Uncollected Later Poems (1968-1979) by Ernst Meister

By Greg Bem

(Death)
From there,
out of the organs’ decay,
the carcass of every human,
I came to you
in the chattel of time.

(page 9)

Approximately nine years ago, I was introduced to English translations of Ernst Meister done by Graham Foust and Samuel Frederick (also published through Wave Books). The translations haunted me, they mesmerized me, they also tore and took a lot out of me. The experience reading Meister was visceral. So much so that shortly after the reading, I gifted the early Wave volumes (In Time’s Rift, Wallless Space, and Of Entirety Say the Sentence) to a non-poet German friend for his birthday around the time he returned from a brief stint in Seattle to Munich, Bavaria. I still remember the muted joy I felt when I received his subtle yet blunt “thanks” and his message that he found Meister’s work enjoyable. It was my most German moment to date.

In late 2023 I was reminded of my personal Meister period upon learning that Foust and Frederick were once again releasing a volume of jagged and razored verse from the exquisite 20^th Century writer—this time Maister’s later, uncollected poems. I was hesitant when I learned about this book. Later works (in general) tend to spark a challenge that I rarely want to face due to cliché reading experiences mostly. I have too many times been disappointed by anything “uncollected” as well; not because the work is bad, but because it is usually unorganized or superficially organized, leaving me feeling wronged by the editors. When I think about my own scattered writings, I often debate if they would ever be good compiled in a semi-structured manner, or if that heap would be in actuality monstrous and unberable, in comparison to the loose leaves fluttering around in the dusty corners of my shelves (or buried in a landfill).

Take a look at it,
this image of words:

ABANDONED, ABAN-
DONED, ABAN-
DONED . . .

(page 16)

Still, Meister had to be an exception. I had to read him again. I had spent hours with him before and I wouldn’t let my biases deter me. As with reading Meister’s poetry generally, it was easy to say “yes” and look the other way in waiting, until that moment of the scythe and slice arrived. When the book did get to my hands, it immediately felt jarring. I remember the earlier Wave releases being thick, oddly so, with the collections of poetry being like small darts across elongated pages. Those early volumes weren’t massive, but they weren’t as thin as Uncollected Later Poems. At 64 pages, it is indeed a thin volume, one that begs the question, “Why isn’t there more?” But noting the biographical rift in Meister’s writing career is helpful: Meister (born 1911, died 1979) was first published in 1932 and following didn’t publish anything else for two decades, then released sixteen books in the closing chapter of his life. Perhaps the Uncollected Later Poems is indeed everything that was left; or perhaps the translators and I align in their omission of the most uncollectable. We may never know (there’s no editorial or translator notes in the book), but we can come to know by that which we have: a slim book that is odd and powerful when positioned alongside Meister’s other English translations.

The first thing to note about this collection is the titled versus the title-less. The collection opens with verse that doesn’t have a title, and each page feels like it sits on its own but also feels like it flows into one giant chasm or crack of poetry bursting out of (yes) Meister. After six pages, the first titled poem arrives, “Little Monopod,” but this too could be a poem multiple pages in length or just a single page. The pages that follow each contain the otherworldly and fragmentary appeal of a funky microtextualism, a forwarding of the minute and utter and temporal, a breaking down across line and stanza. While individual poems are technically stamped with years (of writing or publication or something else), that doesn’t separate them from one another completely as they do still flow from page to page. And the book lacks a table of contents so help in determining structure through a traditional, overarching visual method is also nonexistent.

But I will say it’s also not necessary. In reading the book, I found the titles of the poems, and the divisions I unconsciously wanted to impose, getting in the way of a book-length piece that could stand on its own, that didn’t need the forced qualities of “later” collections as I previously described. Instead of falling in line with a standard collection of poetry, whatever that means, I found myself wanting to break convention in my reading adventure, impose a personal, surreal approach as a reader whose fulcrum of knowing rested on lucidity and uncertainty. I felt myself, in Meister’s words, breaking down into complete and wonderful hallucinatory mania. Dare I say the book thus became pleasant and fun to read? As soon as conceptualist standards were thrown out the window, I could dance and party with Meister’s elegant writ of the end. At least in its form. Its ideas are another story.

Didn’t I tell
you ages ago
that we would
see each other again
where things don’t line up,
where the pain on
the crust of Earth
would be happiness?

(page 27)

When I imagine the poet near the end of life, whether they are resting quietly on a bed with shallow breaths (as I imagined Meister resting) or they are drunk and shaking and wailing in an alley (as I at least once considered Meister shaking and wailing), I find it hard to think of the poet’s poetry being anything but bleak, anything but grief-stricken, anything but filled with a preparation for and control over absence. This too had to indicate some bias or stereotypical readership, but I think it’s one that’s filled with a personal fear, or perhaps some traumatic leaning toward a future of pessimism and disability. But when I have gone into volumes of “later” poems, this is the feeling, the predilection, that amasses and dominates, and it’s one I couldn’t quite shake from Meister’s work. Because it’s true, there’s a kind of end-ness to this book, a kind of coda or finality that strangely feels familiar in his writing, in his ideas (as in: all of Meister’s work might actually contain this), but it also feels starkly different or perhaps more extreme (thus foiling the familiar).

It’s important to pause and note that the poems in this collection, which range the last ten years of Meister’s life, might not be at all biographically connected to death, dying, or illness, in that only two poems in the collection were written in 1978 and one (the final) in 1979. Indeed, the poems move along chronologically as if moving through a funnel towards the sharp, pointed end, but it’s not all “the end.” The book, the poems in sequence, amasses to a bigger structure, one retaining life and liveliness, but they still, with their questions, with their “Meister-ness”, well, they haunt. They haunt in that gray way, not the totally horrific undead way, but the creeping and just-out-of-reach way, the way of not quite knowing or not quite having to know, perhaps a way that only “later” things can haunt. They feel stumbling and irrational and vacuous at times, sometimes a little of each of these things and sometimes all of them together. These poems feel like they were written through a brittle mind, in ways I imagine a decayed, tired person might write, but they are still Meister, they are still fantastically written and composed and feel complete and yet weird. The poems themselves, at least by way of translation, are wonderfully concise and contain severe, chiseled language. But still the poems contain images I might personally connect to death, as we know this German poet’s words to usually lead: images of loss, sentiments of grief, wandering through memory and cherishing aged symbols, and as per Meister’s poetics, the ever-present and very intense embracing of the abstract. The poems’ lucid touch offers an embrace to the reader through this confusion and guidance, which is probably why I felt lucid and even semi-conscious as I waded or flapped across the book.

Clarity
arises, what else,
unburdening the soul.

Closeness of the origin.

(page 43)

Continuing from my earlier sentiment, I think one of the most remarkable qualities of this release is its size and lack of order. The book feels contrarian to the other releases of Meister’s in its unusual structure, and yet it is Meister, it’s Meister’s voice and and ideas, it’s the being and the essence of this poet in a new form. I remember a strange parallel reading experience when I picked up The Whalestoe Letters after reading House of Leaves. These books (very, very different from Meister’s poetry, mind you), contained a similar dynamic to the Wave texts: ultimately a reader of the main text couldn’t ever feel complete without reading the supplement, and yet the two felt nothing alike, and with those texts I felt like Letters was a complete and baffling waste of time due to style and flow and tonal difference, but still I read on, I had to.

