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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Aerial Concave Without Cloud by Sueyeun Juliette Lee

By Greg Bem

the invisible latent image
the nature
the time
the amount of agitation

(page 41)

Sueyeun Juliette Lee’s latest book, Aerial Concave Without Cloud, is a flash of brightness amidst and understanding of brightnesses, a meditation on light while immersed in light. It is a book that was composed while exploring the short and long days in Iceland, Norway, and Wyoming. It is a book that moves forward with Lee’s consistent commitments to a living awareness, and phenomenological and ontological understandings of the self and the systems within and beyond the self.

It is a book of poetry that, when unpacked, feels alive, and dependent upon the infinite number of circumstances provided by the reader and their reading form. And yet it is consequentially personal, a book that reads wholly and wholesomely of being and of being unique and of being alone. Lee’s splicing of study, reflection, and explication cycle into a lively poetics both awake and propulsive.

I began my inquiry into light, simply: can I decipher a similar capacity to translate and speak the light with my living human body?

And by doing so, can I relinquish the intensities of an inherited orphan grief?

(page 77)

Lee’s intentions are provided in small, elusive bits and pieces. The “inquiry into light” is one of both knowledge and experience, often inseparable. The text carries us along, as Lee exhibits situation and the process of revelation. Far from dramatic, these epiphanies lend us the exquisite and mysterious analogous to Lee’s settings. To be dreaming beneath the aurora borealis, to be seeking the textures of light within the arctic: a sense of extremes is muted by a calm determination.

The poet’s abstract work, strongly centered in the early moments of the collection, is heartily energized through its sprawling forms. What I appreciate between the snippets of prose and the small slices of poetry is the robust push and pull of certainty and sequence; Lee’s forms are pleasantly natural, hardly forced or constrained. Other times the narrative takes over, leaving behind form to paint a deep portrait of emotional vulnerability, as seen below:

The high ice cliffs around the village loomed over us, even in this small shelter.

I didn’t know how to proceed.
This isolation. It devours.

(page 99)

Often the artist’s explorations into the world are strongly removed from the resultant output. Lee challenges this norm by bringing the experience of “retreat” and “exploration” into the text directly. Just as the name implies, Aerial Concave Without Cloud is thus a book that extends beyond its core themes, offering a meta navigation of those project experiences.

Lee embeds these engagements fluidly. That the poet’s world was shifted, shaped, scraped, and reassembled by way of these travels. Through extreme climates and environments, Lee finds a new home and structure for her research and her creativity.

When I think of breaks in a chain, my mind can’t also help but turn to wonder at continuities, at streaming extensions that failed to break. My imagination turns to light.

(page 88)

Like her previous work, Lee’s latest collection speaks volumes in its entirety. It is the latest advance through a lifelong personal journey. And while it fits snugly alongside her multimedia and poetry of the past, this book also, by way of its focus on light and immersion, evokes a sense of awakening. And yet despite the epiphanies and the discoveries, and the abstract wonder that binds them together, Aerial Concave Without Cloud is but one additional step forward. It is a liminal work and feels hyper realistic as a result. It invites us to think about Lee’s future, and what body of work we will read our way through next.

You can find the book here: https://nightboat.org/book/aerial-concave-without-cloud/

Greg Bem is a poet and librarian living on unceded Duwamish territory, specifically Seattle, Washington. He writes book reviews for Rain Taxi, Yellow Rabbits, and more. His current literary efforts mostly concern water and often include elements of video. Learn more at www.gregbem.com

Indebted to Wind by L.R. Berger

By John Zheng

What flows through L.R. Berger’s Indebted to Wind is the sensibility presented in each poem. It is a physical and emotional response to what the poet sees, experiences, and feels, a visual chord struck in her senses. This sensibility urges Berger to express through images and evokes the reader to experience or revisualize what she gains through her conscious looking.

The title poem, “Indebted to Wind,” brings what the wind carries: the “dandelion silk dispatching seed” and the “neighbor’s trashcan lid… / hurled in a tempest / against the bedroom window.” The definitions that wind offers are “howling, love cry, / lamentation,” inviting associative thinking about the human characteristics of wind. This sensibility juxtaposes nature with human nature with such a visual effect in this stanza:

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When love unbuttoned your blouse

wind did the rest

fumbling through the aspens

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Here, the wind functions like a gentle lover. If it evokes a memorable scene in the past, it also blows to the future and “tutors your own breath / to extinguish the flame” of an unhappy relationship or an unrequited love.

Wind has been a favorite image for poets. My favorite poems are Emily Dickinson’s “The Wind Tapped Like a Tired Man” and James Stephens’ “The Wind.” Both poets personify the wind to show weariness and temper. In Berger’s poem, wind, as an element of nature, acts kinetically. It dispatches, wakes, hurls, howls, cries, tutors, extinguishes, fumbles, stings, whips, and lifts, activating the human experiences or encounters with nature. Therefore, what Berger presents through the image of wind is the visual sensibility to nature and human nature.

