Review: Blind Date with Cavafy

Blind Date with Cavafy
STEVE FELLNER
Marsh Hawk Press, $12.50 paperback

Placing such a quirky title on the cover sets up the expectation that this poetry collection will deliver its share of literary chuckles. A quick browse at the table of contents (“Breakfast with Socrates” and “I Hate You, Too, Catullus”) only builds that anticipation. And indeed the moments of dark levity abound.

From “Deux Ex Machina”:

There have been times in my life I wanted to douse my apartment
furniture in gasoline and light a match. But then I read
the Want Ads and decide to change jobs for the third time
in a month.

From “The Aesthetics of the Damned”:

Who hasn’t shoplifted

a navy blue skirt to match the bruise on their forehead
they got from running into a lamppost

on their way to a Lord & Taylor Clearance Sale?

But make no mistake, Steve Fellner doesn’t write out of easy laughs. Though the speaker comes across as the town chump (in “Epiphanies,” he’s the only one who’s unaware that his monologue is an epiphany), the tone is usually somber, and each poem builds toward a complex representation of a personality that is curious, sardonic and intelligent. And, yes, it is all communicated through a self-effacing humor.

The strategy however doesn’t distract from facing the serious subjects in the book, like mortality and suicide (“Death still eluded me. But life became more clear.”), and the questioning of faith (“Only God likes us unadorned, unadored.”). Indeed it seems to guide the reader to the unsettling revelation that pathos is the most effective method of communicating the everyday dramas of this cold-shouldered world where “miracles are nothing/ more than accidents we like.”

And in terms of exploring sexuality tragicomically, there is something of Augusten Burroughs in Blind Date with Cavafy, especially in the poem “Self-Portrait,” an autobiographical narrative that takes the reader through a twisted tale of an adoption, a coming out, and a coming to terms with the feeling of lovelessness. But it provides insight into the odd contemplations expressed at other moments in the book. In the poem “Criticism,” for example, the speaker dwells over a scathing review of a film:

How relieved I was
that something deemed so unnecessary
could receive attention. I read that review
at least seventy-six times as my parents planned
their trip to Cancun without me.

And still later in the poem “Consider the Fates,” the speaker examines his ill-luck:

Blame the garbage man for picking up the trash
after three. If he had done it earlier, your family wouldn’t have found
your bank receipts. Which showed a zero balance. You gambled
your entire inheritance away at the racetrack
in one Sunday afternoon.

Fellner’s deadpan delivery disarms the reader (The poem “Judgment Day” opens matter-of-factly with “The line is long.”), but he never fails to reel the true sentiment of his poems back in. And by the end of the book, though even the funnier lines don’t seem as funny anymore because the pain underneath has surfaced fully, the reader will come to appreciate and trust this “funny man” as the compelling teller of the hard personal truths:

Forgive me for shoveling dirt into your grave,
imagining the broken earth crushing your body, breaking
your bones, filling you with a happiness you never found in me.

by Rigoberto González

Review: Quantum Lyrics

Quantum Lyrics
A. VAN JORDAN
Norton, $23.95 hardcover

If A plus B = B plus A,
A and B bear the ability to add up:
why isn’t race always commutative?

That is just one of the key questions in A. Van Jordan’s third book of poetry, Quantum Lyrics, a book of explorations about memory, race, history, and identity, each articulated through the language of mathematics and science. The speech of politics and society, it seems, is racially biased and unable to provide logical explanations or even unbendable truth.

That is why superhero comic books like The Green Lantern, The Atom and The Flash contain more accessible lenses to hold up against the mysterious world. The speaker in the poems “The First Law of Motion” and “Remembrance” for example, gestures toward an earlier poem in which the reader learns about The Flash’s ability to travel at the speed of light and reverse time. For the speaker, there is no going back to rectify past mistakes, no outrunning danger, only the burdens of fear, guilt and hindsight:

I remember, as a boy, walking home
from school, I saw Milton McKnight,

a kid we said was a little slow;
he was tied to a tree.
Three guys, for fun, were beating him

like a pedal on a bass drum,
but no music was coming out.
I want you to know, I remember

not Milton’s blood but mine,
how I felt my blood coursing
through my body. This is how I learned

fear, how I had to tell my blood
to keep moving, relax. I did nothing.

Similarly, The Atom offers essential life lessons about knowing when to claim visibility, when to become invisible, and how both can be subversive or evasive acts:

Sometimes shrinking to the size

of a coin is a super power;

sometimes it’s just a way

to find value in one’s life.

But the heart of this collection is the twenty-three part “Quantum Lyrics Montage,” a compelling portrait of Albert Einstein’s personal and political life.

