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REVIEWS - NOVEMBER 2025
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Resting Bitch Face by Taylor Byas Released August 29, 2025 Soft Skull Press 98 pages reviewed by Christina Linsin, SoFloPoJo Reviews Editor |
Arthur Sze asked, “what line of sight leads to revelation,” and Taylor Byas’s second full-length poetry collection, Resting Bitch Face, presents a resonant, unflinching answer--all of them, together. Broken into four titled sections and beginning with a proem, Resting Bitch Face presents myriad facets through which women in general and Black women in particular see, are seen, and have been seen historically. With rich sensory details, interplay between art and artist, and creative use of format and form, Taylor Byas’s Resting Bitch Face is a sometimes glorious and sometimes necessarily uncomfortable reclaiming of the narrative of perspective.
Byas’s award-winning debut collection from 2023, I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times, is filled with lush sensory details, so it is no surprise that Resting Bitch Face is drenched in rich sensory layers. In a footnote beneath “L***, Annotated,” Byas writes of an encounter with smoke:
… I told my friends about that night,
the regular who blew in my face before
he spoke. I recounted the black-and-auburn light
dying between us as it fell onto the floor.
I remember thinking please don’t touch me but
still feeling touched. I’ve been describing smoke
wrong all this time, been way too lenient with what
I thought I could cut through. Erase what you know
of it, I’m telling you, forget what you think--
after the night, my clothes ran black in the sink.
The visual layer of the colors provides a softer landing to envelop the violence of a tactile layer inflicted without consent in this section, and all of the sensory layers are softened by the auditory as a recounting instead of a direct observation. In Byas’s keen observation, some horrific moments from art, history, and life are rendered and reclaimed, such as in “In the War Photography Exhibit, I Find So Many Things Wrong,” where Byas writes, “There is something about capturing the thing looking.” By capturing what is looking within the verses in this collection, Byas builds an additional layer between the syntactic beauty and the horror of the subject, effectively creating palpable tension in the poems in Resting Bitch Face.
The horror of the subject, and all of its many implications in various art forms, is one of the motifs in Byas’s Resting Bitch Face. The cruelty of painters, photographers, actors, and directors toward women is faced in this collection in an interplay between subject and artist. This interplay is sometimes lighthearted, like in “A Woman to Woman with Mona,” and sometimes heartbreaking, as in “Tell It Like a Movie | Rewind,” in which Byas writes about the 1972 film Last Tango in Paris, “The wall the woman backs into / again and again remembers / her shape.” Byas stares fame in the face and refuses to capitulate to status. The poem, “Well Damn, Picasso” begins with an epigram from Picasso’s granddaughter about his dismissive treatment of the women he painted, and in the poem, Byas writes:
the simple geometry of her body trussed
to the chair like nothing separate from it—the math
of your control. Picasso, she’s so scared
she doesn’t know which way to look, and you’re mad
enough to show it and make her two-faced. Dared
to glam her up in the color of bruises and hope
we wouldn’t notice. Right there, the muscadine
of how she hurts.
Taylor Byas makes no secret of her affinity for form poems, and Resting Bitch Face includes many classical forms like pantoums and sonnets within the collection. Each one of her classical form poems showcases Dr. Byas’s ability to integrate form and subject for the best overall poetic effect. The haunting pantoum “When I Say No, the Joker Smiles” begins with the lines, “In the dark theater, I stale with the popcorn left / between the seats. My boyfriend’s getting handsy. / Behind, a few rows up, a man observes the theft” and the repetition of the pantoum form helps build the pace and the hopelessness of the speaker’s situation. Byas has included some more experimental use of form and formatting in this collection, too, and two of my favorites are the already-mentioned “Tell It Like a Movie | Rewind,” which, as its title subtlety suggests, is a mirror poem or palindrome poem, and “The Violence of Rain” in which the use of punctuation mimics both the speaker’s emotional state and the critical splatter of each drop of rain as it falls. In “The Violence of Rain,” Byas writes:
…i was so. quiet. in
everything. i said. i was. a whisper. i was. wind. tornado. forming. in your
face. i looked. still. because i was. coming. toward. you. you. said. shut. the
fuck. up. and i. was rain. how you. can only. hear it. when. it strikes. something.
how. it punctuates. is. a period. splintering. into. more.
The final section of Resting Bitch Face is titled “Signature” and includes the single poem “In the Lens of Desire” which was inspired by both the photograph “Untitled (Man and Mirror)” by Carrie Mae Weems and the poem “Good Dress” by Brittany Rogers. The photograph, part of the collection at the Art Institute of Chicago, features a scene of quiet, controlled desire, inspiring Byas to the final revelation, “I want the silk kimono and the camisole, the unsanctioned / nipple and its silhouette showing. I want to stop / wanting, so give me a mirror, a camera, give me my face // in the third silver of a man’s eye.” In Resting Bitch Face, Byas’s verses are the mirror, the camera, the face, the lines of sight which, together, lead to revelation.
Dr. Taylor Byas is an award-winning poet and native of Chicago. Her list of extensive awards and positions within the poetry community may be found on her website, https://www.taylorbyas.com/. Before Resting Bitch Face, Dr. Byas published her debut full-length collection, I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times, with Soft Skull Press and two chapbooks, Bloodwarm and Shutter.
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Encounters For the Living and the Dead: poems by Jameela F. Dallis Released September 23, 2025 River River Books 106 pages reviewed by Christina Linsin, SoFloPoJo Reviews Editor |
Like the oysters referenced throughout her debut collection, Jameela F. Dallis’s poems require work of whoever wishes to partake of their layered depths. And, like the oyster, the work reveals treasure. Rich and sensuous, Dallis’s debut, Encounters For the Living and the Dead: poems, weaves together ekphrasis, clear poetic imagery, and the eternal sounding of the sea to create a portal through which reader becomes witness, and prosaic contains holy. Divided into three titled sections of various lengths, beginning with a proem, and ending with a coda, Dallis’s debut invites her readers to be fearless in their exploration of life’s (and death’s) offerings, as she writes in the proem, “Black, Holy Time,” “I do not fear the portal / that conducts, contracts, and transforms. I do not fear the thread that binds me to / those who walk between realms and through histories/ As I am witness to starlight.”
Some of what is witnessed in Dallis’s Encounters For the Living and the Dead occurs in the spaces before the poetry’s genesis, as in the many ekphrastic poems featured in this collection. By its very nature, ekphrasis presents unique challenges in a collection of poetry. Fortunately, most of the paintings and works of art which inspire the ekphrastic poems in Dallis’s debut collection are easily accessible through a quick internet search, and having the art available when reading the poetry is worth the scant effort. The mesmerizing spell of poems such as “Shadows of Her Thorned Dress” would still sing even without viewing Tippy Toes, 2007, Alison Saar’s sculpture which inspired it, but the art adds vast levels when Dallis writes:
But clothes that don’t fit are captivity
and the crinoline is torn
the bodice all thorned with lace--
that lies
Now her shadows cry beauty and open betrayal
wooden arms reaching for
ultramarine…
In the poem “There’s a Place Without Oysters,” the first line of the poem, “displacement unsettles” immediately centers the poem within the realm of the painting which inspired it. The displacement in A Meat Stall with the Holy Family Giving Alms by Pieter Aertsen is two-fold: a displacement of the visual perspective within the painting as a reverse still-life and the displacement caused by a moral divide in the way the beggar is treated by Joseph/Mary as opposed to the others who are on their way to the church in the distance. The parallels in the artwork to the “unrepentant despots” within the poem add additional characterization for the excess Dallis writes is, “foreshadowing death. // the sea has swallowed the shore // hungry. relentless. unrepentant.”
One of the ways Dallis overcomes the inherent challenges of using ekphrasis is through skillful imagery, painting words with whatever can’t be visually accessed, such as in “Material Encounters” where Dallis writes, “Somewhere beyond a heath, hill, or single mosshewn stone there came to / be honeycombed reefs with pocked coral, abstract fish with dreamed-of rainbow / fins, and angular branches of dancing evergreen seaweed.” Dallis’s extensive backgrounds in art and literature provide vast descriptive vocabulary which she weaves into lyrical visions of not only nature, but life, such as in “The Shape of Love,” which opens with, “Now I reach for the shape of love in the absence of light and you are obsidian, India / ink, charcoal // I am raw stretched canvas, cold-pressed toothy paper, unbleached cotton.”
In an interview by poet and editor Han VanderHart and available in the RiverRiver Books Newsletter online, Jameela Dallis says her decision to center this collection in and around the ocean is intentional, in part because “It’s simultaneously a place, no place, and every place.” The connection to water in these poems is not only on a surface level of imagery, though, it’s in the sound Dallis washes through the works and in the rise and fall of the varying sections, creating layers of waves, such as in “Rhythm, Surrender,” where Dallis writes:
we become ancient
marine animals
blots beneath aeons of wet
our dance: squid ink surrender
lyric fluid undulating
The syntax mimics the sound of waves, broken naturally into rhythmic sections, just as the title implies. Dallis also uses repetition as an additional connection to the sea, weaving the motif further into this collection like direct address in prayer. In “Les Betes de la Mer,” Dallis uses the title phrase four times through the poem, becoming a refrain and culminating the repetition with:
I am become les betes de la mer
and my hot pink lips shoot fireworks
from flowerbeds, weave kelp into
my hair tying myself to another
home another space where others
have gone on and become beasts
of the deep.
What is home and what is holy are both explored reverently in Jameela F. Dallis’s debut collection, Encounters for the Living and the Dead: poems, as in “The Bounty of Occasion,” where Dallis writes, “—we find ways to come together tracing / fingers over ribbons and butcher’s twine unraveling opinions and spaces beneath / the weight of conversation.” Connections to the sea, to each other, and to art resonate deeply in Dallis’s work, and this collection is an offering to all of it, as Dallis writes in “Oyster Dreams,” “I gather my dreams / sup at your banquet.”
Dr. Jameela F. Dallis, PhD, is a poet and curator based in North Carolina. Encounters For the Living and the Dead: poems is her debut poetry collection, and she has published individual poems in Honey Literary, Walter Magazine, and other places. She has an extensive background in visual art, and her accomplishments and calendar may be found on her website at https://www.jameeladallis.com/.
