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.

Again, Desire: A Review of Flower Conroy’s The Awful Suicidal Swans by Michael VanCalbergh

Cover Credit: Headmistress Press

The Awful Suicidal Swans by Flower Conroy
Headmistress Press

Reviewed by Michael VanCalbergh

Desire is the only way to describe the dominate subject of Flower Conroy’s The Awful Suicidal Swans. Words like “lust” and “craving” are too layered with judgement, which these poems quickly do away with, while “love” or “adoration” seem devoid of the physicality that connects all of them. Desire ends up the only adequate idea when considering how Conroy’s book confronts the violence and the unabashed joy of wanting another and being wanted by that person.

“In the Wolf’s Den * Gentlemen’s Club” starts the book by balancing the explicitly sexual and deeply emotional layers of desire. Conroy’s speaker ogles a woman stripping, even referring to her as “lamblike,” but immediately complicates this sexualizing by stating:

… You, in love,
on the playground, spinning April on the merry-
go-round, untamed laugh, poppy field of freckles,

head thrown back as the sky turned… They panted,
howled, wagged

By setting up the panting and howling of the crowd next to the image of a girl on a playground, Conroy challenges her readers to see these emotions as layered. Her poems explore more forbidden or out-of-reach aspects of desire in “Your Body the Unnameable Body.” This speaker imagines: “If I were on the other side of that steam-cloaked glass / with you, I would touch your edges” but states shortly afterward, “I am almost afraid of you.”

While her early poems address this tenuous area of wanting but not having, she also introduces the dangerous side of desire. In one poem, a shirtless man is on top of a woman in an abandoned meat factory with “Upside-down / ? hooks dangled / from the ceiling,” while in another a prostitute enters a man’s car and “Fetches from the gaping linen, the planted // squid & milks it, warm, aglow udder.” These poems don’t ignore the dark or disturbing side of sex. Instead, they refuse to look away, examining these moments just as deftly as the poems that come before.

Conroy’s goal is to give voice to all sides of desire instead of highlighting just one perspective, which includes the beautiful and simple. Her poems start this shift with “How Did the Everlasting Begin?” where she states, “There was nothing spectacular about the fire…” between two lovers. She ends the poem with:

There was everything spectacular about the fire
because it was ordinary.
Because it was contained
& then it was not.

Conroy maintains this exploration of beautiful simplicity in “Of Exaltations,” wherein she imagines two lovers spending all their time together. By asking “do you never wonder / who will feed the chickens?” she allows the moment to speak for the loss of time one can feel with another. Similarly, in “Granting Passage,” her speaker describes wanting a lover’s mouth:

… To your blessing
bestowing mouth.

Therefore I am: crucified—
open, starfish-splayed.
Begging for drink. Begging

for fountain.

Conroy describes these sexual encounters as need being fulfilled. A speaker says to a lover, “You suckle the hollow” of a shoulder; has another told, “Now; let me siphon that bite for you…” and another stating, “Without her narcotic sweat, her voodoo breath / breathing down my neck, how did I survive?” These moments build upon each other to present a clearer image of desire as a whole. These poems both watch and touch closely, allowing readers to have tactile and visual connections with the speakers. In this way, Conroy transforms readers into the desired and the one who desires, never making us comfortable enough to feel completely in control.

Conroy’s penultimate poem, “The Morning After,” provides the perfect metaphor for her book. The speaker describes a lover who, while making her breakfast, gets so close that she thinks, “you’d singe me / with the coffee press.” Then the lover touches her and makes a command: “You pushed my bangs / from my eyes, put a cup in my hands / & commanded, sip.” Conroy’s poems offer themselves as the loving act of making breakfast, but they’re also demanding more. They demand that you, not only, face the desire laid in front of you but also “sip” and experience everything that is bitter, warm, and delicious.

A Particular Time and Place: A Review of The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, Third Edition, by Anthony Frame

Cover Credit: Autumn House Press

The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, Third Edition, edited by Michael Simms, Giuliana Certo, and Christine Stroud
Autumn House Press (2015)

Reviewed by Anthony Frame

In his introduction to The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, Michael Simms writes, “Poetry is just like people talking.” He further explains the ways it goes beyond common speech, saying poetry, “has something special or amazing about it, something that makes us think, wonder, or marvel.” It is this idea of everyday language, heightened and crafted to give the reader a sense of amazement, that defines the aesthetic choices made by editors Michael Simms, Giullana Certo, and Christine Stroud as they curated this collection of poems by 106 American poets. The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry offers a snapshot of the poetry landscape at the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century. These poems contain contemporary poetry’s celebration of American life and language as well as its concerns about inclusion and varied voices.

Narrative poetry dominates this anthology, which is clear from the first poem: “Collapsing Poem” by Kim Addonizio. This meta-Ars Poetica begins with a man and a woman arguing. It then discusses what it needs to do in order to give this moment meaning to the reader. Addonizio masterfully places the reader within this scene, writing, “And by now, if you’ve been moved, it’s because / you’re thinking with regret of the person / this poem set out to remind you of.” But even with audience interaction, the poem never leaves the story of the couple fighting. She ends by accepting that she cannot leave the narrative unless she is taken from it:

this poem won’t get finished unless
you drag me from it, away from that man;
for Christ’s sake, hurry, just pull up and keep
the motor running and take me wherever you’re going.

The ending of “Collapsing Poem” seems an apt metaphor for The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry. Although the editors, according to the introduction, value a variety of styles, they continue to return to narrative-heavy or narrative-influenced poems. Even poets whose works usually push far beyond the narrative mode are represented by their most narrative-influenced poems. Larry Levis’s lyric elegies, for example, are omitted in favor of two personal narratives, “The Poet at Seventeen” and “My Story in a Late Style of Fire.” Similarly, master of lyric meditation Li-Young Lee’s three selections are dependent on narrative techniques. For example, “The Hammock” opens:

When I lay my head in my mother’s lap
I think how day hides the stars,
the way I lay hidden once, waiting
inside my mother’s singing to herself. And I remember
how she carried me on her back
between home and kindergarten,
once each morning and once each afternoon.

