Ugh by Carl Kaucher

 

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By g emil reutter

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Carl Kaucher continues his evolution as a poet in his latest collection Ugh. The poet sets the tone for this collection in the first stanza of the opening poem, Café Waldorf:

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A flame perfectly formed on the wick/ is the definition of a candle. / Aspects if gray adorn the dying sky/ like wisps of cigarette smoke dissipate into an afterthought. / A pool of soft orange light seeps through the kitchen window/ onto a snow filled yard/ bounded by a chain link fence/ glowing under a crescent moon/ as the tip of Orion/ stabs shimmering towards the south.

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The poet’s use of strong imagery such as like, wisps of cigarette smoke dissipate into an afterthought, Orange light seeps through kitchen window, and the original image of a chain link fence glowing under crescent moon. He completes the stanza with the tip of Orion shimmering towards the south.

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Café Waldorf is a powerful poem on many levels and I am happy to report the rest of Ugh rises to the level of the opening poem. Kaucher as with his previous collections bring the reader along on a journey through towns and cities, back alleys and rough streets, into the bars, parks strolling past the churches.

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The poem. Elnore Avenue, opens with the changing face of churches in America:

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The white pillars/ of the old Lutheran church/ are peeling into Pentecostal/ and those that exit/ are glowing with spirit/ all high on God. / I have a container of spirt/ in my back pocket/

that always gets me down.

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The poet uses a creative image of the old Lutheran church peeling into Pentecostal coupled with those exiting high on God. But for the poet, he carries a pint in his back pocket that always gets him down. It makes the reader wonder if all those folks high on God even noticed the poet standing, taking notes and observing.

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Kaucher brings us into a better understanding of what he observes on his journeys in the poem, For:

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The first Stanza:

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where to go/ to go back within/ to the place before I begin/ to the streets- the heat/ the miles of empty sidewalk/ the people I don’t know/ going to where they go

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The third Stanza:

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even though some have dimmed/to back within/their troubled lives/but I never would have seen had I not been there/ had I not wove in and out/ of traffic on mad highways through cuts in mountains/through potholes in shit towns

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And in the last lines of the poem:

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it is no place but this place/and it all goes down/as it makes sense/ like a bag tumbling/down the street/making the pace of the place/ and the silence of the still/ breathing sweetly beneath/ the surface of my shine.

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So the poet understands his journey of visiting those places disregarded, forgotten and yet here he is going back within, of seeing what he would never have seen. Weaving in and out of places mostly unnoticed yet there is the silence of the still breathing sweetly beneath the surface of his shine. Simply beautiful.

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While reading through the collection one comes to an understanding that the streets are the church of Carl Kaucher and that notion is very clear in the first two stanzas of Sunday, 24^th and Federal:

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Stalactites drip underpass

like blood of architectural alchemy

peeling blue paint off brick walls behind

stickered phone booth etched of petroglyph

to baptismal waters pooling

beneath broken fire escapes

off alternative ghetto.

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Apostolic church playground

pendulum of squeaky swings

by razor wire chain link fence.

Graffiti holes discussing the advent

at the check cashing store

of Western Union shopping cart rap

crumbling elevated lines.

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The flood of images builds until we reach the crumbling elevated lines. I paused taking in the images and then entered the last two stanzas, simply a tsunami of images:

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Meditation of rhythm and blues

to gospel singer vibrato of falsetto

as Jesus sweeps the sidewalk clean.

Scripture-stained concrete pillars

soul punked at Alter street shacks

and smokestacks of monochrome

barrio gelatinous daguerreotype.

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Snapshot of heavy industrial flowers

blooming big machines of progress

ripping apart the put together

one stone highways of ever,

endeavors of go to gone,

gospels of rusted needles

and pink panties plastered to concrete.

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Reading this collection, cover to cover, poem to poem firmly establishes Kaucher as a unique voice in American poetry. There is a temptation to compare this poet to others but it cannot be accomplished as Kaucher is a man who writes what he lives and observes. There is no pretense here, there is no make believe. Full of metaphor and images, realism rings throughout this collection.

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You can get the book here: Ugh

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g emil reutter is a writer of stories and poems. He can be found at: About g emil reutter

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Pillow Thoughts by Courtney Peppernell

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By Lynette G. Esposito

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If you want to read a book with love on each page, Pillow Thoughts by Courtney Peppernell published by Andrews McMeel Publishing is the one.  The two hundred and fifty-six volume is filled with unsentimental verse expressed in almost statement like single stanza poems that are clear and direct.

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The book is divided into ten sections starting with If you are dreaming of someone from page one to twenty-two. On page seven, Peppernell writes in a one-stanza poem:

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We should kiss.

Not because you passed my way by chance

But because you stopped

And I haven’t been the same since.

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This poem sets the place and situation clearly.  It is full of emotion but not too sweet and not too spicey…almost perfectly seasoned and it sets the tone for the entire volume. In the second section, If you are in love, the untitled one stanza poem presents a clear image of how love works.

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If I were to build a house

I’d have your arms as the walls

Your eyes as the windows

Your smile as the front door

Your heart as the fireplace

And your soul as my light

I’d place my faith

Knowing I’d finally

Found a home.

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This gives the reader a fresh perspective in viewing the place they live where each part is of the loved one and how good it feels. In section four, If you are lonely, on page eighty-four, in a statement-like one line stanza, Peppernell writes:

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How does loneliness exist with all these souls in the world?

