Search Results for: MEYERHOFER

September 15, 2013

2013 Rattle Poetry Prize WinnersPosted by

Rattle is proud to announce the winner of the 2013 Rattle Poetry Prize:

Roberto Ascalon

“The Fire This Time”
by
Roberto Ascalon
Seattle, WA

__________

Finalists:

“A Poem for Women Who Don’t Want Children”
Chanel Brenner
Santa Monica, CA

“My Mother Told Us Not to Have Children”
Rebecca Gayle Howell
Lubbock, TX

“Baby Love”
Courtney Kampa
New York, NY

“What He Must Have Seen”
Stephen Kampa
Daytona Beach, FL

“Man on Mad Anthony”
Bea Opengart
Cincinatti, OH

“Laundry List”
Michelle Ornat
Elma, NY

“Man on the Floor”
Jack Powers
Fairfield, CT

“Basic Standards Test”
Danez Smith
St. Paul, MN

“Who Breathed in Binders”
Patricia Smith
Howell, NJ

“Of You”
Wendy Videlock
Grand Junction, CO

 

These eleven poems will be published in the Winter issue of Rattle this December. Each of the Finalists are also eligible for the $1,000 Readers’ Choice Award, to be selected by entrant and subscriber vote (the voting period is December 1, 2013 – February 15, 2014).

Another nine poems were selected for standard publication, and offered a space in the open section of a future issue. These poets will be notified individually about details, but they are: Jacqueline Berger, Daniel Bohnhorst, Jackleen Holton, Sharon Kessler-Farchi, Michael Meyerhofer, Kathleen Nolan, Charlotte Pence, Sam Sax, and Timothy Schirmer.

Thank you to everyone who participated in the competition, which would not have been a success without your diverse and inspiring poems. We received a record 2,105 entries and well over 8,000 poems, and it was an honor to read each of them.

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September 10, 2012

MY INDEX OF SLIGHTLY HORRIFYING KNOWLEDGE by Paul GuestPosted by

Review by Michael MeyerhoferMy Index of Slightly... by Paul Guest

MY INDEX OF SLIGHTLY HORRIFYING KNOWLEDGE
by Paul Guest

Ecco Press
HarperCollins Publishers
10 East 53rd Street
New York, NY 10022
ISBN: 978-0061685194
2010, 96 pp., $13.99
www.harpercollins.com

Rarely are we given a book that so elegantly marries intellectual and lyrical acrobatics with the emotional equivalent of matter spooned from a neutron star. My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge, Paul Guest’s third book of poems, affects the senses like an unexpectedly tender burlesque show held in the basement of a speakeasy that once upon a time used to be a church. (And just in case it isn’t clear, I mean that as a compliment.)

The first poem, “User’s Guide to Physical Debilitation,” confronts the author’s paralysis due to a childhood bike accident; and it does so with stunning deftness, blending elevated lyricism, gut-wrenching bluntness, and a surprising dose of gallows humor:

Should the painful condition of irreversible paralysis
last longer than forever or at least until
your death by bowling ball or illegal lawn dart
…
you, or your beleaguered caregiver
should turn to page seven where you can learn,
assuming higher cognitive functions
were not pureed by your selfish misfortune,
how to leave the house for the first time in two years.

Those already familiar with the poetry of Paul Guest know that in the Age of the MFA Program, he is still in a stylistic league of his own, confessional but not quite Confessional, reminiscent of the New York School but not exactly academic (or anti-academic, for that matter). And in the canon of poets with beautifully quotable lines, Guest is as good as anybody, living or dead. The Dallas Morning News (cited on the cover) rightly praises Guest’s first lines, their ability to “zigzag from one eye-opening image to another,” but it’s the final line of “Early in a New Year” that has been haunting me for days:

When I’m quiet and still,
when I stop speaking out
to the motion of the water ringing in the drain,
I listen like a child to the darkness
where monsters sing.

The sheer unexpectedness of this, a poignancy of grief and derision reminiscent of Catcher in the Rye, is just phenomenal. I don’t have a tattoo but if I did, I think those last two lines in particular would make a good addition.

These are extravagantly layered poems–something I normally take as a symptom of emotional distancing, but the layering of Guest’s poems is no mere hipster gimmick; rather, his poems are a textbook example of genuine function mirroring meticulously crafted form.

