Antique Densities by Jefferson Navicky

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By Lynette G. Esposito

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Jefferson Navicky uses the technique of short prose poems in his book, Antique Densities published by Deerbrook Editions,Cumberland, ME The volume is divided into five sections and an introduction.  In the introduction, Navicky calls his poems parables.

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 I call the pieces “parables” not because of some ancient moral lesson each one possesses, but rather in honor of Wisdom: 100 Modern Parables (edited by Howard Schwartz 1998). 

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The tome is skillfully structured to reflect the theme of each of the five sections: Books, Maps, City Directories, Transcripts of Oral History and Special Collections. In the first section, the poems deliver observations about books.  They are set forth in a form that resembles paragraphs, but each seem to have a beginning, middle and end much like a short story.  On page eighteen he offers a short one stanza poem entitled A Book.

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Oblivion recorded, she made her way back.  The road, pocked.  Her eyes: vacant. En route, she bought, from a boy in rags, a box.  In it. she put all she’d seen, her dust, her dreams, jealousies of all kinds, gone ambitions and the small bits of hope she had left.

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It feels as if the poem is unfinished.  Navicky is deliberate in this so the reader feels that shred of hope that leads the narrator forward.

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On pages forty to forty-two, Map of the Provinces in the Maps section, is divided into nine sections with a title for each.  The technique to title the stanzas is interesting and provides focus and direction to the poem, The last stanza is titled Epilogue and pulls the poem together.

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The map was given to me as a parting gift from a friend who was moving across country to attend seminary.  She told me this map had been waiting for me.  It was, she said a map the Jesuits used in the early days in Mexico to further their missionaries. She pressed the square block of wood in my hand saying, make your own story.

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In City Directories, Navicky continues the story in the poem Trains to the Provinces on page forty-seven.

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The one-stanza twenty-eight-line poem leads the reader both away from the station and back in one swift turn.  This poem sets up the rest of this section for travel to other places such as of Mexico City and Carsonville.

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The poems in this ninety-eight-page volume are narrative with a conversational low-key tone.The reader does not always anticipate where the poem is going but Navicky controls the pace and message of the verse so the endings of the poems are logical and meaningful. The reader needs to pay particular attention to the punctuation because it controls much of the precise meaning. The book is a good read.  

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Antique Densities is available from www.deerbrookeditions.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.

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Come Closer by Laurie Blauner

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By Lynette G. Esposito

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Rich Ives author of Light from a Small Brown Bird says of Laurie Blauner’s Come Closer that it is an assemblage of inter woven prose poems.  He adds that fresh patterns patiently emerge in varied and surprising forms. Close Encounters, published by The Bitter Oleander Press in Fayetteville, New York, fulfills this promise.

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In the poem I’m Not Like the Others, Blauner creates a form that looks like a conversation with paragraph indentions that support the form and lines that indicate back and forth dialogue. The poem is in part one.

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…I’m Not Like the Others,

I tell the lost little boy wandering in the woods.

He hides behind a tree with long, wispy branches and leaves.  When he asks, I

Allow him to touch my stray feathers that will soon turn into green scales.

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The poem continues with back -and- forth conversations and reads much like a piece of fiction.

The storyline progresses with the creature trying to show the boy the way to safety. but then something surprising happens to this creature who wants to be his better self.

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I am not like the others, I reiterate.  Come, I will show you the way.

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…We saunter towards the edge of the trees before there is a field.  The lost boy is slow.  I move behind him, lick his neck to encourage to go faster.

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When I taste him, I can’t help myself, like the others.

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The poem is like a parable that reveals the conflict of one’s inner struggle and the reality of what one is when they collide. Blauner has excellent control all through this verse with her skillful ability to draw the reader into the woods and keep him there.

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The tome is divided into four parts:  I’m Not Like the Others, The Books, The City That Knows Me, and he Guide for the Perplexed.  This is a good organizing technique and helps to focus each section. In part two, The Books, the poem, A Memoir is constructed first with a prose stanza followed by eleven one-line stanzas each beginning with the pronoun I.

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…I’ve been told that the use of I is too prevalent in my writing.

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She then goes on with her reactions.

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I tell myself:

 

I enjoy complaining.

 

I talk and cry too much in my sleep.

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The reader gets to know her better in her defiance of overusing the word I according to others.

