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Public Poetry, Kevin Walzer's meditations on poetry, publishing, business, and other creative pursuits
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Book of the Day: Slim Margin by Alison Apotheker
There is serious intensity in the poems of Alison Apotheker's Slim Margin. Strongly crafted and emotionally complex, Apotheker's work grabs the reader by the heart and does not let go.
"How Madness Found My Mother" is a good example of the strengths of this collection:
How Madness Found My Mother
Suppose, careening this night
across the Mojave, bounding
through burroweed and creosote,
these were not mere tumbleweeds.
Say they have gone mad from wind.
They straddle barbed fences
to fall back unhurt and wheel
in endless drills of duck-and-
cover over the desert.
What if she had heard in time
their tremblings, at first as faint
as a dust devil through lace curtains
strained yellow from sunlight,
then louder, more persistent
in their approach, the sound now
a tornado of teacups and tennis shoes,
would she have run to her windows,
flung each high in a flash,
her arms lifted as if in praise
of each open palm and glistening finger,
thrown wide the screened porch door,
the back door, the door leading
to the white garage?
But she does not hear the commotion
and sleeps through their caterwauling,
their game of cutthroat leapfrog
that bears down on her panes
and presses against her doors,
so that come morning,
when she goes to pick up her newspaper,
the door knobs don’t turn
and the windows won’t open
and in the cellar where she hides,
she hears them:
Don’t call the fire department.
Don’t call the bulldozers.
Your house is cast in darkness.
Let your eyes adjust.
The image of the whirlwind giving way to silent darkness: this poem is haunting and unyielding.
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Book of the Day: A Memento Sent by the World by Marianna Hofer
In A Memento Sent by the World, Marianna Hofer's attention to the details of the world is that of a visual artist (she is that, as well as a poet): details are everything, revealing both the artist's care of the particular and the larger wholes they add up to.
"Blue Pears" is a good example:
Blue Pears
The ten thousand things
stand in the doorway
to a new world, solid
scarlet and green seckel
pear in hand, sunlight
ripe through a back
kitchen window.
Dropped from empty
second floor apartment
walkways, shadows spill
across your way down
narrow oil stained alleys,
disguise windchimes you
can hear but not locate,
sound that rolls over
the edges of fire escapes.
The new world revels
in a vibrancy that
crops up then fades
without second thought.
A back kitchen window
again. A just ripened
seckel pear in hand,
you bite hard, break
resilient skin, spill juice,
expose seeds as fossilized
teardrops embedded in
the white grainy flesh.
More pears, blue now
from the faded light,
sulk in the dark
bowl. You memorize
the color and feel
of ripe, reach for
the next pear all this
afternoon, no place
else to be.
"You memorize/the color and feel/of ripe." That is what Hofer's poems strive to do, and achieve.
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Book of the Day: The Empty House by Faith Shearin
I like the poems of Faith Shearin's The Empty House very much. Shearin's poems have an emotional warmth and deft music that make them a pleasure to read. Here is one example:
Each Apple
At thirty-nine, each apple reminds
me of some other. The memory lives
in objects: fallen from trees or baked
like pie. I kiss my daughter and
remember my own face kissed.
All Broadway music is from a play
I saw with my father when his
eyes were fine. Maybe this explains why
the very old don't leave their houses,
why they eat no more than a few bites?
Drunk, full really, on memory
there is little room for anything new.
Each word has been spoken by a
thousand voices, each face is another
face rearranged. Night grows
thin and sticky as a spider's web:
even blue moons are not so rare.
The domestic image of the apple is familiar, yet it is rendered with a careful attention, and sense of its larger import (exemplified by the numerous memories it evokes), that make it complelling.
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Wed, 19 Nov 2008
Book of the day: Canticle of Idols by Raina Leon
Canticle of Idols by Raina Leon is an intense read. Leon does not write spare, understated poems: her work smolders with a barely controlled intensity, whether its subject is spirituality, sexuality, or family history.
Consider "Serpent and chisel":
Serpent and chisel
Serpents wind around my hips.
No flames spark in my mouth.
I allow them free passage
through damp body, thinning hair.
My face is already stone.
You want me to fight,
bite hissing heads and lap the blood
like destruction's fiend.
Catholics forgive, learn to be meek.
Yemaya swims too much for my arms.
Writhing sins you spit at my toes,
beg me to stamp them out.
Don't you know?
Don't you know?
Sculptors chiseled my feet
on the Devil's neck.
This poem uses primal images, which in the hands of a lesser poet might be melodramatic, but Leon wields them with authority.
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Book of the Day: Players by Michael D. Riley
Michael D. Riley's poems in Players are dense and rich with communal history. Their images take on the qualities of archetypes, as in this poem:
Into the Bog
Into the old times. Quilting the hides,
eyeing paths just wide enough to scout through,
fear and death immediate salts to breath,
caves of the body to sleep inside.
Desire as clear as the sun: the trail
fat with game, her fingers and lips at once,
spring softening the hills, the gods' wild dance
in the carved rocks, sustaining without fail.
Because down the mountainside a yellow fog
blurs the cave mouth and its tongues of fire.
Stars wheel their knives above the bog
where the bodies cure and turn to leather.
Above slit throats their young features sag
with sleep, weary guarding life forever.
Reading the dark lines of this poem takes time; it is a poem to be savored as you unpack its meanings.
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Book of the Day: Container Gardening by Ellen Steinbaum
Ellen Steinbaum's Container Gardening is a book that is alive with the physical world: Steinbaum pays close attention to the world's immediacy, and her poems trace the interaction between human perception and the external world.
Here's an example:
standing at the shore
afterwards we will
look at it and say
this was when we still or
this was before
but then we will not be
at that same soft moment
grouped in pastel shirts
the children giddy with being
on the beach at nearly bedtime
digging their toes into the sand
wild to escape to the waves
get their clothes wet
looking back we may see
the messy instant of everyone
trying to be perfect or
we may see it
framed by then
glowing
that minute
when we did not know where
we would be looking back from
Nicely done.
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Fri, 24 Oct 2008I've created a new mailing list for folks to get updates on the books we publish. If you want to stay in touch and find out about the latest titles, as well as other press news, visit http://www.wordtechcommunications.com/mailinglist.html to sign up.
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Thu, 23 Oct 2008
Book of the Day: Our Parenthetical Ontology by Deborah Poe
Our Parenthetical Ontology by Deborah Poe is unusually wide-ranging in its subjects. What unifies the poems is Poe's scrutiny of what experience means in a larger sense, her examinination of experience in light of questions of being:
The Burning Question
of why the mid-day
tennis shoe sand shuffle
traipses beside the
florescent silk strewn cactus
flower well beyond its prickly
and why the red rock
arches its back
to bend returning to the ground
its erosioned gymnastic
balanced under sun beams
and why the unpeopled plateaus
chant back their green-eyed
I see you seeing me
and lichened to another
are infiltrated by elemental earth.
Ultimately, every poem in the book comes back to the same burning question(s): What? Why?
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Book of the Day: Killing the Buddha by Nancy Thompson
Whenever I read a book that engages Zen Buddhism, I find myself calmed, as the Zen sensibility calls up a sense of stillness. Against this experience, Nancy Thompson's Killing the Buddha is unusual: it invigorates as much as it invites rest. Thompson writes with a definite edge.
Consider "Curing Paralysis":
Curing Paralysis
Elusive and unreliable as it is, the wise man straightens out his restless, agitated mind, like a fletcher crafting an arrow. (33)
Tonight a woman says she is plagued.