Here, Lee presents his trademark language leaps in deep imagery with the boy hiding in his mother’s singing. Interspersed through these images, though, is a structure that relies on interactions between character, place, and action. “The Hammock” needs the relationship of the boy and his mother for an image like “day hides stars” to carry weight beyond its music. Compare this to opening of “The Sleepless,” from Lee’s collection Book of My Nights (BOA Editions, 2001):

Like any ready fruit, I woke
falling toward beginning and

welcome, all of night
the only safe place.

This poem lacks any narrative devices to pull the reader into the poem. Instead, Lee uses the language of the lines (the repeated “a” sounds) and the oddness of the imagery (such as the comparison of the speaker to a “ready fruit”) to engage his audience. The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary Poetry only represents this different style in a few lines in various poems, and it’s rarely on display in an entire poem.

The anthology does contain a few non-narrative poems. These are best represented by the multi-page works of Michael and Matthew Dickman. Matthew’s “All-American Poem,” though it does have a narrative backdrop, is structured as an address to the speaker’s lover. Its tangents and associative leaps tear the narrative into a surreal journey through the speaker’s psyche. “Let’s live downtown,” he writes, “and go clubbing. / God save hip-hop and famous mixed drinks.” This type of stream of consciousness continues for six pages. His brother, Michael, destroys traditional narrative techniques even more in his poem, “The New Green,” which includes lines like, “I left a note in my brain in red Sharpie it says Don’t forget the matches.”

Beyond the emphasis on narrative, the poets selected for this anthology represent a range of well-known, highly recognizable names in the poetic world, including Alicia Ostriker, Rita Dive, Dean Young, and Jane Kenyon. Similarly, these pages include poets who were, at the time of publication, on the precipice of fame. Ada Limón, for example, was selected prior to the publication of her celebrated fourth book, Bright Dead Things. Four poems by Ross Gay were chosen a year before he won the prestigious Kingsly Tuffs Poetry Award. The anthology also serves as a useful introduction to a number of poets who may not yet be quite as known but who certainly should be, such as Dawn Potter and Yona Harvey. “We’ve selected poems based on their importance to us,” Simms writes in his introduction, “not on the fame of their authors.” The variety of poets at varied stages of their careers represents the editors’ commitment to poetry rather than the writers, and the editors should be celebrated for that.

The anthology should also be celebrated for its commitment to equity in publishing. Of the 106 poets in the anthology, sixty are female. Compare this with the most recently released VIDA counts and Autumn House’s anthology ranks near the top in terms of gender parity. However, there is still a continued problem of racial parity in the contemporary literary world. Of the 106 poets, only 22 are poets of color and only 11 are women of color. Simms’s introduction discusses a number of aesthetic considerations the editors used while making their selections. Although he does not discuss gender or racial parity as being an active part of the selection process, this anthology can stand as a symbol for growing social progress.

Any anthology trying to cover all of contemporary American poetry will, by definition, fail. The American poetry landscape is vast and multitudinous. This is, perhaps, why so many anthologies choose to focus on a specific type of poet or subject. But The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry succeeds as well as any anthology can, limited as it is by its 384 pages and the aesthetic preferences of its three editors. “Poetry,” Michael Simms writes in his introduction, “captures the essence of what it is to be alive at a particular time and place.” If this is the goal of the poem, it is also the goal of the poetry anthology, which Autumn House Press has reached.

Pictures at an Exhibition: A Review of Sandra Marchetti’s Confluence by Angele Ellis

Cover Credit: Sundress Publications

Confluence by Sandra Marchetti
Sundress Publications (2015)

Reviewed by Angele Ellis

Reading Sandra Marchetti’s first full-length book of poetry is like being immersed in a series of works in an art gallery. Each scene of unfolding—in rich brushstrokes of language—pulls the viewer/reader in, and doesn’t quite let go. Like paintings, Marchetti’s mostly brief but lush lines convey both miracles of beauty and intimations of strain and mortality. (Confluence’s cover is a detail from early 18th century Dutch painter Jan van Huysum, in which a rose and peony are captured on the cusp of over-ripeness, and a zinnia’s stem already has fallen.)

This artist’s view of the world is made explicit in some of Marchetti’s poems. In “Saints,” the poet’s eye glides from the “stars” of the Virgin of Guadalupe to an evocation of the techniques of such classic Dutch painters as van Huysum, as in these lines:

…They say
a glass of water
is the very hardest thing…

… The Dutch could do this—
hold water in their eyes—
inside the painter

a glass would become full,
a flower fresh
with drops of dew,
insects on the petals.

And “Sur l’herbe” is a direct allusion to 19th century painter Édouard Manet’s erotic shocker “Le déjeuner sur l’herbe.” Addressing a lover, perhaps, the poem’s speaker directs her own scene like a master:

… Don’t move:
you can’t see
you are a strange
portrait.

Like Manet,
I strain each stroke
of cup and nape
to show I can…

These excerpts demonstrate Marchetti’s command of not only the images but also the music of poetry—including alliteration, enjambment, rhyme and near rhyme, and the punch of the spondee (a metrical foot in which both syllables are stressed—DUM-DUM—as in “Don’t move”). Marchetti is frank about her poetic influences and the ways in which they haunt her work. This is particularly evident in this passage from her essay “Rhyming with the Dead” (The Turnip Trucks, 1-28-2016):

… My influences include the confessionals, Bishop, Hopkins, Dickinson, and others. I have done it both intentionally and unintentionally; indeed, this is very common in contemporary poetry… I have found all of my poems are part of this interconnected web and that is why certain lines ring in my head—they are not wholly mine; they chime with other voices. In short, I rhyme with the dead.

Later in this essay, Marchetti compares her poem “Lunch” to Anne Sexton’s “The Truth the Dead Know,” a mid-20th century classic that Marchetti has learned by heart. She reflects:

… When Sexton says “June” on the Poetry Speaks recording, she gives such weight to word. I remember my initial reaction to its heavy vowel jab. I have never forgotten it. “Lunch,” another poem of mine, incorporates the same syntactical maneuver of Sexton’s “It is June…” line. The second stanza of “Lunch” reads:

Sorting the demands of red-orange,
pink, cream, I flick stems on the bank,
watch them wash downstream. It is noon,
the bees are circling for somewhere to land.

(Marchetti, “Rhyming with the Dead.”)

