All I Can Recall

By: Paul Genega

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All I Can Recall is Paul Genega’s fifth full-length collection of poetry and his third with Salmon. The poems here attempt to piece together the seminal, sometimes traumatic, events which forge identity and inform our lives. Spanning many decades – from his grandmother’s bootlegging days in the Great Depression, to the counterculture of the 60s and 70s, to the Bush invasion of Iraq – these poems are populated by a larg...

ISBN	978-1-908836-42-7
Pub Date	Friday, February 15, 2013
Cover Image	“Pie” © Aaron Fink. Reproduced by kind permission of the artist
Page Count	76
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All I Can Recall is Paul Genega’s fifth full-length collection of poetry and his third with Salmon. The poems here attempt to piece together the seminal, sometimes traumatic, events which forge identity and inform our lives. Spanning many decades – from his grandmother’s bootlegging days in the Great Depression, to the counterculture of the 60s and 70s, to the Bush invasion of Iraq – these poems are populated by a large, quirky cast of characters – some family members, many not – including a female impersonator, a trade journalist who aches to be a model, and a struggling New York actress with a “voice sultry as an Alabamian afternoon.” At turns elegiac and sardonic, All I Can Recall looks to the past to make sense of the present, employing the sharp light of poetry to illuminate memory’s dark corners.

Paul Genega

PAUL GENEGA has published six chapbooks and six full-length collections, four with Salmon. His work has appeared in journals, anthologies and magazines for over forty years, winning awards from The Nation, New York Quarterly and The Literary Review, and an individual fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Perhaps, a portfolio of poems with etchings by Aaron Fink, is in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Art, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and the Harvard Museums, among others. His poem "The Self-Made Man and the Moon" was turned into a robotic theater piece by Barry Brian Werger at the robotics lab at the University of Southern California and toured the US and abroad. As part of ARTS By the People’s Moving Words project, "Pharaoh" was made into an animation by Omar Mizrah and premiered at the Animix Festival in Tel Aviv in 2018. His theater piece Paging Doctor Faustus, co-authored with Patricia Lee Stotter, was performed at the FiveMyles Gallery in Brooklyn in April 2020. Earlier, the Stotter/Genega musical Haven’t We Met? was presented at The Writers Theatre in New York as part of its Developing Projects Festival. Songs from that show were reprised online as Once Upon a Happily Ever After in 2022 by Studio Theater in Exile. He has worked as full-time research assistant to the co-editors of The Jackson Pollock Catalogue Raisonné and as Contributing Editor of The Columbia Encyclopedia. In 2014, upon the death of Antje Katcher, founding editor of Three Mile Harbor Press, he assumed responsibility for the press and inaugurated an annual poetry prize. Currently, he is Professor Emeritus at Bloomfield College, New Jersey, where he founded the creative writing program, served as Chair of Humanities, and taught literature and writing for thirty years. He lives with his husband Jim and their Welsh springer spaniel Chance at the edge of the majestic Hudson in Stuyvesant, New York.

Review: All I Can Recall reviewed by Jennifer Flach for DURA - Dundee Review of the Arts (March 2014)

Paul Genega’s fifth full-length poetry collection explores the ways in which the tangible, external world influences our experiences of life and the formation of our identities. All I Can Recall addresses its theme through an array of diverse topics – from vast, global events like the Great Depression to the deeply personal impact of our own flawed, finite bodies. It is a work of great variety, narrated predominantly by an assortment of interesting characters – some drawn from real friends and family members, and others wrought from the writer’s imagination. All this demonstrates the poet’s extraordinary flexibility.

Genega is clearly skilful. He has a great command of structure and language, and plays with their possibilities. “Parentheses”, for example, muses on the functions of the humble bracket in order to pay homage to a famous Boston art collector, while “Boring Alice” is a child’s tender view of the Northern Lights. “From the Catalogues” is the ex-copy writer’s smirking product summary for a Freud Carving Set in Fitted Wooden Case:

No more clammy silence. No whiny discomposure.

No embarrassing splinters from ego or id.

The poems range from being freeform, and almost conversational in style, to strict and quite structured. This allows Genega a range of devices which enable him to depict his cast of characters appropriately; but his poetic prowess is most apparent when he writes in his own voice. “Wolfie’s Tavern” is a triumph of sound and rhythm:

Blotched with rashes,

a thrall

of skin and bone,

you bristled and scowled,

yelp-howled

on your bar throne

as if bluster and bray

could pass for folks talking,

wit’s fangs keep stalking

death at bay.

“Toast” is simply wonderful. As “not Nat, not, not damned Nat” rises, tipsy, to speak at a wedding, he collides with his brother’s champagne glass and sends its contents flowing across the carpet. In that uncomfortable moment Nat’s thoughts wander with the meandering fizz, recounting the previous and formative embarrassments of his life through “the evanescence of an uncorked mind.” The sense of the relationship between the events of our lives and the people we become as a result is fully realised. It’s a beautiful, intelligent piece, centred around a brilliant and creative image.

However, the range of voices Genega employs to deal with his theme does come at a cost. Some poems have far less impact than others, and some characters appear less well formed. The portrayal of a female impersonator in “Working Life”, with its smattering of “honey”s and references to Marilyn and Tiffany’s, feels a little trite. Certainly, Genega explores our tendency to define ourselves by our jobs – a worthy topic and one common to several of the poems; but this somewhat shallow character representation proves distracting. Inevitably, when even a great artist attempts all things, some will be rendered less successfully than others.

All I Can Recall is the work of a creative and skilful writer, and its concept is undeniably intriguing. Genega’s utilisation of such varied styles and subjects provides a comprehensive examination of the central idea, and makes for a thought-provoking work that showcases his exceptional versatility and skill. It does, however, also confuse and disjoint the collection, offering a mishmash of forms, voices and tones. This is, nevertheless, an impressive work. Just as most readers will find some flaws, most will also find something to make All I Can Recall worth reading.