Posts Tagged ‘8 stars’

Slot

Tuesday, April 17th, 2012

by Jill Magi
Ugly Duckling Presse 2011
Reviewed by Gina Myers

8

“…if I flee consolation…”

In Jill Magi’s new collection of poetry, to slot means to curate, to categorize, to place away. Dedicated to New York and written in the wake of September 11, 2001, Slot shows Magi, a New York City resident, on a quest to understand memorializing and acts of public and private grief.  Published in Ugly Duckling Presse’s Dossier Series, which features works of an investigative nature, Slot looks to a variety of sources in an attempt to make sense of this era. However, the more she investigates and learns, the more complicated the issue becomes.

In Slot, the speaker wanders in and out of museums, goes to work in the days following September 11th, attends a candlelight vigil with her neighbors, and consults a variety of sources, from a mentor to guide books, scholarly works, poetry, and art. Presented as a hybrid, the book combines prose poetry and short lyric poems with photographs, quotes, and bibliography. The bibliography does not occupy its usual spot at the end of the collection; instead, it is woven throughout. Without numbered end notes or citations following the quoted material, it is not exactly clear what comes from where, but that hardly seems to be the point here. Instead, Magi is bringing together a variety of sources and placing them collage-like in conversation with one another as well as with herself:

In November, a place loosened in my throat, I got rid of it, and thought I was sick like the others.

“Perhaps the voids now define a design line that cannot be crossed.”

Thinking that dispatches such as the above were taking a toll on my body, I sought the following:

“Violent city: resembling an ink spot splashed onto the sky—

we saw, together, the glass towers slip and the light quiver shut.

Violent forest: stitched together in wet tunnels.”

Early in the collection, Magi asks, “Am I turning to poetry? As an escape or to make sense?” And it’s possible that she’s doing both—separating herself from the events by attempting to intellectualize them.

In her quest, Magi doesn’t just look to materials about September 11th for answers. She turns to other museums and memorials, from Holocaust Memorials to Hiroshima, the Devil’s Rope Museum in Texas, and the Colonial Williamsburg Escaped Slave Program where “guests are approached by a runaway slave. Visitors know that they are surrounded by slave catchers and so the park’s guests must react instinctively to the situation.” Magi is struggling to understand the memorial in general—how an event can be reduced to a monument and cheapened by a gift shop. She writes:

At the Office, I unroll one of the blueprints:

In the first place, the changing gallery.
In the second, the Café, the Gift Shoppe, 10:46 am. Dusk.
Lively hub of orientation and ticketing. Resource Center. Midnight.

Her mentor comments, “We’ll call them Experience Stages. Documentary Zones. Semi-enclosed spaces. Parental guidance areas so that families, according to their children, may edit.” Through memorialization, history and suffering become sanitized and consumable—something one can edit for his or her children. “Modesty screens” can be used to “prevent small children from watching the graphic and murderous scenes.” At another site, Magi notices “the work to erase the slave quarters, oil refineries up the river, chemical plants barely visible through the trees,” and elsewhere she notes the irony of twenty-nine lynching photos framed in light Georgia oak.

The purpose of memorial is called into question any time beauty or free-spiritedness/childish behavior is juxtaposed with the seriousness or solemnity the memorial should project, and Magi masterfully points a number of these moments out, such as when the Berlin Holocaust Museum opens and “an ‘unidentified youth’ is photographed jumping from pillar to pillar.” She also includes entries from a guestbook and survey questions like “Is there anything that makes an historical site particularly enjoyable for you?”

Even while searching for understanding and attempting to make sense of these contradictions, Magi resists—even rejects—slotting:

Because if I flee consolation

if I midnight. If I contest claims to store, stock, arcade,
exhibit, slot—

If a frame
made from the body
is broken and vulnerable to vines,

There’s a sense that slotting something is to strip it down, to simplify and sterilize, to enforce a single and digestible narrative. While finding a slot for her experiences and feelings surrounding September 11th may make things easier and bring her consolation, Magi knows it wouldn’t be a true representation of things.

Despite the wide-ranging thoughtful investigation of this collection, it is hard to ignore the bit of irony that exists in the fact that Magi’s desire to refuse “slotting” events and grief results in a perfect-bound book, a container of these thoughts and questions that can easily be closed and put away in an open slot on a bookcase. Nonetheless, this is an important collection that is wise in its inquiry and wise in its refusal to reach resolution. In her acknowledgments, Magi writes of her sources, “This ‘incorporation’ is a result of reading and research, writing and rewriting. It is my hope Slot may be a conduit back to these texts, an invitation to study and make brand new incorporations.” And in this way, the book and investigation remain open, waiting for the reader to join the conversation.

*

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not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them

Wednesday, December 21st, 2011

by Jenny Boully
Tarpaulin Sky Press 2011
Reviewed by Kate Angus

“The moon tonight so full, so full of cradles outgrown.”

