Ventriloquism by Prathna Lor on Future Tense Books
Book Review: Ventriloquism by Prathna Lor (Future Tense 2010)
Ventriloquism is the debut print book by Prathna Lor. It contains 39 short prose poems or pieces of flash fiction. The genders/identities of the narrators and protagonists in these poems, as well as the extent to which obviously fictional/fantastical elements are incorporated, vary widely, as do the tone and style, so it makes creative sense to call what the author is doing a kind of ventriloquism, a projection of his voice such that it seems to come from other sources. I think these are clever, complicated poems, alien and personal, their intended tone consistently ambiguous.
“Squircle,” the opening poem in Ventriloquism, imagines a scenario in which a man enters a room containing another man and none of the things in which the man is interested (or which he thinks he wants). At first, the room is being defined by what is not in it, as opposed to what is (apart from the other man). The room, figuratively speaking, begins as a blank space. The man asks the other man if various things are in the room and the answer is always no. The progression of things goes from hats (none, “not even a capuchon”), to bottles, to nipples, to, more generally, soft edges on which to suck. The first man sees only “obtuse angles and irregular mathematics” in the room, but finds solace -- Lor chose that word -- in the shape of the other man’s head (not in its contents, and not in whatever else is in the room). I think this is an interesting way to start a book.
In many of these poems, Lor creates, within a fantastical scenario, an abstract idea or feeling, as in “Hunger,” where a woman who eats the Boreal Forest “piecemeal” and uses the spine of a whale to floss her teeth feels some kind of tenderness for the man she is addressing. Forests, jungles and whales, amongst other images and words, recur throughout the book, creating relations (if not an overall unity) between poems.
My favorite poem is probably “Bibblebabblesquawk.” The voice of the narrator is very interesting and distinct to me (“I don’t eat no melons but they sure eat me”), but what interests me most is the relationship to his mother that he’s describing, how he is telling her stories about herself and how his identity is closely tied to his mother’s. It is irreducible, one can only read it of course, but it captured for me some of the confusing emotions of being birthed, mothered, that feeling of being inseparable.
Here are some distinct lines from the book: “I take pleasure in some brief, silent flagellation”; “I unzip my pants and I see a ghost curled up in the foetal position in the bottom of the urinal stall”; “He knew, unfortunately, the differences between right and wrong; matte and bewilderment; a lark and a queer”; “I just want one baby, a small child to cradle on the tip of my finger”; “Sometimes I’m allowed to set fire to the house”; “My mother says that I got a mouth worth centuries. Says I talk like I lived to see her death and came back to tell her about it in riddles and demon tongues -- harbingering, thaumaturgy. Lampooning the stalk of a giant. Says I’m just as bad as Kookstin when it comes to trying to describe a good day.”
Find out more about Ventriloquism by Prathna Lor on Goodreads.
Prathna Lor as discussed by contributors at HTMLgiant.
Purchase Ventriloquism by Prathna Lor at Amazon.
$5.00, 48 pages, Future Tense Books 2010
ISBN-13: 978-1-892061-38-6