Highland Park Poetry began in 2007. Wow! Amazing! Together with the support of friends and followers, we have created poetry opportunities, experiments, publications, contests, readings, open-mics, pentathlons, and more to bring poetry to the community and beyond the 60035 zip code. Thanks to everyone who has contributed time, energy, talent and cash to this endeavor. Here's to many more!
Thanks to Highland Park Poetry's contributors in 2020:
Anonymous
Emma Alexandra
Jennifer Dotson
Joseph Glaser
Kathryn Hutchinson
Julie Isaacson
Richard V. Kaufman
Lennart Lundh
Donna Ritter
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Poetry Book Reviews
Ministry of Flowers
By Andrea Witzke Slot
Valley Press, 2020
104 Pages
ISBN-13: 9781912436439
Review by Lois Baer Barr
Fasten your seatbelts! From the first poem to the last you are in for a thrilling ride. Don’t worry, you’re in the hands of a skilled driver. Not always one to race, Andrea Witzke Slot knows just what pace to take on dangerous curves.
Yes, Highland Park Poets, you guessed right, the book takes its title from Emily Dickinson’s poem #905. She invokes her muse with the second poem in the collection, “Between my country and the others–a sea.” This poem deals with the distance between the lover and the beloved. The citation is no mere nod to Dickinson whose slant rhymes and nature imagery infuse Slot’s book from beginning to end. One of the last poems is called: “Between my country and the others/As ministry.” This poem is about the painful process of finding forgiveness and forgiving: one of the main themes of the book. The flowers offered as she crosses a bridge to her “sister” stand for the work of the poet. This is no dozen carnations purchased at the grocery, these flowers represent an opening of the self to extreme scrutiny. “Please open our door. I have changed.”
Reconnecting with loved ones who’ve been wronged requires dealing with ghosts. Slot converses with the patients of the former owner of her house, a psychologist. Her stairway reverberates with the steps of others who creaked up and down them. In “Disguises” her friend comes back after midnight “in your absence, we talk/ and, sometimes, we laugh.”
The poetry allows us to be inside very intimate moments as Slot speaks of her annual breast exam or of sitting at a truck stop with truckers waiting for their turn to shower. As she waits for the tow truck that never arrives, she observes the truckers with warmth and startling images: “The odour of stale hotdogs coils/Around this truck stop of quiet men.” Her baby in “The Incubator” has “sapling lungs” and is an “unwrapped bundle of earth, bone, flesh.” There are sensual poems about making love and about carrying a sleeping three-year-old to the toilet. Direct address to the reader heightens the intimacy in poems such as “Remember when we thought we’d live forever?”
But do you remember the night
The boat left the shore
When we realized where we had been?–
And that the Island was gone?
Readers from Deerfield Poetry Workshop will especially like the tribute to one of our members, the late Helen Degen Cohen, in which the author addresses Helen directly. A Holocaust survivor, Helen was an elegant poet. She lived her life with joy and ferocity; she left no poem uncut.
Despite the serious tone of the collection, there’s lots of humor. In “Self-portrait, Desk,” a persona poem, the desk hears a piano upstairs and “wonders how wood can make such a noise.” A narrative poem in epistolary form, “Dear Police Officer,” tells how the poet got a ticket parking in Chicago when she couldn’t drag herself away from Sonia Sanchez’s performance of her poetry.
Ministry of Flowers is a compendium of poetic forms: sonnets, prose, elegies and visual poems. One visual poem is an ode to a cactus that blooms after three years of dormancy. The dashes at the beginning and end of each line and exclamation points at top and bottom form the needles. On the page, the piece looks like the pad of a nopal.
It’s not surprising to learn that Andrea Witzke Slot is also a scholar. She reveals her academic side with literary allusions and abundant Latin words. Slot uses Latinate words that go beyond our common knowledge, like proprioception and Lasius Niger (garden ant). In “Blood Ties, Circa 1932” she calls the work her grandfather did to commit suicide in his garage “the achene preparation.” I had to look that one up. Thankfully, Google lets you hear the word. It sounds like “a keen” which adds acuity and doggedness to the way he pursued death. As always, the sound of the word adds another level of meaning. It reminds the reader of aching preparation and of the aching that the grandmother would relive the rest of her life.
I started with the image of a joy ride. But after that experience, you’d feel the adrenalin rush but not remember many details. With Slot’s work, the images linger: a body collapsing like the circus tent billowing down or her grandmother finding her husband asphyxiated in his car. The plate with what would have been his last lunch waits on the table. Andrea Witzke Slot probes moments of terror and tenderness. There is so much to find in this short book: poems about social justice, poems about llamas and slugs in the garden. Poets, start your engines and race to the bookstore, or perhaps it would be safer to order from this website.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Lois Baer Barr lives in Riverwoods with her husband and her pandemic pup Aggie. You can read her poetry in Biopoesis (Poetica Press, 2013) and her stories in Lope de Vega’s Daughter (Red Bird, 2019). Her work is online at Alimentum, Ekphrastic Review, Highland Park Poetry, The Jewish Literary Review, Persimmon Tree, and Southern Women’s Review and in print at cream city review,East on Central, Valley Voices, and forthcoming at Rattle.
Posted January 1, 2021
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Dragonflies and Algebra
By Dennis Trujillo
FutureCycle Press, 2020
82 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1942371861
Review by Ed Werstein
I had taken notice of Dennis Trujillo’s poetry over recent years in ezines like Blast Furnace and 3Elements Review, and also on websites like Your Daily Poem and, of course, Highland Park Poetry. So when opportunity knocked about reviewing his latest collection, Dragonflies and Algebra (Future Cycle,, 2020) including a free review copy, I answered the door.
One of the hallmarks of good poetry is that it can both surprise and challenge us. Trujillo’s book accomplished that before I even opened it. Reading the back cover I was amazed to learn that he is a graduate of West Point and that he had a 20 year military career, facts which both surprised me, and challenged my peacenik anti-military bias. That bias will be a long time in tempering. This brief review will focus on the poetry, which did not disappoint.
Maybe you’ve imagined what garden gnomes would say to you if they could talk. I haven’t, but Dennis has. Maybe you’ve thought about the taste of raven wings and black diamonds. I haven’t, but Dennis has. And maybe you’ve considered that dragonflies might be interested in studying the quadratic equation. I haven’t, but (you guessed it) Dennis has.
In At the Scrapyard, Trujillo offers us obsolete telephone booths waiting for demolition. “They wait/ like dinosaurs looking up at a sky/ of dark ash.” And in The Red Mower he shows us a weekend project of assembling a new mower. The narrator “poured myself into the job as if/ it were the Apollo Lunar Lander”. Later, “The mower loomed in the backyard / like a giant red ant from Mars.”
After his military career, which included time spent in Asia, Dennis became a math teacher. He is also an avid, avid as in daily, runner and has kept a journal of his runs for years. The result of this wide and seemingly unconnected experience is a poetry that covers an astounding variety of subject matter: Eastern myth and philosophy, astrology, long distance running, science, insects, math, parenthood, love and loss. There are even odes to the veins on the top of his feet, and to the lowly dandelion.
Dennis is a master of simile and metaphor. In My Heart Sprouts Wings, Trujillo happens upon a wounded pigeon while running. The bird “made me think/ of an escaped convict in shackles.” The next day the pigeon is still struggling and two other birds are there, “Two others/ kept company like sentries/ at a queen’s chambers.” And in Voices, “...strands of starlight/ murmured through the branches/ of the ginko tree outside/ my window in a language/ only fairies and fireflies/ could unravel.”
The poem titles invite the reader in: Wooden Bicycle, Shaman of Atlantis, Crayola Therapy, Meteorite Wine, and Where Angels Vacation, to name a few. These poems are full of the sudden turn to the unexpected, and the surprise ending.
Dennis Trujillo’s poetry is imaginative, speculative, whimsical, and yet, at the same time profound. And always, always, surprising. Buy this book.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Ed Werstein is a regional VP of the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets, and the 2018 recipient of the Council of Wisconsin Writers Lorine Niedecker Prize for Poetry.
Posted January 1, 2020
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Apricots to Za'atar: Across Oceans and Time Memoir Greets Persona in the Pantry of My Life's Menu
By Emma Alexandra Kowalenko
Self-published, 2019
129 Pages
ISBN-13: 9781701893696
Review by Dr. Jonathan Gourlay
Emma Alexandra Kowalenko’s book Apricots to Za’atar offers a cornucopia of poems tracing her immigrant experience through food. Each of the alphabetically arranged poems offers a first course of memory or association, followed by a second poem that adds dimension to the first. This structure, with two poems in conversation with each other around a specific dish, creates a depth that captures something unique about the immigrant experience. Her Polish parents’ longing for herring as refugees in Morocco in “Herring and Vodka” is complicated by survivor’s guilt in the next poem, when her mother is met with an abundance of herring as an immigrant in Chicago. The secret ingredient here is time. The way something as simple as herring, matzah, or a roasted peanut can link generations, suggest lost villages in Poland, bring loved ones back more viscerally than any photograph.
Kowalenko’s perspective on the past is also told from point of view of the objects and ingredients that witnessed it. Poems in the persona of “Garbanzos in Hummus Disguise” or a soup bowl further complicate her story. The poems are not only about how food binds our memories to our present and creates our sense of self but also about the objects we carry with us from place to place. These metaphysical poems suggest that cuisine is not an individual pursuit reflected only in the poet’s memories. From the perspective of hummus, after all, our lives are fleeting.
Kowalenko’s poetry derives its’ power from the noun-driven, deceptively plain-spoken way she spins her memoir in poems. Here’s a verse from “Borscht, Hot, Cool, Red, and White”:
Hot borscht, the eastern European, Ukrainian version, pork ribs simmered in Papa’s beet broth. He adds potatoes for body. Countering Papa’s version, Mama cooks beets in chicken broth, bay leaves, a touch of marjoram.
The specificity of the ingredients has an incantatory power, almost like speaking a spell to bring back the memory. Because of the tactile nature of her images, the reader feels the pull of time, the sense of loss, the full scope of the immigrant journey when she returns to borscht, and her Jewish faith, at the end of the poem. She understands why her mother never made the Jewish version of borscht:
Life secrets are better kept than told.
The poems remind us that, like borscht, we all have versions. For Kowelenko, a youthful fascination with couscous and tagine, an early education in the many flavors of Chicago’s Humboldt Park neighborhood, and later travels among the olives and cheeses of Italy.
Perhaps this interest in how food defines us is why Kowalenko calls her book “memoir greets persona.” Our versions of ourselves were created in the kitchens of our youth. And we are constantly adding new ingredients, as long as we are alive, from apricots to za’atar.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Dr. Jonathan Gourlay is a writer in Oak Park, Illinois. He is the author of a memoir, Nowhere Slow, numerous articles, and a dissertation concerning sea cucumbers.
Posted January 1, 2021
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Time Is Not A River
By Michael Minassian
Transcendant Zero Press, 2020
103 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1946460042
Review by LaVern Spencer McCarthy
Since I am relatively new to reviewing books, I will focus mostly on what I like about Michael's book. The first thing I noticed was the impressive amount of acknowledgements. That tells me that the poet is prolific and serious about his work.
In Is This History? the poems are well written with an economy of words. Verb usage is strong with sparing use of adjectives. I was especially fascinated by the poem, The Rosenbergs Come Out To Play. I can almost smell the stench of death from the electric chair and feel the fear Ethel undoubtedly experienced in real life. Powerful imagery runs through the entire book.
The poems' subjects are varied with a few rhymes interspaced. In the section, History Follows You Home, I felt a certain pathos for the pan-handlers, as though I were there refusing to help, feeling guilty and then giving all I had. I noticed an over-used expression in the poem, "Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out." I feel that could have been omitted without detracting from the poem.
Michael's poem, I Heard a River, a villanelle, would read better if the meter was consistent. Otherwise, the poet did a good job writing the poem. In Remembering the Starving Armenians, Michael gets the point across on how seriously his mother disliked wasted food:
But I had to finish my dinner
no matter how full I felt
and if any scraps
remained on our plates
my mother stood
at the kitchen sink
and licked each one clean.