In this case, with Meister, I feel too like Uncollected Later Poems is an important keystone, or perhaps key, that further forms (or unlocks) the earlier works. I would not say this if I hadn’t read this book; indeed, the earlier works are masterfully done and stand on top of their own hills respectively. But I did read this supplement, I did read the “later” works and they somehow, who knows why, offer a more complete view of Meister, of his world, of his mortality. In many ways this latest volume gives a degree of proof or evidence or closure (closing a loop, perhaps?) to a poet whose many earlier works allude to finality, but can’t quite get there on their own.

You can find the book here: https://www.wavepoetry.com/products/uncollected-later-poems-1968-1979

Greg Bem is a poet and librarian living on the sacred and unceded land of the Spokane Tribe: South Hill, Spokane, Washington. He writes book reviews for Rain Taxi, Exacting Clam, The International Examiner, and more. He is a proud union supporter and finds many of his hours stretched across mountains and water bodies. Learn more at gregbem.com.

Necessary Deeds by Mark Wish

By Michael Collins

In a momentary return to his role—from what feels to him at times like a former life—as literary editor and agent, Matt Connell levels with a client, “[T]o be honest, if you want a murderer to be your protagonist, you’re asking me to do a heavy lift when it comes to revising this thing” (181). The statement resonates thematically across Mark Wish’s most recent novel, Necessary Deeds. Connell, who actually is both the narrator and a murderer, is released from prison after agreeing to serve as an undercover FBI operative helping to solve the case of a killer who targets successful writers. As the unfolding case keeps the pages turning, however, Matt’s work to end the story of the serial killer merges with his ongoing inner revision of the story in which he was a killer, understanding of the past fostering present actions that, in turn, recontextualize the past. In this way, the book reflects the many ways in which revisions of our thinking open new plots in our lives, new forms of “agency” to use one of the novel’s central puns. Wish’s positioning of Connell in the literary world allows interplay between the compositions of text and life to manifest in ways that range from empathic to comic, creating a fluid, varied, and engaging reading experience that opens deeper psychological mysteries beneath.

Matt is an “agent” in both his past and present lives and spends much of the book wondering which one—if either—holds future prospects for him. In the process, he achieves moments of critical distance from both: “For a moment I despise this about being an agent, any kind of agent: being caught between party one’s and party two’s needs with no one giving a damn about party three—yourself” (48). Such moments of insight, however, are balanced by a heightened consciousness of his need to belong, and to remain out of jail in the process, as reflected in his excitement when the FBI reestablishes contact after a pause: “They need me again, I think. They need me!” (75). The connection between Matt’s sense of agency and his literal jobs suggests the novel’s deeper interest in the overlap between our senses of self and social roles—and the instability of both.

Matt grows increasingly aware that, in his literary agent days, he was too dependent upon upholding the social appearances required to function as an agent, hiding his own talents: “I rewrote for him, but also to be clear, I essentially rewrote it from scratch—anyway, as soon as he made it big, he dumped me for an agent at ITM” (91; italics original). This expanded sense of “editing” is mirrored by an FBI agent who probably oversteps professional guidelines in her attempts to keep Matt from backsliding to similar mistakes in his love life:

“But regarding Lauren, I just wanted to say that, from my perspective—I mean, given the way I see things personally, as a, you know, woman—you should probably steer clear.” “But she and I have things to work out. As you probably heard.” “That’s what she’s leading you to believe, Matt. I’m just letting you know I think that woman is trouble. I think she was selfish back when she cheated on you […], and I think selfishness like that never goes away. I mean, she strikes me as a woman who’s so full of herself she can’t stop creating drama that ends up making her the prize.” (149)

Both examples also indicate Matt’s tendency to give away too much of himself in manipulative relationships. The complexities of going “undercover” to identify a serial killer present a complicated constellation of opportunities to work through this tendency as the novel progresses.

One such situation involves reprising his editorial work as an investigator, which results in ongoing awareness of how he interprets texts—and how he “reads” people:

The title is Blizzards, which I’m guessing he’s used because he saw Fargo. I flip to a page about three-quarters through to see if he’s mustered any suspense […]

He’s still playing with uncommon fonts, I notice.

I do my best to read with an open mind. (178-9)

The sometimes-conflicting roles deepen his reflections into both, resulting, at least temporarily, in the death of any romantic notions he had about literature: “But what good, I wonder, have all the books in the world done?” (170). Perhaps he hit rock bottom in prison, but he brought the ground with him when he left.

Matt’s doubly critical reading also mirrors the reader’s own continual “reading” of others. We do, after all, spend a lot of time sizing up others’ motivations and perspectives whether we publish them or not. One reason we are so interested in stories of all kinds is that they often teach us how to do so. Perhaps, his heightened consciousness of this broader role that “reading fiction” plays in our lives underlies both Matt’s disillusion and effectiveness. Fictional detectives back to C. Auguste Dupin nod subtly in the shadows.

Some of the book’s other instances of interpreting texts as aspects of writers’ personalities also provide much of the novel’s comic relief. The presumption that the killer is a writer allows for several quiet parodies of the Dangerous Counter-Cultural Writer:

With a glance up at Jonas, he asks, “Your crime shrink notice his failure to use punctuation?”

Jonas nods.

“And you figure this goes to Hendee’s problems with authority?” Scardina asks.

“It doesn’t suggest he plays by the rules.”

“But gentlemen,” I say. “Hendee’s a poet. A poet’s supposed to question authority.” (12)

The gesture of dramatic irony is funny if you’ve read many poems written in the last hundred years, but it also quietly complicates the character of Jonas, Matt’s main contact at the FBI. We become a little suspicious that Jonas is more educated about poetry than he’s letting on when he says things like, “Serial killers can’t help but leave clues, and this guy tends to write confessional poetry to begin with” (15). Knowing what confessional poetry means without knowing that it’s not exactly an outlier seems strange until we realize Jonas…is…himself…a poet.  His concerned colleague seeks Matt’s counsel:

“A few of his colleagues at headquarters,” he says, “including Trinko, have come to me. And Trinko’s worried because he’s been…well, there’s only one way to put this, Matt, odd as it might sound: people have seen verses on scraps of paper on his desk.”

 “Verses?”

 “He’s writing poems, Matt.” (140)

Here, too, the novel manages to balance a humorous scene with plot development. The agent continues,

“He ordered some, Matt. He’s been buying those kinds of books for years now, sixteen all told. To me, that’s not exactly proof that he’s heavily into writing the stuff, but I’m no expert on how people become poets. So, well, that’s why I’m asking my expert in that field—you—if you’ve sensed, or you flat-out know, that in fact he has any aspirations of that sort.” (141)

In the context of the case, this actually does give Jonas’s motive—method and opportunity abound—so the FBI agents are doing their jobs, but the unusual equating of poetry and criminal behavior nonetheless sounds, you know, funny, unless you read lots of Plato.

The suspicion of Jonas is complicated by the view of the poetry world voiced by the one true poet in the novel, Hendee: “Soul schmoul, Matt. It’s time for you also to get real. It’s all about ugly polemics, man—no one gives a shit about soul. It’s about attacking and defeating and…killing, actually. And I simply can’t handle the attacks anymore. They don’t sit well with me; I don’t react very well to being hated” (49).  Maybe the problem with society embodied in the killer is less that we are jealous of successful writers, more that we lack the perceptiveness to notice the soul in writing when it is there. Maybe Matt is in the process of revising his understanding of soul.