Thoughts of women, children,
men she does not know batter her mind
like memories of stillborn babies,
car-struck dogs, lovers'
betrayals. She wails for those
who do not know she's wailing,
and suddenly I want to howl, too,
recollecting a self who cringed
from the hunger of gaunt children
on 34th Street,
who wanted to strip the world
of guns and bombs,
rescue battered cats.
The arousal of thoughts is sickness;
not continuing them, medicine;
tonight, I want this woman
to infect me.
This poem is indeed a howl, not a whisper, yet it retains the luminous awareness that the best Zen poetry cultivates. Nicely done.
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Book of the Day: Spare Parts: A Novella in Verse by Anne Harding Woodworth
The suite of voices that comprise Anne Harding Woodworth's Spare Parts: A Novella in Verse are vivid and propulsive, grabbing your attention right away. Consider chapter one, which introduces us to Lacey, one of the central figures of the story:
1 In which Lacey offers a setting, high and low, old world and new
When you come from the mountains or come from the hills,
even the hills of Tennessee, no flat moves you
except if you see it from a ridge or a pass
or an airplane you jump from and land so that you
walk where marsh once drenched earth and now cotton grows tame.
Over Levadia's plain in Greece--circling 'round
like that, you land, get dragged, walk back to the mountains.
The going up is easy though knee cartilage
is frayed like shoelaces, awning rope. It's the walk
down that's hard because your feet and ankles push up
into your shins into your knees into your heart
cavity, shoulders, neck, the wheeze of your throat, your
pituitary. Juices burn, they don't relent
for your pain, familiar pain of common descent.
That's Paul, not me. Oh, no. My knees are fine. Just fine.
The house next door is the color of dead leaves, oak
and tulip trees, clapboards like loose bark, roof slanting
both ways, shingled, sparkling with black and gray cinders
and copper flashing 'round the stone chimney that smoked
white on cold nights before Sybil died and husband
Gaddis was left free to try on her dresses, all
of her jackets, and look into the mirror with
a comfort at last, relief he'd not known before.
I know he loved her, he did, I'm so sure of that,
and once I saw him kiss the face in the mirror
tearful in the early days of widowership.
I find myself wanting to hear more. Reading the book, I do.
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Book of the Day: The Mackerel at St. Ives by Arthur Brown
I greatly enjoy the subtle, wry lyrics in Arthur Brown's The Mackerel at St.Ives. Brown is a careful formalist, but the strong structure of his poems undergirds a fluid surface that moves gracefully though varied emotional states.
His craft is on strong display in this poem:
Theresa
No child has left me dazed like you just did--
I mean for having grown into adulthood.
"There's no one home but me," you said. And I said,
"Things have changed." That's more than obvious.
We heard you born from just outside the door,
and seeing what sex you were, that all was well,
we ran for beer and brought St. Pauli Girl
into the room itself, and saw you off
within hours--your mother and father a family.
You say you had a summer guest from Spain.
Now you're headed off to Martha's Vineyard.
Tell your dad I'll call him in July.
Tell him I'd like to share a Guinness with him.
And tell your mom I had a dream of her--
we were climbing a snow-covered mountain.
Give our love to Anna, our goddaughter,
and Benjamin, the baby--is he walking?
Hanging up, I pick up crumbs from the floor--
my wife's downstairs, the children upstairs fighting.
It was your manner, remote and understanding,
your portrait-of-a-lady voice and presence,
that's given me this taste of obsolescence.
Rooted in the present, this poem evokes the past and glimpses the future, all while drawing a loving portrait of the young woman who is its subject. A strong achievement.
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Wed, 01 Oct 2008
Book of the Day: To the Archaeologist Who Finds Us by Gary Thompson
The poems in To the Archaeologist Who Finds Us by Gary Thompson have a sharply incsive quality. Thompson's lines are often short, and move with quick leaps and rapid turns from specific detail to general truth.
Here's one chracteristic example, "Before Christmas":
Before Christmas
I go down
in spirits, these difficult days
before Christmas, like sand
sliding through the neck
that separates bottom from top
of an egg-timer. Inevitable.
And inaccurate, I know.
Forgive the bourbon in me,
ancestral and bottle,
sliding from pompous
to silly, bottom to top,
and days that sink or float
with love or without.
Forgive the bottleneck
in my throat.
The image of the "Christmas spirits," with its dual meaning, is the sharp edge that this poem successfully navigates.
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Book of the Day: Sitting in the World by Richard Moore
Sitting in the World by Richard Moore is a collection of deceptively simple lyrics--sometimes somber, sometimes satirical, always human. One does not usually think of Moore in connection with Zen Buddhism, but there is little doubt that the book's emphasis on being in the here and now has connections to, or at least echoes of, a Zen sensibility.
Here's an example, "Burials":
Burials
The children grown
to rage, disaster,
having long known
they wouldn't last her,
declared my sweet,
my erstwhile lover:
Our life? Complete.
Finished now. Over.
Therefore we sever.
Such things, diminished,
far one, but never,
we have found, finished.
To the archives
that wrench and rend
of broken lives
there is no end.
Still, still they haunt us,
in every breath
breathe on us, taunt us,
dance on our death.
The deft meter and rhyme move quickly and surely to a larger awareness of life's mysteries.
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Sun, 21 Sep 2008If you've tried to visit this blog, or any of the related sites I host on this server (see the "home" link on the side of the blog page), you have undoubtedly noticed that the site's been down intermittently.
Put the blame on Hurricane Ike. Even though the storm made landfall in Texas, it retained a surprising amount of strength as it moved inland, northwards. My city, Cincinnati, was hit hard by winds. As a result, nearly a million households in the region lost power, some for several days.
Hurricane in Ohio? Yup.
Generous neighbors allowed my family to tap into their generator for a few hours each day, enough to cool off the food in our refrigerator, and also to power up my server long enough to answer e-mail, and get the dozen or so websites I host up for a while.
The worst, thankfully, is over, and the lights are back on. And we're back in business.
Sidenote: This situation--a power outage knocking out my Internet access--is the usual argument made against hosting your own websites on your own machine. Point taken. I'll never achieve the 99.9% uptime that commercial ISP's offer, and as a result, I have no desire to host anything but my company's sites. On the other hand, a hosting presence on the scale that my company uses would cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars a month. That's a lot of overhead, and the argument doesn't change even when the sites are down for a few days. I am going to be getting a generator, however.
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Wed, 10 Sep 2008
Book of the Day: Wrong by Laurie Blauner
There is so much right in Laurie Blauner's Wrong. Blauner is an exceptionally sure-footed poet; her lines move deftly from image to image, perception to perception, with brio. Consider this poem:
The Sudden Appearance of Blue
The house is too late. Everything that's worth
saying has already been said. Bye to white
and green and yellow. I'm sure of the evenings,
staining my exhausted wine blue, my limbs scatter,
tossing haphazardly, birds perpetually looking
for springtime. It's under there, somewhere. Follow
the sex. Sometimes there's someone else.
It's exciting but a dead end. And that's the point:
the rooms don't know what to do. Turning
themselves inside out like empty sleeves
doesn't help. There's the lamp that can't wait
forever, a desk that knows that none of it
matters. My mirror betrays the dumb animal
faces. What can I do? Watch the paint
peel? Darkness shapes what's missing.
I'm alone everywhere. Doors open to
the smell of fields whose life has been cut
short, the forgotten trees. My steely kitchen.
I miss touch the most, my velvet living room.
Floors hum with life, with a light that can't
stay still. Take it back I want to say. It's
not enough that the walls consider their options
or windows ponder the fate of the afternoon.
The house grows bald and blue, turning
another cheek. It's too little, too late.
Furniture waits, staring at me. The writing
on the wall doesn't mean anything. If only
corners could last forever or my lawn
could speak to birds. I'll go
wherever I'll be taken in.
