BONFIRE OPERA by Danusha Laméris, reviewed by Ren Powell

 

I had high expectations for Danusha Laméris’s new book Bonfire Opera from University of Pittsburgh Press. And by the second poem, I knew I wouldn’t be putting the book down until I finished. This is a textured, dark and joyful collection. The voice in these poems is mature in the deepest sense of the word. In the poem “Berkeley” the speaker explains: 

It’s not that I was happy. I was too young
to be happy, knew only its first blush
not the darker tones that come after
and give it shape. […]

Many of the poems celebrate sex and walk a very fine line, managing to avoid slipping into celluloid-worthy clichés or romance. From “World in Worlds”: 

[…] after a little wine, I was surprised when he
leaning in to kiss me, to cross the threshold
that forever marks before and after in the heart’s guest book,
a portal you can open and find nothing —
or there might be nebulas, comets, whole galaxies.

The poems get sexier from here: full of the concrete sensual details that cause us to long for one another. The poem “Threshold” follows not long after “World in Worlds”, and true to the title, it is about crossing that threshold that “forever marks before and after”: 

And I just stood there in my gangly, animal body,
sniffing the air of you, taking in the rough greenery

of your silence. More landscape than man. Or what I’d thought

a man to be. It was clear that you had done this — opened
yourself — of your own volition. And I felt, in that moment,
what I can only call a terrible power, the burden
of holding something that requires a great tenderness. 

These poems never pull heavily on metaphor or symbolism. They are straight-forward and real. There’s nothing clever in the writing. These poems are honest. Sometimes painfully so. 

In the second section of the book, the poet writes of her brother’s death. These are poems of grief, but the author is never morose. In the poem “Dressing for the Burial” the poet laments: 

No one wants to talk about the hilarity after death —

The poem “The Grass” is a meditation on the grass growing over the gravesite of the poet’s brother. The poem begins with a mention of Walt Whitman. But the reader is also very likely to recall Carl Sandberg’s poem “Grass” which ends, “I am the grass, I cover all.”

It seems that Laméris’s poems often begin in one place and take a sudden turn, like a sonnet’s volta or perhaps like a haiku’s cutting word that shifts the reader’s perspective. One example of this is the poem “Feeding the Worms”, which went viral on Facebook this summer. The titular poem “Bonfire Opera” begins with an exuberant, naked woman singing an aria while half submerged in the sea, the water lapping “at the underside of her breasts”. But:

[…] And even though I was young,
somehow, in that moment, I heard it,
the song inside the sone, and I knew then
that this was not the hymn of promise
but the body’s bright wailing against its limits.
A bird caught in a cathedral — the way it tries
to escape by throwing itself, again and again,
against the stained glass.

Having said that, not all of the poems transition from a perspective. “Surfer Girl” is almost an ode to youthful beauty. An unabashed appreciation that never turns bitter or cynical — or covetous, or creepy.

From the poem “O! Darkness”: 

“My arm is so brown and so beautiful,” is a thought I have
as I ‘m about to turn off the lamp and go to sleep. 

These poems are beautiful. 

*

Buy the book from The University of Pittsburg Press. 

Laméris is an American poet born to a Dutch father and a Caribbean mother from the island of Barbados. She was raised in the California Bay Area, spending her early years in Mill Valley, then moving to Berkeley, where she attended The College Preparatory School. Since graduating with a degree in Studio Art from The University of California at Santa Cruz, she has lived in the foothills of the Santa Cruz mountains.

Her first book The Moons of August (Autumn House, 2014) was chosen by Naomi Shihab Nye as the winner of the Autumn House Press poetry prize and was a finalist for the Milt Kessler Book Award.

IMPERMANENCE by Ren Powell, reviewed by Henry Stanton

We are guided through Ren Powell’s spare and resonating book of poetry by a Virgil of sorts.  Though the bust scribbled with the author’s poetry is ostensibly inanimate, it is, in fact, alive and invigorated, like the book, with the power of poetic utterance.  While the bust is alive, it is still a shade to the reader, as Virgil ultimately was to Dante – a visitor from that other world with who we can dialog but who ultimately moves in mysterious, wondrous and evasive ways.   We travel from one sacred ecosystem to the next, where we are introduced to a locus of insight by the appearance of the bust-in-place and by the revelations of the poetry.  Our guide through the book chaperones us through some exquisitely beautiful poetry – spare and understated, quiet sometimes silent and wordless, always vibrating with soft-spoken intensity.

