Crocodiles Poems by Martha Boss

 

Poet Martha Boss

 
 

Crocodiles

Poems by Martha Boss

BOSSPRESS

22 Pages

Price: negotiable

Review by Dennis Daly

Even the title of this enchanted canvas-covered chapbook by Martha Boss comes alive with unruly brashness. The second “c” in Crocodiles has moved over and embraced the second “o” creating what looks like a rebellious liaison that bubbles forward into the book proper. Retro typos like this happen in the alternative production universe of the Hermes Rocket typewriter, circa 1987, used by Boss to manually type out each finished and unique page.

Big subjects like war and peace Boss delves into with gonzo gusto. In her opening poem, Domestic War Declaration, she internalizes the struggle for poetic expression in biological terms. The poet makes contradictory points in an ever contrasting, yet surprisingly sophisticated, context,

i want that tissue of

inspiration.

i don’t want holy crap

occupying my forever

terroristic globe

my cerebrum my lobes my

hemispheres my cranium of wars.

i want peace for my faculties.

peace. after trillions of

cells have clashed &

collapsed.

then i want them to get up

& start trouble all over again.

Many of Boss’ poems begin with homespun observations, lulling the reader with over simplified logic. In the meantime each line adds accoutrements of detail, building into an elegant but wickedly funny metaphor. Boss’ piece Bad Poem progresses like that. A black ant crosses a cement walk. The poet stirs in traits of focus and determination and then, with a wink, conjures up her infernal vision. Consider these lines leading to an arms race,

…black ants with stingers.

these nano batteried pests

could, in the right hands,

& equipped with just

the right insecticide

drive an enemy crazy.

that is, until the enemy

got their own.

Crocodiles, the title poem, opens definitively with the poet admitting, “I don’t like crocodiles.” That may be true but the cover of this chapbook with its geometric designs looks suspiciously crocodilish. As Boss follows the escape saga of a crocodile from the Gaza zoo and its life on the lam, her irrepressible wit takes over and the poem turns political with a vengeance. Boss concludes the piece with some pretty funny lines that do nothing if not clarify,

in a way

the crocodile

is an enviable creature

pure & simple.

malice is not

a forethought

or an afterthought.

it likes to

slosh around

in your dirty water

& eat yr pets.

& it doesn’t say

It did it

For peace.

Petty bureaucrats beware. Boss has your number. Indeed, in a poem wonderfully titled Uh Oh Here She Comes, the poet nails her subject. Without doubt this is my favorite poem in the collection. The piece begins at the chapbook’s center where the staples, hidden by green twine, secure the pages. As the poem’s anxious protagonist awaits judgment humbly, an inspector of apartments, sent by the city housing department, checks the closets and the drawers, and exhibits the superior air common to many operatives from the lower rungs of officialdom. Boss details the inspection procedure with humor and consternation, and balances the two perfectly. Here’s a bit of the description from the heart of the poem,

she has her big clip board

& big pen.

she opens & closes & peeps

& peers.

she looks like, & i have 

endowed her with, all the

attributes of the chinese

communist police.

she has precise puppet

movements & a very pointy

forefinger.

i have a very funny feeling.

After hearing that Edvard Munch’s painting, The Scream, sold for 130 million dollars, Boss ponders the logic and importance of repressed language in her poem entitled Scream. With just a dash of wit the poet describes the artistic conundrum in words both childlike and profound,

2 short screams mean just in

case you didn’t know it i’m here.

1 medium scream is i’ll

probably need you to play with me.

one long scream is no, you’re

not doing it right. the block

goes here.

some people become expert

at not saying

what should be said.

some become congressmen.

how often we are

governed by words

that replaced the sound

that could have been

a famous painting.