Seen in this context, it’s perhaps unsurprising that Matt has difficulties with both analysis of the queries he receives while posing as an agent and balancing his motivations in reading them:

It’s hard to separate a really bad writer from a really bad writer who might have murdered someone. And sometimes there are excellent writers who’ve created extremely violent storylines and I’m not sure whether to forward their work or not—occasionally I’m tempted to keep their queries to myself and simply represent them. (94)

The concurrent dives into the literary and criminal underworlds also present opportunities for overt comedy about recognizable clichés of local literati made more hilarious by the idea that an FBI agent is the only one taking them seriously:

The third woman walks to the stage on a cloud of pride. She announces she wants to keep the contents of her “nearly done” novel secret until it’s published. She reads ‘a series of short-shorts’ about her mother’s hands. She weeps, needs to be escorted offstage. Jonas studies her as she sits but types nothing into his phone.

Then comes the fourth woman, who might be slightly cross eyed. She speaks with an amount of fear that strikes me as wise. One word and one word only is tattooed across the back of her right hand: Revise.” (25)

Another comic moment points to revision of one’s life story—and our generally “workshoppy” conceptions of it, to use a favorite word of the undercover writer, Jonas—as a broader theme in the central plot:

But no writing sample that implies a homicidal, frustrated writer is coming my way. The closest to suspicious are chapters of novels in which women want to kill their abusive husbands but then leave them for professors of the softer sciences (sociology, psychology, and, more often than anything, anthropology) who whisk them off to Europe, where they engage in dialogue of little consequence. No tension to speak of once they meet Mr. Right. No motivation to kill. (130)

In various understated ways the criminal aspects of the novel alert the reader’s self-protective instincts while the romantic aspects pull at our wish to feel connected and be perceived in loving ways. Matt’s investigative-editorial perception of writers who do not appropriately disguise these human tendencies in their fictions is one example of the novel’s insightful reflections of practical psychology in meta-fiction.

Along these lines, the need for “plot,” recurrently a subject of Matt’s literary insight, is also quietly associated with self-reflection, grounding, and awareness, the “work” many non-writers do in the hopes of changing or deepening their life paths. Matt’s own prior intuitions of homicidal necessity, for example, were based on a dangerous concept of personal boundaries, or lack thereof:

Lauren, my ex, was who I was with pretty much twenty-four seven during my marriage, making me pretty much always happy, so when my client Blaine Davis told me, over lunch, that Lauren had taken a lover—and that this lover was my client and pal Geoff Considine—well, processing those truths all at once was clearly too much of an ask. I sensed, as I soon thereafter stormed over to Considine’s apartment in the East Village, that what I wanted to do was horrible and the sort of thing that puts even the kindest man behind bars, but something in me felt doing it was necessary more than it was wrong. I knew it was wrong, but never once during those crucial twenty-eight minutes of my life did I feel the wrongness of doing it.” (8)

However, his ability to reflect upon his past self’s instinct of necessity with a degree of objectivity, gives him a particular qualification as an investigator: “I know killers, more than a few. It will never not be true that I am one. And after all these days and nights I’ve spent on only sixty square feet of concrete, I believe I know to the core the killer I once was, and Hendee is nothing like him” (11).

His inner monologues deepen this characterization, showing revisions to interior understandings of his past and present possibilities in real time. For example, he attempts to settle his thoughts during an argument with his quasi-girlfriend, who is also a suspect, naturally:

Seriously, I keep thinking.

 Seriously.

 Calm down, I think.

 This is Ferrari brain.

 This is not really you.

 This is just what happens to you.

 But Ferrari brain was her idea, I think. (107; italics original)

The self-reflective movement doesn’t resolve the immediate conflict, but it does lead to a deepening awareness of his own shadow: “You’re as bad as anyone out there […]—you’re acting like a fool because you are weak, and you’re weak for the same reason anyone’s weak: because you need the money” (108; italics original).

It would be expecting too much for his moment of insight to go all the way to the bottom: People don’t become FBI agents or para-literary figures just for money; the money indicates their employment, acceptance into a culture they want to be part of for reasons both overt and usually also suspicious and concealed. Matt’s affinity for critiquing the texts through which people hope to present themselves points to a less resolvable potential of destabilization in his character, a complexity that necessitates the balancing of his incisive understanding of our “plots” with a degree of acceptance—to balance, more generally, tolerance of instability with rational, empathetic, and intuitive discernment. He learns, to a degree, to have control without being controlling.

Or does he?

As much as the novel quietly teaches us about the liminal areas that conjoin being present to oneself and relating to others, it also evokes the torment and danger present in those same undefined spaces. It isn’t particularly odd for fiction to present itself as medium for deeper psychological reflection on our inner complexities and the ways in which they drive us to become agents, investigators, and creators in our own ways. However, there is still a lot to be said for a mystery that conceals beneath its plot an abundance of deeper mystery.

You can find the book here: https://www.amazon.com/Necessary-Deeds-Mark-Wish/dp/1646034066

Michael Collins’ poems and book reviews have received Pushcart Prize nominations and appeared in more than 70 journals and magazines.  He is also the author of the chapbooks How to Sing when People Cut off your Head and Leave it Floating in the Water and Harbor Mandala and the full-length collections Psalmandala and Appearances, which was named one of the best indie poetry collections of 2017 by Kirkus Reviews. He teaches creative and expository writing at New York University and is the Poet Laureate of Mamaroneck, NY. Visit www.notthatmichaelcollins.com

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PAPI PICHÓN BY DIMITRI REYES

By Neil Leadbeater

 Dimitri Reyes is a Boricua multidisciplinary artist, content creator and educator from Newark, New Jersey. He is also the Marketing & Communications Director at CavanKerry Press. His first book, Every First and Fifteenth (2021) won the Digging Press 2020 Chapbook Award and his poetry journal, Shadow Work for Poets, is now available on Amazon. Papi Pichón is his first full-length debut collection.

In Papi Pichón or ‘Daddy Pigeon’, a son imagines his father as a bird whose flight trajectory takes in Newark and New York City and the mountains of Puerto Rico. At times, the pigeon is referred to as a rock dove. The rock dove or common pigeon, of the bird family Columbidae, is considered to be a good omen, a symbol of reconciliation, forgiveness, a harbinger of peace, faith and fidelity. Pigeons appear in stories as birds who can guide souls safely into the hereafter and carry messages between realms. There may at times be a play on the word ‘pigeon’ and ‘pidgin’, the latter in relation to a grammatically simplified means of communication that develops between two or more groups of people who do not share a common language. In Papi Pichón is Rock Dove, for example, we read ‘so you walk by us with bobbing neck / teaching a working tongue // In what language are you speaking this time / prone en la esquina de un roca / from all over the world.

Reyes’ love song to Puerto Rico rages against the ravages of US imperialism (whenever US appears in the text it is written in lower case lettering) and calls for a sense of native solidarity. His book is a celebration of resilience and survival across generations.

In reviewing this book it is important to mention the film / documentary Jurakán: Nation in Resistance. Narrated by Boricua artists, experts, politicians and activists, it is a deep exploration of Puerto Rico’s colonial status, dignity and pursuit of justice, in other words, themes that are very much in close alignment with this book.

The book comprises poems structured into three distinct main parts: ‘Made in América’, ‘Father Pigeon’ and ‘Portal Pichón’ consisting of ten poems each prefaced by Papi Pichón’s Origin Story (Version 1) and concluding with a triptych, notes and glossary. The title of every poem begins with the words Papi Pichón leaving the reader in no doubt about who is the focus of attention and each section begins with a quotation from Puerto Rican poets, novelists, and visual artists, and a former leading figure in the Puerto Rican Independence Movement. Several poems begin with quotations from US businessmen and playwrights or reference American entrepeneurs, astrologers and media personalities. Papi Pichón is bird, spirit guide, encourager, counter hero, the voice of the Puerto Rican people and, ultimately, a rhetorical device.