From the troubled first marriage to Mileva Marić, to the brow-arching second one to his first cousin Elsa, and a few extramarital discrepancies in between, indeed prove the assertion that “the action of love and the reaction/ of disappointment are equal forces.” And also that:

Infinite space
is so hard for people to hold

in their skulls, but they believe
in infinite happiness.

Einstein’s relationship to Mileva, his “elegant equation,” ends with heartbreak, an emotion he sums up with a postulate: “the speed of light emitted from the truth is the same as that of a lie coming from the lamp of a face aglow with trust.”

But Jordan’s investment is clearer with Einstein’s political leanings: his warnings about the development of the atomic bomb, and his solidarity with the black population of the his new home, the United States, he himself a brilliant thinker subject to the anti-Semitic furor sweeping Europe, where even men of learning were bringing into question “Jewish science.”

Imagining the contents of a 1931 letter Einstein wrote to W.E.B. DuBois on the issue of race:

Not talking about it will not ease
the pain of questioning who is white,
Negro or Jewish, just to assess hierarchy
over humanity.

And in a 1946 letter to President Truman in support of an anti-lynching bill: “Trees need only to drop leaves to prove gravity./ The gravity of men hanged from trees is grave.”

By the conclusion of the elaborate rumination in Quantum Lyrics, the speaker assesses: “Nothing changes easily.” Yet the potential for change has been established with the revelation and study of the mechanisms that keep systems of oppression in place.

A. Van Jordan has written a significant and intelligent book of poems.

Rigoberto González

Review: Perfect Villagers

Perfect Villagers
SUEYEUN JULIETTE LEE
Octopus Books, $6

The recognition of the inverted world still requires a knowledge of the order of the world which it inverts and, in a sense, incorporates.
-- Linda Hutcheon

The particular world that a poem creates, populates, and governs is, in one sense, an inverted world. Images, lines, and meanings are all arranged according to the ordered world of the poem. This “poetic world” is not arranged in some dictionary-definition, upside-down order of inversion, though. It is a world that has been turned inside-out, its entrails exposed. But no matter how inverted a “poetic world” might be, it must remain, to use Hutcheon's phrase, aware "of the world which it inverts."

Sueyeun Juliette Lee’s chapbook, Perfect Villagers, is a wonderful example of this inversion. Topics are sometimes large—Korea, Kim Jong Il, language, “the insubstantial ‘universe’”—but the poems in which they situate themselves are striking microcosms of playful precision. For example, the book’s opening poem, “Dear Margaret Cho” (the first of two poems with this title), begins:

korea might be gay but I do not think you are.
korea is a peninsula. you and I are people, meaning that we have hair we
comb and things to look at. our lips pout and take on the fullness of an ad-
opted meaning.

the fact of the matter is that relentlessness is a handshake, a limp fish or glass
of lukewarm tea. the fact of the matter is that standing on a stage everything
is comic, meaning small and memorable, of the insubstantial “universe,” a
minor disaster or floating chord.

the darkness is outside when I see you, not in.

What’s funny about this poem (and some of the other poems in Lee’s collection) is that it’s not all that funny. Based on title alone, one might expect a poem called “Dear Margaret Cho” to be humorous, but this is not the case. Expectation gets turned on its head. There is an overwhelming seriousness that permeates Lee’s poems, and it becomes clear that no matter how cheeky the poems might initially seem, they are primarily concerned with memory, place (both geographical and orientational), and the process of language.

The poems are imbricated with these weighty notions in image after image and idea after idea, but it doesn’t mean Lee misses out on having a bit of fun. Language is the process of progression throughout the collection, and Lee’s oft-fragmented lines are playful with their stunted or piecemeal syntax:

a wellspring of thought. moves on without gaps or expressions of ecstasy.
continuous, fibrous, multiple—violet shades drawn down over a liquid vibe.

(“Enter the Dragon”)

...

this and that. between you and me; between both sides.
make a fire ((in the stove))
smoke. lifelong. one’s lifework.

(“Kim Jong Il: A Reader)

Other lines are straightforward and clear, their images spelled out in simple, subject/predicate declarations, but are no less as playful:

you are where I have left you

every moment that I leave you

(“Toshiro Mifune”)
...

we aren’t differentiable with bangs and hooded lids.
I know the likeness doesn’t stop right there.
what’s so great about being horny? the joke is insatiable.
it rips and roars between and through.

