Su Zi's Review of "Sometimes the Light" by Rick Campbell

 

                                 Available from Main Street Rag Bookstore

The authentic voice: too often overlooked these days, too often put into the shadows by the glitz of more acrobatic literary endeavors, the authentic voice has been subjected to an unjust partisan divide that results in robbing the passionate reader of resonant experiences. Yet such work exists, and ought to gain readership among those who do value that which truly, if quietly, seeks to speak to us in a deeper way. Perhaps the griot nature of experiential work is lost on certain urban-minded people, but even the most cosmopolitan among us will realize how joyous is a blooming tree after months of a concrete gray winter. Thus, Rick Campbell’s work, Sometimes the Light , a prose work of essays that is also memoir, is a pleasant reminder that yes, the authentic world is still here, an authentic voice still exists in published work.

The work opens with a train ride, an essay of seven sections that observes the other passengers with a full sense of being participatory, rather than as subjects of classicist derision. Campbell’s discussion of train passengers includes a section about luggage:

Train people have really bad luggage—mismatched suitcases, garish colors—

            and many have suitcases much larger than what one could take on a plane […]

            A lot of train people don’t, if we are precise here, have luggage. They carry their

            belongings in paper sacks, pillowcases, and large plastic bags from department     

            stores. (4)

The reader is introduced to a setting that is neither or place, or time—as Campbell discusses the lack of synchroneity of train time, of time in motion, with that of fixed positions, such as arrival at train stations. In case the reader is a classist trying to slum along with Campbell, two sections in this opening essay later, Campbell aligns himself with the other passengers:

             I am a train person. My duffel’s cheap and patched on the bottom with duct tape.

             My backpack used to be my daughter’s, and it’s got weird stains here and there.

             I have been wearing the same jeans for four days (9).

The reader will not find any separation between the writer and that which is witnessed on these pages, Campbell stands shoulder to shoulder with the lives that people his work.

Campbell himself is a Pushcart winner, author of multiple titles in multiple genres, and a long-term editorial team member of a respected press. His choice to be of the people does not escape the meditative memoir of this text. In a discussion about a celebrity baseball athlete, Campbell compares the ranks of celebrity, of legacy, between baseball and the literary world via a consideration of nicknames:

                […] was ‘the Georgia Peach” That just doesn’t work.

                It’s rural, regional, Southern. It’s like local color Southern writers

                battling the New York crowd for attention and only coming away with the

                title Regionalists […] it gets them in the Norton, but […] (72).

While the essay itself considers the retrospective moral life of the creator (as an athlete) versus the brilliance of their work, Campbell’s conclusion both includes and passes by the academic with “I tell my creative nonfiction students” (73), to a pure and intimate moment that, in one paragraph, makes prosaic mention of “gifts”, of “synchronicity”, of “forgiveness” and of “redemption”. The reader then too, as silent witness, must acknowledge a kind of posited hierarchy of priorities; that how one is seen as a writer is lesser than the “significance of experience” (73) that a writer might encounter, and that this too must come from us each in our most actualized humanity.

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 "A Brief Conversation with Consciousness" by Marc Vincenz

Available on Amazon

    It is possible for poetry to be both readable and literary, strong enough of voice to be almost conversational, yet sophisticated enough in technique to pleasure the educated reader. In this full-length collection by Marc Vincenz, (Unlikely Books) the reader is presented with not only the new work of a well-published writer, but two critical essays at the volume’s final pages, positioning the book as also existing as a critical text for literary study. 

