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Thanks to Highland Park Poetry's contributors in 2021:
Anonymous
Emma Alexandra
Lois Baer Barr
Jennifer Dotson
Christine Hartman & Ice Hat Creative
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Poetry Book Reviews
Holding My Selves Together
New & Selected Poems
By Margaret Rozga
Cornerstone Press, 2021
231 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1-7333086-6-3
Review by Christine Swanberg
“Gravitas” is the word that describes Margaret Rozga’s Holding My Selves Together. In this full-length, 141-page collection, poems are grouped seamlessly from each section to the next: Alice Marathons, The Last Six Miles are the Hardest, Even in Beauty, and Holding My Selves Together. We have the magical, mythological Alice as the collection swells into poems of a wise elder reflecting on social justice begun in the 60’s and a life filled with commitment to create a better world. The sections transcend into a broader world of beauty and garden, Covid, ending spiritually with personal reflections.
In this collection are a dazzling array of forms, some experimental and many very challenging. We encounter persona poems, prayerful poems, imperative voice, family honor poems, and poems about heroes and friends of the past. Themes include reflection on past activism and wistful yearning that it had solved more problems. Other sections explore search for beauty, transcendent questions and renderings on the nature of being itself.
The selves listed in "Conjugating Pronouns” nail down the identities in an accessible manner, for me the linchpin poem in the collection. Here are the beginnings of the lines:
The gardener gets herself dirty…
The grandmother talks fractions…
The editor seeks to create…
The sky-watcher learns…
The poet feels…
The citizen knows…
The activist now…
Yet the collection’s magnitude morphs these various selves into a story that is much art as narrative. The breadth and depth of the chapters are exquisitely captured in the book’s arrangement into sections. Each section ends with a poem that leads into the next session, a clever poetic foreshadowing telling us to get ready for what is next. As a longtime poet myself, I have noticed a tendency for poetry books to revolve around a single theme. This collection explores more than one theme in more than one style, revealing a committed poet who has been devoted to her art and to her commitment to social justice for many years. An important poet, once Wisconsin Poet Laureate, reveals a life of commitment, which invigorates the reader.
The last section often alludes to life during Covid. I appreciated “A Pandemic of Misses” in which Rozga’s repetition of “I miss” feels as though we were having a conversation. Several voices join on what they miss. A few lines from that poem include:
I miss eating with other people, I said.
I miss our Yoga class, my sister said…
I miss soccer, the granddaughter said…
I miss school lunch. I miss school breakfast, the grandson said…
Rozga has a penchant for choosing themes and words that are not just personal but also important to the world of social justice. The poetry has a collective and personal voice combined skillfully. This is very hard to do without ranting and raving, but she does so quietly but firmly in many narrative poems of past marches, jail visits, and working for fair housing. I wish that younger readers could see all the work that many tried to do and the wish had happened faster and stabilized into a fairer reality. I recommend strongly reading the second section, The Last Six Miles are Hardest. Poems such as “History,” “Alabama Bound,” “Arrest the White Girls,” “Five Gestures of Freedom,” and “At James Chaney’s Grave 50 Years Later” engage the mind and heart.
A short excerpt from “Alabama Bound”:
Sit-ins. Boycotts. University Doorways.
Interstate buses. City jail, county jail.
Bull, the dog, firehouses. Jim Clark, his horses.
Deaths, more deaths.
I would add more selves to Margaret Rozga’s litany of identities: wise elder, lover of justice, brave guardian, and virtuoso poet. The collection is satisfying at every level. Those who love extremely challenging forms and styles to ponder will find them. Those who resonate with causes for social justice will resonate with those accessible poems. Lovers of the earth will find quiet garden poems. Those who seek spiritual connection in poetry will find it in these pages.
This collection is nothing short of a feast, a banquet of delicious poems, one after the other. It is an important book by an important poet.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Christine Swanberg is the first official Poet Laureate of Rockford, Illinois and widely published, awarded, and collected.
Posted July 1, 2021
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Smoke the Peace Pipe
By Roz Weaver
Yellow Arrow Publishing, 2020
61 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1735023014
Review by Cynthia T. Hahn
Creative writing is a well-recognized form of therapy. Reading poetry written by a poet-therapist aimed at describing and showing a path towards self-healing, can also be effective therapy for the reader. Roz Weaver, UK therapist, poet, social worker and spoken word performer, demonstrates the power of creative expression through poetry to heal from physical as well as psychological trauma in her first chapbook, Smoke the Peace Pipe. The cover, by Joanne Baker, illustrates the metaphor which is fully elucidated in the final poem of the same title.
Written in free verse, each poem hangs upon the use of complicitous duality, antithesis with an encouraging twist. In this way, Weaver takes us in, invites us to be part of the "I" and the "we" of her poems, both rain and rainbow. The sorting of the pieces of self comes through not as a puzzle but rather as an accounting, a series of declarations that question, that encourage, and that always recognize the pain, in alternating concrete and abstract terms. As she notes about the text's title, it expresses "...the intention of paying regular visits to the parts of ourselves that don't sit comfortably, how we can learn to bear what we thought was unbearable, and how by doing this we can make space for the possibility of a bigger picture" (61).
From the first poem, "How Trauma Dresses at Daybreak," duality and complicity are already present, communicated by an intimate, informal and knowing poetic voice: "I woke this morning in parts", "...washed my body in two minds/one mine, one a critical mother". The declaration of the damaged state, "I am missing whole pieces of woman" leads the rest of the work through the process of self-reconstruction. In the second poem, "Raw Soup for the Skin Soul", the "we" is present, inviting the reader to see the duality of body/mind, of conflicting emotions or voices, and also inviting us to participate in the struggle aimed at a positive end: "...I will get us through", "...joy wins the war in the end." What is inferred then is the 'chicken soup for the soul' cliché, reanimated here, both burning hot in its 'raw-ness' and also comforting in its description of what has been and what can be accomplished. It is the "Brainwork" of poem three that posits the idea, "I think I'll visit myself more often" and suggests that we "sit across from our fears" (9), brushing out the dust and the dark. Weaver urges us "home", to practice the "gripping" and the "letting go", to step into versions of the self, to unveil what has been in hiding ("Home is Where the Spirit Goes", 11). At the same time, rainbow and storm cohabit, and an important declaration is made "...to live/meant leaving" ("Double Rainbow", 13). The consistent use of physical and metaphysical imagery (e.g. "love coming home", 29, picking "my power up off the floor", 31, creating "a map of my body", 33, laying the "groundwork", "and not seeing hope as a chore", 41) parallels the self-knowing and healing process mentally for poet (and inspired reader), and aptly described as visceral experience.
Peace comes to the self-healing process in the latter third of the text, through a coming to terms with memory scars, and honoring the self-body as "Goddess" (57). Weaver notes "...peace waves,/ where healing is a boat", 47; "There's a peace in the dawn that guides us all; an opportunity /for the heart to lead", 52, and finally, holding the self, "until every part is loved as truth" (59). In the end, Weaver reiterates realistically that this process, while love of the self is being regained, remains so much "unfinished business" as "We, wild spirits", "long lost siblings" find ourselves (59). In this final poem, "Smoke the Peace Pipe," Weaver clearly puts together the pieces of self ("you") and aligns them with others ("we") who have also unleashed the truth of their lived trauma and are fully awakened to life. Here she elucidates the communal sharing of the symbolic "peace pipe" of the volume's title, as a physical and spiritual processing, emphasizing both transcendence and connection. And so from the first poem, descriptive of personal pain ("the war I wear in my chest", 5), Weaver invites us in the final poem to "Welcome home each particle of your being," to inhabit a new wholeness of "our everything alive" (59), effectively bringing us with her through the raw process of baring the damaged body-soul and then reconstructing it within a poetic, loving conversation with the self.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Cynthia T. Hahn has been a Professor of French at Lake Forest College, teaching language, literature, culture, film, translation and creative writing since 1990. Cynthia is also the author of two poetry collections, Outside-In-Sideout (Finishing Line Press, 2010) and Co-ïncidences (alfAbarre Press, 2014).
Posted July 1, 2021
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Common Ground
By Kathy Lohrum Cotton
Deep Well Poetry, 2021
103 Pages
ISBN-13: 97986111359884
Review by Michael Escoubas
Originally published for
Quill & Parchment
As I write this review (late April) President Biden has just completed his first address to a joint session of Congress. Senator Tim Scott hasgiven the Republican rejoinder. Listening to both men recalledpoet Kathy Lohrum Cotton’s latest collection, Common Ground. Whether you believe in Providence, Fate, Coincidence or just plain Randomness, you must admit these ducks fell nicely into a neat row. It seems that the most dominant theme in American life is healing divisions
and finding “common ground,” even though defining exactly what that is, remains elusive.
Enter Kathy Cotton, stage left. With quiet assurance and ripened poetic skills,Cotton offers a collection of poems which bear directly on what many are seeking. Remarkably, these poems were written “prior” to the advent of Covid-19. Which
is to say that her theme is timeless and does not need a worldwide pandemic to justify its existence.
An epigraph by no less a luminary than Walt Whitman, sets the tone: “Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” It is the gift of language that humans alone possess and share. Appropriately, the poem “Finding Common Ground,” opens the door to Cotton’s quest:
Before the extravagant feast,
the flowing wine of words,
let me break bread
at the table of
a neighbor starving
on broth-thin bromides,
elders who chew
old shibboleth scraps,
the child choking down
force-fed fear.
I got the feeling early-on that this poem represents the poet’s life. Helping a person in need is more important that just setting words down on a page. Only then:
let my pen touch
the waiting page,
let the ink’s dark nectar
spill out
every ripened syllable
of words worth sharing.
Stylistically, Cotton does something I’ve never seen before. At the end of many of her poems, she adds key words in a delicate light-face font; subtly highlighting a theme she wants readers to consider.
The volume is organized in three sections: “Quiet Words,” “Shared Words,” and “Last Words.”
In an age of loud talk, street and gun violence, and folks insisting that it’s My way or the highway, Cotton’s wisdom is like a warm cup of Chamomile tea slowly sipped.
In my youth I recall how the evenings took on a unique fragrance after a soft rain, Cotton took me back in her poem “The Scent of Rain,” where her old Lithuanian neighbor:
who stands in rain-spattered pajamas,
breathing, just slow-breathing
in the middle of his wire-fenced yard—
. . .
This cloudburst soaking
his drought-brown garden brought
him from his bed, quick like a child,
wordless with wonder at the scent of rain.
While Cotton writes primarily in verse libre, her skill in formal verse is evident in the villanelle, “Words of Peace”:
There is sweet symmetry in words of peace,
as both the mind and heart communicate—
a balance of withholding and release
through conversation shared: the centerpiece
of knowing when to speak and when to wait.
There is sweet symmetry in words of peace,
not toppled into dogma or caprice.
It chooses not to flatter or berate,
but balances withholding and release
to find a common ground where conflicts cease
to rage alone, a place where pain abates.
There is sweet symmetry in words of peace:
both hope and understanding can increase
when empathy is speaking’s gentle mate.
It balances withholding and release:
a spoken and unspoken masterpiece—
consideration, rather than debate.
There is sweet symmetry in words of peace,
a balance of withholding and release.
Titles in Part I, entice me to reconsider my life perspectives, titles such as: “Quiet Friend,” “Gift of Your Silence-Keeping, “Inner Balance,” and “Slow Thaw,” hang like medals on a service-member’s coat; commendations won on the battlefield of life.
Moving into Part II, “Shared Words,” I found myself focused on “The Sweetness of Doing Nothing.” This poem explores the tension between “busyness” as a virtue and Dolce far niente. (Translated in the title).This shared word is one your reviewer needs to hear. Perhaps I should emulate the poem’s protagonist and, “stretch full length on a Montana stone.” In this section shared words become “strands of simple kindness, a treasure to pass down.”
I recall special evenings tiptoeing into my children’s rooms to read stories and say their prayers.
The ease of those moments, the quietude of being with them, things we shared before clicking
off the lights, returned to me as I entered Part III, “Last Words.”
I lingered long with “Sweet Cluster” where:
I fell asleep to the lullaby
of a family’s last words
of the day, to soft sounds
of Mother and Father kissing.
As the section title suggests, the poet treats the subject of loss and death. Cotton does so with impressive tenderness and restraint. Many of these poems could be read as testimonies to loved ones who have passed on. While platitudes often accompany loss and death, the poet’s treatment is fresh and original. She remembers her brother, the “only shaved face in a little house crammed with petticoats.” Ed was, “the last of all who knew me from my beginning.”
In “The Last of Life,” death is compared to:
Winter’s longing to shed
the weight of every last leaf,
to stand proudly stripped,
wind-whipped to the marrow,
baring misshapen limb and scar.
The “welcome home”
rivers sing to scattered streams
and oceans whisper
to heavy rainclouds.
The ripple
of a zephyr’s soft breath
across ripened fields.
So, this
is how it feels
to love the last of life.
Indeed, Kathy Lohrum Cotton’s Common Ground, closes with a blessing I wish for everyone who buys this superb volume:
Leave something
of sweetness and substance
in the mouth of the world.
--Anna Belle Kaufman, “Cold Solace”
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Michael Escoubas is editor, contributing poet, and staff book reviewer for Quill and Parchment, a 19-year-old literary and cultural arts online poetry journal.This review was originally posted onQuill and Parchment.
Posted July 1, 2021
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Languid Lusciousness with Lemon
By Joan Leotta
Finishing Line Press, 2017
231 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1635341454
Review by Barbara R. Saunders
Joan Leotta declares her stakes in a one-word line. It’s near the center of the first poem of this collection, the title poem, “Languid Lusciousness with Lemon.” This charming book of poetry is a meditation on immortality. Food, for this poet, is a metaphor for life itself—constant but temporary, and meant to be consumed with joy. Every harvest can remind us to be grateful for the living earth; every recipe, of our own agency; and every meal, of the possibility or the realization of love.
In some pieces, the narrator remembers how her elders imparted lessons. She marvels that her grandmother could “summon birds from an empty sky” with the “tossed crumbs and crusts” from breakfast toast. The older woman explains, “Everyone hears when called to the table.” On apple-picking trips with her father, the narrator learns “apples taste better when you know them by name.” And the narrator’s mother demands an apprenticeship before handing over a cherished pizzelle cookie recipe because, she says, “Words are not enough/You need to learn to feel/When the dough has just enough flour.”
The narrator applies this wisdom about food and relationships to the family she generates herself. A bag of peaches from her husband, she observes, signifies the promise of a life filled with sweet adventures. “We cook many into jam and pies together … we dare all this and more -- together.” Speaking of an afternoon of tasting savory bivalves with a daughter, she says, “I savored the found pearl/of our togetherness.” At the family dinner table, she notices, “love is spoken -- loudly, and by all.” A few humorous poems turn inward. The Turkish delight in a novel finds its sticky way onto the narrator’s hands, and a session of strawberry chopping discharges the anger from a marital argument.
There are a few poems unrelated to food. These fit squarely into the theme of family. “Kitty Hawk Hang Glider School,” brings us back to those wondrous birds as the narrator’s son takes “A solo flight. The first of many yet to come.” In another poem, only the smell of coffee shows up—a ghost, like her father, in a dream. This poem, “Dreaming across the Styx” contains my favorite line of the collection: “Instead of Charon,/my own beloved father/waits, patiently, to/ferry me across the Styx/in his white 1960 Thunderbird.”
Though domesticity is a focus, the poet’s heart opens to encompass the world beyond the hearth. Food serves as currency for bonding with fruit vendors, waitresses, and neighbors. When a young man in Istanbul angrily tells her that Americans don’t appreciate his culture, she tries to change his mind over coffee, “talking across the Bosphorus of our diverse lives, until his anger waned.” And she laments, in the closing piece in the collection, that breaking bread together can’t always save us. A young man who shares his Ramadan goodies with her dies at the hands of ISIS.
A solo performer as well as a writer, Leotta skilfully balances autobiographical elements, such as clues to her Italian heritage, with intellectual ones, including the references to T.S. Eliot that pepper the collection. The message, both exciting and comforting: Sweet meets tart, nature’s bounty meets human craft, stay-at-home mom meets Jordanian fighter pilot--such is life!
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Barbara R Saunders hails from New York and lives in Berkeley, California. Her poetry focuses on biography and myth. She’s at work on a memoir, Dead Dreams.
Posted July 1, 2021
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The Kingdom of Birds
By Joan Colby
The Poetry Box, 2020
231 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1-948461-60-3
Review by Caroline Johnson
If you have a dreamy, nostalgic notion of birds, be prepared to consider a darker, more complicated side of our feathered creatures in Joan Colby’s The Kingdom of Birds (The Poetry Box). In this last collection of poems published July 15, 2020, just one month before her death, Colby describes birds as a “calligraphy of the higher kingdom” as she contemplates crows, doves, geese, hawks, flamingos, owls, turkeys and more in a smorgasbord of observation and scrutiny.
“Be calculating as the cardinal,” she writes in her sestina (“The Life List of Birds,” 31-32), “who goes to the block unflinching.” This is an apt metaphor for her observations of all the birds in this collection, none of which can escape the poet’s masterful eye. Even the tiny hummingbird she sees as sinister, as it “hangs like a furious angel” attempting to prepare “to assault the hydrangea” (“Photograph of a Hummingbird,” 33). In this short poem she compares the hummingbird’s hunger to a rapist’s lust, and to the moment when a poem “stabs into the corolla of the mind / And sucks it dry.” In other poems she describes the merciless ravens (34) and the dancing cranes, who cannot escape their animal nature.
Colby was a prolific writer and this collection was her 25th book of poems. Throughout this collection Colby deftly weaves bird imagery with thoughts on human nature. “I have fashioned your nests in my mind,” she writes. The book also doesn’t skimp on contemplations of our mortality, as she writes, “The object / has to die / so we can see its / utterness, its suspended miracle,” an allusion to Audubon’s photos of birds (38). Colby seems to be on the lookout for the real bird, not the illusion, as she scoffs at the “lawn fakes” of flamingoes, “sluttish as five inch heels,” and hallows the dignity of Canada Geese--“Look. Their necks stretch true” (46)--which she also compares to war veterans. In “Swallow,” she makes another brilliant comparison, comparing the act of swallowing to the namesake bird:
“Soaring at dusk, to feed on the wing,
Forked tail like a serpent’s tongue,
Every year returning
To the steep loft, harbinger
Of a thousand summers…
In a lonesome bar knocking back
Shots of Jack Daniels
Swallowing the hard words
Left unuttered.
That reflex, the last to fail,
You refused the tube while
You could still speak…
…your last breath
Coalesced to a lump of sorrow
In our throats, unable to swallow this.” (52)
The book has several poems about hawks, and Colby approaches each with a different lens. “What the camera sees is beauty,” she writes in “Redtail”, “What the hawk sees is blood,” (55). Later in the book she describes a red-tailed hawk whose predatory nature is “written in wingspread / In will and heart” (“Hawks in the Morning,” 87-88). Colby has created a tribute to birds, which she calls a citadel: “I can’t decide whose side / I’m on,” she writes, describing a hawk eyeing a fledgling robin, and the crows that carry the hawk out of their territory (“Sunday Birds,” 67-68).
Throughout the book, we see birds as scavengers, sometimes as graceful friends, but always with the same complexity that humans have. The poet understands the rules of nature, the “sense of grab, / the rules of blood.” Her landscape is stark, real, like that of the painter Georgia O’Keeffe, and her vision is reminiscent of Wallace Stevens’, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” only she covers many species of birds.
In “Parrots,” she discusses domesticated birds that have been “caged for a half century,” and asks, “How can I keep / Birds that could outlive us?” Most of these poems, however, were inspired by Colby’s keen observation of wild birds she saw at her horse farm outside Elgin, Illinois. Then, at her feeder, she writes, “In the new Jerusalem of my backyard, I aim / The telescopic lens to frame / Who shall be singled out and saved” (“Myself as Jehovah,” 70-71). Indeed, to Colby, birds are almost a religion, if we look deeply enough. She also calls them symbols, omens, or harbingers, such as crosses and anchors.
In one of her last poems, she comments on the musicality and shape of birds and their flocks, with their melody on the treble sky: “Birds in chords or trills resound / Autumn fugues of sky” (“Bird Theme”, 78). And don’t forget the wisdom of the owl, who “infects your dream” like a greedy capitalist, and swallows, “The world you sought,” (“Contemplating the Owl,” 85-86). In the title poem, “The Kingdom of Birds,” Colby continues to compare birds to human behavior: “We’re / Just like this, grabbing and getting / …Our hands are made for grasping” (84).