(“Dear Margaret Cho” #2)

Perhaps the most striking poem in Perfect Villagers is its final one, “Toshiro Mifune.” It is a fitting close that revisits and muses on the concerns that traverse the entire collection. In it, Lee sprinkles some of her most heartbreakingly beautiful lines:

I slept with a woman and woke up as a curse
I slept with a man and woke up silent
I ate alone and clasped hands at the kindness of strangers

...

mimicking a glint on a drawn edge, a standoff on the beach
these words draw oars from their spaces
treble their volume with a nay-sayer’s dust
she waxes most eloquent
when of her eloquence she speaks

...

categorically he was a man just as any other man

was born, breathed, one day stood then spoke

In Perfect Villagers, Lee crafts a haunting world of language and memory. There is a freshness and clever sincerity in her work that is, to borrow her words, both “bliss and aftermath,” so dolefully fun.

by Nate Slawson

This is the seventh in a series of eight reviews on the chapbooks from Octopus Books.

Review: Dance Dance Revolution

Dance Dance Revolution
CATHY PARK HONG
Norton, $23.95 hardcover

"In the Desert, the language is an amalgam of some three hundred languages and dialects imported into this city, a rapidly evolving lingua franca," so scribbles the Historian of Cathy Park Hong’s second book of poems Dance Dance Revolution, an unusual journey into a post-apocalyptic landscape that grows more and more familiar with each visit to a different site.

To translate and facilitate the tour, the Historian enlists the help of a Guide, a speaker of this Desert Creole who proudly proclaims her authority as a navigator:

O tempora, o mores! I usta move
around like Innuit lookim for sea pelt…now
I’mma double migrant. Ceded from Koryo, ceded from
‘Merikka, ceded y ceded until now I seizem
dis sizable Mouthpiece role…now les’ drive to interior.

Virgil-like, the Guide spins her poetry and politics into revelations of global conflict, racial tensions, economic instabilities caused by terrorism, corruption and internal uprisings—devastations that resulted in a “dead scald world full o rust puddles, grim service men, / y ffyurious mekkinations.” And though a second world has been built to conceal the broken one, its attraction exists only at surface level. The damaged psyche seeps through very easily via the stories of the “guides who ache for their own/ guides / who mourn / who lead / men from human rinds of discontent.” Here, law is “the sin of choice.”

The Guide weaves the history of the troubled city with her own participation as a revolutionary (“to fightim me yesman lineage”), which compels the Historian to write down her own strained father-daughter relationship set in a more safeguarded, but no less alienating, childhood. She too must come to terms with superimposing truth over deception, reality over memory, and language over language.

By the conclusion of the tour, from the karaoke lounge of the St. Petersburg Hotel to the New Town detention center (a cursory glance “lest ye covet a forkin sinus punch on ye gob”) to the Grove of Proposals where one can toast “to bountiful gene pool, / to intramarry couple breedim beige population,” the Historian (like the reader) has become attuned to the din of Desert Creole and to the spin of “stingy” history. By then, the Historian’s personal connection to the Guide has been disclosed and indeed, the reader can identify with the irony and layered meanings in the Guide’s final statement: “If de world is our disco ball, might I have dim dance.”

As a vision of the present Babel channeled through a futuristic one, Hong succeeds with stunning inventiveness. Dance Dance Revolution is a forthright critique of U.S. meddling (and fumbling) in world affairs, and is unafraid to take a heavy step into the lightly tread arena of American political poetry. This cutting-edge book is a warning to the complacent populations, as well as a “guide” to survival in the apocalypse the world is experiencing at the moment:

You can be the best talker but no point if you can’t
speak the other man’s tongue. You can’t chisel, con, plead,
seduce, beg for your life, you can’t do anything, because you
know not their language. So learn them all.

by Rigoberto González

Review: Duende

Duende
TRACY K. SMITH
Graywolf Press, $14 paperback

In an essay examining Federico García Lorca’s well known though not always well articulated concept of duende, Tracy K. Smith writes: “Unlike the Muse or Angel, which exists beyond or above the poet, the duende sleeps within the poet, and asks to be awakened and wrestled, often at great cost.” With such a risk taking place, successful results should be as impressive. Thus it was a brave move to title her second book, Duende, since the expectations will be high. So far, Smith has met and surpassed that promise by winning the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets because Duende is an intelligent and important book, a staggering study of the modern world.

Indeed, Smith’s project aims for a great vision, opening with a stylized epic titled “History” that sets the tone and volition:

This is a poem about all we’ll do
Not to scratch—

Where fatigue is great, the mind
Will invent entire stories to protect sleep.

Dark stories. Deep fright.
Syntax of nonsense.

From this vast starting point, the rest of the poems navigate through the trials of humanity, personal and communal—grief, loss, oppression, war—the pain, but so to the unsatisfactory healing, follies of the modern man, like 911:

The century’s in rubble, so we curl
Around pictures of ourselves, like Russian dolls
Whose bodies within bodies form a world

Free of argument, a make-shift cure
For old-fashioned post-millennial denial.

