Tales that Fracture the Imagination

Cover Credit: Tethered by Letters

F(r)iction
Number 5, Summer 2016
135 pp
Tethered by Letters Publishing

Reviewed by Mindy Kronenberg

The most difficult thing about reading F(r)iction, a beautifully crafted and thoughtfully edited magazine of stories and poetic narratives, is putting it down. One is tempted to pore over the pages, revisiting the imaginative and distinctive illustrations that are custom-paired to each intriguing selection. They create a sense of excitation (sometimes with whimsy, sometimes foreboding) that enhances the experience of reading the surprising and often chilling tales that follow.

And then there are the stories that transport the reader from the glossy pages with inventiveness and graceful storytelling. There are echoes of Harlan Ellison at his most poetic, Ray Bradbury, Ursula K. LeGuin, George R.R. Martin, and others whose tales of morality and speculation prickle our sense of decency and our fear of the unknown.

In this issue, a short story by Dane Huckelbridge, “Ortolan,” introduces a highly prized dish in haute cuisine that tests greed against the practice in culinary cruelty, and a chef must finally decide whether to eschew his father’s famed (and notorious) recipe:

“Albert was not enthusiastic about it, the birthright or the dish, but he accepted both with the begrudging reluctance and unspoken resentment of those locked into lives by blood and tradition. Il y aura des consequences, his father would warn him, apron spattered with duck grease, fingers raw from peeling turnips, if you do not do things properly. And there are always repercussions if the old ways are ignored—especially with something as sacred as the preparation of Ortolan” (32).

“Leave,” Mike Raicht’s tale of love gone wrong during an alien invasion, creates a surprising amount of tension and suspense in three pages. “The Passing of Mr. and Mrs. Crow” by Daniel Knowlton reads as speculative-fable, with evocative passages and rich description:

“Fat drops of rain broke against the house. The wind clawed at the cliffs, pulling black clouds from the sea. Gabriel Crow descended into his basement. The old planks of the stairs stained the bottoms of his slippers ash gray. Cool air pooled in the darkness, as dry and as still as a tomb. Gabriel stamped is heel against the floor and found the spot that rang hollow. His back creaked as he bent over and pulled open a square hatch in the wood. The silence of the basement filled with the rhythmic, staccato ticking of the clocks. Down another set of stairs, Gabriel followed the sound” (11).

The biblical becomes a dystopic parable in “The Wife of Abel Grace” by Margaret Jameson, and teases out the identity of the narrator within a tragic tale of survival:

“Like all wives, our bodies, our choices, our lives were never truly our own. We lived within the confines they set. Mine were broader than most. Abel let me choose what to remember and what to forget. I chose to remember everything. He gave me something else others lacked, a goal—to help him create the life of your dreams. All you would have to do is walk in the door and embrace it” (129).

There are also selections of flash fiction, a serialized graphic novel, poems, an interview with and novel excerpt by Yaa Gyasi, and a special poetry feature from WriteGirl, a not-for-profit organization in Los Angeles that mentors at-risk teens and encourages creative empowerment. It is an inspiring and touching addition of seven works to this polished collection of voices and perspectives. “Martyrs,” by 16-year-old Valeria Olmedo, honors her mother and those who suffered from work in the textile industry:

Those maternal hands once braided my hair
Mutilated now, martyrs to that industry
Surely a hospital can fix them
just as she once fixed my dinner
But we have no money, and work beckons

My mother, to whom I owe my life, has
Beauty, like the Mexican mountains
spirit and soul, like Mexican music
She has survived, prolonged pain
She has her hands to prove it (42)

And from Erica Logan, age 13, lines from “There’s a Time:”

The time has come
To question the truths of this world,
But remember where I came from

The time has come
To leave the warmth of a mother sun
And fall back on what I once knew (45)

F(r)iction is an entertaining collection that serves as a paradigm for modern magazines. Its aesthetic is matched by its literary quality and, taken as a whole, provides a pleasurable heft in the hand, a delight for the eyes, and a strong stirring of the imagination.

Carnival of Conflicted Souls: A Review of Amorak Huey’s The Insomniac Circus by Mindy Kronenberg

Cover Credit: Hyacinth Girl Press

The Insomniac Circus by Amorak Huey
Hyacinth Girl Press (2014)

Reviewed by Mindy Kronenberg

What is it about the Big Top, its tented skirts rippling with a symphonic swell of Thunder & Blazes, parade of peculiar yet heroic characters who defy gravity, tame wild beasts, and its degradation of the body that fascinates, thrills, and sometimes repels us?

In The Insomniac Circus, Amorak Huey bestows humanity and humility in his cast of iconic and iron-clad performers, giving voice to those whose daring acts rouse cheers or gasps from an engaged yet distanced audience. Each poem is part noir-ish narrative and confessional, a collection of Diane Arbus images turned personal vignettes. The frustrations, desires, and interior tales of the clown, acrobat, contortionist, juggler, animal trainer, trapeze artist, and others are hinted at with clever poem titles that read like funny headlines: “The Sword Swallower Wonders What’s the Point,” “The Unicyclist Wonders if He’s Found the One,” “The Human Cannonball Takes His Best Shot at Redemption,” and “The Tight Rope Walker Gets High.” While not sparing the intimate details of each performer’s wistful story, the poet grants them ownership over their own series of foibles and frailty.

Our “entrance” to events begins with “The Ticket Taker Gives and Gives & No One Seems to Notice.” Alas, the anticipation and excitation of a circus’s promise for the exotic and daring experience push crowds past the gate keeper, who welcomes in others but must remain outside the transformative event, ignored. Almost as a spectator himself, Huey writes:

“…the gift of admittance. This is what you offer. In return
you are invisible. The world rushes past your stool

hungry for something more magnificent—
gold-paved redemption, spotlight on the impossible,

moment when a body’s limits no longer hold.
Such danger. Such promise. Such soaring.”

