July 28, 2014

Michael Schmeltzer

RE: RE: PERSONAL AD #6 (AN EGG, DELICATE, REPAIRS THE DAYS NOW CRACKED)

When I first heard about the Twin Towers
I thought, “How do we move on from here?” 
And the next day I cracked 
and poured three eggs on a skillet, 
made myself an omelet. 
I bought
boneless, skinless chicken breasts. 
I made stuffing. 
I baked an apple pie 
with an old family recipe,
sprinkling cinnamon 
generously over the crust. 
In my head I colored each day
like another barn 
in a paint-by-numbers landscape.
Do you understand? 
Let me put it this way; when we meet 
I will fuck you 
so moderately you will not want to call. 
But you will. 
Each number pressed will feel as rewarding 
as stepping over a load 
of dirty laundry. Do you know why? 
Because we move on 
by doing things that bored us before. 
 

from Rattle #42, Winter 2013

__________

Michael Schmeltzer: “Back about six months ago I read the poem ‘Personals’ by C.D. Wright. It was quirky, charming, and wooed me with the strength of its voice, its overall tone. I couldn’t help writing my own series of personal ads and responses. The whole experience got me thinking about persona, what we reveal and what we keep hidden, especially in the context of author and audience. Ultimately, I’m trying to untangle what it means to wear a mask, and what it means if that mask is in the likeness of our face.” (web)

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December 20, 2012

Review by Michael Schmeltzer Otherwise, Soft White Ash by Kelli Allen

OTHERWISE, SOFT WHITE ASH
by Kelli Allen

John Gosselee Books
ISBN 0983365547
105 pp., $19.00, paperback
www.fjordsreview.com

“I am very interested in the idea that shame is an enchantment.” So says Robert Bly in “Seven Sources of Shame,” his essay which owes a debt to clinical psychologist Gershen Kaufman. At the heart of this metaphor—where shame is a spell, where mythology, psychology, and family mingle—is where you will find Kelli Allen’s Pulitzer-prize nominated book of mostly poems, Otherwise, Soft White Ash.

I say mostly poems because Allen begins and ends her debut book with prose pieces that contain the primary images and concerns of her poetry: family, shame, wings, desire, flight. Considering the multiple parallels she plays with throughout, switching genre-gears make perfect sense. Like the fairytale brother who is left with one swan wing (featured in a couple places in Allen’s work), this is a creation living in two worlds: the beautiful and grotesque, human and animal. Even the speaker, and by extension the author, is daughter and mother, power and impotence, pride and shame. One can say Allen successfully, and almost literally, has given her book wings on either end.

It seems out of a fairytale in and of itself—the author who wants to transform the inanimate into something that can breathe, take flight. Haven’t we all imagined, at one point or another, a paperback book as a bird, wings spread, reminiscent of the loose letter ‘m’ we use to draw as children, that primitive symbol of a seagull in flight? I’m positive Allen has and probably still does. The only difference is she nearly accomplishes turning imagination into reality thanks to clever structuring. One may be inclined to call it the book’s mise-en-scène as there is definitely a cinematic element to the way Allen arranged it all: from egg to daughter, to lover to mother, then a merging of all these into a culminating prose piece.

I don’t often focus on structure when reading a book of poems. There are other tools of our trade that seem more glamorous. It’s like those glossed over Oscars that get the short end of the visibility-stick: Best Sound Editing, Best Art Direction. But in Allen’s work it would be a disservice not to focus on arrangement as I feel the other strengths of her book (imagery, color symbolism, etc.), not to mention the intensity of subject matter, may get all the press.

So let’s delve into the architecture behind Otherwise, Soft White Ash.  Take the opening line of “Orphaned Near the Cave,” the prose piece that kicks off the book. “If the egg splits, its sides falling open just enough for the fuzz-capped head of the child to emerge, then the story might be allowed to end.” We begin with an egg, a child’s birth. We begin with two scenarios split by one “if” (the other scenario involves the egg being crushed). Within that first sentence we’re already in the realm of transformation, of binaries and parallels. As we enter into the poems we find ourselves continuing the child’s journey, her role as daughter and witness solidifying.