Nourishment, sex, art—and the ultimate inability of these things to hold back destruction—make every object in Confluence (animal, vegetable, mineral, the very landscape) a precious yet vulnerable body. In “Orange Bouquet,” one garden-harvested cauliflower encompasses a world of meaning, from “loos[ing]” to “snap,” as in these lines:

… The dark farm in diorama
crams between each branch.

I brush caterpillars into the sink
and geese wink out, smatter

dirt on my hands
in their landing.

Again and again in Confluence, the speaker uses smooth and sharp turns of language to meld with her subject. In “Borderland,” an ordinary fenced-in swimming pool becomes the center of a mystery, with something “… gnawing at your waters.” When the poet asks the pool “What are you?” the answer is “A country.”

The word that provides Marchetti with this book’s title, confluence, has multiple meanings. Literally the merging of two bodies of water (as Pittsburgh’s Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers merge to form the Ohio River), it is figuratively any coming together—of factors, ideas, cultures, beings. At the point of confluence, something is both lost and gained. The book’s final poem, “One Secret” (perhaps echoing Elizabeth’s Bishop’s “One Art”), is both a love poem and an artistic credo. In the last lines of this poem, the speaker’s consciousness expands to embrace her lover’s body in the present, its inevitable demise, and the “rhythms” that define her art and world:

… Dusk flares the bones’ groan, so I rub your stomach
until you sleep. I neat my breath to yours,
as if you were a child; the confluence
of rhythms begins. It is only sound
and meaning. Sound and meaning.

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.

Breathing With and Without Air: A Review of Lisa Fay Coutley’s Errata by Anthony Frame

Cover Credit: Southern Illinois University Press

Errata by Lisa Fay Coutley
Southern Illinois University Press (2015)

Reviewed by Anthony Frame

In her prize-winning full-length debut, Errata, Lisa Fay Coutley traces the life of a woman who embodies the roles of daughter, mother, and lover. She is lake and desert. She is the lapidary, the chisel, and the gemstone. She is both the trauma survivor and the language of the disaster. As Coutley writes in “Love & Squall,” “Mine are two / hands, reaching during a squall, brittle / enough to grasp at anything unseen.” Coutley’s poems are constantly grasping for air, water, and for the people who populate her lines. The question her poems pose is not whether any of these can be held, but how. 

Coutley’s poems tend to circle back to four central relationships—the speaker and her father, mother, sons, and lover—that are present in all four sections, rather than collected into one section. This allows these themes to grow and evolve throughout the book much in the way a single piece of music repeated throughout an entire symphony grows and gains new meaning. For example, in an early poem, “Researchers Find Mice Pass On Trauma to Subsequent Generations,” the father is a singularly violent force. He tries to drown the narrator’s pregnant mother and he forces the speaker to fill her mouth with M&Ms. Coutley writes, “before I took my first breath / … / I mastered a palpable fear of choking.” Later in the second section, in the poem “Goodbye in the Voice of My Father,” the father warns his daughter about tornadoes in the new state to where she is moving. The tension in the relationship remains (“A normal bird’ll nest near the nest / where it was born,” the father says), but there has been a shift. “He hates me / for leaving,” she writes. “Himself, for shoving me from the nest.”

A similar evolution occurs in the relationship with the speaker’s sons. Early in the book, in “On Home,” she writes, “in a wake of black mascara / mothers drive away.” But later, in “Driving Up-Canyon with My Two Teenage Sons,” she pulls her sons close as the three of them attempt to claim ownership over their lives:

This, kids, is the year we’ll write our history
        of black ice & snow. Here, each of you hold
                a wiper blade, & I'll accelerate, eyes closed.

Coutley not only evolves the tense relationship between mother and sons, but also the driving image. Earlier, a car that was once a source of distance becomes the binding force. Throughout, the relationships and the recurring images build and grow as the speaker searches for new, better ways to hold on to these people, even as she leaves them and as they leave her. Complementary to her fiercely etched narratives, Coutley’s brilliantly permits the lyric quality of her lines to drive the narratives. Her images are crisp and evocative. She mixes influences of narrative poetry and deep image poetry, allowing sounds of images to pull the reader deep into the poems. Take, for example, “Self-Portrait as Pyrocumulonimbus.” Here, she adopts the persona of a fire cloud, jumping from space to space. She follows the logic of language, of sound, as she traces the path of this storm. “I wander. I err,” she writes. “I lunge / into ductwork & become the bedroom.” The force of the poem comes less from following the storm’s journey than from those hard consonant sounds ringing through the lines. Coutley similarly accomplishes this in “Patentia,” a narrative in which the speaker’s lover has left. She writes:

                                                              She & I:
        whispering to an outline of a shadow. Because bodies,
                we know, are built for falling.

Here, once again, the narrative is allowed to fall to the background. The lover has disappeared, becoming an outline and leaving only the speaker’s divided self. The emotional punch of the poem is then controlled by the counterbalance of those soft sounds and the abruptness of the bodies falling. By heightening those repeated o-sounds, Coutley controls her reader’s ear, offering a blanket against the roughness of the b-sounds. As the images fall, her use of language safely catches the reader with those final words, “for falling,” which are full of breathless consonants.

Coutley’s collection is a masterful exercise in controlling both technique and subject matter. Her speaker moves from lakes to desert, carrying with her the ghosts of her past. And as the poems’ fears–of violence and of losing dear ones–grow, the controlling voice becomes more confident in her ability to carry the weight she bears. “I'll never stop talking,” Coutley writes in “Listen.” This ability to talk, to interpret, allows the speaker’s life, and Coutley’s book, to become an errata—a collection of a correction of errors. It allows Coutley to write a book obsessed with, among other things, psuedodysphagia—the fear of choking, of being without breath—all while crafting a series of poems that will leave her readers breathless.

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.

The Likeness of the Waves: A Review of Niki Koulouris’s “The sea with no one in it” by Anthony Frame

cover credit: The Porcupine's Quill

The sea with no one in it by Niki Koulouris
The Porcupine’s Quill (2013)

Reviewed by Anthony Frame

Niki Koulouris is a poet of the ocean, of the sea with its wide blue horizon. Although the vast, expansive ocean may be intimidating to those born inland, with only rivers and lakes to dip their toes in, Koulouris’s debut collection of poems easily draws in readers. Perhaps it is the shared love for bodies of water; perhaps we can recognize the rhythms of water found deep in these lyrics. Certainly, Koulouris’s lines and images, tight and terse, flow with “the likeness of the waves” and create a remarkable and daring collection.

