charles rammelkamp

Stop Lying by Aaron Smith

By Charles Rammelkamp

Two-thirds of the way through Stop Lying, Aaron Smith begins the poem, “The World of Men,” in which he is talking to his psychiatrist,

I’m a therapist’s wet dream, I say, and he writes

in his notebook, probably, that I’m using humor,

again, to cope.

Self-deception, deflection: there are so many ways of “lying” – to ourselves and others. Humor is certainly one of Smith’s gifts, as he comes to terms with his mother’s death from cancer. In his previous 2019 collection, The Book of Daniel, also dedicated to his mom, he is likewise coming to terms with her sickness, her mortality. Now she is dead. The drama of her death is central to Stop Lying.

Other forms of lying include withholding information and changing the subject. As Smith writes in “The Only Thing,”

I never told my mother

I wrote books, and as far as I know,

she never saw one. She Googled me,

once, and found an essay I wrote about

being gay. She called my sister and cried,

begged her to ask me to take it down.

I didn’t, and we pretended it never

happened. She loved me without looking.

at me.

Or sometimes the lies are what sound false, boilerplate, as when we struggle toward being authentic and come up short. In “Letter to My Sister,” in which he realizes “Anyone, I now know, // can be lived without (I feel guilty for knowing that.),” Smith writes:

I hate the words we use –

especially numb, or how grief comes

in waves because it’s not true

but it is, and there’s no language

that belongs only to us, how it feels

to miss her, nothing someone else

hasn’t already thought of.

In the title poem, his mother is in Intensive Care. It’s the last week of her life, and the cancer has spread to her brain. Of course, her loved ones are trying to be encouraging, comforting, but to her it feels like deception. Smith writes, “In the ICU, my mother

asked: Is this a dream, or am I really dying? She asked

my father for a kiss, said: tell me the truth, stop lying.

A short poem, “When We Know My Mother Will Never Wake up Again,” reads:

My sister says:

Aaron’s a really talented poet, Mom. He’s published four books.

My sister says:

I thought it was important she know.

In a tender moment of frank honesty, in the penultimate poem, “Fourteen Mondays,” Smith remembers sitting in a restaurant with his mother only months before her death, on his birthday.

She looked beautiful those last months, and I told her,

and not because she was my mother and sick,

but because she was beautiful,

as if the illness had made her more herself.

Similarly, in “Three Months Before She Died We Went to Dollywood,” he writes,

We watched roller coasters, and she said you’d

probably rather be here with friends, and I said no,

and it was the truth. She bought me a mug

with my name printed below Dolly’s perfectly

painted face. She wanted me to remember the day.

But it’s also true that for years both his mother and father, West Virginia fundamentalist Christians, tormented him for his lifestyle. The poem, “Afterlife” sums it up:

Sometimes

the hardest part

is wondering

if my mother died

believing

I would go

to hell

But Smith is funny, witty. “My Father Was Frank O’Hara” is a poem about discovering the love letters his father had written to his mother when they were in high school. Smith calls his sister to read them to her. He notes:

there’s an O’Hara quality

if O’Hara was straight

and in high school

and couldn’t spell. Okay,

they’re not that good.

“God Is Not Mocked” is a satirical poem that contains lines like:

Three Gods walk into a bar…

There was a farmer’s daughter named Mary…

Knock, knocketh…

Who’s there?

How many Gods does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

One, because I am the Great and Powerful Oz!

As the title suggests, “Plathoholic: A Party Game” is another clever poem. And then there’s “Some Days Everything I Do I Do,” which is both funny and heartbreaking:

with a broken heart.

Today, for example,

I threw away

the ceramic red

wheelbarrow she left

in the yard last

winter; it froze

and cracked beside

the abandoned

birdbath. I know,

I’m writing a poem

that mentions

a red wheelbarrow—

fuck off!

As when his dying mother demands it, Stop Lying is also Aaron Smith’s plea for his own sense of identity. This is who I am!

You can find the book here: https://www.amazon.com/Stop-Lying-Poems-Pitt-Poetry/dp/0822967049

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 and Catastroika from Apprentice House.

Bobish by Magdalena Ball

By Charles Rammelkamp

An imaginative recreation of Magdalena Ball’s great-grandmother’s life, from migrating, alone, at the age of fourteen, at the beginning of the twentieth century, from Russia to New York, prompted by the terror of pogroms, through her life of immigrant hardship, the grueling twelve-hour days in the garment-worker sweatshops, escaping certain death in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory disaster in March of 1911 by the sheer dumb luck of not going to work that day (for which she was fired), living through the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918 (“La Grippe”), and more, including a violent, abusive husband, this vivid, lyrical sequence feels like an act of love as much as the necessary preservation of a life before it disappears into the oblivion of time. Its lessons and examples of quiet courage in the face of crushing despair elevate this collection to something verging on the heroic.