The work here is an exoskeleton.
Words on the page, my miner’s tools
packed carefully but dirtily
into a thin sack. I have this stretching
urge to say everything

 (“Otherwise, Soft White Ash”)

In the next poem, “Noon, Like Whiplash,” we are allowed to see what some of the “everything” entails:

                    …I was seventeen
and found myself wearing so much
of my mother’s blood that the new pale
yellow sweater I adored became lost
in awkward blossoms of sticky red.

There is a sense of stretching throughout Allen’s work, especially in the first section. There is urgency, but it isn’t in the way I’m accustomed to reading. These poems are alarmed rants restrained and controlled by lyric lines. In the same way a person in a straight jacket appears both contained and yet not, these poems throb and push against their form. In Allen’s own words:

              …I try
to strap my lines
into obedience just long enough
to hold them to the page—

(“Amputated Landscape, Closer to Getting There”)

Later in the same poem she states:

Often, my mother’s long
and varied illnesses are explained
better by alliteration
than by my screaming
for her blood to just keep flowing

Her lines are full of potential energy, the rubber band pulled taut but not quite snapping.

Allen’s “urge to say everything” can at times be dizzying. Allusions abound. We have plenty by way of the “old masters:” Bly, Bishop, Rumi, Stevens—this is as much personal history as it is literary history (which, for some, is entwined). Her language is lush, elevated, and if that’s something you appreciate then this book can be as intoxicating as an exotic perfume. And as a child who spent too many hours reading fantasy novels and playing Dungeons & Dragons, I felt right at home with every mythological and fairytale reference she offered. If you, however, like a little Kooser with your coffee, this book may get a bit too heady. Personally, I’d prefer to be dizzied by some razzle-dazzle than bored by the ordinary. Hence, I can forgive Allen the occasional overstep, her high-flying Icarus act (shouldn’t all risk require some height and a possible plunge?) since a majority of time her control keeps her from falling awkwardly to earth.

Throughout Allen’s debut, binaries and parallels complement and complicate the text in numerous ways. One of the first things I mentioned was shame. It propels several pieces, but confidence plays an equally important role. To be more specific, a speaker who understands that “Naming the moments/ would be to undress/ and deliberately come back” (“Otherwise, Soft White Ash”) and continues to name those exact moments is a speaker that refuses to hide. This is an act of power and ownership. Allen’s creative and surprising metaphors as well as concrete details add another layer of confidence and authority to her storytelling and poetry.

The last section is composed of a single story titled “Words for Open.” It starts with the line, “As always, it began with two paths.” These two paths echo the two scenarios from earlier in “Orphaned Near the Cave.” Where we began with an egg, we end where “there is nothing here but words—sorrow, lift, enter.” From an egg to lift, or in other words, flight. From prose to poetry and back again.

And I haven’t even mentioned the many other fascinating things about this text: how the color green almost becomes a character, the focus toward and philosophical musings on language, Allen’s cutting sense of humor coupled with an intelligent eroticism. The more I engage the book, the more I find to enjoy. If the words on the page are miner’s tools, as Allen says, then we as readers are asked to do our share of digging. It’s not a breezy read, but trust me when I say that digging is rewarded. It’s a layered debut, one which pleasures and pains, one that shows the animal and human thriving within us. To again quote my favorite poem “Amputated Landscape, Closer to Getting There,” this is a book that will smack you “hard enough/ to leave a sweet pink sting,/ and then pop a piece/ of expensive chocolate” into your mouth.

__________

Michael Schmeltzer earned an MFA from the Rainier Writing Workshop. His honors include four Pushcart Prize nominations, the Gulf Stream Award for Poetry, Blue Earth Review’s Flash Fiction Prize, and the Artsmith Literary Award. Schmeltzer has been a finalist for the Four Way Books Intro Prize, the Slapering Hol Chapbook Contest, and a semi-finalist for the Zone 3 First Book Award for Poetry and the Miller Williams Arkansas Poetry Prize. He helps operate and edit A River & Sound Review and has been published in Bellingham Review, Natural Bridge, Mid-American Review, Water~Stone Review, New York Quarterly, and Fourteen Hills, among others. (email)

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February 25, 2012

Review by Michael Schmeltzer Flies

FLIES
by Michael Dickman

Copper Canyon Press
PO Box 271
Port Townsend, WA 98368-9931
ISBN 978-1-55659-377-2
2011, 78 pp., $16.00
www.coppercanyonpress.org

I have breaking news for the literary world: you can judge Michael Dickman’s award-winning book, Flies, by its cover.

