Jan Steckel

The review copy of this book came with a business card from the publishing company, Zeitgeist Press, and the tagline on that card is “Poetry you can actually read”. And that is true with The Horizontal Poet, to some extent. Some of the poems are very easy to read and straightforward, while other are more abstract and difficult to follow. Many, however, are medical, describing life inside a hospital. Some of these include medical terminology completely lost on me, which made that tagline a little odd in relation to The Horizontal Poet...

Read the rest of my review here: http://lesbrary.com/2012/06/09/danika-reviews-the-horizontal-poet-by-jan-steckel...… (meer)

BOOK BLURB:
A darkly comic and oddly touching story of sex, drugs, rock and roll, and a plane crash that crushes human bodies while leaving the mandolins unharmed. In “Mixing Tracks,” Jan Steckel strikes an unsettling balance between the consolations of memory, the thrilling ephemerality of youthful ambition, and our shared need for connection, even (or especially) when our world seems to have to come to its end.

BOOK REVIEW:
Set in the immediate aftermath of a plane crash, this short story immediately plunges you into musician Cam's disorientation, memories and imagined conversations and gradual exploration as he realizes first that he has survived the plane crash that has killed his band mates ~ including boyfriend David ~ and then that he is not, after all, the sole survivor.

The sense of loss and dislocation is vivid and effective whenever Cam is thinking about his past, but the emotional landscape seems to flatten whenever Cam's focus moves to the present day, and I really wasn't feeling the 'dark comedy' vibe at all.

What I was feeling, though, was an uncomfortable miss-match of different levels of realism going on in this story ~ in parts, this is 'romance' realism, Michael came across as a stock 'gay-toy-boy' character, and the practicalities of survival after a plane crash are left very much in the background, but emotionally parts of it are too realistic for that sort of fantasy-reality.

For me this dislocation meant the final scene felt more like a moment of delusion before the inevitable trauma of their situation engulfs them both, rather than the 'happy for now' ending that I suspect the author intended.
(Originally reviewed for Rainbow Reviews - http://www.rainbow-reviews.com/?p=1516)… (meer)