Though she never met Rivka in her lifetime – already dead by the time of Magdalena Ball’s birth – the affectionate nickname (“Bobish” is a variation on the Yiddish word for grandma, “Bubbe”) tells the reader how vital the family connection is. Ball spells this out in the very second poem of the collection, “Footprints,” in which writes:

Why go so far

leave behind everything

mother, father, siblings, home

forever

time being what it was

back then.

Later in the poem she explicitly defines the project: “I wanted to know what it felt like / and you, Bobish / you needed to tell me / even after so many years.” Even though Rivka “kept her head low / left few footprints,” her great-granddaughter uses her prodigious imagination to bring her ancestor vividly back to life.

The story begins in “The Pale of Settlement,” the area of the Russian Empire to which Jews were banished, poverty-stricken towns (shtetls) that were subject to pogroms, campaigns of violence orchestrated by groups like The Black Hundreds, an extremist rightwing group devoted to the Tsar.

Brutal signs were everywhere

blood, skin, broken bodies

lintel hanging off windows.

Her mother gave her a bag of coins

the brass samovar, told her to pack

quickly.

And so, at the age of fourteen, Rivka goes alone, across the ocean, in steerage (Zwischendeck) promising to send back money, but with so little control over her destiny. (“Ocean Mandala”: “When she earned enough she would // send a ticket for her parents / if she could find them again.”) This first section is titled “Arrival,” and sets the conditions. “Two kopeks” begins:

Seven of them one room

grandparents crouched small alcove below

broken stove no daylight.

Ball goes on to describe the constant trauma of the pogroms (“The piano burned in the first pogrom”) and the desperate search for a solution, for escape. She writes in “Taken with Time”:

the worn trajectory of terror

voices in the distance, banging, barking

the doppler as they moved closer

sound increasing in pitch

like a freight train of atrocities.

.
Poverty and pariahhood bring other obstacles as well; what we call being “illegal” in today’s discussions of immigration policies. Ball explains in “Double Migrant”:

Before she left the largest

ghetto in the word

a small woman on a big ship

she was already a migrant

in the margins of legality

crouching in the space

between integration

and segregation

watching, waiting.

Ball occasionally breaks up her vivid, allusive, short-lined verse with longer, prose-like pieces such as “Mother of Exiles,” in which Rivka encounters the Statue of Liberty and reflects on her status and future, as well in selections like “Manhattan, Assembly District 8,” from the second section, a description of upper Manhattan, in which Rivka finds work at the Shirtwaist Factory.

.
In the second section, “Azure,” Rivka is more or less settled in her new life, trying to adjust while at the same time hang on to her previous identity – her “Mamaloshen,” “mother tongue.”
.
From the very first poem, “A Voice to Shatter Glass,” Rivka has been described as a kind of fortune teller, a seer, reader of tea leaves, diviner of the future. We see it again in “Divination,” which foretells her lucky escape from the factory fire.
.
Poems like “Azure,” “Cairn,” “A Devout Child” describe her nostalgic homesickness for the imagined comforts of that homeland from which, we know, she fled for good reason.
.

In the third section, “Fish Smoker,” Rivka meets her husband, for better or worse but mainly worse. “Third Avenue EL,” “Peddlers,” “Bear of a Man” vividly portray the conditions of her New York life and the man she marries. “He was studying to become a Rabbi / until he lost his faith.” “La Grippe” is another prose piece that describes the Spanish Flu, its effects and stigma for immigrants accused of being responsible for bringing the plague to America. We see her own fate at the shirtwaist factory, in “Potatoes”: “She bent over, her young back hunched as she / leaned into the machine trying to forget the pain / that followed her like a faithful dog / the rest of her life…”

Ball imagines Rivka’s grim New York family life (“Silence and Monkeys,” “Love Wounds,” “Words and Bullets”) but also some of the simple pleasures (“Tar Beach (Kelly Street),” “Nickel Empire,” “Spoons”), and then the Second World War breaks out, and her anxieties about the family left behind torture her. “Operation Barbarossa,” “Memorial Fountain (Bryant Park),” and “News from the Old World” hint at the tragedies of the Holocaust.

The final section of Bobish, “Tikkun Olam,” suggests a kind of redemption. Invoking the Zohar and other mystical Jewish traditions, Ball again taps into Rivka’s “otherworldly” persona. Tikkun Olam means “repairing the world.” It’s central to the Rosh Hashanah liturgy, so the redemption Ball writes about goes beyond the personal, to the universal.

Bobish certainly succeeds in bringing Magdalena Ball’s great-grandmother vividly back to life. As she writes in “The Consequences of Silence,” she succeeds in her quest to “Unstitch the moment connecting her to me,” a lovely allusion to Rivka as a seamstress but also suggesting the fabric that is a family. Bobish is compelling and poignant, a true tour de force.

