Luminous Book: A Review of Maura High’s The Garden of Persuasions by Angele Ellis

cover credit: Jacar Press

The Garden of Persuasions by Maura High
Jacar Press 2013

Reviewed by Angele Ellis

Maura High’s life and work have brought her from Wales to Nigeria and North Carolina, but her poems focus on ordinary, if intense, moments that reflect her interest in Asian poetry and Zen Buddhism. For example, High merges the commonplace incident of a bird’s fatal flight into a picture window with the infinity of disappearance, as of human airplane passengers, in “Exemplary Statements, with Meanings and Annotations.” This small death provides a glimpse into a great mystery:

…A bead
of blood leaking from its beak

To be flying in that blue
and then suddenly to be going

(we say, as if there were
some place to go to) and then gone

Each poem’s title in The Garden of Persuasions (winner of the Jacar Press 2013 Chapbook Contest) is taken from a bibliography of ancient Chinese works and commentaries. In fact, the book’s title poem bears the name of a story collection compiled during the Han Dynasty (1st century BCE). Along with the brushstrokes of the cherry tree branches in Jinxiu Alice Zhao’s cover illustration and the four ideographs that translate the title page, this decision underscores High’s subtle yet rich artistic technique.

High’s repeated use of brief lines—three to seven syllables—and her strong relationship to nature make her images as vivid as haiku. Her juxtaposition of short lines with longer lines in couplets, tercets, and one-line stanzas, as well as her frequent omission of punctuation brings an almost breathless tension to such poems as “Grand Mystery, with Collected Commentaries,” in which the reader feels as much as sees a snake’s entrance into water. As High describes the scene, it is almost as if the reader has become the alien creature:

A long brown snake
scribbled downslope

and slipped into the water without a splash

The pond sealed over as if
nothing had happened

but something did happen…

Even when High’s imagination travels to Ghana, inspired by an artist who makes works from ocean debris, her female beachcomber remains aloof and solitary, caught in the act of gathering essential to any form of creation. In “New Account of Tales of the World,” the artist’s movements become a dance set to an inaudible tune:

…but hers
is a private music—you see it

in her gait and how she bends
and turns and when she stops
to pluck at the strings of a net…

In more than one poem, High seamlessly shifts her attention to the inner world of a child, observed with precise detail—as for example, during the classes that High teaches when she isn’t writing. In “Writings for Elementary Instruction, two young students have very different responses to the national suicide prevention program To Write Love on Her Hands, which gives High a beautiful opportunity to play with her classic sensibility in contemporary time. The speaker attends to her task as the children do to theirs:

The boy wrote in cursive
inside the penciled outline

of his hand Pittsburgh Steelers
and looks over to his sister

who is copying the word LOVE
backward inside her smaller hand

…

her word, in a space she chooses
among the other hands on the poster

as a gardener slips in a flower
and tamps the earth around it

This fragile flower of love is transformed into a riot of weeds in the chapbook’s title poem. High finds both lushness and stubborn humanity in “…sorrell and chickweed / moss, bluets, onion grass… their arguments as manifold as ours / as stemmed and rooted.” With delicate irony (“…They seem harmless, a gift / from some time before Eden”) she unfolds their glorious—or insidious—tenacity:

…it can take years
for one to make its point

to seed or spread by root
or spore or runner, to crowd

or shade out competitors
a garden cultivating itself

The parallels that High draws between the flawed natural world and the flawed human world become strikingly interchangeable in High’s “Luminous Book,” in which the essence of dying autumn leaves seems to enter the speaker’s library and mingles with the pages of her volumes. As she describes the moment:

The leaves stop breathing and turn
the colors of clay, casting

a russet light across the room

on all my books, their lacunae,
errors, subplots ramifying in all directions …

Here—as elsewhere in The Garden of Persuasions—High’s poetic concentration creates a charged and mystical space. To read Maura High’s work with the careful attention it deserves is to enter a world in which every object is sacred, and to feel, with the speaker, a holy awe at the power inherent in the simple act of handling a book. High ends “Luminous Book” on a note of meditative exhilaration:

…I could take down any one at random
and open it, and bow to the light

emitted by its pages

Bittersweet Blossoms: A Review of Sara Henning's A Sweeter Water by Sally Deskins

cover credit: Lavender Ink

A Sweeter Water by Sara Henning

Lavender Ink (2013)

Reviewed by Sally Deskins

Sara Henning’s second poetry collection, A Sweeter Water, is a tough read. As the title suggests, there is a sweeter place out there, and this unsweetened story is about a woman struggling to find it. Much of the poetry collection involves nature with a keen sense of Earth and country. But it takes a few pages to get under the skin of this book and begin to understand what is going on, which is the relationship of the narrator and her father. Henning presents a child’s point of view in the first section and then quickly comes of age after a tragic incident. Readers experience the narrator’s world through her eyes as she literally looks up to her father.

The first piece presents perhaps the happiest moment of the book, “Birthday,” with brief imagery presenting philosophical queries, and intimate foreshadowing for the somber story ahead. Henning writes:

To be a self is to be an incompletion, a yearning for parts…

The day your father looks in your eyes and says daughter is your first birthday.

His eyes the minute they go out, the candles blown.

The poems that commence the collection are abstract, dark, and sometimes disturbing. For example, “How We Love” tells of a python eating a leopard cub, but somehow Henning brings it all back to love:

…Even the leopard carried the cub’s body to a field close to her den, chewed it tenderly to pieces, swallowed each down. Even I still look for your effigy everywhere, practice your body until it is raw susurration, burned not by my throat but my heart. Which of us stays at her guttural refrain for days, though our love was never so close to our hunger? What is love but a set of urges?

Themes about animals and the body further interweave as the narrator delves graphically deeper into existential dilemmas, such as in “Three Themes on Rescue.” As she tries to save a hen found lying on the side of the road, readers see her love of animals and tender spirit, her deep yearning for saving something from death, and the sadness of her past:

I held her still
when she brooded,
cloaca tight with the next
egg’s clench and spasm,
imagining my mother
on the bathroom floor,
blood from the miscarriage
like urine staining
the animal’s tail,
Father three weeks dead.