“I’m fond of ships,” writes Koulouris in the opening poem of The sea with no one in it:

their progress,
the turning weather
for they are never without alternatives
and they may contain the whole population of the mountains

Here we can see the rising tide of her book—the short lines slowly expanding, the pacing of the syllables, even the careful use of articles to control the rhythm. The lines creep up on readers, tentatively, only to suddenly crash into us. Like waves, they then slowly pull back into the poem’s body. This rhythm is fairly consistent, and even the few poems that play with form use the formal repetition to create a sense of water coming in and out. This consistency then binds the book’s two disparate sections.

Koulouris’s book is comprised of forty-four poems. Most are shorter than a page and contain barely a half dozen or so words per line. Each poem is numbered rather than titled and they are separated into two untitled sections. The poems rarely use punctuation or capitalization. When they do, they occur only when the lines’ structures are not enough to convey syntax. In the book’s first section, twenty poems create a catalogue of the sea. The second section, with twenty-four poems, is comprised mostly of ekphrastic poems with a few sea/water images scattered throughout. This changes with poem No. 39 when the sea returns as the dominant poetic vehicle.

At first glance, her poems are reminiscent of William Carlos Williams’s most famous poems. They are crafted with short lines that use pitch-perfect and evocative descriptions. In poem No. 12, for example, she writes about “the steak of Africa / the broken comma / of New Zealand.” And in No. 8, she describes the Aegean Sea as “the colour of a stork.” A Whitman-esque poet might unpack that image, spending a handful of lines stretching the stork metaphor until it snaps. But Koulouris is confident enough to let it hover there, allowing the reader to ponder this rich and unique image. And it is an earned confidence.

But there is more to Koulouris’s work than the precision of the Imagist school of poetry. Throughout, she avoids description and offers a directive statement or an imposing question. In this way, the poems carry an air of the famous ending of Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo” (“You must change your life.”). This is best seen in poem No. 3, during which Koulouris explains what we shouldn’t mention about the sea, “for her waves / will never be yours.” She ends the poem with three stunning couplets:

her heart is solid fire
her eyes are weak

if it is not the sea
it is the shores

where would you be
without regrets?

That final couplet seems to come from nowhere, but it is a remarkable conclusion. She evokes a regret of not fully knowing the sea because it can never be ours, a regret of not tasting her waters and not touching her shores.

More than anything, though, what is perhaps most admirable about Koulouris’s poetry is her subtle irony and humor. This is especially true in the second section of the book, which adopts a darker tone. Many of these poems, inspired by artists and writers like Philip Guston and Maurice Sendak, address mortality. In No. 21, for the German Expresionist artist Anselm Kiefer, she describes “a landscape razed for battle.” Later, she responds to Picasso’s Guernica in No. 28. But rather than focusing on the destruction shown in the painting, she finds a voice of bitter irony. “the band is / paid to screech,” she writes, and “to my surprise / there were wares / outside.” But through this, she doesn’t ignore the horror of Guernica, as seen in this tercet: “a formidable horse / drinks from tinted water / strikes oil.” Earlier poems also contain this biting humor, but none more so than No. 13, which is a catalogue of what the sea does not need, including:

all of Alabama or the NYPD
and I am sure the sea does
not need Jack Kerouac
to take a stab at it

There is something entrancing about Koulouris’s poetry. It makes readers want to dive deep within it, to drown. Its rhythms are intoxicating and, like a riptide, refuse to let go. The surface appearance of simplicity belies the poems’ complex and daunting depth. “It is always midnight / in the river / between two poems,” Koulouris writes in No. 44, the final poem. There may be rivers between her poems, but they are, indeed, oceans.

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.

Structures on Fire: A Review of Kristina Marie Darling's Scorched Altar: Selected Poems & Stories by Julie Babcock

cover credit: BlazeVOX Press

Scorched Altar: Selected Poems & Stories by Kristina Marie Darling
BlazeVOX Press (2015)

Reviewed by Julie Babcock

Kristina Marie Darling is an exciting voice in contemporary poetry. The seven-year span of this collection represents work from twelve different published books. It offers readers a chance to see a highly productive mind work through recurring concerns about genre and representation in an almost limitless ways. The core of Darling’s work centers on questions about whose stories last, why, and how that can be changed. She explores these questions through various forms that draw attention to the ways narratives both layer and erase. “What does a white dress not resemble?” Darling asks as her readers slip into a house and notice a man staring out a window, “Tell me what you see in him / A locked room, but what else—?”

Darling draws upon an evocative backdrop of Victorian images and associations to explore academic and political questions. Her writing, especially in the earlier selections, is filled with phonographs, exotic birds, silk gloves, and fancy dresses. Behind all this nostalgic glamour, though, is a terrifying sense of menace. As the title of one of her books asserts, “The body is a little gilded cage” and traps, poisons, and fires abound.

In some ways, Darling’s writing shares affinities with Mark Z. Danielewski’s, who plays with form and content but manages to create a highly charged tangible experience. House of Leaves is simultaneously a horror story, a love story, and a satire of academic criticism. Darling’s writing works on these multiple layers through an exciting feminist lens. Selections from Melancholia (An Essay) includes footnotes, a glossary, prose poems, and noctuaries: “She wanted to understand the innermost workings of this strange machine. Their courtship was a system of pulleys, levers, and strings.”

Darling’s writing simultaneously evokes the passage of time and refuses it. The women in her poems face the possibilities and devastations of love and power in unsettling ways that happen both two hundred years ago and now. Darling interrogates the structure of courtship and marriage—both its desire and dread—through women whose work, talents, and love have been dismissed or ignored by men. She demonstrates how much these dismissals have missed. In the earlier selections, courtship structures are presented as seductive acts of lyrical transcendence, such as in the prose poem “City Walk.” She describes:

When our taxi arrives, I brush the soot from my long white sleeves. Your gold
cigarette case flips open & I begin to notice the stains on your French silk cuffs.

In the later selections, attempts at lyrical transcendence are much more undercut inside each poem. For instance in “Landscape,” Darling writes:

You kept mentioning the other women, the way they would lie on their backs in the
grassy field. All around them were breadknives. The place settings for a picnic.