The best folk tales and children’s stories are the dark ones, the ones that hint at the world and human relations as they really are and so continue to haunt our adult dreams, shocking us awake to reel at the true terrors of abandonment, our inevitable decay, heartbreak, betrayal, and loss. The act of parsing out and presenting these adult truths from beneath the veils of children’s fantasy is the project at the heart of Jenny Boully’s masterful new book, not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them. The book is a brilliant alternate version of J. M. Barrie’s classic children’s book Peter and Wendy. Boully adjusts the focus so that Peter Pan is, as his name has come to signify, the type of boy who won’t grow up or settle down, who will seduce and then soon replace you, who’ll forget you in the blink of an eye even as you pine for him and wither with age, who will flitter on to the next replacement Mother to bring home for a while as a briefly-loved plaything as he amuses himself on his island of Lost Boys.

The book is constructed to hold two narratives: the original story of Peter Pan and Wendy that Boully assumes the reader knows, and her own variations. Structurally, she tells us these stories through two prose texts, one sitting on top of the other. The top half of each page holds the longer larger narrative while beneath, separated by a line and entitled The Home Under Ground, she gives us smaller fragmentary moments, shards of stunning images and commentary that serve as both literal and figurative subtext to the story above. When, for example, the top narrative tells us:

He will come to you in the darkest part of the night when you are sleeping…Despite his ability to lose so much, despite his boyish looks, his boyish charms, he can only dress himself with skeletons, with skeleton leaves; he smells of and is made of the loam of decaying roots and branches, the rotting sap and juices of Neverland trees. And what are these? What are these? asks Mrs. Darling, who knows that these leaves, these leaves littering the nursery floor, these leaves, aren’t the leaves of earthbound trees.

The Home Underground section whispers an even darker story, asking:

Would the death boat be made of the feathers of the Never bird? Enclose her within the rib bones of swallows….That gleaming in his eyes isn’t a personal excitement; if ever, if ever I forget you, then.

Tarpaulin Sky Press is listing not merely as Fiction / Poetry and that seems about right. Much like Boully’s previous books (The Body unfolds only as footnotes, [one love affair]* is a chimera of fiction, essay, prose poetry and memoir, and The Book of Beginnings and Endings, is comprised entirely of narrative openings and closings), it exists in the hybrid ground where it is both, either or neither, as the story within is both a children’s story and an analysis of a too common trope in adult relationships, and where Peter is both Peter and the “Betwixt-and-Between” that Boully dubs him.

In both texts, the narrative voice speaks in urgent fragment tones directly to Wendy, explaining the significance of small details and clips of dialogue and telling her story to her both as it happens and as it will happen in the future:

The window hasn’t been left open, and there is another boy sleeping in your bed. The absence of the beloved, the replacement that is easily replaced by Peter’s mother is also easily replaced by Peter himself, who will forget you, who will forget to love you or even to know you

Boully’s voice is hypnotic as she weaves half-remembered source-text stories with newer interpretations and builds a forward rush that detonates as she deploys a sudden fragmentation: for instance, the unexpected “let’s play pretend that I save you right before. We drown.”

Peter’s abandonment of Wendy seems inevitable throughout. This is due in part to his own fickle natue: “I’m a little bird, he says. But he doesn’t say that to just you alone.” It is also due to Wendy’s intensifying abandonment of immaturity, and to the simple fact of the inevitable decay that awaits all of us, particularly Wendy, the lone girl still attached to the human world during her sojourn in Never Land: “We won’t notice that we’ve grown until we’ve grown: that’s Wendy’s predicament.” All of these play out sexually as well; Peter has numerous other dalliances, and an air of darkness and complication permeates Wendy’s exchanges with the menacing, powerful Hook. “Don’t write down what actually happened; instead, write down what you wanted to believe,” the narrative voice advises Wendy, and later, half-mockingly reassures her that “If this…storyteller isn’t quite right, why then, another…will shortly come. It’s been known to happen.”

Boully maintains a fluid text but shies away from straightforward narration, providing a modern re-envisioning of a cultural touchstone that is also a commentary on itself. She weaves a gorgeous fever-dream where our half-remembered childhood stories now stand revealed as adult archetypes. Time itself becomes unstuck, as even Peter and the Lost Boys begin to contemplate “how we can continue on here without having to reinvent too much. Or, better yet, let’s…ascertain just what has transpired so that we can make it all new again.”  This moment seems like an embedded ars poetica, as the book itself also continually makes itself new and reinvents its source texts. The text warns Wendy continually that Peter will tire of her, will forget her, will leave her, yet an “I” suddenly speaks near the end, saying “You see, Peter, I too, alone, without you, can have adventures….I can leave you.” The idea of who has left who is suddenly open to new interpretation–was it Peter’s waywardness or Wendy’s ability to mature (something Peter lacks) that is the greater and decisive abandonment? After all, it is Wendy who has controlled the narrative–both by being the cause (the “you” the book speaks to so urgently) and by being identified as a storyteller throughout. At the end, it is Wendy who controls language and meaning, saying to Peter, “My dear, my dear pet wolf: I will tell you the difference between A and Z,” as well as the narrative of passing time, as she is the echo of “the housewife who has grown, has grown, the home is nothing but a hole. The moon tonight so full, so full of cradles outgrown.”

*

 

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Utopia Minus

Wednesday, October 26th, 2011

by Susan Briante
Ahsahta Press 2011
Reviewed by Gina Myers

“Why should we want to confine ourselves in two’s or five’s or cities?”

