What It Means to Be Alive

Dragonfly Notes: On Distance and Loss, by Anne Panning

Stillhouse Press, 2018
243 pages, paperback, $16.00

Grief takes many shapes and can change as we live through it. For author Anne Panning, grief takes the shape of a discarded Better Homes and Gardens Sewing Book, found on a neighborhood street, evoking the memory of her mother. This is where Panning’s new memoir, Dragonfly Notes: On Distance and Loss, begins. “Grief is so private that it’s hard to take it out into the world,” Panning observes as she mourns her mother’s death. The recipient of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction for her collection Super America and a Best American Essays Notable nonfiction writer five times over, Panning can capture the essence of human experience. Panning’s essays are known for being fine-tuned and attenuated to the intensity of a moment, built out of vivid and uncomfortable truths. In Dragonfly Notes, Panning collects and uses these vignettes to craft a longer story about family, regret, and the loss of her mother.

Growing up poor in Arlington, Minnesota, the oldest daughter in a family of four siblings, with an addicted father and a loving mother, Panning manages to capture what it is to question where home is and what it means to leave one’s place of origin for good. Panning faces her own family criticism, quoting her brother: “‘Everything has to be such a drama for you,’” he expresses, “‘Isn’t anything just normal, or whatever for you?’” In this moment, Panning addresses a central aim of this book, which is to probe her family history in order to understand the loss of her mother. Her memoir answers her brother’s question easily, adeptly: No.

There is a symbolic mechanism that brings the memoir together, the “segmentation” of its structure, as Panning may call it, or the quilting together of titled sections that form the larger whole. Sections are not in chronological order, revealing Panning’s ability to shift into new time and geographical place naturally, as though she is having a conversation with us. Panning, like her mother, collects things throughout the memoir, and it is notable that the book, like her mother’s acts of accumulating fabric for making Panning’s childhood wardrobe, is carefully sewn from its sections.

Early on, in a section called “Good Girl,” Panning wonders what made her mother stay with Panning’s father. Barb met Lowell when she was in high school, and, as Panning notes, he was already an alcoholic then. Panning lets herself ask questions to her mother that she will never get answers to. This series of questions starts to open the door to what the memoir investigates: How does abuse happen in a family, and how do we get out of it? What does it mean to stay, and what does it mean to leave?

There is a dynamic relationship between Panning’s unflinching approach to her past and her lyricism in describing her parents’ home. Of the distressed Victorian her parents owned, she describes “the upstairs bathroom that our mother had made cozy by wallpapering the sloped wall over the tub in a tiny floral print, painting the vanity and chair a soft, strawberry pink, and glazing flower patterns on the side of the claw-foot tub. It still smelled like her Caress soap.”

Then, in a section titled “Hijacked,” Panning’s anger appears. After Panning introduces her family to her fiancé, whom she identifies as the healthiest relationship she has ever had, her mother asks her to reconsider the wedding. Panning remembers her mother saying through the phone line, “‘I mean, it’s not like he abuses you or anything, but he seems to sort of dictate how thing go in an abusive way.’” Panning, fierce as ever, responds with vehemence in the exchange, telling her mother, “‘You wouldn’t know a good relationship if it hit you in the face!’” And she goes on. What makes these moments so real is how vulnerable and honest Panning is.

The memoir finds its center in a Minnesota hospital with all of Panning’s siblings, waiting after the last of a series of incomplete and failed surgeries her mother has endured. With her mother on life support, Panning circles scenes with humor (eating Harry Potter Jelly Belly jelly beans with her siblings) and ends them with emotional heft (her father’s inability to stop the alarm going off on his wristwatch while getting very bad news). Throughout this section, the strengths of Panning’s writing are revealed: We can hear the potato chip bag crinkle under the weight of her father’s mindless snacking, we can see Panning trying to sing to her vacant mother in her hospital bed.

As the memoir ends, Panning must face her ordinary life. It’s almost as if she doesn’t want to let go, because doing so fades the memories of her mother. In mourning, Panning puts her energy into the writing workshop she’s teaching at SUNY Brockport, where I myself took classes with her (not the one she recounts). In a nonfiction class I took with her, she guided us to figure out the point of an essay by asking “So what?” At the end of her memoir, she asks, “I have parasailed in Malaysia—so what?” Her memoir easily answers the so-what question, and, in fact, there are many answers to that question in this powerful, necessary nonfiction work. Because this memoir will help readers feel hope if they are in abusive relationships. Because this memoir will help people grieve. Because this memoir will teach readers that it’s okay to be as raw and as vulnerable as you can be, as long as you are being honest. This memoir gives to its readers a sense of what forgiveness, grief, and living fully, all at once, can mean to a person. This memoir needs to be read as a vital voice in nonfiction, a voice that empowers, challenges, and gives comfort to those experiencing what it means to be alive.

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Someplace Better

Don’t Call Us Dead by Danez Smith
Graywolf Press, 2017
88 pages, soft, $16.00

In their second collection, Don’t Call Us Dead, Danez Smith screams at America, particularly white America, to become woke, once and for all, instead of denying the genocide of black males via racism and homophobia. Smith’s words are so pointed and powerful, impassioned and infuriated that I cannot help but equate the poet with James Baldwin, whose writing was frequently, as stated in his essay, “The Creative Process,” a “lover’s war” with society.

In this three-part work (since named a National Book Award finalist) replete with snake, blood, burial, water, fish, black sky, and star symbolism, Smith illustrates what is possible—the frontier of form serving content—poems with segments both traditional and prose-like, that begin and end in concrete form, are epistolary, contain lines that offer colons and backslashes, that are hermit-crab, fill-in-the-blank, and crossed out. However challenging, though, the texts are accessible, a balancing act achieved throughout the book.

Smith’s words are often born in fury, as may be noted in poems that bookend the collection. In part one, “dear white america,” they make it clear that they would rather move to a new planet in danger of being sucked into a black hole than to continue to subsist on Earth. The poet asks, “… how much time do you want for your progress?” In part three, “you’re dead, america,” they make white america aware that only because of “brown folks,” “realer than any god / for them i bury whatever / this country thought it was.” Unlike the black boys buried in earlier poems, the persona buries “america,” respectfully, yet still using a lower-case “A.”

In “Summer, Somewhere,” the prologue, in which they write, “if snow fell, it’d fall black. Please don’t call / us dead, call us alive someplace better,” black men are removed from coffins as boys again, given a second chance, and “… go out for sweets & come back.” Trayvon’s new name is “RainKing.” The poet inquires, “do you know what it’s like to live on land who loves you back?” The poem, although steeped in a context of injustice, is gentle, beautiful, like listening to a dirge—a sense of relief and release created about this imaginary haven, racist and homophobic hell on earth slipping away.

One theme of the timely collection is police brutality. In the prologue, such references as “sometimes it’s they eyes who lead / scanning for bonefleshed men in blue” and that even in this alternative heaven, they still can’t shake their fears, “we wake up hands up.” When I reached “dear badge number,” still in section one, I wondered why the poet was so heavy-handed with his emphatic two-line piece, “what did i do wrong/be born? be black? meet you?” In another context, I would have criticized it for obviousness, but I realized that Smith sees the time for subtlety as long gone. Directness is needed so that white readers cannot possibly misconstrue their words.

Smith writes about homosexuality in equal measure. In “last summer of innocence,” the poet illuminates the final summer before the speaker was aware of their homosexuality. They write about homosexual dating and racism therein, and about sex itself. Tender lines come across as a love letter to black males. This work serves as orientation for what is to come: witnessing a grieving process as the poet, who has revealed publicly they are HIV+, takes readers through the agonizing stages that led to acceptance of such a diagnosis. The poem “fear of needles,” for instance, contains three centered lines written in second-person point of view, in which Smith pushes readers into a place of fear experienced by sexually active gay men:

instead of getting tested

you take a blade to your palm

hold your ear to the wound

The poet delves into the intricacies of being HIV+, discussing betrayal by partner and self, loss of future progeny, homophobic religious leaders, and even the disease as a form a genocide. They intertwine police and infected blood cells, jail sentences and HIV sentences. In the epigraph of “1 in 2,” Smith states that a 2016 CDC study revealed that one in every two black men who has sex with men will be diagnosed with HIV. They observe:

If you trace the word diagnosis back enough

you’ll find destiny

trace it forward, find diaspora

They push themselves in terms of not only content but also form throughout section two, most notably in the final poem, “litany with blood all over,” when the pain becomes so intense that the piece ends concretely as “his blood” and “my blood” increasingly mingle, becoming one, across one-and-a-half pages of type.

To call Don’t Call Us Dead “brave” would be an understatement, an insult. I wish that this collection did not exist, that there was no need. But there is, and since there is, I cannot think of a poet who could handle its subjects more deftly or with more grace and poignancy than Danez Smith.

Please also see Judith Roney’s Aquifer interview with Danez Smith.

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Stretched between Sunshine and Shadow

The Authenticity Experiment: Lessons from the Best and Worst Year of My Life, by Kate Carroll de Gutes
Two Sylvias Press, 2017
200 pages, paper, $17.00

Kate Carroll de Gutes’s debut memoir, Objects in Mirror are Closer Than They Appear, won the 2016 Oregon Book Award for Creative Nonfiction, as well as the Lambda Literary Award for Memoir, and she has written another noteworthy book. Her new memoir, The Authenticity Experiment: Lessons from the Best and Worst Year of My Life, has already won an IPPY (Independent Publishers Book Award) and will speak to many readers who share the struggle between our public personas and private feelings. The book was sparked by a thought-provoking question that poet Fleda Brown posed to her online community about resisting the tendency to present life on social media as perfection, depicting beautiful children, beautiful friends, beautiful houses, even beautiful food—all of the time.

De Gutes set out to see whether or not she could intentionally share what she calls “the duality—the both/and, the light/dark—of life” for thirty consecutive days on her blog. She examines the way social media is used to “connect” with friends and acquaintances in the very moment we have a thought or a photo to share. In her work, she considers the questions: Has the immediacy of social media made us more isolated than in the days of neighbors chatting over the fence, mailing handwritten letters, and making phone calls? Has shaping a public persona overshadowed engagement in authentic human relationships?

She could not have predicted just how much her life would be stretched between the extremes of sunshine and shadow across the time-span of her experiment. Things took a dramatic shift when shortly into the #LightAndDark blog project, her mother experienced a series of strokes. Less than a month after her father died, De Gutes remembers taking her mother to a play. Her mother was having trouble keeping names and plot points straight:

I didn’t think it was Alzheimer’s then. I thought it was grief that kept her from tracking. . . who would think it was anything more than the grief of losing a spouse of forty-six years?

As the play began, my mother reached over and patted and squeezed my right hand, then let her hand linger there. Looking at this now, I see she was apologizing and thanking me in the same move. But all I felt was discomfort. My mother’s hand on mine, me standing in as spouse like I had done so many times before. I never wanted this role. Now here I was starring in it. I withdrew into myself. My mother felt it and pulled her hand away.

Then her mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and eventually moved into a care facility near De Gutes. After the strokes, De Gutes and her sisters moved their mother again—from the care facility to adult foster care—in order to get the hospice care she needed. Just ten days later, she died. De Gutes made her mother’s funeral arrangements, delivered her eulogy, and closed her estate.

Within ten months, De Gutes became the primary caretaker of her close friend Steph. When cancer took her friend, De Gutes closed her estate. Then her close friend, editor Judith Kitchen of Ovenbird Press, died of cancer two days after completing the final edit on Objects in Mirror are Closer Than They Appear. Grief shook the bedrock of De Gutes’ world, and multiple aftershocks continued to leave her feeling ungrounded. At the same time, she was busy giving public readings to promote her debut memoir, winning awards and giving speeches.

Under these circumstances, De Gutes still carried on The Authenticity Experiment, trying to render an honest depiction of her day-to-day reality. Some days her post went up only minutes before midnight, but she wrote something every day for the full thirty days. This chapter, just one short paragraph, titled NEGRONI (PRN) illustrates the swiftness of change in her life and the weight of the decisions that fell on her shoulders.

I’m not sure which is harder: moving my mom to an adult foster home on the down-low so she wouldn’t continually be retraumatized when we had to keep telling her about it, or leaving her there. Which is why tonight I’m sitting at my new favorite restaurant and drinking a Negroni. I ate here two weeks ago tonight with my mom. I feel like I’ve been in one of those Progressive Insurance “Life Comes at You Fast” commercials. Was it really only two weeks ago that I had this same drink at this same table with my mom?

When the thirty-day experiment reached its conclusion, some of De Gutes’ readers didn’t want it to end. She decided to continue to write under the #DarkAndLight hash tag, posting longer essays a couple of times a week. The result is a compelling collection of skillfully written essays, which with honesty and vulnerability celebrate the resilience of the human spirit. They read like letters from a dear friend. The thread tying them together is her understanding that life is never all good, or all bad. Life is messy. Joy mingles with heartbreak:

We live in the great mess, the humus, or soil, of life—which has for its root, the same prefix as human . . . Life should be dirty, tumbling around in all the organic components that make up our lives, our living, ashes to ashes, and all that beautiful fertileness that makes us who we are.

In The Authenticity Experiment, readers are invited to bear witness as the author navigates her way through profound grief, all the while doing her best to fully experience the good things happening for her as well. De Gutes takes her readers along with her to public places, delivering acceptance speeches at award ceremonies, delivering eulogies, and into the most personal spaces, while navigating the legal system to close two estates and being engulfed by crushing emotions in unexpected places. On each step of this journey, she bids readers to consider what she learned from that impossible year—what she calls the “both/and” of our lives. How do we give ourselves permission to experience joy in the midst of grief? Where can we find enough strength to be vulnerable and stay fully engaged with our families, friends, and communities? She asks, “Everything is always both/and, isn’t it? We are alive, and we are dying. We are there, and we are here. We are confused, and in our confusion we are finally able to see clearly and sing out in our full range.”