Taking a personal turn, part II of Duende maps the rift of a disintegrating marriage (“For years, your back to me made a continent./ I roamed it. Like wading the desert after dark.”), and the search for a trope to make sense of falling out of love, or rather, to come to terms with the shifting ground of emotion or being. It’s called moving on. One of those tropes is in the title poem, which personifies the duende, what Smith refers to in the aforementioned essay as “the perilous yet necessary struggle to inhabit ourselves—our real selves, the ones we barely recognize—more completely.” For the Spanish gypsies:

The earth is dry and they live wanting.
Each with a small reservoir
Of heavy music heavy in the throat.

And when they dance flamenco, they make of the body a “parable/ For what not even language/ Moves quickly enough to name.”

Part III takes its cue from Eduardo Galeano’s Memory of Fire, in which he catalogs the atrocities committed against the disenfranchised in the Americas. For Smith, the fabrics of tragedy come as near as Aunt Neet’s admission of a wistful dream at a family reunion, reach as far as the dry savannas of Uganda, where young women were forced to bear children for military leaders. The poem “Slow Burn” offers the connection: how revelation (those personal disconcerting epiphanies or the knowledge of astounding suffering in the world) comes with a consequence: responsibility or madness, and how quick the human is to create a method to sidestep both and inhabit, rather, the unsettling middle ground. The speaker concludes this about cousin Marcus, the madman in the basement: “the same thing dragging his heart drags ours,/ Only he’s not afraid to name it.”

A second concept Smith exercises is the Portuguese saudade, a sigh or longing, often expressed in poetry and song. For Smith, this too, like duende, becomes an avenue for the exploration of “ways of naming the wound,” and then keeping it—like the risk-taking poet, like a citizen in this broken world—exposed, vulnerable and uncertain.

Rigoberto González

Review: The Continuing Misadventures of Andrew, the Headless Talking Bear

The Continuing Misadventures of Andrew, the Headless Talking Bear
JONAH WINTER
Octopus Books, $6

In his captivating chapbook, The Continuing Misadventures of Andrew, the Headless Talking Bear, Jonah Winter crafts a wonderful pastiche of mostly free-verse, sometimes-rhymed sonnets. The poems are playfully earnest and cluttered—in a meticulous, dioramic kind of way—with coherent abstraction and illusory “thing-ness” (or, to use Winter’s word, “thing-hood”). Each poem reads like a fractured fairy tale where character and landscape collide in enchanted proportions:

Terrified angels hover in the basement,
clutching on to each other’s tattered wings,
crying ice-cubes, emitting ball-lightning
from their eye-sockets, now just cavernous spaces.

Evil returns again and again
to the little log cabin where It was born.

* * *

Mr. Duck? Are you aware that “time”
is an artificial concept, divined
by humans as a means of measuring
progress, and, too, destroying the dreams of children?

Come back, Mr. Duck. It’s all so clear now,
like counting backwards all the sheep in Canada:
Tundra-esque, remote, one night repeated
ad infinitum, the porch lamp always lighted...

* * *

Then, after the apocalypse is over,
all the animals are wheeled back onstage,
lifelike, smiling. (Note the Siberian Tiger.)

Oh no – here comes Mr. Pitiful!
What sad song bring ye in thine heart today?
Descending spirals, vomit, closed city,
a huge fountain of anti-matter, raining.

Well, we’ll have to put a man right on that.
Meanwhile, if you could just fill out this form...
Thanks! Understanding why you’re sad
blah blah blah negative thoughts blah blah blah corpse.

Okay, first, let’s move everything
back into the center ring. Maestro –
where is thy victory? Death, where is thy –

Winter also waggishly mixes-in referential elements on sonnets, process, and narrative. Perhaps the best example of this playfulness reaches across the two poems that end the book’s first section, “A Certain Argument”:

“We interrupt this poem for an announcement:
Will the man who’s collapsed on the marble floor
please come to the Information Desk,
I repeat: Will the long line of men and women

waiting at Window #7, turn
towards the great bronze doors. I repeat: O wild west – ”

*

“Shall I compare thee to – ” No, I’m afraid
you have the wrong number...

Here, the halting directive that “interrupt[s] this poem” morphs into additional directives, just like the opening lines of Shelley’s terza rima ode bleed into the opening lines of Shakespeare’s sonnet.

Another sonnet within the book’s first section ends almost winkingly: “This is not to say it can’t be done, / the poem as open-ended as the ocean.” As a whole chapbook, as two self-contained sections, or as individual poems, this notion of the poem’s “open-ended[ness]” is what Winter truly seems to be after. The narratives do lack succinctness, but they are neither trivial nor simply tongue-in-cheek. “The poem as open-ended as the ocean” provides no hindrance to understanding; if anything, the vastness contained in this proclamation serves as a buoyed guidepost as we survey the bizarre worlds Winter creates.