“Eulogy” reminds me of Tony Hoagland’s famous poem, “Suicide Song,” in that both are sarcastic condemnations of self-destruction counter-balanced with subtle self-indictment and acknowledgement of not only the existence but the sustaining nature of sorrow. In that sense, Guest is irreverently reverent, which I tend to think is exactly the place you want to be. He is also supremely clever with his line breaks:“Tell me where / you were when you heard / but tell me later, much later / the kind of later mathematicians get excited about.”

“One More Theory About Happiness” is another fascinating poem that compares happiness to “an accident / with a powder-actuated nail gun and a man whose arms dead-end / at the bulbs of his elbows / kicking a dog.” Despite tones of bitterness and sardonic humor, this is also a poem that resonates with survival, in which happiness multiplies “with the mythic, sexual frenzy of the rabbit” and the before-mentioned dog-kicking amputee understands, like the Buddha, that “desire is the cause / of all human suffering.” In other words, it’s a poem of duality, neither a defense nor condemnation but a celebration of human frailty and metaphysical contradictions. As the poem’s title also happens to be the title of Guest’s well-praised memoir, one is invited see the same topics explored through these different mediums and in so doing, develop an even greater appreciation for Guest’s distinctive, gutsy style.

It’s sometimes tough to place these poems on the slide rule between cynical and optimistic–precisely because Guest is indirectly pointing out the sheer absurdity of thinking of cynicism and optimism as inflexible polar opposites, rather than hopelessly/hopefully interwoven depending on the time of day. And interestingly enough, given that these poems often incorporate elevated language, there is a refreshing lack of filler; that is to say that reading this book with an editor’s eye, I notice an accessibility and economy of language in Guest’s poetry that one would normally associate with Deep Imagists. I can imagine Guest being unfairly lumped in with more esoteric poets who try to be hip just for the sake of being hip, but in Guest’s case, one gets the distinct feeling that his aesthetic is less a product of style than sheer necessity.

In other words, reading these poems, I can’t imagine them being written in any other way. Guest has effectively created his own form for the task at hand, and in that sense, he deserves as much praise as other luminaries like Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Ann Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Allen Ginsberg, and James Wright who told their story the way they needed to tell it and in so doing, helped bolster and reshape the literary canon for generations to follow.

____________

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 won five chapbook prizes. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, North American Review, Arts & Letters, River Styx, Quick Fiction and other journals, and can be read online at www.troublewithhammers.com.

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March 10, 2012

THE MELANCHOLY MBA by Richard DonnellyPosted by

Review by Michael MeyerhoferThe Melancholy MBA

THE MELANCHOLY MBA
by Richard Donnelly

Brick Road Poetry Press
P. O. Box 751
Columbus, GA 31902-0751
ISBN 978-0984100569
2011, 116 pp., $16.00
http://www.brickroadpoetrypress.com/

The Melancholy MBA is the debut collection of Richard Donnelly, and in addition to being timely, it’s also pretty damn impressive. Donnelly’s style is unique in that he manages to break new ground (especially in how his frequent use of caesura forces the reader to take his/her time, really digest the language of these poems) while deftly sidestepping the pretension and unfriendliness all too often found in “experimental” poetry. Put another way, these poems are wonderfully fresh and original yet distinctly human in their accessibility.

The “quiet desperation” famously mentioned by Thoreau is everywhere in these poems, made palatable by wry wit blended with the seething frustration and guilt of Middle Management, America. In “Office Window,” the narrator remarks how he’s just been given “a new office with a window” and, nearing middle age, is finally able to see “Minneapolis sunshine.” One could point out the irony of this, suggesting he could just go outside if he wanted to see the sun, but then you have to wonder how visible the sun would be in the city—not to mention the American ridiculousness of having to choose between a paycheck and sunlight.

Another example is “Jelly Beans,” an early poem in which an unnamed character seems unfazed by the near loss of a “three hundred thousand dollar” account, but sternly questions whether the narrator is the one who has been stealing jelly beans from the jar on his desk. On first read, it’s a funny poem combining the frustration of trying to deal with an incompetent who cares more about safeguarding his sweets than keeping his job. On second glance, though, there’s something sad and familiar about that situation, a bit of human frailty staining the machinery gears. We see this again in “She Tricked,” where we read how an unattractive woman famous for tricking “a man into getting her pregnant” flirts with the narrator, who “[doesn’t] blame her,” perhaps because he recognizes something of his own loneliness and desperation in her actions.