Well done.
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Book of the Day: Counting Thunder by Robert Bernard Hass
Robert Bernard Hass' Counting Thunder is an energizing book: the world comes to live in unusually vivid terms. Hass pays careful attention to rhythm and the organization of his narratives, and the result vigorously depicts the natural world, embodying its physicality in strong, rhythmic lines.
Consider "Barn":Barn
I followed my breath each dawn to work the barn
My father's father built with his bare hands
And local oak he prayed would never burn.
Daily its rafters creaked beneath the sun;
Two narrow shafts of chaff dust left me blind
To follow my breath around and work the barn.
Inside the stench fermented: mildewed corn,
Old burlap sacks, caked lime, and dung would blend
To sting my nose with an ammonia burn.
The bull in heat, I'd hide behind combines,
Taller than dinosaurs, and hear the sounds
Of slapping flanks and cud breath in the barn.
And when the great rats scuttled in the grain,
I'd sight their eyes in crosshairs, shoot them down,
And toss them on the compost heap to burn.
They smoldered there until their bodies turned
And sweetened up our fallow, runted land.
I followed my breath each dawn to work the barn
And prayed each night the old oak would not burn.
Like the barn itself, this poem gives the sense of being built with bare hands, the lines carefully crafted and organized.
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Book of the Day: Measuring Cubits while the Thunder Claps by Gary J. Whitehead
Gary Whitehead's poems in Measuring Cubits while the Thunder Claps are calm and fluid, moving surely through a lyric scene or narrative to a powerful resolution.
Consider "A Cold House":
A Cold House
I wake now to a house as cold
as your side of our double bed.
Across the threshold, in the dark
hall, the thermostat sparks
a blue star, and downstairs
the boiler thumps like a heart
revived. Hot water shrieks
through pipes till registers tick
like clocks toward a time bearable
and close. I dress in wool
and fleece, keep hands in pockets.
On the couch, our dog looks out
the bay window, his breath
on the glass making a bouquet,
gray flowers which bloom and fade.
Moving through the scene of loss--the empty house--the poem ends with the iconic image of "gray flowers which bloom and fade," just as the love in the house did. Understated, yet powerful.
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Tue, 26 Aug 2008Looking at the sidebar of this blog, I see I've listed this purpose for it: "Kevin Walzer's meditations on poetry, publishing, business, and other creative pursuits."
True enough. However, if you read this blog with any regularity, or just scroll through the first page, you'll see that there's not a great amount of topical stuff, about poetry or anything else. Instead, what you see are mostly quick mini-reviews of various books of poetry.
Full dislosure: These are books that my press has published. I'm a voracious reader, but I'm not reviewing books at random: I'm offering my own readerly take on the books my press has chosen to publish. What did I like about these books that prompted my press to want to publish them?
I'm not aware of another poetry editor who writes about his or her editorial decisions in this fashion. When I started this blog, I thought I would write about books more or less randomly, but after writing a couple of short comments about the books my own press has published, I got hooked.
So please understand: these reviews are not objective. In fact, they are anything but. You won't see a negative review here. I'm writing about why I liked these books so much that I wanted my press to bring them to the world.
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We here at WordTech Communications do take pride in offering an alternative to the mainstream contest system in publishing poetry: one that relies on alternative distribution methods and an alternative business model. Since we rely on book sales, we don't have to charge reading fees to poets when we consider their work.
However, we won't be reading this year. We're taking a one-year break to get the titles we currently have under contract into production. We're fully committed through the end of 2010, and it seems a good time to take a breather.
We plan to begin reading again in the fall of 2009. Any interested poet can check our website at that time for guidelines.
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Are poets getting more and more fed up with poetry contests as the means to publish their books?
It would seem so. There's a lot of chatter this week on poetry blogs about various poetry contests.
I won't comment on the specifics of any one contest--the facts in these cases aren't always clear, or complete--but Reb Livingston's blog has an excellent take on the flaws of the poetry contest system. Her suggestions about what steps poets can take to improve the situations are well-taken. (Not so well taken are Bill Knott's comments calling for poets to "rise up in rebellion and demand their due" from commerical publishers, "willing to risk arrest martyrdom in the name of upheaval and disturbance...")
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Tue, 05 Aug 2008
Book of the Day: Another Rude Awakening by Dori Appel
Another Rude Awakening by Dori Appel is a book of striking lyrics that, as the book's title suggests, aim to shock the reader into new awareness. The poems do so not through gratuitous imagery or subjects but through subtle or sharp turns of perception.
Consider "Alter Ego":
Alter Ego
She walks where I walk,
this nun with her great
bird headdress,
white wings fluttering,
black robes whispering at my back.
Skimming the wintry pavement,
she plants her tranquil step
where mine has been,
a ghostly echo closing in.
Hurrying, I feel the cold air shift
as her calm contralto stirs it,
her voice the same
as mine if I could sing.
The sense of identification with the ghostly image of the nun is strong here, and the image is evocative, unsettling. It gives the reader much to ponder.
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Book of the Day: These Things I Will Take with Me by Carmen Germain
Carmen Germain's These Things I Will Take with Me is a collection of tautly-rendered lyrics. Her careful attention to the nuances of image and sound create a powerful experience for the reader:
Writing a Sympathy Card
to My Cousin's Wife
Deer season and the first snow
of Thanksgiving. My cousin,
handsome and fifteen,
his rifle pointing down the field.
And I am waiting for him to do
something, shoot or lower
the barrel and turn around,
but he stands there
as though he sees
into a mystery I can't know,
girl cousin and young, a pest
who follows the boys on their
hunts, keeping her distance.
He doesn't shoot. He doesn't
turn home either, and I watch
him bound into blue pine shadows,
winter light wavering everywhere.
I know the blood of deer, color
of my father's wool, my brothers',
my uncles'. November sky at dusk.
I wait. Wind cracks the house,
and my mother scours a turkey,
which is desolate, like a naked
baby you wash in the sink.
And all that week a deer cures
in the white pine, tied by rope.
Our leaping dogs nip the delicate
and brittle feet that hang knocking
against the winter bark. I bend
the foot joint, feel motion fleeing.
Dense with sound and rhythm, this poem encapsulates many of Germain's strengths.
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Book of the Day: New England Primer by Bruce Guernsey
What I admire most about New England Primer by Bruce Guernsey is the hard, sure sculpture of his lines. Guernsey has a gift for the resonant, finely-rendered scene that enters the reader's memory indelibly, grasping both physical truth and more evanescent themes as well.
Let's look at "Ice Storm":
Ice Storm
To go to bed one April night,
a halo around the moon,
to sleep for hours it seems,
so soundly
you never heard the sleet--
to waken so suddenly old,
all that green gone white,
the orchard creaking,
its branches brittle as ribs--
to squint at the light with milky eyes,
the great-grandchildren gathered near,
all staring, all frightened--
to point towards the window,
someone wetting your lips--
to try to tell them
This poem goes silent when the poet considers his effort "to try to tell them"--it is, of course, impossible, and not even the right thing to try. These poems tell very little, but show and embody a great deal.
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Book of the Day: Food for the Journey by Barry Spacks
Barry Spacks' poems in Food for the Journey are calm, humorous and contemplative, offering plenty of spiritual and intellectual sustenance for the reader who accompanies him.
Consider "Fame":
Fame
Wearing my soft black Australian hat
I walk my friends' dog down Panchita Street.
