'The Brimstone Journals' by Ron Koertge (LS 5663)

Koertge, Ron. 2001. The Brimstone Journals. Somerville, MA: Candlewick Press.

ISBN: 978-0-7636-1742-4

Photo of book cover
by L. Propes

The Brimstone Journals is a verse novel by Ron Koertge set in the fictional suburban Branston High School, although the students refer to it as Brimstone, a sly observation of their feelings about high school in general.   It's almost more of a novella than an outright novel due to its brevity.  The book features ninety journal entries over 110 pages in the form of poems written by fifteen different students at Branston.    The students at Branston could appear anywhere at any high school: Boyd, neglected by an absent and alcoholic father; Lester, the frequently bullied fat kid; Carter, the son of wealthy surgeon and the new kid at Branston; Tran, the son of Vietnamese immigrants, pushed into pursuing a course of study he hates; Damon, the football star and stereotypical jock; Kelli, Damon's girlfriend, chafing under his rules; Sheila, a girl in love with her best friend Meredith and questioning her sexuality; Joseph, the son of fervent environmentalists; Jennifer, the evangelical Christian struggling to reconcile her faith with what she sees at school; Kitty, an anorexic; Allison, who has to put up with her stepfather's sexual advances toward her; Rob, Branston's resident ladies' man; Neesha, who at first glance is the stereotypical angry African-American girl; Dave, who is a dedicated gamer, despite his parents'  worries that it will turn him to violence; and Meredith, the girl who dates older men and has a reputation.  There are a lot of characters in such a short book.

The journal entries offer brief glimpses of the students' lives in and out of school over the course of a single year.  One could argue, though, with an average of six poems per narrator, whether or not the paucity of the journal entries can do more than just skim the surface of the students and the culture within Branston.  For the most part, The Brimstone Journals features several storylines at Branston.  The primary storyline that weaves its way through most of the others involves Boyd and his deepening involvement with Mike, a white supremacist.  Another storyline is Carter's struggle to fit in with students at Branston.  Dave's arguments with his parents that while he does play violent video games, he has absolutely no urges to actually commit crimes and his dreams to become a video game designer and developer.  There is also Tran's lonely journey through high school, weighed down by the expectations of his family, but who forges a connection with Carter through shared love of music. Kelli wants to end her relationship with Damon as he grows increasingly possessive.  The novella itself is so brief, that I fear I've given away the entire plot, such as it were.

Photo of text
by L. Propes

That being said, the surface-skimming quality of the novella is both a strength and a weakness.  Koertge's strategy of spreading the wealth, as it were, among so many students offers a wealth of issues students can discuss.  They span everything from trying to live up to parental expectations to sexual abuse by parental figures to the double-standard by which boys and girls are judged based on their sexual activity.  There is nothing in these poems that treads unfamiliar territory to the average high school student.  On the other hand though, with so many characters it's difficult to get to know any of them in depth.  It also serves to lessen the emotional investment for the reader.  For example, when we first meet Boyd, his father has been verbally abusing him, and then the next time we see Boyd, he's met Mike and is utterly entranced by Mike's racist rantings.  It often feels as if there is a huge jump from A to D and the readers are left trying to construct B and C with few or no details.  There are several characters whose presence is so fleeting that I found myself saying, "Who?" more than once as I read the novella.  In all honesty, Rob, Kitty, Jennifer, Sheila, and Joseph could be removed from the pages and the book's quality would not suffer.  I would even go so far as to call Rob, Jennifer, Kitty and Sheila non-entities as far as the plot is concerned, especially Kitty.  She's barely a blip on the radar, which is how things do work in the social structure of high schools, but she adds so little to the overall tone of the novella, that she might as well not be in it.  Then again, it could be a rather tortured way to symbolize her vanishing body due to her anorexia.  If that was Koertge's intention, it might pass over the heads of many readers.  At most, they provide background color for the rest of the poems.

All of the poems were written by Koertge.  The novella is a quick read and most of the free-verse poems are a quarter to a half page long.  The fluid structure of the free-verse reflects the inner voices of the teenagers who appear on the page and comes off as a natural structure of the characters' thoughts.  Neesha's poems have a rhythmic quality about them, which is not surprising, considering she is a student of the history of rap and hip-hop.  Koertge makes her poems come alive on the page and you can feel the rhythm as you say them.  Koertge also uses pauses built into the poems to create emphasis on certain lines.  Kelli ends her relationship with Damon and describes what happens when she comes home from watching a movie without Damon: "When I got home Mom said Damon / called / three times" (Koertge 2001, 35).  He adds a space between the last two lines to set the number of times Damon called apart from the other lines.  It adds a slight sense of tension, and provides an opportunity for the reader to question just what Kelli feels in that moment.  Is it dread? Alarm?  Panic?  Apprehension?  Is she waiting for the other shoe to drop?  Often the pauses in the poems resemble that moment where the narrator takes a sharp intake of breath and the emotion builds, albeit briefly, because the novella quickly moves on to the next poem.  The poems are an unflinching look at the students' lives and rarely descend into sentimentality.  The book is purported to be an inside look at the lives of fifteen high school students and the poems reflect that.  I do have to give Koertge a lot of credit.  He manages to make the fifteen narrators distinct from one another with a unique perspective and point of view.