Part 2--Postcard Blues-- In Postcard From Key West, the poet explains love as "The overseas highway--sometimes the road doesn't go on anymore"--an apt description. Michael's poems have a certain poignance and elegance that I have rarely seen before.
Most of them have a haunting quality, such as The Children Send Postcards.
The children send postcards
to their parents, missing
since birth, lost in a parking
lot behind the empty hospital.
I liked these lines:
The old, wooden crosses leaning into each other
as if they would hear what the other confessed.
Postcard From the Edge of the Lake is another great poem. Its near-rhyme on certain lines did not detract from the poem. I know that rhyming is not the poet's strong point. I especially enjoyed reading This Autumn Day, where he describes the sky as:
an old cup of tea that swirls of oily milk.
Michael's poems are full of life where he uses all his senses to describe and relate. In Part 3--Let's Burn the Bed-This Winter Day has astounding imagery.
The clouds are piled up
like a train wreck
across the sky,
and tongues of rain freeze
before they hit the ground.
Then, the perfect last verse:
with only the memory of your glance to guide me home.
Part 4--Like Black Rocks--In The Short Story, the poem is not a true Shakespearean Sonnet. It would scan better if the rhyme was iambic and precise. The almost-rhyme does not detract from the poem too much. It was readable and enjoyable. In Early This Morning, the poem is whimsical, one of the poet's finest, I think. He compares his friend to Walt Whitman:
with his long hair and beard
he looked like Walt Whitman
wandering into the wrong century.
Throughout the book the poems have an unforgettable, haunting quality. I would recommend it as fine reading, written by a literary geniuswho goes to extraordinary lengths to make his writing superb.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: LaVern Spencer McCarthy is a life member of Poetry Society Of Texas. She has published five books of poetry and three books of short stories.
Posted January 1, 2021
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Other Maidens
By Toti O'Brien
BlazeVOX Books, 2020
146 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1-60964-374-4
Review by Linda Imbler
Toti O’Brien’s marvelous collection, Other Maidens, has a common thread running through the entire book-angst. Bare, vibrating, soulful angst.
Yet, each work is penned so beautifully that one forgets that the poems are born of heartache or despair. Her masterful grasp of language graces each piece, and allusions to the arts are highly present. Toti obviously has significant knowledge of various art forms, and she employs that knowledge to sing, dance, and paint her way through each of this book’s poems. Furthermore, her scholarly appreciation for Mythology and History is used to best advantage, as she sieves references to these two themes through her eyes and heart, in order to create the treasures that become her poems.
Lines such as those following seem simple, but are lush with symbolism when read within the context of the entire poem. Lines such as:
“ you have seen many skies bleedingpurple” (Voyager),
“ don’t trust jaguars, it sighs. Not when they come in pairs” (House Of Jaguars), and
“ if she dares intruding the arboreal crowd without blinking” (Of The Palm).
I highly recommend this book for its intricacies, gorgeous language, and stunning revelations.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Linda Imbler is the author of Big Question, Little Sleep and That Fifth Element.
Posted January 1, 2021
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My Third Eye Is Blurry: Collected Poems
By William Vollrath
Highland Park Poetry Press, 2020
74 Pages
ISBN-13: 979-8681078173
Review by Arlene Gay Levine
Like the glorious multicolor helix gracing the cover of William Vollrath’s collection of poems, My Third Eye Is Blurry, the text itself is a fascinating kaleidoscope of the various experiences, musings and growth the poet encounters on his journey. The book is divided into two sections, First Vision and Second Vision, with a roughly equal number of poems in each. This presages the work’s dominant theme of seeking that flows beneath the words, as if the poet himself is on a quest for equilibrium, some method to weigh life’s questions and answers in order to find a balanced path.
A frequently jocular tone hides secrets, glimpses into mysteries both human and metaphysical. This is accomplished so suavely you will hardly recognize the depth these short, often amusing poems provide until you take time to read, reflect and reread. Of course, this is what the poet in his affable way, urges us to recognize as needful in understanding the day to day book of our own lives as well. The very first poem, poem-o-matic, provides a glimpse into Vollrath’s creative process and introduces another motif, cooking, whether it be a meal or a poem.
It is a concrete poem in the shape of a bowl holding varied “organic ingredients” such as “temptation, joy, anger, meter, beat and voice” with the direction to “mix/ and hope your muse steps into the kitchen.” It speaks of what will be recurring and intertwining subjects of creation and nourishment. The next poem, My Muse, awakens the poet at 4:00 a.m. with “Brain now boiling joyously/Twitching from her planted seeds/Nascent ideas nourish me.” The second stanza foreshadows the element of forthcoming spiritual concerns in the lines, “Inspiration on god’s platter/My Muse brings kisses from afar.”
Levity in the title Deep Fried Twinkies with the delicious metaphor in the first line: “Truffles for a weary soul” soon recants this mood with a list of woes including “weeds in the yard/ticks on the dog/foolishly lost love” yet once again returns to humor with the wonderful last line, “I’ll take a dozen to go” and who wouldn’t want to try those deep fried Twinkies, at least once? By the way, the dog with ticks makes for one of my favorite poems in section I, Taking My Dog Fishing. You feel the poet’s joy from the “sparkling sun, champagne air” and how the “clear water at the county park/begs for our presence/for our absolute focus/on the shimmering movements gliding just beneath.”
First Vision also contains the moving Pieces of My Soul that seems to me to be a synthesis of the human drama of the poet’s life and his plea for intervention of numinous forces to set things right. He speaks of “forgotten triumphs/hollow victories” that are “stacked in dim crawlspaces and/cobwebbed corners of the mind.” Poignant, the last few lines explain “pieces of then/anxiously waiting/a caretaker’s /healing broom.”
Section 2, Second Vision, more serious in tone, builds to a crescendo toward the growth of the soul through trial and tribulation toward wisdom and understanding. In Pregnant, Vollrath shares “I surrender myself…/servant to suggestion” who is “peaceful in my solitude” and closes with “I shall bear an idea.” Other stand-outs include Kill the Buddha, which speaks to the search for enlightenment, the eloquent Jade bi at the Freer Gallery, asking if the jade disks might “suggest the secret/to our sacred cycles/ of birth and death and birth” and the closing poem of the collection, Connected, which offers the pearl of wisdom the poet has won from his journey on earth thus far.
A seeker of answers, trying with his words to parse the duality between the real world and The Real, William Vollrath is at his best when he mulls over life’s paradoxes with the eye of an experienced traveler. My Third Eye Is Blurry: Collected Poems would make a fine guide and provide food for the mind, heart and soul of any reader.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Arlene Gay Levine is the author of 39 Ways to Open Your Heart: An Illuminated Meditation(Conari Press,) and Movie Life(Finishing Line Press). Her poetry and prose have found a home in The New York Times, numerous anthologies, and journals including Chiron Review, The MacGuffin, Quest and Frogpond.
Posted December 1, 2020
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Rites of Paradise
By Geoffrey Heptonstall
CyberWit.net, 2020
78 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-9389690491
Review by Barbara Eaton
Geoffrey Heptonstall, in his new collection, The Rites of Paradise, offers poems that are a comfort in these trying times. These poems are meant to be read in quiet solitude, and read more than once.
The Rites of Paradise is dedicated to Debbie, who served as inspiration. The first poem, “The Second Time I Saw You,” is a touching tribute and a wonderful introduction. But Debbie remains a shadowy figure. Most of these serious and learned poems deal with the arts: music, sculpture, and literature. As the poet claims, “There is no death in art.” His work quietly affirms his faith in a life after death.
While the poems in the first section, “The Bird of Paradise,” recall the Victorian poets, the second section, “Oceans and Islands,” brings the Romantics to mind. References to Odysseus and Moby Dick make clear that the oceans he speaks of are the strife of life. The islands, similarly, are islands of the mind, and we are “lovers in a storm.” But Heptonstall is confident that “life will last forever,” and the faithful will be guided gently home.
Curiously, the last five stanzas of “An Island in the Mind,” (pp. 29-30) are repeated in “Memento Mori” (p. 70). The poem, “Not Every Thought,” also appears twice (pp. 64 and 73).
The third section, “More Songs for Her,” is reminiscent of the Pre-Raphaelites, particularly the Rossettis. These poems are melancholy, but they resonate with understated emotion. In Heptonstall’s austere language, his well-crafted images come as a welcome surprise.
The Rites of Paradise is highly recommended for poets and anyone seeking solace in a storm.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Barbara Eatonis a poet and semi-retired community college instructor.
Posted December 1, 2020
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Star Gazing: Poems of Astronomy
By Miriam Sagan
Cholla Needles Arts & Literary Library, 2020
136 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-8651830473
Review by Jan Chronister
What most impresses me about this collection of poems by Miriam Sagan is that she could write so many that connect to one subject! Sagan literally takes on the universe and presents it in a way that is as awe-inspiring as the subject itself. There is a cohesiveness to the book that feels natural and comforting. One device that helps link the poems together is the repetition of certain elements: boats, water, moon, darkness, eclipses, telescopes, and, of course, stars. Recurring images such as the woman chained to a rock and keys to locks also tie the poems together.
Sagan presents straightforward experiences, often related to astronomy, and turns them into philosophical statements. Despite the warning we have all been given not to look directly at the sun (or similar blinding objects), she does just that and comes away with revelations she shares with readers. One of my favorite poems in the book is “The Astronomer’s Wife.” It is a college experience I definitely relate to.
Many poems seem to be written in some form, but only one piece is actually identified as a pantoum. The poems with repeating lines seem to reflect the nature of celestial events—they recur as predicted and often mystify the viewer. A table of contents (and even a page of “notes”) would be helpful, but then it would be hard to deal with the numerous haiku-like pieces that appear on a regular basis, usually several to a page. I personally do not care for poems that begin lines with capital letters when not starting a new sentence, but I know it is done by many poets. I find it difficult to follow the thought, but sentence style has always been a strong preference of mine, though other readers are not bothered by it. I do appreciate Sagan’s short lines, a style I also prefer.
Sagan deftly references her Jewish heritage without making it obvious. Her skill in doing this adds an important personal element, as does the poem “Cosmos” in which she answers the question about Carl Sagan that is sure to be on every reader’s mind. I find the strongest part of the collection to be the series of three poems titled “Star Axis.” Here is where we learn that Polaris is only our North Star for 2,000 years, and then things change. The collection ends on a masterful note when Sagan pens a poem for each of the planets. I especially like “Jupiter: Patriarch” where her voice emerges loud and clear: it’s never too early, or late,/to learn to say:/fuck with me, you die.
After reading Star Gazing, I found myself wishing for more personal, subjective details. The poet has been to many fascinating and exotic locales, but her reaction to them seems to be more scientific than emotional. In a way, this does allow the reader to step up to the telescope with her and stare directly at the sun, so to speak. In the end, Sagan proves to be a likeable, competent guide to the practice of star (and planet) gazing.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Jan Chronister is currently serving as President of the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets. Her chapbook, Target Practice, was published by Parallel Press in 2009.
Posted December 1, 2020
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Throwing The Crown
Jacob Saenz
APR/Honickman First Book Prize winner
Copper Canyon Press, 2018
80 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-0983300861
Review by Mike Freveletti
What does it mean to be a poet of place? The best example, at least for me, is Paterson by William Carlos Williams. The poet Jacob Saenz with his collection, Throwing the Crown, has given us poems of a place, Chicago, and of the self. You see, what Williams gave us in Paterson was the connection between man and the city but Saenz, if I can continue with the comparison, tells a story about the evolution of self with the city as backdrop. This is a beautiful set of seemingly autobiographical poems, an exploration of what it means to grow up a young man of color in circumstances that not every reader will understand from their own history. That’s okay. Saenz is a welcomed Virgil, our poetic guide, through this beautiful collection.
It’s hard not to see this book in some ways as a guide to the poet’s Chicago. Poems like the “Blue Line Incident”, a reference to the “L”, puts you right there on the train headed through downtown. The poem kicks off with a startling line, “he was just some coked-out/crazed King with crooked teeth/& a tear drop forever falling”, an arresting image that prepares us for a poem not really about this ‘King’ but what he stands for. They speak in a language, the language of street gangs and develop a mutual respect even if it is a sort of facade. The unexpected violent lines at the end, “I was wishing for a life-/saver & he took, hooked him in/& had him say goodbye like we was boys/& shit when I really should’ve/gutted that fuck w the tip/of my blue ballpoint.” The contrast between the narrator pretending to be a gang member and the violence considered once the man has gone away not only takes the poem in a surprising direction but also says a lot about what situational awareness means for this young man. He’s both a pretender and not. What decision will he make next time?