Direct emotion is displayed in “How She Loves Me,” a standout piece where the raw despair of experiencing a paternal suicide is realized through her relationship with her mother. Henning explains:

…so I’d learn to want her apology pressed onto
my heart like a spray of oleander, on it the words
sunder, daughter, bitter indictment, something to hold
at the end of my sorrow: sorry he left us without flowers.
Sorry he’s never coming back.

Readers further witness the narrator’s troubled adolescence as she seems to grow up in an instant. Her body continues to play a strong role as she grasps at the living. This is powerfully stated in “Lost Things.” Henning writes:

…all these failed translations that feed my mind and not my heart. The tom was cold when I touched my face to his fur; my brother is marrying a woman I have never spoken to, and yet this urge is here to name things which I am not: hen’s wing ripped off by a dog, mother burning my childhood on a pyre, childhood expunged from my body like a struggling sack of sugar.

She comes of age in “Adolescence,” a stellar rendition of the wretchedness of age thirteen, especially in her state, with poignant visualizations. She states:

I tried to read their futures
from the tealeaves of their broken hearts,
beer stolen from neighbor’s basement coolers,
cigarettes dangling between slim, shaking fingers,
where could they situate
the blank slate before a boy (which boy)
could bruise them, is it redemption
in the liberty of being left out past curfew,
longing for a future
that won’t martyr them silently

Moving and despairing realizations during intimate moments reveal her anguish of “the hinge between girlhood and womanhood exchanging masks. And through sleepovers and her first kiss, readers experience how much the narrator’s body is interwoven in girlhood and becoming a woman, and how heartbreak can impact relationships. But there is hope toward the end of the collection with “Glass Negative” and the last piece, “To Speak of Dahlias.” The narrator allows deep and sad reflection on her childhood, adolescence, her body, past relationships, and the present. She writes:

…
instead of howl—buried them
until frost became
dahlia blossom,
luminous material
growing from earth
that once burned.
 *
“And I’m left with dahlias,
deluges, ladder to nowhere
but the sky.”

These metaphors of “howling” as perhaps crying, and the beautiful flowers growing from the earth that “once burned” suggests that through it all, reaching bottom, there is nowhere to go but up. So ends Henning’s truly raw and telling account of one woman’s life through parental struggles and her own as she deals with the regular struggles of adolescence, relationships and life’s meanings. Through intimate relationships with nature, animals, and the body, readers witness and recognize an important exploration and elaboration of extremely intense sides of life.  A Sweeter Water is a welcome, albeit complex, introduction to Henning’s work.

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 Queen's Man: A Review of Laura Madeline Wiseman's Queen of the Platform by Sally Deskins

cover credit: Anaphora Literary Press

Queen of the Platform by Laura Madeline Wiseman

Anaphora Literary Press (2013)

Reviewed by Sally Deskins

Poet Laura Madeline Wiseman burrowed through hundreds of historic newspapers, three books, and letters, poems, and hymns while researching her great-great-great-grandmother, Matilda Fletcher Wiseman (1842-1909). Although “a photograph of Matilda has yet to be found,” the author introduced us to her kin in Men And Their Whims. With Queen of the Platform, Wiseman lets readers in deeper with the 19th century lecturer, suffragist, and poet, as well as Wiseman herself. With her graceful rhythmic flare, and real and imagined homey narrative, she presents upended views of the meaning of equality via the men around her suffragist ancestor in the time before women could vote.

In Men and Their Whims, readers see deep insight into the relationship between Wiseman and her brother, Civil War veteran and accused murderer George Felts (1843-1921), as well as her first husband, John Fletcher. But in Queen of the Platform, readers see more of Matilda through her second husband, Wiseman’s great-great-grandfather, minister Albert Wiseman.

Readers peruse Matilda’s first meeting with Albert in “A Door Opens.” He is seen as a “doorway of light,” which foreshadows his heartening presence. In “Prothalamion,” the title refers to a poem by Edmund Spenser, composed for the twin marriage of the daughters of the Earl of Worcester. Although Albert Wiseman does not become married to two women, perhaps his two marriages are to Matilda the woman and to her speaking career. She writes:

“Do you wonder

that when you travel alone
whether he will light the lamp,

clip the paper headlined
by Matilda Fletcher,
and wait
for the distant roar,

for a whistle
to pierce the night?

Don’t wonder. He will.
His heart is man.”

As the story continues, we observe Matilda as a professional woman before women could vote. She asks herself honest and still resonant queries in “Votes for Women:” “Who deserves rights? Which of us gets to be fully human? ...Which doors are shut to women? ...What do I want to do?”

Matilda’s active spirit is risen again as she dines with Susan B. Anthony in “Traveling with Luminaries with Friends,” wherein the author takes readers on a dreamy spin, as many-a-women have wished to dine with their heroes. She writes: “…She squeezed my hand. / I felt myself go pink as I thought of my talent / for the platform, my ambition, this life I chose. / I squeezed hers and said, I’m adding my voice.”

The anticipation and excitement for the cause mounts with “A Spirited Lecture.” Wiseman writes: “Equal Rights Party delegate meeting to nominate their presidential candidate, Victoria Woodhull, New York, May Day, 1872.” And readers feel the thrill as the author describes the sounds, garb, the moment the first woman was nominated for president: “All arms lifted in the call to her, Victoria! A country girl / turned millionaire, Victoria! A Wall Street Broker, Victoria! / / A leader who listened to voices, Victoria! A namesake / of victory, Victoria!”

Perhaps the most striking poems of the book come from the last personable pieces that read as though they are written from the author’s point of view, and instill feminist mutual support. In “Speaking to My Dead: Matilda Fletcher Wiseman” she movingly questions her own research, echoing that of Matilda’s previous own questioning and self-actualization. She asks:

“Will the dead hear me, Matilda, if I call? Will you?
...
You patented a traveling trunk for women. You wrote bills
passed into law. All of your brothers served in the war
….
You’ve been dead a hundred years. I begin this search for you.”

