The World as it Appears: Review of City Scattered: Cabaret for Four Voices by Tyler Mills
Review by Karin Falcone Krieger
City Scattered: Cabaret for Four Voices
Publication Date: April 2022
Publisher: Tupelo Press
ISBN: 978-1-946482-68-6
"The world is not as it is but as it appears"
The Study: The Delicate Language of Signs
Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories fired my young imagination when he declares, “I am a camera.” I knew he was onto something that I wanted for myself: to be a great observer, to let stories speak for themselves, without erasing myself in the process. Isherwood’s Berlin became Cabaret on Broadway. I recall as a child being intrigued by Liza Minelli’s Sally Bowles with bowler hat and green fingernails on the cover of Life Magazine, circa 1972. The ways these interpretations of eras layer on themselves is a conversation in itself, and one worth having. Tyler Mills is a young writer who decided she wanted to be the Cabaret, not only a camera, after viewing the museum exhibit “Berlin Metropolis: 1918-1933” at the Neue Gallery in New York City circa 2015.
The cover of City Scattered: Cabaret for Four Voices evokes an old City Lights edition: a dated typeface, black and oxidized ivory from cover to cover. Within Mills takes us on an aural journey, “a cabaret for four voices.” The grounding force is “I / Self / Woman in Berlin, 1930.” “The study” and “chorus” borrow language from a 1930 study of wage labor in Weimar Berlin. The fourth voice, the Interlocutor, plays on the varied meanings of that word as a woman in present times.
Ekphrastic yet non-specific to any particular work of art, Mill’s creates a world of layered stories from the fascinations of her historical research. “Neue Frau” – the modern emancipated woman in 1930’s Berlin, a woman living between two wars, during a time of wild growth and freedom -- faces an ageless feminine struggle. The study, perhaps the understudy in the cabaret version of Woman, begins her tune:
One of my friends is pregnant.
They deny it. The men. The boys.
Deny.
What floats on the surface of this?
The language is flat and emotionless, full of cut-up and allusion, and at the same time filled with something akin to electricity circa 1930. Victrolas, postcards and cinema appear as distractions from the doomed economy, and the workaday world’s casual horror: leave your personality at the door and prepare for the boss’ sexual abuse.
Mills’ spare poetics views life in the city through the eyes of “Woman”:
…I saw a tree enclosed in a wrought-iron
fence. What if it fattens, the trunk,
pressing against the metal? Its ashy branches
bunch up at the sky in shivering bouquets…
Halfway through the book, the interlocutor arrives from present times, to mediate these worlds, both so bright and modern and both so dark and violent to women at the same time. How does one sleep with coal dust on the sheets?
Now even “the study” carries a double meaning, as interlocutor questions that 1930 wage labor study. When she returns later, she likens the Woman’s heavy purse of worthless marks to the current student debt crisis in America. I am glad someone brought it up. The interlocutor hacks out erotic bodice rippers for Amazon in an attempt to pay the impossible debt. We could easily replace victrola, postcards and cinema with Instagram, Twitter and YouTube, Mills hints in her spare incisive style.
Mills’ City Scattered is fierce. It honors the struggle of women through time, without sentimentality or even much emotion. The multiplicities of language are purposeful, not merely pirouettes. The darkness reflects an era we thought was behind us, America 2016-2021, but now reemerges as 1930’s style war takes its human toll just miles away from Berlin, 2022. Many women with unwanted pregnancies in the US right now will have to abide by rules that date to the late 1800’s. History can become a hall of mirrors, like the disco ball on the cover, and Mills knows that well.
The overworked scholar questions her days at her desk in the Coda, and leaves us not with a question, but a decisive answer:
I perform
mechanical tasks,
interchangeable,
private. But I am
no less a person.
This book is the winner of Tupelo Press’ Snowbound Chapbook Award, chosen by Cole Swensen. Tupelo Press has been steadily publishing some very polished and evolved books of poems for decades. Ilya Kaminski’s Dancing in Odessa was a Tupelo Contest winner in 2004. Profits from its sale today will be used for humanitarian relief in Ukraine.
Karin Falcone Krieger (she/her) is a writer, visual artist, gardener, advocate, and chef. Her recent reviews, interviews, journalism, poetics, and essays have been published in Tupelo Quarterly, Able News, Contingent Magazine, BlazeVOX, LITPUB, The Laurel Review, The Literary Review, and other publications. She holds a BA in Social Sciences from SUNY Stony Brook, and an MFA from The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University. She taught freshman composition as an adjunct instructor at several New York area colleges from 1999-2019. Her projects can be seen at www.karinfalconekrieger.com.