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Poetry Book Reviews
Coyote's Song: Collected Poems and Selected Art, Carlos Cortéz Koyokuikatl
By Carlos Cortéz Koyokuikatl
Editors Carlos Cumpián and David Ranney with Essays by René Arceo, Carlos Cumpián, and Fred Sasaki
March/Abrazo Press, 2023
212 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1877636028
Review by Lois Baer Barr
How fortunate for Chicago that Carlos Cortéz (1923-2005), born in Milwaukee to a German immigrant activist and a Mexican-Yaqui father, decided to live, work, and die here. How fortunate for Cortéz that his parents, both workers and both political activists from the socialist and anarchist movements, always found the money for notebooks and art supplies and encouraged his creative work. Following in their footsteps he left a huge legacy as a labor organizer, political activist, cultural innovator, visual and word artist. His wood and linoleum prints are in the permanent collections of museums such as, the National Museum of Mexican Art, MoMA, The Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Smithsonian. The murals in Pilsen owe their existence to artists like Cortéz who wanted to display their indigenous and Latinx identity on the skin of their buildings. He was here to protest the deep communal wound inflicted upon the immigrant neighborhoods and Black communities when the Congress Expressway slashed its way through the city’s west side. Urban renewal and the University of Illinois Chicago campus further displaced the working poor and middle-class immigrants of that area.
The poetry of Carlos Cortéz, however, has not been as widely divulgated. So Coyote’s Song, with poems that only appeared in journals, represents a significant achievement and something that poetry and art lovers will want to add to their collections. And how fortunate that current Chicago artists and activists have collaborated to curate and comment on his life and work. Poet Carlos Cumpián, artist Rene Arceo, labor organizer and former academic, David Ranney, and Fred Sasaki, Creative Director at the Poetry Foundation, have created a handsome book that the late Cortéz would have endorsed. He left his linoleum and wooden blocks to museums with the proviso that the price of prints should always be affordable for working class people.
Early poems show the influence of Langston Hughes. In “J.B. Jukebox” he writes:
Him just gulp down
Nickels
& Dimes
& Quarters
And he was spurred to write by the Beat Generation. Fred Sasaki quotes Cortéz as saying about their work, “Hell, I can write this shit.”
The other strong influence in his work is his love of language. He spoke German and Spanish from with his mother and father, learned English in school, Italian when he was in prison as a conscientious objector, and Greek from his wife and his father’s language Yaqui later in life. A Nahuatl spiritual leader gave him the name Koyokokuitl which means Coyote Singer. In “Empty House Blues” his dogs (izkuintlis) are his loyal companions: “Yo sé que los izkuintlis keep me company/But they lack that certain algo.” His “Macuilhaicuh (Cinco Haiku Chicanos) are in Spanish and since they were not translated, I’ll try my hand at one:
¡Órale chapulín
Cántame más
¡Y deja mi lechuga!
Hey now grasshopper!
Sing for me more
And leave my lettuce alone!
Most of his poetry narrates strife, from Industrial Workers of the World general strikes to protests of the Vietnam War. His poems about urban renewal in the fifties and sixties are vitriolic and beautiful. “Kickback artists with mechanical mentalities and/mechanical hearts, and in the wake of the redevelopment juggernaut/leaving behind a mess that would put a B-29 to shame.” In “Requiem for ‘Two Dago Reds,’” he eulogizes martyrs of the workers’ movement like Nicola, a fish monger and Bartolo, a cobbler, unjustly charged with armed robbery and electrocuted. He decries violence perpetrated against protesters in Mexico City and Beijing.
Preachy? Yes, at times, but his poetry is also lyrical. In “Purification 1,” he depicts a pristine white winter night in Pilsen. All the grime is covered, and everything is equal beneath the snow’s blanket. Talking about the steel mill owners in “Youngstown Revisited” he writes, “They took all their gold/But left behind the rust.” In his five haiku in Spanish he likens the chiles in his garden to his wife’s lips and the beans in their pods to the breasts of young women. “How la Guitarra Was Born” tells the tale of a lonely vaquero (cowboy) who carves wood into the shape of a woman’s torso and strokes her by the light of the campfire.
Whether he uses the haiku form or the Mexican corrido, a ballad form, there is always humor. In “Springtime Haiku” he writes:
wise little pigeons
they know
how to decorate
the courthouse
I have minor quibbles about the book. It would be nice to have the poems dated and to have a timeline of the poet’s life. In none of the essays do we learn the name of Carlos Cortéz’s mother, a German socialist who also wrote poetry.
This book has cover artwork by Hector Duarte and more than twenty of Cortéz’s woodcuts, linocuts, and posters, along photographs of the poet which illuminate the life of a key figure in our history. The essays of Arceo, Cumpián, and Sasaki add immeasurably to our understanding to the life and times of Carlos Cortéz Koyokokuitl. Coyote’s Song is an important work for high school and college students to have in their hands. Poetry and art enthusiasts will be thrilled by Cortéz’s gift for narrative, metaphor, resonant verse, and his engaging and ingenious artwork.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Lois Baer Barr lives in Riverwoods and has published in local journals and abroad. Retired from Lake Forest College, she chaired Modern Languages and Literatures and Latin American Studies. Nominated for Pushcart Prizes and a finalist for the Rita Dove Award, Barr has three chapbooks: Lope de Vega’s Daughter (short fiction), Biopoesis (poetry), and Tracks: Poems on the “L,” a finalist at Finishing Line Press. Her first novel, The Tailor’s Daughter is forthcoming from Water’s Edge Press.
Posted September 1, 2023
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Duluth: Zenith City & Beyond
By Jan Chronister
Poetry Harbor, 2023
95 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1886895409
Review by Marie Asner
Jan Chronister is a prolific poet and has over ten books of poetry at Amazon Books. “Duluth Zenith City & Beyond” is her latest poetry collection and in it, Chronister describes a city that I am familiar with, Duluth, Minnesota and nearby Lake Superior. This collection of work is arranged in four sections, Town Life, Almanac, Waterways and Roads. The reader is taken on a journey through present day observations in a city by an enormous inner waterway, and the surrounding countryside which has old rock weathered by the passage of time.
Chronister’s style of writing is reminiscent of Edna St Vincent Millay, in that the point is made in as few descriptive words as possible. Chronister offers “hurricanes, baptized by flood.” where the deciding point is the final phrase. The author’s background includes working in the newspaper field where editors tell you to put your article into one sentence and then expand from there. The first section in the book, “Town Life” has a lesson in honesty in “Karma,” and in “whole foodscheckout on Mother’s Day”, teaching a son how to treat a mother and future wife which is not what you think. This blends with “June Wedding at St. Scholastica” when the wedding vows soon begin to be chipped. “Almanac” is about country life and “Tenth Month” with Orion’s belt hanging on a hook. Then, “Shared Air” and who the person is sharing air with.
“Waterways” is my favorite where water has a part of the poems and the coolness of a stream runs into the next poem. Then, there is “Keeping Secrets” and “…stories told on winter nights," and in “Spring Cleaning,” we have on special days, “Lake Superior is pristine crystal, polished silver on lace."
The last section of poems is “Roads” and telling of the author’s trip to Minnesota to buy a farm. In “The Summer We Bought The Farm,” there is “house barely livable. We move right in.” The rest of the poems at the end of the book, are what a person observes in their area once they have settled into a home. Such as the poem “Commute” with three short lines about a busy road. Or what happens to old furniture, traffic accidents in the area, young girls missing and Indigenous missing women.
In “Duluth,” Jan Chronister’s poems are concise and the reader wants to look ahead to read the next observation. You can sit awhile and savor the words, carefully selected for impact. No need to rush for a dictionary, it’s all here. This shows that Duluth, Minnesota, as with smaller cities, has a story to tell. Some in vignettes, others many pages, but enough information to format a history of life by an enormous lake that is rimmed by old stone. Jan Chronister is giving to the reader a guide to a city of the Northland that has a mystic of its own.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Marie Asner reviews books and films. Marie has a 25-year background of newspaper writing and National Public Radio-Kansas City. She is also a church musician with degrees in music education, and her piano/organ duets were published through Belwin-Mills. Marie is a former member of Kansas Arts on Tour and the recipient of a grant from the Kansas Arts commission for a series of poems on Amelia Earhart.
Posted September 1, 2023
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Fire Carousel
Poems by Virginia Chase Sutton / Airea Johnson / Liz Robbins / Lauren Tivey
Photographs by Nikole Tucker
Main Street Rag, 2023
48 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1-59948-950-6
Review by Carol L. Gloor
Fire Carouselis an anthology of the work of four well-published poets: Virginia Chase Sutton, Airea Johnson, Liz Robbins and Laruen Tivey, all on the subject of mental illness. Each poet contributed five poems, with each section separated by the almost surrealistic photographs of Nikole Tucker.
The book as a totality is stunning because the poems are uncensored, told straight from the minds of those who have experienced mental illness and all of its consequences. The book is not for the faint of heart, but for those who can hear and bear the truth of mental illness experienced by many, especially by women.
That being said, there is a beauty and originality in the poems that emerges in the form of extended metaphor, dream images and color.
The poem “Heritage,” by Chase Sutton, uses the metaphor of a pearl necklace throughout the poem, first as something seen in the poet’s mother’s jewel box when her mother tells the poet “mentally sixk people are common,/in the family,” and later, when the poet is released from a mental hospital when the “Pearls fall like droplets/ of water in my ear.” The metaphor appears again in the poem “Spirit Bead, “by Tivey, where in Navaho crafting a bead is deliberately left out to allow the Great Spirit to enter the work, but the poet asks “what would divinity want with me anyway?”
The poems of Liz Robbin use the garden as a metaphor for care and grounded reality. In “Sad.” the poet tends a lime tree because it will show “the evidence/of my nurturing,” and in “Tomato Crop Guide” the garden is “like/ a god. I work to free myself of the flavor/ of questioning.” Airea Johnson uses the metaphor of smoking in her poems to evoke a dreamlike, ominous mood, as in “The Day Before My Suicide, “I smoked rings around my head / until I was dizzy” leading to her counting the necessary pills. In “Lime Green Spirits” she buys two packs a week “to keep my hands occupied,” until she becomes “the carcass of a burning city/ betrayed by my own body.”
Chase Sutton’s poem “Psychoanalytic Appointment” details a terrible analysis of the poet’s dream, where the analyst calmly states “It is clear your mother knew all about/ the sexual abuseyou experienced from / your father, but she chose to do nothing/ about it.” In Robbins poem “Stray,” she tries hard to feed a feral cat, but “it’s only/in the dark/ in my head, that / she trusts, eats from my hand.
But beyond all these specifics, it is the true terror of being trapped in a damaged mind that leaps off the page. In Chase Sutton’s poem “Vigilant,” the poet recounts a recurring dream from which she cannot escape her sexually abusive father: “Of course, he is under my bed.” And in Tivey’s poem “Lockjaw” the poet locks herself in a vice of perfectionism that eventually leads to her imagined death, ending in “Wow, remember her? Damn/ that woman could work like no other.”
And of course the color appearing throughout, on dresses, inside eyes and minds is always red. Red alert. This is not an easy book to read, but the honesty and survival of these poets makes it a must read.
===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 September 1, 2023
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If There Is No Wind
By Margaret R. Sáraco
Human Error Publishing, 2022
96 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1948521116
Review by Michael Escoubas
This review is reprinted with kind permission from Quill & Parchment
Margaret Sáraco’s new collection takes its title from her poem, “If Wind Were Erased from the Earth.” As the poem draws to closure, Sáraco references a familiar song from the 1960s. Peter, Paul and Mary, had a hit song that featured a classic lyric: The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind. During the 60s, which I contend were far more contentious than the current post-Covid period, that line was on the lips of virtually every youth in the country. It was a time of testing, of soul-searching, like none other in memory.
I mention this only because the poetry of Margaret Sáraco resonates, oh, so strongly, within my heart. Of the 71 poems in the collection, I can’t think of a single poem I did not like. Each poem is substantive in content. Each is drawn, not from the perspective of privilege, but from a treasure chest of experience; no ivory tower here. This is down-to-earth, grab you where you live writing. Yet, she does it in a way that makes you want more of her insights.
As to style, Sáraco writes primarily in free verse. I have said many times that free verse isn’t all that free. Among other factors, the mature free verse poet is concerned with making good end-line decisions, cadence and rhythm and the employment of poetic devices within the text itself. “Invocation,” from late in the book, provides sufficient evidence:
My bulky blue heart hangs in my chest.
I shudder then shutter the windows,
Burrow beneath the knitted afghan.
My anguish bounded for now by these living room walls.
Set me free.
Let the birds carry my body above the salted sea,
Invite me to soar then dive like an osprey
looking for dinner, cutting the water,
swimming in warmth, bathing my afterimage away.
This thoughtful poem features alliteration in line 1, a subtle word-play in line 2, vivid imagery in line 3: “Burrow beneath the knitted afghan,” a brave open heart that avers is “bounded for now by these living room walls.” “Set me free,” is a cornerstone line from which the two couplets above and below gain their power. “Invocation” is more than just a catchy title; it calls on the force of poetry and nature to impart meaning to life. I’m reminded of a saying; Poetry helps us live our lives. Ample evidence of that in Sáraco’s work.
I don’t know if Margaret Sáraco is aware of the above-noted saying or not. Even so, it seems evident that poetry (writing and reading poems) is a bridge to the very heart of her life. One more illustration will make the point. In “Jesus Christ Moved Me,” Sáraco’s use of irony comes out. After being attracted to Christ through the ministrations of nuns who tutored her:
The nuns looked down on me, encased in cloth
I didn’t move, wondered
what kind of underwear they wore.
I wanted to dress like them
to feel he cloth draped around me
. . . . . . . . .
I looked when they weren’t looking at me.
In college I got my wish
I wore a nun’s habit in The Comedy of Errors,
underneath I wore bikini underwear.
If There is No Wind, gives readers different looks within the free verse genre: couplets, quatrains, irregular stanza breaks and no stanza breaks. Never boring, Sáraco writes a short line, she writes a long line. Titles are important: “I Fell into a Painting While Reading the NY Times,” “Living in an Age of Fear,” “A Conversation on the Day of Your Birth,” “A Branch Like Poetry,” and, “Down the End of Linger Longer Road.” These titles did not disappoint.
This poet has something to say. Pick up a copy. You will find something fresh my friend, blowin’ in the wind.
===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 September 1, 2023
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Uncomfortable Ecologies
By Elizabeth Joy Levinson
Umsolicited Press, 2023
102 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1956692600
Review by Jane Desmond
Have you ever noticed those clusters of tiny red dots on the underside of a leaf in your garden? Before reading Uncomfortable Ecologies by Elizabeth Joy Levinson, I wouldn’t have given them a second thought, but now I will always think of a crowd of these miniscule beings in her term: a “scarlet constellation,” imbued somehow with the evocative power of the stars. Studded throughout this quietly stunning meditation on the natural world and our places in it are numerous such moments of transformative recognition that can make readers see the everyday world anew.
Levinson’s choice of title, taken from a line in one of the 52 poems that make up this two part collection, alerts us right away that these works will push and pull us in unexpected ways. An ecology, after all, is a system of relations in which the parts of a whole are dependent upon one another for survival. In Levinson’s hands these relations, between plants, animals, places, and among all of those and the humans who inhabit these worlds, are at times fraught, imbued with longing and failure, but never sentimental. Nor are the non-humans in these poems merely props for metaphor, or imagistic symbolism deployed to look more deeply into human ways.