Colby ends this collection with a prose piece, “Bird Watching,” which is a two-page description of a woman preparing for end-of-life arrangements with her spouse, all the while observing birds outside her window. Despite her breathing machine, respirator and hospital bed, “Susan kept watching the birds.” In the end, she says to her husband, “Don’t forget about the damned birds” (89-90). Rest in Peace, Joan Colby. Thank you for your gift of poetry. We won’t forget you or your poems, either.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Caroline Johnson serves as president of Poets & Patrons of Chicago. Her first full collection, The Caregiver, was pubished by Holy Cow Press in 2018.
Posted July 1, 2021
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Checkered Mates
By Tricia Knoll
Kelsay Books, 2021
54 Pages
ISBN-13: 9781954353138
Review by Joan Leotta
For chess players everywhere, the back and forth and strategy of dealing with other humans presented in this superb chapbook will be familiar to you—though expressed in new and wonderful ways by each of Tricia Knoll’s poems.
If you are familiar with Tricia’s work, you might be expecting a walk through nature. In this volume, however, she turns her observant, loving, sometimes saddened eye to people. The poems reveal loneliness, love, memories and the onus and the challenge of many types of relationships. The first poem lets us in on Knoll’s perspective as she puts together this set of poems. She tells us about her “mates” many of whom we will see in the succeeding pages.
In all of the poems, her attention to poetic craft shines. For me, the best part of each poem, even the painfully sad, is the way she builds her images from often subtle openings to a superb finale.
So powerful are some of these last lines, they may well inspire you, the reader to write a responding work. I was inspired by the last line in the title poem, about a robot petting zoo. The way in which she has spread Un-mooning the Moon on the page, it can be read as three separate endings, unique solutions to the issues raised in the poem and each powerful and stunning. I never thought so much about a cat and moon until Knoll opened my heart with this poem.
My two favorites are the tiny poem, Detailing and its neighbor, Lament of the Heirloom Red Tongue Deer Lettuce. The former has one of the most power-packed codas in the book: “a rear-view mirror aimed to see me as I think I am.” In the latter, as we learn to plant and care for this rare lettuce, she reveals that her lover should have cared for her in just this same way—the revelation comes in the last lines and packs quite a punch with its simple elegance.
The beauty and depth of her words will, I know, beckons me back to its pages again and again, as I find and mine new layers in each poem. Knoll takes ordinary things and transforms them into amazing emotional experiences. In the last poem she gives instruction on how a woman kisses a ghost she knows. Knoll says, “Words may not be necessary...”
But, trust me, this poet’s words are certainly necessary. A worthy addition to any book collection.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Joan Leotta plays with words on page and stage. Her poems, articles, essays, and short stories have appeared widely across the English-speaking world. She has been a Tupelo Press 30/30 author, and a Gilbert Chappell Fellow. Her chapbook, Languid Lusciousness with Lemon, is out from Finishing Line Press. Her chapbooks Nature’s Gifts is free from Stanzaic Stylings. Dancing Under the Moon and Morning by Morning, mini-chapbooks are free through Origami Press. As a performer, she tells folk and personal tales featuring food, family, nature, and strong women. She relaxes by walking the beach and sitting around the table laughing and talking with family and friends.
Posted June 1, 2021
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Riding the Waves of Bliss
Seasons of Life Poems
By Shai Har-El
Homestead Lighthouse Press, 2020
152 Pages
ISBN-13: 9781950475087
Review by Barbara Eaton
According to Gwendolyn Brooks, “Poetry is life distilled.” According to William Wordsworth, poetry is “emotion recollected in tranquility.” Shai Har-El, in his recent poetry collection, Riding the Waves of Bliss: Seasons of Life Poems, succeeds in distilling his own life, recalling the chronological stages of life from a vantage point of tranquility.
Dr. Har-El, historian, writer, poet, educator, rabbi, activist, and businessman, outlines the larger purpose of his book in the introduction: he describes his inner world as a way of reaching towards the universal. Each poem is a window into his soul. His terrain is what he calls the “four landscapes of being”: body, heart, mind, and spirit.
In his preface, Dr. Har-El puts forth one of my favorite biblical quotations, “To everything there is a season….” from the Book of Ecclesiastes. And he states his main theme: “Seasons change. So does human life.” The first poem that appears is “The Tree of Life.” In this poem, Har-El explains that his own life is essentially the biblical story writ small. The poems that follow are neatly divided into five chapters that delineate the five stages of his life: “Yearning and Longing,” “Love and Intimacy,” “Oneness and Harmony,” “Awakening and Illumination,” and “Death and Grieving.”
In “Yearning and Longing,” Har-El expresses his wish to return to Israel, the land of his birth, and his wish to return to his youth. He acknowledges that this is impossible, so he recreates his childhood home and childhood memories in his poetry. The last lines in these poems are especially moving. Also moving is his wish to return to Earth to see his grandchildren as adults, and his desire to re-experience first love.
The title poem, “Riding the Waves of Bliss,” appears in the second chapter, “Love and Intimacy,” which is composed of love poems to his dear departed wife, Rosie. Love, according to the poet, is physical, sensuous, spiritual, and eternal. Love is a religious experience in which the physical and the spiritual, the finite and the infinite, are fused. Love, the subtle knot that makes us man, connects lovers, families, and ultimately all of mankind. These love poems are, to my mind, the strongest poems in the collection.
The third chapter, “Oneness and Harmony,” contains poems that express the poet’s dream for the world: peace and a universal acknowledgment of our common humanity.
“Awakening and Illumination” traces the poet’s journey from bewilderment to an awareness of God’s plan and his place in that plan.
In “Death and Grieving,” Har-El muses on the losses he has suffered: his father and brother, and contemplates his own death, which he faces with wry humor. He ends with a mysterious, magical affirmation: “he was, he is and shall be.”
Riding the Waves of Bliss is a lovely book, a distillation of the poet’s exemplary life and a celebration of his faith. Although there are a few curious typographical errors (clothe, p. 3; pleas, p. 69; altar, p. 109; and sew, p. 117) the book is carefully produced and clearly a labor of love.
Wordsworth also states, “Poetry is spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” and I would encourage this poet to mix in a little spontaneity with the powerful feelings in this most moving and beautiful work.
Thank you, Dr. Har-El. You inspired me, and I am hopeful that you will inspire many others.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER:Barbara Eatonis a poet and semi-retired community college instructor.
Posted June 1, 2021
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Spoken
A Novel
By Melanie Weiss
Rosehip Publishing, 2019
200 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-0988609839
Review by Elizabeth Joy Levinson
As a high school English teacher, I frequently read young adult fiction. Mostly because I am looking for books I can recommend to my young readers, but also because I have come to enjoy the genre. While it is sometimes a guilty pleasure, it often is less guilty than you would think. Spoken by Melanie Weiss, for instance, offers insight into the lives of teens, discusses the craft of writing poetry, and centers around a narrative that is compelling for readers of all ages.
Spoken focuses on Roman, a freshman whose life is turned upside down by the mistakes of his mother. His comfortable life in L.A. is disrupted and he is forced to move to the midwest in an attempt to escape the Hollywood scandal surrounding his mother. He goes from having all the comforts a fourteen year old boy would want to living in his grandmother’s meditation room, sleeping on a pull-out sofa.
He is determined, at first, to return to L.A., despite how unlikely the reader can see this is. But his new midwestern town grows on him and he finds a community. While never explicitly stated, it seems he didn’t have quite the same sense of belonging in L.A. With encouragement from his newfound friends, Roman joins the school’s poetry club. Even early in the novel, the reader can see that Roman is a poet, in this first person narrative he often employs devices like imagery and simile. Take for instance this description of his mother, “To borrow from Grandpa’s chemistry speak, she’s, well, liquid. Like water rushing with such force it pulls everything in its wake along for the ride. Mostly over unfamiliar terrain dotted with jagged rocks, but also, I gotta admit, toward some pretty phenomenal places, too.” While it seems he mostly joins the club because of a girl, he clearly belongs there. In the club, he finds his voice and in his friend, Zuzu, he finds a trusting confidant to whom he can reveal a family secret he had previously kept to himself. Zuzu sets out on a plan to set things right for Roman, but only by unleashing his poetic voice is he able to finally achieve his dream.
The lives of teens are fraught and spoken word and poetry are natural outlets for many young people. I know I often tell my students that I wish I had grown up with a program like Louder Than a Bomb & organizations like Young Chicago Authors. Other novels have also focused on the power of poetry to heal - Elizabeth Acevedo’s The Poet X and Bronx Masquerade by Nikki Grimes both come to mind. But there is room for Spoken at the table. In Spoken, Weiss not only provides a protagonist who finds himself in his poetry club, he also begins to recognize his own privilege when he hears the poetry of his peers, when he learns of their challenges. And just as I try to tell my students, there is room for all of their stories.
=== ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Elizabeth Levinsonis a Chicago based poet and high school teacher. Her second chapbook, Running Aground,is published by Finishing Line Press.
Posted June 1, 2021
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Truth or Dare: Poetry
By Marissa Rose Farella
Independently Published, 2020
275 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1679156380
Review by Arlyn Miller
In the book’s introduction, Farella cue’s readers that we are in for an intriguing and novel (pun intended) experience with poetry:
I have learned early on that life is a simple, yet complex game of Truth or Dare. By walking the path of truth, I have not only learned to celebrate vulnerabilities, but I have dared to take the risks that come with life and love. I hope you find the courage within yourself to do the same.
Now let’s play a game.
Beneath this introduction on the left hand page (itself an unusual formatting choice), Farella poses a series of sixteen questions to the reader in the form of a poem titled, “Truth”. The list begins with the question, “Who are you?” and includes, “Who has broken your heart?” and “Whose heart have you broken?” She challenges the reader, “Are you honest with yourself?” “Are you willing to take risks for love?” “How did you practice self love?”
On the facing right hand page Farella issues sixteen dares in the form of a poem, beginning with “I dare you to feel.” and including, “I dare you to say no if you want to say no.” “I dare you to say yes if you want to say yes.”
At the bottom of the page, we have the authors handwritten signature: With love, Marisa.
Following this compelling introduction, the book is organized into two sections: Truth and Dare. The poems in each section reflect the poet’s own reckoning with the questions and dares she poses in the introduction. Some are as short as one or two lines, sometimes even beginning on left page and continuing on the right page, as with:
The devil lies and now he lies between me and you.
A few of my favorite poems from Truth include:
Your heart is home but I’m locked out.
___________________________________________
You will forever be
My favorite shade
of the grayest days.
_____________________________________________
I am more than mi mistakes.
A few of my favorite poems from Dare include:
I looked back at my demons
and said, “Let’s talk.”
“Maybe we can compromise,
let’s go for a walk.”
_________________________________
Let’s be together,
let’s give us a shot.
I pulled the trigger,
you did not.
_________________________________
To the sun,
How do you trust the moon will return to you each night
[printed on left hand page]
even after knowing all he’s done in the dark?
[printed on right hand page]
For me, as a poet, poetry-based creative writing teacher, and editor, what I love most about Truth or Dare is Farella’s innovative and cunning use of space on the page and her thoughtful interspersing of blank pages and of what appears to be her handwriting. As a reader, I appreciate that Farella sticks with conventional punctuation and recognizable rhetorical structure, thereby providing readers with solid ground upon which to traverse the ingenious terrain she lays out before us.
This is a book worth buying and reading. If you do, you’ll more fully understand what I’ve described discursively, which simply can’t do justice to the poetic artistry of Truth or Dare. And while waiting for the book to arrive, I dare you to contemplate the truth of one of Farella’s concluding poems:
The hardest love letter to write and read
will forever be the one to me.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Arlyn Miller is the creative engine behind Poetic License Writing Workshops and Literary Press and champions writing that is authentic, accessible and engaging. Visit www.poeticlicense.net.
Posted June 1, 2021
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Confluences
By Gari Light
Bagiry & Company, 2020
109 Pages
ISBN-13: 9781734446005
Review by Lennart Lundh
To begin: Read this book. You’ll be glad you did.
I
In the first of the book's three sections, there is open war, again, or at least angry conflict: between countries, factions, ideologies, cultures, whatever, a man and a woman. There is flight to a promised land and the hopefully kept promise of a better life. The flowing together might be peaceful, or it might not, just as the varying line lengths and unbroken stanzas contain unexpected staccato bursts.
"August. Morning. The Current War" (p. 40):
The Army captain was dying
in a vivid sunflower field in Ukraine.
//
There will be no mercy to anyone captured,
as there would be no welcoming music,
to whoever escaped this calamity whole and alive,
as the price of a life was declining abruptly.
"Let the Ocean Behold" (p. 23):
all those repeated errors
by those self-absorbed fanatics
who were always so certain
at the end appearing blind
"Contemplating Victoria Island" (p. 32)
. . . why go to America? --
summers are brutally scorching over there...
Let's think of Canada, it's kinder and more sentimental --
that's where we would have you land.
The language, the words to Light's visions, lies in waiting for the reader, to suspend them with surprise, as in "'Werther is already written, the sail is white'" (p. 38): "Her hands in the fog do appear ghostly / as if they were never raised up to the heavens, / the musical sounds end up being costly."
And there is tenderness, there are miracles, and there is hope, as in "An Epiphany" (p 44):
Let's just get there again --
to that unforgettable place,
where the rain, as it falls,
whispers names on the cobblestone surface.
//
the miracles are ridiculed
by the soulless and clever,
yet, those latter will lose,
just as long as we get there on time.
II
The center group of poems deals largely with confluences undone, lovers and couples going their separate ways, such as "Cinematique" (p. 51), where "They walk on the wet / cobblestones to separate carriages, parting without saying a word..."
This filmography of the estranging and estranged is akin to a river, formed of small joinings into great significance, only to come undone in a fanning delta. Near the end of the section, this similarity between humans and larger geographies is confirmed in "Full Moon Retrospective" (p. 68):
In retrospect a June full moon consists
of its half over Jerusalem,
seven-eighths of the one reflecting in Kiev,
and just a fraction of the local one,
which is intentionally flawed
III
The final section treats the dual nature of our confluences, nature drawing together to bring people together in Chicago, Manhattan, the joining of joinings that is the length of California and the amalgam of the Mediterranean coasts. In "A Seascape Fragment" (p. 80):
Coastal legends are abundant
with the prose interpretations
of the kind that make the poems
sort of blend and less creative...
Seems alternatively awkward
to suggest that seascape artists
rhyme the images in meter...
while in "Snow and Fog of the January Kind" (p. 95), the poet reminds readers:
. . . while relatively north to the Gulfstream,
it's sort of west to the appearance of New Yorkers
to Californians, it is the eastern beam,
yet south of Montreal on southern scorchers.
This place is much inherent in the craft
outside of rhymes, acidic words and crude ellipses,
we ended up here, finishing the draft,
belonging elsewhere, as was prophesied by gypsies
Again: Read this book. Then put it on your shelf of books to revisit over the years. Immerse yourself, and become part of a larger river.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Lennart Lundhis a poet, photographer, short-fictionist, and historian. His work has appeared internationally since 1965.
Posted June 1, 2021
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Black Forest Dreams:
A Journey Through Germany
Joseph Kuhn Carey
Kelsay Books, 2021
86 Pages
ISBN: 978-1952326752
Review by Terry Loncaric
I have long admired the lyricism of Joseph Kuhn Carey's poetry. I respect the clarity of his writing and the beguiling nature of his narratives. Every poem in Carey's latest collection, BlackForestDreams: A Journey Through Germany, lives up to the title of transporting the reader with lush, dreamy images and stories of family, heritage, and the rugged landscape of his ancestral homeland. Along the way, we delight with Carey in such palpable memories as watching a ship that sailed "like sugar cubes through molasses" and enjoying a nightfall that crept upon him "like trickles from a half turned-off faucet."
As the Chicago suburban author paints pictures of "a beautiful green landscape" and "deep dark quietude," he presents more than a series of intriguing vacation post cards. He crafts a love letter to a land with many "endless, expanding, serene" layers. He shares the compelling allure of his ancestral homeland in "The Black Forest is a Dream."
A mysterious mingling of woods, paths
roads and streams, where
past and present join hands
and deftly dance dance across
the alluring landscape . . .
He continues to describe, in "The Black Forest is a Dream,'' the images that Germany has planted into his brain and spilled into his poetry. There is an earthy flavor to Carey's memories that sinks into your soul.
. . . until all you hear is a sweet simple folk song
and all you see is a scythe,
a spoon, a motorcycle,
a boy and a girl and
love and hope flickering
in an old black and white movie
on a stucco farmhouse wall. . .
Carey's poems are lovely in their simplicity, yet complex and textured in their narrative development. In "Watching the Scenery," Carey weaves the simplest of details into a compelling story-poem. There is a musicality in Carey's description of the delightful twists and turns of a family bus trip, fueled by his clever use of action verbs. (In its entirety)
Watching the Black Forest scenery
rolling, dancing, flashing by
from the big clean window of a bus,
humming along the autobahn,
curving along back roads,
spinning huge wheels through
little towns with proud churches
and welcoming gasthouses,
each happily content to be small
and part of the swirling surrounding
wooded hills that flow like green rivers
through the dark and light,
thinking about good beer, cuckoo clocks,
and Schwartzwalder Kirschtorte,
a chocolate dessert that can bring
a strong Schwabian lumberjack
to his rugged, calloused knees.
The last four lines, of course, make me salivate as a lover of desserts. Of all the descriptions of desserts I have read, this by far is the funniest.
Carey is clearly a master of juxtaposition. He can introduce humor to deliver an added punch, yet it does not disrupt the flow of his finely-chiseled narratives. The author ponders the ridiculousness of "Lederhosen," for example, without being disrespectful to this odd-looking German garment.
Lederhosen
are so crazy-looking,
they make you laugh,
but then you look closely,
and you can tell they're
beautifully made and
full of ornate, colorful stitching . . .
BlackForestDreams shares the full depth of Carey's travel adventures, from visiting an open market "as the sun drizzles down like a daytime ice cream sundae delight" to eating pizza and pasta with his wife and children on a rainy day in Wiesbaden, "huddled together like birds in a nest."
Sometimes the poet is at his best when he uses the metaphor of travel to describe the connection of family. He takes a simple utensil, "Grandma's Wooden Spoon," and brings it to life in the animation of his words. The movement of each line paints a picture of Grandma in the kitchen "bustling in her colorful apron."
Grandma's wooden spoon
sits proudly in the drawer,
smooth as silk from years of use,
easy to handle, full of love,
ready to turn again in circles
like the hand of time itself
to make her reappear bustling
here and there in a colorful apron.
Carey takes the reader on a journey through his German heritage that exudes old world charm and human emotion. "Thinking of Germany" pays homage to his ancestors in a soulful, almost haunting way. Carey takes you back in time with his deft storytelling.
Thinking of Germany,
of Black Forest relatives unseen
for forty years,
of the house (still there)
that Grandma Kuhn and
her brother (my godfather) Reinhold grew up in
way down south in tiny Seitingen/Oberflacht,
where farming was a way of life,
and steady muscles were required
for milking the cows and feeding the chickens . . .
In these days of Covid, when travel might not be an option, I love that you can still take a trip to a far-away land in a poet's masterful use of language. In Black ForestDreams, Joseph Kuhn Carey captures lyrical moments, whimsical adventures, and family discoveries as he explores the rich layers of his German heritage. Carey reveals a landscape that changes with the turn of a bus wheel, from mountains to forests and green rivers. His poems are much more than simple travel narratives. Carey's poems reveal his longings to connect with the soul of his homeland. His poems resonate with the traveler in each of us.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Terry Loncaric, of Hampshire, Illinois, is the author of Crashing in Velvet for Finishing Line Press. Her poems have appeared locally, and nationally, on storefronts, newspapers, and anthologies. She has hosted many poetry events in the Chicago suburbs.
Posted May 1, 2021
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Honey From The Sun
By Patrice Claeys Boyer & Gail Goepfert
Independently Published, 2020
Review by Marcia J. Pradzinski
Patrice Boyer Claeys and Gail Goepfert have created Honey from the Sun, an enticing, colorful collection that melds stunning images of fruit with engaging, skilled verse. Boyer Claeys employs her expertise at curating lines from other poets to create centos that offer the narrator’s ruminations about each kind of fruit. Each poem is accompanied by one of Goepfert’s luscious photos to create a sensory banquet for the reader.
With the description of the pineapple, orange, and mango the narrator reflects on the deficiency of superficial judgments.
The pineapple sits on a round wooden tray next to a crimson-petaled Hibiscus blossom:
It is all craggy protection
heft
in raised detail.
…The room within –
bewildering delight.
It’s sweeter than syrup
liquid and shifting
laden with brown sugar scent
of being alive
in summer
Under the skin, the perfect life.
The fruit’s skin misleads the eye; it disguises the pineapple’s mouth-watering interior. The orange sits on a plate with a spiraled peel at its side, a strawberry balanced on its top:
…They grow polished armor
making a fist
Under the cloche –
lamp-bright rind –
between nakedness and nothing
a neon heart flickers.
