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Guest Blogger Christopher Stroner reviews mY Generation: A Real Journey of Change and Hope by Josh Riebock.

To say that Josh Riebock has a handle on Generation Y is an understatement. He not only can peg us as a generation, he is this generation. Josh has a firm grasp on this generation not because he has spent time in ministry or even spent so much time talking to people from this generation, because he has, and it shows, but because living in this generation Josh has painted a poignant self portrait. He is Generation Y.

Josh credits his writing this book to some of the more influential people of this generation, like Rob Bell, Donald Miller, Tim Burton, Christopher Nolan and others. Josh writes this book using references that are common to this generation. He writes in a way that connects to each and every person of the generation. He uses illustrations that cut to the core of a generation that is broken and abused. He offers a refreshing story to a generation that lacks the community that we all desperately long for.

It was a quick read for me, which is saying a lot because I am a slow reader. Josh writes like he talks—I was able to see him speak recently—but it was more than that. It was a story that I could relate to and resonated deep within my soul, stirring something so foundational that I could do nothing but continue reading. It is a story that is written in a undefended state and one of humble brokenness. Josh uses his story and a host of other stories that have inspired and changed him. These stories drive the book to greater depth and help to leave the reader wanting more.

Josh’s command of story and the use of others stories is astounding and inspires my to tell my story. All of it, not just the easy or nice parts, but the hard and down right evil parts. Josh has giving this generation and other generations a book that allows us to be fully exposed and share our deepest feelings and questions with the world. There is genuineness that comes from Josh’s writing and it frees the reader to experience there own story and reach into the dark places and get dirty. Josh’s story helps this generation to know that we are not alone and we need to come together to fix the growing rift that has formed between ourselves and others.

I loved this book from the moment that I picked it up; I could not put it down. It spoke so gently and so soothingly to my soul I felt as if I were talking face to face with Josh. It left me wanting more and it left me looking deep into my soul and searching my heart for some of the deepest questions and fears I have. If you took Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller and Velvet Elvis by Rob Bell, and combined them, this book would be similar to that. Josh dares to write a fully exposed story that at the same time is insightful and can be applicable to all of Generation Y.

Brad Fruhauff

Relief’s Poetry Editor, Brad Fruhauff, reviews John Hodgen’s collection of poems titled Grace.

This volume’s title would seem to promise a series of poems at least indirectly related to a familiar but central Christian concept. “Indirect” is the right word, for among the myriad people, places, and things that appear in these poems, God and Jesus only stick out for their peculiar sanctity among a popular and secular host. There are churches, and there is a form of grace, but it’s not always the kind that makes you think of the generosity and greatness of God.

Not that it has to be. Hodgen’s poems resonate with a spiritual vision, but his audience isn’t specifically us Christians. Rather, it’s anyone who has felt like the heart of life must be beating somewhere else than where we are—somewhere, perhaps, where there are fewer cars and all the iPods are out of batteries. Grace, for Hodgen, is a moment of recuperating life through memory, memorializing, or metaphor-making—that is, through discovering and creating the poetry of the everyday. Grace is an open buckwheat field, and it’s a lightning-struck tree where “a slender roan horse feeds under its basilica of broken branches, / because he knows that is the place / where the soft tufts of grass / taste the sweetest”; or grace is the burst blood vessels of a dead friend’s face that become “God’s autograph, / His certain seal, saying I made this, / this belongs to me.”

This places Hodgen within a class of poets, religious and otherwise, for whom all poetry is about discovering or creating the numinous within the mundane. I used to think such poetry was in the tradition of T. S. Eliot’s shoring the fragments against his ruins, but the ruins of our culture and subsequently ourselves have been bulldozed, paved-over, and replaced with strip malls, so that we barely know there ever was something to be ruined, and we figure whatever fragments we may need can be bought at a discount.

No, the poets of the everyday are not gathering up what cultural riches remain but searching for a richness independent of culture, a richness originating within the vision of the poet himself and, hopefully, taking form or incarnation within the poem. In the latest Image, Gregory Wolfe considers this the very function of art: “not a message to be communicated but a presence and a mystery to be experienced—in the flesh.” Art initiates an experience of presence and mystery.

For Hodgen, the means to this experience is the Proustian means of metaphor. For Proust, metaphors were pregnant with spiritual meaning, and Hodgen squeezes every ounce of spirit out of metaphorical operations as he can. His poem, “Each Moment Is Speaking to You of the Other” explains and demonstrates the gist of this kind of poetry. It begins with the poet landing at an airport, watching another plane landing on a parallel runway. He projects himself into a spectator on the ground looking up and imagining a pair of swans. Planes become swans. Boats become “little florettes on the cake of the sea.” The “Other” moment is “the parallel universe, that twin world that lives like a bubble, like the past / inside each vagrant moment.”