This is such a neat trick.

By trick, I mean nothing like gimmick.  I am speaking of the trick of the coyote, the shaman, the artist.  Ren Powell deftly disorients us and astonishes us and reveals the subliminal and universal to us so that, at the end of the book, we have no clear sense of where we have been and how we got here.  Impermanence, with all its ramifications of “fleeting, disappearing, lost” in the deepest sense is also a referral to the eternal and infinite.  This book is so beautiful because it offers us poetry that is intimate and relevant in the most immediate way of being human.  Here it is exquisite, important and now it is gone.   And, here we find offered to us timeless understanding, the experience of rich organic beauty, a trip into the unknown source from where beautiful poetry emerges. 

From renpowell.com:

This project began with meditation on the idea of impermanence. And with this image, with the body-as-story slowly losing shape. With our narratives falling apart, becoming loose elements that can/will be rearranged in another story. Which is what history is, after all.

The bust was made of plaster and paper mache (using my handwritten poems for the project ripped into strips). I photographed the bust in various locations in the Jæren landscape of Norway. It was supposed to break up slowly in the waterfall during filming. However, it was taken by the current and slipped under an old mill house - trapped by the torrent of water, the wooden beams, and the rocks.

But this is what happens when we try to plan our stories. Isn’t it? Everything falls apart. That’s the way of things.

A Mad Orphan Lit. Publication
A Conceptual Multimedia Artwork:
42 Poems
Plaster/paper mache bust (video) and photography
Acrylic Monoprints

Moroccan handmade paper (hardcover)
Double-Needle Coptic Stitching
(note: this intentionally loose stitch allows for an open-back and “lay flat” binding)
15 X 20 cm, 60 pages
Text block: 160gsm acid-free, ethically resourced paper

120 EURO Limited series of 10

Buy the Print on Demand paperback HERE.

Ren Powell is a writer and teaching artist. She is a native Californian – now a Norwegian citizen settled on the west coast of Norway.  Shas been a member of The Norwegian Author’s Union since 2005 and has published six full-length collections of poetry and more than two dozen books of translations with traditional publishing houses. Her sixth poetry collection The Elephants Have Been Singing All Along was published in 2017 by Wigestrand forlag. Her poetry collections have been purchased by the Norwegian Arts Council for national library distribution, and her poems have been translated and published in eight languages.

THIS IS NOT A STUNT by Cath Nichols, reviewed by Ren Powell

 

In the afterward of Cath Nichols’s collection This is Not a Stunt, the poet writes about her concern that the poems are not “sufficiently poem-y”, meaning that they are too descriptive and leave little room for the reader to insert their own life experience into the poems. But I don’t believe there was anything to fear. 

This is Not a Stunt, published by Valley Press was published in 2017, but is new to me. It also seemed like a good choice for my June reading, as central to the book is a series of poems about a transgender experience (that of the poet/speaker’s partner). The topics of disability and aging are also broached in the collection, which begins and ends with poems about sleep/dreams. 

Make no mistake, this collection is not a misery memoir in verse, or poems tinged with pity or self-pity. They are relatable, while still offering the potential for cis-gendered or able-bodied readers to gain new insights into the human condition. In a poem discussing Nathan’s request for surgery:

[…] Explaining why
such surgery would be wrong the doctor said

It would be like cutting of the legs of a cripple.

The last line is repeated and referenced in subsequent poems. And discussing possible reasons for cutting off legs in the poem “Life Support”: 

[…] Post-removal the patient 

might not run but they might become more agile.
Some become so heavy in their bodies they attempt

self-removal.

These poems are specific, but certainly touch on recognizable emotions that allow us to empathize without appropriating. A line the poet herself has managed to walk well.

Although Nichols is concerned about the poem-y-ness of the collection, her one formal verse – a pantoum entitled “Reading Would Save Me” – is beautifully written, singing so smoothly, I almost missed the pattern of the repetitions. The first stanza of which reads: 

I thought something would change, but it didn’t.
I thought reading would save me. It hasn’t.
I expected to grow up. I have grown inward.
There are circles and chasing and somebody’s tail. 

The poems about relationship difficulties, about physical disabilities, the poet’s own personal narrative, and her partner’s narrative seem in some ways disparate. For example, there is a poem that quotes a Facebook meme that circulated years ago among academics that was a posted notice with red circles around spelling mistakes, and then a comment making fun of the person with the red pen: a kind of reflection infinitely bouncing between mirrors and pointing fingers. In my mind, this was the most prosaic of the poems. And only made sense to me as a part of the collection on a second read, where I saw it not in dialogue with the other poems, but as a kind of meta commentary. 