    The work is divided into seven sections, all named, with six sections for the poems themselves. While these sections are chapbook length, the section names are of a macabre nature, with four named for the corpses of wild born beings, and two for the sort of found trash prosaic to strolls. Of the two concluding essays (by Robert Archambeau and Philip Nikolayev), it is Archambeau who refers to Vincenz’s “typical, despoiled landscape” (127) as a binary seeking enlightenment through a kind of Jungian, intuitive process. A reader moderately aware of symbol structures will discover much meat in this collection: the angelic number of chapters is a strong clue of the symbolic path of the poems, a path that Nikolayev calls “a personal manifesto” (133). But while both essayists cite lines and sections that employ strong symbolism, their view of these symbols is either “a brief flash of satori” (Archambeau, 128), or “observations about insects and birds and other chitchat” (Nikolayev, 140).

   Perhaps a brief conversation can be had about the symbols themselves, perceived by Vincenz and repeated throughout the work. While the fluctuating use of pronouns might interest some readers—how sometimes the second person seems very specific, and other times a general address—or how the plethora of death imagery (“And so we climb/ Deep into the tomb”, 113-114) could yield full study alone, a view beyond the chitchat about birds is also revealing.A casual indexing of references of birds involves some two dozen occurrences throughout the book, with a half a dozen utilizations of egg.

   Vincenz directs one work here to a specific bird, “Hanging Out the Window for a Sparrow” (80), written as a prose poem. Rather than referencing the avian being as symbolic evidence for a meditative point, the poem makes its metaphysical point to the sparrow: “It rained on all of us, even you with your talons, even where the mad moth whirls or the wounded spring curls;” finally including birds as along for the ride, instead of a landscape the reader sees as a kind of fly-over state.

   In the section dedicated to the tell of an avian accident, "Feathers of a Dead Turkey," centered in the collection and comprising of eight pieces, the opening poem “Of Cargo” Vincenz nestles this collection’s gothic meditation. Immediately setting the season, “In autumn”, which birdwatchers know to be legalized murder period for the species, the poem then follows a discourse of associative symbols, except these are references to human myth, concluding with violent Agrippina “her hairpins and hair/ // Overflowing in daises” (60). Later, in “Arrowheads”, two humans, apparently in bed, muse “Later still, sighing, you say:/ ‘How does one get away with murder?/ What century is this? What era?’/ Outside, the towers wobble” (65) Maybe it is here that this work’s migrating thought might roost. Any reader will respond to a symbolic investigation of the noun “tower”, making it a potent symbol. Beyond modern history, the easy mythology of tarot positions a tower as a symbol of expensive endeavor. Combining this with murder creates the sort of modern context of our ordinary anxieties. A view to the poem’s horizon has the reader realizing that this is a probable post-coital conversation. The poem’s title references objects from a pre-colonized human civilization, and the poem’s conclusion is a view of a squirrel—but not an ordinary squirrel, a mutated being who “sits curved, /His blue eyes trained on the soil.” The poem has dealt us a hand in this flock of symbols; the reader is subtly encompassed in an awareness of humanity’s sins. 

   The physical volume has a number of conclusions: a photograph of objects that named the chapters, a prose poem, “One More for the Road”, the two essays and a two-page list of the author’s previous works. Viewing this as either five or seven numerological points from which the reader can exit the book, the parting words of the author “Emerge, Sweet Creature, and light up the way”(119); of the critics , “spirit of exploration”( Archambeau) and  “ a mighty personal lyric chord”(Nikolayev) are a call to carry the book’s song with us, a sophisticated opera about a broken-hearted man in a landscape of death. 

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.

Marc Vincenz and Su Zi

Ron Cooper's All My Sins Remembered, reviewed by Su Zi

 

   In traditional folklore, humor and regionalism are intrinsic aspects that carry the narrative, sometimes superseding it, and sometimes allowing for parable to emerge. And although regionalism as a genre can be considered a spatial concern, or a standard shelf in bookshops, it does draw a binary line between those familiar with a particular place and those who are not. The tourist reader might be carried along by the narrative’s current; the native reader will recognize landmarks. While regionalist writing may find currency among tourist readers, as if it were a literary cuisine, some true measure of the work will be gauged by native readers keenly aware of authenticity. Thus, the tale is told of time and place and those who live there.