The overall effect of The Continuing Misadventures of Andrew, the Headless Talking Bear is one of esteemed wonderment. The poems are shrewd and amusing, as mysterious as they are precocious.

by Nate Slawson

This the sixth in a series of eight reviews on the chapbooks from Octopus Books.

Review: At the Drive-In Volcano

At the Drive-In Volcano
AIMEE NEZHUKUMATATHIL
Tupelo Press, $16.95 paperback

The curious finds in nature and human folly, which might otherwise get slumped into trivia or become the odd ingredient in a conversation starter, are skillfully and delicately handled in the much-anticipated second book of poems At the Drive-In Volcano (Tupelo Press, $16.95 paperback) by Aimee Nezhukumatathil.

In “Fugu Soup Blues” for example, the reader’s introduced to the toxic porcupine fish, “the only fish/ that can close its eyes.” But the poem moves beyond reportage of facts and into the terrain of people’s attraction to risky behavior, i.e. the consumption of such a dangerous delicacy. The closing stanzas, however, beg associations to all of those other uncontrollable urges and indulgences:

You cannot stop this hunger. When
something this good can kill you, every pin prick

of white pain just adds more flavor.

The process of taking the unexpected, disconcerting detour from the seemingly charming direction of the poem is found in numerous pieces but most notably in “How the Robin’s Breast Became Red,” “Bee Wolf” and “Planaria,” about the “murderous business” of biology class dissections. It’s as if the poet has taken to heart the ars poetica cleverly ensconced in the poem about a jealous woman hiding a scorpion in her bride-to-be sister’s hair:

Invent a new line
for me, sketch me something
with lots of hair, extra bite. I crave
a new monster, all of its life
and saliva, how it gives me proof

my blood can still slam from one end
of my body to the other…

Nezhukumatathil’s poetic lens is indeed smudged with an anxiety that gives her second book a distinctively sinister edge. Witness the following lines from three different poems:

If you take away my glass before I’m finished, the ice
will cry soft in its melting, without my last mouthfeel.

*

This is the last hotel where the towels in the corner
of the bathroom (crumpled, dark) look
like someone was shot.

*

…even peeling an apple gives me
a small happy terror—the bright sheen of blood

and seed-skin.

Though the endnotes explain that the five sections of the book “are divided into specific thematic movements in a volcano’s lifespan,” the ordering of the poems within each section only hint at this larger construction. What’s more apparent is the speaker’s own movement in the first-person poems from one marker of identity to the next: sister, daughter, girlfriend, student, teacher, wife. This succession of roles stays connected by the speaker’s constant examination, volcano in the title notwithstanding, of the small and mostly eye-level encounters with the extraordinary ordinary things. The title poem, with its assertion that “Even in this darkness/ there is so much light,” appears to be addressing a new stage in the author’s poetics—a less innocent, and certainly a more perilous worldview. The result is daring and dazzling.

But fans of Nezhukumatathil’s previous volume Miracle Fruit should not be alarmed since they will find traces of that earlier project in this one, such as in the poem “First Fool,” about those men who rush to the summerwear at the first signs of sunlight:

The pale scissors
of this guy’s legs always cut me up. All
that’s left of me is a paper snowflake—
nothing but folds and tiny diamond holes.

by Rigoberto González

Review: The Tides

The Tides
GENYA TUROVSKAYA
Octopus Books, $6

“everything else is a lie”

So begins Genya Turovskaya’s three-sectioned chapbook of poetic oscillation, The Tides. The title could not be more fitting. Turovskaya’s lines wash back and forth across the page, towing objects and ideas from place to place before they run aground and the cycle begins again. The lines are disjointed, divided, but they are not fractured or disconnected. Everything is held together in the precise movements between before and after:

to begin what has begun again

suddenly men appear and absolutely nothing
happens

except that something is and becomes was...

do you approach
recede

the battering tide

something happens
something is happening to me

something has interrupted
something else someone
turns to look
over their shoulder

there is nothing there

(“Pax”)

Turovskaya’s world is full of mythos. It is a world “removed from geography the non-event the human / silhouette impressed in an embankment of mud // land mass torn free of the continent” (“The Tides”). The Tides reads like a post-creation story where the landscape has been reconstructed with names (of trees, of animals, of things), ships, lights, clothes, buildings, and water. The scenes are at once empty and full.