The cover art, from an untitled piece by Jean-Michel Basquiat, has all the qualities of the poetry beneath it. Both are messy, immature, and strange (and if I’ve offended any Basquiat fans, please try to argue his success wasn’t partially based on his messy, immature, and strange vision). Both contain hints of violence and needless repetition, but are not devoid of quality; in fact, Flies is one of the rare books of poetry I couldn’t put down until I finished it. The book is surreal, engaging, and strikes a consistent tone (though if you don’t like Dickman’s particular music, the whole book will come across more drone than tone). In the end though, as sublime as moments are in this collection, as a whole it seems a bit…premature. Regardless of its flaws, however, Flies is a book worth reading, contemplating, arguing, and agreeing with.

Before I begin, let me state I am a fan of Michael Dickman’s poetic voice and the mood it sets within his work (I remember thoroughly enjoying both elements in End of the West). Whether this translates into being a fan of Dickman’s oeuvre, however, remains to be set in stone. Poetry must be more than the sum of one part, and as often as Dickman grandly succeeds in one area of a poem – a provocative image, let’s say, or stunning metaphor – he fails in another (exaggerated, compensational white space, what I can only call punchline breaks, etc.)

At his best, Dickman displays poetic techniques borrowed from Eastern tradition as well as American masters. In one poem we find him smearing feces on Issa, transforming an elegiac “world of dew” into an angst-ridden “world of shit.” In other poems we have him dipping into the pockets of Emily Dickinson and William Carlos Williams. He uses their skills to elevate his own surreal and troubled voice, sometimes to great effect. At his worst, these techniques become nothing more than gimmicks and lazy tricks, auto-tune for an inconsistent poet. In the way a clever jingle sticks in our head, Dickman gravitates toward easy, glib lines that at first strike a reader as profound or deep, but upon further inspection are nothing but gloss. For example, consider the line, “The morning makes its way up the street as a loose pack of wild dogs.” It may sound interesting (and was one of my favorite lines upon first read through), but it simply doesn’t work if you think too hard. In other words, Michael Dickman has figured out a shorthand for writing a Michael Dickman poem.

What Dickman has going for him beyond clever marketing of his biography (this is not his fault by any means, but the fault of a voyeuristic readership at large – shame on us) is a certain amount of chutzpah. Any poet who writes the somewhat corny and childlike line “light like love” or “pulled by the golden voices of children” and squeezes them by an editor has to have some nerve. Which is exactly what Flies is: a nervy book of poems haunted by family, flies, and superheroes (from a dead brother to Emily Dickinson to a “little cross,” everything flies around in this book…except maybe the flies now that I think about it).

Some lines are unabashedly sentimental (“There’s nothing better / than shaving your father’s face), others kind of silly and juvenile (“I want you to fuck my face”). Either way, the risks Dickman takes are absolutely thrilling. He is constantly risking absurdity (thank you Ferlinghetti) and the best part of this dark slapstick is whether he slips on a banana peel or leaps over it, the reader derives a certain pleasure from it; we can’t look away.

Let’s take the seemingly ridiculous opening to “Emily Dickinson to the Rescue” as an example. Not only does Dickman, in terms only my sixth-grade-self would find shocking, conjure up Dickinson taking a dump and having sex (in what order, only the speaker of Dickman’s poem will know for sure), but he also takes it a step further by planting the image of her masturbating in our heads, as if this is what the poetry world had been lacking. Dickman gives us these images rather emphatically with unimaginative line breaks.