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In part three, The City That Knows Me, in the poem, Memoirs From the City, Blauner uses paragraph like stanzas that contrast the feeling in the country compared to the city.

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…I dream of going to the country whose space the city is jealous of,

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She uses the landscape surrounding the city as her comparison and skillfully reveals discontent in both. In part four, Guide for the Perplexed, Blauner explores the poem Aging in the Little Place.

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…Alive, he took me out to dinner with my tiny head.  I whispered into

his enormous car that something was hurting me, something was always hurting

me for a while.

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The poem explores the physiological view of oneself as one gets older and the value goes down. Blauner ends the poem with the note that the little body would soon be gone.

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The book is a successful merger of prose-like forms and poetic creativity.  The subjects are universal and handled in a fresh way.  I would read this book of verse again.  

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Come Closer is available from http://www.bitteroleander.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.

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Flutter, Kick by Anna V. Q. Ross

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By Lynette G, Esposito

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Flutter, Kick by Anna V. Q. Ross features poetry that explores the human aspects of the feminist voice that deals with hurt, loss and solution. Ross observes from complex angles and touches, with a light hand, issues that affect women’s lives.

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In her poem, Milk Teeth on page twenty-two, she speaks of her problems in conceiving and the kindness of friends who suggest she should foster. Later in other poems, she reveals she has a son and a daughter transcending the hurt and loss to solution. 

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While her friends could not predict her future, she demonstrates in her poem, Passenger Pigeon on page thirty-three, how short-sighted people can be in other ways. She opens the poem with:

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I read they traveled

in flocks big as hurricanes, and fast

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She purposely suggests the past in the tense of her verb and how her knowledge of the pigeons is from research. The one- stanza poem says a person could reach up and grab a bird there were so many flying so low. Her view of how we see what we want to see and the lack of seeing the outcome is clear.

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Who was the passenger?

Or is passage the important part–

the routes they moved through air.

We care so much about who

belongs where, arm ourselves

against the imaginary. No one

believed they could die out.

There were so many.

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The poem is short, only eighteen lines, but the message suggests the outcome of how many can become few and then none without anyone predicting it.

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Ross explores memories and scenes as she uses everyday reminders of the good and the bad. On a train ride she pictures the beautiful school her children attend but drowns the thought in sorrow of a shooter. This is a poem brought from the headlines that breaks a heart.

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She addresses another headline issue on page sixty-five in her poem The Crossing, where Ross suggests how people depersonalize migrants.

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In this morning’s paper thirteen women

Drowned off the coast of Lampedusa–

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The mothers, fathers, babies were called migrants by the Italian coast card that came to their rescue as if they were different from people. The one-stanza poem observes that help is not always helpful and good intentions do not always provide good results.

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In this poem, Ross has taken current problems and made them personal in how one views others.  She uses the image of the water opening up to those fallen from the boat and closing over them because the rush of water from the fast- moving coast guard vessel caused the water to rise like a hand in greeting and scuttled the boat.

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The volume is divided into four unnamed sections.  Ross explores both personal issues and subjects that are in the modern news cycle.  She has a contemporary voice that intermixes universal issues with personal ones.  This works well throughout the ninety-one pages of verse.  It has an earthy and realistic tone as if she raised chickens in her backyard and named every one of them.

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You can find the book here: https://redhen.org/book/flutter-kick/

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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.

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Portable Light – New and Selected Poems by Mike James

By Lynette G, Esposito

 

Portable Light New and Selected Poems 1991-2021 by Mike James published by Redhawk Publications (The Catawba Valley Community College Press) Hickory, North Carolina features one hundred and twenty-three pages of poetry that interweaves common images with uncommon juxtapositions presenting old themes in new ways.

 

The volume is divided into two sections including New Poems and Selected Poems. In the New Poems section on page twenty- three, James presents sunlight and one’s expectation of it in his poem In This Place.

 

I expect the morning light to end

And it does.

It does.

 

The sun reminds me which way is west,

One less thing to guess about,

Take me away from my plowed down routine

I’m mostly lost.

 

His narrative voice brings the reader into his morning observations, drawing without unnecessary details, how quickly morning disappears. In choosing the word end, the impression is direct and stark.  Something is over just as it begins. The final stanza of the three-stanza poem concludes:

 

The dreams I wake with don’t stay close.

Last night I dreamed about walking among flowers.

This morning, one window frames

The consolation of an empty field.