The above-referenced interview with Dr. Dallis may be accessed here: https://riverriverbooks.beehiiv.com/p/five-questions-with-author-jameela-f-dallis-bb9c
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The Parachutist by Jose Hernandez Diaz Released January 14, 2025 Sundress Publications 99 pages reviewed by Christina Linsin, SoFloPoJo Reviews Editor |
Jose Hernandez Diaz’s third full-length poetry collection, The Parachutist, reflects a deep connection to tradition which dips delightfully into whole worlds of myth and surrealism. Tying these seemingly disparate ideas together is a palpable nostalgia which opens the reader to all realities, times, places, and characters presented. Divided into seven sections which include between seven and fourteen poems each, this collection considers all of the connections tying together a Chicano experience which transcends time and space. An experience, which despite its fantastic elements, is paralleled by the speaker’s neighbors in “Saludos to the Moon” who are described as “No pretention. Grit. Muchas ganas.”
In the opening section of The Parachutist, Hernandez Diaz reveals an entire family of characters who come alive in clean, measured verse. Deeply personal and vulnerable, these poems reflect a wide range of lived experiences, such as in “Making Tamales with Mom on Christmas Eve,” where Hernandez Diaz writes, “We were probably / spoiled as kids. Not in the sense that we had a lot, / but Mom made the illusion that we had more than enough.” With deep respect for the stories the speaker’s family members tell and those they live, The Parachutist’s first section immediately grounds the collection in family and tradition. In “The True Poet,” Hernandez Diaz writes:
My abuelo was the true poet:
The way he tilled the land with his hands,
Beneath the sun; he seemed to touch the sky
With his hoe. My abuelo was the true poet:
The way he joked with his mule as they rode,
The two of them alone with the dawn;
He seemed to reach the moon with his laugh.
In this family, in these traditions, there is a dance between the familiar and the otherworldly. At times, the surrealism is mythological, rooted in ancient connections, such as in the lovely “Tecolote,” where the speaker informs, “At night, it comes alive: / A little moon. A myth. A continent of leaves. At midnight: the tecolote / Transforms into a jaguar, into a python, into a dragon.” The jaguar figures prominently through The Parachutist. As a mythical character, the jaguar can travel between worlds, and in Hernandez Diaz’s verse, the jaguar straddles both the practical world and the mythical one. As he writes in “The Jaguar,” “As a result of the gifts and cake, / the jaguar and I build a strong bond that I cherish for many years. When the / jaguar dies of old age, three heads of state and four archbishops attend the / somber funeral. The jaguar had lived humbly. It lived fully.”
The third section of The Parachutist is the only division which includes an epigraph, and the Rosario Castellanos quote about connections between laughter and freedom immediately settles the section in an absurdist style for which Hernandez Diaz has become well-known. These poems feature the character, “A man in a Pink Floyd shirt” and his many escapades—from being shipped to England, to selling impromptu paintings, to becoming an astronaut, to just learning how to be himself. As Hernandez Diaz writes in “The Astronaut”:
“We are celebrating your graduation from astronaut training, of
course,” the man in the green sweater said. “Of course,” the main in a Pink
Floyd shirt said. He didn’t actually recall being an astronaut. In fact, he
hated math and science. Was more of an arts and crafts guy. Besides, he had
an incredible fear of heights.
The fourth section of The Parachutist, contains nine prose poems which showcase why Hernandez Diaz’s name is always in the conversation when speaking about contemporary prose poetry. At first glance, the vocabulary and format trick the reader into believing the poem is a simple narrative. However, the layers of philosophy and art and allusion which fill these short poems make them worth multiple subsequent readings. In “The Parrot,” the speaker becomes transfixed by a blue and orange parrot, and by the end of the poem, it’s no longer clear which character is the parrot:
“You’re a star first baseman for the Los Angeles Dodgers.” “I’m a
banker!” I say. “You’re clutch in late innings, and your Spanish is fluent.
You’re an outstanding tipper. But not a rico-suave. You’ve contributed
to charitable organizations without taking credit.” “I’m a slugger and a
captain,” I agree, “I’m on deck and I’m fearless.”
The final section of The Parachutist is a glance forward in time and space, a refocusing on what’s important in life—such as art and civilization and love and a really good mango. There is hope in the final section for a more balanced future, a realization of all the binaries which come together to create experience. The collection leaves its readers with powerful images of resistance at all costs and survival in “The Tattoo of Moctezuma,” when Hernandez Diaz writes, “The man gets the tattoo on his forearm, to show strength. On / the other forearm, he has a tattoo of Hernan Cortes with a sword, to show / symmetry.”
Jose Hernandez Diaz is a Mexican-American poet and teacher. He is a 2017 NEA Poetry Fellow, and his fourth book, Portrait of the Artist as a Brown Man won the Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award. His poems have appeared in Poetry magazine, Rattle, Bennington Review, Georgia Review, The Yale Review, Poets.org, and other places. He is active on many social media platforms, including X, Instagram, and Bluesky, and he teaches generative workshops many times throughout the year.
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A Sharper Silence by Michael Hettich Released July 10, 2025, Terrapin Books 118 pages reviewed by Kurt Luchs Guest Reviewer |
The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) has been ongoing in one form or another for a long time, but intensified about half a century ago when more precise radio telescopes and other instruments were developed that could actually, someday, help us answer one of the ultimate questions: are we alone in the universe? It’s a noble quest, and a vision that should inspire anyone capable of looking up at the night sky with wonder.
Meanwhile, the search for intelligent life on earth is also ongoing. I’m happy to report that we have found several heartening examples in the realm of contemporary poetry, which too often resembles that bright dead wasteland which is our moon. One name that keeps popping up in that regard is that of Michael Hettich, surely one of the best we have. He might almost be a human radio telescope, but pointed away from space and back at our planet, focused equally outward on the life and lives around him, and inward, on the secret life of the soul. He too has been at it for about half a century. He too has asked the question: are we alone? And now, heartbreakingly, he has an answer: yes.
His latest volume of poetry, A Sharper Silence (Terrapin Books 2025), follows on the death of his beloved wife Colleen. Whatever else these poems may be about, or appear to be about, she is the constant presence in them, and now the constant absence. He divides the book into six sections, preceded by an epigraph from the Louise Glück poem “Pastoral,” about lying down in the grass and leaving the impression of her body there. It ends, “When you looked back later, it was as though you’d never been there at all.” Damn! Hettich is already making me cry and I haven’t even got to his poetry yet.
His own poem, “The Secret,” also comes before the six sections of the book. It’s one of my new favorites by him in a volume full of new favorites. Ostensibly about his effort to save an injured crow, it quickly becomes apparent that it’s about channeling his frustration at Colleen’s incurable illness, before which he is helpless. He writes, “but really I’m searching for something like this darkness / I am carrying now, something I can heal, / or pretend to.” What is the secret? The poem ends with these five lines:
and if she’s still sleeping by the time I arrive,
maybe I’ll keep this black bird a secret
after all. I’ll bury him in the garden, in the snow,
and let her discover his body, in spring
when the snow melts enough to plant flowers.
Did Colleen the gardener live to find the grave of the crow in spring? Did she even live to read this haunting poem? The author keeps some secrets from his readers as well. He’s not like the oldest living confederate widow who tells all. Rather, he’s a master craftsman, more concerned with the telling detail that suggests all.
The first section of A Sharper Silence (they don’t have titles, just Roman numerals) deals movingly with other deaths and aspects of childhood. There’s an elegy for his mother Mary and several poems about the life and death of his younger brother James. The one I keep coming back to, “Werewolves,” cuts deepest because it admits to a guilt all of us have probably felt at some point but few of us would have the honesty of Hettich to confess:
When my brother was deaf and living alone
in the apartment he died in, that looked out across
the Hudson to the Palisades, I decided I deserved
to sleep late, after all, I needed to let myself
relax and wake to a big old-style breakfast
instead of flying north to be with him a little while.
The final poem in the section, “Certain Secrets,” consists of six tercets, not rhymed, exactly, except that the last word at the end of each three-line stanza is “sea.” That’s as close to formal verse as this poet ever comes these days, which gives added emphasis to the premonition of the last one-and-a-half lines: “…like life itself must leave / the body that held it, or a wave far out at sea.” As we shall see, this poem has a call-back at the end of the book.
Section II might be described as the ghostly one. There is even a poem called “The Ghosts” and another called “The Angels.” The theme of presences felt yet unseen resonates throughout. Oddly, as often as not, these presences are versions of himself, younger daydreaming, sleeping or remembering. Here he captures the sense of dislocation you feel at the impending loss of someone who’s been with you your entire adult life. The first poem, “Lately,” speaks of his wife’s radiation treatments thusly: “The light we can’t see kills what will kill her / eventually, or stuns it for a while.” The last poem of this section, “Palimpsest,” asks plaintively, “How many days will you hold what you’ve loved / in yourself and lost while you loved it?”
Section III is shorter, only five poems, but they’re all pivotal to the arc of the book. The first one, “Maybe It’s Music,” is about listening, a perennial motif for this most attentive of poets. Though it seems to wander all over the place, and all over time, it’s really more like a guided meditation that ends with this wonderful couplet: “and everything is stranger than it’s ever been before, / stranger and more beautiful. And always almost gone.” There are also two excellent prose poems in this section. My favorite is “Prayer Flags,” where he and Colleen spend an afternoon in the garden while awaiting her cancer scan results. She’s in one part of the garden, he’s in another, and suddenly there’s a young male bear only ten feet away from him, leaving him “alert but not afraid, though he could clearly kill me if he wanted to.” Does the bear want to kill him? Spoiler alert: no. It runs off. Does the cancer want to kill Colleen? At this point still unknown. As Tom Petty sings, “the waiting is the hardest part.” Best to spend it doing something you love with the person you love.
Hettich is not recapitulating the five stages of grief in this book by any means. If he were, however, I think Section IV would be Bargaining. “A Blue Afternoon,” which begins this section, contains these lines: “This fear of letting go / that defines and keeps us / from realizing we’re falling, though we are falling / always.” In “Yearn,” he writes, “If I lay down for a few days, I might become a pond / reflecting what I can’t allow inside me—” I don’t believe I can accurately describe the other poems in this section, their effects are so subtly astonishing, especially “In the Dream of a Bear” and “That Glinting.” I believe that, like me, you’ll find yourself reading and rereading them.