The fragmented sentences in this poem, combined with the deadpan humor of the breadknives and the more directly accusatory tone taken by the speaker, allow the reader to be in both a timeless and time-bound setting of this park. The poem continues:

But even before that we were quarreling. You told me, tilting your pretty head, how my pastoral elegy failed to move you.

Here, the reference to the pastoral elegy in a poem written in a 21st-century tone connects the ways the “you” trivializes both the death of a historic past and the death of their current relationship. Although the lines demonstrate the “you’s” dismissiveness, they also convey a delightful power shift. The speaker condescends the “you” by describing him in midst-quarrel as “tilting your pretty head.” From there, the action and imagination of the speaker builds in power. These power shifts occur frequently in Darling’s writing, and she seduces readers with sublime beauty, creeping terror, and possibilities to think and do otherwise. For instance, in her most recently excerpted book, The Arctic Circle, the woman in the prose poems may be freezing to death in her husband’s house, but unlike the husband, who can’t seem to make a distinction between repetition and difference, the speaker “understands why the boxes are empty, knows fact from fiction.” In “Your Only Wife” the same woman is:

… trying to warm the
endless rooms. You sense that what you had imagined is impossible: the faint
music, the chandeliers, and the bride’s mind gone pale with waiting.

These lines show the impossibility of a stereotypical romantic gender construction. The pale mind cannot be sustained, and this failure highlights the necessity to imagine in more constructive ways. To experience seven years of Darling’s prolific writing career is to witness the inexhaustibility of a compelling idea and a necessary set of interrogations. The poems in Scorched Altar are feeding a magnificent fire.

Rust Never Sleeps: A Review of Rochelle Hurt’s The Rusted City by Angele Ellis

cover credit: White Pine Press

The Rusted City: a novel in poems by Rochelle Hurt
White Pine Press (2014)

Reviewed by Angele Ellis

“…Using elements of surrealism and magic seemed like the best way for me to write a place like Youngstown into something new. A mythical approach allowed for this more than a documentary style would have, which is why I chose to call my city simply ‘The Rusted City’ and not Youngstown.” ~ Rochelle Hurt in an interview with Belt Magazine, December 2014

The reader enters Rochelle Hurt’s lost kingdom through an empty chair. Her cover illustration, Sharon Pazner’s “Throne,” is a doll-sized, kitchen-chair construction of concrete and bent, tarnished nails that might guard a parking space in any American Rust Belt city. Delicate and tough, homely and haunting, it is a near perfect metaphor for the world Hurt recreates from rough materials and memory.

Hurt’s impressive debut is a full-length collection of prose poems mixed with free verse (the eighteenth volume in the Marie Alexander Poetry Series). It reads like an extended fairy tale, a modern version of an old-fashioned story in which rust/blood, fear, and pain leave trails on the road to rebirth. Her recurring characters—The Quiet Mother, The Favorite Father, The Oldest Sister, and The Smallest Sister—are archetypes into which the poet breathes harsh individual life.

In “The Smallest Sister Decides to Make Herself Red,” this child character “often” takes into herself relics of the rusted city. “… She strings corroded washers into a necklace. She dresses her lips in the sanguine water and sucks the stain from the pipes behind the aluminum plant…” As in a fairy tale, these rituals age The Smallest Sister beyond even The Favorite Father’s reach, as demonstrated by the following punch line:

… When he touches her, she is as old as the city that closes around them like a fist.

The Favorite Father is a photographer as well as a mill worker. In “The Roller Coaster is Burning, the Favorite,” “father tells his daughters, buttoning their chin and ear flaps. ‘We’ve got to get pictures.’” But the family, walking in “a line of red caps… a lit fuse,” is too late for the burning but not the death. Hurt describes the grotesque scene:

… the roller coaster is folded in half, a writhing lattice… gangly as a giant insect… its corroded arms are crossed already—the death pose, the smallest sister knows.

In “The Favorite Father Chases a Tornado,” his daughters’ attention is not on “[t]he sky [that] troubles and fills with orange funnels” but on the way the father “ruined” the rust-coated river while “getting his shot.” Hurt writes in this striking sequence:

… A layer of rust floating like algae on the water begins to break up. As he wades, his legs part one red island, making another. Soon there are too many rust islands to count, and the river is a mottled red-brown.

The Rusted City often turns moments of creation into destruction. In “The Quiet Mother Smiles,” the house crumbles around the mother as she cleans her wedding ring in anticipation of the father’s return. The reader feels the chill of ill omen:

… The ring is heavy as a marble in the smallest sister’s hand, and heavier every minute… The quiet mother picks chips of rust from where the ring had hugged her finger and blows on it like something too hot, sending a storm of red to the floor.

The titles of poems in the second and fourth sections of this five-part collection begin “In the Century of…,” bringing the weight of history to bear on subjects as small as lunch pails, dusty hallways, and dirty water, and as large as records, research, and silences. In Belt Magazine, Hurt says:

“Using ‘In the Century of’ was my way of avoiding the constraints of literal time, which seem irrelevant to history in terms of how it’s told between family members and how it affects the lives of individuals. When history is remembered through our own experiences, it always gets warped and mythologized. There are so many centuries in this book that by the end, the city is thousands of years old. In this way it becomes larger than real life.”

“In the Century of Birthmarks” is a startling example of how Hurt positions the rusted city as an eternal city, as demonstrated by the poem’s opening stanza:

parents held their newborns up
to the sun and read the shadows
cast through them like runes.

And “In the Century of Lunch Pails,” the industrial city becomes a noisy, all-consuming monster: “… Everywhere the chew of pipes branching / through copper soil could be heard.” It leeches life from the lunch pail-carrying fathers even as it provides their livelihood, as in its eerily beautiful closing stanzas:

Everywhere the whisper ticks of fingers,
every hand a clock. And every evening,

the clinking, ever nearer the doorstep, of coins
inside all the hollowed-out fathers as they walked.

Hurt ends The Rusted City with two poems of death and rebirth. In “The City Opens” (like a corpse, or a Caesarian section) the smallest sister rebuilds from its amazing array of “expelling antiques.” “… Every night another wall, every week another room, every month another house—her new city birthed from the refuse.” And in “The Smallest Sister is Radiant,” the smallest sister imagines her death as “… a grenade of rust, fool’s gold… She can’t say why she / swallows the word, but when she does she knows it will burst in her / throat one day.” However, death cannot destroy the city that words have immortalized, as shown in the book’s last lines:

… but she knows that at the moment of death, she
will be brilliant. Her body will shine like a city inside.