You can find the book here: Bobish

A Magician Among the Spirits by Charles Rammelkamp

By Stewart Florsheim

When I think about contemporary poetry books that focus on one story, I think about Vikram Seth’s Golden Gate. It’s a novel in verse comprised of 590 Onegin stanzas (sonnets written in iambic pentameter with a specific rhyme scheme). The novel, set in San Francisco in the 1980’s, is about the relationships within a group of young friends. The story is engaging, and the formal style underlies the humor in Seth’s descriptions of San Francisco, as well as his insights.

Although Charles Rammelkamp’s book, A Magician Among the Spirits, is not written in a formal poetic style, it tells an equally compelling story. It’s about Harry Houdini, the well-known Hungarian-American escape artist who was born to a Jewish family in Budapest in 1874, and died in the US in 1926. In 55 poems—all written in the first person–Rammelkamp captures the highlights of Houdini’s life and achievements.

From the start, Rammelkamp brings his own magic into the book. In the first poem, Alternative Facts, when Houdini describes his immigration experience, he invokes Whitman:

I am an American! As Walt Whitman once asked,

Do I contradict myself ? Very well then,

I contradict myself.

I contain multitudes!

As the book unfolds, the reader will begin to see just how complex Houdini is. He’s a refugee who will save himself again and again—his escape acts a metaphor for his own survival.

Rammelkamp does a very good job capturing the historical context of the times. In My Father Flees, Houdini explains why his father lost his job as a Reform rabbi:

But he fell out of favor with the machers –

too old-fashioned, didn’t speak English,

resisted assimilation, too attached 

to his Old World ways.

In the early twentieth century, the Reform movement in the US was still in its early stages. One of the hallmarks of the movement was to promote Judaism, but in an American context. As a result, for example, many of the prayers were recited in English instead of Hebrew.

When Houdini’s father leaves Appleton, Wisconsin, he tries to make his living as a mohel (a rabbi who performs the rites of circumcision) and a shochet (a rabbi who supervises the koshering process). He can’t make a living, and finally moves to New York, where he finds employment cutting linings for a necktie manufacturer:

So Rabbi Mayer Samuel Weiss,

now with seven kids to care for,

out of a job, moved us to Milwaukee,

where he offered his services 

as a mohel and a shochet – 

various cuts of meat 

that never added up to rent.

The story of Houdini and his family’s refugee experience is engaging, but the poems that follow capture what makes Houdini unique: his journey from joining a circus to becoming a world-renowned escape artist. Throughout the story, Houdini refers back to the importance of his family. He is close to his father (“A failure? No, he was an inspiration.”), his siblings, and, especially, to his mother. In Mama, Houdini writes:

It was my sainted mother

to whom I was most devoted,

all my life, even married to Bess.

Houdini takes us on a journey through his acts, from performing magic to donning handcuffs and straitjackets. Although he has some setbacks, he eventually gets noticed in the Midwest by the theatre owner, Martin Beck, and is invited to open a show in Omaha. The breakthrough is described in Jailbreak!:

Beck sent several pairs of handcuffs backstage.

I escaped without breaking a sweat.

A few weeks later, he sent me a telegram.

“You can open Omaha March twenty-sixth,

sixty dollars. Will make a proposition

for all next season.”

No more dime museums or beer halls

for Bess and me!

We’d made the big time!

An escape into success!

Houdini’s success continues, from making $400 week in the US, to $1000 a week after he hits London. All along, he never forgets his roots as a refugee. From Houdini Amazes Detectives:

After a year I was making $400 a week,

more than half Papa’s annual salary at the Appleton shul.

I’d escaped the shackles of poverty.

Houdini eventually comes back home (“I especially liked London/but America was my home”), and buys a brownstone in Harlem and a family burial plot in a Jewish cemetery. The large brownstone has enough room for his mother, mother-in-law, and “various siblings”.

Houdini continues to explore new acts, from the underwater escape, to the Chinese Water Torture Cell, to the jailbreaks. He also tries his hand at being a pilot and movie actor. In an interesting twist, he takes on the Spiritualist movement, explaining that “Professional magicians have always been at war/with Spiritualists.” Clearly not one for seances, in Spiritualism, he says:

I hated the way these dimestore frauds

played on the vulnerabilities of their followers.

I yearned so much to speak with Mama,

knowing it was impossible in this life,

infuriated by the cruelty, taking advantage of grief.

Fakery demeans mourning, and mourning is sacred.

The focus of his disdain becomes Lady Conan Doyle, the wife of the famous writer and creator of Sherlock Holmes. Houdini writes a book called A Magician Among the Spirits (no coincidence with the title of this collection!), where he exposes the movement. Some of the people he attacks try discrediting him as a Jew. From Margery at the Charlesgate:

Bird tried discrediting me by “revealing”

that I was a Jew. Conan Doyle did the same,

calling me “as Oriental as our own Disraeli.”

