ReviewStack: McAllister's Mates Ten
I took something of an extended break from these reviews and Substack to focus on my third book which I hope to publish by the end of June. Also these reviews are now joining up with Reviewstack run by the great writer and pillar of the Substack Community :
An ongoing series of reviews of some of the wonderful articles, poems, and stories I’ve discovered on Substack (and other places) and more importantly the beautiful souls behind the works.
Please take a few moments to read the works of these authors and if you find their work as life-affirming and life changing as I do, then please let them know. We need to support and cherish these voices.
You can meet some of my other friends in the previous instalments: 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
If you want to keep me in caffeine (and keep the ghostly voices whispering for the poetry side of things) - consider clicking below. For any who do so, you have my deepest gratitude.
Hell hath no fury like the office clerk’s ocean of frustrations and crumbling dreams boiled to molten rage. What happens when (to quote Mr. Thom Yorke) the “job that slowly kills you” is faced down by a destroying angel with tie askew and top shirt button undone because today is the day of reckoning?! 11 am annual performance review be damned! All of you be damned!!!
The story is hilarious, surreal, and yet down to earth with touches like a favourite battered old mug (that everyone has in their office) and the heated barbs (and passions) simmering under bland office conversation. Not to say that the dialogue falls short - it sparkles! Like so much else in this story it’s heart warming and hilarious by turns. What starts out as something of a sharply observed office comedy moves to something wonderfully tender in the final leg.
The faceless bureaucrat is all of us, not so much the hero with a thousand faces, but the HUMAN with a thousand faces. You’ll laugh, you’ll cheer, but you’ll also think. Maybe cut your “annoying” boss, co-worker, insurance clerk with a million questions some slack. They too have their dreams, they too live in the walls of the system humanity has built to cage itself. If we can’t tear down those walls - we can at least paint them with bright colours.
“Derision falls upon the heart”, an intriguing opening to a poem that challenges, warns, and beckons playfully all at once. Wordbound trawlers push through an eerie seascape. They sit starved in their boat with the remnants of an old catch yet the sea around them is bountiful. Why? JM Ruitz paints a haunting scene with a plethora of interpretations and personal messages.
As always with my favourite poems, this one elevates atmosphere and emotion over narrative. The hushed and gentle cadence carries an air of quiet desperation. Repeated readings bring various interpretations and insights. Perhaps the travellers are blind to the nourishing wonder around them. Maybe the fishes are an illusion or distraction that our heroes seek to move beyond. Or perhaps they are never to be caught at all, a vision of another world beyond our reach.
This is the power of poetry and is something I lament for in the current mainstream. The real poets paint scenes rich with symbolism, but with carefully placed rabbit holes of subjective ambiguity. This is a poem that rewards with multiple readings and offers a rowboat into the uncharted waters of your soul. The fish are sparkling, are you brave enough to row out to meet them?
Writing about writing is rarely given the respect for its difficulty and is far too often seen as an easy way to gain followers and attention. Take the topic of SUCCEEDING in the realm of writing and you can multiply both of these factors by ten. This article has been crafted with a grace, warmth, and maturity that is usually desperately lacking in this field.
Tali speaks to artists as an artist, with all the warmth, humility, and driving creative passion that you would hope for. No hype, no bravado, no “working the marks”. This is advice from an author who respects you and your audience. The focus of the article is to avoid the lie that you should be cynically aiming your work for a supposed audience profile or some current algorithm that averages popular trends.
The deceptively simple advice to “write for one person” is so much more than a simple marketing tactic or algorithm play. This is a philosophy and a mission. This is a call to follow the first bards with their chants and songs to the Gods and Goddesses. If you're of a more secular disposition we can say the imagination personified. What matters is the writing is crafted with desire and reverence, the voice of a human reaching out to something higher than themselves. Even where your person IS a person it is very much still an act of devotion. This is an area where AI will never succeed.
There is a lot more to the article than I have gone through here, practical advice and heartfelt encouragement, its pieces like this that remind us why we write.
A romantic poem, but one that is more havoc than hallmark. The poem inverts the triumphant climax of “Ain't got no, I got life” by Nina Simmone, where her song celebrates her physical independence in spite of crushing circumstances, the author here wilfully rejects physical being entirely without their beloved. We, the audience, are unsure whether to be enchanted or alarmed. This is more than sadness at being departed, it’s a complete existential breakdown and collapse into nothingness.
Our protagonist speaks of being reunited with their beloved. Their passion then reaches an intensity that not only brings life back to their body, but consumes the physical in a bliss like hot coals. The author speaks of being a ghost but resurrected as though the intensity of emotion transcends the earthly plane entirely. Absence casting their soul into the oily darkness of Tartarus, or their absence elevating their spirit to the omnipotent light of heaven. To merely walk through the world of the living is not an option.
Passion like transcendence is not a commodity to be packaged, marketed, or reduced to shallow slogans. It is wild, free, dangerous, and carries heavy consequences. Some poems are just as dangerous.
I hope you enjoy these beautiful works as much as I enjoyed reading them and writing about them.
You can meet some of my other friends in the previous instalments: 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Substack has proven to be a treasure trove and I already have a few more gifted writers lined up for my next review newsletter.
I am so grateful and humbled that you included one of my posts in this selection. Thank you so much for your kind words and for introducing me to some excellent authors and creators. I love finding new things to read.
Trawlers was one poem I initally was on the fence about. But like a lot of things I write while in work brain fog it, comes out the other end with more meaning and feeling than I anticipated after rereading, so you really mirrored how I feel about it. Thank you for giving it a look, also thank you for introducing me to Dawn at the Tannhauser gate. Out of the books I've read in April 2 of them were works by PKD, so it was SUPER up my alley lol