Standing in her house today all I could think of was whether she
took a shit every morning

or ever fucked anybody
or ever fucked
herself

The tactic is predictable. I get it, you dropped the f-bomb. Neither bomb detonates with any real force. For inspired use of the word fuck, read the poems “Boy in Video Arcade” by Larry Levis or “Self-Portrait with Expletives” by Kevin Clark. Clark and Levis succeed by using not so much an f-bomb, but an f-bullet. Its use is precise, layered, and does more work than two Dickman fucks, including the dull breaks. Hell, take a ride on a school bus, and you’ll probably hear a more creative use of the word. As for sexualizing Dickinson, Billy Collins undressed her years ago. It really doesn’t bring much to the table.

But I digress…Dickman starts off pretty much submerged in the toilet (where later we read his heart resides – yes, it “floats in piss”) but pulls the poem out and brings it into the heavens.

God’s poet
singing herself to sleep

You want these sorts of things for people

Bodies and
the earth
and

the earth inside

Instead of white
nightgowns and terrifying
letters

By the end of the section he magically pulls off one of the most inappropriate openings I have ever read. That alone is almost worth all the accolades the book has been given.

There is a sweetness to this passage that balances the abrasive immaturity of the opening lines. Instead of shock and ugh, we get aww shucks, a naïve tenderness perfectly pitched. Bear in mind I’m not arguing against the crass opening, nor am I some sort of prude against shitting, masturbating, or fucking. I’m arguing against half-baked writing and lazy line breaks (for instance, if one writes “invisible metal teeth,” doesn’t that imply you can, in fact, see them since you know what they are made of?)

Dickman continues the poem (a majority of the second section of this poem seems somewhat superfluous so I’m going to just bypass it) with some of the loveliest lyrics in the book.

The world is Cancer House Fires and Brain Death here in America

But I love the world

Emily Dickinson
to the rescue

I used to think we were bread
gentle work and water
We’re not

But we’re still beautiful

The long line (like the undeniable fact of death) followed by the short twist (his persistent love for the world), the gorgeous three-line stanza (each line shrinking, symbolically mortal) followed by the blunt force of the phrase “we’re not”—all these turns ratchet up the surprise and tension. This is Dickman at his finest. Here is the resilience of a child-speaker, and a rebellious drive against death. Here is an advocate for beauty, a witness to tragedy. When he walks that fine line, when he maintains his balance without falling, it is as good as anything I’ve read in the past few years.

That’s the way to do it
put your face in the dirt
and belt it out

(“Imaginary Playground”)

The speaker can be gentle but does not go gently into that good night.

However, when Dickman gets careless, the reader suffers. Dickman eschews punctuation (with the exception of a handful of question marks and exclamation points), forcing/focusing attention on the music of the line. This technique requires a mastery of prosody and unfortunately, I don’t think Dickman is quite there yet. Where white space should reverberate with layered meanings, often time we get throwaway echoes. Where line breaks should lead the reader into delight (or despair as this book may elicit), it often confuses or irritates. Not many writers could (nor would they) end a six line stanza with the single word “and,” yet Dickman does so. Why? I could pull an explanation out of MFA (My Fat Ass), but why over-intellectualize something that does not strike a chord with me? Often times it comes down to either we forgive some moves (and hence justify it) or we don’t.

Dickman has short lines, extremely long lines, enjambments, etc. Though this can create a sense of unbalance (not exactly the same thing as unease), the stuttering speech I hear in my head sometimes sounds like Captain Kirk. In Dickman’s defense, even the canonized WCW does this to me now and again so hey, he’s in very good company.

Speaking of, William Carlos Williams broke his line to emphasize and distort a sentence (successfully creating echoes that were also somehow not echoes); Dickman’s line breaks often seem arbitrary. Sometimes he makes it work. For example, in “Dead Brother Superhero” we have a speaker watching his bedroom door. He counts his breaths “like small white sheep” and ends with this three line stanza:

Any second now
Any second
now

Here is an echo that is not an echo. Dickman plays with time using well-placed breaks in the line. The single word “now” is part command, part instance of time. It has been given new life in the retelling (though it is rather simple). Of course, the speaker isn’t always so clever.

And I am glad
I am glad
I am
so glad

(“From the Lives of My Friends”)

These lines could have done so much more work, but instead rehash territory Dickman has already covered (ie: the shorthand I mentioned) with very little pizzazz.