Echoes of loneliness and fear are carefully threaded through these poems with a wistful grace, and belie the glittering or seemingly proud visages of the men and women adorned in costume and on parade. In “The Ringmaster Answers the Phone,” we are warned “It’s never / good news, this time of night—someone dead / or arrested or worse: drunk & in the mood to reminisce.” What great things are there to be announced when one’s bedroom “…smells like feet & cat food—” and each season reminds “Your whole life is a series / of the moments just before other moments—?”

“The Lion Tamer Resolves to Start Telling the Truth” has our whip-wielding, big cat trainer (who has not quite faced up to the failings of his former marriage) promising to reveal his feelings “to a certain woman in a certain city” that he’s never forgotten. He reminisces:

…that Y-shaped scar on her lower lip,
summernight warmth of her breath,
skittery touch of her fingernails.

It is her name I whisper each night
on bended knee, my neck bowed,

teeth almost tender against flesh—
the secret is pretending you are not vulnerable.

The reader is also introduced to the daring performances of those who explode and spin in the ring, and what lay beneath the bravado of the spotlight. The “Human Canonball” admits, “The only thing I had ever had going for me / was lack of fear. Violence // is a forwarding address, the next place / anyone calls home, confessional booth, // springloaded tube.” In “The Bareback Rider Gets Dressed (After a Night of Horsing Around With a Townie),” the young, restless equestrian with an “unending quest for the unbuttoned life,” comes to believe “...The best thing in her life / is this headpiece. She holds it with both hands, / careful not to crush the peacock feathers, // iridescent & impossible in the morning sun.” And the daredevil of “The Acrobat Bawls” implores:

Go ahead, tell me you know all about me,
my narrow world, my glittering costume,

the absent net beneath my feet. I am all
too familiar, pitiful as pearls, tourist

in my own skin. Insist you’ve heard this story
before. You don’t even know

my middle name. Surprised
to see me in such prosaic terms? Pretend

you could forget this moment—we know better,
this night already ripples in the breeze

& keeps a million strangers awake.
I offer myself to you, knowing you

will not resist my naked heart.

Interestingly, there’s a poem representing the audience, “The Father Sits in the Front Row with His Family & Convinces Himself That He Takes a Back Seat to No One.” Our patriarch, who suffers from his own threatened sense of masculinity, understands that “What matters is how they see you. // Everything is performance—life in the round...” and “For better or for purse, this entertainment’s costing $600.00 / & there’s nothing you can do about any of it.” This “jack of all masquerades” is reminded that “everything in front of you exists / for your pleasure. If you never turn around // you never see what lies behind.” The grand visions and thrilling performances that we seek on such a large scale may be costly to witness, but “the greatest show on earth,” is surely that of human drama. The Insomniac Circus brings this point home in each poem or “act” of this intimate and oddly-poignant collection. With its skillful combination of glittering revelry and wistful narrative, it continues to haunt the reader’s imagination.

A Personalized Americana: A Review of Bethany Reid’s Sparrow by Mindy Kronenberg

Cover Credit: Writers & Books

Sparrow by Bethany Reid
Big Pencil Press (2012)

Reviewed by Mindy Kronenberg

Bethany Reid’s poems come off the page like a mix of polite gossip and prayer. She writes with the quiet eloquence of Mary Oliver, the raw honesty of Sharon Olds, and shares details of her heartland childhood and coming of age as with Ted Kooser’s sacraments of the everyday. She begins the book with “My Country,” a detailed recounting of life events that, in youth, combine with faith to become a cautionary yet celebratory tale:

Life and death held hands and said grace
over my childhood, every cat that got into rat poison,
every dog hit by a logging truck on our creek road,
every calf with scours….

… Never a way to embrace
All that suffering arm and arm with all that joy,
That astonishing joy I knew as a child in my country.

These are often subtle but substantial poems, a tour of the rural and emotional landscape by a woman who takes nothing for granted and is unabashed in sharing her discoveries. Broken into three sections (Three Horses, Death Must be a Waitress, and What Tongue but My Own), Sparrow takes the reader through a litany of reveries and moments of ripening, rites-of-passage and emotional metamorphosis, and finally a sensually rendered meditation on mortality.

There is an earnest curiosity and humored cynicism where religion, a considerable force, is concerned, as in “What Broke Loose:”

What broke loose when all hell went?
I didn’t have that kind of childhood.
We kept buttoned up. We minded.

Somehow I learned
to experiment with possibility—
the earth crackling like a too-hot stove,
bones budding like exotic flowers.

The same goes for “Rapture,” where the poet remembers savoring the word as a girl, undaunted at the prospect (“A fervent child, I never feared I’d be left…) but wondering how life would be for those on earth, even the mild sinners (“My history teacher who had once / inserted a casual ‘goddamn’ into a lecture…”). Once the faithful were plucked from their everyday lives on the planet, the poet wonders about “…what chaos / we’d leave behind us, my dear, drunk uncles / with no one to fix their suppers, / our cows finding no one at the barn / to throw down their hay.” She also puzzles over the world continuing, unrepentant and unaffected by the absence of the righteous:

What if the world didn’t miss us,
but remained steady on its course,
one ear cocked to the susurrus
of a Pentecostal wind?

In “Prodigal,” we meet the girl-poet in the midst of her early rural life, awakened by birds in the garden, and where she “…chopped wood, / made beds, folded clothes / fresh from the line... picked strawberries, read books, dreamed.” A line that could be a slogan for Sparrow’s underlying sentiment is when the poet admits, after growing up and away from experiences that become cherished in adult memory, “…the smallest of things still beckons.” From the intimate ritual of a waitress undressing and unwrapping her inner selves (“Matyrouska”) to the mother shaking a thermometer like a wand to relieve a fevered daughter (“Pond Girl”), the private scenes in Sparrow echo with heartache, persistence, and joy in dream-like spurts— the totality of a lifetime pieced together in wondrous, ephemeral episodes.

