poems, stories, and essays have appeared in Posit, DIAGRAM, Blackbird, Quarterly West, New Orleans Review, and other places, and he's received artist's fellowships from the Alabama State Council on the Arts and the Cultural Alliance of Greater Birmingham. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama, where he directs the Creative Writing program at the Alabama School of Fine Arts.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
April 19, 2020
T. J. Beitelman employs a breadth of voices in his stories, and I am captivated by them all. I know what's happening here: He inhabits the full experience of each world: character, setting and action, and his absorption reveals itself in an absorbing narrative. Each short piece is a world fully conceived. Beitelman's novel, John the Revelator, was my first introduction to his mastery. Communion was equally appreciated.
January 25, 2017
‘From the very start, Jesus would not take root in me.’
The joy of following the rise of an author of the significance of TJ Beitelman is one of the pleasures or reading and reviewing. He has published five other books (‘Americana’, `In Order to Form a More Perfect Union', `Pilgrims: A Love Story', and `Self-Helpless: A Misfit's Guide to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness', and ‘John the Revelator’): after being impressed with his kaleidoscopic mastery of poetry in IN ORDER TO FORM A MORE PERFECT UNION this reviewer wrote, `Once the reader begins this book of poems it will be impossible to stop gathering the fruits he has placed in this delicious basket. TJ Beitelman is quite simply an astonishingly fine new poet. Watch him. October 20, 2012.' Be certain to read his own author statement on the Amazon page of his book ‘John the Revelator’ as it explains so very well the matrix from which he works the remnants and tattoos on the mind of a childhood in the Age of Aquarius with a father and mother whose influence is palpable on the pages of this novel. Yet it is not all life osmosis that informs his writing: he studied creative writing at Virginia Tech and at the University of Alabama, where he edited Black Warrior Review. His work has appeared in Quarterly West, Indiana Review, Colorado Review, and several other publications. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Alabama State Council on the Arts and the Cultural Alliance of Greater Birmingham, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He lives in Birmingham and teaches writing at the Alabama School of Fine Arts. It only becomes a question of why he isn't better known by now.
And now comes COMMUNION, a series of poetic and prose explosions that move the reader through comedy, tragedy, in praise of beauty, in disdain for the grotesque. There is something extraordinarily magnetic about TJ's writing - it creates a hunger for more, even after the last story in the book is completed. But attempting to describe/review his works is frustrating: the fragments belong together, as though removing a stitch from a quilt would result in all the squares collapsing.
TJ pairs two stories to open his book – ‘Arctic Circle’ and ‘Masks’ – and finding the interrelationships between these two ‘cold stories’ is a clue to the joy of exploring the entire book.
ARCTIC CIRCLE
‘The young men and women of the high reaches of ice devised a party for themselves. In a very cold freeze, a group of ten or twelve gathered in one boy’s father’s barn. In amongst the smells and shuffling of the livestock, the girls dared to unwrap the bundles they’d become. As they watched them do it, the boys tried very hard to breathe, then they themselves quickly remembered to follow suit. Without those many layers, all of them were like pupae, naked in a new skin. They pretended it was summer, very far away, that one of them might, at any moment, break into a sweat. The boys fanned the girls; the girls blew cool breezes into the boys’ ears. One girl, at the height of all this merriment, fumbled through her discarded parka. She found the dimpled orange globe she had buried there. When she ripped the skin, tore it off in one long, curling piece, the smell—that of a faraway, foreign summer where things are light and sweet and very warm—filled the barn. The rose-fleshed girls and the scrawny boys watched, rapt, as she took the sweet sections, one by one, into her cold mouth.’
MASKS
‘This was the game: they took turns by the black-ice creek. One boy unwrapped his carefully muffled head and turned his back to the others. He proceeded to hold his now naked head out against the blue-cold elements. His mouth curled into a long, thin grimace. The tips of his ears turned red, threatened purple. When he could stand it no longer, he brought his hands to either temple and then worked the skin inward and down. In the freezing cold, the skin had lost its elasticity. His forehead held the wrinkles. He had aged by decades. He then turned and presented this new old face to the circle of his friends, all of them presumably unblemished and still young beneath their bundles. The warm ones pointed and convulsed, delighted, and the one who’d made his face turn dead could then scramble for his coverings, blood slowly returning to warm and rejuvenate his cheeks, his ears, the very tip of his nose. Then another boy turned his back and the game started again. One boy after another. Face after face. In the relentless, impossible cold, near the very top of the world. This, a simple sacrament of defiance and resurrection.’