Even Margery’d sing-songed in Walter’s voice, “

Harry Houdini, he sure is a sheeny.”

But who got the last laugh?

After my lecture at the New York Police Academy

on “How to Catch Fake Spiritualists,”

Edmund Wilson praised me in the New Republic,

a highbrow intellectual journal.

Sweet vindication!

Take that, you anti-Semitic frauds!

At the end of the collection, his wife, Bess, talks about his untimely death, most likely from an acute appendicitis. She tries—insincerely at best—to reach her husband through a séance. In The Great Escape she writes:

Would we ever meet? I wondered, remembering

the letter I wrote to Sir Arthur.

“It was Houdini himself that was the secret,”

I’d explained, no need for “psychic help”

to perform his escapes.

Rammelkamp does an excellent job describing the highlights of Houdini’s life in the first person. He does it with grace and humor. His writing is clear and direct, allowing Houdini to simply tell his amazing story. By the end of the collection, we still don’t know how Houdini pulled off his acts, but I’m not sure anyone knows. It’s part of the magic of his life. Says Bess at the end of the poem:

Ah, escape!

Every escape is a success story, no?

Now you see me,

now you don’t.

You can find the book here:A Magician Among the Spirits

Stewart Florsheim’s poetry has been widely published in magazines and anthologies. He was the editor of Ghosts of the Holocaust, an anthology of poetry by children of Holocaust survivors (Wayne State University Press, 1989). He wrote the poetry chapbook, The Girl Eating Oysters (2River, 2004). In 2005, Stewart won the Blue Light Book Award for The Short Fall From Grace (Blue Light Press, 2006). His collection, A Split Second of Light, was published by Blue Light Press in 2011 and received an Honorable Mention in the San Francisco Book Festival, honoring the best books published in the Spring of 2011. Stewart’s new collection, Amusing the Angels, won the Blue Light Book Award in 2022.

Transparency Notice: Charles Rammelkamp is a regular contributor to North of Oxford

These Days of Simple Mooring by Florence Weinberger

By Charles Rammelkamp

In “My Very Own Opera,” one of the new poems in These Days of Simple Mooring, Florence Weinberger writes:

A cantor’s wail becomes a lullaby my father sang which kicks off

Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody which triggers La Boheme, shaky

bridges over troubled waters. It’s all in the shuffle.

This is an apt description of Weinberger’s creative process, how her poems develop, the associations that drive her verse. It’s all in the shuffle, indeed. In another new poem, “The Prescription,” she writes about her doctor suggesting she eat something salty to combat sluggishness (“Are you kidding me?” Salt, after all, has been a no-no for years – bad for kidney stones, blood pressure, tissues and organs, right?), but –

It licks me back home

to my mother’s kitchen.

I don’t compare

the slick of fat.

I don’t care. I’m told

to eat salt, to taste

total recall…

Memory is a key ingredient to her poetry. At ninety, Florence Weinberger has a long life to draw on. In a poem from 2010’s Sacred Graffiti called “The reason I don’t visit your grave,” she asks her dead husband, “Are you still listening? I tend to digress.” (“God, I’d love to make a date / to drink wine with your ghost,” she writes earlier in the poem.) Digression is her crabwise approach to meaning, the memories that pile on one another like hamsters in a nest of cedar shavings.

These Days of Simple Mooring includes selections from four previous collections, The Invisible Telling Its Shape (1997) Breathing Like a Jew (1997), Sacred Graffiti and Ghost Tattoo (2018). “Mame Loshen, The Mother Tongue,” from Breathing Like a Jew, takes her back to her childhood.

Yiddish, my first language,

you were given to me whole, your wild colors

intact, your bent humor, centuries

of bottled-up rage and richly-imagined revenge.

The poem’s a memory of her father. She writes that she believed in him, believed “his dazzling litany of dirty jokes,” “his poker-player’s paranoia,”

because out of this avalanche of language,

punctuated by deep painful rasps of breath

as he battled bronchitis and then emphysema,

still smoking those pungent Turkish cigarettes,

came the rhythm of my poems, like hard slaps

with an open palm….

The rhythm of Weinberger’s poems certainly whacks a reader out of his complacency. “As if all the gods have slashed their wrists at once / your inexhaustible waters pour and pour,” she begins “Iguazu Falls,” an ode to the Argentine waterfall, one of the new poems. “Where are this century’s muses, have they abandoned their vocation, / are they hefting Berettas instead of bone flutes?” she starts another new poem, “”Renew Us to the Mercy of Lyres and Flutes.” Got your attention yet? How can you help but read on?

