E-Reviews

December 5, 2013

DOOR OF THIN SKINS by Shira DentzPosted by

Review by Ann Fisher-WirthDoor of Thin Skins by Shira Dentz

DOOR OF THIN SKINS
by Shira Dentz

CavanKerry Press
6 Horizon Road, #2901
Fort Lee, New Jersey 07024
ISBN-13: 978-1933880365
2013, 96 pp., $16.00
www.cavankerrypress.org

My father died slowly of brain cancer when I was fifteen. For years, I was numb to his death; there was much I did not connect with, could barely remember. I had no sense of how great my loss was until one day when I was twenty-two, writing in my journal about someone else entirely, I wrote, “That night, X said, was when the world broke for him.” Then I wrote, “It broke for me the night my father died”—and I could not stop crying for the next eight hours. The catharsis led me to therapy and to a process of mourning and healing that took many, many years.

For a long time, I would have been easy prey for any older man who made me feel cherished and taken care of—who made me feel fathered. It would not have been difficult really to mess me up. Luckily, the therapists and professors I had treated me honorably; they listened to me, evaluated my work, extended respect and friendship to me without laying their own trips on me, without sexual vibes or entanglements.

It is therefore with special rage that I read Shira Dentz’s book of poems Door of Thin Skins, a harrowing account of sexual and psychological abuse by a highly regarded analyst against the young female poet who is his patient. “Dr. Abe,” as he is called, is a whale of a man with a New York penthouse apartment/office, powerful splayed fingers that seem “to cover everything; above and below,” and “brown, jelly bean orthopedic” shoes. He is full of a sense of his own importance, a “60-year-old therapist, President of the psychoanalytic division of the A.P.A., and the Society of clinical psychologists in his home state, and a postdoctoral psychoanalytic program.” At the beginning of her treatment, the patient is 21 and wants “to look androgynous, stuff my femaleness out of sight.” Apparently she has been sexually approached by her father—to which Dr. Abe’s response is:

                        I’ve had patients whose fathers were very seductive;                      they’d sit in

their father’s laps and he’d tell them about his affairs;         I wonder why you didn’t enjoy your father’s advances

And she has lost a younger brother from disease. Her treatment lasts for years, during which Dr. Abe decides she needs the “personal” approach. He takes her shopping, showers while she washes his dishes, offers her purses his wife and daughter don’t want, and keeps telling her she ought to sleep with one man or another. Just one episode of many:

Evening, and Dr. Abe calls. Says, I’m lonely and thought: Who should I call? I thought, you! do you want to keep me company, maybe watch TV? My head fills like a balloon, at the same time a heavy dock. I dart over (live at the Y just blocks away).               Wind up in the usual: Him in his large recliner, me in his lap crying, him fondling my breasts.              Afterwards, we ride the elevator down to the underground garage and he drops me at my corner on his drive home.

His excuse for his appalling transgression of boundaries: “You need a boyfriend. If you had a boyfriend, I wouldn’t be doing any of this!”

After years this therapy fails—no surprise—and she transfers to another therapist to whom she tells “thesexualstuffthathappened.” Later still, she gathers the courage to lodge a complaint, and eventually a settlement is reached, a settlement that says everything about the powerlessness of this young, damaged female patient vis-à-vis the medical establishment: Because Dr. Abe might have “another heart attack,” the case is delayed six years, until the prosecutor, who needs to close the case, settles without her consent for Dr. Abe’s admission of “one charge of negligence—in termination” and the withdrawal of “all other charges of professional misconduct.”

The brilliance of Door of Thin Skins lies not only in the narrative, but also in the way Shira Dentz stretches and fractures language, not just to report on damage, but to enact damage, trauma and the mind’s desperate attempt to become, then remain, truthful and clear. Words and sentences are broken, obsessively repeated, morphed, made shadowy, made wispy. Words, like things, stand on their heads. At two points language trails off in a scribble, as if all the poet could do, stymied, tongue-stalled, was draw on the page. “History … is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake,” says Stephen Dedalus in Portrait of the Artist. To awake, in Door of Thin Skins, would entail being able to make sense of the tangle of desire, deceit, sincerity, hypocrisy, the pressures of the past and the distortions of memory—and the likelihood of that is trenchantly brought home in a series of pages in the latter half of the book, anatomizing

S
E
N
S
SENSENSES

Or, two pages later,

sSensensensensensensensensensensensensensensensensense sens nse ns ne   nse   e  n   ∞

The cover of Door of Thin Skins depicts a spider’s web made of words. Thinking of Dr. Abe and the seductive power he wields, I’m reminded of these cynical lines by the Rolling Stones: “I said my, my, like the spider to the fly/ Jump right ahead in my web.”

Each time, reading the book, I’m left with admiration and anger—but also with great sorrow for the troubled young woman who seeks healing, but gets tangled up instead in the sticky snarl of a therapist’s ego. “Your life will be different now that I’m in it,” Dr. Abe promises his patient early on, and it seems like a promise of nurturance. He surely does make her life different, though not as she might have dreamed. Therein the patient must minister to herself. Shira Dentz repeats Dr. Abe’s line on the book’s final page, and continues,

Always to taste those words.
His voice my wind while I wait for time.

Later, in my report, A dam broke in me.