I've been house-sitting, dog-walking, reading all week
Richard Brautigan, who wrote that the beauty
is all in the saying, who would not tie
the bird of lunacy by a short string
to his toe, but rather would let her fly
in long loopy moves like a book's page-turning,
all in the name and the acting-out
of freedom - who shot off his head absolutely,
done in, they say, by the Bitch-Fame-Goddess,
broken on her gerbil treadwheel,
depressed, uncheered, remaining a time
unidentified, so de-headed there
and vodka-drowned and Not, in Bolinas,
California - talk about freedom!
I think he would have liked my hat
and surely my friends' dog Ida, black-and-white
border collie with yearning eyes
who'd herd anything to safety, sheep
or striver, doing her dog-work. "Fame
is the spur," blind Milton wrote, but added
little of use in Bolinas.
This wry, wise poem brings a smile to my face.
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Mon, 07 Jul 2008
Book of the Day: To Curve by Michael Daley
What I like best about the poems in To Curve by Michael Daley is the dreamy, yet precise, quality of their narrative: Daley is striving not for flat realism but the kind of heightened realism that constitutes memory. The scenes shimmer, with full awareness of their import.
This poem is a good example:
My Sister Is A Flight Of Birds
I'm standing on ice, a flight of geese
fleeing the moon, skimming the roof,
dampens the air. Seven quiet birds.
I have been saying their names so long
and now I can't remember
what their sudden rising means.
They call on the chill air
and let me be. When I slept, I hoped
never to wake and write these poems.
I'm not the man for this.
I wanted fire whispering over pages,
glowing in cloud. Instead,
I have spent my life as a man ice-fishing.
My line jigs down a hole
and sometimes in winter dawn
I draw up one freezing fish, and I'm surprised
holding it out, my glasses fogged like Dad's
under the small brim of his hat
on mornings he tightened our skates.
Can you remember anything from childhood?
I only know how ordinary we were,
sliding on the snow.
All night I kept these words beside my head,
white faces of skaters, a few haunted birds.
The image of "white faces of skaters, a few haunted birds"--that haunts the reader as well.
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Book of the Day: Threat of Pleasure by Philip Memmer
Philip Memmer's poems are a form of thin ice: they seem safe to tread, but before too long the unwary reader will plunge through to the cold and darkness below, which in the case of Memmer is an enlarged awareness of the darker, hidden meanings of experience. Threat of Pleasure is both an elegant exploration of common life and the dangers that lurk beneath.
This poem is characteristic of Memmer's technique:
Parking Lot
Beneath the lights,
paramedics
tatter a sheet
of unmarked snow--
the shape in slush
the body leaves
tells how long help
took to arrive.
Already now
it fills with snow,
fading to gray,
then even white.
Even at night
the white hurts eyes
beneath the lights
of strip mall lots,
and nights are long--
the kids have hours
to find this snow,
unmarked, lit-up,
and waiting, still,
to be re-scarred
by sports cars named
for birds of prey.
Memmer's work is striking and unsettling.
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Book of the Day: Liquid Like This by Leslie Anne Mcilroy
Leslie Anne Mcilroy's poems are always intense, and not easy to read. I don't know of a poet as skilled at distilling fine music from the raw emotions of love, loss, and pain. Liquid Like This is a relentless, breathtaking collection.
Consider this poem:
Again
To start with the smack of your hand
would be foolish. The start is in the preparation,
the sleek micro-fiber skirt over tight skin,
the thin-stretch blouse that scrapes the nipples,
hair up, neck long inside the collar of leather
and chrome you tell me to wear to dinner,
where I sit panty-less on a cool black chair
anticipating the next penetration
through an opening of your choice.
You tell me when to smoke
and light my cigarette, feeding me
one bite at a time--each smaller
than the last--richer. You tell me
to sit still and spread my legs, moist
and open, making room for your fingers
beneath the table. You say you will
whip me tonight and I am eager
for the burn, the bending over, exposed,
your mark on my body. Each touch--
lick and lash--fueling this graceless
need for surrender, the giving up
like a dark, hot storm when all the lights
are out and anything can happen.
All I can say is, wow.
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Book of the Day: Glass Garden by Ken Pobo
I consider it high praise to call Ken Pobo's poems well-crafted. In Glass Garden, Pobo pays careful attention to the construction of his poems, and the result is work of crisp rhythm and sharp images: analogous to the glass sculpture that he often writes about.
Let's take a look at one of Pobo's stronger poems:
Cobalt Blue Vase
As I peruse creased copies
of Life, a cobalt blue vase grows
hands, taps me. I take him
off a shelf he gladly leaves--
no more waiting
behind inferior glass tumblers,
awful melmac cups. Home at last,
I carry him across the threshold,
dash out into the garden,
pick two Blue Girl roses,
six Pouffe bellflowers, and
an uppity penstamon, pour water,
stick in stems. How handsome
he looks in the sun. That was
eight years ago, and now
we're the neighborhood's
happiest couple--my glass vase
shines as I do when I hear
his blue heart beat,
see his open blue mouth.
These lines are as smooth and polished as the vase they depict.
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Tue, 10 Jun 2008
Book of the Day: Flats and Riots by Michelle Stoner
The poems of Michelle Stoner's Flats and Riots are highly charged, even erotic, in their close attention to physical things.
Consider "Like Me":
Like Me
You're like me: amazed
when I don't hate
science
fiction,
amazed by physics
and her chemical brain;
like me in small tightening skin,
flat some days,
ethereal depths and riots
others
sun turns me
and the name of adventure
exotic messages sent
along untapped wires
like me.
Moving effortlessly between the abstract ("physics/and her chemical brain") and the physical ("like me in small tightening skin"), this poem draws unexpected connections. Stoner, with great economy, makes great leaps.
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Book of the Day: How to Make a Mummy by Mike Smith
In reading How to Make a Mummy by Mike Smith, I often found myself chuckling or even laughing out loud. Smith guides us on a comic romp through history and contemporary culture, with a sharp eye for absurdity.
Consider this poem:
Tips for a Traveler in the Land of Giants
Not daylight, but a single bulb
hanging above, its brightness
a finger in the window frame's
smallest crevice...
You wake there to singing, lovers
bathing in a tub so large you squint
to see its far side. Start to step,
and everything
is soaked and slippery. Remember,
size counts, and you've yet to learn
what hazards even the smallest room
can hold. So when
they get to their feet, avert your eyes,
or thinking your wildest fantasy's
within your reach, and blinded by light
reflecting off their skin,
you'll tumble right over the sill.
(Once alone, vault the sink
with a toothbrush to reach the soap dish
and get a drink.)
Do not explore. That glistening razor,
sloppily perched, is always a danger,
and their falling towels may seem
a pleasant way
to go, but you can't think like that.
In fact, better not think
at all; it will only lengthen
the loneliness.
Slink, instead, between the slats of the vent
behind the sphinx-toilet. The trip
is hours long, but you're safe there.
The weather's temperate,
and they don't have pets. So get some sleep,
and in order not to feel the passing
pace of every fugitive
moment, tell yourself
that though morning is miles above you
where you are, it is happening
for someone,
somewhere.
This poem looks at a familiar landscape--the bathroom--with a strikingly fresh perspective. Seeing old things in a new way is the heart of Smith's distinctive vision.
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Book of the Day: Theban Traffic by Walter Bargen
Walter Bargen's Theban Traffic is an adventurous book, retelling ancient myth in a contemporary narrative context in the mode of prose poems. I found the poems brisk and entertaining.
Here's a sample of Bargen's technique at work:
New Waves on Old Water
Stella travels two thousand miles to sweep up the dust of another relative. Whole mountain ranges pass below her quicker than dreams. She perches on the edge of a continent.
Because they cannot see each other, they cannot exchange diseases though the distant unease is worse. Though they cannot share a bottle of wine their separate glasses overflow with a blush of light. There is a smeared stain in the air like a burning city. Over the phone, he hears her say that's the sun setting over the Pacific.
