Review, THE BLOOD OF A TOURIST by William Taylor, Jr.,

Review, THE BLOOD OF A TOURIST by William Taylor, Jr., Sunnyoutside, PO Box 911, Buffalo, New York 14207, 92 pages, $13, 2014

Review by Barbara Bialick

In the title poem, “The Blood of a Tourist,” poet William Taylor, Jr. says he, Taylor, is like the tourist with blood so cold, he “could only look away” at the wino, “a wounded beast/drunk on the wine/of our fear…”

This is a collection that speaks of the “terror” in life—and “the people you try not to look at”:

“I awoke with the terror today/…this morning it lingered/in the unmade bed/the dirty dishes…/I saw it in the man on the bus/and the woman in the grocery store/and wondered if they saw it/in me/…most everyone knows the terror/more than they will say/.”

Taylor says he was born “with a weak heart and frightened eyes”—“I met the big nothing early on,” he says, having “to let others walk the world/as if they had some place in it.”

This reviewer had a similar feeling when I was young and felt like the author writes, “myself content with dreams/of little rooms with little windows/looking out upon the rain…”

Other sad people (or the secretly sad) could relate to these spare but arresting poems:  “It suddenly strikes me/that so many lives could be made/from all we’ve simply/thrown away…”

William Taylor, Jr. lives and writes in the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco, California. His other book titles are BROKEN WHEN WE GOT HERE (Epic Rites, 2013), AN AGE OF MONSTERS (Epic Rites, 2012), and THE HUNGER SEASON (Sunnyoutside, 2009).  Many of his poems have previously appeared in a wide variety of literary publications.

Reviewer Barbara Bialick is the author of TIME LEAVES and NEVER RETURNS (Ibbetson Street Press).

Review, Poetica Magazine, Contemporary Jewish Writing, Holocaust Edition,

Review, Poetica Magazine, Contemporary Jewish Writing, Holocaust Edition Spring 2012, PO Box 11014, Norfolk, Virginia 23517, www.poeticamagazine.com, Michal Mahgerefteh, Editor-in Chief, 64 pages.




Review by Barbara Bialick, author of TIME LEAVES



At my age, the word “holocaust” reminds me of when I read about all of the horrors, as a child in Hebrew School, of the slaughter by the Germans of 6 million Jews during World War II from 1939 to 1945. That was in the 1960s. But I never forgot… On looking at this special issue of the fine journal Poetica, my thought was Oh no, I can’t read all this again! Yet in well-written poetry by 40 fine poets, is chronicled different views of the nightmare stories of the killing, incarceration, burning and starving, as well as thoughts and memories by and about the survivors.



But I realized who this important collection is really for—the younger generation, who need to hear about it also, or everything that happened will be forgotten. Jews continue to need to be reminded how we have been hated throughout history, even as Israel is often hated today by certain Jews as well as the Palestinians, indeed the whole Middle East.



In the poem, “Holocaust Remembrance Day, 2012”, Helen Bar-Lev writes “the oven warms; a cake bakes/a siren wrenches the heart/the radio plays somber songs/and people retell of the holocaust…of the loss”.



“Why do you sleep, O Lord? Awaken, do not/reject us forever,” writes Bernard Otterman in “Psalm 44 at Auschwitz.”



Another moving poem is “Budapest Shoes” by Jena Smith: “Sixty shoes line Pest bank, cast iron shoes…/shoes of the Jews, Hungarian Jews.”



I really like the poem “I Would Have Called You ‘Oma’” by Joanne Jagoda, about the grandmother she never met: “They shipped you on the train to Auschwitz/and you walked to the showers of gas/your precious light extinguished forever/And when I hold my own sweet grandchild/I think about you…”



This book exists like a holy encyclopedia, written and ready to read, too awful to be quoted so haphazardly. Just buy it and give it to someone of the young generation and let them get sick, too, before the old generations of witnesses and their children disappear, leaving no one to remember what really happened…

Review, Wisconsin Poets Laureate by Marilyn L. Taylor, Denise Sweet and Ellen Kort

Review, Wisconsin Poets Laureate by Marilyn L. Taylor, Denise Sweet and Ellen Kort, Marsh River Editions, Marshfield, Wisconsin, 29 pages, $10, 2009

By Barbara Bialick

It’s not often that you see a chapbook collection by not one but three poets laureate, these all from Wisconsin, going back to the year 2000 and up to the present. All three of these women have strong, creative, voices.

The current laureate is Marilyn L. Taylor, a contributing editor of The Writer magazine.

She taught English at UW-Milwaukee for 15 years in the honors program. In a poem dedicated to her students, “Subject to Change”, she writes in a villanelle: “They are so beautiful, and so very young/they seem almost to glitter with perfection…they’re traveling headlong/in that familiar, vertical direction/that coarsens beautiful, blackmails young…”.

Like the others, she gives us a flavor of Wisconsin, as in “Summer Sapphics”: “a rubber inner tube still can send us/drifting down a sinuous, tree-draped river/like the Wisconsin—“ where she imagines “It’s as if we’ve started evolving backwards: mammal, reptile, polliwog, protozoon—/toward that dark primordial soup we seem so eager to get to…”.

Denise Sweet was Wisconsin poet laureate from 2004-2008. A grandmother and faculty member at UW-Green Bay, she won The North American Natives First Book Award for Poetry, along with other publications and 100 public readings in the US, Canada, Mexico and Guatemala.

In “Palominos Near Tuba City”, she writes “I chase poems down like/wild mares into fenced corrals/…In “Sky Opens”, she calls out to “our relatives without names…”. She moves from “the star quilt/I hide under most nights” to musing “whether the stars we see now have been there all along…just like this/waiting to skid across /the sky, waiting to fall/into the blue canopy we occupy/…So I must think of them/as though no one has ever seen this before…”

The third poet laureate is Ellen Kort, who served from 2000 to 2004. She contributed all new poems for this collection. She has worked with her poetry as an expressive and healing art for cancer, grief, domestic abuse survivors and women in prison. Her poetry has also been performed by the New York City Dance Theater, among others, and she has traveled as a speaker, poet and workshop facilitator in the US, Australia, New Zealand and Japan.

She advises in “When You Write”, to “Do it with your eyes closed with the tips of your/ fingers circling air from the knot in your chest/from juices nerves and hollow bones. Write/ in the deepest well in water that licks your hand craves your salt…”

The publisher has wrapped the soft cover book in a heavy, colorful book cover apparently to elevate it to the status of a larger book. A good notion, as the poets laureate of Wisconsin are all good writers worthy of a second look.