The penultimate part of the book, Section V, features wider and wilder swings of emotion and imagination. These are brought on by the certainty of his wife’s death. The mood whiplashes back and forth between grief and gratitude. In fact, “Gratitude” is one of the poems in this section, along with “The Lucky Man” (another prose poem) and “Angels in the Trees.” In the latter poem, one of Colleen’s dresses, hung up to dry, is presumably blown off the line by the wind and ends up dangling in a tree in the forest, covered in inchworms. I’m sure this actually happened, but what an unearthly prefiguring of her end.
Section VI is the shortest, just three poems. The one that begins it, though, “A Strange Sort of Wonder,” is the longest in the book, at eight pages a gripping mini-epic that forms the climax of this grief journey. It tells how, amid Colleen’s illness and chemotherapy, a large storm knocked out the power and flooded their region. Rather than excerpt it or dissect it, I’ll simply say it stands out even in a volume where most of the poems are remarkable. It is one of the major works in recent American poetry. As is the whole book.
The last poem in the book, “The Window,” end thusly:
No one knows my name
except you, and you’re sailing off in the distance,
waving for help, or goodbye.
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The Ferry Keeper by Judith H. Montgomery Released June 3, 2024 Grayson Books 44 pages Winner of the Grayson Books 2024 Poetry Chapbook Competition reviewed by Christina Linsin, SoFloPoJo Reviews Editor |
There is a stretching and compressing of time within the currents of grief, and the poems in Judith H. Montgomery’s The Ferry Keeper resonantly echo with all of those transmutations caused by loss. Beginning with an epigram from Euripides' Alcestis, the chapbook immediately centers itself in myths and stories of grief. In the opening poem, “The Ferry Keeper,” from which the collection is named, the speaker becomes Charon’s boat, “Lays / her body flat, bellying black// water that licks below the dock.” In an effort to transport the grief she carries, the vessel parallels the collection as she “strokes toward what she must believe // to be the other shore.”
The idea of carrying, of examining and understanding what (or whom) we carry, is richly repeated through this collection, as in the poem, “Apprenticed” where Montgomery writes, “I learn how to sacrifice— // to make my mother smile. How beauty has its consequences. / Obligations. Price.” Our obligations and the prices they demand are only one of the many things we carry in this world, and in The Ferry Keeper, Montgomery reminds us that light, too, is carried. In “Where Light Collects,” Montgomery writes, “Her bodice barely grazes his lapel. It’s not // their bodies where light collects. Light lives / inside their gaze, a subtle current hum.” Through moments of reflection and of kindness, we “rise to meet another’s suffering” as Montgomery writes in “One Year Past My Wedding, My Mother and I,” sharing what light we can between us.
In addition to light, the elemental pull of water is a recurrent motif in The Ferry Keeper, both in the physical layer of Charon’s boat slipping across Styx, but also among myriad currents and depths of loss. As Montgomery writes in “Mother’s Day at Aspen Ridge Assisted Living”:
she hungers only for sweets as she slips beneath
a whirlpool of otherness–too far out for me
to reach and pull her back to land, pat her dry,
fetch her tea, ask about abandoned knitting.
The imagery of the whirlpool here, carrying the speaker’s mother out too far into deep waters is echoed like a tide later, when she discusses her father’s subsequent descent into aging. In “First Night,” the speaker says she wants “to carry him on a skiff / of sound across the slow lake of leaving.” And, later, in “Abide,” as he, too, succumbs to his own whirlpool, Montgomery writes:
I settle beside
the last bed in which he will lie, breathing until …
the room drifts like a boat upon a still lake,
my father faintly rocking in his bed, his pale skin,
his flickering pulse–and I reach to touch his hands,
to hold him while I cling to the intimate buoy
of his breath.
It is the inevitability of loss which pulls and contracts in these poems, giving them a cyclical timelessness which itself mirrors the whirlpool within the poem. Judith H. Montgomery’s The Ferry Keeper reflects so keenly the moments of disconcerting realization which occur when we feel only current beneath our feet instead of solid ground.
Judith H. Montgomery is a Pushcart-Prize nominated poet whose first chapbook, Passion, received the 2000 Oregon Book Award for Poetry. Her first full-length collection, Red Jess, was a finalist for several national first book prizes, and her second full-length collection, Litany for Wound and Bloom, was a finalist for the Marsh Hawk Prize. She has published poems in South Florida Poetry Journal, Poetry Magazine, Rattle, Poet Lore, Prairie Schooner, and many other places. She holds a PhD in American Literature from Syracuse University.
REVIEWS - AUGUST 2025
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Earthly Gods By Jessica Nirvana Ram September 6, 2024, Variant Literature 81 pages reviewed by Christina Linsin, SoFloPoJo Reviews Editor |
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What is more divine than an immortal love which nurtures all parts of who we are? It is this form of divinity which Jessica Nirvana Ram’s debut full-length poetry collection, Earthly Gods, examines in richly-layered, syncretic verse. Broken into three epilogued sections of varying lengths, the collection addresses the inherent dynamism between self and the larger body of family, as well as binaries of grief and elation, uncertainty and faith. In the opening poem, “88-01 88th Street,” Ram immediately settles the collection in the family as a complicated extension of the self. As Ram writes of her grandmother’s hands, “her hands were my hands as I taught myself / to pray again, in the quiet of my apartment.” The roles of grandmother and granddaughter cross and intertwine as the shifting pronouns of Ram’s lines whisper of a trinity of selfhood in which there are parts which are wholly the speaker’s, parts which belong to her family, and parts which are shared in the spaces between. In “On Good Tongues,” Ram writes of some of those shared spaces when she acknowledges the connection between herself and her grandmother: Yes, fragments of her are scattered about & calling on me. Some days I breathe her in more than others & when I pray it’s her voice, not mine that echoes in my apartment. The dichotomy of the family and the individual is one of the main themes in Ram’s Earthly Gods, and for Ram the doctrine of family as a divine, immortal body carries weight felt through generations of women. In “i am unfit to raise daughters,” Ram writes: /with sons / i hoped / i could rest easy / because / with daughters / i will come undone split at the spine / daughters will inherit the fire / i’ve always swallowed / kept tamed / in the pit of my belly / And it is the daughters who bear the weight in Ram’s Earthly Gods, as the three generations of women—the speaker’s grandmother, the speaker’s mother, and the speaker—are the ones in this collection who nurture one another, fiercely and joyfully, as in the lyrical “Reciprocity” where Ram writes of her mother’s promise to take care of her grandmother, “Some days I take her yes, cradle it in my arms / & sing it a lullaby. I want to tell her, this yes / belongs to me too, Ma.” The sense of belonging is strong in these poems. Even in those poems where the first-person, individual speaker is the focus of the poem’s narrative, the ghosts of all the past generations aren’t far from the speaker, as in the haunting “Ode to Self” where Ram writes: Study the darkness of your eyes, like tree bark, like soaked soil. Your eyes reflect you & you them & here you stand in an endless loop of selves & you are not desperate for anyone else. The use of the speaker’s eyes here as an infinite mirror into generations of women behind her individual self is allowed through a dual application of the pronoun them, suggesting both the physical eyes themselves and also suggesting the generations of women reflected within their dark depths, wherein all of the speaker’s “selves” stave her desperation to look elsewhere. In Ram’s title poem, “earthly gods,” she acknowledges the weight of these generations and how interwoven they are with the divine when she writes: i live alone now / no one escorts my ghosts / out the front door / so i learn how to know they’re there / i cannot see them / but they surround me / weight in the air / taffy in my throat / ears that won’t pop / i write them away / turn poems into prayers / prayers into poems The parallels between family and divinity throughout this collection allow Ram to explore more concrete representations of her family’s faith, as well. Characters from Hinduism, such as Kali Maa, Durga, and Shiva, referenced in Earthly Gods reflect a further parallel in their own, inherent dualities, creating additional levels of revelations within the layers of Ram’s verse, such as in the poem, “On Accepted Blessings” in which Ram writes: I never really stopped believing. I thought I did, in the days when my body & bed became one. In the days when tomorrow only lived as a maybe. But even in all that haze, I believe my grandmother when she jharays my body for evil eye, whispering quickened prayers & teaching me ones to recite when I walk through dark places alone. Jessica Nirvana Ram is an Indo-Guyanese poet and writer in Pennsylvania. She was a 2022-23 Stadler Fellow in Literary Arts Administration, and she now serves as the Publicity and Outreach Manager for the Stadler Center for Poetry and Literary Arts. Her list of publications, awards, and projects may be found on her website, https://jessicanirvanaram.wixsite.com/writer. |
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Little Mercy: Poems By Robin Walter April 1, 2025 Graywolf Press (Winner of the 2024 AAP First Book Award) 95 pages reviewed by Christina Linsin, SoFloPoJo Reviews Editor |
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Robin Walter’s debut poetry collection, Little Mercy: Poems, was selected by Victoria Chang as the Academy of American Poets First Book Award winner in 2024 and was published by Graywolf Press in April of 2025. Broken into seven unnamed sections of varying lengths, Little Mercy tenderly asks its reader to notice the intricate connections, both cruel and comforting, between humanity and the earth on which we reside. The collection begins with a proem, “—Here” which is one of many poems containing the book’s title within their verse. This proem uses its title as an invitation into vast worlds of tangible threads stitching together the natural, the corporeal, and the emotional, allowing the act of becoming to reflect a transitory system of progressive connections, “the body, yes / sometimes // a river.” At the essence of each of us, it is this series of connections which tie us to each other, to our world, to our past experiences, and to our future effects. Little Mercy hums with so many of those connections, as in “Hold gentle the name,” where Walter writes of loss, “Here, on earth, / we honor our dead // by holding their names / gentle in our hollow mouths—.” Walter stitches us to each other by our lived experiences, and she stitches each of us to our world by revealing the reflections which already exist, as in “Last July light” where she writes: —The tree line caesuras the dark stamp of sky. The wet pines shake-- · · My grandfather sits on his hands to hide their trembling. With precision, Walter’s verse threads together a line of trees, holding back the inevitable darkness of evening, and the grandfather’s understanding of his own descent into aging. Intricate observations of and connections with nature are featured throughout the poems in Little Mercy, such as in “—Consider,” where Walter writes of a deer, “See her wet nose / reflect the morning—.” In Walter’s nature, everything seems sentient and deeply souled, which sometimes causes tension between emotional and physical forces, as when Walter writes in “—Make”: see the moon unfold the hand as it pulls the body into the next season-- The sentient moon connects with a resistant physical body, seemingly for its own good, as the progression of the natural seasons, both physical and emotional blend in this beautiful poem. Sometimes in Little Mercy, the sentient natural world brings comfort instead of tension, as