“Wind Breaks into the House” is another wind poem. It is a lyric that describes the mess caused by the wind: papers driven off the desk, paragraphs plastered against walls, and stanzas blown into corners of chaos. But the poet catches the moment to experience the wind by unzipping her sweatshirt to let it sweep through her body with whatever it picks from the fields it passes. This unzipping is then a way to open the mind to nature, to be with nature, and to be a part of nature.

“38^th and Chicago” is a poem using the image of the personified wind. It is a tribute to the tragic death of George Floyd on May 25, 2020. The title mentions the two street names, at the intersection of which the murder occurred. The poet re-envisions the murder with the focus on the knee that kills Floyd. The humanized wind which embodies the killed begs the police not to clench tight, but the officer refuses to give an opening for the wind to wedge. The poet smartly sets up the contrast of the sympathetic wind against the brutal knee. While the wind becomes humanized, the officer becomes dehumanized by clenching tight. Wind, as the poet says in another poem, “Ask Anybody,” is “God’s great source / of subsequently / visible gestures.” Yet, the personified wind in “38^th and Chicago” is killed by the knee on its neck, revealing a conflict between nature and human nature.

While poems about wind are apparent in Berger’s collection, other poems about sensibility are also worth reading. “Palliative Care” is one that describes human nature in a difficult situation. It uses the apostrophe to address Hal to express a feeling and an experience both sweet and bitter. It is divided into eight numbered sections, each focusing on a part of the patient’s physical, emotional, or spiritual state, as seen in section 1:

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And God could sometimes be found

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in your final watercolor

propped up and facing us

on the sill of the hospital window—

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its suggestion of wintered trees

fracturing banks of blue

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while under a tent of white sheet

you faded like fugitive colors.

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The speaker consciously seeks a way of showing concerns and a way of optimizing the quality of life through palliative care. In a sense, this poem deals with the difficult time of death and the sensibility to the true meaning of existence.

The second section focuses on the spiritual state of the patient who, though lying on the sickbed like fugitive colors of Hal’s final watercolor, smiles with the shining eyes which “were steady blue flares up ahead / on the gravel of night’s back road.” His smile is contagious and has the power to change everybody’s mood. His good spirit or optimism makes him strong in dealing

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Wearing the face of the jilted

you woke each morning

to find death stood you up.

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In the next section, the speaker imagines the daily changes in the health condition of the patient imagined as a wooden broom, a sleeping prince, and one “fallen nestling, featherless, / still breathing splayed” or one with “a living face / of Christ crucified.” Here, wind appears as an image of death, trying to take him away by “circling the hospital / with something like intention, whirlpool of winter…” Section 5 presents the thought of the speaker, her exhaustion from caring for the sick, and her dream “about birds [they] don’t have.” But whatever comes next is inevitable and must be faced. The last two stanzas of section 5 are repeated in the last section.

A reader may notice that blue is the color in section 6. With its function to string all sections, blue adds a touch of sadness when the blue sky is fractured by winter trees in section 1, shines in the patient’s eyes in section 2, and offers a blurry sheen like chicory weed and forget-me-not. To both characters, each is a forget-me-not in each other’s eyes, as their life is a companionship of blue, shining, blooming, tolling till their last conversation.

Section 7 is like the speaker’s confession in a bitter and difficult tone:

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Once you stopped breathing so long

I crossed the room

whispering finale, meaning finally.

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Then you gasped like a newborn

gulping his first fist of air.

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It is ironic that while death is an inevitable finale of life, the dying person’s desire to live is still as strong as a newborn’s. The palliative care lasts for forty days and nights. During this time, “sometimes the heft of a word’s / true meaning comes to find us.” Yet, when death finally comes, the meaning of the word is just a moment of now, a finale whispered, or metaphorically, the dappled light of the virgin forest finally leaves. Sadness stays and departs at the same time as the light of blue finally fades. “Palliative Care” deserves careful reading, yet one question that haunts this reviewer is why a couple of stanzas reappear in different sections. I guess the poet must have a reason for that.

In brief, Berger’s poems are indebted to nature and reveal human sensibility, something that seems to have gradually faded in today’s human society.

You can find the book here: https://www.deerbrookeditions.com/indebted-to-wind/

John (Jianqing) Zheng’s publications include A Way of Looking, Conversations with Dana Gioia, and African American Haiku: Cultural Visions. He is the editor of the Journal of Ethnic American Literature. His forthcoming poetry collection is titled The Dog Years of Reeducation from Madville Publishing.

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getting away with everything by Vincent Cellucci and Christopher Shipman

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By Charles Rammelkamp

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Shifting location from Louisiana to North Carolina and back, this collaborative work is drenched in dream and memory and necessarily traffics in ghosts and remembrance of things past. Indeed, the very first poem is titled “Solastalgia,” a neologism that, as opposed to nostalgia, that homesickness we experience when separated from loved ones or “home,” signals a distress that is directly connected to the home environment. Rooted in the memory of a mellifluous radio DJ, the poem concludes:

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Yesterday’s splintered limbs say

            don’t let this be the last memory of me

                                                head for the trees

                                                make an offering.