Vulnerability often hides under a cover of strength. A surface conceals a complete picture.
A cubed mango rests against a gerbera daisy’s red-orange fringe in a heart-shaped bowl. Sprouting from the fruit’s belly is a golden-nosed anemone with wild gardenia blooms nearby:
Let me tell you this –
You start by loving yourself
from the inside out.
The narrator gives voice to the mango’s wisdom and it’s almost as if the fruit has spoken. The kiwi reflection /Faux fur –/homely as a house/ clarifies the universal conundrum regarding appearances: It’s that odd/the paradox/of inside and outside.
Other reflections arise after the poet’s close observation of a pear, cherries, and Alpine Strawberries.
Three pear slices nestle in a wine glass next to a burst of hydrangea petals:
For those whose world
mirrors the empty glass
juice in our mouths
from a ripe pear
smooths the broken places.
Often a sweetness comes
drop by drop.
Cherries lie loose like lost worry beads:
…Each time I eat them
I stop breathing
for I have had too much
perfection.
Alpine strawberries cuddle on a wreath of Juniper sprigs:
It is enough –
the bond of living things everywhere.
This thought runs throughout this enchanting volume. A feast for the eyes, the heart, and the mind, this book is well worth owning – and sharing.
Boyer Claeys and Goepfert each had a book released last year in the midst of the pandemic: Gail Goepfert’s Get Up Said the World and Boyer Claeys’ The Machinery of Grace; I highly recommend both as well their new collaboration, The Hard Business of Living, a poetry chapbook to be released in June 2021 as part of the Summer Chapbook Series of Seven Kitchens Press.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Marcia J. Pradzinski is a poet and retired ESL instructor. She served as a poetry judge for The Society of Midland Authors and is currently a board member of Poets and Patrons of Chicago. Finishing Line Press published her first poetry chapbook, Left Behind, in 2015.
Posted May 1, 2021
To purchase copies, email the authors - patriceclaeys@aol.com or gaile13@aol.com
Music Speaks
By Bill Cushing
lulu.com, 2019
32 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-0359827015
Review by Carol L. Gloor
Music Speaks is a beautifully produced, creatively illustrated chapbook of ten poems about music and musicians, plus two additional poems concerning musicians who died after the first ten poems were collected for the book. The focus is primarily on jazz and blues, but there is one poem on a classical composition and another on street musicians.
The poet wisely does not attempt to reproduce the variety of sounds in music in verbal form. Instead he surprises us by mixing different sensory phrases with the feel of the music and mixing musical terms with decidedly non-musical words. For example, near the end of the poem OnModest Mussourgsky’s “Bydlo’, the aftermath of hearing the piece is described as
A wake is left—
strong pungent odor
of musk mixed
with the sweet sharpness
of the cut stalks
being carried
to the village beyond
Or again in the poem Listening to Bird, “chromatic is paired with “gravity,” or in the poem Music isn’t about standing still and being safe, about Miles Davis, music played by the river is “spawned,” and later described as “a blue flame/jumping/off a gas stove/igniting everything.”
Descriptions of the settings in which the music is played also add depth to the perceptions of sound. In the poem Blakesong, the poet describes how jazz pianist Eubie Blake got his start in a Baltimore brothel where he “filled time” for men “waiting/for the girl of—if not their dreams—at least/their choice that evening.” And in ‘Zooz’s Brasshouse’ Busking, about street musicians, the poet notes that “one guy stirs in/a twenty” into the bucket that holds the musicians’ hard-earned money.
The only negatives are the lack of women musicians and the occasional lapses of language. The only poem about women musicians is “Ode to Nina Simone.” On the theory that the poet writes best about the life he knows, this is defensible if the poet did not listen to women jazz/blues artists, but one misses them nonetheless (think Billie Holiday, Nancy Wilson, Nina Simone). Possibly the poet wanted to limit his collection to instrumentalists, not singers.
On language, in the poem about Miles Davis, the poet slips into generalities about how categories always take a back seat
to creativity
and rhythm
space
and feeling
spirit
And in the same poem the musician is first described as a “beacon” and then as a “flagship.” Although both nouns have nautical connotations, “beacon” could have been sustained by a bit more riffing on the theme of light. Or in the poem Listening to Bird, the poet describes the sound as “breaking branches,” which works fine alone, but then adds the superfluous “of music.”
But these omissions and lapses do not detract from the book as a whole. If you want to spend a cheerful hour as we come out of our sad pandemic, spend it with Music Speaks.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Carol L. Gloor’s poetry chapbook, Assisted Living, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2013, and her full length poetry collection, Falling Back, was published by WordPoetry in 2018. Her poems have been published in many journals and anthologies, most recently in Gyroscope, and she is a member of the Chicago poetry collective Egg Money Poets.
Posted May 1, 2021
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Practicing Yoga in a Former Shoe Factory
By Heather Corbally Bryant
Finishing Line Press, 2020
108 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1-64662-228-3
Review by Gay Guard Chamberlin
Emily Dickinson famously said, “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” As soon as I began reading Practicing Yoga in a Former Shoe Factory, I “heard” the poet’s words as an active voice in my head, as if I were in conversation with a close friend. In fact, I became so enthused that I contacted her through her publisher, and she agreed to be interviewed on Zoom for this review and for my own ongoing literary inspiration. In person, she is as gracious and kind as the presence I had imagined.
What I found in this beautiful volume is a poet working at an advanced black belt level, in harmony with her muse, relentless in her truth-telling. These poems are accessible, brave, intimate, and thoughtful. Bryant, who has written a poem a day for years, began writing when she was 6 years old. She has now amassed more than 6,500 poems, and even though she made fun of herself, saying, “Some are ‘poems’,” making air quotes around the word, this is her ninth book. Practicing Yoga in a Former Shoe Factory
is quite a generous collection with 88 excellent and skillfully constructed poems. Most are free verse, some are more formal; all have a dignity which this reader associates with master-poets like Denise Levertov, Pablo Neruda, Toi Derricotte, and Ellen Bass.
Using strong meter and rhythm as well as exquisite (usually internal) rhyme, Practicing Yoga in a Former Shoe Factory explores themes of love and loss, family life, difficult pregnancies and births, the death of her elderly mother, and her journey of awakening as she made her way out of an abusive marriage, and into freedom. (Spoiler alert: she has now reunited with, and married, the former love of her life from 36 years ago!)
Like all good poets, Bryant pays constant attention to the ineffable and the ephemeral, the tiny and easily overlooked. In “The Ground Round, Lawrence, 1982”, she says:
Maybe that’s part of my poetry—to remember what other
People forget—
Notice the ways she pays homage to both the natural world and to women’s lives in the opening lines of “Crevices”:
Like ochre lichen growing in crevices between
Rocks, a woman’s art seeds itself, choosing private
Spaces, places hidden from ordinary view…
Initially I was attracted by the book title, hinting that it might be full of humorous poems; instead, I was pleasantly surprised, and then awestruck, by the profundity of the entire collection. While there is certainly humor present, it is of a subtle and clever kind, like in this line when she “riffs” on citrus fruit in “Winter Song”:
…when lemon
Light slices our eyes…
I like how much she cares about weather in all its forms, from benign to destructive. Her poems are equally grounded in time and space as well, with careful specificity referring to the day and the hour, the month of the year and seasons, the landscape and geography of place. Some of them are set in Ireland where she has spent a lot of time. (Additionally, her best-known volume of poems, James Joyce’s Water Closet, is completely set in the Emerald Isle.)
Color is another constant element in her work which we talked about. She “almost became a painter,” and remains interested in, and stays current with, changes in color theory and art. Another constant is her obvious love of the plant, animal, and mineral kingdoms. Like Mary Oliver, she identifies with the life of other, very-different-from-us, creatures. In “Red Dragonfly,” she recounts:
As if by chance we met, and I looked hard at every
Line and wing—
The same way words tumble from my pen—
Until I etch and scratch against the paper—
And speaking of scratches on the paper, this reader was amazed that a majority of her poems are liberally sprinkled with the em dash, so closely associated with Emily Dickinson’s work. Like Dickinson, Bryant dares to eschew a more conventional punctuation for the elongated dash, creating a heightened sense of urgency and movement. Indeed, in our conversation, she reported she often “writes in a torrent,” and “hates punctuation and struggles with commas.”
There is an intriguing economy and brevity to her words, and, at the same time, an utter lushness. Like Sharon Olds, and other modern “confessional poets,” Bryant writes with intimacy, authenticity, and transparency about life, warts and all. She doesn’t back away from the painful truth of her past yet, like the very best writers, she maintains the needed delicate balance between simply “spilling one’s guts” and elevating raw material into something artful. When we discussed this, Bryant said she is “always interested in the process of moving from Unknowing to Knowing,” and that she finds hope and courage in reading memoirs by women who have also survived abuse. In “Walking Whitby Beach with my Daughter,” she seems to address her readers as well her daughter:
– I hope some of my scars will show
You how to live differently—
Notice the finesse in her powerful poem, “The Onion”:
I.
Here are some words I don’t know how to say aloud:
I am like an onion, the food that scares me maybe
Because I am so much like it—my layers go deep—
I have been threatened, taunted, mocked, debased,
Raped—all in the name of love—I have been told I was
Crazy, stupid, foolish, fat, and lazy—I have been lied
To, cheated, given the silent treatment, slapped, pushed
Against a wall, shoved out of a moving car in Michigan--
Told that I would never be loved again—I have been left
When I was bleeding to death, dropped off at the
Hospital to find my way, I have been told that I was the most
Beautiful woman on earth, also the ugliest woman in the
Universe, that I was brilliant, impossible, dumb, selfish—
Told that I was perfect, told that I was complete dirt—
II.
That I was unlovable; I have been left many times, once at a
McDonald’s in North Carolina with three tiny children and no
Wallet for more than an hour—have been told I wouldn’t
Even be a good nanny, that I couldn’t do anything right, that
My PhD was wasted on me, my dissertation a fiction—so please
Forgive me telling you of my secret history—it has left me
Feeling ashamed, foolish, filled with shame, completely lost
In the universe—sometimes—so please forgive me as I blunder
My way back—my abuse was secret, no one else knew—there
Was always another woman waiting in the shadows, someone
Who could jump in one instant to fill my shoes—forgive me for
Being sometimes confused as I make my way back to belief,
To certainty, to a love that is whole and pure and new and true—
That is what I am learning for the first time in my life with you.
Another strength is the way her poems seem to be in dialogue with one another, often printed on facing pages. I was impressed by the clarity and intentionality of her poem order, so that her collection unfolds like a good novel. In our conversation, I learned this is called the theory of adjacency, something she has studied and published scholarly articles. Her PhD dissertation was on the Irish novelist Elizabeth Bowen, and she published as an award-winning biography of her, How Will the Heart Endure: Elizabeth Bowen and the Landscape of War. Currently, Bryant is a Lecturer in the Writing Program at Wellesley College. (https://www.heathercorballybryant.com/)
Lastly, note how this poem, “A Fire Storm” (which put me in mind of Yeats, one of her influences), centers you as you read it.
When I think of the words, they fly through
My mind, electric and crackling, one after
The other, a story begins to come to me,
Best as I can see, sitting in this quiet space,
I imagine a whole world, people marching
Through it—and I begin to know what I was
Put here on earth to do—after so many false
Starts, I was to tell the story right from my
Heart, all those years of wandering have
Brought me back to where I wanted to be
For the first time—in my mind now,
I know which way I need to turn.
This is a poet I heartily recommend, especially during these isolating and difficult pandemic times. This
book in particular will make a great gift for any one whose life is getting rearranged, or who just wants to enjoy superb poetry. As in her “Queen Anne Cherries,” you may find yourself wanting:
… to taste, to enjoy, to savor,
To linger over as we feel just who
We might be on our way to becoming.
Heather Corbally Bryant’s tenth book, Orchard Days, also by Finishing Line Press, is forthcoming in mid-June. Pre-orders are encouraged.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Gay Guard-Chamberlin is a Chicago poet and artist. Her first volume of poems, Red Thread Through a Rusty Needle, was published by New Wind Publishing in 2019. As often as possible, she performs and teaches as Sibling Revelry with her sister, Anara Guard. https://newwindpublishing.com/book/red-thread-through-a-rusty-needle
Posted May 1, 2021
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When The Virus Came Calling: COVID-19 Strikes America
Edited By Thelma T. Reyna
Golden Foothills Press, 2020
267 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-0996963275
Review by Michael Escoubas
“In order to write about life,” Earnest Hemmingway once wrote, “You must first live it,” I thought about that quote as I prepared to review When the Virus Came Calling. Indeed,the poets whose work appears within these pages, understand Hemingway’s famous dictum.Editor Thelma T. Reyna’s thoughtfully arranged anthology offers valuable perspectives on the viral scourge which has gripped America and the world, like the tentacles of a giant squid.
Limiting the anthology’s scope to the American experience, 45 distinguished authors have produced a compelling collection coalescing around four dimensions: Invasion, Seclusion,Introspection and Realizations.
Invasion (January/February)
Gerda Govine Ituarte’s poem, “Bloom” is the perfect lead-off poem in that it asks an important question: What can poets do to make the world a better place?” While this question is always relevant, it seems especially so in the present moment. Ituarte’s desire is to:
let each of us as poets create
words that feed our souls
free our minds make us thankful
to be alive
In my personal life I have always desired to be a “difference-maker.” One of the ways we poets CAN make a difference is by facing issues head-on. Michael Haussler’s “This year’s Corona COVID-19,” does this. He’s been here before: “I went through this twice. / Fifty-seven Sixty-eight /A million dead each.” // Speaking from experience, Haussler knows what this latest invasion is about:
How quickly distance
Becomes the new social norm.
Jacked into our screens.
If the Earth itself could weigh-in about the origins of Covid-19, what would she say? “Mother Earth Speaks,” by Judie Rae, skillfully uses personification to shake this reviewer to the core of his being. Chronicling the many blessings given to mankind . . . then reviewing what mankind (“I”) have donewith those blessings . . . suffice to say, I came away with a fresh perspective.
Seclusion (March)
Throughout this section, I was struck by the variety of responses to the hard reality of seclusion. With the world quiet, Michael Haussler’s personal essay reflects on Rachel Carson’s environmental masterpiece, Silent Spring. Carson, whose writing ability is equal to that of many poet’s, inspiresHaussler to see the world’s beauty in fresh ways. The pandemic “pause” makes such “seeing” possible.He points out that the pandemic is not the only enemy we face.
Teachers write about relationships with their students and the challenges seclusion poses for education. These poems and essays capture something special about courage, perseverance, and love.
“Cold Vivid State I,” by GT Foster, lashes out at the social, economic, and spiritual suffering conferred on California when Governor Gavin Newsome shut down the state. I read this poem as applicable nationwide.
“Waiting It Out” by Martina Gallegos, does a good job of expressing the frustration shared by many:
In a dimmed-out living room
I can hear the rain outside
This goddamn virus
is making me feel sad
Staying home in self-isolation
depression is lurking in
Two long weeks cooped up inside
with only short visits to the garden
I try to tune out my feelings
and listen to the friendly rain
so I can keep at least mildly sane
till the virus can infect itself dead
Introspection (April/May)
Moving into the front lines of the battle, many poems describe conditions in stark military terms. The horror of “makeshift morgues,” bodies “wrapped in shrouds,” and a world “populated by spacemen in white hazmat suits,” form the landscape.
Nancy Shiffrin’s poem “My Doctor Calls” captures part of the collateral damage inherent in lockdowns:
he wants to know
why I missed my last appointment
do I have a fever
shortness of breath
gastric distress
muscle spasms
dizziness
do I need a video conference
In this section the poets look death in the face, contemplate the innumerable frustrations of lockdowns, as they invite readers to join them together, watching the world pass in plague-time. Your reviewer came away from this section feeling encouraged and supported through shared experiences.
Realizations (June/July)
Though not specifically stated, I definitely sensed strains of Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are ‘a Changin’ as I identified with this last section of poems. Why would I channel one of the most influential poets/anthems of the 1960s? If this anthology does anything, it has challenged the way this reviewer thinks. New thinking, new realizations are hard to come by. The decade of the 1960s, dealing as it did, with war, assassinations, and racial tensions signaled that life in this country would never be, could never be, the same again. 2020 seems to have compacted a decade of change within the confines of a few short months.
On July 30, 2020, John Lewis wrote an essay for the NY Times. Thelma T. Reyna uses excerpts from Lewis’ essay in her poem “Panoply of Gods.” Reyna chose these lines as the poem’s epigraph:
“Answer the highest call of your heart and stand up for
what you truly believe . . . the way of peace, the way
of love and nonviolence is the more excellent way.”
Through the work of dedicated poets like those whose work appears in When the Virus Came Calling, the country we love will surely find that elusive more excellent way.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER:Michael Escoubas is editor, contributing poet, and staff book reviewer for Quill and Parchment, a 19-year-old literary and cultural arts online poetry journal.This review was originally posted onQuill and Parchment.
Posted May 1, 2021
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Running Aground
By Elizabeth Joy Levinson
Finishing Line Press, 2020
34 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1646622795
Review by Aleca Black
Elizabeth Joy Levinson’s Running Aground captivates from the opening line of “I am sorry I have existed, taken up space, opened my mouth and spoken/or opened my mouth and did not speak.” Her mingled defiance and apology set the tone for a visceral world of heat, bugs, rootlessness, and splintered family ties.
Perhaps the most compelling narratives in the chapbook are Levinson’s sense of isolation and difficult relationship with her family. Through poems like “The Fire-Eater”, “Homecoming”, and “My Father’s Hands”, Levinson describes a larger-than-life father figure who pulls his family from town to town, expectant of their attention but giving little in return. At the same time, Levinson seems to grieve the fact that her father ‘runs aground’ in the penultimate work of the book, “Recovering”, describing with apparent sadness her father’s journey “where he sees no one/neither is he seen.” This invisibility is something that Levinson ascribes to herself earlier in the book, recounting “how easy to pretend/you were a song story/when there was no place/your story belonged” in the poem “Things no one told my parents and, also, why I got a D in geography”. She describes feeling like her environment is “the silver ball/of a pinhead”, rather than a magnet guiding her home. Even siblings are regarded like strangers-“my gaze sweeps over my sisters/but holds onto the landscape.” The ocean permeates their wanderings, the only constant in her life. The isolation and transience that Levinson describes weaves its way through each poem, highlighting the struggle between feeling defiantly separate from those around you and still yearning for acceptance.
The ocean, its inhabitants, and the natural world are another trope within the book. In her second poem, “The portrait of an addict as the elements”, Levinson effectively twists each element of fire/water/earth/air into the experience of addiction within the body. This use of the elements highlights an underlying theme; the role of the natural in our lives, from inescapable insects to the unstoppable force of a hurricane. As Levinson holds a degree in biology, it is not surprising that her creative eye also captures the minutia of her environment. Her descriptions draw the reader in, lulled by rocking waves and warm, sleepy afternoons, while still reminding them of the power and death ever-present in the world around them.
As an amateur reviewer, I feel unqualified to offer deep literary insights into Running Aground. All I can tell you is how it made me feel- swept away to a hot Florida day, muggy under the shade of scraggly trees, rooted in a sense of unbelonging yet tied inescapably to the sea.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Aleca Black is a lifelong reader and has recently begun dabbling in poetry. She has a BA in English from the College of William and Mary.
Posted April 1, 2021
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I Have Grown Two Hearts
By Zöe Sîobhan Howarth-Lowe
The Hedgehog Poetry Press, 2020
36 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1913499105
Review by Tina Cole
In, I have Grown Two Hearts, Zoe Howarth-Lowetakes us on a journey through motherhood and beyond. These are poems that bring tenderness into close focus alongside the roller coaster demands of everyday parenting. We grow alongside her children, beginning in an I.V.F clinic and traveling the gamut of mothering through her experiences and back to being a child herself. These are honest poems, with the skill to effectively recreate her world, they speak of love laid bare and the reality of balancing parenting demands. They are frank and never sentimental. She so aptly describes the initial experience in, Pregnancy:
constantly doing two things at once
creating a baby
and everything else.
Howarth-Lowe uses rich language and draws upon a wide emotional range to focus the various perspectives and experiences of motherhood. The voice is strong and clear with no variance in tone from the dedication she feels to her tasks, she speaks of joys and tribulations with equal vigour. The different forms of poems keep the collection light and interesting. As a reader you are drawn along with themes about the developing child through early motherhood / trying to get a child to sleep as in, Lullaby:
tiny newborn
we jig along the corridor, whirling and twirling ……
…. midnight, each moment jinks along like the banjo string plucking.