On her author page on Ahsahta Press’s website, Susan Briante writes, “[T]he lyric is a space of thoughtful speculation, a call for action or witnessing, a place where imagining can become an act of deep sympathy, where we might recognize connections and complicities.” And this is precisely the type of lyric the reader encounters in Briante’s newest collection of poems, Utopia Minus. The title, taken from Robert Smithson’s A Guide to the Monuments of Passaic New Jersey, focuses on a “ruin in reverse” where buildings “don’t fall into ruin after they are built but rather rise into ruin before they are built.” And throughout the collection, Briante documents these ruins, the suburbs, and explores what it is like to be alive among such landscapes.

The project is reminiscent of Brenda Coultas’s A Handmade Museum (2003), where Coultas looks at the detritus of a neighborhood in attempt to tell its story, but here Briante is not looking at objects left behind in the street; instead, she turns her eye outward to the constructed landscapes that surround us. The landscapes she engages are largely set in Texas, though she also has poems about New Jersey, where she grew up, and New York, where she once lived. And while specific places are named—for example, “Abandoned Commercial Use Property, 43rd and Ave. B,” “3000 Block Kings Ln—Demolished Apartment Complex,” and “From the Ruined Concrete Foundry West of Airport Blvd between Manor and M.L.K.”—anyone can relate to the environs Briante describes, even if their only recognition is from the oft-documented modern ruins displayed in magazines and on TV. However, Briante does more than just document the ruin—she’s able to detail what it is like to live amongst these ruins, which is a part of the story many news organizations ignore when covering places like Detroit.

Of course, it’s not just the abandoned buildings that are ruins—it’s the strip malls that are ruins, and we, who have grown up into this America, are ruined too. In “Nail Guns in the Morning,” Briante writes:

Storms this afternoon in Dallas
in the parking lot of the Target/Best Buy/Payless Shopping Center,
big chalices of rain, contusioned sky over the east, big yellow bus moving north
toward the dark end of—what?—

this weather, this fiscal year, this end of empire during which I am reading
the circulars stuck in my screen door, ice waiting
in the highest breath of atmosphere.
It will get us.

Throughout the collection there is a lot of attention given to  nature and the manmade world, but there is often a sense of disconnection or distance—a demonstrated ability to be aware of nature, but to be separate from it, which is perhaps yet another way in which we’re ruined. Human life often feels hollow here—reading the circulars stuck in the screen door—while nature threatens: “It will get us.” There is a great sense of foreboding, dread, and threat in this collection, portraying what it feels like to be alive during a time of endless war. In deft images, Briante is able to capture this mood. In a short poem, “December,” “Pigeons ascend to high voltage cables,” is at once a familiar and an ominous image.

And while much of the book has a sense of darkness, there is humor at times—like when the author laments, “O Sunglass Hut, we hardly knew you!” There is also a deeply personal side to the poems, as Briante explores a developing relationship and all the complications that come with it: “We love each other / and yet and yet and yet / Why should we want to confine ourselves in two’s or five’s or cities?” she writes in “Abandoned Commercial Use Property, 43rd and Ave. B.”  The penultimate poem in the book, “A Letter to Eileen Myles,” one of several prose poem letters, is about wanting to become a parent despite what seems like impossible situations—age and money:

Once I asked the MacArthur award-winning poet CD Wright about children. CD Wright said: Don’t worry. These days you can buy a baby on eBay. But if we eBayed the baby, Eileen, we would still have to pay $7,500 a year for day care. We’d still have to find money for a down payment, replace our 10-year-old cars, plan our retirement.

In Briante’s first poetry collection Pioneers in the Study of Motion (2007), set in Mexico, she established herself as a strong lyric poet with an unwavering eye. She can subtly move between observation and witness to internal reflection and  meaningful critiques of society. And she further establishes those strengths here. In “Up the Road,” Briante writes:

Bring your daughters to this place
tell them there was something special,
tell them we were something special,
our struggle as too few chroniclers.

Thankfully, Briante is one of the few who has taken on the role of chronicler of struggles.

*

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You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake

Wednesday, July 27th, 2011

by Anna Moschovakis
Coffee House Press 2011
Reviewed by Rachel Mennies

“HUMAN MACHINE:”

The Internet feels different after I finish reading You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake. Throughout the collection, Anna Moschovakis mines the Internet’s various engines and portals—Craigslist, Wikipedia, MySpace—for subject matter, reflecting back to us, her readers and the Internet’s reliable users, the complicated and troublesome material it holds. We move quickly and boldly from nature to cyberspace.

In the collection’s first half, Moschovakis shows us a world both hunting and hunted, using anaphora to craft scenes of human struggle against industry and scenarios testing our moral resolves. Variations on the title reappear throughout, crafting repeatedly the beginning of a narrative that doesn’t always end or neatly conclude. Later sections find us in front of the computer while Moschovakis makes a biting cultural study of our technological habits. It was after reading these disorienting and lyric sections straight through that I could sense my online self growing skeptical, even wary, of my usual e-landscape. This is Moschovakis’s strongest work in You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake: a forced, and imperative, reconsideration of the world we inhabit and mindlessly exploit.

“Everybody should have a position on everything,” asserts the speaker in the collection’s prologue poem. “We take our positions with us, like folding stools to the beach.” The long poem that follows, “The Tragedy of Waste,” shapes positions as tight, enclosed scenes, using iterations and variations of the book’s title clause to set the stage:

You are approaching a lake. You have canoes, tent, axes.

