Review of Richardson's Book, Memos from Apartment 5, by Jared Schickling:

Three weeks ago I closed the book, for the first time. I say for the first time - I am surprised how well the binding has held up. Since that first I have been swishing those words about my palette; and what conclusions, you might wish to know, have I come to? Number one: to describe Chuck Richardsons Memos from Apartment 5 as a collection of short stories and poems is to use designators I find here to be, well, inadequate. If only in this vast body of literature available to us there were equally convenient categories in which to place that which is more than a story, that which is more than a poem. Richardsons writing is more than writing. It is a romping. It is equal parts hard and soft. It is elemental. "Nothing Ever Goes Away." Already wrenches at the gut, doesn't it? It is the story of a nameless woman who cancels her appointment at an abortion clinic. I do not hesitate to ruin the ending because, oh, it is what it is within the context of what it is not that sets Richardson, as a writer, apart. Here, as elsewhere in Memos, he does not write per se, but tells. And he does not tell about. He tells of. "Nothing Ever Goes Away" is not a story of this unnamed woman in the usual sense, a detailing of the details of her life that have brought her to a particular time and place. Indeed, the reader gets almost none of this. The closest we come is to understand that a) she is pregnant, which means she has become pregnant (a detail which unfolds itself in a one-plus-one-equals-two sequence of events, meaning that revelation of this fact occurs naturally, organically, without effort), and b) that she is in a relationship. This latter detail flows into the readers awareness only towards the end of the story. So, if the point - and it does seem to be the point - is to inform us of what it is that causes this nameless woman to decide to have her baby after (apparently) deciding not to, how is this accomplished? I don't know. That is the beauty. But it is accomplished. Richardson takes us on a trip through the womans psyche, where the dividing lines between dream and waking life, life and death, subjectivity and objectivity, possibility and impossibility, natural and unnatural, male and female, all are blurred. As so often is the case in Memos, Richardson strives for the full spectrum of reality, by simultaneously obscuring and clarifying it, wherein the reader literally experiences not only an intellectual response but also, simultaneously, a physiological one. The brain and heart finds itself naturally quite alert as the story begins, picking and choosing, pausing to evaluate. But the language has a life of its own, an intoxicating quality. As it evolves the reader is drawn in, closer and closer; the eyes begin to droop, the tongue annunciates each syllable, feeling each word, each phrase, each image; keep your nose buried in the page and the eyes commence to disconnect, severed from the brain to inform instead a sheet of changing light across which folk and city and mother nature and all of her creations dance and talk and sing and careen, to be absorbed by the soul. Our awakening mirrors that of the nameless woman herself, in a place as familiar to her as it is to us, the point of understanding. "Nothing Ever Goes Away" is but one of twenty-nine either stories or poems, all sharing one supreme commonality: their existence in the present. Past and future are dealt with - are felt - in the context of present experience. Perhaps this sounds like nothing special, nothing worth making especial note of. On the contrary. Memos from Apartment 5 is truly conscious writing: aware of the stuff informing life, its passing through - the translation into possibility - being the other side, which approaches the beginning again. Naturally it is subversive, dealing justly with this cycle. No Hollywood here, no paperback romance, no contrived rising and falling action; just pure, unadulterated, glorious, witchcraft. Chuck Richardson is in a class all his own. ___________________________________________ Jared Schickling's work has appeared in Freefall magazine, Borderlands: The Texas Poetry Review, NiagaraBuzz.com and Reader's Quarterly. He also has a book of poetry out called Suburban Eggs (Publish America, 2003).

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