Wiseman then collages descriptions of Matilda in “Spell for Appearances: Clipped Notes on Matilda” and “Charms Against Critics: Contradicting Opinions,” exemplifying the cyclical nature of politics, sexism in media, and hearsay. Too, the ever-diligent life of a professional woman in “II. Judge Hilton and the Women’s Hotel” is displayed as doors literally open and close for Matilda. Wiseman describes:

“…Lady physicians couldn’t
Have libraries in their rooms. Lady artists couldn’t have
Easels. Lady musicians couldn’t have instruments.
…
Sheesh, she hated to kneel to any man for charity.
…
It isn’tLike a kingdom. But if it were, he’d never be selected as King.”

Ironically or considerably, then, the author claims a man as Matilda’s main support system—as almost the reason for her strength and contentment: “a good husband.” For example, in  “III. Secrets, Spells and Love”:

“Her neighbors seethed. She had an enchanting disposition
and a good husband. Wise woman! All this, her secret.”

In the 1960s, a feminist slogan was preached widely: “Behind every great man there is a great woman.” With Queen of the Platform, Wiseman suggests that there is a great man behind—and moreover, beside—each great woman. In “A Memory of Trains, of His Consumption,” she explains: “Is man an angel? / —mine were, Al, John, Geo.” Again, Wiseman challenges perceptions of feminism and justice, with her poignant and heartfelt writing via the perspective of the inspiring Matilda and the men around her, whose “names are written in water / and this history is all that we have / rippling between us” (“The History Between Us”). These lost stories of strength and endurance are brought to life as echoes through Wiseman herself: “I write to you” (“Speaking to My Dead: Matilda Fletcher Wiseman”). 

The Grass Was the Country: A Review of Sandy Longhorn’s The Girlhood Book of Prairie Myths by Angele Ellis

cover credit: Jacar Press

The Girlhood Book of Prairie Myths by Sandy Longhorn

Jacar Press, 2013

Review by Angele Ellis

As I looked about me I felt that the grass was the country, as the water is the sea. The red of the grass made all the great prairie the colour of winestains, or of certain seaweeds when they are first washed up. And there was so much motion in it; the whole country seemed, somehow, to be running. ―Willa Cather, My Antonia

In her second full-length collection (winner of the Jacar Press 2013 Full Length Book Contest), Sandy Longhorn reanimates Cather’s prairie—a fierce, enchanted landscape that becomes as fully realized as the people who inhabit, fight, and succumb to it. Like the dreamy and defiant girls of her fairy tales and myths, Longhorn’s prairie—an anthropomorphic presence, half-human, half-monster—seems to be running, as in “Fairy Tales for Girls in Love with Fire”:

…The horizon

caught fire and the eldest girl fell

for the smell of smoke, craved the heat

of flame and ember. Every adult tried

to hold her back from running toward

the leaping fervor… (38)

All four elements (fire, earth, wind, and water) contribute to the seduction and destruction of Longhorn’s yearning “girls,” in the throes of adolescent angst intensified by the isolation of Longhorn’s personified prairie, and by the patriarchs and matriarchs who abide by its harsh rules. In “Cautionary Tale for Girls Kept Underground in Summer,” a girl abandoned in a “clammy” basement by parents who “had lives to live / in the heat above the ground” becomes part of the earth itself:

…curled in upon herself, her fingers digging, digging

at the crack until she could slip her hands closer

to the dirt. They found her there, immovable,

her limbs tangled in the dense bed of roots, her speech

the foreign tongue of all things planted. (2)

And in “Fairy Tale for Girls Enthralled by the Storm,” “a girl who loved the prairie wind,” and whose father is “unnerved / by the way she smiled like a woman” bides her time until a season of tornadoes provides her with an otherworldly means of escape:

 …One night she slipped from bed and walked

into the rain. She took her place on that slight rise,

called out, was ready to be lifted and transformed. (35)

Longhorn’s precise language, alliterative lyricism, and masterful use of rhyme schemes ground her poems, making their fantastic endings both plausible and moving. Another technique that Longhorn uses brilliantly is the repetition of certain words in her titles and poems, including fairy, tale, cautionary, map, cartography, saint, girl(s). This repetition draws the reader into Longhorn’s spell—as when reading a book of fairy tales—transforming Longhorn’s stories into the reader’s.

Perhaps no story is complete without blood, and without the bloodlines that connect us to the artist’s past, as well as to our own. In “Midwest Nursery Tales,” a fox kills a girl who wanders heedlessly into a ripe field of alfalfa:

…all they found

were her shoes and a patch of blood-red

poppies. Each year those flowers bloomed

no matter how deeply they tilled the soil. (5)

In “It Matters, the Kind of Wound,” “poppies & chilies” bloom from a soil whose accumulated blood “…seeps and stains, marking a new / navigational point—a compass rose, / useless to the one who bled it.” (9)

Bloodlines become particularly poignant in the last of this book’s four sections, “Cartography as Elegy,” which moves from feminist mythmaking to speak more directly of life and death. Armed with “…a map of my home well folded, / creased along gossamer bloodlines” (“Autobiography as Cartography”) (53), Longhorn explores her family history. Throughout “In the Delicate Branches,” she traces her grandmother and mother’s decline:

            …Strong bones and a healthy body

           

can only take a person so far. At some point the heart

has to do its own bidding. At some point you

have to admit that the wolf guards the door. (55)

The mortality of her elders leads the poet to the realization that she may be the last branch of her family tree, in “Choosing Not to Bear”:

…Now, as the hourglass of my womb empties,

I refuse to turn

the moonlight sands

on end again…

           

yet my empty womb is a bursting star…

                      Meanwhile, my mother

lines her life with the silver and gold

            of her last,

                                  her starburst daughter… (56)

As Willa Cather’s “starburst daughter[s]” (in Longhorn’s phrase) rise from the prairie waves to seek and find personal and professional freedom—or in some cases, to be tragically pulled under—so do Sandy Longhorn’s. As Cather makes her “running” prairie the archetypical American heartland, reaching far beyond regionalism to capture the imagination and sympathy of a wide audience, so does Sandy Longhorn in The Girlhood Book of Prairie Myths. 

Searching for Permanence: A Review of Jacar Press's What Matters by Marc Sheehan

cover credit: Jacar Press

What Matters

Jacar Press, 2013

Reviewed by Marc Sheehan

Jacar Press set out to bring together poets to speak about topics core to their being—a truly admirable task. Because if poets can’t address what matters, why spend the time forging one hundred well-crafted poems?