                        If the waves lap at the door

                                                            let us swim.

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            If the sky is never finished

                                                            nothing is.

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And so the next poem, “Time Travel,” focuses on the dislocation experienced from moving from one place to another – specifically from New Orleans to Greensboro, North Carolina – with “ghosts in tow,” as the title of the third poem tells us.

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            same doom

            different poem

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“Even the porch swing was a ghost,” the fourth poem, “This Morning,” continues the thread, as if it were “trying to find the right words / to finish a last sentence.” You get the picture. Haunted. This poem concludes:

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            He understood the desire to perform

            such a gesture, rather

            than finish any sentence

            and wake forever from that dream.

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For “waking is like being dead,” we are told earlier in the poem.

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It’s the following fifth poem, “some mornings,” that launches the title speculation. “Getting away with everything” sounds so triumphant on its face, but it’s more complicated than that. The poem ends:

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            it’s much simpler

to get away with everything

when getting away

with mere nothing

is no cinch.

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All of this is in the first of the seven parts of the collection, the section called “opening words like floodgates.” The six sections that follow expand on the themes. It is the year that the poet turns 37. Think of Dante at the start of The Divine Comedy. He’s just turned 35. “In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost,” he writes. So Cellucci/Shipman has two poems called “On the Morning of my 37th Birthday” and later, the antepenultimate poem in the book, “on my 37th year and yet another day around the sun,” in which the poet obviously feels distress, confusion, lost in the dark wood. The former begins, “I spill from a dream.”

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In “getaway cars,” a poem from the third section called “Pilgrimage to the Fountain of Nothing,” a poem that is full of reminiscences of chases and escape, including “the first 9mm to the head” in a weed purchase gone wrong, the poet writes:

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            a raindrop gets away

with everything down

            the window pane

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Then quickly the poet is back into his dreams where we never get away with anything: “blame everything / get away with / the width of the margins / we sneak into / or are imprisoned in.”

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Death, of course, is a factor in everybody’s life, from which you never escape, never get away with. As Kafka famously observed, “The meaning of life is that it stops.” Does death become more “real” as we age?   “chronic chthonic disorder” is a poem that quickly follows “getaway cars” and is a metaphorical “getaway” to the underworld, across the mythological Styx. “Churn the Earth,” section three, begins with the death of a pet cat, Jack, and segues to the burial of the poet’s grandfather.

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            I remember wanting

to help haul Grandpa’s box

to its muddy hole.

I remember it felt wrong

the job was given

to his brothers alone.

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I had to stand by watching

the rain churn the earth.

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In the following poem, “alt burial rites,” the poet again expresses regret at not having eased a casket into its grave:

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            I too have been envious

of pallbearers

excluded

(probably for my youth

or smaller stature)

from the last time

you have to help

someone make

a move

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“In the Wake of Chthonic Fires,” a poem from the fourth section, “This Never-Ending Theater,” again alludes to burial, just as, from the same section, “negative capability,” a term first used by Keats to describe a writer’s ability to accept doubts, mysteries, uncertainties, he returns to the world of dreams, writing:

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            but there’s some killer

            deep in my dreams

            sometimes he succeeds

            in his war against me

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The poem called “honestly,” from the sixth section, “The Dampest of Spirits,” takes us back, one more time to that phrase at the heart of the book, “getting away with everything”:

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            leaving new orleans

was getting away from

getting away with everything

and I know you felt now-or-never-compelled to do the same

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No escape! So the poet returns, at least in thought, perhaps reluctantly, to Louisiana. Channeling the old quiz show, To Tell the Truth, the poet writes in “Will the Real Secret Agent Please Stand Up?”:

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Now when I’m wishing I could slip back

into an old loneliness I’m back

in New Orleans back to the first year there

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It’s a long poem, about thirteen pages, full of wonder and regret, the memories of youth mixed up with the inevitable memories of mistakes, “the treasured hours / we can’t remember / of friends and feeling / alive and fucked up / immune to / mistakes washed away in the mississippi.”

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getting away with everything is at once a lyrical consideration of life and a philosophical cri de coeur.

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You can find the book here: getting away with everything

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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.