…

End while I wait for time.

__________

Ann Fisher-Wirth‘s books include Dream Cabinet, Carta Marina, and the coedited The Ecopoetry Anthology. She teaches at the University of Mississippi and also in the Chatham University Low-Residency Master of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing.

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November 30, 2013

WHAT IS HEARD by Rachel AdamsPosted by

Review by Sarah VogelsongWhat Is Heard by Rachel Adams

WHAT IS HEARD
by Rachel Adams

Red Bird Chapbooks
N3105 Elm Lane
Pepin, WI 54759
2013, 26 pp., $10
redbirdchapbooks.com

For reasons of tone or subject, some poems seem attached to seasons, and Rachel Adams’ inaugural collection of poetry What Is Heard (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2013), although published in midsummer, to me finds its greatest resonance in fall, the season of putting in order and taking account. In this slim volume, comprising thirteen poems, individuals have turned their thoughts from life’s momentous events to the more meditative duties and pleasures. By the time we read of their lives, the people to whom Adams gives voice are past falling in love; they are negotiating the end of their relationships. They are not buying houses and beginning anew; they are rebuilding and patching together the seams of the old. They are not balanced at the peak of crisis; they are coming to terms with the world in its aftermath.

I have known Adams since we worked together as editors in Washington, DC, and so I had seen a few of these poems over the years as they were published in various literary magazines. But although each still packs a punch when it stands alone, the whole in this case really is more than the sum of its parts because of the thematic coherence of the collection. What most struck me in reading What Is Heard is how much a chapbook can be like a concept album, with each element building on the last, links appearing between the different poems, and the complete set gaining much more force because the author has allowed the reader to look at a single question or subject from so many different angles and in so many different lights.

Adams sets the tone of the collection from the get-go: there is nothing sparse about these poems or the world they describe; instead, they overflow with detail, with symbols and signifiers that harken back to other times, people not present, places that only exist in traces. The landscape for her is no “scraped raw” West, but her native East, “heavy and damp,” swollen with the aftereffects of storms that have already passed through.

The opening poem “What You Bring Along” orients the reader to what is to come, not only bringing us back to the East with its layers of accumulated history but directing us away from the highways that figure so prominently in American writing. Adams is looking for something more subtle and organic: “somewhere, south of your intended route,/ …  a trail bordering a reservoir.”

Trails wind throughout almost every poem of What Is Heard, tracing a path between the destination sought and the memories that continually pull the traveler back into the past. But although physical markers—the “blue paint-blazes on the trees” of “The Movement”—are littered along these trails, the real debris are not objects, but words, “what is heard,” or, more often than not, “what has been heard.”

So it is that in “The Movement,” one of the strongest poems of the collection, what the narrators encounter at the conclusion of the trail is a cabin with

words everywhere—miniature
ballpoint-pen diatribes, and expletives,
and the record book hanging on a nail,
brittle and teeming with little histories.

No matter how much a burden words may be—and the words of “The Movement” are full of pain (they are “brittle,” “diatribes,” “expletives”)—for Adams, words are most fundamentally affirmations of meaning, the illustration of shared memories formed over time.

Consequently, what drives this poem (and, to a large extent, the collection) is the tension that arises between these words that are “everywhere” and the silence that threatens to snuff them out in “a stifling that is subtle.” “The Movement” is full of words that have been heard, but it takes place before new words can be spoken; it ends on the long breath someone takes prior to saying things they do not wish to say.

In this way, words and trails overlap throughout What Is Heard: trails are lined with words and words create long trails of meaning. The fear that creeps through the poems at times is that the trails will eventually end, the words disappear into silence. Nowhere is this fear better expressed than in “Catoctin Mountain Traversal,” at the dense heart of the book, where “the past comes folding in” so close that it penetrates and is absorbed into “the buried time I hold inside my coat.” Here the trail leads nowhere: it “spirals out” but arrives only at a “flat and vacant peak,” becoming at the last moment not a trail, but the closed, burnt-out rings of a cut tree.

This fear of absence, silence, nothingness returns three poems later in the intensely personal “Kinetic,” a work that describes Adams’ own experience undergoing heart surgery in her thirties. But although there is a bleakness to this poem (“What a thing it is to be incapacitated,” the second stanza begins), there is also the sense that all is not lost. The sterility of the first stanza—“mechanized,” “sanitized,” “automatic”—is overcome in the second by the tenacious confirmation of being “alive,” even if “only for minutes here and there.” The struggle is being able to sense (to hear) but not to speak.

The poem from which the chapbook draws its title, “Harvey Mountain Sound Walk,” is one of the clearest expressions of what drives Adams’ work forward. Based on her time at an arts colony in the Taconics, the act of hearing is elevated from a passive absorption of unfolding time to the poet’s active decision to engage, uncover, and catalogue. “We note, like fastidious scientists, what is heard,” Adams writes, and that is, first of all, “one’s own footsteps.” From that recognition of the self, she expands outward to the cicada, the airplane, and the bluejay, the observations accumulating one on top of the other. Even when darkness falls, nothing is lost or erased: “Harvey Mountain will store up its sounds,/ hibernating, rolling them into itself.” The act is similar to the folding in of “Catoctin Mountain Traversal,” but in meaning totally different: in the Catoctins, the trail collapses inward to create a kind of black hole where meaning is annihilated, whereas on Harvey Mountain, the trail becomes part of the flux of life that feeds poetry.