Then to the intimate comfort of a family sharing a bed, the jumble tangle of bodies and tender moments in, Little Souls:
A nest of parents and siblings
There are four of us here
untidy.
To managing the tantrums of a five year old in; You Don’t Fit the Way You Used To,
I am unable to explain my inadequacies
to your nearly five year old stamping foot.
…… I cannot carry you home
These poems have a fine, careful, boldness that anyone who has been through motherhood can instantly identify with. There is longing, there is frustration, there is anxiety, but there is never anger or regret.
The collection contains poems covering topics that you might find in any, ‘Guide to’. The wonder of new life, the terrible sadness of miscarriage, sleepless nights, the strong emotional bond between parent and child, the need to let go and how to manage the everyday small, issues with tolerance and sensitivity.
It is also interspaced with poems about her life in general, their movement to the north of England as in, Northbound. Also, a poem about the horrors of birthing long ago in, The American Museum, with the strong lines:
willing the head and shoulders
of this child to erupt from her
….. struggle and kick;
elbow its own way free..
and two poems about her relationship with her father which I found, particularly moving;
Going Back -
Hand in hand /in silence / …and we remembered
Image on a Brass Lion -
for a second/ I see with your eyes/ and I become the father/ gripping his daughter’s hand.
Placed at the end of the collection these allow the reader to fully reflect on the child – parent circle.
These are poems that roll the words of parenthood around in the mouth like marbles, they talk in the plain language of feelings, sometimes witty and sometimes deeply moving. Zoe writes with a conviction and vividness that so effectively draws us into her world. They seem effortless in their simple style and yet have lines that go right to the heart. A must read for any prospective parent/grandparent or godparent.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Tina Cole lives in the U.K. near the border with Wales. She is a retired Headteacher, (School Principal) and has worked as a consultant with schools and Universities. She is now a poet, reviewer and leads workshops with both adults and children and organises and annual children’s poetry competition (currently stalled due to the pandemic), yppc2019.org. Herpublished poems have appeared in U.K. magazines such as, Brittle Star,Creative Countryside,Poetry Café,Mslexia, Aesthetica, The Guardian newspaper and in many poetry collections. In 2021 her second collection will be published by Yaffle Press. She is currently undertaking a Master’s degree in creative writing at Manchester University.
Posted April 1, 2021
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poetry of the engineer
By Curt Vevang
Self-published, 2021
79 Pages
ISBN-13: 979-8-69-705324-9
Review by Cassandra McGovern
A stunningly colorful cover drew me into Curt’s narrative book, “poetry of the engineer,” a photo of “The vintage steam engine circa 1900 used for many years to raise and lower the Tower Bridge in London.” Curt underscores in his bio, “Yes, I am an engineer. Who else would put a steam engine on the cover of a poetry book.” Curt’s “Forward” further sets a wry tone: “Engineers are considered left brain creatures, analytical and methodical. That’s why we are called propeller heads and wear white socks....Conversely, those that are the “more creative types”, like poets are considered to be right brained. They wear sandals and no socks.”
Many poems are rhymed couplets in iambic pentameter, others are in various length stanzas, as well as a villanelle for the Cubbies: At Wrigley Field. Curt’s poems are witty, poignant, many last lines quite insightful, often a twist on ways of thinking that I hadn’t considered.
In I Didn’t Know How Bad I Had It, he narrates boyhood memories on the North Side of Chicago living above two different taverns his first five years, one having “A brown bear on a leash would/dance at the juke box to “You Are My Sunshine.” At another bar, The Television Inn, he recalls they had the first TV in the neighborhood and that he cried when Whitey the bookie “was cuffed and loaded into a paddy wagon.” These fine details in many of the poems makes the reader feel present, yet back in time within Curt’s memories.
In The Spirit of a Norwegian Village, I envisioned the author’s relatives in a lovely town in Norway, with its Lutheran church, and “the joyous day when King Olaf stopped by,’” yet surprisingly ends with inviting the reader to “Stop in for a cup next time you’re close by,/Route 71, Norway, Illinois.”
Several black and white illustrations further complement poems. In Mighty Megan at the Bat, three photos show a six-year-old as she hits the ball, running to several bases: “Megan heads to first, she takes it in stride,/with a little smirk that’s so hard to hide...Megan reaches the bag with time to spare/two steps ahead of the ball getting there.”
My favorite poem, Shades of Grey, accompanied by an illustration in grey shading, relays in four stanzas a close-up portrait of a seaman: “The visor of his leather cap hides much/of his furrowed brow./Steel wool eyebrows head off in every direction.” Again, the details give a feeling that Curt knows the character well.
A fine collection of thoughtful and fun poetry. Highly recommended.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Cassandra McGovern retired as a reference librarian and began writing poetry and memoir. The latter have appeared in several journals, including The Massachusetts Review and OxMag. Two anthologies include thirteen poems: Five Poets Write about Aging, Illness, and Mortality, 2011, and Fresh Pipes, 2013. Additional poems have appeared in Atomic Press,Olentangy Review, and Not Very Quiet. Besides collecting and teaching about Illuminated Manuscripts, she is currently writing a poetry chapbook of fictional families in Medieval England.
Posted April 1, 2021
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Dead Shark on the N Train
By Susana H. Case
Broadstone Books, 2020
85 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1937968663
Review by Mike Freveletti
With Susana H. Case’s book, Dead Shark on the N Train, there’s brevity and substance. It has the ‘do this, do that’ poetic device made famous by Frank O’Hara and right on the next page the poet gives us a poem that would make the Surrealists proud. There is so much to love about this collection in its ties to New York City across some of the pages and its nods to names like Otis Redding and T.S. Eliot but that is not all, dear readers. Can you guess what was tucked right into the middle section of this collection? Poetry written as a response to small miniature crime scenes depicted with dolls. Yeah, that’s how eclectic this collection was. And yes, I understand you might be puzzled but let’s get to it.
The first section of three separate sections breaking up the collection is titled, “Living Dolls''. I was struck by the poem “The Unpublished Poems of Marilyn Monroe” which is an incredible title and one of my favorite poems in the entire collection. “Marilyn in a striped swimsuit, Reading Ulysses'' conjured up, of course, the photo of Monroe reading Ulysses, a book I love. Why take a photo of Monroe reading one of the most difficult books of all time? What was the point? The poet weighs in, “she wanted blondes to be thought sexy and astute/she wanted herself to be thought astute”. The poem is about self-image, it’s about Monroe, it’s about what the public thought about her and how she wanted to be taken seriously. We even get an appearance in the poem by Arthur Miller, right as he was defying the House Committee on Un-American Activities. The poem had me wishing I could see if Monroe had annotated her copy of Ulysses.
Section two, titled “Crime Scenes”, is by far my favorite section. We’re told on the title page for this section the following, “after Frances Glessner Lee, creator of the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, three-dimensional crime scenes made in the 1940s and 1950s and used for teaching criminal investigation.” “Laundry Line”, written with the photo labeled Scene 2 Attic goes, “In the attic, love letters scatter/like dead leaves/beneath a woman’s dangling feet/it’s Christmas Eve”, sounds a bit like the start to a Patricia Highsmith novel, doesn’t it? That’s the first stanza and the bookend is, “the snow is muddled on the outside path/the door is open/looking closely, her face is scuffed,” The word choice is spare and it feels as though you’re reading a crime scene report written by an overly poetic detective who is sure to hear about their flowery language in the morning from a superior.
Section three, “Storm Clouds”, has a few poems with one word titles with the best being, “Hair”, inspired by a Jack Gilbert poem according to the poet’s notes. “I’d like to think you kept/those threads, the way someone in love/might have sealed them in a locket”, has two people who are clearly no longer in love. Alas, the final stanza illuminates the reality, “Of course you didn’t keep my hair/why would you want to do such a thing?” Hair can be more than just hair and just like anything else, it can be imbued with meaning. The poet shows how easily poetry can turn the quotidian into something truly magnificent.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez makes an appearance and so does Werner Herzog. There are so many different things going on in this collection, like a restaurant with a huge menu of questionable items. In here though? They all work together. I don’t often finish reading a book of poetry and say to myself, man, that was just fun to read. This was fun. Did I mention that it has a Bloody Mary recipe? To the book and the poet I say, cheers.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Mike Frevelettiis a poet, short fiction writer and occasional dabbler in literary criticism. His work has appeared both online and in print.
Posted April 1, 2021
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How Do We Create Love
By Michael H. Brownstein
Independently published, 2019
28 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1703570014
Review by Jacqueline Stearns
How Do We Create Love, is a visual feast for the eyes. The text is accompanied by gorgeous mural like photographs textured so the reader can almost see paint applications. My favorites are gigantic trees arching up into majestic dark blue skies.
How Do We Create Love, is one long prose poem, that tells the story of two couples, one earthly, one magical. The lives of the earthbound couple are depicted in chronological order. The young husband treks along the banks of the Missouri river, in search of a Christmas gift for his wife. He discovers a flower and an agate. He returns home to their woodland cottage. Husband and wife talk about their love. Hugs are enough for them. This couple doesn't need anything beyond each other.
The wife finds joy in nature. Singing birds. A coyote finding its way to the river for a drink.
The man and woman live out the seasons of their lives.
When they reach old age, they take in a young boy, who is lost in a winter storm. When the boy reaches adulthood, he travels to the Germanic forests. The inhabitants are starving. The young man conjures up a tree that provides sustenance. He marries a beautiful Viking princess. The young couple traverse the world, giving people music, trees, and food.
The symbolism of Christmas and the majesties of nature are skillfully interwoven. Water in the forms of snow and a mighty river dictate living conditions for all forest citizens. Humans live alongside deer, possum, raccoons, birds, and coyotes. A boy appears on Christmas Eve, and grows up to be a savior. The tree he creates for the people of the Germanic forests is akin to the tree of life.
I like this book’s depiction of marriage. Commitment is tied to the true meaning of love. What are values? What really matters? For the earthbound couple, the bane of their lives is connected to the sanctity of their relationship. Expensive presents mean nothing to them. For them meaning is found in a hug or meaningful glance. For the young man and his princess, giving to others is what brings them joy.
How Do We Create Love, has elements of a fairy tale. Love, magic, a lovely princess, and happily ever after. The book also has a folk hero. The young man is reminiscent of Paul Bunyan.
This work is a cautionary tale as well. Sometimes beauty needs to be sacrificed to practicality. While in the Germanic forests, the young man cuts down an oak tree, which is turned into firewood. He creates a fir, whose branches contain food.
How Do We Create Love, is a reverent testimony to the power of simple, romantic love.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Jacqueline Stearns holds a bachelor's degree in Mass Media Communications from William Paterson College now University. She is honored to have been published in Highland Park Poetry and several Montclair Write Group Anthologies.
Posted April 1, 2021
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Pictures, Postcards, Letters
By Lennart Lundh
Kelsay Books, 2020
81 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1950462-93-3
Review by Lynne Viti
In this moment in history, public poetry is ascendant. From newcomer Amanda Gorman to established poets like Louise Gluck, Ilya Kaminsky, Richard Blanco, Joy Harjo and Jericho Brown, poets are getting their work out to everyone, not just to the academy. Poetry is everywhere, with Zoom, Crowdcast and similar platforms temporarily supplanting the pre-pandemic venues for readings and poetry slams—community centers, houses of worship, libraries, classrooms, farmers markets, art galleries, food coops, pubs and the public square. Lennart Lundh’s Pictures, Postcards, Letters deploys free verse poetry as well as rich, dense prose poems, some comprising three sentences, others filling two or three pages, to convey deep truths about his life and the lives—and deaths-- of those around him. Both challenging and –with a bit of work—accessible, this writing speaks powerfully to the social and political issues of our day.
This collection, Lundh’s twenty-first, begins with a look back to the poet’s youth, moves on to snapshots of midlife, and concludes dramatically with the honest summing up that is part of aging. Lundh frequently writes persona poems: in “I broke a heel,” a gay man on holiday in France with his partner breaks a high heel that is repaired by a religious French cobbler. In “A terrible week here” a woman ambulance driver writes home about knitting during a lull in the shelling and shooting, just before her colleague is shot dead by a sniper. He alternates long, free verse poems with abrupt, compact paragraphs reporting on the range of human rituals: courtship, young love, marriage; a vigil for a fellow soldier who stepped on a land mine and “kept screaming until the morphine set in or he bled out.”
The three sections of this collection give readers minimal orientation: “In a Box in a Drawer,” “Wrapped in Old Ribbon,” and “From the Front.” It’s often a mystery as to who is speaking, where the story is set, and when. This demands some work on the part of the reader; one cannot just glide through these pages easily. But the work of rereading and discerning the time-place coordinates in each chunk of text is worth it, drawing the reader deeply into the emotional life of the poet.
My particular favorites are Section II’s poems of love, scenes lived and later reconstructed by the older speaker. In Pillow Talk, the words "they were talking" begins with “they were talking as true friends do when they trust each other” in stanza 1, and reprises that first line later, with “they were talking as two people do when they feel safe/ in their love for each other.” In “A couple seated near me,” the poet observes a couple kissing across a bistro table and is reminded of a day long past when his partner “stained your new cardigan with a cheap Cabernet,” and they hurried off to make love in their hotel room. These details are so real and so personal; the reader feels drawn into the speaker’s intimate space. Three Marriages charts a love affair that develops into marriage and soon thereafter, the birth of a daughter, then a son. They carry on even though “everything around them has screamed in flames to the ground.” Juxtaposed with that union is a trip across New Mexico towards san Diego, the assassination of Martin L. Luther King Jr., and an imminent departure to the speaker’s army duty in Vietnam. The last section of the poem chronicles an extramarital affair and its ashes; the speaker continues to write to the woman, the letters go unanswered, and he keeps her photograph in his wallet because when he remembers it, “it makes him feel good.” This is a man who finds it hard to completely let go of the past.
In these snapshots or imagined letters, the speaker’s identity may change from poem to poem, but the underlying focus throughout is humanity at its most fragile, imperfect, and sometimes tragically impotent. The soldier endures the war and loses his buddies, viewing the conflict as increasingly pointless. The adulterous lover learns that love is fleeting, and he is weighed down by the grind of daily life (“Eventually his wife forgave him. He works with machines now.”) The country presumably Vietnam, “here is amazing in its possibly infinite beauty…Except the parts we’ve bombed and burned the shit out of and pissed on” with Agent Orange, which the speaker calls “ misty Orange Crush,” in the sarcastic vernacular of young soldiers.
Near the end of the book, this old soldier/poet/lover, in 12 June 2016: Again We Get It Wrong, kneels in the garden, clearing out the Rose of Sharon seedlings with arthritic hands, pondering the loss of life in the Charleston church shooting of 2015 and the day’s news of a mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub: “down in Orlando/the clean-up crews aren’t even starting to get ready.” He contemplates this carnage on American soil, asking, “Why does the wrongness of this take forever to process?” Here, in the twenty-first century lexicon of recovery, the poet fuses a moral judgment of actions clearly “wrong” with the desire to heal, through “process.” It’s a tall order.
The final poem, There was a die-in begins in the immediate present, where university students are demonstrating against violence, and returns to a vivid, searing memory of “the carnage on the flight deck” when helicopters brought those with ‘real blood from real wounds bathing real bodies, the/efforts at triage and the clergy trying to at least save souls…” Perplexed, he observes that all this “never made the news until just now.” His stoicism in the face of suffering does not detract from his empathy for those who suffer, in the Vietnam era, and today.
In sum, this book is the product of the poet’s “processing” of trauma, his brave confronting of the violence and loss in everyday life and in war and domestic terrorism, and the repetitive cycles of conflict and loss of life that our society experiences. It’s not an easy read, but in confronting the damage done, Lundh produces truth in his writing, and as Keats reminded us, truth is beauty. In that sense, this book achieves both, and bears reading aloud and rereading.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Lynne Viti's most recent book is Dancing at Lake Montebello (Apprentice House Press 2020). A lecturer emerita at Wellesley College, she has published two chapbooks, Baltimore Girls (2017) and The Glamorganshire Bible (2018) from Finishing Line Press. She blogs at lynneviti.wordpress.com
Posted March 1, 2021
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Becoming Vulnerable
By Joshua Corwin
Baxter Daniels Ink Press/International Word Bank, 2020
72 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-0996392778
Review by Mike Freveletti
The question has been asked before but the answer, if you get a genuine one, is different for each writer. Here it is: why do we write? Joshua Corwin’s book, Becoming Vulnerable, has a dedication to his grandpa, Mert, right in the introduction and it indicates that his grandpa’s last words to him were don’t ever stop writing. I’m sure that message is what propelled the poet from word to word in his honest collection of poems.
One thing you notice very quickly in Corwin’s poems is the varied experimentation: enjambment, the use of one word lines, the fractured stanzas. In the poem Little Ensos, these choices are center stage, “I can’t lift/my head/up/out/of/this/sink.” Notice the break of the lines? The drama of letting those words essentially fall off after one another? The poet also does a wonderful job with white space on the page and uses it to perpetuate the human drama in these poems. For me, it’s a skill that I think is incredibly hard to implement properly and at times can look lazy or forced. Not for Corwin though, he uses it wonderfully throughout.
On the opposite end of that spectrum in terms of form is the poem Hello Grandpa, which startled me at first with the presentation of so many words on the page. With this poem though I felt like I was opening the journal of a person I didn’t know. It was intensely personal, “God graced me with sobriety on August 13, 2015”, and other lines like, “I didn’t know why I was smoking & doing what I was doing/this substance, no longer sustenance for me.” Those are serious moments of internal inquiry and Corwin seems to be working those moments out on the page. I appreciated his willingness to share.
My favorite poem in the collection, Memory Smile, is a bit of a treatise on mental disorder combined with drug dependency. It is both beautifully written and stylistically simple for the subject matter. “His mind wouldn’t let him/he couldn’t say the words/when he tried to vocalize them/his mind fought back.” There the poet references a friend who struggled with addiction and mental disorders and how difficult it can be to get in the right headspace to feel better and reclaim your mind and body. I won’t spoil the poem but there is a line at the end, “so why not just smile?”, that hit home in the face of any difficult time in life. Why not just smile? Does the alternative to happiness help anything? Questions I asked myself while reading this one.
Another treat in this collection is Corwin’s photos of his own paintings and his own photographs. In addition to poetry, the author seems well equipped in both of those mediums. For what it’s worth, I’d happily flip through a photobook done by the poet if he ever decided to do so. A wide artistic breadth is on display in this collection that I’m sure many readers will appreciate.
A poem towards the end of the collection called, The Gate Is Not A Gate, felt for me like a modern haiku. “Until it speaks/until you don’t say/your mind is shut”, and then we get a break before it ends, “the gate is not a gate.” Corwin makes it clear that so often what is left unsaid is as important as what is said. A fine, thought-provoking collection.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Mike Frevelettiis poet, short fiction writer and occasional dabbler in literary criticism. His work has appeared both online and in print.
Posted March 1, 2021
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Haiku Rose
By Colleen McManus Hein
Self-Published, 2019
225 Pages
ISBN: B081DGC18X
Review by Hope Atlas
As I started to read Haiku Rose, I was intrigued by its unique format. While it feels like a romance novel in many ways, the author lets the main character, Rose, tell her story using original haiku, poetry and introspective diary entries. As the author was weaving the romantic storyline, I found myself waiting to see when the next haiku would appear. Each haiku presented Rose’s life in a different way – sometimes profound, at other times silly. The author captured the beauty of haiku - its succinctness, yet ability to convey complicated emotions and observations. She deftly used haiku in her novel as mini-illustrations of the Truth that made up Rose’s life. Reading the haiku in the novel encouraged me to revisit haiku and actually try my hand at it! Rose’s daily entries were an effective technique to reveal her inner thoughts and feelings and to maintain my interest. Rose’s journal writing inspired me to peer into my own memories, hopes, aspirations, regrets and feelings of loss.
While the plot carries some predictability, I found the characters engaging. The author expertly developed Rose’s many faces - the girlfriend, the trusting friend, the daughter and the writer. As I read the novel, I was pulled into the main character’s life and how she would fare.
The sudden loss of her mother is a common thread throughout and helps carry her through times of joy and sadness. She speaks often of the desire to plant a garden like the one her mother had – thus keeping the theme of renewal in the forefront of the novel.
Her use of haiku elevated the novel to a level of creativity rarely seen in novels. The author skillfully crafted the emotional layers of friendship, loss, grief and renewal. Her theme of nature is powerful. The garden and the emotional impact it has on the main character reminds us of the interconnectedness our lives have with nature. These universal themes open the novel to a wide audience. Indeed, as I continued to read Haiku Rose, I was moved to take out my journal and write about my life observations and my own journey.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Hope Atlas has a master’s in reading education and has been published in multiple literary publications. In May 2020, her book My Upside-Down World, Journaling Through Unique Quotes and Prompts debuted. www.quotehope.com.