           

It’s a high bar to set, and What Matters largely succeeds in clearing that bar. 

Almost all of the writers, according to their bios, have some connection to the South, and particularly to North Carolina, Jacar Press’s home state. Despite that, What Matters does not, for the most part, read as a collection of southern poems. However, some of its best poems deal with race, an issue by no means exclusively southern but one that is inescapably associated with the notion of “southerness.”

           

For example, in her very fine poem about the legacy of Emmett Till, “Perpetua Holdings Inc.,” Rebecca Black writes:

                        I wanted to stop writing about the South,

                        but then the mother possum and her babies skittered

                        out of the casket lined with shredded satin, its glass lid heavy

                        and still unbroken—Emmett’s first casket left rotting

                        in a shed by some gravediggers and their office manager

                        who’d pocketed the funds donated for its preservation.

Black’s poem is followed by Michael White’s “Coup.” Set in Wilmington, N.C., the poem continues Black’s exploration of how the present is haunted by the past. A walk along the banks of Cape Fear becomes a meditation on the racially-charged Wilmington Insurrection of 1898.  The poem ends:

                        One of the last men killed that night was killed

                        right here, on Water Street. Two white men claimed

                        an unnamed black had “sassed” them. Therefore they shot him;

                        therefore they “toss his body off the dock,”

                        where fathers & daughters ramble, & lovers talk,

                        & everyone loves to go for an evening walk.

In this same vein is Joe Mills’s slyly effective “My Daughter Continues to be Annoyed by George Washington,” in which the poet offers to keep his daughter’s allowance so she won’t be sullied by money bearing the slave-owning president’s portrait. “I saw the struggle, the realization / that this wasn’t how it should be, how it is,” Mills writes. 

           

In addition to strong poems about race, there are wonderful odes to place, family members, life-partners, and nature, among other objects of desire. However, a couple of the finest pieces are characterized less by their subject matter than the sheer joy of language they employ. Tony Morris’s “Night Time Closes In” is one long sentence in praise of—among other things—automotive repair. It begins:

                        Kenny popped his head above the hood and yelled

                        over the roar to shut the engine down

                        because the timing wasn’t right and as the night

                        pressed in we know we’d need to cap the headers

                        with a muffler or the cops would soon be called

                        and nothing killed a buzz like quitting on a rebuild

What matters here, more than anything else, is language that rushes along more powerfully than “…a 327 cubic inch, bored 30 over, high- / torque cam lobe, [with] Headman Hedders…” 

Equally compelling is Al Maginnes’s “Love Song for Electricity,” which has the wonderfully Baby-Boomerish lines:

                        For the kool aid, the strobe, the nightmare wash

                                    of black light, for the tape and the tape loop,

                        for the recordings and the gaps in recordings,

                                    how different would this present be without you?

More than others in this collection, these two poems manage not just to reflect and meditate upon what matters, but also to embody and luxuriate in it. As Archibald MacLeish so famously wrote, “A poem should not mean / But be.” There’s no denying these poems’ striving to mean. If anything, it’s their being, their existence on the page, that is not fully realized. Although this is a good anthology, a few different editorial decisions could have made it even better.

Holding the anthology back is a lack of context. Although I admire gathering poems about essential things, What Matters comes across as overly broad. Poems are often grouped thematically, and it would have been better for this to be more overt—for the groups to be in discreet sections focusing on themes of family, place, etc. In addition, incorporating white space to create breathing room between the sections would have given readers a moment to re-group and re-focus.

Also, though lengthy introductions and forewords are usually unnecessary, here the single-page editorial text could definitely have been longer to single out some of the themes and perhaps individual poems. Although a poem has to stand (or fall) on its own, some editorial insights would have helped the book’s cohesion. Additionally, it is unclear whether the editors took regional affiliation into consideration when making their selections because a few international poets are represented, which drives home the fact that meaning exists within different cultural contexts. Knowing more about the editorial process and expectations would have helped make those contexts clearer.

Overall, What Matters is an ambitious collection of poems whose goal could have been even more fully realized. But whatever its shortfalls, the anthology brings together both accomplished and emerging poets to remind us that words do matter, that they point to things and events beyond themselves, and are not an end unto themselves.

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.

Lyrical Calls to the Feral Spirit: A Review of Jen Karetnick's Landscaping for Wildlife by Mindy Kronenberg

cover credit: Big Wonderful Press

Landscaping for Wildlife

Jen Karetnick

Big Wonderful Press, 2012

Review by Mindy Kronenberg

Landscaping for Wildlife seeks to reconcile the forces of the natural world with human nature. It uses various poetic forms (including villanelle, pantoum, and sestina) to create observations that are rich and nearly ritualized in their music and lyricism. Jen Karetnick’s poems capture the domestic and untamable sensibility (or one could even say conceit) that resides inside us as we witness scenarios of encroachment—whether of the wild on the familiar, or vice versa.

Panic and tenderness intermingle in “Echolalia,” where a baby’s cries from colic (“Back arching, her legs point into pitchforks, / Stabbing my ribs as we rock and walk.”) are echoed by peacocks. The lines of the poem are styled as its own mirror to call back the night’s shrill events, beginning and ending with the harsh call of the birds. Fear and humor come into play in “Interview with My Son before Snorkling,” and despite visions of Shark Week on the Discovery Channel and the poet’s memory of the movie Jaws—she sees “…a dorsal tipping / every wave"—and watches as her son collects underwater treasures. It is a remarkably poignant moment, summoning the sting of parental detachment:

For brief seconds on his own he collected brain coral,
observed eels scooting under rocks, and I wondered

as all mothers wonder if this is the one I’ll be allowed
to keep, before he finned up from behind to slip into mine

his growing, shriveled hand, that once-familiar
fish swimming in the oceanic eddies of my body

“A Gesture,” like “New England Music Camp,” brings together the transformative power of nature’s pageantry and personal transformation, creating memories that are both intimate and celebratory. In the first poem, a display of dolphins acts as a backdrop to the act of handholding (“…glistening fins and clouds, / light striking on every surface, / his fingers grazed mine, / withdrew, then came shyly to rest.”).  In the second, a sensual rhythm vibrates in the landscape while a young choir sings (“In the sticky sap, / the glacial lake’s mercury / licks at rocky lips. // The groove underscored, / released by an hour’s taut / and stretch, the choir / eclipses this song—”).