The poem, “Hitchhiker,” from Sacred Graffiti, quintessentially evinces Weinberger’s style. She’s driving her car past “one of those lost unkempt souls / you see stranded at bus benches trailing / their parcels of loose ends.” Reflexively waving her away and driving on, Weinberger has second thoughts. The girl wasn’t a gang member, after all; she just needed a lift. Weinberger feels a pang guilt.

No sooner had I fled the scene,

I began to play the game of what if.

I began to take credit

for that spontaneous kindness.

“I began to play with a memory already receding,” she writes, “I can no longer tell you what she was wearing.” Memory and imagination conspire to create a poem that a guilty conscience inspired.

Weinberger’s mother and father – her whole family – are never far from her mind. They are inspirations for so many of these poems, as are Judaism and art. “Mother’s Blood,” a new poem, is a memory of her mother’s help when as a young girl she began menstruating. “My Mother’s House,” from Ghost Tattoo, is a poem about her joy at tracking down the house in Ukraine where her mother grew up, though the actual house is long gone. The joy lies in understanding her mother’s childhood,

what it is to live in snow and planting seasons,

what it is to dig into the earth, milk a cow,

fear soldiers on horses,

drunken neighbors with mouths full of curses,

that’s still here, I feel it, her fear,

I feel her here.

Weinberger writes in “The Power of My Mother’s Arms”:

My mother’s death changed the alchemy of food.

Holidays run together now like ungrooved rivers.

I forget what they are for.

I buy bakery goods.

They look dead under the blue lights.

I forget what they are for.

I buy bakery goods.

They look dead under the blue lights.

“What’s mine was my mother’s first,” Weinberger concludes the poem “Whole Grains and Hard, Harmonious Ways.” “How do I spend these final years?”

“Smoking with My Father” from Sacred Tattoo is another affectionate memory of her father, teaching her how to smoke cigarettes. “Years later

a man in a Max Beckmann painting

holding a cigarette European style

reminded me how my father and I

bonded, when I was sixteen….

A mother herself, her two daughters and their offspring also figure prominently in the poems. “My Daughters Tell Their Friends,” one the new ones, and “My two daughters drop me off at the museum” are two titles, the latter poem, from Ghost Tattoo, also highlighting Weinberger’s interest in art, as the poem weaves in and out of various thoughts, with Weinberger-esque association.

These Days of Simple Mooring includes at least a half dozen ekphrastic poems, including “A Common Grayness Silvers Everything,” with references to Diane Arbus, Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange and other photographers; “Unraveling Darkness,” which, like “My two daughters drop me off at the museum,” involves Mark Rothko; “Picasso’s Four Bulls”; “Ejaculate Trajectory I, II, III,” works by the transgressive photographer Andres Serrano; “Revisiting Ozymandias,” sculptures by Albert Szukalski; “You Remind Me of Someone,” Maria Lassnig’s painting, Du Odor Ich.

Judaism and Jewishness are important themes in the poems as well. The rituals of mourning, of eating (“Let me fashion prayer from a piece of dough,” she writes in “The Power of My Mother’s Arms”), references to the Torah, survivors of the Nazi death machine, modern-day Israel. “Where I Was When Yitzhak Rabin Was Assassinated,” an elegy for the murdered peacemaker, is a memory of being in Las Vegas at the time. “I am in the city of chance, city of sham and amnesia.”

These Days of Simple Mooring concludes with “Announcement,” a musing about a sort of DIY obituary, like rescuing her own memory: her very own opera, indeed! Florence Weinberger’s unique voice and verse make for an impressive read.

You can find the book here: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/these-days-of-simple-mooring-florence-weinberger/1141969354

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Muddying the Holy Waters by Chocolate Waters

muddy

By Charles Rammelkamp

Without putting too much emphasis on the cleverness of the title, the words “muddying” and “holy” stand out as the labels of Chocolate Waters’ new collection. “Holy” is an apt description of her outlook, an almost spiritual, if comic and irreverent, voice that spins the narrative of her life; “muddying” certainly pinpoints the details of growing up in a dysfunctional family in the strangling conformity of a Republican small town, being the outsider everywhere, generally.

Muddying the Holy Waters is made up of two parts. “Impossible” is about an unrequited love affair with an unnamed woman. “I’d Rather Be a Toad,” subtitled “(the Curse and the Blessing of Mount Joy, PA),” is about her family, about growing up. Consisting of poems, essays and photographs (mostly in the second part, snapshots of her parents, siblings and herself), the collection is a retrospective of her life, as she enters her 70’s. Her goal in putting this collection together, she tells us in concluding essay, “The End is the Beginning – Muddying Your Own Holy Waters,” is to get to “the authentic bottom line of [my] life experiences,” to “explain how difficult it is for me to be vulnerable, to go beyond expressing my default reaction which is just to be majorly pissed off.”

