Weave Magazine

Ruth Schwartz’s Miraculum is a vivid depiction of living in a world filled with sex and death. Her poems grasp at what brings these companions of our existence together, how they make sense side by side. She finds them in every living corner of our world, but most of all right beside us.

In “Forms of Prayer” there is a salmon “glistening in combat,” its epic and timeless quest to reproduce juxtaposed against the “unyielding hatchery walls” we’ve confined it to. The next moment she marvels at its beauty, “the brilliant pink and iridescent gleam/of the salmon wrapped in paper” just as she acknowledges “how we cook and eat it, knowing what we’re eating.” But even if we know, we ignore or willfully forget. Schwartz’s poetry seeks otherwise.

We meet other creatures who live with the same brutal and beautiful realities as we do, such as the tiny birds in “The Professors,” which through generous description are instantly familiar to us. “Their softly feathered throats/against our palms” and other moments of intimacy have the birds in our own hands, but only long enough so their departure a few lines later is bittersweetly felt. They leave “to marry the stony half of the world/to the half that covers our eyes—/as if they could teach us.”

And then, just as quickly, we are reminded in “Bottom of the World” that “life flattens itself/like a bird crushed in the road:/flat blotch of feathers.” These scenes are the same and they are opposite. There is transient interaction with the living and lingering contemplation of the dead, but both are always teaching, ensuring that we continue to learn from them.

Schwartz wants us to become unafraid of how sex and death can so often be found together, as she has. In “Falling in Love after Forty” she tells how “I don’t want you young again, nor me/I want every sadness we’ve lived to stand here beside us/between the swaying soldiers of dead corn.” Masking the truth is a waste for her, a lessening of the vitality and beauty of her life. She wants “death sitting naked between us/lowering its head to lap at our champagne.” Love and death intermingle, and there is nothing strange in it.

This is a theme in Schwartz’s work. Seemingly opposite ideas and events are brought together for the purpose of revealing them as not opposite at all. In “Music of the World” we hear of “nights when every car alarm/burbles shudders shouts and wails” only to a moment later learn of the mockingbirds “who come to praise, not mock,/that urban song.” If the most prolific avian songsters admire the music of car alarms, then shouldn’t we?

Schwartz’s poems nudge us to examine these questions, or they push us, or they throw at us a full glass of water. At times they even demand a pledge, such as in “What the Day Asks,” when we are so bluntly told “do you know this world is beautiful/will you vow to look.” By reading Miraculum, we already have.

Reviewed by Frank Izaguirre

Miraculum by Ruth Schwartz
Autumn House Press, 2012

July 9, 2012

D. Gilson Reviews Ruben Quesada's Next Extinct Mammal

Ruben Quesada describes the last photograph of his parents by beginning—

Tortillas clap against floured palms,
steaming bowls of avena, frijoles
black as the rumbling sky

Which is also to say, Quesada has taken the advice so many of us have heard time and time again, and too often ignored: begin with the action. After reading Quesada’s first full-length collection, Next Extinct Mammal, I am not surprised D.A. Powell points out that “like Whitman, Quesada is a poet of motion.” And it is apt that I am writing this on May 31, Whitman’s birthday, in the sunny afternoon when I find myself thinking that Quesada is the poet Whitman could have only dreamed of in the most pleasant of dreams.

Next Extinct Mammal is a collection of movement, yes, but one of exquisitely intimate movement. Here we get to know the characters in the world of Quesada, a Los Angeles native and first-generation Costa Rican American. These people, like the forms the poems take as their lacquered shells, vary widely. They are the godmother: “The alcoholic manicurist / with bright pink fingernails / filed into sharp points / was our next-door neighbor, / and my godmother.” Or Margarita, who works in California’s Diamond Creek Vineyards, and wears “a second-hand bra—threadbare, wrinkled like / the corners of her eyes.” Or Quesada’s mother, who stands “on production / line mouthing prayers for prosperity / and health in a room of air / compressors.”

From poem to poem, it’s impossible not to fall in love with the women Quesada first loved (lest we forget that close attention, intimacy again, is, indeed, a form of love; perhaps, in fact, love’s essential poetic representation). These are women beautifully, painstakingly, described. As a fellow member of the tribe, I can safely say that gay men have a unique vantage point within the world of women. And though the poems live more often, perhaps, in this world of écriture féminine, writing of the female body, some of my favorite moments come in the few poems about the love passing between men, whether that between father and son, friend, or lover, poems that cut quick and deep. Such as “Memories Are Made Like This,” which concludes with the stanza—

I’ve searched for the origin
of such intimacy and now
only the thinning smell
of sweat and pomade
makes itself known
to me. Neurons reconstructing
memories which stray
to the heart—that bloody mass
I wish would stop flexing—
just long enough to see
him one last time.

It is not reductive to call something beautiful; but what Quesada’s poetry does here, or one of the many things it does here, is remind us beauty is ever complex, and that an intelligent conversation about beauty is wrapped up in issues of gender, race, sex, class, aesthetics, and form. I would argue Next Extinct Mammal reflects this complexity, flexing the muscles of the lean poem, the prose poem, the narrative, the lyric, and always, the honest.