in “—In the blue-” where Walter writes: A wren no larger than a fist flew to me-- lent my hand her gravity-- In many of the poems in this collection, the connections are so interwoven there isn’t always a clearly-defined separation between humanity and the earth, as in “Beyond the meadow” where Walter writes: Each soul that has nearly slipped the noun of the body remembers river’s cold mercy-- Here, our souls and the earth are necessarily connected, and each is changed by the interaction. The idea of progression as an effect of connection which echoes through the poems in Little Mercy extends to the text itself, particularly in the opening poems of each section of the book, which examine, closely, every facet of their shared motifs, resolving in the final section’s opening poem, “—Sometimes, river,” where Walter writes jubilantly of: bright ribbons that lift the body beneath Visually, Little Mercy is stunning—the brief lines, dashes, and interpuncts allow negative spaces in this collection to sing and emphasize longer lines naturally. In a Zoom conversation with Dan Beachy-Quick, sponsored by The Academy of American Poets and available to members on their website, Walter speaks about the brevity of the poems and the frequent use of the em dash in this collection. One of the things she discusses is a reaching the em dash allows. She compares it to a hand reaching out into the space which follows (or comes before) the dash, functioning as another form of connection crafted into the book. The final poem in Little Mercy “Mercy of meadow” ends with an em dash, carrying the collection into the space beyond the final words: The sun (a little mirror opens eye—” Our connections with one another and with nature are a mercy for us on most days, keeping us grounded in our place and purpose. This is a collection in which all aspects of those integral ties transform into an insistent refrain of interconnectedness, conjured despite the fact humanity and nature exist, as Walter writes in “Proximal worlds coupling briefly,” in “a shared world / with no common tongue—” In Little Mercy, the connections, the reaching toward each other is the common tongue. Robin Walter is a poet and Assistant Professor at Colorado State University, and her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Poets.org, Seneca Review, West Branch, Wildness, and other places. Her website is https://www.robin-m-walter.com/. |
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Pastoral, 1994 By Joe Wilkins Released January 28, 2025 River River Books 80 pages reviewed by Christina Linsin, SoFloPoJo Reviews Editor |
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For the last twenty years, I have lived in an area very much like where Joe Wilkins’ Pastoral, 1994 is set, and reading this collection, one of the first things I noticed was how carefully Wilkins tends the people and the land, land he describes in "Genealogy" as a place where “I rode in the pickup bed / I sat on a chain little bits of dry shit & straw / wheeling in the roadwind in one distance / mountains in the other distance.” Where I live is East Coast and insular, and the land of Pastoral, 1994 is Western and insular; but there is a growing problem in both of these areas with raising compassionate, resilient men. And it is this problem which concerns many of the poems in this collection. As Wilkins writes in the title poem, “We are the unwritten / verse in any George Strait song, the one where it all / goes wrong, if it hasn’t already.” There has been much discussion in the last ten years about toxic masculinity—defining it and discussing its effects—but Wilkins’ Pastoral, 1994 is more concerned with its origins, with the emotional and physical acts (intentional and unintentional) compounded over generations, which cause it. The narrative in Wilkins’ poem,“Visiting,” recounts how the town’s women who visit with the speaker’s parents show affection through hugging the speaker (a young boy), but the men don’t. Wilkins writes: Mr. Russell did so only once, the April after they lost the baby, the ditches running brimful, green wheat rising. He had leaned down to me and started to say something. Then held on as he fell. The description of the act of hugging in this section of the poem shows how awkward and unusual it is for both the man and the boy. Caused as it is by the tragedy of losing a child, the strong emotions are then channeled into an act described as more supportive of the man than comforting for the child. The contrast of the growing wheat rising against the man falling into the boy’s arms further illustrates stark divides between things which make sense to the speaker (the wheat) and things which don’t (the hug). The community in Wilkins’ Pastoral, 1994 is frequently depicted as an other, a they, which the first person speaker is viewing from an outsider’s perspective, compounding the lack of tenderness and the disconnection. In “I Am the One Who Finds the Slender Bones Left Behind,” Wilkins writes of the men who work on his family’s farm, “They stretch and smoke, take easy / sips of the day’s first strong drink. They are gods / in diminishment, and all their labors / will be forgotten.” There is an otherworldly, ominous cast to the people in many of the poems in Pastoral, 1994, as they move and stay silent as a group. It is their silence which is particularly disturbing in poems such as “Foreclosure,” where Wilkins writes, “People walk up & down the long rows. / If anyone hears the wind ripping at the seams of things they don’t say so. / They don’t say anything.” It makes sense for those who grow up starving for connection, starving for tenderness, to have some emotional scarring, and an effect of that scarring is a meanness Wilkins does not shy from in poems like “Locust” where he writes: No matter how it goes the devil shows up. He’s like grasshoppers that way. I keep a glass jar of them on my bedstand. I like in the night their click & skitter. I dream a lake as blue as my rifle eye. If you hook them at the thorax they’ll twitch for hours. Even with a sinker even at the very bottom. The measure of calm control the young speaker takes over the life of the grasshopper parallels the control of Family and land and expectation under which tenderness, if it sprouts at all, suffocates. Even in the moments when tenderness is tried, it seems an unattainable goal, such as in “The Last Boy,” where Wilkins writes, “We held hands, / tried to keep each other / upright. It was almost / impossible, shadows lengthening // so suddenly beneath us.” The scars of the land and the scars of the people co-mingle in Pastoral, 1994 in a connection which transplaces the tenderness Wilkins’ speaker seeks. In “Geomorphology of the Upper Great Plains,” he writes, “Everything was bent // like the grass, / even the small, be-ribbed backs of children.” Wilkins employs the image of barbed wire (and the damage it causes) several times through this collection, and the image here of the bent, ribbed children’s backs subtly echoes those stark metal barbs, protruding from the barbed wire’s central core. Thoreau wrote of men who lead lives of quiet desperation, and it is the people in Wilkins’ Pastoral, 1994 who are today’s counterpart—men (and women, although this collection is primarily focused on the men) working into their seventies and eighties on family farms, quietly-desperate men rooted to their traditions over everything else, as Wilkins writes in “Water Quality Act of 1987”: They say the trouble is the runoff. My grandfather says it may as well be the river the wind. The dumb moon. At the end of the season we’ll burn the ditches. Smoke flower over us dark bits of it inside us. The beeves dip their jaws into troughs of silage. The skillful tension between internal and external in this poem echoes through the collection in many ways, one of which is when reflections of the speaker’s internal fears and disappointments are contrasted with all of the ways in which he fulfills the outward duties of a son. As Wilkins writes in “Boyhood,” “we would have waited forever / for the dark that was our fathers, for the stars / that were our fathers.” It seems to be the idea of father and of grandfather, the Family, in these poems which root the speaker to place, to purpose, and not necessarily what (or who) is inside that idea, as the only tenderness from the speaker’s father in these poems is reserved for “every bevel & concavity of the engine / firing beneath us,” as Wilkins writes in the heart-wrenching “Tamping Bar.” Still, when he contemplates losing his father in the same poem, Wilkins admits, “I have no stories / or landmarks to help me map // his coming absence.” That uncertainty, for many of the quietly-desperate, is enough to make the safety of tradition alluring. For others, it is enough, as Wilkins writes in “Heartland,” to “remember my dead / belong to the shelving hills, / that scalloped, alkali sheen.” Joe Wilkins is the author of two novels; a memoir, The Mountain and the Fathers, which won the GLCA New Writers Award; and four other collections of poetry. He lives in Oregon with his family. His website is https://joewilkins.org/. |
REVIEWS - MAY 2025
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There Are as Many Songs in the World as Branches of Coral
by Elizabeth Jacobson Parlor Press, Free Verse Editions, January 7, 2025, 114 pages Series Editor: Jon Thompson “A student asks: What is the sword so sharp that a feather blown against it cuts away delusion? Baling answers: Each Branch of Coral Holds Up the Moon”* “The Yolngu people of Australia envision our moon Filling with ocean water like breath coursing into a body, Then washing out again. This is their theory of tides. And just as each branch of coral upholds the glow from our moon, Everything touches everything else…” With that, Elizabeth Jacobson’s latest poetry collection, There Are as Many Songs in the World as Branches of Coral, begins. The opening lines revisit a classic Baling Haojian koan, grounding us in a lineage of inquiry both mystical and immediate. The image of the moon and coral, refracted through the Yolngu people’s tidal cosmology, prepares the reader for the expansive attentiveness that characterizes this book. This is a momentous collection of grand minutiae—poems that invite the reader to look closely, live attentively. Don’t be surprised if, after spending time with these pages, you find yourself paying sharper attention to the world around you. The book is divided into three sections: Rhapsodies, Lullabies, and Devotionals. Rhapsodies The first, Rhapsodies, contains twenty-two poems. In these we encounter a mirror poem full of poppies, the poet mourning roadkill among black widow spiders, overheard intimate conversations among mockingbirds, and syncing breath with manatees and each other: “…for a while we try to match / our breath to theirs, and with each other’s.” and the possibility that with practice we match more than breath: “It is you who delivered / solitude’s ending.” Here, breath is practice. Connection is practice. So is attention. One of Rhapsodies’ final poems, Very Long Marriage with Lacerations, prepares us for its companion in the book’s Devotionals section, Very Long Marriage at Bedtime. These two pieces, mirroring each other across the collection, trace a long emotional arc—grit and tenderness braided together. Lullabies The second section, Lullabies, contains a single, four-part poem: "A Brown Stone," divided into Igloo, Shame, Cement, and Wound. Spanning over twenty pages, it’s best experienced in a single sitting—immersive and unrelenting. Here, we enter the interior world of a child observing adult pain with no clear explanation offered. Yet the child creates meaning, forms hypotheses, and reaches toward understanding: “I didn’t know what a soul was. But I thought that it might be something that puts out feelers, like an ant.” In another moment of quiet revelation: “When I woke up in the morning, if I listened carefully, a small voice told me what to do.” And again, in solitary moments, the reader observes the birth of the habits of a lifetime: “I spent hours and hours, day after day, wandering in the woods at the end of my street. Tall tree woods full of oak and maple and sycamore, trees that gave up their leaves to a permanent collage covering the damp floor of the earth. I loved the way my sneakered feet sank down into this muddy canvas.” This section holds a deep ache—childhood marked not by innocence but by hyper-awareness. Its search for clarity among bewilderment lingers. Devotionals The final section, Devotionals, offers twenty more poems, varied in form but linked by tone and theme. It begins with the title poem, There Are as Many Songs in the World as Branches of Coral. The slow unfolding of this poem is characteristic of the collection’s overall rhythm—patient, cumulative, precise. The reader is a full page in before they realize where they are “I was nine / when I first saw the photographs—” And isn't that the point? To wake again to the world, to never forget. The closing poem, Very Long Marriage at Bedtime, delivers a luminous final meditation on creation, memory, and presence: “I remember every minute of each labor, each delivery for both children, and how going into the birthing room for the second time, I remembered: pay attention as the baby exits, that final wet sliding out of me. I remembered to pause for one of the swiftest moments in my life, a whole new warm body joining the living.” What is more perilous and hopeful than the act of creation itself? The final lines of the book’s opening poem echo throughout: “There are as many songs in the world as branches of coral: Each one a glorious, brutal dream.” This is a celebration of the many songs in our world—and a warning. As coral reefs bleach and die, so too do our songs. Elizabeth Jacobson’s poems remind us that everything touches everything else, and that poetry—like coral—both anchors and uplifts the luminous. Reviewed by Michael Mackin O'Mara |
