December 10th, 2011
Review by Karen J. Weyant
BEFORE I CAME HOME NAKED
by Christina Olson
Spire Press
ISBN 978-1-934828-09-0
2010, 80 pp., $14.00
www.amazon.com
In a world where writers complain that people just don’t read poetry, the title of Christina Olson’s first full length collection of poetry, Before I Came Home Naked will certainly catch a reader’s eye. But it’s not the title that is superb about this collection: it’s the rich narratives that follow a narrator’s journeys and exploration for what it means to call a place home.
Olson’s collection is a travel book of sorts. Still, a reader should not venture through the pages expecting the typical “travel” poems. Instead, we experience meeting past hurricanes in “At the Hurricane Name Retirement Center.” Or, we get to visit Bigfoot in Texas in the poem “The Woolly Booger” through the lines “Because down there/everything’s bigger/and a guy can keep/himself to himself.” Finally, there’s even a visit to a ball of string in “Poem Written After an Hour Long Road Trip to Darwin, Minnesota, Home of the World’s Largest Ball of Twine Rolled by One Man.” Through these journeys, we see both humor and bewilderment, and sometimes even a bit of sadness, as found with this last poem when the narrator notes, “If I lived here I would free the world’s/largest ball of twine on a moonless night, cold//still air sitting sweetly in lungs, only sound/locomotives moaning eastbound to Dassel.”
Even more ordinary places get the star treatment. For instance, we find the narrator in the poem, “Buffalo: One Thousand Feet” where she observes, “If we’re going to lose//an engine, better do it right now/Let me fall from this altitude, let me/tumble towards gray so deep I can’t/tell city street from cloud, from lake.” In the poem, “Pompton Lake” the narrator explains that “When you are young even Jersey//can be fun” while offering a litany of memories (imagined or otherwise) of a rented home where “Jeff and I/like some things: the shaggy red stairs/the concrete gnome out front with house numbers/bolted to his belly.” Whether her journeys explore the exotic or more commonplace, the poet sums up her travels in “Ars Poetica” a poem that clearly anchors, and perhaps even explains the collection’s focus on travel:
Certainly I love places:
that last quarter
mile of Vermont gravel
that brought meHome that summer;
all those jogged laps
over for another day. Or
the stark redness of silopunctuating the Ohio
horizons. New York only
sleeps two hours a night –
early morning, honestly —and when insomnia throttled
men in its scaled hand
I’d walk away five
to seven on the street:everyone I passed was me:
their pacing, our shared
want for cigarettes,
coffee bean, sleep, eyecontact.
In between travel poems, we see snippets of everyday life. Some of the poems take the form of what might be perceived as simple (yet poetic) musings. For example, in “I Keep Goldfish” the poet smugly opens her poem with “because the lease says in its first clause/no pets” and “because/their bodies flush without pomp or plumbing/problems.” Light hearted yearnings turn darker to the end when the narrator explains her true admiration for this pet: “Because they’re the unsung/martyrs of long ago hazings. Because I envy anything//with a three second memory, because they can’t blink/and I look away first.”
Certainly, the poet also makes use of memory as part of her muse. In “After Learning that the Family Dog has Been Put Down” the narrator grapples with loss and grief. In “Family Recipe” the narrator bonds with her father over food. And in “Poem I Would Rather Your Mother Not Read” the narrator retells the story of a past relationship. Whether there’s humor or heartache, Olson presents each story, each memory, each feeling with an honesty that is often camouflaged in much of today’s written work.
Olson’s collection leaves the reader in a whirlwind. Out of breath, we reach the final pages only wanting more of a narrator who is a little lost and a little out of control, but always determined (and maybe, just maybe, a little stubborn). In Olson’s words, every place is worth celebrating, every journey a wonderful exploration. Certainly, with this fine first collection, Christina Olson is a poet to watch.
____________
Karen J. Weyant’s chapbook Stealing Dust was published in 2009 by Finishing Line Press. Her most recent work can be seen in 5 AM, The Barn Owl Review, Copper Nickel, Harpur Palate, and Lake Effect. She lives in western Pennsylvania but teaches at Jamestown Community College in Jamestown, New York. She blogs at www.thescrapperpoet.wordpress.com.
September 14th, 2009
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Review by Karen Weyant
WE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN COMING TO THIS MORNING
by Greg Kosmicki
Lewis-Clark Press/Sandhills Press
ISBN 978-0-911015-57-7
2007, 112 pp., $15.00
www.amazon.com
Near the beginning of Greg Kosmicki’s We have always been coming to this morning, he addresses his audience with “My Flag,” a poem that doubles as an invocation. He opens his work with a simple narrative gesture: “It is after dinner and I go to shake/the crumbs from the tablecloth./They fall down the porch steps/for the crickets and the mice and the ants”–yet soon, we see the speaker liken the tablecloth to the American flag, “the flag of the friendly country/where even the vermin have enough to eat.” The poem ends with an invitation: “I want you to spill your wine./I want you to get bread crumbs on my flag.”
