Peripheral Debris by Carl Kaucher

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By Charles Rammelkamp

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Channeling the mystical meandering jazz bebop philosophical musings of Jack Kerouac, Carl Kaucher’s new collection focuses on the gritty and ponders the eternal questions of existence.  At the end of the first poem, “Pond Scum,” he asks:

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If life is God’s music

will the chorus end with a round of applause

for a song well sung

or will there just be silence?

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Meanwhile, in his elegy for a dead friend, “Steve,” he asks, “How many bites to eat a Big Mac?” Kaucher isn’t always so serious!

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Peripheral Debris is divided into two parts, “Peripheral” and “Debris.” While both evince Kaucher’s distinctive style, the poems in the first part mainly seem to develop his outlook while the poems in the “Debris“ section are a kind of travelogue through small town Pennsylvania, from the perspective of the self-described “Hobo Poet” whose attitude the reader has since come to understand.

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Indeed, the poem, “Kerouac,” from the first section, honors his inspirations.

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Beating loud

the bongos of suffering

so that

we might feel the rhythm

and vibrations at a distance

not going near

but knowing still

all dimensions

of the deep discordant drum

drubbing of desolation

the shamanic inflection

angelic resurrection

and insight

of the human predicament

on the down and out

with dissonant choruses

to wallow in

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The poem “November,” referring to “an interstellar literature / written within the lunar wind,” concludes with an homage to Patti Smith, from her iconic 1975 album Horses, “weeping for somebody’s sins / but not mine.” The poem, “The Deep State,” honors William Blake.

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The cleverly titled poem, “Postpoemed,” summarizes Kaucher’s approach. It begins:

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Take a few scattered words,

assemble them into a thought

which can be woven

into the finest threads.

Weave the thread into a tempo and flow

that creates a vision,

an intricate web of idea

to paint a portrait of conditions

and circumstance.

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For four more stanzas he describes the recipe – “Introduce the characters”; “Get lost within the flow / and feel the fuzzy vibration of energy”; “Whisper the words down the alley / so they twist and distort / like an effluent prophecy.” The poem, he hopes, will “provide warmth / to all who have gathered / throughout the long night.”

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While Kaucher sets the poem, “Snakes and cats” from the “Peripheral” section in Reading, Pennsylvania (“at the corner of 11^th and Robeson streets”), it’s mainly in the “Debris” section that he takes us through the Pennsylvania countryside, in poems like “Johnstown,” “Shillington” (birthplace of the novelist John Updike),  “Shamokin,” “Sunbury,” “Tamaqua,” “Wilkes-Barre,” “Carlisle,” “York,” “Manayunk,” “West Scranton,” “Reading,” and “Altoona” – not to mention poems like “Road Ruminations” (“Towns like Tipton and Tyrone, / Bald Eagle and Port Matilda”) and “Perspectives of Butch” (Schuykill County).  It’s a peripatetic life, the observations and experiences of a holy mendicant wandering from town to town. In the poem, “In,” in West Chester, having returned east from Pittsburgh, he meets a young man in a bar.

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            I tell him about the Beats and Kerouac

            and how inspiration and appreciation of the beauty

            factors into achievement,

            also commitment and WOW!

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He’s like the wandering Zen master enlightening the populace. In the poem “Hobo Poet” he writes:

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            Sleeping on the street corner

            doesn’t seem to get you closer to God.

            Although, cold wet asphalt

            and a curb to rest my head

            may be the start of this poem.

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Back in the first section, in the poem, “First light,” we find him waking up on one of those obscure street corners:

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            Ascend to obscurity blessed

            till the blackness rolls golden gardens

            of dawn born in detachment

            and the essence of the void

            rolls out divinity on Christ tongues

            and enlightened Buddha drugs

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            I forever am revelation

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Indeed, the narrator seems to embody an enlightenment that he doesn’t necessarily always share as he makes his way from town to town.

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Peripheral Debris is full of Kaucher’s somber photographs – bridges, graveyards, kitchens, a bleak apartment, a lone seagull, downtown squares, a young woman’s tattooed back, abandoned houses, coin-op laundromats, an angel statue in silhouette. These atmospheric graphics enhance the sense of solitude that’s at the heart of these poems.

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The second section – and the book itself – ends in Altoona, a town in the middle of the state that was founded by the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1849, from its very beginning a stopover on the way to elsewhere.  As always, the poet is observing, experiencing his environment. On the wrong side of the tracks, a homeless guy starts shouting at him, asking for the time. The narrator moves on. With a sly reference to Petula Clark’s 1965 hit song, he goes “downtown / to forget all my troubles, forget all my cares.” He encounters another anonymous citizen of the town, a suspicious woman in neon green slippers, as he scribbles “about the horse fly / bussing my head.”

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            After a while,

            I was only as I am

            and again on my way

            home.

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Wherever that is. Whatever “home” signifies, a place, a state of mind.