Saenz is clearly a born storyteller, but he is not without formal poetic strength. The poet gives us a sonnet, “Sonnet of the Dead” that boasts the camp of a horror movie within the framework of a sonnet, all with a subtitle referencing Dawn of the Dead. A neat juxtaposition that will have some formalists both scoffing and slightly frightened at the same time. It’s important to point out that this is a perfect example of what Saenz does so well in this collection, fun and serious together. A poem about masculinity might sit right next to a poem entirely about baseball.
My favorite poem in the collection is written about a mother-son relationship. “Poem for the Mother” struck me emotionally because of its simplicity. It’s a lineage of moles and freckles that get passed down from generation to generation, “as a kid I grabbed hold/of the moles on your face & neck/handled them like pearls of the earth/you said it was payback for the times/you play w grandma’s when you were small.” I know as a kid I was pulling my Mom’s hair, her necklace, her skin, and you know what she did? Nothing. Just kept on loving me. How lucky we are to be reminded of the unconditional and really, unquestioning, love of a mother.
I can recommend this book for a lot of reasons. The historical sketches based around the city, the story of growing up as a boy of color, the formation of that boy’s body and beliefs, the family narrative as a through line throughout the collection. Any of those would do. Saenz is a poet of place and this unique book is a debut to remember.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Mike Frevelettiis poet, short fiction writer and occasional dabbler in literary criticism. His work has appeared both online and in print.
Posted December 1, 2020
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Get Up Said The World
By Gail Goepfert
Cervena Barva Press, 2020
124 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1-950063-24-6
Review by Caroline Johnson
“How do we persist in this living?” asks Gail Goepfert in the opening lines of her first poem in this collection. Now, more than ever, do we need an answer to this question, which Goepfert attempts to answer throughout the 121 pages of narrative and lyrical poetry.
Each poem is preceded by a carefully chosen word and its dictionary definition, giving us a template and theme to the poem before we read it. In “What Keats Knew,” Goepfert explores the term “élan vital” and asks what matters. “There is risk in thinking / I have anything to say,” she writes, but in the end relies on Keats’s answer: “The poetry / of the earth is never dead.”
The narrative poem, “Tête-à-tête at Trader Joe’s,” describes the poet’s encounter with an elderly woman at a grocery store. Both are plant lovers and Goepfert describes their poignant conversation about flowers beautifully. “Do you know the secret to getting peonies / to bloom?” the narrator asks the woman by way of introduction. This is followed by a heartfelt conversation and attention to detail about a stranger who becomes almost a friend on the page by the end of the poem.
In “Life Lists Not Just for the Birds,” the poet describes an abandoned robin’s egg and other birds, relating them to a violent Chicago weekend. The word “incredulity” precedes that poem, “the quality or state of being unwilling to admit or accept what is offered as true.” Other poems touch on witnessing a suicide, fishing, and a touching elegy for her coal miner grandfather.
In “Cold Calling,” a prose poem that starts out describing some unpleasant jobs, Goepfert writes in detail about having to call one of her older students who is falling behind. She describes the litany of real life problems the student talks about and we, as readers, are drawn into his personal tragedy. Similarly, Goepfert describes her mother’s double mastectomy in “While Spooning Jelly on Toast” with touching details that make us feel her compassion.
In all of these poems, the poet adds a human connection that is reminiscent of poets such as Philip Levine and his portraits of people he knew, especially workers. In “Salting Ash,” Goepfert describes her mother’s instructions for her funeral:
“I don’t want a casket beneath the ground.
Strew some ash of me
with the couch and crab that ride
the steady clout of wave--pain-free
I’ll tumble in the foam.
Let the gulls cry and the terns squawk
making tattoos in the sand.” (p. 57)
Goepfert also includes some ekphrastic poetry in the collection (“Sisters”), and many poems containing sensual language, such as this description in “Easing in”:
“…The bicycle bell’s jingle
breaks through,
clear and clean
as picked bone
like the luminous cells in me.
Can I settle
into the stretch of skin
I was given at birth?
I refuse to hush
the beebox
inside me.” (p. 71)
And in “In the Glass of My Eye,” she writes, “How is it possible / that I taste with my eyes?...I gather light / coming and going.”
Indeed, like Goepfert’s other books--the chapbook A Mind on Pain (Finishing Line Press, 2015), and Tapping Roots (Kelsay Books, 2018)--she explores human connections as if through a glass lens, each poem a prism of light. In one of the final poems in this collection, “The Practice of Gratitude,” Goepfert thanks her body for waking, for the dawn now before her: “Thank you, I repeat / these word to my body.” Thank you, Gail, for offering up such a beautiful collection to the world.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Caroline Johnson is currently the president of Poets and Patrons of Chicago. Her first full-length collection of poems, The Caregiver, was published by Holy Cow! Press in May 2018.
Posted December 1, 2020
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Little Kings
By Peter Kahn
Nine Arches Press, 2020
231 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1-911027-97-3
Review by Elizabeth Joy Levinson
I am heading into year fifteen in the classroom, except I won’t be in the classroom this year, at least not to start. And while I am relieved that this is the direction my district decided to go in, I am heartbroken at the same time, missing those first few weeks of community building with new freshmen, and reuniting with students I taught last year -- though our time together was ended abruptly, our reunion will be all the more poignant. Which is probably why Peter Kahn’s Little Kings has me feeling some kind of way. The bittersweet nature of many of the narratives throughout, and the overall narrative effect of the collection, so closely mirrors my own bittersweet.
The poems in the collection are narratives, each a snapshot, a quick peek at a man’s life, his memories, the people he has loved, the people he could not love enough. And together, these poems build a life, but like memory, they do not move chronologically, rather, they move back and forth through time. They flow like recollection, that one time reminds you of another time, and so on. Something meaningful when you are six may inform something you need to learn at 36.
For instance, the title poem, which appears early in the collection, recounts a pre-teen’s experience getting drunk with friends, unsupervised “cautious/ then, as now, listening to the retching.” The narrator learns from his friend's mistakes, pacing himself with the maturity of memory. But this poem is juxtaposed with the poem, Tuesday Mornings at Neon Street Center for Youth, in which we see young people who did not learn from their friends' mistakes, and while the poet does not pull his punches, his lens is compassionate in its honesty, the recognition of someone who wasn’t quite there, where these youth are, but maybe nearly, maybe adjacent, as the previous poem intimates. “Do not look into the white eyes/ of the future or you will hit snooze/ until the sun puts itself back to sleep.” The narrator keeps showing up, despite the fatigue, despite the secondary trauma. This is the lens we all need right now, Kahn’s lessons in compassion a reminder to keep showing up for each other.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Elizabeth Levinsonis a Chicago based poet and high school teacher. Her second chapbook, Running Aground,is available for advance orders from Finishing Line Press.
Posted November 1, 2020
Late Night Talk Show Fantasy
By Jennifer Dotson
Kelsay Books, 2020
86 Pages
ISBN-13: 9781952326035
Review by
Gay Guard Chamberlin
Even before you open Jennifer Dotson’s delightful full-length book you may find yourself captivated by its inventive title and boldly colored hand-drawn caricatures. The cover practically invites you in to root for her imagined famous talk-show-circuit poet. Take a look at the opening lines in the collection’s titular first poem: The world famous poet / chuckles with the late night / talk show host and the two / trade dazzling word play…Indeed, this book is filled with “dazzling word play” – and more that will entice, entertain, educate, and fulfill experienced lovers of poetry as well as newcomers.
Smartly divided into four sections corresponding to a late-night talk show format (The Opening Monologue, The House Band, The First Guest, The Non-Sequitor Comedian), Dotson’s 48 poems range from quirky to deep, funny to philosophical, like a quickly shifting array of talk show guests. This is a poet who doesn’t underestimate the intelligence of her audience. Her writing is accessible, smart, and chockful of the tiny vivid details so essential to making a poem come alive. Here is a slyly sensual short poem called “Cooking Together”:
It wasn’t my first BBQ.
When we met, I feared
I was just a crust,
a shell, a broken yolk
but your savory attention
set my broth to boil.
You whisked my batter
to a froth and I quickly
flipped my outlook on
life and love.
You didn’t sear me
with your flame
leaving my insides
raw or frozen,
instead you braised
me with wine and herbs
and I’ve been simmering
your spicy stew ever since.
Dotson excavates both the historical and the personal past through pieces like “Edwin Booth’s Dagger” and “When My Mother Met John Travolta,” and imagines the future in “Space Tacos” and “Dear Future Self at 99” (and aren’t those four titles just deliciously intriguing?). Evocative memories from childhood and of family life, rural and urban, abound. Of special note is “Driving Lessons,” a 7- sectioned poem. Each part is titled with a car engine part or function relating to her first experiences learning to drive through the years until her own children are learning. Notice how adroitly the poet builds tension in this excerpted from Section II titled “Pressure Plate”:
A College junior at eighteen,
I am determined to learn
on my summer break.
Sears Driving School sends
Mr. Johnson to instruct me.
Today we’re going to learn drive-thru.
Not as simple as it sounds.
Pull the car close enough to the
menu microphone but not too close
to damage the mirror or door.
Mr. Johnson orders himself lunch.
I repeat the close but not too close
lesson at the windows to pay
and to retrieve his food.
Mr. Johnson has an appetite.
Our next session ups the ante.
My first time cloverleafing into
Beltway traffic, Mr. Johnson purrs
You would look fine in a pair of
black leather pants. My hands grip
the wheel, focus flits to the cars around me,
my mirrors and pressing
down on the gas. Is this a test
or calculated distraction from the
crushing rush of other drivers?
Nervous, I say nothing—not then,
not later—too afraid to lose
my chance to learn agere—to drive.
Dotson is clearly not afraid to tackle big issues such as aging and Alzheimer’s, climate change and sexual harassment; yet the book is full of humor and affection. Her rich sense of the comical comes through even in her titles like “Dionysus Has a Crisis.” (To this reader, there is a bit of Erma Bombeck in Dotson’s Erato!)
At times she plants small and effective electric jolts within benign imagery, such as here in the start of “Living With a Beanstalk Boy”:
Teenage boy knows everything
so he takes our only cow to sell
at the market and returns with
some magic beans and shrugs
whatever when I yell and scream
and choke on tears and bitterness.
I am back to my endless chores
of dishes and laundry, pausing only
to stare hungrily at the empty
pantry and wonder when the
power and the phone will be
turned off for good.
A few pieces seem prescient: “How to Prepare for Disaster,” “Pathogen Rampage,” and “Demeter Mourns” speak eloquently to our current pandemic times yet were written earlier. Take a look at how skillfully Dotson juggles tragedy and comedy in this passage from “How to Prepare for Disaster”:
The end of the world is near
and you are getting ready
just in case the Mayan calendar
is accurate after all and
Nostradamus knew a thing
or two about Arab Spring.
Later in the poem, she wisely encourages us to:
Make sure you have some
reading matter along with
your matches and duct tape,
your can opener and your candles.
Her poetic control and careful attention to detail are evident throughout in her expert handling of alliteration and assonance, rhyme and rhythm. She writes free verse and prose poems, list poems, and formal ones as varied as the Sonnet, Pantoum, Villanelle, Ghazal, Cento, Etheree, Golden Shovel, Luc Bat, and the Gwawdodyn. If you aren’t familiar with these terms, not to worry. Dotson includes succinct and friendly footnotes explaining them, which fits with her dedication to advancing the craft and community of poetry as Founder and Program Coordinator of Highland Park Poetry. (You can learn more about her at www.JenniferDotsonPoet.com .)