 

You’re a dog

You’re a fucking

dog
(“Be More Beautiful”)

Again with the predictable line breaks, again with the boring use of a curse word.

Ultimately, we have a very talented writer, a well-read and intelligent writer, who has found early success. He is a very exciting, promising poet who I fear is at risk of becoming a parody of himself (or of the many influences we find in his work). Surreal doesn’t have to mean absurd, but there are several red flags in this book where surrealism becomes an excuse for mediocrity. Flies maintains an interesting tone from the perspective of a young adult (if poetry were more commercially successful, we would file this under “Young Adult Poetry”), but again I find evidence of immature writing hiding behind the guise of an adolescent speaker.

My hope is either Michael Dickman continues to evolve and grow as a writer (thus solidifying and maturing his vision/voice) and/or that editors will work as hard trying to sell Dickman’s poetry as they do Dickman himself (notice how the main attraction of the cover is not the title of the book – which nearly blends into the white space – so much as the author’s name? The title may as well be Michael Dickman Flies.)

____________

Michael Schmeltzer earned an MFA from the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University. His honors include three Pushcart Prize nominations, the Gulf Stream Award for Poetry, Blue Earth Review’s Flash Fiction Prize, and the Artsmith Literary Award. He helps edit A River & Sound Review and has been published in Natural Bridge, Mid-American Review, Water~Stone Review, New York Quarterly, Crab Creek Review, and Fourteen Hills, among others. He can be contacted at: mschmeltzer01@yahoo.com.

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May 20, 2011

Review by Michael Schmeltzer

SASHA SINGS THE LAUNDRY ON THE LINE
by Sean Thomas Dougherty

BOA Editions, Ltd.
250 North Goodman Street, Suite 306
Rochester, NY 14607
ISBN 978-1-934414-39-2
2010, 80 pp., $16.00
www.boaeditions.org

I read hundreds of pages of poetry in any given month. I also listen to a profane amount of rap and hip hop. As much as I like Eminem and Lil Wayne, I believe certain mash-ups (like adding their diction into a Li-Young Lee or Gregory Orr poem) are simply ridiculous. Twisting slang and high diction puts a taste like caviar and pork rinds in my mouth. So whenever I read a few pages of Sean Thomas Dougherty’s beautifully titled book of poems, Sasha Sings the Laundry on the Line, I can’t help but shake my head. I wonder if it’s the thug who wants to be a poet, or the poet who wants to be a thug. There’s a reason why dictionary.com and urbandictionary.com haven’t merged. That reason is exemplified in Sasha Sings the Laundry on the Line. Plain and simple, this particular Jekyll and Hyde remix doesn’t work.

BOA Editions rarely steers me wrong. Plus, how could one not be attracted to such a musical and emotionally evocative title? I thought Dougherty’s book would be a gorgeous and lyrical tribute to a person and/or place. In a way I was right, except the tribute feels aimed more toward the self than anyone else. I read page after page of preachy, self-indulgent poems that were as much boast from the speaker as they were praise for the wonderfully diverse and detailed urban environment Dougherty observes (which, I admit, he has a keen eye for). These poems spoke at me, not within me.

The biggest problem I have with Dougherty’s poetry is an issue of authenticity/sincerity. I find the narrator of these poems to be completely unreliable. He’s just too earnest for his own good. When attempting tragedy, the poems feel sensational, not sad. When attempting celebration, they feel like ego, not pride. Dougherty tries to convince by means of hyperbole, and when using hyperbole, he forgets there’s nothing more convincing than a little self-depreciation, humor, or irony (aka: perspective, emotional complexity). For example, his list of friends in the poem “Without Making a Noise” read more like a soap opera or noir than poetry:

                                                                       My friends: Garry drowned
in a quarry. Jolie dead of cancer. Shaun in Walpole State Prison.
Brucie in a Nevada Prison. Roger in a Tennessee Prison. Why
expand? You know the story. Drugs, federal statutes, mandatory
five years. Gun possession.