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The question is basically unanswerable but the message is clear.  The question as statement is almost paradoxical in that loneliness does exist even in a crowded room. In another one- line stanza poem, Peppernell writes:

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If I had my say and had my life to do again, I’d have moved us closer.

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This poem on page one hundred and thirty in the section If you are missing someone, demonstrates directly and clearly how one might adjust one of the most important things in his or life. In this case, the most important thing Is the us being in a tighter proximity either physically or psychologically she does not say.  Closer is the key word.

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In this same section, she writes of distance again on page one hundred and forty-six.

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And in the end all that matters, is the distance, that we are,

creating all this longing.

The butterflies I feel for you, listening to our song on the radio,

The way I miss you even in the early hours of the morning.

Wondering about the day I will have through the night before.

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It is a love poem but without all the wine and roses and just a person reflecting on distance. On page one hundred and sixty-eight, Peppernell gives the reader another statement poem.

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You just have to surround yourself with people who have the same heart as you.

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It sounds like a survival poem without the details. In the section These are for you on page two hundred and forty, the one stanza poem expresses the bone deep love can have for another.

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This is my life

And I will fall for you every day

Because you are my love

And I see you in everything.

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Although this author is sparse with words, she tackles big issues in relationships and expresses clearly the emotion that comes with them.  She is skillful at setting up place and situation with few words but with strong impact. This is a book that makes the reader feel good.

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Her books are available from www.andrewsmcmeel.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.  Her articles have appeared in the national publication, Teaching for Success; regionally in South Jersey Magazine, SJ Magazine. Delaware Valley Magazine, and her essays have appeared in Reader’s Digest and The Philadelphia Inquirer. Her poetry has appeared in US1, SRN Review, The Fox Chase Review, Bindweed Magazine, Poetry Quarterly, That Literary Review, The Remembered Arts Journal, and other literary magazines. She has critiqued poetry for local and regional writer’s conferences and served as a panelist and speaker at local and national writer’s conferences.  She lives  in Mount Laurel, NJ.

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Two Short Books by Spokane Poets

By Greg Bem

Terminal Goals by Mark Anderson

At HappyCorp™, we pride ourselves on indulging our guests’ most unrealistic fantasies by providing the highest quality guest service experience.

(page 1)

Former Spokane poet laureate and performance poet Mark Anderson’s Terminal Goals is a fast-paced portrait of desire and violence. It is a movement through prose to the discovery of the shadow side of technical abundance in an age of machine learning, cybernetic intelligence, and the supreme value of the robotic other. In this short text, Anderson explores what current technology has to say about humanity’s everlasting flaws and its drive toward supreme power.

[SMILES SMILES SMILES SMILES as far as the eye can see in an ocean of blood SMILES SIMLES SMILES SMILES]

(page 3)

The book is divided into several parts and focuses on a fantasy land of escape that plays on one of our most absurd commodities: the cruise vacation. Other writers have spent many pages describing the pitiable and exquisite cruise, including David Foster Wallace in an infamous piece for Harper’s. In Anderson’s take, the latest cruise ship concept is a getaway managed by “HappyCorp™,” a seemingly perfect operation that knows what its customers want and how to deliver. The cruise is run by an organization and its mysteries carry it idealistically. In addition to its classic escapist symbolism, Anderson’s boat contains AI-infused robots that are available for customers’ pleasure. Everything we could want to do to humans is made ethically available in Anderson’s speculative romp.

Trauma transformed me into a master of language.

(page 13)

As with any dystopian literary sandbox, the protagonist’s slow spiral into delirium throughout Terminal Goals starts with the ability to jump on a cruise with little effort (leaving significant other behind to communicate long-distance). Once situated, it is a mere feedback mechanism toward escalation of violence and comfort. The protagonist is situated in a space where the stakes get higher and the pleasure gets even more so. When, at last, the protagonist is scheduled to leave, there is one more option to keep paying and playing. The stunning climax is a classic science fiction parable for the age of ChatGPT, internet pornography, and the stress of living as cogs in the mediocre machine.

Picture me as an incomprehensible arachnid crawling out of the sea on eight throbbing, red limbs, searching for my creator.

(page 13)

You can find the book here: https://bottlecap.press/products/goals

CRISIS MODE by Tim Greenup

Spokane Poet and English Professor Tim Greenup brings additional layers of life’s feelings of powerlessness and captivity into view in a short but long-lasting collection of poems. CRISIS MODE is, on the surface, a charming look at the daily goings-on of a life in Washington State’s second largest city. But across the sequence we find disdain, dissatisfaction, and fractures of identity and being.

Like other “working poets” like Joe Hall and Ryan Eckes, Tim Greenup’s experiences of daily life and daily labor finds subtle absurdities across lines and pages. The book opens “I walk through a snowy wood // in search of ambition,” a clever establishing of shadow and longing within the opening shot. Later in the same poem on the same page, one of Greenup’s many motifs, that of otherness centered within familiarity, appears: “Shadows will no longer be // shadows but the way of things, and then I’ll / be the strange one with skin and worries // being ripped apart by the cold power of this / place” (page 13).