An ecological conscience in world’s wilderness beset by human development pervades many of these works, maintaining an eerie beauty amidst the danger. In “Love Poem for the Purple Gallinate,” the bird of the title is heralded in its glossy, abundant environment of the glades. But it is at risk when losing its life mate, diminishing it to a stain: “and should one die, the other will too, become no more than / a freckle of sunspot like the sheen on the surface of oil.” “The Sound of Global Warming: Brief Renku with Myself” is equally haunting:

I.
Traffic rushes by
Like one thousand rivers fed
By icecaps melting.

II.
All night, Iguanas
Thud to the ground like mangos.
Inside, they’re awake.

In visions mythic and modern, concise and elaborate, Karetnick’s poems become a collective cautionary tale. They capture beauty among caveats, dazzling the reader with scenes and images that too suddenly slip from our view.

Seeking Fellow Travelers: A Review of R. A. Voss's We Never Travel Alone by Brigette Bernagozzi

cover credit: CreateSpace Publishing

We Never Travel Alone by R. A. Voss
CreateSpace Publishing (2013)

Reviewed by Brigette Bernagozzi

R. A. Voss’s essay collection, We Never Travel Alone, has been accurately billed as an all-in-one book that nonfiction readers with tight schedules and chaotic lives always seek. And, indeed, it is a mixture of “Travel/Nature/Memoir/History,” as the book’s back cover proclaims.

The introduction is less elegant than the rest; its earnest hopes for the reader to learn something from its pages gives an appearance of a thesis proposal. However, each chapter is well-crafted and inviting. Some are suspenseful, like “Buttermilk Road” with its opening confession: “Something happened that day … Something I never told anyone.” A few offer humor, including the tongue-in-cheek opening to an insomnia chapter: “Will I get lucky tonight?”

At the heart of each chapter, Voss invites readers to travel the world with her as she charts geographical locations such as the Anne of Green Gables historic site on Canada’s Prince Edward Island, her ancestors’ hometown in northern Germany, and her brother’s archaeological dig site in Israel. And that’s before factoring in the Iowa landscape where she was raised. But not all of Voss’s travels feature traditional globetrotting. Her chapter “My Solitary Journey to the Deep” leads readers into the realms of deep sleep. Or, more accurately, into the no man’s land that lies on the other side of a good night’s slumber—one disrupted by blaring alarm clocks, a snoring husband, and the near-constant urge to pee. And in “Bragging Rights,” Voss shows both literal and metaphorical journeys when strains of discord emerge during a boat trip with her then-husband.

Voss raises the stakes in her devastating chapter “Disruptions.” Here, during a visit to observe nesting birds, she refers frequently to the work of Rachel Carson, famed author of Silent Spring—the book that first revealed to the masses potential complications linked with the widespread use of the insecticide DDT. Carson’s work crops up during Voss’s discussion of “environmental endocrine disrupter chemicals” and the devastation they once caused the mating rituals of bald eagles. Readers witness these difficulties in the natural world through the eyes of a woman who hopes to experience motherhood but whose natural cycles, much like those of the eagles she seeks to protect, have been thwarted. In an example of the author’s seamless transition between the personal and the global, she confides:

“I have missed feeling their first kicks inside my womb. I have missed feeling their soft warmth nestled against my chest. I have missed their sticky faces and their muddy little hands. I have missed my unborn children each time a child of one of my friends, born near the time one of mine would have been born, passes through any of the milestones that mark a child’s journey through life” (127).

Naturally, the memoir label applies to this book due to reflective passages like this one, as well as several chapters regarding the author’s childhood in Iowa. In “The Road to Recovery,” a chapter that braids her grandparents’ lives with the economics of the Great Depression, she offers this commentary on present-day Iowa:

“One can take a drive through the countryside in any county in Iowa and find the landscape still dotted with now-defunct windmills standing like sentries over the land” (59).

Here, as in many other places in We Never Travel Alone, Voss’s practiced eye and straightforward yet imaginative prose allow readers to find beauty in a seemingly wasted landscape.

All in all, Voss’s collection of dazzling journeys is impressive in its scope. Although constantly surrounded by appealing locals and fellow travelers, she manages to craft a series of thoughtful meditations on a diverse array of places. Whether ruminating on a surprising act of violence in a Buddhist monastery or exploring notions of motherhood during a road trip to visit nesting eagles, Voss proves a thoughtful tour guide and, most importantly, a worthy companion for any armchair traveler.

A Possible Decency: A Review of Diane Raptosh's American Amnesiac by Marc Sheehan

cover credit: Etruscan Press

American Amnesiac by Diane Raptosh
Etruscan Press (2013)

Reviewed by Marc Sheehan

Over the past several months, the United States (or parts of it, at least) has crossed a number of sociological, political, and historical divides—think marriage equality legislation and marijuana legalization, for starters. However, for me, two events stand out: the re-election of President Barack Obama and the death of noted poet and feminist Adrienne Rich. What the two have in common is that they both rose to the top of their respective paths without the support of—and even the active opposition of—white males. Rich’s power and recognition grew as the power of white males in the United States declined, and President Obama won both his national elections without support from the majority of white males.

Enter American Amnesiac, Diane Raptosh’s wonderful, ambitious, and timely book of poems that was recently a National Book Award nominee. At the center of American Amnesiac is Calvin Rinehart, a former financier (“I plumped / for Goldman Sachs) from Denver who wakes up with amnesia. In an act of self-reinvention, Rinehart adopts the generic name John Doe, which he has been given by the authorities, the media, and the denizens of the blogosphere:

                                        Bloggers from across the world
predict What ‘happened’ to Cal Rinehart will become widespread

if ID cards fall into currency: round-the-globe government-controlled
            DNA database hubs. A mug’s game! A blunt kick in the khakis!