REVIEWS - FEBRUARY 2025
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Good Dress: Poems By Brittany Rogers October 15, 2024, Tin House 96 pages Reviewed by Christina Linsin |
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There is unapologetic solidity of place, a taproot which reaches into the core of home, in Brittany Rogers’s debut full-length poetry collection, Good Dress: poems. Home, for Rogers, is the city of Detroit, and its people, places, and events are featured in many of the poems in Good Dress. Broken into five, unnamed sections of varying lengths, the collection unfurls from the boldness of a beginning poem inspired by both Cardi B and the poet Tiana Clark and travels across all which makes up a life, ending with the self-assurance and autonomy necessary to succeed as a Black woman. In the opening poem, “Money,” from which the title of the collection originates, the speaker shares a wish of many humans today - having more money. However, the complexities of the class discussion in “Money” are more nuanced than any simple wish. As Rogers writes: I want enough coin to relax to spoil my damn self to tend to the baby gasping and rooting for milk without worrying about ruining my good dress. The image of the child’s needs juxtaposed against the one good dress of the speaker creates tension between what the speaker wants and what she must do, a tension that expands and contracts, like breath, through the entirety of this collection, addressing the faceted obligations of motherhood, family lineage, femininity, and community. In the center section of the collection, a single poem entitled “Good Ground” is broken into sections, each revealing an additional connective thread between the speaker and her community. In part eleven, Rogers writes: Ain’t no rest here, but why should I give up my house, my aunties up the way, my church on every corner? My Black folks, my hallelujahs, my makeshift cousins, my gatdamn—can’t nobody outdo us. The interplay between community and individual is one of the main themes in Rogers’s Good Dress. At times in this collection, all of Detroit are Rogers’s siblings, and she supports them vehemently, as in “Ice Cam, Little Caesars Arena, January 2022” where she writes: Strip bare our pinkies, wrists, chests-- for whose gaze? Those thirsty for our throats and what they take to be wealth? Your problem is our nerve, thick as tobacco smoke. It is always we and us when Rogers is speaking of her community, and the connections among and between run deeply through each poem, particularly those in which Rogers becomes her beloved city, like “Self-Portrait as Detroit Public Library, Franklin Branch Library” and the other “Self-Portrait” poems in this collection. The public places of Detroit are crucial to this work, including stores, sports’ arenas, bars, and public buildings; but neighborhoods and churches are also explored. In “Elegy,” Rogers writes of the church she attended with her father as a child, “Each week, the congregation widened // their fire-washed throats and wailed / so long the service outlasted the sun.” In interviews, Rogers has spoken about the concept of audacity and how much she strives to build a place for boldness in her work, and that concept is certainly celebrated within Good Dress. In “Hunting Hours,” Rogers writes, “Most girls shy / away. I glutton. I devour. / I do not wait to be made a meal of.” However, even though these poems celebrate the bold, it’s the balance of the boldness with the minute subtleties of Rogers’s work which make this collection shine. It’s the way Rogers plays with her vocabulary, as in “Black Out, August 2003, Detroit,” where Rogers writes: The grills turn up. Somebody speakers serenade all our porches, and we jam, smoke-soaked and lawless, all open hormones and this powerless field. The use of “powerless” here as both a concrete adjective because of the blackout and as a descriptor for a group of human beings who lack governmental power within their own city is just one of myriad ways in this poem alone where Rogers’s subtlety shines. The subtleties in this collection allow Rogers to experiment with form, as well, and there are several poems in this collection wherein the form itself allows revelation, such as in the poem, “Detroit Public Library, Knapp Branch: Overdue Notice,” in which the narrative of the poem is slowly revealed through the list of overdue items, and the poem, “Select the Most Appropriate Answer,” in which a common questionnaire format is used to reveal the emotional status of the poem’s speaker. Rogers skillfully leads her readers through each of these experimental forms, just as the collection navigates her speaker’s interwoven relationships with community, herself, and the place she knows as home. Unapologetic, Rogers allows herself to bloom, and her readers are fortunate enough to share in that blossoming, as Rogers writes in “Upbringing,” “I’m a daughter of the Eastside, that old girl set in her ways. / I grew a mouth like the grown men in my hood. Bouquet of tattoos / across my shoulders. Where brown hair was, a field of watercolors.” Brittany Rogers is a poet, educator, and lifelong resident of Detroit. Her list of publications and positions within the poetry community may be found on her website, www.brittanyrogers.org. Christina Linsin is a poet and teacher in Virginia. Her work examines connections with nature, complexities of mental illness, and difficulties creating meaningful connections with others amid life’s obstacles. She currently serves as the Western Region Vice President of the Poetry Society of Virginia, and her poems have been published in Still: The Journal, Stone Circle Review, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Whale Road Review, The Mid-Atlantic Review, and others. |
REVIEWS - NOVEMBER 2024
HOMELIGHT by Lola Haskins
HOMELIGHT by Lola Haskins
Homelight by Lola Haskins
A review by Jen Karetnick
If you’ve ever had the privilege of attending a reading by renowned, Florida-based poet Lola Haskins, then you know she never really “reads” her poems. She memorizes and recites them. As a result, her readings are more like performances, with Haskins communing intimately with audience members much the way a singer-songwriter does.
Communion is also a word that comes to mind when diving into her latest collection, Homelight (Charlotte Lit Press, 2023, $18, paperback). The book is written in seven titled sections, all of which link to an dominant theme of “connection,” whether that be from speaker to nature, speaker to another human, or even speaker to herself.
The first section combines all of these categories of relationships and adds one more. “On the Shoulders with Giants” showcases a series of “after” poems that figuratively converse with a wide variety of foremother and forefather poets, ranging from Qi Xiaoyao to Rainer Marie Rilke. In one way, this section feels like a challenge from Haskins to Haskins, with her trying on poetic sensibilities the way one would clothing. Yet no matter how much they are influenced topically or stylistically—for instance, the very first poem, “Why Anaïs Nin Would Lie with Me,” after Sappho, nods to both female sensuality and to a splintered way of writing—they resonate with Haskins’ own voice and vision that has been honed by thirteen former volumes of poetry. In the final lines of a bare three tercets, she writes in her familiar metaphoric way:
“The shells in the mountains
are ancient seas, turned bone.
I wake,
craving them with my tongue.”
Nor do you need to be classically educated as a poet or writer to enjoy a poem after William Blake and John Clare, when the lines in the poem “Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love” are so imagistic and, at the same time, completely matter of fact. She opens the poem with, “The earth is a kind chair. When I have stopped breathing, she will not tell me I must get up.” This extended metaphor is both stunning and, upon examination, startlingly accessible.
It's difficult not to parse the collection by the sections, simply because Haskins has grouped her poems together by subject matter. So if you’re in the mood to read some memorable poems about birds and bird-watching, turn to section two, entitled “Wings,” where you can encounter this magnificent description of “Swallowtail Kite:”
“You are a split-tailed ship, sailing the sky as if the trees below were
nothing. You live hatch to death without ever touching the ground.”
However, because this section is preceded by a poem after Mary Oliver; another about houses, in particular “the little clapboard house / in the woods (like the one Mary Oliver lived in);” and a third about conservation, it’s also a good lesson in ordering poems—even when the sections themselves initially don’t appear immediately linked.
These ornithological studies lead logically into section three, “And They Are Gone.” There, the long, five-part poem, “Seeds: A Sequence,” dominates and disrupts, both the readers’ complacency with eco-justice poems that bemoan climate change as if from a distance—without acknowledging the human element to it—and with Haskins’ own tendency to pen shorter pieces that lend themselves to oration. We’re left with the knowledge that it’s right to fear the wind, that oceans will surely become prairies, and that whether it’s due to fire or wind, “all we are will end // but the stars whose seeds we were will / still shine,” giving birth to something else we can’t yet name or identify.
Global justice-focused poems, set in a variety of settings from Panamá to Ukraine to Syria, follow in the next section, “(In)humanity.” Like many of Haskins’ poems, these are filled with a wisdom that comes from keen observation, but they’re also pithy and ironically humorous, a combination at which she excels. “Untitled” is what Haskins fans might think of as an iconic poem:
“When every dog we’ve met is kept inside
or behind a fence
or in a cage
or on the street at the end of a chanin
it’s not surprising that if we see one free
we fear it.”
Afterward, we’re offered a series of politically inspired think-pieces on the pandemic. Like most of us during that time of our lives, Haskins dwelled in solitude, thought about death—and took a lot of walks. These poems reflect such preoccupations. They also appropriately name-check politicians like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and media moguls like Elon Musk in more comedic moments just as they meditatively check in on nature, thanking the trees for their calm trustworthiness and the animals who “looked at me / with oceans in their eyes.”
The penultimate section, “The Slapped Girl,” is filled with reminiscences, many of them driven from a more emotional place than an imagistic one. It opens with “1962,” about a first love taking his own life—as unusually graphic for Haskins as it is wrenching—and continues with other lovers and heartbreaks. What’s interesting here is how Haskins combines memory and culpability. Her “you” is never completely in the wrong; her “I” always willing to reflect on actions and inactions. And the reasons for this are clear from the beginning: “Who but a fool believes / that a poem may be got for nothing?”