    In Ron Cooper’s novel All My Sins Remembered (Goliad), the reader experiences life as a law enforcement officer in Ocala, Florida, a community currently described as undergoing rapid population growth.  Indeed, the novel opens with specific, native sites,” Through the gap between the lines of trees along the far side of the Silver River[…]a slender bird, probably an egret, passed”(1), and the action throughout stays mostly within that local proximity. Cooper’s land of legend is the Ocala Forest, an annual visit spot for Rainbow People, whom Cooper , in no disguise, calls  “Starlight”, and who play an influential part of the narrative.  While Cooper’s depictions of these annual visitors is both accurate-- the groups preference for “funny hats”-- as well as exaggerated for humor “His lower lip was pierced with what appeared to be a dog whistle”(4), his depiction of the fictionalized but actual residents of the forest follows the same structure of accuracy and hyperbole, with the exception of a far more harsh humor. A scene of a local gathering includes “an old hog trough […] now used as a footrest[…]and as a spittoon by Edna Yancey”(100). While the tourist reader might notice a woman who chews tobacco, the native reader recognizes the name of a local family. That the implication of lowest social caste is attached to this family name might not be humorous to some native readers; Cooper is consistent here, all the residents of the Ocala Forest are painted as being of the lowest social caste—a local myth from town people that is resented by forest residents.

   Cooper might revere Florida’s Beat writer, Harry Crews, but his strength is the didacticism that threads through both this and his other works. In the scene at the weekly bluegrass and potluck barbeque, Cooper educates the tourists with “Blevins announced that he would do a song everyone knew. He sang ’Hold Back the Waters’ by Florida’s folk song hero Will McLean, and everyone around Moreno joined in on the chorus about the threat of a flood” (103), while also creating an intimate nod, perhaps, to his bluegrass duet and Florida blues scholar partner. Not all of Cooper’s references are obscure. A scene involving a family argument about religion contains this comparative analysis: “The Bible prophets knew all about suffering. Vanity is the bastard child of the ego. The bigger the ego, the more dukkha, the more suffering”(68) which is countered with “so then he wandered around the rest of his life eating other people’s, poor people’s food. Never turned a lick in his rich boy life” (69). The novel never bogs in such gems, and is cleverly structured to visit various persons, including a point of view change, that don’t overwhelm the reader with the work’s basic premise of the murder mystery plot, or the unlikely hero’s journey to redemption.

  Cooper is a clever writer: because of the adept complexities here, the novel’s marketability is Florida-based, mystery based, comedy based. Perhaps it is this last aspect that might leave a bit of aftertaste, as Cooper’s Ocala Forest is a town tourist’s view, but few would remark the lack of empathy; in fact, Cooper’s suicidal, family failure deputy is hardly likeable. The novel’s setting of a relatively unknown region rapidly loosing its local history does position the work as succeeding in a core value of folklore—illumination of a threatened culture, even if the story paints that culture with a severe eye.

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.

Justice Volume 1: The Enemy Within by Gavin C. Brown reviewed by Su Zi

Available from Bookshop.org

   Not every novel intends a literary audience only, and works with a specific intended audience are often enjoyable reading experiences. In the first of an intended serial story, the author is endeavoring to create a world beyond a single volume, and there have been populist successes in this area. While Gavin C Brown’s Justice series (volume two is intended for release for February 2022) exists as a single volume currently, the work is still a provocative and entertaining reading experience—especially if the reader has beyond-tourist familiarity with the work’s setting of New Orleans. 