Fans of films like Office Space or even the much darker He Was a Quiet Man will find much that is familiar here, to say nothing of those who themselves have actually worked in factories or offices and experienced firsthand the struggle to maintain individuality in a setting that, perhaps by necessity, wears down the creativity and complexity of the human experience in favor of mechanical productivity. For instance, in “Cabo,” the narrator overhears a group of salespeople being berated like disappointing children, warned that they may lose their “spiffs” if they don’t meet their quota. You can almost see the salespeople hanging their heads, shifting nervously, even though we (like the narrator) have no idea what a “spiff” means in this context.

Those themes continue in “Your Life,” which contains perhaps the book’s most striking scene. There, an obviously dissatisfied narrator contemplates an affair with a woman who claims his life is “so perfect,” but instead of taking decisive action one way or another, he hangs up, clears his schedule, then simply spends “half an hour… staring at the wall.” The poet need provide no further details for the reader to imagine the indecision, excitement, and self-loathing that may be going through the narrator’s mind, all being clear illustrations of the very mortality the narrator both fears and seeks to embrace on the deepest level possible.

However, these poems are not merely concerned with dissecting futility, posing the question of what constitutes a physical or a moral life worth living. Nor is The Melancholy MBA a two dimensional view into the mind of a modern businessman (stereotypically as foreign to most poets as, well, poetry to Wall Street). One of this book’s strengths is its unassuming ambition, plus its ability to maintain verisimilitude while illustrating the paranoia, classism and/or racism interwoven in the business community. “Poor People” is an excellent example (reposted here in its entirety):

there are some poor people
in the world
I see them at the Northland Park
Community Center or
Dell Foods in
Avery
they wear dirty sweatshirts
stained sweat pants old
broken tennis shoes
their hair hangs
around their faces
their oily hair
it’s almost like being crazy
is what it looks like to
me until one of their kids
kicks in your
door at two a.m. and says
crazy
I’ll show you crazy

Some of Donnelly’s best uses of tongue-in-cheek humor occur in poems about the opposite sex, many of which also have some underlying feminist commentary or critique of the human condition. For instance, the sectioned poem “Six Short Poems about Love” begins with a vignette about a woman who refuses to bring the narrator coffee, saying she’ll only do that for her husband, but in fact, “not even for / him.” The rebuke seems playful, though, whereas in “The Good Manager,” a frustrated narrator tries to distance himself from a female employee who seems to be asking for leniency, a raise, and a personal shoulder to cry on, though he finishes by telling her to “button / up the top / of that blouse.” While that poem could be read as a lighthearted critique of an inappropriate worker, an alternate view would be to read the poem’s title satirically, so that the rebuke is how the narrator feels he should respond, for whatever reason, but doesn’t. Perhaps my favorite example, though, not to mention my favorite line from the book, is the beginning of “Sex Poem,” which artfully blends eroticism with measured self-deprecation:

A woman’s body
is a foreign country
and you are not a native
you are a man with a stamped
passport.

Underneath these small, often funny tales of lust, ambition, and petty betrayals, the real strength of these poems is their obsession with mortality, coupled with the absurdity of our daily situation. Somehow, though, Donnelly manages to illustrate all this with the timing, charisma, and lyrical acrobatics of a stand-up comic. The end result is that we not only agree with him, nodding and sometimes laughing as we turn the page, but we feel better (and stronger) for it.

____________

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 won five chapbook prizes. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, North American Review, Arts & Letters, River Styx, Quick Fiction and other journals, and can be read online at www.troublewithhammers.com.