Interestingly, Reyes gives us two versions of Papi Pichón’s origins. In the first version he is described as ‘a placeholder when we can’t see Jesus’ and ‘his angular footprints’ are ‘the guts of peace signs’. In the second version, we sense the creeping incrementalism of American culture sitting beside Puerto Rican culture. At one point, Papi Pichón is described as being ‘an American Airlines of culture’ flying freely between both cultures.

In his poems, Reyes makes use of certain key markers that define national identity. These markers include sport, in particular boxing and baseball (a number of Puerto Rican boxers are mentioned by name in Papi Pichón Shadowboxes with his Legacy and baseball is covered in Papi Pichón Negotiates the Importance of Baseball), music (referenced most notably in Papi Pichón Prescribes Bomba), clothing (referenced in Papi Pichón Shops for Guayaberas in a Department Store), cookery (referenced in Papi Pichón Develops Habichuelology Through Cooking & Existing) and symbolic mascots such as el coqui or the frog, an important symbol of Puerto Rican culture and the unofficial mascot of the island people.

Language is another marker of identity which Reyes uses freely throughout the book making use of Puerto Rican slang, Spanish words and phrases and words of Taino origin (helpfully explained in the glossary). African spirituality meets Puerto Rican folklore to highlight all aspects that make for Puerto Rican identity.

Many subjects covered in this volume are not unique to Puerto Rico but find their counterparts in other parts of the world: cryptocurrency, climate change, racial prejudice, the gradual erosion of national identities…as Reyes says in Papi Pichón on the Outside Looking in, his ‘isla 100 by 35 miles is microcosm / of what goes on all over the world’. His book has a wider frame of reference than Puerto Rico.

His style is direct and urgent. In Papi Pichón as Transplant on the Outside Looking in, every line begins with the word ‘and’ which has a cumulative effect on the reader. Here, climate change, the pandemic, supply chain issues, hurricanes and US politics all combine to create the perfect storm.

Issues relating to skin colour and racial prejudice are tackled head on in poems such as Papi Pichón as ‘Boy finding His Way’:

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Soy blanco? I’m not sure.

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But when a cop is driving behind me, I automatically think of ways

I may have broken the law and by the first traffic light

I can feel shakedown. Chain gangs and jail cells in my chest.

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The pivotal driving force, Papi Pichón, is an ever present guiding spirit living through and, at times, observing both domestic everyday living, factory work, dancing, boxing, cooking, and the various vicissitudes of history: the 1974 Puerto Rican riots in Newark, New Jersey, Hurricane María, a category 5 hurricane that devastated the northeastern Caribbean in September 2017, population displacement, the impact of colonialism and the devastating effects of global warming and climate change. Despite all these forces, Reyes often surprises with positive turns of phrase; Walter Mercado’s ‘We are stars until we become constellations’ and his own descriptions of the cultural wonders of the islands: ‘La Isla is beautiful in every iteration / and we’ll still be here with or without the rising of the ocean’s levels’. Papi Pichón invites us in this book to ‘kick up Mother Earth / and invite her back into our pores’. Essentially, this is a book about survival and endurance. At the end of the day, Papi Pichón insists that ‘there is / a future and we’ll be in it.’

For a debut collection, this is an impressive, multi-faceted, tour de force, about endurance and survival and a celebration of everything that is Puerto Rican.

You can find the book here: https://gfbpublishing.org/shop/ols/products/xn--pre-order-papi-pichn-by-dimitri-reyes-zxd

 

Neil Leadbeater  is an author, essayist, poet and critic living in Edinburgh, Scotland.  His work has been published widely in anthologies and journals both at home and abroad. His latest publications are The Gloucester Fragments (Littoral Press, 2022) and Cityscapes and Other Poems (Cyberwit.net, Allahabad, India, 2023).

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My Family Was Like a Russian Novel by Carla Sarett

By John Zheng

The quote from Willa Cather’s Two Friends on the flyleaf of My Family Was Like a Russian Novel must suggest painful memories that resurface in Carla Sarett’s poetry. Cather says, “When that old scar is occasionally touched by chance, it rouses the old uneasiness; the feeling of something broken that could so easily have been mended; of something delightful that was senselessly wasted; of a truth that was accidentally distorted—one of the truths we want to keep.” Her words work, in a sense, as an introduction to this poetry chapbook.

The old scar that’s touched in My Family Was Like a Russian Novel is the brother’s death, mentioned first in the title poem and then in “Funeral Cake” which tells, in an ironic but sad tone, about the narrator’s response to her brother’s funeral. Irony prevails through the contrast between the brother’s funeral day and the father’s birthday, both on the same day which may be Christmas Day, as seen in this line: “young Santas march in drunken packs.” Yet, this day of merriment to others is a miserable one to the girl narrator, and the aftermath of the funeral is her disbelief in an omnipotent God:

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                   Once I cursed

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the god I didn’t believe in

after my brother’s funeral

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on my father’s birthday—

a cousin brought him a white cake

with burning white candles

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The image of the white cake with burning white candles functions as a symbol of both death and birth. Stunned by the cake, the father blows out all the candles, not as a birthday ritual with a wish to be taken to God by the smoke of the extinguished candles but as a release of the dead brother’s spirit to the afterworld.

This day of three in one—funeral/birthday/Christmas—has cast a long shadow over the narrator’s life which is no longer colorful and cheerful, as the final stanzas conclude:

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Every year,

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I watch A Christmas Carol—

the original, in black and white.

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I like to imagine parties with polkas,

eggnog, and something called cheer.

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The memory about the brother threads other poems such as “Birthday Serenade” and “Sea Stars.” Sometimes it is about “something delightful,” as described in “The Nest”: “My big brother and I, in soft pajamas, / matched as Superman and Supergirl, / in the rear of our white Oldsmobile”; sometimes it is about a “feeling of something broken that could so easily have been mended,” as reimaged in “Thin Cover”: “I enter his room. Every book is in order, dusted, inviolate. / I lie in his bed and I pray to the god my father mocks. / I pray until I run out of prayer”; sometimes it is surreal. In “Birthday Serenade” the brother returns to memory as a ghost who scavenges his sister’s rooms “for chocolate cake” but moans when finding not a single crumb. In a trance, the narrator juxtaposes the brother with a cat: “He slips through my window; his nameless cat waits on the ledge, now they’ve both gone feral.” This memory is everlasting, as the narrator says emotively in “Brother in Pink Shirt”: “I see him in my other life.”

In a sense, My Family Was Like a Russian Novel presents a cathartic experience, a release from the poignant moments of the narrator’s life and the surreal imagination of the dead brother. However, it also gathers moments of family joy in “The Nest” or old age in “The Remains.” It evokes a keen sense of grief and intimacy, like an emotional tie that connects the distance between life and death and between this world and the afterworld.

You can find the book here: https://www.planbpress.com/store/p74/My_Family_Was_Like_a_Russian_Novel_by_Carla_Sarett.html

John (Jianqing) Zheng is the author of The Dog Years of Reeducation (Madville Publishing, 2023), A Way of Looking (Silverfish Review Press, 2021), Enforced Rustication in the Chinese Cultural Revolution (Texas Review Press, 2019), Delta Sun (Red Moon Press 2018), and The Landscape of Mind (Slapering Hol Press, 2002). His edited books include Conversations with Dana Gioia, African American Haiku, The Other World of Richard Wright, and Sonia Sanchez’s Poetic Spirit through Haiku. He is a professor of English at Mississippi Valley State University where he edits Valley Voices: A Literary Review. Zheng’s newest chapbook Just Looking: Haiku Sequences about the Mississippi Delta is available for download via Open: Journal of Arts and Literature.