Take for example, “The Beekeepers,” a poem from Part 1 (“By Land”). It starts with the arresting line: What makes them do it/these strange men who love/a thing that is dying,” and ends “with hope for the quiet hum/for the brush of a furry thorax/against my wrist,/where my gloves might slide down/leaving skin exposed.” Even if we read this poem more metaphorically, searching for “the bitter aftertaste/that follows the harvest/of the comb” and the vulnerability of exposing ourselves to the potential sting of others, at the same time the lives and deaths of the bees are closely observed, befitting the biology background Levinson brings to her work. Throughout the book, all sorts of animals (and not just the more charismatic ones like wolves, coyotes, horses, and parakeets that feature in other poems, but even insects and fish) are vividly drawn, rendered with respect for their lives even when so different from our own.
This close observation is the engine that drives these poems, but, especially in the second half of the book (“By Sea”), the writer’s focus bores in more fully on familial relations, especially with fathers, and occasionally with a mother or partner. Even here, the presence of the natural world, invoked through boating on intercoastal waterways, or scooping up handfuls of a “fossil soup” of tiny shell fragments on a beach, still plays a prominent role. It is the wider ecology in which the pain of lost opportunities for loving connection peek through.
Part of the power of these poems comes from the relative sparseness of Levinson’s language. At times nearly conversational, the poems move swiftly from line to line with a sense of propulsion from beginning to end; the majority of the pieces are roughly a page and a half of free verse, with shortish lines. Although the writer’s descriptions can be arresting (…red/as the ink on the eviction slip/and the tongues of the lizards flicking/as they ran across the door), the diction is never showy, never calls attention to itself through syntactical gymnastics. Instead, short rhythms and assonance within a line keep the poems moving, each poem a perfect size to injest in one gulp, then to savor the resonance of the closing lines before turning to the next.
Readers with a passion for the more-than-human world will especially enjoy this book, but its accessibility, in the very best sense of the word, will also entice other readers who want to think about and to feel how the power of place and landscape can inscribe our childhoods, mark our family relations, and forge our ways of being in the world.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Jane Desmond is a poet and an anthropologist who writes about human-animal relations. Her poetry has appeared in Persimmon Tree, Words for the Wild, and The Shrew Literary Magazine, among others. She lives in Champaign, Illinois.
Posted August 1, 2023
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On Shifting Shoals
By Joanne Durham
Kelsay Books, 2023
39 Pages
ISBN-13: 9780822966531
Review by Cynthia T. Hahn
Poet Joanne Durham has been gaining significant recognition for her poetic voice since 2018 by publishing in in a variety of venues and receiving awards, including a Pushcart nomination in 2022. Her first volume, "To Drink from a Wider Bowl," (Evening Street Press, 2021 Sinclair Poetry Prize) emphasized, among other themes, connections with family. This second collection of poems by Durham, "On Shifting Shoals," emphasizes complex connections to place, and begins with a stirring quote by French author and adventurer Antoine de St. Exupéry, in his admonition to "...teach them to long for the immensity of the sea." A bit of an adventurer herself, Durham has explored various professions living on both North American coasts, engaging in progressive activism and teaching poetry in a D.C. suburb before retiring to a North Carolina beachside town whose physical and social environment has inspired this work. Durham's poems in this text capture this environment and move beyond it to evoke an internal response to external items of beauty and injustice encountered in this liminal space between ocean and land. For example, she pursues the fleeting movement of dreams strewn across the sand, like so many "love stories", recognizing that "time vanishes/ in the clean sweep of tide" ("Sand Stories," 13). There is a hint of nostalgia early in the volume, in a quick recognition of time passing, the 'carrying' of daughter, released from the womb and subsequently released on a board to ride the waves ("A Father Teaches His Daughter to Ride the Waves", 14). It is this recognized shifting between what may be momentarily grasped and what must ultimately be let go, that characterizes the trajectory of the volume, and is aptly found in the uncertain stance of the poet's title, "On Shifting Shoals."
One poem slides easily to the next in this volume, like ocean waves pushing onto the beach and then pulling back to reveal some bit of wisdom, before repeating the whoosh. Many of Durham's poems are fueled by the act of picking up and turning over, the "frantic grip trying to steer the tide" in a smooth shell clutch of "slippery sea inside my palm" ("Equanimity", 37), much the way the ocean picks up and releases its wares on the shore for the strolling poet to consider. Nothing is left untouched—shells, shark teeth, or even "garbage" becomes someone's "world to retrieve" in this beach town (33). Social commentary peppers the images here and there, such as the image of confused sharks that prey upon swimmers, juxtaposed with the evocation of shark hunting perpretrated by humans ("The Hunt", 15). Pelicans are draped in "toxic slush" and dolphins are lost as sonic booms dismantle their sonar, and yet wild perfection of flight is still close at hand ("The Mayor Supports Oil Drilling Off Our Coast, 22-23). It's as if each item pulled to our attention by the book's ocean current is turned over by the poet, exposing another side. These "shifting shoals" sometimes take the form of environmental critique, as in the above examples. At other times they embody a social critique, as when a "flock" of boys, wading into an unsteady tide, one apart from the pack, becomes a reminder of love felt for the one strong enough to brave difference, thus escaping the "relentless pull" of social conformity ("Rite of Passage", 17). At yet other times, a personal sense of unsteadiness is evoked: the coronavirus, "silent stalker," overshadows the poet's desire "to control my own ebb and flow" ("Waiting for the Coronavirus", 21).
There are moments on Durham's pages where a perfect juxtaposition of colors and elements serves to create the serendipitous, reflective pause. For instance, "Orange Butterflies/Orange Blossoms", akin to "lovers" blurring "wing and bloom" (16), in conjunction with the back and forth visual of words across the page, provide a momentary delight of unanticipated beauty. In another such moment, the "crimson egg" of the sun, and its "yolk spreading across the sky" is the "Recipe" for starting the day's beach encounter (38).
Even those with wildly disparate political points of view can come together in a poem that unites through the unexpected beauty of this place, where a "dolphin, midair in a giant leap that looks like it will land on the sun" takes over a divisive conversation and leaves all dispute behind ("The Leap", 25). America, depicted as a "deep, black bruise" spreading across the sky, is contrasted by a "bathed/ in sunlight" perception to counter the foreboding it brings ("America", 28),
Words themselves take on the weight of items considered, and yet cannot be fully captured;
words, "spraying hard edges of thought, are akin to shells; they become "slippery" and elusive.
("Words", 24); the desperate word of a child decrying injustice may be successfully tucked "into her mind's pocket" ("The Hunt", 15). Words painted on stones, "still heavy with the mountain they long ago deserted", take on the weight of choice, as they are carefully selected from a plastic cooler, and proudly, "wisely" display their messages ("Words Matter: Choose Wisely", 19).
Some of Joanne Durham's poems hold a narrative structure with a message, while others are looser, evoking more abstract metaphors. Yet one flows easily to the next. The coronavirus, a "silent stalker" overshadows the poet's desire "to control my own ebb and flow" ("Waiting for the Coronavirus", 21). Death is not a topic to be avoided, but inscribed in a North Carolina boardwalk of engraved memory, as the contemplation of end of life passage is here a response to St. Exupéry's opening expression of longing for "the immensity of the sea"; Durham envisions her ashes thrown to sea, in a 'cradling' of horizon, gulls calling "all of our names" ("Phone Conversation with My Husband about Our Final Resting Places", 29).
The canvas of beach town serves Durham's writing well, with its inevitable tidal turns, from peaceful beauty to potential storm, each poem finding its heft built with secondary or tertiary meaning. "Evacuating for the Hurricane" becomes a piece about traveling lightly, leaning on "lightness", "like the birds" and noting, "we could start again," the short list of irreplaceables including the reconciliatory Navajo sand painting, "earth holding hands with sky" (34).
The book climaxes with a reference to the momentous parting of the Red Sea, this thing that can't be written, an event so terrible that "your poem is overwhelmed" by destruction and "the red ink of misery"; even so, this evocation morphs into the smaller surprise of snow on the beach, an unimagined event, with its "tiny miracle of a parting" between sea and snow on the shore. ("You Can't Put the Red Sea in a Poem", 36). The beachcomber picking a path between sea and shore that the poet describes is what Durham effectively does in her writing, as she juxtaposes mighty or dark realities, with bright or small items of unforeseen beauty, ever surprising to the reader.
Durham's collection functions during the reading experience as a broader tribute to the liminal space, to living with ebb and flow, to the inconstancy of tidal mood ever present. The sucking out and rushing in of this poetry's principal dynamic exposes the reader to an intriguing array of now opposing, now complementary, but ever fleeting glimpses of the transitory world in which we live; it is an invitation to gracefully inhabit, if but for an unsteady moment, "the immensity of the sea" while not missing "sudden shadows thrown across the sand," the "perfect pod of pelicans, swooping overhead." ("The Mayor Supports Oil Drilling off Our Coast, 23).
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Cynthia T. Hahn is the author Outside-In-Sideout (Finishing Line Press. 2010) and Conicidences (self-translated, French and English, Illustrated by Monique Loubet, alfAbarre Press, 2014).
Posted August 1, 2023
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Finding My Heart in Love & Loss
By Jackie Chou
Cyberwit, 2023
ISBN-13: 978-93-95224-63-5
Review by Bill Cushing
In full disclosure, I have known Jackie Chou for perhaps over five years now, not personally but as a part of the poetry community of our Southern California region. One reason for my ignorance is due to her quiet reserve, which I’m sure many interpret as shyness. I can say without reservation that her words on the page are nowhere near bashful or reticent. In fact, there is real power in her writing, which has always knocked me out.
I could also say that I do know her personally having heard and read her work over time, which is why the title of her recent book fits so well. In her “finding” of the personal, Jackie Chou seems to reveal the universal.
“Me and My Doppelganger Converse” a compare-and-contrast study of the narrator and her otherworldly self. Meanwhile, the narrator in “Talking About My Parents in Grief Group” confesses
I speak of you like you’re still here
before you left me alone
in a city lit by cold neon lights
and strange faces
While affairs of the heart represent the focus of this collection, “Saccharine Love” is anything but in its delivery. The poem is simultaneously sensuous and sensual. The narrator of “Do Not Woo Me with Strawberries” admonishes any erstwhile suitor to make use of
Anything but a fruit
pretending to be a heart.”
Some pieces delve into the contemporary world, for example “Before Your Friend Request” or “Pathological” in which she discovers Facebook profiles that consist of
a fake hometown
a false alma mater”
Readers will encounter an interesting juxtaposition between “reflections,” with its lack of punctuation and capitalization—except for the speaker’s first-person nominative pronoun, when seen against “The Lament of a Former Cheerleader,” villanelle that employs a traditional poetic form to address a modern dilemma. I’d argue that Chou offers her own version of the blues in “Cerulean.”
Perhaps her words represent women, but that’s not for me to say. I’m certain there is a good cross-section of that population her work connects with. I know that I come away from Chou’s work in the much same way I do after reading Deborah Tannen feeling a sense of enlightenment in that I’ve learned new things about the opposite sex by immersing myself in her world. Moreover, she does this without sermons or any trace of condescension.
Finally, Chou impresses with her deliberate use of what I’d call—for lack of a better term—her writer’s palette in inventive ways. To me, reading her work is like watching a Wes Anderson film in that I’m never sure what he’ll focus on, but I know it’ll be interesting. With Anderson, it’s his visual technique; with Chou, it’s her diction.
In works like “Advice for the Writer,” I love that she uses the preposition “for” instead of “to” in a way that does not command but actually advises. And in advising, she helps readers in doing their own “finding” of the heart.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Bill Cushing didn’t begin writing poetry until his late thirties and is now trying to make up for lost time, having now passed 70. His fourth and most recent collection, Just a Little Cage of Bone, was released by Southern Arizona Press and reviewed on this site in early April.
Posted August 1, 2023
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Distilled Lives, Volume 6
Illinois State Poetry Society Anthology
Edited By Wilda Morris and Susan T. Moss
Amazon KDP, 2023
114 Pages
ISBN-13: 9798370997181
Review by Michael Escoubas
This review is reprinted with kind permission from Quill & Parchment
Distilled Lives: Volume 6 is the latest in a series of superb anthologies assembled by the Illinois State Poetry Society and published by Kindle Direct Publishing. Poet Mary O. Monical has provided this writer with the perfect “hook” for the review which follows.
The last line of “Exit” hit me hard:
I want to go out like a light
bulb. Suddenly. Snap!
But before I do
I want to light up the world.
What are we about as poets? We desire, I should think, to light up the world. Poets and the things they do make a difference in people’s lives. This sentiment is not lost on co-editors Wilda Morris and Susan T. Moss. In the foreword, they write, “We strive to bring the written word into the world to help make it whole.”
Sixty-two poets contributed two poems each. There is something for everyone: classical forms, free verse, oriental forms, ekphrastic creations, seasonal poems, funny poems, and poems steeped in pathos.
Following are poems which serve as a sampling of the riches waiting to be mined:
Caroline Johnson’s golden shovel features endline words from Terrance Hayes:
Watching you in the garden, I
delight in your hands. I want
to take them and dance, to
measure each moment, open
and free like seeds. A
shadow from clouds, a door
to the sun, the wisdom of the
flowers and bees, please size
your heart so it equals the light of
day, so it expands the
way we reach the sky.
Each end word, when written as a complete sentence says, “I want to open a door the size of the sky.” I like Johnson’s easy dictional pace as well as her reference to light.
Arthur Voellinger delight’s readers with “Ouch Prevention”:
After suffering
a cut or bruise
children know
what to do
By showing
mom or grandma
where to kiss
And change
the hurt
into bliss
Only the best poets know how to capture the feelings and joys of childhood and, in so doing, “pinch” us adults out of a bad mood.
If you enjoy sonnets Curt Vevang’s “Rainbows Are Hard to Come By” is your ticket to the dance:
Too much rain spoils a fragile rainbow’s day,
and too much sun can make it go away.
We see that nature lives upon the cusp,
somewhere between too much and not enough.
Nature’s goodness shines in the day’s bright light,
while its evil face stalks the eerie night.
It brings earthly joys and wonders untold,
Yet allows angst and misery unfold.
The farmer’s fields soak up the gentle rain,
but floods and drought destroy the fledgling grain.
Sailors delight in nature’s potent breeze
until embroiled in ghastly typhoon seas.
Just as sunshine lights up the starry sky,
darkness of night doth bid the day goodbye.
Vevang’s poem showcases craftmanship of meter and rhyme. This skill is paired with keen powers of observation: nature and human nature frequently correspond. I enjoyed the mental exercise of applying this poem to my life.
No anthology would be complete without haiku. Barbara Robinette sent my imagination spinning with “Three Haiku”:
sitting by the pond
October twilight
the sound of grain bins
the scent of wild cherry blossoms all day
dog breath
the silence in this room
her cloudy eyes
In her poem, “What’s Really Going One,” Melissa Huff captures something special about poetry and the irreplaceable function that poetry performs for us:
It only looks like nothing is happening—
my feet propped on the ottoman,
eyes gazing unfocused, abdomen rising,
falling, in smooth waves. I might read
a few lines, jot down a word or phrase.
Rest assured I am storing nutrients,
for somewhere within I am feeding
fragments of ideas, tending
new growth of dormant goals,
encouraging an underground river
to nurture embryonic imaginings,
so that in the coming spring
when this months-long chill
dissolves in warm rains,
when I shed winter’s wrappings,
when light—long held at bay—breaks loose,
I too will emerge with the buds—
A newness in me will flower.
Yes, a newness, a light, for the world to see, a power, an essence of what matters in life—we poets evoke in speech those harmonies that help us live our lives.
Congratulations to co-editors Morris and Moss and to all the gifted contributors to Distilled Lives: Volume 6. Anthology of the Illinois State Poetry Society.