The investment in demonstrative content continues with five final poems—three of them dedications written for friends and children, almost a nod back to the “after” poems in section one—in a segment called “Rehearsing.” These pieces are filled with descriptions about disappearing, about being consumed by the elements, or about not having been alive at all. Given the previous section and its insistence on endings, the “rehearsal” is clearly about death, which comes for us all—animals, humans, and in some of these poems, the world itself.
This progression becomes clear after reading the whole of Homelight, whether you do it once or obsessively (count me in the latter group). But what unites all the poems and partitions, regardless of overriding topic, is motif. Throughout, Haskins has wind and water currents on her mind, and those who ride them with the speaker from start to finish. The lines, diction, and syntax are filled with flight and those fundamentals that make up flight or are a result of it: angels, birds, wings, clouds. As she notes in “Rehearsing,” the title poem for the final set piece:
“When you were little,
I’d lullaby you every night,
stroking your back
lighter and lighter
until I was feathers
until I didn’t exist.”
At the end, Haskins leaves breath, or the lack of it, in place of pretty words.
Lola Haskins lives in Gainesville, Florida and Skipton, Yorkshire. Her poetry has appeared in The Atlantic, the London Review of Books, London Magazine, The New York Quarterly, Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, Rattle and elsewhere, as well as having been broadcast on NPR and BBC radio. She has published fourteen collections of poems, a poetry advice book and a non-fiction book about fifteen Florida cemeteries.
Ms. Haskins has been awarded three book prizes, two NEA fellowships, four Florida Cultural Affairs fellowships,the Emily Dickinson/Writer Magazine award from Poetry Society of America, and several prizes for narrative poetry. She retired from teaching Computer Science at the University of Florida in 2005 and served from then until 2015 on the faculty of Rainier Writers Workshop.
Learn more about Ms. Haskins, buy her books, see what she’s reading, and enjoy samples of her work.
A 2024 National Poetry Series finalist, Jen Karetnick is the author of 11 collections of poetry, including Inheritance with a High Error Rate (January 2024), the winner of the 2022 Cider Press Review Book Award. Her work has won the Sweet: Lit Poetry Prize, Tiferet Writing Contest for Poetry, Split Rock Review Chapbook Competition, Hart Crane Memorial Prize, and Anna Davidson Rosenberg Prize, among other honors, and received support from the Vermont Studio Center, Roundhouse Foundation, Wassaic Projects, Write On, Door County, Wildacres Retreat, Mother's Milk Artist Residency, Centrum, Artists in Residence in the Everglades, and elsewhere. The co-founder and managing editor of SWWIM Every Day, she has recent or forthcoming work in Cimarron Review, NELLE, Pleiades, Plume, Shenandoah, Sixth Finch, South Dakota Review, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. See jkaretnick.com.
A review by Jen Karetnick
If you’ve ever had the privilege of attending a reading by renowned, Florida-based poet Lola Haskins, then you know she never really “reads” her poems. She memorizes and recites them. As a result, her readings are more like performances, with Haskins communing intimately with audience members much the way a singer-songwriter does.
Communion is also a word that comes to mind when diving into her latest collection, Homelight (Charlotte Lit Press, 2023, $18, paperback). The book is written in seven titled sections, all of which link to an dominant theme of “connection,” whether that be from speaker to nature, speaker to another human, or even speaker to herself.
The first section combines all of these categories of relationships and adds one more. “On the Shoulders with Giants” showcases a series of “after” poems that figuratively converse with a wide variety of foremother and forefather poets, ranging from Qi Xiaoyao to Rainer Marie Rilke. In one way, this section feels like a challenge from Haskins to Haskins, with her trying on poetic sensibilities the way one would clothing. Yet no matter how much they are influenced topically or stylistically—for instance, the very first poem, “Why Anaïs Nin Would Lie with Me,” after Sappho, nods to both female sensuality and to a splintered way of writing—they resonate with Haskins’ own voice and vision that has been honed by thirteen former volumes of poetry. In the final lines of a bare three tercets, she writes in her familiar metaphoric way:
“The shells in the mountains
are ancient seas, turned bone.
I wake,
craving them with my tongue.”
Nor do you need to be classically educated as a poet or writer to enjoy a poem after William Blake and John Clare, when the lines in the poem “Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love” are so imagistic and, at the same time, completely matter of fact. She opens the poem with, “The earth is a kind chair. When I have stopped breathing, she will not tell me I must get up.” This extended metaphor is both stunning and, upon examination, startlingly accessible.
It's difficult not to parse the collection by the sections, simply because Haskins has grouped her poems together by subject matter. So if you’re in the mood to read some memorable poems about birds and bird-watching, turn to section two, entitled “Wings,” where you can encounter this magnificent description of “Swallowtail Kite:”
“You are a split-tailed ship, sailing the sky as if the trees below were
nothing. You live hatch to death without ever touching the ground.”
However, because this section is preceded by a poem after Mary Oliver; another about houses, in particular “the little clapboard house / in the woods (like the one Mary Oliver lived in);” and a third about conservation, it’s also a good lesson in ordering poems—even when the sections themselves initially don’t appear immediately linked.
These ornithological studies lead logically into section three, “And They Are Gone.” There, the long, five-part poem, “Seeds: A Sequence,” dominates and disrupts, both the readers’ complacency with eco-justice poems that bemoan climate change as if from a distance—without acknowledging the human element to it—and with Haskins’ own tendency to pen shorter pieces that lend themselves to oration. We’re left with the knowledge that it’s right to fear the wind, that oceans will surely become prairies, and that whether it’s due to fire or wind, “all we are will end // but the stars whose seeds we were will / still shine,” giving birth to something else we can’t yet name or identify.
Global justice-focused poems, set in a variety of settings from Panamá to Ukraine to Syria, follow in the next section, “(In)humanity.” Like many of Haskins’ poems, these are filled with a wisdom that comes from keen observation, but they’re also pithy and ironically humorous, a combination at which she excels. “Untitled” is what Haskins fans might think of as an iconic poem:
“When every dog we’ve met is kept inside
or behind a fence
or in a cage
or on the street at the end of a chanin
it’s not surprising that if we see one free
we fear it.”
Afterward, we’re offered a series of politically inspired think-pieces on the pandemic. Like most of us during that time of our lives, Haskins dwelled in solitude, thought about death—and took a lot of walks. These poems reflect such preoccupations. They also appropriately name-check politicians like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and media moguls like Elon Musk in more comedic moments just as they meditatively check in on nature, thanking the trees for their calm trustworthiness and the animals who “looked at me / with oceans in their eyes.”
The penultimate section, “The Slapped Girl,” is filled with reminiscences, many of them driven from a more emotional place than an imagistic one. It opens with “1962,” about a first love taking his own life—as unusually graphic for Haskins as it is wrenching—and continues with other lovers and heartbreaks. What’s interesting here is how Haskins combines memory and culpability. Her “you” is never completely in the wrong; her “I” always willing to reflect on actions and inactions. And the reasons for this are clear from the beginning: “Who but a fool believes / that a poem may be got for nothing?”
The investment in demonstrative content continues with five final poems—three of them dedications written for friends and children, almost a nod back to the “after” poems in section one—in a segment called “Rehearsing.” These pieces are filled with descriptions about disappearing, about being consumed by the elements, or about not having been alive at all. Given the previous section and its insistence on endings, the “rehearsal” is clearly about death, which comes for us all—animals, humans, and in some of these poems, the world itself.
This progression becomes clear after reading the whole of Homelight, whether you do it once or obsessively (count me in the latter group). But what unites all the poems and partitions, regardless of overriding topic, is motif. Throughout, Haskins has wind and water currents on her mind, and those who ride them with the speaker from start to finish. The lines, diction, and syntax are filled with flight and those fundamentals that make up flight or are a result of it: angels, birds, wings, clouds. As she notes in “Rehearsing,” the title poem for the final set piece:
“When you were little,
I’d lullaby you every night,
stroking your back
lighter and lighter
until I was feathers
until I didn’t exist.”
At the end, Haskins leaves breath, or the lack of it, in place of pretty words.
Lola Haskins lives in Gainesville, Florida and Skipton, Yorkshire. Her poetry has appeared in The Atlantic, the London Review of Books, London Magazine, The New York Quarterly, Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, Rattle and elsewhere, as well as having been broadcast on NPR and BBC radio. She has published fourteen collections of poems, a poetry advice book and a non-fiction book about fifteen Florida cemeteries.
Ms. Haskins has been awarded three book prizes, two NEA fellowships, four Florida Cultural Affairs fellowships,the Emily Dickinson/Writer Magazine award from Poetry Society of America, and several prizes for narrative poetry. She retired from teaching Computer Science at the University of Florida in 2005 and served from then until 2015 on the faculty of Rainier Writers Workshop.
Learn more about Ms. Haskins, buy her books, see what she’s reading, and enjoy samples of her work.
A 2024 National Poetry Series finalist, Jen Karetnick is the author of 11 collections of poetry, including Inheritance with a High Error Rate (January 2024), the winner of the 2022 Cider Press Review Book Award. Her work has won the Sweet: Lit Poetry Prize, Tiferet Writing Contest for Poetry, Split Rock Review Chapbook Competition, Hart Crane Memorial Prize, and Anna Davidson Rosenberg Prize, among other honors, and received support from the Vermont Studio Center, Roundhouse Foundation, Wassaic Projects, Write On, Door County, Wildacres Retreat, Mother's Milk Artist Residency, Centrum, Artists in Residence in the Everglades, and elsewhere. The co-founder and managing editor of SWWIM Every Day, she has recent or forthcoming work in Cimarron Review, NELLE, Pleiades, Plume, Shenandoah, Sixth Finch, South Dakota Review, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. See jkaretnick.com.