Given by Liza Katz Duncan

By Michael Collins

Liza Katz Duncan’s debut collection, Given, winner of the Autumn House Rising Writer Prize, is both a poignant elegy and a sustained meditation integrating reflections on aesthetic perception and the complex interdependence between nature and psyche with deepening mourning of tragedies personal and collective. Its thematic scope allows insights from each context to inform the others, and its variety of approaches offers continued revisioning of and movement of thought and feeling within its central concerns. A considered inner strength permeates the poems, a forthright balance of reflective thought, awareness of emotional nuance, and an intuitive sense of connection between inner and outer, perception and lacuna, love and loss.

“Ekphrasis: Sandy” attends to a sequence of images in the aftermath of the hurricane. The opening prepares us to notice misperception as an opening to insights beyond the frame, within the eye:

In the Weather Underground photos, it appears

no more than an optical illusion: look at it this way,

it’s an eagle’s crest; that way, a snail shell. A trick

of the light, or of the mind.

The sky makes and remakes.

Trees reach sideways: hear us. Under cloud cover,

behind caution tape, a town the bay built and unbuilt. (6)

.

The fifth line drops through the speaker’s arrested gaps in perception to an ego-transcending openness to the storm, perceiving the power that “makes and remakes” as it will, not as we comprehend.  Paradoxically, this sense of connection to greater ongoing creation that contains and threatens the speaker’s own opens to images with personal implications:

A daylight moon, bloated over the bay,

pulls the tide high over the bulkhead

the way one might lift a child, their small fingers

struggling. See where the water left

prints of yellow foam for days. (8)

.

Here the poem pivots, the speaker following her own associations with the foam and child:

The girl in the blurred part of the photo is smiling.

But then, children see adventure in disruption.

.

See the foam blow through her hair,

sand on her tongue. Her sense of time

.

stretches only the length of this boardwalk,

where the ocean leaps onto the planks.

.

Only foam now, but soon it will swallow

everything in the photo’s frame (9; italics original)

.

The speaker associates the pictured child’s psyche with the blurring of the photo in which she appears, a movement towards imagination of and through the child’s experience of both the tactile scene and the felt limitlessness of the present moment. The recurrence of foam again points to an inner significance that connects the girl with the previous section’s imagery. This development is complicated by use of the imperative, more immediately involving the reader. Various, perhaps interdependent, layers of witnessing are implied, allowing the concurrence of the child’s experience and the ending’s foreboding.

The final section again qualifies the image’s ability to convey meaning: “Debris superimposed in the foreground, / as if to justify yet another skyline shot. / The flashbulb blotting out the tiny sun” (10). Another flaw in a photograph prompts the speaker’s intuition, this time towards the limitations of aesthetic response to tragedy. However, the apprehended negations of objective meaning seem to work paradoxically to empower aesthetic imagination to intuit present psychological connections – and also to allow them to resonate across a plurality of potential interpretations.

The uncertainty itself is one psychological gift of the storm, allowing new perspective into inner and outer material – and the complex psychological webbing of associations that connects them.  “Apostrophe” attributes a duality of destruction and witnessing directly to the ocean through direct address:

Punctuation of the morning after: comma between

red sky and sailors’ warning, white space where a storm cloud lowers.

.

Where the bay breaks away, the sentence ends: a waning

crescent of peninsula, barely visible

.

but for the broken buildings, the ambulance lights.

Ocean, even now, even shaken, you hold the memory

.

of words, of worlds that failed slowly, then all at once. (13)

.

The overt connecting of the ocean’s images with poetic composition complicates the speaker’s turn to address it directly, casting the ocean as both witness and mirror, implying a similar duality for the speaker. This intimation of an inner emptiness that is shared with the outer world takes a different form in “Wawa Poem,” in which the water’s emptiness takes on an unconscious quality:

The sound of water

.

against the seawall, brash and arrhythmic,

as if something underwater

,

is arching, is aching, to come up for air. (17)

.

The unconsciousness is not mere inner-emptiness; it also contains psychic material waiting to be realized. Such contents can be projected into the physical world in its attempts to come forth to consciousness; however, such projections also present opportunities to notice nuances of, in this case, the natural world that are unique, considered moments of external witness.

The sectioned poem, “I Wanted To Be Surrounded By Water,” can be read as an corollary process of such material “coming up for air.” It opens by reconstructing the speaker’s wishes while returning to live in New Jersey:

I wanted to be surrounded by water. To find home

easily on a map. I wanted streets with names

.

that were self-explanatory: Harbor Way. Shore Concourse.

I wanted to mark, on the shoreline,

.

their disappearance—the way,

at the site of an accident near Highway 35, someone

.

hung crosses, plastic flowers, photos of a young girl—

I wanted, also, to leave something behind.

.

To document what was, and what will never be— (19)

.

Water is associated with a sense of organic connection and significance here. The young girl’s photo recalls the earlier picture, but the memorial forebodes a move away from the preceding fantasy of clear paths toward an ending that sounds like an elegy.

The next section unfolds a litany of things “I wanted” from the anticipated life, one of which is “waiting for the ocean’s sharp punctuation” sitting quietly beside it (20). In this section, the memory of a cherished future at the heart of the book declares itself: “I wanted children, despite the dying world.” This opens to deeper disclosure of the psychological experience of loss:

.

The child we lost—a girl I don’t know.

She occurs to me in photographic shades: ochre,

.

burnt sienna, vintage bronze. Memory

has softened her outline, as the bay

.

smooths edges of broken glass,

returning it graspable,

.

shatterproof. In the haze

of the neon sky, flecks of her face

.

flash in and out of focus. (23)

.

Three previous themes braid together: the “photographic shades” of memory, the landscape’s own capacity to contain and reflect psychic material, and the ways poetry can foster the interweaving of psychic presences that may only be evoked in language: “I had to write myself back into this place, if only to watch it / fall apart” (24).

Part of this writing “back” forms a series of interspersed poems entitled “Given” that use Whitmanesque anaphora and catalogue to present contexts of destruction and ongoing life brought together by the storm:

Given a factory town, smokestacks that leaked poison into the bay until it swelled,

glowed green, too liquid for its frame

Given the sky breaks and remakes, pours its wet rage on the tortured apartments. (11)

The tone is largely unsentimental, the perspective as keenly aware of humans’ conscious destruction as the unconscious destruction of the storm, both of which intermingle injuries to the natural environment and the body:

.

Given the storm thickened on them

and day by day she taught them how to drink, to chase

sickness with ocean

.

Given the empties, an array of colors like so many boardwalk sno-cones,

and how they drank, thirsty children all

.

Given the storm stayed for days,

crawling into bed with them, nursing them to sleep

.

Given they drank to disappear a brew of rainwater,

liquor, and ocean: where else

was all that liquid going to go (18)

.

The cycles of consumption are subsumed, on an organic level, by the same storm that aggravates them. This is interestingly and inversely correspondent to the oppositional potentials evoked in the juxtaposition of humans’ organic and cultural basis in water with the storm’s jumbling into ruin of one person’s attempts at a coherent life:

Given ancient civilizations evolved on floodplains, thrived for thousands of years,

and there are those who flourish still: who don’t hold onto trappings, or have none

to hold onto, who fold their dark tents onto their backs once a year and walk to

higher ground

.

Given our bodies are just our bodies, 78 percent water

.

Given my neighbor Rebecca, who had nowhere to go; who hadn’t packed, was

wearing all her valuables when the storm hit

.

Given the wedding ring from a previous marriage, the bruise it made on her swollen

finger a parenthesis left open

.

Given this house and everything in it is everything she’s ever made or done: an oil

painting of a fisherman at high tide. A clam shell for an ashtray. Five rooms. One life

.