===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 August 1, 2023
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Like This
By Susanna Lang
Unsolicitied Press (2023)
50 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1956692624
Review by Kate Hutchinson
Upon first scanning the Table of Contents of Susanna Lang’s new chapbook, Like This, I experienced a moment of concern, noticing that all twenty-six titles begin with “Like,” and that the subsequent objects in the titles are in alphabetical order. Did the poet use other constraints as well, I wondered, limiting the range of what I was about to read? I needn’t have worried. This poet, after all, is a highly regarded and prolific writer and teacher, with several previous collections published in the last fifteen years, including three full-length books, two chapbooks, and three books of poetic translations. She knows how to assemble a poetry book worth reading.
Lang’s range of topics and poetic styles in Like This are indeed quite varied, the majority using free verse, though she has included one haibun, a few prose poems, and a modern sonnet. Yet it’s the ever-surprising places she takes us in these poems that most captivate. Many titles appear ordinary, such as the first three: “Like Apples,” “Like Bread,” and “Like Coffee,” which set up certain expectations. But one immediately understands these poems are not simply about the everyday or even much about the title objects at all in many cases. The clever use of the comparative “Like” in every title allows each poem to soar past or dig beneath whatever topic lightly grounds it.
The opening poem’s title, “Like Apples,” evokes the bright red image on the “A” page of a kindergarten primer, which for many of us was the key to unlocking the mysteries of reading. In fact, this poem establishes this theme for the collection, as it focuses on language itself – its importance and ever-changing nature. It opens with these lines:
The young woman has forgotten the word for soul
in the language she heard on her first day in this world.
The speaker then wonders about all the places in her life where the word may have been lost, “buried under other words.” Susanna Lang is a translator who is fluent in French, so, as it must be for anyone who is bilingual, words in one language or the other can be elusive. Only at the end of this poem does the speaker reach the titular apples “ripening in the orchards,” but there they are. The title’s promise is fulfilled.
The opening poem may evoke feelings of nostalgia, but the second poem snaps us out of any reverie. In “Like Bread,” we are transported to a Stalinist work camp, where Russian poet Osip Mandelstam “saw the innocence / of the snow like bread.” How fascinating for a reader to experience such a shift in tone and topic so quickly – and how deft the writer who can find ways to weave together such disparate situations using the motif of language itself. This adventure continues throughout the book, as we witness the speaker in her sick bed during college, too tired to lift a book (“Like Franck’s Sonata”), or when we learn of stories told through generations by family members (“Like the Narrator”), and even as we visit outer space in “Like the universe”. Here, images from the movies shape our understanding as “we walk through the dust or stone or / rushing rivers we discover there, and then we return.”
While some poems are light-hearted and set in the everyday, an ominous thread runs through the book, appearing in several poems such as “Like an Interruption,” where a succession of eerie cityscapes ends at the desk of the Congress Hotel, its shorted-out sign now reading “CONFESS.” The speaker can only wonder, “What have we done, / what have we neglected to do?” Several poems in the second half of the book also reference the pandemic, though some more overtly than others. In “Like the mundane,” the speaker is prompted to wash her hands after retrieving the newspaper from the front porch. In “Like Onions,” which begins, “Now everything makes me weep,” we are reminded of overflowing morgues and arias sung on balconies in Europe. “Like rain washed into the river” ends with this hopeful stanza:
Like the river rising, we gather speed and force
as we go. Everything nourishes us.
We bear everything on our backs.
In “Like Solving for X,” the speaker notes how befuddled we’ve become several months into the pandemic: “we have forgotten the rules governing equations”. And in “Like You,” we share in the speaker’s lament that we are just sick and tired of it all – the pandemic, certainly, but also, the poem implies, the whole world with its never-ending tragedy and trauma.
We write to explore, to share, to remember. This brief collection does all three – and it also reminds us how vital language is. In “Like a Jot or a Tittle,” Lang notes how easy it is for a language in a remote place to disappear, unless those who speak it continue to repeat its words and to write them down, etching them into stone if necessary. This 26-poem collection, while paying homage to our miraculous alphabet, shows us how beautifully we can use words to make meaning out of our lives and the world.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Kate Hutchinson is a poet, teacher, writer. She serves as the Assistant Editor for East on Central. Her recent poetry collection is A Matter of Dark Matter.
Posted July 7, 2023
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Shore
By Dina Elenbogen
Glass Lyre Press, 2023
116 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1941783948
Review by Elizabeth Joy Levinson
I have always wrestled with place and identity. Or place and identity and language. In graduate school, these three were always presented as being tightly linked. As someone with a nomadic childhood, it took me a long time to recognize the ways in which place has shaped my perception of the world and how it has shaped my language towards the world. I’ve come to realize that landscape shapes us and our language more than we shape it, in ways that are loving and intimate, but also full of discomfort and even danger. In Shore, Dina Elenbogen approaches the discomfort in belonging to a place head on, confronting the ways in which we become intimate with place and how that intimacy can leave us both vulnerable to grief as well as open to discovery and love.
In Part One, Elenbogen lures the reader into a place known so well that an unexpected moment of tenderness and discovery can make one lose their bearings. In “First Fruit,” a simple tomato passed between two people creates a moment charged with a palpable energy, “when she opened her hands to receive/ it and their hands lightly grazed/ worlds collided,”leaving them to wonder where the tomato came from, not their garden, it would seem. Because what is left to discover when we have known a place so long? But Elenbogen answers that there is plenty to discover. While the intimacy of the first poem (as well as the second poem) is still lingering, the narrator invites the reader into their grief over a lost tree. “Losing the tree” explores how much our worlds are shaped or reshaped by the nature with which we negotiate our lives. The tree in question, diseased and dangerous, “where the first branch broke/ years ago crushing a car while we slept,” is not feared, but loved and perhaps loved more deeply in loss, “It is difficult to imagine the world without/ the tree easier to imagine a body/ without lung or breast.”
Part Two raises the challenge of language. The title poem, found in this section of the collection, reminds the reader that our landscapes are often more precise than our words.
“I wish I could
tell you this
and everything else
with the precision
of stones
within stones”
However, the poem itself is concise and adept at capturing that feeling, almost contradicting itself. But this makes it more compelling, as poetry exists when we push up against those limits of language and look elsewhere, as the narrator looks to the stones.
Once grounded, in both place and idea, it is easy to follow the narrator through poems of personal loss, of political unrest, and the spiritual explorations these experiences inspire. There is always a tree, or a stone, or a waterway to help the reader find their bearings in rough seas. These juxtapositions of love and loss, grief and tenderness, are very much the shoreline I have known as an adult, the restorative waves of Lake Michigan that can lap gently at my feet in July or bury my front porch in snow in February, both force to be feared and salve and sustenance. It is not the only shoreline Elenbogen wades into, there are oceans and rivers here, too, but it is where she leaves us, especially in the final poem, “Extreme Weather,” seeing the familiar with a renewed appreciation for the worlds in which we inhabit, despite what it can take away from us.
“I am writing to tell you that skies change suddenly
roots that seem deep can be lifted
by November wind
Listen closely nearby is the water
we call life.”
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Elizabeth Levinson is a Chicago based poet and high school teacher. Elizabeth is the author of Uncomfortable Ecologies (Unsolicited Press, 2023)
Posted July 1, 2023
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The Path That Beckons: Poems About the Journey
By Mary Beth Bertzlauf
Independently Published, 2023
87 Pages
ISBN-13: 9798378321957
Review by Michael Escoubas
This review is reprinted with kind permission from Quill & Parchment
In Robert Frost’s timeless poem, “The Road Not Taken” we read these words:
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth . . .
No doubt poet Mary Beth Bretzlauf is familiar with this poem and with the dilemma it poses. Whether this is the case or not, Bretzlauf’s debut collection, The Path that Beckons: Poems About the Journey, resonates like a well-tuned guitar. You like the notes it plays; when one tune ends you long for the next one to begin.
Within its three-part structure consisting of “Off Course,” (21 poems), “Crossroads,” (23 poems), and “On Track,” (18 poems) Bretzlauf explores Frost’s two roads dilemma. She does so with grace and wisdom. Over time life has taught me that I have either completed a journey, am currently on one, or will shortly commence a new trek on roads that will diverge at my personal “yellow wood.”
From Off Course
Our country, and the world, got off course during Covid-19. “Hope (2020),” poignantly captures what many felt:
it burns, this need
for all to be right again—
a struck match to tinder
heat rising, rippling the air
red, orange flames
soon burning white hot
As Bretzlauf develops her journey thesis she moves readers from “an evil virus that spreads / across our world” // to a fresh vision, “even as we hope, it changes-- / becoming a new life form.” Typically, the poet sees “journey” as a positive movement in life. She shifts readers “from” something “toward” something constructive and good.
In another poem, “Kite of Dreams,” Bretzlauf and her husband, having raised their biological son, take in another young man who “arrived on a strong breeze,” and through compassionate mentoring, “taught him how to do a thing or two / handed him a compass and / turned him in the right direction.”
Get it? Off Course? Let’s nudge people onto a better path.
From Crossroads
Expectedly this segment highlights Frost’s line: “two roads diverged in a yellow road.”
“Cancer,” not only illustrates consequences of tobacco abuse by a family member, but also displays Bretzlauf’s writing skill. She uses original and compelling turns-of-phrase to draw readers in. The poem begins:
it is an ugly word
that comes with a long
black shadow even
Peter Pan’s Wendy cannot
rip stitches from its source
it was not unexpected after
six decades of smoking
but just the sound of the word
how it bellyflops from the tongue
in its elocution—the discord
in the symphony of sympathy [Italics by the Reviewer]
Poems with titles like “Kitchen Table Diplomacy,” “Rainbow of Black,” “View from the Train,” explore important crossroads that echo with familiar life experiences. Readers: Be sure to linger here.
From On Track
As the curtain rises on Bretzlauf’s final segment, it is as if she is just up from a good night’s sleep and feels the spirit of Frost’s third stanza:
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I marked the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way
I doubted if I should ever come back.
Indeed, both Frost and Bretzlauf know about decisions that, over time, give definition to our lives. They know that the journeys we make are quite similar yet nuanced in ways that set each person apart. Bretzlauf does not take a cookie cutter approach to poetry. This sensitivity is amply demonstrated in the poem “Who Knew?”:
how did we one day
wake deciding to be
an astronaut
brain surgeon
teacher
nurse
mother
business owner
politician
coach
ballerina
artist
writer?
Like Hansel & Gretel
we gather morsels
of interest suddenly finding
ourselves on the right path
Yes, yes, and yes again! To a collection that echoes with familiar voices that tell the truth about life:
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
===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 7, 2023
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Unsalted Blue Sunrise: Poems of Lake Michigan
By Kathryn P. Haydon
Prairie Cloud Press, 2023
68 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-0-9963856-1-9
Review by Jen Meyer
After living for a time on both the west and east coasts, Kathryn Haydon moved back to the north shore of Chicago. She wanted to mark her homecoming to this third coast of her youth in a meaningful way, to see it anew after her absence. The spark of an idea for reconnection came after seeing a handmade book composed of photographs of Lake Michigan taken daily from one location over the course of a year. Kathryn, a poet, whose work has been published in journals and a previous book of poetry, set out to replicate that photographic exercise with poetry. She regularly went to the same spot overlooking Lake Michigan during her first year back and composed a poem based on what she observed, felt and experienced. This book is a compilation of her Lake Michigan poems.
The poems, the majority of which are untitled, are evocative of the Lake Michigan seasons. The forms they take add to their meaning. Not only do many of the poems use artistic imagery, they have a musicality as well.
The poem that starts with ‘A gull feather lands’ shows the summer in all its glory with squirrels and birdsong. Kathryn ends the poem with ‘Questions roast/in the afternoon sunshine/and answers/are jammed/in a glass mason jar’ which nods to the height of harvest and the introspection we often have at that time of year.
The image of the solitary boat on the lake captures the beginning of autumn in the poem that begins ‘One paper-white sailboat’. The poem is suggestive, with lines like ‘Beach season has passed’ and ‘Sailboat hangs warm’, of those summer hold-outs who have chosen to ignore the arrival of fall.
The poem that begins with ‘The mourning dove calls’ perfectly identifies the midwestern flirtation with spring. It would appear to be spring by all accounts, but ‘We‘re stuck behind the lowered gates’.
The form some of the poems take mirrors the shapes found in the natural environment. The poem that begins with ‘The flock’ is written in the shape of a bird in flight. A few poems have a long, attenuated verticality that mimics the coastline or the horizon. Many of the poems are written in couplets which suggest the ebb and flow of waves. Additionally, other poems feature stanzas that have a diagonal nature that evoke an undulating motion and give an overall feeling of impermanence.
The blocked text of the poem that begins ‘Lake and sky sewn together in a somber cloud’ is unique to this collection. It could be representative of a flag, an arm band of solidarity, a signpost. The mass of the form of this poem calls the readers’ attention to the tragedy of the subject matter.
Like the photographs that were the impetus for this project, the poems have an artistic quality. The collection begins with epigraphs from painters, Claude Monet and Joan Mitchell. Like Monet’s impressionistic paintings of wheatstacks and Mitchell’s abstract expressionist paintings, these poems reveal a newness to the subject matter and artfully capture atmosphere, color and light.
The careful observations translated through poetic imagery calls our attention to the commonplace, a sailboat or minnows, for example, and has us see the ordinary in new light.
The vivid descriptions of atmosphere, as in the poem that begins ‘she wears her veil’, transports us to a hot summer day with phrases like ‘humidity/drapes horizon/fills space’ and ‘blush blue in hazy sunshine’.
So many of the poems have a sumptuous description of color; ‘winter’s dark abyss, robin’s egg, cornflower, murky deep Aegean, azure mirage.’
Not only does Kathryn paint color with words, the visual nature of her work is also on display with the way she describes the light. ‘Sun’s blushing descent’ and ‘hazy moon shines/a single headlight in fog’ and ‘clouds/spray teardrops/fuse/into ice’ are just a few examples of this description of light.
While most of the poems are untitled, in the two with titles, Lake Michigan has a voice. In The Lake Flips the Script, it is as if the lake is looking back at the intrepid poet, a technique used in great works of art like Jan Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait or Las Meninas by Velazquez.
The lake sparkles in this collection. At times, it is wearing a party dress and jewels on its way to a dance. There is musicality and energy to these poems.
Many have the quiet tempo of soft jazz music. Sibilance gives that familiar hissing sound of a wave retreating across the sand, as in ‘waves/whispering/secrets. Locusts buzz’ and ‘a thousand birds sing coded songs’.
Alliteration gives the poetry energy and movement as suggested by ‘wind whips up whitecaps’ and ‘clouds/saunter above swells’. There is playfulness in the engagement with the lake, whether it be wading in the shallows, leaping from sandbars, or marching out to meet the lake.
We give ourselves a gift when we pause our busy lives and notice the beauty that surrounds us. Kathryn’s poetry of homecoming and celebration shows us this gift through an examination of the seasons, form, artistic imagery and musical phrasing.
Studies have shown that coastal environments or ‘blue spaces’ can improve the health of your body and mind. This accessible poetry collection looks outward to the blue environment and lets it inspire. The poems represent a cool and refreshing contrast to the inward focus of our lives these last few years. As you read them, let their restorative effect take hold. Share with landlubbers and lake-lovers alike.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Jen Meyer, a reader, writer and painter. She lives in Highland Park, Illinois, not too far from the lake.