REVIEWS - AUGUST 2024
Cloud Missives by Kenzie Allen
Cloud Missives by Kenzie Allen
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Cloud Missives: Poems
By Kenzie Allen Release date August 20, 2024 Tin House 114 pages Review by Christina Linsin Kenzie Allen’s debut poetry collection, Cloud Missives: poems, examines the binaries of air and earth at their most intimate connections within the human experience. With the care of an archaeologist, Allen digs through the earthen strata of a life as well as the strata of a culture. In Cloud Missives, there are messages in the air, too, which speak to the innermost parts of us and as portents of what may come. The two aspects, air and earth, are woven seamlessly through four sections: “Pathology,” “Manifest,” “Letters I Don’t Send,” and “Love Songs.” Together, the four sections create a vibrant collection of exhumation and regeneration. Cloud Missives begins with “Light Pollution,” a proem that contains the title of the collection and in which Allen writes of the messages the sky sends, “Elder rain, / a voice that tells each of us ache. // Fill vast jars with the pulp of it, and / seal them with whatever tools you find.” The pulp of what aches is tenderly examined in Allen’s work, and the work of digging it up is reflected with a raw and sometimes startling honesty. In the opening section, Allen explores the layers of domestic violence as compared to layers of an archeological dig. She connects the two in “Breaking Ground,” where Allen writes, “What did I think to find of my own history? Some reason for my battered form? What of the memory I carried, the almost-end of me, arms to break, to lay me in the ground. It comes easier outside myself…” Although Allen writes in “Determination of Racial Affinity,” that “...you can’t pull off your own skin / and ask your body questions” that is exactly what the poems in the first section of Cloud Missives do as they reverently examine what lies beneath the skin of a broken woman and the skin of a broken relationship. In the second section, Allen invokes her ancestral history — a macrocosm of the exhumation of one life. In “How to Be a Real Indian,” Allen writes, “The fourth time, the fifth time, the eighth time they ask you how Indian / you are, your mouth is so, so heavy— let it hang open for a moment / so the spirits can enter. Let the woman who had your name and died / before you were born come into your body and speak the wisdom…” As various personas from Earth Mother to Tiger Lily to Pocahontas, Allen inspects with scientific detail the individual shards which make up the skeleton of a culture. In “Elegy Against Elegy” Allen implores: This is an elegy against elegy, a song against the song of our demise. Let go the need for ghosts as memory behind glass, quicksilvered-- remembered, even standing before you-- we are not dead and gone. The third section is one of metamorphosis for the first-person narrator. In the first section we had the unburying, in the second, the invocation, and in the third section we have reinvention. The collection shifts from being embedded in ground to being imparted to the air. Sometimes angry, sometimes bloody, this section is a reckoning of the past with what the future requires, and a recurring persona of The Evil Queen emerges as the part of each of us that clings to survival at all costs. As Allen writes in “10,” “The earth will move to swallow / what has long ruined me, // because we never lose our power, even banished, / even as graves turn slowly into castles, // I am the well and the gate.” It is a rallying cry for every broken human who does not know if they can survive their darkness. Allen has been there and shows her readers the way, as in “11” she writes, “We will devour every legend / you tried to make of us. // I am already / a new constellation, // all my daughters / tending the stars at my feet.” The final section of Cloud Missives, “Love Songs,” is a celebration of survival, as each love song makes a painstaking effort to point toward the things in this world worth the love humans have to offer. The section acts as a guide for the first-person narrator (and the reader) for “how to settle my restless legs beneath me, / to be quieted for what I can have,” as Allen writes in “Love Song to the Alpacas of Solomon Lane.” Healing isn’t all light and rainbows, though, and it is never presented as such in Cloud Missives. Restructuring a life isn’t easy, and Allen acknowledges this beautifully in the final poem of the collection, “Quiet as Thunderbolts,” when she writes, “So much landscape I can’t tend to, / wide as a child’s face / and crumbled in drought, // rimmed in salt.” The journey of this collection is one of hope. The verses move through tactile darkness and danger into an expectation of light. As Allen writes in “Love Song to Banish Another Love Song,” “I awoke one morning / with a need to awaken, / as though I could smell the flowers / distant on the wind, the end / of endless night, the fog / no longer filling up the brick.” There is something in the messages from earth and sky that heals, that renews, that calls on us for survival through even the deepest of burials. Perhaps, as Allen writes in “Ode to Lookouts and Lighthouse Keepers,” that something are “...the lights out there in the dark sea or forest / which tell you there’s something to work for, // someone to look for, a people to serve.” |
Kenzie Allen is a poet and Assistant Professor of English at York University. A descendant of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin, a Haudenosaunee poet, and a multimodal artist, she was a finalist for the National Poetry Series, and her poems have appeared in Poetry magazine, Boston Review, Narrative magazine, The Paris Review’s The Daily, Best New Poets, Poets.org, and other places. Her website is https://kenzieallen.co/.
Christina Linsin is a poet and teacher in Virginia. Her work examines connections with nature, complexities of mental illness, and difficulties creating meaningful connections with others amid life’s obstacles. She currently serves as the Western Region Vice President of the Poetry Society of Virginia, and her poems have been published in Still: The Journal, Stone Circle Review, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Whale Road Review, The Mid-Atlantic Review, and others.
REVIEWS - MAY 2024
After My Father: A Book of Odes by Beth Gylys
& Motherboard by Renée Rossi, M.D.
After My Father: A Book of Odes by Beth Gylys
& Motherboard by Renée Rossi, M.D.
After My Father: A Book of Odes
By Beth Gylys
Dancing Girl Press, 2024
Review by: Judy Ireland, SoFloPoJo Senior Poetry Editor
By Beth Gylys
Dancing Girl Press, 2024
Review by: Judy Ireland, SoFloPoJo Senior Poetry Editor
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Restoring Dignity: Bethy Gylys’ After My Father: A Book of Odes
Beth Gylys’ After My Father: A Book of Odes includes nine odes bookended by two lyric poems. The very first poem, “Writing My Father’s Obituary,” situates the reader at the crux of the book. With only two lines, it prepares us for the sweet, spare poems that follow. : All of the words have holes, and those holes Have more holes. Now I am the one buried. Gylys elevates the steadfastness and predictability of her father’s habits to solid virtue, then shows how they are undone in the end by his mortality. In “Ode to My Father’s Fat,” he is a big dad, with not a hard edge anywhere, my father was ample, curvaceous, Rubenesque without the femme. But in the second half of the poem, “we watch him hollow, / cinch his belt another hole.” The next three odes praise the white handkerchiefs her father carried, his daily Manhattans, and his love for bacon. Each poem turns as time and physical deterioration set in. His life becomes so unlike anything my father would have imagined for himself. “Ode to My Father’s Wishes” goes inward, explores the wish he had for a life as a sportscaster, just as “Ode to My Father’s Prayers” remembers his prayers that persisted perhaps out of habit, like so much else in life, even when they were barely audible. The next to the last poem in the book, and the final ode, is “An Ode to My Father’s Day-Timers.” The poem begins: Oh, but they are dull and he kept them all: The busy, well-documented life of the Father ends at the end of this poem, the date and time noted as he might have recorded them in his Day-Timer: March 13th Time of death 10:04. This small book is an account of the hollows that are left behind by the passage of time and the final passing of those whom we love. The poet begins the book by telling us, “Now I am the one buried,” and she ends the book by saying, the cavern in your chest is his, one of the many things he chiseled for decades into the walls. The parent who helped form you is now gone and staying gone: “You wake up, and still / you have no father.” The “you” is no longer the “I” of the very first poem. The poet’s deft hand has drawn us into the circle of grief, where “there is no / when or where.” Beth Gylys published a poem entitled “My Father Drowning” in her 2020 collection, Body Braille. In it, the poet speaks of how this man who kept her child-self safe in the water is now “drowning” in his own sea. Similar themes of waning power and loss of dignity underpin this collection, but the odes bring about a restoration of that dignity as the reader admires this man whose ordinariness was anything but ordinary. |
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Motherboard
By Renée Rossi, M.D., Kallisto Gaia Press January 2021 Review by: Doris Ferleger, Oh.D, [email protected] …. There might be a late autumn wind whipping outside, thrashing what few dead leaves hold steadfast to swaying limbs. For it is dark and still no stars. But she has waited long enough and can see stars in daylight. She has given everything: blood, milk, muscle, sinew and bone. (“Sometimes, a Woman Stands Up”) Renee Rossi’s second volume of poetry begins with this lyrical yet muscular, personal, and moving scene: a woman stands up and keeps walking—away from the table, away from the patriarchy, away from a too narrow life. A woman stands up and invites us to join her on a journey forward, and back in time to the world of priestesses and goddesses, of epigenetics, of wounded and strong mothers and grandmothers, mythological women, and the great mother—earth. A cornucopia of compelling and interconnected themes emerges with each poem: a woman’s courage, connection and disconnection with self, other and the body, spiritual questions, meditations into the human condition, and the intricacies of mother-daughter, mother-son- relationships. The poet brings a unique feast of powerful voices to the table of poetry: we have intimate conversations with all the guests at the new table of life: the young mother, dying mother, ghost of mother, mother earth, child- daughter, mature daughter, surgeon daughter/mother, sister, lover, healer, spiritual wisdom carrier and seeker, and lastly the necessary body we all inhabit for our time on earth. Demeter, Persephone, and a priestess also appear at the table. I admire how the poet’s personal experiences connect us with every-woman’s experiences throughout history. For instance, when the poet speaks of sorrow, she also speaks of how women of other times heal from sorrow, accompanied perhaps by a priestess: There is an herb called Ashoka that takes away a woman’s sorrow…. And there may be a temple somewhere with a priestess swinging a censer, the smoke coasting along the flight path of swallows. It reaches her. (Sometimes a Woman Stands Up) Throughout the pages of Motherboard, many poems are glazed with a uniquely humble yet confidently inspiring oracular voice: …. The truth about intimate relationships is they can never be better than the ones we have with ourselves. There’s epigenetics, and memory and craving. But the important thing to remember is that ultimately there are No tragedies. …. “Overcome any bitterness that may have come….” Each of us carries a certain measure of cosmic pain. (“Irresponsibility in Everything”) I trust this voice as it also presents a street level wisdom alongside its existential, poetic wisdom. In “Spring’s Wrathful Deities” we read: Stratus clouds, they’re the only ones/joining us at street level. And in the stanza that follows we read a metaphorically driven combination of street level and spiritual insight: Shanti deva