The Algorithm of I by Jack Crocker

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By John (Jianqing) Zheng

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The Algorithm of I is Jack Crocker’s second collection of poems, but it is the first book proudly published by the newly established Mimbres Press at Western New Mexico University. It has a foreword, two poems titled and used as “Prologue” and “Offering” respectively, and seven subtitled sections. The foreword by Joseph Shepard offers a biographical sketch of the poet and points out that the collection is “a reflective journey of intellectual prowess that spins nostalgia with purpose and wonders about life, faith, and human evolution.” The prologue poem functions as a welcome doormat with eight questions about existential and temporal issues in stanza one and the recognition of nature as the source for thought and intuition in stanza two. “Offering” synthesizes the ideas conveyed in the seven sections: the quest about where the person is from:

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the little big bang,

The atom dispersal that made me a singular

Universe, the quantum splash that set in

Motion the journey to entropy, the gravitational

Waves moving from the center of the generous

Brine to deliver me into the Mississippi Delta,

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This quest especially echoes what the poet presents in the first section titled “Expatriate.” The title poem, “The Algorithm of I,” centers on the self. It has 18 tercets followed by 43 couplets or epigrams which function like a kaleidoscope of self-images or different roles played in society, community, and family. The tercet part asks a series of existential questions about the roles of the self. The last tercet shows the self who stands “mentally naked before / The mirror of I am, was, and cannot help but be.” So, the self sees the past and present of the “I” in roles indicated by the titles of each epigram, such as Athlete, Believer, Atheist, Musician, Rhetorician, Artist, Mississippian, Scholar, Philosopher, Poet, and Father. It is important to know that the poet believes that the birth of the self is through the marriage “to the universe in a union of senses / Until consciousness fell in love with itself.” This belief helps us understand why Crocker subtitles the first section “Expatriate”—poems about the Mississippi Delta, his birthplace—and why he states definitely “I left / before / I left” in “Exit.”

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Many poems in “Expatriate” explore the sense of place. This sense can be a loss of place, a nostalgic moment, or a search for the self. It wrestles between attachment and detachment, as suggested by the house image in the beginning lines of “Home Place”:

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The house has stood empty fifteen years.

I’ve returned each summer for the peace I feel

Watching it lean against the absence

Of those who brought it to life.

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This wrestling is suggestive through the effective use of the figurative language, showing the poet’s craft of etching images:

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I hear the sigh of nails ungrip, letting

The weary rafters and studs pull away

To gravity and the whims of wind.

A few snaggled posts remain,

Useless fangs weathered and veined

Like the final years of my father’s skin.

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The abandoned house also symbolizes a lost place where the poet finds peace and embraces memories belonging to him alone. That’s why he does not rent the house out, preferring “its future unlived” so that no thoughtless breaths will foul the space and no strange footsteps will disturb the floors laid by his grandfather. Ironically, this sense of place moves like the ticking of a clock. Time loses itself, so does the self who stands like a headstone where the front steps were, and peace becomes memorial and “purified by fire” when the house burns down into memories.

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“The Visit” is another poem about the loss of place with a feeling of attachment and detachment. Time has erased everything which remains fresh in the mind: the dying road to the birthplace, the rotting asphalt with gravel bones, and the neighbors long gone. There is nothing left in the area. “All welcome has vanished, even the banquet / Of pecan trees, and the oak’s summer shade.” It seems that nature or the Delta land has reclaimed the dwelling area once belonging to humans. What one sees is nothing but the plowed land, fallow and fertile with time. This vision extends the loss of place as the speaker says: “I am here where I once was, / Homeless and free to go.” This poem also suggests that memory of the birthplace cannot encage the bird of the mind from flying away. If the home place deserves a visit; it also deserves a farewell if one feels free to go to a new place.

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The Mississippi Delta is the most southern place on earth. Its fertile alluvial flatland, its history and culture, and its influence on agricultural life also challenge the poet to dwell upon its social and racial issues. This sense of place reveals Crocker’s deep thinking and concerns about life, music, politics, faith, and race. He points out in “A Good Man” that “The Middle Passage never died, / Only turned into double chains.” He states in “Conversation with a Confederate Statue” that “I laid down arms long ago, / And live not in the shadow of was / But the light of letting go” and in “Upon the Removal of a Confederate Statue” that

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Now malice spread from the Whitest House

Released the hemophilia of the lost cause—

Enslaved history is not the South’s alone,

But genetic repetition replayed in the course

Of our lives, a generation to generation clone.

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Raised in the Mississippi Delta, Crocker learns as well to be a male, a musician, a thinker, a philosopher, and an expatriate. He acts against what he is told to follow. His disbelief in what “his bible-thumping cousins” try to sell makes them want to send him to hell (“Ancestry”); his desire to be part of nature helps him recognize that what “keeps us human” is “nature’s God” (“First Lust”); his vision as an expatriate offers an insight into the migration of the soul or the self that “…home is / Always someplace else” (“Migration”); and his interest in blues urges him to make a deal at a crossroads like Robert Johnson (“Delta Nights”).

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The Algorithm of I explores a theme of where to posit the self and the human mind, revealing a sense of place through the loss of the birthplace, the resettlement of the self from place to place, and the human connection with nature, history, and environment. His poetry is both personal and universal, exploring for self-examination. This self comes alive in Crocker’s poems full of wit and poignancy, fresh images and figurative expressions, and loss and memory of the past because, as Robert Penn Warren says, “If there is no past, there can be no self.” Therefore, Crocker is a poet whose life is unique in connecting the self and the past.