Greenup’s poems are far from disturbing or shocking. The poet here plays a long game that relies on a gymnastic rhetoric filled with revelations of disappointment and monotony. One poem reads: “On the cold walk home, Sam and I / slapped construction signs, yelped / into a blank sky.” (page 18) and on the following page the next poem reads: “You ask your friend to carry you down, / but they too are ruined by the sound / and can move no further.” (page 19). Most of this world’s elements are filled with nihilistic devices and in Greenup’s scene each transition, each translation, each repositioning of time and space represents another hurdle, another barrier, another sluggish moment of pause, of interruption.

As a book of experiences by way of introduction, I am reminded of Whinnie the Pooh and Kafka and the many writers who have been subdued and incapacitated by the everyday. Greenup is particularly eloquent in reflecting on circumstance through image and metaphor. Indeed, the Kafkaesque nightmare that is mild and prolonged may even be referenced to in “The air around you”:

A black beetle in the slimey folds of your brain
convinces you to behave this way.

(page 25)

At Greenup’s most surreal, the world still feels familiar and present, hardly removed from the shared human experience, the trite and pathetic conditions that surround that experience. At least Greenup gives us joyful language through which the shadowy epiphanies and reflections can take place.

You can find the book here: https://burnsidereview.org/chapbooks-crisis-mode.html

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

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Trailer Park Psalms by Ryler Dustin

By Charles Rammelkamp

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In his lengthy twelve-part poem “Homestead,” Ryler Dustin writes:

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            What we know of this earth

            are a few high notes

            in a song too low to hear.

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As the very title of this collection suggests, Dustin’s poems are filled with awe and reverence for our world, like David’s reverence for the Lord in his own psalms. Mostly set in the Pacific Northwest, the poems evoke the majesty of creation while highlighting the loneliness and longing of the humans who inhabit it, “how the forbidden holds inside it the holy,” as he writes in “A Secret.” This poem memorializes two boys who lost their lives and inadvertently saved the town of Bellingham, Washington, when they came upon a gas leak in Whatsom Creek.

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The son of a shell-shocked Vietnam veteran, Dustin grew up in his grandmother’s trailer. A trailer park summons images of squalor and poverty, and in a tone saturated with irony the poet begins the opening poem, “Trailer Park Psalm,” “Bless us, Lord of corrugated tin” and goes on later in the poem:

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            Bless us, Lord of the mildewed scent

            my grandmother raised me in –

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            of carpets singed by cigarettes,

            ashtrays made from Folgers tins,

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            Hamburger Helper and discount meat

            in cedar-shadowed kitchens.

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But also in the poem he beseeches blessings for the blackberries, the bracken birch, the Douglas fir, the sword fern and cedar, “the nettle’s electric ache.” The natural world in which the trailer park is tucked is a blessing.

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In a later poem, “To Make Color,” he remembers his grandmother on winter mornings in the trailer carefully saving the ash from their Fisher stove “For the garden in spring.” “Baptism at Agate Park Mobile Home Park” also takes place at Lake Whatcom, where the poet invites his younger self to watch the sun sink on the horizon, “its fire tonguing the shore.”

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“Light Years” tells the story of a complicated family, the Vietnam vet father – “how he disappeared for years to drink / in the dark loft above a service station, pumping gas” – and his subsequent loves. It’s a story of “The rampant damages of love.”

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While the poems in Part Two take place in London and Edinburgh, Bergen and Provincetown, the final two sections bring us back to Washington and Oregon. The poems take on a less personal theme and examine the world he lives in, though the poet’s perspective is no less palpable. “A Brief History of Bordeaux, Washington” is an ode to a former logging boomtown just as “Homestead” gives a vast panoramic picture of Oregon’s Rogue River Valley, “traces of stories older than us” about the indigenous people, the original flora and fauna.

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For centuries this land belonged

to canyon oaks, bracken ferns,

footstep of families

of Tututni and Takelma.

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The white man came along to wreck and plunder the land – Bordeaux is just one example of the rapacious greed and careless destruction. In Oregon, they “washed / the riverbanks away / with hoses, hunting gold / that was hardly there.”

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The homestead Dustin and his love are creating is an attempt to refurbish the land, the environment, to live in harmony with the natural world. “I harvest wood by tracks / of bobcats and bears,” he begins this poem that is addressed to his partner, “scat from the cougar / we never see.” She, meanwhile, at dusk waters “the apples / and a stingy quince.” Widening the lens, the poem ends:

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            And love, you say

            must mean to make a space

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            for this wrecked world

            inside us.

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Part Four of this meditative collection brings the reader to the “separate peace” Ryler Dustin and his love are making, and the tone returns to a sort of reverence, again invoking the Lord. “Late Garden,” perhaps suggesting Eden, and “Love Poem with Stinging Nettles” – “my heart, which knows for its home / only wilderness, now chooses / your wilderness” – strike a devotional posture.

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But it’s complicated, as he notes in the final poem, “Hunger,” which gives a picture of the savage needs of nature, things feeding on things – “Dragonflies, ravenous, hawk the steaming field. / Raccoons gnaw crayfish at the river’s edge. / A stray dog digs for something dead.”

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“The Lord’s angel is his ache,” he goes on, and “love is not near the heart of this.” No, love is “a late, lucky appendage, / unlikely as the life of one lacewing.”

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The poem, “Whatcom Creek Memorial Trail,” returns us to the two martyred boys introduced in “A Secret.” The picture is by measures bleak and hopeful.

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            Behind the memorial totem

            for the boys the gas leak killed,

            dead seeds flutter,

            frozen to chain link.