The Disembodied Voice Within: A Review of Liz Robbins’s Freaked by Mindy Kronenberg

Cover Credit: Amazon.com

Freaked by Liz Robbins
Elixir Press (2015)

Review by Mindy Kronenberg

What is it about being a freak, or possessing freakishness, that summons public curiosity or our private fears of exposed peculiarity? The notion of being a “Freak”—outsider, misfit, against which others measure their merits or failures— rises from superstition or class snobbery. Our society has become a devoted audience to the broadcast lives of the dysfunctional rich and anonymous disenfranchised, those loudly or meekly suffering their private anomalies. The greater the lens on our own conflictual, alternate cravings for camouflage or celebrity, the more uncomfortable we grow within the skin of our own humanity.

Liz Robbins’s Freaked magnifies concern about how easily friends and intimates could be considered pathetic or profound by a simple twist of phrase. Where does eccentric and abnormal differ or intersect? What life styles (or circumstances) determine our value as citizens and intimates?

Divided into six sections that focus on different and intriguing themes to present the skewered human drama, Freaked unravels tales borne from rites of passage, wrong turns, well-intended but misbegotten gestures, and love’s confounding fickleness. These include horoscopes, tabloid curiosities, social and spiritual ritual, and Diane Arbus-captured portraits. Robbins’s prowess is in the language and rhythm of each narrative, creating a dream-like tension through phrasing that approaches incantation, as in “[the scorpion]:”

sooze, the radio jesus says our salvation must come
without body, i’m not willing to wait and you are,
the sax solo growing buttered layers as it complicates,
this explains all—

Or from “[the twins]:”

and mine’s no more a faux life than yours, it’s just you actually
get to the gym, your slept-with-list thinner than mine—
you go out in the day and i stay in, the apartment becomes
a shotgun shack teeming with bad-dream melting clocks
and skyscraper mice—

Poems in the section inspired by “News of the Weird” columns reveals Robbins’s talent for summoning personal tales from the odd reportage of ill-gestured wannabe heroes, benign offenders, and the spiritually afflicted, among others. These headlines-turned testimonies manage a dark humor along with the ridicule of each story. There’s “Drive-In Church,” where the daughter of a devout choir singer expresses her own approach to faith (“… you don’t even have to / get out of your car and therefore your pajamas, just tool / right up with your ciggy’s on the dash and a 12 pack / of Krispy Kremes, reggae on the tape deck…”) and “Man Chokes to Death on Pocket Bible,” a story of a young man’s fatal attempt to purge himself of the Devil, where the poet speaks on behalf of the demon (“For months now, / I’ve explored his brain’s gray maze, turned flowering/ girls to mean drunks and parents to shrieking crows…”). “Rebellion as Ice Floe,” inspired by the story of three teenage boys who commit a robbery and make a regrettable getaway, is an especially strong narrative musing on adolescent angst, and restlessness (“… what waited beyond the yard’s split-rail fences?”). An awkward attempt in escaping (“How / little I knew, stuck in the reach-out-and-grab delirium, assuming / a hard run would bring safety, not paralysis. Like when I backed / down our driveway’s hill, only to stall at the bottom.”) is followed not only by embarrassment but also parental forgiveness for foolish acts.

Robbins excels in ekphrastic interpretation, moving seamlessly from poems of elaborate statements and unfurling lines to a series of sonnets that are deftly connected by their last lines. She summons both the empathy and unease of Arbus’s photographic subjects, as when their confident posturing belies their personal crises. In “A Family on Their Lawn One Sunday in Westchester, NY, 1968,” a couple relaxes on lawn chairs while their young son hovers over an inflatable pool caught by his own reflection. There are clues to their diminished passion— “(Dad covers / his eyes, tired from the sun, Mom’s in the mid- / life crisis bikini.)” —and the accoutrement of marital ennui, such as:

… their bodies turned away to smaller traces
of comfort: stuffed ashtray, the full glass
on the table in between. Their weekend bliss:
the country club tan. Their weekend pass:
him running the yard. They do not kiss
or touch, but once they did…

Robbins also effectively evokes the pained hopes and fears of a giant’s parents (“A Jewish Giant at Home with His Parents in the Bronx, NY 1970”). All the details in the title, taken, as with all of the poems in this section, directly from the photographs, are required to understand the complexity of ambition and disappointment in this family dynamic. The giant’s mother wishes for her son “movie contracts, straight spine, blond wife, fakes guns.” And he gains celebrity, a mixed blessing:

A great man he became, eight feet high.
Played in movies too: son of Frankenstein’s
monster. Looking at him, Father thinks, Why
me. Mother thinks, A nightmare, but he’s mine.
Eddie looks down on them, leans on a cane
(back hunched, shoes thick-soled), dying of bone disease.

Freaked taps into the confounding ways we live, longing for acceptance or denying dependence on others, rejecting convention yet regretting alienation. Robbins captures our attentions with carefully crafted vignettes of dismayed but determined souls striving to be human. It is our dilemma—or privilege—to recognize ourselves among them.

What Makes Us Stronger: A Review of Christine Stroud’s The Buried Return by Mindy Kronenberg

cover credit: Finishing Line Press

The Buried Return by Christine Stroud
Finishing Line Press (2014)

Reviewed by Mindy Kronenberg

Christine Stroud’s debut chapbook is a collection of poems that are each a cautionary tale. These disturbing but determined narratives face the harrowing realities of love (both carnal and familial), loss, and random rites of passage emerging from the domestic and feral realms. The adolescent bravado that begins this journey evolves into adult indignation and self-recognition with every vignette, and raw emotions are crafted with literary precision.