And where is this invitation, to, exactly? With a first reading of this book, the answer might not be clear. Certainly, Kosmicki’s world is a world of complex characters, histories, and situations. But it is also a world of absurdities. This is not to say that his poems are absurd. No, quite the opposite. In fact, in this newest collection from Kosmicki, we find a poet searching to capture the true essence of life by balancing everyday beauty and pure insanity.
In many poems, Kosmicki steps outside the personal narrative to record the voices of others. For instance, in the short and concise work, “Poem an Old Drunk Street Poet Told My Son at the Greyhound Station” (the title is almost as long as the poem itself), the speaker relays words to live by through another’s voice:
He sees the evil
the people who live there do
but pisses on no one.
Certainly, this poem could be seen as a motto for the entire collection, because in many of his works Kosmicki reports, but doesn’t pass judgment. For instance, in “Sacrifice,” the speaker celebrates a man who lived the “life he knew” — a life that encompassed “sleeping in the park/eating out of the trash.” And in “Mailing Out Poems in Benson” a poet records an act of violence:
Mom stomps around the van
from the driver’s side
curses all the way
to slam the door so hard
it could have crushed the girl’s arm in two
and I bet then in a poem
her arm would have broken off like a wing.
However, it’s the more personal poems that truly strike a nerve. For example, in “Skunk Beer” the speaker, while purchasing a six pack, records a memory of buying Pabst when he was younger, “to dull the pain of whatever it was/each one of us knew had to be dulled/but never could explain.” In “Agent Orange” the persona mourns a past friend who “took care of me/drunk slobbering about my dead brother.” And in “I awaken in a group home for the mentally handicapped,” the speaker seemingly finds both religion and reality in the face of a patient who screams “obscenities in my face” and throws “himself to the floor.”
Certainly, many of Kosmicki’s poems are somber in both tone and subject, but I believe that the majority of his works celebrate the daily ordinaries of life, whether they are victories or challenges. In “Peanut Butter,” the speaker sits with his daughter and contemplates “the miracle” of their quiet time with “a jar of Supper Crunch Skippy/and a knife, and smeared/peanut butter all over the bread.”
While domestic life is a big theme in this collection, nature sometimes takes center stage. “The Dandelion”, for instance, is a sort of ode, a work that celebrates a weed “so tough, the only way to get rid of it/is to poison it heavily/or to get a shovel and dig it out.” However, the poem then goes on to mention that the speaker “looked until I found a woman to marry/who loved dandelions as much as I do.” Another poem, “Migration,” celebrates flying geese by explaining “I read somewhere once about the mechanics of the “V”/how the lead goose takes the brunt of the wind.” Then there’s “Cricket Redux” where the speaker tells us, “They are great singers, those/crickets. They are one great song, one great song of the earth.” Finally, the tiny nondescript little sparrow gets star treatment in “Why I Watch Sparrows,” where Kosmicki relays a list poem that celebrates sparrows’ endurance, especially with these ending lines:
because they think for themselves
because so many other birds are gone from our lives.
because the frogs and toads are disappearing
because they have not ceased to be
because they live wrapped up in the meaning of their lives
because they have witnessed
everything.
Can the angry be sympathetic? Can the grotesque be loveable? Can the lost be found? Can the ordinary be seen as something extraordinary? These are the somewhat clichéd questions that Kosmicki explores. But a reader will find anything but clichés in his answers. Instead, the earnest questions he poses, no matter how bizarre, funny or frightening, always have the answer yes.
____________
Karen J. Weyant is a 2007 Fellow in poetry from the New York Foundation for the Arts and her most recent work can be seen in Slipstream, The ComstockReview and Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas. She has work forthcoming in Pennsylvania English and The Minnesota Review. She teaches at Jamestown Community College in Jamestown, New York.
August 23rd, 2008
Review by Karen J. Weyant
MY FLORIDA
by Kathleen Tyler
The Backwaters Press
3502 North 52nd Street
Omaha, Nebraska 68104-3506
ISBN: 978-0-9793934-6-4
70 pp., $16
www.thebackwaterspress.com
Palm trees swaying on sandy shorelines. Couples walking hand-in-hand into sunsets. College students going wild on spring break. Certainly, these images of Florida are often the first pictures that come to mind when we think of our Sunshine State. Kathleen Tyler’s My Florida, however, delivers a much darker landscape.
Tyler’s first poem, “Ars Poetica,” is significant to this collection. While “an art of poetry” poem seems to be a somewhat predictable way to start any collection of poetry, Tyler’s carefully measured lines serve the collection as a strong introduction:
They came on suddenly, storms did,
when I was eight. All morning I swung
upside down from a rope, arcing over
the lake. Trees strung from clouds. Hair raking
water, just beyond the snapping turtle’s bite.
Although we don’t know it quite yet, these opening lines show us what we will expect in from her collection: characters living in darkness within reach of danger. We see a landscape that seems ready to swallow a child whole, a dark world which will make its appearance again and again, along with characters eerily reminiscent of those found in the works of Flannery O’Connor.