De Gutes doesn’t offer a road map. She’s not in the business of giving advice. Still, her story teaches by example that it’s possible to pay attention and appreciate the glimmers of light that brighten even our darkest days. Sometimes it requires conscious intention.

Please also see Heidi Sell’s interview with Kate Carroll de Gutes.

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An Introspective Journey

Beast: A Novel
by Paul Kingsnorth
Graywolf, 2017, $16

We only need to look around ourselves and the world to know there are many things wrong with our society: How our comforts have made us lethargic, how our technology only divides us, and how the lack of empathy between different cultures has only deepened in recent years. This is the rabbit-hole that Beast invites us to plunge down, in a beautiful exercise of stream-of-thought and self-reflection. Paul Kingsnorth’s poetic prose takes us into the mind of Edward Buckmaster, who has fled his normal life to live in solitude, high in the English moors. While this is not a new concept, Kingsnorth’s novel is original in its form and offers a tilted perspective that gives the narrative a unique voice.

Beast is the second novel to a trilogy. The first novel, The Wake, published in 2014, was that same year longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, won the Gordon Burn Prize. Both books stand entirely on their own, with no need to read one before the other. The Wake has been praised for its inventive language, as Kingsnorth merged his own form of Old and Modern English to write it. Beast, on the other hand, experiments with sentence structure, and you’ll find, as the narrative progresses, certain rules are either lost or forgotten. It’s notable, at first, then it becomes a part of the book, and then a part of the character.

Edward Buckmaster’s voice is both simple and dynamic in the constant questioning and reasoning between which he traps the reader. He has fled to the moors to find himself, to let nature overtake him, and eventually find enlightenment, as if it were that easy. We find Edward at the beginning of the novel already more than a year into his self-imposed exile, standing in a freezing river and letting the cold water numb his body. “The river sang and kept singing,” and Edward welcomes pain and challenge in the forms of nature and his own fasting. It’s not long before a powerful storm finds him and breaks his body. From this point on the core of the story begins. The sun stops setting, his food runs out, and it’s not long before a creature of some sort begins to stalk him. There are no other characters to be found, except in his memories. Even then, they appear as wisps and phantoms.

While there are only hints as to what Edward leaves behind in his earlier life, we rarely find ourselves caring about them. He is here now, high in the moors, alone with the rawness of nature and the creature. Besieged with hardships, fog, and visions, Edward must push himself forward. The sense of time becomes lost, as well as any firm sense of reality. That’s not to say that Edward is an untrustworthy narrator. Rather, the effeteness of Kingsnorth’s prose wraps the fog around his readers as much as it does Edward. We get tangled in the “hot and muggy and still and the sky was a uniform white across the farmyard and over the top of the silent ash trees” sentences that go on and against each other, through Edward’s head and seemingly out into the moors.

While the strength of Beast lies in Kingsnorth’s unique prose, at times readers accustomed to plainer fare may find it difficult. The 164-page novel ends up feeling a bit longer, as it becomes necessary to put the book down at times to consider Edward’s thoughts or the surrounding circumstances he finds himself in. The prose insists that you digest each sentence properly, lest you miss some hidden meaning. It brings on a fascination at the level of language as opposed to plot and requires the reader to live inside the world of the novel and inside Edward’s head.

The search for meaning in life is as old and cliché as literature itself, but there is very little that is cliché here. The narration moves from one thought to the next in a translucent, stream-of-consciousness manner that conveys Edward’s thoughts as if they were your own, contemplating topics and issues that are very much prevalent in today’s world. Indeed, Kingsnorth’s elsewhere-stated love for nature, ecological advocacy, and warnings about global warming are underlining themes that come to life in his settings as well.

To read Beast is to make a journey of two sorts, as it may be impossible not to consider your own value as Edward considers his. That is the beauty of Beast—it captures that essence of self-doubt that haunts all of us. Though we may or may not find what we are looking for at the end, there is a sense that the answers have been looking for us as well. The third and final novel in this trilogy has been said to take place two thousand years after the story of Beast. One can only wonder what new form Kingsnorth’s imagination will take in that far future.

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Hidden Lives

Bloodroot, by Annemarie Ní Churreáin
Doire Press, 2017
72 pages, paper, $13.99

While the quote is often misattributed to William Butler Yeats, it was the French surrealist poet Paul Éluard who wrote, “Il y a assurément un autre monde, mais il est dans celui-ci”: There is another world, but it is in this one. It does, however, sound like Yeats, as the quote reinforces the popular view of the grand Celtic poet, the one who celebrates the unseen faerie life, recovering the old stories of the Tuatha dé Danann and the Sidhe. Of course, for Irish poets of the twentieth century, it became a weighty thing, this deep register between the mythic, the landscape, the history, and the poetic voice. And for women Irish poets, an exclusionary thing.

So, to come across Annemarie Ní Churreáin’s first book of poetry, Bloodroot, published by Doire Press, I return to Éluard’s quote. Ní Churreáin is no surrealist, but she does look for the life and lives that have been hidden, removed, erased, lives that still are apparent in this world. She accomplishes this achievement with exquisite craft and unrelenting attention, poem by poem. To find the other world in this one, Ní Churreáin suspends her readers in a tight, liminal space, where we must take great time and care to become still and to reflect, so that we see our own belonging, our own alienation.

The poetry happens even before you open the book. First, the title and its sonic qualities: Just two syllables, each ending on a hard consonant, but then that slipknot of “oo,” the short vowel in the first syllable, a hard and ugly thud, and the long open version of it in the second syllable, an open and soaring cry that is clipped short with that stopped “t.” Such dexterous language will pervade each poem once the cover is opened. Second, the title and its possible references: a medicinal flower whose roots ooze a red sap; a single root that is the life force of a plant, like a taproot or a blood feather for a bird; or a root that feeds from blood, or has been drowned in blood. All those associations fill the book.

The book is separated into three, tight, distinct sections, thematically united: where the poet traverses familial terrain, and then into troubled (and for me recent) cultural histories of Ireland, and then sojourns into India and Florida. Annemarie Ní Churreáin, a native of the boglands of northwest Donegal, is very much the world citizen, evidenced in her receiving several international fellowships and residencies, including those from the Akademie Schloss Solitude, the Jack Kerouac House, and Hawthornden Castle. The thematic breadth of her poetry is thus hardly surprising. Yet, each poem is discretely fashioned, built on its own sharp and unforgiving terms, in language clear, unfiltered, and yet highly wrought. While I have seen some readers say how they glide through Bloodroot, reading it all in one sitting, I am stunned by the poems. I read one or two an evening, and they trouble me, stay with me. Another one would overwhelm me.

For instance, consider the way Ní Churreáin constructs a brief lyric in “The Warning,” a poem governed by such a strong, unyielding sequence of voices (just two lines each), but by a disciplined and harrowing parallel structure. Here’s the poem in its entirety:

Give us your child, the Pica bird said
or else you go to hell.

Give me what I want, the child said
or else I’ll tear this House down.

Obey house rules, the House said
or else this House will break your bones.

Tell my story, the bone said
or else we’re all going to burn.

Despite its tightly faceted structure, there are slight, slight fissures in the poem, where the “child” and the “bone” are not capitalized, and the brilliant shifting of pronouns in the second line of each couplet: second person, first person singular, third person, and first person plural. The poem’s brevity and simplicity and personified voices also suggest something of the nursery rhyme. And then at the heart of the poem is the urgent and necessary call for witnessing, to tell the story or else. I am left wondering about whether or not we’ll all burn anyway after the telling, after the witnessing.

This attention to language partly emanates from the fact that Ní Churreáin is bilingual, a product of a colonized history, and that she is from the hinter boglands of western Ireland. Weighted with the ghosts of her foremothers, to whom the book is dedicated, the simple, hard language is so piercingly employed to speak the truths of the hidden or shamed lives of Irish women, famously the cases of Ann Lovett and Joanne Hayes, two young women in the 1980s who suffered unwanted pregnancies with one resulting in death and the other in pillorying. Ní Churreáin’s is an uncompromising and bold vision: told with a scalded clarity that makes me think of Joan Didion, with a necessity that makes me think of Muriel Rukeyser. But this is all Ní Churreáin, on her own terms.

I come back time and again to another brief lyric, “Cult,” as a grounding moment for the collection. In it, she investigates the double legend of Brigid, the pre-Christian Irish goddess of healing and inspiration who was later appropriated and canonized as St. Brigid. In County Cavan, a pagan cult continued to celebrate Brigid, worshipping a stone head capturing her three faces: one a smithy, one a herder, and one a healer. In the 1840s, a local priest was said to have “lost” the stone head in Roosky Lough. Ní Churreáin plainly notes:

This is what happens to women who brew medicine,
who bend iron, who drive cattle on their own land.

Such powerful women are not only appropriated, even canonized, but then thereafter must be erased. And the poem ends on defiance (and a string of hard “d” consonants), in lines that the place the poet among the original sisterhood, the resistant cult:

Dreamless now, I touch the water in the font,
cold as medals, streaked with my own blood.

Here, the poet unsentimentally faces the world as it is given, “[d]reamless,” while claiming her own agency and asserting her connection to her past, her real, elemental kin.

I am leaving out so much accomplishment that is evident in this remarkable book, both in terms of Annemarie Ní Churreáin’s craft and vision. There is much more for any reader to discover. This first book gives promise of a vital, important poet whose voice denudes our convenient illusions.

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Conjuring Gossamer Ghosts

House of McQueen, by Valerie Wallace

Four Way Books, 2018

66 pages, paper, $15.95

Winner, Four Way Books Intro Prize

When I was seventeen, big-haired and blonde in 1980s Texas, I was invited to walk in a fashion show with other members of my high school drill team. We were cheap labor, and the local bridal and prom store needed pretty girls to parade the latest Gunne Sax gowns for a hospital fundraiser. Looking back, I’m embarrassed. The fashion was about as forward as our mall’s food court. Still, there was drama in it. A girl could imagine a bolder version of herself under all that lace, pouf, and pantyhose. I have since discarded the excesses of that era but hold on to a few prom dresses and the feeling of being transformed by fashion. I inhabit other personas on the page now and indulge in only the occasional Vogue, but I’m aware that the industry remains a tough club to break into. Occasionally, someone unexpected breaks in and ruffles fashion’s feathers. In the 1990s, that someone was a young, English, working-class dropout named Alexander McQueen. This is all one needs to know to gain entry to poet Valerie Wallace’s House of McQueen, a debut collection of equally startling poems about the famed designer.

Wallace—who teaches with the City Colleges of Chicago and works for the project Virtue, Happiness & The Meaning of Life at the University of Chicago—presents her book as this spring’s couture collection. There are so many different lines of entry into these poems: via fabric, gender, fairytale, class, and especially the life of the singular man. In “Autobiography of Alexander McQueen,” the poet gives voice to this man directly:

I’m trying to weave a new fabric, but the loom doesn’t exist.

Born in 1969, McQueen was the youngest child in a large family who quit school to apprentice at tailoring on Saville Row. Lee, as he was known to friends, had talent, and it gained him entrance to fashion school, where he caught the eye of influential doyennes and a voyeuristic, image-saturated society. At times Wallace lets the designer himself write the poems, taking phrases from his interviews and playing with form and function. “Joyce & Lee” is a touching erasure poem from a conversation between the designer and his mother.

Rumored to have been abused by a brother-in-law, whom he later witnessed brutally beat his sister, McQueen said he wanted people to “be afraid” of women wearing his designs. One can feel the fear in “Charmed for Protection”:

Hood be cowled for private thoughts

Sleeves be lined for smell of Night

Let none harm you Let none betray you

Wrap yourself in no Spektral affliction

Your Wound your strength Wild wanted

This air of fantasy is augmented by the fact that these poems take place across the pond in England, which itself lends an air of fantasy for American readers—it is the birthplace of so many of our fairy tales. Skillfully woven throughout the collection is thematic, mythical imagery also seen in McQueen’s collections, especially birds and mirrors. From “McQueen’s Bop with the Interviewer”:

Waif who needs rescuing

isn’t romance.

I’ve seen naivete

I know what can happen.

Someone’s life is burning

from this world’s brutal kiss.

I am │ you are

The voyeur the mirror.

The poems, however, never lose touch with the real world. Within Wallace’s skillfully crafted poems we are in school, under the presser foot, discarded on the shop floor, almost literally threaded through the poems. “Bumsters,” for instance, virtually unzips down the page. “McQueen Linen” cleverly plays with white space and columns to mimic linen’s loose weave. The poet’s shrewd use of form means we arrive at the man through his medium. Wallace gives this poem space to breathe, and it can be approached either horizontally or vertically to elicit different meanings:

I design the shows as stills If you look they tell the whole story

When I find I’ve no place for fear I show myself

The body’s tried to tell you it’s intricate altered

Perimeter what I see our bodies’ silver / dream

In “[When staggering down the runway wearing tartan over torn lace],” the reader is even thrust into one of his radical shows:

When stocks edged with a Stuart ruff enclose the neck

When obsolete colors, fulwe, sad, vernal, watchet

When sleeveless torn satin & cutaway shorts

When strewn with cigarette butts

When a buried history of England & Scotland

When a man yelling, Have I offended you then?

When the body becomes everything it is given

Throughout, the poems evoke experience, putting the reader into experiences otherwise inaccessible.