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You can find the book here: Peripheral Debris

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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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Contra natura by Rodolfo Hinostroza Translated by Anthony Seidman

By Greg Bem

And by then Reality was / an impetuous phantasmagoria

(from “King’s Gambit,” page 15)

At long last, the Peruvian poet Rodolfo Hinostroza’s majestic Contra natura is available to the English-speaking audience. This work is a crucial component of late 20^th-century poetry attuned to the modernist collecting, the surrealist melting, and the complex humor that follows the community footsteps of poets throughout South America. Contra natura is not a long sequence of poetry, at roughly 60 pages, but it is packed with stunning lines, overlapping themes and symbols, and the voice of Hinostroza himself, a witty and multifaceted master of poetic ceremonies who bridges a range of tones and examinations within the heart of the book’s sequence.

Goodbye fucked dreams, goodbye your pulse,
brilliant carver

(from “King’s Gambit,” page 17)

The text was originally published in 1970, having been acknowledged and awarded by Octavio Paz via the Maldoror Prize in Barcelona. The storied history of the poet and his work is worth examining in the book’s extensive introduction, graciously provided by the book’s translator, US-based Anthony Seidman. One might find elements of Paz’s distillation in the text, just as one might find the devouring essence of Lautreamont himself, but more prominently we have a book of wholly original and undeniably impenetrable poetry that both fits and stands unencumbered without comparison.

In many moments, this incomparable core matches the poet’s consciousness and intentions, flighty and sturdy and beckoning: “the world for which I fancied myself mediator / never existed,” he writes in “Imitation of Propertius,” page 31. It is awesome indeed to see the poet call forth the style and concerns of Sextus Propertius in this example, though one needn’t dive deeply into the history of Latin poetry to understand the calm binding to history within the Peruvian’s lines. The layers between word and reference remind me of exploring Olson or Pound at length, wondering and wandering, exploring how deep each reference might go.

The uniqueness and brevity of this book fits well within a relatively straightforward translation; straightforward in the sense that the poetry makes sense, is digestible, and tends to match the Spanish succinctly in a masterful though playful way. Seidman has done a marvelous job at capturing Hinostroza’s energy and making it feel freshly contemporary, arriving today, and yet it maintains a touch of the late modernist period as well, moving around the essence of culture and community through which the book was originally written.

A wave of migratory birds flew over your forehead
you were the girl of the orange trees

(from “Problems of Brabantio,” page 55)

Visually stunning, the poems often read like a descent taken down a magnificent staircase toward some destination of rest. (The poet himself remarks, in another section of “Imitation of Propertius,” “there is only one singer for the ascent / and a thousand for the descent” (page 43). So true in the application of style and form from poem to poem.

Often stanzas last dozens of lines, only cut off by way of subsections within each poem, or new poems entirely. I was taken by lines like: “and that summer we stretched out on the beaches of Spain / incandescence of eyes,” which open and shut an image in a single breath (from “Celebration of Lysistrata,” page 47). Later in the book, where the poet begins to bring in visual symbols and explore limits of the written word, we see Hinostroza’s internal comments fulfill and instill a density to the image: “it was not the vibration of the protoplasm / not a shapeless thing not a swamp / confused libraries yellowing beneath the sun” (from “Hommage à Vasaraely,” page 65). The splicing cluster comes as quickly as it goes, powerfully incising like a haiku, relieving, and confounding, all the same.

Images often make up natural divisions in theme and structure, though they are not kept to a line, a couplet, or other traditional boundaries. The poems read with a sense of ecstasy or exasperation, reflecting the energy of Hinostroza and his peers. The attractiveness seems to logically connect with the poet’s fame in younger and current generations of poets in Peru.

Still, the book is no cakewalk and is as difficult as it is accessible. For each image that feels astounding, there results a sequence of questions over the image’s placement and inclusion, a puzzlement muddying the overall trajectory of each poem. This messiness, a beautiful, organized chaos, is what Charles Bernstein describes in the book’s opening review quotes as a “a gift to English.” Even Paz once remarked to Hinostroza that the book would change Hinostroza’s life. The whole book is a treasure, but often the value, I think, is within its mysteries, its complexities, its nuances, similar to the work of Uruguayan poet Marosa di Giorgio.

A desert, no doubt, something sun-scorched. The sun. Remember it?
There’s a sun outside!

(from “Dialogue Between a Prisoner and Deaf Man,” page 25)

It is impossible to succinctly describe the folds that go into the content, both of scope and meaning, in Contra natura, so instead I invite you, reader, to find this book and explore on your own. Like Blaser, like Spicer, like Waldman, like Baraka, there will explode within the confines of the page lines pluming and spinning and expanding. It may or may not feel as of or against the natural, but it will catch your focus all the same. It is an optimistic book, one that captures attention and imposes drive, imposes will. Moments of chaos are often closed with a vibrance or slow fade into harmony (if not a forlorn form of it), as we see in the book’s title poem: “the peace and beauty of this world have spread over me / our bodies / successive timeless hommages to the daybreak of life” (page 111). It is in these moments, inclusive of all the emotion bound to history and compilation, that we can read a permanence in Hinostroza’s work.

