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.

Welcome from the Editor

Thank you for visiting the Luna blog. I want to thank Nate Slawson and Alex Lemon for their hard work in relaunching the magazine and creating this wonderful and important site. I founded Luna ten years ago at the University of Illinois in Chicago. The first issue came back from the printers as I was moving to Minneapolis to teach in the MFA Creative Writing Program at the University of Minnesota. As I read the first issue and found myself in a new location, I knew my committment to publishing poetry from all over the U.S., along with translations from all over the world, was about to be strengthened. Over the last nine years of being in Minnesota, I have been fortunate to receive excellent poems and translations, along with major support from the University of Minnestoa. I thank them for office space and staff assistance, though the brief intermission between issues six and seven pointed to a temporary lack of funds for printing. On the tenth anniverary of the magazine, I am proud and pleased to say that Luna is back in business and will continue to publish in a smaller format. Our committment to fine poetry and translations is stronger than ever because, in these times of political darkness and a literary atmosphere where too many poets are constantly jockeying for position, it is good to find honest people who are committed to working on a fine publication. It comes down to being professional editors, to loving poetry, and for making the efforts to find the best possible work out there. This means not fitting into any one "school of poetry" or promoting one group over another. I look forward to the further development of this site and to future issues of Luna that will truly represent our efforts to bring you a wide panorama of fine poets, young and old and poems that transcend boundaries to allow the language to speak for itself.

Ray Gonzalez
Editor
Luna

Issue Number Seven

A new issue of Luna will be on its way in Spring 2007. Contributing poets include Michael Burkard, Adam Clay, Dobby Gibson, Rigoberto González, Shara McCallum, Paul Otremba, and a handful of others.

Individual issues are $10 and can be purchased from Small Press Distribution or by calling 1-800-869-7553.

Subscriptions are $18 per year for two issues.



Previous issues of Luna are also available from SPD, including:

Issue Number Six

featuring poems or translations by Guillaume Apollinaire, Willis Barnstone, Christopher Buckley, Sergey Gandlevsky, Elton Glaser, Eugene Gloria, Rigoberto González, Rachel Hadas, Terrance Hayes, Brian Henry, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Patricia Kirkpatrick, Jeffrey Levine, Dulce Maria Loynaz, José Jiménez Lozano, Anne Marie Macari, Jim Moore, Andrew Schelling, Andrea Selch, Dezsö Tandori, Sophia Tekmitchov, Liz Waldner, Valerie Wohlfield, John Yau, José María Zonta, and more



Issue Number Five

featuring poems or translations by Joanna Anos, David Axelrod, Aliki Barnstone, Mario Benedetti, Albino Carrillo, Kent Dixon, Marilyn Hacker, Paul Hoover, John Hoppenthaler, Martha Kinney, Vénus Khoury-Ghata, Martin Lammon, Mông-Lan, Dana Levin, Alexis Levitin, Kathleen McGookey, Nathaniel Mackey, Harry Morales, Joan Murray, Carlos de Oliveira, Gregory Orr, Lucien Stryk, Larissa Szporluk, César Vallejo, Sandra Yannone, and more



Issue Number Four

featuring poems or translations by Delmira Agustini, Francisco Aragon, Jim Barnes, Robin Behn, Robert Bly, Kurt Brown, Luis Cernuda, Marilyn Chin, Nicole Cooley, Debra Kang Dean, Denise Duhamel, Paul Eluard, Reginald Gibbons, Jorge Guillén, Michael Harper, Robert Hedin, Juan Felipe Herrera, Roberta Hill, Holly Iglesias, Ted Kooser, John Latta, Dagmar Nick, Naomi Shihab Nye, Greg Pape, Wang Ping, Don Schofield, Joyce Sutphen, Eleanor Wilner, and more



Issue Number Three

featuring poems or translations by Rafael Alberti, John Balaban, Charles Baudelaire, Rene Char, Jan Clausen, Martha Collins, Léon Felipe, Greg Glazner, Chris Glomski, Ray Gonzalez, Anne Hérbert, Herman Hesse Richard Jones, Roberto Juarroz, George Kalamaras, Ted Lardner, Linda McCarriston, Sarat Kumar Mukhopadhyay, Jan Richman, Paul Roth, Bruce Smith, Judith Taylor, Nguyen Quang Thieu, Cesar Vallejo, Ann Waldeman, Oksana Zabuzhko, and more


Issue Number Two

featuring poems or translations by Diane Averill, Richard Blanco, Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhran, Laure-Anne Bosselaar, Karen Brennan, Rolf Dieter Brinkmann, Michael Burkard, Sandor Csoori, Sean Thomas Dougherty, Liz Gonzalez, Marilyn Hacker, Juan Felipe Herrera, Joseph Hutchinson, Chris Kennedy, Federico Garcia Lorca, Claire Malroux, Dionisio D. Martinez, Alda Merini, Gabriel Mistral, Adrienne Rich, Yannos Ritsos, Francisco Morales Santos, Marin Sorescu, Virgil Suarez, Lee Upton, Jean Valentine, Ko Wan, and more


Issue Number One

featuring poems or translations by Humberto Akabal, Sherman Alexie, Juan Luis Borges, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Jim Daniels, Martín Espada, Jay Griswold, Mark Irwin, Marilyn Krysl, Timothy Liu, Gian Lombardo, Campbell McGrath, Jane Mead, Judith Minty, Simone Muench, Alicia Ostriker, Sheryl St. Germain, Natasha Saje, Luis Omar Salinas, Reginald Shepherd, Mark Turcotte, Jennifer E. Whitten, and more

Luna: a journal of poetry and translation

Luna is a bi-annual journal of poetry and poetry translations Co-edited by Ray Gonzalez and Alex Lemon and published by Mesilla Press. The first issue appeared in 1998, and a new issue is forthcoming in Spring 2007.