Line, language, and subject have all been broken down into incremental elements that, when strung together, complete what cannot be completed. Because if we are always a part of the in-between, and if “something else” is always happening, what other choice do we have but “to begin what has begun again”? Turovskaya builds a world through division and abstraction, but she writes with a serene clarity that never loses its way. She is both creator and guide. The Tides traverses the border that runs somewhere between lost-ness and finding, and Turovskaya allows us to accompany her on her journey through this vast expanse.

by Nate Slawson

This is the fifth in a series of eight reviews on the chapbooks from Octopus Books.

Review: Goodnight Lung

Goodnight Lung
SAMUEL AMADON
Octopus Books, $6

“It is the pervading law of all things organic and inorganic, of all things physical and metaphysical, of all things human and all things superhuman, of all true manifestations of the head, of the heart, of the soul, that the life is recognizable in its expression, that form ever follows function.”

-- Louis Sullivan

Almost all of the poems in Amadon’s chapbook are written in either couplets or tercets, and the form gives the content the space to proceed, to turn, and to try again and again to pin down what has happened or what will happen. In fact, many of the poems orbit around this idea of happening:

No one lets
my grandfather sand the ice, Kansas

isn’t very different from Belgium
& we each have a scaffold that wants

nothing to do with touching. Touch
yours to mine, we see what happens.

(“Last Giddy to Hospital Bed”)

...

Without an unmanageable
mistake, the day doesn’t

happen.

(“Uncomfortable Hand”)

...

We might see to the arrangement of a light
for an emotion which would strike a figure

of a person with a mind for what exactly
has happened to all the tea...

(“Frivolity With Lamps”)

But happening in these poems isn’t limited to the explicit use that word. The poems are pensive, unsure of “how to investigate / our loss.” The voice here is one of hesitancy, a voice that is seemingly uncomfortable in a place where “same will always into same.” For Amadon, the tension lies somewhere between the act of remembering and the act of doing.

The form, with its severe enjambment across couplets or tercets, enhances the tension of each poem’s overflow of ideas. The world is constantly moving, but it is a “world / that moves without attention.” The poems attempt to focus their attention, but the locus is typically unobtainable or elusive.

The repetition of happenings that twine throughout this collection reaches a crescendo in the poem “Declare! Declare!” This poem, as Amadon states in his notes, “is composed of words taken entirely from the eleven formal U.S. declarations of war, with one additional word per line from the Shaker song: ‘’Tis a Gift to be Simple.’” Truly, this must be where “same will always into same.”

The poems read as interior monologues, conversing only with themselves. Questions are asked (“Heard nothing?” “Act ourselves?” “How do we find a thing which / isn’t concerned enough with us to hide?”), but rarely are they answered. Amadon’s conversations unfurl in precise abstraction, and the only clear answer is that the poems themselves are what’s happening again and again.

by Nate Slawson

This is the fourth in a series of eight reviews on the chapbooks from Octopus Books.

Review: The Ohio System

The Ohio System
JEN TYNES & ERIKA HOWSARE
Octopus Books, $6

“It’s the Ohio system of ending things with a pause or hold for safety.”

Tynes and Howsare’s collaboration is a synesthetic thicket of body and landscape. Muscles become caves, brains resemble trees, feet are thorns, and clavicles bloom. At times, ideas and images fold over and into one another:

The bargain of the century is the bones of the face.

...

You tell me whatever you know. A word that means both storm and sadness, where we could have lived but didn’t, the difference between one mile and another.

...

The manufacturer is a city and a fairy, claiming no loss, only kilowatts. Numbers turning. Bifurcated geography pits tongues against necks.

Throughout this chapbook-length poem, metaphor pushes against metaphor and objects continually reappear. Perhaps the most persistent metaphor, though, is that of branching or splitting. There are roots, veins, maps, trains, and a delta. On one hand, they are paths that constantly divide into other paths or tributaries, but if viewed from another angle, they also grow back into themselves to form something singular and whole.

The physical landscape—when one exists—is rural (“Some of it is so rural it rots.” ). The poem is full of fairgrounds, small towns, horses, barns, fields, blackberries, and villagers. It is a place where the “innermost country is made out of hark,” where nothing seems able to exist independently. The persistent emergence of objects out of other objects fills up the landscape.

Each line or sentence in the poem is at once a start and a stop, a “system of ending things with a pause or hold” before things begin again. The effect is one of call and half-answer. Statements don’t typically respond to or answer one another, but they all fit within or grow out of the same “system.” The poem itself functions like a map, and each line is a glyph marking the topography. With The Ohio System, Tynes and Howsare have collaborated on something that’s both mysterious and enlightening: a document of divergence and unification.

by Nate Slawson

This is the third in a series of eight reviews on the chapbooks from Octopus Books.