Like most consumers Boss celebrates gadgets that work. Her poem I’m Wearing a New Watch drives home a capitalistic point of personal pride as well as the importance of good maintenance that supports systems which numerous dependents rely on—such as an elevator. Screechy ones just won’t do. Got it? Well, I didn’t. Boss’ persona then takes a left turn while speaking to an elderly couple on an elevator she shares with them and joins them in an ideological collaboration. The poet expresses her doubts and arguably invents a new right for human kind. Boss continues her narration,

i say” it doesn’t sound good.”

they both say, “no, not good.”

the three of us.

all for one.

freedom from being stuck

in what doesn’t work .

machines

& ideologies.

i’m grateful for my

comrades in conscience.

Did Boss really call them “comrades?” She does sneak up on you with her more serious verses. The poet concludes the same poem this way,

they smile.

smiles of wisdom

with age.

i smile.

i show them.

my watch,

made in china.

Boss’ poems remind me of the English poet Stevie Smith. Not the style or the formal manner, but the temperament. Both can twist their readers into cognitive pretzels. Boss reads her pieces at low key venues in Cambridge (usually Stone Soup) and Somerville. Her self-constructed books (now collectors’ items) she stashes away unless asked. Do ask. You’ll thank yourself later.

The Truth About Ed Meek’s Spy Pond By Teisha Dawn Twomey

The Truth About Ed Meek’s Spy Pond

By Teisha Dawn Twomey

In his book “The Triggering Town,” Richard Hugo advises those seeking advice on writing, “you owe reality nothing and the truth about your feeling everything.” What Ed Meek accomplishes in his skillfully  crafted and well-seasoned collection “Spy Pond” is to connect his reader to intellectual and emotional matters in an honest, candid manner that engages us in their universality. In this way, he provides his reader with an unbounded versatility of mind that becomes the doorway into the more collective conscience. Meek preoccupies our mind with both the supernatural and natural, personal, national, and worldwide disasters, matters of our mortality, it’s heaviness but also it’s fragility, the revenge exacted by a forsaken ecosystem, the justice system, science and technology, and the lingering sense that we will feel comforted, if not by understanding, then through ascribing meaning to the issues that most trouble us.

At times, Meek’s poems express feelings of modern day ennui and a dissatisfied posture regarding the experience of the self in an indifferent world. “Spy Pond” has a willingness to ask the difficult questions and to point out the indifferent and the dishonorable, as if to shake the bored suburbanite out of his or her self-indulgent languor. This poet blows the lid off the suffering and pain of his fellow man, unafraid to strike the bone of contention in this nation. He makes it impossible to ignore or dehumanize the victim. The guilt and lingering sense that life is far more unfair to some, is an issue the reader must cope with, at least while reading. How we each begin to reconcile with this realization (or perhaps the powerful reminder) in the aftermath, is our business, but the author lays all of his own cards on the table and calls a spade a spade. 
 

Ed Meek’s “Spy Pond” speak it’s own truth, candidly and with determination. It has great compassion, limiting judgement or pretense by, instead, asking empathetic questions and allowing the reader space to come to their own conclusions. The author’s willingness, or rather determination, to take risks is beautifully captured in this brave and contemplative collection of poems. The fact that the aha-moments of Meek’s disclosures allow us to feel as if we have arrived at these crisp and concise moments of sudden epiphany naturally, is not a mistake. It is due to Meeks perceptively unpretentious and candid voice, that he is so successful embracing the reader and that as the collection develops or rather unfolds, the hidden truths we uncover feel like our own. 
 

