Belinda's Review of Myths, Beasts & the Ways of Water by Clint Frakes

 Clint Frakes’s Myths, Beasts & the Ways of Water is a capacious, humane collection that moves easily between intimate lyric confession, mythic imagination, and wry, often mordant social observation. Organized in five sections—Mystery not Always Unkind; Dancing Among the Makers; Unreal Cities; Love’s Lost Horses; The Ways of Water—the book charts a life of attention: to landscape (desert mesas, Hawaiian shorelines, the Rogue and Colorado rivers), to beloved teachers and peers (Ginsberg, Snyder, Collom), and to the small, stubborn incidents that accrete into moral memory.

Frakes’s voice is muscular and eclectic. He can pare a line to imagistic precision (“The Chinese business lady…holds up her golden retriever’s tail / as it shits straight into a Macy’s bag”) and also luxuriate in long, incantatory sequences—the book’s myth-poems and ritual narratives—which read like sustained meditations on belonging and loss. The “Desire” series and longer elegies (notably “Father Fisheye”) show his gift for mixture: humor and grief, vernacular energy and learned allusion. There is a recurring ethical core—attention to indigenous presence, ecological grief, and the residue of American violences—that prevents the collection from mere aesthetic play.

Formally, Frakes is resourceful. He uses short imagistic lyrics, prose-adjacent narratives, litany, and occasional collage; his diction ranges from colloquial bluntness to mythic lyricism. His influences—Beat candor, eco-poetics, Native and Romantics threads—are audible but never derivative: he retools them into poems that feel lived-in rather than performative. At their best, poems like “Chelonia mydas,” “Rogue River Redemption,” and “What the River Dreams” combine natural history, careful observation, and spiritual longing into lines that linger.

What the River Dreams

We carry a tune & often desert it on high

plains amid fencing light & shadow.

It won’t matter for long what I felt or where—

like how water can only fall into itself

each rain, bluer for the turn.

Maybe you finally had enough—

yet the road to which you’ve sewn yourself

touches what you never could have loved alone.

The breath of our lives persists

beyond all foreseen destinations.

The old ones say the water never began

& cannot end, that it garners the memory

of every thread & station it’s met—

from the bellies of stars to the viscera of willow.

From my chosen hill, it’s hard to imagine

its stiller parts beneath the ripple.

What this river dreams is what I long to say.

Overall, Myths, Beasts & the Ways of Water is a generous, restless book: attentive, politically minded, rooted in place and relationship, and rewarding for readers who value stewardship, elegy, and a poet willing to mix the sacramental with the profane.

Recommended for readers of contemporary American lyric who appreciate ecological awareness, cross-cultural commentary, and a poet comfortable with both tenderness and provocation.

Where Lies the Passage of Light

after Ammons

“The light became her grace and dwelt among

Blind eyes and shadows that are formed as men;

Lo, how the light doth melt us into song…”

—Ezra Pound, “Ballatetta”

I have considered how light spills without intent,

exposing all surface it surveys

& how the mule deer’s dark morning legs

defy nothing as she nibbles bitter shoots.

Undisguised at my backdoor, light asks nothing

& marks the foreheads of the hills

while I slaughter hourly beasts by its rhythm to weave

another day’s geography of purpose.

I watched the cottonwood leaves rot in the blond grass

under fat beads of October dew.

Only weeks ago I bathed in the spinning silver

they gathered from their tree—

drinking the magnetic river that now pulls them low.

A spider darts along the twinkling curtain rod

that staves the rays that bare all shape

& slant eddies of meaning.

Breath deepens toward the need for meat & grain.

I am certain what should be cleaned & what gathered:

children to be taught their great ascent.

Nothing escapes the trail of Earth’s cascade

as I turn toward & away from comforts & pains—

my ears ringing in their own hollows.

Dawn’s horses shake their manes

against the spectrum of wide tomorrows.

The heart is a basket of such flutters,

passed from night to this

& stars will fade into light’s excess.

Clint Frakes is a poet, writer, teacher, editor, ceremonialist and naturalist living in Sedona, AZ since 1992. His poetry, prose and narrative non-fiction has appeared in over 100 journals, magazines and anthologies in the US, Canada, UK, Australia and Argentina since 1987.  He was named one of the 50 Best New Poets of 2008 by former American Poet Laureate, Mark Strand, and also received the Josephine Darner Distinguished Poet Prize (2008). Other awards include the James Vaughan Poetry Prize (2006), The Pudding House Chapbook Prize (2008) and the Peggy Ferris Memorial Prize for Poetry (2006). 

He is a graduate of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics of the Naropa Institute (1989), Northern Arizona University creative writing program (1994) and received his Ph.D. with emphasis in creative writing from the University of Hawaii (2006). He is the former Chief Editor of The Hawaii Review and Big Rain. He has taught in Writing and English programs across the country. Clint specializes in nature writing and spiritual memoir.