You can find the book here: https://cardboardhousepress.org/Contra-Natura-Rodolfo-Hinostroza

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.

From The Editors

Diane Sahms-Guarnieri

https://moonstone-arts-center.square.site/product/sahms-guarnieri-diane-covid-19-2020-a-poetic-journal/294?cs=true&cst=custom

 g emil reutter

 https://www.amazon.com/Thunder-Lightning-Urban-Cowboys-reutter/dp/B09HFXSD2F

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Red Truck Bear by Richard Nester

By Mary C McCarthy

In “Red Truck Bear” Richard Nester asks the most necessary of questions: what, like the moon, is in plain sight, yet unfathomable? The moon hides nothing, thinks nothing of us, looks back at us “with no discovery on its mind at all/ and even less concealment.” The moon, like the world we inhabit, is opaque in its stubborn “thingness,” cares nothing for us as we weave our webs of choice and action in its reflected light. In the wickedly funny “Wild”, forsythia, that early flowering plant often welcomed as harbinger of the new season, becomes a devouring nightmare, product “from a mating of kudzu with barbed wire.” Here nature is neither benign nor indifferent but actively malevolent. We are counseled to “Forget its pastoral sham,” beauty disguising the fact that “Forsythia hates you,” intends only its own good, and will gleefully overrun all your hopes and plans, punish you with slashes, poke out your eyes, finally even “devour houses and spit out the bricks.” Completely unsympathetic to us and our cherished sensitivities “It will eat your dog.”

All a hilarious exaggeration, yet the kernel of truth it proclaims can’t be denied. Empathy is only possible in the human world, not inherent in nature, and when it exists at all it is an “itty-bitty seed,” rare and hard, small and yet essential for any dream of the future. The job of the poet and storyteller is to make something out of the “Indecipherable,” to “convince you of your own indecipherable worth.”–”so you can go on and not give up.” Poetry may be like prayer, holy and essential, a saving grace.

Humanity, empathy, justice, love, all the hard things these poems strive to find and define, while illuminating their complexity and challenge. What we know is that “broke things stay broken,” and the enormous task of healing is an arduous process, where the damaged “have to be cleaned one breathing bird at a time” The theme of restoration occurs again and again in the idea of cleaning, of making things clean, even though “Clean” is an invitation to dirt, and “Too much cleaning up and one starts to see dirt everywhere.” To clean something becomes an act of faith and love, an insistence on hope. It is interesting that the principal character in the poems who does this restorative act is the poet’s “Dementia Stricken Mother, “who could make already clean things sparkle, and “shine like gospel in a new revelation.” Maybe we should all aspire to the kind of saintly “industrious joy” that loves the world so well “everything can be restored.”

In the series of shorter pieces under “Grudge” Nester demonstrates the power of inertia,

The stubborn resistance to change that keeps broken things broken. In stories about his father he explores the result of remaining mired in old and ungenerous assumptions. Stuck, his father cannot change, and the generations remain strangers unable to meet, share or collaborate on a future. The result is “nothing coming of nothing” unhealed, persistent isolation.

How can we escape this separation, plumb the indescribable space between the self and the world? That challenge comes from a cultural habit, the “Science Method.” To the Cherokee shaman that space doesn’t exist, he is never alone, but continuous with the natural world. For Western man, the existentialist, that space is an unbridgeable chasm, “our gift, only the gray form of a penetrating ignorance we were proud of.” Habit and theory are prisons, “not the key, but the lock.” Freedom is threatened by the familiar, though that familiar may be terrible, it is what we’re used to, what imagination chokes on.

As we live always hungry, always “at the starving end of something” we may only have a choice of addictions, where “Everything that lives is addicted to something.” The best we can do may be to choose our addiction purposefully, eyes wide open. Love something, “bite hard on the hook of something you love that loves you back and doesn’t lie.” We are like the praying mantis who chewed a frame for his head from a leaf, always seeing the world as frame for our image. Can we do more than preen, are we the universe reflecting on itself while “munching our green hopes”?

Perhaps our place is not in death and distance, but in love, which “keeps no calendar.”

Love can be our mirror, and the stories we share, even reluctantly, the fires to warm us. Stories are powerful acts, and shouldn’t be told “with your back turned.” A good novel carries us off and returns the world to us new, remade, and reimagined. In “Reckoning” singing birds teach us to reckon as they do, to see ourselves as “of little consequence beside important song, as by a great river.” Ultimately what we have and what persists is there always outside the window, “the exquisite world,” a wonder we are also part of, that might even “for the smallest instant” have depended on us being there, seeing, reflecting, loving and creating. There lies true restoration.