Given all of these floating through the flooded house like driftwood (14; italics original)

.

The plurality of possibilities presented in this series corresponds with the recurrent title’s own. The litany can sound like a series of preambulatory clauses whose resolution yet awaits, things that must be understood as a foundation; however, it can also read simply as a list of what has been offered, from which the poet may make a life.

Interspersing these poems gives the sense that the collection is always beginning and always continuing, an existential truth that pervades the book. It corresponds with an overlapping vision the speaker develops over the second section that concurrently offers witness to self and other. “Vessels” does so through associative shifting from an observed “line / of horseshoe crab shells.” The speaker imagines their eyes

.

facing, then, everywhere but

the home that did them in, and their

once-inhabitants. At some point, every vessel

has to watch its contents die:

sinking ship, vase of cut flowers,

a tumble of crows from the nest.

.

You died when the last

  of the horseshoe crabs did. What gets me

  is I didn’t feel it happen. (44)

.

Her mourning for the crabs, extended further in other poems, is not an identification or unconscious projection; her own loss offers a paradoxical source of compassion, connecting despite – and through – pain.

The series of poems involving Kristina show this dynamic on an interpersonal level, the speaker primarily a listener. These pieces at times record local history, especially through Kristina’s traumatized perspective. At other times, the speaker records aspects of Kristina’s stories that resonate with her own reflective grieving:

.

Outside, wind picks the bones of the frailest trees.

             She dresses in the dark. The daughter

.

has put herself to bed again, closed the door to keep

             the monsters out. Seeing this, her heart cracks open.

She’s shared homes with monsters.

             Doors don’t stop their ebbs and fluxes

.

from a darkened hallway to a restless mind;

             they enter quietly, as floodwaters seep

.

through fault lines in the plaster. (31-2)

The first image evokes the fearful and exhausted mood of the scene, which shows both Kristina’s empathy and understanding – and her human limitations. The speaker hears and relates this story without judgment or gloss. The connection to her own material arises in the psychological implications of “monsters,” whose ability to haunt us by sneaking through our psychic defenses into our thoughts threatens all of us, though the monsters themselves may differ considerably. The speaker and Kristina are also connected through aspects of storms that split their homes’ foundations.

The inner implications of and responses to such hauntings are the compelling subject of the final, longer poem, “Landfall,” which revisits the book’s central concerns and opens to the speaker’s ongoing life with the psychic presence of her child – and without the child herself. Like the “Given” poems, it uses anaphora to structure the speaker’s gathering and working with psychic materials in their own self-reflective dimension. However, here the structure is more fluid; the repeated phrases shift and morph over the course of the poem, changing themselves in the process of the integrating meditation they facilitate. Water returns, again paradoxically able to open paths forward despite – and because of – its destructive potentials:

.

Dear water      great absolver

Everything I’ve loved I have squandered

.

I will myself to look only at the ocean

.

And not my ruin      while every day

Somewhere a village sinks from view

.

Pounded hour after hour by rain and relentless wind

.

Every day somewhere an ice fortress dismantles

Thawed with the permafrost      every day somewhere

.

The ocean is in the road

.

Streaked with glare from unpredictable evening sun (57; italics original)

The speaker’s inner embrace of complexity mirrors this conception of the water, holding opposing thoughts and inner truths together in consciousness:

Dear daughter      no

I don’t get to call you daughter

. 

To salvage what could not be replaced

.

I didn’t carry you long enough

Hard enough

.

We are dealing with categories here that we don’t normally see

.

Not a daughter

An almost

. 

An aberration

.

Dear almost      given and ungiven

Every day somewhere in a doctor’s office

.

A nightmare makes landfall (59-60; italics original)

Again, juxtaposition of personal suffering with that of others forms pain into a bridge of compassion. Correspondingly, lingering feelings of guilt are complicated by both the aesthetic perception and gratitude for connection within – and with – a flawed and dying world:

What does it say that I find beauty in the ruin

.

While others said they could not bear the sight

.

What does it say that when

The water appears unchanged I feel absolved

.

Even as wave after wave of poisoned fish

Washes up on the shore (64; italics original)

.

The concluding lines bring home the book’s patterns of imagery and its structure of asymmetrical weaving:

.

Dear almost

My body remembers you though it

.

Owes me nothing

.

In dreams I walk with you

By the water

.

And the pain rises      as the mosses

Rise from the snow too soon      you

 .

No longer belong here

.

In this dredge where nothing else

Can grow

.

You no longer belong      though the water

The water      remembers (65; italics original)

.

The final lines point towards both the external, independent existence of the water and its presence as a psychological image, similar to the dual presences of the storm in earlier poems. The inter-contextualizing inner and outer witness once again return to the loss in the speaker’s inner world through the sense of the ocean’s remembrance. This paradox befits the book’s abiding process of finding moments and aspects of psychological connection between the partially or momentarily congruous lives that make up our inner and shared worlds. In the moments of complex and felt insight it offers us, Given offers a considered and moving model of incorporating tragedy into ongoing life.

You can buy the book here: https://www.autumnhouse.org/books/given/

Michael Collins’ poems and book reviews have received Pushcart Prize nominations and appeared in more than 70 journals and magazines.  He is also the author of the chapbooks How to Sing when People Cut off your Head and Leave it Floating in the Water and Harbor Mandala and the full-length collections Psalmandala and Appearances, which was named one of the best indie poetry collections of 2017 by Kirkus Reviews. He teaches creative and expository writing at New York University and is the Poet Laureate of Mamaroneck, NY. Visit notthatmichaelcollins.com.

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A Line In The World by Dorthe Nors

By Ray Greenblatt

          A new and first memoir by Danish novelist Dorthe Nors is titled: A Line in the World. It offers a different orientation to American readers. Nors sees the North Sea as a central body of water, with Denmark and Norway forming the eastern coastline, Germany-Holland-Belgium the southern shore, and England and Scotland on the west. The “line” in Nors’ world is the 300-mile Danish coast. Each chapter deals with an aspect of this natural world. Although she writes only fiction, she also employs many poetic techniques.

North Sea

“The water’s colossal surface looks like a gray-green living creature that cannot lie still.” (107) Nors often compares the sea to something alive. But beneath the surface is “the North Sea, with its storms and underwater freight trains.” (53) What a wonderful image for currents deep in the sea.

The Wadden Sea is a southern part of the North Sea: “The Wadden Sea is a living being with a big, damp lung.” (143) It can speak to a human: ‘Here you have me,’ it said. ‘Here you have my salt teeth. Your future is rising to meet you.’ There was a bottle in the swell.” (114)

Nors uses another human image: “The wind blew from the south-west. The cold was biting, and out there at Skagen Reef, the seas met like young lovers at a railway station.” (217) Meanwhile,  “the sky looks like dirty mop-water.” (171)

She writes about the sea birds that are ”planes of blood, bone, feathers and stamina.” (186) She speaks to them: “ Your senses are alert; you have hatched into the quivering needle of a compass.” (186) She even creates a bizarre depiction of a seal: “Down there in the water, the seal looked like a sodden demon. A skull with empty sockets, staring at me, sober and assured.” (125)

The author states that the sea folk fear three things: “Shipwrecks, storm surges and fire. The town of shipmasters is thatched.” (134) But far more than fire, it is storms that threaten most: “Then stormy forces of the universe clasp their arms around the world.” (151) She remembers times as a girl by the seaside: “It’s like the roar belongs to the galaxies, and it reduces me to grains of sand.” (152)

