He Is Talking To The Fat Lady
By xTx | Review by J.A. Tyler
At some point I cared about naming xTx. How it would adjust me if xTx was a Joan. Or a Cassandra. Or a Gertrude. How it would make me look up from the television during a non-commercial moment. How it would be lighting a candle in darkness. Until I didn’t care anymore. Until I was only paying attention to the words. As I should have been, because who cares. Attention must be paid to the words. Here, attention paid to the words:
from ‘Payout’
Twenty-four hours for thirty-three days, never stopping; exhaustion long gone, now transformed into something akin to transcendence and the encapsulated air within the hollow bones that kept birds afloat. Vision slowly returning; tear ducts drained, devoid. Her fingers, now nubs – it’s fine, she’ll buy gold tips along with new lips...hers gone, worn right through: an exhausted hangman’s noose.
When I suck in the sentences of xTx’s debut chapbook He Is Talking To The Fat Lady (Safety Third Enterprises, 2010) I find pleasure in her loping gait, what I imagine horse breeders see when the newest is born, the one that will be the star when her legs shore up. The conscious repetition of ‘gone’, the variance of ‘exhaustion’ / ‘exhausted’, the rhyming of ‘tips’ / ‘lips’, all of this done to make us rhythmic, to make us bleed back into the words as we read.
from ‘You Are Big. I Am Tiny’
You are big. Very big. So big with your girth. Your infinite waistline. Your head that hits the sky. I cannot comprehend you as a whole, just pieces: fingers, knee, shirt sleeve. I am tiny. Very tiny. So tiny with my shortness. My baby legs. My head skimming undersides of coffee tables. You could put me into your mouth and I could live there.
And xTx understands that repetition creates only half a rhythm, that it takes disparity to complete the whole. Here something as simple as ‘big’ versus ‘tiny’ makes phrases that expand and contract our reading, asking us to see close up and then far away, or both at once, reading through a magnifying glass taped to a telescope.
from ‘He is Talking to the Fat Lady’
He is still talking to the fat lady. Although this telling doesn’t convey it, it’s been a long time. I can prove it because the bald man’s barbeque meat pyramid has collapsed the table it was on, and the man is now standing on a foundation of cooked meats. He is still alone. A meat King on a throne of blackened meat, ruling nobody, full of cooked meat pride.
Because what xTx is doing is writing, the name attached shouldn’t be any concern. I used to care if xTx was a Nancy or a Simone or a Jennifer. A Claudette or a June. In the end, I just care about reading her, about the words, and xTx is full of some very good ones.
J.A. Tyler reviews books and things for Rumble Magazine. He is also founding editor of mud luscious / ml press. He is an iPad 4.