“Spy Pond” is full of sharp wit and the words clearly demonstrate a profound understanding about what it is that we all care about, what compels each of us. Meek's poems never bite off more than they can chew, nor do they hit the reader over the head with a point too many times. Instead, a newcomer to the knowledge Meek presents, is extended with a manner of discerning foresight, that leaves the reader with the sense that the poet is not overly concerned with whether or what the reader does or does not know. Instead, Meek’s collection creates the impression that the writer has trusted the reader, assuming that he or she has enough good sense and to fill in any gaps and/or read between the lines to reach their own thoughtful conclusions. The failing to leave well enough alone and to instead go overboard overexplaining, as if trying to persuade the readers of some allusion, is an ailment many novice writers suffer from. If left unidagnosed and untreated, what would otherwise be successful work is destroyed by it’s very own lack of faith. In contrast, Meek has a distict gift for appearing to cinch the right words the first time through and leaving an impression that delivers his reader towards their significance and the consequences thereof. This, of course, is done by virtue of our own lens of perception, which is at all times at the mercy of context. Invariably our frame of reference will effect how each of us interprets Meek’s poetry. This inner-toolbox, that defines everything we think we know, will vary, as will our ability to expand our perceptions and elevate our understanding towards more meaning and purpose. It is this, in the end, that makes “Spy Pond” or any other successful work of literary art great; it’s ability to give birth to new or reawakened truths.


**********************************************************************************   

Teisha Dawn Twomey is the poetry editor at Night Train, as well as an associate fiction editor for Wilderness House Literary Press. She received her MFA in Poetry at Lesley University. Her poetry and short stories have appeared in numerous print and online poetry reviews and journals. By day, she is the Resource Specialist at Springfield College's Boston campus and by night she wishes she was a superhero.

Teisha Dawn Twomey is the poetry editor at Night Train, as well as an associate fiction editor for Wilderness House Literary Press. She received her MFA in Poetry at Lesley University. Her poetry and short stories have appeared in numerous print and online poetry reviews and journals. By day, she is the Resource Specialist at Springfield College's Boston campus and by night she wishes she was a superhero.

Laughing Wild by Christopher Durang/ Hub Theatre Company of Boston

Laughing Wild by Christopher Durang

Hub Theatre Company of Boston

Directed by Margaret Ann Brady

http://www.hubtheatreboston.org/

Review by Doug Holder

Have you ever had a significant encounter with someone at Market Basket-- in-- say, the frozen food section? I can't say that I have...but while fondling a yam—I had an idea for a poem, but I digress. In playwright Christopher Durang's play “ Laughing Wild,”presented by the Hub Theatre Company of Boston, at the Club Cafe in the South End of the city, something significant happens between two conflicted characters in the tuna fish aisle at Gristede's in New York City. The play ( set in the 1980s)  directed by former Somerville resident Margaret Ann Brady, uses this encounter between an unnamed man and woman as a conduit for an exploration of ontological questions like: why can't I find love? a job? meaningful work? spiritual fulfillment? etc... 

Lauren Elias who plays the unstable woman (the character has had several stints at the state mental hospital) assaults a neurotic male New Yorker as he ponders the existential question: “ What brand of tuna should I buy?” Elias has a set of pipes like Ethel Merman, and the comic flair of the manic Toti Fields. Her eyes are wide-open pools of angst, and fear-- as if some spectral presence revealed itself to her. I also focused on her mouth, a wide, nattering orifice, that chattered incessantly, as if we were viewing a Beckett play. There was a yin/yang thing going on in her performance-- a raging Prince Hamlet throwing barbs at a hypocritical society, the thinning of the ozone layer, Ronald Reagan, even Mother Teresa and her dreadful love of children. On the other side is a women seeking connection, and realizes her search for the silver lining is lost in the dark cloud banks.

Robert Orzalli, the object of the woman's attention, has a wonderful doughy and rubbery face, and shock of Harpo Marx curly hair, all of which help convey his zany embrace of New Age philosophy and the obligatory platitudes—while at the same time letting out burst of contempt about the search for beauty, relationships, a meaningless job, his life as a Gay man, and the list goes on.

Brady, who told me she once lived on Ibbetson Street in Somerville ( Where my Ibbetson Street Press was founded), and was part of the Mrs. Potato Head comedy/musical troupe with my next door neighbor on School St., Berklee professor Lucy Holstedt, has long been a fan of Durang—a master of satire, dark comedy, and all kinds of absurd drama. This is evident in the energy the players bring to the stage, and the audience “laughing wild” in their seats.