The language that Wallace sometimes uses likewise may be unfamiliar (pronk, skirr, chthonic)—made up or resurrected in a way that puts the reader in a strange and different realm. In addition, the poet revels in trying on a variety of forms, including contemporary free verse, slant sonnets and rhymes, shape poems, lists, acrostics and more. The poems also draw on an array of sources, from interviews, articles, biographies, and McQueen’s own words. As a collection of new fashions, where every stitch and fabric can be examined, this collection of poems reveals many details that merit scrutiny, study, contemplation. Alexander McQueen himself was mysterious in life and even more so since his death—and, like her subject, Wallace’s work is not easily accessible. Beauty does not so much blossom here as blur. These are studied poems by an accomplished poet for a reader wanting more.

At times the book feels like an intense research project into the man, except the traditional roles of male artist (albeit gay in this instance) and female muse are reversed. It is terribly exciting to read a series of poems about a man observed and interpreted by a woman, about sexualities that openly defy bifurcated norms. The reversal (maybe even obfuscation) elicits new avenues of exploring and questioning gender roles in fashion as well as poetry, and I can only hope that both worlds will make room for more of that.

The collection comes at an important time for both English and American audiences following Brexit and the election of President Trump. Wallace’s poems hold up a mirror to the reader, daring us to feel disgust or delight, to challenge the status quo. This is not unlike one of McQueen’s most talked about show stunts for his collection Voss, where the audience was forced to stare at their own reflections from a giant, mirrored runway box whose walls dropped—after an uncomfortable hour—to reveal his models inside a makeshift psychiatric hospital. The poems are likewise in turns beautiful and confrontational and sometimes both at once.

I finished this collection feeling like a fortunate grown-up guest at Fashion Week, sitting stunned beside Anna Wintour in a front-row seat, thinking about how far I traveled to get there. Alexander McQueen’s tragic death in 2010 means the designer is not alive to see his portrait painted on Wallace’s page, but House of McQueen is an artistic, imagined collaboration worthy of our attention. Readers will leave swaggered.

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Mournful Meditation

Letters to My Father by Bänoo Zan

Piquant Press, 2017

Paperback, $18.50

A mournful meditation, Bänoo Zan’s Letters to My Father is a collection of forty-one poems, each charged with the turmoil that’s birthed in the meeting of grief and memory. If taken in one long gulp, its power will sear through you. A few sips of Bänoo Zan’s poetry will disperse deep into your soul, relieve your aches, and balm your losses. Its collective experience is disarming.

Zan dedicates her second poetry collection to her father, Parviz Ghanbaralizadeh, who passed away in 2012 in Iran, while she was striving to build a new life in Canada. When news reached Zan, she chose not to visit the funeral or memorial services held in her father’s honor. Removed from the scenes of bereavement taking place in her hometown, Zan turned her pen to a flowing, emotional outpouring of verses that expressed what was left unsaid and explored their complex relationship.

The painful reality that strikes out possibilities to reconcile or reconnect with the one who has passed on is central to this collection. The persona’s anguish makes her wish for death and doom, in hopes that it’ll bring her the reconnection she desires, a reconnection that wouldn’t be possible in life:

If you ever loved me

wish me a death so final

it would rescue the heart

from separation

If you are still somewhere

waiting for me—

prophesy my doom

There’s an evocative quality to Zan’s uncluttered and orderly writing style. Stripped down to their ultimate simplicity, the poems aren’t titled, just numbered, focused on the central vision of the poems. The emotions and situations that she probes are accessible to the reader, though laced with deeper complexities, as in poem number 41:

The river

mourns the ocean

every time

memory

proves shallow

The brief and bare sentences tie up with clear and distinctive imagery to offer a profound view of some of the most disquieting situations in life.

There’s an intimacy that seeps into the imaginings of Zan’s poetry, creating a soulful and transcendent narrative. With grief as a catalyst, Zan explores the posthumous reconciliation of a father and daughter, and couples it with a spiritually charged, introspective layer.

Throughout the collection, the persona tries to connect life with death, both functioning as depictions of herself and her father. She traverses the realities of what death represents, linking everything back to herself. Her father’s death becomes a mirror that reflects the turmoil within her. The collection’s opening poem evokes a sense of longing that sets the tone:

I want you back

from the red of brown

to the blue of green

back from the phallus of death

to the womb of life

from unknown harmony

to known horrors

The poem circles back to the verse, “Leave me with you / as death with life,” an idea that the persona often reconstructs to portray an attachment that exists beyond death. She tries to search for her own emotional equilibrium in her father’s absence and recognizes in herself the reverberations of the bond they shared while he was alive. She tends to look for a rendering of herself in what existed of him. In poem 11, she writes:

You were

a ghazal

meeting qasidas

from

your blood-land

I am your epitaph

She sees herself as a final remnant of his beloved existence. In the consecutive poem, the persona confesses her regret, “I wish I had / shared you / with me.”

With its emotional depth comes a universal appeal; at a core level, people form connections and experience loss similarly. We’re all made up of stories, and in Zan’s poetry the essence of the story is in moments of being and existing. These moments are powerful enough to resonate with the reader, regardless what their personal worldview may be.

One thing that adds to the universal appeal and strength of Zan’s poetry is her alignment of Islamic and Arabian traditions and prophetic stories with the symbolism in western myths. In her poetry she invokes Narcissus, Agamemnon, and Ophelia with the same ease with which she imagines herself as her father’s prayer rug. In poem 30, Zan writes:

If I were your prayer rug

I would water

your desert hands

with golab

Religious and cultural notions become instrumental in her attempts to understand death.

Bänoo Zan’s previous poetry collection, Songs of Exile, was the first to be published in English (Guernica, 2016). Songs of Exile touched upon themes that erupt from becoming an immigrant and also addressed socio-political issues related to gender, ethnicity, and colonization. In comparison, Letters To My Father is a deeply personal poetry collection, one that must have required bravery on Zan’s part to share with the world. Zan’s poetry is a reminder that the discord caused by shifting ideologies does not have to license the irreparable rupture of our blood bonds. In this, Letters To My Father becomes a persona’s cathartic attempt to reconcile with another in death, through poetry infused with life.

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Imperfect Memory

Eating Moors and Christians, by Sandra M. Castillo

CavanKerry Press, 2016

90 pages, paperback, $16

Emerging Voices Series

Sandra M. Castillo’s bilingual poetry book, Eating Moors and Christians, begins with an acknowledgement of her intentions:

Here, memory stumbles, and we rewrite the past, float through the surface of history, what it must have surely been like, galleries of lies and obsessions, a piñata of subjectivity cón lenguaje de sentimentalismo.

Castillo promises an exploration of imperfect memory intersecting with the subjective and sentimental interpretation of history, and her book delivers. Told in three parts, this collection of poems reads as though the reader is flipping through a personal photo book from the Cuban speaker’s past. Ekphrastic descriptions and allusions to photographs from her childhood home in Cuba and her exiled adolescence in Miami are juxtaposed with stories of the roles her parents and grandparents and tías and tíos (aunts and uncles) played in the Revolution, as well as her own journey back to the homeland decades later as an adult. As a result, the whole collection reads as a series of vibrant snapshots, providing the reader with an intimate glimpse of Cuban life during this tumultuous time of transition.

Castillo confronts the conflict of Cubans’ dual identity throughout the collection. In a dream described in “Leavings,” the speaker remembers her aunt calls her to come to America:

TíaVelia waves,

signaling for us to come,

her tall body wrapped in a blue and red

airmail envelope, like a cloak.

…

but I hesitate…

The speaker is entranced by the idea of life in America, and though her family urges her toward safety in this new land, she hesitates: Part of her wishes to remain in Cuba, her home and an integral part of her identity. In “Unearthing the Remains,” the speaker has become accustomed to life in America, yet notes:

Separated by the Caribbean, secret underwater mines,

a revolution, ninety miles of nostalgia, a new language,

I no longer remembered myself.

I had become someone else, the Other,

a stranger, a skeleton of whom I might have been.

She acknowledges that the trip to Florida and her settlement abroad has alienated her from her homeland, and forced her to grow into someone different than she may have been if she had stayed in Cuba. In yet another poem, when she goes back to visit Cuba, the speaker revisits this idea of nonbelonging, and notes how she and her family are greeted with suspicion, “Other, “aquí, / en nuestra tierra natal” [here, in our native land]. Both in the United States and in Cuba, Castillo’s speaker is “Other.” No matter where she resides, she does not belong.

Eating Moors and Christians explores the many ways Cubans may not belong, and how these varied circumstances often bring an undercurrent of fear. This fear often manifests in Castillo’s poems with a recurrent aversion to water and concern about not knowing how to swim, or of the violence of men. She uses vibrant similes like “an engine that exploded / like a violent husband” and “he grabs me, squeezes me, / as if picking tropical fruit” to illustrate the severity and nuance of the conflicts faced by Cubans, even in their own culture.

Braided within these intensely personal vignettes are snapshots of how Cubans made do with life on the island, as well as how claimed Cubans, those with relatives who sponsored them in the US, like the speaker, made it to America yet continued to look back toward the homeland. In the title poem Eating Moors and Christians, which is nestled in the third and final section of the book, Castillo’s speaker describes a reenactment of La Reconquista over a meal of white rice and black beans, noting that they (the rice and the beans) are “cooked together until the rice is brown, mestizo”—deliberately using the Spanish term for people of mixed heritage to draw the connection between black Moros and white Cristianos. Here is the heart of Cuban people and of the book: a mixture that creates something new.

When considering Cuba, Castillo’s speaker identifies: “This is where I come from, a place that exists in photographs I never owned.” But in addition to reminiscing about the memories brought up by the photographs she’s found, Castillo’s speaker also addresses the role of being the photographer with a questionable lens. When considering life in Cuba post-revolution in “La Lisa, Marianao 15, La Habana, Cuba,” the speaker states:

I photograph it all with Catholic grief, our mosaic of sin and guilt, this slow blur into the past, mourn the loss, todo lo perdido, in this, the city of my dreams where everything and nothing has changed.

Toward the end of the collection, the speaker confirms: “I am a camera, dedicated flash.” Indeed, she is. In this collection, Castillo has captured the Cuban people, cuerpo y alma, as they were, as they are, and as they will be.

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Questions of Emotional Truth

The Grass Labyrinth: Stories, by Charlotte Holmes
BkMk Press (University of Missouri-Kansas City), 2016
160 pages, paper, $15.95

The Grass Labyrinth won the 2017 Independent Publisher Award (IPPY) gold medal for short stories and the 2017 gold medal for Indie Book of the Year in short stories from Foreword Reviews. You can hear Holmes read from the book here.

In “Coast,” the first story in this collection of nine interconnected narratives, Henry Tillman, a painter and children’s book illustrator, is staying with his wife, Lisa, somewhere on the coastline of South Carolina in a beachfront cottage that he inherited from a great aunt. We are privy to his thoughts as he ponders reading Rilke with a lover, painter Agnes Landowska; describes a spat with Lisa over making Thanksgiving dinner; and reflects on various liaisons, familial and otherwise. It’s significant that Henry narrates the first story: he is the cog around which many of the ensuing stories revolve.

The Grass Labyrinth is about relationships, how they form and unfold, twist and intertwine, sometimes fall apart and sometimes hold fast. Holmes takes the lives of a few related individuals and shows how various forces—art, love and death—affect how they treat each other. This book is also about the creative act—in the various forms of writing poems, painting portraits, photographing boulders—and its ramifications.

At one point in the opening story, Henry wishes Agnes were with him. “Maybe what I want is just to watch her take in the details of a place I know so well,” he thinks, “see them filter into her consciousness, and come back changed, infused with her own quirky vision.” As we read further into The Grass Labyrinth, this statement becomes relevant to the author’s vision. In some ways Holmes is describing her own narrative MO, a succession of appraisals of places and people—a fine filtering leading to revelations not so much quirky as compelling.

Lisa is the speaker in the second story, “Songs Without Words.” She fills out the details of a reference Henry made in the first story to the abortion she had early in their relationship, the memory spurred by a recent miscarriage that makes her feel cursed. Friends try to comfort her; she, in turn, pictures “a heaven populated entirely by children, floating in static like that of the TV screen when the stations go off the air.” She envisions her own lost children in that limbo, “each one as long as a cocktail shrimp.”

Holmes mixes engaging descriptions of settings with equally persuasive dialogue. Her stories are clearly planned, but they develop without one’s noticing the armature, even when the author pulls a flashback to fill in some bit of information. In this way, each piece in the book works on its own, yet plot and thematic strands woven through the stories serve as a kind of inter-generational DNA.

The story “Taken,” the longest in the collection, exhibits convincing authenticity in its rendering of the dynamics and intrigue at a retreat called the Colony somewhere in the woods of Pennsylvania. A 34-year-old poet, Rika Pratt (Agnes’s daughter), becomes involved with a painter, twenty-seven-year-old Ben Tillman (Henry’s son). Both have significant others—she, Ethan, a bookstore owner; he, Mattie, a photographer—which doesn’t stop them from testing the liaison waters.

The story deftly switches back and forth between the two of them as they size up each other. It’s a sometimes-tense tango that culminates in Ben’s studio where he unveils his work from the residency. Rika finds his realism disappointing and says so: “She’s long regarded photorealism as—to use her mother’s term—just dick-wagging. See what I can do?” Ben bridles at her critique. “Emotional truth?” he asks her, “What’s that?” It’s a question the author asks in one form or another throughout the book.

In “Erratics,” Holmes switches stylistic gears, building the story from a series of thirty-three short pieces, each with a numbered title: “Erratic #112,” “Erratic #35,” “Erratic #7,” etc. The format is inspired by a series of photographs that Mattie has taken of glacial erratics. These rocks left in random places by the glaciers serve as emblems for her and Ben’s fragmented lives, marked by miscommunication and stressful recollections. “You didn’t even know what an erratic was until I told you,” Ben tells Mattie at one point, adding, “And for a long time, you kept calling them eccentrics.” It’s one of a number of moments of appealing meanness.