In these poems, Rinehart/Doe spends as much time and emotional energy piecing together the world around him as he does trying to reconstruct his past. Culture, Rinehart/Doe discovers, both liberates us from ourselves and imprisons us in its expectations:

                                                                 We can’t
ask what we are without asking when, within which mixes, how

weighted, and who’s strung up in we.

Raptosh gives her character a Hobson’s choice: He can either remain untethered from a culture that gave him privilege at the expense of others, or he can re-enter that culture and forgo the redemption he found through having his memory erased. Or maybe there’s a third choice: take the best of the past, jettison the rest, and move forward. Raptosh’s white male protagonist combines longing, regret, remorse, self-discovery, and reinvention in just the right proportions. Of course, it is ironic that Rinehart/Doe has the ability to start over precisely because he is a white male of means, a status which he tries to renounce.

Most of American Amnesiac is written in a loose form of the ghazal—a traditional Arabian/Persian poetic form Rich also explored in her “Ghazals: Homage to Ghalib.” In Raptosh’s hand, the form becomes more narrative and the associative leaps—for which the form is known—stretch further across the couplets, creating a tug between epiphany and narrative. Although, sometimes, the juxtapositions appear faster and put Doe’s predicament into sharper focus:

I recall the end of Rinehart’s last consulting phase
as if it were Lisette’s first look.

At each momentous stage of his life, a Sioux Indian earns a new name.
Jumping Badger landed the tag Sitting Bull on killing his first bison.

Unfriend was just dubbed word of the year.
The name’s John Doe, and I’m just lying doggo here on wheezing earth.

When Adrienne Rich won the Yale Younger Poets Award in 1951, few people felt the United States was on the path of becoming a country that would embrace marriage equality and an African American president. What these poems do best is to synthesize our experience—both intellectually and emotionally—and try to make sense out of the cacophony. Like Rich, Raptosh sees a changed world, and the poems in American Amnesiac point with a “spine of possible decency” toward it.

Writing the Rhythms of Our Lives: A Review of Margo Taft Stever's The Hudson Line by Mindy Kronenberg

cover credit: Main Street Rag Publishing

The Hudson Line by Margo Taft Stever
Main Street Rag Publishing Company (2012)

Review by Mindy Kronenberg

The passing of Irish poet Seamus Heaney has sparked numerous conversations, in both print and on the Internet, of how his work’s significance was due in part to its strong connection to the lives of determined and vulnerable citizens. He was described as a poet who capably expressed “the rhythms of ordinary lives,” by delving beneath domestic pantomime and finding an inner darkness or hope. Similarly, Margo Taft Stever’s The Hudson Line summons the stories of citizens along the route of a suburban commuter train—privilege providing little protection from the chaos that enters lives without warning. It is a haunting ride filled with longing, rage, fear, and a determination to find the right words to share the stories of one’s life.

Stever’s characters and scenarios are startling and evocative, capable of rousing panic while they plumb the emotional interiors of pending violence. Like parables, they are partly reportage and partly out of time, nearly magical in their lyrical narratives. For example, in a scene of marital carnage, a wife is driven to murder to protect her children. With chilling intimacy, she is transformed (“Splitting Wood”):

The wild moon foamed at the mouth.
The wild moon crept softly at her feet.

The arms that grabbed the ax
were not her own,
that hugged it to her heart

while he slept were not hers,
the cold blade sinking in his skin.

In “House Raising,” the vestiges of rigorous indoor children’s play result in a furious husband admonishing his wife. Her recollection of the children’s games becomes metaphorical for how creating a homestead (“…houses out of cushions, / intricate cities and roads / out of rugs and blocks,…”) can dissolve into stains and frayed remnants underfoot.

“The Worst Mother” and “Step-Mother” play upon fairy tale perceptions of failure and fright in the maternal dynamic. The first lists affectionate ritual (“Playing music / for you before / you were born,...”) and the suffering of a child’s illness (“The night you gagged / and choked up shreds… / I comforted you). The latter poem unleashes a litany of brutal powers (“The step-mother’s fangs lengthen / in moonlight.”) as well as the curse of circumstance (“A step-mother is always evil, / marked by the blood of her husband’s children. / She tries to climb into the other’s shoes).

Stever captures the complexity of what dwells beneath even the most cantankerous or hardened persona. In “Beulah Reid,” the “cruel nanny” taunts her charges with the sticks the children find outside (“Some are blunt, others sharp, / spring loaded. You twist them before us.”). She hisses at them “with damnation” and is reduced to an old broken woman with “…stocking pulled down over ankles, the corridors of your bulging / legs, your jutting veins…” who seeks the sedate strains of an old television show for elderly viewers. In an instant, the harridan is anyone’s aunt or grandmother, another transformation that mingles poignancy with pain.

The Hudson Line mixes cautionary tales with those of wonder and persistence (“The Quickening,” “Why So Many Poets Come from Ohio,” “Queen City”), and ignites the live wires of what ultimately makes us human. It is a testament to the poet’s empathy and grace, capturing the resilience and terrors of seemingly ordinary people.

Call for Book Reviews!

We’re opening submissions for book reviews!

As avid readers, we’re always on the hunt for a well-crafted book, be it overlooked or a new release. What should we read next? What book shouldn’t we have passed by on the shelf? And why? We’d love to know what you think about them! If you:

• have an in-depth review of an unknown author or a new release that may not receive the attention it deserves
• are a reviewer who’s looking for a new market
• want to try reviewing a different genre than what you normally write
• are knowledgeable and have fortes in specific genres

Then let us know! Please submit reviews to Weave by using our submissions manager. Emailed submissions will be ignored. If you are having trouble submitting, please contact Submittable support.

Please limit reviews to 500-800 words. We accept multiple submissions for chapbooks only for our Chapbook Roundup. Acceptable categories include all genres of fiction, poetry, chapbooks, and creative nonfiction. Please ensure that your selection follows Weave Magazine’s themes of diversity, community, and equality.

And, of course, if you’re an established reviewer and would like to join our reviews team, please contact our reviews editor, Nicole Bartley. Please include your name, contact information, a brief bio of yourself and your work, your estimated turnaround time for reading and writing reviews, 1-2 titles of work you’d like to review next, and a few samples.

We look forward to your submissions!