Well-known poet Ellen Bass always encourages her audiences to buy two copies of a good poetry book; one for yourself and one to give to someone interested in poetry who might not know where to begin. Late Night Talk Show Fantasy & Other Poems is just such a book - accessible enough for beginners, but complex enough for poets and experienced readers of poetry. The latter will especially appreciate the high-wire acts Dotson performs with such challenging forms. There is truly something for everyone in this fine collection.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Gay Guard-Chamberlin is a Chicago artist and writer whose first book of poems, Red Thread Through a Rusty Needle, was recently reviewed on the Highland Park Poets site by Lennart Lundh. She and her sister, Anara Guard, perform poetry together as Sibling Revelry.
Posted November 1, 2020
Asylum
By Elizabeth Marino
Vagabond Press, 2020
71 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1-936293-45-2
Review by Elizabeth Harper
What do you think of when you hear the word “asylum”? I think of a type of total institution, regimented confinement for the outcast and out of luck. Then there’s the other meaning of asylum: political asylum for folks fearing persecution and violence, seeking sanctuary and opportunity.
Elizabeth Marino’s title poem, “Asylum,” touches on both meanings. An encounter with a child at St. Vincent Orphan Asylum in Chicago is juxtaposed with images of children in Texas detention camps and Pakistani children after a drone attack, both “stacked up like cordwood.” The last two lines of the poem get me in the gut and make the book for me: “I must go out the door/ and decide to be alive.”
The themes of courage, abundance, and integrity reoccur throughout the book, along with historical, pop culture, and Chicago-specific references intertwined with personal history. There are also calls for peace and the meeting of human needs. The words “Grace,” Abundance,” and “Peace,” all have their own capitalized line in the poem “Abundance.” In “On the Cusp of the Big Moon,” we are reminded “that courage/ is feeling fear/ and acting anyway/ again and again.” In her signature poem,”My Mother Loved Spanish Rice,” Elizabeth Marino tells us, “My mother was abundant in a puny world.” Referencing Chicago neighborhoods in “Branches,” she mentions some of her roots: “I was born in Englewood,/ before we branched into Humboldt Park/ and Logan Square, and out again.” A standout poem for me is “What Keeps You Whole,” with the title repeated in each stanza. This is a poem for our time with lines such as “Deliberate distraction is everywhere.” and “This is a time of change and choosing/ how and when to let go….” Marino’s poems tell stories of family, of activism, of human need and human dignity. “Litany for Peace” includes the line: “We each have a right to exist.”
“Foul Fern” is a sympathetic portrait of a street woman. “In Amsterdam” features another woman character, a brief portrait of prettiness and joy. “The Direct Velvet Route” and “Body Language” deal explicitly with the topic of violence against women, providing the important insight that the lives of individuals and what’s possible in personal relationships are damaged and limited by this kind of nauseating, gender-specific violence in our world. One of my favorite poems by Elizabeth Marino, which I’ve heard her read, is “Performance Poet with Daughter,” a lovely description of trust between an adult and child.
The collection includes different forms, including haikus and a villanelle, and also humor and wit. In “A Man Walked Into Our “EL” Car,” we are treated to an inner monologue: “ Great. Socially engaged performance artists are the new mimes.” And in “An Otherwise Uneventful Sunday in March. Chicago,” our protagonist muses: “Perhaps/ casinos in vacant CPS school buildings,/ learning being such a crap shoot.”
The book ends with two important autobiographical poems, “A Safer Place” and “The Days of Bobby’s Passing.” One of the many strengths of this book is its descriptions of individual experiences and reflections inscribed by culture, bureaucracy, infrastructure, and history.
I wholeheartedly recommend this book. Many of the poems will stick with me and be worth rereading.
===About the reviewer: Chicago poet Elizabeth Harper is the author of several books and chapbooks including A Mercenary Girdler and No Solace in Memory. She writes for the Literate Ape website.
Posted November 1, 2020
The Eden of Perhaps
By Agnes Vojta
Spartan Press, 2020
74 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1952411007
Review by Jacqueline Stearns
The Eden of Perhaps is a sensitively written volume of poetry that chronicles the feminine journey as it pertains to a woman's place in the world.
Muse takes a reflective look at a woman who discovers a new, vibrant side of herself. She doesn't know whether or not to embrace these personality traits that could "Wake her up" and give her a broader view of the world.
Questioning talks about a woman who finds solace in Library books. She keeps her writing a secret. "The stacks of Library books reveal what torments her” and "The computer does not judge." The woman is relieved to find the “Librarian has an unfamiliar face."
Greeting Cards They Don't Make deals with the horror of domestic violence: "May only peaceful thoughts touch your heart today doesn't cut it when you're dictating your statement to the prosecutor." She couldn't write because her abuser beat her so badly she suffered a concussion.
The World Split Open, depicts a group of women telling the truth about their lives. They have teetered on the brink of suicide, have lost children, and/or have been sexually assaulted. This particular poem made me think. Women prevail, overcoming tragedies and obstacles, to seek and find love, peace, happiness.
We Live In A World Of Right Angles begs the question what if people broke with tradition and didn't always do what is expected of them?
One of my personal favorites in this collection is Never Too Late. The character in this work begins her life's journey in midlife. Vojta implores younger women not to mock her, explaining that life experiences will make this traveler’s adventures richer.
Agnes brilliantly weaves Greek mythology and classic fairy tales, into a seamless tapestry that asks what if our existences as we know them can change? Is fate really pre-ordained? Sisyphus Calls It Quits jokingly asks what if the gods didn't have a right to punish Sisyphus? What would happen if Rapunzel and Aurora (Sleeping Beauty) struck out on their own, rather than waiting for their respective princes to rescue them?
Vojta also uses natural wonders as a plot device. Peace of the River depicts a woman yearning to cast off the shackles of an everyday routine to live by a river, becoming one with its seasons. Trip Tych On Highway 28 is a lovely tale of a person driving toward a beautiful magical rainbow. What is life without romance?
Unconditional is disturbing because one person wants to erase all traces of herself from her relationship so that the components will focus on her partner.
That Summer We Rolled Around In The Grass, tells a tale of piquant first love and innocent sensuality.
The Eden of Perhaps encompasses life and its citizens slogging through attempting to find their place in the world.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Jacqueline Stearns holds a B.A degree from William Patterson College (Now University). She was a feature writer for Clifton Merchant Magazine. Stearns has had been published in The Millstreet Forward, Grapevine Christian Magazine, and Highland Park Poetry.
Posted November 1, 2020
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The Machinery of Grace
Patrice Claeys Boyer
Kelsay Books, 2020
64 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1950462735
Review by Gail Denham
The Machinery of Grace, an amazing poetry volume, by Patrice Boyer Clacys, is entirely written in the Cento poetry form, using lines from a large number of works, all credited in the back of the book. Ms Boyer Clacys changed little besides tenses or plurals to singular, adding none of her own words.
To have amassed this enormous amount of lines from so many poets shows a skill and attention to detail that many of us wish we could master.
However, it’s not just the skill of compiling these lines into poems which have form and extend a theme – the book is a revelation of how the author viewed grief over her mother’s illness and passing. Then how she progressed to a renewed look at life. The book is both comforting and a book of encouragement.
To point out a few poems – “The Beginning of Forgetting” talks of her mother slipping away: “Her childhood streets, those old recipes she’d been saving,”…”All this time, and it comes back like this – the end humming along.” The poems are put together in such a way as to make complete sense, using a variety of lines.
“after all these years I can still …taste the morning rush, …keep reaching into the past for that muscle memory of love.” Then the book moves into healing: “Just when you thought your history complete, the peach trees blossom.” And “Thank God some things stay the same."
So much to absorb in this book of poetry, published by Kelsay Books Inc. and also available through Amazon.
===ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Gail Denham says, "Writing keeps me sane at times - Have had stories, essays, poems, and newspaper articles, plus many photos published in magazines, newspapers, books, over the last 45 years."
Posted November 1, 2020
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Still Life With God
By Cynthia Atkins
St Julian Press, 2020
112 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1733023306
Review by Tina Cole
In Still-Life with God, Atkins takes us on more than an exploration, it is a quest. These are poems that pose questions and present a still life arrangement for us to consider. What are the relationships between objects, what is there and what is not and what about the gaps in-between? The poems probe the possibilities of something sacred in the now, the everyday, a relationship with God in many guises, A wishing well/ A medicine cabinet/ A bullet/ An alibi. We are drawn into dialogues and disputes about gender, body, illness, gun violence and mental health. Conflicts of inner and outer worlds, the personal and the communal including up-to-the-moment challenges of the twenty first century are brought out of dark closets. These are fragments gleaned over a lifetime, what has been taught, what has been learned and a reflection on the world and womanhood in all its facets chaos, struggle, triumph.
The 46 poems are arranged in four parts. Atkins’ voice is loud, bold even fierce, she assaults the reader with imagery that explodes like soap bubbles, like fireworks, like missiles. Layer upon layer of filo pastry allegory and metaphor, focus and re-focus her painful, apposite and over-arching themes.
Part one begins with the sonnet, ‘God is a Wishing Well’:
lit-up in the parking lot of my heart,
which kick-starts us immediately into the landscape we are to inhabit. Following on, ‘Hello Stranger’, calls us to reflect on human isolation.
it’s me the voice inside a tin box
inside the intention to be a voice
…we are lonely
in our cars, we are little cubicles.
I particularly liked, ‘Imaginary Friends’, …
because you needed to belong
you sought the debutantes who flaunted their
fixed prom dates. See how they build their houses with bricks of silence.
A head butt of a poem that fixes us clearly in our twenty first century world.
Part II moves on to a younger self, a lighter perspective and begins with,‘God is a Treasure Hunt’
I am a gawky kid jumping into a pile of leaves.
Atkins pulls us along those perplexing adolescent tracks of who am I? These are poems of identity and self-discovery. My Persona – is a teenage rant, a listing of the positive and negative, a shouting out of self-belief and self-doubt. The obdurate nature of self-reflection and trying to make sense is well forked over.
my persona has a pecking order …
is filled with yearning…
is behind the curtains where loneliness dwells.
Part III takes us beyond the reflected self into the harsh realities of adulthood, where God might be found in a medicine cabinet, or in a library. There are powerful poems in this section that grapple with adult themes, grab you with heavily concentrated meaning.In ‘House and Home;
where I’ve left so many arguments in lamplit rooms…. my archive of scars..
a shantytown of loneliness.. we tell ourselves to face the music of our grief..
it is a constant assault.
And equally strong, ‘Domestic Terrorism’
every action has a terrible twin
every dictator knows there is power in fear.
This section also contains three insightful exploratory self-portrait poems.‘Self Portrait with No Spare Parts’
this is how
everything is fine until it is not.
The final pages contain a kind of modulation – moments of quiet reflection – a Goddess appears, ‘The Goddess in Purple Rain’
and stars allow me to follow her..
rooftops are hunkering down to sing lullabies.
There is a feeling of some reconciliation with the self, that some kind of still-life can be attained after facing one’s own demons and the demons of society. That a search for the authentic self may bear fruit despite everyday contradictory evidence.This is a brave collection that ends with, ‘God is the Myth’ prompting again the question if he is or not?
Every day..
we mark the calendar with one more hangnail of grief
These are complex poems, a roller coaster of themes, written with skilful imagery and conviction. The still life we are asked to observe and meditate on is sketched out in bold colours. Atkins language is sensitive, emphatic, and impactful, every poem seeking the divine in the everyday. The power and the passion in these poems and the journey that you are taken on as a reader leave you in no doubt that God can be found in who we are, what we do and how we do it.
=== About the reviewer: Tina Cole is a U.K. poet who lives in a rural area near the border with Wales. She has been writing poetry for many years, her collection – I Almost Knew You (2015), focussed on dysfunctional relationship themes. She has won a number of national Poetry competitions and her published poems have appeared in many U.K. magazines, collections and one in The Guardian newspaper. Her second collection, Nothing but the Strength of Names, will be released by Yaffle Press in 2021.
Posted October 1, 2020
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dancing a dizzy holiness
By Larry Janowski
After Hours Press, 2019
91 Pages
ISBN: 978-0-578-56655-9
Review by Ed Werstein
It was with a bit of skepticism that I started reading Larry Janowski’s recent book, dancing a dizzy holiness. After all, Janowski is an ordained Franciscan Friar and I’m a former seminarian and a recovering Catholic. However, I am happy to report that I have absolutely nothing negative to say about this collection. I thoroughly enjoyed, and was frequently amazed by it.