The trees drop all their leaves. Each leaf falls into its own winter. They heap up words so the fire will thaw whatever has frozen. They throw children in and see how brightly they burn: one in Mexico, one repeatedly breaking his collar bone like a twig of kindling. Another crosses borders, not to flee old wars, but to escape into the skirmishes of marriage.
In a house facing west, Stella sits through the evening. The relentless line of horizon breaks through her. Waves claw the beach, dragging back the half-alive. Slicking the sand, the tide arrives like a rash. Plumes of water crown the tops of rocks. She feels a salty spray blow across her face. Marooned in the forgotten middle of a continent, Jake strolls uneasily looking around at what they've forged of old seas.
Never dull, always striking, Theban Traffic bustles and hums in its narrative flow.
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Mon, 19 May 2008
Book of the Day: The One Remaining Star by Susanne Dubroff
Susanne Dubroff's poems in The One Remaining Star burn. They are incisive and unsettling. Consider this poem:
County Auction
You would not think
that among all these
rainsoaked to townspeople
and the worn down
possessions, placid, valueless,
wedding pictures would be auctioned off,
bid on for their frames.
But the face of the bespectacled,
Terrified, nineteen twenties bride
might have been the face that foresaw
They would come,
Rainsoaked, and stay all night
'til she was sold.
The tone is sinister, the implications powerful. Dubroff is a compelling poet.
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Book of the Day: John Henry's Partner Speaks by David Salner
John Henry's Partner Speaks by David Salner is a compelling volume. Salner closely examines the experiences of working people, and the result is consistently illuminating.
Consider "The New World," which recalls the life of his immigrant grandmother:
The New World
I have been imagining how my grandmother
would have left Hungary, with only a sweater
to cover her bones, squinting at the sun
in the haze of the ocean, as her new husband
plays something like a guitar, but smaller.
She joins him in a chorus about a horse
who responds to the touch of a Gypsy trainer
but not the whip of the Hungarian master.
These newlyweds left in a hurry, carrying only
the little guitar and the old gray sweater.
The wind whips over the great steel decks
as she tells a joke about the subtle difference
between luck and fortune. They squint at a spot
suspended over the ocean. Even I see it--
that opal haze, brilliant with vagueness.
The "great steel decks," looking out over the empty ocean, are an evocative image of seeking a new life. Salner is quite skilled with these kinds of subtle, resonant images, and they enhance the narrative arc of his short and long poems.
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Book of the Day: Fallout by Frederick Feirstein
It is hard to imagine Frederick Feirstein's poems outside the landscape of New York City, where so many of his lyrics and dramatic monologues are set. His newest book, Fallout, powerfully considers the scarring of that landscape after 9/11.
Here's a poem that exemplifies the strengths of Fallout:
To My Younger Self
The past is like a library after dark
Where we sit on the steps trading stories
With characters we imagined ourselves to be.
Neighbors in clothing from our childhood stroll by,
Unmolested, nodding at us, benevolently.
One with your father's face tips his fedora.
You lower your face in shame. I look back.
Someone is sitting at a long table,
Reading in the moonlight. I must look startled.
He holds a forefinger to his lips,
As if it is a candle for the dead.
You tap me on the shoulder and I turn back.
The street is dangerously empty,
Except for the newsstand lit yellow
Where your mother in a blue nightgown
Showing beneath her coat buys The Times,
A pack of Kools and, eyeing us, lights one.
You race to her, turn a corner. Goodbye.
I'm frightened as if I'm a foreigner
In a city under siege. Yet I know
It is still mid-century. Underground
Are only subways carrying boisterous
Party-goers or somber family men
Working the night shift or harmless bookies
Respectful of the No Smoking signs.
I walk to where the newsstand, shut,
Advertises brand names I'd forgotten.
I shove my hands in my pockets and whistle
A song we danced to when we were young.
I walk on for blocks, until I smell
Smoke from the burning borough of the Bronx.
"A city under siege": this is the feeling that these strong formal and narrative poems capture. The fallout is considerable indeed.
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Book of the Day: Pointing at the Moon by Bill Wunder
Bill Wunder's Pointing at the Moon is a haunting series of narratives and lyrics about the Vietnam War. Wunder has the unusual achievement of finding the larger spiritual import of the scenes that he narrates: as a result, the Vietnam of his poems seems different than other poetic work about that war and landscape.
Here's one example:
Mama-san
Old woman squats at barracks end,
boils cabbage, fish heads and rice,
jabbers over a dented, black steel pot
left behind by the retreating French.
Every day the same smile,
rotted teeth, red from betel-nut.
The same stained black, silk pajamas
and pointy, sun-bleached hat.
She never learns our names. We think
it's the language, but she has seen too many,
knows we will all leave
one way or another.
The figure of Mama-san is one of permanence: the American soldiers are evanescence. Wunder draws this contrast quite effectively, and the result is a powerful poem.
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Book of the Day: A Temple Looming by Lenard D. Moore
Lenard Moore's A Temple Looming is a series of deftly-etched portraits in miniature. Moore, well-known as a haiku poet, writes these free verse lyrics with a light, spare touch, but every detail burns:
The Soldier
The photograph's subject now aged
through time's ripening; decades later
the background gray,
a dream.
Splendid in uniform,
the barrel-straight stare
of his pure black face
shines like a bullet.
Imagine he'd not returned
from the Great War,
leaving a void in his family,
and in this picture.
These poems fill that imaginary void nicely.
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Thu, 01 May 2008
Book of the Day: Easy Marks by Gail White
Here's the most appropriate comment I can make about Easy Marks by Gail White:
Gail White
has bite.
Her poems,
no tomes,
can snap
or slap.
How daft!
I laugh,
but see
just me
entwined
in her lines:
For My Niece as She Enters Her Teens
One thing the Puritans were right about:
Children are savages. They have no mind
or morals, and their art-work doesn't count.
But now, thank God, you leave all that behind
and count as almost human--golden ore
that only wants a little smoothing down.
So now, the news flash you've been waiting for:
Your aunt and uncle didn't come to town
on a load of melons. We discovered sex
without your help; we drove our elders wild
with music, alcohol, and politics,
and wore our hair as long as yours, my child.
So don't suppose you understand pop culture
when you don't even know who Pogo was.
The Beatles aren't yet ready for the mulcher.
I still know several ways to get a buzz,
the Buddhist creed, and how to write free verse.
Your generation, love, could do much worse.
Cold. Nice
as ice.
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Mon, 21 Apr 2008
Book of the Day: The Last Eclipsed Moon by Linda Casebeer
I greatly enjoyed The Last Eclipsed Moon by Linda Casebeer. It is a strong book about the connections between art and the world, about how vision and seeing.
Casebeer's poems are strongest in their images and the surprise they can lead to, as "Matisse Picasso" shows:
Matisse Picasso
Fountains silent in a year
too far gone for the rushing
water of summer pools,
the Paris sky heavy
with drizzle and mist
on our expectant faces.
We wait in a queue
on the steps of the palace
with the others to find
what passed between them.
To find myth revealed
in the line of a rosy nude,
in blue on blue. How easy
to love the graceful curve
of hip or breast. To love
the way works are hung
in pairs, patterns that repeat.
The way they give up
their essence until slats
of shutters become
the metal strings of a guitar.
Here, art transforms, and is transformed in turn, bringing the reader along.
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Book of the Day: Country Music by Allen Hoey
Allen Hoey's Country Music contains an unusual amount of life, and I don't mean this as faint praise. Ranging between short lyrics and long, loping narratives, Hoey brings in a multitude of voices and experiences, as well as brief evocations of the natural world.