 

   Perhaps most fascinating for both literary and pure pleasure readers is Brown’s hybrid structure in this work, which combines prose and poetry to create the protagonist’s lived world experience as a contemporary black woman. Brown, himself, is no poseur in this arena, having grown up on the Westbank in Algiers. In a telephone interview, Brown describes New Orleans as “ a lively city and there are complexities associated with that”(20 October 2021). The novel attends to some of those complexities with a dark roux of humor, such as one character’s response to Say Their Names by inclusion of black victims of violence in menu items: “the George Floyd Somebody Call My Mamma Hot and Spicy Jambalaya, the Emmett Till Battered Fish and Fries, the Black Lives Matter Seafood Platter, the I Can’t Breathe Hot Wings” which the character justifies as “ Every time someone takes a bite and spends a dollar, it not only goes back into the community through investment{sic}They are reminded of those victims and their sacrifices. Every time someone takes a bite, it’s a bite out of injustice”(31). The novel’s text, at this point, is a conversation, but Brown adeptly shifts into his protagonist’s inner thoughts through a poem in her point of view: “ Is that I don’t know how he/could possible not see/The negative effects of these actions,/Passed his own satisfaction,/This is not how you build/The Black Community/This is not Black Love/Or Black Unity/This is just exploitation/Of victims Black,/Like you and me “(32).  The fluidity of these genre shifts was, for Brown, the “biggest challenge” in writing; the character “is a poet” and Brown used the genre switch to “flow back and forth and climb into her head”(interview). Since this is volume one of an intended series, and Brown’s use of the hybrid form is so fluid, readers can hope to see this genre -bending format continue in the planned future work.

   What becomes striking about this short novel is that both the character and the theme of the work are concerned with justice. Brown himself remarked on his choice of a female protagonist as being “of far more interest…there are not a lot of black women protagonists…they are unappreciated and persevering. There are enough male heroes out there. I want to do something different. Not the same old thing”(interview). Indeed, most of the characters and groups of characters in this street-smart, maybe-not-fantasy-dystopia are women, hero and anti-hero alike. One anti-hero intends a murder in an unnamed hospital “She’s holding flowers, and she enters the room. […]’The Arian Nation sends their regards,’ the blonde says and pulls a gun, but she can’t shoot it with her face full of my feet […] ‘so, what do they call you’ I say. ‘ The Milk Lady’”(58). Lest readers think that the novel posits all white people as enemy, Brown creates a supporting character in the form of a tall blond called Iron Maiden who sees herself as “an exterminator looking for rats…most of my kills have been KKK and Arian Nation”(88-89). Thus the stuff of heroes and their tropes become the core characters of this work, with New Orleans supplanting a fictive Gotham with genuine, real world ills.

   While readers familiar with the choreography of fighting moves will find plenty of meat in the frequent action sequences, there’s no dismissing the ambitiousness undertaken here.  Brown has multiple font changes-- to record the journal entries of Iron Maiden, conversations in italics, --and a use of street-level language that is currently taboo in general culture. This may be volume one, but it’s also the initial development of a hero world, one where corrupt charities and street thugs eventually get caught, where a girl from the St Bernard project becomes a defender of women. Readers of Brown’s “insider audience…because it’s such an African American centric piece” might laugh out loud a bit more, but the work is well worth the read—as shocking as it might be to consider complex issues of social justice through an action hero trope, Brown’s smooth handling allows also for a sense of delight and fun.             

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.

                      

RANK by Kristine Snodgrass, reviewed by Sylvia Van Nooten

RANK by Kristine Snodgrass, is in part glitch after glitch of contained and potent shape and color.  Each piece hums with an understatement that can only be understood as pressure—emotion, thought, intellect, experience—waiting to burst out.  Burst out in song or poetry, in ART—I found myself held within this pressure. 

The second part, Snodgrass' poetry, resounds with a lovely tension:   

“Object of art! Lumps from a freezer going to work in absolutes.  Pushed down in hieroglyphs and then pregnant again...” (pg. 72) 

Each written image frames the visual images, a beautiful balancing of the two.  With this book Snodgrass captures a moment in time when nothing is certain, in the personal and the political.  There is the pain of uncertainty as she speaks from the past to the future.  Endings begetting beginnings and perhaps, those beginnings are too late.