In Pursuit of Shenanigans: A Review of Dan Nowak's the hows and whys of my failures by Anthony Frame

Cover credit: Hyacinth Girl Press

the hows and whys of my failures, by Dan Nowak
Hyacinth Girl Press (2014)

Reviewed by Anthony Frame

The bio note for Dan Nowak’s third chapbook, the hows and whys of my failures, concludes, “Dan takes his time to pursue worthwhile shenanigans with the love of his life.” The pursuit of shenanigans, often in the name of love, turns out to be an apt description of these fourteen short, stream of consciousness poems that race from curiosity to conclusion at a manic pace. Throughout, Nowak’s abrupt line breaks and his complex interplay between ideas and language strip away the artifice of the modern world and leave the reader staring, at times uncomfortably, at how these naked poems wrestle with the world in which they live.

The collection opens simply, plainly, and absurdly: “you’re beautiful like a dolphin.” This, according to the opening poem’s title, is “one of many failed pick-up lines.” This immediately extends the possibilities of what Nowak might do and where he might go over the next fourteen pages. The poem then jumps from the speaker’s failure to find dolphins attractive to a brief meditation on imaginary “future and science fiction children.” By the end, when the speaker decides truth is obnoxious (“almost like a dolphin”), Nowak has fully prepared us for the voice, the tone, and the style of his chapbook. But, perhaps more importantly, he has prepared us for the pace of these poems.

They are frenetic, so much that they push the limits of comfort. Take, for example, “this is my rifle.” Over the course of fourteen lines, Nowak writes about love as a gun, his lack of scholarly knowledge, his inability to talk to a girl, ruminations on how the girl might kiss, how much he has had to drink, a brief meditation on attraction, questions about how the night was supposed to go, a post-party cleanup, and waking up alone. And all of these are strung together without punctuation. But Nowak deftly holds these thoughts together through the rifle metaphor, which transforms from being about love to being about attraction to, finally, being about the speaker’s penis. This transformation coincides with the speaker daydreaming about the girl. As his fantasies intensify to the point of disintegration, so too does the rifle metaphor until all that is left is the speaker “alone again with my hand down my pants and drinks i meant to buy still in my pocket."

Each of these poems works in a similar way (see, especially, “what is implied,” “an option on how to replace church,” and “when it all goes sonic boom boom boom”), but the absurdism and the loose strings connecting each part of each poem prevents the collection from becoming predictable. Still, absurdity, irony and wit alone are not enough to hold a collection like this together. What makes Nowak’s poems work, and work wonderfully, is the intimacy and honesty behind all his surreal leaps. Most of these poems are about love and/or relationships. But connecting with another person is never easy in these pages. Take, for example, “names are like signs for yourself,” in which the author and a bartender discuss the commonality of names. Nowak wants desperately to engage in this conversation but the overactive mind, the one responsible for all these poetic leaps, is unable. Instead, he writes:

i politely sip my beer and imagine
him with my name and how that would change him.
i think he wouldn’t be so judgmental or he would be more.
and i ask myself, how many more letters do i need
before i am someone completely different.

The love poems in this collection are similarly tough and tense and a bit nightmarish. In one poem, the speaker encourages his partner that “sex for money isn’t necessarily such a bad / idea as long as you’re safe” (“and just because i haven't encouraged”). In another, he questions his ability to write about his partner because “your story is boring” (“what is implied”). But strongest of all is the poem, “behind the pretty lights.” The lovers in this poem work desperately to come together while simultaneously pushing each other away. They hold hands and notice the empty spaces between the fingers. They insist on the silence of silence. And those pretty lights, the ones that make the lover dance, are ultimately used “to put the right amount of distance between my body and yours.”

Still, behind the angst, behind the speaker’s obsession with his failures, there is a tenderness. This is best seen in “why i am never really upset about you waking up with me.” Here, the speaker recognizes the selfishness of his desire to keep his lover with him, to make his bed “more home than home” for her. “you’ll see me for who i am,” Nowak writes:

you won’t picture
anything less, but push yourself against
my ribs. i will let you in. that isn’t a question.

It is this tenderness, this heightened awareness of the self and others, and of the relationship between the self and others, that keeps the collection approachable and relatable. It is this tenderness that earns the surreal moments where kissing leads to thoughts about leprosy and armadillos (“why i can never invite you over after i drink moscato all night”).

the hows and whys of my failures accomplishes something pretty spectacular. It smoothly and matter-of-factly blends postmodern dadaism with narrative lyricism. And, perhaps most importantly, it does so unapologetically. Nowak’s new chapbook leaves little doubt about his skill, his wit, and his devotion to honesty, about himself and his world. Indeed, if these poems contain any failures, they are beautiful failures. They are magical failures. Just like dolphins. And armadillos.

If They Would Touch Me: A Review of Robert Walicki’s A Room Full of Trees by Michael VanCalbergh

cover credit: Red Bird Chapbooks

A Room Full of Tress by Robert Walicki
Red Bird Chapbooks (2014)

Reviewed by Michael VanCalbergh

Everything about Robert Walicki’s debut chapbook, A Room Full of Trees, is stunning. First, the reader is treated to a gorgeous, hand-bound cover from Red Bird Chapbooks. The cover art and drawings by Carl Huelsman complement the poems to create one, complete work of art. And Walicki’s words explode even brighter.

From the first poem, “Red,” Walicki introduces the complex way his narrators deal with distance and touch. The poem explores the speaker’s memory of his father watching his soccer games. The two never communicate, but even being as close as a player to the stands feels ominous and dangerous. The speaker states:

Every game he sat, top bleachers, always looking, no wedding ring,

never blinked. And I watched him too, till it was my turn,

till I was called for and had to turn, had to show him my back

Walicki’s use of caesuras makes the readers feel the suspicion and hesitation of turning their backs and letting someone creep closer to them. In fact, the hesitation toward physical contact runs throughout the book.