Posted June 1, 2023
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Gathering Sunlight: The Poetry of Silvia Scheibli & Patty Dickson Pieczka
By Silvia Scheibli and Patty Dickson Pieczka
The Bitter Oleander Press, 2022
104 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1-7346535-7-1
Review by Michael Escoubas
This review is reprinted with kind permission from Quill & Parchment
In Gathering Sunlight, two poets from divergent backgrounds and contrasting styles, combine their skills. The result is an engaging and wise collection which sheds fresh light on the human condition. The book is all about the hard work of “gathering.” Scheibli and Pieczka, have something to say. They are realists. Their poems face life with all its challenges, failures, and sufferings. Poetry is a sanctuary of sorts. Poetry can and should be enjoyed for its magic show of language. However, I hasten to point out that poetry, for Scheibli and Pieczka, is also useful. My goal in this review is to share the harvest Gathering Sunlight has had in my life.
Backgrounds
Among the standout features of Gathering Sunlight are interviews with each poet by the publisher The Bitter Oleander Press, (BOP). Digesting these educational interviews prior to reading the poems increased my enjoyment. From the interview I learned about Scheibli’s love for tropical areas of Mexico and Ecuador. I learned that she is an avid “birder” having compiled a listing of over 500 exotic birds during her intercontinental travels. I learned about a real-life mystical figure named “Chakira,” whose influence permeates much of Scheibli’s work.
Patty Dickson Pieczka’s interview with BOP is no less interesting and brings out both similarities and differences between the two artists. “Beyond These Poems There Be Dragons,” introduces Pieczka’s superb contributions to Gathering Sunlight. I was fascinated by her response to why she chose those particular words. Additionally, Pieczka like Scheibli, is a woman of the earth. She spends time in Shawnee National Forest near her native southern Illinois home. She avers, “Nature has always been important to my sanity and spirituality and is often woven throughout my poetry.
My favorite part of the interviews is when each poet discusses her unique views on the writing process. I found their practical insights helpful.
Poems by Silvia Scheibli
Part I—Duende poems
Chakira, tell me once again
Oh, tell me how the moon
opened your eyes and showed you
a change in consciousness
How you wished that every coyote
should have a black-tipped tail
How the oriole’s hood
was dark until you changed it
to reflect indigo sunlight
Nothing appears natural now—
Now you dream the raven in silver.
How do you dream only in silver, Chakira?
Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca has described the duende form “as a force not a labour, a struggle, not a thought.” Further via Lorca, duende is “an upsurging, inside, from the soles of the feet.” The duende, new to this reviewer, allows the muse to basically take over and drive the poem. One more example:
My friend, Chakira, gave me her chisme
“Listen,” she said.
Pelicans glide on wings
as straight as paddle-boards.
Aero-dynamic frigates ascend
immense, azure skies.
Supplicant, boat-tailed grackles
seek verdant, queen palms.
Caffeinated kiskadees
exclaim an immanent sunrise.
You need to visit Nayarit—
opaline goblet of barefaced dreams—
more often.
Editor’s note: “Chisme” is Mexican slang for gossip.
Such is the mystical nature of much of Scheibli’s work, utilizing as it does, tropical surroundings, feathery creatures and an innate capacity for dream. In all, twenty-five poems comprise this section with titles that drew me in: “Ode to Iguanas in Nayrit,” “Jaguar Crossing,” “Under the Palapa,” and “Song of the Orange-fronted Parakeet.”
Part II—Ecuador Poems
Without a doubt Silvia Scheibli loves the people of Ecuador. This hospitable land with its “lush corn fields & many-colored roses, / ruby bromeliads & golden bananaquits, / scent of cocoa & coffee plantations” holds a large fragment of her heart. Six poems comprise this section. “Echos on the Road to Babahoyo,” reveals the poet’s heart for the land and its people:
Geese & dozens of jungle chickens
scratch endlessly on hillsides
of banana trees.
Escaped sugar cane & emerald mist
engulf abandoned houses.
Bromeliads perch on telephone wires
like mourning doves.
With partially opened wings
black vultures cast a shadow
over yellow hibiscus.
Delicate roof ferns
volcanic rock & golden bamboo
fade into midnight
with our café
con alma socialista.
Poems by Patty Dickson Pieczka
Beyond These Poems ThereBe Dragons
Like a child, I’m captivated by dragons. Pieczka “Had Me From Hello,” with her title poem which I share in full:
Drifting on an ocean’s
silk and shells, sea-foam
lacing pearls along the shore,
I follow a dream back
to its home in the dark,
unlace the night
to find forgotten things:
half-vanished thoughts, time
curled within my roots,
words melted by a long-ago sun.
I drift to the ceiling
to watch you sleep.
Your dream breaks
over shoal-bound rocks,
shaking loose a school
of silver fears
and familiar strangers
who sail angel-winged ships,
read the 16 points
of a wind rose to navigate
through the moon’s veil
and ghosts of fog
to the farthest edge
of the subconscious.
I found, within the dreamy cadences of alternating tercets and quatrains, challenges to my conventional ways of thinking. Did I note above that poetry should have an element of practicality? Gently, the poet prods me to probe life “to the farthest edges / of my subconscious.”
Pieczka’s poems are preceded by a quote from Dante Aleghieri: Nature is the art of God. With that as a baseline, the poet skillfully weaves nature and human spirituality into a seamless and coherent whole. Her practical mind gifts readers with down-to-earth titles: “Misplaced” is about her father’s question which indicates that he does not know his own daughter. He asks, Who I am? With a family member suffering from Alzheimer’s, this poem speaks to me where I live.
A distinctive feature of Pieczka’s work is the “linked poem.” These poems utilize the last line in the previous poem as a springboard to the following poem. This formulation, as far as I know, is unique to Pieczka. At least, this reviewer has not encountered it before. There are a total of four linked poems in the collection; each superbly conceived and written.
Pieczka’s final poem, “At Horseshoe Lake,” shows both the mind and heart of a poet at the height of her craft:
I pull sunlight from your hair
to make our shadows pour
into the cypress swamp,
where rivulets spill back
to the time we met.
Tupelo leaves brush the colors
left by secrets barely whispered—
words beyond flight
and dream, strung to
neither root nor bone,
words tumbling in shapes
never recognized before.
We unbutton the hours
until day and night
meet briefly at the horizon;
they kiss, still making
each other blush
after so many years.
Gathering Sunlight, taken as a whole, is poetry that satisfies this reviewer’s mind and his soul. Scheibli and Pieczka have created a triumph of the imagination.
===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 June 1, 2023
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Saudade
By Rosemary Boehm
Kelsay Books, 2022
72 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-16390-215-9
Review by Jacqueline Stearns
Saudade, which means nostalgia or melancholy found in the Brazilian or Portuguese temperament, is reminiscent of a memoir. The book begins with poems depicting the author's, early adulthood, and takes the reader on a pilgrimage ending in the present time.
The journey takes readers on a journey to Europe, Morocco, South America, and the Middle East, with idyllic stops at gorgeous tropical islands.The author gave me a gritty description of life, i.e. family, friendship, marriage, medical crises, sexual assault, and spirituality, as seen through the eyes of a seasoned world traveler.
Boehm is a gifted writer. She imbues her work with breathtaking imagery. Boehm has a beautiful command of language.
In Not Staying For Supper In Cypress, the author talks about a family trip, which includes a visit to old Aunt Maria. The children find the old lady repugnant. "The kids got kissed. They wiped their faces. My daughter was indignant. Yuck, she's got a mustache."
The opening line in Curiosity: "When my son was still young and immortal, he wanted to die to find out what it's like."
The most chilling line: "His parents have never forgiven him for preferring death."This poem is spookily reminiscent of Flatliners when Kiefer Sutherland's character says, "It's good day to die."
I Am Full Of Empty Spaces, tells the story of the author discovering old family photo albums, and remembering times past. I identify with this as I am estranged from my family and I find myself reflecting on the good old days.
My Best Friend Writes Me A Letter is a sad lament. The author's friend rants about her two failed marriages. She wants to end her life. "I'll probably use razor blades. I'll let you know when I 'm ready." Wanting to die, and yearning for immortality, are interwoven. In the afore mentioned Curiosity, one line reads, "Yesterday my best friend confessed she wants to live forever."
What I love about this book is that Boehm can get to the heart of a poem with one line.
In Fading, the failure of a marriage is summed up by this line. "You must remind me of the good times. How else can I tell the children they were conceived in love?"
In High Noon In Seville, infidelity is described brilliantly in the closing line. "There is a waft of summer sex and perfume of an unknown brand. Your skin can't lie."
Tropical Insomnia reminds me of my own island vacations. "Starbursts on lapping water. The parrot a silent silhouette against Prussian blue." "Stark rainforest. Lake all shades. All refections, all Greens."
Readers can close their eyes and imagine themselves in paradise. Saudade is the definition of armchair travel.
===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 June 1, 2023
Desert Flow
Art by Adrián Caldera
Poetry by Charlotte Hart
Cloud Hands Press, 2022
78 works of abstract digital art
78 poems in English ~ 78 poems in Spanish
ISBN-13: 978-0-9861649-0-6
Review by Michael Escoubas
To view digital images accompanying poems mentioned in this review, scroll below.
This review is reprinted with kind permission from Quill & Parchment
Cloud Hands Press has outdone itself with its latest gem. Desert Flow is a collaborative project featuring creations by abstract digital artist Adrián Caldera paired with poems by Charlotte Hart. Although, a student of ekphrastic poetry, I was unprepared for the challenge presented to my sensibilities by Caldera and Hart. My goal, in this review, is to capture some of their synergy as each artist’s work bears the footprint of the other. Theirs is a conversation in art and poetry which flows like a desert in bloom from hearts nourished by love.
Charlotte Hart’s introduction and Ethan Plaut’s foreword helped me understand the genesis and development of Desert Flow. Seemingly, by chance, (I don’t believe in chance, by the way) Hart saw a Caldera digital creation on Twitter in the spring of 2018. Her unsolicited response to Caldera’s work began a long exchange of art and poetry. They have never met and, so far as I can tell, have no plans to meet. Caldera resides in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico; Hart lives in Chicago, Illinois.
Caldera’s rich colorations within his near-genius abstract creations moved Hart, spiritually, emotionally and psychologically. In her words, Looking at his beautiful colors and widely varying shapes gave me a door into my inner life. Let’s discover together some of the delights on the other side of the door.
Can’t Wall the Sky
This sunlight moment
takes me with great speed
over long distances,
very gently, very kindly,
to the house we have built.
A four-dimensional hypercube home
that casts a
three-dimensional shadow
the endless parameters
of our lives:
tenderness
devotion
the splendor of all
no moment small
in the slow smile
of our days
in this world
of change and commotion,
we are secure
five senses
here.
I’m moved by the way Hart takes shades of sun, couples them with lines suggesting distance, movement and dimension, then merging with some of life’s most important heart-feelings.
I Thought It Was You
My heart leapt out of my chest
and beat furiously in the air.
I touched the tarnished silver tube
holding the rolled prayer.
I opened the door and went in.
No, you were not.
Remembered kisses
exquisite pleasure
sensation of yearning
for my treasure
delirium of my disbelief!
Your colors and shapes flew
burnished red, rue and indigo
from the bare branches of my mind.
Your brazen spirit
burst meteor bright tonight
in me
then left me alone.
Hart’s testimony (see my opening) to Caldera’s art opening a door to my inner life, comes to life in this poem. How precisely a work of art breathes life into the human spirit is best left to the individual to know and explain. Perhaps this is what Wallace Stevens once referred to as the “Angel of reality.” What Stevens meant was the ability of poetry to lay bare the poet’s “brazen spirit.” To bring forth variegated colors of life and their latent emotions . . . emotions that “beat furiously in the air.”
My Love Will Live Forever
Unseen as currents
in the air and sea,
forever.
See the seeds and spores
floating in wind,
and the iridescent plankton
illuminating the shore?
Every word we said,
every smile,
every kiss and tear
flow hidden, fresh,
indestructible.
Hart’s poetic style flows from deep within. As demonstrated by “My Love Will Live Forever,” hers is a poetry that is disarmingly simple on the surface. Don’t let this fool you. Each word belongs. Each word is irreplaceable. Poetic devices such as sibilance, alliteration, and thoughtful endline decisions are consistent hallmarks. Rhymes are occasional and usually interlinear. Her cadences are rhythmical and delight the ear with the musicality of words.
The Will of the River
goes in its golden flow.
You know it’s
shimmering touch.
The currents carry you,
sunlight submissive.
You are the boatman
the boat
the river
the flow
the going
beyond
anything can show.
This poem captures, for me, some of the essence of relationship between Caldera’s abstract digital art and Hart’s poetic responses. Within the poet’s contemplations of the art, I sense her love of color, love of energy within the paintings themselves, which resemble dormant desert blooms, already present, but needing water from the poet’s pen to bring them forth.
Just as the river has a will of its own, Caldera and Hart’s, Desert Flow blooms with synergy, once we allow, as did Charlotte Hart, his beautiful colors and widely varying shapes to open the door to our inner lives.
===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 June 1, 2023
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Adrian Caldera, Artist - "Can't Wall the Sky"
Adrian Caldera, Artist - "I Thought It Was You"
Adrian Caldera, Artist - "My Love Will Live Forever""
Adrian Caldera, Artist - "The Will of the River""
Dialect of Distant Harbors
By Dipika Mukherjee
Cavankerry Press, 2022
81 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1-933880-93-8
Review by Lois Baer Barr
The Chicago area can boast a rich heritage of important contemporary writers from around the world. There’s Nami Mun from Korea, Li-Young Lee from Indonesia, and second generationers like Erika Sanchez of Mexican heritage, and Nnedi Okorofur, a Nigerian—American. Alexander Hemon, born in Bosnia, abandoned us for Princeton, NJ. Let’s hope that poet and novelist Dipika Mukherjee will stay here. The daughter of a Bengali diplomat, she has lived around the world. She has a doctorate in sociolinguistics which she has taught along with creative writing on several continents.
Her recent work Dialect of Distant Harbors brings us her personal take on traveling the world and examining your roots. As with so many of our first- and second-generation writers, she brings not only the wonderment of far-off landscapes, aromas, and soundscapes, but the pain of displacement, and xenophobia. Much of her poetry speaks to colonial corruption, violence, internecine wars, and environmental disasters which have spurred the number of displaced or stateless people. In 2023 their number is projected to be 117.2 million according to the United Nations Refugee Agency.
As the title suggests, Mukherjee’s book of poetry offers not only dialects (actually distinct languages) but a dialectic between dreams and consciousness, dark skin and light skin, Muslim and Hindu, celebration and protest, tropical heat and ice storms. Her poetic repertoire is vast. The book opens with a ghazal and ends with “Aphorisms from Malaysia.” “Dreamscapes: A Haibun” takes us back to the poet’s childhood in New Zealand. Her persona poem about painter M.F. Husain, “Sempiternal Fire,” is in Dante’s Terza Rima. And there is a riff on an important Buddhist meditation in “Buddham Sharanam Gachchanam.” In this poem she explores the personal tragedy of a brother whose name Amithabha means boundless but who, after an accident, ends up bound to a bed and in a vegetative state.
Mukherjee’s lyrical opening section of poems ends with “Monsoon: Delhi” The sad darkness of a rented house in Delhi that is “lopsided” where “[N]othing fits.” The beautiful sounds and aromas of feeding and feasting contrast with the poet’s sense of the place.