 

James skillfully guides the message with a light touch. Dreams are as fleeting as the morning sunlight. We have all been there.

 

His poem Sitting on the Back Porch, in Summer at Dusk in the Selected Poems Section on page forty-eight, works with juxtaposing an observation of nature and a human response.  The poem is made up of mostly unrhymed couplets and feels as if one is having a conversation with oneself.

 

my children play in the neighbor’s field

games they make up themselves

 

my wife somewhere else

wherever that is

 

James has established the place through his title and the situation by putting his family away from where he is alone on the porch. The narrator observes the crow and suggests the crow observes him.

A crow lands and human and bird stare.

 

after a few minutes he makes his loud cry

then flies away

 

I can’t repeat the cry he makes

only the silence he leaves

 

This is a skillful poem that visualizes a quiet lonely moment on a back porch and shapes its message into a comment on the ability of nature compared to the silence of man.

 

James explores carnal knowledge in his poem Questions for Genesis. This is one of those long skinny poems that slides down the page like a string.

 

did eve’s lips

grow lustful

after the first

bite of the

apple did she

inhale in

anticipation

of adam’s

scent think

of her own

which she

barely knew

did she

quickly look

over each

shoulder’to

see if animals

saw her

different

before she chewed

 

In the series of questions, the focus is clearly on eve but the bigger question becomes obvious in the last lines. Is she perceived different now? Again, James is skillful in focus and in drawing the reader into the world he creates.  He does not rely on capitalization or punctuation but on image and message.

 

This tome is well worth a read and reread.  The themes are varied as well as the poetic forms. James has excellent control in his poetic works and is able to lead the reader to places they don’t realize they are going.

 

Portable Light is available here: https://redhawkpublications.com/Portable-Light-New-&-Selected-Poems-1991-2021-p414512514

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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.

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The Girl Who Quit at Leviticus by Suzanne Rhodenbaugh

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By Lynette G. Esposito

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The Girl Who Quit at Leviticus by Suzanne Rhodenbaugh is a slim tome published by Homestead Lighthouse Press in Grants Pass, Oregon. In fifty-seven pages of thoughtful. irreverent, and unsentimental observation, Rhodenbaugh explores universal themes of faith love, death in addition to flowers in a mixed variety of poetic forms.

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In her poem, Religious Preference on page five, Rhodenbaugh presents two stanzas and an ending couplet that explores a relationship with God but suggests an earthy connection. The poem is evocative, focused and well controlled reversing the one who is face down on the ground with the worshipped God.  Are we talking faith here or is this poem suggestive of desire and lust or both? Word choices such as trough of love and manageable tick suggest animals and bugs which are not usually associated with love.  But the poem gives attitude.  The narrator in the poem is not just a beast feeding or kneeling, but a thinking being who is demanding. I like the clarity and form of the poem.  It put a smile on my face as I visualized God in tight jeans at a Biker Bar ready for game.

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I don’t want to feed

at the trough of love.

I don’t want to wait or stand.

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I don’t want to kneel

before a prostrate God,

or a manageable tick

in a blurred white sky.

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I want a sky that is hot and blue,

God in pants, and full of the devil.

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In her StoryFlowers poem beginning on page fourteen, she gives the reader a series of definitions

that tell flower stories.  The first stanza titled Iris is just two lines.

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Once I was all lips and tongue.

Now I am a fist.

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She continues this story telling through fourteen different flowers for example Petunias on page seventeen.

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Droopy Daliesque trumpets,

until the sun plays them

up.

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All the stanzas are short in this poem and focus on an observable suggestion of a flower’s personality in the garden.  This is both a fun and serious poem.

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The title poem, The Girl Who Quit at Leviticus, on page fifty, begins at a day camp.

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A blue spot shone on the Methodist Youth Camp

Counselors acting out

Smoking, Drinking, Cussing,

sin blue as a saloon. …

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The narrator, after observing the actions of the holy counselors in the first stanza, resolves in the second to read the whole Bible in one year.  In the third stanza, the speaker says:

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The Devil, who wasn’t big on Methodists,

never took me.  There was no Big Fall.

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In seven stanzas the narrator goes from a pony tailed girl who strays into other good books like The Black Stallion and The Return of the Black Stallion to a young woman who becomes more aware of life through reading.  She reads tales of mystery and slaughter, Into love and dark achievement.  Because of these other readings separate from the Good Book, she says in the last stanza:

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whereby I missed the angels,

and the pale horses of Revelations.