The first poem, “I Threw Your Shoes into the River,” is a provocative start. The poet claims not to regret the gesture (for an unnamed victim). Yet, in this passage, there remains a searing image of summer shoes thrown defiantly and disappearing from view:

… But I

stood at the end of the pier
and watched your Day-Glo orange
flip flops float down the White Oak
until they were nothing
but a burnt smear on the water.

Many of the poems in The Buried Return are encounters meant to haunt the reader, pull us out of a comfort zone that so many poets struggle to preserve. The way Stroud summons empathy and trepidation from visceral (and sometimes alarming) details recalls Theodore Roethke’s and Sharon Olds’s rending of personal violence into eloquent verse—the language sublimely releasing events that make us wince. The brutality of ignorance and bigotry and the complicated injustice of victimization is rendered in “Farmville High,” where a lesbian student is physically attacked by two boys after school. The tension begins before the violence, as her attackers position themselves (“One at each end of the hall. / Even before they yelled / dyke, you understood.”). The carnage that follows leaves us speechless:

…
They shattered you
under long fluorescent
bulbs running parallel
to the cobalt blue lockers.
Those lights always
too clear, too white.
…

In silence, the doctors
rearranged you, wrenching bones,
wiring your mouth shut.

Lessons of loss and mortality are poignantly demonstrated in two poems, “Knowing” and “On the Way Home from a Bar in Portland,” which take place respectively in childhood and adulthood. Focusing on a hunt for a lost cat and an encounter of another, horribly wounded, each deals with the uncomfortable urges of hope and bravery, survival and merciful death. In the first poem, configured as a prose narrative, the discovery disappoints: “I find him. Curled up like a roly poly, his mouth hanging open, blood on his / teeth. His tiger-striped fur looks soft and I bend down to stroke him. Dad / grabs my hand, No he could have diseases. …” In the second poem, a more formally constructed narrative that is built on self-doubt and ending suffering, the poet follows a “tar trail of blood” to a hedge where the animal appears:

… He was a pair of torn black pantyhose,
leaking thick pink mucus. I should’ve gone home. …
…
I envisioned snapping his neck bone.
Instead I scratched him between the ears, stilled
by his sticky, short breath. I got up, walked home.

There are several poems on family with their own brand of spirited, celebratory dynamic, as when a walk in a graveyard becomes a bonding session for mother and daughter (“Graves We’ve Shared”), a father-daughter fishing expedition that’s a lesson on “the patience of stillness” (“Fishers”), and a hammock nap recreating the loving tension between the practical grandmother and rebellious sprite (“Grandmother”). A complicated chasm between revelry and sobriety exists in poems on friends and lovers (particularly in four “Relapse Suites”), and even the most raucous scenes contain imagery and detail with a peculiar beauty—“as bullets fell into the snow / like awful inverted stars…” (“Relapse Suite, Ashville”) and “It was so cold in your room / the door handle sparkled / with frost.” (“Relapse Suite, Pittsburgh”).

The Buried Return is by turns tragic and tender, wild and disciplined. Stroud unearths what we fear and desire, and reminds us how poetry can haunt both our conscience and consciousness, chronicling and shaping the lives we choose for ourselves.

The Intoxicating Risks of a Poet’s Painful Blossoming: A Review of Lisa Marie Basile's Apocryphal by Mindy Kronenberg

cover credit: Noctuary Press

Apocryphal by Lisa Marie Basile
Noctuary Press (2014)

Reviewed by Mindy Kronenberg

There is a solid, if not sometimes discomfiting, legacy of women poets taking ownership of victimization, familial or societal, within the larger sexual, emotional, and political playing fields of their generation. Sylvia Plath gave us the overbearing “Daddy,” Ann Sexton celebrated her body and moments of sensual reverie taken for madness, and Sharon Olds shared portraits of her family’s damaged and damaging patriarchs. How can we not admire Marie Howe’s “Mary Magdalene,” in a clever twist of self-declaration in citing the seven sins cast out of her (including: “The fourth was I didn’t belong to anyone. I wouldn’t allow myself to belong / to anyone. // Historians would assume my sin was sexual.”) or, in another poem, Magdalene’s ticking off the physical peculiarities and personalities of each male phallus she encounters.

In Apocryphal, the ambitious first full-length collection by Lisa Marie Basile, the poet creates a noirish tale against a surreal landscape that mingles (or perhaps blurs) memory and nostalgic illusion—a stylized series of personal and disturbing episodes. Before the larger narrative begins, an isolated section that serves as a preface provides clues to an evolving, pained history that precursors the narrator’s own flowering and debasement (“as a child his mother took an iron to him good, strangled / him in curtain cords.    so I’m your mother now // give it to me good.”). She states: “I am not like everyone else’s child, I learned early of toil & kink: little girl    bambi girl    sprawl for me / and I learned early all the men who want bambi…” But whether this transformation actually took place can be interpreted, like the title of the collection, as apocryphal in nature. She adds: “it might be the truth,    or not.   that is up to you.”

It is an intriguing, if not unsettling, start to a tale that often flickers across the page in vintage iconography (the douse of cologne, cabinets filled with booze, hands posed with cigarettes, scarved coiffures and boat-like sedans) and fragmented sexual encounters. It begins, Dali-like, with a dream-state of images:

When I sleep nude on sands, I open
my mouth so a whole man could get in, so you
could get in,
& stretching, I realize there is nothing but blackcoral,
          wrapping this body of me,

parts parting,

taken with you or taken by you. I wear the both of us,

as golden hoops in my ears.   the skin
is stretching all over the place, my hands are the hives,
& I smell of high valley fire.
o, it is very young of me to spill myself like this, a pearl
necklace snapped off by drunken blackness
     so dizzied
by the rotary tone of you.