The Taconics return once more before the end of the chapbook in “Northerly,” another love poem that, like “The Movement,” is marked by foreboding. Here “what is heard” takes on a rawer edge, becoming almost a question: “Tell me the sound,” Adams writes in the first stanza, and for a moment, love and poetry seem to become one. “Tell me the sound—/ … of memory, of folding-out road,/ of possibility.”

But having brought us to this brink, she sends us crashing down at the opening of the second stanza with a line from Yeats’ “Adam’s Curse”: “I had a thought for no one’s but your ears.” She leaves unsaid Yeats’ next lines: “it had all seemed happy, and yet we’d grown/ As weary-hearted as that hollow moon,” but that unsettling emptiness still permeates the rest of the stanza, encapsulated in the “heavy press of a palm” that brings the poem to its conclusion. The reader knows immediately that something is wrong, that the trail has gone crooked and “the words that warmed us so” will ultimately be brought to silence again.

These are dense poems, although they read easily. Like the hiker who gets caught up in the beauty of a trail without discerning any of the details of flora and fauna around him, it’s easy for a reader to be lulled by the smoothness of Adams’ rhythms and the loveliness of her language. But a more careful reader, or someone who returns to these poems again and again, will begin to see the links between each piece and to unearth the “stories in the ground,/ in the low layers.”

__________

Sarah Vogelsong is a freelance writer and editor living in Richmond, VA. Her work has appeared in Style Weekly, the Washington Independent Review of Books, and The Neworld Review. (sarahvogelsong.com)

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November 25, 2013

IF I FALTER AT THE GALLOWS by Edward MullanyPosted by

Review by Michael Meyerhofer

If I Falter at the Gallows by Edward Mullany
IF I FALTER AT THE GALLOWS
by Edward Mullany

Publishing Genius Press
2301 Avalon Avenue
Baltimore, MD 21217
ISBN: 978-0983170655
2011, 84 pp., $13.25
publishinggenius.com

As a poet, editor, and generally over-opinionated loudmouth, part of my soapbox issue is that many experimental poets seem to be experimental just for the sake of being unconventional and pseudo-provocative—in other words, their poetry is innovative but gutless. Not so with Mullany’s If I Falter at the Gallows. These poems are stylistically unique, mostly short (often just a few lines) with an obvious stream-of-consciousness vibe to them, but what really makes them leap off the page is their underlying tenderness, their unabashed examination of the human condition that reminds me of those famous Chinese poets, Li Po and Tu Fu. There are echoes of William Carlos Williams and James Wright here, too, especially in the following, short poem:

In Praise of Narrative Poetry

Into the bleak
lake on the estate

on which no
one resides, falls

the quiet
rain.

At the same time, these poems are distinctly postmodern, almost always favoring brief, lyrical snapshots over richly textured storytelling. For instance, consider the following, two-line poem in which the title (“The Horse that Drew the Cart that Carried the Condemned Man to the Gallows”) serves as a de facto opening line: “lived for a while longer/ and then died.”

The risk of such a poem is obvious; however, for me, the brevity serves to do an end-run around my natural contempt for blanket statements about mortality by focusing not on the condemned man (referenced only in the title), but the equally mortal beast-of-burden whose survival was simply a stay of execution. In that, it somewhat reminds me of “By Their Works,” a Bob Hicok poem in which Hicok tells the story of the Last Supper by focusing not on the central characters, but on the perspective of a waitress.

While a potential criticism of such short poems is that their ambition is overshadowed by gimmick, that would be missing an additional element that adds tension to Mullany’s work: the element of surprise. Often, that surprise resonates with social commentary that, exactly because of his poems’ blindsiding brevity, has an additional haunting quality. Consider the following five-line poem, New Light:

The sun is hardly
up over

the fields at the edge of the city

when the city
itself explodes.

Usually in poetry workshops, I find myself telling my students over and over again to be specific. What beer did you drink? What movie were you watching? What city were you in when a lover broke up with you over text message? In the case of this poem, though, the lack of background detail—especially when coupled with the points earned by the gentle pacing and pastoral beauty of the opening lines—frees my mind to imagine everything from literal atrocities (such as the atomic bombings of World War II) to more generalized, post-Cuban-Missile-Crisis, Hollywood-inspired fears engraved in our collective subconscious.

As I said, though, Mullany’s poems aren’t simply clever; while his poems are far from confessional, what really drives them is their underlying humanity. Take this short example, “No Children”:

When I come back
as a ghost, and try
to tell you all the things
for which I’m sorry,
you will hear nothing
but the sounds of the dryer,
which doesn’t mean
you’re not listening.

This playful but distinctly metaphysical poem reminds me of Hemingway’s oft-referenced Iceberg Theory in that its sparse details hint at a rich and tragic backstory, despite the fact that the poem also has echoes of dark humor that help carve it into the subconscious for further analysis.

Put another way, many of these poems remind me of Zen koans in that they short-circuit the brain in the best possible way. For instance, I feel like I get the following poem, even though I couldn’t explain it to you for a million bucks (except maybe to say that it has something to do with opposites and contrasts and the tension created between life and death):

The Entombment of Christ

Assume a black
dot on a white

wall and a white
dot on a black

wall are facing
each other.