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            A plastic bag snags

            in a bare oak,

            its sound like a memory

            of leaves.

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Later in the poem he amplifies the continuing human threat.

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            Wind whistles in varicose elms

            by graffiti that says fuck

            the spotted owl.

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In “Names of Trees” he also tells us

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                                    White gunmen

            haunt the news, and the pale blue

            sheen of the police chief’s tie

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            is like the wash of TV light

            on fake wood paneling

            in my grandmother’s trailer.

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The earth is not a safe place, constantly threatened.  Echoing his observation about our knowledge of the earth is Dustin’s final observation about heaven, with which he concludes the book:

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            If there’s a heaven, we will bend

                                            to examine our old selves

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                                    and wonder how something so delicate

                    was ever allowed.

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You can find the book here: Trailer Park Psalms – University of Pittsburgh Press

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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.

No Sweet Without Brine by Cynthia Manick

By Charles Rammelkamp

Cynthia Manick’s voice is confident, assertive. She doesn’t take any shit. But at the same time she knows to be cautious. “When I Tell Our Story of Bees and Vinegar” (sweet and brine!) ends:

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I want to say that we talk a lot

        but not about dreams

how they swell in buckets like

         language of flowers and all

the things we’re too scared to say

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Manick is not too scared to say anything. But she realizes the danger. Even the title of the book strikes a note of caution. The poem, “Endangered Species,” three nightmare scenarios, imagines a world in which Black is erased.  “I went to the future / and color was gone” (“…you too can be white…re-write genetics…”). Not that she envisions genocide, but as she observes in  “My Calm App Lets Me Sleep with Idris Alba”: “Dear Manufactured Calm, / we get used to being whelmed over.” Danger lurks everywhere.

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            I believe him

            and almost forget my day

            of basement apartment laundry – hauling

            my back, black roots

            clothes, and a keychain of blue

            pepper spray. The maintenance man –

            I mean devil I mean nice man,

            asks for my hand and body every time I see him.

            One day I think he’ll say no to my

            no thank you. He’ll want to break something…

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“Tanka Suite on Survival” likewise takes in this picture of “layers of grit, soul and blade.” As that title alone suggests, on one level, just getting through can almost be construed as triumph enough.  But in that powerful, confident voice that will not be silenced, Manick also asserts her own passion, her love, a counterpoint that puts fear in shadow. Her self-portraits – seven of the poems are titled “Self-Portrait No. X” (1, 5, 7, 9, 13, 11 and 15) – give a picture of a confident woman bursting with vitality (#5: “Some people think I was born / savage”; #9 “I fall in love with words…/ …and how the syllables of blueberries / and plethora undress , ripen around / the tongue.”; # 13 “I arrived as red-throated / anthill, just as busy”; #15 “the wildness inside all of us”).

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In “3 am and the Moon is Curled like a ‘C’” she writes:

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            I once read that Black poets write love poems the least

            as if we’re too busy swallowing

            mouthfuls of dusks

            tallying wounds

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The gratification/self-actualization Manick envisions doesn’t really have a name, a label, but let’s call it love anyway. Manick writes in “Wishes for Black Folk in Woody Allen Movies”: “Let them be uncomplicated and alive,” a sentiment that echoes the concluding line of “Dear Future Body (Keep Your Skin Thickk)”: “I want us living, not just alive.” “I Want to See Black Love on Television” displays Manick’s free-associative style – “With sex there’s heat in every thunder, an avalanche rising. I don’t have a sassy white friend who talks too much about the wrong things.” – and the title says it all. “What Can Grow in the Dark” is even more explicit.

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            One day I will enter your arms

                    and be swallowed

            into untamed yeast

                    and Sunday barley

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            we’ll be slick as sweat

                    from frosted soda cans

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Editor of The Future of Black: Afrofuturism, Black Comics, and Superhero Poetry, Manick’s poem, “Praise for Luke Cage’s Skin and Starshine,” in homage to Marvel Comics’ Power Man, continues the theme: “you make wanting to live / a life legal.” “Dear Superman” is another poem along these lines, suggesting that for every “Lois” or “bright-haired Jane” there are “Women of strong flavors – / hot peppers between their legs / and a storm inside” who stir Clark’s emotions with the same intensity.

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Manick’s love for her family shows through in poem after poem about her mother and father (“Ode to JET Magazine (When You Be a Rainbow with a Streak of Black),” “I Try to Imagine Them Smitten,” “MTA Transit Exam Attempt #4,” “Urban Tumbleweed,” “A Taste of Blue,” “Is This Your Sky or Mine?”), her ancestors, her uncles, her aunts (“”I Learned to Be a Lady,” “Pretending Is Like Breathing,” “Message Pulled from a Bottle at Sea.”) Love and caution are in the wisdom of the aunties, as she writes in “B-Side Testimonials”: “They were right about having a spare $40 tucked in the rattiest bra you own – to keep it there months in, no years in, just in case a bloom goes sour and you gotta fly on the gray dog I mean greyhound.”

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Manick asserts love throughout. “I’ve decided to take Love for a walk,” she begins the poem, “Dear Spring,” (“I once told an ex that Häagen-Dazs / was like orgasms—there is never / enough.”), and in “We Make Sin as Good Hymn”:

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            I get so drunk off the dark

            galaxies under our skin

            it rushes like major keys

            on brass cello horns

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“When You Kiss a Smoker” combines all of this, the romantic love and the filial. “I think this

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            is what love is, a scent with a promise and no

            real name, but I smelled it in my father’s hug,

            tight as moon pit when I didn’t know fear.

