Duck Boy
by Bill Bunn
Bitingduck Press (2012)
ISBN 978-1-938463-37-2
e-book $4.99

Duck Boy is a novel filled with symbolism and Alchemy. The first symbol, “Duck”, is in the title and represents both the derogatory Webster’s dictionary definition of “one that cannot act effectively because of a disablement or other cause” and, symbolically, as a journey of the soul.

Steve, the main character, starts the novel filled with self doubt. Through a journey of discovery and growth he changes into an able confident young man. Having lost his mother under mysterious circumstances Steve is trying to fit in while accepting the loss, yet he continues to believe he will find her. Will he be able to find her? Can he bring her back? His wacky Aunt Shannon thinks so. Steve doesn’t believe her.

The addition of alchemy to the story creates a new level of interest. Transformations are not limited to changing one object into another, along the old lead to gold theory line, but, include the movement of the alchemist through space. Steve learns that his mother, along with his aunt are both alchemists, and that perhaps alchemy is responsible for his mother’s disappearance. Aunt Shannon teaches Steve that alchemy is performed through the appropriate use of language and a benu stone. Bill Bunn emphasizes the value of words to change ourselves and the world around us, and gives the reader a clue as to how Steve will change his situation.

You can change a thing with words much easier than you can with fire. I can bend words so many ways, break them, and put them back together again. And when you change a word in just the right way, you change the world.” Aunt Shannon paused (51).

Bill Bunn’s use of language in Duck Boy is superb with remarkably fresh images starting in the prologue and continuing throughout the novel. Images like, “[a] brown pond of coffee on the floor … surrounded by the shark-fin shards of a shattered mug” (2), a part of the scene when Steve discovers his mother has disappeared. Then later when he thinks he sees his mother at the mall, and she starts off “slaloming through the food court tables” (7) while Steve’s progress to catch her is thwarted by a crowd that sprouts up. Steve is awoken from this daymare by “[a] badly dressed frown with legs” (8), his teacher Mr. Pollock. Further on while Christmas shopping with his Great Aunt Shannon, Steve mentally voices the depressing thought, “I’m going to the mall with a cartoon” (64). The wacky aunt character made me laugh.

Symbolism abounds throughout the novel with such instances as Aunt Shannon’s white “1966 Dodge Monaco convertible” (64) being referred to as “the dragon rumbled to life” (65) when it started. Later in the story Steve has to master the dragon — drive the car — to return to Aunt Shannon’s house after she goes missing in the same manner as his mother went missing.

At first Steve doesn’t believe his aunt can change one object into another, until he sees her do it, and then has success causing a transformation himself with the aid of his aunt and her benu stone. Once Steve finds his benu stone and starts to experiment, he discovers that perhaps he shouldn’t short change his own abilities. The choice of benu, as the name of the stone that allows for transformations, brings in more symbolism: the Benu Bird (also known as the Phoenix) whose meaning in alchemy refers to a rebirth from its own ashes after combusting voluntarily. By the end of the story we see a new Steve, one who could be said to have returned from his own ashes.
At the end of the novel Steve proudly refers to himself as Duck Boy with the proclamation that he is master of the world of pieces. “You are my world now…You will listen to me. I am a whole one: I am the Duck Boy” (281).

I expect I will come back to Duck Boy for an additional read in the future. In the past ten years a number of novels written for a younger audience have crossed over to the adult market, I think Duck Boy by Bill Bunn has the potential of making that crossover.

This review appears in FreeFall Volume XXIII Number 2 Spring / Summer 2013

The post Book Review of “Duck Boy” by Bill Bunn appeared first on FreeFall Magazine.

The Porcupine’s Quill
ISBN 9780889843431
$19.95

This collection of eleven cantos is a memoir in verse that follows a rough chronological order where George Amabile shares his life through a lyrical narrative. The opening poem “Tangents & Vectors” uses vivid weather and sea images to create a link between the parts. I can see the cars/drivers thrusting forward bent on reaching their destination regardless of the weather, bent on reaching an edifice where the work they do creates nothing more then an abundance of fish eggs most of which will have little or no effect on the condition of man or the world.

Dawn is a salmon run
of tail lights. Exhaust
curdled by the arctic (11)

Freezing rain
smeared across the windshield
like a bird’s eyelid
changes the carbon steel lights (11)

The law is all

that’s left of good

intentions.

We pass it copiously like roe. (12)

This poem connects the mundane travel to and from work daily with thoughts on environmental, sociological and biologically innate behaviour before stringing together life’s events that lead into the more autobiographical Cantos that follow.

“Burnt Wings” begins with a barbecue then leaps into the defining moments of childhood through a first person tour. “…, flying / into the great white sun” (17). These leaps show the exploration of a young boy’s sense of invincibility. Amabile then pushes that invincibility into a loss of that sense, which is clearly apparent with the illness and its dramatic result: “The priest made a rare house call” (17) . . . While “feeling my thighs melt from their bones.” (18). He shows the slow recovery from the illness and childhood illusions, before moving on to the poems only stanza written in third person. Amabile sharply displays the child’s loss of kinship and trust with his father.

The father cannot fathom
how he has changed
from partner, mentor, friend
to a predator that stalks the boy in his dreams. (21)

The following section returns to the opening adult when the protagonist declares “I am a part of the morning, / the part that watches while it burns.” (22)

Amabile portrays the pain and confusion created when a memory is thrust to the forefront of perception in “What We Take with Us, Going Away”. A trip through Europe where the sections are tied to family history past and present, where what went before nearly repeated itself. Where, a collision with a cyclist throws Amabile back into the accident that killed his brother.

I knelt, still

shouting, trying to shake him
awake, then rocked him senseless in my lap.

I kneel now, in broken glass,
in the headlights of stopped traffic, feeling
his cold neck for a pulse, confused
by the scent

of wine

in the air, and my breath

explodes

when I understand,

he’s dead

drunk, and snoring. (43)

Throughout this collection the reader is invited to share in the very personal ethos of one man, George Amabile, through his elegant and extraordinary verse.

‘ What muscular lyricism! Amabile is a fearless singer who finds the right note for every human emotion.’
Lorna Crozier

This review first appeared in FreeFall XXII Number 3.

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