There is a continual metamorphosis of the body, whether of the narrator’s or other female and male figures. These references approach the rhythms of spiritual service, a perversion of communion that can startle with violence (“my body of bark, my body of body // the salt, the sound of          hollow. // this legion, this inner summer. //I awake to you   my prayer  forcing me / with fists.”). In two other sequences:

our fathers and mothers make us holy
             in their form.

the form is       my fingers            inside myself
& then in your mouth.

you put them there, you did it.

you drink me, a little hair, a little salt.
my body tastes like the afternoon & I’m bent
in the shape of a woman, but I am not a woman.

you decide what I am. (p 35)

…

the small white dress I wear when the pain comes,
     with the stains on it.          this is my body.
this is my body.         this is my body. the sick
and the summer.        the air of a thousand men

blown up inside.        I live inside crates shipped
across the sea.         I venom good things. (p 85)

Although Apocryphal’s poems wander across the pages in a continuous release, without separate titles or standard formatting, there is a subtle application of style to break up or contain the book’s epic energies. This helps to “ground” the reader, temperamentally, as we experience the emotional interiors and exteriors of a life being revisited, shared, and self-investigated. On pages 26, 43, and 49 the narratives are presented as if boxed, like progressive, confessional pit-stops with the cinematic aplomb of capturing close-up monologues. In the first, we are told: “I keep growing & getting bigger, & my hair is soilblack now, … when you put your hands on my waist you say baby is this you?” and a remembered (or fantasized) night of shimmering light leads to an inflated sexuality but diminishing self and death of identity. In the second, we learn “I am afraid of photographs. I am ashamed they will show / where I really came from …” and again, intimacy is a force to be reckoned with from outside and within. The third is printed as two “boxes” separated by two lines that take us from “backstage” to the moment of her delivery to an on-screen persona, and that embodies the pageantry of rite (spiritual as well as theatrical). The narrator shares:

…                I have spent my entire life & all of its suffering
both as spectator and subject. a woman trapped eternally as a
child waiting for the holy father.
…
when he approaches I am cinema, a conquering, validation,
revolver and good mascara. he says,  you are beautiful.

With its edgy cinematic qualities, cast of familial and possibly invented characters, and shadowy events, Apocryphal effectively integrates noirish imagery and lyricism (“this woman is / a despicable thing / on our glossy sofa… those lashes / that bouffant:    a cage // an apron / an earring / a man / & a briefcase, // dead face down,    olive oil thighs …”). Told through a Fellini-esque lens, this is a woman’s odyssey of desire, shame, assertion, and redemption through telling her story with her own words, the truth present even in distortion. After all, whoever promised that grief, rage, or the excruciating process of healing and survival could ever truly be decipherable?

Seasonal Revelations of the Self: A Review of Mary Meriam's Girlie Calendar by Mindy Kronenberg

cover credit: Headmistress Press

Girlie Calendar by Mary Meriam
Headmistress Press (2014)

Reviewed by Mindy Kronenberg

Co-founded by Mary Meriam and Risa Denenberg in 2013, Headmistress Press is an independent publisher of books of poetry by lesbians. As stated on its website, it is “dedicated to honoring lesbian existence, discovering a range of lesbian voices, and promoting lesbian representation in the arts.” Girlie Calendar is the last volume in the “Lillian Trilogy” (the first two books were Word Hot and Conjuring My Leafy Muse) and dedicated to the poet’s creative mentor, scholar, and educator, Lillian Faderman. Mary Meriam’s voice joins an established and recognized canon of gay female writers (Marilyn Hacker, Adrienne Rich, Elizabeth Bishop, June Jordan, and Joan Larkin among them) with her own brand of self-declaration and exuberant chutzpa.

The visions conjured by the phrase “Girlie Calendar” rouse images of sirens posed in risqué postures, sultry but coy, beckoning and somewhat vulnerable, teasing an audience with the promise of carnal conquest and unimagined sexual pleasure. Meriam cleverly plays on the clichéd and misogynistic notions of this familiar cultural artifact by creating a catalog of poems that cross a decade and address the desires, promises, gifts, and, occasionally, disappointments of each month.

In the May section, “Hot Spell” opens with a glimmer of optimism: “This sonnet holds the hope of something hot: / a summer night with soft cicada din, / a sultry rush of fingers on the skin, / a tender lightning bolt that hits the spot.” So much of the magic in Meriam’s verse lay in her deft use of language, often like a sleight of hand as she uses rhyme that subtly rears its head in elongated lines. For example, from “Beginning with a Line by Robert Frost” in the January section, she writes:

The pile of rotten branches and gold leaves lies there dead and swirled.
It would take every court in the countryside to count the fallen leaves.
The judges must number themselves among the dirt-thirsty thieves.
I live in a room of cold-toed winter glowing with no relief.
Wandering silent, muttered about, I move from grief to grief.

Some poems reach for words to celebrate sensuality or express a quixotic sense of joy or despair. In the July section, the poems “The Romance of Middle Age” and “Lingua Lesbian” are back to back, the first articulating the realities of an aging body, and the second softly expressing a memory of blooming libido. From the first, the warning signs: “…It’s strange / how people look away who once would look. / I didn’t know I’d undergo this change / and be the unseen cover of a book / whose plot, though swift, just keeps on getting thicker. / One reaches for the pleasures of the mind / and heart to counteract the loss of quicker / knowledge…” From the second, we learn of the “language that was hidden,” passionate gestures that bring the poet and her lover together, beyond the use of words. Meriam describes:

Her curls of silky sunny light,
blond blooming in my hand
entangle me and turn the night
gentle where we stand.

