Review: "Ghost Town, USA" by Christopher Luna

This review has been provided courtesy of Lynn Alexander, editor of Full Of Crow, Fashion For Collapse, Blink|Ink Online, and producer of assorted chapbooks, zines, and ebooks through her small press collective.

Ghost Town, USA refers to the poet’s town of Vancouver, Washington, a town in the shadow of the infamous Portland. The name comes from his first impressions: a quiet place, a place without people, even in the middle of the afternoon. Now maybe he was exaggerating, or maybe bustle is relative. Certainly for a transplanted New Yorker, it can be unsettling. And for a poet like Christopher Luna whose writing is so rooted in observation, one can imagine how difficult it must have been in the beginning as he struggled to get used to the silence.

Perhaps something changed in him, opened up to the place, because he came around to this particular town and came to discover his own layers of noise, in the chatter of the ordinary. He needed to get to eye level and engage with the place, with the geography and it’s subtle pulse, to hear it, and it came. These poems include : conversations on the bus, one sided sentiments delivered in skips to a cell phone, young lovers and friends immersed in the logistics of living, plans made, plans changed, bands discovered, people making their way on the bus to different destinations…personalities made, being crafted and delivered in postures and gestures before his observant eyes. We have conversations recounted, bits of text, but his is an omnimedia ethic: music, bumper stickers, signs, notes, fridge magnets, jackets, recollections of poetry, words of the street. We meet believers of magic and miracles, social service cynics, hustlers and bruskers, addicts, people who are in love and people who would dearly like to be.

Of course there’s sex, which he embraces dutifully, ever the innocent voyeur glad to serve the cause of documentation:  “a young girl/in a turquoise top/her breasts/a redeeming vision.”

The reader can’t help but connect the poet’s exploration of his own layers (the essence of neuroses, habit forming thoughts, thousand shoulds) with his excavations in Ghost Town.  Ghost Town is a place that perhaps shifts the burden of that “genuine life” squarely on the shoulders of the practicing poet who will not be confronted by the lifestyle at every turn upon leaving the apartment in the quiet suburb, but must rather seek out opportunities. A poet in a low key place might not have that sense of “keeping it real” but then something happens in the mature relationship of the poet to his world- the poet finds a way to practice no matter what corner he shouts from and no matter which streets he roams. The poet “of place”, as he is becoming in his Ghost Town, is not a passive witness but an avid seeker.  He has decided to make peace with this place.

What is there about a man, coming to terms with transitions, that would resonate with a reader who has never been to Vancouver?

Perhaps change and resistance is something we can identify with, and many of us remember times where we needed to process a new environment. His town is every town, the ugly he finds is not unlike the ugliness that exists everywhere. The people of these poems might be thousands of miles away from the reader, but no doubt the reader has known them. They are nameless, faceless characters that pass through his poetry, they are faces we recognize, things we read and sense as familiar but we can’t always place where or why. He learns that despite being a haven for the socially paranoid, the suburbs have their share of scary things.

He is not complaining, he is celebrating, and he is documenting, and he is no longer waiting for the bustle to find him.

In the end, we learn that Christopher Luna is not just writing about “some town” and what he comes to know about it’s character. He is giving the reader an opportunity to examine these snippets and vignettes and connect them to something that is very important to him, something in the subtext of so much of his work: active living. Being on the street, touching one another, experiencing one another with the full spectrum of the excited, engaged sensorium-hearing voices in all kinds of contexts, different people involved in different relationships and playing out their roles, exterior manifestations of interior selves, common struggles and extraordinary ones alike.

Get out there and live, and look-that’s how you come face to face with a place.

Selected Poetry From “Ghost Town, USA” by Christopher Luna:

THE PEOPLE ON THE BUS
#4 WESTBOUND  AUGUST 6

Yasmin sits in the back
pierced forehead, blonde wig, dirty feet
impeccably painted fingers and toes
patchwork summer dress
vaguely Arabic, vaguely tribal tattoos
on her ankle, chest
“How are you, hon?” she croaks
legs up on the seat in front of her
to allow me to see straight up her skirt

at first I try to look away
but as my gaze is drawn back toward
the lacy white panties
and the tattoo on the inside
of her right thigh
she opens wider, and smiles

LIQUOR & WINE

Manager to clerk:

“When Melissa gets back
I’ll let you fly the cage,
how’s that?”

“Ghost Town, USA” is available directly from the poet, whose details can be found on his blog. Christopher Luna is a poet, editor, teacher, and collage artist from Long Island, NY. He currently lives in Vancouver, WA where he hosts a monthly open mic poetry reading every second Thursday at Cover to Cover Books. Publications include The Long Islander, Made Up Movement, Cadillac Cicatrix, eye-rhyme, Exquisite Corpse, and the @tached document. Chapbooks include tributes and ruminations, On the Beam (with David Madgalene), Sketches for a Paranoid Picture Book on Memory, and GHOST TOWN, USA.