You can get the book here: https://www.amazon.com/Red-Truck-Bear-Richard-Nester/dp/1950462749/ref=sr_1_3?dchild=1&qid=1635534873&qsid=140-5063485-5152802&refinements=p_27%3ARichard+Nester&s=books&sr=1-3&sres=B096TN7H7W%2C1909916315%2C1950462749%2C1949229319%2C1909916110%2C0615951864%2C0692743626%2CB0006QVHPK%2CB001GTABCQ%2C1718192878&text=Richard+Nester

Mary McCarthy is a writer and artist whose work has appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Third Wednesday, Verse Virtual, Earth’s Daughters and The Ekphrastic Review.

Poems from Argentina by David Francis

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By Patricia Carragon

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We travel by train, boat, plane, car, or on foot. In Poems from Argentina, David Francis shows us another way—by poetry, in four segments—Tucumán, Buenos Aires, Mar del Plata and Honeymoon Hitchhike. But this is not an ordinary travelogue that details superficial expectations and experiences of tourists from the United States. This is an independent traveler’s journal; a modern-day troubadour traveling deeper into the daily throes of a country at war with the United Kingdom back in the early 80’s. Mr. Francis, a poet and singer-songwriter, writes about the tensions he saw and sensed in the Argentinean people, even while doing the most mundane tasks. Being a poet, he has empathy. His poems are conduits for a nation’s sorrow. Yet at the same time, his personal life experiences discord, making it difficult to balance the pressure, giving credence and flavor to his work.

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In his first poem “A Window in front of the Mountain,” Mr. Francis picks up on foreboding karma in the atmosphere.

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A window in front of the mountain

but from that window you cannot see

the mountain . . . Clouds themselves like

towels fray and mildew, are impure

because the air is not a vacuum.

Even the cypresses will not last but

turn to sticks, a slight discolored

stain on the grass.

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He sets the metaphoric tone for his stories to unravel. War is waging, and Argentina is dealing with a military dictatorship. You can’t see the mountain in front of you. Clouds aren’t pure, and the cypresses will die. Nature in pain like its inhabitants.

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In “A Rainy Night,” fear is everywhere and grips the people of Tucumán.

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but the wires are black

but then forms start to emerge

sharing no umbrella they hurry across

the street to one of their houses

leaving behind a house with no lights

then – the shadow of the inside of a kitchen

on a neighboring house – a face in silhouette –

in the darkness a horrible white face –

then nothing – back to bed

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We move on to the section called Buenos Aires. Buenos Aires, famous for the tango and its European architecture and culture, has its dark side. In “Apology for the Seamen,” we read about how sailors react to the city.

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There is a logical reason

seamen are so gray and bored and

redundant and their endless card

games have the insensitive traveler’s

flipping-through-postcards flatness.

There are certain calls they won’t

answer and ports they wouldn’t

go to if you gave them a million

dollars.  They are tired of

meeting begging children on the

first land they see.

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And in “Drops Falling after a Downpour,” the author is miserable in his hotel room. He writes:

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Stick my head

                       out the window

from our hotel room

                                 into the alley

so dark

            with a bad smell

and feel

             the drops falling

catch one

               in my hand

one on

           my eyelid

am I

       catching

the present

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The author, like the sailors, impoverished children, and nature itself, lives in the ever-present gloom encompassing the city and nation. As you read on, the balconies get darker, rain becomes incessant currents, and the author goes deeper into battle with himself. An old man nods to something Mr. Francis fears.

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Mr. Francis takes us to Mar del Plata, a section where he writes his truth behind a pretty postcard seaside resort. He is lonely and sees that he is not alone as we learn in “Mirror of Loneliness.”

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The loneliest rooms facing the sea

the opposite of what people say

the sea is a mirror of loneliness . . .

. . .  and an old man walks his dog

runs him across the street

then takes off the leash

and sets him free

                           on the beach

and the man picks up the bread

for the birds and throws it

and the little dog ignores him

                           for a sand castle

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The ocean in “The Sea Is Peaceful” tends to be calming but to the author, its rhythmic tides synchronize with the flow of soldiers marching off to the Falklands War.

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oh we say the sea

is violent

but it’s just an expression

the sea is peaceful

but always, always

old waves rolling

young men marching,

young men.

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Lastly, in Honeymoon Hitchhike, Mr. Francis and his bride travel through a myriad of landscapes, ranging from hills, pampas, deserts, to the southernmost tip of Argentina. This final chapter does end on a more hopeful note.

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We feel the iciness of “A Wall in Río Gallegos.”

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Woman in black walking along the white wall,

holding her purse tightly as though in a stall,

ignoring the signs advertising the city

as though they were so much graffiti,

huddling in the chill of the South . . .

. . . I had seen her before proudly enter the café

as the men froze their dice and glowered her way:

what made her move to this cold town

like a black rose by a sudden snow weighed down?