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You can find the book here: The Algorithm of I

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John (Jianqing) Zheng published A Way of Looking and Conversations with Dana Gioia in 2021. His poetry has appeared in Hanging Loose, Mississippi Review, Poetry South, Tar River among others. He is the editor of Journal of Ethnic American Literature.

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My Body Lives Like a Threat by Megha Sood

By Candice Louisa Daquin

If we consider poetry as a polemic for societal change – then Megha Sood’s full-length poetry collection, My body lives like a threat, will strike a deep chord in the reader’s psyche. Sood doesn’t aim to soften the blow; her truth is brutal and honest, wrapped in her wordsmith craft. Social activism runs like a hot vein through these poems, imploring us to step outside boundaries and challenge the broken system until it begins to give way.

“Your breath on my skin spits and marks its boundaries. Your words carve out / the burnished wounds. The bourgeois display of pain splayed for the whole world. / To whom this body belongs? Suffering is nameless. Carved out of the tongues of those / who abused us. Misunderstood and mispronounced like a foreign language.” (Entry/Exit)

Reading these poems separated into four relevant sections, we’re submerged in a collective outrage against inequity and racism. When in recent history have, we needed a book like this more than now? They say it takes a village, and Sood’s words are a veritable village of experience. Her reach into empathy and intelligent understanding (“This lack of emergency / this hunger frothing between our teeth” – True Lies) of how the machinations of oppression, patriarchy, and injustice work, is uncanny and deeply moving. Sood’s poems deftly unravel the lies we’re told; instead, she presents the gory truth about suffering, bias, and prejudice as it really is.

“Where were the entry points for the catacombs this city / was hiding for so long chewing and spitting out the half-eaten narratives. / The flawed narratives. / Where is the blind mouth of this cave which /devoured everything which one was once black and beautiful.” (Safekeeping).

We badly need civic-minded, eyes-open poets like Megha Sood. Not to write pretty poems but to storm into a room and present the truth for all those who are too comfortable to do anything about it.

“the unbroken trails of tears have yet again / dusted by the ashes of dead and unknown / screaming from the headlines of the paper, / lying helpless at our doorsteps / waiting to be hauled in we are averting our eyes to living these days.” (Are You Listening, World?).

If poetry can cause social change, and I believe it can, then My body lives like a threat will drive a much-needed stake into the heart of apathy; forcing us to confront our notions of what is acceptable. Megha Sood has written a battle cry, and I for one am turning up. Her fierce unbridled words are searing truths for a world that has misplaced the art of truth-telling. Maybe she’s the original reason people wrote poetry.

“You are not carrying your freedom in your arms /your right to bear arms/ when the only right you give to a mother / is to stick a cross in the middle of an unknown street / giving a piece of land for her dead son.” (An Act of Self Defense, After Ahmaud Arbery).

This intense poem about a shattering event, continues scathingly:

“To hell with your right to the Second Amendment / when it’s laced with the blood / of a black brother whose murder / you are incessantly / trying to justify as self-defense.”

We think of poets as breaking conventions but even then, to blatantly call out a system with the purity of outrage, is relatively new because for so long those complaints were denied publication and only localized. Sood stands outside parochial group-think as an outsider looking in, sharing with us a collectivized observation through her no-holds-barred approach. Perhaps when you have experienced the immigrant journey and survived it, you have transcended notions of ‘place’ and you can write fearlessly on what you witness without needing to watch your tongue. There is a freedom to Sood’s truths that most will find refreshing and necessary. When poets share the inequality of the world, they forge conversation. Sood’s style is a perpetual question, calling out that which is unacceptable but accepted, that which is wrong but justified.

“how thin is the separation between / the love and the acceptance, / despair and the second chances, / between the judged and the forgiven.” (Demarcation)

And should you for a moment, think this poet is safely removed, speaking from a distance, then reflect please on the title of this book and its message of survival. Megha Sood the woman who has endured and thrived even when she thought she could not. Consider the aching truth of what it takes to survive and how even if we do, we understand the pain in a molecular level ever afterward:

“My pain impaled on the stars in the nightly sky / I shine through my pulverized skin, / the broken pieces I foraged together / to make a whole of me.” (My Survival Story).

When Sood says “I am the knowledge in the verse.” She’s not being pithy, she’s harkening to the reality of being a woman: “I’m the war cry, the mortal fear / residing behind the enemy lines.” (My Survival Story). Aside from being a well-informed polemic on the depleted state of racial equality today, Sood’s work is intensely feminist, standing in defense of all women in the 21^st century. Some may say, we don’t need defending, but as long as inequity exists, that’s simply not true, and without speaking out, change will never be wrought. We need poets like Megha Sood, not just in India or America but every continent, until it becomes universally accepted to treat all people with respect. The book’s title is both a woman’s body being under threat but also being a threat (to the established norms of violence and oppression) gives a clever double-meaning to this collection’s title. With reproductive rights under attack, this is beyond timely.

