Book Review: Voices

Voices,  Kyle Muntz (Enigmatic Ink)

What begins as a young poet's journal of entries about the friends, the dark, desperate spaces they inhabit, and world around him quickly morphs into a journey that dissolves the boundaries between himself and the things he records—one that reveals the true sources of the "voices." The title is a clever one, as the narrator documents many voices: those of his friends, lovers, and associates; the urban world; and, in doing so, his own.

The protagonist's camera also plays a crucial part and reinforces the distance between him and his subjects, which alternately serve as muse, menace, and mirror. The photographic angle is particularly relevant when you consider the job of an SLR (single lens reflex): a semiautomatic moving system that allows the photographer to see what will eventually appear on film.

Sometimes the pictures are clear--painfully so; at others, the lack of focus speaks clearly to a perspective blurred by the voices. The concept of the shutter goes a long way toward explaining the length--or brevity of certain passages (click!). Cliche has it that the camera never lies; the photographer, on the other hand, always does--through framing. It is he who decides what to show and what to ignore/obscure. Interestingly enough, the edges of said frame/s converge to distort the distance between shutterbug and subject.

Before the picture, however, there are the words. Without them, the reader would have no idea what the narrator's one-man exhibition looks like. Muntz uses them to great effect, masterfully bending them to his will. His lush prose merges with poetry that wrestles, resists, and fuses into a language all its own. The combination of clever wordplay gives way to cinematic passages that pull the reader beyond the word, through the lens, and into the visceral realities of the narrator.

Before long, the reader, too, is forced to reckon with the voices and their prescient transience. (I use the term "prescient transience," because: [a] they set the stage for the crisis to come and; [b] like urban life, people, places, and things come and go, reappear and vanish yet again.) Certain phrases and rhythms repeat themselves, giving the effect of a literary dementia that allows little room for objectivity. One begins to wonder if the voices are the narrator's—or the reader's.

As the end draws near, so too does all the narrator seeks and seeks to avoid. The demarcations of self and other, urban and rural, artist and inspiration, objectivity and immersion are gone. All falls down and creates a space for the death required to break through.

Voices is more than a book; it's the literary equivalent of multimedia sculpture—and like any work of art, is deserving of more than one reading to capture the many facets of its prism.