says an uncompassionate act is like planting a dead tree. “The loss of daughter to mother, and mother to daughter, is the essential female tragedy.” On cloudy nights, dung beetles have difficulty orienting themselves. They need sun. Motherboard is also full of embodied poems, curvaceous, corpulent, muscular, fertile, milk giving, seed growing. This practice of being a mother, / it’s a type of dismemberment, the poet writes in “Tower of Mothers.” Bronze Tower of Mothers/ who face outward breasts and eyes to the crowd, trying to shield their sons/from going to war. In “From Motor City Mulch,” Rossi writes of bodies from her perspective as a doctor in training: …. the hospital where I learned to put breathing tubs in the ones who didn’t make it: the ones still warm and pliable. And in “Dakinis,” the poet writes of the joyous body of womanhood: They throw their breasts over their shoulders and run. Personally, I am profoundly moved by the poetry that inhabits the body so fully, cervix ripe as pomegranate, from a variety of perspectives. Rossi also writes in several poems of the body of Mother Nature: If you study earth too long a coiled fiddlehead fern erupts from a running stream…. How the cabbage rose opens with the vulnerability of time, or a jet flare serrates the sky. . (“Do We Know How She Survives?” I savored the thoughtful order of the poems, how the seed of a plant in one poem becomes the seed of the baby in the womb in the next poem. Throughout the pages of Motherboard, I admire how the poet’s mind is one that synthesizes, how she invites the reader to see and feel and hear the interconnectedness of life, and to consider the vital interrelatedness of life and death. In “Self Portrait of a Birth from Hand Held Mirror,” the poet/speaker reveals to the reader what she will or will not tell her son when he asks about the fetal skeleton he sees in her medical text, or when he asks why she is called upon by the neighbor to bury the dead hummingbird. It is because she is used to death/ has cross-clamped arteries and veins…/leading in and out of that place that connects the two of you. As a mother, myself, I appreciate how sensitively Rossi writes of such small, yet monumental moments of making such choices as a mother of what to reveal about life and death. I am also deeply impressed with Rossi as a poet of place, not just the place of the body and Mother Earth. She invites us to see and feel her birthplace. In “My Father’s Firearms,” she writes: It was a Detroit-heavy-sky-day, and the water broke in grey waves, but winter grasses swayed to some heartbeat around ponds and walkways of Frederick Law Olmsted’s sorriest jewel park— Concomitantly, the poet speaks deeply of the ones she has loved in these places. In “My Father’s Firearms,” she addresses her complex relationship with her father as she asks him, a police lieutenant, a million times, if he’s ever shot anyone. The poem ends with this: still you never answered me. Further, in a brilliantly, loosely woven crown of sonnets, rich with metaphor, Rossi explores her compelling, complex relationship with her mother who is revealed in her own intricacies. Pursed in determination, her lips shape smoke rings larger than Saturn’s, caressing a cigarette as if it were the joystick to another life. Molding the ash tip to a fine point, she reads about the Ming Dynasty and its curious custom of foot binding. How the lotus petal feet couldn’t venture far from home—crimped…. The banquet of poems about the speaker’s son and their relationship are easeful, joyful, and wonderfully relatable. I smiled in recognition of the son who ate sand and dismantled a dead computer. Though my son ate only the sand retrieved on his half-eaten peach that had fallen onto the beach, Rossi’s son enjoyed the grit in his sandbox. And while my son also took apart a defunct computer, he did not gift me with a uniquely decorated dead motherboard. My son used to eat sand in the sandbox when he was little…. A little beach growing inside him…. He used a whole roll of film photographing a pig bug rolling around after he’d lifted the stone and said, there I saved that one (“Motherboard”). The mother in the poem Motherboard doesn’t have the heart to say the pill bug requires dark places to live, just as she doesn’t correct his mismatched socks. She even admires the whole roll of her film filled with his photos of a dog’s eye or anus up close. I found myself continually appreciating the mother’s compassion toward her son. All this powerful poetic memoir, rich narrative and lyric, metaphor and image on the table is further made more delicious by the unabashed spiritual wisdom spread through the pages, wisdom made wiser when merged with humility, a self-mocking humor: There are more angels than wounds on this earth. A nun at school had said. Or maybe she said, Every life has a moment like this one that breaks you into new pieces. Or maybe she just scolded me for spitting out a piece of chewing gum into the air at the end of recess and having it land in my hair. (“Irresponsibility in Everything”) Finally, I am in praise of Motherboard as it takes on timeless, compelling life questions: How is relationship the sharing of one’s solitude with another? (“Irresponsibility in Everything”). Rossi further reminds us of the questions we may have pondered as children, but never asked, like, how did snow globes get invented as a result of a happy accident? Most impressively, in the last poem, Rossi leaves us with a question meant to remain unanswered. We get to experience a childlike delight in the poem’s dessert: delectable delicacies of life’s untold mysteries: When children show up at the snow globe factory, /they must be mesmerized/as they start shaking the globes all at once—/and the snow, depending on the phases of the moon, falls everywhere/everywhere but never melts and never sticks. Renée Rossi has published the full-length poetry collection, TRIAGE, and two chapbooks: Third Worlds, and STILL LIFE, winner of the Gertrude Press Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in Comstock Review, Southwest American Literature, Journal of Medical Humanities, and Best of the Net Anthology. She recently completed a Master’s Degree in Ayurveda and teaches integrative medicine courses. A native of Detroit, she currently divides her time between the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont and other places that she finds compelling. |
REVIEWS - February 2024
Whipsaw
By Suzanne Frischkorn
ISBN: 978-1-934695-84-5
Anhinga Press, 2024
Review by: Judy Ireland
Whipsaw
By Suzanne Frischkorn
ISBN: 978-1-934695-84-5
Anhinga Press, 2024
Review by: Judy Ireland
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Suzanne Frischkorn’s fourth book of poems, Whipsaw, pulls the reader deep into new and familiar territory. Dual forces are everywhere in these poems. Predators are ever-present, but strength and endurance can answer the danger. The natural world is being destroyed and must be grieved, even as it generates more life and sacred sustenance. The gorgeous sonnets of Frischkorn’s earlier book, Fixed Star, have given way in this new book to a wonderful variety of poetic forms, including one ten-stanza erasure poem that comprises an entire section of the book. “Before the Gods Existed the Woods Were Sacred” includes ten stanzas of six lines each, all filled with reverence for the forest and the language that arises from the natural world. The text Frischkorn chose for her erasure was a 1958 book of architectural philosophy by Gaston Bachelard, whose philosophy has been compared to that of Heidegger in terms of stature. Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space explores how one’s physical environment, especially one’s home, affects humans, their consciousness, and their poetics. In Frischkorn’s poem, there is a real connection between the woods and humans, between our identity and our original home: And with a stroke of the pen I name myself. To be long in the woods we no longer know where we are. A primary attribute to the forest. We feel this in the very structure of our bodies: This delicate Aeolian harp nature has set at the entrance to our breathing. A sixth sense. It quivers to sing. The vowel a, the vowel of immensity. We take infinity into our lungs. We breathe cosmically. The tree knows no bounds. The tree has its being in you. The tree and its dreamer grow tall. The title of the book finds expression in nature as well, especially in a poem titled, “Doe”. It is twilight, and a doe has left the forest and is off-kilter, trying to get her footing so she can flee: she is righting herself – as cars speed past her, speed toward her, in that dangerous time twilight – the refraction & scatter of sunrays when the sun slips below horizon, …. blinded by sun, on the road. Her natural grace abandoned her, she favors her left side, the doe in the midst of righting herself, her eyes on the woods. The fae hold their breath. The speaker of the poem watches as the doe lurches back and forth, whipsawing between danger and escape, seeing the struggle continue in her rearview mirror, but never seeing the outcome. This is not the same circumstance, but it is the same degree of danger faced by the daughter in the first poem in this collection, in “Dear America.” The speaker will make sure the young woman is prepared: It’s time to teach my daughter how to shoot an arrow How to use a knife How to hit the center of a target The beautiful scope of this book makes every poem belong to the whole. There are elegies for a whale calf and for baby chicks in Ohio, alongside verses for women who need freedom despite the danger. Suzanne Frischkorn uses myth and metaphor and the movement of seasons to give us this deeply satisfying volume of poetry. Fixed Star was a hard act to follow, but Whipsaw may be Frischkorn’s best work yet. Whipsaw will be released in April of 2024. |
MICRO REVIEWS
LSU Press has been sending me poetry collections.
I don't write reviews. I don’t write them because I’m lousy at writing them. But I’m taking a crack at it now simply because I want to acknowledge my gratitude to LSU, and because the two collections I’m about tell you about are so worth talking about.
I’ve never heard of either Sally Van Doren or Morri Creech before I received their books: Sibilance by Van Doren, and The Sentence by Creech.
Sibilance is remarkable. Let me steal a blurb from the back cover that says it all. It’s by Rachel Eliza Griffiths--
“Tactile, luminous, and original in voice, Sally Van Doren’s Sibilance is a journey of the body andits elusive ache and the shape of living in the name of life itself.”
I’ve seen blurbs using the word luminous before. But that word for those collections fell short of the mark. They were not “Luminous.” But it certainly is on the money when used for describing Sibilance.
This is an unexpected pleasure. Van Doren’s work is wonderful. I love this book.
For Creech’s The Sentence, I’d use the word stunning. Creech’s control and craft is superb. His use of rhyme, magnificent. Nobody writes formal poetry as well as this. Nobody.
I’m lulled and emblazoned at the same time. I love this book. I LOVE this book.
-Lenny DellaRocca
I don't write reviews. I don’t write them because I’m lousy at writing them. But I’m taking a crack at it now simply because I want to acknowledge my gratitude to LSU, and because the two collections I’m about tell you about are so worth talking about.
I’ve never heard of either Sally Van Doren or Morri Creech before I received their books: Sibilance by Van Doren, and The Sentence by Creech.
Sibilance is remarkable. Let me steal a blurb from the back cover that says it all. It’s by Rachel Eliza Griffiths--
“Tactile, luminous, and original in voice, Sally Van Doren’s Sibilance is a journey of the body andits elusive ache and the shape of living in the name of life itself.”
I’ve seen blurbs using the word luminous before. But that word for those collections fell short of the mark. They were not “Luminous.” But it certainly is on the money when used for describing Sibilance.
This is an unexpected pleasure. Van Doren’s work is wonderful. I love this book.
For Creech’s The Sentence, I’d use the word stunning. Creech’s control and craft is superb. His use of rhyme, magnificent. Nobody writes formal poetry as well as this. Nobody.
I’m lulled and emblazoned at the same time. I love this book. I LOVE this book.
-Lenny DellaRocca