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May 10, 2011

OVERTIME by Joseph MillarPosted by

Review by Michael MeyerhoferOvertime by Joseph Millar

OVERTIME
by Joseph Millar

Eastern Washington University Press
Spokane, Washington
ISBN 0-910055-74-2
2001, 61 pp., $29.99
http://ewupress.ewu.edu

I have always had the deepest admiration for poets who know what to say and what not to say: wordsmiths who sense when it’s time to just shut up and let a scene describe itself, free of heavy-handed pretension. Joseph Millar is such a poet. With wit rivaling that of Tony Hoagland and Stephen Dobyns and a sense of timing and elegance reminiscent of William Carlos Williams, Millar treats the reader to humor and poignant observations complimented by fluid lyricism and superbly orchestrated line breaks. Consider this first stanza from Sitting Bull in Canada, which is about as tight a stanza as any written in the English language:

It’s three years since Little Bighorn,
               the Month of Blackening Cherries;
Crazy Horse has been murdered
and civilization keeps rinsing its glittering face in the dawn,
               perfecting the treaties and blueprints,
while the railroad pushes its stained fangs
                                             west through the rivers of grass.

In just eight lines, Millar not only sets the stage but uses masterful alliteration and imagery to take a scene that might very well be cliché in the hands of another poet—the tragic mistreatment of Native Americans—and makes it seem not only engaging, but unexpectedly poignant. While some poets surprise us with lyrical end-runs, Millar utilizes an uncompromising, direct approach that sacrifices nothing and astonishes the reader with its heartfelt grace.

Though Millar’s poems often address the lives and attitudes of Middle America, they do so without that air of condescension often present in today’s socially conscious narrative poetry. Put another way, Millar’s poems are the antithesis of snobbery. For instance, in “Autumn Rainfall,” Millar describes a woman who “…makes her supper late, moving slowly / in the bare kitchen, between the entertainment channel / and the glass tray of leftovers bubbling in the oven.”

While these lines contain obvious commentary on the human condition, they provide said commentary in a way that resonates with tenderness and humility. Also, as a matter of style and craft, Millar knows how to calm the reader and engage him/her before elevating his language for the profound observation that follows in the next stanza: “To be brave is to be tired much of the time, / half stunned by the continual dusk.” Now, a lesser poet might have been charmed into beginning the poem with that line, based on its music and meaning, whereas Millar’s approach seems infinitely more affecting because he allows the poem to open with a character, relying on image and description rather than the ruminations of a heavy-handed narrator.

And when Millar does begin his poems with the narrator, he knows the best way to convey a serious point is not to take himself too seriously. One perfect example is “Sunday Night,” a poem about mortality and guilt, that begins on a humorous and unassuming note: “This is my first time trying to make beef stew / and I remember the Indian stories / about thinking kind thoughts while cooking…” Here’s another example from “Names I’d Forgotten”: “I used to get drunk in the morning, starting awake / in the sinister warmth of the couch, tangled up / in my raincoat and pants like a trapped animal.”

Millar also goes beyond the self with that same biting wit, as in poems like “Heart Attack”:

You’ve always suspected the voice of defiance
would carry you only so far, wondering
when your life might end
even as you lounged on the high school steps
smoking a Lucky Strike.
In those days you considered it honorable
to make yourself drunk with fear…

As much as I like Millar’s sense of humor, though, I think what’s most pleasing about these poems is their humanity, their blend of strength and vulnerability. “Somehow I’ve told her everything,” Millar writes. “In this bed I’ve exploded every grief into her body, one by one… the drinking, the failed marriages and jobs, / the weight of my children pressing me down.”

Joseph Millar’s Overtime is one of those rare books that combines narrative brevity with lush descriptions, the result being a book that is both accessible and joyfully, smartly lyrical. This can be seen in the opening line of “Love Pirates”: “I follow with my mouth the small wing of muscle / under your shoulder, lean over your back, breathing / into your hair and thinking of nothing” Another prime example is “Ed’s Auto Repair”, one of my favorites from this book, in which the narrator watches a mechanic’s “…torch flame splash / its lizard shapes onto the dark steel.” Like all of Millar’s poems, “Ed’s Auto Repair” resonates with visceral, luxurious descriptions: a shop “smelling of gas and iron,” “air hoses [hissing] in the corners,” “the shadows under the muffler, / the new metal ticking.”

I first came across Millar’s work in various literary journals and was immediately struck by Millar’s ability to accomplish some kind of lyrical feat in every line without sounding heavy-handed. I ordered this book and have been recommending it ever since. In short, Overtime is just a lovely example of wordsmithing at its best. Pick it up; your bookshelf will thank you!

