New Books: ‘The Concession Stand’

‘The Concession Stand: Exaptation at the Margins’
By Arpine Konyalian Grenier
Otoliths, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-9807651-5-1
84 pp; $16.95

Essays and memoirs that light the darkest corridors of history and disaster…
– Kevin Killian

A quest to understand what it means to be human in terms of poetry…
– Jonathan Cohen

Arpine Konyalian Grenier’s hybrid text of prose and poetry brings French writer Helene Cixous to mind. Both share a similar style, mastery of theory, and concern for the poetics of reading and writing lives, memory, history, and the spaces in-between. “History belongs to the domain of the universe. We must be gentle with it, go around it. That may be the antidote to the shame of being alive,” says Konyalian Grenier. The elusive prose moments presented in these eight pieces beg an unknowing; maybe we don’t know or fully understand, but can we keep going anyway, and can we feel something in the process? Philosophy fails, but does silence? How to get from the heart to the brain is the task, she notes, and there is a sense that somewhere within the slippery but hopeful silences of her words, there between the pages and her refusal to catalog and customize and cure us of the human, the way is lit. As she notes, hope lives there.

With The Concession Stand: Exaptation at the Margins, Konyalian Grenier is after a materiality that is luminous and forgiving of matter. Where “the word” meets itself is where we are—at the concession stand—a magical and mundane space that welcomes exaptation, possibilities.

transformation follows resistance with the word
because of the sound language comes from
sound the mind weaves around some
will we come from

In The Concession Stand is a piece about poets, another about translation, and yet another on heritage. There is a letter to a Turkish woman whose name is the same as the author’s grandmother’s (I did not know her, she says). There is the diary of a first visit to Turkey, her father’s homeland. The phrase “consumed as aligned” is pivotal in this book. One bows to it to some extent but also resists it, in line with current evolutionary concerns regarding Darwin’s theory of natural selection (somehow suggesting that externalization is the price one pays to adapt). The musicality of the text as well as occasional references to scientific principles allow the reader to experience language in more ways than one.

Thus whereas one cannot aptly read vulnerability and flawed citizenship, and cannot name what most think comes from a pathetic past. Whereas we all have unfinished business as G stands for grief, greed, the gothic, gratitude golem and gul, global, gospel, girk (passion or book in Armenian), goodwill, gravity, guilt and gout (penchant, partiality), and genocide. And whereas it is mostly silent, here’s an ode to tears, an investment return to the investment return of clinging to the river, Euphrates, Araxes, other.

To order the The Concession Stand, available on Amazon by early April, visit www.lulu.com/product/paperback/the-concession-stand-exaptation-at-the-margins/14735087.