INTERVIEWS
The Pedestal Magazine > Archives > Issue 55 > Reviews >Ted Jonathan's Bones & Jokes

Bones & Jokes
Ted Jonathan
NYQ Books
ISBN Number: 9781935520016

Reviewer: JoSelle Vanderhooft


          With perhaps the exception of Staten Island, the Bronx is the most underrepresented borough in New York City when it comes to depictions in film, art, and even poetry—or it is, at least, in my experience. In fact, in all my years of reviewing for The Pedestal Magazine, I can’t name a single New York-centered title that has focused primarily or even tangentially on this borough—a shame, given its wealth of stories.

          But happily, Ted Jonathan’s first full-length collection, Bones & Jokes, has broken that streak. In this unusual hybrid of poetry, vignette, and short story which often overlap one another in style and structure, Jonathan tells the stories of this often-neglected borough’s history and people with a keen ear for voice, dialogue, and character, as well as a sharp understanding of pacing.

          I have long enjoyed hybrid collections such as Bones & Jokes (that is, books that collect poetry and short stories) and am often disappointed that such compilations are comparatively rare in the field. In the case of Jonathan’s latest effort, however, I think that the juxtaposition of the two is not only interesting, but essential. Jonathan is one of the rare writers who seems to be equally at home in both disciplines, so much so that his poems often flow like breathless vignettes and his stories bristle with poetic language and devices. Although I have often argued that all poetry, even the most imagistic and fleeting, tells a story (though, perhaps, not an explicit or even conventionally structured one), Jonathan’s strives to do so blatantly. Take, for example, “Tommy Bolan,” one of the collection’s early poems. Here, Jonathan relates the all-too-short life of a survivor of child and spousal abuse in language and structure that seems to straddle the line between prose and poetry.

My little sister slept in the other bed. It was the only
bedroom of the 3 room apartment. On the other side of the
shut door was a small foyer. To the left was the bathroom.
On the right was the doorless arched entrance to the living
room—where our parents would sleep on the sofa bed. You
had to pass through the living room to get to the kitchen.
If I dared go out—it might stop. Sometimes my mother
would come into my room sweaty and scared and sleep with me.
And we slept. Months might have passed between beatings,
but the threat was—always—there.

So, I’d get up to piss a lot and stay up and go out and
come back and do what my mother told me to do and years
passed and I kept an eye out and I went out to look at the
girls who loved me but I had no good clue about and while
I was out—he stabbed her dead—and she was gone, and he
was gone straight to jail—and my sister and I now had to
go live with our maternal grandparents and they were old
and infirm and I kept an eye out for them and—it started—
the most ordinary thing—a short passage from a book—
over and over in my head increasingly and replaced by another
series of numbers increasingly I was crazy—of course—
look who my father was. And liquor made me feel better and
liquor and pills made it better to feel nothing and I felt
nothing when I OD’ed at 15, and it was better. I should know.

          The breathless pacing of this poem and its long though still conspicuous lines place this work, on the one hand, firmly in the realm of poetry. On the other hand, the poem’s use of stark yet conversational language, as well as the seemingly haphazard line breaks, leads to a flow that resembles that of a prose piece. Although a reader might reasonably conclude that such a poem is the work of a prose writer attempting to “shoehorn” a story into a poem, I can say from experience that a piece such as “Tommy Bolan” is actually quite difficult to pull off. First, Jonathan has to establish a sense of rhythm—the methodical and indeed shell-shocked pacing of the first stanza. He then completely breaks it apart in the second by breaking the lines at increasingly awkward places and extending them with dashes. Although prose can certainly be rhythmic, this piece would not be half as effective devoid of Jonathan’s strong sense of line and punctuation.

          Jonathan’s understanding and skillful blending of both prose and poetic techniques appears in almost all of the selection’s poems, including “A Better Man” (a hilarious look at the self-centeredness of over-privileged youth), “Chinatown” (a hard-boiled noir piece which takes the collection on a rare trip outside the Bronx to Los Angeles), and “Letter to Lori Waterhouse,” which I am convinced should be more properly called a vignette than a poem. But regardless of such rather petty quibbles over taxonomy, his poems are universally strong in voice, anchored in place, and awash in a profound sympathy for their subjects—or, in some cases (as in “A Better Man”), a willingness to gently mock them. Indeed, one of my favorite poems in the collection is “19 Actions More Practical than Writing this Poem” (here reproduced in full), a short piece which skewers the solipsism to which poets often fall prey as well as the frustration one faces when wanting to write a poem that simply will not be written.

Assaulting the wall with my head. Switching to a raw food diet.
Curing cat co-dependency. Channeling Elvis. Blaming the messenger.
Playing computer solitaire. Playing lotto. Playing the kazoo.
Petitioning the lord with prayer. Massaging my prostate.
Assaulting the wall with your head. Reading Thackeray’s Vanity Fair.
Taking up golf. Dancing the Funky Chicken. Shaving my chest.
Casting a vote for American Idol. Collecting Nazi war memorabilia.
Shouting Bama Lama, Bama Loo. Netting butterflies. Collecting dust.

(On a somewhat pointless aside, the funniest part of this poem, for me, is that it actually lists twenty actions.)

          The second half of Bones & Jokes consists of short stories, most of which follow residents of the Bronx in activities ranging from the commonplace to the bizarre to the absurd. In “Don’t Blame Me,” a seemingly innocuous comment made while waiting for the start of a Yizkor service on Yom Kippur may have disastrous consequences; “Ballad of Caleb Belleu” follows the sheltered, eighteen-year-old title character’s attempts to lose his virginity, which quickly swerve from the amusing to the dangerous; and “Godfather Death” is a retelling of a little-known Brothers Grimm fairytale with a brand of humor that I can only describe as one I encounter solely in New York writers. These are small stories about small actions—a bizarre job delivering firewood to hookers (“From the Diary of a Prizefighter”), standing in line for a synagogue service—that nonetheless capture the reader and carry him or her along as only stories about the small and commonplace can. I have often listened raptly, for example, as a member of my family recounts an incident at work or something silly one of my cats did while I was away. The charm of Jonathan’s stories is exactly the quality which makes us listen and treasure such anecdotes; a sense of the immediate and an appreciation for the commonplace things and happenstances that make us human. Additionally, each of these stories moves with a pace and panache that I have only heard in oral storytelling, a fact which makes me wonder if Jonathan has ever practiced this art. Regardless, he has a skill for it that any oral storyteller would envy.

          Bones & Jokes is an engaging hybrid collection that places a much-needed spotlight on not only the foibles, charms, and lives of the Bronx, but also on the ways in which poetry and prose can serve as allies. Obviously, readers interested in the five boroughs’ literary output should pick this up, as should anyone who loves to hear a good story told as only a bard can tell it.
Enter your email:

Home      Register     About Us/Staff     Submit     Links     Contributors     Advertising     Archives     Blog    Donation    Contact Us    Web Design