The collection didn’t offer me a straightforward, cohesive series of poems. But then… what life is cohesive? As the poet herself mentions in the afterward, there is a challenge in telling a story that can rest comfortably in Keat’s “negative capability”, because we naturally desire clarity. She writes, “A poem may become slippery, and I am fine with that, but if it becomes too unmoored from meaning then I defeat my own purposes.”

These poems cannot be read as a kind of biography in verse. For example, the character of Nathan is referred to as “he” uniformly throughout – leaving the reader to wonder when a transition – if a transition takes place. In my case, this left me feeling somewhat uncomfortable, questioning the relationship of my own prurient curiosity with a genuine desire to become better informed on a very sensitive aspect of our culture. 

That said, I also believe that sitting with what is uncomfortable is probably one of the most valuable things we can do as a reader.

There are also a few poems entirely free of specific narrative but are tied to the subject matter, to nature, and to a conscious, internalized sense beauty in a way that is (dare I say) edifying.

From the final poem “Chiaroscuro”: 

March marigolds hold out their cups
shout, Look at me! Look at me, 

don’t I do yellow exceptionally well? 

Cath Nichols introduces herself in The Poetry Archive:

I've been a queer journalist in Manchester, a poetry events organiser in Liverpool, a life model, and a waitress, amongst other things. I taught creative writing at Leeds University for ten years. I've been chronically ill since 2017 after a genetic predisposition was triggered. This is Not a Stunt (Valley Press, 2017) is my second poetry collection and celebrates the humour and mundanity of disability and trans identities.

THE GIRL AQUARIUM by Jen Campbell, reviewed by Ren Powell

Reading this collection, I began to question the definition of surrealism. The leaping images in Jen Campbell's poems in The Girl Aquarium seem at times more playfully associative than Freudian. These poems make the wild, imaginative connections of childhood’s make-believe worlds. Though at times they allude to a darker kind of fairy tale than any I've ever read. 

Reading through once, for the individual poems, the collection compels me to read again to find all of the details of the narrative, to understand and fully embrace the brokenness and the strength of these girls with equal appreciation.

The collection includes free verse, "formal" verse like list poems and prose poems, and Campbell is a master of utilising internal rhymes and assonance when referencing fairy tales.

From The Doll Hospital: 

My mother claimed I had changeling feet
dancing in dirt water         pulling a ragged doll
through fairy rings when she summoned me home for tea.

I cup my palms. 

Little fishling.
I wonder if we should roll her hair like starfish.
Watch it flicker the colour of raspberry-plum. 

We hum, take turns.                  Pirouette
her little body so her organs align like marbled planets. 

While five of Campbell’s poems are so rooted in the culture of Northern England they are written in dialect, they hit close to home for this reader. The freak shows and sides shows that conjure up Coney Island and the stained, canvas tents at county fairs across the American heartland. The Girl Aquarium isn’t difficult to imagine: 

At half-term the aquarium is at its busiest.
They hire street vendors to come inside and hand out beer.
Candy floss for the kids whose parents don’t care.
The corridors heave with barbecue.
Too damp to strike a match. […]

In the feeding room: girls with extra limbs.
They scuttle into corners, pretend they’re shy.
In the sunroom: girls with beetle eyes.
Iris headbands blinding
at all the mobile phones.

Hashtag girls.
Hashtag half-girls.
Hashtag nothing you’ve ever seen before in your tiny little life. 

A teenage boy bangs the window, gives them the finger.

This collection conjures up the all too familiar atmospheres of xenophobia, homophobia, misogyny… 

From What the Bearded Lady Told Me:

That between her legs is volcanic.
That men are terrified.
That she loves how terrified they are.
That she likes the sea.

And zoanthropy. Here is a world-full of woman forced into a half-creature existence. From The Woman’s Private Looking Glass: 

Take the physician’s advice. 

Forget imagination and do not look straight at the moon.
Up there devil-girls cradle silver eggs. They slide
from roller coaster innards, trickle tales
of the greats. 

Leda, Lilith, Sirin — all owl-chested women. 

 And do not peer into the sea; for there salted-tadpoles twist around your organs and turn your body into stone. 