Her Russian babbles in my ear,
mon francais sways her hips,
we laugh, go quiet, I draw near
and kiss her rosy lips.

Meriam can be skillfully playful and witty, as in “Workshop Romance” (…I like your smile, I like your frown, / but darling, must you always shun / my adjectives? Are you a nun? / Am I a silly, sorry clown? / I like your verb! I like your noun!”). She sloughs off modest success and minor defeat with good humor and an eloquent kvetching in “The Loser’s Lament,” where the poet extols the virtues and prized lives of “The winning wealthy poets” whose coveted works “dribble from their mouths.” Of herself and her creative labors, which answer to a different authority, she states:

But I’m a poet of a single table.
I wash my dishes at the kitchen sink.
I have nowhere to go, and so I think
I’ll sit and write a poem at the table.
The price I pay for every line I write
is measured by the gods in bloody light.

With its periodic bravado and good natured posturing, sexual dynamism and moments of vulnerability and isolation, Meriam’s seasonal catalogue of poems is an honest and honorable series of rites of passage. Girlie Calendar is a robust collection of free verse and formalist work that explores a seasonal spectrum of a gay woman’s emotional and physical experience—aching, wistful, hungry, indignant, and determinedly satisfied.

Remedies in Songs and Silences: A Review of Toadlily Press's Mend & Hone by Mindy Kronenberg

cover credit: Toadlily Press

Mend & Hone by Elizabeth Howort, Dawn Gorman, Leslie LaChance, Janlori Goldman

Toadlily Press (2013)

Reviewed by Mindy Kronenberg

I first became acquainted with Toadlily’s quartet series back in 2008, when I reviewed their third collection, Edge by Edge. Each book in the series brings together four poets in separate sections that are essentially “joined” chapbooks of 13-14 poems each that find common ground within differing styles and approaches. It’s a marvelous idea that increases by number and literary style the experiences of discovery and transition, and Mend & Hone proudly continues this tradition.

The volume begins with Elizabeth Howort’s section, “Turning the Forest Fertile.” These prose-like, untitled pieces float on the page, dream-like, referencing the silences we need to immerse ourselves in experience, to turn inward. They also beckon the reader to listen for music that rises through an unfurling leaf or the calamitous pulse in a city of pedestrians and traffic. “I looked in the shops and cafes, bars and museums, but silence was nowhere. / Who hears her breath amid sirens?” Howort asks in the third piece.

Silence and sound—the pastoral and urban—intertwine, blend, and evade. Howort presents this in a Zen-like series of statements (“What sound does a fruit make when falling? // A branch upon release?” “My breath is a foyer that moans with entrance, exit.” “When we hold silence we do not answer.”) and psalm-like passages, as we learn how elusive and profound silence is. She explains:

     

Out of silence, light:

a blessing on your eyes,          acres.

Out of the silence, space:

A place to inhabit:                   field,

                                                                        sky.

You invite me into the garden.

A third pulse.

You invite me into silence and say

We are drawn, weightless, into a world of diminishing wilderness and overgrown urban landscape, hovering and anchored by the music and libretto of our hopefulness.

Dawn Gorman’s imagistic, lyrical poems in “This Meeting of Tracks” find fascination with time, memory, and the juxtapositions that can encourage longing, regret, or denial. In “Stiletto,” a nearly surreal appearance of the shoe “on top / of the spiny winter twigs” causes no discussion in a rural place that readers are told has no secrets or unturned stones. “The rain has warped the insides, but the toe still lines up hail clouds / like a stealth bomber. // They keep their eye on it, though; / farmers, mothers, priests / all remember a shoe like that.”  In “Buried,” an act of love outdoors is roused in memory by the images of trees: “The beeches silenced us, / their sudden amphitheatre / spread brown / with last year’s empty nut shells.” The hard evidence, a condom, was buried, according to the poet “under the crushed shells / where nothing would grow. I imagine it there now, re-routing nature / still.”

There are forces to be reckoned with—nature and intimacy—that Gorman summons with drama, as in “Wave” where a storm whirls beneath the surface, prompted by “a passing thought…” Yet, she writes, it:

…builds, rises, coming unstoppably,

turns darker blue, green, triumphant turquoise

then ruffles and tumbles and wallops forwards

huge, heavy, froth leaping, flying. …

Or conjures quietly, as intense but fleeting desire in “Blue,” where a chance encounter at an airport summons longing amidst short, polite conversation (“…I have precious minutes/to watch the hands / I ache for.”).

Leslie LaChance’s poems in “How She Got That Way” endear with their wit, cleverness, and celebratory air—even as she allows poignancy to effortlessly emerge from between the lines. In “Strange Little Enthusiasms” LaChance extolls the virtues of indefinite articles, “…so small, so full / of possibility and yet complete?” She continues:

…We go

For a walk. I tell you a secret; we make a pact. See how easy it is

with just a few little words? A mouth, a breath, a long

kiss, and then another. …

In “Literary Landmark: A Valentine” a hangover after a drunken declaration of love in an Irish pub is immortalized in a photo taken the day after the carnage. Speaking directly to her beloved (“You proved your love with one hand / holding my hair back, and the other tilting the ice bucket to my chin…”) she recounts standing with him “on the Great Dead Writer’s front porch with a pair / of headaches, a camera, and go figure, a future.” “Nocturne” possesses a wistful beauty, visually and emotionally stunning, inspired by the simple act of removing one’s—and rousing the memory of removing another’s—glasses. LaChance describes:

I took my glasses off and set them

open on an open book. Later

when I came back into the room,

they looked so melancholy in the lamplight—

there on the dining room table

trying to read Tolstoy by themselves.

