Su Zi's Review of "This is My Body" by Jonathan Fletcher

The chapbook has a two-hundred-year history, and a search overview describes the chapbook as originally a type of street literature. Certainly today, there’s a potential for multiplicity, for revealing voices that might be too Other for the increasingly oppressive monotone of the more corporate presses. For anyone dedicated to the literary arts, a support of the chapbook is more than crucial.

Some chapbooks become into existence through the auspices of an institution, and the book is intended to be laudatory, the author presented as a debutante to literary society. In the case of Northwestern University Press, an established institution—that of an expensive school—presenting a chapbook seems to be more of an aristocrat endeavor than a funded effort at street literature. Since chapbooks tend to be the annoyance of booksellers --and thus often require special order-- a well-heeled sponsorship of a chapbook does present a middle ground between world bank publishing and that of the threadbare independent press. Thus, we might approach these works with our determination at inclusion still held dear.

If finding new voices is the reader’s goal, the chapbook often contains poems that were individually published, often by periodicals with their own position on the publishing spectrum. A discerning reader will not let the voice of status overshadow that of the work itself, although authors are pressured into the Sisyphusian task of complying with a market that rarely considers the work for its own merit. What can be equally annoying to a serious reader is a superficial introduction to the work itself, as if the work were a magic trick instead of an artistic endeavor with the potential for layers of nuance. In the introduction for Jonathan Fletcher’s This Is My Body (Northwestern University Press, 2025), the work’s introduction, with two authors, seems to consider the first poem only, a childhood recollection. Nonetheless, this first poem, “Jonathan”, contained the striking stanza

As we bathed together,

 compared bodies—mine brown 

and foreskinned, yours light

 and circumcised—we wondered 

whose was better, cleaner. 

And while the introduction’s authors find the work “nakedly intense and overwhelming at times”, they appear to leave it to the reader to discern the vowel shifts from “brown/foreskinned” to “light/circumcised” and the triple alliteration of “we wondered whose” that speaks to a consideration of technique, in addition to the intimate action portraited.

Each poem in this collection is a portrait of an intimate moment, many of which might create binaries of experience among readers—those for whom the poems resonant, and those for whom the poems frighten. Fletcher’s language seems conversational and smooth, balancing topics often barely whispered. In “Medusa”,

       The way you attach 

electrodes to my scalp,

 let them drape behind

 my head, I must 

look like a Gorgon. 

Though punished

by no goddess, I feel

cursed. Though not quite

a Hippocrates, you diagnose,

 treat. Though no oracle,

you foresee recovery: (15)

The resonance is the now, often-fraught medical experience—a cultural hotspot, too ubiquitous now to be a taboo topic. Even the specificity of electrodes is balanced by the classical allusion. Once again, Fletcher uses a subtle vowel shift to shift the point of view. A look at the assonance shift from the a vowel of “Way/attach/scalp/drape” gives us that physical moment of touching, which shifts to the more distant view posited by the allusion to a monster and the use of “cursed/punished”.  That intimate perception, those personal reckonings that too often happen because of medical settings, are still also too often the taboo topics that surround the stigmas of disability.

Fletcher’s portraits of intimate moments do give the work the overall feel of memoir, but the work doesn’t follow that as a sequence. In the closing poem “Boys”, the scene is of a slumber party and action figures, with sound effects and off-stage directions (“time for bed”),  a scene culturally seen as utter normalcy. The poem concludes with

[...]Our heads atop

 your X-Men pillows, our bodies beneath 

your matching comforter, we’d fall asleep,

 warm and peaceful, in one another’s arms. (26)

the rhyme here of “beneath/asleep” does not conclude the poem, but leads up to it, as if musically introducing the concluding assonant that sonically seems a sigh.

Whilst those who bean count status might just become aware of Fletcher’s sublime offerings through the ivory influence of the press, for those to whom the work itself matters would be advised to add Fletcher to their personal collections. His social media profile, and this chapbook’s acknowledgements, show him to be a diligent producer of work. This Is My Body is a strong start for a writer worth watching.

Su Zi is a writer, poet and essayist who produces a handmade chapbook series called Red Mare. She has been a contributor to GAS from back when it was called Gypsy Art Show, more than a decade ago.

                     

Check out her author page on Amazon.

 

Review of Su Zi's DANKE by Jonathan Fletcher

Danke

Su Zi

Ethel Zine and Micro Press

2024

49 pgs.

$10

“Darkest moon cycle: / ritual of dawn and dusk, / wet wind bends dry grass. . .” (Su Zi 3). And so begins Su Zi’s Danke (2024), a chapbook-length poem in quatrains.  Though small in dimensions, relatively short in word count, Danke is anything but lean in subtext, diction, meaning, or description.  Within the compact pages, each rich in detail, crows summon mornings, moons melt, and a horse “allows a long embrace” (ibid. 18).  Though full of such unique and skillful instances of anthropomorphism, Danke does much more than lend nonhuman characters human attributes; it invites the reader into an environment too often (and equally sadly) foreign to a modern reader. 