The Hectic Road to Compassion: A Review of Lorraine Lopez’s The Realm of Hungry Spirits by Nicole Bartley

cover credit: Hatchette Book Group

The Realm of Hungry Spirits by Lorraine Lopez

Grand Central Publishing (2011)

Review by Nicole Bartley

The Realm of Hungry Spirits by Lorraine Lopez is an overwhelming search for personal peace, for both characters and readers. Lopez drops readers into the main character’s varied and complex life, and readers will be compelled to learn how the drama unfolds and resolves—all in the span of two weeks. They may also reach for a bottle of wine just to tolerate the stress.

Marina Lucero is a middle-aged teacher who opens her home to friends and family members in need of shelter. Her unstable life becomes overrun with their troubles, such as her friend Carlotta who flees from an abusive husband, her nephew Kiko who is kicked out of his house, her little sister’s ex-fiancé Reggie who is grieving from their recent breakup and living with Marina for the time being, and her well-meaning but dimwitted ex-boyfriend Rudy and his blackmailing friend. Everyone turns to Marina because she is intelligent, reliable, and giving. To relieve her chaotic life, she relies on teachings from the Dalai Lama and Gandhi—teachings that play heavily into the overall plot.

But Marina—despite her good intentions, responsibility, propensity to care too much, and lofty spiritual goals—is an unreliable narrator amongst many unreliable characters. Her emotions can flip at least three times in one page, and she is subject more to rage and pheromones than the rationality she attempts to wield. Her loneliness gets the better of her more often than not, and readers are left wondering how one so intelligent can lack emotional follow-through.

Luckily, Lopez is deft at making readers quickly sympathize with Marina’s plight. From the first chapter, readers are bombarded with Marina’s troubles in order to quickly understand her anger, annoyance, and exhaustion: Her nephew starts a rap band one morning and by the evening, he’s acquired a small dog to train for fights and claims it’s his calling; a neighbor’s sister asks Marina to help her pack belongings but is caught in the act of trying to rob a former married lover; Marina’s younger sister dates and seduces anyone who might seem financially well-off; and an ex-boyfriend’s best friend threatens spiritual curses if Marina doesn’t follow the friend’s instructions concerning his custody deposition. The tribulations quickly pile atop Marina, and it’s a wonder she manages to keep everything in line.

Through numerous extreme situations and their resolutions, Lopez shows that everyone should be accepted and forgiven, despite their flaws. This, in the end, is the main lesson of the book: to recognize similarities, not differences, in others and accept them. This Buddhist method of compassion has a Christian correspondence: “God grant me the serenity to accept what I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

For example, when Marina’s harsh words about another man backfire, they open her eyes to one of the Dalai Lama’s true meanings behind his teachings. Lopez writes:

“I nod, my cheeks suffusing with heat. The Dalai Lama’s gentle face appears in my mind’s eye, his expression sharpening into disapproval, even disgust. Compassion, he writes, is built upon connections forged through recognizing similarities, not by fixating on differences and holding in contempt those who are different, as if they are lower than the self” (122-123).

Throughout the story, Marina seeks like minded people who are intelligent, responsible, and clean. Those who don’t fit these traits are usually met with consternation and impatience. It takes a small family to make her realize she’s been looking at compassion with the wrong perspective. She doesn’t often recognize the good in people around her until they shove it in her face. The passage above is a subtle turning point in the story—a eureka moment for her.

Although Marina’s internal world grounds the story, readers unfamiliar with Los Angeles may feel lost amidst the geographical references and the consistent use of Spanish in both narration and dialogue.  They may also wonder if life is really how she depicts it: poverty results in insanity and promiscuity, most men are too lazy to be responsible for anything, and most uneducated women are weak, selfish, and manipulative. It’s not a pretty rendering. Yet, most of the characters exhibit a moment of pure humanity, such as when an abusive husband reveals intense love and stand-offish teenagers show compulsions to please. If readers substitute their own neighborhoods for the one in Lopez’s novel, they might recognize themselves or the people around them. This returns readers to the aforementioned passage; there is always something that connects us to everyone else, and we must recognize that similarity and feed it in order to gain peace.

The Symphony and the Sorrow: A Review of Julie Marie Wade's Postage Due by Hillary Katz

cover credit: White Pine Press

Postage Due by Julie Marie Wade
White Pine Press (2013)

Review by Hillary Katz

Julie Marie Wade’s Postage Due is a familiar yet unique coming-of-age journey through prose poetry. By using varying form and perspective, Wade chronicles her girlhood with the masked but overriding wisdom of adult experience. She heavily references a number of literary, movie, and television characters and actors, including the disgraced Hester Prynne, the naïve Dorothy Gale, and the independent Mary Tyler Moore, as well as real-life people such as the author’s mother and despised dermatologist. Wade connects all of these people to her personal oppression, confusion, and maturation that follow central themes of burgeoning self-discovery and sexuality.

Much of the book consists of direct letters and postcards. Although these forms are effective in portraying the struggle and angst of the speaker, they often lack the linguistic musicality and surprise that separates poetry from prose. In fact, many of the direct letter poems, such as “Dear Mary Tyler Moore:” seem to be better suited for a young adult novel than a poetry collection due to their juvenile tone and sentiment. For example, Wade writes:

Well, I like to swear sometimes. It’s liberating. And I’ve sampled cigarettes, & I’ve gotten high a few times, & I don’t think it’s such a crime. (I certainly don’t think it’s evil.) And even though I’m probably never going to be a true bad-ass like Rizzo, I’m already way past Sandra Dee. Does that make sense? It’s like I just haven’t been able to experience so many things, & now I’m hungry (starving, actually) to get out & try everything.

Although the self-realization here is one that many people can relate to, the writing’s literal nature relates more to Judy Blume’s Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret than to a serious book of poetry.

This is not to say that the author is incapable of musicality and surprising language. More “grown-up” poems are interspersed throughout the book, including several religion-themed ones and a few ekphrastic poems. These sparser, “older” poems are a welcomed relief to the dominant teenage-torment-themed pieces. The uses of memory and seeing the self from an outsider’s perspective are well placed and presented in a lyrical, subtle way that creates mystery and intrigue for readers. For example, the book’s opening poem, “Aubade,” paints an imagistic picture of summer in Pittsburgh with an interestingly weighty tone. The speaker states, “I remember being born,” and ends with “Stay close. The earth is shaking / (or) / I see you, / even when / you’re hidden.”