  “There are few variations that our mothers have also imagined. Like weeds majestic and quarreling, thoughts like you lure into the dancing light.  We are imagined and then you left. Past burns, stripped and pressed.  A grind and flood—darkness glared.  As I paint the road, afflicted sobbing peaks.  Blue fills a partial page, black enters this year. Long live the pain and its slow ending.  We are wicked, after all.  How we roll on floors and watch ourselves splinter into the Milky Way. And we can’t stop it.  Prayers as nourishment. Spells as sacrifice.  Yesterday, I looked into a camera.  I’d like to speak to him.” (pg. 92) 

 The explosion and release of the line, “splinter into the Milky Way” has me wondering if this art, this poetry is about the unintentional joy of unexpected futures.  A beautiful, powerful book, and one I will return to again and again.

RANK, published by JackLeg Press, can be purchased on Amazon 

Kristine Snodgrass is an artist, poet, professor, curator, and publisher living in Tallahassee, Florida. She is the author of Rather, from Contagion Press (2020) and the chapbook, These Burning Fields (Hysterical Books 2019) as well as  Out of the World (Hysterical Books 2016) and The War on Pants (JackLeg Press 2013). Her poetry has appeared in decomP, Versal, Big Bridge, 5_Trope, Shampoo, 2 River View, Otoliths, and South Florida Poetry Journal among others. Kristine’s asemic and vispo work has been published in Utsanga (Italy), Slow Forward, Asemic Front 2 (AF2). Her work was just featured in the Asemic Women Writers Summer Exhibition Online. Snodgrass has collaborated with many artists and poets.

COVID GARDENS by Stark Hunter, reviewed by Hex'm J'ai

Welcome to… Covid Gardens!  Here, you can sleepwalk with Santo and Johnny!  You can grab a cheeseburger with Steve McQueen, hang with the Stones or The Who, enjoy Rice-A-Roni with Eddie and the Showmen meet the ubiquitous Jackie Robinson or have a healthy helping of Veronica Lake’s meatloaf!  You too can star in the newest Covid-19 inspired TV program produced by Allen Funt!!!

But there is one rule.  To fully engage these activities, to fully experience these events, upon entering the Gardens one must follow the Poet’s Instructions. It is also highly recommended that you are multi-lingual or have a translator readily available as these instructions come in various languages, scripts, and dialect.

Covid Gardens: The Anti-Poems of Stark Hunter, is a recent collection published by Mind Tavern Books. Anti-Poems are artistic endeavors that break away from traditional conventions expected from poetry. These are the eloquently crafted observations and interpretations of the NOW in all its absurdity.  In a time of pandemic quarantine, uncertainty, and social unrest many indulged in the outlets available to them to sustain the illusion of familiarity and “normalcy” (whatever that is) through the outlets of music, film, and television.  This created a cultural paradox that many may not have been aware of while it was occurring, but that Mr. Hunter clearly documents and exemplifies in his work.  The stark and threatening reality anesthetized by the culturally topical salve of binge-watching images and listening to music of the world that was, or more accurately, the mythical world we wish existed once upon time.  In Anti-Poem 8, “Veronica Lake’s Meat Loaf” we grab some comfort food with Steve McQueen to the backdrop of:

“Time for the marching of everything designed, to slaughter, annihilate and procreate; The full United States Army.”  

Yet, before engaging this, we must heed the poet’s instruction to only read this if we have both shots of one of the Covid-19 vaccines.

This collection is at once a love letter to the western cultural pantheon as well as the instrument of its undoing, the Anti-Poem exclamation that the emperor has no clothes!

And so, to Mr. Stark Hunter, I say bravo sir…. bravo!

Covid Gardens, The AntiPoems of Stark Hunter is currently available in Kindle format at Amazon.

Anti-Poem 44  “Mona Lisa”

“No Lisa. I am not afraid. 

Where on my sleeve do I shine yellow? 