____________

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 won five chapbook prizes. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, North American Review, Arts & Letters, River Styx, Quick Fiction and other journals, and can be read online at www.troublewithhammers.com.

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January 4, 2011

“Dedication” by Michael MeyerhoferPosted by

Michael Meyerhofer

DEDICATION

In our house, not once did we hear
someone say you’re welcome
in answer to thanks. Instead—“it’s all right,”
backhanded reminder of the sacrifice
this or that Dollar Store trinket
cost folks well below the poverty line.
This is a hard habit to break.
“Don’t worry, it’s fine” when you thank me
for helping you move furniture
or coming to your reading,
your wedding, your beloved’s funeral.
“Oh, it’s all right” to students
when they thank me for margin comments,
for letting them turn in assignments
half a semester late. “It’s all right”—
the door held open a few seconds longer
for the jock on crutches,
for the blue-eyed girl breathing
into the straw fixed to her wheelchair.
I want to thank the moon for tilting
in time to highlight the rain
spilling off a parked windshield,
my body for keeping itself free
so far from cancer, diabetes, suicide.
I want to thank my fear of death
for melting whenever a beautiful woman
bends to drink from a fountain.
I want to thank the crows for mating
on any windowsill but mine.
And their answer, rising in chorus
with each day’s rusty sunset:
It’s all right. It’s all right. It’s all right.

—from Rattle #33, Summer 2010

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October 25, 2010

ZEPHYR by Susan BrownePosted by

Review by Michael MeyerhoferZephyr by Susan Browne

ZEPHYR
by Susan Browne

Steel Toe Books
Western Kentucky University
1906 College Heights Blvd. #11086
Bowling Green, KY 42101-1086
ISBN 978-0-9824169-4-5
2010, 92 pp, $12.00
www.steeltoebooks.com

The poems in Zephyr, winner of the 2009 Steel Toe Books Prize in Poetry (Editor’s Choice), by Susan Browne, reminded me right away of Bob Hicok’s work—and I mean that as the highest of compliments. Browne, like Hicok, is willing to take big risks in her poems. Unlike other established poets who begin to play it safe after awhile, Browne continuously pushes the envelope, betting the success of each poem on its next line. That makes these poems daring, authentic, and fun.

As the one-word title implies, there’s a certain directness to these poems, but it’s not the directness of Zen-like brevity; rather, it’s the directness of the snappy punch line; the elegant, quick turn of phrase; the wholly unexpected image that renders you unable to imagine a thing being described any other way. Take, for example, the everyday malaise described in “Mountain”: “Maybe a map is a good thing / On those days I feel / Like I’m riding a rhino up a mountain…”

Another fine example can be found in “Tuesday,” wherein Browne perfectly captures the combination of panic and numbness felt by someone who returns home to find her house has been broken into: “The front door’s smashed open, wood busted, / Hinges broken, a dusty space / Where the TV had been, / And what you feel is Oh. / ….Then the police arrive, their radios blaring. / Sorry, they say, but this happens every day. / Oh, you say. Just Oh, nodding, wearing all / your best jewelry at once.”

She is also a poet who knows how to use line breaks (to flush out double-meanings, to create tension, to set up a joke) in an era when many other poets struggle with basic punctuation. Take, for example, the first and last lines of “At Bloomingdale’s Grand Opening in San Francisco.” Here, the laugh-out-loud humor belies what seems to be a genuine, human struggle for identity in a postmodern world:

I can’t find my way out
of the new shopping center
which was added on to the old shopping center
and now covers two million square feet of earth.
….
I can never go outside again,
these doors only open onto other doors,
down into the funnel of more and more,
until I’m buried in denim, ten thousand different kinds of jeans,
a cross made of diamonds driven into my heart.

Further, the unexpected turn at the end is especially striking because it combines religious, commercial, and romantic imagery all at once (plus a nod to figurative vampirism); these lines simultaneously invoke a sense of tenderness and violence, humor and sadness, that could be seen as a microcosm of the entire poem (plus the entire book as a whole).