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Other poems like “Rx for Little Black Girls,” “Notes Toward a Poem on Self-Care,” and “All of My Rejected and Broken Poems Come Together and Form a Gang” spell out the caution but the fulfillment that’s key (“I want us living, not just alive”). The poems have become a “family” themselves:

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            they know a spoonful of ink

            makes the medicine go down.

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My absolute favorite poem in the collection, however, is “Something Like Gratitude to the Girl on the 5 Train,” in which she hears Janet Jackson coming through the earbuds of the girl beside her on the subway and Manick is cast back to a memory of her youth. “The train

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                        stops, and you, Janet, and 1994 depart –

               but my shadow flickers, follows

            with a choreographed dance number.

                It feeds my muscle memory, the name

                         of a skinny boy who kissed

                 like wet elephant grass,

                           and lines for this poem.

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 No Sweet Without Brine is brilliantly lyrical and full of a homely wisdom. It’s a worthy follow-up to Manick’s debut collection, Blue Hallelujahs.

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You can find the book here: No Sweet Without Brine: Poems

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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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It’s About Time by Barry Wallenstein

By Greg Bem

The Wolf Moon, full of itself,
looms over this January field,
snow-covered and sparkling.
The creatures are silent
careful not to shatter the spell.

• From “Luminous Danger,” page 53

As the title suggests, poet Barry Wallenstein’s latest book is all about time. More specifically, the book explores relationships as they appear at various chapters and moments in the poet’s life, with the occasional allegorical or epiphanic narrative. It’s About Time is an accessible collection of poems, often minimal and straightforward in descriptions and depictions. While it occasionally feels too stripped down as a collection, lacking flourish and the grandiose, its direct manner charges the reader to consider their own lives, their own experiences, their own growth across age and space. It is ultimately a delightful book capable of everyday inspiration, casual humor, and a dip away from the intellectualism common in most contemporary poetics.

Those cries or sighs
buoy us up as we
pick you up to hold,
nestle and fool around.

• From “Happy Birthday,” page 28

Wallenstein’s collection is divided into nine sections, which are seemingly unrelated but connect over tone and structure more than other qualities. The first section, “Eventually,” seemingly covers reflections from an older age, often with references to children and grandchildren.  “Listen to the Music” offers poems describing the lives of music and jazz musicians. Stylistically, Wallenstein pulls from the energy of artists like Hal Galper. In “Albert Ayler at the End of the Day” the poet writes: And at the end of the day / the muted scream silenced / drowned/ hush / pearls for eyes/ yes.” (page 121). These abstractions are fantastical when juxtaposed with the otherwise clear and acute writings that otherwise fill most of the book. To encounter the poet’s more experimental writing at the very end of the collection offers insight into what other works may exist, now or in the future.

One the gates are opened,
I’ll tip-toe outside,
and on a whim
choose a direction

• From “Quarantined,” page 82

It would be remiss to omit the poet’s pandemic writing from this overview. Wallenstein includes what is arguably the most powerful section, “Lifeboat,” which covers times of quarantine and isolation throughout the pandemic. While it is a strange and unsettling section given how short it is (eight poems in total, similar in length to the other sections), “Lifeboat” feels like a keystone holding the book together and offering insight, like an easter egg, into when this book was composed. Leaning into metaphors near and far, the poet brings plague and fire into the heart of the book, a shadowy center to the book’s otherwise refreshing and optimistic whole.

All readers can benefit from the occasional encounter with simple writing, and just because the poems here are simple or simplistic does not take away their urgency or impact. Poems like “August Remembered” bring the reader to reflect on the changing seasons (page 37). Poems like “The Border” ask us to consider what it is like to physically move from one territory into another (page 96). “Skin Deep” offers a subtle but engaging description of the body with all its veins and textures (page 107). These poems are broad and open, yet the window is narrow, the thinking focused, and the breath steady. They are small, wondrous gifts and there are many of them in this collection, making for robust revelry.

You can find the book here: https://nyq.org/books/title/its-about-time

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 gregbem.com.

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Until Next Time – Selected Poems 1990-2022

Until Next Time – Selected Poems 1990-2022 by g emil reutter has just been released by Alien Buddha Press. The collection is available on Amazon.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C2S719VK/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2SLFCSTBNIY13&keywords=B0C2S719VK&qid=1682344564&sprefix=b0c2s719vk%2Caps%2C73&sr=8-1

 

What Others Have Said About g emil reutter’s Poetry

reutter’s poetry has the keen ability to focus on people in a variety of situations, and to add his own unique twist to each poetic experience.

–           Diane Sahms

… g emil reutter is an urban poet, a man with a city and a town, with family friends… he finds succor, comfort and peace in the fringes of nature, the cold, swift anonymity of creeks and rivers and denizens of the margins.

–           Louis Mckee

As always g emil reutter has the ability to pull us into his world where he conjures up images of late night streets, broken relationships, and men who are on the edge of life and lost in America’s backwaters.

–           James D. Quinton

The colloquial voice of g emil reutter rises from the valley, circles back through years of close observation with a steady eye. There’s nothing trumped up in these poems, nothing inflated into transcendence.