Right from the opening lines of “Religious Poem,” Janowski lets the reader know that he’s not going to be preached to: I hear you secretly groaning, Jesus-- not religion! Well, yes, but not a sermon in poem’s clothes, but the thick Latin root of religion, the lig of it-- as in ligament...
And near the end of the poem the word ligature creates a nice echo with the opening. These are poems for word lovers. Poems to be read aloud.
If you like poems with titles that point the reader down a path that ends in an unexpected place, you’ll find plenty to enjoy here as well. For one example, given some of the history of the Catholic priesthood, one might cringe before diving into a poem titled “Abuse.” It ends, though, in a decidedly pleasant little turn. And which of us has ever read a confessional poem written from the priest’s side of the screen? The last poem in this section, "Severe Thunderstorm Warning," is a narrowly constructed poem of abrupt line breaks evocative of the poetry of Todd Boss or Eavan Boland. Many of the short lines could stand alone as poetic prompts.
The book’s 45 poems are grouped into seven sections. As if planned that way, the shortest section (two poems) is titled, Coming Up Short. Both poems are quite humorous, self-deprecating riffs on the author’s own diminutive stature. "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Short Guy," is a series of backhanded insults, each in its own particular style:
Diffident Sorry. I didn’t see you.
Optimistic When it rains,
you’re the last to know.
The six poems in the section, The City, make up a collective ode to the place Janowski calls home, Chicago. They take us from colorful descriptions of pedestrian-watching while stopped at red lights, through the city’s fickle changing seasons, and ends with election night 2008. Like many poems in the book they are full of creative metaphors. Have you ever heard slow traffic described as the thrombosis of arterial streets? Family is a section of poignant, often tissue-grabbing poems that venture from the author’s childhood to the parenting of his own parents in their old-age. The evolving relationship of boy and father is especially heart-warming.
The poem, “Life Expectancy”, which opens a section called, The Waning Crescent, is a thought-provoking read for those of us living under the delusion that the longevity of our parents has given us a free pass into our old age. But my favorite poem in the entire collection is one called, “Skin: A Letter”. It is a dreamy, speculative tribute to the authors two poetic heroes, Gerard Manley Hopkins (also a priest-poet) and Walt Whitman. In it Janowski imagines an afternoon of skinny-dipping with his heroes.
These are accessible poems written for everyone, writers and readers alike. So, leave your dictionary and mythology encyclopedia on the shelf, grab your favorite beverage, and sit down for a thoroughly enjoyable read.
===About the reviewer:Ed Werstein is a regional VP of the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets, and the 2018 recipient of the Council of Wisconsin Writers Lorine Niedecker Prize for Poetry.
Posted October 1, 2020
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Body Falling, Sunday Morning
By Susana H. Case
Milk and Cake Press, 2019
34 Pages
ISBN: 978-1-7341066-0-2
Review by Joseph Zaccardi
Every day, the shoe factory and then,
one day, inevitably, the shotgun.
With these startling first lines from the first poem, “No Sign of Activity,” from Susana H. Case’s, Body Falling, Sunday Morning, the reader begins a journey filled with mystery and revelation; from the cover art, whose background of newsprint is set in reversed type, that is, light color text on a dark gray pallet, to Frances Glessner Lee’s photos taken of her crime-scene dioramas, reproduced here in black-and-white, from the originals done in color. This stark rendering, along with the text of the poems, adds a cinéma vérité feel to unveil truth and highlight the horror of murder, either because of passion or revenge or greed.
Case gives voice to Glessner Lee’s dollhouse-sized dioramas, created by her in the 1940s and 50s. Although the crimes depicted were composites of actual cases, the characters and decorations of the dioramas’ interiors were Glessner Lee’s invention; she disclosed the dark side of domesticity and its potentially deleterious effects––many victims were women led astray from the cocoon-like security of the home––by men, misfortune, or by their low stations in life.
In this collection,Susana H. Case, the poet, shows her mastery of the ekphrastic poetic form when she connects the extraordinary with the ordinary; she redefines perceptions with linguistic agility. Few contemporary poets of ekphrastic poetry, in my opinion, can so effectively accomplish such artistry. It would not be accurate to label her poetry, and Frances Glessner Lee’s dioramas, merely as artwork paired with words, for the poems in Body Falling, Sunday Morning are seamlessly controlled, and, because of Case’s attention to detail, the reader can envision the subtle nuances in the scenes that ask: is this murder, suicide, or accident? Case employs metronymy and drumroll by her deftly chosen words and phrases to place us at the center of crime scenes, and guides us through the case study of the murdered, and fingers those suspected of murder: from the poem “Body in the Closet,” she writes: Her neck is slashed…. // female sexuality / begets violence; the hooker / always gets it in the end. And this from “End of the Affair,” He bent over and shot himself / his mistress insists…. No matter that the gun’s not under him…. This is not poetry for the faint of heart, one must stand awake, eye on the photographic images, ear attuned to the sound and significance of the words on the page, for they will not stay still; readers may find themselves turning back pages to re-read and re-view what has transpired. Where is the truth, one may ask; you the reader become the chief inspector and coroner, perpetrator and victim.
Case goes a step further in her placement of the black-and-white photos, assembling her poems in six scenes, each scene foreshadowed by one of Glessner Lee’s dioramas. The poems explore in detail not only the dead bodies, but also the décor of the middle class and the ne’er-do-well; there are the dotted curtains and floral wallpapers, the spill of dark blood on carpets and bed sheets, a woman lying on the floor with a knife in her body. Here’s four lines from the poem “Bite Marks,” A pervert, one she knows / has bitten up her torso and legs… She’s cut, mis-loved, teenager / in ballet shoes, knife in gut.
It is the mission of the poet to find the primitive understory and bring to life, with quiet force, the victims who suffered this fate. Yes, a picture is worth a thousand words, but words, especially in the hands of a poet with the acuity of this poet, resurrects the deceased imagistically to reveal their story. She further explores the relationship of the real world to its encapsulation in rooms (stanzas) via the dioramas, and effectively melds the distinction between the actual and the perceived.
What we have here is a poet who shares her heightened appreciation of art, for her language underscores the most consequential subject matter; in the last line, in the last poem, “Wallpaper with Fish,” she shows us the devastation in its summation:
You don’t know what to think.
===About the reviewer: Joseph Zaccardi served as Marin County, CA poet laureate (2013-2015), and during his tenure published and edited Changing Harm to Harmony: Bullies & Bystanders Project. He is the author of five books poetry, the latest being The Weight of Bodily Touches, from Kelsay Books. www.josephzaccardi.com
Posted October 1, 2020
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Wild Fruition: Sonnets, Spells, and Other Incantations
By Christine Swanberg
Puddin'head Press, 2017
98 Pages
ISBN: 978-0981975634
Review by Barbara Eaton
Christine Swanberg's Wild Fruition: Sonnets, Spells, And Other Incantations starts out as a journey, illustrated by her husband Jeffrey's well-chosen photographs.
The first photograph, a dark interior of what appears to be a covered bridge, revealing a vista of trees, is particularly apt, and the first few poems, "Something So New," "Great River Road," and "Bridges," create the excitement every new journey presents. Swanberg is especially good at satisfying and surprising last lines, and "Great River Road" contains an unusually fresh last line: "spring green promise now springing forth."
"Black Mesa Magic" and "Dangerous Woman" also have great last lines: "a thousand miles from home again," and "a woman with chemicals, Marlboros/and a lighter that works. Watch out." A little disconcerting was the error of "ice sickles" for "icicles," which occurred twice.
The book also traces a journey through the seasons, and a journey through life. Many of the poems celebrate the simple joys of life in one's later years, such as "One October Morning Past Your Prime," and "One January Morning Past Your Prime."
"Spell to Enchant a House," luckily, the spell of a good witch, is both entertaining and amusing.
Lovely garden poems follow, and "The Joy of Unimportance," sings praises of life after one's sixth decade: "We no longer have to please all people!" "The Sweet Spot," too, ends with a wonderful line: "the sweet life--/the long, luxurious meander,/mid-afternoon for no good reason/whatsoever."
These poems are very welcome to readers in their later years who are ready to slow down and simply enjoy life. This book is a pleasure to read, and the pleasure deepens upon rereading. This book would make a thoughtful gift for a recent retiree. Well done, Christine!
===About the reviewer: Barbara Eaton is a poet and semi-retired community college instructor.
Posted October 1, 2020
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Angular Embrace
By Sylvia Cavanaugh
Kelsay Books, 2018
49 Pages
ISBN - 13-978-1-947465-42-8
Review by Barbara Eaton
Family and childhood memories form the focus of Sylvia Cavanaugh's collection of poems, Angular Embrace.
The poet grew up in Lancaster, Pennsylvania in the 1960's and 70's, not far from her Irish coal mining relatives in Schuylkill County.
What strikes me about these poems is their imagery: simple, humble, homespun, yet paradoxically rich. "Finding Frozen Peas" follows a day's winding journey in the life of a child, ending with the return home to Mother preparing dinner on the stove. Very moving.
"Black-eyed Susans" describes a peak childhood experience -- hiking through the Appalachian mountains with grandmother, grandfather, aunt, and mother and coming unexpectedly upon the profuse wild blooms. The poet tries to re-create this experience for her own children, so they might know how she was "once loved/by the wild mountainside."
In "My Lipstick," Cavanaugh recounts a trip to the opera with her grandmother, and muses on youth and aging. "Who does a grown woman become/anyway/when she coats her lips with color?"
The poet closes with "Seed Pod," my favorite poem in the collection. She describes summer turning into fall, all the colors and the music "in the memory of her waning years."
As Joseph Weitzel, former Lancaster County Poet Laureate, notes, even though these poems present memories of childhood, Sylvia Cavanaugh "has a keen awareness of the adult she has become."
One wonders if these poems are a gift to the poet's children. They certainly are a gift to us.
===About the reviewer: Barbara Eaton is a poet and semi-retired community college instructor.
Posted September 1, 2020
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Body of Water
By Jeff Santosuosso
Clare Songbirds Publishing House Poetry Series, 2018
29 pages
ISBN:9781947653399
Review by Elizabeth Levinson
This chapbook functions as a body of water. Each poem informs the next, the way a river feeds a body of water, or the way a one wave gives way to another. Water, as the thread that pulls these poems together, does it with its natural fluidity, allowing for poems to move through a variety of topics and forms, while still tied together enough to lend this chapbook the same satisfaction reading a chapbook with a more focused subject might have. Because that is the real joy of reading a chapbook, yes? That it allows us to see a thing in new and multiple lights. To be both expansive and specific, and contained, so that it doesn’t simply feel like a truncated collection.
The first poem, “Warmth,” is appropriately a birthing poem. While a little on the nose, its mention of ice gives the poem an almost primordial feel, the opening line, “I was born in a thaw” calling to mind the end of an ice-age or at least a reminder that we are all thaw, all the water that births us, that moves through us or washes us over as we emerge. In its economy, this poem sets up the rest of the chapbook -- water appears in lyrical musings or as a character in a single narrator’s life story. But each poem can be traced back to this motif as can anything in life.
In “The Blue,” there is a lapping back as well, to the Aegean Sea, which functions as an ode, until the last stanza when the narrator recalls his Greek grandmother and the whole history of the Aegean takes on new meaning. The narrator recounts so much history, but then becomes a part of the history.
But we also travel through land, through Missouri and Ontario, we drink milk from Greenland and taste maple syrup from Canada. We are bathed in rain, we are bathed in sprinklers. And finally, we are bathed in Walden Pond. Body of Water is a beach read for the landlocked: sensual, musical, reflective.
===About the reviewer: Elizabeth Levinson is a Chicago based poet and high school teacher. Her second chapbook, Running Aground, is available for advance orders from Finishing Line Press.
Posted September 1, 2020
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Steve Henderson in Poetry and Paint
By Michael Escoubas
Self-Published, 2019
83 pages
Copies available through Amazon or order directly from the author at farside747@hotmail.com
Review by Charlotte Digregorio
In Steve Henderson in Poetry and Paint, by Poet Michael Escoubas, we are offered an exceptional collection of ekphrastic poems complementing the art pieces of Henderson, a nationally-known painter. Escoubas’ poems are inspired by thirty-two of Henderson’s pieces, the latter reproduced in the collection.