The title poem gives on instance of the capaciousness of Hoey's work:
Country Music
Mothers and dogs die, and fathers too; in the fullness of time
they all do. Wives and husbands, boyfriends, girlfriends, and lovers
run away or break your heart. Someday, someone will smash
your car, your truck, whether it's some dumb-ass in an SUV
or only a deer whose trajectory through life has the misfortune
of intersecting yours a few feet this side of the shoulder--
crumpled fender, bent frame, or just a broken headlight, your baby
ain't the same, and, even apart from the increase you know
your premium will reflect the next time the bill comes due,
it hurts. At some point in your life, unless you're someone
I'd never want to sit next to and sip a beer, you've felt
a little sad and maybe lonely when you've heard a train whistle
keening through the trees on a dark October night. At three o'clock
the wind batters rain against the bedroom window, debris
from the porch roof clatters on the pane, and you lie awake
thinking about how years ago you might have done something
different than the way you did it and rehearsing the many ways
your life might've changed. But would you give up the feeling
you get listening to the slow breath beside you, reassuring,
keeping you in bed when part of you wants to get up, get
the bottle and sit at the kitchen table with only a smudge of light
coming in from the one lamp you've switched on in the living room,
listening to that wind, those twigs and branches racketing
against the glass and clapboard--would you, could you
be any happier, really? A piece of pie, maybe, some stale
remnants of a birthday cake. Instead, you lie in bed, hear
the faint strains of a fiddle, the twang of a Telecaster,
and in the wind the wailing sound of a pedal steel guitar,
all of this put to music--this life you've maybe lived.
Tinged with regret, this poem is nonetheless a celebration of wisdom hard won. Well done.
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Book of the Day: Rose Fever by Barbara Daniels
What I admire in Barbara Daniels' Rose Fever is the way she searches out feeling in even the most everyday objects. She writes in a quiet, unadorned style, but her poems have a sly movement from specicity to larger truth.
"What Saves You" is a good example of Daniels' technique:
What Saves You
A bowl of dark oil
stands on your table.
You dip your fingers into it,
cover your whole hand.
You call your feeling sadness.
It is despair. People say
you choose your sorrow,
that truck parked on your chest.
You don't have the strength
to sweep through a store,
buy a stark new lampshade.
huge ovals of purple soap,
white sheets that would bloom
in moonlight. All the utensils
of the heart. You don't paint
a blue sun on your forehead.
Remember prayer?
You squeezed each finger,
gently, eyes tight shut.
It was only an attitude.
But surely it saved you,
didn't it? Didn't it teach you
strangeness? The florid colors
behind closed eyes?
Snow clots the grass outside
your window. If you look
directly into it, can't you
remember the idea of light?
Moving from "a bowl of dark oil" to "the idea of light"--it's a big leap, but Daniels' technique is equal to the task.
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Book of the Day: Dust and Bread by Stephen Haven
Dust and Bread by Stephen Haven is a quiet book, balancing a tone of lyric introspection with an unusually wide range of subjects, including China, spirtual concerns, and family history.
Let's look at "Willow":
Willow
All China a green-gold row of them.
When you walk through--
delicate, skirted, light-limbed
and yellow, swishing their loveliness
in the wind--they brush
the whole of you.
The Han are awfully dark
to love such hair: one single tree
the parasol of thousands
of years of poetry.
It is essentially
a pastoral tradition, a light
gesture in a concrete sea--
this park, these willows,
these bamboo growing near,
as if forever curtained
beneath these trees
Li Bai still sprung
pure passion from a flush of wine.
And if you listen
you can almost hear him:
bamboo, bamboo, the green shoots
of earth, heaven when they brush
these yellow skirts!
Looking both inward and outward, Dust and Bread is a book of subtle power.
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Book of the Day: Telling Time by the Shadows by J.M. FitzGerald
John FitzGerald's Telling Time by the Shadows is an unusually frank confrontation with God. FitzGerald's poems challenge the emptiness of the universe, questioning how we can intuit God's presence in the shadows:
The Misunderstood
As for the talking,
if I wanted something said,
it would be here.
These lines exist as they do for the falling,
for the unrevealed hurt,
for God to cry and angels fear
at my corruption,
at my shaking,
at my curse.
I need time to get away,
but present demons love me worse,
and figure ways to pose as muses.
They point to where my secrets wither.
They bruise the heights and stir the lows
with longing songs that ever crave to scream:
Let me come back!
No voice is greater than this.
What happened to the blasted silence?
No one should believe I'm real.
I disclaim myself for persona,
or I'd be bawling.
The poem is over,
I used to feel.
But now who knows?
The sense here is one of longing, of agony, even a scream, and of uncertainty. FitzGerald's exploration of these feelings is powerful.
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Book of the Day: Organs and Blood by Jean Hollander
Jean Hollander's Organs and Blood is a graceful, dignified lyric collection that explores the various intersections of human and natural experience: the body, history, growth and death. Hollander writes with a subtle and refined music that gradually brings her sharply-etched images into view.
"Despair" is one example of her technique:
Whatever the world really looks like--
is the tender green really grey --
we have eyes to think it beautiful.
The red-breasted bird feeding
its drab young with its own hunger
sees them in its own image
the fireflies dying as they light my bedroom
are dazzling in their promise,
the cat, its tongue rough in the confusion
of love and usage, sits at my hand
waiting for love's hand-out,
and on a cool night, this valley
this clover-covered lawn is paradise
though in your despair you plotted
to crawl out a window to death
but your very darkness kept you
from moving, for in our despair
we are helpless, the blind dog follows
its broken trail, the little frogs leap
into chlorinated water, they cannot help it,
though I fish them out over and over
the guileless moths wasting themselves
against the lights that save us:
cooking fires and lighthouses,
the simple flame of a candle--
ceremony and knowledge--
a radiance of night.
Emotion comes alive in these stately lines.
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Book of the Day: Cloud Journal by David Rigsbee
We don't publish a lot of book-length poetic sequences: they are difficult to write successfully. Often in reading them, we find strong poems mixed with weaker poems, or a wandering focus. That's why David Rigsbee's Cloud Journal is such a nice collection.
Two long sonnet sequences comprise the book, and they are as different as can be. The first, "Sonnets to Hamlet," is a compelling narrative about the tragedy of a fire in the Imperial Foods chicken processing plant in Hamlet, North Carolina that killed twenty-five people. The second, "Cloud Journal" is an extended lyric exploration of place and perception. Rigsbee writes a quiet, fluid poem that allows his subject matter to radiate through.
Here's an example of Rigsbee's work, from "Sonnets to Hamlet":
Dragonfly September, birdsong is boilerplate.
The stir of heat, like a clothesline’s wave
keeps horizons indistinct: you suffocate.
An indigenous butterfly leaves the grave
to flit in children’s connect-the-dots down
cemetery lanes to haloed fields.
Time that is everything lies in the unseen;
a flick of its toad’s tongue yields
only one more spire-skewered prize.
Nearby the last cougar parts the weeds
leveling real estate with the same enterprise
that measures its life-dream in overloads,
where predator’s eye and victim’s throat
hold silence in place as you would a coat.
In its quiet detail, this poem sets the stage well for the horrific story it will later tell.
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Mon, 14 Apr 2008
Changes at Amazon
Amazon is currently the largest online retailer for books, and we have made Amazon the major component of our strategy for selling individual copies of our books online: every book we publish has a link to Amazon.
Until now.
Amazon has recently made some distressing moves against print-on-demand (POD) publishers, which is the kind of printing my organization uses. Here's a brief summary:
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In 2005, Amazon purchased a print-on-demand printer/publisher, Booksurge. Booksurge is a competitor to the largest POD printer, Lightning Source (whom we use to print our books).