Another thing I admire about these poems is their sense of perspective. You get from Zephyr a sense that Browne is a poet who never pulls her punches; nor, though, is she a poet of glamorous self-indulgence and melodrama. Rather, she is able to strike right to the heart of an event, its deepest essence, by maintaining a multi-dimensional perspective—which is a fancy way of saying she takes poetry seriously but knows not to take herself too seriously. Take, for instance, these lines from “Sadness”: “You wanted to be happy / but got hooked on sadness. / ….Your one hope was to be the saddest person alive / and win an award,” or this opening from “To the Moment”: “Thank God you’re here, / eternal warrior who wrestles against the joyless / onslaught of mortal ugh.” We could use a lot more poems that poke fun at the need some (many?) artists have to outdo each other’s lamentations, to view their work as more pivotal than it actually is.

“Fairy Tale Elegy” (a poem reminiscent of Jeannine Hall Gailey) is another fine example: “Once upon a time in the Land of Sad, / a girl went on a journey. / She was not a princess, except to her mother… / Her father had vanished some tipsy moons ago, / kidnapped by the pirate Captain Smirnoff.” The girl goes on to find love, but reject it because “she had to return to the Land of Sad,” perhaps a roundabout acknowledgment of just how addictive depression and sadness are in the first place (especially for those of us who find themselves in this rather odd business of words).

Browne’s poems contain plenty of vulnerability, too, as in “Hard to Believe”: “We stood by our mother’s grave / in black silk sheathes…./ My younger sister couldn’t afford a dress / so had bought one at Nordstrom, / a store known to take everything back.” Here the humor, taken in contrast with the sadness of the opening, actually makes us feel a little guilty for laughing—which could itself serve as a metaphor for funerals, since everyone knows that it’s exactly when you’re supposed to be solemn that your lip starts twitching.

What I continuously return to in Browne’s poems, though, is her taut imagery, her imaginative leaps, as in her description of a dog’s fur “rippling in sunlight like black fire,”, or this ghoulishly awkward scene described in “On Our First Date”:

He ordered oxtail, heap of dark meat
he scooped with his hands off the white plate,
saying, The marrow has the best flavor…

It’s not just the imagery but the fantastic use of assonance (especially the ominous long-O sound) plus the close attention to stressed syllables that makes these opening lines especially vivid.

Equally worthy of note are Browne’s wry observations—such as in “The Nose on Your Face,” which points out that: “In all your life, you will never see your actual face. / If you close one eye, you can gaze / at the side of your nose, but that’s it.” I think we all secretly crave a good dose of wisdom from the poems we read; wisdom starts with observations, and the wryer the better. The trick, though, is finding a poet who won’t turn you off with their own sense of self-importance, their haughty overuse of language. No such concern with Browne; here, we have a smart poet who seems to genuinely care about her readers, who hopes (rather than insists) that we leave her book just a little better off than how we arrived.

____________

Michael Meyerhofer’s second book, Blue Collar Eulogies, was published by Steel Toe Books. His first, Leaving Iowa, won the Liam Rector First Book Award. He has also won the Marjorie J. Wilson Best Poem Contest, the James Wright Poetry Award, the Laureate Prize, the Annie Finch Prize for Poetry, and four chapbook prizes. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, North American Review, Arts & Letters, River Styx, Quick Fiction and other journals, and can be read online at www.troublewithhammers.com.

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January 10, 2010

THE ORIGIN OF THE MILKY WAY by Barbara Louise UngarPosted by

Review by Michael MeyerhoferBarbara Louise Ungar

THE ORIGIN OF THE MILKY WAY
by Barbara Louise Ungar

Gival Press
PO Box 3812
Arlington, VA 22203
ISBN 978-1-928589-39-6
2007, 70 pp, $15.00
http://www.givalpress.com/

My apparent lack of a womb means I’ll likely never know what it’s like to bear a child (maybe not an altogether bad thing) but reading the lyrically-rich, often darkly witty poems of Barbara Louise Ungar’s The Origin of the Milky Way, I experienced that payoff of truly great poetry: identifying with feelings and experiences altogether different from one’s own. This book—Ungar’s second, and winner of the Gival Press Poetry Award—is a most welcome addition to the stage of modern verse.

The first poem, “Embryology,” begins with these beautifully reflective lines: “Could it just be hormones, / this euphoria / as if someone rubbed petals / of opium poppy all over…” Interestingly, and perhaps what I like best about Ungar’s poetry, is that this description might just as easily apply to other acts of creation—say, to writing a successful poem, an act which for Ungar seems as natural as childbirth.