 

As if aware of the cultural divide between such a reader and the pastoral, the speaker addresses Red Woman, presumably one of a handful of equine characters, at various points in the chapbook.  In such intimate moments, however, the reader gets the sense that the speaker is gesturing toward them as much as the horse, and maybe even the author herself. In such moments, too, the speaker nearly (and implicitly) bemoans the tragic and irrevocable separation of humanity from its primal habitat while also (and equally fervently) celebrating, even ennobling, the nonhuman characters and their georgic environment.  Su Zi’s choice of capitalization of the common names of the various animals (e.g. Mourning Dove, Cardinal, and Warbler) only lends further support for such an interpretation.

In Danke, Su Zi wisely eschews ornate language for plainer (though not plain) diction.  Though not exactly minimalist in nature, Su Zi’s descriptions are simple (though not simplistic) in syntactical construction.  Take, for example, the following quatrain: “never forgetting / hungry years, palomino now learns gentleness. / following difficult steps / those of a beloved ghost” (ibid. 7).  Or, to take another example: “grass is burnt with frost / yet my red sister searches / for sleeping green roots / disinterested in grain / it seems she dreams of sweetness” (ibid. 31). Or, yet another example: “these simple moments: / cranes come to peck corn and dance, / sun sweetens damp air / so Sister Mare cleans all seeds, strolls soft-eyed in golden light” (ibid. 35).  Though arguably quiet and reflective, Su Zi’s minimal language emotionally charges such otherwise interior moments.  Though neither metered nor rhymed, Danke operates with an informal rhythm.  It operates with alliteration and assonance (“awful arctic air” being an example of the former,” “flit of the left oat” an example of the latter) (ibid. 23, 21).  It operates with anaphora: “this moment’s wet wind / this moment’s intimacy / this forever in the now” (ibid. 19).  Though never overwhelmed by such conventional poetic devices, Danke allows for just enough and, in doing, so not only informs and enlightens the reader but transforms them.

Although Su Zi’s chapbook-length poem is indeed a quick read, it is one that stays with the reader long after.  It is one that begs for a reread. Several, in fact. Don’t pass up this literary revelation. Pick up Su Zi’s chapbook today, and let it settle within you. Let it rumble.  Let it rise.  You won’t be disappointed.

Jonathan Fletcher holds a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Columbia University School of the Arts.  His work has been featured in numerous literary journals and magazines, and he has won or placed in various literary contests.  A Pushcart Prize nominee, he won Northwestern University Press’s Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize contest in 2023, for which he will have his debut chapbook, This is My Body, published in 2025.  Currently, he serves as a Zoeglossia Fellow and lives in San Antonio, Texas.

Su Zi's Review of DOMESTIC BODIES by Jennifer Ruth Jackson

    The lineage of modern American poetry is now a century of voices, some of which have been levitated into the canon—the voices we find most anthologized, most taught to students. As scholars find perhaps marginalized voices from history and that work is seen anew, out of its time of creation, certain aspects of the canon gain in wider recognition. Our cultural sense of discovering marginalized voices and amplifying that work is familiar enough when the artist is dead; however, the living artist is a conundrum in the tempestuous weather of social expectation. Taboo topics, although the pillars of the American canon at a historically safe remove, challenge the humanity of us all. 

    What is taboo is a culture can vary, but globalization has homogenized differences into what is sometimes cute exploration—a new type of food, public pajamas; yet certain taboos seem entrenched in westernization and often invert previously revered social positions into ones of stigma; from wise elder to covid disposable. We do not discuss the covid disposable, and what history makes of this will not glow up the humanity of our current culture. We do not discuss the covid disposable even at cultural events, which exclude even as they publish photos of the very throngs that are the core of jeopardy. The covid disposable are the disabled and the not-yet-disabled, the most vulnerable among us, and their American voices ought not to be shunned now, as they too sing our canon.

    Among those whom we now teach as our literary giants was Wallace Stevens, who has not been as readily cited as being as influential as other modernist poets; yet this influence is readily perceivable in the recent publication of Jennifer Ruth Jackson’s Domestic Bodies (Querencia 2023).  Stevens himself did not bother with literary throngs and was recognized after years of work. Jackson’s acknowledgments page too shows years of work, with individual poems finding publication some ten years before collected publication. Such career trajectories are common enough in poetry, as in the arts overall; however, Jackson’s work resonates with aspects of Stevens’ work that are distinct. This resonance can be seen in the poems “Absentee Father” and “Those Who Inherit”, which begin, respectively, with  “Pause, cut the applause off mid-cheer/And screams mod-screech like a bird of prey” (46) and “Come, hungry hippos, another of your ranks has died”(52) that has a metrical echo of Steven’s widely anthologized poem “Emperor of Ice Cream”.  Jackson’s meter throughout this work has a musicality, a tendency towards line emphasis of the quadratic familiar in our culture.