Interview with Heather Aveson: New News Director of Somerville Community Access TV

Interview with Heather Aveson: New News Director of Somerville Community Access TV

By Doug Holder

Heather Aveson joined me at the Bloc 11 Cafe in Union Square to talk about her new role as the News Director of Somerville Community Access TV's program,  Somerville Neighborhood News. Aveson is an energetic woman with an infectious smile, and is as accessible as any of the staff at the station, who I have worked with over the years. From my chat with her I came away with the distinct impression that she abhors the obvious story, and always digs deep into its soft underbelly.

Aveson is no stranger to Somerville. She has lived on Willow Ave., and bought her first house on Lowell St. with her husband, before defecting to the 'burbs. I asked Aveson what she thought about the gentrification of Somerville.  As chance will have it she told me she was working on a story about this very subject. She has already learned that much of the investment in real estate in our community is coming from Russian and Chinese interests.She said, “I am asking, 'Where are we going from here?' I wonder if people who are born and raised in Somerville will be able to continue to live here. I am afraid Somerville may be on the road to becoming a sterile environment -- like say Kendall Square in Cambridge.”

Aveson took over the directorship of Somerville Neighborhood News when the founding director Jane Regan moved on to new horizons. Aveson was a former news producer at WGBH on the 10:00 News with Christopher Lydon. She told me," Chris set the bar very high. He always encouraged me to dig deep.”

Aveson reflected, “ I want to continue Jane's mission of giving a voice to people who don't have a voice.” And some of these people she gave a voice to were the Nepalese community in our city, as well as the janitors at Tufts University who were being laid off, etc... Aveson said he wants to report on stories that are interesting, controversial, and important to the community.

Although SCAT has a a lot of new innovations and cutting-edge technology, it of course can't compare to WGBH where Aveson once worked. Aveson opined, “ Telling a story, is telling a story. It is what you bring into it. I want to be a hands on person with a close relationship with the community.”

When I asked Aveson to talk about her time with Lydon on WGBH her eyes' lit up. She said “ Chris brought a curiosity and passion to his work. We did a diverse group of stories from a local piano builder in Woburn,  to a piece on  Stan Grossfield' (The Boston Globe) war photography concerning the Beirut conflict, and other fascinating stories.”

Aveson told me she also works as a programming coordinator for Wilson Farms in Lexington. She created the famed “ Spooky Hayride” event that has run for the past ten years. She is a strong advocate of urban farming—creating plots to grow veggies amidst the hot asphalt of the city.

Aveson tries to instill in her staff and interns the need to research a story—and to have a sense of history. For instance, instead of  simply writing a story that a new business opening in Somerville, the reporter should ask questions like, "Why did they chose a place to do business where things can change drastically in just a few years, etc... Aveson said, “ You have to be open to the fact that a story unfolds one way,  but it may go in a totally different direction. You have to be flexible"'

.

I am looking forward to the ongoing changes Aveson will bring---  here... in the Paris of New England.

The Underwater Typewriter By Marc Zegans

Poet Marc Zegans

The Underwater Typewriter
By Marc Zegans
Pelekinesis Press

Review by Meghan Guidry

Charting the Depths – A Review of Marc Zegans’ The Underwater Typewriter

Poets who are capable of fearlessly engaging with the sting of absence are rare, and in his new collection The Underwater Typewriter, Marc Zegans’ has proven that he is in that select few. The collection is visually lush and carefully crafted, the mark of a poet who is deeply attuned to the undercurrents of the world as it is both experienced and imagined.

Stylistically, Zegans draws from the American Beat Poets and British Romanticism to shape an immersive poetic landscape simultaneously luminous and lonely. He is fearless with language, weaving luxurious description into every line of text—yet Zegans knows that compelling poetry needs more than description alone. What makes The Underwater Typewriter truly alluring is the poet’s clear vision and interlocking themes.