The heroine says: We shall first try to secure
an aeroplane view of our own

This taxes the imagination. Too many studies have begun
and ended in the middle.

* * *

You and others, approaching

We shall be asked for a way out

               to be fed

               to keep warm and dry

Here, the tragedy isn’t what little we’re given to survive, but the socio-cultural mess made in our attempts to do so. Moschovakis alludes to: Germany, 1917, modern industrialism, Western overconsumption, war and genocide. As explorer of the twentieth-century, she suggests, the Western world has created its own demise, a lifestyle where “ten men could live on the corn / where only one can live on the beef,” and we’re accusable and accountable for the configuration of this way of life. “You have your axes // What, precisely, is your procedure?” Moschovakis asks us at the poem’s end.

In the collection’s next long poem, “Death as a Way of Life,” we look more closely at the animal and human costs of this world—what it takes, both literally and figuratively, to produce the beef we require to survive. “In 1755,” the speaker tells us, “Louis XV / assembled 13 hunters / for an 18-day excursion.” We’re confronted next with their list of kills, an astronomical body count of wild animals:

19 stags
18,243 hares
10 foxes
19,545 partridges…
for a total 48,237 killed

This spectacle of consumption, as much about the pleasure of the hunt as it is for sustenance, receives its condemnation in later sections of the collection, as we visit briefly the names and ideas of twentienth-century philosophers known for their commentary on animal rights and the ethics of animal slaughter. “Then there is that Jewish thinker Emmanuel Lévinas / who wrote about violence,” notes the speaker of “Death as a Way of Life,” who later references philosopher and bioethicist Peter Singer. Singer’s name, books and philosophy appear in the background of portions of You and Three Others Are Approaching A Lake, offering a sort of compass through this corrupt, made world. “Anna is not on MySpace,” we learn later in the collection. “But she has read Peter Singer. Reading Peter Singer causes a creeping fire to burn its way up her center.”

“Annabot,” who led most directly to my own disorientation, speaks to us in the collection’s third poem, “The Human Machine.” In this and “In Search of Wealth,” the book’s fourth and final poem, e-found phrases and images push against their ethical use and purposeful cultural misuse by e-citizens. We’re taken through the landscape by Annabot, a sort of doppelganger for the author who takes us through the landscape by way of a “pop-up”-echoing, playful structure which aids in Moschovakis’s conjuring of the online realm). In the fourth of thirty “chances,” or small poems-within-the-poem, we learn that Annabot “is a chatbot designed to pass / the Turing Test. This is the language // of simple, obvious things.” Throughout this portion of the collection, Annabot interfaces with the Human Machine; the forces often confront one another, revealing Annabot’s struggle to process and render sincere emotional reactions in the medium to which she’s confined:

ANNABOT: But I am not cheerful.
HUMAN MACHINE: I ought to reflect, again and again, and yet again, that all others deserve from me as much sympathy as I give to myself. I place my hand over your heart.
ANNABOT: I cannot feel your hand.
HUMAN MACHINE: I cannot feel your heart.

We learn the consequences of this difficult human synthesis in “In Search of Wealth,” which uses the Internet as a found medium for sections of the poem. Here, we find excerpts from Craigslist: people looking for retail work or rough sex. We read of Scientology in a factual list, presumably culled from the organization’s own website. Our brain cache—like, one can assume, our Internet cache—fills to the brim with clutter and danger, periphery and violence. And yet: we still live in this world, even grow it: “But still we type,” asserts the speaker in the collection’s epilogue, “one letter at a time.”

Culpability shadows You and Three Others Are Approaching A Lake: the culpability of early Western industrialists, whose greed led to the depletion and ruin of our natural world; the culpability of those who prefer violence to rhetoric (“can a grammar kill?” asks a quoted poet in “Death as a Way of Life”); and the culpability of those “person-bots,” perhaps all of us, who choose to exist online over existing humanly. As Annabot, Moschovakis shows us provocatively what our online lives have the risk of doing to our psyches by placing them in an important historical narrative—that of past moments where cheap indulgence (meat over corn, hunting over cultivating, Craigslist sex over human connection) leads to an erosion of our very moral centers. Our anti-bots, our human selves.

And what of these human selves? Individual and complex, non-programmable, we have the most to lose by plugging in too far. “Dear Reader,” the book ends: “your documentary is prize winning.”

*

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The Bigger World

Wednesday, May 25th, 2011

by Noelle Kocot
Wave Books 2011
Reviewed by Nick Sturm


“There is no other life.”

The basic reason I pick up a book of poems, or attend a live show, or walk along a river, is to get closer to something I don’t understand, or at least to feel like I’m getting closer to it. Most of the time I’m just sitting in it, eating macaroni and cheese in it, feeling hurt or happy in it, sleeping in it, reading poems in it. Noelle Kocot’s The Bigger World has it, and each time I read these poems I feel fixed. I am a human being surrounded by things I don’t understand, and loving it, and falling apart in it, and suddenly this mysterious pronoun that once referred to everything I don’t understand now refers to the poems in The Bigger World.

As the title suggests, this is a book of amplification, which I mean both as the act of making something larger and also as the process of artificial, large-scale reproduction of DNA sequences. These poems are ontological; they are clear windows on a world that is brittle and elegant. From “Fugue”:

The building gleamed
In the midday rain. The cats
Ate their turkey dinner. She
Screened phone call after
Phone call. A wild loneliness
Descended like a flock of
Robins drained of their red.