He asks the reader why expand, and yet he does. He goes on to mention a shooting, a rape, torture, murder, etc. With each new tragedy I find myself going numb, becoming bored. Simply listing these miserable Macguffins without delving further into the characters dulls the intended effect. The flat characters cushion the emotional impact. Despite giving them names, they felt like statistics without the benefit of a percentage sign.

In other instances Dougherty turns his particular music to melodrama:

                  On a day that it is cold out,
                  the kind of cold that kills
the kind of cold where some kid sledding
always finds a man frozen in the park dead.

(“At the Intersection of Parade and Punk”)

                                         The arbitrary cities
of our lives will go on long after I am gone

from this two-story tenement on the edge
of the frozen lake in this rusty town

of abandoned factories and cheap diners,”

(“Arbitrary Cities”)

A dead body? Vacant factories and crummy diners? Frozen lake in a rusty town? It doesn’t take much to see the problems of a poet don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. Honestly, I expect these lines from Rick Blaine or Philip Marlowe. This is pulp, not poetry.

In the same vein, injected throughout the poems are numerous drug and booze references. In “The Opposite of Elegy,” when the speaker states:

When you were strung out

and I kissed you
I imagined your mouth

a mound of cocaine

I don’t believe it. Later in the same poem when he states:

Some nights we fucked so

slowly I dissolved
like a Quaalude in a glass

of vodka

I immediately want to call his bluff. How many drug, alcohol, and/or slang references does it take to prove the speaker street savvy? I don’t know, but Dougherty probably triples it. The speaker is the drunk at the bar, bravado in overdrive. One minute he’s bragging, the next he’s weeping (a favorite, overused word of Dougherty’s). No one really likes that guy.

When he’s not drowning you with weeping, Dougherty tries to impress the reader with how “bad ass like blackjack or Cadillac or Billy Jack or Bruce Lee” he is. Although he can be extremely versatile in his pacing and rhythms, more often than not the gerunds run amok, his rhymes (slant or otherwise) lack creativity, and his poems degenerate to terrible, terrible spoken word sound bites:

X cafeteria workers and coal smoke. Who ain’t broke? Who ain’t
             X’d?

Who ain’t waiting for that last severance check?

(“X”)

Or a page later:

When you walk on my block, I’ll jack your thesis (just more
feces).–don’t believe this? You’re funded by Guggenheim;
I’m funded by wind chimes and cheap wine, carpenter’s nails
and Kool-Aid.

(“X”)

Don’t believe this? No, I absolutely don’t believe any of this. It’s like my father just walked in wearing a Tupac t-shirt. Actually, I do believe one thing; I think cheap wine definitely funded the making of these poems. On a related aside, in the notes at the end of the book, Dougherty writes “X” was written as a response to “too many of my too careerist peers.” He condemns them for “kissing up to the grant giving ruling class.” This coming from a poet who has been awarded a Fulbright Lectureship to the Balkans from the US State Department and two Pennsylvania Council for the Arts fellowships in poetry. Something about that just doesn’t sit well with me, but I digress…back to the poetry.

Another poem, “Dear Tiara,” comes across as a bunch of one-liners aimed at a stripper from the drunkest of patrons. If that’s the case, I wish that was made explicit. I would’ve liked this poem very much, and yes, would’ve even related to it. Some cringe-worthy lines include: “I dreamed I was a library fine, I’ve checked you out / too long so many times,” “I must’ve dreamed I was a nail, because I awoke beside you still / hammered,” and my personal favorite, “I must’ve dreamed I was gravity, I’ve fallen for you so damn hard.”

Earlier I mentioned how humor would’ve benefited his poems. Dougherty does use humor (using phrases like “Bling Bling brake!” and “mofoing” can’t be anything but humor). However, each instance tends to come with a smug smirk and/or street reference. So many times these pop/youth culture references undercut his lyric maturity. When the speaker says a seemingly simple and elegant phrase like “The young boys slinging rocks began to sing,” (“The House of Fragments”) I honestly don’t know if he means they’re selling crack or literally throwing rocks. It may be both, but either way, it pulls me out of the poem. More than anything, though, I wish Dougherty’s poems were more emotionally complex and morally ambiguous. His gritty and raw world seems rather black and white.