Probably my favorite poem from this whole book, though, is “The Not So Simple Truth,” which manages to be unabashedly philosophical precisely because it draws its energy not from rote philosophical statements, but tactile, gentle imagery culminating in a musical, final turn:

Potatoes. Dirt and
water. And a soft

towel left for us while
we shower. These

things are no
truer for their

plainness than peas
or pus or leprosy.

Despite the fact that virtually all the poems in this book are crafted with an extreme economy of language, the book itself still feels as broad in style as it does in subject matter. Again, these aren’t confessional poems, nor do they make much use of narrative, but their raw lyricism, twists, and humor speak to a deep intellect bolstered by innovation and, above all, a quiet sense of compassion.

__________

Michael Meyerhofer’s third book, Damnatio Memoriae, won the Brick Road Poetry Book Contest.  His previous books are Blue Collar Eulogies (Steel Toe Books) and Leaving Iowa (winner of the Liam Rector First Book Award). He has also published five chapbooks and is the Poetry Editor of Atticus Review. (troublewithhammers.com)

 

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November 20, 2013

EVERY SEED OF THE POMEGRANATE by David SullivanPosted by

Review by Robin H. LysneEvery Seed of the Pomegranate by David Sullivan

EVERY SEED OF THE POMEGRANATE
by David Sullivan

Tebot Bach
P.O. Box 7887
Huntington Beach, CA 92615-7887
ISBN# 978-1-893670.86.0
2012, 118 pp., $16.00
www.tebotbach.org

David Allen Sullivan’s new book, Every Seed of the Pomegranate, uncovers the war in Iraq like a wound needing air to heal. We are taken into the conflict through haiku-like stanzas, the form steadying the reader in a rhythm of walking through events such as Abu Ghraib through soldiers’ eyes, through prisoners’ eyes, and through the eyes of angels and other unseen forces giving comfort to the wounded and dying. This is a brave move on Sullivan’s part, as he is willing to encompass other realms besides this well-trodden one that we live in. The voices are further clarified by the layout of the book which Sullivan divides into three formats: left for the American voices, the center for the Angels and otherworldly voices, and right for the Iraqi voices. This action of dividing the voices fascinated me: He did not favor the American voices being on the “right” and the Iraqi voices being on the “left” as one might expect. This is shrewd move on his part, as he is challenging the “rightness” of the American voice and perspective, though subtly, throughout the book. To me, as an author who has written books on ritual, it almost seems a ritual move. He is declaring the equality of the Iraqi voice by offering it on the right, the direction of making or creating, binding or sending of energy. The left is the direction of undoing, unmaking, or releasing.

But as much as Seeds of the Pomegranate engages the Iraq war, it does not just note the horrors of war and its consequences; it also holds it in question. This war clearly haunts Sullivan. In the first poem he writes:

Someone draws circles
on my back inside my dreams
that keep widening.

Who am I to write
these words? Who are you to turn
from these words and rest?

He challenges the reader to take in these accounts as part of a greater global community, but he is also questioning his own justification for being haunted by the war and its images as a man who has not fought himself. As a woman, I have questioned the same thing in my anti-war philosophy and activism. When soldiers returned from Vietnam, I was in college, and while I was compassionate towards them, I found myself realizing that these fellow students had such a horrible experience that they could not discuss it, even when asked to do so with sincere interest. One roommate who had fallen in love with a soldier who had been in a prisoner of war camp for seven years found herself at a loss for what to do with him as he woke night after night in terror. She and I were both left feeling as though our voices on the matter were woefully uninformed and lacked any real context for their experience. As he discusses in the introduction, Sullivan worked through this “odd person out” feeling by talking with those vets and finally becoming encouraged.

He weaves the book title around and around. Using the Middle Eastern fruit as a symbol, the pomegranate in this book comes from an old Arabic saying: “Every seed of the pomegranate must be eaten/ since you can’t tell which come from Paradise.” A reporter says later in the same poem:

… and placing them on
outstretched tongues one by one—
ritual that fed

us like a blessing.
I bit the liquid jewel,
sorrows broke open.

The poet’s compassion for both sides of the conflict comes thundering through, as this poem fragment illustrates.

Sullivan uses interviews of many of those who fought and reported on the war. In one poem he quotes a general: “If the public saw// images like that/ they wouldn’t tolerate it;/ there’d be no more wars.” Well-researched with interviews, news articles, and first person accounts, Sullivan takes his imagination into the war to speak from the perspectives of both the dead and the living. He engages the women’s voices as well as the men’s: “My prayers are bent back/ on themselves. What good comes from/ tearing up our lives?” As women are often left out of the conversation of war, it is a good thing that he brings their voices in.