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The poem is well controlled using the common space and time of an innocent girl with a big goal becoming distracted with the love of reading as she grows up. The poem represents faith interrupted but not abandoned.  Rhodenbaugh has a light touch with a serious subject, and it works.

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Rhodenbaugh has an unsentimental approach to traditionally sentimental themes.  Her attention to both detail and form works well throughout.  The poems mix levity with solemn subjects which creates a question of how loud you should laugh, how quiet should you cry. This is an interesting group of poems worth traveling through.

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The Girl Who Quit at Leviticus is available from www.homesteadlighthousepress.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.

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The Bar at Twilight by Frederic Tuten

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By Lynette G. Esposito

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The Bar at Twilight by Frederic Tuten published by Bellevue Literary Press, New York in May, 2022 is a selection of seventeen short stories that cover the gamut of universal themes including love, loss, and grief.

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In the title story, The Bar at Twilight, beginning on page seventy-nine, Tuten opens with:

He walked into the bar, twilight at his heels, and without thinking ordered a scotch neat. 

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The scene is set. Tuten explores the character’s conversations for a while as if this were a normal bar throwing in hints of the importance that it is twilight and the bar has a ghostly history.   As the reader approaches the end of the story, he carefully leads the reader through the snow to a boat that takes the bar’s occupants out to the open sea. Tuten has explored the themes of love, loss, reconciliation, hope, despair and much more in this short piece of fiction.

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The language is both common and sophisticated as the participants in the bar reveal themselves and each character becomes an individual with a history as they get to know each other. The pace is well controlled and focused bordering on mythology and reality as the occupants ingest their liquor.

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In The Phantom Tower beginning on page one hundred eighty-five, Tuten explores the relationship of a boy to his father and how the world is understood.  The boy asked his father What is the world made of?  His father answers Made of nothing and is nothing.  Tuten uses a dream sequence to show the boy who has become a man climbing a phantom tower while his wife calls to him to come down. When the father buys the boy books and tells him he has reached the age of reason, the reader is alerted that this is a story about finding one’s self in the world and climbing the phantom tower in a dream leads to discovery.  The subtlety of this story telling is wonderful.

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On page two hundred and fifty-six, the story Coda, Some Episodes in the History of My Reading, is divided into mini chapters like those in a book: Bed, The Seduction, The Poisonous Book, Another Book, Another Folly and A New Love.  For those who love to read books, this story details how it begins, how it continues and the reasons one appreciates reading.

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Tuten is a skillful story teller. I particularly like the titles Tuten has chosen for his stories.  They are clean, neat and focused.  Winter, 1965 suggests time and place. The Safe, the Sea, Deauville, 1966 also suggests time and place but hints at a relationship amongst the three. The Restaurant, The Concert, The Bat, The Bed, Le Petit Dejeuner appears to be a layered title that focuses on particulars within the story.  Tuten chooses the titles for his stories so that they enrich the fiction.

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The tome is composed of two hundred and seven-three pages of short reads good for a cold winter in front of a warm fire or on a work break.  Well worth the time to explore.

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You can find the book here: https://www.amazon.com/Bar-at-Twilight-Frederic-Tuten/dp/1954276036

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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.

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Event Horizon by Cate Marvin

By Lynette G. Esposito

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Event Horizon by Cate Marvin, published by Copper Canyon Press (Port Townsend, Washington, May 2022) is ninety pages of long, sometimes prose-like poems that deal with universal subjects such as relationships, memories and life problems.

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Rendezvous with Ghost on page eleven explores the possible sensual relationship with a ghost in an historic hotel filled with memories.

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Did it transpire to rise from beneath the floorboards?

Did it escape into the room through a heating vent?

Suddenly, my head palpable as an apple, felt its eyes.

The folding chairs woven into the room by their rows.

The shining caps of knees bent that belong to bodies

that sat with ears attentive as rabbits struck midfield

by a passing motor…

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The eerie scene is set.  The poem consists of twenty-six lines in a one-stanza form presented visibly like a newspaper column.  The narrator’s voice erupts in the last line in italics: But I love him, I love him, I love him.  All is made clear in this imaginative love story.

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Marvin’s poem Blue on pages forty-seven and forty-eight is dedicated to Adam Zagajewski (1945–2021)

and explores grief with the memory of shared observances in nature.