You are the choicest of life’s pastries. 

The universe has a hard-on for you, 

As I do now here at the end of the world. 

But as you sit there as my eternal lover, 

Your stringent expectations surpassing, 

My abilities to even unfold my capacities, 

I wonder if this is even appropriate now

As millions drown in the hateful gurgling. 

Maybe we can sit here instead and pray. 

Maybe we should close our eyes and listen. 

The survivors now are creating their mad gods, 

With mindless verve and pleasing contours; 

These robot monster hybrids singing arias, 

Making false speeches to the groveling captives. 

Mona Lisa! Mona Lisa! Go home to your mother. 

She fell in the bathtub butt-first and is stuck. 

We sent for the pill salesman to get her out but 

Well, there you have it. 

No, Lisa. I am not afraid. 

I am looking into the green cemetery and now I can see God. 

He is digging up the dead with a bloody pickaxe.”

Born in Whittier, California in 1952, Stark Hunter was a high school English teacher for 34 years before retiring from the classroom in 2017. He has written and published 11 books, which are available on Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.com.

Mr. Hunter’s poetry works can be perused at poetrysoup.com. and allpoetry.com. Mr. Hunter is married with two daughters, a granddaughter, and resides in Chino Hills, California.

Su Zi's review of FATA MORGANA by Joel Chace

   

There are those for whom scholarship still matters -–that ancient practice of study and dialogue with a text, outside the temporal constraints of our mortal transience. Sometimes, this scholarship might take another form than the philosophical treatise; sometimes this scholarship, this dialogue with a text, will result in a variety of other written genres, sometimes even poetry. In the instance of Fata Morgana (Unlikely Books, 2021), the opening section is a poem in response to another poet, Jack Spicer; which is, in turn, also in dialogue with the process by which the poem was written. While experiments in spacing, unreliable narration and odd trim size are not new to literary endeavors, Fata Morgana makes ample use of these techniques to try and prompt the reader to consider multiple ways of reading while reading; there’s no definitive approach to this work beyond the traditional format of opening the book and turning pages.

   The book as an entity is an object of 8 by 8 inches, which does not fit tidily on the shelf, and thus demands consideration of its physical nature: a perfect-bound volume of less than 80 pages. Within these pages are graphic devices, simple drawings, which both divide sections within the book, as well as sections within poems. While the paper for the book is traditional enough in trade volumes—standard weight, matt cover, low gloss for easier reading of the text—the physical appearance of the text, in two columns, makes the decision for the extra wide pages a logical, editorial choice.

   The title poem is a seven-page section in the volume, presented in two columns with an underscore line creating a graphic connection from the end of the left stanza to the italicized column on the right. This presents the reader with the decision of how to read the poem, to follow the graphic right and left and right again, to read the left column through before that of the right, or to beg a scholarly patience from the reader by reading the poem multiple times. In seeking from the text itself how it wants to be read, the reader discovers the dialogue between, apparently, the two minds of the author: the left column presenting a more traditional poem, the right presenting a mind considering aspects of consideration external to the poem. In the case of this title poem, the external consideration is a meditation on architecture, which “is about asking questions concerning the/meaning of human ha-/bitation”(35). While the narrative of the entire poem is the sort of curious disaster found in local news, Chace uses overt allusion to clearly demark the poem’s genre as also being that of a ghost story:q“ if he is a Banquo come/back to tell them[…]that those/ he returns to instruct or[…]murder will not stay murdered/ or instructed, unlike/a Banuo who returns but/cannot be unmur/dered”(37-38). Chace’s meditation on the ghost here returns to the external consideration of philosophy and architecture, as if the mortal lives that appear in the poem are more dust to him than the ideas their lives might represent.

