Prayer: fix my set
Oddball
Publishing
Copyright
2016
44
pages
Poems
by Martha Boss
Review
by Lo Galluccio
The
new book of poems by Martha Boss, recently released by Oddball
Magazine Publishing, is truly a genius treat to read. Martha’s
thinking and her pen are tightly bound so that you feel as though the
ink on the page is her very own blood. But these are not poems inked
in dry salty blood – their effect is more like cherry juice or a
Manhattan cocktail. Martha seems loaded with brilliant insights
about her own process of creating and the world around her. She
eschews capital letters and uses an ampersand instead of “and.”
Her book begins with this Whitmanesque declaration:
“i
celebrate my pen.
keeper
of protest & riot.”
And
later in the poem she writes:
“my
pen, desperate avatar
Of
truth, translating
Crammed
passion.”
Boss,
a regular at Stone Soup on Monday nights, writes in free verse, her
stanzas no set length and without rhyme schemes. Her own logic about
things is jazz enough. In the title poem: Prayer: fix my set, she
engages in a monologue to the Maker, in which she begs him to get the
remote working and turn on the TV. This is quite entertaining until,
at the end, she issues one more request:
“so
Where
are you from. Anyway, God?
Give
me a sign.
I’m
praying.
I’m
guessin’ radioshack, please.
Can
you fix my set?” p 8
I
love the idea that God is at radio-shack, hanging with the other
employees in a uniform.
Poems
about the movie, “The Ten Commandments,”
“hmm
…now I’m thinking with my pen.”
Ends
with “did God give the order to have Jesus killed?
Wassup
with these guys?”
In
a confessional poem about her own process she writes that she starts
by drawing the sky every day and birds.
“I
draw every day. Every day I draw
the
sky. It’s usually indigo blue. It usually gets me past a bad
memory. …& birds. I draw
birds.”
P 12
In
the playful poem “Cookie Man” Boss coyly feeds a flock of birds
some fig newtons...identifying with the birds as they
“peck
at one & then another & another like they’re seeing if they
all taste the same
and
they’re not sure what it is” p 26
She
notes from the box that they were made in Mexico which prompts Boss
to finish the poem in Spanish:
“hay
chica. esta la fantasma del galeta-hombre./el cookie-man esta
viviendo en el arbol
y
ahora we know eso es que pasa a los fig newtons.” P 27
Roughly
translated, the cookie man is living in the tree and now we know that
is what is happening with the fig newtons.
In
“I walk by the river of everything” Boss takes on a musing stance
toward probably the Charles River in Cambridge –
“along
the reedy banks/of high bio research/I am a single digit/wrapped
tight in wool
some
other/Ireland river. In a lyrical declarative voice she then sings:
in spring we will
float/
our boats/the river of everything/will flow with experiment…and the
waste of
ideas/have
given it new data./the river moving the mystery/the unknowable
genome/in
the
undertow.”p 34
All
the poems in this collection are good and riveting. In her
plain-spoken eccentricity Martha Boss brings her own vision and life
to the poetry she writes. There is a staccato feel to these pieces
but then sometimes a well-spring of aria that extends the lines. It
feels home-made and well spun, like plain funny and fantastic clothes
you want to try on again and again. From the aluminum space suit to
the cotton dress – all the birds she invokes—draws us into her
mind’s resonance of language. I highly recommend checking out
prayer: fix
my set
out.
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