Posted March 1, 2021
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Porch Swing Rhyme
By Lavern Spencer McCarthy
Self-Published, 2019
64 Pages
ISBN-13: 9780359975556
Review by Curt Vevang
Porch Swing Rhyme is a pleasant collection of rhyming poetry that should thrill the hearts of the rhyming community. A title such as Porch Swing Rhyme would lead us to believe that this 62 page book would provide us with rhyming poems that we could leisurely and enjoyably read while gliding back and forth on a porch swing. It does not mislead, it is indeed such a book.
These poems are not profound or difficult to read, just comfortable, feel good, reminiscent poetry. With chapters covering Rural Poems of Nature, Back in the Day, Country Critters, and Country Folks we know we are about to take a step back in time, to a quieter gentler place. Many of the poems in fact combine a delicate balance of all four, nature, olden times, and country critters and folks. For example consider these snippets from:
On Silent Feet.
There might be coyotes I must greet,
their shadows, gray from winter's chill.
Wild creatures mostly are discrete.
My feral friends deserve a treat.
If I can help them out, I will.
At night they creep on silent feet.
and from Coyote Songs
Coyotes wail
a lively tale
that gives my heart a thrill
of days replete
with green mesquite,
bluebonnets on the hill.
There was a day when all poetry rhymed. Today rhyming poetry is often snubbed, yet many still enjoy it. For them, as well as myself, this book contains a wealth of rhyme.
Porch Swing Rhymeis close to a textbook on the various forms that rhyming poems can take.Instead of relying on just one or two different rhyme schemes the poetry in this book uses a myriad of the most popular rhyme schemes. For example, you will find poems written with:
aabcbcaa
aba aba aba aba aba abaa
abab bcbc cdcd dede eaea
aabbccddeeff
abcb defe ghih
abab cdcd efef ghgh
While rhyming poetry is not for everybody, it is well suited to a porch swing. So if you are into rhyme or just curious as to how many ways rhyme can be used I suggest you take a look at this book.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Curt B. Vevang is active in the Chicago area poetry scene. He has published three poetry books, a scant bagatlle, the nature of things and poetry as we like it. He fourth book is poetry of the engineer.
Posted March 1, 2021
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Central Air
By Mike Puican
Northwestern University Press, 2020
80 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-0-8101-4207-7
Review by Carol L. Gloor
Mike Puican’s book Central Air relies on sequences of images, rather than a narrative framework, within most of the poems. These sequences are always full of surprise, sometimes verging on magical realism. These surprises often work well, as in the poem “Man Digging a Sidewalk,” which is a miscellaneous, but interesting, catalog, of people on the sidewalk, including a teenager walking her “chihuahua dressed/as a honeybee,” and then the dog turns to the poet and says “Don’t fuck with me. I’m capable/of anything. I am boundless,” a surprising speech for a little dog. The whole poem “Unbridled,” tells of a fry cook dealing with many customers, but both the fry cook and the customers are all horses or colts, which makes for some surprising sequences, like “. . . A team/of colts, who are also graduate students, / exchange tips on how to locate hotel/ rooms rented by the hour.” In the first poem of the book, “The Lawyer Says,” the images of wish and reality are suddenly broken because “a lion enters/the courtroom.” So the unexpected, at its best, keeps us looking at physical reality in new ways.
This is not to say that this technique is always successful. Sometimes the strange images seem put there just for shock value. In “Clark and Belmont Ghazal,” a people-watching poem, which first grabs us with its specific images, like three brothers turning on every faucet in the church bathroom and then sprinting for the door, a waitress who is philosophizing then experiences a plane which “flies in her left ear and out her cheek.” Or again, the poem “Fall,” at first a lovely poem of rain, trees and hidden secrets, gets lost in the line “I watch a jet float through an el train.” The poet generally walks a careful line with the imagistic, non-narrative poems, but sometimes steps over that line.
Beyond form, Central Air deals with the universal themes of place, family, work, God and spirituality in complex and original ways. Of course the place is Chicago, and the city is both grit and beauty. In the poem “Chicago,” the city is made of “car alarms” and “Cigarettes/in a doorway.” But in “Tequila and Steve,” a love poem of sorts, the grit and beauty mix easily to end the poem:
The scents of fried eggs
and just-cut lilacs filled
the air while the back
of her neck and a can of beer
created a near-perfect tranquility.
The place poems decrease as the book moves on into the other themes, sometimes in “I” poems, where the poet speaks directly, sometimes in third person poems, in which the poet observes others, and sometimes in combined form. The poet’s father emerges as a somewhat relaxed figure, but also a worker and problem solver, revealing the poet’s complex love for him. The poem “Joke,” which is not really about the poet’s father, opens with “The one Dad told . . .. /A dog walks into a bar and orders a beer”. In “Drying the Dishes,” Mother wants to work harder, but Dad puts his hand on the poet’s arm and says “Let’s not get up today.” The poem “Settlement” describes how the poet and his father “would spend hours with our faces/inches apart fixing a sink, installing/a ceiling fan.” In the wonderful poem “When He’s Dead,” a catalog of the things the dead no longer have to worry about, the first lines ask, “why he never had the nerve to hug his father,’ and one can only wonder if this is the poet speaking of himself.
The family poems mix with the some of the strongest poems in the book, which concern the world of work and its hypocrisy, in a trenchant and sometimes totally laughable way. Again in the poem “Settlement,” the poet contrasts his father’s view of work, “He believed a person’s story /was told in their work,” with the poet’s own: “Most days my story’s told in dollar signs/I shake hands, smile, lie, and have lunch. /then am lied straight back to.” In “Why I’m in Marketing,” advertising becomes completely laughable:
The three-story woman in a negligee was my idea. It stopped traffic
but no one bought the oatmeal . . ..
We’re not selling breakfast,
we’re selling escape. Everyone pretends to write it down.
The unreality of the poet’s work in marketing comes home again in the poem “30 Seconds,” “It doesn’t have to make sense; it just has to sell product,” and “Dryer sheets become spring rain, ready-to-bake/ desserts are cookies in the oven at Grandma’s.”
Interspersed with the work poems, and often combined with them, are images of God, spirituality and religion. The poet has little respect for religion as such. In “Abandoned Church,” the poem personae leans against the stone wall, lights the day’s first cigarette and listens to a restless wind that is definitely “Not God’s voice.” And in “The Magi Ask for Directions” the three wise men are told first to “Turn right at the Olive Garden,” and are then led through a series of commercial landmarks that end with the admonishment “You can’t miss it. / It’s just beyond Land’s End.”
But religion is not God for the poet, and God keeps turning up in unexpected, and expected, places, in many different guises. In “Friday Night Poker,” God can’t help from loving everyone,” and everyone becomes “like babies, unjudged.” In the poem “Here,” everyone is doing the best they can, including “God in heaven, / silent as it is, is doing the best it can.” This clearly is the voice of longing, of wanting to know a loving God, or at least a God who pays attention. The last stanza of the poem “Loved One,” a visit to a graveyard, is really a prayer for that kind of God:
Let there be a God that sees this.
Then a light, a grieving, a swatch of childhood,
Let there be a father, an affection that suffices.
Let there be a memory that finally,
irrevocably resolves, even as it is also capitulation.
Let there be someone who sees this.
Central Air is not for those who want narrative or progression, but for those who can let disparate images wash over them, for those who are open to surprise and amazing originality.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Carol L. Gloor’s poetry chapbook, Assisted Living, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2013, and her full length poetry collection, Falling Back, was published by WordPoetry in 2018. Her poems have been published in many journals and anthologies, most recently in Gyroscope, and she is a member of the Chicago poetry collective Egg Money Poets.
Posted March 1, 2021
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Dancing at Lake Montebello
By Lynne Viti
Apprentice House Press, Loyola University Maryland 2020
113 Pages
ISBN-13: 9-781627-202800
Review by Terry Loncaric
Lynne Viti snares the reader into the compelling layers and calculated nuances of poetry. Her latest collection of poems, Dancingat LakeMontebello, strikes that rare combination of evocative imagery, lyrical language, and potent themes. She has the capacity to delight and jar you in the immediacy of her narratives.
Viti's precision of language is evident in every line of every finely-crafted poem in her memoir-inspired collection. Viti's work is deeply introspective, yet a joy to read. These poems are clearly meant to be savored, mulled over, and reflected upon. Each reading of a Lynne Viti poem invites you to glean new meanings and discover fresh layers. The power of memory becomes crystal clear.
In "Biography," Viti exposes the stain of segregation, through the lens of a young woman growing up in the '60s in Baltimore, the most segregated Northern city. Viti was raised Catholic. During her life, she taught writing at Wellesley College and worked as a lawyer. She is the daughter of a tavern owner and school teacher. She captures some visceral memories in "Biography."
White girl, born in the city, grew up near the county line.
Catholic school, navy jumper, nuns in round white collars.
Negroes, only saw them when we went downtown,
on the streetcar -- after North Avenue when you looked around.
Viti bears witness with the grace of a poet and the brutal honesty of a memoirist. In our tumultuous times, this message seems less about the '60s than the scab of racism, which never seems to heal.
I breathed the air of segregation, taking it in,
hardly knowing how it worked in this border state city
of unstated rules, takeout only, segregated pools,
separate schools, public or private, secular or parochial.
Some of her poems are simply beautiful narratives. In "Matinee at the Shore," she shares a vivid childhood memory of sneaking candy into the movie theater with a surreptitious delight.
I followed DewAnn's long legs up the wooden staircase,
dragged my hand on rough painted wallboards as we went.
The candy bag bulged in my pocket.
Laughter met us at the landing.
"Labor Day" recalls a boating accident with haunting imagery. Viti skillfully juxtaposes softer images with the darker details of the event.
To say something went wrong that day
is to turn away from the sun on their faces,
the sun on gray water,
beer cans they drained, tossed overboard.
"I Can't Get No" describes with a tinge of wistfulness a basement party in which college friends flirted and danced to the sexy beat of the Rolling Stones. In the details of her narrative, Viti makes you remember your old crushes and sexual attractions.
you were the preppiest guy I knew.
I never knew anyone who
could dance like you, with such abandon.
It could be Mersey sound, blues beat, r&b.
You were an equal opportunity
music-loving dance machine.
In the same poem, the poet comes to realize, most friendships outlast the sexual attractions of our youth.
You were my friend, one who asked so little,
who made me laugh and shared
his cigarettes and his Scotch with me
his fake cynicism and his jokes.
You were never my boyfriend,
never my lover. You were
the companion who years later left a handwritten poem
rolled into my old typewriter,
blue-black ink, corrasable bond.
In "I Learned That Marilyn Had Died," Viti writes a poignant tribute to Marilyn, a free-spirited English teacher she met at the first school where she taught. Marilyn had a complicated life, grew up with an alcoholic father; she was once engaged, but she never married. Viti has regrets she lost touch with Marilyn, "one of those beloved teachers everyone remembers forever." She reflects on the fragility of life.
She had the saddest face even when she smiled,
black lashes against white skin.
Her dark wit made me laugh and wonder
really, what was so funny about what
was so sad. I wished I knew
what became of her, before
her short ticket was punched.
Often Viti mines poetry from the mundane. Like all great poets, she can capture and crystalize a moment, and then grasp its significance. The lovely images in "Last Sunday in July" linger in these simple lines. That last line slays me. It reads like a mantra.
Sun, then not-sun, clouds.
Then not clouds.
Warm, then not warm.
Not much to do save
listen to Bill Evans play the piano
wrestle with the crossword.
Turn off the phone. Dream.
A composite of life experiences, condensed into poems, Dancingat LakeMontebello is a substantial and enduring body of work. Lynne Viti captures with grit and grace the experiences that brought her full circle, through love and loss, social unrest and reconciliation. In its rhythms, Viti's poetry moves like a wave that keeps slapping you with its force, yet calms you in its serenity. Viti paints a landscape of emotional truth and intellectual depth. There is a cohesiveness in her storytelling that is never lost in the devices of poetry. Viti sharpens every one of her skills as a poet and academic to chisel lasting, precise, and beautiful life narratives.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Terry Loncaric, of Hampshire, Illinois, is the author of Crashing in Velvet for Finishing Line Press. Her poems have appeared locally, and nationally, on storefronts, newspapers, and anthologies. She has hosted many poetry events in the Chicago suburbs.
Posted February 1, 2021
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Decennia
By Jan Chronister
Truth Serum Press, 2019
156 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1925536980
Review by Carol L. Gloor
Jan Chronister’s book of poems,Decennia, is a journey through five decades of the poet’s life, from the 1950’s to the 1990’s, and through a changing world during that time. Each decade has its own section. From the publication credits at the end of the book, almost all of which are very recent, one wonders if these poems are primarily memory pieces written fairly recently, which is suggested the use of the past tense in many of them, or if they were written earlier and just now offered for publication. In the poem Thoughts on the Nomination of Brett Kavanaugh from the 1960’s section, she hints that she was writing poems early: “I had an angry heart /a city bus ride to college/ and a folder full of poems.”
Whether written then or now, poems traverse a landscape of alteration: of the body, of family, of gender relations. The poems are totally accessible and sometimes give the reader who lived through all or part of these decades a startling twinge of remembrance. In the 1950’s poem Self Portrait as Tea Kettle, she remembers how her father called her “Trixie/after my favorite cereal.” I lived through all these decades and fondly remember Trix as the cereal that always turned the milk orange. In the 1960’s section she notes “I am from a 60’s ranch house /built in a cornfield,” which certainly recalls the heedless growth of subdivisions during that time. On a more serious note, in the Brett Kavanaugh poem, in the 1960’s section, she recalls how women then always had to “Feel pretty/Feel important.” Similarly, in the 1970’s section, the poem Still in Alabama: recalls the still pervasive imposed impoverishment of African Americans, especially in the south, ending with the poignant lines “traces of cotton fluff/ catch on the roadside weeds.”
At best the poems focus on a specific event or object and use sensory images to evoke their meaning. For example, in the 1950’s section poem The Blues, the poet is going through drawers of old items and finds a piece of cloth she meant to somehow use and didn’t, but most importantly the smell of the cloth, “pine, touch of lake, tears” stunningly recalls the childhood moment when she saved the cloth. Similarly in Letter to Myself at Forty, she begins recalling many family vacations, both actual and dreamed of, then berates herself for not keeping an organized scrapbook as her sister does, and ends with finding a photo that both surprises her and absolves her from the roads not taken and from disorganization, a photo which “takes me back to that day/ in Tucson or Seattle/ when the four of us were still together.”
At worse the poet falls into the old trap of telling instead of showing. In I Never Eat Strawberry Sundaes, she recalls seeing her grandfather slaughter a pig in a scene awash with blood, and then being served ice cream with strawberry sauce, which sauce “pools in my mind,” a totally unneeded phrase because the rest of the poem and the title have already done the needed work of the poem. Or again, in Decorating Habits of the Male Sexual Predator she sustains a metaphor of comparing wallpaper to women, and uses strong verbs like “slaps” and “peels”, but then ends with the statement that this is how such a man “picks out his prey.” The ending is superfluous because the title, the sustained metaphor and the strong verbs have already gotten us there.
But these are small lapses in an otherwise satisfying trip through time. Does the poet grow and change? Yes, because by the 1990’s she confronts her own truths and the truth of inevitable final loss. In Car Crash and Three Minutes she movingly laments the death of a friend, and in All The Things I Did Not Mention she tells us “I never really believed in God” and “I also have sex with myself.”
Decennia is an easy read, and worthwhile one.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Carol L. Gloor’s poetry chapbook, Assisted Living, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2013, and her full length poetry collection, Falling Back, was published by WordPoetry in 2018. Her poems have been published in many journals and anthologies, most recently in Gyroscope, and she is a member of the Chicago poetry collective Egg Money Poets.
Posted February 1, 2021
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the samurai
By Linda Crate
56Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1735023021
Review by Cynthia T. Hahn
What writer among us has not been surprised by a kind of déjà vu of the self? Linda M. Crate, in her poetic chapbook, "the samurai", has personified this discovery of a stronger, subconscious self, the stuff of dream incarnation, in a feminized samurai form, beautifully portrayed by the wood cut cover by artist Ann Marie Sekeres (annemarieprojects.com).
The dual self that author Crate describes, fuses into one as the text reveals her, that strong sword-wielding warrior, yet falling-from-a-roof self, the one who has lost her life and yet whose essence is prolonged as she is received, integrated and understood in the context of the narrator's current life.
This poetic text can easily be read as a river of words, as one poem flows to the next, in a continued inner monologue of self-uncovering, punctuated by poetic jewels along the reader's path such as, "the lyric of an honest wind," (31), "the starlight she put back in my eyes" (21), and "we have a future in new bones" (13). The thematic of current self in creation initially spurred by "little seeds of doubt and curiosity singing together" (7) encompasses both remembering a stronger version of self to supplant a more recent, weaker sense of self, one who has been rejected in love, and freshly grieving. As the narrator picks up the other 'self sword', her anger is given symbolic weight, and imbued with the power to free herself from past wounds. She projects herself both backward and forward, as if sewing a connection to a female samurai of the self, one who has fallen in a dramatic demonstration of loss, and yet also exhibits strength in her fall. In a sense, the author poetically catches her, or catches up with her in the words, and resurrects her past, envisioned self, re-"incarnating" her as she recovers from her own fall into the grief of unrequited love. As the author states, "we both know the misery of unrequited love" (31) "but choose to focus on the kindest moonlight" (31).
The cover's spectacular red samurai, falling head-first from a green-blue tiled roof into near night lit by full moon is a powerful image echoed by the text; the sword she wields whose arc echoes the shape of her unbound hair suggests a warrior who has lost her balance and whose white, outstretched hand reaches for the full moon's light. The back cover's image continues the front, a red sun setting into an ocean of blue-green, and whose white 'butterfly' birds suggest a free flight of spirit, while coasting and falling across the page around a red-boughed tree. These contrasting images of dark and light, of stability (tree, house, tranquil sea) and movement (samurai woman, birds, sun and moon) comprise a wonderful visual summary of the textual duality and movement towards healing that Crate underscores throughout the text; the poet notes that the samurai took the "monsters" and "sent them packing" (33). It is the samurai's look that reminds the author she is a "tiger" in the "Chinese zodiac" and can use her "claws" to 'slash' "through the throat of every painful memory" and depart from the clutches of death, in her poem, "14. a grave that was not mine" (33).
The three internal black-and-white renderings offer inscrutably strong faces of standing women, one with sword. The final greyed image of the samurai woman with cat, drinking tea at the window as she contemplates bird, tree and rooftop (reminiscent of the cover) also faces an open lock on a string, suggesting the undoing of the lover's bond, and new freedom to see the horizon, underlining the poetic journey of the text.
These twenty-one poems, moving from "lost in translation" to "there is no surrender" complete a textual identification and self-transformation that is nearly seamless, devoid of capitals so as not to interrupt the stream of consciousness effect, paused by only a strong image of sword-wielding samurai in the middle of the text, following "10. every monster will fall," (23), and the numbered titles of each page's poem. In Linda M. Crate's penultimate poem, "20. i won't stop fighting", the author clearly expresses the inspiration and healing essence of the samurai sword, and a path forward, in her broad statement of the movement of inner healing: "the samurai in me still lives through me and so I make my/ dreams, my words, my light a sword against/ the darkness of this world" (45).
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Cynthia Hahn has been a Professor of French at Lake Forest College, teaching language, literature, culture, film, translation and creative writing since 1990. She is also a published poet and author. Visit Cynthia's web site -www.cynthiathahn.com
Posted February 1, 2021
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Beyond the White Moon's Claw
By Patty Dickson Piecza
Red Dragonfly Press, 2020
128 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1945063329
Review by Michael Escoubas
Originally published for Quill & Parchment
In my role as a book reviewer few collections have moved me more than Patty Dickson Pieczka’s new work. As a poet I have learned that reading and writing poems brings about healing in the aftermath of stress. Pieczka avers in her introduction, “I needed to come to terms with the some of the murkier parts of my past.” Beyond the Moon’s White Claw, chronicles that journey and its results. She offers these poems in love, as a gift to her fortunate readers.
Divided into five parts, Pieczka invites readers to accompany her on a quest for healing. While the poems are strong enough to stand on their own, she urges readers to take them in chronological order.
Part I. Marriage to Vic and his father’s suicide Part II. Life after divorce and my friend Kinouk Part III. Vic’s attempt to return home Part IV. Dedication to all those affected by violence or war Part V. Epilogue, my present life
As a veteran of the Vietnam war, your reviewer is well acquainted with Pieczka’s profile of her husband Vic. At 18, he, like so many young men was
Young and in the war-singed jungle, his face as carved as an old man’s,
shadows of death weave through his hair, ghosts drifting past his eyes.