In “The Black Camel,” he intertwines the voices of two soldiers and the angel of death, Azrael, who says: “Don’t cling to one form;/ water continues to flow/ after the pot breaks …” Clearly this is a Rumi reference: “… falling up into the bowl of sky./ The bowl breaks/ Everywhere is falling everywhere// Nothing else to do.” (Illuminated Rumi, p. 62) The voices of the angels have a Rumi-esque quality that feels haunting and convincing. It is a perfect nod to the long poetic tradition that the Middle East has brought to the world. As a professional medium, intuitive, and Energy Medicine practitioner who deals with grief and supports others in reconnecting with loved ones on a regular basis, I found his angel references to be extremely accurate in their neutrality and unconditionally loving tone. His centering of the angel voices reinforces the idea that all people are equal in death, and all can access the angelic realms no matter their religious orientation. Even with Azrael’s voice as the angel of death—who I have, gratefully, not yet met—Sullivan sets the right tone for Azrael’s compassion.

These poems speak of pain, but they also are a means to healing. They go in and through and under the questions that were fought in the media. Engaging with others who have lived through it, his students at Cabrillo College in Santa Cruz, California, who were vets, as well as veteran Brian Turner who encouraged Sullivan to keep writing, Sullivan definitely joins the conversation of “why war,” especially the Iraq war. These poems are healing for those who lived it, and engaging enough for those who didn’t, to give one pause to really ask the question of why we fight wars at all.

__________

Author, Artist and Energy Medicine Practitioner, Robin H. Lysne has three books published: Dancing Up the Moon: A Woman’s Guide to Creating Traditions that Bring Sacredness to Daily Life; Sacred Living (both by Conari Press); and Heart Path: Learning to Love Yourself and Listening to Your Guides (Blue Bone Books). and several more in the works. Her next publication, Poems for the Lost Deer has been picked up by Finishing Line Press. She has an MFA from Mills College and a PhD in Energy Medicine from the University of Natural Medicine in Santa Fe, NM.

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November 15, 2013

THIS DRAWN AND QUARTERED MOON by klipschutzPosted by

Review by Patrick Denton MackayThis Drawn And Quartered Moon by klipschutz

THIS DRAWN & QUARTERED MOON
by klipschutz

Anvil Press
P.O. Box 3008
Vancouver, B.C., Canada V6B 3X5
ISBN: 978-1-927380-45-1
2013, 128 pp., $18.00
www.anvilpress.com

Klipschutz is a well-kept secret whose talent is only now emerging after his second volume, This Drawn and Quartered Moon. I had the privilege of reviewing Mr. Lipschutz’s first poetry collection, Twilight of the Male Ego some years ago. His finely hewn and keenly adept poems shine like the shiver in a pond at dusk, and slowly ripple out into consciousness in profound ways. A once street hustler, and a remarkably funny person, it is not surprising when he tells me that “everyone knows me at the bank.”

If one of the missions of poetry is to say what everyone thinks but never says, truth so often couched or hidden by formalities, etiquette, governmental suppression, or simply lack of vocabulary, then This Drawn & Quartered Moon succeeds in exposing what otherwise would be left unsaid. Yet, rending the guts of poetry and pulling the innards of truth into daylight is only part of this volume’s mot juste. In the hundred-page-plus ride, we’re exposed to a powerhouse of play that sings, sparks, flips fingers, points at, snaps, makes fun of, bleeds, roasts, startles, rearranges, debunks—in short, lights with a blowtorch mouth the hilarious and tender moments of life with formidable skill.

The collection is made up of six espresso shot sections—mostly free verse—with a smattering of formal structure. No matter the choice of such a modern style, This Drawn & Quartered Moon still resonates musically, lines lining up like a row of lucky sevens singing on a slot machine:

Something in the water, somehow in the air, search engine
For your sampled thoughts, somewhere over the radio …
—“Ghazal of the Terrible Twenties”

The office bottle was dry, so I bought myself a vowel,
Once upon a girl whose fortune was her face.
—“Ghazal of the Sugarless Gumshoe”

The lingual play here is deft; the “search engine” is what all poetic hounds in a technological age are becoming. And further, the fantastic turn of a transmogrified fairytale opening, “once upon a girl …” and the sudden whiplash caused by the rest of the line “whose fortune was her face …” leads to the riveting conclusion that so many fortunes today are truly made up of faces, and more, made up of made-up faces. Rhetorically, such “switching” is typical of klipschutz’s ironic style: take a cliché line, an adage, some saying, and twist it so tight that the poetry drips from its rendering.

However, to see from a vantage point the multi-year vision that klipschutz has birthed, one need only observe the titles to be introduced to the humorous mechanics that are so often his signature: “The Reelection of God (1999),” “The Alpha Beta Male,” “Slab of Consciousness,” “We Interrupt This President,” “I Am Not a Haiku,” “Interview with an Echo,” and “The TV Weatherman Rats Himself Out.” All are magnetic enough to pull one inside, the gravity of the titles like rabbit lures. And here the fun begins.

You want miracles, try Lourdes.
No more can my dog play Hot Cross Buns
Than a CPA scramble the code
And make pearls from a string of sham zeroes …

Like a dry martini served up in a glass, the neat and somewhat raw perception is quaffed, tingles on the tongue, intoxicates, begins to spin the internal gears, and, swirling, the sarcasm goes down. What better way to get slammed than by ingesting the richly visual and metaphoric crescendo, “And make pearls from a string of sham zeroes.”  One is given the literal impossibility of a no-miracle situation while flung into the miraculousness of the lines themselves.