The title story and its coda, “Provenance,” give the collection a strong one-two closing—not a climax or a tying-up of loose ends exactly, but rather an opening to new possibilities. Invited by Kerry, his father’s widow, to sort through his papers, Ben visits his childhood home, on Thanksgiving, to find his young stepmother planning to transform the front yard. Ben thinks The Shining, but the spiral design Kerry has in mind is a vehicle for meditation. It turns out to be an environment an outsider artist might have assembled, wonderfully peculiar.

Finding fault in what is an altogether rewarding read comes down to nitpicks. A few similes seem a stretch, such as likening a child’s round and clear syllabic calls of “co, co, co” to “crystal beads flung across a tabletop.” An occasional cliché wrinkles the prose: at one point, Agnes says, “Destiny is simply an excuse invented to explain bad choices and missed opportunities,” a fitting thought for the occasion, but one that rings a bit bromidic.

Returning to the opening epigraph from poet Charles Wright after finishing the book, one is struck by the aptness of his lines: “We live in two landscapes, as Augustine might have said, / One that’s eternal and divine, / and one that’s just the back yard.” Charlotte Holmes is a master of both kinds of landscapes and the men and women who inhabit them. She is a painter of place and passion. The Grass Labyrinth is an exceptional collection.

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Language as Remembrance, Witness, Companion

In June the Labyrinth, by Cynthia Hogue
Red Hen Press, 2017
76 pages, paper, $17.95

Cynthia Hogue’s latest collection from Red Hen Press unfolds around a journey to the labyrinth at Chartres Cathedral undertaken as an elegiac pilgrimage. On this journey, Hogue maps a poetic space connecting grief and immortality, presence and immanence, love and loss. These connections demonstrate the power of language as remembrance, witness, and, ultimately, companion.

In June the Labyrinth begins following the death of Hogue’s mother and is dedicated to four of the poet’s friends who died in the subsequent two years of the book’s writing. As the poet begins the journey through the cathedral labyrinth, she transports the reader to an inner labyrinth of voices:

The difference between finding a way

and finding the way

is like that between not knowing

and having forgotten.

The spiraling movement of the labyrinth walk is layered with voices, primarily those of the I-speaker and the figure of the dying Elle, a strong female presence determinedly writing her “book of wisdom” until “she cannot hold her pen.” When Elle calls and a demon answers, Elle knows she is on her own:

This is the crux of her belief:

No one here to fall

back on but herself, she the wild,

and true blue, the only starry night.

Elle walks the labyrinth “meekly above ground / (there is a clearing in her heart). A crunching sound / like wheels on gravel, a whirring / as of flight. A lifetime’s surrender.” The I-speaker, on the other hand, walks the labyrinth casting intuitive petals in the four cardinal directions as if to ward off the inevitability of Elle’s death. In the face of this loss, the speaker’s ritual creates poetically an opening of time into a space layered and timeless where self and other arrive as companions already loved, a place of healing.

With a generosity of spirit, an imaginative embodying of others within a self, and an inclusive carrying of lost beloveds within the human heart, Hogue’s poems demonstrate how language may transmute the experience of grief as habitation; they evidence the way a poem may become a form of visitation, embodiment, and possession which C. D. Wright called being “one with others.”

Hogue’s honed and spare language embraces innovative play with words misread, crossed out, called out, and sounded, giving the collection a vibrant texture. The poem “(“dehors et dedans”),” for example, begins with a fruitful misreading and then carves words out of themselves, a creative strategy that suggests, in this context, how “real” life remains “sliced from unreal” even as “life’s excluding” Elle and the speaker “cannot harbor / her.”

Outside is inside,

I misread Bachelard’s French

imagining Elle belonging when

life’s excluding her.

She will message me,

I think. But I cannot harbor

her. She is inside herself,

sliced from unreal, real,

as no from not.

A hope in the face of devastating loss is that Elle will “message me, I think.” The message is not a sure thing, yet if the speaker puts her mind to it, if she can imagine it, she may hear it. The power of memory and imagination connects the living and the dead. Embodied through Hogue’s language, it becomes a witness to the emotional and spiritual complexity of the grieving process:

being close enough to touch

differed from her distant love,

safely abstracted from presence.

Elle’s goodness found in her forgiveness.

Hogue achieves the flow and syncopation of the book’s startling music through her finesse with line, space, punctuation, and variations of form from tercets, quatrains, sestets and septets, to a hyphenated list, field composition, and prose. A subtle chiming rings through the book’s outer and inner worlds, which connect through sound and Hogue’s own aliveness as a poet.

One feels her urgency in seeking to understand and to reckon with the power of loss and death, particularly a daughter’s loss of her mother. Elle becomes the speaker’s familiar, an inner witness on the journey through a life learning to accept death through forgiveness:

Forgiveness is a labyrinth, a way,

going in this direction and not that,

the ethical route and heart’s root,

the core, of course, riddle of how

to cure the poison of the demon,

that bitterness which

bent her like a bell

until at last she sounded

sound.

Cynthia Hogue’s In June the Labyrinth is a stunning and unforgettable book. It is a letting in of grief rather than a letting go. Hogue’s poems demonstrate how one does not recover but rather uncovers and discovers truths about the other’s being in relation to oneself. Ultimately, these truths come to rest in language itself, in the poem embodied as a form of conscious companion.

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A Woman’s Journey

Black Dove: Mamá, Mi’jo, and Me, by Ana Castillo
The Feminist Press at CUNY, 2016
350 pages, paper, $16.95

For years, Joseph Campbell’s monomyth has served as the definitive narrative archetype. The seventeen-step adventure from the known to the unknown and back again describes the challenges a character faces on the path to become a hero. From “The Call to Adventure” through trials like “Belly of the Whale” and “Woman as Temptress,” the character comes out on the other side forever changed into a more mature, more capable man. Toward the end of Ana Castillo’s memoir Black Dove: Mamá, Mi’jo, and Me, she draws attention to Campbell’s monomyth of the journey of a male hero. As an aside when discussing how she spent the two years her beloved son was incarcerated for robbery, Castillo tells the story of when she taught the monomyth in a feminist course at a university and had to adjust Campbell’s linear narrative for a woman’s journey. Castillo writes, “… female archetypes had three life stages: lovely maiden, fertile mother, and (sterile, hunchbacked, saggy, wild-haired, banished from-the-village-to-a-hut-where-she-concocted-poisons-to-harm-men-unworthy-of-love-although-wise-and-yet-despised-for-her-wisdom) crone. Me, in other words.”

Although the various chapters are not broken into separate sections, this three-stage female monomyth forms the base structure of Castillo’s memoir, placing Castillo on her own hero’s journey from daughter of a Mexican Indian immigrant family to well-established Chicana novelist and poet. Through this journey of becoming, Castillo reflects on multiple generations of her family (her parents’, her own, and her son’s and grandchild’s), weaving together these generations and the trials they faced once the family became citizens of the United States.

The backbone of Black Dove may be the female monomyth, but Castillo mostly avoids an obviously structured approach and instead strips down on the fictive elements often found in memoir, such as detailed scenes and dialogue, and opens up for an intimate chat with the reader. For the most part, chapters cover large periods of time, placing her own journey beside those of family members. She jumps from story to story, transitioning back and forth in time, moving as though a new story has just popped into her head. For example, at one point, Castillo relates a story about her aunt dropping a busted television out a second-story window and it narrowly missing her aunt’s husband. After this story, Castillo writes, “That wasn’t the story I wanted to share about my livewire tía Flora, although that one was a good one, too.”

This stream-of-consciousness approach allows the reader to get closer to Castillo, to feel as though there are no fictive elements masking the author. She exemplifies the need to share everything about her “becoming,” with no topic off limits (childhood, love, sex, immigration, gun violence, motherhood, writing, marriage, feminism), but she also backs away from naming other individuals, thereby protecting identities and showing her compassion and understanding.

Throughout Black Dove, Castillo seems uninterested in offering readers answers, suspense, or even new revelations on the immigrant experience. This sounds like a weakness, and it may be in other books, but Castillo’s honest and affable voice easily carries the memoir through to the end. Castillo remains so likable, the reader wants to continue reading only so as to not leave her presence. Sharing her experience, trying to connect to the reader, person to person, seems to motivate Castillo’s narrative. It is difficult, if perhaps impossible, to read Castillo’s memoir without thinking of the xenophobia, especially regarding Mexicans, that has intensified in the United States during Donald Trump’s presidential race and into his presidency. Castillo recognizes this and begins her introduction with:

Perhaps some of you may come away from this book feeling that my stories have nothing to do with your lives. You may find the interest I’ve had in my ancestors as they were shaped by the politics of their times, irrelevant to your own history. My story, as a brown, bisexual, strapped writer and mother, constantly scrambling to take care of my work and my child, might be similarly inconsequential. However, I beg your indulgence and a bit of faith to believe that maybe on the big Scrabble board of life we will eventually cross ways and make sense to each other.

Castillo, then, discusses the importance of knowledge and how, growing up, she never saw people like her in history books. She does not mention the current political landscape (where recent inclusion of Native and other minorities’ histories are once again being stripped out of schoolbooks), but the connections are clear. She wrote her memoir to show readers a life they may not have lived, to show how similar that life is to each reader’s own or at least to increase understanding of the forces that have shaped her own.

The memoir, however, mostly avoids political comments, with the exception of a digression here or there. Most of these exceptions come during chapters focused on her son, Mi’jo, as though in her role as a mother, Castillo recognizes how little control she has in protecting her child, how she must turn to larger forces for explanations and understanding. For example, while discussing her son’s incarceration, she writes, “in a country proud of its wealth and resources, healthcare and public education are not guaranteed to all citizens.” Castillo’s dialogue with the reader draws connections between political, cultural, and, most of all, personal history to show how multifaceted a person is and how linked together so many aspects of our lives are. She goes deeper than her own experience by including so much from other generations of her family. One whole chapter is given over to an essay co-written with her son Mi’jo, allowing his voice, for a moment, to be just as important as Castillo’s. In Black Dove, Castillo shows the hardships faced by immigrants, hardships that last generations, well beyond those who immigrated, and most importantly, she shows that one vital way to combat prejudice is try to connect person to person. In this, she succeeds with brilliance.

Please also see our interview with Ana Castillo here in Aquifer and an excerpt from Black Dove in 41.2 of the print Florida Review.

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Moving Beyond the Boundaries

The Impossible Fortress, by Jason Rekulak

Simon and Schuster, 2017

285 pages, hardback $24.00, paper $18.00

Writing a computer program and writing a novel share certain characteristics. Both involve using an established alphabet, syntax, and set of concepts. What separates truly great computer programs from serviceable ones might be the same thing that separates the great novels from the rest of the pack: a creativity that moves beyond the boundaries of what a reader or user expects. Jason Rekulak’s The Impossible Fortress does just that, taking the familiar elements of coming-of-age novels and injecting wit, pathos, and a helping of nostalgia. A tribute to outcasts and geeks and an unabashed love letter to the 1980s, The Impossible Fortress is a compelling and humorous first novel.

Set in Wetbridge, New Jersey, in 1987, the story is narrated by Billy Marvin, a computer nerd and pop-culture connoisseur. The child of divorce with a mother who works night shifts at Food World, Billy spends his days debating best friends Alf and Clark about the hot issues of the day. Who would win in a fight? T. J. Hooker or MacGyver? Springsteen or Billy Joel? Children of the 1980s, obsessed with Pop-Tarts and Atari, they take these conversations seriously, a fact which explains their fascination with Wheel of Fortune letter-flipper and 1980s it-girl Vanna White.

This schoolboy crush becomes a real-world obsession when White appears in Playboy. Billy, Ash, and Clark turn their world upside down in an ill-fated quest to secure a copy of the illicit magazine. Were this set in contemporary America, the boys would simply Google search the images or check Reddit. In 1987, they must result to more nefarious scheming. Their plan involves shoplifting a copy of the magazine from Zelinksy’s, a local newsstand and office supply store run by Mr. Zelinsky, who seems to be channeling Kurtwood Smith from That ’70s Show. A curt and dour manager/owner, Mr. Zelinsky sees through the boys’ attempt to shoplift, but when Billy meets Mr. Zelinksy’s daughter, Mary, the plot takes off. Initially, the boys plan to use Billy to seduce Mary and get the store’s alarm code so they can break in to steal the magazine after hours. Plump, chubby Mary is an object of scorn for our resident would-be porno bandits. However, when Billy gets to know Mary as a person, he learns that, like him, she is an expert computer programmer. The two collaborate on The Impossible Fortress, a game they design for a national competition. As Mary and Billy’s relationship grows, the boys make promises they can’t keep and wind up enlisting the help of high school bad boy Tyler Bell, whose role in the story is much larger than the novel first suggests.

As the affable and well-written prose moves forward, we learn that the real impossible fortress is adolescence itself, a hormone-fueled time that finds young people paradoxically living in the moment while planning for their future. Rekulak handles teen emotions well. We believe not only in Billy’s emotions, but we also believe that he believes them. Billy is an authentic character, one drawn with emotional weight and depth. His growing concern for Mary is undercut by his own ambition, and, as the plot moves towards its inexorable ending, readers witness his transformation from a boy whose world ends at the tip of his nose into a young man who understands the weight of his choices.