In “The Boy,” after seeing a kid get beaten up, the speaker comments, “What I saw taught me how to stand by, how to say nothing.” The fear of reprisal by the bullies in this line is immediately universal. Who didn’t witness some form of bullying or torment in school and kept quiet because they didn’t want to be next? Even later in “Touch,” the speaker suspects that the group of people seeing a friend off “knows I couldn’t bear it if they would touch me.” But when this space is breeched in other poems, the reader, like the speakers, is shut out or violated by it. The narrator in “When the Sunlight” explains:

When he touches you,
think of trees.
And when you say no,
he’ll say I’ll kill your parents if…

The lack of touch and the omnipresent distance is so expertly constructed by Walicki that the readers identify directly with the speakers, even if similar experiences are not shared. Together, the readers and speakers can only speculate what connection could feel like. This struggle is most clear in “The Way Back,” wherein a narrator tries to relive a memory of an old home by “draw[ing] the floor plan in the air.” While exploring this “house,” the narrator remembers going through his mother’s things:

I am downstairs when the last of her things are boxed up
In the photograph I ask to keep,
nothing moves.
It is 1933 and she is standing in a bread line.

…

And I am trying to remember the last time
I touched her.

I hold the photograph up to the light.
My thumb touches her face,
but she doesn’t notice.

The reader is not even given a memory of touch to experience, but is left with a thumb on an old picture. The lingering effects of loss, as well as striving to recreate past moments, is again felt when a speaker erects a scarecrow with his sister. While using his deceased father’s clothes as the scarecrow’s costume, he states that “She doesn’t know I’m building a man,” as if he is trying to rebuild the person with the leftover materials of memory.

Despite anxiety, distance, missed contacts, and loss, light plays a key role in keeping the collection from getting too dark. Even when recalling sexual abuse in “When The Sunlight,” there is a“… sliver of light through the gaps / reaching you, here, and now, and always.” Walicki’s poetic gift to readers is filling all the space that he has created between bodies. “What the Light Wants” starts by saying, “Not the tall branches above me rocking and breaking. / Not the dead branches over tree lines too high to touch.” The poem uses the title and the first two lines to state that light isn’t interested in the living or the dead. Instead, the light wants the rest of the poem: the struggle between a son and his deceased father.

Dealing with death and the seemingly unbridgeable distance between people can be immense and disorienting. For all the pain and darkness, though, light is always somewhere in Robert Walicki’s poems. There is still “sunlight flashing off the windshield” even if it’s sometimes a “broken light… moving through the space between the trees.” The ability to express this complexity while keeping his poems layered and inviting is nothing short of radiant.

Where The Wild Things Are: A Review of Sam Sax’s A Guide To Undressing Your Monsters by Angele Ellis

cover credit: Button Poetry

A Guide To Undressing Your Monsters by Sam Sax
Button Poetry/Exploding Pine Cone Press (2014)

Reviewed by Angele Ellis

Each section of Sam Sax’s first poetry book—a runner-up in the 2013 Button Poetry/Exploding Pine Cone Contest—ends with a drawing of a monster undressing itself. Akiva Levi’s illustrations, reminiscent of Maurice Sendak, reveal the monster to be an ordinary boy—but a boy whose melancholy face is faded and incomplete, as if lost in the clouds of his own and the world’s making.

Like Sendak, Sax is a gay Jewish man haunted by his cultural and historical past, and seeking illumination and redemption in art. Unlike Sendak, the myths that Sax explores and recreates are not for children but for adults, and their wrenching transformations promise no resolution.

Variations and continuations of one poem, “Bestiary,” begin the five sections of A Guide to Undressing Your Monsters. The fabulous beasts that Sax catalogues become, in the poet’s intense and sometimes violent imagery, lovers whose intimacies are fraught with danger. Beware the lover/monster most when he is sleeping, as Sax seems to be saying in the following passage from the first “Bestiary” (his use of backslashes in these poems intensifies the warning), because of what may happen when he awakens:

werewolf—
… / go to sleep / beside the man you love
& wake up next to a dog / maybe the moon brought it out of him /
… / or maybe
it was there inside him / howling all along

The poems that follow each “Bestiary” are lyrics of sexual longing and initiation that carry, along with the urgency of desire, the knife’s edge of potential destruction and even disgust. In “When Researching Public Sex Theatres for a Poem,” the very seats of the theatre are repositories of viral guilt, as in Sax’s pungent description:

… who uses cloth seats anymore, anyway?
         you read they hold disease better than mosquitoes,
              feel the swarm beneath you as you sit,

each tiny needle sucking you down.

…

isn’t it funny how you once believed nothing
in this whole world could disgust you?

In “Fishing,” the knife is figurative and literal. Sax’s adolescent narrator and his friend Daniel, with whom he is infatuated, butcher still-living fish from the ocean as bait to catch more. The process is both seductive and brutal, as in this passage:

…fish don’t have throats to cut, so we stabbed
         wildly. my first knife, bright as a smile, sectioned their
seizing bodies. my smile, my knife.

That night, sleeping in Daniel’s mother’s house, the narrator “want[s] so badly / to be a knife… to take [Daniel] / apart in pieces” after he has “… in the dark… [run] my fingers through / his hair, brought them to my face and tasted salt.” “Fishing” becomes a vivid fantasy of lovemaking and completion in the final lines of the poem, as follows:

…or perhaps, i wanted to take him
        into my mouth, to feel something sharp
break inside of me,
        to be pulled up
                  into the screaming air
                                 somehow whole.

The fruitful consummation of love between men is woven into “Folktale,” a rich and humorous prose poem written after Marge Piercy, but also with the flavor of Issac Bashevis Singer. It is told in the voice of the narrator’s “zedee… from her creaking wood body buried in her creaking wood chair.” In the grandmother’s words, the proximity required by sleeping bodies in the bitter Ukrainian winter creates more than children:

… i don’t know if you know this sam but when two men make
love, they also make bread, the slow yeast and butter, yolks
breaking in the hand, sugar poured until it makes you sick…
you know the older the man the richer the bread, so hashem
rose the body temperature of these men until they all sang
like ovens. they labored indoors and birthed perfect loaves.
that winter, we ate how kings eat.

But consummation also can be cannibalistic and parasitic. In the Kafkaesque “The Hunger Artist,” the body that is devoured is so similar to the narrator’s as to fuse with it permanently. The horror of this union is demonstrated in the poem’s last stanzas:

… the job of any competent
parasite is to convince

its host of their relationship’s
symbiosis…

… & when i was at last inside him,
i couldn’t make a sound.