The Place

“One of the most inspiring things about the Vikings: they had grasped that the earth was round, and if the earth is round, then you can’t live on the edge.” (74) Every place can be the center where that people live. Nors sees her Danish landscape in a unique way:  “I sew my geographical stitches between this coastal world and the savage city. I need the plurality, the conversations, the invisibility and the people. But I cannot cope without the landscape, without nature. I need a broad, still place to which I can return. A horizon.” (20)

“We sail in reverent silence past the white, wind-turned forest.” (71) A marvelous poetic phrase. “Paths arrange themselves under women’s feet: organic as the roots of trees.” (136)

Forests and paths lead to a church:  “Enhanced by the light, the sea and the distant horizon, the church shivers with raw and understated beauty.” (108) And a lighthouse that “looked like the barrel of a gun, pointing in hot-tempered defiance at the sky.’”(219)

But Nors warns that too much isolation is not good: “The place was supposed to improve your life, but it simply trapped you in the life you already had, only now without a filter: your demons came with you.” (192)

Sea Folk

What is day-to-day life like living by the sea? Nors tells us in many ways. “I walked like a slash against the wind.” (132) “She hugged him till he creaked.” (104) Nors admired the durability of the women: “They settled their broad backsides around the table, becoming their own version of fire. Gossip set ablaze.’”(134)

The people love to dance:  “They whirl like scaled-down dervishes across the floor. They have one another caught, in a centrifugal force. Like a North Sea depression, with its silent eye and its wildness at the periphery.” (137)

Nors considers how important memory is to a human being: “This eternal, fertile and dread-laden stream inside us. This fundamental question: do you want to remember or forget? Either way, something will grow.” (85) Once while wading, she fell into a trench that felt  “like a trapdoor in my soul.” (62) These thought processes arise in one’s mind at sudden times.

The locals have many superstitions. They think that death comes at certain times: “Those due to die died when the waters receded. You could read it in the obituaries. So-and-so died late Tuesday night ‘at falling tide.’ It was important to include that.” (138) However, for Dorthe Nors her year by the North Sea was a joy: “My year in Sonderho is a cello’s sound inside me.” (131)

So much of this book can be interpreted as a sea idyll. Some chapter titles are romantic: “Wandering Houses,” “Wadden Sea Suite,” “Quiet Rain in Skagen.” But like the best nature writing in America—Walden by Thoreau, The Outermost House by Henry Beston, A Pilgrim at Tinker’s Creek by Annie Dillard—the sensitive writer issues a warning, like the following: “Cheminova and its nightlight leaking in—that, too, seemed part of the landscape to the child that I was. That Folidol, glyphosate and mercury leaked in too—that we didn’t know. My parents believed in the good in other people. I believed in my parents, and they drove us home when the wind blew in from Cheminova.” (54)

You can find the book here: https://www.amazon.com/Line-World-Year-North-Coast/dp/164445209X

Ray Greenblatt is an editor for the Schuylkill Valley Journal and for a decade now has taught a “Joy of Poetry” course at Temple University-OLLI. He spoke at the John Steinbeck Festival in Salinas, California. His most recent book—From an Old Hotel on the Irish Coast (Parnilis Media, 2023)—is a compilation of poems and fiction, with drawings by Philadelphia artist Michael Guinn.

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The Daughter of Man by L.J. Sysko

.

By Lynette G. Esposito

.

The Daughter of Man by L. J. Sysko published by The University of Arkansas Press, Fayetteville, Arkansas 2023, is an interesting mix of poetic form and experimentation on subjects that might be taboo for some. In one hundred and three pages of poetry divided into five sections, Sysko covers subjects such as how to use a tampon for the first time and how to properly behave at a funeral and others that universally affect people.

.

In the poem The Mooning 1986 (Etiology of the Cauldron) on page six,  she sets the time and place of a young kid being laughed at then even more after the retaliation goes wrong.

.

Once when my sister and I were roughhousing

with our boy-neighbor, they made fun of me, so

I stood on the guest-room bed and mooned them,

.

It is a childhood reaction to being the butt of the joke.  But her response backfired because of her innocence which is shown in the next stanza.

.

pulling my pants down low enough to convey my ire

–all the way to my knees–,

bending over far enough to emphasize

. 

my commitment to the gesture

–folded in absolute half–.

They laughed harder, a lot harder, doubling and

.

Of course, the narrator ran from the room bawling.  She had revealed too much and her revenge was on herself.  Although this was a childish thing, what a strong lesson to learn about retaliation and its unexpected outcome.

.

In the poem Kristallnacht on page twenty-four, Sysko addresses the control of Jewish women by their name.  In a prenote before the poem begins, she states: After Kristallnacht occurred in Germany, female Jews who did not have “typically Jewish” given names were forced to add “Sara” to official identification cards. The poem reacts strongly to this requirement.

.

The poem is long and thin. like a pencil notation recording history.

.

Sara and

Sara and

Sara and

Lotte

each carry

a crystal

balloon

.

The poem speaks of the Saras and what happens to them including a ride in a cattle car where a Sara disappears.  The poem is forty-seven lines long ending with:

.

Nothing cuts like

aftermath except

a taxi-line tether

from wrist leading back

to a green hill

in the distance here heads

like light bulbs line

the path

Sara to Sara to Sara

. 

    and their

    blazing

    vanishing

    point.

.

Sysko has skillfully made us all Saras as we see the evil complexity of one group’s control over another. The form of the poem contributes to the strength of the poem as if it represents a long rope that binds the past and the future together.

.

In her poem some people know what to say after death on page one hundred and two, Sysko tackles the uncomfortable feeling of communication after death.  In the one stanza poem, she uses standard symbols to set the scene but the poem is really about empathetic communication from both sides of the veil.

.

when someone’s died and they’re

standing beside the bed/casket/dug ground. Some know what token to send

or withhold, foods that succor versus what will sit in the sunken hull

.

She adds:

.

…__kids do funerals best. kids play

.

Then at the end she closes the poem with;

.

…then they go to bed and dream of ghosts who stand

silent/solemn by their bedside, holding vigil over the vital.

.

She has covered a lot of ground here with neither the vital nor the dead knowing what to do but the children in their innocence treat it as a usual day.  There is an understanding from the children that life is to be lived. Sysko a skilled poet with a deep mind and an interest in bringing historical facts into her work.  She is not limited by form but takes the form and mixes it into the symbolic messages of each poem.  This is a book I would like to read again and again.

.

You can find the book here: The Daughter of Man (Miller Williams Poetry Prize)

 .

Lynette G. Esposito has been an Adjunct Professor at Rowan University,  Burlington County and Camden County Colleges. She has taught creative writing and conducted workshops in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.  Mrs. Esposito holds a BA in English from the University of Illinois and an MA in Creative Writing and English Literature from Rutgers University.   She has critiqued poetry for local and regional writer’s conferences and served as a panelist and speaker at local and national writer’s conferences.  She lives  in Mount Laurel, NJ

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Shadow Dance by Martin Ott

By Charles Rammelkamp

“The dance of fake names and tall tales at the strip club reminded me of the shadows of myself,” West, the protagonist of Martin Ott’s riveting noir novel, observes.  The metaphor of shadows is key throughout the drama of this gritty tale of greed and scams. The narrator is forever puzzling the murky behaviors and schemes of the people around him. “Shadow” is a word that occurs in all twenty chapter titles as well as the title of the book itself. It signifies ambiguity, uncertainty, ambivalence, impenetrability. These are the conditions of the narrator’s life.  “I didn’t even know who I was,” he confesses at one point, and later, “I wasn’t sure what I’d learned along the way, wasn’t sure who I was supposed to be.” In essence, Shadow Dance is the narrator’s struggle to understand himself, to separate himself from the shadows that threaten to engulf him. Does he succeed? The reader needs to decide for him- or herself.