This excerpt is one of “Four Snapshots of Victor,” which open the collection. Each poem contains five couplets which correspond to Vic’s life in carefully measured decades, at 18, 28, 38 and 48. These poems form a kind of artist’s sketch of the man destined to influence the poet in profound ways and compel her to inspect both the beauty and undersides of situations that sparked and flared from her memory.
Like the changing of seasons in the middle-west, where nature signals gradual transitions, so between Patty and Vic, changes were subtle, moving from
Sing to Me
and make the rough-ridged rocks of this day vanish into the sun.
Unlace the afternoon; let its blue-gray ribbons fly loose in the silver breeze.
Your voice is a satin river that lifts me to its currents,
to things more sinister on the horizon
War Shadows
When dark wind and leaves cannot console each other, he thrashes the night into thin black rags as fear runs its hot tongue through his veins.
As the poems progress in Part I, my heart felt heavy for both Patty and Vic as their marriage gradually changed to the point of no return; Patty writes in The Well
I drag my emptiness behind me. it clatters along the stones like a metal bucket.
Divorce segues Pieczka toward friendship and hope as the she faces the pain of an appendage being ripped from her body. In a series of memorable poems Pieczka blends the visible outer world of nature with the invisible (but no less real) world of the human psyche. The moon, the collection’s pivotal metaphor, is present throughout. Even when it is not directly referenced, it is still there, as in this excerpt from
Silence and Echoes
Wind whispers Vic’s quiet laugh, gathers leaves and piles them against my door. Kitchen pots Speak in hollow voices. … Sometimes, I wake in the cool arms of night, feel his presence and know he’s traveling closer.
Perhaps some readers have felt the same as Pieczka, sensing that a relationship is moving toward crisis
Back from the Bayou
Vic appears from the Gulf, and we circle each other like suspicious cats, our once-flowing conversations threadbare and sparse.
As Part II develops Pieczka draws readers up close and personal as
I pour bittersweet August into my opened wounds and pray for light, tear the night’s fears into tiny black pieces for the breeze to hold.
Pieczka’s anguished heart brings forth powerful imagistic poems. In Part III, she reaches into the night to feel morning’s warm hand. Vic returns home from his sojourn in Louisiana, but things do not go well. The trauma to Vic’s soul from his military experiences finds expression for Pieczka in poems laying open the pathos of their relationship. Here is an excerpt from What Lives in the Dark
The day closes its heart, and I listen through gaps of dusk to the breath of black trees.
While darkness is profound for the poet, she does not give into darkness; she continually has faith that light will not forever be obscured
While Waiting for Sunlight
I ignored the moon, never noticed its shape was an unopened dream ready to bloom silver.
This poem, toward the end of Part III, marks a subtle transition moving the poet ever-so-cautiously into the orbit of hope anchored in love.
In parts IV and V, Pieczka unfolds a tapestry of poems, born of love, and dedicated to all affected by violence, racism, and prejudice in its many forms.
Though the poet is dealing with issues of profound emotional and psychic depth, she remains faithful to her poetic craft. She is an artist of amazing skill and range.
I would be remiss if I did not cite a particularly poignant poem from Part V; I leave you with this in power and in majesty
Autumn
I carry your breath in my hands like warm sun at dusk. Your laughter vines through my hair, roots growing into my heart.
Stay with me while the forest rings its small brass bells, and the lake reflects the oracle
of October’s bronze mirror, candling golds and russets of evening’s wild dance.
Hold to our branch and whisper your song of riffling leaves before wind clips our stems
to whirl us back to earth in our separate turns.
We have only until the moon blinks.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Michael Escoubas is editor, contributing poet, and staff book reviewer for Quill and Parchment, a 19-year-old literary and cultural arts online poetry journal. This review was originally posted on Quill and Parchment.
Posted February 1, 2021
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Inside Out: Poems on Writing and Reading Poems with Insider Exercises
By Marjorie Maddox
Kelsay Books, 2020
63 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1950462445
Review by Teresa K. Burleson
"Have you ever befriended a poem?" Marjorie Maddox asks in her book, INSIDE OUT POEMS. In this book, she takes a subject which could easily become rather dry and tedious and makes it a delight. With a whimsical and lighthearted touch, she doesn't just explain the major poetic forms and literary devices. She gives you original examples of metaphor, personification, simile, dramatic monologue, pun, paradox, alliteration, onomatopoeia, enjambment, caesura, eye rhyme, couplet, clerihew, triolet, iambic pentameter, English sonnet, Italian sonnet, sestina and villanelle.
I especially liked "Befriending a Poem," in which she talks about inviting a poem home for dinner and ends with the line, "Much of what he has to say lies between the lines."
Another of my favorites is "Tug of War between Concrete and Abstract," which discusses the limitation of the abstraction. It concludes with the line, "Meanwhile on the other end of twine or hemp, Concrete's daily dedications pump pictures weighing thousands."
All in all, I found the book a refreshing reminder that poetry is meant to be enjoyed. At the end there are nine insider exercises and a glossary.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Teresa K. Burlesonis the author ofA Pilgrim's LyreandRose Without Thorns. She has been free-lancing over 40 years and has credits in over 45 magazines.
Posted February 1, 2021
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Ministry of Flowers
By Andrea Witzke Slot
Valley Press, 2020
104 Pages
ISBN-13: 9781912436439
Review by Lois Baer Barr
Fasten your seatbelts! From the first poem to the last you are in for a thrilling ride. Don’t worry, you’re in the hands of a skilled driver. Not always one to race, Andrea Witzke Slot knows just what pace to take on dangerous curves.
Yes, Highland Park Poets, you guessed right, the book takes its title from Emily Dickinson’s poem #905. She invokes her muse with the second poem in the collection, “Between my country and the others–a sea.” This poem deals with the distance between the lover and the beloved. The citation is no mere nod to Dickinson whose slant rhymes and nature imagery infuse Slot’s book from beginning to end. One of the last poems is called: “Between my country and the others/As ministry.” This poem is about the painful process of finding forgiveness and forgiving: one of the main themes of the book. The flowers offered as she crosses a bridge to her “sister” stand for the work of the poet. This is no dozen carnations purchased at the grocery, these flowers represent an opening of the self to extreme scrutiny. “Please open our door. I have changed.”
Reconnecting with loved ones who’ve been wronged requires dealing with ghosts. Slot converses with the patients of the former owner of her house, a psychologist. Her stairway reverberates with the steps of others who creaked up and down them. In “Disguises” her friend comes back after midnight “in your absence, we talk/ and, sometimes, we laugh.”
The poetry allows us to be inside very intimate moments as Slot speaks of her annual breast exam or of sitting at a truck stop with truckers waiting for their turn to shower. As she waits for the tow truck that never arrives, she observes the truckers with warmth and startling images: “The odour of stale hotdogs coils/Around this truck stop of quiet men.” Her baby in “The Incubator” has “sapling lungs” and is an “unwrapped bundle of earth, bone, flesh.” There are sensual poems about making love and about carrying a sleeping three-year-old to the toilet. Direct address to the reader heightens the intimacy in poems such as “Remember when we thought we’d live forever?”
But do you remember the night
The boat left the shore
When we realized where we had been?–
And that the Island was gone?
Readers from Deerfield Poetry Workshop will especially like the tribute to one of our members, the late Helen Degen Cohen, in which the author addresses Helen directly. A Holocaust survivor, Helen was an elegant poet. She lived her life with joy and ferocity; she left no poem uncut.
Despite the serious tone of the collection, there’s lots of humor. In “Self-portrait, Desk,” a persona poem, the desk hears a piano upstairs and “wonders how wood can make such a noise.” A narrative poem in epistolary form, “Dear Police Officer,” tells how the poet got a ticket parking in Chicago when she couldn’t drag herself away from Sonia Sanchez’s performance of her poetry.
Ministry of Flowers is a compendium of poetic forms: sonnets, prose, elegies and visual poems. One visual poem is an ode to a cactus that blooms after three years of dormancy. The dashes at the beginning and end of each line and exclamation points at top and bottom form the needles. On the page, the piece looks like the pad of a nopal.
It’s not surprising to learn that Andrea Witzke Slot is also a scholar. She reveals her academic side with literary allusions and abundant Latin words. Slot uses Latinate words that go beyond our common knowledge, like proprioception and Lasius Niger (garden ant). In “Blood Ties, Circa 1932” she calls the work her grandfather did to commit suicide in his garage “the achene preparation.” I had to look that one up. Thankfully, Google lets you hear the word. It sounds like “a keen” which adds acuity and doggedness to the way he pursued death. As always, the sound of the word adds another level of meaning. It reminds the reader of aching preparation and of the aching that the grandmother would relive the rest of her life.
I started with the image of a joy ride. But after that experience, you’d feel the adrenalin rush but not remember many details. With Slot’s work, the images linger: a body collapsing like the circus tent billowing down or her grandmother finding her husband asphyxiated in his car. The plate with what would have been his last lunch waits on the table. Andrea Witzke Slot probes moments of terror and tenderness. There is so much to find in this short book: poems about social justice, poems about llamas and slugs in the garden. Poets, start your engines and race to the bookstore, or perhaps it would be safer to order from this website.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Lois Baer Barr lives in Riverwoods with her husband and her pandemic pup Aggie. You can read her poetry in Biopoesis (Poetica Press, 2013) and her stories in Lope de Vega’s Daughter (Red Bird, 2019). Her work is online at Alimentum, Ekphrastic Review, Highland Park Poetry, The Jewish Literary Review, Persimmon Tree, and Southern Women’s Review and in print at cream city review,East on Central, Valley Voices, and forthcoming at Rattle.
Posted January 1, 2021
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Dragonflies and Algebra
By Dennis Trujillo
FutureCycle Press, 2020
82 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1942371861
Review by Ed Werstein
I had taken notice of Dennis Trujillo’s poetry over recent years in ezines like Blast Furnace and 3Elements Review, and also on websites like Your Daily Poem and, of course, Highland Park Poetry. So when opportunity knocked about reviewing his latest collection, Dragonflies and Algebra (Future Cycle,, 2020) including a free review copy, I answered the door.
One of the hallmarks of good poetry is that it can both surprise and challenge us. Trujillo’s book accomplished that before I even opened it. Reading the back cover I was amazed to learn that he is a graduate of West Point and that he had a 20 year military career, facts which both surprised me, and challenged my peacenik anti-military bias. That bias will be a long time in tempering. This brief review will focus on the poetry, which did not disappoint.
Maybe you’ve imagined what garden gnomes would say to you if they could talk. I haven’t, but Dennis has. Maybe you’ve thought about the taste of raven wings and black diamonds. I haven’t, but Dennis has. And maybe you’ve considered that dragonflies might be interested in studying the quadratic equation. I haven’t, but (you guessed it) Dennis has.
In At the Scrapyard, Trujillo offers us obsolete telephone booths waiting for demolition. “They wait/ like dinosaurs looking up at a sky/ of dark ash.” And in The Red Mower he shows us a weekend project of assembling a new mower. The narrator “poured myself into the job as if/ it were the Apollo Lunar Lander”. Later, “The mower loomed in the backyard / like a giant red ant from Mars.”
After his military career, which included time spent in Asia, Dennis became a math teacher. He is also an avid, avid as in daily, runner and has kept a journal of his runs for years. The result of this wide and seemingly unconnected experience is a poetry that covers an astounding variety of subject matter: Eastern myth and philosophy, astrology, long distance running, science, insects, math, parenthood, love and loss. There are even odes to the veins on the top of his feet, and to the lowly dandelion.
Dennis is a master of simile and metaphor. In My Heart Sprouts Wings, Trujillo happens upon a wounded pigeon while running. The bird “made me think/ of an escaped convict in shackles.” The next day the pigeon is still struggling and two other birds are there, “Two others/ kept company like sentries/ at a queen’s chambers.” And in Voices, “...strands of starlight/ murmured through the branches/ of the ginko tree outside/ my window in a language/ only fairies and fireflies/ could unravel.”
The poem titles invite the reader in: Wooden Bicycle, Shaman of Atlantis, Crayola Therapy, Meteorite Wine, and Where Angels Vacation, to name a few. These poems are full of the sudden turn to the unexpected, and the surprise ending.
Dennis Trujillo’s poetry is imaginative, speculative, whimsical, and yet, at the same time profound. And always, always, surprising. Buy this book.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Ed Werstein is a regional VP of the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets, and the 2018 recipient of the Council of Wisconsin Writers Lorine Niedecker Prize for Poetry.
Posted January 1, 2020
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Apricots to Za'atar: Across Oceans and Time Memoir Greets Persona in the Pantry of My Life's Menu
By Emma Alexandra Kowalenko
Self-published, 2019
129 Pages
ISBN-13: 9781701893696
Review by Dr. Jonathan Gourlay
Emma Alexandra Kowalenko’s book Apricots to Za’atar offers a cornucopia of poems tracing her immigrant experience through food. Each of the alphabetically arranged poems offers a first course of memory or association, followed by a second poem that adds dimension to the first. This structure, with two poems in conversation with each other around a specific dish, creates a depth that captures something unique about the immigrant experience. Her Polish parents’ longing for herring as refugees in Morocco in “Herring and Vodka” is complicated by survivor’s guilt in the next poem, when her mother is met with an abundance of herring as an immigrant in Chicago. The secret ingredient here is time. The way something as simple as herring, matzah, or a roasted peanut can link generations, suggest lost villages in Poland, bring loved ones back more viscerally than any photograph.
Kowalenko’s perspective on the past is also told from point of view of the objects and ingredients that witnessed it. Poems in the persona of “Garbanzos in Hummus Disguise” or a soup bowl further complicate her story. The poems are not only about how food binds our memories to our present and creates our sense of self but also about the objects we carry with us from place to place. These metaphysical poems suggest that cuisine is not an individual pursuit reflected only in the poet’s memories. From the perspective of hummus, after all, our lives are fleeting.
Kowalenko’s poetry derives its’ power from the noun-driven, deceptively plain-spoken way she spins her memoir in poems. Here’s a verse from “Borscht, Hot, Cool, Red, and White”:
Hot borscht, the eastern European, Ukrainian version, pork ribs simmered in Papa’s beet broth. He adds potatoes for body. Countering Papa’s version, Mama cooks beets in chicken broth, bay leaves, a touch of marjoram.
The specificity of the ingredients has an incantatory power, almost like speaking a spell to bring back the memory. Because of the tactile nature of her images, the reader feels the pull of time, the sense of loss, the full scope of the immigrant journey when she returns to borscht, and her Jewish faith, at the end of the poem. She understands why her mother never made the Jewish version of borscht:
Life secrets are better kept than told.
The poems remind us that, like borscht, we all have versions. For Kowelenko, a youthful fascination with couscous and tagine, an early education in the many flavors of Chicago’s Humboldt Park neighborhood, and later travels among the olives and cheeses of Italy.
Perhaps this interest in how food defines us is why Kowalenko calls her book “memoir greets persona.” Our versions of ourselves were created in the kitchens of our youth. And we are constantly adding new ingredients, as long as we are alive, from apricots to za’atar.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Dr. Jonathan Gourlay is a writer in Oak Park, Illinois. He is the author of a memoir, Nowhere Slow, numerous articles, and a dissertation concerning sea cucumbers.
Posted January 1, 2021
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Time Is Not A River
By Michael Minassian
Transcendant Zero Press, 2020
103 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1946460042
Review by LaVern Spencer McCarthy
Since I am relatively new to reviewing books, I will focus mostly on what I like about Michael's book. The first thing I noticed was the impressive amount of acknowledgements. That tells me that the poet is prolific and serious about his work.
In Is This History? the poems are well written with an economy of words. Verb usage is strong with sparing use of adjectives. I was especially fascinated by the poem, The Rosenbergs Come Out To Play. I can almost smell the stench of death from the electric chair and feel the fear Ethel undoubtedly experienced in real life. Powerful imagery runs through the entire book.
The poems' subjects are varied with a few rhymes interspaced. In the section, History Follows You Home, I felt a certain pathos for the pan-handlers, as though I were there refusing to help, feeling guilty and then giving all I had. I noticed an over-used expression in the poem, "Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out." I feel that could have been omitted without detracting from the poem.
Michael's poem, I Heard a River, a villanelle, would read better if the meter was consistent. Otherwise, the poet did a good job writing the poem. In Remembering the Starving Armenians, Michael gets the point across on how seriously his mother disliked wasted food:
But I had to finish my dinner
no matter how full I felt
and if any scraps
remained on our plates
my mother stood
at the kitchen sink
and licked each one clean.
Part 2--Postcard Blues-- In Postcard From Key West, the poet explains love as "The overseas highway--sometimes the road doesn't go on anymore"--an apt description. Michael's poems have a certain poignance and elegance that I have rarely seen before.
Most of them have a haunting quality, such as The Children Send Postcards.
The children send postcards
to their parents, missing
since birth, lost in a parking
lot behind the empty hospital.
I liked these lines:
The old, wooden crosses leaning into each other
as if they would hear what the other confessed.
Postcard From the Edge of the Lake is another great poem. Its near-rhyme on certain lines did not detract from the poem. I know that rhyming is not the poet's strong point. I especially enjoyed reading This Autumn Day, where he describes the sky as:
an old cup of tea that swirls of oily milk.
Michael's poems are full of life where he uses all his senses to describe and relate. In Part 3--Let's Burn the Bed-This Winter Day has astounding imagery.
The clouds are piled up
like a train wreck
across the sky,
and tongues of rain freeze
before they hit the ground.
Then, the perfect last verse:
with only the memory of your glance to guide me home.
Part 4--Like Black Rocks--In The Short Story, the poem is not a true Shakespearean Sonnet. It would scan better if the rhyme was iambic and precise. The almost-rhyme does not detract from the poem too much. It was readable and enjoyable. In Early This Morning, the poem is whimsical, one of the poet's finest, I think. He compares his friend to Walt Whitman:
with his long hair and beard
he looked like Walt Whitman
wandering into the wrong century.
Throughout the book the poems have an unforgettable, haunting quality. I would recommend it as fine reading, written by a literary geniuswho goes to extraordinary lengths to make his writing superb.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: LaVern Spencer McCarthy is a life member of Poetry Society Of Texas. She has published five books of poetry and three books of short stories.
Posted January 1, 2021
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Other Maidens
By Toti O'Brien
BlazeVOX Books, 2020
146 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1-60964-374-4
Review by Linda Imbler
Toti O’Brien’s marvelous collection, Other Maidens, has a common thread running through the entire book-angst. Bare, vibrating, soulful angst.
Yet, each work is penned so beautifully that one forgets that the poems are born of heartache or despair. Her masterful grasp of language graces each piece, and allusions to the arts are highly present. Toti obviously has significant knowledge of various art forms, and she employs that knowledge to sing, dance, and paint her way through each of this book’s poems. Furthermore, her scholarly appreciation for Mythology and History is used to best advantage, as she sieves references to these two themes through her eyes and heart, in order to create the treasures that become her poems.
Lines such as those following seem simple, but are lush with symbolism when read within the context of the entire poem. Lines such as:
“ you have seen many skies bleedingpurple” (Voyager),
“ don’t trust jaguars, it sighs. Not when they come in pairs” (House Of Jaguars), and
“ if she dares intruding the arboreal crowd without blinking” (Of The Palm).
I highly recommend this book for its intricacies, gorgeous language, and stunning revelations.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Linda Imbler is the author of Big Question, Little Sleep and That Fifth Element.
Posted January 1, 2021
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My Third Eye Is Blurry: Collected Poems
By William Vollrath
Highland Park Poetry Press, 2020
74 Pages
ISBN-13: 979-8681078173
Review by Arlene Gay Levine
Like the glorious multicolor helix gracing the cover of William Vollrath’s collection of poems, My Third Eye Is Blurry, the text itself is a fascinating kaleidoscope of the various experiences, musings and growth the poet encounters on his journey. The book is divided into two sections, First Vision and Second Vision, with a roughly equal number of poems in each. This presages the work’s dominant theme of seeking that flows beneath the words, as if the poet himself is on a quest for equilibrium, some method to weigh life’s questions and answers in order to find a balanced path.
A frequently jocular tone hides secrets, glimpses into mysteries both human and metaphysical. This is accomplished so suavely you will hardly recognize the depth these short, often amusing poems provide until you take time to read, reflect and reread. Of course, this is what the poet in his affable way, urges us to recognize as needful in understanding the day to day book of our own lives as well. The very first poem, poem-o-matic, provides a glimpse into Vollrath’s creative process and introduces another motif, cooking, whether it be a meal or a poem.