I guess at words in the dark,
hear the sad music of sibilants,
and fear this city of violent needs. (p. 12)
The fourth section of the book contains poetry of protest. In “Dynamite” a blue-eyed boy is allowed to take a photo of the Tribune Tower and say, “Anyone got some dynamite” and still be “on holiday/freckled and free/” p. 35. While in “Dreamers, 2017,” she writes, “The Dream is so pale, too pale” (p. 38), and in “Foreign Passport” the poet’s nine-year-old son is held by security at O’Hare for four horrific hours. The security guard explains this aggression to Mukherjee: Do you know how many people were killed in the Twin Towers? The poet protests by asking the guard what relation that has to her son. The guard answers– You are a guest in this country. (p. 39) Finally, “Say the Name” protests not only the destruction of a Sikh Temple in 2012 in a suburb of Milwaukee, but the way it was reported. The names of the perpetrators were presented in the media eliding the names of the Sikhs who died. Mukherjee gives voices to the survivors and highlights the names of their deceased loved ones by using all capital letters.
It is hard to pick a favorite in this collection of finely crafted work, but “After the Ice Storm” gut punched me. In this poem the cruel cold beauty of trees glazed and bent by the weight of ice evokes memories of a grandmother bent over Dipika as a young girl. The “quasimodic” old woman holds her still “Between tight bony knees” as she “kneads [my] scalp with coconut oil/ mixed with the essence of hibiscus.” (p. 25).
In “Dialect of Distant Harbors” Dipika Mukherjee laments that her own son does not know Bengali, “The seventh most spoken language in the world.” (p. 56) She wonders how rooted her child will be. Or will he be an inveterate traveler like her. In the opening poem, “Wanderlust Ghazal,” the last stanza says:
Wanderlust is a disease. Incurable. Deep from within, it
chortles,
The light of the moon cannot be rooted, Dipika, do not
even try! (p. 3)
Rich language and images as well as finely honed narratives make this collection a delight to read. Dipika Mukherjee’s poetry proves that the more local and precise the language and narratives, the more universal they are.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Lois Baer Barr of Riverwoods, Illinois is a literacy tutor at Forging Opportunities for Refugees in America and the author of three chapbooks. Tracks: Poems on the “L” was a finalist at and is available from Finishing Line Press. Her novel, The Tailor’s Daughter, is forthcoming from Water’s Edge Press.
Posted May 1, 2023
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Ripples Into the Light: PhotoPoetry
By Artist Vandana Bajikar & Poet Michael Escoubas
Cyberwit.net, 2023
73 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-9395224680
Review by Michael F. Simon
Ripples Into the Light is a collection of 34 images, photographs and acrylic on canvas, and 34 poems. As Michael Escoubas states in the Preface, “Upon viewing examples of Vandana’s work I asked permission to write poems about her pictures. …. As the poems and photographs grew in number, it occurred to each of us (separately) that a collaborative project might be possible.” Ripples Into the Light is a very enchanting collaboration. Though the poems are ekphrastic, the pairing of image and verse feels immediate: this just happened.
This review will focus on the poems. The images are truly wonderful, but I’m neither a visual artist nor an art critic. I’m a poet and occasional reviewer of poetry.
“First Intimations” page 15, captures the spirit of the book. These lines are written in the first and third stanzas of that poem:
… winter’s leaves
blown by wind
skittering along paths…
Soon the muskrat
will leave his burrow
to feed on roots and fish,
Winter’s leaves blown in an ephemeral world will return in a cyclical world. The fish, while worthy of poetic admiration elsewhere, is helping the muskrat thrive. Life becomes life, as in the last stanza:
This is life, the world
visible, reborn, blooming
with intimations of good things,
heralded by bluebells in spring.
The beauty of creation in a common spring flower, the bluebell. The entire book offers this perception of detail within a panoramic horizon, balancing foreground and vanishing point.
In the poem, “Winter in Yellowstone” buffalo snort with their “breath rising in plumes” giving artistic balance as the “stream meanders toward the tree line.” The poems have been carefully phrased to fit the photography.
Visual art is often an interpretation of what the light reveals and what the eye believes. The poem, “Ripples Into the Light,” reminds us of the power of water to both resemble and reflect light as we are “… washed clean/ by the mingling of sun and mist.”
In the last two stanzas, we revive and are re-inspired:
We feel empowered as living water
finds its way into the heart’s
secret places … washing away
yesterday’s pain. A melody is heard,
sung by a voice not our own,
in moments that ripple into the light.
“White Water Over Mossy Rocks,” page 7 and “Spirit of Wahclella Falls, page 25 introduce personas into this collaboration. They offer perspectives which express an added depth to the work.
Mist falls upon her face
in a moment of realization
as silver strings
roll over mossy rocks.
Is God present? Does he live
in her, in this place,
in passions of the earth,
as waters tumble and toss?
She pauses, startled by a moment
of reckoning. Is Life
about such moments?
In the poem “Spirit of Wahclella Falls” (page 25)
He came here to rest
among the deep greens and yellow flowers.
He had found a sanctuary of sorts.
The mist was cool fingers
on his face. The falls, crashing
on rocks, moss flourishing
in the glinting sun signaled peace.
Our daily world makes us world-weary. Ripples Into the Light reminds us that the remedy to the heartbreak of our day-to-day is in Mother Nature’s world. This collection is not one to enjoy quickly or once. The real joy in this work opens more slowly than that as the reader’s imagination, the images and the poems mingle and react with one another.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Michael Simon is the author of God's Cowlick: Poems and is a regular contributor to East on Central and Highland Park Poetry. He lives in Oregon with his wife Janet on a forested hillside with over 300 acres for hiking.
Posted May 1, 2022
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The Path That Beckons: Poems About the Journey
By Mary Beth Bretzlauf
Independently Published, 2023
87 Pages
ISBN-13: 9798378321957
Review by Carol L. Gloor
The Path That Beckons is a promising first book that deals with both the profoundly personal and objective observations of the world as it is. This dichotomy is best reflected by the most successful of the poems, and others that are less so and could be improved, or perhaps forgotten.
The most successful of the personal poems are in first person, or an imaginative persona. “Thai Floating Market” and “Clean Slate” are the best of the former. The poem “Thai Floating Market” puts us on a boat in Bangkok floating through a catalog of sensory images. The fragrance of flowers “in every color” covers the “hideous durian fruit’s odor.” “Juice from mango sticky rice” runs down the poet’s chin. And the poem ends with a surprise question, “how have we lived until now?” “Clean Slate,” also a very personal poem, succeeds in specificity and thus avoids the sentimentality of many poems dealing with the decline of an older person. The poem witnesses that decline in a series of images, each showing another step in forgetfulness. We go from the “days you would forget to eat lunch” to “you hold a baby doll these days,” to the poet’s realization that “your mind is a clean slate.”
Other successful poems create an imagined persona so carefully we are willing to accept it.
“Hotel Housekeeping” is told in the voice of the housekeeper, as she cleans one room, noticing “the gray-white sheets tossed aside” the “knock-off paintings” that must be dusted, until she leaves “this dismal room/. . . /then onto the next.” Another very successful poem is “Fly Away,” in which a butterfly speaks of being “always on display--/a stained glass fluttering about” whose important mission is to “pollinate the world/with color and grace/while there is still time.
The less successful poems are those that deal with politics, and those in which the poet reveals a certain judgmental or self-congratulatory tone that just does not ring true. “Dear 45” and “January 20, 2021,” both political poems, dissolve into generalities and tell us nothing we do not already know. Harder to deal with are the others, like “Rudderless,” “Death of a Friendship,” and “Doors.” In “Rudderless” the poet takes aim at those she believes to be “slackers,” primarily young people, who are lost in a fog “unable to see their way out/or even the ambition to do so.” “Death of a Friendship” begins well enough, but definitely goes astray with the stanza “I found a different road/found inner peace/and I lost you/on the journey.” That same self-congratulatory tone comes again in “Doors,” in which the poet deals with her job history, moving from “a place where my creativity/wasn’t solicited or appreciated” to “a creative community that accepted me/where I can broaden my mind and skills.” This is more the language of a self-help book.
Despite these lapses (and they are lapses from the majority of the other poems in the book). The Pathway That Beckons is a generally good read, for whatever path you might be on.
===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, 2023
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God's Cowlick
By Michael Feld Simon
Independently Published, 2023
98 Pages
ISBN-13: 979-8373302074
Review by Bill Cushing
According to Michael Simon, “most of the poems [in his new book] were written” in the Pacific Northwest, the place he has made his home for over 30 years. Against such a backdrop, Simon’s work presents him in almost direct lineage with the American Naturalist movement of the 19th century.
“Hearing Just the Tones of Their Resort Conversation” reveals his understanding of the natural world while applying that to humanity as
Her speech was pitter-patter tap,
bouncing from tree to tree like a woodpecker.
His speech churned through the ground
making small rumblings like an earthworm.
“Walking in One place” brought me back to Annie Dillard’s 1974 memoir Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Then, as if connecting with a New England writing compatriot, there is a Thoreau-like atmosphere seen in both “Running Naked, Panting Hard” and “If a Tree Falls in the Forest and No One Sells It.” Not far afield, readers can note a tone of nature versus knowledge exhibited in “Long Ago They Traveled Only at the Speed of Sound” where “across a wilderness bigger than vocabulary/names have shrunk the world” and “both your head and mine are cluttered/with what we haven’t finished pondering/but don’t know how to use.”
One of the attributes of the naturalist movement hinged on its combination of science and nature. Here again, Simon’s words reflect such a mix, or perhaps the better word is a “blend,” of those two spheres.
For example, “Insomnia” advises readers to
never continue a bar conversation
with someone who tells you this, no matter the equations
written on napkins.
What’s the “this” Simon refers to? Read it and learn. This is similar to what readers encounter two pages later in “What’s the Matter,” a neat play on words. In the poem, we meet the atomic particles beginning with electrons that “hang out in their clouds,/in clusters, never in crowds.”
He also nods to the obvious that most of us miss when he proclaims how “Stars are more numerous than numbers.”
In his poem “Professor Dawkins and Goat Lake,” he presents a daring balance of not only the natural but also the analytical where
every perception arises
from the little necessities
of matter and energy. I agree
God is not necessary.
Likewise, “Speaking the Word Divine” presents a title that hints at an upcoming mystery of seeming contradictions. Then, there are the mythic attributes of “In the Beginning” that are decidedly not based in Christianity. This theme continues in “What Belief Sounds Like.” Simon’s narrator admits that
If I were to tell you
Hope is a color
I’d be lying. Hope is a compass.
The narrative voice here is equally American and advises readers to “Loaf like Whitman, Intoxicated.” There are philosophical musings inherent in “Something to Think About While This Cobbler Cools,” another piece that shows how well Simon can shift from the macro to the micro. In “Big Snow Here and Abroad,” he depicts being snowed in from the perspective of a narrator who notices
No electricity now for four days.
No way to run the pump. Our one ambition
is to melt enough snow to flush.
He finally admits
I envy the man
with two BTUs to rub together.
Buddy, can ya spare a joule?
“Memories of I-80: An Old Trick Teaches an Old Dog” is a great play on words—and talk about “turning a phrase,” Simon recalls “driving your VW cross-country and discovering/that perfect pull behind a tractor trailer rig.”
The writing here is not entirely cosmic, natural, or phenomenological; there are numerous touches of the personal. “Skinny Died When I Was 25,” focuses on a grandparent who “descended from the same ape/who gave us Einstein and Rube Goldberg.” The poem “Walking With My Ancestors” presents a contemplative series of couplets that move back and forth between the world and the bloodline.
A final aspect of note inherent in the writing here is the strength of description, which is seen in lines depicting “rocks that pretend to be birds,” or when “shadows are shrinking, the sun is/barbed like a cholla thorn.” Observe the images seen—and felt—as
Waves swallow the cormorant, the rocks
the light and air, the morning; and receding,
the morning, the air and light, the rocks emerge.
The beach is a sky of rock and water,
gray spilled to the edge, blue here and there.
One thing is certain in God’s Cowlick: given the words on these pages, one wonders what Mr. Simon did with “the syllables I throw away as I write.”
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Bill Cushing didn’t begin writing poetry until his late thirties and is now trying to make up for lost time, having now passed 70. His fourth and most recent collection, Just a Little Cage of Bone, was released by Southern Arizona Press and reviewed on this site in early April.
Posted May 1, 2023
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One Bent Twig
By Tricia Knoll
FutureCycle Press, 2023
82 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1952593390
Review by Joan Leotta
Opening the pages of One Bent Twig by Tricia Knoll takes us into a small forest. Knoll’s skillful use of imagery, forms, and free verse take us on a stroll introducing us to her own deep love and appreciation for trees and to the many ways we owe a debt to these guardians of nature. She also alerts us to the ways that we, humankind, are sadly ignoring the value these giants of the world of flora, much to the detriment of our world. I was thrilled to be offered a copy of the book to review because, having read many of her poems over the years, I am a fan of the way Tricia Knoll uses images and rhythms that carry her meanings directly from her pages to our hearts.
Knoll’s opening poem, Funeral in the Forest, talks about the fall of an old maple tree. Her eulogy for this once-living creature evoked tears. I recalled my mother’s simple words about trees: “Trees are important.”
Knoll says she grew up with a deep appreciation for trees. In her second poem, the book’s title poem, “One Bent Twig, “ Knoll lets us know just how closely she identifies with these wonderful beings. As a city girl, my appreciation was limited, but I was always, thanks to my mother, aware of them, but Knoll’s work has certainly deepened my appreciation of trees and their role in our lives as individuals and on the planet.
After reading Knoll’s collection I find myself thinking of trees not as an accessory for the garden or even of the many things around me made of wood and their connection to me. I see trees now as cousins—first friends, related. Knoll ventures farther than the usual feel good sentiments of “forest bathing” that are so popular now—using a walk in the forest to restore oneself, and even to boost our immunity. She confirms a sense of personal relationship, even attributing to trees a role in her development as a person in her poem All I am, “I am all that trees forget, the passing of footsteps…”
However, she does not ignore the sadness of life when trees are forced to partake in horrible things like lynchings. Her description of these wrong doings, is bold. She also describes the way trees are often relegated to the background for our lives. I had to admit I can fall into this pattern, forgetting what Knoll points out, how deeply related we are to trees.
But the book is far from negative. She plants seeds of hope for a better future in many of the poems. In American Chestnut she says, “hope inserts like a sliver..” Her choice of the almost extinct (thought once abundant) American Chestnut tree underlines her overall hope for the survival of our planet and the return of trees to a more prominent place in our society.
The penultimate poem, Sequester encourages us to protect the tree species remaining to us, and our job to“ repair for damage by our ancestors.”
Her final eloquent, elegant but simple words in “Notes on One Bent Twig” are presented as a series of couplets each a brilliant, wise, and profound defense of and hope for trees in our future.
Knoll ends the book with the hope that the natural order of trees living much longer than we (think of the 200 year old tree I the opening poem). She notes that would mean that today’s children will be long gone and the trees will remain, as the natural order of things. Trees are meant to outlive us, to carry wisdom from generation to generation on our behalf and to protect the world in forests for time well beyond the span of a human generation.
This is the perfect book to read now since soon we will be able to shed the indoor mindset of winter and walk outside among the trees and flowers. Reading it now, in winter, made me long for the days when trees would once again be verdant. I thought I appreciated trees before reading this—now I am much more aware of how vital they are in our lives. Everyone should read this book.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Joan Leotta of Calabash, NC, plays with words on page and stage with stories and poems from real life and her imagination, usually dealing with food, family, and strong women. Her newest poetry collection, Feathers on Stone, was published by Main Street Rag in 2022.
Posted April 1, 2023
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Just a Little Cage of Bone: Collected Poems from Bill Cushing
By Bill Cushing
Southern Arizona Press, 2023
99 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1-960038-10-4
Review by Mary Beth Bretzlauf
When I first am introduced to a poet through their poems, it’s like meeting at a cocktail party and being thoroughly entertained and enlightened. This is the case with Bill Cushing and his latest collection entitled Just a Little Cage of Bone.