Human engagement and connection is a negative condition of survival in Zegans’ poetic environment. Without it, we perish. This is the axiom of Zegans’ work: The whiplash anxiety between grasping for connection and the moments of grace when it’s obtained.

Zegans’ speakers’ voices are at once wise and terrified, the latter because of the former. Understanding the importance of skin, of smile, of safe silence between self and other, Zegans’ poetic avatars turn the world for authenticity, and for meaningful connections to place, to time, and most importantly, to people.

Absence and distance are tangible beings in Zegans’ work. These are no less important, and no less real, than the speakers themselves. They are the tactile gulfs separating us from each other, whether by circumstance or design. Zegans both maps and mitigates these gulfs, charting the places where two souls press against the shared distance between them.

    Imagine two perfect absences
    separated by interval
    un-reckoned by the cycles of light.

                                                                   (from" The Reunion of Darkness")

Zegans charts these distances not through measurement, but by artifact, by what he pulls from the depths of the spaces between us, executed expertly in poems such as “Salvage” and “Hacking”

        Yet we haul and fondle worn bits, gauging
        texture and mass, function and fit, and loss
        holes and breakage, sometimes signifying.

                        (from “Salvage”)

        Air rises between me
        and the coat, stained
        orange. What does
        it say about me
        that I wear this pen
        splotched relic
        out and about?

                        (from “Hacking”)

Zegans doesn’t dwell where life dramatically ruptures; instead he rests at the jarring moments when, in the ordinariness of our everyday habits, we are suddenly and inextricably reminded of the abyss lurking just beyond the mundane.

Zegans also brings illusion to the forefront as an incarnation of the fantastic and as a condition of human existence. If illusions of self and meaning separate us from each other, then this poet strives for an inroad that is tangible and sacred in the overwhelming weight of our multitudes of masks.

    As if every part must be a sign post

    A ballyhoo for that which isn’t there
    She’d come quieter, drawing my hand

(from “drawing”)

Zegans is at his best when he, as Helene Cixous wrote, “writes by the light of the axe.” His language is vivid, colorful, and sensory, but it is the moments he speaks unadorned that truly sing, the moments in which he bravely confronts the reader and dares us to know him:

    I cannot raise the strength
    to summon the day dream
    that allowed me know
    the world without border

(from “perchance”)

The Underwater Typewriter isn’t merely a collection of poems. It is an assembly of artifacts dragged from the depths of human relationship and heart, laid bare to turn, to witness, and ultimately, to love.

The Underwater Typewriter is published by Pelekinesis Press, and is available for pre-order here: http://pelekinesis.com/catalog/marc_zegans-the_underwater_typewriter.html

Furs Not Mine By Andrea Cohen

Andrea Cohen

Furs Not Mine

By Andrea Cohen

Four Way Books

New York, NY

ISBN: 978-1-935536-51-2

89 Pages

Review by Dennis Daly

Poems as polished as those by Andrea Cohen give up their secrets very slowly. Furs Not Mine, Cohen’s newest collection encourages her readers to enter its confines with enameled logic and diamond-edged imagery. Once inside one finds a sense of loss, a Siberian coldness, and a ghostly hunger for a way out. Escape, however, may not be in the cards. The chilliness continues even after the book’s completion and Cohen’s well-wrought lines ebb away into mnemonic limbo.

The opening poem, a really marvelous short piece entitled The Committee Weighs In sets the tone. Give and take repartee between mother and daughter exudes warmth, family closeness, and intellectual life. Then, of course, clarity enters with its uncomfortable surprises. The poet’s persona has just jokingly announced her reception of the Nobel Prize to her mother who engages playfully. The poem continues,

Again? she says. Which

discipline this time?

It’s a little game

we play: I pretend

I’m somebody, she

pretends she isn’t dead.