This canny poetess is a leading voice in Indian-American poetry with her voice carving a way through the false belief that everyone has an equal chance in America today. Her blunt, informed, fierce voice refuses half-measures, and stands shoulder-to-shoulder alongside other social justice warriors, utilizing the power of poetry to identify and harness meaningful change.

You can find the book here: https://www.flowersongpress.com/store/p/my-body-lives-like-a-threat

Candice Louisa Daquin, Senior Editor, Indie Blu(e) Publishing. Poetry Editor, The Pine Cone Review. Writer-in-Residence, Borderless Journal. Editorial Partner, Blackbird Press. Author of Tainted by the Same Counterfeit (Finishing Line Press, 2022).

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Harvest Time by Martin Willits Jr.

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By g emil reutter

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Willitts brings us onto the farm in this collection offering insight into the Amish/Mennonite life style in rural Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.  He uses poetic imaging to reveal the harshness of field work, chopping wood, milking nameless cows. He writes of his quiet Grandfather and Grandmother. The title poem opens the collection that meanders through the seasons and as he accomplishes this he also meshes the farm with the lives of his grandparents who work the farm hard and in the end pass to the other side as the bank seize their assets. Willits worked the farm every spring into summer from the ages of 5-17. He tells us in this poem, I carry baskets of tomorrow/heavy as death. Willitts reveals the violence of nature in survival and the violence of man interacting with nature using domesticated animals until they have no use and then disposing of them. Not all is dark here as Willitts reveals the beauty of life in barns, fields, even Amish lovers.  In the poem, It’s All a Matter of Perspective, he himself watches as his girlfriend, ..ran away with the broom salesman.  He further tells us:

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At seven, I never understood why Grandmother giggled

when Grandfather looked at her a certain way.

I believed it was because he puckered his lips

like he tasted lemon. Later, I found out what it meant.

My girlfriend made the same giggle when she ran off.

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The poet tells the reader of Quiet:

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When the world goes silent

after the crackle of birds landing on trees,

air seems to glow—

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that moment of sadness

when nothing else happens,

time crawls into a small whimper,

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a bantam rooster’s spurs

barely tic, tic, tic

on a grey, crushed-stone path.

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Some people just need to disturb that silence.

Others want to escape the disturbance

like those birds swarming onto trees.

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I just want that moment of solitude

emitting from apple blossom odors

in noiseless breeze.

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Quiet is a beautiful poem with a freshness of images, time crawls into a small whimper…that moment of solitude/emitting from apple blossom odors/in noiseless breeze.

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In the poem, Milking the Moment, the poet tells us:

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Love takes the same slowness—

a body responds to evenness of hands,

anticipating the next light touch

until it feels fingers before they land,

gentle as dust. And if you lay your head

against a belly, cooing a soothing melody

the other person eases

into what will happen next.

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This from an experience of milking a cow, a life lesson in handling other humans.

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Willitts writes extensively of learning from his Grandfather in silence, no words, just nods and smiles as he learns the farm. He captures the beauty of this lesson in the poem, Silence Has Its Own Language:

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There are days when I am still ten, following Grandfather

out the back door into the prayer of stars.

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There are several ways to know silence—fishing forever

without a bite, your heart moving with a spring steam defrosting;

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or mucking the barn, rake scratching wooden floors and straw;

or cat swishing its tail before striking: or goldenrod opening.

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Grandfather barley spoke all summer. No need to talk. Words

Were wasted, when silent commands and nods worked well.

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You can hear more if you listen intently— deer moving at dawn,

Inventing silence; or the stillness of heart and hush of breath.

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More important, all of earth and stars and silence speak.

You can hear, like a dog ear’s perking, everything unsaid.

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Harvest Time is an excellent read. Be sure to read intently as gentle metaphor and imagery blends with the harshness of farm life as Willitts captures rural Amish America.

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You can find the book here: Harvest Time

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g emil reutter is a writer of poems, stories and an occasional literary review. He can be found at: https://gereutter.wordpress.com/about/

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A Way of Looking by Jianqing Zheng

By Charles Rammelkamp

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Jianqing Zheng’s new book of poems, winner of the 2019 Gerald Cable Book Award, is a collection of haibun, a Japanese literary form first used by Matsuo Bashō in the 17^th century that combines prose and haiku juxtaposed to provide a fresh “way of looking” at an event, a scene, a character, an anecdote, a sort of “double vision.” The form is inherently reflective, meditative, while being descriptive in brief but vivid prose and incorporates elements of autobiography, essay, flash fiction/nonfiction. The accompanying haiku may be seen as a subtle commentary or summation of the prose passage.  A Way of Looking is divided into four sections, “On the Road,” “Farewell,” “Momentary Stay” and “Forever,” which feels almost like the cycle of seasons, so that the reader has a sense of coming “full circle,” experiencing the writing, which indeed has many seasonal referents.

