I wonder how prolific Eric Hofstatter really is. It certainly seems like he's prolific, because his first contribution to Aqueduct Press's 'Conversation Pieces' series was as recently as #95 last year, but this, arriving as soon as #101, is already his third. I liked that first book, 'Stone Martyrs', but I got less out of his second, 'Bankrupting Sky Banks'. This one, however, bites its way out of the gate on the very first page. As this sort of poetry, often short and musing, goes, one piece might speak to me and the next one not. In this volume, the dark tone that pervades the entire thing carried me through the ones that didn't, because it's palpable and dangerous.

We're in North Sumatra in 1965 but nothing else seems firmly defined. Hofstatter hurls out a slew of impressions and tasks us with coalescing them into a consistent meaning. The back cover blurb tells us that this is "a lyrical exploration of a ghost autopsy", which makes sense but I wasn't ever entirely sure if the ghost being autopsied is a woman or a relationship with one. There are points where I wondered if the woman was Death herself. She's certainly female here. Whichever way, it seems clear that this ghost won't leave easy, so it permeates everything here with memory.

The writer, whoever he is in this dystopian society where fascist death squads masquerade as the defenders of democracy, is trying everything he can to lose that memory. In the beginning, he's a mercenary of sorts, taking money to bludgeon his way through obscenity but treating it more like art. Whether he's reshaping a neck with wire or taking a machete to a child, it seems to be more than a job but there are few of the crudities that Hofstatter threw out of his earlier volumes. It's dark but it's also beautiful, like a horror flick shot by an arty cinematographer.

Over time, the mercenary aspect shifts more into serial killer mode, the money forgotten but the art still there. This is where it shifts from a woman, presumably dead, to a relationship with one, a relationship that's over but without any guarantees that the woman isn't still out there, living an entirely different life somewhere far from North Sumatra. The best lines come at this point as he uses her as justification for his actions. You're too much, he thinks. He has to kill you to remember himself. The peach for me is "All my streets are named after you. That's how I get lost." That's the sort of musing I might expect from Leonard Cohen.

Of course, whatever he does, he can't forget, because whatever happened, it's part of him. When he states, "you can't travel away from your mind", I thought of the famous 'Buckaroo Banzai' line, that wherever you go, there you are. That expands the remembrance of this relationship into the realm of obsession, clearly toxic and self-defeating. You killed me by no longer loving me, is one of the switcharounds. Your absence is worse than my atrocities, is another. There's a phrase used at one point that could have given birth to a serial killer name: Scar Patriarch.

It's all so inherently personal that it's hard to picture a backdrop, but the time and place defined at the outset may be enough. Indonesia certainly got bloody in 1965, with an attempted coup that sparked an anti-communist campaign by the leaders of Guided Democracy. I don't know too much about it, but the invasion and occupation of East Timor was still a decade away, so this must tie to the campaign I mentioned that wiped out the PKI. The narrator therefore is presumably working as part of that clampdown. Whether he believes in it is another matter. He freely admits that his morals shift when money hits his palm.

All of this works for me, because the tone plays very nicely with the shifts. I've paraphrased a lot of the narrator's thoughts here and outright quoted others, because the language is always very effective, even in pieces that seemed peripheral as I swept forward through the book. I wouldn't call those weaker, because they're just as full of interesting language and turns of phrase. Other readers may well find those the ones that speak to them. If I were to call out anything as weaker, it would be the points where Hofstatter realises he's found a magic word and then riffs on it for a whole page.

For instance, there's a point where the narrator, talking up his ability to manipulate, says that he can "play football with your head". That works on both a literal level and a metaphorical one. It's a good line. What follows, however, is an entire piece that's built out of language that plays with football as a metaphor, as if this has suddenly become a panel game. To be fair, that page finds a few good lines too, but the approach feels gimmicky and that breaks the tone. Hofstatter tries it a handful times with different metaphors but the same result.

Fortunately, that doesn't affect much of the book as a whole. Mostly, this flows powerfully, if not linearly, through a much darker mood than the earlier two volumes, which says rather a lot given what ground they covered. This feels richer than both of them because it isn't rooted in the same spot for the whole book. That's not a criticism of 'Stone Martyrs', which can't move because of its very nature, as a conversation between standing stones, or indeed 'Bankrupting Sky Banks', with its only motion what could have been had the letters of the Borgias were actually sent.

This, on the other hand, is an inherently mobile volume because the narrator's is the only voice in play and he's roaming around the landscape killing "echoes of you" in human form. It also makes it, rather surprisingly, a book I'd like to see adapted. And yes, I never thought I'd say that about a volume of free poetry, but it's something that could, in the hands of an avant-garde genius, like a Bill Sienkiewicz, become a blistering freeform comic book, an even more chaotic 'Stray Toasters'. I look forward to whatever Hofstatter comes up with next, presumably around #104. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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