   While the book presents itself as a work of poetry, it is also an obvious philosophical work about the distance from life events that critical thought requires. Ironically, the last section of this volume contains 14 poems written during the first flush of the pandemic. In these poems, the dialogue of the scholarly mind in the right column begins to break down into a counterpoint of other physical observations, into comments about music, and finally into auditory verbs. The poems’ narrative scaffolding seems to retreat from a wider world view into an observation about sanitation workers. 

    Yet, still the sense of dual thought, of observing and thinking about what is observed, is consistent through this volume. Whether or not such meditations are of value, or whether or not the pursuit of a critical and philosophical endeavor is mere mirage is a larger cultural issue of our time. For those for whom such intellectual endeavors are still crucial, this work posits a number of worthy considerations.

Fata Morgana is available on Amazon.

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.

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.

"i saw god cooking children / paint their bones" by John Compton, reviewed by Hex'm Jai

Greetings and salutations bibliophiles!

This is a small and powerful collection.  I make it no secret that I am sucker for well crafted imagery.  If poetry or the literary canon were an organized religion, I would be a devout zealot of the deities Rimbaud and Baudelaire.  That said, there is imagery and then there is IMAGERY.  IMAGERY being beyond the aesthetically pleasing window dressing of ‘imagery’ which, unfortunately, is the more prevalent of the two.  ‘Imagery’ is decorative, it is filagree, form without function and therefore, though beautiful like a floral arrangement, ultimately free of substance.  IMAGERY on the other hand is a fantastic delivery system.  It provides the same aesthetic nature of ‘imagery’ but with function and purpose.  It’s not just ‘pretty,’ it is engaging and transportive; it can be beatific / horrific but always has an effect beyond two dimensions.  IMAGERY is visceral.

Reading this collection is like being emersed in barrage of film shorts…each image or scene carefully crafted and delivered to your core.  Through his concise use of IMAGERY, John paints images into your eye that you can feel, taste, hear and smell as well as see.  Through this delivery system you are provided with both emotion and meaning that you can experience.  These are not longwinded, verbose bouquets of language.  You will not become lost in impressionistic imagery and texture.  You will BECOME the imagery and texture and therefore experience it.

Sample poem from i saw god cooking children / paint their bones:

like & but & &

i went into the room

collapsing

a song bleeds from my ears

i am deaf

i lie on my back

floating          the river

is dense

saltwater like

the dead sea

like the salt

flats

somewhere in utah

like a log like a

dead fish like a leaf

i drift

in my current

unharmed but

harmed

but screaming

but somewhere there is an old lady

crying

swimming to me

paddling & clawing

through the liquid substance

digging at my eyes

my mouth my chest

clotting my ears

with her fingers

with cotton

breathing into my lungs

her oxygen her carbon

dioxide her meager life

When you have finished this collection, you can put it on the shelf right next to “Les Fleurs du Mal”. 

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i saw god cooking children / paint their bones

is available at Etsy via Blood Pudding Press

john compton (b. 1987) is gay poet who lives in kentucky. his poetry resides in his chest like many hearts & they bloom like vigorously infectious wild flowers. he lives in a tiny town, with his husband josh and their 14 dogs and 3 cats. he feels his head is an auditorium filled with the dead poets from the past. poems are written and edited constantly. his poetry is a personal journey. he reaches for things close and far, trying to give them life: growing up gay; having mental health issues; a journey into his childhood; the world that surrounds us. he writes to be alive, to learn and to grow. he loves imagery, metaphor, simile, abstract language, sounds, when one word can drift you into another direction. he loves playing with vocabulary, creating texture and emotions. he has published 1 book and 5 chapbooks published and forthcoming: trainride elsewhere (august 2016) from Pressed Wafer/tba; that moan like a saxophone (december 2016) from kindle; ampersand (march 2018) from Plan B Press; a child growing wild inside the mothering womb (june 2020) from ghost city press; i saw god cooking children / paint their bones (oct 2020) from blood pudding press; to wash all the pretty things off my skin (sept 2021) from ethel zine & micro-press. he has been published in numerous magazines and anthologies.