Each chapter begins with a snippet of BASIC computer programming, the rudimentary pieces of Mary and Billy’s game. A fully-playable version is available on Rekulak’s website (http://jasonrekulak.com/), rendered in cheesy, faux-8-bit graphics. This touch rounds out the book’s absolute love for all things 1980s, from Rubik’s Cubes to video rental stores, from cheesy TV to school bullies drawn from CBS after-school specials. Nostalgia can be dangerous for a writer. With too much of it, a story becomes mushy and syrupy, wallowing in details rather than advancing the plot. However, in Rekulak’s capable hands, the world becomes an extension of the characters. Indeed, it would be hard to imagine Billy existing elsewhere, with his un-ironic earnestness and honesty.

Writers and critics sometimes fetishize “newness,” quoting Ezra Pound’s closing-on-century-old advice, “Make it new.” That drive to make all things new denies the fact that writers have been telling different versions of the same stories for years. Have we seen coming-of-age stories before? Of course. Have we seen paeans to the 1980s before? Yes. However, we’ve never heard this story before told by this character at this moment. Like a computer programmer, first-time novelist Jason Rekulak takes the elements and assembles them. In his creative hands, the parts transcend into a beautiful whole.

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Not a Museum to Nostalgia

Appearances, by Michael Collins
Saddle Road Press, 2017
84 pages, paper, $16.00

“No one wants to hear / impressions of the natural world,” Louise Glück warned twenty-five years ago, tongue-in-cheek, in The Wild Iris. “It is / not modern enough.”

Writing about the natural world in 2017 is an even trickier business. In Appearances, Michael Collins’ second full-length collection, however, the natural world becomes the imperfectly perfect site of one man’s struggle to hold onto the fraying pieces of himself within the whirlwind of a numbing, urban, twenty-first century life. This doesn’t, however, turn into a sentimental journey marked by luminous insights or an elegy to environmental ruin. What we get, instead, is a disarmingly genuine and intimate collection of all the thoughts a person walking every day around an ordinary harbor thinks, and all he’s seen, in poems that build convincingly on plain, deliberately understated images: ducks, clamshells, old people sunbathing, gulls, fish, oil spills, and water, lots of water.

That Collins himself realizes the potential perils of his quasi-Romantic undertaking comes through loud and clear in several poems, and adds to the charm and complexity of his speaker. Take the opening section of “Eclogues,” one of the stand-out poems of the collection, placed near the end of the book:

I came to this harbor unconsciously.

Seeking a mother made of breezes and waves.

One of those sublime lies the soul will tell

to trick a depressed man up out of bed.

Even after I reasoned this was silly,

I still liked it here, so I wrote poems

to honor the landscape for its own sake,

lending my voice to the slumbering fiddler

crabs and their marshland and ducks and swans and clams,

feeling rather magnanimous, thank you.

What’s notable here, apart from the skillfully timed humor, is how subtly—and unexpectedly—the speaker glides from state to state, and from tone to tone. From the high mythical arch of “Seeking a mother made of breezes and waves,” the opening couplet drops to a hard stop, a hard silence, before making a complete about-face. This is just a lie I tell myself, the speaker admits, because I’m depressed. In the third stanza we get another shift: I knew this wasn’t true all along, but I still like being at the harbor and trying to write. The poem goes on by acknowledging that nature isn’t “some museum to nostalgia,” before reaching the realization that “there’s nothing to fear or worship here.” In closing, Collins offers an effectively understated image of the speaker holding onto a fence as a storm approaches. Hairpin turns, psychological acuity, and self-effacing humor—we get these, fortunately, throughout Appearances.

This passage from “Eclogues” illustrates another pleasure of this book and a hallmark of Collins’ style: ingeniously compact philosophical statements. What is a “sublime lie,” exactly? That could be the thesis of its own essay. And on death, in “Katabasis,” the speaker observes: “It is not / an event; it is / a perspective, growing / slowly in each unique / separate sight.” On death and nature, in a passage about gulls shattering clamshells, “Seawall” gives us this to chew on:

. . . no words

to name an act murder. Nature, pure

transformation. Instantly

the world is only this cycling;

there is nothing

I must render.

Cleanly sculpted, with line breaks that let us savor the full meaning of this poem’s simple but resonant words, we get a weird chill from realizing that killing holds no moral content in Nature and that our seeing, as poets or otherwise, has zero bearing on any of it. And finally, on what it means to try to turn experience into words, “Myth” plunges us headlong into a fast-moving philosophical and personal meditation. Set in short lines that zigzag down the page as quickly as the concepts metamorphose from one to the next, the third-person speaker “walk[s] until / the jagged harbor is / a circle, walking until / he is himself, until / he is also the self / he is not.”

But perhaps what’s most compelling, most likable, about Collins’ work in Appearances is the raw persistence of his struggle—rendered fully and quietly visible to the reader—to commune with the soul that’s ‘out there’ in the natural world and also in us. “[A]ngel i know you here in flesh / i will not release you / until you bless me,” demands the speaker in “Genesis.” And like Jacob wrestling all night with the mysterious angel that could be God himself, that struggle in Appearances is often bittersweet. Moments of restoration and solace come as we watch leaves swirling in the water (“Fall”), a grown man hugging his dog (“Poem for a Predator”), enormous snowflakes falling down as in a winter globe (“Creation”). Keen disappointment, even outrage, crop up, too, in poems like “Dead Fish,” where a whole species dies helplessly in polluted water. But for every blissful pair of retirees whooping over a newly caught fish (“Communion”), Collins seems to tell us, there’s a plastic “Shop&Stop bag / that hangs from the chain link fence thrashing.”

That there is no final resolution at the end shouldn’t come as a surprise. A mandala has no starting or ending point, as the circular shape of “Harbor Mandala,” a late poem in the book, reminds us. We find in this poem that, despite the speaker’s private agonies and raptures, “ducks nap silently / in the oak shade.” There’s something comforting in that. And something true, if not comforting, in the act of walking by those ducks while carrying our own, completely other, merely human, emotions. The joy of Appearances—its gift—is placing us in these moments again and again, through winter and summer, high and low tide, elation and despair, so we can experience that open, shifting, mandala’s shape of apprehending the world as silly humans.

—

Michael Collins’ poem “Nightmare of Intercourse with Lightning” was a finalist in our 2015 Editors’ Awards and appeared in The Florida Review 39.1&2 in 2015.

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From Knowing to Unknowing

An Earlier Life, by Brenda Miller
Ovenbird Press, 2016
174 pages, paper, $14.95

Winner, 2017 Washington State Book Award in Memoir

In her most recent collection of essays, An Earlier Life, Brenda Miller examines the rich assortment of previous lives she has come through on her way to the life she currently inhabits. “In an earlier life,” she begins, “I was a baker in a bakery on a cobblestoned street. I woke early, in the dark, to do my work . . . In the quiet, I brought something to life.” The image of Miller kneading dough in the quiet hours of morning bringing something new into being is reminiscent of her work as a writer, and she delivers a breathing work of art between the pages of this book.

In “Who You Will Become,” Miller reflects on a sign which always hung in the front hallway of her childhood home, the Hebrew letters for Shalom with its multiple meanings—hello, goodbye, welcome, good and peace. She explains, “In Hebrew, the word for God means, “I am what I am becoming.” This presence is always imminent, always evolving. When we say Shalom, we are in the midst of this transition: hello, goodbye, turning to face the past and future at once.”

With that, she begins a candid examination of her life beginning in childhood and adolescence, through her early adult years and into a time of reconciliation and healing. The theme that one thing—a word, an object, an event—can carry more than one meaning, echoes throughout the book.

Miller’s close observations illuminate the remarkable contained within the commonplace, making the scenes dance on the page, and readers can’t help but pay closer attention to their own surroundings. “In Alaska, you understand how light is now a substance of its own making—tactile, with particles and waves and something else. You understand how light finds the least pinhole and expands.” With these opening lines of “Understand,” readers are suddenly more aware of the light that plays around them. Miller’s vivid account of her physical world brings the geography of the readers’ own into sharper contrast.

Later, in the essay “How to Get Ready for Bed,” she renders the mundane task of shopping for a new mattress into a work of art, a study of all the mattress represents: sleep partners past and future from boyfriends to pets, sanctuary and isolation, and the best description of insomnia I’ve read. “It’s as if you’re afraid of something, but you don’t know what. Maybe you’re afraid of that moment you slip from knowing to unknowing—the moment you’re with your unpartnered self alone.”

Yet not afraid to be vulnerable, Miller allows us to enter the places she stalled, consider decisions that led to trouble or heartache, and experience the consequences of missteps. Even so, she doesn’t neglect to shine a light on the beauty contained in even the darkest places. In “Beloved,” an essay tense with the possibility of violence, Miller describes a day boating on a desert lake with her boyfriend. He’s drinking and flaunting the fact that he could do her harm, that she’s defenseless. The stakes rise when he steers the boat into a secluded cove, “A place,” she writes, “that in any other time, with any other person would be a romantic picnic spot.” Juxtaposed against the visceral sense of mounting danger is this description of her surroundings: “This cool air in the desert, over the water. It’s a land of contradiction, the light bright and subdued at once. You can motor along the wide expanse of the lake, find a small canyon to enter and look for the hanging gardens: plants growing high above the waterline, gaining foothold and flourishing on bare rock, while beneath you—far beneath—a ghost garden mirrors the one above.”

By age eighteen Miller writes in “L’Chaim,” she no longer attends synagogue, but there is a thread running through these essays that suggests a search for spiritual meaning—a desire to understand how each of her ‘earlier lives’ contributed to the full spectrum of her life as a whole. Miller carefully considers each remembrance as if she’s turning them over and over in her hands to consider every plane, seeking the places where light shines through.

As co-author of the craft book Tell It Slant: Writing and Shaping Creative Nonfiction, it’s no surprise that Brenda Miller’s writing is exceptional. Many of her essays are written in second person. Speaking directly to readers in this manner, she calls them to walk alongside her, to share in each choice that moves her to the next experience. A life unfolds full of music and grit and danger. The beauty, and the pain, and the wonder on her journey toward wholeness becomes their own, a life shared.

In the epilogue, “We Regret to Inform You,” readers are treated with an outstanding example of a hermit crab essay—a term coined by Miller and co-author Susan Paola in Tell It Slant. In the form of rejection letters, she highlights a string of her ‘failures’ at various roles and relationships—with her elementary art teacher to the babies she lost in miscarriages to her grad school boyfriend, and finally, an acceptance letter from a pet adoption organization. The letters are bittersweet, sometimes funny, and always insightful.

Miller’s ability to turn angst into art, to interpret the ordinary with extraordinary clarity is unmatched. Her work wakes up the senses—external and internal—and will resonate with readers of poetry, as well as prose. An Earlier Life sings to readers, and they can’t help but hum its tune while going about their own tasks. Like bite-sized treats, readers can consume these essays one taste at a time, or in a decadent cover-to-cover feast—the perfect balance of savory and sweet.

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Love Itself Can Be Dangerous

Further Problems with Pleasure by Sandra Simonds
University of Akron Press, 2017
72 pages, hardcover $49.95, paper $14.95, epub $9.99

Further Problems with Pleasure, Sandra Simonds’ latest book of poetry, addresses similar themes found in her other collections. All of her work addresses important, timely subjects, yet she has proven with each volume that she is not afraid of leaving her audience uncomfortable. Her poems require her reader to work hard in order to come to a blended understanding of both content and syntax. The payoff is well worth it. To me, the most interesting of her subjects are her explorations of violence against women, the dangers of love, the complexity of living in the South, and the potential of suicide.

She opens this collection with a five-page poem provocatively titled, “Poetry Is Stupid and I Want to Die,” updating Marianne Moore’s sentiment for the 21st century. As the title suggests, her lines are manic, almost desperate. By linking her syntax in nontraditional ways and by ending and beginning new sentiments without regard for punctuation, she establishes the manic voice, which emerges from her Lego-like constructions of grammar and yet ends up being hauntingly beautiful. The poem opens as the female speaker, alone in a room with a man, considers how she might escape “unharmed / the way a woman has to manipulate both mind and body.” As many readers know too well, women find themselves in situations that can turn dangerous in an instant. Here, we are reminded to always consider an escape route.

For Simonds, love itself can be dangerous. Such a forceful theme is apparent in much of this collection. In “Spring Dirge,” she states, “Some people call it self-destructiveness / but I call it love.” Even more explicitly, she writes about the violent repercussions against women in “A Lover’s Discourse”:

Every so many seconds a woman is hit by a man
 with direct tectonic rage. Geology
 is some rough sadism I know
 not what. Agony is property
 but it is also agony. Vow to me, agony!
 Declare your allegiance! (Or buy me a house.)

Simonds’ manic voice mirrors the complexity of these lines and the familiar, cultural position of the powerlessness of women. Here, the speaker considers the payoff of an abusive relationship, one defined by agony and rage, to that of material wealth. In poem after poem, Simonds positions her speaker in these places of opposition.

For example, another favorite poem of mine from this collection, “Our Lady of Perpetual Help,” juxtaposes ideas of the feminine. The poem, set in Mississippi, describes a group of nuns who are not who “they pretend to be / One is pregnant under her habit / One thinks she ought not to touch that / One buys a Diet Dr. Pepper and Twizzlers.” Because this poem is set in the South, I can’t help but wonder about the sins and terrors of this geography. Is God dead? Has he been false (like these nuns) all along? The poem digresses into a word and sound play on “nun” and “none”:

This is a place of weeping things
 where the world has wept
 and wept and no one has come

No Father None     No Mother None
No Baby None Comes     No Sister
None Comes No Brother None Comes
No One     like None
It’s that kind of place
 You’ve seen it before
 It’s blind to everything, everyone

Although they are not officially marked, I would say that Further Problems with Pleasure is separated into three sections. The middle section, titled “The Baudelaire Variations,” is broken into sixteen smaller poems. Simonds translates several Baudelaire poems, mostly maintaining a close reading of the original, yet modernizing them in order to bring them into the contemporary world. Most of the translations follow the path other translators have taken, but a poem like “I Love Wine!” is acutely different:

Today, omg, I’m just so spaced out and splendid
 as I walk this earth without death, without an apron
without being a wife and so my queer heart transforms into the nostrils of a
 winter
 workhorse whose exhalation breaks through the iced tulip sky.