Once again, kudos to a giant of a writer. The awards are plentiful – he simply needs to be read/experienced. Highly recommended.
The joy of following the rise of an author of the significance of TJ Beitelman is one of the pleasures or reading and reviewing. He has published five other books (‘Americana’, `In Order to Form a More Perfect Union', `Pilgrims: A Love Story', and `Self-Helpless: A Misfit's Guide to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness', and ‘John the Revelator’): after being impressed with his kaleidoscopic mastery of poetry in IN ORDER TO FORM A MORE PERFECT UNION this reviewer wrote, `Once the reader begins this book of poems it will be impossible to stop gathering the fruits he has placed in this delicious basket. TJ Beitelman is quite simply an astonishingly fine new poet. Watch him. October 20, 2012.' Be certain to read his own author statement on the Amazon page of his book ‘John the Revelator’ as it explains so very well the matrix from which he works the remnants and tattoos on the mind of a childhood in the Age of Aquarius with a father and mother whose influence is palpable on the pages of this novel. Yet it is not all life osmosis that informs his writing: he studied creative writing at Virginia Tech and at the University of Alabama, where he edited Black Warrior Review. His work has appeared in Quarterly West, Indiana Review, Colorado Review, and several other publications. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Alabama State Council on the Arts and the Cultural Alliance of Greater Birmingham, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He lives in Birmingham and teaches writing at the Alabama School of Fine Arts. It only becomes a question of why he isn't better known by now.
And now comes COMMUNION, a series of poetic and prose explosions that move the reader through comedy, tragedy, in praise of beauty, in disdain for the grotesque. There is something extraordinarily magnetic about TJ's writing - it creates a hunger for more, even after the last story in the book is completed. But attempting to describe/review his works is frustrating: the fragments belong together, as though removing a stitch from a quilt would result in all the squares collapsing.
TJ pairs two stories to open his book – ‘Arctic Circle’ and ‘Masks’ – and finding the interrelationships between these two ‘cold stories’ is a clue to the joy of exploring the entire book.
ARCTIC CIRCLE
‘The young men and women of the high reaches of ice devised a party for themselves. In a very cold freeze, a group of ten or twelve gathered in one boy’s father’s barn. In amongst the smells and shuffling of the livestock, the girls dared to unwrap the bundles they’d become. As they watched them do it, the boys tried very hard to breathe, then they themselves quickly remembered to follow suit. Without those many layers, all of them were like pupae, naked in a new skin. They pretended it was summer, very far away, that one of them might, at any moment, break into a sweat. The boys fanned the girls; the girls blew cool breezes into the boys’ ears. One girl, at the height of all this merriment, fumbled through her discarded parka. She found the dimpled orange globe she had buried there. When she ripped the skin, tore it off in one long, curling piece, the smell—that of a faraway, foreign summer where things are light and sweet and very warm—filled the barn. The rose-fleshed girls and the scrawny boys watched, rapt, as she took the sweet sections, one by one, into her cold mouth.’
MASKS
‘This was the game: they took turns by the black-ice creek. One boy unwrapped his carefully muffled head and turned his back to the others. He proceeded to hold his now naked head out against the blue-cold elements. His mouth curled into a long, thin grimace. The tips of his ears turned red, threatened purple. When he could stand it no longer, he brought his hands to either temple and then worked the skin inward and down. In the freezing cold, the skin had lost its elasticity. His forehead held the wrinkles. He had aged by decades. He then turned and presented this new old face to the circle of his friends, all of them presumably unblemished and still young beneath their bundles. The warm ones pointed and convulsed, delighted, and the one who’d made his face turn dead could then scramble for his coverings, blood slowly returning to warm and rejuvenate his cheeks, his ears, the very tip of his nose. Then another boy turned his back and the game started again. One boy after another. Face after face. In the relentless, impossible cold, near the very top of the world. This, a simple sacrament of defiance and resurrection.’
Once again, kudos to a giant of a writer. The awards are plentiful – he simply needs to be read/experienced. Highly recommended.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews