Review by Paula Marafino Bernett

TALKING UNDERWATER
Sally Bliumis-Dunn

Wind Publications, 2007
600 Overbrook Drive
Nicholasville, KY 40356
ISBN: 978-1-893239-69-2
103 pp. $15.00
www.windpub.com

There’s beauty, intelligence and a keen poetic eye at work among the 77 poems collected in Sally Bliumis-Dunn’s Talking Underwater. But too often the poems feel as if they’ve been transmitted from an underwater place (the title poem isn’t happened on until page 85), only infrequently bursting through the surface to present the reader with an accomplished, realized poem.

There’s aspiration too, evident in a wealth of strong phrases, ambitious ideas, and pulses of energy that promise much, but often fail to deliver.

In Section I, the poem “Not Seeing” begins with this strong opening: “…everything is too much/ what it has been/ and not enough/ what it is.” These lines are obliquely supported by the example of the leaf, which does not do them justice. Then comes the line “… I see nothing/ in your hand…” and as I’m struggling to connect this thought to the opening, an inchworm wrapping itself in a leaf enters the poem, arguably very much what it is, and I’m lost.

“Leaving for College” gives us another strong set of lines:

(more…)

Rattle has received the following review copies in the last month:

• John Kinsella - Divine Comedy (hardcover)
  
• Carrie Shippers - Rescue Conditions (chapbook)
• Louis Daniel Brodsky - The World Waiting to Be
• Rich Murphy - Family Secret (chapbook)
• Signs & Signals: The Daybooks of Robert Crosson
• Adriano Spatola - Toward Total Poetry

New literary journals:

• Slipstream - 28
• New England Review - 29.3
• Greensboro Review - 84

See the full list of available books here.  If you might be interested in reviewing any of these, we’ll mail them to you. Just send an email to:

If your review is then chosen for publication, payment is a copy of the forthcoming issue of Rattle.

Christine Stewart-Nuñez

LOST
The Grand Bazaar, Istanbul, Turkey

Pretend one language is all you speak, so the swirl of vowels,
edge of consonants around you turn to cacophony. Home
is thousands of miles away. Familiar syllables float by, lost
in air heavy with sweat. Four thousand shops along labyrinthine alleys
and your group has evaporated into the crowd like cigarette smoke.
Men shout “hookahs! kilims!”—words lost in your ear.
You’re too new, but “come in for tea” pulls at your full purse.
All salesmen look the same: brown slacks, white button-downs,
dimply grins. They want you, or seem to, eyes boring into your body.
The rush only lasts twice. One wants to sell a hookah with its limp pipe
curling over its glass tube like the neck of an alien bird. You find
yourself haggling. You don’t even smoke. You just came here to sightsee.
Next it’s a gold chain two centimeters thick, some platinum rings
set with emeralds and amethysts. Something more reasonably priced
turns out to be moonstones that look like a child’s drawing of a flower.
Each time you turn a corner or veer down a left fork you end up at a store
selling boxes inlaid with mother-of-pearl or painted with men
on horses clashing with other men, both with uplifted spears.
The moustached man promises a deal on a yellow leather jacket
if you don’t want a box. Suddenly you want a box and a set
of ceramic tiles. Organza embroidered with butterflies and roses
as souvenir gifts, perhaps a carpet woven in Bergama—hand-dyed
with chamomile, madder, indigo. You begin to haggle and he laughs
when you suggest half. Unbuttoning your shirt a notch knocks off
a million lira—ten bucks. The clerk’s assistant runs for a bigger
shopping bag, but it’s time. You imagine your group standing
at the ferry platform, your name on their lips. You depart
empty-handed with the taste of tea leaves on your tongue.

–from Rattle #28, Winter 2007

Kendra L. Tanacea

STEPMOTHER

Because he hates chocolate, you’ll bake lemon cakes
and lemon tarts, trying to make the sour sweet.

You’ll ride roller-coasters with him until you are dizzy
and sick and the whole world is spinning.

Your husband will ask you to leave, and you will, taking long walks
alone in the shade of the redwoods, or wandering the aisles

of Safeway until you are asked to return. In the morning,
when you are naked in bed, covered only by a thin sheet,

this boy will walk in. You’ll stiffen like a corpse,
remembering that Tom told you when he was thirteen

all he wanted to do was look at his stepmother’s breasts.
Your husband will chide you for failing to pour his son a cup

of cranberry juice or neglecting to toast a bagel, convincing
evidence you have no maternal instincts. Your stepson

will finger through all your things and you’ll start
sleeping with your clothes on and your purse at your side.

You’ll police yourself so carefully that you are no longer yourself,
just a ghost of a woman who silently slips in and out of bed.

And you’ll realize the trouble you’re in when the young boy
at Albertsons carries your groceries all the way to your car,

smiles, says, good to see you, asks, how are you doing?
and overcome by his generosity, you mistakenly

hit the wipers, spraying, then streaking the windshield.

–from Rattle #28, Winter 2007

Kandie St.Germain

NAILS

Tammy’s mother wanted to save me so drove me to church every Sunday.
This was back when I wanted rich white shag like Tammy’s, where
on Sunday afternoons we’d lie on bellies face-to-face, where
I confessed my dream of living on an alp in Switzerland with
my three Saint Bernards that would rescue me should I get lost
while searching for firewood or building a snowman, where

Tammy told me her mother’s no-dog-in-the-house rule. When
Tammy’s mother called us to lunch, we sat across from her
at the fingerprint-free, glass-topped table, the pesticide stench
of nail polish remover mingling with tomato soup and saltines.
After Tammy said grace, I sipped soup and cold milk
and imagined crawling under the table, not to beg

for scraps, but to see everything upside down: the bottoms
of the plastic bowls and cups and her mother’s nearly line-free
palm, that hand splayed, all the people in the steeple flattened
corpses, the tiny bottle already shaken with a click, clickety,
click, click, each inch-long nail already scrubbed of their Sunday
coral, four cotton balls pinched, dense, the color of punched skin.

And while we ate, Tammy’s mother applied cherry-sucker-tongue
red to all ten beds. We left her to blow on a hand turned claw,
and I toted my bowl to the porcelain sink, just like Tammy,
and rinsed it out, just like Tammy, but didn’t mention how someday
I wanted nails after church, didn’t lie on Tammy’s shag rug
that afternoon and whisper about how I wanted my dirty hands,

their abused nails chewed to jagged little lips, to someday be tipped
in a sharp red. Didn’t tell her how badly I wanted to someday
have nails like her mother’s, nails that could scratch eyes out,
nails that could easily drive into some savior’s back.

–from Rattle #28, Winter 2007