The twin world leads him to his mother guilting him over a putative twin in Europe who wishes he had green beans for dinner, which leads to a reflection on pairing itself and a series of pairs: a lover and his love, a street person and a sitting Buddha, a woman picking up a mango and a man cleaning out his dead mother’s fridge, discovering little peas sliced in half, “worlds split in two.”

Hodgen’s poems are veritable piles of such metaphor-making, following one shape to another to another on a path only the poet can take, turning now and again to show us how the path has been switch-backing all the way from the ground up to the glorious mountain peak of—well, of some kind of vague spiritual experience. One reviewer of this book complained that there feels like little takeaway, which seems fair enough; Hodgen describes a world where people are often lonely or desperate and where death shows up and rends an already fragile existence, and he certainly doesn’t offer any positive statement for how to live in this world.

What he does instead is model a form of meaning-making that memorializes the tragic and strange by integrating these experiences with their “pairs” or “twins”—the simplest form of meaning-making, perhaps, such as occurs when we learn the English equivalent of a foreign word. This is like that.

There is something powerful in this kind of naming and connecting—it suggests that extraordinary experiences can still become part of us, do not have to represent voids or tears in the fabric of the self. But Hodgen doesn’t go much farther than to point this phenomenon out to us—in fine, flowing language with a light but elegant sense of rhyme, granted, but in language that circles back in upon itself. In “Each Moment Is Speaking to You of the Other,” the poem concludes with each of the split worlds “speaking sweetly to the other.” The poem, as does much of the book, ends where it started. We’re not going anywhere, we’re just learning how to be where we are.

Which may not seem like much of a gift, but simple gifts are gifts nonetheless. Hodgen at least offers you a pleasant trip back to where you started, and maybe the world looks a little more wonderful than it did before you started. Christians can often slip into an attitude of pining nostalgically for a version of Christiandom in which miracles happened all over the place; Hodgen adds his voice to the chorus of poets who insist that the miracle world—the kingdom of Heaven, Jesus would say—isn’t in some idyllic past but is staring us in the face every day.

***

Brad Fruhauff has recently received a PhD in English at Loyola University Chicago. He occasionally contributes book and music reviews to the Burnside Writer’s Collective, and his story “The Strangler” appeared in the first volume of the Ankeny Briefcase. He is by temperament something of an Ancient—”a grumpy old man,” as his (young) wife puts it—and does not believe a good idea goes bad by going out of fashion. He is currently excited about the novels of Marilynne Robinson and Orhan Pamuk, and enjoys the poetry of Auden, Donne, Hopkins, Tennyson and, more recently, Scott Cairns.

About a month ago, Robin Merrill wrote into Relief’s Editor-in-Chief asking to write a review of Relief published author Andrew McNabb’s new book, The Body of This: Stories.   The e-mail was passed to me and I was more than happy to put Robin on the schedule.  So I present to you Robin’s review:

An Important New Voice

By Robin Merrill

A man gives up a million dollar lottery ticket so his girlfriend will eat a bag of potato chips.  A thirty-three year old lawyer quits his practice to work at Home Depot, where he can be truly subservient.   A young girl dreams of marrying Christ.  A woman contemplates the birth of her albino child.  A family man dreams of licking a homeless woman’s teeth to achieve rapture.

Andrew McNabb’s debut collection of short stories is a triumph.  Twenty-eight stories in only 164 pages, some are more like vignettes than stories.  McNabb does not waste words.  His stories are tight and potent.  Don’t expect plot driven narratives; instead, each story paints a portrait of a character (or two), most of whom seem inexplicably familiar.  Have I met them somewhere before?  Or do I recognize myself in McNabb’s honest depictions?

I would be remiss if I did not call attention to McNabb’s peculiar ability to write a love story.  How can a writer today tell a love story that is fresh and authentic without falling into the sticky traps of romance and sentimentalism?  McNabb achieves this with realism.  The collection is worth reading for one piece alone: “Their Bodies, Their Selves.”  An elderly man falls while using the restroom and his elderly wife, upon finding him injured and embarrassed, undresses in front of him for the first time.  Tender.  Human.  Perhaps the most exquisite love story I’ve read.

This is a corporeal collection.  I fear a “Christian” label might summon expectations of cartoonish characters and Little House on the Prairie plots. Instead, a reader finds blatant realism, with sex and flatulence and nudity, and yes, even cursing, but it is never gratuitous, just graciously honest.  McNabb fuses the spiritual and the physical in such a perfect union, one wonders how there was ever a divide.

This is not a collection of stories about being Christian, but instead an exploration of what it means to be human in a beautiful, haunted world. McNabb’s faith and spiritual self-awareness is intrinsically woven throughout the book’s pages.  No story is told “because of faith” or “in service of faith.”  The faith is just there.  It is just part of the human experience, which makes The Body of This all the more authentic.  I expect to be affected by these stories for some time.  Andrew McNabb is an important writer.