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Over the past few weeks, Amazon has been contacting some print-on-demand publishers and demanding that they begin using Booksurge for POD books sold through Amazon.
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If the publisher does not sign up with Booksurge, Amazon has threatened to remove that publisher's books from direct sale on Amazon. The books would still be listed on Amazon, but could only be purchased from third-party booksellers who have listings in Amazon's Marketplace network.
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Amazon has justified this move on the basis of improved customer service and faster shipping of titles.
We're concerned with this development. Based on these facts, here is how we will be responding to the situation:
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We have used Booksurge in the past, but were not happy with the quality of their printed products or their customer service. That is why we switched to Lightning Source. We plan to stay with Lightning Source and have no plans to add Booksurge as a printer. We do not want to compromise on the quality of the printed books we sell.
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Our books will continue to be available through Amazon, either for direct sale or from third-parties (if they enforce their ultimatum about using Booksurge or else).
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We have posted additional sales links on our websites for individuals to order the books we sell--specifically, to Barnes and Noble and Powells.
We think it's important to offer our readers multiple outlets to purchase our titles, so that the decisions of a single vendor don't affect customer choice.
For more information on Amazon's actions, this site offers a useful overview of information and the industry's response.
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Tue, 18 Mar 2008
Book of the Day: Smoke and Strong Whiskey by Robin Chapman
The poems in Robin Chapman's Smoke and Strong Whiskey are inward in their focus; whether narrative or lyrics about landscapes, they prompt a meditative attention from the reader.
"Shadows" is characteristic of the interiority of these poems:
Shadows
And who is it, standing
In the shadows, waiting these weeks
To speak to me,
And each time she motioned
I turned away?
For I had sharpened a knife
And cut my heart free
Of the man we loved
Who could not be in our life--
Mumbled into the phone Goodbye
And now I feared
That she stood with a knife
In her own childlike hand
Meant for the wild grief
Closing her throat.
I was afraid
I’d done her an injury
I could not mend--left her alone,
Dying of hunger and need.
Or was that me?
And the woman in the dark,
The one whose anger
Had sharpened the blade?
And there’s more to say than this,
For I dreamed I walked,
A woman grown, down a lonely path
And came upon
Two dark and curly-headed girls--
One sad, one sullen--
And held out to each my arms.
Went on with toddlers
Slung on each hip.
Dark, dreamlike, "Shadows" is haunting in its quiet intensity.
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Book of the Day: Pilgrimage to a Gingko Tree by Edward Dougherty
Edward Dougherty's Pilgrimage to a Gingko Tree is a quiet, graceful collection of lyrics and narratives about the author's time in Japan. Reflecting the understated aesthetic so prevalent in Asian poetry, Dougherty's poems are mostly small exursions into revelation.
This poem is characteristic:
Origami
Folded by an old woman, silver bird
what do you know? Your paper feathers
are slippery. You give the light back.
At the flash she dropped like a rag.
A single day, a single bird: the day
that repeats itself with each crease.
The hours stretch out like crows' wings.
Samuel said he wanted to come here
to help people forget the past. My eyes burn
with the day's unrelenting length.
My life is brief and my sight short.
No wonder she keeps turning paper
in her creased but unburned hand.
While each poem might work on a modest scale, cululatively Dougherty's work expands the reader's awareness of human connection, history, and the world.
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Mon, 03 Mar 2008
Book of the Day: Sort of Gone by Sarah Freligh
Sarah Freligh's Sort of Gone is a dynamic narrative about men pursuing their dreams of playing professional baseball. Using varying techniques and voices, Freligh presents a rich portrait of these players' hardscrabble lives.
A good example is "The Wages of Sin in Western New York":
The Wages of Sin in Western New York
Fourth of July a tornado crashes
parties, backyard picnics, tosses ten
houses a dozen miles north, plants them
in a farmer's field. A warning
God's running out of patience,
says the parish priest, prompting
a parade of people to drive out after mass
to witness just what He has wrought.
Al finds a pair of sneakers that exactly
fit his feet, a catcher's mitt, nearly new,
a birthday card signed Marge and Greg,
a baby doll without its head. Wonders
what Marge did, or Greg, to piss off God,
make Him stir the air with His index finger,
twist the wind so it blew their lives
to kingdom come. What could He
do now to Al, his family, snug in their Chevy,
a blue bead in the rosary of cars strung
bumper to bumper in both directions,
do to them when they bend
to say grace over Sunday dinner?
Suppose there's a heavenly blackboard
somewhere bearing their names, a blizzard
of chalk marks tallied by angels
waiting to give the high sign to Him
that they've run out of chances, time
for a natural disaster to show who's boss.
Afterward would some small boy sift
through the rubble, think about
the wages of sin? Or would he test
the leather of a catcher's mitt, think
finder's keepers, loser's weepers?
No romantic illusions here, the quest of these players still has its own kind of grace.
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Fri, 22 Feb 2008
Book of the Day: Second Opinion by Leatha Kendrick
Beneath the colloquial surface of Leatha Kendrick's Second Opinion is a life-and-death struggle: a battle against cancer. The quiet tone of Kendrick's poems reflects a determination to find what is worth living for, to find brightness in even the darkest days: the underlying gravity makes the poems' appreciation of the daily rhythms of life that much more poignant.
Consider this poem:
Christmas, Adolescence, Yin and Yang
My first love called them Skeeter and Bite.
Equal, then, if small. Skeeter got most
of his attention. Now that right
breast's shadowed, a dark harbor
to what will not differentiate, but does
its incessant adolescent dance. Light
and unseen shadow. Eye of light in darkness,
eye of darkness in light--two nipples
staring from one divided chest. They'll lift
one out, the eye sewn shut by mastectomy.
At this festive time of year, God's breast
sees all, bears all. His eyes never
shut. Mary suckled Jesus, and
in some theologies, the milk
of human kindness flows
from His chest. At any rate,
that yearning to reach down and lift
someone to the heart does not depend
on breasts (I'm grateful to the man
who told me this, his eyes dark with grief.)
And yet, I lie abed touching the soft weight
splayed from breastbone to underarm and wonder
how we'd treat these dugs, these tits, if God Herself
floated forever and ever Amen in Heaven above
with lovely, heavy, downward-reaching breasts.
Mixing humor and spiritual yearning, this poem encompasses many of the strengths of Kendrick's wonderful collection.
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Fri, 15 Feb 2008
Book of the Day: Ancestral Radio by Edward Haworth Hoeppner
Edward Haworth Hoeppner's Ancestral Radio traces unusual connections between experience and our perception of that experience. Hoeppner covers a wide range of subjects, usually in an ambling free-verse line that takes its time to ponder, to meditate.
Here's one good example:
Poem without Hands
The idealist's question would be
something like: What right have I not
to doubt the existence of my hands?
--Ludwig Wittgenstein
It would like stepping onto glass, unbroken sheets
to oval per instruction as a pony takes shape
in matchbook covers that would teach you how to draw.
But the mazed, concentric hoops of blunt desire
you've penciled, like so much bangle on your wrists,
resist the sudden transformation: no living animals
move from off these lines, their poor mathematics.
Without touch, far better the ivory slippers you have found
sleepwalking on water, slipping out beneath your robe
until you've reached the stairs and wake. A ship
inside a bottle, you stretch your arms against the walls
going down into the dark. You know the paintings hung
on the landing you can't see, but none of them are yours.
And what you must not do: reach out as you step down,
brush along the wooden frames and close your eyes,
stop here, put your too smooth fingers to your lips.