The verve continues in electric similes, as we see in “The TV Weatherman Rats Himself Out” the remarkable bridging of snow. “And what about snow—drifting as slow as a twelve-year-old boy/ waking up.” No better analogy could be made. The gently rocked awake weather, the weather a child, the child drifting from sleep into reality, all of it slips in gentle vision. And such precision is amplified at the line break “waking up,” which stands alone, enhancing further the effects of klipschutz’s quiver—for, how can one wake “up.” A sudden spin into the sky and we float with the poem.

Still, it is consistency that allows a poetic collection its life. Where one feels as if they are slipping from the author’s talents, the talent to “hold” the attention with something as abstract as “squiggles” on a page, is always the poet’s concern. And one should worry if the mix is spiced too much by overly rhetorical lines. None of these observations appear to clam up or depose this body of work.

Even in “Guilty W/An Explanation #2,” the shortest poem in the volume, we again are introduced to klipschutz’s wit, and perhaps even mastery of wit, however macabre: “The gun was, like, a prop. The bullets were symbols. / The blood—I hadn’t thought that part through.” Such keystone cop punning does not in any way diminish the author’s integrity as a serious poet, for, again, we are, as readers, allowed to laugh, and to laugh is not a petty emotion, evoked only by stand-up comedians. To evoke laughter by writing is a high and often forgotten quality of poetic art. To master it is no small affair.

This Drawn & Quartered Moon is an illuminating text, verbally sharp as a tack, spinning a web of language that catches many a random fly, but most importantly speaks of and about what most people never venture to say, and then says it with such irony as to twist the audience into the volume’s tornado lines. As a book it retains its integrity no matter the jibes, the ribaldry, the lingual play, all the while reminding anybody who loves language that it may be rendered beautiful and in the same time play its cards. The verbal Polaroid is slowly coming into focus. The lines electrically disclosing klipschutz is the in-house resident chair of Wit:

Look, there I am!
Flossing like faith incarnate

Cooped up in this poem
And all that sun outside.

__________

Patrick Mackay lives and writes in Santa Barbara, California. He has won Honorable Mention in Glimmer Train‘s Short Fiction Contest, Best of the Decade in Hawaii Pacific Review, and has published in the United States and the United Kingdom. His poetry volumes include Perfect Entropy, Deadpan, The No Theater, Circuitry (Collected Work) and Graffiti Download. Mackay is also the author of the novel A-Metrical Techniques of a Schizophrenic.

 

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November 10, 2013

THE TRUTH GARDEN by Emma NealePosted by

Review by Max L. ChapnickThe Truth Garden by Emma Neale

THE TRUTH GARDEN
by Emma Neale

Otago University Press
PO Box 56 / Level 1
398 Cumberland Street
Dunedin, New Zealand
ISBN: 978-1-877578-25-0
2012, 63 pp.,  NZD $30
www.otago.ac.nz/press

Sometime after the sun set but before early twenty-somethings are prone to hit the bars, I went for an evening stroll through my suburban neighborhood. Under glistening streetlights I pondered a recent college graduate’s existential questions: Why are neat lawns so boring? What is the minimum amount of money I must save to move out of my parents house? Immediate follow up: Can I afford a Snickers bar? Turning a corner, a small child suddenly appeared. No older than four, she froze on an abandoned lawn. I stopped on my sidewalk tracks and we stood gazing at one another for a long moment. Then she contorted her blank stare, half-wary, half-laughing, into something more like a scowl. She screamed at me, into the night, “BOO!!!”

Though the yard was as empty of flowers as the girl’s mother’s voice was of a New Zealand lilt, I couldn’t help but hear a personal metaphor to Emma Neale’s The Truth Garden.

In truth, my own life harmonizes more easily with T-Swift’s 22 than it does with Neale’s jingling, Kiwi verse. But Neale’s book was, to use her own metaphor, “like a silver rope flung/ from a drenched and listing ship// … it is the waking cry,” the voice of a baby the speaker doesn’t recognize as her own until a moment of clarity breaks upon her. Despite the disconnect between my own position in life and the one occupied by the young mother who narrates these poems—or perhaps because of that divide—Neale’s scenes awoke in me a remembrance of my earliest years and a new consideration of my future ones. An emerging family might inherently imply growth and beauty, but it is a weighty, confining thing, especially for someone who dreams of escaping, like me. Somehow, when Neale works at it, I, too, am startled into hearing sounds of silvery beauty from inside the borders of family life.

My first encounter with Neale’s work came from a submission to a feature on New Zealand poetry in Shenandoah: The Washington and Lee Literary Review, which I co-edited with professor-poet Lesley Wheeler, and fellow undergrad Drew Martin. The poem of hers we ultimately accepted, “Alchemy,” captivated me with delightful word-pairings but bored me with a motherly plot. Going into it, I figured Neale’s book would focus on “home and garden,” as Cilla McQueen announces on the back cover. Flip over the slim volume, and the front looks like memoirs of middle-aged women my mom brings to her book clubs. I don’t read them, of course, but I’m skeptical and dismissive. Yet, for “Alchemy[’s]” “oxytocin monkeys” and a nagging feeling I’d be missing out, I thought I might as well give it a try.