The Bigger World is self-identified as a book of character poems; each poem has its own unique, unrepeated cast, and this cast animates and is animated by Kocot’s imagination, a la James Tate in Return to the City of White Donkeys and The Ghost Soldiers. One poem in this book tells us about Jelka, a woman who lives in an MRI machine for a few months. Another describes how Jim once had a tricycle accident but is now a butterfly. But these poems resist these kinds of futile synopses. Something big and full of light and pressure lives inside them. Meet Mary, who is “standing on so much wreckage / I think my legs will break.” Kocot shows her:

…groping fruit in the market,
Pretending it was the body of a lover,
And eating disgusting things out
Of cans, while the birds chirped quietly
In the dawn outside her kitchen window
After she’d rubbed her wrists with
Scissors oh-so-quietly in the dark.

This amplification works through Kocot’s often-charming, often-disturbing specificity. As readers, we are seeing parts of people we aren’t supposed to see: the parts they gave up on, their coping mechanisms. These lives and situations are tangible, yet fantastic. I trust the narrator when, in “Kind Regards,” she tells us about Rex, a man who spends his time looking for poisoned apples.

…Rex didn’t like being harassed
By a honeybee, so he crushed it
And rolled it around in his hand
Until it was nothing but a fine paste.
He touched a little of it with his tongue,
And discovered that it had the exact
Same aftertaste as a poisoned apple.
Rex was quite pleased with himself
And turned his car back toward home.
“What do you know about that?”
He thought. He was soon home,
And he turned on the television.
The mayor licked his balls like a dog.
Rex had plans. He dropped off to sleep,
Dreaming of buzzing things, dreaming
Of poison, and making plans that no
One in his right mind would ever understand.

The poems are about private lives. They are strange, but so is privacy. They are not surreal; they are—sometimes horrifyingly—all around us. As Kocot states, “There is no other life.” She gives her characters strange, illuminated specificity. The above poem also shows Kocot’s ability to adopt a fairy tale-like premise, magnetize it with a contemporary phenomenological reality, give us an uneasy laugh, and then unsentimentally ring our hearts out. It’s amplification. It’s your DNA being recoded.

More than anything else, Kocot’s generative imagination is the main catalyst that makes these poems explode. Illuminated, feral, Kocot’s creativity engenders an excitement comparable to being twelve years old, exposed to good poetry or music or art for the first time, and knowing that, for better or worse, things have been bent. One can’t help but to be unsteady, but believe in that instability. Meet Ritchie and the sleeper from “Fourth of July,” two unordinary guys with one foot in American masculinity and another in the metaphysical.

There was a shrinking downpour,
And the sleeper’s beans rusted
In the heat. Then, in a mercurial
Instant, there were unimaginable
Sounds, and bright pinwheels lit up
The Fourth of July sky better
Than fireworks. “What do you
Say we get some hot dogs to go
With them beans?” Ritchie asked
The sleeper. “The river, the sun,
And the night will take us
Where we want to go,” he replied.
“Hot dogs are for sissies.” Then,
Like tired sages, they dropped
Off to sleep and each had the same dream,
That they picked up a tiny blue
Moose and it was smiling.

The surreal turn at the end—reminiscent of certain poems by Tate and Dean Young—is nonetheless terrestrial, as it is placed in a dream. Kocot’s skill, and her heart, allow these poems to interweave the whimsical and the unworldly, opening us up to a sudden wonder, a falling through what we thought we knew. And really, the falling has never felt so necessary (in the final poem, a father butterfly named Jim buys his daughter a tricycle and has to watch as she rides “away / Unfettered into the summer night.”) It’s akin to a kind of spiritual awe, like being exposed to ancient stained glass or looking at the sun through a waterfall. She leaves us hanging in the best way: always about to fall, always about to be saved.

*

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chap nook 2: Durbin, Crill, Stucky

Monday, January 31st, 2011

 

Fragments Found in a 1937 Aviator’s Boot, Kate Durbin (Dancing Girl Press 2009)

8Dancing Girl Press has done an admirable job with the neat and attractive publication of Kate Durbin’s chapbook Fragments Found in a 1937 Aviator’s Boot. The title of the work refers to a recent development in the mystery of aviator Amelia Earhart’s 1937 disappearance during an attempted transpacific flight—though this is not made immediately apparent to readers not well versed in Earhart’s history. Earhart is the voice for each poem, narrating the events leading up to her premature death.

Durbin favors prose poems and writes in a sparse language full of bold colors and immediate emotion. Durbin uses some of Earhart’s own words as found in the aviator’s 1937 collection of writings Last Flight, which was compiled posthumously by her widower, George Putnam. She often rephrases them, as in her various “Red” poems: “What did that little plane try to tell me as it swished by?”

Earhart’s thoughts achieve a beautiful, contemplative poetry through Durbin. Some of the earlier poems reflect on Earhart’s domestic situation and her womanhood. For instance, in “Ink” she muses, “Fear of woman’s blood too long has bound us to burning at high stakes.” But this fate is not for Durbin’s Earhart, who finds release in “the indefinite sky” and imagines that these “papers” will be found after her imminent death, affording her forgiveness from her husband and “grace for a woman who fell from the sky.”