Janlori Goldman’s “Akhmatova’s Egg” rounds out Mend & Hone with poems that are personally inspired yet have the confident stride and linguistic grace of domestic parables. These poems deal with mortality, love, and the pain in living that fuels indignation that sometimes fuels hope. In “Yom Kippur,” the poet is in synagogue and begins:

Today everything hurts, and I’m as close to

god as I’ll ever come

or want to be. I try to forgive myself, fist knocking at the chest,

a door that forgot how to open. The prayer book’s spine

against my palms, I sing loudly to drown out the dandruff

flaked on the suit in the next row, sing as if I do believe…

Even after her mind wanders to the spiritual disappointments of the past and back, she eventually “thinks of the woman asleep in the window well on my block, blonde / wisping out of a hoodie, sneakers on the sidewalk like slippers by a bed” and wonders about her own ability to reconnect to faith.

In “At the Cubbyhole Bar” the reader is an invisible guest as the poet and her friend, a First Responder (the dedication reads “for Donna Bianco, retired NYPD sergeant”) share the small and large horrors of family dysfunction and global disaster. The discussion leads from a father dead from AIDS, to a dinner fight between mother and daughter, to the unimaginable, as Goldman writes:

That morning, after the buildings buckled,

a brown skirt of cloud billowed up.

            You saw her, a bleached blonde

in purple satin shirt, no body

            Below the waist, thought how a human head

Weighs 8 pounds, lifted that weight

            Of a newborn, zipped the bag.

The startling imagery of these poems also presents the forces of nature, as in “Cyclone” (“The twister lifts a home’s petticoats, / holds its skirts/high over the pasture, …”) and “The Bear” (“A grizzly crawls into the station wagon— / its left leg mangled—finds a plastic soldier / and red dinosaur on the backseat.”) and ultimately, the force of life itself, as in “baking in the 8^th month.” She recalls “rosemary-soaked olives and sea salt, my mouth / in licked delirium from this warm bread. // yeast swells, opens the well of yearn and ache/ for the grain at its start. dark under the cheekbones, // darker from the navel straight down, this rise / a sign of life inside, my acre swollen to the brim.”

Mend & Hone is a fine collection of distinctive voices that brings pleasure in the discovery of what ails and heals us. Each poet captures the confounding and consistent challenges of being human with language that seeks emotional detent with its subject matter.  It is a welcome addition to Toadlily’s quartet series.

Magnifying Life’s Silences: A Review of Leigh Anne Hornfeldt's East Main Aviary by Mindy Kronenberg

cover credit: Flutter Press

East Main Aviary by Leigh Anne Hornfeldt
Flutter Press (2012)

Reviewed by Mindy Kronenberg

The narrative “tour” the reader experiences through both physical and emotional realms in East Main Aviary is by turns haunting and nostalgic, with poems that are intimate yet detached. The tensions and comfort of past, present, and future come together in the lead poem, “Driving Back We Pass My Parent’s Home,” where readers are told upfront: “This never means the same thing twice. / Tonight our children sleep in the back seat.” As the poem, like the car, moves forward, memories are roused: “Under that pinoak I crept, / kissed a boy in porchlight pallor… // By the juniper I snuck my first cigarette…” It is “too late for visit,” and Leigh Ann Hornfeldt has visions of her parents, separate and familiar in their unhappy spheres, even as she reaches for her husband’s hand, heading into “the familiar darkness ahead.”

Her first collection contains narratives with vivid, often musical language. “Flowering Plum” captures the ravages of unbridled growth and neglect with imagery and alliteration:

Your promised greens
plummet into deep purple,
you flood with color, clots
clinging on the white-molded boughs
which break to my touch …
Why should the caterpillars love you more
than this oak, uncrippled and not fraught?

In “As the Sparrows Fall,” the troubling discovery of a yard of dead birds leads to grief and panicked speculation.

How I worried that winter, wanted to know what
I’d done wrong to bring such plague
upon our yard: Were the feeders teeming
with bacteria, had the black oil sunflower seed gone bad?

Seasonal and emotional planes intersect in “Where Our Aprils Meet,” where a bird’s “needled cry / threads back and forth, stitches days together / like a hand-sewn quilt…” and there was “the old book smell of smoke and woods / in our hair.” The poet and a companion tend to flower beds (“heirloomed irises / and sprawling tiger lilies”) near a place where the natural world becomes entangled in human debris, but the force of life persists: “…we found the Killdeer’s nest in the vacant lot / of weeds and crushed beer cans, // behind the rusted wire fence and honeysuckle. / She feigned lame, flopped like a wrung chicken / to draw us away from her eggs…”

Sometimes Hornfeldt’s simplicity can be as startling as her more elaborate, descriptive language. There is an aching precision in how she conveys loss and longing, as in “Freshly Missing” in which a woman’s first son is described as a “murdered blur.” The event left her “…changed / a gaping hole scratched in the nest bottom / leaving her wringing hands in dumbness / leaving her tonguing suicide without tiring” until another son filled the hovering emptiness. In “Absence,” the poet shares the gap and murmur of her own experience:

Yours left me
exploring childhood
the way tongue
searches the hole
where once
there was baby
tooth, the way
tongue stumbles
blindly across
that gap,
rush
of warm air
as the mouth mimes
brother.

Without being sentimental or self-indulgent, Hornfeldt deftly probes looming and impenetrable spaces of grief, longing, and love. There is eloquent precision in how she recreates quiet and disquieting moments of coming-of-age, flashes of mortality, and growing into the whole of oneself. East Main Aviary is an elegant, often wistful collection of memories, rites of passage, and revelatory moments that are poignant markers in a poet’s personal journey.