In fact, one of his poems, Crashing the Apostle’s Cocktail Party, encourages you to be the wallflower observing the evening, waiting for something to happen, and knowing the evening is complete when,
Jesus appears just before the bar empties out,
grabs himself a Rolling Rock –
“Second one this week,” he claims between quaffs.
Topics like sports and faith intersect with living and dying, like Chuck Yaeger’s Prayer:
Allow me to die acute
knowing the best of us aren’t born, that those
who attain greatness make themselves
by experience and with eagerness, and at that moment
of truth, there are either excuses or results.
In Playing Ball in the Hereafter. Henry Aaron and Don Sutton are rivals in heaven playing in an eternal season. Basketball, Vin Scully, and horseracing have their moments in the spotlight as well.
His bio says he’s lived in many places across the country, and we get a glimpse of those places in several pieces like An Elephant in Iceland and Los Croabas.
His poem entitled Haka, captures the defiance of the Ukraine:
The air shimmers from muscular vibrations....
the warriors offer unbroken stares,
challenge anyone who dares engage:
“Take my head. Gnaw on my bones, suck the marrow,
but never doubt what ferocity we’ll return to you.”
Deeply personal poems Feeling Judas, Medicine of Moths I can relate to being in that position myself. In his poem Marathon, I am running along with him, experiencing the same rhythm of breathing and I can hear the slap of rubber soles against the pavement as he marks the miles.
Mr. Cushing introduces us to some characters who have intersected with us at some point in our lives. In Approaching Auschwitz, we are introduced to a young soldier standing outside the gate on liberation day. At Pete’s Hut One Saturday Night, the handsome pool wizard, being ogled by three young ladies, and the elderly neighbor, Mr. Kunstler, from the old country in First Work.
His loss of loved ones is evident in several poems. The contemplations of life and loss, and shelving items and memories resonant with the reader. In A Brief Eulogy for an Atheist I found myself asking, how often do the dying wish for one more day when their day would be spent not able to engage with loved ones? Is it out of greed for more time or the disbelief of an afterlife? This was one of many poems on the subject that I felt was like a warm sweater hugging me in the quiet moments.
Now that I’ve spent time with this poet, I intend to read his previous books: A Former Life, Music Speaks, and …this just in…
I look forward to the next cocktail party – er, I mean, his next book as well.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Mary Beth Bretzlauf is the author of The Path That Beckons: Poems About the Journey (2023). She is contributor, editor, and member of the Highland Park Poetry events team and serves on the boards of East on Central and the Illinois State Poetry Society.
Posted April 1, 2023
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Feathers on Stone
By Joan Leotta
Main Street Rag Publishing, 2022
56 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1-59948-43-8
Review by Tina Cole
I chose this collection from a random list as I was drawn to the metaphorical possibilities in the title. I was not disappointed. This book takes us on a journey, in three sections with such a variety of subject matter: family relationships, culinary delights and ekphrastic poetry. I found a quiet voice in skilful poems of everyday experiences shot through with wise detailed observations.
These poems surprise yet are always deeply humane, subtle and honest. Leotta’s poetry finds plain language for moments in time, for the gentlest and harshest touches of human experience as in, ‘Feather to Stone’; ‘your hardness deflects my tiny self’. Her phrasing captures the elusive, unspoken tenderness that inhabits the everyday whether teasing back the layers of family relationships as in ‘My Father’s Late Night Suppers’, or opening the door to personal revelations through observations on art as in, ‘Two Women at a Window’:
I know these girls
both of them are me.
Section One focusses the reader on an exploration of the title and its meanings in poems that parallel the natural world and personal relationships. The voice is always compassionate and resolving. I particularly liked both ‘Feather to Stone’ and ‘Feathers on Stone':
Your stone self is
stuck
in equally hard earth
incapable
of understanding that my
very softness
my lightness is my
strength.
You are forgiven.
and this is the voice I hear throughout the work. However, Leotta is never a sentimental describer of nature but a writer whose own awareness of her surroundings enables an examination both of her own and all personal relationships. She is a fine observer of the interaction between people and places, sights and sounds. She deftly invites us to savour the narrative and accompany her through various stages of her life. Many poems use humour as in ‘Our Crepe Myrtle Resists Autumn’. The Autumn tree as a metaphor for her own aging:
I often
stand before my mirror
with various creams
attempting to delay
my own autumnal changes.
Section Two is a collection of vignettes, the doors to memory are opened through recollections of family and food related experiences. Leotta invites you to step inside her world where you will find echoes of Philip Levineand Ted Kooser. To read these poems is to see moments cast in a spotlight, small moments that carry a much greater impact. In ‘Quilt’ we are carried back to childhood memories, each moment unspooling before us. A child and her grandmother:
Now each square’s
a pathway back to childhood
when my cheek
on grandma’s coat
could quiet the discord of a
too busy world.
Her subject matter is diverse. Taking a trip on an old wooden escalator in, ‘Kaufman’s Escalator’, playing with dandelions in, ‘Best Use for Dandelions’ and darker subjects; ‘Feast of Memories’ a narrative about Nazi death camps that although stark and filled with disquieting imagery still contains that calm, optimistic voice.
Section Three contains ekphrastic poems in response to Murillo, Rothko, Magritte and Pocahontas’ cloak. Particularly interesting to me was, ‘Magritte’s Apple Explains it All’. A poem about the powerful image of a huge apple completely filling a classroom, where Leotta explores the relationship with her own mother and the lack of her mother’s appearance in her dreams. This is a poem of resolution; I found the conceit and imagery particularly impactful and personal;
She does not come in dreams because she has never really left
my waking moments.
She fills the room of my consciousness, my crisp green apple
of a mother, larger than life – even in death.
Perhaps the wonderment of this collection is that Leotta writes about such familiar moments and the power of them is that we can recall these poems when we see physical reminders in our everyday lives. Her poems spark our imagination and equally our memories of the humdrum and ordinary and how much this is valued. In these pages you will find a simple and direct style and an alertness to quiet yet moving moments. I recommend them to you.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Tina Cole lives in the U.K in rural Herefordshire. She is a retired Head teacher, (Principal), who has worked with children aged 5-15. Currently as a poet and reviewer, she leads workshops with both adults and children. Her second collection, Forged, (Yaffle Press) was published in2021 and focuses on themes of heritage and generational trauma. She has just finished an M.A. in creative writing/poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University.
Posted April 1, 2023
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Crystal Fire: Poems of Joy & Wisdom
Edited By Maja Trochmczyk
Art by Ambika Talwar
Moonrise Press, 2022
188 Pages
ISBN-13: 9781945938580
Review by Michael Escoubas
This review is reprinted with kind permission by Quill & Parchment
The Sublime Senses
Until the heart stops
it desires.
Until the mind stills;
it aspires;
Until the senses
take their leave
they deceive—
such dreams they weave . . .
I chose this poem by Ella Czajkowska, as the perfect lead-in to my review of Maja Trochimczyk’s stunning new anthology Crystal Fire: Poems of Joy and Wisdom. In two succinct quatrains Ella’s poem captures my emotions. While defining abstract terms such as Joy and Wisdom is like trying to nail jello to a wall, key words such as “desires” and “aspires” speak to me. I desire Joy; I aspire to Wisdom. Both words are beyond my reach.
Stanza two, hints that I must take a pause and allow the subtleties of the imagination to inform me. Through the superb efforts of 12 talented poets (8 women, 4 men) fresh light has been shed upon your reviewer’s quest. More on this later.
The book is illustrated by the multi-talented Ambika Talwar. One of her works precedes each featured poet’s contribution. I mentioned earlier that growing in Joy and Wisdom requires slowing down, taking a pause. Ambika’s paintings play a key role . . . they whisper Joy. Here is an example entitled “Quiet Rainfall” (image posted below the review).
As I reflected on Ambika’s painting, paired with Marlene’s poems, something struck me: Painters and poets share similar concerns, namely, bringing Nature’s message of beauty and spirituality to live in people’s hearts. Da Vinci said it, Poets paint pictures with words; artists write poetry without words. Hitt’s poem, “Words from the Garden,” gives me a sense of “Quiet Rainfall,” here’s an excerpt:
Rose and Petunia, Lantana and Sage . . .
A passing breeze lifts my hair as I sit pondering
the beauty of the life that surrounds me.
Bushes with plain simple leafy life
display themselves and I speak their names,
Savor the sounds my lips make . . .
Hitt’s inflections and phrasings surround me with a sense of raindrops assuming (but not imposing) their rightful place in the world and even in human life. Could life be about that? Could it be that Joy and Wisdom have something to do with such perceptions? Hitt’s sensuous phrasings continue,
. . . Xylosma, Sweet Jessamine, Plumbago Blue
and Bougainvillea Magenta, Oleander, Fuschia,
bright yellow Palo Verde, iron wooded and thorny,
Wisteria surrounding it all to make me feel safe.
While Trochimczyk’s goal is not an ideal coordination between paintings and poems, the paintings do set a mindfulness tone as readers step into each section.
Frederick Livingston’s “Rainbows Dreaming,” brought me up short with a touch of Wisdom I had not considered before. I have italicized his Wisdom lines. The poem was inspired by Snoqualmie Pass, in Washington state.
Now I know
the blankness of snow
is only rainbows dreaming,
teaming with streaks of red paintbrush
little lanterns of columbine
tiger lilies prowl the scree slope
yellow asters multiply the sun
the hungry green of spring leaves
purple-blue lupine flooding the valley.
Who would ever know
these slopes were covered in snow
one mere moon ago?
What else have I not seen
and called “empty” in my ignorance?
What dreams within me may erupt
from thawing soil,
simply waiting for ripe moments
to answer the generosity of sunlight?
Before launching into the poems themselves, I was blessed by Maja Trochimczyk’s two and one-half page preface. This personally revealing summary of her motivations for giving birth to Crystal Fire is indispensable reading. She also defines her use of “Crystal,” and “Fire,” in her title. Don’t miss this part.
I also appreciated reading the extended biographies of each poet at the end of the volume. Each contributor offers a unique take on the subject matter, thus adding a touch of virtuosity to the whole.
In an age of vitriolic talk, of political and moral uncertainty, amid the dark clouds of Covid-19, Crystal Fire draws back the curtain on Love, Joy and yes, Wisdom.
As art and poetry work together, I’ve come to an ever-deeper appreciation of Wallace Stevens’ very practical saying, “Poetry [and painting] is a response to the daily necessity of getting the world right.” I can’t help thinking that Maja Trochimczyk, Ambika Talwar, and the talented contributors to Crystal Fire, would agree.
===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 April 1, 2023
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Ambika Talwar, "Quiet Rainfall," acrylic 1997
Ambika Talwar, "Initiation," acrylic 2003
Hot Thicket
By Cassandra Rockwood Ghanem
Nomadic Press, 2022
87 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1955239189
Review by Barbara R. Saunders
Fire in the Mind, Body, and Soul
Danger, courage, and transformation are the themes of Hot Thicket, Cassandra Rockwell Ghanem's debut collection from Nomad Press.In this universe, cruelty gilds both love and desire, and raising one's voice breaks the cycle. The courage Rockwell Ghanem speaks of isn't the sort that comes from pulling back the shoulders, putting on a brave face, and powering through fear. Instead, courage is the heat that rises from deep scars life scorches into every being.
A fine-arts painter, Rockwood Ghanem sets the tone with a cover image that evokes the burning bush of Exodus, alight with divine fire but not consumed. In this speaker's lived experience (the poems read like the words of a single narrator), relationships – with her mother, lovers, her ancestral homeland, and the earth itself – present hurt and harm she has no choice but to survive.
The inevitability of getting burned starts in childhood. In "Felled II," she writes, "When I was a child, my mother told me to lick the end of a battery to see if it had a charge – ." The child immediately transforms this instruction. "I tried to stick my tongue in a light socket … a tiny hollow rectangle gave me the sense/that there is a universe beyond these walls."
Education in torture starts early too. In the prose poem "Shadow Box," the speaker accompanies her mother on a trip to capture monarch butterflies just after metamorphosis, when "their new wings sparkled, iridescent in some places and powdery in others." Then she witnesses her mother casually smoke a joint before slipping the butterflies in a killing jar. The resulting display of these mounted beauties is "The ache I learned to write by."
The destructiveness turns inward, and the speaker becomes a woman who can coldly remark that her lover's wife tolerates their affair because "He will destroy me and she knows it." Still sex offers one path of return to the self. In "Thickness," the speaker recalls an encounter with a fat man, declaring, "Hold my roundness in your roundness/We will step into the great expanses/And take our space."
One of the longer poems, "The Physics of Desertion," is a meditation on the speaker's separation from her father and connection with her daughter. It hints at the root of the despair she can't shake: a sense of displacement, with overlapping cultural and personal dimensions. "I hear the fatherland rises/again and again like a phoenix … I see the orphan image and wonder/if I'll ever get there, Lebanon."
"Speak of Violets" appears almost exactly midway in the book. For me, it is a highlight. A string of spare couplets unites stories of ancestral trauma, personal betrayal, and harassment at work. The innocent wildflower, the violet, invites its linguistic cousins – Violated. Violence. – into the speaker's senses ("Now I know how they taste, bitter/like baking soda, smell of sweat and dirt, sound of wood and metal") and her very body ("I pluck them stem stamen/from my tender areolas, labia, lips").
Rockwood Ghanem is a creative writing instructor in Bay Area high schools, and her talent as an educator shows in some editorial decisions: An introductory essay provides a preliminary explanation of the symbolism in fire. A sardonic piece called "Table of Contents" prepares the reader for the emotional range and intensity of the poems. The book closes with a robust readers' guide with juicy writing prompts.
This collection fulfills the promise set down in the beginning. These writings offer unflinching guidance through the question "What can we do, collectively, to create more of the flames that burn away illusions, and less of those that destroy innocence and beauty?".
===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 March 1, 2023
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as if a caress
By j. lewis
Cyberwit.net, 2022
127 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-8182539105
Review by Tricia Knoll
as if a caress collects accessible poems that grow out of Jim Lewis’ many-layered experiences that include being a dishwasher, silversmith, computer programmer. The list is long. His description of his poems on Amazon affirms, “I use the term caress to mean basically any gentle contact made with the hand.” The title poem as if a caress says it this way:
october’s evening light as if a caress
soft brushing against my pain
whispers, as mother did then,
that the coming darkness
is not to be feared.
In these poems, we hear the guitar he plays, the music he makes. He describes relationships with family: what to whisper into the ear of a newborn baby, his patience when he helps his father establish a dial-up connection, his delight in being let loose in a candy store as a child, what he learned about his ancestors in “haying with tom.” The touch is gentle.
Lewis has practiced as a Nurse/Practitioner working with people experiencing mental illness. That contact is evident in his empathy for people in difficulty – what he refers to as “soft places in the heart.” In “When the Flavor Goes,” he asks, “What would you do, if mental illness/crushed you so hard that even tears lost their flavor?” He has a reverence for what heals, knows the meaning of broken within the measures of shy smiles, tiny hands and searching eyes. “erasing mistakes” addresses removing the telltale graffiti of despair.
His poems raise questions for the reader. Are you a cat person? (I’m not a cat person and apparently Lewis isn’t either if you believe “i never cared for cats.”) What really is division by zero? What kind of mindfulness permeates the toasting of the perfect slice of sour-dough bread? Have you ever heard the “powerful and pointed and piercing” voices of a choir in “preaching to the choir.” How is it that we can continue to find wonder in a new moon after 50 years of seeing moons? He asks if we give way to depression, who will mind the pets? His poems contain hope for humanity. He works to remake himself to recognize goodness in everyone he meets.
