Bernadette Mayer and Lewis Warsh wrote Piece of Cake as a work of collaborative prose poetry, based on a process of each writing on alternate days in the course of August of 1976-the bicentennial year of the America's Declaration of Independence. It recounts the quotidian details of daily activities, negotiating the exigencies of young, married-with-children life, the artistic path and citizenship. It has the classic I did this, I did that of a New York School of Poetry text, as characterized by the poetry of Frank O'Hara, and is somewhat reminiscent of Mayer's work Studying Hunger Journal, written not long before taking up Piece of Cake. Another distinguishing feature of this work is that it is arguably the first significant male-female collaboration in 20th century American poetry. Regarding the possible derivation of the work's title, and exemplary of the work's tenor, is the start of Warsh's entry of August 29: I also recall getting up and eating a piece of left-over cake (a very sweet store-bought cake with green or possibly pinkish icing) and drinking a glass of milk at the kitchen window. Empty streets, no moon. Michael and Twinkie asleep on the floor of Bernadette's room, Guy and Karen in mine, Bill on the couch in the living room. Marie in her crib. Everyone 'dead to the world, ' a phrase I dislike, what a full house.
Cunningham wears her reverence at a such a rakish angle that it's easy to overlook the deeply religious sensibility that informs her work. In treating the pious and priggish denial of Christ's physicality as the set-up for her outlandish comic effects, she is fall-out-of-your-chair funny. She could crack up the Mater Dolorosa. But she is also mounting a serious challenge to that denial. Nor does she spare the more recent pieties of New Age spirituality, which tend to bury the personality of Magdalen under a mawkish heap of female archetypes. Her mouthy Magdalen won't sit still for being anyone's icon or emblem. She is here to tell you that Jesus, her friend, sweetheart and cosmic sibling rival was adorably, poignantly--and sometimes annoyingly--human. In less grace-full hands, this sassy treatment might amount to no more than a smart-aleck deconstruction of Christ's divinity. But Cunningham is up to no such thing. She insists on humanity as one who sees in its every awkward aspect the image and likeness of God. Beneath her sense of the ridiculous and the ribald, is a subtext thatsings Alleluia -Catherine MacCoun, author of The Age of Miracles
Cunningham has outdone herself. Always an imaginative writer, as such books as The Return of the Goddess and The Wild Mother show, Cunningham here mixes Celtic mythology with the emergent feminist tradition of the Magdalen to create a powerful and spiritually charged visionary novel. Red-haired Maeve was born on the legendary Isle of Women, where her weather-witching mothers (yes, the plural is intentional) raise her to be utterly self-assured as
Poetry. TOKYOATOTO is made of and from a hand-written book composed by the poet Sam Truitt during a 2019 Tokyo sojourn. The writing includes, among other elements, descriptions, impressions, insights into Japanese life and culture and the concrete exigencies of negotiating a foreign land. This last is complicated as Truitt lived in Tokyo for four years from the age of three: Japanese was very close to his first language, as Japan was close to being his first culture. This acts as a backfield to the writing as Truitt both seeks and betimes touches traces of their influence. TOKYOATOTO'S structure is unique in that Truitt seeks to foreground that movement toward originality by reproducing in facsimile the pages of the hand-written book. An engaging, thoughtful and sometimes profound glimpse into contemporary life in Tokyo from a perspective of complicated naivete, TOKYOATOTO is a fast, entertaining poetic tramp full of pratfalls, missed connections, and surrenders in which, as the author writes on a Tokyo subway passage, one senses a web each of us hold together & against & around us like a net knit of civility not docility as there are some faraway landscapes in our mind & in our heart & our bodies are dreaming all of them uniting to listen to the underground hum its magic.