Notice that the startling last line all but swallows up the self-deprecating humor prefacing it. Nice touch.

Breaking and Entering, a poem of profound pessimism, leaves one locked in a world of night where homes devolve into lonely interiors. Cohen’s wit takes control here, saving the day and keeping the piece emotionally taut. Here’s the heart of the poem,

Mostly the home

invasion is an inside

job: your interiors

get ravaged and pointing

a finger, you

mean to seek

damages. I left

the window open,

told the guard

dogs to roll over.

He pinched my last

Candlestick…

Cohen’s poem Macaroons quips about the penultimate things of life, as well as the acceptance of death. Her tone is clipped. The phrase “I get it” takes on a sullen choral power not directed at her dead mother, but rather at the deal humanity gets as one by one they make their way through the brutish and duplicitous aspects of life. The poet especially pummels the concept of the Promised Land. Navigating the short lines and tight logic I felt breathless, caught in the poem, unable to slip out between the syllables. From the very first line the tone of the piece never varies. Cohen opens her strange lament with acceptance, aggressive acceptance,

I get it now

You’re dead.

You can’t do

everything

you used to.

Reruns instead

of new episodes.

I get it.

You can’t send

Macaroons this Passover…

My favorite poem in this collection Cohen entitles Bargain. The poet relates a story line as old as human kind. Well-heeled travelers are led into the desert, perhaps for quixotic reasons (Magi? tourists?). Their guide wants to renegotiate the terms of their agreement now that he has the upper hand. In the desert no deal is iron-clad. Everything can be renegotiated when circumstances change. The irony of their situation strikes a chord due to the self-satisfied arrogance that led the travelers into this trap of their own making. In fact I know a little bit about this type of negotiation, only it happened to me at 12,000 feet in the Hind Kush Mountains. My guides, who otherwise were quite honest, saw an opportunity to exercise their business acumen. We compromised. Back to the review at hand. Cohen ends this poem with a grounding eye-opening flip. She uses this technique in many of her pieces and she does it well. Actually, she does it better than anyone I can think of. The poet details a changing reality,

Such slim wages

to take us, without

complaint, all the way—

so far, without a star.

We were in the middle

of nowhere, or at its edge.

Friends, he asked, from

inside that blackness,

what will you pay me

to take you back?

The word “Friends” in this context deserves special mention for its remarkable and almost instantaneous transformation into a sinister threat par excellence, infused with surrounding darkness in case one misses the point.

Furs Not Mine, the title poem, seems almost etched onto the page. Each line exposing angular depth as it builds into the singular metaphor. The poet’s spiritual iciness speaks for itself. Consider these telling lines,

…one

need not be or speak Russian

to comprehend the sense

of furs not mine. One need only

to have known deep cold, an inmost

Siberia made more Siberian by one

who basks nearby, oblivious in her Bolivia.

Like an unindicted co-conspirator he lords over us, this God of ours, the God of Job, with arched right eye and then judges us for what we do and don’t do. Yes, we created this God not only to share our guilt, but also to commiserate with us over his so-called gift of free will. Yeah, thanks a bunch. Cohen puts it another way in her riveting poem entitled Sins of Omission. Her protagonist, stricken with regret over life choices and lost potential, tests the very reality of her dream-world and calmly arrives at its dead end. Her family dissolves as she steps back in existential dread,

…God knows

we’ve been left

out by God.

The last part I

say under my breath

so my son

won’t hear. But—

little pitchers—he

does. Mom, he

says his brow knit.

It’s the moment

I’ve dreaded. You

know I don’t

really exist, right?

Poems that confront the glacial landscapes deeply within our shared consciousness are few and far between. Cohen’s icy architectures in this stellar collection showcase her uncommon bravery in facing humanity’s common, but no less scary, demons. Engagement generates warmth. That’s one of the poet’s secrets. Now breathe.