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And his final poem “Ushuaia” almost sums up Mr. Francis’ Argentinean adventure.

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the shadow of the stovepipe

on the snow is like a toadstool

but neither the frozen wires

nor the frozen antenna

that balances like a cat

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have shadows or reflections

and the reason is

buried things have no reflection

and the snow buries

even the clouds

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sometimes even the stars

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However, there are reasons for hope, since the chill and bleakness of snow and sorrow are temporary in the last stanza.

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A twisted tree

on the side of a hill

and behind a yellow falling torrent

and bushes with orange thorns

stranded on streaked snow

sea gulls congregate on an isthmus

and cows listen

strange buds start reddening

one ahead of the others

in the distance

ready

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To summarize, Poems from Argentina is a traveler’s journal set to poetry. With his troubadour poet wisdom and vision, David Francis delves into the depths of situations, going beyond his world to understand nature and the Argentinean people, while watching history take another ugly step into the future.

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You can find the book here: https://www.amazon.com/Poems-Argentina-David-Francis/dp/1950462404

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Patricia Carragon’s debut novel, Angel Fire, is from Alien Buddha Press and her latest book from Poets Wear Prada is Meowku. Patricia hosts Brownstone Poets and is the editor-in-chief of its annual anthology. She is an executive editor for Home Planet News Online.  She lives in Brooklyn, NY. For more information about Ms. Carragon and her reading series, www.brownstonepoets.blogspot.com  and at patriciacarragon8.wordpress.com  

Farmers, Queens, Trains and Clowns by g emil reutter

Please share with others who may have an interest 

Alien Buddha Press has just released g emil reutter’s poetry collection, Farmers, Queens, Trains and Clowns.

The collection is available on Amazon at this link:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08MN3GH95/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&qid=1604506678&refinements=p_27%3AG+Emil+Reutter&s=books&sr=1-1&text=G+Emil+Reutter 

What Others Say about Farmers, Queens, Trains and Clowns by g emil reutter

In g emil reutter’s Farmers, Queens, Trains, and Clowns we are treated to a panorama of a fractured Americana. The singer/seer/poet weaves the celebratory and the lament in his masterful “Philadelphia.” The ghost of a railway station is conjured along with the past majesty of derelict neighborhoods. Gut-wrenching abandonment abounds—turkey buzzards on rooftops, icy furnaces,  vacant-eyed buildings, carp that float sideways next to legless frogs. Laced through the graffiti-scarred souls who wander these poems, the moon’s splendor shines as does the richness of family and the poet’s compassion. reutter blesses us with a raw poetry of savage beauty like his bees encased in a silken coffin. His acute powers of observation witness the spider’s captive brown butterfly as well as what is ensnared in the vibrating strands of a divided America.  We are left with the haunting image of Orion frozen with his back to the earth as if an entire civilization has been discarded.

            —-Stephanie Dickinson, author of The Emily Fables and Big-Headed Anna Imagines Herself

Red, white, and blue-collar—g emil reutter champions the past glory of America, finding triumph in his avid, dead-on descriptions. Suicide, cancer, abandoned tracks, those down-at-the-heels and down on their luck—these are the subjects this poet describes with boundless compassion, flawless cadence, and drum-tight metaphors. Here is a distinctive, authentic, and powerful voice. And beautiful. He makes rust sing.

            -– Jeffrey Cyphers Wright, author of Party Everywhere 

You can get the book here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08MN3GH95/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&qid=1604506678&refinements=p_27%3AG+Emil+Reutter&s=books&sr=1-1&text=G+Emil+Reutter

A reading from 2018

Journeyman’s Suitcase by Mike James

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By Lynette G. Esposito

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In Journeyman’s Suitcase by Mike James, published by Luchador Press, clear questions and observations open a literary window of perspective and viewpoint. The fifty-two pages of this short tome are mostly one-stanza experiences that read like someone’s notebook as the writer interprets representative images into logical conclusions.

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For example, in the poem False Confessions on page three, James presents things that never happened in a one-stanza truncated sentence form.

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                   The time you panhandled for tattoos. The monthly

                   payments for transcendence.  All the famous people waived at or

                   had orgies with.  The time you found the burnt wreckage

                   of flaming shoes.  Childhood spent tossing pennies behind the

                   Red Dirt Cabaret.  The mother who worked as both a nun and a

                   stripper. The medical journal contribution about aspirin as a

                   cure for love sick penguins.  How you were the first o capitalize

                   and conjugate KAPOW.  That ability to translate any fairy

                   language into Yiddish.  The parakeets who sang duets while

                   you scrambled and re-scrambled the eggs from the plain white

                   chickens you raised. The prize-winning rooster from Borneo.

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The choices of the false confessions suggest bravado and humor as well as serving a good dose of how our memory works and what we are willing to confess to even if there is little truth in it.