A large majority of the poems throughout her book are in the form of an address, and here too, Simonds ends with an address—this time to someone named Felix, requesting a trip to the “Oregon coast / [to] relax inside the boxed wine paradise of our dreams.” Historically, Baudelaire and photographer Felix Nadar were very close friends. Baudelaire claimed that Nadar was the “most amazing manifestation of vitality.” Perhaps Simonds is playing with this historical relationship and a present-day character to whom most of the poems in this section are addressed. Felix changes gender and appears to be a muse or imaginary partner. Remarkably, the name Felix is derived from the Latin for “happy.” Felix, for Simonds, is the “manifestation of vitality” that often, poem to poem, seems elusive.

The first and third sections of her book include both poems that reveal the hectic, intense inclinations of the speaker’s tone as well as poems that are tight, clear, and adhere to grammatical order. In both the first and third sections, the word “suicide” frequently occurs. It is a conceit that makes sense considering the desperateness of a suicidal mind. Mania and suicide go hand and hand. Simonds’ opening poems make the claim “I can’t imagine why anyone / would feel the desire to hurt a woman / who thinks about suicide every day.” Occasionally, the speaker of a poem declares that they don’t want to kill themselves, or they implode grammar into one important conviction in lines like “This is my life / I don’t want it I do.” Poems like “Ode to Suicide, Delirium, and Early REM” advertise from the beginning the difficulty the speaker has with life. Always keeping in the contemporary world, Simonds’ brilliantly contrasts a Twitter or Facebook posting about the shape of a women’s eyes to those of Mary as an icon:

mine are not almond-shaped, like my sister’s, my tips are “downturned,”
 something medieval and sad, something fenced-in the manuscript or
 economic,
 the way they paint the little strawberries are a technological advance,
and deep green vines up the gold-vermillion boxes to keep the text in, to keep
the lion in, to keep the flow
 of the blue flow robes in,
 Mine point down (Almond eye surgery for downturned eyes? please help,
 photos)
 the way Mary’s tips point down, the hue, a libidinous blue,
a corruption, wave, metal star work of mournful
 space —

I so admire how Simonds takes what to many of us might seem trivial social media moments and reminds us of the bombardment of criticism and difficulty that comes with simply surviving in the modern world. And, unfortunately for many, it becomes too much:

I follow these downward tips
 my eye sockets
that are not beautiful after all
 but eternally plain
as coffins.

In “Elysian Fields” the speaker asserts “Life is evil / That is all / I want to live because I’m stubborn.” The poem takes its title from classical mythology as the final resting place for the blessed. It also references a place or state of perfect happiness, paradise. As it is situated as one of her final poems in the collection, might Simonds be addressing the one thing her speaker searches for poem after poem? Further Problems with Pleasure, as the title suggests, is the elusiveness of that pleasure and all the obstacles that get in its way. Readers must endure the mind of one who toys with suicide and addresses difficult themes stemming from social to geographical limits and confines, but on the other end lies something real and rewarding and magical.

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The Most Beautiful Dialect

Chemistry by Weike Wang
Knopf, 2017
211 pages, paper, $24.95

Early in Chemistry, the unnamed protagonist describes how an atom is mostly empty space: “If you remove the empty space from every atom, the entire world’s human population could fit inside a sugar cube.” In a way, this brief comment on empty spaces applies to the brilliance of Weike Wang’s debut novel itself. The novel’s narrative suggests more than is stated plainly on the page. It is a book as much about what goes unsaid as it is about what is said. In this way, Weike Wang tells a story full of ambition, loneliness, humor, heart, and naiveté.

I hesitate to describe the plot because of its familiarity. A twenty-something-year-old struggles to complete her PhD, commit to her long-term boyfriend, and withstand the great deal of pressure on her academic success placed on her by her immigrant parents. The protagonist procrastinates, meets with her shrink regularly, and drinks a lot of wine—bottles and bottles of wine. However, the surprise of Chemistry is not in a riveting plot that charts new territory; it is in everything else.

There is something about the protagonist of Chemistry that makes her aimlessness charming. Perhaps it is her subtle intelligence. The novel is written in vignettes, none longer than a handful of pages, most under a page in length. These scenes rarely linger, and a gesture in Chemistry does all the work that another novel might have needed pages of interiority to explain. The precise language at times more closely resembles prose poetry or a braided lyric essay than it does conventional fiction prose. The closest example on the sentence level that comes to mind is Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation, although at times I felt like I could deduce influences from Amy Hempel and Annie Dillard.

Interspersed between scenes, the protagonist ruminates on the visible light spectrum, refraction, the scientific method, the history of scientific breakthroughs, and plenty of other scientific observations. These passages are always approachable and never felt overwhelmingly technical. Sometimes these facts are interspersed while in the midst of a scene, which shows the character’s wandering mind and helps the reader better understand the rationale behind her actions. For example, after the protagonist reveals that her mother knows the Shanghai dialect, which the protagonist doesn’t understand yet also considers the most beautiful dialect, Wang writes:

When I am born she does not speak (the dialect) with me.

Studies have shown that the brain feels exclusion not like a broken heart but like a broken bone. It is physical pain that the brain feels. (55)

This braiding of scientific data with narrative allows access to the particular way that the protagonist sees the world and interprets her own thoughts. The intelligence and external pressure put on the character to succeed make her refusal to complete her PhD and accept her boyfriend’s proposal acts of defiance. In a way, the protagonist is rebelling in the only way she knows how—via stagnation.

Stable relationships are few and far between in Chemistry. Yet these strained relationships don’t erupt into emotional outbursts. The conflict is impossible to separate from the protagonist’s identity as a first-generation immigrant who moved from China to America as a child. Her boyfriend needs more than she can give. She can’t even appreciate him fully because “it is the Chinese way to not explain any of that, to keep your deepest feelings inside and then build a wall that can be seen from the moon” (192). If her romantic relationship is strained from her Chinese qualities, her familial relationships are strained because she has become too Americanized. Unlike her parents, the protagonist has forgotten most of her birth language and doesn’t have much of a relationship with her relatives back in China. At times she is embarrassed by her mother’s accent and pronunciation, a common thread in immigrant literature. In an interesting reversal, however, both narratives also encourage the protagonist along both continuums. Her boyfriend begins learning Chinese in order to better relate. Meanwhile the protagonist has tremendous pressure to be successful in a conventional sense—a prestigious degree and job—placed upon her by her parents. In this way, the parents are pushing the protagonist further into the American dream narrative. This clash in both sets of relationships traps the protagonist between two worlds, making it impossible for her to fully inhabit one or the other.

Chemistry manages to capture a sense of knowing in the unknown. Scientific facts are approachable in a way that makes you consider whether you always knew the processes of meiosis and that lonsdaleite is a mineral that is “58% harder than diamond.” The whole book feels familiar in the same way, like running into a friendly acquaintance that you can’t quite remember where you met. After saying goodbye, you may find yourself hoping that you stumble across paths again soon, that the atomic empty space isn’t quite so vast.

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Riding Out the Storm

The Night We Set the Dead Kid on Fire by Ephraim Scott Sommers

Tebot Bach, 2017

94 pages, paper, $16

In storytelling, the phrase “coming of age” is as ubiquitous as “once upon a time,” yet the trope has led to some of our most beloved and widely read literature, from On the Road and Catcher in the Rye to children’s book series like Harry Potter or even Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie set. Ephraim Scott Sommers’ poetry collection The Night We Set the Dead Kid on Fire, released earlier this year by Tebot Bach, carves out its own niche in the “coming of age” canon that reflects the raw realities of twenty-first–century family life and employs the creative use of language and musicality that makes poetry enjoyable as well as thought-provoking. It’s all there: the boozy adventures, the bad decisions, the wayward wanderings of youth, but you don’t need to have a long trail of destruction to look back on in your life to appreciate the themes, images, and wordplay in Sommers’ collection. There are many entry points into this fine work.

The starting point of Sommers’ journey is his family and friends in his hometown of Atascadero, California, which is a logical starting point for the sort of reflection this collection promises. There is a lot of alcohol. There is generational violence. Yet there is also a respect for and humanization of deeply flawed but deeply loved people. There is a warmth in the childhood memories of dirty work boots stomping down a hallway or a diesel engine idling just outside the bedroom window. The poet places a certain reverence on his family members and close friends through stark imagery, a hallmark of this collection. In “The Hardest Thing,” a poem about the difficulties of forgiveness, is Aunt Diane who “scorches / a pork shoulder with a blow torch / and spits Skoal onto the back of a golden / retriever[.]” In “Shotgun Christmas,” the poem’s speaker is a child waking from a nightmare to find that “Santa won’t arrive in your doorway, but your mother will, / barefoot, in a nightgown and curlers with a sawed-off / shotgun dangling from her right hand.” The members of this family lack polish, but are strong, protective, and fierce. The poems bear both ambivalence and undeniable love.

Despite the warmth and respect the poet affords the characters of his earlier life, many of the poems are starkly honest about the difficulties of life in Atascadero and the unhealthy coping mechanisms that the men and women of Atascadero—including the “I” and “you” speaker of many of the poems—have adopted as a result. While a bulk of the collection speaks to this idea, one of the best examples is the tragically complacent “A-Town Blood,” wherein heroin use is “great Pegasus rides to the dragon-heights / of clouds above a Chevron parking lot,” and where the best way to escape the boredom and the pure existential dread of drone strikes and mass shootings and nuclear meltdowns is smoking weed in a blue lawn chair. Meeting one’s buddies at the bar after everyone gets off from their construction jobs leads to drinking, snorting coke in the bathroom, and “shitting in a urinal or ninja-kicking / the sink off the wall” as a remedy for drudgery and malaise bordering on despair, for powerlessness parading as denial.

As the collection progresses, we see a shift toward stability, maturity, a shift toward a different type of profession, to a long-term romantic relationship, to the inevitable settling down. Poems like “Labor Day” and “Memorial Day,” with their hard partying and heavy drinking, give way to “Us Sleeping in on the Fifth of July,” where the early inklings of love are the high instead of drugs. The substance of addiction is a person. In “The Dirty Tangerine,” the speaker’s “greatest adult discovery” is “that not everything / of these bodies we share between us must be sexual[,]” and slowly we see committed-relationship love replacing familial love and the love of childhood friendships. The speaker and his lover create a new sense of home away from Atascadero.

Poems of California shift to poems of Michigan. There is a metaphorical and, at times, literal loss of family and old friends. It is a shift both in terms of geography and loyalties, and in the poems that result from that shift, we see the poet’s complicated emotions regarding it. There is guilt mixed with a strong sense of inner conflict, of wanting to run, of wanting to stay. “Tornado Warning” tells the story of a man riding out a storm in Michigan while his father lies in a hospital bed in California. The father becomes a stand-in for Atascadero itself, and natural disasters like drought and tornado are stand-ins for the family disaster the man feels is his own doing. This and poems like “Forgettable City” highlight separation and loneliness. Leaving Atascadero for good is wrapped up in leaving family, in abandoning while feeling abandoned. And the old adage about not being able to go home again proves true in “Judas Home for Good Friday.” Here, the speaker calls himself a traitor, “the local rat on his knees, / knuckling a front door bloody, screaming, I still love you, / Atascadero, you bitch!” Perhaps this is why so many poems toward the end of the collection have such a strong sense of farewell and bittersweet nostalgia, a progression that I found deeply satisfying as a reader.

But it’s not just the familiar coming-of-age themes that avid readers of poetry will appreciate in this collection. Sommers’ use of language is musical and just plain fun. For instance, he often turns nouns into verbs. A group of hungry drunks “hurricane” inside an In ‘N Out Burger. During a trip to the emergency room, “[t]he fragrance / of fear windmills through us[.]” And in “Ruby,” the speaker tells her that “no one in the universe can / black-dress and macchiato-skin / into Club Soda like you[.]”

And the entire collection is typified by a frenetic stream of consciousness that gives the reader a sense of tumbling headfirst down the page. In the midst of this not unpleasant madness, many poems are touched here and there with particularly lovely moments of melody and striking imagery, as in “O Hospital Holy” when “our questions grow down / from the ceiling, solidify like stalactites[.]” The images emerge in sudden bursts, forcing the reader to slow, to stop, to reflect.

The stream-of-consciousness style in earlier poems seems to mirror moments of wild youth. In later poems, the same style conveys a sense of being overwhelmed and overpowered, of asking, as Sommers does, “What will we do with all the world’s unhappiness?” It was only in reading these later poems that I realized the earlier poems do not function as mere nostalgia, but as attempts at self-preservation. To move beyond the past and make peace with a sometimes frightening present becomes a new challenge for the poet who closes the collection on a note of hopefulness, pointing out that “we are only beginning to live.”

The interplay between form and content creates a collection of very accessible poems. Whether your entry point is, as it was for me, the subject matter and themes or the crafting of musical language that draws many readers to poetry, there is a lot to appreciate here for longtime fans of the genre and newcomers alike.

We’re also happy to present two new poems by Ephraim Scott Sommers.