In an unlikely turn of events, Neale’s opening poem welcomes the listless college graduate, pandering unknowingly to my own waking dreams of wandering far from home,

when you stop in your hot kitchen …
or wait in a foreign city on a crowded train,
and you are lost in some intimate, troubled thought
… you will hear her, you will hear her,
and see clearly where you need to be, and are.

Some might slide easily into a book about motherhood and marriage. But as one who intrinsically resisted, I appreciate the call to appreciate. Neale’s repeating chimes, like clinging, persistent vines nudge the reader to look back as more homey portraits rustle by. The same speaker who might “dream of a dozen other things:/ carnivals, parades; a sprint down the street;/ an open-field dance, the green leap of waves,” also narrates poems about dressing in the morning or watching her son play in the yard. That this young home-maker has also dreamed my dreams fashions her into an empathetic figure of the family-tinted rhythms to come.

But at first I wished for a more extensive struggle: Where was the speaker’s regret at having sacrificed exotic shores for a child and garden? Didn’t she lose some grand sense of freedom, and if so, where is the lament?

On later readings—or maybe just because these thoughts dominate my inner poems—I discovered the grand dialectic of responsibility and freedom had already taken root in this book’s soil. In “Discontinuous,” a friend mourns lost past and future time, grasping at, “nineteen, twenty, its vigorous dance/ the inevitable/ where-did-it-go toboggan.” But unlike her friend, “our sons, gentle giants in miniature,/ play you be the builder, I’ll be the driver, then you be the boy/ I’ll be the father,” mesmerize the speaker. Neale cultivates an argument less flashy than the dances of wild adolescents, but centered more on the potential of budding seeds.  Creative freedom—an ability to imagine, to play and to pretend—flowers here, too. In one of her final poems, the patter of “Drummer Boy” recalls an earlier parade,

but the be-doom-doom-be dap in him
insists he tips this I’m alive! high-hat
to anything passing by:
sparrows, strangers, day-sky, grey-sky
rubbish truck, brother, fog-cat, snow-sky.

Though these floats are more mundane, and the beats simpler, Neale asks aloud whether the sights are any less glorious and whether the music is any less moving.

One of my personal favorites, “Fidelity Sestina,” locks Neale’s mostly tight-lined free verse into this form’s dependable, end-word gates. Focusing on a related subject with which I have similarly zero first-hand experience, marriage, Neale digs her playful wit deep into strict boundaries. She puns liberally, for example, employing the verb and noun forms of “stage,” including the splashy variants “backstage” and “stagey.” Besides these tricks, the lines grow and shrink organically,

the cost of being allowed
to share another person’s life again,
now we thought we’d grown out of the old coat of our own families, their
                        games—
cupboards, junk shed, go carts, chores, the unspoken sores it’s a fair

bet every family has and thinks their own affair.

Neale treats marriage, the ultimate way to become stuck, I think, with one of the stickiest forms. But as a yoga instructor reminds the speaker in an earlier poem, “don’t get sticky with it, let it all go.” Neale likewise deploys formidable skill un-sticking herself, getting as close to free-verse-dom as possible. The energy expended seems to be her message: old coats of familial baggage inherent to marriage need not hinder it’s elegant ballet. The play often comes from dressing up inside these heavy, repeated word-rules and, sometimes, leaping out of them. In the final lines of this poem Neale breaks form, proclaiming, “Pray I’m game enough to concede, the heart’s allowed so few dances, let it play/ let it play, till its brief light’s done.”

Whether it be the vision one struggles for or the one that appears spontaneously, often the description of light constitutes a poetic dance of faith. In “Event!” a roadside sign foreshadows some great happening, “… a bomb? Will he jump?” And then all at once, “I see it:/ the harbor glistens,/… like scattered silver shavings.” That’s it. Neale delivers to us a climax of well-illustrated shimmers, a fairly pretty day, but not much else.

It’s this nothing particular moment …
as if some old god
has descended in a shower of gold
turned the body into a bead of light
run on a wire of air.

This subtle shift in perspective and sunshine jolts the reader to a higher awareness, which manifests in this poem when the anti-climax becomes the climax. So what, nothing extra-ordinary happened—no one exploded or jumped off a bridge—isn’t it amazing that the waves reflect and refract light just so?

Though light functions as a useful tool for Neale in many of these “ah-ha” sidesteps, an even better version comes towards the beginning of “Brood”:

The baby is amazed. He points. ‘Duck!’
There is a real thing for the sound we make.
‘Duck!’ As if the word spills a spell,
the word paddles off the page.

Never mind a censoring mother at the poem’s end with whom I can’t properly understand, this internal anecdote entrances me. Words, spells! True story, my first was “duck,” also.

The other day I told my little cousin I read a book “in my head,” and he promptly stuck the book open-faced on top of his head, “He read the book in his head! Max read the book inside his head!” Even though I’ve never raised a child, and don’t plan on it for quite some years, I still get it. To paraphrase “Brood,” the baby is amazed; the baby amazes. Awareness spills over, contagious, paddling even across pages and oceans. The Truth Garden tells the story of a hundred million mothers who’ve married, watched light reflect off harbors, and taught little boys to speak; it is not my story. But Neale cultivates the tale so well, with such jolts of beauty, these poems force even me to pause on suburban streets, stop, and smile.