    Jackson employs the Objects of Americana, a path now traditional in modern poetry, and recognizable as American highways, family dinners, bathtubs. In this use of the prosaic, Jackson often allows the metaphor to become symbolic, the poetic delight of a tightly constructed collage, a moment of being privy to the internal experience of living the poem. Jackson is also overtly disabled in this text, and the juxtaposition of that taboo within the framework of an American life will certainly challenge any conditioned thinking. In the arc of the work, Jackson introduces us to disability both in sensual hints—as in “You On The Palate” begins with “Let me taste you again and discover/ (with this chemo mouth) what flavor” (36)—and the medical nightmare of disability “I’d Rather Be Dead Than In Your Shoes” (26). Furthermore, Jackson’s text centers an identity poem “The Word Is ‘Disabled’”, that begins with “Yes, I am that cripple with calloused/knees and suede-soft soles” (56).  The fifth stanza refines this phrase to ‘I am that wheelchair, no name or gender/when you talk about the space I take.”  While the identity becomes one of other to object, Jackson’s point is made through the subtleties of alliteration, rhyme, and other auditory repetitions.

    This is a densely poetic work, well-constructed and well-worthy of inclusion in any scholarly consideration of Steven’s influence—intentional or not. In our era of challenges both to our curriculum and our personal health, Jackson’s work offers a well-crafted consideration from a point of view that has been held taboo for far too long.

Su Zi is a writer, poet and essayist who produces a handmade chapbook series called Red Mare. She has been a contributor to GAS from back when it was called Gypsy Art Show, more than a decade ago.

                     

Check out her author page on Amazon.

Su Zi's Review of Valois J. Vera's I, THE REVOLUTION

     The personal library is a testament to an individual’s intellectual life, and the volumes curated sometimes have individuality as entities in that collection. Sometimes the rarity of the edition is more than a volume’s history, sometimes the edition is signed or acquired from the author. Upon the release of his book (2023), Valois Vera had a swag bag that was of higher quality than something snagged from a big five house; happy recipients were sent the book, a book bag, a flag, a jute-fringed bookmark, a pin and stickers. The book itself is perfect bound and standard sized, with three blurbs on the back and a graphic of black background, of white letters and the raised fist logo that is found on the sticker and the bookmark. Also striking about this work’s appearance is the title itself:  I, The Revolution. The appositive comma in the title of the work, also gives title to the pronoun; readers are thus confronted immediately with the social activism nature of this volume of poems.

     The work’s opening poem “That Poet, in Front of the Stage” is directly addressing the audience, from the page, but as if from the stage. The strong sense of direct address is a characteristic of this work throughout, and Vera introduces the reader to the narrative individual with a bluntness that emphasizes immediacy. Vera also uses graphic elements in the text itself—some traditional and some more contemporary. In this first poem, Vera uses double spacing and hanging indentation to emphasize six stanzas of repetition “my soul”, “my nose,” “my skin” before repeating “That poet”, using the italics in the poem a dozen times, title included. In the first stanza using this repetition, Vera self identifies as “diagnosed with a disease and a short life [...} I was crowned a casualty, an anomaly, an unpublished/obituary” (12).  A strong confession that continues with observations such as “because a ramp was an afterthought” (14) and continues with further biographical enumeration. Vera is overt in establishing this point of view, of our times as experienced by the disabled individual.

     Many of the pieces in this volume are intended for performance, but Vera is also cognizant of the poems as existing on the page. There’s an experimental aspect to some of the graphic elements, especially the use of the forward slash:

          We fill our souls with fresh fruits/ from the plantations

          of poetry

          We fill our body-minds with intoxicating wines/ from

          the vineyards of our verses   (29)

                                                              

The reader will notice Vera’s multiple forms of internal repetition, his use of end rhyme, internal rhyme and alliteration are frequent techniques. There’s a strong, vocal element to this work, but an awareness of traditional poetic elements that gives the poems a sense of physicality, of the narrator’s strong presence.

      The works are contemporary, the Covid poem is titled “Graves of the Unwell and Other Beautiful Things” (23) and a telephone recitation from this reader of a section of “The Revolution Will Not Be Accessible” (17-22) to a friend facing a bad flare day evoked that sensation in the listener akin to a hosannah. Vega uses observations from the repeated and overt realities of disability “You can tell by the tracks of my tires” (51) , which would be a gestural reference to his wheelchair on stage, but which reminds the text reader of the root of this work.