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Just as Bashō’s haibun were originally travel accounts from his various journeys, so many of Zheng’s are the same, as is evident from the title of the first section. In many of these, Zheng, who lives in Mississippi, drives around the Deep South region in search of the places where famous bluesmen performed.  As he writes in “Weekend Drive, 1998”:

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After landing a university job in the Mississippi Delta, I fell in love with photographing blues sites for my research. One Saturday I went to grab shots in Moorhead where W.C. Handy’s “Yellow Dog Blues” immortalized the crossing of the Southern and Yazoo Delta railroads.

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            juke joint blues

            a sluggish creek crosses

            through town

            by a lean-to shack

            blooming wisteria

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He drives on to Inverness, hometown of Little Milton, another bluesman, looking for Arcola. He gets lost, asks directions from various people, one of whom suggests Zheng, who looks a little bewildered by the instructions, follow him in his truck, until he finally finds the fork to Arcola.  He rolls down his window and thanks the man. “Oh, brother, the back road wasn’t that hard to find.” In “Birds of Passage” he is driving to the airport in Memphis, just before dawn. “We cross the Yazoo River Bridge, pass Baptist Town where the bluesman Robert Johnson died of poison,” eventually passing Avalon, “where the blues marker for Mississippi John Hurt looms above the roadside high weeds.”   As day starts to break, he slows down, “to catch this gorgeous flight:

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            crack of dawn

            thousands of snow geese

            honk off the fields”

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His travels take him to Helena, Arkansas, New Orleans, Tokyo, Wuhan and Canton, China, where the protagonist of the haibun encounters

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            a rooster’s crow

            headstone

            of a Chinese railroad builder

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The haibun in the “Farewell” section are more third-person sketches and anecdotes than personal reflections or reminiscences. They are all located in China. “Mediation in Changsha, China,” “Moon Festival,”  “Home,” “The Seven-Year Itch,” an amusing anecdote about a man named Seng whose snoring disturbs his wife, are some of the titles. The accompanying haiku to this latter reads: “spring equinox— / a cat’s nocturnal yowl / in the front yard.” The title is a sly reference to the popular belief that the romance in a marriage dies with sustained familiarity. You can feel the wife’s frustration!  There’s even a haibun called “Responses” that recalls an inane song in praise of Chairman Mao that he was forced to sing during the Cultural Revolution. The selection ends with the humorous haiku:

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            riverside hip hop

            even the water

            starts twerking

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“Fish Debate,” another haibun from this second section, has a very Taoist point-of-view. Two ancient Chinese philosophers, Zhuang Zi and Hui Si, walk by a river and see fish. Zhuang Zi (known also in literature as Chuang Tzu) thinks they look happy, but Hui Si says it’s not possible to know if fish are happy. Zhuang Zi replies, “You are not me; how do you know I don’t know the fish are happy?” This is so much like the other famous Taoist about Chuang Tzu dreaming he was a butterfly. The accompanying haiku reads:
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which came first,

the hen or the egg? –

endless rain

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The “Momentary Stay” section brings us back to Mississippi. “Night in the Mississippi Delta,” “Road to Vicksburg,” “The Bayou by the Home in the Woods” are some of the titles of haibun that take us to specific scenes. In “Road to Vicksburg” the narrator sees a dead armadillo in the road and, momentarily distracted, nearly collides with an oncoming eighteen-wheeler.

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by the blues highway

to casino

a wreathed cross tilts in wind

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In “Delta Wind,” Zheng writes with an almost Kerouac-like flair, “the wind rises like the saddest blues blown from a sax in a lean-to juke joint.” The accompanying haiku reads:

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autumn night

a freight train chugging

across the Yazoo

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A Way of Looking is dedicated to the memory of Don and Nell George. The final section, “Forever,” includes several tender haibun written in their memory. The Georges welcomed Zheng to Hattiesburg, Mississippi when he came to the United States from China as a young man, and he feels a great love for them, a sadness at their death, but the haibun express an enduring connection that itself reflects back on the section title.

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Many of Zheng’s haibun include more than one verse passage. Many of the haiku contain seasonal references, and this is true of the three included in “Eulogy,” written in memory of Don George. The first reads:

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            summer visit –

            in the town where

            I was born

            I’m asked

            where I’m from

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The second follows the reflection, “He taught me to pronounce a word in English, how to mow the grass, and more importantly, how to be a man in my life.” The verse that follows reads:

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            spring morning

            mom and dad chat

            over coffee

            memory an aroma

            of old times

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Finally, after thanking both Don and Nell for their kindness and guidance, he concludes the haibun:

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            autumn dusk

            an empty recliner

            in the den

            a lonely cat

            at the window

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The section and the book end with a short haibun called “Waiting for spring” that sums up not only the section but Zheng’s overarching philosophy as well:

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When life stops clicking, body – a mass of elements – can be turned to ashes, used as fertilizer for flowerbeds.