“My life has been about rejection,” Waters writes in her introduction to “Impossible.” She also tells us about the origin of her name, the taunts of her classmates calling her “Choc-o-lotta Weirdo,” but also, living less than half an hour away from Hershey, named for “the religious racist chocolate magnate,” had something to do with it. (Spoiler alert: her parents named her Marianne, which I learned from reading the caption to a newspaper photograph of her as the Douglas High School spelling bee champion, in the second part.)

But rejection is at the heart of “Impossible,” in which she describes the evolution of her sexuality, from rejection by high school boys to eventually identifying as lesbian. She’s one of the first openly lesbian poets to publish in the United States, part of Second-wave feminism, which flourished in the 1960s and 1970s. First-wave feminism focused on voting and property rights; second-wave expanded the debate to include issues of sexuality, the workplace, and family.

As a front-line warrior, she experienced plenty of rejection. But this sequence focuses on a particular love interest that never developed the way she wanted. From poems like “Encounter #1” and “First Rush” (“longing to / ingest you / whole or / bit by bit”), in which her desire takes hold, to “Apology” and “Dirty Karma” she confesses her hopes, only to have them dashed in “Things I Won’t Have to Do (since I’ll never see you again)” and “Bang Bang” (“She shot me down / as I was talking on the phone / She shot me down as I was washing the dishes / as I was watching Netflix / as I was peeing”). The bitter reactions morph: “You Don’t Deserve Me” begins:

You know you don’t
The nights I howled over your rejection
What tossing me out the window did

Then, in the “Afterthoughts” section come the episodes of drunk dialing. The rejection still hurts.

The first section also contains a sometimes-funny, mostly sad series of poems about the dead animals in her life, from a favorite collie to her faithful cat Scruff-o (“for seven years he loved me”). We’ve all lost pets. Waters captures the heartbreak with real sensitivity.

The second section, “I’d Rather Be a Toad,” is by far the more affecting sequence, starting with the essay, “How Mount Joy Transformed Me into a Pisser Poet.” This section is all about her parents and siblings. If she is often unsentimental in her assessments of family members, she is always forgiving, affectionate. To her brother Bob she writes:

you are so terrified
of me
pagan dyke poet telling my truth in a bar
as i am
of you
good christian
telling yours in a church

Chocolate confesses her shortcomings as an older sibling, growing up in Mount Joy, Pennsylvania, her impatience, but she concludes her short essay, “What Good Are Brothers?”: “So what good are brothers? More than I thought, more than I have the ability to say.”

But it’s the poems about her mother and father that cut the deepest. Her dad was a bigamist, a second family they only learned about later. He was also a real prick to his wife. They both essentially hated each other but stayed married. When her father died, Chocolate was heartbroken. He was her favorite. She writes in “waiting room”:

I was in the waiting room w/uncle billy
down on my knees in public
crying unabashedly
gasping so hard
my tears strangled me
praying to a god I didn’t believe in

About her mother, she is not so teary. Though she recognizes her mother was a victim, she still can’t quite forgive. In “pauline’s daughter” she writes,

it was impossible having you for a mom
no way you could have mothered wild-child
brilliant
pissed-off
melancholic me
i ran more circles around you
than a venn diagram
but what was it like for you
left alone to parent four young children

abandoned by your husband
who preferred the company
of any woman but you

In “Mommie Dearest” she addresses Pauline who is lying in her coffin: “”What do I say to your dead body?” No breast-beating at this bedside.

The Mount Joy poems are bookended by the “Curse” poem – “I ran away / oh the freedom in escaping / the christian republican evangelists” – and the blessing:

two kinda of people live here
the ones who go to church and
the ones who go to the bar
had i stayed
i’d become a raging alcoholic
or a hallelujah

Chocolate Waters clarifies her muddied waters in this affecting collection, so we can see ourselves down there at the bottom as well.

You can find the book here: https://www.amazon.com/Muddying-Holy-Waters-Chocolate/dp/0935060111

Casualty Reports by Martha Collins

cas reports

By Charles Rammelkamp

Martha Collins’ new collection is dedicated to “the casualties of Covid-19; to the casualties of racism inflicted by the police and others in the United States and throughout the world.” The poems shine a light on the casual cruelties the powerful inflict upon the vulnerable, the exploitation, the inhumanity, the total lack of empathy.

The book is also dedicated to the memory of her father, William E. Collins, whose similar stories of exploitation in the coal industry are highlighted as part of the thematic thrust of Casualty Reports.

The tone is necessarily elegiac but the verse is written in a style that is at once allusive and expository, suggestive and explicit. Several poems in the final section, “And Also,” are indeed elegies for lost friends. In fact, Casualty Reports is finally dedicated to Collins’ late friend, the peace activist/poet Lee Sharkey, whose collection I Will Not Name It Except to Say, which likewise addresses injustice and inhumanity, was published in 2021, after her death in October of the previous year.