Vera himself makes multiple references to the root as a symbol—the rising fist graphic seems to be rising from roots plant-like, the personal history he speaks of in the poems is often on his family.

     Vera’s poems are an enumeration of his disability experience and might be seen as an answer to Whitman’s Sing of America; however, Vera’s point is a call for justice, a call for inclusion as both a poet and as a physical member of society. If our libraries are, as Franklin said, a wealth between the ears, then the physical realities of disability do not bar accessibility of this book of poems onto the library shelf. If the curator of a personal library keeps books of personal significance, that “opened up a truth” (Dianne, personal conversation, 2024), then poetry from the perspective of disability ought not to continue to be marginalized.

Su Zi is a writer, poet and essayist who produces a handmade chapbook series called Red Mare. She has been a contributor to GAS from back when it was called Gypsy Art Show, more than a decade ago.

                     

Check out her author page on Amazon.

   

Su Zi's Review of BEAST BODY EPIC by Amanda Earl

 

   The narrative arc occurs often enough in individual poems, and is not utterly rare in an entire volume of poetry, but what stories are being told? The reader will be familiar with a narrative poem that offers a protagonist, and the position of the protagonist as a hero is an established one. The hero takes a journey and the literary work that reports this journey is generally called an epic. Of course, there are dialectical uses of that word, but all inferences consider the journey to be iconic, to carry cultural weight sometimes for centuries. If that journey is a visitation of hell, of horror, of torture, then those who lived to tell are heroic by the fact of their survival. Amanda Earl’s Beast Body Epic (AngelHouse Press 2023) is such a journey.

    Elegance is the aim of many an art form, and poetry is not a general exception; however, a binary of the macabre and the eloquent can have an elevated impact, and such is the case with this work. The book itself is trade-sized, perfect bound with a matt-finished, heavy and textured paper—it has a sense of physicality, its near one hundred pages have a slight weight. The cover image of a vispo graphic folding circle is repeated on page 39 as a section graphic; however, each of the eight sections in this volume begin with a vispo graphic. With endpapers of red heavy bond that echo the red and creme cover design, the book itself has a subtle luxuriousness.

   The first of the eight sections is the most narrative in structure, with the protagonist being introduced as Rot. Harking back, perhaps, to Medieval theater, the second character met is Death, “the moocher”, with the third character being introduced by possessive case in the third stanza (and the work often maintains this possessive reference) of that of “husband”. The narrative moves quickly into a hospital, but the voice of the poem as a poem ought not to be swept past. The poems here keep careful tension from the get-go: “Death’s pub stank of onion breath and armpits” (6). The immediacy of the perceptions in combination with the contemporary setting gives the morality play of the narrative a steady energy.

   Perhaps it is still taboo to talk of illness, of infirmity; certainly, vulnerability is not always a welcome guest in cultural discourse. When visions of the grotesque are the prosaic offerings of media, the viewer has to decide what aspect of this vicarious experience to take, and often the default appeal is to other the sufferer. These poems, however, are reports of the suffering, as experienced from the body in torment: “the nurse pulled the stained gauze/ out of me and kept pulling. I was a /hat with a trail of colorful scarves/but only one was red. It stung, its/string of scarlet bells ringing “(34). While the noun phrase of stained gauze is relatable enough, the stanza elevates empathy with the comedic metaphor, before the sensory and alliterative metaphor reminds the reader of pain.

  While pleasure is often both easily called to memory and to the pen, pain exists as amnesia, as metaphor. The narrative’s perceptions are often ones of pain, “[...] I am/ destroyed/ I am vacant/ a light” (58) and this aspect of the work is notable in its dedication to that which we rarely speak. It might be said that work that centers disability is, in its very nature, tackling the taboo topic; Even more taboo is the acknowledgment of sexuality in disabled people. Yet, section five of this narrative has the plot of a sexual encounter. The protagonist has become “a warrior who refuses to die” (63) yet there’s no soft-focus mythology here when “he puts his hand on/ my stomach and winces at the ridges the staples/have made in my once smooth white skin or his// fingers meet the crater of the site where my/ colon once was” (63). This is not a distanced view, it is intimate, physical and specific.

 

   In previous times, work about illness, work from the disability community tended to be marginalized overall. Realities of vulnerability were shadow banned in favor of the myths of conquering, super-strengthened anti-heroes. The realities of years of sickness and turmoil in our contemporary culture evaporate these weak myths, but their absence ought to encourage us to learn from those who faced a horror we cannot fully speak about, a horror from which we are eager to move away...move forward to the just society we dream about Yet, we cannot think ourselves just readers if we leave such work behind.

Su Zi is a writer, poet and essayist who produces a handmade chapbook series called Red Mare. She has been a contributor to GAS from back when it was called Gypsy Art Show, more than a decade ago.

                     

Check out her author page on Amazon.