Through the flow of Escoubas’ pen, all five of the readers’ senses are stimulated, as we experience nature’s glory through amazing detail, leaving the gloom of everyday life and struggles behind– just as Henderson strives to achieve through his art’s “emotional realism.”
William Wordsworth said that poetry “takes it origin from emotion recollected in tranquility,” and we are reminded of this in reading Escoubas’ stunning collection. He writes with an uncommon facility of language. Alliteration and assonance please the readers’ ear throughout, and the line breaks are skillful.
Even if one doesn’t normally read and write nature poems, they’ll likely change their minds after reading this book. Escoubas leaps into nature scenes from Henderson’s work, writing elegantly. His poems are a celebration of the landscape, seasonal changes, and the natural phenomena around him– sparked by Henderson’s work and the poet’s spiritual and creative soul.
Many of Henderson’s scenes prompt Escoubas to reminisce of childhood experiences. In “Autumn Memories,” the poet writes:
I leave the car by the gate/ to recall again the white-rock path/ I walked as a boy: / I still love the white dust on my shoes, / the ancient maple’s flaming leaves, / its bark brittle with age. / A gaggle of geese compete/ for space as I slow-walk the lane.
On a personal note, I was born and raised in the Northwest, and Escoubas/Henderson take me back to the region in “Along the Salmon River”:
. . . I feel the bubbly rush /of Chinook, Sawtooth and Kokanee/ their opalescent bodies shimmer/ in sunlight. I lose all sense/ of myself. I’m a twig/ among purple mountains/ the mountains wrap themselves/ in chiffon clouds.
Escoubas’ imagistic poems reveal his spiritual side. Often, in his work, we are struck by the beauty found in the ordinary–shapes and colors in nature that we often take for granted. In “Banking on the Columbia,” we read:
How could I have missed it? / Love, I mean, given that God/ has surrounded me with Himself, / in the way the river kisses the shore, / in the way woodland colors take me/ back to Joseph’s coat. In the sun’s/ dependable rise, like God, always there, / in the clouds, white as swaddling clothes.
Escoubas remembers many of his childhood experiences with his brothers and sister. In “Verdant Banks,” he vividly describes experiencing the spiritual in nature on a Sunday morning before leaving for church.
As we dip our feet in the stream, / dragonflies in purple robes/ sing hymns, a croaking bullfrog/ adds the bass-note, the breeze/ and trees bid us stay for potluck.
Still other artistic pieces by Henderson, allow him to reminisce. This is a scene in the meadow with his sister :
. . . shoes drenched through/ to our socks, washed by/ high grasses–fragrant/ apple blossoms fell/ in clumps after spring’s/ first rain.
Throughout the book, the reader is struck by precise nouns, adjectives, and verbs that make us feel as if we are present. In “Emergence,” we experience:
. . . Colors emerge, / reticent at first: half-green/ grasses yawn as snow recedes/ in splotches down the hill./ Violets/ take a bow, first lilies sport/ saffron gowns. Everything seems/ a little tipsy as the breeze/ teases, Let’s get up some mischief.
Here is a beautiful analogy in “First Light”:
How dawn appears/ without sound/ on tippy-toes, / like a mother checking/ on her sleeping child, /
Further, in “Dreamcatcher,” we share in the poet’s delight:
I catch my dreams/ on the sticky strings of a spider’s web/ I catch my dreams/ mirrored on a raindrop on a lilac’s leaf/ I catch my dreams/ in the emerald shimmerings of wet grass/ I catch my dreams/ in a burst of juice from a fat blackberry/
When I recently asked Escoubas if he first started writing poetry in the ekphrastic form, he replied: “I didn’t begin writing ekphrastic poetry, but worked into it gradually, allowing photos/ especially works of art, to stimulate me in particular ways . . . I try to write in such a way that my reader wouldn’t need the visual to “see” the picture.”
Escoubas has certainly succeeded in his goal.
This book is highly recommended. Readers will learn about the art of writing fine poetry through Escoubas. He is the editor of Quill and Parchment.
===About the reviewer: Charlotte Digregorio is the author of seven books, including her latest, Ripples of Air: Poems of Healing.
Posted September 1, 2020
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Poetry With A Passion
By Storiword/T.J. Morris
Self-Published, 2019
86 Pages
ISBN: 9781076042439
Review by Mary Beth Bretzlauf
T.J. Morris has created through her poems what every woman needs to hear at some point in their lives. Our mothers, sisters and best friends who know us the best, who give us words of love and support are present in this publication. She has combined a selection of poems from her previously published poetry book “A True Heart” with her new poems to give us a journey - her journey, our journey to self-love and confidence.
Ms. Morris begins with an appropriately titled poem, “Starting”. She captures the angst of starting anew.
Starting
That personal human revolution…
It was time to stop lying to the true me,
So I could get to the true me
Starting at Point A
Maybe I might make it Point B
Her poem “Do Yo Thang!” is an anthem to being yourself. It reads like a song or even like a girls’ night in with a bottle of wine that fuels introspective conversations. Her words resonate with you because her experiences are our experiences. When she straps her proverbial boots on, we do it right along with her.
Poems like “Fear” and “Where’s the Dream?” hold up a mirror for us to see her life clearly
fear keeps us in prison
and we have to learn how to set ourselves free
and
What happened to the dream?
The happy times and wedding rings
In ‘Why Am I Angry?’, Ms. Morris writes:
I’m sleeping with my car keys in my hand….
Her line about sleeping with the car keys in her hand is a haunting image. There are probably women all around this world that do the same thing – clutching onto the last token of freedom for a chance to achieve it.
…that woman that I wanted to be
a woman that has strong roots
like a big beautiful tree
That big beautiful tree she wishes to be, that we all have wished to be and have become, is just another example of how much we have in common with the poet.
Ms. Morris shares her survival, her self-discovery of strength and courage during her husband’s addiction and you can feel her pain, sorrow and fear along with her vulnerability. Her poems are cathartic monologues and in saying that, I can see one day perhaps they could be performed on a minimal stage by women of all shapes, sizes, economic backgrounds, and colors. So many of her poems sing with honesty the raw pain of betrayal and how she came out the other side.
For full disclosure, I saw Ms. Morris read a couple of these poems before I purchased the book. I felt this was an advantage, a test drive of sorts, because when I sat down to read this book later that night, I had her lyrical voice in my head. To see her recite these pages is like that performance I mentioned above – powerful.
Ms. Morris also writes historical fiction. In reading her book, “Blood is Thicker Color” (also available on Amazon), I discovered her gift for writing authentic dialogue stems from those monologues we read in this book of poetry.
===About the reviewer: Mary Beth Bretzlauf is a member of Poet & Patrons, and the Illinois State Poetry Society of which she is North Chapter Facilitator and Board Member.
Posted September 1, 2020
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Pequod Poems: Gamming with Moby-Dick
By Wilda Morris
Kelsay Books, 2019
115 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1949229608
Review by Mike Freveletti
Located in Chapter 53 of my copy of Moby-Dick I’m provided with the definition of “gam”, a whaling term that is explained as the social meeting of two whaling ships where the captains meet on one of the ships and the first mates on the other. Sound familiar? No? Yeah, me either but I’m sure the poet, Wilda Morris, of this Moby-Dick themed poetry collection, Pequod Poems, Gamming with Moby-Dick, absolutely knows what gam means. In literature, reading Moby-Dick is a feat that has tested readers for eons. This is not a review of Moby-Dick. What this is, is an appreciation of a book of poetry broken into five parts crafted so meticulously that it not only holds the spirit of the novel but expands on it in a way that’s fresh and interesting. The sheer volume of poetic devices, which I’ll get to later, is one of the stars of the show reading this collection but what I was most intrigued by was the poet’s interpretation of the source text.
Pequod Poems is clearly of labor of love for Melville’s creation and by extension poetry’s ability to tell stories in a multitude of different ways. The poet at times strikes a somewhat metafictional investigation by taking a chapter from the novel and creating her own narrative poetry through augmentation of Melville’s plots and sub plots. From “White according to Ishmael”, an erasure poem, we’re treated to a story from the poet on how Ishmael might’ve interpreted the whiteness of the whale or simply what can be imagined about white as a shade. Lines like “whiteness enhances beauty/in marbles pearls/snow-white charger/ermine”, an image that pushes the ever-present metaphor toward a fascinating point of view.
You cannot read this book of poetry without appreciating the experimentation with different forms both known and obscure or even thought up. I’ll name a few here: sonnets, terza Rima, rondeau, erasure, lipogram and my personal favorite the pantoum titled “The Song of the Maltese Sailor”. Lines from that poem sing off the page, “a voluptuous swell would waltz me off/hug me, kiss me and caress me/as I glided to the vibrant rhythm/of the ocean’s pulsing dance”, beautifully rendered as a parallel between the swaying of the ocean and the way one can sway on the dance floor. The book is educational in its ability to expose you to new ways of poem construction, teaching you how to read it as you go along which is something I’ve heard in my reading of poetry that I agree wholeheartedly with.
One section of the collection titled, “Memos to Herman Melville” was particularly fun to thumb through for the poet’s inquiry into why Melville made the choices he did throughout his writing of Moby-Dick. A standout is “Whales” that starts with, “Ishmael was convinced whales are fish/of course they aren’t/I think you knew they are mammals just like us/this was just one of your little jokes wasn’t it?”, playful isn’t it? A dialogue between poet and novelist on the page some 150 odd years later. Again, it bears repeating the analysis the poet has undertaken in the way she synthesizes different situations and themes in the novel and puts a poetic spin on them. A ton of fun to read.
To enjoy this collection you need not have read Moby-Dick, this is true, but I would recommend reading Pequod Poems and considering a Moby-Dick novel reading voyage after you’re done. If you don’t end up reading the big book so be it, at least you’ve ended up with a fascinating journey through the text via poetry. Not a bad way to journey through a classic.
=== About the Reviewer: Mike Freveletti is poet, short fiction writer and occasional dabbler in literary criticism. His work has appeared both online and in print.
Posted August 1, 2020
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Poetry As We Like It
By Curt Vevang
Self-published, 2020
49 Pages
ISBN: 9781725941335
Review by Mary Beth Bretzlauf
Poet Curt Vevang presents a bold statement with his title, Poetry As We Like It. I mean, how does he know what I like? Perhaps I’m a sonnet girl or a prolific haiku poet (yeah, right). Even our poet acknowledges the “ambitious goal” he set for himself as you read his forward. However, this poetic old soul does not disappoint.
Personally, I bow to anyone who can rhyme with the ease of lazy summer mornings. I find I have to tackle that when I’m in the mood. In this collection of poems, we discover Mr. Vevang is a master at rhyming. I was also pleased to see his non-rhyming poems were just as masterful.
In “America’s Back Roads” Curt takes us on a trip across America, snippets of scenes so common we overlook them.
Cemetery grave markers, tall enough to be seen from the road,
tilt at random angles on a neglected landscape
that has heaved and settled over the years.
The poem “The Awards Banquet” is so timely during this pandemic that I wonder when he wrote it. He reminds of the everyday heroes we are saluting these days – and nudges us to salute others who are overlooked.
As a writer and poet, I adored his poem, “The Blank Page” which pays homage to every writer who battles their inner critic and a defiant computer.
I thought a muse was supposed to help?
But she, he, it, only asks questions,
raises doubts, assaults my character
This is a poet with a wonderful sense of humor. In “Twenty-Four Roses For You”, we see his missteps in sending sentiments to his wife. In “Dawn’s Early Light” we are entertained by the narrator sneaking off at before daybreak to spend time fishing.
Poignant poems like “To My Grandchildren”, “The Man Who Came for Dinner”, “May you Always Brake for Butterflies” and “Owed to the Life of a Soldier” grab our heartstrings and form a lump in your throat with lines like these about a soldier named Jane:
I have what she earned, I’ve hardly a care,
She lies in that bed. War is not all fair.
Or in “To My Grandchildren”he gives them wise words to follow:
Be your own person, follow your conscience.
And of “The Man Who Came to Dinner” he writes:
A few steps and we realized he didn’t ask for money,
he was asking for food.