–Erin Lynn

*

The Upstairs Hammer, Hildred Crill  (Argos Books 2010)

Hildred Crill’s The Upstairs Hammer forms an awkward marriage of the abstract and the trite. The opening poem, “Document,” provides a tonal preview for what’s to come. It is vague, yet gripping:

I was a hedged bet, just one
of the holes a rat found
and possessed, a last gulp
from the welling cup.

Crill’s ability to manipulate sound (i.e. gulp/cup) is one of her greatest strengths. Both rhythmically pleasing and full of dark intrigue, “To the Original Tower” provides an exemplary moment:

Unfinished is only completed
as ruins. The task
is neglect. The pause,
oblivion.

However, Crill’s poems are sometimes handicapped by sentimentality. One such poem, “Twofold Tale: Troll With the Cap of Invisibility” is a mythical mini-story, as the title implies:

I believed you unwelcome me

                People think people
                don’t like them
                but it’s themselves
                they dwell on
                and won’t love

But you said nothing
as if layered in shale

                 When people aren’t seen
                 they witness more

Oh, the wisdom of trolls. These tidbits of knowledge from the troll read a little bit like a quote-a-day calendar.  The most interesting parts of this poem come from the narrator, but the italicized Troll-speak ultimately dominates.

While parts of The Upstairs Hammer can be overdramatic,  the majority of the book offers a musicality and controlled rhythm that makes it a worthwhile read.

–Joanne C. Wood

**

Your Name is the Only Freedom, Janaka Stucky (Brave Men Press 2009)

“Destroy Song” is the name given to four poems in Janaka Stucky’s Your Name is the Only Freedom. In combination with cover art suggestive of hell and constant talk of destruction, the opening lines of “Hopeful in Spite of Legion” are indicative of the book’s overall mood:

Of beasts, of blood
of devils; of horrid hell

of appetites & passions

Stucky’s language is colloquial and direct– “Buck like fuck as I press / My hands between your breasts.”–but he is able to maintain a light tone in the presence of dark themes. For example, “My broken neck singing / A holocaust of seahorses.”

Certain lines are cliche, and a few lines are extraneous and affected: “Children play with matches /  Planes about to crash.” These lines have little impact amidst images of flames and witches. In a similar fashion, images of locks of hair and honey are juxtaposed with images of beasts and blood.

The Hindu goddess Kali appears in several poems throughout the collection, and the leaflet preceding the title page is stenciled with an image of a dancing creature with four arms and a necklace of  what appear to be human skulls. The symbolism Stucky is conjuring is unclear, but the Hindu text, Kalika Purana, depicts Kali as a four-armed figure, albeit beautiful  and brave, which is perhaps the duality at which Stucky drives.

–Ivana Kilibarda

***

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Seedlip and Sweet Apple

Monday, January 24th, 2011

by Arra Lynn Ross
Milkweed Editions 2010
Reviewed by Rachel Mennies

8

“a voice / I have heard faintly all my life”

“The words flew up”—with that spectral incantation, we’re immediately in the world of Ann Lee, figurative mother and literal founder of the Shakers. Seedlip and Sweet Apple, the first full-length collection by Arra Lynn Ross, mines the life, death, and faith of Lee, crafting a world as spiritual as it is grounded in labor—the different labors of farming, sex, prayer. Lee’s work here is to redeem her followers from the sins of the body, and Ross details the rise of the Shakers flush against the narrative of Lee’s life. “I walked through briars,” says a young Lee in the poem “Jane Helped Me to My Feet,” “and came out the other side, scratched // and torn, my blood as red as anyone’s.” By way of Lee’s conversion, Ross writes of abuse and resilience, using experimental forms to add a strange and authentic dimension to Lee’s story.

Rarely are these poems orderly or demure. Even when telling of Lee’s austere disavowal of the bodily and the sensual, Ross sprawls lines and meanders stanzas, creating a deliberate, complicated contrast between the book’s form and content. In “Sabbath Breaking,” short lines capture a violent and recurring scene of Lee’s physical punishment for her beliefs:

I spoke of
                         God
                                                       in seventy-two
          languages
and still
             they would have nothing
but my body broken.
                                                     Bound
with rope,
                                        knocked with clubs,
                                                                kicked
every two miles…

Here, fragmentation and spacing disorient the reader and confuse the line even as the poem’s described moment wrenches us with its pain. We see in these snippets the twisted logics of torture and religious persecution. Form in other poems serves a more historical, “found” purpose. In poems like “Manchester Constables’ Log” and “The World’s Course,” Ross mimics written media from Lee’s time—a police logbook in the former poem and a town ledger in the latter—granting the book a faithful, contextualized feel. These are Lee’s poems, from Lee’s time, and Ross captures these emotional and historical climates with riveting accuracy.