And speaking of black and white, I want to briefly discuss the question of identity and race. I praise Dougherty for incorporating race and socio-economic concerns into his work (topics rarely covered and rarely done well), but I ask, in all sincerity, what does it mean or imply when a poet writes things such as “The year the police shot how many Black boys dead,” (“The House of Fragments”) and then later states, “A handful of seconds/ he [the speaker’s dog] was sprawled beside me on the white man’s lawn” (“Without Making a Noise”). Specifically, what does it mean when a poet writing these things is, for all intents and purposes, a “white man,” one who capitalizes black and not white? Once again, something I can’t quite put my finger on is not settling well with me. In my more cynical moments, I feel Dougherty is capitalizing on and exploiting a neighborhood and culture he doesn’t (or no longer) belongs to. In my optimistic moments, I feel he is an advocate, a celebrant of all those he considers brothers and sisters.

I admit my critiques against Dougherty’s poetry may seem harsh at times. Dougherty evokes in me many things, but the negative impulse comes first and foremost from a place that’s filled with complete admiration and respect for the handful of poems in the book that I’m absolutely in awe of. At times Dougherty’s use of rhythm, repetition, and rhyme (slant and/or full), can be hypnotic. “What We Were Given” is a lesson in what a poet can do with repetition and sound.

               When the tea kettle steamed,
steamed through the walls and no one stopped it.
             When the spring sky was full of kites,
but the only bird she found was wounded.

The poem just spirals downward and pulls you right along with it. It does this in a way that’s natural and compelling. It’s skillfully done. Dougherty also has an acute eye for detail. When all these factors are in sync, when Dougherty doesn’t undercut his lyric intensity with a need to prove his street cred, the final product is stunning. The poem “After” is another fine example. His lovely descriptive talent balances the raw edge of his world. The tension between the two is masterfully crafted.

The wind moving the hairs on my arm

like human breathing.
A blue jay stealing eggs

in the boysenberry tree.
The shadows asleep in their beds.

He continues on to an absolutely wonderful scene.

And then the garbage can
I bent to lift up, covered with maggots.

So I pulled it out to the sun
and by late afternoon

they were white husks, the finches pecking
the last ones for the nestlings’ upturned mouths.

Dougherty just turned sickening rot into sustenance, not just for the nestlings but for the reader. This, I believe, is what Dougherty wanted to do throughout the book, but this poem did it in a subtle, interesting way. Other fine examples are “My Neighbor Shadrack Has Been Coughing All Night Again” and a good 99% of “Arbitrary Cities.”

I can pull from any poem in this collection a line or two that is nearly perfect in its execution and intended effect. The problem is I can pull about five lines in the same poem that simply miss their mark and weaken the piece as a whole. There are many tremendous lines, but not many tremendous poems.

I will say this about Dougherty; he does not turn from the world around him. As poets we should all witness, and for that, Dougherty earns extremely high marks. Whether it’s the crumbling buildings, the singing birds, or the wild and broken people around him, he looks without flinching. He has a great eye for detail, an open ear for music (Bjőrk, Gogol Bordello, funk and jazz, rap, not to mention his own music which comes in the form of the lyric line, prose poems, fragments, collage, etc), and a mouth that can spit out the most impassioned verse to the most ridiculous slang. He stares directly into every abyss with his entire body and soul.

At the Lebanese market
where I do not turn away

from the lamb’s head
hanging from the window.

At its bulbous eye, at my own face
reflected in its black pupil.

(“After”)

Unfortunately, as the quote above demonstrates, when Dougherty stares at the world, too often we find him staring into his own face.

____________

Michael Schmeltzer earned an MFA from the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University. His honors include three Pushcart Prize nominations, the Gulf Stream Award for Poetry, Blue Earth Review’s Flash Fiction Prize, and the Artsmith Literary Award. He helps edit A River & Sound Review and has been published in Natural Bridge, Mid-American Review, Water~Stone Review, New York Quarterly, Crab Creek Review, and Fourteen Hills, among others. He can be contacted at: mschmeltzer01@yahoo.com.

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