We looked back. He was gone.
Mr. Vevang is happy to share one of his poems each month if you send him an email at curt@curtvevang.com. You won’t be disappointed with a little sunshine in your inbox.
Every poem holds that part of this poet that is most honest and completely him. I enjoyed this collection and I look forward to more, because this is poetry as I like it – very much!
===About the Reviewer: Mary Beth Bretzlauf is a member of Poet & Patrons, and the Illinois State Poetry Society of which she is North Chapter Facilitator and Board Member.
Posted August 1, 2020
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Sympathetic Magic
By Herb Berman
Self-Published, 2020
Copies available for $15 ordering directly from the author. Proceeds donated to Highland Park Poetry. Send email tohmbsib@gmail.com
Review by Gail Denham
One of the first things I appreciated about Berman’s poetry is that it’s so easy to read, follow, and understand. That’s a biggie for me – as often poetic works are long and seem rather ornate, rather than meaningful or readable.
The theme of Sympathetic Magic is life itself, enjoying what is here and now – a great message. Berman’s poems spoke of growing older, making the most of today. “sing, laugh, exult…May (the month of May) may never shine this way again.”(pg. 38). The theme that we won’t pass this way again is valid. Underlying themes were death and dying.
Berman wrote of the seasons: In Winter, “Walk in the wind…feel life in the ice.” (pg. 48) And I liked the ending of that poem, “Those who are blessed must bless the world in turn.” Berman wrote about how fast the seasons speed by (page 41) “the tireless dance of seasons.”
Sympathetic Magic deals with many subjects – cities – the poor – growing older. There’s a section on love, and I enjoyed touches of humor – acceptance of snow, but “I won’t say I love the soft spring rain.” (pg. 19) Me either. I’d rather it only rained at night as (I believe) it did in the garden of Eden.
And I especially appreciated his take on poets (pg. 12). Poets “swallow the world…The world we know hates poets. The world we know dies without us.” Well said.
===About the reviewer: Gail Denham's stories, poetry, newspaper articles and photos have appeared in numerous publications, nationally and internationally.
Posted August 1, 2020
Gathering the Harvest
By Mary Jo Balistreri
Bellowing Ark Press, Second Printing, 2020
81 Pages
A signed copy is available through the author. Email: joeybfl@gmail.com
Review by Charlotte Digregorio
In Gathering the Harvest, Mary Jo Balistreri has created a stunningly beautiful, deeply personal, and generous collection of poems that brings us closer to insights, truths, and wisdom relevant to our own lives. Balistreri has the courage to face life’s challenges and write about them with clarity, thoughtfulness, and honesty. The poet shows us that life’s problems can be overcome. Her poetry speaks of losses, such as the death of her young grandson and her parents, and her own illnesses, throat cancer and Mitochondrial Disease, the latter that resulted in hearing loss, and involved two years of recovery, learning how to walk, eat, write, and speak clearly again.
However, this book offers much delightful reading, rather than just expressions of sadness. Balistreri shares precise memories of enjoying friendship and family, the awe of nature, and childhood memories that are all relatable.
There is, for example, her sightless great-grandmother touching her life as a young girl, and likely influencing her later in life when she lost her hearing.
In “A Letter to Great-Gramma Belle,” she tells of baking sugar cookies with her, writing skillfully with unusual line breaks, as she does throughout the book:
You taught me to see with my hands. If / the texture felt thin, it needed flour, too thick, / it needed milk. When the dough was ready /to shape you said to me / Close your eyes. Let the dough sing to you.
You taught me how heat has different / smells as it rises. I learned to sense when the oven / was hot enough, when the cookies were done.
In the collection’s title poem, “Gathering the Harvest,” her precise imagery is especially captivating for its alliteration and assonance:
We picnic on a knoll overlooking the river / that wears its skin like a party dress / aglow with glistening beads, its curves like hips / as it moves sinuously around the bends. / Clusters of berries glisten in the bushes.
The poem’s final stanza seems to speak to us all in broader terms with the wisdom to keep moving forward throughout our lives:
We look now over the distance we’ve come, / layer upon layer of golden-green hills/ airbrushed to ever softer hues in the distance. / We scoop them up into the net of memory, / winding back upon itself, moving forward.
In “The Bracelet,” a very touching poem, she recalls her mother’s last breaths:
I unfastened/ the magnetic bracelet/ from your wrist, / the one we thought /might cure you/ and put it on . . .It’s been two years, Mom / and I still wear/ the bracelet./ The drifts shift, / a hint of my heart/ song returns. Still, / the rawness bites/ and seeps into/ the cracks when/ I least expect it./ It’s then I hear/ your voice, / the one that called me/ “Joey.”
(I, too, put a magnetic bracelet on my mother’s arm when she was bedridden, hoping that somehow it would cure her. We never give up on loved ones, and hope for miracles.)
There is wisdom throughout Balistreri’s poetry. Wondering whether her throat cancer has spread, she is left in limbo in “After the C-Scan.” We can feel her fear and anxiety, and her analogy about life’s brevity is insightful:
I walk to the stove, wait for the teakettle’s whistle, / thinking how fast the fog erased everything in sight. / Like an undetected cancer cell? The starlings were there/ then not, / leaving no trace of ever having existed.
Balistreri, the ever-hopeful and grateful poet, always sees the positive in her life’s experiences. In “Beneath Van Gogh Clouds,” she writes of her hearing loss, a profound one, as she was a concert pianist:
I can no longer hear Chopin. I can no longer hear music/ at all. My brain refuses to recognize the sound/ of the piano I played for years. But today, / the music of sails, smooth legato of the boats, / connects me to the Chopin of memory.
Read this book. It’s a treasure! Through all the poet’s trials, we see Balistreri lives graciously, accepting what comes with measured perspective and gratitude for life at each juncture, aware of the beauty around here. Her book gives us all hope. You will come away with a sense of profound gratitude and appreciation for both the small and large “goodness” in your life. You will also know that painful experiences are not in vain, but will spur you to experience future goodness more deeply.
===About the Reviewer: Charlotte Digregorio is the author of seven books, including her latest, Ripples of Air: Poems of Healing.
Posted August 1, 2020
Ripples of Air
Poems of Healing
By Charlotte Digregorio
Artful Communicators, 2020
236 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-0-9912139-1-7
To order, email artfulcommunicators@icloud.com. Also available on Amazon.
Review by Michael Escoubas
“I get discouraged when I encounter poetry that is supposed to be great poetry but is so hard to understand that I give up after reading just a few lines.”
I frequently hear this among friends when I mention that I write poetry. I didn’t always have an adequate comeback . . . until now. Today, I would introduce my sincere but uninformed friends to Charlotte Digregorio’s new collection, Ripples of Air: Poems of Healing. Packed into a mere 236 pages, lucky readers encounter some 14 distinct poetic forms. The volume contains something for everyone: from compact oriental forms, to sonnets, to the little known etheree, to fun forms such as acrostics and limericks, free verse and more. It is all here, written in an accessible style for all to savor.
The book is arranged in 12 sections. These include: Nostalgia, Peace, Creatures, People, Work, The Heart, Season’s Potpourri, Solitude, Art, Wonder and Whimsy, The Spiritual, and Aging, Illness, Death (these last three comprise one whole section). Each section is introduced by a short narrative that provides background, context and life-application to the poems that follow. Variety and mature craftsmanship showcase each section.
Like many readers, I tend to shortchange introductions to the books I review. Not this time! The collection is subtitled Poems of Healing. For Digregorio, the introduction becomes a vehicle for making her case for the entire book. Who among us has not needed healing? Who among us has not spent time in the cave of despair? Who among us has not needed an outlet for anger or loss? Who among us has not strolled through fragrant gardens and longed for a way to express how it felt? Trust me on this one: spend quality time on Digregorio’s six page intro.
In section 4, “People,” Digregorio reveals her sensitivity to the human condition, with poems about the plight of the homeless, and these excerpts from Foreigner
He arrives in his fifties
from his native land
living unknown.
Soft gray eyes, a calm smile,
voice cadenced
approaching a spring song.
As the poem develops . . .
He tells me today is
the best of yesterday,
something to remember
in twilight skies when
winds are with him.
Heightening the emotional effect of “People,” is an impressive array of modern haiku, senryu and tanka which capture the poignancy of human interaction or, at times, the despair of people in great need while the rest of us have plenty
at our thanksgiving table
i say grace, mindful of
the young man in the park
cocooned from hunger
face buried in his knees
I’ve provided no more than a gentle breeze in this review; but hopefully, just enough Ripples of Air, to make purchasing a copy of Charlotte Digregorio’s Poems of Healing, the next important thing you do today.
======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.
Posted July 1, 2020
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Flatman: Poems of Protest in the Trump Era
By Cheryl Caesar
Thurston Howl Publications, 2020
42 Pages
ISBN-13: 979-8630347008
Review by Barbara Eaton
Cheryl Caesar, in Flatman: Poems of Protest in the Trump Era, adds her voice to the growing chorus of outrage in the United States today
The poems chronicle political events from September 2018 to May 2019. And while there is not much new here, the poems aptly express the American people's response to being thrown under the bus time and time again.
To be fair, Caesar's portrayal of President Trump is no more than a caricature, a two-dimensional puppet-villain who survives on Big Macs. Trump is first and foremost a businessman, and the strengths and weaknesses of his presidency can all be traced back to this one simple fact.
Most moving to me were "Flowers and Candles," "Michael Cohen Testifies Before Congress," "Letter to Our Lady," and "Don't Give Up on Us, Baby: A Letter to Europe."
These lines from "Flowers and Candles" rank among Caesar's loveliest: "They have guns but we have flowers/and candles. Look: people/are laying flowers everywhere," and "your face and your son's like bright planets/in the darkness, your arms/circling like a protecting sky."
"Letter to Our Lady" paints a beautiful, evocative picture of Notre Dame cathedral and asks a most poignant, pertinent question: "Why do you mourn a building, and burn your world?"
In sum, Cheryl Caesar's poems provide us with a detailed record of American history that is informative and should prove useful in the years to come. I would like to have seen more compassion for the American people, such as we see in Garry Trudeau's cartoon in the Chicago Tribune on June 14, 2020: after praising himself and blaming others (former President Obama, governors, the press), President Trump reluctantly acknowledges the daily death toll from the Coronavirus.
And I would like to have seen a little compassion for President Trump. He did not, as the back cover of the book explicitly stated, "unleash" the Coronavirus. That was done in Wuhan, China. Like it or not, he is our current president, and if he goes down, we all go down.
By all means buy this book, read it, and vote. Vote your conscience. And pray.
===== ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Barbara Eaton is a poet and semi-retired community college instructor.
Posted July 1, 2020
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Red Thread Through a Rusty Needle
By Gay Guard-Chamberlin
New Wind Publishing, 2019
74 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1929777129
Review by Lennart Lundh
The thirty-six poems of Gay Guard-Chamberlin’s collection, Red Thread Through a Rusty Needle, are wide-ranging, touching on a buffet of subjects, including horses, dogs, and crows; parents and other relations; neighbors and emotions-as-humans; Easter eggs and politics (both electoral and inter-personal). They are highly personal and revelatory, but also imbued with a strong sense of universality.
Better still, they are also well-written, reflecting the author’s mastery of the poet’s craft. Form generally follows function, amplifying carefully chosen words instead of burying them. There’s nothing obscure in the imagery, and the text is free of the typos that seem to plague current small press productions.
The lengthy prose poem “Stella Maris” acquaints us with the wonderful character of Guard-Chamberlin’s grandmother, who “dated Johnny Weissmuller before he went to Hollywood and became Tarzan.” We’re told of a book Stella Maris’ father gifted her in a dream: “She swallowed the book and the little black seeds of letters sprouted inside her. When she opened her mouth, invisible words tumbled out. My grandmother fed me with sweet invisible words she grew inside her.” Such a way to be remembered and immortalized.
“Corporal” presents its subject in much less detail, but this simply allows the reader to complete the sketch by drawing on every veteran they’ve either known or seen in a film. The closing is beautifully vague:
Home the hero
tosses the papers
into a rusty tin tub
splashes in a dash
of high-flash kerosene
and a goddamned handy
strike-anywhere match.