A poem without hands, a world without touch--an impoverished world, indeed. Hoeppner explores these ironies with wit and compassion.
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Tue, 12 Feb 2008
Book of the Day: The Night Marsh by Penny Harter
Penny Harter's The Night Marsh is a book of discoveries. Harter's poems closely inspect the surface of the world, and delve beneath that surface as well, and the result is always a surprise.
Consider this poem:
Archaeology
She is always unearthing something--
here, a rotting bone a dog buried,
there, a headless doll with
stuffing leaking from its chest.
She digs in this field each night,
sniffing the dirt, savoring the strata
as she claws her way down
through soil and clay.
Perhaps the grinning skulls
of her cursed father, mother,
will turn up, blind as bulbs
waiting to sprout into her palms.
She carries resurrection in her hands,
her fingers splayed to sift the earth,
searching for some fragment of a skull
that answers to her name.
There is almost a physical, tactile sense of searching in this poem. Not only is "Archeaology" a compelling poem of seeking, it is characteristic of Harter's method.
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Wed, 06 Feb 2008
Book of the Day: Universal Monsters by Bryan Dietrich
Bryan Dietrich's Universal Monsters is one of the most unusual books I have read in a long time. Ransacking popular culture for images of monsters, Dietrich assembles them into an inventive pastiche that touches on the monstrosities in our own lives--our experiences, our culture, our fears, our pleasures.
Here's one poem that provides the flavor of Dietrich's achievement:
Dementia
"You can't kill the Boogeyman."
-from Halloween
You meet a woman, a worker of words
who loves O'Connor and Hitchcock's Birds,
all horror stories, the better for worse.
She's blonde and Wiccan, a comely curse.
Zombie, chainsaw, fetus, hook,
athame, candle, bell, book.
Her spell is modern, her interests, yours.
She knows of triffids and cepheids and spoors.
She, too, once sat in the glow of the screen
while the monsters processed and summer grew green.
Alien egg sac, mouthful of brains,
priest on the sidewalk, count the stains.
She takes you first by neck by eye,
then takes you again with the gorgeous lie
of language spun from the life she's not
lived so much as faced and fought.
Tooth, claw, razor, bone,
Halloween, Twilight Zone.
The monsters she has staked and boxed,
buried out by the hollyhocks,
outnumber yours by kith and kind.
Hulk, brute.... Malign design.
Rosemary's Baby, Eraserhead,
Race With the Devil, Dawn of the Dead.
You want her to know that you understand,
that sometimes the thing in the dark, The Hand,
is still attached to a heart that speaks.
The first date comes. You rent her Freaks.
Stalker, slaughter, barker, blight.
We live and love in black and white.
Universal Monsters is a truly ambitious book; it is, literally, fearless in the face of monsters.
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Sun, 20 Jan 2008
Prose on Poetry: Classics and A Formal Feeling Comes
While the main focus of our press is poetry itself, we also try to publish books that expand a reader's thinking about poetry. Our Textos Books imprint brings out one or two books of critical discussion on poetry each year. The latest releases from Textos are especially notable.
The first is Classics, the latest collection of essays by the poet Rachel Hadas. Hadas is a distinguished poet with numerous books to her credit (including The River of Forgetfulness), but she is also a perceptive essayist about poets and poetic craft. Classics is part memoir, as Hadas explores her own background as a classicist and how that informs her poetry, and part critical discussion, as she considers a wide range of poets.
Textos' other major release this year is a reissue of Annie Finch's A Formal Feeling Comes, a landmark anthology of poems in form by contemporary women. First published by Story Line Press in 1994, Finch's anthology laid to rest permanently an old saw that said that strong, feminist poetry could not be written in rhyme and meter. A Formal Feeling Comes went out of print after Story Line Press closed its doors last year, and Textos has taken this opportunity to bring the volume back to a reading public.
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Book of the Day: Line Dance by Barbara Crooker
Barbara Crooker is the rare poet who muse revolves around joy rather than darkness. Even when confronting painful subjects, Crooker's work turns to the light. In Line Dance, her newest collection, Crooker continues this tendency.
Consider this elegy, which is anything but elegiac:
Blues for Karen
God does not leave us comfortless.--Jane Kenyon
The season of your death, morning glories trailed
along the wire fence, one tone deeper than the sky.
I still go to the telephone to call you,
but the lines don't stretch to heaven--
the title of a bad country & western song.
How could you die? We weren't done talking yet.
So I am trying to call you using the morning glories,
whose blue mouths are open to the sky,
whose throats are white stars,
thinking those tendrils could trellis upward,
hand over little green hand, so tenacious,
they hang on in any storm,
forgetting that the quick slap of frost
will put out those blue lights,
that the seasons will snap shut like a purse,
that this old blue world will keep on spinning,
without you.
Crooker's work has an uplifting quality that is rare among contemporary poets. I always find myself nourished when I return to her poems.
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Thu, 10 Jan 2008
Book of the Day: Dislocation and Other Theories by Erin Murphy
Erin Murphy is a poet who writes with great flair and panache. This is not light or faint praise: Murphy's poems have an energy, an inventiveness, that is invigorating. Whether writing in free verse, form or prose poetry, her work examines the details of daily experience with humor and curiosity. Her latest book, Dislocation and Other Theories, bears out this observation.
Consider "Hula Dancer":
Hula Dancer
She will dislocate her hips. Or maybe they're already dislocated, a kind of double-jointedness, like the suburban girls back East who wrap their heels behind heads in slumber party stunts. There is fury in her rhythm, her belly a dark blur beneath coconut c-cups. More than once a drunk man in an airport aloha shirt has slipped a hotel key in the cinched waist of her grass skirt, slurring a room number in her ear. She drops the keys in the trash with the paper plates from this nightly luau staged by a fair-skinned businessman from Chicago. After the show, she'll change into a tank top and low-rise jeans with a red thong peeking up in back. She'll board the number 8 bus--named, after a decade of island time planning, simply The Bus--and listen to Ludacris on her iPod as she makes her way inland to neighborhoods where laundry stretches across apartment balconies. On Monday, her night off, she'll sit with a bottle of Sunny Delight under a line of dishtowels and her father's boxers as the wind picks up, lifting the clothes, bending the palms. And in between the buildings, pulsing low and steady, she'll see the real sun, Victoria's Secret red, right where it belongs.
While this poem is unusual among Murphy's work in being prose poetry, its fast-paced energy is not. Dislocation and Other Theories never lets you settle into a comfortable reptition.
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Fri, 04 Jan 2008
Book of the Day: Shameless by Suzanne Roberts
Despite its brassy, sassy title, Suzanne Roberts' Shameless is a deadly serious book. Roberts takes the reader on a journey through heartbreak and loneliness to a brighter, stronger place. Her poems are haunting in their understatement, as the title poem shows:
Shameless
He knocks at the door, looks
through the window. You have no choice
but to answer. He explains that the end
of false religion is near. You'd shut the door
without an excuse, but he's tall and blond,
a thinner version, you think, of Barbie's Ken.
So you tilt your head with feigned interest and say,
Really? Tell me more. A harlot, he answers,
sits on the back of a beast. And?
The beast has seven heads and ten horns.
You say the woman rides him?
Yes, and exerts influence over the kings
of the earth. What's she wearing?
She's dressed in purple, wears a crown
of rubies, burns incense. She's exceedingly wealthy.
And shameless? He loosens his necktie,
puts down his briefcase, gestures with long fingers.
But the beast will make her devastated
and naked. He will eat her fleshy parts.
And she will burn with fire.
Yes, and he will carry out God's thoughts.
Intimate, longing with memory but recognizing the sober present, Shameless is a vital book of poems.
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