Other Electricities

Sarabande Books, 129 pages, $14.95 If you put your ear to the ether, you can hear a faint transmission. Those familiar with the seminal online site DIAGRAM might feel kinship with the lyrical nature of these emissions: The artful ponging of schematics, poetry, itemized lists, figures and fiction, fused together into a telling and engaging broadcast of infotainment. From the editor of DIAGRAM, Ander Monson, comes a full-length book, Other Electricities, in which he expands his role as literary DJ into a shamanic MC that speaks of and in the electric ether. Unlike Jodie Foster's character in Contact who listens for and decodes signals from outer space, Monson is listening to and deciphering the sublime transmissions from our own human race, with keen attention to the intriguing details that are often lost in the white noise of media overload.

Other Electricities is more than stories or poems. It is an accumulation of mounting evidence compiled obsessively by Monson, whose role is akin to that of a forensic scientist, switchboard dispatcher and hack short-wave radio operator all noised into one. "Everything has a source if you can find it," says Monson, "some point of emanation." The setting or source for the book is the raw and desolate Keweenaw peninsula of Upper Michigan, "former home of massive copper & iron mines," and "now in some ways a place only for ghosts & tourists;" a place that Monson constructs (by deconstructing) as a circuit or an electric city where everything-the people, the snow and ice, the economy, teenage antics, the stars, our instantly dated technologies, the lakes and canals-is all interconnected by unseen forces. Unseen by many perhaps, but not by Monson, who is in tune to the bandwidth of despair, and whose acute sense of observation picks up on the subtler signals and is able to channel and unscramble this analog static-a static analogous to the meaningless gossip that grips many remote northern communities bounded and bonded by isolation and the elements-only to retransmit this chatter with clear and quiet intensity, imparting to it new meanings and truths in nostalgic retrospect.

Other Electricities is a novel in much the same way as Magnolia is a movie or Twin Peaks a TV drama: There are those who drown, fall through the ice or get trapped in snowdrifts; there are vandals, shoplifters and arsonists, those that throw eggs at boats or drop bowling balls off overpasses; there's grief and the burden of loss, and although death abounds, it is seen through the detached lens of cause and effect, as a consequence of entropy, a mere slowing down of motion, a transferal of energy from one form to another. There's also advice on "reducing your murderability index," and even an index at the end with the term "indexing" within the index, spiraling into self-referential-and healing-decay. There are adolescent romantic obsessions and perversions, and the human response to natural phenomena of the kind that make Unsolved Mysteries. And then there is Monson, the radio amateur with a "license to use the language," who causes us to take a step back and consider human behavior in a refreshing new light, who allows our invisible signals to penetrate his bones like x-rays, and precipitate this nothingness into something tangible; his style sublimates and so transmits our data as accessible and beautifully eerie anomalies, shedding sparks of light and warmth into what otherwise might be just a cold dark void.