Readers can expect interesting craft from a man who serves as the Editor of the popular online literary journal, Verse Virtual. In “fat rain” he gives us an image of elbow room for fish. My favorite metaphor is in “cancer woman” where Lewis describes the narrator’s spelling as sloppy as the soup in a hobo’s cup. He compares Princess Diana to the fox in a fox hunt. Humor haunts many poems like “how to seduce a poet.” Old friends present themselves like good books. Fat rain is compared to the soft touch request for money.
I’m fond of a poem toward the end of the collection, “Tonight I Will Make Soup:”
Tonight, I will make soup
naming aloud each child of mine
letting the swirl that trails
behind the stirring spoon
absorb and dissipate my fear,
knowing that this soup
will bring them home
where they are loved.
Yes, there is a great deal more to these poems. He reflects on feelings when a famous person dies, acknowledges the pandemic, physical pain, and sadness, but stays true to his promise about the caress that the touch will be gentle and sometimes with humor within each and every poem.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Tricia Knoll’s sixth collection of poetry, One Bent Twig, came out in January 2023 from Future Cycle Press. Website: triciaknoll.com
Posted March 1, 2023
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Anamnesis
By Denise O'Hagan
Recent Works Press of Canberra Australia, 2022
78 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-0-6451808-8-6
Review by Michael Simon
The title drew me to the book; it was a word that I hadn’t seen before. Anamnesisrefers to uncovering or discovering knowledge that is hidden. In this collection of over fifty poems, the knowledge many times is knowledge of family, revealed to us in remembrances, laments, griefs and nostalgias. The images and language of the poems conceal the forms and poetics which are used very effectively. In a Petrarchan sonnet, I walk on sea shells, page 44, the first three lines could be a carefree day at the beach:
I walk on seashells, I walk on oyster shells
And tread the fine-grained sand between.
Gaze at the rippling water’s pearly sheen
The images grab you and pull you along into the beauty of the walk on the beach, the natural flowing iambic rhythms echo the waves; then, at the turning, the images pull you into the harsh realities of human life. When you re-read, you realize that the poem is an 8-6 sonnet. The rhymes are effective and easy on your “poet’s ear”. They are natural to the verse, deepening the meaning while remaining unobtrusive. As a poet, this is exactly the kind of poem I would steal!
The poem You’ve got his eyes, i.m. Patrick, page 20, invites the reader’s mind’s eye to observe a contest between compassion and the inevitable, though we know the inevitable is bound to occur.
The poem starts with the root of the compassion, childhood experience, hearing herself described as having this one’s eyes, this one’s smile, feeling like a child of mixed parts
I considered myself a composite being,
A patchwork of pre-existing features,
Not an original, certainly not unique
As a mother, she made repeated efforts to not do it, to not identify her sons as the eyes or noses of others, a genetic inevitability.
I was careful later, with my own sons,
Not to bequeath them a cast of traits,
A sense their aptitudes and by extension
Their paths in life were preordained,
Determined by genetics.
Then, one day examining old photos, one shielded son says of his great-uncle,
“Mom, you’ve got his eyes.”
I nodded and thought
Of my mother, the echos and reverberations
She’d pick up in things and people
That others didn’t see.
And my son, he had her mind.
O’Hagan’s language and her control both seem precise and effortless. In her poem, If I could, page 22, after cataloging every possible “If I could” to save her son, she posits touching “That space which lies at the slippery heart of grace.”
In Limbo, page 26, begins
We can circle around the fact of it
And, like the gulls, swoop and swipe, and try
In vain to get the measure of it, but when it happens,
The inevitable yet holds the greater shock.
An appetite for whimsy, page 57, holds these wonderful lines
The place writes herself, this
Wild slash of a gully,
… …
Awestruck on an ordinary, extra
Ordinary day…
This book has a lot to offer, especially if you read slowly and more than once, as if uncovering something. The anamnesis we explore in these poems is the understanding that our own experience allows us a clearer perception, as expressed in Mother and Child, page 21
I recognized myself in her, and shivered; she was all of us.
This collection of poems includes two sonnets and a villanelle. For a writer, working with a form can help uncover what we have to say. For a reader, studying a poem in form can help you understand and empathize in ways you wouldn’t have predicted.
Anamnesis is Denise O’Hagan’s second poetry collection. It is both inviting and rewarding, with perhaps a challenge or two. I strongly recommend it to both readers and writers.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Michael Simon grew up in Illinois then, about forty years ago he moved to Oregon. He has been learning to write poetry for many years. He has just published his first book, God’s Cowlick.
Posted March 1, 2023
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When the Daffodils Die
By Darah Schillinger
Yellow Arrow Publishing, 2022
71 Pages
ISBN-13: 9798985070422
Review by Michael Escoubas
This review is reprinted with kind permission from Quill & Parchment
Recently my wife spent two weeks visiting our daughter helping in the care of her newborn. Upon her return home, I surprised her with a vase of burgundy roses. The roses were decorated with baby’s breath and a white ribbon. My wife was overjoyed as she entered the house. The roses maintained their beauty for a good 10 days. Sadly, on about day 11, we noticed a blackening on the petal’s edges as they began waning and drooping. Finally, they were done. This experience came to mind as I reflected on Darah Schillinger’s collection when the daffodils die. Though the roses died, it was their life that brought much joy.
At the tender age of 22, Darah Schillinger understands life’s fragility. Just as daffodils are among the first flowers of spring, so they tend to fade and die all too soon. I want to show that Schillinger’s debut collection is emotionally rich with life-vibrations, even though there comes a time when the daffodils [must] die.
Schillinger opens with “ripe,” a poem which aligns the poet’s life with the natural world:
I am unfurled
open and wide
hands shoved deep—
the deepest chasms between my collar bone
into the space between my ribs
where white daisies grow
and yellow roses prick my lungs
where fields of grass and budded fruit blossom and drop
into the layers of my flesh
where the sun pulses
gently and my heart,
ripe for picking,
falls full onto the earth.
The poet’s sensitivity to life, her immersion in its spiritual waters is impressive. “Where fields of grass and budded fruit blossom and drop / into the layers of my flesh,” suggests a life-affirming intensity rarely encountered by this reviewer.
Even the title “ripe” forms a kind of theme for the collection. I think of maturation. Schillinger isn’t pretending to have arrived either as a person or as an artist. I like this quality. It is essential to growth. I mentioned the poet’s life-affirming intensity, a moment ago. “Distance” illustrates this quality in a poem about her beloved.
I want his smell sunk into my skin
at the temples
where the hair meets my face.
Just as she knows that daffodils must die, life, with all its joys, permeates her writing. She asks,
What can I do when he leaves but wait for him to come back
just as it all starts to fade from my sheets
Consistent with her thesis that “daffodils” must die, it is their life, their presence, in moments that “taste of almonds” that claims the day.
Schillinger’s titles entice me: “someone told me once that their bones are like trees and I laughed,” “winter in Pennsylvania,” “couples therapy,” Brood X,” and “ I love meeting people lined with tattoos,” are but a few “teasers” rich in poetic content.
I return to my argument that Darah Schillinger is a talent on the rise precisely because her mind is “ripe” with life-vibrations. Her poem “Mother’s Day,” is a prime example of a special daffodil that infuses her world with life:
our Mother’s love is constant and vibrant and holds me
fast to her chest
when romance leaves deep bloody crescents in the skin of my arms
and a throbbing hollow dissatisfaction
in in the clay of my stomach
Mother loves me even when I don’t love her back.
(Blessed be.)
I submit that this heart-daffodil will never die!
===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 March 1, 2023
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Seeing Voices: Poetry in Motion
By Kelly Sargent
Kelsay Books, 2022
35 Pages
ISBN-13: 9781639801350
Review by Lynne Viti
It’s well known that from early childhood, many twins invent and share a private language. In Seeing Voices: Poetry in Motion, Kelly Sargent goes one better, painting a portrait of identical twins who must learn to accommodate the challenge of one twin’s profound deafness. The hearing (though admittedly hard of hearing, as she’s deaf in one ear) twin communicates with her sister using sign language and private gestures, born of necessity and inspired by both twins; inherent creativity when it comes to language in many forms.
Sargent’s suite of poems draws heavily on autobiographical source material—a deaf sister who could silence the hearing one merely by closing her eyes, so as to shut out the hearing twin’s attempt to argue via sign language—
My twin sister used to shut her eyes
To shut me up when we argued.
Born deaf, she held the advantage in any girlhood fight
The irony here is clear—the “disadvantaged” twin seizes the advantage, besting her hearing sister.
Sargent and her identical twin were born prematurely in Luxembourg; one, three pounds at birth, was born profoundly deaf. Both babies were soon surrendered for adoption to an American couple. For the first few years of their lives, as evidenced by the poems “The Mushroom Caves in Madrid” and “Devouring Grace,” the family lived in Spain; these two poems recount the childhood exploration of mushroom caves in Madrid, and the Chinese restaurant in that city their parents took them to, near where a Little Bear statues in a fountain “waved his immobile paw to my twin and me…”
Even as a young child, the hearing twin—the speaker in all but one of these poems—attempts to teach her deaf sister to pronounce the words she can so far only spell out in sign language—“blue-ber-ry, ba-nan-a.” We observe the hearing twin holding her sister’s small hand to guide her: “I wrap your tiny hand around my throat…for you to feel the sounds vibrating within.”
Other poems shift the tone to mystery—the leitmotif of the poet-twin seeing in the mirror her own image which is simultaneously the image of her deaf identical twin:
She crosses
Intuitively between night and day
With starved, skinny, bird-like arms…
Then suddenly, this grotesque creature is brushed aside by a more comforting memory: “We blink away Night…we toast to Midnight.”
Sargent’s language is imagistic, highly visual, blending snapshots of the natural world of beaches and sunsets with the mysteries of the twin’s private one: “…we were/wrapped securely in a vast, uninterrupted galaxy…”
Throughout the collection, Sargent sets up vivid scenes of the past, then quickly brings readers into the present, when the speaker frames these accounts of her and her sister as children as memory: “A mourning dove coos/pausing/to remember.” Here, the cooing dove harnesses sound just as the speaker harnesses a voice that is unavailable to her twin in the same way.
Sargent deftly captures the experience of a child—now an adult—who is intimately entangled with her deaf sibling, the almost-self who remains apart from the hearing world. In the book’s penultimate poem, Sargent assumes the persona of her sister, aiming to describe for us, her readers, how the deaf person perceives the spoken word through sign language:
Fingertips pave slick exclamations,
punctuated by nails sinking low into clamminess
I sculpt hyperboles.
Kelly Sargent does more than deploy poetry to invite readers into the world of sisters who must overcome a language barrier posed by deafness. She demonstrates that sign language is only part of their mutual solution—the real magic lies in their invented language of touch, their mutual respect, and their sisterly love.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Lynne Viti’s most recent poetry collection is The Walk to Cefalù (Cornerstone Press, 2022).
Posted February 1, 2023
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Periods, Pauses and Other Poems
By Jacqueline Nicole Harris
Self-published, 2021
33 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-0578968612
Review by Judith MK Kaufman
Jacqueline Nicole Harris is at turns, defiant, sardonic, self-deprecating and self-celebrating. Her most recent publication, Periods, Pauses and other Poems, arrives at a particularly difficult time in the poet’s life, published in the aftermath of a number of losses, in particular the death of her beloved mother. If anything, loss seems to have strengthened the poet’s commitment to putting her sensibilities out on a platter for all to see and understand.
In “Write Happy,” she tells us that her attitudes are just performance art. But we know what is real to her when we read “Blackness and the Palate of the Human Tongue,” in which the poet describes four stages of a child growing up black in terms of the four tastes: sweet, salty, sour and bitter.
While she strongly identifies with the community in which she grew up and continues to live, a part of her decided to reach out to a community she did not know, and she surprised herself by finding a more welcoming place than she thought she might find. That surprise has everything to do with her poetry.
This is a poet who chose to investigate the poetry scene in a place not too far from where she lives in North Chicago, yet (she must have thought) very far from who she is. In the poem “Preoccupied” the poet describes the time she spends sitting on a bench in Sunset Park in the city of Highland Park. She tries to write, but her ink is stifled by all the serenity, where children play nearby without swearing and dog walkers pick up their pets’ deposits. Despite her initial discomfort, Jacqueline chose to investigate and ultimately join the poetry community of Highland Park/Deerfield, where she found an unexpected welcome for her own very different poetic expression. (By way of explanation, Jacqueline and I are both long-time members of the Deerfield Library Poets, a group that has been meeting for a number of years for the purpose of sharing and improving our poetry.)
As an editor of poetry, there are a few aspects of Periods, Pauses and other Poems that I might change: there is no table of contents, and the poetry could be formatted in a more organized fashion, perhaps using double columns so that individual poems do not end with just a few lines on a new page. But what is important in Jacqueline’s poetry is her point of view, her honesty with herself and her readers, and a fierce determination to express who she is and how she thinks with the rest of the world. In this she is quite successful.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Judith MK Kaufman is Editor-in-Chief of East on Central, Highland Park's own Journal of Arts and Letters. Judith is the author of Caught Laughing: The Esther and Bernie Story.
Posted January 1, 2023
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Tracks: Poems on the "L"
By Lois Baer Barr
Finishing Line Press, 2022
30 Pages
ISBN-13: 979-8-88838-053-6
Review by Cynthia T. Hahn
[S]itting is death" ; these three words close an early poem in Tracks; Poems on the 'L' (Finishing Line Press, 2022, finalist, New Voices Contest). This invitation to move compelled me to share the active poetic gaze that characterizes all twenty-three poems in this new monograph to movement by Lois Baer Barr. Tracks, Barr's second poetry chapbook, after first prize-winning Biopoeisis (Poetica Publications, 2014), captures a pre-pandemic period during which the poet commutes by car to a writer's studio at Bryn Mawr station, before jumping on the "L" train to tutor second grade children as a "reading buddy" at George Manierre school. Partially inspired by Ross Gay's Book of Delights, an intertextual reference in "Dare on the 'L' I", she affirms, "I will dare to go beyond my limits every day for a year." Barr notes that after reading chapbooks on the train, she often arrived at the school early, "bursting to write a poem about the 'L'" and this became a writing habit that ultimately grew this volume of poems (Interview, 12/22/22).
Barr moves us into some momentary uncomfortable places in the text: "yesterday, 4 p.m. two men/were shot on the Argyle platform/fourteen-year-old boy arrested" ("Woman may go blind after attack"), "the chubby kid across from us whose eye is swollen shut" ("Today I worry"), "the rat that brushed our feet in a New York subway" ("Cabrini Green II"), but more often as reader, I am happily jostled by the poetic eavesdropping, seeing and being seen, on the train and off the train, by the quick snippets and unfinished stories of those the poet accompanies. I am struck by the intimate speculation of "Inauguration Day" as it ends with train doors that frame a lesbian couple in a tender moment on the platform and the train whisks us away from the possibility of closure.
Accomplished author Lois Baer Barr, emerita professor of Spanish at Lake Forest College, avid traveler, observer of human nature, with her self-avowed "love of public transportation" (Interview, 12/22/22), underscores in this text her call to tutoring children in Chicago, which came to an end, along with the writer's studio, during the onset of the COVID pandemic, and has since restarted for her in other venues, fueled by the author's curiosity to know others by capturing parts of their story. In the course of these pages, Barr works to break down potential barriers of age, race and class and describes her tone as "casual", wanting "to talk to the reader" (Interview, 12/22/22). In this volume, fully aware of being observed and perceived as an older woman who merits a seat on the train, she stands in stark contrast to others she describes, such as Elder Dillman, a young missionary she engages in conversation, "from a farm south of Salt Lake City" ("Dare on the 'L' II"). In addition, she refers to politicized Chicago figures and beyond: Cabrini, Dr. King, Wrigley Field, Mayor Lori Lightfoot, Charles Tyson Yerkes, Chairman Mao...
