Review of Eric Greinke’s Invisible Wings, Presa Press, 2019

Eric Greinke

Review of Eric Greinke’s Invisible Wings, Pressa Press, 2019

Eric Greinke is a poet with a moderate pallet and a subtle intelligence. His poems notice things, ordinary things, and pursue them; he is curious but he treads lightly and could easily be disregarded because of his plain-spoken disguise. He is worth slowing down for. In his latest collection of 44 short poems, Invisible Wings, every sound and cadence rings true, if the reader listens carefully. He writes of a “nympho wind” that sings songs “into our rainy brains.” This is a “kissing” wind that arouses someone, whose breath goes wild and cries out “like a poem / just before birth.”

The first poem in the collection is “Wings,” where Grienke flirts with the cosmos whose stars were named after “ancient Gods” and whose direction spreads like an (imagined) expanding universe. Its energy is not showy or boastful, and Greinke delivers in a style of language that one could call, without error, plain. Yet, much of the ordinariness in the footsteps of the lines causes a likely embarrassment for one who suddenly realizes that the poem she’s reading has got quite out of hand. “Our collective neurons,” the poet writes, “back beyond the big bang,” have reverberated to become

an infinitesimal compact

of impacted selves,

their endings encoded in

expanding beams of energy.

To recognize the power of the Greinke’s language, his eschewing of sensation, his insistence on exactitude, is to grope about, “blind in every dimension / but our poor human senses.” But arise! We must scramble to keep up with the fusions, dimensions, disasters, collisions, with each “atom alone but connected.“ Really, you have to run to keep up with what’s going down in this poem, until it “plays on all the pages & stages of our days.” He doesn’t need to mention WS.

Now that we see that nothing at all is ordinary about the poem, it’s basically over. The story, that is. But not without transformation. The entire process, the cause and effect, the eons of time, and the vast universe itself are

cast. . . into the frozen fire,

transformed again into invisible wings.

Still, when an opening poem is a tour de force, one may reasonably expect to find some wobbles or potholes up ahead. And Greinke has included a few poems here that may have benefitted from a rest. “The Sunken Dream,” for instance, can be flatfooted in places, or may not know what it is really trying to convey. We get the gist; but perhaps a pivotal image and some liquid language could dive into the deep of a flooded valley of drowned houses. When the speaker says, “He blamed the government, but / his thoughts were persistent,“ we can admire the savvy line-break, but that is not enough to rescue “The Sunken Dream.”

There are other winners, of course. One of those others is “November Nights,” the most sensuous of the lot. It doesn’t strive; it begins gently:

I find your face

on a pillow of leaves,

lately adrift.

One knows that the speaker must go down to the pillow, that the leaves “lately adrift” are gathered meaningfully in one place now, a place for love and rest and listening. Greinke is a listener.

****Marcia Ross, author of the novel Layla and the Lake (Pelekinesis, 2019)

Review: Sex & Other Slapsticks by Ellaraine Lockie ( Presa Press)

Review: Sex & Other Slapsticks by Ellaraine Lockie  

--reviewed by Gregory J. Wolos

The title of Ellaraine Lockie’s latest poetry collection, Sex & Other Slapsticks, begs a question, which her poems answer with candid mirth, spirit, and often a touch of wisdom: what do sex and slapstick comedy have in common? Remembering that the term “slapstick” derives from the joined slats of wood used in 16^th century commedia dell’arte (think “Punch and Judy”), we have our answer—the two terms of Lockie’s title both require bodies, both imply performance, both can make us laugh or cry; and both remind us of our shared humanity.

A slapstick is a prop, and props and performance draw Lockie’s keen comic appraisal in the poems and brief prose pieces comprising this collection. In “To Dana,” (subtitle :“Whose Deathbed Wish Was for a Friend to Dispose of Her Vibrator Before the Family Found It”), Lockie describes her personal history with props of self-stimulation, highlighting her own fear of “embarrassing” exposure as she imagines her own “piece of personal plastic” “mauled in front of my mother-in-law” by the family dog or accidentally activated at airport security where it “purred itself into a bomb bluff.”

Another poem centered around a prop and imbued with physicality is “Bidet in a Haebun,” in which the narrator and her husband consider with growing curiosity the bidet in the bathroom of their Florentine five-star hotel. At first they guess at its function, then misuse it. After discovering its purpose on Google and absorbing the knowledge that “Americans are unhygienic” compared to most of the world, the poet’s period arrives during the night, while “Light from the full moon/ floods the bed where she sleeps.” The next morning, she follows the instructions on the internet and, experiencing the satisfaction of “[w]ater like a spring brook,” orders her own “Biffy bidet converter” for her “American” toilet.

As in “Bidet,” ignorance or misunderstanding is pivotal in many of Lockie’s poems, such as “Sex 101,” where the narrator is informed “[a]fter forty years of pacifying penises” that her lover’s “morning erection” did not signal “a need for sex,” and she wasn’t “obligated . . . to lighten his procreative load/ in my most copulatory capacity.” In “Reading at the Little Joy,” the narrator, “Daydreaming on a winter evening . . . on Sunset Boulevard,” is mistaken by two young men as a prostitute. After she asks, “You guys wanna read,” they move on, determining she’s “[t]oo whacky” for what they had in mind.

In “Nomenclature in Montana” Lockie uses language as a prop to trace the loss of innocence that parallels a loss of ignorance. “As children,” she writes, “there were no body-part words” for the animals as they were “making babies.” Her father used simple “bodily function” words like “Pisshole and Asshole,” and her mother favored “a more refined Number 1 Place and Number 2 Place” /Like they were addresses.” Eventually, the narrator discovers “Number 1 ½ Place” that could accommodate fingers “and even welcome houseguests,” but didn’t learn the word “vagina” until high school, believing until then that “twat” was the past tense of “twit.” Like most of Lockie’s “ignorance to knowledge” poems in this collection, “Nomenclature” concludes on a note of personal affirmation, as she considers how the value of “my little piece of property . . . increased exponentially when it served/ as an annex through which my two daughters passed.”

Because, after all, the poems of “Sex & Other Slapsticks” are about accepting ourselves: of our ignorance and fear of humiliation; of our bodies and our sexuality. With or without props, Ellaraine Lackie performs her “slapsticks” for her readers with a kind of warmth and humor that enables us to accept ourselves. She encourages us to appreciate our lives as we would a situation comedy, as in “Sitcom in a Café,” where we watch the narrator’s deaf and nearly blind ninety-one year old mother deposit leftover restaurant food in what she believes is her handbag, but is actually the mouth of “my niece’s Guide Dog for the Blind in Training.” And, in a final prose poem, “The Robe Also Rises,” Lockie sacrifices her dignity for our mutual identification and self-forgiveness. Futilely chasing after her escaped dog at a mountain resort, she lies down in the snow, and oblivious to the public performance, “spread[s] out into an X-rated snow angel,” a trick that had lured her dog in the past. She raises her arms, revealing a “naked pubis that was as black and silky as my robe,” and, in spite of a little boy’s concern that “Mommy, that lady doesn’t have any underwear on,” the trick works: the dog returns to see what she’s up to, and she snares the pet’s collar. As she leads the dog back to her room, she “ignored the fairly large audience of gaping faces.”

Sex and slapstick, props and performance: in the same way Lockie recaptures her dog, her poems capture us, and we share not only the humiliation of exposure, but the triumph of her successes.