Using thirty-seven precise words, “The Inner Life of Words” exposes heart, leaving us “listening // from the heart / of the heart.”
The narrator of “After Hearing of Your Suicide” examines both the resulting grief and their sense of culpability:
Did I notice? Did I listen?
or did I lean my head
at the right angle to convey attention,
then place a bookmark between your words
so my mind could wander off in the woods instead?
For readers who have lived in rural or smaller urban towns, “Shift Change” (p. 21) holds a most relatable, and carefully alliterative, verse: “Street lamps would flit on and off, fitful, / forgetful, an erratic glimmer along darkened / streets neon-lit by a few small shops.”
Out of fairness to the reader, enough; there’s not a single piece here unworthy of being pointed out. In the end, despite deeply plumbed wells, these are surprisingly gentle poems. There are no eruptions of anger at others or the narrator’s memories. Instead, there is honesty in these poems that is careful and caring. Out of fairness to yourself and the poet, add a copy to your library.
======About the reviewer:Lennart Lundh is a poet, short-fictionist, historian, and photographer. His work has appeared internationally since 1965.
Posted June 1, 2020
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Hand on my Heart
By Anara Guard
New Wind Publishing, 2019
66 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1929777136
Review by Lennart Lundh
In its thirty-six free-verse poems, Anara Guard’s collection, Hand on my Heart, unflinchingly approaches the narrator’s personal and public lives, complete with joys and tragedies both mundane and spiritual. Serious and direct, Guard consistently fills her ruminations with wonderful images. The language is clear and carefully chosen, the subjects and references cross-generational.
“Yes, She Knew” speaks to Yeats’ “Leda and the Swan,” answering what the poet sees as its central question quickly and directly, following with vivid imagery as proof:
They flew above the forests
heaving with rain,
and she watched the flamingos dance
their pink seduction.
She saw the deserts,
scraped clean to the bone.
In contrast, “>45” answers its question, “What is greater than forty-five?” by way of a clever, and clearly political, list poem that always and never names its subject:
Bottles of beer on the wall
Cards in a deck, even after we remove all the jokers
Colors in the big box of crayons
Native American nations
before concluding, “what is greater than 45? // We are.”
After “Hole in My Head” reminds us of the fragility of memories (“Where is that word? / I need it to fill a hole / in my heart.”), “Regret” warns, through their similarity to a garden, against failing to deal with them in time:
I have waited too long to prune
and my roses have grown tangled
and straggly. They resist
all efforts to tame them now.
Miscarriages and drownings. Recycling. Love, with its resilience or departure. The inevitable growth of a child and the lessons contained therein. Hand on My Heart is a marvelous gathering of Life’s examples to us, deserving from start to finish of your time.
======
About the reviewer:
Lennart Lundh is a poet, short-fictionist, historian, and photographer. His work has appeared internationally since 1965.
Posted June 1, 2020
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In the Dark, Soft Earth
Poetry of Love, Nature,
Spirituality and Dreams
By Frank Watson
Plum White Press, 2020
231 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1-939832-20-7
ISBN-10: 1-939832-20-9
Review by Mary Beth Bretzlauf
I was given an Advanced Reader Copy of this book due to be released later this year. Having one of the first looks at this collection is like opening up a journal found hidden away in a cave forgotten by man for centuries. When you open this book, you are greeted with a welcome – a contemporary haiku – a road sign as we travel through these pages.
finding meaning
in the subtle underpinnings
of this soft earth
I picture Frank Watson writing from a mystical castle, rooted in the dark, soft earth and yet soaring into the sky. Wistful, he watches the journey of his silhouetted love sailing above the water. That is the imagery that wrapped around me as I read the book. If you want to be taken away to an ancient world, learn of old, lost love, then this is the poetry book for you.
Artwork accompanies much of the poet’s work in this publication. The visual art compliments the poems that speak of another place, another time. While much of the artwork is in the public domain, other were used by permission.
The book is broken up into ten books.
Within the Weeping Woods
Between Time and Space
Assembly Required
Percussion Mind
A Dance Between the Light
Beneath the Raven Moon
Omens
An Entrance to the Tarot Garden
Across the Continents
Stories Before I Sleep
So much of nature and time are a part of this collection. You can almost feel the earth, sand or moss between your toes as he leads us into the glimpses of his world that he allows us to see. I expect to smell the earth, be enshrouded in a cool mist from the sea.In the poem Fossils, Watson writes:
in two thousand years
they will find an oak fossil
with the lovers’ names
and in the poem Rhythms, the last stanza gives us another glimpse:
in this country
made of trees
the music sleeps
between the leaves
I found Book 8, entitled ‘An Entrance to a Tarot Garden’ to be the most interesting – bringing to life the soul of the characters from the ‘High Priest’ to ‘Death’, to ‘The Countess’. Having the artwork next to the poems adds that extra dimension for contemplation.
This is definitely a book to read at your leisure. A few of his poems make sharp changes that distract the reader. Many of Watson’s poems will lift you in a fanciful journey with that long-ago lover for which he still pines.
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Still
By Mary Jo Balistreri
FutureCycle Press, 2018
94 Pages
ISBN 978-1942371588
Review by Mary Beth Bretzlauf
blazing firewood… be drink cider with a bite
So begins my journey into the still life this book represents. Yet, her poems paint anything but stillness.
I read Still by Mary Jo Balistreri twice before I felt I could share my experience with you. I felt that I had met an instant friend and I wasn’t ready to share her with you just yet.
I’m just going to put it out there - Mary Jo is a marvel to the world. With her musical and artist souls braided together, she vrafted a collection that had me soaring and diving into the pictures she painted for the reader with her lyrical words.
Even now, I am longing for the beaches at sunrise, to imagine myself painting with Van Gogh as my inspiration. I feel a need to enter her world again.
She took me on a journey – of young married life with all its gushy love, of sadness scattering like weeds coming through the cracked pavement. Of silent hours where our minds are anything but silent, but chasing the unattainable, dreaming of another life and shouting at the world.
Her artist’s eye pulled me along as she wondered of Van Gogh and how colors were his words in “Dear Vincent”. She weaves concertos with colors in “Improv Blue” “Without A Voice” is a rallying cry to women to not remain silent, still – that we must speak. It is a timely message to all generations of women. She ends it with this line: at what point in speaking the language of silence do we become a quarry of stone?
In “How to Deal with the Dead” I am comforted with the knowledge they are still among us – so helpful to me since I lost my father a few months ago.
I would write about more of her poems inside the covers of Still – but I want you to feel them for yourself. You won’t look at colors the same again, especially, orange.
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Still
By Mary Jo Balistreri
FutureCycle Press, 2018
94 Pages
ISBN 978-1942371588
Review by Charlotte Digregorio
Award-winning Poet and Author Mary Jo Balistreri has written a book that you’ll keep coming back to on your bookshelf. Still is an adventure to read with many experiences we can all relate to. The poems are like stories. At times, she speaks of sorrowful experiences–from cancer to family illness/deaths, but she always comes back to hope for the opportunity of beginnings, appreciation, and gratitude for the beauty of life that surrounds us.
Here is one poem:
Waiting for The Light Rail
by Mary Jo Balistreri
She sits in an alcove of light and dark,
a pause between coming and going.
She’s an empty bench, a blank sheet of paper,
a sign askew, a mouthful of air,
a pencil in hand, and the now of now.
In the spaciousness of release, her mind fills
with words, the words become flesh,
and a cement shelter melds with the loam
of a thousand fields, fragrant as the fleshy blooms
that dangled from her father’s pear trees. Now on the cusp
of summer, the wind ruffles her hair, rustles leaves
she cannot see, carries the whistle of the oncoming train—
and is the breath that writes the living poem,
intertwined, inexhaustible.
Balistreri has a talent for poetic imagery with consummate sensory appeal. Her elegant language is music with her background as a professional musician.Here are some of my favorite lines from a variety of poems:
• In the waning light, beech trees along the river/ morph into pillars of a faraway temple.
• frosted window panes/ spangles of dreamscapes/ like antique lace
• wings flicking just slightly upward before/graceful, gangly legs drop down into courtships of bows and leaps,/jumps and pirouettes.
• The last sunflower in the barrel/ closed its petals this morning/ragged cloak faded
• the diamond-dazzle or sheen of light/ swallowing sailboats in its maw.
• Let your eyes rest where the red of winter wheat/flames in a prairie you thought bare
• I inhale marsh and musk./The plonk of a carp emphasizes the silence
• the silver-gray splay of light after storms,
• my father, who doesn't recognize my face./Sometimes he hums snatches of songs,/but he has lost the key,/his shadowed smile uncertain.
This is a book that poets and non-poets will appreciate. It will encourage everyone to notice the beauty around them, and to capture and write about it. Highly recommended for yourself or to gift to others.
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Everblue Soul
By Gregg Dotoli
Subterranean Blue Poetry Imprint, 2019
64 Pages
ISBN 9781099564178
Review by Mary Beth Bretzlauf
It is clear from the start that poet Gregg Dotoli knows his heart. So many of the poems are love poems. His euphoric love for an individual, and the crushing of the heart at the end of a relationship is clear but so is his love for this earth. That is the key to his poetic soul, I think.
There are several poems that refer to his youth, the coming of age in the 1960’s and how the Vietnam War changed so much of what he and his generation thought. In Come on Dream, I feel the urgency to find the REM state to seek the solace that you only find in dreams.
There are so many poems that resonated with me – the anguish in Last Dance (Climate Tears). The pain of losing Nature in such a reckless manner is so devastating to him that you are bereft as well after reading some of these poems. Other poems, A Sense of Scent, Grace Gifts, and Seeds also grabbed me.
I found a couple of poems lost behind a black page and a few pieces of artwork that seemed too dark. I was left wondering what the original piece really looked like.
All in all, this was a poetic journey that kept me turning the page.
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Beneath The Surface: A Book of Poems
By Barbara Garay
Self-published; available on Amazon.com
143 pages
ISBN: 978-0578458663
Review by Mike Freveletti
Beneath the Surface, by Barbara Garay, is a collection of poems with strong personal narrative focused on trauma, love, and respect for the adventure of life. Garay mentions the influence of thinkers such as Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, De Beauvoir, and Levinas. I found I didn’t need to be well versed in philosophy to enjoy what this collection had to offer.
The collection is broken into five thematic sections: Roots, Love, Heartbreak, Inner Struggles, and Resilience. The poet has, with the help of a photographer, interspersed black and white photos, which lend to the earnestness of the collection and further accentuates the mood of the poems. I have never been a huge fan of rhyming poetry, but I do understand its place in the genre, and I can appreciate it when it’s done well. Reading lines like “beneath the stars/measuring/the depth of our scars/ruminating/on our immanence/while losing our innocence," you see a poet who understands pacing and how rhyming can be deployed in a way that’s pleasant to read, even out loud.
I couldn’t help but feel like I was reading a memoir in verse. A memoir is only as interesting as the subject who’s decided to let us in. When you’re treated to emotional, heartfelt writing about someone else’s experiences that could’ve only been shared through the poetic medium, I think that’s an extraordinary honor. I was offered a window into the mind of the poet talking about abuse and its ability to stick in the psyche like a parasite in the poem “Abuse”: “she hides/inside her mind/and prays for a hand that’s kind/but continual silence/ . . .” You feel the difficulty of being heard, and when the poem ends with, “with ashen waste/that is still felt/inside her mouth/this-very-day,” you get to see poetry as the perfect vehicle for the things we need to say but are sometimes unsure how.
As I read the collection, the one word that continued to flash in my mind was cohesion. Poetry collections that claim some connective tissue between poems sometimes fail in telling a story, but with this book, I felt I had gotten my beginning, middle, and end. Cohesion is not always something I require in my reading, but the author was successful with this group of poems.
Garay’s introduction describes poems as snapshots frozen in time, and she’s right. Beneath the Surface gives us a moment in time full of instances, feelings, and reckonings, all of which help us understand how each is a factor in the understanding of who we really are. She tells us a story in short bursts, which makes connections with our lives, while trying to better remember all the details therein. “We endure, we learn, we rise, and we evolve,” Garay says, and I’d say her poetry is evidence that she’s done just that.
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