In “The Last Text,” Quesada explains, “and now I know / why I reread those words before I go to sleep…eyes scanning the distance between each word.” But as I have had the time to sit with Next Extinct Mammal; to travel to Los Angeles, Costa Rica, Texas, and many points in between or beyond; to meet a cast of fascinating characters spun into a impeccably woven narrative; and to learn from poems wrought by the careful hand of a wise craftsman, I can tell you the lines are befitting of Quesada’s Next Extinct Mammal as well, the lines I will reread again and again, my eyes scanning the distance between each word.

Ruben Quesada’s debut collection of poetry, Next Extinct Mammal, was published by Greenhouse Review Press in 2011. He received his M.F.A. degree in Creative Writing & Writing for the Performing Arts from the University of California, Riverside in 2007. He is completing a Ph.D. in English at Texas Tech University, where he teaches literature and creative writing. He currently serves as Editor at Codex Journal, Poetry Editor at The Cossack Review, and Contributor at Fringe Magazine. He will begin as Assistant Professor of English at Eastern Illinois University starting fall 2012.

Reviewed by D. Gilson

Next Extinct Mammal by Ruben Quesada
Greenhouse Review Press, 2011

June 15, 2012

Andrew Purcell Reviews Caki Wilkinson's Circles Where the Head Should Be

THE DUCHESS OF NONCE

I first encountered Caki Wilkinson's work in The Atlantic, which awarded her poem “Bower Bird” the first prize in poetry for their 2007 Student Writing Contest. Her insouciant rhymes, deftly jounced meter, and sure but playful command of diction leave the reader craving more of Wilkinson's work, but those left voraciously wanting had to be content to track down poems and online recordings.

That was until the recent release of her first book, Circles Where the Head Should Be, winner of the Vassar Miller prize in poetry out of the University of North Texas, itself a somewhat unexpected font of wonderful poets. Blurbed by MacArthur Fellow A.E. Stallings, who rightly praises Wilkinson's virtuosity, Circles Where the Head Should Be showcases the aesthetics of constraint, favoring constriction over release, poise over flow, the self-correcting over the self-obsessing.

Few living poets, aside from Stallings, possess such undeniable fluency in combining the mind and its sometimes staccato turns of thought with rhyme, meter, and clever turns of phrase. Wilkinson nods toward classical ambition, opening with a poem entitled “Cosmogony,” which, in a cute (if we can set aside any of that word's dismissive connotations) yet remarkably agile way imagines the first cause as a cat setting the world, a ball of yarn, in motion. This is no internet meme cat, however, nor the spinster poet's cat; rather, she evokes the cat's deeper, truer nature, an animal quite at ease with mischief-making gods.

In “Lares and Penates,” Wilkinson demonstrates her familiarity, her comfort with the classical realm, while buffing away any trace of stuffiness normally tarnishing such approaches. Her humor, a universal solvent, leaves behind a brilliant shine, and her double-jointed tropes transcend amusement to showcase something absent in much contemporary poetry – true wit:

     Still, every spring our porches spawn
       insects we can't identify
       and ferns turn freeze-dried octopi.
       They spill into the arid lawn
       with diasporic fliers, clover
           and choirs of woebegone

       house sparrows whose incessant cheeping
       recalls the gloomy Ubi sunt,
       our soundtrack to the nightly hunt
       for whatever is downstairs, beeping.
       (As if the sleepless needed some
           reminder they're not sleeping.)

But the greatest degree of emotional movement, the plushest pathos occurs in “The School By the Zoo,” a sixteen-part poem, rich in genuine self-effacement that drills into the halting action of the mind with an Audenesque precision.

           ––her mind
       racing to keep her place–– works constantly,
       fidgets, deletes, and realigns, resigned
       to making notes for notes she ought to keep;

Somehow, though writing about collegiate life, the alchemy of Wilkinson's masterful end couplets elevates her material above the banal. The extreme compression and the clever overlaying of the lofty and the lowly can perhaps best be seen in the poem's eighth section, “The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead,” where the closing couplet reads:

     So locomotion's neither here nor there:
       the axis mundi is her rolling chair.

The intelligence underlying Wilkinson's poems is as inviting as it is undeniable, compared, for example, to the unapproachable pretense of Ben Lerner's boisterous braininess. It is her restraint, often most obvious in staccato, two-word phrases like punctuation marks, that is most arresting. Reinforced by the strictures of meter and often rhyme, her mind pulls against that “silk-ribbon bondage” as A.E. Stallings refers to it, the tension arising as a palpable and satisfying sensation.

Wilkinson reaches her peak when she addresses the bathetically domestic in the face of a muted but all-enshrouding aether of mortality, similar in this regard to Larkin, Levis, or Hecht if he’d loosen his tie. From the sleight of hand in “Svengali Deck,” where a parlor trick motif disguises brilliant ars poetica, to the more straightforward but no less devastating “Assisted Living,” superb aural composition and readily comprehensible (yet hardly obvious) mental leaps make for a book of poems you'll likely find yourself wanting to read aloud to a friend.