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Bearing Witness

Collected Poems: 1974 – 2004 by Rita Dove

W.W. Norton, 2016

432 pages, hard, $39.95

In reading Rita Dove’s National Book Award finalist, Collected Poems: 1974 – 2004, we bear witness to her maturation as both a woman and an award-winning poet. Dove opens this volume of seven books with a prologue, “In the Old Neighborhood,” set in her childhood home. The collected works are the ebb and flood of leavings, travel, and homecomings, hers and her personas’, and the lessons one learns over the course of lived experiences.

In the first of the seven included books, The Yellow House on the Corner (1980), narrative poetry is the dominant mode, as Dove reflects upon adolescence. The work is short and terse as compared to poetry published in later sections, and it can also be romantic and dreamy, such as in “This Life”:

With a Japanese woodcut

of a girl gazing at the moon.

I waited with her for her lover.

He came in white breeches and sandals.

He had a goatee—he had

your face, though I didn’t know it.

Even early on, much of her poetry focuses on spaces both political and cultural, and we are able to see the evolution of her interest in social justice over a thirty-year span, beginning with “Teach Us to Number Our Days,” in which she alludes to police brutality:

In the old neighborhood, each funeral parlor

is more elaborate than the last.

The alleys smell of cops, pistols bumping their thighs,

each chamber steeled with a slim blue bullet.

Furthermore, Part III of Yellow House focuses exclusively on slavery, often in persona form, in a manner that is as thought-provoking as it is haunting. For example, “Someone’s Blood” depicts a slave mother and a child of unspecified gender, a choice that conveys how the situation could apply to any slave mother and child. As this mother and child are permanently separated, the mother asks the child for forgiveness for giving him or her life, as chilling an image as possible and one likely to echo throughout the many mother-child interactions we see in daily life.

In contrast, the next collection, Museum (1983), a more challenging read, is perhaps the most concerned with form experimentation, and in Dove’s increased risk and related excitement, readers cannot help but to be enthused as well. The poet begins to manipulate form in such poems as “The Hill Has Something to Say”; each stanza begins with a line that serves as a continuation of the title: “but isn’t talking.” The second stanza then starts “and takes its time.” This pattern continues for four additional stanzas, providing a powerful sense of the layering of time in a place.

Later, she offers “Sunday Night at Grandfather’s,” a concrete poem in which the stanzas create triangles with a one-word bottom point, capitalized and emphatic: “Ghost,” “Drunk,” “Son.” Stanza two, for example, reads:

He hated Billy the parakeet, mean as half-baked sin.

He hated church-going women and the radio turned

Up loud. His favorite son, called Billy

Too, had flown the coop although

Each year he visited, each

Time from a different

City, gold

Tooth and

Drunk.

With a “museum” theme employed, this collection appears least concerned with contemporary socio-politics; simultaneously, it seems as though Dove is traveling, both literally across the globe, across time, and figuratively within, gaining perspective.

In Thomas and Beulah (1986), a semi-fictional chronology of her maternal grandparents, form takes on subtler aspects and pace quickens as readers learn about the title characters’ romance and marriage, first through the eyes of Thomas and then Beulah. Beginning in 1921 and ending in 1969, this story in poems is imbued with historical detail that helps us to see what life was like for a black Ohioan couple throughout and following the Great Depression, as well as from images that build a complex portrayal of their life together—personal, professional, and parental, from courting to death. In “Variation on Guilt,” the universality of fatherhood is explored as Thomas’s wife is about to give birth; although determined, he is scared:

Wretched

little difference, he thinks,

between enduring pain and

waiting for the pain

to work on others.

Thomas and Beulah is a touching and insightful rendering of intimate family life through the lens of black history.

While Dove’s volume contains considerable range, the fact that she is a black woman is always in our consciousness. Inversely, in, for example, “Nothing Down,” “A carload of white men / halloo past them on Route 231,” and whites or whiteness seem always to linger in the shadows of the African-American experience. To further illustrate, in “Taking in Wash,” Dove writes, “She was Papa’s girl, / black though she was,” though her father himself pales in the winter due to the “Cherokee in him.” Only the dark mother whose color “never changed” is there to protect the speaker from the possible predations of the light-skinned father upon his dark-skinned daughter, a reference to skin color as a persistent issue within the black community, beginning with the mainly forced integration of white genes into the population during slavery.

Grace Notes (1989) is a return to narrative as well as to beauty innate in the everyday. Dove meditates on subjects as random as grain silos, as if casting farther into water to capture vivid imagery, ending “Silos” with “They were masculine toys. They were tall wishes. They / were the ribs of the modern world.”

Yet, she moves beyond the personal and the aesthetic, finding ways to sew a thread of racial inequality into the whole cloth of the collection. In “Crab-Boil,” she recounts the distress of crabs meeting their untimely demise, and Aunt Helen’s

laugh before saying “Look at that—

a bunch of niggers, not

a-one gets out ’fore the others pull him

back.”…

The aunt is waiting for herself and her niece to be run out of the event and back to the “colored-only” beach “crisp with litter and broken glass”; however, the poem is set in Ft. Myers in 1962 and the niece, who narrates, does not believe the aunt about either her crab analogy or her assumption that they will be removed from the event. However, if it should happen, the persona determines, “…I’m ready.” Readers are energized by subtle changes as in her books Dove works from slavery through decades of slow progress toward the 2000’s.

Mother Love explores the modern sonnet while breathing fresh air into the ancient Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone, entwining the story with the modern day in myriad ways. In the preface, Dove notes that she likes “…how the sonnet comforts even while its prim borders… are stultifying.” She continues, “The Demeter/Persephone cycle of betrayal and regeneration is ideally suited for this form since all three—mother/goddess, daughter-consort and poet—are struggling to sing in their chains.” The poet proceeds to interlock the ancient story with contemporary life. In “The Narcissus Flower,” it is simply through use of universal “you”:

The mystery is, you can eat fear

before fear eats you,

you can live beyond dying—

and become a queen,

whom nothing surprises.

The eight-part “Persephone in Hell” is set in contemporary time, with references to such items as “good tennis shoes” and “honking / delivery vans.” Similarly, “The Bistro Styx” contains a modern setting. Perhaps most interestingly, “Exit,” written using second-person point of view, could be construed as either Persephone leaving Hell or any woman making a hard decision. Such effective hybridity proves fascinating and speaks to the issues of women across time.

On the Bus with Rosa Parks (1995) contemplates freedom, racial tension, journeys down roads with familiar and unfamiliar stops, when where an individual sits counts. In “Cameos,” Dove tells a story of a couple, Joe and Lucille, and their children, this time beginning in 1925 and lasting fifteen years. In the title section, “On the Bus with Rosa Parks,” the poet makes clear her point of view about Parks’ action, about activism or lack thereof. “Freedom Ride” uses direct address in the final resonant stanza:

Make no mistake: There’s fire

back where you came from, too.

Pick any stop: You can ride

into the afternoon singing with strangers,

or rush home to the scotch

you’ve been pouring all day—

but where you sit is where you’ll be

when the fire hits.

Dove asks readers to see the Civil Rights movement and ourselves in relation to activism through new eyes.

She also interlaces issues of gender, demonstrating how interwoven these social issues are. For instance, in On the Bus with Rosa Parks, the son’s story is recounted from his decidedly male perspective:

Sisters,

laughing….

Idiots,

he thinks. No wonder

there’s so many of them.

Dove makes the interesting choice of not revealing the sisters’ fates until near the end of American Smooth, written nine years hence, in “The Sisters: Swansong,” a short, sad sequel, concluding in a powerful one-line stanza, “We all died of insignificance.” Both gender inequality and racial injustice create the texture of the world Dove illuminates.

Dove plays strenuously with form again throughout American Smooth, such as when she writes “Rhumba” with the dancer’s thoughts and moves flush left alternating with the instructor’s dialogue in right flush, as if the words themselves are dancing—words that combine, then center for an embrace mid-practice.

In this final collection, named after a form of ballroom dancing that allows for the independent creative expression of each partner in addition to close embrace, it is as though Dove’s soul is at last dancing, too. Her words convey a sense of inner calm, of release, not present in the previous books. In the title poem, a couple is in perfect sync:

I didn’t notice

how still you’d become until

we had done it

(for two measures?

four?)—achieved flight,

that swift and serene

magnificence

“Fox,” too, is reflective of such inner peace and joy:

She knew what

she was and so

was capable

of anything

anyone

could imagine.

She loved what

She was…

In American Smooth, Dove exhales and invites readers to do the same.

By the end of this masterful collection, Dove has come full circle to the themes she highlights in her prologue. The final word that flows in in American Smooth is “home.” While reading, we travel as we remember the textures of home and contemplate the idea of “home.” In her poem, “Looking Up From the Page, I am Reminded of This Mortal Coil,” the poet asks, “What good is the brain without traveling shoes?” Just as with Dove, in the span of thirty years of writing, we, through reading, leave the volume more enlightened than when we entered. This collection brings a world of experience home to us.

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Invitations to Linger

Infinite Altars: Poems by James Brasfield
LSU Press, 2016
92 pages, paper, $17.95

In an age submerged by torrents of evanescent information, the poems in James Brasfield’s second book, Infinite Altars, extend invitations to linger that prove a pleasure to accept. The collection has at its heart an instinctive patience, asking of its readers a corresponding willingness not just to witness or overhear, but to engage in the construction and accumulation of meditative insight. That responsive participation constitutes the most valuable (and these days, somewhat unusual) pleasure of lyric poetry, which Brasfield’s book offers generously throughout.

                                                             From our

seeing more closely, always more closely
in our extreme attention, light’s angles and subtle shade,
a recognition comes, this for the first time always—
such presence, hidden from plain sight, emerges,
as though it trusted our seeing—...

These lines from “Homage to Piero Della Francesca” in the book’s vividly pictorial opening section could be understood as a motto for the entire collection’s acts of attention, which consistently draw what Hopkins called inscapes out of their hiding places in ordinary experience. The volume’s opening poem, “Northern Bay,” gently turns its detailed landscape vision indoors and inward: “Diamond glints coming in, wind-driven, / a rhythm like rows of woodgrain / through a plank table…,” deftly evoking the life lived in “a room / arrayed with what’s been salvaged from a tide: / what a hand reached for, what remains.” The lyric strategies Brasfield explores are various: painterly meditations on the act of perception (“Window Frame”), delightful symbolist impersonations, as of a snail in “The Night of Daydream,” the gently mythic and allusive “Map,” and a lovely homage (“The Magic Gardener”) to Stanley Kunitz, one of Brasfield’s teachers and a presiding, one might say permission-giving spirit for the collection as a whole. The sensibility informing these poems thus establishes itself as trustworthily ambitious, refusing merely performative gestures, while premising a range of subject and approach that’s amply fulfilled by the book’s succeeding two sections.

If the book’s opening portion invites us to experience the evolution of perception toward illumination in language gently, slyly, honestly aware of its own interposition between what it presents and who perceives it, the middle section features pieces more various in their subjects and development. Daringly long, cinematic sentences still find their inherently apt pacing enhanced by Brasfield’s excellent instinct for line, but the range of tone broadens, and several of the poems pay discreet homage to canonical American voices. A gentle resonance of Hart Crane informs “Brooklyn to Menatay,” in which a train ride fosters access to the original inhabitation of this continent. “The Incorporation” recalls surviving factory work with a wonderment reminiscent of Philip Levine, and “Standard Time” meditates on the provisioning of firewood in manner that brings to mind Robert Frost and perhaps Richard Hugo. Brasfield closes this section of the book with an affectionate, evocative elegy for his long-widowed mother, “Afternoons Into Evenings.”

The elegiac tones established in that section’s closing poem gently suffuse this beautifully crafted book’s final third. Haunting poems such as “Demopolis” (a portrait of Brasfield’s grandmother), “Stray Stone,” and “Daylight Ghosts” have the courage of their mystery, of their moods and intimations. The social, the familial, the solitary aspects of experience all find expression here. Often in this culminating portion of the book, place and memory find each other out, penetrating experience to discover imaginative obligations, as in these lines from the poem “Soundings”:

                                   Despite
a shell held to my ear,

there is no sound to memory—
 only remembrance, how-it-was-heard,

as in the museum I saw de Kooning’s
 Screams of Children Come from Seagulls.

Seeing it, I heard them again.

If a book of poems is indeed, as Wallace Stevens once opined, “a damned serious affair,” obligated to sing essences back into experience, it’s heartening to read Brasfield’s, so firmly rooted in its variety of impulse and settings, from Kiev to Brooklyn to Savannah, and so convinced of the value of patient, reverent attention, and its potentially exalting pleasures:

...a lark singing
 and you barefoot, standing in the celestial
 solitude of your identities—all around you
 silence has sung light into song.

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Restless Curiosity

At the Foundling Hospital by Robert Pinsky
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016
59 pages, hardbound, $23.00

The threads running through Robert Pinsky’s At the Foundling Hospital are varied enough to provide the topics for a Jeopardy round: music, language and languages, names and naming, identity and origins. And Pinsky’s restless curiosity is mirrored by the various forms these poems assume. There are sonnets, couplet and tercet poems, lists, narrative poems, brief lyrics, and free-associative repetitions. What melds these disparate elements, rendering the book a seamless read, is Pinsky’s cerebral yet human voice.

Taking its cue from the collection’s epigraph from Pindar (“What is someone?”), that voice offers more questions than postulations. Sometimes those questions are explicit, as in “Genesis”: “Where was the kiln, what was the clay? / What drove the wheel that turned the vessel?” At other times the questions are implicit, often involving notions of accepted faith. In “Sayings of the Old” the speaker remembers an acquaintance who “hates the sanctimonious Buddha-goo / But loves to meditate.” And in “Dream Medicine” the speaker recalls a childhood encounter with his father when,

…from the Ford’s back seat,
I asked him, did he believe in Life after Death?
His eyes in the rear-view mirror kind of shrugged,
“I don’t know, probably not,” he said. “Or maybe
Look at it this way: you are my life after death.”