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James uses this same tone and technique in the poem, She Could Have been a Seller of Indulgences on page twenty-one This poem shows a perception of time as it controls and/or influences one’s choices.  The poem is presented in a two–stanza format.

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                        It was never easy for her especially on Tuesdays, as we know

                        how Tuesdays are with their leftover promises from the start

                        from the start of the week and the day before.  It’s probably not enough

                        that every third day she wore a sun dress to keep the sun

                        interested and nearby.

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The reader is introduced to the she of the poem by what she wears and on what day. she wears it.  There is a certain tonal sorrow for this SHE as the unnamed person who seems to be holding on by the thread of a perhaps unneeded sun dress on a specific day of the week. The answer the narrator gives is to keep the sun near and interested. This is almost like a Don Quixote scene without windmills.  In its place is the sun.

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The second stanza gives details of her life and the dry chardonnay she shares at her dining room court with her nail technicians and everyone else.  It is like a short story without unnecessary details.

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In part two of this volume, the journey continues as James explores the everyday symbols that define everyday life. The image of a map is used in Too Far on page thirty-nine.

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                               A map keeps you from too far.

                               That’s a map’s job.

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                               The best map would reflect stars.

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This poem like so many of the poems in this book, suggest in a direct way the meaning, both literal and figurative, of everyday objects that guide us.

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James demonstrates his prowess in observing and analyzing poetically how the world works.  The book is a pleasure to read and quick paced.

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You can find the book here: https://www.amazon.com/Journeymans-Suitcase-Mike-James/dp/1950380866

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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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What the Owl Taught Me by Annest Gwilym

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By Byron Beynon

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In this, her first full collection, Annest Gwilym makes an impressive debut. She brings to life, through rich observation, her deeply felt connection with the natural world. She inhabits this world with an objective and sympathetic eye. Landscape and place are important to an understanding of what Gwilym is trying to say in these poems. The creatures that inhabit them become the primary focus, whether they are mammals, birds, insects, reptiles, fish and marine life, they all play a part in the delicate balance and rhythm of a world we all share and live in.

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As Ted Hughes discovered as a teenager, animals have a “vivid life of their own, outside mine” and he began to “look at them……from their own point of view.” Gwilym’s poem “Last Night I Became An Emperor Moth” begins with this view in mind:

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“I rode through the liquid night,

as a melon-slice moon crested a bank of cloud.

Part of the hush and curve of the universe;

Pleiades above me a diamond cluster ring.

Clothed in starlight, wings powdered,

furry belly glossy and plump.”

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Gwilym also casts an innocent eye in the poem “Whelk Shell” when

“As a child they looked like ice-cream cones”……and “Held to the ear I hear/the rushing blood and heartbeat/of a living being.”

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There are several focused observations in her work such as:

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“sheep like drops of candlewax/Spilled over bare green hills.” (Driving Through Sheep Country)

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“Hair-thin legs on stilts” (Daddy Longlegs in the Attic)

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“They huddle like conspirators/in slick black suits…” (Crows)

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“they crest/ like the pure notes of a clarinet.” (Dolphins At Porthdinllaen)

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and from the poem “Great Crested Newt” she takes us to a world inhabited by a “Creature of two elements,/he waves his dinosaur tail /at his chosen one, beguiles/her with cologne/in his brightest spring suit.”

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There is also that sense of fate which many creatures have little or no choice to determine:

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“Ear-tags show these beasts are marked for death;” (September Cattle) and again where trees are uprooted and houses built “foxes /stalk the shrinking woods.” (The Fox Road)

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As the Anglo-American writer Stephen Pain says we “experience a whole range of feelings towards animals, and hope and believe that they are reciprocated. They produce, to paraphrase David Hume (author of A Treatise of Human Nature), “a sensible concern” in us. The birth and death of animals (not all of course) elicit from us sympathy. The nature and extent of this sympathy has evolved over centuries into something complex and provides the foundation for our appreciation of animal verse.”

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This concern can be heard in the poet’s voice as she looks outside late at night from a bedroom window at a family of foxes “a swirl of autumn,/with a feline leap from a fence they landed,/velvet-footed, spangle-faced, a mother/and kits who rolled and played…”(City Foxes)

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Gwilym has two patterned poems, “Wasps’ Nest” and “Golden Child”, both arranged in interesting shapes on the page. In her poem “Golden Child” the endangered Undulate Ray is: “Beauty queen of rays,/she hides her cartoon face underneath where she/grins with 50 teeth. She bears children in a purse/fit for a mermaid.”

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We are closer to the poet’s home territory in “Seal At Play” where in the marina she perceives the unfamiliar in familiar surroundings;

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“A water-slick head surfaces and his eyes

watch the watchers, as sunlight glosses him.

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Later, the retreating tide will lead him away,

dragged by the moon and stars.”