–           J.C. Todd

Here is a distinctive, authentic, and powerful voice. And beautiful. He makes rust sing.

            -– Jeffrey Cyphers Wright, Author of Party Everywhere

…Yet, even as these poems show us hard labor and trashed dreams, reutter affirms how close attention to those lives and to the natural world serves to redeem us…

–           Nathalie F. Anderson

Until Next Time – Selected Poems 1990-2022 by g emil reutter

 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C2S719VK/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2SLFCSTBNIY13&keywords=B0C2S719VK&qid=1682344564&sprefix=b0c2s719vk%2Caps%2C73&sr=8-1

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The Cut Point by Rodrigo Toscano

By Greg Bem

The Cut Point is Rodrigo Toscano’s tenth book, and is the latest in his forays into the elastic and acrobatic edges of poetry and poetic language. It is an ambitious work that continues to best represent Toscano’s range, though it lacks some of the book structure that could make the work accessible and better knowable to the general reader.

From the opening poem, “Magnolias,” Toscano’s experimental and performative breath is accelerated across the page: “This shade-casting magnolia’s / getting involved / with your breathing” (page 1). This introduction to the book is a prime example of finding quick, concise balance between astute observation (place making and world building) and leaning into the fringe and pulling out the abstract.

The balance here is the difficulty of Toscano’s works, which make it excellent to read through, backwards and forwards. Toscano continues: “Or is it better put / was always involved / with your breathing”. The visual qualities (the poet emphasizes intensity and momentum through a pendulum of tabulations and enjambment) and the linguistic precision form a kind of doppler effect of poetry: the feeling of speed and the pressure to slow down at once moves into the reader.

Not all the works are quizzical and baffling, but many of them are. These qualities of question and wonder make Toscano’s poetry great to sit with, to puzzle over, to get haunted by. Sometimes the poems dribble down the page in their mesmerizing: “The unpaired, or paired / or semi-paired, or / multiply paired people / and pestilence” (from “Endless Summer NOLA,” page 12). This literary cascade is complimented by Toscano’s list poems, which are also splattered across the book in mildly absurd, often ecstatic, otherwise amusingly bemusing: “In yellow pants / with red cane / green glasses / with sparkles / purple shoes /with stars / starched white shirt / perfect creases” (from “Sapeurs and Cobalt,” page 3).

Poems like these contain the dialogical and bisecting performative voice Toscano has chiseled across the years. “Couplets” are more like schisms, more like being split down the middle and put back together again, a stack of bricks placed with chapped fingers, a cairn of pebbles in a glacial basin, a conversation of interruption and compilation. In “Triage Poetry,” the cuts are direct, rhythmic, clean:

So sick of triage poetry
Can’t even tell you how much, folks.

Poetry that picks up the pieces
Of broken people, smashed up people

So sick of it. Don’t want to hear it.
Oppressions of all kinds, real shit.

(page 73)

The lines read like a singular voice in couplets, but the allusion to multiple voices, to dialogue, to duality, is also present. “American Poetry Quarterly” moves further afield, the dialogue broken up with line breaks into a clear distinction of separate voices, separate speaking:

You don’t have a routine?

I mean—

You’re spontaneous! You’re a spontaneous poet.
Spontaneantism

No no no—

(page 72)

And in some cases, the “cut” is not as clearly a this or that, but a more varied texture, with nuances in timing and space on the page. “The Land” reflects this by way of a director (as the first voice) and a performer (as the second voice), with the cut between the two voices, as well as a cut within the performer’s lines: “’The land. . . / swims to sea’ // perfect— / take eight // “The land. . . / floats in space”’ (page 80).

Toscano brings additional forms into this collection, including exploring more complex patterns of the “the foot,” tercets and other stanza styles that feel like William Carlos Williams or Anne Waldman and so on. The rhythm and motion push the book forward and each poem feels like one in a long arc of experimentation through various forms, various common approaches that Toscano has chiseled open and weathered into across time.

Still, the book tends to move so astoundingly fast, with little context, that the themes get buried in the form and experimentation. Toscano often includes more serious topics in his writing, and comments on gun control, political parties, postcolonialism, to name a few in this volume, but the impact of these topics feels awash and buried. Likewise, the poet’s approaches to writing feel distanced and obscured through the lack of the book structure, lack of explanation, lack of traditional explication for the reader. And yet the book’s writing is so compelling that perhaps that is the true cut: the slice of being, an excision from expectation.

You can find the book here: http://counterpathpress.org/the-cut-pointrodrigo-toscano

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 gregbem.com.

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The Dog Years of Reeducation by Jianqing Zheng

By Jerome Berglund

straw hats float like life preservers / in a white sea of cotton

George S. Patton once famously declared that pressure makes diamonds.  Folk musician Robert Dylan similarly posited that ‘behind every beautiful thing, there’s been some kind of pain’.  Dickens had his boot blacking sweatshop, Bukowski that dread post office, Plath a certain apiary.  For one particular youth in mainland China during the Cultural Revolution and ever after the harrowing indignities and discomforts inflicted across his peculiar rice paddy, nearby cotton or soybean fields in young adulthood, and the ‘reeducating’ these locales supplied for him and an entire generation of disillusioned acolytes will come to loom large, rattling past and present, irrevocably informing and energizing the eventual scholar and educator’s tangible and subconscious worlds personally and professionally – shifting paradigms, granting heretofore unprecedented perspective, empathy, incredulity, butterfly wings precipitating an ocean’s worth of ripples outward in profound and fascinating fashions.