It is a concrete poem in the shape of a bowl holding varied “organic ingredients” such as “temptation, joy, anger, meter, beat and voice” with the direction to “mix/ and hope your muse steps into the kitchen.” It speaks of what will be recurring and intertwining subjects of creation and nourishment. The next poem, My Muse, awakens the poet at 4:00 a.m. with “Brain now boiling joyously/Twitching from her planted seeds/Nascent ideas nourish me.” The second stanza foreshadows the element of forthcoming spiritual concerns in the lines, “Inspiration on god’s platter/My Muse brings kisses from afar.”
Levity in the title Deep Fried Twinkies with the delicious metaphor in the first line: “Truffles for a weary soul” soon recants this mood with a list of woes including “weeds in the yard/ticks on the dog/foolishly lost love” yet once again returns to humor with the wonderful last line, “I’ll take a dozen to go” and who wouldn’t want to try those deep fried Twinkies, at least once? By the way, the dog with ticks makes for one of my favorite poems in section I, Taking My Dog Fishing. You feel the poet’s joy from the “sparkling sun, champagne air” and how the “clear water at the county park/begs for our presence/for our absolute focus/on the shimmering movements gliding just beneath.”
First Vision also contains the moving Pieces of My Soul that seems to me to be a synthesis of the human drama of the poet’s life and his plea for intervention of numinous forces to set things right. He speaks of “forgotten triumphs/hollow victories” that are “stacked in dim crawlspaces and/cobwebbed corners of the mind.” Poignant, the last few lines explain “pieces of then/anxiously waiting/a caretaker’s /healing broom.”
Section 2, Second Vision, more serious in tone, builds to a crescendo toward the growth of the soul through trial and tribulation toward wisdom and understanding. In Pregnant, Vollrath shares “I surrender myself…/servant to suggestion” who is “peaceful in my solitude” and closes with “I shall bear an idea.” Other stand-outs include Kill the Buddha, which speaks to the search for enlightenment, the eloquent Jade bi at the Freer Gallery, asking if the jade disks might “suggest the secret/to our sacred cycles/ of birth and death and birth” and the closing poem of the collection, Connected, which offers the pearl of wisdom the poet has won from his journey on earth thus far.
A seeker of answers, trying with his words to parse the duality between the real world and The Real, William Vollrath is at his best when he mulls over life’s paradoxes with the eye of an experienced traveler. My Third Eye Is Blurry: Collected Poems would make a fine guide and provide food for the mind, heart and soul of any reader.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Arlene Gay Levine is the author of 39 Ways to Open Your Heart: An Illuminated Meditation(Conari Press,) and Movie Life(Finishing Line Press). Her poetry and prose have found a home in The New York Times, numerous anthologies, and journals including Chiron Review, The MacGuffin, Quest and Frogpond.
Posted December 1, 2020
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Rites of Paradise
By Geoffrey Heptonstall
CyberWit.net, 2020
78 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-9389690491
Review by Barbara Eaton
Geoffrey Heptonstall, in his new collection, The Rites of Paradise, offers poems that are a comfort in these trying times. These poems are meant to be read in quiet solitude, and read more than once.
The Rites of Paradise is dedicated to Debbie, who served as inspiration. The first poem, “The Second Time I Saw You,” is a touching tribute and a wonderful introduction. But Debbie remains a shadowy figure. Most of these serious and learned poems deal with the arts: music, sculpture, and literature. As the poet claims, “There is no death in art.” His work quietly affirms his faith in a life after death.
While the poems in the first section, “The Bird of Paradise,” recall the Victorian poets, the second section, “Oceans and Islands,” brings the Romantics to mind. References to Odysseus and Moby Dick make clear that the oceans he speaks of are the strife of life. The islands, similarly, are islands of the mind, and we are “lovers in a storm.” But Heptonstall is confident that “life will last forever,” and the faithful will be guided gently home.
Curiously, the last five stanzas of “An Island in the Mind,” (pp. 29-30) are repeated in “Memento Mori” (p. 70). The poem, “Not Every Thought,” also appears twice (pp. 64 and 73).
The third section, “More Songs for Her,” is reminiscent of the Pre-Raphaelites, particularly the Rossettis. These poems are melancholy, but they resonate with understated emotion. In Heptonstall’s austere language, his well-crafted images come as a welcome surprise.
The Rites of Paradise is highly recommended for poets and anyone seeking solace in a storm.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Barbara Eatonis a poet and semi-retired community college instructor.
Posted December 1, 2020
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Star Gazing: Poems of Astronomy
By Miriam Sagan
Cholla Needles Arts & Literary Library, 2020
136 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-8651830473
Review by Jan Chronister
What most impresses me about this collection of poems by Miriam Sagan is that she could write so many that connect to one subject! Sagan literally takes on the universe and presents it in a way that is as awe-inspiring as the subject itself. There is a cohesiveness to the book that feels natural and comforting. One device that helps link the poems together is the repetition of certain elements: boats, water, moon, darkness, eclipses, telescopes, and, of course, stars. Recurring images such as the woman chained to a rock and keys to locks also tie the poems together.
Sagan presents straightforward experiences, often related to astronomy, and turns them into philosophical statements. Despite the warning we have all been given not to look directly at the sun (or similar blinding objects), she does just that and comes away with revelations she shares with readers. One of my favorite poems in the book is “The Astronomer’s Wife.” It is a college experience I definitely relate to.
Many poems seem to be written in some form, but only one piece is actually identified as a pantoum. The poems with repeating lines seem to reflect the nature of celestial events—they recur as predicted and often mystify the viewer. A table of contents (and even a page of “notes”) would be helpful, but then it would be hard to deal with the numerous haiku-like pieces that appear on a regular basis, usually several to a page. I personally do not care for poems that begin lines with capital letters when not starting a new sentence, but I know it is done by many poets. I find it difficult to follow the thought, but sentence style has always been a strong preference of mine, though other readers are not bothered by it. I do appreciate Sagan’s short lines, a style I also prefer.
Sagan deftly references her Jewish heritage without making it obvious. Her skill in doing this adds an important personal element, as does the poem “Cosmos” in which she answers the question about Carl Sagan that is sure to be on every reader’s mind. I find the strongest part of the collection to be the series of three poems titled “Star Axis.” Here is where we learn that Polaris is only our North Star for 2,000 years, and then things change. The collection ends on a masterful note when Sagan pens a poem for each of the planets. I especially like “Jupiter: Patriarch” where her voice emerges loud and clear: it’s never too early, or late,/to learn to say:/fuck with me, you die.
After reading Star Gazing, I found myself wishing for more personal, subjective details. The poet has been to many fascinating and exotic locales, but her reaction to them seems to be more scientific than emotional. In a way, this does allow the reader to step up to the telescope with her and stare directly at the sun, so to speak. In the end, Sagan proves to be a likeable, competent guide to the practice of star (and planet) gazing.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Jan Chronister is currently serving as President of the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets. Her chapbook, Target Practice, was published by Parallel Press in 2009.
Posted December 1, 2020
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Throwing The Crown
Jacob Saenz
APR/Honickman First Book Prize winner
Copper Canyon Press, 2018
80 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-0983300861
Review by Mike Freveletti
What does it mean to be a poet of place? The best example, at least for me, is Paterson by William Carlos Williams. The poet Jacob Saenz with his collection, Throwing the Crown, has given us poems of a place, Chicago, and of the self. You see, what Williams gave us in Paterson was the connection between man and the city but Saenz, if I can continue with the comparison, tells a story about the evolution of self with the city as backdrop. This is a beautiful set of seemingly autobiographical poems, an exploration of what it means to grow up a young man of color in circumstances that not every reader will understand from their own history. That’s okay. Saenz is a welcomed Virgil, our poetic guide, through this beautiful collection.
It’s hard not to see this book in some ways as a guide to the poet’s Chicago. Poems like the “Blue Line Incident”, a reference to the “L”, puts you right there on the train headed through downtown. The poem kicks off with a startling line, “he was just some coked-out/crazed King with crooked teeth/& a tear drop forever falling”, an arresting image that prepares us for a poem not really about this ‘King’ but what he stands for. They speak in a language, the language of street gangs and develop a mutual respect even if it is a sort of facade. The unexpected violent lines at the end, “I was wishing for a life-/saver & he took, hooked him in/& had him say goodbye like we was boys/& shit when I really should’ve/gutted that fuck w the tip/of my blue ballpoint.” The contrast between the narrator pretending to be a gang member and the violence considered once the man has gone away not only takes the poem in a surprising direction but also says a lot about what situational awareness means for this young man. He’s both a pretender and not. What decision will he make next time?
Saenz is clearly a born storyteller, but he is not without formal poetic strength. The poet gives us a sonnet, “Sonnet of the Dead” that boasts the camp of a horror movie within the framework of a sonnet, all with a subtitle referencing Dawn of the Dead. A neat juxtaposition that will have some formalists both scoffing and slightly frightened at the same time. It’s important to point out that this is a perfect example of what Saenz does so well in this collection, fun and serious together. A poem about masculinity might sit right next to a poem entirely about baseball.
My favorite poem in the collection is written about a mother-son relationship. “Poem for the Mother” struck me emotionally because of its simplicity. It’s a lineage of moles and freckles that get passed down from generation to generation, “as a kid I grabbed hold/of the moles on your face & neck/handled them like pearls of the earth/you said it was payback for the times/you play w grandma’s when you were small.” I know as a kid I was pulling my Mom’s hair, her necklace, her skin, and you know what she did? Nothing. Just kept on loving me. How lucky we are to be reminded of the unconditional and really, unquestioning, love of a mother.
I can recommend this book for a lot of reasons. The historical sketches based around the city, the story of growing up as a boy of color, the formation of that boy’s body and beliefs, the family narrative as a through line throughout the collection. Any of those would do. Saenz is a poet of place and this unique book is a debut to remember.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Mike Frevelettiis poet, short fiction writer and occasional dabbler in literary criticism. His work has appeared both online and in print.
Posted December 1, 2020
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Get Up Said The World
By Gail Goepfert
Cervena Barva Press, 2020
124 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1-950063-24-6
Review by Caroline Johnson
“How do we persist in this living?” asks Gail Goepfert in the opening lines of her first poem in this collection. Now, more than ever, do we need an answer to this question, which Goepfert attempts to answer throughout the 121 pages of narrative and lyrical poetry.
Each poem is preceded by a carefully chosen word and its dictionary definition, giving us a template and theme to the poem before we read it. In “What Keats Knew,” Goepfert explores the term “élan vital” and asks what matters. “There is risk in thinking / I have anything to say,” she writes, but in the end relies on Keats’s answer: “The poetry / of the earth is never dead.”
The narrative poem, “Tête-à-tête at Trader Joe’s,” describes the poet’s encounter with an elderly woman at a grocery store. Both are plant lovers and Goepfert describes their poignant conversation about flowers beautifully. “Do you know the secret to getting peonies / to bloom?” the narrator asks the woman by way of introduction. This is followed by a heartfelt conversation and attention to detail about a stranger who becomes almost a friend on the page by the end of the poem.
In “Life Lists Not Just for the Birds,” the poet describes an abandoned robin’s egg and other birds, relating them to a violent Chicago weekend. The word “incredulity” precedes that poem, “the quality or state of being unwilling to admit or accept what is offered as true.” Other poems touch on witnessing a suicide, fishing, and a touching elegy for her coal miner grandfather.
In “Cold Calling,” a prose poem that starts out describing some unpleasant jobs, Goepfert writes in detail about having to call one of her older students who is falling behind. She describes the litany of real life problems the student talks about and we, as readers, are drawn into his personal tragedy. Similarly, Goepfert describes her mother’s double mastectomy in “While Spooning Jelly on Toast” with touching details that make us feel her compassion.
In all of these poems, the poet adds a human connection that is reminiscent of poets such as Philip Levine and his portraits of people he knew, especially workers. In “Salting Ash,” Goepfert describes her mother’s instructions for her funeral:
“I don’t want a casket beneath the ground.
Strew some ash of me
with the couch and crab that ride
the steady clout of wave--pain-free
I’ll tumble in the foam.
Let the gulls cry and the terns squawk
making tattoos in the sand.” (p. 57)
Goepfert also includes some ekphrastic poetry in the collection (“Sisters”), and many poems containing sensual language, such as this description in “Easing in”:
“…The bicycle bell’s jingle
breaks through,
clear and clean
as picked bone
like the luminous cells in me.
Can I settle
into the stretch of skin
I was given at birth?
I refuse to hush
the beebox
inside me.” (p. 71)
And in “In the Glass of My Eye,” she writes, “How is it possible / that I taste with my eyes?...I gather light / coming and going.”
Indeed, like Goepfert’s other books--the chapbook A Mind on Pain (Finishing Line Press, 2015), and Tapping Roots (Kelsay Books, 2018)--she explores human connections as if through a glass lens, each poem a prism of light. In one of the final poems in this collection, “The Practice of Gratitude,” Goepfert thanks her body for waking, for the dawn now before her: “Thank you, I repeat / these word to my body.” Thank you, Gail, for offering up such a beautiful collection to the world.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Caroline Johnson is currently the president of Poets and Patrons of Chicago. Her first full-length collection of poems, The Caregiver, was published by Holy Cow! Press in May 2018.
Posted December 1, 2020
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Little Kings
By Peter Kahn
Nine Arches Press, 2020
231 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1-911027-97-3
Review by Elizabeth Joy Levinson
I am heading into year fifteen in the classroom, except I won’t be in the classroom this year, at least not to start. And while I am relieved that this is the direction my district decided to go in, I am heartbroken at the same time, missing those first few weeks of community building with new freshmen, and reuniting with students I taught last year -- though our time together was ended abruptly, our reunion will be all the more poignant. Which is probably why Peter Kahn’s Little Kings has me feeling some kind of way. The bittersweet nature of many of the narratives throughout, and the overall narrative effect of the collection, so closely mirrors my own bittersweet.
The poems in the collection are narratives, each a snapshot, a quick peek at a man’s life, his memories, the people he has loved, the people he could not love enough. And together, these poems build a life, but like memory, they do not move chronologically, rather, they move back and forth through time. They flow like recollection, that one time reminds you of another time, and so on. Something meaningful when you are six may inform something you need to learn at 36.
For instance, the title poem, which appears early in the collection, recounts a pre-teen’s experience getting drunk with friends, unsupervised “cautious/ then, as now, listening to the retching.” The narrator learns from his friend's mistakes, pacing himself with the maturity of memory. But this poem is juxtaposed with the poem, Tuesday Mornings at Neon Street Center for Youth, in which we see young people who did not learn from their friends' mistakes, and while the poet does not pull his punches, his lens is compassionate in its honesty, the recognition of someone who wasn’t quite there, where these youth are, but maybe nearly, maybe adjacent, as the previous poem intimates. “Do not look into the white eyes/ of the future or you will hit snooze/ until the sun puts itself back to sleep.” The narrator keeps showing up, despite the fatigue, despite the secondary trauma. This is the lens we all need right now, Kahn’s lessons in compassion a reminder to keep showing up for each other.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Elizabeth Levinsonis a Chicago based poet and high school teacher. Her second chapbook, Running Aground,is available for advance orders from Finishing Line Press.
Posted November 1, 2020
Late Night Talk Show Fantasy
By Jennifer Dotson
Kelsay Books, 2020
86 Pages
ISBN-13: 9781952326035
Review by
Gay Guard Chamberlin
Even before you open Jennifer Dotson’s delightful full-length book you may find yourself captivated by its inventive title and boldly colored hand-drawn caricatures. The cover practically invites you in to root for her imagined famous talk-show-circuit poet. Take a look at the opening lines in the collection’s titular first poem: The world famous poet / chuckles with the late night / talk show host and the two / trade dazzling word play…Indeed, this book is filled with “dazzling word play” – and more that will entice, entertain, educate, and fulfill experienced lovers of poetry as well as newcomers.
Smartly divided into four sections corresponding to a late-night talk show format (The Opening Monologue, The House Band, The First Guest, The Non-Sequitor Comedian), Dotson’s 48 poems range from quirky to deep, funny to philosophical, like a quickly shifting array of talk show guests. This is a poet who doesn’t underestimate the intelligence of her audience. Her writing is accessible, smart, and chockful of the tiny vivid details so essential to making a poem come alive. Here is a slyly sensual short poem called “Cooking Together”:
It wasn’t my first BBQ.
When we met, I feared
I was just a crust,
a shell, a broken yolk
but your savory attention
set my broth to boil.
You whisked my batter
to a froth and I quickly
flipped my outlook on
life and love.
You didn’t sear me
with your flame
leaving my insides
raw or frozen,
instead you braised
me with wine and herbs
and I’ve been simmering
your spicy stew ever since.
Dotson excavates both the historical and the personal past through pieces like “Edwin Booth’s Dagger” and “When My Mother Met John Travolta,” and imagines the future in “Space Tacos” and “Dear Future Self at 99” (and aren’t those four titles just deliciously intriguing?). Evocative memories from childhood and of family life, rural and urban, abound. Of special note is “Driving Lessons,” a 7- sectioned poem. Each part is titled with a car engine part or function relating to her first experiences learning to drive through the years until her own children are learning. Notice how adroitly the poet builds tension in this excerpted from Section II titled “Pressure Plate”:
A College junior at eighteen,
I am determined to learn
on my summer break.
Sears Driving School sends
Mr. Johnson to instruct me.
Today we’re going to learn drive-thru.
Not as simple as it sounds.
Pull the car close enough to the
menu microphone but not too close
to damage the mirror or door.
Mr. Johnson orders himself lunch.
I repeat the close but not too close
lesson at the windows to pay
and to retrieve his food.
Mr. Johnson has an appetite.
Our next session ups the ante.
My first time cloverleafing into
Beltway traffic, Mr. Johnson purrs
You would look fine in a pair of
black leather pants. My hands grip
the wheel, focus flits to the cars around me,
my mirrors and pressing
down on the gas. Is this a test
or calculated distraction from the
crushing rush of other drivers?
Nervous, I say nothing—not then,
not later—too afraid to lose
my chance to learn agere—to drive.
Dotson is clearly not afraid to tackle big issues such as aging and Alzheimer’s, climate change and sexual harassment; yet the book is full of humor and affection. Her rich sense of the comical comes through even in her titles like “Dionysus Has a Crisis.” (To this reader, there is a bit of Erma Bombeck in Dotson’s Erato!)
At times she plants small and effective electric jolts within benign imagery, such as here in the start of “Living With a Beanstalk Boy”:
Teenage boy knows everything
so he takes our only cow to sell
at the market and returns with
some magic beans and shrugs
whatever when I yell and scream
and choke on tears and bitterness.
I am back to my endless chores
of dishes and laundry, pausing only
to stare hungrily at the empty
pantry and wonder when the
power and the phone will be
turned off for good.
A few pieces seem prescient: “How to Prepare for Disaster,” “Pathogen Rampage,” and “Demeter Mourns” speak eloquently to our current pandemic times yet were written earlier. Take a look at how skillfully Dotson juggles tragedy and comedy in this passage from “How to Prepare for Disaster”:
The end of the world is near
and you are getting ready
just in case the Mayan calendar
is accurate after all and
Nostradamus knew a thing
or two about Arab Spring.
Later in the poem, she wisely encourages us to:
Make sure you have some
reading matter along with
your matches and duct tape,
your can opener and your candles.
Her poetic control and careful attention to detail are evident throughout in her expert handling of alliteration and assonance, rhyme and rhythm. She writes free verse and prose poems, list poems, and formal ones as varied as the Sonnet, Pantoum, Villanelle, Ghazal, Cento, Etheree, Golden Shovel, Luc Bat, and the Gwawdodyn. If you aren’t familiar with these terms, not to worry. Dotson includes succinct and friendly footnotes explaining them, which fits with her dedication to advancing the craft and community of poetry as Founder and Program Coordinator of Highland Park Poetry. (You can learn more about her at www.JenniferDotsonPoet.com .)
Well-known poet Ellen Bass always encourages her audiences to buy two copies of a good poetry book; one for yourself and one to give to someone interested in poetry who might not know where to begin. Late Night Talk Show Fantasy & Other Poems is just such a book - accessible enough for beginners, but complex enough for poets and experienced readers of poetry. The latter will especially appreciate the high-wire acts Dotson performs with such challenging forms. There is truly something for everyone in this fine collection.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Gay Guard-Chamberlin is a Chicago artist and writer whose first book of poems, Red Thread Through a Rusty Needle, was recently reviewed on the Highland Park Poets site by Lennart Lundh. She and her sister, Anara Guard, perform poetry together as Sibling Revelry.
Posted November 1, 2020
Asylum
By Elizabeth Marino
Vagabond Press, 2020
71 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1-936293-45-2
Review by Elizabeth Harper
What do you think of when you hear the word “asylum”? I think of a type of total institution, regimented confinement for the outcast and out of luck. Then there’s the other meaning of asylum: political asylum for folks fearing persecution and violence, seeking sanctuary and opportunity.