A Thresher of Dust and Dreams: A Review of Miriam Bird Greenberg's All Night in the New Country by Mindy Kronenberg

cover credit: Sixteen Rivers Press

A Thresher of Dust and Dreams in the Promised Land

All Night in the New Country
Miriam Bird Greenberg
Sixteen Rivers Press, 2013

Review by Mindy Kronenberg

Miriam Bird Greenberg’s disturbing, recent collection of twenty-three poems chronicle episodes of a future America driven by a desperate migration. In a time of ecologic and social collapse, citizens move to survive, congregate, and keep madness and carnage at bay. As one reads through each poem, there are echoes of other cautionary tales of environmental disaster and human conceit—The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker, Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood, The Road by Cormac McCarthy—and the uneasy reminder of historic migrations to stake claim to the great potential of this vast country.

The first poem, “Before the World Went to Hell,” sets the stage for this dismantled realm, and we are introduced to the early stages of pending disaster (“…people theorized the earth’s orbit / was off-kilter, time had stopped moving right,…”) in an uncomfortable juxtaposition of the frightening with the poetic (“My sweetheart steamed a pot of wild mustard flowers / by the roadside, rain sizzling on the lid…”). This cleverly keeps us off balance as we travel through these pages, creating a longing for the familiar or fabled past, clinging to old gallantry and social convention—a belief in empowered heroes and the guidance of ancestral ghosts—even as the world around us is dying. In “All Night in the New Country,” there is the pain of loss of legacy and self, “…it is like a body walking next to you in the night, ghost / of the lost one keeping you / company, or only your own grief stumbling / beside you in the darkness.”

This tour of deteriorating Americana emerges in scenes of surprisingly casual violence within a backdrop fit for Normal Rockwell. For example, in “I Passed Three Girls Killing a Goat,” Greenberg writes:

I passed three girls killing a goat, shotgun
leaned up against a tree and the entrails
spilling into a coil on the ground. It was hooked
between the tendons of its back legs
to a high branch that gently creaked
like a dry hinge busybody aunties wouldn’t oil.

Or these haunting lines, from “Remember:”

Remember the ruined caravan
we approached at dusk where boys lolling on the lip of the well
idly sent three bursts of bullets

into the air, neither welcome
nor threat? Remember, one told us of another who’d fallen
into that same well,

treading water for three days
and calling like a baby bird for its mother. Only
they didn’t say it like that. …

Death is harvested more than food or quarry stone; nature teases the promise of bounty amidst rot. In “Night Trembled All Around Me,” we are told “But what you really had to watch for / were pits dug in the ground in empty places.” We’re told:

Watch carefully
when the moon is at this angle; people
go out to the woods (no—are sent) with shovels.
Fallen fruit sweetening the air, pungent
where saplings will sprout from the stones
in spring; but the pits they are digging
are meant         for a different thing.

There is a combination of beauty and terror in each poem, bearing witness to the ravages of the landscape yet clinging to the persistence of the human spirit. They compose a journey for survival through a landscape of dying dreams and create a disjointed tension as we learn in uneasy and evocative stages how things fall apart.

Synesthetic Repast: A Review of Katherine Rauk's Basil by Mindy Kronenberg

cover credit: Black Lawrence Press

Basil by Katharine Rauk
Black Lawrence Press (2011)

Review by Mindy Kronenberg

There is a clever sort of alchemy at work in the poems in Basil, Katharine Rauk’s poetry chapbook. These thirty-one oddly compelling and challenging poems emerge as collective parables that, taken together, form a surreal, spiritual, and sensual guide to this and the next life.

Some poems combine prose and poetry narrative formats, transitioning between exterior and interior events, creating an effect of guided dreaming. For example, in “Suicide Rates Spike Near High Voltage Power Lines,” we meet a woman who knew “the metal switchbox outside her apartment window… was the very voice box of God,” and “ …felt God’s voice thrum around the rims of teacups, pulse along the floorboards’ crease.” As she lies on her bed awaiting her reward, the story breaks from prose into stanza, and the narrative distills into electrified testimony: [She felt]

God’s voice
sizzle in her teeth, she felt
God’s voice surge
down the wire
of her spine, and
God’s voice gather
in the satellite
saucers of her knees…

Rauk uses the same split in “Heartbone (I),” this time in the form of a wistful reverie, a poetic escape amidst a meal with repellent company. She has the ability to create micro-dramas with minimal context but tremendous tension, maintaining a visceral connection to the human dynamic in its many guises.

There are startling transitions in poems with such concrete titles as “Blood Orange,” “Basil,” and “After Cooking with Turmeric.” Each encounter is a journey that transcends culinary expectations. In the first, the poet asks: “Is this a fruit, / a wound, a lover?” In the last, an act of intimacy is savored as a synesthetic repast: “Now / we are opening / vaulted windows / to a sunlight of bees, / a thousand burnished / throats.”

Ultimately, there is a great deal of longing in the poems in Basil, desire entwining with ambiguity, seeking reason or redemption. In “Vignette,” enchantment and superstition take hold in a ritual for a woman wishing for motherhood. Rauk writes, “…so she tied a cucumber to her waist. // Cucumber vines crept beyond / the edges of the garden plot / like sticky fingers swiping from the sweet jar.” In “Heartbone II,” the poet/narrator seeks discovery in the intricate parts of herself—“My nub, my sweetness, my buried / bruise. My blue note and knotted / fruit stone, my blood knocking at the edge / of known…” By presenting an inventory of tactile and temporal elements (“root bits and flesh / snips, snarls of hair that won’t let loose. Made of loss, made of juice…”), she wonders if her own personhood will fully emerge among the sum of her parts. This speaks to the poet’s earnest process in each work in Basil, a hunt for the self within the confounding yet comforting sensory-tangled world.