Review: The Book of Truants & Projectorlight

The Book of Truants & Projectorlight
JOSHUA MARIE WILKINSON
Octopus Books, $6

Crack open Wilkinson’s chapbook and the dusty mothlight glows on a little bit of this (a picturebook, starlings, “a kind of note more easily read / when torn in two equal pieces”) and a little bit of that (marbles, grass, “a country song / in your bottle of blood”). The poems here are snapshot narratives, each one a collection of meticulously posited images. Six of the sixteen poems are titled “still life with...” (“still life with starlings in the attic,” “still life with bullfrog,” “still life with shark tooth, sleeping boy, moon [missing], & treefrog,” etc.), and the canvases on which they reside are immense. But the poems are not static. They move across landscapes populated by gardens, animals, bicycles, bellies, water, and ominous weather.

This three-part chapbook is aptly titled: the stories and images proceed frame by frame, and there are times you’d swear you could hear the clicking of the projector reel. The poems are brief, but their trajectories are endless. Worlds spring to life in the poems’ first lines:

The dusk light reeled backwards & all the children marched into the collated fields.
(“dusk light / long light”)

...

Here is the kingdom of the phonebooth.
(“sleeping & arriving alike”)

...

There are four gashes in the moon & if you look through this glass you will see them all & the lost satellite, spinning.
(“still life with satellite, radish garden, mailboxes, & deer”)

The first and third sections of the book are prose poems. The second section is in Wilkinson’s more familiar fragmented lineation that would be right at home in his most recent full-length collection, Lug Your Careless Body Out of the Careful Dusk (winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize). As in his previous books (including the wonderful chapbook published by New Michigan Press, A Ghost As King of the Rabbits), Wilkinson builds a narrative across poems, crafting what is, in essence, a book-length poem. The beauty of his work is in how each poem has both nothing and everything to do with each of the other poems. They converse with each other through queries, shared images, and a language that is both measured and ephemeral, but taken individually, they are striking and complete.

The poems in The Book of Truants and Projectorlight inhabit serene, magical worlds of solemn whimsy in which everything is familiar, but shrouded in a dream-like fog. It’s like a visit to the attic, a day spent at the Museum of Collected Things, and all you need to do is stop and look around for a bit—you’re bound find something to stow in your pocket and carry away.

by Nate Slawson

This is the second in a series of eight reviews on the chapbooks from Octopus Books.

Review: The Knife-Grasses

The Knife-Grasses
JULIE DOXSEE
Octopus Books, $6

As the title suggests, the duality of objects is not an either/or, but an is/is. This chapbook-length poem, with its short lines and spare syntax, strings together image after image, investigating the multiplicity of each one in perfunctory preciseness:

Here are the
lullabies sick
voices dump
right in the
cochlea...

The moves Doxsee makes are not turnings-over to see the other side of images, but are more like meditations on images where each image presents itself for a brief instant before it shifts out of focus and another one takes its place. In that sense, this is a book full of fleetingness where place constantly shifts under the “now sky / & now cracked sky,” where, to paraphrase Eliot, the world is a heap of twofold images.

It is a fantastic, child-like world of cross-eyed dogs, fireworks that explode into castles, girls diving from balconies into mittens, a peanut-shaped sun, and stars that are walls. It is a Technicolor dreamscape where everything is only when it seems, whether real or imagined or some gorgeous hybrid of invention.

by Nate Slawson

This is the first in a series of eight reviews on the chapbooks from Octopus Books.

Volume 7 Has Arrived!

Hot off the presses, the newest issue of Luna is in and available for your reading pleasure.

Volume 7 is full of wonderful poems by Mary Jo Bang, Michael Burkard, Adam Clay, Mark Conway, Denise Duhamel, Dobby Gibson, Rigoberto González, Mark Irwin, Henry Israeli, Laura Kasischke, Shara McCallum, Paul Otremba, Ellen Wehle, and Crystal Williams.

Subscriptions are available, too. Just print and mail the ordering form found on this page.

Review: Crow Call

Crow Call
MICHAEL HENSON
West End Press, $12.95 paper
ISBN 0-9753486-6-3

A book-length elegy, a meditation on loss and love, a call to action, Crow Call is an unusual book of poetry. Inspired by the murder of Cincinnati homeless activist Buddy Gray, these poems boldly call upon Henson’s “ancestors”: Debs, Tubman, King, Neruda, Whitman, Lorca, Blake, Florence Reece, Tom McGrath, Joe Hill, and Molly Jackson.

Tough company, but this book takes great risks, and they pay off. One of the results is that the book possesses duende, Lorca’s term for that death-defying ability found in great art. You hear it over and over it these poems, which at times echo Lorca’s “Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias.” Henson too uses repetition to build deep emotion, as can be seen in these lines from “Song of Wounds":

Wounds blackened in the asphalt of the beltway
Wounds with the marks of teeth of the wind
Wounds in the bellies of small brown children.
Wounds sleepless at four in the morning
Wounds in the disordered ladders of the cell

Henson’s “at four in the morning” even evokes Lorca’s “at five in the afternoon,” but if Henson’s influences are manifest, so is the power of these poems.