A successful direct reference poem is “This Thing I Want, I Know Not What (A Correspondence with Mick Kelly).” The speaker’s imagined conversation with the protagonist of Carson McCullers’s The Heart is a Lonely Hunter cuts to the loneliness and confusion of adolescence in a refreshingly understated way. Wade writes, “Difference is the darkest word in this whole / hard language,” to explain the isolation felt by her younger self. In an exploration of her sexuality, the speaker reveals a surprising and intimate (presumably first-time) scene:

Under the pelt of his skin, I was hiding. I still
remember how heavy he was, rocking
from side to side. I didn’t want to be that kind of woman,
the kind that turns to sawdust in their hands.

The animalistic “pelt of his skin” portrays the rawness of inexperience, and the reflection of wanting something different than the stereotypical submissive female norm is important to the book’s central ideas—both for readers and for humanity as a progressive species steering away from gender rules.

The poem ends with the resonating line, “So this is the symphony then, this is the sorrow.” Truly, this line embodies the heart of Postage Due—the ongoing, essential process of discovering one’s self, and the strange juxtaposition of pain and beauty that inherently comes with it.

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.

Bittersweet Soup: A Review of Marsha Mehran's Pomegranate Soup by Nicole Bartley

cover credit: Random House, LLC.

Pomegranate Soup by Marsha Mehran is an intriguing narrative with a dash of wonder and one-too-many sprigs of enchantment. She gradually unfolds the co-dependent Aminpour sisters’ tale of evading mysterious pasts and a desperate attempt to establish a safe home in the small Irish town of Ballinacroagh. While there, Marjan, Bahar, and Layla rent a small cafe from an Italian landlady, Estelle, and introduce their secluded town to cultural cuisine. This results in both trusting friendships and despicable prejudices.

The Iranian, Irish, and Italian cultures are depicted only through language and food. Mehran created strong, distinct voices through realistic vernacular from Estelle and the Irish citizens. However the Aminpour sisters don’t present dialogue cadences. Instead, they use the same language structures as the narration: American. This could be an attempt to make the sisters as “normal” as possible for American readers and set them apart from other characters.

Mehran explores the sisters’ “otherness” further through their experiences with prejudice from the town gossip, close-minded society women, and the town bully. Although the sisters are never questioned about running a business without a man, the town (and author) focuses on their ethnicity. Among earlier instances of indirect prejudice, Bahar encounters hatred when she is angrily shunned by the butcher’s wife and men in a bar while trying to find Layla one evening.

“Something was very wrong here…. Something that went beyond the sad little curiosities of the old women in the butcher’s. Whatever she thought of that kind of small-mindedness, it was nothing compared to the bald hatred before her. It was an exclusion as foul as she had experienced in those scary early years in London, when the whole city was under alert of terrorist threats, and anyone who looked slightly foreign was watched with suspicion. Turning on her heels… Bahar pushed through the pub door, anxious to escape the dread that was rising in her chest. Just as the door slammed behind her, a sinister voice called out: ‘Go back to yer stinking camels!’ Raspy smokers’ laughs enveloped the rest of the smarting insult” (140).

The commonness of that insult connects with the characters, which mostly represent tropes. Bahar is fully developed and the overall story arc seems to center on her. Her abusive past resulted in mistrust of men, in addition to severe migraines triggered by fear and any conflict. She is constantly on edge, and her post-traumatic stress is enough to make readers want to hug her and hand her a bowl of abgusht and a cup of tea.

Because of this, readers will find common ground with Marjan. The narration follows her reliance on general kindness, food, and drinks as attempts to provide comfort. They also counteract her ineptitude of protecting and guiding her sisters. And, to ensure that they’re accepted in town, she uses her peculiar gift of making inspirational meals.

“Through her recipes, Marjan was able to encourage people toward accomplishments that they had previously thought impossible; one taste of her food and most would not only start dreaming but actually contemplate doing (78). … Evie and Fiona sat at one of the window-side tables now, each drinking her own bowl of red lentil soup as vague ruminations—prompted by Marjan’s magic—swam in their heads: Evie could see neon pink letters spelling out her name over the salon’s door, while Fiona imagined hers lighting up a theater marquee once again” (89).

But this relates to Mehran’s inability to remove excessive ingredients after her dish has been plated and served. Although Marjan’s cuisine provides a touch of magical realism, other poorly integrated fantastic elements cause hiccups. For example, Layla’s supernatural musk of cinnamon and rose is just enough for readers to suspend disbelief and enjoy the story. But Mehran unnecessarily explains the scent by killing the sisters’ mother in childbirth.

“Layla never knew her mother either, for she died shortly after pushing her out into the harsh world… The weary doctors in Tehran General Hospital had no explanation for the merciless bleeding and just shrugged with defeat when they told her father the news. They failed to mention that, as the last drops of blood seeped into the hospital’s sea green bedsheets, a tiny bud had popped out of his wife’s womb. When the flower seed fell into the pool of blood, it blossomed into the face of a full-grown rose. The fearful doctors kept this to themselves, partly to avoid a malpractice suit, and partly because the rosewater and cinnamon scent that accompanied the flower’s miraculous unfolding reminded them of a time when military guards did not hover behind every surgery room door” (29).

The background of the mother dying will gain readers’ sympathies, and it’s easy to believe that Layla’s natural musk is due to Marjan’s constant cooking with exotic spices. But a rosebud causing fatal hemorrhaging represents an elaborate need to appeal to readers, which tarnishes the story.

But Pomegranate Soup isn’t just a novel about family and finding a safe home; it is also, surprisingly, a cookbook. Each chapter is prefaced by recipes, and the rich descriptions of ingredients will make readers salivate. Overall, the novel provides enough intrigue and simplicity to keep readers turning pages without much thought. It will succeed when readers wonder if they, too, live in a provincial town that needs a bit of spice.

Review by Nicole Bartley

Pomegranate Soup by Marsha Mehran
Random House, 2005