Elizabeth Marino’s title poem, “Asylum,” touches on both meanings. An encounter with a child at St. Vincent Orphan Asylum in Chicago is juxtaposed with images of children in Texas detention camps and Pakistani children after a drone attack, both “stacked up like cordwood.” The last two lines of the poem get me in the gut and make the book for me: “I must go out the door/ and decide to be alive.”
The themes of courage, abundance, and integrity reoccur throughout the book, along with historical, pop culture, and Chicago-specific references intertwined with personal history. There are also calls for peace and the meeting of human needs. The words “Grace,” Abundance,” and “Peace,” all have their own capitalized line in the poem “Abundance.” In “On the Cusp of the Big Moon,” we are reminded “that courage/ is feeling fear/ and acting anyway/ again and again.” In her signature poem,”My Mother Loved Spanish Rice,” Elizabeth Marino tells us, “My mother was abundant in a puny world.” Referencing Chicago neighborhoods in “Branches,” she mentions some of her roots: “I was born in Englewood,/ before we branched into Humboldt Park/ and Logan Square, and out again.” A standout poem for me is “What Keeps You Whole,” with the title repeated in each stanza. This is a poem for our time with lines such as “Deliberate distraction is everywhere.” and “This is a time of change and choosing/ how and when to let go….” Marino’s poems tell stories of family, of activism, of human need and human dignity. “Litany for Peace” includes the line: “We each have a right to exist.”
“Foul Fern” is a sympathetic portrait of a street woman. “In Amsterdam” features another woman character, a brief portrait of prettiness and joy. “The Direct Velvet Route” and “Body Language” deal explicitly with the topic of violence against women, providing the important insight that the lives of individuals and what’s possible in personal relationships are damaged and limited by this kind of nauseating, gender-specific violence in our world. One of my favorite poems by Elizabeth Marino, which I’ve heard her read, is “Performance Poet with Daughter,” a lovely description of trust between an adult and child.
The collection includes different forms, including haikus and a villanelle, and also humor and wit. In “A Man Walked Into Our “EL” Car,” we are treated to an inner monologue: “ Great. Socially engaged performance artists are the new mimes.” And in “An Otherwise Uneventful Sunday in March. Chicago,” our protagonist muses: “Perhaps/ casinos in vacant CPS school buildings,/ learning being such a crap shoot.”
The book ends with two important autobiographical poems, “A Safer Place” and “The Days of Bobby’s Passing.” One of the many strengths of this book is its descriptions of individual experiences and reflections inscribed by culture, bureaucracy, infrastructure, and history.
I wholeheartedly recommend this book. Many of the poems will stick with me and be worth rereading.
===About the reviewer: Chicago poet Elizabeth Harper is the author of several books and chapbooks including A Mercenary Girdler and No Solace in Memory. She writes for the Literate Ape website.
Posted November 1, 2020
The Eden of Perhaps
By Agnes Vojta
Spartan Press, 2020
74 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1952411007
Review by Jacqueline Stearns
The Eden of Perhaps is a sensitively written volume of poetry that chronicles the feminine journey as it pertains to a woman's place in the world.
Muse takes a reflective look at a woman who discovers a new, vibrant side of herself. She doesn't know whether or not to embrace these personality traits that could "Wake her up" and give her a broader view of the world.
Questioning talks about a woman who finds solace in Library books. She keeps her writing a secret. "The stacks of Library books reveal what torments her” and "The computer does not judge." The woman is relieved to find the “Librarian has an unfamiliar face."
Greeting Cards They Don't Make deals with the horror of domestic violence: "May only peaceful thoughts touch your heart today doesn't cut it when you're dictating your statement to the prosecutor." She couldn't write because her abuser beat her so badly she suffered a concussion.
The World Split Open, depicts a group of women telling the truth about their lives. They have teetered on the brink of suicide, have lost children, and/or have been sexually assaulted. This particular poem made me think. Women prevail, overcoming tragedies and obstacles, to seek and find love, peace, happiness.
We Live In A World Of Right Angles begs the question what if people broke with tradition and didn't always do what is expected of them?
One of my personal favorites in this collection is Never Too Late. The character in this work begins her life's journey in midlife. Vojta implores younger women not to mock her, explaining that life experiences will make this traveler’s adventures richer.
Agnes brilliantly weaves Greek mythology and classic fairy tales, into a seamless tapestry that asks what if our existences as we know them can change? Is fate really pre-ordained? Sisyphus Calls It Quits jokingly asks what if the gods didn't have a right to punish Sisyphus? What would happen if Rapunzel and Aurora (Sleeping Beauty) struck out on their own, rather than waiting for their respective princes to rescue them?
Vojta also uses natural wonders as a plot device. Peace of the River depicts a woman yearning to cast off the shackles of an everyday routine to live by a river, becoming one with its seasons. Trip Tych On Highway 28 is a lovely tale of a person driving toward a beautiful magical rainbow. What is life without romance?
Unconditional is disturbing because one person wants to erase all traces of herself from her relationship so that the components will focus on her partner.
That Summer We Rolled Around In The Grass, tells a tale of piquant first love and innocent sensuality.
The Eden of Perhaps encompasses life and its citizens slogging through attempting to find their place in the world.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Jacqueline Stearns holds a B.A degree from William Patterson College (Now University). She was a feature writer for Clifton Merchant Magazine. Stearns has had been published in The Millstreet Forward, Grapevine Christian Magazine, and Highland Park Poetry.
Posted November 1, 2020
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The Machinery of Grace
Patrice Claeys Boyer
Kelsay Books, 2020
64 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1950462735
Review by Gail Denham
The Machinery of Grace, an amazing poetry volume, by Patrice Boyer Clacys, is entirely written in the Cento poetry form, using lines from a large number of works, all credited in the back of the book. Ms Boyer Clacys changed little besides tenses or plurals to singular, adding none of her own words.
To have amassed this enormous amount of lines from so many poets shows a skill and attention to detail that many of us wish we could master.
However, it’s not just the skill of compiling these lines into poems which have form and extend a theme – the book is a revelation of how the author viewed grief over her mother’s illness and passing. Then how she progressed to a renewed look at life. The book is both comforting and a book of encouragement.
To point out a few poems – “The Beginning of Forgetting” talks of her mother slipping away: “Her childhood streets, those old recipes she’d been saving,”…”All this time, and it comes back like this – the end humming along.” The poems are put together in such a way as to make complete sense, using a variety of lines.
“after all these years I can still …taste the morning rush, …keep reaching into the past for that muscle memory of love.” Then the book moves into healing: “Just when you thought your history complete, the peach trees blossom.” And “Thank God some things stay the same."
So much to absorb in this book of poetry, published by Kelsay Books Inc. and also available through Amazon.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Gail Denham says, "Writing keeps me sane at times - Have had stories, essays, poems, and newspaper articles, plus many photos published in magazines, newspapers, books, over the last 45 years."
Posted November 1, 2020
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Still Life With God
By Cynthia Atkins
St Julian Press, 2020
112 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1733023306
Review by Tina Cole
In Still-Life with God, Atkins takes us on more than an exploration, it is a quest. These are poems that pose questions and present a still life arrangement for us to consider. What are the relationships between objects, what is there and what is not and what about the gaps in-between? The poems probe the possibilities of something sacred in the now, the everyday, a relationship with God in many guises, A wishing well/ A medicine cabinet/ A bullet/ An alibi. We are drawn into dialogues and disputes about gender, body, illness, gun violence and mental health. Conflicts of inner and outer worlds, the personal and the communal including up-to-the-moment challenges of the twenty first century are brought out of dark closets. These are fragments gleaned over a lifetime, what has been taught, what has been learned and a reflection on the world and womanhood in all its facets chaos, struggle, triumph.
The 46 poems are arranged in four parts. Atkins’ voice is loud, bold even fierce, she assaults the reader with imagery that explodes like soap bubbles, like fireworks, like missiles. Layer upon layer of filo pastry allegory and metaphor, focus and re-focus her painful, apposite and over-arching themes.
Part one begins with the sonnet, ‘God is a Wishing Well’:
lit-up in the parking lot of my heart,
which kick-starts us immediately into the landscape we are to inhabit. Following on, ‘Hello Stranger’, calls us to reflect on human isolation.
it’s me the voice inside a tin box
inside the intention to be a voice
…we are lonely
in our cars, we are little cubicles.
I particularly liked, ‘Imaginary Friends’, …
because you needed to belong
you sought the debutantes who flaunted their
fixed prom dates. See how they build their houses with bricks of silence.
A head butt of a poem that fixes us clearly in our twenty first century world.
Part II moves on to a younger self, a lighter perspective and begins with,‘God is a Treasure Hunt’
I am a gawky kid jumping into a pile of leaves.
Atkins pulls us along those perplexing adolescent tracks of who am I? These are poems of identity and self-discovery. My Persona – is a teenage rant, a listing of the positive and negative, a shouting out of self-belief and self-doubt. The obdurate nature of self-reflection and trying to make sense is well forked over.
my persona has a pecking order …
is filled with yearning…
is behind the curtains where loneliness dwells.
Part III takes us beyond the reflected self into the harsh realities of adulthood, where God might be found in a medicine cabinet, or in a library. There are powerful poems in this section that grapple with adult themes, grab you with heavily concentrated meaning.In ‘House and Home;
where I’ve left so many arguments in lamplit rooms…. my archive of scars..
a shantytown of loneliness.. we tell ourselves to face the music of our grief..
it is a constant assault.
And equally strong, ‘Domestic Terrorism’
every action has a terrible twin
every dictator knows there is power in fear.
This section also contains three insightful exploratory self-portrait poems.‘Self Portrait with No Spare Parts’
this is how
everything is fine until it is not.
The final pages contain a kind of modulation – moments of quiet reflection – a Goddess appears, ‘The Goddess in Purple Rain’
and stars allow me to follow her..
rooftops are hunkering down to sing lullabies.
There is a feeling of some reconciliation with the self, that some kind of still-life can be attained after facing one’s own demons and the demons of society. That a search for the authentic self may bear fruit despite everyday contradictory evidence.This is a brave collection that ends with, ‘God is the Myth’ prompting again the question if he is or not?
Every day..
we mark the calendar with one more hangnail of grief
These are complex poems, a roller coaster of themes, written with skilful imagery and conviction. The still life we are asked to observe and meditate on is sketched out in bold colours. Atkins language is sensitive, emphatic, and impactful, every poem seeking the divine in the everyday. The power and the passion in these poems and the journey that you are taken on as a reader leave you in no doubt that God can be found in who we are, what we do and how we do it.
=== About the reviewer: Tina Cole is a U.K. poet who lives in a rural area near the border with Wales. She has been writing poetry for many years, her collection – I Almost Knew You (2015), focussed on dysfunctional relationship themes. She has won a number of national Poetry competitions and her published poems have appeared in many U.K. magazines, collections and one in The Guardian newspaper. Her second collection, Nothing but the Strength of Names, will be released by Yaffle Press in 2021.
Posted October 1, 2020
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dancing a dizzy holiness
By Larry Janowski
After Hours Press, 2019
91 Pages
ISBN: 978-0-578-56655-9
Review by Ed Werstein
It was with a bit of skepticism that I started reading Larry Janowski’s recent book, dancing a dizzy holiness. After all, Janowski is an ordained Franciscan Friar and I’m a former seminarian and a recovering Catholic. However, I am happy to report that I have absolutely nothing negative to say about this collection. I thoroughly enjoyed, and was frequently amazed by it.
Right from the opening lines of “Religious Poem,” Janowski lets the reader know that he’s not going to be preached to: I hear you secretly groaning, Jesus-- not religion! Well, yes, but not a sermon in poem’s clothes, but the thick Latin root of religion, the lig of it-- as in ligament...
And near the end of the poem the word ligature creates a nice echo with the opening. These are poems for word lovers. Poems to be read aloud.
If you like poems with titles that point the reader down a path that ends in an unexpected place, you’ll find plenty to enjoy here as well. For one example, given some of the history of the Catholic priesthood, one might cringe before diving into a poem titled “Abuse.” It ends, though, in a decidedly pleasant little turn. And which of us has ever read a confessional poem written from the priest’s side of the screen? The last poem in this section, "Severe Thunderstorm Warning," is a narrowly constructed poem of abrupt line breaks evocative of the poetry of Todd Boss or Eavan Boland. Many of the short lines could stand alone as poetic prompts.
The book’s 45 poems are grouped into seven sections. As if planned that way, the shortest section (two poems) is titled, Coming Up Short. Both poems are quite humorous, self-deprecating riffs on the author’s own diminutive stature. "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Short Guy," is a series of backhanded insults, each in its own particular style:
Diffident Sorry. I didn’t see you.
Optimistic When it rains,
you’re the last to know.
The six poems in the section, The City, make up a collective ode to the place Janowski calls home, Chicago. They take us from colorful descriptions of pedestrian-watching while stopped at red lights, through the city’s fickle changing seasons, and ends with election night 2008. Like many poems in the book they are full of creative metaphors. Have you ever heard slow traffic described as the thrombosis of arterial streets? Family is a section of poignant, often tissue-grabbing poems that venture from the author’s childhood to the parenting of his own parents in their old-age. The evolving relationship of boy and father is especially heart-warming.
The poem, “Life Expectancy”, which opens a section called, The Waning Crescent, is a thought-provoking read for those of us living under the delusion that the longevity of our parents has given us a free pass into our old age. But my favorite poem in the entire collection is one called, “Skin: A Letter”. It is a dreamy, speculative tribute to the authors two poetic heroes, Gerard Manley Hopkins (also a priest-poet) and Walt Whitman. In it Janowski imagines an afternoon of skinny-dipping with his heroes.
These are accessible poems written for everyone, writers and readers alike. So, leave your dictionary and mythology encyclopedia on the shelf, grab your favorite beverage, and sit down for a thoroughly enjoyable read.
===About the reviewer:Ed Werstein is a regional VP of the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets, and the 2018 recipient of the Council of Wisconsin Writers Lorine Niedecker Prize for Poetry.
Posted October 1, 2020
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Body Falling, Sunday Morning
By Susana H. Case
Milk and Cake Press, 2019
34 Pages
ISBN: 978-1-7341066-0-2
Review by Joseph Zaccardi
Every day, the shoe factory and then,
one day, inevitably, the shotgun.
With these startling first lines from the first poem, “No Sign of Activity,” from Susana H. Case’s, Body Falling, Sunday Morning, the reader begins a journey filled with mystery and revelation; from the cover art, whose background of newsprint is set in reversed type, that is, light color text on a dark gray pallet, to Frances Glessner Lee’s photos taken of her crime-scene dioramas, reproduced here in black-and-white, from the originals done in color. This stark rendering, along with the text of the poems, adds a cinéma vérité feel to unveil truth and highlight the horror of murder, either because of passion or revenge or greed.
Case gives voice to Glessner Lee’s dollhouse-sized dioramas, created by her in the 1940s and 50s. Although the crimes depicted were composites of actual cases, the characters and decorations of the dioramas’ interiors were Glessner Lee’s invention; she disclosed the dark side of domesticity and its potentially deleterious effects––many victims were women led astray from the cocoon-like security of the home––by men, misfortune, or by their low stations in life.
In this collection,Susana H. Case, the poet, shows her mastery of the ekphrastic poetic form when she connects the extraordinary with the ordinary; she redefines perceptions with linguistic agility. Few contemporary poets of ekphrastic poetry, in my opinion, can so effectively accomplish such artistry. It would not be accurate to label her poetry, and Frances Glessner Lee’s dioramas, merely as artwork paired with words, for the poems in Body Falling, Sunday Morning are seamlessly controlled, and, because of Case’s attention to detail, the reader can envision the subtle nuances in the scenes that ask: is this murder, suicide, or accident? Case employs metronymy and drumroll by her deftly chosen words and phrases to place us at the center of crime scenes, and guides us through the case study of the murdered, and fingers those suspected of murder: from the poem “Body in the Closet,” she writes: Her neck is slashed…. // female sexuality / begets violence; the hooker / always gets it in the end. And this from “End of the Affair,” He bent over and shot himself / his mistress insists…. No matter that the gun’s not under him…. This is not poetry for the faint of heart, one must stand awake, eye on the photographic images, ear attuned to the sound and significance of the words on the page, for they will not stay still; readers may find themselves turning back pages to re-read and re-view what has transpired. Where is the truth, one may ask; you the reader become the chief inspector and coroner, perpetrator and victim.
Case goes a step further in her placement of the black-and-white photos, assembling her poems in six scenes, each scene foreshadowed by one of Glessner Lee’s dioramas. The poems explore in detail not only the dead bodies, but also the décor of the middle class and the ne’er-do-well; there are the dotted curtains and floral wallpapers, the spill of dark blood on carpets and bed sheets, a woman lying on the floor with a knife in her body. Here’s four lines from the poem “Bite Marks,” A pervert, one she knows / has bitten up her torso and legs… She’s cut, mis-loved, teenager / in ballet shoes, knife in gut.
It is the mission of the poet to find the primitive understory and bring to life, with quiet force, the victims who suffered this fate. Yes, a picture is worth a thousand words, but words, especially in the hands of a poet with the acuity of this poet, resurrects the deceased imagistically to reveal their story. She further explores the relationship of the real world to its encapsulation in rooms (stanzas) via the dioramas, and effectively melds the distinction between the actual and the perceived.
What we have here is a poet who shares her heightened appreciation of art, for her language underscores the most consequential subject matter; in the last line, in the last poem, “Wallpaper with Fish,” she shows us the devastation in its summation:
You don’t know what to think.
===About the reviewer: Joseph Zaccardi served as Marin County, CA poet laureate (2013-2015), and during his tenure published and edited Changing Harm to Harmony: Bullies & Bystanders Project. He is the author of five books poetry, the latest being The Weight of Bodily Touches, from Kelsay Books. www.josephzaccardi.com
Posted October 1, 2020
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Wild Fruition: Sonnets, Spells, and Other Incantations
By Christine Swanberg
Puddin'head Press, 2017
98 Pages
ISBN: 978-0981975634
Review by Barbara Eaton
Christine Swanberg's Wild Fruition: Sonnets, Spells, And Other Incantations starts out as a journey, illustrated by her husband Jeffrey's well-chosen photographs.
The first photograph, a dark interior of what appears to be a covered bridge, revealing a vista of trees, is particularly apt, and the first few poems, "Something So New," "Great River Road," and "Bridges," create the excitement every new journey presents. Swanberg is especially good at satisfying and surprising last lines, and "Great River Road" contains an unusually fresh last line: "spring green promise now springing forth."
"Black Mesa Magic" and "Dangerous Woman" also have great last lines: "a thousand miles from home again," and "a woman with chemicals, Marlboros/and a lighter that works. Watch out." A little disconcerting was the error of "ice sickles" for "icicles," which occurred twice.
The book also traces a journey through the seasons, and a journey through life. Many of the poems celebrate the simple joys of life in one's later years, such as "One October Morning Past Your Prime," and "One January Morning Past Your Prime."
"Spell to Enchant a House," luckily, the spell of a good witch, is both entertaining and amusing.
Lovely garden poems follow, and "The Joy of Unimportance," sings praises of life after one's sixth decade: "We no longer have to please all people!" "The Sweet Spot," too, ends with a wonderful line: "the sweet life--/the long, luxurious meander,/mid-afternoon for no good reason/whatsoever."
These poems are very welcome to readers in their later years who are ready to slow down and simply enjoy life. This book is a pleasure to read, and the pleasure deepens upon rereading. This book would make a thoughtful gift for a recent retiree. Well done, Christine!
===About the reviewer: Barbara Eaton is a poet and semi-retired community college instructor.
Posted October 1, 2020
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Archived Book Reviews posted July - September, 2020
Sylvia Cavanaugh, Angular Embrace (review by Barbara Eaton)
Jeff Snatuoso, Body of Water (review by Elizabeth Levinson)
Michael Escoubas, Steve Henderson in Poetry and Paint (review by Charlotte Digregorio)
Storiword/T.J. Morris, Poetry With a Passion (review by Mary Beth Bretzlauf)
Wilda Morris, Pequod Poems: Gamming with Moby Dick (review by Mike Freveletti)
Curt Vevang, poetry as we like it (review by Mary Beth Bretzlauf)
Herb Berman, Sympathetic Magic (review by Gail Denham)
Mary Jo Balistreri, Gathering the Harvest (review by Charlotte Digregorio)
Charlotte Digregorio, Ripples of Air: Poems of Healing (review by Michael Escoubas)
Cheryl Caesar, Flatman: Poems of Protest in the Trump Era (review by Barbara Eaton)