Casualty Report is made up of five sections, two titled “Legacy,” which deal with coal – coal mining, coal miners and unions, pollution, propaganda – and two titled “Reports,” which focus on other injustices for which we have a collective accountability – racism, poverty, war, gun violence among them.

The first poem in the first Legacy section – the first poem in the collection – is called “In Illinois” and deals with her family’s history in the coal mining business, great-grandfather and grandfather dating back to 1871.

My father whose mother kept him out of the mines kept

his father’s fathers oil lamp kept his father’s carbine

& safety lamps kept a box of wicks-picks-globes kept

his father’s 50-year union pin his first aid pin his

flashlight safe for use kept manuals papers This lamp\

was given all labeled This pin was given kept it all it was

his legacy labeled dated 1965 & signed & kept for me

Two poems later is “A History of American Coal Through the Lens of Illinois,” largely a prose description of organized labor – United Mine Workers of America – with a mention of Mother Jones, and the largest private-sector coal company in the world, the Peabody Coal Company. Subsequent poems – “Du Quoin,” “Herrin,” “Virden” – highlight the brutal massacres of miners in parts of southern Illinois, union members and Blacks. Poems like “Store” and “Model Miners (2005)” allude to Merle Travis’ celebrated country song, “Sixteen Tons” (famously covered by Tennessee Ernie Ford) about the virtual slavery of the miners to the coal companies for which they worked (“Saint Peter don’t you call me ’cause I can’t go / I owe my soul to the company store”).

Collins does for coal mining what Herman Melville did for whaling in Moby-Dick, an exhaustive overview and close examination of its history and its global implications, from “A History,” which cites references to coal in the Oxford English Dictionary from as far back as 1387, to “Types of Coal Mines,” which include coal picked up from the surface, to mines going deeper and deeper, more intricate and elaborate, to the controversial practice of mountaintop removal mining, which devastates the landscape, turning lush forests into barren moonscapes. “Burning” focuses on the poisons and pollution.

the mercury, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen

oxides from burning coal that fill

our air & fall upon us as acid rain—

the selenium, arsenic, lead from coal

ash stored in coal ash ponds that leak

& spill & pollute our waters—

but most of all the carbon dioxide

released by burning that captures

heat that warms our air & melts

our glaciers, lifts our seas & warms

them, dries our land & fuels fires,

strengthens rainfalls & hurricanes….

The previously mentioned “Model Miners (2005)” is a poetic transcript of a propaganda piece General Electric made to depict coal miners as sexy Marlboro men and women, who are concerned about the environment and global warming. The advertising clip can be seen here – https://pophistorydig.com/topics/tag/ge-model-miners-ad/.

The poems in the two “Reports” sections concentrate on other forms of worldwide injustices. The five-part poem, “Lamentations,” modeled, Collins tells us in an endnote, after the Biblical Book of Lamentations, was written in response to an interdisciplinary project about guns and gun violence. The first part begins:

America more guns more than us

Bullets bullets bullets bullets more

Children in school boy in park no sorrow

The subsequent parts allude to Trayvon Martin, mass shootings in locations across America (El Paso, Dayton, Midland Odessa), hate crimes and gang violence. It ends, part five, echoing Lamentations, with a call to remember the dead:

Remember our people killed by guns

we have more guns than people

. Remember our 100 people killed each day

the shot and injured

Remember our 1000 killed each year by police….

“For Gaza” is a poem about the shabby treatment of the Palestinians by the Israeli government. “Blue” is a poem that refers to the Vietnamese monks who set themselves on fire in protest in the 1960’s. The poem, “Like Her Body the World” sums up our inherent responsibility in the whole mess. Collins writes:

we are part of the body we forgot

we thought we lived outside like a brain in a jar

we thought we were pure like thought nothing to lose

but we are losing too we are losing parts.

The poems in the final section are more personal, saying goodbye to different friends who have passed on. Casualty Reports is a devastating indictment of our time, of our species, of our less than honorable stewardship of the earth.

You can find the book here: Casualty Reports – University of Pittsburgh Press

Suitor by Joshua Rivkin

By Charles Rammelkamp

“we are what happens by accident,” Joshua Rivkin writes in the first “Envoi” of this lyrical, emotionally probing collection, and goes on:

Suitor, from the Latin secutor,

to follow. I can’t

catch them, or let them go —

So much of the poetry in this book is about desire, the Joie de Vivre it provides and the mistakes and tragedies it can cause. Or, as he writes in the second “Envoi” that bookends the collection, meditating on an orange peel “wound over the core of an apple —”:

imperfect as the marriage

of memory and desire.

Our bodies hunger

and can’t remember for what.