Part of the power of the book is the relentless focus, the reoccurring images: crows, moles, cold, streets, and bullets. Once again, it’s risky, but Henson knows how to use crescendo and silence. And he also knows the strength of direct statement, as can be seen in the closing lines of “The Day”:

It is sad, to leave such richness and grief,
but it was love that called us out,
and I think it is love who calls us back,
into the earthen lap and wintering birth of the world.

Readers who tire of the poetry of clever displays of technique and ego, or who believe that poetry of resistance no longer can be found are in for a surprise with Crow Call. We need more poetry like this, and more poets with Henson’s courage.

by John Bradley

Welcome!!

The Editors are pleased to announce that Rigoberto Gonzalez, contributor to Issue 7, will be joining LUNA as a contributing editor. Rigoberto (author of the new collection Other Fugitives and Other Strangers), will occasionally grace the LUNA blog with his reviews/criticism of contemporary poetry. Welcome, Rigoberto!

Review: Collected Poems 1947-1997

Collected Poems 1947-1997
ALLEN GINSBERG
Harper Collins, $39.95 cloth, ISBN 0-06-113974-2

This is it. This is the American story told in poetry of blood, music, madness, and light. This is the 1,200 page monster of the 20th century journey that formed one of the greatest accomplishments in U.S literature and should have been granted the Nobel Prize while its author was alive. This is the work of genius, of pure humanity, and the writings of an explorer whose greatest strength was knowing exactly where he was going as he wound up, in legendary poem after poem, in places he never dreamed he would. This is “Howl” and “Kaddish” changing American poetry forever. This is Plutonium Odes and White Shroud reminding us a gifted master walked among us and many didn’t even know it. This is a huge book that must be read in the time of Bush and in the time of poetry. It is a mind-blowing escape into reality and the humming hallways of language that erase human foibles and rewrite them as angelic actions of prophets.

by Ray Gonzalez

Review: The Complete Poetry

The Complete Poetry
CÉSAR VALLEJO
Edited and translated by CLAYTON ESHLEMAN
University of California Press, $49.95 cloth, ISBN 978-0-520-24552-5

This is a landmark book in the history of modern poetry. To have the complete poems of César Vallejo in one volume changes the course of poetic translation as this huge volume records layers of visionary experiences that often defied interpretation. Vallejo saw the world through the anguished eyes of a hawk and the heart of an elusive spirit. The result was some of the darkest, yet most moving poetry of the twentieth century. The publication of this massive undertaking is important because the entire poetic work of Peruvian César Vallejo, one of the three most important Spanish language poets of the past century (Pablo Neruda and Federico Garcia Lorca being the others) has finally been gathered in an English edition.

by Ray Gonzalez

Review: The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems

The Great Enigma
New Collected Poems
TOMAS TRANSTROMER
Translated by ROBIN FULTON
New Directions, $16.95 paper, ISBN 13978-0-8112-1672-2

This book gathers all the poems the great Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer has published, from his first book in 1954 to work written after a debilitating stroke in 1990. All twelve books are collected here, along with a new cycle of haiku poems. Transtromer has always been one of those poets who sees beyond things and creates through the immediate revelations of language. His work has been translated into English by several key American poets, but this is the best translation of his poetry because Fulton recreates Transtromer work in dynamic English poems that build image upon image, until the Swedish voice of experience becomes a universal call for discovery, reincarnation, and redemption.

by Ray Gonzalez

Review: The Mountain in the Sea

The Mountain in the Sea
VICTOR HERNANDEZ CRUZ
Coffee House Pres, $15.00 paper, ISBN 1-56689-191-4

For almost forty years, the rich tradition of Puerto Rican literature has centered on the music in the poetry of Victor Hernandez Cruz. No poet has influenced the cross-cultural union of so many people as Cruz has done through a long and distinguished body of work. This new book extends his vision beyond personal global experience as he reminisces about key individuals who influenced his formation as a writer. This “Portraits” section includes poems on figures like Don Quixote, Jorge Luis Borges, and other literary and musical icons. By acknowledging his masters, Cruz proves how the timeless calling of poetry has no territorial boundaries. Cruz is a poet who hears the higher angelic calling of the artist and his response is a poetry of meaning, adventure, and the heavenly sound of human transcendence.

by Ray Gonzalez

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: Prose on poetry, to be published on the LUNA blog. Please query lunapoetry@gmail.com before submitting.