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                        autumn dusk

                        a worn-out jacket

                        on a peg

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Jianqing Zheng’s A Way of Looking alters the reader’s own vision, providing a view of reality that’s more peaceful, more benevolent, more thoughtful.

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You can find the book here: A Way of Looking

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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.

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Her Wilderness Will Be Her Manners by Sarah Mangold

By Greg Bem

They put our body
into the text

and there we are
made to wonder

(from Her Wilderness Will Be Her Manners, page 1)

Back in 2016, I was made aware of Sarah Mangold’s extensive catalog by way of the publication of her latest book at the time, Giraffes of Devotion. I ended up reviewing four of her works altogether, and occasionally came across her readings and engagements in the Seattle literary community between then and now. Giraffes in particular stuck with me as a book filled with the engagements of ghosts. A powerful feminist exploration of historical found text and the channeling of voices from eras past, Mangold’s work created a sort of time traveling choir that (at the time) left my gawking and to this moment has made me think about poets’ enduring capacity as archivists and historians.

Now we’re into 2021, and I have come across Mangold’s latest volume, Her Wilderness Will Be Her Manners, winner of the Poets Out Loud Prize from Fordham University Press, and “out loud” only begins to describe this exquisite return to the form of ghosts, near and far, lost and found. In this book, generally speaking, Mangold’s aim is to bring attention to taxidermist Martha Maxwell and “the wife of the father of modern taxidermy,” Dalia Akeley, and their realities, otherwise faded or ignored. Mangold approaches natural history texts and other sources, funneling their words into a repurposing. This is a project of presence and one in which Mangold responds to the problem of absence. In fields dominated by men, Mangold provides an investigation into the possibility of, and the reality of, women in those spaces.

What interested me was
the way ladies survive
as acknowledgments
in other people’s prefaces

(from Her Wilderness Will Be Her Manners, page 14)

There are several types of poems that fill the book’s pages. From elegantly aged lyric to blocks of prose poetry to lists to spacey and less formal additions, the book includes a lot of range, and a single reading will definitely not uncover the many patterns and constructions Mangold has included. Despite the collage effect of the found texts, the poems are undeniably easy and enjoyable to read, their subject matter intellectually challenging and emotionally dynamic. As I read, I felt like Mangold is offering certain forms of accessibility to the reader: the layers may run deep, but the surface of these poems is inviting and contains enjoyable qualities at the onset.

As the book unwinds and the poems continue, challenges are offered and afforded. Mangold has provided an extensive (to say the least) bibliography of the source and inspiration of the text as a whole, a field of portals waiting to be entered. The archivist, the historian, the poet: the forms converge and coalesce into a document that feels incredibly alive. This is “the choir” that Mangold has championed and led in past works, reconstructed. Or, unusually and amazingly, the taxidermy construct crafted by Martha Maxwell, or an alter-ego, a benefactor, a promoter. The representation is a cluster formed of erasure and assemblage, a polyvocal reality from history to the present. And at its forefront? Sarah Mangold, who spent years conducting the research that would feed the poems of Her Wilderness.

My own chosen world
of intellectual development

and feminist action
might indeed unstring

unnerve
and unfit me

(from Her Wilderness Will Be Her Manners, page 23)

There is an exquisite conceptual balance between the found and the authored, where Mangold herself becomes the subject in some of the investigations. Indeed, Mangold’s presence within the works continues what I last investigated in 2016: a commitment to not only be for the research but to be of it, to have a stake in it, and to embed. Mangold has created collages of images that explore taxidermist Martha Maxwell’s collections. Metaphorically and literally, Mangold has offered an abrupt and present dualism: she has applied a collage method to create stereographic images. It is worth looking at the images through the flow of the book’s poetry, but I found myself paging back through the book time and time again to revisit these images as moments of process and result; they are, as much as the text, reflective of Mangold’s process of work.

In Her Wilderness, Mangold is providing images and text derivative of the past. The poet wants to fill the masculine void with a feminist revisiting, crafting a life out of a static, oppressive history. There is much that should (and will) be said about this project, and for me I found Mangold’s presence in the work to be the most fascinating. The poems flit and jump between the pulling at the strings of found text, but Mangold’s voice is undeniable. It creeps in, manages to find a place, and is defiantly present. Most found poems lose the author’s voice and tone, but not here, not within Her Wilderness, and as I read the book cover to cover, I kept thinking: perhaps the book’s truths are just as much rooted in Mangold’s reality as the goal of the restructure and positioned text.

she braced against the inequalities of the bark and drew

herself up among branches

(from Her Wilderness Will Be Her Manners, page 41)

You can find the book here: https://www.fordhampress.com/9780823297702/her-wilderness-will-be-her-manners/

Greg Bem is a poet and librarian living on unceded Duwamish territory, specifically Seattle, Washington. He writes book reviews for Rain Taxi, Yellow Rabbits, and more. His current literary efforts mostly concern water and often include elements of video. Learn more at www.gregbem.com

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