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I really like that joe-eyed weed.

Pictures of pretty pink wildflowers

can hinder sorrow for a second,

by the idea of filling my yard with

the distraction of blossoms whose

colors turn on like a hundred radio

stations all at once.  The problem

with plants for me is all the names I can’t remember….

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Marvin skillfully equates flowers, colors and one’s own yard to the alleviation of grief which she gives a time frame to—a second.  The reader can feel the loss through the carefully selected images of things a person wish they did, the lack of remembering things, and the wondering about where one was when death came for the loved one. All work extremely well partly because they are common to all of us.

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The poem has six stanzas all composed of nine lines.  This reminds me of Sylvia Plath who often used form to suggest a message.  I particularly like this.

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In the poem, My Mother Hangs Up, on pages eighty-four, eighty-five and eighty-six, is presented

in couplets mimicking the back- and -forth conversation between a daughter and a mother on the phone and the masks a daughter wears for her mother’s sake.

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I can feel my mind panting.

She asks me to save the program.

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I almost convinced her to fly

to New York to see the performance

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with me but her knee is stiff

and she can’t manage stairs.

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The daughter persuades, the mother resists. The poem continues in this venue.  Marvin sets up scenarios of her past, her mother’s reactions and the ultimate concern that her mother thinks she knows her.  It is a fine example of two people in a complicated relationship, a mother and a daughter,

who understand each other but not in the way they think they do.  Mother love does that.  Daughter love does that, and Marvin hits the target on this.

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You can find the book here: https://www.amazon.com/Event-Horizon-Cate-Marvin/dp/155659643X

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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.

American Maniac by David Spicer

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By Lynette G. Esposito

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n American Maniac by David Spicer, the reader experiences a voice that is loud and clear in seventy-seven pages of poems. Kerby Cassady, author of Overthinking in Poetry, says of American Maniac, it is a must read for anyone uninterested in dreamy fantasies and shiny vehicles that take us nowhere but to our self- deluding perceptions of America.  This book will kick you in the ass and have you begging for more.

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Spicer does not hold back.  In the title poem American Maniac on page thirteen, the tone is aggressive and clear.

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 My sister was the biggest kid

 on the block, so nobody

fucked with me.

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The twenty-seven line one-stanza poem suggests the narrator is a bit of a blow hard with a strange over protective sister who enacts vengeance more like a brother. The structure supports the narrative of the poem as it reads not as a conversation but a declaration. The last few lines pull it all together.

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His sister beat that sonofabitch, too.

Now there is silence,

now there is pretend time

to look out the window, he says,

but none of us in this magic city

believe him, just listen as long

as he wants to talk.

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The observers allow the reader to see the situation and closure comes.

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Anthem of a Terrorist on page forty-eight also demonstrates Spicer’s skillful control of voice.

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Everybody needs to hate

when his eyes are dead.

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The poem continues in eleven couplets that read like mini declarations and puzzle pieces of a damaged angry mind.

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I’ll never die.

I don’t need your weapons.

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He continues.

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I am small but I am God’s brother.

I’ll kill you in my sleep.

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Spicer draws a picture of a dangerous person plotting out his harm to others and elevating himself to godhood.  The poem closes with:

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You are my first enemy.

After you, I will find someone else.

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The poem exposes the big ego of a terrorist and the last line indicates the terror will continue.  It is an excellent poem on a contemporary subject.

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This poetry volume is filled with contemporary themes.  On page seventy-seven, the poem Maniacs Survivor’s Song is again a poem written in eleven couplets with each one making a clear statement. The opening couplet sets the tone and scene.

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Apples will be blue this year.

The bombs fell yesterday.

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The poem mirrors the terrorist poem almost as a response and details of aftermath.

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I can still hear the screams.

They are the new anthem.

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The poem clearly shows that surviving is not pleasant.  He uses nature images and human images that portray the severity of hatred.  The poem closes with:

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and we have found a new God.

She sings to us as if we are lambs.

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The positive side of the poem is that there is survival.  The type and breadth of the survival is not pretty. The Biblical reference to lambs suggests a new beginning and perhaps peace. This is one interpretation. There are, of course, others.

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This tome is one that commands a read and re-read.  It is not for the faint of heart.

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You can find the book here:  https://www.hekatepublishing.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.

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Editor’s note: David Spicer passed from this place on November 25, 2020.

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