GAS Featured Poet: Sreeja Naskar

 

Sreeja Naskar is a young poet based in India. Her work has appeared in Poems India, Crowstep Journal, ONE ART, Ink Sweat and Tears, FRiGG, The Chakkar, and elsewhere. She believes in the quiet power of language to unearth what lingers beneath silence.

kissing with the news on mute

the apartment smells like garlic & rain.    

    we eat pasta off chipped plates  

 while gaza buries its children beneath the rubble.  

     you kiss me like there’s no ash in the air  

 and the water running through our pipes  

      didn’t skip someone else’s throat to get here.  

 

           you say: stay.   

           & i do, because the world is too loud 

 

 we turn the tv on, just for the light.  

     the anchor's mouth moves, silent.  

 i think about a girl with red barrettes,  

     found under concrete. i think about  

         the mother who washed her with bottled water.  

 i think of my own mother, folding towels  

     while the country she left burns slower  

         than the one she fled.  

 

           (sometimes survival is shame  

           that learned how to walk upright.)  

 

 my shower runs hot.  

     i cry into the tile & say, it’s cleansing.  

 i scroll past headlines, donate five dollars,  

       feel righteous, then kiss you again.  

 my body forgets how to hold grief  

     so it folds into yours.  

 

            (what language do we use  

             for pleasure that costs someone else’s breath?  

 

 outside, the rain keeps falling.  

     somewhere, a city turns off its sirens.  

 you whisper my name like a prayer  

     and i want to believe it’s enough.  

 i want to believe loving you  

     isn’t the most selfish thing i’ve done today.  

 

           (but the water runs hot  

           and the sky, for now, is whole)

 god works in immigration

denied my mother’s visa three times—  

    each refusal a prayer unanswered.  

i watch the clock punch holes in our grief,  

     stamped with expiration dates,  

the smell of waiting rooms stale as old promises.  

 

           (he never learned how to say my name.)  

 

god sits behind a desk cluttered with files,  

     his hands folding paper dreams into ash.  

my father’s papers lost somewhere between  

     midnight and the next form,  

i lost faith the day they lost his identity.  

 

           (there’s no heaven here  

           just endless lines and locked doors)  

 

i call god by the wrong name,  

     curse him in the language he forgot.  

my mother folds towels with hands trembling—  

     each crease a silent protest  

against a god who trades in red stamps, not mercy.  

 

the walls listen but do not answer.  

     outside, the city breathes without us.  

i fold my grief into a suitcase,  

     tuck my name inside like a secret,  

hoping god forgets how to open it.

 diaspora is a scam

  my aunt says it over bitter tea—  

     how they sold us dreams wrapped in passports,  

  promises folded like cheap paper planes,  

     crashing somewhere between here and nowhere.  

 

          they told us it was freedom,  

          but freedom never comes with baggage fees  

 

  i learned to speak two languages that don’t quite fit,  

     my tongue a clumsy translation of home and exile.  

  my mother’s cooking tastes like memory and loss,  

     the same dishes nobody knows how to name anymore.  

 

         (we are strangers in maps we didn’t draw)  

 

  every flight ticket is a wager on belonging,  

     but the currency is too high—  

  a lifetime of waiting rooms,  

     missed birthdays,  

     empty chairs at tables still warm with absence.  

 

          diaspora is a scam  

          sold by those who never had to leave  

 

  my father’s laugh is thinner now,  

     stretched between two countries,  

  one that forgot him,  

     the other that never fully claimed him.  

 

          and i—  

          caught in the middle—  

          wonder if home was ever real  

 

  i hold my heart like a visa application—  

     folded, stamped,  

     always pending.

Su Zi's Review of PLANT DREAMING DEEP by May Sarton

 

On reading May Sarton Plant Dreaming Deep

It might happen that to the hand comes a book: hardbound with cloth, dustjacket long gone. The tightly woven canvas of the book is green and has a texture; the book has feel. The inside cover is still tight and green and gracefully sun struck. Thumbing the text against the palm is a remembrance of high-quality paper, of books with deckled edges. Suddenly, there is also the remembrance of how one reads such books—with care for both the entity and the words within.

The volume has a 1968 copyright, and photographs. Prior to generic pixels, means of reproduction involved plates, and this book has a number of them: of the author across from the title page, across from each of the fifteen chapters. It is a testament to the prowess of the publisher then to have been able to release such a book; and there the crest of  WWNorton.

Of course, an AI overview of the work at hand is infuriatingly superficial, but not untrue—let consideration for such broad gloss not be here. Yes, the work is a memoir of buying a house in the middle of the twentieth century—readers will gasp at the minuscule monetary amounts mentioned. Nor ought to readers, getting a glimpse of the list of previous publications, be surprised that the author, May Sarton, is readable. What becomes striking about the work becomes its nuances—as if coming across the volume itself—once a ubiquitous version of a book, now a vintage treasure—were not clue of serendipity enough.