What hooked me, though, was the poem, “Riddle,” in which Ungar reflects on her unborn son: “There’s a penis deep inside me, / getting bigger every day. / I’m growing balls / & big teats at once.” What’s great about this poem is that it disarms you with its quirky humor then delivers knockout lines like: “I’ve got a pair / of hearts…. One womb, one way / in & out—the hard strait / he’ll have to take.” In this relatively short poem, Ungar successfully shifts from the oddity of having another living being growing inside her to the literal and metaphorical agony of separation. I also love the use of the word strait with its connotations of vying elements, of earth and water as neighboring opposites.

The anxiety of mothers (especially expectant mothers) is surely something that men, let alone men without children, can never fully hope to understand. However, I was deeply moved by the dark humor and intense worry present in “Dream at Twenty-three Weeks.” In this poem, the narrator gives birth to “a talking frog” that falls apart despite the narrator’s best efforts to love and care for it, prompting the narrator to think in dream-state: “What a terrible mother I am.” This poem has its real world compliment in “Prepartum Blues,” which begins: “I miss you / and you’re not even born yet.”

Another admirable quality of this book is its stylistic variations. Too often, poets write poems that all look virtually identical on the page. Not so with Ungar. Some have the short, breathy lines reminiscent of the shorter works of William Carlos Williams. Others (like “Blanche’s Tale”) have a longer, more narrative format that plays with dropped lines and italics. While this is chiefly a book about pregnancy and motherhood, there’s rich variation within that subject, as well. In “Prenatal Yoga,” the narrator ironically notes that the prenatal yoga teacher is the only woman in the room without two hearts. In “Transference,” Ungar writes of women who “…fall in love / with their obstetrician” whose “…small hands travel where no / others do… / while your husband turns away.”

One of the best, most ingenious poems here is “Izaak Laughing,” written to the poet’s son (now a toddler). The poem details the horrors described in the daily newspaper then goes on to say:

You pull yesterday’s horrors from the rack,
shred them, stuff some in your mouth
and work like cud. You sit
so beautifully, upright and plumb,
smiling young Buddha
who eats all suffering.

Given that “Izaak” comes from the Hebrew word for laughter (a fact noted in the beginning of the poem), “Izaak Laughing” can be seen as the melding of at least two major world religions, not to mention the acknowledgement of world suffering and, on a more personal level, the narrator’s honest, deeply human need for consolation—a consolation that comes in the form of her child doing what children do best. The loving humor of this poem belies its underlying motif of redemption from destruction. Ungar is a poet who successfully navigates the provocative waters of honesty and emotion without giving in to cliché and over-sentimentality—something too many contemporary poets are afraid to even try.

Another favorite of mine, “Why There Aren’t More Poems About Toddlers,” humorously describes similar child-wrought havoc:

…while you shower
he microwaves potholders, salts the teapot,
peppers the sofa, pours milk on rugs;
because he’s magnetized by knives
scissors water & electricity.

What seems at first to be just a funny, anxiety-tinged poem about a mother trying to find time to write while simultaneously keeping her child from destroying the house and/or himself (a common experience, say my writer-friends with children) then takes this heart-wrenching turn:

…with luck, he will leave
for school and break your heart.
And still you’ll wonder, where
did it all go?

What’s interesting and masterful about this poem is not just its seamless emotional turns but how the pronoun in the last line can be applied equally to all manner of things, from the writer’s inspiration (and writing supplies) to the actual havoc wrought by the toddler, which the narrator might one day grow to miss.

Although the poems of The Origin of the Milky Way all center on a similar theme, this book is a melting pot (or is salad the new, prevailing metaphor these days?) of many different emotions and insights, a labor of love in the truest sense. I’m glad to recommend these lyrical brave, often witty narratives to everyone, and I count myself lucky to have this thoroughly dog-eared volume on my shelf.

____________

Michael Meyerhofer’s second book, Blue Collar Eulogies, was published by Steel Toe Books. His first, Leaving Iowa, won the Liam Rector First Book Award. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, North American Review, Arts & Letters, River Styx, Quick Fiction and other journals. He can be contacted at: mrmeyerhofer@bsu.edu.

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