The poems will appeal to some older middle grades (probably Grade 8 and some Grade 7 students) and to high school readers who will likely find themselves or someone they know on the pages of The Brimstone Journals.   Reluctant readers might like The Brimstone Journals.  It's intellectually demanding due to the topics that are brought up in its pages, but the poems are easily accessible and the free-verse structure might make students forget they're even reading poetry at all.  The poems skip  randomly from character to character, but it's not as confusing as it might seem.  The top of each page has the signature of the student who wrote the journal entry, as seen on the introduction page.  The poems are printed in a regular typeface, but I wonder how the overall effect would have changed if they had printed the poems in the penmanship of the writer.  It might have helped personalized the poems.

There are a few examples of figurative language in the poems, but by and large, Koertge uses ordinary language, and as a result the poems don't necessarily "feel" like poetry.  Lester and Tran's poems have the best examples of figurative language.  Lester employs metaphors as he compares his body to a "big bag of fries and Coke and pepperoni" (Koertge 2001, 3).  Lester also describes the football players coming down the hallway "like a tidal wave of muscle" (Koertge 2001, 36).  That single phrase evokes the image of a hallway filled with larger-than-life football players, rolling over everything in their path.  It's an effective image.  Tran's language overall is so picturesque that his poems are the most emotional of the fifteen narrators.  His status as an outsider gives him the opportunity to observe his classmates.  He describes them as "attractive, but still insatiable" ghosts (Koertge 2001, 37).  Tran refers to himself as "an anthology of [his father's] ghosts", burdened by the responsibility of doing what his parents want, rather than following his own dreams.  Tran's poetic voice even renders gossip as something striking rather than lurid.  He says, "I listen to what is traveling through wires, / dripping from overhead lighting, radiating / from computer screens, oozing from outlets / in walls" (Koertge 2001, 28).

The poems are not titled and are only distinguishable from one another by the heading that contains the name of the narrator at the top.  It has no table of contents or index.  This tends to make it slightly difficult to track down a specific poem and the reader ends up having to leaf through the entire book to find the exact moment they want to read or use.  It's a bit annoying.

I do want to take a moment to mention the cover.  It's chilling in its design, given the context of the novella.  The main plotline deals with a planned school shooting. It looks like a page ripped from a high school yearbook.  One young man's face is washed with red ink or watercolor paint, while the faces of the surrounding students have been scratched out with the point of scissors or a black pen.  The cover sets a provocative tone to start the novella.

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Spotlight On...

Lester

I'm about half sick to my stomach all
the time because I'm scared.

Those jocks come down the hall like
a tidal wave of muscle.  On a good day
they only knock me into the wall once.

The time Damon smashed a Twinkie
in my face I went to the office and
ratted him out.

I could see Mr. Newman look at his
calendar and think, The game's tomorrow 
night.

But he said, "I'll talk to him, Lester.  We'll
make sure this doesn't happen again."

Next time it was a Ding Dong instead
of a Twinkie.  Damon said if I opened
my big mouth, I was a goner.

(Koertge 2001, 36)

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Lester's poem about the constant bullying he experiences at the hands of Damon and the other football players offers an opportunity to discuss bullying, especially in the context of Anti-Bullying Week/Bullying Awareness Week.  I would have copies available for the students to read and read it aloud a few times.  Ideally, I would want the students to write and present short skits about what they would do if they saw Damon bully Lester.  Would they approach Damon or Lester?  What would they say?  This would also be a great chance to use social media, as Bullying Awareness Week in Canada has a Twitter presence and a hashtag: #BAW2015.  Students could use a school or teacher created Twitter account to tweet responses to Lester's poem with the BAW hashtag.

This is absolutely the kind of poem where a responsive Web 2.0 platform would come in handy for a teacher.  The students could create a class wiki or a blog that discusses bullying and methods they have found that works to curb or alleviate bullying in their schools or classrooms.  They could share their blog or wiki with another school and engage in a meaningful discussion with each other.

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Works Cited

Koertge, Ron. 2001. The Brimstone Journals. Somerville, MA: Candlewick Press.