“I’m tired of the gods, I’m pious about the ancestors,” “Creole” begins, an attitude that is evident throughout this book. While Pinsky often pokes and prods at ideas surrounding religious belief, he seems much more interested in people. “The Foundling Tokens” is a beautiful meditation on how the orphaned children were identified by something tangible when they were brought in: “Bit of lace or a pewter brooch, / Identifying coin, button / Or bangle. One crushed thimble, / noted at admission.” The poem expands to include Africans on the slave passage, “the Chinese immigrants / In the dark Angel Island / Internment cells,” and the people who left “a rhyme or name” scraped “Into the very death-compound dirt” of a concentration camp. What did it avail any of them? “…almost never was / A foundling reclaimed, ever.” These poems never flinch from such hard truths, yet they wear those truths lightly, neither celebrating the darkness nor inviting pity in its wake.

Pinsky is widely acknowledged as a contemporary master. Everywhere in this collection I am made aware of a confidence of sensibility and craft, the sense that he can accomplish anything the poems set out to do. Partly that is surely the result of long practice. But there is also generosity of spirit here. The few explicitly narrative poems we do have are concerned as much with other people as they are with the speaker. Pinsky’s impulse is to honor the people who often don’t have a voice, such as the veteran in “Radioman” who matter-of-factly joined another platoon, his having been wiped out in the Battle of the Bulge: “We slept, we ate. / I had another outfit, somewhere to be. / They had a radioman, and that was me.” The abandoned in the Foundling Hospital, his grandmother who delivered wisdom in Yiddish, and childhood friends who have died receive the same fond attention as do Irving Berlin and Ray Charles and God.

There is no axe to grind here, no quarrel with fate (but neither is there complacency). Rather, there is the acknowledgement that the speaker of these poems is corporeal, one among countless. “Procession” begins with a description of the array of telescopes atop Mauna Kea and their ability to travel back through time. Inevitably, that focus leads the speaker to a meditation about our shared human past. “Innumerable names and doings, innumerable / Destinies, remote histories, deities and tongues. / Somewhere among them your ancestor the slave, / Also your ancestors the thief the prince the stranger,” all of them “…traveling a filament of light / Across the nothing between the clouds of being / Into the pinhole iris of your mortal eye.”

The poems in At the Foundling Hospital examine what it is to be human through the microcosm of individual experience. Robert Pinsky—sometimes reverent, sometimes irreverent, but always honest and forthright—is our guide. This book is strong evidence that he deserves the respect he is so often accorded.

Please also see our interview with Robert Pinsky.

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The Double Under the Bed

Willy Loman’s Reckless Daughter or Living Truthfully Under Imaginary Circumstances by Elizabeth A. I. Powell

Anhinga Press, 2016

108 pages, paper, $20.00

Elizabeth Powell’s Willy Loman’s Reckless Daughter is a thoroughly entertaining work about sad things. For instance, in the prose prologue “Autocorrecting the Lyric I” that opens the book, we learn that the poet-narrator is an “Episcojew,” who, though she learned to “pass” according to the demands of the occasion, was once kicked by the Catholic boys on the playground for “killing Christ.” When she was 14 years old, her “cold borscht” father and “finger sandwiches on white” mother divorced, and she was raped by a drunken neighbor, Bill Gottlieb. Concurrent with these events, she discovers that she has a double “snoring and talking and laughing in her sleep” under the bed. She also learns that the source of her parents’ conflict is her father’s rampant philandering (“No more 42^nd Street hookers, no more secretaries!” she hears her mother yelling).

Though this may sound like Too Much Information, Powell makes it entertaining by approaching it primarily through humor and irony. She writes, “It is better, the Boston Brahmins say, to have a history not a past, so when I speak in the ‘I’ it must be my Jewish side, when I say that I am a vaudeville act in a quiet New England house. I’m the Daughter of the American Revolution in third class steerage. I’m the debutante in the Pogrom.” That last sentence is simultaneously jarring, discomfiting, and hilarious.

Powell’s book is one long poem that explores the poet’s identity and past through concentrating on the figure of the double under the bed, her doppelgänger. This “alter” is called “stepsister, bitch bastard—the roofied one, erased from the storyline.” The double is also a dead twin brother who, as we learn in the prologue, has been literally absorbed by the poet in utero. The doppelgänger becomes the poet’s half-sister with whom the father’s new red-headed mistress is pregnant at his funeral (a fact that the poet learns later).

Metaphorically, Powell’s book itself finds its doppelgänger in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. The famous play becomes a virtual template for Powell’s own life: like Willy Loman, her father was an adulterous salesman who died suddenly. In her prologue she says that, like Loman, her father “had eaten the dream and it had made him sick.” In Miller’s character Biff, Powell sees the twin brother who was incorporated into her own body in the womb.

She also imagines that Willy Loman’s mistress gives birth to a girl whom she identifies with the half-sister that her father’s mistress carries. Powell’s alter merges with Powell’s half-sister and speaks as Willy Loman’s “reckless daughter” in the stunning six-act title poem which ends the book. This figure seems to signal catharsis and resolution, even wholeness, for the poet. She says, “Tell me, Willy, isn’t it true—//daughter sounds like slaughter,/son, the sun.” The doppelgänger is the finally emergent genius of the book. The poet’s struggle with her is one of the book’s principle sources of vitality.

In many ways, the genre in which this book participates is theater. The book includes acting exercises, references to set design and to the Fourth Wall, soliloquies, and staging directions. Its hybrid of forms—prose, plays, a sonnet sequence, rhyming couplets, and various nonce forms—and its many different points of view are held together by an unforgettable and one-of-a-kind urbane, postmodern, humorous voice and then pulled apart, almost to the point of breaking, by a swirling, centrifugal energy. In “On the Way to the Theatre, Stuck in the Roundabout,” Powell says, “We surrender to the thrashing, thrust all at once to the left side. . . . We are imaginary people becoming real once again by the fever of this throttle[.]”

In this centrifuge of a book, she throws many bites of information at us simultaneously: other highlights include the narrator/poet’s lack of a belly button, fire that used to follow her “like a strange cat,” psychoanalysis, and a deep urge to connect with a God—“I love God this much (see my hands out as far as I can reach) and farther.” Willy Loman’s Reckless Daughter has a frantic velocity that is thrilling and at all times under the control of the guiding intelligence of its maker.

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Mortal Words

Bukowski in a Sundress, by Kim Addonizio

Penguin, 2016

224 pages, paper, $16.00

Mortal Trash, by Kim Addonizio

W.W. Norton, 2016

112 pages, hardcover, $25.95

Dissatisfied with the label “confessional poet,” Kim Addonizio nonetheless owns up to it in the pages of Bukowski in a Sundress: Confessions from a Writing Life (Penguin, 2016). “I hope you will forgive me,” she deadpans partway through this funny, lyrical, moving set of essays. “I can’t seem to stop telling you everything about me in the lineated memoir of my life.” Poetry, that “lineated memoir,” serves as but one topic here, from the satirical “How to Succeed in Po Biz” (“It is crucial not to win the major award, because then you might feel too great a sense of achievement. Be a finalist, but not a winner”) to the candid “How I Write.” “Each time, I’m lost,” she admits. “Each time, I wish I hadn’t started down this road.”

Other essays here similarly de-romanticize Addonizio’s writing life without diminishing its psychic and emotional rewards. She recalls a revelatory moment in childhood, being “hurled into tumultuous confusion about the true nature of reality” when she saw how the ordinary word bologna was spelled: “Clearly,” she writes, “there were deeper truths than I realized lurking beneath not only language, but existence itself”(“Best Words, Best Order”).

With characteristic humor, Addonizio goes on to credit another word, libido—part of a rhyme scrawled anonymously on a schoolyard wall—with inspiring her lifelong twin obsessions, eros and language. One of the sharpest essays here, “The Process,” begins as an anodyne craft talk to MFA writing students—the title itself a workshop shibboleth—but after nodding to such writing-program proprieties as “inspiration” and “revision” Addonizio throws down the gauntlet: “maybe what you really need to learn is something else, like how to write a decent English sentence.” Addonizio practices what she preaches. The writing throughout Bukowski in a Sundress is vivid and memorable, the sentences bristling or sinuous as the need arises, qualities readers of her poems have come to expect. Indeed, some passages here have the intensity as well as the verve and wit of Addonizio’s best poetry:

We shelled peanuts from a red plastic basket and sat together
through the late afternoon as the sun lowered itself gradually
over the docks and the boats like a shining woman lowering herself
into a very large, sparkling bathtub. Or maybe like a shooting star
on heroin. Or maybe the sun was more of a golden quaalude, slipping
down the darkening blue throat of the day.
(“Are You Insane?”)

As in her poems, Addonizio’s essay topics range from the quotidian to the tragic: not only flu shots, cocktails, and “How to Fall for a Younger Man,” but also emotionally disturbed family members, single parenthood, and her mother’s battle with Parkinson’s Disease. Along the way we find plenty to laugh over as well as ponder, from the indignities of online dating to the smarminess of literary critics. (Her book’s title, originally a reviewer’s jibe, is a label Addonizio gleefully accepts.) Such acceptance is necessary to the confessional mode. “I confess to happiness,” she writes. “I confess to grief.” Far from mere rationalizing or hoping to atone for admitted missteps, and just as far from self-congratulation, Addonizio’s dispatches “from the writing life” make clear the emotional ballast such a life requires even as they distinguish one’s art from one’s lived experience: “I confess that a kelson of my creations is love. The poems are not the life.”

This kelson of love turns out to be a preoccupation in Mortal Trash (W.W. Norton, 2016), Addonizio’s latest collection of poems, published nearly simultaneously with Bukowski in a Sundress. More particularly, she is interested in the ways love has so often been poetically construed or codified: Addonizio devotes major sections of the book to revisions of, or responses to, poems by Shakespeare, John Donne, and others. Her tweaking of a famous image or line can honor the original love poem while also addressing the realities of contemporary relationships. Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”) looms dauntingly over the lover’s complaint in Addonizio’s poem: “I couldn’t compare this to anything / I’m not going to talk about it now.” The speaker laments the miles separating lovers, but just when we think she has achieved some aesthetic, ironic detachment with a joke about remedying the situation (“every airline fare sometimes declines”), Addonizio reminds us that—the Bard notwithstanding—poetry in fact is no match for Time: “Death still has bragging rights / this line has stopped breathing.” The omission of conventional punctuation from the poems in this section furthers the sense of dislocation, unmooring us from the Shakespearean original just far enough. We hear it echoed and renewed.

Mortal Trash trades in such re-workings and reappraisals of poetry’s means, its metaphors and imaginings. As in her prose “confessions,” Addonizio often satirizes her chosen art both to refresh it and to suggest its continuing relevance. “[L]et me not to the pediment of two minds / admit marriage,” a speaker quips in a tweaking of Sonnet 116, the line break here providing an extra satiric bite to the reversal of Shakespeare’s syntax. The substitution of “pediment” for “impediment” is crucial, the barrier to love in the original reduced to what may be merely a façade of love in Addonizio’s version.

One of the pleasures of Addonizio’s verse is this kind of darkly comic turn, this jab of rueful insight. “Plastic” begins with a grim environmental fact that “trashes,” so to speak, the hackneyed language of love:

A bunch of it is floating somewhere
way out in the Pacific.
If your love is deeper than the ocean,
then the surface of your love is a swirl
of swill, toothbrushes and swizzle sticks
carried by the inevitable current…

Skeptical as they may be of conventional tropes, we shouldn’t overlook that these lines make for wonderful poetry themselves, the vivid image of consumer detritus washing in on the tide of those “s” sounds: surface, swirl, swill, swizzle… Likewise the lines that conclude “Elegy for Jon”:

I wish the sea would stop
swallowing his name, while it goes on
kissing the sand, laying
another cold wreath at my feet.

The swish of the sea is conveyed in those s’s, the low vowels (stop and swallow and on, goes and cold) competing with the high, bright e’s in sea and wreath and feet as if to mimic the internalized tones of grief, a shifting between dirge and keen.

Indeed, nearly every page in Mortal Trash yields its metaphorical and acoustic riches. In “Divine” we see “black trees / hung with sleeping bats / like ugly Christmas ornaments.” Another poem offers “the ROYGBIV” of damp bras laid out to dry. Elsewhere we watch “this slut of a river smear kisses all over / east Manhattan. “Charting the emotions, the “mortal trash” that is the heart, remains Addonizio’s primary concern throughout the volume, but this creative “kelson” of love in her work merges with her gimlet-eyed retooling of tradition at several key points. Perhaps the best example, “Here Be Dragons,” reads as both a map of love’s perils and a kind of ars poetica. “I’m not done with the compass / & I’m still puzzling over the chart,” her speaker begins, then admits to being drawn to the outlandish, even the dangerous. This holds true emotionally (sea monsters and sirens “were my lovers” and “what dragged me down”) as well as artistically, the poem concluding with the refreshing brashness we hear throughout both this collection and her book of essays:

I drank
in the taverns with pirates howler
monkeys my sea captain ancestors my
sozzled staggering fathers & returned
but not to any harbor only the curved
surface I sailed on

If “confessional,” these two books rise above both the typical memoir’s tendency to capitalize on addiction or dysfunction and much of contemporary poetry’s self-defeating rage against coherence. Bukowski in a Sundress treats with candor as well as mordant humor the travails of not only “the writing life” but life, period—this existence we nevertheless are stuck with, and which Addonizio’s poems renew our passion for, mortality in all its awkward, exasperating, despairing, and joyous “trash.”

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Category: Book Review