This collection was so painful to read, so familiar and so fantastical that I sit back and wonder now how I ever negotiated—much less survived—being a girl. But there is more here. The poetry is infused with the poet’s personal experience with very real physical disabilities. This knowledge forces the reader to interrogate the poems further. The reader has to question the limitations of empathy with regard to experience, has to explore the boundaries between metaphor and metonymy—and even the literal. 

These poems left room for me to find myself within the pages. But then they also pulled me out of myself entirely, which is what great poetry does. 

Jen Campbell

JEN CAMPBELL grew up in the northeast of England, and graduated from Edinburgh University with an MA in English Literature. She is an established writer of children books and short stores, but The Girl Aquarium is her first poetry collection, published by BloodAxe books in 2019. She has a YouTube channel where she talks about (not surprisingly) fairytales and disfigurement. Her website is jen-campbell.co.uk. Her book is available through Bloodaxe and Amazon.

THE MERCY OF TRAFFIC by Wendy Taylor Carlisle reviewed by Ren Powell

The Mercy of Traffic
Unlikely Books, 2019

Available on Amazon

I’m not done with this book. Don’t get me wrong, I have read it—cover to cover—but there is so much more for me to find. The poems in Taylor Carlisle’s book The Mercy of Traffic speak to one another. Images return in new contexts, and images are repeated almost like leitmotifs. Hats, for example, pop up unexpectedly as in “Parsing the Nolo Me Tangere” where Jesus wears a Piedmont farmer’s hat. And in the poem “Little Hats” which begins playfully (and unexpectedly) with a rhyme:

    Six million bats,
    less or more,
    remember, they
    are not little
    Draculas or
    airborne felt hats […]

But ends with the prescient lines:

     Still, we must
     be careful
     not to flip
     our chicken
     bones into
     their cool cave.
     Who knows
     where a disease
     comes from,
     anyway?

Though I am careful as a reader to avoid conflating the poet and the speaker, many of these poems taken together begin to feel like a memoir of sorts. The arc from childhood to adulthood, the locations shifting – though Southern always. From “Juke”: 

     […] As soon as Dolly Parton’s done
            Singing, I’m getting out of here
            But before that, I’m going over
            To the Union Five and Ten
            And lay my good name down
            On a new        red        skirt

There are striking images here that I believe will stay with me: 

Grackle/on the lawn, shiny as spoiled meat (“What I’d Missed: An Ozark Sonnet”)

I shelter in empty rooms and touch myself//to find another knot of madness (“Things Burn”)

In the hot kitchen, I learned to take a punch. (“Say Yes: An Ozark Sonnet”)

I long for carnage//and an armpit with some sweat in it. (“Ferrous”)

The collection is rich with images and the details of food, of foliage and bodies in heat.  There are twelve Ozark sonnets. From “Blossom: An Ozark Sonnet”

      […] In the south of my childhood, time passed
             like a platter of chicken. Grandma made 

             fried rashers of bacon and piles of pork chops and
             presided over the hugging and sassing and eating 

             and telling and pulling of sticker burrs […]

While all the sonnets are 14 lines, Taylor Carlisle doesn’t adhere to traditional forms. She pushes and plays forms. The long sentences of the prose poems create long lines across the page and a unique tension within the context of a collection that consciously uses white space in each poem.

A few of the poems focus on images alone, for example “Lust”: 

[…] never ask how it would be/to have a man//with his heart/on the wrong side of his chest […]

--while others ground the images in an explicit narrative. She’s created a nice balance for the reader, in terms of tempo and subverting expectations. The collection is so rich that the (ostensibly) personal aspects never take over in a way that feels self-indulgent. It never becomes a pure memoir in verse. There is so much more here.  

From WendyTaylorCarlisle.com:

Wendy Taylor Carlisle was born in Manhattan, raised in Bermuda, Connecticut and Ft Lauderdale, Florida and lives now in the Arkansas Ozarks in a house she built in 1980. She has an MA from The University of Arkansas and an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She is the author of The Mercy of Traffic (Unlikely Books, 2019), Discount Fireworks (Jacaranda Press, 2008) and Reading Berryman to the Dog (Jacaranda Press, 2000.) Chapbooks include They Went to the Beach to Play (Locofo Chaps, 2016), Chap Book (Platypus Press, 2016), Persephone on the Metro (MadHat press, 2014), The Storage of Angels (Slow Water Press, 2008), and After Happily Ever After (Two River Chapbooks, 2003.) Her work appears in multiple anthologies.