Containing a wealth of fresh, original content to marvel at, the newly released full-length poetry collection Dog Years of Reeducation also presents together some carefully selected, arranged, and essential chestnuts – polished or expanded upon, with a definitive, ‘directors cut’ feel – to ensure as complete and comprehensive as possible an exhibition from a widespread and extensive career of Jianqing Zheng publishing in different places, styles, and approaches discussing these topics and experiences, creating an essential showcase of the poet at his finest in discourse upon a subject deeply familiar and important to him – and germane for each of us also, in many relevant ways, wherever we reside or fit into discrete struggles for agency, autonomy, edification and community.  Appreciators of his new book should also investigate a previous shorter collection by the author examining similar matters, Enforced Rustication, roughly half the length of this latest robust assembly of material.

Half a century having elapsed since their occurrence, these scenes have only grown more potent in the annals of recollection and grasping their rightful place in posterity, aging like a fine artisanal vintage, fermented and preserved with enormous care.  Jianqing’s series has a decidedly Leaves of Grass nature; like the portfolio of Whitman’s representing an industrious life’s work, Zheng’s own magnum opus continues quietly shifting and expanding here, contracting there, everywhere pulsating with the most serious intention and disciplined searching for the perfect words and spaces to express and communicate an ephemeral feeling, convey ambivalence as to what ultimate moral (nor have such revelations remained static; comparing the earliest poems scrutinizing this era from first sections of book with the latest additions in the evolving conversation and debriefing makes for a wildly thought-provoking and stimulating exercise:  ‘rusticated years / no longer taste bitter’?!) or lessons should be inferred, interpreted or gleaned, poignant but elusive truth which is slippery as a worm between one’s fingers.

When you feel the pain, the leeches already bloat with your blood.

If you are interested in history, knowledge, the quest for meaning and acceptance, desire to better understand global politics and the murky missteps of that Great Leap Forward in hopes of learning from and not repeating various miscalculations, intuiting happy accidental benefits, discerning glaring pitfalls so they may be avoided, then this will prove an indispensably didactic addition to every student of the human condition’s library.  Observing one of the foremost modern masters in English language haiku and haibun applying his talents to such an ambitious, intimate cause and undertaking is truly riveting to witness.

Just as Henry Miller constructively plumbed his ‘Rosy Crucifixion’ period to great effect throughout his career, Edvard Munch would be plagued by an obsession with the image of his sister withering on her sickbed from tuberculosis, Billie Holiday’s nickname Lady served as a constant reminder and hearkening back to that nascence working with her mother in a house of ill repute (imaginably not dissimilar to the French equivalent in which Edith Piaf was almost identically matriculated), the same specter which has so long been haunting Europe made its presence no less felt in the formative years of one of America’s most revered and accomplished living poets of our generation as Jianqing Zheng ironically found his voice amongst crushing subjugation and pressure to remain silent and conform, traumas and anxieties both patent and invisible inherent of coming into maturity under the regime of Chairman Mao Zedong.

life in the fields / a fly trapped / in a web

In a tactic quite analogous to how Canadian and the American indigenous children were removed from their families and cultures, indoctrinated with Christian beliefs, clothing, hairstyles, robbed of their names, encouraged to not learn their ancestral language or traditions of sustainable agriculture and self reliance, the minutia and broad strokes of what in practice this romanticized initiative of working the land, receiving tutelage by agrarian castes amounted to is captivatingly illustrated here in a case study which should give every progressive reformer pause.  This affecting period, equated in the opening poem – and revisited figuratively near the conclusion – to the dog-eared pages of a yellowed book, suffice to say made a lasting impression on its pupils, though a far cry from the sort responsible architects had envisioned it should.  The particulars, details, and startlingly similar nuances of an approach ostensibly under the ironic pretenses of rejecting and revolting from capitalism’s peculiar brands of bondage and feudalism, yet creating for all intents and purposes a proletariat dictatorship every bit as tyrannous to the citizen and stifling for the intellectual, has been one of Jianqing’s lifelong fixations – looking back on with the bias of hindsight and a storied career’s amassed experiences with statecraft, philosophy, theory Eastern and Western both, viewed through diverse and holistic lenses.

It’s been said no one is a prophet in their own land.  As with Joyce’s intensive, elevated depictions of an Ireland he remained permanently detached from after his exodus, something in the introduction of time and distance, the finality and confliction of expatriation – it’s no surprise or coincidence that one finds the wayfaring hobo and stray dog among Zheng’s recurring cast of characters; the third section of Dog Years begins ‘homesick / a seesaw creaks’ – facilitates much of literature’s most evocative reflections and deliberate meditating.

There is something quite archetypal and timeless about this narrative, from the Biblical Joseph impressed into service by a betrayal of his brothers, to the Athenian children sacrificed one after another to a labyrinth’s minotaur, and more contemporary local parallels such as the story of Solomon Northrup which inspired his memoir of repression and liberation 12 Years a Slave, the many unmistakable commonalities between the coerced physical labor and psychological hegemony exerted upon the individual throughout the People’s Republic of China in the late sixties and early seventies and the abominable practice of forced servitude upon which the Americas were founded – vestiges of which remain vital organs of the nation’s economy, rebranded and obscured through the entrapments of convict leasing – were immediately apparent upon emigrating from the land of his birth, Zheng could not fail to perceive in the Mississippi Delta region of the postbellum South he arrived in, has called home for over three decades.