Despite the violence and sufferings of Lee’s life, Seedlip and Sweet Apple is ultimately a joyous text, a liturgical text, a text about love. Some of the collection’s most beautiful poems mine Lee’s different loves—for her savior and her followers—in earnest and rapturous verse. “Learn to Sing By Singing” lists, in a sort of nonce prayer, the stuff of loving, what’s observed in the process of worship. “You are // the love, lemon and rind. Soft pine, cicada, swamp and vine. / Cattails at the edge of the road. Blue-eyed dragonfly. / Moon. Friend. Lizard in the woodpile. Sweet surprise.” Even during the moments prior to Lee’s passing, faith takes a positive cast: a tone grateful to a difficult life. “To be held in God’s arms,” yearns the speaker of “God Is the Mother of All,” “to hear / the trumpets in his voice, a voice / I have heard faintly all my life, / as a babe inside the womb.”

This beauty—hard-wrought and suffered-for—resounds throughout Seedlip and Sweet Apple. Far from fragile or delicate, this collection shows love and faith at its most fraught and ugly moments, and allows its heroine Lee room for complication and doubt even as she bravely founds the Shakers. Ross has written a book of quiet, wrenching triumph: a narrative for a strong woman surrounded by violence, whose piety and faith in God burns, a fierceness in her guts.

*

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Parable of Hide and Seek

Sunday, December 26th, 2010

by Chad Sweeney
Alice James Books 2010
Reviewed by Kate Angus

8

“…watch the sky / braiding and unbraiding its light.”

Although there are many smaller pleasures in Parable of Hide and Seek, Chad Sweeney’s latest collection, the book’s greatest strength is Sweeney’s embrace of mutability and potential. The poems in this book move effortlessly between the concrete logical world and a place where the laws of nature are suspended or irrelevant. Through his use of associative imagery and elegant line breaks, Sweeney creates a liminal space where the real work of poetry begins, which is to say that his readers–with a tip of the hat to an older master– wander through a series of shifting images that allow them to “find (themselves) more truly and more strange” (Wallace Stevens, “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon”).

This world of infinite possibilities is perhaps best illustrated by “Wednesday,” a poem comprised of five elegant tercets. He begins with the mundane; “A hubcap was ringing,” moves rapidly into the rest of the stanza’s unexpected action (“I lay flat on the street / to answer it.”) and then leaps into a series of assured and surprising associations as the poem unfolds. Sweeney continues,

A fern was ringing.
A tombstone. A ladle.
It was Wednesday

at the center of the year
and everything was calling
to everything else.

This assertion that everything interacts is one of the essential and most interesting tenets underlying Sweeney’s poetry. The contradictory images of metal and plant (hubcap and fern) merge as they perform the same action, and the speaker’s action creates another implied image (hubcap and fern as telephone). These associated images propel the action of the poem forward into the second great strength of his poetry: a clear-eyed and calm acceptance of the world’s inescapable danger. Sweeney concludes:

Hello! Hello!
The clouds were doused
in gasoline.

Hello! I answered,
into a blue sheet
fluttering on the line.

The implication of danger remains after the poem has ended, and yet the reader is left with a curious and lovely sense of tranquility as well. Amidst the anxiety inherent in clouds doused in gasoline, the blue sheet on the line holds the connotation of the blue sky, an inherently peaceful image, and the speaker is speaking to all of it as he greets and answers the world.

This twined sense of calm and danger is consistent in Parable of Hide and Seek, most notably also in “The Methodist and His Method,” where the speaker’s dead grandfather “preaches to the other corpses” and concludes with the ominous and lovely

Each man has been given his row boat,
he says,

to lie back in and watch the sky
braiding and unbraiding its light.
No one is safer than we are.

There are less interesting poems in this collection–moments where Sweeney draws a bit too much attention to his magician’s tricks (for instance, by telling us “a noun is verbing” in “Captain’s Log”). But overall, this is a book of manifold pleasures written by a poet with a deft, assured hand.

*

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One With Others

Friday, November 19th, 2010

by C. D. Wright
Copper Canyon Press 2010
Reviewed by Steven Karl  

8  

“So they slew the dreamer, and ever since they’ve been trying to slay the dream”

C.D. Wright’s dazzling new book, One with Others, can be seen as a thematic continuation of two previous books, Deepstep Come Shining and One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana, which consist of many voices and narratives that expose the corrupt underbelly of the South’s systems of power.  In One With Others, Wright focuses on the civil rights movement in the South, specifically Arkansas. She weaves narratives of those that survived the vicious polarizations of hatred and those who did not.  

Although the bracketed title is [a little book of her days], there is nothing “little” about this book.  It is more than 150 pages long, and is formatted as one extended sequence (continuing, and perhaps paying homage to the book-length Southern poem tradition of Frank Stanford). It is full of voices, stories and fragments, and closes with 10 pages listing source material and notes. Wright provides real voices of the Civil Rights-era South. The South at its best — “Then she shocked me saying, They have souls just like us.” — but mostly, at its worst:  

The assistant warden, at 300 pounds, is the one identified for administering the 

strap at the Arkansas pen [a self-sustaining institution]. Several say they were 

beaten for failing [to meet cotton quotas]. Others more often than not did not 

know why [they were beaten]. One testified to more than 70 [beatings]. 

The strap is not in question. In question is when it is to be administered. 