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In “Encounter” an unexpected meeting with a mare unfolds “she is as polished as a chestnut just out of its thorny armour,” when the horse is offered some grass to eat a trust develops as:

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“the mare lowers her head

and eats, lipping my hand

as ears flick away flies.”

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This is a mature, accessible first collection of forty poems, written with imagination and craft.  Her keen perception allows the reader to experience an understanding of familiar creatures in a receding and threatened world from a different slant.

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You can find the book here:  https://sites.google.com/a/lapwingpublications.com/lapwing-store/home

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Byron Beynon’s work has appeared in several publications including North of Oxford, The London Magazine, Agenda, San Pedro River Review, Planet, Poetry New Zealand, Wasafiri and the anthology Moments of Vision (Seren).  A former co-editor of Roundyhouse poetry magazine.  Collections include Cuffs (Rack Press) and The Echoing Coastline (Agenda Editions). His selected poems appeared in 2018 (Bilingual: English/Romanian – published by Bibliotecha Universalis/Collectiile/ Revistei “Orizont Literar Contemporan”, translations by Dr Monica Manolachi, University of Bucharest)

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Reviewing Jennifer Firestone’s Two Latest Books of Poetry: Ten and Story

By Greg Ben

Within six months, poet Jennifer Firestone published two pivotal works: Ten and Story. Both books of poetry follow 2017’s remarkable Gates & Fields (published via Belladonna*), and both resemble a conceptual understanding of their predecessor’s interest in poetic movement and observation, voice, and the poet’s relationship to time and space.

The two leafless trees operate by wind,
look happy.
When one behaves the brain responds, the gesture
absorbed. (Ten, page 11)

In Ten, the first of the two published works, Firestone presents a series of 10-line poems that were written during her time restricted to a single room. In circumstances that follow knee surgery, these poems of constraint are matched with and blended through a second sequence of prose narratives exploring the underlying architecture of emotion, livelihood, and creative liberation.

While the 10-line poems are fascinating on their own, the prose interjects and offers context, and clues into the why of the writing and the how of the writer. The earliest section of prose describe the moments leading into the surgery, which would result in the 10-line project: “What you can say is there was a burning, up, up the body. They had given you the meds too late. Isn’t that basic, make sure the patient gets her meds before pain kicks in. You cried right before going in. Yes it’s knee surgery, but you pleased, ‘I have kids!’ It was genuine but you also thought maybe your tears accompanied with saying ‘kids’ would get extra attention.”

As the quote reveals, Firestone’s writing is closely aligned with the lived, daily experiences she encounters pre- and post-surger. The short journey of Ten is not just summation; Firestone is concerned with an examination of self-determination, exercising power and action within constraint, and exploring the openness of possibility within an explicit physical environment. The result? Firestone’s creeping sense of wonder glides between concrete and abstract observations:

The setting shifts. I am a tiresome sea.
Surely, sight has value. Say it. Thoughts
quaking. Quietly I shift,
anxiously awaiting the end.
“I am infinity,” claims he. (page 17)

The world within her room crosses through the window to the world just outside, and the poems only expand from there. Within the 10-line poems especially, undefined characters with their own fragments of language support the liminal and the ambiguous within Firestone’s project. The tone is cryptic and shifting. Firestone’s poems contain rhythms seen and unseen, as hinted at through this moment ars poetica: “The idea is to freshen up, give things a twist. When you’ve stretched out each menial task as far as they might extend, putty that becomes so thin it’s stringy, you look at Ten. There it is, bricks stacking. Its tidiness deceiving. The words rush, then slip” (page 51)

While in many of its moments the book feels like a day log composed of curious observations and poetic maneuvering, Ten is also a longitudinal expression of life within recovery. There is imperative and there is urgency and there is, really, a longing to overcome and thrive. While reading Ten, I was reminded of Frida Kahlo’s life working with spina bifida. I was also reminded of David Wolach’s 2013 examinations of chronic illness and the “Hospital Industrial Complex” in Hospitalogy. I also thought of my own, similar history as an artist—in 2013 I suffered a blood clot, and was bound to my home under physical recovery, while engaging with an incessant opiate addiction. Far from melodramatic, Firestone’s work is ever-personal, a clear portrayal of self, a chiseled proclamation of experience, and it also feels incredibly relatable.

To have a book from 2019 concerned with questions on how to be an artist in times of constraint feels oddly like a premonition or foreshadowing. Today, under COVID-19, many of us see the same rooms, stare at the same trees, hear the same voices each and every day. Our world shrinks. The world becomes cyclical, repetitive. As a result, our minds deflate, become tired, and the world melts, becomes more abstract. Blurs and blends. Is Firestone’s book of poems, then, a representation of what we are currently experiencing? Or perhaps it is a rhetoric, a blueprint, for how we can respond. Either way, Ten is an applicable, evolving document that I cannot recommend more in mid-2020.

