Character Flaws by Eben E. B. Bein
Fauxmoir Press, 2023
When my best friend and I learned to drive at 16, she and I would head from our suburban valley town 45 minutes to the coast to visit the Monterey Bay Aquarium together. We’d stand before the dark open sea exhibit and the jellyfish displays that cast a blue glow across our faces. The sea nettles, the comb jellies, the Lion’s Mane, and the moon jellies, each undulating and shimmering and seeming to move separate of the rest, the polyps floating like specks of dust in the water.
In the first poem in the collection Character Flaws, Eben E. B. Bein writes:
Tina asks without turning
Or even speaking if we’ll all
Still be friends a year from now
I have wondered that. I have asked that. I thought I knew the answer.
Bein’s first poem captures the vastness of the ocean and life, the way our relationships can shift around us without us realizing, and how we so easily drift from each other. But like the jellyfish polyps in the display, while we might diverge, we sometimes find our way back to each other, in new shapes and forms.
In “Half-Built House,” Bein weaves an imaginary home with a real one, both broken.
This is where the construction stopped,
where we lay down our tools
where we lay down our bodies
to cry and wonder
The collection uses emotional depth and humor to acknowledge that while our flaws may bind us to others, those flaws leave us worried about driving others away. Bein’s collection came together during the pandemic, a time of longing for human connection for many of us, and that comes through in these collected pieces that Bein has dubbed “misfits” in his email response to my questions about his process:
“Sitting in my apartment with collections I love helped me feel connected to the world, and so I knew I wanted to learn how book publishing works so I could be part of that web of connection in a different way. I started sorting them on [my friend’s] drafting table into piles based on theme/topic. While some of those piles are the full-length manuscripts that I’m currently working on, there was one small pile of misfits that seemed to be lamenting the same thing—my own proclivity to judge myself and others in romantic and sexual relationships.”
And so through these pieces that didn’t quite fit, Bein has captured a universal way we dream of our futures together, and the sadness when we are left in the unfinished remnants of those visions.
The other pieces in Bein’s collection explore longing, love and attraction—the kind that is unrequited, the kind that is so strong we turn on our heels and run from it, and the kind we are sure will never last.
Whether you are still in the throes of your youth or have settled into the middle of your life, Character Flaws will resonate with its deep heart and levity.
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Melissa Flores Anderson is a Latinx Californian whose creative work has been published in swamp pink, Chapter House, and HAD, among other spaces. She has a novelette (ELJ Editions) and a chapbook (JAKE) out now. She is a reader/editor for Roi Fainéant Press.