__________

Max L. Chapnick is an AmeriCorps Volunteer Coordinator at FEGS Health and Human Services in lower Manhattan and a recent graduate of Washington and Lee University with majors in Physics and English. In January, he will travel to Wellington, New Zealand on a US Student Fulbright grant, where he will study and write poetry at the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University.

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November 5, 2013

WOMEN WRITE RESISTANCE: POETS RESIST GENDER VIOLENCE Edited by Laura Madeline WisemanPosted by

Review by Jeffrey HeckerWomen Write Resistance

WOMEN WRITE RESISTANCE: POETS RESIST GENDER VIOLENCE
Edited by Laura Madeline Wiseman

Hyacinth Girl Press
ISBN-10: 0615772781
ISBN-13: 978-0615772783
2012, 252 pp., $19.95
hyacinthgirlpress.com

Kaiser Wilson, have you forgotten your sympathy with the poor Germans because they were not self-governed? 20,000,000 American women are not self-governed. Take the beam out of your own eye.
—Silent Sentinel banner, 1918, directed at President Woodrow Wilson

Every male has a stake in feminism. Obviously it is not a good situation for anybody when one sex has earned the greater right to complain. And don’t happy women tend to be generous? Self-interest, if not basic decency, should convince men that a fair-minded feminism is also their liberation. All of us, finally, free enough to be scoundrels.
—Stephen Dunn, Journal Notes, Walking Light, 2001

Good news: August 18th marked the 93rd anniversary of 19th Amendment ratification.

Bad news: Mike Wallace (60 Minutes) was 93 years old when he expired last year.

Good news: 2020 will mark a single century American since women legally cast ballots in every town and city, increasing the popular vote count in Warren Harding’s election by 8.3 million. Another way to consider that: there are less breathing bodies in all of Switzerland as I’m writing. Bad news: I wish I was flying to Switzerland instead of Norfolk, Virginia.

More bad news: it’s 2013—and many Y chromosomes strut around our United States like they personally invented the blast furnace (invented in Sweden circa 1350, probably by a nice bookish child). The nightmare goes beyond endless, baseless boasting. Despite impressive barriers broken by women in just Mike Wallace’s life span, men continue to beat, victimize, and psychologically manipulate, all while audaciously claiming to love their babies. Here’s good news: I can’t put down Women Write Resistance: Poets Resist Gender Violence, an anthology of 106 writers alive, fighting tormentors with a carry-on item no TSA agent can ever take away: VERSE.

Editor Laura Madeline Wiseman conducts a choir of multi-cultural voices Adrienne Rich would be proud to call soul sisters. The collection includes pages laying out Wiseman’s intent (pyromania, a.k.a. open dialogue), as well as pages of critical background. Her introduction sets a necessary fire, especially for the faint-hearted. These poems are projected more toward those fearful to speak than those empowered, which is why I believe this book is vital to the mute and the Muse.

The pieces run a wide tonal spectrum, from nuptial violation (Ann Bracken’s “Marital Privilege”); workplace human resources hypocrisy (Marianne Kunkel’s “In Praise of a Co-Worker); all strains of verbal, physical, emotional abuses (Laure-Anne Bosselaar “The Cellar”); and rape brutality (Natanya Ann Pulley “High-Water Mark”); to poems exposing subliminal neglect; witnesses to barbarism (Lisa Lewis “Tracy And Joe”); understated acts of liberation (Sandi Day “I Wanted To Tell You The Dog Died”); experimentation (Evie Shockley “At The Musée De L’Homme”); satire (Monica Wendel “Sexual Assault Awareness Week”); and an innovative form of feng shui break-up letter (Kristin Abraham “from Caution: Avoid Getting in Eyes or For External Use Only”).

These poets, Audible Sentinels, continue a path blazed by Silent Sentinels, who were not silent, who changed the meaning of that word, who paced in front of the White House over two years in bad weather without police protection, who only ceased marching after they’d gained access to a ballot box, even knowing their only two choices would be rich white men brandishing suspect smiles. This book sports its own Facebook page you can join. Contributors reading pieces from this ensemble can also be found on YouTube. This is essential historical work I expect to see cross-stitched into classroom, bathrooms, living and dining rooms. In 2016, I hope women and clear-headed men vote in a woman president. A single strophe from Lois Marie Harrod’s “Off” sets the mood, a mood that refuses to set the table nor do dishes. In fairness, this anthology wipes the table clear off satellite imagery:

I’m off too, she said. Outtahere—off, if
he comes home oiled again. Get off of
me, she said, I mean if a man is going
to act like that, I’m gone, away, off the
shelf, absentee, off before you off me
off like a sock, you’re off your rocker,
you know that? Off your nut. Off
your trolley, call 911.

__________

Jeffrey Hecker was born in 1977 in Norfolk, Virginia. He’s the author of Rumble Seat (San Francisco Bay Press, 2011), the chapbook Hornbook (Horse Less Press, 2012), & the forthcoming chapbook Instructions for the Orgy (Sunnyoutside Press, 2013). Recent work has appeared in La Reata Review, Mascara Literary Review, Atticus Review, La Fovea, Zocalo Public Square, The Burning Bush 2, LEVELER, Spittoon, and similar:peaks. He holds a degree from Old Dominion University. He resides with his wife Robin in Olde Towne Portsmouth, Virginia.

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