If Ten explores the power behind and overcoming of constraint, then its follow-up, Story, exercises the inverse. It is a book more rooted in the future, more concerned with the past. It is a book about remembering, about defining memory, and about the construction of reality through language, through poetry. It is also a book about trauma and traumatic experience, and how we—as individuals and as groups—respond to trauma during its initialization and presence.

The book’s story is also nearly inverse the story of Ten: the protagonist and her partner are tourists in a tropical locale when they encounter a terrible accident, an event of such violence that the tension of juxtaposition is ever-present. The book is about that violence, just as it is about arriving to that violence and trying to live beyond that violence. Story is also that locale, that setting, and the implications inform the book’s narrative. Story pushes the world into a meaningful constraint, an identifiable form, though through filters of glaze and dream.

Like Ten, Story shows Firestone’s attention to form and container as significant and prioritized. A much different book visually, Story contains mostly pages of four lines, listed in the following order: a statement unbound by quotation marks, a statement bound by quotation marks, a statement unbound by quotation marks, and a statement bound by quotation marks, as with the following:

When the body wriggled like a fish on land, lines of logic dissipated.

 

“Slim fish, films.”

 

It was like this: she wondered is this my narrative?

 

“Waves crack, pour.” (Story, page 32)

Lines are distanced from one another. Each inform each other in more or less direct ways. There are themes between the quotes and the unquoted. The voices are never defined. There is puzzle building and puzzle solving. There is synchronicity and asynchronicity. As the book unfolds, the observations from the past surface. It is fascinating to look at the weaving between the two strands of thought, and wonder where these strands originated. Perhaps there are more than two strands—the ambiguity is intelligent and concerning, keeping the book pinned open, keeping a narrative from reaching any level of comfort as it develops.

While a book completed through just the patterned language described above would be captivating, Firestone splices her work on multiple occasions with variance of form. Story, like Ten, also contains a strong sense of rhythm. The first splice in the book, for example, breaks down the form from the four lines into a single line: “To my dear story      gristling in the wind” (page 48). Two pages later, a set statements are listed in rapid succession on the page, including:

The bar man prepared several ornate tropical drinks repeatedly.
Presumably the ambulance crew patiently rattled protocol while lifting.
Presumably another tourist couple hopped into the back with humanitarian kindness. (page 52)

This falling and rising through language mimics thought processes and memory: from the focus on a single image that can sit in consciousness for what feels like an eternity, to the focus on a barrage of images that feels relentless and overwhelming, trauma is never so simple as ebb and flow. With memory systems within Story driven by images of the locale’s water, tide, and beaches, Firestone’s language is compelling. It is empirical while also feeling distant. It is focused while also feeling spread thin. The poet explores these movements of trauma, the approachability and untouchability of it, through the content and its form. And there are many surprises to both, which are worth discovering through a read of the book directly rather than second-hand, here.

When considering what is said versus what is quoted, when thinking about what is proven and final versus what is felt and squishy, Firestone considers larger constructs of polarization and contentious relationships in how we learn, how we feel, and how we know. Where Ten held a much more lenient understanding of the connection between concrete and abstract, the weight of both feels much more intense in Story. Knowing what is concrete and knowing what is abstract suddenly is filled with implications: what happened that day, on the beach, and what does it matter? How is it processable? In thinking about process, I was reminded of White Noise by Don DeLillo, of Staying Alive by Laura Sims, of Things That Go by Laura Eve Engel. In each of these works, there is a “large something,” and understanding that something is the point, and the point can only be reached by reaching forward, by attempting to grasp. In a way that differs completely from Ten in intention, Story too is about power.

Did she emerge wet and coronated, past the sorrows of her human face?

 

“With grace, murmurs.” (page 72)

Much can be said about Story and I hope a lot is; the work is significant and complex and there’s nothing quite like it. And there is so much about it as a collection and as a paradigm that feels important to our world today, right now. To say it too is timely would be an understatement; that so many are struggling to learn, understand, and even identify the source of the global public health crisis is applicable to this text. And derivable from this text.

Firestone’s writing feels as if it was written about our world right now, with each day feeling like a distant memory and each moment of thinking and feeling combined into a mixture of the exhausting and the enthralling. When thought of alongside Ten, a book of so much “stay alive, stay inside,” I find incredible lengths of beauty and intelligence.

It would be a disservice to not mention that like Gates & Fields, both of Firestone’s latest books are precisely and adamantly feminist. Jennifer Firestone is front and center. Her voice is front and center. And her work contains comments on gender—via presence, authority, and relationships. It is exciting to me to see Firestone’s trajectory, her personal canon, continue to explore the world, personally and generally, while also honoring her personal experiences and her voice. We have strong works to keep us company while in anticipation of Firestone’s future creative projects.

You can find the books here: https://uglyducklingpresse.org/publications/story/  and http://www.blazevox.org/index.php/Shop/new-releases/ten-by-jennifer-firestone-518/

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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