Some may find the poise behind these poems too artificial for their tastes and the degree of construction, along with the plethora of Latin phrases, too intellectually indulgent. But compared to the overabundance of workshop poetry – poems that demonstrate safely competent aesthetics married to flat, predictable, and substance-free material – Wilkinson offers the musings of a vigorous, thoughtful mind captured and displayed through a kind of formalism that is clearly looking forward, not back.

Reviewed by Andrew Purcell

Circles Where the Head Should Be by Caki Wilkinson
University of North Texas Press, 2011

May 24, 2012

Garon Scott Reviews Heidy Steidylmayer's Fowling Piece

In Fowling Piece, Heidy Steidlmayer’s first collection of poems, the poet registers the spiritual aches that feed desire, and often finds their reflections in nature, driving the poems forward with end and cross rhyme, stringing them together by a more traditional (though carefully imperfect) meter. In “Couples,” for example, she too looks to nature and romance’s emptiness:

ask me if my emptiness equals all
your clothes, if the light shows
through your thinnest shirt
to hurt, or if the wind blows
your darks from the line by design

Through poems on protozoa, saints, and hospitals, her idiom is unflaggingly buoyant. A patched-over, palsied eye reveals “the mind in its weedy prominence.” A Chinese mantid wilts “deep in his ester of acetic acid.” The book’s final poem, “Charybdis,” opens “I am the crepe de chine of Paris green, rauwolfia, and atropine.”

The book’s first third is its most pliant. Evidenced by titles like “Heartbreak,” “Couples,” “Taxonomy of Grief,” and “Agonal,” the dominant mood is, well, heartbreak, grief, and agony, especially that of couples. There are, however, portents of matters to come—two poems that struggle with institutional religion, a poem about an orrery (“Sad amplitudes of clocky junk/crank moons and tiny globes of granite”) and an interest in prophecy and the supernatural throughout.

In the book’s second section, Steidlymayer’s voice is less urgent as she considers three routes to the unknown: Christianity, Greek mythology, and science. Her technical play and diction is less surprising here; her themes either buried or too dominant. The Christian poems are split between dissent against religion’s ritualistic, human-controlled side, and impersonal poems of Biblical stories, miracles, and the cults than surround them, like Naple’s thrice-yearly sensation, the liquefying blood of Saint Januarius. Science, it seems, in all its strangeness, catalyzes the poet’s language-impulse in exciting ways. She is determined to present this world in its own argot—Lepidoptera, not butterflies, entomology, not insects, elytra, animalcules, ootheca, cirri. Sometimes, the technical language works, but the twitch of misunderstanding and the impulse to run to a dictionary often deflate the experience of the poems.

Paradoxically, it is with a more distant subject that the poet finds her most personal, moving voice. Her poems of Greek mythology—as she inhabits the voice of Charon and Callisto, Scylla and Charybdis—are so effective because the act of speaking feels imperative. These are voices of impulse, irresistible, vital. Speaking of Zeus, Callisto asks,

Cynosure of all
eyes, did he
rise in a hood of bees

and throw off

his otherness?

The imperative to speak, and the unornamented weight it produces, carries from Steidlmayer’s Greek poems to the book’s final section, in which we discover the reason, or perhaps the culmination, of her restless spiritual searching—a brain tumor. Like another book recently reviewed by Weave—Christian Wiman’s Every Riven Thing—Fowling Piece confronts the surreal world of the hospital—the ubiquitous white, the masked faces, the screaming stranger in the next bed over—while attempting to make sense of death and self. Here, Steidlmayer is at her most brilliant. Her images are exact and necessary, no longer simply enjoyable flights of language, but the inescapable products of her topics. Where Wiman progresses from horror to spiritual serenity, Steidlmayer, as though under an analgesic haze, registers dreamlike visions in floating, punctuation-free lines:
the anesthesiologist, her faded countenance
as far away as a giant

my husband beside the bed, his face
as if I had just fallen from one of his branches

In a poetic world that, for better or worse, values idea over execution, Fowling Piece is a remarkable testament to the potential of technique, and is all the more so for being a first book. Steidlmayer uses—and is not used by—devices such as meter and rhyme, and though very few poems in the book could be called formal, the influence of formality is felt throughout. She handles line breaks masterfully because she lacks allegiance to form, and yet her most memorable lines are often weighted by their metric regularity. Moreover, the book’s passion for the unknown, for our pains to know and make claim on meaning, is admirably broad and honest, and its resolution—with poems of motherhood, creation, nature, and myth—is one of not certainty but hope. Her imperative in “Poverty,” one of the book’s earlier poems, may as well be to herself:

let the sun beat
down its fat old heart
bring another day to its knees

there is nothing left
to carry but your voice.

Reviewed by Garon Scott

Fowling Piece by Heidy Steidylmayer
TriQuarterly, 2012