From his childhood with con artist parents working scams on a Mississippi River gambling boat called Aces to his work as security and general factotum for the sketchy Iranian Jewish Pourali family (Big Z, Yar, Bianca, Donya, Malik, Mona, Alice, Nikki, et al.) at their strip joint, Club Paradise, in the “Tehrangles” neighborhood of Los Angeles, the protagonist, West (aka, Buddy Rivet), has been involved in the noir underworld of crime and betrayal all his life. It’s impossible to sort the real from the fraud or the swindle. It’s no wonder he feels overwhelmed by the shadows. “Everything in Los Angeles was a shadow,” he tells us. “I couldn’t help but feel that something bad was flickering on the horizon.”

After finishing another tour of Afghanistan as a military policeman at the Bagram prison in Kabul, Buddy Rivet goes home to Louisiana, only to lose his temper and beat up his sergeant, the intolerable bully Jeff Lasicky, on the airstrip at Barksdale Air Force Base. What can he do but flee? He first tries to make up with his high school girlfriend/fiancée, Dierdre, whom he left behind in the trailer park in Lake Charles when he joined the Army and was deployed overseas, only to find her in bed with his Uncle Miles. Buddy steals his uncle’s truck and heads to Los Angeles to find his childhood friend, Solomon.  West’s self-proclaimed mission is to save his childhood buddy Solomon from wrecking his life. All along, of course, he’s really trying to save his own.

“Solomon was the brother I never had,” West says. They had grown up together in Lake Charles, Louisiana. As West puts it, they “had spent most of our lives being each other’s shadows.” Solomon works as a DJ in a strip club called Club Paradise, owned and run by the Pouralis.  “Solomon was a flashpoint for chaos, and I was his protector.” AWOL from the Army, hiding, on the run, West seems an unlikely protector. He also feels he has to protect Nikki, Big Z’s sexy daughter, and Alice, one of the strippers at Club Paradise. Does he “save” any of them?

On top of this, West learns that his parents, whom he thought had died in a hurricane several years before, have actually re-surfaced in Las Vegas where they have resumed their life as con artists. He’s a bit miffed that they didn’t think to get in touch with him, and he’d had to resort to an old “Craig’s List” routine they had worked out to track them down.

“Telling stories is the biggest con of all,” West’s father tells him when he goes to Las Vegas to see them. One of the stories? The girl named Lucinda that West thought was his younger sister, the one who drowned while he was supposed to be looking out for her. Only, Lucinda was not actually his sister. “Lucinda was the shadow dance I lived every single day.” Ostensibly, West drove to Las Vegas to get the true story about Lucinda. As it turns out, Nikki stowed herself away in the minivan that West borrowed from Alice to go to Las Vegas, which throws a monkey-wrench into his plans. Ultimately, West returns to Los Angeles, with Nikki, his doubts and shadows unresolved.

The Rivet family curse is another story that haunts West. It goes back to a slave-trading ancestor whose jaw-dropping cruelty to one of the slaves and her son brings the curse down on the family. “The mother who cursed her own flesh and blood in order to get revenge.” The curse can only be lifted if a Rivet descendant “can figure out what that kid said with his last breath.” Another shadow! Does West solve the riddle by the end? No spoilers! Or, as West asks, is the curse even real, or “some con to make people feel sorry for us?”

In noir, there are no heroes, no actual “good guys.” True, West fantasizes himself as Travis McGee, the hero of John D. McDonald’s detective stories, and although his voice is sympathetic, a likeable character, West is not a hero. “I needed to navigate the dead zone, to dart between cactuses that threw shadows like people and away from people that cast shadows like animals,” he notes. Buddy Rivet, aka West, is a compelling storyteller (i.e., con artist?), and of course Martin Ott is the one who is really pulling the strings, the true raconteur. Is there an ultimate “feel-good” resolution to this noir tale? Is this the final con? Read Shadow Dance and find out!

You can find the book here: https://www.amazon.com/Shadow-Dance-Martin-Ott/dp/1646033795

Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for Brick House Books in Baltimore and Reviews Editor for The Adirondack Review. His most recent releases are Sparring Partners from Mooonstone Press, Ugler Lee from Kelsay Books, Catastroika from Apprentice House and Presto from Bamboo Dart Press.

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Yellow Brick Pilgrim by Joseph Farley

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By Lynette G. Esposito

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Joseph Farley’s Yellow Brick Pilgrim published by Alien Buddha Press in 2023, explores the issue of faith with common language that suggests deep contemplation.

In his title poem Yellow Brick Pilgrim on page six, Farley begins this four- stanza poem in a cornfield,

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I kneel in the cornfield

at the feet of the scarecrow

seeking forgiveness

and directions to oz.

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His not- so- subtle reference to religion and wizards is both interesting and disturbing but sharply executed. The second stanza expands the references to Eve and apples and angels descending.  Again, the clear focus and sardonic picture, suggests a very aware narrator questioning where the real God is.

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Let the trees throw apples

and monkeys descend from the sky.

I shall suffer all calamities

on the route to find God.

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The third stanza changes the tone from the picturesque situation to an almost hopeful but an uneasy pronouncement of what could be and how one should or might feel and react.

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If he should turn out

some fraud in a suit,

should I complain

or applaud this fantasy

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The language is well chosen and skillfully presented. The theological question goes to the core of faith. This continues to the closing stanza.

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for weaving strange beauty

into a world more bleak

without the willing

suspension of disbelief.

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The architypes Farley has chosen, hold layers of symbolism that when pealed back, suggest that belief, whether viable or not, is a good thing in a dark world where more light needs to shine.

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In Farley’s poem on page twenty-five, Immersed, faith and religion are addressed again.

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We gather at the river

to be blessed or drowned.

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The dichotomy of thought is presented as he includes all in the pronoun, we, and speaks of those who come to be saved.

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Our tears have fed the torrent.

The hands on our heads

fear nothing but God.

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The direct language sets place and situation in a strong venue and suggests an emotional commitment. In the second stanza of this two- stanza poem, he explores the understanding of faith.

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Beneath the skin of water

fish see all with open eyes.

Open mouths utter no words.

Listen for the body

weighted as with stones.

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The inter mixing of both figurative and literal metaphor gives a depth to the poem that slides through the mind like angel wings with barbs. This is a small but mighty ten-line poem. On page thirty-five, Farley addresses what God wrought in the two-stanza poem What We Got.

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God so loved the world

he gave us all hand-me downs:

a half box of used crayons

a bent but broken knife.

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What we draw from this

or carve into flesh

is whatever we make it.

The rainbow and the inferno

in each other’s eyes.

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The poem sets up the boundaries of belief with the contrast of balance of the good and the evil—the rainbow and the inferno both placed next to each other.  He puts the responsibility not on God but on the we. All through this slim chapbook of thirty-nine pages of poems, Farley presents scenarios that cause the reader to think and evaluate.  He is not preachy but draws the reader in with possibility and skillful use of known icons.  He maintains tight control of each poem.

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You can find the book here: Amazon.com

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Lynette G. Esposito has been an Adjunct Professor at Rowan University,  Burlington County and Camden County Colleges. She has taught creative writing and conducted workshops in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.  Mrs. Esposito holds a BA in English from the University of Illinois and an MA in Creative Writing and English Literature from Rutgers University.   She has critiqued poetry for local and regional writer’s conferences and served as a panelist and speaker at local and national writer’s conferences.  She lives  in Mount Laurel, NJ

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