We make the same mistakes over and over again, propelled by our desires. “A New Old Story About Want” is a title that hammers this home. As Rivkin later notes in “Suitor’s Dream,” “I want to begin again.

A new desire is an old one rising.

Old mistake. Old news.

The heart of Suitor is about inherently dysfunctional families, his in particular, about fathers and sons, oddly suited partners, mothers looking for love, everybody looking for love.

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At the physical heart of Suitor, indeed, is a 20-page prose meditation on the moral ambiguities of people titled “The Haber Problem.” Making an implicit comparison between his father, an internationally admired oceanographer, often absent from his family on research expeditions – until he leaves the family altogether, via divorce – and the Nobel Prize-winning scientist, Franz Haber, whose discoveries led to gas warfare in World War I and Zyklon B, the gas used in concentration camps in World War II to murder Jews (Haber, ironically, was a German Jew), Rivkin ponders the moral legacy a man leaves behind him. Rivkin cites one historian’s observation about Haber: “People don’t know whether to admire him or despise him.” On the one hand his discoveries led to artificial fertilizers, expanding how much can be grown, feeding people, and on the other, Haber was an enthusiastic gas warrior and a really horrible husband who drove his wife to suicide. His son likewise killed himself.
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Just so, Rivkin constantly re-evaluates his own father, a boastful guy very much enamored of his own abilities and accomplishments, to the point of obnoxious arrogance. He is a man who has likewise caused emotional pain for his wife – and son. His father has “anger he carries like a pocket watch.”
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The disturbing thing for Rivkin, though, is in his observation that “every father is a window. And in the right light, that window can be a mirror.” He quotes an unnamed poet: “Let us be gentle when we question our fathers.”

Indeed, who among us could stand up to the same microscopic scrutiny? In the poem, “The Ad,” Rivkin suggests something like this. The poem begins with an allusion to a classifieds dating profile:

The ad I answered asked for me

or the man I wanted

to be. On paper we sing.

In flesh, we’re off-key.

Do we ever measure up to our ideals? Life gets in the way. We can’t always live up to our self-conceptions. He treats his lover badly, ghosting him until he goes away. The poem ends:

The man I promised

to be – taller, surer,

content – left too.

On paper I sing.

In flesh I run.

Rivkin’s verse predominantly consists of these short lines, the language spare, allusive, vivid, wise. The two parts of poems that are broken up by “The Haber Problem” in the center are like mirror images. Both begin with multi-part poems entitled “The Suitors” and “Envoi” followed by a handful of lyric poems.

The suitors Rivkin catalogs in part one are the men who wooed his mother after his father left, making the reader think of Penelope and Telemachus (or not). “My mother’s third boyfriend owned a Peugeot / he let me drive over the Choptank River Bridge.” Another suitor (or a different view of the same one?):

He was a different kind of wisdom poet –

faith in real estate, rolls of Lifesavers

and Amway. He sold cleaning supplies

and cologne from his Buick’s backseat.

The “suitors” in the second part are Rivkin’s own lovers, male and female. One of these segments begins:

Her mother warned her never to date a writer.

Or become one.

They have no skills in this world

just lies and sweet talk

mixing up the story they tell

and the story they live.

Hah! But this also gets at the perplexing dichotomy Rivkin riffs on throughout between a person’s self-conception and his or her actual life. “The Docent,” from part two, further digs into the duplicity of relationships. Again referring to classical literature, this “docent” can be seen as a sort of Virgil figure (or not), but turned on its head.

We lied about our first meeting.

We lied to our friends. To each other.

Rivkin ends the poem by addressing the docent himself about this essentially misguided relationship: “My coy guide,” he writes,

where are we going? When will we arrive?

What will we call that place?

But of course, it always comes back to the mothers and fathers. In the poem “Tashlich,” from the first part, referring to the Jewish custom on Rosh Hashanah of symbolically tossing your sins away in the water with bread crumbs, the speaker unloads everything into the stream, shirts, socks, pants, wallet.

the watch from your wrist, a name,

shame, a stubborn reflection that holds to you

as you hold to it,

your father’s voice, your mother’s eyes.

Toward the end of the collection, sounding almost like a Yiddish curse (“May you be so rich your widow’s husband never has to work a day” or “May your teeth all fall out except one so you can still get toothache,” are classic examples), Rivkin writes in “At Night You Read to Me”:

If I write again about my father

may my hands fall off,

my tongue harden to obsidian.

Or give me the punishment of myths:

my son will never speak to me;

or he’ll speak to me in that tone, write

every mistake, tell all I’ve done wrong

and regret every word.

Suitor is a satisfying read on many levels, both admirable as artistic expression and valuable as self-reflection, uncovering certain universal truths about all families.

You can buy the book here: https://www.amazon.com/Suitor-Joshua-Rivkin/dp/1597098582