Sarton’s reason for buying a house begins with her commitment to her ancestry: “ I enjoy beginning this chronicle with an evocation of two ancestors because in this house all the threads i hold in my hands have at last been woven together into a whole” (19), but she purchases her particular house in a remote location because of a bird

[...]under a stand of old maples, and there, a little back from the road, behind its semicircular drive, withdrawn from the village itself, stood the house. [...]The whole impression was one of grace and light within a classical form, and i was so bedazzled by this presence that for a moment i could only see, not hear. But then I heard it—an oriole, high up in one of the maples, singing his song of songs” (28)

For any bird lovers, Sarton beguiles aplenty throughout the seasons; she maintains feeders in winter “And sooner or later I must push hard to open the front door against the drifts and get myself out with seed for the bird feeders” (86), and weaves these perceptions with ones about solitude and the life of a writer.

Sarton also gardens, because she: “considers flowers a necessity, quite as necessary as food. So from spring until late October i spend the hour just after breakfast in the garden, [...]for whenever I look for the rest of the day there is always somewhere a shaft of light on flowers, and I feel them strongly as part of the whole presence of the house” (57). 

 It might seem, to those who are quintessentially transient, to be so thoroughly stay at home, and to do so in solitude. Sarton does socialize—she has guests, and becomes participatory in her community, but she also travels to teach. There might be some who consider Sarton’s determined retreat to be quaint; others might find themselves already in the solitude of which Sarton speaks. Certainly, the perceptions here are worthy for many reasons, giving Sarton’s simultaneously simplistic and complex style her worthy iconic status.

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.

GAS Featured Poet: Arvilla Fee

 

Arvilla Fee lives in Dayton, Ohio, teaches English for Clark State College and is the lead poetry editor for October Hill Magazine. She has published work in over 100 journals and magazines, and her poetry books, The Human Side, This is Life, and Mosaic: A Million Little Pieces are available on Amazon. Arvilla’s life advice: never leave home without a snack (just in case of an apocalypse). Arvilla’s favorite quote: "It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.” ~ Henry David Thoreau. To learn more, visit her website and check out her new poetry magazine: https://soulpoetry7.com/

How to Eat An Over-Easy Egg

in Front of Your Ex

 

carefully,

deliberately,

fork cutting

straight down the middle,

yolk pooling

like a daisy-yellow pond,

perfect for dipping

butter-covered toast;

fold the bread,

drag it along the plate

in slow, circular motions,

absorbing,

never dripping—

never leaving the table

with egg on your face

Momma Needs a Moment

 

just five minutes to close my eyes,

to allow my chest to rise and fall,

to let my mind go blank.

Put your badgering on a shelf,

tuck those questions under your arms,

and just let        me         be.

I cannot answer the rapid-fire requests

that press into the gray matter of my brain

like bullish thumbs against a tender wrist.
I cannot tell you what’s for dinner.

No, I don’t know where birds go

when they leave their nests.

I don’t know why the store

was completely out of grapes.

Just let me have this bubble;

I’ll close my eyes and imagine,

if only for a moment

that I have all the space I need.

I’ll stretch my arms over my head,

yawn,

listen to the coo of doves,

step into the sun’s warm orb,

and measure my brief autonomy

in the beat of a hummingbird’s wings.

The Air Between Us

 

without the mixture of my molecules

and your molecules, the air is clearer,

fresher somehow, with a hint of jasmine,

pine, and tangerine—

 

without the verbal bullet holes and

the cock crowing, I can take a breath,

can spin around without hitting your ego,

fragile as it was—

 

without the rumbling of your empty

thunder, the sky has returned to me,

a prodigal piece of blessed haven,

draping me like a prayer

The Mad Librarian

 

Everyone said he was crazy,

my grandfather,

but I liked to think of him as

                  unconventional.

OK—so maybe the five hens

that slept in old milk crates

on his front porch was a little crazy.

Maybe the life-size garden statue

of Edgar Allan Poe with a raven

sitting on his head was—

well, odd at best.

But the pinnacle of his peculiarity,

according to the wholesome folks in town,

was his insatiable love of books.

Having converted his 1920-something

house into a massive library

when I was just a kid,

I found the rows and rows of bookcases

perfectly normal! Little books, big books,

books that smelled like the earth itself,

books with water marks and wax seals.

Books with red covers, brown covers,

no covers at all—tattered pages clinging

desperately to the threads that bound them.

Grandfather often sat in a winged back chair,

a book perched upon his knee, a book open

on his lap, a book held between two gnarled hands,

his gold, wire-rimmed glasses perched smartly

on the end of his thin nose.

I stepped on his glasses once, breaking both lenses,

but he kept reading with them anyway,

said it gave him a whole new perspective.

And it’s those glasses, sitting demurely on the last stack

of books he read that now waver behind the salty film

of tears in my eyes. I blink twice, put the specs on my face,

trying to see through Grandfather’s eyes.

Hazy Days

 

Clouds stretch thin

like prim Puritan lips;

the sun pouts

from behind the sultry veil,

searing the soil with her breath.

I stretch out on a lounger,

sweet tea glass to my forehead

icy condensation dripping

down flushed cheeks.

The bees fly in slow motion,

tipsy on pollen,

This is summer’s sweet spot,

the arc of time where days stretch

like melted salt-water taffy,

the radio scratches out Beatle songs,

and I forget about everything

except a raspberry sorbet

in the freezer.

straight down the middle,

yolk pooling

like a daisy-yellow pond,