The anecdotes and realizations of this collection represent an integral catalytic impetus, seeds which would sprout into a strong thread of solidarity and internationalism (e.g. in Delta Notes: ‘hayfield / blacks and whites work together / under the blue sky’; among academic contributions to the critical landscape the author has edited significant and acclaimed anthologies African American Haiku and the Other World of Richard Wright which include valuable articles on a range of subjects and exemplars) running across, perceptible admirably about the oeuvre of Jianqing – whose given name bears a noticeable resemblance to the word zhiqing, or ‘Educated Youth’, used to describe those millions of middle and high school aged adolescents shipped off to the countryside for compulsory drudgery and propagandistic training by provincial agents of supposed ideologic superiority.  These preoccupations with class, oppression and homogenizing, affinities with experiences of marginalized and exploited American populations will be discerned and artfully cited for the reader’s attentive consideration innumerable places throughout Zheng’s vast and eclectic body of work; leitmotifs and correspondences become more obvious as one observes the mosaic each piece and facet comes to form when understood as a cohesive unit.

‘Night Life on the Farm’, one of Zheng’s signature and most provocative works is worth paying particularly close attention to, clearly represents a highly consequential and significant piece to this longstanding private puzzle of origins the poet has so worthily grappled with.  In different iterations it has appeared in earlier collections, is here presented with a new intriguing ending and twist, serving as a vital backbone and means of grounding and contextualizing the work, offering an overarching through-line across a prolific literary journey and thirty years (in Delta Notes Jianqing wistfully ponders, ‘MLK Day / wondering what dreams / I’ve realized’, laments lacks of progress or improvement: ‘still a black and white pic / at the edge of cotton fields / a paint-flaking church’) of diligent composition and publications.  The cotton towns of the United States, microcosms of sorts for the global south, and pickers who inhabit them, their distinctive field holler music (in Found Haiku, Delta Notes) reappear persistently, like Blues standards being covered by deft musicians old and new. Cigarettes as currency, smoking representing momentary release are also noteworthy recurring symbols and themes in many poems.  The sparrows Mao failed to eradicate are frequently omnipresent, leaping, pecking, fluttering indomitably through many a storyline.

An initial string in Dog Years ‘Reel to Reel’ describes one young farmer (a father in an earlier variation of the piece, interestingly) in a rice paddy urging an ox through its plowing.  Elsewhere the hill Myna blackbirds of his native land are described caged and free, engaged in hunger strike and parroting back basic phrases.  Confined parakeets (present in Minis too) and a caged rooster similarly appear in collection The Porch.  More overtly in Found Haiku one verse describes the residents of a plantation interning a large enclosure of tropical birds.  In ‘Free Choice’ through the dying and style of a women’s hair identity and authenticity, self-determination in the face of or response to domineering societal pressures to superficially conform, toward a presumed aesthetic principle (something very relatable for African Americans past and present, females most particularly, in regards to hair and makeup traditions) is beguilingly relayed.  In many areas throughout the author’s writings, the melon as seasonal delicacy and bucolic staple both Asian and American, figures prominently and enigmatically in different usages.  There is also a question of qualification, appropriation superbly broached or posed countless times, such as a remarkable verse in Delta Notes: delta tour / a cell phone’s blues ring / in a tourist’s purse.  No clear or straightforward answers exist for such perplexing inquiries, and the koan aspect, element of reflecting upon complexities at length lends much value and interest to each of the author’s incisive investigations.

If I never acquainted myself with local peasants…

How a surging populist movement representing groundswells of consensus and public support may compromise its ideals egregiously, a nation can flippantly forsake its population, a generation can misuse (the Emmett Till tragedy subtly galvanizes many of Zheng’s poems, including memorable pieces exploring Money and the Tallahatchie River in Delta Sun) and manipulate their youth, a zealot excuses and consents to problematic means for justifying lofty ends, the way conflating babies and bathwater invariably lead to misunderstandings in the highest echelons perverting objectives, fomenting ignorance, discouraging critical thinking (a scene of apple picking, as well as a striking verse from Zheng’s collection of sequences Minis comes to mind: ‘on every window / of the school shines / a morning sun’; a passage in Found Haiku is also germane: ‘hidden track / through cotton fields – / a train of dust’), fostering complacent automatons rather than the spirited striving toward actualization necessary to achieve a post-scarcity economy, predicated upon learning and constant challenging of imperfect institutions, infrastructure of both commerce and the state… These subjects provide the poet with no shortage of powerful raw material, the careful synthesis of which has required a lengthy and painstaking brewing process which finds some of the most coherent and urgent articulation yet in The Dog Years of Reeducation released this year by Madville Publishing.  Daring readers who seek this book out shall encounter compelling contents both immensely edifying and tremendously enjoyable to peruse.

You can find the book here: https://madvillepublishing.com/product/dog-years/#:~:text=About%20The%20Dog%20Years%20of%20Reeducation%3A%20Poems%20by,countryside%20to%20receive%20reeducation%20from%20the%20poor%20peasants

Jerome Berglund has published book reviews and scholarly articles in Frogpond, Fireflies Light, Valley Voices and more. He has also published poetry in short form in Asahi, Shimbun, Bottle Rockets, Modern Haiku and more. Twitter

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