In "Social Science Study II", dated as May 2019, she takes note of those who read from paper (19%) vs. those who are tied to electronics (78%) or are dozing (3%"), all the while part of and yet distinct from those who surround her on the train. The poetic narrator chooses her seat, or more often standing place, poised for maximal observation, the senses playing a key role in her rapid sketches. "[T]he clatter of the tracks" ("The Patty Crowley Apartments") is an example of playful instances of assonance Barr uses such as "the meter of the wheels" ("Social Science Study I") and "Chit-chat distracts." ("Cabrini Green II"). These are coupled with effective alliteration, "The guy with robin's egg blue bangs" ("Inauguration Day"), "the girl with the long blonde braid that swishes my shoulder" ("Today I worry") as a way to sketch a quick character portrait. These sensory portraits are drawn with memorable details of speech or look: "Addison, he says with a Slavic Ah. Then Addison with the flat Chicago 'A'" ("Today I worry"); "Brandy has long eye lashes, a rhinestone stud in one ear, dreadlocks and a huge smile"; "—Hey, I'm a boy!" ("Reading buddies at George Manierre School"). Her artistic talent is evident in the images that sparingly line the pages here, leading the reader to sketch quickly alongside her, to see, touch, hear and even smell the experience, from "tweedy wool sneakers" ("Social Science Study I") to "organic Peruvian coffee" ("Edgewater Studio").
Linear progression in the volume is often suggested by poetic stops, such as "Sedgewick is next!" ("Reading Poetry about Maoist China") which easily lead into the next poem. The settings, not always on the train itself, are yet framed by boarding the train, with the school as a primary destination and the ultimate descent in an epilogue, "at home", holding fast to what is "gone" ("the steep stairways, crowded platforms, unreachable straps") during a pandemic that shut down the option of daily displacement.
This author also features more detailed prose portraits in her writing, as in her chapbook of stories, Lope de Vega's Daughter (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2019). Barr has also published and performed short stories featuring commuters; she imagines her father's daily bus ride to his law office and back after the onset of Alzheimer's in "Transit Authority of River City", and her story, "Train of thought", takes place on the Metra train (Highland Park to Ogilvie Station).
The cover art, a photo of Bryn Mawr Station, visually emphasizes the tracks that take the reader along with the poet on a quickly moving encounter with others. In essence, the poet "tracks" her inklings of story and character by observing and asking questions, albeit some left unspoken ("I realize I can't go up to each one to see whether they’re playing Candy Crunch or reading War and Peace." ("Social Science Study II"). We are invited to journey with her and lose ourselves in between poems, as our mind may wander off track and envision the lives of others, suggested by the high-rise housing of the cover photo, and mentioned by name in poems such as "Cabrini Green I", "Cabrini Green II" and "The Patty Crowley Apartments".
The writer's studio described in the begining of the volume along with a blessing, offers a preliminary morning coffee break musing on writing before the action of writing in motion begins. Barr's work in the end leaves one wanting another ride, imagining the next stop. A reader's response to this volume will likely be a kind of anxious curiosity, of a kind that stimulates reflection and envisions a standing pose at the train pole, readied for escape onto the next platform. This reader appreciates the slender line of dramatic tension that shudders into Barr's poems as the train veers around the next corner, and we spy the next dumpster with abandoned mattresses, contrasted with an envisioning of condos with hardwood floors and granite kitchens ("The Patty Crowley Apartments") or when "at home", we contemplate our scattered dog's ashes that will surely "bloom", with a "white-flowered beauty" akin to the "tender wounds" of past and future losses. The inner voice, "Try again. Fail again. Fail better." ("Fail Better I") is a mantra found within two poems in this volume, and we see the poet repeat her efforts to engage with the journey while juxtaposing images of life and death, of dream and disappointment. What guides us successfully through the movement of Tracks is the implication that we too are "buddies" who accompany the 'whistle of wheels' "through the long curve east..." and we become the prized, observed passenger when the narrator cajoles in her poem, "Gentle Reader,": "Gentle reader," I ... want to be your reader too".
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Cynthia T. Hahn, PhD, is the author of two volumes of poetry, Outside-In-Sideout (Finishing Line Press, 2010) and Co-ïncidences in French and English, illustrated by Monique Loubet (alfAbarre Press, 2014). She is a member of Highland Park Poets and Bluff Coast Writers, along with Lois Baer Barr. She has been a professor of French, teaching creative writing, translation, literature, film and language at Lake Forest College since 1990. She has published ten book-length prose translations by Algerian, French and Lebanese authors as well as original poems in varied journals such as East on Central and Last Stanza, anthologies and is a regular online contributor to the Highland Park Poetry Muse's Gallery.
Posted January 1, 2023
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What Can Be Held Briefly
By Diane L. Redleaf
Visible Evening Press, 2022
e-Book
ISBN-13: 9798986244129
Review by Carol L. Gloor
Diane L. Redleaf’s What Can Be Held Briefly is an unapologetic celebration of a new grandchild, and, more broadly, of family itself . Her dedication is not only to the child, but to her entire family, “precious and held tightly for as long as can be.”
Always the tension with such a theme is dancing on the edge of cliché, that can only be addressed by facing the duality of family, how we both love and hate them. The love of family is evidenced throughout the book. In the poem, “You Have Many Parts,” the poet describes her new grandson as having “parts” from other family members (“Your mom’s eyes/Your grandpa’s hair,”) all of which are “Perfect/Loved.” And many of the poems trace the development of the baby boy, all expressed with close attention and specific images. In “Tyrant, Pint-Sized” the baby is crying into a scream, and the family attempts “…to fathom/which ministry will quiet the infant beast.” Then in the title poem the poet addresses the boy’s growing skill at holding “…your own bottle today/until it gently slides from your lips” Then the boy learns blocks (“Stacking Up”) and working at puzzles “(Puzzle Pieces”).
All this could well devolve into a baby book, but what saves this is the poet’s sometimes touching on the ambiguity of parenting, and expanding the single boy to the imagined future world in which he will live. In “Tyrant, Pint-Sized,” the poet remembers that
. . . years from now
We will have forgotten these days.
Your parents, even they so devoted
will cry out for you.
And in the poem “First-Time Parents,” the poet considers her own direct parenting of her two children as well as that of the new parents. The poet cannot tell the new parents “. . . what you need to know./ He will tell you what none of us knows.” In “Generations,” the poet reminds the new parents that the boy will become “whole in pieces taken from you,/in pieces he might wish never to have been given.”
Yet the book is not quite saved from such almost too sweet sequences like the “peek-a -boo” stanza in the poem “Next Time,” and the playfulness of baby toes in “Heaven.” Since the project of this book is not only the grandchild, but the poet’s children and the poet herself, what is missing is the incredible difficulty of parenting, which those who have experienced it know well. Where is the smell of baby shit encountered at 3AM? Where is the dry-eyed exhaustion of yet another sleepless night or the continual cleaning up of that food that baby from the plate the baby throws down (in the poem “Next Time”)?
But these failures do not destroy the validity of what is there. What is in these poems needs to be developed more concretely, more shockingly. If one is to discuss parenting, even grand-parenting, one needs to tell the hard truths, and tell them hard. The poet knows that she and her children and the baby boy live
In our pod of blossoms,
this life knows its privilege,
Its selfish inwardness,
Its lucky draw.
We know the arrangements are temporary.
From the poem “Charmed Life, Pandemic Style.” Yes, these “arrangements” are indeed temporary, as are they all. We just need to feel the “arrangements” more specifically; we need to feel the punch in the gut that comes with actual parenting.
===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 January 1, 2023
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...this just in...
By Bill Cushing
Cyberwit.net, 2021
43 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-8182537460
Review by Gail Denham
Beginning with aspirations to become a journalist, poet Bill Cushing was captured by a comment at a journalistic conference. The woman speaker said: “If you want to improve your writing in any form, start writing Poetry.” The speaker went on to outline the value of poetry by way of the discipline of using words, perhaps “miserly” but definitely efficiently. By the next day Cushing began writing poetry and explored all its aspects.
Many of the poems in …This Just In… are ekphrastic, one of my favorite forms of poetry, which uses art, photos, or perhaps a viewed image on which to focus – to stir your imagination and poetic voice.
Some poems show an evident leaning toward journalism also, as in “A Thanksgiving Prayer”, which interjects current news headlines into the poem.
“folks are praying
over plates piled with meat
and mounds of vegetables;’…
and “Downtown tavern shooting”
or “Prostitute arrested.”
He ends the poem with “Life goes on forever and forever.”
In the poem: “Getting Old Is” Cushing speaking of:
“…an emaciated
Santa stands at the curb…
eyeing the entrance to the
free soup kitchen in the church.”
In this poem he also speaks of a drifter:
“all his belongings hang, bagged
at his side – almost a part
of him…
this traveler—this vagrant
wreckage, this canary in our
coal mine…”
Haikus, free verse, and ekphrastics help make this book a good read, quick to the point, and stirring the mind to consider what we see about us. This, to me, is a true mark of a good poet, to notice everything.
In Cushing’s poem “Impotence” he says:
“On a table littered with twisted
metal, stale beer mixes with smoke.”
Cushing speaks of talking to someone at a bus stop – about “The Nature of Snow”, of the funeral of a man’s son, in which his son’s image is projected on a screen at front of the room – a solemn scene. He writes of the military with compassion.
…This Just In…, Bill Cushing’s book, is short, but full of glimpses into the lives of those he views around him, and “news” happenings. I believe he mixes a touch of journalism with good poetry. Cushing has authored several other books which were well received, and is widely published.
===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 January 1, 2023
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What is Another Word for Intimacy
By Amanda Baker
Yellow Arrow Publishing, 2022
72 Pages
ISBN-13: 979-8985070439
Review by Jacqueline Stearns
This book is not just another poetry collection dedicated to romance. Every facet from the rhyme scheme to how the poems are placed on the page, catches the reader's eye and draws them in.
As a poet myself, I love Amanda Baker's rhyme patterns which in some pieces are simplistic.
The Fruit Gum Variety Pack: "Like a piece of gum stuck on the bottom of my shoe. Now everywhere I go I have a little bit of your residue.'
In Imagination and Creation, which details a person who is talking to a lover about understanding her thoughts and emotions, we have: " I let go of power to be your equal. Transparent feelings make us people."
Page arrangement kept my attention on the writing. Some poems are one paragraph straight down lines underneath one another.
Other pieces are several paragraphs written in the same style single spaced.
The dedication is written on a diagonal, beginning with the first line on the top left, and the last word on the bottom right.
Other writings have words separated by lines. /
Simplicity is what makes this collection so original. Baker utilities everyday objects to depict relationships.
In the afore mentioned The Fruit Gum Variety Pack, gum alludes to the author's connection to someone important in her life. Upon careful examination, Baker realizes this person may not matter as much as she thought.
Green uses an old green dress as a metaphor for a woman's past and present.
Leave Me In Your Pocket, is a brilliant poem. An imaginary pocket is the catalyst describing the ever changing dynamic of romantic love.
"I never put anything in my pockets. I don't invite anyone in because I don't want to turn mine inside out."
"Okay maybe I invite you in my pocket."
Spare terse language give some of the poems individual flavor. In My Love Language: "I would love you in all ways because I wouldn't have to write poems about you."
In Take Me To The Mountain spins the tale of Baker's flip flopping about what she wants in a relationship. The narrative takes the form of: ,"Take Me To The Mountains, no don't take me to the mountains."
The words are simple. I shout, "Take Me To The Mountains but don't fall in love with the idea.'
Music Is Everything is a dynamic piece where Baker utilizes music as an analogy for a romantic entanglement. Again simple language. "You are an arrangement, a four chord song. Melody and lyrics. I hear you."
What Is Another Word For Intimacy, is a book teenagers and adults of all ages can identify with. Who among us hasn't been profoundly affected by 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 January 1, 2023
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Archived Book Reviews Posted October 2022 - December 2022
Ode to Toni Morrison (and COLLECTED poems...) by Jennifer Brown Bank (review by Barbara Eaton)
Talk Smack to a Hurricane: Poems by Lynn Jensen Lampe (review by Lois Baer Barr)
Odes: Poets Praising People, Places, and Things edited by Jennifer Dotson and Mary Beth Bretzlauf (review by Michael Escoubas)
Alice's Adventures: A Modern Version of Lewis Carroll's Classic in Verse by Paul Buchheit (review by Judith MK Kaufman)
Breaking Cover: Poems by Michael Maul (review by Michael Escoubas)
Leave It Raw by Shakira Croce (review by Michael Escoubas)
American Male by Steve Henn (review by Ed Werstein)
Chronicle of Lost Moments by Lara Dolphi (review by Michael Escoubas)
Long Distance Romance by Barbara Eaton (review by Jacqueline Stearns)
Erasing Influences by R. Bremner (review by Margaret R. Sáraco)
To Talk of Many Things: Selected Poems by Richard Greene (review by Michael Escoubas)
Self Portrait With Thorns by Gail Goepfert (review by Michael Escoubas)
apparitions by Amelia Cotter (review by Michael Escoubas)
Archived Book Reviews Posted April 2022 to June 2022
Aquifer: Poems Evoked by Water by Ellen Sander (review by Lois Baer Barr)
Blue Flame Ring: Collected Poems by Tinker Greene (review by Jacqueline Stearns)
Mile Markers by Tom Moran (review by Michael Escoubas)
apparitions by Amelia Cotter (review by Pauline Kochanski)
Doctor Poets and Other Healers: Covid in their Own Words, edited by Thelma T. Reyna, Frank L. Meyskens, Jr., and Joanna Shapiro (review by Michael Escoubas)
Art Work by Terry Allen (review by Ally Frank)
Dreamless Night: The Selected Chinese/English Poems of William Marr (review by Michael Escoubas)
Underground River of Want by Kathleen Gregg (review by Michael Escoubas)
Mapping a Life by Susan T. Moss (review Michael Escoubas)
My Body the Guitar by Karla Linn Merrifield (review by Michael Escoubas)
Archived Book Reviews posted January 2021 - March 2021
How Do We Create Love by Michael H. Brownstein (review by Jacqueline Stearns)
Pictures, Postcards, Letters by Lennart Lundh (review by Lynne Viti)
Becoming Vulnerable by Joshua Corwin (review by Mike Freveletti)
Haiku Rose by Colleen McManus Hein (review by Hope Atlas)
Porch Swing Rhyme by Lavern Spencer McCarthy (review by Curt Vevang)
Central Air by Mike Puican (review by Carol L. Gloor)
Dancing at Lake Montebello by Lynne Viti (review by Terry Loncaric)
Decennia by Jan Chronister (review by Carol L. Gloor)
The Samurai by Linda Crate (review by Cynthia T. Hahn)
Beyond the Moon's White Claw by Patty Dickson Piecza (review by Michael Escoubas)
Inside Out: Poems on Writing & Reading Poems with Insider Exercises by Marjorie Maddox (review by Teresa K. Burleson)
Ministry of Flowers by Andrea Witzke Slot (review by Lois Baer Barr)
Dragonflies & Algebra by Dennis Trujillo (review by Ed Werstein)
Apricots to Za'Atar: Across Oceans and Time Memoir Meets Persona in Pantry of My Life's Menu by Emma Alexandra Kowalenko (review by Dr. Jonathan Gourlay)
Time is Not a River by Michael Minassian (review by Lavern Spencer McCarthy)
Other Maidens by Toti O'Brien (review by Linda Imbler)