(pg 12) 

Wright collects various forms of narrative: reportage, news accounts, stories passed on through oral traditions of hymn and gossip, and varieties of lists. She uses the points of view of witnesses, activists, racists, crooked law enforcement officers, survivors, and those who have survived in spirit.  With this collage, Wright reaches a more personal and lived history of Arkansas during the Civil Rights era and exposes some of its secrets. One narrative thread presents experiences of black children who were integrated into “white” schools.  They are often accounts of alienation and fear. Here are two examples:   

          GRADUATE OF THE ALL-WHITE SCHOOL, first year of Integration- 

By-Choice: Spent a year in classes by myself. They had spotters on the 

trampoline. I knew they would not spot me. You timed your trips to the 

restroom. 

(pg 17) 

*** 

          GRADUATE FROM ALL-WHITE HIGH SCHOOL, First Year of Choice: 

When MLK died kids were laughing and talking about how they should have 

killed that [N-word] a long time ago. 

          Did you hear the one about the [N word] that… 

          Do you know why the colored want to send their children to the white 

school. 

So they can learn to read and riot. 

           Do you know what they sang at King’s funeral. 

           Bye-bye, blackbird. 

          Memphis has one up on Dallas. 

          They got a president. We got a king. 

So they slew the dreamer, and ever since they’ve been trying to slay the dream. 

(pg 95) 

One with Others is potent because it is alive with voices, alive with suffering, alive with a language which earmarks an era, but also a message which seeks to persist. It is also alive with an ideology of hatred that still courses through the United States today.  Wright’s book gives the voices of the oppressors a place to be shamed and provides a place for the voices of the oppressed to be heard. Wright’s rolling blend of voices helps the reader to access the psychic landscape of Civil Rights Era-Arkansas in a way that non-fiction and news reports do not. You will find yourself connected to her characters. You will root for some; others will break your heart with their ignorance and arrogance. These are voices retransmitted, American voices perceptive to a present which is suddenly the past:  

The river rises from a mountain of granite.

The river receives the water of the little river.

The house where my friend once lived, indefinitely empty.

Walnuts turning dark in the grass. Papers collected on the porch.

If I put my face to the glass, I can make out the ghost

of her ironing board, bottle of bourbon on the end. 

(pg 7)

Recalling Langston Hughes, Wright draws upon the river for constant movement. This river begins in the mountains and subsumes smaller rivers on its way to the sea.  It becomes an example of nature’s continual rush.  Wright then shifts to a human construct, “the house where my friend once lived.”  Unlike the river, people physically cease to continue, so Wright continues to build the tension between the bucolic (river, house of a friend, walnuts, ironing board) and the “ghost,” or the persistence of memory which continues long after a life has stopped.  One With Others is the reckoning of ghosts.  

*

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The Madeleine Poems

Wednesday, October 13th, 2010

by Paul Legault
Omnidawn 2010
Reviewed by Kate Angus

8

“the little bones in their faces”

legault cover

The first question a reader might ask when opening Paul Legault’s lovely debut collection, The Madeleine Poems, is perhaps the most obvious: who is Madeleine, our title character, our heroine? The question might be better phrased as who is she not, however, as even the table of contents reveals Madeleine’s mutability.

Appearing as herself in the first poem, “Madeleine” only, she dwells very briefly on her own nature, telling us she is “righteous and moth-like.” This statement soon gives way to a series of flickering transformations, a continual refusal to be categorized or held by the boundaries of flesh or character. Madeleine seems, at first, potentially vulnerable, admitting that others could hold some physical power over her, as they have the ability to “Wash me or tear me; knead me in lye,” but this acknowledgement is immediately followed by the declaration, “know then that I will outlast you.”

And outlast us she shall, in her multiplicity of incarnations. The rest of the book presents Madeleine in a series of personas: “Madeleine as the Homosexuals,” “Madeleine as James Dean and the Whale,” “Madeleine as Travelogue” (twice!), “Madeline as Mathematician,” as Lice, as Home, as the New Frontier, as Portrait of Walt Whitman as Gertrude Stein as a Stripper, as Ode of a Nightingale, as Forest Gospel, etc. While these transformations could seem forced or overdone in a less sure hand, Legault makes of them a fragmented beauty. Madeleine’s series of selves unfold in a series of evocative dreamlike images where

The mirrors placed flat on the lawn. The movers sleeping. The grass caught
      above them stirred. The grass stirs. Stirred little green knives. Stirred
                  little thieves–the little bones in their faces. Move from them,
        clockmaker. The thieves. and their little sister-assistants. Madeleine,
there is no one with each of the small bones of his face for you.

(from “Madeleine as Travelogue”)

Although disorienting, there is nothing alienating in these poems’ shifting moments. Rather, the reader is included, invited, as Madeleine tells us, “This is where a love is starting: you” (“Madeleine as Tourist”).

If the reader’s inability to pin Madeleine down and truly identify her is, at times, frustrating, there is a greater and more interesting project at work here: that is, to show us luminous possibilities. If Madeleine can so easily take on these multiple personas, then it makes sense that this mutability extends to the surrounding world and so we can “Let the wing be without and within” (“Madeleine as Pornographer”). Although there is a dark current here, where “the dead / grew their numbers / from things named Madeleine” (“Madeleine as Crusoe”), concomitantly there is a bright thread of hope. If, as the melancholy voice of “Madeleine as Crusoe” points out, “A thing is in itself– / to name is to bring death to” then there is also a power in the continual trying on and shrugging off of names. Though Madeleine is always Madeleine, she is also in herself so many, her variety so–as the old saying goes–infinite, that she becomes somehow immortal.

*

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