Silence is transformed into “shrieks” from both the screen and the movie audience in the prose poem “It’s Alive!” that unreels on the page like a strip of film. Told from “the point of view / of the [gay] monster,” the poem/movie’s inevitable narrative becomes a defiant cry of pain and protest, as in these lines:

                               … it’s not
till you love a boy & make him
like you         that   you’re   able
to  curse         the    civilization
that  assembled    your    fiction

…
                       … & audiences
in darkened   theatres   release
a  collective  sigh    of    relief
as you perish,   as credits  roll
back  like  eyes…

Sax ends A Guide to Undressing Your Monsters with a return to childhood in “Boys & Bridges.” Beneath a veneer of roughhouse and innocence, however, his boys are “gods” of “flame & melt.” The narrator knows not only where the matches are, but also where the bodies are buried. “[A] dog… below the corn. /… there because of us… once it opened / its mouth to howl & all of god’s green dirt / spilled in.” Another dead dog “spill[s] out” of a bag pulled from a river.

Although the boys burn the forest in anger, and return “home to our undrowned / dogs,” a forest of civilization rises to contain them. As Sax says in the book’s final sentence, “we’re still climbing out.”

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?

The Martians Have Landed: A Review of Laura Madeline Wiseman's American Galactic by Susana H. Case

cover credit: Martian Lit

American Galactic by Laura Madeline Wiseman
Martian Lit (2014)

Reviewed by Susana H. Case

The Martians are everywhere, including the crevices of Laura Madeline Wiseman’s teeth in her sci-fi poetry collection, American Galactic, inspired by strange happenings around a real Nebraska storm. Around it, Wiseman constructs her imaginings of Martian personality, and what that reveals about human personality. Playfulness and creativity abound in this well-rendered visitation. For example, in “Warning” she writes:

Even now I watch the trees gutter
and the wind tongues the house.
I can almost hear the words, something like
The Martians have landed. You’re free.

It’s not just storms that ramp up the atmosphere in this collection, but the oddities of social experience and human behavior. We are all aliens, Wiseman says in “The Tabloids.” Our social and physical world is made unfamiliar by destructive practices—police brutality as quotidian policy and environmental depredations that have altered the planet, disrupting routines. And of course, she writes in “Getting Out of Here:”

...down the street,
          NASA plants lettuce in a lunar greenhouse
to practice gardening in outer-space

In “The Left Boob of Largeness,” when the left breast of the poem’s speaker begins to get inexplicably bigger, it’s the Martians who drive her to the clinic and pat her hand for support. In this exploration of tribal affiliation and strangeness versus family, lines are crossed. Oddities happen. Nothing, not even a visit to the doctor, is routine. By seeing the social world she lives in through the eyes of Martians, that world becomes an object of study and suddenly not taken for granted. Thus, the poet becomes sociologist. As the Martians drive her home past fields of genetically modified crops, they are:

…quiet in the small space
until I say, I’m normal. The engine revs.
The nurse said some boobs just continue to grow.

There is a quirky humor to this collection, despite the political context, that is reminiscent of Wiseman’s premier full-length collection, Sprung. American Galactic reflects upon an otherness that can be non-threatening and somewhat familiar, as with gender. The Martians are tourists in Wiseman’s social milieu, and that setup is ripe for the ironic voice. In “After Watching a Martian Marathon on Cable, she supposes:

...If they called,

I’d probably not answer because of the number,
thinking it was that automated voice

to tell me again, my warrantee is about to expire,
when I know my 1991 car doesn’t even start.

Other than calling, Wiseman speculates on the ways that Martians might try to make contact. In the final analysis, “The Trouble with Martians is they Don’t Fit In,” they’re annoying when they eat comforters and dust ruffles without apology, and puzzling when they kneel to worship daffodils or go to the beach still dressed in spacesuits. For some reason, they don’t masturbate, Wiseman tells us, though they are sexual in their own way. For example, in “Making Up,” she explains:

I said, how was your day? and kissed
the tip of each green finger. Kissing me
back, they whispered in my ear,
It just got better. How was yours?

Wiseman takes this a step further in “Epithalamion: An Undetected Life.” When the Martians attempt to get married, they buy bridal magazines and go to the mall to browse wedding clothes, but don’t quite get the rest of the normative practices. She explains:

They all fill out an application to officiate
because they can’t decide who gets to

wear the veil or sprinkle rose petals
and who will be allowed to kiss whom.

They decorate the backyard with tulle,
fairy lights, and rows of folding chairs.

Everyone arrives, but the Martians.

In other words, the Martians want to be a part of American society, but truly don’t recognize how. Still, they make attempts and Wiseman imagines the ways in which those attempts rupture her everyday social world. What would it be like to clean the house with Martians to help, for example? What does it mean for them to long to be part of the group? After all, Martian is just one other partially divisive minority category. Perhaps they want the same things as the midwestern Earthlings that Wiseman knows. Perhaps they want the same things that Wiseman wants and has but, being strangers, don’t know how to attain those things.

Maybe that they can settle here
in a suburban neighborhood—
everyone gets a PC, a green lawn,
a veggie patch out back to tend.

…

Maybe that when they line up
at the elementary in November
their vote will be counted.

They would not need to stage a crashed spaceship, or an alien autopsy, as in Roswell, Wiseman suggests, if they could somehow blend in. The fantasy myth of alien abduction is touched upon in “Abduction Dream,” in which Wiseman fantasizes being rescued from Midwestern winter. Perhaps she suspects we’re all transplants from somewhere else, and what could possibly be more bizarre than Planet Earth? Martians are the objective correlatives of outsider status; in a way, the eccentric cousins of the speaker. We can see ourselves in their practices, which are odd, but not odd enough to make them frightening.

The cleverness in Wiseman’s collection is in the essential humanness of these exotic creatures, which leads the reader to wonder: which of us is stranger? They, too, go to museums (for the amphibian and mammoth exhibits) and watch movies, shaking at death scenes and crash landings. They, too, slurp hot chocolate and get tattoos. They, too, play dress-up with boots, hats, and scarves. Even Martians are willing to walk the dog around the block. They, too, miss home.